My Wife Started Sleepwalking — Then I Checked The Cameras And Saw Who She Was Talking To.
Part 2
The darkness that swallowed the room was absolute and suffocating.
I scrambled blindly across the mattress, my hands desperately feeling for the flashlight.
My fingers brushed against the cold aluminum of the baseball bat instead.
I grabbed it by the handle just as I heard a sickening, wet shuffling sound near the sofa.
I finally found the heavy flashlight and clicked the power button with my thumb.
The beam pierced through the blackness, shaking violently in my trembling hands.
Megan was no longer lying next to me.
The mattress was completely empty, the sheets tangled and freezing cold.
I swept the beam across the living room, bracing myself for the tall, faceless figure.
The corner where it had stood was totally vacant, leaving only a patch of black mold on the plaster.
Then I heard the frantic sound of fingernails tearing at solid wood.
It was coming from the hallway, right next to the locked basement door.
Sprinting out of the living room, I nearly tripped over the edge of the mattress.
Swinging the flashlight beam down the narrow corridor, I spotted Megan standing by the basement.
Facing the heavy wooden door, she was violently scratching at the surface with both hands.
Leaving bloody streaks on the white paint, her fingers moved so fast they were practically a blur.
Dropping the bat, I grabbed her by the shoulders to pull her backward with all my strength.
She let out a piercing, unnatural shriek that sounded like tearing metal.
It wasn’t her voice.
She thrashed against my grip with a strength that was completely impossible for her small frame.
I pinned her arms to her sides and dragged her backward toward the front door.
I fumbled blindly with the deadbolt, my hands slick with sweat.
The heavy wooden door finally swung open into the freezing night air.
I dragged us both out onto the wraparound porch, slamming the door shut behind us.
The instant we crossed the threshold, Megan went completely limp in my arms.
She gasped for air, blinking up at the stars in utter terror.
Staring down at her torn fingernails, she let out a choked sob and wiped the blood on her shirt, trembling uncontrollably as she searched my face for answers.
I half-carried her down the porch steps and sprinted across the dead grass to my truck.
I shoved her into the passenger seat, locked her door, and scrambled behind the wheel.
I jammed the keys into the ignition, my hands shaking so badly I could barely hold them.
I twisted the key, praying for the familiar roar of the engine.
The engine sputtered weakly, choked on nothing, and completely died.
I twisted the key again, over and over, until the battery clicked in defeat.
That’s when the temperature inside the cab plummeted, our breath turning into white clouds.
I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a massive, distorted shadow filling the backseat.
What do you do when the thing haunting your house is already sitting inside your car?
Part 3
You don’t think.
When the thing haunting your home is suddenly filling the backseat of your locked truck, instinct simply takes over.
The human brain is not wired to process the impossible.
It only knows how to command the body to survive.
I slammed my shoulder into the driver’s side door, throwing my entire body weight against the locking mechanism.
The metal groaned under the sudden impact, but the lock remained stubbornly jammed.
I could feel the unnatural, freezing cold radiating from the backseat, seeping through the fabric of my coat.
It felt like someone had opened the door to an industrial freezer right behind my neck.
I slammed my shoulder against the door again, screaming in pure, unadulterated panic.
The door burst open with a violent crack, spilling me out onto the frozen gravel of the driveway.
My hands tore at the jagged ice covering the ground as I fought to gain my footing.
I didn’t waste a single fraction of a second looking back at the distorted shadow in the rearview mirror.
I knew that if I looked at it directly, the sheer terror would paralyze my legs.
I scrambled around the hood of the dead truck, my boots slipping on the icy patches.
The metal of the hood burned my bare hands with an intense, biting cold.
I reached the passenger side and gripped the handle with terrifying desperation.
The lock mechanism was frozen shut, encased in a thick layer of rapid frost.
I yanked the handle with every ounce of adrenaline coursing through my veins.
The mechanism snapped with a sharp metallic ping, and I ripped the heavy door open.
Megan was paralyzed in the passenger seat, her body rigid against the upholstery.
Her eyes were wide open, reflecting the dim, haunting moonlight filtering through the bare trees.
She wasn’t breathing, and her chest remained terrifyingly still beneath her winter jacket.
The temperature inside the cab had plummeted so drastically that thick frost was webbing across the windshield.
The ice crystals formed impossible, fractal patterns that seemed to point directly toward the backseat.
A sound like grinding molars echoed from the rear of the cabin, loud enough to vibrate the floorboards.
