Black Coffee

A literary horror serial served one cup at a time.

The first sip is always bitter. Strong, dark, and unsettling on the tongue before it softens into something familiar. That’s how I think of this story, and how I hope you will take it in. Black Coffee begins here, in a place at once ordinary and otherworldly: a roadside diner lit by flickering neon, where the night is never quiet and the patrons carry more than weariness through the door.

This chapter is longer than what you might be used to reading online: five thousand words or so, but that feels right for a diner experience. Sometimes you don’t want to go to a Starbucks drive-thru. Often its best to walk in, sit down, and watch the life around you as you sip slowly and take in the ambience. I’ve broken it up into sections so you can more easily find a place to set down your cup and take a breather.

You don’t need to finish this all in one sitting. Let it linger. Come back to it in the odd corners of your week, when the house is still, or when the world feels strange and unfamiliar.

Every story begins and ends at The Midnight Diner, steaming in the air above chipped porcelain and another cup of black coffee. I invite you to stay as long as you like. Oh, and before I forget, pass this along to someone you know, who might like it. Coffee’s always better in the company of friends.

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Kat rubbed the counter with a gray rag that had been boiled too many times. The motion was slow and circular, a rhythm her body had taken on without thought. She was tired, though she could not have said exactly how long she had been working nights at The Midnight Diner. Months, at least. Long enough that her sense of time had shifted, so that daylight felt like a rumor and the hours between midnight and dawn felt like the only hours that really counted.

The diner was small, a box of glass and chrome that glowed against the dark like a beacon for the restless. A neon sign buzzed outside, pink letters half-failing, so that MIDNIGHT sometimes read as M D IGHT. Inside, vinyl booths creaked when a body settled into them, and the Formica counters were patterned with little constellations of scratches and burn marks. The air carried the tang of fryer oil, a sweetness of old pie, and the bitterness of coffee that had been sitting a little too long on the warmer. It was the smell of good hard work and predictable Americana.

Kat’s reflection bent in the napkin dispenser. She looked younger that way, her face warped into an oval, her skin stretched out into a wrinkle-less illusion. In truth she was in her forties and there were a few showing up here and there, but she often felt much older than that, as though fatigue had seasoned her more quickly than actual years. She tried to remember if she had ever been a morning person, but she didn’t think so. Nights claimed her as their own.

She watched the customers sitting around with a kind of detached affection, a curiosity that came from seeing the same faces under the same light night after night. Men in work shirts with cuffs stained by grease. Women with scarves tight under their chins, lipstick freshened in the mirror by the door. Soldiers on leave who pretended they were not listening to the jukebox, because Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe live was way more swinging than whatever came out of that thing. Kat studied them as she walked around and poured their coffee, and sometimes she caught herself writing their stories in her head, stringing together bits of conversation into lives she could almost believe were real.

There was a word for it she heard once: sonder, the sudden realization that every stranger carries a world inside them. Like this diner, she thought. She felt it every shift. A man in a booth chewing eggs too fast was not only a customer. He was a man with a sick wife, or a man who had done something at work he could not take back. A woman sipping tea alone had a letter folded in her purse, the words etching themselves into her mind as she waited for the fifth, sixth, or twentieth sip before she would take it out and read her man’s final goodbye. The cook in the back who hummed while scraping the grill carried a grief that Kat had felt but never asked about.

She had learned this: you cannot work a diner at midnight without learning that everyone has ghosts. They came in hidden under coats, trailing cigarette smoke, carried in handbags and glove compartments. Some were loud. Some were quiet and patient, waiting until the coffee cooled before making themselves known. Kat never asked for them. She set down plates gently, like offerings, and listened without appearing to listen.

The diner walls held these lives in. The jukebox in the corner gave its metallic croon, sometimes breaking into silence without warning, as if the machine itself grew weary of Frankie Valli or Johnny Mathis. Fluorescent bulbs flickered overhead and left shadows clinging to the corners along with the cobwebs (she had never bothered with those… customers were always staring at their mugs, if they weren’t looking inwards. The cobwebs were safe). The floor tiles had dulled to a color that could not be named, washed in footsteps and long, relentless years.

Kat rubbed the counter once more and set the rag aside. She poured herself a cup of coffee and let the steam rise into her face. The taste was bitter, stronger than it should have been, as if the night itself had seeped into the pot. She drank anyway, the way one prays even when they doubt. Black coffee was the only thing that would keep her going.

