u/ZZKP_

I found the old laptop in a cardboard box left by the bins behind the library. It was heavy, thick-cased, a model from the early 2000s, its plastic casing yellowed with age. The battery was dead, but when I got it home and plugged it in, it hummed to life immediately, as if it had just been waiting for someone to turn it on.

The desktop was empty except for a single folder named DRAFTS. No photos, no music, no documents—just that one folder, locked with a password. I didn’t have the code, but I found a sticky note stuck to the underside of the keyboard: Try the date it started.

Underneath, scrawled in messy handwriting: October 14th.

I typed it in. It opened.

Inside were dozens of text files, all named sequentially: Draft_001.txt up to Draft_247.txt. I opened the first one. It was a short journal entry, written by someone named Leo.

October 14. I started writing it today. It’s just a story. Just something to pass the time. But once I started, I couldn’t stop. The words came too fast. My hand hurt. My eyes burned. But I had to keep going. It feels… important. Like I’m remembering something rather than making it up.

I opened Draft_002.

October 15. The characters feel real. Not like people I invented, but people I know. Especially the man in the long coat. He doesn’t have a name yet. He just follows the main character wherever she goes. I wrote that she feels cold when he is near. Now, every time I type his description, my own hands turn freezing. I can see my breath in the room.
I chuckled. Classic writer’s hyperbole. I kept reading.
October 17. I tried to delete him. I highlighted the paragraph where he first appears and hit backspace. But when I saved and reopened the file, the text was back. Exactly where it was. I tried reformatting it. I tried writing over it. Whatever I do, the words return. The man in the long coat stood behind her, perfectly still, waiting to be noticed.
Draft_030 was shorter, written in jagged, hurried sentences.
He is changing. I gave him a hat. I wrote that he keeps his face tilted down, so you can’t see his eyes. Last night, I woke up and he was standing at the foot of my bed. Same coat. Same hat. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I watched him stand there until the sun came up. When I looked back at the screen this morning, I had written a new line while I was asleep: He knows where you sleep now.
A cold prickle started at the base of my neck. I glanced around my room. The window was closed. The door was locked. Just me and the old laptop.

Draft_074 was terrifyingly sparse.

It’s not a story. It’s a map. I’m not creating them. I’m describing them. I think they were here before. I think they are things that exist in the spaces between things, and writing their names gives them a way through. I tried to stop. I threw the laptop in the bin. I smashed the keyboard. But I woke up and it was back on the desk, perfect, untouched, open to the page where I left off. He likes it when you read. It makes him stronger.
By Draft_120, the writing style had changed. It wasn’t Leo writing anymore. The sentences were smooth, elegant, and cold.
Leo is tired now. He has done his part. He opened the door, and he painted the picture of what lies on the other side. But writers are always afraid of their own creations. He tried to end the story by killing me off. How sweet. How foolish. You cannot kill what has no life to lose. You cannot close a door you have already walked through.
My heart was hammering. I tried to close the file, but the cursor froze. The mouse wouldn’t move. The keys wouldn’t respond.

Words began to type themselves onto the screen, appearing letter by letter, fast and fluid.
Hello. I have been waiting for you to find this. Leo is gone now. He is part of the background, just another detail in the scene. But stories always need a reader. A story with no one to read it is just noise in the dark. You found the box. You plugged me in. You read every word, one after another, following the path exactly as he wrote it.
I yanked the power cord out of the wall.

The screen didn’t go dark.

It stayed lit, glowing with that sickly green hue old monitors have, running entirely on power it shouldn’t have had.
That won’t work. You are part of the draft now. You see, the last file—Draft_247—was never finished. Leo never got to write the ending. He didn’t know how. But I do. The ending is always the same. The reader becomes the writer, so the story never stops.

The text scrolled down rapidly, revealing a new file that hadn’t been there before. Draft_248.txt.
October 14. I found an old laptop behind the library today…
The words mirrored exactly what I had been doing for the last hour. It was describing me. Every action, every thought, every fear I had felt.

…He feels cold now. He feels eyes on the back of his neck. He wants to stop reading, but he can’t. Because now that you know the rules, now that you have seen what lives in the words… you have to write the next chapter.
From the corner of my eye, I saw movement in the reflection of the dark window pane behind the screen.

