Mara’s key scraped in the lock at exactly 12:17 a.m. The hallway light flickered above her head — not unusual for her old building, but enough to make her pause. The night outside was quiet, just the distant sound of wind through half-bare trees. She pushed the door open, expecting the same cozy mess she’d left behind that afternoon: a couch buried under throw blankets, a candle that smelled like caramel apples, her pumpkin mug still sitting on the coffee table.
Instead, she froze.
Everything — everything — had moved.
Her dining chairs were stacked in a crooked tower that reached almost to the ceiling. The couch was tilted against the far wall, legs sticking up like some kind of overturned beetle. The framed prints she’d hung above the TV were now all perfectly aligned in a row on the floor. And in the middle of the room sat her pumpkin mug, right side up on the carpet, with a note written beneath it in flour:
HI MARA
Her stomach dropped.
For a long, breathless moment, she just stood there, listening. No footsteps. No voices. Only the soft hum of her refrigerator — until that, too, stopped.
A chill ran down her spine.
She crept into the kitchen, pulling her phone from her pocket. The flashlight beam cut across the counter, catching on something greenish. The fridge door was open just a crack, and the smell hit her immediately — sour and sharp. She reached out with a trembling hand and pulled it open. Every single thing inside was spoiled. Milk clotted like glue, lettuce shriveled and brown, strawberries turned to fuzz. It was impossible — she’d bought all of it two days ago.
Her pulse picked up. There were no signs of a break-in, no footprints, no broken window. But something was off. Then the living room light flickered once… twice… and went out completely.
Mara’s breath caught. “Hello?”
Silence.
Then, from somewhere near the ceiling, a faint, muffled snicker.
Mara’s fear evaporated in an instant, replaced by pure exasperation. “You have got to be kidding me.” A soft shimmer appeared in the air above the couch — first like a dust cloud catching moonlight, then gradually resolving into a grin.
“Boo,” said Harper.
Mara groaned, tossing her keys onto the counter. “You cannot do that to me on Halloween.”
“I can and I did,” Harper said, flipping upside-down midair like a smug goldfish. “You left me alone for five hours. Do you know how boring it is haunting a studio apartment?”
“Apparently boring enough to give me a heart attack,” she muttered.
“I had to do something festive!” he protested. “It’s Halloween! You’re out flirting with Pumpkin Spice Boy or whatever his name is, and I’m stuck here—”
“It was one date,” Mara said, crossing her arms. “And it was nice until I came home to find my furniture possessed.”
“Rearranged,” Harper corrected. “Possessed is more of a May thing.”
She shot him a flat look. “You owe me new groceries.”
He gave her his best ghostly puppy eyes. “Can I pay you in eternal loyalty and light haunting services?”
“Throw in doing the dishes and we’ll talk.”
“Deal.”
With a satisfied grin, Harper drifted toward the fridge and waved a hand — the spoiled food vanished in a faint shimmer of light. “See? All better. Ghost perks.”
“Next time,” Mara said, stifling a laugh, “you could just text me like a normal spirit.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
She shook her head, finally smiling. “You’re lucky I like you, you little menace.”
Harper hovered just long enough to wink. “I know.”
And then, with a faint pop, he disappeared — leaving the faint scent of cinnamon and a single pumpkin seed on the counter as proof he’d ever been there.
Mara sighed, righted her couch, and smiled despite herself. Life with a ghost roommate wasn’t easy… but it was never boring.
"It's quite literally not possible to hate Halloween. How? Why?" she asked again, leaning so far across the table that the pumpkin-shaped candle between them threatened to scorch her sleeve. The orange glow caught the edge of her smile, too bright and too sharp to be entirely playful.
"I just don’t like it," they repeated, shrugging. "I don’t like horror, I don’t like pumpkins, I don’t like candy…"
The words fell like stones into the room. Every friend gathered around the table seemed to flinch a little harder with each one. Not like candy? Not like pumpkins? It was as though they had stood up in church and shouted that they hated sunlight.
A silence crept in. It was broken only by the sound of laughter outside—children’s squeals, rustling costumes, the low boom of someone’s portable speaker rattling out a ghostly remix.
One of the others at the table leaned forward carefully. "So… what do you do on Halloween?" she asked, voice light but nervous.
"I stay home," they said simply. "I turn off the lights so no one knocks, I make tea, maybe read a book. It’s just another night, honestly."
The silence deepened. Even the candle’s flame seemed to bow lower, shrinking as if in disbelief.
Her smile twitched, faltered, then returned. "Just another night," she repeated, rolling the phrase around like it tasted bad. "But it isn’t just another night. It never has been."
They laughed awkwardly, trying to dispel the tension. "Come on, it’s not that serious. You all just take it really personally because you’re obsessed with this stuff. You decorate in August, for god’s sake."
"Because it matters," she said softly.
And the way she said it—almost reverent, almost like a warning—made the others around the table straighten in their chairs. Their gazes, usually warm and teasing, had shifted. Watchful now. Serious.
She tapped one long nail against the rim of her glass, a quiet, rhythmic sound that began to feel uncomfortably like a metronome. "I thought tonight could be special," she said. "I thought we’d welcome you in. We’re always looking for one more."
They raised a brow. "One more what? Trick-or-treaters?"
Her eyes gleamed. "No. A coven."
It was said so simply, as though she’d said "a card game" or "a movie marathon." The others didn’t react—not with laughter, not with disbelief. They just sat there, solemn, faces half-lit by the shifting candlelight.
The back of their neck prickled. They forced another laugh. "Oh, very funny. This is one of your Halloween skits, right? You dress up, you commit to the bit, we all clap at the end—"
But no one clapped.
She stood then, slowly, deliberately, pushing back her chair with a scrape that echoed far too loud in the quiet room. "A circle is stronger with many hands," she said. "Stronger still when those hands are willing. I thought you might join. You’re clever, loyal, close. We could have been more than friends tonight."
Their mouth was suddenly dry. "Maybe… another time," they offered, weakly joking. "I’ll, uh, pencil it into my calendar."
She shook her head. "No. The circle doesn’t wait. It either opens…" She trailed off, gaze sliding over the others, who had risen now as well, forming a loose ring around the table. "Or it seals."
The candle flames trembled, bending toward her as if pulled by an unseen breath. Shadows stretched tall and strange across the walls, twisting into clawlike shapes.
They tried to rise from their chair, but the space felt smaller than it had a moment ago. Too crowded, too close. The air smelled of wax, smoke, and something faintly metallic.
"You don’t understand," they said, voice cracking. "I don’t hate it. I just don’t—"
"You refused it," she interrupted. Her tone was no longer playful or soft. It was final, ringing with the weight of old things. "The joy, the masks, the night itself. You turned it away. And what is turned away must be given back."
Her friends—no, her sisters, her circle—closed in, their faces calm, almost tender. Not cruel. Not gleeful. Just inevitable.
She reached out, brushing her fingers across their cheek, gentle as a lullaby. "What better sacrifice," she whispered, "than the one who cannot love Halloween?"
The chanting began then, low and melodic, the sound curling around the room like smoke. The shadows lengthened. The candles flared.
And the circle closed.
The nightmares start small.
A flash of light behind her eyelids. A pressure in her chest. The faint echo of the explosion she’s spent two years trying to forget. Every night, her body remembers before her mind does. She wakes up choking, sheets twisted, drenched in sweat. The air always smells faintly like smoke.
Her therapist says it’s normal — that PTSD can warp dreams into loops. “You’re reliving it,” she says gently. “But your mind is trying to rewrite the ending.”
Except every ending is the same. The sound of static right before the blast. The blinding heat. The scream that might’ve been hers.
By the fifth night, she begins to dread sleep. The static follows her into waking now — a faint, electric hiss under everything. The fridge hums. The streetlights were buzzing outside her window. She tells herself it’s just tinnitus, a side effect of anxiety. But when she turns off all the power, it’s still there.
She starts staying awake longer, eyes burning, nerves frayed. At 3 a.m., the shadows in her apartment seem to move like they’re breathing. Once, she sees the outline of a person standing in the doorway to her room. When she blinks, it’s gone.
By morning, she doesn’t remember whether she actually saw it or if it was just a dream.
Her days begin to blend into one another. She loses track of what’s real — her body jerks at loud sounds, her hands tremble when she tries to write. The static builds into whispers that have no words, just rhythm. Sometimes she catches herself answering them out loud.
Her therapist suggests medication. “You’re not sleeping,” she says. “You need rest to heal.”
She tries. She really does. But every time she starts to drift, she sees the red light again — the flare of the blast reflected in the window of the truck. The light becomes a doorway. Behind it, something moves.
She wakes up before she can see what.
She begins recording herself while she sleeps. She tells herself it’s for proof, some kind of reassurance that nothing’s really there. The next morning, she watches the footage. She’s still, breathing shallowly, eyes darting under her lids. Then — at 3:17 a.m. — she sits upright all at once, head tilting slightly toward the camera.
Her eyes are open.
She’s whispering something she can’t remember saying.
She leans closer until her face fills the frame. Her lips move. The static on the recording spikes, drowning everything else out.
She watches that part over and over. She can’t tell if it’s her voice under the static, or someone else’s.
The next night, she unplugs the camera. She tries to tell herself she’s not afraid — that it’s just her brain replaying trauma in the only language it knows. But when she closes her eyes, she’s back in the truck again. The hum starts low, building until it rattles her bones. She can see the red flare reflected in the rearview mirror. Only this time, it isn’t an explosion. It’s a face — her own, distorted and watching her from the glass.
She wakes up on the floor beside her bed, heart hammering. Her throat burns like she’s been screaming. When she tries to stand, her reflection in the window moves a beat too late.
That’s when she breaks. She rips the blanket off the bed, throws it over the mirror, and sleeps with the lights on.
Days pass. Or maybe weeks. The therapist’s calls pile up unanswered. She can’t tell if the static is getting louder or if she’s getting quieter. Sometimes she thinks she hears the explosion again, faint and far away — the sound bending time in on itself, pulling her back.
Last night, she woke up standing in front of the covered mirror. Her hands were pressed flat against it, trembling. The static was whispering in her own voice:
Wake up.
Today, she sits in the dark, afraid to blink. She can’t tell when dreaming stops and memory begins. The clock says 3:17 p.m. but the light outside looks wrong — the heavy, red kind that belongs to nightmares.
Somewhere in the apartment, something buzzes softly. Maybe the fridge. Maybe not.
She whispers, “It’s over.”
But her voice sounds like it’s coming from the other side of the blanket.
The thing comes at night.
I smell it first—cold and wrong, like wet earth and rotted leaves trapped inside the walls. It moves without sound, but the air ripples when it passes, heavy enough to press my whiskers flat.
The humans don’t see it.
They laugh when I hiss at the corners or chase shadows that don’t belong to me. “You’re such a weirdo,” the tall one says. “Must’ve seen a bug.”
There are no bugs. Nothing lives where that smell touches.
The first time it broke something, they blamed me. The vase fell in slow motion, like invisible hands had pushed it off the table. When it shattered, I saw a pale shape reflected in the glass—something that looked almost like a face, watching.
I cried out, but the tall one only sighed. “You’ve got to stop knocking things over, Pumpkin.”
I didn’t. It wasn’t me.
That night, the thing crouched by the window. Not outside. Inside. Its shape barely held together, like smoke pretending to be solid. My fur stood on end. I hissed until my throat burned.
It turned its head toward me. The air went thin. I bolted.
When I came back, the thing was gone, but the tall one’s picture frame had turned backward on the shelf. I pawed at it, trying to fix it. The short one laughed and said, “She’s trying to tidy up her mess.”
No one notices the smell but me.
It follows them now, clinging to the tall one like a shadow she doesn’t cast. When she walks down the hallway, the lights flicker one by one behind her. She thinks it’s faulty wiring. I know better.
The thing watches her when she sleeps. I see it standing at the foot of the bed, its mouth opening wider and wider until it’s nothing but a hole. Sometimes, when I yowl at it, the short one wakes up, groans, and throws a pillow at me.
“Go back to bed, Pumpkin.”
If only they knew.
Last night, it changed its shape again. The smell came first, sharp and wet, and then the sound—a scraping, like nails dragging down the walls. I crouched by the doorway, tail puffed. The thing stepped into the light, wearing the tall one’s face. Its eyes were open too wide.
I screamed. The lights burst. The air shook.
The tall one ran in, blinking from the dark. “What’s wrong?” she whispered. But her voice echoed twice, once from her mouth and once from the thing still standing in the hall.
I hissed and clawed at her arm. She yelped, stumbled backward. The thing smiled with both their faces.
Then the short one flicked on the light—and the hall was empty.
Now they don’t let me near the hallway at night. They close the door and whisper about “bad dreams” and “freaky coincidences.” But I still smell it, seeping under the crack of the door.
Sometimes, when they’re both asleep, the door creaks open just an inch. Just enough for me to see it waiting there.
It crouches low now, close to the floor, mimicking the shape of a cat.
When I move, it moves. When I tilt my head, so does it.
The only difference is the eyes.
Mine reflect gold.
Its glow red.
And last night, when I looked away, I heard a purr that didn’t come from me.
The first letter wasn’t even threatening.
Just a folded sheet of printer paper, no return address, written in blocky, careful handwriting:
“You shouldn’t have left things the way you did.”
Morgan read it three times before tossing it in the trash. No signature, no hint of who it was from. She told herself it was junk mail—maybe a prank, maybe some scammer’s idea of “personalized.” She tried to forget it over dinner.
The second letter arrived two days later.
“You walk the same route every morning. I like your new blue jacket.”
Her hands trembled as she held the envelope. She looked out the window at the mailbox across the street. Nobody there. The emptiness of the suburban street suddenly felt threatening. The police officer who came later was polite but detached. “Could be someone pulling your leg. We’ll file a report, but without direct threats, there’s not much we can do.”
By the end of the week, three more letters arrived.
The handwriting was the same—too neat, too familiar. One of them had a coffee stain shaped like a crescent moon, just like the mugs she used to own. That’s when Daniel’s face flickered in her mind.
She hadn’t spoken to him in over a year. He’d called it a “mutual breakup,” though the bruise on her arm said otherwise. She’d moved across town, blocked him on everything. But this… this felt like him. Like something he’d do when he wanted her to remember who held the power.
By the sixth letter, she no longer pretended it was harmless. It came on pink stationery.
“Still drinking chamomile before bed? You always said it helped your nightmares.”
Morgan slept with the lights on, every creak of the floorboards sending jolts through her chest. She showed her coworker the letter, but the woman just gave an awkward smile and shook her head. “Maybe you’re reading too much into it?”
It wasn’t a coincidence. The next letter contained a photograph—her house, taken from the sidewalk. The yellow glow of her kitchen window framed her silhouette as she washed dishes.
The police officer she called that night frowned at the photo and said, “He’s not trespassing if he’s on public property. Just… lock your doors.”
By mid-month, Morgan no longer opened her blinds. She didn’t go out if she could help it. The letters came anyway, always between six and seven p.m., almost ceremonious.
One said:
“I liked watching you cook tonight. Lock your window before you chop vegetables, though—looks dangerous.”
Another arrived smeared with a substance that smelled faintly of gasoline.
“You never appreciated what I did for you. Maybe I need to remind you.”
Her nights dissolved into a blur of panic and half-waking. She would startle awake at shadows, imagining footsteps in the hall, the faint echo of her own name whispered outside her window. She could feel eyes on her from across the street.
The seventeenth letter was brief:
“I’m sorry it had to come to this.”
She didn’t go to work. She packed a bag to stay at her sister’s, but the thought of stepping outside made her stomach twist. Every time she peered through the blinds, every shadow felt like Daniel, the outline of someone familiar.
That evening, a police cruiser finally pulled into her driveway. An officer came to her door with a clipboard. “We got a call,” he said. “Someone reported a suspicious person near your mailbox.”
Morgan’s throat went dry. “Did you catch them?”
He hesitated. “No one was there when we arrived.”
She asked if they’d at least take the latest letter for fingerprints. “We’ll see what we can do,” he said vaguely.
When she checked the mailbox after he left, there was only one envelope inside. No stamp. No address.
The ink bled through the paper where it had been pressed too hard.
“You called them again. You never learn.”
Morgan backed away from the box, trembling. She went inside, locked every bolt, and dialed 911 once more.
They promised to send someone. Ten minutes later, she heard footsteps on the porch. Heavy. Deliberate.
She clutched the phone, whispering, “Hello? Officer?”
A pause. Then—three slow knocks.
Through the peephole, she saw a familiar jacket. Blue. Just like hers.
And in the man’s other hand—a letter, already open.
The call dropped before she could scream.
She dropped the phone and pressed herself against the wall. Her breathing echoed too loudly in her ears. Every memory of Daniel’s smirk, every shared secret that had turned toxic, now swarmed in her mind like hornets. She wanted to run. She couldn’t.
The letter slid under the door. She didn’t pick it up immediately, could barely look. Something deep inside her told her that reading it would pull her across the line she’d worked so hard to rebuild.
But curiosity—terror—kept her feet moving.
She knelt, trembling, and opened it.
The message was simple.
“I’ve been waiting. Always.”
Morgan’s hands went cold. She looked up through the peephole. The porch was empty.
