Monsters Under the Bed

Johnny just turned five. In his own mind, he now was a “big boy” reinforced every single day when his father came home from work, grabbed him under each arm, lifted him up high up into the air and with a big flashy grin on his face asked Johnny the question, “how is my big boy today?”

Johnny thought he was fine today. He was fine yesterday, the day before that and probably would be fine in the coming days. He did not tell this condition to his father, who just happily looked up at Johnny flailing at the end of his dad’s arms where his head always grazed the ceiling sending little bits of white popcorn flakes falling onto his father’s shoulders.

Being a big boy, Johnny had a room all to himself at the top of the stairs and to the right of the stairway landing as you walked down the hall. So did his sister Sue and his parents too.

Around Johnny’s bedroom pinned up on the dark red walls, was his collection of monster posters. To his right above his bookcase, hung a poster from the movie Godzilla with Japanese script shouting out the title in bright red letters and images of the monster destroying downtown Tokyo by burning down the buildings with his fiery, radioactive breath. Of course, all around Godzilla as he tore down the cables of a bridge with his claws and ripped apart a raised maglev train with his teeth were explosions from Japanese Army howitzers detonating on his invincible, reptile scales as they tried to take him down. It always seemed in the poster, at least to Johnny, with one of the soldiers impaled on the razor-sharp teeth in Godzilla’s truck-sized mouth that Godzilla was laughing at the soldiers knowing they could not hurt him.

On the back wall behind Johnny’s bed was a poster of King Kong, with his massive, hairy hands holding a beautiful blonde babe in one hand while he held onto the radio antennae at the top of the Empire State Building with his other hand as biplanes buzzed about trying to kill him with their machine guns. Jimmy knew that King Kong had died in the movie, the one he saw with his dad and sister when he was four, after falling 110 stories to the street below. Johnny cried when King Kong was killed. He was just a big innocent ape taken from his jungle home, imprisoned on a ship, and then killed when he got loose in New York. “It just wasn’t fair or right,” Johnny would say to himself every time he looked at King Kong on the poster.

Next to the door to his bedroom, was another poster depicting the evil vampire, Count Dracula. For some reason or other, King Kong and Godzilla apart, Count Dracula was the scariest monster of all to Johnny. In the poster, Dracula’s eyes, bloodshot and bleeding, were fiercely staring out from the poster while his sharp fangs were biting into the stark white neck of a beautiful blonde babe. Those beautiful blonde babes seemed to be in every monster movie Johnny had ever watched and knowing that his sister Sue was blonde, but not yet a beautiful babe, wondered if she would ever be clutched in the claws of some monster, some day. He could only hope!

Johnny was not scared of the dark, but that did not keep him from racing across his bedroom floor and leaping onto his bed just in case there was a monster lurking somewhere in the darkness under his bed.

One night after his dad had left his room, after reading Johnny one of his monster books about Tyrannosaurus Rex, possibly the scariest monster of all time and probably could eat King Kong or smash Godzilla in the head with his tail, Johnny was restless and sleepless. He laid on his pillow watching the curtains billowing away from the windowsill when a small breeze blew under the raised window. He heard noises in his room and usually they were just scratching sounds his cat Manx would make on the cloth rug or the wood floor until Johnny yelled at him to stop.

Johnny pulled his blanket further up and slightly covered his face with it, not that that would help if something bad was in his room. As he laid in bed thinking about what it might be, the foot of his bed raised up about a foot into the air. Then it dropped down and made a pounding noise. His dad yelled upstairs from the foot of the stairs for Johnny “to quit playing around and get to sleep” which of course was exactly what Johnny was trying to do.

Johnny whispered into the darkness, “Who is there? What do you want?” And no answer came back except a small rough growl.

Now most people in Johnny’s place, a little boy alone in the dark of his room, feeling something pulling on his blanket and giving off a small growl in response to “Who is there” “What do you want?” would be completely freaked out, and jumping out of the bed as they raced to open the door and went screaming down the stairs, their arms flailing in the air. Not Johnny!

Johnny immediately knew that the “whatever was under his bed” was not King Kong or Godzilla or Count Dracula, for that matter. If there was a monster or a ghost or some such thing under his bed, Johnny reasoned that it wasn’t much bigger than Johnny himself. This knowledge gave him the confidence to know that he would probably be alright, like the beautiful blonde babes captured by his favorite monsters in the movies who eventually survived their captivity and went on to marry the bastards who had killed the poor hapless monsters to save them and all humanity.

