The Man Beneath the Bed

“Nightmares are easy to forget—until you wake up and realise they’ve been following you all along.”

The dream didn't begin.

It was already there, waiting for me beneath the surface of sleep like something crouched at the bottom of dark water. I didn't fall into it so much as sink—the medicine in my veins pulling me down, down, through layers of consciousness that peeled away one by one, each one thinner than the last, until there was nothing left between me and the nightmare but a membrane as fragile as a soap bubble.

It popped.

And I was home.

The house materialised around me with a clarity that was worse than any blurriness could have been. Dreams were supposed to be soft, hazy, uncertain—things you could dismiss upon waking as tricks of the sleeping mind. But this wasn't like that. This was sharp. Precise. Every detail rendered with the kind of hyper-real focus that made everything look slightly too vivid, slightly too saturated, as if someone had turned up the contrast on reality until it crossed the line into something else entirely.

It wasn't a large house. Three bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room. A normal family home in a normal suburb, the kind of house that hundreds of other families lived in, the kind of house that shouldn't have been frightening because there was nothing remarkable about it, nothing that would make a stranger look twice.

But I knew this house. I knew it the way you know the inside of your own mouth—every surface, every contour, every hidden place. And in the dream, all the things that were normal in daylight became something else. Something wrong.

The layout assembled itself around me like a stage being set. The kitchen and living room huddled at one end, pressed together, their familiar shapes distorted—the dining table smaller than it should have been, the living room darker, the ceiling lower. At the other end, the three bedrooms, arranged in a row, two on one side and the third on the other. And connecting them, running between the two ends of the house like a spine, like a throat, like a tunnel you couldn't see the end of—

The hallway.

Long. Narrow. Stretching before me into shadow. The carpet was brown, the same brown it was in real life, but here it seemed to absorb the light instead of reflecting it, seemed to swallow everything that touched its surface. The walls pressed close on either side, lined with photographs in frames—family pictures, the kind every house had, Mum and Dad and Paul and me, smiling for cameras at birthdays and Christmases and ordinary afternoons.

But in the dream, the faces were turned away.

Every photograph, every frame. The figures were there—I could see their bodies, their clothes, the familiar poses—but their faces were aimed at the wall, as if they couldn't bear to look at the hallway. As if they knew what happened here and had chosen not to witness it. The frames hung slightly crooked, tilted at angles that suggested they'd tried to turn even further away but had been stopped by the nails that held them in place.

The details were too perfect. Too precise. I could see the worn patch on the carpet where Paul always dragged his feet—a lighter brown stripe, like a scar, running from his bedroom door to the bathroom. I could see the crayon mark on the wall near the skirting board, the one I'd made when I was four, the blue swirl that Mum had tried to scrub away but that clung to the paint like something that refused to be erased.

These details shouldn't have been frightening. They were just details. Just the familiar markers of an ordinary home, an ordinary childhood.

But in the dream, they were evidence. Proof that this place was real, that it existed somewhere beyond the boundaries of sleep, that whatever happened here happened not just in my mind but in the world.

The bathroom and toilet sat squarely in the centre of the hallway, their doors closed.

In daylight, they were just doors. White paint, brass handles, nothing special. But here, in the dream's darkness, they pulsed. I could see it—or feel it, maybe, the distinction had lost its meaning—a rhythmic swelling and contracting, as if the doors were breathing. As if something behind them was breathing, something large and slow and patient.

The shadows around the doors were darker than they should have been. They pooled at the base of each door like liquid, spreading outward, reaching toward my bare feet with tendrils that might have been shadow or might have been fingers.

My bedroom was the furthest room on the right.

Directly opposite my parents' room, at the far end of the hallway. Paul's room was next to theirs—a space that in real life meant nothing but in the dream's cruel logic meant everything.

In real life, this distance had meant I could cry at night without waking anyone.

In the dream, it meant no one would hear me scream.

The thought arrived fully formed, carrying a weight that sank through me. It wasn't a dream-thought—vague and slippery and easily forgotten. It was sharp. Certain. The kind of thought that cuts.

Mum had arranged it this way. The separation. The distance. "You boys need to learn to sleep properly," she'd said when she'd moved Paul and me into separate rooms. "It's not healthy, all this staying awake." She'd said it as if it were a kindness, as if she were protecting us, as if the bunk beds we'd shared and the whispered stories and the suppressed giggles had been something bad, something that needed to be fixed.

