No Sleep Tonight

Last year, I spent six months participating in what I was told was a psychological experiment. I found an ad in my local paper looking for imaginative people looking to make good money, and since it was the only ad that week that I was remotely qualified for, I gave them a call and we arranged an interview.

They told me that all I would have to do is stay in a room, alone, with sensors attached to my head to read my brain activity, and while I was there I would visualize a double of myself. They called it my “tulpa.”

It seemed easy enough, and I agreed to do it as soon as they told me how much I would be paid. The next day, I began. They brought me to a simple room and gave me a bed, then attached sensors to my head and hooked them into a little black box on the table beside me. They talked me through the process of visualizing my double again, and explained that if I got bored or restless, instead of moving around, I should visualize my double moving around, or try to interact with him, and so on. The idea was to keep him with me the entire time I was in the room.

I had trouble with it for the first few days. It was more controlled than any sort of daydreaming I’d done before. I’d imagine my double for a few minutes, then grow distracted. By the fourth day, however, I could manage to keep him “present” for the entire six hours. They told me I was doing very well.

The second week, they gave me a different room with wall-mounted speakers. They told me they wanted to see if I could still keep the tulpa with me in spite of distracting stimuli. The music was discordant, ugly, unsettling, and it made the process a little more difficult, but I managed nonetheless. The next week, they played even more unsettling music, punctuated with shrieks, feedback loops, what sounded like an old school modem dialing up and guttural voices speaking some foreign language. I just laughed it off; I was a pro by then.

After about a month, I started to get bored. To liven things up, I started interacting with my doppelganger. we’d have conversations, play rock-paper-scissors, I’d imagine him juggling or break dancing, or whatever caught my fancy. I asked the researchers if my foolishness would adversely affect their study, but they encouraged me.

So, we played and communicated, and that was fun for a while…and then it got a little strange. I was telling him about my first date one day and he corrected me. I’d said my date was wearing a yellow top, and he told me it was a green one. I thought about it for a second and realized he was right. It creeped me out, and after my shift that day I talked to the researchers about it. “You’re using the thought-form to access your subconscious,” they explained. “You knew on some level that you were wrong, and you subconscious corrected yourself.”

What had been creepy was suddenly cool. I was talking to my subconscious! It took some practice, but I found that I could question my tulpa and access all sorts of memories. I could make it quote whole pages of books I’d read once, years before, or things I was taught and immediately forgot in high school. It was awesome.

That was around the time I started “calling up” my double outside of the research center. Not often, at first, but I was so used to imagining him by now that it almost seemed odd not to see him. So, whenever I was bored, I’d visualize my double. Eventually, I started doing it almost all the time. It was amusing to take him along like an invisible friend. I imagined him when I was hanging out with friends, or visiting my mom; I even brought him along on a date once. I didn’t need to speak aloud to him, so I was able to carry out conversations with him and no one was the wiser.

I know that sounds strange, but it was fun. Not only was he a walking repository of everything I knew and everything I had forgotten, he also seemed more in touch with me than I did at times. He had an uncanny grasp of the minutiae of body language that I didn’t even realize I was picking up on. For example, I thought the date I brought him along on was going badly, but he pointed out how she was laughing a little too hard at my jokes and leaning towards me as I spoke, and a bunch of other subtle clues I wasn’t consciously picking up on. I listened and let’s just say that the date went very well.

By the time I’d been at the research center for four months he was with me constantly. The researchers approached me one day after my shift and asked me if I’d stopped visualizing him. I denied it and they seemed pleased. I silently asked my double if he knew what prompted that, but he just shrugged it off. So did I.

I withdrew a little from the world at that point. I was having trouble relating to people. It seemed to me that they were so confused and unsure of themselves, while I had a manifestation of myself to confer with. It made socializing awkward. Nobody else seemed aware of the reasons behind their actions, why some things made them mad and others made them laugh. They didn’t know what moved them…but I did, or at least I could ask myself and get an answer

A friend confronted me one evening. He pounded at the door until I answered it and came in fuming and swearing up a storm. “You haven’t answered when I called you in fucking weeks, you dick!” he yelled. “What’s your fucking problem?”

I was about to apologize to him and probably would have offered to hit the bars with him that night, but my tulpa grew suddenly furious. “Hit him,” it said, and before I knew what I was doing, I had. I heard his nose break. He fell to the floor and came up swinging, and we beat each other up and down my apartment. I was more furious than I have ever been, and I was not merciful. I knocked him to the ground and gave him two savage kicks to the ribs, and that was when he fled, hunched over and sobbing.

