Nightmare Imp

From publisher blurb:

“That same hideous nightmare thing,

Talking, as he lapped my blood,

In a voice cruel and flat,

Saying for ever, ‘Cat! ... Cat! ... Cat!...’”

-From “A Child’s Nightmare” by Robert Graves

Of all the forces in Hell, few are so ubiquitously known as the Nightmare Imp. Small things, they find it easy to slip onto the material plane and steal into human settlements. All too many people know the sensation of the waking nightmare, a memory of paralysis as the creature sits upon their chest and wracks them with nightmares. Then it slips away, invisible, to torment another, or, perhaps, to return night after night until a poor soul dies of its troubled sleep.