The Gravity of Sleep

In the autumn of 2014, I was housesitting for my cousin in a remote farmhouse in the Welsh hills. The nearest village was six miles away, and the only sounds at night were the wind and the creaking of old timber. I turned in around midnight on the 14th of October, after a long drive and a solitary dinner.

I don’t know what woke me. The room was absolute pitch, the kind of black that presses on your eyes. The air was cold, unnaturally so, as if the window had been left open to a winter storm, but I knew I’d sealed it. My legs were freezing, a deep ache that clawed up from my toes to my thighs. I tried to sit up, but my body wouldn’t obey. My torso twisted, my head angled as if being pulled toward the door, while my legs felt propped up, dangling over the edge.

My arms were free, though. I swept them across the bed, searching for the duvet, but found it bunched around my hips. The cold intensified, as if I were lying in a pool of ice water. Panic rose, but my breath was slow, controlled, as if my lungs were not my own. I heard a faint sound, like the rustling of dry leaves, coming from the corner of the room.

I strained to see, but there was nothing. Then, I felt a pressure on my ankles, like hands gripping, but they were ice cold. A voice, barely a murmur, whispered from the darkness: ‘You’re not meant to be here.’ The grip tightened, and I felt myself being dragged, inch by inch, toward the edge. I clawed at the sheets, but my arms were useless, heavy as lead.

Then it stopped. The pressure vanished, the cold receded, and I could move again. I shot up, reached for the lamp, and flooded the room with light. The room was empty, but the window was open, and frost had formed on the inside of the glass. On the floor, at the foot of the bed, were two perfect indentations in the dust, shaped like bare feet. But the strangest thing was the clock on the nightstand: it read 3:33 AM, and the date had changed to the 15th, but my phone said it was still the 14th.

I got up, shivering, and closed the window. The house was silent, but I felt a presence, as if something watched me from the shadows. I slept on the sofa after that, with all the lights on. In the morning, I found the bed made, but the sheets were folded into a perfect rectangle, and a single black feather lay on the pillow. I left that day, driving back to the city, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had attached itself to me, a cold weight on my back that would return when I least expected it.