Inktober52: Glide

Dr. Lorena Wynn noticed the word for the first time on Tuesday.

“Do you ever see it?” her patient asked.
“See what?” she replied gently, pen poised over her notepad.
“The thing in the hallway.”

Lorena waited. Silence is more often than not, filled by people uncomfortable with their own thoughts.

“It doesn’t walk, exactly,” the patient continued, reading Lorena’s encouragement. “It doesn’t make footsteps. It just…glides down the hall.”

The word hovered in the air between them.
Glides.
Lorena wrote it down in her notebook.

“Tell me more about that.”

The patient’s eyes glanced toward the office door, though it remained closed. “It passes my bedroom every night. Around three, I think. I never hear it. I just…sense it. The air changes.”

Lorena relaxed a bit and held in a chuckle, because she let herself believe for a second, that the office might be haunted.

“Changes how?” she asked.
“Like when you wander into a walk-in cooler.”

Lorena nodded. Hallucinations tied to sleep cycles were not uncommon. Stress. Anxiety. The architecture of fear built from pure exhaustion.

“Do you think it could be a dream?”
“I’m awake.” The patient swallowed carefully, her nails scratching away at the sofa as she brings her arms close to her body like a shield. “I always sit up and watch the shadow move under the door.”

“Does it try to enter?”
There’s a long pause before the patient answers. “No. It just glides past.”

It happened again on Thursday.
Different patient.
Different life story entirely.

“I keep thinking it’s my neighbor coming home from work,” the woman said, laughing nervously. “Maybe she sleepwalks.”

“You said your neighbor glides?” Lorena asked lightly.

The woman blinked, taken aback by the question. “That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

Lorena peeked at her notes. Yes. Glides.

By Friday, three people came to her with a similar story.
By Monday, it was five people.

Lorena didn’t believe in shared delusions, but she started to second guess herself. There was no online forum buzzing about hallway apparitions. No viral TikTok urban legend making its rounds. She was certain none of her patients knew each other. And yet…

“It doesn’t walk,” the teenage boy emphasized, fingers knotted in his hoodie. “It glides - like it doesn’t weigh anything.”

“It doesn’t have feet?”

He frowned. “I don’t think so.”

That night, Lorena stayed late. She pulled old files from storage - patients from six months ago. A year ago. She listened to archived recordings, headphones pressing against her ears.

Most sessions were mundane. Someone was going through a divorce. A young girl suffered panic attacks whenever she walked outside. A man grieved his lost wife.
Then she heard it.

“…I thought it was my cat at first,” a man from eight months ago said. “But the cat came rushing out of the bathroom. And then this thing just glided past the bedroom door.”

Lorena froze.
Eight months ago.
She rewound the recording to play it again.

“…this thing just glided past the door.”

Her stomach tightened. She searched her own session notes from that time. The word appeared only once. But it was circled. Why did she circle it?

The pattern deepened. No one ever described a face. Nor did they describe other expected body parts like arms. Only movements. Smooth. Soundless. Just above the ground. One person described it as feeling like they were being watched. Another claimed their bedroom door handle twitched as the thing glided past.

Lorena’s sleep started to suffer. The hallway in her own home felt longer at night as she navigated to the restroom. Shadows pooled in the corners differently. Once safely back to bed, she found herself staring at the closed door, watching a shadow glide past.

She laughed at herself. Occupational hazard; you absorb other people’s fears.
That was all it could be.

The first time she heard it, she nearly convinced herself it was the plumbing taking a shit. She didn’t exactly have a brand new house. Then she heard it again. A faint brushing sound. Soft. Moving from one end of the hall to the other. Not steps, or a shuffle. Something sliding.

Her body reacted before her mind. She sat upright in bed, heart ricocheting in her chest like it was locked in a bulletproof safe. The sound continued. A steady, deliberate glide. It stopped outside her bedroom door. The air cooled, reminding her of teenage years spent stocking the drink cooler at her first job.

She held her breath, waiting for the door to open, but the handle never moved. After a moment, the sound resumed and the darkness passed. Lorena remained upright in bed until dawn.

