The Presence

The streetlights blinked one-two-three. They always had.

Tonight, they didn’t. It was one-two-pause-three.

I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Not because I wanted to. Because the bones in my chest vibrated to the same beat. One. Two. Silence. Three.

I didn’t perceive the silence as an absence of sound. It was pressure, like someone pressing a thumb into my ear canal from the inside.

One-two... pause... three.

A car alarm howled a few streets away. It cut off at two. Started again at three. As if something held it by the throat.

I saw nothing at the end of the alley, just darkness where the light didn’t reach. But the dust over the asphalt didn’t hang the way it should. It quivered, gathered, retreated.

I picked up the metal pipe by the trash cans. My fingers felt rust. And heat, under the rust, as if someone had held it over a flame.

One. Two.

Pause. And in the pause, it came.

A mass. A displacement. The asphalt beneath my feet cracked in an arc of hairline fractures that spread out like a spiderweb.

I struck.

The pipe didn’t hit air. It stopped abruptly, as if against a wall. The impact jarred up my arm and straight into my teeth. The metal screamed, but it wasn’t a sound I heard, but a sound I felt.

Something hit back.

I flew sideways against the brick wall. Not hard. Precise. Like a hand that knows exactly how much force is needed to break without killing. The skin over my ribs darkened in three circles. No swelling, just three flat points where the blood vessels had burst under an enormous, localized suction.

One-two-pause-three.

Glass shattered behind me. Not my fault. The windowpane decided to become dust.

I didn’t run. I walked, mechanically, toward the only place my Neanderthal brain perceived as safe. It was a mistake. You don’t seek cover in a box when you are being hunted by pressure.

When I got home, I saw the pipe was bent at an angle I didn’t have the strength to create. There was bluing in the metal, heat discoloration like that of a short-circuited cable cabinet.

I turned on the television with a hand that wouldn’t stop shaking. My fingers vibrated against the remote.

The news came on. It showed an incident downtown. The footage from the surveillance camera showed me in the alley. I saw myself striking at nothing. I saw myself turn, as if I were pushed.

And then, in the same clip, without me being anywhere near it:

A car compressed down as if under an invisible weight, as if it imploded. A parking meter twisted. A window exploded inwards.

The sound from the TV speaker fell into rhythm: one-two... pause... three. The subwoofer pumped in and out on its own.

The living room lamp blinked one-two-pause-three.

The pause after two lasted a little longer now.

It had followed me home.

The pause after two was no longer silence. It was vacuum.

The air pressure in the living room dropped so abruptly that my ears popped, like when a plane enters a dive.

Then came three.

The light flared back on.

It was close.

I didn’t hear footsteps. I heard the floor.

The parquet in the hallway creaked and bowed under an enormous, point-concentrated weight moving toward me. The planks didn’t splinter; they were compressed.

Creak... stop... creak.

I backed away toward the kitchen counter. My ribs ached where the three points had hit me in the alley.

On the coffee table stood a half-full glass of water.

The water didn’t tremble. It tilted.

The surface was forced down at one end, as if an invisible finger pushed the liquid away. The glass cracked. A clean, sharp sound. The water ran out over the tabletop, but it didn’t run down to the floor. It was stopped at the table’s edge by a wall of condensed air.

The air no longer tasted just of iron. It tasted of ozone. Static electricity made the hairs on my arms stand up. From charge, not fear, but my heart beat harder.

The living room lamp blinked again.

One.

I looked down at my rug. The fibers were compressed flat. A perfect round impression, half a meter in diameter, sank down right in front of me.

Two.

The impression disappeared.

Pause.

In the darkness, I felt the heat. A dry, intense radiant heat hit my face, like opening a hot oven and sticking your face inside.

My breath stopped. There was no room for the air in my lungs anymore; the pressure outside was greater than the pressure inside.

Nasal cartilage snapped. A thin stream of hot blood ran down over my lip.

Three.

The light came on.

It stood right in front of me.

I couldn’t see it. But I saw the dust motes in the air stop and swirl around a massive form. I saw how the light from the lamp bent faintly around the contours, a miniature gravitational lens.

I threw myself to the side.

It was a miscalculation.

The beast didn’t strike. It expanded.

A shockwave struck out from the center of the room.

The windows didn’t blow outward. They were pulverized into sand.

The TV screen pressed inward until the electronics and glass became a flat, crunching mass against the wall.

I was flung against the refrigerator. The magnets fell to the floor.

I slid down to the floor, clutching my chest. The pain was white and sharp.

The rhythm changed.

It was no longer the light controlling it.

It was my heart.

Thump-thump.

A deep drone answered from the center of the room. A resonance that made my teeth ache, as if the air in the living room had become an extension of my ribcage.

Thump-thump.

The drone got louder. The floor vibrated. The refrigerator behind my back quivered against my spine.

I tried to stand up.

The air turned hard. An invisible anvil pressed me back down to the floor. An even, crushing pressure across my shoulders.

I gasped. Panic shot speed into my blood. My heart hammered wildly.

Thump-thump-thump-thump.

The resonance followed. The light in the ceiling stopped blinking; it flared up in time with my pulse. For every thundering beat in my chest, it shone whiter. The heat in the room rose abruptly, a fever heat smelling of scorched dust and static electricity.

It was feeding.

The more afraid I became, the harder my heart beat. And the harder it beat, the more massive the pressure in the room became.

I forced myself to breathe calmly. In... out...

I tried to lower my pulse. Tried to calm the engine down.

The light dimmed faintly. The droning subsided.

Then came the pain.

It didn’t feel like a hand. It felt like a vacuum closing around my ribcage and pulling outward. The ribs creaked in their joints. It demanded more. It did not accept a resting heart rate.

It squeezed harder. A brutal, physical command to continue.

I screamed, and my heart kicked into gear again.

The light flared up. The pressure around my ribs lifted immediately, satisfied with the new frequency.

I remained sitting, paralyzed against the refrigerator door. I was no longer a resident in my own apartment. I was a piece of furniture.

Nosebleed dripped down onto my pants.

One drop.

Two drops.

The third drop never hit the fabric.

It stopped in mid-air, a few centimeters above my knee. It shivered, a perfect, red sphere in weightlessness, before it slowly began to drift horizontally away from me.

It floated toward the living room. Toward the center of gravity.

To be consumed.

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