|
 |
||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
Goodnight, Sleep Tightby
Alexis Byter
So anyway we are on the school bus one day and Mikey turns to me and says "You know that thing the shakes your bed at night, just before you go to sleep?"Ah, that thing. The thing that creeps into my room at night and shakes the foot of my bed...
It's been happening on or off for about a year now but when I first mentioned it at home - it was over breakfast one morning - my big brother just laughed and said it was the bogeyman who lived under my bed, coming to get me because I'd been playing myself again. (He should know, I've seen some of the stuff he downloads off the web.) My mother gave him a clip round the ear and told him not to be so crude as there was no place for talk like that at the breakfast table. Then she turned to me and said "It's probably just the wind shaking the house and rocking your bed. This is a very old building. Besides," she added, "you've got a divan bed, so how could any bogeyman squeeze under that?"
Gee, thanks Ma, I remember thinking at the time, but I was hoping for rather more positive reassurance that bogeymen don't exist at all, no way, not anywhere - and certainly not under my bed, period.
But back to the school bus... At first I say nothing because although Mikey is my best friend, he can sometimes be a motormouth and I'm just a little bit concerned he is going to blab to everyone in our class about my secret. But I needn't have worried.
"Well," he says, "I've got something that should help you find out who it is." And with that he dives into his rucksack and pulls out this plastic bottle filled with black dust.
"It's a photocopier toner waste bottle," he says. (Like I didn't know that already.) "I got it from my Dad's office - they are supposed to recycle this stuff but they just sling it in the trash." (Like I didn't know that as well!) "I saw them do this on an episode of CSI - it's just like the powder they use when they are dusting for fingerprints."
"So?" I ask.
"So," says Mikey, "last thing at night you wipe down the end-board at the foot of your bed and then brush a fine layer of this powder over it. Then, if anyone does creep into your room at night, they'll leave their fingerprints in the dust."
"Then what?" I say.
"Then in the morning, you take a hi-res picture of it with your digital camera, then we access the memory card on that PC your father has in his den, blow up the image so the details are really clear and run off a hardcopy on his laser printer."
Sometimes I wonder about Mikey's imagination. At home we still talk about the time at last year's Halloween party. We were all sitting round telling ghost stories when Mikey comes out with this tale about there being this old guy, who lived in our house a hundred years ago, who dabbled in black magic and - it was rumoured - sacrificed children to the Devil in a temple he'd constructed in the cellar.
"So what happened to him?" my brother asked.
"The legend has it," said Mikey, "he disappeared one dark and stormy night."
"Sounds like a paedophile to me," said my mother.
"Worse than that," says my brother, "he sounds like a child molester to me." Sometimes my brother can be oh so stupid.
Still, this time Mikey's idea seems good to me. Of course we would need to match the prints to whoever was doing this - but as both me and Mikey think it's my brother, that shouldn't be too hard to do either.
I take Mikey's advice and brush the powder on the end-board. For three nights: nothing. But then, the next evening, it happens. Just as I'm falling asleep there is this sensation, like someone has just grabbed the bottom of my bed and given it a sharp tug, as if they're either trying to drag the bed somewhere - or else trying to grab me.
The first time it happened - OK the first few times - it scared me witless and I spent the rest of the night with my eyes screwed tightly shut and the blankets pulled up over my head. But this time, I go to sleep with a smile on my face, as I know I am going to catch out my smart alecky brother for once and for all.
Next morning - success. There are fresh marks there in the dust.
I photograph them and, that evening after school, Mikey comes round to my house and we head off to my father's den in the basement. We fire up his PC, upload the file from the camera and then open the image on the PC.
It takes a couple of seconds but then, filling out the computer screen, the marks in the copier dust can be seen all too clearly. But, they are not your usual fingerprints, complete with whorls and loops and ridges. Oh no. These are the prints of two skeletal hands, with just the faintest impression of scraps of flesh still clinging to their boney fingers.
Mikey is the first to run for the door.
TO COMMENT ON THIS STORY CLICK HERE
© Byter, 2006
Alexis Byter is a UK-based barrister turned writer and journalist who by day earns his living publishing a newsletter advising lawyers on that blackest of arts - how they can earn even more money by using computers! His poetry (which has been described as 'walking a narrow edge that could crumble into cleverness') and short stories have been published in a number of webzines, magazines and anthologies.