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Prologue: Between Sleeping and Waking

There is a moment between sleeping and waking when the body forgets to come with you.

Your eyes open. The room is there. And you cannot move, cannot speak, cannot scream. They call it sleep paralysis.

They say it is common. They say it is harmless. They say it is nothing.

Nothing switched off my light.

Chapter One: The Girl Who Was Never Afraid

My name is Ira, and until I was fifteen, I did not know what fear felt like.

I don't mean I was brave. Brave is when you are scared and you do the thing anyway. I simply wasn't scared. While the rest of our small town slept, I sat cross-legged in front of the old TV at two in the morning, the house completely dark, the screen's blue glow on my face, the volume turned down to a whisper. Horror films. True ghost stories on the documentary channels, the ones with a slow, heavy narrator and the words based on real events fading in at the start. The kind of shows people tell you never to watch alone.

I always watched alone.

I believed in all of it, too. Ghosts, spirits, the old stories my grandmother told about trees you shouldn't sleep under. I believed the way you believe in a country you have never visited. It existed. It just had nothing to do with me.

My little brother Kabir was the opposite. He was four years younger, and the house frightened him the way the sea frightens some people: all of it, all the time. He would lie next to me in our big bed and tug my sleeve in the dark.

"Didi," he would whisper. "Didi, please turn around. I'm scared."

And I, the girl who watched horror films at two in the morning for fun, would sigh and pull the blanket over my head.

"Sleep, Kabir. There's nothing there. Let me sleep."

I think about that a lot now.

There was one night, though, when I was in eighth grade, that I should have paid more attention to. I had my science exam the next morning, and I had left everything to the last moment, as usual. By three o'clock the whole house was asleep. Kabir was curled up beside me. Through my open door I could see straight into my parents' room, where Maa and Papa lay still under the slow turn of the ceiling fan.

That was when I heard the footsteps.

They began at the main door. Heavy, unhurried steps, the steps of a grown man, a big one. They came down the passage toward my room, stopped, and went back. Then they came again. To and fro. To and fro. I could hear the weight settle into each step. I could see everyone in my house, every single person, asleep.

For a moment, something cold opened in my stomach.

Then I looked down at my notebook, at the diagrams of the human heart I still hadn't memorised, and a different fear swallowed the first one whole. If I failed tomorrow, there would be no ghost in the world scarier than my mother's face.

So I put my head down and studied. I recited the four chambers of the heart under my breath while something paced the passage outside my room. And after a while, the footsteps simply stopped, the way rain stops.

I passed the exam. I forgot about the footsteps.

It took me years to understand that whatever walked that passage hadn't forgotten about me.

Chapter Two: Dawn at Four

I was fifteen the first time it happened.

My room had one enormous window, a long rectangle that took up nearly the whole wall, and over it hung old curtains with faded blue and cream stripes. I had fallen asleep on the very edge of the bed, the way I always did, and when I opened my eyes, the clock on the wall was just past four.

Dawn was coming. A thin grey light leaked through the gaps in the striped curtains and lay across the floor in long bars. I could see everything: the window, the curtains, the shapes of the furniture slowly turning from black to grey.

I tried to turn over, and nothing happened.

I told my hand to move. It didn't. I told my mouth to open. It stayed shut. It was like being buried inside my own body, every part of me awake and every part of me sealed. I could feel my heart, and it was the only thing in me that could still run.

Then something came.

I don't know where from. It came out of nowhere, fast, faster than anything should move in a room, and it stopped beside my ear. And it whispered.

It wasn't words. Or maybe it was words, just not any I was meant to understand: a rapid, broken murmuring, sounds tumbling over one another, so close I could feel them against my skin. Gibberish. And yet something in it was so wrong that my heart simply dropped.

And the cold came with it. Not the chill of fear. I know the difference now. This was real cold, a wind, icy air striking my face again and again, as if someone had flung open a window in the dead of winter right beside my bed. Cold, cold, cold, slapping at my skin, and I couldn't even turn my face away.

