Two
I'm not sure when I first realized there was something wrong under my bed. I must have been fairly young, because I can remember one night when I was about five or six I rolled a ball under the bed by accident. I heard a popping sound and started to cry because I knew I would never get my ball back from the weird gray nothingness down there.
So clearly I knew about the nothingness by then, and understood that things disappeared into it. But at the time I was upset simply because I had lost my ball. Like a kid who needs glasses but doesn't know it, and just assumes things look fuzzy to everyone else, too, I figured that was just the way the world was.
Besides, everyone loses things in their bedroom — socks, pencils, yo-yos, homework you're certain you did. It wasn't until I began staying overnight at friends' houses and saw the incredible messes under their beds — messes that didn't disappear — that I realized something was truly wrong at my house.
My second clue came when I tried to tell my parents about this and they thought I was playing a silly game. “For heaven's sake, David,” said my mother. “Don't be ridiculous!”
I remember these words well, because I heard them so many times in the months that followed. The few times I actually did manage to drag Mom and Dad up to look under my bed, the weird gray nothingness wasn't there and all they saw was solid floor. That happened sometimes. Finally, I realized that the nothingness disappeared whenever grown-ups were around.
As you can imagine, this was very frustrating.
After a while Mom and Dad decided to get me some “special help” — which is to say they sent me to a shrink. Unfortunately, the nothingness under my bed wasn't something that could be fixed by a shrink. All I learned from the experience was that I had better keep my mouth shut if I didn't want to get sent away for even more intense treatment.
Personally, I think Mom should have figured out that a kid as sloppy as I was could never naturally have a bed that didn't even have dust bunnies under it! But Weztix has taught me that people will believe really stupid things in order to avoid having to believe something they think is impossible. I guess Mom just assumed that my losing so much stuff simply indicated I was even lazier, sloppier or more addlebrained than most kids.
Maybe I was. That didn't mean that the area under my bed wasn't weird and scary.
Even so, I managed to live with it — until the day it swallowed Fluffy.
Yeah, I know: “Fluffy” is a disgustingly cute name for a cat. But when we got Fluffy she was a disgustingly cute kitten. And according to my parents, I was a disgustingly cute toddler. So when I wanted to call the kitten Fluffy, they were happy to oblige.
As you get older, you discover certain things you wish your parents had done differently, maybe even been a little stricter about. Naming our cat Fluffy was one of them. By fifth grade I had earned at least two black eyes from fights that started with people teasing me about my “sissy” cat.
Not that Fluffy cared what anyone called her, as long as we fed her on time. She was pretty aloof. But she was mine, and I loved her.
Fortunately, Fluffy seemed to have figured out on her own that she should avoid the area under my bed. Maybe it was some instinctive awareness of danger. Whatever the reason, I never had to worry about losing her there. She just naturally avoided the area.
If it hadn't been for my rotten cousin Harold, I doubt she would ever have gone under there.
– End Chapter Two –
