The Drowsy Page

I was eight when the malaise took hold, or perhaps nine—memory is a fog around those days. We lived in a rented cottage on the edge of the Paskagama bog, where the air smelled of peat and wet rot, and the nearest neighbor was a quarter mile down a dirt road. My mother, a devout woman, had decided that summer I would read the Good Book aloud each evening, to strengthen my soul against the ‘worldly whispers’ she feared. But the moment I opened the worn leather cover, a heaviness would settle behind my eyes, like a warm blanket soaked in lead. I would read a verse, then another, but my tongue would thicken, words slurring into a meaningless hum. My mother would shake me, her face tight with worry, and say, ‘It is the shadow of disbelief, child. Push through.’ I didn’t believe her; I thought it was just the stuffy heat of the room, the drone of flies at the window.

Then the dreams began. Not nightmares, but a thick, suffocating stillness where I stood in a field of waist-high, gray grass under a sky the color of bruise. In the distance, a figure—tall, impossibly thin, with arms that hung past its knees—stood motionless. It never moved, but with each dream, it was closer. I told my mother about the dreams, but she dismissed them, saying it was the devil’s attempt to lure me from scripture. She began to insist I read longer, even as the drowsiness turned to a near-paralysis. I remember one evening, mid-sentence in the Book of Job, my vision swam, and the next thing I knew, I was standing in the kitchen, the refrigerator door open, cold air washing over me, and a knife in my hand. My mother stood in the doorway, her face pale, and she whispered, ‘What are you doing?’ I had no memory of walking there.

Night after night, the sleepwalking grew more elaborate. My parents would find me in the backyard, standing at the edge of the bog, staring into the black water, my lips moving in a silent mantra. Once, I had scratched strange symbols into the kitchen table with a fork. My father, a practical man who scoffed at superstition, finally nailed my bedroom window shut and locked my door from the outside. But the worst was yet to come.

One morning, I woke in my bed, the sheets soaked with sweat, and a foul taste in my mouth—like mud and copper. My mother was sitting on the edge of the mattress, her eyes red-rimmed. She held up my hands. My fingernails were caked with dark soil, and there were deep scratches on my forearms. ‘You were digging,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘In the bog. I followed you. You were digging with your bare hands. There was something in the water, a shape, and you were crying and saying, ‘I will find you.’ She wouldn’t tell me what she saw, but from that day, she stopped making me read the Bible. Instead, she began to pray over me as I slept, sprinkling holy water on my forehead. But the heaviness did not lift. Instead, it shifted. I began to feel a presence in every room, a cold spot in the corner of my eye, a sense of being watched by something that was patient and ancient.

The climax came on a Sunday, the day of the harvest moon. My parents had gone to the early service, leaving me with my grandmother, a frail woman who dozed in her armchair. I was sitting on the floor of the living room, trying to read a comic book, when the drowsiness hit like a wave. I fought it, but my eyelids were like stones. I remember the room growing dim, the sunlight filtering through the curtains as if through dark water. Then, the sensation of my body moving on its own, as if I were a puppet. I rose, walked to the kitchen, and took the butcher knife from the block. I could see myself, but from a distance, as if I were watching a movie. I walked to the back door, unlocked it, and stepped out into the yard. The bog was a flat, black mirror under the full moon. I walked toward it, the blade glinting.

I stopped at the water’s edge. The figure from my dreams was there, but now it was solid, dripping with slime, its head cocked at an unnatural angle. It spoke, but not with a voice—it was a vibration in my skull, a feeling of hunger and recognition. ‘You opened the page,’ it seemed to say. ‘You read the words. You are the key.’ And I raised the knife, not toward it, but toward my own chest.

The next thing I remember is waking up on the kitchen floor, my mother’s face hovering over me, her hands pressing a towel to my sternum. There was blood, but the wound was shallow—she had come home early, misplacing her rosary, and found me just in time. The knife had nicked my collarbone. I was rushed to the hospital, and after a battery of tests, they found nothing physically wrong. But the sleepwalking stopped that night, and never returned. Yet, I have never been able to read the Bible since. The very sight of a black leather cover makes me dizzy. And sometimes, when the moon is full and I look out at a dark body of water, I see the figure standing at the edge, and I feel that pull, that drowsiness, like a seductive whisper, urging me to come closer, to finish what I started. I don’t know what it was, but I know it was real. I know because my mother saw it too, and she never spoke of it again, not even on her deathbed. The last thing she said to me, though, was not ‘I love you.’ It was ‘Don’t read those pages again.’ And I never have.