Say Your Prayers - I'm Coming Up Your Stairs

 

     Not the polished kind you recite in daylight, not the tidy sentences you learned as a child, at the boy scouts, but the raw ones—the ones that snag in your throat and scrape on the way out. The kind you whisper when the house feels too quiet, when silence has weight, when the dark seems to lean in and listen.

I’m coming up your stairs.

Step by step, slow enough that you question it. Was that real? Was that the settling of old wood, or something deliberate—measured, patient? You lie there, eyes open, fixed on the ceiling you know so well, suddenly foreign. Your body refuses to move, as if it understands something your mind hasn’t caught up with yet.

Were you thinking that?

That something was wrong long before the first creak. That the night had a different texture, thicker somehow. That your thoughts weren’t entirely your own—that they’d been nudged, guided toward this moment.

Did you say it out loud?

Because sometimes fear escapes before we can contain it. A word, a breath, a half-formed question slipping into the dark. And the dark… it answers. Not in language, not in anything you can repeat, but in presence. In the way the air changes, like a held breath just behind you.

Can you hear it?

Your breathing. No—your breast heaving, sharp and shallow, betraying you. Each inhale louder than the last, each exhale a signal. You try to quiet it, to swallow it down, but panic has its own rhythm. It drums in your ears, a pulse that isn’t entirely yours.

And beneath it—something else.

A second sound.

Not as frantic. Not as human.

How did I know where you were sleeping?

That’s the question, isn’t it? The one that coils around all the others. Because it suggests something worse than chance. Worse than intrusion.

It suggests I’ve been here before.

Maybe I stood at the foot of your bed last night, watching the rise and fall of your chest, learning the cadence of your dreams. Maybe I traced the outline of your room in the dark, memorizing every shadow, every place you might try to hide.

Maybe you felt it then, too—that faint unease, like being observed from just beyond sight. And maybe you dismissed it. Turned over. Closed your eyes tighter.

We always do.

Another step.

Closer now.

The stairs don’t creak anymore. Funny, that. As if the house has decided to help me. As if it’s tired of pretending this is just another night.

You hold your breath.

But it’s too late for silence.

I already know the sound of you.