r/nosleep

I’m sorry, because what I’m about to tell you will sound like the kind of bullshit people make up when they want strangers online to pay attention, but made-up stories don’t park two black SUVs outside your house every night for two weeks and pretend not to watch your windows.

Believe me, don’t believe me, that’s not really why I’m writing this.

Just know the road near my old house is still blocked. They say it’s because of a gas leak. There is no gas line there. We had electric everything because Dina was scared of open flames. She said indoor fire felt primitive and wrong, and I thought she was just being dramatic. That’s funny now, in a sick way.

Dina and I had been married for ten and a half months. We were stupid in love. Embarrassing love. The kind where one of us would leave to buy something and the other would already be texting before they reached the store.

We fought too. Badly. Over nothing. Over dishes, over my work at the research institute, over her saying I wasn’t really listening, over me saying she always sounded like she was translating normal human emotions from a manual.

That one made her cry.

I apologized for it for two days.

I didn’t know then how close I was.

The night it happened, I came home late. I was shaking from coffee and hunger and whatever you call it when your whole life has just cracked open. I had done it. Not the final machine, obviously, but the math. The ugly part. The part everyone said was impossible.

Star drive. Faster-than-light. Whatever name you want. I don’t know what they’ll call it when they finally show you. If they ever do.

I had it in my bag.

Dina had dinner ready.

That should have scared me right away, because Dina did not cook when she was happy. She cooked when she was trying not to fall apart.

There were candles on the table. Cheap ones. One had burned down into this sad little blob. Pasta, garlic, wine. She was wearing my shirt. Bare legs. Hair still wet from the shower.

God, she was beautiful.

That’s the thing I hate most. Not that she lied. Not that I was just a chore. That I can still see her and want her.

She said, “You’re late.”

I said, “You’re scary.”

She laughed, but not right. A little too late.

You know how you learn someone? Not the big stuff. The tiny stuff. How they breathe when they’re mad. How they say “fine” when it’s absolutely not fine. How they kiss you when they want sex versus when they want forgiveness.

That laugh was wrong.

But I wanted to ignore it. I wanted dinner, and her, and that stupid little moment where I got to tell my wife I had done something impossible.

So I ignored it.

She came over and kissed me before I even put my bag down.

Hard kiss. Teeth, wine, salt. Like she was mad at my mouth.

Then there was a bitter taste.

I said, “What the hell is that?”

Or I tried to.

My tongue got thick. My fingers went numb. The bag slid off my shoulder and hit the floor.

Dina caught me.

Caught me like I weighed nothing.

That was another thing she forgot to hide.

She lowered me down onto the kitchen tile. Gentle. Careful. Like I was drunk and she was embarrassed for me.

I couldn’t move.

Not couldn’t move like panic. Couldn’t move like my body had been unplugged. I could breathe, barely. I could see. I could hear. I could feel the cold tile under my cheek.

She sat on the floor and pulled my head into her lap.

Then she wiped spit from my chin with her thumb.

That almost broke me.

I know that sounds pathetic. But when someone poisons you and still wipes your mouth because she can’t stand seeing you like that, your brain doesn’t know where to put it.

She was crying by then. Quietly. Not movie crying. Ugly crying. Nose running. Shoulders shaking. Trying not to make noise, which was very Dina, because even then she didn’t want to make it about her.

Then she explained, just enough.

Not everything. People in stories explain too much. Real people don’t. Real people choke on half of it and repeat themselves.

She wasn’t from here. Not from Earth.

She had been sent because of me.

Not because I was special. Because I might become special. Her people had ways of knowing which humans were likely to open certain doors. My name came up. She was supposed to get close. Slow me down. Push me left when I should have gone right.

And she did, for a while.

The job I didn’t take.

The paper I gave up on.

The nights she pulled me back to bed when I was close to something.

The trip she begged me to take right before a deadline.

The fights. Jesus, the fights.

They had told her to kill me months earlier. She didn’t betray them. She stalled. That was all her love was worth in the end.

She said humans couldn’t be allowed out there. We liked playing with fire too much. Not yet. Maybe not ever. We were too fast. Too angry. Too good at turning pain into tools.

