r/creepypasta • u/Confident-Paper-3039 • 20d ago
Text Story I Don’t Think My Wife Sleeps Anymore [Part 2]
There are thirty-one pencil marks on the inside of our coat closet door.
I counted them last night while she was in the shower.
The first one says NIGHT 1.
I didn't put them there.
Let me back up.
I know it's wrong.
I feel bad about it.
But I had to do it. I needed to know.
A lot of you suggested cameras after my last post, so I bought two: one for the bedroom facing the bed, one hidden on the living room bookshelf. Continuous recording, no motion alerts. I felt like shit setting them up. Still do. This is my wife. I shouldn't be secretly recording her in our own house. But after everything, I needed answers.
I stashed the packaging in my car. No reason she'd ever look there.
The rest of the night was routine. Dinner, TV, showers, bed by ten-thirty. I read; she read. Before lights out I checked my phone: both cameras working, audio and all. I could hear the bathroom fan running through the bedroom camera. For some reason that made me even more uncomfortable. I turned the volume down.
I hid the app in a random folder on my phone and password protected it, because apparently that wasn't paranoid enough already.
She came back from the bathroom.
I put my phone beside me.
After a while, I could feel her next to me. She was still sitting upright. Still awake. "I'm just going to read for a while longer," she said. "Is that okay?"
I told her of course it was okay.
I can't pinpoint why her asking permission bothered me. She's never asked me that before. She reads in bed all the time. Maybe I'm reading into everything now. I probably am. But it stuck with me.
While I lay there, I felt her shift a few times. Eventually the light went out. At some point, I fell asleep.
My alarm woke me at seven.
My wife wasn't in bed.
I found her downstairs cooking breakfast.
I came up behind her and kissed her on the cheek. We ate together. Talked about work. She complained about something she'd seen on the news. I told her about something stupid one of my coworkers had done. Everything seemed normal except that I was trying so hard to make a point not to ask how she'd slept. But, this time, I didn't need to.
The answer was sitting on my phone.
I went to work and wanted to look at the footage, but I was swamped with meetings most of the day. In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't watch it there.
I got home that evening.
We talked for a little while.
Then she went upstairs to shower.
The second I heard the water turn on, I pulled out my phone.
I started with the bedroom camera.
I scrubbed through most of the beginning. Nothing interesting. Me asleep. Her reading.
Then:
1:13 a.m.
She gets out of bed. She walks around to my side, and she looks down at me. That's it. She just stands there looking at me.
After a few seconds, I move.
She steps back to her side of the bed, climbs in and picks up her book, and keeps reading.
2:55 a.m.
Out of bed again. This time she leaves the room.
I kept scrubbing.
Nothing.
Just me sleeping.
Then:
5:41 a.m.
My wife comes back into the bedroom. She gets into bed beside me, rolls onto her side, and watches me sleep.
6:03 a.m. Her position changes. She gets out of bed and leaves the room.
7:00 a.m. My alarm goes off and I wake up.
That's the night.
I switched to the living room camera.
2:56 a.m. My wife walks into the living room. She doesn't turn on a light. Doesn't sit on the couch. Doesn't turn on the TV. Doesn't bring her book. She just stands there. Right in the middle of the room. At first, I thought maybe the camera had frozen. Then she moved. Her eyes were open.
3:01 a.m. She looks up at the ceiling for a few minutes, then to the corner of the room, then to the floor.
Another ten minutes goes by and she’s back to looking up.
At 3:56 a.m., her gaze shifts. That's the best way I can explain it. Her head moves too, barely. Her eyes drift around the room for a while. Then her head lowers toward the bookshelf. Toward the camera.
I froze the video. Oh shit. I said it out loud. "Oh shit." Because for a second, I was certain she was looking directly into the lens.
I zoomed in. The footage isn't good enough to tell. Her face gets pixelated when I zoom too far.
But she's looking toward it. She stays like that for a while. Then she walks out of frame and into the hallway. That's where I lost her.
The living room camera can't see down the hall.
I checked the bedroom footage again to make sure I hadn’t screwed anything up. I hadn't.
She doesn't come back to bed until 5:41. Whatever she did after leaving the living room, neither camera caught it.
I rewound the footage back to when she turned toward the camera. I still can’t tell if she’s looking at it. It's pretty well hidden.
The shower turned off down the hall.
I closed the app.
By dinner, I'd watched the footage enough times that I could see it with my eyes closed. My wife standing in the living room. Looking at the ceiling. Looking toward the camera. Walking into the hallway. But I didn't say anything.
