While Hans was counting the crumpled bills in his wallet to pay the delivery guy, something happened — something not just strange, but wrong in a way that scraped against his soul with the cold indifference of pure Evil. A moment that didn't fit, like a twisted key forced into a flawless lock.
The delivery guy, a young man with patchy stubble and the kind of nervousness that clings like humidity, cleared his throat. His voice was rough, uneasy — the kind of tone someone uses when they're about to apologize for noticing a bad smell they wish they hadn't.
"Sir," the young man said, glancing over Hans's shoulder into the dark hallway. He looked genuinely startled. "Excuse me, but… I think your lady needs help coming down the stairs. Is she your mother?"
The question hung in the air, chilling the moment more than the biting wind of Maine.
Hans froze mid-count, the weight of the money fading from his hand. He turned — slowly, like a man who already knows he's about to see something he'll wish he hadn't. His eyes followed the delivery boy's gaze toward the mahogany staircase, thick shadows pouring over it like syrup.
There was no one there.
No shadow. No sound. Not even a drifting speck of dust.
What the hell was the pizza guy talking about? It was the kind of mistake that made you wonder if you'd just stepped into a parallel universe the moment you opened the door.
"I'm sorry," Hans said, his voice sounding hollow even to himself — the voice of a man suddenly forced to explain something unspeakable. "But I think you're mistaken. I live alone. My mother… well, she passed away a year ago. And I just moved into this house."
That was all it took for the pizza guy to hurry the exchange. He handed Hans his food, took the bills, and practically ran back to his motorbike.
Before he started the engine, the delivery boy looked back one last time — and that's when he saw it.
A shadow, standing right beside Hans, as if it had been there all along.
Hans didn't react. He looked perfectly normal — calm, casual, as though that shadow had never existed at all.
It was around three in the morning when Hans finally fell asleep, the TV still on and tuned to the local news channel. After catching up on the day's headlines — both global and local — he'd dozed off, too exhausted to stay awake for the haunted-house documentary he'd been dying to watch. Hans loved that kind of stuff, and of course, he didn't consider himself a coward for watching it — not even while living alone in a mansion in the middle of nowhere, far from the city.
He slept face-down, completely uncovered, with the pillows and blanket scattered on the floor. The mansion was silent — so silent he could hear the night breeze gently brushing against the closed windows, except for the one in his bedroom, which he kept open for ventilation. He preferred that to buying a fan that might keep him awake with its constant whirring.
He was sleeping so deeply that he didn't even stir when a shadow slipped silently into the house, like it had traveled across the cosmos at light speed.
That night was quiet — unnervingly so — and maybe he was simply too tired to notice that something else was moving in the dark with him.
But Hans wasn't sleeping as peacefully as he seemed.
Sweat covered his forehead, dripping down in slow, steady streams, like he'd just run a marathon.
Then — crash!
The sound of a vase shattering into pieces jolted him awake.
Eyes half-open, heavy with sleep, Hans groaned and sat up, trying to decide whether to get up at all. Maybe it was just a mouse, he told himself. If so, it was going to be a long night of hunting.
Grumbling, he got out of bed, barefoot, descending the stairs. Each step creaked beneath his weight, and the cold air clung to his skin, numbing his fingertips.
But no.
There were no signs of mice anywhere.
Hans found the broken vase — one of his favorites, collectible and expensive. Now, just shards. Nothing left to do.
He swept the pieces into a dustpan and threw them away in the kitchen trash. Then he washed his hands and decided to make himself a cup of hot milk to help him sleep again. The nightmares he'd been having since drifting off with the TV on had been awful.
Maybe those dreams came from the excitement of wanting to watch that paranormal show. Or maybe they were just hallucinations — nerves, perhaps, from living alone in such a strange, isolated place.
While the milk heated in a small pot on the stove, Hans froze.
His eyes locked on a white corner of the kitchen wall. He couldn't look away.
His breathing grew heavy. His whole body felt weighed down, like he was carrying a sack of stones on his back.
"What… the hell is happening to me?"
He tried to speak, but his mouth barely moved — his lips glued together, trembling as though sealed shut by invisible glue.
He remembered something he'd read years ago — when he was thirteen, bored and unsupervised on the internet after overhearing his mother talk to a neighbor about "sleep paralysis." They'd changed the subject when they realized he was listening, so that night, right at 9:15 — the usual time his mother went to bed — Hans had booted up their old, half-broken desktop computer and typed into Google:
What is sleep paralysis?
That was when he learned everything.
Minutes passed, and just when he was about to give up, Hans came back to himself.
His body returned to normal.
He no longer felt as if his lips had been sealed with glue, nor that his body had been frozen in time. His breathing steadied, and his soul seemed to have found a moment of eternal rest.
The most confusing part of the whole situation was that the next morning, he woke up at six a.m. because his phone alarm had been set to ring at that hour every day. Unfortunately, he'd forgotten it was Sunday — his one day to rest as much as he wanted.
He tried to go back to sleep after turning off the alarm, but it was a lost cause.
He decided to get out of bed. That Sunday was going to be a long day — it was still hard for him to adjust to his new life in the middle of nowhere.
Surrounded by pure, peaceful nature, the crushing stress of city life was gone. Yet, the strangest part of it all was that Hans truly believed everything that had happened the night before had been nothing more than a damn dream.