A presence had crept into the room—not with footsteps or noise, but with stillness so profound it suffocated the air. It didn't arrive. It unveiled itself. Not in motion, but in the cessation of all movement. As if time had stumbled for a moment, unsure of its next breath.
It lingered just beyond Mansh's awareness, cloaked in a blackness far deeper than shadow. The kind of black that doesn't just swallow light—it rejects it entirely–it was pitch black. Like a tear in the fabric of reality, drawn in a shade that even the night couldn't recognize.
Its form was vague. Shapeless. Almost formless. But not empty.
Because its eyes betrayed it.
Two orbs, deep crimson, pulsing faintly with the dull glow of dying embers—smoldering in the dark. They didn't blink. They didn't drift. They only watched. With a hunger so ancient, so deeply etched into whatever essence it had, that no word could describe it.
And still, Mansh read on.
Unaware.
Detached.
Minutes passed—or maybe it was longer. Time, in this room, meant nothing now. The clock continued its mechanical ticking, but it was distant, like a memory struggling to be remembered. Each turn of the page echoed faintly in the silence, the only sign that Mansh was still tethered to the physical world. The occasional creak of the wooden chair as he shifted, searching for a more comfortable angle, was the only movement left in the room.
The figure didn't flinch. It didn't need to.
Eventually, as if emerging slowly from a deep mental current, Mansh closed the book.
The sound—soft, barely audible—seemed to ripple through the thick air like a pebble dropped in still water. The stillness recoiled for just a moment.
He exhaled.
Long. Slow. As though he'd been holding it for too long and didn't even realize.
He rose with lethargic grace, the kind that comes after hours of stillness. Like someone waking from a warm daze. His surroundings welcomed him back without question. The shelves, the quiet corners, the worn-out carpet—everything was precisely where he'd left it.
His footsteps were featherlight as he approached the bookshelf again. As if moving too harshly would disturb something sacred. He slid the book back into its rightful place. No sound. No resistance. Just a soft hush of paper against wood.
Then, turning around, he moved to return to bed.
Hid intention was to–
Just… lie down.
Let sleep take him.
Forget the world.
But before he could take another step—
He stopped.
And not because he heard something or saw something shift.
He simply knew.
It was there.
In the far corner of the room.
Standing still.
As if it had always been there.
And had simply waited for the right moment to be noticed.
A shadow—tall, unnatural, utterly motionless—rose against the darkness like a mistake in the rendering of the world. It wasn't part of the room. It wasn't even part of reality. It looked wrong. Deeply, impossibly wrong.
No arms.
No legs.
No face.
Just the silhouette of something not meant to exist.
But the eyes.
The eyes were clear.
Piercing. Crimson red. Alive.
And they were looking at him.
They weren't curious. They weren't hostile. They didn't even feel. They only stared—with a pressure so complete, it threatened to hollow him out from the inside.
Mansh's breath caught instantly.
It didn't stutter.
It stopped.
His lungs refused to draw in more air, frozen by instinct. He blinked once—twice—but the figure remained. Unmoving. Unblinking. Anchored.
Terror didn't crash into him.
It rose. quietly but quickly.
Like ink seeping into paper.
Slow and inevitable.
His limbs forgot their function. The same legs that had carried him to the shelf just seconds ago now refused to take a step. His hands twitched at his sides, then went still. His body, once fluid and obedient, now felt like cold marble.
His knees gave in.
Not dramatically. Not with weight.
But slowly.
As though his joints had been drained of energy. He dropped, knees folding beneath him, hands catching his fall in a trembling brace. The floor was cold under his palms. Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was just his skin that had gone cold.
His muscles quivered. His breath came back in short, ragged bursts—sharp and shallow. His chest rose unevenly. His heart pounded with a violence he could feel in his throat.
Move, he screamed inside his own head.
But nothing answered.
No signal reached his limbs. His mind was still conscious—aware—but his body had been stolen by fear.
"I… can't move," he realized. The thought didn't scream. It whispered.
His eyes trembled as they held the figure in view, unable to look away. Every second felt like an eternity stretched taut.
And then—
The scream came.
Not planned. Not willed.
It erupted.
A cry raw with terror, stripped of dignity or restraint.