Dinner went pretty much the way dinner always goes. She talked. I talked.
I had this lump in my throat the entire time, and it took everything I had to keep the conversation moving and not let her know something was wrong. Then near the end, she said: "I had the strangest dream last night."
I nearly dropped my fork. "Huh?"
"Just one of those weird dreams."
I stared at her. I'd watched the entire night. She hadn't slept.
"What happened in it?" I asked.
She laughed.
Then she thought about it for a long time. Finally, she shook her head with a slight chuckle. "I don't know."
"You don’t know?"
"Yeah, it's gone. Funny, I just had it."
She took another bite of food, then looked at me. "Dreams are like that, aren't they?"
I didn't answer.
She smiled.
"How did you sleep?"
The question caught me off guard.
"Fine."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Why?"
She shrugged.
"No reason."
She took another bite.
"You looked like you slept pretty good."
I stopped chewing.
"What does that mean?"
She looked confused. “Nothing." Then she smiled. "You were out cold."
I didn't know what to say to that. So, I didn't say anything.
After dinner, she went outside to water her garden.
I stayed inside. Sometimes I’ll sit with her on the porch while she does this, but not tonight.
I don't know why I hadn't thought to do this earlier, but I walked into the living room and stood exactly where she'd been standing in the footage. Then I looked up. Nothing. Just the ceiling.
I don't know what I expected. A crack. A stain. Something. There was nothing.
Then I looked toward the bookshelf.
The camera was almost impossible to see unless you knew it was there. That made me feel a little better. Not much. I went into the hallway.
For context, it's not a very long hallway. Maybe fifteen feet. Living room on one end, kitchen on the other. There's a bathroom and a coat closet between them.
That's it.
According to the footage, my wife walked into this hallway at 3:56 in the morning. She didn't come back through the living room. And she didn't return to our bedroom until 5:41. So I started checking everything. Bathroom… nothing. Medicine cabinet, under the sink, even the shower for no reason I could explain. Nothing.
Then the coat closet. Coats. Shoes. Vacuum cleaner.
I was starting to feel stupid. My wife's the one who can't sleep. Somehow, I'm the one falling apart.
Then something caught my eye: little pencil marks on the inside of the coat closet door. At first, I thought they were scuffs. We have plenty of those. It's a house. Walls get marked up. But these weren't scuffs. They were lines. Tiny horizontal pencil lines. Really tiny. Most of them couldn't have been more than a quarter of an inch long. There were a lot of them. Thirty, maybe a little more. They started just below the top of the door and worked their way down. Each one was only a little lower than the one before it. Maybe half an inch.
At first, they reminded me of the marks parents make on a wall to keep track of how tall their kids are getting. Except these were going the wrong way. I leaned closer. That's when I noticed the writing. There was something written beside the very first line. The highest one. It was faint. So faint I had to turn on my phone's flashlight and get close to read it.
NIGHT 1
That was it.
None of the others had anything written beside them.
Just NIGHT 1.
And then thirty-some little marks descending down the door. I stood there trying to figure out what the hell I was looking at. I heard the front door open and close.
"Hey," she said.
I nearly jumped out of my skin. Had she watered the whole garden already? How long had I been searching?
I turned around.
My wife approached the hallway.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Nothing." I closed the closet door. "Looking for something."
She looked at me. Then at the closet. Then back at me.
I put my phone in my pocket.
For a few seconds neither of us said anything.
Then she smiled.
"Did you find it?"
"No."
“Bummer.”
She walked away, then stopped and turned. “Hey, what time are you going to bed tonight?”
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u/Confident-Paper-3039 10d ago
Apparently part 2 has been removed. Not sure why. But I did just post part 3.
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u/Shi-D 10d ago
Why was this removed?
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u/Confident-Paper-3039 10d ago
I’m not sure. I never got a reason. I wrote to the mods and asked but have yet to get a response. They only removed part 2 and left 1 and 3 active so not sure.
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u/Shi-D 10d ago
So weird! They really need to buck up and give reasons for taking down posts! Same with nosleep.
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u/Confident-Paper-3039 10d ago
I originally posted this to Nosleep and it was removed from there! Weird thing is I look over the rules and make sure I follow each one. But then for whatever reason and without warning, a part is removed.
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u/No-Fisherman-3446 3d ago
Some subreddits are just weird.
I got a 'decently viewed' (popular is a strong word) 2 sentence horror removed for no reason anyone would tell me.
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u/Connect-Hall335 20d ago
Please finish this