The Bed by the Window

The Bed by the Window is a story from More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It is about a man in a nursing home who desperately wants to lay next to a window and will do any means necessary to achieve his goal.



The Story
Three old men shared a room at the nursing home. Their room had only one window, but for them it was the only link to the real world. Ted Conklin, who had been there the longest, had the bed next to the window. When Ted died, the man in the next bed, George Best, took his place; and the third man, Richard Greene, took George’s bed.

Despite his illness, George was a cheerful man who spent his days describing the sights he could see from his bed- pretty girls, a policeman on horseback, a traffic jam, a pizza parlor, a fire station and other scenes of life outside. Richard loved to listen to George. But the more George talked about life outside, the more Richard wanted to see it for himself. Yet he knew that only when George died would he have his chance. He wanted to look out that window so badly that one day he decided to kill George. “He is going to die soon, anyway,” he told himself. “What difference would it make?”

George had a bad heart. If he had an attack during the night and a nurse could not get to him right away, he had pills he could take. He kept them in a bottle on top of the cabinet between his bed and Richards. All Richard had to do was knock the bottle to the floor where George could not reach it.

A few nights later George died just as Richard had planned he would. And the next morning Richard was moved to the bed by the window. Now he would see for himself all the things outside that George had described. After the nurses had left, Richard turned to the window and looked out. But all he could see was a blank brick wall.