So anyways… Here goes… Chapter One…

It was amazing how quickly Andi was violently thrust into from a quite peaceful sleep. She was known to be a the heavy sleeper. Practically dead, as her mom would say. But the light pouring into her bedroom window was strong enough to break the spell quite effortlessly. She waited. Annoyed. For what seemed like an eternity, Andi told herself that the light would soon pass. Her curtains were a sheer pink wisp of lace that were designed to be pretty, not to block out such a staggering amount of weaponized luminescence. She had never needed such protection before. She had never noticed such a bright spotlight pouring into her window, especially at such a strange time. 

Headlights from the street, she assumed. Most likely a neighbor getting home from a late shift,. They entire episode was unusual in the way that the lights hung around far longer than headlights should, and at too late an hour. Her patience melted away, finally forcing her to look at her bedside clock. It claimed to be well past three in the morning. A strange time for any sort of movement in her neighborhood. Her thoughts danced around the curiousness of the hour, as if there was some higher meaning that would let it make sense. Questions multiplied in her head like a petrie dish of annoyance. Her peaceful sleep was no longer on hold. It was over. And it would stay that way until that malfeasant light was dealt with. Her patience and grace were replaced with a consuming desire to identify and extinguish the source of the light that had so villainously snuck into her room.

Andi’s arm tugged the dead weight of her diminutive frame towards the edge of her bed. Her legs finally decided to help her out, sliding off of her mattress and feeling around for the floor below. She heaved herself upright, her confused muscles snapping back and her hair whipping her in the eyes. She stood up on shaky legs. Her mind turned towards something her mother had often told her about teenagers needing a good night’s sleep. She had a busy day ahead, full of tests and essays and god knows what other impossible busywork that would be shoved down her throat. And this careless interloper with their high beams leering into her window would have to be dealt with. She gave her feet a few seconds to get reacquainted with the soft fibers of her carpet. 

As her wakefulness increased, the inevitable cost of her interrupted slumber took up more space in her brain. Her tiredness that began as mere agitation morphed into full-on anger. The cruelty of this deranged sleep thief, carelessly taking away her dreams, was cold and inhumane. A terrible blight on humanity that deserved more than just harsh words. She imagined a crowd of pitchfork wielding people in their nightclothes marching through the streets smashing every light they encountered along the way. The God of Sleep would be proud. Sweet dreams would be had by all. She would be the hero that led this righteous crusade. She chuckled at the sleep-deprived absurdity of her own tired thoughts. 

Her feet started rolling heavily towards her light-stricken window. Her eyes could not adjust quick enough to escape the painful embrace of the intense illumination. She looked down, feeling carefully with her wiggly toes to avoid the traps that she had been laying for the past few weeks. Clothes, books, discarded notebook paper and cheap discarded makeup created a dangerous minefield in what should have been the floor. For the first time, she cursed at herself for her underdeveloped housekeeping skills. She imagined herself as a ninja as she navigated the obstacle course, feeling with her toes for what her eyes could not reveal. Misjudging the depth and stability of one particularly large swath of dark clothing, she nearly succumbed to a broken ankle. 

After a harrowing journey, she found herself finally standing at her window. The harsh light bathed her in heat as her as it washed over her face. Her eyes were forced shut, causing her a sharp pain from her overworked muscles. She held up a hand to shield herself as she painfully practiced letting in a little bit of light. As her sleep-deprived eyes finally began to adjust to the intense brilliance, her unseen nemesis played an even crueler trick. The light vanished. Her eyes were now forced to adjust in the opposite direction. The burns to her retina made her blind even beyond the darkness of her room. She further strained her wounded vision into the still blackness of the street outside but saw nothing. She opened her window quietly, as to not wake her sleeping parents, and hung her head outside. She looked for the heartless creature that had brutally intruded upon her dreams. Nothing that she could see from the neighboring driveways could have caused the light to cast in the manner that had so greatly offended her. 

There was no activity on her street that suggested that any late night commuter had descended upon the neighborhood. No car. No person. Just the dull serenity that was typical of the sedated suburb in the wee hours of the morning. She was just awake enough to be certain that she wasn’t crazy. She couldn’t have dreamed the light. She wasn’t that crazy, at least that she was aware of. She was angrier now that the light was gone than she was when it first blasted her out of bed. This quite possibly was the most annoying thing she had ever endured. She could not rest until justice was served.

She shuffled her now energized legs back to her bed, plopping down with a disorienting bounce. Grabbing her phone from her nightstand, she slid the lock with a purposeful ferocity and resumed her back and forth with her best friend Riley. Andi was certain that Riley was asleep. Lucky little heathen, she thought. Still, she was committed to rallying her pitchfork wielding crowd and Riley would be her first recruit. Even if she couldn’t enlist for a few more hours. 

“Some asshole just blasted their headlights in my window and now I can’t sleep and going to look like crap tomorrow and fall asleep in class and going to fail school and die poor and alone and ugly. Going to kill someone. You in? Ugh!!!”

She lobbed the phone back on her nightstand with a satisfying thud. A fitting sound of frustration to put a sharp exclamation point on the episode. She threw herself back beneath her now chilled over bedding and pulled her blanket tight to her face. She forced her eyes closed, now reluctant to comply. She did her best to wipe the incident from her mind, so that she couldn’t wander back into her seething hatred. She buried her fears about suffering through a school day without an extensive number of hours of sleep to make it tolerable. Thankfully, her eyes and her body began to give in, releasing the stiffness of aggravation and welcoming back the sweet lightness of slumber.