Then I woke up.

Except I hadn't been asleep. That was the part my mind kept tripping over as I lay there, gasping, finally able to clutch the blanket. I had been awake the whole time. I had seen the dawn. I had felt the breath. There had been no moment of waking, just a moment where the locks came off.

For the first time in my life, I knew what terror was. It wasn't the feeling from the movies. It was smaller and much worse: the feeling of being completely, utterly helpless while something chose what to do with you.

At breakfast, I told Maa. She was rolling out rotis and didn't even look up.

"Oh, that," she said. "It happens, beta. It happens to everyone. You were in deep sleep, that's all. Don't be scared."

The aunties in our town said the same thing. Everyone gets it. It's very normal. And I nodded, because I wanted it to be normal.

The next night, it happened again.

The same locked body. The same thing, rushing out of nowhere, pressing close to my ear. The same whisper, that stream of sounds that might have been words, or words I was never meant to understand. And the same cold wind, slapping across my face, though every window in the room was shut.

The next day, I did what any fifteen-year-old would do. I searched the internet. That was when I first read the words sleep paralysis, and REM, and hallucinations. My brain, half-asleep, half-awake. Monsters painted on the walls.

It was such a relief.

I held onto that explanation for a long time. I held onto it right up until the night it stopped explaining anything.

Chapter Three: The Web

For a few weeks, it became ordinary. That is the strange thing about fear: if it visits often enough, you start setting a place for it at the table. Some nights I froze. Some nights I felt someone come into the room. I would wait it out, the way you wait out a power cut, and in the morning I would tell myself, brain, REM, hallucination, and go to school.

Then came the night of the web.

It was summer. The old fridge in the corner of my room hummed beside my bed, and I lay facing it on the edge of the mattress with the blanket pulled over my head, the way I always slept, even in the heat. I have a habit, even now: I hold one arm up in front of my face under the blanket, so it makes a little tent. Covered completely, but with a pocket of air to breathe.

In the middle of the night it got too hot, and I pushed the blanket off my face.

Something fell across it.

That feeling. You know it. The feeling of walking face-first into a spider's web, that soft, invisible touch across your skin. Except I hadn't moved. I was lying perfectly still. It was as if someone had thrown it onto my face. I touched my cheeks, my lips. There was nothing there. Nothing at all.

I wasn't fully awake, and I wasn't asleep. And everything in me was saying: something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong.

So I did what a child does. I pulled the blanket back over my head and made my little tent with my arm, and I lay there in the dark pocket of air, breathing, waiting.

Then I watched the blanket begin to move.

Something on the other side was pressing into it. Slowly, the cloth bowed inward toward my face, as if a hand were pushing through. I watched the dent grow deeper. I felt it come closer. My heart was dropping, dropping, and then the locks came down, and I was frozen.

And I saw it.

A hand. Long, far too long, with brown, dry skin and fingers that had too many knuckles in them. It reached through the blanket as if the blanket were water, and it rested on my forehead. And it began to stroke me. Slowly. Back and forth. Back and forth. Gentle the way you would stroke a sleeping child, and I could feel each fingertip, one by one, dragging across my skin.

At the same time, a white light was pouring in from the window, bright and cold, brighter than any streetlight in our town. And the cold came again: waves of it, breaking over my forehead and face, again and again, in the middle of a summer night when the fan was barely cutting the heat.

I don't know how long it lasted. I pulled against my own body with everything I had, the way you'd pull against chains, until something snapped and I jerked upright, gasping, the blanket tangled around my legs.

The room was dark. No light at the window. No hand.

The clock's hands sat somewhere between 3:33 and 3:34.

In the morning, Maa listened more carefully this time. Then she went to the kitchen drawer and came back with an old iron key, heavy and black, the kind nothing in our house had opened in years.

"Keep this under your pillow," she said. "Iron keeps bad things away. And remember, nothing is stronger than you."

I slept with the key under my pillow that night.

It didn't matter.

