Sammy the Bed Monster

by T Jondral

  The class remains quiet; everyone is too shy to answer. I am not going to get Luke into any problems, so I keep my hands on my lap and stare blankly down at my desk. Mrs. McNally goes on talking,

  “Greece is a country found in the continent called Europe. Its capital city is Athens; it is also the largest city of the country. Ancient Greece is considered the foundation for the Western world.”

  Mrs. McNally explains all of this with a monotonous tone – her voice is flat, boring and without emotions. She points at the map found on the wall of the room and continues shooting facts about Greece. Such as, “The Olympics were started in Greece”, and, “The basis for democracy was founded in Greece. Democracy being the type of government we have today in our country, where we get to vote for our leaders and representatives and we get a voice on the issues we find important.”

  Sometimes, I saw Mrs. McNally moving her mouth and I could hear faint mumbles but I did not understand a single word she said. But this isn’t strange to me at all, usually in dreams everything seems to make sense and when the child wakes up they realise it was just nonsense. It is already quite impressive that Luke can recall so many facts about Greece, I wasn’t expecting him to know so much.

  Right now, Mrs. McNally is talking about Greek mythology. Greeks believed in a variety of myths about legendary heroes and gods. Each god was responsible for taking care of something. Zeus was the leader of the gods. Poseidon was the god of the sea, Ares was the God of War, Aphrodite was the goddess of Love and beauty, Athena was the goddess of Wisdom and War, Eros was the God of love and Demeter was the goddess of Earth and harvest. There were, of course, many other gods. But, I only know as much as Luke and what he knows is already very impressive for a boy of ten years.

  I finally realise Mrs. McNally pause from all her talking. She had just asked,

  “Does anyone know who the most beautiful woman of all of the Greek myths was?”

  Mrs. McNally now stands in front of the class waiting for someone to be brave enough to answer. Her sunglasses are very intimidating and everyone is too scared to be the first to answer. But Mrs. McNally keeps waiting for someone to answer. She is now wearing a sly grin on her face, taunting the class for a mysterious reason.

  Finally, a tiny boy put his hand up slowly. He is wearing thick glasses and has messy golden hair. His hand is only half way up when the teacher pounces on the opportunity and with enthusiasm asks him to answer. He quietly says,

  “I heard that it was Athena, the goddess of Wisdom.”

  As he finishes answering, his head goes back to staring at his lap. He is very embarrassed but that isn’t the end of it. Looking towards the teacher I see that the worse is yet to come. Mrs. McNally has become frozen on the spot, her eyebrows scrunched together, and even though she is wearing dark sunglasses I can tell she is angrily glaring at the shy boy. Steam starts fuming out of her ears, her breath coming out loud and heavy.

  She takes large steps and grabs the boy by the collar.

  “No, no, no!” That is the wrong answer”

  She takes the boy out of the class. I can hear her screaming at him, “How dare you?! It isn’t, it never was and it will never be Athena. It was Medusa! MEDUSA!!!”

  I’m only a misunderstood monster inside a dream and I don’t usually question the dreams I work in, but I thought the boy had answered right. But I don’t have time to ponder on that as the teacher walks back into the classroom. Her fists are still clenched with anger. I’m searching for the little boy but I can’t see him. He isn’t with the teacher…

  Chapter 7

  “Now, let’s revise Maths.”

  Mrs. McNally grabs a blue whiteboard marker and starts writing on the whiteboard. The marker squeaks against the board and I cringe at that awful sound. When she is finishes writing, she moves away from the board and turns back to the class. She gives the students a menacing stare and a crooked smile. “3/4 + 1/16” it reads.

  “Can anyone answer this question?” Mrs McNally asks the class.

  I cringe in my seat. I feel the dream is just repeating itself. I don’t think anyone will want to speak up now that they know the consequences of answering. I look around the class and realise that all the students have their faces down.

  Looking up the board the idea of even trying to answer becomes impossible. It just looks like a few random numbers and scribbles to me.

