Creepy - Day 7 - The Hollowing & You Don't Scare Me Anymore

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

The Hollowing***Narrated by: Nate DuFort***Content warning: child death***You Don't Scare Me Anymore***https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/***Support the show at patreon.com/creepypod***Sound design by: Pacific Obadiah***Title music by: Alex Aldea Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Creepy presents the 31 days of horror. Day 7. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepy pastures and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Good afternoon, Nate.

Good afternoon. What's that you're working on? Mem painting. Mem painting? Yeah, I like to paint pictures of famous memes. This one is Kermit drinking tea. You know, from the, but that's none of my business memes. That's very clever. It looks just like Kermit.

Thanks. It helps me pass the time when I can't sleep. Figured there's a better choice than Momo. Were you able to get any sleep last night? Enough to dream, I mean. Uh, yeah. I did last night. You want to hear about it, right? Please. It's kind of hard to explain.

It was almost more like a feeling. It was about something called the hollowing. October's dusk bleeds slower than any other. It holds the light too long, then snuffs it all at once, as if the sky grows tired of the charade. I've always felt that. The air isn't cold enough yet, but everything smells like it's rotting anyway. leaves, old wood, last week's rainwater in the gutter, even the grass.

I hate it. I live in a cul-de-sac where no one talks after dark unless it's Halloween. And even then, it's all forced cheer. I wasn't planning to go out that night. I hadn't since I was 12. But something about the way the wind blew around the corner of the house made me get up and look outside. That's when I saw it.

At first, I thought it was just a kid in a costume. The orange was too vivid to be natural. The sun had long since set away for it to be a reflection off a window, but the shape was unmistakable. A round, rough pumpkin balanced on narrow shoulders. Its carved face flickering from within. No parents hovered nearby. No friends giggled close behind. The child moved deliberately, not stopping in any house, not even glancing at the bowls of candy left out for convenience.

I should have ignored it. I should have turned off the porch light and gone back to whatever I was pretending to do. But instead, I put on my shoes and stepped outside. curiosity compelling me in a way I can't remember ever feeling. I could say I was worried about a kid trick-or-treating alone, but they'd be a lie. I can't really say why I did it. The child didn't seem to notice, or maybe it didn't care. Its walk was steady, rhythmic, like it was tracing lines I couldn't see. Left at the bent oak.

past the three shuttered houses no one talks about anymore across the drainage ditch I'd never dared to jump as a kid I stayed far back close enough to keep them in sight far enough that I could pretend I hadn't meant to follow if someone caught me

but no one did the neighborhood fell away with each step as though it had been peeled back Then, the houses stopped entirely. I had lived in that area my whole life. I knew its limits, its turns, its quiet misgivings. Where I was standing, beyond the last row of duplexes and the chain-link fence that guards the edge of the woods, there should have been nothing but trees, but there was a house.

It leaned backward, like it had been. been built drunk. The porch sagged in the middle, held up by thin spindles that looked more like bones than wood. Its siding was faded to the color of old bark, but no tree ever grew like that. The child didn't hesitate. It walked straight to the door and pushed it open without knocking. The light from within was the same orange as the jack-o-lantern's grail. in. I waited a long time, staring at the still open doorway, long enough to convince myself to leave. But I didn't. Eventually, I stepped inside the house. The air was warm, almost too warm, and it smelled of things that didn't make sense to my nose. The door closed behind me without a

sound. The child was gone. I don't know why I went further in. Curiosity is a word people use to excuse things they can't justify. I think I was already past the point of justifying anything. The hallway stretched further than the exterior of the house should have allowed, tapering inward like a throat. I followed it. The walls were covered in layers of peeling wallpaper, none of which matched. My footsteps sank into the soft floorboards. There were no pictures, no furniture, just a hallway and doors that led nowhere. And at the end, circular, wood paneled, the only light came from a wide pit in the floor, about the size of a small car, broken through the floorboards and filled with coals that brought.

breathed as if alive. Above it, chains hung from the ceiling, each with a hook at the end. I could hear something faint, a scraping, wet, and methodical. I wasn't alone in the house, but I couldn't see who else was there. I stood perfectly still, listening. The sound stopped. Then, a voice. not spoken, not heard, felt like it was behind my teeth.