Then a whisper, unmistakable, filled the room:
“Why’d you run from me, Morgan?”
She spun, heart hammering, but there was no one there. The shadows stretched long and dark, but empty.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to throw the letter in the trash, run to the police, to her sister, anywhere—but every instinct told her she couldn’t leave.
Because she knew, deep down, whether he was real or just the twisted echo of her own fear… he was already inside her mind.
Hours passed. Or was it minutes? Time had no shape anymore. The letters kept coming, one after another, sliding under doors, appearing on counters, in the fridge, pinned to mirrors.
“I can see you in every reflection. You think I’m outside, but I’m inside. I’m in your thoughts.”
Morgan’s eyes darted to every surface. Her phone rang incessantly—calls with no one speaking. Sometimes she thought she saw movement in the dark corners of her apartment. Sometimes she saw Daniel’s face in the patterns of wallpaper or in the steam from her tea.
Finally, she felt him. Not at the door, not in the hallway—inside her.
A cold presence behind her, whispering words only she could hear:
“Run, and I’ll follow. Stay, and I’ll wait. You can’t hide.”
Her hands shook as she pressed against her ears, wishing she could block him out, wishing she could wake from this nightmare.
And then she realized she had been awake the entire time. There was no nightmare. There was no sleep. Only letters, footsteps, whispers.
She wanted to leave. She wanted to escape. But as she moved toward the door, a familiar blue jacket brushed against her arm in the reflection of the window.
No sound.
No one there.
Her heart beat faster, mind spiraling. She could feel him everywhere—in the shadows, in her thoughts, in the letters that multiplied as if by magic.
And Morgan understood, with icy clarity, that the stalking would never stop. That she was trapped in a cage of paper, ink, memory, and terror.
She was alone.
But not alone.
She couldn't tell the difference anymore.
And in the mirror, her own eyes widened in terror—because she saw Daniel smiling back.
The three of them stood on the sidewalk outside Screams & Scones: Haunted House Experience, a brand-new attraction that promised equal parts terror and pastry. Fog machines hissed at the entrance, and somewhere in the haze, a pair of glowing eyes blinked.
“I… don’t know about this,” Mara said, tugging her scarf nervously. “Pumpkin patches feel safer.”
“Nonsense,” Avery replied, bouncing on the balls of their feet. “Spooky and cute. Plus cinnamon rolls. Did you read the sign? Ghosts and cinnamon rolls.”
Sage leaned back, hands in their pockets, taking in the flickering orange sign. “I have a feeling we’re about to regret—or love—this.”
“Excuses won’t stop us,” Avery said dramatically, grabbing both their hands. “We’re doing this.”
Mara rolled her eyes but smiled. “Fine. Let’s get spooky.”
The crooked door creaked as they stepped inside. The first room looked almost… normal. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling, skeletons held trays of cookies, and a fog machine puffed in slow, uncertain bursts. Somewhere, a ghost mannequin stared blankly.
“I expected… more ghost energy,” Sage muttered, eyebrows raised.
“I don’t really need any more of that in my life, though. We could literally just go back to my place…”
Before anyone could reply, a bucket of confetti exploded above their heads. They all screamed and froze, confetti clinging to hair and coats.
“I… think that counts,” Avery said. “Scare level: maximum chaos.”
They pressed forward. A hallway lined with cat portraits seemed harmless… until one cat blinked. Sage yelped, nearly tripping over a sheet-covered “ghost.”
“Really? A blinking cat?” Mara muttered. “I’m traumatized.”
“Cute trauma,” Avery pointed out, laughing.
Next, a fog-filled room contained a single chair beneath a spinning disco ball. A ghostly voice whispered, “Sit… with me…”
Sage exchanged a look with the others. “Well… together?”
They all squeezed onto the chair, giggling. The disco lights cast dramatic shadows across their faces. For a moment, the haunted house actually felt like a stage for scared, cozy, sparkling chaos.
A sudden caw! made them jump again. Mara shrieked as a stuffed crow with googly eyes flopped in their path. Avery ducked behind Sage, still laughing.
“I think it’s… trying to communicate?” Avery asked.
“It’s duct-taped,” Sage said flatly, still laughing.
In the next room, faux tombstones read “RIP Diet” and “Here Lies My Motivation.” Floorboards creaked ominously. Mara leaned into Sage.
“I can feel the cold embrace of death,” she whispered.
“Peak haunted-house energy,” Sage said. “Holding hands, laughing, screaming… surviving nonsense together.”
Suddenly, a skeleton popped up from behind a gravestone, waving a rubber hand. They all screamed—but less than before—before collapsing into laughter.
“I declare this haunted house… too cute to die in,” Sage said, brushing off faux fear.
The final room was a café-themed haunt. Ghosts in tiny aprons offered mini cinnamon rolls and pumpkin lattes. One ghost tripped, sending a latte flying, Sage caught it midair like a pro.
“Hero of the haunted house,” Avery declared.
Mara winked. “We all deserve pastries for surviving this chaos.”
They sat at a tiny table, snacking and sipping lattes. Fog drifted lazily from a machine.
Avery leaned across the table. “Next year… haunted house again?”
“Yes,” Sage said, crumbs on their lips. “Maybe with slightly scarier ghosts.”
Mara nodded. “And more confetti explosions. Balance is key.”
They clinked paper cups together, hearts racing, arms casually brushing. Spooky? Absolutely. Cute? Even more so. Some scares, they realized, were infinitely better shared.
Wren and Selene had spent the week preparing for Halloween with careful devotion, as if the season itself demanded ritual obedience. Their home smelled of cinnamon and burnt sugar, a sweetness that clung too long. Lanterns glowed in the windows like patient eyes. The world outside was hushed, the first frost biting into the grass, and for a moment, everything felt safe.
Then the fair arrived.
It did not come with fanfare. One morning, the square was simply different—banners fluttering from iron poles, painted with looping letters that made no real words. The air smelled of caramel, tar, and smoke, thick enough to taste. A low, thrumming tune drifted from nowhere, or everywhere. Each note bent, wavered, dissolved before the next began. Wren’s stomach turned.
Tickets appeared in their mailbox that evening, folded into envelopes dusted with black ash. The paper felt alive—warm, pulsing faintly, like something that had once been flesh. When she tore it open, she swore she saw silver veins running through the fibers, shifting when she blinked.
They went anyway.
The fair was dazzling. Fire-eaters sent flames arcing into the dark, heat washing over the crowd. Jugglers hurled knives in perfect rhythm, the metal catching the light like trapped lightning. Clowns laughed too loudly, faces split by smiles that didn’t seem attached to muscle or bone. Their laughter was hollow, mechanical—like wind chimes in a sealed room.
Selene squeezed Wren’s hand. “They’re beautiful,” she whispered.
Wren wanted to agree, but her throat felt tight. The air smelled wrong—sweet, then metallic, then sweet again. Every time she blinked, something in the crowd shifted. Faces blurred and reformed, smiles flickering between delight and hunger.
When the fire-eater bowed, Wren noticed his torch wasn’t a torch at all—it was a human arm, charred black, the flame sprouting from the open wrist. No one else reacted. They clapped. Cheered.
She turned to Selene. “Did you—”
But Selene’s gaze was fixed on the stage, unblinking, her pupils wide enough to swallow the light.
The show built and built—flame and blade and laughter—and then, without warning, the fair was gone. The torches snuffed out. The air cleared. The banners were gone. Just empty frost and silence.
No one remembered leaving.
In the morning, the house no longer smelled of cinnamon. It smelled of dirt. Of wet leaves and iron. Selene stirred tea with a steady hand. The spoon clinked too loudly against the cup.
“You slept well?” she asked.
Wren hesitated. “No. I dreamt of the fair.”
Selene smiled too slowly. “Dreams can’t follow you, love.”
But something had. The walls breathed when Wren passed them. Shadows shifted against the grain of the light. The reflection in the hallway mirror lagged a second behind. In the corners of her vision—just there, gone again—white makeup, silver eyes, a mouth stretched too wide.
By evening, the whispers began.
Soft. Amused. So tidy. So quiet. So easy to watch.
Wren froze in the kitchen. The tea in her cup quivered.
“Selene,” she whispered.
“It’s just the wind.”
But the wind didn’t breathe her name. The wind didn’t press cold fingers down her spine.
That night, Wren woke to the sound of laughter behind the walls.
It wasn’t loud. It was worse than loud—it was restrained, careful, listening back. She held her breath. The sound mirrored her, matching each inhale and exhale until she couldn’t tell whose lungs moved.
“Selene?” she whispered.
Selene didn’t answer. The shape beside her in bed was too still, too exact, like something copied rather than born.
The first knock came just before dawn.
Not on the door.
On the inside of the wall.
Three soft taps. A pause. Three more.
Then, beneath the plaster, something laughed.
Selene sat up slowly. Her eyes reflected the faintest glint of silver.
“Don’t open it,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were,” she said gently. “It knows that.”
The knocks stopped. Then came whispering, a hundred voices layered and inverted, speaking backward and forward all at once. The sound slid between languages, between meanings. Wren could make out her name, over and over, drawn out like a chant.
The lights flickered.
The air grew dense, syrupy. The house seemed to lean closer.
Then, a voice—not sound, but thought, pressed directly into her mind:
You came. Now you stay.
The lights went out.
When they returned, Selene was smiling. Perfectly.
Too perfectly.
“Wren,” she said softly, “it’s all right now.”
But her voice had the same broken cadence as the fair’s music—each word falling slightly out of place, as though she were remembering how speech worked. Wren backed away. The mirrors all around the room reflected things they shouldn’t—shapes bending in impossible angles, faces laughing silently behind the glass. Every reflection showed Selene’s smile stretching wider, wider, until it split the skin.
“Selene,” Wren whispered, “what did it do to you?”
Selene tilted her head. “Do?” she said. “It didn’t do anything. It showed me what I am.”
Wren’s breath caught. Behind Selene, in the glass, the fair was visible—lanterns burning black, tents folding and unfolding like lungs, hundreds of figures pressed together, grinning. She snatched a knife from the counter, hands shaking. “You’re not her.”
Selene smiled. “No, love. But I remember her. I remember how she let it in.”
The house pulsed. Shadows twisted along the floor, pulling toward Selene like threads. The laughter was everywhere now, rising, unbearable. Every reflection in the room turned toward Wren. Every one of them smiled. The silver in Selene’s eyes flared.
“Join us,” she whispered.
The air curdled. A smell like scorched sugar and rot filled Wren’s lungs; her tongue went numb, metallic. The walls seemed to sweat—a thin, oily sheen that shimmered under the candlelight and smelled faintly of smoke and blood. A warm breath ghosted against the back of her neck, though Selene hadn’t moved. Beneath it all, a slow, wet heartbeat throbbed through the floorboards, syncing with her own.
Selene leaned closer, her voice almost kind.
“Though… maybe you never had a choice.”
Wren tried to move, but her limbs were heavy, like the air had turned to syrup. The knife trembled in her grip. Her reflection in the window raised it first—faster than she could.
And then everything went dark again.
When the neighbors found the house days later, it was empty.
The mirrors were all shattered, except one.
In that one, if you stood long enough, two figures could be seen in the reflection—hand in hand, smiling too wide.
Behind them, faintly, a carnival still turning.
Waiting for someone to notice it again.
Evelyn and Marcus were chasing deadlines, but inspiration had fled them like a cat from water. Horror anthologies demanded originality, and their latest drafts were tired echoes of clichés. That was when Marcus mentioned the old Hawthorne place, abandoned for decades. The neighbors whispered about it, claiming a grisly murder had stained its walls—an entire family, gone in a single night.
“Perfect,” Evelyn said, eyes lighting up. “We go in, take notes, and get material for the new story. Think about it—real fear.”
Marcus smirked. “Real fear or a lawsuit?”
By dusk, they stood before the rotting Victorian. The boards over the windows rattled like teeth, the paint peeling in jagged strips. The air reeked of mold, wet earth, and something else… metallic.
“Do you hear that?” Evelyn whispered.
Marcus shook his head. “Probably just the wind. Or rats. Or—” He froze as a soft thump echoed from inside.
With a shared glance, they pried a loose board and slipped into the hallway. Their flashlights cut weak swaths through darkness, illuminating faded wallpaper, cracked ceilings, and a staircase that groaned under imaginary weight.
“I could write a whole chapter on this floor alone,” Evelyn murmured. Her fingers traced the edge of a chair draped in cobwebs.
Suddenly, the air thickened. The shadows seemed to twist in the corners, gathering like smoke. Marcus shivered. “Eve… are you feeling that?”
Evelyn froze, listening to a faint whisper. It wasn’t wind. It wasn’t the house settling. It was a voice.
“Get out…” it hissed.
Marcus laughed nervously. “Oh, come on, that’s—” His words died in a gasp. Across the hallway, the outline of a figure shimmered, translucent but unmistakably human. Its face was featureless, smooth like porcelain.
Evelyn’s pulse raced, yet curiosity held her feet firm. “It’s probably… some kind of projection. Or my imagination.”
The figure drifted closer, and the temperature plunged. Their flashlights flickered and dimmed. Words scratched against the walls, as if invisible nails raked the plaster: Leave. Leave. Leave.
Marcus grabbed Evelyn’s arm. “Okay. Nope. We leave.”
But the house didn’t want them to. Doors slammed shut, locking themselves. Windows rattled violently, even though the air was still. The whispering became a chorus of anguished voices, echoing from every corner, rising and falling like tides.
Evelyn realized, too late, that their presence wasn’t welcome. The house spirits—they weren’t content to haunt passively. They were provoked. Perhaps it was the way the two had laughed about the tragedy, turned it into story fodder, or maybe the scribbled notes Marcus had left on the foyer table.
“I’m sorry! We’re just—writers! We—” Evelyn’s scream was swallowed by the walls.
From the darkness, the figure multiplied, dozens of featureless shapes sliding from the shadows, surrounding them. Each step they took reverberated with a wet, sucking sound. The air smelled of rust and decay.
Marcus fumbled with his notebook, ripping pages out and crumpling them. “We take them back! We can write about this, okay? But—” His words were interrupted as the pages caught fire spontaneously, the smoke curling into faces twisted with grief and rage.
Evelyn grabbed his hand, pulling him toward the staircase. “Now!”
The stairs creaked under their weight, threatening to break. One more glance revealed the hallway empty, but the walls themselves seemed alive, breathing, waiting. A whisper followed them up, chilling and intimate: You belong to the story now.
Outside, they stumbled into the night air, hearts hammering, lungs on fire. Behind them, the Hawthorne house stood silent again, windows dark, as if it had never stirred.
Neither spoke until they reached the streetlight, shaking too hard for words.
Finally, Marcus said, voice trembling: “We… we have our story. But I… I don’t think the house will ever forgive us.”
Evelyn nodded. “And neither will I if we ever go back.”
Yet even as they left, a soft scratching sound followed them down the empty street—like a pen across a page, writing a story that had chosen its own authors.
The building waited. It had waited for years, and it had learned patience. Its peeling paint and broken windows gave no hint of the small, precise attentions within: the way the floors shifted when someone stepped, the way shadows coiled in corners just a little too long, as if listening.
Jamie, who thought of herself as adventurous, did not notice this. She had squeezed through the gap in the side door with a scraping elbow and a rush of excitement. Her flashlight cut a thin beam across the dusty office space, bouncing off overturned chairs and water-stained walls.
At first, it was ordinary. Old desks, papers scattered like confetti after a parade no one attended, and a chair set upright in the middle of the floor as though someone had left it mid-thought. But then the building began to whisper. Not audibly, at least not to anyone else—if anyone else were there. A soft sound, just at the edge of perception, like the hum of a refrigerator that had forgotten how to be quiet.
Jamie froze, flashlight trembling in her hand. The air pressed closer, heavier, as if the building itself were leaning in to see what she might do next.
“Probably just the wind,” she muttered. Her voice cracked in the empty space. The building didn’t reply, at least not with words. It didn’t need to. It waited, and the shift of the air, the tremor of the floorboards, and the twitch of shadows told her exactly what it thought.
The corridors stretched differently the further she went. Doorways that had appeared to lead to hallways now ended in walls. Ceiling beams hung lower than they should. And everywhere she stepped, the whispering followed. Not like a sound that bounced, but like a presence that circled, patient and deliberate.
Jamie’s legs moved faster, though she tried to keep them quiet. Every step provoked another subtle movement: a paper slid an inch across the floor, a shadow flicked sideways just beyond her light. And always the whispering, insistent but distant, tugging at her nerves with words she could not place.
The building seemed to enjoy her confusion. It nudged the walls just enough to be disorienting, shifted angles so that even her flashlight’s beam betrayed her. Dust motes became pinpoints of intelligence, moving as though they had a will of their own.
A door loomed ahead. She tried it. Locked. Another door. Locked as well. Panic crept in, slow and sticky, settling in her stomach like syrup. The whispers intensified, curling around her thoughts, though still without shape, without a name, without a face. She could feel them, like watching eyes in the darkness, always just beyond reach.
Jamie pressed against the walls, moving sideways now, careful to avoid anything that could trip her. She was beginning to understand that the building wasn’t abandoned—it was aware. She couldn’t see it, but it could see her, knew her panic and her curiosity in equal measure. It was teaching her, testing her, and laughing quietly in the way that all terrible things laugh: with patience.
