27

I lay awake in bed, the ringing in my ears loud, the restlessness pulsing in my body.

There’s no sleepiness. I am tired, coming off little sleep, the weight of the day fueling my exhaustion, but sleep’s something that washes off my body, leaving now just this: the early morning dissonance.

The thoughts that flit through my mind are disordered. I think about the story for a screenplay I’m reworking, and then another screenplay that I’m meant to rework; the revision for my sci-fi novel, and the struggle to reshape it; the book I desperately want to write; and then, memories of my best friend, and my ex, both jostling at polar extremes; and, lastly, a stream of random observations about my environment.

I can hear the fridge in the kitchen, whirring away. It’s such a common sound that it’s become white noise. Right now, it’s easy to divorce it from my world.

Then what else is there?

The silence, my silence replete with the constant hiss of the CPAP machine, obscuring my shallow breathing, and the ever-present ringing in my ears.

More white noise.

What else does the night hold?

What other sounds can it hold?

A scream. I could imagine a scream. It would come from the tub in the bathroom. A frightened twenty-something woman, thin with sickness, is curled up there. Her scream would be so shrill it might shatter the night through reverberation alone. I’ve thought that often about that bath tub. I don’t know why.

But right now, that’s a distant thought. I know it’s a distant thought.

Some part of me wants something closer.

Footsteps.

That’d be so much more subtle than a scream. A scream would be an immediate shock, the equivalent of a jump scare. Contemplating it isn’t scary because it’s so abrupt that I can’t process it as a genuine possibility that builds dread.

But what if I heard footsteps, so light at first I was sure they must be imagination, or some sound that I’ve twisted into the shape of footsteps? They could begin at the end of the hallway, and as they grew louder, as they approached, they would firm from imagination.

It’s a child.

A child is coming toward me.

And as they near, they quicken, like they’re prepping to bound out of the realm of fantasy, like a long jumper gaining speed and preparing for that ultimate leap.

Then I would know that, yes, they are foosteps, but I wouldn’t have time to contemplate it because they’d be inside my bedroom.

Faster. Heavier. Louder.

And each is an exclamation mark on a new truth: something’s running at me, something’s running for my bed and, as it nears my bedside, it leaps.

I think about this until I’m sure in the depth of the night, lost in my sleeplessness, that this is something that is happening – it’s just not happening here, but some other plane of existence separated from our own by only the thinnest partition, and if I keep thinking about this, keep imagining it, it’s not that I’ll will it into existence, but I’ll claw it from wherever it exists into our world, drag into my world, and once that happens, all the parameters of reality as I understand it, as the general populace understands it, shatters, and then for me, only impossibility remains.

It becomes so real now, so undeniable, that I’m growing agitated, and I have to push the scenario from my head before … well, I want to say I’m not sure what, but I am now.

I totally am.