It is not your year. The words didn't frighten me. What frightened me was that I understood them. Not just the meaning, but the weight. Like being told you still had time left. Like being spared without being saved. The chains shifted slightly, and the coals sighed. I ran, out through the long hallway, back into the too warm night.

The house didn't vanish behind me like I thought it might. It stayed there, quietly real, as if daring me to forget. I didn't sleep well that night. Not the next, either. But I didn't tell anyone. Who would believe me? even I didn't believe myself in the full daylight. They say time heals all wounds.

But whatever it cut into me, cut deep, and didn't fade. Even with the holidays and changing seasons, it sat back there, festering. Never once did I try to go back to the house. Pick a reason, but fear will do. when the next Halloween came, I sat in my window and watched, and the pumpkin child returned.

This time I was ready. I tried to tell myself for a year that I imagined it, the house, the heat, the coals breathing in the dark, that the mind, given time and distance, can sand down the sharp edges of even the strangest nights. But some things don't fade. They grow teeth in the silence. So I waited on the porch again.

Same cul-de-sac, same dead leaves, same hour when the color drops out of the world. And there he was. The Pumpkin Child. Same height, same stiff gate, same perfect round head glowing faintly from within. Though no candle could burn that long, or that clean. The same triangle eyes and mouth carved too wide, too knowing, not festive, not grim, just inevitable. This time, I followed closer. He took the same path as before, past the silent houses, through the fence gap, beyond the woods where no property line reaches.

But this time, I noticed the small things, how the grass bent under his feet but didn't spring back, how the wind moved around him like it knew better than to touch, how the world grew dimmer as we walked, even though the moon was clear above us. And again, the house. Same lean, same strange, bone-thin, porch. Same open door, waiting like it knew I'd come back. The glow inside was steadier this time, as if it had grown stronger with age or hunger. But the pumpkin child didn't go in. He stopped at the foot of the porch and turned. The head didn't move like a human's. It swiveled gently,

No sound. Just the turning of something that wasn't really connected by a neck. I couldn't see a face inside. Just shadow and flame. But I knew it was watching. Waiting. Waiting for me. I stepped closer.

One step, then another. He didn't move. He just waited. The air was heavier here. like it had been boiled down to its final ingredients. No oxygen left for lies. I reached out, slowly, the way you reach towards something feral, not because you expect it to bite, but because you'd respect it if it did.

My fingers brush the edge of the pumpkin head. Not foam, not plastic, not even a real pumpkin. Something else. Something dry and pulsing. with the memory of growth, but no longer alive. Not quite dead either. A rind of something harvested from nowhere. The child turned and went inside.

This time, I followed without hesitation. The hallway stretched again. Longer. I swear it was longer. The peeling wallpaper shifted subtly, curling at the corners like it had just been hung in reverse. I didn't look at the doors. I didn't need to.

My feet already knew the way. The circular room was exactly as I remembered it. Pit of coals, chains above, same breathless warmth pressing against my skin. The only difference was the presence of the child, standing beside me. the pit. He held something. A mask. It was carved like his own head, though smaller. The same grim smile, same hollow eyes. But it wasn't made for decoration. It was made for use. He held it out to me. No words, no pressure, just offering. And I knew what it meant. It wasn't my year still, but it was a year, and this was an invitation, not to escape, but to witness, to become part of the waiting.

I took it. The mask was light and strangely cool, though the room felt like the inside of a furnace. The moment my fingers curled around it, something inside the pit. stirred. Not a creature, not a person, something older. The chains above jangled softly in answer. Then the coals shifted, and I saw it. A shape rising slowly from the embers, rough, hunched, the color of old wax and bruised bark, limbs gnarled, folded like they'd grown wrong and hadn't cared. It didn't look at us. It didn't need to.

