Someone was watching him—him and his mother. He felt an odd creeping sensation, like a shadow falling across him. The darkest kind of shadow. He began to sweat, and his heart beat hard in his head. He couldn’t move. Just kept on staring out that window. Maybe the watcher was out there, hiding in the moon or hanging from the windowsill, trying to climb up.

There was a muffled noise from behind him. His mother. Her arm pulled suddenly back and her body jerked away from him. The bed shook violently. He lay rigid, unable to turn his head to look back at her. Unable to move at all. And then someone shoved him hard so that he fell out onto the cold wooden floor, while above him the bed continued to shake. He didn’t dare look but he heard things. The bed creaking. The slap of an open palm against a face. Some male grunts and something from his mother that was not quite a scream, not quite a moan. How long did it go on for? He lay on the floor, staring at his mother’s dancing slippers, which sat on the rug below the window. They were made of red silk with little white flowers embroidered across the round toes, and they had long red ribbons that you’d wind up the leg to secure them. They were her pride and joy, but he’d never seen her wear them. He imagined his mother’s feet dancing in the shoes, hopping and pointing and skipping. Happy feet. He imagined white flowers, like those stitched on the shoes, raining down from the sky and gathering in a thick, soft carpet on the ground.

Eventually the bed became still again, and there was an odd, rasping sound—perhaps the sound of his mother attempting to stifle her sobs.

He stayed there, on the floor, until morning. He must have slept. When daylight finally came, his mother had already risen and left the room. The bedsheets were rumpled, but no more than usual.

She told him he must have dreamed it.

Years later, just before he was due to leave for Paris, he asked her about what had happened that night—tried to press for an explanation. She insisted she didn’t know what he was talking about.

Now and then, in the dead of night, that feeling would come over him again—a nasty creeping sensation, like the darkest shadow falling across his body—and he would wake with a gasp, clutching the bedsheets, soaked in sweat. Sometimes, when he fell asleep again, he would dream of red dancing slippers or flurries of white flowers.

There was never anyone there watching him. There was never anyone beside him in the bed. Until now.