Chapter 12: The Memory Under the Bed

Chapter 12: The Memory Under the Bed

The dawn that filtered through the windows did not bring relief, only a cold, grey illumination of their impossible situation. The living room remained a monument to a mad god, a surrealist landscape of inverted furniture and silent mockery. Alex and Sarah sat on the floor, surrounded by the wreckage of the night’s frantic research, the laptop screen now a black mirror reflecting their exhausted, hollowed-eyed faces.

The Third Rule echoed in the suffocating silence. It cannot create. It can only take what is yours.

“So if it’s made of you,” Sarah said, her voice raspy with fatigue, breaking the stillness, “how do we find the piece it used? Your brain is a big place, Alex. You can’t just go rummaging around in there for a rogue memory.”

“I have to,” Alex replied, her gaze distant. “It’s the only move left. It took the image of the girl from somewhere inside me. The grin. The upside-down perspective. It’s all a collage of… me.”

The task felt insurmountable. It was like trying to find a single grain of sand on a vast, dark beach. Where did she even begin? She had lived twenty-six years. The entity felt ancient, primal, yet it had only been born a few weeks ago in a moment of drunken laughter.

“Okay,” Sarah said, shifting into a practical mode, a welcome anchor in Alex’s sea of dread. “Let’s be methodical. Let’s treat it like a design problem. What are the core elements of the brand?”

Alex gave a weak, appreciative smile. “The brand?”

“Yeah. The ‘Upside-Down Girl Spooky Ghost Co.’,” Sarah said, attempting a levity that didn’t quite land but was appreciated nonetheless. “Element one: The girl. She’s young, maybe eight or nine. Element two: The grin. It’s too wide, unnatural. Element three: The eyes. Big, round, bloodshot. Element four, and this is the big one: She’s always upside down. Defying gravity.”

Alex closed her eyes, forcing herself to dissect the image that had terrorized her, to strip it of its power by breaking it down into component parts. A girl. A grin. Eyes. An inverted world. They were symbols, but what did they symbolize?

They spent the next hour talking. Prodded by Sarah, Alex dredged up half-forgotten moments from her childhood. She spoke of school days, scraped knees, family vacations. She unboxed a dusty container of old photo albums, the smiling, carefree faces of her youth feeling like they belonged to a stranger. There were pictures of her at eight, nine, ten. She had bright eyes and a gap-toothed, genuine smile. There was no monster there. No unnatural grin. No hint of the darkness that now occupied her home.

“Nothing,” Alex said, snapping an album shut with a frustrated sigh. “It’s all… normal. Annoyingly normal. My childhood was fine. We weren’t rich, we weren’t perfect, but it was fine.”

“Maybe it’s not about an event,” Sarah mused, tapping a finger on her chin. “Maybe it’s a feeling. When did you feel… upside down? Powerless?”

Alex’s mind was a blank wall. The more she tried to force a memory, the more stubbornly it receded. The silence in the apartment seemed to press in, thick and heavy, as if the entity itself was resisting this line of inquiry, enjoying her frustration. It didn’t want to be understood. It wanted to be feared.

It was Sarah who finally saw the connection they had been wilfully ignoring.

“Alex,” she said softly. “From the very first night. Liam dared you to open the door to your bedroom. You saw it under the bed. You heard it scuttling under the bed. You found Max’s toy under the bed. You’ve been so focused on the ‘what’ of the entity, you’ve been ignoring the ‘where’.”

Alex felt a cold dread wash over her. Of course. It was the one place she had been avoiding. The one piece of geography in her own home that had become the absolute heartland of her terror. The dark, cramped, dusty space beneath her own mattress.

“It’s always been about the bed,” Sarah continued, her voice gentle but firm. “Maybe… maybe the memory isn’t in those photo albums. Maybe it’s in there.” She nodded towards the stairs leading to the loft.