But what it had really done was isolate me. Put me at the end of a long hallway in a room by myself, in a lower bunk where anything could reach me from any angle, where the darkness pressed in from all sides, where the door never quite stayed shut no matter how many times I closed it.

My eyes flew open.

Not in the hospital. Not in the waking world where my body lay drugged and sweating in a bed that wasn't mine. Here, in the dream—that horrible moment of false awakening, the moment when you think you've escaped only to discover you've plunged deeper.

I was in my bed. My real bed, from home. My lower bunk, with its metal frame and its thin mattress and its dinosaur sheets—the ones Mum had bought me for my fifth birthday, green and blue with cartoonish T-Rexes and Triceratopses and Stegosauruses scattered across the fabric. I could feel the familiar texture of them against my skin, the slightly rough cotton, the places where the print had faded from washing.

This detail—this touching of something so innocent, so purely childlike—made what was coming even worse.

The darkness pressed in around me. Not the ordinary darkness of a bedroom at night, the kind that was really just dim light, the kind where your eyes adjusted and shapes emerged from shadow. This was different. This darkness had weight. It had texture. It had intention. It seemed to breathe, to pulse, to lean toward me with a hunger I could feel on my skin.

Every sense was heightened to a painful degree. I could hear my own heartbeat—not just feel it, but hear it, a deafening rhythm that filled the room, that bounced off the walls and the ceiling and came back amplified. I could hear the blood rushing through my veins, the air moving in and out of my lungs, the tiny creaks and groans of the house settling around me.

I could taste fear. It coated my tongue like something metallic, like the thermometer that had been in my mouth that morning, like medicine, like blood. But this taste was older than the hospital, deeper than any medicine. This was a fear that predated my illness, my stays in hospital, my time with Gloria. This was the original fear, the first fear, the one that everything else had been built on top of.

Then I heard it.

Footsteps.

Down the hall.

They were soft. Measured. The careful tread of someone who was trying not to be heard, each foot placed with deliberate precision on the brown carpet, avoiding the boards that creaked, finding the silent spots that only someone who knew this house intimately would know.

But in the stillness of the night, they might as well have been thunderclaps.

Each footfall sent vibrations through the floor, through the frame of my bed, through my bones. I felt them in my teeth, in my spine, in the soles of my feet pressed against the dinosaur sheets. They were coming from the far end of the hallway. Coming from the direction of the front of the house, moving toward the bedrooms.

Moving toward me.

I knew those footsteps. I'd heard them before—not just in dreams, but in that shadowy place where memory and nightmare bled together, where the things that had actually happened and the things my sleeping mind created were woven so tightly that pulling them apart would destroy them both.

My breath caught in my throat. A bubble of terror, solid and round, blocking my airway. I wanted to scream—every cell in my body wanted to scream—but I knew, with the terrible logic of dreams, with the terrible knowledge of experience, that screaming would only make it worse.

Would make him come faster.

Surely my parents were asleep? The thought was reflex, automatic, the child's instinct to call for the adults who were supposed to protect him. But even as the thought formed, it dissolved into something worse than uselessness. In the dream, they were always asleep. Or maybe they were awake but paralysed, frozen in their bed by the same force that stole my voice. Maybe they could hear everything—every footstep, every creak of the hallway floor, every strangled gasp from their youngest son's room at the far end of the house—but couldn't move. Couldn't help. Could only lie there in their own bed and listen.

The thought was almost worse than the footsteps themselves.

I pulled back the covers.

Not because I wanted to. Not because any part of me wanted to leave the fragile protection of my dinosaur sheets, the thin barrier of fabric between me and whatever was out there. But the dream had its own momentum, its own terrible script, and I was compelled to follow it. Compelled to play my part in a performance I hadn't chosen, in a story that was being written by something older and darker than my own imagination.

My feet touched the floor.

The cold was immediate and shocking—not the normal cold of floorboards in an unheated room, not the kind of cold that went away when your feet adjusted. This cold was something else. It sank through my skin, through my flesh, into my bones, into the core of me. It was the cold of abandoned places. Of spaces where terrible things had happened and left their mark. Of rooms where the air itself remembered what had occurred within their walls and had never quite warmed up again.

