Penn foster late payment

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. Life is pain. Life is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. Life is pain. Life is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. Life is pain. Life is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. Life is pain. Life is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. Life is pain. Life is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. Life is pain. Life is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. Life is pain. Life is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

https://imgur.com/a/CnNKkjw
Hey swap, looking to move these two and ship out tomorrow morning. Both knives come with original boxes and additional hardware. Payments are PPG&S per the rules. Yolo > chat.
Luft AVNT Ti with Zirc - This is the titanium version with zirc pivot collar and back spacer. M390 blade, original wire clip. Beautiful satin lines and super thin/slicey hollow grind. I got this from the pre-order placed late last year. I really like this knife, it just isn't finding enough pocket time to justify keeping it. So it has been carried 5 or 6 times, maybe less. I'm not sure if there is any wear on the scales or if it's just part of the finish. Either way, looks great imo - check the photos and video. The only thing this has cut is a piece of paper and the plastic wrap from a case of water bottles (I ended up slicing two bottles open that way - this has a fun edge). The flippehole action is excellent. It has gotten better over time but you can tell it still needs breaking in to be smooth on the drop. To that end, it has been disassembled a few times to be cleaned and oiled. SV $320
Kizer Towser K Liner-lock, Micarta Exclusive (Mojave Outdoor Gear) - Never carried, never cut, but disassembled for cleaning and applying some KPL. There were oil stains on the scales at the pivot area, so I applied some KPL to the rest of the micarta for consistency. Looks perfect to me. Has typical Towser K action (basically a smooth guillotine). Good lockup, perfect centering. Basically BNIB. -SV $50

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. Life is pain. Life is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. Life is pain. Life is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. Life is pain. Life is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. Life is pain. Life is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. Life is pain. Life is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. Life is pain. Life is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. Life is pain. Life is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.
I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.
She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.
Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.
And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.
The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.
Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.
Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.
Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.
We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.
By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.
Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.
The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.
Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.
Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.
It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.
At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.
Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.
These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.
One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.
With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.
Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.
Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.
Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.
And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.
For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.
I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.
One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.
I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.
Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.
Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.
I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

I've lived in my apt for almost a year. Still have 8 months left on the lease. Roommate has be fine. Then one day she up and moved out of nowhere. No warning, I just came home and everything of hers was gone. 90% of kitchen items were hers (we shared plus when I moved in there was no room) I was left with No pots, pans, plates, cups, silverware and most kitchen tools were gone I just had a few items. I wasn't mad she took all her stuff I was mad I had no warning. I text her asking her if she moved out. No response. Then she tells me she moved and said she wanted to be closer to her school and work. Which is fair but still we had like 8 months left on our lease. Then she tells me she's looking for someone to take over her lease. And would be bringing people over to show them the apt. Ok so I'm relieved she's doing the work to find someone and will be covering her half of the rent til she finds someone. So the internet and electricity bill were both in her name and she'd just send me a venmo request every month for my half and that's how I'd pay. The internet router was still left in the apt and I figured she would give me a heads up before she took it especially since she knew I worked from home. Friday evening while I was at my bfs she text me telling me she came by and took it and acted like she did me a favor by waiting til a Friday since I worked from home during the week. It took me 2 weeks to be able to afford an instalation fee to get internet hooked up. It cost me $200 for the installation fee. She paid her half of the rent like promised. She found a new roommate. Sweet! The only thing was she wouldn't be moving in til the 10th of the next month. She told her she'd prorate the rent for her. New roommate moves in and pays her prorated amount for the rent. I was unfortunately in between jobs at the time, had a new job but just hadn't started yet so I paid rent just after my new roommate moved in. I paid the late fees and whatnot cuz it was my fault but I still felt the amount I paid was higher than it should have been.. I checked our resident portal and sure enough the only payments made were my new roommates prorated payment and mine. So essentially I had to cover the remaining amount my old roommate was supposed to pay from her half. Around the same time she sends me a venmo request for the electric bill. Now I'm thinking, no she skipped out on her part of the rent and I covered it I am not paying that! I explain it to my bf and he agrees with me. So I ignore the request. She texts me about it and I HATE conflict do I ignore it. Well she messages my boyfriend on FB about it. At this point I'm pissed cuz she messaged him. What I covered for her was more than the electric bill but I just want to be done with her so I'm just calling it a wash but she keeps sending reminders for the venmo request. But I'm refusing to pay it. So AITA?

