Whispers in the Dark

with Ellie Navarro

Two Years Ago

The book wasn’t supposed to be real.

It was a dare. A joke. Something to kill time while they were all half-drunk in the basement of an abandoned dorm. The kind of place with rusted pipes, wet cinderblock walls, and old rumors about freshman ghosts and satanic graffiti.

But Caleb read the book anyway.

It had no title, no author. Just rotting leather binding and a page near the center marked by a scorch ring. Someone had handwritten across the top in red ink: THE SEVERING.

The rules were scrawled beneath in crooked, slanted letters:

Speak what you want to forget.
Mark your place in the circle.
Spill your blood where your truth once lived.

No one took it seriously. Lena rolled her eyes and said it sounded like some failed Reddit ARG. Devon, bored as usual, muttered that it was cleaner than a frat hazing. Jordan was already sketching a crude circle on the concrete with chalk, candles wobbling as he laughed through it. Zoë held the matches and stared like she was waiting for the basement to breathe.

“It’s just for fun,” Caleb said.

He sounded casual, indifferent, like he hadn’t sat in that same room alone the night before and whispered to the dark.

They sat cross-legged around the circle. Each had a shard of mirror laid out before them. The air stank of mildew, dust, and rust.

Zoë went first. Her voice barely carried, almost swallowed by the stale air.

She pressed the key to the mirror and carved a slow, trembling spiral. The metal scraped like teeth on glass. She bit her lip, took the pushpin from Caleb’s hand, and drove it into the pad of her thumb. The blood welled up fast, too red in the flickering candlelight.

“I sever the guilt I carry for what I didn’t do.”

She held her hand over the mirror. A drop slid down and struck the glass with a soft, wet tick. She shivered.

Jordan leaned in next, laughing under his breath but with a twitch in his jaw. He scratched a jagged lightning bolt into his mirror, then jammed the safety pin into the side of his finger like he wanted to feel it.

“I sever what I said that ruined him.”

His blood hit with a heavier splash, smearing across the mirrored surface. He didn’t wipe it off.

Devon didn’t look at anyone. He ran a coin edge across the mirror until it squealed, drew a triangle, and bit the side of his own hand like it didn’t matter. His blood left a thick smear. He said something low, but no one asked him to repeat it.

Lena rolled her eyes, muttered something under her breath, and slashed a sharp X into her mirror. She used the blade of her house key to slice a small cut across her palm and smeared it on like war paint.

Then Caleb was silent for a long moment, eyes locked on the mirror. His own reflection stared back, pale and distant. Slowly, he drew a ring of short vertical lines around the edge of the glass, like tally marks. Then he unpinned the clasp of a silver bracelet from his wrist, a broken heirloom, and jabbed it into the flesh below his knuckle. The pain was sharp, precise. Controlled.

“I sever the night I let him die.”

His blood trailed down onto the mirror’s surface, running along the marks like it knew where to go.

No one moved. No one breathed. The candles snapped once. The silence thickened.

Zoë pulled her sweater around her shoulders. Jordan laughed too loud, like static from an old speaker. Lena stood up, brushing off her jeans.

“Happy now?” she said. “Spooky bonding complete.”

Caleb didn’t answer. He just smiled, faint, empty.

Behind him, the flame of the nearest candle flickered sideways.

 

Senior Year

Lena wasn’t scared of much. She never had been. Not the dark, not the woods behind campus, not the stories about the dorm basement. But when she sat across from Caleb at the coffee shop near the quad, she looked like she hadn’t slept in days.

“I think I’m losing my mind,” she said, poking the lid of her coffee without drinking it. “Either that, or my apartment’s trying to gaslight me.”

Caleb didn’t respond at first. He just waited.

“I’m serious,” she went on, half-laughing. “The lights turn on by themselves. I’ll lock my front door and find it wide open ten minutes later. My closet door opens on its own. Last night I swear I heard someone whisper my name. Thought it was my neighbor or something.”

She paused, fidgeting with her cup. “But it wasn’t. I mean… it sounded like my dad.”

Caleb’s expression tightened, but he didn’t speak.

“Which is impossible,” she said quickly. “Obviously. I haven’t heard that voice in years. So, maybe I’m just stressed. Maybe this is what burnout looks like. Midterms, bad sleep, repressed trauma, all the fun stuff.”

She smiled like it was a joke, but it didn’t reach her eyes.

“And then this morning, I found scratches on the inside of my closet door. Like… claw marks. I live alone, Caleb.”

He stirred his coffee slowly.

“Have you told anyone else?”

She shook her head. “They’d just tell me I need therapy. And maybe I do.”

A beat passed. Caleb’s eyes stayed on her face.

Lena laughed softly, trying to brush it all off. “Probably just need to get my meds adjusted or something.”

She stood, gathering her bag. “Sorry for dumping this on you. I just… haven’t been sleeping right.”