This was the one who would wear the mask. The child stepped forward as if to present me. But the thing in the pit, I'll call it the root, because it had none I knew of, raised one hand slowly, deliberately. It pointed to the chains, and then to the child. It was his year. I didn't know what to do. The child didn't flinch.

Just stood there, still holding the mask, now glowing faintly in his hands. The root being turned its head, if that's what it was, and opened its mouth. No sound came out, but I heard it anyway. One gives, one wears, one returns. I dropped the mask. out of fear, not even out of defiance, but because something in me rebelled at the math of it, something deep and instinctual that had been yelling at me the entire night to run, to pretend like none of this had ever happened and live my life the best I could while

knowing these things exist. I turned and ran again, back through the throat of the house, back to the night that still pretended it was part of the world, back home. The mask did not follow me. The child did not return. No one else noticed he was gone. I checked with my neighbors the next morning. No one had seen a child wearing a pumpkin head.

I walked around and looked for any sign of the pumpkin child. No footprints, no scorch marks, no strange orange glow in the trees. Nothing. but I didn't dare go back to where I knew the house was breathing. I could hear the chains tinkling any time I thought about it. The mask I had dropped didn't come with me, but I remembered its weight perfectly. It had left a shape in my poem, a gentle imprint,

like the way you still feel a ring after taking it off. I tried to draw it, I tried to describe it, Once in the margins of an old book, that didn't work. The lines refused to stay where I put them. Still, I knew. I had become a part of something. And the worst part was, it felt right. Each October after, I waited.

The child didn't return the following year, nor the next. I watched the woods. the fence, the sagging curve of the cul-de-sac's end. The Halloween decorations grew bolder in town, bloated inflatables and motion-triggered screamers. But here, in our quiet ring of half-lit houses, the season grew quieter, less eager, like the soil remembered something the trees didn't.

It wasn't until the fourth year that I saw another one. Not the same child, taller, shoulders narrower. The head was different, too, less symmetrical, carved with deeper cuts, like someone had grown angry with the blade. But the walk was the same, steady, rhythmic, not human. They passed by the same houses, took the same trail, paused at the same twisted porch. I was already waiting in the shadows. This time I didn't follow.

I stood ahead between the pumpkin child and the door. My heart didn't beat any faster. It had been waiting too long for this. The child didn't stop. Just stepped around me like I was furniture. But I spoke. Do you know him? I asked.

The question felt strange in my mind. mouth, not forbidden, just misused. The child paused. For the first time, it looked up at me. Inside the carved head, there was no face, no flicker of flame. Just the suggestion of presence, like the space had been hollowed, not for light, but for memory. And then I understood, not just one gives, one where. one returns, but also one watches.

I had watched. I had turned away when the root had spoken. I had fled. I had dropped the mask and someone else had taken it. The child stepped forward again, and this time I didn't block the door. I followed, not of curiosity, but obligation. We passed down the hall that bent like a riverbed.

The doors on either side sealed tighter than before. No air flowed here. No draft. Just the gravity of ritual pulling us toward the center. The room was unchanged. Pit glowing, chain swaying slightly, though the air was still. But the mask was already there. placed at the edge of the pit, facing outward, waiting.

This child didn't need prompting. They stepped to the pit and removed the pumpkin from their shoulders. Beneath it, nothing. Not a head, not even a stump. Just a clean absence, like their body ended with the task it had come to do. They picked up the mask and held it gently with both hands. then offered it to the coals, and again the root rose. Not the same one, but of the same kind, formless, ancient, twisted not by malice, but by time.

It reached out gently and accepted the mask. It did not place it on its face. It absorbed it. And the mask, like the memory it carried, was gone. Then the creature turned toward me. I didn't run. It raised its arm again and this time pointed at me. A new voice, deeper than the first, pressed against my ribs.

