User:USAllOriginal18

Bedside Lamp

January 21, 2012

I hate clowns, and it was only a few hours ago when I feared them the most. My younger brother knew that. He always had that knack little kids do of knowing things you don’t want anybody to know. I remember the last time I saw my real younger brother and we were fighting. I think he started it. But I’m not mad at him anymore. I can’t feel too much as I lie in the inky darkness, the musty smell that makes my nose bleed means I’m in the attic, the basement or in the cupboard under the stairs; I already know which. I don’t have long. I can hear its claws scratching on the walls outside the door. Or inside.

My brother really pissed me off. Whatever it was he did, it was me who made the mistake of locking him in the cupboard. It was cruel, I know. He’s scared to death of that cupboard. He went fucking wild as I shoved him in and I could see why he hated it. The darkness under there was always so…inky. So…not right. I knew it was wrong when I shut the door. When he was younger he’d tell me he could hear voices under there. And scratching.

I couldn’t believe what I did. Scared, I ran and sat down on the bed in my brother’s room at the end of the hall. I could hear him pounding on the door against the chair I had propped up against the cupboard. I thought about how much trouble I’d be in when my parents came home and how my brother would tell them what I did. I’m three years older than he was, and I should’ve been more mature than to do that to him. I thought about that as I fell asleep.

When I woke up it was dark. I wondered why my parents hadn’t come home and woken me up. But then I thought about my brother. I no longer heard the pounding on the door at the end of the hall. I set my feet on the floor, about to run to get him out, when the light beside his bed began to slowly flicker.

I watched my brother’s bedside lamp. It blinked eerily in fluorescent mores code before that feeling of being watched without knowing who is watching you smothered me. I quickly looked around to the door and relaxed. It was my brother standing in the doorway. In the dim flicker of the bedside lamp, my relief grew stale. I saw the chair I used to imprison him hooked in his hand. I was about to say his name but swallowed it. In the spasming halo he started to shuffle towards me. Little by little I saw more of him as he came closer.

Flicker…his left leg was dragging behind him as if it was broken, and then I was what he was wearing.

Flicker…a grimy multicolored wig was screwed to his head. Moths flew from its curly tresses. Floppy clown shoes smacked like diver’s fins stretching three feet across the room, curled at the ends like overgrown black nails.

Flicker…I saw the silky white costume with large red pompoms. The costume seemed to almost glow. The polka-dots splattering the white fabric began to run and I knew it was blood.

Flicker…I head the drag of his feet and the chair scrape behind him. In the light of the lamp I saw his armpits shimmer.

Glitter. As his arms raised up over his head, like he did when he was littler pretending to be a monster when we did shadow puppets, an endless shower of glitter fell from under his arm. A breeze carried some of it into my mouth. I started to cough and choke and I somehow saw through my agony of fear he was soaking wet as if he had been swimming, a water trail staining the carpet behind him.

Flicker…It was the face I remember most. It was hardly his anymore. It was blue as if he had drowned. The makeup, the snarling smile of broken teeth stretching from ear to ear, sharp like knives, began to pop his lips making more polka-dots.

But I can’t tell you anymore. God knows I’d much rather remember him as he was. He was a very good kid.

It’s coming closer now. It’s closing in. That’s all I can tell you. Yes, it’s inside the cupboard with me. I hope I can tell you the last thing I saw. In the shadow of that lamp, on the far wall behind my brother, I saw the outline of his fingers grow. I looked at the shadows, not daring to look at his hands. The cutouts of his fingers lengthened. His fingers were stretching out into claws.

I would like to think that it wasn’t my brother, that it was a demon of my imagination. I hated to think of that thing as my brother when I closed my eyes and felt its claws needling into my mouth before blacking out, but I knew that it was. It was what was left of him and I hate to wonder what would be left of me.