r/RedditHorrorStories

We heard the knock again. Coming from the basement.

Arjun was the first to move. He took the knife, unlocked the basement door, and walked down the stairs. The light flickered. His footsteps stopped.

Then silence.

Maya called his name. No answer.

We heard footsteps coming back up.

Arjun stood at the top of the stairs. His hands were clean. His face was calm.

"Someone is down there," he said. "But they're not coming up."

He sat down by the fire, the knife still in his hand. He didn't say anything else.

We wanted to run. But the basement door was still open.

Then I heard a sound. Not from the basement. From behind me.

I turned around.

Ria was standing at the front door. It was wide open. Snow was falling inside.

She was holding Vikram's phone — the one he was holding when he died.

"He called me," she said softly. "Before he died. He said — it's one of us."

We all turned to look at each other.

Maya stepped back. Arjun froze. Ria didn't move.

Then she smiled.

"It's always been me."

"I just wanted to see how long it would take you to figure it out."

She moved fast — faster than we could react. Maya fell first. Arjun tried to fight, but he was too slow.

I ran. I didn't look back.

When I reached the forest edge, I stopped and turned around.

Ria was standing at the cabin door, watching me leave.

She didn't chase me.

She just smiled.

And raised her hand to wave.

---

THE END

We found the second body at dawn. Vikram was still holding his phone — the screen cracked, but the call was still connected. On the other end, silence. And then a whisper: "You're next."

We moved him to the basement. No one spoke. Snow kept falling.

The fire had died down. We were just sitting in the dark.

I looked at Maya. She was still staring at the floor, like she was counting something in her head. Arjun had his back to the wall, holding that knife. Ria hadn't spoken — not a word since we found Vikram.

No one was crying. We were too tired for that.

Then I saw it. A photograph, lying on the table. Face down.

I picked it up.

It was all of us — inside the chalet, laughing, eating. The photo was taken from outside, through the window.

But we hadn't been here when it was taken.

We had just arrived.

No one had taken that photo.

I looked around the room. Maya was watching me. Arjun's grip tightened. Ria had her eyes closed.

And then I heard it. A knock. From downstairs.

The basement door was still locked.

But something was in there.

Knocking. Waiting. And I knew — the thing in the basement wasn't one of us.
Part 3 coming out at 8:10 today

something has compelled me to write this journal, in the hope that somehow, it might save me.

On an ordinary night, the kind where I would sit on my balcony with my newly acquired telescope, the air soft against my skin as I looked up at a sky I never thought would change. I had always been interested in astronomy, not in a scientific way, but in the way a child looks at the Moon and feels like there is something behind it, something just out of reach, hidden behind a colourless wall that refuses to give anything away.

My tracking app told me Saturn was visible tonight. Clear enough for anyone with a telescope to see it. I am one of the people who finally spotted it for themselves.

I saw it then, 

At first I thought something was wrong with the telescope, or my eyes, because Saturn was red. Not faintly tinted, not slightly off-colour, but a deep, impossible crimson that felt like it did not belong to anything natural. The storm at its pole, the hexagonal formation I had read about so many times, was no longer still. It seemed to be moving, slowly rotating, like an eye turning toward me. Not toward Earth. Toward me.

For a moment I felt something I still cannot explain. Awe, comfort, recognition, all mixed together in a way that made my thoughts feel heavy. Then that feeling turned wrong. I stumbled back from the telescope and knocked it over, and I did not stay outside after that. I went straight to bed and hid under the covers like I was a child again, trying not to think about what I had seen. Eventually I slept.

And the dream began.

I was standing on a cliff-like surface beneath a sky that was no longer a sky. Everything was covered in thick red fog, the air smelling of sulphur and something else I can only describe as burnt meat. Above me there was a shape forming, a hexagon made of pulsing red light.

It did not behave like anything in reality should. It did not shift with perspective. It did not change angle depending on where I stood. It remained perfectly fixed in the sky, as if it existed independently of my perception. Even when I tried to move, it stayed exactly where it was.

It also cast a shadow that did not match its position.

That was the first moment I understood something was wrong, because even in dreams things should still follow some kind of logic. Then the sound began.

At first it was like recordings of Saturn’s storms, low and distant, almost natural. But it quickly changed. It became deeper, layered, and wrong in a way I cannot properly explain. It stopped feeling like sound and started feeling like pressure inside my mind, I might sound crazy but it felt like something was pulling at my thoughts from the inside. 

Then it became closer. And I was screaming.

