It all started on a cold autumn evening, just after dusk. The town had fallen under a strange fog that curled through the streets like whispers from the unseen. My boyfriend, Ethan, and his group of friends had decided to venture into the woods that night. There was talk of some mysterious house hidden deep within, where no one dared to go after dark. But Ethan, brave as he was, laughed at the superstitions. His friends followed suit, and together they headed into the forest.
I didn’t go. Something inside me had stirred, a nagging sense of dread. I begged him to stay, but he brushed it off with a warm smile and a promise to be back before midnight.
He never came back.
The next morning, the whole town buzzed with the news. People whispered of how they’d found their bodies—brutally murdered, left in such a grotesque state that it haunted even the toughest men in the village. “The way they died,” they would say, shaking their heads in disbelief, “it was like something from a nightmare. But we can all see how it happened, plain as day.”
Everyone could see it. Everyone but me.
I couldn’t understand why I was the only one who didn’t know, couldn’t see what the others saw. I asked. I begged people to tell me, but they looked at me as if I were mad, like the truth was right there, obvious and terrifying, but somehow hidden from my eyes.
Days turned into weeks, and the weight of not knowing crushed me. My sleep was filled with half-remembered dreams, shadows moving just beyond my vision. I couldn’t go near the woods without feeling the oppressive darkness closing in on me, like something ancient and malevolent was watching, waiting for me to step closer.
Then, one night, the fog returned, thicker than before. As I stood by the edge of the woods, I heard it—a whisper, faint but unmistakable, calling my name. It was Ethan’s voice. Trembling, I followed it, the trees closing in around me as I ventured deeper than I ever had.
And there, in the clearing, I saw it—the house.
Except… it wasn’t a house at all. It was something far older, something twisted and unnatural, pulsating with a life of its own. I knew then why I couldn’t see how Ethan and his friends had died. I wasn’t meant to know. It was the house that had kept it from me, and now it was calling me inside, promising the answers I craved.
But as I stood at the doorway, I realized something. It wasn’t answers it wanted to give me. It was a fate far worse.
I never turned back to the town. They say I vanished that night, swallowed by the fog, just like Ethan and his friends. And now, in the silence of the woods, the house waits—for the next soul too curious to resist its call.