The next must be caring. I should have asked, where? Why? Instead, I nodded. The root being sank into the coals, satisfied. The light dimmed, the air cooled, the room exhaled, and behind me in the long corridor, a door I'd never noticed creaked open. Inside was a small bed, a desk, a window that looked onto no world I knew, and sitting on the bed, a child. Small, uncarved, still whole.

Their eyes met mine, not pleading, not afraid, just waiting. For me, the child didn't speak. Neither did I. It wasn't silence in the room. There was a kind of presence in the air, like the space had been created not for comfort, but for holding. The child sat with their hands on their knees, staring out the false window. The glass looked onto something that moved like leaves in a wind that didn't belong to us.

What world it showed. I only know that once I stepped through the doorway, I couldn't leave the same way I came. I sat on the floor, not across from the child, beside them. We waited. There's no word for the time that passed. only that the light outside the false window faded and grew again several times. It didn't match any calendar I knew. My body didn't hunger.

My skin didn't chill. My thoughts, though, grew louder in the hush. The child never slept. Their eyes never blinked. On what I started thinking of as the fourth dusk, the door behind us closed with a slow, final sound. The child stood, and I followed. We left the room behind and the house opened in a way it hadn't before. The hallway now angled upward, and the wallpaper peeled in larger

strips. The floor grew firmer underfoot. Doors no longer lined the path. Only walls marked with lines, scratches, stains too deliberate to be random. At the end was a staircase, narrow, spiral, wooden. We climbed it. At the top, a room,

not unlike the first, circular, central pit, chains dangling from above. But this, this pit was cold and empty, and there were no coals. A hollow stone bowl, bowl carved into the floor, rimmed with symbols that looked like they'd been etched with iron nails.

In the center sat the next mask. It was smaller than the last, more delicate. Its grin was shallow, almost hesitant. The eyes were less cruelly cut, shaped like soft crescents. Whoever carved it had done so with care. The child turned to me and placed their hand against my chest. No force, just a touch, like they were giving me something, a memory maybe, or a name. I picked up the mask.

It felt familiar, though I had never touched it. The surface wasn't smooth. It pulsed faintly, like from time to time it remembered breathing. I held it, not like an object, but like a responsibility. The child didn't need words. I knew what to do. We left the house together. This time the hallway did not stretch.

It shortened. The front door was closer than I remembered, and the night outside was still young. Halloween had just begun. The world was unchanged, but I was not. I carried the mask to the cul-de-sac, and the child followed me like a shadow made real.

We did not ring bells. we did not speak to anyone. We walked the silent path until we came to the edge of the schoolyard, where the trees still whispered about things older than the town's founding date. And there, sitting on a swing with a bag of untouched candy at their feet was the next one. I recognized them. I didn't know their name, but I'd seen their face before. At the grocery store, on a bike, in line at the local dot.

with a parent too tired to smile, a child who didn't quite fit the outline drawn around them. They looked up as we approached. No fear, no surprise. Just the sort of recognition that can't be taught. I offered the mask. Their hands were smaller than mine, but steadier. They took it with a reverence I hadn't earned and held it against their chest. The shadow child stepped forward. The shadow child stepped and placed a second hand on the mask. Together, the two turned toward the woods. And I followed, again. This time when we arrived at the house, it looked different, not broken, not bent,

resting, as if it had taken a long breath. The child and the new one passed the door. I stayed outside, not out of fear, but because my role had changed. The house would open again when it was time, and I would be there, not watching, carrying. Some nights, I dream of the house, not in symbols or riddles, just the clean, sober geometry of it, the lean of its roof, the slouch of its porch, the hallway that stretches too far, and the pit that waits at the center. I know every inch of it now.

Not from memory. From service. After that last Halloween, the rhythm changed. The world spun the same, but the weight of my hours shifted. Each October, I felt it. Closer, sharper. Not dread. Not excitement, either.

