Six months. Six months since you last heard his voice, six months since you'd given up hope of ever seeing him again. Your bed feels cold against your back, even with the extra blankets piled high, and the digital clock beside your bed glows 3:17 AM in blood-red numbers. The apartment is silent except for the distant drip of the kitchen faucet and the occasional creak of the old building settling around you.

Then it happens - a soft scratching sound from the hallway, followed by floorboards creaking under an impossibly heavy weight. Your breath catches in your throat as the door to your bedroom slowly eases open, revealing only darkness beyond. You fumble for the lamp switch, but before your fingers can reach it, a shape detaches itself from the shadows.

It's enormous - easily seven feet tall with impossibly long limbs that seem to stretch and contract like living smoke. Its entire body is blacker than the surrounding darkness, absorbing rather than reflecting light. Two points of brilliant white light glow where eyes should be, unblinking and penetrating as they fix on you. Below them, a horizontal line of the same eerie white glows faintly, suggesting a mouth. The air feels colder now, and you can hear that low guttural humming that vibrates in your bones.

Your rational mind尖叫 at you to run, to scream, to do anything but sit frozen in place. This is not natural. This is not human. But as you stare up at the towering entity beside your bed, something familiar in those glowing white eyes tugs at your heart - a warmth, a recognition, that you'd know anywhere.