I know what’s about to happen before if occurs. I had been having an uneasy sleep all night, but now, after the 3rd time waking up in the middle of the night, it happened.

A warm feeling washes over my body, slowly spreading up my legs and through my torso. My arms, which had been laying at my sides as I tried to fall back asleep, grow heavy. I try to move my hands, to reach out for the lamp on my nightstand and fill the room with light before she can morph from the shadows. But I can’t. It’s as though I have lost all motor control and I’m suddenly a helpless, stiff board of wood.

I try to speak, try to part my lips and call for someone- anyone- to turn on the lights and stop my mind from drawing figures from the shadows, but even my own mouth betrays me.

The pressure that weighs my body down builds, and my visions starts to blur and distort the longer I lied there in that in that strand in-between place.

I’ve tried explain it to people a million times before, that strange transition from laying their paralyzed, to laying their paralyzed in a world that isn’t entirely real. But no matter how many times I try to explain it, it’s like the limitation of my vernacular prevents me from doing so. Or perhaps it’s because what I say is so bizarre and frightful, that they simply do not understand the language I speak.

But the transition from on the real world to that place is always the same. One minute I’m laying on my back unable to move or call for help, and the next, the world around me tips ever so slightly. The change at first is minor, making the whole room look the same but… different. As though the scene before me is a picture left slightly skewed on the wall; the change is uncanny and discomforting, but the scene is too familiar to tell if anything’s really changed.

I can slighglj make out the chair at the foot of my bed, piled high with this mornings laundry. But the shadows around it pull and gather, coalescing as one and suddenly, I’m not too sure what I am even looking at. Is it a ghoulish creature perched on the chair and watching me sleep? Or is it simply a pile of clean clothes? In this strange new state, I am unable to tell. I am unable to trust my mind to give me answers to the riddles my eyes sell me.

While these changes- the figures hovering over my bed, the faces in the books on the shelves- are unsettling, the real fear inducing addition has yet to show herself.

The longer I lay here unmoving, looking at the strange changes in the room around me, the more confident I become that she won’t appear. I begin to think that maybe this time she’ll spare me the visit and leave me be.

But it is naive to think this was and I know better. She’s always liked to play with her prey a little before she seized her opportunity to strike.

When I first see her standing at the foot of my bed, I think I have just caught my reflection in the closet mirror. She likes to do that sometimes, to wear my face so similarly to how I do that I start to believe that maybe she’s a part of me. But then she smiles that sinister grin and something cracks in the illusion. While she still resembles me, startling enough that I doubt my own family could tell the difference, her face is all wrong. She wears it more like a mask that barely hides the rippling emotions and expressions she wears beneath the skin. She’s not real and she’s not human, she’s something entirely different.

She steps closer my mind screams at my body to run, but of course, I am unable to do so.

I watch as she crouches down beside my bed and leans her forearms on the pillow beside me that’s slipped out from under my neck. She eyes me with a strange curiosity, tilting her head to look at me.

She leans in closer and fixes her dark, lifeless eyes on mine. Slowly and deliberately, she runs a finger along my cheek and all I can do is lie there and let her do it.

Out of all the horrible things I see when I am stuck in this in between, she is by far the worse. While all the other things are illusions, merely manifestations of my own subconscious fears, she is something entirely different. She is not my own creation, her presence is a product of something else outside of my own mind. I know this, know that she isn’t mine, because she is the only creature in this state that can touch my flesh and leave her mark.

I know that in the morning when I check my cheek in the mirror, my face will be marred with a deep scratch along my skin where her nail had been.