u/Aggravating-Main-396

It was the spring of '96. I was in my early twenties, strong and fit. I had my own flock of sheep in our village, and especially in the summertime, I used to roam the rugged mountains and hills. I knew which trail led where, which creek dried up in the summer, which valleys gathered the thickest fog at night... I knew it all. Naturally, everyone in the village knew me too.

​That morning, our village headman came to find me at the village square.

​"Listen, son," he said. "There’s been some strangeness up on the high ridge these past few nights."

​I didn't ask what kind of strangeness at first. The headman's face was dead serious.

​"Two sheep went missing in two nights," he said. "It's not wolves. A wolf leaves bones and makes noise."

​I kept listening. I wasn't missing any sheep from my flock, nor did I have any problems. But the headman was dead serious.

​"You know that stone shelter up there? You know that stone shelter up there? The one that looks like an old bunker."

​I nodded. Of course I knew it. I used to stay there some nights with my flock in the summer. It was a peaceful place for me. I'd stay a night or two, let the flock graze, and then head back home. It was a place I'd known since my father's time. I knew every detail around it. It was completely ordinary to me.

​"Stay there tonight," the headman told me. "Just take a look. See if there are strangers, thieves, or anyone wandering around. Just one night. That's all I'm asking."

​"Sure," I replied. "I was getting bored waiting for summer anyway. I'll take a walk up there, no problem."

​He looked relieved. "Just keep your rifle on you," was all he said. "Just in case."

​"Like always. Don't worry about it," I said, asking for his leave.

​I set out around noon. I wasn't in a rush. It wasn't exceptionally far anyway; just behind a ridge visible from the village. Still a bit of a distance, but not even a half-day's walk. I packed some food and my father's old single-barrel shotgun. I stuffed some shells in my pocket and hit the road.

​I arrived at the stone shelter with plenty of daylight left. I knew the spot. Stone walls, a covered roof... Entering it in this season, I noticed the smell of damp earth. But it blocked the wind. "I missed this place..." I muttered, stepping inside.

​Before dusk, I scouted the perimeter. No footprints. No freshly broken branches. Everything looked perfectly normal. I planned to patrol every few hours during the night.

​After dark, I ate my food and rolled a cigarette. Silence fell. It was cold, but I didn't mind. I did a couple of patrols and noticed nothing unusual. As the night deepened, the air grew freezing, so I decided to head inside the shelter. But before doing so, I took one last patrol around the area. I walked a little further down the slope when...

​Suddenly, a beam of light appeared down below.

​At first, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. I shook my head. No, it was still there. Then another one lit up. A bit further away. It was a torch. Not steady like an electric flashlight; the flame was dancing.

​Then a third... And others. A swarm of lights began to blind me. They lined up in a row.

​A deep unease settled into my gut. Normally, there wasn't a single soul around here. Not a bird flies, not a caravan passes. Especially not a crowd this big. But there they were. I couldn't make sense of it, but to understand who or what they were, I started walking down toward them. As I got closer, sounds reached my ears. Like instruments. Bizarre sounds. Drums, zurnas (traditional pipes), weird, twisted sounds.

​"Who the hell are these people out in the middle of nowhere at this hour?" I thought, creeping closer. They were a massive crowd. But as I drew nearer, the sounds started to disturb me deeply. "What kind of sick music is this?" I muttered, pressing on.

​As the sounds grew louder, my unease swelled into dread. This wasn't festive music. The drums weren't really drums, and the zurna definitely wasn't a zurna. It was high-pitched, yet it clawed at the inside of my skull. It felt less like sound and more like something physically scraping against my eardrums. Was there a rhythm? I couldn't tell. Sometimes it sped up wildly, sometimes it slowed to a crawl, then picked up again. Instinctively, I slowed down. My feet wanted to walk backward, but I couldn't take my eyes off them.

​Silhouettes emerged through the torchlight. Tall figures. Arms, heads... From a distance, they looked human, but something was horribly wrong. Their clothes looked ancient, completely bizarre. Their gait was uneven. They weren't stepping naturally. Their feet seemed to touch the ground, but also didn't. Like taking one step but covering the distance of two.

​Some of their necks were far too long. Others had arms dangling past their knees. All their faces looked identical. Extremely pale. 

As if their faces were just attached. 

Added on as an afterthought. Absolute terror gripped me. The thought flashed through my mind: "These aren't human." A fear so profound dropped into my stomach that my throat went bone dry. I could hear my heart pounding in my ears. I decided to retreat, fast. Right then, I thought I saw one of them look directly at me from that distance. I didn't stare long enough to be sure. Trying desperately not to react or make a sound, I sprinted back toward the shelter with everything I had. I ran so fast, praying the blaring music covered the sound of my escape. I still wasn't sure if the one who looked had actually seen me. My heart was beating out of my chest.

​"Oh God! What were those things? God, please protect my sanity!"

​The moment I got inside, I pressed my back against the wooden door. My knees were buckling. I sat there, unable to move for a long time. My ears were ringing. I couldn't get what I saw out of my head. Even when I closed my eyes, they were there. Their height, their walk, that look... I felt like they were still standing on the slope. My chest was heaving, but I felt like I couldn't breathe.

​After a while, I slowly tried to gather my senses. There had been no movement outside since I ran in. "Calm down," I told myself. "It's over. Maybe you saw it wrong in the dark. You're just exaggerating in your head."

​I looked at the stone walls. The smell of dampness. The smell of dirt. This was a place I knew, a place I was used to. A place I stayed with my flock at night. I had taken refuge here before. But it had never felt like this. Never felt this suffocating. I pulled back and started staring at the door carefully, as if I didn't know it. I was examining something so familiar. The door was thin. Made of wood. Obviously, it didn't have a lock. A voice inside my head whispered, "If they come up here, this door won't hold anything." One second I believed what I saw, the next I tried to deny it, telling myself my mind was playing tricks on me.

​Right at that moment...

​I heard a sound in the distance.

​At first, I wasn't sure. I thought it was my own heartbeat. Then I listened closely. No... It was that sound. The music I had just heard! It was very faint, but distinct. Thin. Choppy. Coming from down the slope. From the same spot. Slowly... but this time it wasn't stopping. It was moving toward me.

​I held my breath. I froze in place. "Did they see me?" I wondered. "Or are they just wandering blindly?" But the direction of the sound wasn't changing. It was coming straight for me. Every few seconds, it got clearer. Yes, they were getting closer and closer.

​My heart pounded so violently I thought it would burst from my chest. I felt like passing out.

​A thousand things raced through my mind. What if they pushed the door? If I hid, where would I go? Should I curl up into the smallest ball in the corner? Sweat poured down my back. My palms were slick. My mouth was bone dry. I tried to swallow, but my throat was sealed shut.

​The sounds were incredibly close now. The rhythm of the instruments had changed. Faster. More muffled. And then... light began to bleed through the crack under the shelter door.

​It was the light from their torches. They were right on top of me. I pulled my knees to my chest, waiting in absolute silence. They couldn't know I was in here. I had to hide like this. Yes, I had to wait without making a sound, without even moving, until they left. Assuming I didn't die of fright first..

​They slowly closed in. All of those things were now gathered right in front of the shelter. I was silently begging, pleading inside my head for them to just leave.

​But they didn't leave. The torchlight filtered through the gaps in the wood, swaying left and right, casting dancing shadows on the stone walls inside. The shadows... Stretching, shrinking, phasing in and out of each other. Playing. Stomping. Jumping. Spinning. As the music's rhythm accelerated, so did their movements. Occasionally, they let out a shriek, but it sounded like a cry of joy. They yelled louder. Danced harder. Moved faster...

​As if telling them to get even more ecstatic.

​Wave after wave of cramps hit my stomach. My uvula felt swollen, choking me. My heart beat so furiously I thought they could hear it through the door.

​"They're going to hear me... They're going to hear my heart," I thought.

​I couldn't move. I had internally collapsed inside that shelter. My hands were shaking. My palms were drenched in sweat. I covered my mouth to keep from screaming.

​Then, one of them swung a torch right up to the door.

​And right at that second, a burst of laughter erupted.

​This time it was painfully close.

Right in front of the wood.

Then another.

Then another.

​They all laughed at once. But the laughter wasn't laughter. It dragged on. It didn't break. It sounded like they were laughing without drawing breath. Like they didn't have mouths to laugh with, but something was forcing its way out from inside them.

​That's when I realized...

​One of them wasn't just standing in front of the door.

It was leaning against it.

​I could feel a heavy weight pressing against the outside of the wood. The door bowed slightly inward. It didn't open. It wasn't being forced. It was just... there. Deliberately. As if telling me, "I'm right here." As if saying, "We know you're in there..."

​I remember my legs giving out completely. I couldn't even sit up anymore. I collapsed right where I was. I closed my eyes, but the light was still burning through my eyelids. The music started spinning inside my skull. I felt violently nauseous. My tongue felt like it was slipping down my throat. I genuinely thought I was going to die.

​I felt a sharp pain in my chest. I tried to breathe, but no air came. I opened my mouth, and only a dry rattle escaped. My hands clamped shut involuntarily. I couldn't uncurl my fingers.

​"It's over," I thought. "This is the end."

​I remember the music, the laughter, all of it merging into one piercing, deafening shriek. And then something violently crashing inside. Then, I blacked out...

​Suddenly, I heard a creak at the shelter door.

​At first, I couldn't comprehend what it was. Then the sound came again. Harsher this time. Something was hitting the door. Panic surged through me. My heart started its frantic hammering all over again.

​"They're here," I thought. "They're opening the door."

​Right then, the door was forced open.

​Daylight flooded my vision. It was so bright it burned my eyes. Used to the torchlight, my eyes couldn't handle the sun. I screamed. I screamed so hard I thought I’d tear my throat.

​"Leave me alone!!" I yelled. "Stay back! Go away, please!!"

​I scrambled backward, crawling. I covered my head with my hands. My body convulsed. I was out of my mind.

​"Stop, son! Stop! Calm down!" a voice called out.

Not one, but several voices...

"Look, our hands are up!"

"It's us, it's us!"

​I slowly lifted my head.

​There were no torches.

No bizarre instruments.

They weren't there.

​The headman stood in front of me. Two other villagers were with him. Dressed in their day clothes... Holding sticks and hats, not torches.

​My eyes welled up.

For a second, my breath caught.

And then...

I couldn't hold it back.

I started crying.

Not a quiet, silent weeping.

I was sobbing. Bawling like a child.

​The headman dropped to his knees beside me. He put a hand on my shoulder.

​"What happened to you?" he asked. "It's over. We're here."

​But I couldn't stop. My eyes were glued to the entrance. I still felt like someone had just been standing there, watching me.

​"You didn't come back," the headman said. "It hit noon. We thought, 'Did something happen to the boy?' So we came looking."

​They grabbed my arms and pulled me to my feet, but my knees were useless. I couldn't walk. My feet wouldn't touch the ground. Two men had to hold me up.

​As we left the front of the shelter, I turned and took one last look back. They tried hard to bring me back to my senses. I had barely trusted even them after what I experienced that night. We managed to get back to the village. Once there, I told them exactly what happened, piece by piece. They listened with their jaws dropped.

​"You must have hallucinated."

"You fell asleep. It was just a nightmare."

​They told me all kinds of things like that, trying to comfort me. But my physical state proved it was anything but a dream. They didn't know what to say or do.

​After that day, I never went back up there.

I didn't just not go...

I couldn't even bear the thought of it.

​Whenever someone mentioned the high ridge, a knot formed in my stomach. If someone said "that shelter," my throat closed up. Eventually, I sold my flock. Some time later, I left that village completely. Because whenever the night wind blew hard up there, my ears would instinctively strain to listen. As if I was about to hear that thin, muffled music echoing from afar...

​Many years have passed since then, but I never forgot that night.

​Because some nights...

When I close my eyes...

Some nights, I still feel them standing right outside my door.

And on those nights, the sound of that music never stops playing in my mind.

​It was the spring of '96. I was in my early twenties, strong and fit. I had my own flock of sheep in our village, and especially in the summertime, I used to roam the rugged mountains and hills. I knew which trail led where, which creek dried up in the summer, which valleys gathered the thickest fog at night... I knew it all. Naturally, everyone in the village knew me too.

​That morning, our village headman came to find me at the village square.

​"Listen, son," he said. "There’s been some strangeness up on the high ridge these past few nights."

​I didn't ask what kind of strangeness at first. The headman's face was dead serious.

​"Two sheep went missing in two nights," he said. "It's not wolves. A wolf leaves bones and makes noise."

​I kept listening. I wasn't missing any sheep from my flock, nor did I have any problems. But the headman was dead serious.

​"You know that stone shelter up there? You know that stone shelter up there? The one that looks like an old bunker."

​I nodded. Of course I knew it. I used to stay there some nights with my flock in the summer. It was a peaceful place for me. I'd stay a night or two, let the flock graze, and then head back home. It was a place I'd known since my father's time. I knew every detail around it. It was completely ordinary to me.

​"Stay there tonight," the headman told me. "Just take a look. See if there are strangers, thieves, or anyone wandering around. Just one night. That's all I'm asking."

​"Sure," I replied. "I was getting bored waiting for summer anyway. I'll take a walk up there, no problem."

​He looked relieved. "Just keep your rifle on you," was all he said. "Just in case."

​"Like always. Don't worry about it," I said, asking for his leave.

​I set out around noon. I wasn't in a rush. It wasn't exceptionally far anyway; just behind a ridge visible from the village. Still a bit of a distance, but not even a half-day's walk. I packed some food and my father's old single-barrel shotgun. I stuffed some shells in my pocket and hit the road.

​I arrived at the stone shelter with plenty of daylight left. I knew the spot. Stone walls, a covered roof... Entering it in this season, I noticed the smell of damp earth. But it blocked the wind. "I missed this place..." I muttered, stepping inside.