The police were by a few minutes later, but I told them that he had been the instigator and since he wasn’t around to refute me, they let me off with a warning. My tulpa was grinning the entire time. We spent the night crowing about my victory and sneering over how badly I’d beaten my friend.

It wasn’t until the next morning, when I was checking out my black eye and cut lip in the mirror, that I remembered what had set me o ff. My double was the one who’d grown furious, not me. I’d been feeling guilty and a little ashamed, but he’d goaded me into a vicious fight with a concerned friend. He was present, of course, and knew my thoughts. “You don’t need him any more. You don’t need anyone else,” he told me; I felt my skin crawl.

I explained all this to the researchers who employed me, but they just laughed it off. “You can’t be scared of something that you’re imagining,” one told me. My double stood beside him and nodded his head, then smirked at me.

I tried to take their words to heart, but over the next few days I found myself growing more and more anxious around my tulpa, and it seemed that he was changing. He looked taller and more menacing. His eyes twinkled with mischief, and I saw malice in his constant smile. No job was worth losing my mind over, I decided. If he was out of control, I’d put him down. I was so used to him at that point that visualizing him was an automatic process, so I started trying my damnedest to not visualize him. It took a few days, but it started to work somewhat. I could get rid of him for hours at a time, but every time he came back, he seemed worse. His skin seemed ashen, his teeth more pointed. He hissed and gibbered and threatened and swore. The discordant music I’d been listening to for months seemed to accompany him everywhere. Even when I was at home; I’d relax and slip up, no longer concentrating on no seeing him, and there he’d be, and that howling noise with him.

I was still visiting the research center and spending my next six hours there. I needed the money, and I thought they weren’t away that I was now not actively visualizing my tulpa. I was wrong. After my shift one day, about five and a half months in, two impressive men grabbed me and restrained me, and someone in a lab coat jabbed a hypodermic needle into me.

I woke up from my stupor back in the room, strapped into the bed, music blaring, with my doppelganger standing over me, cackling. He hardly looked human any more. His features were twisted. His eyes were sunken in their sockets and filmed over like a corpse’s. He was much taller than me, but hunched over. His hands were twisted, and his fingernails were like talons. He was, in short, fucking terrifying. I tried to will him away, but I couldn’t seem to concentrate. He giggled and tapped the IV in my arm. I thrashed in my restraints as best I could, but could hardly move at all.

“They’re pumping you full of the good shit, I think. How’s the mind? All fuzzy?” He leaned closer and closer as he spoke. I gagged; his breath smelled like spoiled meat. I tried to focus, but I couldn’t banish him.

The next few weeks were terrible. Every so often, someone in a doctor’s coat would come in and inject me with something or force-feed me a pill. They kept me dizzy and unfocused, and sometimes left me hallucinating or delusional. My thought-form was still present, constantly mocking. He interacted with, or perhaps caused, my delusions. I hallucinated that my mother was there, scolding me, and then he cut her throat and her blood showered me. It was so real that I could taste it.

The doctors never spoke to me. I begged at times, screamed, hurled invectives, demanded answers. They never spoke to me. They may have talked to my tulpa, my personal monster. I’m not sure. I was so doped and confused that it may have just been more delusion, but I remember them talking with him. I grew convinced that he was the real one and that I was the thought-form. He encouraged that line of thought at times, but mocked me at others. ‘ Another thing that I pray was a delusion: he could touch me. More than that, he could hurt me. He’d poke and prod at me if he felt I wasn’t paying enough attention to him. Once, he grabbed my testicles and squeezed until I told him I loved him. Another time, he slashed my forearm with one of his talons. I still have a scar; most days I can convince myself that I injured myself, and just hallucinated that he was responsible. Most days.

Then, one day, while he was telling me a story about how he was going to gut everyone I loved, starting with my sister, he paused. A querulous look crossed his face, and he reached out and touched my head. Like mother used to when I was feverish. He stayed still for a long moment and then smiled. “All thoughts are creative,” he told me, then he walked out the door.

Three hours later, I was given an injection and passed out. I awoke unrestrained. Shaking, I made my way to the door and found it unlocked I walked out into the empty hallway and then ran. I stumbled more than once, but I made it down the stairs and out into the lot behind the building. There, I collapsed, weeping like a child. I knew I had to keep moving, but I couldn’t manage it.

