Don’t go in there…
The voice of reason tried to steer him away from the glass wall of the building he had pressed against like a starfish. Something within though, kept luring him forward. It was nothing for him to slip through the huge open window, passed the blowing curtain caught by the breezes and pulled just outside of the frame. Every other window was closed and locked tight but this one. Every other curtain drawn tightly over the glass to block out the world beyond. Every other but this one.
He stood on the threshold of the bedroom, between the attached bathroom and the huge bed occupied by a sole living, breathing creature of perfection. Her. The magic of who and what he was caused a song to play on the radio, softly, like sweet background music in a romance movie.

“Can I touch you….? I can’t believe that this is real….How did I…ever find you….!”

She was old enough to have her own place. But young enough that her parents paid for half the expenses still, just til she got on her feet. She was old enough to sleep in a giant oversized bed with silk and satin sheets and comforter. But young enough that she still clutched a teddy bear under her arm. Old enough that she hadn’t gone trick-or-treating this evening. Young enough that she’d worn a costume to work anyway, regardless of what her more mature co-workers might say. Old enough to have an executive style apartment, but young enough to think that not having a balcony and being sixteen floors up kept a girl safe.

He was a black silhouette against the window, and when the intruder entered the bedroom from the hallway, expecting to find a sleeping victim, the thug’s eyes bugged out of his head and he couldn’t draw another breathe. It took only a moment for the demon to relieve the man of his oxygen, and his life, and toss the already cooling body  out the window for the police to find in the morning. Then he could return to his gazing, his indulgence. The girl.

She stirred and a leg came out of the blanket’s protective tumble of material. Fresh skin, so sublime he could smell the sweat that oozed out of every pore, invisible to the human eye but wafting like incense smoke up towards the black slits of his nose. She murmured in her sleep and kicked that exposed leg towards him, though he knew she had to be completely unaware of his presence.

“Cotton candy…” she whispered, holding the soft brown teddy bear tightly in her hands, next to her cheek.

He stared at the stuffed animal, and it felt to him like the creature’s beady glass eyes stared right back. Warned him not to come closer. That at any minute the little baby sized bear would turn into a raging true incarnation of ursa arctos. Threatening with those fake and glossy eyes to tear the demon limb from ethereal limb if he raised even one void-instilled digit towards the girl.

“Buttons…with cheese…”

Her brow was furrowed as if she were thinking hard on some deep philosophical question and was on the verge of an answer. Ah the whimsy of dreams, taking human kind to realms of thought they couldn’t fathom in the waking world.

“Purple…”she moaned. Then followed it with an angry “Pink!”

He would have laughed if he hadn’t been from the very bowels of Hell, unleashed this night when the veil between the worlds was thinnest and his ilk could rise up from the still uncovered graves or tombs now unmarked and untended, and haunt the world of the living. He was no ghost, he was much more. And never before had he been drawn just so to someone so innocently pure and serene.

“Buttercup, no….!”

Her voice was weak but the fervor with which she talked in her sleep amazed and thrilled him. If only he could steal into her dreams, see what strange things so tormented the girl. She kicked her foot even closer to him, as if some part of her could read the evil in his mind. And he reached out a slow and careful claw, eyes on the bear as his wispy fingers closed the gap between flesh and evil.

A flash of pink caught the corner of his empty eye, a flash that to the human world, the waking world, would be the rise of the sun and coming of the dawn. He froze, turning his head towards the cityscape that was now being outlined in a brazen golden orange colour, the likes of which he had not seen for millennia. Hand still outstretched to her, he knew it was too late.

He never should have come into this window, never should have gone through that open frame, brushed so arrogantly passed that flapping curtain. It was already too light out for him to return from whence he had come. But perhaps not too late for him to revel in at least one touch of that skin, one caress of that leg, one forbidden gesture.

Just as his fingers made contact with her sleep-warmed skin, the sun burst through the veil between the world that humans know and the world that exists beyond their comprehension. And he became like an exhalation of breath lost in the night, a black and nebulous memory that was gone before it came.

She sat up in her giant bed, upright like a statue. What weird dreams she had been having. Before she could remember them, they were gone. Diaphanous as her night time visitor.

An itch caused her to reach down and touch her leg, the one that always managed to stick itself out of the blankets. A heated imprint, she could feel it beneath her fingertips. Nothing more.
The girl gave an indignant snort, then pulled the comforter back over her head and fell into a much smoother and deeper sleep.