The third night 🌙

A few years ago, I spent a week in a small cabin deep in the North Cascades. It was one of those places so remote that the silence actually has a weight to it.

On the third night, the power went out. It wasn’t a storm; the air was perfectly still. I lit a single candle and sat by the window. That’s when I saw it—or rather, I saw the lack of something.

In the treeline, about twenty yards away, there was a patch of "black" that was darker than the night around it. It looked like a tear in the world, shaped roughly like a tall, thin man, but with limbs that seemed to have too many joints.

I watched it for an hour. It didn't walk; it unfolded. It would reach out a long, shadow-thin arm, grip a tree trunk, and then its entire body would snap toward the arm in a silent, blurred motion...and I kept telling myself it was just a trick of the light, but I know it wasn't.

But the reason I’ve never told anyone is what happened when it reached the cabin wall...and it started to get cold, the kind of cold that makes your teeth ache..

It didn't try to open the door. It didn't break a window. It pressed its "face"—which was just a smooth, featureless void—against the glass. I was inches away, separated only by a thin pane of cooling glass.

I expected to feel terror, but instead, I felt a massive, crushing sense of recognition. As I looked into that void, I didn't see a monster. I saw a version of myself that had been "emptied out."

It began to tap. Not on the glass, but on the rhythm of my own heartbeat. Thump-thump. Tap-tap. If my heart skipped a beat, the tapping skipped. It was mimicking my internal biology from the outside.

Then, it leaned in and whispered—not into my ears, but directly into my thoughts. It didn't use words. It shared a memory that wasn't mine: a memory of the earth before there were trees, a cold, grey world of wind and stone. It was telling me that it had been waiting for me to be alone long enough to remind me where we both truly came from.

When the sun rose, it was gone. But to this day, if I sit in total silence for too long, my heartbeat starts to sync up with that rhythmic tapping, and I feel that cold, grey world trying to pull me back in.