u/ZH0901

Hi! I have my horror novella, One Free Play, ready for beta feedback. The story is completed, and I’d love some genuine reader reactions to it

Blurb:
Layla and her friends never meant to find Alderwick.

A wrong turn leads them to a quiet little town, and they decide to stay the night. That afternoon, the locals are preparing for a carnival full of rides and games.

At the entrance, each of them is handed a red ticket.

One ticket. One free play.

But at Alderwick’s carnival, winning is the easy part.

Feedback:
I’d particularly appreciate thoughts on pacing, characters, the mystery and horror elements, anything confusing or inconsistent, and any points where your interest dropped.

Please message me if you are interested. Thanks!

The flies arrived during the hottest week of July.

At first, everyone complained. They filled kitchens and cafes, crawled across fruit displays and gathered inside bus shelters where the glass trapped the heat. Supermarkets sold out of bug spray within two days. My local supermarket put handwritten signs above the empty shelves limiting customers to two cans each, although there was nothing left to limit.

I found three flies in my bedroom on the first night. One circled the light bulb while the others knocked themselves against the window, their bodies making small taps against the glass.

I killed them all before I went to sleep. By morning, there were six more.

Nobody knew where they were coming from. The news blamed the heat and the overflowing bins caused by delayed collections, but that didn’t explain why they were appearing in clean homes and offices. People posted photos of them clustered around plug sockets and smoke alarms. One woman filmed them pushing through the gaps around her bathroom extractor fan.

For a while, it was all anyone spoke about. Then people stopped complaining.

I first noticed it at work. A fly landed on the edge of Amelia’s coffee cup while she was serving a customer. It walked slowly around the rim, rubbing its front legs together. Amelia glanced at it and carried on talking. I waited for her to brush it away.
Instead, she lifted the cup and drank.

The fly moved under her nose as she tipped the cup towards her mouth. Its wings trembled in the steam. She swallowed, lowered the cup and smiled at the customer without acknowledging it.

“You’ve got a fly on there,” I said once the customer had left.

Amelia looked down. “Oh.”

She held her finger beside the rim. The fly stepped onto it almost immediately.

For some reason, that unsettled me more than if she had simply ignored it.

Flies didn’t behave like that. They darted away when you reached for them. They battered themselves against windows rather than use the open one beside them. They did not calmly climb onto a fingertip.

Amelia lifted it closer to her face. Its wings fluttered against her skin.

“Be careful,” she said.

I thought she was talking to me. Then she carried it to the front of the shop and released it through the door.

When she returned, I was still staring at her.

“What?” she asked.

“You drank while it was on your cup.”

She shrugged. “It was only resting.”

That became the phrase people used.

Only resting.

They said it when flies landed on food or crawled across their arms. They said it when they found one sitting in their baby’s hair or walking over the exposed surface of a cut. If someone flinched, another person would smile and tell them not to worry.

It was only resting.

A week earlier, I had watched Amelia chase one around the stockroom with a rolled up magazine until she nearly knocked over a display stand. Now she spoke about them with the patience people usually reserved for frightened animals.

I asked whether she had stopped using bug spray. Her expression changed. It was slight, just a twitch at the corners of her mouth, as though I had said something unnecessarily cruel. She said the flies weren’t hurting anyone.

“They spread disease,” I told her.

“Do they?”

I laughed because I thought she was joking.

She didn’t laugh with me.

Over the next few days, I noticed fewer people brushing them away. A man at the cafe near work let one crawl across the lid of his coffee while he drank through the opening. When it reached his mouth, he paused until it moved, then carried on.

Soon, videos began appearing online.

People filmed themselves holding out their hands and waiting for flies to land. Parents encouraged their children to let them crawl across their knuckles. One woman sat completely still while dozens covered her cheeks and forehead, disappearing into her hair.

The video had nearly two million likes. I watched it twice, trying to understand why nobody in the comments seemed disgusted.

They called it beautiful. They said she had been chosen.

At first, I assumed that was just another word people had started using online. Something meaningless that would disappear within a week.
Then my roommate used it.

I came home one evening and found Samira sitting at the kitchen table with her hands folded in her lap. The windows were closed despite the heat. Sweat had darkened the collar of her shirt, and the kitchen smelled of overripe bananas and warm rubbish.

A fly sat between her eyebrows. It was larger than the ones I had seen outside. Its body was a deep, inky black, and short hairs were visible along its back.

“Why are the windows shut?” I asked.

“I didn’t want it to leave.”

I dropped my bag by the door. “What?”

Samira smiled without moving her head.
“It chose me.”

I watched the fly crawl down the bridge of her nose, pause beside her nostril and lower its head.

“Get that off your face.”

Samira told me to stop being dramatic. The fly had reached the edge of her nostril, one leg lifting each time she breathed.

I grabbed a tea towel from the counter and flicked it towards her. She screamed and covered her face, knocking the chair backwards as she stood. The fly shot towards the ceiling.

Samira rarely raised her voice, even when she was angry, but now she shouted at me like I had done something unforgivable.

“You could have killed it!”

“That was the idea.”

The fly circled above us, its buzzing filling the kitchen. Each time it passed over the light, its shadow flickered across her face.

“It’s mine,” she said.

I left before the argument became worse.

That night, I woke to buzzing beside my ear. I slapped the side of my face and sat up, tangled in the duvet. The room was dark apart from the orange glow coming through the curtains.

The buzzing stopped.

I switched on my bedside lamp. A fly sat on the wall beside my pillow. The skin beside my ear prickled where it had been, and I rubbed at it hard with my palm before reaching for the book on my bedside table and smacking it.

Its body burst with a soft crack. When I pulled the book away, one wing was stuck to the wall. The rest slid down in a dark smear.

I wiped it from the wall with a tissue, dropped it into the bathroom bin and went back to bed.
In the morning, Samira was standing in my doorway with the crumpled tissue from the bin pinched between two fingers. A black leg had pushed through the paper.

“What did you do?” she asked, distraught.

I told her that the fly was in my room. Her eyes filled with tears. Without another word, she carried the tissue into the kitchen and unfolded it on the table.
The fly’s body was flattened. Its abdomen was split, releasing a thin yellow fluid that soaked into the paper.

Samira touched one of its legs with the tip of her finger.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

My stomach tightened.

“I’m sorry she did that.”

The apartment became difficult to live in after that. Samira stopped taking the bins out because flies gathered around them. She left plates of fruit on the counter until they moulded and leaked into the bowls. The air grew sweet and rotten. Tiny white larvae appeared around the edges of the sink. When I tried to clean them away, she blocked me.

“They’re not ready.”

“For what?”

She stared at the writhing cluster. “I don’t know.”

Flies followed her from room to room. Not hundreds. Never enough to look like an infestation. Usually, there was only one.

That was what I began noticing everywhere.

One fly per person. One rested on the shoulder of the bus driver. Another crawled across a woman’s handbag on the train. A child in a pushchair had one nestled in the soft crease beneath his chin while his mother watched it with quiet affection.

Nobody swatted them away.

The flies weren’t random. I became certain of that. They didn’t move between people or circle the room searching for food. Each one remained close to a particular person, landing on their clothes, their hair or the exposed skin of their faces.

Some people spoke to them.

Amelia kept hers on the counter at work. It waited beside the card machine while she served customers, occasionally lifting its wings. She had started bringing small pieces of food for it in a bottle cap.

I pointed out that flies only lived for a few weeks.
Amelia looked genuinely confused. Her gaze moved to the one beside the cash desk.

“That isn’t true.”

“It is.”

She smiled. “Not these.”

I stopped going into the staffroom at lunch. Flies gathered around the people eating there, stepping across forks and resting on open lips between bites. Nobody seemed to mind when they touched the food.

By the end of the week, the nets had disappeared from the pastry displays in the cafes near work. The bakery across the street removed theirs after customers complained that they made the flies seem unwelcome. Now, flies were crawling over the iced buns and settling between the layers of croissants while people queued without reacting.

The news changed too. Reports about infestation levels disappeared. Pest control adverts were removed. A scientist who had warned about contamination issued an apology, saying his earlier comments were based on outdated information.

Councils asked residents not to use chemical sprays.

A man was arrested after someone filmed him setting fire to a cluster of flies on a bin. The video showed people dragging him away while others knelt around the burnt insects.

Their crying was louder than his shouting.

I started carrying a small can of deodorant and a lighter in my bag. Not because I planned to use them. I just wanted something with me.

The flies had stopped coming near me by then.
At first, I was relieved. No buzzing around my bed. No small bodies appearing on the bathroom mirror while I brushed my teeth. They filled every public place, but a clear space seemed to form around me.

But people began noticing.

Amelia was the first. I was restocking shelves when she asked where mine was. I pretended not to hear her, but she stepped closer and started searching the shelves and lights around me.

When I told her I didn’t have one, the fly on her chest stopped moving.

“You killed it, didn’t you?”

The shop was busy, but the customers had gone quiet. A man near the door tilted his head. A fly rested at the corner of his eye, its legs disappearing between his lashes.

Amelia reached for my wrist. I pulled away, and her face tightened, not with anger but pity.

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

I went home early that day.

Samira was in her bedroom. Her door stood open, and the curtains had been drawn despite the afternoon sun.

She was lying on top of the covers. Flies covered her from the chest upwards.

There were more than I had ever seen on one person. They filled her hair and formed moving lines across her cheeks. They gathered around her nostrils and lips, crawling over one another to reach the damp openings.

I stood in the doorway, unable to breathe.

“Samira?”

Her eyes opened. Flies clung to her eyelids. One became trapped between them and disappeared when she blinked.

“You’re home,” she said.

Her voice sounded thick.

I stepped into the room. The flies shifted as I approached. Their wings vibrated, creating a low hum that I could feel in my teeth.

“We need to go to hospital.

“I’m not ill.”

“There are flies in your mouth.”

She smiled. Three crawled out from between her teeth.

I stumbled backwards and covered my mouth.

Samira sat up slowly. The flies moved with her, clinging to her skin and clothes. Some disappeared under her collar. I saw the fabric twitch where they crawled underneath it.

“You frightened yours away,” she said.

“You know I killed it.”

The humming stopped. Every fly in the room became still.

Samira’s smile faded.

“You shouldn’t have said it in front of them.”

She reached towards me.

I ran.

I locked myself in my bedroom and pushed the chest of drawers against the door. Samira didn’t follow. For nearly an hour, I heard nothing in the apartment.

Then buzzing.

It started near the window and spread around the room. Thousands of wings moved through the narrow spaces surrounding me. The sound travelled behind the headboard and from under the floorboards.

I pressed my hands over my ears.

Something tapped against the vent above my bed. A fly pushed its head through one of the holes. Then another appeared beside it.

Their bodies squeezed against the small openings. Legs reached through the gaps, feeling at the air.
I grabbed the deodorant and lighter from my bag. Before I could use them, Samira spoke from the other side of the door.

“They only want to help.”

The handle moved. The drawers shook against the door.

“Go away!”

“You’re making them anxious,” she replied, her voice almost soothing.

The buzzing grew louder. Flies began pushing through the vent one at a time, dropping onto the bed before taking flight.

I sprayed the deodorant towards them. They fell onto the duvet, twitching.

Samira screamed outside. The scream didn’t sound human. It broke halfway through and became a wet, choking noise. Then something struck the door hard enough to move the drawers.

I opened the window and climbed onto the fire escape. The metal burned through my socks. I descended quickly, gripping the rail while flies poured from the window above me.

I didn’t know why they weren’t chasing me. They gathered around the frame and watched.

Samira appeared behind them. Her face was dark with flies. They packed her mouth, stretching her cheeks and forcing her jaw open. More crawled from inside her nose.

She lifted one hand. I thought she was waving. Then I realised she was pointing.

People had stopped on the pavement below. Every one of them was looking up at me. Every one of them had a fly.

I ran to the nearest station. Nobody tried to stop me, but their heads turned as I passed. Flies lifted from where they were resting, hovering for a moment before settling again.

The station was packed. Heat clung to the tiled walls, carrying the smell of sweat. I pushed through the barriers and boarded the first train that arrived.

The carriage was full. I stood by the doors, breathing hard. People looked at me from every seat. A fly rested on each of them.

One on a woman’s forehead. One on the bald patch of the man reading beside her. One on the hand of a teenage girl holding her phone.

Nobody spoke.

The doors closed, and the train moved into the tunnel. As the windows turned black, the flies began to lift.

Not all at once. The first left the shoulder of the man nearest me. Then another rose from the woman beside him.

One by one, they took flight.

The sound filled the carriage.

Dozens of bodies circled the lights. Their shadows flickered over the passengers, but nobody ducked or raised a hand.

Every face turned towards me.

The flies gathered above my head. I crouched and covered my face. They landed on my arms first.
Their feet were lighter than I expected. Tiny points moved across my skin, testing each hair and pore. More settled on my neck and slipped under my shirt. Wings buzzed against my ears. Something crawled into my hair and pressed against my scalp.

I screamed for someone to help me.

The woman nearest me leaned forward. Her eyes were wet with sympathy.

“Stay still,” she said. “You killed the first one, so it takes more now.”

A fly landed on my lower lip. I clamped my mouth shut. Others gathered around it, pressing against the seam. Their legs moved quickly, searching for a way inside.

The people watched.

Some smiled.

The train continued through the tunnel while the flies covered my face, and when the first one pushed itself into my nostril, everyone in the carriage sighed with relief.

The comment was buried so deep under my latest video that I almost missed it.

Try Dimer Ridge. Nobody comes back alone.

No likes or replies. Not even a profile picture attached to the account. Just that one sentence sitting underneath a video where I’d spent twenty minutes walking through an abandoned church and pretending every creak in the floorboards didn’t make me jump.

I don’t know why it caught my attention. Maybe it was the way it was worded. Not you won’t come back, or people disappear there, or any of the usual dramatic crap people left under my videos.

Nobody comes back alone.

I stared at it for longer than I should have. Then I opened a new tab and typed in Dimer Ridge, and at first, there was almost nothing. A few property listings, an old weather report and a blurry photo of a road sign on some outdated county website. Ordinary stuff. Boring stuff. 

The only thing that stood out was an article from ten years ago. A couple had gone missing while on a road trip through the area. Their names were Daniel and Maya. According to the article, they were last seen stopping for gas near Dimer Ridge. Two days later, their car was found at the edge of town.

Untouched.

No broken windows. No blood. No signs of a struggle. Just an empty car and that was it. No follow-up. No update. No bodies. For most people, that probably would have been enough to leave it alone. For me it was content.

Three days after reading the comment, I was packed and driving to Dimer Ridge.

It was only meant to be a two hour drive. Long enough to feel like a proper trip but short enough that I could convince myself I wasn’t doing anything stupid. I had my camera bag on the passenger seat and a half finished iced coffee in the cup holder.

Every so often, I glanced at the empty signal bar on my phone and told myself that was normal. Rural roads have bad coverage. Nothing worth narrating into the camera yet.

Then the trees thinned and the sign appeared on the side of the road.

WELCOME TO DIMER RIDGE

POPULATION: 1,204

It was old, painted white with faded red lettering. The top right corner was bent inward and rust had eaten around the screws. I slowed the car down and filmed it through the windshield.

“Alright,” I said, trying to sound excited. “Dimer Ridge. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

I drove on and honestly everything looked normal. The road narrowed into a residential street lined neatly with houses on both sides. They were pretty, in that small town sort of way. White siding. Dark roofs. Trimmed lawns. Red mailboxes at the end of every driveway.

Then, not even five minutes later, I saw the sign again.

WELCOME TO DIMER RIDGE
POPULATION: 1,204

Same bent corner, rusted screws and faded red letters.

I slowed down.

“What the hell?”

For a second, I just stared at it through the windshield, waiting for my brain to make sense of what I was seeing. Then I laughed, because that felt easier. I must have taken a wrong turn, some weird loop road. That seemed reasonable. So I kept driving.

The houses came back into view, sitting in perfect rows under the setting sun. At first, I barely noticed them. I was too busy watching the road, trying to see if I’d somehow circled back. But the longer I drove, the harder they were to ignore.

Every house was the same shade of white. Every lawn was trimmed in the same neat square. Every driveway had the same red mailbox standing at the end of it, flag down and door shut. I told myself it was probably some planned community thing. Some towns liked everything uniform and maybe the people here were just weird about appearances.

That was when my fuel light came on. 

The gas station sat at the end of the street, with two pumps out front and a flickering sign that only managed to light up every other letter. A man was filling his car at the pump beside mine. There was nothing unusual about him at first. Late twenties. Cropped brown hair and a thin, neatly trimmed mustache sat just above his lip. He was wearing a blue collared shirt, jeans and black Converse. The kind of person you’d forget two seconds after passing him in the street.

I filled my tank, then headed inside to pay. Behind the counter stood the same man. Cropped brown hair. The same neatly trimmed mustache. Blue collared shirt, jeans and black Converse. I stopped with one hand still on the door. For a moment, I actually looked back through the window. The man at the pump was still outside, standing beside his car with one hand on the nozzle.

The cashier watched me expressionless and I forced a laugh.

“Twins?”

He didn’t answer.

He just grunted, pressed a few buttons on the till, and held out his hand for the cash. He counted my change once. Then he counted it again. Slowly with the same blank face. The receipt printer rattled, paused, then rattled again. He tore off both receipts and handed them to me. 

I only took one and didn’t look back at the pump when I left.

By the time I got back on the road, the sky had started to darken. Dimer Ridge didn’t seem like the kind of place that had much to offer after sunset, and honestly I was too tired to keep pretending I wasn’t already unsettled.

I told myself I’d get better footage in the morning. That was the sensible thing to do. Check in, get some sleep, then wake up early to film the town properly when my head was clearer and the shadows weren’t making everything look worse than it was.

The motel was called The Ridge Rest. It sat just off the main road, with peeling beige paint and a red neon sign that buzzed loudly. It was exactly the kind of cheap small town motel I’d expected, with a tacky carpet and a vending machine humming in the corner like it was struggling to stay alive.

The woman at the front desk looked almost as old as the building. She had grey hair parted neatly to the right and swept into a tight bun at the back of her head. Her glasses hung low on her nose as she watched me over the frames as I stepped inside.

“You got a room?” I asked.

She slid a guest book across the counter without answering. I wrote my name, the date, and one night under the length of stay. Even though I’d planned on being there for the week, something about the place made me want to leave myself an option.

Her eyes moved over the page. Then she glanced up at me.

“Just you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just me.”

The woman gave a small hum, like she’d expected that answer but didn’t quite believe it.

“We don’t get many singles.”

I laughed, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do.

“Busy season?”

She didn’t smile. Instead, she reached below the counter and pulled out a key attached to a plastic tag.

22. 

The number had been scratched into it by hand.

“Second floor,” she said. “End of the hall.”

I took the key from her. Her fingers were cold.
The hallway smelled like old carpet and cleaning spray. Every door had a number screwed into the wood.

At first, I thought I was seeing it wrong. Then I slowed down and actually looked. Every room number was doubled, each pair of digits painted in the same dull brass colour. I almost laughed, but I was too tired to go back downstairs and ask questions I already knew would get weird answers.

So I unlocked the door and stepped inside.

The room was exactly what I expected. Beige walls. Brown carpet. A painting of a lake hanging slightly crooked above the dresser. 

Then I noticed the beds.

Two of them.

Both neatly made, with the same thin floral blanket and one mint placed in the centre of the pillow. I stood in the doorway for a moment, my hand still on the key.

“Great,” I muttered. “Romantic.”

I dropped my bag on the floor and walked further in. Two towels folded on the rack. Two plastic cups beside the sink. Even the little motel soaps had been placed in pairs. I told myself it wasn’t strange. Twin rooms existed and cheap motels like this probably gave out whatever room was available. Maybe all their rooms looked the same.

Still, I found myself turning around and heading back to the lobby. The old woman was exactly where I’d left her, sitting behind the desk with the guest book open in front of her.

“I think there’s been a mistake,” I said, holding up the key. “I only need a single.”

She looked at the key tag, then at me.

“There’s no mistake.”

“It’s a twin room.”