I got home eventually; I don’t remember how. I locked the door and shoved a dresser against it, took a long shower, and slept for a day and a half. Nobody came for me in the night, and nobody came the next day or the one after that. I twas over. I’d spent a week locked in that room, but it had felt like a century. I’d withdrawn so much from my life beforehand that nobody had even known I was missing.

The police didn’t find anything. The research center was empty when they searched it. The paper trail fell apart. The names I’d given them were aliases. Even the money I’d received was apparently untraceable.

I recovered as much as one can. I don’t leave the house much, and I have panic attacks when I do. I cry a lot. I don’t sleep much, and my nightmares are terrible. It’s over, I tell myself. I survived. I used the concentration those bastards taught me to convince myself. It works, sometimes.

Not today, though. Three days ago, I got a phone call from my mother. There’s been a tragedy. My sister’s the latest victim in a spree of killings, the police say. The perpetrator mugs his victims, then guts them.

The funeral was this afternoon. It was as lovely a service as a funeral can be, I suppose. I was a little distracted, though. All I could hear was music coming from somewhere distant. It was discordant, unsettling stuff that sounds like feedback, shrieking, and a modem dialing up. I hear it still – a little louder now.

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Shortly after I turned seventeen, my parents separated. My father stayed in my childhood suburban home for some time while selling it, while my mother rented a townhouse for me and her to live in. Our new house had two stories, three bedrooms, and it was built in a row house style with several identical houses adjoined. The front of each house opened up directly onto the sidewalk and in the back we had a small fenced-in yard with a little wooden porch, big enough for a couple patio chairs and a barbeque. The neighborhood was pretty nice, but there wasn’t much privacy. The walls were thin, and we could hear our neighbors walking up the stairs, flushing the toilet, and sometimes even talking.

One lady in particular was very nosy. She lived right across the street, alone as far as we could tell, and kept track of everything and everybody, when we came, when we went, when we took out the trash. She didn’t talk much to me, however, but she always seemed to be lurking behind the curtain when I was outside. According to the other neighbors she had lived here for decades, but after her husband passed away she became a bit… loopy.

About a week after we moved in, my mom brought down two big cardboard boxes from the attic crawlspace, seemingly left there by a former tenant. They were unmarked and I watched as she opened them, hoping for some kind of interesting treasure. The first one contained old sheets that had been crisp and clean once but now smelled of mildew, as well as some personal items such as jewelry and an old pair of glasses. The other box was a bit smaller and my interest was piqued as soon as mom opened it – it was filled with children’s items. There were toys – among others a very small and ragged teddy bear, a couple of plastic horses bleached by sunlight, a large doll whose eyes shut when you tilted her horizontally. Then there were a few newspapers, dating back to the 1970’s. Further down there were what seemed to be school mementos – work books, a drawing of a smiling family outside a house eerily similar to ours with oversized flowers and a rainbow (aptly titled “MY FAMILY” in a child’s handwriting), stickers, pages of cursive writing wrinkled by moisture – and a diary. My mom scorned me for wanting to look in it, but I convinced her to let me have it by saying that I wanted to figure out who it belonged to, and maybe be able to reunite the owner, who by now would be an adult, with their long lost stuff.

I took the diary into my room and sat down with it on the bed. It was a rather girly creation, with pages that had once had been heavily scented, and a small heart-shaped lock that was now broken. The front cover was pastel purple, and framed in the middle against a black background was a drawing of a girl in 1920’s era clothes. A tear was running down her face. I quickly flipped through the pages and saw that the diary was about half full. I decided to start at the beginning. The writing was large and childish, but fully legible.

Today is the first day I am writing in you. I hope you and I will be great friends! So what did I do today? I was in school. Me Mary and Susan played during break. I don’t know if Mary likes me but she sure is mean to me. When I came home we had meetballs for dinner. They were yumy!

The short, innocent entry made me smile as I turned the page. The next few entries were filled with similar stuff about Jessie’s life; piano recitals, a boy at school she had a crush on, how she liked math, notes about her mom and dad, a new shirt she got and how mean Mary said it was ugly, and here and there little illustrations related to the entry or just random little girl stuff like flowers and horses. However, a few months into the diary I came across an entry with slightly different undertones.

I have a hard time sleaping. I woke up and there is someone in my room. I told my mom but she says Bogyman isn’t real. I can’t see what he looks like but I don’t like him.

I furrowed my brow. Somewhat creepy, yes, but little kids have vivid imaginations. So I shrugged it off and kept reading.

