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Barbara Lake was never afraid of The Monster under her bed.
More so, until a certain age, she wasn’t even aware there was one.
It’s Gavin, with his sinister jokes that give their mother a start time and again, who manages to convince her, a very determined and not at all gullible five-year old.
«There is no one there,» she states to her cereal one morning during breakfast, before she is off to a kindergarten and he is away to skip another day of school. «I checked.»
[She did, red braids spread on the floor, glasses that were too big for her face trying to escape, the edge of the covers defiantly lifted. She found a lost sock and a carpet of dust. It was very disappointing until she found Operation and discovered where a spleen was.]
«Well yeah, Barbs,» replies her brother, fixing his own horrendously huge eyewear. «That’s because you are checking during the day. Everyone knows the monsters are afraid of daylight.»
Their mother, round and plump, hurries back and forth, tucking paper bags in their backpacks, more concerned about their father’s choice in ties that anything else.
«So I should check… at night?»
«You can’t just go looking under your bed! You have to trick it.» He chugs down a glass of milk and slams it on the table. «Take a glass of water, and put it under the bed. And if some of the water is gone in the morning, then the monster drank it.»
Barbara did.
And with a glass stashed carefully on the floor right beneath her pillow, she lied very very still through the most of a late May Californian night, hot and dry and stuffy, trying to hear, if the sinister entity makes a sound.
And it doesn’t - or at least it doesn’t before Barbara finally dozes off, flashlight in one hand (as a precaution) and stuffed frog in another - and Barbara doesn’t expect much in turn.
Except in the morning there is just a bit of water missing and she is intrigued.
Yet there is still no one there, and, like a painfully inquisitive child that she was - as he mother has been informed by her daycare lady - Barbara cannot let this go.
She repeats the experiment.
After examining the glue line, definitely above the water level in the glass, Barbara comes up with a conclusion.
And writes the Monster under the bed a note.
(Well, it wasn’t a note, per se: it was a very descriptive drawing of her - braids and an arrow to her name included - and a vague frog green man-shaped thing. They were holding hands. It had FRIENDS? in crayon at the top. She thought it would be sufficient to convey her point.)
The Monster drinks water - in a very small sips - and doesn’t reply.
Barbara comes to a conclusion that the Monster either can’t read (or write) or is very shy.
She doesn’t mind. She’s bad at making friends too.
Joselyn Lake never thought that her daughter would be so this insistent about being read out loud. But she reads to her baby every evening, and leaves the book on the bedside table.
Somehow, every morning, the book ends up under the bed, right by the glass of water her daughter demands on putting there.
Barbara is not afraid of the monster under her bed.
She is afraid of other things: spiders, clowns, someone taking her away from her parents. Gavin leaving.
And if some fears pass, like a fear of dark - because you have to be afraid if you are all alone, but she is not alone, so why should she be afraid - the others come to life.
One fit of angrily shaking moustache from their father and Gavin is off to a military academy. He rarely comes back, and when she does, he is not the same.
Sometimes she misses him.
The monster under her bed listens to crying. It does nothing, but she likes to pretend that he cares.
Barbara Lake is fifteen when she falls in love for the first time. He is tall and dark-haired, and painfully indescribably blue-eyes, and Barbara thinks that he is the most beautiful boy she has ever seen.
She sees his face whenever she closes her eyes, and that stops any idea of sleep from coming to her.
«He is so nice,» she whispers to her ceiling, after she stuffs another book - To kill a Mockingbird - under the bed. «And smart. And funny.» Somehow the silence judges her. Barbara sighs.
«Alright, he is also very handsome. Happy?»
(Barbara isn’t worried that she speaks to herself or an imaginary creature her brother made her believe in. She just likes to have an intelligent conversation from time to time. This is that kind of an intelligent conversation: the truthful one.)
She marries James when she is nineteen, and he is twenty, and he grows himself a beard that makes her mother frown. They rent a small apartment near her college, and he works for his father doing something she has no time to figure out the details of.
Barbara is blissfully in love.
But also very very tired all the time.
(And sometimes, she puts one of her school books under the bed, hoping it will put The Monster to sleep - as it does to her sometimes. It’s been years, but she still get so very embarrassed.)