She looked down by her feet and was happy to see her three dogs sleeping peacefully behind the counter. How she managed to talk the boss into letting her dogs in there she’d never know, but she was glad for the familiar company. In the hub-bub of this or that new customer, orders yelled out from the kitchen, and spilled coffee, their presence was calming. They were three friends she knew, and they didn’t mind being there. Kat bent down and scratched Meg behind her ear. She was the oldest of the three, and (though she’d never say so out loud) her favorite. Meg just looked up with doleful eyes and gave her tail a couple wags.

The clock on the wall ticked on with its dry, unyielding rhythm. The hour was late. The hour was always late. Outside the night pressed firmly against the windows, waiting for someone to let it in. But the flood light out front kept it at bay, at least by the door.

The bell gave a thin metallic ring as the outside world spilled in and a man walked into the diner.

He was heavy-set, broad through the shoulders, in his late fifties. His square face sagged with deep folds that had begun to settle permanently into his skin, giving him the look of a weary bulldog. His brow was heavy, a shelf of bone that shadowed his eyes, and beneath it those eyes glared out red and swollen, shot through with wild streaks of blood. They seemed too large for his face, as though something behind them pressed hard against the surface.

He wore a black sweater that clung to him in damp patches, tan khaki pants that sagged at the knees and black boots dulled by salt and dust. He moved toward the counter without pausing to glance at the booths or the pie case. The stool legs squealed under his weight when he dropped onto one.

Strong Enough to Stay Awake

“Coffee,” the trucker muttered. His voice carried a low rasp, as if the road had sanded it raw. “Black coffee. Strong enough to keep me awake forever.”

“Got plenty of that,” she said as her hand closed around the pot. Kat poured slowly, watching the stream hit the bottom of the mug. Steam curled upward, pale and twisting, and she slid the mug across. His hands shook when he reached for it, a tremor running through the knuckles and into the wrist. The sight unsettled her more than she expected. It made her look out the large windows into the dark, but there was only their reflection.

Above the counter, the fluorescent light flickered and hummed, a steady drone that cracked once like an insect caught in the wire. From the corner, the jukebox sputtered mid-song, notes chopped off as though something had pulled the cord.

The café shifted. A couple in the back lowered their voices. Forks stopped scraping plates. The small conversations that filled the night drained away, leaving Kat alone with the sound of the man’s first swallow.

She watched him drink. His lips pressed against the rim of the mug as though the coffee were medicine, as though each swallow were not desire but compulsion. The tremor in his hand passed into the cup, making the liquid shiver. She had seen men drink themselves steady before, but never with coffee.

Something in him unsettled her. Not his size, not the folds of flesh sagging around his jaw, but the sense that he was too full, that his skin barely contained him. His eyes, fever-bright and wide, darted once toward the windows and then back to the cup, as if he feared catching sight of something that might already be waiting there.

Kat had learned to tell when customers carried ghosts. Most wore them in the stoop of shoulders or in the clench of a jaw. His ghost seemed closer, as though it had followed him through the door and taken the stool beside him. She felt her skin prickle, the tiny hairs on her arms rising. She glanced around the room. The couple in the booth had fallen silent, watching their plates with unusual care. Even Manny at the grill lowered his spatula and frowned toward the counter. The whole diner seemed to lean in, waiting for the man to speak again.

Kat set the pot back on its warmer and forced her hands to still. She told herself she had only served another customer, another tired body on the road, but she knew this one would not leave her mind when his cup was empty.

He began without preface, as if the words had been riding up in his throat since the first mile and had finally found air.

“It starts the same way every time,” he said. “A clock that should read one time and reads another. A sign that should be green and looks black. The highway narrows when there is no reason for it to narrow. The paint lines grow thin like old veins. I think it’s a trick of the eyes, then I remember the first night, and I stop thinking.”

Kat nodded once and did not interrupt. She folded the rag into a neat square, then folded it again, then set it aside. She kept her hands visible, palms loose, as if to show him she would not press him for details he didn’t want to give. The clock by the pies ticked on. She didn’t look at it. She kept her gaze where his was, on the coffee and the window and the inch of counter between them that seemed to matter very much.

