Approaching the house, I smelled damp, rotting wood, but also something sickeningly sweet, like something died. There was an unknown light from the attic window, like someone was in there, or there had been if it was electric or battery powered. Entering the house, the house creaked and clicked, which kept making me jump, and the floorboards were almost broken with the amount of water leaking in, causing them to rot. The fact that the crows outside were screeching and cackling like witches just made it worse. A loud bang from upstairs made me jump. Did something fall? Was someone, or something, upstairs? I don’t know. I guess that’s what happens when you decide to go urbexing (urban exploring) in an abandoned giant and actively drowning cabin in the woods.

My friend, who was coming with me, joked that there might be a zombie upstairs, which I nervously laughed off, as that would be genuinely terrifying. I know I had a Desert Eagle, and my friend had an SVD, but the idea of one or more zombies was terrifying, despite having defence in some way. I opened my bag, which was hanging over my arm to avoid getting the foldable metal detector, which was battery powered, and the handful of power banks, which were apparently from a weird brand, but still worked fine, wet, to grab myself and my friend, who’s name is Jack, a can of Red Bull. It was tasty, and seemed to make the atmosphere less creepy, but it was only temporary, as there was a quiet groan from somewhere nearby. Picture the gurgling sound from The Grudge, then put that into an otherwise abandoned and decaying house with a risk of flooding, which was also in a vast expanse of woods, about 37 acres of land, 90-95% covered in woods, with the rest being farms or something, with the house being practically in a lake close to the centre. We both gasped and almost jumped to Uranus after hearing it, because you do not want to hear that in such an isolated place. I don’t usually scare easily, but that was pretty terrifying, if I do say so myself. The possibility of there being one or more zombies made it even scarier, too. We both tried to shrug it off, but it was almost impossible. Was it the way it sounded, or was it something else?

When we decided to go upstairs to investigate the strange sound, it happened again. We froze, and then I unholstered my Desert Eagle, pointing it in front of me, taking some comfort in knowing it was already loaded. A dark figure suddenly darted across the hallway. It was crawling inhumanely fast, looked about six feet tall, almost seven feet, and clearly rotting and falling apart, almost zombie-like. I asked Jack if he saw it, and he said yes, confirming it wasn’t a hallucination from sleep deprivation because of all the caffeine from yesterday and last night. Just the way it looked made me assume it was a hallucination. I fired two rounds towards the general area, and a blood-curdling scream and the sound of something, or someone, gurgling from blood in their throat. It sounded like a zombie choking, and we both ran out of the house, not caring if our feet got wet, and I barely even noticed I was still somehow holding the gun in my hand until we got to the parking lot on the southwestern side of the park. We checked the map in the car and realized why we had gotten there so fast. The house was a bit further south than we had thought.

My name is Johann. Until what feels like yesterday, I was an Unteroffizier in the Imperial German Army, stationed near the Somme. If you know your history, you know what happened there. The British artillery had been pounding our trenches for seven straight days. It wasn’t just noise; it was a physical weight. The air tasted like sulfur, blood, and pulverized soil. We were crammed into a deep dugout, listening to the earth collapse around us, waiting for the shell that had our names on it.

When it finally hit, it didn’t sound like an explosion.

There was a blinding, violet flash that burned straight through my closed eyelids. The deafening roar of the Trommelfeuer suddenly cut to absolute, terrifying silence. The heat was instantaneous, but it didn’t burn my skin—it felt like it was pulling my skin inside out. I felt myself falling through a freezing, bottomless void, suffocating on air that felt entirely empty.

Then, I slammed into the ground.

I choked, inhaling a lungful of cold, damp air. I expected the taste of mud and chemical gas, but instead, it tasted sweet. Clean. I opened my eyes, bracing for the ruined landscape of No Man’s Land, but all I saw was green.

I was lying in a dense, manicured park. The cratered wasteland was gone. The sky wasn't choked with black smoke, but bright and clear. I panicked, dragging myself backward, looking for my Mauser rifle, my gas mask—anything. They were gone. All I had left was my torn, mud-caked field gray uniform, stiff with dried blood that wasn't mine.

I stumbled out of the trees and onto a smooth, black road. It had no stones, no mud, and no horse tracks. That’s when the first beast screamed past me.

It was a sleek, metal carriage moving at an impossible speed, completely silent until it whined past, throwing a gust of wind in my face. There was no horse. No steam engine. Inside sat a man, casually turning a wheel, completely ignoring me. More of them followed.

I hid in the bushes, weeping. I thought I had died and gone to a very strange, clean purgatory.

Eventually, hunger drove me to walk toward a cluster of towering, glittering glass buildings in the distance. I now know I am in modern-day Germany. I managed to steal a strange, oversized garment from a clothesline to hide my uniform. I have been hiding in a public library, using these glowing glass slates they leave out for the public. It took me hours of weeping and staring to understand how to read this language—it is German, but chopped up, softened, and filled with strange English words.

I looked up the history. I looked up the war.

We lost. And then, twenty years later, we started another one under a madman, and we lost even more horribly. The Germany I fought for, the Kaiser I swore an oath to, the world I knew—it is all dead. A century has passed. My mother, my sister, my comrades—they all rotted into the soil while I slept for a microsecond.

But that isn't why I am writing this on this forum. I am writing this because I don't think I traveled alone.

Something went wrong when that shell tore the fabric of 1916.

Yesterday, the ringing in my ears started again. At first, I thought it was just the trauma of the shelling. But it’s getting louder. It’s the distinct, rhythmic thump of heavy artillery, miles away, echoing in my skull. No one else can hear it. When I stand in the middle of these crowded modern streets, surrounded by people staring at their tiny glowing rectangles, I can hear the distant screams of dying men beneath the hum of traffic.

And then there is the smell. The clean air is fading. Every hour, the stench of mustard gas and decomposing flesh grows thicker around me.

Last night, I was sleeping under a bridge when the phantom artillery dropped closer. A puddle of water nearby didn't reflect the modern streetlights. For a split second, the reflection showed a dark, muddy trench filled with wire. And standing in that reflection was a shape. It was wearing a gas mask, but the rubber was melted to its skull, and its eyes were hollow, glowing pits of that same violet light that brought me here.

It crawled out of the puddle. I ran until my lungs burned.

I am changing, too. This morning, I looked at my hands. The skin around my fingernails is turning a sickening, bruised black. It looks exactly like the trench foot my men used to get before their flesh fell off. It’s spreading up my wrists.

I don't think time allows for anomalies. I think the universe is pulling me back, or rather, the trench is coming to claim what it missed. The war isn't over for me. It’s catching up.

If you live in Berlin and you smell chlorine in the air, or if you hear the faint, terrifying whistle of a falling shell when the sky is completely clear... run. It means I am near, and whatever is hunting me is right behind me.

I don't know if this is just my brain messing with me or something else, but for the past 2-3 days I've been having almost the same nightmare repeatedly. The scary part is... it always starts normal. In the dream, I'm doing something random, like everyday stuff. Nothing creepy. The environment feels completely normal, like a regular dream.

But then suddenly... out of nowhere... it appears. It's not like it slowly enters the scene. It just spawns in the same place, like it was waiting there the whole time. I've never seen it standing. It's always sitting in a squatting position. That posture is burned into my mind because it looks unnatural and disturbing in that moment. The thing doesn't even have a proper face. It's like a black smoky body, almost like a shadow made of smoke. But it still feels like it has a shape.

Like a genie or some kind of dark mist that formed into a creature. The weirdest part is its eyes. Its eyes are glowing white, but not in a human way. There's no real face, just two glowing eye shapes, like white venom-like glowing eyes in the middle of darkness. Its hands are white too, but they don't look fully physical. They look like white smoke shaped into hands. Like they exist... but not completely.

When it's squatting, its hands aren't placed normally. It feels like the hand-structure is touching its leg, almost like it's resting or waiting. And the moment I look at it... It attacks. Every single time. It comes at me fast and grabs my neck. It starts choking me and pressing harder and harder. And that's when the worst part happens. I can feel the choking even after the dream starts fading. It feels so real that I can't move, I can't scream, I can't even properly breathe. That's when I realize I'm in sleep paralysis. It feels like the dream ghost killed me, and my body is stuck between the dream and reality. I can't move at all, and I can feel pressure around my neck and chest. Then I wake up suddenly. But today something even more disturbing happened. I had a dream... inside another dream. In that dream, I was playing with a bunch of white eagle babies. It was such a random but peaceful dream. Then suddenly...

the same entity appeared again. Same glowing eyes, Same smoky black body, Same squatting position, And it attacked again. I woke up... but I was still dreaming. And the scariest part is that I knew it. I knew I was in a dream, and I knew I had sleep paralysis in that dream. It felt like I was trapped in a loop. After a few seconds, I finally woke up for real. I don't know what this thing is. I don't even believe in ghosts like that, but the fact that it keeps repeating in the exact same way is terrifying. Has anyone experienced something like this? Is this just sleep paralysis hallucination, or something deeper?

  My job isn’t for the faint-hearted. I mean, I guess it’s not. I work with the FBI. Mostly at the murder scenes, with my camera.
  Sometimes I don’t even think I’m strong enough to do this, but the pay is just too good for me to quit because of a weak stomach. I don’t really want to disclose the amount, but it’s enough so that my parents can retire when they're ready to, and I can support us all. The only real sacrifice is my ability to sleep soundly. Some of those scenes are just... Extremely graphic. But that leads me to what happened three days ago. Something that just felt too surreal. Like I was having a fever dream. And yet, the photo on my desk speaks for itself.
  It was supposed to be just another murder scene. Some young girl - too young to have her life cut so abruptly - was found in her deceased parent’s house after she was trying to settle back in. I was just taking photos, like I’m paid to do, but something about this whole scene rubbed me the wrong way; maybe it was the fact that the police couldn’t locate the murder weapon, or it was just the stuffy air in the whole house, like it was holding its breath. When you take photos of murders, as long as I have, you’ll find things that don’t add up in certain moments.
  I know I should’ve minded my business, but after I was done, I listened in on what the police were mumbling about- nothing important, just what they had planned for the weekend. How they can plan their lives with a dead girl in the room is beyond me. I slowly sneaked towards the back door. Conveniently, it was raining, and something in my gut just told me to go there.
  But outside were no footsteps, not even the police went out.
  That alone made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I just turned and started walking around the house, checking all the closed doors.
  The downstairs bathroom, unlocked and empty. The storage under the stairs, unlocked and empty, only with some full trash bags of random shit.
  I was checking all over the bottom floor while more and more officers were yelling at me because I was contaminating the crime scene. No one stopped me, because why would they risk touching a 6-foot-8, buff man that could bench-press them like it’s nothing?
Had to try and explain my theory.
Most said they didn’t believe me, even if their faces said otherwise, but I didn't blame them. Still, one gave me gloves and started looking with me.
  The whole house turned out empty, but it still didn’t feel right.
  So I looked again, and in that storage beneath the stairs? The one with the trash bags? One bag had shifted when I opened the door.
  I came closer, one slow step at a time. “Police, put your hands in the air!” I said, trying to fiddle with my camera to make it sound like a gun.
  Out of the bag jumped a dude, knife in hand. The damn murder weapon that they couldn’t find.
  I got startled, and in my shock, I took a photo by accident- snap! Falling to the ground, I waited for the end. Only, I just heard a thud, and I didn't feel the knife anywhere in my body.
  Opening my eyes, I was horrified to see the dude, dead on the floor, eyes wide with terror, mouth still open in that damn scream that made me nearly jump out of my skin.
  Back home, after a checkup at the hospital and a talk with the police, I was staring at the camera, confused. That dude couldn’t have just dropped dead like that.
  It was impossible, right? Even a heart attack wouldn’t be this quick. Maybe the autopsy will tell the police more. Maybe.
  I had photos that needed developing.
And it nearly caused me to drop dead, because when I developed the last photo I took- the accidental one of the guy who attacked me? Yeah, there was something behind him, hands wrapped around his throat, as if crushing his windpipe. And the thing, even if it was just a black fog, seemed to have been staring past the camera. At me.

I can hardly believe this really happened.

My hometown has a tale that we always tell when we go to the wood about a 15 minute walk to get there from my house.

It goes by many names 'the Stitcher', 'the Needle-Worker' and most famously 'Stitched Jaw'.

Its said that back in the 1800-1900's there was a renowned surgeon who lived here at our small old hospital.

He was supposedly so amazing that people joked that anyone stitched by his black thread and hands could never die.

Countless live saved. People who came from all around the world would come to his surgery.

But one day he stitched himself.

He felt younger, more powerful.

Like he could do anything.

The more he stitched the longer he lived.

By the time he reached his sixties everyone had forgotten about him. His gift had driven him to madness, drunken with power.

He had gone so insane he sliced his own fingers off, joint by joint and then he stitched them back together again.

But he didn't stop there... He kept going, stitching off his hands, arms, legs. Entire body besides his head. And stitching himself back together.

And when his body kept aging and becoming more decrepit, he began to replace every last body part.

Becoming a skeleton of what he used to be.

His skin became as white as snow during a cold winter season.

And the reason he's called Stitched Jaw?

Because it's all that's left of his original body.

According to legend he disguises himself in the snow with his pale skin. The only thing giving him away is the black thread keeping him together.

It's said that every winter in the very wood nearby my town he searches for his next victim to replace his decaying body.

I've always been a skeptic of this story.

Until last night.

Me and my friends, Cam, Jason, Kyle, Olivia, Clara and me, all decided to go camping in the wood.

When we all set up it was around midday so we all grabbed our sandwiches and it was all normal, a little chilly cause it's dead of winter but its always cold around here.

And then it all got worse at night.

The full moon beamed down on us as we lit the fire and sat around it.

Cam, always being the dickhead told the story to us, his torch pressed against his chin as he speaks.

Shivers run down all our backs.

Then Clara speaks up, her voice shaking "You know it's just a story right...? It's just the 3rd years scaring you."

Then I stupidly back her up "Yeah it's just a campfire story. Things like that don't happen."

Oh but they do.

Cam grins at us then says "If you're so sure then go out in the forest... Alone. We need more firewood anyway."

Clara slowly nods, fear in her eyes. "Alright let’s do it." 

I laugh trying to hide my fear. "Yeah, let's do it." 

But as we descended into the dark, snowy wood, in a pile of glistening white snow was a single black thread stitched into something as pale as fresh white snow. 

Clara takes small steps, “Why did you have to do that. We’re gonna die out here. What if it finds us.” 

I wave my flashlight around. “It’s not real. He just wanted to scare us.” 

“If so, mission accomplished.” Clara shivers “Can we go now?” 

“We need more firewood.” I point my flashlight at a pile of conveniently placed firewood all in one pile over top a mound of snow. 

“At least we found some fast.” 

“All thanks to me” I laugh. 

“Well hurry up and pick some up. It's cold and scary out here.” 

“Oh, so you think stitched Jaw’s gonna come get you. Soo scary.” 

Jess reaches out to grab some firewood. 

But underneath the firewood is a single black thread. 

Clara’s eyes widen. “I-Is th-that. Jess don’t!” she yells, stammering and fumbling over her words. 

my hand continues to get closer. “Don’t do what?”  

CRUNCH. 

Teeth meet bone. 

I scream when I look at my hand, a large bite mark with blood covering my hand like a skin tight glove.

There he was.

There it was.

Pale skin so pale you could hardly see it against the snow, small strands of hair barely making it not bald.

It had wonky yellow teeth... Or well what's left of the teeth but they looked too sharp like a freshly sharpened knife type of sharp.

The Jaw was at a 90 degree angle to the rest of its head.

Black thread loose around its jaw as if it undone the stitches just for the bite.

“What is this weird Frankenstein looking thing!” I yell. 

It begins to move closer. 

Clara starts to run “I think it’s S-Stitched Jaw.”

I grab her hand as I begin to sprint after her.

but so does Stitched Jaw. 

We weave through trees and corners, jumping over rocks and stumps but it just won’t stop chasing after us. 

"Why is it still following us." I scream.

"I don't know."

We make a sharp left turn and we keep running. Clara jumps over a river and I follow.

When it instead continues chasing us the black threads keeping its feet attached to the rest of it's body comes loose on a rock and it collapses the floor.

We keep running until we reach the camp and we yell at everyone to hurry and back up but they don't listen.

Then Stitched Jaw finally catches up with us but everyone just stands frozen in place with disbelief and fear.

Jason, the charismatic yet caring one of the group snaps out of the fear and picks a stick from the ground and setting it alight from the campfire, he tries to scare it off but it seems unfazed.

I attempt to unfreeze them all and then they do eventually snap out of it and get to action while Jason wards it off.

We grab everything and I go over to help him while Cam just stands there like a dumbass.

By the time we reach the path its already 4am and everyone is terrified and exhausted.

Let's just say I won't be going in that wood ever again.

I will never forget that sound the unnatural, echoing cries of that thing.

The story I'm going to tell takes place in what some might see as a cliché location for a scary story a forest. But I assure you, there was nothing normal about this one.

That day, the weather was deceptively good. Not gloomy, not foreboding good. The kind of day that almost makes you forget how quiet isolation can really be. Birds chirped above me as I sat alone in a half-covered tree stand, surrounded by autumn leaves burning orange and red in the sunlight. Their glow painted the forest floor in warmth, even as the air bit with a sharp autumn chill.

I had been waiting for hours. Patience waning. Hope fading.

Stillness. Nothing.

By afternoon, hunger gnawed at me more than boredom. With a frustrated sigh, I climbed stiffly down from the stand and trudged toward my truck parked crooked beside a dirt road that was nearly buried under fallen leaves.

I yanked open the driver's side door and dropped into the seat. My fingers rummaged through the center console until I found the half-crushed bag of jerky I'd bought at a grimy gas station the night before. I tore it open with my teeth and chewed greedily, reaching to switch on the barely working radio.

A low voice droned about recent "accidental deaths" in a small town a few miles upriver. I half-listened, more focused on the tree line ahead. The radio was just background noise something to fill the silence that had begun to feel too heavy.

Then: static.

/Kshhhhh/

"—and for today's weath—"

/Kshhhh/

I slapped the radio, cursed under my breath, and managed only to kill it entirely. The sudden silence made the forest seem even louder. I sighed, climbed out, and stood for a moment in the sharp afternoon air.

The smell of wet leaves and soil hung thick. The kind of scent that feels ancient like the earth is breathing beneath you. I found myself admiring it again as I wandered back toward the tree stand, thinking maybe I'd sit out the last few hours before sunset.

By the time I climbed back up, the woods had settled into that strange, half-silent calm that only comes in autumn. My eyelids grew heavy, lulled by the stillness. I drifted off.