Jim is three when he crawls into their bed after a nightmare. James turns on the other side, grumbling - this starts happening a lot, the absent-minded kisses to her forehead, the promises made and not kept, the late evenings at work - but she is not worried. Barbara carries her son back to his bed in his room in this house that still smells like fresh paint, pulls him close to her chest and starts telling him a story about a girl and her friend who lived under her bed.
His room is smaller than what she had growing up, but it’s more than she feared they would be able to give this child, so sudden yet so loved.
«Look after him for me, would you,» she asks, and puts Gulliver’s Travels on the floor by the bed.
She can’t do much, but at least she’d try to make sure he is not afraid. The rest they can handle between the three of them.
Jim is five. The three becomes two.
Barbara stops putting books under her bed.
It’s time grow up.
Nancy Domzalski from across the street catches her one morning when she is just off her part-time work and she has about three hours of sleep to have before she has to wake up and pretend she is capable of finishing medschool and raising a child at the same time.
Her voice is on the shrill side of cooing and at least that helps Barbara to wake up a bit.
«I wanted to thank you, sweetheart,» the woman drabs Barbara’s hand between he own two pulp ones and shakes. «Tobykins is really struggling with his new life here and I was going out of my mind figuring out what to do. If I was younger I would have stayed up with him, but unfortunately- But Jimmy was such a dear, it was so quaint, I would never have thought about telling Toby to make friends with all his imaginary monsters! Our boys will be best buddies in no time.»
Barbara just nods and smiles.
«Sorry, it was mean of me,» she puts one of the books from her (wistful) To Read stack under the bed. «You’ll have to tell me what it’s about. I expect an in-depth critique.»
Mr Strickler appears in their house suddenly - Jim tells her about him a couple of times, but he does the same about his Spanish teacher (who Jim thinks is after him), and his math teacher (who is eccentric but genuinely good at teaching), and his gym teacher (who is pretty much what Barbara expects him to be like) - and somehow it’s an invasion she doesn’t recognise as one.
Maybe because he speaks in calm, finished sentences, as if his words are not just sentences, but a pleasant exercise in vocabulary.
Or maybe because when he looks at her, he is soulful and attentive and kind, and she is at home with his careful concern for her son, and his extensive knowledge of literature, music, art, and you-name-it.
And before she knows it, Barbara is completely taken over.
«Is he single?» she jokes, and sniggers at her baby making a face. (Because her baby keeps growing up so fast and she somehow missed the point where he started to be a responsible one.)
Barbara admits to the Monster under her bed that she was only half-joking.
«Mom, you’re… home?» her son’s voice calls from downstairs, and she has never been more glad for taking those Krav Maga lessons, because it takes her one shove to kick Walt off the bed (he has a surprisingly soft landing), before the door opens and Jim’s very concerned face peeks in.
«Don’t you have work today?»
«There has been a scheduling mix-up,» she wraps her duvet around herself, hoping that he will mistake her disheveled look for sleep-disheveled and not «your-history-teacher-is-really-good-in-bed» disheveled. «So I am going to take advantage of it, and just sleep to my heart’s content.»
Her child buys it. «Want me to make you something? Toast, omelet, waffles?»
«I’m good. I just need a couple of hours of rest.»
«Well, I’ll put on some coffee anyway,» he smirks. «And them I’m off till the evening. Toby and I are working on a project for bio and-«
«Yes, I get it. Just not too late.»
She plops herself back on the mattress when the door closes, and hopping footsteps descend to the lower floor. The room turns blissfully silent, and she can hear the soft beep of the coffee maker, and the mumbled tone of Jim talking with someone on the phone.
«Walt, are you alright there?» she rolls over the side of the bed to look and finds… nothing. «Walt?»
«I’m under the bed,» he replies, and Barbara has to fight a sudden jolt of what feels most like panic. «There is a book here.»
There is one indeed. Somehow Barbara completely forgot about it.
«Must have fallen off the side-table,» she tries to explain too quick for her own liking.
In return, she gets a hum and then-
silence.
«Walt, what are you dong there?»
«Reading.»
«…reading.»
«I would have never thought that a popular non-fiction about the history of cancer could be so fascinating.»