“It was late,” he said. “Empty late. The kind of late that has no cars, no tail lights, no oncoming high beams to rub against. Pines closed in. The asphalt had a skin on it from the cold. Wet in places, not wet in others, like it could not make up its mind. I had a load of fixtures out of Lowell and too many hours behind me. There’s a stretch before the Connecticut River that turns where deer cross. I felt sleepy. Just couldn’t keep my eyes open.”

He lifted the cup and drank. The swallow made a small sound, a private effort. When he set the cup down, a ring of steam unfurled and climbed. The jukebox tried to start, coughed, and gave up.

“He was there,” the trucker said. “Left shoulder. Thumb out like a boy who learned what hitchhiking looks like from a magazine. Coat too thin for the month, collar turned up, head bent like he couldn’t quite fix his neck. I hit the brakes. The rig answered slow, all that weight coming forward. Tires hissed on the wet pavement. I had that flash of thought, the one you get when you’re about to end your life. Then I lost him. He wasn’t in the lane or in the rear view mirror. He wasn’t even a smear on the road as far as I could tell. I put the hazards on and went out with the flashlight.”

He looked up then, not at Kat, but at a point level with her shoulder. His eyes were larger now, or seemed larger, as if the memory swelled them from within.

“The beam shook,” he said. “I remember I couldn’t keep my hand still. I blamed the cold. The ditch was a mouth of weeds and candy wrappers. Someone had thrown a beer case there, torn cardboard going soft with the damp. No blood. No shoe. No man. I told myself I’d seen a stump. People see stumps. They see mailboxes. They see what they expect to see. But then I turned around and the beam caught it: a man’s forearm and hand sticking out of the brush. And you know what? His hand still had its thumb out. I must’ve froze for a few minutes. I noticed a pool of blood snaking its way down the embankment and onto the road. It looked like jet black coffee, actually.”

Kat listened to the sound of Manny scraping the grill. It had gone quiet without her noticing. The kitchen worked, but its sounds hung back. The couple in the booth moved forks without clinks. She had picked up the old rag again and noticed she was cleaning the same spot on the counter over and over again.

“Forty miles when I drove away,” the trucker said. “The world went the way it should for forty miles. The radio tried to hold a station from Bangor and couldn’t. I passed the billboard that shows the big tooth with a crown on it, for that dental practice in Springfield, I think. I dunno, but I breathed then, that’s for sure. Then the road dipped into the Berkshires and rose again, and there he was. Same side. Same thumb. Same coat.”

The man said this with a kind of patience that told Kat he had replayed it so many times before. He had made the words simple so that his mind could carry them without breaking.

“I stopped,” he said. “You can forgive a man for not stopping the second time he sees a ghost or a trick. I couldn’t forgive myself. I had to stop. Maybe he was giving me a second chance, I thought. Maybe the bloody arm was someone else’s back there. So I stopped. Right in the middle of the road. The headlights washed him as he stood there looking kinda dumb, smiling, sticking his thumb out. I closed my eyes to make sure I wasn’t imagining things, and when I opened my eyes again, he was closer. I told myself it was distance and angle. It wasn’t that he actually moved towards me. It’s that he simply got closer altogether. I blinked again, and he came closer, and this time his smile was gone. His thumb was still out, though. So I stepped on the gas and blew past him.”

Peeling an Apple

The man drew his hand across the counter, palm down, feeling the seam where two plates of Formica joined. Kat noticed the scar that crossed his lifeline. It looked like a pale thread stitched in before birth.

“I know I’m not crazy,” the trucker said. “We all have our breaking point. I get that. But he was there. He’s been there. I drove for a long time without letting my eyes make water. They burn when you do that. They feel like two coins you’ve heated in a stove. I learned to breathe only when the road was straight and my headlights showed no one. I learned to swallow without swallowing. I told myself if I made it to the next exit, I’d pull off and drive where all the houses were. I’d feel better.”

“And did you?” Kat asked, her voice low. She felt the question as a weight. It wanted to fall, but she let it drop gently.

“There was no exit,” he said. “There’s always an exit there, a little green sign with white letters, but there was none. I thought I had passed it. Maybe I had passed it. Maybe the road chose not to show it. I drove until I could not feel my fingers. I watched the line where the hood ends and the night begins. There was never a sign. Just a straight shot through the woods.”