It wasn’t a human sound; it was the noise of massive stones scraping against each other in the dark.
I grabbed Megan by the collar of her jacket and hauled her out into the night air.
Her body was dead weight, unresponsive to my frantic pulling.
We hit the gravel together just as the back windows of the truck shattered outward in a shower of safety glass.
The glass rained down around us, glittering like deadly diamonds in the pale moonlight.
A massive, suffocating wave of foul air poured out of the broken windows.
It smelled distinctly of raw ozone, electrical fires, and freshly turned graveyard dirt.
I dragged Megan to her feet, ignoring the sharp, searing pain radiating up my own scraped knees.
Blood was already soaking through the denim of my jeans, but I didn’t care.
I pulled her forward, my hand gripping her slender wrist like an industrial vice.
The driveway stretched out before us, a long, treacherous tunnel of absolute darkness.
The ancient, dying oaks lining the path seemed to lean inward, their bare branches interlocking like skeletal fingers.
We ran without looking back, our desperate breath trailing behind us like thick white steam.
Every step was an agonizing battle against the slick, frozen mud and the sharp rocks.
The gravel crunched loudly beneath our heavy boots, the sound deafening in the dead silence of the night.
A sharp, cracking noise echoed behind us, sounding like a massive tree branch snapping under immense pressure.
I knew it wasn’t a falling branch; it was the heavy tread of something enormous stepping onto the gravel.
I pushed Megan harder, forcing her to match my frantic, stumbling, uneven pace.
The cold night air burned my lungs with every agonizing breath I took, tasting like copper and ash.
My chest heaved painfully, my heart slamming against my ribs like a trapped bird.
I could hear a low, rhythmic thrumming sound building steadily in the freezing air behind us.
It sounded like a massive swarm of hornets buzzing right at the very edge of human hearing.
The vibration of that sound seemed to bypass my ears entirely, rattling directly inside my skull.
The shadows cast by the trees seemed to twist and elongate, reaching out toward us across the gravel.
They pooled in the deep ruts of the driveway, looking like bottomless pits of black ink.
A profound, unnatural wave of freezing air washed over my unprotected back.
It wasn’t just the winter chill; it felt like a heavy, suffocating blanket of absolute zero.
The moisture in my eyes began to freeze, making every blink a painful, scratching sensation.
Megan stumbled over a massive rut in the driveway, her knees buckling under her own desperate momentum.
She let out a sharp gasp as her boots lost traction entirely on a patch of black ice.
I caught her by the arm just before her face hit the jagged rocks, hauling her forcefully back upright.
The sudden strain tore a muscle in my shoulder, but the adrenaline masked the worst of the pain.
She let out a short, terrified sob, the first sound she had made since leaving the house.
I didn’t stop moving for a single second, dragging her forward by sheer brute force.
I risked a single, fleeting, terrifying glance over my left shoulder.
A towering mass of visual static was surging down the long driveway after us.
It moved without walking, simply gliding over the frozen gravel with terrifying, predatory speed.
Its shape constantly shifted and warped, resisting any attempt by my brain to process its true form.
The ambient moonlight seemed to bend and warp around its elongated, unnatural silhouette.
It consumed the light, leaving a trailing wake of absolute, crushing darkness behind it.
Where its face should have been, there was only a pale, featureless void that seemed to actively stare.
The grinding sound of molars grew exponentially louder, vibrating painfully against my eardrums.
The horrific noise was punctuated by wet, sickening snaps that sounded like dislocated joints.
I shoved Megan forward, yelling at her to keep running toward the distant, glowing safety of the state highway.
I let go of her hand, stopping abruptly and spinning around to face the pursuing entity.
I didn’t have a weapon, no baseball bat, no flashlight, nothing but my bare, freezing hands.
But I knew with absolute certainty I had to buy my wife enough time to escape its reach.
The creature loomed over me, its sheer, impossible size overwhelming my field of vision.
It had to be nearly eight feet tall, its limbs stretching down toward the ground at grotesque angles.
The stench of ozone and rotting earth hit me like a physical, heavy blow to the face.
It made my stomach heave, a sour taste of bile rising rapidly in the back of my throat.
The entity raised a long, impossibly thin limb toward the center of my chest.
The limb ended in a cluster of jagged, shadowy protrusions that vaguely resembled grasping fingers.
I threw my arms up instinctively, bracing my entire body for a devastating, fatal impact.
The air between us crackled with a surge of static energy.
