MeSH

The devil lay on my back.
The weight pinned me down like nails on wood and my neck twitched as I tried to raise my eyelids. No chance, they were sewn shut for the time being.
The bed sheets were crumpled around me and a little man, to be politically correct, entered from the crack under my door in a tailcoat and a superb red shirt. His shoes were pointed like the aggressive branches of bare winter trees.
He was old, well, he was old compared to youth. His grin looked like that of a circus ring-master and his cane pointed in my face.
The shiny end of that cane was the only thing in that room that was glinting positively. The rest of the room suffocated under a heavy cloud of shadow, which subtly consumed the corners of the square I was in.
He was talking to me but someone had pressed mute on a great remote control and no sound escaped from his thin lips.
He was sucked back into the crack under that door.

I jumped up and slept with my lamp on for the rest of the night.

The following night a hag sat on my chest.
It was an aged Patti Smith. Maybe.
I shuddered, my neck twitched so much it was bent out of shape. Bones shot out of newly ripped orifices above my shoulders.
REM wouldn't let go of me yet.
The hag cranked open my mouth with long nails and slowly pushed four bony discoloured fingers down my throat.
I choked, I couldn’t open my eyes, wiggle my fingers or move my head but I could choked.
I was drenched in panic.
My spirit darted from every corner of the lazy entity that is my body in an attempt to make that entity move. It didn’t, I was a statue of myself.
After an episode of gasping for breath and writing a mental guest list to my funeral, the incubi’s artwork fractured and my eyelids flickered open.

The hag left me alone when I turned the light on.

An army of uninvited demonic souls once welcomed themselves into my attic bedroom.
I lay in the centre while they sat around me talking over one another about the best plan for my vulnerable demise.
I was still enough to be buried already. Soil was already in my throat. Worms were already squirming through me.
The sounds of their voices emulated those of my friends and their laughter whipped up a hurricane which crashed into my bedroom and lifted me from beneath my bed sheets.
Before I knew it I was tumbling towards the ceiling but I was frozen solid so I could not stop myself.
They sounded like my friends but they never reached out with their black grasping claws to hold me from my close collision.
The roof became a Night Fever dance floor and I was still being hurled towards it when a hooded figure crept up behind me and sliced me in two.
I felt a rush of blood spilling from my sides. Nothing has ever felt so side-splittingly funny and I didn’t even laugh.
Again, the spirit that is caught in the snare of this human jail rattled the bars on the cage, but only my neck knew this – twitching - I never made a sound.

People wonder why I hate to sleep.