Forest Under the Bed 3: hold my legs (Patreon)

The darkness under the bed grew and grew, boiling out, thin ribbons of shadow lurching across her floor. Like vines, or spiderwebs, or an octopus with too many legs all moving in different directions, trying to find something to latch onto and they were starting to get really close to her.

(There had been nothing under her new bed. Nothing. She was absolutely certain of that in the same way she was sure that she was alone, and her mom was already halfway across town, and the police wouldn’t believe her if she called.)

Faustia stared down at the floor and watched a monster crawling out from under her bed, and her brain told her this can’t be real but the flashlight digging into her back through the pillow said do something this time.

She didn’t know how to use the guitar. But the other monster hadn’t come until the lights had gone out, and this one hadn’t either, and her dad hadn’t kept a whole box of flashlights for paperweights.

She took it out and turned it on. The tentacles recoiled, ran from wherever the light touched, it was working—

It was only working in the flashlight’s narrow, unsteady beam.

“You’re going to need rather more light than that,” the ghost said.

Yes, thank you, I figured that out, she did not say, because she was too busy standing up on the bed and aiming her light. She started at the farthest shadow-tentacles, sweeping the beam to send them running back towards the bed. Towards her. They seemed to realize that, too, and the whole mound of them writhed and bunched closer, glad to twist their way up her sheets and onto the mattress towards her legs.

“Do you really think that’s wise?” asked the ghost, who she regretted ever getting to talk.

Faustia jumped. Over the tentacles, onto the floor, into the space she’d cleared, which was only a few feet from the light switch—

She lunged for the switch as the shadows lunged for her. They wrapped around her ankle, so cold against her skin that they almost felt wet. Her knees cracked against the floor. So did her elbow. The flashlight flew out of her hand and rolled, out of reach of her stretching fingers.

The tentacles pulled her back. Reeled her towards the dark mass under the bed.

“You don’t want to go under there,” the ghost boy said, one hand propped under his chin as he sat cross-legged on her bed. “It’s rather a long way down. If you could just get free for a moment…”

“Turn on the light!” she shouted.

“Can’t,” he said.

Faustia kicked at the shadows with her free leg, kicked at them like she wanted to kick at door-slamming imposter ghosts who wouldn’t even help with a light switch when he’d been the one to turn them off in the first place. It was like kicking rubber, or taffy. She tried to grab at the floor, to brace herself, but the hardwood was smoothly uncaring. Her foot slid under the bed and her toes dropped, like there was a hole cut into the floor. The ghost was right. She really, really didn’t want to go down there.

“It’s not that I don’t want to,” the ghost boy said, “this is significantly more distressing to watch than I imagined it would be, but I lack the fine control necessary for—”

“You can slam doors,” Faustia twisted to brace her free leg against the bed, and also both arms, because she could never have enough limbs not being dragged into a monster-infested hole under her bed. “Slam the light!”

“I’ll forgive you for not understanding the finer points of ectoplasmic kinetic theory,” the ghost said.

Faustia took a deep but very quick breath in, then let go of the bed with one of her hands to make a grab for her nightstand. There was another flashlight up there, if she could just—

The tentacles jerked her a little further under. Faustia jerked the nightstand a little closer. Her alarm clock tumbled off. She grabbed it and aimed it down, but the big red numbers didn’t seem to hurt the shadows the way her flashlight had. She hit a tentacle with it, but it bounced off. She threw it towards the ghost instead. It went right through his wispy white head, where he’d been peering over the side of the bed.

“That was uncalled for,” he said, as the clock hit the end of its cord and clattered back to the floor.

“Just get the stupid light!”

“Fine, fine,” he said, half-sliding and half-floating to the floor. “Send the incorporeal entity to touch things. I’m sure I’ll do my best.”

Faustia’s whole leg was disappearing under the bed. Her knee had already slipped into the unseen hole, scraping over the hard edge. She felt the coldness of more shadow tentacles, and open air, and unseen things that scratched at her kicking foot. Other shadows were coiling around her free leg, trying to pry it away from the bedframe. She reached back to the nightstand and pulled again, higher and harder, dumping it sideways. A tissue box bounced off a tentacle. A bracelet rolled under the bed, and disappeared. Her phone cracked down out of reach. And her second flashlight landed, right next to her hand.

She snatched it away from a flailing shadow and it hit the switch. The tentacles in its path shriveled in like twigs in a fire, but the ones around her legs curled even more tightly. They were trying to get out of its beam, but they were taking her with them.