“It’s okay,” Caleb said.

Lena caught the way his brow furrowed, the way his voice dipped lower, that gentle concern he always tried to mask. He looked at her like she was already halfway gone, like he was preparing for bad news.

“You can always talk to me. I mean it, Lena.”

She smiled, quick and small, and cast her eyes down toward the coffee. The warmth in her hands didn’t reach her chest.

“I will,” she muttered. “Catch you later.”

As she walked away, Lena could feel his gaze pressing between her shoulders. She hated how heavy she felt, how exposed.

The apartment was cold when she got home, like something had been holding its breath all day and finally exhaled the moment she walked in.

Lena dropped her keys on the counter and turned on the lights. They flickered, pulsed, then steadied. Her heart jumped despite herself. She muttered a curse, walked into the kitchen, and grabbed a beer from the fridge.

She didn’t notice the closet door was open until she passed the hallway.

It hadn’t been open that morning.

She stopped mid-step. Her keys slipped from her fingers and hit the hardwood with a sharp clatter. The door hung ajar, just enough to expose darkness thick and wrong. Her breath caught.

The air was heavier here. Still. Not like the rest of the apartment, which was cold but breathable. This felt dense, clotted with damp rot and rusted iron. Something deeper lingered beneath it, something like spoiled meat, like breath gone stale inside lungs that no longer worked.

Lena grabbed the broom leaning against the wall. Her palms were slick.

“Alright,” she said, quieter than before. “Let’s get this over with.”

She kicked the closet door open hard and jabbed the broom in like a spear.

Nothing.

Just coats. Shoes. Boxes stacked with old notebooks. Her heart pounded stupidly, hammering her ribs, loud in her ears. She let out a shaky laugh.

Then she heard a soft inhale behind her.

She turned, broom raised, body tense. Nothing. The hallway stretched empty, the door still locked, the windows shut. A silence so deep it felt manufactured.

When she turned back, the closet had changed. The entire back wall was gone, replaced by something impossible, wallpaper she hadn’t seen in over a decade. Faded yellow flowers, curling at the edges. The floor had transformed into that same awful green carpet, so scratchy she used to get rug burns playing on it.

Her knees went weak.

“No…” she whispered. “No, no, no…”

She took one step back, then two. Her back hit the hallway wall.

From the darkness down the hall, something shifted. A figure emerged, slow, heavy steps dragging across the hardwood. At first just a shape, hunched and broad, then the sharp edges of his shoulders, the curve of his jaw, the weight of him filling the corridor like smoke. Her father.

He stepped into the light spilling from the darkness, features snapping into focus. Not the dying man she’d last seen in a hospital bed, but the version burned into her childhood: thick-armed and drunk, wearing the flannel stained with sweat and beer. His mouth hung crooked, twisted into that awful smile he used before the yelling started, twisted into that mockery of affection he used to wear when she was small enough to scare. His eyes were wild with something feral,

Her stomach lurched.

“Lena, honey,” he cooed. “Come here a sec.”

He took a step forward. Glass crunched beneath his boots. She didn’t remember there being glass on the floor. But now, it was littered with broken beer bottles. More appeared with every blink.

He kept coming. His smile widened.

“I said come here,” he growled.

She turned and bolted for the kitchen.

Behind her, the lightbulb in the closet burst with a sharp pop. A roar echoed through the hallway.

Lena hit the kitchen, skidding on the tile, yanked open the drawer for a knife, but the drawer was empty. Every one of them was.

Behind her came the sound of stomping boots and furious breath.

A bottle sailed past her head and exploded against the cabinets. Another shattered across the counter. He was screaming now, wordless and full of rage, the voice of her childhood nightmares, louder than it had ever been in life.

Lena ran to the only place that offered safety in her childhood, the closet.

Her body moved on instinct. She slammed through the hallway, past the wreckage, and into that yawning dark. The closet, twisted and stretching far too deep, waited with open arms, the warped memory of safety turned inside out.

She dove inside, lungs burning, every nerve alight with panic. Her feet hit the carpet and sank. The scratchy green flooring was wet now, thick with something warm that clung to her ankles. She didn’t dare look down.

The closet door slammed shut behind her with a finality that vibrated in her bones. Total blackness swallowed her.

She scrambled back into the space, heart slamming against her ribs, arms outstretched, grasping for the corners she remembered curling into as a child. The coats were gone. So were the boxes. The closet was deeper now, impossibly deep, like it led underground.

Silence hung heavy, broken only by her heaving breaths. Lena clutched her arms around her knees and forced herself to breathe slower, quieter, more controlled. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. She’d had nightmares like this before, waking ones, sometimes, when sleep blurred too close to memory. That’s all it was. Her mind playing tricks on her. A flashback with teeth.

She whispered to herself, barely audible. “It’s not real. He’s not real. You’re safe. You’re home.”

