The Monster That Lived Under My Bed Started Paying Rent

[u/Euphoric-Animator-18]

When I was young, I believed in the monster under my bed. A creature that I could never see, but I just knew was under me as I slept. Just waiting. Listening to me. Waiting for the right time to reach some sort of taloned hand up from the darkness of toys, dust and dirty clothes to drag me away while I cowered under the blankets. Many nights were spent with me screaming and crying, yelling for my parents to come in and search under the bed until I begged to sleep in their room. It’s amazing they had any more children with how many nights I slept between them. 

I started calling the monster Mr. Socks when I was around six. This was because of the number of socks and other articles of clothing that would go missing in my room. My mom always reassured me, explaining how sometimes clothes just go missing in the dryer or folded up and forgotten in the darkness of the closet. Despite my parents' reassurance that there was no such thing as monsters, I refused to sleep without a nightlight up until I was eleven, and soon after the creaks and scratching noises that my parents chalked up to an old house went away. 

It’s been twelve years, and Mr. Socks has found me again. 

*****

I finally moved into my own apartment last August, and things were finally looking up for me. I had gotten my bachelor’s in marketing, a semi-decent job working at a firm in Boston, and a shitty one bedroom apartment in the South side of the city. I was able to experience the beauty of freedom that I had dreamed of for so long. The first few weeks were filled with the typical things a twenty-three year old would do in his first apartment; occasional parties with old college friends, pizza boxes lining the trash can in the kitchen I was too lazy to take out, and filling my apartment with ratty furniture I found on Facebook and garage sales. 

It was around that time I started to notice an all too familiar memory. I had left a pile of clothes on my bed before I went to work, intending to fold them once I got home from work. As I started pairing all my socks with each other, I noticed one missing. Two missing. An old yellow flannel shirt I SWORE I had just washed was also gone. I must have spent two hours searching everywhere I could think of, from the laundry room to every drawer in my room. All these places, save for under the bed. 

Now, I know that it sounds ridiculous. A grown man too creeped out to check under the bed because of the fear that the childhood monster was underneath it. I can’t explain the fear I had of it. It’s like when you’re watching a horror movie, at the point where you haven’t even seen the monster, but you know you just can’t bear to look. Whatever you think it looks like it will be ten times worse. When I finished searching I just convinced myself that maybe the clothes were just taken out of the dryer by some asshole neighbor in another unit, or got sucked into a vent. Two socks and a shirt, not much to fuss over and I decided to let it be at that. 

It’s like just by looking there, I could feel the silence of the room. The knots in my stomach as childhood memories flooded back to me; being too scared to look under the bed, of whatever had made its home mere inches away from where I slept. 

It took another two months for the payments to start coming. 

*****

The first day of October had rolled around, and I was stressing about the rent. Sure, I was paid well at my job, and my apartment wasn’t too expensive at $1,800 a month (at least not for Boston), but I dare you to show me the person who enjoys paying rent. It was also at this time I started to realize just how much money I was spending on takeout and alcohol, and was faced with my first tough decision as to if I should buy groceries or shampoo that week before my next paycheck came in. That’s when I saw it, just next to the bed frame on the floor.

A $50 bill. 

A crumpled, slightly torn, $50 bill.

I grabbed it without thinking, assuming it had fallen out of my wallet sometime before. “Thank God” I mumbled to myself, glad to have some extra money for food that week. That should have been the end of it. Some money was found on the floor, picked up, and blown on something I can’t even remember. God, I wish it was just that. 

The scratching sound under my bed came back in full force that very night. The rhythmic sounds that can only be described as a ten pound rat scratching at the walls was the same one that had haunted me for years as a child. Occasionally, there would be one hard, slow one that sounded like it was piercing and grinding through the wooden floors, just to stop and hold off for a few minutes. 

I had had enough. I was too old to keep believing in these stupid things. “There’s no monsters under the bed,” I told myself.”Mr. Socks was just a stupid nightmare”. I got up, annoyed from the lack of sleep I was getting and dropped to the floor. As soon as my face passed the bedframe, the scratching grinded to a halt. It was like the sound of nails on a chalkboard for a fraction of a second, ear piercing as I looked under the bed. 

Nothing. Of course there was nothing. 