​Before dusk, I scouted the perimeter. No footprints. No freshly broken branches. Everything looked perfectly normal. I planned to patrol every few hours during the night.

​After dark, I ate my food and rolled a cigarette. Silence fell. It was cold, but I didn't mind. I did a couple of patrols and noticed nothing unusual. As the night deepened, the air grew freezing, so I decided to head inside the shelter. But before doing so, I took one last patrol around the area. I walked a little further down the slope when...

​Suddenly, a beam of light appeared down below.

​At first, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. I shook my head. No, it was still there. Then another one lit up. A bit further away. It was a torch. Not steady like an electric flashlight; the flame was dancing.

​Then a third... And others. A swarm of lights began to blind me. They lined up in a row.

​A deep unease settled into my gut. Normally, there wasn't a single soul around here. Not a bird flies, not a caravan passes. Especially not a crowd this big. But there they were. I couldn't make sense of it, but to understand who or what they were, I started walking down toward them. As I got closer, sounds reached my ears. Like instruments. Bizarre sounds. Drums, zurnas (traditional pipes), weird, twisted sounds.

​"Who the hell are these people out in the middle of nowhere at this hour?" I thought, creeping closer. They were a massive crowd. But as I drew nearer, the sounds started to disturb me deeply. "What kind of sick music is this?" I muttered, pressing on.

​As the sounds grew louder, my unease swelled into dread. This wasn't festive music. The drums weren't really drums, and the zurna definitely wasn't a zurna. It was high-pitched, yet it clawed at the inside of my skull. It felt less like sound and more like something physically scraping against my eardrums. Was there a rhythm? I couldn't tell. Sometimes it sped up wildly, sometimes it slowed to a crawl, then picked up again. Instinctively, I slowed down. My feet wanted to walk backward, but I couldn't take my eyes off them.

​Silhouettes emerged through the torchlight. Tall figures. Arms, heads... From a distance, they looked human, but something was horribly wrong. Their clothes looked ancient, completely bizarre. Their gait was uneven. They weren't stepping naturally. Their feet seemed to touch the ground, but also didn't. Like taking one step but covering the distance of two.

​Some of their necks were far too long. Others had arms dangling past their knees. All their faces looked identical. Extremely pale. 

As if their faces were just attached. 

Added on as an afterthought. Absolute terror gripped me. The thought flashed through my mind: "These aren't human." A fear so profound dropped into my stomach that my throat went bone dry. I could hear my heart pounding in my ears. I decided to retreat, fast. Right then, I thought I saw one of them look directly at me from that distance. I didn't stare long enough to be sure. Trying desperately not to react or make a sound, I sprinted back toward the shelter with everything I had. I ran so fast, praying the blaring music covered the sound of my escape. I still wasn't sure if the one who looked had actually seen me. My heart was beating out of my chest.

​"Oh God! What were those things? God, please protect my sanity!"

​The moment I got inside, I pressed my back against the wooden door. My knees were buckling. I sat there, unable to move for a long time. My ears were ringing. I couldn't get what I saw out of my head. Even when I closed my eyes, they were there. Their height, their walk, that look... I felt like they were still standing on the slope. My chest was heaving, but I felt like I couldn't breathe.

​After a while, I slowly tried to gather my senses. There had been no movement outside since I ran in. "Calm down," I told myself. "It's over. Maybe you saw it wrong in the dark. You're just exaggerating in your head."

​I looked at the stone walls. The smell of dampness. The smell of dirt. This was a place I knew, a place I was used to. A place I stayed with my flock at night. I had taken refuge here before. But it had never felt like this. Never felt this suffocating. I pulled back and started staring at the door carefully, as if I didn't know it. I was examining something so familiar. The door was thin. Made of wood. Obviously, it didn't have a lock. A voice inside my head whispered, "If they come up here, this door won't hold anything." One second I believed what I saw, the next I tried to deny it, telling myself my mind was playing tricks on me.

​Right at that moment...

​I heard a sound in the distance.

​At first, I wasn't sure. I thought it was my own heartbeat. Then I listened closely. No... It was that sound. The music I had just heard! It was very faint, but distinct. Thin. Choppy. Coming from down the slope. From the same spot. Slowly... but this time it wasn't stopping. It was moving toward me.

​I held my breath. I froze in place. "Did they see me?" I wondered. "Or are they just wandering blindly?" But the direction of the sound wasn't changing. It was coming straight for me. Every few seconds, it got clearer. Yes, they were getting closer and closer.

​My heart pounded so violently I thought it would burst from my chest. I felt like passing out.

​A thousand things raced through my mind. What if they pushed the door? If I hid, where would I go? Should I curl up into the smallest ball in the corner? Sweat poured down my back. My palms were slick. My mouth was bone dry. I tried to swallow, but my throat was sealed shut.

​The sounds were incredibly close now. The rhythm of the instruments had changed. Faster. More muffled. And then... light began to bleed through the crack under the shelter door.

​It was the light from their torches. They were right on top of me. I pulled my knees to my chest, waiting in absolute silence. They couldn't know I was in here. I had to hide like this. Yes, I had to wait without making a sound, without even moving, until they left. Assuming I didn't die of fright first..

​They slowly closed in. All of those things were now gathered right in front of the shelter. I was silently begging, pleading inside my head for them to just leave.

​But they didn't leave. The torchlight filtered through the gaps in the wood, swaying left and right, casting dancing shadows on the stone walls inside. The shadows... Stretching, shrinking, phasing in and out of each other. Playing. Stomping. Jumping. Spinning. As the music's rhythm accelerated, so did their movements. Occasionally, they let out a shriek, but it sounded like a cry of joy. They yelled louder. Danced harder. Moved faster...

​As if telling them to get even more ecstatic.

​Wave after wave of cramps hit my stomach. My uvula felt swollen, choking me. My heart beat so furiously I thought they could hear it through the door.

​"They're going to hear me... They're going to hear my heart," I thought.

​I couldn't move. I had internally collapsed inside that shelter. My hands were shaking. My palms were drenched in sweat. I covered my mouth to keep from screaming.

​Then, one of them swung a torch right up to the door.

​And right at that second, a burst of laughter erupted.

​This time it was painfully close.

Right in front of the wood.

Then another.

Then another.

​They all laughed at once. But the laughter wasn't laughter. It dragged on. It didn't break. It sounded like they were laughing without drawing breath. Like they didn't have mouths to laugh with, but something was forcing its way out from inside them.

​That's when I realized...

​One of them wasn't just standing in front of the door.

It was leaning against it.

​I could feel a heavy weight pressing against the outside of the wood. The door bowed slightly inward. It didn't open. It wasn't being forced. It was just... there. Deliberately. As if telling me, "I'm right here." As if saying, "We know you're in there..."

​I remember my legs giving out completely. I couldn't even sit up anymore. I collapsed right where I was. I closed my eyes, but the light was still burning through my eyelids. The music started spinning inside my skull. I felt violently nauseous. My tongue felt like it was slipping down my throat. I genuinely thought I was going to die.

​I felt a sharp pain in my chest. I tried to breathe, but no air came. I opened my mouth, and only a dry rattle escaped. My hands clamped shut involuntarily. I couldn't uncurl my fingers.

​"It's over," I thought. "This is the end."

​I remember the music, the laughter, all of it merging into one piercing, deafening shriek. And then something violently crashing inside. Then, I blacked out...

​Suddenly, I heard a creak at the shelter door.

​At first, I couldn't comprehend what it was. Then the sound came again. Harsher this time. Something was hitting the door. Panic surged through me. My heart started its frantic hammering all over again.

​"They're here," I thought. "They're opening the door."

​Right then, the door was forced open.

​Daylight flooded my vision. It was so bright it burned my eyes. Used to the torchlight, my eyes couldn't handle the sun. I screamed. I screamed so hard I thought I’d tear my throat.

​"Leave me alone!!" I yelled. "Stay back! Go away, please!!"

​I scrambled backward, crawling. I covered my head with my hands. My body convulsed. I was out of my mind.

​"Stop, son! Stop! Calm down!" a voice called out.

Not one, but several voices...

"Look, our hands are up!"

"It's us, it's us!"

​I slowly lifted my head.

​There were no torches.

No bizarre instruments.

They weren't there.

​The headman stood in front of me. Two other villagers were with him. Dressed in their day clothes... Holding sticks and hats, not torches.

​My eyes welled up.

For a second, my breath caught.

And then...

I couldn't hold it back.

I started crying.

Not a quiet, silent weeping.

I was sobbing. Bawling like a child.

​The headman dropped to his knees beside me. He put a hand on my shoulder.

​"What happened to you?" he asked. "It's over. We're here."

​But I couldn't stop. My eyes were glued to the entrance. I still felt like someone had just been standing there, watching me.

​"You didn't come back," the headman said. "It hit noon. We thought, 'Did something happen to the boy?' So we came looking."

​They grabbed my arms and pulled me to my feet, but my knees were useless. I couldn't walk. My feet wouldn't touch the ground. Two men had to hold me up.

​As we left the front of the shelter, I turned and took one last look back. They tried hard to bring me back to my senses. I had barely trusted even them after what I experienced that night. We managed to get back to the village. Once there, I told them exactly what happened, piece by piece. They listened with their jaws dropped.

​"You must have hallucinated."

"You fell asleep. It was just a nightmare."

​They told me all kinds of things like that, trying to comfort me. But my physical state proved it was anything but a dream. They didn't know what to say or do.

​After that day, I never went back up there.

I didn't just not go...

I couldn't even bear the thought of it.

​Whenever someone mentioned the high ridge, a knot formed in my stomach. If someone said "that shelter," my throat closed up. Eventually, I sold my flock. Some time later, I left that village completely. Because whenever the night wind blew hard up there, my ears would instinctively strain to listen. As if I was about to hear that thin, muffled music echoing from afar...

​Many years have passed since then, but I never forgot that night.

​Because some nights...

When I close my eyes...

Some nights, I still feel them standing right outside my door.

And on those nights, the sound of that music never stops playing in my mind.

​It was the spring of '96. I was in my early twenties, strong and fit. I had my own flock of sheep in our village, and especially in the summertime, I used to roam the rugged mountains and hills. I knew which trail led where, which creek dried up in the summer, which valleys gathered the thickest fog at night... I knew it all. Naturally, everyone in the village knew me too.

​That morning, our village headman came to find me at the village square.

​"Listen, son," he said. "There’s been some strangeness up on the high ridge these past few nights."

​I didn't ask what kind of strangeness at first. The headman's face was dead serious.

​"Two sheep went missing in two nights," he said. "It's not wolves. A wolf leaves bones and makes noise."

​I kept listening. I wasn't missing any sheep from my flock, nor did I have any problems. But the headman was dead serious.

​"You know that stone shelter up there? You know that stone shelter up there? The one that looks like an old bunker."

​I nodded. Of course I knew it. I used to stay there some nights with my flock in the summer. It was a peaceful place for me. I'd stay a night or two, let the flock graze, and then head back home. It was a place I'd known since my father's time. I knew every detail around it. It was completely ordinary to me.

​"Stay there tonight," the headman told me. "Just take a look. See if there are strangers, thieves, or anyone wandering around. Just one night. That's all I'm asking."

​"Sure," I replied. "I was getting bored waiting for summer anyway. I'll take a walk up there, no problem."

​He looked relieved. "Just keep your rifle on you," was all he said. "Just in case."

​"Like always. Don't worry about it," I said, asking for his leave.

​I set out around noon. I wasn't in a rush. It wasn't exceptionally far anyway; just behind a ridge visible from the village. Still a bit of a distance, but not even a half-day's walk. I packed some food and my father's old single-barrel shotgun. I stuffed some shells in my pocket and hit the road.

​I arrived at the stone shelter with plenty of daylight left. I knew the spot. Stone walls, a covered roof... Entering it in this season, I noticed the smell of damp earth. But it blocked the wind. "I missed this place..." I muttered, stepping inside.

​Before dusk, I scouted the perimeter. No footprints. No freshly broken branches. Everything looked perfectly normal. I planned to patrol every few hours during the night.

​After dark, I ate my food and rolled a cigarette. Silence fell. It was cold, but I didn't mind. I did a couple of patrols and noticed nothing unusual. As the night deepened, the air grew freezing, so I decided to head inside the shelter. But before doing so, I took one last patrol around the area. I walked a little further down the slope when...

​Suddenly, a beam of light appeared down below.

​At first, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. I shook my head. No, it was still there. Then another one lit up. A bit further away. It was a torch. Not steady like an electric flashlight; the flame was dancing.

​Then a third... And others. A swarm of lights began to blind me. They lined up in a row.

​A deep unease settled into my gut. Normally, there wasn't a single soul around here. Not a bird flies, not a caravan passes. Especially not a crowd this big. But there they were. I couldn't make sense of it, but to understand who or what they were, I started walking down toward them. As I got closer, sounds reached my ears. Like instruments. Bizarre sounds. Drums, zurnas (traditional pipes), weird, twisted sounds.

​"Who the hell are these people out in the middle of nowhere at this hour?" I thought, creeping closer. They were a massive crowd. But as I drew nearer, the sounds started to disturb me deeply. "What kind of sick music is this?" I muttered, pressing on.

​As the sounds grew louder, my unease swelled into dread. This wasn't festive music. The drums weren't really drums, and the zurna definitely wasn't a zurna. It was high-pitched, yet it clawed at the inside of my skull. It felt less like sound and more like something physically scraping against my eardrums. Was there a rhythm? I couldn't tell. Sometimes it sped up wildly, sometimes it slowed to a crawl, then picked up again. Instinctively, I slowed down. My feet wanted to walk backward, but I couldn't take my eyes off them.

​Silhouettes emerged through the torchlight. Tall figures. Arms, heads... From a distance, they looked human, but something was horribly wrong. Their clothes looked ancient, completely bizarre. Their gait was uneven. They weren't stepping naturally. Their feet seemed to touch the ground, but also didn't. Like taking one step but covering the distance of two.

