Dying Perfume

Sleep paralysis is a devastating condition. I was 7 when I first had sleep paralysis. My mother tucked me in that night. I could remember the citrus fragrance of her perfume. Her scent would always comfort me. After she tucked me in, I quickly drifted off to sleep. The night seemed quiet, but the peaceful atmosphere in my bedroom didn't last. 

I woke up around midnight. A smothering sweat drenched my little body. I couldn’t move my arms and legs. I could only move my eyes and my lips. It took my eyes some time to adjust to the thick darkness in my room. While my eyes were struggling to see, that’s when I heard it. I could hear it snorting. A dreadful feeling came over me when I heard the inhuman sound. I could see someone standing in my closet after my eyes adjusted. It peeked at me from behind my closet door. It stood there for a minute snorting at me. When it lurched out of my closet, I finally saw its full body shape. Its elongated arms stretched out like tree branches. It was tall, but it had a feminine shape. It looked like a deformed 7-foot tall naked woman. I tried to scream, but nothing came out. It felt like something paralyzed my vocal cords. 

After this shadowy figure stepped out of my closet, it stood in the corner of my room with its arms out. It would release a guttural snorting sound every few minutes. The sound was sickening. It reminded me of someone hawking and spitting on the ground. I could see this figure. I’m listening to the horrible noises it’s making while I’m paralyzed. The moonlight came in through my bedroom window. It illuminated a part of the shadow woman’s arm. Her skin looked like mud. It didn’t look burnt, just darker than dirt. All I could see was her one arm stretched out across my bedroom wall, bathed in the moonlight. 

My mind kept trying to figure out what she was. I thought I was looking at a demon for the first time. Or possibly, the Devil. Movement occurred, but not from me. I still couldn’t move my body, no matter how hard I tried. It felt like invisible hands were holding my arms and legs down. The movement came from the shadow woman. I watched in horror as she made a step toward the foot of my bed. She would take one step and then she’d hesitate for a minute before taking her next step. 

Her awkward hesitation sent more chills through my body than her measured baby steps. I knew she was gonna kill me if I didn’t move. Frustration tortured me just as bad as my fear. I didn’t know what this thing was or why it was in my bedroom. I didn’t know what it wanted. The scary stories that my dad told me about the Boogeyman came back to me. So I had this naked creature creeping toward me while I’m thinking about my dad’s story and how he told me the Boogeyman captures children at night and they never come back. Thanks a lot, Dad. 

I wanted to move so badly. I wanted to scream. It felt like I was fighting my body. The voice in my mind yelled at my body, telling it to move. The dark woman mocked me with her hesitant steps. She inched closer and closer to the foot of my bed with her arms stretched wide open. A crazy thought went through my head. Since I couldn’t move my body, I thought maybe my feelings would be numb. I assumed the creature would viciously attack me, but at least I wouldn’t feel the pain. I could see her long fingernails pointing out at me, and I knew those fingernails would be the first thing to dig into my body. No pain. Please, no pain. This is what I kept telling myself. Just be calm, Miranda. When the monster grabs you, you won’t feel it. It won’t hurt. Your body is numb so you won’t feel a thing. Tears were in my eyes while I was telling myself this. I wanted my mom to save me. I wanted to see my mom’s face and I wanted to smell her perfume. I wanted to call out to my dad. My dad told me to never be afraid of anything, and that’s what I tried to do. 

Time was running out for me. My urge to move was so strong that I started imagining that I could move my arms and legs. I thought I could move my arm, but it was just an hallucination. This was torture. Why was this happening to me? I was just a kid. I just turned 7 and now I was going to die on the day after my birthday? I’ll never go to high school and meet new friends. I’ll never graduate from college. I’ll never get married. I’ll never find out what it’s like to be a mom. The best thing I could do was close my eyes. I didn’t want to see it attack me. I just buried my eyelids in my tears. I said a prayer that my mother taught me. My lips and my voice were still useless, so I had to say the prayer in my head. The prayer repeated in my mind. My mom and dad taught me to believe in God. I needed God to save me. 

