"Under the Bed" by Harold Fürchten

Guten morgen, guten abend, guten tag, whenever you are reading this. My name is Harold, the resident boggart at The Academy. Around here I'm the thing that goes bump in the night. Well, me and Adelaide, and Will when he's raiding the fridge for a midnight snack, but they can tell you all about that in their own stories.

Now, draw the curtains, light some candles, and relax while you still can, for this is not a story one should commit themselves to on a whim. It is time to look inside yourself and confront your darkest fears, just as I had to do when I experienced these events first hand.

I come from Rosenheim, in the south German state of Bavaria. Not much of interest has happened there, besides the apparent incidence of a poltergeist in one of the houses here in the '60s. That was probably not actually a ghost, as most things have logical explanations, although once again Adelaide proves me incorrect...

I lived with my parents and my seventeen year old sister - two years my senior. The house was small and humble, so I shared my room with my sister Lisa-Marie, but we were close so we didn't mind. We were a good family with few arguments and very uneventful lives.

Well, we were uneventful for a time. One day a letter came in the post from some estranged and eccentric old great-aunt who had no family of her own and all of her belongings went to her sister. Her sister, my mother's mother, had departed us and so some time after the letter arrived we had a truck full of boxes join us.

Apparently she had a very large house, but very large debts to match, and so her house was forfeited to the government to atone for her debts. The house was then gutted and the innards sent to us in accordance with her will. Most of the boxes were untouched and just sent to the loft, as there was far too much to look through and the first few boxes were filled with little of interest - dusty old crockery reserved for the presence of the company the poor woman never received, the sad reminders of how lonely she must have been.

What was taken out of the boxes found a place, her "polite company" crockery was reserved for the same purpose with us, and there must have been a box filled with eccentricity in there that my father inherited. This was evidenced by his decision to put the stuffed deer head that he found in one of the boxes at the top of the stairs, so it was impossible to walk upstairs without looking at it. The unnerving part was that it always felt like it was looking back, even with its glass eyes.

It was just after everything had gotten back to normal that things got weird. One day I was out with some friends and my parents having a spa day that they'd got as a Christmas present from me and Lisa-Marie. That left Lisa-Marie alone to do what she usually did when she was alone - smoke something she probably shouldn't be smoking, if you catch my drift. I cannot judge, I've tried it, but she was more regular with her use of it.

So, whilst laying on her bed, Lisa-Marie heard a noise from above her, like a scraping or a scuttling. The hatch to the loft was in our room, so she looked up at it, considering venturing up there to investigate whether it was a bird or something like that that was trapped up there. That was when she saw the hatch rattle.

Lisa-Marie ran out of the room and refused to sleep in there for a week, choosing the sofa instead. My parents found her bag of illicit substances on her bed when they went to check in the room, so they never really believed her, but my dad went up into the loft to humour her anyway.

My father never expected much, you could barely move for boxes up there so he didn't know how there could be space for anything to live up there. Judging by what he said when he woke up in hospital with a concussion that wasn't what he believed any more.

He said that when he got up there all he could see was boxes. In the darker corners he could see some of our boxes that had been pushed back to make way for new ones. What he couldn't see, however, was any space where a thing could hide. Then, in the darkest section of the attic he saw something he didn't expect. It looked like an eye, one deep red eye, glowing gently so he could just make it out. That's when a pile of boxes flew into him and knocked him back and through the hatch. That was the last thing he remembered.

My father does not scare easily, and he does not stray from the facts. He is a police officer and is proud of his sensible approach to his work, only making judgements once he has enough evidence. He would not lie about what happened to him in the attic, so that did not fill me with confidence when I had to sleep underneath a room where such strange things had happened.

For a while it was just me and my mother who had not experienced anything. Then, one night, my mother was in the living room watching television. I think it was a late-night political debate, but that is not the important part. At some point she heard the creaking of the stairs, as though someone was coming down them. The footsteps went to the room next door, and then she heard someone fill and boil the kettle, then the pouring of water and a spoon clinking in a cup. The footsteps then went back upstairs.

