u/Kira1006

Lars sank with a deep sigh into the worn leather armchair that had been his faithful companion after long workdays for years. Friday evening. Finally. This week had dragged on forever.

His job as a data analyst at Hartwell & Associates was genuinely interesting. Columns of numbers told their own stories, revealing patterns and secrets others overlooked. But interesting did not make it any less exhausting. A dull ache pulsed rhythmically through his skull, as if someone were tapping a tiny hammer against his temples. Eight hours in front of three monitors, squinting against the bluish glow while the world outside moved on without him.

All he wanted now was silence. To switch off for a while.

The remote control lay within reach on the small side table, beside a half empty coffee mug from that morning and a stack of unopened mail. Lars pressed the red button, and the 42 inch flatscreen flickered to life, his window to the world whenever he was too tired to step into it himself.

He flipped mindlessly through the channels. A blonde presenter with impossibly perfect teeth smiled at him while promoting a new dating show marketed as “authentic reality TV.” Click. An overly energetic salesman waved around a supposedly revolutionary iron that would allegedly change the lives of millions of housewives. Lars snorted and kept going.

The familiar jingle of the evening news filled the living room. The voice of the anchor, Marcus Brenner, the face of the regional news for years, barely registered in the background haze of his exhaustion.

“…and now to our main story tonight. Another mysterious missing persons case has shaken our city. At around three o’clock this morning, a neighbor contacted the police after hearing unusual noises coming from the house next door, loud banging sounds and what he described as ‘unnatural screams.’”

Lars instinctively straightened in his chair. His exhaustion gave way to a vague sense of unease.

“When officers arrived at the scene, they discovered the house abandoned. The front door was standing open, and the interior had been completely trashed. On the staircase leading to the upper floor, investigators found a large amount of blood and traces of tissue, suggesting the missing person suffered severe injuries. However, as with the previous cases, no body was found. There are likewise no clues regarding the missing individual’s whereabouts.”

The screen switched to aerial footage, probably recorded by a police drone. Lars recognized the neighborhood. Oak Street, only a few miles from here. One of the quietest residential areas in the city, neat front yards, row houses built for young families. Two years ago, he had even considered leaving his downtown apartment and moving there himself. More space, less noise, a better future.

The camera moved inside the house. Lars swallowed hard. The staircase leading upstairs looked like a slaughterhouse. Dark red splatters stained the cream colored walls. At the foot of the stairs, a trail of blood dragged off to the side, as though someone had pulled a body across the floor.

Lars leaned forward, his exhaustion completely gone. On the wooden banister he noticed a handprint, fingers spread wide, as though the person had desperately tried to hold on.

A chill crept down his spine. He imagined what that person’s final moments must have looked like. The terror. The panic.

Bright yellow police tape blocked access to the staircase. In the background, officers struggled to keep reporters and curious onlookers away from the scene.

“The identity of the missing person has not yet been confirmed, though authorities suspect it may be the homeowner,” Brenner continued in his professionally concerned tone. “Police are asking the public for any information while also warning against premature speculation. This marks the eighteenth unexplained disappearance in the past four months.”

Eighteen. Lars rubbed his face and turned the television off. The sudden silence felt almost deafening.

Another disappearance. And Lockhaven had always been such a quiet city, the kind of place where nothing exciting ever happened. The biggest scandal in recent years had been the mayor getting caught illegally parked.

But that had been before four months ago. Everything had started with the first case, Sophie Chen, eight years old, vanished from her own backyard while her mother had stepped inside for only a moment to answer the phone. Lars had even joined the large scale search effort, trudging through the woods with dozens of other volunteers, looking for a little girl with black pigtails and a yellow summer dress.

They never found her.

Three weeks later, Marcus Kellner disappeared, a twenty nine year old bank employee. His grandmother testified that he had been in the kitchen making tea while she watched television in the living room. When she checked on him five minutes later, Marcus was gone. Simply gone. There were no signs of a struggle, no indication of a break in.

They searched for Marcus too. They never found him either.

Then more followed. A retiree during a walk in the park. A university student on her way home. A construction worker during his lunch break. The missing people had nothing in common. No shared gender, age, profession, or social class. Nothing that pointed toward a pattern investigators could follow.

The only thing linking all the cases was the complete absence of usable evidence. It was as though people were simply vanishing from reality itself. No bodies, no traces, no witnesses. Only blood sometimes, like tonight. But never the bodies.

