He brushed his teeth, washed the acne cream off his face and checked to make sure he didn’t need to shave today (not yet). Having forgotten to pick up some clean clothes from his bedroom, he opened the bathroom door, started to walk out...

And stopped.

Something was wrong.

A chill raced down his spine. Nick knew what he’d see without looking, and when he did look, forcing himself to glance down the hall in both directions, it confirmed what he’d already suspected.

Heart pounding, he ducked back into the bathroom and quickly closed the door. What he wanted to do was call out “Mom! Dad!” until one or both of his parents came to his rescue. But he was seventeen, too old to exhibit such childish fear, and he knew he was going to have to get through this himself.

He stared at the closed door, thinking about what lay on the other side of it.

The shadow.

For several weeks now, there’d been a shadow in the hall that he didn’t like. It was only there sometimes, but there didn’t seem to be anything consistent about when it appeared. It wasn’t a certain time of day or night, had nothing to do with the light in the hall, or illumination from any of the bedroom doorways or the living room. It just…appeared every so often. There was no rhyme or reason to it, and what really freaked him out was that it didn’t seem to correspond to any tangible object. Every time he saw the shadow, he attempted to identify its source, only to be confronted with the fact that there was nothing inside or outside the house even vaguely similar to its shape.

For its contours changed. It was still identifiably the same shadow, but sometimes it appeared more humanoid in shape, other times more amorphously bloblike. Always it was faint, barely perceptible, as though it were attempting to hide in plain sight. And always there was about it a palpable sense of wrongness, that same disturbing impression he had gotten upon opening the bathroom door, a feeling that something nearby was not as it should be.

Nick looked at himself in the mirror, waited a few seconds, then, gathering his courage, opened the door again and peeked out.

There it was, hovering on the wall next to his parents’ bedroom door, an elongated form with what appeared to be three arms, unmoving but possessing a strange quivering aspect.

Something about the shadow reminded him of that figure he’d seen through the window of what was going to be the new bank, and he immediately shut the door again. Too embarrassed to admit he was afraid but not too embarrassed to do something about it, he pressed his shoulder against the door again. “Mom!” he called.

No response.

The shadow had killed her.

“MOM!”

“What?” she called back from the kitchen.

“Come here!”

Footsteps, and then her voice. “What is it?”

He opened the bathroom door a crack and poked his head out. “Could you get my jeans and that Star Wars t-shirt from the top of the hamper in my room? I forgot.”