unless...
“Goodnight,” I grumble towards the empty corner while I rub my aching eyes.
Eyes that ache from the mounting lack of sleep I’ve suffered these last few months.
But the corner isn’t empty. It never is.
In that corner, the northwest-facing corner of my room, the corner where I used to pile up my laundry until I ran out of clean clothes, grew a shadow.
The shadow first appeared on November 17th; it grew and grew out of those dirty clothes until it consumed the entire corner and then some. It used to not talk back. Now it does.
“Goodnight~” the shadow purred back at me in a soft, melodic voice barely above a whisper.
“I’ll see you as soon as the sun sets again tomorrow. That is, unless…”
The floorboards of my room creak and crackle as if the weight of a large beast were creeping towards my bed.
“...I kill you in your sleep.”
I sigh, shaking my head as if to shake the voice right out of my ears and pulling back the covers.
The shadow first spoke to me on December 9th. Tonight is February 22nd.
Every night since it started speaking to me, it has baited me with the same gruesome idea.
Every night, it implies that I might not wake up tomorrow.
The first time it happened I was so frightened that I fled my home, opting to crash on a friend’s couch with 911 on speed dial.
The soft-spoken threat continued to frighten me every night for a little over a month and a half.
I didn’t WANT to die, so the thought of being murdered in my sleep by the shadow in the corner was enough to send me into full-blown insomnia.
I haven’t slept more than three hours a night ever since the first time it spoke to me.
Even though the threat of death doesn’t faze me as much as it did a month ago, knowing that the presence persists just 5 feet away from the foot of my bed keeps me awake.
My dreams aren’t safe either. Every time I do manage to lull myself into drifting off, the phrase haunts my dreams.
“Goodnight, I’ll see you as soon as the sun sets again tomorrow. That is, unless, I kill you in your sleep.”
Despite how used to this nightly ritual I’ve become, the idea of this… presence, this creature, this demon killing me in my sleep still sends my body into a horrible, unending state of fight or flight.
Because I know it could. I know it might.
I made the mistake one time of asking the shadow how it would kill me.
“I will cast myself across this floor and over your unconscious body. I will fill your ears, nose, and mouth. I will suffocate you slowly like a thick fog—like a boa constrictor—and you will awaken and you will struggle. You will thrash and claw, clawing at your mouth and throat in a very vain attempt to remove my presence from your airways. You will become so desperate that you will even attempt to rip your throat open to allow any single atom of oxygen into your lungs. You will fail, of course, and you will die like a rabbit caught in a wire snare.”
It took me several moments to process this horrifying description of my slow and painful death. But then I made an even worse mistake, telling it to prove that it could even affect the physical world.
It said nothing in response to this request. Instead, a dirty shirt from my laundry pile slowly lifted off the ground until it was flung onto the foot of my bed.
I didn’t ask any more questions after that.
Now, as I get ready for bed every night, I play music for it, I tell it about my day, and I tell it goodnight.
I hope to stay in its good graces. I hope it’s bluffing.
But tonight could be the night.