She stumbled into what had once been an office space. A chair in the middle of the floor, a single, small piece of debris that hadn’t been there before. Her flashlight flickered. She dropped to a crouch, trying to rationalize the shapes dancing in the shadows. Maybe it’s the wind. Maybe it’s rats. Maybe it’s… something else.
The something else, however, did not reveal itself. It did not need to. The building and its whispering were enough. Every corner she turned, the floor seemed to tilt. Every step she took, the air grew heavier. Every shallow breath felt watched, measured, noted.
She reached a stairwell. The stairs, though warped, allowed her passage downward. The air smelled worse, wetter. The shadows seemed to gather in tight little pockets, just beyond the reach of her light. She realized with a start that she could not remember how she had gotten there, only that she had, somehow, and that it was wrong.
At the bottom, a door promised escape. She yanked at it. Nothing. Panic surged, but it was still measured, the whispering guiding her, feeding her terror in precise increments. Every instinct she had screamed to leave, but every escape route failed. The building had grown around her.
Then, quiet. Not the kind of quiet that comforts, but the kind that waits. That waits and watches. Her chest tightened. And then, just behind her ear, soft but deliberate, came a whisper she could place, and could not place, at the same time.
“Don’t leave.”
She spun. The flashlight swung wildly, illuminating only walls and debris. No one stood there. Nothing moved. Yet the air felt heavier, the space narrower. The whisper didn’t repeat, but she felt it linger, like a shadow pressing into her shoulder, just out of sight.
Jamie fled, moving through corridors that seemed to fold in on themselves. She didn’t know where she was going, didn’t know what she might find, didn’t want to. Her thoughts were chaotic, oscillating between horror and dark, nervous humor. Maybe it’s like a haunted Airbnb, she thought. Maybe it wants reviews.
The city street finally appeared ahead, ordinary, mundane, safe. She stumbled into the alley, chest heaving, heart hammering, feeling almost foolish. She looked back once, and the building stared back in silence, unyielding, patient, still. She didn’t see movement, didn’t see shape. Only the shadows and the understanding that it was waiting, always waiting.
And then the whisper returned, floating on the wind, just audible:
“Next time… bring a friend.”
Jamie didn’t laugh. She didn’t move. She only stared, knowing that the building had won in a way nothing else could. It didn’t need eyes. It didn’t need hands. It only needed patience—and the perfect, delicious terror of someone who thought they were brave enough to explore.
The beach was quiet in a way that felt unnatural, like the world had pressed pause and left me behind. Moonlight stretched across the sand, silvering the foam of the waves, but even the usual rhythmic sigh of the surf seemed... wrong. Slower, maybe, or faster—I couldn’t tell. I walked along the shoreline, letting the wet sand cling to my bare feet, trying to shake the unease curling in my chest.
That’s when I saw it.
A shape moved at the edge of the surf. At first, I thought it was a figure, a person wandering too close to the water. But there was something in the way it moved that made my stomach seize. The motion was jerky, like a puppet learning its own body, and yet fluid, almost like it was being pulled along by the tide itself. My pulse spiked.
Time didn’t feel right. I glanced at my phone—the clock jumped forward five minutes in a single second. Then ten. The world seemed to speed and stretch all at once, like the night had decided to rewrite itself around this thing. The waves pulsed too quickly, the foam collapsing and reforming before I could track it, and the stars overhead streaked faintly across the sky as if the earth itself were spinning too fast.
The figure—or whatever it was—rose from the water, its form elongated and wrong. Too long, too thin. Its limbs bent in ways no human joint could survive. Its skin glistened wet and slick under the moonlight, reflective but not like any natural creature I’d ever seen. And the eyes… there were eyes, if that’s what they were, and they were too dark, infinite, like staring into the ocean itself. I felt them pierce through me, the kind of gaze that makes your own thoughts feel exposed, rearranged, fragile.
I wanted to step back. I wanted to run. But something rooted me to the spot. The tide curled unnaturally around my ankles, too high for the time of night, then retreated suddenly as if mocking the rules of physics. With each wave, the thing pulsed, gliding a little closer, silent but purposeful.
“Who are you?” I croaked. My voice sounded small, swallowed instantly by the surge of the distorted sea.
No answer. Only the creak of its limbs moving in impossible angles, the soft splash of water that didn’t match the rhythm of the waves. And then I noticed—the sand where it passed didn’t look like sand anymore. It glimmered with an oily sheen, the grains rearranging themselves under an invisible pressure, forming patterns that seemed alive.
Time slipped again. Minutes condensed into seconds, seconds stretched into eternities. My body trembled, but my senses felt sharpened, as if the night had taken everything else away to focus solely on this creature. I could feel my heartbeat in the salt-laden air, taste the electric tang of fear on my tongue.
It raised a hand—or a thing that resembled one—and tilted its head. My eyes followed its motion, and for a terrifying instant, I felt the pull of the tide itself, the ocean urging me forward, toward it. The water swirled around its form, strangely dark, almost black, reflecting the moon in unnatural shards. I realized I wasn’t walking; I was sliding, the sand beneath me moving as if it were liquid.
The creature’s movements quickened, though the air and sea around it seemed to slow, creating a dissonance that made my head spin. I stumbled, fell to my knees, and the waves surged higher, clawing at me, rising impossibly fast. The sound of water, normally soothing, became a roar, a scream that rattled my bones. And then it was gone.
One second it had been there, just beyond the foam, a distorted, impossible figure. The next, the tide sucked back and left the shore empty. Only the traces in the sand remained: patterns too precise to be natural, tiny depressions that shimmered faintly, glinting like wet glass. My chest heaved. My mind reeled. When I finally glanced down at my watch, its hands spinning backwards, faster and faster. Then it stopped. Right where it was before I saw the thing.
I scrambled to my feet, heart hammering, eyes scanning the surf. The figure didn’t return. But the memory of its gaze, its impossible form, lingered, twisting through me like smoke. And I knew, with an instinct that made my blood run cold, that it hadn’t just been moving near the shore. It had been moving through time itself, dragging pieces of the world into its orbit, shaping the night to its will.
The tide now licked my ankles gently, as if mocking the chaos that had just passed, and the waves whispered their normal, mundane secrets. But I couldn’t shake the certainty that whatever it was, it had marked me. And one day, I feared, I might see it again—emerging from the water, patient, silent, and impossibly, eternally wrong.
William had never really cared about Halloween. Costumes felt like an obligation, a way to pretend you were someone else for a night—but Damien had other ideas. Now, they were weaving through the crowded aisles of the costume store, the scent of plastic, cheap fabric, and faint pumpkin spice from a display blending into a slightly sickly, synthetic perfume of fake blood and cobwebs. Damien’s eyes glinted under the fluorescent lights, alive with that manic energy William secretly adored.
“Come on, Will,” Damien said, tugging at his sleeve. “We have to get something this year. I refuse to go as ‘late-to-the-party ghost’ again.”
William snorted, brushing back a loose strand of hair. “Fine. But don’t expect me to wear pink suspenders or anything. I draw the line there.”
Damien froze mid-step, feigning horror. “Pink suspenders? Really? That’s the hill you want to die on?”
“I mean it,” William said, smirking. “No hot pink, no glitter, no wigs, no tutu situations. I’m not doing it.”
Damien shook his head, grinning, his dark curls bouncing with the motion. “Fine, fine. We’ll do something thematic. Look at this.” He lifted a black staff from a display, the jagged carvings catching the light. “Mysterious, powerful, slightly intimidating…you know, politician vibes.”
William arched an eyebrow. “Politician vibes? Really? That’s your Halloween angle?”
“I mean, look at it!” Damien insisted, spinning the staff with a flourish. The plastic made a faint whoosh sound as it moved through the air. “Charismatic. Dark. Slightly dangerous. Kind of…me.”
William laughed, shaking his head, but his attention drifted to a display across the aisle. Khaki jackets, rugged boots, and wide-brimmed hats beckoned. He plopped the hat on his head, brushing back his hair. “Huh…this would actually fit me,” he said, smirking. “Think I could pull off the rugged, adventurous type?”
Damien’s gaze followed him, lingering just a little too long. William felt a flutter in his chest. “Oh, totally,” Damien said, voice softening almost imperceptibly. “You’d look…good. Like, really good. Dangerous but approachable. Explorer, no no, Colonel William.”
William tilted the hat back, grin spreading. “And you’d be…what? Evil wizard Damien?”
“Ha,” Damien said, twirling the staff between his fingers. “More like cunning mastermind Damien. And together…we’d be unstoppable.”
William laughed, quieter than he had intended. “Unstoppable, huh?”
Then, impulsively, he grabbed a broomstick propped in a corner, wielding it like a sword. “Fine, mastermind. Let’s see how unstoppable we are.”
Damien’s eyes lit up. “Oh, it’s on.” He adjusted his cloak dramatically, letting the hood fall over his forehead. “Prepare yourself, Explorer Boy.”
The first clash came with a dull thwack as William swung his broomstick. Damien parried with his staff, the plastic vibrating against William’s stick. “Really? That’s your opening move?” Damien teased, feigning a dramatic stumble.
“Hey, it’s a stick!” William shot back, circling him. “And it’s a very sturdy stick.”
Damien spun, staff slicing the air, tapping William lightly on the shoulder with precision. “Sturdy or not, you’ll never best the Mastermind of the Dark Arts.”
“Pfft,” William said, swinging low and then high, narrowly missing Damien’s knees. “I’m more like…‘Master of Stupid But Brave Moves’.”
They collided mid-aisle again, sticks clashing with a muffled clunk against the plastic of the costumes on display. Both laughed, breath coming fast and warm, their cheeks flushing. Other shoppers moved around them with wary glances, but William and Damien were in their own ridiculous world, spinning and lunging with the uncoordinated grace of dumb teenage boys.
William ducked under a swing, the bristles of his broom tickling his forearm. “Ha! Beat you!” he crowed, only to have Damien spin the staff and tap him lightly on the shoulder in retaliation.
“Not so fast, fool,” Damien said, ducking low. “You forget—I’ve had years of sophisticated scheming experience.”
“Scheming, my ass,” William countered, laughing so hard he had to lean on the broomstick for balance. “You mean like plotting how to make me trip over my own feet?”
Damien grinned, stepping closer, staff tapping William’s stick as though testing him. “Exactly. And don’t think I won’t use it to my advantage.”
Their eyes met, and for a fleeting moment, the fluorescent lights faded behind a haze of amusement and something warmer, more dangerous. The scent of cheap rubber and candy corn surrounded them, but all William noticed was Damien, right there, close enough that he could feel the heat radiating off him.
Then William lunged again, broomstick held high. Damien blocked, twirling, and in a sudden, playful flourish, he toppled lightly backward. William laughed so hard he almost dropped the broomstick. “Explorer triumphs again!”
Damien groaned, theatrically staggering back. “Curses! Foiled by a stick-wielding fool!”
William’s laughter softened into a grin. “Stupid, dumb kids,” he muttered.
“Yeah,” Damien agreed, brushing imaginary dust from his cloak. “But…maybe stupid, dumb kids who make a pretty good team.”
William swallowed, heart thumping. “Yeah…a pretty good team.”
They laughed again, the sound echoing in the aisle, and for once, the world felt like it had shrunk down to just them, just this ridiculous, chaotic little bubble of plastic weapons, khaki jackets, and unspoken feelings. Somewhere beneath the laughter, beneath the sticks and the duel, William realized he wouldn’t have traded this moment for anything.
Even if they were still dumb teenagers at heart.
When Jamie first met Rowan, they figured he was just another softly awkward guy who smelled faintly of petrichor and loose-leaf tea. His dating profile said he was into “gardening, folk music, and trying to keep his basil plant alive despite the odds.” It felt endearingly human — someone who overwatered things, forgot to reply to texts until midnight, and probably had a mismatched mug collection.
Their first date took place in a tiny café that smelled like cinnamon and wet coats. It was raining outside — the kind of slow, steady drizzle that made the world feel muffled. Rowan had arrived first, tucked into a corner booth under a flickering pendant light. He looked up when Jamie walked in, his brown eyes going soft like he’d just recognized a song he liked.
Jamie noticed right away that Rowan didn’t try to look too polished. His hair was a little messy, curling slightly where the rain had caught it. His nails had dirt under them — probably from his garden — and his hands were broad, the kind of hands that had actually done work. When he smiled, it wasn’t dazzling; it was quiet, like he didn’t expect much but was happy to be there anyway.
They talked easily. About favorite bands, about the strange satisfaction of repotting houseplants, about whether tea counted as soup (“it’s leaf broth,” Jamie declared; Rowan nearly choked laughing). The café’s candlelight flickered over their table, and Jamie thought — maybe — this could go somewhere.
Dessert came: lemon tarts that glistened under sugar crystals. The warmth of the café wrapped around them, steam clouding the windows while rain tapped a steady rhythm outside. And then the energy shifted.
Rowan went quiet. His shoulders tensed, fingers drumming against the edge of his plate. Jamie could tell something was on his mind — the way his gaze kept darting to the candle, then back down to his hands.
“I should probably tell you something,” he said finally, voice low and careful. “Before we… I mean, before this gets serious.”
Jamie blinked, unsure what “serious” meant at this point but feeling a tiny knot of anxiety twist in their stomach. “You’re not secretly married, are you?”
He gave a small, rueful laugh. “No. Nothing like that.” He hesitated for a beat that felt longer than it should have.
“I’m… technically not human.”
Jamie blinked again, half a second from laughing. “I’m sorry, what?”
Rowan winced, shoulders curling slightly, as if bracing for impact. “I’m Fae. You know — the older kind. Not like in the movies.”
Jamie just stared.
“Like—what does that mean?” they managed. “You look—normal. You’ve got sneakers on.”
“I get that a lot,” he said, with a weary little smile. “It’s not as dramatic as people think. My great-grandmother was from one of the old courts, but the family’s pretty blended now. I don’t have wings or anything. I’m just… me.”
Jamie studied him. The way his eyes caught the light — just a bit too golden now that they looked closely. The faint hum in the air, like static right before a storm. Something was off, but it wasn’t frightening. It was just there.
“Okay,” Jamie said slowly. “So you’re—part Fae. And you live in, like, a normal apartment? With a lease and utilities and Wi-Fi?”
Rowan nodded. “Yup. I Venmo my rent and complain about my landlord like everyone else.
Jamie tilted their head, trying to decide whether to laugh or leave. “How did I not notice?”
He looked a little embarrassed. “We’re good at blending in. Glamour’s kind of a family habit. I don’t use it much, though — it takes effort. This is just… me, mostly.”
Jamie frowned, curiosity overtaking confusion. “So if I touched you right now, would it feel weird or something?”
Rowan hesitated, then turned his wrist upward, palm open. “You can try.”
Jamie brushed their thumb along the inside of his wrist. His skin was warm — almost alive in a way that felt more than human. There was a faint vibration beneath the surface, like a low hum in the air. They drew their hand back, startled but not scared.
“That’s—wow,” Jamie said. “Okay. You weren’t kidding.”
“Didn’t think so.” Rowan’s voice had gone soft again. “I just… wanted to be honest. People get strange about it.”
Jamie tilted their head. “Yeah, well. You also ordered dessert before dinner, so clearly you make interesting choices.”
He laughed, and the tension cracked open. The sound of it filled the small café, brighter than the flickering candlelight.
They spent the rest of dessert asking practical questions. Did he get sunburned? (Yes.) Was he allergic to iron? (Just nickel, which made jewelry shopping difficult.) Did he owe allegiance to some ancient monarch? (“We don’t talk about Aunt Maribel,” he said gravely.)
When they finally stepped outside, the rain had stopped. The air was cool and damp, puddles reflecting amber streetlight. Rowan walked beside Jamie, his breath misting faintly in the chill. The smell of wet asphalt mixed with the faint earthy scent that always seemed to cling to him — moss, wood, something older than the city around them.
Jamie shoved their hands into their pockets. “So you weren’t exaggerating about that basil plant thing.”
“Magic-assisted,” Rowan admitted, his grin returning. “But only a little. Mostly sunlight and panic.”
Jamie snorted. “That’s kind of relatable.”
They walked a little farther in silence, comfortable this time. Then Jamie reached out and took his hand. His skin was warm, the faint hum still there beneath it, but somehow — it felt grounding. Real.
“Fae or not,” they said, “you still texted back within an hour. That’s rare enough magic for me.”
Rowan laughed, relief washing through his expression. He squeezed their hand gently, and the contact sent that faint, buzzing warmth up Jamie’s arm — like being near something quietly alive.
As they walked beneath the streetlights, Jamie decided they didn’t need to understand all of it. Rowan was strange, sure. But his strangeness felt like truth — something steady and unpretentious in a world that often pretended to be more than it was.
And maybe that was its own kind of enchantment.
Jamie insisted they didn’t scare easily.
“It was fine,” they said as Rowan clicked off the TV. “Predictable, even. The jump scares were cheap. I’ve seen scarier bugs.”
Rowan raised an eyebrow, still holding the empty popcorn bowl. The credits from The Haunting of Briar House flickered blue light across his face, throwing shadows that made the whole living room look slightly haunted itself.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “You definitely didn’t grab my arm during the mirror scene.”
