The road stretches endlessly, winding through unfamiliar territory. My sister grips the wheel, eyes fixed on the path ahead, while I glance sideways at the man who has joined us. I don’t know where he came from, not really. Maybe we met him along the way, or perhaps he was always there, trailing just behind, waiting for the right moment to enter our journey. Either way, he’s with us now, and I trust him. At least, I think I do.
As the sun dips below the horizon, we stumble upon a place. An isolated structure in the middle of nowhere. It’s not a house, not exactly. Just two rooms. A main space and a smaller one off to the side. They’re connected, somehow, but when you stand in one, the other feels impossibly distant. My sister claims the small room, where a single bed is pressed against the wall. The man and I take the larger one, where another bed waits.
The woman who lets us stay is old. Ancient, almost. She moves between the rooms as if she belongs to both but fits in neither, her presence a constant weight pressing against my chest. She’s cold toward him—too cold. And he, in contrast, is overly polite, with a careful charm that feels rehearsed. The tension between them simmers beneath the surface, an unspoken hostility I can’t quite place. But when my sister pulls me aside, her voice sharp with urgency, I realize she sees something I don’t.
She hands me her phone, showing me a picture. At first, it’s just the man, his face familiar, the way I’ve come to know it in such a short time. But her voice trembles as she begs me to look closer. She begins to change the settings of the image, adjusting something, and the image begins to shift. I don’t understand what I’m looking at, not at first. Then, the features distort and begin stretching into something else. Something wrong. His face, his form, his very existence is twisting and warping right before my eyes. And a face that once felt new but familiar, what was once an image of him, becomes something else.
And then I see it.
The old woman’s cold, sunken eyes stare back at me through the glass of the screen.
“It’s just a trick of the filter,” I tell her. “A distortion.”
But somewhere deep inside me, I don’t even believe my own words.
Outside, the wind howls, rattling the doors in a space that has the illusion of safety. But the familiarity of walls doesn’t soothe me. I sense danger, hidden in the dark corners. I tell myself it’s only the storm. The cold pressing in. The world outside raging. But I know better. The reality is the structure isn’t built for storms, and the thin doors tremble against the onslaught. I move to lock them, to secure us inside, but the moment I do, something shifts. The relief I expect doesn’t come. Instead, the walls feel tighter, the darkness inside heavier.
The man watches me as I settle onto the bed. His eyes flicker toward the connecting door, the one leading to my sister’s space. He doesn’t like that she has access. I can feel it in the way his jaw tenses, in the way his fingers calmly, but tightly, curl into the blanket. I tell myself I’m imagining it, that my mind is playing tricks. But as I lay down, the sense of safety I should feel never arrives. Instead, a deeper unease settles into my bones.
The old woman is still here, somewhere, in one of the rooms. She has nowhere else to go. And suddenly, I’m not sure if locking the doors has trapped danger outside or sealed it in with us.
The man watches for the old woman carefully, as though he needs to know where in the space she exists. It’s almost as if he’s focused on an intent that will bring me a sense of safety, but I can feel the woman watching him just the same. And for the first time, I wonder if I should be watching him too.
The storm outside rages on, the wind screaming against the walls, and I know, with absolute certainty, that if I close my eyes tonight, I may not open them again. But then I make the unsettling realization that I am already trapped somewhere between the trance of sleep and the uncertainty of consciousness.
The house creaks, the storm raging outside, the wind screaming its warning. But inside, it is too still. Too quiet. I try to tell myself it’s just paranoia, just exhaustion playing tricks on my mind. But deep down, I know better. I have always known better.
The air shifts. A presence stirs.
And I know, without needing to open my eyes, that something is wrong.
I force myself to breathe. Slowly. Evenly.
If I move, will they know I’m awake? If I keep still, will they leave me be? I don’t know. I don’t know what is real anymore.
I squeeze my eyes shut tighter, my pulse hammering against my chest. I tell myself that soon, I will wake up, this fear will dissolve, and this will all be over. That I will hear my sister stir in the next room, and that the morning light will seep in through the cracks of the curtains that cover the window. That the old woman will be gone, and he, the man who lies next to me, will be the man I trusted again. That everything will be okay.
But as I lay there, silent and still, I begin to wonder if I ever truly went to sleep at all. If I ever truly woke up. Or if I am still somewhere in between, caught in the space where dreams bleed into reality, where the Devil lingers just beyond the veil, watching, waiting.
© 2025 Kimberly Beth Thomas. All rights reserved.
This piece came from a recurring dream that haunted me after I was assaulted—a dream I couldn’t shake until I poured it onto the page. Writing it was my way of releasing the fear and finding my way back to myself. If these words resonate with you—or if you know someone who’s wrestling with grief, fear, or something they can’t name—please share this with them. Sometimes, the stories we release are the ones that help someone else find their way through the dark.