r/Dreading

This doll shows up a lot in my dreams so I made her! and now she is presenting to you a piece of artwork for my upcoming horror book. Also, the doll is usually accompanied by the girl on the second picture. I did fx make up to make her into a halloween costume a few years ago.

A man walked alone through the Amazon Basin. He was a conservationist and had dedicated his entire life to protecting endangered wildlife. But at fifty-six years old, his body was beginning to slow down. Before retiring, there was one thing he wanted to see one last time: the endangered Amazon river dolphin in its natural habitat.

He had been trekking through the jungle all day, and night was quickly approaching. Exhausted, he sat on an old rotten log and began setting up his tent near the riverbank. Mosquitoes already swarmed around him in thick clouds, so he decided to build a small fire to keep them away during the night.

He pulled out a flint and steel and worked patiently until sparks caught the kindling. A small flame flickered to life. He fed it carefully, watching it grow brighter against the darkness of the jungle.

Once the fire was stable, he unpacked an MRE and activated the chemical heater. Steam rose from the bag as the meal warmed. He smiled tiredly, licking his lips in anticipation of the ravioli. After mixing in hot sauce, he ate slowly while listening to the sounds of the rainforest around him.

For the first time all day, he felt content.

After finishing his meal, he crawled into his tent and unbuckled his gear. He needed a good night’s rest before continuing his exploration in the morning.

Hours later, he awoke suddenly to a low, rumbling growl.

His eyes snapped open.

Another growl echoed from outside the tent—deeper this time.

Dangerous.

Slowly, he unzipped the tent and peeked outside.

A massive jaguar stood near the edge of the campfire’s light.

The animal moved silently toward him, its golden eyes fixed on his face.

He immediately stood tall and shouted, trying to scare it away. But the jaguar didn’t flinch.

Instead, it kept coming.

The man grabbed a burning branch from the fire and waved it in front of him. The jaguar growled and swatted at the air. He thrust the flaming stick closer to its face.

Now he could smell its horrible breath.

Still, the jaguar refused to back down.

Fear surged through him. Acting on instinct, he swung the flaming branch and struck the animal across the muzzle. The jaguar snarled violently as the fur around its face singed from the heat.

For a moment, the two stared at each other.

Then the jaguar slowly backed away into the darkness.

But before disappearing into the jungle, it stopped.

It looked back at him one last time and roared.

The man suddenly understood something horrifying.

He was being hunted.

The rest of the night was miserable.

He threw every remaining piece of firewood onto the flames, desperate to keep the blaze alive until sunrise. Even then, he barely slept.

Before dawn, he packed his gear quickly. He wanted to get as far away from the jaguar’s territory as possible.

For hours he hiked through the basin, sweat soaking through his clothes as the jungle closed around him. By midday he estimated he had traveled nearly six miles.

Finally, he allowed himself to relax.

Maybe the jaguar had given up and he was far enough away from its territory.

He stopped beside the river to eat breakfast and recover some energy. Afterwards, he pulled out his camera and prepared to photograph the wildlife.

He waited patiently beside the muddy water.

A small caiman drifted through the river nearby before suddenly diving beneath the surface, as if startled by something below.

Then he saw them.

Two adult Amazon river dolphins emerged from the cloudy water, their gray bodies tinted faint pink beneath the sunlight. Between them swam a calf.

The man’s heart nearly stopped with joy.

After weeks of searching, he had finally found them.

And they had a healthy calf.

With shaking hands, he lifted the camera and began taking photograph after photograph. He became so focused on the dolphins that he stopped paying attention to the jungle behind him.

A growl erupted only feet away.

He turned slowly.

The jaguar stood directly behind him.

Its eyes burned with hatred.

Before he could react, the animal lunged.

Both of them crashed into the river.

Murky water swallowed him whole. He thrashed violently as the jaguar clamped its jaws around his arm, ripping and tearing through flesh.

He screamed underwater, but only bubbles escaped his mouth.

The jaguar was trying to drown him.

His lungs burned. His strength faded. Darkness crept into the edges of his vision.

Desperate, he grabbed the camera hanging around his neck and smashed it against the jaguar’s face. The flash exploded underwater.

The jaguar recoiled slightly—but it refused to let go.

Summoning the last of his strength, the man jammed his thumb deep into the animal’s eye.

The jaguar jerked back violently, tearing a chunk from his arm before finally releasing him. Growling in pain, it swam to shore and disappeared into the jungle once more.

The man crawled from the river coughing violently, water pouring from his lungs.

Blood streamed down his ruined arm.

He knew he would die if he didn’t stop the bleeding.

Using his knife, he cut a long strip from his shirt and wrapped it tightly around the wound. He shoved a stick beneath the fabric and twisted until the tourniquet tightened.

Agony exploded through his body.

But eventually the bleeding slowed.

Barely able to stand, he stared into the jungle.

Somewhere out there, the jaguar was still watching him.

He knew there was a small village several miles away.

If he could reach it, maybe he could survive.

So he started walking.

Wet. Bloody. Exhausted.

Hours passed beneath the crushing jungle heat. Several times he heard movement in the trees beside him.

The jaguar was still following.

Keeping its distance.

Waiting.

The man collapsed to his knees repeatedly, but every time he forced himself back up. He grabbed vines and branches to pull himself forward.

Eventually he noticed something wrong with his arm.

The flesh around the bite had turned a deep raspberry red.

Infection.

He tried to ignore it and kept moving.

But after several more miles, the skin began turning black.

Sepsis was setting in.

Soon he could barely think clearly. Fever consumed him. His head pounded. His body felt freezing cold despite the humid jungle air.

A few trees away, the jaguar watched him silently.

It knew he was dying. Just waiting for him to be weak enough to not fight back.

Night began to fall.