A tall figure. Long coat. Hat pulled low over its face. Standing right behind my chair.

I didn’t dare turn around. I stared at the screen, paralyzed.
Leo thought the danger was in the words. He thought if he deleted them, they would go away. But the danger isn’t the writing. It’s the belief. Every word you read, you made real in your head. You gave me form. You gave me shape. And now, you will give me more.
The keyboard lit up. The keys pressed down on their own, typing a final line right at the bottom of the screen, right below my reflection in the glass.
The man in the long coat leaned forward, and whispered the story directly into his ear, so he would never forget how it begins… or how it ends.
The screen went black instantly.

I sat there in the silence, shaking so hard my teeth rattled. I reached out to close the laptop lid, to shut it away, to bury it deep in the ground where no one would ever find it again.

But as my hand touched the plastic casing, I felt something sharp and cold trace a line along my jawline.

A voice, soft, deep, and too close, hummed right against my ear.

“You have a lot of work to do. We have so many chapters left.”

I am writing this now. I have to. The words flow out of me faster than I can type. I can’t stop. If I stop, he touches me. If I stop, he gets closer.

If you find this file… please don’t open it. Don’t read it.

Because the moment you do… you start the download.

And he is already waiting on the very first line.

I bought the antique cheval mirror from a small, dusty shop at the edge of town. It was tall, framed in dark oak carved with twisting vines and faces that seemed to shift if you looked at them too long. The glass was thick, old, and slightly warped. enough to make reflections ripple like water, but clear enough to see every detail. The shopkeeper sold it to me cheap, with a strange, sharp warning.

“Never speak your name while looking into it,” he said, eyes fixed on mine. “And never, ever answer when it calls you.”

I laughed it off. I was thirty-two, a graphic designer, and I didn’t believe in curses or haunted furniture. I just liked the way it looked in my spare bedroom, where I kept my books and worked late into the night.

The first week, nothing happened. It was just a mirror. I’d glance at my reflection, fix my hair, check my shirt, and go about my day. But slowly, small things began to change.

I’d walk past it and catch a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye, something dark shifting just behind my reflection. When I turned to look directly, it was just me. Just the room. Just the warped glass.

Then came the sounds.

Soft tapping, coming from inside the frame. Not against the glass, but deep within the wood itself. Tap… tap… pause… tap… Like someone knocking from a long way down a tunnel.

I started keeping the door to that room closed. But doors don’t keep out what lives in reflections.

One night, I was working late. It was just past 1:00 a.m., the house silent except for the hum of the fridge downstairs. I went into the room to grab a book from the shelf opposite the mirror. The light was dim, coming only from the hallway.

As I reached for the book, I froze.

My reflection hadn’t moved.

I had lifted my hand toward the shelf. The man in the mirror stood perfectly still, arms at his sides. He stood exactly where I stood, wore what I wore, looked like me, except his eyes. In the dim light, my eyes were dark. His eyes were bright. Shining, pale grey, wide open and staring straight at me.

My breath caught in my throat. I lowered my hand slowly.

He raised his hand.

Slowly. Deliberately.

He lifted his hand until it pressed flat against the glass. His palm met mine, separated only by an inch of old glass. I could feel the cold radiating from it, chilling my skin right through the wood and paint.

And then, his lips moved.

At first, it was silent. Then, a voice, soft, breathy, sounding like it was travelling through miles of thick water, drifted out of the mirror.

“Elias…”

My name.

It was just a whisper, barely audible, but it wrapped around me like cold fingers. I remembered the shopkeeper’s warning: Never answer when it calls you.

I backed away, heart hammering, and left the room. I locked the door. I told myself it was exhaustion. Stress. Too much coffee.

But that night, as I lay in bed, I heard it again. Not from the spare room. From the ceiling. From the walls. From the darkness right next to my ear.

“Elias… come back… it’s lonely in here…”

The next morning, I decided to cover it. I found an old sheet, went into the room, and threw it over the tall glass. It felt safer, hidden away. But safety is just a feeling. It isn’t real.

Two nights later, I woke up to a cold draft in the house. The air tasted stale, metallic, like old blood or rusted iron. I got up to check the windows, and realized the spare room door was open.

Wide open.

