The Body On the Ceiling

At night I wake up to a disfigured body on my ceiling. I'm awakened by a faint struggling breath, and unable to move; my body paralyzed and so vulnerable. Then there I see it, looming on the ceiling above me. It seems like something I'm not supposed to see, but I see it every night. Once I see it, the moment only lasts about less than a minute before I fall back to sleep, but it feels like an eternity being paralyzed and scared. I never remember falling back to sleep. I just see it for a bit then eventually go unconscious.

The body blends with the darkness that fills the room. Barely visible. I see just its twisted silhouette, its limbs bent in bone breaking ways. I can never see the body's face but I know it’s looking at me. I know it’s facing me by watching its chest slowly push out and shrink back as it lets out raspy breaths that echo throughout the room. It’s chest is the only movement I ever see from it.

If you were to walk into the dark room you'd never see it unless you looked for it. During the day I can hear creaking in my walls. I think that's where it lives, crawling in my walls and only coming out at night to observe its prey when it’s defenseless.

Someday I’m going to die. I will be killed. Someday the lifeless body will drop to the floor like dead weight making a loud thump that awakes me, but this time I will see nothing on my ceiling. That will be the moment I know I’m going to die. I will die a horrible death, fully conscious of my state but my body paralyzed unable to move no matter how much I resist. I will only be able to push out struggling groans of fear and discomfort.

-

The night has come, I’m awakened by a loud thump. My body feels tight and I’m unable to move. I scan the room, my eyes flicking in every direction in panic but I see nothing. Then I hear faint breaths. Listening closely I can hear the breaths coming from the front of my bed where my feet lay. I stare at the tips of my toes because that’s as far as my eyes can reach. Nothing is there yet, it must still be laying on the floor. I wait, my anxiety increasing as time goes. My teeth clench and my heart bangs against my chest as I hyperventilate.

Then I hear something that makes me hold my breath. I heard something crack. I listen, but now it’s pitch quiet all I hear is my heartbeat throbbing in my ears. Suddenly cracking sounds shoot throughout the room rapidly. I’m sure it’s the only sound in the universe right now. The disfigured body begins to rise, cracking its bones as it does. I see one arm rise up then clamp between my feet. Its arm alone is so terrifying that in distraught I immediately squeeze my eyes shut and pray. I keep them close as I feel the weight of the body push down on the mattress as it climbs onto the bed.

As it climbs onto the bed and over my body towards my face I feel different spots of the mattress dip and sink and hear the popping of bones. Sometimes its skin brushes against mine, and it is so rough and cold that it stings. My eyes still squeezed shut but I can feel its presence hovering over me. I can feel that I’m face to face with it now; too terrified to open my eyes to see what’s before me. I know that it’s looking right at me, it's eyes only centimeters from mine. I cringe and whimper, feeling it so close to me.

Suddenly I feel its hand tightly grasp my face, it's cold fingers reaching the ends of my face for a firm grip. It then yanks me off my bed and drags me on the floor till it slams me against the wall, all while still holding my face. It hurts but I scream more in fear than I do in pain. I finally open my eyes in shock but my vision is limited to the gaps between its fingers. Through its fingers I only see glimpses of my dark room. With my torso up against the wall I try to catch my breath as the world feels frozen, before I can, I am jerked up on the wall as it climbs on the wall like a spider, taking me with it. I feel the back of my body rub against the wall and watch the floor under me get lower and lower as I’m dragged higher. I hear its limbs quickly pat against the walls and make thumps that echo through the hollow walls as it climbs up dragging me by the face. Before I know it my body is dangling in the air, only held up by the tight grip its hands have on my face. The body has climbed up all the way back onto the ceiling. I get a sense of vertigo feeling my body dangle and seeing the floor far below me.

Then I feel my body fall and shoot right back up, my head is slammed into the ceiling. The body is using my head to bash open a hole in the ceiling. My skull suffers repeated blows with each blow splatting blood on the ceiling and dripping onto the floor. Finally with a hole big enough I’m entirely shoved into the hole. My body is squeezed into a tight suffocating area in the ceiling like a cocoon. Laying on my side, barely conscious, I feel my blood travel on my forehead and drip off. I begin to sweat from how hot it is because of the lack of air circulation. My breaths sound like the loudest thing in the world as I struggle for air, and heat of each breath slaps my face with each exhale.

With my consciousness hanging by a thread I use the last of it to focus my blurry vision on a figure in front of me. My heart beats faster and faster as my eyes begin to focus on what's in front of me, a rotting corpse with no eyes in its sockets and its mouth gaping open at me, and past that corpse is many more rotting bodies all aligned in a row. I feel sick thinking about how I once ate in a place with so much death above me. The rotting corpse in front of me has a face of terror and horror. This is the only thing I’ll see till I die. I’m so frightened, I begin to lose my mind, I’m going to die a madman. Burning anger and insanity takes over me, seeing nothing but death staring straight at me drives me off the edge. My own tears begin to swallow my vision. I can’t stand it, from deep within my throat I let out a loud long scream that hurts, “KILLLLL MEEEEEEE”.

Just when I thought that scream would take the last of me and I would finally die, I hear the cracking from the disfigured thing again. It’s crushing itself to fit into the hole and crawl to me; louder and louder the snapping bones get as it gets near. Praying won’t save me from what’s about to happen next. Petrified I watch, as a blurry hand reaches for my eyes. One at a time it digs its cold fingers into my eyes and rips them out. Cables that were once connected to my eye to transmit signals to my brain pop out my sockets and lay out across my face. I scream in pain and terror as I feel my insides lay against my face and the blood pour out my sockets. With no sight, just imagining how I look is traumatizing. I know I look more horrifying than the corpse that lies in front of me now. I can’t stop screaming, my mind and body cringe at everything I physically feel and imagine.

Agony filled time passes and the fire in my mind eventually burns out and I begin to lose myself, once madness is gone, then there is nothing. With no sight, I’m trapped in the darkness of my own mind. I will lose myself. My soul won’t know where to go and it will be trapped in my body. I’m going to die inhuman. I’ve become less than dirt.