She said that part like she hated us.

Then she touched my face like maybe she was hoping love had finally worn off.

It should have been simple. Kill the husband, take the math, get on the ship. Hero of whatever hell she came from.

Her people were coming for her before dawn. I would be dead. My lab would burn in a way that looked like my fault.

Clean.

That word made me want to laugh, but my mouth didn’t work.

Clean.

My wife sat there holding me like she used to after panic attacks, except this time she was the reason I couldn’t move.

You’re probably thinking I was a naïve idiot. Some dead-eyed scientist who knew math but not his own wife. Too busy chasing equations to notice what was sleeping next to him. I wasn’t.

I actually had known for months.

Not “known” like I had a photo of her with antennae or whatever stupid thing you’re imagining. I knew the way husbands know things and then hate themselves for knowing.

She was wrong in small places.

The first real crack was a cut on her hand that closed while I was still reaching for a towel. She laughed it off and said I’d imagined how bad it was.

The second was finding her barefoot in the yard at three in the morning, whispering into the dark while every insect in the grass had gone silent. There were other things, too. Small things. Things you can explain once, maybe twice, until explaining them starts to feel stupider than the truth.

Eventually I called an old friend of my dad’s. I didn’t want to. I sat with the phone in my hand for almost an hour, because making that call meant admitting that the thing in my bed was not my wife in any normal sense.

He didn’t sound shocked. That scared me more than anything. He asked me three questions, very calmly, and by the third one I understood he already knew what she was.

Then he said, “Do not confront her. Do not try to leave. If she thinks you know, you won’t survive the night.”

That was when it landed properly. Dina wasn’t a mystery anymore. She was a placement. She was there for me, for the work, and sooner or later she was going to finish what she had been sent to do. Which is exactly what happened.

Then I met the others. Men and women with normal clothes and dead faces, asking questions nobody should know to ask.

Not just about Dina. About our sex. Our fights. Her blood. Her sleep. The words she used when she was angry. Whether she ever got sick. Whether animals acted strange around her. Whether lights flickered when she touched them. Whether I had ever woken up and found her watching me.

Nobody looked shocked enough.

That was when I learned they had been chasing this for years. Not aliens, exactly. Traces. Shadows. Bad transmissions. Burned bodies. Missing scientists. Houses cleaned too well. Bodies found with organs that did not fail in any way human medicine understood.

Nothing whole.

Nothing useful.

They didn’t need proof aliens existed.

They needed one of them alive, but even that wasn’t the real prize.

The real prize was what came to pick them up.

A ship. A working one. Not another fried transmitter, not a melted implant, not some dead thing on a table with all the useful parts burned out. A ship meant propulsion, shielding, power, navigation, alloys, control systems, the actual machinery of how they moved through space. Not theory. Not guesses. Hardware.

So we made me bait.

The breakthrough was real, but the timing was fake. The notebook was bait. The public lecture next week was bait. The little hints I dropped at work were bait.

The house was the trap.

The busted plumbing? Trap.

The new water heater Dina hated because it made the closet smell like metal? Trap.

The landscaping crew that tore up our backyard for three days while Dina complained they were killing her lavender? Trap.

Under our house was enough human desperation to pull something impossible out of the sky.

But only if she called them close.

Only if she didn’t just run.

Only if she loved me enough to say goodbye.

Do you get how disgusting that is?

I used the thing I was angriest about.

I used us.

At some point she looked down and saw my face.

Not my fear. Not my pain.

My guilt.

Marriage is a curse. You can’t hide in your own face.

She stopped touching my hair.

She whispered, “No.”

That was all.

Just no.

Then, “How long?”

I couldn’t answer.

She looked at the bag on the floor. The notebook. The candles. The windows. All of it.

And she understood.

I saw my wife die right there, without anyone shooting her (they didn’t), before anything fell from the sky. Whatever she thought we had, whatever little piece of us she believed was clean, it broke.

Our marriage was a big fucking total sham. A trap with wedding photos on the wall and her hair in my shower drain. She was using me. I was using her. We both had our noble excuses. But when she put her hand on my face, it still felt like home.

