Lights Out

Try as you might, you just can’t stay awake any longer. Your eyelids begin to close all by themselves and the text on the page grows fuzzy. When you realize you’ve read over an entire sentence and remember not a word of it, you decide it’s time for bed.
The usual routines go like clockwork. Wash the hands, brush the teeth (lazily, to preserve that sleepy haze in your brain), swish with mouthwash. Fifteen seconds instead of thirty, like the label says. You don’t care. You’re tired. Spit once, twice. Seems like mouthwash always wants to stay for good. Three times. One last pee before lights out.
Into the bedroom. You dig out your best PJ’s, and clean underwear for sleeping. It’s been really hot all day and the ones you’re wearing have that disgusting moistness to them.
Mom pokes her head in to remind you it’s bedtime, lets out a surprised “Oh” when she sees you’re way ahead of her for once. She gives you a kiss and bids you good night before disappearing down the hall, turning out the bathroom light that you forgot to turn out, yourself.
Dad’s already in bed. Leno delivers his opening monologue from the TV in the folks’ room. He usually konks out before the first commercial break, then the TV will go off and the house will be silent for the night.
All the lights in the house are off except in your bedroom. The street light outside burned out over a year ago and no one’s bothered to fix it, so the neighborhood seems to have vanished into a black void. Somehow it makes the house’s shadows thicker than they ought to be as they creep up the hallway toward your bedroom. You find yourself noticing every night now.
You turn to your bed, eyes instinctively dropping to the dark slit underneath. Except for that blackness, the entire room always looks deceptively cheerful when the light is on. Funny how you used to be scared of the closet when you were five. Dad used to tell you all the time that there was nothing hiding in the closet, and he was right.
You reach for the light switch by the door, eyes still locked on the underside of the bed. Somehow it stares back.
Your hand stops. Better not just yet. You turn on the bedside lamp first, then walk back across the room and flip the light switch. The room dims, but a safe yellow aura envelops the bed.
It’s only three feet to the mattress. Last summer Mom insisted on rearranging the entire house, including your room. The bed used to be tucked snugly in the corner; now it rests near the center of the room, with only the headboard leaning against a wall. Sleeping in it makes you feel exposed. Stepping near the shadow under the bed fills you with the sensation of teetering on the edge of a steep cliff or stepping too close to a lagoon filled with crocodiles. When it was in the corner you could get a full running start and dive under the covers.
You take a step toward the bed, diverting your eyes to the pillows. Don’t acknowledge it. It’s nothing to be afraid of. A figment of your over-active imagination. That’s all.
You clear the next two feet with a graceful bound, landing square on the center of the mattress. Climb under the comforter, tuck the bottom under your feet so there’s no way to reach in. Wrap yourself like a burrito. Nice and cozy. Except now you’re wide awake.
The hum of the air conditioner is a slight comfort. It’s deep and gentle, almost animal-like, and hopefully the only sound you’ll hear tonight. Soothing ambience always helps you get to sleep better.
You have to pee again. Not a lot, but just enough to keep you from falling asleep straight away. It always happens after all the lights are out and you’re neatly tucked into bed, but hours before your eyes have had time to adjust to the darkness.
You could probably leap clear of the bed and make it to the bathroom with little incident, but then you’d have to hope it didn’t decide to follow you. And sometimes it’s not under the bed. Sometimes it’s somewhere else in the house. You hear it wandering around out there on rare occasions, when everyone else is asleep. You almost bumped into it on the way to the kitchen late one night. Since then you’ve never set foot outside the room after bedtime for fear of being ambushed.
You decide to tough it out. You don’t have to pee that bad. Pulling the comforter up to your cheeks, you close your eyes and try to focus on the hum of the air conditioner.
Then it shuts off. The hum dies with a deep sigh and a dull “kathunk”. Silence.
Outside not a single leaf rustles. Your ears don’t even ring from the day’s noise. You start to wish for a car alarm, or a catfight, or the distant blare of a passing train. The house is dead calm. All you can do is lie there, wrapped in the comforter ever-tighter, and try to focus on the darkness behind your eyelids until you pass out.
Maybe you won’t hear it speak if you go to sleep quickly enough. The few times it spoke, it called you by name — it’s known your name from the beginning — and when it was sure you were listening intently, it giggled. Then it was quiet the rest of the night.
It doesn’t stir often enough for you to get used to it. Once or twice every other month. Usually you just hear its voice somewhere in your room, laughing quietly to itself — a soft voice, almost a whisper but not quite. It always sounds like it’s coming from the entire room, but you know its origin is under there, in the shadows. The worst part is its unbearably motherly tone, like its desire to do unspeakable things to you has escalated to adoration.
