Story #165: Monsters in the Closet (Picture)

Story #165: Monsters in the Closet (A sequel to 'Story #5: It Came From Underneath My Bed') (Content Tags: Horror, anxiety, wetting, messing, diapers) The fact that I've survived this long was a testament to my grit and determination. In a den of demons, I'd managed to keep myself safe in the most desperate of ways. There wasn't anything about it to glorify, but I also didn't have the capacity to be embarrassed by it either. It was only a matter of strategy. The diapers, I mean. One of the only things that'd kept me alive after an endless gauntlet of perilous nights. I could thank the diapers for allowing me to stay in bed, and I could thank my blanket for acting as a shield against the evils that stalked me. The monsters underneath my bed. The monsters that crept out during the twilight to drool over the thought of stripping my bones of their meat. Creatures whom tried every dirty trick in the book to entrap me; from baiting me with supposed gifts, to imitating my own parents. Horrible ghouls and ghasts who couldn't get me in my bed, but who were nakedly desperate for my foot to touch the floor just once. Monsters who would only exist for me, as they fled into nothingness whenever the lights came on or my real parents opened the door. They were sneaky and they were clever. It didn't matter how many times I asked my mom or dad to look underneath the bed before it was time to sleep, or in the middle of the night. I don't know where they went, but they always came back. Over the course of many months, since the inception of such a conundrum, I'd been wetting and eventually soiling myself while in bed. Not while I was asleep, but because I couldn't get out of bed to use the toilet in the middle of the night. Befouling myself was preferable to risking life and limb in the pursuit of dignity. I hadn't given that detail to my parents. They already didn't believe me, so telling them I was doing it intentionally would have just led to me getting grounded. As far as they knew, my nighttime pottytraining had just suffered a major backslide. The wetting hadn't been all that problematic, since that was common enough at my age, but the occasional soiling had been another issue entirely. They weren't happy about it, but they didn't blame me for it. The only thing to do was to start buying diapers again, and while they weren't strictly necessary for my nightly survival, they had certainly made my living nightmare more comfortable. Falling asleep in a warm diaper was a lot easier than trying to sleep in a quickly cooling puddle. They'd become so essential that I'd added them to my list of 'survival rules': Rule #1: Don't trust anything after dark. Rule #2: Don't leave the bed until morning comes. Rule #3: Never look at it. Rule #4: Never let it know that you're awake. Rule #5: No monster dares to live in the light. Rule #6: Always have the nightlight on. Rule #7: Diapers aren't so bad. These seven rules were the key to making it through each and every night; I'd learned them well and I'd lived them every single time it was bedtime. None of them were centered around offense, because I frankly didn't believe that there was any way to attack the things that lived under my bed. The closest thing to an offensive maneuver I had was to either turn on all the lights or to cry for my parents, but neither were sustainable options. I couldn't even reach the light switch from my bed, and my parents always turned it off after they'd diapered me and tucked me in for the night. Summoning my parents back to my room by screaming or crying wasn't all that useful either, as it just irritated them and they'd only ward off the monsters for as long as they were in the room to check on me. There had been a few times that I'd lied about horrible nightmares, so I could sleep in their bed, since the monsters didn't seem to follow me there. I couldn't do that every night though. It was a little funny too, since the traumatic things I was seeing weren't from nightmares, but from the waking world. I hadn't had any friends over to spend the night. Besides the diapers making that problematic, I couldn't subject my friends to any of the horrors that had filled my life. It wasn't worthwhile to have a witness if they got gobbled up by monsters. I occasionally would go to someone else's house for a sleepover, but again, the diapers made that awkward. I didn't really need the diapers in a monster-free bedroom, but there was no way to communicate that to my parents, who would be informing the parents who were hosting that I had potty problems at night. Even if I wasn't going to use the diapers as I was expected to, I would still have to wear them around my friends for the whole night, which made me look silly and infantile. It made for a very lonely existence at night. Unable to prove the grim reality I faced and unable to get any real support to deal with it, either emotionally or practically. I'd become accustomed to it, but I'd be lying to say that it didn't make me miserable. And then there was a paradigm shift for the worse. It'd been the morning after another tumultuous night. I'd climbed over the toddler rail on my bed, which I'd coaxed my parents into installing after lying about falling out of bed a lot; truthfully, I'd been petrified at the thought of accidentally falling out of bed and being devoured. The sun was poking through the window, my diaper was soggy as usual, and I was ready to get changed for the day. Another night survived! Monsters repelled by the sanitizing rays of sunlight, like burning shards that turned them to ash. It'd be another twelve hours before I had to worry again, right? I'd approached the closet to open it and get a shirt that was hanging inside, but the door suddenly rumbled. I stepped back, my heart stopping, and then the door creaked open a couple of inches. Inside was an inky blackness. The depths of which paralyzed me with the same fear I felt at night. It looked as if the darkness was moving, like it was slithering and writhing in a pile of abyssal tendrils. There was a sound from within, like a slurping followed by a crunching. This was uncharted territory for me. Never before had I seen any activity during the day. It was an event that laughed in the face of rule #5: "No monster dare live in the light." From a technical standpoint, maybe it really didn't break that rule. My closet was dark at the moment, so the only real contention was that it was no longer night. Did that mean if not for my window or my overhead light, then my room would be under siege by these vile creatures at all times? "Sweetie, can you come in here? I need to talk to you about what a mess your closet is!" It was mimicking again. That *thing* was using my mother's voice from inside the dark recesses of the closet; it was trying to lure me, although in a decidedly sloppy manner. The way it could capture her voice so perfectly was the most frightening part; it started off a little scratchy and gruff, but it almost immediately changed to match her exact pitch. It was the thing that filled me with dread the most. I could still vividly remember those mannequin monstrosities that'd been in the likeness of my parents, who had used their