Not alone. The sky itself seemed to react, as though everything around me had become aware of the same thing at once. Something inside my mind snapped, not painfully, but suddenly, and I was pulled back into my body.

I woke to screaming.

Laughing. Crying. All at once.

George. He was my neighbour and had always been loud. Drunk most nights, talking to himself, sometimes shouting, sometimes laughing for no reason at all. It was not unusual to hear noise from his room. But this was different. The noise was layered and wrong.

I could have sworn I saw a flash of red from outside my window. 

It was several days before I saw George again. When I did, he was unrecognisable.

Everything about him had changed. The bottles were gone. The smell of alcohol was gone. Even the chaos of his apartment had been erased. It looked cleaned, almost sterile, like it had never belonged to him at all. He was sober. Fully lucid. Present in a way he never had been before. It was strange but not unnatural.

His voice had changed too. Calm, controlled, almost too precise, like every word had been chosen carefully before being spoken. Even his appearance was different. His hair, once messy and unwashed, was now neatly cut and styled. Nothing about him looked accidental anymore. It was just so strange.

We spoke in the hallway when I came back from work. Normal conversation at first. Small talk. The kind you use when you are not sure what else to say. “Nice night, isn’t it?” the casual stuff. I noticed something behind his eyes. Something moving. I believe I saw a worm of some sorts crawling just behind his glassy pupil. At first I told myself I was imagining it. 

His iris was changed. Not quickly. Not violently. But slowly, The perfect circle became. Six-sided. A hexagon. I forced a smile, and excused myself, then went back into my apartment without looking at him again. Something I forgot to mention. Something I only began to notice after all of this started.

Saturn is getting closer. Am I the only one that can see it? The big red ball in the sky?.

It has been getting more noticeable recently but nobody has noticed it. 

They always looked up when they saw it. They pointed sometimes. But then they moved on, as if it was normal. As if the sky had always been that way and I was the only one remembering something different. I'm not sure if they are playing a cruel trick on me but I need to find out.

I have started hearing it recently, the sound of screaming. It reverberates across all my walls. Sometimes it sounds like it's coming from the sky, the walls. And now it's in my head.

A sound like storms, but distorted beyond recognition. I think it's listening to me. Maybe I can communicate with it?.

I woke up this morning with a sour taste in my mouth. I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, trying to understand what I was seeing. My reflection was wrong. I was seeing myself from above, even though the mirror was directly in front of me. At first I thought it was exhaustion, or stress, or something my mind would correct if I ignored it. But it did not correct itself. It simply stayed wrong. 

Things are getting weird, I’ve been noticing light seeping through the cracks in pavements and in the walls. 

People in town are changing.

I saw a man walking down the street in a perfect hexagon. Not turning corners normally, just walking in six equal movements, as if something else was guiding him. When he noticed, he stopped for a moment, confused, then continued walking in a straight line as if nothing had happened. But I know what it is.

And always, Saturn above it all.

Now it fills most of the sky.

I can feel it even when I am not looking at it, like pressure behind everything. Like the world is being slowly pressed into a shape it was not meant to take. Sometimes I hear it clearly now. Not just storms, but something that feels like screaming folded inside itself. It does not sound natural. It sounds aware.

Outside my apartment, I saw George again.

I could have sworn he was smiling at me. His eyes look hollow and lifeless but his body was perfect. They did not speak. They just watched. I do not think they are trying to hurt me.

They need me.I do not know why yet.

But I understand something now that I did not before.

I don't think I was dreaming.

Saturn is now so large that I cannot tell where the sky ends anymore. It is no longer something above us. It feels like something surrounding us. Something that has been slowly arriving without anyone noticing until it was already here. Still nobody has noticed, they still walk around not saying a word about it. And when i mention it they look confused, I think they are in on it, they know more than they are saying. 

Saturn has disappeared, but the screaming hasn't stopped. I can feel it in the depth of my mind, I think it has swallowed us whole, I can see it in the crimson red tint of the clouds. George has noticed my erratic behaviour. I think he is on to me. I hope that whoever reads this might know more, I need answers, I need an escape.

I don’t know how long we had been driving.

Amara was in the passenger seat, feet on the dashboard, somewhere between asleep and gone. I was running on three hours of sleep and the kind of focus that kicks in when panic has been going long enough to feel like a personality trait. The highway had been empty for hours. Everything had been empty for days.

We did not talk about what we had seen. You get to a point where talking about it just means living it twice.

