Necroleptic
Emily was four years old the first time she died.
It happened at 2:47am on a Saturday morning, and when she regained consciousness she was absolutely terrified. She could not fathom what she had just experienced, the things she had seen, heard and done. When she tried to explain it to her parents that morning during breakfast, they told her she had simply suffered a nightmare. A very bad nightmare, and that she need not worry.
“I was falling,” she recalled herself saying to them as they all sat around the breakfast table. Her parents were patient, and she knew they didn’t believe her. “I was falling up, and I was so small. Everything was dark. And I was falling so fast.”
She had tried her best to explain her ordeal, but she couldn’t express herself properly. She began to cry. Her four year old vocabulary was not developed enough to truly articulate the sense of overwhelming insignificance she had felt once in her death-state. A sense of total obsolescence.
Her parents were as understanding and supportive as any parents could be when confronted with their child telling them they had died that morning. But ultimately there was nothing they could do. This was something they could not relate to, something they had not prepared for, and something they had never read about in the multitude of parenting books and magazines they had collected over the years.
She was ten when it happened again. During the final fifteen minutes of a primary school netball game she suddenly fell to the floor. The netball coach, Mrs Winters, and the school nurse immediately checked her vital signs, put her in the recovery position, and performed CPR. Over their many combined years of service within the school system they had seen dozens of students faint during sporting activities, but Emily’s case was somewhat different. No matter how hard they tried they could not find a pulse.
They checked her wrist and neck, and listened patiently - ear to chest, for a heartbeat, but all to no avail. The paramedics eventually arrived and confirmed that Emily was indeed dead. They couldn’t determine the cause of death without the results of a post-mortem, but stated it was likely caused by a heart malfunction, such as an aortic aneurism. They covered her body and put her on a stretcher and into the back of the awaiting ambulance.
Emily’s parents were both called at work and informed of the tragedy. Her mother had lost consciousness upon hearing the news, and her father had cried for the first time in decades. However, by the time they arrived at the hospital to identify their daughter’s dead body, she was wide awake and being consulted by half a dozen confused and outraged doctors. The confusion came from those who could have sworn she was dead, and the outrage arose from the senior members of staff who blamed the others for medical negligence and outright incompetence.
The paramedics had attested that after five minutes of being in the back of the ambulance, the young girl had suddenly shot upright, screaming deliriously.
Emily’s parents felt instant relief, and also instant fear. They had never spoken about the first event which had occurred eight years prior, and were sure their daughter had either forgotten about it, or buried it deep within her subconscious. But as they all drove home from the hospital that evening, they both silently questioned whether their daughter may have been telling the truth after all.
There was no chronological pattern to the Emily’s episodes. They were as infrequent and unpredictable as natural disasters. However, as Emily aged the bouts of death increased in frequency, and by the time she was fifteen she was dying at least four times a week.
The thing that scared her the most wasn’t the dying, or the being dead part, or even coming back to life. The worst part was the ever-increasing longing she had to be dead again; to go back to that place. It was a place stripped bare of any falsities. A place of solace. It was a place of infinite mysteries. No single word or collection of words could ever encapsulate the complexities of the void she entered once in her death-state. She simultaneously felt alone, afraid, liberated and at home.
As a teenager she found it very hard to make friends. Life seemed trivial, as did the notion of forming a bond with other people for the purposes of social conformity and security. She knew she was not ordinary, and therefore found it very difficult to do ordinary things. She had seen the other side dozens of times now, and with each venture beyond the bounds of her own mortality, her existence became more mundane. With every day that passed, her yearning to explore the other side increased. She longed for death, but was too afraid to admit it.
Her school, like any other, was an amalgamation of tribes; each faction as unique and uniform as the next. She naturally gravitated to the Goths. They dressed in black, they shared her disdain of the status quo, and they listened to death metal, which she initially found quite enthralling.
However, in time she grew bored of them. They were morbid, and they had little right to be. They were alive, yet they idolised death, something they had no knowledge of. To them, death was a fantasy, something they could pretend to understand, a pantomime. For her it was a frequent destination.
She came close several times to telling them about her condition. But in the end, she decided against it, as she always had done. They wouldn’t understand, nobody ever did.
“What do you see when you’re dead?” she knew they would ask. “Do you see any ghosts? Famous people? Do you see the future?” It would be too difficult for them to understand that when she went beyond, the luxuries of speech, touch, sight, smell and sound all become redundant. It was an experience, but not one of corporeality.
