I am locking myself in the upstairs bathroom of my patient’s house in rural Ohio, and I don’t think I’m going to make it out.

I work as a night-shift home hospice nurse. Last week, Father Miller, the old parish priest who does the last rites for our county, pulled me aside. He smelled like cheap tobacco and dust. He grabbed my arm hard and whispered: “Some souls don’t realize they’ve passed, Mark. They just keep sitting on the porch. They keep watching the TV. If you see them doing that after their time of death, do not speak to them. Because if you break the illusion, ‘something else’ realizes they are there. And it comes to collect.”

I thought he was losing his mind. But tonight, my patient, Mr. Vance, got out of bed and sat in his living room recliner. I turned on the baby monitor from the kitchen to keep an eye on him. Through the grainy screen, he was just staring at the dead static on the TV.

But his chest wasn’t moving.

I crept into the room to check his pulse. His skin was ice cold. Rigor mortis had already set in. He’s been dead for at least twelve hours.

I tried to back away quietly, but my shoe squeaked on the hardwood. The dead man slowly turned his head, his eyes completely milky white, and whispered, “Why is it getting so cold in here, Mark?”

I ran upstairs. Now, looking at the monitor, Mr. Vance is still sitting there. But there are three impossibly tall, pitch-black silhouettes standing right behind his chair. They don’t have faces, but their heads are tilted upward. Staring at the ceiling. Right at where my bathroom is.

The baby monitor just flared with violent radio static, and Mr. Vance’s dead voice just echoed through the speaker:

Part 2: The Missing Time

The phone slipped from my sweaty palms, the screen cracking against the old hexagonal bathroom tiles. I didn’t reach down to pick it up. I couldn’t move. My entire nervous system felt like it had been plunged into a bath of liquid nitrogen.

Downstairs, the heavy, wet footsteps stopped.

The absolute silence that followed was worse than any scream. It was a thick, suffocating quiet—the kind of silence you only hear in a graveyard at 3 AM when the wind dies down. I stood frozen, my back pressed against the peeling wallpaper of the bathroom door, holding my breath until my lungs burned. My eyes darted around the small, sterile space. The dripping faucet. The faded floral shower curtain. The small, frosted glass window sitting high above the clawfoot tub.

“They say you are the one who doesn’t realize you died in that car crash tonight.”

Mr. Vance’s dead voice echoed in my skull. It wasn’t just the words; it was the metallic, hollow timber of the voice. It sounded like it was being broadcasted through an old ham radio from the bottom of the ocean.

“I’m alive,” I whispered frantically to myself, my voice trembling. “I’m right here. I’m breathing.”

I pressed two trembling fingers to my carotid artery. I pressed hard, digging into my neck.

Nothing.

Panic surged, hot and blinding. I pressed harder, shifting my fingers. Come on, come on, find the pulse. There was a faint, erratic flutter, but it felt distant, muted, as if I were feeling someone else’s heartbeat through a thick mattress. I’m just in shock, I told myself. Hypovolemic shock. Severe panic attack. My blood pressure is dropping.

Then, the floorboards right outside the bathroom door groaned.

A shadow, ink-black and unnaturally sharp, bled underneath the crack of the door. It wasn’t cast by the hallway light—it was darker than the absence of light. It seemed to absorb the dim fluorescent glow of the bathroom. The air temperature plummeted. I could actually see my breath billowing in small, pale clouds.

Click. Rattle. Click.

The brass doorknob slowly began to turn.

I scrambled backward, knocking over a plastic cup of toothbrushes, and dove into the bathtub. I reached up and grabbed the latch of the small frosted window. It was painted shut, layered with decades of white gloss. I slammed the heel of my palm against the wooden frame. Once. Twice. The doorknob clicked loudly, hitting the deadbolt.

A sound leaked through the door. It was a wet, clicking noise, like a massive insect chattering its mandibles, mixed with the faint, overlapping whispers of a dozen people talking at once.

I struck the window frame with all my strength. The old paint cracked. The window slid upward with a harsh, grating screech. A gust of freezing autumn air hit my face, carrying the smell of ozone, dead leaves, and something horribly sweet—like rotting fruit and copper.

Without looking back, I hoisted myself up, squeezing my shoulders through the narrow frame. As I tumbled forward into the night, the bathroom door splintered inward with a deafening crack.

I fell. It was a second-story drop onto the muddy grass of the side yard. I hit the ground hard, rolling onto my shoulder, waiting for the sharp, blinding agony of a fractured collarbone or a twisted ankle.

