I lie in half darkness under the moonlight and wander toward sleep, wondering about anger and evil. Where it comes from, how it sustains itself beyond life.

I’d like to be happy and leave people alone. Why don’t other people want the same thing?

The song wakes me up at 1:30. Snooze.

2:30. Snooze.

Fleeting projections. Wasps circling a head of blond hair with a bloody hole in the side. And that wraith card’s warning to me: You may become a victim of someone’s misdirected vengeance.

To take a gun into a school and start shooting . . . To kill randomly. Without calculation or care. Nothing reasonable. Only deranged. So why couldn’t I be next? Why couldn’t anyone?

The xylophones play at 3:15, when the moonlight seems the brightest it’s been all night. It sneaks in through the slats, casting soft light on my walls.

It feels protective, like the sky is watching what happens here. Only four more hours before I have to be awake.

I press stop on the rest of my alarms and roll over, letting my arm dangle off the side of the bed.

Maybe just for tonight, he’s given me a break.

There’s some rest in my chest as I close my eyes. A noise whispers across the carpet under the bed, but I’m sure I imagined it—nothing is there but my paranoia.

And a hand taking hold of my wrist.

It yanks me off the mattress. My body shakes the floor. I’m being pulled under, and under. My chin punches the bed frame, stopping my momentum.

There’s a demon under the bed. Pain is roaring up in my head, through my shoulder, and down the string of veins constricted in this grip. My bones creak in its fingers.

“Seeseeseeseesee.” The whisper comes with laughter.

The carpet is ripping my knees apart. My palm is driving into the bed rails, my heart shooting fire through my bloodstream. There is something so angry about this tug-of-war.

“I’m sorry,” I moan. “Please.” I must be on punishment for something. If I can reason with it, maybe it will stop.

Sweat pushes down the hills of my body. The demon’s nails tear into my wrist.

There’s a cackling. “HA HA HA HA HA!”

How long have you been here? Living under my bed? I am so unaware. I never see what’s happening right around me.

This fight is uneven, and the foe is some shape-shifting, invisible entity changing its method of harm. The hand is now a bracelet of barbed wire, tearing deeper and deeper . . . through my skin.

“HELP!” I shout into the house. “HELP ME!”

And then it lets go. All at once.

I pull my hand back and grab it, just to make sure it’s still there. It is.

My back hits the wall. There’s no blood. Thank God there is no blood, and no pain.