An American Marine was set up with a tarot card reader as his wife and the terrifying things he saw every night when he slept with her…

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Marine Jack “Gunner” Miller doesn’t believe in ghosts. He believes in M4 rifles, iron discipline, and government-issued housing checks.

After his third deployment in Afghanistan, Jack returns to Camp Lejeune with a buzzing head and an empty bank account. He needs money to pay off his Ford Mustang, and he needs a quiet place to live. The bachelor’s solution is simple: Get married and get married so he can get his benefits and move out.

The woman he’s matched with is Elara Vance.

Elara isn’t like any girl Jack has ever met. She lives in an apartment on the edge of town that smells of sage and candle wax. Her hair is as black as night, and her main job is reading Tarot cards for tourists and selling random crystals on Etsy.

“I need health insurance,” Elara said bluntly when they first met, swapping out an old Tarot deck. “You need rent. We don’t need to sleep together, we don’t need to be in a relationship. Just a piece of paper.”

Jack agreed. To him, Elara was just a harmless, eccentric “spirit.” A black cat with a taste for mystery. But he was wrong.

The first week of living together was uneventful, except for Elara turning the spare bedroom into a “shrine” with all sorts of charms. But by the second week, Jack’s sleep began to be invaded.

It all started on the fourteenth night.

Jack woke up at 3 a.m. The air in the room was freezing, even though the heater was still running. He wanted to move, to reach for the Glock 19 under his pillow, but his body was paralyzed. A sleep paralysis.

And then he saw her.

Elara wasn’t sleeping in the next room. She was kneeling right on his chest.

In the dim light from the street lamp, Jack saw Elara’s eyes roll back, the whites of them. Her hair hung down like a spider’s web. She held something sharp and glistening in her hands—a long needle or a small knife—and she was making invisible slashes in the air right next to his throat.

She was mumbling creepy words, not in English, but in an ancient language, hissed through her teeth: “Solvo… Vinculum… Exi…”

Jack wanted to scream, but his throat was tight. He felt her weight, the smell of burning herbs filled his nostrils. She leaned down, whispered in his ear: “You can’t keep it… You have to let it go…”

Then she pressed the sharp object hard against his chest, right where his heart was. There was a sharp pain, and Jack passed out.

The next morning, Jack woke up in a sweat. He lifted his shirt to check his chest. There was no open wound, but there was a tiny, red bruise right over her heart. Elara was sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee, looking as calm as if nothing had happened.

“What the hell were you doing in my room last night?” Jack growled. Elara looked up at him, her brown eyes calm. “I slept in my room all night, Jack. Did you have another nightmare? Your PTSD seems worse than you think.”

Jack didn’t believe it. He was a scout, he knew what was a dream and what was real. She was lying.

The next night, and the night after that, the scene repeated itself. Jack always woke up paralyzed. Elara was always there, climbing on top of him, muttering some weird incantation, and holding the sharp object to the pressure points on his body: neck, temple, heart.

Jack began to collapse. He lost weight, his eyes darkened. He began to rummage through Elara’s things while she was away. In her “witch room,” he found a black leather-bound notebook. Inside were scribbled drawings of human anatomy, marked with deadly points.

And on the table, an unfinished Tarot spread. The center card, representing “The Present,” was The Tower—a symbol of collapse, of sudden disaster. The card representing “The Outcome” was the Ten of Swords—a picture of a man lying prone with 10 swords stuck in his back.

Jack’s spine shivered. She wasn’t doing a fortune-telling. She was performing a ritual sacrifice. She was a crazy witch who believed his death would give her power. Or worse, she was slowly killing him with some kind of poison or acupuncture to make it look like a natural death.

Jack called Sergeant Davis, his best friend. “You have to help me, Davis. My wife… she’s a bitch. I think she’s trying to kill me in my sleep.” Davis laughed hysterically on the other end of the line. “Stop watching horror movies, Gunner. You’re probably stressed. But if you’re scared, get a camera. Catch me red-handed.”

Yes. Camera.
Jack bought a small dash cam with a video mode

infrared night vision. He hid it on the bookshelf, pointed it at the bed.

That night, Jack decided not to sleep. He drank three cans of Red Bull, clutched the pistol under the covers, eyes half-closed, waiting for prey.

2:45 AM. The bedroom door creaked open.

The smell of sage wafted in again. The sound of bare feet on the wooden floor. Jack held his breath, his heart pounding like a drum. Through his squinted eyes, he saw Elara approaching. She was wearing a sheer white nightgown, holding a silver knife in her hand – this time he saw clearly, it was a ceremonial dagger (Athame).

She stood on the edge of the bed, staring at him. Her eyes were rolled back again, white. She climbed onto the bed, straddling his hips. She raised the knife high, the blade glinting with a cold light.

Her mouth began to hiss: “Cut it… Free it…” She swung the knife down.

“STAND STAND OR I SHOOT!”

Jack roared, rising like a panther. His soldierly instincts kicked in. He threw Elara off him, aiming the barrel of the Glock at her forehead.

Elara fell to the floor, the knife flying away. She showed no fear or surprise. She just sat there, panting, her eyes slowly returning to normal, staring at the black barrel.

“Jack… put the gun down,” her voice was strangely calm.

“You were going to kill me!” Jack shouted, his hand shaking on the trigger. “I saw it all! You crazy witch! You were going to sacrifice me, weren’t you?”

“I didn’t mean to kill you,” Elara said, holding up her hands. “I was saving you.”

“Shut up! I have proof! I saw you with the knife, I saw you on me every night!”

“You want proof?” Elara pointed to the camera on the bookshelf that Jack thought he had hidden so well. “You think I don’t know it’s there? I’m the one who turned it on for you tonight because you forgot to record.”

