Sleepwalking Granny

“Need anything else, Granny?” Lauren asked, leaning against the doorjamb.

“I’m fine, dear,” her granny replied, letting a twinkling smile escape. “I sleep like the dead anyway. I’m sure I’ll be out like a light in a matter of seconds.”

Lauren smiled. That was true. Gran had always been a deep sleeper. Even years ago, when Lauren was still small and woke up scared in the middle of the night, she’d rarely ever been able to shake Granny awake. Lauren would have to be consoled by curling up under the covers next to Granny and pretend that the monsters couldn’t see her there. Now that Lauren was grown and had a place of her own, it was her turn to take care of Gran.

“Sleep well, Gran,” she said, and started to close the door.

“Wait a moment, Lauren dear,” Gran said suddenly. Lauren stuck her head back into the room.

“I know this sounds silly,” Gran continued, “but just on the off chance that you wake up in the middle of the night and see me walking around the house, don’t worry about it.” She paused as she looked down and scratched the back of her head. “I’ve, uh, I’ve been sleepwalking lately. Several times in the past few weeks I’ve woken up on the floor or holding something of Bob’s in my hand. The doctor says it’s probably related to the emotional trauma of Bob’s passing, but that it’s harmless and will pass eventually. But I wanted you to know. Just in case.” Lauren frowned but nodded in understanding.

“You sure you’re okay, Gran?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, dear, I’ll be fine. If you do run into me tonight, standing in the kitchen looking confused or something, don’t be alarmed; just gently guide me back to my room and I’m sure I’ll go right back to bed.” Her mouth pulled into a consoling smile, and Lauren returned it, though it didn’t remove the unease that had settled in her gut.

Lauren finished her nightly routine and got into bed, pulling the covers up to her chin. It was late fall, and the nights had been growing increasingly frigid with the threat of snow perpetually in the air. Thankfully, Lauren was prepared, with blankets piled on top of her a foot high, and she fell asleep quickly.

Later that night, something roused her from a deep slumber. Instantly awake, Lauren raised her head from the pillow slightly and perked her ears toward her cracked bedroom door. There it was again. It sounded like a shuffling noise, like someone dragging their slippered feet across the wood floors. And now a scraping sound. It was coming from the direction of the kitchen. Her granny’s warning came back to her, and Lauren sighed. She really needs a full-time caregiver, not just an occasional visit to her granddaughter’s house. Lauren would do it if she could, but money was too tight right now; plus, Lauren wasn’t even home half the time.

Soaking in the warmth emanating from beneath her layered blankets for another second, Lauren took a deep breath and threw them off, then jumped up and slipped her fuzzy bathrobe on. Her room was near to the kitchen, so she stepped across the hall and into the doorway of the dim kitchen. She shivered when her bare feet touched the cold floors. Darn, should’ve grabbed my slippers, too.

Instead of going back for them, Lauren stood still, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom. There, on the far side of the room, a wispy figure stood. Lauren’s heart skipped a beat, but she forced it to settle with another deep breath.

It was just Granny. Sleepwalking Granny. Good thing Gran had told her about her latest habit of nocturnal wanderings or Lauren would’ve been scared stiff getting a glass of water in the middle of the night as she sometimes did.

She took a step forward into the kitchen, balancing on the balls of her feet to avoid the shockingly cold floor. “Gran?” Her voice came out raspy, so she cleared her throat and tried again. “Granny?” There was no answer; her gran simply stood in front of the sink, apparently looking out the window. A faint shaft of crescent moonlight fell across her face, illuminating the poof of white frizz haloed around her head.

What am I thinking? Lauren thought. She’s not going to answer me, right? She’s asleep! Duh. Or at least I hope she doesn't talk to me; 'cuz that would just be creepy.

