MicroHorror

The moon cut through the darkness with its milky shaft of light. Lewis strained his eyes into the glow as this was his only point of consolation. The large beech tree scraped against the window with twisted branches luring him to look, but Lewis was too afraid. His youthful mind taunted him with the notion that it was under the bed. Every muscle in his body twitched with anticipation from the imminent manifestation of the bogeyman to slide from below and to grab him down to the cavern of hell where it dwelled. Turning his eyes to the window, the tree had finally won. Lewis focused his weary eyes onto the gnarled branches that rhythmically and relentlessly scratched the glass surface. Dark silhouettes of beguiling arms reached out beseeching Lewis to not look under the bed.

“Stay with us…” The wind and branches whispered to him with hypnotic tones, caressing him away from looking below. The wind sneaked through the tiny open window with a pleading crescendo embracing Lewis, securing him with its soothing breath.

“Shh!” Lewis abruptly retorted as the sound became amplified inside his cluttered head. Reluctantly his mind began to wander. He recalled the moment the pencil ground into the soft vulnerable flesh, the pale neck vomiting claret fluid with a pair of pleading eyes bulging with intense incredulity. A quiver of a lip, a fruitless lift of a wavering arm and it was all over. So quick, so final. No child should see such a pitiful death.

Though Lewis was fourteen years of age, he still yearned for a comforting hand to stroke his clammy brow. It never came. Only the bogeyman continued to terrify him, just as it did when he was of a much more tender age.

Rancid emaciated hands would slowly secrete and slither from under the valance, a rusty substance oozing from behind the sharpened fingernails as they wormed their spindly bony arms around Lewis’s panting and heaving body, crushing eventually his neck until he no longer had the breath to scream, or even to weep. Lewis would wake within the damp moist sheets, perspiration budding from under his hairline, his body throbbing with panic nevertheless relieved it was only a nightmare. His brother in the next bed often brought him back to reality with his irritable “What the hell, Lewis, shut the fuck up!” bawl. However every night the thought of the bogeyman plagued him, teasing and testing his conscious and subconscious mind.

But at this moment it was paramount. As of tonight the unremitting hellish visions were about to reach their final climax. A conclusion. Struggling against his will to look under the bed and that of the comfort he gained from the tree with its lullaby of calm, Lewis eventually managed to force his ridged body with laboured exertion to look down. Curiosity peaked to a point of obsession. He had never done this before, fear had always paralyzed him, but in order to end these horrific nightmares tonight he was compelled to look. The rustle of his duvet interrupted the cooing wind as he leaned over his bed. Squeezing his eyes securely shut, he could see a myriad of floating abstract images darting and waltzing within his head.

“He’s not real, he’s not real.” These words circulated desperately as his chestnut hair flopped to the floor; hands gripping the edge of the metal bed. Lewis eventually opened his eyes. His mother’s decomposing body lay still, silent, her eyes staring into the coils of his mattress. The pencil still jarred into her bloodless neck.

From her unyielding mouth echoic words uttered repeatedly:

“It’s you. You are the bogeyman, Lewis. You. Look what you did to me!”

Lewis with frantic hands muffled his ears and screamed. Disorientation engulfed him. The nurse heard his maniacal cries; with a syringe by her side she strode down the whitewashed corridor and entered his stark sterile room, as she did almost every night.