The thought was a physical blow. To voluntarily go to that place, to confront it on its own terms, felt like surrender. But she knew Sarah was right. The Third Rule meant the entity was bound to the source material. It couldn’t have chosen that spot at random. It was drawn there because that’s where it was born.

Steeling herself, Alex stood up on legs that felt like jelly. She walked to the stairs, each step a monumental effort of will. Sarah followed a few paces behind, a silent, supportive shadow.

The bedroom was still and cold. The bed, neatly made, looked deceptively innocent. It was just a piece of furniture. But the space beneath it held a palpable darkness, a well of psychic energy that made the air around it feel thick and cold. For days she had forced herself to sleep in this bed, a desperate act of defiance, but she had never once looked underneath it again.

She didn’t need to fight it. She needed to understand it.

Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Alex knelt down, her knees cracking in the silence. The floorboards were cool against her skin. She lowered herself onto her stomach, the smell of dust and old wood filling her senses. Bracing herself, she forced her head into the darkness, peering into the shadowed space.

There was nothing there but dust bunnies and the distant wall.

But the act of being in that position, of seeing the world from that low, confined angle, was the key. It was a physical trigger that unlocked a door in her mind that had been rusted shut for nearly two decades.

The memory didn’t surface. It detonated.

---

She is eight years old. The world is a terrifying landscape of giant furniture legs and a vast, Everest-like continent of patterned carpet. Her breath is hot and loud in her own ears, coming in tiny, panicked gulps. She has crammed herself as far back under the bed as she can, her small body pressed against the wall, her cheek flat against the dusty floorboards. The universe has shrunk to this dark, enclosed space.

Outside this space, there is shouting. A man’s voice, her father’s, a rumbling, angry thunder that shakes the very floorboards she’s hiding on. A woman’s voice, her mother’s, high and thin and pleading. There is the crash of something breaking—a plate? a glass?—and the sound makes her flinch so hard she hits her head on the wooden bed frame.

Tears, hot and silent, stream from her eyes, carving clean paths through the dust on her cheeks. She wants to sob, to scream, but she knows that noise is danger. Noise will draw the thunder into her room. So she bites her lip, the taste of blood coppery in her mouth, and does the strange thing she always does when she’s terrified. She forces her face into a smile. A wide, tight, trembling grin that stretches her cheeks and makes her jaw ache. It’s a mask. A desperate, silent plea to the universe that if she looks happy, the scary thing will go away. It never works.

Her eyes, wide and staring into the half-light, burn from the unshed tears. They feel raw, swollen. Bloodshot.

She looks out from under the bed at her small, quiet room. Her bookshelf, her little desk, her toys. It’s her world, but seen from this angle, it’s all wrong. Distorted. Upside down. She stares at the ceiling, a smooth white expanse, and wishes with every ounce of her tiny being that she could just unstick from the floor. That she could float up there, weightless and invisible, a little ghost clinging to the ceiling where the thunder couldn’t reach her. She wishes she could disappear.

---

Alex gasped, pulling back from under the bed so quickly she banged her head on the frame. The sharp pain brought her crashing back to the present. She was twenty-six, lying on the floor of her own bedroom. But the phantom smell of dust and the echo of angry shouting still clung to her. Tears were streaming down her face, the same hot, silent tears from the memory.

It was all there.

The scared little girl, hiding from a rage she couldn’t comprehend.

The forced, terrified grin meant to ward off the darkness.

The burning, bloodshot eyes, swollen from crying in silence.

And the desperate, childish wish to be inverted, to float upside down, to be anywhere but where she was.

It wasn't a monster. It was a psychic photograph of a moment of profound childhood trauma. It was her own pain, her own terror, given a name and a shape by a careless, drunken joke. She hadn't invited a demon into her home. She had simply opened the door to a room in her own mind that she had kept locked for eighteen years.

She looked at Sarah, her face a mess of tears and dawning, tragic understanding.

“It’s not a monster,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “It’s me. It’s the little girl who wanted to disappear.”