“It should be fine for you.”

The way she said it made my throat tighten. I waited for her to explain but she only looked down at the guest book again, as if the conversation was over.

That was when I noticed her hair. Earlier, it had been parted neatly to the right. Now it was parted to the left. Same tight grey bun. Just mirrored. I stared long enough that she looked up.

“Something wrong?”

I blinked.

“No,” I said. “Sorry. Long drive.”

She gave me that same small hum from before.

I went back upstairs and locked Room 22 behind me. I didn’t sleep well, but nothing happened, and by the time morning came, I felt almost stupid. The sun was leaking through the thin curtains, turning the room a dull yellow. The second bed was still perfectly made. Same thin floral blanket tucked neatly under the mattress. Same mint sitting untouched in the middle of the pillow. I stared at it for a while, waiting to feel afraid. Mostly, I just felt disappointed.

That’s the thing about making content around haunted, creepy places. You start wanting the world to prove you right. Every shadow becomes a possible thumbnail. Every strange noise becomes something you can clip and post with a title that ends in a question mark. But Dimer Ridge had given me nothing I could actually use. A weird sign. A weird cashier. A weird old woman.

Not enough.

I got dressed in a black T-shirt and khakis, grabbed my camera, and decided to get breakfast at the diner I’d passed on my way to the motel. I figured I could film some of the town properly and interview a few locals. Maybe even ask about Daniel and Maya if I was lucky.

I was locking my door when someone passed behind me. Fast enough that I only caught the back of him as he moved down the hallway and took the stairs two at a time. Head lowered like he didn’t want to be seen.

“Morning,” I called out.

He didn’t stop.

I stood there with my key in my hand, listening to his footsteps disappear down the stairs. For some reason, before I left, I opened my door again and looked at the second bed. It was still untouched.
I told myself to stop being ridiculous and headed downstairs. The old woman was behind the front desk, exactly where she had been the night before. Her hair was parted to the right again. 

“Sleep well?” She asked with her head still down.

“Yeah,” I said. “Fine.”

She gave me that small hum. I nodded goodbye and walked out before she could say anything else.
The diner was called Molly’s, though the sign had lost the apostrophe, so it just read MOLLYS in faded red letters. Inside, it smelled like burnt coffee, syrup, and old grease. It was normal enough, with red booths, a checkered floor and a glass case by the counter with pies inside. 

A waitress came over with a menu tucked under her arm.

“Just you?” she asked.

I almost laughed.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just me.”

She led me to a booth near the window and put the menu down in front of me. Then she paused, looked at the empty seat across from me, and set another one down there too. I opened my mouth to correct her and that was when I saw him. The man from the motel.

He was sitting at a booth in the back corner, facing away from me. I don’t know why I decided to go over. Maybe because by then I was tired of feeling like the only person in town who didn’t understand the joke. Maybe because I thought he might be another guest, another outsider, someone else who had come to Dimer Ridge and was trying to convince himself he wasn’t scared either.

Or maybe some part of me already knew. 

I picked up my camera and walked towards him.

“Hey, man,” I said. “I think I saw you earlier at the motel.”

He didn’t turn around.

The closer I got, the more wrong he looked.
Not visibly. Not in any way I could explain. But something in my body reacted before my brain did. My stomach tightened. My fingers went cold around the camera. The noise of the diner seemed to pull away from me, like someone had turned the volume down.

I reached the table.

“Are you staying at The Ridge Rest too?”

The words died in my throat.

He looked up.

It was me.

Not someone who looked like me.

Not one of those people you see online who share your face in a way that makes everyone tag you and say, found your twin.

Me.

My eyes. My mouth. My black T-shirt. My khakis.

He stared at me blankly for one long second.

Then he smiled.

I backed away so fast I hit the table behind me. Coffee spilled over the edge of a mug. Someone swore. The waitress turned at the sound and I bumped into her hard enough that she dropped the plates she was carrying.

“I’m sorry,” I said automatically, even though I wasn’t looking at her.

I was looking behind her.

At first, I thought someone was standing over her shoulder. Then the waitress moved and the thing behind her moved too. Same grey uniform. Same blonde ponytail. Same wide green eyes staring at me. One body, then another, just a beat behind.

I turned towards the counter. The cook lifted his hand. Two hands lifted. One of the old men by the window raised his coffee. Two mugs touched two mouths. The whole diner seemed to split in front of me, every person doubled, every movement repeated half a second out of time.

I looked back at the booth. The other me was gone. But I felt him behind me. I knew he was there the same way you know when someone is standing too close in a queue. That quiet pressure at the back of your neck. The certainty of another body just outside your sight.

I didn’t turn around. I ran.

The bell above the diner door rang once when I shoved it open. Then it rang again half a second later.

Outside, the morning sun was too bright. I stumbled past the diner window and caught my reflection in the glass. I stopped. I don’t know why. I turned sideways and there were two of me in the reflection. One of us was shaking while the other was standing just behind him. When I lifted my hand, both reflections lifted theirs. Mine trembled. His didn’t.
I ran back to the motel.

I don’t remember crossing the street. I don’t remember passing the gas station or the neat white houses or the red mailboxes. I remember the motel sign buzzing above me. I remember dropping the key twice before I managed to get it into the lock of Room 22.

I didn’t turn on the light. I just grabbed my bag off the floor and started throwing things into it. Clothes. Charger. Toiletries. The camera batteries from the dresser. I didn’t fold anything. I didn’t check if I had everything. I just needed to leave.

My hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t get the zip closed.

“Come on,” I whispered to myself.

Then I saw the second bed. The sheets were twisted, the blanket had been kicked halfway down the mattress and the pillow was dented in the middle. Like someone had slept there while I was gone.

My phone buzzed. After that, there is nothing.
I woke up in Room 22 with sunlight pressing through the curtains and my mouth dry. For a second, I thought it was still the same morning. Like all of it had been some horrible nightmare. Then I checked my phone and a full day had passed. My bag was back on the chair, unpacked, every item folded and placed exactly where it had been before.

My notifications were full. Comments. Messages. More than I’d ever had from one post. The newest upload on my account was titled:

DIMER RIDGE WAS NOTHING

I don’t remember posting it. The thumbnail was me standing outside the motel, smiling at the camera. I don’t remember taking it. The caption read:

Sorry to disappoint everyone, but there’s no curse here. Just a quiet town, friendly people and a bad night’s sleep.

I think I let the comments get into my head.

Honestly, Dimer Ridge is peaceful.

I came here alone, but I don’t feel alone anymore.

I think I’m going to stay.

I read it until the words stopped looking like words. Then I noticed the comments. Most of them were asking why the video kept looping.

One said, “Dude, why do you blink a second after yourself?”

Another said, “Pause at 1:12. There’s someone standing behind you.”

I didn’t want to look but I looked anyway. At 1:12, I’m standing in front of the motel sign. My mouth is moving but the audio is slightly behind, and in the window of Room 22, someone is watching. Me. Only he’s smiling before I do.

I’ve tried deleting the video three times but it keeps coming back. I've tried leaving the motel, but every hallway leads back to Room 22. The doors are all numbered 22 now. Every single one.

I can hear someone moving in the bathroom. I’m sitting on the bed closest to the door. The other bed is still warm. 

Please, if you see another update from me saying Dimer Ridge is normal, don’t believe it.

That isn’t me.

I can hear him on the other side of the bathroom door.

And he’s breathing exactly when I do.

Hi! I’m looking for beta readers for the first three chapters of my horror novella "One Free Play" totalling approximately 7500 words.

Four friends take an unexpected detour during a road trip and arrive in a small town that doesn't appear on their map. With no phone signal and nowhere else nearby to stay, they decide to stop for the night and visit the town’s carnival the next day. What initially seems like a lucky distraction soon begins to feel increasingly wrong, especially as they notice how closely the townspeople are watching them.

The novella is still in progress, but these three chapters have been revised.

Please comment or message me if you’re interested, and I can send a Google Docs version. Thank you!

The comment was buried so deep under my latest video that I almost missed it.

Try Dimer Ridge. Nobody comes back alone.

No likes or replies. Not even a profile picture attached to the account. Just that one sentence sitting underneath a video where I’d spent twenty minutes walking through an abandoned church and pretending every creak in the floorboards didn’t make me jump.

I don’t know why it caught my attention. Maybe it was the way it was worded. Not you won’t come back, or people disappear there, or any of the usual dramatic crap people left under my videos.

Nobody comes back alone.

I stared at it for longer than I should have. Then I opened a new tab and typed in Dimer Ridge, and at first, there was almost nothing. A few property listings, an old weather report and a blurry photo of a road sign on some outdated county website. Ordinary stuff. Boring stuff. 

The only thing that stood out was an article from ten years ago. A couple had gone missing while on a road trip through the area. Their names were Daniel and Maya. According to the article, they were last seen stopping for gas near Dimer Ridge. Two days later, their car was found at the edge of town.

Untouched.

No broken windows. No blood. No signs of a struggle. Just an empty car and that was it. No follow-up. No update. No bodies. For most people, that probably would have been enough to leave it alone. For me it was content.

Three days after reading the comment, I was packed and driving to Dimer Ridge.

It was only meant to be a two hour drive. Long enough to feel like a proper trip but short enough that I could convince myself I wasn’t doing anything stupid. I had my camera bag on the passenger seat and a half finished iced coffee in the cup holder.

Every so often, I glanced at the empty signal bar on my phone and told myself that was normal. Rural roads have bad coverage. Nothing worth narrating into the camera yet.

Then the trees thinned and the sign appeared on the side of the road.

WELCOME TO DIMER RIDGE

POPULATION: 1,204

It was old, painted white with faded red lettering. The top right corner was bent inward and rust had eaten around the screws. I slowed the car down and filmed it through the windshield.

“Alright,” I said, trying to sound excited. “Dimer Ridge. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

I drove on and honestly everything looked normal. The road narrowed into a residential street lined neatly with houses on both sides. They were pretty, in that small town sort of way. White siding. Dark roofs. Trimmed lawns. Red mailboxes at the end of every driveway.

Then, not even five minutes later, I saw the sign again.

WELCOME TO DIMER RIDGE
POPULATION: 1,204

Same bent corner, rusted screws and faded red letters.

I slowed down.

“What the hell?”

For a second, I just stared at it through the windshield, waiting for my brain to make sense of what I was seeing. Then I laughed, because that felt easier. I must have taken a wrong turn, some weird loop road. That seemed reasonable. So I kept driving.

The houses came back into view, sitting in perfect rows under the setting sun. At first, I barely noticed them. I was too busy watching the road, trying to see if I’d somehow circled back. But the longer I drove, the harder they were to ignore.

Every house was the same shade of white. Every lawn was trimmed in the same neat square. Every driveway had the same red mailbox standing at the end of it, flag down and door shut. I told myself it was probably some planned community thing. Some towns liked everything uniform and maybe the people here were just weird about appearances.

That was when my fuel light came on. 

The gas station sat at the end of the street, with two pumps out front and a flickering sign that only managed to light up every other letter. A man was filling his car at the pump beside mine. There was nothing unusual about him at first. Late twenties. Cropped brown hair and a thin, neatly trimmed mustache sat just above his lip. He was wearing a blue collared shirt, jeans and black Converse. The kind of person you’d forget two seconds after passing him in the street.

I filled my tank, then headed inside to pay. Behind the counter stood the same man. Cropped brown hair. The same neatly trimmed mustache. Blue collared shirt, jeans and black Converse. I stopped with one hand still on the door. For a moment, I actually looked back through the window. The man at the pump was still outside, standing beside his car with one hand on the nozzle.

The cashier watched me expressionless and I forced a laugh.

“Twins?”

He didn’t answer.

He just grunted, pressed a few buttons on the till, and held out his hand for the cash. He counted my change once. Then he counted it again. Slowly with the same blank face. The receipt printer rattled, paused, then rattled again. He tore off both receipts and handed them to me. 

I only took one and didn’t look back at the pump when I left.

By the time I got back on the road, the sky had started to darken. Dimer Ridge didn’t seem like the kind of place that had much to offer after sunset, and honestly I was too tired to keep pretending I wasn’t already unsettled.

I told myself I’d get better footage in the morning. That was the sensible thing to do. Check in, get some sleep, then wake up early to film the town properly when my head was clearer and the shadows weren’t making everything look worse than it was.

The motel was called The Ridge Rest. It sat just off the main road, with peeling beige paint and a red neon sign that buzzed loudly. It was exactly the kind of cheap small town motel I’d expected, with a tacky carpet and a vending machine humming in the corner like it was struggling to stay alive.

The woman at the front desk looked almost as old as the building. She had grey hair parted neatly to the right and swept into a tight bun at the back of her head. Her glasses hung low on her nose as she watched me over the frames as I stepped inside.

“You got a room?” I asked.

She slid a guest book across the counter without answering. I wrote my name, the date, and one night under the length of stay. Even though I’d planned on being there for the week, something about the place made me want to leave myself an option.

Her eyes moved over the page. Then she glanced up at me.

“Just you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just me.”

The woman gave a small hum, like she’d expected that answer but didn’t quite believe it.

“We don’t get many singles.”

I laughed, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do.

“Busy season?”

She didn’t smile. Instead, she reached below the counter and pulled out a key attached to a plastic tag.

22. 

The number had been scratched into it by hand.

“Second floor,” she said. “End of the hall.”

I took the key from her. Her fingers were cold.
The hallway smelled like old carpet and cleaning spray. Every door had a number screwed into the wood.

11.

22.

33.

44.

At first, I thought I was seeing it wrong. Then I slowed down and actually looked. Every room number was doubled, each pair of digits painted in the same dull brass colour. I almost laughed, but I was too tired to go back downstairs and ask questions I already knew would get weird answers.

So I unlocked the door and stepped inside.

The room was exactly what I expected. Beige walls. Brown carpet. A painting of a lake hanging slightly crooked above the dresser. 

Then I noticed the beds.

Two of them.

Both neatly made, with the same thin floral blanket and one mint placed in the centre of the pillow. I stood in the doorway for a moment, my hand still on the key.

“Great,” I muttered. “Romantic.”

I dropped my bag on the floor and walked further in. Two towels folded on the rack. Two plastic cups beside the sink. Even the little motel soaps had been placed in pairs. I told myself it wasn’t strange. Twin rooms existed and cheap motels like this probably gave out whatever room was available. Maybe all their rooms looked the same.

Still, I found myself turning around and heading back to the lobby. The old woman was exactly where I’d left her, sitting behind the desk with the guest book open in front of her.

“I think there’s been a mistake,” I said, holding up the key. “I only need a single.”

She looked at the key tag, then at me.

“There’s no mistake.”

“It’s a twin room.”

“It should be fine for you.”

The way she said it made my throat tighten. I waited for her to explain but she only looked down at the guest book again, as if the conversation was over.

That was when I noticed her hair. Earlier, it had been parted neatly to the right. Now it was parted to the left. Same tight grey bun. Just mirrored. I stared long enough that she looked up.

“Something wrong?”

I blinked.

“No,” I said. “Sorry. Long drive.”

She gave me that same small hum from before.

I went back upstairs and locked Room 22 behind me. I didn’t sleep well, but nothing happened, and by the time morning came, I felt almost stupid. The sun was leaking through the thin curtains, turning the room a dull yellow. The second bed was still perfectly made. Same thin floral blanket tucked neatly under the mattress. Same mint sitting untouched in the middle of the pillow. I stared at it for a while, waiting to feel afraid. Mostly, I just felt disappointed.

That’s the thing about making content around haunted, creepy places. You start wanting the world to prove you right. Every shadow becomes a possible thumbnail. Every strange noise becomes something you can clip and post with a title that ends in a question mark. But Dimer Ridge had given me nothing I could actually use. A weird sign. A weird cashier. A weird old woman.

Not enough.

I got dressed in a black T-shirt and khakis, grabbed my camera, and decided to get breakfast at the diner I’d passed on my way to the motel. I figured I could film some of the town properly and interview a few locals. Maybe even ask about Daniel and Maya if I was lucky.

I was locking my door when someone passed behind me. Fast enough that I only caught the back of him as he moved down the hallway and took the stairs two at a time. Head lowered like he didn’t want to be seen.

“Morning,” I called out.

He didn’t stop.

I stood there with my key in my hand, listening to his footsteps disappear down the stairs. For some reason, before I left, I opened my door again and looked at the second bed. It was still untouched.
I told myself to stop being ridiculous and headed downstairs. The old woman was behind the front desk, exactly where she had been the night before. Her hair was parted to the right again. 

“Sleep well?” She asked with her head still down.

“Yeah,” I said. “Fine.”

She gave me that small hum. I nodded goodbye and walked out before she could say anything else.
The diner was called Molly’s, though the sign had lost the apostrophe, so it just read MOLLYS in faded red letters. Inside, it smelled like burnt coffee, syrup, and old grease. It was normal enough, with red booths, a checkered floor and a glass case by the counter with pies inside. 

A waitress came over with a menu tucked under her arm.

“Just you?” she asked.

I almost laughed.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just me.”

She led me to a booth near the window and put the menu down in front of me. Then she paused, looked at the empty seat across from me, and set another one down there too. I opened my mouth to correct her and that was when I saw him. The man from the motel.

He was sitting at a booth in the back corner, facing away from me. I don’t know why I decided to go over. Maybe because by then I was tired of feeling like the only person in town who didn’t understand the joke. Maybe because I thought he might be another guest, another outsider, someone else who had come to Dimer Ridge and was trying to convince himself he wasn’t scared either.

Or maybe some part of me already knew. 

I picked up my camera and walked towards him.

“Hey, man,” I said. “I think I saw you earlier at the motel.”

He didn’t turn around.

The closer I got, the more wrong he looked.
Not visibly. Not in any way I could explain. But something in my body reacted before my brain did. My stomach tightened. My fingers went cold around the camera. The noise of the diner seemed to pull away from me, like someone had turned the volume down.

I reached the table.

“Are you staying at The Ridge Rest too?”

The words died in my throat.

He looked up.

It was me.

Not someone who looked like me.

Not one of those people you see online who share your face in a way that makes everyone tag you and say, found your twin.

Me.

My eyes. My mouth. My black T-shirt. My khakis.

He stared at me blankly for one long second.

Then he smiled.

I backed away so fast I hit the table behind me. Coffee spilled over the edge of a mug. Someone swore. The waitress turned at the sound and I bumped into her hard enough that she dropped the plates she was carrying.

“I’m sorry,” I said automatically, even though I wasn’t looking at her.

I was looking behind her.

At first, I thought someone was standing over her shoulder. Then the waitress moved and the thing behind her moved too. Same grey uniform. Same blonde ponytail. Same wide green eyes staring at me. One body, then another, just a beat behind.

I turned towards the counter. The cook lifted his hand. Two hands lifted. One of the old men by the window raised his coffee. Two mugs touched two mouths. The whole diner seemed to split in front of me, every person doubled, every movement repeated half a second out of time.

I looked back at the booth. The other me was gone. But I felt him behind me. I knew he was there the same way you know when someone is standing too close in a queue. That quiet pressure at the back of your neck. The certainty of another body just outside your sight.

I didn’t turn around. I ran.

The bell above the diner door rang once when I shoved it open. Then it rang again half a second later.

Outside, the morning sun was too bright. I stumbled past the diner window and caught my reflection in the glass. I stopped. I don’t know why. I turned sideways and there were two of me in the reflection. One of us was shaking while the other was standing just behind him. When I lifted my hand, both reflections lifted theirs. Mine trembled. His didn’t.
I ran back to the motel.

I don’t remember crossing the street. I don’t remember passing the gas station or the neat white houses or the red mailboxes. I remember the motel sign buzzing above me. I remember dropping the key twice before I managed to get it into the lock of Room 22.

I didn’t turn on the light. I just grabbed my bag off the floor and started throwing things into it. Clothes. Charger. Toiletries. The camera batteries from the dresser. I didn’t fold anything. I didn’t check if I had everything. I just needed to leave.

My hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t get the zip closed.

“Come on,” I whispered to myself.

Then I saw the second bed. The sheets were twisted, the blanket had been kicked halfway down the mattress and the pillow was dented in the middle. Like someone had slept there while I was gone.

