Yes, that ending works much better. Here’s the updated HTML with the SPAG fixes and that changed line.
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I thought I was just tired.
That was the strange thing about it. I didn’t feel dangerously exhausted. I wasn’t falling asleep at my desk or drifting off in meetings. I just felt slightly out of step with myself, like my brain was lagging behind everything else by a fraction of a second.
We’d just come back from holiday and the shift back into normal life had completely wrecked my sleep pattern. One week I was wandering around Spain in the sunshine with no alarms and nowhere urgent to be, then suddenly it was back to work, deadlines, emails, and lying awake at three in the morning staring at the ceiling for no obvious reason.
The night before had felt fairly normal. Not great sleep, but enough to get through the next day. At least that’s what I thought until I checked my sleep app the following morning.
SLEEP: 2hrs:11mins
Deep: 33%
Light: 24%
REM: 8%
Awake: 35%
I remember staring at the screen for a while because the numbers didn’t even seem possible. I’d spent longer than that lying in bed. Somehow my brain had barely switched off at all, although I thought I was asleep. Initially confused, I then blamed my sleep app for just being wrong, but ... I was very tired.
The effects of my tiredness started showing almost immediately at work. Nothing dramatic, just little mistakes that kept irritating me because they weren’t the sort of mistakes I usually make. Typos in emails. Wrong filenames. At one point I wrote down a project delivery date that had already passed. Tiny things, but enough to notice. Enough that I started feeling uneasy about how disconnected my thoughts felt.
Physically, I felt OK, but couldn’t stop the urge to yawn all the time and my eyes were feeling gritty in that way they do late at night.
Around eleven that morning I went and got a couple of minutes of fresh air, then to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea.
Our large workplace kitchen sits off a long corridor to the office, and the lights outside are motion activated. They always take a second or two too long to register you and burst into life, so when you open the kitchen door the corridor sits in this awkward half-darkness for a moment.
I pushed the door open and something black and low to the ground moved quickly past my feet.
This wasn't a case that I thought I saw something, I mean I physically reacted to it. I bent my legs instinctively to avoid it bumping into me. The reaction was immediate, completely automatic, like somebody avoiding a dog running across their path.
Then the corridor lights flicked on, I looked around, but nothing was there.
No shadow disappearing around the corner. No bag on the floor. No movement at all. Just an empty corridor and the gentle hum of fluorescent lighting.
I stood there for a few seconds, the door had shut behind me and the tea was still sloshing around in my mug, trying to process what had just happened. The unsettling part wasn’t what I’d seen. It was how convincingly real it had felt. My body had reacted before my brain had time to question it.
I shook it off as a trick of the light, got back to my desk and carried on with my day, although I kept replaying the moment in my head. Every now and then I’d catch myself glancing down corridors slightly too quickly, or looking twice into empty rooms without really meaning to, but probably subconsciously looking for something.
That evening as my wife and I settled in to watch some TV, I picked up my phone and started reading about sleep deprivation.
That was probably a mistake.
Once you start reading deeply enough into severe sleep loss, you realise how fragile the brain actually is. People who miss enough REM sleep begin experiencing something called REM intrusion, where fragments of dreaming begin bleeding into waking consciousness. Hallucinations, movement in peripheral vision, shadow figures, distorted faces. The brain, desperate to complete the dreaming cycle it’s been denied, starts forcing parts of it into reality.
At least that’s the official explanation.
The thing that bothered me was how similar all the accounts sounded.
People described the same shapes. The same movement. The same feeling that whatever they’d seen wasn’t random. Some of them even described the exact same instinctive reaction I’d had, where their body responded before their conscious mind did. I found a couple of online forums, and Reddit provided some fascinating discussions around sleep, hallucinations, and narcolepsy.
Much of my research made me a little uneasy, not fearful, mainly because what I felt seemed strangely familiar.
That night I barely slept at all. Partly because my sleep pattern was already ruined, but mostly because every time I started drifting off I kept thinking about that thing in the corridor. My rational brain knew there had been nothing there, but another part of me seemed less convinced.
At around half past two in the morning I got up to get a glass of water. As I walked back upstairs I glanced absent-mindedly into the spare bedroom and saw someone standing beside the window.
I stopped instantly. There were only two of us in the house, and that wasn't my wife standing there.
