“The Night My Mouth Filled With the Taste of Cold Metal and the World Tilted Sideways — The Unfolding of a Chain of Impossible Incidents That Began Without Warning, Drew Me Into a Maze of Unseen Forces, and Ended in a Discovery I Am Still Struggling to Believe Was Ever Truly Real”

I remember that taste of metal in my mouth like my body knew before my mind: something was about to break.
It was faint at first, as if a coin had been pressed against my tongue, but it grew stronger with each breath. The air seemed to thicken, turning heavy, as though the room itself had decided to hold its breath.

It was an ordinary evening—at least, it should have been. I was alone in my apartment, a place so familiar I could navigate it blindfolded. The clock on the wall ticked normally. The refrigerator hummed softly. And yet, underneath the steady rhythm of domestic life, there was a strange tension I couldn’t name.

That was when I heard the faintest crackle. Not loud enough to be electricity. Not sharp enough to be static. Just a whisper of sound, rising and falling, like someone dragging a finger along the inside of a glass jar.

At first, I dismissed it. Old buildings make noises. Pipes rattle. Floors shift. But this wasn’t the sound of a structure settling — it was directional, purposeful. It was listening.

The metallic taste sharpened, curling around the back of my throat. My skin prickled, every hair rising as if charged by some invisible current. And then, everything stopped.

No hum from the fridge. No ticking clock. No sound at all. I had never experienced silence so absolute. It was as though the walls had swallowed every vibration, leaving me suspended in a stillness that was alive.

I turned slowly, scanning the room. Nothing had changed, yet everything felt wrong. My breathing sounded unnaturally loud in the quiet, each inhale and exhale scraping against the air. Then, without warning, the light above me flickered — once, twice — and stayed on, but dimmer than before.

Something was here.

I didn’t know how I knew it, only that my body had already decided it was true. My mind scrambled for rational explanations: a power fluctuation, a sudden drop in blood sugar, an overactive imagination. But those thoughts were flimsy, transparent things. Beneath them was the instinct — primal, ancient — that something was in the room with me.

The crackle returned, but now it carried a rhythm, almost like breathing. I held still, afraid that any movement might draw attention. My eyes drifted to the corner near the bookshelf. The shadows there were too dark, too dense, as if the light couldn’t quite penetrate them.

A tremor ran through the floor. Not enough to rattle furniture, but enough that I felt it in my bones. My mouth flooded with that metallic tang again, stronger than ever. And then I saw it — not with my eyes, but somewhere deeper. A presence.

It didn’t step forward, didn’t reveal itself in any familiar form. Instead, the air in that corner rippled like heat rising from asphalt. The shadows flexed, and a single pulse of cold radiated outward, cutting straight through me. My breath caught, and I realized my heart was pounding so hard it hurt.

Time became strange. I don’t know how long I stood there, locked in that silent standoff. My body screamed at me to run, but some other force pinned me in place. The ripple in the air grew denser, the room dimmer, until the edges of my vision blurred.

And then, as quickly as it began, it ended.

The hum of the refrigerator returned. The clock ticked. The light regained its full brightness. The metallic taste faded, leaving only the memory of it clinging to the back of my tongue.

I stumbled backward into the kitchen, clutching the counter to steady myself. My knees felt hollow. The silence I had just experienced was gone, replaced by the normal sounds of life — yet they felt artificial, like stage props covering up the truth.

I checked every corner of the apartment. Nothing was out of place. The bookshelf was just a bookshelf. The shadows behaved like ordinary shadows again. But I couldn’t shake the certainty that I hadn’t imagined it.

Over the next week, I tried to tell myself it was nothing. Stress. Fatigue. A trick of the senses. And then, on the seventh night, it happened again.

This time, I was ready. When the metallic taste bloomed in my mouth, I didn’t freeze. I turned on every light in the apartment, grabbed my phone, and started recording. The silence descended just the same — swallowing the hums, the ticks, even the faint traffic outside.

The air shimmered again in the same corner, but this time, it was closer. The shadows bent in ways shadows shouldn’t. My phone’s microphone registered nothing — no static, no hum — just a flat line of dead air.

And then, something else happened.

I felt a pressure in my head, like a thought was being pushed into my skull from the outside. Not words exactly, but an impression: You noticed.

The ripple in the air intensified, almost vibrating, and then collapsed into itself. The soundscape of normal life rushed back. The metallic taste vanished. But the message — whatever it was — stayed.

Since then, it hasn’t happened every night, but often enough that I’ve stopped pretending it’s not real. The pattern is always the same: the taste, the silence, the presence. Each time, it feels closer, more deliberate.

And though I’ve tried to run, to stay elsewhere, it finds me. Always.

The most unsettling part isn’t what happens when the presence arrives. It’s what happens afterward — the way the world seems subtly different, as if something about reality has been swapped out when I wasn’t looking. People speak with slightly different inflections. Objects feel lighter or heavier than they should.

I’ve started to wonder if these events aren’t interruptions at all, but adjustments. And if that’s the case, I can’t help but fear the day when the adjustment is so complete that I no longer remember what the world was like before.