But her fingers trembled as they pressed against the wall. The scent of sweat and beer was still thick in the air, as real as the ache in her chest. Her breath hitched. She closed her eyes, trying to will the memory away. But the darkness pressed closer, louder, like it could hear her doubt.

As she rocked herself back and forth she heard a creak, the sound of the door opening again.

Light spilled in. Just a crack. Just enough for her to see the silhouette standing there, tall, monstrous in its familiarity. It was her father again, but something was terribly off. He loomed taller than he ever had in life, his shoulders stretching past the frame of the doorway as if the walls bent to make room for him. His face was slack and bloated, the skin around his jaw hanging loose, his grin grotesque and oversized, splitting his cheeks almost to the ears. His eyes gleamed, too dark, too still, like oil slicks reflecting firelight. Whatever this thing was, it wore her father’s shape, but it had forgotten how to wear it right.

“Found you,” he said.

The light snapped off.

A hand clamped over her shoulder, ice-cold and strong.

She tried to scream, but the sound caught in her throat as the floor gave way beneath her. She fell, and kept falling, as if the closet itself was swallowing her, as if it had waited all these years to take her back.

And everything vanished.

Devon had a bad feeling long before he reached Lena’s door. She hadn’t texted him back that morning, which wasn’t unheard of, but when she didn’t show up to class and didn’t answer her phone, something twisted low in his gut.

Devon knocked firmly on the door, pausing afterward to listen for any sound, footsteps, a rustle, even the faint echo of movement, but there was nothing. The silence that answered him felt far too complete, too intentional. He knocked again, harder now, each rap echoing down the hallway like a warning.

“Lena?” he called, his voice slightly strained with worry, but the silence that followed was absolute, pressing in on him like the stillness after something breaks.

He reached for the handle and felt it give beneath his hand, unlocked, easy, as though she had stepped out for coffee and forgotten to secure it behind her. That was the first thing that didn’t sit right.

The apartment looked the same as always, almost unnervingly so. The kitchen counters had their usual spotless shine. The floor, freshly vacuumed, bore tight lines from the roller that made everything look orderly and untouched. Her throw blanket was perfectly folded on the couch, the coffee table empty save for a closed book and a bottle of water.

Yet something was off. The silence that hung in the air felt like the kind of silence that comes after something violent has already happened.

“Lena?” he called again, louder now, the word catching on the edge of his throat.

There was no reply.

As he walked the hallway toward her bedroom, his eyes swept over every familiar detail. Her phone sat silent on the nightstand, the screen dark and unresponsive. Her keys remained on the counter by the door, untouched. Her favorite jacket, the soft, mustard-colored one she wore even in spring, still hung neatly on the hook, unmoved.

Then his gaze caught on the closet at the end of the hall.

The door wasn’t open, but it wasn’t properly shut either. It leaned against the frame, crooked, the latch not quite aligned. As if someone had meant to close it… or had tried to keep it closed and failed.

Devon stepped forward, heart beginning to race and pushed it open.

Lena’s body was crumpled in the corner of the walk-in closet. Her back was against the wall, one arm flopped limp across her lap, the other clawed toward the door as if she’d tried to crawl her way out. Her eyes were gone. Hollow sockets red and wet, clawed open by her own nails, nails that were torn, some broken down to the bed, blood trailing across her cheeks in jagged paths.

A screwdriver jutted from her ear, handle sticky with blood. It had been rammed in hard and deliberate. Her mouth hung open, frozen in a silent scream.

The inside of the closet door was shredded.

Scratch marks covered the wood, deep and desperate, some so raw they still bled. Long, uneven gouges trailed from the bottom to as high as her arms could have reached. The knob was scratched too, as if she’d tried to tear it off.

Devon stumbled back, hand over his mouth, the taste of bile rising fast.

The rest of the apartment remained untouched. Pristine.

A perfect life, frozen around a nightmare. He fumbled for his phone and called 911, barely managing to give the address.

Then he called Caleb.

His voice shook, cracking like ice.

“She’s gone,” he said. “It’s Lena. She’s, she’s dead. I found her. In her closet. It’s”

A sharp inhale.

“There’s blood everywhere, man. She, she did something to herself. Her eyes. God, her eyes. It’s not right. None of this is right.”

The diner buzzed with a dull sort of energy, too normal for how off everything felt. Silverware scraped against ceramic. A toddler cried somewhere behind them. Across the table, Caleb stirred his coffee like it might reveal something if he did it long enough. Jordan muttered half-hearted jokes that went nowhere. Zoë kept unlocking her phone, checking messages that weren’t coming.

Devon hadn’t touched his food.

None of them really wanted to be there, but they needed to be around each other. After Lena… it felt wrong to be alone.

“I still don’t get it,” Jordan muttered. “She was fine one day and then… that? It doesn’t make sense.”

