It’s been happening for a while now, but each time feels like the first. It always begins the same way. A distinct scent that’s familiar, but I can never remember when I wake up. It’s powdery, a mix of spicy florals and something else. Sandalwood, I think. After the scent, I feel a weight compressing my chest. I can’t move. The room fills with shadow, and darkness closes in. I know I’m still asleep, but I’m alert and aware of the room around me. The mattress beneath me gives way. I’m not alone, and it terrifies me.

Chilled air brushes my skin, followed by the coolness of her breath near my face. She doesn’t speak, only watches and touches with teasing gestures. She starts with light strokes at my sides, then her hand slowly climbs, her fingers tracing patterns that make it hard to think. I try to scream. Nothing comes out. Whatever holds me still won’t break. It never does.

Her hands spread over my chest, cold against my skin, pressing until I can barely draw a breath. I feel her hair graze my cheek. I can’t make out her features, but I know it’s her from her scent. When she slides her tongue along my face, I try to turn to meet her mouth. Nothing moves.

“Easy, big timer.” Her voice doesn’t sound out loud. It swirls in my head like smoke. “You know the steps to this dance.”

I can feel her knees on either side of my hips, and the shape of her thighs against mine. She sinks lower. I feel the wet heat of her pussy sliding along my stiff cock, dragging with a slow cruelty that makes everything in me clench. I can’t grind up into her. All I can do is take it, every unbearable glide of her body across mine.

She lowers her head to mine. Her breath cools my neck before I hear her voice. “Poor sap.” Her words feel like they’re being spoken into my skin. “Stuck fast. Delicious, isn’t it?”

Her hips continue to circle over me, her slit still dragging against my cock. It’s the only warmth I feel from her. The frustration of not being able to push into her forms a crack in my mind.

“You ache for release. I ache for mine.”

She keeps moving, rolling her hips in a maddening rhythm, her wet folds rubbing my cock with each pass. It’s too much. I’m so close it blurs everything else. The need spreads through my stomach and wraps around my mind. My whole body is screaming to cum, but nothing answers.

“We’ve grown thick as thieves, haven’t we, sugar?” I feel her words more than I hear them. “You haven’t broken like the other snuggle pups. You might be my ticket out.”

Her voice doesn’t fade like normal speech. It sinks into me and stays. My cock throbs against her with every slow rock of her hips. She rides just high enough to keep me out, feeding on my desperation.

“It’d feel like heaven to be inside, but paradise is closed. For both of us,” she whispers through me.

She presses down harder, brushing her clit across me. Her body tenses. Her thighs clamp around my waist, she trembles, hips stuttering in sharp bursts as she cums. The sound she makes vibrates through my chest.

I almost lose it. Every part of me strains toward her. My cock pressed firm against her, soaked in her, aching past pleasure into pain. I’m right there, ready to cum with her… but she pulls away. The crack in my mind widens.

She lifts just enough for air to touch me, still cold where she’d been. My cock twitches against my stomach, with no relief in sight. I try to plead, but my mouth won’t open.

“No.” And then she’s gone.

The weight breaks. My chest unlocks. I suck in air so hard it burns. My body jerks upright like I’ve been thrown, fists knotted in the sheets, shaking. All I can do is breathe and shiver like I’ve been plunged into cold water.

I reach down and wrap my hand around my cock, trying to remember the way she moved against me. I imagine her mouth, her breath, the moment she clenched around me, desperate to bring it all back, but my body won’t respond.

I pull faster, trying to will it back to life, to make myself hard enough to finish the way I desperately need to. But I’m softening by the second. My grip loosens. I stop and stare at my hand.

“Fuck.” The word falls flat.

I’ve never had this problem, not until she arrived. I don’t know if she’s stolen it from me or if my body wants her so much that nothing else will do. I collapse back, breathing too fast. The sheets are damp under me. My heart is still thrashing.

This is the second time this week. The thirty-seventh time since I started counting. Variations on the same thing each time. I can’t live like this. I need answers.

