Sleep Agent
I haven’t slept in seventy-two hours. Seventy-two hours of raw consciousness, stretched thin over the edge of sanity. At first, I thought it was nothing—just one of those bad patches people get. Too much caffeine from late nights at the office, too many deadlines stacked on top of each other like bricks pressing down on my skull. I told myself I’d crash eventually, that sleep was inevitable. But by the third night, inevitability felt like a cruel joke.
My thoughts no longer moved in straight lines. They spiraled and tangled in looping knots. My skin prickled constantly, as though ants were crawling just beneath the surface. Every sound felt amplified: the hum of the refrigerator, the ticking of the clock, the faint rattle of the pipes in the walls. And my heart—my heart never slowed. It hammered inside my ribs like it was trying to break free, sometimes so fast I thought I’d faint, only I never did.
I knew I was breaking down. I saw it in the mirror. Hollow eyes ringed with dark bruises, skin pale and clammy, lips cracked from nervous biting. My reflection didn’t look like me anymore. It looked like a stranger wearing my exhaustion.
That was when I went to the doctor. He was a thin man, balding, with glasses that constantly slipped down his nose. His office smelled of antiseptic and paper—too clean, too clinical. I sat across from him while he leafed through my file, tapping a pen against the page. He barely looked up when I told him I hadn’t slept in three nights. Only when I mentioned the hallucinations did his eyes flicker up, sharp and assessing.
“You’re seeing things?”
He asked, voice calm but measured.
“Just shadows,”
I admitted, though I knew it was more than that.
“Flickers in the corner of my eye. A… presence sometimes. Like someone’s standing in the room with me.”
He nodded slowly, not surprised.
“That’s a common symptom of severe sleep deprivation. Your brain starts to misfire, dream imagery leaks into waking life. It’s not real.”
I wanted to believe him. God, I wanted to. That was when he leaned back, sighing, and scribbled on his notepad. His handwriting was jagged, rushed.
“This is experimental,”
he warned, tearing the slip free and holding it out to me.
“But it will help. You need to sleep, or your body will shut down. And when that happens, things get dangerous. Very dangerous.”
His eyes lingered on me, as though he was afraid of what might happen if I didn’t take the pill. That was yesterday. I took the pill an hour ago. Already, the edges of the world feel softer. The frantic buzz in my veins has dulled, my body heavy with a strange warmth. It’s like sinking into a bath after freezing in the rain. Relief spreads through me, thick and sweet. I’ll finally rest. But there’s something else.
The problem with being awake for three days is that you don’t just get tired—you start to see. At first, I explained it away. Little flickers of movement in my peripheral vision, shapes that dissolved when I turned to face them. The sensation of being watched when I was alone. The faint impression of a tall, dark outline standing quietly in the corner of my bedroom at night.
I laughed it off. Told myself it was just the sleep deprivation, hallucinations stitched together by a collapsing brain. Even the doctor confirmed it.
“Ignore them,”
He said.
“They’ll go away once you sleep.”
That should’ve reassured me. But it didn’t. Because now, as the drug pulls me deeper, I realize something awful. The blur in the corner isn’t fading—it’s sharpening. The edges are clearer now. The shadows are parting, peeling back to reveal a figure. There is a man standing in the corner of my room.
He’s tall, impossibly thin, his limbs too long, his posture too still. His skin is a sickly grey, stretched over his bones like wet parchment. His face is smooth in places it shouldn’t be, as though someone had pressed down and distorted it. The nose is too flat, the eyes too sunken, and the mouth God, the mouth. That smile. It stretches wider than it should, lips curling with an unnatural patience. It’s not a grin of joy, not a grin of malice. It’s worse than either. It’s the smile of someone who’s been waiting. Waiting for exactly this moment.
I understand now. He was never a hallucination. He wasn’t a trick of the mind, not a side effect of sleeplessness. He’s been here all along. Every night, standing silently in the corner, waiting for me to lose the fight. Waiting for me to close my eyes. And now I can’t fight anymore. The drug is too strong. My eyelids droop, heavy as stone. My limbs sink into the mattress, paralyzed. My chest rises and falls slower, as though the weight of the air itself is pinning me down. I want to move. I want to scream. But my body betrays me.
Through the thickening haze, I see him take his first step toward me. Silent. Intentional. The kind of movement that suggests inevitability. His shadow stretches across the floor, reaching the bed.
My throat tightens. I try to force out a sound, any sound, but nothing comes. I want to run, but I’m anchored, my body dead weight. The drug has left me defenseless, and he knows it. He’s smiling wider now. His teeth gleam faintly in the dark, sharp and gleaming like broken glass. The darkness rises, swallowing the corners of the room, swallowing me. My vision narrows, the world collapsing into his advancing figure. I can smell him now—a faint, metallic stench, like rust and earth.
The last thing I see before sleep drags me under is his grin stretching, stretching until it no longer looks human at all. And then he leans close. His voice is soft, impossibly close to my ear, as though he’s been waiting centuries just to say this moment aloud:
“No one has ever stayed up this long before,”
He whispers,
“But I always have the last laugh.”
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