I'm sorry I haven't updated this for so long. To be quite honest, it's because for the most part, nothing had happened since.
To start with, if you read my first story, you may remember that after I posted, my partner Dave was taking a couple of days off from work. What I didn't know was that he was surprising us with a short holiday. So nothing happened for a while, mainly due to us not being at home. It was so nice to relax. The thought that whatever had begun to happen in our home was attached to us rather than the property played on my mind for the first few days, but after 3 days of non-event I forgot about it. I slept. My kids slept in their own beds. We played around, we chilled, we were normal again. I wasn't on edge all the time. And once we got back, again for a couple of days nothing happened. I started to believe maybe I had imagined it all. Stress maybe. Or as I make a point of spending my Octobers with horror sites, scary movies and anything vaguely spooky, I thought maybe hours in front of nosleep and Netflix had played with me.
But it has started again.
My timeline is a little squiffy; I'm not sleeping well and my days are starting to blur, so I will do my best.
A couple of nights ago, Dave had gone out to the pub with his friends. The baby was in bed, my 9 year old was playing Minecraft in my bedroom, and I was monging out on the sofa watching Paranormal Witness. Honestly, the recent events were the last thing on my mind. I was back in my comfort zone.
The first slightly weird thing that happened was all my consoles came on at once. We're a gaming family, and under my tv I have a PS3, a PS4, an Xbox 360, an Xbox One, a Wii and a Dreamcast. Suddenly they all beeped and whirred into life. This would be explainable by a surge or fluke if it weren't for the fact that the Dreamcast, PS3 and Xbox One weren’t even hooked up. Nope. All totally disconnected. I can't deny a little shiver took over me, but I decided to just brush it off as an anomaly of electronics. Denial, essentially.
I got up and turned them all off, shut my console cabinet, and sat back down and tried to shove it to the back of my mind. Shortly after I was folding washing in my kitchen. All is silent. Even Charlie has turned off Minecraft and gone to bed, to dream of Endermen and Redstone.
A box of cereal FLEW off my refrigerator and exploded against the wall just left of me. My heart was leaping out of my chest. I just could not explain it. All windows were shut, not the tiniest breeze ruffled the air. Many other things sit on my fridge; cereal boxes, a jar of pasta, bottles of spirits. The cereal box that had moved had sat between them all. I bolted from the kitchen. Dave came home shortly after. I tried my best to act normal, and I didn’t tell him what happened. I think he’s sick of hearing about the events, or he thinks I’m going crazy. I just told him I knocked the cereal over and would clean it in the morning.
I barely slept.
Since then, there has been this intermittent smell. It is horrendous. I am anosmic (I have a severely limited sense of smell) yet it makes my eyes water. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like burning plastic in a tramp’s shoe. It comes and goes, in each room of the house. Opening windows or lighting candles make no difference. Sometimes it is so strong I have to go work in another room. And sometimes it is just a clinging hint. At first Dave thought it might be drains, but we’ve had them looked at and they’re innocent. Then I thought maybe something had got in and died, but I’ve pulled the house apart. Besides, if that were the case, the smell would be strongest in one room, but as I say the smell travels and the strength wanes.
And finally, the reason I feel the need to update this, the reason I need SOMEWHERE to express all this in a place that won’t immediately call me nuts, is my children. My lovely children.
Last night I put the baby to bed. There was no smell in their room so I guess I wasn’t worried. It’s funny when things like his happen; your mind has an amazing ability to pretend nothing is happening. I’m a little more sympathetic to victims in horror films now I know the true feeling of dealing with this stuff.
I placed Arya in her cot, and headed to the other side of the room to put the night light on. But I had barely turned my back when something hit me on the shoulder. On the floor behind me was Arya’s bear, Cora. And Arya was looking up and to her left and giggling, as though someone next to her had thrown it and she had got a kick from it. Arya cannot throw things that far and hard. I was a good 8 feet from the bed. At most she can get an inch or so in distance, but definitely not the up thrust required to make that bear hit me on the shoulder whilst being thrown from her position, which is roughly at my knee height.
