Sleep became a battlefield. Every time Arthur closed his eyes, he felt phantom fingers tracing the seams of his eyelids.
He began to notice the black thread. It started as a stray hair on his pillow, but soon he was finding it everywhere. It was stitched into the hem of his shirts. It was tangled in his pasta. One morning, he looked in the mirror and saw a single black stitch protruding from the corner of his own tear duct.
He grabbed a pair of tweezers, his hands shaking. He pulled.
The thread didn't stop. It came out an inch, then six, then a foot. It wasn't thread—it was human hair, ancient and soaked in something that smelled like formaldehyde and stagnant pond water. As he pulled, the wall behind him in the mirror began to bulge.
The wallpaper tore like wet skin. A face, devoid of features except for a mouth stitched shut with that same black wire, pushed through the lath and plaster. It had no eyes, yet it watched him. It reached out a hand—fingers elongated and extra-jointed—and touched the back of Arthur's neck.
The cold was absolute. It wasn't the cold of ice; it was the cold of a vacuum.