Gingerly, Lauren took another step into the kitchen, and another. Suddenly, her toes slammed into something solid, which skittered across the floor and into a cabinet with a loud crash. The harsh noise made her heart bullet into her throat and she gasped. Placing a hand on her chest, Lauren’s eyes fluttered shut as she tried to get her breathing and heart rate under control.

“Crap,” she muttered. Then she wondered, How did I leave something on the floor last night? That’s totally not like me. She definitely should’ve turned the light on before venturing into the dark kitchen like an idiot. “Yeah, like the idiot in the horror movies that always gets murdered first,” she said out loud. The thought sent a chill down her spine, so she shook it away and looked up to where her granny was standing--or where her granny was standing.

Granny was gone.

Lauren blinked, stunned, then darted her eyes around, her head whipping back and forth as a feeling of dread soured her stomach. How on earth did Gran get away so fast? She normally needed her walker, or, at the very least, a helping arm to support her. And Lauren hadn’t seen the walker anywhere in the hallway or kitchen.

Cold feet forgotten, Lauren rapidly crossed the kitchen and stopped near the sink where Granny had been. Looking down, Lauren saw what looked like the peel and core of an apple. This sink had been spotlessly empty when Lauren had gone to bed last night. Sleepwalking Granny liked to eat apples, then? That was the only explanation. Except for the fact that Granny hadn’t eaten anything hard since she’d misplaced her dentures several months ago.

Lauren pivoted on her heels, about to go search for her granny in the next room, when she felt something wet and sticky under her feet. With a grimace, she looked down and saw she’d stepped in a small pool of dark liquid. She grabbed the nearby roll of paper towels and hurriedly wiped her feet off, but had trouble completely removing the sticky, partially congealed substance.

“Darn you, Gran.” Lauren sighed. It looked like Gran had broken into the jar of caramel apple dip. Like, literally, broken into it. Though, Lauren didn't see the jar anywhere. But it was dark in here. The shadows made the details easy to miss. She considered wiping up the rest of the spill, but decided it was more important to find Gran and get her back to bed first. “I’ll deal with this mess in the morning,” she told herself.

Before she could decide which direction to search for her gran first, Lauren heard a low chuckle coming from the dining room. She froze, her blood curdling in her veins. That didn’t sound like Granny’s soft, tinkling laugh. But it couldn’t be anyone else. It must be a strange effect of sleepwalking.

Lauren forced her feet to start moving again and walked on shaky legs toward the door leading to the dining room. With the large sliding door to her back patio, the dining room was somewhat brighter than the kitchen. Lauren stopped in the doorway and immediately spotted Granny sitting at the head of the table. First, relief trickled through Lauren, followed by apprehension.

Gran had something in her hands. What was she doing? After a few seconds, Lauren realized Gran was slicing the apple and dipping the wedges into a bowl of caramel dip at her elbow. The movement was all slow, precise, and methodical. Gran never stepped out of that set rhythm.

A shiver wracked Lauren’s whole body; she didn’t think it was related to the cold, either. Because as she watched, Lauren saw her granny carefully dip an apple slice and place it in her mouth with a crunch. But Granny couldn’t chew. She had no teeth.

“Granny?” Lauren called out again, her voice cracking. Granny didn’t respond. She just kept chewing and slicing and dipping, her unseeing eyes trained on the wall opposite her. Lauren’s feet moved slowly across the room, an unexplainable dread seizing her insides. She watched Gran the whole time, who never deviated from her rhythm or stone-still expression.

Lauren came to a stop at Gran’s left side. “Granny?” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper now. “We need to get you back to bed.”

Gran was unresponsive, her wide-open eyes still staring straight in front of her, the methodical crunch, crunch of her supposedly non-existent teeth echoing in the stillness while the knife in her hand went shript, shript, slicing through the white flesh of the skinned apple to clink on the china plate beneath. Then the glup, glup of the apple wedge being scooped into the bowl of viscous, dripping caramel. Slowly, slowly, Lauren reached out her hand to lay it on Granny’s arm.