We found the facility by accident. The road broke off from the main highway without a sign, curving downward like it was trying to stay hidden. Amara spotted it first. She put her hand on my arm without saying anything and I slowed down and we both looked at it.

A white light was coming from somewhere underground. Steady and electric and completely impossible given everything going on above ground.

We looked at each other and drove in.

There were maybe thirty women inside.

They were standing in silence when we pulled in and the look on their faces knocked something loose in my chest. It was not relief and it was not welcome. It was something closer to terror, and underneath the terror something that looked almost like grief.

Several of them had guns.

I rolled down the window. “Hey, we are just looking for—”

“Shut it off.”

A woman was already running toward us, whispering so hard it came out like she was scraping the words off the back of her teeth.

“The car. Shut it off right now. Do you understand what you have done?”

We got out slowly. The engine ticked as it cooled.

“It is too loud,” she said. Her hands were shaking. She looked at us the way you look at someone who has just made a terrible mistake on your behalf and cannot take it back. “They heard you. They are going to come now. You have to hide. Everyone. Go. Right now.”

And all of the women moved at once.

They scattered and every one of them already knew exactly where to go. Behind equipment racks, between wall panels, into corners. They lay down or pressed flat and closed their eyes and went completely, perfectly still.

The woman grabbed my wrist before she dropped to the floor.

“Wall. Eyes closed. Do not move. Do not open your eyes or you WILL die.”

She closed her eyes.

I grabbed Amara’s hand and we found a gap between two panels and pressed ourselves in and I shut my eyes.

I heard them before I felt them.

It didn’t sound like footsteps but it felt like a pressure change. The air in the facility got heavy and close and then there was a sound I did not have a name for, coming from too many directions at once. Metal doors flew open somewhere across the room. There was fast uneven movement, and then suddenly still and then fast again.

Something came close to me. I felt the temperature drop before I heard it. A wave of cold air and then something at my throat, then at my collarbone. Taking its time. I was prepared to be attacked.

But it moved on.

I do not know how long I stood there but it was long enough that my legs started to go numb.

Then the woman to my left made a sound.

Something small and involuntary. The kind of noise a body makes when it has been rigid too long and something in it gives without permission.

They were on her instantly.

In the chaos of it her hand found my leg and grabbed hold, fingers closing around my ankle with everything she had left, and the force of what was happening to her dragged me sideways. I went down hard, cheek against cold concrete, something warm hitting my face, and I lay there with my eyes shut and I did not move. I could not move. I pressed my face into the floor and I stayed there and I let her hand go slack around my ankle and I did not move.

Eventually the sounds moved away. The doors closed somewhere across the room. The pressure lifted and the air came back.

The woman to my left did not get up.

Her name was Priya. I learned that afterward. She had been at the facility for two weeks before we arrived. She had a daughter whose photo was still on her phone, sitting on the cot where Priya had slept.

The phone was there in the morning but Priya was not. Her cot was made and things were arranged neatly. She was simply gone and nobody said anything about it and I moved through the rest of that day without thinking about her again.

Sera seemed to be the one who ran things.

She had short hair, a quiet voice, and the kind of stillness that comes from surviving something so many times it has stopped feeling like survival and started feeling like just existing. She sat us down and explained the rules the way you explain something you have explained too many times and no longer expect to change anything.

The things came when there was anything too sudden or too loud. They assumed they had no eyes. If you were still enough and silent enough you became unappetizing to them.

There was an alarm. A red light that came on randomly, no pattern anyone had been able to find, but always at the same hour of night when it did come. When the light went red the things came with it. Thirty seconds, maybe less, to find your spot and close your eyes before they were already inside. In the beginning some of the women had tried to disable the alarm. Whatever they did made no difference. The alarm came on regardless and when it did the things came faster, like the disruption itself was something they could track.

Guns made it worse. Someone tried in the beginning but the noise sent them into something beyond frenzy and it cost four women before it ended.

And the exit. Sera mentioned it the way you mention something that has stopped being worth feeling anything about. No matter what they tried they could not cross back through the way they had come in. She did not explain further and something about the way she said it made me not ask.

The days settled into a rhythm. Between the nights there was food and quiet conversation and a version of routine that almost felt like a life. We moved slowly. We spoke softly. We existed in that facility the way you exist somewhere you are not sure you are allowed to be.

But something felt off about my body even then and I did not let myself look at it directly.