The next day passed more like a dream than reality. I know I left the apartment. I think I made coffee. The subway was a crush of bodies. Work was a fog. I couldn’t take any of it in. I moved through it, but I wasn’t really there. My mind was on her. It always is. She’s all I think about.

At my desk, I filled my journal with what I could remember of her last visit. My best effort to record everything I knew about her. Rough sketches drawn from memories that already faded. The things she whispered. I even tried to pin down her scent, line after line that never came close. Weeks of notes, and each page says something different, though when she’s with me, it’s always the same. I flip back and see nothing but contradictions, proof she belonged only to the dark. If anyone ever read this, they’d think I’d lost my mind. I have to assure myself that I haven’t.

I don’t remember the journey home. My body carried me on instinct. My thoughts were ahead of me, pulling me toward her. The city felt like a play I had no part in, a stage set around someone else’s life. The only thing I wanted was to fall into bed. I wasn’t looking for sleep. I wanted that half-state where she waited. Where she lives. The quiet that comes just before. That’s what feels real.

I crawled into bed too early. The blinds leaked pale evening light. I wasn’t tired. I pulled the covers up and shut my eyes, hoping it would summon her like she might already be waiting. For a while, I just lay there. Still, awake, not dreaming. My eyes opened, then closed, then opened again. The bed stifled me, hot sheets and a pillow that felt like a solid lump. My mind kept circling back to her. Eventually, I gave up. Threw the covers off and made my way to the living room.

The TV flashed sound and light. I don’t even remember turning it on. I just needed something that would make me feel less alone. A true crime show where a calm voice-over described something heinous like it was nothing. I couldn’t focus on it. I kept seeing her in my head. The way she moved against me. The moment she stopped. The way she left me hard with nothing to show for it. I didn't know how I was supposed to feel, wanting the thing I dreaded most.

I reached for my phone and began to search. Sleep paralysis. Sexual dreams. Night terrors. Waking nightmares.

Most of the results blurred together. Forum posts written like fantasy confessions or ghost-hunting blogs with flashing casino ads. Nothing useful. A handful of academic papers came up, but they were worse. Sleep charts and medical jargon, all trying to dismiss it as a trick of the brain. I knew better. What I was experiencing was real. It had to be.

My eyes strained, but I kept scrolling. Post after post of men describing the same pattern, waking pinned, something on top of them, beauty that felt off. Some swore theirs would return on command. Others said once it chose you, you were marked. One claimed they stalked the lonely. Another said they left you that way.

Her scent filled my nose. She was there, on the couch. Ten feet away. Watching me.

I saw her more clearly this time. Her hair was cut into a short bob, dated in a way I couldn’t place, with obsidian eyes that caught light but didn’t reflect it. Her skin shone with a metallic sheen, like black mercury. She was wearing lingerie. That was new. A shimmer clung to her, warping her form. Her body glitched and snapped back and forth, fighting between the shape of the woman before me and the version I usually saw, cloaked in shadow. 

“You were looking for me.”

I tried to answer, but words wouldn’t come. My mouth hung open. My limbs wouldn’t move. I sank deeper into the cushions, like gravity changed in her presence. My chest lifted in shallow gasps, as my heart started to hammer.

She slid onto the floor. Then, in a blink, she was in front of me. My clothes were gone.

“What you’re chasing isn’t out there, sugar.” Her cold hand grazed my cheek. “It’s here with you.”

Her hands went to my knees, pushing them apart. The smirk on her face hinted at what was in for. I was at her mercy. She didn’t rush. She never did. Her lips hovered at the tip of my cock, brushing so lightly it felt more like something imagined than realized. Her breath was usually cool, but it was warm now. With a kiss and the barest graze of her tongue, she reminded me of how close I was to being inside her mouth… and how far she was from granting it.