Lauren’s fingertips grazed the paper-thin skin of Gran’s arm where the sleeve of her nightgown had ridden up. Hesitantly, Lauren closed her fingers around Gran’s slender wrist and gave it a gentle shake. “Gran?”

Gran’s movements came to an aprupt halt. The crunching and the cutting and the scooping all silenced and for a few seconds, total stillness reigned. Lauren’s already shallow breathing all but stopped.

Granny delicately laid the knife down on the table, and without warning, twisted her face toward Lauren and looked right at her with an unblinking, fixed stare. Lauren’s heart gave a terrible shudder at the sight of Gran’s sharp, bony face and sunken eye sockets that gave her a ghoulish appearance in the shadowy room. Lauren swallowed with a gulp and began to pull her hand away, when Gran reached out her other hand whip-fast and snapped it around Lauren’s wrist. Lauren pulled harder, but Gran’s grip was unyieldingly tight.

“Gran? What are you doing--” As Lauren tugged, Gran suddenly opened her mouth and let out another of those foreboding cackles. Lauren’s jaw dopped open and she barely stifled a scream at the murderous glint in her granny’s eyes and the dark caramel sauce streaking her granny’s teeth like blood streaking the fangs of a ravenous wolf feeding upon a helpless lamb.

Lauren’s heart was pounding so hard now and her mind was racing to figure out how to snap Gran out of this terrible...whatever this was. It was unnatural. Otherworldly. Horror-movie-worthy. She had to do something, but she was slipping into a state of panic, and who knew what would happen to her in this brain-stunted terror.

Come on, Lauren, get a hold of yourself! Stay calm. Use that smart brain of yours and do something. Come on, come on...! Lauren racked her brain. Wake her up. That’s it! Wake Gran up, and it’ll all stop. She’ll drop this maniac murderer stuff and go back to normal.

“Okay, Lauren, do your thing. Wake her up,” she murmured to herself, partly to help summon her courage.

Lauren tugged again, but Gran’s hand was still glued to her wrist, Gran’s ice-blue eyes nearly glowing in the moonlight like someone possessed. Lauren’s eyes darted frantically around the room. The light. Maybe if she turned the light on it would help shock Gran back into consciousness.

With a massive tug, Lauren jerked her hand out of Gran’s grasp, but Gran’s grip was so strong it pulled her up out of her seat into a standing position before Lauren finally managed to free herself.

Lauren backed away slowly, keeping her eyes on Gran, who still grinned that glowing, teeth-streaked smile, but as Lauren backtracked, Gran matched each step with one of her own--steady, strong, full of intention, coming toward Lauren. The moonlight glinted off something in Granny’s right hand, and with a startling realization, Lauren recognized it as the knife Gran had been using to cut the apple. When had Gran grabbed it from the table? Well, she had no time to consider that now. She needed to wake her gran up, now!

Lauren stumbled backward in a rush to reach the light switch near the kitchen door. She refused to turn her back to Gran, so she reached her hand behind her, blindly feeling around the wall for the switch.

Gran kept coming forward steadily, holding the knife in an unnaturally strong grip and flashing her black-streaked smile like an evil witch coming to sacrifice the defenseless maiden.

Where was that switch, dammit?! Finally, Lauren’s fingers brushed against the knob of the switch and she flipped it up. Light flooded the room, momentarily blinding both of them. Lauren’s eyes adjusted faster, so she had a few seconds of stillness to fully take in her granny’s figure and the horrifying fact that the lack of light had caused her to sorely misjudge the color of the sticky substance Granny had been dipping her apples into and which now coated Granny’s teeth.

It wasn’t caramel sauce.

It looked sort of like ketchup, but darker, thicker, stickier. Lauren had a feeling it wasn’t tomato-derived. She became aware of something in her fisted hand and looked down at the crumpled paper towel that she’d used to wipe her feet: it, too, was smeared in a dark red fluid. That puddle of liquid on the kitchen floor...it was--Lauren shuddered violently, not willing to believe that Gran was actually a murderer. Maybe she’d accidentally cut herself or something. But Lauren didn’t see any signs of blood anywhere on Gran’s body or clothes--except for the streaks on her teeth and lips.