There would never be any words spoken, because there would be no mouths to speak them, nor ears to hear. Just as there would never be any ghosts or prophetic oracles waiting to give her clairvoyant advice, riddles or clues. It was quite literally a place where no body could tread. A place where only the rawest essence of one’s being was exposed to unknown forces, unseen currents and unbound elements.
In her early twenties she gathered the courage and visited a doctor, several miles away from her home town. She told him about her sporadic forays into the afterlife, and he sat and took notes. After several moments of prolonged awkward silence, he suggested that they keep her overnight, and monitor her sleep. Emily insisted that it would be futile, as she could not predict when the next episode would occur.
“Are you familiar with the term narcolepsy?” the doctor asked her. He was a middle aged man, balding with a rotund mid-section. He peered at her over his spectacles, which perched rather gracefully on the bridge of his nose.
“No. I’m not,” she said.
“It is a medical condition which causes random and uncontrollable bouts of sleep. The term is derived from the Greek, narko meaning lethargy or stupor, and lepsis which means attack. A narcoleptic person could be driving their car, watching television, or walking their dog, when all of a sudden they will fall asleep. Totally without warning."
Emily looked at him in silence, nodding her head and urging him to continue.
“If what you are saying is true- and I mean no offence, but it sounds extremely unlikely that it is- but if what you saying is true, I would say you have a case of necrolepsy. Necro being the Greek term for death. I suppose one could conclude that you are the victim of death attacks.” The doctor said this with some relish, and chuckled. When he realised Emily was not amused he composed himself and told her there was truthfully nothing he could do.
She thanked him for his help and made her way to the reception at the front of the small building, where she paid the secretary an extortionate fee for the doctor’s brief and quite useless service. As she was walking to her car she heard him calling her name, as he half-shuffled and half-jogged out of his practice towards her.
“I wanted to ask,” he said between ragged breaths. “What do you see when…you die?”
Emily thought of a dozen smart answers to return with, something which would leave him feeling stupefied, insignificant and dumbfounded. But in the end, she just answered him with the truth.
“I see…the beginning.”
© Matt Lee Marshall
It happened at 2:47am on a Saturday morning, and when she regained consciousness she was absolutely terrified. She could not fathom what she had just experienced, the things she had seen, heard and done. When she tried to explain it to her parents that morning during breakfast, they told her she had simply suffered a nightmare. A very bad nightmare, and that she need not worry.
“I was falling,” she recalled herself saying to them as they all sat around the breakfast table. Her parents were patient, and she knew they didn’t believe her. “I was falling up, and I was so small. Everything was dark. And I was falling so fast.”
She had tried her best to explain her ordeal, but she couldn’t express herself properly. She began to cry. Her four year old vocabulary was not developed enough to truly articulate the sense of overwhelming insignificance she had felt once in her death-state. A sense of total obsolescence.
Her parents were as understanding and supportive as any parents could be when confronted with their child telling them they had died that morning. But ultimately there was nothing they could do. This was something they could not relate to, something they had not prepared for, and something they had never read about in the multitude of parenting books and magazines they had collected over the years.
She was ten when it happened again. During the final fifteen minutes of a primary school netball game she suddenly fell to the floor. The netball coach, Mrs Winters, and the school nurse immediately checked her vital signs, put her in the recovery position, and performed CPR. Over their many combined years of service within the school system they had seen dozens of students faint during sporting activities, but Emily’s case was somewhat different. No matter how hard they tried they could not find a pulse.
They checked her wrist and neck, and listened patiently - ear to chest, for a heartbeat, but all to no avail. The paramedics eventually arrived and confirmed that Emily was indeed dead. They couldn’t determine the cause of death without the results of a post-mortem, but stated it was likely caused by a heart malfunction, such as an aortic aneurism. They covered her body and put her on a stretcher and into the back of the awaiting ambulance.
Emily’s parents were both called at work and informed of the tragedy. Her mother had lost consciousness upon hearing the news, and her father had cried for the first time in decades. However, by the time they arrived at the hospital to identify their daughter’s dead body, she was wide awake and being consulted by half a dozen confused and outraged doctors. The confusion came from those who could have sworn she was dead, and the outrage arose from the senior members of staff who blamed the others for medical negligence and outright incompetence.