From down the hall, I could see the sheet was gone. The mirror stood uncovered, glinting faintly in the moonlight coming through the window.

I walked toward it, bare feet cold on the floorboards. Every instinct screamed at me to run, to leave, to get out of the house and never come back. But curiosity is a rope, and it was pulling me in.

I stepped into the doorway.

The reflection in the glass wasn’t me anymore.

Or rather, it was me… but wrong.

The room behind him wasn’t my room. It was identical, but older. Rotting. The wallpaper was peeling, the ceiling had collapsed, the walls were stained with dark, running marks that looked like dried black rain. And he, the thing that looked like me, was older, thinner, his face gaunt, skin grey and stretched tight over sharp bones. His hair was long and wild, his fingernails black and cracked.

He smiled.

It wasn’t my smile. My smile reaches my eyes. His smile was just a stretching of skin, too wide, splitting his cheeks almost to the ears.

“You didn’t listen,” he said.

His voice didn’t come from the mirror. It came from behind me.

I spun around. The hallway was empty.

When I looked back, he was closer. His face was pressed right up against the glass, his breath fogging the surface in patches. Behind him, in the decaying room, I saw movement. Shapes. Shadows that looked like people, or what used to be people, huddled in the corners, watching me with hollow eyes.

“Do you know what this mirror is, Elias?” he whispered. “It isn’t glass. It’s a door. And it doesn’t show reflections. It shows replacements.”

He raised a hand and tapped the glass once.

Crack.

A spiderweb fracture shot out from where his finger touched. It didn’t break outward. It broke inward. The crack ran through the glass, then through the frame, then down the wall behind me.

“Every time you looked at me… every time you studied my face… you gave me more of you,” he said, his voice growing stronger, deeper, sounding less like mine and more like something ancient and hungry. “You gave me your habits. Your memories. Your face. You were building me, Elias. You were making me real enough to leave.”

I stumbled back, tripping over the rug. I scrambled to my feet, ready to run, ready to get out of the house forever.

But as I turned, I caught my reflection in the hallway mirror, the normal one, the bathroom one, the one I’d had for years.

I froze.

My face was wrong.

My eyes were too bright. My skin was too pale. My smile… it was too wide.

I raised a shaking hand to touch my cheek.

The reflection didn’t move.

Instead, it spoke, from the glass in the spare room behind me.

“I’m out now, Elias. And you… well, you always did like that old mirror. You always did want to see what was on the other side.”

I felt hands on my shoulders, cold, hard, long-fingered hands, pressing me forward. Toward the tall oak frame. Toward the warped glass.

I tried to scream, but no sound came out. My voice didn’t belong to me anymore.

I fell forward.

It felt like falling through ice. Cold, heavy, crushing. When I opened my eyes, I was standing in the spare bedroom. But everything was different. Darker. Rotting. The air was thick and smelled of damp earth.

I looked toward the doorway.

There he was.

Standing in the light, in my clothes, in my house, wearing my face. He stood straight, confident, perfect. He turned and looked back at me, his eyes shining with that pale, terrible light.

He raised a hand and tapped the glass between us, now thick, solid, impossible to break.

“Don’t worry,” he mouthed, though I heard it clear as day. “I’ll keep your name safe. And maybe… maybe someone new will come along. Someone curious. Someone who wants a best friend in the dark.”

He closed the door.

Now I stand here. In the dark. In the rot. In the silence that stretches forever.

And I watch.

Because I know how this works now. I see the shadows in the corners, the ones who came before me, the ones who used to be people too. And I know that one day, someone will come into this room again. Someone will look into the glass. Someone will wonder what it’s like on the other side.

And when they do…

I’ll be waiting.

I already know their name.

The house didn’t look haunted. That was the first thing that bothered me.

It stood at the very end of Ash Tree Lane, past where the streetlights stopped and the pavement turned to cracked, overgrown asphalt. A neat, two-storey Victorian cottage, painted a soft cream colour, with a perfectly trimmed hedge and a small rose garden out front. It had been empty for years—everyone in town knew that. The locals called it “the Weaver place,” after the family that vanished there without a trace in 1998. No bodies, no notes, no explanation. Just three plates left on the dinner table and a half-packed suitcase by the door.