A wave of numbing cold sliced straight through my thick winter coat.
The sudden freeze seized my lungs, forcing me to gasp for thin air.
I swung my bare fist toward the mass of static, expecting to pass through empty shadow.
Instead, my fist slammed into a block of dry ice.
The skin on my knuckles split open, spraying droplets of blood that froze before hitting the ground.
The jarring impact shot up my forearm, rattling my elbow joint.
The freezing contact deadened the nerves in my right hand, leaving my fingers stiff and useless.
The entity recoiled slightly, the grinding noise shifting into a high-pitched, metallic shriek.
The sound was deafening, like a subway train grinding its brakes against rusted steel tracks.
The shriek shattered a thin layer of ice on a nearby tree branch, sending shards raining down on us.
I used the creature’s momentary distraction to turn and sprint wildly after my fleeing wife.
The highway was just a few hundred yards away now, the orange glow of a streetlamp piercing the gloom.
That single pool of artificial light looked like the gates of heaven compared to the darkness behind me.
I could see Megan’s small silhouette running frantically toward the edge of the paved asphalt.
She was pushing herself beyond her limits, her arms pumping wildly as she fought the slippery terrain.
The creature let out another deafening shriek, recovering from my desperate strike with terrifying speed.
The sound shook the barren branches above us, causing a murder of roosting crows to scatter into the night.
I pushed my legs harder, my muscles burning fiercely with the absolute limits of human endurance.
Every step felt like lifting lead weights, my boots sinking heavily into the freezing mud.
I felt the unnatural cold surging right at my heels again, closing the distance rapidly.
It was close enough that I could feel its freezing presence brushing against the bare skin of my neck.
The hairs on my arms stood straight up, charged by the raw electrical static bleeding from its form.
I knew that if it touched my spine, I would paralyze and collapse onto the gravel.
I dove forward as I finally reached the very edge of the driveway, tackling Megan sideways.
I wrapped my arms around her waist, launching us both onto the soft, weed-choked shoulder of the highway.
We rolled together down a short, steep embankment, crashing hard into the dried weeds and frozen mud.
The impact knocked the remaining wind out of my lungs, leaving me gasping helplessly on the ground.
A massive, concussive blast of freezing air exploded over our heads, rattling the metal post of the streetlamp.
The sudden pressure differential popped my ears painfully, leaving a loud, ringing whine in my head.
We scrambled frantically back up the embankment, crawling on our hands and knees toward the road.
The rough asphalt tore through my jeans, scraping the remaining skin off my battered knees.
We didn’t stop crawling until we reached the absolute dead center of the illuminated road.
The entity stopped abruptly at the exact edge of the driveway, hovering menacingly in the deep shadows.
It seemed unable or unwilling to step into the harsh, buzzing glare of the sodium streetlamp.
The orange light seemed to act as an invisible, impenetrable barrier against the shifting static.
We huddled tightly together under the pool of orange light, shivering and staring back at the darkness.
Megan was weeping silently now, her tears freezing into tracks of ice on her pale cheeks.
I wrapped my arms around her trembling shoulders, trying to share my rapidly fading body heat.
The faceless void remained visible for another agonizing minute, watching us silently from the dark tree line.
It swayed back and forth slightly, like a pendulum suspended in a thick, invisible fluid.
The grinding noise had stopped, replaced by a heavy, suffocating silence that pressed against my eardrums.
Then, very slowly, the shadowy mass began to melt backward into the surrounding gloom of the trees.
It didn’t turn around to leave; it simply faded out of existence, dissolving into the winter night.
The oppressive stench of ozone and rotting earth slowly dissipated, replaced by the crisp smell of snow.
I held my wife tightly against my chest, staring blankly down the dark, empty expanse of the road.
My heart was still hammering a frantic rhythm, refusing to believe we had actually survived.
I knew with absolute, terrifying certainty we could never, ever go back to that house.
We sat huddled on the freezing asphalt under that buzzing streetlamp for what felt like hours.
Every sudden rustle of the dry grass made my heart slam against my aching ribs.
Every distant, shifting shadow seemed to warp and elongate into that towering, unnatural shape.
Megan was silent again, her face buried deeply into the protective collar of my jacket.
I could feel her entire body trembling with a deep, systemic shock that bypassed the cold entirely.
I kept my eyes locked relentlessly on the dark, foreboding entrance of our long driveway.
I half-expected the entity to find a way to circumvent the protective circle of the streetlamp’s light.