Johnny had a Mothra retro flashlight, you know the giant radioactive killer moth in Japanese movies, sitting on his bedstand that his dad had given him for his fifth birthday and on the second tug on his blanket by whatever creature lurked under his bed, he grabbed it, leaned over the side of his bed and turned it on.

Johnny’s flashlight lit up a trap door in the wood floor that was opened under his bed; a trap door that probably led to the empty room under the stairway that rose along the wall of Johnny’s room. Johnny knew the trap door was there because his dad had said, on many occasions, that he was going to nail the door shut one day so no one would fall through it, meaning Johnny crawling under the bed or his mother making the bed, but had not yet done so.

As Johnny moved his flashlight up the trap door from the dark hole now opened in the floor, he saw a hand gripping the top of the door. It wasn’t a human hand, too hairy for that and it had long fingers, six in all, with sharp curved claws at the end. “Spooky,” Johnny thought to himself. “What kind of creature was this?”

The hairy hand slowly lowered the trap door and behind the door, sitting on their haunches clearly startled by the bright light in their eyes, were two small monsters not much bigger than Johnny. Johnny immediately noticed that their faces were gorilla-like, but fiercer, with hairy bushy eyebrows that hung low over their blue eyes accented by yellow corneas that seemed to glow in the dark. They both had long, razor sharp teeth that appeared too big for their mouths and they both seemed to be in a constant state of drooling.

As Johnny lit up the faces of the two scary, ape-like creatures he stared at them trying to figure out what to say. And the two monsters stared back in the darkness at Johnny.

“Who? Who? Are you?” Johnny finally said, not expecting the two monsters to speak English or any language for that matter. Listening to Johnny and seeing him staring at them, they both made a small growling sound, under their breath, without changing the expressions on their faces. Johnny was not scared when they growled, curious as to how these two monsters had gotten into his house, under his stairway and made it up to the trap door under his bed.

“What do you want?” Johnny asked, again not expecting an answer. The two ape-like creatures turned their heads to one another, then back to staring at Johnny and made another growling sound. Then, without warning, they both jumped down the trap door opening in the floor and disappeared in the darkness below.

Johnny got back into his bed, and being later than his usual time to sleep, fell off to sleep. When he awoke the next morning to the knocking of his mother on his bedroom door, he decided that he would not tell his mother and father or his sister about the monsters under his bed. They would not believe him in any case since he had an active and vivid imagination and so it was his secret and his secret alone.

After breakfast, Johnny dressed in his school clothes and his mom took him off to his half day at kindergarten. When he was sitting at his tiny desk with a box of crayons, Johnny tried to draw pictures of the monsters under his bed but, alas, he was not an exceptionally good artist. All he could do was make hairy stick figures, with big hands that had long claws and faces with sharp teeth. He was able to make their eyes blue in color with yellow at the centers, but that was the extent of his artistry. His kindergarten teacher, whom he called Miss Biddy because she was always asking him about stuff he did not want to talk about, commented on the drawing which confirmed, in her own mind, Johnny’s vivid imagination and passion for monsters.

That night, after dinner, Manx came into the room with Johnny when he went to bed. Manx liked to hang out with Johnny as he read his monster or horror picture books and often curled up with him next to his pillow. Johnny had his bedstand reading light on, the lamp with three fierce velociraptors roving about in an ancient jungle illustrated on it, and happily read his book. Manx jumped down to lie on the rug next to Johnny’s bed. When Johnny shut off his light, just a few moments later, he heard the trap door open and rustling under his bed. Manx got up to investigate, saw the two monsters sitting on each side of the open trap door and hissed at them. One of the monsters grabbed Manx and he yowled out loud several times.

“Is that you Manx? It is alright, buddy, the monsters are just coming to visit. They will not hurt you.” Johnny said, although he knew that the character of monsters was always about hurting people. With the room in darkness, Johnny grabbed his Mothra flashlight and shone it under the bed. As he flashed his light on the two monsters, he saw that Manx’s head was being eaten by one of the monsters and the other was eating at Manx’s stomach with his intestines hanging out. Manx’s blood was everywhere and still squirting out of his head and the monsters seemed to be relishing every bite of the poor helpless cat.

Seeing his cat being devoured by the monsters, Johnny was petrified and did not know what to do next. He did not want to scream out to his father watching TV below or his mom in the kitchen doing dishes and certainly not his sister in her room doing homework. “No,” Johnny said to himself, “I am a big boy, and I will handle this myself.”

