The Stairs Under the Bed

As Ethan entered his new bedroom for the first time, his gut contracted. His bed frame leaned against water-stained wallpaper, the flowery pattern flaking like sunburned skin. The movers had left. Every night the house settled, a solitary naked bulb swayed from the ceiling, creating uneasy shadows that slithered across the floorboards.

With forced enthusiasm and ruffling Ethan’s hair, his dad remarked, “Home sweet home.” 

Though both of them had suffered greatly from the divorce, his father’s smile no longer reached his eyes. Not since Mom started her trip.

Ethan stayed up that first night listening to the symphony of unusual sounds: the groan of old pipes, the scritch-scratch of something in the walls, the sporadic muffled thump from some far-off area of the home. He heard it when his eyelids grew weighty.

Squeeze.

Not the home starting to settle. Not the breeze, either.

This sound came just under his feet.

Ethan stopped, his fingers holding his dinosaur comforter. Once more, the noise was a slow, deliberate scrape, like something dragging itself across the unfinished wood under his bed. His breath stopped as he counted the seconds separating sounds.

One (two).

Create creaks.

He pushed himself to glance over the edge of the mattress, sweat stinging his neck. Initially, only darkness. A draft, then.

Icy air coiled up from beneath the bed, bearing with it the wet earth aroma of a freshly dug grave and something else instead pleasantly rotting, like forgotten fruit liquefying in a lunchbox at the bottom of a locker. His stomach swung.

Ethan reached down with quivering hands and rubbed against the floorboard closest to his cushion. Terrifyingly, it moved under his hands.

It wasn’t firmly anchored.

With his pulse thumping in his ears, he raised the board to see a vast blackness beneath. His phone’s flashlight app hardly made a difference in the darkness, but what it showed halted his breathing.

Stairs.

Not a crawlspace. Not some builder’s oversight. A narrow, twisting staircase plunging into darkness, the wooden steps uneven and warped, like they’d been constructed by something that understood the idea of stairs but had never actually used them. The banister – if you could call it that – consisted of knotted ropes that looked suspiciously like braided hair.

Then –

“Ethan…”

His name slithered up from the depths, spoken in a voice that wasn’t quite a voice. More like the memory of one, echoing as if from the bottom of a well. He dropped the floorboard with a crash that shook the bed frame.

Silence.

Ethan stayed up late, not sleeping.

The terror from last night seemed like a horrible dream as morning sunlight poured through the filthy windows. There were no holes, no secret stairs to the dream realm; the floorboard sat exactly flush with her neighbors.

“Probably just the house settling,” his dad said over cereal that tasted like cardboard. “These old places make all sorts of noises.”

But that night, it happened again.

Creak. Creak. Creak.

Rhythmic now. Purposeful.

Footsteps.

Climbing.

Ethan’s phone flashlight revealed the stairs once more, and this time, at the very edge of the light’s reach, a pale hand gripped the fourth step. Small, child-sized. The fingers flexed experimentally, nails clicking against the warped wood like a spider testing its web.

His scream brought his father running, but when the overhead light flicked on, the floor was solid. Unbroken.

“Ethan…” His dad’s voice carried that new tone – the one that meant he was counting to ten, the one he’d started using after the divorce papers were signed. We should schedule another session with Dr. Bennett.

Ethan stopped arguing after that. But he spent the next week sleeping with his bed shoved against the wall and every light in his room blazing.

It didn’t help.

At precisely 3:17 AM (he’d checked the glowing numbers of his alarm clock a dozen times), Ethan woke to the sound of wet, ragged breathing.

Not his.

Not the house’s.

Something under the bed.

And the floorboard was already open.

Lena from next door didn’t laugh when he finally confessed. At fourteen, she wore her skepticism-like armor – all black hoodies and combat boots, her nose perpetually buried in some dog-eared horror paperback from the library.

“Show me,” she demanded, her dark eyes glittering with something between excitement and dread.

They waited until Ethan’s dad left for his late shift at the hospital. Lena arrived armed with a heavy-duty flashlight and her older brother’s Swiss Army knife, the one with twelve different tools, including (she proudly informed him) a saw blade.

The floorboard lifted with disturbing ease as if something below had loosened it in anticipation. 

The air that rushed up was thick and colder than the deepest winter night, carrying that same grave-dirt stench mixed now with something sharper like copper pennies left in the sun.

“Age before beauty,” Lena quipped, nudging him toward the opening.

The first step groaned under Ethan’s weight but held. The second let out an ominous crack. By the fifth, the darkness had swallowed the flashlight beam almost entirely, reducing it to a faint glow that barely illuminated the next step down.

They reached a landing at what should have been the basement level, except it wasn’t any basement Ethan had ever seen.

A hallway stretched before them, impossibly long, its walls pulsing faintly as if breathing. Doors lined both sides – some closed, some ajar, all slightly wrong in ways Ethan couldn’t quite articulate. The ceiling hung too low; the floor sloped at an angle that made his ankles ache and the air…

The air hummed.

Like the sound of a television left on in an empty room.

Lena pushed open the nearest door. Inside –

A bedroom.

Ethan’s bedroom.

But not his. The sheets were a floral print he’d never seen. A stuffed rabbit missing one eye sat propped against pillows that weren’t his. And in the bed,

A child.

Curled on its side, facing the wall.

Then,

Crack.

Its head spun all the way around, neck bones popping like bubble wrap, revealing blank, featureless skin where a face should have been.

Lena’s grip on his arm turned vice-like. “Run.”

They fled as the hallway stretched unnaturally, doors multiplying like reflections in a funhouse mirror. Behind them, giggling erupted – high-pitched and wet, the sound of something that had learned human laughter but didn’t understand joy.

Ethan’s lungs were burning. As he ascended two steps at a time, his thighs protested. Just as they ascended, he felt chilly fingers on his ankle.

SLAM.

The floorboard crashed down with finality, severing the connection with a sound like a tomb sealing.

No one believed them. Not Ethan’s dad, not the school counselor, not even Lena’s usually credulous older brother. The floorboard remained stubbornly sealed after that, resisting all their attempts to pry it open again.

But sometimes, in the dead hours between midnight and dawn, when the house holds its breath, and even the crickets fall silent, Ethan hears it –

Creak.

And he knows.

The stairs are still there.

Waiting.

Patient.

For the next lonely child.

For him.

Did “The Stairs Under the Bed” send chills down your spine? Craving more tales that lurk in the shadows?

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