The Night Stalker: by Robert Bryndza

Author:Robert Bryndza
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781786810052
Publisher: Bookouture
Published: 2016-06-02T07:00:00+00:00

39

Simone arrived home after a long shift at work and closed the front door, drinking in the silence in the gloomy hallway. Sloughing off her coat, she went to her computer, which was tucked into the nook under the stairs. She booted it up, logged into the chat room and started to type:

NIGHT OWL: Hey, Duke. U there?

A few moments passed, and DUKE began to type.

DUKE: Hey, Night Owl. What’s up?

NIGHT OWL: I saw him again. Stan. My husband.

DUKE: Yeah? You okay?

NIGHT OWL: Not really. I knew he wasn’t real, but he was there, as real as anything.

DUKE: Did you start the new meds?

NIGHT OWL: Yeah.

DUKE: Which one?

NIGHT OWL: Halcion.

DUKE: What’s ur dosage? 0.125 mg?

NIGHT OWL: Yeah.

DUKE: Visual disturbances are a side effect.

NIGHT OWL: Tell me about it!

DUKE: I’ve been there, done that. They took me up to 0.5 mg and it still did nothing: endless days of no sleep… So what u up 2?

Simone stared at the screen. It blurred slightly and she rubbed at her tired, scratchy eyes. She’d suffered from insomnia for years. It stemmed from when she’d been taken into care, when she’d been afraid to close her eyes after being put to bed at night in the children’s home.

Over the following years, twenty and counting, she had learned to cope with the insomnia, to cope with the feeling of numb exhaustion, the feeling that her body was slowly rotting from the inside. She had learned to function as a normal human being.

She craved sleep – it occupied her thoughts constantly – but when it came to bedtime, a phrase that seemed like a bad joke whenever she heard it, her body went into a cold panic. Panic at the knowledge that sleep would be out of her grasp, that she would spend endless hours lying in bed watching the red glow of the digital clock, thoughts spinning wildly out of control in her mind.

Fear, Simone knew, was particularly prevalent at night. When everyone else seems to have departed the world, the insomniacs are alone, stranded in the half-light. Simone’s insomnia had guided her into an abusive relationship and an unplanned pregnancy. She’d lost the baby soon after her shotgun wedding to Stan. It was ordinary, the doctor had said. Extremely common to lose the baby the first time you become pregnant. But it hadn’t felt ordinary. She’d been devastated. She had thought her life was finally coming right, and she’d been so excited to meet and care for the little life growing inside her.

As a newly-wed, Simone had thought that sharing a bed might help her insomnia, but again she found herself staring into the darkness. She would watch Stan as he moved through the stages of sleep: the gentle rise and fall of his broad chest, the twitch of his eyelids as his eyes flitted underneath.

Sometimes, without warning, the rhythm of Stan’s laboured breathing would break, and his eyes would open with a hungry, vacant stare. And then, at the time of night when

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