​Some of their necks were far too long. Others had arms dangling past their knees. All their faces looked identical. Extremely pale. 

As if their faces were just attached. 

Added on as an afterthought. Absolute terror gripped me. The thought flashed through my mind: "These aren't human." A fear so profound dropped into my stomach that my throat went bone dry. I could hear my heart pounding in my ears. I decided to retreat, fast. Right then, I thought I saw one of them look directly at me from that distance. I didn't stare long enough to be sure. Trying desperately not to react or make a sound, I sprinted back toward the shelter with everything I had. I ran so fast, praying the blaring music covered the sound of my escape. I still wasn't sure if the one who looked had actually seen me. My heart was beating out of my chest.

​"Oh God! What were those things? God, please protect my sanity!"

​The moment I got inside, I pressed my back against the wooden door. My knees were buckling. I sat there, unable to move for a long time. My ears were ringing. I couldn't get what I saw out of my head. Even when I closed my eyes, they were there. Their height, their walk, that look... I felt like they were still standing on the slope. My chest was heaving, but I felt like I couldn't breathe.

​After a while, I slowly tried to gather my senses. There had been no movement outside since I ran in. "Calm down," I told myself. "It's over. Maybe you saw it wrong in the dark. You're just exaggerating in your head."

​I looked at the stone walls. The smell of dampness. The smell of dirt. This was a place I knew, a place I was used to. A place I stayed with my flock at night. I had taken refuge here before. But it had never felt like this. Never felt this suffocating. I pulled back and started staring at the door carefully, as if I didn't know it. I was examining something so familiar. The door was thin. Made of wood. Obviously, it didn't have a lock. A voice inside my head whispered, "If they come up here, this door won't hold anything." One second I believed what I saw, the next I tried to deny it, telling myself my mind was playing tricks on me.

​Right at that moment...

​I heard a sound in the distance.

​At first, I wasn't sure. I thought it was my own heartbeat. Then I listened closely. No... It was that sound. The music I had just heard! It was very faint, but distinct. Thin. Choppy. Coming from down the slope. From the same spot. Slowly... but this time it wasn't stopping. It was moving toward me.

​I held my breath. I froze in place. "Did they see me?" I wondered. "Or are they just wandering blindly?" But the direction of the sound wasn't changing. It was coming straight for me. Every few seconds, it got clearer. Yes, they were getting closer and closer.

​My heart pounded so violently I thought it would burst from my chest. I felt like passing out.

​A thousand things raced through my mind. What if they pushed the door? If I hid, where would I go? Should I curl up into the smallest ball in the corner? Sweat poured down my back. My palms were slick. My mouth was bone dry. I tried to swallow, but my throat was sealed shut.

​The sounds were incredibly close now. The rhythm of the instruments had changed. Faster. More muffled. And then... light began to bleed through the crack under the shelter door.

​It was the light from their torches. They were right on top of me. I pulled my knees to my chest, waiting in absolute silence. They couldn't know I was in here. I had to hide like this. Yes, I had to wait without making a sound, without even moving, until they left. Assuming I didn't die of fright first..

​They slowly closed in. All of those things were now gathered right in front of the shelter. I was silently begging, pleading inside my head for them to just leave.

​But they didn't leave. The torchlight filtered through the gaps in the wood, swaying left and right, casting dancing shadows on the stone walls inside. The shadows... Stretching, shrinking, phasing in and out of each other. Playing. Stomping. Jumping. Spinning. As the music's rhythm accelerated, so did their movements. Occasionally, they let out a shriek, but it sounded like a cry of joy. They yelled louder. Danced harder. Moved faster...

​As if telling them to get even more ecstatic.

​Wave after wave of cramps hit my stomach. My uvula felt swollen, choking me. My heart beat so furiously I thought they could hear it through the door.

​"They're going to hear me... They're going to hear my heart," I thought.

​I couldn't move. I had internally collapsed inside that shelter. My hands were shaking. My palms were drenched in sweat. I covered my mouth to keep from screaming.

​Then, one of them swung a torch right up to the door.

​And right at that second, a burst of laughter erupted.

​This time it was painfully close.

Right in front of the wood.

Then another.

Then another.

​They all laughed at once. But the laughter wasn't laughter. It dragged on. It didn't break. It sounded like they were laughing without drawing breath. Like they didn't have mouths to laugh with, but something was forcing its way out from inside them.

​That's when I realized...

​One of them wasn't just standing in front of the door.

It was leaning against it.

​I could feel a heavy weight pressing against the outside of the wood. The door bowed slightly inward. It didn't open. It wasn't being forced. It was just... there. Deliberately. As if telling me, "I'm right here." As if saying, "We know you're in there..."

​I remember my legs giving out completely. I couldn't even sit up anymore. I collapsed right where I was. I closed my eyes, but the light was still burning through my eyelids. The music started spinning inside my skull. I felt violently nauseous. My tongue felt like it was slipping down my throat. I genuinely thought I was going to die.

​I felt a sharp pain in my chest. I tried to breathe, but no air came. I opened my mouth, and only a dry rattle escaped. My hands clamped shut involuntarily. I couldn't uncurl my fingers.

​"It's over," I thought. "This is the end."

​I remember the music, the laughter, all of it merging into one piercing, deafening shriek. And then something violently crashing inside. Then, I blacked out...

​Suddenly, I heard a creak at the shelter door.

​At first, I couldn't comprehend what it was. Then the sound came again. Harsher this time. Something was hitting the door. Panic surged through me. My heart started its frantic hammering all over again.

​"They're here," I thought. "They're opening the door."

​Right then, the door was forced open.

​Daylight flooded my vision. It was so bright it burned my eyes. Used to the torchlight, my eyes couldn't handle the sun. I screamed. I screamed so hard I thought I’d tear my throat.

​"Leave me alone!!" I yelled. "Stay back! Go away, please!!"

​I scrambled backward, crawling. I covered my head with my hands. My body convulsed. I was out of my mind.

​"Stop, son! Stop! Calm down!" a voice called out.

Not one, but several voices...

"Look, our hands are up!"

"It's us, it's us!"

​I slowly lifted my head.

​There were no torches.

No bizarre instruments.

They weren't there.

​The headman stood in front of me. Two other villagers were with him. Dressed in their day clothes... Holding sticks and hats, not torches.

​My eyes welled up.

For a second, my breath caught.

And then...

I couldn't hold it back.

I started crying.

Not a quiet, silent weeping.

I was sobbing. Bawling like a child.

​The headman dropped to his knees beside me. He put a hand on my shoulder.

​"What happened to you?" he asked. "It's over. We're here."

​But I couldn't stop. My eyes were glued to the entrance. I still felt like someone had just been standing there, watching me.

​"You didn't come back," the headman said. "It hit noon. We thought, 'Did something happen to the boy?' So we came looking."

​They grabbed my arms and pulled me to my feet, but my knees were useless. I couldn't walk. My feet wouldn't touch the ground. Two men had to hold me up.

​As we left the front of the shelter, I turned and took one last look back. They tried hard to bring me back to my senses. I had barely trusted even them after what I experienced that night. We managed to get back to the village. Once there, I told them exactly what happened, piece by piece. They listened with their jaws dropped.

​"You must have hallucinated."

"You fell asleep. It was just a nightmare."

​They told me all kinds of things like that, trying to comfort me. But my physical state proved it was anything but a dream. They didn't know what to say or do.

​After that day, I never went back up there.

I didn't just not go...

I couldn't even bear the thought of it.

​Whenever someone mentioned the high ridge, a knot formed in my stomach. If someone said "that shelter," my throat closed up. Eventually, I sold my flock. Some time later, I left that village completely. Because whenever the night wind blew hard up there, my ears would instinctively strain to listen. As if I was about to hear that thin, muffled music echoing from afar...

​Many years have passed since then, but I never forgot that night.

​Because some nights...

When I close my eyes...

Some nights, I still feel them standing right outside my door.

And on those nights, the sound of that music never stops playing in my mind.

PART - 1

​Every single one of us was in a wretched state. Orhan, Melih, the Chief, and me... We had all seen them, had all witnessed their darkness. And it was painfully obvious from our demeanor that we had just lived through a trauma. Four strong men, workers who wielded shovels for a living, were on the verge of crying like children. Among our other friends, not a single one even bothered to say things like, "Where are we going? We can't leave without finishing the job." We hastily piled into the truck and started getting as far away from that cursed place as possible...

​Everyone was burning with curiosity. They were waiting for the words to spill from our mouths. They looked at us with pity, but also with prying eyes, desperate to understand what we had just experienced. I, too, was wondering what the Chief and Melih had gone through. Both of their faces were as white as chalk. They probably looked far worse than I did.

​I was the first one to gather myself and break the heavy silence.

​-"Why... Why did you turn off the headlights?"

​Those were the first words out of my mouth.

​-"Was there a malfunction? Why did the lights go out?"

​The bewilderment on my friends' faces in the truck only deepened at that moment. Already struggling to make sense of what was happening, my crewmates were now even more baffled by this question.

​-"What do you mean the headlights went out... Murat, the headlights were never turned off?"

​I didn't know what to say. I still didn't know what was real, what was an illusion, or what I was supposed to believe. I couldn't comprehend it.

​-"First Melih went. Then you and the Chief followed him. We saw you go over there, and within seconds, you came sprinting back this way, screaming at the top of your lungs. We never turned off the lights; they were on the entire time."

​Meanwhile, Melih and the Chief were still trembling. Both were staring into the void, completely unresponsive to anything.

​One of my friends turned to me and started speaking.

​-"Murat. Look, you seem a bit better. We don't understand what happened. At least you're talking. You guys are in such bad shape that we dropped the job and hit the road. We risked losing our jobs for you, but that doesn't matter, as long as you're okay. But tell us, what happened? How did you end up like this? Why are we on the road right now, why are we fleeing?"

​I took a deep breath. I recounted everything from start to finish. Reliving the exact same horrors all over again as I spoke. Just like I am telling you right now, I told them everything. How Melih's vest was hanging on that tree, how the headlights cut out the exact second the Chief stepped into that farmhouse, leaving me in pitch-black darkness, and how, when I went to the window, I saw that malignant entity staring back at me with my own face and a demonic smile... I told them everything from the beginning.

​As I spoke, my friends' jaws dropped. Some started whispering prayers, others averted their eyes. While Melih and the Chief continued to stare into the void, Orhan was trying to hold back his tears. He had warned us, told us not to go, told us he had seen them. But we hadn't listened. He looked as if he felt guilty; to let him know he shouldn't feel that way, that it wasn't his fault, I gently touched his shoulder.

​An atmosphere of pure shock dominated the inside of the truck. Right at that moment, with a raspy, muffled voice, Melih spoke up...

​-"I... I was walking toward that farmhouse. I was just about to reach it. Right as I got to the entrance path, I heard a voice from up ahead. It was the Chief's voice..."

​We were all listening to him with rapt attention. Even a fearless, massive man like Melih was recounting his ordeal trembling like a fragile sparrow.

​-"The Chief called out to me from within the darkness. At first, I was very surprised. I was trying to figure out what he was doing there, how he had gotten there. 'Melih... Come,' he told me. I walked in that direction."

​-"'Chief, what are you doing here? How did you get here?' I asked him. There was a strange, mocking expression on his face, but he spoke just like the Chief."

​-"'I followed you. To keep you company. There is something I want to show you.' That's what he told me. At that moment, what caught my attention was that he wasn't wearing his vest. I asked him why he wasn't wearing his high-vis vest."

​-"'The ones inside don't like the light, Melih. They love the dark. The darkness belongs to them. And your vest shines too brightly. Before you go over there, take off your vest and give it to me. Go on now. They are waiting for you.'"

​I didn't understand why he said that. I thought he had come up behind me and gone to the house first, that there were people living there. The Chief was staring intently right at me without even blinking. A small sense of unease crept into me; deep down, I felt something was wrong. But the man standing in front of me was the Chief, after all. Saying 'Alright then,' I took off the vest and handed it to the Chief. Or rather... to the malignant entity that appeared to me in the shape of the Chief..."

​We were listening to Melih breathlessly. Even the Chief had torn his eyes away from the void to listen to what Melih was saying. Melih continued:

​-"I took the vest off and gave it to him. The exact moment I handed it over, the vehicle's headlights suddenly cut out. The surroundings were completely engulfed in darkness. I couldn't even see the entity in front of me that I thought was the Chief. Only my vest in its hand was glowing. This time, with a much more muffled, much stranger voice... it told me I needed to go toward that farmhouse, that they were waiting for me. I turned my head and looked toward the farmhouse. A faint light, like a candle, was seeping from inside. Just like Orhan had described. 'Who is waiting, Chief? What is going on here, who are they?' I asked, and when I turned back toward the Chief, he was gone. He had vanished. I started to panic. Strange noises, whispers began to echo from inside the house. Yes, the vehicle's headlights had gone out, but there was a much heavier, much more profound darkness in the air. It was as if the entire world had gone black. I couldn't see a single step in front of me. The only source of light was the candlelight leaking from the window of that cursed farmhouse..."

​It became clear that Melih had taken off his high-vis vest and handed it to them himself. This explained why that vest had been moving back and forth so senselessly, and how it ended up hanging so perfectly on that tree. Melih had been manipulated by them. But the most terrifying parts of his story hadn't even begun yet...

​Melih clasped his trembling hands together. His eyes were locked onto a spot on the dark floor of the truck. His voice was muffled and raspy, as if there was no air left in his lungs:

​-"I began approaching the house. I was moving with heavy steps. I was terrified. But... those whispers rising from inside felt as if they were calling me, pulling me toward it. I looked toward where the vehicle's headlights should have been coming from; it was complete darkness. Neither you, nor the machine, nothing was there. It was as if I was in another dimension... I moved toward the house and looked inside through the broken window of that farmhouse..."

