Ethan Graves jolted awake, his breath ragged, his sheets damp with sweat. His room was pitch dark except for the red glow of his alarm clock.
3:33 AM.
He swallowed, staring at the numbers, his mind still tangled in the nightmare. His heart pounded like he had just run ten blocks.
But it wasn't just a dream.
He could still feel it—the cold air of that twisted place, the way the ground seemed to shift beneath him like a living thing, the sound of something breathing just behind him, always just out of sight.
He sat up, rubbing his face. His body felt stiff, like he had actually been running, fighting to escape.
"Get a grip, Ethan."
Just a nightmare. That's all.
And yet, as he turned to grab his phone from the nightstand, he noticed something that made his skin crawl.
His window—it wasn't right.
At first glance, it looked normal. The city lights outside, the familiar rooftops, the occasional car passing below. But the sky... the sky was wrong.
It looked... glitched.
Like an old TV screen, flickering between two images. One second, the sky was black, speckled with stars. The next, it was a deep, sickly red, stretching endlessly with no clouds, no stars, nothing. Just empty.
And then—snap—it was back to normal.
Ethan's breath caught. He scrambled out of bed, rubbing his eyes, staring harder, but it was gone.
His fingers curled into fists.
Something was wrong.
Something was very, very wrong.
Earlier That Day...
It started in third period.
Ethan sat slouched at his desk, half-listening to Mr. Callahan's dry lecture about the Great Depression. His notebook was open, but he wasn't writing anything. Just staring.
His mind felt... off.
Like he wasn't really there. Like part of him was drifting somewhere else.
He was about to shake it off when it happened.
For one second, the world around him glitched.
The entire classroom stretched outward, like someone had grabbed the walls and pulled. The overhead lights flickered. The students around him froze—completely still, mid-motion. Even Callahan, who had been writing on the board, was frozen, his hand mid-air, the chalk hovering just before it could touch the surface.
The windows went dark.
Not the usual darkness of night—but a void, a nothingness.
Then—snap—everything went back to normal.
The lights were fine. The students moved. Callahan kept talking like nothing had happened.
Ethan's pulse thundered in his ears. He gripped his desk so hard his knuckles turned white.
He turned his head slightly, scanning the room.
No one else reacted.
Jax was still hunched over his notebook, doodling some kind of monster in the margins. Maya was chewing on the end of her pen, staring out the window. Lucy had her head down, flipping through a book she wasn't even supposed to have out.
Not a single person seemed to notice.
"What the hell was that?"
He tried to calm his breathing, but his stomach twisted.
Was he losing it?
The bell rang, breaking his thoughts, and students began shuffling out into the hallway. Ethan grabbed his bag and hurried out, his mind still racing.
And that's when he saw it.
At the far end of the hallway, past the crowd of students heading to their next class, a figure stood perfectly still.
Tall. Unmoving.
Its face was blurred, like a photograph that hadn't loaded properly.
Ethan's chest tightened.
His eyes darted away for half a second—just a blink.
When he looked back, the figure was gone.
A cold shiver ran down his spine.
Later That Night...
Ethan spent the rest of the day trying to forget about it.
Maybe he was just tired. Maybe he had dozed off in class for a second, and his brain had mixed reality with some half-dream. Maybe the figure in the hallway was just... his mind playing tricks.
By the time midnight rolled around, he almost believed it.
But then the nightmare came.
He didn't remember falling asleep. One second, he was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. The next, he was somewhere else.
A street. A city street, but not New York.
The buildings twisted unnaturally, stretching up into the sky at sharp, impossible angles. Some leaned too far forward, others seemed to breathe, their windows expanding and contracting like lungs.
The streetlights flickered erratically, casting long, twitching shadows that didn't quite match the objects that made them.
And the whispers...
They came from everywhere. From nowhere. Crawling under his skin like insects.
"He sees you."
"Not supposed to be here."
"Wake up before he finds you."
His breath came fast, uneven. He turned sharply, scanning the street, searching for where the voices were coming from.
A street sign caught his eye.
It was rusted, barely hanging on by a bolt, but he could still make out the letters:
"FULTON ST."
His stomach dropped.
That was a real street. In Manhattan. He had walked past it a hundred times.
But this wasn't Manhattan.
A hand grabbed his wrist.
Ethan spun—but there was no one there.
The air warped, distorting around him. The shadows on the walls twitched, some peeling themselves free, moving against the flickering light.
His heart slammed against his ribs.
Something was here.
Something was watching him.
And then—
The world collapsed inward, swallowing him whole.
Ethan jerked awake, gasping for air.
His sheets were damp with sweat. His entire body trembled. He pressed a shaking hand to his chest, trying to steady his breathing.
He wasn't alone.
Not just in the nightmare.
At that exact moment, across the city, four others woke up screaming—each with the same dream, the same twisted streets, the same whispers crawling under their skin.
And none of them knew that this was only the beginning.