Chapter 2: Claws on the Wood

Chapter 2: Claws on the Wood

Daylight was a merciless intruder. It streamed through the blinds, striping the messy room with dusty bars of light and offering no comfort. Daniel stood shirtless in front of his bathroom mirror, the fluorescent light above buzzing with an annoying, high-pitched hum. He stared at the bruise on his chest.

In the harsh morning light, it looked even worse. A violent, chaotic bloom of purple and black against his pale skin, the phantom imprint of a monstrous jaw. He prodded the edge of it again, wincing at the sharp, real pain.

"You fell out of bed," he muttered to his reflection, the words sounding hollow and rehearsed. "You hit the corner of the nightstand. You thrashed and punched yourself. It's sleep-related trauma."

He recited the logical explanations like a mantra, a desperate attempt to shore up the crumbling walls of his reality. For twenty-five years, the horror had been contained, locked behind the gates of sleep. The three doors—the drowning, the grief, the hunt—were his own private hell, but a hell with boundaries. The bruise was a breach. A declaration that the boundaries no longer existed.

He tried to force himself into his routine. A shower. Coffee. The soul-crushing spreadsheet awaited. Normalcy was the only weapon he had. But as he walked back into his bedroom, a chill that had nothing to do with the morning air slithered down his spine. The room felt... violated. Watched.

A faint, persistent draft ghosted across his bare skin. Frowning, he traced it to the window. He’d locked it last night; he always did. But now, near the latch, a thin, jagged line fractured the glass. A hairline crack, starting from the frame and spiderwebbing out a few inches. It was small, almost unnoticeable, but he knew with a sickening certainty it hadn’t been there yesterday.

He could explain this away, too. Temperature changes. A bird. A pebble thrown by a passing car. But as he leaned closer, another detail assaulted his senses.

A smell.

It was faint, hiding beneath the stale scent of old coffee and laundry, but it was unmistakable. The smell of the third nightmare. A foul miasma of damp, overturned earth, of something rotting just out of sight, and a sharp, acrid tang like burnt sulfur. He recoiled from the window, his heart beginning to thrum with a low, primal rhythm of fear. The scent was a memory made real, a phantom of the dream-forest clinging to the air of his bedroom.

"Get a grip, Keller," he whispered, his voice trembling. He needed to get out. He needed coffee from a cafe, the noise of other people, the reassuring sight of a world that wasn't coming apart at the seams.

He pulled on a fresh t-shirt, the soft cotton a torment against the tender bruise on his chest. He grabbed his keys and wallet, his movements jerky and hurried. He just had to walk out the door.

He reached for the knob, pulling his bedroom door open and stepping into the small hallway. He started to pull it shut behind him, a reflexive habit. As the door swung closed, the light from the hall lamp caught the wood at an angle, illuminating the cheap, white-painted surface.

And he froze.

There, gouged into the exterior of his door, were four deep, parallel slashes.

They ran diagonally from the top hinge downwards, each one a vicious trench that had splintered the wood and torn through the paint. They were not scratches. They were grooves, deep and violent, carved with immense force. The raw, pale wood exposed beneath the white paint looked like fresh wounds.

Daniel’s breath hitched. His carefully constructed wall of rationalizations didn't just crack; it exploded into dust. The window, the smell... they were whispers of the impossible. This was a scream.

He reached out a trembling hand and traced the edge of one of the gouges. The wood was rough, shredded. This was real. Utterly, terrifyingly real. A thousand frantic thoughts collided in his mind. A burglar? A prank? But no burglar used their bare hands to tear through a door, and the sheer savagery of the marks spoke of nothing but raw, animalistic rage.

The most chilling realization hit him like a physical blow. The marks were on the outside.

While he had been thrashing in the grip of his nightmares—drowning in the endless ocean, grieving on the path of heads, being pinned by the beast in the forest—something had been out here, in the hallway of his quiet apartment. Something had been trying to get in. The weight on his chest in the dream... had it been real all along, pressing against the other side of this very door?

A wave of nausea rolled through him. He leaned against the wall for support, his legs suddenly weak. He stared at the savaged wood, his gaze frantic now, searching. And then he saw it.

Embedded deep within the splintered ruin of the third gash was a speck of black.

It was small, barely the size of a grain of rice, wedged tightly into the wood. Driven by a morbid, desperate need for proof, he fumbled for his keys. Using the tip of his apartment key as a makeshift pick, he carefully, painstakingly worked at the dark fragment. It was wedged in tight, a testament to the force of the blow that had left it there. Finally, with a soft crackle of splintering wood, it came loose.

He held it in the center of his palm. It was hard and glossy, like a sliver of obsidian, but it was organic. It was curved slightly, tapering to a brutally sharp point.

It looked like the tip of a claw.

He stared at the black fragment, this impossible piece of evidence lying in his shaking hand. It was a piece of the beast. The creature from his nightmares, the monster that had hunted him since childhood, was not a figment of his psyche. It was solid. It was flesh and bone and claw. It had a physical body that could travel to his apartment, walk down his hallway, and try to break down his door. It had left a piece of itself behind.

The panic that had been simmering in his gut erupted into a full-blown inferno. The apartment, his sanctuary, felt like a cage, a baited trap. The world outside was no longer safe. There was nowhere to run.

He couldn't call the police. "Hello, officer? The monster from my dreams is real and it scratched my door." They would send a psychiatric team, not a SWAT team. He couldn't tell his friends; they'd think he was losing his mind. He felt like he was losing his mind.

His thoughts, wild and terrified, snagged on one name. One person whose world had always seemed to have room for things that didn't fit into neat, logical boxes. A person who told him stories as a child, tales of the old country, of creatures that lurked in the deep woods and the long nights. Stories she told with a smile, but with an undercurrent of seriousness in her kind, wrinkled eyes that he had never understood until now.

Omi.

With hands that felt like they belonged to someone else, he pulled his phone from his pocket. His thumb shook so badly it took him three tries to unlock it. He scrolled through his contacts, past the names of people who lived in the real world, and pressed the call button next to 'Omi.'

The phone rang once. Twice. His entire future seemed to hang in the silence between each ring.

"Ja, hallo?" Her voice, warm and familiar, crackled through the speaker.

Daniel opened his mouth to speak, but only a dry, croaking sound came out. He swallowed, the black claw-fragment digging into his palm.

"Daniel? Bub, is that you? Is everything alright?"

He took a ragged breath, the smell of sulfur and rot still haunting the air. "Omi," he finally managed, his voice breaking. "Something's wrong. Something's... happened."