Today I think I saw Bogyman at school. I wish he would go away. I told Mary and Susan but Mary said I was ill in the head and needed to be locked away. She is so mean. I kicked her and had to go to detenshun. Mom was angry when we got home. She said I am making it all up.

Last night I had a very bad dream about a tree. It was scary. The tree came in through my window and ate me. I went to sleap in moms and dads room. Bogyman doesnt go in there.

I put the book down. Okay, something wasn’t right with this kid. During dinner I told my mom about what I had read so far, and asked if the knew anything at all about the people who lived here in the 70’s, but she didn’t. Jessie’s diary gave me the heebie jeebies, and when I went to bed that night I could feel it staring at me from my nightstand. That little teary-eyed girl on the cover just wouldn’t stop trying to catch my gaze. Against better judgement, I picked it up and found the place where I had left off.

Bogyman keeps moving my toys around. I told him to stop. Mom and dad still dont believe me and said to stop playing with my toys at night when I am supposed to be in bed. Mom is always mad. Maybe she cant sleap either. Tonight I am going to a sleap over berthday party at Susans house. I hope he doesnt come there. Mommy said she is takeing me to the doctor to find out why I dont sleap. She still doesnt believe me.

Bogyman comes almost all the time now. He says I should come with him. I don’t like him because he doesnt have a face and is scary. He told me that he lives in the tree outside my window. I dont want to go with him.

Okay, to hell with that. I slammed the book shut and stuffed it in my nightstand drawer. After making sure every inch of my body was safe and secure underneath my covers, and suspiciously staring at the window for about 45 minutes, I fell asleep.

I woke up, laying on my side. I slowly opened my eyes and saw only my white bedroom wall in the dark. I was facing the wall, my back to the rest of the room, and it must still be nighttime. As I was beginning to ponder how long I’d slept and what had woken me up, I realized that something was wrong. I couldn’t move. At first I (silently and motionlessly) freaked out, but then I recalled what I had read about sleep paralysis and I understood what was going on. A friend of mine had it once and we had read up on it online together, as she didn’t know what it was either. Basically, you are stuck in a half-dream state where you are paralyzed and quite often hallucinate. Scary stuff, but it’s all in your head and when you wake up properly everything is back to normal.

So I calmed down and concentrated on wiggling my toes to try to snap out of it. No luck. I decided to just try to go back to sleep. As I waited to drift off, I became aware of a presence in my room. Now, I knew that this stuff was a very common hallucination with sleep paralysis, but it did not make me any more comfortable with what happened. I was now frightfully aware that there was something else in the room with me. I couldn’t see it or hear it, but it radiated an aura of… evil, lacking a better description, and I couldn’t turn around and face it. Never in my life have I felt so vulnerable. I could feel my heartbeat in my ears – a strange, almost sucking noise – and then I heard whatever-it-was slowly move around the opposite side of my room, from the window towards the door. Suddenly, quick footsteps ran up to the side of my bed and something started to hit the mattress behind my back, with absolutely furious, inhumanly quick fists. I could feel the assault sending my body bouncing. Suddenly I was on my back, or at least I think I was, and I saw a dark figure looming above me. I couldn’t see any features other than the black shape, but it leaned down close to me and put its goddamn hands on my face. They felt cool and hard, like really thick leathery skin, or wood. I felt more than saw those wooden fingers sprout and grow really long and thin, and snake their way into my mouth. I tried to keep it closed while feverishly trying to remind myself that none of this was real, but tears streamed down my cheeks and I felt like I was fighting for my life. The fingers wedged themselves in between my upper front teeth. My whole head reverberated with sickening cracks as it pried my teeth apart. There was no pain, but I could feel them shatter.

I snapped out of the paralysis and sat up, wild-eyed and sweaty. Whimpering, I ran to the bathroom mirror and naturally, my teeth were fine. There was no sign of the intruder. I ran so fast downstairs that I almost fell, turned all the lights on and sat on the couch for the rest of the night. My mom found me there, finally asleep, at 7 am. We agreed that I’d had nightmares due to the stuff I’d read in Jessie’s diary. A perfectly rational explanation, which I was quite comfortable with.

However, two days later I was about to have second thoughts about that. I went to take the trash out and the nosy old lady across the street was also outside, getting her mail. Our eyes met and I gave her a short, polite nod. She gave me a really funny look and said;

I stared at her in disbelief as she gave me a triumphant snort and shuffled back inside, dressed in an old nightgown and ragged slippers. Yeah, this was discomforting.