He yelled at the monsters, in a whisper, and asked them why they had killed his cat; a helpless, innocent cat that he loved and who was his buddy. But, of course, the monsters kept munching on and did not or could not answer Johnny’s question. Johnny broke into tears and when he did this it seemed to bother the two monsters who stopped what they were doing and just looked into the anguished face of little Johnny, just a five-year-old boy, a big boy yes, but just a boy. The two monsters turned to one another, blood dripping from their jaws, picked up what remained of Manx’s mutilated and half eaten body, then jumped down into the darkness below the trapdoor, their blue-yellow eyes glowing in the darkness.

Broken hearted at the loss of his cat, Johnny shut the trap door and then crawled up into his bed. He cried for a while and then drifted off to sleep.

Johnny woke up early and headed down the stairs where his mom was making breakfast for the family. His mom asked him if he had seen Manx that morning because she wanted to feed him, but Johnny said he hadn’t. Manx had a cat door in the kitchen door where he went in and out on his own and so Johnny told his mom that maybe Manx was out in the neighborhood catting around although he knew Manx was dead, eaten alive by the two monsters.

As Johnny ate his pancakes, he kicked his sister Sue under that table and ignoring her “stop it, Johnny!” pleas and his father’s “that will be enough, young man!” entreaties to stop, he knew he could not tell anyone, especially his family, that the monsters under his bed had eaten his cat. Maybe they would all think that Manx just ran away from home, but he knew better.

Johnny went to school after breakfast, his mom dropping him off as she did every day of the week. Johnny was still distraught over the death of his cat and thinking about Manx, a little tear escaped his right eye as he settled into his chair in the kindergarten. Miss Biddy, her real name was Miss Carroll, saw the tear in Johnny’s eye and came over to ask him what was wrong. Johnny could not tell Miss Biddy that the two monsters under his bed ate Manx and just told her that his cat was missing, and he was sad.

After dinner, his dad, his sister Sue, and he went into the living room and watched a Star Trek episode with an alien monster who could bore through stone walls with his acid saliva. Cool, Johnny thought. While Sue played with one of her dolls, Johnny kicked her where she sat and looking around his paper at Johnny kicking his sister and her yelling, “stop, Johnny, stop kicking me!”, his dad yelled at Johnny, and he immediately stopped.

Disgusted that he could not kick his sister with impunity, Johnny got up and went up to his room. When he opened the door, the light was off and since he already knew that there were monsters under his bed, there was no need to run and leap on his bed thinking they might grab him. Johnny laid in his bed, his raptor side table lamp lit, and he thumbed through one of his illustrated monster books. He read the words he understood-- after all, he was just five years old--ignored the words he couldn’t read and mostly just looked at the pictures of monsters. Giant apes, immense lizards, vicious dinosaurs, scary spiders, and a whole host of other wolfmen, vampires, ghosts, and such. He noticed that the two monsters under his bed were not in his book, but on the other hand, they were real living creatures and not make believe like in his books or in the movies he loved.

As he read, Johnny turned to pet Manx lying beside him on his pillow then he remembered that the monsters had eaten him the night before. Johnny was still very sad about Manx but not scared of the monsters who had killed him. He did not really know why he wasn’t scared he just wasn’t.

Johnny was turning the pages of his monster book when the blanket lying across his chest was pulled down. He grabbed it knowing that the monsters under the bed were the ones pulling on the blanket. He pulled back hard to play with them. They pulled it even harder, and he heard a low growling sound under the bed. Johnny grabbed his Mothra retro flashlight, bent over the edge of the bed with his head down and flashed the light on the two monsters. With the light on their faces, he saw their piercing blue and yellow eyes, scowling faces, their long, sharp yellow fangs which seemed longer and sharper than he remembered and drool dripping out of their mouths. Without warning one of the monsters grabbed Johnny by the neck and pulled him under the bed. Then they both pounced on him, tearing at his chest with their sharp claws and biting into his face and neck with their razor-sharp teeth.

Johnny was so surprised and dumbfounded by the attack that he did not utter a word, or shout out, or scream even though he was suffering so much pain, so much bloody pain as they devoured him alive. Half-eaten and already dead, the two monsters pulled Johnny down into their dark lair below the stairs and shut the trap door, leaving splashes of blood and parts of Johnny all over the wood floor under his bed to be found by his mother the next day. Unlike Johnny, she screamed and screamed when she found his remains.

Down in the total darkness of their lair under the stairway, the monsters thought to themselves that little Johnny really was a “big boy.” And a yummy one too! Burp!

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