Chapter 3: Hunted by My Own Ghost

She slammed into the car door, setting off the alarm.

The headlights flashing wildly.

She wasn’t scared. She pressed her whole face against the window, features flattened and twisted, neck stretched long, black pupils straining downward, glaring at me from a nightmare angle.

Her stare made my skin crawl. Panicked, I stomped the brake and tried to start the car. But the engine just sputtered and died. Every warning light on the dash lit up; no matter how I hit the start button, the engine wouldn’t turn over.

That was it—the car was dead.

I sank into a despair I’d never known.

My ears rang with the blare of the alarm. I pounded the steering wheel, cursing under my breath.

I could hear my wife’s ragged breathing through the glass, the sound wet and unnatural.

The air in the car was thick with fear, choking me.

My wife found the door handle and started yanking it like crazy.

The clack-clack sound made my scalp tingle.

I kept praying the lock would hold. After a while, the door didn’t budge. She gave up, crawled onto the hood, and tried to get in through the windshield. She seemed to have lost all human sense, acting only on the instinct to attack, desperate to break in. I had no doubt that if she got inside, she’d rip me apart.

Her nails scraped long white lines across the glass.

I watched, paralyzed, as her mouth opened wider, jaw distending. The only thing between us was a thin pane of glass. I could see her breath fogging up the windshield, leaving behind streaks that spelled out my doom.

In the rearview, the open trunk let in a bit of streetlight, outlining distant buildings in the night. I didn’t dare turn around. My wife—or whatever she’d become—was crouched on the windshield, baring her teeth and pounding.

Her gaze was locked on me.

If I so much as flinched, she got more agitated. I didn’t even dare look at the mirror for fear she’d notice and see the open trunk.

I tried to slow my breathing, counting backward from ten.

The sound of her fists on the glass echoed in my skull.

My hands were numb, my mind blank with terror.

Just a few minutes felt like an eternity. I sat frozen in the seat, every muscle locked, my calves starting to cramp. My wife jumped off the hood and paced anxiously beside the car. She’d notice the open trunk soon.

Despair and terror left my mind blank.

At that moment, I even absurdly remembered how the trunk always jammed and how my wife kept nagging me to get it fixed. Memories from the past were crystal clear—even the fine hairs on her cheeks. My mind had already started to break under the stress.

I remembered her laughter echoing in the kitchen, the way she used to roll her eyes when I forgot to fix the leaky faucet.

The memory was so vivid it made my chest ache.

For a second, I almost called out her name, as if she might answer like she used to, soft and tired after a long day.

I don’t know how long I was out of it when a strange, vacuum-like silence yanked me back. A chill shot up from my feet, freezing me in place. I forced myself to turn. My wife’s corpse was in the trunk, staring right at me. Her legs were bent, arms propping her up. Her neck looked longer, her head stretching through the gap between the seats, her plaster-like face pale and stiff, only half an arm’s length away. Slowly, her mouth stretched wide open, showing two rows of white teeth.

I felt my bladder threaten to give.

My vision tunneled, black at the edges.

The silence was so deep I could hear my own heartbeat, slow and thunderous.

Extreme fear made me go eerily calm. I quietly unbuckled my seatbelt, holding the latch in my hand, staring at her with a blank face while my mind raced, planning an escape. I’d been driving toward a remote spot, planning to dump the body. Now, there was no one around, and not far off in the night was a building—just a skeleton, probably an abandoned construction site. That was my only hope. As soon as the monster that was my wife’s corpse attacked, I’d jump out and run for it, praying for a slim chance at survival.

I could see the building’s outline against the night sky—unfinished steel beams, graffiti scrawled on the plywood.

The wind rattled loose plastic sheeting, making a sound like distant applause.

I took a deep breath, the taste of blood and adrenaline sharp on my tongue.

She twisted her neck left and right, like a writhing worm, her face a grotesque mask.

My heart pounded so hard it hurt.