The lights went out.

Not like a power outage. Like the dark had weight.

The windows filled with white.

The whole house made this deep animal sound. Metal screamed inside the walls. My teeth hurt. Blood ran out of my nose onto the tile.

Dina crawled off me and tried to stand.

She was still trying to reach the back door when the sky tore open.

I didn’t see a ship. Not clearly. I saw shapes where the stars should be. I saw the yard bending upward like it wanted to leave. I saw Dina in the white light, one hand on the doorframe, looking back at me.

She could have killed me then.

Then the world punched itself inside out.

I woke up in a hospital with tubes in me and two government men pretending to be doctors.

They got it.

That’s what they told me.

“Intact enough.”

I didn’t care, really.

They didn’t tell me about Dina at first.

I had to ask three times before one of them finally looked at the other and said, “She got out.”

I laughed because I thought he meant she had escaped the room.

Then he said she had shed the human layer, like it was clothing, like my wife was something she could peel off and leave on the floor.

The other one said, “You don’t want to see what was underneath.”

I asked anyway.

They told me what she looked like underneath. I could hear the disgust in their voices.

“Sorry you had to live with that,” one said.

Something soft and deep and awful twisted inside my chest.

I am parked directly under the harsh, buzzing fluorescent canopy of a twenty-four-hour fuel station. I have locked all four doors. I have the engine running, the heater turned on high, and all the interior lights illuminated. I am surrounded by concrete and artificial light, and I still cannot stop my hands from shaking against the steering wheel.

I am a county law enforcement officer. I have only been on the force for two years, but I have built a reputation for being strict, thorough, and completely reliant on protocol. I like rules. I like guidelines. In this line of work, the manual is your best tool. If you follow the steps, if you run the plates, if you approach the vehicle at the correct angle, you eliminate variables, and maintain control of the situation.

My assigned patrol sector is a massive, desolate stretch of a two-lane county highway. It is a lonely, isolated assignment. The road runs along the eastern perimeter of a massive, deep freshwater lake. The layout of the geography means there is absolutely nothing out there. On the left side of the highway, there is a steep, rocky embankment that drops directly down into the dark water of the lake. On the right side, there is an endless, dense expanse of thick pine forest. There are no houses, no streetlights, and no intersecting roads for over forty miles. It is just a ribbon of dark asphalt trapped between the deep woods and the deep water.

I work the graveyard shift. I patrol this highway from ten at night until six in the morning. Usually, the entire eight-hour shift consists of driving back and forth in complete silence, listening to the hum of my tires and the occasional crackle of the dispatch radio. Sometimes I pull over a long-haul trucker who missed a turn, or a local teenager driving too fast. It is a quiet, predictable job.

Tonight started exactly like every other night. The weather was clear but very cold. A thick layer of fog was rolling off the surface of the lake, creeping over the embankment and drifting across the asphalt. I was cruising at forty miles per hour, holding a cup of lukewarm coffee, scanning the dark road ahead with my headlights.

At approximately 2:15 AM, I saw a vehicle driving a few miles ahead of me.

I sped up slightly to close the distance. It was a dark-colored minivan, an older model. It was traveling well under the speed limit, moving at maybe thirty miles per hour. As I got closer, I noticed two things. First, the passenger-side taillight was completely burned out. Second, the vehicle was swerving. It was not a violent, erratic swerve, but a slow, drifting weave. The tires drifted over the solid yellow line in the center of the road, corrected slowly, and then drifted back over the white shoulder line near the edge of the lake embankment.

Protocol for this is clear. A burned-out taillight is a minor traffic violation, but combined with the swerving, it establishes reasonable suspicion for driving under the influence or extreme driver fatigue. I had to initiate a traffic stop.

I pulled up behind the minivan, keeping a safe distance of three car lengths. I reached down to the center console and flipped the switch for my overhead emergency lights. The flashing red and blue strobes instantly illuminated the dark highway, reflecting off the thick pine trees on the right and cutting through the fog drifting off the lake on the left.

