by Katja Bartholmess
It’s been night for a while. The girl can’t seem to fall asleep. She kicks the sheets off her small body, her night clothes sticking to her. She’s hot, sweaty.
She draws a wheezy breath, getting ready to call out into the dark room toward the direction of the tall window, looming in the corner at one end of the long wall. She’s done it before: called out the names of the people she holds dear. But the window is always closed and nobody can hear her. Yet the urge returns every night.
Before she can make her nightly call into the void, however, she senses movement under her bed. She slowly exhales her bellyful of air and listens – really straining her ears but her room remains perfectly silent. She fans the fingers of both hands out on either side of her as she lies on her back, pressing her palms into the mattress.
She waits.
There!
There is the movement again.
It feels like a vibration. She lies perfectly still, only her eyes dart around, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever might be in the room with her. She sees nothing but the switched-off light fixtures above her head on the ceiling, the two empty beds on either side of hers, and – by her left side – a tall metal hanger with a plastic pouch dangling from it.
Everything is as it was, as it has been.
When she feels the rumbling vibration again, she draws another deep breath. This time, it’s not to scream, but to work up the courage to investigate.
Three deep breaths later, she scrambles to a kneeling position, her bony knees jutting out over the side of her bed. She grabs the edge of the mattress and tips her head forward and down. With her butt sticking up in the air, and her short curls weighing her head down, she peeks below her bed.
She sees nothing but darkness.
What is causing the vibrations, she wonders, starting to feel dizzy as the blood rushes into her head. To avoid accidentally somersaulting out of bed, she lifts herself up to her kneeling position again.
When she lies back down, the exertion from her fear and her bout of acrobatics whisk her off to sleep at last.
***
“Could you please check under the bed?” the girl asks the next morning.
“Arm,” the nurse replies, ignoring her request. Her voice is muffled. She wears two masks and her thick-rimmed glasses that reflect the light, making her eyes invisible, as if she wore a pair of mirrored sunglasses.
The girl obediently turns her arm so the inside of her elbow faces up. She wonders whether the nurse has long or short hair under the blue head cover that looks like a shower cap. The woman connects a tube to the catheter taped to the bend of the girl’s elbow. The girl watches dispassionately, feeling the cold sensation as the pouch by her bedside releases its liquid contents into her veins again.
Before leaving the girl to herself, the nurse pumps disinfectant from the dispenser by the door into her palm, rubs it in, and then adds another pump before shouldering her way out.
The girl spends another day waiting for time to pass.
Nobody talks to her.
Nobody visits her.
She leafs through her picture books. She has three of them.
She lines up her stuffed toys against the pillow. She has four of them.
The biggest one is a brown dog with floppy ears. There’s also a small lamb with curly hair like her own. And finally, there are two sock monkeys that she made with her mother’s help from a pair of tennis socks with holes in their heels.
She reads the books to her toys, showing them the pictures on every page until she grows tired and falls asleep in the early afternoon. The nurse enters and places a tray with lunch on her bedside table. Then she detaches the IV from the girl’s arm who is so soundly asleep that she doesn’t wake.
When she stirs, it’s night again.
She finds herself cradling her stuffed dog.
“What is it?” she asks the toy as if they are in conversation. “Where my mother is, you ask?”
She lifts the dog up in the air with both hands.
“Well, I ask myself the exact same thing,” she says. “And I regret to tell you that I just don’t know – and not for lack of trying to find out. The nurse always says the doctor will tell me but I’ve been here for a million nights and I have yet to meet him.”
“What do you say?” she holds the toy’s plush snout against her ear. “Oh yes, or her! The doctor could be a man or a woman. But I don’t know which because I still haven’t met the doctor. I said that before. You have to pay attention, my little friend.”
“Okay,” she continues. “We are going to practice your aerial somersaults now.”
With that, she throws her plush puppy into the air and catches it. She plants a kiss on the plastic button that’s its nose and throws it again.
A little higher this time.
This time, she doesn’t get a good grip on it, and it slips out of her hand and flops onto the ground.
The girl turns onto her stomach and slides her legs over the side of the bed until they hinge down at her hips. Then she wriggles and stretches her feet until her big toes touch the cold floor. She slips all the way to standing on her bare feet and immediately crouches to look for her stuffed toy.
It’s bounced under the bed and she waddles toward it. The room is already smothered in darkness, but it seems particularly dark under her bed. She probes around with her hands outstretched.
Instead of the tufted nylon fur, her hand dips into something that has the resistance of jelly while lightly scraping against her fingers like sandpaper. There is a sense of suction that draws her fingers into the strange mass under her bed.
When a shriek escapes her, the suction reverses as if her fingers are spat out. Suddenly, she feels her plush puppy pushed into her arms with enough force to slide her out from the bed she’d crawled under.
She scrambles back onto the bed and gathers her sheets around her like a particularly flimsy blanket fort. She sits up very straight, clutching the puppy to her chest.
Besides her hectic breathing, everything is quiet.
The girl listens into the silence.
Nothing.
