Elijah first noticed it while brushing his teeth.
His shadow didn't match his movements.
He tilted his head left. The shadow tilted right.
He raised his hand to his mouth. The shadow stayed still—until he stopped. Then it caught up in a twitchy, broken lag. Like an old VHS tape glitching through time.
At first, he blamed the old bathroom light. It buzzed constantly and flickered on colder nights. But one evening, it wasn't just in the bathroom.
It was everywhere.
Shadows in his kitchen that didn't belong to any object. A tall, narrow silhouette near the fridge—gone when he turned. But its afterimage stayed burned in his mind.
He tried sleeping with all the lights on.
Big mistake.
Because now they knew he was watching.
Every time he blinked, they moved closer.
At first, it was small—shifts in angle, unnatural curves in the shape of a coat rack.
Then they started showing up on walls without anything to cast them.
One night, Elijah left his bedroom light on and sat up all night facing the wall, keeping a lamp fixed on the far corner.
The lamp flickered just once.
Just a second.
That's all it took.
A second later, the shadow was no longer on the wall.
It was behind him.
---
He called a priest. The priest didn't come.
He called a therapist. She said stress, sleep paralysis, hallucinations.
But Elijah never told her what he saw in the mirror the next morning:
His shadow… had eyes.
Two faint, pale glows in the blackness that tracked him in perfect sync. Watching him blink. Watching him breathe.
One night, during a blackout, he whispered,
"Why me?"
From every corner of the room, the shadows whispered back.
"Because you noticed."
---
Elijah is gone now.
Neighbors say his apartment is empty. But every night, you can see movement through the blinds. Flickering shapes—too tall to be human.
They say the new tenant, a young woman named Jess, just moved in last week.
And lately… she's started to notice something strange when she brushes her teeth.