It started with a vase.
Not the kind of vase you’d find in a luxury boutique, carefully displayed under soft lighting, nor the kind your grandmother would fill with wilting chrysanthemums. It was old. Rough. Uneven. Its glaze was cracked in places, giving it the look of something that had been through fire and survived.
Daniel Cheung brought it home from Vietnam, just another trinket from his travels. He wasn’t a collector, nor was he sentimental about objects—he just liked the way it looked. A deep, almost bruised shade of blue, with swirling patterns that seemed to shift if you stared at them too long. When he asked the vendor about it, the man had only smiled, revealing teeth stained red from years of chewing betel nut.
“A gift,” the vendor had said. “From the past.”
A harmless enough phrase.
Daniel never believed in ghosts. Not really. He had been raised in Singapore, spent years in London, and was now settled with his wife and two children. He had heard the old stories—tales of vengeful spirits, lost souls clinging to the world of the living—but to him, they were just that. Stories.
So when he came home, he placed the vase against the bedroom wall, not realising that on the other side of that very wall was his teenage daughter’s bed.
And that was when it began.
Emma Cheung had always been a practical girl. At sixteen, she prided herself on being the type who rolled her eyes at horror films and scoffed at her younger sister’s fear of the dark. She didn’t believe in ghosts. She didn’t believe in anything she couldn’t see or touch.
Which was why she ignored it at first.
The feeling.
That prickling sensation on the back of her neck when she was alone in her room. The way the shadows seemed to shift ever so slightly when she turned her head. The faint, almost imperceptible weight in the air, like the room wasn’t quite empty.
But it was just her imagination. Of course it was.
Then, one evening, as she lay in bed scrolling through her phone, she saw it.
A shadow.
It wasn’t cast by the furniture or the dim glow of her bedside lamp. It was something else entirely—something that moved. Just at the edge of her vision, near the foot of her bed.
She snapped her head up, but it was gone.
Her heart pounded. But after a moment, she let out a breath and forced a laugh. You’re being stupid, she told herself. Just a trick of the light.
She turned off the lamp and pulled the blanket over her head, willing herself to sleep.
But the feeling lingered.
And a few nights later, she saw it again.
Only this time, it wasn’t at the foot of her bed.
It was sitting on it.
She froze. The shadow was there—an indistinct mass, blacker than the surrounding darkness, perched just to her right. She didn’t dare move. Didn’t even blink.
Then, slowly, she turned away from it.
If she couldn’t see it, it wasn’t real.
That was when she felt it.
A cold grip wrapped around her ankle.
The breath was yanked from her lungs as something pulled her down, dragging her halfway off the bed before she found her voice and screamed. The grip vanished in an instant. She scrambled up, kicked the blanket away, and bolted out of the room.
She ran straight to her mother, shaking so badly she could barely get the words out.
But by the time they returned to her room, the shadow was gone.
The air, however, remained thick.
As if something had only just left.
That night, over a late cup of tea, Emma’s mother, Christine, told Daniel what had happened.
Daniel frowned. “That’s strange.”
Christine expected him to laugh it off. To say it was just a nightmare, or stress, or some nonsense about Emma needing to get more sleep.
Instead, he rubbed his chin and muttered, almost to himself, “I thought I had already moved the vase.”
Christine’s grip tightened around her mug. “What vase?”
He sighed.
He told her about the strange occurrences in their bedroom.
It had started small—just a nagging sense that something was... off. Then the massage chair had begun turning on by itself. The first time, he had assumed he’d left it on. But then it happened again. And again. One night, it switched on at 3 a.m., vibrating violently, the motor growling like a caged animal.
So he unplugged it.
And yet, the following night, it turned on anyway.
And then there were the voices.
Not full sentences, not even words. Just whispers. Low, murmuring sounds in the dead of night. And once, soft crying.
He never told Christine. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe because he didn’t want to acknowledge that it was real.
So, two weeks ago, he had taken the vase out of the house and thrown it away.
“But that’s when all the weird things started happening to Emma,” Christine said.
Daniel stared at his reflection in his tea.
“I know.”
For days, Emma refused to sleep in her room.
They burned incense. Placed salt in the corners. Christine even stuck a piece of red paper, inscribed with a Taoist charm, above the bedroom door.
And for a while, it seemed to work.
The air in Emma’s room lightened. The shadows no longer moved. The strange sensation of being watched faded.
Everything went back to normal.
But Daniel was restless.
Objects didn’t just vanish.
Where had it gone?
Then, one night, as he stood in the hallway, his fingers lingering on the door handle to his own bedroom, he heard it.
A low hum. Mechanical.
The massage chair.
Turning on by itself.
Again.
And beneath the sound of the vibrating motor, beneath the quiet murmur of the night, he heard something else.
A whisper.
And the faintest sound of crying.
Daniel closed his eyes.
Because whatever had clawed its way out of that vase—whatever had pressed against the walls of his house, creeping into his daughter’s room, dragging her from her bed—hadn’t left.
It had simply found somewhere new to hide.
Somewhere close.
Somewhere waiting.
ns 15.158.61.51da2