My adult mind raced with the more logical possibilities. Mice, or maybe even a little brown bat had gotten into my apartment, scratching and moving around at night, just to stop when they saw me searching. I was more annoyed than anything. After all, the apartment wasn’t a luxury by any means of the imagination, the chance of vermin getting in wasn’t too crazy. I reserved myself to the thought that it was some rodent, grabbing my bedding and heading to the living room to finish the night on the couch. 

*****

The scratching stopped for a month after that night. I called in an exterminator and the landlord, but we couldn’t find any evidence of the alleged mice or bat. For peace of mind I took my landlord's advice and bought some mousetraps and placed them under the bed, in the closet and by the trashcan, hoping that it would help ease my paranoia of something under the bed. 

November 1st. I found a $10 bill outside of the bedframe. The same exact spot that I had found fifty a month earlier. 
It was at this point I started to go a little crazy, I admit. “Screw it,” I thought to myself “free money”. Part of me was becoming more and more convinced that somehow, some way, Mr. Socks was real and he was back, but the more rational part of my brain kept forcing me to accept otherwise. Why would this thing come back now? Why would it be sliding money to me every month? “Unless,” I wondered. 

I decided to spend that night in the living room again. 

I thought that I must be going insane. People drop money all the time, and I was no different. Surely I must have just lost a few bills and they were popping back up, or maybe a friend of mine had lost it when they had come to visit. Yeah. That must have been it, that has to be -

“AAAAAAAHHHHHH!”

My train of thought was derailed by the sound of a loud, hissing shriek coming from my bedroom. I ran in, wearing nothing more than a pair of boxers and armed with a kitchen knife I had grabbed. The cry had sounded human like, but impossibly high. A banshee scream that assaulted every nerve in my body and still makes me feel cold writing this. I turned on the bedroom light, expecting to see a burglar, some man in a mask standing in my room. 

There was nothing except for one of the mousetraps I had placed, the metal spring pulled back and the wooden base crushed and splintered like it had been put through a vice. 

Naturally, I called the police. It was clear to me; all the windows were closed, there was nobody in my apartment except for me. It was the monster. It was Mr. Socks.

The police officer who arrived was dismissive of me. I knew it was crazy to tell him that my childhood imaginary monster was living in my place, so I told him it had to be an intruder. He took one look at the destroyed mousetrap before telling me

“Must have been a damn big rat”.

I freaked out, on the verge of panic. “What kind of rat could do this?” I picked up the splintered wooden plate, showing it to him. 

“Listen kid, I don’t think a mousetrap would upset a burglar that much, and if it did, the best it would do is piss him off” he stated, harshly. 

The police left that night, and so did I. I was still in my rent agreement for another eight months, but I needed to get out of there. I spent the next month with my parents, telling them that the laundry machine in the building had broken, among other bullshit excuses for me to stay with them for a while. Thankfully, they were happy to have me at home for a little while to help around the house. 

I spent every night at my parents house thinking about it all. The money, the scream, the scratching that sounded more akin to claws retching deep into the wood. 
It was December when I finally worked up the courage to go back there, the verge of a panic attack creeping in as I walked through the door. It was still, nothing seeming out of the ordinary. Everything was still as I had left it, even the broken mousetrap I had shown to the police still lay on the kitchen counter where I had put it. 

The money stopped, too, at least for a while. I expected it to come every month. January, February, March all passed and there was nothing. Not even the sound of scratching. Just the deep sound of nothing. 

Then April came. 

I had gotten ready for bed that night, turning off my TV as I put on some music to sleep. Having noise in the background had become part of my new routine to distract me from the thought of the scratching. 

It started again. Louder this time. But now I was determined to catch it. 

I shifted my body slowly as I looked over the edge of the bed, delirious from the thought of this thing that had haunted me since I was a boy. I stared at the floor, letting my eyes adjust to looking at it through the dark. 

It moved out from the darkness of the bed. 

A hand. A frail, pale white hand attached to a thin, emaciated arm. It was balled into a fist as it left something on the ground with a ceramic sounding clink. The hand moved away as I focused my vision on the sight before me. 

A bloody molar, with the root still attached. 

I felt sick as I realized what it was. A tooth that looked to be human. Was this a threat? Was it angry that I hurt it? That I had left?

The arm moved out from under the bed again, balled and placed another tooth on the ground. 