“Look at me, slamming a light,” the ghost said. “Oh no, it didn’t work. Shock.”

“Keep. Trying.”

She wrapped her free arm around a leg of the fallen nightstand, and hugged it for dear life as she and it scraped across the floor. It caught on the side of the bed frame, too big to be dragged under. Unlike her. Her other leg, with a painful jerk, fell under the bed and then the hard edge of the hole was digging into her waist, both her legs dangling into the open air of the place where monsters came from.

The overhead light flared on, bright and wonderful and blinding.

“I slammed it!” the ghost said. “I slammed the light!”

The shadows fled under the bed. Faustia jerked her legs free, and push-scrabbled her way back onto solid floor, so far across the room she hit the wall by the door. One last shadow-tentacle was left, pinned and struggling under a corner of the fallen nightstand.

Faustia sat gasping on the floor, staring at the black shape still moving under her bed. It was black and lumpy, and getting smaller by the second. Part of that was because of the light, but part of that was because it was going back down the hole. Only its trapped tentacle was stopping it from getting away.

“Did you see?” asked the ghost, who she definitely couldn’t see now that the lights were back on, even though the switch was just to her left. “I turned on the lights!”

“Good job,” Faustia panted. Maybe he expected her to appreciate this more, but she was watching the nightstand shake as the monster worked its tentacle free inch by inch. “What happens if it gets away? Does it come back another night?”

“Unlikely,” the ghost said. “It knows we’re on to it. Did you see how effectively I turned on that light? That was proper poltergeist-level control, if I do say so myself.”

“What will it do?”

“Climb up under another bed, I imagine.”

Another bed. It took Faustia a second to understand. “It will go after someone else?”

“Of course,” the ghost said. “It’s hungry.”

The tentacle popped free. The monster started sliding out of sight, slipping back wherever it had come from.

“Hold my legs,” Faustia said.

“Hold your—? Wait, stop!”

She slipped under the bed, grabbed as much of the monster as she could in her arms, and held in a scream as she felt herself tipping forwards. She couldn’t see the place she was falling into. All she could see was the monster’s tentacles, wrapping around her, welcoming her to follow it down.

Something caught her legs the same way a falling bookshelf caught a bug. She winced, and squished her arms tighter around the squirming blob of the monster’s body. “Pull me back!”

“This is not how being a ghost works!” the ghost protested, and pulled her back.

He also pulled back her bed. Her dresser. Her fallen nightstand. Her mirror. Her unpacked boxes and the stack of not-so-neatly-folded-anymore ones, and the curtains on her window and her pillows, which fwumped down onto the floor, where the guitar landed on top of them with a muted thwang. Everything in her room shifted a few feet towards the door with the sound of scratching and screeching and a hardwood floor crying out in pain.

Faustia lay on the floor of her room, blinking up at the overhead light. In her arms, the monster squiggled and struggled, shuddered and shrank. It went from nightmare-sized to dog-sized, cat-sized to baseball size. She almost lost her grip on it, but in the end she was left with a little many-tentacled blob shivering in the cage of her fingers, trying to hide in the shadows cast by her hands.

She sat up, crossed her legs, and stared at it. It didn’t seem to have eyes, but she got the impression it was staring back.

“I am going to hold you up to the light and watch you burn,” Faustia said.

It tried to squeeze out between two of her fingers, its little tentacles flailing and shrinking the moment they left the safety of her palms’ shadows.

“You are insane,” the ghost said. “You just dove after an unsettled monster into the Red Forest while shouting—what was it again?—hold my legs. To an incorporeal specter.”

“I had to do something,” Faustia said, giving the monster a little squeeze. It squished out the edges of her palms, its tentacles wriggling so frantically they made little squeak-squeaks as they brushed against each other. Or maybe that was just its voice.

The ghost was quiet for a long moment. When he started making the sound, she thought he was crying, or in pain, or having trouble catching his breath. Except that last one didn’t even make sense, he was a ghost, why would he need to breathe? Then the sound got louder, and she realized exactly what it was.

“Are you laughing at me?” she demanded. She couldn’t see him with the lights on, but his laughter seemed to be coming from her newly moved bed. Faustia stood, squeezing down on the monster with one hand. She threw a pillow at the sound, but it went straight through.

“Oh no,” the ghost said, finally collecting itself. “I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at all those who must soon deal with you.”

Her bed creaked: the sound of a ghost straightening up.

“How would you like to be a monster hunter?” he asked.