Short Story: "Sleep Paralysis"
Beware the faceless shadow...
I wrote this story several months ago, and it is inspired by a real instance of sleep paralysis I experienced around that time. Due to the subject matter and tone, I decided that Halloween would be the perfect time to unleash it on the world.
At two in the morning, something opens my bedroom door.
I don’t hear its approach. There is no turn of the knob or creaking of hinges. What the intruder brings instead is a wave of numbness, pins and needles settling over my skin. Before I can open my eyes, before I am even fully awake, I know that I am in the presence of something horrible.
With labored, feverish effort, I pry open my eyelids just long enough to peer out into the dark. When I do, I see my bedroom door standing halfway open. And in that window to the darkness, a towering mass of shadow stares back at me.
Its shape is just ordinary enough to mistake for the outline of a human, at least for a moment. Until I see its head scraping against the doorframe, and then the featureless void where a face should be.
It has no eyes, I think. How can it be staring at me if it has no eyes?
I attempt to sit up, but the waves of numbness keep me frozen. I'm trapped.
As panic rises in me, so too does a cry for help rise in my throat. I can barely force it out through my rigid lips. The sound emerges not as words, but only a faint, high-pitched warble of terror.
And yet, that alone is enough to change everything.
My vision shimmers and swirls, like air above hot asphalt on a summer day. The pieces of my room, so jumbled and unfamiliar a second before, settle back into place. The pins and needles lift from my skin, and I can breathe again.
The pale blue light from the power strip on the floor illuminates my room. I can see now that the door is shut tight. All is still and silent, just as the nighttime ought to be.
I breathe a sigh of relief. “You're okay,” I whisper to myself as I cocoon myself in my bedsheets and lie back down. “You're okay, you're okay…”
This has never happened to me before. But it's happened to plenty of other people, hasn't it? I try to comfort myself with facts and logic. This sensation has a name and a scientific explanation. The visions that it creates have hundreds of names and faces. People have deluded themselves into seeing aliens, demons, shadow people…
I think back to the moment I stared at that thing in my doorway, wondering which of us would move first. Back to the split second when I knew, against all logic, that it really was there.
The pins-and-needles sensation begins to slide up my arms again.
I squeeze my eyes closed and bury my face in my pillow, trying to banish the memory. Just focus on the dark, I tell myself. Don’t think about anything. Just focus on the dark.
Sleep comes again soon. Just not soon enough.