“That was instinct,” Jamie said quickly, pulling the blanket tighter around their shoulders. “Anyone would react that way.”
Rowan chuckled. “Sure.”
They glared at him halfheartedly. “Don’t you have, like, a supernatural resistance or something? You can’t judge.”
He smirked, leaning against the doorway. “You think just because I’m Fae I can’t appreciate bad human horror? I love this stuff. It’s like folklore karaoke.”
Jamie rolled their eyes and started gathering the snack bowls. “Well, I’m fine,” they declared, getting to their feet. “No nightmares for me. Totally unbothered.”
But by the time Rowan had gone home and Jamie was alone in their apartment, the confidence had started to unravel.
The place was quieter than usual — too quiet. The radiator hissed like it was trying to speak, and the wind outside made the trees scratch at the window in irregular, deliberate-sounding taps. When the fridge kicked on, Jamie flinched.
They laughed at themself. “Get it together,” they muttered, pulling on their oversized hoodie. They even turned on a podcast to fill the silence — something about baking, all cheerful voices and background music. It helped for about fifteen minutes.
Then came the creak.
It was small — the sound of a floorboard settling somewhere down the hall — but it froze them mid-sip of chamomile tea. Their apartment wasn’t that old. It shouldn’t creak.
Jamie set the mug down and stared toward the dark hallway.
“Probably just… pipes,” they whispered.
Another creak. A little closer.
They turned off the podcast. Mistake. The quiet pressed in like a weight.
The air felt colder. The shadows in the corners seemed darker than usual, stretched a little too long. Jamie tried to remind themself that they’d just watched a movie about a haunted house. Their brain was making connections. That was all.
But the sound came again — a slow, deliberate tap… tap… tap — and that was enough.
Jamie dove into bed, blanket clutched up to their chin, phone light trembling in their hand. They texted Rowan before they could talk themselves out of it:
you awake?
He replied almost instantly.
yeah. can’t sleep. what’s up?
Jamie hesitated, then:
nothing. my house just decided to impersonate the one from the movie we watched. totally fine tho lol.
A few seconds passed. Then:
want me to come over?
Jamie chewed their lip. It was late. He lived only a few blocks away, but still.
no no you don’t have to. I’m fine. totally fine. just dumb brain stuff.
Another pause.
okay. stay on the phone with me for a bit?
sure.
When his voice came through, warm and calm, Jamie felt their shoulders ease a little. He didn’t tease them. He just… talked. Asked about their day, about work, about whether the basil on their windowsill was still surviving (“barely,” they admitted).
Then, faintly, Jamie heard it again — the sound in the hallway. Closer this time.
Their breath hitched. “Rowan?”
“Still here.”
“I think something’s in my apartment.”
A long pause. Then, gently: “You want to tell me what it sounds like?”
Jamie described it — the slow creaking, the soft tap. They could almost hear him thinking on the other end.
Finally, he said, “Okay. Don’t freak out, but I’m going to do something small to help, all right?”
Jamie frowned. “What does that mean?”
“You’ll see. Just… close your eyes.”
They hesitated, then did as he said.
The air shifted — subtly, but enough to notice. It grew warmer, humming faintly like it had a pulse. The smell of petrichor drifted in — that same earthy scent Rowan always carried with him. Jamie opened their eyes and blinked.
The corners of the room glowed faintly green. Not bright — just a soft light, like moonlit moss. The air felt thicker, safer somehow. And from somewhere near the ceiling came a gentle rustle, like leaves stirring in a breeze.
Rowan’s voice was still steady through the phone. “That should keep whatever’s making noise away. It’s just a ward — a little glamour I can do from a distance.”
Jamie stared at the soft light curling around the window frame. “You can do remote magic?”
“It’s more like leaving the porch light on,” he said. “Just lets anything wandering by know this space is claimed. I won’t let anything hurt you, Jamie.”
Their throat tightened. The fear ebbed away, replaced by something warmer. “Thanks,” they whispered. “Sorry I’m… you know. Jumping at shadows.”
“It’s okay,” he said gently. “You can be brave and still get scared. That’s how most of us survive things.”
Jamie smiled into the darkness. “You really know what to say, huh?”
“Occupational hazard,” he said lightly. “Half my relatives are poets.”
They laughed — quietly, but it sounded like a release. The tapping had stopped entirely. The apartment felt still again, wrapped in that faint green shimmer.
“Rowan?”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t have to hang up yet.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
They stayed like that — Jamie lying under the covers, Rowan’s voice humming softly through the speaker, the room still glowing faintly. They talked until their eyelids grew heavy, conversation dissolving into half-sentences and small laughter.
Before sleep took them, Jamie murmured, “You were right… I did grab your arm during the mirror scene.”
“I know,” he said. “You nearly broke it.”
Jamie smiled drowsily. “Worth it.”
By morning, the glow was gone. Only the faint scent of moss lingered. The hallway, now lit by daylight, looked perfectly ordinary again. No shadows. No creaks.
Jamie sent a text:
Thanks for the magic. I owe you coffee.
Rowan replied a minute later.
You can pay me in leaf broth.
Jamie grinned, shaking their head. Somehow, the world felt a little less scary — not because the ghosts weren’t real, but because someone out there was willing to light up the dark for them when it mattered.
It started the week before Halloween.
At first, nobody thought much of it — just a few posts on the neighborhood Facebook page: “Anyone else see that guy in the mask near Pine Street?” or “Is there a haunted house event going on I don’t know about?” The photos were grainy, half-lit by porch lamps. People laughed it off. Costumes, pranks, seasonal weirdness. But the laughter died when they stopped moving.
Every night, more appeared. Always in pairs or small groups. Always standing — not moving, not speaking — in front of houses.
And on the fifth night, they came to mine.
It was almost midnight when I noticed them. I’d been watching some old horror movies, the kind with practical effects and overacting that made the monsters look more pitiful than terrifying. I muted the TV when I heard the crunch of gravel outside.
My curtains were already drawn, but curiosity got the better of me. I peeked through a narrow slit — and froze.
Three figures stood on the sidewalk. Their faces were hidden behind white plastic masks — the kind you’d find in a craft store, blank and smooth, no expression. They didn’t move. They didn’t hold phones or flashlights. Just… stood there. Facing my house.
My first thought was teens pulling a prank. My second was why my house?
I turned off the lights, hoping they’d leave.
They didn’t.
After a few minutes, I worked up the nerve to call the police. The dispatcher’s tone told me I wasn’t the first. She sighed, said they’d send a patrol, and asked me to stay inside.
When the car finally arrived, its headlights swept over the street — but the figures were gone.
The next day, there were more stories. Someone on Oak Street said the masked people had stood outside her house from midnight until dawn. A man across town said he saw one staring through his fence slats for an hour straight. No one saw them arrive or leave. They just… appeared.
The police said they couldn’t do much. “We can’t arrest someone for standing on a sidewalk,” one officer said on the evening news. “It’s creepy, sure, but not illegal.”
That night, I kept my curtains closed. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. I told myself not to look, that if I ignored them, they’d get bored and move on. But at 12:37 a.m., something made me check again.
Four of them this time.
All closer.
Standing at the edge of my yard.
I stared, heart hammering. One of them tilted their head — a slow, deliberate motion — and I stumbled backward, letting the curtain fall shut. I didn’t sleep.
By Halloween night, the whole town was talking about it. Some people tried confronting them, but the figures never responded. Some waved bats or shouted obscenities, and still — nothing. Just silence.
Others thought it was performance art or viral marketing. Theories spread like wildfire: ghosts, cultists, social experiments.
Me? I stopped caring what they were. I just wanted them gone.
At 11:58 that night, I sat on my couch in the dark, every light off, every door locked. I watched the digital clock flick to midnight and held my breath.
Nothing.
No sound, no movement outside. Relief loosened my chest. Maybe it was over. Maybe they’d chosen another neighborhood.
Then came the knock.
Three slow raps.
I froze.
A knock meant something new. They had never knocked before.
It came again, harder this time. I grabbed my phone, intending to call the police — but when I looked at the screen, there was no signal. Not even a single bar.
A third knock.
My front door creaked open.
I remember grabbing the nearest thing — a lamp — and holding it like a weapon. My heart beat so hard it hurt. I expected to see one of them standing in the doorway, but there was only darkness. Cold air drifted in, smelling faintly of earth.
Then I saw it: a mask lying on the welcome mat. White, smooth, staring up at me.
I slammed the door and backed away. For a long time, I didn’t move, didn’t blink. I must’ve stood there until the first light of dawn spilled through the blinds. When I finally dared to open the door again, the mask was gone.
It’s been a week since Halloween, and everyone says the masked people disappeared that night. No more sightings, no more knocks, nothing.
But I know that’s not true.
Every night since, when the world is quiet and the air is still, I hear them. Just outside the house — soft steps on gravel, like someone pacing back and forth. Sometimes I catch a reflection in the window: a pale face where there shouldn’t be one.
Last night, I found something new on the porch.
A second mask.
Inside it, carved with something sharp, were the words:
“You looked at us.”
Now, I keep the curtains drawn and sleep with the lights on. I’ve tried to leave town, but every time I pack, something stops me. It’s like the air itself thickens, pushing me back inside.
Sometimes I think I see movement in the shadows — not just outside, but inside, too. The faintest flicker at the corner of my vision, like someone standing behind me just long enough to make me doubt my senses.
And sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I feel something cold against my skin.
It takes me a moment to realize what it is — smooth plastic, pressed against my cheek.
I don’t scream anymore.
Because I know if I do… they’ll put the mask on me next.
It started like it always does.
Two people.
A couch.
The glow of a television that’s too bright for the dark.
Tara and Colin were friends, or used to be, or maybe you only think they were. There’s a half-eaten carton of lo mein on the table, and something behind it is ticking — maybe a clock, maybe something else.
“You can’t beat monster movies,” Colin says. “They’re honest. They bleed. You can look a monster in the face.”
Tara tilts her head, the motion a little off, like it takes a second too long. “Ghost stories are better. They don’t end when you stop watching.”
You’ve heard this before, haven’t you? The way they argue, the rhythm of it. You might even remember who wins. But that’s strange, because you’re reading this for the first time.
They choose their films. They always do.
Tara goes first. The Hollow House.
The television light turns the room into an aquarium. You can see them both reflected in the screen — two faces floating in the blue dark. The whispers start early, crawling beneath the dialogue. They sound like the noise between radio stations, shaped almost like words.
You think you see something in the reflection, too — something sitting just behind them. You might even turn your head now, half-aware of the impulse. (You won’t see it. It doesn’t need to be seen. Just noticed.)
Colin asks, “Do you hear that?”
Tara answers, “Hear what?”
Except her mouth doesn’t move.
The woman on the screen turns, and it’s Tara’s eyes staring back. Too wide. Too knowing. For a single frame — that’s all it takes — you can tell she’s aware of you.
The movie stops.
Black screen.
Tara smiles, faintly. “Ghosts win.”
Colin laughs, but the sound’s brittle. He puts on The Beast Below.
Now it’s his turn to make her squirm — or maybe it’s yours.
At first, it’s just noise: footsteps, dirt shifting, the low moan of something underground. But then the sound starts coming from under the floorboards — not the ones in the story. The ones right here.
The room vibrates. You feel it in your teeth.
The walls look softer now, don’t they? Breathing. Subtly. The paint stretching like skin.
Tara looks pale. “Colin, turn it off.”
But the remote doesn’t work. The TV shows them sitting on the couch, exactly as they are now — except Tara’s face on the screen is wrong. Her lips tremble like they’re remembering how to smile. When she finally does, the skin splits at the corners.
Colin stands. On-screen Colin doesn’t. He just stares at you.
“Stop it,” Tara whispers. “I don’t like this part.”
“What part?” Colin asks.
“The part where you stand up. The part where everything loops.”
Her voice sounds like it’s underwater.
You can stop reading now, if you want.
But you won’t.
You never do.
On the television, Tara and Colin start arguing again. The same lines.
Word for word.
Something dark pools on the rug — at first you think it’s shadow, until it glistens like oil.
Tara touches her hand to her cheek and finds her fingers slick. She looks down. Blood. No wound.
Colin takes a step toward the screen. His reflection moves a second late. When it catches up, the jaw keeps opening. Bone unhooks. Tendons stretch like ropes snapping.
The screen flickers.
You see three people now: Tara, Colin, and someone sitting between them, in the empty space on the couch. The camera can’t quite catch their face.
They all look up at you.
Tara says, “You’re watching us again.”
Colin says, “No. We’re watching you.”
The screen goes black.
You can almost see your reflection now, faintly, in the surface of your monitor — or the phone, or whatever you’re using to read this. You can almost swear there’s a second reflection behind you.
Don’t turn around yet.
Just listen.
There’s a faint static hum now, isn’t there?
That sound between sentences, behind your breathing?
It’s okay. It always happens around this part.
The handprints on the inside of the screen are starting to form.
They’re not Tara’s this time.
They’re yours.
(You can close this tab now, but you’ll still hear them arguing.)
(About ghosts. About monsters.)
(About which is worse — the things that haunt you, or the things you become trying to fight them.)
Case No.: 2025-1016-H
Filed by: Det. L. Harrow, County Homicide Division
Date: October 16, 2025
Location: 1175 Brookvale Road, Ashwood Township
Summary:
Officers responded to a distress call placed at approximately 22:43 by Simon Greaves, male, age 29. Caller reported discovering a “hidden basement” in the residence of his recently deceased father, Dr. Leonard Greaves, and described “bodies” and “something moving.” The line went dead mid-transmission. Units arrived on scene at 22:58.
Initial Observations:
The front door was ajar. No signs of forced entry. The interior of the residence was in disarray, consistent with estate cleanup activity. Foul odor present throughout, origin determined to be from below-floor level.
Officers located a rug in the study partially displaced, revealing a wooden trap door with iron ring handle. Airflow from beneath carried strong scent of decomposition and formalin. Ladder led downward approximately twelve feet into a cement sublevel not listed in property records.
Basement Scene:
The basement consisted of a single rectangular room (approximately 20 feet x 15 feet). Walls were lined with shelving units containing glass jars filled with fluid and organic matter in various stages of preservation. Each jar bore hand-written labels referencing “G..”, “Phase II,” and anatomical notations (e.g., “cardiac structure—viable”).
Six stainless steel examination tables occupied the room’s center. Five were covered in sheets saturated with biological residue. The sixth table was empty but showed evidence of recent use (fresh fluids, scalpel discarded).
Upon lifting the coverings, officers observed human remains exhibiting abnormal anatomical modification:
Subject A: Female, approximate age 27, strong facial resemblance to Clara Greaves (daughter of the deceased). The thoracic cavity was surgically opened and sutured with nonmedical thread.
Subject B–E: Composite cadavers, mixed tissue composition, multiple genetic markers likely originating from the Greaves family.
Subject F: Unclassifiable specimen; incomplete skeletal formation; displayed faint muscular twitching upon discovery.
During examination, a low vocalization was noted. Audio captured on body cam (file ref: 1047H_V2). Sound described as gurgling speech approximating “Don’t leave me down here.”Officers withdrew from the sublevel immediately. Trap door closed of its own accord upon retreat. No air movement or mechanical trigger detected.
Missing Persons:
Clara Greaves – last confirmed sighting 21:30 same evening.
Simon Greaves – 911 caller; remains unaccounted for.
Both presumed deceased or otherwise compromised.
Evidence Collected:
· Blood and tissue samples from “Subject A–F.”
· Handwritten notes recovered from Dr. Greaves’ desk (see Addendum A): repeated mention of “preserving the line” and “reassembling the soul through cellular resonance.”
· Audio file 1047H_V2 (classified).
Status:
Property sealed under Biohazard Containment Protocol 9. Further entry prohibited pending CDC evaluation.
Forensic Pathology Report pending DNA analysis.
Note (Det. Harrow):
Unverified reports from containment personnel claim hearing voices emanating from beneath the floor when near the study. Statement noted, not corroborated.
ADDENDUM A — EXCERPTED NOTES FROM DR. LEONARD GREAVES
(Recovered from the study desk and laboratory sublevel. Handwriting deteriorates in later entries.)
March 3
Subject: Post-mortem degradation of neural tissue (Phase I).
Observation: Decay begins within 4–6 minutes. Memory, therefore, is not biochemical alone. Must be resonant.
Hypothesis: If the body can be restored, perhaps the resonance—the pattern—can be called back.
(margin note: “A body is only an instrument. The song lingers somewhere.”)
April 17
Initial trial using porcine substrates was inconclusive. The flesh reanimates briefly but without cognition—only autonomic motion. A twitch, a gasp, then silence. No echo of self.
Need a closer biological match. Family tissue provides the most stable base. Bloodline continuity may be the tether.
(margin: “DNA as a prayer.”)
May 2
Sample acquired: C.G. (lock of hair, toothbrush). Simon’s contributions are voluntary. He does not understand yet.
First recombination successful at the cellular level. Growth rate abnormal—unregulated mitosis forming coherent structures that mimic cardiac rhythm. It beats when I enter the room. Stops when I leave.
It knows.
June 12
Specimen “Phase II-A” has developed facial features similar to Clara’s, though asymmetrical. Left eye unformed. Vocal cords fused, yet movement was observed when addressed by name.