Kat found herself leaning closer, elbows on the counter. She didn’t remember putting them there. She saw the highway his words drew, and as she watched the creases on his forehead grow deeper, a resigned sadness welled up in her. The man was lost. Not just because of the highway he drove, but deeply lost. And afraid.

“The third time I saw him,” the trucker said, “I knew it was really him. He was dead. He showed up hitchhiking again in the middle of the road this time, smiling at me again. But I didn’t have to close my eyes to make him come closer. My truck did that for me. I felt the wheel jump with the ghost of a bump. I heard a sound that ought to be bone and cannot be bone because there was no body. I kept the rig going straight. My foot had a mind of its own. I pressed the accelerator like you press a prayer to your teeth. But then I looked behind me and there he was in the sideview mirror. I stepped on the brakes and came to a standstill in the middle of the abandoned road, and I kept looking. When I blinked, the guy’s shadow got a few feet closer behind me.”

He drank again. The mug clicked on the counter when he set it down.

“I went to a truck stop at dawn,” he said. “I was somewhere outside Buffalo. The stop was fine; warm light, the smell of bacon. A good crew of people. I walked around the cab and looked for a mark. I found a smear of something dark on the chrome. Oil can look like blood in certain lights. I washed it with the squeegee, like a man doing a penance with a little rubber blade. The boy at the register told me I looked like I needed some sleep. I told him I was fine.”

He shook his head slowly. Kat could not tell whether he was answering the boy, or himself, or the shape sitting beside him on the stool.

“The next night I was supposed to drive back to Massachusetts after loading up and getting some rest. I tried to nap for a few hours that afternoon but I kept seeing him when I closed my eyes. Whatever sleep came, it was barely enough. And I was going to have to do that stretch again. There are only so many roads. The world is narrow if you’re moving freight, big as it is. I made a promise before I left the yard in Buffalo. I was going to drink coffee the whole way. I wasn’t going to nod off. I wasn’t going to let him show up and get closer.”

The lights above them hummed a little louder. One bulb dipped and recovered. Kat kept her face neutral, but she felt the tiny change in her body, a nervous system taking a note. The man pressed his palm down as if testing the counter for a secret button. His eyes went to the window and came back quickly.

That’s when Kat saw the hitchhiker standing on the other side of the window. He was right at the edge of darkness, looking in, with a serene smile on his face, and his thumb out. He was wearing a brown suede jacket and blue jeans. There was blood on the left side of his face, where it had been smashed in by something large and fast. Kat forced herself not to look at him but to keep her eyes on the man she was serving. Best not to say anything.

“I took a few days off,” the trucker said. “Thought maybe I’d go home and rest, maybe look into some other way to make a living. But he started visiting me there, too. Dreams first, until about two in the morning, where I’d see him on the street, standing by my front yard, thumb out. If I blinked he’d get closer until he wasn’t. He never came to the glass, though,” the trucker said. “He was kinder than that. He waits where I can almost forget him. Then he shifts. A half step. That’s his kindness. He gives me time to understand what’s happening, and then he takes more of it. He takes it like a man peeling an apple without breaking the skin. A little curl. Another curl. The apple still sits round in your hand, and yet there’s less of it.”

He turned the cup so the handle faced away, then turned it back. The veins in his hand rose. Kat felt a small ache in her chest, a tenderness that did not belong in the story but had crept in anyway.

When the World’s Not Looking

“That’s the long and short of it,” he said. “I should’ve stopped that first time. Should’ve called someone. Asked for help. Maybe saved him as he lay dying. Anyway, after a few nights of no sleep at home, I got back in my truck and started driving again. If I was going to see him, might as well be on his own turf, I thought to myself. Now it’s been three more days of driving, three more nights of no sleep. Each night the same thing. He shows up on the road and I hit him again and again, and if I stop, he inches closer. It’s worse in the hours when the road empties completely,” he said. “Two in the morning to three. That hour has corners. You turn them and the world isn’t there.”

He closed his eyes then, only for a moment, and Kat felt her own chest constrict. When he opened them, they were wet but not gentler.

“At least here I can rest,” he said softly, staring past Kat into the memory of some happier time before that fateful night. “Otherwise, I’ve tried everything. Windows down. Cold on the face. Radio talk. Slapping the cheek. I can do them for only so long. He can wait longer. He can wait forever.”

