Sleep does not come to Sister Meribel.
Not because she is restless.Not because her thoughts race or her body refuses its need.
Sleep simply stops short of her.
She lies on her narrow bed with her hands folded over her stomach, breathing evenly, waiting for the familiar softening behind the eyes—the dull slide into heaviness, the gentle blur that usually gathers at the edges of thought. It never arrives. Her mind remains clear, alert, as though something has kept a lamp burning just out of sight.
She is not anxious. She is not afraid. She is simply awake.
The ceiling watches back, unchanged, its cracks faint in the dimness. Her body knows the posture of rest well enough—muscles loose, jaw unclenched, breath steady—but the final step never comes. The moment where consciousness loosens its grip and lets go. She waits for it patiently, as one waits for a train that is late but surely coming.
It does not come.
In this clarity, time stretches. Minutes lose their edges. She thinks of nothing in particular, and then of everything lightly, without weight. The knock drifts through her thoughts, but it does not press on her tonight. It sits at a distance, a known thing, neither welcome nor unwelcome.
And then, without intending to, she thinks of the city.
It comes to her the way a memory of warmth comes on a cold day—not urgent, not painful, simply present. She has walked there many times. The path is familiar, worn smooth by shoes and seasons alike. It hardly takes thirty minutes to reach the city center, less if one walks with purpose. The convent sits on its small hill as it always has, modest in height but clear in its vantage, as if it had been placed there to observe rather than participate.
From that height, the city unfolds below.
At night, especially, it stays with her. Even now, lying in the dark, she can see it: the lights scattered without order, windows and streetlamps and signs glowing in soft yellows and harsher whites. They feel alive to her in a way the stars do not always manage. The stars are distant, indifferent in their beauty. They shine without concern for who sees them.
The city lights feel intentional. Made by hands. Sustained by effort. Fragile enough to fail.
She knows it is a strange thought for a sister to have, and she never voices it. Still, when she stands at the edge of the hill after evening prayers, she lets her gaze linger longer than necessary. The sky above may be filled with stars, scattered across blackness in ancient patterns, but the city below feels closer. More honest. A bucket of stars, she sometimes thinks, spilled carelessly onto the earth and surrounded by dark, sleeping land.
Tiny red dots move along thin, invisible paths—cars, their taillights sliding forward in steady lines. They remind her of veins, or quiet currents beneath a surface that appears still. Each one carries someone somewhere. A destination. A reason.
From the hill, none of that is visible. Only motion.
Lying awake now, Meribel understands how easy it would be to lose herself here.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. Slowly.
If she did not look toward the city—if she did not sometimes let her eyes follow that downward path, the roofs stacked unevenly, the faint smoke rising at dusk—she thinks the world beyond the convent walls might begin to feel unreal. Optional. Like something read about rather than lived in.
Every day she walks the same halls. Stone underfoot, pale walls worn smooth by generations of passing hands. The convent does not announce its age; it assumes it. There are moments, especially in the early morning or late evening, when she feels as though she has stepped out of time entirely. As if the century has folded in on itself and left this place untouched.
Except for the lights.
The fluorescent lights hum softly in the corridors, a thin, persistent sound that never fully disappears. Their glow is flat and unforgiving, too even, too white. They cast no mystery, no shadow deep enough to hide in. They do not belong to the stone or the silence. Sometimes, they feel like the only proof that the world has moved on at all.
Meribel often thinks that if those lights were removed—if candles were placed back into the walls and oil lamps lit the halls—nothing else would need to change. The sisters would move the same way. The prayers would sound the same. The routines would hold.
That thought unsettles her more than she expects.
It would be so easy to become nothing but repetition. To let the days pass without marking them. To wake, work, pray, sleep—or lie awake—and never notice when one year ended and another began. Identity could thin here, dissolve gently into function.
She does not think this with resentment. Only with awareness.
Perhaps that is why the knock matters.
It interrupts. Not violently, not loudly, but precisely. It insists that something exists outside the pattern. Something that does not belong neatly to bells and prayer times and sanctioned silence.
Lying there, eyes open in the dark, Meribel exhales.
She does not rise. She does not pray. She does not force sleep that refuses to be taken.
She remains where she is—awake, unafraid, suspended between days—listening to the convent breathe, the fluorescent lights humming faintly beyond the walls, the city glowing below the hill in her mind.
Letting the darkness settle back into its proper places.
Sleep does not come.
Eventually—not out of fear, not out of obligation—Meribel begins to pray.
It is not the formal posture of prayer. She does not sit up or fold her hands tighter. The words begin quietly, almost lazily, forming in her mouth because they have always formed there. A habit meant to wear the mind down, to sand its edges until exhaustion finally wins. She has learned that prayer, repeated long enough, can become a kind of labor. Something to tire the spirit the way scrubbing tires the hands.
"In nomine Patris…"
Her voice is barely sound at all, more breath than speech. The Latin moves through her with practiced ease. She does not linger on the meaning. Meaning requires attention, and attention keeps her awake. She lets the words pass through her like water through stone.
"…et Filii…"
Her breathing stays even. Her eyes remain open, unfocused, fixed somewhere between the ceiling and memory. The prayer continues, verse following verse, each one familiar enough to require no effort.
"…et Spiritus Sancti…"
And then—
The knock.
It comes from above her, sharp and unmistakable, pressing down through the ceiling at the precise moment her lips shape the next line. Not loud. Not violent. Just firm enough to interrupt the air around her.