The man staggered forward, barely able to lift his feet anymore. Then suddenly he smelled smoke.

A village.

Hope surged through him.

The jaguar crept closer between the trees.

The man tried to shout for help, but his voice came out weak and broken.

Using the last of his strength, he stumbled into a run.

For a brief moment adrenaline made him feel light again.

He was so close.

Then something slammed into his back.

The jaguar.

Its claws buried deep into his flesh as both crashed to the ground.

The man screamed as the animal raked its claws across his face. He tried to reach for its eyes again, but the jaguar caught his hand in its jaws.

His hand crushed.

The man couldn’t fight anymore.

He was too weak. Too sick. Too exhausted.

Slowly, the jaguar moved its jaws toward his neck.

Then it bit down.

The man stopped resisting.

He could feel his life draining away with every fading breath. His vision darkened as the pressure around his throat tightened harder and harder.

His face turned purple.

And finally…

He relaxed.

Days later, searchers found the man’s camera near the river basin.

Inside were hundreds of beautiful photographs—birds, trees, sunsets, and finally the rare river dolphins swimming peacefully with their calf.

There were also several older pictures of the man smiling beside his two sons.

But investigators were disturbed most by the final image stored on the camera.

A blurred photograph accidentally taken during the attack

It was Staring at him with blood thirsty eyes wide open.

He needs an excuse to go to the store. Another afternoon coming off a long high, he takes a few edibles at around 8:30pm. He’s running out, but he doesn’t mind. Pay day’s less than a week away, & he has the ingredients to make more at home. Well, everything except butter. He refused to use vegetable oil, per the instructions on the box, because he swore that the fat content in the rendered butter bonds better with the THC distillate .

So, at 9:15, he decides to walk to the store. It’ll be a thirty minute round trip, nearly fifteen minutes each way. He wants snacks anyways, despite the overwhelming options in this pantry. He has his sights set on a frozen delicacy. A supreme Tombstone Pizza.

Bluey slippers on each foot, & his Smoke-Shop, Delta-9 vape in his pocket, he makes his way out into the muggy, Virginia summer night. The mosquitoes buzz as they flock to his exposed skin, so he picks up his pace.

As he makes his way under the first light pole of the trip, he thinks he sees something. The lights of the neighborhood porches & the streetlamps illuminate his immediate surroundings, but between the trees & the edges of the fences, shadows held firm like curtains.

He takes his earbuds out. He only hears the few cars on the nearby highway. As he gets closer, he can make out the faint visage of a woman, hiding in the dark.

Just like that, there it is. The faint sound he could've sworn he heard. The sounds of buzzing & chirping, like the sounds of a machine, maybe a printer. As he passes her, maybe fifteen feet away, she watches him, & he realizes something that makes his skin prickle. The mechanical noises were coming from her, & even though he couldn’t clearly see her face moving from the dark, he knew the sounds were mimicry made by a human voice, repeating perfectly on a loop. He picks up his pace slightly more. He keeps his sights ahead after he passes her, trying not to attract her attention.

“Maybe I’m just higher than I think,” he mutters. He didn’t see her head rotate to watch him, just her eyes, but even then, his mind could’ve just been playing tricks on him. He goes through the light of the immediate next street lamp & looks back at her. He was now about twenty-five feet away. She was staying still, her position unflinching. He turns away & continues. Under the next streetlamp, he repeats, looking back again. Still, nothing. At least forty-five feet away by this point, he lets out the breath he hadn’t even realized he had been holding, & pops his earbud back in.

“Huh, weird.”

Sixty feet away, under the last umbrella of light on his street, he humors a last glance back, just before he bolts. She’s strolling briskly towards him, calculated & confident. She’s not even on the road, she’s cutting through dark driveways & lawns in a direct beeline. As she gets closer, he runs faster & faster. By now, he’s closer to the store than to his mobile home.

“Holy shit! I need to get somewhere with fucking cameras & lights," he thinks.

He rounds past the small, vacant Sheriff Deputy building, & under more streetlights. He was now out of the neighborhood, on the sidewalk right next to the sparse highway, no further than two closed establishments from his destination. He looks back, momentarily grateful to see she’s not visibly behind him anymore. He begins to slow slightly, his unfit joints & atrophied muscles shrieking in pain. The cramps nip his ankles & thighs, & his pace loses steam. That is, until he sees two individuals across the road to his left.

They keep his pace & watch him predatorily. He can’t make out their faces clearly, but he can see they’re wearing something on their heads. Something silvery that went down just above their mouths that exposed their eyes. Something was… off. Uncanny about their expressions. They looked so angry, & their faces were flush. Too flush.

To the contrary of his body, he speeds up again. Some predators try to surround their prey & block off the exits. He was going to take his chance before he lost it. With one last burst of energy, his feet smacked from pavement, to grass, & back onto pavement as he crossed the threshold into the parking lot of the open Family Dollar. Nearly tripping, he threw himself into the unlocked glass doors, & with a blinding light, he’s done it. He’s inside the store.

Relief blossoms in his stomach & warms his fingertips. He wipes his mouth & looks around. The small shop is nearly empty. His heartbeat flutters rapidly, & he desperately tries to regain his breath.

“Dude?”

He snaps his neck to face the person who spoke & took his earbud out. A small employee, donning a nametag that says, “Grenda,” looks at him like they’d been trying to get his attention for several seconds.

“Dude. You good?” Grenda asks, visibly concerned.

He looks back out the glass doors. No one in the parking lot, in the road, on the sidewalk. No normal people, no one with helmets. He turns & looks at Grenda again.

“Yeah, I think. Sorry.”