The driver of the minivan reacted slowly. It took them nearly a quarter of a mile to register the lights in their rearview mirror. Eventually, the right turn signal blinked, and the van slowly pulled over onto the narrow gravel shoulder, coming to a stop just a few feet away from the steep drop-off into the water.

I pulled my cruiser onto the shoulder behind them. I followed my training exactly. I offset my vehicle slightly to the left, creating a safety corridor between my cruiser and the flow of traffic. I angled my front wheels toward the road, so if a drunk driver rear-ended my cruiser, it would not be pushed forward into the minivan. I put the transmission in park, unbuckled my seatbelt, and grabbed my heavy metal flashlight.

I stepped out into the cold night air. The only sounds were the low rumble of the two idling engines, the crunch of the gravel under my boots, and the faint, rhythmic lapping of the lake water hitting the rocks at the bottom of the embankment.

I walked up to the rear of the minivan. I reached out with my left hand and firmly pressed my palm against the trunk lid. This is another standard protocol. You leave your fingerprints on the vehicle. If something happens to you, the investigators will have physical proof that you were standing right behind that specific car.

The metal of the trunk felt unusually cold and damp.

I walked up the driver’s side, keeping my flashlight pointed low. I stopped just behind the driver’s side window, angling my body so I was not an easy target if the driver decided to open the door aggressively. I tapped the glass with my flashlight.

The window rolled down manually with a squeaking sound.

I shined the beam of my flashlight into the interior of the van.

It was a perfectly normal family.

The driver was a middle-aged woman. She looked incredibly exhausted. Her hair was messy, and there were dark, heavy bags under her eyes. She squinted against the glare of my flashlight.

Sitting in the passenger seat was a middle-aged man. He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt. His head was tilted back against the headrest, his eyes closed, lightly snoring. He looked completely relaxed.

I moved the beam of the flashlight to the back seat. There were two young children, a boy and a girl, maybe eight or nine years old. They were both fast asleep, their heads leaning against the cold glass of the side windows. There was a pile of blankets and pillows shoved between them. It looked exactly like a family pushing through the final, exhausting hours of a long road trip.

"Good evening, ma'am,"

I said, keeping my voice polite but firm.

"I am stopping you tonight because your passenger-side taillight is completely out, and I noticed you were having some trouble maintaining your lane."

The woman rubbed her face with a tired hand.

"I am so sorry, officer,"

she said. Her voice was quiet and hoarse.

"We have been driving for a very long time. We just wanted to get there before morning. I guess I am more tired than I realized."

"It happens,"

I replied.

"But driving exhausted on this stretch of highway is dangerous. Especially this close to the water. I need to see your license, registration, and proof of insurance, please."

She nodded slowly. She reached across the sleeping man in the passenger seat, opened the glove compartment, and pulled out a small stack of papers. She handed them to me along with a plastic driver's license.

When her fingers brushed against mine, her skin felt freezing cold. It felt like touching a piece of ice.

"I am going to take these back to my cruiser and run your information,"

I told her.

"I will be right back. Please remain in the vehicle."

She did not say anything. She just gave me a slow, tired nod and looked straight ahead through the windshield.

I turned around and walked back to my cruiser. I climbed into the driver's seat, pulled the heavy door shut, and placed the license and registration on the center console. I turned on the overhead dome light so I could read the small print.

I picked up my radio microphone.

"Dispatch, this is Unit Four. I am initiating a traffic stop on a dark-colored minivan. Requesting a plate check."

The radio crackled. The dispatcher on duty tonight was an older woman who usually worked the quiet shifts. "Copy that, Unit Four. Go ahead with the plate number."

I read the alphanumeric sequence off the registration paper.

"Copy,"

she replied.

"Stand by. The system is running a little slow tonight."

I put the microphone down. I settled back into the seat, enjoying the warm air blowing from the heater vents. The heavy protocol of the stop was complete. Now, I just had to wait for the computer system to verify the documents, write a simple warning ticket for the broken taillight, and advise the tired mother to pull over and rest.

While I waited, I glanced down at my center console.

Mounted directly below the radio is a small, heavy-duty monitor. It displays the live video feed from the cruiser's dashboard camera. The camera records continuously during a traffic stop, capturing everything that happens directly in front of my vehicle. The video is strictly black-and-white, designed to capture high-contrast details like license plates in low light conditions.

