The Clammy Palm

The pandemic lockdown had transformed my cramped one-bedroom apartment in Cape Town’s southern suburbs into a prison of my own making. Between endless video calls, sourdough experiments, and the relentless hum of the refrigerator, I’d convinced myself that the creeping dread in my chest was just cabin fever. But the incidents that unfolded over those three months made me question everything I knew about the walls around me.

The first happened on a Tuesday night, when the city outside was as silent as a held breath. I lay in bed, my eyes squeezed shut, trying to drown out the day’s anxieties with a playlist of lo-fi beats. Insomnia was my constant companion, and I’d made peace with my nightly ritual of futile rest. But as a particularly mellow track swelled, something cool and damp pressed against my face. It wasn’t a brush of air or a stray strand of hair; it was a full, deliberate stroke, like a giant palm sliding from my forehead down to my chin, lingering for a moment at my jaw before retreating. My eyes snapped open, my heart hammering against my ribs. I fumbled for the lamp switch, flooding the room with harsh yellow light. The room was empty, save for the jumbled laundry and the stack of books on my nightstand. I threw off the covers, my feet cold on the wooden floor, and searched behind the curtains, under the bed, even inside the closet. Nothing. I sat on the edge of the bed, my breath ragged, and tried to rationalize: a draft, a muscle spasm, the residue of a dream. But the memory of that clammy, heavy touch lingered on my skin like a mucus film. I didn’t sleep that night, and I took to keeping the light on for the rest of the week.

The second incident occurred exactly nine days later, at 3:15 in the morning. I had finally managed to drift into a shallow sleep, only to be yanked awake by a sound that was less a noise and more a physical presence: a wet, slapping footstep in the hallway outside my room. My apartment was a single-bedroom unit, with the bathroom and kitchenette branching off the hall. I lay motionless, my ears straining. The footsteps were unhurried, as if whatever owned them had all the time in the world. They stopped directly outside my door. In the silence that followed, I could hear the faint, sticky sound of something peeling away from a surface, then a wet smack as it made contact again. The doorknob, which I’d never locked, began to turn, slow and deliberate. I could see it in my mind’s eye: a knob of cold, gray flesh twisting with a sound like tearing cloth. I screamed, a raw, guttural sound that scared me more than the intruder. And then the footsteps retreated, squelching down the hall and into the bathroom, where I heard a splash. I didn’t dare leave my room. I sat with my back against the headboard, a kitchen knife in my trembling hand, until the first gray light of dawn seeped through the curtains. When I finally ventured out, the bathroom was dry, the shower curtain still, the floor spotless. But there was a faint, greasy film on the door handles, as if something large and moist had passed through.

The third event was the one that finally drove me to the edge of sanity. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I had foolishly decided to take a nap on the couch, the lockdown having stripped my weekends of any difference from weekdays. I woke to the feeling of being watched, a sensation so acute that I opened my eyes immediately. Standing at the foot of the couch, less than three feet away, was a shape that defied logic. It was roughly humanoid, the height of a tall man, but its skin was the color of a drowned fish—pale, mottled with gray and green. Its surface glistened, as if perpetually wet, and a smell like low tide and old pennies filled the air. Its face was a smooth, flat expanse, featureless except for two sunken pits where eyes should have been, and a slack, gaping mouth that hung open, revealing a dark cavern. It stood perfectly still, its head tilted as if studying me. I wanted to scream, to run, but I was frozen, my muscles locked in fear. It took a single, shambling step toward me, and I saw that its feet were too long, its toes fused together like a fin. It reached out a hand—that same enormous, pale appendage—and I saw the palm was covered in a fine, sticky slime. As it came within an inch of my face, it spoke. But it wasn’t a voice; it was a vibration, a subsonic thrum that rattled my teeth and made the air in my lungs vibrate. It said, ‘The tide is rising. You must not sleep when the moon is full.’ And then it dissolved into a spray of salt water, leaving nothing but a damp spot on the carpet.

I moved out of that apartment within the week, breaking my lease and fleeing to a friend’s mountain cabin far from the coast. I told myself it was a stress-induced hallucination, a product of isolation and fear. But on the night of the next full moon, I lay awake in the unfamiliar bed, listening to the wind howl through the pine trees. And I felt it again: a cold, clammy hand pressing against my face, as if to reassure me that the tide was, indeed, still rising.