He picks up a basket & wearily begins traversing the store. The shelves are like a thin maze. He grits his teeth & pushes on. He grabs a few small snacks. Some Pork Rinds, a case of kool-ade & a jar of pickled jalapenos. But he has his sights set on the refrigerator section. A pizza & some butter. Looking both ways like he’s crossing the street first, he makes his way to the brightly lit, freezing cold aisle. As he does, he bumps into an older woman, another customer.

“Oop, sorry ma’am.”

She mouths something in response, but he can’t hear her over the sound of his reactivated earbuds.

He crouches down to look at the selection of frozen pizzas, & his earbud runs out of battery. As soon as it does, he hears that sound again. The person imitating a robot. In surprise, he falls back onto his ass & looks up. There it is, fully illuminated. She looked like she used to have a thick head of blond hair. She’s bright pink, like a lobster. Flush as if she’s been exerting a great amount of effort, but she doesn't breathe, her nostrils don’t even flair. She just stands there, wide enough to block the entire aisle, & built like a bulldog. Her lips are pulled up in a sneer, & her teeth look rotten, gritted together so hard that her jaw visibly strained from the effort. The part that made him want to cry was what it was wearing. She was wearing normal houseware, a tanktop & some basket-ball shorts. She looked like a normal person, juxtaposed against something horrendous on its head.

Covering the cranium down to the tip of the nose, was a filthy wrapping of duct-tape. It partially concealed all manner of exposed wires & blinking things, motherboards & copper shavings that reflected the light's glint. The only thing that was not covered were her eyes. They were bulged out of her noggin like overfilled water balloons, squeezed through a thin pipe. Blood leaked from the edges of their duct-tape sockets, & from under the border that covered her cheeks & the tops of her ears ran streams of blood across her blushed skin as well, dripping all the way under her chin. & down her neck. He was frozen for a moment from sheer panic. What was this?

As soon as he gathered his bearings enough, he scrambled up & backed away, trying to keep sudden movements to a minimum.

“Lady, lady!” He gasps, addressing the older customer who he’d bumped into earlier.

“What?!”

“What is that?”

She glances over, her eyes trained on the same spot as his, at the end of the aisle.

“What?”

“Look!”

“Look at what?”

He momentarily turns to assess the old woman. She looks dumbfounded.

“You don’t see her?” He breathes.

“See who, young man?” She gulps, frightened & a little flabbergasted.

He looks back at the thing, & it’s moved closer. Now merely five feet away, more details become noticeable. The antenna on top of its head. The two pulsing buttons on the side of its left temple. The way that even though the eyes were on the verge of bursting, they stayed locked on him.

He didn’t even bother taking the items with him. He just dropped everything & ran out the door. He tried to call 911, but his phone ran out of battery too. Once outside, he didn’t look back, but he did hear it start to catch up. He closed his eyes & pumped his legs, pushing harder than he ever had before. He wouldn’t look back.

When he was a kid, he heard the story about the man whose family got a pass out of Sodom & Gomorrah. The wife had looked back, & got turned to salt. As he heard the sound of the thing getting closer behind him, footsteps smacking the pavement at a constant, precise speed, he tried not to think of all the things that might happen to him if he dared.

He ran, & it kept a steady pace behind him. A couple of times, he got some good distance, others, the thing was almost close enough to brush him with its fingertips. At some points, he swore he heard other footsteps, like the pack of them were coming back to finish him off, but over the sound of his heartbeat, he couldn’t have been sure. The entire time, he heard that repeating sound. The whirring, puffing, beeping & buzzing. Its vocal chords were worn out, & they strained to continue droning, but on they did.

A round trip that wound up usually being thirty minutes was done in twenty-five this time. The wood of the porch thumped under his slides & he gripped the handle, twisting & yanking with all his might. The automatron sounded like it could've been just yards behind him. He slammed the metal door shut behind him & slumped to his knees, letting out a half sob, half wheeze. He whimpered & crawled to his blinds, shutting them too. The tears were welling up almost as hard as the stomach bile in his throat. He hadn’t run like that in so long, he almost felt like he’d pulled something in his calves. Everything burned. He sat down on his couch & tried to plug his phone in. That was the last thing he did before he realized someone was under his table.

That night, his neighbor reported seeing him run into his camper, & then a few minutes later, screaming. When the police arrived, all they found was the top of his skull, scalp still intact, & a puddle of bloody spinal fluid.

“What do you think, Detective?” A policeman asked as he placed yellow caution tape over the door of the trailer.

The detective picks up a brownie from the microwave & smells it.

“It’s these damn kids & their weed, it's always these damn kids & their weed…”

Thanks to everyone who checked out my story last night! The encouragement was great, so I finished editing this one I had in the making and figured I’d share it tonight. This one was really fun. I hope it translates well into written format, this was originally intended to be a short film. Hope y’all enjoy!

I need to get this out before I lose my mind, or before whatever is wearing my skin decides I've said too much.

I'm writing this from the closet in my bedroom. It's 4:12 AM. The house is doing that thing again—breathing. Not the normal expansion and contraction of old pipes. I mean breathing. A slow, wet inhale somewhere behind the walls, followed by a sigh that ruffles the dust on the floorboards. I can hear Liam's door creaking open down the hall. Soft footsteps. They'll stop outside my room in about thirty seconds.

They always do.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning, because if I don't organize this, I'll convince myself I imagined all of it. I didn't. The bruise on my wrist proves I didn't.

One week ago, my family got back from our annual summer trip. Every August, we rent the same cabin on the Oregon coast. It's nothing fancy—knotty pine walls, a kitchen that smells like coffee and old spices, a wraparound porch facing the craggy shoreline. We've been going since I was twelve. Liam's eleven now, and this year he spent the whole trip doing what eleven-year-olds do: complaining about the Wi-Fi, collecting obscene amounts of shells, and following me around like a shadow.

I'm twenty-six. I moved back home after college to save money, which is its own kind of horror, but up until last week, it was fine. Boring, even.