She presses the palm of her free hand into the mattress again.
There it is.
Like last night, she feels a strange vibration. A tremor.
“I know that you are down there,” she says with all the boldness she can muster. “You might as well come out.”
The silence continues.
The girl presses her lips together, willing herself not to be afraid. She’s been so brave, she tells herself. Braver than she ever thought she could be. She survived every one of these lonely nights in this lonely room. She’s not going to be afraid of a thing that feels like a powdery octopus vibrating under her bed.
She stays quiet. Should she say something else? Maybe threaten it? But how?
She eyes the red button that hangs on a white cord over the end of her bed frame.
She considers pressing it to alert the nurse and the so-far invisible doctor. But the last times she pressed it, she got reprimanded. What she thought to be an emergency was, in fact, just the normal experience of being in a hospital, nothing to be concerned about. And certainly nothing to bother the nursing staff with.
She releases her focus on the red emergency button.
Suddenly, something that looks like a black, bulging tide oozes out from under her bed. It wafts across the room and begins climbing up the wall across from her.
Her eyes wide in terror, the girl watches this with her breath stuck in her throat, realizing that even if she wanted to, she couldn’t reach the emergency buzzer now. She feels paralyzed.
Across from her, the black ooze seems to be trying out a few shapes to assume. It does so silently. Slowly. So agonizingly slow, that the girl loses her patience, pushes her feelings of fright aside, and addresses the undulating mass of black goo.
“Are you a monster?” she asks.
She poses the question with genuine curiosity.
The black ooze ceases its undulating motion, a couple of tentacles seem to drip from it before being absorbed back into its form. It continues its ever evolving movement, straining upward and then dripping downward.
It’s a terrifying sight, all things considered, yet the girl finds herself strangely captivated by it. She’s encountered things she couldn’t immediately identify before. That’s because she’s so young and hasn’t yet seen everything there is to see or learned everything there is to know.
Usually, though, she had at least a general idea what kind of a thing she was dealing with even if the specifics eluded her. She could normally tell whether something was an animal, or a plant, or a type of thing that occurs in nature or something made by humans. Her mother would then help her narrow it down further until the previously unknown thing had a name that was henceforth known to her.
This black ooze, however, would even stump her mother.
As the girl considers this, her eyes fully adjust to the darkness enveloping her. The black goo seems to have settled into a somewhat defined shape and position.
She gazes at it, tilting her head to one side. Though hesitant to say this out loud for fear of coming across as unkind, the way the black ooze had arranged itself reminds her of a tightly packed trash bag – bulging at the seams, tied off at the top and slumping against a wall, as if waiting for disposal. It would require an enormous trash chute, though. She has to tip her head all the way back as the top of the mass nearly touches the high ceiling.
“Are you a monster?” the girl repeats the question.
A ripple runs over the creature across from her. The girl doesn’t know whether the ripple means yes, it is a monster or no, it is not a monster. But she has a feeling that the ripple is a response to her question.
She tries another.
“Are you here to eat me?”
The ripple looks more pronounced but the meaning remains elusive.
“Well, I should be sleeping,” the girl states. “But it’s been a bit hard to sleep. Impossible, really, to tell you the truth. And when I don’t sleep, the days get very difficult.”
With a sigh, she lets her head sink forward and she gathers her legs with her slender arms, resting her forehead on her knees.
She desperately wants to be on her best behavior, because she’s convinced herself that only then will the nurse allow her to return to her mother. The nurse, she has concluded, is the gatekeeper between her and the outside world. In the three weeks that felt like an eternity, she has seen no one else.
Unfortunately, she has not been able to be a well-behaved girl, compliant with all rules and requests.
For starters, she has kicked the nurse twice. Not out of malice but from fear of the syringe in her hand. And she has pressed the emergency button so many times that the nurse stopped checking on her.
As she sits, a little bundle of disappointment, she feels a nudge on her shin.
Lifting her head, she gasps and scoots back against the wall in an instant.
The black ooze has come closer. Or rather, it has expanded itself to cover the distance between the wall and the side of her bed.
It remains calm and relatively still. As if patiently waiting while the girl regains her composure.
Maybe it knows how frightful it is, the girl wonders. How must it feel to look like this and move like this? Maybe that’s why it hid under my bed and only comes out at night, she thinks. Maybe it’s ashamed.
As she ponders this, a few tentacles grow from the black ooze in her direction.
Her first impulse to be scared for her life is overshadowed by her fear that the black substance might soil the bed and get her into trouble.
She makes a defensive motion with her hands. “No!”
The tentacles stop mid-air.
“You can’t get my sheets all oily or goopy or whatever-you’re-made-of-y,” she says. “I’d get into so much trouble.
One of the tentacles points down to the bed.
The girl nods.
“Yes,” she says. “You can’t get it dirty or I’ll be punished. Once, I accidentally dirtied the sheets and the nurse ripped them from under me, then held me under a tap with the water turned up hot. I was scared she would cook me like a chicken to teach me a lesson.”
The black ooze ripples in response.
