You ever get that feeling like the night is leaning in, not just surrounding you but actually observing you? Not like some creature out there — I mean the darkness itself, the negative space between things. Lately it’s been moving wrong. I swear the shadows are lagging behind objects, like they’re thinking before they follow.

Two nights ago I woke up at 3:11 a.m. — not because of a noise, but because the silence snapped. You know how silence has a texture? This one felt too smooth, like someone had polished it. I open my eyes and the room is pitch-black, except for the faint outline of my door. But the door isn’t closed. It’s not open either. It’s… paused. Like reality couldn’t decide which state to render.

Then I see it: a thin vertical line of pale light in the hallway outside. Except the hallway light is broken. Has been for months. This glow isn’t warm or yellow — it’s an ugly, sterile white, like the kind that leaks out from under medical curtains. Every instinct in my body screams don’t look at it directly. So of course I do.

For a second, the light flickers, and I see something tall standing at the end of the hall. Not detailed — more like a silhouette that didn’t load all the way. But its head… its head was tilted at an angle no vertebrae would allow. And I swear I heard a soft clicking sound, like fingernails tapping glass, except I don’t have any glass furniture.

I blink, and it’s gone. The hall is dark again. But the afterimage of that impossible shape is burned into my mind harder than sunlight.

Next day I check the hallway bulb. Still dead. No sign of a visitor. But the air feels heavier, like the house is holding its breath. And there’s this faint smell — metallic, but cold, like frozen pennies.

Last night, it got worse. I dreamt I was standing in my living room, except the walls had vanished and the whole house was floating in a black void, lit only by that same sterile light. And standing just outside the edge of illumination were hundreds of those half-rendered figures, their necks all bent at the same awful angle, watching. Not moving. Just waiting.

When I jolted awake, I wasn’t in bed. I was standing in the hallway, right in front of the broken light. And the door behind me… was open.

I didn’t open it.

I didn’t close it either.

It decides that on its own now.