It happened a long time ago. I vaguely remembered that I was on my way home from secondary school one evening:
After evening study ended that day, I walked home alone, completely unaware that the cars and pedestrians around me were gradually thinning out, or that the scenery behind me was beginning to blur and twist.
The pitch-black night felt eerie, and everything around me was silent. There were few cars along the road, and faint rustling sounds drifted through the air. An isolated pedestrian passed me with a numb smile and a bloodless, deathly pale face, moving in what almost looked like little hops. I found that stiff gait strange, but paid it little mind and continued home.
My home was neither particularly far from school nor especially close, about a twenty- or thirty-minute walk away, yet somehow it felt as though I had been walking for hours.
I looked up at the night sky and shuddered instinctively. It was an unfathomable black, smothered beneath an endless blanket of thick clouds, without a trace of starlight or moonlight. It was the sort of chaotic darkness that shut out all light and hope and filled you with despair.
As I walked along the lonely, nearly deserted road, I kept feeling as though a pair of eyes were fixed on me, though I could not see where they were. My scalp prickled, so I quietly gathered my courage and told myself, Almost there. I'll be home soon.
The dim yellow streetlights flickered erratically, as though they had not been repaired in ages. A bone-chilling wind blew from behind me. Though it was a sweltering midsummer night, I felt inexplicably cold. Suddenly, a cold, slender finger brushed gently across the back of my neck, like a lover's teasing caress.
My pupils contracted