Every night, the nurse comes in and draws some of my blood.

Sometime later, maybe minutes, maybe hours, she comes back in and replaces it with... something else.

I never see her face. I call her "the nurse" because her outfit reminds me of one, though there's no insignia on it. At first she was nothing more than a slim shadow gliding into my room, through the door that I don't remember being open, while my limbs lay like leaden weights at my side and my voice shrank back inside my throat. I remember the first time.

"Who is this woman coming into my bedroom?" was my first wild thought, and then "Oh, never mind, it's just a nurse," when I saw the thin slats of moonlight falling on her white uniform and her distinctive peaked hat.

Panic returned when I realized that nurse or not, she had come into my house... and into my bedroom... and I found that I couldn't move to resist or even ask why she was gripping my arm with her hand like an icy vise and jabbing a needle like an ice pick into my insensible arm and drawing out my bright red blood. How can so much vitality come out of one person and leave them alive?

It was a nightmare. Of course it was. Night terrors, nocturnal paralysis and an overactive imagination... but then she came back, the hypodermic tube now full of something shiny black and viscous and oily that burned as it went into my veins... and still when it was over and I lay shaking I told myself it was a dream.

It happened again the next night, and the next. Not exactly the same. There's little differences in her movements that tell me it's not a simple replay of memory. I slept with the lights on, but it only compounded my terror. I closed my eyes at her approach to keep from seeing, the most freedom that's allowed to me, and whimpered until she was done, then lay there eyes cemented shut until morning.

I put in a burglar alarm. I put a chain on my bedroom door, and then a deadbolt. Every night, the door is unbarred and opened. It doesn't open. Nobody opens it. I simply look over, and it's open, and she's gliding through it on her modest heels that never make a sound. If I don't look, maybe she won't... but she does. Every night.

At first I tell no one, but sooner or later, you have to tell someone. My friends- the few true friends who stick by me- agree to stay up with me, but they unaccountably fall asleep moments before her arrival. Afterwards, they swear up and down on a stack of Bibles that they stayed awake and it was I who fell asleep… sometimes I wonder if they're not... but no, that way lies paranoia... paranoia and madness.

I am not mad.

I know I am not mad.

But it's clear my friends are no help to me. This is bigger than them. Bigger than anybody. Somebody wants my blood. For what? I don't know, but they want it quite badly or why go to all this trouble for it? I think about this. It begins to consume my waking moments, replacing for a time the visions of the nurse and the evil hypodermic with its vile contents. It's a welcome respite, but a temporary one, for I have no answers and can only meditate in circles so long.

But my meditations were not in vain, for through them I happened upon a solution. And now I lie in bed, awaiting my nightly visitation. Will she notice my treachery immediately? Will the difference be apparent even as she makes her nightly withdrawal? If so, how will she react? I can't dwell on that. One way or another, my suffering ends tonight... for I have outsmarted my tormentors.

I have poisoned the well!

I will sleep easily after tonight.