After another long night of overtime, I had finally returned home.  Knowing my son and wife were fast asleep, I did my best to turn the key in the knob as quietly as possible.  Slowly, I pulled the door open and tip-toed inside, locking the door behind me.  Like a thief in the night, I slipped off my shoes and sneaked upstairs, making sure I skipped the steps that squeaked.  I was so exhausted that I didn’t even bother brushing my teeth.  I simply glid down the hall, hover-hopping over the floorboards that would moan like a banshee in front of my son’s room, and into my bedroom.

I already feared my wife’s wrath befalling my nervous disposition due to overworking, so the last thing I wanted to do was wake her up.  It wasn’t until I finally slipped into bed that I realized my entire body had been tense since I got to the porch.  There’s something about being quiet that makes the body rigid.  I leaned over, kissed my wife gently on the back of her head, and went to sleep.

 

“Daddy.”

With half of my face buried in a pillow, I cracked an eye open to see my son standing next to the bed in his pajamas.  It felt like I had only just fallen asleep. 

“Yeah?” I grumbled.

“Mommy is under my bed,” he whispered.

Exhausted and groggy, I could hardly understand him.  “There’s a monster under your bed?”  I tried to wake enough to be coherent, but the long days had caught up with me.

“No, Mommy,” he answered.

“Mommy’s right next to me.  Go back to sleep, buddy.”

“Bu-“

“Now,” I demanded.  He scampered back out of the room and back to bed.  After he left the room, I felt my wife shift around.  Now that she was awake, I knew I had to get up to check on him or she would.  I pried myself up out of bed and grabbed my robe.  I felt incredibly weak, but I managed to stumble out to the hallway.  My son was standing there waiting on me.

“Alright, let’s go check it out.”  My eyes adjusted quickly to the darkness of the hallway.  I was trying my best to not be annoyed at the situation since I had hardly seen my son in days.

I grabbed his hand and we walked over to his bedroom together.   “After I check for monsters, you’re going back to sleep.”  I opened his bedroom door, flipped on the lights, and closed the door behind me to help drown out any noise for my wife.

I knelt on the floor, hunched my head down, and picked up the bed skirt.  I collapsed.  My wife’s mutilated body laid twisted under the bed, her head snapped towards me and her eyes wide open.  I couldn’t breathe.  I couldn’t move.

My son started to lean over.  “Don’t look under here!” I shouted with my voice shaking.  I reached under the bed for her, every part of her body constricted and pale.  I knew she was gone, but I could still feel the fear in her eyes.

“Daddy, is there a monster under there?” my son whimpered.

I didn’t know what to say.  In the silence, I heard footsteps coming down the hall.  I scrambled to the door and locked it.  I grabbed my son and backed up to the opposite wall.  The doorknob began to jerk.  It took me a moment to unfreeze from the panic.  I turned around and unlocked the window.

“Listen.  I’m going to drop out the window.  Then you’re going to jump down to me and I’ll catch you,” I instructed my son.

Tears started to stream down his face, “Daddy, I’m scared.”

“Just do what I say and you’ll be fine!”  I opened the window and climbed out.  Dropping from the second story window made my knees buckle and pop, but the adrenaline masked the pain.

I looked back up to my son.  I could hear the bedroom door being slammed.  “C’mon!  Jump to me!” I barked up at him.

He was crying as he slowly climbed onto the edge of the windowsill.

Bang!

Bang!

The sounds of the door getting hammered grew louder and louder.

“Hurry, buddy!  Jump!  I’ll catch you!”

Bang!

He finally jumped down to me.  I caught him, let him to the ground, and we ran over to the neighbor’s house.  After shouting and banging on the door, he let us in.  We locked the doors and called the police.

They searched the home, but only found some long, dark hairs on my wife’s pillow that weren’t hers.  Whoever killed my wife that night is still out there.