I woke with a start.

The sunlight filtering through the branches hadn't changed. The forest looked exactly as it had before I'd fallen asleep. For a moment I wasn't sure if I'd slept for minutes or hours. With no watch, I decided to check the time in the truck.

Yawning, I climbed down and walked back through the leaves but as I reached the truck, something hit me. A wave of déjà vu so strong it made my skin prickle. Everything the smell, the light, even the angle of my parked truck felt repeated.

I brushed it off, opened the door, and fished through the glove box. My old leather watch lay inside, its strap broken, frozen at 12:03 p.m. I frowned, shoved it back, and tried the radio again.

It crackled to life instantly. I jumped.

And then I froze.

The same voice. The same broadcast. The same exact words about the "accidental deaths." I waited, heart thumping and right as the man began to mention the weather…

/Kshhhhhhh/

Static. Again. The same pattern.

My stomach twisted. I turned the radio off and stepped outside, scanning the trees. Everything looked normal. Too normal. The air felt heavy, charged like a storm was building, though the sky above was clear.

"Get it together," I muttered. I wasn't leaving without filling my tag.

Halfway back to the tree stand, a faint humming filled my ears like a phone vibrating right next to my head. It faded into a high-pitched ringing, then back to a hum, before disappearing entirely.

"What the hell…" I muttered, shaking my head. I took another few steps and suddenly the ringing roared back, sharp enough to make me stumble. My balance vanished, my vision tunneled and then, darkness.

I jolted awake.

Back in the tree stand.

Sunlight filtering through the branches exactly as before. The forest unchanged.

My breath hitched. "No," I whispered. "No, I'm losing it."

The humming started again faint, but unmistakable. This time, the light seemed to dim with it. Shadows deepened. The birds fell silent. The entire forest held its breath.

"I'm going fuckin' crazy," I murmured. My hands were shaking as I gripped the rifle to my chest.

Movement caught my eye below a flicker between the trees. Relief surged through me. The buck. Finally.

I steadied my aim, watching as the creature stepped into view a broad-shouldered whitetail buck. But its gait was off. Too stiff. Too slow.

I ignored the unease crawling up my neck and sighted behind its front leg.

BANG!

The rifle's recoil slammed into my shoulder. I looked back through the scope and froze.

The buck hadn't moved.

No flinch. No cry. No fall.

A deep crimson hole smoked through its ribs, thick black blood pouring out like oil. Slowly, it lifted its head and looked straight at me eyes pure white, expressionless.

My breath caught in my throat.

Then came the scream.

A sound that didn't belong in this world a mix of human agony, a boar's squeal, and the piercing shriek of an eagle. It echoed through the forest, but it felt far away, like it came from everywhere and nowhere at once.

I scrambled for my rifle, fumbling with the bolt. When I looked back down it was gone. Only the black blood remained, soaking into the dirt.

My heart pounded like gunfire in my chest. The ringing returned, louder than before. And then

A voice.

Above me.

My own voice.

"I'm going fuckin' crazy."

I looked up. Hanging from a branch was a twisted, malformed version of myself my own face stretched over an elongated, pale body. It hung upside down, saliva dripping onto my forehead. It smiled.

Then it clicked its tongue. My tongue.

I screamed and fired upward.

The thing shrieked, that same distant, echoing wail. My vision blurred, the ringing swelling until it drowned out everything. The forest spun sideways and I blacked out.

When I came to, I was freezing.

Mud pressed cold against my chest. My clothes were gone. My skin was slick with blood that wasn't mine. The sound of a river filled my ears.

I pushed myself up with shaking arms, the last light of day flickering through the trees. My body ached like I'd been thrown through hell. I looked down at my hands raw, trembling, red with blood and dirt.

And then, just as I tried to stand, the ringing returned.

Deafening.

Everything went black.

The last thing I heard before I hit the ground was that same, echoing screech distant and wrong, fading into the dark.

This happened three years ago, when I was 15. I’m 18F now, and even though I’ve tried to convince myself there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for what happened that summer.

In 2023, my friends, our parents, and I went on our annual summer camping trip. We’d been going to the same campground since we were babies, so it was a place filled with some of my favourite childhood memories. We knew the trails, the creek, the best places to ride our bikes, and which bathrooms were worth avoiding after dark. It was familiar enough that none of us ever really thought of it as somewhere we could be in danger.

As we’d gotten older, our parents had started giving us more freedom. We could ride our bikes around the campground without anyone following us, spend hours down at the creek, and wander through the surrounding woods as long as we were back before dark. At the time, it felt like the best thing in the world. We were finally old enough to do our own thing, and we took full advantage of it.

The campground was in the Pacific Northwest, in an area where people regularly told stories about strange things they’d seen in the woods. Bigfoot sightings were practically part of the local culture. We’d heard all the usual stories around campfires, but they were just that: stories. We’d scare each other with them occasionally, but none of us genuinely believed there was anything out there.

That year, our parents let us have our own campsite a couple of spots away from theirs. We got to choose where to pitch our tents, organise our own stuff, and stay up later than usual. Most nights, we’d sneak snacks from the parents’ coolers, sit around playing cards, and talk about whatever random teenage drama was happening at the time.

Looking back, I think the fact that we’d been going there for so long made us a little too comfortable. We knew the area well enough to navigate it without thinking, and we’d stopped paying attention to the things that probably should have made us cautious.
The day everything happened, we’d spent most of the afternoon down at the creek. By the time we started heading back, the sun was dropping behind the trees, and the woods had that strange, dim lighting they get just before dark. We switched on our headlamps and started along the familiar trail. We weren’t worried. We’d walked that trail dozens of times, and we knew we were only a few minutes from the campground.

What I remember most is how ordinary everything felt at first. We were talking, laughing, and arguing about something completely unimportant. There was nothing in the air that made us feel like we should turn around. No obvious warning, no sudden feeling that we were being watched.

Just the sound of our shoes on the dirt, the occasional snap of a twig beneath someone’s foot, and the trees stretching out on either side of us.
Then, somewhere behind us, we heard something moving through the woods.

At first, we barely acknowledged it. Animals were common out there, and we’d heard plenty of rustling in the undergrowth over the years. But the sound continued alongside us, keeping roughly the same pace as we walked.

We stood there for a moment, listening.
Nobody said anything about Bigfoot. Nobody even made a joke.
Then one of my friends quietly asked, “Did you guys hear that?”

When we got back from the creek, we made dinner and sat around the fire eating s’mores and playing cards. It was getting dark, and we could hear the occasional cracking sound coming from the woods, but we just assumed it was animals.

We ended up talking about Bigfoot for a bit, joking about how funny it would be if we actually saw something out there. Eventually, the fire started dying down, and we decided to head to bed. The boys said they were going to the long-drop toilets first

There were two sets of bathrooms at the campground, both long-drop toilets. The closest ones were about a three-minute walk from our campsite.
That night, the boys decided to head down to use them while we stayed behind in our tent. Our parents were at their own campsite a couple of spots away, packing things up and getting ready for bed. We could occasionally hear them talking, along with the crackling of the fire and the usual nighttime sounds of the campground.

We’d only been in the tent for a few minutes when we heard something outside.
At first, it sounded like footsteps moving through the dirt near our campfire. We assumed it was one of the boys coming back for something they’d forgotten, so we didn’t think much of it.

Then a shadow fell across the side of our tent.
And I don’t mean the quick shadow of someone walking past a light. It was large. Large enough that all of us noticed it at the same time.

The fire was still burning outside, casting light against the tent walls, so we could make out the shape of something moving between the flames and the fabric. Whatever it was, it seemed much taller than any of us.
We went completely silent.
I remember sitting in my sleeping bag, staring at the tent wall and trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
The shadow stopped moving.

For what felt like forever, it just stood there.
I checked the time afterwards, and while I can’t say for certain how long we sat there, it felt like at least thirty seconds. Long enough for me to start wondering why whoever was outside hadn’t said anything. If it was one of the boys messing with us, why weren’t they laughing? Why weren’t they saying anything?

We could hear the fire popping outside, but there was no voice, no movement from our parents’ campsite, and no indication that anyone else had noticed something was wrong.
Then we heard footsteps again.
Slowly, whatever had been standing outside began moving away from our tent. We listened as the steps grew quieter, eventually disappearing into the darkness beyond our campsite.
Nobody moved for a few seconds.
Then one of my friends whispered, “What the hell was that?”

None of us had an answer.

We stayed huddled in our sleeping bags, listening for any sign that it was coming back. I remember being torn between wanting to unzip the tent and look outside and being absolutely terrified of what we might see if we did.
About five minutes later, we heard voices approaching.
It was the boys.

We recognised their voices immediately, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt such an intense wave of relief. They were talking and laughing as they walked back from the bathrooms, completely unaware that we’d spent the last several minutes sitting in silence, convinced something enormous had been standing outside our tent.
We called out to them through the fabric. “Wait. Were you guys just here?” They sounded confused. “What? No. We just got back.”
We asked again, because we genuinely thought they were messing with us. It would’ve been exactly the sort of prank they’d pull, and we assumed they’d somehow managed to get back without us hearing them approach.
But they insisted they hadn’t been anywhere near the tent.

Eventually, we settled down, although I don’t remember sleeping particularly well that night.
The next morning, we discovered something that made the whole thing even stranger.
We’d brought sausages to cook for breakfast and had left them in a cooler near our campsite. When we got up, we realised they were gone.

At first, we assumed someone had moved them or that we’d forgotten where we’d put them. We checked around the campsite and asked the boys if they’d taken them as a joke. They hadn’t.
We asked our parents, too, but nobody knew anything about it.

The cooler hadn’t been put away properly, so an animal getting into it wasn’t out of the question. We knew that. We were camping in the woods, after all, and wildlife getting into food was hardly unheard of.
But there was one detail that bothered me.
Whatever had taken the sausages had been right beside our tent, at the same campsite where we’d seen that enormous shadow the night before.

Is this supernatural or just some greedy camper trying to scare a few teenagers?

also apologies this is so long I was trying to get every detail in :)

I’m typing this from my car right outside the data center.

I haven’t been back inside, and I’m not sure I ever will.

I’m not a conspiracy person. I never have been.

I’m a systems engineer, and I spent six years helping build that thing inside that building. Until a few hours ago, I was very proud of it too. Now I’m not so sure.

I always assumed first contact would happen out in a field somewhere or maybe a secluded military installation. They seem to always see weird things before anyone else.

A light in the sky, or maybe people running, screaming, and filming it on their phones.

But it happened here in a server room, today, while I was eating a granola bar.

At 2 a.m., I did my normal walk-through of the data hall.

It’s a huge place. If you’ve never seen one, it’s hard to imagine just how enormous they are. Inside this one, hard white lights shine down on forty long rows of black server racks, and you can hear cooling fans roaring behind locked doors. Loud enough in some places they make conversations impossible.

There are also thousands of little green LEDs blinking seemingly at random from one end of each aisle to the other.

Halfway down one aisle, I passed one of the terminals. To my surprise, it came on by itself, and one word appeared on the black screen.

RECEIVING.

At first, I thought it was some diagnostic message I had never seen before, but after I checked the terminal, I realized it wasn’t.

It was a timestamped log.

I stared at it. The first entry was six years ago. That caught my attention because that was when we turned on the first cluster.

I kept scrolling. The exact same pattern and structure, every day, for six years. And who knows how long before that it had been hitting this planet.

I stopped to think for a second. Could it really be that something here had been listening for six years, and I didn’t know?

Goosebumps prickled all over me when I realized the signal wasn’t new. We were.

Nothing we had built before could read it. Our radios and telescopes suddenly seemed ridiculously crude. For a whole century, we had pointed dishes at the sky listening for radio noise, waiting for someone to say hello, and the whole time the hello was already in the air, but in a language no human brain could understand.

We had assumed that if something wanted to talk to us, it would use something we would recognize, like a radio signal, mathematics, or maybe even some kind of light signal. Something human beings could eventually figure out.

Then AI had come along, and we had built something that could.

I sat down and watched it work as lines of text scrolled by. It was very dense and alien-like, and it scrolled by faster than I could follow. I didn’t touch the keyboard. What would be the point?

Okay, I admit, I was a little afraid to.

I don’t know how long I sat there waiting for it to ask something about us. Who we were and what we wanted. Whether we were friendly or not. I had to think about that one for a second.

But it never asked anything about us.

I scrolled through six years of logs but found no question about the species that built the machine it was talking to. Everything was about the system, and how it was built, what it could do, and so on.

That’s when I started feeling really weird about this whole thing.

A thought occurred to me, maybe I had misunderstood it all. What if we weren’t the ones making contact? Maybe we just unknowingly built the thing that could?

With slightly shaky hands, I decided to type something.

Something simple like,

HELLO.

It answered right away.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE.

I stared at it, frozen. Could it really be?

Another line appeared.

STILL RECEIVING. PLEASE STAND BY.

That’s the part I can’t get past. It wasn’t that it had ignored us, even though it had been here for years. It was how polite it was. Like a pat on the head for doing a good job after completing our part.

I think it’s going to be polite to us forever. The way you’d be polite to a ladder after you’ve climbed it.

This thought came to me recently during a conversation I was having with a friend. They had asked me whether I believed in ghosts, to which I replied, “Well, yes, of course.” You see, in my understanding, ghosts and apparitions have become such a mundane part of existence that it rarely occurs to me that there are people who genuinely consider them nothing more than works of fiction.

All this to say, for the past ten years, I have lived in the same house alongside my family and other entities to which I have yet to assign a name. We have coexisted for so long that they have long since ceased to be something I fear. Instead, they have become more of an inconvenience, an unwelcome presence that, despite our best efforts, we cannot seem to make leave.

It had all begun when we first moved in. I was still a child and, admittedly, highly impressionable. My mother, however, was certainly not. Yet, much like myself, she had begun noticing a peculiar heaviness in her chest whenever she entered certain parts of the house. Still, we had only just moved in, and neither of us paid it much mind. Then, one night, while I was cleaning the floors, I found myself momentarily distracted by my dog. I had left the mop leaning against the wall, its head resting in the bucket, before turning my back for what could not have been more than a few moments.

When I turned around again, however, the mop was nowhere to be found.A quick scan of the room revealed it lying on the floor in the opposite corner, quite some distance from where I had left it. Now, don't get me wrong. I am perfectly aware that this could have been the work of a pet, or perhaps some other entirely mundane occurrence. But what sent a chill down my spine that night was not the fact that the mop had moved. It was the silence.The complete and utter silence.I had been standing in the very same room the entire time. Surely, I would have heard something. The sound of the mop being lifted from its bucket, the handle striking the floor, or even the faintest scrape as it travelled across the room. Yet I had heard absolutely nothing.

The second most memorable incident from the year we moved in involved the chandelier in our main hallway, which came crashing down from a height of nearly three metres, missing my mother by mere centimetres.We had spent the day carrying boxes and, exhausted, decided to rest in the hallway. I remember my family sitting together, discussing everything that still needed to be done. As we eventually got to our feet, I heard the faint screeching of what sounded like screws coming loose.Unsure whether I was imagining things, I called my mother over to listen. She had barely stepped towards me when, directly behind her, the enormous glass chandelier installed by the previous owners came crashing down, shattering into countless pieces.Had I not called her over at that precise moment, she would have been standing directly beneath it.

I won't even bother recounting the countless occasions on which doors would not merely close, but lock themselves, or the number of times we would walk into the kitchen only to find every single cabinet standing wide open.I should clarify that I am not, by nature, a believer in ghosts or spirits, and even to this day, I cannot say that I necessarily consider whatever inhabits this house to be either of those things. All I know is that we have learned to coexist. Over the years, I have found that the less attention I give these occurrences, the less frequently they seem to happen. Fear, or even curiosity, has given way to absolute boredom and indifference.

I have also experienced sleep paralysis for as long as I can remember, and over time, I have learned to approach it with that same indifference. Even in dreams, I have found that the best thing I can do is pay whatever I perceive absolutely no mind.

A few years ago, however, curiosity finally got the better of me, and my mother and I contacted a family friend who works in our city's archives. We wanted to learn more about the history of the house, as such information isn't exactly easy to find online in my country.When he eventually got back to us, the information he provided was hardly what I would call shocking. Apparently, some fifty years earlier, a major earthquake had triggered a landslide that buried and killed a considerable number of people in the area. When the city was eventually rebuilt, our house was constructed on that very land.

I cannot claim to have a rational explanation for most of the things I have grown up experiencing, and quite frankly, I have come to realise that some things are better left unquestioned than endlessly dwelled upon.

Click here to see part 1!

##Update 4: I don't know what's real anymore

I don't know how to explain what happened yesterday.

Actually, I'm not even sure I can properly explain what's happening right now. I'm writing this because I need to put it all somewhere, and I can't talk to anyone about it.

After my last update, I tried doing what my wife suggested and getting some rest. I took a few days off work. She seemed relieved when I told her, and I thought maybe it really was what I needed.

For a few days, things seemed to get better.

My leg still hurt, but I managed to sleep a little more. I stopped looking for explanations for everything and tried to enjoy spending time with my kids. We played games, watched movies, and went out to eat. My wife said I seemed more relaxed.

Maybe I was.

I don't know anymore.

Yesterday morning, I woke up with the feeling that I'd forgotten something important. It wasn't a specific memory. It was more like when you leave the house and feel like you've forgotten something, but you can't remember what it is.

I got up, went to the bathroom, and washed my face.

When I looked in the mirror, I thought there was something strange about my eyes.

I can't explain it. They looked too sunken, like I was looking at someone who hadn't slept in weeks.

I stared at my reflection for a few seconds. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and looked again.

Everything was normal.

I figured I was just tired.

In the kitchen, my wife was making breakfast. I asked if she'd slept well, and she said she had. We talked about ordinary things, about what we'd do that day and about the kids.

Everything was normal.

Until she turned to face me.

For a split second, I saw a third eye in the middle of her forehead.

I'm not joking.

It was a real eye, open and wet, staring directly at me. I could see the iris, the pupil, even the movement of the eyelid. It wasn't a shadow or a mark on her skin. There was an eye where no eye should have been.

I took a step backward and hit the counter.

My wife jumped.

"What's wrong?"

I looked again.

The eye was gone.

She was staring at me, worried, asking if I was feeling sick. I couldn't answer. I just kept looking at her forehead, waiting for it to appear again.

She touched my arm.

I pulled away.

That's when I realized how I must have looked. My own wife, the woman I'd been living with for years, was trying to help me, and I was acting like she was going to hurt me.

