The first time I saw it, I was walking home from work, late November, the sky already dark at five o'clock. It appeared in the lower left of my peripheral vision: a shape, roughly human in height, standing in the gap between two buildings about thirty feet behind me. I turned to look.
Nothing there. Just the gap between buildings, a recycling bin, a fire escape, the ordinary contents of an alley. I kept walking.
The second time was a week later, in my apartment, in the hallway outside my bedroom. I had gotten up for water. I saw it in the periphery: same shape, same rough height, standing at the end of the hallway. I turned. Hallway empty. Light on. Nobody there.
The third time, a man stopped me on the street.
He was sixty or so, a stranger, and he stopped me with the particular urgency of someone who has been waiting for the right person to arrive. He said: "You've seen it."
It wasn't a question.
He told me the rules. He said he had learned them the hard way, and the hard way had cost him three years and his marriage and the full use of his left hand, and he was going to tell me so that I could avoid the same costs.
"Rule one," he said. "When you see it in your peripheral vision, do not turn to look at it directly. If you look directly at it, it knows you can see it. Once it knows you can see it, it's much closer to being able to touch you."
I said: but instinct makes you turn.
"I know," he said. "That's what it counts on."
"Rule two," he said. "Do not look away from it. Do not close your eyes. Do not turn your head in the other direction. As long as you can see it — even in the periphery — you are safe. It cannot move while you're looking."
I said: but you just said not to look directly at it.
He looked at me for a moment.
"Yes," he said.
This is the impossible situation. The thing exists in the corner of your vision and the two rules for surviving it — don't look directly, don't look away — are contradictory if you parse them long enough. The trick, the man explained, is the periphery itself: you can be aware of something without looking at it, and this awareness holds it in place. The moment the awareness lapses — the moment you blink at the wrong time, or flinch, or let your attention drift — it moves.
"How fast does it move?" I asked.
He held up his left hand. Two fingers were bent at wrong angles, healed that way. "Fast," he said.
I have been living with this for four months. I have developed a partial awareness — a way of knowing whether it's in the room without actively searching for it. It's there perhaps twice a week. Sometimes for hours. I sit very still and I watch the peripheral shape and I don't look and I don't look away and I wait for it to be gone.
I've learned one other thing, through observation.
It has rules too. It cannot move while it's being watched. It can only approach while your attention is elsewhere. It is patient. Whatever it is, it has learned patience, and it will wait until you have to blink.
Everyone has to blink.
I haven't slept longer than three hours in a month. I have rearranged my apartment so that I face the most open space and have the least peripheral blind spots. I have put mirrors on the walls.
The man who stopped me on the street — I went back to find him. I went back to ask him: does it ever give up? Does it ever get bored and find someone else?
He wasn't there. But someone who knew him told me he'd been in an accident. A fall. He'd been home alone. The paramedics said it was consistent with a fall.
He was found facing the wall.