The Twilight Sleep Lab, Part 1
A Horror Short Story in Two Parts
An insomniac undergoes a sleep study, but she doubts a diagnosis will dissuade the things that go bump in the night.
The pavement in the Twilight Sleep Lab’s parking lot twinkled wetly, an inversion of what lay in the night sky somewhere above the blanket of rainclouds. It was nearing ten o’clock, and a handful of cars glistened near the fluorescent entrance of the facility. A slow night: there was only one patient scheduled for a sleep study.
“I hate this,” Lilly breathed for the umpteenth time. She braced herself against the sink in the tiny bathroom and scrutinized her image in the mirror. Her blue, satin nightgown clung to her in every unflattering manner possible, her hair hung limply down to her shoulders, and her bare face was a collection of wrinkles, sagging flesh, and dark eyebags. Getting old isn’t for wimps, she reminded herself.
A knock at the door startled her. “Mrs. Camp?” came a young woman’s voice from the other side. “Is everything alright?”
No, I’m a nightmare creature. “Yes, honey; just getting myself put together.” Lilly tried to straighten up, throwing her shoulders back in mock confidence, but a thrill of pain in her lower back rebuked her. I hate this.
The door clicked and swung open. Lilly shuffled out in measured steps, one hand operating her flower-print cane and the other trailing along the wall. The young technician stepped forward to assist, but Lilly politely waved her off. The last thing I need is to be treated like an invalid.
“You look lovely,” the technician smiled. Long blonde hair pulled back in a high ponytail, a nice figure accentuated in pink scrubs, and brilliant white teeth.
No, you look lovely. I’m giving Medusa a run for her money. “Thank you, dear.” Lilly continued her pilgrimage from the bathroom to the bed in the small, motel-like room. Her chest tightened and her breathing labored, but she concealed as much of it as she could. She plopped gratefully onto the bed’s edge. Hard as a rock, she lamented. How are they going to do a sleep study if I can’t get any sleep?
“Alright, Mrs. Camp, I’m going to apply these sensors.” The technician ignored Lilly’s hitched breathing (bless her for that) and pulled sticky pads from a cart nearby. Long wires connected each of them to a monitor that blinked little colored lights indecipherably. Lilly focused on them while the technician applied the cold pads to various places on her head, face, and body.
The next sensors were a pair of elastic straps to go around the upper and lower chest. The technician said nothing as she loosened the straps considerably before slipping them around Lilly’s torso. “Okay, you can lie back now.”
Easy for you to say. Lilly rolled back and swung her right leg up onto the bed, but she had to assist with pulling the left along after. The bed creaked beneath her as she wriggled further toward the center of the stiff mattress. Her joints screamed in protest, as did her ego. Lilly Louise Camp, you will not cry in this stupid little room in front of this skinny little girl.
“Are you okay?” the technician asked. Lilly was not sure as to which part the technologist was referring, but it did not much matter. Her response would be the same.
“Peachy keen, dear.” Lilly could not conceal the strain in her voice, but the technician moved along with her calibrations. She arranged the final sensor, a breathing monitor, beneath Lilly’s nostrils and patted her on the shoulder. Lilly was sure it was intended to be a comforting move, but it felt perfunctory and patronizing. Like a car salesman patting the hood of a beaten down old junker.
“I hate this.”
“I understand, Mrs. Camp, but these tests will tell us what your brain, heart, lungs, and limbs are doing while you’re asleep.” The technician’s eyes shone with an innocent fervor. She truly believed her little tests could improve a patient like Lilly’s life. She was naïve.
Lilly knew better. Lilly knew she was looking down the barrel of a gun, and each passing year, each new ache or pain, each bad medical exam was the finger slowly squeezing down on the trigger. And why should it not? Everyone had to go eventually.
I’m not afraid to die, Lilly insisted. But does it have to be so morbidly boring? She figured that a quick yet eventful death had to be preferrable to this lingering descent.
“Do I need to do anything special?” Lilly asked.
The technician pulled a blanket up from the foot of the bed to tuck Lilly in. “Just get a good night’s rest.”
“So that’s a ‘yes.’” Lilly firmly took the blanket’s edge from the technician and tucked it around herself, careful to rearrange the mass of cords flowing from her to the nearby machine. “I barely sleep even on a good night.”
“Hopefully, we’ll be able to fix that. Relax and rest, and we will handle everything else.” The technician drifted from the bed and, without warning, flicked out the lights. The last thing Lilly heard of the woman’s departure was the door closing with a thud, like the heavy lid of a vault. Or a tomb. Lilly flinched, more at the thought than the sound.
The darkness hugged around Lilly, suffocating her. Her breathing hitched again, and her eyes darted around futilely. Calm down, old girl, calm down, for cripes’ sake, calm down. Her body quivered with tension, like a cord vibrating from being violently pulled taut. This was going to be a bad night, she was sure.
Her sleep had started its deterioration shortly after her husband passed. She blamed her insomnia on the now empty bed, though it had been functionally empty for nearly a decade before Gregory’s fatal aneurysm. But with or without affection, she had not slept a single night alone from the day she was married to the day she was widowed. In the three years since his death, Lilly had adapted to singleness in all parts of her life but one. Sleep.