Just gravity. Like the tide rising with a moon. No one can see. see. I didn't age, not exactly. I grew tired in a way that didn't register on clocks. My reflection blurred at the edges. Some nights I walked through crowds and realized no one looked at me, not avoided, just unseen, as though I'd stepped out of the consensus. And still, I waited. Three more cycles passed. Each time a child appeared.

Each time, I found them, or they found me. Sometimes in the woods, sometimes outside shuttered houses or in playgrounds where no one else lingered. Each of them different. Each of them already marked by something they couldn't name. I carried the mask each time, and each time the house welcomed them. them. But the fourth year, this most recent year, something broke. The child refused the mask. I hadn't believed it was possible. I thought the ritual only allowed as one of consent. That refusal was a myth, an option that never truly existed. But the child, older than the others, maybe

10, maybe 11, looked me in the eye and shook their head. They weren't afraid. They were angry. And something ancient in the air cracked when they said no. The pumpkin child beside me froze and then vanished, not in a puff of smoke or a dramatic shimmer, just ceased like a flame that forgets why it's burning. I felt the mask grow heavier in my hand. I felt the mask grow heavier in my hands. The carved grin faltered and began to split. The sky darkened too quickly. The air thickened. The ground pulsed once. Then the house called me back. Not in words, not even in thought. In pole. I ran across leaf-blanketed paths and root-warped earth, back to the place that should not stand. This time the house looked sick. Its angles collapsed into themselves. Its windows wept sap. The front door hung open like a mouth pried wide.

Inside, everything was wrong. The hallway twisted left, then right, then looped. The walls bled resin. The doors now led somewhere, and each one screamed in a language that wasn't meant for air. I stumbled to the central room. The pit was boiling, not coals but liquid, orange, red, black, a stew of memory. The chains flailed wildly, slicing sparks from the ceiling. And the root being, or what was left of it, crawled from the pit

in pieces, fractured, rotted, screaming without breath, because the ritual had been interrupted. The mask still clung to my hand. cracked, dying, but it wasn't mine to wear, not mine to give. The root looked at me. No words, just a command. Find another. But the season was over. The hours passed.

The door to October closing with a snap. The child had said no, and there had been no one else. The house could not continue. you. Unless, unless I carried more than the mask, unless I gave more than time. The coals surged, the root being reached, and I understood. One gives, one wears, one returns, but someone must feed the hollow, and someone must hollow themselves. This is the way it must be. This is the way it's always been.

A pact beyond our understanding between those with no names, no faces. The ultimate sacrifice for some, but less than a drop in the ocean for the universe to notice. A drop that must fall. I dropped the mask into the pit. Then I stepped in after it. Falling into the pit wasn't a fall. not in the way gravity would have it. It was more like being unwritten.

My limbs folded inward. My senses collapsed one by one. No heat, no pain, just the peeling away of each name I'd worn until all that was left was the shape of what I'd meant to others, a trace, a function. I didn't die. The pit held more than fire.

It held everything left behind by those who'd worn the mask, carried the mask, rejected it. I passed through them, or they passed through me. The space was crowded with absence, if that makes any sense. A thick, humming void of choices fulfilled and refused, of roots that had grown down through centuries, not to feed, but there was no time. Only ritual.

And then, I became... emerged, I wasn't what I had been. I didn't walk. I returned to the neighborhood, to the fence behind the shuttered houses, to the cul-de-sac where dusk never feels honest. And I was carrying it, the new mask. It was simple, raw. Its mouth wasn't grinning, it wasn't frowning either. It was waiting. I had no face now, not that anyone noticed. They looked through me the way people looked past lampposts or leaf piles, a shape assumed to be part of the background.

That's how I knew it had worked. The cycle had resumed, but I wasn't the one to carry it next. I was the one to choose. So I walked through the familiar streets, past the carved pumpkins, the ones lit with real flame and those dull LED imitations. Past the children still pretending this night was all sugar in shadows. Past the grown-ups drinking in their driveways and pretending they still believed in anything that didn't have a market value.

