Timothy Brown did not want to go to bed. Why he did not want to go to bed, he wasn't entirely sure. He wasn't afraid of monsters hiding in dark places; being a mature and sophisticated 7-and-a-half-year-old he knew better. It had been a solid two months since his father had convinced him that there were no monsters hiding in his ears (he didn't have a closet and his bed was a mattress on the floor, so he had no traditional places for monsters to hide. Being a creative and enterprising young boy, he had elected to fear the monsters' arrival from the only dark, unseen place he really had to offer), and he wasn't about to start backpedaling now. Still, despite his firmly skeptic stance on the subject of monsters, he had to admit that the fear he felt at the moment was similar to the itching he felt in his ears when such horrors first entered his noggin.

This desire to stay in the land of the waking proved to be a very futile one, when Timothy's parents steadfastly refused to allow him to stay up all night. When he asked why, they mumbled something about writing a letter to the stork. (Timmy secretly suspected that if he survived the night, this episode would later come to gross him out terribly years later after he learned the truth behind the bees and their avian "pals") When calm, rational thought didn't work out, Timmy used his next most powerful adaptation as a larval human being. He cried until his lungs blazed hotter than a supernova. Being an old-school student of child rearing, Mr. Brown simply gave Timmy a rear end to match, and firmly planted him in his bed.

Bottom screaming, tears streaming and head teeming with anxiety, Timmy looked about his bedroom. This did him very little good, and after a while he realized that it was so dark that he wasn't even sure in which direction his face was pointed. Sighing, Timmy tried to bury his face in his pillow and force himself into peaceful slumber, but to no avail. No matter how hard he tried, the fear that something may be hiding in his ears was too great to be ignored for sleep.

Curling up in a tiny ball, Timmy rocked himself back and forth, trying to secure some feeling of safety. He told himself that the fear would soon pass, that there were no monsters in his room, and that as time went on he would slowly be able to forget about all that nonsense. He reminded himself that he was far too old to worry about such things, and had been for two months. He clung to this notion desperately, thinking that by convincing himself that any monsters didn't exist he could hopefully convince them that as well and persuade them to leave him alone.

But curling up did not make him feel safe. It made him feel tiny, and vulnerable. The fear did not soon pass. With each and every passing moment, it became more and more intense. He did not convince himself that the monsters did not exist...

...And he did not convince the monsters either.

His stomach heaving, Timmy felt something squirm its way out of his ears. It was an unholy squirming, a sort of dark writhing that he'd always had an inkling existed, but had never truly experienced before now. His eyes bugged out, and he let out noises of fear and sadness as he felt the evil from these darkest corners seep out and surround him. The noises were pathetic, going beyond noises begging for help or to be left alone, and into the realm of a noise so abjectly depressing that the noisemaker subconsciously prayed the attacker would simply kill them then and there to shut them up. There was no such luck for Timothy, as whatever manifestation of evil it was that surrounded him wrapped him tightly in its snaky embrace, filling him with feelings of fear, horror, shame and self-loathing, but not quite squeezing hard enough. The entity simply drew all the suffering they could from the boy, squeezing this negativity into him just hard enough to get the greatest possible pain, but with enough tenderness to keep him from dying.

As Timothy wailed, he never noticed as his cries became more faint. He never noticed as he became number to the pain. No matter how hard his heart became, the pain it was being subjected to was always just enough to matter to it, even as it eroded. And slowly, through this blasphemy chipping away at his heart and his soul, his cries became nothing, and his pain became nothing. In the end, Timmy became nothing, and was no more.