Sleep meant rest. It meant recovery from the strains and stresses of the day, a reset and rejuvenation. But it was denied to Lilly like a tantalizing fruit hanging from a branch just out of her reach. A punishment straight out of Tartarus.
An ache across Lilly’s brow made her realize that she was squeezing her eyes shut. She cracked them open with slow reluctance. Her vision adjusted to pick up the texture of the stipple ceiling above her, barely illuminated by the monitor next to the bed and, further away, the sickly yellow light leaking under the door.
Lilly did not lie on her back anymore due to her various pains, so it had been a long time since she had last stared at a popcorn ceiling. It was her own ceiling at home that had worsened this mess from mere insomnia to full night terrors. Inevitably, her brain would try to make sense of the dried polystyrene, and just as inevitably, she would not like what she saw. The vague valleys and peaks of stippling could, should, have created landscapes, fairytale animals, and lovelier images to usher Lilly to sleep. She saw none of those.
She saw faces. Ugly, twisted, ghastly faces covered the ceiling above her. They stared. They leered. Hovering over her, each visage had teeth, so many teeth, and they laughed and growled and hissed, and Lord, oh Lord, they’re coming down, coming down, coming down to meet me, bite me, hurt me, Lord, don’t let them, please don’t let them, pleasepleaseplease-
“Mrs. Camp, are you alright?”
The lights blazed on and the faces retreated.
Lilly choked and sputtered, flailing even as her muscles, joints, and nerves screamed in pain. The little technician rushed to her and, with surprising strength, pulled Lilly around to a seated position on the edge of the bed. The younger woman checked rapidly if the cords or tubes where constricting Lilly, which they were not, and then put her face directly in front of Lilly’s.
“Breathe, Mrs. Camp, you have to breathe!”
“I-I-I,” Lilly gasped, trying and failing to draw enough breath to speak. She instead pointed a flapping hand toward a nearby chair containing her canvas tote bag.
“Do you have an inhaler, Mrs. Camp?” the technician asked without waiting for a response, pawing through the bag until she grasped upon a smooth, gray cylinder. She expertly took Lilly by the nape, pressed the inhaler to her lips, and directed, “Suck in, Mrs. Camp.” As she depressed the top of the device and Lilly desperately wheezed, a spray of albuterol flew into Lilly’s airways.
The results were not as immediate as either woman would have preferred. Still, Lilly’s breathing slowly recovered from a restricted whine to a shallow shudder and then to a somewhat acceptable gasp. The whole while, the technician stood next to her and repeatedly patted her hand. Lilly felt the move was doing more to comfort the girl than herself.
“You gave us quite a scare, Mrs. Camp.”
A hundred different quips came to Lilly’s mind, but she could not bring herself to attempt conversation. Instead, she pulled her hand away from the girl and gestured that she was ready to lie back down.
“Are you sure, Mrs. Camp? You just had a pretty nasty asthma attack—”
Lilly attempted a laugh but instead produced a phlegmy cough. “That was nothing. Believe it or not, it’s an improvement over what I had during COVID.” She hauled herself back into the bed, allowing the technician to fuss with the monitoring apparatuses, but a glance at the ceiling gave her pause. “Can I lie on my side? That’s… more comfortable for me.”
“Absolutely, Mrs. Camp,” the technician replied perkily. For a young woman who had just been near panicked by Lilly’s condition, she had resumed her sunny optimism more quickly than Lilly thought appropriate. “Just get in a position that is comfortable for you, and I’ll rearrange the cords as necessary.”
A moment later, Lilly had found a position that hurt less than the alternatives (and kept her gaze away from the stippling). The technician offered another round of pleasantries before sashaying away. The room plunged once more into darkness upon her exit.
Round two.
Lilly enjoyed a passing relief that she was now staring at a blank white wall. Sterile and featureless. This was good. The faces on the ceiling could not get her if she did not look at them. It was a rule she had discovered (yes, discovered, not invented, she was sure), like the childish rule of a blanket around your feet keeping the creature under the bed at bay.
However, the faces were not her only nightly visitors.
There was also the thing made of sound. She knew it as a singular creature that cloaked itself in benign noises, individually easy to explain away but collectively the sign of a predator. A distant pop and the creaking of floorboards (just the house settling). Skittering across the roof (just a squirrel or a racoon). A tapping at her window (just the old, overgrown cherry tree; I oughtta get someone to trim it back).
Then, after giving her time to dismiss the creeping paranoia, the thing of sound would close in on her. A long, wet, guttural rasp that came just at the moment she was about to nod off to jolt her awake in cold terror.
But that was at home, in the old house she had shared with Gregory for over twenty years. What would the creature sound like in the Twilight Sleep Lab? Would it come in the form of soft footsteps down the hall (just the staff doing rounds)? The distant ring of a telephone (just a patient calling in the middle of the night)? The barely perceptible whine of the equipment strapped to Lilly herself (just electric currents from these fancy machines, surely meant to help instead of harm)?
Lilly’s heart thrummed in her ears. Her eyes were squeezed shut again. The acrid taste of albuterol and toothpaste lingered on her tongue. If you’re going to do it, hurry up and do it.
The thing of sound acquiesced.
A gurgling gasp flowed into her ear, but for the first time, she felt its hot breath roil across her cheek.
The lights were on again before Lilly realized she was screaming.
to be continued…
I really enjoyed this. Great start and the cliffhanger left me needing more.