  “No one?” she asks,

  “Not even a single one of you? Were you sleeping all through class last year? This should be simple revision!”

  She shifts her gaze from one student to the next. She steps forward, towards the students. I look down at my lap, and I desperately wish to be invisible so she won’t see me. I am definitely of no use to Luke in maths. I may be hundreds of years older than you but I am still a monster! What did you expect! I had to go to monster school system. There we learnt about the proper ways to enter the dreams, how to use the remote controls, what to do if we were ever caught and organisational skills in arranging the wardrobe inside a child’s brain. It was nothing like human school.

  Sometimes I do wish that they had at least prepared us with basic maths, geography and history. I see these topics all the time in dreams, especially at the beginning of the year. I even need maths just to make my job work to calculate how much time I have left in a dream and what I can accomplish in this time. You’d think they would teach basic maths at monster school… I’m a self-taught reader, but maths is a bit harder to self teach. That is why, I am very afraid that the teacher will ask Luke this maths question, I just wouldn’t know how to help him.

  I hear her take another step, her high heels echoing in the silent room. She takes few more steps forward and stops right in front of me.

  “How about you? Can you answer the question?” She asks, challenging me to answer.

  I look up to see her towering over me. I feel a shiver going up Luke’s spine. I feel the gaze of everyone in the class on me. I read the question on the whiteboard again. It looks a bit familiar, as if Luke had seen this question before. I shift my head from one side to the other trying to decipher it. But it still doesn’t make any sense to me.

  “You don’t know how to answer the question? You silly boy! If you aren’t capable of doing a little revision, how will you cope this year?” She mocks me.

  She grabs my arm tightly and pulls me up, her grip is so strong that it hurts my arm. I hear a few gasps and whispers coming from my classmates.

  I look at the board once more. The familiarity of the maths question continues to bother me. Maybe Luke has learnt this last year. That’s it! I remember the remote control in Luke’s pocket and I reach for it with my free arm. I try to feel for the button to go to Luke’s memory.

  Meanwhile, Mrs McNally is dragging me towards the door. My finger is searching the remote control. I am beginning to feel Luke’s anxiety as his breath - both in the dream and in reality – comes out in short and rapid puffs and his heart speeds up. This nightmare just keeps getting worse. Luke’s panic is just making it worse to concentrate.

  I have no clue what happened to the last child who got dragged out of the class and I do not want to find out. I find the remote control but Mrs. McNally is holding me by the collar and I can’t look down into my hands. I kept shuffling with the buttons, trying to find the right one.

  I accidentally press a round button which turns out to be the red emergency button. It gets me out of the dream immediately if I think it is getting too dangerous. The images around me start to get fuzzy and I feel Luke’s body in the dream become bigger and furrier, like my own. I do not have time to get out of the dream and I have to help Luke!

  I quickly press the red button again seeing. At monster school we had been taught that once we pressed the red button we had to get out of the dream, wait a few more minutes and then if wanted to, we could press it again to get back inside. However, I know that I don’t have that much time and I hope that the effects of pressing it so suddenly wouldn’t be
too bad.

  Luckily I find myself back in the dream. I do have a bad headache, but that is about it. But the problem is Mrs. McNally stills holds me by the collar. Clumsily I keep trying to find the right button.

  Chapter 8

  Finally, I feel the big, green rectangular button in the middle of the remote and press it. Mrs McNally angry face fades away, and is replaced by the pink room with bubbles.

  I seat on one of the comfortable armchairs; they are so soft and bouncy! But I’m not here to relax, no matter how much I want to. And, I keep being reminded of all the work left to do, by the thought bubbles that keep bouncing into me. I sigh and count to ten, trying to calm myself and to get rid of all of Luke’s anxiety so I can concentrate.

  That maths question seemed vaguely familiar to me, this means that hidden deep inside Luke’s brain is the question and hopefully the answer. I can’t figure out the maths problem but with a help from Luke I could impress Mrs. McNally. Hopefully it would prove to Luke that he was capable of a lot and if he learnt that scary question last year, this year he would be capable of a lot more.