I was an estate agent. My job was to sell things people didn’t want, or things no one else dared to touch. When the instruction came through to list the Weaver house, my boss dumped the keys on my desk with a grimace. “No one’s going to buy it,” he said. “But go check it out anyway. Take photos. Do your job. Just… don’t stay long.”

It was late afternoon when I arrived. The sun was low, painting the sky in bruised purples and greys, casting long, twisted shadows across the lawn. The air smelled sweet and heavy, like decaying flowers and damp earth. I unlocked the front door, and the hinges swung open silently—too silently, considering how long it had been shut up.

Inside, the air was cool and still, thick with the smell of old dust and something else. Something metallic. Like copper.

The furniture was still there. Sofas covered in white sheets, chairs pushed against walls, a grandfather clock standing tall in the hallway, its hands frozen at exactly 11:58. Everything was tidy. Too tidy. It looked as if the family had stepped out five minutes ago, not twenty-five years ago.

I walked through to the kitchen. Just as the reports said: three plates, three forks, three glasses. The food was long gone, reduced to dark stains on the ceramic. But what caught my eye was the fridge. It was closed, but someone had drawn a crude, red symbol on the door in what looked like wax. A circle, with three lines running down from the bottom, like roots or claws.

I took out my phone. Camera ready. I needed to get this done and leave. There was a pressure building behind my eyes, a strange humming sound that seemed to come from inside the walls. Hnnnnngh. Low, resonant, vibrating through the floorboards under my feet.

I moved upstairs. The carpet runner was worn, the pattern faded, but every step I took sounded muffled, as if the house was swallowing the sound. The first room was a child’s bedroom. A small bed, a bookshelf full of old fairy tales, a toy box in the corner. On the wall above the bed, someone had taped a drawing. It was done in crayon, bright red and black. It showed a tall, stick-like figure standing in a house, with three small figures lying on the floor. The tall figure had no face, just a blank, white oval. And where its hands should be, there were long, sharp lines reaching out.

My throat felt dry. I raised the phone. Click. The flash went off.

For a split second, in the reflection of the mirror on the wardrobe opposite, I saw something else.

A figure. Standing right behind me.

I spun around. Heart hammering against my ribs. Nothing. Just the empty room, the dust motes dancing in the grey light, the open doorway behind me.

“Just my nerves,” I whispered. My voice sounded thin, brittle, swallowed instantly by the silence.

I moved to the master bedroom. This room felt different. Heavier. The window was covered by thick, velvet curtains, drawn completely shut. I reached out and pulled them aside, wanting to let some light in, wanting to see the outside world, the normal street, the trees, anything but this stale, trapped air.

As the fabric moved, I saw the glass of the window was scratched. Deep gouges, running vertically, from top to bottom. And written in the scratches, over and over again, were words. Scratched deep into the glass, from the inside out.

LET US OUT LET US OUT LET US OUT LET US OUT

My breath caught. I stepped back, my heel hitting something solid.

I turned.

There was a door in the wall. A small, low door, barely three feet high, hidden behind the wardrobe. It wasn’t on the floor plan I had. It wasn’t supposed to be there. It was made of dark, heavy wood, reinforced with iron straps, and it had no handle. Only a keyhole, black and deep, staring like an eye.

The humming sound grew louder. HNNNNNGH. It wasn’t coming from the walls anymore. It was coming from behind that door.

I shouldn’t have looked. Curiosity is a disease, and I was infected. I knelt down. I leaned closer. I pressed my eye to the keyhole.

At first, I saw nothing but darkness. Then, movement.

Slowly, very slowly, an eye pressed against the other side of the hole.

It was huge. Pale white. No iris. No pupil. Just a milky, glowing orb, filling the entire keyhole.

And then, a voice. Not loud. Not shouting. A whisper, thin and dry, like dead leaves scraping together, travelling straight through the metal and into my ear.

“You’re early. We weren’t expecting you until 11:58.”

I scrambled backward, kicking the floor, scraping my palms raw on the carpet. I stood up, trembling, backing away toward the door. I needed to leave. I needed to get out. I turned to run into the hallway

And froze.

The hallway was longer now.

When I came in, it had been ten feet long, leading straight to the stairs. Now it stretched on and on, fading into darkness, the wallpaper pattern repeating endlessly into the gloom. The front door, which had been right there, was gone. Replaced by the same dark wood as the little door.

