At Sunrise

It rattles, like a tin can with only one item held inside. Leave it be. He buries his head a little farther beneath the blankets. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to remember the words to The Lord’s Prayer, which he spoke so many times in the past without conscious effort on all those Sundays when his grandparents took him to church, always casting a disapproving glare at his parents and their refusal to join. He remembers the glare his mom would cast from the alcove window as her own parents pulled out of the driveway with him in their car on their way to St. Vincent’s parish.

“Our Father, who art in Heaven,” he says in no more than a whisper, feeling the tears start to leak onto his cheeks. “Hallowed be they name.”

He hears the ticking of a grandfather clock he knows they don’t own. Mom checked and double-checked under the bed and in his closet in-between her strained words of assurance that there is no reason for him to be afraid. She says that there’s nothing there except toys and clothes, but he knows better because he’s seen the things there. He’s seen them when they come out in the middle of the night and keep him still, too afraid to move beyond his bed and the blankets he pulls over himself that he knows won’t protect him.

“Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done,” he says, stuttering out the words now and panicking as he forgets the next lines. His grandparents told him so many times not to wear a rosary, it’s improper, but maybe he can hide the one his grandpa gave him under his pillow. The one with the blue beads and silver crucifix because grandpa listened and knew his favorite color. He wouldn’t be wearing it that way. That would make it okay, right?

He catches a whiff of Nana’s perfume, overwhelmingly floral since she always used one more spritz for good measure, even when she felt she applied enough. For a moment, he basks in the nostalgia. Remembering how she filled the bowl on her coffee table with his favorite candies and how she made sure that the Christmas lights he loved to see were put up early every year so he had more chances to look at them. Until she passed last year, almost an exact six months after his grandpa.

Then it’s gone, and the warmth the scent brought fades with it. Not a guardian angel, just a fragment of memory that can’t save him.

From under his bed, twisting tendrils of shadows rise up, somehow darker than the pitch blackness around them. They reach toward him with thin, skeletal fingers, and he knows without knowing how that they want to drag him under his bed with them. They want to make him part of the nightmare from which they were born.

His breathing speeds up until his lungs hurt and his head feels light. The room spins. He wishes he would pass out. Mom says there’s nothing to be afraid of here, but she’s wrong. Church always said that a prayer helps keep bad things away and protects the faithful, but he prays and doesn’t see the shadows leave, nor does he feel anymore protected from them.

The rattling starts again, louder this time. Where is it? What is it? No matter how many times he hears the sound, he can’t understand where it comes from or what causes it. He thinks that it might be better he doesn’t know, but curiosity is a strong, strange thing.

The clock strikes again, louder. Every tick and every tock send a reverberating shiver down his bones like they’re tuning forks.

He starts his prayer from the beginning. He’s forgotten where he’s left off. “Our Father, who art in Heaven.”

He should go to his parents’ room and tell them, Look. I wasn’t making it up. There’s something here at night. But his legs won’t work, and he’s not sure he has the courage to leave his bed even if they did.

So, he stays in his cloth cocoon and forgets his prayer to God.

He prays to the Sun instead.

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He grows up trapped in a cycle. Every morning brings relief, and he releases a breath he feels he’s held all night once light filters through his sheer blue curtains. Every night, his courage slips away with the Sun as it dips below the horizon, allowing darkness to reign once again.

His parents remain unconcerned. Their dismissals evolve from childhood imagination to stress, anxiety, and recommendations that he shouldn’t eat so late at night (he doesn’t). Sometimes people get nightmares, his mom says. Sometimes certain people have nightmares more often than others, she says. His medication says it can cause vivid dreams.

Does he have to take it?

Yes, she says. You’re sick and the medicine helps you.

He doesn’t feel sick.

Because you’ve always been sick. You don’t know what it’s like to feel healthy.

He can’t dispute that. He can’t remember a time when he wasn’t forced to take medication every night before bed.

His dad, hidden behind the day’s newspaper, keeps his silence between breathy chuckles as he reads the obituaries. He used to try to be comforting when he was a kid, but he’s given up. If he says anything, it’s that he needs to grow up and find whatever scraps of courage he might have hidden away.

He tries not to fall asleep at the table, and his dad slides his cup of coffee towards him. Black and bitter.

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The sleepwalking starts in his teen years, and makes him glad that homeschooling has evolved into online schooling. He can get a little bit of sleep in the morning, when the light protects him, and not worry about being late to class. As long as he finishes the proper modules before Sunday night each week, he can do his school work whenever. He shuffles out the back door of the house more nights than he spends inside it, huddled under his blankets.

The night chill doesn’t bite his skin in the same way it would if he were awake. He feels like he’s moving underwater. Even in darkness, the woods behind his house emit an ethereal light that draws him in and shows him the way to an unknown destination. Distant awareness has him watching his journey like he’s riding shotgun.

Shadows on the ground rise up and swipe at him. They try to encase him like back in his bedroom and drag him into a world where light cannot save him from the nightmares, but the fear is replaced with numbness. It doesn’t stop his heart from beating like a hummingbird’s, but he feels that he can distance himself from the source of his physical fear.

