Alarm Clock

The following short story is a non-Aetheriad, second person horror story inspired by a bout of insomnia I had one night a couple months back, and by the sleep paralysis a couple people in my life have. I mostly try to stick to Aetheriad short stories for the Patreon- I know what y'all are here for, hah- but sometimes, inspiration just strikes, and I have a story that I just need to write. Oh, and Basilisk Street issue 2 later this month! And back to Aetheriad short stories- and more Basilisk Street- next month. Thanks to my voting patrons for letting me take a little break from Aetheriad short stories- apart from getting sick twice in a row (the flu followed by food poisoning), I've been making really good progress on More Gods Than Stars!

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You’re going to die as soon as your alarm clock goes off.

Not in a funny, haha, you can’t stand to go to work today sort of way. Not in your usual sleep-deprived way, not in any way you can fight with caffeine or a nap.

You’re going to get ripped limb from limb the instant your alarm goes off.

You can see the demon waiting at the edge of your bed, watching you, eyes shimmering ever-so-faintly. It hasn’t intruded fully into reality yet, hasn’t fully solidified. You haven’t done enough to draw its attention from wherever its home really is.

But your alarm clock will.

You have no idea how much time you spend slowly turning your head to one side, forcing yourself to move your neck so slowly that your muscles protest.

4:06 AM.

Three hours and nine minutes until your alarm goes off. Three hours and nine minutes until the demon rips you limb from limb.

You knew there was a risk setting the alarm, but it seemed so remote. These things kill, what, a few hundred, a few thousand people a year worldwide? You’re more likely to get hit by a car, and your boss absolutely won’t accept oversleeping as an excuse for being late. She’s one of those atrocious morning people that wake refreshed with the dawn, not even needing coffee.

You like to joke that your boss feeds off the suffering of her workers, but it’s not really a joke.

And now your fear of your boss’ endless petty cruelties and yelling is getting you killed.

Oh, there’s a chance the demon gets bored and wanders away— they don’t stay waiting forever— but odds are, once one’s there, it’s there for at least four or five hours. Usually longer. You’ve heard of them staying for eight, nine hours.

You only went to sleep… maybe two hours ago? You’re not sure. Not nearly long enough.

Maybe, maybe you have a chance. If it showed up just after you fell asleep, it might slip away before your alarm goes off.

You wouldn’t count on it, though.

No, you’re going to lie there in bed in terror for most of three hours before you die. You don’t know how the pounding of your heart hasn’t alerted it to your presence already.

And to add insult to injury, the reason you woke up in the first place is because you need to pee.

4:34 AM

You’re starting to get past the horror, start to get past the sheer, heart-pounding terror.

Now it’s just dread. Just a relentless sense of oncoming doom, like what some stroke and heart attack victims report feeling beforehand.

You used to think you were about to suffer a heart attack, used to think you were feeling that sense of doom. You weren’t, though. Just garden variety anxiety.

This is the real deal. Your body knows it’s going to die, knows the end is nigh. The difference between your anxiety and this is unmistakable, and on the off-chance you survive the night, you’ll never make that mistake again, never have to deal with that particular stupid anxiety.

You’d have plenty of new anxieties to worry about, though!

If you live, that is.

You don’t find that likely.

5:00 AM

You don’t know why you assign such significance to the hour changing, to hitting five sharp. You know for a fact that your clock is a minute or two off.

It doesn’t matter. The demon is still standing at the end of your bed, waiting patiently. And the instant your alarm clock hits seven-fifteen AM, you’re dead.

You’re starting to hate your clock.

You bought it for your sleep quality. You kept staying up to ungodly hours, browsing your phone in bed. Doomscrolling, reading, didn’t matter, you found some way to keep yourself awake.

Not that your sleep is good now, but the clock helped a bit. Moving it across the room to your dresser helped even more, so you had to get out of bed to shut it off, couldn’t just whack the snooze button without opening your eyes anymore.

There were stories about people who’d awoken like you, then spent long, excruciating minutes reaching for their alarm clock, moving ever-so-slowly to avoid waking the watching demons. Slowly turning off their alarms, then ever-so-slowly retracting their arms until they were motionless in bed once more.

You won’t be one of those stories. Reaching out of bed with an arm is one thing, but climbing out of bed entirely? The demon’s going to be all over that. Hell, even if the clock was on your nightstand, you wouldn’t be one of those stories. Moving that slowly, with so few trembles? It takes muscle strength and stability you just don’t have anymore. If you were still making time for the gym every week, if you hadn’t abandoned your efforts back in February.

You still fantasize about making the slow walk to the alarm, though. Still plot out your moves, one by one. Imagine yourself flicking the little switch on the top of the alarm, then slowly leaning against the dresser in triumph.

It won’t happen.

You still need to pee.

5:22 AM

You blame the pharmaceutical companies.

No one knows the precise origin of the demons, but they only started appearing when one of the pharmaceutical companies discovered a cure for sleep paralysis.

It turned out all those poor suckers who woke up trapped inside their bodies with some horrible monster just out of sight, watching them sleep? Suffered that miserable motionless state again and again? Weren’t hallucinating.

There really was something watching them.

You’ve heard a lot of people arguing about the connection. You try to ignore all the fundamentalist weirdos and the grifters trying to sell you preventatives, but the scientists are still arguing about it among themselves.

Was sleep paralysis a defense mechanism, keeping demon-sensitive people safe from the extra-dimensional creatures? Did sleep paralysis make people sensitive to the demons in the first place? Or were the demons just attracted to people in sleep paralysis?

You don’t know.

But you do remember the jokes when the pharmaceutical companies came out with a cure for sleep paralysis. Cures aren’t profitable. The pharmaceutical companies want therapies, suppressants, anything they can keep milking patients wallets for year in and year out.