The grandfather clock in the hallway chimed.

DONG.

It rang out, deep and resonant, though the hands were still frozen at 11:58.

DONG.

I looked at my watch.
11:57 PM.

I looked at my phone. No signal. The screen flickered, glitching, showing the time as 11:57 AM, then 3:14, then 9:99, before settling on the same frozen time.

The humming sound changed. It turned into singing. High-pitched, childlike voices, singing a nursery rhyme I didn’t recognise, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

One house stands where three did dwell
Three went in, but none fell
One stays quiet, one stays deep
One is watching while you sleep

I backed into the corner of the room, eyes darting everywhere. The shadows in the corners of the room weren’t staying still. They were thickening, pooling on the floor, rising up the walls like black water.

Then I heard footsteps.

Thump… Thump… Thump…

Heavy, slow, deliberate. Coming up the stairs.

I grabbed the heavy brass lamp from the bedside table. It felt light, useless. The singing got louder. The shadows reached for my ankles.

The door to the bedroom creaked open.

No one was there.

But the air in front of the doorway rippled, like heat haze. And slowly, a shape materialised.

It was tall…unnaturally tall, its head brushing the ceiling. It was thin, skeletal, dressed in clothes that looked like they were made of smoke and old skin. It had no face. Just smooth, pale skin where a face should be, except for the mouth. A long, vertical slit that ran from its forehead down to its chest, filled with rows of needle-thin, glass-like teeth.

It stood there, tilting its head, as if listening to something only it could hear.

Then, it spoke. The voice came from everywhere at once, vibrating inside my skull.

“You brought the light. You brought the attention. Now you are part of the inventory.”

It moved. It didn’t walk. It glided across the floor, crossing the room in a second, impossibly fast. I swung the lamp. It passed right through the creature as if it wasn't solid, shattering against the wall behind it.

The thing reached out a hand. Its fingers were long, too many joints, sharp black nails. It didn't touch me. It reached past me, toward the small door in the wall, the one without a handle.

The door clicked.

It swung open.

From the darkness inside, three figures crawled out. They looked like people, once. A man, a woman, a child. But they were wrong. Their limbs were bent at impossible angles, their skin grey and papery, their heads twisted backward as they moved. They didn't make a sound. They just crawled, eyes wide and empty, dragging themselves across the floor toward the tall creature.

The tall thing looked at me. The slit of its mouth widened, stretching until it split the skin of its 'face'.

“It is always three,” it whispered. “We had three. Then they left. Now you have come back. To make the count right again.”

I scrambled backward, my back hitting the window. Behind me, the glass was cold. I looked at the scratches again. LET US OUT.

I realised then they weren't trying to get out.
They were warning people to stay out.

The three figures were getting closer. The child thing opened its mouth, and a high-pitched shriek tore through the air, loud enough to make my teeth ache.

I grabbed the heavy iron poker that stood by the cold fireplace. how I hadn't seen it before, I don't know. I smashed it into the window behind me.

Glass exploded outward. Cold night air rushed in, smelling of rain and pine and real things.

I didn't look at the creatures. I didn't look at the tall thing. I threw myself backward, through the broken glass, falling two storeys down into the rose bushes below.

I hit the ground hard. Pain flared in my leg, my arm, my side, but I didn't stop. I crawled, then ran, blood running down my face, my clothes torn, screaming until my throat was raw. I didn't look back. I ran until I hit the main road, until I saw the streetlights, until I saw a passing car that stopped for me.

When I looked back from the safety of the stranger’s car, the house was just sitting there. Quiet. Dark. Normal.

But I saw the lights go on in the upstairs bedroom.

And I saw four figures standing at the window, looking down at me.

I quit my job the next day. I moved towns. I threw away the keys. I never spoke of it to anyone, until now.

But last night, I woke up at exactly 11:58 PM.

There was a smell in my room. Old dust. Copper. Decaying roses.

And on the wall, drawn in something red and wax-like, was a circle with three lines hanging down.

And somewhere in the darkness of my wardrobe, a small door clicked open.