I was always hungry. Not the regular kind of hungry that food fixes. A deeper hunger, like something was being taken from me at a level I could not locate. I was tired in a way that sleep did not touch. I told myself it was the stress. I told myself it was everything we had been through before we found this place.

We were all noticing but not one of us was saying it.

Three weeks in, Amara came and found me.

She had been quiet for days in the specific way she gets when she has been pulling something apart and finally has all the pieces in front of her. She sat down close and kept her voice low.

“I need you to do something right now without thinking about it first,” she said. “Look at your hands and count your fingers.”

I looked at her.

“Just do it.”

I looked at my hands and counted.

Eleven.

I counted again. Ten. I counted a third time and lost track somewhere in the middle and had to start over.

“Did you know that when you are dreaming you cannot count your fingers,” Amara said quietly. “Your brain cannot hold the number steady. It keeps changing.”

I looked at my hands again. The count kept coming out wrong in a way I could not pin down.

Part of me wanted to tell her she had lost it. I counted my fingers again.

“What about those things that come at night,” I said.

“They only exist here. In this layer.”

“And the people they kill.”

“Die here and do not come back.”

I thought about Priya. About how I had not thought about her once since that first morning. About how her phone was still on that cot and none of us had touched it and none of us had said her name since.

“Amara. If we have been dreaming this whole time.” I stopped. “Where are our bodies?”

She did not answer right away.

“Whatever is happening to our bodies in the real world is bleeding into the dream,” she said finally. “The mind does that. When the body is in danger it does not just shut off. It translates. It turns what is happening into something the dreaming brain can process.” She looked at me. “Those things that come at night. I think they are the dream’s version of something that is actually happening to us right now. Somewhere real. And the hunger we feel. The way our bodies feel wrong. That is real too. That is our bodies sending information through the only channel they have left.”

“Then the ones who get killed here,” I said.

“Something is reaching them in the real world,” she said. “And the dream is how we are finding out.”

We brought it to Sera.

She listened to everything without interrupting. When Amara finished Sera was quiet for a long time and I watched her face and could not read it.

“Count your fingers,” I said.

Sera looked at me. Then she looked down at her hands. Something moved in her expression and was gone before I could name it. She did not count.

She got her notebook and opened it to a page near the beginning and set it on the table.

“I have been keeping a list,” she said. “Every name I could remember. Every woman who has passed through here.” She turned it toward us. Forty-seven names filled the page in small careful handwriting. “I do not recognize a single name on this list except the ones still here and Priya.” She paused. “I wrote all of these down myself. I know I did. And I cannot remember a single one of them.”

Nobody spoke.

“There has to be a way to wake up on purpose,” I said. “If we train ourselves to do it during the attack. When they come, we scream the word awake inside our heads, over and over, until something breaks through. The problem is we cannot open our eyes to check anything without giving ourselves away. So writing the word on our skin is the last resort only, something to look at if screaming it stops working. But the moment you open your eyes you are visible to them. So that has to be the very last thing.”

“Why only during the attack,” Sera said. “If we are dreaming right now why can we not just wake up now.”

“Because right now it feels completely real,” Amara said. “There is nothing to push against. The dream is too stable. But during the attack the fear creates a break between the two layers. That is the only moment the edge becomes accessible. It is the same reason you can wake yourself out of a nightmare when you almost never wake yourself out of a normal dream. The intensity is what opens it.”

Sera was quiet for a long moment.

“In the beginning we tried to fight,” she said. “Stay loud. Resist. Every time we did more of them came. Faster. Like something was adjusting.” She folded her hands on the table. “I used to think they were hunting us. I am not sure I still think that.”

Nobody asked her what she thought instead.

We wrote the word WAKE on the inside of our left wrists in black marker, just in case. Amara spent the days between practicing, trying to find what it felt like to hold two things at once, the dream and the awareness of the dream, so that when the moment came she would not lose it.

Two nights later the alarm went off and the lights went red.

I found my spot between the panels. Pressed my back against the wall. Closed my eyes. I held the word in my mind and I waited.

They came in fast.

The cold hit first and then the sound of them moving through the room and the fear came with it, clean and total, the kind that does not leave room for anything else. I screamed the word awake inside my head over and over and nothing happened. From across the room someone was being attacked, I could hear it, and the screaming that followed was cut short in a way I will not describe. Something shifted. The floor shook. More sounds. More than one person. The room was falling apart around me and I was still not waking up and I had no choice, I opened my eyes just enough to look at my wrist, the letters were moving, and I screamed the word again inside my head with everything I had.