Then, he jolts awake like his puppeteer jerks his strings and sends his limbs into a flurry of artless motion with the Lord’s Prayer on his lips. He twists and falls to the ground from his bed in a tangle of blankets, grabbing for the rosary tucked under his pillow. But his feet sting when they make contact with the floor as he kicks his blankets away.

They’re covered in dirt and small cuts. He shows his mom and tries to explain that he remembers walking out behind their house, but he thought it was just a dream.

She shakes her head and tries to hide her eye roll, but he sees it.

She says she isn’t sure what she can do about this. Sleepwalking is unpredictable. She doesn’t know what he wants her to do about it.

He isn’t sure either.

She sends him to bed with his pills.

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This night is different. He’s older now, almost considered an adult, but that’s not it. Not the chill in the air, that’s the same. Not the shadows that twist around him with each step, those are the same. Years of this strange sleepwalking that he doesn’t understand has left him knowing the woods behind his house almost as well as he knows the interior of his house. His distant consciousness tells him it’s the lights in the woods that are different. It’s the sounds intertwined with nature that aren’t there other nights.

As he trudges closer, he makes out the lights to be torches held deeper in the woods. Their dancing flames are enticing and call him towards them. His mind tells him it’s all a dream. He’ll wake up soon.

The pain that crackles through the sole of his foot when he steps on a rock at the perfectly wrong angle tells him otherwise. There’s a moment of clarity that cuts through him with the pain, clarity that brings all his dulled senses into sharp reality. Voices speaking words he can’t understand. The smell of burning. The exhaustion of disturbed sleep mixed with wakefulness pulling down his body.

And the fear. The familiar fear that’s stalked him since childhood. How many years now? Ten? More? Was there a time he didn’t feel fear? It chills the marrow deep within his bones, and each step becomes more difficult to take as his body tries to pull him forward while his mind tries to hold him still.

One of the torches moves closer to him through the rustling trees, crunching leaves underfoot, until he makes out the shape of a man in a hooded cloak. When the man reaches his hand out, he’s sure that this is Death coming for him.

He tries to take a step backward, to turn around, but the roots of the trees around him slither out of the dirt and wrap themselves around his legs. He pulls at them, but they refuse to budge and keep him still.

Wake up, he begs himself.

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

“Our Father, who art in Heaven…”

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Awareness returns and he jerks his head up only for the back of it to strike something hard. Fresh air assaults his lungs, and he blinks away the blur in his vision.

“Hey, how are you feeling?” his mom asks, tilting his head to the side and brushing his hair away enough to see if there’s a bump. She wears a robe like the one he saw before losing consciousness, but her hood is down.

He recoils from her hands, his own unable to move from their position behind him, tied on the other side of the tree pressing against his back.

“What’s going on?” he asks. “How long was I out?”

His mom cups his face in her hands, smiling.

He doesn’t recognize her. She is undeniably his mom, but there’s something cold about her now. The face is the same, but it isn’t his mom’s. It can’t be. She doesn’t have that darkness in her eyes. The imposter seems unfazed by his questions, that smile sharp enough to cut the ropes if he could snatch it from her face. He tries to think of anything in the past that might have warned him that his parents are crazy, but his panic is taking the lead and muddying his thoughts until the only clear one left is that he has to get out of here. It doesn’t matter where he goes as long as it’s far away.

“So many years in the making,” she says. She laughs a bit and shakes her head. “All those shadows, and you always took your medicine like an obedient boy. Such a trusting son.”

“What’s going on? Mom?”

She isn’t the only enrobed figure in the clearing. Most of the faces he can’t recognize, if only for the fact that they were too shadowed to distinguish, but he wonders. How many people has he encountered somewhere as simple as the grocery store when he was sent to pick up a forgotten odd or end during the last trip, so innocuous, who are present here and taking part in this… this ritual with him at the center?

“Dear, don’t worry about the others,” she says.

He meets his dad’s eyes as he takes his hood down off his head.

“They aren’t important. Not to you.”

They’re wearing a deep red. It looks like velvet. He doesn’t recognize the symbol embroidered on each chest. Twisting horns or some kind of animal drawn in gold thread. He isn’t certain what to make of the image.

His tongue swells up and he can’t form words, not that his brain can find any fitting to be said.

His dad separates from the others gathered there, approaching him. He can’t hide from this threat, and he knows it isn’t imagined.

He wishes his dad would say something, anything is better than his silence. He sees the knife in his dad’s hand, and he waits for an “I’m sorry” or an “I love you,” but neither leave his dad’s mouth.

When his mom moves away, his dad moves closer and the cold blade of the knife touches his neck. The sting and warm trickle down his skin are enough to let him know that blood has been drawn, but there’s time for his dad to pull away and say that it’s all a joke. Haha, got ya. Should’ve seen your face.

His dad isn’t the joking type. He can remember all the times that his dad has shown that he possesses a sense of humor because they’re so few.

His mom moves to some sort of bench made of sticks and branches woven together in the middle of the clearing, and he can’t identify most of the objects set atop it. She lifts a chalice with symbols he doesn’t understand carved into the ornate outside of the cup and the base looks like it was shaped like the hoof of a goat. She brings it close until it’s almost touching his neck.

He sees his dad take a deep breath and adjust his grip on the knife.

In the east, the soft glow of the Sun peeks above the horizon, spreading light through the woods.