Just the thought of hearing it talk sends chills up your spine. You pull the comforter over your head, curling into a fetal position, eyes tightly shut.
You’re not sure how long you’ve been lying there, curled into a pitiful and slightly painful little ball. Your joints ache. Has an hour passed? A few minutes? Will daylight never come? You want to peek out of your haven to check the time, but the fear of seeing the thing staring back at you freezes every joint in your body. But if it were standing at the side of the bed just now, watching you, it makes no sense that it would only wait until you’d seen it to pounce on you, and a lot of good the comforter would do for protection.
The house is so deathly silent…maybe a little peek won’t hurt…
Your eyes have fully adjusted to the dark. Peering through a small hole between the covers and the mattress, you can discern every piece of furniture in your room, and every poster on the wall.
The bedside clock reads…eleven-oh-oh. Less than an hour has passed since you went to bed, but it appears you dozed off at some point. The house is just as unnervingly still as it was when you slipped away. Maybe the stillness, itself, jarred you to waking.
No. No, that isn’t it. That isn’t it at all. The house isn’t completely still. Though the floor of your room is draped in blackness as far out as the hallway, you swear you spot a twitch of movement. Sudden and swift, like something darting out of view to avoid detection.
The voice whispers your name. You’re not sure you heard it at first — not because it’s so quiet, but because part of your mind is trying so desperately to shut it out. Your throat seals up. You feel all the blood drain from your face as you pinpoint the source at the foot of the bed.
“The hunger’s too much to bear,” it whispers.
Resistance is beyond you now: terror has taken control of your body. You stare down the comforter toward your feet.
It’s looking at you. Peering over the lumps in the sheets, staring with two sightless slits in a dry, shriveled, hairless head. Its mouth stretches into an insane grin, like those found on the embalmed faces behind museum glass. How long has it been watching you?
You want to scream and pull your feet back from the thing’s horrible face, but your legs ignore the command again and again, even as those ghastly fingers slither onto the mattress and take hold of the right foot. Even as it pulls your foot closer and stuffs it, still wrapped in the comforter, into that gaping, grinning mouth. It has no teeth. It has no teeth but its nails are like razor chisels. It has no teeth so it minces its food by hand.
With a horrified cry you break free of your trance and reel your legs in, ducking under the comforter. You scream again and again, calling for help, but all that comes out is sobbing incoherence. It’s climbing onto the bed now, clawing at the covers, its bony arms reaching inside, searching for something to grab a hold of. It’s going to drag you onto the floor, and from there you daren’t think. You swat its hands away frantically, screaming at the feel of its leathery skin, gagging at the smell of its cold, rancid breath as it whispers in your ears through the comforter, madly repeating with awful glee, “It’s too much to bear! It’s too much to bear!”
Light floods the room. Still sobbing and kicking, you suddenly realize you’re alone on the bed. At the door, Dad stands with his hand on the light switch and a concerned look on his face. He speaks, but what you hear is unintelligible at first.
Your eyes jump from one end of the room to the other. It’s nowhere to be found. Your skin still shudders from its touch, and that graveyard stench still lingers in your nostrils, but the moment you acknowledge either sensation it vanishes.
Dad’s voice draws your attention back to the door. Now Mom is there, too, asking about the noise. The moment Dad mentions bad dreams she’s sitting on the bed with her arms around you, kissing you gently on the head and asking if you’re all right.
You want more than anything to throw your arms around them both and cry. Instead, with a nod and a sniffle you play along, admitting your dreams haven’t shaken you up this badly in a while, but swearing that you’re okay now. Confident they’ve chased the demons off once again, Mom and Dad kiss you goodnight and plunge you back into darkness.
Monsters are never real to adults. They always find an explanation. Something you ate. Reading scary stories or watching scary movies before bed. Your overactive imagination. The solution is always attention or medication or visits to a psychiatrist. They’re never real.
Maybe it’ll get you someday, and it’ll be the grown-ups’ fault. Mom and Dad will come into their “imaginative” child’s room one day and find it mysteriously empty, or perhaps they’ll turn on the lights and find the thing there instead, sitting on the bed with a bloated belly and that horrible eyeless grin.
They may come up with an explanation for that, too.
You curl up under the comforter again, eyes closed, mind struggling to shut out the unnerving silence. Sleep may yet find you if your thoughts remain on mundane subjects, like school. Mom suggested it once when you were seven, and it always seemed to work. But now you may never sleep again.
The thing giggles.
You open your eyes partway to scan the floor for movement, but it’ll be hours before they adjust to the darkness again. Pulling the covers over your head like before, you curl into a ball and wait.
The room is silent the rest of the night.