I imagined it crawling through the drainage ditches, approaching us from the blind spots of the darkness.
The biting cold of the winter night was slowly seeping through our inadequate clothes.
My toes and fingers had gone numb twenty minutes ago, replaced by a dull, throbbing ache.
I knew we couldn’t stay out here exposed to the elements much longer without freezing to death.
The temperature was dropping steadily toward zero, and the wind chill was cutting through my coat like razor blades.
Finally, a pair of bright, piercing headlights appeared on the distant, dark horizon of the highway.
The low, steady rumble of a heavy diesel engine slowly broke the terrifying silence of the night.
I pushed myself up onto my numb, battered legs, staggering slightly as my knees threatened to buckle.
I stepped carefully into the center of the right lane, waving my arms frantically above my head.
The massive long-haul truck blasted its air horn, the deafening sound echoing sharply across the empty, frozen fields.
The heavy air brakes hissed loudly as the massive vehicle ground to a sudden halt just a few feet away from us.
The passenger side window rolled down smoothly, revealing the confused and deeply concerned face of an older man.
He wore a faded baseball cap and a thick flannel shirt, chewing nervously on a wooden toothpick.
He took one look at our battered, freezing, bloody state and immediately shoved the heavy passenger door open.
We scrambled up the metal steps into the massive cab, collapsing gratefully onto the worn leather seats.
The sudden blast of the truck’s industrial heater felt like a miraculous, overwhelming wave of pure salvation.
It burned my numb skin, causing a thousand tiny needles of pain to prickle across my frozen hands.
The driver asked urgently if we had been in a bad accident, his eyes darting toward the dark, empty road behind us.
He reached for the CB radio mounted on his dashboard, asking if he needed to call the state troopers.
I reached out and grabbed his wrist, shaking my head frantically with wide, terrified eyes.
I just nodded blankly toward the highway ahead, incapable of forming a single coherent sentence.
I managed to croak out a pathetic whisper, begging him to just drive us somewhere with bright lights and people.
He didn’t argue or ask any further questions, clearly recognizing the primal look of absolute terror on our faces.
He put the heavy truck back into gear and slowly, methodically accelerated away from the vicinity of the Victorian house.
I pressed my throbbing forehead against the cold glass of the side window, watching our dark driveway recede into the distance.
The property looked harmless from the highway, just another old farm hidden behind dying trees.
I didn’t stop watching the road until the darkness swallowed the property whole, erasing it from view.
The trucker dropped us off at a brightly lit, twenty-four-hour diner about twenty miles down the interstate.
The neon sign buzzing outside the window read ‘Open All Night’, acting as a beacon of modern, artificial safety.
We thanked the man profusely, stumbling down the metal steps of his cab and onto the salted pavement of the parking lot.
We pushed through the heavy glass doors, the little bell above our heads jingling cheerfully.
We slid into a cracked vinyl corner booth, the fluorescent lights buzzing comfortingly and brightly overhead.
The diner was mostly empty, save for a few weary travelers hunched over plates of greasy eggs.
The waitress, an older woman with a kind smile, brought us two heavy mugs of scalding black coffee immediately.
She didn’t ask why we were covered in mud and blood at four in the morning.
She just set the mugs down gently, leaving a towering stack of paper napkins on the table before walking away.
I wrapped my painfully numb, blistered hands around the thick ceramic mug, absorbing the heat.
I tried to take a sip, but the violent shaking in my fingers caused the dark liquid to spill over the sides.
Megan stared blankly down at the chipped Formica table, her eyes totally empty and utterly, profoundly exhausted.
She looked like a hollow shell of the woman who had happily mapped out furniture placements just three weeks ago.
We didn’t speak a single word to each other for the first three agonizing hours we sat in that booth.
We just sat there, listening to the clatter of silverware and the low hum of the refrigerated pie case.
There was simply nothing left to say that wouldn’t sound like complete, institutional-grade madness.
We both knew exactly what we had experienced in the oppressive darkness of that house.
We both knew how incredibly close we had come to losing everything, to becoming another unexplained disappearance.
As the morning sun finally began to peek over the distant horizon, the brutal reality of our situation sank in entirely.
The golden light filtering through the diner’s blinds offered a temporary sense of physical safety, but no real comfort.
We had escaped the entity with our lives, but we had left literally everything else we owned behind.
Our phones, our wallets, our car keys, our clothes, our entire carefully planned future—all locked inside that cursed house.
We were sitting in a diner booth with nothing but the bloody clothes on our backs.