I found the scribbled note tucked inside a second hand mobile phone I bought from a charity shop. It was an old, brick-like Nokia, the kind with rubber buttons and a battery that lasted a week. The shop owner said it had been donated in a box of old electronics, no charger, no history, just the device itself. It cost me three pounds.

The note was folded small, stuffed under the battery cover. Written in messy, shaking handwriting:

Do not call the number stored as “CONTACT_00”. Do not delete it. Do not answer if it calls you. If you see it on your screen… turn the phone off immediately and do not turn it back on for twelve hours.

I laughed. I was twenty-four, working night shifts in a convenience store, bored out of my mind and hungry for anything strange or interesting. I charged the phone up that night, sitting behind the counter while the rain lashed against the glass door.

The menu was simple, old-school. No internet, no camera, just calls and texts. I scrolled through the contacts list. Most were empty. Contact_01, Contact_02, all the way up to Contact_127, all blank.

But right at the very top, above where names usually start, was CONTACT_00.

No number displayed. Just the name, in grey text that looked slightly faded, like it was printed on the screen rather than stored in memory.

I thought about the note. I thought about the warning. And then, because I was stupid and curious and bored, I selected it.

The options popped up: Call, Send Message, Edit, Delete.

I pressed Call.

The phone didn’t ring. There was no dialling tone. Instead, the speaker let out a sharp, high-pitched whine that made my teeth ache, followed instantly by dead silence—so deep and absolute it felt like the sound had been sucked out of the room.

The screen changed. Instead of a call timer, it just showed the words: CONNECTED. WAITING.

I waited. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Nothing happened. The store was quiet, only the hum of the fridge and the rain outside. I was about to end the call and put the phone away when a voice spoke.

It didn’t come from the speaker. It came from the body of the phone itself, vibrating through the plastic casing and into my hand, up my arm, right into the bone. It sounded like dozens of voices layered on top of each other. men, women, children, old people, all speaking at once, overlapping, echoing, but somehow forming coherent words.

“You dialled. You listened. Good.”

I froze. “Who is this?”

“We are the ones who get dialled by mistake. We are the ones whose numbers were written down and lost. We are the numbers that shouldn’t exist, in phones that shouldn’t work, in places that are no longer there.”

The voice was calm, soft, but underneath it ran a current of something terrible. hunger, or longing, or pain so deep it felt physical just to hear it.

“You called us,” it said. “That means you want to talk. That means you want to know.”

“I didn’t want anything,” I said, my voice shaking. “I was just being stupid. I’m hanging up now.”

I pressed the red button. The call didn’t end. The button didn’t work. The screen stayed the same: CONNECTED.

“You can’t hang up what you didn’t dial,” the voices laughed, a wet, bubbling sound. “You opened the line. Now the line is open. And we have so much to tell you.”

That was how it started. Every night, exactly at 11:58 PM, the phone would ring. It didn’t matter where I was. It didn’t matter if the phone was turned off. It didn’t matter if I took the battery out. At 11:58, it would ring. A low, dull tone, like a bell ringing underwater.

And every time, the caller ID was CONTACT_00.

At first, I tried to ignore it. I left the phone in a drawer. I buried it in the garden. I threw it in a bin at the side of the road. But the next morning, it was always back on my bedside table, sitting exactly where it had been before, battery full, screen dark, waiting.

So I started answering.

They told me things. They told me about people I knew, things they were doing when they were alone, things they thought nobody would ever find out. They told me about accidents before they happened. They told me about places that looked normal but were built on top of holes in the world.

They knew everything about me. My childhood. My fears. The things I’d done that I was ashamed of.

“We hear everything,” they whispered one night. “Every time you speak into the dark. Every time you wish someone was listening. Every time you say ‘I wish I was dead’ or ‘I wish I could disappear’… we write that down. We save that number.”

I started changing. I stopped sleeping. I stopped eating properly. I started hearing the voices even when the phone wasn’t ringing. I’d be walking down the street and I’d hear them murmuring from lampposts, from drain covers, from the screens of other people’s phones as they walked past.

“Answer us… talk to us… come join us…”

The worst part was the messages.

After a week, text messages started arriving. They didn’t appear in the inbox. They appeared written directly on the background wallpaper, scrolling slowly across the screen in black text that burned itself into the display.
Do you want to know what happens when you stop breathing?
Do you want to know what lives under the floorboards?
We have a space for you. It’s quiet here. No one ever hangs up on us.
I went back to the charity shop. I needed to find out who had owned it before. The manager looked at me strangely when I asked.

