October 13, 1847

You will think me mad. You must. What sane man would commit to paper what I am about to confess? And yet I am not without reason, not bereft of those faculties which constitute the ordinary governance of the mind. On the contrary, I am — or was — a man of precise habits, inclined toward the rational, given to measured inquiry rather than frenzied speculation. My purpose in writing is not to indulge fevered imaginings, but to set down, with all possible exactitude, the events that took place upon the thirteenth day of October in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and forty-seven.

I do not write for sympathy, nor for belief. Indeed, I expect neither. My hope — if such a frail thing may be called hope — is that the mere act of laying these words before me will drain from my spirit the poison that has taken root there. And yet even as I begin, I feel the cold prickle at the back of my neck — that familiar sensation, at once intimate and alien, of being observed.

At that time, I was residing in a decrepit quarter of an unnamed seaport, in a house that had seen better centuries. The timbers were warped from years of damp; the mortar between the blackened bricks was crumbling to dust. My chamber occupied the uppermost floor, beneath a roof that groaned when the wind pressed in from the harbor. I had taken these lodgings for the solitude they offered, for in those days I had turned away from society. My former acquaintances — what few remained — would have called me reclusive, perhaps morbid; but I was merely weary. I sought nothing more than the company of my books, the dim companionship of my own thoughts.

Yet solitude, as I learned, is no passive state. It does not simply shelter one from the intrusion of others; it alters the very texture of the mind. Days passed in a haze of silence, broken only by the far-off cries of gulls or the mournful tolling of a buoy at sea. In time, these sounds, faint and irregular as they were, began to acquire the quality of words half-heard. The wind at night whispered along the walls, and I could almost persuade myself it carried syllables — slow, dragging syllables, as if spoken by a mouth reluctant to open.

It was in the midst of this isolation that I first became aware of it.

I call it it because no other word will suffice, though in the beginning I thought it merely a trick of my imagination — a conjuring of the nerves, nothing more. At first, it was no more than a sensation: the distinct, undeniable impression that I was being watched. This was not the vague awareness one might feel in a crowded room, nor the fleeting startlement of turning to find someone unexpectedly behind you. No — this was a fixed and patient gaze, steady as the pressure of a hand upon one’s shoulder. It began in my waking hours, manifesting as a prickle beneath the skin at the nape of my neck.

Night after night, the sensation followed me into my sleep, until it became the nucleus around which my dreams assembled themselves. In those dreams, I occupied various rooms — some I knew, others entirely foreign — and always, in the farthest corner, there stood a figure. A figure without a face. I never saw it move, and yet each time I turned, it was in a slightly different posture, as though shifting just out of the range of clear sight.

I reasoned — as I still attempted to reason in those days — that such dreams were the natural offspring of my seclusion. I had been too long alone. My mind, deprived of wholesome distraction, was fashioning companions from shadow and silence. I might have continued to dismiss it, had not the thing intruded upon my waking life.

It was late on that October night when I retired to bed. I had secured the bolt on my door — a heavy brass mechanism that rasped audibly in its socket — and extinguished my lamp. Sleep came slowly, a reluctant tide, but at last I drifted into that uneasy borderland between waking and dream.

Then came the sound.

A metallic scrape. Deliberate. Soft. The unmistakable lift of the latch.

I froze. The bolt should have made such an intrusion impossible, yet the sound continued — the faintest creak of hinges admitting a current of air far colder than the season warranted. The smell that followed was rank, briny, like rotting kelp drawn up from the sea floor.

The darkness beyond the door was not the natural darkness of an unlit passage. It was denser, almost luminous in its opacity, as though darkness itself had condensed into a tangible form. And within that mass — yes, within it — I discerned the outline of the figure from my dreams.

I did not cry out. My throat constricted, my limbs felt nailed to the bedstead. It entered without sound, crossing the threshold in no manner I can describe — neither stepping nor gliding, but rather advancing as though the air itself had conspired to bear it forward.

The air thickened. My ears filled with a sound like waves rolling within a cavern. And then — whether in truth or in some subtler language of the mind — I knew. It had come for me.

I rose, though how I found the strength I cannot tell you. Words — ragged, desperate — broke from me: demands for its name, its purpose. It made no reply, but in the silence between us I heard the echo of my own heartbeat, magnified until it seemed the pounding of some colossal heart outside my body. The figure expanded, or perhaps the room contracted; walls seemed to tilt inward, the floor to slope beneath my feet. The door to the corridor was gone — no, not gone, but replaced entirely by the thing, its edges indistinguishable from the darkness that now smothered the room.

A rushing filled my head; my vision narrowed to a single point. I remember nothing more until I awoke upon the floor, my cheek pressed to the warped boards, my breath ragged.

The door stood shut, bolted exactly as before. But upon the far wall, opposite my bed, was a mark. Not a stain, not a shadow, but a scorched impression in the plaster, vaguely human in outline. The air still carried that fetid salt-reek.

I did not leave my chamber for two days. Hunger eventually drove me to descend the stairs, though every shadow along the passage seemed to swell as I approached. The innkeeper — a stooped, mumbling man — remarked that I looked ill. I mumbled some excuse about the damp.

But night brought no reprieve. The sensation of being watched returned, sharper, more insistent. I barred the windows, shoved the bureau against the door. Still, I felt it already inside. I could not read; my thoughts unraveled at the first line. I could not sleep; my ears strained for the sound of the latch, for the shift of air that would announce its presence.

At moments, I told myself this was illness of the mind — the fevered product of solitude and overtaxed nerves. And yet the alternative seemed less terrible than that conclusion. For if the thing was only in my mind, then my mind was no longer mine.

The mark on the wall remains. Each day it seems darker, more defined, as if the shadow it represents were returning to claim its shape. Last night I thought I saw it move.

If you find these pages, know that on the thirteenth of October, eighteen hundred and forty-seven, I did not die by my own hand, though you may judge it so. It was here. It looked upon me. And I—