Again I pushed the blanket off my face, and again something was thrown over it, that same feeling of a web flung by a hand, and again there was nothing there. Again I knew. Again I hid under my tent, and again the blanket bowed inward, and again I froze. But this time it wasn't the hand.

This time, something was rattling over me.

It was right over my neck. A dry, clicking rattle, like seeds in a gourd, or teeth. I couldn't see it, but I could feel the air move with it. The white light flooded the window again. The cold broke over my face again. I fought my way out, and I turned on the light with shaking hands, and once again, the clock sat somewhere between 3:33 and 3:34.

Chapter Four: Didi, Turn Around

The next afternoon, Kabir found me on the terrace.

He sat beside me for a long time without saying anything, picking at a scab on his knee. Then, without looking at me, he said, "It's happening to you now, isn't it?"

I didn't answer. I didn't have to.

So he told me. When he was smaller, he said, there used to be a girl in our house. A girl only he could see. She would come at night and stand at the foot of the bed, and she would talk to him. She told him terrible things. She told him to hurt us, all of us, Maa and Papa and me. When he refused, she hurt him instead. He could feel her nails dragging across his skin. He could see the scratches open, see the blood running from them. But every morning, when he looked, there was nothing. Not a single mark. He used to scream, he said, scream and scream, and none of us ever woke up. Not once. We all just slept, quiet as stones, while he screamed.

"That's why I used to say it," he said. "Didi, turn around. I just wanted you to look at me. I thought if you were looking, she couldn't come."

I remembered every one of those nights. I remembered sighing. I remembered the blanket over my head. Sleep, Kabir. There's nothing there.

I didn't know what to say, so I put my arm around him, and we sat there until the sun went down. That night, for the first time, I understood exactly how small and alone he must have felt. I felt sick with it.

The paralysis came again that night, but at first it was the ordinary kind, if anything about it can be called ordinary. No hand, no web, no light. Just the heavy, floating strangeness of being sealed inside myself, and the slow work of trying to claw my way out.

Then I felt someone behind me.

It was Kabir. I knew his weight on the mattress, his small shape against my back.

"Didi," he whispered. "Didi, I'm scared."

My heart broke and leapt at once. It's happening to him again, I thought. After everything he told me today, it's happening to him, and I'm lying here frozen with my back to him, just like before. Not this time. This time I was going to turn around.

I pushed against the paralysis with everything in me. Move. Move.

"Didi," he whispered again. "Please turn around."

Then I felt a fingernail.

One long, hard, sharp nail, pressed into the back of my neck. And slowly, it began to drag, from the nape of my neck around to the right side, scratching along my skin with a sound I could hear inside my own head, a dry, scraping hiss.

"Didi," said the voice, and it wasn't quite Kabir's voice anymore. "Turn. Around."

I broke free and spun around.

Kabir was asleep. Not behind me. On the far side of our king-size bed, a whole body's length away, curled up on the very edge with his back to me, breathing slow and deep.

I sat there in the dark with my hand on my neck, and a thought came to me that frightened me more than the hand or the web or the rattling ever had.

It knows.

It knew what Kabir had told me that afternoon. It knew what I felt about it. It knew exactly which words would make me want to turn around. It wasn't just visiting me. It was paying attention to me, and it was using the people I loved to do it.

After that, I started to dread three o'clock. I learned the pattern the way you learn a bully's route home: if I woke up around three and then fell back asleep, it would come. Every time. So I started fighting sleep. My marks slipped. Teachers asked if I was well. I said I was fine.

One night I woke at three and was so afraid that I got up and switched on the tube light. Nothing can happen in the light, I told myself. I lay back down with my eyes squeezed shut against the brightness, and somehow, I slept.

When I woke, fifteen or twenty minutes later, the room was dark.

The light was off.

The switch was on the far wall, beside the door. Kabir was asleep beside me. In the morning, Maa swore she hadn't come in. Papa hadn't. No one had.

I told myself the power must have gone out for a moment.

The power had not gone out. The fridge had been humming all night.