Every nerve was taut, waiting for the moment. She didn’t attack for a long time, and my mind started to wander again, picturing the car door stuck or me tripping as I jumped out.

I couldn’t take the tension anymore and suddenly let go. The seatbelt snapped back with a "whoosh," like a snake in the dark. My wife’s corpse was distracted. I took the chance to yank open the door and bolted.

The night air hit me like a slap. Gravel crunched under my sneakers as I sprinted. My lungs burned, every breath ragged and desperate.

The world narrowed to the sound of my own feet pounding the ground.

The abandoned building was about a hundred yards away. I ran for my life. The night air burned in my lungs, which felt like they were about to burst. When I reached the building, my vision went black—I couldn’t tell if it was the darkness or lack of oxygen. I barely managed to brace myself against a cement wall to keep from collapsing. I felt like if I didn’t catch my breath, I’d drop dead right there.

The first floor was littered with construction debris.

Scaffolding still stood, draped with tattered safety nets. The building had almost no exterior walls. There was nowhere to hide, so I forced myself to keep running upstairs. Every step on the stairs kicked up dust. The sound of my shoes scraping the cement made my heart race. I tried to tread lightly, but I couldn’t avoid making noise.

I could smell old sawdust and mold, the musty scent of rain-soaked plywood.

My foot caught on a stray length of rebar, and I nearly went down.

Somewhere below, a rat scurried through the debris. I kept moving, driven by pure terror.

Just as I was debating whether to take off my shoes, a strange sound came from downstairs.

Rustling, rustling, like many feet scraping quickly across the ground.

The sound made my skin crawl. I couldn’t imagine what my wife’s corpse had become to make that noise. There was no time to take off my shoes or worry about the noise—I just kept running up. I don’t know how many floors I climbed, but there were lots of concrete pillars. I ran to the innermost corner and hid behind a huge pillar.

I pressed myself flat against the cold concrete, trying to slow my breathing.

I listened to the sound—faster now, frantic, searching.

My heart hammered against my ribs, threatening to break free.

The rustling sound got closer and closer. I pressed my back tightly against the rough concrete, trying to melt into the shadows, eyes squeezed shut, silently chanting, "It’s all in your head, all in your head..."

I remembered the coping tricks from therapy: focus on your senses, name five things you can see, four things you can touch.

But all I could feel was terror, all I could see was darkness.

I wasn’t crazy. I did have some mental health issues, but not to the point of losing touch with reality. I often had hallucinations—maybe it was because of my job. My hallucinations were always terrifying, always life-or-death. And even though I knew they weren’t real, I couldn’t break free. It wasn’t my fault—no one can snap themselves out of a hallucination by willpower alone. Mental illness can’t be self-cured, or there wouldn’t be so many people struggling with it. I studied psychology in college; if anyone knows this, it’s me. My wife’s corpse must still be lying in the trunk, and the monster chasing me is just a hallucination. But even so, I couldn’t help being scared. Hallucinations might be fake, but the fear is real. That real fear is enough to wreck a person’s mind, even cause a heart attack—scare someone to death. If I’m killed by the monster in my mind, people will just find a body dead from a panic attack. To escape this terror, I needed outside help—a therapist, a cop, even a pizza delivery guy... As long as someone could do something, say something, to pull me back to reality.

I’d always told myself I could handle it alone.

But tonight, in this hollowed-out skeleton of a building, I’d never felt so helpless. I would’ve traded every book I’d ever written just to hear another human voice, to know I wasn’t alone with the thing in my head.

The rustling stopped. I froze, then realized—the monster had stopped on my floor. A chill shot down my spine and paralyzed me. I wanted to turn around but couldn’t move. After a brief silence, the rustling started again. But it wasn’t going up or down; it was coming toward me. It was slow, as if my wife was searching for me. She found me on this floor? Unbelievable. Suddenly I remembered the dust on the ground. Footprints—it was the footprints!