We try to accept something incomprehensible. We use belief to accept the workings we cannot understand until the time comes when at last we comprehend. ― L.M. Browning
As a therapist I usually don’t counsel friends but Mark was deeply troubled and I felt he needed an immediate intervention.
He was experiencing a night terror involving sleepwalking so I decided to accompany him home and stay overnight to keep watch and observe him.
Mark’s apartment was in a stately Spanish hacienda just outside Cabo San Lucas here in the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula. I had set up a practice ten years ago, intending to stay a few years, but fell in love with the seaside and the locals. So, here I was, a decade later, catering to retirees and the odd movie star…and now my best friend.
The first thing I did when I got to the apartment was to carefully examine it. The only way out of Mark’s room was through the hall door—the window overlooked a cliff and a sheer drop of hundreds of feet to the rocks below. If Mark physically left the room, it had to have been through that hall door.
We sat and talked for about an hour. Mark told me he had broken off the relationship with Edi, although she still tried to phone. Apparently, she had sent dozens of letters—all of which, he marked return to sender and sent back unopened.
About midnight, he finally got to sleep. I heard the concierge come by and lock the door. I got up and tried it myself. It was tightly locked. I settled in with an anthology of Sherlock Holmes and prepared to face the long night.
For two hours, I heard nothing but the rhythm of the waves crashing against the rocks and Mark’s gentle regular snoring. It was almost hypnotic. Once or twice, I almost dozed off, but just before three a.m. I made myself a coffee and stood staring out the window at the silvery track of the Moon on the Gulf waters.
I returned to my sofa chair and took up reading The Hound of the Baskervilles. A few minutes later, Mark’s breathing changed and he seemed to become agitated. He began muttering the occasional word and then began flailing with his arms as if fending off an attack.
I dropped the book and stood to wake him, when out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a luminous blue mist. It was forming in the opposite corner of the room, directly across from Mark’s pullout bed.
I stood transfixed and watched as the mist spun into a vortex, spinning faster and faster, until finally the shape of a woman began to emerge. I cried out in fear as I saw a dark haired woman glare at me malevolently. Black shapes resembling bats came fluttering out and flapped around me whirling and cutting the air.
A vibration began inside my body I can only liken to thunder and for a moment I either went blind or lost consciousness. I fell to the floor and when I came to, the bed was empty—the bedding was scattered across the floor, but Mark was nowhere to be found.
I called the concierge who opened the door. He assured me no one had left the apartment. The following morning Mark’s body was recovered from the Gulf, washed up on the rocks below the window. The official cause of death was listed as accident caused by misadventure—a probable case of somnambulism leading to Mark’s falling from the open window.
Well, that was the official cause of death, but I know otherwise. I now regularly see Kurt Strauss, my Jesuit colleague and we talk and try to make sense of what happened.
That’s right—shrinks need shrinks—sometimes it’s all that keeps us sane.
Kurt’s got a perfectly succinct explanation, but I just can’t get to the level to which he’s ascended.
I have no explanation of my own to offer other than to say, sometimes stuff happens.
I’d like to leave it as a mystery, but lately, a damnable thing keeps happening…
I find now that I’m sleepwalking.
© 2026, John J Geddes. All rights reserved
