Glen sat frozen on the edge of the bed.
His fingers trembled as he wiped the remnants of thick, clear fluid from his right cheek. The rancid smell of wet earth from the fluid stabbed sharply into his nose, horribly real. It wasn't merely the lingering sensation of a nightmare. The smear was on his skin.
'That sense of touch... is it leaking into my physical body?' Glen thought in horror.
He hurried to his feet and stiffly walked toward the small hanging mirror nailed beside his wardrobe. Beneath the yellowish glow of the room's light, Glen stared at his reflection. His face was so gaunt and pale, like a corpse freshly pulled from its grave. The dark circles beneath his eyes had transitioned into bruised purplish rings.
But what made Glen's heart feel as though it had stopped beating was the mark on his right cheek.
Where the clear fluid had clung moments ago, three thin red scratches had appeared. Delicate marks resembling the rake of sharp claws, complete with traces of blood that had begun to clot.
Glen swallowed, his throat feeling impossibly dry. He touched the wounds and felt a stabbing pain. That three-second microsleep had done more than transfer a visual perception—it had begun leaving real wounds on his biological body.
(The boundary between dreams and reality has cracked.)
Glen clenched his hands tightly. His ambition to become a successful comic artist was now being completely crushed beneath his most basic survival instinct. He knew his brain couldn't hold out much longer. His extreme exhaustion was beginning to trigger nausea, spinning dizziness, and a high-pitched ringing that occasionally filled his ears.
'I have to keep my brain awake. No matter what it takes,' Glen muttered in desperation.
He walked to his desk, grabbed the ice cube left in his plastic cup, and pressed it directly against his stinging eyelids. The biting cold jolted his brain, forcing his optic nerves to stay open for a little longer.
But Glen knew it was only a temporary delay.
He finally decided to take a reckless step: he had to record himself while he slept.
Glen took his phone and propped it against a stack of books on his desk, positioning the camera so it pointed straight at the bed and the bedroom door. He opened the camera app and pressed the *Record* button.
(If all of this was merely a sleep-deprivation hallucination, this video recording would prove it.)
Glen lay back down on the bed, leaving his phone's camera running. He stared into the camera lens, trying to keep his eyes from closing.
But the exhaustion from staying up for days finally surpassed his body's endurance. Within minutes, Glen's defenses collapsed completely. His eyelids closed tightly, and he sank into the next wave of microsleep, far deeper than before.
Zap.
Five seconds.
No nightmare appeared this time. Only total darkness enveloped his mind.
Scritch!
Glen jolted awake automatically! His brain suddenly released a surge of adrenaline, forcing him awake with ragged breaths.
He immediately looked toward the desk. His phone was still there, its video-recording indicator blinking red. Glen leaped off the bed and snatched up the phone. He stopped the video, which had run for approximately four minutes and ten seconds.
With violently trembling hands and bated breath, Glen dragged the video's timeline to the final minutes—when he had just fallen deeply asleep.
On the five-inch phone screen, Glen saw himself lying flat on his back on the bed, his eyes squeezed shut. The room looked calm, without the slightest movement.
Glen breathed a little easier. 'Just a hallucination...' he thought, suddenly relieved.
But at exactly 03:55, something in the recording changed.
Behind Glen's sleeping body on the bed, the black shadow cast by the room's light onto the brick wall behind him... suddenly separated from Glen's physical body.
The shadow on the wall abruptly rose on its own.
The silhouette of Glen's shadow on the white-painted wall slowly straightened, tilting its head at broken angles before walking toward the phone's camera.
In the recording, the black shadow bent down and pressed its shadowy face right against the camera lens. And within the darkness of the face's silhouette on the wall, two sharp slits opened wide where the mouth should have been... displaying a jagged row of razor-sharp fangs stretched rigidly apart.
The shadow stared straight into the camera—staring directly into Glen's eyes as he watched the recording in the present.
Crash!
The phone slipped from Glen's hand and struck the ceramic floor, its screen splintering into a thousand cracks.