At least for a short while. Just a few minutes had passed as the blanket of sleep had slowly been laid over Andi once again. And then the light returned. Her eyes shot open once more. The fog of sleep was completely gone now, as she was consumed by a mad quest to extinguish this unholy terror once and for all. She threw herself to her feet, marching with heavy feet back to her window. This time she would not be slowed by the sandman’s grip, driven forcefully by her call for revenge. Once again the maddening power of the spotlight forced her eyes to retreat behind her eyelids. Yet once again she had arrived at her window just in time for the light to extinguish itself. Once again there was nothing outside telling of its existence. 

There were no cars in sight. No creepy stalkers were lingering outside her window wielding giant spotlights. Nothing. Just a quiet and serene neighborhood, fast asleep. She began to think that she was still asleep, experiencing a terrible and unsettling dream. Or maybe it was just a hallucination, which might even be better. This was totally uncool. She started back to bed before stopping once more, her curiosity unsatisfied. She turned and walked back to the window. Still nothing. She repeated this process a few times in her head. Surely she was just being dumb. There was a stupidly simple explanation that she just hadn’t stumbled on yet. Nor would she. She slung herself back into her mess of blankets and pillows. She was over it.

Having convinced herself that whatever was disturbing her was not worth sacrificing any more of per precious sleep, Andi finally began to feel a sense of serenity raining down on her once more. Her body grew heavy and numb as it raced her brain to the great prize in the clouds. No light could stop her now, she thought. No annoying neighbor would make demands on her attention any longer. She was in charge now. Her will to ignore the outside world was strong. Sleeping was, of course, one of her favorite activities. She was the Queen of Sleep and would not be swayed by lowly peasants. 

As she once again embraced her warm blanket, a terrible unease fell upon Andi. Halfway between sleep and wakefulness, her mind aroused a terrible feeling. A panic. Anxiety shot through her in an unfamiliar and disconcerting way. Had she been asked, she likely could not have explained the sensations that were percolating in her exhausted mind. A preternatural sense of danger told her that she was not alone. Somehow, someway, the light was inside her room. Forcing her eyes wide, she saw nothing. Though the room seemed blacker than normal, so she could not be sure that there was nothing to see. She tried to move but found her body stuck tightly to her bed. She could not tell in the dark whether her eyes were open or shut. She felt a tremendous force bearing down on her that entrapped every muscle in her body. She struggled, which seemed to only make the pressure even worse. Eventually she tried her hardest to relax her body in the hope that whatever held its grip on her would reciprocate. 

She poured all of her energy into rolling herself from her bed, finally tumbling down with a painful thud onto her floor. She shook uncontrollably as she looked back at her bed, expecting to see something terrifying hovering over her. But there was nothing there. She was still alone. She looked around the room, squinting through the dark. Her shaking slowed. She must have been stirring in the early stages of a terrible dream. She knew that that could happen. She was stuck somewhere in-between the real world and a nightmare. She began to calm down, hearing her heartbeat take a bit longer between thumps. Stupid baby, she thought. She slowly felt her way up her invisible bed and slithered once more under her covers.

She remembered what she had learned in school about the sleep cycle. Sometimes the mind played crazy tricks on a person to a terrifying effect. She was sure that she was awake, however, when the sounds started. At first, a distant buzzing sound. It reminded her of some type of alarm. It was faint, but grew louder as she looked for the source. Andi was now fighting exhaustion with every minuscule bit of energy that she could summon. Her mind was once again a train wreck of confusion and panic. She felt her muscles lose their will as they were once again met by a heavy and unseen force. Soon it was as if her entire body was numb and lacked the capacity for movement. She still tried. She could feel her leg twitch as it regenerated just enough stamina to give one more push. It was hopeless. The force she created was nothing compared to what lay on top of her. She wiggled fruitlessly hoping for some end to the paralysis that now enveloped her entire form. And the intense noise that had built up strangled her ears. She thought that she should be hearing herself scream, but had no way of truly knowing.

Pain shot throughout her body as she attempted to squirm and shake herself free. The feeling didn’t target any one part of her in particular. It was a scary, peculiar type of pain that seemed to resonate throughout her entire form. She was going to die, she thought. She would not even have the luxury of knowing how it would end. Her heart was pounding as she lay helpless, her mind on fire with every painful emotion slamming into her at once. She lay motionless, bound by the indecipherable darkness. The rapture of fear flooded her brain, replacing any hint of cognizant thought. Her exhaustion began stifling what fight she had left in her as her body became lighter than air. As she lay there, incapable of struggling, she lost all perception of the world around her. Her brain had experience something that it was not built to process and began to shut itself down. She would not get any comfortable answers. Before she could recapture her sense of self, or establish sound notion as to what abhorrent menace had descended upon her, her entire world fell into blackness. Perhaps what she went on to experience was some form of sleep, but for Andi it was simply absence. That night she became absent from her own body, lost in time and space.  

It’s definitely a WIP. But a start to something at least. If you made it this far thanks for reading! If you didn’t make it this far then shame on you.