Time passed.
The strange things never stopped.
Lights flickered. Toys moved. Shadows twitched.

But no one in the Walker family talked about them anymore.

They learned to laugh it off.
“Old house,” James would say.
“Drafts,” Olivia would chime in.
“Faulty wiring,” Alex would shrug.

Angelo stopped bringing it up.
What was the point?

But one night — something returned.
And it wasn’t like before.

It was deep into the early hours, the kind where the world feels still… too still.
The air was heavy. The kind of heavy that pressed into your lungs and made the silence ring.

Angelo stirred awake.
A sound had pulled him from sleep — something wet.
Crunching.
Gnawing.

His vision was blurry with sleep, but the moment he turned toward the corner of the room, it hit him.

There was something standing there.

A figure.
Tall. Inhumanly tall.
Its head nearly brushed the ceiling, hunched over in the dark.

The thing’s skin was black — not the color black, but the absence of light.
Its edges bled into the shadows, impossible to trace.
And from the pit of that void… two eyes burned.
Red.
Flickering like coal left too long in a dying fire.

It was eating.
That sound — the crunch — came from something in its hands.
Hands that were too long, with fingers that seemed to curl and stretch like liquid bone.

Snap.
Crack.
Squelch.

The smell hit next — metallic, wet, wrong.

Angelo couldn’t move.
His body refused to listen.
But his mind screamed.

And then it looked up.
Right at him.

Their eyes locked — if those glowing pits could be called eyes at all.
And in that moment, something ancient stared back.

His heart thudded so violently, it hurt.
His whole chest trembled.
He wasn’t breathing. He wasn’t blinking.

And then—

Darkness.

Like a switch flipped, his eyes closed, and he fell asleep.
Not peacefully. Not naturally.
As if something forced him to.

He jolted awake with sunlight leaking through the blinds.
The corner was empty.
No trace. No scent. No burn mark.

When he told his family, they dismissed it instantly.
“A nightmare.”
“You were dreaming.”
“You shouldn’t play horror games before bed.”

But he knew.
He knew what he saw.
And something inside him whispered…

It saw you, too.

That night, sleep came slower.
He lay in bed, eyes open, heart still fragile from what he’d seen.

It was quiet again. Too quiet.

Then —
Clink…
Clink…
Clink…

Chains.

Soft, metallic drags across the wooden floor.

He sat up.

At the edge of the bed stood a girl — no older than six.
She wore a white dress, faded and stained with something dark and dry.
Her skin was pale like ash, lips silent, eyes too wide.

Iron shackles clung to her wrists and ankles — thick, ancient, rusted.
Even her neck bore one, like a collar.

She didn’t speak.
Didn’t whimper.
She simply climbed onto the bed… slow, deliberate.

The mattress dipped beneath her tiny feet.
Her chains scraped across the sheets like nails on glass.
The sound made his skin crawl.

She reached the foot of the bed.
Then stopped.

Not a word.
Not a breath.
She stared.

Her head tilted slightly — not curious, not kind.
Searching.
Like she was trying to remember him.

And again… that pressure.

That same invisible weight that told him something was wrong.
Deeply, horribly wrong.
The kind of wrong that existed before names were invented for fear.

He kicked the blanket.
Panicked. Flinched.

And just like that — she was gone.

No flash. No vanishing sound.
Just… gone.
As if she had never been there.

But she had.
He knew it.
And something about her felt… unfinished.
Like she wasn’t done with him.

Not yet.