And I found her. She stood by herself at the end of a gravel path, watching the stars instead of the costumes. Her costume was half done. some kind of animal, maybe a fox or a cat. But the mask was pushed up on her head. She wasn't playing the part. She wasn't interested in pretending.

She saw me. Not clearly, just enough. She saw what I represented. That was all it took. I left the mask at her feet and waited. She didn't pick it up, but she also didn't find. walk away. She stared at it like it had spoken, and I knew she would come. Not this year,

maybe not next, but she would feel the pull like I had. And when her year came, she would walk the long hallway. She would see the pit. She would stand before the route and listen, and she would decide. That is the part we never control Only offer Only carry Only witness Have you ever seen a child staring at something that wasn't there

Talking to someone When no one is around When ask they say The old woman or the sad man These things that you can't see But they can They see the offer They see the offering.

That's all. And they know the weight of it. It's all they'll ever know. And one day, I'll sink back into the earth and let another take my place. Because the house does not hunger. It remembers. And someone must wear the memory. Thank you.

Is there anything else you'd like to talk about? I think I can get some water colors. Drawing these in crayon is way harder than it looks. I think we can do that. Just let me talk with the orderlies. Thanks, Dr. Hall. Feeling today. Fine.

It sounds like you have something you want to say. I have something for you. But first, I need something from you. What? I need to know your current state of mind. and level of cooperation. Do you think you can do that? And if I do...

I'd like to assess your level of cooperation before I divulge that information. So what do you want me to do? Just tell me about your most recent dream. My dream? That's it. That's it. Fine.

I guess I could sum it up with... You don't... scare me anymore. It started with a smell, thick and sour, like a chicken left on a picnic table in the middle of July. I tore the fridge apart, cleaned the garbage disposed with bleach and vinegar, even crawled through the crawl space with the flashlight. Nothing.

But the stench never left. It clung to the corners of the house, hung in the curtains, settled into the fibers of my clothing. After a while I stopped noticing it, the way you stopped noticing anything terrible when it's coming from inside. That's when I heard the voice. Not loud, not even a whisper, not at first. It was a breath, just a breath right beside my ears I stepped out of the shower, alone in the house. The kind of breath that made me think of play in hide and seek as a kid. When a seeker would come close but not see you and you became convinced they could hear you breathe so you hold your breath.

The sound of someone exhaling when they've been hiding for a long, long time. I didn't scream. Not because I'm brave, but because it didn't surprise me. Something in you already knew it had been there for a while. A seeker still, even as an adult, my name isn't important. It's probably already carved into the way. walls somewhere. I've lived in this house too long. I inherited it after my father died, collapsed in the garage with a car running and the doors shut. They ruled it suicide.

Oh no. It seemed weird that he wasn't in his car at the time. I didn't warn him. He died like he lived, quietly suffocating everyone around him. After they, he was. He was in his car. He was a lot of funeral I came back to pack his things, but I never left. Not really. Now I just exist here, in the dark, with it. I was drunk the first time I saw it standing at the edge of the hallway, tall, still, backlit by the flickering bathroom light like a silhouette car from tar. Not empty, or like hungry. Its mouth was stitched shut, but I could hear it anyway. The words didn't come through air.

They crawled inside me. Through my teeth and nestled into my spine. You let her die. You know who her was. That's the part that scared me. Because I believed it. Those words rang truer than any words I'd ever known. I used to beg it to leave.

pleaded in empty rooms as I sat inside a salt ring surrounded by chalk lines scrawled across a hardwood like a child's tantrum. Anything I could find on the internet that would help me. But evidently, you can't banish something that wants to be here more than you do. In reality, it's more like I'm the one that needs to be banished. Wants to be banished. No, I don't bother. I just sit in the dark and wait for it to do something. something new, hoping it will make the windows and doors reappear so I can escape.