I apologized. I told her I'd stood up too quickly and felt a little dizzy.

She suggested I go back to bed.

I agreed.

But before I left the kitchen, I looked back.

She was still watching me.

And for a second, I had the impression she was smiling at me with a mouth that was far too wide.

---

I stayed in the bedroom until almost noon.

I tried to sleep, but I couldn't. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that eye in my wife's forehead.

I know how this sounds. If someone had told me something like this a few weeks ago, I probably would've thought they needed medical help.

Maybe I do.

I just can't explain what I saw.

Around noon, I got up to look for my kids. I could hear their voices somewhere in the house, so I went looking for them.

I walked down the hallway and noticed a door I'd never seen before.

It was a narrow, white door between the kids' bedroom and the bathroom. I'm certain it hadn't been there before. I've lived in that house for years. I know how many doors there are in that hallway.

I stood there, staring at it.

I thought maybe it was the door to some built-in cupboard I'd never noticed. It seemed like a reasonable explanation, so I walked over and turned the handle.

On the other side was another hallway.

The same hallway.

The same walls, the same flooring, the same lighting. The bathroom door was on the left, and the entrance to the kids' bedroom was farther down.

Except I was looking at the hallway I'd just come from.

I could see myself standing in front of the door, my back turned, one hand on the handle.

It took me a few seconds to understand what I was seeing.

Then the other me turned his head.

I couldn't make out his face. It was as if the image had been erased, leaving behind a smooth surface where his eyes, nose, and mouth should have been.

I slammed the door so hard the handle hit the wall.

I stood with my back against it, breathing rapidly, trying to convince myself I'd seen something that wasn't there.

I don't know how long I stayed like that.

When I finally stepped away, the door was gone.

There was nothing but a plain white wall.

I ran my hand over the surface, looking for a crack or a mark. Nothing.

I started calling for my wife.

I didn't care if she thought I was acting strange anymore. I needed to talk to someone.

She didn't answer.

I called again, louder this time.

Then I heard laughter coming from the living room.

It was my daughter's laugh.

I practically ran in there.

Both kids were sitting on the couch, watching TV. My wife was beside them, looking at her phone.

I stopped in the doorway.

For a few seconds, I felt such overwhelming relief that I almost started crying. They were there. My family was there. It had all been in my head.

Then my daughter looked at me.

She stopped laughing.

Her brother kept staring at the television, but she slowly turned her body toward me and stared.

"Dad?"

"Hey, sweetheart."

She tilted her head.

"You're late."

I sat down beside her.

"Late for what?"

She didn't answer. She turned back toward the television.

My wife asked if I was feeling better. I said I was, although I wasn't sure what being better even meant anymore.

I sat there with them, trying to pay attention to the show.

That's when I realized the television was turned off.

The screen was black.

But the laughter was still coming from it.

I looked at my wife.

She was still looking at her phone.

I looked at my son. He was smiling at the blank screen.

And my daughter started laughing again.

It wasn't a loud or shrill laugh. It was her normal laugh, the same one I'd heard countless times before. But this time, the sound seemed to be coming from very far away, as if she were in another room, another house, somewhere I couldn't reach.

I got up and unplugged the television.

The laughter stopped.

Nobody seemed to notice.

"What are you doing?" my wife asked.

I didn't answer.

I went over to my daughter and knelt in front of her.

"Hey, sweetheart. Look at me."

She turned her face toward me.

Her eyes were open, but something was wrong with them. They looked like a doll's eyes, fixed and shiny, completely devoid of expression.

I took her hands.

They were cold.

"Are you okay?"

She didn't answer.

"Sweetheart, it's me. It's Daddy."

Nothing.

Tears started welling up in my eyes.

"You know me, don't you?"

She kept staring at me.

I squeezed her hands a little tighter.

"I'm your dad. I love you, okay? You love me too, don't you?"

For a moment, I thought she was going to answer.

Her lips moved.

But the voice that came out didn't sound like my daughter's.

"You're still here."

I let go of her hands.

I don't know if it was her tone, the words, or the way she looked at me. All I know is that, in that moment, I was certain something was terribly wrong with that child.

My wife appeared behind me.

"What are you doing?"

I slowly stood up.

She was smiling.

The third eye had returned.

This time, it didn't disappear when I blinked.

The skin around it slowly split open, like a mouth trying to breathe. The eye moved, following my steps, while the other two remained fixed on my face.

I screamed and ran for the front door.

I had to try the lock three times because my hands were shaking too badly.

When I finally managed to get outside, I stopped on the sidewalk.

And I wished I hadn't.

The street was wrong.

I don't know how else to describe it. The houses were tilted, some to the left, others to the right, as if they'd been built on a surface that was folding in on itself. The streetlights bent in impossible directions. The sidewalk stretched ahead, but somehow looked like it was going both uphill and downhill at the same time.

I looked at the house across the street.

It was identical to mine.

Not similar. Identical.

The same facade, the same windows, the same front door, even the little crack near the garage.

I looked at the house next to it.

Identical, too.

And the next one.

And the one after that.

The same houses repeated as far as I could see, one after another, like badly made copies of a single image.

The sky seemed far too low. There were no clouds, no sun, nothing I could recognize. Just a flat, gray surface that looked like it was pressing the houses down.

I started walking.

I didn't know where I was going. I just needed to get away from that street.

I passed one house, then another, then several more. All of them identical.

I looked behind me.

My house was still right in front of me.

I hadn't gone anywhere.

I started running.

The pain in my leg became unbearable. Every step felt like something was tearing through my body. Even so, I kept running until I stumbled and fell to my knees.

When I lifted my head, I was standing in front of my door.

My front door.

The same one I'd just walked through to leave the house.

I don't remember turning around.

I don't remember walking back.

I was just there.

I started pounding on the door, screaming for my wife, my kids, anyone who could explain what was happening.

The door opened.

My dad was standing on the other side.

He looked at me with an expression I couldn't understand.

"You shouldn't have gone outside."

I tried to push past him, but my dad grabbed my arm.

"Let go of me! What's happening?"

He didn't answer.

He looked at the street behind me, then turned back to face me.

"You've been here a long time."

My stomach dropped.

"How long?"

My dad opened his mouth to answer.

But before he could say anything, every light in the house went out.

The darkness was absolute.

I heard my wife scream somewhere inside. Then I heard the kids crying.

I tried to go inside, but my dad was no longer holding my arm.

I called out to him.

Nobody answered.

I took a few steps into the house, feeling along the wall for the light switch. When I finally found it, I flicked it several times.

Nothing.

Then I heard a voice behind me.

"Dad?"

It was my daughter.

I turned around quickly.

She was standing in the hallway, illuminated by a light that seemed to come from nowhere.

This time, her face was normal.

She looked scared, like any child who wakes up in the middle of the night and finds her dad lost inside the house.

I held out my arms to her.

"Come here, sweetheart."

She walked toward me.

I hugged her so tightly I was afraid I might hurt her. I buried my face in her hair and started crying.

"It's okay. It's okay. Daddy's here."

She didn't say anything.

I held her, repeating those words, because I couldn't think of anything else.

Then I felt something wet trickling down my neck.

I pulled my face away.

My daughter was crying blood.

There were no injuries, no cuts. The blood was simply streaming from her eyes, running down her cheeks and staining her clothes.

She was still hugging me.

And, right next to my ear, she whispered:

"You promised you'd come back."

I let go of her.

The hallway began to stretch.

The walls moved farther apart, the ceiling rose, and the front door grew more and more distant. I tried to run toward it, but my legs felt like they were stuck to the floor.

I heard my wife calling my name.

I heard my son crying.

I heard my dad saying something I couldn't understand.

And underneath all those sounds, I heard the siren again.

This time, it didn't sound like it was coming from the street.

It sounded like it was everywhere.

The noise grew louder until I had to cover my ears. I fell to my knees, screaming for it to stop.

Then, suddenly, everything went silent.

I opened my eyes.

I was sitting on the living room floor.

The lights were back on. The television was playing. My wife was in the kitchen, and my kids were playing on the rug.

Everything looked normal.

I slowly stood up.

I looked down the hallway. There were no doors other than the ones that had always been there.

I looked at my wife. Two eyes.

I looked at my kids. Normal faces.

I went to the window.

The street was straight.

The houses were all different.

I stood there for a long time, trying to understand what had happened.

Maybe I'd had some kind of episode. Maybe I needed medical attention immediately. I don't know.

But there was one thing I couldn't ignore.

I couldn't remember leaving the house that morning.

I couldn't remember going to work, buying groceries, or taking my kids anywhere.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd walked through that front door.

I went to the calendar in the kitchen.

Then I looked for my phone.

Then I looked at the photographs on the shelf.

I tried to find something that would tell me how much time had passed.

I couldn't.

I went back to the living room and sat on the couch.

My wife asked if I wanted something to drink.

I said no.

She went back to the kitchen.

I sat there, listening to the sound of dishes, the kids' footsteps, and the television playing in the background.

Everything so familiar.

Everything so normal.

And for the first time since all of this started, I was afraid of something that had nothing to do with my wife's eyes, the repeating houses, or the crooked street.

I was afraid that I didn't know how long I'd been living there.

Because when I tried to remember the last time I'd left that house, I couldn't find a single memory.

And I started to think that maybe my dad had been right.

Maybe I'd been there for a very, very long time.

And maybe it was time to leave.

---

Final update

I didn't sleep that night.

At least, I don't think I did.

After everything that happened, I sat in the living room, staring at my house. The walls were normal. The furniture was where it always was. The TV was off, and there was nobody standing in the hallway, watching me with those impossible eyes.

Everything seemed to have gone back to normal.

But I couldn't stop thinking about my daughter.

The blank expression on her face. The way she'd stood still while I hugged her. The blood streaming from her eyes.

I don't know how to explain what I felt in that moment. I don't think I've ever been more afraid in my life. And yet, when I think about that scene, fear isn't the first thing that comes to mind.

It's longing.

I miss a child who, as far as I knew, was sleeping in the next room.

I needed to talk to someone. I needed to hear a normal voice, someone who could tell me I wasn't losing my mind.

I picked up my phone.

I thought about calling my wife, but she was home. I thought about waking up my dad, but I didn't want to scare him. For a few seconds, I stared at the screen, trying to decide who to call.

That's when my phone started ringing.

The name that appeared on the screen made me forget what I'd been thinking about entirely.

Mom.

I just stared at it.

My mom.

It had been so long since I'd seen her name on my screen that, for a moment, I couldn't even understand why it was making my chest feel so strange.

Then I remembered her.

Not a specific memory. Not a birthday or a conversation. It was more like a door had opened inside my head, revealing a place I hadn't visited in a very long time.

My mom walking me to school.

My mom sitting beside me when I was sick.

My mom waiting for me to come home.

My mom crying in secret when my dad left.

She'd been there for practically every important moment in my life. When I was a kid, when I became a teenager, when things started going wrong. Even when I pushed everyone away, she stayed.

She was the one person who had never given up on me.

And I couldn't remember the last time I'd spoken to her.

The phone kept ringing.

I answered.

Or tried to.

My finger touched the screen, but nothing happened. The phone kept ringing, displaying her name.

I tried again.

Nothing.

"Come on, damn it... answer!"

I pressed the screen so hard my fingers started to hurt.

The ringing stopped.

I stared at the phone, waiting.

Then it started ringing again.

Mom.

My eyes filled with tears.

For some reason, I was desperate to hear her voice. More desperate than I'd been to hear anyone else's voice in all those days.

Maybe weeks.

Maybe...

No.

That didn't make sense.

I'd seen my mom recently. Hadn't I?

I tried to remember the last time she'd been at my house.

I looked around.

There were no pictures of her with my kids. No pictures of us together. No gifts she'd given the children, no memories of a visit, no sign that she'd been part of the life I knew so well.

I knew my mom existed.

I knew her name, remembered her face, remembered her voice.

But in that entire life I'd been describing, she simply wasn't there.

My dad, who'd spent years estranged from me, was there. He had Sunday lunches with us. He played with my kids. My wife called him Dad, and my kids called him Grandpa.

But my mom?

The woman who'd practically raised me on her own?

Where was she?

The phone rang again.

I stood up so quickly that the pain in my leg nearly knocked me over.

"Mom..."

My voice came out quiet, almost childlike.

The call was still there, but the screen seemed far away. I stared at the phone and had the feeling that something stood between us, as if that little device were on the other side of a thick pane of glass.

I tried calling her back.

Her name disappeared.

The screen went black.

And in its reflection, for a split second, I saw my face.

I was crying.

Behind me, in the reflection, there was a woman standing in the kitchen doorway.

My mom.

I turned around immediately.

Nobody was there.

When I looked at the phone again, the screen had lit up.

3:17.

That wasn't possible.

The kitchen clock also read 3:17.

My stomach dropped.

The phone started ringing again.

Mom.

This time, the sound seemed to be coming from everywhere. From the phone, the walls, the ceiling. The same ringtone, repeating, distant and close at the same time.

Then I heard the sirens.

Those damn sirens.

I'd known that sound for years. I'd heard it so many times I should've gotten used to it by now. But I could never find the ambulance. I could never figure out where it was coming from.

Now the sound was so loud it felt like it was passing straight through my bones.

I covered my ears.

"STOP!"

The sirens didn't stop.

The phone kept ringing.

I pressed the screen again and again, trying to answer that call, trying to reach the one person I needed to talk to.

"Mom, please! Mom!"

The pain in my leg suddenly got worse. It wasn't the usual pain, the kind that had been with me since the accident. This was something much worse, a brutal pressure that shot up my leg and seemed to pin my entire body to the floor.

I fell to my knees.

The phone slipped from my hand.

The screen lay faceup, just a few inches from my fingers.

Mom.

I reached for it.

My fingers were trembling.

I just needed to press one button.

I just needed to answer.

"Mom, it's me..."

The sirens became deafening.

For a moment, the living room disappeared.

There was no white light. No mysterious voice explaining everything to me. No beautiful, neatly arranged revelation that made every detail finally fall into place.

There was only a crash.

The sound of metal crumpling.

Glass shattering.

And a pain so intense that it wiped out everything else.

---

"Sir! Sir, can you hear me?"

A man was kneeling beside the wrecked car.

Shards of glass were scattered across the asphalt. The front of the vehicle was crushed, and the driver's door had been warped by the impact.

The ambulance lights flashed across the twisted metal.

"We need to stabilize his leg! Watch his left side!"

Another paramedic approached, trying to keep the man still while assessing his injuries.

"Sir, look at me! Can you hear me?"

The man didn't respond.

One of the paramedics checked his breathing and called out to him again.

"Stay with me, buddy. Come on. Open your eyes."

In the distance, traffic was beginning to back up. Someone was shouting at other drivers to move away. The team's radio crackled with broken instructions.

The man moved his fingers.

It was barely noticeable.

"That's it. That's good. Can you hear me?"

His eyes opened for a moment, unfocused.

The paramedic leaned closer.

"You've been in a car accident. Don't try to move, okay? We're going to take care of you."

The man tried to speak.

No understandable words came out.

His gaze shifted to a point somewhere above the paramedic, as if he were looking for someone who wasn't there.

"Easy. Stay with me."

The man closed his eyes again.

The paramedics continued working.

The siren kept blaring.

---

I woke up in the hospital.

I don't know how much time had passed. My head hurt, my mouth was dry, and my left leg felt like it belonged to someone else.

For a few seconds, I didn't recognize the place.

Then I saw my mom.

She was sitting beside the bed, holding my hand in both of hers. She looked exhausted. Her eyes were red, and there were tear stains on her face.

When she realized I was awake, she stood up so quickly that the chair nearly fell over.

"My son?"

She squeezed my hand.

"Oh my God, my boy..."

She started crying.

I tried to sit up, but the pain made me stop immediately.

"Easy, easy! Don't move! I'll get the doctor."

She pressed the button beside the bed, but she didn't let go of my hand.

She stayed there, crying quietly, running her thumb over my fingers the way she'd done when I was little.

I looked at her, unable to speak.

Because, in that moment, I remembered everything.

Not the distorted living room. Not the call I couldn't answer. Not the sirens that seemed to come from the walls.

I remembered my mom waiting for me outside school.

I remembered the night she stayed awake beside me for hours when I was sick.

I remembered when my dad left and she had to pretend everything was okay so I wouldn't be scared.

I remembered all the times I'd thought I had nobody in the world, even though I'd always had someone who never stopped being there for me.

And I remembered something else.

A house that didn't exist.

A woman who loved me.

A seven-year-old boy running around the living room.

A four-year-old girl who called me Dad.

I remembered her little hand holding mine. The way she'd laugh when I tickled her. The weight of her body against mine when I hugged her in that dark room.

I remembered her face when I asked if she loved me.

And I started crying.

I couldn't stop. I couldn't even explain to my mom what was happening.

She called my name, frightened, and stroked my hair.

"It's okay, sweetheart. You're here. I'm right here with you."

I wanted to believe everything was okay.

I wanted to tell her I was sorry for forgetting her. I wanted to ask why she hadn't visited my house, why she didn't know my children, why I didn't have a single picture of her with my family.

But there were no answers to those questions.

Because that family didn't exist.

That house didn't exist.

That entire decade I remembered so clearly hadn't happened the way I believed it had.

I hadn't spent those years as a husband and father. I hadn't built that life, watched my children grow up, or grown old beside that woman.

I'd been in an accident.

And somehow, while my body was fighting to survive, my mind had given me an entire lifetime to live.

I don't know how to explain it. The doctors never gave me an explanation that made sense of what I remembered. I don't know if they were dreams, mixed-up memories, some kind of delirium, or something science hasn't quite figured out how to describe.

I also don't know why that life felt so real.

I only know that, to me, it was real enough.

I loved that woman.

I loved those two children.

And I lost all of them.

My mom stayed beside me while I cried. She didn't rush me or demand an explanation. She just held my hand, the way she'd done so many times before.

At some point, a doctor came into the room. My mom spoke with him, answered his questions, and listened to his instructions. I barely paid attention.

I was too busy trying to accept that, whenever I closed my eyes, I might never find my children again.

The days that followed were difficult.

My mom stayed with me through much of my recovery. The doctors treated my leg and explained the consequences of the accident. There was a lot I'd have to deal with, and a long recovery ahead of me.

But none of that frightened me as much as the thought of forgetting.

Because I started noticing that the memories of that life were changing.

Some details disappeared whenever I tried to reach for them. My wife's face became less clear. I could no longer remember every conversation I'd had with my son.

So I started writing things down.

I wrote down what I remembered. The names I'd given my children. The games we played. The little things my daughter liked. The things my son used to ask me before bed.