At work, the wildest theories circulated constantly. Sandra from accounting was convinced a serial killer was behind it all, hiding the bodies so well they would never be found. Mike from IT insisted it had to be human trafficking, some organized network kidnapping people and shipping them overseas. Jenny from marketing whispered about government experiments and black helicopters.

People needed explanations, Lars knew that. When there were none, they invented their own. But he felt that none of those theories were right. Something else was at work here, something beyond ordinary logic.

Fear had slowly but steadily crept into the city like a cold fog. It was not openly visible, but it could be felt everywhere. People went home earlier. Parents picked their children up from school personally. The streets emptied after sunset.

Even Lars himself moved differently through the city now. More alert. More suspicious.

He glanced at the wall clock above the television. Quarter to nine. Sarah would be here soon. Their three year relationship had become increasingly strained over the past few weeks. Small arguments about meaningless things escalating into larger fights. Long stretches of silence. The creeping suspicion that both of them were staying together out of habit more than love.

Lars got up and shuffled into the tiny kitchen of his two room apartment. The refrigerator hummed softly to itself. When he opened the door, he could not help grinning.

“The mouse hanged itself in the fridge.”

His father used to say that back when money had been tight and the refrigerator had often stood painfully empty.

Things did not look much better today. A few eggs in the side compartment, an opened can of peaches, leftovers of yesterday’s spaghetti bolognese inside a plastic container. Enough for him alone, maybe, but definitely not enough for two.

Lars stepped into the small bathroom and studied himself in the mirror above the sink. His dark blond hair stuck out in every direction. The shadows beneath his gray blue eyes were impossible to miss, dark circles that made him look older than twenty nine.

In the hallway, he grabbed his black leather jacket and left the apartment. The evening air was cool and fresh, a welcome change.

Lars took a deep breath and headed toward the supermarket. The streets were surprisingly lively for a Friday evening. At the edge of the small park separating his neighborhood from downtown, a group of teenagers sat on a wooden bench drinking beer from cans. Their laughter echoed through the dusk.

“…and then the guy got stuck in the elevator for four freaking hours!” one of them was saying in a slightly drunken voice. “Four hours! By the time they got him out, he was completely losing it!”

Another wave of laughter erupted. Lars could not suppress a smile. Normal teenage problems.

A few yards farther ahead, an older man with messy hair sat beside a trash can holding a cardboard sign.

NEED HELP. GOD BLESS YOU.

Lars slowed his pace. The man looked up at him with tired eyes in a weather worn face. How long had he been living on the streets? What kind of story lay behind that face? Did he have family somewhere worrying about him? Or was he one of those people who had simply slipped through society’s cracks?

Pity stirred in Lars’ chest, but he looked away and kept walking. He knew he would forget the man within minutes, just like so many other unpleasant truths of life.

The neon sign of “Market Weber” glowed in the twilight like a lighthouse. The small supermarket was one of the few places still open until ten at night, an old fashioned family business. Only a handful of cars sat in the parking lot, and a few retirees stood near the entrance discussing the weather and the government.

Lars nodded politely to them before disappearing between the brightly lit aisles. The dairy section was his first stop. Sarah drank her coffee only with whole milk, never the low fat version he preferred. A small detail, but details mattered.

He wandered through the aisles gathering ingredients for a simple but decent dinner. Pasta, fresh tomatoes, basil, parmesan. Nothing spectacular, but homemade and prepared with care.

On the way back, Lars cut through the quieter side streets of the neighborhood. He wanted to take a shortcut through the narrow alley between the pharmacy and the old post office building. He had walked this route hundreds of times before. Harmless. Familiar.

But tonight, something felt wrong. At the far end of the alley, a figure turned the corner. A dark silhouette with a slightly hunched posture, the face hidden beneath the hood of a sweatshirt. It was too dark to make out any details.

Lars instinctively slowed his pace. After all the disappearances, caution felt reasonable, even if it was probably just an innocent passerby.

They moved closer toward one another. Lars subtly crossed to the other side of the street. The grocery bag rustled softly in his hand.

Then he felt it. The air around him began to vibrate. Not metaphorically. It actually vibrated, as if some enormous invisible machine were running nearby. The hairs on his arms stood up.

Lars stopped abruptly. The figure across the street froze as well. Slowly, the stranger pulled back his hood, revealing the face of a young man, maybe mid twenties, with friendly features and an equally confused expression.

