A Confession Concerning My Nightly Deaths

I am an old man, and my mind is sound, whatever anyone tells you after reading this. I set this confession down because I have to put it somewhere. These weeks of dread have only sharpened me. If anything I notice more than I used to. Do you imagine that fear alone, some old wives' tale swallowed whole from a nursemaid, could account for the state you find me in? I tell you my senses have never been keener. I hear the house settle at midnight the way another man hears a shout across a field. I hear my own blood in my ears, a steady drumming, and lately I have come to believe some other rhythm answers it, faint and patient, from inside the walls of my own room.

It began, this affliction, with a single dream. Pale faces crowded above my bed, mouths wide in a scream I never once heard, though I felt it in my teeth, in the roots of my hair, the way a man feels a bell too large for his ears to hold. I woke that first night gasping, and laughed at myself in the candlelight, for what sensible creature permits an old wives' tale to govern his nerves? The tale runs thus, that the soul which perishes within a dream perishes also in the flesh that dreams it. A child's terror, I told myself, dressed in the robes of philosophy. I dined well. I slept again.

The dream came back. Each time it returned it carried a fraction more detail than before, and I started to wonder whether something behind it meant this cruelty as a design rather than an accident. Night after night the pale company drew closer, and somewhere among their faces I would find one I had buried years before, an uncle, a companion of my youth, a woman I loved and lowered into the ground with my own trembling hands. Their mouths never ceased that soundless cry. I began to think they were trying to warn me of a thing, and I began to think they had learned it too late themselves.

I confess I grew ashamed of my own dread, and told my physician little of it, for I dislike being regarded as one whose mind has softened with age. I let him believe indigestion the cause of my restlessness. I accepted his tinctures with a grateful show and poured them, more evenings than I care to admit, into the cold hearth rather than down my throat. Some part of me had begun to suspect, God help me, that whatever drug dulled my dreaming might dull the same faculty that let me wake from it.

Here is the part I hesitate to set down. I grew, in time, almost eager for the dream. Call this madness if you like. A terror rehearsed enough times starts to feel, in some perverse way, like an old acquaintance you dread visiting yet visit anyway. Each morning I woke a little pleased with myself for having escaped again whatever reached for me in the dark behind my eyes. That pleasure built on itself, morning after morning, until I hardly recognized it as pride anymore. Toward the close I found myself closing my eyes each evening almost on purpose, calling the nerve it took defiance, though it was closer to something else I still find hard to name for you plainly.

The skeletal visitant appeared among the pale company on what I now reckon the twentieth night of this ordeal, farther back than the rest, its face bare bone, lit somehow from behind the sockets of its eyes like a candle held inside a skull. Its arm was bare bone too, and it reached across the room toward the bed where I lay sleeping inside the dream. Somehow I knew, the way you know things in dreams before anyone tells you them, that the hand was closer than it had been the night before. It gained a little ground each time, the way water gains on a man standing too long in the tide.

I ought to have spoken then, told my physician everything, let him bleed me or purge me or do whatever his science thought might help. Pride held me back. There was something else too, some cold curiosity I still find hard to admit to, a wish to see how the experiment my own sleeping mind seemed to be running on me would come out. I wanted, God forgive the vanity in it, to know whether the old story was true. I wanted to be the one skeptic in an age of skeptics who tested the legend and lived to write down the answer.

On the final night the pale company stopped their silent screaming all at once, as though a signal only they could hear had claimed the hour. The skeletal visitant closed, at last, the distance it had spent so many weeks laying out, and its fingers, cold as well water pulled up in the depth of winter, closed around my throat inside the dream. I tried to wake. I pushed everything I had toward the surface, toward the candle on my table, toward the safety of my own darkened room. Nothing answered. The pushing accomplished nothing at all, and that frightened me worse than anything the pale company had shown me yet.

The candle in the room beyond my dreaming went out on its own, my manservant swore afterward, right around the moment he noticed, through the door, that my breathing had changed. He found me sitting upright, my face settled into something silent, something he never quite managed to put into words when he tried to tell the physician about it later. My heart had stopped, and its stopping defied every explanation the physician tried to offer. My eyes were still open, fixed on the dark, as if I was watching something come toward me across a distance that kept getting smaller.

If you would like to enter RMS's 𝖀𝖓𝖔𝖋𝖋𝖎𝖈𝖎𝖆𝖑 𝖂𝖗𝖎𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕮𝖍𝖆𝖑𝖑𝖊𝖓𝖌𝖊, click below.