“None of this makes sense,” Zoë replied, her voice low. “

Devon nodded absently, but his eyes weren’t on them. He was looking past Caleb’s shoulder, toward a booth in the far corner.

There was someone sitting there.

A guy, alone. Mid-twenties maybe. He had dark curls, pale skin, a denim jacket with a faded band patch on the sleeve. He wasn’t eating, simply seated in stillness, his eyes fixed squarely on Devon as if he’d been waiting for him all along.

A slow, icy pressure crept through Devon’s chest, the tightening unmistakable.

He knew that face. Or he used to, before it disappeared beneath shattered glass and a sea of headlights. Before the panic and the screaming, the blur of red lights dancing on wet pavement. Before the cops filed it away as a hit and run with no suspects, no answers, just a body, a funeral, and a hole Devon never patched.

Devon’s fingers curled against the side of the booth.

“Devon?” Zoë’s voice pulled him back.

He blinked and looked again. He was still there.

“I’m getting some air,” he said, already rising and grabbing his coat.

Caleb glanced at him. “Want someone to come with?”

Devon shook his head. “I’m good.”

He wasn’t. But if he stayed a second longer, he was going to lose it right there under the flicker of fluorescent lights and the weight of things none of them were saying.

He stepped into the night alone, trying not to look back at the window.

The booth hadn’t emptied. The man was still there, unmoving, face half-draped in the neon haze, eyes locked onto Devon like he knew every sin he’d ever buried. Even as Devon stepped into the cold night, he could feel that stare pressing against the back of his skull, unblinking, relentless.

Devon reached his dorm just past midnight, his breath curling in the cold as he fumbled with the key. The hallway lights flickered the way they always did, the same busted bulb buzzing above his door like a dying insect. Inside, everything was just as he’d left it—clean, contained, quiet.

He kicked off his shoes and flicked on the TV out of habit, letting the low hum of some late-night broadcast fill the silence. He didn’t even look at what was playing. He just needed something normal, something stupid and forgettable.

The weight of the evening pressed on him like humidity, thick and clinging. Lena’s death, the man in the booth, that face — all of it clawed at the edge of his thoughts. He moved into the kitchenette, unscrewed the cap from a half-empty bottle of whiskey, and poured two fingers into a glass.

The TV cut through the moment with a sudden, too-familiar voice.

“and in breaking news, a tragic accident claimed the life of twenty-four-year-old David Harper earlier this evening, in what appears to be a fatal hit and run just outside of the campus district…”

Devon froze, glass halfway to his lips.

He turned slowly toward the screen.

There he was. David. Caught in mid-laugh in a still photo, unmistakably him. The same man from the diner. The same eyes. His face gave way to flashing red and blue police lights and shaky footage of the aftermath. A reporter’s voice trembled as she described the chaos, the screech of tires, the impossible sound of impact, and the way his body was found near the crosswalk.

Devon blinked hard. This couldn’t be real.

But it was the exact same coverage from five years ago, every word, every frame.

The footage had aged with him. Like time had moved forward around a single, terrible moment playing on repeat.

Devon grabbed the remote and turned off the TV. Silence.

Then the screen flickered back to life. David’s face filled it again.

Another clip, a blurred photo from the accident, grainy and dark. Devon’s reflection stared back at him from the screen, pale and motionless.

He pressed the power button again, held it down, clicked it once more, but the screen refused to comply, as if the image were burned into the glass itself. The heaviness in the room deepened with every failed attempt.

The screen didn’t flicker, didn’t distort, it just held steady, David’s face staring back at him with that same dead calm, eyes like anchors dragging Devon down into the past.

Something in his chest cracked, a breath hitching sharp through his teeth.

Without another word, Devon grabbed his keys from the hook by the door, the metal jangling too loudly in the stillness, and stepped out into the hallway, leaving the glow of the television behind him.

The night air clung to him, damp and cold, as Devon walked with his hands shoved deep into his coat pockets. The streets were quiet, the usual campus chatter and drunken laughter swallowed whole by the fog rolling low over the sidewalks. He told himself he just needed space, a walk to clear his head, a few deep breaths to prove he wasn’t having a mental breakdown. Lena’s death had just fucked with his head, seeing her like that.

Cars passed at irregular intervals, headlights glaring, engines too loud, then fading into nothing. He caught movement in every shadow, reflections that didn’t belong in storefront glass, flickers in puddles that made his heart stutter.

Every time his footfall echoed back at him, it seemed off-beat, just a little too slow, like something was following half a step behind.

As he turned down a side street, the sensation bloomed into certainty. A hum started in his ears, low, crawling, mechanical, and deepened with each step. He wiped his hands down his jeans, suddenly sweating despite the night’s chill.

A sound cracked through the silence, tires screeching, sharp and violent.

