PARASOMNIA

!Book Excerpt!

“Wwwake up with daybreak news, KLPX at channel 8!” The small TV blared, bathing the otherwise dark room with shifting light. It was dawn, and she was awake again. “Theirs a traffic jam on the north side of…”

Naomi allowed the words to blur into the constant static sound of her tired brain. When was the last time I had a full night’s sleep? She questioned herself, absently chewing on a piece of her half-frozen waffle. At this rate I’m going to sleep through class again. Naomi blinked, her blurry vision resting on a picture displayed on the screen; a picture that made her exhausted body suddenly stiffen in her chair.

“A young woman was reported dead in her home late last night,” The anchorman announced, the picture depicting the woman now accompanied with the subtitle ‘picture courtesy of the police’. “Authorities have been forced to investigate the case as a suicide until further evidence is found; being that the room the victim was found in was locked from the inside, the medical coroner concluded the wounds to be self-inflicted…”

She dropped her fork; Naomi’s head suddenly feeling heavy as her thoughts hummed unbearably loud. “It can’t be…” she said aloud, “It has to be a coincidence, right? The dream…” she trailed off, concentrating hard in order to produce the bits and pieces of her latest nightmare.

It was Tuesday night, wasn’t it? She thinks hazily, her memory isn’t so good now that she’s stopped sleeping. Days often eclipsed each other. Yes, Tuesday, because we had open discussion in class that day. She works her brain near to its brink as she closes her eyes, trying to drag back the dream in its entirety.

It was cold, as most of her nightmares were, and the further she’d walked towards the door the more the eerie chill seeped into her bones. There was an irrational sense of fear in the air, making her heartbeat thunder in her ears and her lungs pound in her chest with each rapid, panicked breath. She couldn’t remember why she was so afraid, or when the fear had first latched it‘s grip on her brain, but something in her warned that opening the door wouldn’t be a good idea. She hadn’t wanted to do it, but her shaking hand seemed to move of it’s own accord when it reached out to turn the knob.

She flicked on the light switch in the bathroom instinctively; finding the combination of the baby-blue walls and white tile to be cheerful if not in dire need of re-modeling from its 50-something flare. The vanity light seemed to be dated as well, and the bulb flickered for a few minutes in the darkness before finally granting her a full view of the sight.

The girl. The dead girl from the news was in the tub, one hand over the lip of the fiberglass structure and dripping blood onto the fuzzy blue bathmat. Her face was ashy although her skin tone was dark, the dead girl’s eyes glassy and vacant as they stared into space. She had slit her wrists, now lying naked in a cloudy tub of blood with her head lolled to one side. Some sort of morbid curiosity, stronger than the urgent panic overtaking her body, drew Naomi towards the lifeless husk. Aside from the news report, the dead girl’s profile was familiar, and left Naomi with a feeling of déjà vu even though she couldn’t place the dead face to a name. Maybe they had a class together once?

The hair on the back of Naomi’s neck stood up as she paused, crouching over the dead girl, and her skin crawled with the sudden feeling of an unseen presence behind her. Naomi didn’t need to turn in order to know who it was, as the fear she’d felt building inside of her was suddenly explainable. It was him, of course it was him. He tortured her dreams, appearing often in her nightmares but never saying a word; he did nothing but stare. Bleeding Grin Boy, as he had no name, lived in the shadows that perpetually masked most of his appearance. The only identifiable feature about him was his large, malicious, grin that leaked blood through his teeth like some sort of cursed fountain; the dark red running perpetually down his chin every time he appeared.

And now, Naomi could feel his nightmarish stare on her even without the sight of his eyes themselves. It was like a cold corpse’s hand twisting the nerves at the back of her skull; making her feel terrified and anxious all at once.

“What do you want?” Naomi choked, her voice shaking as she spoke. “Leave me alone” she finished, her voice lacking any sort of threatening conviction. Naomi turned around to face the terror, only to find herself once again in the kitchen; standing alone in the darkness with her chair abandoned on it’s side during her haste to stand. She took a few rattling breaths, staring into the shadows of the room that the glow of the TV kept hidden. Slowly, she calmed herself down. Slowly, she ran a hand through her scraggily hair. Slowly, she kneeled to right her chair.

I’m going fucking crazy, she thought as she sighed at herself. It’s bad enough that I get these nightmares every time I close my eyes; do I really have to re-live them too? And now this connection with the dead girl… Nothing like this has happened before. Am I insane? Are insane people aware of their insanity? Does that fact make me sane?—That I’m self-aware? Naomi sat her breakfast dishes in the sink, staring at her half-eaten waffle as if it could tell her weather or not she should commit herself then-and-there.

She glanced at the clock, hefting another sigh into the air, “Time to get ready” she said to herself, walking out of the kitchen and through the living room towards the house’s communal bathroom.

[Excerpt from the ebook Parasomnia by Elisa Mask, Chapter One: She’s Dead]

(Purchase the entire Parasomnia short story as an ebook HERE for only $3.00 USD)