I went back into my room and took out the diary from my nightstand drawer, weighing it my hands, unsure of what to do. From the descriptions Jessie had supplied in the diary I knew that her bedroom had been the third one, the one that neither me nor my mom slept in. It was the smallest one, had one side with a slanted ceiling and there had at one point been a large tree outside it, but it had been cut down years ago and now only remnants of a mossy stump remained below. At least that gave me some comfort. I took Jessie’s diary and went into her old bedroom and sat at the computer desk my mom had set up in there. I looked around, trying to imagine how it would have looked back in the 70’s when Jessie had lived in there. I was almost at the last of her entries, and I have to admit I was a little bit nervous to see what they had to say.

My dad and mr Richards next door cut down the tree outside my window. He said it was full of beetles and was gonna fall over. I’m glad, maybe now the Bogyman cant come back. I went and looked at the beetles in the tree, there sure were lots of them. My mom is baking cinimon rolls and Im gonna go eat one now.

Bogyman came last night. He was very angry that dad and mr Richards cut the tree down. He grabbed my arm and said I had to come with him. His fingers are really long and they hurt my arm. He wears a suit like dad. I didn’t go with him but he said that he was coming back. Im scared. I dont want to live here any more.

That was the final entry. Below it there was a drawing of a figure that must be Jessie’s Boogeyman. It was a tall human-like figure with long arms and legs and long snaky fingers. I closed the diary, firmly set on never opening it again. I went to put it back in the cardboard box (while toying with the idea to burn it) when my eyes fell on one of the yellowed newspapers that had been packed away with it. It was dated October 1976, the same month as Jessie’s last entry. I held my breath as I carefully took all the newspapers out of the box and went through them in search of… well, anything.

My heart sank like a stone when I read about a little girl being abducted from her bedroom in the night. She disappeared on the night of October 18th. Her window had been opened but the police didn’t have any clues. I looked through the other articles and learned that due to Jessie’s diary, which the police had found when looking through her room, they believed she had been kidnapped by a child predator. However, there were absolutely no tracks outside, and to get into the room the perpetrator would have needed a ladder. Plus, the window in her bedroom could only be opened from the inside. In an issue dated about a month later there was a notice that they had found Jessie’s nightgown in a ditch a few kilometers from the house, near the woods. There were no other traces, and that was the last newspaper article I found.

A couple of days later I asked the lady next door, whose name I can tell you was Rowena Richards, if she remembered that day when her husband had helped the people across the road cut down the tree outside their little daughters room, and if she could tell me anything about them. She just shook her head and said,

“Poor little girl. The tall man in the suit took her. They’ll never find her.” I couldn’t get anything more out of her.

A few months later, I was very relieved to find out that I had been accepted to a university out of state. I moved as soon as I could, and now here I sit in my dorm, telling you this story. I still wonder what happened to poor little Jessie, and I hope I will never find out for myself.

Horror movies never really scared me. Scary books had no effect. Haunted houses are meaningless. I was never a child who slept with the covers over their face, or with a night light. As a little girl, I never felt the need to crawl into bed with my mother after having a nightmare. I never really had nightmares to begin with, and the few that I did, most would never consider a nightmare at all.

I’ve simply never been afraid of what goes bump in the night. Our home security system kept away fears of very real humans with dark intentions, as did our rottweiler, aptly named Killer. As for threats outside the home, well, who could be afraid in a nice, white, upper class community? I’ve lived in a bland bubble all my life, never knowing what fear is.

Up until this moment, I haven’t been. I saw it as childish and illogical. Of course, I don’t feel that way anymore. I’m writing this to you now as a warning because it’s too late for me. I know that now, and it’s brought on a surreal sort of calm…When I finish warning you, it will be all over. So forgive me if I’m being long-winded…I enjoyed life a bit more than I was once willing to admit.

It all started with what I thought was a virus. I had been linked to a video called “Girls and Boys Come Out to Play.” It sounded harmless enough. I thought it was an art student’s film, perhaps. The person who had linked the video promised it was very good. Well worth watching.

I can’t remember the video. All I can remember is the feeling it brought up. It wasn’t fear, but it was close. I was uncomfortable. I was unnerved. I was also vaguely ill.