I just didn’t know what to do. I just stood there frozen for a while. Arya acted like nothing happened, as a baby will. My senses were so heightened. I swear, I could have heard a bug scuttle, but all was still. I could hear Arya rustling as she settled in her cot, and my son’s papers rustling as he did some work in the living room. Nothing else. I couldn’t tell if it was my own tension and adrenaline, or something else, but the air felt electric, like before a storm. Metallic and charged. I picked Arya up and let her sleep in my bed. I usually wouldn’t as it’s not as safe but I created a total fort of pillows and blankets. Regardless, she was fine. It’s what happened to my son that has really rankled me. This…thing, whatever is happening, has not gone near my son or partner yet. In fact, part of me was beginning to suspect it may be female-focused. But that changed last night.
My son was asleep. Charlie has sleepwalked all his life. It’s always been mild, occasional and only once has it been nearly harmful (he nearly walked down a flight of stairs when he was 3). It’s never been scary, and he has never spoken during it. He’ll generally spend the episode finding me, then standing in front of me rubbing his arms and making these funny little snuffly noises until I gently steer him back to bed. He never remembers it. It’s actually kind of cute once you’re used to it, if occasionally a little jarring.
Last night, my partner and I were in bed (we had put Arya in a makeshift bed on the floor. I told Dave she was a little sick and wanted me near). Dave and Arya were asleep, I was laying there zoning out to The Office, when Charlie walked in. He hasn’t sleepwalked for a long while, but I could tell from his face and the snuffly noises that he wasn’t with it, so I got out of bed, tiptoed past Dave and Arya and gently began taking Charlie down the hallway back to his room. I had both my hands on his upper arms, when suddenly he stiffened, threw his head back, and then crumpled to the floor. He just lay there in a foetal position. He seemed perfectly well otherwise. My first thought was the recent events, but then I tried to be less sensationalist; Charlie is 9. He’s not far off of hormones and attitude problems. He’s also had a lot happen to him in the last couple of years so I just thought maybe his sleepwalking was evolving due to stress or age. I picked him up and carried him to bed. He’s such a skinny, long little thing; he’s not much heavier than his sister. He’s healthy and robust and eats like an elephant but built like a streetlamp. He’s all arms and legs and a mop of blonde curls he refuses to have cut for wanting to look like Pewdiepie.
As I crossed into their room, his body tightened in my arms, and his long arms snapped to my neck, grasping me like the babe in arms he always will be to me. And he began murmuring into my neck, his tone frightened, low and desperate. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I lowered my ear to his mouth to hear better, and what I heard chilled me to the bone. He was repeating the same thing over and over, his breathe hot in my ear. “She watches from the ceiling. She watches from the ceiling. She watches from the ceiling.” I could hear all the blood rushing in my ears as I grasped what he said. I took him back out into the hallway, and whispered to him “who?” Still muttering, still asleep, he said “She’s covered in blood. She’s covered in blood. She’s covered in blood.” He was cold and shivering now. I was frozen, not in temperature but in myself. The horror that washed over me upon hearing my poor boy say these things is indescribable.
Suddenly, he woke up, confused. He blinked at me and rubbed his head, asked me why he was in the hallway in my arms. I struggled to find an answer that wouldn’t terrify him, but he didn’t wait to hear. He went into his room, got under his covers, and went back to sleep.
And that’s it. I asked him about it in the morning, but he didn’t remember it.
Again, I haven’t told Dave. I wouldn’t even know where to start at this point. So I write it here. I don’t write it well, I don’t ‘build tension’ or use any kind of writing skill, because I’m not a writer, so I’m sorry if this is not as exciting or scary as other entries. But I’m not trying to scare. I’ve had enough of scared, I’ve had enough of not sleeping. I’m just a mother who has this THING happening to her, who happens to grace these pages in my spare time, and thought I could share what’s happening with people who might at least understand my fear.
Submitted October 20, 2014 at 11:30PM by Zombeedee http://ift.tt/1vWRljN nosleep
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