Familiar Spirit

But the rat existed only in her nightmare. Her hand found the lamp just where it should have been. The switch clicked back and forth between her fingers with a loud, empty sound. There was no light.

It had been many years since Sarah had been afraid of the dark, but that long-buried, nameless fear rose up to assail her now. The dark closed around her, menacing, suffocating. She tried not to imagine what dangers it might hide. She forced herself to stand up and walk away from the couch, towards the kitchen. The flashlight was there. She realized she had no idea what to do if a fuse had blown, but she was far too tense, now, to go back to sleep and wait to deal with it in the morning.

Sarah made her way slowly and carefully towards the kitchen, her whole body rigid with dread. At every step she expected to encounter something horrible—to run into a waiting human figure, or to step on something warm and alive. She scarcely knew which would be worse. The darkness was oppressive. Sarah stretched her arms out, trembling, and pushed her way through it.

At the doorway to the kitchen there was a light switch, and she groped for it eagerly. Her spirits fell again when it clicked emptily. It must be a fuse, then, and not merely a dead bulb. In the kitchen she experienced a few long, horrible seconds of running her hands over the clammy tiles beside the kitchen sink before she finally felt the comforting metal roundness of the flashlight. She held it close to her chest and switched it on.

Feeling safer already with the light in her hands, Sarah turned towards the back door. The yellow beam carved a path out of the darkness before her, illuminating a segment of linoleum and wall, and threw back the gleam of two eyes.

Two evil, golden eyes, set in a narrow head. Crouching before the door, barring her escape, was a huge, grey rat.

It wasn’t the monstrous creature of her nightmare—it was no larger than a rat might be. And Sarah knew that she was awake. So the rat had to be real.

But real rats didn’t have eyes like that, huge, glowing golden flames which dwarfed the small, pointed head. Rats didn’t stare and compel attention with eyes that hypnotized. Sarah tried to look away and could not. She was trapped by those eyes—and the will behind them—just as in her dream. But this was far more horrible than her nightmare. This time, she could not wake up.

Sarah tried, tried desperately, to move. Any physical motion at all, however small, would be a release from this numbing paralysis. At last she managed to flutter her eyelids and then, with a feeling of triumph, to close her eyes. Saved, she thought. If she couldn’t see the rat, she couldn’t be trapped into staring into those dangerous eyes.

It was like cold, dirty water moving into her head. Sarah realized she couldn’t breathe. She had to keep blowing air out through her nose, to expel the water, to keep from being suffocated. Her chest labored, and each breath required more energy, more struggle, more strength. She was weakening rapidly, feeling the filthy water catch at her lungs, and she wondered how long she could continue to fight for air.

Easier, much easier to stop. Had someone said that? The words seemed to ring in her ears, like kindly advice. Give in. Relax. Easier to give up. Easier to let go.

She continued to struggle, but she did not quite understand why. It was a dream, after all; only a dream. What happened in dreams didn’t matter. She couldn’t really drown in a dream—if she let go, let the water fill her lungs and bear her under, she would wake up. And her waking life would be so much easier. No more struggle. She didn’t need air; she didn’t need to breathe. Someone else would do it for her, while she slept undisturbed and peaceful. She had only to stop, to let go.

And still Sarah fought, breathing in and out, accomplishing each breath with greater struggle. She wasn’t sure why she continued to fight—she supposed it was because the habit of breathing was so strong that she didn’t want to give it up, even in a dream. Even though it would be so much easier, and she thought, more and more, of letting go.

But there was something else that bothered her. A small, distant pain. She couldn’t isolate the feeling—to do so would have required too much effort, too much concentration, and she could not spare anything from her struggle for air. Like small, sharp teeth worrying at her flesh—something she was forgetting—something important—

The rat!