I’ve never seen the thing standing behind me I only know…
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I’ve never seen the thing standing behind me
I only know it exists because other people keep breaking when they look over my shoulder.
I’m twenty-two. More than sixteen people have told me about it. Most of them didn’t know each other. I never brought it up first. They still use the same details.
Tall.
Dark.
Left side.
Smiling.
Aware.
I turn every time. There is never anything there.
When I was little, I used to wake up sure my room was occupied. Not noise. Pressure. The air felt taken. I learned to stay still until morning made the feeling thinner. Back then I thought every kid lived like that.
They don’t.
The first time an adult described the figure to me, I laughed because laughter is cheaper than belief. Then it happened again. And again. Different years. Different towns. A friend. A stranger. A girl on FaceTime who went silent mid-sentence and said, “Why is that behind you?” Once several people on the same group call flinched together, which is the moment I stopped calling it coincidence in my head.
Then came Mara.
Mara had seen shadow figures her whole life. She told me that before she ever set foot in my room, like she needed me to know she wasn’t new to this. Most of what she’d seen was smaller. Manageable, in the way a person gets managed by repeated fear.
She saw mine in full light and went white.
“It’s standing right there,” she whispered. “Don’t turn. Don’t—just don’t.”
I turned anyway. Wall. Empty air. Bed frame. Nothing.
When I looked back at her she was gripping my shirt with both hands. She said it was smiling at me. Only me. Then she made a sound I still remember and told me it had sat down on the end of the bed with its knees up, watching me like it had all night.
I did the only thing I know how to do when something in my life gets too thick. I talked about God. Out loud. Not fancy. Just honest.
Mara’s fingers dug into me.
“It’s nodding,” she said. “It’s nodding at you.”
I watched her watch whatever sat behind me. I watched her face change as it stood, crossed to the corner, and faded. She said faded, not vanished. Like it chose the exit speed.
After she left I sat on the edge of the mattress until my legs went numb. The room was ordinary again. That almost made it worse.
If that had been the only impossible thing, I might have forced it into psychology and stayed there. It wasn’t.
Years earlier, before I had language for any of this, I was in a car with my brother and my friend on black back roads, going fast enough that the hills threw us airborne. We were laughing. Stupid. Invincible.
Then the trees opened.
A field stretched out under the dark, and in the middle of it were roughly thirty people in white robes. Torches in their right hands. A single figure in red bowed at the center. Their faces were covered by huge demon masks, stiff and wrong in the firelight. They were about a football field away.
I dropped the glass speaker in my hand. It hit, rolled, and sent sound across the grass.
Every masked head turned toward us at the same time.
Including the one in red.
No confusion. No staggered reaction. One noise, one turn, one focus. Us. We left with the kind of silence people only keep when they know they interrupted something that did not want witnesses.
Years later a girl talked me into a Ouija board. I wasn’t trying to summon a life plot. I wasn’t asking the question people think I asked. The board still spelled out prepare. It said a coven would find me. Then it used a title so heavy my first instinct was to laugh it off the table.
The next morning I stood outside alone and watched plane trails accumulate overhead, line after line, until the finished shape hanging above me was an inverted pentagram. The same girl came out. I pointed up. She didn’t mock me. She just looked.
After that I stopped needing the board to feel targeted. The sky had already done the underlining.
I train until my body should fail, and sometimes it doesn’t. I recover too fast. I walk through ordinary rooms and watch people’s eyes arrive half a second late to my face. I have started wondering how many saw the figure and chose not to tell me. That may be the worst thought I own. The silent ones would mean this is already bigger than the count in my head.
I don’t know what stands behind me.
I know it smiles.
I know it sits.
I know it nods when I talk about God.
I know other people leave my presence looking like they need to relearn empty air.
And I know this:
if it ever shows itself to everyone at once, they won’t ask what it is politely.
They’ll name me after it.
I’ve never seen the thing standing behind me.