Now, my mother had been into the kitchen earlier that night to get a banana whilst she watched the show, and she could hear the adverts playing in the living room. That led her to think whoever made themselves a drink would have known she was there, so in the morning she asked us all why we hadn't offered her a drink as well. None of us had any idea what age was talking about - we had all been asleep. She persisted, but in the end realised she had now joined her husband and daughter in experiencing something out of the ordinary.

Then there was only me, the only one not to have seen or heard something unusual. I thought I did every now and then, maybe I thought I saw the deer head blink sometimes, subtle things like that. Then, one day, things got a little bit more obvious.

I was sat on my bed one night, just reading, and things went abnormally quiet. Things were quiet already, everyone was downstairs, but then things went eerily silent, like you could almost touch the air - it was so still.

Then I felt something, a small something but still something. Looking down I saw a cockroach crawling on my arm. I didn't want to kill it so I flicked it off and hoped it would get the message, before getting back to my reading.

A few pages later I felt the feeling again, the tingle of tiny legs on my arm, but there were a few more legs this time. There were three of the nasty little things on me this this time, and I wasn't letting these get the better of me, so I went over to my window and brushed them off of my arm and outside.

It was around the time that I finished my chapter that I felt legs again, but when I looked down I was more than a little irked. Spilling in from the open window and under every bit of furniture, all over my arm, were bugs. Cockroaches, centipedes, ants, maggots, they were just everywhere. Then the top drawer of my chest of drawers flung open and my yelling mouth was filled with flies as they flew straight towards my face.

Everyone had heard me screaming, but as soon as they opened the door snake burst in everything disappeared. Every bug was gone as soon as other people were there. All that was left was the fear, the feeling of tiny legs covering my body and filling my mouth. I still shudder to think about it.

There was nobody we could call, the Ghostbusters don't actually exist so we were stuck with trying to live through this nightmare. The rest of my family handled it better, but that's only because it wasn't as bad for them. Their problems had mostly stopped, but mine carried on.

There was one thing that we all shared, and that was the clock. It was another of our inherited possessions, a large aspen grandfather clock that found a place in our hallway, and like everything else that we inherited it refused to be normal. At midnight every single night it struck thirteen without fail. We could alter the time and it would still do it when every other clock said twelve, even if it didn't. My father tried to fix it so took out the entire mechanism, and even with no cogs it struck thirteen.

Doors would slam randomly, mirrors and windows would shatter, sometimes the deer head would make noises as though it was alive, blood once came from the shower whilst I was in it, and the radio occasionally produced nothing but white noise or a screaming sound. They were all relatively minor compared to what happened next though.

I'd been asleep for about an hour when the clock struck thirteen again, waking me up. When I opened my eyes, I couldn't move, it was like I'd been tied down to the bed. But worse than that, I couldn't close my eyes any more, whatever it was that was doing all of this was preparing for something.

I felt something on my arm but I couldn't pull away, I couldn't even turn my head to look at it. It was a hand, and then another followed, as someone pulled themselves out from under my bed.

When the fingers loosened their grip I started to hear scampering, footfalls in the dark corners of the room I couldn't turn my head to look at. Then the scampering moved to the ceiling, and I could see what was making the noise. It was a person.

I didn't recognise the person at first, I was too busy trying force my eyes shut. They scampered across the ceiling and down the wall, hiding at the end of my bed. The top of their head started to appear as they moved up, revealing dark greasy hair. Then they grasped the end of my bed to show pale, dirty hands with chipped fingernails that were once painted red. The face came next, the face of my sister, much paler than I remembered and with eyes as deep and black as anything you could imagine.

I tried to scream but the noise never came. I couldn't open my mouth and my voice just wouldn't work. I was alone with this demonic, monstrous version of my sister.

Then the face changed suddenly, the colour returned and the eyes went back to normal. Everything else - the greasy bedraggled hair and dirty clothes - stayed the same.

