Night Terrors

Table of Contents

The man had lived in the same apartment for nearly three years, tucked away in a quiet part of the city where the buildings leaned into one another like old friends sharing secrets. His third-floor unit was modest but comfortable—one bedroom, a small living space, a kitchen barely large enough to hold a table, and a single window in the bedroom that overlooked the street below. From that height, he could see only the tops of the nearest trees and the distant glimmer of headlights passing in the night.

It was unremarkable, an ordinary place where nothing unusual had ever happened. Until two weeks ago.

The first time he saw the man in the window, it had been late—long past midnight. He’d awoken without knowing why, the air in the room cold and still. His eyes had drifted toward the glass, and there, standing against the dark city backdrop, was a figure. A man. Unmoving. Staring directly at him.

The sight had frozen him in place. There was no balcony, no ledge wide enough for anyone to stand on, and the drop from that height would shatter bones. Yet the figure was there, faintly illuminated by the streetlights below, its outline distinct against the pane. He had tried to rationalize it, telling himself he was dreaming, half-awake, his mind conjuring shadows into human shapes. By morning, the memory felt strange but distant, like a smudge he could brush away.

But the figure came back the next night. And the night after. It was always the same. He would wake at an odd hour, the apartment steeped in silence, and find the man waiting at the window. Sometimes the figure’s head tilted slightly, sometimes the shoulders shifted, but it never spoke, never moved from its position. The stillness was worse than any sudden movement could have been; it felt deliberate, patient.

He began to dread the nights, knowing that the moment he opened his eyes, the figure might be there. His sleep became restless, broken into shallow fragments, each waking bringing the same cold awareness. He started mentioning it to his friends, telling them how the man appeared without fail, always in the exact same spot, always watching. They dismissed it as recurring dreams, symptoms of stress, or tricks of light. The reassurances did little to calm him.

Days passed, and his exhaustion deepened. His appetite waned, his work suffered, and he began to feel a constant weight pressing at the edges of his thoughts. The sight of the figure was no longer shocking—it had become a grim certainty. Yet each time, the same question rose: How could he be there?

Two weeks in, he finally acted on the unease that had been building. Ignoring his friends’ insistence that it was all in his head, he reached out to the apartment manager. The man explained the situation in a casual tone, even laughing as he did so. The window, he said, had been installed incorrectly. The glass was reversed: the inner surface was reflective, while the outer surface was transparent. From inside the room at night, under the right lighting, the glass could reflect the interior, creating the illusion of someone standing outside.

The explanation should have been comforting. It was a trick of physics, nothing more. The figure he saw was, supposedly, his own reflection distorted by the glass. But instead of relief, the words sank into him like ice.

If it were a reflection, he thought, then it would mirror his movements, match his position. Yet every time he saw the figure, he had been lying in bed, his body still beneath the covers, his face half-buried in the pillow. The man in the glass was never lying down. He was always upright, standing at the pane, his head tilted as if studying the room, studying him.

That was the detail he could not ignore. If the window’s reflection was to blame, then who or what was it reflecting?

His mind circled the possibilities, each more disturbing than the last. Perhaps there was someone living in his apartment without his knowledge, hiding during the day and emerging only at night. It seemed impossible, yet so did the idea of someone scaling the sheer exterior wall to his third-floor window. And if neither explanation fit, then perhaps his own thoughts were betraying him, conjuring an intruder from the shadows in the fragile hours before dawn. But deep down, in the quiet space where instinct lives, he felt certain it was not his imagination. The figure was real.

That night, he stayed awake as long as he could, determined to catch the moment of appearance. He turned off the lights, leaving the room bathed in the faint silver glow of the city. The hours crawled past. Midnight came and went.

At some point, exhaustion pulled at his eyelids. He allowed them to close, only for a moment and when they opened again, the man was there. Closer this time.

The figure’s face was hidden in shadow, but the outline of its shoulders loomed sharply, and the faint rise and fall of breath fogged the glass in slow, deliberate pulses. The sight rooted him to the mattress, his pulse hammering in his ears. He could not move. Could not speak. His own breathing became shallow, as though too much noise might provoke it.

The figure did not shift or waver, even as the minutes passed. Its stillness was oppressive, a silent presence that pressed into the room without crossing the glass. Eventually, the night dissolved into a pale dawn, and with the light, the figure was gone.

For the next several days, the pattern repeated. He tried sleeping on the couch, but the same compulsion to look toward the window would drag his gaze across the room, only to find the figure there once more. The idea of confronting it—of opening the window—filled him with a dread that twisted in his stomach. Something told him that whatever stood there was not meant to be touched, not meant to be acknowledged.

Still, the thought of sharing his space with it was unbearable. He searched the apartment from top to bottom, opening closets, pulling furniture away from walls, checking every corner for signs of intrusion. He found nothing. And yet, the feeling of not being alone grew stronger.

On the fifteenth night, he awoke to find the figure standing not at the window, but inside the room. It was only a step away from the glass, the faint city light glancing off the curve of a shoulder, catching in the strands of hair that hung forward to obscure its face. The breath against the glass was gone; instead, the air in the room itself seemed thicker, harder to draw into his lungs.

He did not remember falling back asleep, but when morning came, the space beside the window was empty again.

No one believed him—not his friends, not the manager. And perhaps they never would. But he knew now that the reflection had never been his own. The glass had been a boundary. And something had crossed it.