Sometimes when he slept, he would half wake. A menace would hang in the air. Something would be in the room with him, just on the edges of his vision, smeared into the shadows and watching him with burning eyes. He’d try to scream but couldn’t.
He first saw one when he was 11 or 12. His eyes eased opening after a night awake wondering why it felt so strange to lay on your stomach. Just outside his bedroom door, a skeleton. Not a collection of bones strung together like you’d find in a classroom. No, this was a being. A thing. A malevolent entity. It watched him sleep. Observed him. Waited for its moment to do … what?
He tried to scream for his parents, to call out for help, but no air reached his lungs and no sound escaped him. He screamed until he was exhausted, but there were no cries anyone could hear. There was only terror in his soul. And then it went away.
Sleep paralysis. A traumatizing but ultimately nothing nothing.
This was not that.
These figures of shadow crawling into the window were different. They were a waking thing. They were real. Some were shaped like children. Most were, though they moved unlike any children he had ever seen. Some were elongated to spider-like dimensions, limbs splayed out and probing, feeling, searching, wanting. The light from outside began to flicker. It turned a sickly green. The door on the far side of the room eased itself open, though no one else lived with him. Two figures appeared. These were not malformed or stretched out or otherwise drawn from a nightmare. They were a woman and a child, perhaps, or something wearing their skin. Imposters. Pretenders. Something that donned human flesh at need, wore it to set others at ease, then discarded it like so much decaying meat.
Was their skin from someone real, he wondered? Was there a home nearby with two skinless figures screaming in agony, their last moments impossible torment? Or was it all an illusion?
I should pause here for a moment. I should gather my thoughts to decide how to describe this next
a flutter and a flux and
Two more of them watched the
I should tell you about the fax machine. The story inside the fax machine, sent with good will but laced with unintended malice, or so they felt, the machine that
Television theme song from another room paralyzes child with fear
light dimming now but the shadow beings remain
I should tell you
…
…
I should tell you.
***
He woke an hour later than he should have. His back ached. It didn’t used to ache when he was younger. He threw his legs over the side of the bed and sat himself up. The room looked like it was draped in gauze. These days, it always looked this way in the morning; just a soft smear across everything he saw. Took about an hour for it to wear off. He staggered to the next room, his steps not quite even, not as confident as they once were. Jammed a toothbrush into his mouth and went through the motions.
This is what mornings are. Going through the motions.
He spit into the sink. Rinsed. Looked at himself in the mirror. At the yellowing eyes that were once so vivid and clear. At the skin now so sickly. At the ragged tangle of hair that used to speak of youth and now just spoke of someone who had given up. At the person waiting for either an end or a happening or, perhaps, both at once.
His unsteady gait led him to the living room.
They were waiting. A woman and a child, or what looked like a woman and a child, drenched in the morning sun, the light illuminating the loose folds of what they pretended was their skin. It hung loose around their faces, like candles left unattended. Their eyes were black. In place of teeth, something wriggled. Mold clung to the seams where their hair was stitched to the faces they wore.
She, the woman, the mother, or whatever she was — she opened her mouth to speak.
He heard the words inside his head and began to scream.
end part 2 – part 3
