This is StoryQuest. Today's story is The Monster on Top of the Bed.

I don't know if you've ever moved to a new house and had a new bedroom.

Kaz and her family had just moved to a very old house.

It was bigger than their last one and was what mum mum called a doeru-u-upper,

which meant basically that it needed a ton of decorating and building work to be done.

Kaz found it funny that some of the work was to get rid of old things and replace them with new ones,

like taking up the thick lino in the kitchen

floor, which mum wanted to replace with slate tiles. And some of the other work was to make the old

things look new again, like the ancient rusting aga oven and the tiles around the fireplaces.

Kaz's new room was lovely with a pretty fireplace, forget-me-not blue tiles and high ceilings

and she had all her toys and teddies arranged as she liked them but there was just one problem

and it was something that happened when she tried to go to sleep at night. Now old houses can be

funny places. Think of all the people who must have lived in them, and all the things the house must have seen. Well, not seen, seen, but you know what I mean. They can almost seem alive with the memories steeped into the thick old brick of the walls. In the dark of the night the house seemed to breathe. There were odd clanks from the water pipes

and creeks in the walls, and even though Kaz liked the house in her new room, it took a bit

of getting used to. One night she woke up with a start to hear a new creek. It was coming

from under her bed. She lay frozen, listening. It was a regular creekak as if someone or something was moving around.

After a while it stopped and she screwed up her eyes in the dark and eventually went back to sleep.

The next night the same thing happened. It was so spooky.

Cree- creak, the squeaky creaking noise could almost be coming from an

animal. The thought made Caz even more scared. There was only one logical explanation. I think I've got

a monster under my bed, she declared one morning at breakfast. Her parents looked at each other, not sure if

Kaz was pulling their legs. I mean it. Every night there's this strange noise coming and I can hear

...