  I remember Mrs. McNally putting a great emphasis on the words ‘revision’ and ‘last year’. Maybe, this is a sign. If this question had been done last year it would have been stored in the big wardrobe labelled year 5. I check inside the drawer labelled maths and see that it is filled with equations all wanting to get out. I quickly flick through the questions. Using my remote control, I point to the questions and type, “3/4 + 1/16”. As I had hoped, one of the equations starts glowing brightly. I take that one and close the drawer, careful to leave it just as I had found it and not letting any other questions get out.

  Sitting back down onto the pink armchair I take the question and press the play button. It shows a video of Luke in his old school. It is the last day of school and his teacher (a much nicer looking lady than Mrs. McNally) is giving everyone a candy cane stuck to a piece of paper. I pause the video at that moment and see that the title of the sheet is, “Extended Revision for the Holidays”. I find, right underneath the title, the question that had been troubling Luke. Now it all makes sense! Luke wasn’t going to go back to that school so he hadn’t finished or even attempted that question, but it had stuck with him and he was now nervous that because he had not done this question he would have trouble learning in his new school.

  Because he hadn’t done the question before and because I haven’t learnt a lot of maths except in children’s dream, this question would be a bit tricky to answer. However, Luke had in his brain the knowledge to solve this and I will help him. Leaving the question on the chair I go back to the drawer labelled maths and pull out a thought bubble that had already been organised and labelled. It was called, “Learning Addition of Fractions”. After watching Luke’s old teacher explaining how to do fraction, I feel that Luke had the capacity to finish this question. I think I understand how to do it too, so I put the thought bubble back in its place and go back to the armchair to resolve the maths problem.

  I look at the numbers that had previously just looked like a string of random numbers and now I understood them to be fractions and quite simple to resolve! So the question is, “3/4 + 1/16”. As Luke’s old teacher explained in the video there were three simple steps to resolve fraction addition problems,

  1) Find a common denominator.

  The number at the bottom of a fraction is called the denominator while the number at the top is called the numerator. To solve problems that have different denominators we have to look for a number that both denominators can be multiplied into.

  2) Multiply the denominator by a number that will get it to the common denominator chosen in step one.

  Using the same number, you multiplied the denominator, multiply the numerator.

  3) Add the numerators together

  Leaving the answer as the addition over the common denominator.

  I applied these steps into solving this question.

  The question: “3/4 + 1/16”

  1) The denominators are 4 and 16. Both these numbers can be multiplied to get the number 16. So the common denominator I choose is 16.

  2) The denominator of the first fraction is 4, so to get it to 16 I must multiply it by 4. Therefore, I also multiply the top number by 4. 3x4= 12. The first equation becomes ‘12/16’.

  The second equation already had a denominator of 16, so to leave it the same; I can say I multiplied it by ‘1’.

  3) The whole equation after step 2 is ‘12/16 + 1/16’. Adding the numerators gives me, 12+1 = 13. Therefore, the final answer is 13 over the common denominator, this is ‘13/16’.

  That’s it! I managed to solve it! The answer is 3/4 + 1/16 = 13/16. With that in my mind and in Luke’s mind, I place the question back in the drawers and press the green button to take me back into the dream. I shut my eyes, and when I open them again Mrs. McNally is standing in front of me. She is still dragging me towards the door and we are already halfway there.

  Chapter 9

  “Wait!” I exclaim, “I know how to answer it!”

  Mrs. McNally stops walking and I accidentally bump into her.

  “Really?” She snorts. “Show me then, if you think you’re so smart.”

  She lets go of my arm suddenly, and I stagger backwards. She gestures towards the whiteboard and I go towards it. I pick up the blue whiteboard marker that she left open on top of her desk. Luke’s hand is shaking and I can tell he’s still scared even though he already knows the answer.

  I look up at Mrs McNally to make sure I have her approval to write on the board. She is still standing in the middle of the room, her arms crossed, and her feet tapping impatiently on the floor.