"You've done this," she said, her voice drenched in fear, as though she was begging me to save her. Then the face changed back, the eyes became black again.

"You've done this," she said again, only it wasn't her. It was her mouth that moved, but the voice that came out was deep and raspy, hearing it was like having sandpaper rubbed on your eyes.

Blood started to drop from her mouth, slowly at first, but as she moved down my bed on all fours it got worse. It dropped on my white bedsheets, pouring out of her mouth as she got closer, her skin turning paler and grey. The skin on her face and arms grew taut and thin over her bones until she looked like a skeleton covered in the thinnest veneer of skin. The black eyes looked sunken in their sockets, so black and empty. I could my face reflected in them.

With her face directly above mine the blood stopped just long enough for her to say "You've done this" in the other voice one more time. As she opened her mouth and blood flooded out from it like a raging torrent, only then was I permitted to scream.

Then it all disappeared. I was sweating but not covered in blood, and I could move my body again. Looking at Lisa-Marie's bed, she was still there. I could see her chest move up and down as she breathed, the knowledge that she was alive and fine making me feel much calmer.

As I was about to turn away I saw her head move towards me. Her eyes flicked open to reveal the darkness once more, and then the other voice came again. As it said "You've done this" the words appeared on the wall behind her, daubed on in blood.

I woke up screaming in a cold sweat and brought everyone into the room. Lisa-Marie leant over me, absolutely fine, but I couldn't look directly at her out of fear. My parents tried to reassure me that everything was okay, but it wasn't. Something was haunting us and I wanted it to stop more than I had ever wanted anything before.

For the next few days I barely spoke, jumping at the tiniest noise and shuddering most of the time. Once I'd recovered I decided that I had to stop whatever was causing all of this. I read everything I could find about ghosts and decided that I needed to search for whatever item might be keeping one here. We'd been fine until we inherited all of those boxes, so something in there had to be causing these events.

I ventured into the attic, it was full of boxes so it was my best chance. My father had warned me not to but I was sick of being tormented and I had to take matters into my own hands.

I spent hours trawling through all of the boxes but I found nothing that seemed like it would cause these occurrences. On my way out of the attic, however, I noticed another strange happening.

As I sat on the edge of the hatch in the attic, feeling quite defeated and ready to leave, I saw a thick, crimson liquid spreading across the carpet from under my bed. I felt a shiver down my spine but I thought it may lead me to what was causing these things, so I bounded down the ladder as fast as I could.

Not wanting to get covered in blood, I got on my bed and leant over the side do I had an upside-down view of what was under there. What I saw was an endless void of nothingness, as black as Lisa-Marie's eyes in my nightmare.

I lifted my head up so I couldn't see it anymore and shook my head. It was so absorbing, I felt like it was drawing me into it, so I needed to escape its grip. The blood, as that is what I assumed the liquid was, had disappeared, so I decided to look again.

This time there was no soul-sapping abyss, just a regular cardboard box like all of the others in the attic. Perhaps there was no space in the attic and it had been left there and forgotten about, or maybe it had moved down there from the attic of its own accord. Weirder things had happened. Whatever the case may be, it was under my bed, and as that was the source of the blood, the void, and my nightmare sister, I had a hunch that it was the source of every other peculiar event.

Opening it I saw nothing of particular interest. There were empty picture frames and dusty old books, but I knew it couldn't be just that. I dug deeper, past everything that didn't seem of interest, determined that there had to be something in the box. And I found it.

I saw a glint of deep red at the bottom. I burrowed faster into the box and saw an amulet, and it felt like it saw me. It was a gold oval, the shape of an eye, with more oval shaped rubies in the centre making up the iris. It had to be this, nothing else could explain it.

It blinked, or at least it looked like it did. The many rubies turned to one large one, a thin black pupil, as deep as Lisa-Marie's in the dream. It looked just like the one my father described from the attic. It was staring at me, boring deep into my very soul. I saw every single incident that had happened since we inherited it, I could tell it had caused everything, I think it was telling me.