The paramedics had attested that after five minutes of being in the back of the ambulance, the young girl had suddenly shot upright, screaming deliriously.
Emily’s parents felt instant relief, and also instant fear. They had never spoken about the first event which had occurred eight years prior, and were sure their daughter had either forgotten about it, or buried it deep within her subconscious. But as they all drove home from the hospital that evening, they both silently questioned whether their daughter may have been telling the truth after all.
There was no chronological pattern to the Emily’s episodes. They were as infrequent and unpredictable as natural disasters. However, as Emily aged the bouts of death increased in frequency, and by the time she was fifteen she was dying at least four times a week.
The thing that scared her the most wasn’t the dying, or the being dead part, or even coming back to life. The worst part was the ever-increasing longing she had to be dead again; to go back to that place. It was a place stripped bare of any falsities. A place of solace. It was a place of infinite mysteries. No single word or collection of words could ever encapsulate the complexities of the void she entered once in her death-state. She simultaneously felt alone, afraid, liberated and at home.
As a teenager she found it very hard to make friends. Life seemed trivial, as did the notion of forming a bond with other people for the purposes of social conformity and security. She knew she was not ordinary, and therefore found it very difficult to do ordinary things. She had seen the other side dozens of times now, and with each venture beyond the bounds of her own mortality, her existence became more mundane. With every day that passed, her yearning to explore the other side increased. She longed for death, but was too afraid to admit it.
Her school, like any other, was an amalgamation of tribes; each faction as unique and uniform as the next. She naturally gravitated to the Goths. They dressed in black, they shared her disdain of the status quo, and they listened to death metal, which she initially found quite enthralling.
However, in time she grew bored of them. They were morbid, and they had little right to be. They were alive, yet they idolised death, something they had no knowledge of. To them, death was a fantasy, something they could pretend to understand, a pantomime. For her it was a frequent destination.
She came close several times to telling them about her condition. But in the end, she decided against it, as she always had done. They wouldn’t understand, nobody ever did.
“What do you see when you’re dead?” she knew they would ask. “Do you see any ghosts? Famous people? Do you see the future?” It would be too difficult for them to understand that when she went beyond, the luxuries of speech, touch, sight, smell and sound all become redundant. It was an experience, but not one of corporeality.
There would never be any words spoken, because there would be no mouths to speak them, nor ears to hear. Just as there would never be any ghosts or prophetic oracles waiting to give her clairvoyant advice, riddles or clues. It was quite literally a place where no body could tread. A place where only the rawest essence of one’s being was exposed to unknown forces, unseen currents and unbound elements.
In her early twenties she gathered the courage and visited a doctor, several miles away from her home town. She told him about her sporadic forays into the afterlife, and he sat and took notes. After several moments of prolonged awkward silence, he suggested that they keep her overnight, and monitor her sleep. Emily insisted that it would be futile, as she could not predict when the next episode would occur.
“Are you familiar with the term narcolepsy?” the doctor asked her. He was a middle aged man, balding with a rotund mid-section. He peered at her over his spectacles, which perched rather gracefully on the bridge of his nose.
“No. I’m not,” she said.
“It is a medical condition which causes random and uncontrollable bouts of sleep. The term is derived from the Greek, narko meaning lethargy or stupor, and lepsis which means attack. A narcoleptic person could be driving their car, watching television, or walking their dog, when all of a sudden they will fall asleep. Totally without warning."
Emily looked at him in silence, nodding her head and urging him to continue.
“If what you are saying is true- and I mean no offence, but it sounds extremely unlikely that it is- but if what you saying is true, I would say you have a case of necrolepsy. Necro being the Greek term for death. I suppose one could conclude that you are the victim of death attacks.” The doctor said this with some relish, and chuckled. When he realised Emily was not amused he composed himself and told her there was truthfully nothing he could do.
She thanked him for his help and made her way to the reception at the front of the small building, where she paid the secretary an extortionate fee for the doctor’s brief and quite useless service. As she was walking to her car she heard him calling her name, as he half-shuffled and half-jogged out of his practice towards her.
“I wanted to ask,” he said between ragged breaths. “What do you see when…you die?”
Emily thought of a dozen smart answers to return with, something which would leave him feeling stupefied, insignificant and dumbfounded. But in the end, she just answered him with the truth.
“I see…the beginning.”
© Matt Lee Marshall