  “Well, first of all you need to find a common denominator. In this case it’s 16,” I explain, “I multiply the first denominator by four to get to 16, so now I must multiply the numerator also by four. The second fraction stays the same because it already had a denominator of 16.”

  I write “12/16+ 1/16” on the whiteboard. I glimpse at the teacher, but she shows no sign that what I’m doing is either wrong or right. So I just continue.

  “Now, I just add the numerators together and put their sum over the denominator.”

  I write the answer next to the question and put the whiteboard marker back down on the desk. All of my classmates gape at the whiteboard. The silence is excruciating.

  Finally, Mrs McNally clears her throat and says briskly, “Yes, that is correct.”

  The class claps and looks at me in surprise.

  “Well done!” Marcus, the red-haired boy beside me, says, as I am walking towards my desk.

  “SILENCE!” Mrs McNally yells, before I even have a chance to thank Marcus. The whole class quietens instantly.

  I shuffle back quickly towards my desk and take a seat. Wow, I feel so relieved! I’m sure that when Luke wakes up tomorrow he will get up and rush to complete the question in the real worksheet. He definitely won’t have to worry about not understanding adding fractions, and can move on to learning much more in school. If I ever come back to his dream I may have to learn even more Maths to help him and his brain will teach me!

  I felt my face smiling; I guess this nightmare was feeling more like a dream right now. But, this night isn’t over and neither is this dream, I still have work to do. I keep thinking back to the statue of a young girl that I saw at the beginning of the dream. I’m sure it was nothing, but my mind keeps wandering back to it. The statue was so realistic, it is amazing how a sculptor would be able to sculpt such fine details, especially the eyelashes that were so delicate. But it was the look of pain and fear that causes me to worry, why would they keep a statue of a panicked girl in a school?

  Suddenly, the class becomes really quiet now, and this shakes me out of all the thinking and worrying. The teacher seems to have disappeared of the class and all the students are reading a book. The atmosphere of the class has completely changed; it is as if having the teacher gone took a big weight out of all th
e students’ shoulders. No one spoke, but everyone’s breathing had become much more relaxed.

  As strange as it seems that the teacher just disappeared, things like this always happens in dreams. I just hope that she won’t be coming back and that Luke’s dream is nearly over. I feel like I’ve been here an eternity. I guess all that is left is to do is follow the course of the dream until the end.

  So, I look down and see Luke’s bag is half open. Inside there is a black book with golden pages. I reach in and grab the book. It’s called, ‘The Mystery of Medusa’. I guess Mrs. McNally’s lecture at the start of the lesson had left an impression on Luke. The cover has a picture of what Medusa supposedly looks like; she has the face of a woman in her 60s, with green snakes coming out of her head instead of hair. Her pupils are completely black and even though it is just a picture, I have the sensation that the eyes are glaring into my soul. Better get reading.

  Chapter 10

  Briiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing...

  And that is the bell. It is the same daunting sound that I had heard in the beginning of the school day. It interrupts me just as I was about to relax and read for a bit. But, a nightmare is a nightmare and my job is to help Luke throughout the whole thing.

  As soon as the bell stops ringing, all the students got up from their seats and walk out of the class with their lunchboxes. I look inside Luke’s backpack again and see that it now has a red lunchbox inside. I take it out and follow the students outside for their lunch break – at least, that’s what I’m assuming it is.

  Someone poked my shoulder and I turn around and see Marcus, the boy who was sitting next to me in class.

  “Hello,” he greeted, “Would you like to sit with me at lunch?”

  “Yes, please,” I reply.

  I follow him, and soon we reach a small, grassy oval with a few tables on it. It is surrounded by trees on three sides, and only one side has a path back to the school. He sits down on a table on the corner of the oval, with large trees making a big, cooling shadow on it. I sit down next to him and open my red lunchbox. I take out a sandwich that was in there, and take a big bite. Mmmm... Lettuce and mayonnaise! I take another bite, but I see that Marcus isn’t eating.