The Sleep Demon's Grasp
When sleep folds over the room like a heavy blanket, I learn to listen for the creak of the floorboards and the old house that knows my name. The clock snores, and the walls murmur in a language that sounds like rain on slate. I am not afraid of the dark; I am afraid of what waits in its quiet corner—the stillness that refuses to lift its hand from my throat. The first sign is a pressure, a slow, methodical weighting that pins me down as if the night-sky itself pressed a finger to my chest.
A figure arrives not with sound but with presence: a silhouette drawn in the corners where the lamp light refuses to touch. The Sleep Demon, a name I never gave until now, moves with calculated patience. Its eyes are coins left out in the rain—cold, unblinking, and somehow knowing every fear I keep secret. It does not bite; it asks, in a voice like thunder muffled by velvet, whether I wish to be free or to listen.
“Do not fight the quiet,” it murmurs, “for naming it gives it breath.”
I manage a rasp of a reply, though no breath leaves my lips. “What are you?” I ask, and the room seems to lean closer, as if curiosity itself could topple the darkness. The demon does not answer with words but with a slow, deliberate tracing of its shadow along the wall, as if inviting me to follow a trail I have long avoided. The air grows thick with copper-tinged cold, and the shadows peel back, revealing a corridor of memories I hid behind doors I swore I would never reopen.
- The weight on my chest becomes a bar of iron, and every breath pursues a longer distance than the last.
- The room smells of rain and old plaster, of summers that never quite ended.
- Shadow shapes widen their borders and then retreat to the corners, leaving only the space between them where I must decide to sleep or stay awake.
- From the doorframe, the air glitters with a noise like keys turning in a lock, a soft invitation to step through nothing and become everything I forgot.
Morning arrives with a pale apology of light, and I am released, but not unchanged. The Sleep Demon slides back into the wall, a shadow shelved for the day, yet its presence lingers in a way that feels almost like a memory you can’t quite erase. On the nightstand, I find a leather-bound notebook I do not remember owning, its pages filled with handwriting that matches my grandmother’s looped script, a note tucked between lines: Do not fear what you must keep to survive. Some doors stay closed until you are ready to walk through them with your eyes open.
As dawn stretches its pale fingers across the room, I realize the grasp was not a capture but a key. The demon’s vigil was a guardian, guiding me to a memory I carried alone for years, a truth too fragile for daylight. I blink away the last echo of sleep and breathe out the knowledge that some nights are not meant to be conquered, but to be remembered—so that the morning sun does not pretend the dark never visited.