My phone buzzed. After that, there is nothing.
I woke up in Room 22 with sunlight pressing through the curtains and my mouth dry. For a second, I thought it was still the same morning. Like all of it had been some horrible nightmare. Then I checked my phone and a full day had passed. My bag was back on the chair, unpacked, every item folded and placed exactly where it had been before.

My notifications were full. Comments. Messages. More than I’d ever had from one post. The newest upload on my account was titled:

DIMER RIDGE WAS NOTHING

I don’t remember posting it. The thumbnail was me standing outside the motel, smiling at the camera. I don’t remember taking it. The caption read:

Sorry to disappoint everyone, but there’s no curse here. Just a quiet town, friendly people and a bad night’s sleep.

I think I let the comments get into my head.

Honestly, Dimer Ridge is peaceful.

I came here alone, but I don’t feel alone anymore.

I think I’m going to stay.

I read it until the words stopped looking like words. Then I noticed the comments. Most of them were asking why the video kept looping.

One said, “Dude, why do you blink a second after yourself?”

Another said, “Pause at 1:12. There’s someone standing behind you.”

I didn’t want to look but I looked anyway. At 1:12, I’m standing in front of the motel sign. My mouth is moving but the audio is slightly behind, and in the window of Room 22, someone is watching. Me. Only he’s smiling before I do.

I’ve tried deleting the video three times but it keeps coming back. I've tried leaving the motel, but every hallway leads back to Room 22. The doors are all numbered 22 now. Every single one.

I can hear someone moving in the bathroom. I’m sitting on the bed closest to the door. The other bed is still warm. 

Please, if you see another update from me saying Dimer Ridge is normal, don’t believe it.

That isn’t me.

I can hear him on the other side of the bathroom door.

And he’s breathing exactly when I do.

I had never actually seen my son bite his nails.

That was the part nobody seemed to understand. By the time Daniel was nine, his nails were permanently chewed down. The skin around them stayed red and swollen, and every few days one of his fingers would start bleeding again. His teachers noticed. His doctor noticed. Everyone said the same thing. Anxiety. Habit. Some children did it without realising.

Maybe that was true, but I had lived with Daniel for six years and had never once seen him put his fingers anywhere near his mouth. I watched films beside him, sat through long car journeys with him and helped him with homework at the kitchen table. I read to him until he fell asleep and carried him to bed with his arms hanging over my shoulders.

Nothing.

If anything, he seemed unusually protective of his hands. Whenever someone mentioned the damage, he curled his fingers into his palms or pulled his sleeves over them. The first few times I asked whether he had been biting them, he denied it. After that, he stopped answering altogether.

I tried everything the doctor suggested. Bitter nail varnish, plasters, gloves at night. I offered rewards if he could let them grow for a week and showed him photographs of infected fingertips that were probably too graphic for a child his age.

None of it worked.

I would tuck him into bed with gloves secured around his wrists, then find them folded neatly on his bedside table the following morning. Once, I wrapped each fingertip separately in medical tape. By morning, every strip had been removed and placed in a careful line along the windowsill.

There was a small wet hole in the centre of each one.

Daniel insisted he had slept all night.

I assumed he was lying, although I could never understand why. He was not usually secretive. He admitted when he broke things. Once, after taking money from my purse to buy sweets, he confessed before I even noticed it was missing. Yet whenever I asked about his nails, he looked genuinely frightened.

“I don’t bite them,” he said.

“Then what happens to them?”

He stared down at his hands.

“I don’t know.”

For a while, I wondered whether another child was hurting him. I spoke to his teacher and asked whether anyone had been grabbing his hands or picking at his fingers. She said Daniel was well liked and rarely got into trouble. She had never seen anyone touch him.

She had never seen him bite his nails either.

That bothered me more than it should have.

I began checking his hands every morning and evening. Sometimes nothing changed for several days. Then I would wake him to find every nail bitten down again at once. 

It always happened overnight. I should have realised that sooner.

The first time I heard it, I was sleeping in his room. Daniel had developed a fever, and I dragged an old mattress onto the floor beside his bed so I could keep an eye on him. He fell asleep quickly. I stayed awake reading until around midnight, then switched off the lamp.

Sometime later, I woke up to the sound of his voice.

“Please be gentle.”

It was soft and slurred with sleep.

I lifted my head. The room was dark except for the glow of streetlamps outside peeking through gaps in the curtains. Daniel was lying on his side facing the wall, with one arm hanging over the edge of the bed.

“Daniel?”

He didn’t answer.

I was about to reach for him when I heard a small crunch from under the bed.

It wasn’t loud. It sounded almost like someone biting through dry spaghetti.

I froze.

Another crunch followed. Then another.

Daniel’s hand moved slightly, not pulling away but slipping lower.

I switched on the bedside lamp.

His arm jerked upwards so quickly that his elbow struck the bedframe. Something scraped across the floor beneath him.

I dropped to my knees and looked under the bed. The space was empty. But I noticed that the carpet near the headboard had been pressed flat, as if something had been lying there for a long time.

Daniel slept through the entire thing.

In the morning, three of his fingernails were bleeding.

When I asked whether he remembered speaking during the night, he shook his head. I described the sound I had heard, and the colour drained from his face.

That was the moment I should have stopped treating it like a habit. Instead, I convinced myself there had to be an explanation. Mice in the walls. Daniel chewing his nails after I fell asleep and dreaming he was doing something else.

I bought a camera.

It was one of those cheap indoor security cameras people use to watch their pets while they’re at work. I placed it on top of Daniel’s wardrobe and angled it towards the bed. I didn’t tell him about it. I felt guilty, but by then the skin around his nails was painfully raw and I was desperate.

The first night showed nothing unusual. Daniel shifted in his sleep, kicked off the covers and once sat upright for nearly a minute without opening his eyes. His hands remained above the blanket.

The second night was the same.

On the third night, the recording froze at 2:13 a.m.

The image didn’t cut out. It simply stopped moving. Daniel lay on his back with both arms beside him. The digital clock on his desk read 2:13. For the next forty-seven minutes, the room remained completely still.

At exactly three o’clock, the video resumed.

Daniel was in the same position, but his right hand was bleeding.

I checked the camera settings and found no fault. There had been no power cut, and the camera by the front door had recorded continuously. Cars still passed outside. My own bedroom door opened when I got up to use the bathroom.

Everything else in the house had carried on.

Only Daniel’s room had stopped.

The next day, I bought another camera and positioned it on the floor. I hid it behind a stack of books and pointed it under the bed.

For the first few hours, nothing moved.

At 2:13, something entered the frame.

One moment, the space beneath the bed was empty. The next, a pale hand was resting on the carpet.

It was thin, with long spindly fingers. The nails were black and smooth, clicking softly against the floor as the hand moved towards the edge of the mattress.

A second hand appeared beside it.

Nothing else came into view. Whatever owned those hands remained hidden in the darkness beyond the camera’s reach, although realistically there wasn’t enough room for a body to hide.

The hands waited.

After a few seconds, Daniel’s arm lowered into the frame.

He was asleep. I could see that clearly from the other camera. His hand casually slipped over the edge of the mattress, like he had done it hundreds of times before.

One of the pale hands closed around his wrist.

It did not pull.

It held him with surprising care and lifted his smallest finger towards the darkness.

There was a quiet crunch.

Then another.

The hand moved to the next finger.

I watched it work across his hand, biting every nail to exactly the same length. When Daniel whimpered, it paused and stroked the side of his wrist with one black nail.

Then it continued.

I couldn’t finish watching.

I ran into his room, switching on every light along the way. The pale hands were still holding his arm.

For a second, I saw something crouched under the bed. Its limbs were folded tightly against its body, shoulders pressed against the bottom of the mattress. Grey skin stretched over a shape that seemed way too big for the space containing it.

It released Daniel as soon as I entered.

It didn’t attack me or try to drag Daniel down. It recoiled. One hand rose, shielding its face from the light, then it moved backwards into the darkness.

I grabbed Daniel and pulled him into the hallway. By the time I returned with a kitchen knife, the space under the bed was empty.

That night, I removed the bedframe.

Daniel slept on a mattress in my room. I pushed it against the wall, left every light on and stayed awake with the knife in my lap.

Nothing came.

The following day, I took him to a hotel.

I told the receptionist there had been a leak in our house and booked a room for a week. Daniel barely spoke during the journey. When we arrived, he sat on the edge of the hotel bed and stared at the gap under it.

“It can reach under this one too,” he said.

I asked him what he meant.

He looked down at his hands.

“It doesn’t only live at home.”

That was the first time he acknowledged it.

I knelt in front of him and asked how long it had been happening.

He shrugged.

“Before you came to live with me?”

Another shrug.

“Did it hurt you?”

He shook his head.

“Then why did you let it bite you?”

Daniel’s face crumpled.

“I thought I was supposed to.”

I promised him he was safe. I told him nothing would touch him again.

I meant it.

For the first few days, his fingers began to heal. The swelling went down, and thin white lines appeared at the base of each nail. I felt relieved enough to believe the worst was over.

By the fifth day, the nails had grown past his fingertips.

Daniel’s nails had never been that long before. I bought clippers from a chemist and tried to trim them, but the blades wouldn’t cut through. The nails were too thick. I tried a larger pair, and the metal bent between my fingers.

They were no longer translucent either. They had turned cloudy and pale, almost the colour of bone. 

I took him to the hospital.

The doctor examined his fingers, asked about medication and took blood samples. He said the growth was unusual but didn’t appear immediately dangerous. He wanted to keep Daniel overnight for observation.

Daniel panicked when a nurse tried to lead him away from me. He clung to my coat, screaming hard enough to make people stare. His nails caught in the fabric and tore through it without breaking.

I brought him back to the hotel.

That evening, he developed another fever. While he slept, I searched through the paperwork I had brought with us.

Daniel came to live with me when he was three. The process was unusually fast, and I didn’t question it at the time. I had waited so long to become a parent that every shortened delay felt like a blessing.

The organisation called itself Willow House Family Services. Their office had been in a converted townhouse outside the city, and a woman named Miriam had handled nearly everything.

I remembered the rooms being warm and too bright. I remembered there were no photographs of children on the walls.

I remembered Miriam telling me Daniel had been found alone.

I could not remember where.

The paperwork should have said, but it didn’t.

There was no original birth certificate, no hospital record, and no information about his biological parents. His medical history consisted of one page filled with the word UNKNOWN.

At the bottom of a placement report, underneath my own signature, someone had written in faint blue ink:

Maintain regular care of hands.

I had never noticed it before.

The Willow House website was gone. The telephone number had been disconnected. When I searched the address, I found a solicitor’s office that claimed to have occupied the building for twelve years.

I had adopted Daniel six years before.

Miriam’s name appeared on none of the official documents. Every email she had sent came from an account that no longer existed. Her signatures were little more than scratches.

I called the local authority listed on the paperwork. They had no record of Willow House Family Services. They had no record of Daniel. The woman on the phone asked whether I was certain the adoption had been completed legally.

I hung up.

Behind me, Daniel said, “It’s back.”

He was sitting upright in bed, his face shining with sweat. The room was dark except for the bathroom light.

Something scratched the mattress. I pulled Daniel towards the door. The scratching stopped almost immediately. A grey hand emerged from under the bed. Daniel made a small sound, but it didn't sound like fear. He reached towards it. I caught his wrist.

The hand remained still. Long fingers spread against the carpet, black nails resting flat. Whatever was under there made no attempt to crawl closer.

Instead, it tapped one nail against the floor.

Once.

Twice.

Then it pointed at Daniel’s hands. His fingernails had grown even longer since that morning. The creature tapped again, faster this time.

“Get away from him,” I said.

An eye appeared in the darkness under the bed.

It looked at me, then at Daniel. Its mouth opened slightly, and a wet clicking noise came from its throat. The sound repeated several times, almost like it was trying to say something.

The hand reached for Daniel. I stamped down on it. The noise it made was not a growl or a scream. It sounded like crying. The hand vanished beneath the bed, leaving one black nail behind on the carpet.

I pulled Daniel away from the bed and crouched to look beneath it. The space was empty. 

Daniel picked up the nail before I could stop him. He held it beside his thumb. They were almost the same shape.

“Put that down.”

He looked at it with an expression I had never seen before.

Not fear.

Recognition.

I took it from him and flushed it down the toilet.

We left the hotel that night and drove to my sister’s house. I told her Daniel had an infection and needed somewhere quiet to rest. She prepared the spare room and helped me settle him onto a mattress placed directly on the floor.

There was nowhere for anything to hide.

I sat beside him until he fell asleep. At some point, I must have drifted off too.

When I woke up, Daniel was gone.

The bedroom door stood open. I found him sitting at the kitchen table with both hands resting in front of him. My sister stood beside him, staring.

Every fingernail had split down the centre.

There was no blood. The two halves of each nail had lifted slightly away from one another, like shells beginning to open.

Something pale moved in the narrow gap between them.

My sister asked what was wrong with him.

I wrapped his hands in tea towels and drove home.

I don’t know why. Perhaps because the creature had found us at the hotel and I thought it might return to the house. Perhaps because, by then, I no longer believed it had been trying to hurt him.

Daniel was silent during the journey.

When we arrived, his bedroom door was open.

I had left it closed.

The mattress was still on the floor where I had thrown it, and the empty bedframe leaned against the wall. Deep scratches covered the floorboards.

They formed no words or symbols, but every one of them pointed towards the centre of the room.

Daniel walked inside before I could stop him. He knelt beside a deep scratch and pressed his fingers against it.

“It tried,” he said.

“Tried to do what?”

He looked up at me.

“To keep me little.”

One of his thumbnails made a faint cracking sound. The split widened. Something underneath pressed against the opening. For one awful second, it looked like the tip of another finger. I reached for his hand, but Daniel pulled it against his chest.

“Don’t.”

The room had gone completely silent. Then, from somewhere beneath the floorboards, came a soft crunch.

Daniel closed his eyes. He looked relieved. The sound stopped almost immediately. He stared down at his hands.

“It can’t reach anymore,” he whispered.

I have locked us inside the house.

I know how that sounds, but I don’t know where else to take him. The hospital will separate us. The police may decide he was never legally mine. I cannot explain what I saw under his bed without sounding dangerous.

Daniel is asleep now. His hands are tucked under the blanket.

Every few minutes, something taps against the mattress from underneath, but there is no gap. The mattress is lying flat on the floor.

I have checked three times.

The tapping is not coming from under the mattress.

It is coming from inside his hands.

I entered the garden competition because of Mrs Porter.

She lived opposite me and had spent the first three months after I moved in making comments about my front garden. Nothing openly rude. Mrs Porter was too polite for that.

She would pause beside my gate and say things like, “Wildflowers can be lovely when they’re intentional,” or, “I suppose not everyone has time to keep on top of weeds.”

My garden wasn’t that bad. The lawn was uneven, and the flower beds had been left empty by the previous owner, but it didn’t look a mess.

Mrs Porter disagreed.

The annual Best Kept Garden competition was apparently a serious event in the neighbourhood. People began preparing weeks in advance. Hedges were trimmed with rulers. Plant pots were scrubbed. One man accused his next door neighbour of using artificial geraniums.

I had no intention of entering until Mrs Porter handed me a leaflet.

“You’ve still got time,” she said. “Although perhaps next year would be more realistic.”

I filled in the form that afternoon. At first, I only wanted to make the garden presentable. Then I saw Mrs Porter watching from behind her curtains while I planted the first row of lavenders. After that, it became personal.

I reseeded the lawn, painted the fence and filled the flower beds with roses and hydrangeas. I watched gardening tutorials during my lunch breaks at work. I learned how to edge a lawn properly and which fertiliser encouraged the most flowers.

The garden responded almost immediately. Bare patches thickened within days. The roses opened overnight. Plants I didn’t remember buying appeared between the others, their pale buds turned towards the house.

Neighbours stopped to compliment me.

“Beautiful,” they said.

“Coming along nicely.”

“It must really like you.”

I assumed they meant gardening suited me.

There were four previous winning houses on the street. Each had a small brass plaque fixed beside the gate.

BEST KEPT GARDEN
2025

BEST KEPT GARDEN
2024

And so on.

Their gardens were perfect. The lawns were bright green, the hedges square and every flower looked freshly opened.

However, the houses themselves were strangely quiet. I never saw the curtains open or anyone taking in parcels. When I asked Mrs Porter where the owners had gone, she looked at me for a moment too long.

“They won their year,” she said.

The evening before judging, I found Mr Peters standing in my garden. He lived three doors down and had barely spoken to me before. He was staring at the flower beds with his hands clenched at his sides.

“You need to ruin it,” he said.

I laughed because I thought he was joking.

“I’m serious. Pull some flowers out. Damage the lawn. Anything.”

“Is this because yours isn’t doing well?”

His face changed.

“You don’t want them choosing your house.”

Before I could ask what he meant, Mrs Porter appeared at her gate. Mr Peters left without another word.

That night, someone pushed a note through my letterbox.

COME SECOND.

I tore it up.

The judges arrived at ten the next morning wearing green council jackets and carrying clipboards.  

By then, half the street had destroyed their own gardens.

Mr Peters had dragged his wheelie bin across his lawn, leaving two muddy tracks. Someone had snapped every rose from Mrs Porter’s bushes. A woman at the end of the road was pouring bleach into her flower beds while crying.

Mrs Porter stood beside her ruined roses with visible relief.

It was then that I finally understood that something was wrong.

I went outside and told the judges I wanted to withdraw. One of them smiled.

“Entries closed yesterday.”

“I don’t care about winning.”

“That isn’t what the competition measures.”

The three judges walked slowly around my garden. They praised the symmetry of the flower beds and the condition of the lawn. One examined the hydrangeas. Another made notes about the fence.

The oldest judge kneeled beside a patch of pale flowers near the house. I never planted them. Their stems were thick and colourless, and their closed buds were pressed against the soil.

The judge placed his palm on the ground. Something moved underneath it. Not an earthworm or a mole. Something large rolled slowly beneath the lawn, lifting the grass slightly.

The judge smiled.

“Excellent root development.”

The others wrote that down.

Mrs Porter wouldn’t look at me when they announced the result.

Everyone applauded.

That evening, a brass plaque appeared beside my gate.

BEST KEPT GARDEN
2026

Underneath it, in smaller letters, were two words I had never seen on the other plaques.

CURRENT CUSTODIAN.

I tried to leave. My car wouldn’t start. When I walked towards the main road, I somehow returned to my own gate.

At midnight, I heard cracking under the floorboards. Thin white roots pushed through the gaps in the kitchen floor. They moved slowly, feeling their way across the tiles.

I ran upstairs and looked out of the bedroom window. Lights were turning on inside the previous winners’ houses. One by one, figures appeared behind the curtains. They stood perfectly still, their arms hanging at their sides. Vines were wrapped around their legs, their waists and their throats, holding them upright.

Across the road, Mrs Porter was watching from her bedroom. She raised one hand. Not to wave. To apologise.

Something under my house knocked three times.

The pale flowers outside opened all at once.

Every one of them had teeth.

I spent nine years investigating murders before I transferred to cold cases.

People assume cold cases are quieter. They picture old files, empty interview rooms and patient detectives solving mysteries over bad coffee. In reality, the photographs don’t become easier to look at because they have faded, and grief doesn’t disappear just because everyone involved has grown older.

The only difference is that people have had more time to perfect their lies.

Charlotte’s file arrived on my desk on a Monday morning.

She was thirty seven and lived alone in a small terraced house. A neighbour became concerned when her curtains remained closed for over a week. Police entered through the back door and found her in the upstairs bathroom.

The door was locked from the inside. There were no defensive injuries, signs of forced entry or evidence that anyone else had been in the house. The coroner ruled her death a suicide, and the investigation was closed.

The file only reached me because one of the officers had recently transferred into my department. Something about the bathroom mirror had always bothered him. The shower had been running when Charlotte was found. Steam covered the walls and mirror, except for a clean rectangular patch near the centre.

Someone had wiped the condensation away.

