Cecilia Krate

Cecilia Krate, one of my newest clients, has died. She was found yesterday morning, at the foot of her own bed. Claw marks, from her own hands, making trails from the seat of her eyelid all the way to the tops of her breasts. Her flesh turned to stone, and ice cold. Her hands clenched into the same claw that cut her flesh, with small bloody pieces still glued to her uncut fingernails. The coroner's report has it marked a heart attack. 

As a psychologist, it is one of my many obligations to remain totally, utterly, devoid of biases. At least, that is what I am obligated to imply to the clients, and to the medical board. But I can not keep her from crawling into my mind, making little spaces for herself inside of me. 

23, white, mid-height, incredibly slim, lives alone and covered head to toe in bruises and small cuts. She was handed over to me by the state after self-surrendering to a state-run institution. She turned herself in at 4:30 AM, 1 week ago. My one, and only, session with her took place 2 days following her surrender. It was introductory, mostly, as first sessions usually are. Her symptoms as reported from the doctor at the state institution: insomnia; induced by anxiety. impending doom, suicidal ideation. She was kind, verging on bubbly, until I asked her about her symptoms. She seemed so scared. Almost like she felt watched by someone in the room, unsure if she could answer in truth. 

Questions about sleep brought silence, dodged looks, a chest breaking heartbeat that I could feel from across the room. Right before we ended the session she leaned closer in, like she was about to tell a secret, and asked, “Do you hear it too?”. She whipped her head around, the second the last word hit her lips, as if she was caught. “I have to go”, she blurted, halfway out of her chair already.

Since I found out about Cecilia’s death I have become obsessive. What did she hear? What could she have experienced in those last moments that brought her to such terror that it popped her heart? 

I’ve found myself in online forums discussing sleep paralysis, night terrors, and insomnia. Reading others suffrage, describing themselves blood-eyed and breathless, unable to produce anything from their lips but mouth-foam. Peering shadow men, black winged angels blazed in flames, outlines of gargoyles and goblins dancing like monkeys with nothing inside them but TV static. These stories freed me. It gave me some sort of solace in the idea that what Cecilia went through was perhaps, explainable, understandable and studied. 

From what I can gather through the posts I’ve read, most seem to think their hallucinations come from a past trauma. Leon, a man from Mississippi described that when he has an episode, he sees the 7-month old body of his miscarried son, grown to adult size, standing on the stomach of his sleeping wife and wailing. 

Another, Sherri, describes seeing her sister, drowned when she was 9, floating outside her window, her house surrounded like an aquarium with dead embodiments of her baby sister. 

Could Cecilia have had a story like theirs? A tragedy somewhere throughout her life that brought her to the point of madness? Or is her tragedy simply the haplessness of her, the unluck? Could I have prevented this?

#####

Cecilia Krate has been dead for one week, and I’m not an inch closer to understanding why. I am sleepless, completely consumed by her, and the versions of her that live online. Their delusions, buzzing around inside of me all of the time, like flies frantically finding a place to lay their drones of incessant yellow babies. They live all over me. 

I have stopped going to work, I can not eat, I can barely work the nerve to speak. My house is a shell. Shadows echo off each piece of dusted furniture so easily now. Creaks so easily explainable before feel like snarls of hungry wolves, voices of a world so ready to consume me I can practically feel it waiting. My eyes blazoned by the blue light of the laptop screen, scattered with words so blurred through my eyes they seem as though they are an ancient, indecipherable language. 

Now I, again, must make the attempt for rest. My body sits unmoving but tethered to the sheets where I lay, them wrapping me like straight jackets. My hair coiled around my neck, strangling me like a hungry snake. My eyes glued to the dark ceiling, this is the hardest part of the night. The first attempt to close my eyes. I first close my right, leaving my left at a bare squint, just in case. Dresser, door, closet, window, nightstand. One last glance, checking every corner of the room one by one, to ensure all is in place, and nothing out of it. Then, shut the left eye. The blackness of my eyelids shuts me in, enveloping me in its dark sky. Echoes of shapes trail off through the darkness, tiny fragments of shadow and dark color moving around until they form more and more pieces, until they all scatter, and settle. 

  “Hey, pretty girl.”

A gruff voice comes out of the air. My eyes snap open like bullets, I glance around the room, dark but shadowed lightly from the moon through the curtains. Dresser, door, closet, window, nightstand. I look once more, knowing I can not look again. My blank eyes, glazed over in tears, and shining like glass. I must pick a spot on the ceiling, make it my home, and live in that little square of moon-shone white as long as I can. They can not close, I can not let them. 

Two hours have passed, my eyes have not moved from their newfound home on the ceiling. I can feel him, moving over me, waiting to eat me whole. The creaks have turned into a howl, like a window left open in a tornado. The walls that surround me beat like flesh, as if they’re skin-covered, vein-throbbing with a fast moving heart. I feel the lashes of my eyes connect, only for a moment. 

“There you go, pretty girl.”

I hear with the droop of each lid. Before I can make the time to stop them, they’re already closed.

  “I found you”

I am caught.

“If your heart stopped now, where would you go?

  You would go nowhere, and I would stay right here. 

  Resting. 

 All of you stuck inside that rotten little head you call home.

 My body calmed, and smoothed over. 

 Yours hard and stiff like ice. 

 I could keep you there, you know? 

 All ugly and rotting. 

 Slice into you every night, with a hot knife. 

 Just for the hope that whatever pieces of you that exist inside still can

 feel its serrations moving your organs around.”

My heart beats faster. It’s blood filling me to a point where I think I just might pop. 

 “I have found nest in you. 

  Nest in your body.

  In your home.

  When you awake, it will be too late.

  You are hollow,

  And I am already here.”

My eyes separate, it is still dark. My eyes scan. Dresser, door, closet, window, nightstand. I am awake, and Cecilia Krate is sleeping at the foot of the bed.