She stops speaking.
The silence afterward feels deliberate.
Her heart does not race. Her breath does not hitch. She does not feel fear rise up in her chest the way she expects it to. Instead, there is a strange alignment, a sense that two things have briefly overlapped where they were never meant to meet.
The knock comes again.
Once.
Exactly once.
It lands on the same verse, the same place in the prayer she has recited a thousand times. As if it had been waiting there. As if it knew.
Meribel swallows.
She does not move. She does not look away from the ceiling. The cracks seem closer now, sharper, as though the sound has tightened the space between them. She listens for anything else—footsteps, shifting wood, the settling of stone—but there is nothing. No echo. No continuation.
Only the absence the knock leaves behind.
Her mind does not leap to terror. It narrows instead, focusing with an unfamiliar clarity. This is not the morning. This is not the minute before the bell. The rules have changed, quietly, without permission.
She tries to continue the prayer.
The words feel heavier now, resistant. She reaches the same verse again, slower this time, cautious without fully understanding why.
"…sicut erat in principio—"
The knock answers her.
Not louder. Not closer.
But exact.
Meribel closes her mouth.
A thought occurs to her then, simple and unadorned, slipping into place without drama: this is not a warning. It is not an accident. It is not even interruption.
It is response.
She lies there, awake beneath the ceiling, the prayer unfinished on her tongue, listening to the convent's deep, sleeping quiet press in around her. Somewhere above, something has marked the same moment she has.
For the first time since the knock began, Meribel does not try to explain it away.
She only waits, wondering—not with dread, but with a slow, dawning seriousness
Meribel's lips part before she has fully decided to speak.
"Is… is someone there?"
Her voice comes out thin, scraped from disuse, as if it has forgotten how to exist outside prayer. The sound barely fills the room before it fades into the walls. She waits, eyes fixed on the ceiling, listening for any answer that might come from above.
Nothing.
The silence settles back in, heavier now, shaped by expectation. It presses against her ears until she becomes aware of her own breathing again, steady and calm despite herself.
She swallows and speaks once more, quieter, almost conversational.
"You seemed very eager to disturb my prayers just now," she says. "And now that I want to listen to you… you are silent."
Her words hang in the air, unsupported. They feel foolish as soon as they leave her mouth, stripped of the strange clarity they had carried only moments ago. She waits again. Seconds pass. Perhaps longer. The convent remains unmoved.
No knock. No answer. No sound above her head at all.
The silence stretches.
It becomes wide enough for doubt to step into it.
Meribel exhales, a breath she hadn't realized she was holding, and a soft, almost embarrassed chuckle escapes her before she can stop it. The sound surprises her. It feels out of place in the room, too human for the hour.
"Perhaps…" she murmurs to herself, "…perhaps this is what it feels like to lose your mind."
She turns her head slightly on the pillow, staring now at the faint outline of the wall rather than the ceiling.
"It starts like this, doesn't it?" she continues, voice barely above a whisper. "Little things. Sounds that aren't there. Answers to questions you never asked."
She shakes her head once, slowly.
"I am talking to no one," she says, firmer now, as if stating a fact aloud might secure it in place. "There is nothing above me. No one. Nothing listening to me."
The room accepts this declaration without comment.
For a moment, she feels foolish—but also oddly relieved. The explanation is simple. Comforting, even. Tiredness does this. Silence does this. Repetition wears grooves into the mind, and sometimes thoughts slip where they should not.
She allows her eyes to close at last.
Then—
A knock.
Not from above.
From the door.
Meribel's eyes open instantly.
The sound is softer than the one from the ceiling, but unmistakable. Close. Real. Wood answering knuckles. Her heart stirs, not in fear, but in startled recognition.
Before she can speak, a voice follows.
"Sister Maribel?" comes a voice from the corridor. "Are you… Are you all right?"
She pushes herself up on one elbow, breath unsteady.
"Yes," she answers, then hesitates. "I—yes. I'm fine."
There is a pause on the other side of the door.
"I'm sorry," the voice says, uncertain now. "I didn't mean to intrude. I just… I heard you speaking."
Maribel's mouth goes dry.
"You heard me?" she asks.
"Yes," the sister replies. "Quite clearly."
Maribel swings her legs over the side of the bed and stands, the stone floor cold beneath her feet. She does not approach the door.
"How long," she asks carefully, "have you been standing there?"
Another pause.
"I don't know," the sister admits. "A moment, perhaps."
Maribel presses her palm flat against her chest, grounding herself.
"And," she says, "who did you think I was speaking to?"
Silence.
Then, quieter now, "I wasn't sure," the sister answers. "That's why I knocked."
Maribel closes her eyes.
She exhales slowly.
"I was praying," she says.
The lie comes easily.
"Oh," the sister says, relief flooding her voice. "Of course. I thought—well. Forgive me."
There is the sound of fabric shifting, of someone turning away.
"Sister?" Maribel calls.
"Yes?"
"Did you hear… anyone answer me?"
The corridor is very still.
"No," the sister says at last. "Only you."
A beat.
"And," she adds, almost as an afterthought, "you should rest. You sounded… as though you were speaking upward."
Footsteps retreat down the corridor.
Maribel remains standing, staring at the closed door.
Slowly, she turns her head back toward the bed.
Toward the ceiling.
Her chest tightens—not painfully this time, but with a cold, creeping certainty.
She had not been praying when the other sister arrived.
She had been silent.
Listening.