text: Ever since I was a kid I have hated the dark. Though I think my real problem was with shadows. Hanging clothes and floor lamps disguised as dark figures haunt the corners of my room. So I would turn on the light, rationalise my thoughts and fall back asleep. Because that’s all they were; senseless, paranoid thoughts created by memories of horror movies and scary stories. But four days ago I saw something real. Someone under my piano, hiding in the dark of my room. I was so close to sleep I could feel my mind fogging up, until something shifted in the corner of my eye. It didn’t move the way things usually move in the dark, like when you turn your head and think you see someone rushing past the doorway. A figure crawled out from under the shelter of the piano. Head tilted with glazed over eyes. The figure was dark and about as tall as a five year old child. It was the shade of black that swallows every ounce of light with the waxy, uneven surface of a half-melted candle. I reached for the light switch instinctively. I prayed that whatever was standing 4 metres away from me wouldn’t try to kill me in the time it took for my eyes to adjust. Nothing had changed. Nothing had moved. I fell back asleep three hours later when anxiety finally exhausted my mind. In the morning I wrote the whole thing off as a sleep induced hallucination, but I didn’t exactly believe it. I sleepwalked through the following 24 hours until the night came again. My mind was restless, tears pricked my eyes from staring at the empty space below the piano. It was 1:30, my unblinking eyes began to close and it returned. I was paralysed, watching it repeat the movements from the night before. Except this time, when it stood it was a foot taller. I paid frozen, panicked attention to its thin frame, it’s boney hands. Black liquid slowly dripped from its fingertips and onto the carpet. Again, when the light turned on, it disappeared and I stayed awake with the light on. The next morning I stared in the mirror at my bloodshot eyes and cried. I needed this feeling to leave. I needed sleep. Throughout the day I felt eyes everywhere, the sight of shadows sent me into a panic. But it was in my head. It had to be. I am not the kind of person to wear tin foil hats and hunt for ghosts, so I refused to believe that this was anything more than a monster under the bed. I got home and sleep began to call me but as I walked into the bedroom my heart dropped. There was something on the floor. Two clusters of black dots blemished the carpet, each collection less than a metre apart. The stains looked like ink the same inky black that dripped from my tormentors hands. I did not sleep. Not for a second. I laid on the couch wrapped in blankets with a knife held under my pillow, flinching at the slightest noise or flicker. The morning felt like night. All sense of time was disrupted, I could feel my sanity slipping from my grasp. I got up from my couch, the knife clutched tightly in my hands. I walked to the room and the knife fell to the floor. I could feel blood pooling around me. The blood was seeping from my butchered foot and into the cracks of the floorboards. But my gaze was fixated on the walls. At the black dripping letters written across the plaster. “Why are you hiding?” The white hot pain spreading up my legs was numbed by the rampant thoughts in my mind. I crawled from the carpet to the floorboards of my living room. Travelling in and out of consciousness. I grabbed my phone from the table and saw a second message on the screen. “I can see you.” I couldn’t take it. I collapsed on the floor after dialling the emergency service number. A trail of blood tracking my movements. I woke up a day later in a hospital room. I told them what happened, I told them about the figure in the dark and asked them about the writing in the walls. They chalked it up to pain meds and delusions but I know what I saw. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to sleep.