Chapter 4: The Scars She Leaves

Chapter 4: The Scars She Leaves

The command echoed in the silent spaces of Elara’s mind. Follow me. It was a whisper that coiled around her as she drifted off to sleep, a hook waiting to catch in the fabric of her dreams. For weeks after the first sleep paralysis, she fought it with a desperate, thirteen-year-old’s defiance. Sleep was no longer a refuge; it was a nightly siege. As the invisible weight settled onto her chest and the reek of damp earth filled her nostrils, she would forge a single, silent word in the furnace of her terror: No.

She screamed it in her mind until her silent throat ached. No. I won’t. Leave me alone. NO. She imagined the word as a shield, a wall of fire. She was no longer just a victim; she was a resistor. It was a small, pathetic rebellion waged in the paralyzing darkness of her own bedroom, but it was hers.

She learned quickly that defiance had a price.

One morning, she woke up not with the usual lingering dread, but with a sharp, stinging pain on her left forearm. She pushed back the sleeve of her faded pajama top. Three parallel lines, angry and red, ran from her wrist to her elbow. They were too clean, too precise to be from tossing and turning. They looked for all the world like she had been raked by fingernails. As she stared, horrified, tiny beads of blood welled up along the raw scratches.

At the breakfast table, her mother noticed immediately. Sarah’s hand flew to her mouth, her eyes wide with a familiar, weary concern. “Elara, honey, your arm! What happened?”

Elara’s heart hammered. For a fleeting moment, she considered lying—a fall, a scrape against a bush. But the desperation to be believed, to have someone else see the truth, was a raw, aching need. “It was the nightmare,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “The girl. I told her no, and… and she got angry.”

Her father, Tom, lowered his newspaper, his brow furrowed. He looked from Elara’s face to the scratches and then to his wife. It was the same silent, worried conversation they’d been having for years.

“Nightmares are in your head, Elara,” he said, his tone gentle but firm. “They can’t actually hurt you. You must have done it in your sleep, scratched yourself without realizing.”

“I didn’t!” she insisted, her voice rising. “I was paralyzed! I couldn’t move! How could I scratch myself if I couldn’t even move?”

“Sometimes, when we’re having a vivid dream, our bodies can still react,” her mother offered, her voice strained with forced reasonableness. “It’s okay, sweetie. We’re not angry. We’re just worried.”

But they didn’t understand. Their worry was a wall she couldn’t breach. They were worried about her, not the thing that was tormenting her. To them, the cause and the effect were both contained within her own troubled mind. Her protestations only seemed to confirm their diagnosis.

The punishment for her nightly defiance continued. She began to wake with other, stranger marks. A deep, ugly bruise bloomed on her hip, dark purple and tender, shaped like a grasping handprint. She hid it beneath her jeans. Another morning, she found a small patch of hair at her temple was missing, her scalp tender and pink as if it had been viciously yanked. She learned to comb her hair differently to cover the spot.

She was fighting a war on two fronts. At night, she battled the crushing weight and the sibilant whisper of the thing that wore her face. By day, she fought to conceal the evidence, to appear normal, to stop the tide of parental worry from becoming something worse. She learned to be a curator of her own wounds, hiding them away like dark secrets. The truth was no longer a plea for help; it was evidence for the prosecution. And she was the only one on trial.

Her isolation became a thick, soundproof bubble. At school, she was the quiet girl, the one who always wore long sleeves, even in the sweltering days of early September. The other kids’ chatter about crushes and pop quizzes seemed to come from another universe. How could she care about a math test when she was preparing for a nightly battle for her own body?

The turning point, the moment that shattered any remaining hope of being understood, came on a Sunday morning. She woke from a particularly violent nightmare, one where the whispers had been replaced by a wet, guttural snarl directly in her ear. A deep, throbbing ache pulsed in her upper thigh. It was a different kind of pain—not a stinging scratch or a dull bruise, but a sharp, radiating agony.

With trembling hands, she pushed down the elastic waistband of her pajama shorts. And then she saw it.

Set into the pale skin of her thigh was a perfect, angry, crescent-shaped bite mark.

It was brutally, undeniably real. The arch of the upper and lower jaws was clearly visible, a ring of deep, purple indentations where teeth had clamped down with ferocious pressure. A few of the marks had broken the skin, which was raw and weeping a faint, clear fluid. It was a human bite. But the jaw it came from was far too wide to be her own.

For a moment, all she could do was stare, her mind a maelstrom of horror and a strange, wild flicker of vindication. This. This was the proof. No one could explain this away. You couldn’t bite yourself on the outside of your own thigh like this in your sleep. It was impossible. This was the wound that would finally make them believe.

She didn’t bother getting dressed. She stumbled out of her room and down the stairs, her pajama shorts still pushed down to display the injury. Her mother was in the kitchen, humming softly as she stirred a pitcher of orange juice, the picture of peaceful domesticity.

“Mom.”

Sarah turned, a smile on her face that faltered when she saw Elara’s expression. “What is it, honey? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Look,” Elara said, her voice flat and raw. She pointed to her thigh.

Her mother’s eyes followed her finger. The hum died in her throat. The glass pitcher slipped from her hand, shattering on the linoleum floor and splashing orange juice and shards of glass across the tiles. But Sarah didn’t seem to notice. Her gaze was fixed on the grotesque mark on her daughter’s leg.

Elara saw the horror dawn in her mother’s eyes, and for a heart-stopping second, she thought, She sees. She finally sees.

But the horror wasn’t for the monster. It was for the daughter.

Sarah’s face crumpled, not with fear of an outside attacker, but with the devastating sorrow of a parent witnessing the absolute collapse of their child’s mind. This wasn't a mysterious wound to her; it was a desperate, terrifying cry for help. A symptom. An act.

“Oh, Elara,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “Oh, my baby. Why? Why are you doing this to yourself?”

The words hit Elara harder than any physical blow. Doing this to myself. Her proof, her undeniable evidence, had been twisted into the ultimate condemnation. Later that day, hidden in the upstairs hallway, she heard her mother’s hushed, frantic voice on the phone with the doctor’s office.

“Yes, it’s about my daughter… She needs an appointment as soon as possible… I’m worried… she’s… she’s hurting herself. We found a… a bite mark.”

Elara backed away from the sound of her mother’s voice, a cold, hard knot forming in her stomach. She crept back to her room and stood before the blanket-draped mirror. She had tried to show them the monster. But all they could see was her.

She pulled her pajama shorts back up, hiding the wound. From now on, she would hide all of them. The truth wasn’t a key that would set her free. It was the final nail in the door of her own private prison. She was alone with her scars, the tangible, agonizing proof of a horror no one else in the world would ever believe.