Wildan felt as though a sledgehammer had slammed directly into his skull. A vicious, throbbing pain spiked behind his temples, beating in time with his erratic heartbeat. When he finally forced his eyes open, his vision swam with a hazy blur. The first thing his senses registered was the dark ceiling of his bedroom, tracing the familiar outline of peeling paint he had known all his life.

He was still in his room.

Lying on top of his thinning kapok mattress.

Wildan groaned softly, trying to push himself up into a sitting position. Every single muscle in his body fought back, sending a strange, aching stiffness through his limbs as if he had just been dropped from a great height. The twenty-four-year-old rubbed the bridge of his nose, desperately trying to piece together what had happened last night. Why did his head hurt this badly? Was it the cheap liquor he had downed with his friends hanging out by the market stalls? Or was it something else entirely?

His memory hit a dead end.

A thick, opaque wall blocked his mind from drifting back even a few hours. One thing he knew for certain: his throat felt bone-dry, scorching him with a burning, unquenchable thirst.

Wildan reached out for his phone, which he usually left resting right beside his pillow. The rectangular object felt ice-cold to the touch. He slammed the power button down repeatedly, but the screen remained dead black—completely flatlined. "Damn it, the battery's dead again," he muttered under his breath. His voice sounded raspy, almost alien to his own ears.

He swung both legs over the side of the bed. The chill of the concrete floor bit instantly into the soles of his feet, making the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Wildan frowned. There was something deeply wrong with this night. Something that made his instincts flare into sudden, sharp alert even while his logic remained half-asleep.

He stared toward his bedroom window, which was tightly veiled by cheap, gray secondhand curtains.

Normally, no matter what hour of the night he woke up, his room was never silent. Wildan’s house sat deep inside a dense residential neighborhood that bordered directly on the main market district. Ordinarily, nighttime was when life around him truly began. The roar of transport trucks unloading vegetable crates, the shouts of cargo porters, or at the very least, the loud, obnoxious laughter of neighborhood youths hanging out at the security post while playing mobile games—those sounds would always punch straight through his thin bedroom walls.

On previous nights, Wildan had often cursed that very noise for ruining his sleep.

But tonight... the silence was absolute.

No laughter. No roaring truck engines. Even the chirping of crickets or the rustle of wind-swept leaves was entirely absent. The air inside the room felt static, heavy, and suffocating. It was as though the entire outside world was holding its breath, or perhaps, as though the world had simply vanished, leaving this single house stranded alone in the dark.

"What time is it?" Wildan muttered.

He dragged himself out of his room, intending to grab a drink of water in the kitchen and check the wall clock in the living room. His bare footsteps made zero sound against the concrete floor. The house was pitch-black, illuminated only by a faint sliver of moonlight bleeding through the ventilation gaps above the doorway.

Passing through the living room, Wildan lifted his gaze to the circular wall clock hanging near his family's vintage television set. Through the dim gloom, he could make out the positions of the long and short hands.

They overlapped precisely.

Dead on twelve. Midnight.

Yet, something was wrong.

The clock wasn't ticking. Normally, the loud tick-tock of that cheap clock would echo deafeningly through the quiet house.

Wildan stepped closer, squinting. The red metal second hand sat completely frozen, as though time itself had been forcibly halted at the darkest point of their lives.

Wildan shook his head, trying to banish the ridiculous thoughts creeping into the corners of his mind. The battery probably died, he reasoned rationally. Besides, lately, a lot of things in this house had been neglected due to financial trouble.

He resumed his walk toward the kitchen. The thirst in his throat had crossed the line into intolerable. But the moment he drew near the edge of the dining area, his steps ground to an abrupt halt.

Wildan’s breath caught in his throat.

At the far end of the dark kitchen corridor, near the wooden back door leading out to the yard, a silhouette stood completely upright. Wildan’s heart hammered against his ribs. The figure didn't move; it just stood frozen with its back turned, swallowed by the thick, heavy shadows.

"Who's there?" Wildan’s voice shook, barely rising above a whisper. His hand reflexively brushed against the wall, hunting for a light switch, but when his finger jammed down on the toggle, nothing happened. A power outage.

The silhouette slowly turned around. It pivoted with an impossibly smooth motion, almost completely silent.

As the faint moonlight shifted to illuminate the figure's face, the tension snapped in Wildan's shoulders, replaced by a long, rushing exhale of relief. It was his mother.

She stood right there, wearing her everyday faded batik housedress. Her hair, streaked with gray, was tied back in a messy knot. Yet something about her expression felt off. In the faint gloom, her face looked unusually pale, framed by deep, dark hollows beneath her eyes. Her gaze locked straight onto Wildan—a look stripped of any simple definition, carrying a heavy mixture of profound sorrow, deep longing, and chilling dread.

"Mom?" Wildan called out, his parched throat making his voice sound raspy. "Why are you standing over there? You scared me. And... why is the house so dark? Did the power cut out?"

His mother didn't answer the question about the lights. She just kept staring at Wildan before her pale lips finally parted, curving into a thin, agonizingly forced smile.

"You're awake, Le?" Her voice sounded remarkably soft, as though it were traveling from a vast distance, echoing gently off the quiet kitchen walls.

"Yeah, Wildan's thirsty. Came to get a drink," Wildan replied, shuffling toward the dish rack to grab a glass. "Why aren't you asleep yet, Mom? It's already midnight. And why is the neighborhood so dead quiet? Usually around this time, the kids out front are still making noise."

His mother ignored his observation about the quiet neighborhood. Instead, she stepped closer to Wildan, her movements fluid yet deeply unsettling, as though her feet weren't truly touching the floor. She reached out, her hand brushing against Wildan's arm.

Wildan flinched slightly. His mother's skin felt freezing cold. Not the ordinary chill of someone stepping out of an air-conditioned room, but a biting, glacial frost—as though no warm blood flowed beneath those wrinkled veins.

"Mom, you're freezing? Are you sick?" Wildan stared at his mother with a furrowed brow, a sudden wave of guilt washing over him. He remembered how lately he had barely paid attention to his parents' well-being, too consumed with wallowing in his own failure to land a job.

His mother shook her head slowly. Her smile hadn't reached her eyes, which glistened with the weight of something terribly heavy.

"I'm fine, Wildan. Mom just wanted to make sure you were here," she whispered. Her cold hand drifted up to cup Wildan's cheek with a gentleness he hadn't felt in years, ever since he had grown into a rough, rebellious young man. "Don't go anywhere, okay, Son? Stay inside the house. Outside... outside isn't safe."

Wildan frowned, confusion pushing aside his thirst. "Not safe how, Mom? Are there burglars? Or a street fight down by the market?"

His mother didn't answer. She only glanced back toward their tightly shut front door, as though a monstrous terror waited just on the other side, ready to tear them apart if anyone dared crack it open even an inch. The atmosphere inside the kitchen grew heavier by the second, leaving Wildan frozen in bewilderment, while his mother gripped his hand tighter still, terrified that if she let go even for a fraction of a second, Wildan would vanish forever into the dark.