You always tell yourself you’ll sleep early. But it’s never true. It’s always 2:14 a.m. when you finally put your phone down, screen light still burning behind your eyes. The room feels too quiet, too still, and your body hums with the leftover static of wakefulness. You roll onto your side, half-asleep, half-aware — and that’s when it happens.

You can’t move. It always starts the same: that heavy, sinking weight pressing into your chest. Your breath comes shallow, eyes flicking toward the dark corner by the wardrobe. There’s a shape there — darker than the dark — watching. You try to tell yourself it’s just sleep paralysis again, that it’s not real, that it can’t hurt you

But it moves. Slowly, deliberately, it slides closer. Its edges blur like smoke, like it doesn’t quite belong here, and the air grows colder. You feel the mattress dip, hear the faint creak of springs. Its voice is silence — the kind that hums under your skin. You want to scream, but your throat is locked, your tongue leaden. You’ve seen it before. Every night you stay up too late, it comes.

Sometimes it just watches, its head tilted, curious. Sometimes it brushes your hair back with invisible fingers, leaving a chill down your neck. But last night — last night was different.

You remember the pressure shifting, the air thickening as it leaned in. You could feel it, something impossibly cold and soft pressing against your lips. You fought, you tried, but your body betrayed you, frozen, helpless. It lingered there, like it was learning. Like it wanted to understand what it meant to touch you

*And then it whispered — not in sound, but in the hollow behind your thoughts — a promise: “Sleep late again. I’ll be waiting.”