The last day of the trip, we went to a beach we don't usually visit. A cove about two miles south of the cabin, accessible only at low tide through a gap in the cliffs. Mom found it in some coastal guidebook. "Mermaid's Grotto," it was called. Touristy name, but the place itself was strange. The sand was darker than it should've been, almost black, and the tide pools were filled with water that seemed too still, too clear, reflecting a sky that looked two shades too green.

Liam wandered off.

I was on the rocks, taking pictures. Mom was reading. Dad was napping on a towel. It was maybe fifteen minutes before I realized I couldn't hear him—that constant hum of a boy narrating his own adventure to no one. I found him at the far end of the cove, standing at the mouth of a sea cave with his back to me. He was perfectly still, which was wrong. Liam doesn't do still. He's a kid made of springs and noise.

"Liam?"

He didn't turn. The cave behind him was dark, and the air coming out of it smelled wrong—not like seaweed and salt, but sweeter. Staler. Like water that's been sitting in a closed room for years.

"Liam, come on. Tide's coming back."

He turned then, and I remember thinking his eyes looked odd. Not the color—just the way they focused. Like he was looking at me from the bottom of a well.

"I was just exploring," he said, and smiled. A normal smile. Liam's smile.

I didn't think about it again until the drive home.

We pulled into the driveway at 9:47 PM. Seven hours of traffic, two rest stops, one screaming match about who forgot the cooler in the cabin (me). We were exhausted. Dad unlocked the front door, and we all stumbled inside, and the first thing I noticed was the smell.

Our house shouldn't have a smell. We'd been gone a week. It should've been neutral, maybe faintly musty. Instead, the hallway hit me with this thick, damp sweetness—like saltwater left to rot in the sun, underneath something floral I couldn't place. The kind of smell that coats the inside of your nose and stays.

"Ugh, did something die in the fridge?" I asked.

Mom just wrinkled her nose. "I'll check. Someone grab the suitcases."

I turned to go back to the car—and stopped.

The suitcases were already in the living room. All four of them, lined up neatly by the couch. Ours are the hard-shell kind, and they're heavy. Mine alone is forty pounds when full. I stared at them, that wrongness settling into my chest like a cold stone.

"Who brought these in?"

Dad was already heading upstairs. "Not me."

Mom called from the kitchen: "I thought you did."

I looked at Liam. He was standing by the suitcases, one hand resting on top of mine like he'd been waiting for me to notice.

"They were heavy," he said, matter-of-factly. "I helped."

A ten-year-old who weighs seventy pounds soaking wet did not carry four packed suitcases up a flight of porch steps. I opened my mouth to say so, but he was already walking toward his room, his bare feet padding softly on the hardwood.

I stood there for a long time, looking at the suitcases. They were damp. Condensation clung to the shells, like they'd been out in the fog.

We hadn't had fog.

The first night, I didn't sleep.

Jet lag, I told myself. The drive. The weird smell. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, listening to the house settle. At 2:47 AM, I heard footsteps. Light, bare ones. Pacing the hallway. I assumed it was Liam going to the bathroom—kids wake up, it's normal—but the pacing didn't stop. Back and forth. Back and forth. A slow, deliberate rhythm that went on for forty-five minutes.

At 3:00 AM exactly, the footsteps stopped outside my door.

I held my breath.

The door was cracked open an inch—my room gets stuffy—and through the gap, I could see a sliver of the hallway. A sliver of Liam. He was standing perfectly rigid, facing my door. Not looking through the gap. Just facing it, the way a camera faces a subject. His arms hung at his sides, straight as rods. He didn't move. He didn't blink.

I lay there, heart hammering so hard I could taste copper, watching my little brother stand like a mannequin in the hallway for eleven minutes. Then, without a sound, he turned and walked back to his room.

In the morning, he was eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch and watching Transformers. He burped at me and laughed. Normal. Completely normal.

"Liam, were you up last night?"

"Mom says sleepwalking runs in the family," he said, not looking up from the TV. "We don't remember it."

We. The word snagged on something in my brain, but I let it go.

I shouldn't have let it go.

Day two. I went into Liam's room to return a book I'd borrowed, and I stopped in the doorway. Something was different, and it took me a second to place it.

The mirror. The full-length mirror on the back of his door, the one Mom put there so he could check his "school fit" every morning. It was covered with a towel. A ratty blue beach towel—the one he'd taken on the trip.

"Liam, why's your mirror covered?"

He was sitting on his bed, legs crossed, sorting his shell collection. "I don't like it anymore."

"Since when?"

"Since it shows the wrong things."

My throat tightened. "What do you mean, wrong?"

He held up a sand dollar, examining it in the light. "Like when you look in a mirror and your face is yours but it's not yours. It's the wrong one." He said this with the same casual tone he'd use to describe a video game level he couldn't beat. Then he looked at me, and for a split second, his expression flickered—something old and hungry passing behind his eyes like a cloud across the sun. "We don't like that lamp either."

I looked at the lamp. The desk lamp by his bed. It was the same lamp he'd had for years—a blue ceramic one with a rocket ship.

"What's wrong with the lamp?"

"We just don't like it."

He turned back to his shells. Conversation over.

I backed out of the room and went straight to the hallway. The family photos. I don't know why I checked them—some instinct, some part of my brain that had been quietly cataloging wrongness and was now connecting dots.

Every photo of Liam on the wall was blurred. Not the whole picture—just his face. Like he'd moved during a long exposure, a smudge of features where his grin should be. But the photos had been fine when we left. I'd dusted this hallway the day before we drove to the coast.

I leaned in to look closer. The glass on the frames was slightly fogged with age, and in the reflection—only in the reflection—I could see Liam's face. Not blurred. Perfectly clear. And he was smiling. Not his gap-toothed, braces-glinting smile. This was wide and lipless, the grin of something that learned what a smile is by being told about it. Too many teeth. No teeth. Both at the same time.