Chapter Five: The Black Hand

The next night, I fell asleep facing Kabir.

Somewhere around three, I surfaced the way you do when you shift position, that one blurry minute when you are almost awake. My eyes opened a little. Kabir was asleep in front of me, his blanket pulled up to his chin.

And out from under his blanket came a hand.

It was black. Not dark-skinned, but black, like something cut out of the night itself. It came out from beneath my brother's blanket, reached across the space between us, took hold of the short, fine hairs at my forehead, and pulled.

If you have ever had those baby hairs at your hairline tugged, you know how much it hurts. My eyes flooded with tears. And I wasn't frozen. That was the thing. I could move. I sat up and smacked Kabir on the arm, hard.

"Why did you pull my hair?"

He jolted awake, confused and hurt. "What? I didn't! I was sleeping!"

And he was telling the truth. Both of his hands were tucked under his own pillow, on the far side of his body. They had been there the whole time.

My forehead was still stinging.

I screamed then. I screamed until Maa and Papa came running, and for the first time, I told them everything: the web, the hand, the rattling, the nail, the light. All of it came out in one long, shaking rush.

In our town, there are some things people believe in quietly, the way they keep a lemon and chillies hanging over the shop door. My parents exchanged a look I had never seen before.

"You'll sleep with us," Papa said. "In our room."

And for a few nights, it was better.

Then one afternoon, Kabir came to find me again. He had been napping in my old bed.

"Didi," he said quietly. "There's something in your place. Where you sleep. I felt it. It's very... it's not nice."

So we swapped. Maa and Papa took my old room, the one with the fridge and the striped curtains. Kabir and I took theirs. We thought the room was the problem.

We were wrong.

It wasn't as bad as before. But it never stopped. The paralysis still came, and I learned to tell the difference between the ordinary kind, the floating, heavy, nothing-there kind, and the other kind. The other kind had a presence. It had attention. One night I opened my eyes under the blanket, and at the little gap at its corner, where the cloth didn't quite meet the mattress, there was an eye. Just one. Watching me. Unblinking.

And there was the touching. Something touching my head, my hair, poking at my neck, again and again, while I lay frozen. And then, slowly, even when I wasn't frozen. Even when I was awake, lying next to my own mother, it would keep on. Poke. Poke. Stroke. It only stopped if I sat all the way up.

I tried everything Maa gave me. The iron key. A red thread on my wrist. Prayers before bed. Nothing worked.

One night, scrolling through an old internet forum at two in the morning, I found a thread full of strangers who said they had sleep paralysis too. One of them had posted a short mantra. A few unfamiliar words, something with a soft Ra sound in it. Repeat it in your head when it happens, the post said. It breaks the paralysis.

I memorised it. I went to sleep almost hoping it would come, so I could finally fight back.

It came.

I was locked, sealed in, and I began to chant. In my head, and in my mouth too, as much as I could. I found I could move my tongue, just slightly, and I shaped the words with it, over and over.

Then my tongue began to move on its own.

It curled backward. Slowly, it rolled down and back toward my throat, as if something were pulling it from the inside. I felt it press against the back of my mouth. I couldn't swallow. I couldn't breathe. I was choking, frozen and choking, and I could do nothing at all.

I remembered what Maa always said. Nothing is stronger than you. And I held onto those words like a rope.

I am stronger than you, I said in my head. I am stronger than you. I am stronger than you.

Something laughed.

It came from outside, from beyond the window, and it was not a human laugh. It was low and amused and delighted, the laugh of someone watching a small animal struggle in a trap.

"No," it said. "You're not."

And it kept laughing.

A few seconds later, the paralysis broke on its own, as if it had simply decided to let me go. I lay there gasping, my tongue my own again, and understood something very clearly for the first time.

There was nothing I could do.

After that, it started to leave marks I could feel. Wherever it touched me during the paralysis, my skin burned, a deep, hot sting, like a bad sunburn or a nettle rash. Sometimes the burning stayed for hours after I woke up. Once, something dragged a long, sharp nail down the whole length of my back, from my shoulder to my waist, and I felt every inch of it.