Last night I woke up with mud under my fingernails and blood smeared across my pillow. The knife was in the sink. I live alone, and I can't go outside. You want to scare me? You think your cheap parlor tricks? The shadows, the voices, the things that skitter behind the walls are enough? You're wasting your time. Fear is for people who think they deserve to be saved.

I know better. I know I'm not alone in this house. Not because something's haunting me, because something's been growing inside me, whispering through the walls, asking me to do things. Terrible things. And you know what?

Lately I've started answering back. I waited until 3333. 3 a.m. That's its hour. The one fucking thing that movies ever got right about this kind of thing. I don't need a clock to know anymore. My body knows. My bones buzz. My teeth ache. At exactly 333, the hallway outside my bedroom began to click, like bones tapping against drywall. Not scratching, not footsteps, just clicking. Deliberate, rhythmic. I imagine it using its fingers, too many of them to sound real, wrapping each one against the wood one by one, like it's counting down to something, or trying to remember how it used to be human. I didn't get up, I just stared at the ceiling.

I could see the imprint of its face in the plaster, and on my mind, physically there, like the paint was swelling and bubbling outward. pressure from the other side by something grinning wide beneath the surface. It didn't speak that night. Didn't need to. Because when I woke up, the carpet was wet, soaked through with something black and sticky. My footprints followed me from the bed at the door. I checked my hands, my arms, no wounds or blood. Then I looked down to my feet.

That's not accurate. First I turned to get out of bed, and the moment I set my feet on the ground, the pain shot through my toes and my eyes searched for the source. It was hard to miss. My toenails were missing. All ten of them, I laughed as my eyes watered with the pain, a low cracking sound that didn't feel like it came from me. It tore out of my throat like a dry cough soaked in rain.

Is this all you've got? Do you have any idea what I've been through in this house? You can take pieces of me, carve me up slowly. You leave your stains and marks and messages in the mirror, written backward in languages I don't recognize. You press your face through the ceiling, knock on the walls with fingers you stole from the people I don't dream about anymore. Nightmares don't last forever. At some point your brain will turn off when there's nothing in your day to compare them against. When you don't see the sun or friends or anything that makes you smile,

who really gives a shit about a bad dream? Life is my bad dream. You want a reaction? You want to scream? Not this time. This time I made breakfast. Otherwise, I don't know how long it would have taken for me to find a gift you left for me in the oven. A small heart, blackened and shriveled like a dead insect.

It thudded once when I picked it up with the tongs. Still warm. Nice touch. I stopped cleaning the house. It was never a very clean person, but it was something to do. Well, it was something I did. Not anymore. but you like that, don't you?

The filth, the rot, the walls looking disease now. Vains of mold stretched through the dry wall like something's pulsing behind it. The air is thick. It hums at night. Sometimes I think I can hear breathing through the floor vents. Or maybe that's me. Maybe I've been breathing for two. You tried again last night.

real drama this time. You made windows appear just as I was falling asleep. And before I could even process the return of something, I'd almost forgotten even existed. It all shattered at once. Every one of them. Glass sprayed across the room like crystal rain. And behind them, no holes in the wall.

Just brick. And then the lights blinked out. I went to the kitchen and poured a drink. You keep the booze around to mess with my emotions, but it won't work. You dragged your nails down the hallway, let the doors slam shut one by one. You screamed through the vents with all the voices you've ever stolen. Some that sound too familiar. But I didn't flinch, did I?

I just whispered back, I'm still here, and I felt you stop. Just for a second. You're used to fear. Panic, prayers, not defiance, not hatred. You fed off the guilt I repressed about dad. But now there's something new inside me. Something thicker, heavier. I don't know if it's madness or clarity.

But I know what I want now. I want to see you. Not glimpses, not shadows, not your filthy tricks through the wallpaper. I want your face. I want you to come out of the walls, come out of the floorboards, stand in front of me like you used to be someone. Because until now, I still clear the kitchen knives who keep so sharp and free of rust. And I'm not afraid of bleeding anymore.