The next day she curled up on the couch and loaded the security footage from her office. She installed the camera years ago after a break-in, but for the most part, forgot it existed. It pointed toward the waiting room and hallway leading to her consultation office.

She watched hours of empty footage and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Until 7:15PM. Long after she had left, the motion sensor activated. One of the lights at the end of the hallway flickered on despite no one entering. There were no windows, except for the glass at the main entrance. But the camera shifted. There was a distortion low to the ground; almost like heat rising from the pavement. It moved across the carpeted hall. Smooth. Without footsteps. Without a shadow. Gliding.

Lorena leaned closer to the screen in disbelief. The distortion paused outside her office door. The doorknob trembled, then stilled. This…thing might not have had a face, but she had an uneasy feeling that it was looking at her through the camera.

The hallway light flickered off. Her reflection in the dark screen looked thinner than she remembered. Hollowed.

Lorena gave herself a secret side quest to get to the bottom of this delusion. She started by asking her patients different questions.

“Who mentioned it to you first?” she asked a woman in her thirties.

“What do you mean?” the woman replied. “You did.”

Lorena’s pulse skipped a beat.

“I’m sorry?”

The patient scrunched her brows. “In our first session, you asked if I’d been sleeping well. I said no…”

Lorena tried to think back to that first session, but nothing came to mind.

“And you said sometimes when people are anxious, they imagine something gliding past their doors.”

Lorena’s mouth went dry. “That doesn’t sound like something I would have said. It’s a very odd sentence.”

The woman shrugged and looked at the clock. “You did. It stuck with me. You were very specific about it gliding.”

Later that evening, Lorena pulled out the recording of their first session. Her own voice filled the room.

“Sometimes,” she heard herself say, calm and with all the authority of a professional, “people report seeing something glide past their bedroom doors when they’re under a lot of stress.”

She really didn’t remember saying that. Nonetheless, the patient had been right - and she never mentioned any hallway figures prior to that conversation. Lorena rewound the tape.

She dug deeper into old files; one from six years ago caught her attention. At the time, she was doing rounds at a facility for those with severe mental illness. The hospital hadn’t crossed her mind in years. Memories of the night shift and walking the long hallway came back in pieces. Lorena plugged in the session’s tape and pressed play.

“…I keep thinking about what happened,” the patient said absent-mindedly. “It moved. Not walking. Just sort of gliding.”

“What moved?”

“The body.”

The recording timestamp placed the session a week after a patient was found hanging in his room.

Lorena closed the laptop, her memories flooding back as she realized where this thing originated. There had been people talking in a huddle outside room 213. Lorena joined, asking what was going on.

One of the nurses nodded toward the now empty room. “We found him this morning. After shift change.”

Her jaw dropped. “How?”

“Hanging.” Another doctor chimed in, his face sunken.

The patient had been pronounced dead and zipped onto a gurney in the hall, awaiting transport to the Medical Examiner. But when they returned from gathering paperwork, the gurney across from room 213 had vanished. The whole ward was subsequently shut down and a search team went looking for the missing body. It was eventually found on the other side of the wing.

That night she patrolled the halls during her break, trying to decipher how the body moved so far, so quickly. Then she saw it. Something moved at the far end of the hallway. Not walking. Gliding. Freightened, she turned around immediately and found her way back to the cafeteria.

Back in the present day, Lorena left the hallway lights off before bed. The door to her bedroom was left hanging open. She sat upright, waiting.

At 3:00AM, the air temperature dropped. A coolness pressed against her arms. From the darkness beyond her doorway, a shape separated itself from the typical nighttime shadows. It moved silently. It didn’t cast a shadow. It glided across the hall and past her open door. This thing had never followed her patients - it had followed her.

The air grew colder as the thing began to glide back toward her open door.

The next morning, three patients left voicemails. Each described a similar incident.

“It came into my room last night!” one yelled.

“It didn’t just glide past,” another whispered. “It stopped right in front of my door.”

Lorena sat in her office, listening to each voicemail multiple times. Outside, in the hallway, something brushed softly against the carpet. Not a step. Not a shuffle. A movement without weight.

Gliding.

And this time, it didn’t pass her door.