It Waits for the House to Sleep

It waits for the house to sleep.

The lights snuff out, one by one, until the only glow left is a thin strip of yellow leaking under a bedroom door from the hallway… that too will fade.

The boy reads past his bedtime, cocooned in his covers, eyes squinting in the gloom as his lips move silently and his fingers trace the words. He is small, and the book large, and the room so dark it is doubtful the pages are even legible, but he keeps his head buried in it regardless, eyes fixed to the page, face pinched tight.

Perhaps to distract from the oppressive gloom or the wail of the wind outside… or the closet door which now stood ajar.

Inside the closet is darkness deeper and colder than a winter well. The shadows pooling inside seemed to pulse, breathe, and stoop forward from the black void, leering at the boy from the periphery of his senses.

The Bogeyman has lived here for three nights now. Before that, it lived in a cramped apartment closet two streets over. Before that, the hollow space beneath the staircase of an old farmhouse. It never occupies a space for too long. Children grow up fast these days, stop looking for it. Fear turns stale.

This boy is the right age.

The Bogeyman watched him intently with eyes like pools of pitch. When the time was right – always between midnight and three – it would let the closet hinges sigh open and step into the cool night air of the bedroom. It plays the room like an instrument; claws would be raked torturously slow over floorboards, curtains were rustled as if by an ill wind, and – having slid forward from the shadows – it would loom over the bed, stoving its fetid breath against the child’s cheek. Always enough to rouse its prey slowly but surely from slumber and stretch out their terror.

A monster must feed, after all. Terror was its meat and wine. Its kind had hunted children for longer than living memory; never killing, never harming… just feeding. Returning, night after night, until the child outgrew their terror. By adulthood, they would dismiss their nocturnal tormentor as a bad dream, and the sweetness of their fear would forever sour from disbelief.

It has repeated this cycle countless times, in many places, in innumerable forms, for centuries.

It decides it is time. It slides closer to the boy, moving without sound, until it is close enough to see the boy’s eyes, squinting, trying in vain to pierce the inky depths.

The stillness of night gave weight to half-heard sounds, imagined lumbering bulks, and the perceived presence of peering, beady eyes boring into his form. The beasts of the screen and page never stayed trapped within their covers or reels at night; they were with the boy in that room, brought to life upon the canvas of the formless dark, where his mind lent them a power daylight denied them.

The boy is fully awake now, stirred from deep slumber.

The Bogeyman has seen this countless times… it has one final string to pluck. It lets out a slow, raspy exhale, its breath a putrid miasma of decay and death. It expects screams, horror, pleading… it expects to feed.

This house is different.

This boy never screams. Never cries. Never once calls for his parents to come to his aid. Instead, he peers into the dark with a kind of tired curiosity which honestly… puzzles the Bogeyman  and gives it pause. The boy’s eyes are wide in the dark, the whites stark in the gloom, with a tightness to his mouth which spoke of something deeper than mere childish fright.

The Bogeyman could not name the emotion it now felt. Curiosity was too warm a word for such a creature of instinct and cold, precise predation.

The boy is not afraid. That much is clear. There is no feeding to be had here tonight.

So, it retreats to the darkness of the closet.

****

 

It tries again the next night. And the night after that.

The ritual is repeated – the sounds, sights, smells – and is similarly rebuffed.

It rakes its claws against the dresser or drops the temperature in the room until the boy’s little breath freezes, it even slams open the closet door and looms large in its yawning maw. These are acts which are well received by other children. Which make them shiver and shake and bury faces in blankets.

This boy merely turns over and remains stubbornly silent.

The Bogeyman is patient. Ancient. It has lived through winters alone, far from the dwellings of mankind and succour. It has known famine and feast. It has even outlasted the slow death of belief in beings like itself. It can wait for fear to blossom. But in this room, it fears not even the seed of fear will germinate.

****

 

One night, the answer to its unasked question came.

The boy is not in his bed.

The bedroom door is open, light spilling in from the hallway. The bogeyman does not move. It listens.

An adult’s voice tore through the quiet house; a hoarse, furious snarl.

‘You little cunt, what the fuck did I just tell you?!’

A sound then. A dull, sickening, meaty slap followed by a deep thud. The man’s voice is slurred, thick with rage and something else. The boy’s voice is weaker, stumbling through apologies.

Another blow. Another.