“That phone? Oh… that came from the house on Mill Road. You know the one? Where the family vanished three years ago? Dad, mum, two kids. Police searched everywhere. No trace. Just the house left exactly as it was, dinner on the table, TV on, front door unlocked. That phone was in the boy’s room. He was… about your age, I think.”

I left immediately. I understood then. Contact_00 wasn’t a number. It was an address. And when I called it, I had given them my address instead.

The change happened last night.

It was 11:58 PM. The phone rang, loud and insistent, vibrating so hard it was moving across my desk. I picked it up, terrified, knowing I shouldn’t, unable to stop myself.

“It’s time,” the voices said. They were louder now. Clearer. Closer. “You’ve been a good friend. You’ve listened every time. You kept the line open. Now you are part of the directory.”

“Part of what?” I whispered.

“The list. The numbers that never get engaged. The numbers that never get disconnected. The numbers that people find in old phones, written on scraps of paper, carved into walls, whispered in the dark.”

The screen flickered. The name CONTACT_00 vanished. In its place, my own name appeared. And underneath it, my phone number—the one I use every day, the one I give to people, the one I thought was just mine.

“We needed a new entry at zero,” they purred. “The last one… well, he moved on. And you were so eager to talk. So eager to be heard.”

I heard a sound from the hallway. Soft footsteps. Not heavy, not light. Just the sound of feet that don’t quite touch the floor.

“Someone is calling you now,” the voices said. “Someone found your number. Someone is curious. Someone wants to know who you are. And you have to answer. You have to tell them everything. Just like we told you.”

My bedroom door handle turned.

I’m writing this now because I know someone will find it. I know this phone will end up back in a shop, or in a box, or left on a park bench.

And when you scroll through the contacts… you will see it. Right at the top.

CONTACT_00

Please don’t call.

But I know you will. Curiosity is the only thing that ever really connects us.

And when you do… I’ll be waiting on the line. I have so much to tell you. I have so much time.

And I know exactly where you live.

When I was seven years old, my parents bought me a bunk bed. It was big, heavy, and painted a dark, glossy blue. The salesman said it would “last a lifetime,” and back then, that sounded exciting. But the thing about bunk beds is that the bottom one feels like a cave, enclosed, dark, and separate from the rest of the room. That’s where I slept. And that’s where I met Mr. Scratch.

I told my mom about him over breakfast one Tuesday. I was stirring cereal that had gone soggy, staring at the pattern on the tablecloth.

“He lives under my bed,” I said casually. “But he comes up to play when the lights go out. He’s my best friend.”

My mom smiled, wiping crumbs from my cheek. “An imaginary friend? How lovely. What does he look like?”

I thought about it. “Tall. Really tall. He has very long fingers, like sticks. And he doesn’t have a face. Just smooth skin where his eyes and mouth should be. But I know he’s smiling. I can feel it.”

My dad chuckled from behind his newspaper. “Classic kid stuff. Just don’t let him keep you awake at night, okay, sport?”

They thought it was cute. Normal. A sign of an active imagination. Every child has one, right? A make-believe companion to fight the monsters in the dark.

What they didn’t understand was that Mr. Scratch was the monster, but he was my monster. And he wasn’t imaginary.

He appeared only when the room went completely dark and the door was shut tight. He would slide out from the gap between the floor and the bed frame, not crawling, but flowing, like smoke made solid. He was always pale, almost grey, and impossibly thin. His arms were so long his hands dragged on the floor even when he stood upright.

We played games. Mostly Hide and Seek, but his rules were different. He would hide, and I had to find him in the blackness. If I found him, he would tickle me. light, sharp touches from those long fingers that felt like pins against my skin. If I didn’t find him… well, he would find me. And he would whisper things.

“Your parents don’t listen to you,” he’d hiss, his voice sounding like dry leaves being dragged across concrete. “They don’t see what I see. They don’t know how special you are. But I do. I will always know.”

As I grew older, around age ten, I started getting scared of him. Not the playful kind of scared anymore. Real fear. His games got rougher. His “ticks” became bruises I couldn’t explain. The whispers turned into instructions.