I moved with agonising slowness. Each step was a negotiation with terror, a careful calculation of risk.

But I knew it didn't matter. The stealth was pointless. An illusion of control in a situation where I had none.

He always knew where I was. He was always coming.

My bedroom door was open.

It was always open in the dream. Always. Even though I knew—knew with absolute certainty—that I closed it every night. Pulled it shut, heard the click of the latch, sometimes even pushed my shoes against it as a makeshift barrier. But in the dream, it was always open. A mouth in the wall, a gap in my defences, an invitation to whatever prowled the hallway beyond.

I stood in the doorway, listening.

Silence.

Not comfortable silence. Not the peaceful quiet of a sleeping house, the gentle background hum of a family at rest. This silence was different. Active. Predatory. The quiet of something holding its breath, the stillness of a hunter waiting for prey to make a mistake.

My imagination conjured shapes in the darkness—shadowy figures pressed flat against the walls, watching me with eyes I couldn't see. Clawed hands reaching out from under furniture, fingers curling, beckoning. But my imagination wasn't needed. I knew what was coming. I'd been here before. I would be here again.

I stepped into the hallway.

The darkness closed around me.

Step by step.

One small bare foot in front of the other, each placement careful, deliberate, silent. The hallway stretched before me, longer than it was in daylight, longer than it had any right to be. The walls pressed close, narrowing, the ceiling lowering, the space compressing around me until it felt less like a corridor and more like a throat—a throat that was slowly, patiently, inevitably swallowing me.

The presence was everywhere.

I couldn't see it. Couldn't hear it. But I could feel it—a malevolent attention fixed on me from all directions at once, a weight in the air that pressed against my skin and set every nerve ending alight. It watched me from the darkness with cruel amusement, the way a cat watches a mouse that doesn't know it's been seen. The air grew thick, making each breath a struggle, each inhalation a conscious effort. It tasted of dust and old fear and something else—something medical, something chemical—like ether or chloroform, something that made my head swim and my thoughts slow.

It was only a few steps to Paul's room. A few steps in the real world, in the daylight world, in the world where hallways had fixed lengths and distances were reliable. But in the dream, those steps took hours. Days. Years. Each one was a journey, each one was a lifetime, each one carried me deeper into the nightmare and further from any hope of waking.

The memory of our shared room floated up unbidden. The bunk beds. Paul on top, me on the bottom. The whispered stories after lights-out, the suppressed giggles, the games we played in the dark—imagining we were astronauts, or pirates, or explorers discovering new worlds. The warmth of knowing someone else was there, just above you, breathing the same air, sharing the same darkness.

Those memories had been shattered by the separation. By Mum's decision to split us up, to put us in separate rooms at opposite sides of the hallway.

Now I had the lower bunk in my room. Alone. Exposed. Vulnerable. A small boy in a small bed in a dark room at the far end of a long corridor, where anything could reach me from any angle and no one would hear.

Paul had the upper bunk in his room. Elevated. High up. Closer to the ceiling, further from the floor, further from whatever might be underneath.

The unfairness of it hit me with sudden force, a bitterness that cut through the terror like acid. He was safe up there. Safe in his sleep, safe in his breathing, safe in his dreams that were normal, that were innocent, that didn't feature glowing eyes and reaching hands and a hallway that stretched into forever.

I reached Paul's door.

It was open, like mine. A dark rectangle in the darker wall, a doorway leading into a room I could barely see. The faint light from his curtains—thin, inadequate, filtering in from the streetlamp outside—gave the space a murky quality, all greys and blacks and deep blues, shapes suggested rather than defined.

I could see him. His body in the upper bunk, silhouetted against the dim glow from the window. He was on his side, one arm tucked under his pillow, the other resting against the safety rail. His breathing was deep and even—the slow, steady rhythm of someone lost in peaceful sleep. Someone whose dreams were safe. Someone who didn't know what was happening in the space below him.

For one brief, shining moment, I felt a flicker of something that might have been safety. My brother was there. Alive. Sleeping. Real. Perhaps the footsteps had been nothing. Perhaps the presence I felt was just the darkness itself, just shadows and silence and a frightened boy's imagination running wild in the small hours.

Perhaps everything was okay.

Then I saw them.

The eyes.

Bright. Glowing. Staring at me from underneath Paul's bunk.