My mother always told me I was God’s child and he had his angels watching over me. I wanted his angels to save me that night, and I didn’t see them. A demon was lurking itself toward my bed, and God was just gonna sit there and watch this demon kill his child? My young mind couldn’t understand what was happening. I thought the dark figure was a demon. A little girl who knew for sure she would die in her bed. More chills traveled up and down my spine when I opened my eyes to see the giant shadow woman standing over the foot of my bed. She changed her position. Before I closed my eyes, her arms were spread out as if she wanted to hug me. When I opened my eyes, she was standing motionless in front of me with her long finger over her lips. She was telling me not to make a sound. I couldn’t make a sound anyway, so when I saw her holding her finger to her lips, it didn’t matter to me.

My situation turned upside down when I heard something else. Something unexpected happened. There was evil in my room. But the evil that stepped into my room was not the shadow woman. I remembered hearing the news reports of missing children in the town. My mom wouldn’t let me out of her sight whenever we would go to the store. There were reports of a crazed man in a clown costume going around abducting children. The police were searching for him. They couldn’t find him, but they found his aftermath. They found two missing children dead in a wooded area.

As a child, I couldn’t completely comprehend the danger. When you’re a child you want to play with your friends. I wanted to play with the other little girls in the neighborhood. But my mom would always keep me close to her side. On my birthday I went to an amusement park, but I couldn’t enjoy myself because I would go from being in my mom’s arms to being in my dad’s arms, constantly being carried around the park like a doll. I hated this smothering, overprotective behavior from my mother. She passed her paranoia to my father, who would normally allow freedom in my playtime. My childhood freedom ended for a little while because of this child-killing bastard. 

Somehow the killer entered our home through the basement window. He stayed hidden in our home for two days. This is how he broke into other people’s homes and he would hack into alarm systems and shut them off. Most of the missing children news reports involved children being taken from their homes in the dead of night without their parents even knowing what happened. A few days later they’d find out that their child’s naked body was found in a nearby pond or in a dumpster. Mothers and fathers were losing their babies to a middle-aged, 6 foot 5, 250 pound psychopath in a clown outfit. We didn't know that the psychopath clown broke into our home two days ago and was hiding in the basement. I was the only child, so he thought one little girl in the house would be easy prey.

He picked the wrong house that night. I heard him creeping down the hallway right outside my bedroom door. His footsteps were quiet but clumsy. The hardwood floor in the hall would always creak. My bedroom door creaked open and I saw this tall shadow, standing hunched over in my doorway. I remembered hearing my pounding heart. My eyes shifted between the killer clown and the dark shadow woman. I couldn’t believe I was seeing these two nightmarish figures standing in my bedroom. One figure was evil, while the other was good. 

I saw his clown makeup. He had a red-painted nose and he wore a pair of sunglasses over his chalky white face. I could see he had a beard. He had on a pink Afro wig and he was shirtless. He had an opposing physique, like a wrestler. I also saw a massive tattoo of a wolf’s face on his chest. The large butcher knife he clutched in his right hand immediately caught my eyes. Even in the darkness, I could see the knife’s serrated blade gleaming. He was so big that he blocked out my doorway. I didn’t know what to do. There was nothing I could do but just lay there, helpless. I started imagining that I could scream for help. My imaginations were cruel. I hated my body for not moving. I hated my voice for not letting me scream. 

He knew I was awake because he spoke to me. Hi there, little princess. I’m your new friend. Your mommy went away and she asked me to take care of you. When he said my mom went away, my heart sunk deep into my chest. As he got closer to my bed, I could see something dripping off the knife and I didn’t want to know what it was. When the child killer spoke to me, his voice didn’t fit his body. His voice sounded androgynous. It had a deceivingly calm feminine quality. It’s terrifying to see a mountainous man in clown makeup talk softly down to you through a teenage girl’s voice. I kept thinking about Pennywise from the movie It. But imagine Pennywise if he was shirtless with the body of Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson. 

I closed my eyes again when I saw the killer towering over my bed, getting ready to bring his butcher knife down on my face. I expected to feel cold, sharp steel slice through my nose, but none of that happened. I shut my eyes, but I couldn’t keep them shut for long. The child killer had so much of my attention that I forgot about the shadow woman who was still standing at the foot of my bed. I remembered hearing the man scream out a curse word and then I heard a snap. I could still make out through the darkness what was happening. I saw the killer clown’s arm hanging in another direction. I’ll never forget his guttural, blood-curdling scream that pierced my ears. His scream echoed throughout our home. I thought that even the neighborhood could hear him. What happened next made me almost pass out from shock. I saw the dark shadow woman lifting the child killer by his throat. She hurled him into a wall and a penetrating thud shook my bedroom. I kept hearing the man begging for his life and he sounded so pathetic. He kept screaming out; What are you?! Please don’t kill me, ma’am! 

