The shadows have returned.

I fought them first with willpower and then with drugs... But they always come back.

Those self-proclaimed geniuses with their P.H.D's and textbooks did not understand. No pill, no injected formula or serum can keep them from crawling from the corners of my vision and viewing me. They are here even now.

I remember seeing them for the first time as a child, dark shapes that lingered out of focus and disappeared. I remember never being able to stand the white noise of a bad television signal. They would whisper to me in the murmur of a creek, and the roar of a crowd. My friends would attribute my distant gaze to daydreaming, if only that were true.

Can you imagine my horror when I realized that they were real?

Can you imagine the terror of a child when he sees ancient insects, man sized and leering, swim past his vision?

After a few years I grew acclimated to their presence, for they were always slightly out of focus and far away from me, these dark visitors.

Now they are close, and I am nearly out of my medication. I dread the time when I can no longer receive my medicine. What I will do then, I can only imagine.

I must have been eighteen when they first noticed me. I remember that I had been living well with steady work and a loving girlfriend. I had all but forgotten about the dark shapes that had plagued my early years.

I was driving home from work, when I saw a hooded figure on the side of the road.

I had never been the kind of person to pick up hitchhikers but I pulled over all the same. I awoke moments later driving down the road at breakneck speed. My heart was pounding and I was drenched with sweat. I looked in my rear view mirror and saw the hooded figure dwindling into the night behind me. It struck me then that they had returned to me, after many years of quiet, the shadows had come back, and one had seen me.

That face that was not a face, and the eyes, if you could call them even that.

Soon after I had a breakdown and was committed to an asylum for study. Darker times I had not known. But the haze of drugs and psychiatrists mostly blocked the gazes of eyeless beings from my memory.

I was released.

I came home.

They were waiting.

Some had skin pulled so tightly across weirdly proportioned bones that they looked as frail insects, and some had no skin at all.

Some walked, and others drifted on unseen winds. They all looked at me. And I looked back. They drift around me and through me. I cannot feel them, but I know one day I will. One day I will awake and, as I have seen in my nightmares, one will plunge its icy clawed hands deep into my chest and squeeze...