The Night Reader

 It all happened in my childhood. I was sleeping on the couch at the time, there was a door to the right of the couch, a closet against the opposite wall, and a chair to the right of the closet. So, for as long as I can remember, there was a man sitting on this chair every night. More precisely, not a man, but just a dark silhouette of a man. Moonlight was coming from the window, and he was sitting in the shadow of the closet. I never saw him appear there — my father or mother turned off the light, and the chair seemed to be empty, then I looked away for a second — and there he appeared. I wasn't afraid of him at all then, because I was little.

This man was always saying something. I understood that most of the time he was just reading random excerpts from books, although he had nothing in his hands. The books were completely different and unrelated. I also came across children's fairy tales, but he read them in such a way that later, when my parents tried to read the same fairy tales to me, I started crying. He spoke in a monotone voice, and pronounced the words abruptly, as if each word was a separate sentence. I remember reading something about Sherlock Holmes. Once I read a whole paragraph about sex from a biology textbook — of course, I didn't understand anything, but then I said the word "penis" in front of my parents, and my mother tried for a long time to find out where I learned it. I could not identify some of his texts, and I doubt that such books exist at all.

Sometimes he would start saying an endless sequence of numbers, right in the middle of a sentence, without any pauses. "Two." "Seven." "Four." "Zero." "Nine." Even rarer were the moments when he stopped. He would pause for about five seconds, and then say something about himself. "For me. It's boring." "For me. Nice to meet you." "I am. I'm tired." "I love you. I see it." Neither the body position nor the intonation changed. And so it was every night.

I usually listened to it for half an hour or an hour before falling asleep. At first, it just confused me, but as I grew up, I gradually realized that something was wrong. I tried asking my parents about him, but they just laughed and said there were no monsters. And then I realized that his parents never heard him, even though he spoke loudly enough.

So one day I went to bed, my mom wished me good night and turned off the light. Time passed, and I lay there and was afraid. It was quiet. No one was talking. I lay there and lay there, and then I turned my head and looked at the chair. He was there and he was looking at me— his head was turned in my direction. Then he stood up. But before, he barely moved! I immediately squeezed my eyes shut, clutched the blanket, and listened to his soft footsteps getting closer and closer, and then fading away. I couldn't resist opening my eyes. He was there, leaning right over me. There was enough light, but I still couldn't see the face: a dark, indistinct silhouette, and that was it. I was about to scream when he leaned even closer and said in his usual monotone voice, "You. Are you afraid. I'll leave. I'll come back." And everything. I immediately blacked out and only woke up in the morning. This silhouette has not appeared since.

I think about it now and I think that I probably made it all up. You never know what was there, right? Nevertheless, every night I nervously look around the chair in front of the computer. Maybe he'll be there. He promised to come back...