It Waits for Me

He noticed it first in the way people looked at him. Not with fear or suspicion, but with something more primal. Animals were the first to sense it—dogs that used to bark playfully at him now whimpered and hid behind their owners. Birds stopped singing when he passed. Even the wind changed; it no longer rustled the trees, it hissed through them.

It started small. A figure glimpsed in his peripheral vision. A second set of footsteps when he walked home alone, they were long distorted, unreal. A door would close just a second too late behind him, echoing faintly with a low noise almost like a giggle. He told himself it was paranoia, stress, lack of sleep. He’d been through worse. He could handle worse. Maybe this was a dream?

But it was never a dream. Not really.

In Chicago, his landlord went missing the night after handing him the keys. The apartment was cold when he entered, unnaturally so. There were clawed handprints on the frosted window—on the inside. He stayed only two nights. The third night, he woke up to find every cabinet open, every faucet running. Something had rearranged the furniture into a circle around him as he slept.

In Austin, the hotel room door clicked open at exactly 2:17 a.m. three nights in a row, despite the chain lock. The concierge vanished the morning after giving him a knowing glance. When he inspected the room carefully, he found small scratches under the bed—clawed runes in a language that had no place on this earth.

New Orleans brought other kinds of signs. A child stared at him for a full ten minutes on Bourbon Street without blinking, then whispered to her mother that “the skin he wears is too tight.” That same night, he saw a shape slither across his hotel ceiling—long, black, fluid. It paused over him as he lay frozen in bed, then seeped into the cracks of the top of the wall.

In Portland, every mirror in his apartment cracked simultaneously. In Minneapolis, his breath fogged the air indoors, even in the height of summer. In El Paso, he found something like a feather in his bed—slick with oil, longer than his forearm. No bird in this world had wings like that. He touched it and it disintegrated into nothing, like ash in the wind.

Still, he didn’t run. Not exactly. He moved—a lot. No trace, no patterns. Just enough to try to stay off its scent. Or so he hoped. Every time he left a place, it followed with more confidence. The signs grew bolder, the traces more permanent.

There were nights when he sat in the bathtub fully clothed, the door locked, the lights off. Just listening. Not for anything in particular—just the absence of noise. The moment when the hum of the refrigerator stopped, or the air outside grew too still. When he could hear his own breath echo like it was being whispered back to him. He began carrying knives. Salt. Chalk. A small mirror, always angled toward the nearest door. He etched sigils into the soles of his shoes, it was something he saw on the internet. He stopped sleeping in beds.

Then the dreams started.

At first, they were fragments: the sound of footsteps on wet stone, the glint of movement just beyond torchlight, whispers from behind doors that didn’t exist in the waking world. But soon they deepened into something more vivid—a recurring dreamscape that seemed to grow with each night.

He found himself in a corridor stretching infinitely, its walls pulsing like lungs, covered in twitching, black veins that whispered his name. The ceiling was too low in places, too high in others, and exhaled stale, hot air that smelled of sulfur and mold. He ran his hand along the surface and felt it twitch beneath his touch.

Through all of this, something always followed in the distance. Never running. Never frantic. But always gaining ground.

The creature was no longer just a shape in the dark—it began taking form in the dreams. First as a silhouette with too many limbs, then as a malformed shadow with eyes that opened and closed randomly across its chest. Once, it appeared in a mirror embedded into a wall—an unformed shape watching him with what seemed like fascination, its’ shattered tongue licked the inside of the glass.

He would try to escape it, but the corridors shifted behind him. Doors led back to rooms he’d already fled. The floor sometimes became viscous, clinging to his feet like tar. The lights flickered to reveal flashes of the thing’s form, each time closer, growing more defined.

One night, he woke up screaming, the taste of salt and iron on his tongue. He had seen it crouching in a room made entirely of mirrors, its limbs folded like a praying mantis. As he entered, the reflections did not match what he knew to be himself. They moved in the glass, mimicking him with delay, but also with increasing speed until a version of him lunged out and he awoke feeling a small scratch across his cheek.

Another night, the dreamscape shifted into a cathedral of bone, lit by flickering blue fire. He saw it standing at the altar, surrounded by others—shapes half-formed, shifting, watching him silently. It raised a warped, clawed hand, beckoning him forward.

