Chapter 1

His mother’s hand paused on the edge of the blanket. The night-light hummed its usual low note, but Leo kept his eyes fixed on the corner of the ceiling where the paint had started to peel. It looked like a mouth opening.

“Another dream?” she asked. Her voice had that careful softness he’d learned to read — the one that meant she was pretending not to be tired.

“I don’t dream. I told you.”

It was the 2,844th night in a row with zero sleep. Leo knew the number because he counted them on the calendar in his closet, crossing off days with a red marker his father had stopped buying him last year. That was fine. He’d stolen a blue one from the kitchen drawer.

“Leo.” His father appeared in the doorway, sleeves rolled up, a damp dishrag still in his hand. “It’s almost one in the morning. We need you to at least lie still.”

“There’s something under my bed.”

His father’s jaw tightened. He exchanged a look with his mother, that same look they’d exchanged since the first year of the wakefulness, back when doctors still came to the house. That look said:

It’s happening again.

But Leo wasn’t lying. Under the wooden slats of his bed, a cold had pooled and spread, a cold that didn’t come from the drafty window. He’d felt it first three nights ago — a deep, sucking chill that made the hairs on his arm rise. Now it had a shape. Not a shape you could see straight on, but one you could catch from the corner of your eye: a long, low shadow that didn’t belong to any piece of furniture.

“Please just try to close your eyes,” his mother said. She smoothed the blanket up to his chin. “Maybe this time—”

A soft thump came from under the floorboards. His mother stopped. His father took a step into the room.

“Did you hear that?” Leo asked.

“It’s just the pipes,” his father said, but his hand tightened on the dishrag.

It wasn’t pipes. Leo had learned, over 2,844 nights, the sound of every creak and groan in this old house. That thump was something else — something that answered the name he’d given it: the Hum. Not a sound you heard with your ears, really, but one you felt in the hollow space behind your nose, a low vibration that had been growing stronger ever since his ninth birthday started creeping closer.

His ninth birthday. Two days away.

The shadow under the bed stretched. It didn’t move like a regular shadow — it pulled itself longer, thinner, reaching toward the patch of moonlight on the floorboards.

“Leo, we’re going to stay here with you,” his mother said. She sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress didn’t even dip; she was that light from the worry. “We’ll be right here.”

“You can’t help,” he whispered. “It wants to show me something.”

His father dropped the dishrag. “Show you what?”

Leo didn’t answer. He was watching the shadow now, watching it press up against the bottom of the moonlit patch, and he remembered the whisper from the first night it had come:

When you stop counting, you can leave the night.

He hadn’t told his parents about the whisper. Some things you didn’t say because saying them made them real. But the Hum was real already. It thrummed in his teeth.

“I need to go under,” Leo said.

“Absolutely not.”

His father’s voice was firm, but Leo slid out from under the blanket anyway. His bare feet touched the floor, and the cold shot up through his soles, past his ankles, into the center of his chest. It didn’t hurt. It felt like a door opening.

“Leo, get back in bed.”

He knelt and looked under the bed. There was nothing there — just dust and a forgotten sock. But the cold was strongest at the floorboard right below the wall. He pressed his palm against it.

And the floorboard gave way.

Not like it broke; like it vanished. A hole opened in the wood, perfectly round, descending into darkness that had no bottom. A voice came up from it — not his parents’ voices, not anything human. It was the Hum made into sound. Leo was scared and heared his parents say.

Come down, Leo. There’s only one door.

His mother screamed. His father grabbed his arm. But Leo was already leaning over the hole, and his own hand reached down, down into the dark where the shadow was waiting to show him how to finally sleep.

He let himself fall.