She doesn’t want to ask how he can see under the bed in a dark room - must have a really good eye-sight, she notes off-handedly - but her face flushes with an emotion so fresh and gripping she has to bite her lower lip to keep it from spilling out.
«Would you like some tea, while you’re at it? Or you can crawl from under the bed and read it to me.»
There is more silence - she doesn’t mind, really, he manages to make even silence in his company pleasant, how? - and then appears a book, in a hand, then an arm, and then the rest, hair sticking out of the slicked back comb, and semi-closed pensive eyes with bags under them, and hard set of protruding clavicles.
«Would you like me to read it from the beginning?» he says, fitting himself by her side, or her by his side. Doesn’t matter. They fit. «I would also bring you tea but I doubt your son will be rejoicing at my sudden appearance.»
«It’s alright,» she stretches over him to turn on the lamp. «Now read.»
He smiles into her hair, kisses her forehead and does just so.
Barbara is not afraid of the Monster under her bed -
(and there are Monsters, in rock and scars and claws, in glowing eyes and magic, magic, monsters with wars and communities and culture that is old and unforgiving, violent and prejudiced, and at times absolutely heart-breaking, and her son is right in the middle of it, and her family is now bigger and louder and stranger than she or her brother would ever come up with)
-so it stands to reason that she should not be afraid of the one in it.
«Close your eyes,» he growls, while his eyes glow with primeval hungry yellow.
«Wouldn’t that be counter-productive?» she squints and curls an eyebrow at the hard lines of his features. It is already quite hard without her glasses, and how she is going to see him if she closes her eyes is very questionable.
«Just please do?» his lips harden into a line, and he is a rock - well, not exactly, but this is the whole point of this exercise isn’t it? - but uncertainty laces itself into his tone.
«Alright, sure,» she gives herself a moment to deliberate, then leans her head back on the pillow, and sighs. «What next?»
Next his hands, human hands, bring her up to the headboard. «No touching unless I tell you to.»
«Walter-«
«Please.»
«What are you trying to do, Walter?»
«I just want to show you something very important,» he keeps his hands on her wrists.
And then he flashes in gold behind her eyelids, and his touch, skin on skin, turns to -
- imagine a peddle on a beach, sanded by what surrounded it, smoothed by salt water, travelling the world with tides for hundreds of years, until it reaches you, tired and withered and sun-baked, and a child picks it up, passing it from one hand to another, and puts it, slightly cooled, against your very pulse-
- imagine that pebble to be alive, breathing, moving, hard as a rock it is but melable like clay, filled with all the same emotions you do, except the bottom of the sea it has seen is a lonely dark place, and the sand has rubbed it raw in places, so that you can see the very rock from which it was born-
- and it caresses her skin, a clawed thumb touching the rivers of veins at the bottoms of her palms, and flowing in waves up and down her forearms.
Barbara wants to call - what, who - but a defined ridge of a nose nuzzles into her hair, and a mouth, wider, toothier, kisses her forehead, then her ear, then her cheek, and his breath huffs at her when it reaches the bow of her pursed lips.
«Relax, I won’t bite.»
His tone is sly and self-assured.
«You know that is not a problem,» she throws back, and then realises what exactly happened.
And while Walter nudges against the edge of her jaw, warm stone and pointy teeth, she comes to a conclusion that there is no flipping difference to this and to him because this too is him so who is she to judge.
There is an actual troll family in her cellar. She should just get on with the program.
«Walter,» she murmurs with a smile, and lowers her hands to get him back to her, and encounters something she cannot comprehend.
So she opens her eyes and tugs her boyfriend up by what appears to be horns.
«Oh,» her boyfriend - moss green, with grooves and lines of luminescence and grey hair and horns? - makes a face, and she has to bite her lower lip to stop herself from laughing. «Watch me take a bull by the horns.»
And then she does laugh because her monster boyfriend -
don’t forget, Bar-ba-ra, changelings are stones with a human hearts beating inside
-gives a very human groan «Barbara, I swear» and proceeds to kiss her with his not human mouth.
Barbara was never afraid of the Monster under her bed, and she ain’t going to start when there are much more fascinating things she could be doing.