"Aaaaaaaahhh!!"
It wasn't just a scream.
It was a rupture.
A soul-level exhale of panic, despair, helplessness.
The sound tore through the room, ricocheted off the walls, filled every inch of the space—and then spilled into the hallway beyond, echoing through the house.
The figure didn't flinch.
Didn't move.
Didn't acknowledge.
It simply stood.
A quiet monolith of dread.
Then—
Footsteps.
Fast. Real.
Growing louder with every step.
A door creaked. Hinges snapped.
Light spilled into the room as the door burst open.
His mother stood in the doorway, hand still clutched around the knob. Her eyes were wide, frantic. Chest heaving from the sudden sprint. Her gaze darted across the room, scanning for danger—searching for the source of the scream that had clawed its way into her sleep.
"Mansh!" she cried out. Her voice cracked with worry. "What happened?!"
But she hadn't even stepped into the room yet.
Because in that instant—
The figure vanished.
Not faded.
Not retreated.
It was just gone.
in an instent.
Completely. As if it had never been.
A void that unmade itself.
The air trembled in its absence, as though it had been holding its breath and could finally exhale again.
Mansh still knelt on the floor.
Shaking.
Breathing.
Remembering.
And though the room was now calm—though the warmth had returned—he knew something had changed.
Something real had looked at him.
And now, it knew him too.
Mansh gasped.
The sound broke from him suddenly, sharp and uneven, as though his lungs had been sealed shut and only now torn open. Air rushed in too quickly, scraping through his throat like cold metal, and his chest jerked with the effort. He wasn't even aware he'd been holding his breath—not until that first, jagged inhale forced his body back to life.
His back arched slightly as he lifted himself from the floor. It wasn't a smooth motion. His body moved with the resistance of someone waking from a nightmare that hadn't quite let go. Every muscle in him was coiled tight, locked in that moment of frozen terror, and now they trembled with the aftershock—twitching, spasming with leftover electricity.
His hands pressed into the floorboards, trying to steady him, but they shook uncontrollably. The heels of his palms dug in harder, as if grounding himself physically might somehow pull him out of the unreality that had swallowed the room just moments ago. His arms barely held him up. They quivered under the strain, and his elbows nearly buckled with the weight of his own body.
He was still breathing in short, shallow bursts. Gasping. Not because he wanted to—but because he had to. As if his body was re-learning how to breathe. The air felt thick now, heavier somehow.
Denser.
He dragged it in through parted lips, feeling it scrape along his dry throat, catching on the raw edges left by the scream.
His eyes remained wide, staring—not at anything in particular, but everywhere all at once. They darted frantically, searching the corners of the room, chasing shadows that no longer moved. His pupils twitched, his gaze too fast, too erratic. There was no pattern, no rhythm. Just panic. Pure and unfiltered.
He couldn't stop shaking.
The silence in the room felt unnatural. Too complete. Too sudden. It wasn't the calm that followed relief—it was the stillness that came after something unspeakable. A quiet that wasn't peaceful, but hollow. And in that hollow space, his mind reached for words—anything to give form to what had just happened.
"There was…" he croaked, barely above a whisper.
The sound of his own voice startled him.
It was thin. Brittle. As if his vocal cords had cracked somewhere deep inside his throat.
He blinked, slow and deliberate, as if the world around him might change if he just looked again. But nothing did. The room was the same. Bookshelves. Chair. Window. All where they had always been. But his body knew better. Something had changed. Something had been there.
"There was a black shadow," he said again—this time a little louder, though his voice wavered with every syllable. He sucked in another breath, slower now, but still uneven. "Right here…"
His hand rose, hesitantly, trembling as it lifted from the floor. He pointed to the far side of the room, where the darkness had once stood—where those eyes had looked through him as though he were made of glass.
The spot was empty now.
Unremarkable.
Quiet.
But his hand stayed there, extended in the silence, as though expecting someone else to see what he had seen. As though the room might answer back.
"Just a moment ago…"
The words hung in the air like mist. Unbelieved. Unwelcome.
And still, he stared.
Waiting.
But there was nothing.
Only the memory.
And the awful certainty that it had not been imagined.
****
A/N: why did it show up so early it was saposed to show up 2 days later.
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