The Bleeding Hours
The day felt wrong from the start.
Sky woke up to find the clocks in his house frozen at 3:17 a.m.—the exact time he'd woken gasping the night before. His phone wouldn't turn on. His reflection in the bathroom mirror lagged half a second behind his movements.
At school, Lumen was already waiting by their lockers, pale and quiet. His notebook hung open in his hand.
"Look," he said.
Sky did.
Each page had been filled overnight. Dozens of tight, careful lines of text.
Sky read the first one aloud:
"If you see the boy in the chair, don't sit down."
The next page:
"Mirrors remember who you were, not who you are."
And the last one:
"He's not a ghost. He's a door."
Sky looked up. "You didn't write this?"
Lumen shook his head. "Not while I was awake."
Then, softer: "I think something's trying to warn us. Or use us."
Reality bent at 1:42 p.m.
They were in history class. Fluorescent lights humming. Teacher droning on about some forgotten war.
Then the classroom stretched—walls folding inward, windows shrinking, colors bleeding.
Sky blinked and suddenly everyone around him had hollow eyes. Silent mouths.
Lumen was gone.
He stood up. Walked out.
The hallway was dark, lined with mirrors instead of lockers. Each reflected him differently—older, younger, broken, afraid.
At the end, the red door.
Lumen, elsewhere in the same dream-space, ran through a library that shouldn't exist—rows and rows of shelves filled with books bound in skin-like covers. Every spine bore his name.
He pulled one.
Inside: pictures of him sleeping. Dozens. Every night for the last two months. Angles no one should've been able to take.
At the bottom of the page: a drawing of Sky.
Standing over him.
Again.
When they woke up—in the middle of class, breathless, shaking—they realized something had changed.
Their hands were bleeding.
Not cuts. Words.
Scratched into the skin like jagged ink:
Sky's said: "Don't trust the chair."
Lumen's said: "You already sat down."
Neither said anything for a long time.
Then Sky whispered, "We're not just dreaming."
Lumen nodded, voice tight. "I don't think we ever were."
Outside, shadows moved without light. And somewhere, unseen, the boy in the chair turned his head… and waited.