​We were all holding our breath.

​-"There wasn't a single piece of furniture inside, nor anyone we expected to see. It was an empty room. Right in the center of the room, a single candle was burning on the floor. And there, illuminated by that dim candlelight... was an old wooden coffin, on the verge of rotting away."

​He took another deep, trembling breath. Orhan covered his half-open mouth with his hand in shock.

​-"But the real horror wasn't the coffin," Melih continued. "It was the things spinning around the coffin... There were six of them. Pitch-black, human-shaped entities that looked as if they were carved from the darkness itself. But they weren't human. Their faces... their faces were red like fire, like glowing embers. They had centered the coffin and were spinning around it relentlessly. Heavy, mesmerizing... spinning around themselves as if they had entered a demonic trance... All of them were looking at me. Even the ones circling to the back were looking at me; they didn't take their eyes off me for a single second..."

​After saying these words, Melih took his head between his hands and just sat there for a while. It was obvious he felt like he was reliving those moments right then and there.

​A few of our friends went over to him, hugged the silently weeping Melih, and tried to comfort him.

​-"It's okay, Melih, it's over. Look, we are right here with you. Don't be afraid, Melih, it's over!"

​Melih wiped away the tears silently streaming down his face and continued to speak.

​-"But the most terrifying part wasn't their gaze, it was their posture. Both of their arms were raised in the air, and their palms were facing the window, pointing directly at me."

​He continued.

​-"I was seized by such an immense terror that it felt like I spent years there. It felt as if I had been watching their ritual for years. I was nailed to the spot. It felt like I wasn't even breathing. My throat kept knotting up, I felt like I was trying to swallow but couldn't. It was so bad that I couldn't even blink. It felt as if I hadn't blinked for minutes, hours, days; my eyes were burning so intensely..."

​-"As those red-faced entities continued to spin while staring at me, that rotting coffin finally creaked... The lid began to open, slowly, inch by inch. The spinning of those entities grew faster and faster. They were now like red streaks blurring in the darkness. When the coffin fully opened, someone sat up from inside. Their back was turned to me... They were wearing a high-vis vest like mine, our work clothes. Then... they slowly turned their head toward me."

​He couldn't hold it back any longer. And that mountain of a man began to sob at the sheer horror of what he had experienced...

​-"It was me... The one rising from the coffin was me. But my eyes were pitch black, and on my face was that disgusting, unimaginable demonic smile. I was staring back at myself..."

​The words spilling from Melih's mouth devastated all of us. The lips of those who had just been whispering prayers were now sealed shut; those who had averted their eyes in fear were now locked onto Melih in pure terror, their eyes wide enough to pop out of their sockets. No one made a sound; there was only the groaning roar of the old truck engine, as if it were in pain, and the squealing of the metal chassis bouncing on the broken road. One of the workers sitting across from me was unknowingly squeezing the shovel he held so tightly that it looked like he might snap it in half.

​Another worker, acting as if the red-faced entities Melih described had slipped into the back of the truck with us, began trembling and keeping a watchful eye on the darkest corners of the bed. Orhan was slowly shaking his head from side to side, as if wanting to deny the incomprehensible things he was hearing, while the Chief continued to stare into the void with that soulless, ice-cold expression.

​At that moment, the air inside the truck had become so heavy that every breath we took pierced our lungs like shards of glass; we could all feel in our bones that the pitch-black darkness outside had already seeped inside us.

​-"The thing that rose from that coffin wearing my face suddenly appeared in front of the window. I snapped out of that hypnotic state for a second and fell to the ground. And then, coming to my senses, I ran this way in a desperate panic for my life... Then I found Murat. Then the Chief came out from inside, but when I looked back there, the Chief was gone. All my senses blurred together. Was I even there, how long did I stay, how much time passed, everything is such a blur..."

​When Melih said these words and took his head between his hands again, the suffocating silence returned inside the truck. While everyone's eyes were on Melih, the Chief, who had stood like a petrified statue until that moment, parted his lips.

​His voice was so raspy and muffled, he spoke as if there were shards of glass lodged in his throat.

​-"I saw you, Melih..." he said, fixing his eyes on Melih's face.

​We all turned to the Chief in shock. He was finally able to react. Taking a deep, trembling breath, he began to recount the nightmare as if living it all over again.

​-"Murat and I came after you. I sent him ahead to find you and bring you back. I walked toward that farmhouse and went inside. The moment I stepped through the door, I looked around... There was nothing inside. There was only that dim candlelight burning on the floor in the room. It was an empty, dilapidated room."

​The Chief paused for a moment, wiping the cold sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.

​-"As I was looking around, someone called out to me from the side window. 'Chief!' they said... I looked in that direction. It was you, Melih, looking in from the window outside. The candlelight was hitting your face. You were right in front of the glass."

​The Chief's eyes widened as if they were going to pop out of their sockets as he recalled those moments. Everyone in the truck held their breath, listening to him.

​-"When I saw you there, I let out a sigh of relief, but of course, I was also angry. 'Where are you, boy, Melih? Is this the time for a joke?' I snapped at you through the window. But you didn't react at all... You just stood there, stiff as a statue."

​The Chief, with that dead expression on his face, continued to recount, forcing the words out of his mouth:

​-"As I got a little closer to you, there was a look of agony on your face. Your eyes were bloodshot and tears were streaming down, exactly as you just described... You were staring into the void, completely frozen. It was as if you were watching something inside, exactly as you described."

​The Chief swallowed hard, whispering the blood-curdling truth without taking his eyes off Melih:

​-"But there was nothing there, Melih. In the room I was in, there was no coffin, nor those red-faced entities... You were looking into an empty room with nothing but a burning candle, experiencing that sheer terror."

​-"'Melih, what happened? Are you okay?' I called out to you. Again, you didn't react. You seemed to be suffering inwardly. You were staring at an empty wall as if you had seen hell. I came over to you..."

​He took another deep breath. As he told us about those moments, he was struggling immensely to speak. He took long pauses as he described what he went through. The Chief was truly having a hard time speaking at that moment.

​The Chief took another deep breath. The words were getting caught in his throat, and the massive man's jaw was trembling.

​-"I came over to you, Melih..." he said, his voice now nothing more than a whisper. -"I reached out to put my hand on your shoulder, to pull you out of that frozen state. Right at that moment... Behind me, I heard that wooden door I had just closed to come inside slowly creak open."

​No one in the truck was breathing. There was only the monotonous hum of the engine.

​-"The door opened, and someone walked in. Before I even had the chance to turn around, I heard my own voice. With my own ears, I heard the person behind me speaking with my voice:

 -"Where are you, boy, Melih? Is this the time for a joke?'..."

​-"The blood rushed to my head. I slowly turned around... I was standing in the doorway. Wearing the same clothes, the same vest. My exact replica came right up to me in shock and sheer terror, looking at me. It was like a mirror, but there was no mirror. I thought I was going to lose my mind at that moment. I froze solid, nailed to the spot. My eyes widened in shock, and I just stared at that 'me'."

​The sound of the Chief swallowing echoed in that silence.

​-"But the real hell began right then... That 'me' who walked in, looked at me and fell into the exact same terror I was in. He froze solid and started staring into the void with a dead expression, just like me. Seconds later, the door creaked once again. A third person walked in from behind. This time, the face of the 'me' that entered was slightly distorted. The skin was sagging, the bags under his eyes were pitch black, but it was still me. From that disgusting, mangled mouth, the same words spilled out: 'Where are you, boy, Melih? Is this the time for a joke?'... Then he saw me and the other one. The moment he saw our frozen state, his twisted face took on the exact same expression of shock as mine. And he, too, froze solid, locked in the exact same position with us with that rotting face."

​His hands had started to tremble now; he was shaking his head from side to side, everyone was trying to deny what they were hearing. No one could sit still while listening. The Chief was completely immersed in that moment. His voice was steadily rising as he spoke. He kept rocking back and forth. While talking, he continuously scratched his own arm, he was about to make it bleed but wasn't even aware of it.

​-"The door opened for a fourth time..." he said with a tearful voice. "-This time, the face of the thing that entered had become completely demonic. Its jaw was unnaturally elongated downward, its eyes had shrunk, its teeth were sharpened. But it was still me. From that demonic mouth, my voice came out, this time metallic and scraping: 'Where are you, boy, Melih? Is this the time for a joke?'... Then it, too, took on our exact posture of terror. It froze. When it opened for a fifth time, the face of the thing that entered was now crimson red. It glowed like embers, as if its skin had been burned. My facial features had completely melted away, turning into a demon from hell. Its face was like that, but its body and clothes were mine. It whispered the same words... And it, too, froze solid with us in that cramped room. I was losing my mind. I was going to go insane!!"

​The Chief was acting as if he had completely lost control. We tried to go over and check on him. He had sped up so much while talking and was rocking back and forth so violently that he was going to accidentally hit his head on something and hurt himself.

​-"The room was filled with 'me'. That room... The cursed ones, the malignant ones... My mind... My mind is snapping. It's snapping! The real me, and behind me, my replicas entering one by one, rotting, becoming demonic, gradually turning into those red entities. All of them froze exactly like me, with the same expression of terror, looking at me as if they were genuinely surprised by this situation. Whatever I did, whatever despair I experienced, even the most demonic one mimicked that exact despair. I was losing my mind. I was silently going insane... And finally, the door opened for a sixth time."

​The Chief fell silent. He closed his eyes, as if forcing himself not to see that sixth entity again.

​-"The sixth one to enter... was no longer me. It was the very entity you mentioned spinning around that coffin, the one made of pure darkness with a fire-red face. It glided into the room with its pitch-black body. It didn't say anything. It just turned its red face toward me... And even that pure evil, that hellish fiend, took on my exact expression. It dropped its two hands helplessly to its sides, just like me, and an expression of 'shock' and 'petrification' appeared on its crimson, disgusting face. I saw my own fear, my own helplessness materialize on that disgusting entity."

​The Chief was screaming at this point. He couldn't control himself. His mind truly couldn't handle the things he had experienced. It was so intense that even we were struggling to just listen to him...

​Pure chaos reigned in the back of the truck. On one hand, the violent bouncing of the vehicle on the broken road; on the other, the suffocating terror descending upon us from the darkness... Orhan was trying to hold the Chief's arms, and I was shaking his shoulders. That massive, fearless man we knew was trembling like a leaf in our hands, continuing to scream at the top of his lungs. Mentally, he still hadn't escaped that cycle of hell, that room.

​-"Snap out of it, Chief! Snap out of it!!!"

​We were lightly slapping his face. Shaking him. If we had just a sip of water, we would have splashed it on his face to ease his pain, to break that dark trance, but there wasn't a single drop of water in the bed of that cursed truck.

​-"Snap out of it! Please, snap out of it!"

​It felt like it lasted for minutes. Those tearing screams gradually gave way to wheezing, ragged breaths. The Chief's body suddenly went limp like jelly, collapsing as if his knees had given out. We grabbed him by the arms and gently sat him down on the floor of the truck bed. In those heavy moments where everyone in the back was gasping for air, where it smelled only of sweat and despair, he finally began to calm down. The Chief's chest was heaving like a bellows, and he was holding his head with his trembling hands.

​In that silence like the grave that settled over us, the Chief slowly raised his head. That panic was no longer in his eyes; instead, there was the empty stare of a man who had accepted everything, who had left a piece of his mind behind in that farmhouse. He fixed his eyes on the darkest corner of the truck bed, a place none of us could see. And he continued his story...

​-"From behind me... I heard you scream, Melih," he said, staring into that void. "-While I was locked in that room with my rotting reflections, while that red-faced entity was right in front of me... from outside, came your agonizing scream. When that sound echoed, I woke up from that nightmare for a brief second. How I escaped, how I threw myself out of that door, how I ran all the way here running for my life... I don't know. I just made it here..."

​After these last words from the Chief, a deadly silence fell over the inside of the truck. For the remainder of that long journey, no one uttered a single word. What had we just gone through? Orhan, me, Melih, and the Chief... Why had all this happened to us? We were just regular workers, chasing our daily bread in the middle of the night. Why had those malignant, cursed entities chosen us, why had they played so mercilessly with the darkest corners of our minds? No matter how much I thought about it, I had no idea. I couldn't find a single logical explanation to hold onto amidst that incomprehensible horror. The only thing I knew was that the darkness surrounding that farmhouse had permanently seeped into all of us.

​As we arrived in the city accompanied by the jolts of the truck, the horizon was slowly beginning to lighten. With the first light of morning, completely exhausted, we reported the situation to our superiors. We explained that we couldn't finish the job, that we had to abandon it and flee, and that we had experienced inexplicable, horrific events up on that mountain. At first, naturally, they were furious with us, thinking we had made up a crazy excuse just to slack off work. But when they saw our ghost-like states as we climbed out of the back of the truck, Melih's slumped shoulders, and the Chief's dead eyes still staring into the void, their objections caught in their throats. Ten grown men, workers who wielded shovels and were scorched by the sun, weren't going to get together to fabricate a nightmare like this. Even if they didn't believe us, they understood from the pure terror in our eyes that something beyond human comprehension had taken place on that cursed land that night...

​What ultimately became of that cursed road, whether the asphalt passed in front of that farmhouse and was finished or if it was left half-done like that, believe me, I don't know. And frankly, I don't want to know.

​The Chief... He could never again escape that dark cycle he was trapped in inside his own mind in that farmhouse that night. He truly couldn't handle what he had lived through. He was diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia and is currently still in a mental asylum, left alone with the echoes of that night.

​As for Melih, shortly after getting out of that truck, he packed up everything and moved to an entirely different city. He cut off all contact with us. I don't know if he managed to escape the demons inside him, but we haven't heard a single word from him in a very long time.