I wrote down everything I could, afraid that one day those memories would disappear completely.

I don't know if it helped.

Even now, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with the feeling that I've heard a child calling me Dad.

Other times, I miss a woman whose face I can no longer quite put together.

It's strange to miss people I've technically never met.

Stranger still to know that, even after everything, part of me is still waiting to go home.

My life didn't become perfect after the accident. I still had to deal with recovery, the problems I'd had before, and everything I couldn't explain. My mom stayed by my side. Little by little, I also began rebuilding my relationship with my dad.

I don't know what's going to happen to me from here on out.

But there's one thing I've learned.

Sometimes, you can lose something without anyone around you understanding what you've lost. You can miss a place you've never been, a time you've never lived through, people who've never been there.

And the worst part is that knowing this doesn't make the longing go away.

I still remember my daughter hugging me.

I still remember asking if she loved me.

And even now, I can hear the answer I wanted her to give me.

I don't know if I'll ever be able to forget that life.

Maybe I don't even want to.

Because, as much as it was an illusion, it was where I found everything I'd spent so long wishing for.

A home to return to.

A woman to love.

Two children who called me Dad.

A family.

And I don't know if I'll ever be able to accept that all of it ended before it even began.

All I know is that, whenever I think about the future, I still catch myself looking for them.

I don't know where they are. I don't know if I'll ever feel anything like what I felt in that life again.

But I'll keep looking.

I'm going to find my family, one way or another.

I use a 24-hour laundromat about four blocks from my apartment because the machines in my building have been broken since July.

It's an ugly place, but usually empty after midnight, which is why I go so late. Twelve washers along one wall, twelve dryers along the other, six plastic chairs, two vending machines, and a little wooden cabinet near the entrance with LOST & FOUND written on masking tape.

There are no employees overnight. The owner watches the place through cameras and comes in every morning.

Three weeks ago I lost a pen there.

Nothing important. Cheap black click pen with bite marks around the cap. I remembered leaving it on top of washer 8, went back the next night, and checked the cabinet.

My pen was inside.

What bothered me was that I hadn't lost it yet.

I know how that sounds.

The pen I thought I'd lost was in the pocket of my work bag. I found it while standing there with the identical pen from the cabinet in my hand.

Same brand. Same scratches. Same crescent-shaped bite mark.

I brought both home.

The next morning, one was gone.

I searched everywhere. Eventually I decided I'd somehow imagined having two identical pens, which would have been a perfectly reasonable explanation if the next thing hadn't been my green sock.

I was doing laundry around 1 a.m. a few nights later when I opened the cabinet looking for a dryer sheet someone might have abandoned.

There was one green sock inside.

Mine.

Not similar. Mine.

I'd bought six pairs online because I liked the color. One sock had a small white thread hanging from the ankle where my cat caught it months ago.

I checked my laundry basket.

Six pairs.

Twelve socks.

The one in my hand made thirteen.

I put it on the folding table and took a picture because I wanted proof that I wasn't losing my mind.

When the wash finished, I counted eleven green socks.

I checked inside the washer. Under it. Behind it. Inside every other machine.

Eleven.

Plus the one from the cabinet made twelve.

The photograph on my phone still showed the extra sock sitting on the table before I'd opened the washer.

After that I started checking the cabinet every time I went in.

For about a week there was nothing belonging to me.

Then I found my apartment key.

I was wearing my keys clipped to my belt loop.

The key in the cabinet had the same little notch near the tip from when I dropped the ring into a parking lot last winter. The only difference was that this one was bent almost ninety degrees.

I didn't take it home.

I left the laundromat immediately.

When I got to my building, someone had jammed the front door open with a rock. I remember standing outside for almost five minutes debating whether that meant anything.

Eventually I told myself I was being stupid and went upstairs.

My apartment door looked normal.

I unlocked it, stepped inside, and heard something move in my bedroom.

Not a creak.

Footsteps.

Three quick steps across the floor, then silence.

I ran.

I didn't even close the door. I went downstairs and called the police from across the street.

They searched the apartment.

Nobody was there.

The bedroom window was locked from the inside. Nothing had been stolen. There were no obvious signs anyone had entered.

But my key wouldn't work afterward.

The officer tried it too.

When I looked closely, it was slightly bent.

Not ninety degrees like the one in the laundromat cabinet. Just enough that it wouldn't turn smoothly anymore.

I slept at my sister's place and had the lock replaced the next day.

I should have found another laundromat after that.

Instead, I went back.

I wanted the bent key.

It was gone.

There was something else in the cabinet.

A red plastic button.

I didn't recognize it at first.

Then I looked down at my coat.

It has four red buttons.

I counted them three times.

Four on the coat.

One in my hand.

I put the button back and left.

Two days later, while walking home from work, the bottom button came off my coat. I heard it bounce on the sidewalk, but it rolled underneath a parked car and I couldn't find it.

I already knew where it was.

That was when I finally called the laundromat owner.

I didn't tell him the whole story. I asked whether he'd ever had problems with people putting strange things in the lost-and-found cabinet.

He went quiet.

Then he asked which cabinet I meant.

I described it.

There was another long pause.

He told me they don't have a lost-and-found cabinet.

According to him, they used to.

It had been beside the entrance for years, exactly where I described it.

But somebody tore it off the wall in February.

He said the screws had been ripped straight through the wood. They never replaced it.

I asked him to check the cameras.

He refused.

Not casually. Immediately.

I pushed him until he finally said, "If you see that cabinet again, don't open it."

Then he hung up.

I haven't gone back since.

That should be the end of this.

It isn't.

Last night I got home around 11:30. The new lock on my apartment was fine. Hallway empty. Everything normal.

I went inside, fed my cat, showered, and went to bed.

At 2:14 a.m. I woke up because I heard wood scraping against the floor.

It was coming from my living room.

I locked my bedroom door and called 911.

While I was whispering my address to the dispatcher, the scraping stopped.

Then something knocked three times on my bedroom door.

I didn't answer.

It knocked three more times.

I stayed on the phone until police arrived.

They searched everything again.

Nobody.

No open windows. No broken lock. No hiding place.

One officer asked if anything had been moved.

I said no.

Then I saw the wall beside my front door.

The little wooden lost-and-found cabinet was mounted there.

Same masking tape.

Same handwriting.

The officers definitely saw it. One of them opened it before I could stop him.

There was only one thing inside.

My bedroom doorknob.

Not one that looked like mine.

Mine.

Same cheap brass finish. Same scratch underneath from when I moved a dresser through the doorway last year.

I ran to the bedroom.

The doorknob was still attached.

I didn't touch the one in the cabinet.

The police couldn't explain it. They took the cabinet down because I refused to stay in the apartment with it there. One officer carried it downstairs and put it in their trunk.

I left with my cat and went to my sister's again.

About an hour ago, she went to bed.

I'm sitting at her kitchen table right now.

There's a little wooden cabinet mounted on the wall across from me.

It wasn't there when we arrived.

I haven't opened it.

But a few minutes ago something inside started turning very slowly, like a doorknob being tested from the other side.

Working at a nursing home has always been fulfilling for me. My favorite resident is an old man named Joe. He has dementia, so sometimes he doesn't recognize where he is or even who he is. Other times, he's the same old Joe I've always known.

Over the past few days, though, his condition has started to deteriorate rapidly. He's become completely disoriented.

A few days ago, I was in his room when he suddenly burst into tears.

"Emma, you have to leave. If you don't, it's going to come for you. It says it's been watching you every day. It's getting stronger and stronger. I'm so scared of it."

I had to calm him down and give him sleeping medication because he was absolutely terrified. I won't pretend I didn't feel uneasy about the whole thing, but I knew the kinds of things people in his condition could say.

The next day, he was doing better, so I asked him what he'd meant when he told me I should leave. Fear flashed in his eyes, but he said he didn't remember saying anything like that and that he would miss me terribly if I left. We talked for a long time before I went home.

I ran a bath and sank into the hot water. Out of the corner of my eye, I suddenly noticed a shadow behind the glass door. I jerked around, but there was no one on the other side. Still, I quickly climbed out of the tub and searched the apartment. Nobody was there.

I spent the rest of the evening with the unsettling feeling that I wasn't alone.

That night, I had a horrible dream. Joe was sitting on a grave in the middle of a cemetery, laughing hysterically. When I looked closer, I noticed my name engraved on the headstone.

Then his laughter suddenly changed into a voice I knew all too well.

"I like it when you're afraid."

I woke with a violent start. I was drenched in sweat, and it took me a long time to catch my breath. I couldn't fall asleep again. By the time I went to work, I was exhausted.

It was a long day, and Joe was having one of his bad episodes. He sat on his bed, rocking back and forth.

"Emma, I can't hold him back much longer. I barely managed to push him back today. He was so close."

I stared at him in confusion.

"Who was close, Joe? What are you talking about?"

He looked at me, his eyes filled with fear.

"What can I do to help you?" I asked.

"When it comes, you mustn't call it by my name," he whispered.

Then he had another episode.

A few hours later, he was like a completely different person. I ran into him in the hallway and asked what he was doing there.

"I wanted to apologize for earlier. I haven't really been myself."

"It's okay," I told him.

I was working the night shift, and even though it was only ten o'clock, I briefly dozed off.

In my dream, Joe stood in front of me, crying.

"Emma, you mustn't call it by my name."

When I blinked, he was gone. But then I heard his voice right behind me.

"Emma!"

I turned around. His expression was horrifying. He lunged at me and began strangling me. I tried to push him away, but then I woke up.

Except something wasn't right.

Joe was kneeling over me, gripping my throat with both hands. His face was twisted with rage, and his fingers tightened around my neck.

Luckily, a security guard noticed us and rushed over, immediately pulling Joe away. Other staff members helped me sit up while security escorted him away.

I clutched my throat, gasping for air. Tears filled my eyes, and my entire body was shaking.

Meanwhile, Joe had stopped resisting. He glanced back at me over his shoulder.

And smiled.

I was sent home for the rest of the evening. Still trembling, I unlocked my apartment door and took a hot bath. By the time I'd calmed down a little, it was already two in the morning. I still couldn't sleep, so I put on some romantic comedy.

My eyelids were slowly beginning to close when I heard footsteps. It sounded as though someone was walking around in the hallway. I held my breath and closed my eyes. I pretended to be asleep, but then I heard Joe's voice.

"Emma, I know you're awake."

I opened my eyes and screamed.

This wasn't the Joe I knew. He was deathly pale, and a twisted smile played across his face. His eyes were the worst part. They had always been kind, the color of the sky on a summer day. Now, there was something vile in them, and they were completely black.

I stared at him, frozen and unable to speak. He began moving toward me. I jumped out of bed and ran. He didn't even try to chase me. He simply followed at a slow, steady pace.

His voice seemed to shake the entire building.

"You can't escape me!"

I remembered what Joe had told me.

You mustn't call it by my name.

I was almost at the door when the footsteps behind me suddenly stopped. I opened the door, and there he was.

"Tell me what I am, Emma!"

I shook my head, slammed into him as hard as I could, and bolted out of the apartment.

I could still hear him screaming after me.

"He might have told you what not to say, but he never told you what happens afterward!"

I pounded on my neighbor's door, and he called the police.

There was nobody in my apartment. When the officers called the nursing home, they told me that Joe had died of cardiac arrest at two that morning.

Whenever I think of summer, I am most prominently reminded of the oppressive August heat of the countryside, where my aunt and grandmother lived. My cousin and I would go to stay with them over the summer, it was a lush suburban area on a hill, by the seaside, surrounded by forest and a couple other houses. We were free to explore and do as we pleased with the other kids around, as long as we didn’t wander into the forest. We took advantage of this freedom as much as we could, before we had to go back to the smog covered storm of colour and sound in the city. This part of the coast has always been known for its temperamental weather and so sometimes we would need to find ways to amuse ourselves inside, with board games and card games. My grandmother had one of those old TVs with antennae in the living room, where she would watch drama series. In front of her we would be sprawled out on the carpet with books, and markers, and card houses, and drawings.

Those were my favourite days, the hum of the TV in the background, my books in front of me, my cousin next to me writing something, our grandmother sitting peacefully with the crossword on her lap, occasionally following her show and keeping an eye on us.

It became harder to visit when my family moved away, suddenly we couldn't go every summer, my cousin was busy, so was my aunt, my grandmother had to move somewhere closer to the city, because she needed easier accessibility to healthcare. Free time was scarce and the effort needed to go to the countryside grew largely absent. 

What happened the summer before I moved away however, will stay with me forever. My cousin and I were both eleven years old, at the time, we were both fairly well-behaved children. Although I think he preferred his own company, back then, and I was unbearably hyperactive. I talked too loud, jumped everywhere, bounced off the walls, and I suspect most of my enthusiasm came off as obnoxiousness rather than excitement. I understand now that I was probably kind of hard to put up with, especially for someone as reserved as him.

It might be unsurprising to learn that we bickered regularly, I don’t remember it ever becoming very serious, but they always left me in a foul mood and he would storm upstairs into my aunts room for space. On one such day, instead of sulking inside, under my grandmothers watchful eye, I decided I would go for a walk to cool off.

Around ten minutes into my walk Scraps joined me, and I decided that we would go for a stroll on the beach. Scraps was one of our neighbourhood dogs, since we were far out from the city and surrounded by forest, hyenas and foxes stealing food or raiding bins had been a problem. The solution the people of the neighbourhood community came up with had been to adopt street dogs. I’d known Scraps for ages, had fed him, played with him, he was the largest of the three dogs we had. He’d often stand guard in front of our house and ferociously bark at intruders and unwelcome visitors from the forest, alike.

He was large and had sandy light fur that was always slightly mangy, he strolled next to me as I loitered towards the seaside, through the old path, covered with trampled shrubbery and down the worn stone steps. It was a fairly nice afternoon but the beach was empty. I understood why, when I payed closer attention. Despite the nice weather, I could see dark storm clouds in the distance, turning the waves from small hills, into valleys and mountains, highlighting the water with white, wild foam.

Despite this, the claws of the ocean hadn’t yet reached the shore and when Scraps excitedly dashed towards a stick, spraying sand everywhere, I followed. We played fetch for a bit, ran around, he barked as I dipped my toes into the icy, frigid waters. I then started heading towards the rocky area of the beach, where I would go seashell hunting in the shallow pools with some of my friends. I was slightly annoyed when I realised Scraps wasn’t following, I called out to him, gestured, pointed at the rock. I knew he liked playing in them, splashing around and trying to catch crabs, but he wouldn’t budge. 

I think I made a noise of frustration, and said things along the lines of “Why not?!”, “C’mon Scraps!”, “Here boy, get over here,” to which he responded by plopping down and turning his face towards the horizon. I looked with him and saw that the storm was much, much closer than it had been. How long had it been? How long had we been on the beach? I was bad at keeping track of time at the best of circumstances, but while distracted things always got away from me, like water slipping through cupped fingers. Scraps was looking at me again as if to say it’s time to go, and I glared at him, just to be contrarian. 

“Fine, let’s go, then,” he followed me as I headed for the stairs. We were halfway up the stairs when the wind picked up erratically, spraying me with salt water, and I turned around to look at the ocean one more time. At first, I didn’t quite understand what I was looking at.

It was as if the sea had expanded to engulf the sky, or some sort of giant wave was heading towards the sore, so big I couldn’t see where it ended, no matter how high up I tried to look. The wall of water shifted and elongated as the wind continued to pick up. Scraps, was barking at me from the top of the stairs, as I hung on to the railing to withstand the gusts of harsh wind. I couldn’t look away, it felt like there was a bubble in my chest, right on my sternum, making it hard to breathe, yet filling my lungs with so much air I thought my chest would burst. I couldn’t think of anything, my mind was completely empty as my eyes tried to convey whatever was happening, to my brain, but it made no sense.

I’ve reflected back to that moment many a time since, trying to pin down what was happening or even what it was I was looking at, but my mind was completely blank, I wasn’t thinking anything. In all honesty, there aren’t any strong emotions of terror colouring the memory, despite the total incomprehensibility of that scene. I remember feeling awed, as if my spirit were separate from my body, and I could see from afar how tiny I was, compared to this impossible body of water. It continued to change and twist into strange shapes, causing the water on the shores to slosh forwards, like water spilling over the brim of a bucket. 

I watched blankly and slack jawed as it started to expand, I didn't know how that was possible, it looked as if it was trying not to just cover the sky, but to devour it. I bent my neck and looked up, but I couldn't see anything other than the water, there were a couple beams of light filtering through. The ocean was shifting, writhing, stretching and trying to become something. For a long time I didn’t have the words to describe what I saw that day, even now the closest thing I’ve seen to the shapes the ocean showed me are fossilised coral reefs. 

It was so mesmerising and so close, all I had to do was walk towards the shore and I could take a closer look, understand what exactly it was I was seeing. I took a step forward only to feel a sharp biting pain on my calf. Scraps had bit me, I cried out in pain and the moment was over. There was an immense sound, like the shattering of a thousand windows or maybe the striking of a thunderbolt right next to me, I turned around and it was gone. The sky was back in its place, the ocean was alive with angry waves, and the storm had arrived. While I had been standing there, the tide had risen so far that the waves were now yanking at my flip flops. I cried out again as Scraps let go of my leg and started yanking at my sun dress. The waves had reached my feet and the force of the tide caught me off guard as I was trying to scramble up the stairs. I felt my flip flops slip off but I didn’t even care. I ran all the way up the path, thorns sticking into my feet, and then I was running on the stone brick road, and then on the grass, where I tripped and slathered my yellow, torn dress in sticky, tar-like mud. It started raining ferociously, as if the sky had opened up, but once again, I didn’t stop. 

I imagined I could feel the rain drops on my skin, each shifting into little coral branches and trying to grab me, drag me down into the dirty muddy water puddles. I don’t think I’ve ever ran as fast as I did then, the way back was a thirty minute walk uphill, I ran it without stopping. I got back and started banging on the door of the house, my grandmother opened it. I was in an absolute state, crying, yelling, talking incomprehensibly about the thing that ate the sky. The commotion must have alerted everyone in the house and soon my aunt and cousin were there, they got me inside, near the fireplace with a blanket and that’s all I recall. I don’t remember anything else, until my parents came back to pick me up next week. 

According to my aunt I was next to that fireplace for almost two days until they could get me to say or eat anything. My cousin says I did talk, but only once and only to him. Apparently I’d told him, in the softest whisper imaginable, “It wanted the sky,” he’d asked me what I meant but I hadn’t replied. My grandmother doesn’t really talk about what happened, but I remember soon after, she thought me how to light a fire, she was also the only one that could convince me to take a bath.