TLDR; my mom is disabled, my sister and her bf were kinda abusive. I left everything to help her and kick them out. Now I'm struggling and regretting my situation.
My mother is disabled and recieves disability payments so we're pretty poor. I have been living with her on and off since I was 19. I work when I live with her (I've only had about 9 months of time I didnt work or pay for anything and that was when I was 19). When I was 22, I finally was able to get my license, a car, an apartment, a good job, and a bf. I'd moved out and my sister moved in full-time with her then bf now hubby. Well...she's a hardcore pot smoker and he's a meth addict. They were both unemployed. Just a background on the house a bit...we've always had at least 3 animals that we've had the ability of caring for but when my sister is at the house she usually ends up collecting animals. It had gotten to the point that there were 3 dogs and 11 cats and no one cleaning up after them (mind you my mother is disabled and bending over to clean is extremely difficult for her). My sister would leave days on end with my mother alone in a house with tons of animals, no food, no car. My sister and her husband would use up all of her money (my mom would allow her to use her card to go buy groceries for the house etc) and leave her without anything to pay for the bills. This is why I left everything to come back home and kick them out and help my mother with her debt. Now as much as I love my mom, she isnt the easiest to live with. Very judgemental of others and needy in the sense of I cook, I clean, I wash clothes and renovate and work and make her coffee and get her whatever else she needs. She washes dishes and feeds the dogs at most. Lately I've been slacking a lot. That may be awful. I wash clothes and cook still but I'm becoming irate and burtn out. Today we were going to make dinner together- fish and salad- and I was making a salad for her and one for me and she came in and started making remarks like "I guess I'm just having a salad tonight" and "you've been in here too long" because she didnt like that it took me 30 minutes to cut up all the ingredients and run back and forth for her to try and see if she liked the dressing and stuff I was making. I'm not sure if I'm being mean or if she's really just ungrateful. I get an earful when I dont do what she wants me to. Shed get annoyed if i wanted to take an hour and a half to workout when i first wake up instead of doing all the house chores...she really.is driving me insane. Should I just say screw it and leave? Am I the asshole? Dont get me wrong, I love my mother. I just lost my job because my car broke down. I lost everything moving back home and she gets pissed whenever I bring it up. I just feel like I'm stretching myself thin. I can't go to school because I cant afford it. The house has no flooring, the roof needs to be fixed, the vents need to be cleaned out...and she expects ke to do most of it. She calls me a narcissist when I talk about my future or ask her about my looks or compare them to what I think I'd look like if I tried. I just don't know if I'm really actually a narcissist or if she is or what...there's a lot of bad history of when I was in foster care for a time and a bf she had when I was 9 who was a convicted paedophile. I'm just not sure what to think or do anymore. She has helped me in some ways and I have some good childhood memories. Sorry I'm rambling now. But thanks to those who've made it this far. Any advice would be great.

My mom is old school. She even still has a house phone. We struggle with bills every month. Once in awhile the Dish service gets shut off due to late payments. She has a monthly income and when she can she will slap down a huge stack of cash to get the service turned back on.
Here's the thing. Despite her being reluctant to try new things like Smart TVs and apps (such as Netflix, Hulu, Disney+), she's actually got the hang of it. She uses apps and watches antenna TV in order to see her favorite shows all the time. But for some reason she won't let Dish go. I have no idea why, except that we've always had cable/satellite so maybe that's her mindset? Also she loves the DVR feature (despite not watching any of tons of stuff she's recorded).
Please help me find a way to get her away from Dish. She doesn't really need it and hardly anyone in the house uses it much either.