Watchers of the Night

by Matthew Keith

Chapter 1

  Paul woke from another dream-filled night, having once again slept straight through until sunrise. He blinked and stretched as he rolled diagonally on his bed, trying to find the will to pry himself from his mattress and face another day of high school. Although his body was aching and tired, it was his mind that was most exhausted. He felt as if he’d spent the entire night cramming for a big exam.

  How was it that he could sleep for ten, sometimes twelve, hours a night and wake up nearly every morning feeling as if he hadn’t slept at all? He’d tried to find something to fix the problem, but no amount of doctor visits, talks with trained professionals, or pills had ever been able to make any difference—and it had been that way for nearly five years now.

  Every night he would begin to nod off around seven o’clock in the evening, as if knowing it would soon be dark created a subconscious trigger in his mind that shut him down. He could be sitting on the couch watching a movie, and even though he fought against it, he would still nod off, waking stiff and sore the next morning.

  The worst part was that it happened no matter where he was or what he was doing. The few times that he’d spent the night at a friend’s house were a disaster; particularly the time a couple of summers ago when his best friend Steven decided it would be fun to shave his eyebrows after he fell asleep. Paul had woken up and left Steven’s house without knowing what had been done. It wasn’t until he was in line to pay for his breakfast burrito that he noticed all the stares and snickers from the people around him. It took a week for Paul to get the nerve to leave the house again, and two more months for him to reestablish his friendship with Steven, who’d always been the kind of friend that took every chance he could to pull a prank.

  The only time he was able to fight against falling asleep was when he was with Stephanie, another of his best friends. She’d been his across-the-street neighbor in the third grade, and although he and his mother had moved across town by his ninth grade year, the two of them had remained close friends. There was something very safe about his ‘chick friend’—her term, not his—that he knew he could never find in any of his guy friends. He certainly would never find any kind of comfort zone from a joker like Steven. He and Stephanie had fun, of course, like normal friends did, but they also talked about the deeper things in life. He never felt embarrassed when he told her how he was feeling or what he was thinking.

  Sitting on the edge of his bed, rubbing his sandy eyes and trying to get rid of the cottony, morning-brain feeling that accompanied the first hour of every day, he squinted at the clock. Just after seven in the morning–the same time he always woke this time of year. No matter what time his alarm went off, he always opened his eyes just after sunrise. Summer time, winter time – it didn’t matter if daylight savings had just begun or ended; he was waking up when the sun came up, and that was that. This caused him a major problem at school—attendance, or lack of it, in his first hour. He’d served many hours of detention as a result.

  Pushing himself up onto his feet and scratching at his tangled mess of hair, he made his way downstairs into the kitchen for something to eat. Breakfast with the Cap’n - hard to beat, he thought.

  He lost himself in the sound of his own crunching for the next fifteen minutes.