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“Ja-mie.”
Jamie’s breath catches in his throat as he hears the familiar wind-hollow voice at the window. How could this still be happening to him? He pulls his heavy quilts over his head and curls into a ball. “You’re not real,” he whispers. “Go away. You’re not real, you can’t hurt me, go away, go away, go away.”
He’s sixteen! He has a driver’s license! He’s been babysitting Sophie for years! He could possibly go on a date with Pippa soon if he worked up the courage to ask her! So why is the imaginary monster of his childhood still here?
“Ja-mie. You didn’t come sledding today. And I made the first snow just for you. Why didn’t you come, Jamie? Are you too oooooold?”
“Yes!” Jamie wants to yell. “Yes! I’m too old for you to bother me anymore!” But he can’t. His words freeze in his throat.
When he was very small, before Sophie was born, he remembers playing in the snow with his mom and dad. He remembers snow angels, and snow forts, and catching snowflakes on his tongue. He had loved the snow.
But then there had been those strange days of the Easter blizzard when he was eight. The sled ride through traffic that he couldn’t stop, the three days of ice storm that had followed, his high fever and the worried look on his mother’s face when she realized they were running out of medicine and no one could drive anywhere, and the fear that struck him deep inside when he realized he was having trouble thinking of anything that might happen tomorrow, that he was having laughing fits for no reason.
Fortunately, Spring had prevailed soon after that, and everything went back to normal.
But when next winter came, the strangeness followed. All the winter fun he tried to have was touched with danger. He seemed to have become incapable of being careful. Yet he was always all right—barely.
“Someone watching over you,” his mom had said.
Someone trying to kill me, he had thought.
And there had been a voice in the night wind that year. “We had fun, didn’t we, Jamie? And we’ll have fun tomorrow. We’ll have fun together forever.”
And so it had been, even after the Thing Under the Bed politely stopped showing up and the gunk in the corners of his eyes in the morning no longer glittered.
The voice laughs and Jamie shivers. “I hope you are too old, Jamie. Because we’ve had fun, haven’t we, Jamie? And we’ll have fun tonight. We’ll have fun together.
“Because you’ve always been my favorite. You anticipate me every year since I found you. Oh Jamie…”
To hear the hollow voice sigh like that leaves ice settling in the pit of Jamie’s stomach.
“Jamie, Jamie, I’ve been so impatient, it’s good that you mortals grow so fast, Jamie, Jamie.”
Jamie thinks he’d ask even the Thing Under the Bed for help now if he believed it was still there. “This can’t be happening,” he whispers to himself. “Whoever you are, you aren’t real.”
He can’t make himself believe what he’s saying.
After all, it’s hard to deny the distinct sound of icy fingers scrabbling at your second-floor window latch from the outside, and harder still to deny what happens after the latch slides open.