Bedside Manner

Mrs. Farlow tapped her clipboard as she glared at Alan Clay..

"Once again, Mr. Clay," she growled. "there is nothing under your bed!"

Alan blushed and looked down so he could avoid her eyes. He had only moved into the retirement home recently, but it was already obvious that Mrs. Farlow considered him to be a senile old fool. He suspected she thought that of everyone over the age of sixty, but she seemed especially annoyed when dealing with him.

"I... I'm sorry to bother you," Clay stammered. "But I really did hear something moving when I walked into my room."

She raised an eyebrow.

"Tomorrow morning I'm going to arrange to get your hearing checked. Now, it is getting

late, so I suggest you get some sleep."

She walked out of his bedroom and forcefully closed the door. Alan looked at his bed nervously, then slowly shuffled forward. His gaze never left the spot between the blanket and the floor. The darkness in that few inches seemed to be waiting for him. When he got as close as he dared, he tried to jump onto the mattress. The effort was for naught and he banged his knee against the frame. Gasping from the pain, he still quickly pulled himself onto the bed. With his task accomplished he rolled over on his back and panted as he tried to calm himself.

Several minutes passed before Alan was able to relax. As his breathing finally slowed, he rolled onto his side and surveyed the floor. He eventually nodded and turned off the lamp on his night stand. He carefully wriggled his legs and torso under the bedsheets.

“Here in bed I safely hide, with all the beasties stuck outside. For the blankets are my shield, to which the monsters have to yield.”

The words came easily. He had been saying them for decades, ever since he was a boy.

His father had died when he was very young. Maybe a year later, one night his mother had caught him pilfering from the cookie jar. She had yelled, no, screamed at him for several minutes before sending him to bed. About an hour later she came into his bedroom and stared at the floor for almost a minute, her hands loosely closed on her hips. Just as he was about to start crying from the tension she dropped to her knees and reached under the bed. When she stood back up she was holding two handfuls of earth. She then said something that had haunted him for the rest of his life.

“Just as I thought! Your father was here! Whenever you misbehave it makes him so mad that he crawls out of his grave and hides under your bed, waiting for you. One of these days I won’t make it into your room on time. He’ll come out from under, grab you, and drag you with him back to his grave! You just remember that whenever you are thinking of doing something bad again.”

Alan had remembered it very well. He lost a lot of sleep in the following years. When he eventually moved out on his own he never owned an assembled bed again. He would just put a mattress on the floor. That made him feel better, but the fear never completely left him. Any misdeed, even a bad thought, might anger his father, and his mother was no longer with him to come to his rescue.

He had excelled at school and at his job, and he was always a model citizen. He had never been able to maintain a relationship, however, as women would always lose patience with him. After every breakup he would stay awake all night to make sure he hadn’t angered his father again.

The fear had travelled with him through all the long years and was still with him now as he lay in the darkness. The only sound was came from the wind against his window. The weather had been bad all day due to a hurricane several hundred miles away. His eyes drooped as he began to drift toward the void between night and morning. As so often happened, the stern face of his mother filled his mind. She was angry, of course.

“You’ve done it again, Al,” she said through tight lips. “That poor lady is only trying to do her job, and you are making things very difficult for her! All you do is misbehave and engage in foolishness. No wonder your father is always angry at you! Well. I am having no more of it! This time he can have you!”

Alan suddenly came back to full awareness. Something was not right. He listened for anything out of the ordinary, but could hear nothing. Suddenly, it came to him. There was no wind. A small sound escaped his lips as he reached out and fumbled for his lamp. His heart skipped a beat as he almost knocked the lamp over, but he managed to grip it, set it upright, and turn it on.

Fearfully, he looked around the room. Nothing was there. This didn’t reassure him. Any danger would be under the bed. He picked up a flashlight, turned it on, and slowly leaned over the side. The seconds seemed to stretch into years. Alan whimpered as he hung his head close to the floor and pointed the beam of light into the darkness. The blackness seemed reluctant to give way to the illumination as he expected at any moment for something to reach out for him.

There was nothing. The elation filling his body seemed almost physical. His sigh of relief then turned into a gasp when he heard the closet door open, followed by a voice that sounded as if it came from a mouth filled with clay.

“Farlow was right. There is nothing under there.”

Just as Mrs. Farlow sat down she heard a brief scream come from Clay’s room. She smacked her palms against the desk, then stood up and stormed to his room. Throwing the door open, she burst into his room. She frowned then. He was not in his bed and the blankets were in disarray. She then spotted his flashlight, still lit, in front of the closed closet door.

“Mr. Clay, whatever are you doing in there?”

Moments passed with no answer. Cursing under her breath, she walked to the closet and reached for the door.

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