19

I wake to the sight of an old woman standing over me.

She’s a crone, twisted and ancient and alien, a disruption of my reality that lasts a millisecond, but it’s a millisecond that stretches so tortuously over my surprise that I’m able to process so much.

It’s seven years ago. I’ve been sent home from work for a few days because I have a bad cold and, after waking around my usual time, have stayed in bed and tried to catch up on sleep.

But light’s busting in from the window, and the blinds aren’t that effective. Come the morning, I know about it.

Opening my eyes, seeing her, there’s an instant of calm. I’m good in emergencies. The everyday, not so much. The chronic pain psychologist told me that anxiety’s like all this worry and nowhere to put it, but when an emergency arises, my mind coalesces and focuses.

This crone’s white-haired – this unnatural white that’s so pure and untarnished it shines. It’s partly because the pixilation I usually see as an overlay isn’t there, and her skin is bronzed so the hair’s a contrast. Her face is a tangle of lines, and as much as they should suggest an antiquity, it comes now with a sense of timelessness. She wears a navy cardigan and a plain dress – the clothing so ordinary that they barely register.

I don’t know her.

That’s what startles me.

I know immediately she isn’t here – not physically, like somebody broke in. That means she must be something else, and that something else is something supernatural.

A ghost is just too cliché, and media’s reduced the term to something trite. But she might be something spiritual – some soul somehow connected to me.

She doesn’t look like anybody I know or anybody from my family circle who’ve passed, although she might come from some previous generation. A cousin told me when she was a child, she would sporadically see an older woman who would sit on her bedside, and who (she found out later after seeing a photo) turned out to be her (deceased) great grandmother.

But this doesn’t have that feel – as if there’s a frame of reference for me to use. If there were, though, I know this wouldn’t be it.

I also know it doesn’t have to be somebody benevolent. Recently, I’ve been researching (for a story) things like succubuses and incubuses – demons who prey on sleeping forms, so this could totally be my subconscious projecting as I come out of sleep.

Or it could be that very thing I’m researching. A spiritualist once told me there was an energy hovering around me, something dark that had attached to me, although at the time I thought the spiritualist was unwittingly extrapolating from my explanation that I was constantly tired and on edge.

It could be something else altogether, some thing that exists on an alternate plane that overlays ours, and which I’m able to catch a glimpse of right now because the pragmatic part of my mind hasn’t roused, allowing me to see something beyond my comprehension.

But her presence isn’t random – it’s not like looking out through the window, and seeing the neighbour watering their lawn, totally oblivious to me.

The old woman is watching me – is standing within reach, should I stretch out my arm.

I might be catching a glimpse, but see’s been watching me a lot longer than that.

And she sees now that I see her.

All this thinking is done in an instant.

And then I’m sitting up with a cry and she’s gone.

Fully awake, logic reestablishing itself, as well as daylight dismissing the fears, I decide she was just hypnapompic hallucination and nothing more.