Nothing happened.

Something was moving toward me from across the room. Fast and getting faster. I was out of time and I was still asleep and I was going to die here and—

Amara’s hand closed around my wrist from somewhere that was not the dream.

Cold. Real. Shaking.

I was awake.

Stale air was the first thing I noticed.

I opened my eyes.

It was the same walls but gutted and dark and old. Half the lights dead. The rest throwing a dim yellow over everything that made the room look like something abandoned mid-thought.

There were pods lining the walls, arranged in rows across the floor. Each one just wide enough for a body. Tubes running in and out. Most of the monitors above them dark. A few still running on whatever power was left.

Some of the pods had cracked open on their own. What was happening inside those ones had been happening for a long time before we woke up and whatever had gotten to them had not heard us yet, was still focused on what was already in front of it, and I looked away before I could see more than I already had.

Amara was beside me, her hand still on my arm, barely able to stand. She was the thinnest I had ever seen her. Her eyes were sunken and awake in a way that looked like it had cost her everything she had left.

I looked down at myself and did not recognize what I saw.

The skin on my arms hanging loose. Bones I had never been able to see before. I touched my face and felt my skull too close to the surface and understood all at once what the hunger had been telling us the whole time.

All around us the other pods were sealed. The women still inside them, still under, eyes closed, monitors running. Still in the facility, still hiding from the red light, still believing the dream was the only world there was. We moved to the nearest pod and tried to open it and could not. We did not have the strength and there was no mechanism on the outside we could find and whatever was still in the room with the cracked pods had started to register that something else was awake in the building. We could hear it adjusting.

There was no time. There was no way. The only thing we could do was get out and come back with help or come back with something and that is the thought I held onto as Amara pulled me toward the exit. There was a car outside, parked with the keys inside. We got in as fast as our bodies allowed. I drove because Amara’s hands would not stop shaking.

I do not know exactly when it started happening.

It was not one moment. It was like watching a photograph fade while you are holding it. One minute I could still see the pods clearly and the next time I reached for the image it was softer. The details were still there but they had stopped feeling like something that had happened to me and started feeling like something I had heard about once.

By the time we hit the main highway I could not have told you what the inside of that building looked like.

By the time the sky started going grey I could not have told you why my arms looked the way they did or why my hands would not stop shaking or why every time I looked at Amara I felt something close to grief but could not find what it belonged to.

I knew something had happened. I could feel the outline of it. But when I reached for the specifics there was nothing there.

Suddenly I became aware that I was speeding and could not remember why I was in such a rush. I found the map in the back seat. Three routes marked in red pen. Two of them crossed out in my own handwriting.

I did not remember crossing them out.

I stared at the X marks for a long time and felt something behind a door I did not want to open and then folded the map and put it back.

Amara’s hand came to my arm.

I looked up.

Down the highway, where the road curved and the tree line broke, a white light was coming from somewhere underground.

Steady. Electric.

I looked at the light.

Something in me said no. Something in me said keep going. I reached for this feeling but it was already gone. I looked down at my hands and it looked like I had two extra fingers for some reason. I quickly blamed it on exhaustion.

Amara and I looked at each other and we drove in.

The next few weeks passed in a haze of doctors appointments and mandatory leave. Everyone insisted I needed time to recover. Apparently dying wasn’t something you were expected to bounce back from overnight. The muscles in my abdomen pulled every time I moved too quickly, a constant reminder of the knife that should’ve put me down. While I sat at home, the city kept turning. The murders didn’t stop. Three more bodies were found before I was cleared to return, each one matching the others. Cut open, nailed to the wall and crowned with their entrails. 

Stepping beneath the yellow crime tape again felt strangely familiar, like I'd never left. Officers greeted me with awkward smiles, though few looked at me a little too long. I guess news travels fast when a detective wakes up in the morgue. I ignored the stares and stepped inside the victim’s house, letting my eyes wander over another living room frozen in time. CSI worked quietly around the body while I searched around for anything we missed. 

She was already there, standing silently in the corner of the dining room, half hidden in darkness. The pale dress and red insides. The long black curtain of hair. She hadn’t changed. Somewhere over the past few weeks I’d stopped reacting every time I saw her. She appeared almost everywhere now. Crime scenes, empty sidewalks, reflections in store windows, and always disappeared when I stopped looking. She never spoke. Not even a sound. The scary part wasn’t seeing her. It was how normal she’d become. 