The Russian Sleep Experiment

This is a real history, the Russians wanted to test the human reactions of the insomnia. Maybe you can search it in Google, but in that time they used to made experiments, even if that cost a mans life,or insanity.

Russian researchers in the late 1940s kept five people awake for fifteen days using an experimental gas based stimulant. They were kept in a sealed environment to carefully monitor their oxygen intake so the gas didn't kill them, since it was toxic in high concentrations. This was before closed circuit cameras so they had only microphones and 5 inch thick glass porthole sized windows into the chamber to monitor them. The chamber was stocked with books, cots to sleep on but no bedding, running water and toilet, and enough dried food to last all five for over a month.

The test subjects were political prisoners deemed enemies of the state during World War II.

Everything was fine for the first five days; the subjects hardly complained having been promised (falsely) that they would be freed if they submitted to the test and did not sleep for 30 days. Their conversations and activities were monitored and it was noted that they continued to talk about increasingly traumatic incidents in their past, and the general tone of their conversations took on a darker aspect after the 4 day mark.

After five days they started to complain about the circumstances and events that lead them to where they were and started to demonstrate severe paranoia. They stopped talking to each other and began alternately whispering to the microphones and one way mirrored portholes. Oddly they all seemed to think they could win the trust of the experimenters by turning over their comrades, the other subjects in captivity with them. At first the researchers suspected this was an effect of the gas itself...

After nine days the first of them started screaming. He ran the length of the chamber repeatedly yelling at the top of his lungs for 3 hours straight, he continued attempting to scream but was only able to produce occasional squeaks. The researchers postulated that he had physically torn his vocal cords. The most surprising thing about this behavior is how the other captives reacted to it... or rather didn't react to it. They continued whispering to the microphones until the second of the captives started to scream. The 2 non-screaming captives took the books apart, smeared page after page with their own feces and pasted them calmly over the glass portholes. The screaming promptly stopped.

So did the whispering to the microphones.

After 3 more days passed. The researchers checked the microphones hourly to make sure they were working, since they thought it impossible that no sound could be coming with 5 people inside. The oxygen consumption in the chamber indicated that all 5 must still be alive. In fact it was the amount of oxygen 5 people would consume at a very heavy level of strenuous exercise. On the morning of the 14th day the researchers did something they said they would not do to get a reaction from the captives, they used the intercom inside the chamber, hoping to provoke any response from the captives they were afraid were either dead or vegetables.

They announced: "We are opening the chamber to test the microphones step away from the door and lie flat on the floor or you will be shot. Compliance will earn one of you your immediate freedom."

To their surprise they heard a single phrase in a calm voice response: "We no longer want to be freed."

Debate broke out among the researchers and the military forces funding the research. Unable to provoke any more response using the intercom it was finally decided to open the chamber at midnight on the fifteenth day.

The chamber was flushed of the stimulant gas and filled with fresh air and immediately voices from the microphones began to object. 3 different voices began begging, as if pleading for the life of loved ones to turn the gas back on. The chamber was opened and soldiers sent in to retrieve the test subjects. They began to scream louder than ever, and so did the soldiers when they saw what was inside. Four of the five subjects were still alive, although no one could rightly call the state that any of them in 'life.'

The food rations past day 5 had not been so much as touched. There were chunks of meat from the dead test subject's thighs and chest stuffed into the drain in the center of the chamber, blocking the drain and allowing 4 inches of water to accumulate on the floor. Precisely how much of the water on the floor was actually blood was never determined. All four 'surviving' test subjects also had large portions of muscle and skin torn away from their bodies. The destruction of flesh and exposed bone on their finger tips indicated that the wounds were inflicted by hand, not with teeth as the researchers initially thought. Closer examination of the position and angles of the wounds indicated that most if not all of them were self-inflicted.

The abdominal organs below the ribcage of all four test subjects had been removed. While the heart, lungs and diaphragm remained in place, the skin and most of the muscles attached to the ribs had been ripped off, exposing the lungs through the ribcage. All the blood vessels and organs remained intact, they had just been taken out and laid on the floor, fanning out around the eviscerated but still living bodies of the subjects. The digestive tract of all four could be seen to be working, digesting food. It quickly became apparent that what they were digesting was their own flesh that they had ripped off and eaten over the course of days.

Most of the soldiers were Russian special operatives at the facility, but still many refused to return to the chamber to remove the test subjects. They continued to scream to be left in the chamber and alternately begged and demanded that the gas be turned back on, lest they fall asleep...

To everyone's surprise the test subjects put up a fierce fight in the process of being removed from the chamber. One of the Russian soldiers died from having his throat ripped out, another was gravely injured by having his testicles ripped off and an artery in his leg severed by one of the subject's teeth. Another 5 of the soldiers lost their lives if you count ones that committed suicide in the weeks following the incident.

In the struggle one of the four living subjects had his spleen ruptured and he bled out almost immediately. The medical researchers attempted to sedate him but this proved impossible. He was injected with more than ten times the human dose of a morphine derivative and still fought like a cornered animal, breaking the ribs and arm of one doctor. When heart was seen to beat for a full two minutes after he had bled out to the point there was more air in his vascular system than blood. Even after it stopped he continued to scream and flail for another 3 minutes, struggling to attack anyone in reach and just repeating the word "MORE" over and over, weaker and weaker, until he finally fell silent.