I jerked back. Looked at the photo directly. Blurred again.

I told myself it was a trick of the light.

Day three. The footprints.

I got up for water at midnight and found them on the hardwood floor of the living room. Small, bare footprints. Child-sized. They started at the front door and tracked across the rug, through the dining room, and down the hallway toward Liam's bedroom. Wet. I knelt down and touched the edge of one—cold, damp, and the smell. God, the smell. That same sweet, stagnant rot. Like the water in a tide pool where something's been decomposing for weeks. Like the ocean back in that cove.

I followed them. They led all the way to Liam's room, and that's when my stomach dropped.

The footprints stopped three feet from his bed. Just stopped. The last one was perfectly intact, as if whoever made them had simply ceased to exist, or as if they'd been lifted from that spot and placed somewhere else. Somewhere without footprints.

I checked Liam. He was asleep—or his eyes were closed, his chest rising and falling in slow rhythm. Normal. Except his hands were folded neatly on his chest the way you'd position a body in a casket, and his room was freezing. My breath didn't fog, but it should have.

I didn't sleep again that night.

Day four. Mom and Dad stopped humoring me.

I showed Mom the photos. She looked at them, tilted her head, and said, "Honey, they look fine to me." I showed her the footprints. By then they'd dried to faint salt rings, and she said the dog from next door probably got in. We don't have a dog door. The neighbors don't have a dog.

"Maybe you should talk to someone," she said, not unkindly. "You seem really on edge. It could be stress. You know, post-vacation blues."

"Mom, there is something wrong with Liam."

Her face hardened. "Liam is fine. He's adjusting to being back. Kids need routine, and we disrupted his. You're projecting."

"DID YOU SEE HIM LAST NIGHT? He was standing in the hallway at three in the morning like a—"

"I'm scheduling you an appointment with Dr. Reeves." Her voice was steel wrapped in mom-concern. "I won't have you obsessing over your brother. It's not healthy."

She walked away. I stood in the kitchen shaking, and that's when I saw it.

She was at the end of the hall, standing in front of Liam's closed door. And her face—God, her face. She was staring at the door with an expression I've never seen on another human being. Her eyes were wide, her lips parted, her skin the color of old paper. She looked terrified. Not concerned, not confused—primal, prey-animal terror, the kind of fear that paralyzes.

She stood there for ten seconds. Then her face went blank, smooth as a mask, and she turned and walked to her bedroom like nothing had happened.

She saw something. She knows. And whatever it is, it won't let her say it.

Day five. My phone.

I was scrolling through my photos, looking for the ones from the trip—trying to find a picture of that cove, that cave, something to anchor me to reality—when I found the folder.

It was at the bottom of my gallery, timestamped starting the night we got back. Thirty-seven photos I didn't take.

They were all from inside Liam's closet. The slatted doors, the view through the narrow gaps between the wood. They showed his room at night. His bed. His small form under the blankets, sleeping. Photo after photo after photo, all taken between 1:00 AM and 4:00 AM, all from the same angle. My phone had been on my nightstand. Charging. I'm a light sleeper. I would've heard someone take it.

I swiped to the last photo and my skin tried to crawl off my body.

It was the same angle—the closet, looking out at Liam's bed—but in the foreground, resting on the edge of the closet door's interior frame, was a hand. Small. Pale. The fingers were too long, the joints sitting wrong, bending slightly in directions fingers shouldn't bend. The skin had a translucent quality, like something that lives where light doesn't reach. It wasn't Liam's hand. It wasn't anyone's hand.

It was the hand of whatever was holding my phone.

I deleted the photos. My hands were shaking so badly I dropped the phone twice. When I checked my gallery an hour later, they were back. Every single one.

That night—last night—at 2:14 AM, I woke up unable to breathe.

Something was sitting on my chest. Heavy. So heavy. I opened my eyes, and Liam was straddling me, his knees pinning my arms. He was looking down at me, and his eyes—his eyes were open but empty. Like glass marbles pushed into dough. No recognition. No Liam behind them.

He leaned down until his face was an inch from mine. His breath smelled like brine and something older, something that made my hindbrain scream.

"Remember when you almost drowned when you were eight?" he whispered, and the voice was his but also not his—layered, doubled, like two people speaking in imperfect unison. "The water was so cold. It filled your lungs. We remember."

I couldn't move. I couldn't scream. All I could do was stare up at my little brother and feel the cold spreading through my chest like I was back in that pool, going under, the chlorine burning my throat—

He blinked. Life flooded back into his eyes. He looked confused, then embarrassed. "Sorry. Bad dream." He climbed off me and shuffled back to his room, and I lay there gasping, tears running into my ears.

I almost drowned at the YMCA pool when I was eight. I never told anyone. It was my secret, my shameful near-death that I buried so deep I barely admitted it to myself. Liam was a baby when it happened. He couldn't know.

But it could.

Tonight. The whispers.

I couldn't take it anymore. The not-knowing. The gaslighting. The slow rot of my own certainty. At 1:30 AM, I crept to Liam's door and pressed my ear against the wood.

He was whispering. That much I expected. But what I heard nearly broke me.

It was Liam's voice, yes. And underneath it, layered like harmony in a song no one should sing, was my voice. My own voice, reciting my fears in a singsong tone. "I'm afraid of the dark because I think something watches me sleep. I'm afraid I'll die alone and no one will notice. I'm afraid of the ocean because I can't see what's below." Every private, wretched terror I've never spoken aloud, poured out in my own voice through my little brother's lips.

I threw the door open.

Liam sat cross-legged on the bed, hands in his lap. The room was empty. Just him, the covered mirror, and the faint smell of low tide. He blinked at me, sleepy and sweet.

