Her eyes shot open with a start and she gasped, as if she had been suffocating; her hands gripped the sheets as if trying to grasp anything substantial. Her breathing was heavy and strained, and the darkness gave her a feeling of unutterable void. She could remember nothing about what she had just been dreaming; from it remained only a lingering feeling of dread, a stifled desperation, like fading thunder in the distance. Gradually, her breathing subsided and she lay back and closed her eyes again.
But sleep didn’t come. The silence which soothed her just a few moments before now became deafening: a din of nonexistent noises, a blare of nothingness. She stared into the horrifying nothingness around her, and felt an anxiety building up inside, in the pit of her stomach. She felt cold and hollow.
The wind blew outside with an eerily melancholy whistle. But… what was that? She heard something else, a sound mingling with the wind, a cry — no, a wail, so faint, so vague that she ascribed it to her imagination. She took a deep breath and steadied herself. Just her imagination. She turned over to her side and shut her eyes.
But she was uneasy now. She tried to reprimand herself for being so silly, afraid of the dark, but her disquiet would not go away. She could still hear the wail, faint, faint, but very clearly there; or was it? She covered her head with a pillow, trying to stifle the sound. She kept it there, shutting off all noise for a couple of minutes. She slowly raised the pillow and put it under her head again, and everything seemed fine. But suddenly she became aware of it again, and much louder this time. It was a muffled moan of desolation, like from the bottom of a deep, dark well in an abandoned town, and it gave her a feeling of indescribable despair. It also felt close. She didn’t know how she could tell, but it was close. Horrifyingly close.
She covered her head with the pillow now, sobbing with fear, but she couldn’t silence the terrible wailing. It was still as loud as it was, even louder. It seemed to be in her room — not as if whatever it was had left its dark well, but as if it had brought its abyss along with it. It screamed in her ear, and seemed to fly around her, an emptiness closing in on her. She curled up into a fetal position, holding her legs, closed her eyes tight and just prayed, pleaded that it would go away.