But there was no pain.

Just a dull, distant thud. I scrambled to my feet, my mind racing too fast to process the impossibility of my painless fall. The neighborhood was dead. The streetlights on Elm Avenue were flickering violently, casting long, strobing shadows across the manicured lawns. The air felt heavy, viscous. Every breath I took tasted like ash.

“My car,” I muttered, my voice barely a rasp. “Get to the car. Drive to the station.”

I sprinted toward the end of the long driveway. My Honda Civic was parked right where I left it at 9:45 PM. Or at least, I thought it was. As I broke through the thick fog rolling off the nearby treeline, my boots crunching violently on the gravel, my momentum completely died.

I stopped. My stomach dropped into a bottomless void.

There was a car at the end of the driveway. It was a silver Honda Civic. My silver Honda Civic. But it wasn’t parked.

It was utterly obliterated.

The front end was wrapped around the massive trunk of the century-old oak tree that bordered Mr. Vance’s property. The hood was folded upward like an accordion, the engine block shoved violently into the passenger cabin. The windshield was shattered into a spiderweb of millions of glittering diamonds. Steam and faint smoke were still hissing from the ruptured radiator.

“No… no, no, no,” I choked out, stumbling forward, my hands instinctively reaching out to touch the cold, mangled steel. “I drove here. I parked. I walked inside. I made coffee.”

I looked through the shattered driver’s side window. The airbag had deployed. It was stained with a massive, horrifying dark crimson smear. On the driver’s seat, completely saturated in blood, was my favorite blue windbreaker. The same windbreaker I thought I had hung on the coat rack inside the house.

I looked down at my own body. I was wearing my scrubs. But they were clean. Too clean.

My mind violently rejected the visual input. This is a hallucination. Carbon monoxide leak in the house. I’m passed out in the living room having a severe hypoxic hallucination. Wake up. WAKE UP.

Suddenly, from the pitch-black woods just beyond the oak tree, a voice drifted out.

It was Father Miller. The old priest.

But he wasn’t speaking English. He was chanting in Latin, the heavy, archaic syllables of the Last Rites. The horrific part wasn’t the chanting itself—it was the audio distortion. The words were playing in reverse.

“…unemA .irtirips te iilif te sirtap enimon ni…”

The syllables sounded wet, reversed, skipping like a scratched vinyl record. I backed away from the crushed car, my boots hitting the asphalt of the empty suburban road.

“Father Miller?” I yelled out into the darkness, the panic finally breaking my voice into a sob. “Help me! Someone help me!”

The reversed chanting stopped instantly.

From the shadows between the trees, they emerged. They didn’t walk. They glided, stuttering forward as if reality itself was dropping frames. Three entities. They were easily nine feet tall, their bodies completely devoid of features, composed of a darkness that seemed to suck the ambient moonlight into a vacuum. Their limbs were impossibly long, with two elbow joints on each arm, twitching in erratic, micro-movements.

They weren’t looking at the house. They weren’t hunting Mr. Vance.

Their faceless heads were locked dead onto me.

They began to spread out, forming a semicircle, slowly cutting off my path down the street. I was trapped between the crushed car, the haunted house, and the woods.

Then, my pocket vibrated.

The sudden, mundane buzzing of my cell phone was so jarring it felt like a gunshot. I fumbled in my scrub pockets, pulling out the cracked device. The caller ID flashed brightly in the dark.

MOM.

My thumb slammed the answer button, pressing the broken glass against my ear.

“Mom! Mom, please call 911! I’m at the Vance house on Elm—”

“…Mark?…”

Her voice wasn’t just crying. It was the guttural, soul-tearing wail of a mother who had just had her heart ripped out of her chest. Background noise bled through the speaker. It wasn’t the quiet hum of her living room. I heard the rhythmic, mechanical whoosh-hiss of a hospital ventilator. I heard the frantic, rapid beeping of an ICU heart monitor.

“Mom? Where are you? Why are you crying?” I screamed, tears finally streaming down my frozen face.

“Mark, baby, please…” she sobbed, her voice breaking into a horrific wheeze. “The doctor said your brain activity is gone… They said you didn’t feel any pain when the car hit the tree… Oh god, my baby boy…”

“MOM! I’M RIGHT HERE! I’M TALKING TO YOU!” I shrieked, clawing at my own face, feeling the cold, clammy skin.