​I occasionally talk on the phone with Orhan and the other guys to check in on each other. But there is an unspoken, strict rule among us: we never, ever bring up this event we lived through. We are dead scared of drawing that darkness back upon us, even with a single word.

​As for me? I still feel the weight of that night, the gaze of that malignant entity smiling at me with my own face from behind that window, right on the back of my neck. And to keep from being crushed under that weight, to hold my mind together... right now, I am telling you this story in these lines.

​I still sometimes see myself inside that house in my nightmares. Around that cursed candlelight, I see not those malignant entities, but myself spinning and continuously performing a ritual, I see that they still hold my mind captive there...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DJF3X59P

Sinan lives a quiet, monotonously dull life in a small Anatolian city, battling insomnia and recurring nightmares. His solitude changes when a mysterious woman named Zuhre offers to read his fortune.

​But Zuhre is no ordinary fortune teller; she unearths terrifying details about Sinan's past and his nightmares that no one else could possibly know. Finally feeling truly seen, Sinan forms a unique bond with her. However, what starts as a simple reading quickly drags Sinan into a suffocating world of ancient curses and unholy entities.

​In this short story, you will witness sinister events of a kind you are entirely unaccustomed to.

​It was the middle of summer, and the weather was literally like hell. We were a 10-man crew, miles away from civilization, laying asphalt on a completely empty, unopened intercity highway. The Ministry was planning to open this road soon, so the job was incredibly urgent. Normally, our shift was supposed to end in the evening, but because of the rush, we got a call saying we had to stay for the night shift too. Chief (our foreman) broke the bad news to us looking pretty miserable...

​Between the breathless, suffocating summer heat and the flames of the boiling asphalt smoking right beneath our feet, our lungs were practically fried. The nearest gas station or convenience store was at least a 1.5 hour drive away. Aside from the endless highway, there was nothing around but a few empty lots and some dying vineyards.

​As evening approached, our water ran low and our food was completely gone, so we had to send one of the guys to drive out and get supplies. After all, we were totally unprepared for this extra shift.

​We kept working, drenched in sweat. By the time our friend was supposed to return, it was already pitch black. We were eagerly staring down that dark road, waiting for him, when we finally saw the headlights in the distance.

​-"Alright boys, that's it, we're taking a break," Chief said, halting the work.

​But as we were digging into the food our friend brought, we realized something terrible.

​He hadn't bought any water...

​-"Come on bro, how do you forget the water? You could've forgotten the food, but not the water. What do we do now? Who's gonna drive all the way back?"

​-"Look, I'm really sorry," he said. "I thought we still had some left to manage, it didn't cross my mind at the store. I can go back right now if you want..."

​-"Are you just trying to slack off?!" Chief snapped. "What do you mean you'll go back? You've been gone for 3 hours. If you disappear for another 3 hours, how are we supposed to finish this? We're on a deadline, you know that. Every missing guy slows us down. While you were gone, everyone here had to bust their asses. Our leftover water is almost completely out. We're exhausted!"

​Chief had every right to be pissed. The guy came back empty-handed, and now he wanted to leave again. It didn't matter if it was him or someone else who went; it meant losing another guy, and we were already dropping from exhaustion in that heat. We desperately needed water.

​-"So... what do we do, guys?"

​-"Look over there! There's a dim light. Is that a farmhouse? Maybe someone lives there?"

​-"Wait a minute. How come we didn't see that during the day? Yeah, yeah, that must be an old farmhouse. We can go over there and ask the owner for some water."

​Sure enough, a little over a kilometer away, there was a farmhouse. A faint light was seeping from inside. We hadn't even noticed it while working under the sun.

​It made sense to all of us. At that point, we didn't even care if the water was completely sterile or not.

​-"Alright Orhan," chief said. "Since you forgot the water, this is on you. Go over there, tell them we're the road crew and we ran out of water. If anyone's living there, I hope they won't turn you away." He added;

-"And if no one's living there, check around for an outside faucet. Let's just hope the water's running. Just figure something out..."

​We shoved whatever empty bottles we had into Orhan's hands and sent him toward the farmhouse. We aimed the headlights of the asphalt paver in that direction. He was already wearing his high-vis vest, so between the lights and the reflective stripes, we could keep an eye on him from a distance.

​Orhan walked fast and reached the place in a few minutes. He stood in front of the house for a brief moment. And then, suddenly, he started sprinting back toward us with everything he had.

​-"What the hell is he doing? What happened?"

​No matter how fast he had walked there, he covered that same distance back at the speed of light, stopping right next to us.

​His face was pale as a sheet. He looked absolutely terrified.

​-"Orhan, what happened? Was someone there? Did someone pull a gun on you?"

​Orhan didn't react to anything we said. He was just staring into the void, shaking uncontrollably like he was in deep shock.

​-"Answer us! What happened? What did you see?"

​Still no reaction. We shook him hard. Finally, to snap him out of it, chief slapped Orhan hard across the face. He came to his senses a little.

​-"We have to go!! We have to leave!! Let's go!! They are here!! We have to get out of here!!!"

​He kept mumbling this to himself.

​-"Where are we going, man? What happened! Just tell us normally!"

​-"Chief... chief... that's not a house. There are no people there. There are other things. Entities. Please, for the love of God, let's get out of here!"

​-"Snap out of it!" Chief yelled at him again. -"What entity? What creature? Have you lost your mind? What the hell are you tripping on!"

​-"Chief. You don't understand. I saw them! They've claimed that place. There's something in there. I went up to the house, and when I looked through the window, I saw them! Inside... They lit a candle, and they were spinning around it! They were doing some kind of ritual!... Please, let's leave!"

​-"A ritual? Hahaha. You've completely lost it, boy. Are you hallucinating from the thirst? I keep telling you to stop obsessing over those paranormal stories. See? Your brain is playing tricks on you. Or are you just trying to pull a prank on us... Hahaha."

​Neither chief nor any of us took a single word Orhan said seriously. Hearing a grown man believe in nonsense like that just made us laugh.

​-"So they lit a candle and spun around it, huh? Hahaha."

​-"Look, I'm telling you! Why won't you believe me? They are in there... There are no humans there. There are other kinds of entities..."

​We ignored him.

​-"Alright, alright, I'll go," Melih chimed in, laughing.

​-"Fine, take the bottles, Melih," Chief said, sounding a bit relieved. 

-"Ignore this coward, the heat's making him see things."

​Melih gathered the empty bottles from the ground. Orhan was still leaning against the paver's tire, covering his face with his hands, shivering. As Melih walked past him, he patted Orhan's shoulder:

​-"Don't worry kiddo, I'll say hi to your friends at the ritual," he joked, and started walking away.

​Then he zipped up his high-vis vest and walked into the pitch-black night, heading straight for the farmhouse.

​The paver's headlights were already pointing that way. We watched that yellow, reflective vest slowly shrink into the darkness. His pace was relaxed, confident. Melih wasn't the kind of guy to get scared of things like this anyway; he was the biggest and most reckless guy in our crew.

​For a while, we just watched his back. He slowly approached the house. Near the very edge of where the headlights could reach, we could only make out the glow of his vest in the dark.

​But then... something very strange started happening.

​Instead of moving in a straight line toward the house, Melih's high-vis vest began to move aimlessly from left to right.

​-"What the hell is he doing?" one of us asked.

​-"I don't know... Maybe he's looking for a faucet around the house?"

​We kept watching him for a bit. No. What he was doing didn't look like searching for something. That yellow glow would move a bit to the right, stop abruptly, and then move back to the left exactly the same way. It was as if, without any purpose at all, he was just pacing left and right in the pitch black. Back and forth, like a pendulum... Not taking a single step forward toward the house or backward toward us, just moving strictly left and right.

​-"Guys, what is Melih actually doing? Is he trying to mess with us?" Chief said. He was squinting, trying to make sense of that bizarre movement, just like the rest of us.

​This time, Melih's high-vis vest started moving left and right much faster, in a jagged, jerky way. From a distance, it was just a yellow light swinging wildly in the dark. We all fell dead silent, completely locked onto that absurd sight.

​I was the one who broke the silence.

​-"Screw this! Chief, we're dying of thirst! What the hell are they doing?!" I snapped angrily.

​-"Yeah Murat, you're right. Come on, let's go check this out together. Let's just get that damn water and bring it back. These guys have all lost their minds! Like this is the time for jokes!"

​-"You're right chief, let's go," I said, while the others groaned in agreement. We were genuinely sick of this water taking so long. We didn't even know if there was actually water there yet. One guy was talking about entities, the other was pulling stupid pranks.

​Chief and I started walking into the darkness. As we got closer to Melih, his meaningless left-right pacing was still going on.

​Right as we were getting close, Melih and his high-vis vest suddenly stopped dead in their tracks. Not a single flinch. He just stood there.

​As we quickened our pace, that yellow glow in the pitch black remained completely motionless. There wasn't much distance left between us now.

​-"Murat," chief said, suddenly pausing.

​-"Look, we've wasted too much time. You grab Melih and bring him to me. I'm gonna go toward the house, see if anyone's living there, ask for water or find a faucet. Come on, let's not waste any more time."

​-"Alright, Chief."

​As chief veered off to the right, toward the yard of the house, and left my side, I kept walking straight ahead toward that motionless yellow high-vis vest.

​-"Melih! Joke's over, come on man, let's go!" I called out as I got slightly closer.

​No answer. Not a chuckle, not a movement...

​When I was about 15-20 meters away, my footsteps naturally began to slow down. My eyes had fully adjusted by now, and the paver's headlights were still shining in this direction, even if they were weak at this distance. And in that moment, I felt a massive knot drop into my stomach. A hard-to-describe, ice-cold, bizarre feeling washed over me.

​Because the thing standing in front of me wasn't Melih.

​The high-vis vest was draped over a thick branch of a dead, twisted tree, just hanging in mid-air. There was no one inside it. Melih wasn't anywhere around. Just the vest...

​I stood rooted to the spot. I couldn't tear my eyes away from that empty vest. My mind was frantically thrashing around for a logical explanation in those few seconds. Okay, let's say Melih was pulling a prank... But we had been staring intently at that yellow reflective light the entire time, from far away until we got here. How did he take off that vest in the pitch black, without us noticing at all, and hang it on that tree branch with such professional stealth?

​How did he do it? Melih had just been standing there like a statue. If he took the vest off, we would have seen the movement. And in such a short amount of time? That glowing light had never cut out, never disappeared while we were watching. Or... if this vest had been here the whole time, what the hell was that thing we saw from afar, moving back and forth? And where was Melih?

​In the suffocating heat of the night, I felt a cold sweat run down my spine. I tore my eyes away from the vest and looked toward the dark wooded area.

​This place was genuinely terrifying. While I was trying to figure out how Melih did this, or where he was, trying to make sense of it all, I became fully aware of the sheer gloom of our surroundings.

​Not knowing what to do, I quickly turned my head toward the house. I saw chief walking through the door. He was stepping inside slowly; clearly no one was home, and he was going in to see if there was running water. He went inside, and then the door closed.

​And in that exact moment, something incredibly strange happened. The second chief went inside and the door shut... it was as if someone tripped a breaker. The headlights of the asphalt paver went out with a loud snap. Right at that exact second!

I was suddenly stranded in the middle of pitch-black darkness. In front of me, Melih’s high-vis vest hung motionless from a tree. Why had the headlights suddenly gone out? Was it a mechanical failure? Or were the guys back at the paver pulling a prank? But we had come here thinking Melih was the one playing a joke... yet he was nowhere to be found. And the timing of the lights cutting out was so, so perfect... It defied logic to believe it was a simple breakdown. The lights vanishing at the exact second the Chief closed that door felt as if they were both connected to a single switch. Slowly, Orhan’s words, Orhan’s experiences, and Orhan’s warnings began to flood my mind... A growing chill began to wrap around my soul.

​-"Chief!" I shouted instinctively. My voice echoed through that desolate void, hanging in the air without hitting anything. 

-"Chief! Do you hear me? The lights are out!"

​The Chief didn't answer. There was no reaction at all.

​"Melih! Are you there? Where are you? Answer me!"

​From Melih, there was neither a sound nor a trace, other than his vest hanging from the tree.

​I could feel the tension mounting. I had to do something. Deep down, I felt that something was horribly wrong, a gut-wrenching feeling that something catastrophic was about to happen. It was pitch black everywhere, save for the dim candle light seeping out from inside the house. Exactly like Orhan had described...

​I walked slowly toward the house.

​My steps were so heavy, as if tons of weight were tied to my feet. I tried to swallow, but my throat was bone-dry. In the middle of that pitch-darkness, I moved toward the faint, flickering yellow light leaking from the broken window of that ramshackle house.

​I reached the window. I took a deep breath and slowly turned my head toward the pane to look inside.

​In the center of the room, a dim candle was burning on the floor. And right in front of that flickering flame... there was someone. They were sitting cross-legged, facing the light, with their back completely turned to me. I couldn't see their face or who it was.

​Was it the Chief? Melih? Or someone else? I couldn't tell. I couldn't distinguish anything. I just saw someone sitting there, perfectly still.

​There was an incredible strangeness about the person there, something that froze my blood and clawed at my brain. Their shoulders didn't move at all. Not a single movement, not a single human reflex. It was as if they weren't breathing, sitting as rigid as a statue carved from stone.

​"Chief..." I could only whisper.

​The thing in there heard my voice. And it slowly began to move.

​It was rising slowly from its spot.

​In that dim candlelight, I couldn't clearly see the clothes, but judging by the posture and the height... Yes, it was the Chief. Hadn't he just walked through that door a few minutes before me? For a split second, a wave of relief washed over me...

​But no. Something was wrong.

​The act of standing up hadn't finished yet. That person was still rising upward, as if locked joints were only just beginning to open. Its height grew more. Its silhouette loomed larger in the darkness. Then this... this had to be Melih? After all, Melih was the tallest and largest among us.

​But... the thing's ascent didn't stop.

