Warning: This story contains non-consensual sex and elements of horror.
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I first saw it when I was twelve.
It was watching me from the doorway, in the inch of space my parents had left open to dote lovingly upon me as they passed. A terrible, unnatural stiffness swept down my body. Every muscle went suddenly still, refusing to respond, like the rigor of death. In the dark, through the corner of my small eye, I saw the door inching its way silently open. The horror I felt to see it move, I cannot accurately describe. I was only a child.
It was a black shape that emerged from the darkness. It did not hurry. The figure neared the edge of my bed. It was watching me. My eyes were frozen helplessly on the ceiling. I couldn't quite see it, but I felt it looming closer. If it could breathe, its breath would have stirred the small hairs of my face.
The creature stayed there, its head just out of my sight. Hours passed as it watched, I am sure of it. Yet, after a time, I fell asleep. And when I awoke, it was gone.
It returned again three years later. As before, the demon spied on me from the doorway. This time, it did not approach. The terrible paralysis was still set into my bones. I was helpless but to lie there and wait to see if it would kill me then.
When it left, I admit, I was unhappy to be left alive. To wait for the next encounter felt the greater punishment. I was certain by now that my fate was already sealed.
Years passed, and I finally found a name for it. It was not so uncommon after all. Sleep paralysis, they called it. A state when the body is trapped between dreams and reality. Between hallucination and nightmare.
For the first time in years, I slept with a lightened heart. The fear was real, but the monster was not. It could be faced. Life could go on.
With the first chance I had, I left my childhood home for a school in the city. I was eighteen by then. The other schoolchildren lamented our overcrowded rooms and the busy hallways of our dormitories. They complained that they couldn't sleep for all that noise, the commotion. In truth, they missed being home.
For me, though, I slept like the dead. I made up for a lifetime of nights spent with one eye open. For the first time, the bud of contentment blooming inside of my heart. I was eager to see what life now held before me.
Days passed before it found me again.