Out of pure, ingrained habit, I looked at the monitor to ensure the camera was recording the minivan.

I stopped breathing.

The image displayed on the small screen was wrong. It was entirely, fundamentally wrong.

I looked at the screen, and my brain struggled to process the visual information. The camera was pointed directly at the space in front of my cruiser. The red and blue strobe lights were flashing across the scene in alternating waves of bright white and deep black.

The vehicle on the monitor was not the minivan I had just walked away from.

The van on the screen was crushed. The roof was caved entirely inward, bending the metal frame down toward the seats. The rear bumper was twisted and hanging off by a single rusted bolt. The exterior was completely covered in thick, dark, hanging layers of aquatic algae and river weeds. The tires were flat, rotting, and half-buried in thick mud.

It looked exactly like a vehicle that had been pulled from the bottom of a lake after decades underwater.

But that was not the part that made my blood turn to ice.

The dashboard camera was positioned directly behind the rusted, crushed rear window of the van. The glass was shattered.

Looking out through the broken back window, staring directly into the lens of the dashboard camera, were four faces.

They were bloated. They were skeletal. The flesh on their faces was gray, peeling away from the bone in wet, ragged strips. Their eye sockets were empty, dark, hollow pits filled with stagnant water. They were pressed tightly together in the back of the crushed vehicle.

The mother, the father, the two children.

They were all looking directly at the camera. And they were smiling.

It was not a natural expression. Their jawbones were pulled back, stretching the rotting, waterlogged skin into wide, unnatural, gaping grins. They were completely motionless, suspended in the grainy black-and-white feed, just staring and smiling at the lens.

A wave of suffocating panic slammed into my chest. My hands gripped the edges of the monitor so hard my knuckles turned white. I thought the camera system was malfunctioning.

I tore my eyes away from the screen and looked up through my windshield.

Parked twenty feet in front of me was the pristine, dark-colored minivan. The metal was clean. The roof was perfectly intact. The red glow of the functional brake light illuminated the gravel shoulder. Through the back window, I could see the silhouette of the two children sleeping peacefully under their blankets. I could see the mother looking into her side mirror, watching my cruiser.

Everything was perfectly normal.

I looked back down at the monitor.

The crushed, rusted, algae-covered wreckage was still there. The four rotting, skeletal corpses were still there.

They had moved.

The mother had raised her hand. A skeletal, bloated arm, covered in peeling wet skin and thick green weeds, was pressed against the shattered glass of the rear window. She was tapping on the glass from the inside.

I could not hear the tapping through the heavy doors of my cruiser, but I could see the bone of her finger hitting the lens on the screen.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

They were still smiling that wide, gaping, impossible grin.

I felt dizzy. I reached forward with a shaking hand and physically hit the side of the monitor, hoping to reset the feed. The screen flickered, but the image remained. The bloated corpses continued to stare.

Suddenly, the radio crackled loudly, breaking the heavy silence in the cruiser.

"Unit Four, this is dispatch,"

the older woman's voice said. She sounded deeply confused. Her professional tone had completely slipped.

I grabbed the microphone, fumbling with the cord.

"Unit Four. Go ahead."

"I ran the plates and the license,"

she said slowly.

"Are you absolutely sure you read that sequence correctly? Are you sure you are looking at a dark minivan?"

"Yes,"

I stammered, my eyes darting between the pristine van out the windshield and the nightmare on the screen.

"I am parked right behind it. Why?"

"The system flagged the registration,"

the dispatcher said.

"Those plates belong to a vehicle that was involved in a major missing persons case. Thirty years ago."

I felt the blood drain from my face.

"Missing?"

"A family of four,"

she read from her screen.

"They were driving cross-country. They were last seen at a gas station near your current location. The police searched for weeks. The primary theory was that the driver fell asleep at the wheel and the vehicle went off the embankment into the lake. They never found the car. They never found the bodies. The license you gave me belongs to the mother. Her status is listed as legally dead."

The radio went silent.

I sat completely frozen in the driver's seat. The heater was blowing hot air onto my face, but I was shivering uncontrollably.