When I whispered, “You’re home,” it tried to answer.
Air moved through the half-formed throat—almost a sigh.
(margin, smudged)“The dead remember tone before language.”)
July 9
Ethical review is meaningless now. The grant board would never understand—this is resurrection through resonance, not crude necromancy. If memory is frequency, then kinship is the amplifier.
I dreamt of my wife last night. She said, “You’re building me wrong.”
I woke to find the basement lights already on.
August 1
Phase III specimens responding to the proximity of biological relatives. Clara entered the study—heartbeat readings spiked across all subjects simultaneously. Their eyes opened though none possess functioning optic nerves.
Connection established.
Resonance confirmed.
Control uncertain.
(margin: “Perhaps they are not returning to me. Perhaps I am going to them.”)
September 23
Subject VI is now capable of partial locomotion. Skin is translucent, with a visible pulse along the spine. Emits sustained vocal patterns—cannot yet form words, but rhythm resembles human weeping.
Simon insists we stop—foolish boy. The family deserves completion.
(illegible scrawl) “She will be whole again.”
October 10
I heard Clara through the floor.
She was upstairs, alive.
And yet the voice came from below.
October 13
Entry incomplete. The page is soaked through with formalin and dark fluid.
Last legible line reads:
“The door must never stay open too long. They get curious.”
It started as a joke. It always did.
“Right,” I said, stirring my drink with a straw, “and I’m actually the Queen of France.”
She grinned across the café table, the kind of grin that made you feel like you’d missed the setup to a joke she was about to deliver. “You don’t have to believe me,” she said. “Most people don’t, until they see it.”
Her name was Iris. We’d met two weeks ago at a late-night poetry open mic, of all places. I’d read something half-hearted about loneliness and rooftops, and she’d cornered me afterward, talking about sigils and “energy patterns in people’s words.” She said mine hummed. I thought she was eccentric, maybe one of those spiritual types who collects moon water and uses words like manifest.
I wasn’t expecting her to text me the next morning. Or for it to be fun, somehow—her strange blend of sincerity and mischief. She’d never once asked for money or followers or attention. Just conversation. And I liked her. I liked how she looked at the world, like everything shimmered a little more than most people noticed.
Now, sitting in a corner booth of a mostly empty café, rain tapping against the windows, she had just said, in complete seriousness: “I’m a witch.”
“Sure,” I’d replied. “And I’m descended from Zeus.”
“Maybe you are,” she said with a shrug. “But that’s not really my area.”
I laughed, half-nervous. “So what is your area?”
“Patterns,” she said simply. “Threads. The way one thing touches another.”
She took a slow sip of her tea, eyes never leaving mine. They were strange eyes—grey, maybe, but not really. They shifted like a storm cloud, edges gold where the light hit. I remember thinking she looked like she’d been painted in a different century.
“Look,” I said, rubbing my forehead, “I’ve met people who think they’re witches before. Tarot decks, crystals, the whole thing. I don’t mind it, it’s just—”
She held up a finger. “You think it’s pretend.”
“Not pretend, exactly. Just… symbolic.”
For a moment, she studied me, quiet in that unnerving way that made me want to fill the silence with excuses. Then she said, almost playfully, “Would you like me to prove it?”
“Prove what? That you’re magic?”
Her lips quirked. “Yes.”
I snorted. “Go on then.”
She leaned back against the booth. For a few seconds, nothing happened. I started to regret humoring her at all. Then she reached out and tapped her index finger against my drink—once, lightly, as if testing the surface.
The straw began to spin.
At first I thought maybe she’d bumped the table, or there was a breeze. But the air was still. My stomach tightened as the motion grew faster, the liquid circling in a tight whirlpool. The sound of the café dulled around us, as though the air between us thickened. The glass lifted slightly from the table, just enough that I could see a thin thread of shadow beneath it.
The hair on my arms rose. The drink hovered for maybe three seconds, spinning like it was caught in some invisible current, then lowered itself again—softly, precisely, as if guided by invisible hands.
The moment it touched the table, the lights flickered. Once, twice.
Then everything was normal again.
My heart was not.
“Okay,” I said finally, voice too loud in the quiet room. “That’s—okay. You have some kind of magnet? Or trick cup?”
Iris tilted her head, smiling in a way that was neither smug nor defensive. “You think I carry magnets around in my tea set?”
“I don’t know what to think!” I said. “That’s—physics! That’s impossible!”
She looked delighted by that word. “Exactly.”
I stared down at my drink, half expecting it to start levitating again. “Do that again,” I whispered.
She shook her head. “Once is enough. Magic isn’t a party trick, it’s a conversation. You don’t shout it twice.”
Her voice softened on the last word, like she was speaking to something invisible in the air.
I leaned back, trying to laugh, but it came out thin and shaky. “You can’t just—show someone that and expect them to act normal.”
“I don’t,” she said. “But you’re doing fine.”
That made me laugh for real, even as my pulse raced. “Why tell me? Why me?”
Her expression changed then. The mischief faded, and what replaced it was something achingly sincere. She toyed with the rim of her teacup, tracing a circle. “Because you looked like you needed to see something impossible.”
The rain outside had turned heavier, streaking the windows in silver. The streetlights shimmered through it like candle flames, distorted and strange.
“What does that even mean?” I asked, though my voice had gone softer too.
“It means,” she said, meeting my eyes again, “you’ve been walking around like the world already showed you everything it has. Like you’ve decided all the miracles are spoken for.”
I wanted to tell her she was wrong. I wanted to insist that I wasn’t that cynical. But the words didn’t come. Maybe because I knew, somewhere deep down, that she was right.
She smiled again, smaller this time, gentler. “There’s still more,” she said. “You just have to stop looking for proof.”
And then she stood, gathering her coat, the spell—or whatever it had been—already dissolving into the hum of espresso machines and rain.
Before she walked out, she looked back at me. “You’ll start noticing it now,” she said. “The edges. The little things that don’t quite fit.”
Then she was gone, slipping into the street like a shadow pulled by the wind.
I sat there for a long time, staring at my untouched drink. The straw had stopped spinning, but the ice inside had settled into a perfect spiral, thin and fragile as a seashell.
For the first time in years, I didn’t want an explanation. I just wanted to keep looking.
The first thing that struck them was the silence.
Not the absence of noise — cars still rolled by, voices still rose and fell — but a sort of muffled distance, as though everything were happening one layer too far away. The world had been wrapped in gauze.
They blinked against the light, which was all wrong. Too even. It came from everywhere and nowhere, like the sun had been replaced with a fluorescent panel hung just out of reach. The shadows were wrong, too — sluggish, reluctant, bending in ways that made the eyes itch.
It took them a few minutes to realize they were standing in front of their own building. Or almost their own building. The bricks were the same, but the color was off by a shade too pale, and the street number had shifted — 318 instead of 319. They tried the key anyway. It didn’t fit.
That was when they noticed the sign across the street: Baskin-Ribbons.
They stood there for a long time, reading it over and over, as if by doing so the letters might rearrange themselves into something that made sense. But they didn’t. The “i” remained stubbornly where the “i” shouldn’t be.
By the third block, the nausea had settled deep in their chest. People moved normally, but none of them felt right. Faces blurred just slightly when they looked away; voices warped, muffled, too low or too fast. They stopped a woman they swore they knew — the neighbor with the little white dog.
“Do you know me?” they asked.
She blinked, confused. “Should I?”
Her eyes were perfectly calm, perfectly polite. There was no recognition.
They tried their phone. No contacts. No call history. No photos, except for one — a blurry image of a park at night, with two figures standing at the edge of a lake. They couldn’t tell if one of them was them.
The days blurred after that.
Every morning, they woke in a different bed that was still somehow theirs — the layout identical but subtly wrong. The color of the sheets changed. The pattern of the wallpaper moved, imperceptibly, like it was breathing.
Sometimes the faucet ran red for half a second before clearing.
Sometimes mirrors didn’t reflect their movements right away.
And no one — no one — remembered them. Not their friends, not their family, not even the version of their own mother who stood in front of the same house, watering the same garden, humming an unfamiliar tune in a voice that was almost right.
They stopped trying to go inside.
On the seventh day — or maybe the ninth — they met someone who did remember.
It happened at dusk, the sky twitching between orange and violet, as if unable to decide which to be. They’d wandered into the old underpass where graffiti bled into the concrete, the letters melted and elongated like something organic.
Someone was sitting at the far end, back to the wall. When they turned, it was like seeing a photograph finally come into focus.
“Holy shit,” they said. “You’re—”
The other finished the sentence for them. “—real.”
They both laughed, shaky, desperate, relief spilling out like air from a punctured tire.
The other person’s name was Avery. Or maybe they’d both said that first — it was hard to remember who introduced themselves. Avery had been stuck here too, just as long, just as lost. They compared stories: same world, slightly wrong; same faces that didn’t recognize them; same feverish sense that the air was too thick to breathe.
“Maybe we died,” the narrator said, only half-joking.
“Maybe,” Avery said. “Or maybe we didn’t exist to begin with.”
They started meeting every evening under the same streetlight that buzzed in and out of rhythm. The light would flicker, and they’d compare notes on what the day had changed: a building vanishing, a name rewritten, the smell of the air tilting toward metal. Sometimes the stars rearranged themselves.
One night, Avery brought something — a photograph.
It was of the two of them. Standing together, smiling. Behind them, the skyline was normal. Their eyes looked alive.
“Do you remember this?” Avery asked.
They wanted to. God, they wanted to. But the harder they tried, the more the memory fractured — until it was just light, motion, and sound collapsing into static.
“I don’t,” they said. “But I think I should.”
Avery nodded, face tight. “I thought so. Every time I look at it, the people in the background move.”
They took the photo. It was true. If you stared long enough, the bystanders in the image shifted positions. Subtly. Unnaturally. As though the picture itself was alive.
They tore it up and threw it away. The next morning, it was back in their pocket.
The city grew quieter each day. Fewer people. Fewer lights in windows. Eventually, even the birds stopped making sound. The world around them felt like it was collapsing in on itself — folding into a smaller, tighter version of reality where only they and Avery still existed.
And yet, something was watching them. They could feel it, a presence just beyond the edges of things. When they turned corners, they caught glimpses — silhouettes with their own posture, their own gait, just a half-beat delayed. Like their shadow had found a new host.
Then one morning, Avery didn’t show up.
They waited all night. The streetlight flickered erratically, buzzing like an insect trapped under glass. Finally, at dawn, they started walking — anywhere, everywhere — until they reached the underpass again.
Avery was there. But something was wrong.
Their skin was pale, translucent around the edges, as if they’d been worn down by too much reality. Their shadow didn’t line up. It stretched sideways, moving slightly after Avery did.
“You’re not supposed to find me,” Avery said.
The voice was theirs. Not just the tone — the exact voice. Every inflection, every rhythm. Hearing it was like being hollowed out.
“What do you mean?” they whispered.
“You weren’t supposed to find me,” Avery repeated. “They don’t like it when we connect. It makes the world unstable.”
They took a step back. The concrete around them began to ripple like water, the graffiti writhing into shapes that resembled open eyes. The light dimmed.
“Avery—”
But Avery was already fading. Their face flickered between features — familiar, unfamiliar, and finally, their own.
“Don’t you see?” Avery said. “We’re not two people. We’re the same. They split us. One to observe. One to live.”
The air began to hum. The walls closed in. The world peeled back, revealing a grid of colorless geometry beneath it — like someone had lifted the texture from reality.
They fell to their knees, clutching their head. “Make it stop.”
Avery knelt beside them, touch cool and soft. “It doesn’t stop,” they said gently. “You just go back. You wake up. You forget.”
The light blinked once — white, blinding.
When they opened their eyes, the world looked normal again.
The shadows moved right. The sun was warm. The sign across the street read Baskin-Robbins.
They laughed, shaky with relief. Everything was fine.
Their phone buzzed. One new photo.
They opened it.
It was a picture of the underpass. Two figures. One standing. One kneeling. Both with their face.
The air grew still again. The light flattened.
And somewhere behind them, a voice whispered — gentle, familiar, and wrong:
“You weren’t supposed to find each other.”
The first time Alex saw Jonah again, it was raining.
Not the soft kind that whispered against glass and made the world gentle. This was the kind that made everything shiver—thick, relentless, cutting through the skin and clinging to the bones. The streetlamps burned halos into the wet fog, and in the middle of it, by the old bus stop, stood Jonah.
He hadn’t changed. Same faded denim jacket. Same slight tilt to his shoulders, like he’d been born carrying an invisible weight. Same eyes—gray-blue, cutting and distant and impossibly alive.
Alive.
Alex froze halfway across the street, the sound of tires hissing on wet pavement filling the silence between his heartbeats. He knew, with the kind of certainty that sears itself into the back of your mind, that Jonah was dead. He’d seen the car wreck. The funeral. The casket. The dirt.
And yet—
Jonah smiled.
It was small and crooked, like always. Like he’d never left.
“Hey, Lex,” he said, voice low and familiar.
The world stuttered.
Alex almost laughed, because what else do you do when a ghost calls you by the name only one person ever used? The syllables cracked something open inside him.
“You’re not real.”
Jonah’s expression didn’t shift. “You always say that when you don’t want something to be real.”
Alex took a step forward. “You died. I was there. I buried you.”
“Yeah,” Jonah said quietly, looking down at his hands. “That’s what they tell me.”
For a moment, neither of them spoke. The rain softened. Somewhere, a car alarm went off and died just as quickly. The city felt hollow, drained of all its movement—like they’d stepped out of time and into some echo of it.
Jonah finally looked up again. “You never came by.”
Alex swallowed hard. “You were gone.”
“That stopped you?”
The question hit like a slap. He wanted to scream, of course it stopped me, but his throat burned with something rawer than anger. He remembered the night Jonah’s car skidded off the bridge, remembered the flashing lights, the twisted metal, the police saying words that didn’t sound like English. He remembered standing at the edge of that bridge weeks later, wondering if Jonah had felt the cold water rush in before he stopped feeling anything at all.
And now Jonah stood here, soaked through but solid, his breath fogging the air.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Alex whispered.
“I know.”
The silence that followed wasn’t peaceful. It thrummed, electric and wrong.
Jonah stepped closer, boots sloshing through the puddles. “I didn’t think I’d get another chance to see you.”
“Another chance?” Alex’s voice trembled. “What are you talking about?”
Jonah tilted his head, studying him. “You ever think about how things might’ve been different? If you’d gotten in the car that night?”
Alex’s chest tightened. “Don’t.”
“I waited for you,” Jonah said, voice soft but relentless. “I told you we’d go together. You said you’d come.”
“I know what I said.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
Because I was scared. Because I thought we had time. Because I didn’t know the last thing I said to you would be next time.
The words pressed against his teeth but never made it out.
Jonah smiled again—sad this time. “You always were a bad liar, Lex.”
Alex took a step back. The rain seemed heavier again, like the air itself was trying to drown them both. “Why are you here?”
Jonah’s eyes darkened. “You called me.”
Alex blinked. “What?”
“You called me back.”
A flicker of memory—last week, sitting in his apartment, half-drunk and angry at the world. Saying things into the dark he didn’t believe anyone would hear. “If you’re out there, just—just come back. I can’t keep pretending it’s fine.”
His stomach dropped. “That wasn’t—”
“An invitation?” Jonah’s mouth twisted. “You think the dead care about intent?”
Alex’s heart slammed against his ribs. “So what, you’re haunting me?”
Jonah’s gaze softened again, almost fond. “You make it sound like a punishment.”
“Isn’t it?”
Jonah looked away. The streetlight above them flickered, buzzing like a dying insect. “You miss me,” he said quietly. “Even after everything.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“But you do.”
Alex’s throat felt tight. “You left me, Jonah. You said we’d figure it out together, and then you—” He stopped himself, voice cracking. “You didn’t even say goodbye.”
Jonah nodded, slow and pained. “I know.”
There was something unbearably human in his expression—guilt, longing, regret. Things ghosts shouldn’t feel. Things the dead should’ve left behind.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” Alex said, voice small.
Jonah stepped closer until he was within arm’s reach. “I want to know if you forgive me.”
The words gutted him.
Alex’s breath hitched. He could smell rain and the faintest trace of cigarettes—Jonah’s brand, the one that used to cling to his clothes and make Alex complain and secretly love it anyway.
He wanted to reach out, to touch, to prove this was real or fake or something in between. But his hands shook, and he didn’t trust himself not to fall apart.
Jonah waited.
Finally, Alex whispered, “You don’t need my forgiveness.”
Jonah smiled—really smiled this time, the kind that made his eyes crease at the corners. “Yeah, I do.”
And then he stepped back.
The air around him shimmered, faintly. The rain didn’t touch him anymore; it slid off, like he was made of light and memory instead of flesh.
Alex felt the first tug of panic. “Wait—don’t—”
Jonah’s voice was almost drowned out by the rain. “You can stop calling now, Lex. I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
“Don’t go.”
But he was already fading, edges unraveling like smoke. The last thing Alex saw was that same crooked grin and a whisper carried through the storm:
“You came after all.”
Then he was gone.
The rain kept falling.
Alex stood there for a long time, until the world remembered how to move again. Cars passed. The light changed. Someone brushed by him, muttering. Everything looked normal. Everything felt wrong.