I was transfixed by the curio, I had to have it for myself. I felt like I knew the evil contained within it but I didn't care. From that moment on it never left me.

My family started looking at me differently from then, but the haunting, or whatever it should be called, stopped. The three of them tried to avert their gaze when I walked past, giving me a wide berth. It was like they were afraid of me. And it wasn't just my family, my friends at school were the same.

One day Lisa-Marie had worked up enough courage to ask me if everything was alright, and I explained everything. I even showed her the amulet, which she immediately shied away from. I put it away and asked her why, and apparently she saw spiders crawling out from a hole in the middle, where the giant ruby was when it blinked for me. Lisa-Marie was scared of spiders.

I showed the amulet to my parents next, to see if they had any clue what it was. Both of them reacted in the same way as Lisa-Marie, my mother saying she felt claustrophobic and my father as though he was at the top of a large tower. That was when I realised the amulet instilled fear in people, it found out what they were afraid of and it put them in that situation.

I had to learn how to use the amulet, there was no instruction manual but I wasn't going to let that stop me. I didn't want people to be afraid of me, but I knew that with the amulet on me at all times I knew that that was never going to happen.

One day at school I realised how to work it though. I was walking through the corridor when I bumped into someone coming the other way and fell over, the amulet coming out of my shirt as I did so. I always wore it around my neck, so it seemed to have simply slipped out.

Whoever I had bumped into turned around to help me up, but I never saw who it was because they ran away yelling "Snake! Snake!" I felt something weird come over me when he did, and nobody acted like they were afraid of me for the rest of the day, but later that day I figured out why.

The amulet feeds off of fear, that's why it caused of those strange goings-on back at the house, and why it showed my family what they were afraid of when they saw it. But when I was wearing it if was as though the amulet and I were one, so it didn't feed off of my fear. However, when somebody else saw it it would use me as a medium for that fear - I would become that fear, so for the student in the corridor he may have seen me on the floor as a writhing mass of snakes. Then, after the amulet has been fed to its fill it doesn't need to cause fear any more, so that is why nobody else seemed afraid of me for the rest of the day.

Basically, it was a symbiotic relationship between me and the amulet. It would use me to make other people afraid so it could feed, but since wearing it nothing had frightened me. Usually exams would, but I had done several tests in class and I was perfectly calm. Even 'scary' films didn't bother me.

So once a day I would find somebody to scare, somebody that I wouldn't mind using to satisfy the amulet's eternal hunger. Usually it was someone I'd seen picking on another student at school, I didn't mind using it for good. I never saw what they saw though, occasionally I would get an idea of what it was, a vague misty image in the back of my mind, but nothing concrete. Since joining the ACES I've learnt how to hone in on the fear though, figure out what other people see in me.

Before long the symbiotic relationship escalated. It wasn't just the amulet that needed to feed on fear, I did too. I would wake up gaunt, my eyes sunken in their skills. My skin was pale and stretched across my bones. I would have greasy hair and yellowing teeth from the moment I awoke until the moment that the amulet and I could finally feed. Looking back, they were unpleasant times. A lot of people go through an 'emo' phase, but not many become vampires sustained only by fear.

The people who fed me changed schools before long, so I had to find new students to scare. None of them lasted long either; our school had the highest amount of dropouts in Bavaria, maybe even all of Germany. That meant we had a visit from an inspector.

He seemed awkward when I first saw him. His suit was slightly too large and his sleeves tended to cover part of his hands when he dropped his arms. His hair was combed over from the back to cover a bald patch and his eyes looked enormous through his thick glasses. All of the files he carried were clutched close to his chest most of the time, as though they gave him comfort. But the most important of his features was the fact that he wouldn't be there long, so he was a prime candidate for a feast.

I had never tasted the fear of an adult though. It did have a taste, fear, or at least I thought so. It felt sour on my tongue, bitter and harsh, but I still couldn't get enough. That's why I wanted to try with an adult, see if it was different, if it was better. Adults were supposed to be harder to scare than children, so maybe this would be worth the challenge.