​I couldn't believe my eyes. The height of that thing was exceeding the limits of a normal human, continuing to grow as if defying the laws of physics. It had long surpassed Melih’s height. I was frozen in front of the window. In total shock, with cramps twisting my stomach, I watched that thing rise, watched that endless stretching.

​The shadow in the room grew and grew. It passed two meters, then two and a half...

​Watching that dehumanized, giant monstrosity reaching all the way to the ceiling, my breath caught, and I stood nailed to the window as if I had suffered a stroke. My eyes were wide enough to pop out of their sockets, and my teeth ached from clenching my jaw so hard in shock. I had completely forgotten how to breathe. My heart was pounding frantically, as if it wanted to tear through my chest.

​At that exact second, from behind me, from the depths of that pitch darkness, I heard frantic footsteps. Someone was running with all their might, pounding the ground, screaming at the top of their lungs. I would know that voice anywhere... it was Melih!

​In a flash of reflex, I instinctively snapped my head away from the horror in the window toward the sound in the darkness. I couldn't see anything, but the voice was approaching fast.

​Immediately after, as I turned my trembling body back toward the window, toward the inside of the room... Oh my God!

​That giant, ceiling-reaching abomination was no longer facing away from me. That massive body had slowly turned, and its face was now fully toward me. And that face...

​That face was mine!

​It was my face, my features, my eyes looking back at me! But on the face of that thing carrying my features, there was a smile so diabolical, so sinister and disgusting, that it defied human nature... My blood froze in my veins. My mind rejected what it was seeing.

​And that wasn't all! Orhan was right, I swear! Around that dim candlelight, horrifying entities with crimson skin and distorted, mangled faces suddenly appeared. They were spinning around the candle with a wild, blurred speed!

​I was going to lose my mind!

​I don't know how I tore my eyes away from that cursed window or how I bolted away from the front of that house. All I know is that my legs dragged me toward that pitch darkness, toward the direction I came from, toward the asphalt, in a race for my life. I was running and screaming.

​I was sprinting through that darkness where you couldn't see your hand in front of your face when I slammed into something hard... no, someone. Both of us tumbled onto the dusty ground with a loud thud.

​In panic and desperation, I grabbed the collar of the body I had fallen onto in the dark. He, with the same madness, grabbed my throat. We couldn't see each other in the darkness, snarling like wild animals, choking each other in pure terror.

-"Let go of me! Let go!" I screamed, struggling with all my strength.

-​"Murat?! Murat, is that you?!" a muffled voice came from the owner of the hands squeezing my throat.

​My arms fell to my sides.

-​"Melih?!"

​Yes, it was him! It was Melih. We both let go of each other in shock, breathless and covered in dust. The owner of that hanging vest, the missing Melih, was right in front of me.

​-"What is happening here! I'm losing it! What is this place? What were those things, Melih? Where are we!!"

​Right behind us, from inside that ramshackle house, another terrifying scream erupted, loud enough to shake the earth and sky and make your hair stand on end.

​The door of the house burst open with a massive crash, as if torn from its hinges. And from inside, the Chief came charging out, flailing his arms wildly, screaming at the top of his lungs like he had lost his mind!

-"Run!!! Ruuuun!!!"

​Neither Melih nor I had an ounce of courage left to look at what was behind him. Seeing the Chief in that state, hearing that horrific, torn scream was enough for us. We both scrambled up from where we had fallen and took off in such a sprint toward the dark road, toward the asphalt paver, toward the other guys...

​The three of us ran together, cutting through that pitch darkness without looking back for even a second, running until our lungs were about to burst!

​As the three of us sprinted, tearing through that pitch-darkness with our lungs burning... suddenly, as if a whole neighborhood's power had been cut and the breakers were flipped back on, the headlights of the asphalt paver ahead snapped back on with a loud "CHAT."

​That blinding yellow light hit our eyes, but I swear it was the most beautiful sight in the world at that moment.

​Our guys were there! They must have heard our terror-filled screams because they were moving toward us from the asphalt, clutching crowbars and shovels in panic. I don't even remember how we threw ourselves into the boundary of that light, how we entered that circle of safety.

​When we reached the asphalt paver, all three of us collapsed onto our knees, drenched in sweat. we were covered in dust and grime, gasping for air. My chest was heaving like a bellows.

​"What happened to you? What is this state?" one of them shouted in horror.

​"Man, tell us what happened! Did something attack you? What did you see!" the others were shouting. They surrounded us, looking into the darkness with fear.

​The Chief... that man who always stood tall, authoritative, and never minced his words... was doubled over on the asphalt, holding his head with trembling hands. His eyes were wide open, as if he were still staring into the hell inside that house. He began to mutter to himself in a hollow voice:

​"Entities... They... They were there..." His voice trembled, the words barely leaving his mouth. "Demonic... They've come from hell... They aren't human... Malignant ones..."

​When our guys saw the wrecked state of both us and the Chief, and heard those senseless mutterings, they panicked completely. Everyone's face turned as white as chalk.

​At that moment, Orhan stepped forward from the back of the crowd. His face was soaked with sweat and fear, but there was an edge of anger mixed with terror in his voice.

​"I told you!" he shouted with a cracked voice. "I told you! There are entities there, they aren't human, I said! You didn't believe me! You laughed, you mocked me! Do you see it now!"

​No one had the strength to answer Orhan, to silence him, or to tell him he was wrong. Because what we had seen had long since surpassed the limits of reason.

​Melih, that massive man who didn't care about anything, struggled to stand up from the ground on trembling legs. Not a trace remained of that indifferent, reckless expression on his face. His eyes were darting toward the darkness behind us in fear.

​"Let's go.." he said in a hurried, shaky voice. "Gather up! We’re leaving this cursed place, right now!"

​No one second-guessed him. We didn't care about the shovels, the half-finished asphalt, or the materials in the machine. We grabbed the Chief under his arms and forced him to his feet. None of us knew how we threw ourselves into the vehicles and the back of the pickup truck. The engines roared to life with a bitter scream, and we hit the gas to the floor, fleeing that cursed farmhouse and leaving it behind in that pitch darkness. ​As we sped away from there, fleeing for our lives, for a brief moment I wondered what Melih and the Chief had actually gone through... what they had seen in that cursed place.

But I was going to find out...

In this absolute robbery system, Bayern would have way more than just 6 UCL trophies. I'm sick and tired of watching the exact same thing for years, somebody needs to do something!!!!!

PART - 2

​Every single one of us was in a wretched state. Orhan, Melih, the Chief, and me... We had all seen them, had all witnessed their darkness. And it was painfully obvious from our demeanor that we had just lived through a trauma. Four strong men, workers who wielded shovels for a living, were on the verge of crying like children. Among our other friends, not a single one even bothered to say things like, "Where are we going? We can't leave without finishing the job." We hastily piled into the truck and started getting as far away from that cursed place as possible...

​Everyone was burning with curiosity. They were waiting for the words to spill from our mouths. They looked at us with pity, but also with prying eyes, desperate to understand what we had just experienced. I, too, was wondering what the Chief and Melih had gone through. Both of their faces were as white as chalk. They probably looked far worse than I did.

​I was the first one to gather myself and break the heavy silence.

​-"Why... Why did you turn off the headlights?"

​Those were the first words out of my mouth.

​-"Was there a malfunction? Why did the lights go out?"

​The bewilderment on my friends' faces in the truck only deepened at that moment. Already struggling to make sense of what was happening, my crewmates were now even more baffled by this question.

​-"What do you mean the headlights went out... Murat, the headlights were never turned off?"

​I didn't know what to say. I still didn't know what was real, what was an illusion, or what I was supposed to believe. I couldn't comprehend it.

​-"First Melih went. Then you and the Chief followed him. We saw you go over there, and within seconds, you came sprinting back this way, screaming at the top of your lungs. We never turned off the lights; they were on the entire time."

​Meanwhile, Melih and the Chief were still trembling. Both were staring into the void, completely unresponsive to anything.

​One of my friends turned to me and started speaking.

​-"Murat. Look, you seem a bit better. We don't understand what happened. At least you're talking. You guys are in such bad shape that we dropped the job and hit the road. We risked losing our jobs for you, but that doesn't matter, as long as you're okay. But tell us, what happened? How did you end up like this? Why are we on the road right now, why are we fleeing?"

​I took a deep breath. I recounted everything from start to finish. Reliving the exact same horrors all over again as I spoke. Just like I am telling you right now, I told them everything. How Melih's vest was hanging on that tree, how the headlights cut out the exact second the Chief stepped into that farmhouse, leaving me in pitch-black darkness, and how, when I went to the window, I saw that malignant entity staring back at me with my own face and a demonic smile... I told them everything from the beginning.

​As I spoke, my friends' jaws dropped. Some started whispering prayers, others averted their eyes. While Melih and the Chief continued to stare into the void, Orhan was trying to hold back his tears. He had warned us, told us not to go, told us he had seen them. But we hadn't listened. He looked as if he felt guilty; to let him know he shouldn't feel that way, that it wasn't his fault, I gently touched his shoulder.

​An atmosphere of pure shock dominated the inside of the truck. Right at that moment, with a raspy, muffled voice, Melih spoke up...

​-"I... I was walking toward that farmhouse. I was just about to reach it. Right as I got to the entrance path, I heard a voice from up ahead. It was the Chief's voice..."

​We were all listening to him with rapt attention. Even a fearless, massive man like Melih was recounting his ordeal trembling like a fragile sparrow.

​-"The Chief called out to me from within the darkness. At first, I was very surprised. I was trying to figure out what he was doing there, how he had gotten there. 'Melih... Come,' he told me. I walked in that direction."

​-"'Chief, what are you doing here? How did you get here?' I asked him. There was a strange, mocking expression on his face, but he spoke just like the Chief."

​-"'I followed you. To keep you company. There is something I want to show you.' That's what he told me. At that moment, what caught my attention was that he wasn't wearing his vest. I asked him why he wasn't wearing his high-vis vest."

​-"'The ones inside don't like the light, Melih. They love the dark. The darkness belongs to them. And your vest shines too brightly. Before you go over there, take off your vest and give it to me. Go on now. They are waiting for you.'"

​I didn't understand why he said that. I thought he had come up behind me and gone to the house first, that there were people living there. The Chief was staring intently right at me without even blinking. A small sense of unease crept into me; deep down, I felt something was wrong. But the man standing in front of me was the Chief, after all. Saying 'Alright then,' I took off the vest and handed it to the Chief. Or rather... to the malignant entity that appeared to me in the shape of the Chief..."

​We were listening to Melih breathlessly. Even the Chief had torn his eyes away from the void to listen to what Melih was saying. Melih continued:

​-"I took the vest off and gave it to him. The exact moment I handed it over, the vehicle's headlights suddenly cut out. The surroundings were completely engulfed in darkness. I couldn't even see the entity in front of me that I thought was the Chief. Only my vest in its hand was glowing. This time, with a much more muffled, much stranger voice... it told me I needed to go toward that farmhouse, that they were waiting for me. I turned my head and looked toward the farmhouse. A faint light, like a candle, was seeping from inside. Just like Orhan had described. 'Who is waiting, Chief? What is going on here, who are they?' I asked, and when I turned back toward the Chief, he was gone. He had vanished. I started to panic. Strange noises, whispers began to echo from inside the house. Yes, the vehicle's headlights had gone out, but there was a much heavier, much more profound darkness in the air. It was as if the entire world had gone black. I couldn't see a single step in front of me. The only source of light was the candlelight leaking from the window of that cursed farmhouse..."

​It became clear that Melih had taken off his high-vis vest and handed it to them himself. This explained why that vest had been moving back and forth so senselessly, and how it ended up hanging so perfectly on that tree. Melih had been manipulated by them. But the most terrifying parts of his story hadn't even begun yet...

​Melih clasped his trembling hands together. His eyes were locked onto a spot on the dark floor of the truck. His voice was muffled and raspy, as if there was no air left in his lungs:

​-"I began approaching the house. I was moving with heavy steps. I was terrified. But... those whispers rising from inside felt as if they were calling me, pulling me toward it. I looked toward where the vehicle's headlights should have been coming from; it was complete darkness. Neither you, nor the machine, nothing was there. It was as if I was in another dimension... I moved toward the house and looked inside through the broken window of that farmhouse..."

​We were all holding our breath.

​-"There wasn't a single piece of furniture inside, nor anyone we expected to see. It was an empty room. Right in the center of the room, a single candle was burning on the floor. And there, illuminated by that dim candlelight... was an old wooden coffin, on the verge of rotting away."

​He took another deep, trembling breath. Orhan covered his half-open mouth with his hand in shock.

​-"But the real horror wasn't the coffin," Melih continued. "It was the things spinning around the coffin... There were six of them. Pitch-black, human-shaped entities that looked as if they were carved from the darkness itself. But they weren't human. Their faces... their faces were red like fire, like glowing embers. They had centered the coffin and were spinning around it relentlessly. Heavy, mesmerizing... spinning around themselves as if they had entered a demonic trance... All of them were looking at me. Even the ones circling to the back were looking at me; they didn't take their eyes off me for a single second..."

​After saying these words, Melih took his head between his hands and just sat there for a while. It was obvious he felt like he was reliving those moments right then and there.

​A few of our friends went over to him, hugged the silently weeping Melih, and tried to comfort him.

​-"It's okay, Melih, it's over. Look, we are right here with you. Don't be afraid, Melih, it's over!"

​Melih wiped away the tears silently streaming down his face and continued to speak.

​-"But the most terrifying part wasn't their gaze, it was their posture. Both of their arms were raised in the air, and their palms were facing the window, pointing directly at me."

​He continued.

​-"I was seized by such an immense terror that it felt like I spent years there. It felt as if I had been watching their ritual for years. I was nailed to the spot. It felt like I wasn't even breathing. My throat kept knotting up, I felt like I was trying to swallow but couldn't. It was so bad that I couldn't even blink. It felt as if I hadn't blinked for minutes, hours, days; my eyes were burning so intensely..."

