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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/11velociraptors on 2024-11-16 21:18:58+00:00.

The first time it happened, I almost dismissed it as a dream. It was the middle of the night, and I opened my eyes to a dark bedroom. The house was cool, pleasantly so, and the comfort of the blankets around me almost lulled me right back to sleep. Before I slipped into unconsciousness, I became aware of a faint whisper. 

Turning onto my side, I was surprised to see my wife sitting up in bed. Her body was turned away from me, angled towards the far corner of our room. I assumed at first that she was speaking to me, but her words came out in a constant, almost desperate stream. Once I became cognizant enough to decipher her hushed speech, I recognized it as a prayer.

Gemma, though what I’d call a “casually practicing” Catholic, had never prayed in her sleep before. In fact, in the decade we’d been together, I hadn’t known her to talk in her sleep at all. I found myself unsettled by the intensity of her words. Sitting up, I placed a hand on her back, and the touch seemed to startle her awake. She jerked forwards and opened her eyes, looking at me in confusion. 

“Hello?” She said, and something about the indignant way she said it dispelled the tension in the room. 

“Sorry to wake you but you were talking in your sleep. Reciting the ‘Our Father,’ actually.” 

She found this amusing and was asleep again in no time. I, however, had a much more difficult time falling back asleep after that. Something told me to stay vigilant, though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. Even as Gemma slept peacefully beside me, I kept finding myself sitting up to survey the dark corner she’d been angled towards while praying. 

A full week passed before it happened again. This time, when I awoke in the middle of the night, I could tell immediately that Gemma wasn’t in bed next to me. I got up and walked into the hall, checking the upstairs rooms to no avail. When I went downstairs, I heard Gemma before I saw her. I followed the sound of frantic whispering into the living room, where she stood in front of the fireplace mantle, praying before a silver urn. 

As I drew nearer, I saw that Gemma’s eyes were still closed. When I called out to her and didn’t receive a response, I realized that she was still asleep somehow. I was thankful she hadn’t fallen down the stairs, but I was also concerned with the sudden escalation of her parasomnia. The one thing I knew about sleepwalking was that you weren’t supposed to wake the person up, so I gently put my hands on Gemma’s shoulders and started to walk her back towards our bedroom. She didn’t stop whispering as we walked, and, even stranger, I realized after a while that she wasn’t speaking English. I thought it sounded like Latin, which wouldn’t be too weird, right? Lots of Catholic prayers were originally written in Latin after all. That explanation was enough to reassure me as I walked through the dark house beside my sleeping wife. Or at least, it was enough until we reached the bottom of the stairwell, at which point Gemma opened her eyes, looked at me, and said: 

“You’re both going to die in this house, Marco.” 

For a moment, I was frozen in place, surprised by both her words and the absolute certainty behind them. It was only after her macabre statement that Gemma seemed to fully awaken. She blinked slowly, looking blearily at our surroundings. 

“Marc? What’s going on?” 

“You were sleepwalking.” 

“What? I’ve never sleepwalked in all my life.” 

“Yeah … And you said something a little creepy at the end there. Do you remember anything? Maybe a dream that might’ve spilled out into real life?” 

As it turned out, Gemma had been dreaming, though not about me or the house. In her dream, she’d been laying immobile inside of a glass casket. She described two humanoid silhouettes on either side of her, one made of shadow and the other of pure light. The former poured water into the casket while the latter tried to scoop it out. She was unable to move as the water level crept higher and higher, threatening to cover her nose and mouth as the bright figure tried its best to slow the flood. 

Gemma and I, both fully alert at that point, went to the kitchen to drink some tea and wait for our nerves to settle. As the tea steeped, I found myself thinking of my mother in law, Thérèse, and not only because our cups had once belonged to her. Gemma’s mother had lived with us for the last year of her life, and had passed away only a month prior to Gemma’s first sleeptalking incident. As a result, there were reminders of her all over the house—her tea set in the kitchen, her mirror in the corner of our bedroom, her portrait hanging in the hall. But it was Gemma’s words, not her mother’s things, that made me think of Thérèse. You see, my name is Marc, and everyone in my life refers to me as such, with the exception of my mother in law, who used to call me “Marco.” How strange it was that Gemma had called me that in her sleep. 

