Gibbering in the Dark...

Journal - Saturday, 5.22.10

Why do they keep coming at me through her??

Going to bed last night, about 3a; wife had gone to bed a couple hours earlier. Room was dark, just a few shafts of sickly green-yellow light from the streetlamps outside peeking in through the closed slats covering our windows, casting everything I could see in the room a dark purplish-black. I was standing next to the bed, getting undressed, and I heard my sleeping wife behind me... giggle.

Slightly startled, I turned to see if she was awake, but she seemed to be sleeping peacefully, just as I'd expected. I turned back around and finished getting undressed, when I heard that soft giggling from behind me again. I turned back around and leaned over the bed to get a closer look at her face this time.

It's hard to describe. The dark was playing tricks on my eyes, for sure, but I also know what I saw. There were two faces, and it kept switching back and forth between the two. It was as if, every time my eyes would adjust to the darkness and register what I was seeing, her face would change again and my eyes would have to adjust again. And it kept going back and forth that way, so that my eyes seemed to be constantly trying to adjust and register, and her face seemed to continually shift back and forth between two very different visages.

The first was exactly what I would expect - her peaceful, sleeping face. But the other one... Her eyes were half-open, and she was looking up at me from under those heavy lids. Her face was split nearly in half by a huge, toothy grin. Picture Jack Nicholson in The Shining ("Heeere's Johnny!"), and you've got a bit of an idea what I was seeing last night.

Haltingly, I asked, "Are you awake?"

"Ur sidge a sumber gu bik cha verml."

"What did you say?"

"Ur. Sidge. A. Sumber. Gu. Bik. Cha. Verml." She/it spoke slowly and loudly, enunciating each syllable as though talking to a retarded child, or a foreigner from another land. As though she/it was actually saying something. But it was just gibberish! Nonsense.

Right?

Then she giggled again.

At this point I (hesitantly, I'm not afraid to admit) took my Silver Key from my nightstand, secured it around my wrist with the key in the palm of my hand, made the Sign of Kish, and climbed into bed next to her.

There were two more moments before I feel asleep. At one point I was terribly startled by a short, sharp, very loud sound like a small girl giving a quick cry of pain or fear from behind me, sounding like it came from directly next to my bed. No clue what that was. And then shortly after that, my wife began to snore very resonantly (which she never does). I wasn't disturbed by her snoring, but after a while, I started to hear...something...in the "echo" or resonance of the snores. I don't know the correct word for what I'm trying to describe here, but it wasn't the sound itself that she was making, but in the short seconds after the sound as it was reverberating around the room. (Perhaps aided by the resonance coming from our whirring ceiling fan?)

I didn't want to hear it. I tried not to. Oh, gods I tried. But once I first recognized it, suddenly it was as if I couldn't hear anything else.

I swear to you, in the echoing snores of my wife reverberating through the dark of our bedroom, I heard... whispering.