Each dream left him more tired than the last, drained in a way that sleep should have cured but only deepened. He’d wake up in a cold sweat, fingernails clawing at the sheets, nose bleeding, the mirror on his nightstand fogged up as if someone had leaned over him while he slept.

He kept moving, a new location almost every day. But it kept getting worse. In Denver, he found claw marks on his chest one morning. No blood, no pain. Just skin peeled back in five perfect lines. In Savannah, his phone recorded a four-minute call made from his number to his number—at 3:33 a.m. The audio was a low static, punctuated by a wet, dragging sound. He never played it again.

Baltimore was the last straw. A stranger approached him at a gas station and handed him a folded note. “You smell like the edge of things,” it read. “It’s almost ready.”

By the time he reached the empty farmhouse in Pennsylvania, he felt it was already too late to hide. He didn’t choose the place by accident though. It was remote, abandoned, soaked in the kind of old silence that only came from forgotten blood. The floorboards groaned like they remembered the weight of sorrow. The wallpaper peeled in places, revealing old script beneath. He dusted off the broken furniture, lit a fire, and waited. Just as it was waiting.

He hadn’t slept in days.

The fourth night arrived wrapped in fog. The wind was still. Not quiet, but dead. No insects. No rustle of trees. Even the fire in the hearth flickered in slow, unnatural rhythm, as if constrained by something unseen.

He stood at the center of the living room, every candle extinguished. Only moonlight, silver and sickly, filtered through cracked windows. The smell was the first thing—ash and something sweet, like rotting fruit.

Then the temperature dropped.

Not a coldness of weather, but a vacuum, like the warmth was being fed into something else. He saw his breath, then the breath of something else beside it—twinned puffs of vapor, one of them too large to be human. He turned towards it and it moved.

The creature revealed itself not by stepping into view but by peeling back the edges of the world. The walls rippled. The floor sighed. The moonlight bent around the window. It stood in the corner, tall and impossibly thin, a shape made of wrong angles and stitched shadows. No face. Just impressions of features that hinted at emotion—delight, hunger, inevitability.

It moved closer, soundless, slow. It wanted him to run. It wanted to give chase. It wanted him to scream.

He smiled.

“You took your time,” he said.

The thing hesitated. Confusion twisted its already unstable form. That was its first mistake.

He shed the skin of the man.

With a sound like tearing flesh and cracking bone, his body distorted—arms lengthening, spine unraveling, mouth splitting into rows of interlocked teeth that shimmered like obsidian. His eyes, now glassy and bottomless, caught the thing’s form in perfect clarity. His muscles no longer ached. He was free of his bindings. He was hungry, so very hungry.

The thing shrieked—an unnatural, garbled cry—and turned to flee. But there was nowhere to run. Not in this house. Not now. The walls, once fragile, were now a cage of intention. The creature bolted down the hall, phasing through doors, flickering like static. But he was faster. Hungrier. Ancient.

He moved like shadow given form, slipping around corners, appearing in front of the creature before it could process the turn. It lashed out, its limbs distorting into wicked barbs and blades. He absorbed the blow, barely flinching. His grin only widened.

The predator had become prey. And prey never stood a chance.

He lunged.

His claws sank through the thing’s torso, not piercing flesh—there was none—but unraveling the sinews of what it was: fear, hunger, memory, pain. He opened his jaws wide, wider than any human skull could allow, and bit deep into its core. It screamed in a dozen voices, voices stolen from so many dying mouths. He silenced them one by one, consuming its essence.

It tried to shift, to escape, to vanish between dimensions. But his grip held reality in place. He dragged it back into form, into being, into death. It writhed in agony as he devoured it not just bodily, but spiritually—until nothing of it remained but a thin mist and the faint echo of failure.

When it was done, he stood over the remnants. No blood. No carcass. Just silence—and the scent of finality.

He returned to the shape of the man, took a deep breath, and adjusted his shirt. His skin itched with the restraint. But the hunger was sated, for now.

Back in the city, no one noticed him. Just another face. Another body among millions. But he watched. Waited. Scanned the news for strange disappearances, unnatural deaths, and glimpses of things that didn’t belong. He would find another. He always did.

After all, they waited for those like him.

But he was the one who fed.

Credit: Steve_L