Sam woke with a start, his heart fluttering in his chest and his brow moist with sweat.

As he looked around, he could see a pair of eyes peering back at him, drawing closer. He wanted to cry out, to yell and shout and lash out at the darkness that surrounded him, but he was stopped in his tracks as he felt himself being enveloped.

“Shhh. It’s OK…”, whispered the pair of eyes, and the person attached to them. He felt a hand slip into his own, and suddenly the darkness around him seemed to recede, his body beginning to loosen.

“You just had another bad dream…”

Sam sighed in frustration as he settled backwards, his heart still racing. The body pressed against him soon returned to slumber, the sound of garbled breathing filling the room once again, but he lay awake well into the night. He wondered to himself if these dreams would ever end, or if they’d linger on the edges of his mind forevermore, coming and going as they pleased. He never could remember them - they always seemed to slip away before they could coalesce fully in his mind, and that much he was grateful for. He knew deep down though, what they represented.

Those days seemed like an eternity ago, but no matter how many years passed between then and now, through all the sorrow and joy and contentedness that life had given him, he could never escape the long shadow they cast.

Those days of muffled footsteps and darkened rooms, of vulnerability and a little boy’s fears so great that they seemed to take on a life of their own, shifting and flourishing and growing alongside him - fears borne not of ghosts in sheets or other fancies of imagination, but of something much more sinister and something much, much closer to home.