The Leech of the Walled Garden

It was the dead hour, the cellular purgatory between three and four in the morning, when the old farmhouse seemed to breathe. I lay on my side, facing the wall of the guest bedroom, the wallpaper’s faded cabbage roses barely visible in the sliver of moonlight that slipped through the warped shutters. The house, inherited from a great-aunt I barely remembered, groaned with the usual settlement, but tonight there was a certain rhythm to it, a syncopation that put my teeth on edge.

I’d woken, or rather, found myself trapped in that cruel paralysis, my limbs pinned by an invisible weight, my lungs working but each breath feeling borrowed. I was a prisoner in my own body, and the familiar panic began to rise. But I’d read about this, about the ones who chose to remain, to observe. So I forced my mind to still, my eyes sealed shut, and I decided to endure. I would not open my eyes. I would simply watch the void behind my lids.

The air turned cold, a sharp drop that smelled of cold iron and damp earth, like the cellar door had been left ajar, but it was the pressure that came first. A force, heavy and patient, settled onto my right side, exactly where I lay, crushing the mattress beneath it. It wasn’t a hand, but a presence, a heavy cloak of wrongness that pressed me deeper into the bed. Then, the sensation began at my ribs, just under my arm: a slow, rhythmic pulling. Each pull was a siphon, and with each one, I felt a piece of myself—something that was neither air nor blood, but a humming, electric liquidity—being drawn out through my skin. It was the color of static, the taste of burnt lemon, and it hurt in a way that was both physical and spiritual.

I tried to scream, to bite down, but my jaws were locked. Tears leaked from my sealed eyes, hot and useless. The creature, if I could call it that, was not visible, but I could perceive its satisfaction, a ghastly contentment that it was feasting on my most vital essence. Each slurp was a small death, a dimming of a light I hadn’t realized was inside me. And then, just as suddenly as it had come, the pressure lifted. I felt it recede like a tide, and with it, the room returned to its normal temperature, the groaning of the house resuming its mundane chatter.

I managed to force my eyes open, the paralysis finally breaking like a fragile sea-ice. The room was empty, of course. But I was drenched in a cold sweat, my entire right side ached with a deep, bruising soreness, and I felt hollowed out, as if I’d given blood, or worse. This wasn’t my first encounter. A year ago, in a cramped apartment in the city, I’d had a similar visitation while lying on my back. That time, the sucking came from my solar plexus, and as it drained me, I felt a buoyancy, a sickening float that lifted me an inch off the mattress, as if I were the last dregs of a drink being drawn up a straw.

I had documented both occurrences in my journal, trying to find a pattern, a meaning. But tonight, as I sat up in the unfamiliar bed of my aunt’s rambling estate, I realized something else. My great-aunt had kept a garden. A walled garden, they said, that she had forbidden anyone from entering after her husband died. In the attic, I had found a box of her things, including a book of pressed flowers, each one labeled with dates and strange, geometric symbols. I hadn’t thought much of it then. But now, I felt a pull, a direction.

I rose, my legs unsteady, and padded through the dark hallway, down the creaking stairs, and to the back door. The key was in the lock, rusted but functional. Outside, the moon was low, casting long shadows across the lawn. The walled garden stood at the far edge, its bricks covered in ivy, its wrought-iron gate locked with a chain and a heavy padlock. But as I approached, I saw that the chain was slack, the padlock hanging open.

I knew I shouldn’t enter. Every fiber of my being screamed at me to return to my room and pull the covers over my head. But I was drawn, as if by that same siphoning force, now reversed. My hand reached out, my fingers wrapping around the cold iron of the gate. With a creak, it swung open, revealing a path overgrown with weeds, leading to a central stone bench.

And on that bench, in the moonlight, sat a figure. It was not a human figure, but something that hunched and shimmered, like heat mirage given form. Around it, the garden was a riot of strange flora, all facing the figure, as if paying homage. I felt the pull again, a tug at my very core. And I knew, with a terrible clarity, that the garden was not a garden in the soil, but in the soul. And I had just become its newest bloom. I wanted to flee, but my feet carried me forward, and I could feel the same cold pressure beginning to gather at my side, ready to slurp again. But this time, I had walked in willing, and the darkness in the garden seeped into me, not as an energy thief, but as a seed. I sat down on the path, as the figure on the bench finally turned its head, and its face, or what passed for it, was my own.

I know this happened because I wrote it down, in the small leather journal I keep in the locked drawer of my desk, the one with the pages that smell of copper and burnt sugar. I’m writing this now, in the early hours of the morning, from my bed in the farmhouse. The sun is about to rise, and the paralysis is gone. But I can feel it, the tiny root that has taken hold inside me, and the garden outside is growing a little greener every day. I don’t think I will leave this place. I belong here now. I am part of the wall, the gate, the night. And sometimes, in the dead hours, I go to the garden, and I sit on the bench, and I wait for the next visitor to come through the gate. And I watch as the pull begins to work on them, and I smile with my borrowed face. There is a certain satisfaction in it, a terrible contentedness. I have learned, you see, that the slurping is not theft. It is a transplant. And I, the unwilling host, have become the gardener.