He finally made it home just before dawn. The apartment smelled like damp concrete and stale coffee. On the table sat the photograph he’d thrown away years ago—the two of them, laughing, caught in the blur of summer sunlight.
It was dry.
Alex sat down, heart aching in that quiet, impossible way that comes after miracles or dreams or madness. He touched the edge of the photo, traced Jonah’s face with his thumb, and whispered into the pale morning light,
“I forgive you.”
Outside, the rain finally stopped.
The first thing she noticed was the quiet.
Not the kind of quiet that came after noise, but something deeper, older—like the world had been hollowed out and left to cool. There was no heartbeat, no wind, no sound of her own breathing. Just stillness, stretching endlessly.
Then, the light.
It shimmered above her like the surface of a frozen pond—thin, trembling, impossibly far. She reached toward it and saw her hand move sluggishly through the dark, her skin almost translucent. The light pulsed faintly in response, as if it recognized her. As if it was waiting.
She couldn’t remember what had happened. A scream, the sound of glass. A red light, maybe. Then falling. She thought she had landed hard, but there was no pain here—just the aching absence of it.
“Hello?” she tried to say, but the word came out like a thought more than a sound, echoing back to her from every direction.
Something shifted below.
It wasn’t quite movement—more like a ripple through the nothing, an awareness turning toward her. The air (if it was air) grew colder, the dark around her thickening. And then she saw it: a second light, far beneath her feet. Not white, but red, flickering as though through smoke. The contrast made her dizzy. Two choices: one above, one below. Both calling.
“Not yet,” a voice whispered beside her ear.
She spun, but there was no one there.
The voice came again, quieter. “They’re not done with you.”
They? she thought, and suddenly she wasn’t sure who “they” meant—the living, or something else.
The upper light pulsed brighter, warm and beckoning. Somewhere within it, she thought she saw shapes: faces, maybe. Familiar ones. Her mother’s eyes, her brother’s crooked smile. Home. She felt her chest tighten. She wanted that. She needed that.
Then the red light pulsed once, and the warmth drained away.
She looked down, and the darkness below opened like a wound. Shapes were moving in it—slowly, sinuously, as though swimming through tar. The longer she looked, the clearer they became: people, or what was left of them. Their bodies were wrong—limbs bending where they shouldn’t, mouths opening too wide. But it was their faces that froze her. She recognized every one.
The drunk driver who had hit her.
The friend she hadn’t forgiven.
The stranger she’d passed on the sidewalk without helping.
Each of them looking up at her, eyes glinting with hunger.
The voice came again. “You belong somewhere, don’t you?”
She tried to back away, but there was nowhere to go. Above her, the white light trembled; below, the red grew brighter, sharper. The figures reached upward, their arms stretching longer than humanly possible. The distance between her and them was shrinking, whether she moved or not.
“Help me!” she shouted, though she wasn’t sure who she was calling to. “Please, I’m not— I’m not supposed to be here!”
A sound answered her—metal scraping stone, low and steady. A second voice joined the first one, this time from above. “You weren’t supposed to leave, either.”
The light above began to distort. The familiar faces inside it smiled wider, too wide. Her mother’s eyes wept light, her brother’s grin stretched ear to ear until it split. What had looked like home moments ago now pulsed with something hungry of its own. Their hands—white and radiant—reached down toward her, fingers twitching like the legs of pale insects.
“Come back,” they whispered together. “You can be ours again.”
Her pulse—suddenly returned—hammered in her ears. She looked from the red to the white, from the whispering dead below to the luminous ones above, and realized the truth: neither was heaven. Neither was hell. They were the same thing, just two mouths of the same beast, one promising warmth, the other punishment. Both wanted her for keeps.
“I don’t want either,” she breathed.
The world seemed to listen. Then it laughed.
A sound like bones grinding together filled the air, a chorus of distant echoes overlapping until it became unbearable. She covered her ears, but the sound was inside her head. The darkness cracked like glass, and she fell—up, down, she couldn’t tell. Both lights streaked past her in a blur, and suddenly she was somewhere else entirely.
A hospital room. Machines screaming. A doctor’s voice shouting orders. Hands on her chest, forcing air back into her lungs.
She gasped and jolted upward.
The lights overhead burned too bright; the room felt too sharp, too real. She sucked in a shuddering breath. Someone was crying. A nurse whispered, “She’s back.”
But as her eyes adjusted, she saw it—the flicker of red behind the fluorescent white. A shadow stretched impossibly long across the tile floor, writhing just out of reach.
Her chest hurt. Not from the CPR, but from something colder pressing against her ribs. She looked down and saw faint fingerprints—dark, red, burned into her skin where something had held her.
The doctor said her name again, but it sounded wrong in his mouth, like a borrowed word.
She stared past him, at the heart monitor still twitching weakly beside her bed.
The line stuttered.
For a heartbeat, she saw two rhythms instead of one.
And deep inside her chest, something laughed softly—like it knew she’d only made it halfway back.
It was a week before Halloween when the first knock came.
Three sharp raps, deliberate, just as the rain started to fall.
Jordan frowned, setting down their mug. It was late—too late for kids—and the neighborhood was quiet, the kind of cul-de-sac where everyone went to bed early and left their porch lights off. Still, they opened the door.
A child stood there.
Maybe ten years old. Thin. Pale enough that the porch light caught her skin like paper. She wore a costume, though it was hard to tell what of—something old-fashioned, like a cracked porcelain doll: a white dress smeared with mud, black ribbons at the wrists, a painted smile too wide for her small face.
“Trick or treat,” she said.
Jordan blinked. “You’re a little early, kiddo.”
The girl tilted her head. Her eyes didn’t move. “You still have candy.”
“I don’t, actually. Not yet.”
Silence stretched. The rain began to patter harder on the porch roof. The girl didn’t move. She just stared up, eyes reflecting the porch light like wet glass.
“You should go home,” Jordan said, a bit firmer. “Your parents’ll worry.”
The girl didn’t blink. “You opened the door.”
Something about the way she said it made Jordan’s skin crawl. The words sounded wrong—not like a child talking, but like someone repeating a phrase they didn’t understand.
“Right,” Jordan muttered, forcing a smile. “Goodnight then.”
They closed the door.
Or tried to.
The latch didn’t catch. Something soft blocked it. When they pushed again, they felt the slightest resistance—then a small, cold hand slipped through the crack and pressed flat against the wood.
Jordan froze.
“Hey,” they said carefully, “don’t—”
“You opened the door,” she repeated.
Jordan shoved hard, slamming it shut and locking it this time. The sound echoed in the quiet house. They stood there, heart hammering, waiting for the next knock.
It didn’t come.
When they finally looked through the peephole, the porch was empty. Just the rain.
By morning, the whole thing felt ridiculous. A weird kid, maybe a prank. Jordan laughed it off, told themselves they’d imagined the hand.
But that night, the knocking came again.
Three sharp raps.
Jordan’s stomach dropped. They checked the peephole—nothing. Just shadows. Still, the knocking continued, measured, patient.
When they opened the door (against their better judgment), she was there again. Same dress. Same ribbons. Only now her makeup was smudged, like she’d been crying.
“You didn’t give me candy,” she said.
“I told you—it’s not Halloween yet.”
She stared. “It doesn’t matter.”
Jordan stepped back. “Listen, you can’t keep coming here. Do you understand?”
No answer.
Rain dripped from the porch. Jordan noticed, for the first time, that the girl’s feet were bare—her skin gray-blue from cold, the nails dirty.
“Where are your parents?” Jordan asked.
The girl tilted her head again. “You opened the door.”
Jordan slammed it shut. Locked it. Deadbolted it.
She didn’t knock again that night. But at 3 a.m., Jordan heard something soft scrape against the wood—like fingernails dragging slowly across it.
Over the next few days, Jordan tried to pretend life was normal. Work, groceries, sleep—though sleep came harder each night. Every evening, just after dark, there’d be those same three knocks. Always three. Never more.
Once, Jordan tried waiting it out. They hid in the back room, lights off. Hours later, when they dared peek through the blinds, they saw her still standing there—soaked through, motionless, staring up at the door.
By the fifth night, she’d started to whisper through the keyhole.
“You opened the door.”
“You said I could come.”
“Let me in.”
Jordan stuffed towels under the door to block the sound.
On the sixth night, the knocking didn’t come.
Jordan almost cried from relief. They slept for the first time in days, heavy and dreamless.
Morning sunlight filled the kitchen. They made coffee, looked out the window—then froze.
There were small, wet footprints across the porch.
Leading to the door.
And from the inside, faintly visible on the wood near the lock, was a handprint. Small. Pale. Pressed from within.
That night, Jordan didn’t turn off the lights. They sat in the living room, every door locked, every curtain drawn. Midnight passed.
No knocking.
1:00 a.m.
Still nothing.
They exhaled, finally daring to close their eyes.
Then came the voice—soft, right behind their ear.
“You opened the door.”
Jordan turned, heart in their throat. The hallway light flickered.
And at the end of it, where the front door should’ve been, stood the child. Not outside. Not anymore.
Her eyes glowed faintly in the dark. Her smile cracked wide as porcelain breaking.
“You let me in,” she whispered.
The lights went out.
And the house, for the first time in a week, was utterly silent.
The sun was low over the mountains when Dusk, Amanda, and Morgan crossed the worn trailhead, the forest swallowing the thin ribbon of road behind them. The air smelled of damp earth and pine, and every few steps, the trees seemed to lean closer, as if watching them. Dusk adjusted their backpack straps, feeling the weight of their camera and journal more acutely than they’d expected.
“You really think anyone’s ever found anything here?” Amanda asked, her voice tight but curious, fingers tracing the worn strap of her flashlight.
Morgan smirked, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “Found what, exactly? Ghosts? Lost hikers? The triangle itself?” He tapped the brim of his cap. “It’s famous for disappearances, sure. But people get lost all over the world. I’m not betting on some supernatural nonsense.”
Dusk let their gaze drift over the trees. There was a strange, almost imperceptible vibration in the air, like the forest itself was breathing. “Maybe it’s not about ghosts. Maybe it’s… something else,” they said quietly. “Something about the forest that makes people… misremember directions, lose themselves. People vanish because the place doesn’t let them leave.”
Amanda shivered. “You mean… like, it’s alive?”
Dusk didn’t answer. They hadn’t come all this way to argue about whether the Triangle had a pulse; they had come to document it, to walk the path others never returned from, and to see with their own eyes what the local stories never explained.
By nightfall, the trio had pushed deeper into the forest than any of them realized. The path had disappeared under a carpet of dead leaves, and Morgan’s phone, which had stubbornly refused service all afternoon, now glowed uselessly in the dim light.
“Compass,” Dusk said, producing a small metal device from their pack. The needle spun erratically, twitching like it wanted to escape. “That’s… not normal.”
Amanda grabbed it, watching the needle flail. “It’s broken. There’s no way—”
“You think?” Dusk cut in. “I’ve read about this. People go in circles. Hours pass in minutes, minutes in hours. The Triangle isn’t forgiving if you underestimate it.”
Morgan frowned. “So… we’re lost?”
Before Dusk could respond, a low rustling came from the underbrush. Amanda froze, and even Morgan took a cautious step back. The sound repeated, closer this time, then vanished. The silence afterward felt thick, almost tangible, pressing in from all sides.
“We should stay together,” Dusk said. They flicked on their flashlight, the narrow beam carving a tunnel through the darkness. The trees seemed to stretch upward, unnaturally tall, their bark dark and glistening as if wet.
Hours passed, though none of them could tell. Every direction looked the same: twisted trunks, dark hollows, the faint glimmer of moonlight on fallen leaves. They were moving, but the forest seemed to move with them, rearranging itself, bending pathways just enough to make them feel… wrong.
Then Amanda stopped. “Wait. Do you see that?”
A clearing opened before them, unnatural in its stillness. No wind stirred the grass; no animals moved. But in the center, half-buried in damp soil, was something unmistakably human.
“Oh God,” Morgan breathed, taking a step forward, then freezing. “It’s a body?”
Dusk’s flashlight revealed a rusted frame, half-collapsed into the earth. It wasn’t a corpse—at least, not in the conventional sense. It was a small pile of tangled clothing, shoes, and… a notebook. The notebook’s pages were warped with moisture, but as Dusk flipped it open, they realized the writing inside was still legible, though smeared: frantic, looping letters filled the pages with pleas and directions, none of which matched the landscape around them.
Amanda knelt, trembling, and held up a cracked photograph she’d found tucked in the pages: a group of three, smiling on the edge of a forest that looked impossibly familiar. “It’s… us?” she whispered.
Morgan’s hand went to his face. “What the hell—”
Before Dusk could answer, the forest shifted. The clearing seemed to stretch, the edges of the trees pulling away and twisting, forming new paths that hadn’t been there a second ago. The compass on Dusk’s wrist spun wildly. Their flashlight flickered, then went out entirely.
“Stay calm,” Dusk said, their voice firm, but inside, they were panicked. Every story they had read about the Bennington Triangle—the lost hikers, the vanishing trails, the endless wandering—they had dismissed as folklore. Now they were living it.
Amanda grabbed their arm. “We need to move. Don’t… don’t split up.”
Morgan nodded. “Agreed.” But even as they stepped forward, the clearing behind them seemed to stretch, making it impossible to tell which way they had come. Every tree looked like a twin of another. Every shadow seemed to hold something watching.
Time became meaningless. Hours, minutes, maybe days—they could not tell. Hunger gnawed at them, and cold seeped into their bones. Dusk kept the notebook open, trying to track the symbols and directions the last visitor had left, but it offered no clarity—only more confusion.
Then a scream cut through the forest, sharp and human, but impossibly distant. Amanda stumbled, clutching her ears. “That’s… that’s not me,” she cried.
Dusk shone their flashlight in every direction. Nothing. Just trees, dense and unyielding. Morgan gritted his teeth, scanning the underbrush. “We’re not alone,” he muttered.
They moved as one, Dusk leading, guided only by instinct and a half-remembered map they had drawn earlier. The forest resisted, twisting their paths, doubling back, swallowing landmarks. And then they saw it: a shallow pit, lined with stones, partially covered by leaves. Something glimmered inside.
Amanda knelt and pushed a branch aside. Dusk bent over to look. Beneath the leaves lay dozens of small items—personal effects, notebooks, trinkets—clearly left by those who had disappeared. Among them was a cracked compass, a pair of boots, a camera with a single photo still intact. Dusk recognized it instantly.
It was them.
Or a version of them, smiling, walking into the forest just as they had.
“No,” Morgan whispered. “This… this isn’t real.”
Dusk’s stomach twisted. The forest didn’t care about reality. It didn’t care about fear or reason. It only consumed. They had a choice: keep moving, risking the same fate, or turn back, knowing the Triangle might rearrange itself again, erasing the path entirely.
Amanda’s voice was soft, terrified. “Can we leave?”
Dusk closed the notebook and slipped it back into their pack. “We try,” they said. “We stay together. That’s all we can do.”
They stepped forward into the unknown, shadows pressing close, the air vibrating with whispers of the lost, the vanished, the forever wandering. Behind them, the clearing remained still, but they knew it would not be there for long. Not for anyone else.
And the forest waited, patient and eternal.
The three moved forward, every step measured, hearts pounding in rhythm with the forest itself. Branches scraped their arms, roots tangled their feet, and the compass in Dusk’s pocket continued its frantic spin, useless as ever. The notebook offered no guidance—its pages smeared, cryptic, mocking.
“We’re going in circles again,” Morgan muttered, voice tight with panic. “I swear we just—” He stopped, eyes widening. They were standing in the same clearing they had found earlier. Only now it felt… wrong. The soil looked darker, wetter, and the pile of trinkets had multiplied, as if more had been added in the shadows.
Amanda gasped. “There’s… more stuff. They keep—” Her voice caught. She pointed to something half-buried in the dirt: a small, familiar backpack with Dusk’s initials scrawled across the flap.
Dusk’s stomach sank. “That… can’t be mine.” Yet it was. And beneath it lay another notebook, fresh and unmarked, as if waiting for them.
A whisper slithered through the trees. Not words, just a sound—a sigh, a pull, a beckoning. “Dusk…” It twisted their name, carried in the wind, in the snapping of twigs, in the vibration of the forest floor.
They froze. Amanda’s hand tightened on their sleeve. Morgan tried to laugh, nervously, but it died in his throat. “We… we need to stay together. Just keep moving.”
Dusk nodded, but their mind was already fracturing. Every shadow seemed to breathe, every tree to lean closer. The clearing began to twist around them; a path they thought led out now spiraled back, leaves whispering like dry teeth.
“Which way?” Amanda asked, panicked.
Dusk swallowed hard, realizing they couldn’t answer. The forest had erased all bearings, dissolved the memory of the path. Time had fractured—minutes, hours, maybe days blended into an endless twilight.
Morgan stepped forward, then recoiled. “Look—over there!”
Through a gap in the trees, a faint light flickered. Hope flared, and they ran toward it. But the light stretched and bent, retreating just as they approached. The forest laughed in silence, and their legs moved of their own accord, running in circles they could never trace.
