Part 3 — The Thing Under the Bed
(Part 1) ➡️ https://storiesworld.us/archives/10126
(Part 2) ➡️ https://storiesworld.us/archives/10127
Several nights later, Sherry woke sometime after midnight.
At first she wasn’t sure what had awakened her.
The house seemed quiet.
Then she heard a voice.
The sound was coming from her son’s bedroom.
Assuming he was awake, she got out of bed and quietly walked down the hallway.
As she approached the room, she realized something immediately felt wrong.
Her son wasn’t simply talking.
He was carrying on a conversation.
He would say something.
Pause.
Listen.
Then respond.
It sounded exactly like two people speaking.
The only problem was that only one voice was audible.
Sherry stopped outside the doorway and listened.
The conversation continued for nearly a minute.
The longer she stood there, the more uneasy she became.
Finally she pushed the door open.
The room fell silent instantly.
Her son was sitting upright in bed.
Looking downward.
Directly toward the space beneath the mattress.
For several seconds neither of them moved.
Then she asked the obvious question.
“Who are you talking to?”
The boy slowly looked up.
The fear in his eyes shocked her.
This wasn’t embarrassment.
This wasn’t a child caught pretending.
He looked genuinely terrified.
“I’m not talking to anyone.”
Sherry knew that wasn’t true.
She had heard the conversation herself.
“Who’s under the bed?”
The boy immediately looked back toward the darkness beneath the mattress.
Then he whispered:
“I can’t tell you.”
The answer made Sherry’s heart sink.
“What do you mean you can’t tell me?”
“He’ll get mad.”
There it was again.
The same phrase.
The same fear.
The same refusal to explain.
For the first time, Sherry felt genuinely frightened.
She crossed the room quickly.
“Who’s under there?”
Her son started shaking his head.
“I can’t say.”
“Why?”
“Because he’ll get mad.”
Without waiting another second, Sherry dropped to one knee and looked beneath the bed.
Nothing.
No person.
No animal.
No hiding place.
The space was completely empty.
For a brief moment she felt relieved.
Then she looked back at her son.
The relief vanished instantly.
Because he wasn’t reacting like a child whose game had been exposed.
He wasn’t smiling.
He wasn’t laughing.
He wasn’t pretending.
He was staring beneath the bed with absolute terror.
As though something remained there despite what she could see.
Sherry climbed to her feet.
She told him everything was fine.
She told him there was nobody under the bed.
Yet even as she spoke the words, she wasn’t entirely convinced.
She led him downstairs and spent the remainder of the night sitting with him in the living room.
Neither of them slept.
Over the following weeks, the strange atmosphere in the house continued.
The unexplained incidents never completely stopped.
Her son’s fear never entirely disappeared.
And although Sherry never again found him speaking beneath the bed, she occasionally caught him staring toward dark corners of rooms as though listening to something she couldn’t hear.
Eventually she made a decision.
The house wasn’t worth it.
Whether the cause was psychological, environmental, or something she couldn’t explain, living there was clearly affecting her family.
Not long afterward, they moved.
According to the story, the most unsettling part wasn’t the scratches, the bruises, or even the conversations she overheard in the middle of the night.
It was a conversation she had with her son years later.
By then he was older.
Old enough to discuss the experience openly.
One evening she finally asked him what had frightened him so much in that house.
For a long time he remained silent.
Then he gave an answer she never forgot.
He said that whatever had been speaking to him never wanted anything.
It never told him to do anything.
It never threatened him.
It simply wanted him to know it was there.
When Sherry asked why he had been so afraid to talk about it, he looked at her for several seconds before answering.
“Because it always knew when we were talking about it.”
According to the story, that answer disturbed her more than anything else she had experienced in the house.
Years later she still couldn’t explain what happened in Madison.
She couldn’t explain the scratches.
She couldn’t explain the bruises.
She couldn’t explain the conversations.
But according to her, the most frightening realization was that her son never changed his story.
Not once.
No matter how old he became, he always insisted there had been someone else in that room.
Someone she couldn’t see.
Someone who listened from the darkness beneath the bed.
And someone who became angry whenever anybody talked about him.