Everything else in the room seemed to darken around them, the shadows deepening, the walls receding, the world contracting until there was nothing left except those two points of light burning in the darkness beneath the bed.

They were yellow. Not the warm yellow of sunlight or lamplight or candle flame, but a cold yellow, a wrong yellow, the colour of something that had never been touched by warmth. They didn't reflect light the way eyes should. They generated it—produced it from within, as if they were windows to some terrible burning place, some furnace that existed behind the face they belonged to.

And they were looking directly at me.

Not just looking. Seeing. Reading. Piercing through skin and bone and the thin protective shell of my six-year-old consciousness to reach the things underneath—every fear, every secret, every moment of weakness, every memory I'd tried to bury. Those eyes knew things. They knew about the hospital. They knew about the medicine from the brown bottle. They knew about Mum's fingers twisted in my hair, about her thumbnail in my earlobe, about the hot water on the thermometer. They knew about the episodes no one else witnessed and the seizures that left no trace.

They knew about Gloria.

About how she was gone and I didn't know where. About how I'd failed to save her, failed to even understand what was happening until it was too late. About how I'd fallen asleep in her arms and woken up alone, and the space beside me had been cold, and the bed had been made with corners so sharp they could cut.

Those eyes knew everything about me, and they were amused.

I couldn't move.

My body had become a statue, frozen in the doorway of Paul's room, every muscle locked tight. My lungs refused to expand. My heart, which had been hammering moments ago, now seemed to have stopped entirely, suspended between beats, waiting for permission to continue.

My breathing was the only thing I couldn't control. It accelerated on its own, each inhalation a ragged gasp that seemed to echo in the stillness, seemed to bounce off the walls and come back louder, seemed to announce my presence to everything that might be listening.

The sound was too loud. Much too loud. But I couldn't stop it. My chest heaved, my ribs ached, my lungs burned with the effort of pulling air through a throat that felt like it was closing. I was hyperventilating, drowning in oxygen, suffocating in open air.

And the eyes watched. Patient. Knowing. Fixed on me with an intensity that felt like a physical touch—like fingers pressing against my skin, like hands holding me in place, like a gaze that had weight and substance and the power to paralyse.

My body began to shudder. Fine tremors that started in my hands and spread outward, running through my arms, my shoulders, my chest, my legs. Not shivering—this wasn't cold in any normal sense. This was the cold of the grave. The cold of places where no warmth had ever existed, where the concept of warmth was foreign, meaningless. My teeth chattered, and the sound seemed to amuse whatever owned those terrible eyes.

I could see them more clearly now. Could see the shape of the space they occupied—the underside of Paul's bunk, the metal slats that supported the mattress above, the darkness that pooled beneath like black water.

And in that darkness, something was moving.

The eyes began to shift.

Slowly. So slowly it was almost imperceptible at first—a slight drift to the left, then to the right, then forward. Toward me. They moved with a horrible smoothness, disconnected from any visible body, floating through the darkness like lanterns on a river. There were no features around them yet—no face, no form—just those two points of cold yellow light, drawing closer with each passing second.

With each fraction of movement, my terror grew. It built inside me like pressure in a sealed vessel, expanding, pressing against the walls of my chest, my throat, my skull. My heart had remembered how to beat, and it was making up for lost time, hammering so fast it was barely a rhythm anymore, just a constant vibration, a humming in my bones.

I opened my mouth to scream.

I pushed with everything I had—every ounce of breath, every fibre of my throat, every desperate cell in my body that wanted to produce a sound, a cry, a word, anything that would break the silence and bring help crashing through the darkness.

Nothing.

My voice was gone. Stolen. Ripped away by whatever force governed this place, this dream, this nightmare that felt more real than reality. I was screaming inside my own mind—screaming so loudly I thought my skull would crack from the pressure, thought my brain would tear itself apart with the force of the sound that had nowhere to go. But what escaped my lips was barely a gasp. A whisper. A wheeze, like air leaking from a punctured tyre.

Pathetic. Useless. In no way audible to any other sleeping body.

I tried again. Strained my neck until the tendons stood out like cords. Pushed until my face burned and spots appeared in my vision. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

The eyes seemed to grow brighter at my futile attempts. As if they fed on my desperation. As if my voicelessness was the point, was the purpose, was the thing that gave them power.

But I did not give in.