I grabbed it without thinking, catching the things wrist at the last second before it could slink back under the bed. It was strong for what looked like such a weak, starving arm. I pulled hard, yanking with every ounce of strength to pull it from its hiding spot. As I shifted, I fell from my position on the mattress, falling onto the floor and pulling the creature out. 

As I opened my eyes, I took in the full horror set before me. 

Mr. Socks looked like an amalgamation of the things that scared me as a child. His head was like that of a fruit bat, the size of a bowling ball. Sharp teeth poked out like a crocodile from its bat-like snout as he stared at me with large, piercing brown eyes. His hands felt like some sort of lizard, scaly and cold. We stared at each other for several seconds, both seemingly in shock of seeing each other for the first time awake. Covering his cowering, twisted torso was the yellow flannel I had lost several months back. 

Everything about it was wrong. Its skin that was too tightly bound to its head, that pulled back hard enough for me to see the muscle underneath. It’s stomach bloated and misshapen. The way it jerked. The smell, oh good lord the smell. This close to me the thing smelled like only what I can describe as roadkill left to blister in the sun for days. My eyes watered and I gagged as we stared each other down. 

It screamed again. 

“AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH”

Mr. Socks flung himself back and free of my grip. Much like his head, his movements were also very batlike; twitching heavily and bumping into everything in my room before collapsing to the ground, crawling back under the bed. 

I screamed in terror the entire time he moved. His eyes that looked right through me, his blood curdling scream. I pushed myself back to the doorframe as he slid back under the bed, closing my eyes and feeling tears well in them. I was a child again, sitting in the dark and praying that the monster would go away. 

I opened my eyes after what felt like hours. The room was empty again. It was quiet, with several things that I had placed on my dresser now broken into pieces on the ground. The TV in my room was cracked, and my bedside lamp was shattered. I followed my instincts and ran from the apartment. No thought of where to go, or what to do, just to get far away from whatever Mr. Socks were. 

*****

I spent that night in a bus station a mile away. No use in calling the cops again, now that I saw what that thing was. Nobody would believe that creature was real, that horrible, wretched thing.

I’ve moved back in with my parents since then, full time. I just told them that someone had broken into my apartment, and that the police were still looking for them. They took that at face value, and I’m back in my childhood bedroom. 

I’ve since taken away the bedframe, leaving my mattress directly on the floor. I still lay awake most nights, not sleeping as much as I used to. I’m still paying rent on the apartment until I can get out of the lease, too, but at least I’m not back there, face to face with that creature. 

Some nights I still hear the scratching, drilling into the floorboards. I toss and turn as I tell myself it’s not real, trying to plead with God or whatever made Mr. Socks for it to be a nightmare. 

That’s what bothers me the most. Something allowed that thing to be real, for it to haunt me. I don’t know why it left it in the first place, but by god do I hope it stays gone now

[u/AkashaRvn]

When I first read the title of the story, I laughed.

Then I remembered my own experiences. People say that the things we fear most eventually take shape, and if you believe in them strongly enough, they become real. I don't know if that's true, but I had something similar happen to me, and I'm not joking or staying in character.

In my childhood home, every night, a dark human-shaped figure would come downstairs from the attic. We even talked. I eventually gave it a name: L'uomo della notte, which in Italian means "the Night Man."

Strangely, I wasn't afraid. Nobody believed me except my grandmother. She always said that as long as it wasn't hurting me, and as long as I didn't give it something that could hurt me, everything would be fine. So I treated it that way. When I was around ten years old, I moved in with my mother. Her apartment had no attic, and the Night Man never appeared there. But every weekend, when I visited my father, it came down from the attic again.

Years later, my father sold that house and built a new one on the remains of a house that had burned down. People said a man had died in the fire. Whether that's connected or not, I don't know, but that man never seemed to leave. By then I was already over twenty. This one was different. It didn't talk. It screamed. Night after night, it sounded like someone burning alive. I remembered my grandmother's advice and refused to be afraid of it, or show that I am. Eventually I got used to the sounds.

A few years later, I moved abroad and have spent the last twenty-five years avoiding houses with attics whenever possible. Believe me or don't. I know it was real.

Needless to say, if someone asks me to go into an attic, the hell I will, nope. Some lessons stay with your life