The couple in the booth shifted, and their leather seats sighed. Manny lifted the basket from the fryer and set it down quietly. He glanced at Kat and then away. The diner had learned how to listen.

“You know, I went to a priest,” the trucker said. “I’m not even Catholic. Said he’d listen to my confession. Can they do that?”

Kat shrugged, unsure herself of what the priesthood could or couldn’t do. She hadn’t had much time for church herself.

“He told me to confess the thing that sits behind the fear. He said the fear is a curtain. I told him about the night on eighty-nine when a kid stepped out where he shouldn’t have, and I couldn’t stop, and there was a sound like a bird hitting a window. Did you get help, he asked me. That’s when I froze. Of course I didn’t get help. That’s why I was in there. But I didn’t say that. What I said was, yes. I got help. But I still feel bad I killed him. The road didn’t change after that. He absolved me of my fear but not the cowardice. Of falling asleep at the wheel but not the cowardice. How could he absolve me of something I never confessed?”

He said this last part like a man reporting the weather. No dramatics, no plea. Only the fact of it.

“So I’ve been thinking about stuff. Ways I could get out of this,” he said after a moment. “Stopping on purpose. Turning the key. Letting the cab go dark. Letting your eyes do what eyes do. Invite him in. Sit with him like two men at a table. Ask him what he wants. Tell him I’m sorry. One night I let him get as far in as the back seat of the cab before I perked up real good, and he was gone. I wasn’t ready for that sight, and I wasn’t going to do that again. So I just drive.”

Kat felt the heat of the coffee urn at her hip. It worked like a heart that could be counted on, steady and unromantic. She topped off his cup and watched the ripple climb to the rim. The liquid steadied. He didn’t thank her. He didn’t have to.

“You think I’m sick,” he said softly.

“Not sick,” she replied. “Just tired. What I actually think is that you need a cot in the back and a few hours while Manny watches the door.”

“Not sure it’ll do much good,” he said, “though I appreciate the effort. He’s here anyway, isn’t he?”

Kat drew a slow breath and let it out. She felt the corners of the room shift closer by a fraction. “Yes,” she said finally. “Just outside.”

The look of fear brushed past his face only for a second, before he took a deep breath and another sip from his mug. “That is how I win. I drink this. And I tell you my story while I’m still awake. What else can I do?”

He looked at her then, finally and fully, as if asking whether she could hold what he had set between them. The question didn’t require speech. She held it. She nodded once.

“Do you want me to call someone?” she asked. “A friend? Family? Maybe that priest again?”

He just shook his head sadly.

“Well, what would happen if you slept in a church?” she asked. “Maybe on a pew with the doors locked.”

“I would dream,” he said. “He’s there, too, remember. And sometimes that feels worse, because in the dream, I just want to keep sleeping. I just want to let him get me.”

He pushed the cup a little away, not far, then pulled it back. “These things happen when the world isn’t looking. When you drive down a road at the witching hour. Or when you close your eyes and shut out the world, and all you have left are your regrets.”

Kat felt a chill take her arms, not from cold but from recognition. The diner knew this truth. The diner existed in the hour when the world wasn’t looking.

The trucker lifted the mug and finished what remained. He held the empty vessel in both hands as if it might still give something if he asked the right way. Then he set it down carefully, as if returning a borrowed object to its shelf.

“I could wait here until the morning,” he said. “Sit in the corner booth. Let the sun make me safe. I’ve done that once or twice. The morning isn’t a cure. It’s a reprieve with a bill on the back. The next night the road’s there again, and so is he. But I’m a man who moves things. I gotta move.”

He sat for a moment in silence. His eyes went again to the window, but they didn’t linger. Kat wasn’t sure if he could see the hitchhiker, but he was still there, standing with that bloody smile, with his thumb out.

“I tell you this so that someone knows he’s real,” he said, “that I’m not crazy. If I go out and keep my eyes open, he’ll go away. But if I close them, if for some reason I just gotta get that shut-eye, you’ll know why I never came back for another cup. But at least you’ll have my story. You know I always come back, Kat. Every time I drive by. You’ve got the most beautiful face, a listening ear, and the blackest coffee a man like me could want.”

Kat’s throat tightened. He had been there before, telling him the same story. But why couldn’t she remember him? She felt the urge to reach out and touch his sleeve, to offer a human anchor to a man who seemed to be drifting a little above his own seat. She kept her hands on the safe side of the counter.