Somewhere deep inside me—buried beneath the layers of terror, beneath the drugged fog, beneath the paralysing weight of the gaze that held me—something refused to surrender. A small, stubborn part of me that was not just the frightened boy in the doorway but something else too. Something older, maybe, or something that hadn't been broken yet.

This was the part that raced wheelchairs through hospital corridors. The part that had survived whatever had really happened the morning I was born. The part that Gloria had seen when she looked at me, the part she'd believed in when she told me I was stronger than I knew.

It wasn't bravery. It was something more primitive than that. A refusal to stop existing. A biological stubbornness that kept the heart beating even when the mind had given up.

The eyes drew nearer.

And as they came, so did the body.

It emerged from beneath Paul's bed like something being born from shadow itself.

First the eyes—always the eyes—burning their cold yellow light into the air between us. Then, gradually, a face. But calling it a face was generous. It was more a suggestion of features, as if someone had tried to sculpt a human face from memory and had gotten the proportions wrong. The nose too small. The mouth too wide, stretching toward the ears in a line that might have been a smile or might have been something else entirely. The skin stretched too tight across the bones beneath, pulling at the corners of the eyes, distorting the features into something that was almost human but not quite.

Not quite was worse than not at all. The almost-rightness of it was what made it so terrible. If it had been a monster—scales and fangs and horns—I might have been able to dismiss it as fantasy, as nightmare. But this was close enough to human to be real, and wrong enough to be something else entirely.

It was a man. Or something that wore the shape of a man.

He was muscular—powerfully so, the kind of strength that seemed to strain against the skin, that made veins and tendons stand out like ropes. But he was small. Compact. A contradiction that made no sense and that my dreaming mind couldn't reconcile, that added to the wrongness, the unreality, the feeling that the rules of the world I knew didn't apply here.

He moved wrong. Too fluid, too smooth, his joints bending in ways that human joints shouldn't, his limbs flowing through the darkness as if he had no bones, or too many bones, or bones that were arranged in a pattern no human body had ever followed. In the dim light filtering through Paul's curtains, I could see the contours of his form—the broad shoulders that seemed to shift and ripple, the thick arms that were too long for his body, the hands with their too-many fingers.

He was like a living shadow. Darker than the darkness around him. A hole in reality shaped like a person.

And I knew him.

Not his name. Not his face—if you could call it a face. But I knew him the way you know the feeling of falling, the way you know the taste of fear. This was the watcher from my falling dreams, the presence I felt when Mum hurt me, the thing that lived in the spaces between what was real and what was nightmare. He had always been there. Waiting in the darkness beneath beds, beneath consciousness, beneath the surface of a life that had never been safe.

He had always been there. And he was always coming.

His arms reached for me.

They stretched—elongating impossibly in the darkness, growing longer, the fingers extending, becoming thinner, becoming claws, becoming shadows, becoming something worse than any of those things. They moved through the air between us with a slowness that was more terrifying than speed could have been, a deliberate, patient reaching that said there is no hurry, there is no escape, you will still be here when I arrive.

I could almost feel those hands on my skin. The imagined touch was as vivid as the real thing—cold, unyielding, the grip of something that had no intention of letting go. In my mind, those hands were closing around my throat. Dragging me downward, into the depths beneath the bed, into a realm of eternal darkness where things like him lived and waited and fed.

Or worse. Dragging me somewhere real. Somewhere in the waking world where similar hands had once reached for a small boy in the dark, in a room at the end of a long hallway, while the rest of the house slept or pretended to sleep or couldn't wake up.

I was screaming. Screaming so hard that my throat felt raw, that my chest burned, that every muscle in my body was clenched with the effort of producing a sound that would not come. The silence swallowed everything I gave it. Ate my screams like a hungry animal. Gave back nothing but more silence, more darkness, more of those terrible yellow eyes drawing closer.

Then something touched my shoulder.

Light. Barely there. A touch so light it was almost nothing—just the brush of fingers against the fabric of my pyjamas, just the faintest pressure of skin against skin. But it was electric. Volcanic. It broke through the paralysis like a hammer through glass, shattering the invisible chains that held me in place, flooding my body with the desperate, animal energy of survival.

I ran.

