There’s a woman in my house who tells me how she died.
“They came from the forest,” she says. “In swarms of shadows and swathes of darkness. They took my child, and then they took me.”
I can’t help but listen. She whispers in the dead of night when sleep paralysis takes hold. I can feel her breath on my neck as she spins the same story each time. Sometimes they are living shadows; sometimes they are simply people from another town. But the outcome is always the same.
They take her child, and then they take her.
The only sound that shakes me out of my stupor and scares her away is the crying of my baby from the other room.
On the twenty-seventh night of her coming (I keep notes on my phone of every visit, every warning) there is something different.
“They’re here.”
I feel an ice-cold touch at the base of my spine and I sit bolt upright. I feel like she lets me, like she has awoken me.
And there she is. Sitting on the edge of my bed, like my mother used to do when I had a bad dream. But she is not my mother. She is barely anything at all any more.
She is but a shadow herself, an echo of a person, an outline of someone who once was but is no longer.
Her eyes are great pits of nothingness, pools of the deepest, darkest night. And I can feel her looking back into mine, deep into my soul. As she is looking into me, I feel like I am looking back into her. I feel her pain, her terror.
We are both crying now.
I blink, and she is at the window. The curtains move aside for her while her outline remains unmoving, unchanging. Impossibly, breath appears on the glass as she speaks.
“Look.”
This house is old, and I never believed any of the stories about it when we bought it. Tales to frighten children, rumours from a bored, insular little village in the middle of nowhere. But now the stories are coming true.
The trees at the edge of the forest that borders this forgotten land move aside for a figure that stumbles through, at first on its hands and knees and then upright, just about. It stops at the threshold of light and dark and inclines its skeletal head up at my bedroom window.
It advances, followed suddenly by a dozen or so others, borne out of thin, empty air.
I look to the spirit, perhaps my guardian angel or just another lost victim like me, for guidance or encouragement or assistance. But she is gone. I am alone.
As if on instinct, at the moment the midnight maiden vanishes, my mind goes to my baby in the other room. But this time there is no crying. There is nothing.
I turn back to the window and stare out. I’m so tired, like I haven’t slept for days, and my body aches and longs for rest.
The shadows skulk back into the forest. This time, they do not turn to look at me.
A lone, spindly, broken figure with empty eyes stops at the border and stares up at the bedroom window. Finally, I hear my baby’s cry. But it’s faint, muffled. Wrapped up in a shadow’s embrace. And then gone between the trees, stolen by the night.
They came from the forest. In swarms of shadows and swathes of darkness. They took my child, and then they will take me.
And I will be ready.