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.