Their eyes met silently. Both of them obviously sensed the same thing. Something was fundamentally wrong. The vibration intensified. Then came the sound.

A high pitched shriek sliced through the air, drilling straight into his bones. Lars pressed his hands against his ears, but the noise seemed to come from inside his skull itself. Dizziness washed over him and the world tilted for a moment.

Then the impossible happened. The brick wall beside the young man began to flicker. And something burst out of it. A creature.

At first Lars’ mind refused to process what he was seeing. The thing was dark and wet, with limbs far too long and an anatomy that mocked the laws of nature. Its skin, if it even was skin, gleamed black green beneath the streetlights. The stench of decay instantly flooded the alley.

The creature lunged forward. The young man never had a chance to run. Razor sharp teeth sank into his shoulder, and a horrifying scream tore through the night.

But the scream ended abruptly when the monster dragged its prey back toward the wall. The brick surface swallowed them both like water, closing behind them as though they had never existed.

Only a pool of blood remained on the asphalt. And Lars, standing frozen in place, clutching the grocery bag against his chest, eyes wide with horror.

An eternity passed, or maybe only seconds, before his legs obeyed him again. He ran. Blindly. Panic driven. Propelled by a primal instinct screaming at him to flee, hide, survive.

He only came back to himself once the apartment door slammed shut behind him. His hands shook so violently he had barely managed to fit the key into the lock.

Lars collapsed onto a kitchen chair and stared at his trembling hands.

What had he just seen? Was he losing his mind? Hallucinating? But the image in his head felt too real. What he had witnessed was the reason behind the disappearances. Of that he was suddenly certain. It explained why they never found the bodies. Oh God. Those poor people. Nausea twisted in his stomach as he thought about the little girl. Those creatures…

If they could move through walls… Then nobody was safe. Nowhere.

A gentle touch on his shoulder made Lars jump violently. His body reacted as if shocked by electricity.

“Hey. It’s just me.”

Sophia’s familiar voice cut through the fog of panic. She stood behind his chair, her warm hand still resting on his shoulder. When had she come in? Had he missed the sound of her key in the door while trapped inside his own thoughts?

He turned and looked into her face. Sophia was twenty eight, a head shorter than him, with chestnut brown hair tied into a loose bun today. Normally her baby blue eyes carried a natural warmth capable of lighting up an entire room. But now her expression changed the moment she saw his face.

“Is everything okay?” Her voice turned worried. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Lars opened his mouth, but the words stuck in his throat. Could he tell her? Would she believe him? The story sounded insane even inside his own head. A monster leaping from a wall and dragging away a man. Who would believe something like that?

He swallowed hard. Sophia noticed his hesitation and frowned. Without asking, she grabbed his arms and searched his eyes.

“What happened? You’re seriously scaring me.”

The concern in her voice cracked something open inside him. This was Sophia, the same woman who had stood beside him for three years, who had helped him through bad days and shared the good ones with him. If he could tell anyone, it was her.

“I…” He took a deep breath, as though preparing to jump into freezing water. “I just saw someone get killed.”

Not the whole truth. But a start. Sophia’s eyes widened in shock. Immediately she let go of his arms and began checking him for injuries.

“What? Oh my God, Lars! Are you hurt? Did they do something to you?”

“No.” He shook his head and gently placed his hands over hers to calm her. “Nothing happened to me. I’m okay.”

She stepped back, but the tension did not leave her face. Instead her voice became firm.

“We need to call the police right now.” She was already pulling her phone from the pocket of her jeans. “You need to make a statement and tell them exactly what you saw. Maybe they can still catch whoever did this.”

“No!”

The sharpness in his own voice startled him. He grabbed the phone from her hands before she could dial emergency services.

“You don’t understand. We can’t call the police. This is… this is something else.”

“What do you mean?” Sophia stared at him in confusion. “Someone was murdered, Lars. Of course we need to call the police.”

He saw the look in her eyes, the way she looked at him as though he had lost his mind. Maybe he had. Maybe he really was imagining all of this.

This was Sophia, he reminded himself. If he could trust anyone, it was her. He could not lie to her.

“It was a monster.”

The words dropped into the silence of the room like stones.

“It looked… horrible. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It grabbed the guy by the throat and dragged him into the wall. Straight through it.”

