Do you know that feeling you get before going to bed late at night? The sound of your computer or TV shutting off quickly shifts over to a deafening silence. So quiet, you hear that ringing in your ears. So quiet, that lifting your bed sheets feels like metal clanging against your ears.
If you have, you've probably felt anxious while getting ready for bed. You tell yourself that logically nothing can really hurt you, it's all in your head. You've looked in all the nooks and crannies in your room just to comfort yourself. Under the bed, in your closet, the usual. You decide everything's fine, and snap back into reality and go to bed.
If you don't have a light by your nightstand, you've probably tried running to your bed after flipping the switch off, in hopes monster don't catch you. You tuck yourself into bed, making sure to keep your feet under the covers to make sure no one grabs it while you sleep. You start thinking that this is all a bit silly. Nothing's there, just go to bed.
You promptly shut your eyes, and let your mind wander. Although, time passes and you can't seem to fall asleep. You try everything, from thinking up an extended fantasy, to trying to stare down the colors among the darkness of your eyelids. Yet nothing seems to work.
At this point, you might start looking around your room in the dim light coming from your window. You might find shadows on the wall making shapes and figures. All of it however controlled by your mind, convincing itself there's something on the wall. Inevitably though, your mind starts to wander and it still keeps you up.
If you've ever focused on a small, faint light in this kind of darkness, you might notice how focusing on that one light drowns out everything else. Leaving that one light in the middle of pure darkness. You might have experimented with this a bit, since once your eyes move even a little off focus, all the lights come back immediately.
So you're there, just letting the time pass, knowing that you might eventually fall asleep, with no real memory of it. Your eyes shut down, and your body starts to relax, ready to fall into a dream. When you hear a strange noise in your room. A creek or shuffling, yet it manages to wake you up, and have your eyes darting across your room. Yet you don't move, if there's someone there, shuffling will let them know you're awake, you tell yourself.
From where you're sleeping you see the lights on your computer or your power cord on stand-by. You look around for someone there, but start to convince yourself it was just the house settling, or something. Yet you don't close your eyes. You continue to let it wander as you're scared of whatever made that noise, convincing yourself it was someone, or something.
This goes on for a while, each time you close your eyes, you think of the noise and shoot back to your anxious staring across the room. Until finally, you get back to that relaxed feeling, and get some sleep. But then, you wake up.
You wonder why. You don't recall a dream, at least not correctly, and try to brush it off as just dying in the dream and waking up. You start to fall back into sleep, but there again, the noise, a soft shuffling noise across the room. Now you're tired, and don't want to hear it. Maybe if you just ignore it, you'll be fine. But you can't ignore it. You keep looking around the room, looking for answers. But nothing.
All this has drained your already tired body, and you slowly descend back to sleep. But one more time, you're awoken. Now you're really scared. You've heard stories about how when you're being watched while sleeping, you wake up. Now this is that runs through your mind, someone has to be there. But a scan of the room does nothing.
You decide to give up, if someone's there, then there's probably not much you can do about it. You rest your eyes, and feel a sort of relief. That anxious feeling seems to be gone. It was all in your head. You're still awake and give one last look at the light on your computer and have the light around it absorbed. But then something's wrong. The light has been covered by something in front of it. You look around the room to adjust, and there, in front of your bed, stands a figure standing high above your bed, watching.