As it turned out he was pretty easy to scare, one glimpse of the amulet and he left, never to return. However, his fear was of rats, apparently, as the next inspector was told to look out for signs of a possible infestation.

The next inspector was not the kind of man you would expect to be doing that kind of job. With his muscular build and slicked-back brown hair he looked more suited to the job of a personal trainer. No matter what his job, I intended to treat him in the exact same manner as his predecessor.

He was the first one to ever put up a fight against their fear. Whatever it was that he saw was powerful because I got a glimpse of it in the back of my mind. There were lots of flashing images and it was difficult to make out anything concrete. There was something sharp, a shortness of breath, maybe a woman. I only got a small taste of his fear, an appetiser for the main course I would attempt to get the next time I saw him.

I decided to try and catch him alone the next time. I laid in wait around corners, ever trying to catch him off guard. I had started dressing in all black, wearing a hood to cover my face against the sting of any light, so that kept me hidden. He was more prepared than I was though.

When I tried to use the amulet on him he moved in a flash. Some sort of reaction must have kicked in for him because I was on the floor before I could pull my talisman from out of my jacket.

I woke up tied to a chair in my bedroom. I didn't know how much time had passed since my failed feast. The inspector came in not long after and explained that he wasn't s normal inspector, but something more along the lines of a talent scout.

Then he told me I was on a detox. He could only tell me more about the kind of talent he was scouting once my mind was in a better place. Apparently I had become addicted to creating and feeding off of fear. It clouded my mind and I needed to rid myself of the addiction.

For how many days I do not know, but I was forced to stay in that room, tied to the chair. It felt like years. At the start I craved fear and tried to fight for it, tried to escape my bindings, but to no avail. Eventually it just became a dull ache, a scratching at the back of my mind. Eventually that stopped, and as my family returned to give me food and drink I felt myself plumping up a bit, looking less skeletal.

The inspector came in not long after I noticed my body returning to normal and he released me. After he'd permitted me to get a shower, where I noticed my hair was no longer greasy and tangled, he told me all about why he was there.

He was building a team, teenagers like me who had skills the average teenager didn't have. He wanted to teach us how to use and improve our skills, teach me how to use and control my amulet, and then we could do some good in this world.

Of course I wanted to accept, I wanted to go away to learn how to be better and then I could come back and my family wouldn't be afraid of me any more. More importantly, I wanted to help create a world where people wouldn't have to be afraid. Looking back, what I did was awful, the faces of the people I tormented still visit me in my dreams, and I wanted to use my abilities to apologise to them. I've never stopped trying in that regard.

So I went downstairs to see my family since I was back to normal, so the memories of me they would have to think of whilst I was away would be of love and not fear. They were happy that I'd found a constructive use for the thing that had ruined our lives ever since it had arrived.

So I went away with the man, taking only what I needed. I almost forgot the amulet, of course, as it was removed and put in a draw whilst I was detoxing, and I never thought to check for it. We were about half a mile away when I realised that I didn't actually have the reason that this man was so interested in me.

Once we'd picked it up and done the awkward second goodbyes with my family we were actually ready to go. After overcoming my addiction with the amulet it felt somehow different. I think it felt a bit lighter, and I wasn't as compelled to keep it on me at all times. Usually it's on my bedside table nowadays.

Well, that's how I got to where I am today, literally and metaphorically. It was definitely a tough journey, but I think the whole ordeal has improved me as a person. Going through horrible events and addiction like I have, you get a different perspective on life. I take things a lot less seriously now, try to enjoy life a lot more. So that's why I take it upon myself to keep all of my friends at The Academy happy, and also why I currently have bright red hair. It puts a smile on everyone's faces and Jordyn seems to like it, so that's good.

Right, I guess I should probably try and put a moral into this so it doesn't seem like there's no reason for reading this. Always try and take the positives out of things, don't let things get on top of you, and try to do something that makes you smile every day. Or not, but if you don't listen to my advice you may want to lock all of your windows and doors tonight, unless I'm already inside...

Goodnight.