He is the shadow in the corner of my eye. He is the tingling on my shoulder. He waits for me each night, calling to me with a nauseating lullaby of cackles, and I cannot resist. Black as fear and towering as the unknown, the creature of the demon’s smile visits death upon me once more.

I am ten years old, and I toss in bed, eyes wide open, cowering from sleep’s embrace. Will tonight be the night he returns? How can I enjoy a dream when he slips among them, entering at will? But soon, I find my eyelids sinking, drawn closed by his fingers. Those same fingers that reach for me, wiggling in time with his giggling, until they clutch at my shoulders and chest, sending tremors through my lungs, driving the breath from my body.

I first encountered this monster when I was a baby. My parents were letting me watch a harmless television program. Psalty the Singing Songbook and his young friends smiled and sang about the B-I-B-L-E and how it was the book for them. And then he appeared. I still remember him sauntering down the stairs, scouring my soul with his eyes, and screeching out gibberish with a hellish laugh. I reached out, trying to push him away, blot him out, but it was too late. What I had seen could not be unseen; the demon was at home within me.

I never knew his name, or even his species. Was he a rat? A black sheep? Some unnamable monster? Whatever the case, I knew no dream was safe. No matter how I ran, I would always be too slow. No matter how hard I fought, my fists would never obey me. And no matter whom I trusted, the moment I looked away, the person I loved would undergo the gruesome metamorphosis into my tormentor. Over and over, he would find me. Over and over, he would kill me. Over and over, his laugh would echo in the chambers of my heart long after I was forced awake. Tonight will be no different.

Or maybe it will . . .

As the beast approached me, gibbering nonsense, the words of my father echo at the back of my brain: “You control your thoughts. You let things in, and with God’s help, you can keep them out. But you have to choose.”

I tense my body and mind, focusing on lucid thought. I don’t want to dream about you tonight. I’m going to wake up now.

Without so much as a parting howl, the torturer fades into white light.

I open my eyes and take a deep, soul-cleansing breath. The darkness doesn’t seem as black tonight. I smile and snuggle into my sheets once more.