As I glanced toward her this time though, something caught my attention. Her hands were hanging at her sides instead of hidden underneath her sleeves. In the center of each palm was a perfectly round hole, large enough that I’d be able to look right through it. Instead, there was only darkness. Not a shadow, but an endless void that swallowed the light around it. I stared for a moment before forcing my eyes back to the victim. When I looked up again, she hadn’t moved an inch. 

By the time I got home, the sun had already disappeared behind the skyline. My apartment was quiet, the only sound was coming from the small clock mounted above my desk. I shrugged off my jacket, brewed another cup of coffee I didn’t need, and spread every crime scene photograph across the scarred wood. Victim after Victim stared back at me. All in the same horrific scene. I sat there for what felt like hours, rearranging photographs, comparing notes, and retracing timelines until they blurred together. There was something I was missing. I had this tingle in my chest, like the endless ocean I was in was calling to me, telling me there’s something I didn’t know. Some detail that was sitting right in front of me, refusing to be seen. 

The room felt heavier. I didn’t need to look up anymore to know she was there. When I finally lifted my eyes, she was standing on the opposite side of my desk, closer then she’d ever been before. Her long black hair spilled over the photographs like a sheet. Her dress hanging motionless around her, and her hands rested at her sides, each palm bearing that impossible black hole from the crime scene. I stared at her for a moment before letting out a tired sigh. 

“I’m busy” I muttered, trying to ignore her. For several seconds, nothing happened. Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw her arm begin to move. It rose slowly towards my face. Instinct took over and I leaned back in my chair, trying to put distance between us, but it didn’t matter. Her hand kept coming at the same slow, deliberate pace until her palm pressed gently over my right eye. The darkness inside the hole wasn’t empty. It was the same endless ocean I’d seen when I died. The instant it touched me, another hand covered my left eye, suddenly I was looking through both impossible voids. The room disappeared for only a heartbeat before returning different. 

I blinked, my heart pounding, and looked back at the photographs. I nearly fell out of my chair. Every scene had changed. Standing around each victim were figures that hadn’t been there before. Some crouched beside bodies with impossible limbs. Others stood in corners with twisted skeletal frames wrapped in skin that looked more like wet bark or heat wrap. One had no face at all, only a mouth filled with hundreds of eyes that reached from the top of its head down to the center of its abdomen. Every photograph contained them, each creature lingering just outside of where everyone stood. They just watched. 

For the first time ever, I was staring into a world that hid in plain sight. 

The next morning, I did my best to pretend everything was normal. The precinct hadn’t changed. Phones rang, officers laughed over old coffe, detectives shuffled through papers, and dispatchers barked through calls. I settled into my chair and buried myself in reports, trying to focus on something grounded after what I witnessed the night before. It didn’t help. Every now and then I’d catch her standing somewhere in my periphery. Near evidence lockers, by the break room, at the end of halls. She followed me everywhere I went, silently watching while everyone passed through her. 

I was halfway through writing up notes on the latest homicide when an odd sensation tingled in my chest. I froze, trying not to make it obvious as I casually looked around the bullpen. Nobody else seemed out of the ordinary. Then I felt her behind me. Before I could turn around, her hands gently covered my eyes, and the precinct changed. The room was washed in that familiar ocean blue. The corners writhed with movement. Horrific figures stood throughout the office, lingering behind people, perched on filing cabinets, and crawling on the ceiling. My eyes drifted across the room until they settled on detective Harris. He was an older investigator, pushing sixty, known for surviving two bypass surgeries and carrying heart medication everywhere he goes. 

Standing directly behind him, was one of the creatures. It towered over him by several feet, impossibly thin, its skin stretched tightly over a crooked skeleton. Its head hung unnaturally and dozens of bulging eyes stared down at him. A second later, Harris suddenly clutched his chest. His chair slammed backwards as he collapsed onto the floor, gasping for air. Papers scattered everywhere and officers rushed toward him, shouting for someone to call an ambulance. I stood frozen, unable to look away. As Harris finally went limp, something translucent pulled itself from his body, slowly being pulled away by an invisible current. Immediately, the creature moved, snatching it with its long arms, its torso splitting into a mouth of thousands of teeth. It scooped the translucent figure into its mouth before snapping shut. Its eyes drifted to the lifeless body as officers tried desperately to apply cpr. 

The world snapped back to normal as the woman slowly pulled her hands from my eyes. Paramedics rushed to the scene, doing their best before pronouncing Harris dead at the scene. Did it kill him? Or did all of these beings know he was going to die? 

