This is a story about an old friend of mine, we’ll call him Ray. Ray and I used to work in the same small office side by side. With so many common interests like inventing ways to slack off or our love of anime, it was inevitable that we would become good friends over the months we worked together. But over the 6 month mark my friend Ray started acting a bit off.
We used to slack off sure but not like we weren’t earning our keep. We always finished the allotted work in record time and reported it only on the given deadlines.
Yet as I said before, Ray started having trouble meeting the quota. I won’t go into the details but it wasn’t pretty. Every other day he would get called into the boss’s office for some major error he made while submitting his work. He had developed some serious dark circles and had stopped talking to anyone in the office, which included me.
I kept trying to get him to talk but I wasn’t able to get any more than a few words out of him.
“Sorry.” “Yes.” “No.” were the only words left in his vocabulary. And just as everyone in the office guessed, he resigned soon after. Since I always sat beside him I had the front row seats to - whatever was happening with him.
During his notice period I saw him lose so much weight his usual tight fitting clothes had become too big for him. Even the stern boss of ours had stopped giving him any flak over the work he wasn’t able to put in.
Eventually even I had given up. So I was surprised when on the last day of notice period he asked me to go for drinks.
We went to the same bar near the office we always went to and it was awkward. I had downed two bottles of beer and this guy barely even touched his.
A little hammered I grilled him a little too harshly but I guess that’s what he needed to finally voice his troubles. Since he started talking for the first time in a while.
Now both of us were new to the working world and unlike me Ray had moved to the city from the countryside.
He talked about how his parents weren’t that well off. So even when they had sent him to the big city with some savings for him to rent a decent place. My man found the cheapest apartment he could rent out and sent the excess money back to his folks. Regardless, he admitted this was his first mistake.
By this point he asked me if he could stay over at my apartment to which I agreed. Smiling he downed his bottle too and we both made our way back to my place.
As we settled in, he asked if we could sleep in the same room. A bit weirded out I asked him why and he didn’t say anything. Afraid that he would clamp up again I told him sure I brought out the pillows and a mattress. Letting him crash on the couch while I slept on the floor.
As I laid on my mat I asked if he was ever gonna finish that story of his. To which he nodded and continued.
He said the first few months in the new rental weren’t bad. But as time went on he started getting these sleep paralysis episodes. I quietly listened as he detailed how it started.
In the middle of the night, every night he would wake up with his body stuck in place. He said he’s had sleep paralysis before but none were this intense and it started happening daily.
When it happened he had this unshakeable sense of dread, it would last for a few minutes then he would just fall back asleep. After a few days the time he stayed awake paralyzed went from a few minutes till dawn.
Sweat ran down his forehead as he recalled the nights. He said that at some point it turned from simple sleep paralysis to something more unexplainable.
You see we had some intense bar nights during this period. Ray thought that these drinking sprees would knock him out enough to not wake up paralyzed in midnight. He had tried everything: supplements, booze, sleeping pills, but nothing worked and he would always wake up around midnight.
Even this he said was bearable compared to what happened recently. During one of his episodes he would have this feeling that someone was always in the room with him. Watching him.
He took a long pause and I noticed that he shuffled on the couch uncomfortably. He would turn to his sides but never lay still as if he was trying to avoid facing the ceiling.
Soon he started speaking again, now facing the couch instead of me. He said the episodes started to feel like a fucked game. Among all his sleep paralysis episodes the only thing he had control over was his eyes which he kept closed. He said it felt like the moment he opened his eyes things would go to the point of no return.
I asked what made him come to this conclusion. Like how was he so certain that this was a fucked game.
He asked me if I had my phone with me and I replied yeah. He took out his own phone and started typing away.
Right then my phone buzzed, taking my phone in my hands I read the texts he sent me.
“Look, I am not crazy but I think something that lives in the ceilings has been following me.”
I looked up from my phone towards Ray who had his back to me. Now I was feeling creeped out but mostly concerned, since he preferred talking more on text I humoured him.
“And..? Can this “something” listen to what we’ve been talking about right now?”
“I think so.”
“This is crazy.”
Ray did not reply, he turned to face me from the couch and handed me his phone. I took it and saw it had the video player open.
The screen was dark with a big play icon in the centre so I tapped it. The video played, the phone was recording Ray sleeping on his bed. The room had little light so it was hard to make out the hours on the clock in the room. But I could faintly tell the clock was about to hit 3.
After a few minutes of the clock hitting 3 am. The camera shook a little, changing the angle to only catch half of Ray’s body in his bed.
I struggled to see the point of this video but I felt my hair stand when I did. From the little light that was on Ray, even from the shitty angle the camera was in, it was easy to catch a huge shadow fall upon him. I watched the video for a few minutes holding my breath but nothing else happened. I tapped on the video then I realised the video was 6 hours long. I skipped a few hours and the shadow remained covering Ray. It only moved a few minutes before the sunlight lit up the room fully.
Speechless and a little unsettled, I handed the phone back to Ray. It felt like a prank but at the same time being aware of my friend’s condition I didn’t know what to say.
Ray didn’t say anything much after that neither did I. We just went about spending the night, I went and turned off the lights.
Maybe it was his whole story, maybe I have some underlying condition. Because that night I woke up around midnight.
There was this teetering sound of someone walking. It was slow as if whoever was walking was having a bad go of it.
By this point I’m sweating bullets thinking this was a home invasion. That some hobo somehow broke into my apartment and was walking around the hall.
I was the one sleeping on the ground so consider my surprise when I didn’t feel the sounds of those steps anywhere beside me.
No, it sounded like someone was walking above me. I opened my eyes and saw a pale shadow hanging down from the ceiling right above Ray’s turned back.
I laid there, paralysed, as I saw this bleached thing standing upside down, its stick-like leg somehow stuck on the ceiling. Its limbs were too long for any human connected to a pot-bellied sickly looking body.
The head had boils, uneven hair like someone pulled it off right from the base. As I was having trouble believing what I was seeing, the thing’s neck creaked a little and as if on instinct I closed my eyes.
I heard a sharp popping sound as if someone was cracking their neck then it was back to silence. After a while of that I could hear the faint steps from earlier. Still above but quieter than before.
I laid there, trying my best to imitate a corpse. This was all a nightmare, it had to be.
And right then, I felt a warm breath on my shoulder. I laid there all night, wide awake feeling this disgustingly warm breath on my shoulder reminding me that it was still there.
The breath didn’t leave me until hours later. And even then I didn’t dare to move or open my eyes thinking that thing was still there.
I stayed there until Ray shook me up. It was already afternoon and he had his bag with him looking ready to leave.
He had a smile on his face as he told me it was the best sleep he had in months.
To this day I have no idea what I saw that night was real or not because it never happened again.