Not once, but over and over, echoing from all directions with increasing intensity, as if the street itself remembered every accident it had ever witnessed. The noise crawled into his bones, relentless and dissonant, untraceable to any visible source.

The crosswalk light ahead flickered with erratic pulses. A breeze pushed down the block behind him, sudden and cold.

The next sound was worse, sickening, gut-wrenching thud, like a body meeting a hood at full speed.

Devon spun around, heart lurching in his chest, but nothing was there. Just a parked car across the street, and his own breath fogging in the cold.

Streetlamps began to die, one after another, behind him. First the one at the corner. Then the next. Then another. The darkness followed in steady rhythm.

Up ahead, a car sat idling beneath the last working light.

The headlights were too bright, blinding and steady, and the sound of an engine revving, low and guttural, grew louder, though the car never moved an inch.

Devon stopped walking. Every nerve in his body screamed to run, but his limbs wouldn’t respond.

He turned back, only to find another car had appeared behind him, headlights identical, sealing him in.

Devon could only feel his panic breaking loose. He staggered backward, shaking his head, eyes darting between the headlights that pinned him in place. The shadows seemed to warp. Something broke in his mind and suddenly he was sprinting. Not toward safety, but into traffic, his mind lost in the dissonant screeching, the phantom pain, the relentless weight of everything he could no longer outrun. He didn’t see the car until the very last second, only the blinding lights, too bright, too real, rushing toward him as if summoned.

He barely had time to scream.

The impact threw him up and over the hood, his skull cracking against the windshield, a flash of red blooming across the glass. His body slammed onto the pavement with a crunch that echoed through the street.

Somewhere nearby, a car screeched to a halt. A woman screamed.

Devon’s ears rang as he stared upward, vision blurring, cold seeping into his bones. Faces gathered in the distance outside a nearby bar, figures coming into focus.

Among them, just behind the crowd, stood David stood just beyond the crowd, his expression eerily serene, body motionless, gaze locked directly onto Devon with a stillness so complete it almost didn’t seem human.

Jordan sat on the couch, eyes locked to the television screen without really seeing it. The room was dark except for the flickering light of the news broadcast. His drink sat untouched on the coffee table, the condensation dripping silently onto a pile of unopened mail. He didn’t move, didn’t blink, barely breathed.

The anchor’s voice droned on: “Authorities are investigating the death of a local college student who, according to multiple witnesses, ran directly into the path of oncoming traffic late last night. The identity of the student has not yet been released pending notification of next of kin.”

The footage replayed. Police tape. Flashing lights. A sheet-covered stretcher. It wasn’t real. Couldn’t be.

But Jordan knew better.

His phone rang on the cushion beside him, vibrating sharply against the stillness. He didn’t want to answer it. Every instinct told him not to. But his hand moved anyway.

“Hello?”

Zoë’s voice came first, high, frantic, brittle. “It’s him, Jordan. It’s Devon. It has to be.”

Caleb chimed in, his voice tighter, barely holding together. “It doesn’t make sense. He would have said if he was struggling.”

Jordan swallowed hard, his mouth dry. “You think… you think seeing Lena like that did something to him?”

“I don’t know,” Zoë whispered. “Maybe. I’ve been trying to make sense of it. Maybe he was already dealing with something. Maybe that night just,”

“Snapped him?” Jordan offered.

No one answered for a moment.

“It doesn’t feel right,” Caleb said at last. “It feels… wrong. All of it. It just isn’t right.”

Jordan stared back at the screen while the footage looped again. Another classmate gone. Another friend.

The days after Devon’s death blurred together, each one heavier than the last. Jordan hadn’t been sleeping. He hadn’t been eating much either. Something about the way Devon died, the randomness of it, the violence, gnawed at the edges of his thoughts. The group didn’t talk much anymore, not after the call. Everyone seemed to retreat into themselves. Jordan tried to act normal, go to class, play it cool, but it all felt paper-thin.

The whispers started on the third night.

Faint at first. Like someone else’s television through the wall, muffled and forgettable. He chalked it up to the neighbors. Then they grew louder. Clearer. Closer.

By the fourth night, they were unmistakable. They said things he recognized. Words he wished he could forget.

By the fifth, he stopped pretending it was anyone else.

That night, Jordan couldn’t sleep. He wandered aimlessly through his apartment, a half-empty bottle of gin clutched in one hand, the TV still playing muted headlines in the background. The city outside his window felt too still, too watchful. Everything in him itched.

It began with whispers in the walls. At first, Jordan blamed the gin. The vents. The old pipes. But the voices sharpened into words, phrases he’d heard before. Things he said. Jokes. Cruel ones. The kind that never sounded as bad until they echoed back, warped and slow.

He turned off the TV. The voices didn’t stop. They seeped from the drywall, hissed from behind outlets, curled into the corners of the room. Say it again, one breathed. Another laughed. The same laugh he’d once used to humiliate someone.