The surviving three test subjects were heavily restrained and moved to a medical facility, the two with intact vocal cords continuously begging for the gas demanding to be kept awake...

The most injured of the three was taken to the only surgical operating room that the facility had. In the process of preparing the subject to have his organs placed back within his body it was found that he was effectively immune to the sedative they had given him to prepare him for the surgery. He fought furiously against his restraints when the anesthetic gas was brought out to put him under. He managed to tear most of the way through a 4 inch wide leather strap on one wrist, even through the weight of a 200 pound soldier holding that wrist as well. It took only a little more anesthetic than normal to put him under, and the instant his eyelids fluttered and closed, his heart stopped. In the autopsy of the test subject that died on the operating table it was found that his blood had triple the normal level of oxygen. His muscles that were still attached to his skeleton were badly torn and he had broken 9 bones in his struggle to not be subdued. Most of them were from the force his own muscles had exerted on them.

The second survivor had been the first of the group of five to start screaming. His vocal cords destroyed he was unable to beg or object to surgery, and he only reacted by shaking his head violently in disapproval when the anesthetic gas was brought near him. He shook his head yes when someone suggested, reluctantly, they try the surgery without anesthetic, and did not react for the entire 6 hour procedure of replacing his abdominal organs and attempting to cover them with what remained of his skin. The surgeon presiding stated repeatedly that it should be medically possible for the patient to still be alive. One terrified nurse assisting the surgery stated that she had seen the patients mouth curl into a smile several times, whenever his eyes met hers.

When the surgery ended the subject looked at the surgeon and began to wheeze loudly, attempting to talk while struggling. Assuming this must be something of drastic importance the surgeon had a pen and pad fetched so the patient could write his message. It was simple. "Keep cutting."

The other two test subjects were given the same surgery, both without anesthetic as well. Although they had to be injected with a paralytic for the duration of the operation. The surgeon found it impossible to perform the operation while the patients laughed continuously. Once paralyzed the subjects could only follow the attending researchers with their eyes. The paralytic cleared their system in an abnormally short period of time and they were soon trying to escape their bonds. The moment they could speak they were again asking for the stimulant gas. The researchers tried asking why they had injured themselves, why they had ripped out their own guts and why they wanted to be given the gas again.

Only one response was given: "I must remain awake."

All three subject's restraints were reinforced and they were placed back into the chamber awaiting determination as to what should be done with them. The researchers, facing the wrath of their military 'benefactors' for having failed the stated goals of their project considered euthanizing the surviving subjects. The commanding officer, an ex-KGB instead saw potential, and wanted to see what would happen if they were put back on the gas. The researchers strongly objected, but were overruled.

In preparation for being sealed in the chamber again the subjects were connected to an EEG monitor and had their restraints padded for long term confinement. To everyone's surprise all three stopped struggling the moment it was let slip that they were going back on the gas. It was obvious that at this point all three were putting up a great struggle to stay awake. One of subjects that could speak was humming loudly and continuously; the mute subject was straining his legs against the leather bonds with all his might, first left, then right, then left again for something to focus on. The remaining subject was holding his head off his pillow and blinking rapidly. Having been the first to be wired for EEG most of the researchers were monitoring his brain waves in surprise. They were normal most of the time but sometimes flat lined inexplicably. It looked as if he were repeatedly suffering brain death, before returning to normal. As they focused on paper scrolling out of the brainwave monitor only one nurse saw his eyes slip shut at the same moment his head hit the pillow. His brainwaves immediately changed to that of deep sleep, then flatlined for the last time as his heart simultaneously stopped.

The only remaining subject that could speak started screaming to be sealed in now. His brainwaves showed the same flatlines as one who had just died from falling asleep. The commander gave the order to seal the chamber with both subjects inside, as well as 3 researchers. One of the named three immediately drew his gun and shot the commander point blank between the eyes, then turned the gun on the mute subject and blew his brains out as well.

He pointed his gun at the remaining subject, still restrained to a bed as the remaining members of the medical and research team fled the room. "I won't be locked in here with these things! Not with you!" he screamed at the man strapped to the table. "WHAT ARE YOU?" he demanded. "I must know!"

The subject smiled.

"Have you forgotten so easily?" The subject asked. "We are you. We are the madness that lurks within you all, begging to be free at every moment in your deepest animal mind. We are what you hide from in your beds every night. We are what you sedate into silence and paralysis when you go to the nocturnal haven where we cannot tread."

The researcher paused. Then aimed at the subject's heart and fired. The EEG flatlined as the subject weakly choked out, "So... nearly... free..."