I tried to lift my hips, tried to force my body, but nothing moved. My cock pulsed helplessly in the air, every throb answered by her slow withdrawal, her mouth stopping just shy each time. She let her tongue drag along the underside before pulling back. The wet shine she left only made the emptiness worse.

She lowered her head more, parting her lips over me, and for a heartbeat, I thought she might take me in. But she only let me feel the heat of her breath, like a whisper in place of a scream.

“Isn’t it rich? I want it, same as you.” My cock rested on her cheek. “But your hunger’s the only motivator I trust.”

She stroked my cock, eyes locked on mine, smiling as her tongue wet her lips. She played with me as if time itself bent to her control, speeding her hand, slowing it, stopping just as I was about to erupt. Each pause felt endless, and each return felt unbearable. It was torture, but I didn’t want it to stop.

She stood up and turned her back to me, and lowered herself onto my lap. My cock pressed into the curve of her ass as she rocked, grinding down. She glanced back, savouring the torment in my face. She placed a hand between her thighs, and soft sounds began to bleed from her mouth.

Her movement became more frantic. She ground harder, trembling as an orgasm tore through her. I sat helplessly beneath her. Denied again.

She leaned back, pressing herself against my chest, and rested the nape of her neck on my shoulder. “We both deserve release,” she whispered directly into my head. “But only if you find the tether.”

I jolted forward, gasping for air. My shirt stuck to my skin, drenched in sweat. The TV was still on. Same crime show, different episode. My phone sat face down beside me. I didn’t remember falling asleep.

I slipped a hand under the waistband of my pants. A little swollen from how hard I’d been. But there was no pressure behind it. I gave it a tug. Then another. Nothing. Not even the start of something. Just a dead weight in my hand. It still belonged to her.

Her parting words followed me into the morning. I couldn’t work today. I called in sick. There was no way I could sit at a desk and pretend to care about emails or meetings. Not when every thought went to her and what was happening to me. Find the tether.

I didn’t know where to start, so I went back to the same kinds of searches from the night before. Sleep paralysis demon, spectral lover, succubus mythology, whatever I could think of that might fit. The deeper I went, the more it drifted away from me until nothing matched what I was going through.

I closed the lid of my laptop and rubbed my face, telling myself I’d take a break, maybe eat something. I didn’t even make it to the kitchen before I went back to the computer.

This time, I wasn’t going to search for demons or dream logic. I pulled up public records, starting with the building’s address. Lease dates, construction permits, ownership changes, anything I could find. I searched for my unit and found a list of names and dates. It read like a list of former tenants, but I wasn’t on it. Neither was the guy before me.

I remembered the envelopes from my first week in the apartment. Some mail that wasn’t mine was dropped in my box. I tried giving them back to the property manager, but he waved me off.

“Previous tenant,” he said. “Throw them out. He’s not going to need them where he is.”

“Dead?” I asked.

“Worse. The loony bin. Lost his mind. Even tried tearing up the floor in the washroom.”

His name was Mark Clarkson. I typed it into Google.

It took a while to find anything. There were too many unrelated pages. Then, near the bottom of the fourth page, I found something. A subreddit with only seven followers called Mark Clarkson In Apartment 3C. My unit.

The title of the first post was simple, but it made my stomach turn before I clicked on it.

She Comes At Night

The first entry was dated August 15th, 2023. Two years ago.

It started out like he wasn’t sure anyone would read it.

“I don’t know who this is for, maybe just me to prove to myself that I’m not crazy. But if you’ve ever lived somewhere that feels wrong, like the air’s not right, and you fear going to bed, keep reading.”

At first, he wrote about vivid nightmares. Graphic details about century-old gangland shootings, Tommy guns, and bootleggers. None of that was familiar to me. Scrolling down, the entries gave way to ones about sleep paralysis. Those read like I could have written them myself.

She makes you think it’s sex, but it isn’t. She somehow stops you from moving. Then keeps rubbing herself against your dick until she cums, and you don’t. You never do. That’s what gets to you. And then once you’re hooked, your cock stops working for anyone else. I can’t even get it up anymore. Pills don’t do a damn thing either.