The officer assumed Charlotte wanted to see herself before she died. Nobody considered the detail important enough to investigate further.

“It probably means nothing,” he said.

Still, after he left, I opened the crime scene photographs. The bathroom was ordinary. White tiles, pale towels and toiletries beside the sink. The mirror was almost entirely grey with steam. Near the centre was a clear patch roughly the size of a face.

There were no visible finger marks. Someone had wiped the glass carefully, creating a small window in the condensation.

I searched the database for similar deaths. I expected nothing. Instead, I found Rebecca.

She had died six years before Charlotte. Her husband returned from a work trip to find the bathroom locked from the inside. The shower had been running, and a section of the mirror had been wiped clean.

Then there was Sophie, who died three years later in a rented apartment nearly eighty miles away. Her housemate heard the shower running late at night. By morning, the bathroom was still locked.

Both deaths had been ruled suicides. Neither woman left a note, and there was no evidence that anyone else had entered. The three cases occurred in different towns and had been investigated by different departments. Nothing suggested that the women knew one another.

At first, I suspected someone was staging the deaths. A careful killer could make three murders look like suicides, especially if nobody knew to search for a pattern.

I checked their employers, relatives, finances and phone records. There were no obvious links. It took me almost a week to find one. All three women had attended the same school.

I drove there the following morning. In a storage room filled with old registers and dusty yearbooks, I found a group photograph of Charlotte, Rebecca and Sophie.

Two other girls stood beside them.

Olivia and Rachel.

Someone had circled Rachel’s face in faded blue ink. The receptionist had no idea who had done it.

Rachel’s name meant nothing to me until I searched it. She had died at fifteen, twenty two years earlier.

Found in a locked bathroom. Ruled suicide.

I sat alone in my car outside the school, reading the summary while rain struck the windscreen. The pattern didn't begin with Charlotte. It started when they were children.

Rachel’s case file arrived two days later. The investigation had lasted less than a week. She was found in the upstairs bathroom of Olivia’s house after a sleepover. The door was locked from the inside. Olivia claimed she had woken up early, noticed Rachel was missing and found the bathroom locked.

Her parents had been away overnight. There was no sign that anyone else had entered. Rachel’s parents insisted she was not suicidal. Her teachers described her as quiet and intelligent. No note was found.

Police concluded that teenagers sometimes concealed emotional distress.

Case closed.

The witness statements were brief, but something about them felt wrong.

Charlotte said Rachel had gone home before the sleepover began. Rebecca claimed she arrived but left after an argument. Sophie insisted Rachel stayed the night and went upstairs sometime after midnight. Olivia said she assumed Rachel was sleeping in a spare room until morning.

Four close friends gave four different accounts of Rachel’s final hours.

Near the back of the file, an officer had noted rumours involving a game called Bloody Mary. Rachel and her friends were said to have played it in a school bathroom shortly before her death. No further action had been taken. 

I dismissed it. Every school had stories like that. Stand before a mirror, say the name three times and wait for something to appear. Children turned ordinary buildings into haunted places because it made the school day more interesting.

One of Rachel’s former teachers remembered the five girls being inseparable until the week Rachel died. There had been an argument, after which Rachel stopped sitting with the others at lunch. The teacher also remembered rumours involving the girls’ bathroom. Rachel had seemed frightened, but nobody took it seriously.

“They were children,” she said. “Children can be cruel over things that seem very small.”

I spoke to former students, staff and neighbours. Most remembered little, but the same story gradually emerged.

The five girls had stayed behind after school and tried the Bloody Mary ritual in an upstairs bathroom. Rachel refused to join in. Olivia mocked her, faced the mirror and repeated the name three times.

Nothing happened.

The girls already had plans to stay at Olivia’s house that evening. Her parents were away, and Olivia later contacted Rachel, apparently wanting to apologise. Rachel arrived shortly after eight.

Olivia was the only member of the group still alive. She refused to speak to me, so I continued digging.

A former neighbour gave me the first piece of solid evidence. She had lived opposite Olivia’s family and saw three frightened girls leave the house before Olivia’s parents returned. One of them was crying. Rachel was not with them. The original investigators had never interviewed her.

I reviewed the medical reports and photographs. Rachel had suffered an injury to the back of her head. A small crack was visible in the porcelain sink, and the bruising suggested the injury may have occurred before her death. She had likely fallen or been pushed during an argument. 

The injury had not killed her immediately. The girls could have called an ambulance. Instead, I think they panicked, moved Rachel and staged the bathroom to resemble a suicide. Then they gave four conflicting accounts of when they had last seen her alive.

I never discovered who suggested the cover up. Perhaps all of them did.

Once I had enough evidence, Olivia agreed to meet me.

She looked exhausted. Not tired from one bad night, but worn down by something that had followed her for years. When I placed the yearbook photograph on the table, she looked immediately at Rachel.

I explained what I had found. Olivia admitted they should have called for help. She insisted they believed Rachel was already dead, although the medical evidence suggested otherwise.

There was no satisfaction in hearing her confess. Three of the girls were dead, and Olivia had spent twenty two years waiting for someone to uncover the truth.

At that point, I thought I had solved everything. Rachel’s death had been covered up. The guilt followed the others into adulthood until Rebecca, Sophie and Charlotte eventually took their own lives, each recreating some detail from that night.

It was tragic, but it was human.

Then Olivia told me Rachel had never played the game. She had refused to say the name and stood outside the school bathroom begging the others to stop. Olivia had been the one who faced the mirror.

Nothing happened that afternoon.

Not immediately.

After Rachel died, the girls began seeing things. Reflections that moved too late. Shapes behind them in dark windows. Faces that disappeared when they turned around.

The four stopped speaking soon afterwards. They changed numbers, moved away and avoided one another whenever they returned home.

Olivia learned about Rebecca’s death through a former classmate and Sophie’s through a local newspaper. By the time Charlotte died, she recognised the pattern.

Olivia believed all three women had seen the same thing before they died. When I asked how she could know, she admitted she had started seeing it too. I told her guilt could do strange things to people. She said fear could do the same.

Before I left, Olivia asked whether I had mirrors in my house. When I said yes, she looked genuinely sorry for me.

Then she grabbed my wrist and begged me not to leave her alone.

At first, I thought she was afraid of being arrested. Then I realised she was staring past my shoulder at the dark television screen behind me.

I turned. The screen reflected the sofa, the coffee table and the open doorway. Nothing else.

Olivia believed whatever had killed the others now knew she had told me the truth.

There was enough evidence to suggest the only surviving member of a group connected to three suspicious deaths might be in danger. Whether the threat came from a killer, Olivia herself or something else, I couldn’t leave her alone.

I called my department. Two uniformed officers arrived and searched the house. Every door and window was secure. Olivia’s confession meant she would need to be formally questioned, but she was in no state to be moved that night.

One officer remained downstairs. Another waited outside Olivia’s bedroom. I stayed because I still believed someone might be targeting the women.

Olivia refused to sleep. I sat with her in the bedroom, where every mirror had been removed. As darkness turned the window into a reflection, she made me close the curtains.

Nothing happened until shortly before four, when she needed the bathroom. The room was small and windowless. A mirrored cabinet had been fixed above the sink, its painted over screws sealing it to the wall. 

I covered it with a towel and accompanied Olivia inside. We left the door open.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then the shower turned on. 

I twisted the handle off, but the water continued running. Steam filled the room quickly, soaking through the towel and slicking the walls with condensation.

Olivia began backing towards me. She wanted the towel removed. Before either of us touched it, one corner came loose. The towel slid down the mirror, and the glass underneath was completely fogged.

A clean rectangle appeared near the centre.

The condensation simply disappeared, leaving a clear section about the size of a face.

Olivia was visible inside it. She was staring at something over her shoulder. I stood directly behind her, but she was looking slightly to my left.

I looked closer at the mirror. A woman stood between us. I saw only part of her face. Pale skin. Dark, wet hair hanging over one eye. Her mouth was open wider than it should have been.

I turned around. The space behind me was empty.

Olivia screamed.

Something threw me into the hallway. The bathroom door slammed shut and locked from the inside.

I was separated from her for maybe three seconds. The officer outside ran in, and together we forced the door open.

The shower was still running. Olivia was lying in the bathtub. She was dead.

There was no weapon and no one else in the room. The mirror was covered in steam except for the clean rectangle near the centre. Through it, I could see the space behind me.

For a moment, dark hair moved at the edge of the reflection.

I did not turn around.

The investigation moved quickly. Olivia had confessed to her involvement in Rachel’s death and was facing arrest. Despite the officers inside the house, her death was ruled a suicide. The official explanation was that she had panicked, locked the door and acted before anyone could stop her.

The shower was blamed on a faulty valve.

I did not mention the woman in my report. A childhood ghost story had no place in an official investigation.

The deaths of Charlotte, Rebecca, Sophie and Olivia were attributed to guilt. Rachel’s case was amended, though nobody was left to prosecute.

I thought that was the end.

A week later, I requested Rachel’s original crime scene photographs one final time. I told myself I was checking the position of the body and the damaged sink.

In truth, I wanted reassurance. I wanted ordinary evidence of an ordinary crime.

The photographs were exactly as I remembered. Then I reached the final image.

It showed the wall above the sink. The photograph was badly exposed and slightly out of focus. I had looked at it many times without noticing anything unusual.

This time, I saw the mirror. Most of the glass was covered in condensation, but near the centre was a clean rectangle.

The same size as the one in Charlotte’s bathroom. The same as Rebecca’s, Sophie’s and Olivia’s. 

Nobody had recorded it because, twenty two years ago, it had meant nothing.

I sat alone in the evidence room, staring at the photograph until the lights switched off automatically.

The others had not been copying Rachel. 

Rachel was the first.

Officially, all five deaths have been explained. Rachel died because four frightened girls chose to protect themselves instead of helping her. The others lived with the guilt until they could no longer bear it.

That is what I wrote in my final report. It is what I try to believe.

I retired three months later and removed the mirrors from my bedroom. There is still one above the bathroom sink. I avoid looking into it when the shower is running.

Sometimes, without thinking, I wipe a small section clean. Whenever I do, I remember something I left out of every report.

The wiped sections were never positioned to show the victims their own faces. They were too high and too far to one side.

Each one revealed exactly enough of the mirror to show the space over the victim’s shoulder.

Not so they could see what was behind them.

So they would see what was waiting in the mirror.

We had been driving for nearly nine hours when Leo admitted he couldn’t remember the last few miles.

He said it casually at first, like he had only missed a turn or forgotten the name of a town we had passed. It took a few seconds for the rest of us to realise what he meant.

“What do you mean, you don’t remember?” Priya asked.

“I mean I remember leaving the motorway and Connor complaining about the music. After that, nothing until you asked how long we had left.”

Connor leaned forward between the front seats. “You’ve been driving. How can you not remember driving?”

“That’s why I’m telling you.”

There were four of us in the car: Leo, Connor, Priya and me. We had met during our first year at university and remained friends after we graduated. The road trip had been Connor’s idea. He had spent months sending us lists of places he wanted to visit, most of which involved driving hours to look at something he had seen in a video online.

Our planning had been fairly optimistic. We had booked places to stay for most nights but left that evening open, assuming we would find somewhere once we knew how far we had managed to travel. It seemed sensible when we were sitting in Priya’s kitchen with a map and four glasses of wine. It felt less sensible after dark, with no signal and no idea where we were.

Leo slowed the car. The road was barely wide enough for one vehicle, with tall trees close on either side. There were no houses around or places to turn around.

“What does the map say?” I asked.

Priya held Leo’s phone closer to her face. The map had frozen with the small blue arrow sitting in the middle of the motorway.

“It says we’re still on the motorway.”

“We haven’t been on it for at least twenty minutes,” Connor said.

“Very helpful,” Priya muttered.

The route had originally taken us towards a service station. According to the screen, we were still twenty miles away, although the arrival time had not changed since we left the main road.

Connor suggested reversing. Leo told him he was welcome to try if he thought he could keep the car straight for several miles in the dark. Priya said we should continue until we found a driveway or junction, then turn around properly.

The radio crackled between stations. Leo switched it off, but a few seconds later the music started again, barely loud enough to hear. It was the same song that had been playing before we turned, picking up from the exact same line.

Connor leaned forward and turned it off again.

“Loose connection,” he said.

The music stopped this time.

We continued for another ten minutes before the trees suddenly ended. The road widened, and smooth tarmac replaced the cracked surface.

Streetlights appeared ahead, illuminating a wooden sign beside the road.

WELCOME TO ALDERWICK

Small yellow stars had been painted around the name. Someone had tied strips of multicoloured ribbon to the post, and they fluttered in the wind.

The town appeared almost immediately after that, gathered around one long street lined with brick buildings and cheerfully painted shopfronts. Strings of small lights stretched between the rooftops, glowing softly above rows of colourful flags that moved in the breeze. Flower baskets hung from the lampposts, and even though most of the windows were dark, warm amber light spilled onto the pavement and made the place feel welcoming and cosy, like we had arrived just after everyone had gone home for the night.

Connor sat back.

“Problem solved.”

“We don’t even know where this is,” Priya said.

“It has a sign. That’s already more information than we had five minutes ago.”

We drove slowly along the street, passing a bakery, a butcher’s, a small supermarket and a pub that had already closed for the night. Painted stars decorated most of the shop windows, and a banner hung across the entrance to the church.

ALDERWICK SUMMER CARNIVAL

Near the far end of the street, a motel stood with its lights still on. Its sign looked older than the rest of the town, with VACANCIES glowing unevenly. A smaller board beneath it read:

ROOMS AVAILABLE

CARNIVAL TOMORROW

Leo pulled into the car park.

“We stay here, sleep for a few hours and leave first thing,” he said. “Agreed?”

Connor had already unfastened his seat belt.

The reception smelled faintly of lavender and polished wood. It was small but well kept, with dark wooden panelling and a faded floral carpet. A pair of armchairs sat beside a low table stacked with old magazines, and a vintage-looking lamp cast a warm pool of light across the front desk.

An old brass bell sat on the counter, although we didn’t need to use it. A woman appeared through the doorway behind the desk almost as soon as we entered.

She was probably in her late sixties, with short grey hair curled neatly around her face. She wore a red cardigan and a silver name badge that said Margaret.

For a moment, she simply looked at us.

Then she smiled.

“You’re lucky,” she said. “We only have two rooms left.”

Behind her, room keys hung neatly from rows of brass hooks. Most of them were still there.

Leo glanced at me, but none of us challenged her. We were too tired to care whether the motel was busy or whether Margaret was trying to make it sound that way.

She placed a thick register on the counter and turned it towards us. The pages were yellowed at the edges, with columns for names, addresses and dates of arrival.

“I’ll need all four of you to sign.”

“Can’t I just put my name down for both rooms?” Leo asked.

Margaret’s smile remained in place. “We need everyone’s name. Fire regulations.”

Margaret watched as each of us wrote, paying particular attention when Connor struggled to fit his address into the narrow space.

“You’ve come a long way,” she said.

“We’re only passing through,” Leo replied.

Margaret asked where we were heading, whether we had family expecting us and how early we planned to leave. She made the questions sound like friendly conversation, but there were enough of them that Priya eventually stopped answering.

Connor noticed a poster beside the counter. It showed a Ferris wheel against a dark blue sky, surrounded by the same yellow stars painted on the town sign.

“Is the carnival any good?” he asked.

Margaret’s face brightened.

“It’s the best day of the year.”

She told us it opened at midday in the field behind the church. There would be rides, music, food and games, and everyone in Alderwick would be there.

“We’re leaving early,” Leo said.

Margaret’s expression changed so slightly that I might have imagined it. Her smile remained, but her eyes settled on Leo for a second too long.

“That’s a shame.”

“We’ve got somewhere booked tomorrow night.”

“You could still stay for an hour. It would be a pity to come all this way and miss it.”

Connor laughed. “We didn’t exactly come for it.”

“No,” Margaret said. “People rarely do.”

She handed us two heavy brass keys, each attached to a smooth wooden block. One was for room seven and the other for room eight.

Upstairs, the corridor was narrow and slightly uneven, with cream wallpaper that had begun to peel at the corners. The floral carpet was faded along the centre where years of footsteps had worn it down, and framed photographs of Alderwick hung in mismatched wooden frames along the walls.

Priya and I took room seven. Leo and Connor had the room next door.

Our room looked old, like it had changed very little in decades, but everything had been carefully looked after. There was a narrow wardrobe, a small dressing table and an old television with buttons along the side. The curtains were patterned with tiny red flowers, and a bowl of wrapped sweets had been left beside the bed.

Priya dropped her bag on the floor and went straight into the bathroom.

I was closing the curtains when I noticed the photograph hanging above the bed. It showed the carnival at night. Crowds gathered under strings of lights while the Ferris wheel turned behind them. The photograph had faded with age, but the people nearest the camera were still clear enough to make out.

One of them was Margaret. At least it looked like her. She stood beside a stall holding a paper cup, wearing a pale dress with the same silver badge pinned to her chest. Her hair was grey and curled around her face exactly as it had downstairs.

I lifted the frame from the wall. Someone had written a date on the back.

August 1987.

Priya came out of the bathroom drying her hands.

“What are you doing?”

I showed her the photograph.

She looked at Margaret, then at the date.

“Her mother?”

“With the same name badge?”

“It could be an old uniform.”

I turned the frame over again. Even through the faded image, the letters on the badge were visible.

Priya stared at it for a moment before shrugging.

“Maybe she’s older than she looks.”

“She looks exactly the same.”

“We’ve been awake since six. Everything looks strange right now.”

We were exhausted, and the photograph was old enough that the details could have been misleading. I hung it back onto the wall and got into bed.

For a while, neither of us spoke. The motel was quiet except for the occasional creak from the pipes and Connor laughing through the wall.

Just before I fell asleep, music began playing somewhere outside. It was faint, almost too distant to hear, but I recognised the melody. It was the same song the radio had played twice on the road.

When I looked out of the window, the street below was empty.

But just before I closed the curtains, I caught a glimpse of Margaret standing underneath the motel sign. She was facing the road, like she was waiting for something to arrive.

By morning, Alderwick no longer looked deserted.

Music drifted through the open window, and the street was filled with people. Stalls stood outside the bakery and butcher’s, selling cakes, paper flowers and handmade toys. Children played with painted stars on their cheeks, and somewhere near the church, a band was practising the same few bars repeatedly.

Priya was already dressed when I woke. She was standing by the window watching the people below.

“Did you hear music last night?” I asked.

She nodded. “I thought it was coming from Connor’s room.”

Connor denied it at breakfast. He claimed he had fallen asleep before either of us and accused Leo of talking in his sleep. Leo told him he only talked in his sleep when he was stressed, which apparently proved Connor had annoyed him even while unconscious.

The four of us sat in a small dining room at the back of reception. Margaret moved between the tables with a pot of tea, wearing the same red cardigan as the previous night. There were six other guests eating breakfast.

They watched us whenever they thought we weren’t looking.

One of them was a thin man with a beard and deep shadows under his eyes. He sat alone near the window, tearing a piece of toast into smaller pieces. When Connor mentioned the carnival, the man’s hand stopped.

Margaret appeared beside our table before he could say anything.

“It’s perfect weather today as well,” she said.

“We’re not staying,” Leo reminded her.

Margaret poured tea into Leo’s cup even though he hadn’t asked for any.

“The procession passes at eleven-thirty. You may as well watch before you leave.”

Connor looked interested. Priya noticed and kicked him from under the table.

“We need to get back on the road,” she said.

The bearded man began coughing. It sounded forced, like he was trying to disguise a word. Margaret turned towards him, and he lowered his eyes.

As we left the dining room, he caught my wrist. His grip was surprisingly strong.

“Don’t let them—”

Margaret dropped a tray behind us.

The crash made everyone turn. By the time I looked back at the man, his hand had released me.

“Don’t let them what?” I asked.

He stared at the broken cups on the floor.

“I was going to say don’t let them block your car in. The procession gets busy.”

His voice was flat.

Margaret smiled at him as she kneeled to gather the pieces.

We returned to our rooms and packed quickly. When Leo tried to start the car, the engine made a dull clicking sound.

