Something in the House

  Elias stood frozen in the garage, his breath shallow. The silence outside was unnatural, like the world had been put on mute by some unknown force in the ethereal realm.

  Elias’s feet felt rooted to the cold concrete, but his mind screamed at him to move.

  That sound—the slow, deliberate creak—it had come from inside the house.

  His pulse pounded as he turned his gaze toward the door that led from the garage into the kitchen. It stood ajar, a yawning black void spilling into the dimly lit room beyond. Hadn’t he closed it earlier? He was sure he had.

  The silence was thick, almost pressing against his ears. No storm. No wind. Just the suffocating quiet of a house that was no longer empty.

  Something was waiting.

  Watching.

  He swallowed hard and stepped forward. The metallic tang of blood still clung to the air, mingling with the sharp burn of turpentine. The floorboards groaned beneath his weight as he inched through the doorway.

  The kitchen light flickered. Once. Twice. Then, steady.

  His eyes darted around. Everything looked the same—the half-empty bottle of whiskey on the counter, the pile of unopened mail, the cracked tile near the sink—but something felt different.

  The air pulsed.

  Like the walls were breathing.

  Then—a shift.

  From the corner of his eye, something moved.

  He spun around, heart hammering.

  Nothing.

  Just his own distorted reflection in the darkened window above the sink. His chest rose and fell in shallow gasps, and for a moment, he almost laughed at himself. The storm, the shadows, his own paranoia—he was psyching himself out.

  And then...

  The reflection blinked.

  His breath hitched.

  Not him.

  Not his eyes.

  Something inside the house had blinked back.

  A deep, bone-chilling cold slithered up his spine. The thing in the glass—it wasn’t his reflection at all. It was standing behind him.

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  Elias didn’t turn around.

  He couldn’t.

  Because if he did...

  He knew it would be waiting.

  Right there.

  Close enough to touch.

  And then—

  The kitchen light went out.

  The Thing That Should Not Be

  Elias is cornered.

  The figure was in front of him, its eyes glowing in the dim shadows of darkness. Its skin pale, almost translucent, as it stretched tightly over its skeletal frame.

  His body refused to move.

  His mind screamed at him to run, fight, do something, but his muscles locked in place as if his very soul had been anchored to the floor.

  The figure loomed closer.

  Its eyes—hollow, sunken pits of glimmering gold—devoured the darkness. Its skeletal frame jerked unnaturally, its limbs too long, its fingers curling like the brittle legs of a dying insect. Its mouth stretched open, far wider than it should, revealing a void where a throat should be. And the sound—

  A metallic wail, a thousand rusted gears grinding together, laced with something almost human, something shrieking from inside it.

  A voice lost in agony.

  Elias’s stomach twisted at the stench pouring from its gaping maw—sulfur, old metal, the scent of something long buried and rotting beneath the earth.

  The light from the shattered garage bulb flickered, and for a moment, the thing’s skin—pale, stretched tight, nearly translucent—shifted. Something inside it moved.

  A slithering. A writhing. Something else was underneath.

  Not one thing. Many.

  Elias gagged, the back of his throat burning with bile. His knees buckled, his vision blurring at the edges. His mind wanted to reject what he was seeing, to force it into something comprehensible—a man, a monster, anything but this. But the truth squirmed beneath its skin, laughing at him.

  The thing took another step forward, its fingers twitching, dripping with thick, black fluid.

  Elias stumbled back.

  It followed.

  A whisper slithered through the room, curling against the walls like smoke. Not a word. Not a sound. A presence.

  Elias’s breath came in ragged, shallow gasps. His mind, once frozen in fear, now screamed at him to do something—anything—before it was too late.

  The door.

  If he could reach the door—

  SLAM.

  The garage door behind him crashed shut on its own.

  The thing was blocking the only way out.

  And then, in a voice that was not a voice, it spoke.

  “You’ve seen too much.”

  Further Into the Abyss

  The figure lunges for Elias, intending to consume him. But at the last second, it vanishes.

  The light went out completely.

  Leaving Elias sprawled on the cold garage floor, confused and terrified, as he laid there with his eyes shut.

  Darkness swallowed him whole, but the last thing he saw, were the rows of empty paint cans, each one reflecting the malevolent gleam in the figure’s eyes.

  He comes back to his senses after five minutes.

  Elias slowly, blinks his eyes open.

  The fluorescent lights of the garage seem impossibly bright after the darkness.

  His body aches, and his mind is foggy. He tries to sit up, but his head pounds, and he slumps back down to the cold concrete floor.

  Elias is dazed and bleeding from his neck, after being scraped by a falling tin. He is trying to make sense of what just happened?

  The figure is gone. Or was it ever really there?

  Maybe it was just a hallucination, a trick of the mind played in the dim light of the garage. But the oily residue on the floor, the lingering scent of sulfur – they’re proof that something was there.

  Something terrifying.

  He glances around the garage, trying to make sense of it all.

  The old tools, the dusty shelves – they seem different now, somehow more sinister.

  He notices a peculiar symbol etched into the workbench, something he doesn’t remember seeing before. It looks ancient, almost forgotten.

  As he stares at the symbol, he feels a strange pull, like he’s being drawn into it. The lights in the garage begin to flicker, and the air grows cold. And for a brief moment, Elias swears he hears a whisper, a voice carried on the wind, telling a story of darkness and secrets hidden within the walls of the garage.