Amanda hadn't slept for days.
Her small apartment was dark, the curtains are shut tight, the air heavy with the smell of old coffee and burnt candles, clothes laid crumpled on the floor, half-finished drafts stacked in uneven piles by the desk, the glow of her laptop was the only light in the room. She sat at her desk with her laptop glowing in front of her, her eyes red and tired, her body aching from lack of sleep and her hands trembling on their own.
Her hands shook as they typed on the keyboard as though they no longer belonged to her. Each keystroke echoed through the silence. She didn't feel like she was writing a story anymore. It felt as though she was bleeding onto the page, dragging out her nightmare, her greatest fear. Writing wasn't for fun anymore; it was survival. She was just trying to escape the silence around her, the silence that felt alive. It was her way of breaking the silence that pressed against her chest, suffocating her and making it hard to breathe.
The silence had a weight, and Amanda swore it had a heartbeat, one that beats faster than normal.
It had started with panic attacks. At first, they came at night when she was asleep, she would jolt awake, her heart hammering so violently it felt as though her ribs might shatter, her heart racing, her breath loud, sharp and short, until the dizziness set in. Fear had become a parasite, clinging to her even in the daylight, the fear that lingered gave her hints of her death.
Then came the shadows in the corners, darker than they should have been, moving when she wasn't looking directly at them. Whispers followed, the whispers that didn't belong to her thoughts, words she didn't recognize, voices that didn't belong to her thoughts.
She had told her boss, Mr. Keller, she needed time off.
"I need rest," she had said, her voice trembling.
He only laughed, adjusting his glasses with a sneer.
"Darkness is your job Amanda," he said. "If you can't use it, then maybe you're not a real writer."
The words stung more than they should have. That night, instead of sleeping, she sat back down at her desk. Then came to a conclusion, If she couldn't fight the darkness, she would try to trap it in words.
So she wrote.
She wrote about a monster. A creature that didn't chase or hunt. It didn't crawl out of the shadows with teeth and claws. It was worse. It waited, quietly, in the corners of their minds, It waited and lingered in silence and hidden corners, feeding on fear the way fire feeds on oxygen, until their fear feeds it. She called it The Maw.
The more she wrote, the more real it felt, she could almost hear it breathing, long and slow, inside the walls of her apartment. When she closed her eyes, she could almost see it, a huge shadow pressing against the walls of her apartment, and also against her furniture, a mass of shifting blackness, stretching its limbs against the ceiling, breathing slowly in the dark and bigger than the room could hold.
Her fingers tapped the keys faster, the sound echoing in the quiet as she writes more lines.
The Maw waits where fear lingers.
The Maw feeds when the heart weakens.
The Maw never stops.
She didn't stop typing until her hands ached. Her chest tightened as she read the words, her eyes burned, her body felt cold and hot at the same time, her stomach knotted. It no longer felt like she was inventing the creature. It was like the words weren't coming from her thoughts anymore, but from something else, something whispering to her, something sitting right behind her, guiding her hands.
And then, suddenly, the words shifted.
She blinked.
On the screen, in the middle of her paragraph, sat a single sentence
The sentence there read: The Maw is Amanda's child.
At that point, she looked at her laptop screen and froze.
Her blood ran cold. She hadn't typed that. She was certain. Her heart skipped, then pounded furiously, as though trying to escape her chest. She wanted to delete the line, but her fingers wouldn't move.
The room seemed darker than before, as though the sentence itself had stolen some of the light.
And that was when the memories surfaced.
Amanda was ten again, lying awake in her childhood bedroom, staring at the cracked ceiling. The house was quiet, but not safe. Her father's shouting was carried through the walls, his voice, bolder and thicker due to alcohol. She remembered pulling the blanket over her head, praying the noise wouldn't reach her door. Every night she feared the sound of footsteps climbing the hallway, slow, deliberate and heavy.
Her mother never stayed long in the house. Amanda would often find herself alone, lights flickering, wind slapping the windows. Shadows always seemed to linger longer in that home, stretching and twisting, as if watching her. She would whisper to herself to stay calm, but the silence was worse than the noise. It breathed. It listened.
The Maw had been there even then, though she hadn't named it. She remembered the sensation of eyes staring from her closet, the way her chest tightened as though invisible hands pressed against it. Nobody believed her when she said something was in the house. They told her it was just her imagination, [laughs], a writer's mind already spinning stories.
But Amanda remembered the way fear made her small, made her fragile and made her shiver. And she remembered the night she swore she heard a voice, low and guttural, whisper from the corner of her room.
"MOTHER….."
Back in her apartment, Amanda blinked away the memory. Her breath hitched. Maybe The Maw wasn't new. Maybe it had always been there from the beginning, waiting for her to give it shape.
Her body finally gave in. Exhaustion dragged her down. She slumped over the desk, her cheek against the warm keyboard as sleep swallowed her, the apartment was silent.
When she woke, the air felt heavier, thicker, as if someone else had been breathing in her apartment all night. Her head ached, her mouth dry, her body stiff. The clock on the wall said she had only slept an hour.
And then she heard it.
The sound of pages turning.
Slow, deliberate, steady.
Amanda's head snapped up. Her gaze landed on the piles of papers on her desk, then to the closed notebooks stacked on the shelf, then it moved to the empty coffee table where books once layed. Nothing was open. Nothing was moving.
Yet the sound continued.
Page after page after page.
Her throat tightened. Her skin hairs stood. She clutched the edge of the desk, trying to convince herself it was her imagination, probably another symptom of sleeplessness.
But deep down, she knew the truth.
She knew she hadn't just written a story, oh how much she wanted to remain in denial, but then reality struck her.
She had carved out a door with her words, and something had walked through.
The Maw was no longer bound to her imagination, she had created a tunnel between her world of terror and the human world.
The Maw didn't just gained freedom alone, it was hungry.