I slowly raised my head and looked through the windshield.

The pristine minivan was gone.

It had not driven away. I had not heard the engine start. I had not heard the tires crunching on the gravel. The red brake light was simply gone. The space in front of my cruiser was completely empty.

I reached up and engaged the mechanical lever for the high-powered spotlight mounted on the driver's side pillar. I twisted the handle, aiming the bright beam of light directly at the patch of gravel where the van had been parked seconds ago.

There were no tire tracks.

Instead, covering the gravel shoulder, was a massive puddle of thick, black, stagnant water. The water was actively bubbling, seeping quickly into the dirt. A horrible, foul smell began to enter the air vents of my cruiser. It smelled like dead fish, rotting wood, and ancient, stagnant mud.

I looked down at the dashboard monitor.

The screen was displaying a live feed of the empty gravel shoulder and the puddle of water. The crushed van was gone. The corpses were gone.

I dropped the radio microphone onto the passenger seat. I could barely grab the gear shift. I needed to put the cruiser in drive. I needed to turn around and drive away from the lake as fast as the engine would allow. Protocol did not matter anymore. I just needed to leave.

I grabbed the gear shift and pulled it down into drive.

Before my foot could touch the accelerator, the entire patrol cruiser violently lurched.

It was a massive, concussive impact that originated from the right side of the vehicle. The heavy metal frame of the Ford Explorer groaned under the sudden stress. My head snapped to the right, hitting the headrest.

The cruiser was moving.

It was being dragged sideways.

Something was pulling the two-ton police vehicle across the gravel shoulder, dragging it directly toward the steep embankment that dropped into the black water of the lake.

I slammed my foot down on the gas pedal. The powerful engine roared, the RPM needle jumping into the red. The rear tires spun frantically, kicking up a massive cloud of gravel, dirt, and mud. The tires screamed, trying to find traction on the loose shoulder, but the sideways momentum was too strong. We were sliding toward the edge.

I turned my head and looked out the passenger side window.

The lake was churning. The dark, flat surface of the water was boiling, sending thick, white foam crashing against the rocks.

Rising out of the freezing black water were four figures.

It was the family. The mother, the father, the two children.

But they were not human anymore. They were the bloated, skeletal, rotting corpses from the camera monitor. Their flesh was gray and peeling. Their empty eye sockets stared blankly at my cruiser. Their jaws were unhinged, locked into that wide, horrific grin.

They were suspended in the air.

Attached to the back of each rotting corpse was a massive, thick, muscular appendage. They looked like dark, wet, glistening tentacles, thicker than tree trunks, emerging from the deep water of the lake. The tentacles were fused directly into the spines of the corpses, using the dead human bodies like fleshy, rotting puppets.

The tentacles extended from the lake, reaching up the rocky embankment. The rotting puppet-corpses of the family were pressed directly against the side of my cruiser. Their bloated, skeletal hands were gripping the window frames, the door handles, the wheel wells.

The strength of the appendages was impossible. They were dragging the heavy police cruiser sideways through the deep gravel, inch by agonizing inch, pulling me closer to the drop-off.

The smell of the stagnant water and the rotting flesh was overwhelming, filling the cabin of the cruiser. The metal doors buckled inward under the crushing pressure of the tentacles. The passenger side window shattered, spraying tiny cubes of safety glass across the front seat.

One of the bloated, rotting arms reached through the broken window. The skeletal fingers, dripping with thick lake mud, grabbed the fabric of my passenger seat, pulling the cruiser harder toward the cliff.

The rear tires of my cruiser slipped over the edge of the embankment.

The back of the vehicle dropped violently, the undercarriage slamming against the sharp rocks. My stomach dropped. I was angled upward, staring at the night sky. The black water of the lake was churning wildly just a few feet below my rear bumper.

I had exactly one second before the center of gravity shifted completely and the cruiser tumbled backward into the deep water.

I grabbed the steering wheel with both hands, locked my elbows, and slammed my heavy police boot completely down on the accelerator pedal.