And the strangest part is that I was getting used to it. The way you get used to a dripping tap, or a neighbour's dog that never stops barking. It was frightening, but it was no longer the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

That was about to change.

Chapter Six: My Name in the Dark

Then it learned my name.

The first time, I was in the garden in the late afternoon, picking roses for the little brass vase in our prayer corner. The air was warm and full of bees.

"Ira."

Clear as anything, right behind my shoulder. I turned around with a rose in my hand.

There was no one in the garden. The gate was shut. Inside, through the kitchen window, I could see Maa at the stove, her back to me.

After that, I heard it everywhere. In the bathroom with the tap running. In the stairwell. At night, lying beside Kabir, I heard someone right next to me say, softly, Ira, and when I opened my eyes, there was only the wall. For days, my name followed me around the house like a stray cat, always just behind me, always just out of sight.

One night, around two, I couldn't sleep, so I sat on the floor of my parents' old room, which was ours now, watching late-night cartoons on the small TV with the volume low. This room had a window too, almost as large as the one in my old room. But this one didn't face the street. It faced the empty plot behind our house, a tangle of wild trees and bushes that everyone in the colony called the jungle.

Cartoon music was playing. Kabir was asleep on the bed behind me.

And the volume went down.

I didn't touch the remote. It was lying on the floor beside my knee. But I watched the little green volume bar on the screen slide down, step by step, all the way to nothing, until the room was completely silent.

Then, from outside the window, something said my name.

"Ira."

I went very still.

It came again. And this time it was slow, stretched out and dragged through the dark, almost singing. Almost playful.

"Iiiiii-raaaaa."

There was something in that voice I have never been able to describe properly, not even now. It wasn't a man's voice or a woman's or a child's. It was full of something old, and hungry, and pleased with itself.

And it was coming from the corner of the window.

I didn't move from that spot until the sky went grey. I didn't sleep at all. And I didn't touch the TV either. In the morning, the volume bar still said zero.

Chapter Seven: The Rug

A day or two later, I had a dream. It lasted maybe ten seconds. I have had longer nightmares, bloodier ones, ones with monsters in them. None of them has stayed with me like this one.

In the dream, I was asleep in my parents' old room, the room that was mine now. And from outside, somewhere beyond the walls, came a sound.

Shh. Shh.

Soft. Patient. Like someone calling to me without using my name. Calling me outside.

In the dream, I got up and went to Maa and shook her shoulder. "Maa, wake up. There's someone outside."

And the door opened by itself.

Something swept past the open door, out in the dark beyond it. It didn't walk. Its feet, if it had feet, never touched the ground. It floated, upright, completely covered by a cloth: a heavy, old, patterned cloth like a rug that had lain on some forgotten floor for a hundred years, its pattern faded into browns and dull reds, its edges frayed. You couldn't see any shape beneath it, any face, any hands. Just the rug, hanging over something.

It crossed the doorway. Then it crossed back. Then it crossed again.

One. Two. Three.

Shh. Shh.

And I woke up.

I lay there with my heart going like a train, trying to understand why I was so frightened. There had been no blood in that dream. No eyes, no teeth, no skin. Nothing that I had ever seen in any film, nothing my mind could have borrowed. Just an old rug, floating past a door three times. But the terror that came with it was the deepest I had ever felt, so deep it didn't even feel like mine.

The very next night, the paralysis came.

But it was wrong in a new way.

I was lying in my parents' old room. I knew I was. I had gone to sleep there. But when I opened my eyes, frozen, I was looking at my room. My old room. The fridge was in the corner beside the bed, though there was no fridge in this room. The walls were dark blue, though these walls were cream. The big rectangular window had my old striped curtains, blue and cream, hanging open. The door was on my left, where my old door had been.

The paralysis broke. And here is the thing I need you to understand: it broke completely. I could move. I sat up in bed. I was awake.