He tried again.

Nothing.

Connor opened the bonnet and stared into it with the confidence of someone who had no idea what he was looking at.

“Battery,” he said.

“How do you know?” Priya asked.

“That’s what people say when cars don’t start.”

The man at the petrol station across the road came over before we called for help. His name was Bernard, and he wore faded blue overalls. He listened to the engine, checked the battery and told us one of the terminals had come loose.

“That happens on the road out,” he said.

“What road out?” Leo asked.

“The one you came in on.”

He tightened something, then asked us to try again. The engine started immediately.

Priya thanked him and reached for her purse, but he refused to take the cash, telling us to save it for the carnival.

“We’re leaving,” I explained.

Bernard looked at the lights above the street. “Not yet, you’re not.”

He said it with a smile, and Leo’s hand tightened around the car door handle.

A line of children appeared at the far end of the street, carrying painted wooden stars. Behind them came the band, followed by dancers in bright costumes and a small wagon decorated to resemble a carousel.

People stepped into the road, blocking the car.

Connor laughed. “We can wait ten minutes.”

The procession took nearly forty.

By the time the road cleared, Connor wanted coffee. Priya wanted to visit the bakery because she had seen something in the window. Leo said he needed to stretch his legs before driving again.

None of us suggested leaving immediately.

We walked through the town while the carnival music grew louder behind the church. Alderwick was charming in a way that felt almost deliberate. Every shopfront had been freshly painted, flower baskets hung from the lampposts and strangers greeted us as though we were expected guests.

At the bakery, the woman behind the counter refused to let us pay for four pastries.

“Visitors eat free today,” she said.

“How do you know we’re visitors?” Priya asked.

The woman looked at our clothes, our bags and the motel key still in Connor’s hand.

“We know everyone who lives here.”

A small boy sat on a stool near the window, licking icing from his fingers. He stared at us while his mother wrapped the pastries.

“Are you going to play?” he asked.

Connor smiled. “Play what?”

The boy’s mother placed both hands on his shoulders.

“He means the carnival games.”

“There are lots,” the boy continued. “But the old one is best.”

His mother’s fingers tightened.

“That’s enough.”

Outside, Connor said he wanted to see what the boy meant. Priya told him he could search for mysterious old carnival games online once we had signal again.

We crossed the street to an antique shop while we waited for Leo to finish his coffee. The window displayed old cameras, jewellery and faded postcards. Priya noticed a box of photographs near the counter and began looking through them.

Most showed people standing in front of the carnival. The clothing changed from one photograph to the next, but the rides looked almost identical.

Connor held one up.

A young woman stood beside the claw machine with a yellow scarf around her neck. The photograph had been taken recently enough to be in colour, although the edges were faded.

“Recognise her?” the shopkeeper asked.

Connor shook his head.

The shopkeeper was an elderly man with thick glasses and a waistcoat that strained across his stomach. He took the photograph from Connor and placed it under the counter.

“When was that taken?” I asked.

He glanced towards the door before answering.

“Nineteen ninety-eight.”

The woman in the photograph looked no older than thirty.

“Does she still live here?” Priya asked.

The shopkeeper’s expression instantly became guarded.

“Everyone lives here.”

A bell rang somewhere outside.

The effect on the town was immediate.

Conversations stopped. Shopkeepers looked towards the church, and children began pulling their parents towards the end of the street. The bakery closed its doors despite the trays of food still in the window.

The shopkeeper told us the carnival had opened and that we should go before the queues became long. When I said we were leaving, his face filled with something that looked almost like disappointment.

“We’ve already stayed this long.”

That was the argument Connor used.

We had already lost most of the morning. Another hour wouldn’t change much, and the carnival was apparently the only interesting thing in Alderwick. Leo was still reluctant, but Priya pointed out that we had accepted free food from half the town. Leaving without visiting would feel rude. I didn’t care enough to object.

That was the part I remember most often. There was no threat, no moment when we were forced into anything. Alderwick simply made staying easier than leaving.

We walked towards the church with the rest of the town. The carnival field lay behind a low stone wall. From the street, it looked small, but the ground stretched far beyond the churchyard once we passed through the gate.

A man in a red coat stood at the entrance. He charged us two pounds each and handed us four red tickets.

“Keep hold of those,” he said. “You’ll need them before you leave.”

Connor turned his over.

“What for?”

The man smiled.

“You’ll find out.”

As we entered, people on both sides of the path stopped to watch us.

Then the music began again.

The carnival looked normal until we began paying attention.

Children ran between the stalls with sweets in their hands. Couples queued for rides, and families sat at wooden tables beneath strings of coloured lights.

At first, I thought people were staring because they recognised us as outsiders. Alderwick was small enough that four strangers would be noticeable. Then I realised they weren’t looking at our faces.

They were looking at the red tickets in our hands.

A woman selling candyfloss watched Priya fold hers into her purse. The operator of the carousel counted the tickets as we passed. When Connor stopped at a stall filled with glass bottles, the man behind the counter asked whether all four of us had received one.

Connor held his up.

The man smiled with visible relief.

“Good.”

“What does it do?” Connor asked.

“You’ll find out before you leave.”

Everyone gave us the same answer.

The tickets weren’t for the rides. We paid separately for the carousel and a spinning teacup ride Connor insisted was suitable for adults despite being filled with children. When Leo asked whether the tickets could be exchanged for food, the woman behind the counter laughed like he had made a joke.

“Save them for the games.”

The games stood further back in the field. There were familiar stalls such as ring toss, but most of the games looked homemade. One involved throwing painted stones through small wooden doors. Another had a row of bells with no visible instructions.

Each stallholder encouraged us to play somewhere else.

The man at the ring toss looked at Connor’s ticket and told him the bottle game was easier. The woman at the bottle game insisted he would have better luck at the wheel of fortune. Before long, two stallholders were arguing about which game we should try.

They stopped the moment we walked away.

Near the carousel, a girl in a blue dress stood alone beside the fence. She looked about eight or nine, with dark hair cut bluntly at her chin. When I smiled, she came closer.

“Which one of you is using theirs?” she asked.

“Using what?”

She pointed at the ticket in my hand.

Before I could answer, a woman hurried over and gripped the girl’s shoulder.

“Don’t bother the visitors.”

The girl kept staring at me as the woman pulled her away.

“Don’t let them choose for you,” she said.

Her mother covered her mouth.

Connor laughed awkwardly. “Friendly place.”

We continued towards the back of the carnival. The rides were older there, and the cheerful music from the entrance faded. Most stalls stood empty despite the crowds elsewhere.

Connor stopped at the shooting gallery.

Tin animals moved along a track behind the counter. The man at the stall handed him an air rifle and accepted a pound coin.

“You get three shots,” he said.

Connor missed the first target and clipped the second. His final pellet struck the edge of a tin rabbit without knocking it over.

“Bad luck,” the man said.

Connor reached for his red ticket. “Can I use this for another go?”

The stallholder’s face changed.

“No.”

The answer came too quickly.

“You said the tickets were for the games.”

“Not this one.”

“Why not?”

The man leaned closer.

“Because you should use it somewhere you’ll win.”

He looked past Connor towards the edge of the field, where a faded red machine stood between two empty stalls.

The claw machine was older than everything around it. Its paint had faded to pink, and scratches covered the glass. A metal sign on top read:

ONE FREE PLAY

The machine was packed with toys. Some of them looked handmade. There were bears with button eyes, rabbits in little jackets and animals stitched together from mismatched pieces of fabric.

A woman stood beside the machine.

Her dark hair had been tied back, and a yellow scarf rested around her neck. She was the same woman from the photograph in the antique shop. She looked exactly as she had in the picture dated 1998.

Connor hadn’t noticed that.

He was staring through the glass.

A green dinosaur lay in the centre of the pile. It came from a cartoon we had watched as children, and Connor had spent months searching for one for his younger sister. The toy had been discontinued long before she was born, but she had become obsessed with the programme after finding old episodes online.

“That can’t be real,” Connor said.

The woman followed his gaze.

“It is.”

“How much?”

“One ticket.”

Leo looked at the sign. “We were told we needed those before leaving.”

“They’re for claiming your complimentary prize.”

“Why didn’t anyone say that?”

The woman smiled. “I’m saying it now.”

Connor took the ticket from his pocket.

Priya caught his arm.

“Don’t.”

“It’s a toy.”

The woman with the yellow scarf rested one hand against the glass.

“My younger brother had that dinosaur,” she said. “I haven’t seen another in years.”

It was such an ordinary comment that it broke the tension. Connor smiled at her, and she stepped aside.

More people were gathering nearby. They pretended to watch other stalls, but their attention was on us. Margaret stood beside the candyfloss cart in her red cardigan. When she saw me looking, she gave a small wave.

Leo told Connor to leave it.

He laughed. “Everyone needs to relax.”

He slid the ticket into the slot.

The machine came to life with a low mechanical hum. The lights flickered, and the claw moved before Connor touched the controls.

It travelled directly over the dinosaur.

The prongs lowered and closed around its body. They held it perfectly as the claw carried it towards the prize chute.

Nobody spoke.

The dinosaur dropped.

Every light at the carnival went out.

The music continued in the darkness.

Priya grabbed my arm. Leo shouted Connor’s name. Somewhere close by, someone made a sound that could have been laughter or crying.

The darkness lasted only a few seconds.

When the lights returned, Connor was gone.

So was the woman with the yellow scarf.

The prize chute was empty.

Leo began shouting before any of us had properly understood what had happened. He searched behind the machine, then dropped to the ground and looked under it as though Connor might have fallen through a hidden panel.

Priya pushed into the crowd, calling his name.

Nobody helped.

They watched us with expressions I couldn’t understand. Some were smiling. Others looked sick.

Margaret began clapping. The sound was slow at first, each movement deliberate. A man beside her joined in, followed by a woman holding a baby. Soon the applause spread through the crowd.

One elderly man looked away from us in shame.

He continued clapping.

Leo kicked the machine hard enough to leave a dent in its side.

“What did you do to him?” Priya shouted.

A man stepped forward from the crowd.

“Nobody did anything. He used his ticket.”

“Where is he?”

The man’s eyes moved towards the prize chute.

“He won.”

That was all he would say.

I started noticing the missing time three weeks ago.

It was never more than a second. I would blink and feel like my eyes had stayed closed slightly longer than they should have, even though nothing around me changed. At first, I blamed tiredness. I work from home, spend too long looking at screens and rarely get enough sleep.

Then I started remembering the room.

The first memory came to me while I was making coffee. Grey walls, a pale floor and a wooden chair in the centre. There were no windows or doors, and the ceiling gave off a weak glow.

I remembered standing inside it. It didn’t feel like a dream either. Dreams become less convincing the more I think about them, but the memory of the room became clearer. I could picture the dark wooden chair and the uneven patches of grey paint on the walls. I even remembered the temperature. It was neither warm nor cold. 

Two days later, I blinked while brushing my teeth, and for a moment, I was inside the room. Then I was back in my bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror. The toothbrush fell from my hand. The tap was still running, and no time had passed, but I remembered looking down at my empty fingers inside the room. I remembered turning towards the chair before my eyes opened again.

After that, I began testing it. I set my phone up and recorded myself blinking. During thirty minutes of footage, I entered the room four times. On the recording, every blink looked completely normal and lasted less than half a second. Inside the room, I had enough time to look around.

The chair had moved. It was no longer in the middle. It stood against the far wall, facing me instead. That was the point when I stopped believing I was imagining it.

The visits became more frequent. At first, it happened once or twice a day. Within a week, I was entering the room multiple times an hour.

Each blink lasted longer inside. A fraction of a second here might give me ten seconds there. Then thirty. Once, I spent nearly four minutes walking around the room, touching the walls and searching for some kind of opening. My phone showed that my eyes were closed for less than a second.

Nothing I touched made a sound inside the room. I could feel my footsteps, but I couldn’t hear them. When I clapped, my palms struck each other silently. I could feel myself breathing, but even that made no noise.

I tried shouting. My mouth opened and my throat strained, but the room remained silent. When my eyes opened, I was standing in my kitchen screaming.

After that, I tried not to blink.

I used eye drops, lowered the brightness on every screen and drank far too much coffee. None of it helped. Eventually, my eyes always closed.

Sleep never took me there. I could close my eyes for eight hours and remember nothing, then wake up, blink once and spend minutes standing inside those grey walls. This place existed specifically inside the blink. 

On the ninth day, a second chair appeared. It stood directly opposite the first, with barely a metre between them.

During my next visit, I was sitting in one of them. Until then, I had always arrived standing. This time, I couldn’t move. My hands rested on my knees, and my feet were planted firmly on the floor.

Something had been scratched into the floor between the chairs.

YOU TOOK LONG ENOUGH.

I spent the rest of that night sitting against my bedroom wall, forcing my eyes open whenever they began to close. By morning, I had convinced myself that the words were a hallucination caused by exhaustion.

Then I found the same words written in my notebook. The handwriting was mine, but I didn’t remember writing them.

I booked a doctor’s appointment the same day. I described the missing time but left out the room. He asked about stress, sleep, medication and drugs before checking my eyes and reflexes.

During the appointment, I blinked. This time someone was sitting in the second chair. 
I could not see their face. There was nothing covering it, and the room wasn’t dark. I was looking directly at them, but my mind couldn’t understand what I was seeing. I could make out the individual parts, a head, shoulders, hands resting on their knees, but the moment I tried to see the whole person, my attention slipped away.

It was like trying to remember the exact second you fall asleep. I knew someone was there. My mind refused to see them fully. The figure leaned towards me. Then my eyes opened.

After that, the figure appeared during every visit. Sometimes it sat opposite me, close enough that its knees almost touched mine. Other times it stood behind the empty chair.

It never moved while I watched it. Whenever I looked away for even a second, it would be somewhere else.

The visits continued getting longer. I began keeping track of how much time I had spent inside the room. By the end of the second week, I estimated it was more than eleven hours. Eleven hours that had passed nowhere else. The figure had been with me for most of them.

During one visit, I forced myself to ask what it wanted. There was still no sound, but I shaped the words slowly with my mouth.

The figure tilted its head. Its answer appeared inside my memory rather than reaching my ears.

“You ask me that every time.”

I opened my eyes screaming.

After that, I began remembering things that had never happened. I remembered sitting in the chair for hours while the figure watched me. I remembered lying on the floor and begging it to let me leave. I remembered walking around the room so many times that I knew the number of steps between every wall.

I had no memory of experiencing any of it. The memories just appeared suddenly. One afternoon, I opened my notebook and found pages filled with my handwriting. The first few lines were neat. They became increasingly unsteady as they continued.

HOW LONG HAVE I BEEN HERE?

IT SAYS I ALWAYS FORGET THE BEGINNING.

I AM NOT ENTERING THE ROOM.

I AM REMEMBERING IT.

I stopped reading. I closed the notebook and placed it inside a kitchen drawer. When I returned an hour later, it was open on my desk.

A new line had been added.

STOP CALLING THIS THE OUTSIDE.

Yesterday, the room changed. The figure was no longer sitting in the second chair. It stood against the far wall, leaving both seats empty.

A narrow dark line had appeared behind it.

A door.

I had spent hours searching those walls and never found any opening. There was no handle, but when I pressed my hand against it, part of the wall moved inwards.

Another room waited behind it.

It was identical to the first. The same grey walls, pale floor, and two wooden chairs facing each other.
Someone was sitting in one of them.

Me.

The other version of me wore the same clothes and sat with both hands resting on their knees. Their eyes were closed.

The figure stood behind the chair with its hands resting on my shoulders.

I tried to step into the second room.

The version of me in the chair opened their eyes.
At the same time, something touched my shoulder from behind.

I woke up on the floor of my bedroom.

My desk chair had been pulled into the centre of the room.

I have no memory of moving it.

There were marks on the wooden legs. Dozens of short scratches, cut deeply into the surface.
I counted them. There were one hundred and eighty. I don’t know what they represent.

Since then, I have been trying not to blink for longer than necessary. The room appears every time now. There are no normal blinks left.

The figure no longer sits or stands at a distance. It waits directly behind my chair. The other room remains open in front of me. The version of me inside is sitting with their eyes closed.

A few hours ago, they started speaking. There was no sound, but I understood the words. They told me that the room was not somewhere my mind went when I blinked. They said blinking was the only moment I stopped pretending to be somewhere else.

I asked which one of us was real. The figure tightened its hands around my shoulders. The person in the other room smiled. Then my eyes opened.

I have been staring at this screen ever since. My eyes are burning so badly that the words keep blurring. I can feel tears running down my face, but I am afraid to wipe them away in case I blink.

There is something else too. For the past hour, I have been able to see the figure reflected in the edge of my monitor.

It is standing behind me. Not in that room.

Here.

Its hands are resting on the back of my chair, and each time my eyes begin to close, its fingers move closer to my shoulders. I think it is waiting for me to blink again.

And somewhere inside my head, I can hear the person in the second room repeating the same thing.

“You have been gone long enough.”

I don’t think blinking takes me into the room anymore.

I think it lets me back in.

Every room had to be thanked before you left it. Not the person inside. The room itself. You stood in the doorway, looked back and said, “Thank you for having me.”

Nobody treated it like a ritual. People said it while checking their phones or pulling on their coats. Children learned it alongside please and thank you. Public buildings even had signs beside the exits:

REMEMBER TO THANK YOUR HOST.

Whenever I forgot as a child, my mother made me go back.

“Properly,” she would say.

So I would look into the empty room and say my thanks before we left. 

I never questioned it. Adults said it was polite, and that was enough. By the time I moved into my first apartment, the words came automatically. I thanked my bedroom each morning, the kitchen before work and the hallway before leaving the building.

Everyone did. Some people even thanked the lifts.

I had lived in my apartment for almost six months before I forgot. I was late for work and halfway down the corridor when I realised I had left my bedroom without thanking it. I considered going back, but the lift had already arrived.

It was only manners, I told myself. I went to work and had almost forgotten about it by lunchtime.

But when I returned that evening, something felt wrong. My bedroom seemed smaller, and the gap between the bed and wardrobe had narrowed. The difference was small enough that I thought I might be imagining it, but I measured the room anyway.

It was eleven centimetres shorter than the floor plan said it should be. The following morning, it had lost another three.

That was when I started researching the custom. I expected to find an old superstition, but every search led to articles about manners and gratitude. Government websites called it “a long standing civic practice”, but none explained when or why it ever began.

At the library, I searched through old newspapers and council reports. The earliest documents did not call it thanking. They called it acknowledgement.

One report described a family disappearing inside their home. Their belongings were still inside, but the walls had expanded by nearly two metres overnight. Another reported that a classroom door had refused to open during a fire drill. Thirty children disappeared before the teacher remembered to address the room.

Similar incidents had occurred in hospitals and factories. The same instruction appeared underneath every report:

FURTHER INCIDENTS MAY BE PREVENTED THROUGH VERBAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT BEFORE DEPARTURE.

Later campaigns softened the wording.

ACKNOWLEDGE THE SPACE became THANK YOUR HOST.

Compliance became courtesy.

Warnings became manners.

I eventually found a handwritten report from seventy years earlier. It described workers uncovering sealed chambers beneath a construction site. The chambers were perfectly square, with smooth walls and no entrances.

When engineers cut into them, they found chairs, beds and tables inside. None of the objects had been placed there. They appeared to have grown directly from the floor.

Within weeks, nearby buildings began changing. Corridors stretched past their original length. New rooms appeared overnight. Then people started disappearing after leaving spaces without acknowledging them.

The final pages were missing.

The librarian noticed what I was reading and came over.

“You need to put that back.”

“Why isn’t any of this public?”

“It is public.”

“Nobody knows about it.”

She glanced around the room before lowering her voice.

“Everybody knows enough.”

I asked whether anyone had discovered what the chambers were. She did not answer. She simply waited while I gathered my things.

When I reached the doorway, I hesitated. The place looked harmless. Still, the librarian watched me expectantly.

“Thank you for having me.”

Only then did she close the door.