I am beginning to believe that is the point.
#entertainment
source
I only know it exists because other people keep breaking when they look over my shoulder.
I’m twenty-two. More than sixteen people have told me about it. Most of them didn’t know each other. I never brought it up first. They still use the same details.
Tall.
Dark.
Left side.
Smiling.
Aware.
I turn every time. There is never anything there.
When I was little, I used to wake up sure my room was occupied. Not noise. Pressure. The air felt taken. I learned to stay still until morning made the feeling thinner. Back then I thought every kid lived like that.
They don’t.
The first time an adult described the figure to me, I laughed because laughter is cheaper than belief. Then it happened again. And again. Different years. Different towns. A friend. A stranger. A girl on FaceTime who went silent mid-sentence and said, “Why is that behind you?” Once several people on the same group call flinched together, which is the moment I stopped calling it coincidence in my head.
Then came Mara.
Mara had seen shadow figures her whole life. She told me that before she ever set foot in my room, like she needed me to know she wasn’t new to this. Most of what she’d seen was smaller. Manageable, in the way a person gets managed by repeated fear.
She saw mine in full light and went white.
“It’s standing right there,” she whispered. “Don’t turn. Don’t—just don’t.”
I turned anyway. Wall. Empty air. Bed frame. Nothing.
When I looked back at her she was gripping my shirt with both hands. She said it was smiling at me. Only me. Then she made a sound I still remember and told me it had sat down on the end of the bed with its knees up, watching me like it had all night.
I did the only thing I know how to do when something in my life gets too thick. I talked about God. Out loud. Not fancy. Just honest.
Mara’s fingers dug into me.
“It’s nodding,” she said. “It’s nodding at you.”
I watched her watch whatever sat behind me. I watched her face change as it stood, crossed to the corner, and faded. She said faded, not vanished. Like it chose the exit speed.
After she left I sat on the edge of the mattress until my legs went numb. The room was ordinary again. That almost made it worse.
If that had been the only impossible thing, I might have forced it into psychology and stayed there. It wasn’t.
Years earlier, before I had language for any of this, I was in a car with my brother and my friend on black back roads, going fast enough that the hills threw us airborne. We were laughing. Stupid. Invincible.
Then the trees opened.
A field stretched out under the dark, and in the middle of it were roughly thirty people in white robes. Torches in their right hands. A single figure in red bowed at the center. Their faces were covered by huge demon masks, stiff and wrong in the firelight. They were about a football field away.
I dropped the glass speaker in my hand. It hit, rolled, and sent sound across the grass.
Every masked head turned toward us at the same time.
Including the one in red.
No confusion. No staggered reaction. One noise, one turn, one focus. Us. We left with the kind of silence people only keep when they know they interrupted something that did not want witnesses.
Years later a girl talked me into a Ouija board. I wasn’t trying to summon a life plot. I wasn’t asking the question people think I asked. The board still spelled out prepare. It said a coven would find me. Then it used a title so heavy my first instinct was to laugh it off the table.
The next morning I stood outside alone and watched plane trails accumulate overhead, line after line, until the finished shape hanging above me was an inverted pentagram. The same girl came out. I pointed up. She didn’t mock me. She just looked.
After that I stopped needing the board to feel targeted. The sky had already done the underlining.
I train until my body should fail, and sometimes it doesn’t. I recover too fast. I walk through ordinary rooms and watch people’s eyes arrive half a second late to my face. I have started wondering how many saw the figure and chose not to tell me. That may be the worst thought I own. The silent ones would mean this is already bigger than the count in my head.
I don’t know what stands behind me.
I know it smiles.
I know it sits.
I know it nods when I talk about God.
I know other people leave my presence looking like they need to relearn empty air.
And I know this:
if it ever shows itself to everyone at once, they won’t ask what it is politely.
They’ll name me after it.
I’ve never seen the thing standing behind me.
I am beginning to believe that is the point.
#entertainment
source
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