From then on, things only got worse. The background on my computer had changed to a picture of a disturbed looking young woman who stared at me from a black abyss. Every now and then, and growing more frequent by the day, strange noises would emit from my computer, even when the sound wasn’t on. Screaming, strange laughter, grinding noises…

At the time, I was annoyed; the fear hadn’t settled in quite yet. Then, the faces started popping up, like those ridiculous ‘screamers’ that scared my friends in high school. Yet these were different. They looked real. They were the faces of the dead; and they had died violent deaths.

I wish I could say that I stopped using the computer, but I couldn’t. My job requires me to use my computer frequently. What was I to do? I had no other computer available to me.

I tried to take it in to have the virus removed, but no one could help me. They said there wasn’t a virus. They said the computer was fine.

Meanwhile, it got worse. The faces weren’t just popping up; they would stay. And with those horrible, rotted eyes, they would hold my gaze. I couldn’t look away from them and their terrible, mocking grins. And oh, God…the smell. My computer forever had a vague stench of death around it.

I thought I was going crazy. I thought that perhaps someone was messing with me. The people at the computer repair place didn’t know what they were talking about. Something was wrong, but I knew that it had to be something very real that just had to be fixed.

So I got a new computer. Everything was fine for a while, but then it all came back, and in full force. Now there were voices. Now there was screaming. Now, the rotted faces showed their stinking bodies. I could see every maggot, every fly, every pus-filled crevice…And they were calling to me. Telling me that soon, very soon, I’d be joining them. They were so angry that I had tried to get rid of them, and now they would make me pay.

I didn’t know what to do. Ignoring the problem wasn’t working. I thought maybe it was the fault of a friend from work. Perhaps it came from the emails they had been sending me? I never thought it was the video. Not for a second. After all, that just wasn’t logical.

I was at the end of my rope. Today, I unplugged the computer and began packing. I would go on vacation, clear my head, and pray that everything would be back to normal.

A few minutes ago, I realized it would not. The power went out, and for the first time in my life, I felt true fear. I had no idea that in a few moments, it would become mind-numbing.

I stumbled through the house, looking for a flashlight, when I saw that something was still giving off light.

The unplugged computer was on, and the woman in the background was moving. Beckoning me over.

I couldn’t help myself. I sat down across from her with the darkness caving in all around me. And then the woman, like all of the other images I’ve seen before, began to rot away. The whole scene rotted away, and then the screen went black. And without light, without a means of seeing my reflection, I saw her behind me for the briefest of moments, a bloody and rusted knife in hand. The computer came back to life, and my old background had returned.

So I’ve decided to come here. I know you all like to be scared, right? Well, take it from someone who has only very recently known fear: it’s not always worth it, and not everything is fun and games.

The thing is…I haven’t been completely honest with you. There was no video. It was a story. A story quite similar to this one, though with subtle plot differences and perhaps better story telling. I know all of you like stories that might give you a good scare. That’s probably why you started reading mine.

Now that you’ve read this, you’ll share my fate. I know it’s cruel, and perhaps unfair, but it has to be done. I just hope that you can take comfort in knowing that when I’m the woman haunting your computer, I’ll be a bit more gentle. If I can, I’ll use a blade that’s a little less dull. Pictures of those who came before us who are a little less grotesque. Sounds that are a little less alarming.

Don’t worry. I wont ask you to repost this story five times. Nothing will save you. After all, nothing could save me.

The power is still out. And I know, behind me, the woman is waiting for me. I’ll see you very soon.

What is it about being naked that makes someone feel so vulnerable? I mean, really, are you suddenly stronger with clothes? Maybe if you’re the type who goes around wearing steel toed boots and Kevlar, but if you are, something tells me that even in the buff you probably know more than the average Joe about self-defense and would stand a good chance in a fight either way.

I attribute my particular fear of having to fight commando to the classic Psycho. Chalk it up to poor parenting that my earliest childhood Halloweens were not spent dressed as Snoopy out getting mountains of candy, but were instead spent in a darkened room, alone, and with access to cable t.v. because, “The t.v. won’t rot your brain the way candy would rot your teeth, Ashley.” As my mom was so fond of saying every year.

The shower scene always stuck with me, traumatized me you could say, and brought many a day where family fights would erupt over me staying firmly locked in the single shared bathroom until I was fully clothed and ready to face whoever was on the other side of the door. It is a habit, a fear, which saved my life a little over a year ago.

