Annie lay in bed, reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and listening to some Nirvana. She didn't like bright lights, and as it was eleven o'clock at night, she only had the bedside table lamp on to read by. The plot thickened seemingly with every page, and even though she became more and more tired, she couldn't bring herself to put the book down. Her eyelids got heavier, and heavier, but the story was so good, she forced her self to push forward through the exhaustion and keep turning pages.
She didn't know what time she had finally drifted off. But the book was still in her hands, the lamp was still on, and the radio still playing, when she awoke again. Her husband was already lying in bed next to her. She hadn't woken up, even though he had to climb over her to get to his side of the bed. Their bedroom was so small, one side of the bed had to be pushed up against a wall if they were to have any floor space whatsoever. She was used to him climbing over her in the middle of the night, and he had gotten pretty good about not waking her up when he did so. She noticed that he had already fallen asleep, jaw slack and snoring slightly, sprawled on what was more than his share of their bed.
She shook her head, and was about to sit up to close her book, turn the radio off and put out the light, when she saw her husband coming to climb over her to get into bed. She froze, terribly confused. He was already in bed, asleep, right next to her. She'd seen him. How could he be on the other side of her, climbing into bed over her again? She cringed, shrinking away from the impostor. She thought if he touched her, she might scream. Or she might be tainted with the alienness of this impostor. The impostor stayed quite close, climbing over her body rather than just her feet, and her eyes darted back and forth from her husband beside her to her impostor husband climbing over her, and she had a horrifying premonition of what might happen should they meet.
Perhaps it would be like in time travel stories when one kills the other one, or maybe it would turn out that the impostor was really a ghost or a spirit of some kind who would possess him and turn him into a completely different person. Or perhaps, somehow, his soul had somehow been torn away from his body and was trying to reincorporate itself now.
It slithered, she thought, as it climbed over her. And she felt like shrinking into the bed itself if she could have, to distance herself from this thing that so resembled her husband, but wasn't.
It gave her a grin as it finally made it to the other side of the bed--a hollow, joyless grin that seemed to be the grin of something dead, before slipping into? behind? disappearing altogether? the body of her sleeping husband. She gasped, and her breath caught in her chest, like an air bubble that refused to burst or escape. She was shaking, trembling fiercely, and now sobbing, so much that he finally woke up.
'Annie? Jesus, what's wrong? You look like you've seen a ghost.'
Her shocked frozen breath now released, and destabilized into hyperventilation.
'I thought I had,' she panted.
Creepy enough for you? Or just silly? Talk amongst yourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment