The babysitter used to record us sleeping
A camcorder on the dresser, red light blinking
She said it was for safety
My parents never questioned it
Twenty years later she died
And the tapes came to us in a box
Labeled by date, two hundred nights
Of children sleeping in infrared
We watched them out of morbid curiosity
And for the first hour they were normal
Two kids in bunk beds, tossing and turning
The ambient sounds of a sleeping house
Then the footage changed
At 3 AM in every recording
We both sat up in perfect synchronicity
Eyes open, facing the same corner
The babysitter tapes show what we did
In the hours we cannot remember
The babysitter tapes document
The appointments we kept in our sleep
We climbed out of bed together
And walked to the closet
And opened the door
And descended stairs that the closet does not contain
The camera angle showed us disappearing
Below the closet floor
Into a passage that should not exist
And we stayed down there for an hour
Then we came back up
Closed the closet door
Got back in bed
And in the morning remembered nothing
Two hundred nights of this
Every time the babysitter watched us
Two children descending into a passage
That led somewhere below the house
The last tape was different
On the last tape we descended
And something came up with us
A shape behind us on the stairs
We got in bed and the shape stood there
In the corner, where we used to stare
And it watched us sleep
Until the tape ran out
And the babysitter
Who must have watched this footage
Who must have seen what was in that corner
Never said a word
She just kept coming back
With her camcorder
And her red blinking light
Recording what we brought up
From below