​-"As those red-faced entities continued to spin while staring at me, that rotting coffin finally creaked... The lid began to open, slowly, inch by inch. The spinning of those entities grew faster and faster. They were now like red streaks blurring in the darkness. When the coffin fully opened, someone sat up from inside. Their back was turned to me... They were wearing a high-vis vest like mine, our work clothes. Then... they slowly turned their head toward me."

​He couldn't hold it back any longer. And that mountain of a man began to sob at the sheer horror of what he had experienced...

​-"It was me... The one rising from the coffin was me. But my eyes were pitch black, and on my face was that disgusting, unimaginable demonic smile. I was staring back at myself..."

​The words spilling from Melih's mouth devastated all of us. The lips of those who had just been whispering prayers were now sealed shut; those who had averted their eyes in fear were now locked onto Melih in pure terror, their eyes wide enough to pop out of their sockets. No one made a sound; there was only the groaning roar of the old truck engine, as if it were in pain, and the squealing of the metal chassis bouncing on the broken road. One of the workers sitting across from me was unknowingly squeezing the shovel he held so tightly that it looked like he might snap it in half.

​Another worker, acting as if the red-faced entities Melih described had slipped into the back of the truck with us, began trembling and keeping a watchful eye on the darkest corners of the bed. Orhan was slowly shaking his head from side to side, as if wanting to deny the incomprehensible things he was hearing, while the Chief continued to stare into the void with that soulless, ice-cold expression.

​At that moment, the air inside the truck had become so heavy that every breath we took pierced our lungs like shards of glass; we could all feel in our bones that the pitch-black darkness outside had already seeped inside us.

​-"The thing that rose from that coffin wearing my face suddenly appeared in front of the window. I snapped out of that hypnotic state for a second and fell to the ground. And then, coming to my senses, I ran this way in a desperate panic for my life... Then I found Murat. Then the Chief came out from inside, but when I looked back there, the Chief was gone. All my senses blurred together. Was I even there, how long did I stay, how much time passed, everything is such a blur..."

​When Melih said these words and took his head between his hands again, the suffocating silence returned inside the truck. While everyone's eyes were on Melih, the Chief, who had stood like a petrified statue until that moment, parted his lips.

​His voice was so raspy and muffled, he spoke as if there were shards of glass lodged in his throat.

​-"I saw you, Melih..." he said, fixing his eyes on Melih's face.

​We all turned to the Chief in shock. He was finally able to react. Taking a deep, trembling breath, he began to recount the nightmare as if living it all over again.

​-"Murat and I came after you. I sent him ahead to find you and bring you back. I walked toward that farmhouse and went inside. The moment I stepped through the door, I looked around... There was nothing inside. There was only that dim candlelight burning on the floor in the room. It was an empty, dilapidated room."

​The Chief paused for a moment, wiping the cold sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.

​-"As I was looking around, someone called out to me from the side window. 'Chief!' they said... I looked in that direction. It was you, Melih, looking in from the window outside. The candlelight was hitting your face. You were right in front of the glass."

​The Chief's eyes widened as if they were going to pop out of their sockets as he recalled those moments. Everyone in the truck held their breath, listening to him.

​-"When I saw you there, I let out a sigh of relief, but of course, I was also angry. 'Where are you, boy, Melih? Is this the time for a joke?' I snapped at you through the window. But you didn't react at all... You just stood there, stiff as a statue."

​The Chief, with that dead expression on his face, continued to recount, forcing the words out of his mouth:

​-"As I got a little closer to you, there was a look of agony on your face. Your eyes were bloodshot and tears were streaming down, exactly as you just described... You were staring into the void, completely frozen. It was as if you were watching something inside, exactly as you described."

​The Chief swallowed hard, whispering the blood-curdling truth without taking his eyes off Melih:

​-"But there was nothing there, Melih. In the room I was in, there was no coffin, nor those red-faced entities... You were looking into an empty room with nothing but a burning candle, experiencing that sheer terror."

​-"'Melih, what happened? Are you okay?' I called out to you. Again, you didn't react. You seemed to be suffering inwardly. You were staring at an empty wall as if you had seen hell. I came over to you..."

​He took another deep breath. As he told us about those moments, he was struggling immensely to speak. He took long pauses as he described what he went through. The Chief was truly having a hard time speaking at that moment.

​The Chief took another deep breath. The words were getting caught in his throat, and the massive man's jaw was trembling.

​-"I came over to you, Melih..." he said, his voice now nothing more than a whisper. -"I reached out to put my hand on your shoulder, to pull you out of that frozen state. Right at that moment... Behind me, I heard that wooden door I had just closed to come inside slowly creak open."

​No one in the truck was breathing. There was only the monotonous hum of the engine.

​-"The door opened, and someone walked in. Before I even had the chance to turn around, I heard my own voice. With my own ears, I heard the person behind me speaking with my voice:

 -"Where are you, boy, Melih? Is this the time for a joke?'..."

​-"The blood rushed to my head. I slowly turned around... I was standing in the doorway. Wearing the same clothes, the same vest. My exact replica came right up to me in shock and sheer terror, looking at me. It was like a mirror, but there was no mirror. I thought I was going to lose my mind at that moment. I froze solid, nailed to the spot. My eyes widened in shock, and I just stared at that 'me'."

​The sound of the Chief swallowing echoed in that silence.

​-"But the real hell began right then... That 'me' who walked in, looked at me and fell into the exact same terror I was in. He froze solid and started staring into the void with a dead expression, just like me. Seconds later, the door creaked once again. A third person walked in from behind. This time, the face of the 'me' that entered was slightly distorted. The skin was sagging, the bags under his eyes were pitch black, but it was still me. From that disgusting, mangled mouth, the same words spilled out: 'Where are you, boy, Melih? Is this the time for a joke?'... Then he saw me and the other one. The moment he saw our frozen state, his twisted face took on the exact same expression of shock as mine. And he, too, froze solid, locked in the exact same position with us with that rotting face."

​His hands had started to tremble now; he was shaking his head from side to side, everyone was trying to deny what they were hearing. No one could sit still while listening. The Chief was completely immersed in that moment. His voice was steadily rising as he spoke. He kept rocking back and forth. While talking, he continuously scratched his own arm, he was about to make it bleed but wasn't even aware of it.

​-"The door opened for a fourth time..." he said with a tearful voice. "-This time, the face of the thing that entered had become completely demonic. Its jaw was unnaturally elongated downward, its eyes had shrunk, its teeth were sharpened. But it was still me. From that demonic mouth, my voice came out, this time metallic and scraping: 'Where are you, boy, Melih? Is this the time for a joke?'... Then it, too, took on our exact posture of terror. It froze. When it opened for a fifth time, the face of the thing that entered was now crimson red. It glowed like embers, as if its skin had been burned. My facial features had completely melted away, turning into a demon from hell. Its face was like that, but its body and clothes were mine. It whispered the same words... And it, too, froze solid with us in that cramped room. I was losing my mind. I was going to go insane!!"

​The Chief was acting as if he had completely lost control. We tried to go over and check on him. He had sped up so much while talking and was rocking back and forth so violently that he was going to accidentally hit his head on something and hurt himself.

​-"The room was filled with 'me'. That room... The cursed ones, the malignant ones... My mind... My mind is snapping. It's snapping! The real me, and behind me, my replicas entering one by one, rotting, becoming demonic, gradually turning into those red entities. All of them froze exactly like me, with the same expression of terror, looking at me as if they were genuinely surprised by this situation. Whatever I did, whatever despair I experienced, even the most demonic one mimicked that exact despair. I was losing my mind. I was silently going insane... And finally, the door opened for a sixth time."

​The Chief fell silent. He closed his eyes, as if forcing himself not to see that sixth entity again.

​-"The sixth one to enter... was no longer me. It was the very entity you mentioned spinning around that coffin, the one made of pure darkness with a fire-red face. It glided into the room with its pitch-black body. It didn't say anything. It just turned its red face toward me... And even that pure evil, that hellish fiend, took on my exact expression. It dropped its two hands helplessly to its sides, just like me, and an expression of 'shock' and 'petrification' appeared on its crimson, disgusting face. I saw my own fear, my own helplessness materialize on that disgusting entity."

​The Chief was screaming at this point. He couldn't control himself. His mind truly couldn't handle the things he had experienced. It was so intense that even we were struggling to just listen to him...

​Pure chaos reigned in the back of the truck. On one hand, the violent bouncing of the vehicle on the broken road; on the other, the suffocating terror descending upon us from the darkness... Orhan was trying to hold the Chief's arms, and I was shaking his shoulders. That massive, fearless man we knew was trembling like a leaf in our hands, continuing to scream at the top of his lungs. Mentally, he still hadn't escaped that cycle of hell, that room.

​-"Snap out of it, Chief! Snap out of it!!!"

​We were lightly slapping his face. Shaking him. If we had just a sip of water, we would have splashed it on his face to ease his pain, to break that dark trance, but there wasn't a single drop of water in the bed of that cursed truck.

​-"Snap out of it! Please, snap out of it!"

​It felt like it lasted for minutes. Those tearing screams gradually gave way to wheezing, ragged breaths. The Chief's body suddenly went limp like jelly, collapsing as if his knees had given out. We grabbed him by the arms and gently sat him down on the floor of the truck bed. In those heavy moments where everyone in the back was gasping for air, where it smelled only of sweat and despair, he finally began to calm down. The Chief's chest was heaving like a bellows, and he was holding his head with his trembling hands.

​In that silence like the grave that settled over us, the Chief slowly raised his head. That panic was no longer in his eyes; instead, there was the empty stare of a man who had accepted everything, who had left a piece of his mind behind in that farmhouse. He fixed his eyes on the darkest corner of the truck bed, a place none of us could see. And he continued his story...

​-"From behind me... I heard you scream, Melih," he said, staring into that void. "-While I was locked in that room with my rotting reflections, while that red-faced entity was right in front of me... from outside, came your agonizing scream. When that sound echoed, I woke up from that nightmare for a brief second. How I escaped, how I threw myself out of that door, how I ran all the way here running for my life... I don't know. I just made it here..."

​After these last words from the Chief, a deadly silence fell over the inside of the truck. For the remainder of that long journey, no one uttered a single word. What had we just gone through? Orhan, me, Melih, and the Chief... Why had all this happened to us? We were just regular workers, chasing our daily bread in the middle of the night. Why had those malignant, cursed entities chosen us, why had they played so mercilessly with the darkest corners of our minds? No matter how much I thought about it, I had no idea. I couldn't find a single logical explanation to hold onto amidst that incomprehensible horror. The only thing I knew was that the darkness surrounding that farmhouse had permanently seeped into all of us.

​As we arrived in the city accompanied by the jolts of the truck, the horizon was slowly beginning to lighten. With the first light of morning, completely exhausted, we reported the situation to our superiors. We explained that we couldn't finish the job, that we had to abandon it and flee, and that we had experienced inexplicable, horrific events up on that mountain. At first, naturally, they were furious with us, thinking we had made up a crazy excuse just to slack off work. But when they saw our ghost-like states as we climbed out of the back of the truck, Melih's slumped shoulders, and the Chief's dead eyes still staring into the void, their objections caught in their throats. Ten grown men, workers who wielded shovels and were scorched by the sun, weren't going to get together to fabricate a nightmare like this. Even if they didn't believe us, they understood from the pure terror in our eyes that something beyond human comprehension had taken place on that cursed land that night...

​What ultimately became of that cursed road, whether the asphalt passed in front of that farmhouse and was finished or if it was left half-done like that, believe me, I don't know. And frankly, I don't want to know.

​The Chief... He could never again escape that dark cycle he was trapped in inside his own mind in that farmhouse that night. He truly couldn't handle what he had lived through. He was diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia and is currently still in a mental asylum, left alone with the echoes of that night.

​As for Melih, shortly after getting out of that truck, he packed up everything and moved to an entirely different city. He cut off all contact with us. I don't know if he managed to escape the demons inside him, but we haven't heard a single word from him in a very long time.

​I occasionally talk on the phone with Orhan and the other guys to check in on each other. But there is an unspoken, strict rule among us: we never, ever bring up this event we lived through. We are dead scared of drawing that darkness back upon us, even with a single word.

​As for me? I still feel the weight of that night, the gaze of that malignant entity smiling at me with my own face from behind that window, right on the back of my neck. And to keep from being crushed under that weight, to hold my mind together... right now, I am telling you this story in these lines.

​I still sometimes see myself inside that house in my nightmares. Around that cursed candlelight, I see not those malignant entities, but myself spinning and continuously performing a ritual, I see that they still hold my mind captive there...

PART-1

I was suddenly stranded in the middle of pitch-black darkness. In front of me, Melih’s high-vis vest hung motionless from a tree. Why had the headlights suddenly gone out? Was it a mechanical failure? Or were the guys back at the paver pulling a prank? But we had come here thinking Melih was the one playing a joke... yet he was nowhere to be found. And the timing of the lights cutting out was so, so perfect... It defied logic to believe it was a simple breakdown. The lights vanishing at the exact second the Chief closed that door felt as if they were both connected to a single switch. Slowly, Orhan’s words, Orhan’s experiences, and Orhan’s warnings began to flood my mind... A growing chill began to wrap around my soul.

​-"Chief!" I shouted instinctively. My voice echoed through that desolate void, hanging in the air without hitting anything. 

-"Chief! Do you hear me? The lights are out!"

​The Chief didn't answer. There was no reaction at all.

​"Melih! Are you there? Where are you? Answer me!"

​From Melih, there was neither a sound nor a trace, other than his vest hanging from the tree.