The posts went on, spread out over a few months, becoming less coherent with each passing week. The words slipped out of order and drifted into fragments. Reading it felt like being a witness to his mind falling apart, one entry at a time.

I stopped scrolling and sat with it. What he described lined up with me, except I hadn’t started with nightmares. That had to mean something. I went back to the first entries. His dreams sounded like they were describing mobsters and the 1920s.

I checked the Toronto Star digital archives. There wasn’t a lot of old gangster related history in the city, but the name Rocco Perri kept coming up. I searched his name with my address. That’s how I found her.

An article dated February 14th, 1929, the same day as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. She was a casualty of someone else’s feud. The article barely filled a paragraph. She was a burlesque dancer, well known to the speakeasy crowd. Her distinct bob-cut made sense now. She was a flapper. Shot dead in bed, wrong place, wrong time, when someone put a hit on her lover, an enforcer tied to Rocco Perri.

She lived here, in apartment 3C.

My nighttime visitor had a name. Zelda March.

I tried looking for more, but nothing came up. No photographs or follow-ups. Mark’s subreddit didn’t mention her either. He never found out who she was, or if he had, the state of his mind wouldn't let him write about it.

I sat there staring at the glow of the screen, certain I was missing something. That’s when I remembered what the property manager had said about Mark tearing up the floor. It was the only lead I had left.

The washroom was small, not a lot of floor space, and nothing about the tiles looked out of place. No signs of a repair. No patches. If anything, it seemed redone, maybe to fix whatever damage he’d caused. There was only one other place to check.

I opened the vanity and pulled out rolls of toilet paper and bottles of cleaner. That’s when I saw it. The tiles beneath the wooden base didn’t match.

My next step seemed obvious, but I had to stop and think this through. Mark had gone down this same path, ripping away at the floor like a madman. I didn’t want to end like him. But maybe not finding the answer is what drove him crazy, and I felt like I had it staring me in the face.

Find the tether.

I went to the front closet and pulled a hammer and screwdriver from the toolbox. Back in the washroom, I crouched under the sink and started prying at the tile.

The floor gave way more easily than I expected. Piece by piece, it cracked away, fragments scattering against the wall. I brushed the dust aside with my hand until I hit wood. Most of it felt solid, but one spot flexed when just a little pressure was applied. I wedged the screwdriver in and levered it up. The board lifted clean, not even nailed down. A secret compartment.

I reached in and felt a case. It was green with a pattern and a tassel on top. The smell reached me before I even opened it. I knew exactly what it was, smelling it for the first time while awake. Inside sat a bottle of perfume. A black, art deco-style bottle decorated with a gold band like a flapper’s headband. Caron Nuit de Noël, 1922.

Now in the living room, I set the bottle on the table. I stared at it and turned questions over in my head. Why was this so important to her? It seemed this was what bound her to the apartment, the thing she called a tether, but from what I could tell, it was just an ordinary bottle of perfume. Google didn’t say much, just that it was popular in the 1920s and a bit of a status symbol for young women.

When it came time for bed, I placed the bottle on the nightstand where it couldn’t be missed. I didn’t feel myself drift off. One moment, I was staring at the ceiling, the next, she was at the foot of the bed. No scent announcing her arrival this time.

She crawled onto the mattress. I was frozen, but my eyes cut toward the nightstand. She paused, following the glance.

Her face relaxed, and her lips formed a subtle smile. The dark shimmer around her body thinned, and her skin flushed with colour. For the first time, she looked fully human. A stunning woman who, if I didn’t know better, I’d think might have been in her early 20s.

“Well, if that isn’t a sight for sore eyes,” she said. Her voice was soft, and I realized she was speaking aloud, not inside my skull. “You did what none of the others could do.”

For the first time, the weight lifted from my chest. My arms twitched against the sheets. Air rushed into me. I could move.