I live in a big city, and with it comes big city crimes. Nightly news reports of robberies, shootings and the like are not uncommon. Still, I liked to think myself well protected. I lived on the second floor of an apartment building, which coincidentally means a pre-installed alarm system came with the package. The front desk was manned at all hours of the day, and my place was at the rear of the building, facing another building directly behind my own. I could see their 24 hour security guard booth from my bedroom window and between us sat a tall dividing wall. You could say that the nightly news didn’t give me much bother.

All those thoughts of security went out the aforementioned bedroom window in the course of a single night.

I normally take my showers in the morning, but this evening I just felt like soaking under the hot water for relaxation more than for hygiene. I went through my pre-shower check. Front door locked, windows locked, sliding door locked, alarm up. I sauntered into the bathroom, and firmly closed and locked the door behind me.

I stood under the warm jet stream, eyes closed and hands upstretched toward the water, soaking in the calm when I heard a rattle. I quickly opened my eyes and ripped back the shower curtain. The door was closed, the handle was still. It wouldn’t have been the first time I imagined the scene.

I took a deep breath and slipped back into the water, trying to let it go and relax my now tense muscles. A few minutes passed. It must have been my mind, and then I heard a thump on the door and the rattle once again. One hand slammed down on the water faucet while the other once again tore back the curtain.

The door was still closed, but I was sure that it wasn’t my imagination anymore. The whir of the bathroom fan seemed deafening. The door handle was motionless, and any sound beyond that was muffled by the fan. My eyes strained watching the knob, my hair and body frozen with fear even as rivulets of water continued to stream off me.

Suddenly the handle stated convulsing and a loud thud rammed against the door. I screamed as I sprang out of the tub and shoved my body against the door. The figure on the other side rammed against the door again, and I felt the impact run through me. I screamed again, a deep chuckle responded.

My body was trembling from the tips of my soaked hair to the points of numbed toes. My back remained firmly pressed against the door, bracing for another attack. None came.

A minute passed, two. It seemed like an eternity when I heard that chuckle again, but it seemed to come from a lower height than before. I looked down and saw the knife reflecting my body against its silver surface. Its edges were smeared with what I knew instantly as blood.

I slammed the light switch off, refusing to let the menace outside get any kicks from seeing how terrified I was inside. The whir of the fan stopped, and the only sound I was left with were the shallow gasps of my own breath. I heard the knife slip back out from the crack beneath the door, a slow deliberate withdraw making me all the more aware of its presence so close to me.

My breath caught in my throat and I could feel my heart nearly bursting from my chest. The voice was low and deep, like his laugh, and deliberate. I didn’t respond, couldn’t even begin to think. I was trapped, and the only way out was through him.

I started screaming at the top of my lungs, the terror and desperation more real than any of the horror flicks I’d ever watched. I hoped my neighbors were home. I hoped that because I sometimes heard their weekend parties, they would now hear my pleas for help.

I screamed until the tears were running down my cheeks, mixing with the shower water and dripping from my chin to the floor below. “Help…” It was barely a whisper, but he heard it.

He didn’t try to ram the door again, and the handle remained motionless throughout the hours that I stood silently crying. I heard him moving through my apartment, heard a scratching on the other side of the door, but he didn’t try to get in again.

I stood like that in the dark; cold, wet and naked until the rays of daylight began to shine from underneath the bathroom door. I didn’t know if he was still there, waiting, and so I just stayed where I was, waiting.

It was eleven in the morning when I heard the shouts at my front door. I couldn’t understand them, but I screamed in return. I heard my front door shatter and the quick thud of many boots rushing into my apartment.

I demanded that the officer push his ID underneath the door before I opened it. It didn’t matter that I was naked; I fell into his arms, breaking down and sobbing all over again while someone else covered me with a blanket.

I returned to my apartment only once since the incident to gather my personal belongings, some of which were missing. I knew I would never feel safe there again.

I was right about it being blood. My captor killed not only the security guard from the building just behind mine, but also the young couple who lived next door to me. My alarm system was bypassed by a simple magnet, and the latch on my sliding door was easy pried open. Both facts have left me with a severe distrust of the token ‘security’ features thrown into apartments in order to close the deal.

These facts also let me know that he could have broken through my flimsy bathroom door or its weak lock any time he wanted to. Perhaps he just preferred playing with me. Or maybe the message he left carved into my bathroom door has yet to come to pass.

It’s there - just at the veil of sleep. That dull sensation of falling or spinning just before you fall to sleep. The next time you go to bed, try to hold yourself there. Just as you drift off, hold onto that feeling. Hold on, and listen. Listen close, for you cannot hold onto that edge of sleep for long. There, in the space before sleep, is a sound: a gentle hum, a distant echo; like a sigh in a brick building.