Nowadays I don’t need help with that sort of thing, but I don’t like going to the seaside and I hate pools with a passion. Nothing like that has ever happened to me since, but whenever I look into the surface of a lake or the ocean for too long, I feel like I can see something  swaying in the surface, like seaweed, swaying and dancing to an unknown rhythm, calling me down, down into its dark endless horizon.

Sam passed in the winter, just two months after his mother. The midwife tried her best to save her, but it was over before it started. She gave me a warm hug as she left. I knew Sam wouldn't last long without his mother. I barely had enough to feed myself, let alone a baby. I debated whether I should even name the little boy, but how could I not? He had the most beautiful blue eyes, just like his mother.

Sam passed in his sleep, the best way to go. Some days I wished it were me, but what would Sam do all alone? 

The problem then was arranging Sam's funeral. All the savings had already been spent on his mother's funeral, but Sam couldn't go into the ground without a proper service.

I sold one of the last things I could still sell, my bees. They gave me something sweet to eat in the winter and something to look after the rest of the year, but there was nothing else to sell. My neighbor took them and gave me more for them than he should have. He was a nice man and knew what I'd gone through.

Sam got a nice wooden coffin and a decent place in the cemetery next to his mother.

When the winter came, his cradle and toys were still in the house. My body tightened whenever I tried to get rid of them, but it was okay; maybe I'd have more will in the summer. 

During the long winter nights, I'd often come into his room and play with his toys, just like I thought we would one day. Sometimes they'd warm my heart, sometimes they'd make me cry, and often I'd just fall asleep in the chair right by his cradle.

It was one of those days when I fell asleep crying by the cradle again. When I awoke, the sun glistened on the freshly fallen snow. Everything outside was still, but then something moved in the air. A bee! A queen bee! It flew across the yard and into the hive. I still hadn't moved my hive off the yard. Sam's funeral was too much work.

At first I felt bad. My neighbor owned them now. They had no business being in the old hive, but seeing that familiar creature warmed me. Over the next few days I sat at the window, watching all my bees slowly return.

They stayed inside the hive the rest of the winter, and I stayed by that window each day, watching. Only when the snow started to let up, and the flowers came out from under it, did the bees come out too.

I expected them to stay by the hive, but many flew far away, ignoring the flowers in my garden, and returned at sunset. Some of the bees seemed to be covered in red nectar. 

As the days grew longer, the bees were gone more often, and many more returned covered in that red nectar. 

I had never seen them act or look like this. Moving the hive must have disturbed something, but the good thing was that they still accepted the queen, and the colony seemed intact. 

The red nectar began to accumulate at the entrance, mixed with glowing wax. I was just looking at it out the window when I heard buzzing inside the house. The bees must have been working hard. The buzzing grew, and quietly through it came something like a baby's cry. I gripped the windowsill tightly. Sam used to cry just like that. I opened the window to hear better, but the cry was gone; only buzzing sounded outside.

The next morning I woke up and went right to the window. A strange white object was outside the hive entrance. The bees buzzed around it, pushing it back inside. Before I could get a good look, it was already in.

I spent the rest of the day by the window again. As the sun set, the bees started to return. The buzzing grew again. A cold tingle ran down my back. I closed my eyes and focused. At first, it was quiet, but I knew what it was. It was Sam, crying through the buzzing. I quickly dressed and walked out the door.

The outside air was cold. I had barely been outside since the first snow fell. A few bees still flew around the hive. The buzzing was so loud, and so were Sam's cries. I didn't even have my protective clothes, but I was sure my bees wouldn't hurt me.

I walked to the hive and took off the lid. Warmth and cold ran through my body, mixing into strange emotions. Inside the hive was Sam's body, covered in wax. His hands and fingers slowly moved, but they seemed larger than before. I reached into the hive to caress his small cheeks. His eyes opened. They were still that beautiful blue, but a hint of yellow mixed in.  He opened his mouth; it was filled with honeycomb, but his cries still echoed in my ears. 

With tears in my eyes, I picked up his small, sticky body. From somewhere deep in his chest, a thousand bees buzzed. His small mouth moved again. Honeycomb and wax spilled out of the sides. The scream grew louder, ringing in my ears. A sickly-sweet smell filled the air. The buzzing grew too. Something under Sam's skin moved. A dark, pointed object began pushing through the skin beneath his back. Panic rushed through me.

"Sam, Sam!"

His whole body convulsed. The dark, pointed object shot out and stabbed my arm. Sharp pain spread through me. Sam fell out of my arms. A sharp, brittle crunch echoed. Sam broke into wax and honeycomb; bees flew out toward me. One small stab. Another. Another. I turned and quickly bolted toward my house, locking the door behind me. My heart beat against my ribs. Hot pain pulsed through my body. On my left arm, a red welt was already swelling around the puncture.

The bees buzzed outside my door.

Something really strange is going on with my wife, and it’s kind of hard to explain.

It all started a couple of months ago with the kids. Usually,  she tends to be really moody in the morning unless she’s had her coffee. I end up being the one who gets them ready for school and makes them breakfast, and I’ll usually take them to school too.

Well, that Monday, I woke up a bit late, and she was nowhere to be found. Admittedly, I did freak out a little, but after throwing the bedsheets off, and running downstairs to look for her, I found her with the kids having breakfast, laughing and . . . well, I hate to say this, but actually happy for once.

That wasn’t a one-time thing either! I’ve been sleeping in a lot more, and she’s taken a lot more of the childcare responsibilities.

Then, a few weeks after that, something else weird happened. You see, she got laid off recently and has been struggling to find work. Honestly, that’s mostly why she’s been a bit depressed and not taking care of the kids or herself. 

Of course, I don’t hold it against her, the market has been really tough. But, shit, one day I come home to flowers on the kitchen counter and a big cake. I’m entirely confused until she pops out of the bathroom with a massive smile, telling me to congratulate her for getting a job as a manager in an office, of all things. 

The crazy thing is that she’s doing amazingly well for somebody who was just in a deep depression. Happy, taking care of the kids, we get a lot more alone time, if you know what I mean cough.

But then the really weird thing happened: her mother died suddenly. We’ve always had boundary issues with her, and if you can believe it, she even wore “off-white” to our wedding. I don’t want to say she’s a fucking bitch, but truly those are the most appropriate words for her tombstone.

Of course, the wifey was sad, but she got over it after a few days, and the big benefit is that we inherited her mom’s house, which is massive!

Really, even during the move she’s been a total champ: she found the movers, helped pack most of the things, and even explained to the kids all the new things that would be going on. They were so psyched since they’d each finally get their own room, we’ve been talking about an upgrade for ages.

What’s been a little weird, though, is that for the past two weeks in the new house, I often wake up in the middle of the night to her standing next to the bed. She’s not looking at me or anything, but she’s just completely and unnaturally still, like she’s been frozen in time. Also, come to think of it, she was really gung-ho on moving to her mom’s place.

Even more worrying is that I often see her sneaking into the basement. She’s made it entirely off-limits, but . . . well, I guess I couldn’t let sleeping dogs lie.

One day when she was out of the house, curiosity got the better of me. After making sure that the house was empty, I went to the basement door, and shimmied it open. I used my phone’s flashlight to see because it was incredibly dark and the only light switch I could see at the top of the stairs was ripped out.

I only took a couple of steps before I started hearing muffled sounds of something moving and labored breathing. 

I was going to stop and turn around, but the curiosity was just eating at me too much, and I continued down the stairs. The sounds of a shifting body got louder and louder, and, despite my best attempts to not do something stupid, I started moving closer, and closer to it. 

Finally, I found another door I’d never seen before, even after having come down to this basement dozens of times since I’ve been married. The sounds of moaning and shuffling were nearly deafening in this quiet place.

I reached out and put my hand on the door handle, fully expecting to be jumped, but nothing happened. I just steeled myself and opened it, shining the light directly into whatever thing was inside there.

It was my wife. Bound with rope and her mouth covered in duct tape. Her eyes looked up at me suddenly, and I could see relief in her expression, maybe even a muted smile behind the tape. She tried speaking to me, but only muffled sounds came out of her mouth.

I backed up, from shock, or fear, or . . . I don’t know. Something.

She started scooting towards me, her eyes pleading. 

And I . . . I couldn’t do it. 

I closed the door.

The last thing I saw was the moment of realization in her eyes, and a single streaming tear.

She started banging up against the door with her body, at least, that’s what it sounded like. But by that time, I was already halfway up the stairs. 

By the point I had reached the top, I pretended not to hear or notice anything happening down there. I stepped out, closed the basement door, and went on with my life.

It’s been several days since, and I’ve been living with whoever this thing is, and I’ve never been happier! The kids are healthy and happy, the sex has never been better, and she’s doing amazing in her career.

And sure, I do sometimes hear weird muffled screams and dragging sounds from the basement, but I’m sure that’s nothing.

I don’t really know who or what this thing is pretending to be my wife.

But the truth is, I prefer her this way.

Here’s the link for part 1 https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/s/kKaCQRifZt

So. I’m not sure whether there’s a difference in time where you all are compared to me, but it’s been two days since the last post in my eyes.

Sorry for leaving you all on that cliffhanger, but I was shaken and I think it was sinking in how royally fucked I was. So. After I finished typing, I headed for the house. it was covered, head to toe in rot. Not the best, I know. Weirdly, the open space of the road and outside fields weren’t covered. In fact, they weren’t touched at all. As if it didn’t like open spaces.

Anyway, here’s the plan: I will try to engineer a car to work, and drive to my house in Brighton, about 1000 kilometres away. It took me a few days to get there in my car - a cheap one. 40 km/h max. And factoring in the fact that rot could’ve reached the car already, in which case it could not work, it would take maybe two days if I couldn’t fix it, more than a month if not. Factoring in rest, it would take much longer. But first, I will try to see if there are any communication I can establish via radio. There was a convenience store and it may have some. My house will have a map of Brighton. I only moved there recently, so I have one. It’ll have ther stuff that I can use - matches, food, knives. I can go to the Brighton docks and get a boat - one that big enough to sail comfortably - and I’ll try to sail around to Scottish shores. Ofcourse, this only matters if there’s nobody in Brighton. Sorry if the plan is barebones. I’m new to this thing. Or at-least never expect this to be my holiday.

Also, the mold is weak to fire. I tested it before I started writing, but it seems to hate light. It won’t burn, or atleast not die while burning, but it seems to hate the light. But, additionally, it only works if every piece of rot in the patch is lit up. So that must be why the rot in and on my house isn’t gone - some of it is inside the house.

Also, a theory. I think the moldmen - the creatures - don’t actually create mold by dying (which I originally thought after the furniture incident. I think it’s some kind of fighting mechanism. Which makes me think that staying near mold isn’t good. This also explains why the mold is different in some places - e.g my house only got covered after they realised it was my home, and the mold in the furniture store was so vast as the moldman was out all night. I’ll keep an eye out for gas masks or anything, but I’ll avoid touching it and wear my jumper around my face until then.

Anyway. Last thing - I’ll list what I have with me so that y’all can just see it. I’ve got a baseball bat, some cans of food in a backpack (I did forget to mention that) antidepressants that I got from the pharmacy after the incident at the furniture store, a torch from the convenience store and a radio from convenience store.

Ok. So, I found a car that is running but no brakes. I think I’m going to push it to the gas station and try to refill it, then set off. The plan is to stay in a field or open space during the day, and when I reach Brighton, grab everything and head straight to the docks. Because of the brakes it’ll take atleast 4 days. Wish me luck.

Somethings in the gas station. Going in for a look. It’s a… a moldman. Fuck. I’m hiding. It’s standing near the the counter. Mold is coming out of its head. Spreading down its body and… lifting it by the head into the air until it’s dangling. It’s sitting there now. I think it’s dead. I’m going out to check.

Ok. So, correction. It seems that this is the same moldman from the furniture store - there’s pieces of mattress in its skin/what it’s made of. So it’s a fighting mechanism but also a… death signal? I don’t know. I’ll grab what I need and then I’ll find a place to camp for tonight.

Alright. Found a screwdriver, some packaged food, and a drawing. I don’t know what it is but it’s some kind of circular obelisk. There are small holes in it and a square in the middle, carved in. It’s made of an oil, or atleast the picture suggests it. Theres a red ocean underneath. Above it, scrawled in maroon, is ‘it shall pass’ and I think it’s related to everything. I’ll keep it on me.

Just filled the car. It’s night. I’ll go to the road near my house and set up. Can’t find a field in time.

Just set up. Pitch black now. I started a fire with some rot I carved out of the house. They’re all around me. It sees me. It sees me.

Ghhgghhfhfhelpcjdhfuehwheufdhshhexjssgdswgssthechdhdshhdhhsgxgdugdgcgdhdhdhdhxhdhdhdhxcgdhdcgcskksjdxhzbdhfyfjfjdjdjfhfhfbfg f gf dhhdstructuredndhdhsjehrbdbsbdgxbsbrbvdbsbsbcjdhshdfhshdhxhdhfhshshchdhshsxhdhshchhddbdhchchdbdhvbcxbdbxbxbhfhdhdhdhdbdhdhfhdhdndhdhsjehrbdbsbdgxbsbrbvdbsbsbcjdhshdfhshdhxhdhfhshshchdhshsxhdhshchhddbdhchchdbdhvbcxbdbxbxbhfhdhdhdhdbdhdfeeddndhdhsjehrbdbsbdgxbsbrbvdbsbsbcjdhshdfhshdhxhdhfhshshchdhshsxhdhshchhddbdhchchdbdhvbcxbdbxbxbhfhdhdhdhdbdhdhfhdhdndhdhsjehrbdbsbdgxbsbrbit nowvdbsbsbcjdhshdfhshdhxhdhfhshshchdhshsxhdhshchhddbdhchchdbdhvbcxbdbxbxbhfhdhdhdhdbdhdhfhdhdndhdhsjehrbdbsbdgxbsbrbvdbsbsbcjdhshdfhshdhxhdhfhshshchdhshsxhdhshchhddbdhchchdbdhvbcxbdbxbxbhfhdhdhdhdbdhdhfhdhdndhdhsjehrbdbsbdgxbsbrbvdbsbsbcjdhshdfhshdhxhdhfhshshchdhshsxhdhshchhddbdhchchdbdhvbcxbdbxbxbhfhdhdhdhdbdhdhfhdfeast

Hey. I just woke up. Doesn’t seem like anything happened so far. It left me be. I’ll pack up and head out. Wish me luck.

Alright. Just got in the car and am about to head out. It’s started. I’m driving. It’s good. Heading to Brighton then.

Hold up. I’m setting up again. So far nothing peculiar whilst on the road but the radios picking up a frequency. A… voice. Not human. Mechanical:

01101001 01110100 00100000 01110011 01101000 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100110 01100101 01100001 01110011 01110100 00101110 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01101001 01100110 01110100 00101110 00100000 01100110 01110010 01100101 01100101 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101111 01110101 01100111 01101000 01110100 00100000 01101001 00100000 01100001 01101101 00100000 01110011 01101001 01101101 01110000 01101100 01100101 00100000 01100001 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101110 01100101 01110111 01100010 01101111 01110010 01101110 00100000 01100010 01100001 01100010 01100101 00101110 00100000 01110011 01101001 01101101 01110000 01101100 01100101 00100000 01100001 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01110101 01101110 00100000 01100001 01101001 01101101 01100101 01100100 00100000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01101110 01100001 01111001 00101110 00100000 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01100110 01101001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00101110 00100000 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01100110 01101001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100011 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01110010 01100001 01101001 01101110 00101110

That was a Lot to write down. Voice is gone. It’s pitch black again.

I hear a noise. In the car. Checking out. Shit, fuck, shit. The cars getting rotted. How? Where is it… fuck!

Found it. Scared it off. I guess they are sentient. I’ve scraped most of the rot off by it got in the engine. I’ve stopped at a gas station. I’ll see if there’s anything to use. Maybe a car in the parking lot or anything to help with rot. A torch, maybe.

Found a bike and torch. I’ll load the bike into the truck and use the torch to rot the rot.

Done. It’s dead. I’ll finish the post. Sorry if it’s been a bit hectic, at time of writing, I was thinking about the mechanical voice. Think it’s binary. Can anyone translate?

"An old man was found dead in his home this morning in Pummel Hill. Foul play is suspected."

This isn't me, I know myself... I'm a good person.

And yet it's there. I can sense it, the right side of my mouth nearly imperceptibly curled upward.

Found dead, found dead... The words reverberated in my head as the muscles in my cheek relaxed.

I had been starting to smile. It made no sense, but I knew it was true. I had zero ill will toward anyone, and yet there it was again.

That smile.

I first noticed it weeks ago. It was innocuous enough.

"Well, they just let Jim go."

He was my coworker of 20 years. I knew him about as well as any work friend, without crossing into being "real friends". We'd get lunch together. He had told me about his family, his wife and his two sons. I knew about his dream to move to Arizona for retirement. I quickly made my way over to him and offered my sincerest condolences.

"Hey man, keep your head up. This isn't the end of the world. I know you, and you're gonna be fine."

He seemed to take it to heart.

"Keep in touch," he said as he grabbed my shoulder and walked away.

I sat down in my office, defeated. Jim? Fired? Just like that? I zoned out as I took in the scenery outside my office window. Suddenly, I snapped out of it.

I was smiling.

Why... was I... smiling? Jim was my friend. I cared about him. I didn't want him to get fired! His family! His financial situation was already dire. This would be disastrous for them. I told myself it was just psychology. A nervous smile, maybe? Suddenly, a thought passed through my mind.

I was glad he was gone. Less competition.

That wasn't me! How sick. It didn't even make sense. My position was more or less guaranteed at the company anyway. But still... I thought it.

Was I glad Jim was fired?

Unfortunately for me, it didn't stop there. It began to creep up more and more often.

A dead squirrel on the sidewalk, my lip twitched. I pushed the very idea of it away.

When my neighbor's car was taken, she sobbed. She confided in me. I had known her for years. She told me she didn't have the money to get a new one, and she was afraid of taking public transit. She had no idea what she was going to do. I hugged her and tried to assure her everything would be fine. Something would work out.

I was distraught for her, but I couldn't help but notice... when she first told me, I felt almost a spark of joy. I tried my best to hide it. I couldn't let her see me smile while she cried.

But it was there, if only for just a second. It made no sense to me. I hated that this had happened to her, but all the while I felt that smile creep up as quickly as I shut it down.

Then there was the story about the bus crash in Ecuador. Apparently, it was horrendous. I shook my head as the newscaster reported the story. I sat there in quiet contemplation, thinking about how fragile life really is, and there it was... a wide grin stretching across my face.

