The Curtain’s Foreign Language

I’ve always been a light sleeper, but since I moved into the old Harbinger House on Marrow Lane, my nights have turned into a theater of the absurd. It started three months ago, before the doppelganger incident that still makes my skin crawl. I was lying in bed, the kind of deep paralysis where your mind screams but your body is a stone. The room was pitch black—my glasses were on the nightstand, useless. My eyes adjusted to the faint glow of the streetlamp filtering through the lace curtains. And then I saw them.

Two hands, long-fingered and pale, moving slowly behind the curtain. They pressed against the fabric, tracing patterns like they were reading braille. Feminine hands, delicate but with a sense of urgency. They weren’t trying to get in—they were communicating. The fingers curled and uncurled, a silent language only the dark understood. I tried to shout, but my throat was sealed. The hands paused, as if sensing my terror, then slowly withdrew into the folds of the cloth. The paralysis broke, and I gasped, drenched in sweat. For the next week, I slept with every light in the apartment blazing, but the dark always found its way back.

I thought it was just sleep paralysis—I’d had episodes before. But then came the night the entity decided to share my bed. It was a few weeks later, after I’d convinced myself it was all in my head. I woke in that familiar frozen state, and there was someone next to me. Not a man, not a woman—a presence that felt like a memory wearing a human suit. It had the face of my brother’s old college friend, Lucas, a guy I’d had a fling with last summer. But Lucas’s eyes were closed, and that’s what unnerved me most. He shifted, turning on his side, propping his head on his hand, all without opening his eyes. He was reading me, I realized, not with sight but with some other sense. He smiled—a slow, knowing smile—and whispered something in a language I didn’t recognize. It sounded like a question. I couldn’t answer. He nodded, as if satisfied, and then dissolved like morning mist.

This time, I wasn’t afraid. Intrigued, maybe. I wanted to know what he asked. I started researching sleep paralysis, old folklore, anything about entities that lie beside you. That’s when I found a mention of the ‘Courd Men,’ beings from Slavic myth who visit the sleeping to ask a riddle. If you answer correctly, they leave you gifts; if you fail, they take something precious. I had no idea what he’d asked, so I couldn’t answer. And I think that’s when the hands returned.

Three nights ago, I saw them again. This time, the curtain was fully drawn aside, and the hands were unmistakably attached to a shape—a woman made of shadow, her face a void. She stepped into my room, and the air turned cold. She moved to the foot of my bed and placed her hands on my ankles. Her fingers were ice. She leaned in, and I could feel her breath on my ear, and she spoke in that same foreign language. But this time, I understood one word: ‘Answer.’ My paralysis was absolute. I couldn’t even blink. She waited, patient as stone, and then she pulled at my foot. I felt something give—not physically, but spiritually. A rip, a tear. She stepped back, holding a wisp of something silvery, then faded into the curtain, which fluttered as if in a breeze. The next day, I couldn’t remember my mother’s face. It was gone, replaced by a blank. I know she had a mole by her lip, but now I can’t see it. I can’t see her at all.

I’m writing this in the dark, because the lights don’t work anymore, and I know the hands are coming back. The entity with closed eyes will lie beside me again, and he’ll whisper the question one more time. I don’t know what I did to attract them, or what they want, but I’ve learned one thing: don’t ignore the hands. They are not a dream. They are a summons. And if you don’t answer, they’ll take more than your memories. They’ll take your name, your identity, until you’re just another shadow behind the curtain, waiting for the next sleeper to wake.