When I returned home, my apartment had changed again. The hallway was narrower and the bathroom door caught against the sink. In the bedroom, the gap between the bed and wardrobe had almost disappeared. The bedroom had lost another twenty centimetres.

I thanked every room before leaving that night and stayed with my sister until I found somewhere else. A week later, I returned for my belongings. The bedroom door would only open halfway. Inside, the bed was pressed tightly between both walls.

I stared at it for a long time. Then, before leaving, I quietly said, “Thank you for having me.”

My new building is only three years old. According to the landlord, the land had been empty before it was built. My apartment is at the very end of the corridor. Beyond my front door, there’s a window overlooking the street.

I still thank every room before leaving. Everyone does.

But now I notice what happens when someone forgets. A restaurant door that refuses to open until a customer mutters the words. An office corridor that looks longer when everyone leaves in silence. A changing room with one more cubicle than it had when I entered.

Most people don’t notice. Or maybe they do, and they know enough not to say anything.

Yesterday morning, I thanked each room, locked my apartment and stepped into the corridor.

There was another door beside mine. The corridor now continued a couple of metres past the window, into space that should have been outside the building. 

As I stood there, the new door opened. A woman stepped out carrying a handbag. She looked back into the apartment behind her and said, “Thank you for having me.”

Then she closed the door, smiled at me and walked towards the lift like she had always lived there.

My mother used to tell my sister and me a story about a woman who lived beyond the last house in a village.

Mum never gave the woman a name. She only told us that her hearing was so sharp she could hear a child crying three valleys away, and someone whispering from six feet underground.

Every evening, the woman would stand outside her home and listen. Sometimes, she heard someone who could hear her too. Whenever that happened, she would call into the darkness and ask them a simple question.

“Can you hear me?”

Mum always finished the story with the same warning.

“If you hear her, do not answer.”

My sister used to ask what would happen if someone did. Mum never told us. She would only say that the woman wasn’t asking whether they could hear her voice. Whenever we asked what she really meant, Mum said we were too young to understand. By the time we were old enough, we’d stopped wondering.

I thought about that story for the first time in years on a Friday evening, while my sister and I were driving to collect a vanity I’d bought online. It was old, ugly and way too big for my apartment, but it was made from solid wood and cheap enough to justify borrowing Dad’s van for the journey.

The seller had warned me that the signal was unreliable near her house. She sent me written directions beforehand and told me not to trust the navigation system once we left the motorway. I trusted it anyway.

The first part of the journey was normal enough. We passed through a few small villages and a petrol station. After that, the navigation system directed me away from the seller’s directions and sent me down a narrow road with trees on both sides.

I kept going because the map showed the road joining the main route again further ahead. About twenty minutes later, I realised we hadn’t passed a house in a while. The trees had grown thicker and closer to the road, and there were no signs and nowhere wide enough to turn around.

The estimated arrival time still said twelve minutes. Sara noticed it first. She leaned towards the screen and watched it for another minute before pointing out that the time hadn’t changed since we left the main road.

I refreshed the route. The map loaded slowly, then showed us moving across an empty patch of green land. According to the screen, we weren’t even driving on a road.

I stopped the van and looked for somewhere to turn around. While I was doing that, Sara stared into the trees on her side. Her expression changed, but she didn’t say anything at first. When I asked what was wrong, she told me she had heard someone whisper.

I lowered my window slightly and listened. There were no cars or wind, and no movement in the trees. The only sounds came from the engine and the navigation system repeatedly telling me to make a U-turn.

Sara said the voice had sounded close enough to be inside the van, but somehow she knew it was coming from very far away. Neither of us mentioned Mum’s story, but I knew we were both thinking about it.

I reversed until we reached a slightly wider area of the road and managed to turn around. The map recalculated straight away and directed us back the way we had come. We should’ve reached the main road within fifteen minutes, but instead, we found another petrol station that neither of us remembered seeing on the way in.

It stood alone beside the road under a rusted sign. We were running low on fuel and Sara needed the toilet, so we decided to stop. We agreed to stay together and leave as soon as I asked for directions.

The man behind the counter looked surprised when we walked in. He was elderly, with thick glasses and a portable radio sat beside him. The radio seemed to be tuned between stations, producing nothing but a low hiss of static. I told him we’d been following the lane behind and asked how to get back to the main road.

He glanced through the window and frowned. From where we stood, the lane was clearly visible past the fuel pumps, disappearing between the trees. He said there had never been a lane there before. I might’ve assumed he was joking if he had smiled, but he didn’t. 

He stared at the road for a moment before telling us to leave through the opposite side we came from and continue until we reached a roundabout. As we turned to go, he asked whether anyone else was travelling with us. Sara told him it was just the two of us. He looked through the window behind us again and said he thought he saw a woman standing beside the rear passenger door. We turned to look, but there was nobody near the van.

We didn’t dismiss it as a reflection. We checked the van and the narrow gap beside the shop before getting back inside. There was nowhere nearby where someone could’ve hidden without crossing the open area.

Once the doors were locked, Sara opened the notes app on her phone and typed:

Mum’s story.

I typed underneath it:

I know. Don’t answer anyone we can’t see.

We left and followed the road the man had pointed out. Less than a minute later, the lights disappeared behind us. It was odd. There wasn’t a turn, a dip in the road or anything that could’ve blocked our view. One moment, the station filled the rear window. The next, there was only darkness.

At the same time, the navigation screen changed. The destination address vanished, and a new instruction appeared in its place.

Continue until heard.

I switched it off. We continued to drive without speaking. The road stayed narrow and completely empty, with thick trees on either side. There were still no houses or road signs, and strangely, the fuel gauge didn’t seem to move either.

Sara suddenly pressed both hands against her ears. She said the woman was calling again. I still couldn’t hear anything. Sara said the voice was repeating the same question from somewhere ahead of us, but it also seemed to be coming from every direction at once.

I kept driving because there was nowhere safe to stop or turn around. We agreed that we would stay inside the van until we reached somewhere populated. If anyone appeared on the road, we’d keep the doors locked and drive past them. 

Eventually, a light appeared in the distance. At first, I thought it belonged to another car, but as we got closer, I realised it was coming from an upstairs window. A house stood alone beside the road, surrounded by dense trees. 

A woman was standing outside. She wore a long grey dress, loose hair hung around her face, and her head was slightly tilted.

Sara told me not to stop. I already had my foot on the accelerator. As we passed, the woman turned her face towards the van. She was older than I expected, with pale eyes that looked unfocused.

Her lips moved, and this time, I heard her.

“Can you hear me?”

The question was barely louder than a whisper, but I could still hear it clearly. Neither of us answered.

The road carried on without any turns. I kept checking the mirrors, expecting to see the woman following us, but there was nothing behind us except darkness.

Ten minutes later, we passed the same house again. We never turned around, yet the house appeared ahead of us in exactly the same place. The woman was still standing outside, only now she was closer to the road.

She repeated the question as we passed. The third time the house appeared, the woman stood in the middle of the road, forcing me to stop. She was barefoot and mud covered the bottom of her dress, but her feet were perfectly clean.

Sara handed me her phone. She’d written one word.

Reverse.

Before I could move, the woman spoke. 

“Your mother taught you well.”

It was the first thing she’d said apart from the question.

Sara made a small sound before she could stop herself. The woman’s head turned towards her straight away.

I reversed until the woman disappeared into the darkness. As soon as I found enough room, I turned the van around and drove back the way we’d come.

A road sign appeared ahead of us soon afterwards.

BELRIDGE - 4 MILES

I let out a sigh of relief. Sara started checking her phone for a signal while I concentrated on keeping my hands steady on the wheel.

Then she noticed the time. The dashboard clock still showed 8:17, and her phone showed the same.

We arrived at the petrol station at 8:17. Since then, we’d been driving for what felt like more than two hours. I assumed the dashboard system had frozen when the navigation failed, but that didn’t explain Sara’s phone. 

The sign ahead still said Belridge was four miles away. It grew larger as we approached, then slowly became smaller again, even though we were still driving towards it.

Sara opened her messages to text Mum, but there was already a message sent from her phone at 8:17. 

WE CAN HEAR HER.

Sara hadn’t written it. There was no response from Mum, and the message hadn’t been delivered. We didn’t try to call her. By then, we understood that anything reaching us through the phones couldn’t be trusted.

Then the road sign disappeared, and the house stood in its place. 

The woman was waiting outside the house, exactly where she was the first time. I tried to ignore her and drive past, but the engine cut out before we reached the house.

The headlights stayed on, lighting up her pale face as she walked towards the van and placed one hand against my window. There was no anger in her expression. Instead, she looked exhausted and afraid. 

That was when I heard it. A sound came from somewhere past the house. At first, it was too far away for me to recognise. 

The woman closed her eyes and listened.

The sound became clearer. There was a horn, tyres dragging across wet tarmac and the sound of metal folding in on itself.

Then we heard ourselves.

Sara’s scream came first. My voice followed, shouting her name over and over while glass shattered around us. The sounds seemed to be coming from miles ahead, but they filled the inside of the van.

I turned towards Sara and saw that the woman was sitting in the back seat now. Neither of the rear doors had opened. One moment the seat was empty, and the next she was there with her hands folded neatly in her lap.

I grabbed the door handle to get out, but it wouldn’t budge. The woman told us not to be scared of her. The sound ahead was what mattered. She explained that the stories about her hearing had changed over time. People believed she could hear across huge distances because they didn’t have any other way to describe what she could do.

She didn’t hear people from miles away. She heard them from moments that hadn’t happened yet. Sometimes the sounds came from a few seconds ahead. Sometimes they came from years in the future. She heard children crying before they were born, buildings collapsing before they were finished and travellers calling for help before they became lost.

Whenever she heard a voice clearly enough, she called out to it. Most people never heard her because they were still safely inside their own time. The people who answered had already started slipping towards the moment she was hearing.

That was what her question really meant. She wasn’t asking whether we could hear her voice. She was asking whether we could hear past the moment we were still living in.

The horn sounded again, and the woman looked towards Sara. She said Sara had answered first. Sara denied it, but I remembered the whisper beside the trees and the way she went quiet before telling me about it. Eventually, she admitted that after hearing the voice, she had whispered back. She hadn’t thought one word would matter. 

The woman told her that answering had not caused anything. It only confirmed what she already feared.

She could hear our crash. 

She could hear me afterwards.

She couldn’t hear Sara.

The road and the house started flickering. For a few seconds at a time, I could see another place behind them. A wet road. The bright side of a lorry. The van entering a junction.

The navigation system had never sent us down a different road. We stayed on the main route the whole time. Everything that happened after 8:17 had taken place in the fraction of a second between seeing the lorry and being hit.

The petrol station, the endless road and the house weren’t real places. They were the only way our minds could process the final moments before the crash. We heard the accident before it happened. The woman had found us in the space between those two moments.

Sara reached for my hand. Her fingers felt cold and strangely light, like there was already less of her there than before. She asked the woman whether there was any way to change what she had heard. The woman listened before answering, but her face told us first.

She said she could hear me waking up in the hospital. She could hear Mum crying beside my bed and police officers asking me what I remembered.

But she still couldn’t hear Sara.

The lorry horn grew louder until it hurt. The woman reached forward and placed one hand on Sara’s shoulder. She told her she was sorry.

Then the house disappeared.

I woke up in the hospital the following afternoon.

The lorry had crossed the centre line and hit the passenger side of the van. The front of the van was so crushed that they had to get me out through one of the rear doors.

Sara died before the ambulance arrived.

There had never been a diversion, a narrow lane or a petrol station. The seller confirmed that she’d been waiting for us that evening, but we never reached the turn before her house.

Mum had called us seventeen times after the crash, but none of the calls had connected. The message on Sara’s phone was still marked as unsent, even though it had a timestamp of 8:17.

The police recovered my phone from under the driver’s seat. The screen was shattered, but the audio recorder had been running before the collision. I didn’t remember opening it.

The recording began at 8:12. For the first few minutes, Sara and I were talking about the vanity and whether it would fit through my front door. The navigation system told me to continue along the main road.

At 8:16, another voice spoke from the back seat.

“Can you hear me?”

Sara went quiet. Then a few seconds later, she whispered yes.

The lorry horn started less than a minute after.

After I left the hospital, I asked Mum to finish the story. For the first time, she did.

The woman past the last house wasn’t there to lure lost children away. She called because sometimes she heard them before they were lost, and she needed to know whether there was still time to reach them.

Most people never answered. The few who did were already too close to whatever she had heard.

That was why the warning had always been so simple.

If you hear her, do not answer.

Not because answering brings her closer, but because if you can hear her at all, she might already be listening to the last sound you’ll ever make.

I started working at the factory because the pay was better than anything else nearby.

The factory manufactured luminous emergency signs for office buildings, hospitals, schools and underground stations. Things like fire exits, stairwell markers and evacuation arrows. The kind of things nobody noticed until the lights went out.

My job was simple. I painted the lettering and symbols with a thick layer of luminous paint, left the signs to dry, then slid them under a row of bright ultraviolet lights. After ten minutes, each sign was placed inside a dark inspection cabinet to make sure it glowed evenly.

The paint had a chemical smell, somewhere between wet plaster and burnt rubber, but the supervisors insisted it was harmless.

“It’s water based,” we were told during training. “No different from decorating paint.”

We were given aprons and told to wash our hands before eating. There were gloves in the storeroom as well, but our manager discouraged us from using them because they made the brushes harder to control. Nobody wore masks.

The paint got everywhere. Underneath our fingernails, on our sleeves, in our hair. We found pale fingerprints on our phones and bags. Once, Lucy put her hand inside the inspection cabinet and noticed the skin around her nails glowing faintly. We all thought it was funny at the time.

“Look,” she said, wiggling her fingers in the darkness. “I’m one of the signs now.”

The glow faded within seconds of her pulling her hand out, and none of us thought about it again.

Lucy was the first person to become noticeably ill. She complained about headaches and a metallic taste that never went away. Then her gums began bleeding whenever she brushed her teeth. Her doctor told her she was probably anaemic.

After that, others started mentioning things. Nadia’s wrists ached whenever she worked near the ultraviolet lights. Elaine developed a rash across both of her hands. A woman on the morning shift started vomiting before work and blamed the smell of the paint.

I also felt unwell sometimes, but never badly enough to leave or miss work. I had frequent headaches and a tightness in my chest after long shifts. Some mornings, I woke with the same metallic taste Lucy described.

But none of us connected it to the factory. Why would we? We had been told that the paint was safe. The signs were going into hospitals and schools, surely a company couldn’t put something dangerous into products designed to protect people.

Management held a meeting after three workers called in sick during the same week. The factory manager stood in front of us with a printed report and said that all equipment had passed every required safety test. He blamed the symptoms on a combination of a seasonal virus, dehydration and poor diets.

“Some of you are working long hours,” he said. “Please remember to take care of yourselves.”

They installed a water cooler beside the break room. That was the only change.

Lucy didn’t return after her next doctor’s appointment. She messaged me to say she had been admitted to hospital because her white blood cell count was dangerously low.

A week later, the power went out. It happened near the end of the afternoon shift, seconds after we had finished activating a large batch of signs for a new railway station.

The ultraviolet lamps cut off first. Then the main lights and machinery died together. For a moment, the factory was completely dark. Then the signs began to glow.

Rows of arrows and white figures glowed across the worktables, their light filling the room with a faint, sickly haze.

Someone laughed nervously.

“At least we know they work.”

A second laugh answered from the other side of the room. That was when we saw her teeth. They glowed through her open mouth. Not brightly, but enough to outline every tooth in a pale green light.

The laughter stopped soon after.

Next to me, Elaine whispered something, and I could see her teeth glowing too. Then Nadia raised both hands to her face, and her fingertips were shining beneath the skin.

As our eyes adjusted to the dark, more of us became visible. Faint lines ran along wrists and forearms. The outlines of ribs appeared from under blouses and aprons.

The person who had worked there the longest glowed the brightest. Margaret had been at the factory for almost five years. In the darkness, I could see most of her skeleton. Her hands, jaw and ribs were clearly visible underneath her skin.

She looked down at herself and began to cry.

I raised my own hands to my face. Thin green lines marked the bones of my fingers. The sight made my stomach turn.

The paint didn’t just stain us, it had built up inside our bodies, little by little. Every minute under the ultraviolet lamps had charged whatever had settled in our teeth and bones.

We had never noticed because the glow faded quickly once we left the lamps. By the time we reached home and went to bed, there was nothing left to see.

The power cut had trapped us in complete darkness while we were still fully charged.

The emergency lights never came on. Instead, the factory manager entered carrying a flashlight, followed closely by two supervisors. He swept the beam across the glowing room. When the light passed over his face, he looked frightened, but not surprised.

“Everyone remain where you are,” he said. “The backup system will be restored shortly.”

Margaret stepped towards him.

“You knew.”

He lifted a hand.

“Most of you are still below the treatment threshold.”

It was quiet for a second, then Nadia broke the silence.

“What treatment threshold?” she asked.

The manager realised what he had said and started backing away towards the nearest exit.

Margaret lunged at him. The supervisors tried to hold her back, but the room erupted. Women shouted, shoved tables aside and reached for their phones. One supervisor attempted to lock the main exit.

That was when Elaine collapsed. She hit the floor hard, coughing violently. The glow around her jaw brightened, then spread down her neck and across her chest. Someone called an ambulance while three of us forced the exit open.

The company tried to stop us from leaving. Later, they claimed it was because they were worried about contamination. I think they were worried about witnesses.

Emergency services arrived within minutes. By then, several workers had collapsed. Others were vomiting or bleeding from their mouths.

We were taken to hospital and quarantined. At first, the doctors didn’t know what they were dealing with. 

The chemical composition of the paint had not been accurately disclosed on the product sheets provided by the company. It contained several undeclared substances, including one designed to bind permanently to mineral structures. Bones, in other words.

The doctors washed us repeatedly, removed our clothing and gave us medication intended to draw as much of the chemical as possible from our bodies. They kept the wards dim because bright lights caused the pain to worsen.

The worst cases needed bone marrow treatment and surgery.

Lucy died two days after we were admitted. Margaret died the following week. Elaine survived, but part of her jaw had to be removed. Nadia spent three months in hospital and still uses a wheelchair.

I was luckier. I had worked at the factory for less than six months. Most of the material had not yet settled deeply into my bones.

The company denied knowing the paint was dangerous. They said workers had ignored safety guidance, despite never giving us masks and actively discouraging gloves. They claimed the manager’s comment about a treatment threshold had been misunderstood.

The factory closed and reopened under another name six months later.

The doctors told me that the chemical still circulating in my body should leave my system within a year.  

Most nights, I believe them. Then the power goes out, or I step into a dark room after spending too long in bright light, and I can still see my teeth glowing in the mirror.

They are much dimmer now.

Those who had worked there longer were not so fortunate.

The landlord had several rules about the building, but the one she repeated most often concerned the mail.

“Do not open anything that isn’t addressed to you,” she would say whenever letters ended up in the wrong boxes. “Put it in the blue mailbox downstairs.”

I had lived there for almost seven months and assumed she was unusually strict about privacy. The building had an old row of brass mail slots in the lobby, each marked with a black apartment number. The slots often jammed, especially when the weather was damp, so letters regularly ended up in the wrong boxes. Whenever that happened, I dropped them into the blue mailbox beside the front desk.

The landlord emptied it every evening. At least, I thought she did. I never actually saw her open it.

The envelope arrived on a Tuesday.

I came home carrying groceries and grabbed the entire bundle of mail without checking it. I didn’t notice the unfamiliar envelope until I was upstairs at my kitchen table.

It was plain white, slightly yellow around the edges, with no stamp, return address or postmark. The front had been typed in faded black ink.

CURRENT OCCUPANT
APARTMENT 0

The building did not have an Apartment 0. The ground floor apartments began at 1A and 1B. Beneath them were the lobby, boiler room and basement laundry area. I had passed every door often enough to know there was no zero anywhere.

I should have taken the envelope downstairs. Instead, I held it up to the light. There appeared to be only one sheet of paper inside. I told myself it was probably an old management notice or a joke from another tenant.

The landlord’s warning hadn’t crossed my mind.

Do not open anything that isn’t addressed to you.