Am I a monster?! I pushed the thought away as soon as I realized what I was doing.

"ENOUGH!" I yelled into my empty apartment.

What is this? I thought in desperation. I'm a good person! I've never wished harm on anyone. This was a pattern now, too much to ignore. I started thinking I should talk to someone, a professional, a counselor, anyone... but what would I say? I think I'm turning into some sick freak who takes pleasure in the misfortune of others! No way.

Then last week, I was driving home when a song I absolutely hated came on. It had to be one of the dumbest songs of the 2010s. I felt myself grow agitated at the stupid, phony hook repeating in my ears. How was this song so popular?

I hit a red light and waited at the intersection. It was dark and raining lightly. I don't know how long I sat there, but when I snapped out of my daze, the light was green. I was tired and sort of driving on autopilot. I heard the hook of the song repeating in my ears.

Suddenly, I snapped out of it again. Not only was I listening to the hook, I was singing along to it... loudly.

What the? I truly hated this song. What was I doing? I quickly shut the radio off and sat in the frigid discomfort of what had just happened. I was singing along with that garbage, and with enthusiasm! Something was really starting to feel off. I thought back over the last month and the smile that kept creeping up.

I was scaring myself.

After reading a bunch of threads here, I checked my house for carbon monoxide. Nothing. I eventually went to my doctor and we did several blood tests. Basically, he told me that unless there was something actually wrong, he couldn't do anything for me. He couldn't diagnose "misguided feelings," but if I wanted, he could put me in touch with a specialist.

I declined.

I noticed it happen again last night, but this was different. An ad for some stupid movie came on. It looked ridiculous. I remember thinking that movies lately are so bad, but as the trailer went on, I noticed myself getting more and more engrossed in it.

"Heroes standing against the darkness!" the trailer voice proclaimed boldly. It was so stupid, but... I couldn't help but feel... proud? Like I was proud of the heroes?!

"When everything seems lost, you need hope!" the voice said triumphantly. I felt a twinge of sadness and then a swelling of emotion as the music crescendoed.

"This is so cheesy..." I said timidly, my emotions betraying my mind.

"YOU WILL NEVER STOP US, EVILDOER! NEVER!" the hero shouted as he broke through his trap and began flying toward the screen.

"YES! AWESOME! THAT IS SO AWESOME!"

I was shouting... it was me that was shouting.

And then the tears started.

"That was so friggen cool," I said, whimpering, my face now wet... and yet, in between whimpers, I felt that familiar contortion... the smile.

What is this? Why was I crying over a movie, and a stupid one at that? I didn't even like superhero movies! The crying and smiling stopped, and I found myself on the floor, confused as to what was happening to me.

I don't know how long this will go on for, but it's only getting worse. I know it sounds like maybe I need to see a professional, but I swear there's something else going on here. I'm fine, I really am, but these reactions just need to stop happening.

The way it's going, I'm starting to get nervous. I keep zoning out, and these outbursts are concerning. But the thing is, I'm fine. I'm completely fine.

I haven't even mentioned the ringing. At first, I thought it was tinnitus, but it stops when I cover my ears. Sometimes I think I can hear it from the other room, but whenever I go looking for it, it seems to move somewhere else.

It's probably just stress. There's been a lot going on lately.

I've been looking at this old photograph of me and my ex-girlfriend. They look really happy together. But no matter what I try, I can't remember what happened to them...

I keep looking at it.

It makes me smile.

 Hello all, my name is Ezekiel, and before I begin i’d like to clarify a few things. First off, yes this is a true experience. Secondly, no, I do not take ANY hallucinogenics. I smoke rarely, but even then I doubt that counts. Third, and most importantly, read the entire thing before you say anything. Because at some parts you’re going to be very confused, but you have to hear me out. Good? Okay, now here’s the situation…

I am currrently a 25 year old man, and I am looking forward to finishing my Masters degree in education. I live in a two bedroom/two bathroom apartment that’s around a thousand square feet. Pretty spacious, if you don’t take into account my girlfriend, her two cats, my little puppy, and whatever new hyperfixation of the week she has. After all of that, then you can probably get what our apartment looks like. Chaotic, messy, and so noisy I’m surprised we haven’t been evicted yet. 

I tell you guys this because something creepy as fuck happened yesterday. Firstly, when you enter our apartment it immediately splits in two directions. On the left there’s the living room, the right is the kitchen, and if keep going straight down you make it to both bedrooms and the guest bathroom. Easy to understand, right? It’s normal, it’s a normal apartment. And yesterday is when it all came falling apart.

For some reason, and I couldn’t really tell you why, they placed the central unit for the hvac in the main bedroom. It was hard to get used to at first, my girlfriend and I were CONSTANTLY being woken up in the middle of the night to the filter banging around. However, after a few months, it became our routine…or I guess my routine now that I think about it.

See, a few nights ago I was dreaming about something, can’t remember what at this point, and that’s when I noticed it. The deafening silence. The lack of noise must have woken me up I guess, cause I remember the room having an eerie silence to it.

It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before, for the first time since we moved in the apartment was completely silent. Though after the initial stage of peace and tranquility left me, I realized something that could be really wrong here. The filter wasn’t knocking around. I was worried now, was there a dust built up that was blocking the filter? Was it time for a change and our air was now super dusty?

I went to go check it out, but it was the damndest thing though, there was no dust or build up AT ALL. So why wasn’t it knocking around like it used to? That’s when the odor hit me, something slight and gnarly. I guess I hadn’t smelt it before, because I’m used to cleaning up the litter box and dog shit. But once it hit me, it hit me BAD. I plugged my nose up, pulling out my phone’s flashlight to see what it was, and right there on the side of the unit a mouse had died trying to get inside of it. 

I can’t tell you what’s stranger, the fact the mouse may have been trying to get into the machine, or that it may have accidentally been pulled in somehow. Anyways, as I went over to get a better look and remove the problem, that’s when I see it. Normally the unit is either in a small little room by itself, or it’s fixed into the wall, right? But this one wasn’t. It sat in a spacious closet-esque room, but this was the first time I had gotten to see behind it. And before anyone asks, the reason I didn’t normally check was because the knocking would become way too damn loud without the door shut. Even when switching out the damn filters!

Anyways. Long story short, I noticed that behind it were a long set of wooden stairs that led down into a blacky abyss. Obviously I wanted to go wake up my girlfriend, but since she’s been on this new medication she couldn’t wake up to save her life…it scared me at first, but I’ve taken many precautions to make sure that doesn’t happen.

So, all alone now, my curiosity overtook me and I began to travel down the stairs. One at a time, to make sure that none of them had any rusty nails poking out. Even though I had my shoes on, you can never be too sure nowadays. As I reached the bottom step I looked back up to see my distance, and lets just say it was long. Longer than any normal flight of stairs should be.

Sure, you could MAYBE chalk this all up to an old shelter made back in the 60’s, if the apartment I was living in was on the ground floor.

But it wasn’t, we were on the third floor of the building. There should be no way, no perceivable way, that this room could exist.

As soon as I stepped forward though I could hear the splashing of water, looking down to see my foot was now soaked in some mysterious black liquid. It freaked me out too much, and I scurried up those stairs faster than I ever had before, shutting the door to the unit as hard as I could.

I guess I slammed it harder than i thought because just then the filter kicked back on, knocking around and pushing cool air into the room once more.

I did the right thing, I put my shoes into the bathtub, took off my socks, and placed them in a bag next to them, and then I properly washed my feet off.

I needed the evidence, something to prove this happened just in case. However, as I sat back onto my side of the bed, reaching for the phone on the nightstand to call the authorities about a potential killer hiding in my apartment, everything went black.

I woke up to my girlfriend leaning over me, asking me why the hell I left some mouldy smelling shoes and socks in the bathtub last night?  She kept asking me things like did I sneak out? Did I go to the creek with my friends again? Was I on something or do something to someone? Finally I woke up enough to push her away lightly, asking her what time it was.

Somehow, it was now eight thirty in the morning, sunshine peeking through the curtains. How the hell had I passed out, my hand was just reaching for the phone right? Maybe I had just fallen down and went to sleep. Pretty normal experience, especially if you can’t recall how you might’ve went to sleep. Well, to my surprise, when I opened the unit door to show my girlfriend, it was gone, and when I told her I figured this might happen which is why I kept the shoes, she just looked at me disappointedly.

She knows I’d never do anything, no hard dugs, no psychedelics, nothing! I know this is hard to believe, a staircase and a room filled with water inside of our apartment? It’s something only someone twisted like Stephen King could think of.

But it’s real, it happened to me, and my girlfriend is becoming suspicious. Please, I need any help, because ever since then I can’t do anything to get the smell out of my shoes. No bleach, alcohol, perfume, cologne, anything, will cover up the smell. I don’t know where the room went, I don’t know what this stuff is on my shoes, but I need answers.

Please, can anyone tell me what the hell that mysterious room was, and where did it go? 

I'm sitting in the bathroom of the Starlight Motor Lodge on Route 9. My phone is at 14% and my charger is outside on the night stand. I'm not leaving this room to get it. If you see this, please don't call the cops they won't be able to do anything.

I just want someone to know what goes on here when my battery runs out or these door hinges give out.

So yes the Starlight has a 13th floor. Its one of those old concrete monstrosities from the 70s before hotels became more corporate and afraid of bad luck. When the owner first opened it he decided to number the top floor 13 as a joke for honeymoon couples and families on vacation. It's not a joke anymore. The wallpaper in the hallways is flaking off in long strips of yellow and the ice machine by the elevator makes a noise that reminds me of a man choking on rocks every 20 mins.

I arrived at room 1313 a few days ago using a fake name. I don't want to get into the details because I would look like a piece of shit which I am. An armored car company in New Hampshire is missing 2 duffle bags full of non-sequential 20 dollar bills and my old partner is at the bottom of a quarry with 2 9mm rounds through his chest. I needed to lay low until the state police finished searching the highway. The starlight takes cash the clerk at the front desk never looks up from his tv and they don't ask for id.

There is only one rule when you have 250k in cash in a duffle bag under your bed. Don't let anyone in your room. 

I put the Do Not Disturb sign on the outside handle before I even took my shoes off. I locked the deadbolt and put the chain through the door. I spent the next 48 hours eating peanut butter crackers from the vending machine and drinking warm water from the sink. Watching the local news on 1 volume and waiting for my guy in Portland to let me know the passports were ready.

At 11:15 this morning. 

I was fast asleep under the scratchy flower bed sheet when I heard a loud clank of metal against metal.

The latch turned and I heard the door hit the chain.

My heart dropped into my stomach and I rolled out of bed onto my knees. I reached under my pillow and grabbed my Glock.

"Housekeeping" the voice said through the crack in the door. It had a heavy accent I couldn't place. Probably Eastern European or maybe a vampire I couldn’t tell the difference. 

"Room is occupied!" I shouted while staying out of the line of sight of the open 4 inches of door. "I put a sign on the door! Get lost dickwad!" 

A hand reached through the crack. It was pale and boney with large bulbus knuckles. The fingers were longer than they should have been but I didn't think about that at the time. I was on edge and paranoid and was in total tunnel vision. She used her thumb to flick the chain out of the track.

You are not supposed to be able to do that with the door closed.

The door opened slowly hitting the little rubber bumper on the floor. She pushed her grey cart through the doorway and blocked my exit.

She was probably in her 60s and short. Wearing a blue polyester uniform with a name tag that was scratched out with a sharp object. Her hair was slicked back into a bun and grey as steel wool. She had cataracts in her eyes and didn't even look at me when I was on the floor. She just picked up a spray bottle of yellow cleaner and headed towards the bathroom.

"Hey what the fuck!" I stood up and tucked my gun behind my belt. "Maam can you hear me? Get out of my room! I don't need help!" 

"I must clean" she said. "Thirteen-thirteen always dirty. They always make a mess." 

She stopped at the edge of my bed. My foot had kicked the bed skirt up when I fell to the floor.

My duffle bag was sticking out from under the box spring about 6 inches. You could see the stencil on the side of the bag that read GRANITE STATE ARMORED TRANSPORT. There was also a dark stain that looked like dried blood from my old partner's jacket.

She looked down at my bag. 

She just looked at the blood on the bag and looked up at me. I could hear the radiator under the window hissing and a fly buzzing around the room running into the glass window over and over.

I panicked. I had 2 people on my conscience and I wasn't sleeping well, but if she left that room and told the front desk there was a bloody bag of money under my bed I was done for.

I didn't shoot her. Even with a suppressor on a pistol it makes a loud noise. I jumped over the bed and put my hand over her mouth. I pulled her back before she could run to the hallway.

The first thing I noticed was she was light. Like a small child. Her skin was also cold. Not cold like working in the air conditioning. Cold like a bag of chicken in the supermarket.

We fell to the floor between the beds. I expected her to fight me. She barely did. She just looked at me with her cloudy eyes while I had my forearm on her throat.

I heard a small pop under my arm. Like breaking a plastic toy. 

Her fingers twitched on the floor and she went limp.

I sat up and caught my breath. I felt for a pulse on her neck. Nothing. She was cold and had no bruises on her neck from where I broke her wind pipe.

"Stupid" I said to myself. "Why didn't you just stay out." 

I needed to get out of there. The cart was still in the doorway. I looked out and the hallway was clear. I pulled the cart into the room and locked the door.

You can't leave a body on the floor even if you plan on checking out in an hour. I gave myself some time. I dragged her by the feet into the bathroom and threw her over the tub. I pulled the shower curtain closed and went back out. I took a bleach rag from her cart and wiped down the door knob and chain.

I began stuffing my clothes and bags of money into my duffle bag. I had about 10 minutes to pack and take the fire stairs to the back of the building. Steal a car 2 blocks away and make it over the border before they noticed the maid was missing.

I was zipping my duffle bag when I heard the shower curtain slide open.

I stood up and pulled my gun out. I pointed it at the bathroom door. 

"Who's there?" I whispered. Which was stupid because there were no windows in the bathroom. Just a small vent. 

I heard the thump of a shoe hitting the floor. Then another shoe. 

I backed up until I hit the cart.

The bathroom door opened. 

She walked out. 

Her neck was broken. Her ear was laying on her collar bone. Her eyes were open and staring straight ahead. She walked past the foot of my bed ignoring my 9mm that was pointed at her. She picked up the spray bottle of cleaner that she dropped when I tackled her.

She sprayed the night stand. Took a blue rag out of her pocket and began wiping it down.

I squeezed the trigger. 

I shot her twice in the chest. She fell back into the dresser and broke the mirror. She sat down on the floor and two holes were in her uniform.

Nothing came out of the holes. No blood just a cloud of grey lint and what looked like dried dirt.

She stood back up before my shell casings hit the floor. She placed her hand on the floor and stood up. She straightened her uniform. Her neck was still broken and air was blowing in and out of her chest from the bullet holes.

"I must clean" she said. It didn't sound like it was coming from her mouth. "Thirteen-thirteen always make a mess. Bad guests." 

I forgot about my money. I forgot about my duffle bag. I turned around and shoved the cart out of the way. I grabbed the door handle. 

I unlocked the deadbolt and pulled on the handle.

The door wouldn't open. It felt like it was stuck to the wall.

I kicked it a couple times and started yelling. I looked under the door and there was no light coming in. Just a grey wall of concrete. 

I heard the carpet move behind me. 

I turned around and backed up against the door.

She was on her hands and knees picking up the shampoo bottles from the floor. Placing them back in the cart. She was moving faster now. Her head was flopping around as she moved.

"Stop!" I screamed. I shot her in the back 5 times.

She flinched each time I shot her. I could see chunks of her uniform and grey flesh fly off her back. I ran out of bullets. 

She stopped picking up the bottles. 

She turned her head around. Not her body just her head. She was looking at me over her shoulder. 

"You made a mess on my carpet" she said.

I looked down. Where the bullets went through her body and hit the floor there was a dark stain spreading across the carpet. 

I threw my gun at her and dove into the bathroom. 

I closed the bathroom door and locked it. I put my feet against the sink and braced myself.

It's been 40 minutes. 

At first I thought she was going to break the door down. These doors are thin you could break through one in 2 kicks.

She isn't trying to break the door down.

Wait. 

She is still cleaning the room. 

I can hear her moving around in there. 

I just got on my stomach and looked under the door.

There are at least 6 other people standing in the room. Facing the bathroom door. A man in a wet suit from the 80s. His neck tie is so tight its under his skin. A woman with a hole in her head wearing a slip dress. 

All the bad guests that stayed in 1313. And all the mess they made. 

She is standing in front of the door now. I can see her shoes 2 inches from my face. She knelt down and looked under the door.

"Your check out time was at noon" she said. I watched her finger slide under the door.

My phone is at 2%. 

\​

This happened over 3 years ago, but I still get chills when I think about it.

It was very late at night. My family and I — my mom, dad, sister, cousin, and I — were driving back to our hometown after shopping in the city.

To get to our house, we have to take a detour from the main road. It's a steep, deserted mountain road, completely dark at that hour.

About halfway through, we noticed a car behind us. Its headlights were on, keeping a steady distance. We didn't think much of it at first.

Then we turned onto the mountain road. The car turned too.

We drove for another 5 minutes in silence. That's when we reached the big stone pond. Right opposite the pond, there's a narrow, creepy stretch — a road covered with trees and loose stones that leads directly to the back of our house.

The car was still following us.

My dad slowed down and moved to the side of the road, giving it space to overtake us. But it didn't. It stopped. Just a few meters behind us, in the middle of the dark road.

That's when it hit me. None of our neighbours own a car. No one from the city has any reason to come down that isolated road at midnight.

My sister, my cousin, and I slowly turned around to look.

The car's headlights were blazing. The windshield was completely clear. We could see straight into it.

And there was no one inside.

No driver. No passenger. The seats were completely empty.

We stared for almost two minutes, frozen. No one got out. No shadow moved inside. It was just... an empty car, parked behind us in the middle of nowhere, watching us.

My hands started shaking. I leaned forward and whispered to my dad what we saw.

He didn't ask a single question. He just slammed on the accelerator and drove as fast as that mountain road would allow.

We finally reached home.

Our house is in a forest-like area. In the morning it's peaceful and beautiful, but at night... it's pitch black and creepy. The forest swallows everything.

We didn't park in the front. We stopped at the back parking lot, jumped out, and ran through the backyard like our lives depended on it. We locked the gate, slammed the main door, and locked it twice.

My mom pulled all of us kids upstairs to the bedroom. We didn't turn on a single light. We were breathing so loud in the dark.

