There is a bogeyman under my bed.

I've known for a couple of days; since the night of my twenty-first birthday party when I'd come home so wasted I'd barely been able to see.

That presence though, that presence cuts through any amount of alcohol, any amount of drug induced high. I know because I've been running from it for years.

My very first memory was of fear – fear of the bogeyman under my bed. It was feeling so thick it pressed me into the bed but so energizing at the same time. My mouth had filled with spit; I could barely swallow fast enough to keep it from dribbling all over my pillow. It felt like lightening shooting in ferocious little bolts all through my insides making my fingers and legs twitch with the need to do something.

But I couldn't move.

My mom had been military so we'd moved around a lot, but still it came. Oh it would take it awhile to catch up to me, to find me, and in that time I was free.

The euphoria of those few weeks or months after a move were the highlight of my childhood – a childhood fraught with blind terror, child psychologists and escalating beatings from a father who demanded I grow up.

Actually the bogeyman was the only real constant in my life.

Most nights back then it would just lurk under my bed or in my closet – it was either one or the other and it changed when we moved; in the blue ranch house it had lived under the bed and at the red bi-level it was the closet. Most nights I could only even tell it was there by the occasional odd shadow or the smallest sound of movement in an otherwise silent house.

But the oppressive fear that held me in my bed was always there.

I was a card carrying insomniac by the age of eight. They'd medicated me but that didn't stop the fear. It put me in some sort of trance state that in some ways was so much worse than the terror-stupor induced by the creature.

At sixteen something changed.

The monster upped the ante, so to speak.

I'd lie in bed and something would touch me.

Even in the fetal position in the middle of my bed there was something under the covers with me. Sometimes one, sometimes ten... sometimes hundreds; just barely touching, almost imperceptible, but there.

Light was no deterrent either.

The few times the creature had proved to me, without a doubt and undeniably that it was real and not just a figment of my overwrought imagination, had been on the nights I'd thought to ward it off by leaving on the lights.

It had shown its displeasure in small things at first; Matchbox cars zipping across the floor and crashing into the baseboards, an army man flung at my head.

But as the hours passed, it got angry.

The quilt was ripped from the bed and shredded by something just out of sight.

The sheets pulled right out from under me.

The bed shaking.

The closet door rattling.

Toys flying around in a small tornado.

And I had been unable to move until my fear had built so high, so it seemed, that it knew when to release its invisible hold on me and I'd launched myself across the room to turn off the lights.

With the darkness everything had gone still, it apparently contented by my submission.

Of course my father had burst in the door only minutes later and given the beating to rival all those before it once he'd seen my room.

I tried again three more times over the years. The final time it had wailed... a cry so loud and long that it had pierced my eardrums.

A round of electroshock had followed.

On my eighteenth birthday the touches weren't teasing anymore.

Tentacles had wrapped around my legs, from ankle to thigh and pulled me halfway down the bed before I'd fought free and run.

And kept running.

For three years I've been running.

Never sleeping the same place twice in the same month.

I hookup - men, women, it didn't matter - just to sleep at their place; I whore myself for a semi-decent nights sleep. When hookups failed there are always park benches, buses, or a pup tent in the park.

Now I've turned twenty-one and its had found me again – in the apartment I've barely ever slept in.

That first night I slept on the couch. I could just make out the occasional shift in the shadows under the bed from the living room.

I felt it watching me.

The next night it was the same.

And the next.

I don't know why I keep coming back. Its right there, the thing I've been running from forever and I just keep coming back.

I guess I'm just tired.

Fear is exhausting and I've been terrified since I was four.

Its been four days - four days of me wondering what the hell I'm still doing here and four days of not being able to muster the energy to leave.

I'm home, stripped and laying on the bed before the sun has even set.

I can feel the it under me, waiting. It could make itself known in the light but it was at home in the dark.

The minutes tick by.

I can hear it now, crooning softly; a strangely comforting sound I've never heard before.

As darkness fills up the corners of the room I start to catch flashes of movement at the edge of my vision. I feel the creature's excitement as if it were my own.

I am afraid but excited; anticipation flickers through me and I don't know why.

Unlike when I was a boy, this time instead of feeling like I can't run, now I don't want to.

Finally the light goes out and the room has a shocked silence to it – like in a movie after a big crash. The silence of devastation...

It pulls itself from beneath the bed, a writhing mass of black tentacles. It stands, for lack of a better word, at least as tall as me.

It has a pearlescent sheen to it that reflects back a passing car's headlights and the blue numbers of my alarm clock.

Every part of it is moving even as it waits beside my bed.

"What do you want," I whisper.

In answer a tentacle caresses my chest, down my stomach and wraps tightly around my thigh.

I just stare at it for awhile and the creature doesn't move other than the wriggling of its appendages.

I touch the tentacle holding me with a finger.

Softness; possibly the softest thing I've ever touched.

I've run for seventeen years.

"Yeah," I said, "Okay. You want me, you got me."

It crooned again and continued to croon as more and more tentacles wrapped around me.

A silken cocoon. I can't see, can't hear... can't breathe...

*****

I wake.

It's dark and I am under the bed. I feel carpet beneath my face and see shiny white baseboards across the way.

I can smell the most wonderful smell... my stomach growls. I can't place the scent. It's like steak and eggs and cinnamon rolls... like someone made my most favorite breakfast.

I am ravenous and the smell is coming from the bed above me.

I hear a tiny voice, "There's no such thing as monsters, there's no such things as monsters..."

It repeats over and over again and I reach up –

End