"Just talking to my friend," he said, yawning. "He says you're a good sister. He wants to meet you soon."

My mouth opened. Nothing came out. I backed into the hall and ran to the attic and grabbed the old nanny cam Mom never returned—the one from when Liam was a toddler. It's small, wireless, connects to my phone. I set it on the top shelf of his closet behind a stack of board games, aiming it at the bed.

I told myself I'd watch the feed. I told myself I'd get proof. I told myself then someone would have to believe me.

I watched the footage live for an hour. Nothing. Liam sleeping. The closet door cracked open. Normal. I dozed off with my phone in my hand.

At 3:33 AM, a notification woke me. Motion detected.

I opened the feed.

Liam's body was rising from the bed. Not sitting up—not a kid getting up. Rising. Like something was lifting him by the sternum. His arms dangled, his head lolled back, and his body folded upward in a way that made me gag because spines don't bend like that, joints shouldn't hinge in those directions. He hung in the air for a moment, suspended like a marionette whose puppeteer was testing the strings.

Then his shadow peeled off the wall.

I'm not being poetic. It peeled. It detached from the shadow his body cast and crawled—vertebra by vertebra, like a spider made of darkness—up the wall and across the ceiling. It moved wrong. Too many joints. Limbs that bent where there shouldn't be knees. It stopped at the corner of the room, and I swear to God, it looked at the camera.

The closet door swung open. Not violently—slowly, like it was being pushed by breath. Behind it was black. Not the black of an unlit closet—black. A void that had texture, depth. It pulsed. It breathed, that wet inhale I'd been hearing in the walls, and the darkness expanded and contracted like lungs.

And then Liam's head turned toward the camera.

He was still floating. His head turned—rotated—on his neck. Not the way a head is supposed to turn. He kept turning past the point where a neck should snap, kept rotating until he was facing the camera directly, and he was smiling that smile. The wide one. The one with too many teeth and no teeth.

And the voice—the double voice, his and not-his—spoke directly into the camera, directly to me:

"We see you watching. Come play. You promised we could all be together."

The head kept turning. Full rotation. Past 360 degrees. And still that smile.

The feed cut to static.

I threw the phone. I heard it crack against the wall. I didn't care. I was on the floor of my room, hyperventilating, my whole body shaking so hard I bit through my lip.

The nanny cam is in pieces on my floor now. But before I smashed it, I checked the footage one last time. The recording was corrupted—static, noise, broken frames. Except for one frame. One single, crystal-clear frame.

My own face. Eyes wide, mouth open in a silent scream. But I'm not in the closet. I'm not in Liam's room. I'm somewhere dark and wet, and the thing behind me in the frame has its arms around my shoulders, and it's smiling.

I don't remember that. I don't remember that happening.

But I found the note.

After I smashed the camera, I went to my desk to find something—anything—to ground me. In my top drawer, under my journal, in handwriting that is unmistakably mine, was a note.

"You said yes at the beach. You said you'd trade places to save him. The trade is almost done."

I don't remember writing it. I don't remember saying yes. But I remember the cove. I remember finding Liam at the mouth of that cave, and I remember—God, God—I remember feeling something brush my ankle in the water. I remember a voice, low and wet and ancient, saying, "The short one is open. But the tall one is stronger. Choose."

And I remember thinking, so clearly, so desperately: Not him. Anything but him. Take me instead if you have to take someone.

I said yes. I said yes, and I forgot. And whatever came back from that beach has been wearing me during the hours I can't account for, filling my phone with photos, writing notes in my handwriting, living in my body while the real me—while the part of me that's writing this—has been blind to it.

That's why the footprints stopped. They weren't walking to Liam.

They were walking back from wherever I've been going.

It's almost 5:00 AM now. I can hear Liam's door opening. The soft footsteps in the hall.

But this time, I'm not going to watch through a camera or listen through a door. I'm going to confront it. I have to. If I made a deal, I'll unmake it. If there's a way to save Liam—really save him, pull him back from whatever has been wearing him like a coat—then it's in that room. In that mirror he covered.

I can hear my own voice coming from down the hall. Singing. That singsong tone, reciting my fears, laughing between verses.

I'm going to post this now. If I don't update, you'll know why.

And if you're reading this and you live near the coast—any coast—don't go to the coves at low tide. Don't look into the caves. And if something asks you to choose, don't answer. Don't answer, don't answer, don't—

He's at my door.

[UPDATE — I'm adding this part after. I don't know how long I've been sitting here. It might be minutes. It might be hours. But I need to finish this before I can't anymore.]

I went into Liam's room.

The towel had fallen from the mirror—it was on the floor, crumpled, like it had been pulled down. The mirror was uncovered, and the room was bathed in that pre-dawn gray that makes everything look like a photograph of itself.

Liam was standing in front of the mirror. Not the real Liam. The reflection. The real Liam was—I think the real Liam was—

The reflection was wearing his body like an outfit. Smiling that smile. And when I stepped up beside it, I looked at my own reflection, and my reflection was smiling too.

Not my smile. That wide, lipless, toothless grin. My reflection's eyes were wrong. Too knowing. Too old. And behind my reflection—behind me in the glass—stood a shape. Tall. Too tall. Limbs folding and unfolding with too many joints, a silhouette that seemed to be made of the darkness between stars, and it was pressing its face against the back of my reflection's head like a lover.

It spoke with my voice.

"You were the strong one, so we chose you. Liam is just the door. You're the house."

And then I heard the real voice. Liam's real voice. Small. Terrified. Coming from inside the mirror, muffled, like he was trapped behind glass in a room that was filling with water.

"Help me, please. It's so dark in here. Why did you leave me? Why did you leave me?"