A man’s voice, muffled, spoke in the background of the call. “Mrs. Davis… it’s time. We need to turn off the machines. I’m so sorry.”

“Mark… PLEASE WAKE UP,” my mother wailed, the sound shattering my sanity. “THEY ARE PULLING THE PLUG IN FIVE MINUTES.”

Part 3: The Collection

“Mom! DO NOT LET THEM DO IT! I’M ALIVE!” I screamed into the phone until my vocal cords tore, tasting hot copper in the back of my throat.

But the line was already dead. The call hadn’t dropped; it just transitioned into a low, droning hum of dial tone. I threw the phone onto the asphalt, clutching my head, spinning around in the middle of the empty street.

“This isn’t real! It’s a nightmare! WAKE UP!”

I slapped my own face, hard. My cheek stung, but the pain felt muted, distant, like it was happening to someone else’s body. The fog around me began to thicken, rising rapidly from the wet asphalt like dry ice.

And then, the neighborhood began to break.

The American suburban reality I had known my entire life started to glitch. It didn’t explode or crumble; it simply folded in on itself like a corrupted digital file. The neat, vinyl-sided houses of Elm Avenue flickered rapidly, their porch lights strobing violently before fading entirely into a deep, consuming blackness. The manicured lawns and concrete sidewalks dissolved into wet, decaying earth and thick roots.

The sky above me—the familiar dark blue canopy dotted with faint stars—tore open, revealing a ceiling of heavy, swirling, bruised purple clouds that seemed terrifyingly close to the ground.

I wasn’t standing on Elm Avenue anymore.

The houses were gone. The street was gone. There was only the endless, towering darkness of ancient, dead pine trees stretching into an infinite, sunless purgatory. Only my crushed silver Civic remained, jammed into the phantom oak tree, its headlights violently flickering against the encroaching fog.

“They are the collectors, Mark,” Father Miller’s voice echoed in my memory. “They harvest the souls who refuse to cross over. They take the ones who cling to the porch.”

I was the one on the porch.

I was the dead man watching the static.

The entire night shift, checking Mr. Vance’s vitals, making the coffee, watching the baby monitor—it was all an illusion my shattered consciousness had constructed to avoid the horrifying reality of my own violent death.

A wet, heavy thud snapped me out of my spiral.

I looked up. The three shadow entities were no longer standing at the edge of the woods. They had closed the distance. They were less than twenty feet away.

Up close, they were incomprehensibly terrifying. They weren’t made of flesh, but they weren’t just shadows either. They were composed of a dense, swirling static—like millions of black, microscopic insects swarming in the shape of unnaturally elongated humans. Their double-jointed arms hung limply at their sides, the long, pale fingers twitching with eager, predatory anticipation.

I backed up until my spine slammed into the crumpled side door of my wrecked car. There was nowhere left to run. I dropped to my knees in the dirt, my legs simply refusing to support my weight anymore. The psychological weight of my own death crushed me into the mud. I wept. I wept for my mother, sitting in that sterile ICU room, holding my lifeless, mangled hand. I wept for the life I had lost at 9:45 PM on a dark Ohio highway.

The tallest entity stepped forward. It towered over me, a nine-foot pillar of suffocating void. The temperature plummeted so drastically that frost instantly materialized on the fabric of my scrubs.

It tilted its head down to look at me.

Slowly, the smooth, featureless surface of its face began to split open. It peeled back like rotting fruit, but there was no skull, no teeth, no eyes beneath.

Instead, inside the gaping cavity of its head, there was a violent, blinding square of television static.

The sheer volume of the white noise that erupted from its face was agonizing. It wasn’t just sound; it was physical pressure, driving a spike of pure, unadulterated terror through my eardrums and directly into my brain. It sounded like a thousand empty radio stations screaming simultaneously.

“A C C E P T . . .” a voice boomed beneath the static. It wasn’t a sound. It was a vibration that rattled my teeth and shook the marrow in my bones.

I couldn’t look away. The static was hypnotic, pulling my consciousness out of my chest, draining the last remnants of my identity, my memories, my fear.

The entity slowly raised its arm. The limb snapped and popped at the joints as it reached down. From the swirling black void of its sleeve emerged a massive, impossibly pale hand, the skin stretched tight over elongated, skeletal fingers.

“Please…” I whimpered, closing my eyes, waiting for the abyss.

The cold, dead fingertips touched my forehead.

Instantly, the world exploded into blinding, sterile white light.