I figured out that you needed a little help. Maybe you've been whatever you are for too long, parts of being human are lost on you. Maybe you don't even remember what a front door is. Why would you, when all you want is inside anyway, right? So I drew a door where I thought it used to be with a big permanent marker. And then I knocked. And you didn't let me down, did you?

The door reappeared and it was open. Because you think I'm stupid. That'll just run out into whatever other insanity you have lined up. Maybe if I'll leave, I'll just be back in my room over and over again. Fuck that and fuck you. I left the front door open. Let the cold pour in. Let the fog roll up in the stairs I press from a grave.

I wanted to see what you'd do. You didn't disappoint. The house sighed deep and heavy like something exhaling after a long nap. The pipes groaned. floor swelled under my bare feet, and from somewhere inside the walls came a wet tearing sound, like wallpaper peeling away from meat. You're waking up, aren't you? The real you.

Not the shadow, not the whisper, but the thing that's been chewing through my thoughts for weeks. The thing you buried deep in this place, behind the dry wall beneath the floorboards and the black cavity where my conscience used to be. I'm ready. Come out! I waited in living room, lights off, knife in my lap. Not one of the kitchen ones this time. His knife. The one I found rusting under a pile of old tools in the garage.

I remember this blade. I remember the smell of it when he came home drunk and loud. He never used it on me, but he wanted to. He told me so, as he... wave it in front of my face and tell me how soft I was. I'm not soft anymore. Maybe you're a piece of him. Maybe that's why you haunt this place.

Or maybe you're something older. Something that was already here when he was screaming and I was small and too afraid to move. It was almost dawn when you finally showed up. No drama this time. No flickering lights, no bleeding walls, just a slid. low creak of the hallway door and then? There you were. You didn't walk.

You unfolded. Like someone unrolling a memory locked way too long. You are the wrong shape. Your limbs bent like fingers broken backwards. Your head twisted too far. Your smile stretching to where your ears should have been. But worst of all were the eyes. not glowing, not hollow, just familiar.

My own eyes reflected back at me. You crawled across the ceiling like a spider, and when you dropped to the floor, soft, soundless, I didn't move. I raised a knife, and you smiled. You didn't fight. You let me drive the blade into your chest. and when you opened your mouth, I finally heard your voice.

Not a whisper, but inside my head, louder than anything I've ever heard. Now you know, the knife slipped from my hand. Because I did. I did know. I remembered everything. The night I locked the bedroom door and didn't let her in. Tired of her complaining, tired of her ranting, tired of her crying. The pills on the floor.

The breath that never came again. My sister. I forgot her. No, I can't say that. It's a lie. I've lied for too long. I didn't just happen to forget her. I chose to and pushed it so deep.

I didn't even remember her face. I didn't let myself think about how she coped with our home. It was different from how I did. It annoyed me. Like father, like son, and you. You were what was left. The guilt, the rot, the parasite born from what I erased. Not some spirit.

Just a part of me that couldn't be buried. You're gone now. At least I think so now that you've delivered your message. The house is still. quiet. The walls no longer bleed. The floor no longer groans. The windows and doors are back. But I don't leave. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I still feel the wet grip of your hand on mine. Like I pulled you out of the wall and now you live in me. I don't scream or cry anymore. I laugh. Because now I'm the thing in the house.

passed down from father to son. And when someone new walks through the front door, if anyone were to come in, they won't smell rot. They'll smell remorse. Then they'll know what I've become. What dad made me. What you made me.

What I chose to be. Tid for tat, Doc. I think it would be good exercise. Out? You mean? Like, outside? No, I don't think we're quite ready for them. Why can't I go outside?

It's for your safety and ours. What's that supposed to mean? If you could step up to the window, there's a screen we've set up to show you some security footage. Footage of what? Footage of you. The last time we opened that door. The last time... What?

What's the point of showing him that? He's not going to remember anyway. Remember why we're here, please. Now be quiet. Looks like he's done with the footage. That was me? Yes, please. For more information on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration.

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