Lars watched Sophia’s expression change. Her lips formed a silent “O” while she tried to process what she had just heard. Slowly, she raised a hand to his forehead, checking for fever.

“Please be honest with me,” she said carefully, speaking as though to a frightened child. “Did you… maybe take something? Medication that reacted badly or…?”

Frustration surged inside him. Lars stepped away from her touch.

“No. No, I didn’t take anything. I’m serious, Sophia.”

“Lars…” She took a breath, obviously searching for the right words. “You know how this sounds, don’t you? Monsters aren’t real. You know that.”

He saw the helplessness in her eyes. She was completely overwhelmed, unsure how to handle him.

“I’m not crazy!” he snapped louder than intended. “And yes, I know exactly how it sounds. But I also know what I saw. Please, Sophia. Believe me.”

She stayed silent for a long moment.

“Okay,” she finally said. “Look, let’s just sit down first. I’ll make you some chamomile tea, and once you calm down a little, you can tell me exactly what you saw. I mean… your eyes could have played tricks on you. It was dark, you were tired. Maybe…” She searched desperately for explanations. “There has to be a rational explanation.”

Lars sighed deeply. He could tell she did not believe him, that she thought he was sick, overworked, or stressed. But what else could he expect? An hour ago he would have reacted exactly the same way.

He sat back down at the kitchen table and let her fuss over him. Sophia hurried to the kettle, filled it with water, and switched it on. Her movements were hurried, almost frantic, as though she were trying to suppress her anxiety through activity.

Lars stared down at his hands. They were still trembling. The images returned. The razor sharp teeth. The man’s scream cutting off abruptly.

A new fear crept into his chest. He did not feel safe here anymore. The walls of his own apartment suddenly seemed threatening. What if the creature could emerge through any wall it wanted? What if it was already here, lurking on the other side of the kitchen wall only inches away?

Maybe they should leave the city. Drive to his parents’ place out in the countryside where it would be safer.

But he could not leave Sophia here alone. Not after what he had seen.

The clink of a mug on the table pulled him from his thoughts. Sophia sat down across from him and slid a steaming cup of chamomile tea toward him.

“I saw what I saw,” he said quietly but firmly. “The man was only a few feet away from me. That thing grabbed him and dragged him away.”

He looked up directly into her eyes.

“Don’t you get it? All the disappearances over the past few months. Chen. Kellner. All the others. Those things must have taken them. That’s why nobody ever found the bodies.”

“Lars…” Sophia sighed and bit her lower lip. She chose her words carefully. “You know something like that doesn’t exist. Monsters jumping through walls? That’s… that’s impossible.”

“I saw it with my own eyes!”

The words exploded out of him louder than intended.

“And still…” She held his gaze, though he could see the fear in her eyes. “There has to be a logical explanation.”

“There was a monster!”

“You’re really worrying me, Lars.”

“I’m not crazy!”

His voice nearly cracked, echoing through the small kitchen. In the sudden silence afterward, his heavy breathing sounded unnaturally loud.

Sophia carefully reached out toward him.

“Please. I want to help you, but…”

The shrill ringing of her phone interrupted her. The device lay on the counter, the screen lighting up. Lars could read the name displayed there.

Jenny.

Sophia glanced between him and the phone before pressing decline. The ringing stopped.

Then immediately started again. The same name.

“Go ahead,” Lars said hoarsely, bitterness creeping into his voice. “Seems important.”

Sophia hesitated, studying him for a moment before answering.

“Hey, Jenny… this really isn’t the best time for…”

She was abruptly cut off. Lars could hear the frantic voice on the other end but could not make out the words.

“What? No, seriously? What exactly happened?”

Sophia jumped to her feet and hurried to the window. With one hand she pulled aside the thin curtains and looked out at the street. Her entire body tensed.

“Are you sure?” Her voice sounded nervous now. The calm was gone.

She listened in silence for several minutes. Occasionally murmuring “I see” or “Oh my God.” Her face grew paler with every passing second.

“Yeah, okay. Thanks for calling. Stay safe. Talk to you later.”

She ended the call and turned toward Lars.

All color had drained from her face. Her eyes looked horrified.

“What happened?” He was immediately beside her, gripping her shoulders. “Sophia, what did she say?”

Her voice was barely above a whisper.

“They’re sealing off the city.”

[Self promo] Imagine falling asleep in one place… and waking up somewhere else. You just slipped out of reality. (Horror, Scifi)