I walked slowly over to the diner’s grimy payphone, dropping a few borrowed coins into the rusted slot.
I dialed my older brother’s number from memory, my voice cracking horribly as he answered his phone.
I begged him desperately to wire me some emergency cash at the nearest Western Union immediately.
I didn’t try to explain the dark entity, or the sleepwalking, or the massive faceless guest in the living room.
I just lied and told him we had experienced a catastrophic house fire and needed immediate, unquestioning help.
He didn’t ask any invasive questions, recognizing the sheer panic in my trembling voice.
He immediately transferred enough money to cover a cheap motel room for the week and some basic, clean clothes.
We spent the next seven days hiding like fugitives in a cramped, dingy motel room just off the interstate.
We kept the ancient television turned on constantly, dialing the volume up to drown out the oppressive silence.
We watched mindless infomercials and morning news programs, desperate for any connection to normal human reality.
We slept fitfully with every single light fixture turned on, keeping the room blindingly bright even in the middle of the night.
I even unscrewed the bulb from the bedside lamp and replaced it with a higher wattage one I bought at a hardware store.
I called a local real estate agent from the motel’s dirty landline on our third day hiding there.
I strictly instructed her to list the Victorian house on the market immediately, and entirely as-is.
She sounded thoroughly confused, asking politely when we planned to return and move our furniture out.
I explicitly told her to leave everything exactly where it was and just change the exterior locks.
I warned her emphatically never to go into that house alone under any circumstances.
I told her, with a deadly serious tone, never to step foot on that property after the sun went down.
I could hear the distinct skepticism and judgment in her voice, but she eventually agreed to take the unusual listing.
The financial fallout of our desperate escape was devastating for both of us.
We had foolishly poured our entire combined life savings into the down payment for that historic fixer-upper.
We were forced to sell it to an out-of-state investor for a pathetic fraction of what we originally paid.
We took the massive loss just to get the cursed deed legally off our hands as quickly as humanly possible.
We had to start our entire lives over from scratch, with zero safety net to our names.
We eventually packed our two suitcases of cheap clothes and moved to a massive, sprawling metropolis.
We chose a city hundreds of miles away from the dark, isolated woods of upstate New York.
We rented a tiny, incredibly cramped studio apartment on the seventh floor of a busy, noisy concrete building.
The city was beautifully loud, chaotically crowded, and wonderfully, relentlessly bright at all hours.
There were no long, dark driveways or dying oak trees or isolated, suffocatingly silent nights.
There was only the constant, reassuring hum of heavy traffic and the neon glow filtering brightly through our drawn blinds.
It took Megan over a full calendar year to stop obsessively checking the corners of rooms before entering them.
The deep, bloody scratches she had torn into her own fingers eventually faded into thin, pale white scars.
Her horrific night terrors slowly subsided over the months, replaced by a deep, lingering, generalized anxiety.
She developed a profound, unwavering phobia of total darkness that required her to sleep with a mask while leaving lights on.
We slowly and painfully rebuilt our decimated finances, finding new corporate jobs and establishing a new, incredibly cautious routine.
On the surface, to our new friends and coworkers, we had successfully escaped a bad real estate investment.
We survived the faceless guest, and we managed to build a new, functioning life together in the city.
But some deeply inflicted wounds run far deeper than scarred flesh and depleted bank accounts.
The psychological damage of what we witnessed in that house permanently altered the architecture of my brain.
Every single night, before I finally allow myself to go to sleep, I meticulously check the heavy deadbolts on our apartment door.
I walk methodically through every single small room, ensuring there are no dark, unoccupied corners.
I leave the overhead hallway light burning brightly, refusing to let our tiny home sink into absolute darkness.
Because sometimes, in the absolute dead of winter, when the bustling city outside grows unexpectedly, terrifyingly quiet.
I can still feel that sudden, unnatural, suffocating drop in the ambient temperature of our bedroom.
I can still smell the faint, sickening, phantom odor of raw ozone and rotting graveyard earth lingering in the stale air.
And I lie perfectly still awake, my heart pounding against my ribs, staring widely at the illuminated ceiling.
Terrified, barely breathing, just waiting for my sleeping wife to start whispering to the empty room.
THE END
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Disclaimer
This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events. Names, characters, and details have been altered. Any resemblance is coincidental. The author and publisher disclaim accuracy, liability, and responsibility for interpretations or reliance. If you would like to share your story, please send it to [email protected].
