Recollections of Teddy Bears

March 26, 2008

I tried to tell them, but they didn’t believe me. They thought that I just had an overactive imagination. They should have listened. Now it’s too late.

At night when I get into bed and turn out the lights strange things happen. Sometimes the dark scares me. It’s the things in the dark that frighten me the most.

Nestled in my bed at night, I look at the shelves of my bookcase, all my stuffed animals are arranged there looking over me.

To begin with, I too thought it was only my imagination, I was only five years old, but I knew that what I was seeing could not be real.

I would see them move out of the corner of my eye. I would see a teddy bear blink his bright button eyes, or a bunny perk up his long floppy ears.

Just my over active imagination? It had to be, what else could it have been?

A sound woke me one night. As I opened my eyes, I saw my big white and black panda bear sitting on the end of my bed. I looked at him mutely. How did he get to my bed from his shelf in the bookcase five feet away?

I sat up, never taking my eyes off of him. He just sat there blinking his big round eyes at me.

“You aren’t real,” I whispered out loud, “how are you blinking your eyes?”

His sewn shut mouth pulled open, revealing a maw of razor sharp teeth. “I am alive. We are all alive. Every night while you have been sleeping, we have stolen a little more of your soul. It has taken five years of breathing your sleeping soul to bring us fully to life, and we are hungry!”

My ten-year-old mind could not comprehend what I was seeing and hearing. My heart was racing out of control. I closed my eyes, when I opened them again my old panda bear was back on his shelf, just looking like a plain, old bear.

I ran to my parents’ room, screaming. I told my mama what had happened. She had never believed me before when I had told her I thought my animals had moved, but tonight, my bear had talked! I thought that maybe now she would believe me, but she didn’t.

Mama only said, “Kayleigh, sweetheart, you’ve only had a bad dream. Your animals would never hurt you. They are only toys.”

She put me back in my bed, with a kiss on the forehead, and left me in the dark, with the monsters.

I pulled the covers over my head, shivering with fright under the thick blankets, my heart beating so fast and hard that I almost didn’t hear the four soft thuds hit my carpeted floor. My bedroom door opened and closed softly. I listened intently, blowing air slowly in and out to calm the racing panic I felt in my chest. There was only silence.

Slowly I peeked out and saw that the panda, bunny, monkey, and puppy were gone from their shelves! I then heard screams and growls and horrible wet splashing sounds.

I pulled the covers back over my head and cried in fear.

Suddenly there was quiet. What had happened? What were all those sounds? I opened my eyes and could see light through my covers. I slowly pulled the covers down off of my face, only my eyes peeking over the edge of the blanket. All my stuffed animals were back on their shelves, silent and still. I got up out of bed, and crept over to the shelves were my animals sat. They were covered with thick, wet red slime. I ran to my parents room.

What I saw shocked and terrified me, I didn’t understand what it was to start with. What had been my parents were only shreds of tissue and bone. I couldn’t even tell that they were people, just red pulp with streaks sliding down the sides of the bed, blood dripping and oozing down the walls.

I ran to our neighbor’s house, screaming.

Nobody believed me when I told them what had happened, not my remaining family, not the police, no one. They thought I was insane.

I have been locked up for forty years in a state mental institution. I’m fifty years old now, living a ghosts existence with only half a soul. Since that night when my once dearly loved stuffed animals came to life, I have been only half a person, half dead inside. I have never been able to heal the scars that mar my soul. I can feel those evil animals that still live out there with part of my soul living in their stuffed, bloated bodies.

All these years I have been locked in this tiny room with only a stuffed teddy bear for company. The doctors think he will help me to get over my “unnatural” fear of stuffed animals. They don’t believe me either. But...

He comes to life at night.

A/N: I wrote this just as a quick short story. I really appreciate the reviews that I've gotten, thanks! I wrote this because my stuffed animals used to creep me out at night in the dark...Thank goodness none of them ever came to life! It does kind of remind me of Child's Play. Live stuffed animals would scare the crap out of a small child, but being older we tend to see this as kind of scary but more comical, unless they were chewing on us that is.