The boy didn’t cry then, either. Just a strangled whine, a shuffle of small feet moving across carpet, and then the adult’s voice again – the father, the Bogeyman knows – low and poisonous: ‘Don’t make me hit you again…’

The Bogeyman’s head tilted in thought.

Something passed through it then. Not pity, for of that it had no knowledge. But it understood. It knew why the boy didn’t cry out for help when the closet groaned open and the dark crept closer; he feared summoning a worse monster.

The boy has no fear left for the Bogeyman. His terror is tethered to another.

The man storms out, muttering, the hallway light snapping off behind him. In the dark again, the bogeyman feels something unusual stir inside its cold shape. Not hunger… something else.

It retreats into the darkest recesses of the closet, but not to sleep.

****

Fear is not all the same. A child’s fear is primal and pure – a bright flash of lightning against a dark sky. Adults – men especially – are different. Their fear is muddied with memories, shame, secrets, the desperate yearning to appear unafraid and unbothered. Their fear is harder to draw out, harder to taste.

But no less sweet…

The Bogeyman turns the problem over in its mind, like a child fiddling with a toy: the boy offers no sustenance, that much is decided. To linger in his space too long is to starve. Yet to abandon the house entirely and seek new territory would mean losing the chance to feed on what is already here: a man who dominates his home in the daylight, but whose nights could be made unbearable.

It is not without risk. Adults, if roused enough, will talk of it. They will search for it. They will try to drive it out or destroy it. But the Bogeyman has learned across countless homes that disbelief is its greatest ally. No one believes a grown man who swears a monster is in his closet…

So, it imagines a new path.

****

It begins the very next night.

It coils itself in the darkness of the Father’s room, nestling snug in the shadows on the edge of sight. The Bogeyman watched the man’s sleeping form. Fear would be hard to farm from him, the rituals reserved for younglings would not do. But it was possible. Fear could be coaxed, ripened until exquisite.

But how?

The Father sleeps with one arm dangled over the edge of the bed. His breath was coming in short, steamy grunts. Tossing and turning occasionally.

The Bogeyman knew what it had to do.

At three in the morning, it slinks unheard towards the man and caresses his wrist with a claw, leaving a faint scarlet line along a vein. Just enough to wake him; just enough for him to see the door to the closet yawning wider than before as his eyes crack open.

The man pulls the covers tighter but does not stir fully.

The next night, a silhouette, too tall to be human, stood in the corner of his bedroom. It did not move until his eyes fell upon it. Then, one step forward. And another. Painfully slow, letting the floorboards groan in slow deliberate steps towards the bed.

He stirred then. And he screamed.

By the fifth night, the man no longer sleeps with the lights off.

By the tenth, he is crying, swearing that something haunts his bedroom every night to anyone who will listen. His voice quivers, and his eyes dart to dark corners, but no one believes him. The Boy’s mother rolls her eyes at him, the neighbours chuckle. “Too much drink,” they say.

In the dead of night, the Bogeyman feasts on fear. The Father’s fear is rich, tangled with disbelief and isolation. His terror is a rare delicacy.

The Boy sleeps undisturbed, his nights are still.

His monster has his own tormentor. And in the monster’s closet, the Bogeyman eagerly awaits the night, as the man dreads the setting of the sun. It will sit there, still as a statue, unseen by unwanted eyes, until the next time the man awakes to find the dark staring back at him.

****

After three weeks, the father no longer argues with his wife about bumps in the night. He simply lays there and accepts the inevitable, eyes plastered to the ceiling, waiting for the dark to move.

The bogeyman had learned his rhythms; the precise moment when his breathing slows, when the icy shiver races down his spine, when his eyes betray him and flick to the closet without meaning to.

That night, it decides to add something new.

From the black cavern of the closet, a small, trembling voice seeps out:

‘Dad… please don’t…’

The man’s breath hitches.

The voice comes again, weak, afraid, and breaking on the words:

‘I’ll be good, I promise…’

The man abandons the bed in an instant, ripping the closet door open.

‘You little shit!’

His face is expectant – borderline triumphant, but upon finding only shirts swaying gently on their hangers, it crumples into an expression of utter terror and dawning panic.

The man flees back to the bed and cocoons himself in the folds of the duvet. Weeping and shaking wrack the bulk huddled on the bed as it curls into itself.

Beneath his own childish terror, the man can hear another sound which seems to come from everywhere and nowhere… a child’s voice:

‘Daddy… why are you crying?’

The Bogeyman swears it can almost hear the man’s fragile mind snap.

THE END