The engine screamed, pushing maximum torque to the all-wheel-drive system. The front tires, still gripping the solid asphalt of the highway lane, bit down hard. The rubber burned against the road, filling the air with thick white smoke.

For a terrifying, agonizing second, the cruiser held completely stationary, suspended in a brutal tug-of-war between the horsepower of the engine and the crushing strength of the tentacles in the lake.

The metal frame groaned. The engine whined.

Then, the front tires caught traction.

The cruiser violently jerked forward. The sudden, explosive forward momentum ripped the vehicle out of the grip of the rotting corpses.

I heard a wet, sickening tearing sound as the skeletal hands gripping the window frame were physically ripped away from the tentacles.

The cruiser launched forward, climbing over the edge of the embankment and slamming hard onto the flat asphalt of the highway. The rear tires caught the road, propelling the vehicle forward like a missile.

I did not let off the gas pedal. I kept my foot floored.

I looked in the rearview mirror.

The massive, wet tentacles were writhing on the gravel shoulder, aggressively slapping the ground where my cruiser had just been. The rotting bodies of the family dangled limply from the ends of the appendages. As I sped away, the thing slowly pulled the tentacles back down the embankment, dragging the skeletal puppets beneath the black, churning surface of the lake, disappearing without a splash.

I drove at over one hundred and ten miles per hour down the county highway. I did not turn on my sirens. I did not radio dispatch to tell them what happened. I just drove, staring straight ahead, gripping the wheel until my hands went numb.

I did not stop until I saw the bright, artificial canopy of this fuel station.

I pulled under the lights and threw the cruiser into park. I have been sitting here ever since. I have checked the passenger side of my vehicle. The window is completely shattered. The heavy metal doors are deeply dented, crushed inward by a massive, circular pressure. Sitting on the passenger seat, resting amidst the broken glass, are three severed, skeletal fingers, completely coated in thick, foul-smelling lake mud.

I am not going back to the station. I am leaving the keys in the ignition and I am walking away from this job. I do not care about the rules anymore.

I am writing this on my phone and posting it here as a direct warning to anyone driving alone at night. If you are traveling down a desolate highway near a large body of deep water, and you see a vehicle driving slowly, drifting over the lines, trying to get your attention.

Do not stop. Do not pull over to help them

My mom has always been my idol, the biggest role model in my life. When my dad died shortly after I was born, she raised me on her own, while also maintaining her career as a doctor. My grandmother offered support when she could, but my mom was the foundation. As I grew older, I noticed that I was not the only person who seemed to depend on her wisdom and guidance.

I was maybe six or seven when I began to notice the women. White, black, Asian, Hispanic. Early 20s, late 40s, fairly well on in their 50s. There didn’t seem to be a particular type or requirement to come and see my mother, but whenever they would come, my mom would send me to my room. That was fine with me; I was usually given a snack or something and I kept myself busy with whatever new gaming system or computer I had at the time. Whatever my mom was doing to “treat” these patients didn’t take long; After about 15 minutes or so, my mom would poke her head in my room, her gray eyes bright as she let me know our latest guest had gone.

Mom was certainly making a pretty penny at the hospital, but we lived in a standard two-story, three bedroom house. Our spare room, located right next to my mom’s, was her “medical chamber.” She kept it under lock and key, telling me that there were many instruments I could hurt myself with, or expensive equipment that she didn’t want me to break. I had never once been inside the room before, but I never gave it much thought. By the time I was 15 years old, though, I started to wonder about something. As far as I knew, my mother was an obstetrician, the most renowned in town. And yet, none of the women who visited us, not one, had ever been pregnant…

One day, as I was sitting on the couch eating scrambled eggs, there was a knock at the door. My mom was off at work, and she had taught me never to let anyone into our house, under any circumstance if she was not there. I had grown used to ignoring any phone calls to the landline or unexpected visitors, but whoever was standing outside was persistent; They banged nonstop at the wood, and even began to yell. Annoyed, I trudged over to the door and yanked it open aggressively. There was a woman standing there, sweat running down her round, pale face that was framed by her dark hair. She wore a dirty white dress and was quite obviously pregnant, but her eyes were what drew my attention. They were wide, panicked, full of cold, unmistakeable fear.