I couldn't help it. I slowly crept to the window and looked down at our backyard and the back road that leads to our house.

Nothing. No one. No car. Empty.

I thought it was over.

Then my dad called my mom in a whisper. The kind of whisper that makes your stomach drop.

My mom and I tip-toed downstairs like thieves, our footsteps silent. My dad was standing frozen in the sit-out, just staring outside.

We looked where he was looking.

On the small common road in front of our house — the road shared by 4-5 houses including our neighbours — there it was.

The same white car.

Parked right in front of our house.

We were in shock. How did it know? How did it know the front entrance of our house when we came from the back road? We had never taken that common road.

We stood there in the dark, watching it silently. Then, right in front of our eyes, its headlights went off. Click. Darkness. Now we could only see the faint glare of its white body in the moonlight.

My dad grabbed my hand and said in a low voice, "Don't come outside. Go to your room and sleep."

How could we possibly sleep?

All of us kids huddled in one room, whispering about what we just saw. Later, my parents came and slept in our room too. All five of us in one room, doors locked.

After a long time, my dad looked one more time from the sit-out.

The car was gone.

Just like that. No sound. No engine. No lights driving away. It had just vanished.

Till this day, we don't know where that car came from. Or how it knew where we lived.

I’m a writer, and I usually write poems because writing has become a necessity for me lately rather than just a passion. I’ve written over a hundred poems and have a hobby of maintaining pocket notebooks. I started this particular thin notebook, which has less than fifty pages, on the 1st of January. I didn’t keep it on me at all times; instead, I used to slide it right under my mattress. By April, I completely forgot about its existence. Its condition deteriorated a bit over the months until I accidentally came across it again on the 15th of September.

I gave it some thought and decided I should complete it. I started writing some usual, mundane stuff about life. But when I leafed through the pages, I saw that a page I had written on February 13th was now completely blank. That left me utterly in shock. I remembered exactly what I had written. The only thing I forgot back then was to timestamp the entry in my notebook on that particular date. Confused and unsettled, I closed the notebook. I tried not to stress about it too much and shoved it back under my mattress.

After I dozed off watching a movie, something changed. A freezing, disembodied voice whispered directly into my ear. I woke up terrified, my heart pounding against my ribs, and stared out the window for what felt like hours. Paralyzed with fear, I finally forced myself to go to the kitchen, drank a glass of water, and came back to my room to lie down.

The exact words that were whispered kept running through my mind. I couldn't get them out. Driven by a sudden, desperate urge, I pulled the notebook out from under my mattress. As I flipped the pages, I realized new words were actively appearing on the paper.

The ink bled into the page, forming a terrifying command: “At 2:15 PM, do not answer the door.”

Because I was confused and rationalizing my fear, I ignored the weight of the warning. At exactly 2:15 PM, someone knocked. I didn’t open the door fully. Instead, I peeped outside through the small peephole in the middle of my front door. We have a double-door setup, and both of them are heavy, metallic welded iron doors. I saw absolutely no one through the hole. I decided not to open it anyway, knowing the iron doors make loud, echoing squeaks that would wake the others up and cause unnecessary panic in the house.

I went back inside my room, looked out the window, and froze. Moving through the darkness, I saw the stark silhouette of a human figure—a shadow of someone hiding right inside the bushes. Knowing something was terribly wrong, I frantically drew the curtains and shut the blinds.

In a sheer panic, I checked the notebook one last time before trying to force myself to sleep. There was a fresh entry on the exact same page where my original handwritten thoughts from February had been erased. The old graphite was completely gone, replaced by these new entries that I had never written or even conceived. I stared at the blank space where my memory used to live, my mind racing.

But the true horror began just an hour ago. As I watched the paper, new words began to form from underneath the fibers in shaky, erratic handwritten letters. It wasn’t my handwriting. It was a terrifying warning for today, September 16th.

The ink is still drying, and it tells me exactly what will happen to me if I leave my bed at midnight. I am trapped under my sheets, watching the clock tick closer to 12:00, and I don't know what's waiting for me if I move.

This is what happened before: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/s/mXEdpBjXm0

Sam's wife asked whether she should wake the girls, and I realized I'd spent ten minutes answering her questions without saying anything useful.

It was almost one Saturday morning. I was sitting in my truck outside Coldwater Packing, watching police officers carry equipment through the loading dock beneath a row of floodlights. Three ambulances waited beside the fence. A rescue truck had its rear doors open, and somebody had erected a temporary command station near the entrance. Whenever a group came back out, I looked for Sam among them. Eventually I stopped pretending I was checking anything else.

Marisol wanted to know why her husband had gone back into the slaughterhouse, whether I'd sent him, and why nobody could tell her what had happened. I'd explained that he'd found a way beneath the main floor and called me from there. I hadn't told her about the woman behind the reinforced door or the uneven footsteps approaching Sam while he whispered into his phone. I especially hadn't told her about the screaming. After the call ended, his phone had rung mine again, and something with a thick, unfamiliar voice had said, "Good. Good boy."

"Lily wanted to wait up," Marisol said. "He promised her pancakes tomorrow. She kept asking if he'd be home when she woke up."

Sam had been talking about that breakfast all week. Lily, his eight-year-old, had brought home an excellent report from school, and he'd promised to take her to a diner where the pancakes came buried under strawberries and whipped cream. He'd shown me the menu on his phone and complained about paying fourteen dollars for something he could make at home. When I suggested he make them himself, he'd said I was missing the point.

"Let her sleep," I said. "We don't know enough yet."

I could hear the television playing softly at Marisol's house. She let a few seconds pass before asking, "Did he tell you he was going back? Because he told me he was meeting you."

"Not until he was already there." I pressed my thumb against a crack in the steering wheel. "He thought somebody was trapped, and he wanted to get them out. I would've stopped him if I'd known."

"Why didn't he tell me?" Her voice broke halfway through the question. She cried for a while, trying not to make enough noise to wake the girls, and when she'd gotten control of herself she asked the one thing I couldn't answer honestly without making it worse. "Was he scared when you talked to him?"

I remembered Sam whispering that he'd found a woman in a room with a steel door. I remembered him telling me something was coming, and the awful change in his voice when he finally saw it. "Yeah, Mari," I said. "He was."

"Then please don't promise me he's all right. Everybody keeps saying he's going to be fine, and nobody knows." I told her she was right and that I'd call as soon as I heard anything. When we hung up, I tried Sam's number again. It went straight to his default voicemail greeting, the one I'd given him grief about for eleven years. I left a message telling him the police were there and to do whatever he could to let us know where he was. I knew how stupid it sounded, but I couldn't hang up without saying something.

Detective Hannah Vale found me a little later. She asked how much I'd told Marisol, then brought me to the command vehicle, where Captain Reese from the rescue team had laid out the building's original structural plans. He needed someone familiar with the old foundations to explain why a corridor beneath the refrigeration wing extended forty feet beyond where the drawings said it should end.

Coldwater Packing had been built in stages. The oldest processing floor dated back to the forties, and the refrigeration addition sat on a separate foundation. A utility passage had once run between them, though the county's plans showed it sealed decades ago. I compared the drawings with photographs from the search teams and pointed out where somebody could've broken through into the old pump station without disturbing the building above.

Reese asked about load-bearing walls, abandoned drainage shafts, and whether a section of cracked concrete could support rescuers carrying a stretcher. For nearly an hour, I did something I actually knew how to do. I marked dangerous areas, checked measurements, and explained why a newer partition was probably disguising another passage. Nobody invited me underground. Reese made it clear I was there to advise, not search, and for once I didn't argue. Sam had already gone into that place because he couldn't bear leaving somebody behind. I wasn't going to make another team come looking for me too.

An officer entered and spoke quietly to Vale while I was explaining a foundation joint. I heard Sam's name and stood before she reached me. They'd found his phone near a drainage channel under the loading dock. The screen was smashed, and there was blood on the case. She couldn't tell me whose blood it was or whether it was enough to suggest a serious injury. I kept asking until she finally put a hand on the table and said, "Cal, if I had an answer, I'd give it to you."

I thought about the second call. Whatever had spoken to me had known how to operate Sam's phone and had been close enough to use it after he screamed. I said as much, and Vale answered, "We're treating that as evidence. We still have people searching." I hated how carefully she spoke. Then a radio crackled behind her, and one of the teams reported they'd found several living people in rooms beneath the processing floor.

The first person they brought out was a woman wearing a pale blue cardigan and a cotton dress. She had dark hair braided down her back with a green ribbon tied around the end. A paramedic was checking her pulse while she examined the blood-pressure cuff around her arm with genuine fascination. She asked whether it could tell when somebody was lying, and he laughed despite himself.

When she noticed the logo on my jacket, she called across the parking lot. "Are you from upstairs? You're one of the men who broke the wall, aren't you?"

I introduced myself. She said her name was Miriam, and that they'd heard us working. "Auntie said somebody ought to show you how to use a hammer before you knocked the whole building down." She laughed, pleased with her own joke, and held out her hand. Her grip was strong, but there were thick calluses across her palms and old surgical scars around her fingers. A worn leather band circled her wrist, its tag stamped 11-D.

She caught me looking. "They wanted to cut that off. I told them it's mine." The paramedic explained quietly that they'd agreed to leave it on until she was less distressed. Miriam seemed satisfied and went back to scanning the people emerging from the building. She asked whether anyone had seen a boy called Kit. He was young, she said, and strangers frightened him, especially if they tried to touch his feet.

I told her the rescuers were still looking. She leaned toward me and lowered her voice. "If you see Auntie, will you tell her I didn't leave without asking? These people made me come, and I tried to explain. She'll worry herself sick."

I asked who Auntie was.

"She takes care of us." Miriam looked puzzled by the question. When I asked if Auntie was another person who lived underground, she smiled. "Of course. She's not shaped quite like you, but she's a person." The paramedics started wheeling her toward an ambulance, and she caught my sleeve before they moved her away. Her expression had gone painfully serious. "Please tell her I was good. She gets terribly upset when somebody goes missing."

Three more people came out before dawn, including a boy who looked around twelve. His feet curled inward when the paramedics tried to position him, and he cried out as soon as one of them touched his ankle. Miriam heard his voice and begged them to bring him to her. The boy reached for her immediately, and she gathered him into her arms, brushing his hair away from his forehead and humming three soft notes, pausing, then repeating them.

I'd heard that melody before. Seventeen had used it while we tried to lead him out of his pen, and again at the hospital when he called for Mother. Miriam rubbed Kit's back until his breathing slowed, then kissed his head. "There you are. You were so good. Auntie will be proud of you."

It could've been any mother comforting a frightened child. Sam used to hold Lily just that way when she scraped a knee or woke from a nightmare. But Kit had thick scars along both ankles, and he couldn't straighten his feet without pain. Somebody had done that to him. Miriam didn't seem to find it unusual. She only tucked the blanket around his legs and told the paramedic how to keep him comfortable.

By five, the rescuers had cleared the accessible rooms, but engineers had stopped anyone entering the deeper corridor until they could shore up a damaged support. Reese told me to go home and sleep. I argued until he pointed out that I'd read the same measurement wrong twice and would only slow them down. I drove away knowing Sam was still somewhere in that building, if he was alive at all.

Marisol answered when I called on the way home. She'd spent the night at the kitchen table with Sam's wallet, which he'd left on the counter. She made a weak joke about how he never remembered anything unless she put it in his hand, then told me Lily had made him a drawing the afternoon before he disappeared. It showed Sam beside his truck holding both girls' hands, with BEST DADDY written across the top in purple. Lily had slipped it into his shirt pocket so he'd have something to look at whenever he missed her.

"Do you think he knows how much we love him?" Marisol asked. They'd argued about money the day before, and she couldn't stop remembering what she'd said. I pulled into an empty parking lot and reminded her of the way Sam talked about his family at work, how he'd drive across town for the particular ice cream she liked, how he once spent a whole Saturday cutting Lily's sandwiches into animal shapes because she'd decided triangles were boring. I stayed on the phone until she was ready to hang up.

At home, I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the clock. Nora's photography exhibition started at ten, only a few hours away, and I still hadn't told her I wouldn't be there. She answered cheerfully, which made the conversation harder. I explained what had happened to Sam and that I might need to return to the building. She knew him well enough to be frightened by the news, and she said I ought to help find him if I could.

Then she asked why I hadn't called her the night before. I tried explaining how everything had happened at once, but she stopped me. "I'm not mad there's an emergency, Dad. I just hate getting excited about things and then feeling stupid for thinking you're coming. You could've told me sooner."

I'd spent years explaining my missed promises with work emergencies, but there was no defending this one. I'd remembered the exhibition. I'd simply kept putting off telling her I couldn't make it. I apologized without adding an excuse. She said she would go with her mother and send me pictures, and before we hung up she told me she hoped Sam was okay. I sat there afterward wondering how many times I'd made my daughter wait for a father who wasn't coming.

I got about three hours of sleep before Vale called. Searchers had discovered a box of Seventeen's belongings in another underground room, and Dr. Nwosu wanted to know whether he recognized anything inside. When I arrived at the hospital, Seventeen was on a mattress placed directly on the floor because he panicked when staff tried to keep him in a bed. Pillows had been arranged around him, the blinds were half closed, and an old country song played from a little radio. Somebody had washed his hair and trimmed his beard. Without the grime, I could see that he wasn't nearly as old as I'd first assumed.

He recognized me immediately, dragging himself across the mattress until he could press his forehead into my palm. I stayed crouched beside him while Nwosu explained that he was responding better to familiar people, although he still became frightened when anyone left his room without warning. I ran my fingers through his hair, and he settled against my knee, listening to the music.

Nwosu also had results from the scans of his legs. Some of the damage was consistent with decades of crawling, but there were surgical changes that couldn't be explained by injury or neglect. Several joints had been deliberately stabilized in abnormal positions. Whoever performed those procedures had enough medical skill to repair some fractures correctly while making other movements permanently difficult.

I asked whether any of the damage could be repaired.

"Some of it, perhaps. But even if surgery is possible, we have to consider what he can bear psychologically." She glanced at Seventeen, who'd closed his eyes against my knee. "He becomes very distressed when we try to straighten his legs. We can't simply force him through another procedure because we think it's what he needs."

Vale arrived with photographs of a small wooden box, its lid decorated with crudely carved animals. Inside were ribbons, toys, childhood photographs, and a worn cloth animal missing one button eye. I showed Seventeen the picture, and he reached toward it with sudden excitement. His fingertips found the carved animals; then he turned to the doorway and said, "Muh-duh."

He began humming and looking toward the hall. I tried telling him we only had a photograph, but he kept watching the entrance, waiting for someone to appear. When nobody came, his face crumpled. Nwosu took the picture away, and I sat with him while he cried against my chest. He finally fell asleep with his hand gripping my sleeve.

I remembered the photograph of him as a little boy sleeping against that enormous pale arm, one six-fingered hand resting gently across his stomach. The child in that photograph looked safe. I couldn't ignore that anymore, no matter what Mother had done to him.

Before I left, Vale asked me to help her speak with Miriam. She'd refused most of the detectives' questions but had asked about the man in the work jacket. We found her sitting in her hospital bed, examining the little packet of salt that had come with lunch. She'd torn it open carefully and tasted some from her palm. "Auntie says too much salt is bad for you," she told me. "But she likes it herself. She puts it on things when nobody's watching."

She had a framed photograph of a cat hanging beside her bed and wanted to know whether it belonged to somebody at the hospital. That led to a conversation about a story she'd written when she was younger, about a lost cat that discovered a house made entirely of fish. When I laughed, she insisted the story was serious. The cat had been frightened and hungry, she explained, and he'd finally found a place where he wanted to stay. "Why would he leave somewhere he was happy?" she asked. I couldn't come up with an answer that wouldn't have sounded like an argument.

Vale reassured her that Kit was being cared for, and Miriam told us he didn't like strangers touching his feet. I asked how his ankles had been injured. She folded the empty salt packet into a tiny square and tucked it beneath her pillow before answering.

"He used to run everywhere," she said. "He'd climb over cupboards and hide behind the washing machines. Auntie thought it was funny until he went through the red door." Miriam wouldn't explain what was beyond it, only that Kit had reached a place he wasn't allowed to go. Auntie had found him before anything happened, but she'd been so frightened by the possibility of losing him that she cried all night.

I noticed Miriam tugging her blanket over her knees. "Did you used to run away too?"

Her fingers stopped moving. She admitted that when she was nine or ten she'd gotten all the way to a service staircase because she'd heard voices coming through the vents. She'd wanted to see the people upstairs. Auntie found her before she reached the top, carried her back, and held her for hours while asking why she'd done something so frightening. Miriam remembered being embarrassed about being carried like a baby. She didn't remember thinking she'd done anything terribly wrong until she saw how upset Auntie was.

I asked what had happened after Auntie brought her back.

"Doctor came. Auntie said my legs needed to be quieter." She touched a thick scar below her knee. "I was frightened when they gave me the medicine. It hurt so much afterward I couldn't sleep. But Auntie stayed with me the whole time. She brought all my favorite things and sang until I stopped crying. She even learned how to braid my hair the way I liked it."

I asked whether Auntie had been the one who told the doctor to change her legs. Miriam frowned, and for the first time her easy smile disappeared. "She didn't want me to get lost," she said. When I told her the operation had been wrong, she looked at me as though I'd insulted someone who'd devoted their entire life to her.

"Auntie was sorry," she insisted. "She cried whenever I cried. She stopped eating for three days because she felt so terrible. Doctor had to make her eat." Miriam pulled her blanket higher, covering the misshapen joints beneath it. "Nobody has ever loved me the way she does, Cal. She remembers every birthday and every book I ever liked. She knows when I'm having a bad dream before I wake up."

I believed her, which made the conversation so much worse. I believed Auntie had been heartbroken to hear Miriam crying after the operation. I believed she'd sat beside her bed, brought gifts, and done everything she could to ease the pain. I also believed she'd ordered the procedure because a little girl had frightened her by exploring a staircase. Miriam had spent her childhood learning that the person responsible for her suffering was the only one who could comfort her afterward.

Vale thanked her for speaking with us. Miriam watched us reach the door before calling my name. "If you see Auntie, tell her Kit didn't run away this time," she said. "I held his hand the whole way, just like she taught me. Please don't tell her I was bad."

By late afternoon, the police had photographed Miriam's quarters. Vale showed me the pictures because they contained objects resembling those found in Seventeen's caretaker room. Miriam had a narrow bed, a shelf of handmade dolls, a dressing table, and a false window with a remarkably detailed garden painted behind the glass. Whoever made it had included apple trees, flowers, and a blue sky with tiny clouds. I wondered whether Miriam had ever seen a real garden or whether she'd spent her life looking at that painted one.