My feet found the life they had been rejecting, slamming against the floor, no longer caring about creaks or groans or the sounds they made. The hallway stretched before me—longer than before, impossibly longer, the walls extending into a distance that had no end. The family photographs turned to watch me pass, their hidden faces somehow worse than any monster, their turned-away gazes full of knowledge and shame and helplessness.

The darkness clung to me as I ran. It grabbed at my pyjamas, my arms, my hair. It tangled around my ankles, trying to trip me, to slow me, to deliver me back to the thing I was running from. The shadows had fingers—dozens of them, hundreds—and they all wanted to hold me, to keep me, to pull me back into the darkness beneath the bed where the yellow eyes waited with infinite patience.

Behind me, he followed.

Not footsteps. Something worse than footsteps. A sound like breathing—but not my breathing, not human breathing. The breathing of the house itself, the walls inhaling and exhaling, and he was riding that breath, surfing the darkness, moving without moving, getting closer without seeming to try.

The hallway twisted. A corner appeared where no corner should have been—our hallway was straight, had always been straight—but in the dream, everything was wrong, everything was distorted, the geometry of the house warped by whatever force was reshaping it around me. The walls pulsed in and out, expanding and contracting. The carpet beneath my feet felt soft—too soft, yielding, as if I were running on something alive.

I ran harder. Faster. My lungs screamed for air, my legs burned, my bare feet slapped against the floor with sounds that seemed to crack the world open.

The front door.

I reached it the way you reach safety in nightmares—not through distance covered but through desperation spent. One moment it was impossibly far away, and the next I was there, my small hands grasping the doorknob.

The metal burned cold against my sweat-slicked palms. So cold it felt like my skin might stick to it, might fuse with the brass, might tear away if I tried to let go. For one heart-stopping moment, I thought it was locked—thought the house had sealed itself around me, thought there was no way out, thought I would be trapped here forever with those eyes and that breathing and the endless hallway that led nowhere and everywhere at once.

My mind reeled. Images flashed—those yellow eyes drawing closer, those too-long arms reaching, those wrong-jointed hands closing around me—

The knob turned.

The mechanism clicked. Loud. Final. A sound like bones breaking, like a lock opening, like the last barrier between one kind of darkness and another giving way.

I threw the door open.

Nothing.

Beyond the threshold lay nothing. Not night. Not outside. Not the street where I rode my bicycle, not the front garden where Paul and I played, not the sky with its moon and stars and the comforting evidence that the world continued beyond the walls of our house.

Just void.

An abyss of darkness so complete, so absolute, that it made the shadows of the house seem bright in comparison. It wasn't merely the absence of light. It was the absence of everything—of ground, of sky, of direction, of meaning. No up or down. No near or far. Just an endless, featureless expanse of nothing that stretched in every direction, that had no bottom and no top and no edges.

It pulled at me. Invisible hands—or invisible forces that felt like hands—reaching from the void, wrapping around my arms, my legs, my chest. Not grabbing. Inviting. Coaxing. The way a current tugs at a swimmer, the way gravity tugs at a stone held over a cliff.

I stood on the threshold.

Behind me: the house. The hallway. The breathing darkness and the yellow eyes and the thing that wore the shape of a man. Warmth—terrible, threatening warmth, but warmth nonetheless. The known horror.

Before me: the void. The absolute zero of nothingness. The unknown.

As I stared into it, I felt it staring back. Not with eyes—there was nothing so defined, so comprehensible as eyes. But with an attention. A vast, hungry, patient awareness that took me in and measured me and found me small. Infinitely small. A speck of consciousness standing on the edge of an ocean of nothing.

And I understood—with that terrible dream-knowledge that needed no explanation—that this darkness was where he came from. The thing behind me, with its glowing eyes and its wrong-shaped body and its arms that stretched like shadows, had crawled out of this void and into my world. This was his home. This was where he returned when the dreams ended, where he waited between nightmares, where he existed in the spaces between what was real and what was imagined.

This was where he wanted to take me.

The breathing behind me grew louder.

Closer. I could feel heat on the back of my neck—wrong heat, fever heat, sickness heat, the heat of something that burned without light. If I turned, I knew I would see those eyes. Inches from my face. Close enough to count the flecks of darker yellow within the yellow. Close enough to smell the breath—if it breathed, if it was alive in any way I understood.

If I turned, it would be over.

If I stepped forward, I would fall forever.

"Choose."