Desperate to drown it out, he turned on music, loud. But the lyrics twisted. Every voice sounded like his own, mocking, venomous. He couldn’t remember what real sounded like.

He stumbled toward the bathroom, bottle still in hand, legs unsteady from the gin. He didn’t bother turning on the light. The door creaked shut behind him, and the familiar darkness folded in. He fumbled with his zipper, missed the toilet completely, the sound of liquid hitting tile joining the quiet hiss in his ears. He cursed under his breath and leaned heavily against the sink, gripping its edge as the room spun.

When he finally looked up, the mirror was already fogging. Messages etched themselves into the glass, like scratches from inside the mirror. Everyone heard. He cried. You laughed.

He stared at the words until his eyes burned. He shouted back, hoarse, panicked, voice cracking under the weight of slurred curses and desperate apologies. His fists slammed against the wall, his reflection fracturing into shards behind the condensation. There was no reply, just the thick quiet of an apartment holding its breath.

The whisper came again, hot against his ear like someone pressed their mouth right beside it: They’re still laughing. The tone held no mockery, no cruelty, just the cold, unwavering weight of a truth Jordan couldn’t run from anymore, as if the voice had already decided what was coming long before he did.

He couldn’t take it anymore. The voices, the walls, the memories, they pressed in until something inside him snapped, and his body moved on instinct. He needed air, space, distance from whatever was crawling through his thoughts. So he grabbed his keys and the bottle and staggered out of the apartment, heading for the stairs without looking back.

The stairs blurred beneath him. His feet moved without thought, the gin numbing everything except his racing pulse. When the door opened and he stepped onto the roof, the night wasn’t empty. It was alive.

Music thumped low from somewhere, vibrating against his ribs. Lights flickered along the edge of the building. A crowd had gathered, dozens of students, laughing, drinking, swaying to a song Jordan couldn’t recognize. The faces were wrong. Smiles too wide, eyes too knowing. Every head turned when he appeared.

Jordan blinked, his vision swimming, trying to make sense of what he saw. It was the same rooftop. The same string lights, same beat-up patio furniture, same skyline view. The same night. The one that had haunted him more than he ever let on. Where he’d made that joke, a single, calculated punchline that turned a private truth into a public spectacle. The laughter that night had been immediate. Wild. He’d soaked it in like a performer basking in the applause.

But the laughter had curdled into something different, and as Jordan blinked into the shifting, too-bright lights, he realized the crowd wasn’t cheering anymore, they were watching him with an intensity that felt more like a collective hunger than recognition, their expressions frozen in wide, cruel amusement, waiting to see what he would do next.

Dozens of faces, some familiar, others distorted, twisted with cruelty. Their mouths curled with too many teeth. Their laughter was jagged, serrated, ripping into him with every breath. The voices came fast, layered over each other, impossible to separate: “Say it again, Jordan.” “He cried, didn’t he?” “You made him cry.”

Someone whispered his own joke back to him, word for word, but it was wrong. Their tone was venomous, their faces too close, their breath too hot

He stumbled backward, the empty bottle of gin slipping from his fingers and shattering at his feet. The smell of alcohol mixed with something metallic, like blood, as a hand clamped on his shoulder. But when he turned, no one was there.

The crowd parted slightly, like a curtain peeling open, and standing at the center was the boy he outed, his friend, his face blank, drained of all life, with blood seeping from the gunshot in his mouth in a slow, constant trickle. His eyes never blinked, never moved, just stared straight into Jordan’s.

Jordan tried to speak, to apologize, but his throat locked up. His feet dragged him forward, toward the ledge, as if pulled by invisible strings.

The whispers changed, growing louder, crueler, they weren’t suggestions anymore. They were commands. “Jump.” “Do it.” “Be the punchline.”

He looked around, hoping for a way out, but the skyline pulsed with red light. The buildings themselves seemed to lean inward, closing in on him like observers in an arena.

He climbed the ledge, the concrete cold beneath his palms. His knees buckled slightly. The voices were deafening now, drilling into the base of his skull. One last glance behind him, and every face in the crowd wore his own.

“You always wanted attention,” they said.

His body tipped forward with the ease of surrender, the wind slicing against his skin as the rooftop vanished behind him, the city rising to meet him with a blur of fractured lights and remembered shame, the ground below growing sharper with every breathless second, until impact came as a grim release, the final punctuation to a torment he could no longer outpace.

The party above continued as if nothing had happened. Music still thumped. Bottles still clinked. But beneath the surface, that laughter lingered, sharp, echoing, and hungry.

Zoë sat hunched over a narrow table in the library’s back study room, her arms wrapped tightly around a stack of old, weathered books. Her eyes were sunken, dark circles bruising the skin beneath them, and her hair was tied in a loose knot that looked like it had been redone a dozen times and never quite right. When Caleb entered, she didn’t look up immediately, just stared at the page in front of her, unmoving, like the words had clawed their way into her skull and refused to leave.