voices to try to get me off my bed. It was like their faces had been painted on. It'd been the thing that had most successfully preyed on my greatest insecurities. It knew that if I couldn't trust my parents, then I would be alone, adrift on my raft in a sea of darkness. They were my defenders, and the monster was trying to make me doubt them; to always wonder about whether or not I could trust their voices. I continued to stand there, completely mute as the monster tried to coax me further. Suddenly, from out of that small crack, an eyeball stalk poked out and looked right at me. To my genuine embarrassment, I'd soiled myself. Driven to such a silent terror at seeing this phenomena in an unfamiliar way, my bowels had seen it fit to evacuate themselves, since my feet didn't seem to want to help me evacuate in a more pragmatic way. All I'd felt was my body tense up as I gasped, as I'd recoiled in horror, and then there'd been a rude noise from behind me. The nighttime diaper that had previously only been wet had become heavy and warm in the back. It'd been quickly recognizable that the thing pressing against my bottom was a fresh load, since it'd become a fairly familiar feeling on my butt, but rarely was it evoked through accident. My mom, the real one, had been the one to break the spell that the closet had on me. She'd stepped into the room to make sure I was awake and had seen me standing in front of my closet with a drooping diaper on. She took one whiff of the air and deduced I was in desperate need of a change. After the dirty diaper had been disposed of, and I was in a pair of undies, she'd told me to get dressed and come down for breakfast. Meekly, I'd had to tell her about the monsters in my closet. My complaints about monsters were nothing new, though I'd mentioned them a lot less in the past few months, since it hadn't done me any good. What was new was that I was talking about them in the daytime, and not from under my bed, but from within my closet. Her gentle sigh told me that she wasn't particularly thrilled about this newest 'regression' of mine, but she was far too compassionate of a woman to be truly upset by it. She looked down at me with sympathetic eyes and tried to explain for the umpteenth time that monsters weren't real. Then to prove it, she opened the closet fully and tugged on the dangling chain to turn on the light. Just as she said, there wasn't a monster in sight, just like it'd been with the creatures under my bed. For whatever reason, they disappeared whenever my parents went looking for them. She grabbed a shirt and handed it to me. She gave me a kiss on the forehead and told me to get dressed, before departing my room to go finish making breakfast. While the light in the closet was on, I took this time to take all the clothes I might need from inside and moved them into the bottom drawer of my dresser. I still didn't know exactly whether this would become a new issue, or if this was a one-time thing, but I couldn't ask her to get me a shirt every morning. I got dressed and gave the closet another look. The chain was too far inside for me to turn the light off from outside the closet. I couldn't bring myself to risk being in there when the darkness returned, so I closed the door and left the light on. "Hey buddy, your mom tells me that you had another accident last night. Did you have a bad dream?" My father gently asked as I came into the kitchen. The man was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and the newspaper; he'd been the more irritable of my parents when it came to my problems, which was why it was typically my mom who involved herself. Still, the man probably didn't fancy the idea of his supposed 'big kid' son going back to waking up in full diapers and he wanted to somehow nip this in the bud. "...Guess so..." I sheepishly muttered as I sat at the table.  "...She also told me that you said there were monsters in your closet." My dad frowned. He had about as much patience for the 'monster' issue as he did for my newfound nighttime accidents. My father was a very logical man, a rational one, and he had a hard time understanding my seemingly irrational fears. There had been many lectures on why there weren't any real monsters, and on the logistics of how if they did exist, then they couldn't be living under my bed. Most of those lectures had ended with some variation of 'you're too old to be acting like this', which unsurprisingly hadn't given me the morale boost I so desperately needed. The only thing about not being believed, was being shamed for what I myself believed. I knew the monsters were real, whether they could logically exist or not. Logic wasn't going to stop them from threatening my life every night. I couldn't simply inform them that according to my dad they couldn't exist. "Y-yes sir... I saw them when I woke up." He sighed and pushed his glasses up, "Buddy, we've talked about this. There aren't any monsters living in your room; there are no such thing, remember? Not under your bed or in the closet." My mom put a plate of eggs and toast in front of me. She'd already said as much when she'd been in my room, so there was no point for her to interject now. "I-I know, daddy, but I...I see them. They're scary..." Scary hardly begun to describe the unearthly horrors that had taken residence in my room. It sometimes felt that my room was itself a direct entrance to the bowels of the underworld, and all of the most heinous beasts had come to visit. These weren't boilerplate monsters from movies or cartoons; these were twisted machinations that were beyond human comprehension, let alone a tiny human like me. "I know you're scared, but you don't have anything to be scared of. You're letting your imagination get the better of you. You think you'll see monsters, so your mind plays tricks on you." My father meant well, of that I was sure. He might not have understood or fully respected my plight, but he cared enough to want to fix the problem in a way he believed was right. I couldn't blame him or my mother for thinking it was simply my imagination run amok, since the monsters were always gone by the time they came to check. It was frustrating, but I was used to it. I could have been content to continue living my nights in abject terror, peeing and pooping myself instead of getting off the bed, if not for the sudden change in the rules. Morning had always been something I could grasp as a savior; I knew it I could make it to morning, then everything would be alright. That was apparently no longer the case. Now I'd come to find out that it wasn't simply a matter of the monsters being nocturnal. For whatever reason, they had started to adapt and evolve into something new, which meant that I would have to follow suit. It was just the closet that'd been annexed now, but what else might they take over? Would darkness become a problem wherever I went? What about my bathroom? It had no window, and the light fixture wasn't the best. What would happen if the lights went out while I was on the toilet? Could I risk going in there to do my business during the day? Was it possible that I was about to have to rewrite my survival rules? Was it possible that I might have to give up on underwear entirely?