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. From behind me and before me and inside me. It might have been his voice—whatever his voice sounded like, whatever sounds a thing like that produced. It might have been my mother's. It might have been my own, thrown back at me by the void, distorted and deepened and stripped of everything except the word itself.

"You always have to choose."

Time stretched. Each second became an eternity, each heartbeat a lifetime. I stood on the threshold—six years old, barefoot, in dinosaur pyjamas—and the two darknesses pressed against me from either side, and I understood with a clarity that the waking world never allowed that this was not really a choice at all.

Both directions led to darkness. Both led to fear. Both led to something I couldn't name, something too big for my six-year-old mind to hold.

And it was here, on this threshold between nightmare and oblivion, that I always woke up.

Every time. Every dream. The same moment, the same breath, the same heartbeat. Standing on the edge, the void before me, the monster behind me, the impossible choice pressing down on me from all sides—and then light, and hospital, and the scratchy sheets and the beeping machines and the waking world reasserting itself with merciful violence.

But this time was different.

This time, the medicine held me under.

The drug my mother had poured down my throat—the sweet cherry liquid from the brown bottle, the one that wasn't hospital medicine, the one that wasn't prescribed—wrapped around my consciousness and held it tight, kept me pinned to the dream like a butterfly pinned to a board. The usual escape route, the usual trapdoor back to reality, was sealed.

And I felt myself lean forward.

Just slightly. Just a fraction. My weight shifting onto the balls of my bare feet, my body tilting toward the void, toward the nothing, toward the darkness that promised an end to everything—the fear, the confusion, the pain, the loneliness, the mother who hurt me and called it love, the best friend who was gone and might never come back.

It would be so easy. Just one step. Just one small movement, and the void would catch me, and I would fall, and the falling would go on forever, and forever was a long time to not feel anything at all.

I almost stepped forward.

Almost.

But somewhere—in the last bright corner of my mind that the drug hadn't reached, in the place where Gloria's voice still echoed, where her last words were carved into something permanent—a hand reached out and pulled me back.

Not a real hand. Not a dream hand. A memory.

"You promised you'd keep asking. Keep fighting. Keep being brave."

"I love you, Luke. Don't ever forget that."

I jolted awake.

Truly awake. Violently awake. My body jackknifed upward in the hospital bed, sheets tangling around my legs, sweat pouring from every pore, the smell of my own terror sharp and acrid in my nostrils.

And the scream that had been trapped inside me—the scream that the dream had stolen, that the voicelessness had swallowed, that had built and built behind my sealed lips until it threatened to tear me apart—finally, finally, ripped free.

It tore from my throat like something alive, a sound of pure terror that echoed through the room, through the open door, down the corridor. Not a child's cry. Not a whimper or a sob or a plea. A scream. Raw and ragged and animal, the sound of a creature that has looked into the void and almost fallen in.

The room assembled itself around me. Hospital. Afternoon. The sun lower now, angled, casting long shadows across the floor. The machines beeping their steady rhythms. The antiseptic smell, the scratchy sheets, the hard mattress.

Real. All of it real.

But the terror remained. It clung to me like a second skin, like a shadow that wouldn't detach, like the after-image of a bright light burned into the backs of my eyelids. The dream was fading—the details dissolving, the house and the hallway and the yellow eyes retreating back into whatever darkness had spawned them—but the feeling stayed. The certainty that what I'd experienced wasn't just a dream.

It was too real. Too specific. Too familiar.

The man under the bed, with his glowing eyes and his wrong-shaped body and his reaching hands—he felt like something I'd actually seen. Actually experienced. Actually survived. Not a monster from a storybook or a creature conjured by a frightened imagination, but a memory. A real memory, dressed up as nightmare because my young mind couldn't face it any other way.

The thought was there and then it wasn't—too big, too heavy, too terrible to hold. It slipped away from me the way dream-details always do, leaving behind only the shadow of itself, only the knowledge that I'd almost understood something important and then lost it.

I stared at Gloria's empty bed.

The sheets were still perfect. The pillow still undented. The space still empty, still waiting, still crying out with a silence that was louder than my scream had been.

And I wondered: had she seen him too? In her final dreams, in those last hours when her body was shutting down and her mind was drifting into whatever came next—had she stood at that same threshold? Had she faced those same yellow eyes, that same void, that same impossible choice?

And had she, like I almost had, chosen to step through?