The sound of the television static was violently cut off, instantly replaced by a sound so sharp, so deafeningly loud, it echoed through the very fabric of my nonexistent soul:

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.

The flatlining tone of a hospital heart monitor.

The light swallowed me completely. I was falling, falling into a sterile, clinical void, the sound of my mother’s screaming fading into an echo, then a whisper, then… nothing.

PART 4: The Reality Check

BZZZT. CLICK.

The perspective shifts violently. The sterile white void vanishes, replaced by the shaky, high-definition realism of a police body camera.

The timestamp in the top right corner of the screen reads: OCT 14 – 03:14 AM. Two days later.

The camera bobs up and down rhythmically, accompanied by the heavy, steady breathing of a police officer. Rain is falling in sheets, illuminating the darkness in violent, silver streaks every time the red and blue emergency lights from the cruiser flash off the wet asphalt.

“Dispatch, this is Unit 4,” the officer’s voice crackles over his shoulder radio, his tone tight, exhausted. “I’m at the 104 mile-marker on County Route 9. I’ve located the vehicle from the missing person report. Silver Honda Civic. Ohio plates.”

“Copy that, Unit 4. Status of the driver?”

The officer steps off the pavement, his heavy boots sinking into the muddy shoulder. He sweeps his high-powered flashlight over the wreckage. The car is wrapped around a massive, ancient oak tree. The front end is completely caved in. The driver’s side airbag is deployed and stained a terrifying, rusted brown.

The car is completely empty.

“Driver is… negative, Dispatch. Vehicle is abandoned. Looks like a severe impact. Lots of blood loss. But nobody is here.”

“Roger, Unit 4. Securing perimeter. Backup is en route.”

The officer leans into the shattered driver’s window, the flashlight beam cutting through the rain and dust. He sweeps the light over the bloody steering wheel, the cracked dashboard, the empty passenger seat.

Then, the beam catches something reflective on the floorboard, half-buried under shattered glass and a bloody blue windbreaker.

A cell phone.

The officer reaches in, his thick latex gloves crunching over the glass, and picks it up. The screen is heavily cracked, completely shattered resembling a spiderweb, but miraculously, the backlight is still glowing weakly.

The officer wipes the blood off the screen with his thumb. The phone is paused on a video file. The last thing recorded before the crash.

“Dispatch, I got the victim’s phone. Looks like he was recording something.”

The officer taps the screen. The video begins to play.

The bodycam perfectly captures the phone’s screen. The video is shaky, vertical footage. It shows the front porch of the Vance hospice house. The camera pans across the peeling white paint, the rusted mailbox, the dying potted plants.

The officer squints, bringing the phone closer to his face. “What the hell is this?” he mutters.

On the video, there are no shadows. There are no nine-foot-tall entities. There is no dead Mr. Vance sitting in a recliner.

It is just an empty porch.

In the center of the frame, an old wooden rocking chair is moving. It is rocking back and forth violently, creaking loudly on the wooden floorboards, as if someone heavy just stood up from it.

The video plays for eight seconds, just the empty rocking chair swinging in the dead of night.

The officer sighs, confused, moving to turn the phone off.

But then, the audio spikes.

The wind in the video dies down entirely. Through the tiny, tinny speaker of the cracked cell phone, beneath the heavy breathing of the person recording, a faint, heavily distorted whisper bleeds through the audio track. It doesn’t sound like it’s coming from the porch. It sounds like it’s coming from directly behind whoever is holding the camera.

“He’s watching us right now through the screen…”

The officer freezes. The blood drains from his face.

He slowly lowers the phone. The bodycam perspective shifts as the officer slowly, mechanically turns his head, staring into the pitch-black woods surrounding the crash site. The red and blue police lights flash against the tree line, illuminating nothing but wet bark and darkness.

The rain seems to stop hitting the ground. The crickets go dead silent.

The officer slowly reaches up, his trembling, gloved hand hovering over his chest. He looks down, staring directly into the glass lens of his own bodycam.

His eyes are wide, pupils dilated to the point of swallowing his irises. An expression of pure, unadulterated, primal terror twists his features. He opens his mouth to scream, but no sound comes out.

From the darkness directly behind the officer, a massive, unnaturally long, pale hand reaches over his shoulder.

BZZZT. ERROR. SIGNAL LOST.

The video violently cuts to black.

The final frame is a silent, frozen glitch of the bodycam interface, leaving the viewer sitting in total silence, wondering: Did watching the footage just mark us for the collection?

END.