No signal. Reloading times out after each attempted refresh. Looking up from your phone, your eyes struggle to make sense of the night in front of you. The sidewalk beneath your feet sweeps right and just beyond a moat of golden asphalt, a cold darkness towers over you. Red-orange slits on leaf edges and purple shards of night sky punch through the oppressive black smudge across your horizon. Outlines in the shadow-foliage give hints of something rigid and large. A structure. A house. The darkness reveals nothing else.

From deep within the black mass, a sliver of light opens and swings wide. A human shape leans against the doorframe, cries out, and slumps into the dark. For a second, you do nothing, not sure of what you saw. Instinctively, your body pulses with an urge for action. Your mind sets. You run into the dark ahead of you.

You arrive excited at the threshold of the house, but the light from inside reveals only dirt and concrete. No body. You look through the doorframe and hear the soft, pitiful sobs of a person in pain.

You pull out your phone. Still no signal.

You step into the house. Your eyes dart around for a phone. The house is like any other house. Typical furniture in the typical places. The poor victim within these walls must be just like you. You step deeper into the house.

In the kitchen, you find a landline. You pickup the chunky receiver and mash the buttons. 9… 1… 1. You tell the voice on the other end what happened. They tell you help is on the way.

As you hang up the phone, you hear something large shift upstairs. It sounds too big to be human; too big to be in this house. Small cracks and wet slaps roll heavily across straining floor boards above your head. You stop thinking of anyone else.

Your legs carry you too fast to the front door. You slam against it, now that it’s closed. The handle doesn’t turn. The engaged deadbolt is operated only by a key you never had. You look around. Behind you is a set of stairs leading up. You think of climbing, but you remember the sounds, which promptly start again, now with more clarity and anchored by a rhythmic, low humming.

It’s time to go.

You throw your shoulder into the front door a few times as panic runs through you. The shifting grows louder from the top of the stairs. Someone is now shouting, but the words aren’t making any sense.

You run back through the house, to the kitchen. Behind you, the slapping and rolling and cracking and humming rise with a fresh intensity. You look back, but your eyes don’t understand what they see. The hallway behind you is swiftly filled with a roiling black mass. You hit the back door. Locked. You look to your left. Another door. You fling it open, throw yourself in and pull the door shut with both hands.

In the dark, the heavy shifting overwhelms. The rhythmic humming buzzes in your teeth. Wet thuds hit the door. Behind the cacophony, you hear a human shouting clear nonsense. Both hands are still on the door handle as you lean back and pull. Your heart is in your ears now as you close your eyes and brace for a counter-pull that never comes.

Then, silence. You’re still pulling at the door as your eyes open now to the darkness. You stand like this for a while, trying to stifle your gulping breaths. You stop pulling. Slowly, you move your ear close to the door. As you lean with your cheek against the wood, you hear nothing. You try the door. It’s locked from the other side.

You feel around in the blindness. From the faint light of the crack around the door, you see stairs behind you, leading down. With no other choice, you descend deeper.

Step after careful step, you sink beneath the house for what seems like an hour, or mere minutes. You reach another door, edged with light from the other side. The handle gives when you try it, and the door cracks openx for what seems like the first time in a long while. Stepping into the light, you find yourself in a small room. The accommodations are spartan. There is no other door; no windows. Just an exposed bulb hanging from the ceiling, a wall lined with stacks of books, and a worn office chair sat behind a simple, wood desk. Grabbing a book, you flip through page after page of hand written text. Each book is written by a different hand and the words you can make out unsettle you.

Approaching the desk, you find a mug full of pens and a book full of blank pages. You look up. On a plaque stretching over the door frame, words are engraved:

WELCOME TO OUR DREAD DIARY. READ AS MUCH AS YOU LIKE, BUT ONLY YOUR DEEPEST FEARS CAN SET YOU FREE.