Glen immediately sat bolt upright on his bed. His fingers tapped frantically across his phone screen, ignoring the stabbing dizziness pulsing behind his skull.
“Melissa, are you serious? You’re alone in your room right now?” Glen typed back.
It only took a few seconds for the two check marks in the chat app to turn blue. The animated dots showed that Melissa was typing a reply.
“Yeah, Glen... It’s really faint, but it gets clearer whenever I turn off the lights. It sounds like something’s scraping a sharp object across the tiles beneath my bed. I’m too scared to get down,” Melissa replied, complete with a terrified emoticon.
Glen clenched his fingers tightly. The fear that usually left his body frozen was now being pushed aside by a wave of anxiety for Melissa. His girlfriend was a shy girl who was extremely afraid of anything supernatural—even more so than he was in some ways.
Why can Melissa hear it too? Glen thought in panic. Is this just a coincidence because she caught my anxiety, or...?
“Glen, I swear, it’s getting closer to the edge of the bed...” Melissa’s next message came in, followed by a short five-second voice message.
Trembling, Glen pressed his phone’s speaker to his ear and played the recording.
Scrrrk... scrrrk...
A stiff, sharp scraping hiss drifted softly through the faint static of the audio recording. It wasn’t a rat or ordinary creaking wood. It sounded exactly like two hard, enamel-coated substances grinding against each other—the sound of fangs snarling against one another inside a narrow mouth.
A sudden chill made Glen’s blood feel like it was boiling.
“Mel, don’t get off the bed. Turn on your room light right now! I’m coming over!” Glen typed.
Without thinking about his wrecked physical condition, Glen snatched the black jacket hanging behind the door and slipped on his sandals. He unlocked his room and stepped out into the second-floor corridor.
The second floor of the Sewon boarding house felt unnaturally dark that night. The fluorescent light at the end of the hallway flickered dully, giving off an irritating hum. Empty rooms numbered 4, 5, and 6 stood frozen in the darkness along the corridor.
Glen quickened his pace, half running toward the stairs. But just as his foot touched the first step, his brain, exhausted and sleep-deprived for days, suddenly—
Hang...
Zap...
His eyelids snapped shut for “two seconds.” (An involuntary microsleep.)
Within those fleeting two seconds, Glen’s view suddenly shifted. He was no longer on the stairs of his boarding house. He was suddenly standing in the corner of Melissa’s dimly lit boarding room.
Beneath Melissa’s bed, where the darkness was pitch-black, Glen saw two faint red points glowing from the shadows. From between the hanging bedsheet, a hand emerged, its long black fingers tapering to sharp points like barbed wire. The hand slowly crept upward, gripping the edge of the mattress where Melissa lay in terror.
Scritch!
Glen jerked awake! His eyes flew open.
He nearly lost his balance and fell down the stairs of his own boarding house. Glen gripped the cold metal handrail tightly, breathing hard, his temples slick with cold sweat.
He looked at the clock on his phone screen. No time had passed—only two seconds in the real world. But the vision from that microsleep had felt so real that his chest tightened.
That creature... it isn’t only after my mind, Glen whispered inwardly, the horror burning hotter inside him. It’s beginning to spread through my comic and my thoughts to the people close to me.
With the last of his strength and fear blazing through him, Glen ran down through Sewon’s nighttime silence, ignoring the fact that his brain was giving in to increasingly frequent microsleeps that were growing more dangerous by the second.