My clock was blinking 1:12am when Luc decided to get in touch with me. He called my cell which vibrated angrily on my bedside table and woke me up from a restful sleep. When I picked up my cell and saw the caller ID and immediately rejected the call. Moments later my cell alerted me to a text message from Luc.

‘Mia we need to talk. I cannot reach your mind and I cannot sense what you are thinking or feeling-’

“Good,” I muttered to myself bitterly. Henrietta and I had gone to great lengths to shut Luc out from my head.

‘I understand that you are upset with me and if it makes you feel any better I want you to know that I am not pleased with me either. I really want to talk to you and I know you’re mad and I am willing to deal with whatever hell fire you want to throw at me- God only knows that anything this empty silence without you is killing me-’

I stared down at his words on my cell phone screen and wondered if he was bluffing or genuine? I scrolled down to the final sentence and read:

‘Please let me come to you.’

My thumb hovered over the screen, lingering over the reply button while I debated with myself whether or not to invite Luc over for a talk. The longer I looked at the text message the more I felt my resolve weakening. It was like Luc’s words were reaching out and holding on to me, urging me to reply to his text. I quickly shoved my cell under my pillow and turned over in my bed.

No, I wasn’t going to call him or text him … not just yet anyway. Luc and his sorry excuses could wait until morning. Until then I would not even bother humouring him with a reply. As far as I was concerned Luc could uncomfortably hang on until morning for a reply.

I crawled back into bed and pulled the blankets over my head. I was so tired I thought I would fall asleep straight away, but I didn’t. Instead I tossed and turned in my bed thinking about Luc and all the stupid things he had ever said- which seemed a lot but could not be that much considering we had been together only for a few days.

I thought back to his text message and remembered what he had written about the ‘empty silence’. I was feeling that empty silence too. A little voice inside me then asked ‘why not text him back and bring him over here’. I hugged my pillow miserably and thought to myself- how could I ask him over when he had hurt me so badly?

I curled up in my bed and began to count my breathing after ten minutes of tossing and turning in my bed. Restlessly I turned over again and exhaled loudly, partly because I was tired but partly because I frustrated with Luc. Either way when I breathed out I noticed something odd. My breath was condensing into white wisps of water vapour.

The room couldn’t be that cold, I thought sitting up in bed. I reached for my bedside lamp and flipped the switch but nothing happened. Then I noticed the next odd thing, my alarm clock that had been working ten minutes earlier was also dead. The weird thing was that the lamp ran off the mains, but my alarm clock was battery operated.

I breathed out again and noticed the water vapour this time was a stronger white, and the swirls of mist it created were much more defined and pronounced as if the temperature in the room was dropping.

Outside my room I heard the main door that divided my dorm level from the main corridor swing open. Howls of drunken laughter and chatter echoed down the corridor, but were quickly silenced by an angry shush.

“Shut up idiots! You will wake her up!”

I recognised the voice immediately- it was Laura Taylor. Someone from my dorm level must have let her and her friends in. I heard the click-clack of their heels down the corridor and felt the room growing colder, as if it was responding to them getting closer. When they were outside my door I heard Laura giggle, “I am going to shave her stupid eye brows off.”

There was a pause followed by the metallic clinking of a set of keys. I quickly realized what was happening because it had been done many times before by other student. Someone had managed to slip into the janitor’s office down stairs and steal the master key for the whole dormitory. At this point I could have said something, but for some reason I didn’t.

It was cold … so very cold. It felt like something or someone was sucking the warmth out of the atmosphere. Outside I could hear Laura fumbling with the lock. The door rattled and the handle turned, then the door was slowly pushed forward.

There was a mummer, or rather a shiver of protest from Laura’s friends as cold air came rushing out into the corridor. Laura responded with a harsh whisper, “Be quiet or she will wake up.”

They had no idea I was wide awake and waiting for them. My bed was on the other side of the room so I was hidden from view. I watched as they pushed the bedroom door open a fraction and stop. For some reason no was stepping through the door.

Quietly I thought to myself no one was stepping through the door because they could sense something was wrong. The room was growing colder and colder with each passing second, and even I was starting to sense there was something terribly wrong. I pulled the blankets around my chin and felt a sudden sickening sensation in the pit of my stomach.

From my bed I saw Laura’s hand emerge through the crack in the door holding a cell phone. Her finger hit a button and white light from the cell phone lit up the far corner of my bedroom. My bed was on the other side of the room and was shielded from view. The light panned slowly across the room and stopped when it reached the open doorway of my dorm bathroom because the light of the cell phone was being captured and reflected back at Laura in a shimmering dazzle by what I can only describe as a kind of glittering substance that clung to the wooden frame of my bathroom door.

The temperature in the room was still dropping.

“What is that?” I heard Laura ask exactly what I was thinking.

No one answered her question.

Her arm moved forward, pushing the light of the cell phone deeper into the bathroom. The light was pushed a little further through bathroom door way before stopping dead. The light should have been able to reach further and illuminate the whole bathroom but there was a dark inky blackness stopping it, a kind of strange shadow which the light could not touch.

While I watched it from my bed and Laura watched it from the hallway, the shadow breathed, exhaling in low rumbling growl that sent a white plume of water vapour from an invisible mouth out into the beam of light from the cell phone.

Laura emitted a small scream of fright and her arm instinctively began to withdraw out of my bedroom, but before her arm could fully recede there was another growl from the bathroom and my bedroom door on its own accord slammed violently shut on Laura’s arm.

There was a loud snapping noise followed by a bloodcurdling scream.

“GET IT OFF!” Laura screamed as the door continued to crush her arm against the door frame.

Her friends panicked and I heard the chaos in the corridor as they pushed against my bedroom door trying to free Laura’s arm. Immediately I jumped out of bed to help and ran to the bedroom door preparing myself to pry the door open and free Laura’s broken arm. However when I grabbed on to the door handle and pulled the door opened for me without the slightest resistance.

Laura’s arm was free and the five people who had been shoving at my bedroom door, toppled through the doorway and onto the floor with several loud thuds. The pervasive cold in my room suddenly lifted and the bedside lamp in the corner of my room flickered back to life and the shadow that had been in my bathroom was gone.

I looked up at Laura and saw the unnatural bend in the middle of her forearm. Her friends scrambled to her side but Laura took no notice of them, her eyes were wide and unblinking while her gaze was fixed. She was stood completely frozen in an almost catatonic state staring into the darkness of the bathroom.