I knew I’d have to figure it out myself.

Pt. 1

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMidnightArchives/s/YEyoqpQBQw

Rain always made crime scenes heavier. Not because it washed away evidence and soaked my clothes, but because it muted everything. Lights blurred across wet pavement and the drumming muffled everyone’s chatter inside the house. I’d been to enough murder scenes that the sight should’ve stopped bothering me forever ago, but every new victim settled in the back of my head, adding another face to a growing list I couldn’t forget. This one made four in two weeks. Different people, different neighborhoods, different lives. The only thing connecting them was the way they died. Cut open, their hands nailed to their walls, their small intestines wrapped around their heads like a sick crown.

The house was eerily untouched outside of the body. A television still murmured to itself in the living room. Dinner sat cold on the kitchen table, abandoned half way through. Family photos lined the hallway, smiling faces sealed inside dusty glass as if the walls refused to recognize what just happened inside them. I wandered from room to room with a notebook tucked under my arm, letting my eyes drift over details I’d probably end up writing off later. A muddy footprint near the back door, a cracked picture frame, a child’s drawing stuck to the fridge with a faded magnet. Nothing jumped out. Nothing explained why another life was taken. It was just another quiet house with another loud secret. 

As I stepped back into the hallway, something caught my eye. At the far end, tucked into the darkness where the overhead light couldn’t reach, stood a woman. She was completely still, dressed in what looked like a tattered white dress. A color in direct contrast to the deep red that stained a hole in her abdomen, entrails hanging out and curling around her feet. Long black hair covered her features except for the faint outline of her chin. She wasn’t moving. She just stared at me. My hand instinctively found my holster as I called out through the empty house. 

“Hey! You shouldn’t be here!” 

I closed the distance in a few quick strides, never taking my eyes off her. The moment I reached the end of the hall, she was gone. I searched every room twice before finally stopping, breathing harder than I’d like to admit. There were no open windows, no back exits, nowhere anyone could slip out of without getting passed me. One of the officers outside came in to check on me after hearing me shout. I hesitated before telling him what I thought I saw. 

“There hasn’t been anyone else inside this house besides us for the past hour.”

I looked back into the corner where she had been standing. It was empty. Even so.. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she had seen me, far before I had seen her.

I told myself it had been exhaustion. The next few days blurred together into a cycle of paperwork, interviews, and dead ends. I buried myself in the investigation, hoping the work would push that woman from the back of my mind. Every victim led to another unanswered question. Security footage from home cams would conveniently fail. Supposed witnesses either saw nothing or gave contradictory information from one another. It was trying to ask kindergartners who broke a vase. I stopped sleeping as much as I should have, surviving mostly on stale coffee and whatever food I could grab between interviews.

One evening, after combing through old case files at a coffee shop I’d practically adopted as my second office, I finally called it a night. The place was one of those old neighborhood cafes that looked like it hadn’t changed in fifty years. The owner gave me a sympathetic nod as I left, probably noticing the dark circles under my eyes. Outside, the rain hadn’t stopped all day, leaving the streets damp beneath the glow of flickering streetlights. People shuffled passed on their way home, umbrellas shielding them from the downpour, paying little attention to the world around them. I was halfway down the block, lost in thought, when I heard splashing footsteps closing in behind me. 

I barely had time to turn around when something slammed into me. A sharp burning pain erupted through my abdomen, stealing the air from my lungs. I looked down just in time to see the handle pressed into my stomach before it was ripped back out. The hooded figure didn’t hesitate for a second. They drove the blade back into me again, then a third time before I managed to shove them away. My hand flew to my holster, but my fingers felt clumsy, slick with my own blood. By the time I got my pistol free, the attacker had already backed away. 

For a second we just stood there. I couldn’t make out the face beneath the hood, only darkness where it should have been. Then screams erupted as people scattered across the sidewalk. The hooded figure turned and vanished into the fumbling crowd of people and was simply gone. I tried to chase after them. I made it a whole three steps before my legs gave out. I hit the pavement hard, blood spreading beneath me as strangers rushed to my side, their voices growing distant. My vision blurred, the world narrowing into a tunnel of flashing lights and muffled shouting. 

Across the street, standing beneath a flicker street lamp was the woman. The same dress. The same black curtain of hair. She just watched. Then everything went dark. 

