'A Summer Chill' by Tim Kelleher
It was the height of summer, the fifth hottest on record, when my little brother started having trouble sleeping. In our cramped attic room wadded with the cluttered presence of two young lives he writhed through the small hours, seared by visions of apparently fearsome power. With each blazing dawn they melted from his mind, leaving us to laughingly speculate, and privately dread the dusk.
Night after night I lay in that stifling darkness, transfixed with silent fascination as he mumbled and shrieked in the grip of phantom horrors or delights. While these nightly paroxysms made sleep impossible for me, he sunk ever deeper into that wild and unnatural slumber as weeks became months and the temperature relentlessly climbed.
One night, the heat-wave finally broken by a torrential downpour, I was drawn from my bed by the most powerful convulsions yet. I stood over him, watching with silent awe when, suddenly rigid, he sat bolt upright. He peered blindly into the darkness, still half-submerged in nightmare, before fixing on me with a ragged shriek of terror. I fell back stunned, allowing him to stagger across the room and fling the window wide for a reviving breath of air. I realised too late how much he meant to take.
It is summer again now, the third hottest on record they tell me, and I sleep alone in a sweltering padded cube. My dreams are fraught and wretched, always fading with the dawn, but happily, in this place, there are no windows.