The night pressed down, heavier and darker. The whispering grew louder, echoing their fears: lost… lost… lost…
Amanda stumbled into a shallow depression, screaming as hands—or roots—seemed to curl around her ankles. Dusk grabbed her arm, yanking her free, but the ground beneath them shifted like quicksand. Morgan tried to pull them both out, but the earth was unyielding.
“We… can’t… stop!” Dusk gasped. “Keep moving!”
They fought, scrambling over roots and rocks, but the forest was patient. The clearing they had stumbled into again opened in front of them—but each time they tried to leave, it expanded, the trees rearranging, closing in, reshaping reality.
And then Dusk saw it.
Not a body, not a reflection, but them: a perfect, living replica of themselves, smiling, holding a notebook, beckoning them forward. Amanda’s and Morgan’s duplicates were there too, frozen in the clearing, waiting.
“No… no, that’s not real!” Amanda screamed, lunging at the figure. Her hands passed through empty air.
Dusk felt a pull in their chest, a tug at the soul. The forest was alive, and it wanted them. Wanted their names written in the smudged pages of its endless notebook. Every step toward the duplicate selves felt inevitable. Their hearts hammered, every instinct screaming to resist, but the forest’s rhythm had already claimed them.
The last thing Dusk remembered was Amanda’s scream fading, Morgan’s hand slipping through theirs, and the whispering—soft, coaxing, triumphant—swallowing their names.
When the forest finally released the clearing to silence, it appeared empty. No footprints, no signs of struggle—only the faint shimmer of three new notebooks lying half-buried in the leaves, waiting for the next wanderers to arrive.
And the trees leaned closer, patient as ever, shadows shifting just enough to suggest movement where none existed. The Bennington Triangle had claimed three more, and it would wait for many more.
Autumn had thought it would be a simple trip down memory lane. She hadn’t seen her cousin Mara in years, not since the last Halloween before she moved across the state. The air was crisp with the scent of fallen leaves and wood smoke as they met at Mara’s small, cluttered house on the edge of town. Mara’s smile was warm, but something in her eyes flickered—maybe the reflection of the dim porch light, maybe something else.
“I found these in the attic,” Mara said, dragging a battered box from behind a stack of old suitcases. The label read Halloween ’92–’00. Autumn’s pulse quickened. She hadn’t thought about those Halloweens in decades. She remembered the costumes, the candy, the laughter—but the box promised something more.
They settled on the living room floor, knees pressing against the wooden planks. Mara blew dust from the top of the box, revealing a stack of VHS tapes, their edges curling and labels written in a childish scrawl.
“Let’s start with the earliest,” Mara said, plugging the first tape into the old VCR.
The screen flickered to life. There they were: two small girls, Autumn in a red witch’s dress, Mara in a cat costume. They ran up the sidewalk, plastic pumpkins swinging, giggling at some private joke they no longer remembered. Autumn remembered the feeling of the cool wind whipping her hair into her face, the faint crunch of leaves underfoot, and the thrill of racing from house to house before the night swallowed the streetlights. Mara’s laughter had always been infectious, a bright, bubbling sound that made her forget her own fears.
And then, something strange appeared. In the background of the footage, at the far edge of the yard, a figure stood just beyond the reach of the porch light. At first, Autumn thought it was a neighbor, maybe Mr. Harlow checking his mailbox late. But the figure was too tall, too thin, and it didn’t move like a person. Its posture was unnervingly still, almost as if it was hunched in a way that defied natural bone structure. Autumn blinked, certain she was imagining it. “Mara… do you see that?”
Mara squinted. “Where?”
Autumn pointed. When Mara leaned in, the figure was gone, as if it had never been there. But Autumn could still feel it, a cold pressure at the edge of her vision. She swallowed hard and tried to focus on the children on the screen—themselves—laughing, running, holding hands as if nothing could touch them.
The next tape was Halloween ’93. The girls were older, dressed as princesses this time, their capes dragging slightly in the fallen leaves. They ran from porch to porch, calling out “trick or treat!” in voices that were simultaneously innocent and high-pitched with excitement. Autumn remembered the sweet stickiness of candy on her fingers and the thrill of seeing pumpkins flickering in every window.
And again, the figure appeared. This time it was closer, hovering at the end of the street. Autumn froze in the memory, certain she had seen it move just once as if it was turning its head to watch her. Its form was shadowy and indistinct, but the sense of intent radiating from it made her stomach twist. Mara, still too young to notice anything, skipped ahead, oblivious, and Autumn remembered feeling a subtle unease she could never name back then—a presence that didn’t belong.
By Halloween ’95, the figure had grown bolder. The tape was shaky; someone had filmed from the top of the porch steps, the camera panning as Autumn and Mara ran along the sidewalk. A low, elongated shape lingered at the edge of the frame, sometimes disappearing behind trees, sometimes emerging from dark doorways. Autumn’s child’s memory tried to dismiss it as a trick of the light, a shadow from the lamp post—but now, watching the tape, she knew better.
“Were we… ever scared back then?” Autumn whispered.
Mara shook her head. “I don’t remember it. Not really. Just… fun. But that thing… it was always there, huh?”
Autumn nodded. She could feel it in every frame, patient and silent, tracking them as they laughed, collecting every joy and fear they had not yet learned to name. It didn’t move like a person. Its form shifted in impossible ways—sometimes hunched, sometimes stretching taller than the streetlight, sometimes fading like smoke. Its presence was deliberate, never interacting with the world around them, just watching, waiting.
By the time they reached Halloween ’00, the footage had grown almost surreal. The streetlights threw long, jagged shadows, and the figure had taken a more humanoid outline, but still impossibly thin, its edges rippling as if it weren’t fully in this world. Autumn’s heart hammered. Each year, it had become more patient, more focused, always just beyond the threshold of what she and Mara could notice as children.
Autumn swallowed hard. “I… I don’t remember any of this.”
Mara shook her head. “Neither do I. But it’s here. We were watched, Autumn.”
Then Mara pulled out the last tape. Unlike the others, it was clearly labeled, in neat handwriting that looked eerily familiar: “Halloween ’25.”
Autumn hesitated. “This… this can’t be.”
Mara slid the tape into the VCR. The screen flickered, and then they were looking at their own living room.
The camera was positioned near the corner of the ceiling. The angle was too high for any of them to have set it. On the screen, Autumn and Mara sat cross-legged on the floor, looking exactly as they were now. Around them, the room was dark except for the flickering orange glow of a jack-o’-lantern on the coffee table.
Autumn’s hands shook. “This… this is right now.”
Mara didn’t respond. She was frozen, eyes locked on the screen.
From the corner of the footage, movement. A shadow detached itself from the darkness, thin and elongated, moving with a deliberate, unnatural slowness. It lurked at the edge of the frame, a black smear that seemed to drink the light around it. Its “head” tilted at impossible angles, observing, studying. The pumpkin’s flame flickered as if reacting to its presence. Autumn’s hair stood on end.
“Mara… the door’s locked, right?”
“Yes,” Mara whispered, voice breaking. “I… I locked it.”
The shadow didn’t move closer, but it didn’t leave either. It waited, hunched at the edge of the room like it had been counting the years, learning them, waiting for them to notice. The VCR hummed, the tape slowly winding to the end, leaving the room in a silence that was almost too loud.
Autumn and Mara sat frozen, watching themselves on the screen, watching the shadow. Outside, Halloween night pressed in, the wind moaning through bare trees, carrying the scent of decay—and something older, darker.
The jack-o’-lantern flickered again, and for a brief second, its carved mouth seemed jagged, sharp, as if smiling at something only it could see. The shadow remained, patient and unyielding, a silent witness to every memory, every lost moment of innocence, waiting for the next time it would be seen.
The first morning at Marrow & Finch Security felt like stepping into a painting—stale, muted colors, and a silence so thick it seemed almost unnatural. The receptionist gave a tight, rehearsed smile as she handed over the security badge and a laminated sheet titled “Rules and Expectations.”
“Read carefully,” she said. “No one lasts more than a week here without breaking at least one.”
I laughed nervously. “Guess I’ll be the exception, then.”
She didn’t laugh back.
The building itself was a relic, a mid-century office block whose elevators groaned like tired lungs. My first task was simple enough: monitor the cameras, log unusual activity, and patrol the hallways. Standard security stuff. The pay was excellent for an entry-level position, which was why I hadn’t hesitated despite the ominous warning.
By the third hour, I started to notice oddities. Hallways would stretch longer than they should, doors that had been locked in the morning suddenly creaked open, and the cameras—well, they didn’t always show what I expected. Sometimes I’d see people in the feeds who weren’t supposed to be there, shadows moving in ways that defied physics.
I shrugged it off. New building, new job jitters.
But then came the first rule, the one the laminated sheet didn’t really explain but everyone whispered about: Never ignore the warnings.
I should have paid attention.
It started with the phone call.
“Don’t…” a voice rasped, static cutting in and out. “Leave… the… 3rd floor… tonight…”
I froze. There was no number attached. It wasn’t on my desk. The intercom hadn’t been used. And yet, it had been loud, clear, and terrifyingly insistent.
I shook my head and tried to laugh it off. Must be a prank, I thought. Must be.
By evening, the office had emptied, and I was alone. I checked the cameras obsessively, noting nothing out of the ordinary—yet the static returned, briefly distorting the images with… figures. Just glimpses. A man in a dark suit staring directly at me from a hallway that I knew should have been empty.
I rationalized it as fatigue. Coffee and anxiety will do strange things to a person.
Then the lights flickered.
I froze, realizing the pattern: the flicker wasn’t random. It followed me. I turned to the hall outside the security office, and in the brief moment the lights died, I caught a glimpse of something crouched, far down the corridor. Something waiting.
My phone buzzed again. A text. No number. Just one word:
Leave.
Panic set in. I wanted to. I wanted to run out the front doors and never look back. But every door I approached seemed… different. The exits stretched farther than before, twisting around corners that weren’t there earlier, hallways merging into walls. The building itself felt alive, reshaping itself in subtle, horrifying ways.
I ran back to the office, heart hammering, and slammed the security door behind me. I tried the cameras, but now they only displayed the same hallway repeatedly—empty, featureless, but somehow… wrong.
I remembered the warning about employees not lasting. It wasn’t about quitting—it was about surviving.
A scraping sound came from the stairwell. Slowly, methodically. I couldn’t see who—or what—it was. But I knew I wasn’t alone. I had the urge to bolt, but something rooted me in place, a primal understanding that moving could draw attention.
Hours passed. Maybe minutes. Time was fractured in that building. The intercom crackled again.
“Why…don’t…you…listen?” The voice sounded older now, as if it had been trapped for decades. “They…don’t…want you…”
Suddenly, the cameras flickered back to life. The same hallway. Empty. Except… a figure appeared, blurry at first, then crystal clear. I knew that suit. It was me. Only I wasn’t me. My face was twisted, elongated into a grin I didn’t own. My eyes were hollow.
A new rule formed in my mind without words: Do not become the building.
I tried to move, but my legs were leaden. The office walls seemed to pulse, closing in, breathing around me. And then the door behind me clicked open, slow and deliberate. I didn’t turn. I couldn’t. I only knew it was time. Time to decide whether I would obey…or become another cautionary tale.
I left, but not really. My mind fractured, half of me still standing at the monitor, logging every shadow, every echo. The building whispered, always whispering. I knew the other employees—those who “didn’t last”—weren’t gone. They were there, waiting, warning, trapped in the spaces between walls and floors.
I understood, finally, why no one ever lasted. Marrow & Finch wasn’t a job. It was a test, a trap, a sentient snare for those foolish enough to think a paycheck could outweigh survival.
And now…so was I.
The warning had been clear from the start. I should have listened.
The first thing she noticed was the smell: damp earth and the iron tang of old blood, as though the cellar itself had been inhaling years of fear. The darkness pressed against her eyes, heavy and implacable, leaving only a thin line of gray where the weak light from a narrow window met the floor. She could hear the water dripping somewhere in the distance, steady, patient—like a clock mocking her.
She tried to remember how she had gotten here, but memory was a fractured mirror. Faces she thought she recognized flickered in her mind, morphing into someone else’s—someone with intent. She had been walking home. She had been asleep. She had been nowhere, and yet here she was. That was the first lesson: the mind could betray, twist every recollection into a lie.
Her hands searched the walls. Cold, rough stone. She traced the mortar, counting cracks, feeling for weaknesses. The cellar wasn’t just a physical prison; it was a stage, perfectly designed to make her doubt herself. Every corner held a shadow that moved just slightly out of step with her own. Every sound was amplified: a shift in the boards above, the faintest rasp of air moving through a vent.
“Hello?” Her voice was brittle, alien. Even she barely recognized it. The sound bounced off the walls and returned to her like a memory that didn’t belong. She pressed her palms to her ears to drown it out, but the echo was in her head, not the room.
She thought about the door. Heavy wood, iron hinges. Locked. She ran her fingers over the keyhole. Something about it seemed… wrong. She felt it could open on its own if she simply willed it, and yet the key wasn’t there. She tried to imagine a key. A small brass key, cold in her hand. But imagining it didn’t bring it into reality. Or did it? Sometimes she swore she heard the click of a lock in her mind, soft and seductive.
Then the voices started.
Not voices outside the door—they came from inside her. Low, whispering, impossible to locate. “You’ve always been here,” one said. Another disagreed. “No, she’s not real. This is just a story. She’s a character.”
A character. That word struck her like a hammer. Was that what she was? Something constructed, penned into a fate she could not control? The cellar seemed to pulse at the thought, walls bending imperceptibly, as though the architecture itself were alive, aware.
She pulled at the door again, but now the hinges shifted, groaning under a weight that wasn’t there before. She stumbled back, heart hammering, eyes darting to the shadows where the voices seemed to concentrate. She wanted to scream at them to stop, to tell her what to do, but the sound choked in her throat. Her own fear felt like another presence.
Hours—or maybe minutes—passed. Time had lost its authority here. She tried to count the drops of water, tried to mark herself with scratches on the stone, but the scratches vanished when she looked away, or multiplied into strange sigils that didn’t belong to her hand. The cellar was changing. Or was it her perception?
She pressed her ear to the floorboards, listening. Sometimes she imagined she could hear herself, somewhere else, talking to her in the past or future, telling her the key was under the rug or behind the stone that had never existed. She tried to follow the instructions of her own voice, but each attempt ended with her slamming against an invisible wall, her mind laughing at her futility.
A faint light flickered, not from the window, but from nowhere. She turned to see it, a candle suspended in the air, wax dripping upward, smoke curling like smoke should never curl. And then she realized—she had lit it herself. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t struck a match, and yet there it was, defying logic.
“I’m here,” whispered a voice, closer this time. But when she turned, the space was empty. The candle swayed, and for the briefest instant, she thought she saw her own face in the flame—twisted, screaming, eyes wide with terror. The face smiled.
The realization hit her: she wasn’t alone in herself. Part of her was trapped in the cellar, part was observing, part was writing. Or being written. It didn’t matter if the words were hers, or if they were being placed in her mouth by an unseen author. The boundaries between self and story had eroded, and every thought she had felt like a sentence she had never chosen.
She moved toward the corner where the walls met, pressing her back to the stone. “I am real,” she whispered. She wasn’t sure if she said it to herself or to the void that wrote her. “I am real.”
“Do you believe that?” asked a new voice, patient, amused. It came from everywhere and nowhere. It didn’t belong to a person. It belonged to the cellar, to the narrative itself.
Her mind recoiled. If she wasn’t real, why did she feel the stone bite into her spine? Why did the ache in her chest feel authentic? She tried to touch the walls, the floor, her own arms, but everything seemed porous now, leaking meaning and reality. Her hands slipped through surfaces that should have been solid.
Panic rose in her like smoke. She screamed, and the scream returned to her not as sound, but as words: trapped, trapped, trapped. They weren’t her words. They were the cellar’s, the story’s. Her identity fragmented, splintering along invisible lines of narrative logic.
And then she noticed a small door in the corner, one that had never been there before. She approached it cautiously. It was unremarkable, save for the keyhole. Her hands shook as she reached into her pocket—where had the key come from? Her memory failed, but the key was real, cold and heavy. She slid it in. The lock gave a satisfying click, almost joyous.
But when she opened the door, there was nothing but another cellar. One like this one, infinite, recursive, stretching into itself. And behind her, the shadows whispered:
“You see? There is no escape. Only levels, only mirrors, only you and us. You were never outside. You are never free. You are the story, and the story is hungry.”
She stepped through anyway, because she had no other choice.
And somewhere, in a space she couldn’t perceive, the voices wrote themselves into a new paragraph, and the cellar sighed with approval.
The fall of 1996 smelled of fallen leaves and wet asphalt, a thick, comforting perfume that clung to the small town of Millford. Mara, a year younger than her cousin Autumn, tugged at the drawstring of her hoodie as they walked down the narrow path behind the old Hawthorne estate, their sneakers squeaking softly against the damp sidewalk.
“I don’t know why we’re doing this,” Mara whispered, her eyes wide. “That house is—creepy.”
“Creepy is exactly why we’re doing it,” Autumn replied, a small smirk tugging at her lips. “It’s Halloween month. We can’t chicken out now.”
The Hawthorne house had stood abandoned for nearly twenty years, a relic of Millford’s past. Windows were boarded up, the wooden siding splintered, and the wrought-iron fence leaned awkwardly, as if the house itself were shrugging off the weight of history. Kids whispered about ghosts and strange noises, but Autumn and Mara were determined—courageous in the way only eleven- and ten-year-olds could be.