I slid my finger under the flap. The glue stretched into thin black strands before snapping apart, leaving a sticky residue on my skin. Inside was a single sheet of paper with one sentence printed in the centre.

Your occupancy has been acknowledged.

I let out a quiet laugh, folded the paper and dropped it into the kitchen bin.

That night, I saw Mr Vale in the hallway.

He had lived in Apartment 5C when I first moved in. He was a quiet man in his forties who always wore dark suits and smelled strongly of aftershave. He had left suddenly at the beginning of winter.

He was standing outside my apartment at eleven thirty. His clothes were soaked, even though it wasn’t raining. The skin around his eyes looked swollen and pale, and one side of his jaw hung lower than the other. His right hand was pressed against the wall. Two of his fingers had been flattened almost completely, the nails split and blackened.

“Mr Vale?”

He turned slowly and smiled.

“You opened yours too,” he said, his voice wet and quiet.

I stepped back. “What?”

He lifted his damaged hand. A white envelope was stuck to his palm, stained with dark moisture.

“They always send one first.”

I reached for the keys in my pocket as he moved towards me. His knees barely bent, forcing his body to sway as he crossed the hallway.

I ran to my apartment and threw myself inside. The lock turned just as something struck the other side. Mr Vale dragged his fingernails slowly down the door. Then he whispered through the gap beneath it.

“Don’t let them take your number.”

The next morning, the landlord denied knowing what I was talking about.

“Mr Vale moved out months ago,” she said.

“I know. That’s why I’m telling you I saw him.”

She stood behind the front desk sorting letters. The blue mailbox sat closed beside her.

“You were probably tired.”

“He knew I opened the letter.”

Her hands stopped moving.

“What letter?”

Something in her expression made me hesitate.

“Nothing,” I said. “I must have been mistaken.”

The landlord watched me for a moment before returning to the mail.

“If anything arrives that isn’t yours,” she said, “you know where to put it.”

I went upstairs and retrieved the envelope from the bin. It was damp now.

I waited until later, when I thought the landlord had left her office, before taking it back downstairs. After the way she had reacted when I mentioned the letter, I didn’t want her to know I had opened it.

The lobby was empty, and her office door was closed. I pushed the envelope through the slot in the blue mailbox, but it stopped halfway.

Something inside seemed to press it back towards me. I pulled it out and tried again, pushing harder this time. The envelope bent between my fingers before sliding out on its own and dropping at my feet.

The slot lifted slightly, even though nothing was touching it from the outside. For a moment, I thought I saw pale fingertips curled around the metal from within.

Then I heard the landlord’s office door unlocking. I grabbed the envelope and hurried upstairs before she came out. I stuffed it into a kitchen drawer, planning to try again once I was certain she had gone. 

I never got the chance.

That night, someone began knocking from inside my bedroom wall. The sound continued until sunrise. Three slow knocks, followed by a pause, then three more. Whenever I moved closer, it stopped. Whenever I returned to bed, it began again. By morning, I had convinced myself it was a pipe.

Then I saw Rachel in the laundry room. She had lived on the second floor with a small white dog and disappeared sometime before Christmas. She was sitting on top of a washing machine in a soaked nightgown, holding an opened envelope between both hands.

“You still have your key,” she said.

I looked down at the keys in my hand. “What happened to you?”

“I had a key once.”

Her eyes moved towards the concrete wall behind the dryers.

“They don’t like us staying in the rooms too long.”

I ran.

After that, I began seeing them everywhere.

An elderly man stood in the elevator with his forehead against the back wall. When the doors opened on my floor, he turned enough for me to see a deep scar behind his ear.

“Wrong floor,” he whispered as the doors closed.

A young woman was crouched beside the rubbish bags in the alley, scratching at the bricks with a broken key.

“Do you know which apartment is mine?” she asked with tears streaking her face.

They all carried opened envelopes.

I stopped using the elevator. I avoided the basement and took my rubbish out during daylight. At night, I heard soft tapping in the walls and at my window, but I kept the curtains drawn, not wanting to see what might be out there.

Then one of them touched me. 

Mr Vale was waiting at the end of the hallway when I returned from work. His swelling had worsened, and the damaged fingers on his right hand were bound together with strips of paper.

I turned towards the stairs, trying to ignore him. He crossed the distance before I reached them and grabbed my wrist. His fingers felt soft and cold, but his grip was strong enough to grind the bones together.

I struck his arm with my keys until the skin split. There was no blood inside him. Instead, thick black liquid seeped from the wound, carrying scraps of wet paper with it.

“It’s changing your address,” he whispered.

I tore myself free and ran.

Five dark bruises had appeared around my wrist. Inside each one was the pale outline of my apartment number.

6C

Over the next two days, the six faded. Then the C curled closed. Two days later, each bruise contained the same number.

0

That was when the building began treating me like a visitor. My key started sticking in the lock. Some nights, it took ten attempts before the door opened. One morning, I found my name missing from the intercom panel beside Apartment 6C. The apartment number was still there, but the space beside it was blank.

I checked it twice before going back upstairs and calling the landlord.

“There’s something wrong with the intercom panel. My name isn’t on it anymore.”

There was a pause.

“Who is this?”

I looked around my apartment. My coat was hanging beside the door, and the mug I had used that morning was still on the kitchen counter.

“It’s me. I live in 6C.”

She told me the apartment was vacant.

When I insisted I was standing inside it, she sighed and said I must have the wrong building before ending the call.

I stood in the kitchen with the phone still pressed against my ear. The landlord sounded like she thought I was making some strange prank call about living in 6C.

The following afternoon, I returned from work and found my front door open. The landlord was standing outside with a woman holding a property brochure.

“What are you doing?”

The landlord turned. For a moment, she looked genuinely frightened.

“You moved out.”

I held up my keys. “I still have my keys.”

Her eyes moved over me with confusion before drifting towards the framed photos inside, my coat beside the door and the shoes lined up on the rack.

“These are my things.”

She stepped into the apartment and picked up one of the photographs. I was standing in the centre of it, but she studied my face like she had never seen me before.

“You left them behind,” she said eventually.

Then she noticed the bruises around my wrist, and the confusion disappeared. She dismissed the woman without explanation and followed me inside, closing the door behind her.

“You opened the letter.”

I asked her what Apartment 0 was, but she ignored me and demanded to know where I had put it.

The envelope was still inside the kitchen drawer. When I unfolded the paper, I saw that it had turned almost completely black. The original sentence was gone. It was now replaced with:

OCCUPANCY PENDING
CURRENT RESIDENT: UNCONFIRMED
PREVIOUS ADDRESS: 6C

The landlord stared at it before telling me I should have come to her immediately.

“I tried putting it in the blue mailbox. Something pushed it back out.”

“You had already opened it by then.”

“You never told me what would happen.”

Her jaw tightened. She said the warning should have been enough, but even she didn't sound convinced.

I asked about Mr Vale and Rachel.

The landlord looked towards the walls before answering. They had both received letters. So had every person I had seen wandering through the building.

The building had not erased them completely. It had replaced their absence with explanations people would accept. Mr Vale had moved out. Rachel had broken her lease. One former tenant had supposedly died in hospital, while another had gone to live with her daughter.

None of it really had happened.

The landlord only noticed because she managed the building and sometimes found evidence that contradicted what she remembered. Even then, the false memories felt real until something forced her to question them.

A faint dragging sound moved through the wall behind us, travelling from the kitchen towards the bedroom.

The former tenants’ apartments had never disappeared. The people had simply lost their right to occupy them. Once the building stopped recognising someone as a resident, Apartment 0 moved them into whatever spaces remained unclaimed.

The walls. The service shafts. The gaps between floors. Anywhere that was not officially occupied.

The dragging stopped behind my bedroom door. Heavy breathing came from the other side.

“What do they want from me?” I whispered.

The landlord looked at the door.

“Your place.”

The bedroom door opened by itself. Mr Vale was sitting on the edge of my bed. He was wearing one of my shirts with my work badge pinned to his chest, but my photograph and name had been scratched away.

Behind him, the wardrobe door opened. Rachel stood inside, folded into the narrow space with her knees beside her shoulders. She began forcing her joints back into place without looking away from me.

“You have a room,” she said.

Mr Vale repeated it.

“You have a room.”

A third voice came from under the bed.

“We need one.”

The landlord pulled me behind her into the hallway, but before she could close the bedroom door, the wall behind Mr Vale split from floor to ceiling. The plaster stretched apart like wet paper.

Inside was a narrow black space packed with bodies. Faces were pressed between pipes and beams. Arms and legs had been bent into gaps no living person could have fit inside. Some wore clothes from decades ago, while others were so swollen that the fabric had sunk into their skin.

Every one of them held an opened envelope. They began pulling themselves through, repeating the same words as they came.

“You have a room.”

“We need one.”

The landlord shoved me towards the living room, but something caught my ankle. I fell to the floor and felt hands close around my legs and shoulders. Mr Vale pinned me down while Rachel reached into my pockets.

The landlord shouted that they were taking anything that proved I belonged there.

Someone tore the keys from my hand, another pulled an earring from my ear. The missing residents weren’t trying to kill me. They were collecting evidence that 6C was mine.

The young woman from the alley crawled over my chest. The broken key had been driven through the centre of her palm.

She opened her mouth. My scream came out of her. I tried to make a sound, but only air escaped.

Before they could drag me towards the open wall, the landlord struck Mr Vale with her ring of keys. Brass sliced through his cheek, releasing black liquid and scraps of paper, and his grip loosened.

She held up the letter and tore it in half.

Every missing tenant screamed.

The sound came from the walls as well as the room. Mr Vale clutched his chest, Rachel’s body folded inwards, and the zeros around my wrist burned as they stretched into thin lines and began to fade.

The landlord tore the letter again.

This time, the darkness inside the wall pulled the bodies backwards. Hands clawed at the floorboards and walls as the opening swallowed them. Mr Vale slid across the floor, leaving a trail of black liquid behind him. Rachel’s limbs bent around the edges of the gap before snapping free.

The young woman held on longest, hooking the broken key between two floorboards. The landlord stamped on her wrist. The key tore loose, and she disappeared into the wall.

The opening closed with a wet, sucking sound.

The landlord found my keys underneath the table and tried them in the front door. It turned without resistance.

She told me the transfer had been stopped. The building recognised me as the occupant of 6C again, but the others were still trapped inside Apartment 0. 

By morning, my name had returned to the intercom beside Apartment 6C. The landlord’s records showed that I had lived there continuously for seven months. According to everyone else in the building, I had never moved out.

I haven’t slept in the bedroom since. The landlord insists the wall is sealed, but I still hear movement behind it whenever the building becomes quiet. Sometimes Mr Vale drags his fingers across the plaster. Sometimes Rachel whispers that she used to have a kitchen just like mine.

The young woman can still use my voice. She uses it to call my name from inside the wall, then answers herself when I refuse to respond.

This morning, I went downstairs and found another name underneath mine on the intercom.

MR VALE
APARTMENT 6C

By the time I called the landlord, Rachel’s name had appeared beneath his.

She told me not to remove them.

Apartment 0 had failed to take me, but the people inside it had already been acknowledged as occupants of my apartment.

According to the building, I still live in 6C.

I just don’t live here alone anymore.

I should have known something was wrong when they offered me three thousand to watch their dog for a week.

Claire said Winston was anxious and needed someone to stay at the house full time while her family attended a wedding in Italy. The application asked for my age, allergies, medical history and a recent photograph taken in natural light. It seemed excessive for a dog-sitting job, but I needed the money badly enough that I filled it in anyway.

Claire lived with her husband, Michael, and their daughter, Sophie, in a large white house at the end of a quiet street. Winston was a German shepherd, and he took a liking to me immediately.

The interview was fairly normal until Claire mentioned their neighbour across the road.

“Her name is Diana,” she said.

“She might come over while we're away.” Michael looked up from his phone.

“Don't let her inside.” Claire glanced at him.

“She can be intrusive. That's all.”

Sophie came into the kitchen carrying a half-packed bag. “Is this about Diana again?”

“Honey, you know Diana can be a little nosy,” Claire said.

Sophie rolled her eyes and left the room. She looked tired of hearing her parents talk about their neighbour.

They offered me the job before I left.

The family flew out the following Monday, and I met Diana less than an hour after I arrived. She was standing at the end of her driveway when I took Winston out for his first walk. She looked around forty, with shoulder length red hair, unusually smooth skin and a short pearl necklace that looked expensive.

“You're the new one,” she said.

When I stopped, she added, “The new dog sitter.”

Winston stood close to my legs and began growling. Diana ignored him and looked at my face for long enough that I started to feel uncomfortable.

“You have lovely skin.”

I laughed because I didn't know how else to respond.

“Complexion,” she corrected. “That's what I meant.”

Winston pulled at the lead, so I let him drag me further down the street.

After that, Diana always seemed to be outside when I was. She watered her plants when I took Winston out in the morning and checked her mailbox whenever I returned from the store. Once, I looked across the street and saw her watching the house through an upstairs window.

Winston reacted to her every time. Claire had described him as anxious, but he seemed confident around everyone else. He barked at delivery vans and passing cyclists, but he never tried to hide from them. Whenever Diana came near us, he pressed himself against my legs and tried to pull me back towards the house.

By the third day, I had started checking whether she was outside before taking Winston for a walk.

That afternoon, I found her in one of the family's framed photographs. At least, I thought it was her. The picture showed Claire and Michael standing beside a woman with the same dark red hair and pearl necklace. But her face was completely different. She looked older, with deep wrinkles around her eyes, a wide nose and thin lips. The date written on the back was from ten years earlier.

It was easy to assume she might've been a relative. Then I found another photograph taken a few years later. The woman in that one had a round face and fuller lips, but she had the same hair and wore the same pearls.

There were five photographs in total, each featuring a woman I believed to be Diana. In every image, her face was different, yet her hair and necklace remained the same. I tried to convince myself that they were members of the same family, or that Diana had undergone extensive plastic surgery over the years. Neither explanation felt quite right. Something about the photos made me feel as though I was missing something obvious.

I was still holding one of them when movement across the street caught my attention. Diana was standing in front of her upstairs window with the curtains open. The room behind her was brightly lit, and she was facing a mirror with both hands pressed against her cheeks.

At first, I thought she was applying makeup. Then she pinched the skin near her right temple and pulled it backwards. Her cheek tightened immediately. The lines around her mouth disappeared, and the skin under her eye smoothed out. She kept it stretched with one hand while reaching towards the table with the other. She picked up something small and silver that looked like a dressmaker's pin and pushed it into the skin behind her ear.

I stepped closer to the window without thinking about what I was doing.

Diana turned her head and began working on the other side of her face. That half was still loose. The skin under her eye sagged, and the side of her mouth hung low enough to expose part of her gums. One side of her face looked smooth and tight. The other looked as though it was slowly slipping downwards.

Then she looked down and locked eyes with me.

Neither of us moved.

Diana smiled, but only the tightened side of her face lifted properly, the other side following a moment later.

I watched as she lowered her hands, picked up her coat and walked out of the room.

Winston started barking before she reached the garden. I ran to lock the front door and close the curtains, then backed into the hallway as the doorbell rang.

“I know you saw me,” Diana called.

Winston continued growling and barking while I took out my phone and called Claire. She answered almost immediately.

“Diana's outside,” I said.

“Is the door locked?”

“Yes. I found pictures of her in the house. They all have different faces.”

Claire went quiet.

“Claire?”

“Take Winston and leave through the back.”

“What is she?”

“I don't know.”

The doorbell rang again. When Claire spoke, her voice was much quieter.

“She chose Sophie first.”

I didn't understand what she meant.

“What?”

“She said she wouldn't touch our daughter if we found someone else.”

For a few seconds, I could only listen to Winston barking at the front door while the doorbell rang incessantly.

“You chose me?”

“We didn't have a choice.”

“You sent her my photograph.”

Claire didn't answer.

“The medical questions. My allergies. You gave her all of it, didn't you?”

“She told us what she needed.”

I felt sick.

“How many people have you done this to?”

Claire ended the call.

I grabbed Winston's lead and ran towards the kitchen, but the back door wouldn't open. I twisted the lock again and pulled hard enough to shake the frame, but it didn't move.

Winston left my side and began scratching at the basement door. He whined, looked back at me and scratched again.

I opened drawers, searching for the key or anything I could use to force the back door. At the back of the final drawer, under a pile of old takeaway menus, I found a silver key with a strip of tape wrapped around it.

BASEMENT.

Winston scratched at the basement door again. Only then did I realise the doorbell had stopped. The house had gone completely quiet.

Diana knew I couldn't leave through the back. I imagined her standing outside, waiting for me to panic enough to open the front door, and suddenly the kitchen felt far too exposed.

Winston scratched at the basement door again. I didn't know whether he was warning me away from it or telling me to go inside, but I couldn't think of anywhere else to hide.

The basement key turned easily. I pulled Winston inside and locked the door behind us.

Most of the basement looked normal. There were boxes, old furniture and cleaning supplies stacked against the walls. I moved further into the room, searching for somewhere we could stay hidden. Then Winston began growling at a narrow door behind the boiler.

It was partly concealed by a stack of cardboard boxes. I moved them aside as quietly as I could and pressed my ear against the door.

I couldn't hear anything inside.

Winston's growl deepened.

I told myself it might be a better hiding place. If Diana managed to find a way into the basement, she might not notice the second door.

The door pushed open easily. There was a reclining medical chair inside. Two lamps had been positioned above it, and sheets of clear plastic covered the floor. A metal cart beside the chair held gloves, gauze, saline and scalpels of various sizes.

My application photograph was taped to the wall. Red lines had been drawn around my eyes, jaw and hairline. Someone had written three short notes beside it.

Good elasticity.

Minimal scarring.

Close enough.

Other applications had been pinned beneath mine. They were all from women around my age, and some had been crossed out.

Too much sun damage.

Wrong bone structure.

Poor match around the eyes.

There were dates written beside several of the photographs. Some went back years.

Claire and Michael had not chosen me because they were desperate parents making one terrible decision. They had done this before.

Winston turned towards the basement stairs and began barking. A moment later, the front door opened upstairs.

Diana had a key to the house.

She could have entered whenever she wanted. The doorbell, the waiting and the repeated demands for me to let her inside had all been part of some game.

I heard her footsteps cross the kitchen above me and stop outside the basement door. The handle turned once, but the door remained locked.

“I know what you found,” she said.

A key slid into the lock from the other side. But she didn't turn it immediately. Instead, she stood there in silence while Winston barked and strained against my grip.

“You were easier to choose than the others,” Diana said.

“Claire told me how badly you needed the money.”

The key turned slowly.

I pulled Winston into the hidden room and closed the door behind us. There was no lock, so I dragged a heavy box across the floor and wedged it firmly in place.

Diana's footsteps descended the stairs one at a time. She didn't call my name or pretend she was there to help. She walked around the basement slowly, humming while she moved boxes and opened cupboard doors.

Then her footsteps stopped outside the narrow door.

“You weren't supposed to look in there,” she said.

I backed up against the wall and tightened my grip on Winston's collar.

“What did you do to those women?”

The door handle moved.

“No one has done anything to you yet.”

She pushed against the door, shifting the box slightly across the concrete, but it remained wedged in place. Through the narrow gap, I could see part of her face. One side was still pinned tightly behind her ear, while the skin on the other hung loose around her jaw.

“You don't understand what it feels like,” Diana said.

“To wake up every morning and feel your face slipping.”

The door opened another inch.

“The skin always stretches eventually. That's why what's underneath matters.”

Her hand appeared through the gap. Winston tore free from my grip and lunged. Diana screamed, followed by a wet ripping sound, and the pressure against the door disappeared.

I shoved the box aside and pulled the door open.

Diana had fallen backwards on the concrete with one hand pressed to her jaw. Winston had caught the edge of the skin near her neck. A pale section hung loose above the pearl necklace. Underneath, her skin was red and shiny, covered in old scars. Several small silver pins were still fixed behind her ear.

“You could have made this easier,” she shrieked, but it sounded less like pain and more like irritation.

