The Auctioneer’s Lullaby

Mara had always been a light sleeper, but the summer she house-sat for her aunt in the remote town of Cold Creek, her nights turned into a battlefield. The house itself was a relic of the 1920s, all dark wood and creaking floors, perched on a bluff overlooking a river that seemed to swallow sound. It was too quiet, the kind of silence that pressed against your eardrums. And then, the voice began.

It started as a whisper, barely a breath against her ear, calling her name. ‘Mara… Mara…’ It was soft, almost tender, like a mother coaxing a child. She would jolt awake, heart pounding, but the room was empty. It happened every night, at the edge of sleep, when her body was heavy and her mind was slipping. She told herself it was exhaustion, the stress of her doctoral thesis on local folklore. But the voice grew insistent, and with it came a strange weight, as if an invisible presence lay on her chest, pressing the breath from her lungs.

The nights blurred into a haze of sleeplessness and that terrible lullaby. She would lie frozen, eyes open, watching the digital clock on the nightstand tick from 12:00 to 12:01, and she would feel herself growing weaker, as if the voice was siphoning her life. She tried to scream, but her throat was locked. She tried to move, but her limbs were stone. It was a prison of her own body, and the only escape was to surrender to the drowsiness that pulled at her like a tide.

One night, a week into her stay, she woke not to the whisper, but to a sound like the popping of a string on an old violin. Her grandmother’s music box, sitting on the dresser, had opened on its own. Its tiny ballerina spun in a dying circle, and the rusted melody of ‘Für Elise’ tinkled out, warped and sluggish. The voice spoke then, not a whisper but a low, gravelly hum, and it said, ‘The auction is tomorrow. You’ll bring a good price.’

Mara’s blood ran cold. The town had a history, she’d read, of ‘Sleep Auctions’ in the 1800s—a practice where the deepest sleepers were sold, their consciousnesses bartered like cattle to those who wanted to live out unattainable dreams. She had thought it was a myth, a cautionary tale for children. But now, she felt the truth of it in the way her own name was called like a chant, in the way her energy drained each night, in the way her dreams were becoming someone else’s.

The next day, she tried to leave. But her car wouldn’t start, and the landline was dead. The town’s only mechanic, an old man with clouded eyes, just smiled and said, ‘The river’s high tonight. You’ll stay for the auction.’ She returned to the house, and that night, the voice was not just in her ear—it was inside her skull, a pressure behind her eyes. She saw flashes of figures in Victorian clothing, standing at a podium, holding gavels. And she saw herself, standing on a block, while a crowd of pale faces bid.

She fought. She tried to stay awake, drinking coffee until her hands shook, but her eyelids were lead. The drowsiness was a drug, sweet and inescapable. As she felt herself drifting, she saw her own reflection in the dark window, and it was not her own. It was a gaunt, hollow-eyed version of her, smiling a lopsided smile. It raised a hand and waved. ‘Time to wake up,’ the reflection said, and Mara realized with horror that she was already asleep.

She snapped awake to the smell of dust and old paper. She was in the town’s abandoned opera house, which had been converted into a makeshift auction hall. Rows of wooden chairs faced a stage where a gilded podium stood. On the podium, a man in a top hat, his face hidden, raised a gavel. ‘Item number 23: a fresh mind, untainted by the waking world. Do I have a bid?’

Mara tried to run, but her body moved without her consent. She walked to the stage, climbed the steps, and stood on a small platform. She could see the bidders now—they were the townspeople she had seen, but their eyes were wrong, black and pupil-less. They raised paddles with numbers. The auctioneer’s voice chanted, ‘Going once, going twice…’ and then the gavel fell with a sharp crack.

As the gavel struck, empathy surged through Mara, and she felt the world tilt. She was no longer in the opera house but in a field of tall grass under a pale sky. A voice, her own, but distorted, said, ‘This is your new home. You’ll be the dreaming one now.’ And she saw herself from outside, her body walking away with the crowd, leaving her consciousness behind, trapped in an eternal twilight.

She screamed, but no sound came. She tried to wake up, but she was already awake, and this was her world now. As time stretched, she heard the voice again, but now it was calling someone else’s name—a new resident in the old house on the bluff. And she, the auctioneer, would be waiting to give them the same lullaby.