There are three rules to being under a bed, and Octavitin had never broken one.
Rule One: You are not there.
Rule Two: If you are there, you are socks.
Rule Three: Wait. Wait until they are properly asleep. Not pretend asleep. Not the kind of asleep where one ear is still pointed at the floor. Then, and only then, you may begin the tidying.
Because that is what Octavitin was for. He was an under-bed sock tidier. Somebody has to be.
He had practiced for a hundred years, in a small tidy room of his own a long way under everything. He had practiced being socks. Each of his eight arms had a job. Arm Eight's job was waving hello, and he had never once let it, because hello is the opposite of Rule One.
A child had to ring him in, with one particular small brass bell. And they had to ask.
Children said things about creatures under beds. They said they pinched toes. Octavitin had never so much as looked at a toe. Nobody had ever rung him in.
Children were enormous. They had torches.
Tonight, somebody rang.
Ting.
A whisper followed it: If you're down there -- you can come out.
He went.
He was simply, suddenly, under a bed in a small blue room, hanging from the slats, with the carpet a long way below him and a hundred years of practice going oh no, oh no, oh no in all eight arms at once.
Arm One grabbed the slats.
Arm Two went shhh.
Arm Seven, whose job was worrying, tied itself in a knot.
Arm Six, whose job was doing whatever it liked, reached straight down and rang the bell.
Ting.
The small brass bell sat on the carpet right beneath him, with a string running up from it over the edge of the mattress. Next to the bell lay a flashlight, switched off, pointing at exactly the place where a pile of socks might be.
Somebody had set a trap for him.
He reminded himself that he was a professional.
His hair -- a small quiet fire with no heat in it, a color he called orangle -- flared up so bright he had to clap two hands over it.
One of his other arms -- Six, naturally -- was waving.
And that’s only the beginning.