I could see him in the glass—behind the reflection, behind the thing wearing my face. My little brother, pounding on the inside of the mirror, his fists leaving ripples on the surface like the glass was water. His face was streaked with tears and something darker—seawater, brine, black as the void in his closet.

He was drowning in there. He's been drowning since the beach, and I didn't even know.

I pressed my hand to the mirror.

The surface rippled. Not like glass—like water. Cold water. It closed around my fingers, my palm, my wrist. And from the other side, my reflection's hand—the thing's hand—reached through and gripped me with a strength that crushed bone. It pulled. I pulled back. The glass rippled and stretched and I felt cold, salt water close over my head, filling my nose, my throat, my lungs, and the last thing I heard before everything went dark was Liam screaming my name and that double-voiced laugh—

I woke up on the floor of Liam's room.

Mom found me this morning, asleep on the rug next to his bed, and said I looked peaceful. She smoothed my hair and asked if I had a nightmare. Liam was sitting at the kitchen table eating pancakes, and he smiled at me—his real smile, the one with the gap in his teeth—and said, "Good morning."

Everything is normal. The photos are fine. The mirror is covered again. My phone gallery is empty. The footprints are gone.

But I'm writing this because something is wrong with my hands. When I type, my fingers bend just a little too far. And when I look in the mirror—any mirror—my reflection blinks a half-second after I do.

And last night, while I was brushing my teeth, I heard my own voice come out of my mouth without me speaking: "The house is warm. We like it here."

Mom says I look peaceful.

She doesn't know I'm still screaming inside.

I'll update if anything changes. But I have a feeling it won't.

I think this is just how it is now.

We like it here.

This is essentially a pilot for the series btw. Also the series is officially called: Counselor Lake

Link to the vid in yt: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3lEBlAVc-pk

A while back, Apple released the first ever smartphone. Initially, you had two ways to access it. Either leave the thing unlocked, or use a four digit pin for security. Eventually, they introduced more options. Fingerprint ID, six digits, different pattern locks and password codes. When the fingerprint ID came out, convenience caught me like a catfish on a hook. Nowadays, it's standard, not really anything special. Within the last couple years, they even made it so you can use a face scanner to unlock a ton of devices.

With every cellphone upgrade, I kept the same four digit verification as my passcode. 9932 was my go-to for most everything from my home security system to my bank account password, but I would stick almost exclusively to the fingerprint scanner, using the thumb on my dominant hand. It was just so easy, barely even took a second thought, and I was sure that my phone was completely secure that way. Between a pin and a thumbprint ID, what could go wrong? As far as I was concerned, I had nothing to worry about.

A year ago, I got into a fight with my blender. I call it a fight, really, it was more like my stupid mistake that led the appliance to defend itself. I jammed my whole hand into it to retrieve a ring that had fallen off, a ring that was trapped underneath the four, razor sharp blades. The damn ring wasn’t even important, it was just some cheap copper cast bling from a Walmart jewelry set. Rather than unplugging the thing and disassembling it safely, I thought, “I’ll just reach in and grab it real quick. What’s the worst that can happen?”

In less than 5 seconds, my boob accidentally mashed the start button, and my dominant hand was left as an oversized, bloody stub with prolapsed knuckles. When shock kicks in, you feel a rush of warmth, almost like a deep blush, and sometimes, you don’t really understand exactly what you’re looking at.

I remember staring at what was left of my digits, not fully comprehending what had happened, and thinking to myself, “that can’t be right, why does my hand look like an inside out rhubarb?” As soon as the realization began to dawn, the pain set in. I picked up my phone and frantically tried unlocking it with my thumb, a thumb that was now bony pulp, emulcified and pooling under the blades of the blender. The shiny ring still glimmered cruelly from the bottom of the clear plastic machine.

It took 3 attempts of smooshing the “thumb” side of my appendage into the home button before shredded nerve endings alerted me to the scale of my predicament. I gritted my teeth and entered the four digit passcode using my non-dominant hand. 15 minutes later, I was losing consciousness in the back of an ambulance on my way to the ER.

Almost every bone in my hand was obliterated. The doctors said that very little of my hand still had skin, and most of the flesh was like uncooked hamburger meat. My fingers were all completely gone, and a good chunk of the palm was unsalvageable. I spent a while in the SICU of my city's shittily-funded hospital, pitifully bitching my way through a series of bone grafts and skin procedures. In the end, I was left with a bright pink, tight, zit-shaped knob that extended two inches past my wrist. One continuous line of ugly, black stitches went from left to right, decorating my new tip like a macabre sandwich bag zipper.

Eventually, I was back home. My dads stayed in for a week or so to help with recovery, but once I started showing progress in physical therapy, they decided that their job was done and fucked off back to Vermont. To be fair, I guess they were right. The night I came home from the hospital, my dads had a look on their faces that I won’t forget. They’d seen something traumatizing. When I asked about the noticeable odor that filled my kitchen and dining room, they had a sit down discussion with me.

When an uncomfortable situation arises, I’ve noticed that most people tend to speak less and imply more. Unless you happen to be a very straightforward person with few reservations towards disagreement, most people just dance around their point to avoid conflict.

My dads are like that.

They gently meandered conversationally. It reminded me of when I was 10, when they tried to indirectly explain the birds and the bees to me, when they found porn on my laptop. But now, as an adult, I was able to gather what they were trying to tell me. The trip from their place in Vermont to mine is nineteen hours normally, twelve if you’re lucky, which they weren’t. My house sat empty for almost a full day from the moment I got into the ambulance, to the moment my dad with grey hair opened the front door. Half a cup or so of my viscera was still sitting on the counter inside the kitchen appliance, and logically, smelled how you’d assume it would after being left out for so long. They cleaned up the mess to the best of their abilities, and the biomatter waste removal guys disposed of the whole blender, per my request. Despite their attempts to improve my home aroma using everything they could, from candles to Febreeze, the smell just continued to linger…

“So, it’s me? I’m the smell?” I asked.

