Are you here? [creepypasta]

Midnight.

This guy couldn't sleep. Chest tight from stress, just completely unable to shut his brain off, so he decided to take a walk along the beach near his place.

Then he heard it. Coming from the ocean. A woman's voice, faint, like it was coming through a loudspeaker. And when he looked out toward the water he saw this golden thing just... glittering. Shimmering. Like a statue or a monument, shaped like a Buddha, floating on the surface and glowing.

Weird as hell but he went down to the shore anyway.

The voice was just repeating the same thing over and over, sort of blank and hollow: "Are you here? Are you here?"

He stood there watching it for a bit and then. Something shifted. The thing started moving. Slowly at first, arms and body sort of writhing, and then it lost its balance and started drifting TOWARD HIM.

He ran.

He booked it back toward the road and the voice got LOUDER. "Are you here? Are you here?" He looked back and the Buddha thing was just thrashing across the beach toward him.

He thought it was over. He was about to just give up and answer "yes."

But something in his gut wouldn't let him. Some instinct just. No.

So he said "No."

And the voice stopped. The thing vanished.

And then he realized.

He wasn't on the beach.

He was in the ocean. Chest-deep in water. And the direction he'd been "running" to escape? Deeper in.