There is a limbo, a place snug between the light and dark. It's presence casts a shadow, it has its own weight like bricks and steel. It could even be some creature. One that breathes like the sound of trees on windows, a scratch that alerts you that it is immediately behind you. It could even crawl to your bed, your safety being your turned back to said window. It could even indent the shitty mattress with its knees. At this point, what does it look like? Do you expect a monster, a bony structure supported by yellowing skin drawn taut over tall ribs, hip bones protruding like shelves? Is it even a biped? Is it only beasts that crawl with hands to earth, or is there evil in two legs?
What are you afraid of?
At this point it doesn't matter anymore. You've wasted so much time sweating and moaning that whatever it is is already sitting on your chest. If your body had any blood left in the limbs to move, it has certainly frozen now. Don't you get it?
You've wasted your time.
Panic. It starts a flame in your chest, I'm sure the extra weight doesn't help, but nevertheless you're drowning. Can you even open your mouth? Struggling and struggling and suddenly it stops. The breathing stops. Yours stops. Was that a closet door that just closed?
The weight is still there.
Your paralysis is still there.
A sound like feet dragging across carpet seems to originate from the now closed door. Your mouth has never been dryer. The mattress yields again to something else unexplained. But it hovers and sways in its spot, shifting weight left to right, left to right, left to rig
You couldn't have seen it coming, your turned back as your only safety, a barrier you believed to separate you from the rest of the world. Eyes shut tight, mouth drawn back to gum to teeth, tongue incredibly dry and no sound produces.
It begins at the nape of your neck and, with something akin to scales and talons, drags down the ridges of your spine. You have never wanted to move so badly in your life.
You suddenly realize you never put the blanket over your feet when you went to bed. Open, naked to the dark. And something worse happens.
Another thing akin to goosebumps on an arm that has been burned with oil licks across the sole of your foot, a stiffer thing scratches your toes. Soon they feel as if they are in a cave, the pounding of your heart echoing in the nail beds. Damp, dark, that limbo hangs ever so closely to your face and hums, the song of a dirge,
Hold my hand
Oh baby
It's a long way down to the bottom of the river
Warm breath hitting your face, your voice finally comes and you scream ferociously. You scream with your tongue like a sock in your mouth. You scream until two hands are on your shoulders and there is light in the room.
It's 5:37 in the morning, your mother tells you. What are you doing yelling at 5:37 in the morning?
The sun is barely cresting the horizon you notice as you gaze over to the window. The window you woke to face. You cough like there has been a release of your lungs. Water pours from your mouth salivating like a dog and you go to drink more on the bedside stand. You cough again.
A nightmare?
But as you turn to the other side once you've caught your breath, you notice the closed door of your closet.
You never close your closet door.
You notice a light in there and a shadow in the space between the carpet and the floor, where there are tracks imprinted.
The light immediately switches off.
Don't you lift him,
let him drown alive.
(The good lord speaks like a rolling thunder)
Let that fever make the waters rise.