As Gran came out of her temporary blindness, Lauren’s heart beat at an incredible speed that had to be breaking a record, and her breathing was so rapid she feared hyperventilation. She felt like she was stuck in some kind of waking nightmare, like the terrifying episodes of sleep paralysis she used to get as a child. She struggled to wrap her mind around what was happening right now: her granny was actually trying to kill her!

Wake up, Lauren! Move! Do something! she shouted at herself mentally. Wake Granny up!

That’s right. She had to wake Gran up and everything would be all right.

Somehow, she found her voice. “Gran! Wake up! Gran!” But Gran kept moving toward her, forcing Lauren to back up along the wall. Too late, she realized Gran had trapped her in the corner of the room. She had nowhere to go.

Like a deer caught in a headlight, Lauren stared petrified as Gran raised the knife toward the ceiling, the sharp point aimed directly for Lauren’s heart. Then, with another chilling cackle, Gran struck.

At the same time, Lauren screamed as hard as her vocal cords would allow, and some sort of innate survival instinct made her duck down into a crouch. She heard a menacing thud right above her head, exactly where she’d been standing upright just a moment before. Another louder thump followed.

In her panic-induced state, she sat there frozen, her legs drawn up and her head buried under her arms, even though her brain was yelling at her to move, get out of there. But her muscles felt like jelly; she simply could not make them budge. Helpless, Lauren waited for the second strike, for the pain of the knife being jabbed into her skull like it was a ripe pumpkin ready to be gutted.

A second passed, then two. Then five. After ten seconds, Lauren let out the breath she’d been holding unconsciously. After twenty seconds, she finally jolted herself out of her frozen state enough to lift her head.

Trembling, Lauren cracked her eyelids open and took in the moonlit room. Her gran was lying limp on the floor, eyes closed, her empty hand open and loose, the awful bloody grin wiped away like it’d never been there. She looked like a ghostly shell of the bloodthirsty monster she’d just been. Hesitantly, Lauren twisted her head up and around, and saw the knife still embedded in the wall of her dining room.

Lauren let out a sob, her body shaking from head to toe. Somehow, she got to her feet and nearly tripped over Gran’s arm as she stumbled forward. At second thought, Lauren turned around and watched anxiously for a sign of life; Gran’s chest rose and fell in a gentle rhythm. She was still asleep.

Lauren backed away and tore out of the dining room, through the kitchen, and into her room, where she slammed the door shut firmly behind her. She leaned against the door, her pulse wildly out of control and her breath coming in stilted puffs.

But what the freaking heck was that? A highly extreme and violent case of somnambulism? And was Lauren really just content to stay in the house the rest of the night with the threat of being murdered by her demon-possessed, sleepwalking granny?

That was a hard pass.

Lauren grabbed the bag she used for weekend trips and began packing it haphazardly. She’d go down the street and stay with her friend for the night, and then...well, to be honest, she didn’t give a care what happened to her gran at the moment. Likely, she’d just be conked out for the rest of the night and wake up with no idea of the horror that had gone down.

But the blood?!? And the teeth? And the fact that Granny had been strolling around the house like a fit thirty-year-old? That was all just too...wrong. And frankly, freaked Lauren the hell out. She kept stuffing random clothes and items into the bag. After a few minutes, deciding that she had enough for the night or however long she’d have to hide out from her homicidal granny, Lauren zipped the bag and stood up.

She started toward her closed bedroom door, but halted in her tracks when a light tap came on the door.

Then, Granny’s crooning voice: “Lauren, dear, you awake?” Lauren did not dare move a muscle. “I thought you might want a midnight snack,” Gran continued. “How does apples and dip sound?”