Sneak Preview :: Chapter Eight (Snippet 14)
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Sneak Preview :: Chapter Eight (Snippet 14)
Tossing to her left, Sanya suddenly became aware that she was in fact not asleep. The first sign of that was a sound. It was a creak! A very inaudible one, but there nevertheless. Confusion reigned as Sanya’s mind struggled in the no-man’s land between the powerful but stark state of conscious wakefulness and the peaceful yet impotent state of deep sleep. Was the creak real? Or was she imagining things? Was it her hyperactive subconscious conjuring up things by mish-mashing unconnected happenings in real life and painting a mental picture of things to come?
Sanya thought she ordered her eyes to open, but funnily, her eyes disobeyed her. They were controlled by some unknown force overriding her brain which was usually the master of bodily functions. Try as she might, she could not get her eyelids to part even a bit. Instead the very effort of ordering them to open seemed to tire them out, closing them even harder. Dismissing the sound as the random mischief of a tired mind, Sanya willed herself to plunge deeper into the blissful world of slumber.
A few minutes later, there was another sign that she was not actually asleep. This time the sign felt more real. It was a movement! The sliver of light that fell across Sanya’s face was blocked, if only for a fraction of a second. It was tantalizingly brief, but real. Somebody was in the room! This time Sanya was sure she was awake and tried to open her eyes by a slit. To her horror, again her eyes remained tight shut and refused to comply. All she could ‘see’ was the inky blackness of the internal wall of her own eyelids. Her heart raced as she knew there was another presence in the room.
Sanya did not know when her eyes opened. Suddenly she was confronted by dark nothingness all around her. Realizing she was looking at the room where they were sleeping, she tried to avoid all movement and squinted to see if she could make out anything in the dark. At first, her eyes could not focus – the whole room appeared like a dark void with no sense of direction or dimension. As her retinal cells slowly adjusted to the utter absence of light, she looked around without turning her head. Almost instantly, she froze. A shape was moving in the darkness!
It looked like a dark black oval against a lighter shade of black all around it. Sanya’s heart threatened to explode from her mouth. She tried to get up, but astonishingly, now it was her body’s turn to disobey. She was quite sure she had willed her upper body to rise while trying to use her left elbow to prop herself up. Neither had moved. Was her mind playing tricks on her? The ghostly oval shape shifted to its left and now appeared to be at the foot of the bed.
Sanya wanted to scream but her mouth went dry as the terrifying apparition seemed to be staring at her, almost willing her into silence. The dark nothingness around her dissolved as she suddenly realized that her eyes were no longer open. She was once again looking at the inky blackness of her eyelids. The terrifying and unreal paralysis was complete. Now she could neither move nor see nor shout for help. All she could do was just torment herself with the thought that someone or something was just next to her bed, and it didn’t look like it was from this world.
Coming soon: the next Sneak Preview.
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