The figure didn’t move. It was tall, unnaturally still, one arm hanging slightly lower than the other. For a moment I genuinely believed somebody had broken into the house.
Then I switched the landing light on and the room was empty. I went around the house and checked all the doors and windows, but I didn’t sleep properly after that.
The next few days became increasingly difficult to explain away. I started noticing movement where there shouldn’t be movement. A dark figure at the far end of a supermarket aisle that disappeared when I reached it. Someone sitting motionless in a parked car outside work who vanished the second time I looked. Once, while driving home late in the evening, I became convinced somebody was sitting silently in the back seat behind me.
That one frightened me enough that I had to pull over, get out of the car, and check the back seat and boot.
The strange thing is that these 'visions' never move once you properly focus on them. You only ever catch the movement beforehand, that brief glimpse of approach at the edge of your vision. Once you actually look at them directly, they’re completely still.
Watching. Waiting.
By then I was sleeping with the television on because silence had started making me uncomfortable. Every creak of the house sounded deliberate. Every dark reflection in the windows made me pause slightly longer than it should have.
Everywhere else I was becoming more wary of opening doors and walking into rooms, mildly worried about what I might see.
The exhaustion was building. The less sleep I got, the more often I saw them. Then seeing them made sleeping even harder. It became a loop that fed itself night after night.
I tried all the sensible explanations first.
Stress. Fatigue. Anxiety. Too much caffeine. Too much alcohol. Eating late at night. Poor sleep hygiene.
I went to the doctor. I cut down caffeine and alcohol completely, and I stopped eating after 8pm. I tried meditation apps, sleeping tablets, breathing exercises, all the normal advice people give you when your brain starts betraying you a little ... but none of it helped.
Three nights ago I woke at around four in the morning and saw one standing beside the bed, not near it, beside it.
Tall. Thin. Completely motionless. Its face looked almost human in the same way mannequins look almost human. Close enough at first glance, but wrong in tiny ways once you looked properly. The eyes were too still. The expression slightly delayed, like it was copying what a human face should look like rather than understanding it naturally.
I couldn’t move at first. Not because I was particularly scared, but because some buried instinct was telling me not to fully acknowledge what I was looking at.
The thing leaned closer until its face was inches from mine, and then it whispered something.
Not words exactly. More like a thought pressed directly into my head.
You’re letting us in. You’re letting us in. You’re letting us in. It kept repeating.
I don’t remember falling asleep afterward, but I woke properly just after sunrise with the bedroom empty and my heart hammering hard enough to hurt.
I called in sick to work that morning. I was too exhausted and my mental state just wasn't in the right place.
I was sat on the sofa all morning, casually aware that life was happening around me, but also deeply aware that something just wasn't right. These events just didn't feel like hallucinations, they felt very real. I continued my research, trying to understand what was happening. My thoughts wouldn’t settle. Even sitting still, I felt wired and exhausted at the same time.
Around lunchtime my wife casually asked why I’d been standing in the garden during the night.
I shot her a puzzled look and told her I hadn’t.
She looked immediately uncomfortable, like she regretted mentioning it at all, then quietly said she’d seen me through the bedroom window sometime around three in the morning.
Apparently I’d been standing completely still at the bottom of the garden facing the house. I was just staring up at the bedroom window.
Last night I finally understood what they are.
People think sleep deprivation causes hallucinations because the brain is failing. I don’t think that’s true anymore.
I think exhaustion weakens something. Some barrier between us and whatever these things are. That’s why they stay hidden in microsleeps and fragments of REM sleep, appearing only in glimpses and peripheral movement at first. They need you exhausted before you can properly perceive them.
And once you do, they start getting closer, much closer.
They don’t kill people. At least not physically. What they want is quieter than that. They replace you slowly, and carefully.
By the time it happens properly, nobody notices at first. You still remember names, routines, conversations. The thing now wearing you uses your memories like instructions from a manual.
Only the people closest to you sense something wrong. A slight delay before you smile. An odd flatness behind your eyes. Moments where you become strangely still and distant without realising it.
Tonight I’m trying not to sleep. But every time I blink I catch movement near the bedroom door. Something standing there patiently in the dark.
Waiting.
And deep down, somewhere beneath the exhaustion, I think I already know the worst part.
I don’t think they’ve been trying to get into the house.
I think they’ve been trying to get into me.