Rick didn’t talk much at school. Not because he didn’t want to, but because the talking always led to something else. Shoving. Mocking. Gum in the hair, once. Locker doors slammed hard enough to echo like gunshots.

He was seventeen and lived in a beige house in suburban Texas with his aunt, who liked daytime television and instant mashed potatoes. His parents had died two years earlier in a robbery at a gas station—a story people nodded solemnly at and forgot as soon as the bell rang.

He didn’t have many memories of them. Just two: his dad’s laugh, which was low and round, and his mom’s hands, always warm even when they were cold.

The dreams started after a boy tripped him in the hallway and everyone laughed.

It wasn’t a scream kind of dream. It was slow. Dull around the edges like an old tape.

He would be standing in a long hallway, somewhere between a hospital and a school. The floor was white, too white, and everything smelled like something sterile trying to cover up something rotten.

At the far end of the hallway, the man appeared.

He was thin. Tall. Wearing a brown jacket and gray pants. His eyes were blurry—Rick could never quite see his face. But it was the way he moved that mattered.

He walked backward.

One slow, gliding step at a time. Not dragging, not clumsy. Smooth. Intentional. Holding a kitchen knife in one hand, the blade pointed down like he was hiding it from the world.

He never ran. Just walked, back first, toward Rick. And in every new dream, he started a little closer.

Rick didn’t scream. Couldn’t. That wasn’t the kind of dream it was.

He woke with sweat on his back, heart stammering in the dark. He told himself it was just his brain, stress, whatever. But the dreams kept coming.

And the man kept walking.

—

By the fifth dream, Rick could see the man’s shoulder blades. His hair was short. Neat. Like a dad’s haircut.

By the sixth, he could hear the faint slap of his shoes.

On the seventh, Rick started drinking coffee at midnight and chewing caffeine gum in class. His aunt scolded him once for his trembling hands, but forgot after her show came back from commercial.

He couldn’t risk sleeping anymore.

And when he didn’t sleep, the rules started to bend.

A girl dropped her books in the hallway, and when she bent to pick them up—her legs folding backward for a split second—Rick screamed.

Another time, he saw a man backing out of a parking spot and dropped his bike in the middle of the street.

He became obsessed. Terrified of moonlight on linoleum. Of long corridors. Of the way some people shuffled back when making space for others.

But he could only stay awake so long.

On the tenth day, he collapsed in the school library, face-down between rows of outdated encyclopedias.

He dreamed.

—

This time, the hallway was shorter. The man was only a few steps away. Rick could hear his breath now—a kind of steady exhale, like someone trying to blow out a trick candle.

He wanted to run, but his feet didn’t move.

The man walked backward, slowly, arms swinging slightly, as if this were just a normal stroll. The knife glinted with each overhead light.

Rick whispered “please,” but it came out like a cough.

The man stopped.

And then—he turned.

Not his whole body. Just his head. Rotated it too far, too slow, like it wasn’t attached right. His face was smooth and almost familiar. No malice. No smile.

Just the quiet sadness of someone who knew what they’re about to do.

Then the man walked the last two steps forward.

The knife didn’t rise.

It was just there.

Then not.

Then Rick woke—

—

No. He didn’t.

The school held a memorial. His aunt cried for exactly forty-five minutes. The students were shocked for a week and back to normal by two.

No one asked why he had circles under his eyes for weeks.

No one wondered what he saw when he looked at the back of someone’s head and flinched.

The hallway in the dream remains somewhere. Still. White. Still too long.

And every now and then, someone else starts dreaming of a man walking backward.

Only now the man begins much closer.