Darkness didn’t come the way I thought it would. I expected darkness. Nothing but that. Instead, I opened my eyes beneath an endless ocean. At least that’s the closest thing I ever found to describe it. The water stretched forever in every direction, impossibly clear, illuminated by a blue light that had no source. There was no surface above me and now floor below me. I wasn’t swimming, and I wasn’t sinking. I didn’t need to breathe. I couldn’t feel the knife wounds anymore. The cold never came. Time stopped having meaning. Seconds could have been years passing. There was only the quiet, deep hum of water. 

Eventually I realized I wasn’t alone. People drifted through the water around me as if a current I couldn’t feel was pulling them. There were hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. Some floated peacefully with their eyes closed, while others swam slowly into the endless blue, never looking at me as they passed. Young faces, old faces, men, women. Every life imaginable slipping through the silent abyss. I tried to call out but couldn’t find myself to speak. 

For the first time in years, my mind was completely empty. No murder investigations, no paperwork. No memories of blood soaked floors or flashing lights. Just.. peace. It was unsettling how easy it became to accept it. I remember wondering if this was all there was. Floating forever in an endless sea, watching souls drift by until I became one of them.

Then, something seemed to grab my heart. It wasn’t a hand exactly, but it felt like one. An immense pressure closing around my chest from somewhere deep inside me before squeezing hard enough to make every muscle in my body tense. Once. The pain was blinding, sending ripples through the water around me. Then it released, leaving me gasping for air despite not needing to breathe. Before I could recover, it squeezed again. Harder this time. Hard enough that the ocean around me seemed to crack apart. 

I shot upright with a scream. Metal instruments clattered across the floor as a man in a white coat stumbled backwards so violently he nearly knocked himself over. His face had gone completely white, his eyes locked onto me in absolute horror. I blinked against harsh fluorescent lights, my chest heaving as I looked down. I was lying on a steel table beneath a white sheet, my torso exposed. Someone had already drawn a thick black line down the center of my chest. A scalpel rested on a trey beside me, only inches from my arm. 

The mortician. He’d been seconds away from cutting me open. By the time the screaming stopped, the room had filled with people. Doctors, nurses and officers. Questions came faster than I could answer them. According to every report, I’d died on the street. No heartbeat, no wounds. They tried cpr but it didn’t work. They’d pronounced me dead, tagged my body and wheeled me downstairs. As far as anyone was concerned, I was a corpse. 

A few hours later, I sat wrapped in a gray blanket inside one of the precinct’s offices, wearing borrowed sweatpants and a hoodie that hung a size too big. A cup of coffee sat untouched between my hands, more for the warmth. Across me, another detective leaned against his desk, arms crossed, studying me like some kind of puzzle. 

“You’ve been declared dead for almost five hours.” He finally said, breaking the silence “you mind explaining how I’m having a conversation with you right now?” 

I stared at the coffee, watching the surface tremble from the slight shake of my hands. “I wish I could” because the truth was, I had a feeling that whatever brought me back, hadn’t been done with me yet. 

Pt2!!

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMidnightArchives/s/zwai0NzJ8X

While driving home one recent night, my wife found herself sandwiched between two large trucks. The truck behind her turned on its high beams, maybe to annoy or signal the truck in front because it was driving 10k under the speed limit. It was a dick move. Because she was driving a smaller vehicle between them, the intense light flooded her cabin and projected a clear silhouette of her outline onto the flat, white back of the truck ahead. She could see her outline very clearly, along with items on the dashboard.

---

As the three vehicles turned a corner, the angle of the high beams shifted and then shone through her car again. When the silhouette reappeared on the truck ahead, she noticed something changed: the shadow now clearly showed the shape of a tall male looking person sitting in her passenger seat, with the head and shoulders distinctly visible.

Confused and startled, she looked over at her empty passenger seat and then back at the shadow a couple of times to make sure she wasn't misseeing it. She immediately accelerated, pulled out, and overtook the front truck to get out from between them and escape the high beams.

A story that I wrote back in May, “I’m a Pokémon Scalper With The Worst Luck,” just got Narrated by the YouTuber

https://youtube.com/@creepycavatappi?si=L7d-fJwu60erHGYrn - Creepy Cavatappi and is officially up on their channel. Huge thank you to them, and as well, I highly suggest taking a look at their other work, such as the “I’m a NATO soldier” series, “The Need to be Seen,” and “I’m a Mortician.”

I’m gonna try and cook up something spooky that should be posted tomorrow, but for right now, I just figured I’d just give this small content creator a shoutout, if you happen across this post, you’re great Creepy Cavatappi 👍