“Someone’s getting fired for this one,” the joke went. “They could have made millions, but they went and put the cure in one pill instead of a hundred.”

It wasn’t really funny, but there wasn’t a much better way to cope with how awful healthcare was those days. Or still is, you suppose. The pharmaceutical companies haven’t even gotten a slap on the wrist for summoning demons into the real world.

You’re not quite sure how curing sleep paralysis brought the demons even closer to our world. No one is. But a year after the pill that cured sleep paralysis went on the market, people started dying.

It wasn’t even the people who’d been cured of sleep paralysis being turned into piles of dismembered meat. It seemed utterly random, and the pharmaceutical companies used that to help squirm out of any blame.

Had the demons been feeding off the fear of sleep paralysis sufferers, and deprived of their food, intruded farther into the real world? Or had Big Pharma done something they shouldn’t to find the cure? There were a lot of unexplained oddities about the pill’s creation. A lot of wild theories about its true origins. Alien DNA? Pacts with the devil?

You don’t know. You always liked the idea that the demons themselves were manipulating the scientists who created the sleep paralysis pill, speaking to them in their sleep. Several of them, after all, had suffered from sleep paralysis themselves.

You like the idea a lot less now that the demon is lurking at the foot of your bed, reaching out to you with its strange senses, looking for any hints of you moving.

There’s a pain in your back to go with your over-full bladder, now, and you can’t even shift to take your weight off the muscle.

6:14 AM

You fell asleep. Somehow, impossibly, you fell asleep. Dozed for most of an hour without tossing and turning enough to alert the demon.

Moving in your sleep is safer than moving while awake— even without sleep paralysis, there’s something about human sleep that confuses the demons, makes it hard for them to find you.

You think for a moment about trying to sleep through your alarm, but you know it won’t work. Not because you can’t sleep through your alarm— you absolutely can, if you try— but because the alarm will be more than enough of a beacon to draw the demon fully into your bedroom from… wherever.

You can feel tears running down your face, but you don’t let yourself sob.

6:33 AM

You wet the bed.

You’re not sure why you waited so long, why you bothered holding it in. Why you spent so many of your last minutes of life miserable from needing to pee.

The demon shifts slightly as you lose control of your bladder, but the blankets shield the goings-on from it.

And then you’re just laying there, wet and soaking, filled with shame and relief and fear.

And the glowing red numerals of your old clock just stare balefully at you.

6:45 AM

You’re going to die in half an hour.

It’s raining outside, as though you losing control of your own bladder set loose the sky. You hope, irrationally, that the power goes out, that Mother Nature saves you from your own alarm clock.

It won’t, though. It’s just a light sprinkle. No thunder, no lightning, no wind— the clouds have barely even dimmed the morning sun.

7:02 AM

You wonder who’s going to discover your corpse. The dismembered pieces the demon will leave behind.

They don’t eat their victims. Don’t seem to take anything with them but a few drops of blood that clings to whatever they’re covered with. It isn’t skin.

They just… kill. Quietly, purposefully, slowly.

You try to dream up scenarios for your corpse being discovered— your boss realizing you’re not at work and knowing something’s wrong, someone in your family checking on you out of some terrible intuition, something.

You’re pretty sure that it’s just going to be the smell of rot, days from now, that will attract the attention of the neighbors.

Your screams won’t do it. You will scream for however long it takes you to die— everyone does— but none of your neighbors will notice, will find anything unusual about it. No one ever takes notice of the screams, as though the demons pull their victims partway into their own world during the murder.

7:06 AM

Not long now.

7:09 AM

You hate your alarm clock so much.

You’ve always hated it.

You’ve always resented dragging yourself out of bed early in the morning to go to a shit job you hate. Always resented that fucking alarm, seen it as a goddamn chain forced around your neck by fucking capitalism. Always knew it was slowly killing you, slowly chipping away at your health through sleep deprivation and stress.

And now it’s killing you in a much more abrupt, violent way. Your shitty little cheap alarm clock that cost you an hour’s pay is going to end your life.

You were so proud of yourself when you bought it— you weren’t fool enough to buy one of those “anti-demon” alarms that were supposed to shut themselves off when a demon showed up. Nothing with a computer in it could detect demons. Only humans and analog cameras. Those demon-detection alarms were just overpriced scams that would have killed you anyway.

Doesn’t make you hate the alarm any less.

You can’t find it in you to hate the demon, though.

Just fear it.

7:12 AM

As you lay in your soaking wet blankets, you think about getting out of bed early, of dying on your own terms. Of preserving some last little bit of your own pride and dignity. Of dying on your own damn feet.

7:13 AM

You don’t.

7:14 AM

You start counting seconds in your head the instant the numbers change on the clock. One Mississippi two Mississippi three Mississippi.

You’re counting too fast, you know it. You know you’re going to go far past sixty before the alarm goes off, know you’re going to spend your last few seconds alive counting off numbers like some goddamn idiot, your heart racing faster and faster and faster and faster until it seems like it’s going to rip its way out your chest. You find it bizarre that the demon hasn’t grown more clear, that it doesn’t sense the oncoming alarm, that it’s not readying itself to rip you apart at this very moment.

But it doesn’t know. They can’t see the future. They struggle to see into our world. If your alarm wasn’t due to go off, you’d probably survive this, if you were careful not to move until the demon lost its grip and sunk back into its own world.

As you lose track of your count, you hope desperately that you forgot to set your alarm, that this fear was all for nothing. You’ve done it before, crashed in bed without double-checking your alarm.

You did, though. You triple-checked the alarm last night.

It’s going to go off, and nothing will stop it.

7:15 AM

It’s time for you to get up.