When she finally spoke, her voice was low and raw. “I found it,” she said, tapping one of the books. “The ritual. I found what it actually was.”

She didn’t look up when she heard footsteps approach, but she knew it was Caleb by the way the chair scraped against the floor, too loud, too sudden for a space so quiet. She could feel his eyes on her, probably waiting for her to start ranting, to crumble in front of him like the others already had. But Zoë didn’t crumble. She’d been collecting these pieces for days, slowly piecing together what they had actually done.

He started talking, trying to sound reasonable, trying to lead with logic, but his words barely reached her. He said they were drunk. Said they were scared. Said the ritual wasn’t real, just symbolic. She let him say it all without interruption, but none of it mattered now, not when she knew the truth.

She looked up at him then, and he froze. Her expression wasn’t angry, and it wasn’t exactly sad either, it was distant. She looked like someone holding themselves together through sheer will but cracking at the seams. “You know that’s not true. I know you want to pretend it didn’t mean anything, but it did. It wasn’t about healing. It was about debt. It was about giving something up, something that was never really ours to sever.”

He shook his head, trying to ground himself in logic. “Lena told me she hadn’t been sleeping. She said she wasn’t well. Devon… he couldn’t deal with seeing her like that. Jordan drank himself sick, he slipped. These aren’t connected, Zoë.”

But she was already shaking her head. “No. You’re not listening. It’s coming for us. You can feel it, can’t you? The pressure building, like it’s watching. Like it’s waiting. We let something in that night. Something old. Something that doesn’t forget.”

She reached into her bag and pulled out another book, its spine cracked and cover faded. Caleb didn’t recognize the language printed on the front. “We didn’t bury anything that night,” she whispered. “We woke something up, and now it’s moving through us, picking at the pieces we thought we cut away.”

The study room felt smaller. The overhead lights buzzed faintly. Caleb stared at her, heart starting to pound, but his mouth refused to form words.

Zoë flipped the book open and turned it toward him. Her fingers trembled slightly as she pointed to the page. The symbols didn’t make sense. But the illustration beneath them chilled him, five figures in a circle, one by one, their faces fading.

“We’re next,” she said, voice so quiet it barely registered. “And I think it wants us to feel everything we tried to cut out, before it takes us.”

Caleb didn’t move. He couldn’t. From where Zoë sat, she could see it in his eyes, the shift, the realization sinking in, slow and suffocating. He wanted to deny it, to walk away and pretend they were still just college kids who made a stupid mistake in the woods, but she knew better. And so did he.

Zoë wandered her apartment like something pulled loose from time, drifting from room to room with no clear purpose, driven by a gnawing sensation she couldn’t name. The lights buzzed faintly overhead, dimming and flaring at irregular intervals, casting long shadows that stretched and twisted along the walls. Each time she turned a corner, she half-expected someone to be waiting, someone or something, but each room greeted her with only silence and the heavy pulse of her own heartbeat. Her hands trembled constantly, fingertips numb, and her skin had begun to feel too tight for her body. Her eyes moved faster than her head, snapping toward things that weren’t there: shapes in the windows, flickers in the corners, reflections that seemed too slow to follow.

The crying began around 3:33 a.m., as if the hour itself had peeled open some unseen threshold. The sound was faint at first, muffled, like someone crying underwater, but as she stood frozen in the kitchen, it deepened, grew fuller, more human. She knew the voice. She’d heard it a hundred times growing up, outside locked doors, echoing through her memories. Her sister.

The sound came from the bathroom.

She moved slowly, as if each step required permission. The hallway narrowed as she walked, the walls seeming to breathe inward with her approach. The crying didn’t stop, and every soft sob pulled at something inside her, guilt, grief, recognition.

The door was slightly ajar. Light spilled out across the floor like a thin ribbon, pulsing with the rhythm of the overhead fixture inside.

Her hand hovered above the knob, fingers twitching. The air grew colder as her palm pressed against the wood. She pushed.

The door creaked open. Her sister sat on the edge of the tub, hair wet and clinging to her cheeks, face bowed low, a small white object trembling in her hands, the pregnancy test. Her shoulders shook with silent sobs, and the air inside the bathroom felt warped, like grief was radiating off her in waves.

It mirrored that night with uncanny precision, the same unbearable tension tightening the air, the same sobs cracking through the silence, and the same terrible knowledge rising in Zoë’s chest.

Zoë’s throat tightened, a knot of guilt rising with such force it nearly choked her. The words surfaced again, unwanted and heavy, as if they’d been waiting in the silence for their cue. She had spat them out that night with venom, not thinking, not seeing the damage they would do. And now they coiled inside her like rot, a sickness she couldn’t cough out, gnawing her from the inside. They lived with her. They had never left.