But the dark woman had no mercy on him. She bludgeoned him with his knife. I watched her break both of his legs. She punched him in his chest so hard that I heard the bones in his chest cave in. I heard his rib cage cracking. After a few minutes, his verbal pleading became whimpering moans of agony. I didn’t know that you could break bones in the human body in so many ways. After twisting the bones around in his arms and shattering the bones in his knees, I watched the dark woman raise the child killer off his feet again. She held him over her head before shoving the butcher knife into his throat and nailing him to the wall, literally. 

I never blinked as I stared at what happened to the killer. I almost felt sorry for the sick son of a bitch. No, not really. The dark lady made him pay for all the children he abducted, and she made him pay for his attempt to kill me. After the violence ended in my bedroom, I watched as the shadow woman moved toward my bed. She stuck out her arms again while moving toward me. It looked like she was floating in slow motion. My heart was still pounding, even when I felt her clawed fingers breezing through my hair. When she touched my face, I could smell a familiar fragrance. It was that citrus aroma from my mother’s perfume. I couldn’t understand why the shadow figure smelled like my mom. I didn’t understand it until later. The shadow woman hovered over me. Her lips stroked my forehead. She caressed my face for a few minutes, and then she vanished when I heard my father’s panicked voice coming from downstairs.

I didn’t want to believe that I saw blood on the killer’s knife, but it was blood. It was my mother’s blood. That asshole stabbed my mother to death right before he made his way up the stairs toward my bedroom. He left my mother’s body lying in the kitchen. My father stepped out of the house to get a few things at the store. When he came back home an hour later, he found my mom’s body lying in a pool of blood. Her lavender, sleeveless nightgown was soaked in red. My father cried out when he saw her body. I heard him running up the steps, crying out my name. When he bolted into my room, I was already in his arms before he could switch on my bedroom light. He saw the man’s body nailed to my wall and he lost his breath. I told him what happened and what I saw. He couldn’t believe it but he had no choice. He knew that a little girl didn’t have the strength to nail a 250-pound man to a wall. 

My father called the police, and when they arrived, they asked him a few questions. The police asked me some questions too, and they gave me some candy. I told them everything. Like my father, they stared at me. A policewoman caressed my face and she said, It’s okay, sweetie. You just had a traumatic experience. Who you saw in your bedroom was just a good Samaritan wearing a dark costume. None of the police officers believed that I saw a dark shadow woman. They all believed that my trauma caused me to hallucinate. They even told me I might have seen my father killing the man, and I told them that my father wasn’t in the house. I heard him telling my mother that he was going to the store. I heard him kiss my mom before leaving the house. 

Those cops couldn’t believe my story. They had tons of sympathy for me. But I wanted my mother more than their sympathy. I missed my mother and I couldn’t stop thinking about her fragrance. I found the perfume she wore while moving some boxes around in my attic. That sweet fragrance took me back to that night. I believe the dark figure I saw in my bedroom that night was my mother. A dead version of her. I’m 36 years old now and I think about my mom every day. I got married to a kind and beautiful man and we had a son.

My little boy is 5 years old and he has his mom’s hazelnut eyes and his daddy’s lips and dimples. I try to be an excellent mother and I’m very protective over my little one, just like my mother was protective over me. Every night I tuck my son into bed and I read him a bedtime story. One night I told him about what happened to his mom when she was 7 years old. He looked scared after I told him the story. My son is afraid of the dark, but I told him not to worry. I told him that a mother’s love and protection can reach beyond death. I told him I'd always be there to protect him. I told my baby not to be frightened if he sees a dark shadowy woman standing in the corner of his bedroom. I told him she’ll watch over him while he sleeps. I also told him not to panic if he wakes up suddenly, unable to move his body. Sleep paralysis is scary at first, but I told my baby that his paralysis will be a sign, letting him know that the shadow woman is there to protect him from the things that go bump in the night. There was one thing I didn’t tell my little boy. I didn’t tell him that the dark shadowy woman standing in the corner of his bedroom might be his mommy… If she dies the way her mother did.