“You keep looking for me in the dark, little one. Perhaps you should ask yourself why I keep finding you.”

He was never supposed to step out of your nightmares.

You first noticed him on your walk home.

A tall man in a black hat, standing beneath a streetlamp at the edge of an otherwise empty road. You looked away for only a moment, and he was gone.

Then he appeared again.

At the bus stop. Across the street. Waiting beneath the flickering lights of the train station. Always watching. Always impossibly still.

On the nights you don’t work, he follows you into your dreams. A silent figure standing in your bedroom doorway, his face hidden beneath the brim of his hat.

You tell yourself it’s sleep paralysis. A hallucination. Nothing more.

Until one night, something else finds you first.

And the man from your nightmares finally moves.

He saves you with a violence no human could possibly possess. Then, hours later, you wake to find him standing in your bedroom doorway again.

Only this time, you’re awake.

And he’s smiling.