“Oh sweetheart,” my dad with brown hair cooed, “no actually… well, I guess, yeah. I mean, it is what it is. What can you do?”

“Well for one, why didn’t you try opening all the windows and setting up fans to air it out?” I raised an eyebrow, gently holding my sore injury so as to not cause myself more discomfort.

“Wow, that’s a really good idea Katie,” my dad with grey hair said sarcastically, crossing his arms and turning to look pointedly at my dad with brown hair, “yeah Beck remind me, why didn’t we do that? I think I remember someone telling me, ‘nah, we just need more candles.’”

“Jeez Lance, can we not right now?” My dad with brown hair groaned.

Satisfied, my grey headed father glanced at me as if to say, “I told him so, but he wouldn’t listen.”

We sat uncomfortably for a moment, allowing the information to settle over us like a cold blanket. Finally, I broke the silence.

“Never mind the smell, what did it look like?” I asked.

“What?”

“My fingers, what did they look like? All turned into… well, you know.”

“God Katie, we don’t really need to–”

“Dad, they were my fingers, they used to be attached to my hand. What did they look like when you got here?”

My brunette dad just stared at me like a fish out of water. After waiting a moment, my grey headed father spoke up.

“Well, we didn’t really look at it for too long, because those guys came and cleaned up pretty soon after we got home,” he started, “but I remember it kind of looked like a maroon-ish chili.”

My dad with brown hair didn’t look at his companion, he just kept watching me, but his expression transformed from gobsmacked to unwell. His husband continued.

“And um… pulpy? You remember when we made tomato sauce when you were 15, but the tomatoes were still kind of whole? Not fully emulsified?”

“Yeah,” I humored, “chunky.”

At that, my brown haired father became physically sick. He stood up and ran into my bathroom, making a retching sound.

“Ah, I’d better stop,” my grey old man mumbled.

“C’mon. Was there actually blood everywhere, or am I misremembering?” I pleaded, indulging in my morbid curiosity as I leaned forward in my seat.

My dad stroked his wispy beard, the sound of his husband emptying himself audible from a room over. He watched me like he was surveying me, taking account of my condition.

“Katie, I don’t really want to think about… look, I’m gonna be stuck in a car with your father for like nineteen hours in a few days, I don’t want him to be sick the whole way home. I love you girl, you’re a freak of nature with a good heart. But I think I done told you quite enough now. Get some rest.”

He put his warm hand on my shoulder and stood up to meet my other dad in the bathroom, and the conversation was over. Then, seemingly in the blink of an eye, they were gone, making the trip home like they’d never been here in the first place. I was alone in my home again. Or so I thought.

I got better, physically. Mentally, I think there was some healing, but not much. I’m not sure if I’ll ever fully recover. Sometimes, I go to unlock my phone, and that, “tap to unlock with fingerprint,” message just taunts me from the bottom of my baby-blue screen, right above the home button. My eyes would linger on it for a few seconds, then I’d just tap the passcode in, and continue. I never deleted my old fingerprint from the phone, and I never swapped it to my remaining thumb. I would just enter that same memorized code. 9932.

I kept working at physical therapy. Eventually, the stitches were removed, and I got to where I could flex and curve the remains of my hand to act as a pseudo-mitten. I could pick up some cups with handles, I could balance tableware, and occasionally, when I would start to drift to sleep at night, I’d be torn awake to the sound of the blender’s skull splitting roar, like a chainsaw going off right next to my ear. A phantom shotgun blast of pain would rip through my knuckles like I was right back in my kitchen, hand eviscerating as I reach for that stupid ring. On those nights, as soon as the sleep was ripped from my eyes and I’d boot straight up, the sound would immediately disappear, kind of like that feeling of falling when you’re dozing off. When you wake up, you think for a second, “did I even really feel that?” But I knew I did. I always did.

I think I could handle it, all of it, the trauma, the phantom pain, if not for what happened today when I got home from physical therapy. I forgot my phone on my kitchen table. Upon discovering such, I decided not to turn around, and to just go without it. It was only an hour, what could happen? I unlocked my front door and made it inside, exhausted from the arm workouts, and ready to binge Welcome to Derry while eating a whole, steaming hot Tombstone pizza. But my blood ran cold, every ounce of self assuredness tunnelling out of my body and abandoning my flesh like worms from a rotten apple the moment I approached the table and saw it. The fleeting message displayed on the small, rectangular portal, lying next to my flower vase. The notification had so recently appeared, that it was barely fading by the time I read it, an oval of maroon grime above the home button at the bottom of the screen.

“Biodata ID Confirmed: Device Unlocked.”

Someone had unlocked my phone using my dominant thumb, and it had been very, very recent.

Howdy! This is the Author, Mikey, and I just wanted to say, thanks for reading. This is my shortest story that I’ve posted yet, and I think this is the one I’m most proud of. I may be huffing copium, so if I need to be knocked down a peg or two, please feel free to tear me a new one in the comments! I need critique, and there’s no one better suited to give it to me than you, dear reader. I hope to get better, so please, if there’s anything I can improve on, let me know. Thanks again for sticking around to the end, it means the world to me. To all the night owls, I hope y’all enjoyed!

a gateway 

 where suffering does not exist

            where peace and joy are everlasting forms of life

  tucked between the stars 

zack. it is heaven zack. join me zack. 

join me please.

[ DO NOT LISTEN TO THE TREES. THE SCREAMS OF ENLIGHTENED ONES INSIDE YOUR HEAD IS NOT REAL. YOUR FLESH IS NOT MOVING. YOU ARE NOT BEING HARVESTED. ]