There was a smell that night I couldn’t name — not quite damp wood, not quite the dry bite of old paper.
It lingered in the corners of the room like a thought I’d forgotten to think, pooling along the mattress edge where shadow thickened. Something was off. The rug’s edge curled as if nudged by a careful foot, a lone sock hid farther beneath the bed than I ever would have kicked it, and on the underside of the bedpost a faint smear of darkness looked like it had been touched by something that didn’t belong to me.
The sound came next. A soft shifting — not random, not the usual house-settling creak, but a deliberate brush, as though the air itself were being rearranged. It wasn’t loud, just certain.
When I was a child, the under‑bed void was my first definition of terror. I knew the exact groans of the floorboards, the way the nightlight carved faces into the walls, the wind’s sly whistle through the old window frame. Growing older was supposed to banish those fears. Monsters, I told myself, belonged to stories, not the space beneath my bed. But age teaches logic, not immunity.
Last night proved that.
I had barely killed the lamp when the sound began — fabric sliding over fabric, like a secret being whispered without words. My breath stalled. Every instinct screamed for action: fling on the light, drag the unknown into sight. Yet something deeper, something older, urged stillness. What if the childish terror was right? What if something truly waited there?
Curiosity betrayed me. My hand groped for the phone, thumb trembling as I lit the screen and aimed its pale beam into the dark. Dust drifted like slow-motion snow. An orphaned sock slumped in the corner. Nothing moved. And yet the silence that followed felt inhabited, dense, like a presence had just exhaled and stepped backward into the walls.
I told myself it was the house breathing, wood and wind conspiring to trick me. But long after the light returned, the question lingered, low and steady: if a sound can feel intentional, isn’t intention its own kind of existence?
Now I sleep with the lamp burning a thin circle into the dark. I listen to the floorboards. And I wonder whether fear is merely memory—
or whether memory sometimes remembers us.