If you should hold on to that feeling too long, the sound will become more distinct. Murmured voices emerging from the sound.

You have the choice of letting sleep take you, or getting up. Those are the only two safe things to do, for if you hold onto that feeling too long, you will slip into the beyond, where the voices become screams.

Do you ever wonder how scary death is? Think about it; it’s the one thing that we truly know absolutely nothing about. Some people may cite religious beliefs of an afterlife and others might claim they just focus on life, but it’s really something that is totally and utterly foreign to us. And what if the religious people are wrong? What if death really is nonexistence…that it’s simply over once the brain dies? Terrifying, huh? Of course, the reasoning goes that you won’t notice it, since you won’t exist.

But…let’s say a certain someone could expose you to nonexistence. Let’s say this person could actually let you experience the state of not existing and more importantly, let you remember it. He’d probably be able to get you to agree to anything in order to avoid that fate. Tangentially, for certain people near death, their brain activity sometimes ceases completely for about three seconds and then returns, only to shortly die in a more conventional fashion.

As another aside, many hospital orderlies have noticed a man wearing a suit that they have never seen in any catalog or on any person before. Interestingly enough, when you ask them about the suit they will struggle for a moment, then reply that it’s hard to describe, but they are sure they haven’t seen it before. Ask them about the man however, and they will freeze up, spasm violently and reply, “What man?”

A recent study by the National Psychiatric Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, concluded that no activity can account for the phenomenon known as nightmares.

Whereas many dreams come from unconscious desires, most nightmares seem to come from an outside source independent of the individual. In fact, when subjects are asked to recall nightmares they are almost always found in the same memory section as actual physical memories, not the section where normal dreams are replayed.

So, in other words, those aliens and creatures you see at night in your “dreams”?

Should you ever despair of life so much that you want to die, you have the means at hand and yearn to end your life, you have written a suicide note to those you will leave behind and you are prepared to die…at that moment, stop.

Get a pair of scissors. Cut away at the note until you end up with a piece of paper in the shape of a key. Go to a door, any one will do. Push the paper key forward and turn your hand as if unlocking an imaginary lock.

The lock is real. Open the door. There you will find it. The other Earth. The one that awaits to replace this one when it dies. That death is inevitable, but in the meantime the other Earth will belong to you. Once you step through that doorway, you can’t return. To everyone else in the world you left behind, you have gone missing, and they will never find you. This is the other Earth.

On his way home that night, as he walked through town, a man stepped out of an alley in front of him. He tensed to defend himself, but the man just stood there. Looking him over, he realized the man looked like a hippie. Something of a comedy caricature of a hippie, really. Long unwashed hair and beard, sandals…and a sandwich board reading “THE END IS NIGH”. That, he thought, was unusual, even for a hippie.

He stepped around the hippie and kept walking. High as a kite, he thought to himself. The hippie started walking after him, and fell into step beside him.

The hippie leaned against a wall, watching him walk away. The hippie wasn’t all that disappointed; lots of people gave this kind of response. Another skeptic, he thought to himself, fingering the ragged holes through the middles of his hands.

Normally you sleep soundly, but the thunderstorm raging outside is stirring you from your sleep. You begin to doze, then another crash jolts you awake. The cycle lasts most of the night. So you lay there, eyes open and outward, looking at your room stretching out before you in oblong shadows. Your eyes move from nameless object, to object, until you reach your mirror, sitting adjacent to you across the room.

Suddenly a flash of lighting, and the mirror flickers in illumination. For a scant second the mirror revels to you dozens of faces, silhouettes within its frame, mouths open and eyes blackened. They stare out at you, their black pupils fixed upon your face.

Then it is done. Are you sure of what you have seen? Unsettled, you don’t sleep for the rest of the evening. The next morning you remove the mirror from your wall and toss it in the trash. It didn’t matter if the vision you had seen was of truth or falsehood, you wanted to be rid of that mirror. In fact, you scrap every mirror in your house.

Weeks pass and the event of that night falls into passive memory. You are spending the day at a friend’s house and it’s time to use the bathroom. While you are in there the faucet starts to run without you prompting it. Taken aback by this, you do not yet act, trying to reason with your paranoia in your mind. The water starts to steam and a skin of moisture covers the mirror up above. You’re watching intently as words form: “Please return the mirrors. We miss watching you sleep at night.”