He looked at the coffee one last time, then at Kat, and in that look there was both gratitude and grief, the two coins men carry for moments that cannot be repaired.

“Thank you,” he said. “For the coffee. For a room where my story can find a listening ear. For making room for a coward but treating me with respect. Not too many ladies around like you.”

Kat inclined her head. She saw the shape beside him now without seeing it, the way one can feel someone enter a room without hearing the door. The story had finished and had not finished. Had the hitchhiker ever been this close to the man before? Had he ever come in? The clock went on with its small jerk and settle.

She filled his mug again, overcome by a sudden desperation, an assurance that if he walked out that door, she wouldn’t see him again. He’d be just another forgotten man in the dark, another silenced story. “Are you sure you don’t want another?” she asked quickly. “Please.” The stream of coffee wavered in the tremor of her hand, though she told herself it was only the weight of the pot.

The man lifted the cup and drank as though each swallow was the only thing holding his body upright. The liquid vanished too quickly. When she reached for the pot again he didn’t protest, only bent to it with the same fierce need. His hand pressed flat to the counter, then closed around the edge. The tendons stood out, his knuckles whitening until they looked like small stones pressing through flesh. She thought he might split the laminate in two.

“If I close my eyes,” he muttered, almost to the coffee, “even for a second, he’ll climb into the cab with me.”

For a moment the window gave her the vision of two men by the counter. The trucker, sitting on his stool, hunched over his cup, and behind him another shape, faint, blurred, and standing there.

Kat blinked, and the reflection was gone. So was the hitchhiker outside the window.

The trucker’s hand slipped from the counter, the white drained from his knuckles. He dug into his pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. They fell onto the Formica with a muted clatter, scattering like pieces of something broken. He didn’t count them. He didn’t look at Kat again.

“Thank you,” he said. The words were soft and plain, as though this time they were meant more for the coffee than for her.

Then he stood. The stool moaned against the floor and rocked back into place as if eager to be rid of him. He straightened his sweater, folds of flesh settling around his jaw and neck, and moved to the door with the weary determination of a man carrying too many miles on his back. The bell rang, a high brittle sound, and the night welcomed him.

Kat stared at the mug he left behind. Steam rose from it in a pale ribbon, though she had watched him drain it again and again. The cup was still full, the surface of dark liquid unbroken. She leaned closer. The smell was fresh, sharper than the pot should have allowed. She thought of the tremor in his hands, the way he drank as though each swallow bought him another mile, and felt her stomach tighten.

Through the glass she watched him step into the wash of the neon sign. He looked both ways. The pink and blue glow slid over his face, hollowing his eyes and deepening the folds of skin until he appeared as if carved out of stone. Beyond the flood light and neon colors, the parking lot lay in its shallow dark.

He paused just past the edge of the light. For a moment he seemed to waver, like a figure caught between one world and the next. Then, to the right and a little bit behind him, another man rose from a bench that was up against one of the diner windows along the front. Kat hadn’t seen him sitting there a moment before. This time he looked more solid, and he stood smoothly, as if knowing exactly what to do. He followed the trucker. The window glass held them both for a breath, then released them with an exhale into the dark.

Kat’s hands pressed to the counter. Her palms felt damp. She wanted to call out, to bang on the glass, to break the silence that had settled over the room, but her voice caught in her throat. She looked down at the mug again. It was still steaming. The handle gleamed with a thin sheen of condensation. She thought of reaching for it, but some part of her recoiled.

The couple in the booth had gone back to their plates, heads bent close, voices low, as if nothing unusual had passed. Manny worked the grill, metal scraping in steady strokes. Yet everything sounded muted, wrapped in a hush. The neon sign outside hummed, buzzing faintly with the pulse of electricity. The clock above the pies ticked on, indifferent.

Kat kept her eyes on the glass where the two men had disappeared. The words he had muttered replayed in her head, low and certain, worn smooth by repetition: Black coffee, strong enough to keep me awake forever.

She poured herself a cup, though she didn’t drink. The coffee wavered in its vessel, dark and shining. Kat watched the surface settle into glass. And for the first time, she wondered if some customers weren’t ordering coffee just to keep their eyes open, but to keep the nightmares out of their minds forever.