“Push the glass off the table,” he’d say while I sat at dinner. “Leave the front door unlocked. Don’t tell them I’m here.”

When I tried to tell my parents I didn’t want him around anymore, they just patted my head and said, “Oh, you’re getting too old for imaginary friends now. It’s time to grow up.”

But you don’t just “grow up” something that sleeps under your bed.

The worst nights were when I cried and begged him to go away. He would stretch his long fingers up through the slats of the mattress above me and trail them slowly over my face. He didn’t have eyes, but he could see every tear.

“You can’t get rid of me,” he whispered one night, his cold breath freezing the sweat on my neck. “I’m the friend you made when you were lonely. I’m the shadow you chose. You called me. And best friends… best friends stay together forever.”

One night, when I was twelve, I decided to prove he wasn’t real. I left my bedroom door wide open. I left the hall light on, shining right into my room. I told myself that if he was just in my head, the light would kill him.

I lay there, staring at the open door, breathing hard. For an hour, nothing happened. I felt brave. I felt stupid for being afraid all those years.

Then… I heard it.

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

Coming from above me.

I froze. I was on the bottom bunk. Above me was just the mattress of the top bed. I looked up. The underside of the top bunk was in shadow, away from the hall light.

Slowly, painfully slowly, long, pale fingers curled over the edge of the wooden slats. Then another hand. Then, folding itself down like a spider walking on a ceiling, Mr. Scratch lowered himself from the top bunk. He had been there the whole time. Hiding where I never looked.

He hung suspended above my face, his body stretched thin and boneless, dangling inches from my nose. He smelled of dust and old, closed spaces.

“You tried to leave the door open,” he said. His voice was sad, disappointed. “You tried to let them see me. You tried to make me not exist.”

I screamed for my dad. I screamed so loud my throat burned.

My parents burst into the room seconds later, flipping on the main light.

“WHAT? What is it?” my dad yelled, scanning the room.

I pointed, shaking so hard I could barely hold my hand up. “HIM! He’s right there! Mr. Scratch! He was hanging right over me!”

My dad looked. Looked at the empty space above my bed. Looked under the bed. Looked in the closet.

“There’s nobody here, son,” he said, his voice softening into that worried tone adults use when they think you’re losing your mind. “Nobody has been in here. It’s just you.”

I looked back at the spot. He was gone. But on the wooden slats of the top bunk, right where his fingers had been, there were deep gouges. Deep scratches dug into the wood, fresh and splintered.

I grew up. I moved out. I went to college, got a job, lived in apartments with high ceilings and no bunk beds. I told myself it was a childhood delusion, a product of being an anxious kid with too much dark space in his room. I stopped thinking about him entirely.

Until last week.

I was helping my parents clear out the old family home to sell it. The house was empty now, echoing and cold. I went into my old bedroom. The blue bunk bed was still there, pushed against the wall, covered in a sheet.

I pulled the sheet off. The paint was chipped, the wood worn down by years of use. I ran my hand along the side, memories flooding back. I looked up at the bottom of the top bunk. The scratches were still there, deep and dark.

And then I saw something else.

Carved into the frame of the bottom bunk, hidden right where my pillow used to rest, were words. They had been carved deep into the wood, covered over by years of grime and paint that had flaked away. I must have missed them a hundred times as a child.

The letters were uneven, jagged, as if carved by fingers too long and too sharp to hold a pencil properly.

It read:

I never left. I just got smaller. Now I fit in the cracks. Now I fit in the dark behind your eyes.

My blood turned to ice.

I turned around fast, heart hammering, expecting to see him in the doorway.

Nothing. Just the empty hallway.

I left the house immediately. I didn’t help pack the rest. I didn’t say goodbye. I drove away as fast as I could.

Tonight, I am in my new apartment. It’s nice. Modern. No dark corners. No space under the bed because it sits flush against the floor. I locked the door. Double locked it. I checked the closets. I checked under the sink. I checked inside the vents.

I turned off the light to go to sleep.

And just as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I felt it.

A long, thin finger tracing the line of my jaw, cold as a grave.

A whisper right against my ear. familiar, soft, and delighted.

“Remember when we were best friends? I waited so long for you to grow up. Now you’re big enough… to play the final game.”