And I was still in my old room.

The curtains were open. And in front of the window, in the faint grey light from outside, something was standing.

It was only a shadow. I couldn't see colours, or detail, or a face. But I knew its shape. A shape draped in something heavy, hanging down to the floor, frayed at the edges. A shape wearing a rug.

It was standing a few steps from my bed, facing me.

And it was short.

Shorter than me, even sitting up in bed. And something in me went quietly, coldly still, because I realised I had always known. The rattling over my neck that felt so close. The voice that came from the corner of the window. Every night, some part of me had felt that whatever came for me was small.

Now I could see it. It was.

And I felt nothing.

Not fear. Not panic. Not a single thought. It was as if someone had reached into me and switched everything off. I just sat there, very calm, very empty, and stared at it, and it stared back at me, and nothing at all moved inside my head.

Then someone came into the room.

It was Maa. But she came from my right. In my old room, the door was on the left. I turned my head sharply, startled, and in that moment she reached for the wall and switched on the light.

And the room changed.

Cream walls. No fridge. No striped curtains. My parents' old room, exactly as it should be, with Kabir asleep beside me and the window empty. The door, of course, was on the right. It had always been on the right.

Maa stood by the switch, calm, looking at me with that quiet, searching look only mothers have.

"Are you okay?" she asked gently.

She had been asleep in my old room, in my old place on the bed, the place Kabir had said felt wrong. And she had just woken up frozen. Paralysed. "It happened to me just now," she said. "So I thought it must be happening to you too."

I looked at the clock on the wall.

3:33. Exactly.

I don't know what I saw that night. I don't know whether I was seeing my old room from where I sat, or whether I was somehow sitting in it, or whether it was showing me, just for a moment, where it had come from.

But I know the shape. I had seen it in a dream the night before. I saw it again with my eyes open, sitting up, awake.

And after that night, the thing in the rug never came back.

Chapter Eight: Something Else

For a few days, I let myself believe it was over.

Then something else came.

I knew immediately that it wasn't the same thing. The thing in the rug had been strange, and patient, and almost playful in a horrible way. This was not playful. This was heavy. I was asleep, and then I wasn't, and I could feel it lying over me, over the whole right half of my body, from my shoulder down to my leg, pressing down like wet earth.

And where it touched me, I burned.

Not the sting I'd felt before. This was fire. It felt as if someone had poured kerosene over the right side of my body and set a match to it, and I was lying there, frozen, being burned alive, unable to even scream. I could feel my skin blistering. I could smell something I can only describe as smoke.

When the paralysis finally broke, I tore the blanket off and looked down at my arm in the light of my phone, expecting it to be black and raw.

There was nothing. Not a single mark.

But the burning didn't stop. It stayed for two whole days. A deep, hot ache along the right side of my body that no cream, no cold water, no ice could touch. And for those two days, I knew something with a certainty I can't explain. Whatever had come that night was older than the thing in the rug. Stronger. Much, much stronger. The others had been playing with me.

This one hadn't been playing.

Not long after that, I left home. I got into a school in another city, far away, and I packed my bags and went, and I didn't look back at the house from the car.

The sleep paralysis came with me. It still does, sometimes. But it is the ordinary kind now: heavy, floating, empty. No hand. No web. No voice at the window. Whatever lived in that house, I told myself, had stayed in that house.

There are things no one has ever explained to me.

Who switched off the light, when the switch was on the far wall and everyone was asleep?

Who turned the volume down to zero, when the remote was lying by my knee?

Who laughed at me from beyond the window when I said I was stronger?

How did my mother wake up frozen in my old bed, in my old place, on the very night I sat up and saw my old room?

I had almost stopped asking.

Then, one day, long after I had left, Maa called.

Kabir had been paralysed the night before, she said. Something had come to him in the dark. It didn't touch him. It didn't hurt him. It only asked him one question, over and over.

Where is she?

Where is she?

Where is she?

It wasn't looking for him.

It was still looking for me...