The Night Stalkers

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.

I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.

She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.

I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.

Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.

And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.

The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.

Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.

Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.

Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.

We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.

By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.

Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.

The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.

Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.

Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.

It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.

At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.

Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.

These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.

One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.

With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.

Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.

Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.

Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.

Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.

And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.

For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.

I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.

One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.

I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.

Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.

Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.

I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.