Gift or Curse: What Notices You When You Notice Back | After Midnight

For as long as he can remember, the world has never felt empty.

As a child, he didn’t think of it as fear—just awareness. The sense that silence carried weight. That darkness wasn’t just the absence of light. That rooms noticed when you entered them.

The nights were worse. Dreams bled into waking moments. Footsteps came from places they shouldn’t. Voices tried to form words they didn’t quite know how to speak. Sometimes he woke up convinced he was already awake… only to realize something was standing in the doorway.

Then it...