Glen held his breath. The warm coffee cup in his hand trembled faintly, creating tiny ripples across its surface.
The wet footprints were unnervingly dark. They were the prints of bare feet, somewhat long—too large to belong to Amelia, yet far slimmer than Glen's feet. The black mud left behind on the ceramic tiles looked rotten and gave off the faintest scent of wet earth.
"Glen? What's wrong with you now? Why are you just staring blankly at the floor?" Amelia asked, noticing the change in her best friend's expression.
Amelia instinctively started to look behind her, toward where the footprints had come from.
"Don't look!" Glen suddenly cried, his voice strained.
Amelia stopped, staring at Glen with a confused furrow between her brows. "What's going on? You're freaking me out, you know."
Glen swallowed with difficulty. The eyes behind his glasses darted rapidly over the dark corner behind Amelia's chair—where the wet footprints ended. There was only a stack of blank canvas boards and a dusty wooden bookshelf. No one was physically there.
Yet the bookshelf's shadow on the wall looked strange. The bedside lamp cast the shelf's shadow to the left, but an additional thick, wavering silhouette stood motionless right beside Amelia's shadow. The shadow had an asymmetrical head, as if its jaw extended downward.
'Is he... is he in this room?' Glen screamed inwardly in panic. A terrifyingly familiar fear clutched his chest until it felt hard to breathe.
"Glen, seriously, you're getting paler," Amelia said, the stern look on her face now completely replaced by concern. She stood up from her chair. "I'll get you some cold water. Just sit down."
As Amelia stood and walked toward the small water dispenser near the door, the strange shadow beside the bookshelf did not shift with her. The silhouette remained frozen there.
Glen closed his eyes for a moment to clear the dizziness in his head. (Just one blink lasting half a second.)
Zap.
When his eyes opened again, the wet footprints on the ceramic tiles had vanished completely. The strange shadow beside the bookshelf had also returned to normal—just the ordinary shadow of a wooden shelf.
Glen panted, wiping the cold sweat from his temples. That brief *microsleep* had forcibly refreshed his visual perception, but left behind a paranoia that burned through his mind. Had the footprints really been there, or was his exhausted brain creating a visual projection of his own fear?
"Here, drink this first," Amelia said, holding out a glass of water.
Glen took the glass with trembling hands and drained it. "Thanks, Mel."
"You need to sleep now, Glen. I don't want to hear any more excuses," Amelia said firmly as she picked up the jacket she'd left on the bed. "I'm going back to the room downstairs next door. You'd better not still be sitting in front of that tablet when I come up tomorrow morning."
"Yeah, Mel. I'll go to sleep after this," Glen promised weakly.
Amelia looked at Glen for a moment, let out a long sigh, then walked out of the room and gently closed the door. Hearing the lock turn from inside made Glen feel a little safer, even though he knew the wooden door latch wouldn't be able to hold back anything that came from inside his dreams.
The room fell silent again. Glen walked over to his desk, turned off the bedside lamp, then let his body collapse onto the foam mattress.
An overwhelming exhaustion immediately took over his mind. But before his eyes could fully close and carry him into the dream world, Glen glanced toward his phone beside the pillow, where it had suddenly lit up with a bright glow.
A message notification from the chat app.
From Melissa: "Glen, are you asleep yet? Earlier, when I was about to close my eyes in my boarding room... I suddenly heard the sound of fangs scraping beneath my bed. I'm really scared..."
Glen's eyes, which had been unbearably heavy, suddenly flew wide open. His heart felt as though it stopped beating when he read the message from his girlfriend.