The Stranger in the Dark

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I woke. Silence. It wasn’t peaceful. It pressed against me, suffocating. The kind of silence that didn’t leave room to breathe.

I was blind. A car crash took my sight. I’d never adjusted. The memories from that moment fractured. Faces blurred, moments tangled, and the crash—still there. The sound, the blood, everything wrong, out of place.

That silence… It didn’t stay silent for long.

The first night, I heard it. A voice. Soft. Faint. I thought it was a hallucination, but it came again the next night. The same voice.

"Are you awake?" it whispered.

It felt familiar, like a memory I couldn’t catch. The tone… warm, intimate. A voice from my past, one I couldn’t place.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Someone you’ve known," the voice said. "Someone you’ve forgotten."

The voice returned every night. It told me stories. My childhood. Secrets. Things I hadn’t thought of in years. It felt… safe. Familiar.

But it didn’t stop. Each night, it came again. The voice. Always gentle. Always close, like a presence in the dark. It guided me.

"You’re doing better," it said. "You’re moving forward."

Forward? I didn’t know. Time blurred together. But the voice… it kept pushing.

The voice led me. It told me to go somewhere. A place I hadn’t thought about in years. My old house.

I didn’t know how I found it, but there I was. Standing at the front door.

"Go inside," the voice urged. "You need to remember."

The house felt… wrong. Empty. Abandoned. The air smelled old, dusty. The shadows clung to every corner. I stepped inside.

"Do you remember now?" the voice asked.

I froze. The walls, the rooms—familiar but wrong. I couldn’t remember it all, but something felt off. Something was here. Something I had left behind.

I followed the voice into the basement.

"Listen," it said. "You need to face what you’ve done."

The air grew heavier. "What do you mean?" I asked, my heart racing.

"You’ve buried it," the voice whispered. "But you can’t keep running."

Memories flooded. Faces. A body. Cold. Limp. The accident. But no. Something was different. Something I had forgotten.

The voice pushed me further. "You know who you killed."

I stumbled. It couldn’t be. But it was. The voice—it wasn’t a trick. It was real. A memory, a presence, an echo from the past. A person I had hurt, someone I had… killed.

Silence returned. But the voice remained, lingering in the dark. It was not just my mind. It was a part of me. My guilt, my past, waiting for me to face it.

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