“Abel,” she whispered, her chest rising and falling as she seemed on the verge of hyperventilating. “Abel, is your mother here?”

I was more than a little uncomfortable that this woman knew my name, but she was clearly a client of my mother’s, so I didn’t worry too much about it.

“Uhh, no, she’s not. She’ll be back in a few hours, I’ll tell her to give you a ca-“

“No. I need her now, right now goddamnit. You call her and tell her that I need her now!”

I recoiled, startled by this woman’s escalating aggression. There was something wrong, but what the hell was I supposed to do? “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but you-“

“Listen to me boy you call her and you call her now, or else I’ll call the cops and tell them about what she’s got back there.” The woman’s eyes were glowing, as though she felt she had the leverage on me. I wanted to slam the door in her face, but I also didn’t want my mom to get in trouble; I called her and told her about the woman’s threat, and she was pulling into the driveway twenty minutes later. The woman, who was kneeling on the porch panting, sprung up immediately.

“I’ve changed my mind! I can’t do this, I can’t, I’m not fit to be a mother! You take this thing out of me, take it out now you bitch!”

My mother was expressionless as she stared at the woman. She didn’t blink as she replied, “Alright. Come with me.”

She glanced at me as she stepped into the house, and I knew what it meant. I dashed into my room, closing the door behind me. But I was curious now; I put my ear to the door, listening as their footsteps padded down the hall. When I heard the door to the medical chamber close, I stepped into the hall. I listened intently; A few seconds went by in silence. And then I heard a bloodcurdling scream; This was followed by a loud thud, and I retreated back into my room and pretended to play my PS5. It didn’t take 15 minutes this time: My mom, blood on her face, stuck her head in my room. “I’ve got to get back to work dear. I’ll make tacos tonight.”

Call me stupid, but I do have a conscience; I knew that my mother had done something terrible to this woman, and I couldn’t just sit fiddling my thumbs knowing this. That poor lady hadn’t left the chamber, and I couldn’t just leave her there, hurt and pregnant. I watched my mom back out of the driveway, and then I snuck into her room. I went through her drawers, opened her closet, checked under the bed. I couldn’t find the key, so I resorted to brute force. I rammed my shoulder repeatedly into the door; It took a while, but then the hinges finally gave in and the door fell open. Sore and wheezing, I fell to my knees. There was a foul odor, like nothing I had ever smelled before, wafting out of the dark room. I did not belong in here; Still, I had opened Pandora’s box, and now I had to face the chaos.

When I stood up and my eyes adjusted to the dark, the first thing I saw was the woman lying on the floor. Blood was pooling under her head and she was motionless; Yet, her belly seemed to be pulsing, the baby inside seemingly trying to escape. I was horrified beyond belief, but then I felt a sort of pull; It was as though I was a moth, but the thing attracting me wasn’t light. No, this was darkness beyond comprehension.

A great, wriggling, pink and red mass was situated in the middle of the room. It rose about seven feet in the air, and was about five feet wide. It had multiple tendrils, thick and wet and diseased, thrashing to and fro. There were slits all over it, which opened and closed repeatedly, as though it was…breathing. It had a single eye, set in its center near the top, yellow and full of puss. It stared into my own eyes as I stood transfixed; It never blinked, only looked upon me in what I can only describe as…admiration? The cursed eye shifted from me over to the dead woman on the floor. The thing that shouldn’t be seemed to tremble, fluids secreting all over it, and then one of the tendrils suddenly extended, shooting past me and grabbing the woman’s ankle.

It dragged her up close, and I…well, I’d rather not describe what I was forced to watch. I’d probably have gone insane, but my clarity has somehow prevented me from losing it. After the tendrils were finished, they deposited…something…into the woman, and her belly abruptly stopped moving. The eye was looking at me again now, and I found myself moving forward. I knew now….it all made sense. All those desperate women, they had all come here for the one thing they couldn’t get naturally, whether it was the fault of a man or their own body. My mom had been giving them little miracles. I spread my arms and hugged the great behemoth before me, feeling all of its warmth. Slime ran down my face and into my mouth as I whispered.

“Dad.”