It started with a dream.
I know how that sounds. Dreams are nothing. Dreams are the brain digesting the noise of the day, sorting garbage into narrative-shaped bins. I have always believed this. I believed it until the night David sat down at the foot of my bed and told me his name.
In the dream I was in a department store, the old kind with wooden floors and slow escalators, the kind that no longer exists except in the geography of sleep. There was a rocking chair in the children's section. A boy sat in it. He looked about nine or ten, but his head was wrong — caved in on the left side, the skull soft and collapsed the way a piece of fruit goes after the rot sets in. He was watching me the way only dead things and cats watch people: without wanting anything, without the performance of curiosity, just the bare fact of attention.
I asked him his name.
"David," he said.
"What happened to your head?"
He pointed upward. "I fell," he said. "I died."
There was a woman beside me — older, a stranger, the kind of stranger dreams produce with total confidence — and she grabbed my arm. Her fingers were cold. "You can ask him two questions," she said. "You've already asked two. Do not ask a third."
I woke up.
The chair at the end of my bed was rocking.
I don't own a rocking chair.
My cats were pressed against the wall, both of them, flat and electric with terror. Max and Gustav. They are not afraid of anything — not thunder, not strangers, not the building fire alarm that went off twice last winter. They were afraid of the space where the chair had been.
I told myself: the dream was vivid, I was still half-asleep, the chair rocking was pareidolia, the cats were reacting to me. I have a talent for assembling rational explanations. I used every one of them.
He came back three nights later.
Not in a dream this time. I woke at 3 AM and he was there, at the foot of the bed, standing. Not in a chair. Standing. His head was wrong in exactly the way I remembered. He was looking at me.
I know the protocol for sleep paralysis. I know the hypnagogic hallucination literature. None of it helps you when you are fully awake and sitting up in bed and something is standing in your room.
He didn't move. He didn't speak. I turned on the light and he was gone, but my cats were under the bed and did not come out until morning.
The photos started a few weeks later. I have a habit of photographing my apartment — for insurance, for memories, because I like documenting ordinary life. In the photos from October I found something in the background of several shots. A smear of darkness in the corner of the hallway. A shape that was not there in the next photo taken from the same position.
Then my cats began staring at the corner by the window. Every night. Just staring.
Then Gustav stopped eating.
Then I found the photo where the shape had moved.
I have tried to be rigorous about this. I have checked the photos for artifacts, for lens flares, for pareidolia. I have asked other people to look at them without telling them what I was looking for. They see it too. They all see it. A shape with a dented head. Something sitting. Something watching.
The last thing the woman in the dream said to me — and I have thought about this every day since — was not about the questions. It was something she said as I was waking up, so quietly I almost didn't catch it.
"Don't let him under the bed," she said.
Last night, I woke at 3 AM and the rocking chair was back. My apartment does not contain a rocking chair. It was rocking slowly, empty, at the foot of my bed. The cats were nowhere. The light I turned on flickered before it caught.
I did not look under the bed.
I am not going to look under the bed.
Dear David: I see you. I know you're there. I am not going to ask a third question.