These aren't the stories your mother told you.

No.

These are the other stories.

The unclasping of the latch woke him.

At the bottom of the bed, past his feet, and to his right, the scratching

of metal against the fine grains of wood. A coin spinning and dancing in the shadows of the dark

bedroom. It lost momentum and dropped to its side. The sound of it crashing against the bedside

table was thunder in the night.

It wasn't the first time Stephen Barker had trouble sleeping, something that people spend a

third of their life doing. Even with all that practice, he couldn't get it right. He had the

night terrors in his youth, waking to find himself in soiled

Thunderbird PJs tearfully howling to his parents. It's okay, they told him. You were just dreaming.

And then the sleep paralysis later on in life, waking in the middle of the night, panicked,

hallucinations of people in his bedroom, paralyzed and unable to move. More dreams, his dad had told him, just silly dreams. Still,

that night it didn't seem like a dream. It never did, but that time, more so than usual.

Stephen laid in his bed, pinned down by his own fear, and tied up by the dull panic that

prickled the back of his neck. He tried not to cry. He tried to remain calm. He reminded himself that sleep paralysis was a common occurrence.

Many people have it. Just hormones in your body designed to help you relax, numbing your movements.

And your mind, half awake, half asleep, hallucinating horrible imagery in the shadows.

Most people saw an old hag,

a woman, a demon. But that wasn't what Stephen saw. No, Stephen saw something quite different.

Stephen saw a businessman. A three-piece suit with thick-rimmed glasses hiding his eyes and alabaster cheekbones lit by the moonlight pouring in through the gap in the curtains. The slight damp of the man's hair

...