Two weeks passed, and while I sometimes awoke to Gemma murmuring quiet prayers in her sleep, her sleepwalking seemed like a one-time incident. While Gemma continued to have nightmares, and while I continued to be somewhat creeped-out by the sleeptalking, it wasn’t a major impediment to our lives, and thus we both did our best to ignore it. That is, until this morning.

It was just after one when I awoke. I’d grown accustomed to having my sleep interrupted by Gemma’s prayers, but this time, I opened my eyes to find my wife’s side of the bed empty. I rolled onto my back and was startled to see Gemma standing at the foot of our bed, facing towards the bedroom door. Her hands were clasped in front of her chest, her head bowed and her lips moving rapidly. Annoyed at having my rest disturbed yet again, I started to get out of bed when an odd sensation befell me. Before my foot touched the ground, I felt the overwhelming urge to stay put. For no reason that I could discern, I felt a compulsion to pull the covers over my head and hide like a child. 

“Gems?” I called out, and she raised an open palm towards me, signaling for me to stay put. 

“It’s here.” She said. I pushed down the urge and got out of bed, coming to a stop beside my wife. The air in the room was very, very cold.

“Who?” I asked her, though I’m not sure why. I knew she was only sleep talking, but she just sounded so damn certain. Gemma didn’t answer. I looked towards the bedroom door and realized that at some point after I awoke, it had opened. 

My heartbeat quickened at the thought of an intruder in our house. Retrieving the baseball bat I kept under our bed, I began walking towards the door when Gemma suddenly moved, grabbing me by the wrist and pulling me backwards. 

“Don’t. Move. Don’t you move, Marco.” 

That name again. 

“My love, what is going on with you? Why are you calling me that?” I gently pulled my free hand from her grip and put a palm on her cheek. When I touched her, I found that her skin was damp with tears. I felt a pang in my chest. Poor thing was probably having that same nightmare again. 

“Please wake up.” 

For a moment, my wife was quiet. Her whispered prayers ceased and she stood there motionless as I willed her to awaken. 

Then, suddenly, she gasped, inhaling like someone who’d been holding their breath for a long time. Her eyes fluttered open, locking with mine. 

“Gemma?” I said, and then the house erupted with sound. The wall mounted mirror came crashing to the ground, as did our framed family photo hanging near the door. Instinctively, I pulled Gemma close and wrapped my arms around her as the sound of shattering glass filled the room. A shard from the mirror had wedged itself into my calf and I cursed sharply. I waited for the tremors to subside, but after a minute, I realized that there were no tremors. It hadn’t felt like an earthquake at all. Instead it almost seemed like the mirror and photo had flung themselves off of the wall of their own volition. 

Gemma stirred in my arms and I let her go. She was fully awake by then, and so after telling her to be careful of the glass, I picked my way around the mess on the floor to check out the rest of the house. The scene was … bizarre. Some objects had fallen and shattered in every room, but many of their neighboring items remained perfectly intact. The tea set in the kitchen, for example, had fallen from the shelf, but the row of glasses right next to it hadn’t moved an inch. It looked like someone had walked through each room in the house and picked out a few specific objects to destroy. 

I found my wife in the living room, staring down at the carpet. The silver urn had been knocked from the mantle and the ashes within it were strewn all over the floor. I felt so bad for Gemma—between her mother and her parasomnia and now this earthquake, she’d been through so much in the past few months. I gave her a hug and told her I was sorry, and strangely, instead of tearing up as I expected, she smiled at me. 

“It’s alright, dear. Nothing we can’t replace, right?” She stretched her arms above her head and yawned. “I’ll help you clean up in the morning. Too tired at the moment.” Without another word, she turned around and made her way back upstairs to bed. 

How she was so calm, I had no clue. I spent some time tending to my leg and was pleased to see that the cut was quite small and probably wouldn’t need stitches. After making sure there was no glass left in my skin, I patched myself up and got to work cleaning. …

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