Silhouette

Mr. Omnia sat in his bed, his back pressed hard against the cold cinder block wall, the chill of it bleeding through his paper-thin gown and gnawing at his skin. His breathing came in shallow, ragged bursts, each inhale rattling in his chest like a dying engine struggling to turn over. His body was wound tight, every muscle coiled, locked in place like a rusted spring. He didn’t blink. Didn’t dare. His gaze fixed, unflinching, at the foot of his bed.

Darkness pooled in the corners of his room, thick and oppressive, swallowing up the small space like a tide rolling in. The only break in the suffocating black came from a single, pale slit of light slashing through the access hatch in his door. It cut a thin, sterile line across the wall, down the sharp ridges of his face, over the stiff, sweat-damp sheets, and across the linoleum floor. A feeble, useless thing against the abyss pressing in around him.

He reached out with his senses, grasping for something, anything, beyond this room. The distant, fevered chatter of the other patients slithered through the air . . . fragments of incoherent ramblings that twisted and warped as they echoed down the asylum’s long, hollow corridors. Somewhere beyond those voices, tinny and almost lost in the hum of madness, a radio played. Mr. Black liked to listen to music while he worked.

For a fraction of a second . . . a blink, a breath . . . the sliver of light across his face trembled.

A shadow had passed through it.

His body turned to stone. The pulse in his throat stalled. He did not move. Did not breathe. The wall behind him may as well have been swallowing him whole. Sweat beaded at his temple, thick and clammy, beginning their slow, deliberate crawl down the ridges of his face like condensation gathering on the side of a cold glass on a summer day.

He would not look. Could not. If he didn’t acknowledge it, it would lose interest, slip back into whatever level of hell it had crawled from. That was the trick.

He had to be a ghost himself.

Empty.

Blank.

But in the frayed edges of his vision, it stood there, the silhouette of something almost person shaped, beside his bed, watching him.

It had come tonight. He knew it would. He told her . . . warned her . . . that speaking about it, drawing attention to it, would piss it off. He had never looked directly at it before, that was new. It added another layer of terror to the creature, knowing what it looked like. And now here it was, looming inches away from him, whispering its sick suggestions, trying to dig its claws into the soft spaces of his mind, to bend him, twist him, turn him into something else. Something it wanted him to be.

But he had outlasted it before. He could do it again. If he held firm, if he ignored it long enough . . . tonight, tomorrow, maybe a week . . . it would get bored. It would leave. It always did.

The music drifted in from the hallway again, tinny, distant. The lyrics seemed strangely appropriate.

“…Stay with me… In the silence of your room… In the darkness of your dreams…”