Alt Title: Night Hag
Arthur thrashes in his sleep.
He warned Peter about this when they moved in together. “I can be a bit loud. I’ve woken myself up shouting a few times.” He’d said it sheepishly, like it was a subject of minor personal embarrassment and not…well shit, what could Peter say? Have you considered there’s something wrong with you? The man knew that, or Peter wouldn’t have introduced himself over a whiskey bottle.
Anyway.
Arthur thrashes in his sleep. “Go ahead and peek in if you’re worried,” he’d said. “Go ahead and wake me if I’m too bothersome.” As if Peter would do something that shitty. Arthur hardly sleeps enough as it is. Peter’s woken up to find him pacing around in the middle of the night, reading or researching or—
Anyway.
The point is. The story he’s trying to tell here is, Arthur thrashes in his sleep. He shouts, sometimes. And a lot more often, he mutters to himself. Sometimes Peter is pretty sure he isn’t asleep and that he’s just talking to himself. People think that’s crazy but honestly it’s just something lonely men do a lot. But here’s the thing.
It’s an old building. It gets damp. Sometimes the doors warp and they don’t latch right. So one night Arthur’s door was kinda swung open. And Arthur was in there muttering to himself. Only…sometimes it didn’t sound like him. Like he was doing voices or something. Now, that would have been weird.
Peter isn’t a detective because he hates snooping. After a bit, he gave up on not being curious about his obnoxiously private friend, and he crept over to stand by the door.
“…Don’t want to,” Arthur was saying. But in a kinda weird, muzzy absent way that Peter’d heard from people who talked in their sleep.
“Now, come on, darling,” and Peter nearly jumped out of his skin because that wasn’t Arthur’s normal voice, he absolutely was doing voices. “Don’t be like that. Open up for me.”
“Please,” Arthur begged himself.
“Oh, dear heart. You’re such a sweet boy, Artie, don’t fight me on this. Just do as I say and let me have it.”
The hairs went up along the backs of Peter’s arms. This was all kinds of fucked up. This was…holy shit, he shouldn’t be listening to this, or else maybe he should be sailing to England to axe-murder a child molester. Something about that higher-pitched voice went straight through him with the crawling horrors.
While he shivered in atavistic loathing, Arthur was begging for something that sounded more important than his life. “Please,” he said, “please, don’t, please!” and with each ‘please’ his voice cracked a little higher till Peter couldn’t just stand there listening, not if he considered himself a friend or, for that matter, any kind of decent human.
He stepped through the doorway without barely thinking about it, ready to reach out to wake his friend from whatever night terror of a memory he had to be living through—only he wasn’t alone. There was a shape, bending over him. Peter blinked a few times, his brain helpfully pointing out to him that he was seeing shit because he was up too late and the shadows in the room were weird.
Only it was still there, kneeling over Arthur in the bed. Straddling him, leaning right down into his face. Until it straightened up to look at Peter. And then.
And then it lifted one shadowed hand and put a finger to its lips. Peter was so fucking sure it smiled and winked at him.
And then Peter blinked again as his brain said “Oh fuck no,” and everything was normal. His friend was lying twisted into the bedclothes because he’d been thrashing again, from some godawful nightmare, and the room was dark with dim light peeking through the blinds casting stripes of light and shadow across the room, and the shadows were all normal and explicable and it hadn’t been anything at all, had it? It’d all just been… Well, okay, maybe the reason Peter knew Arthur paced in the middle of the night was because he wasn’t the only guy in this apartment who didn’t sleep well sometimes.
So he went back to bed.
And he forgot. He forgot! Until the day Arthur picks up that parcel and unwraps it. One look at that repulsive symbol on the cover and…
He sees that shadow again. That silhouette of a man, slim and black, raising his finger to his lips just as Arthur flips open the cover and begins to read.