“Bet no one’s even gone in since Mr. Hawthorne died,” Mara said, kicking a small rock.
Autumn nodded, but her hands were clammy. “Exactly. That’s why we’re going in. Quick in, quick out. No crying.”
The air seemed to thicken as they squeezed between the fence posts. Leaves crunched underfoot. Autumn’s heart beat a little faster. She pushed open a side gate, and it moaned like it had been asleep for decades. Mara followed, shivering despite the warm day.
Inside, the house smelled of damp wood and old paper. Dust motes hung in the sunbeams that slipped through the cracks in the boarded windows. Autumn flicked her flashlight on, the narrow beam trembling against the walls.
“Did you hear that?” Mara’s voice was barely above a whisper.
Autumn froze. At first, nothing. Then—footsteps. Not theirs. Slow. Measured. Coming from the staircase.
“You think it’s a ghost?” Mara’s hand gripped Autumn’s arm.
“Maybe,” Autumn admitted, though she tried not to sound scared. “Or maybe just… a raccoon.”
They climbed the stairs cautiously, each step creaking like a warning. On the second floor, they found a room where the door hung open, the knob long gone. Inside, an old dresser was overturned, drawers gaping. A mirror leaned against the wall, dusty and cracked. Autumn’s reflection shimmered oddly in it, almost like the glass was breathing.
Then she saw her.
A girl, maybe eleven, pale and thin, wearing a dress that looked like it had been sewn decades ago. Her hair was dark and tangled, and her eyes… Autumn couldn’t look away. The girl’s lips moved, forming words that were too soft to hear.
“Mara…” Autumn whispered.
The girl tilted her head. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said in a voice like wind through dead leaves.
Mara clutched Autumn’s sleeve. “Let’s go,” she said, voice trembling.
But Autumn couldn’t move. Something about the girl rooted her to the spot. Then the girl stepped closer, the floorboards groaning under her weight, even though she seemed almost… weightless.
“You have to remember,” the girl said.
“Remember what?” Autumn asked, confused.
“Me,” the girl whispered. “You promised.”
Suddenly, a chill shot through the room. The walls seemed to close in. Mara screamed, and Autumn grabbed her hand, yanking her toward the door. As they ran, the girl’s voice echoed behind them, a soft, haunting chant that sounded like their own names.
Outside, they didn’t stop until the Hawthorne estate was a shadow behind the autumn trees. Both girls were panting, trembling, and wet with sweat.
“I… I think that was a ghost,” Mara said finally. “I think she wanted us to know something.”
Autumn nodded, but couldn’t speak. All she knew was that she had seen her face before—somewhere in dreams she didn’t remember having.
___________________________________
Twenty-nine years later, Autumn sat at her kitchen table, sipping coffee on a quiet autumn morning. Mara was scrolling through old family photos, flipping to a faded image from Halloween 1996: Autumn and Mara, grinning in their matching ghost costumes, oblivious to the weight of the day.
“You ever think about the Hawthorne house?” Mara asked, her voice casual but not entirely so.
Autumn’s fingers tightened around her mug. “All the time. Especially that girl in the mirror.”
Mara froze, eyes wide. “Wait—you remember her?”
“I do,” Autumn said softly. “I’ve never forgotten.”
They didn’t speak for a long moment. The wind outside rattled the windowpane, a familiar sound that felt like a whisper.
“I looked it up once,” Mara said finally. “Hawthorne had a daughter. She… died in the house. Just about our age. Nobody knows why. Some say she wandered the halls ever since.”
Autumn shivered, though the sun was bright outside. “That’s the girl we saw,” she whispered.
Mara nodded slowly. “And the thing is… she wasn’t scary. She just… wanted someone to remember her.”
Autumn closed her eyes. She could almost hear the soft chant of her name, just like that day. Not a threat, not a warning—just a plea to be seen.
“I think she trusted us,” Autumn said. “That we’d remember her even after all these years.”
Mara smiled, a sad, knowing curve of her lips. “And we did. I’ve never forgotten. Not for a second.”
Outside, the leaves swirled in the morning breeze. Autumn felt a quiet warmth, as if the girl from the Hawthorne house were standing just beyond the veil, smiling.
For a moment, it was as if the past and present had folded together. And the girl—long gone but never forgotten—was finally at peace.
The city was quiet in a way that felt unnatural, as if it had been holding its breath. Streetlights flickered intermittently, casting long, wavering shadows across the cracked pavement. I had moved here just a week ago, and everything felt alien—strangers’ faces that blurred together, buildings whose corners seemed sharper at night, alleys that seemed to swallow light whole. I tried to shake the tension gnawing at my chest, convincing myself a walk would help.
The first few blocks were uneventful, almost soothing, until I noticed it: a rhythm that matched mine, subtle at first, but insistent. Footsteps. Not my own, but close enough to make me pause. My heart stuttered. I stopped, listening, and the footsteps stopped too.
I tried to laugh it off. “Just my imagination,” I whispered, my voice trembling in the silence. I moved again, quicker this time, and they resumed—soft, deliberate, echoing from just behind me.
I turned a corner sharply, hoping to lose whoever it was, and the sound followed. Always one block behind, matching my pace exactly. I tried ducking into a side street, the kind that smelled of wet asphalt and trash, but they didn’t hesitate. The footsteps slowed, then stopped when I froze, as if waiting for me to make the next move.
Panic surged, making my legs heavy, my lungs burn. Every instinct screamed at me to run, but I was acutely aware of how unfamiliar the streets were. I didn’t know where I could go that would be safe—or if I could even outrun whoever—or whatever—was behind me.
I reached for my phone, fumbling with the buttons as if the tiny screen could protect me. The light illuminated only the nearest stretch of road, but behind me, the shadow lurked, growing larger, darker. I could feel it now, more than hear it—a presence. A cold, suffocating sense that it was studying me, learning me.
My breath came in ragged gasps as I spun around. The street was empty. Empty, but for the way the lamplight seemed to bend unnaturally, for the whisper of movement that wasn’t there. A low, wet sound tickled my ears—footsteps, but slower now, deliberate, dragging across the asphalt with a patient malice.
I started running. The city blurred past, the familiar landmarks I had tried to memorize useless in my terror. Every turn was a gamble, every shadow a threat. And always, somewhere behind me, that slow, relentless pace.
Finally, I stumbled into a small park, the gates creaking as I pushed through. I collapsed onto a bench, chest heaving, head spinning. Silence fell. The city seemed to be holding its breath again. I laughed shakily, the sound cracking in the night. “I’m imagining it. It’s just—just…”
The soft shuffle of footsteps. Closer this time.
I froze.
And then, from the darkness beyond the streetlight, a figure stepped forward, tall and featureless, its face hidden in the shadows. My blood ran cold. I didn’t recognize it—couldn’t recognize it—and yet, somehow, I knew it had been there the entire walk, waiting for me to notice.
The night swallowed me whole.
The old gas station on Route 47 had always had a reputation. Locals said it was cursed, but nobody could quite say why. The neon sign flickered like a dying eye, casting harsh shadows across the cracked asphalt. Most people drove past it after dark, but for truckers and late-night travelers, it was the only place to refuel for miles.
One rainy October night, a young couple, Amy and Mark, pulled in to get gas. Their car had been sputtering on the long, empty road, and the station’s flickering lights were a relief. The station was eerily quiet, except for the hum of the fluorescent bulbs and the faint hiss of rain. The pumps were numbered one through six, and a faint smell of gasoline mixed with something metallic lingered in the air.
As Amy filled the car, she noticed the small, shuttered convenience store attached to the station. A single old man was behind the counter, hunched over a ledger, muttering to himself. His eyes were pale, almost lifeless, and when she waved, he barely acknowledged her. Mark, meanwhile, had noticed the station’s surveillance cameras—all six pumps were covered, yet the feed seemed off, as if the screens themselves were trembling.
When they finished, they approached the counter to pay. The old man’s voice was raspy. “Pump six… that one’s different,” he said. “Most don’t notice until it’s too late.” Mark frowned, thinking it was a joke, but Amy felt a chill run down her spine. “What do you mean?” she asked. The man simply shook his head and turned back to his ledger, mumbling something she couldn’t catch.
They ignored it and drove off, but as soon as they passed the station, the car began to shake violently. The dashboard lights flickered. Then, through the rain-smeared windshield, they saw it: the gas station had vanished. In its place was a black void, like the night itself had swallowed it. The pumps, the neon sign, the building—all gone.
Panicking, they tried to restart the car, but the engine roared back to life on its own, and the headlights illuminated the same station again, as if nothing had happened. Trembling, they pulled back into the lot. Pump six stood at the far end, separated from the others, its nozzle lying on the ground. The faint smell of iron and rot was stronger here.
Mark stepped forward to grab the nozzle. As soon as his fingers brushed it, a cold, whispering voice filled their minds. “You can’t leave… not yet.” He froze, unable to move, while Amy screamed, trying to pull him away. But the world around them warped. The asphalt cracked, oozing a black, tar-like substance, and shadows moved beneath the pumps, forming shapes that were almost human.
Suddenly, the old man appeared behind them, his skin pale and stretched unnaturally tight. “Pump six chooses its visitors,” he said. “Once you start, it doesn’t stop until you’re a part of it.” Amy tried to run, but the shadows snatched at her legs, holding her in place. Mark struggled against an invisible force, his screams swallowed by the storm.
The pump itself seemed alive. The hose writhed like a snake, coiling around Mark’s arm, burning through his clothes but leaving no marks on his skin. Through the nozzle, they glimpsed visions of people trapped in the station: faces twisted in terror, screaming silently behind glass walls of an endless, dark room. Some were old, some young, all worn and hollow-eyed. The whispers grew louder, chanting in a language that set Amy’s teeth on edge.
Realizing that fleeing wouldn’t work, Amy remembered something the old man had said—Pump six “chooses” its visitors. With desperation, she shouted, “We don’t belong here!” and grabbed Mark, pulling with all her strength. The pump lashed out, spraying gasoline in a shape that almost looked like hands trying to drag them back. Amy’s mind raced, remembering the ledger behind the counter. The old man had scribbled something that looked like a ritual, symbols scratched in the pages. She didn’t know what it meant, but instinct told her to grab it.
With the ledger in hand, she pressed it against the pump. The whispers turned to agonized wails. The shadows writhed violently, shrieking as if in pain. Pump six hissed, spitting sparks and smoke. Mark collapsed to the ground, freed, and Amy dragged him toward their car. The old man watched silently, expressionless, as the pump’s tendrils retracted.
They didn’t stop until they reached the nearest town, gas tank still half full. When they turned to look back, Route 47 was empty, no gas station in sight. Weeks later, they discovered in the local archives that a series of disappearances had occurred at the abandoned Route 47 station over decades. Every victim had been last seen near Pump six.
Mark and Amy never returned, but occasionally, passing truckers swear they see the flickering neon of an old station in the distance, hear whispers in the night, and smell iron and gasoline mingling in the cold October air. Pump six, it seems, never stops choosing.
It had been a year since Junior passed away. The tuxedo cat with the little white patch on his chest, the one who used to wait by the window every morning for the sun to warm his fur, was gone. The apartment still carried traces of him—the faint scent of his fur in the corners, the subtle groove in the couch where he loved to curl up, the way the sunlight hit just right on the old blanket he favored. Sometimes, when she paused in the quiet of the evening, she thought she could hear the soft tap of his paws on the hardwood, just like the old days.
Grief had softened into a gentle ache, one that had made room for memory without entirely consuming her. And yet, for months she had felt a hollow space where companionship used to be, a longing that neither her friends nor books nor music could fill. The idea of another pet had hovered, but she wasn’t ready. Not until that morning, when she wandered into the shelter almost on a whim, a whisper of curiosity guiding her steps.
The shelter was noisy, a jumble of meows, barks, and little paws skittering across linoleum. But among all the animals, one little figure drew her attention instantly: a small cat with honey-colored fur and eyes that seemed to see her in a way no one else did. He didn’t meow or flinch or dart away from the crowding around. Instead, he padded directly toward her, weaving between legs as if he knew exactly where she would be. When she knelt down, he settled into her lap without hesitation, curling neatly in the posture that Junior had favored.
Her breath caught. “You… you sit like Junior used to,” she whispered, a laugh trembling at the edge of her voice. “How did you know?”
The shelter staff smiled knowingly, but she barely noticed. The moment felt impossibly intimate, as if some small thread of continuity had stretched across time and space to bring her here.
When she brought him home, the little cat seemed to move through the apartment with quiet, instinctive knowledge. He gravitated toward Junior’s favorite sunny window, stretching luxuriously across the old blanket Junior had loved. He would hop onto the couch at the exact spot where Junior used to curl, kneading gently with his paws before settling into a nap. When she returned from work, he greeted her with a soft, measured meow, tilting his head in a way that felt eerily familiar. Even the way he nudged her hand, insisting on petting, mirrored Junior’s old habits perfectly.
It was uncanny—but not in a frightening way. More like… guidance. Like he had been taught, or remembered, how to honor the life that had come before. She began leaving small tokens: Junior’s old toy mouse, a patch of sunlight on the floor, a small cushion by the radiator. Each time, the new cat, who she finally decided to call Honey, seemed to understand instinctively. He would arrange himself around these things, moving gently, carefully, like a student learning from the master who had come before.
One evening, as she sat on the couch reading, Honey leapt into her lap, kneading gently against her legs. She traced the line of his back with her fingers, feeling the warm, soft rhythm of his presence. “You’re not Junior,” she whispered softly. “I know that. But somehow… you’re keeping him here with me, too.”
Honey purred louder, eyes closing in contentment. For the first time since she’d lost Junior, she felt a quiet, steady presence in the apartment. Not a replacement, not a shadow, but a living connection, carrying the past into the present. Junior was gone, but in the little gestures, the habits, the soft purrs, she felt him—teaching, guiding, and reminding her that love, once given, never truly leaves.
I have watched the tides for longer than any living thing remembers. My body is a part of the lagoon now, the dark water weaving through my limbs, the reeds bending around my shoulders as if they have always belonged there. Fishermen speak of me in hushed tones—“the shadow that rises when the moon is full,” they say—but I have never sought them out. Curiosity, not malice, is what brings me near.
The lagoon is my memory, its murky depths a mirror of all that has passed. I remember the first time I emerged from the darkness, a newborn shape in a world that did not yet know me. I was small then, awkward, unsteady, but alive in a way that made the sunlight seem like a soft blessing. I did not yet understand the weight of eternity, the slow erosion of the shores, the way the water would remember my passage long after I had moved on. Over the centuries, I have grown, and the lagoon has grown with me, wrapping me in roots and silt, filling my body with the rhythm of tides and moonlight.
Today, a child wades too far into my waters. Her laughter is bright, carrying across the surface in little ripples. I pause, keeping my form beneath the murk, letting my eyes trace her tiny movements. She does not see me, yet I see her entirely: the way her hair clings to her neck, the way her toes curl in the silt, the careful rhythm of her breathing.
I remember what it is to be small, to feel enormous things pressing down from above. I remember the cold of the world before the lagoon embraced me, the fear of being torn apart by giants who did not understand. The memory is sharp, a frozen shard beneath my ribs. In the quiet moments, I replay that fear endlessly, reminding myself why I remain hidden, why my presence must be cautious.
She steps closer to deeper water. Instinct tightens my chest. I emerge slowly, a ripple in the glassy surface, a shadow that stretches longer than the sun allows. The girl freezes, eyes wide, lips parting in awe rather than terror. I am monstrous, yes, but I am not cruel. I tilt my head, letting the water lap over my scaled shoulders, letting the light refract in my eyes.
Her eyes narrow in curiosity. She holds out her hand, trembling. I hesitate. I do not recall ever touching another being so directly, and yet something in the gesture is familiar. I lift a clawed hand from the depths, careful not to break the fragile water between us, and allow her fingers to brush against mine. The sensation is fleeting—a tickle of warmth and life—but it stirs something inside me that has not been awakened in centuries.
She laughs again, softly this time, and throws a stick. I catch it, a gentle twist of my arm, and place it back at her feet. She smiles, and I feel—strangely—a flicker of what humans might call friendship. Or perhaps it is simply recognition: two beings alone in the vastness, each a creature of a world that misunderstands us.
The sun dips lower. Shadows stretch across the lagoon, painting the reeds with streaks of gold and violet. Fish leap in tiny arcs, birds call overhead, and the world moves with a rhythm I have grown to understand. I slip beneath the surface, currents closing over me like a veil. I leave the girl with the memory of me, a story to tell that will grow taller each time she whispers it. And I remain, eternal and unseen, a sentinel of the lagoon, a monster not for terror, but for the quiet, patient witness of life itself.
Sometimes, I wander the shallows alone, letting the mud cling to my scaled skin, listening to the croak of frogs and the whisper of reeds. I speak to the water, softly, and it answers with waves and eddies. I am a legend, yes—but more than legend, I am memory, a keeper of the unseen and forgotten. I know the lagoon as no one else can, its hidden corners, its secret currents, its silent warnings. I am not a god, nor a demon—I am simply here, present, enduring, and for that I am content.