“I never aimed to wound you,” she whispered. “But men don’t move fast enough unless infatuation’s got the lash.”

Her hand went to the bottle. She touched the stopper with a finger, then marked each side of her neck with the perfume. The room filled with it, slightly different than previous times. Now it was filled with warmth instead of cold.

“That bottle was the only treasure I had worth a damn,” she said, her eyes locked on it as if it might vanish if she looked away. “So I kept it hidden, tucked it under the floorboards. When the gunman burst in, I was foolish enough to think he’d come for it.”

She turned her head toward me. “I went out fretting over that bottle. Not my lover. Not my life. The perfume was my last living thought.”

“Zelda.” It was the first word I’d ever been able to say to her.

“I haven’t heard my name breathed in a century.” I heard sorrow in her voice, like she only realized then how long it had been.

“I'm terrified, but I also can’t imagine my life without you.” I stopped, afraid of my next question, but I had to know. “Am I going insane?”

“Not yet. You’ve got more fight in you than others did. But I’ve seen this tune play out before, and it never ends sweet for the fella.”

“What happened to Mark… did you do that to him?”

“That’s the price of obsession, not what I charge.”

“Does that mean you can stay with me?”

“I can’t stick around, sugar, greener pastures waiting,” she whispered, shaking her head. “But I can give you something you’ll never shake. A memory the years won’t be able to touch.”

Her lips found mine, and my hands instinctively slid up her back. I felt muscle and skin, warm beneath my fingers. She wasn’t a cold shadow anymore.

Zelda edged herself forward on me, her body positioning until I felt the heat of her slit against my cock. It wasn’t a tease this time. She guided me into her and lowered herself, moaning into my ear as she took me. My body rose into hers. The stretch of her wetness around my cock was heaven after being denied for so long.

She moved slowly, her thighs clenching against my hips as she rocked back and forth. I gripped her waist and thrust up into her, harder than I meant to. Weeks of frustration were being unleashed. Zelda gasped and raked her nails down the sides of my arms. Her breasts were pressed tight against my chest as she ground harder, fucking me with the same need that had haunted me night after night.

Her hair fell against my face as she rode faster, her cunt gripping me in pulses that brought me to the edge. I buried my face in her neck, smelling the perfume, now mixed with sweat and the salt of her skin.

I rolled on top of her. For a moment, her eyes widened, then softened. She had always been the one in control, the one holding me still. Now she smiled, eased beneath me, her body opening as if she’d been waiting for this.

“Mmm,” she moaned. “You really know how to handle a dame.”

My hands pinned her wrists against the sheets above her head. She didn’t resist. Her legs spread wider, drawing me in, but the rhythm was mine. With each thrust, I drove her deeper into the mattress, her breath broke against my mouth in small gasps.

I slammed into her, making the bed shake beneath us. She tightened around me, and I felt her body give. Her climax tore through her as she clung to me, spasming, her thighs trembling against mine. I followed, hammering down into her, coming hard, every denied release had been saved for this moment.

Zelda kissed me again, softer this time, her lips staying on mine as the tremors in our bodies slowed. Her warmth spread through me, the first true warmth she’d ever given. She whispered something I couldn’t catch. Her words dissolved the moment they left her mouth. I felt her weight begin to lift. I tried to hold her, to keep her in my arms, but she was already slipping. She looked at me, knowing I was the last man she would ever see.

I called out her name, but woke screaming. My face was buried in the pillow, the sheets twisted around me, my skin soaked with sweat. My cock throbbed, hard for the first time since she arrived. Proof she was gone, and her mark left with her. The crack in my mind began to heal, leaving something behind. Maybe a memory. Maybe a scar.

The bottle sat alone on the nightstand, black glass and gold trim, gleaming like a headstone in the half-light of the early morning. The prized possession that kept her tethered to the apartment, hidden under the floorboards, waiting for someone weak or hungry enough to dig up. Finding it set her free. But the scent still hung in the air, and with it, her promise.