Sleepwalker

Stage 1

"The repose of sleep refreshes only the body.  It rarely sets the soul at rest.

The repose of the night does not belong to us.  It is not the possession of our being.

Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms.  In the morning we must sweep out the shadows."

-Gaston Bachelard

The little girl desperately wishes to fall asleep.

It is an almost nightly chore, the struggle to find just a few more precious minutes of sleep before she is called upon to go back out into the world to suffer its slings and arrows.  It's so much easier to bear when she's gotten a proper eight hours, but those days are few and far between.  Most night, like this one, continue in frustrated silence as she stares helplessly at the ceiling and hopes for a reprieve.

She has little understanding of this affliction.  Mommy and daddy have sent her to doctors and clinics, spending as much and sometimes more than they can afford to find a reason if not a cure behind the insomnia, but to little avail.  It is simply her unnatural condition, to remain awake when by all rights she should be asleep, dreaming dreams of far away lands of magic and mystery.

The little girl sighs into the darkness and turns to fluff her pillow.  The ritual has just as much affect as it usually does, that is to say none at all.  She looks around her room, picking out her toys and furniture in the dim light of the moon streaming through her window.

She has no night light.  She doesn't need one.  Unlike other children her age, she knows quite well that there aren't any monsters in her room.  Nothing lurking under the bed.  Nothing skulking in the closet.  She knows because she's checked hundreds if not thousands of times.  Sometimes she still does so just so she can have something to do during her sleepless nights.

Setting her stuffed cat Mr. Lumpkins aside, she swings her legs over the side of the bed and prepares to turn on the light and do some exercises.  Exercising was one of the methods the doctors tried to get her to sleep, by wearing her out.  It worked only rarely, but still often enough that she figures it might be worth a shot.

The light does not turn on.  She turns the switch on the lamp cord again, but there is still no response from the bulb, not even a brief flicker of the filament within.  She shrugs off the anomaly as just a busted light and makes her way unerringly across the room to hit the wall switch to turn on the overhead light.

It remains stubbornly dark as well, which causes the child no small measure of annoyance.  Daddy payed the bill for the electricity.  She knows because she helped him affix the stamp to the envelope herself.  She looks back at her bed to see the soft red glow of her alarm clock sitting on the nightstand just to be sure, then frowns deeply.

The little girl asks herself, what are the chances that both lights blow out at the same time?  She isn't sure, especially since math - let alone probabilities study - wasn't exactly her best subject in school.  But it still seems pretty unlikely.

The small hairs on the back of her neck suddenly prickle, and it takes her a few moments to realize that she's starting to feel a little creeped out.  The idea of monsters in her room suddenly seems less fanciful than before, and she almost imagines that she could be convinced a random assortment of toys sitting in the corner is really the shadow of a nasty kid-eating goblin.

But she keeps her wits about her.  She ventures back across her room carefully, intent on procuring the flashlight that sits between the mattress and box springs of her bed.  It is usually used for reading books under the covers late at night, but now she feels that it is necessary for a higher purpose, that being bedroom security.