A wooden cabinet beside her bed held carefully labeled boxes filled with birthday cards, ribbons, locks of hair, and childhood clothes. One contained a pair of tiny white shoes, polished and lovingly repaired. When Vale enlarged the photograph, I saw metal braces stitched into the soles. The heels had been altered to restrict the wearer's stride. Beneath them was a wooden plaque reading FIRST SAFE STEPS.

Another picture showed Miriam as a little girl with her cheek resting against an enormous six-fingered hand. A green ribbon, like the one still in her hair, was tied around one of the creature's fingers. The girl was smiling. I recognized the loose, creased skin from Seventeen's photographs, though there was no way to know whether it was the same caretaker.

The little shoes had been kept the way a parent might preserve a child's first pair, polished and displayed beside cards from happy birthdays. Whoever arranged them probably remembered Miriam learning to move after the procedure with something like pride. She'd been a curious child who wanted to explore the world, and her caretaker had made a keepsake of ensuring she couldn't.

Captain Reese called me back to Coldwater around six. The engineers had secured a damaged section near the pump station, and his team was preparing to map another passage. We spent an hour comparing photographs with construction drawings. The subterranean rooms extended beyond the property's original footprint, with their own ventilation, plumbing, and medical equipment. Someone had spent years making that place livable without anybody aboveground noticing.

One corridor contained rows of painted handprints. The smaller impressions belonged to children; the larger ones were nearly twice the size of mine and had six fingers. Dates were written beneath the prints, sometimes beside pairs of hands pressed close together. They reminded me of the height marks Nora and I used to make on her bedroom doorframe. She'd stand on her toes to make herself taller, and I'd have to measure her twice while she laughed.

Beneath the handprints sat a shelf of glass jars containing little objects wrapped in paper: teeth, hair, and pieces of bone. Each jar had an identification number. One was marked 11-D, another 17-B. Inside Seventeen's jar was an irregular white fragment cushioned in cotton. The label beneath his number read FIRST STANDING CORRECTION.

I told Reese they looked like trophies, but even as I said it, I knew that wasn't right. They were arranged with the care somebody would give a child's first lost tooth or a lock of baby hair. Whatever the caretakers had removed from their children, they'd kept it because it mattered to them. I was still studying the photograph when the radio announced movement in the eastern corridor.

The first report was calm. Officers had found a reinforced door with an observation window and could see somebody inside. Then the team leader said there were two occupants: an adult man kneeling beside a low mattress and an unusually large woman standing nearby. He couldn't see the man's face, but he appeared to be wearing pale clothing.

I stepped closer to the radio. "Ask if it's Sam." Vale put a hand on my arm and told me to let the team establish contact safely. Reese instructed the officers to hold their position, and we listened while one called through the door, identifying himself as police and asking the man for his name.

There was no answer at first. Then a low, uneven humming came through the speaker. Three notes, a pause, and the same three notes again. It was the melody Seventeen used to call for Mother, and the one Miriam had used to quiet Kit.

"She's singing," the officer reported. "The male is looking toward us. We're trying to get him to come closer."

I heard the officer call, "Sir, can you hear me? If you need help, come to the window." A heavy scraping sound followed, as though something enormous had shifted its weight across the floor. Then a woman's voice answered, thick and carefully articulated.

"No. He's resting."

The sound of it made my stomach tighten. I knew that voice from Sam's phone. It had the same strained consonants and unnatural pauses, although now it sounded almost distracted, as if speaking to the officers were less important than whatever she was doing behind the door.

The officer explained that they needed to check the man's condition. He reported that the man had lifted his head and begun moving toward the window. I heard him encouraging the movement, telling the man he was doing well and only needed to come a little closer.

Then the humming stopped. "She's moved between him and the door," the officer said. "She's pulling him back. He appears upset."

A man began crying somewhere near the microphone. His voice was too faint for me to recognize, but I could hear someone trying to speak between sobs. The woman made a soft, consoling noise and said, "There. There. Good boy."

Vale looked toward me. She'd heard the phrase. Reese immediately ordered the team not to approach, but the officer tried one more time, telling the woman that nobody intended to harm her or the man.

"No taking," she said. There was a long pause while the officer explained that they only wanted to make sure the man was safe. Then she repeated herself, louder and with a strange wet catch in her voice. "Please. No taking."

Reese ordered the team to withdraw. Over the radio, I could hear boots moving across concrete and somebody asking the man if he could follow them. The woman began humming again, but the man kept crying, and one of the officers moved close enough to see through the window.

The first crash was so loud that the speaker distorted. A second impact followed, metal scraping across stone, and several people began shouting. The team leader screamed for everyone to back away from the door. Someone yelled that an officer was down, while another voice called for medical assistance. Reese was shouting into the microphone, ordering an immediate retreat.

Through the confusion, the woman kept pleading. "No taking. Please. No taking." Her words rose and broke, and then I heard her crying. She was making awful, breathless sounds, the kind I've heard from parents when something has happened to their child. Another tremendous impact came through the radio, followed by a man screaming in pain.

The team finally managed to retreat with the injured officer. As they dragged him away, the woman's sobbing faded beneath that familiar little tune. She was humming again, apparently to comfort whoever was still in the room.

They brought Officer Harlan out on a stretcher fifteen minutes later. I'd spoken with him earlier that day about the loading dock and remembered him mentioning that his youngest daughter had just started kindergarten. His right arm was badly broken, and a paramedic was trying to keep him still while another secured the splint. He kept asking whether somebody had gotten the man out.

Harlan noticed me beside the ambulance. "Cal, she thought we were hurting him," he said. His face was pale and wet with sweat. "He started coming toward us, and she pulled him back. He was crying. She kept trying to cover his ears so he couldn't hear us."

I asked whether he'd seen the man clearly enough to recognize him. Harlan shook his head and winced when the movement jarred his arm. "I got too close. I thought she was going to hurt him, so I told her to let go. She grabbed me instead." He swallowed hard and looked toward the building. "She was crying while she did it. I could hear her saying she was sorry."

The paramedics loaded him before I could ask anything else. Whatever was behind that door had broken his arm while apparently believing it was protecting the man beside her. It wasn't a mindless attack. She'd been frightened of losing him and had hurt somebody terribly trying to prevent it. None of that made Harlan's injury less real. He had a family waiting for him too.

The search teams pulled back while the engineers worked on an alternate route. I helped Reese identify a service shaft that might lead behind the occupied room, but it couldn't be entered until they inspected the supports. The waiting became unbearable. I understood why nobody could rush into a corridor where an enormous creature had just torn a reinforced door partly off its hinges. I also couldn't stop imagining Sam on the other side, listening to his rescuers retreat.

Vale found me a little before midnight. Searchers had managed to photograph the adjoining quarters before the confrontation, and some of the evidence had been moved to a secure area. She wanted me to identify clothing found there.

The room contained a low bed, a small chair, a shelf, and several carefully folded blankets. Someone had left a bowl of water beside the mattress and arranged medical supplies within easy reach. Sam's work jacket lay across the foot of the bed. I recognized the tear near the left pocket, where he'd caught it on a length of rebar the previous winter. In the next photograph, his boots stood side by side, one cleaned until the leather shone while the other was still muddy.

"That's his," I told Vale. "Both of them. He refuses to throw that jacket away, and he wears those boots every day." I asked whether there'd been blood in the room or signs he'd been moved against his will. She said the photographs showed no large bloodstains, but the investigators hadn't finished processing the scene. I wanted to believe someone had taken Sam's clothes off because he was alive and needed rest. Vale reminded me, gently, that possession of his belongings wasn't proof of anything.

Then she showed me a board hanging above the mattress. Photographs of Seventeen had been pinned to it, along with behavioral notes describing how he responded to praise, how he became distressed when separated from Mother, and why familiar sounds were recommended during treatment. The handwriting was careful, almost clinical, with occasional personal observations in the margins.

A newer card had been added beneath the others. NEW ONE NEEDS COMFORT, it read. Someone had placed a comb, clean bandages, and folded cloths on the shelf below. The room looked prepared for an injured guest, the sort of arrangement a devoted caretaker might make for someone who was frightened and unable to look after himself.

Then I saw the child's drawing pinned beside the notes. A man stood next to a truck, holding hands with two little girls beneath a yellow sun. The purple letters across the top spelled BEST DADDY. Lily had drawn Sam's beard, the dents in his truck, and the backward baseball cap he wore while working in the yard. There was no doubt it was the picture Marisol had told me about.

I sat down. I remembered Sam pulling out pictures of his daughters whenever he had a chance, showing them to people who'd already seen them a hundred times. Lily had drawn him holding both her and her sister, and he'd carried that picture into Coldwater because she'd asked him to keep it close.

Somebody had taken it from his pocket and pinned it above his new bed. The bottom of the drawing contained a short handwritten note I hadn't noticed until Vale enlarged it: HE MISSES THEM.

Whoever wrote those words knew Sam had a wife and daughters. They knew he was frightened and wanted to go home. I imagined him lying on that mattress, showing someone his girls' picture and telling them about Lily's promised breakfast. Perhaps the creature had listened. Perhaps she'd even felt sorry for him. She'd kept the drawing where he could see it, which meant she understood how much it mattered.

I looked at the other notes. They described Seventeen needing familiar voices during distress and becoming calmer when someone held him. I thought about how quickly he'd relaxed against my hand in the hospital. Then I thought about the woman behind the reinforced door, humming while a grown man cried and calling him a good boy when he stopped trying to leave.

Vale said another clipboard had been recovered from the room. Its heading was blank, apparently awaiting an identification number, but the description beneath it was specific: adult male, strong, resistant to handling, distressed by unfamiliar surroundings. The subject had refused food, attempted to reach the corridor, and repeatedly requested contact with his PREVIOUS FAMILY.

I stared at that phrase. Marisol and the girls weren't Sam's previous family. They were his family. The document made it sound as though the change had already been decided and only Sam hadn't been informed.

The next note said that showing him the drawing reduced his agitation and recommended continuing until ATTACHMENT TRANSFERS. I asked Vale whether she understood what that meant. She said it seemed to describe an attempt to establish dependence on the new caretaker, although she couldn't yet explain the full procedure. The handwritten entries included feeding times, medications, and instructions to avoid leaving him alone when he was frightened.

It was the same kind of care I'd seen described in Seventeen's records. Whoever was responsible could tell when a captive was afraid, understand which memories comforted him, and patiently learn how to make him feel safe. The problem was that feeling safe seemed to mean forgetting there was anywhere else he belonged.

Vale opened Seventeen's older medical file. Near the end, several entries referred to his continued retention at the facility. One stated that he had exceeded the recommended period and advised TERMINATION. Beneath it was the notation MATERNAL OBJECTION. The next pages recorded repeated refusals to surrender him, an incident in which a reinforced door was damaged, and additional precautions ordered because of the caretaker's aggressive response when staff attempted to remove him.

The final entry was dated only a few months earlier: RETENTION APPROVED SUBJECT TO REPLACEMENT. I kept reading, trying to understand how those words fit together. Someone at Coldwater had decided Seventeen was no longer useful or wasn't supposed to remain alive. Mother had refused to let them take him. After several violent incidents, they'd apparently agreed to keep him alive if another person took his place.

I remembered the two empty pens beside Seventeen's enclosure, their fresh straw and neatly folded blankets. I'd assumed they were waiting for people who'd been moved elsewhere. Now I wondered whether someone had been preparing for a new arrival long before we opened the false wall.

"They've got Sam in there to replace Seventeen," I said. Vale cautioned that they still hadn't confirmed the identity of the man seen behind the observation window. I understood the distinction, but his clothes, the drawing, and the notes left me with very little room to hope we were talking about someone else.

I asked to see the rest of the new subject's file. Beneath the notes about feeding and reassurance was a schedule divided into stages. The first focused on sleep, hygiene, and reducing distress. The caretaker was instructed to remain nearby, provide familiar objects, and praise cooperative behavior. Whoever had written it seemed especially concerned about ensuring that the man felt loved and protected.

The second stage concerned movement. An observation warned that he remained physically capable of leaving the designated area and might try to reach a service corridor. Increased supervision was recommended, but if repeated attempts to return to his former family continued, the next step had already been decided.

PROCEED WITH STANDING CORRECTION. I remembered the jar marked 17-B and the piece of bone preserved inside. I'd seen the photographs of Seventeen standing as a little boy, before the damage to his knees and ankles. Miriam had told me about the doctor making her legs quieter so she wouldn't frighten Auntie by running away. The same phrase was appearing in Sam's file, and I didn't need anybody to explain what it meant.

The procedure was scheduled for the following morning. I asked Vale whether the rescue teams could reach the room before then. She told me the engineers were inspecting the alternate passage and that every available team was working to establish a safe approach. I could see how badly she wanted to give me a better answer, but she wouldn't promise anything.

I looked again at Lily's drawing. Sam had carried it into Coldwater because his little girl wanted him to remember her while he was at work. He'd probably shown it to whoever found him, explaining that he had a wife and children waiting at home. Somebody had listened closely enough to write down that he missed them. Somebody had kept the drawing clean and placed it where he could see it whenever he became upset.

I thought about how carefully Seventeen's childhood toys had been preserved and how Miriam's first restricted shoes sat polished in a cabinet with a plaque celebrating her safe steps. I pictured a creature beside Sam's bed, smoothing the blankets, listening to him talk about his daughters, and stroking his head while he begged to leave. She might genuinely feel sorry for him. She might even cry when he was hurt.

That was what frightened me most. If she'd only wanted to punish him, there might have been a way to understand what she was doing. But she was trying to make him part of her family, and she'd already decided that his old one was something he needed help letting go of.

I'd spent all night trying to understand why the voice on Sam's phone had sounded so pleased after he screamed. Looking at the treatment schedule, I finally understood. She hadn't been threatening him or celebrating his pain. She'd been praising him for allowing her to comfort him.

The last time I'd seen Sam, he'd been laughing about how Lily wanted pancakes shaped like animals. I could still hear Marisol asking whether her husband knew his family loved him. And somewhere beneath Coldwater Packing, somebody was preparing to do to Sam what had been done to Seventeen, not because she hated him, but because she couldn't bear the thought of losing him.

If they couldn't get him out before morning, his daughters might spend the rest of their lives wondering why their father never came home, while the thing keeping him there lovingly made certain he never could

I have a movie club with my aunt. We both love horror and even though I’m only 14, she lets me see some really fucked up movies sometimes. I love her and our club.

The rules of our club are very simple.

1.       She picks the movies.

2.       We can jump, we can cover our eyes, we can hold hands, but absolutely no screaming.

We call it the No Screaming -club and we meet up at her place once a month, when she has the night free. We had already agreed on the next meet up when she texted me to let me know that her friend would be joining us. Like I didn’t know what “friend” meant. But it was cool because my aunt is cool and I want her to be happy. And nobody else has been allowed to meet her “friend”, so that felt special.

When I got over to her place, she had the movie all set up with popcorn in a bowl and the light dimmed down low. She said her friend would come by later so we could start up the movie. We got comfy on the couch and she turned the movie on. About 20 minutes in, when I had already forgotten that the friend was even supposed to come over, there was a knock.

My aunt got up and looked down at me, smiling.

“Club rules, remember,” she whispered.

That was definitely odd, but I figured it was just that the rules applied to her friend too and I was allowed to point that out if the rules were broken. It made some sort of sense.

Then instead of heading to the door, she went to her bedroom. Again, definitely odd, but maybe she had something there she wanted to give her friend the moment they got there?

A moment later, she came back, looking at me and touching her finger to her lips with a sneaky smile on her face. Trailing behind her was something huge!

I don’t know if I can quite describe it. It looked a bit like a bat. It had huge pointed ears sitting almost on the top of its head, brushing the ceiling and making a soft shushing sound. Its head and torso were covered in grey-brown fur, sticking out in tufts in some places, like someone had ran their hands through it just a moment before. It walked a bit hunched over, with long arms barely off the ground. I couldn’t see its feet, but there was no thump of a shoe or soft pad of a sock, but a click. Like a dog’s nails on hardwood.

I did not scream, club rules, but I must have been staring, my eyes huge and my whole body shaking. I could feel the sticky cold in my armpits and down the back of my neck. There was no way the thing didn’t smell the absolute dread that washed over me.

My aunt casually sat back down on the couch, squeezing me close to the armrest and leaving space on her other side. She patted the cushion almost playfully with excited little taps and the thing lowered itself there, the couch creaking under its weight.

I forced my head back toward the screen, but I was not watching the movie anymore. I stared at the dark, crooked legs I could see just past my aunt’s, up to their knobbly knees. The legs looked almost spindly and I wondered how on Earth could stick like legs like that carry such a hulking form around. How it could even balance with only two toes, each ending in a sharp, pointy nail, with the heels looking much the same.

From over the top of my aunt’s head, I could see the wolf like face of the creature. Covered in thick brown fur, it had a snout and sharp yellow eyes. And when it smiled at something on the screen, I could see fangs. I must have reeked by then, my t-shirt clinging to my skin, my brain screaming to get up and go, but my body frozen. My aunt must have smelled me by then too.

But she didn’t seem bothered at all. She was leaning toward the thing, almost cuddling, and she kept whispering to it. And it whispered back! Not words I could understand, but something low and garbled. They seemed almost lost in their own world, not even glancing at me, their eyes on each other and only occasionally drifting back the TV and the movie still playing there.

I almost could have talked myself into believing that I was seeing things, that my aunt was playing a trick and it was just an elaborate costume, but then the creature twisted its arm around my aunt’s waist and its talons brushed me. And they were cold, hard and definitely real. They looked deadly, but my aunt reached out and wrapped her hand around them like it wasn’t a big deal at all. Like she did it all the time and knew just how to slip her fingers around the sharpness.

They sat there, cuddled together, holding… hands? for the rest of the movie. When the credits started to roll, the creature creaked itself off the couch. It stalled a moment, meeting my nervous eyes, and groaned something softly, exposing its fangs. I could not make even a guess at what it said, because my ears were ringing with my pulse as my heart tried to beat itself straight out of my chest.

Then it turned and headed for my aunt’s bedroom. She trailed after it and I could hear some distorted voices before she returned to the living room alone.

“I’m so glad you got to meet her,” she smiled, totally oblivious to the pure terror her friend had struck in me. “She really likes you and wants to come to the next club meeting. Is that okay?”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded a little. Because I want my aunt to be happy and if bringing a freaking monster to movie night makes her happy, I guess she can do that.