40 It was April seventh when the hauntings first began. Harper’s doctor called it sleep paralysis. So did her therapist, and she believed them for a while. Harper didn’t even know that sleep paralysis existed until the night it happened to her. Her mind woke up first. Too tired to move, she let her mind focus on the nauseating hum of the air conditioner. Her breaths began to slow, slinking their way back to the rhythm of sleep when a sharp shiver went through her spine. Something was different. Before Harper could escape back to her nightmare, the shiver crawled through the pit of her stomach and pushed down on her chest. It was panic. It was fear. Her breaths short and shallow, Harper’s body screamed at her. Unable to ignore it any longer, her eyelids tore open. There, at the foot of her bed stood a dark figure. It was unmoving— its entire being masked in shadows. Harper blinked, and blinked again. Each time the outline of the figure grew more defined. She screamed and only silence answered. It released inside of her and bounced off of her sealed, trembling lips. She was completely immobilized. The only things that could move were her eyelids. Even putting every thought and effort into lifting her pinky finger led to nothing. Move, she thought. Move. The room was filled with the incessant pounding of her heart. As she stared into the unmoving void, she wondered if her heart might burst from her ribcage. After giving up on trying to create any sort of movement, all Harper could think to do was squeeze her eyes shut. It’s not real, she told herself. It’s just a nightmare. But when her eyes opened, the figure had moved. It was standing beside her now, its face hovering just inches about her own. Harper felt herself choking on the scream that sat lodged in her throat, but still no sound could escape her. Without thought, her eyes fluttered open and shut, trying to unmask the shadow. But the figure remained just a figure—a presence of darkness. Harper couldn’t tell how long she lay there staring back at the presence. Eventually she decided that sleep would be her only salvation. She pushed the screams of warning to the back of her mind and let her eyelids fall. Needing to occupy her mind, she started counting. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 . . . Harper counted to 317 that night. Her doctors had told her that this instance was completely normal. That almost everyone who suffered from sleep paralysis saw the same thing: a kind of dark figure looking down on them. Google had confirmed the same thing. They told her that it was usually caused by stress or lack of sleep, but when she woke up it would all be over. It was easy to listen to them at first. Harper was fine. Harper suffered from stress, anxiety, and lack of sleep, but she was normal. She clung to the words of her doctors and the internet. Although the events remained consistent each night, she could handle it. But Harper soon found that the doctors and internet were wrong. The thing that haunted her nights did not listen to their rules—it escaped her nightmares and infiltrated her days.
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