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You are just getting ready to head to sleep and you're all tucked in when something catches your eye. It's a strange shape, or light, in your room. It's only there for a second, but dread immediately floods through you. It was just a shadow, right? Maybe you pulled too many all nighters? Forgot you put up that new poster and thought it was something else?

...Or was it something else?

Either way, whatever you thought you saw was only there for that fleeting moment. What did you see? How do you react?

...Are you going to be able to sleep tonight?




He'd kind of come to hate that feeling of being right on the cusp of sleep. Where you're not either awake or asleep, and not sure if you'll dream, or simply, blink and it will be later.

He'd hated it since he'd woken up in the hospital, still not sure he wouldn't wake up there again. Or somehow otherwise shatter the fragile certainty that he had actually woken up at all, which was an unpleasant, eerie doubt that kind of lingered in the back of his mind, undisclosed.

He hated it now, even though he could hear sleepy Bodi rustling around in her cage.

Then something... he wasn't sure...

It was a shadow, like there was someone standing at the foot of his bed, and with Bodi asleep, there was nothing to confirm if he was actually seeing it. Were she awake, she'd have reacted immediately, but no, nothing. Just the shadow, and her quiet feather rustles and sleepy noises.

He froze, trying to make it out through mostly closed eyelids, but it was difficult to focus without opening his eyes enough to reveal he was now awake. Very awake, with adrenaline crackling through him like lightning.

He lost track of it, vision blurred by his own eyelashes. s**t! Where are they??

His heart was pounding like a hammer, and it was hard to keep his breathing sounding calm. He didn't hear anything. Couldn't see them anymore.

Did that mean anything?

Where are they???

He wasn't crazy, he'd seen something. He knew it. It didn't stop his brain from remembering that Coma victims sometimes lost the ability to differentiate dream from reality. He argued that he'd know already. It would have manifested before now.

They had to know he was awake, if they were there. He was almost hyperventilating. He couldn't stop seeing someone reaching for his chest, to rip out important parts of him, but there was no more shadow. He sat up in a burst of movement, reaching for the nearest weapon. It turned out to be a text book but he was almost surprised when it didn't turn out to be a shepherds crook.

"I know you're there..." He bluffed, to the darkness, but nothing except Bodi answered, that with a sleepy, confused chirpy noise. Nothing else. No shadows.

He climbed out of bed anyway, carefully toeing around the room, checking under the bed, and in the closet, and anyplace else he thought something might fit. Even the places where it was unreasonable something would fit, like the heat registers.

There had been too much strange lately.

He took another few shivery breaths, still clutching his improvised weapon, and tugged the quilt off the bed.

No sense waking up Bodi, but he'd go downstairs, watch something quietly in the living room. Maybe put in a video game. Killing a few dragons or the like might improve his mood.

He even hoped, for one irrational moment, that it was/wasn't Mary. Mary of the red hair and the bright smile. Mary who'd been dead for years. Mary who deserved sunshine.

He didn't know anymore.

God. He just didn't know.