Jack froze.

“Watch it, Jack,” Elara said, her voice sharp. “Watch what really happens when you sleep. Not what you think you see when you have sleep paralysis.”

Jack kept the gun pointed at Elara, his other hand reaching for the camera. He stepped back, turned on playback mode.

The black and white video appeared on the tiny screen. Time: 01:30 AM.

In the video, Jack was sleeping. But not peacefully. His body jerked violently. He began screaming silently, his face contorted in pain. Then, a horrifying scene unfolded.

Jack in the video – who was sleeping soundly – ​​suddenly sat up. His eyes were wide open but lifeless. He raised his hands, clutching his throat. He was committing suicide. He was unconsciously trying to strangle himself. His fingers were clenched so tightly that his veins were bulging.

The door opened. Elara rushed in. She didn’t attack him with a knife. She used a blunt knife (the kind used to cut herbs, without a sharp blade) to pry Jack’s steel-like fingers from his throat.

Jack’s strength in his sleepwalking was terrifying. Elara was thrown off, hitting the wall. But she rushed in again. She climbed on top of him – in what Jack thought was a pressing position – in fact, using her body weight to hold his hands down.

She muttered: “Solvo… Vinculum…” (Relax… Release…). It wasn’t a curse. It was a hypnotic suggestion. She was using hypnosis to calm his panicked subconscious.

The sharp object Jack thought was a needle? It was her thumb, pressing hard against his sternum to stimulate his heart to slow down, preventing him from having a panic attack.

The video flashed forward to 2:45 AM – when Jack woke up. In the video, Jack began to unconsciously reach for the gun under his pillow again. Elara held up the (blunt) dagger, not to stab him, but to cut the invisible string in his mind, a psychological ritual she used to wake him from the “Kill or be Killed” nightmare he was replaying from the battlefield.

Jack dropped the camera. The gun in his hand fell. He looked at Elara. Her neck was covered in bruises – traces from the previous nights when she tried to control him.

“Why…” Jack whispered, his voice breaking. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Elara stood up, straightening her disheveled nightgown. She walked over to the Tarot table and flipped over the Hanged Man.

“This card doesn’t mean death, Jack. It means changing your perspective. Sacrificing yourself to see the truth.”

She turned to look at him, her eyes sad but full of love. “The first night we slept together, you almost broke my arm in a dream. You were reenacting the scene where you strangled a Taliban fighter in a cave, right?”

Jack shuddered. It was his darkest secret. The event had left him with severe PTSD.

“I’m a Tarot reader, Jack. But I also have a Master’s degree in clinical psychology, specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder. I quit because I was too sensitive to other people’s pain.”

Elara stepped forward, gently took the gun from Jack’s hand, and placed it on the table, out of reach of both of them.

“You don’t have sleep paralysis caused by demons. You have extreme REM sleep behavior disorder.

n. If I wake you suddenly, you will kill me or kill yourself in a fight-or-flight response. The only way is to use suggestion and physical pressure to put you back into a deep sleep.”

“Knives…anatomical drawings?”

“To learn how to control a 6’3″ Marine without hurting him. And the knife…that’s the trigger. Your subconscious believes in weapons. I must use a ‘weapon’ to command your subconscious to surrender.”

Climax: The Real Enemy
Jack fell to the floor, covering his face with his hands and crying. The iron soldier crumbled before the naked truth. He had intended to kill the only person who risked his life every night to keep him alive.

But the story wasn’t over.

“But Jack,” Elara suddenly said, her voice becoming serious. “There’s something you need to know. The Ten of Swords… it hasn’t been read yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“In your sleep sessions, you don’t just talk about the battlefield. You talk about something else. You keep saying one name: Sergeant Davis.”

Jack raised his head. “Davis? Your best friend?

Elara pulled a tape recorder from a drawer. “Listen.”

A crackle sounded, then Jack’s sleepwalking voice: “Davis… don’t do it… I won’t sign… I know you’re stealing money from the arms sale… I’ll report you…”

Jack froze. Buried memories came flooding back. It wasn’t just the Taliban. On his last night in Afghanistan, he’d seen Davis selling stolen military weapons on the black market. Davis had hit him in the head, causing a mild traumatic brain injury that left him with temporary amnesia, and had faked it as an IED explosion.

“Davis was the one who told you to install the camera, right?” Elara asked.

“Yes…”

“He wanted me to film you having a fit,” Elara said quickly. “He knew you had a sleep disorder. He wanted proof that you were a violent psychopath, a danger to society. So that if I remember and report him, no one will believe a crazy man who strangles his wife every night.”

Bang!

The glass shattered. A bullet went through the window, hitting the wall right where Jack had been sitting.

“Lights out!” Jack yelled, rushing forward and pinning Elara to the floor.

Outside, the familiar roar of a car engine. Davis’s pickup. He had been outside watching through the infrared camera (which he might have hacked into) and saw that Jack hadn’t killed Elara, but was discovering the truth.

“He’s outside,” Jack said, his eyes bulging. But this time, he didn’t panic. He was more alert than ever.

“Elara,” Jack whispered, reaching for his Glock. “You said the Tower card means the collapse of false beliefs, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then watch that son of a bitch’s tower collapse.”

Jack crawled to the window. He was no longer The paranoid husband was afraid of his wife again. He was Gunner Miller, a United States Marine. And this time, he knew exactly who was his enemy, and who was his friend.

Beside him, his “witch” wife was unafraid. She pulled a card from her pocket and placed it in his hand. The Emperor – a symbol of power, control, and action.

“Finish it, Marine,” she whispered.

Jack smiled, loaded his gun, and charged into the darkness.