Winston charged at her again, giving me enough time to run past them and up the stairs. The front door was still open. I ran outside and called for Winston from the garden.

A few seconds later, he came racing through the doorway with Diana close behind him. She stopped under the porch light, one hand holding the loose skin against her neck.

We kept running until we reached a petrol station on the main street. I called the police from there. By the time they searched the house, the room behind the boiler had been cleared.

Claire and Michael returned the following day and denied knowing anything about it. Diana claimed Winston had attacked her after she used the family's emergency key to enter the house because she heard me shouting. Claire and Michael confirmed that they had given her one months earlier. With Diana’s face and neck hidden beneath bandages, there was no way to prove otherwise.

Sophie looked genuinely confused when the officers questioned her. I don't think she ever knew what her parents had agreed to.

There was no medical chair, no equipment and nothing taped to the walls. The police found cleaning products and folded plastic sheeting, but nothing that proved what I had seen.

Winston was taken away while they investigated the attack. Claire told them she no longer felt safe having him around Sophie, so he was rehomed. I tried to find out where he had gone, but nobody would tell me.

Claire called me a week later from an unknown number.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

That was all.

Nearly three months passed before I saw the dog-sitting listing again. It was the same family, the same house and the same amount of money. The application still asks for the sitter's age, medical history and a recent photograph taken in natural light.

One of the listing pictures shows Claire standing in the kitchen beside a woman I don't recognise. She has sharp cheekbones, a narrow jaw and the same shade of red hair. Around her neck is a short pearl necklace.

She looks younger than the Diana I met.

This time, they found the right fit.

It began with a post asking whether anyone else remembered a colour that no longer existed.

The question appeared on a forum about false memories. Most posts concerned old logos or misremembered film quotes. This one was different.

The person who started the thread could not describe it. They only remembered seeing it throughout childhood on train seats, school walls and packaging that now looked grey in every photo.

Within a day, thousands had replied. Some remembered a shade of blue. Others said it was almost black. One person described it as the colour you saw when you pressed your eyes too hard. Nobody could reproduce it. Every example uploaded looked grey to most commenters.

I read the replies for an hour before admitting I remembered it too. It had been the colour of the front door of the house where I grew up.

I could picture it clearly, even if I couldn’t explain what it looked like. It sat strangely in my memory, more like a feeling than something I had seen.

I called Mum and asked when she and Dad had painted the door grey.

“It was always grey,” she said.

“No, it wasn’t.”

I reminded her of the photos Dad took outside the house before school each year.

“The door was grey in those too.”

I went to their house the following evening and searched through the old albums. Mum watched from the hallway, insisting I had confused it with a neighbour’s door.

Then I found it.

I was six, standing between my parents in a red coat. Behind us, the front door was that colour.

“What colour is the door?” I asked.

Mum glanced at it. “Grey.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Her expression changed.

“When you came back,” she said quietly, “you kept asking why we had changed it.”

“What do you mean, when I came back?”

“You vanished when you were six.”

Mum had always said I slipped out while she was cleaning and made it halfway across town before anyone noticed.

Apparently, that was a lie.

“You disappeared from your bedroom,” she said. “The window was locked. Three days later, you were standing outside the front door.”

I waited for her to smile. She did not.

“You knew our names, your teachers and where we kept everything. But you said the house was wrong. You said your bedroom was on the other side and that we had never owned a dog.”

“We did own a dog.”

“Yes, but you said we hadn’t. The girl who disappeared also had a scar here from falling off her bike.” Mum touched my chin. “The girl who came back didn’t.”

“You thought I wasn’t your daughter?”

“You remembered being our daughter. Some details were different. After a few weeks, you stopped mentioning the door.”

She turned the photograph over. The date was three weeks after I had returned.

Above it, in Dad’s handwriting, were the words:

FOUND HER STARING AT THIS PICTURE AT 3:17 AM. SHE INSISTS THE DOOR IS THE WRONG COLOUR.

“We threw away everything connected to those three days,” Mum said. “Your father must have missed this.”

I took the photograph home despite her asking me to leave it.

That night, I posted it in the thread.

Half the commenters insisted the door was grey. The others could see the colour.

One person asked whether I had noticed the girl.

I zoomed in. Someone was standing behind the narrow glass panel beside the door. At first, I thought it was my reflection, but the angle was wrong. She was inside the house, watching my family outside.

She looked about six.

She had my face.

A small scar ran under her chin.

More people shared similar stories. Everyone who could see the colour remembered something nobody else did. A different teacher. A house with one more room than it had now.

Many had also disappeared as children.

Mum came to my apartment the following evening. She made me tear up the photograph and watched me put the pieces in the bin.

Before she left, she held my face between her hands.

“You are my daughter,” she said. “I don’t care where you came from.”

At 3:17 this morning, someone knocked on my front door.

As I approached it, the door changed colour. Not blue. Not black. That colour.

I FaceTimed Mum and switched to the back camera.

“What colour is the door?”

“Grey.”

“It isn’t grey to me.”

Her face crumpled.

Then a woman spoke from the other side. She sounded exactly like me.

“She still can’t see it, can she?”

The woman knocked again.

“Ask her about the scar.”

I kept quiet.

“She knows which one of us disappeared.”

The handle moved once, but the door was locked.

The woman outside knows things I don’t remember. A neighbour who apparently never existed, which cupboard I hid in when Mum tried to take me to the dentist and what Dad said after I broke the kitchen window. Mum confirmed everything.

But she also knows things that happened after I came back. She knew about the argument Dad and I had last Sunday. She described the coat hanging over my chair, although she said it was brown. It is black.

“I don’t know why I know those things,” she said. “You knew things about my life too.”

Mum began crying.

“Do not open that door. You’re my daughter. Your father and I raised you. Do not let her in.”

The woman was quiet for a long time.

Then she said, “I think someone knocked on my door when I was six too.”

I looked at the handle.

“What happened?”

“I opened it.”

Mum told me to move away.

The woman outside stopped knocking twenty minutes ago, but I can still feel her there, waiting, like she knows I’ll open it.

I still don’t know if I belong on this side of the door, or if I’ve been standing in the wrong place all along.

I should have known something was wrong when they offered me three thousand to watch their dog for a week.

Claire said Winston was anxious and needed someone to stay at the house full time while her family attended a wedding in Italy. The application asked for my age, allergies, medical history and a recent photograph taken in natural light. It seemed excessive for a dog-sitting job, but I needed the money badly enough that I filled it in anyway.

Claire lived with her husband, Michael, and their daughter, Sophie, in a large white house at the end of a quiet street. Winston was a German shepherd, and he took a liking to me immediately.

The interview was fairly normal until Claire mentioned their neighbour across the road.

“Her name is Diana,” she said. “She might come over while we're away.”

Michael looked up from his phone. “Don't let her inside.”

Claire glanced at him. “She can be intrusive. That's all.”

Sophie came into the kitchen carrying a half-packed bag.

“Is this about Diana again?”

“Honey, you know Diana can be a little nosy,” Claire said.

Sophie rolled her eyes and left the room. She looked tired of hearing her parents talk about their neighbour.

They offered me the job before I left.

The family flew out the following Monday, and I met Diana less than an hour after I arrived. She was standing at the end of her driveway when I took Winston out for his first walk. She looked around forty, with shoulder length red hair, unusually smooth skin and a short pearl necklace that looked expensive.

“You're the new one,” she said.

When I stopped, she added, “The new dog sitter.”

Winston stood close to my legs and began growling. Diana ignored him and looked at my face for long enough that I started to feel uncomfortable.

“You have lovely skin.”

I laughed because I didn't know how else to respond.

“Complexion,” she corrected. “That's what I meant.”

Winston pulled at the lead, so I let him drag me further down the street.

After that, Diana always seemed to be outside when I was. She watered her plants when I took Winston out in the morning and checked her mailbox whenever I returned from the store. Once, I looked across the street and saw her watching the house through an upstairs window.

Winston reacted to her every time. Claire had described him as anxious, but he seemed confident around everyone else. He barked at delivery vans and passing cyclists, but he never tried to hide from them. Whenever Diana came near us, he pressed himself against my legs and tried to pull me back towards the house.

By the third day, I had started checking whether she was outside before taking Winston for a walk.

That afternoon, I found her in one of the family's framed photographs. At least, I thought it was her. The picture showed Claire and Michael standing beside a woman with the same dark red hair and pearl necklace. But her face was completely different. She looked older, with deep wrinkles around her eyes, a wide nose and thin lips. The date written on the back was from ten years earlier.

It was easy to assume she might've been a relative. Then I found another photograph taken a few years later. The woman in that one had a round face and fuller lips, but she had the same hair and wore the same pearls.

There were five photographs in total, each featuring a woman I believed to be Diana. In every image, her face was different, yet her hair and necklace remained the same.

I tried to convince myself that they were members of the same family, or that Diana had undergone extensive plastic surgery over the years. Neither explanation felt quite right. Something about the photos made me feel as though I was missing something obvious.

I was still holding one of them when movement across the street caught my attention. Diana was standing in front of her upstairs window with the curtains open. The room behind her was brightly lit, and she was facing a mirror with both hands pressed against her cheeks.

At first, I thought she was applying makeup. Then she pinched the skin near her right temple and pulled it backwards. Her cheek tightened immediately. The lines around her mouth disappeared, and the skin under her eye smoothed out. She kept it stretched with one hand while reaching towards the table with the other. She picked up something small and silver that looked like a dressmaker's pin and pushed it into the skin behind her ear.

I stepped closer to the window without thinking about what I was doing.

Diana turned her head and began working on the other side of her face. That half was still loose. The skin under her eye sagged, and the side of her mouth hung low enough to expose part of her gums. One side of her face looked smooth and tight. The other looked as though it was slowly slipping downwards.

Then she looked down and locked eyes with me.

Neither of us moved.

Diana smiled, but only the tightened side of her face lifted properly, the other side following a moment later.

I watched as she lowered her hands, picked up her coat and walked out of the room.

Winston started barking before she reached the garden. I ran to lock the front door and close the curtains, then backed into the hallway as the doorbell rang.

“I know you saw me,” Diana called.

Winston continued growling and barking while I took out my phone and called Claire. She answered almost immediately.

“Diana's outside,” I said.

“Is the door locked?”

“Yes. I found pictures of her in the house. They all have different faces.”

Claire went quiet.

“Claire?”

“Take Winston and leave through the back.”

“What is she?”

“I don't know.”

The doorbell rang again. When Claire spoke, her voice was much quieter.

“She chose Sophie first.”

I didn't understand what she meant.

“What?”

“She said she wouldn't touch our daughter if we found someone else.”

For a few seconds, I could only listen to Winston barking at the front door while the doorbell rang incessantly.

“You chose me?”

“We didn't have a choice.”

“You sent her my photograph.”

Claire didn't answer.

“The medical questions. My allergies. You gave her all of it, didn't you?”

“She told us what she needed.”

I felt sick.

“How many people have you done this to?”

Claire ended the call.

I grabbed Winston's lead and ran towards the kitchen, but the back door wouldn't open. I twisted the lock again and pulled hard enough to shake the frame, but it didn't move.

Winston left my side and began scratching at the basement door. He whined, looked back at me and scratched again.

I opened drawers, searching for the key or anything I could use to force the back door. At the back of the final drawer, under a pile of old takeaway menus, I found a silver key with a strip of tape wrapped around it.

BASEMENT.

Winston scratched at the basement door again. Only then did I realise the doorbell had stopped. The house had gone completely quiet.

Diana knew I couldn't leave through the back. I imagined her standing outside, waiting for me to panic enough to open the front door, and suddenly the kitchen felt far too exposed.

Winston scratched at the basement door again. I didn't know whether he was warning me away from it or telling me to go inside, but I couldn't think of anywhere else to hide.

The basement key turned easily. I pulled Winston inside and locked the door behind us.

Most of the basement looked normal. There were boxes, old furniture and cleaning supplies stacked against the walls. I moved further into the room, searching for somewhere we could stay hidden. Then Winston began growling at a narrow door behind the boiler.

It was partly concealed by a stack of cardboard boxes. I moved them aside as quietly as I could and pressed my ear against the door.

I couldn't hear anything inside.

Winston's growl deepened.

I told myself it might be a better hiding place. If Diana managed to find a way into the basement, she might not notice the second door.

The door pushed open easily. There was a reclining medical chair inside. Two lamps had been positioned above it, and sheets of clear plastic covered the floor. A metal cart beside the chair held gloves, gauze, saline and scalpels of various sizes.

My application photograph was taped to the wall. Red lines had been drawn around my eyes, jaw and hairline. Someone had written three short notes beside it.

**Good elasticity.**

**Minimal scarring.**

**Close enough.**

Other applications had been pinned beneath mine. They were all from women around my age, and some had been crossed out.

**Too much sun damage.**

**Wrong bone structure.**

**Poor match around the eyes.**

There were dates written beside several of the photographs. Some went back years.

Claire and Michael had not chosen me because they were desperate parents making one terrible decision.

They had done this before.

Winston turned towards the basement stairs and began barking. A moment later, the front door opened upstairs.

Diana had a key to the house.

She could have entered whenever she wanted. The doorbell, the waiting and the repeated demands for me to let her inside had all been part of some game.

I heard her footsteps cross the kitchen above me and stop outside the basement door. The handle turned once, but the door remained locked.

“I know what you found,” she said.

A key slid into the lock from the other side. But she didn't turn it immediately. Instead, she stood there in silence while Winston barked and strained against my grip.

“You were easier to choose than the others,” Diana said. “Claire told me how badly you needed the money.”

The key turned slowly.

I pulled Winston into the hidden room and closed the door behind us. There was no lock, so I dragged a heavy box across the floor and wedged it firmly in place.

Diana's footsteps descended the stairs one at a time.

She didn't call my name or pretend she was there to help. She walked around the basement slowly, humming while she moved boxes and opened cupboard doors.

Then her footsteps stopped outside the narrow door.

“You weren't supposed to look in there,” she said.

I backed up against the wall and tightened my grip on Winston's collar.

“What did you do to those women?”

The door handle moved.

“No one has done anything to you yet.”

She pushed against the door, shifting the box slightly across the concrete, but it remained wedged in place.

Through the narrow gap, I could see part of her face. One side was still pinned tightly behind her ear, while the skin on the other hung loose around her jaw.

“You don't understand what it feels like,” Diana said. “To wake up every morning and feel your face slipping.”

The door opened another inch.

“The skin always stretches eventually. That's why what's underneath matters.”

Her hand appeared through the gap. Winston tore free from my grip and lunged. Diana screamed, followed by a wet ripping sound, and the pressure against the door disappeared.

I shoved the box aside and pulled the door open.

Diana had fallen backwards on the concrete with one hand pressed to her jaw. Winston had caught the edge of the skin near her neck. A pale section hung loose above the pearl necklace. Underneath, her skin was red and shiny, covered in old scars. Several small silver pins were still fixed behind her ear.

She shrieked, but it sounded less like pain and more like irritation.

“You could have made this easier,” she said.

Winston charged at her again, giving me enough time to run past them and up the stairs. The front door was still open. I ran outside and called for Winston from the garden.

A few seconds later, he came racing through the doorway with Diana close behind him. She stopped under the porch light, one hand holding the loose skin against her neck.

We kept running until we reached a petrol station on the main street. I called the police from there. By the time they searched the house, the room behind the boiler had been cleared.

Claire and Michael returned the following day and denied knowing anything about it. Diana claimed Winston had attacked her after she used the family's emergency key to enter the house because she heard me shouting. Claire and Michael confirmed that they had given her one months earlier. With Diana’s face and neck hidden beneath bandages, there was no way to prove otherwise.

Sophie looked genuinely confused when the officers questioned her. I don't think she ever knew what her parents had agreed to.

There was no medical chair, no equipment and nothing taped to the walls. The police found cleaning products and folded plastic sheeting, but nothing that proved what I had seen.

Winston was taken away while they investigated the attack. Claire told them she no longer felt safe having him around Sophie, so he was rehomed. I tried to find out where he had gone, but nobody would tell me.

Claire called me a week later from an unknown number.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

That was all.

Nearly three months passed before I saw the dog-sitting listing again. It was the same family, the same house and the same amount of money. The application still asks for the sitter's age, medical history and a recent photograph taken in natural light.

One of the listing pictures shows Claire standing in the kitchen beside a woman I don't recognise. She has sharp cheekbones, a narrow jaw and the same shade of red hair.

Around her neck is a short pearl necklace.

She looks younger than the Diana I met.

This time, they found the right fit.

I found the first email in my spam folder last Thursday.

The sender was me. Or, more accurately, it was an email address I had made when I was nine, back when my entire personality could be reduced to kittens, the number seven and whether “princess” was already taken.

The message contained only one word.

Hello.

I assumed the account had been hacked, deleted the email and searched the address to see if there were more. There were hundreds, with one arriving every day for just over six months. The first few were harmless enough.

Hi.

Are you still here? Do you check this?

Write back if you can.

Then they became more specific. They mentioned my new hair colour, the way I still bit my nails when I read and the cheap cereal I always bought. The most recent message said I had looked tired on the bus.

I lived alone, and nobody had access to my apartment except my mother, who lived forty minutes away. I blocked the email address, then checked the door, the windows and every room as a creeping paranoia set in. I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone might be watching me.

The next one came to my work email. The subject was Please Open, and beneath a short message telling me to go home was a photo.

It showed my front door, taken from the hallway outside my apartment. My black doormat was visible, along with the fresh scratch beside the lock where I had caught the paint with my keys the week before.

I called the police. They searched my apartment and the rest of the building but found no signs of forced entry, no hidden cameras and nobody waiting in the stairwell. One of the officers told me to save every message and advised me to stay somewhere else that night.

I went to my mother’s house that evening. She made up the sofa for me with a pillow and blanket, since my old bedroom had been used for storage for years. The walls were still pale yellow, but the bed, desk and old computer were long gone.

Later, after she went to bed, curiosity got the better of me and I tried logging into the old account on my laptop. The password hint was still there, favourite toy + birthday. I knew the answer straight away.

The inbox was mostly dead, but the sent folder contained hundreds of messages, all addressed to the account itself. Most were exactly the sort of things I remembered writing as a child.

Dear future me, do you still like dolphins?

Dear future me, are we famous?

Dear future me, do we have a cat?

Then I found one I did not remember.

Dear future me, please don’t forget me.

A reply had been sent from the same account two years after I stopped using it.

You forgot me anyway.

More followed. They asked why I no longer answered and accused me of changing our room and giving away our toys. As the spelling mistakes gradually disappeared, the messages became angrier.

On the day I moved away for university, the account had written:

You left me here.

On the day I cut my hair short, it had sent another message:

That was mine.

The drafts folder was empty, but there was one scheduled email waiting to be sent at 3:12 am. I glanced at the time. It was already 3:09.

The subject was You’ve Got Mail. The body contained five words:

I knew you’d come home. 

An attachment had been added. It showed a pale yellow wall, an old white desk and the computer my mother had thrown away when I was fourteen. At the edge of the picture, a small hand rested on the keyboard.

At 3:10, I heard typing upstairs.

The sound was slow at first, each key pressed separately. Then the rhythm grew faster, followed by the bright email notification chime I hadn’t heard since childhood.

My phone buzzed. The scheduled message had been sent.

I should have woken my mother, but instead I walked upstairs. The landing appeared longer than I remembered, and blue light spilled from under my old bedroom door. It was no longer the white door my mother had installed after redecorating. The original door had returned, complete with faded sticker marks and the wooden plaque that used to have my name written across it in purple bubble letters.

Now it said Future Me.

The typing stopped as I approached. A child’s voice whispered from inside, so familiar that I recognised it before I understood why.

“Did you get it?”

My phone buzzed again.

Open the door. I want to see what you did with my life.

I tried to wake my mother, but her bedroom door wouldn’t open. When I called the police, the line connected only to play the same cheerful email chime over and over again.

The blue light beneath my old bedroom door grew brighter, and the typing resumed. I stayed on the landing, listening until the house suddenly fell quiet.

A moment later, my phone buzzed.

There was a new email.

The subject line read:

Hello.