Alone

I was lying here in the safety of my bed when I saw two people walk casually into the room from the direction of the closed front door. They walked past my bed toward the windows behind me and seemed to vanish, though not all at once; I could see the streetlight reflecting in their eyes even as their shapes blackened and lost form. Paralyzed, I tried repeatedly to say “Please leave,” in the hope that they were benevolent spirits that wouldn’t stay where they were unwanted; but I couldn’t force more than a choked gasp from my throat.

Just when I began to believe that they were gone, or imaginary, I heard a rustling toward the foot of the bed. When I forced myself to look, I saw one of them balancing on top of the bookcase, wearing my robe. She turned and stared at me with the most malevolent expression you can imagine; in fact more so. It was such a coldly, coolly evil and beautiful face that your waking mind would protect you from confronting a picture of it. I could vaguely make out the other of the two, a man, standing a few feet closer, just at the foot of my elevated bed. By then I knew that they were not benevolent spirits at all, though they were most certainly not human.

I envy you now, because if you’re reading this, you are likely doing so in broad daylight, wrapped in the security of your personal reality. But even now, I’m reluctant to lower the device that I’m using to write this, which I picked up for comfort as soon as that dark face at the end of my bed faded into a purer darkness, accompanied by a sharp pain in my strained neck. The light from it has made everything else black, and I’m not entirely confidant of what my eyes will find when they learn again to separate the shapes around me. Am I alone, or is my waking mind trying to protect me from being confronted by my helplessness in the face of such inhumanly playful malice? So many hours still separate me from the daylight you’ve forgotten to be thankful for. I guess we’ll see.