My New Mattress

I bought a new bed over the weekend.  It was from a mattress warehouse downtown that sells discounted mattresses after the big name vendors put them on clearance.

I’ve never been able to sleep well, and I thought that perhaps getting a new mattress would help.  To my dismay, however, the first night sleeping on that mattress was even worse than before.

The mattress was soft enough even considering the fact that it was one of the few models that still contained springs, but for some reason, each night was spent tossing and turning rather than any sort of restful sleep.

Another odd event that happened during the few days that I’d had the mattress had to do with my dog.  Usually, he slept with me on the bed, taking up a good portion of it for himself, but since I got this mattress, he seemed remiss to have anything to do with it.  At first, he started off sniffing at it, then turning away, but as time went on, he began to refuse to enter my bedroom at all.  He would bark at the bed and snarl fiercely from the doorway.

On the fifth day, I’d gone to the store for a few minutes, and when I came back, I wasn’t met by my dog at the door, barking and jumping and licking, but instead I was met by silence.  I put my bag down and called for him, but still the house was pin-drop silent.  I walked around the house calling him, beginning to worry that he’d somehow gotten out or had gotten into the cleaning supplies or something, and that’s when I heard it.

It was a wet, slapping sound, like the sound a fish makes when it’s been pulled from the water.

I followed the sound to my bedroom, and saw the blood speckled on the walls.  It was smeared all over the floor, and there was cotton strewn everywhere.  I called for my dog again, and the sound stopped suddenly.

With a dry swallow, I followed the smeared blood to the other side of the bed, where I noticed several things simultaneously.

I noticed the gigantic hole torn from the side of the mattress.  It was nearly the entire length of the bed.  The cotton stuffing that had filled it was everywhere, caked with blood in some places.  I also noticed that there weren’t any springs inside the mattress.  I’d slept on it and heard it creak when I laid down each night, but there was no sign of any sort of spring anywhere within the gaping hole.

I saw then the source of the sound.  The wet, slapping noise that I’d heard was coming from my dog as he played with the limp hand that was connected to the dead corpse hanging out of the hole in the mattress.