Then it slowly dips one tentacle against the sheet, lifts it back up. No residue. The tentacle repeats the motion, a little faster now.
The girl reaches to touch the spot. Nothing. The sheet is as it was. A little rumpled, a little sweaty, but unmarked.
“Oh, I see,” she remarks with delight. “You just look like you’d leave a stain but you don’t. You’re an optical illusion.”
She places her hand, palm up, on the mattress where the black ooze touched the sheet.
Understanding her intent, it slowly extends one tentacle downward. The girl sharply inhales as her hand connects with it. It is the strangest feeling, this sandpapery jelly sensation. The tentacle lingers for a moment and then moves across her palm, following her lifeline.
The girl giggles at the tingling sensation. As that noise escapes her lips, the black ooze freezes for a moment. Then, the largest ripple yet crawls over its entire surface. Tentacles start shooting out, cautiously poking at the girl – her belly, her feet, and the sides of her torso.
It’s trying to tickle her.
And with much success.
Soon, the girl is rolling around on her bed, her giggles escalating into belly laughter.
But then she remembers something, abruptly stops laughing, and starts pushing the tentacles away.
“You shouldn’t get so close to me,” she admonishes. “You must know that I have something bad that’s very catchable.”
Defeated, she runs her hand across her forehead where a few sweaty curls are stuck to her skin. She rolls onto her side and curls into a ball.
The tentacles hover momentarily before retracting back into the undulating black mass of its being. Instead of many, a single tentacle – its circumference that of an adult’s arm – extends outward.
It wraps around the girl like a hug. She can feel the weight of it and the vibrations running through it like a low current.
“If I close my eyes, I can pretend it’s my mother comforting me,” the girl thinks and presses her lids together.
Though not quite like her mother’s embrace as she remembers it, it’s lovely nonetheless.
“Goodnight,” she whispers, and drifts off to sleep.
The next night, she keeps checking under her bed, hoping for the black ooze to reappear.
She peers into the dark, her vision surprisingly clear, as if she’s developed night vision. But her new friend just isn’t there.
“Maybe it will appear when I stop waiting for it,” she thinks and starts counting down from one thousand instead. Counting backwards, she knew, always demands one’s full attention.
At six hundred and forty-seven, she feels the familiar vibration.
“There you are!” she exclaims, jumping up in her bed.
She immediately sits down again, feeling a little light-headed.
The black ooze rises like sourdough from the space under the bed that was empty when she started counting.
“I saved you a cookie from dinner,” she says, reaching for the plate on her bedside table.
Two tentacles grow towards the cookie in her hand, circling it as if inspecting.
“I must admit it’s not a very big sacrifice, as it isn’t a very good cookie,” the girl says. “But a cookie is never a bad thing, right?”
“Do you like cookies?” she asks.
The black ooze ripples in response and lifts the chocolate chip-dotted disk from the girl’s hand.
“So your ripple does mean yes!” the girl exclaims.
But the next moment, a wave of nausea washes over her at the sight of the black ooze eating the cookie.
If you can call it eating.
A thousand tentacle tongues devour it. As if they’re penetrating the pastry, absorbing the pastry morsel by tiny morsel into the black ooze’s gooey mass.
“I’m just going to hold my eyes shut for a moment,” the girl says, clasping her palms in front of her face. “Don’t think anything of it.”
The girl doesn’t want to judge the black ooze too harshly, especially as she doesn’t always have the best table manners herself. But if she had to pinky-swear to tell the truth she would have to say that watching the black ooze eat was the most revolting spectacle she’d ever seen.
Moments later, she feels the now-familiar sensation of tentacles. First on her hands. Then on her feet and finally they’re poking at her ribcage and before long she’s shrieking with laughter at all the tentacle tickles.
Her laughter echoes louder than the night before.
So loud, in fact, that the door swings open and the nurse rushes into the room.
The girl stops laughing instantly.
“Don’t step on it,” she shouts urgently. “Don’t hurt my friend.”
“Quiet,” orders the nurse firmly. “You’re having an episode.”
She grips the girl tightly by her shoulders as she starts thrashing about.
“You scared him away,” the girl continues to scream. “He’s my friend. I need him.”
“Assistance, please,” the nurse calls out.
And then, for the first time since the girl was admitted, the doctor enters the room.
But the girl is too distressed to notice. She scans the room desperately, searching for any sign of her friend – a black ripple, even the tip of a tentacle would reassure her. But there’s nothing.
The nurse and the doctor exchange concerned glances.
“300 milliliters,” the doctor instructs.
The nurse draws a syringe full of blue liquid from a glass bottle and administers it directly into the IV port by the bedside, connecting it to the girl’s elbow catheter.
Almost immediately, the girl calms down. She desperately tries to keep her eyes open, hoping to catch a glimpse of her friend, but the sedative takes hold quickly.
The last thing she feels is a vibrating weight settling over her, like a weighted blanket.
A soft giggle escapes her, briefly, it feels as if a thousand tentacle tongues are tickling her.
THE END