“That’s your problem, Lucy.”

Her sister looked up slowly, strands of wet hair peeling from her tear-slicked face. There was no recognition in her expression, only sorrow, ancient, aching sorrow. Her eyes were not eyes anymore. They were bottomless wells, black and glistening, leaking ink that traced sharp lines down the bones of her face.

Her lips parted. “You didn’t help me.”

Zoë’s body jerked, a violent snap that pulled her spine taut, her limbs locking into place as if she had been seized by something cruel and precise. Her arms rose stiffly. They hung there and the real horror came when her hands began to move, by her own doing, as if her mind had been shoved into the passenger seat of her own body. Her fingers lifted toward one another, trembling uncontrollably. She began pressing her left pinky against the cold tile of the sink’s edge. Her jaw opened in a sob, and then a scream tore out of her throat as the joint gave way with a sickening pop. Tears streamed down her face as she screamed again, this time begging herself to stop, to resist, but her other hand moved next. One by one, she slammed her own fingers against the ceramic, each impact splintering bone and unleashing a new pulse of agony. Her cries grew hoarse and desperate, echoing off the walls. Her mouth formed the word “please” again and again, but her hands did not listen.

The bathroom door slammed shut with a force that rattled the walls, sealing her inside.

Her reflection in the mirror twisted, lagging behind her movements by a fraction of a second, as if something inside the glass were mimicking her with deliberate malice. It grinned, impossibly wide, grotesquely stretched, while Zoë’s real face trembled with panic. Her eyes darted to Lucy, still perched on the tub. She hadn’t moved. Her hair dripped slowly onto the floor, her hands folded in her lap, her hollow eyes fixed unblinkingly on Zoë like a judge awaiting a sentence.

The reflection leaned in closer, as if whispering a command only the glass could hear.

Zoë’s body lurched forward, yanked like a puppet on invisible strings. Her forehead cracked against the mirror with a sickening thud, the impact loud enough to rattle the light fixture above. She gasped and tried to pull back, but her hands refused to move, white-knuckled and locked onto the sink as if fused to the porcelain.

Another slam followed, harder this time. The glass trembled.

She cried out, blood already dripping from a split along her brow, trickling into her eyes and blinding her. Her legs tried to twist away but held firm. Her breath came in shallow, broken pants as her face met the mirror again, the sound meatier now, wetter, and this time she felt a tooth loosen beneath her upper lip.

Crimson spiderwebs bloomed across the mirror, veins of red racing outward from each impact. Shards embedded themselves in her skin like ice needles. Her face met the surface again and again, each collision bending her nose, bruising her cheeks, ripping her open inch by inch.

The mirror fractured with every strike, until her reflection split into a dozen distorted, monstrous versions of herself, all grinning with inhuman delight, mouths gaping with rot and teeth like razors. Her jaw dislocated with the final impact, her eyes wide with silent agony as her forehead caved inward with a dull, final crunch.

She dropped in a collapsing heap, limbs twisted unnaturally beneath her, blood pooling like black ink beneath her temple.

Lucy never moved. The last thing Zoë saw was her sister’s ruined face watching her, quiet, broken, and crying through the veil of her wet hair.

It had been two days since Caleb learned about Zoë. Two days since her name became another echo in a hallway of grief, another whisper clawing at the inside of his skull. He hadn’t gone to class. He hadn’t eaten. The world beyond his bedroom had folded in on itself like the pages of a burned book, unreadable, ash-streaked, final.

His room was dark, the curtains drawn so tightly they might have been nailed shut. The only light came from the soft glow of his laptop screen, muted and untouched on the desk across the room. Dust was beginning to collect on the keyboard.

Caleb sat in the corner of his bed, knees pulled to his chest, staring at the grain in the wood of the floor as if it might crack open and swallow him whole. His phone was face-down, silenced, vibrating sporadically with messages he refused to read. He already knew what they’d say.

Every few hours, it came. A knock at the door.

It was gentle, the kind of knock that tried not to disturb, familiar in a way that crawled down his spine, stirring memories he wished had stayed buried.

“Caleb?” a voice would say, soft, nervous, hopeful. “Can I come with you to the party?”

His heart would stop. Then race. Then ache. Because Elijah had been dead for years. And Caleb had buried him with silence.

He never answered the knock. He didn’t move. Just pressed his hands to his ears, rocking slightly, repeating the same hollow mantra in his head: It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.

But the knock would come again.

And Elijah would ask.

And Caleb would remember exactly how warm the night had been. How the sky looked just before the headlights appeared. And how he had turned away, just for a moment, because he didn’t want anyone to know his younger cousin Elijah was with him.

Outside the door, the voice whispered again. “Please, Caleb. I just want to go with you.”

Caleb shut his eyes, but the darkness behind them was worse. Elijah was always waiting there.