one night.

It was a cold, dark night, typical of most in late October. The slight change that this night held was the monster under the bed, waiting.

Steven lay underneath the covers, body so rigid that the small of his back didn’t touch the mattress. The little matchstick boy stared at the ceiling, but really waited for something to appear in his peripheral. He pushed his head further back into the pillow, watching both sides of the bed.

While his eyes pretended to watch the ceiling, his ears strained to hear the slightest slither, the scrape of dry, inhuman skin on the floorboards. He barely breathed to keep it as silent as possible, but his heartbeat raced out of control and echoed in his ears like war drums.

Ten years old. At ten years old you knew better than to lose sleep over whatever figments your imagination was coming up with in the late hours of the night. But he knew there was something there.

In the corner of his room, leaning against the wall, was his hockey stick. He thanked God that he chose a hockey stick over a new bike last Christmas, and cursed himself for not asking for a baseball bat. It would be difficult to use a hockey stick- it would be unwieldy, and hard to swing.

That being thought, he knew what he had to do. The full realization of his next, and very likely last, action caused his eyes to open wide, and he sucked in a deep breath.

Something large and scaly dragged itself past the boxes underneath the bed.

It seemed like hours before he released that breath. When he did, it was slowly, so that he felt like a slowly deflating balloon.

The monster had gone towards the left side of the bed.

This was his chance. The hockey stick was on the other side of the room, in the right corner. It leaned against the wall with all the might of Excalibur, promising salvation, or at the very least the feel of something hard and heavy.

He closed his eyes, and hoped this wouldn’t be the last time.

Steven threw the covers back over the left side of the bed, and knew in his head that they had landed on something. The sound of tearing cloth reached his ears as soon as his feet touched the ground, and he very promptly wet himself. He ran so fast that his forehead collided with the darkened wall, but his fingers wrapped themselves tightly around the handle.

Now he could fight back.

The creature had slid back underneath the bed, and turning around he felt its hot, putrid breath pour over his feet, even though the bed was at least four feet away. Two bright, yellow eyes reflected the streetlights outside, and they looked right into his.

He raised his hands over his head, grit his teeth, and brought the stick down hard on the floorboards. They struck with a resounding CRACK. His hands were numb, and they hurt, but he knew what he had to do.

Steven screamed at the top of his lungs and brought it down again, harder, feeling the wooden shaft almost shatter. The jaundiced eyes widened, and a heavy breath washed over his feet and ankles, causing them to start sweating.

The rest of his body was ice, and he shook like a leaf. He knew that although his scream had echoed throughout the entire house, no one was coming. He was all alone.

He levelled his arms and brought the hockey stick out, straight in front of him like a lance. In his mind he knew that only one of them would be left alive once it was all over.

This would be his one night stand.

gross.

The foot came down.

Then came up again.

With his right leg raised he peered down at the rough blue carpet, straining to see what he had stepped on. It had felt slimy.

Both feet planted firmly on the ground he squatted, elbows on his knees. Lying there was a moist, blackish shape.

He walked into the next room, carefully stepping high over the thing. He grabbed a roll of toilet paper from a decrepit laundry machine and ripped off a handful. Turning back to the doorway, very carefully, he picked it up.

It was roughly two inches long, and looked like a thin slug. He turned it over in the tissue, looking for anything… noticeable. It was dark on the top, light, sickly brown along the bottom. There was a miniscule triangular opening near one end, the only discernible difference. It’s a leech.

His right foot tingled.

He could feel his lunch starting to come up. Sick sick sick sick. Crumpling up the wadded tissue with the ends of his fingers, he kept it as far away from his palm and the rest of his body. With one frantic motion he hurled it into a toilet on his left.

Still filled with disgust, he spat into the bowl, then urinated into it for good measure. He then flushed the toilet, holding down the handle for longer than he should have. Turning on the shower he wet the floor, and then proceeded to scrub the bottom of both feet against the tiles, hard. He then washed his face with icy cold water, still nauseous.

As he walked out of the back room he kept his eyes glued to the floor, searching for any more traces of… anything. Then he turned around and scanned the ceiling near the doorway. Nothing. There was just the usual stuff you’d find on a basement ceiling: dusty cobwebs.

He walked as fast as he could without running into the stairwell and the next room. Once his body touched the bed his feet sprung off the floor. He once again looked everywhere for them.

Later that night, as he lay in that same bedroom, staring straight up at the ceiling, he felt his right foot. It felt- sensitive. This is impossible, he thought. The skin on the bottom of my foot is way too thick for anything to happen. It’s impossible. He rubbed the bottom of his foot against his left calf, then stopped. Whatever happened to his foot, if anything happened, he wasn’t going to spread it to the rest of his body.

Eyes wide open, he imagined them crawling under the door that he’d shut and locked, creeping up the sides of the bed, sliming their way up the walls and dropping onto his face. He slept- but he didn’t sleep well.