​I could feel the tension mounting. I had to do something. Deep down, I felt that something was horribly wrong, a gut-wrenching feeling that something catastrophic was about to happen. It was pitch black everywhere, save for the dim candle light seeping out from inside the house. Exactly like Orhan had described...

​I walked slowly toward the house.

​My steps were so heavy, as if tons of weight were tied to my feet. I tried to swallow, but my throat was bone-dry. In the middle of that pitch-darkness, I moved toward the faint, flickering yellow light leaking from the broken window of that ramshackle house.

​I reached the window. I took a deep breath and slowly turned my head toward the pane to look inside.

​In the center of the room, a dim candle was burning on the floor. And right in front of that flickering flame... there was someone. They were sitting cross-legged, facing the light, with their back completely turned to me. I couldn't see their face or who it was.

​Was it the Chief? Melih? Or someone else? I couldn't tell. I couldn't distinguish anything. I just saw someone sitting there, perfectly still.

​There was an incredible strangeness about the person there, something that froze my blood and clawed at my brain. Their shoulders didn't move at all. Not a single movement, not a single human reflex. It was as if they weren't breathing, sitting as rigid as a statue carved from stone.

​"Chief..." I could only whisper.

​The thing in there heard my voice. And it slowly began to move.

​It was rising slowly from its spot.

​In that dim candlelight, I couldn't clearly see the clothes, but judging by the posture and the height... Yes, it was the Chief. Hadn't he just walked through that door a few minutes before me? For a split second, a wave of relief washed over me...

​But no. Something was wrong.

​The act of standing up hadn't finished yet. That person was still rising upward, as if locked joints were only just beginning to open. Its height grew more. Its silhouette loomed larger in the darkness. Then this... this had to be Melih? After all, Melih was the tallest and largest among us.

​But... the thing's ascent didn't stop.

​I couldn't believe my eyes. The height of that thing was exceeding the limits of a normal human, continuing to grow as if defying the laws of physics. It had long surpassed Melih’s height. I was frozen in front of the window. In total shock, with cramps twisting my stomach, I watched that thing rise, watched that endless stretching.

​The shadow in the room grew and grew. It passed two meters, then two and a half...

​Watching that dehumanized, giant monstrosity reaching all the way to the ceiling, my breath caught, and I stood nailed to the window as if I had suffered a stroke. My eyes were wide enough to pop out of their sockets, and my teeth ached from clenching my jaw so hard in shock. I had completely forgotten how to breathe. My heart was pounding frantically, as if it wanted to tear through my chest.

​At that exact second, from behind me, from the depths of that pitch darkness, I heard frantic footsteps. Someone was running with all their might, pounding the ground, screaming at the top of their lungs. I would know that voice anywhere... it was Melih!

​In a flash of reflex, I instinctively snapped my head away from the horror in the window toward the sound in the darkness. I couldn't see anything, but the voice was approaching fast.

​Immediately after, as I turned my trembling body back toward the window, toward the inside of the room... Oh my God!

​That giant, ceiling-reaching abomination was no longer facing away from me. That massive body had slowly turned, and its face was now fully toward me. And that face...

​That face was mine!

​It was my face, my features, my eyes looking back at me! But on the face of that thing carrying my features, there was a smile so diabolical, so sinister and disgusting, that it defied human nature... My blood froze in my veins. My mind rejected what it was seeing.

​And that wasn't all! Orhan was right, I swear! Around that dim candlelight, horrifying entities with crimson skin and distorted, mangled faces suddenly appeared. They were spinning around the candle with a wild, blurred speed!

​I was going to lose my mind!

​I don't know how I tore my eyes away from that cursed window or how I bolted away from the front of that house. All I know is that my legs dragged me toward that pitch darkness, toward the direction I came from, toward the asphalt, in a race for my life. I was running and screaming.

​I was sprinting through that darkness where you couldn't see your hand in front of your face when I slammed into something hard... no, someone. Both of us tumbled onto the dusty ground with a loud thud.

​In panic and desperation, I grabbed the collar of the body I had fallen onto in the dark. He, with the same madness, grabbed my throat. We couldn't see each other in the darkness, snarling like wild animals, choking each other in pure terror.

-"Let go of me! Let go!" I screamed, struggling with all my strength.

-​"Murat?! Murat, is that you?!" a muffled voice came from the owner of the hands squeezing my throat.

​My arms fell to my sides.

-​"Melih?!"

​Yes, it was him! It was Melih. We both let go of each other in shock, breathless and covered in dust. The owner of that hanging vest, the missing Melih, was right in front of me.

​-"What is happening here! I'm losing it! What is this place? What were those things, Melih? Where are we!!"

​Right behind us, from inside that ramshackle house, another terrifying scream erupted, loud enough to shake the earth and sky and make your hair stand on end.

​The door of the house burst open with a massive crash, as if torn from its hinges. And from inside, the Chief came charging out, flailing his arms wildly, screaming at the top of his lungs like he had lost his mind!

-​"Run!!! Ruuuun!!!"

​Neither Melih nor I had an ounce of courage left to look at what was behind him. Seeing the Chief in that state, hearing that horrific, torn scream was enough for us. We both scrambled up from where we had fallen and took off in such a sprint toward the dark road, toward the asphalt paver, toward the other guys...

​The three of us ran together, cutting through that pitch darkness without looking back for even a second, running until our lungs were about to burst!

​As the three of us sprinted, tearing through that zifiri darkness with our lungs burning... suddenly, as if a whole neighborhood's power had been cut and the breakers were flipped back on, the headlights of the asphalt paver ahead snapped back on with a loud "CHAT."

​That blinding yellow light hit our eyes, but I swear it was the most beautiful sight in the world at that moment.

​Our guys were there! They must have heard our terror-filled screams because they were moving toward us from the asphalt, clutching crowbars and shovels in panic. I don't even remember how we threw ourselves into the boundary of that light, how we entered that circle of safety.

​When we reached the asphalt paver, all three of us collapsed onto our knees, drenched in sweat. we were covered in dust and grime, gasping for air. My chest was heaving like a bellows.

​"What happened to you? What is this state?" one of them shouted in horror.

​"Man, tell us what happened! Did something attack you? What did you see!" the others were shouting. They surrounded us, looking into the darkness with fear.

​The Chief... that man who always stood tall, authoritative, and never minced his words... was doubled over on the asphalt, holding his head with trembling hands. His eyes were wide open, as if he were still staring into the hell inside that house. He began to mutter to himself in a hollow voice:

​"Entities... They... They were there..." His voice trembled, the words barely leaving his mouth. "Demonic... They've come from hell... They aren't human... Malignant ones..."

​When our guys saw the wrecked state of both us and the Chief, and heard those senseless mutterings, they panicked completely. Everyone's face turned as white as chalk.

​At that moment, Orhan stepped forward from the back of the crowd. His face was soaked with sweat and fear, but there was an edge of anger mixed with terror in his voice.

​"I told you!" he shouted with a cracked voice. "I told you! There are entities there, they aren't human, I said! You didn't believe me! You laughed, you mocked me! Do you see it now!"

​No one had the strength to answer Orhan, to silence him, or to tell him he was wrong. Because what we had seen had long since surpassed the limits of reason.

​Melih, that massive man who didn't care about anything, struggled to stand up from the ground on trembling legs. Not a trace remained of that indifferent, reckless expression on his face. His eyes were darting toward the darkness behind us in fear.

​"Let's go.." he said in a hurried, shaky voice. "Gather up! We’re leaving this cursed place, right now!"

​No one second-guessed him. We didn't care about the shovels, the half-finished asphalt, or the materials in the machine. We grabbed the Chief under his arms and forced him to his feet. None of us knew how we threw ourselves into the vehicles and the back of the pickup truck. The engines roared to life with a bitter scream, and we hit the gas to the floor, fleeing that cursed farmhouse and leaving it behind in that pitch darkness. ​As we sped away from there, fleeing for our lives, for a brief moment I wondered what Melih and the Chief had actually gone through... what they had seen in that cursed place.

But I was going to find out...

​It was the middle of summer, and the weather was literally like hell. We were a 10-man crew, miles away from civilization, laying asphalt on a completely empty, unopened intercity highway. The Ministry was planning to open this road soon, so the job was incredibly urgent. Normally, our shift was supposed to end in the evening, but because of the rush, we got a call saying we had to stay for the night shift too. Chief (our foreman) broke the bad news to us looking pretty miserable...

​Between the breathless, suffocating summer heat and the flames of the boiling asphalt smoking right beneath our feet, our lungs were practically fried. The nearest gas station or convenience store was at least a 1.5 hour drive away. Aside from the endless highway, there was nothing around but a few empty lots and some dying vineyards.

​As evening approached, our water ran low and our food was completely gone, so we had to send one of the guys to drive out and get supplies. After all, we were totally unprepared for this extra shift.

​We kept working, drenched in sweat. By the time our friend was supposed to return, it was already pitch black. We were eagerly staring down that dark road, waiting for him, when we finally saw the headlights in the distance.

​-"Alright boys, that's it, we're taking a break," Şef said, halting the work.

​But as we were digging into the food our friend brought, we realized something terrible.

​He hadn't bought any water...

​-"Come on bro, how do you forget the water? You could've forgotten the food, but not the water. What do we do now? Who's gonna drive all the way back?"

​-"Look, I'm really sorry," he said. "I thought we still had some left to manage, it didn't cross my mind at the store. I can go back right now if you want..."

​-"Are you just trying to slack off?!" Chief snapped. "What do you mean you'll go back? You've been gone for 3 hours. If you disappear for another 3 hours, how are we supposed to finish this? We're on a deadline, you know that. Every missing guy slows us down. While you were gone, everyone here had to bust their asses. Our leftover water is almost completely out. We're exhausted!"

​Chief had every right to be pissed. The guy came back empty-handed, and now he wanted to leave again. It didn't matter if it was him or someone else who went; it meant losing another guy, and we were already dropping from exhaustion in that heat. We desperately needed water.

​-"So... what do we do, guys?"

​-"Look over there! There's a dim light. Is that a farmhouse? Maybe someone lives there?"

​-"Wait a minute. How come we didn't see that during the day? Yeah, yeah, that must be an old farmhouse. We can go over there and ask the owner for some water."

​Sure enough, a little over a kilometer away, there was a farmhouse. A faint light was seeping from inside. We hadn't even noticed it while working under the sun.

​It made sense to all of us. At that point, we didn't even care if the water was completely sterile or not.

​-"Alright Orhan," chief said. "Since you forgot the water, this is on you. Go over there, tell them we're the road crew and we ran out of water. If anyone's living there, I hope they won't turn you away." He added;

-"And if no one's living there, check around for an outside faucet. Let's just hope the water's running. Just figure something out..."

​We shoved whatever empty bottles we had into Orhan's hands and sent him toward the farmhouse. We aimed the headlights of the asphalt paver in that direction. He was already wearing his high-vis vest, so between the lights and the reflective stripes, we could keep an eye on him from a distance.

​Orhan walked fast and reached the place in a few minutes. He stood in front of the house for a brief moment. And then, suddenly, he started sprinting back toward us with everything he had.

​-"What the hell is he doing? What happened?"

​No matter how fast he had walked there, he covered that same distance back at the speed of light, stopping right next to us.

​His face was pale as a sheet. He looked absolutely terrified.

​-"Orhan, what happened? Was someone there? Did someone pull a gun on you?"

​Orhan didn't react to anything we said. He was just staring into the void, shaking uncontrollably like he was in deep shock.

​-"Answer us! What happened? What did you see?"

​Still no reaction. We shook him hard. Finally, to snap him out of it, chief slapped Orhan hard across the face. He came to his senses a little.

​-"We have to go!! We have to leave!! Let's go!! They are here!! We have to get out of here!!!"

​He kept mumbling this to himself.

​-"Where are we going, man? What happened! Just tell us normally!"

​-"Chief... chief... that's not a house. There are no people there. There are other things. Entities. Please, for the love of God, let's get out of here!"

​-"Snap out of it!" Chief yelled at him again. -"What entity? What creature? Have you lost your mind? What the hell are you tripping on!"

​-"Chief. You don't understand. I saw them! They've claimed that place. There's something in there. I went up to the house, and when I looked through the window, I saw them! Inside... They lit a candle, and they were spinning around it! They were doing some kind of ritual!... Please, let's leave!"

​-"A ritual? Hahaha. You've completely lost it, boy. Are you hallucinating from the thirst? I keep telling you to stop obsessing over those paranormal stories. See? Your brain is playing tricks on you. Or are you just trying to pull a prank on us... Hahaha."

​Neither chief nor any of us took a single word Orhan said seriously. Hearing a grown man believe in nonsense like that just made us laugh.

​-"So they lit a candle and spun around it, huh? Hahaha."

​-"Look, I'm telling you! Why won't you believe me? They are in there... There are no humans there. There are other kinds of entities..."

​We ignored him.

​-"Alright, alright, I'll go," Melih chimed in, laughing.

​-"Fine, take the bottles, Melih," Şef said, sounding a bit relieved. 

-"Ignore this coward, the heat's making him see things."

​Melih gathered the empty bottles from the ground. Orhan was still leaning against the paver's tire, covering his face with his hands, shivering. As Melih walked past him, he patted Orhan's shoulder:

​-"Don't worry kiddo, I'll say hi to your friends at the ritual," he joked, and started walking away.

​Then he zipped up his high-vis vest and walked into the pitch-black night, heading straight for the farmhouse.

​The paver's headlights were already pointing that way. We watched that yellow, reflective vest slowly shrink into the darkness. His pace was relaxed, confident. Melih wasn't the kind of guy to get scared of things like this anyway; he was the biggest and most reckless guy in our crew.

​For a while, we just watched his back. He slowly approached the house. Near the very edge of where the headlights could reach, we could only make out the glow of his vest in the dark.

​But then... something very strange started happening.

​Instead of moving in a straight line toward the house, Melih's high-vis vest began to move aimlessly from left to right.

​-"What the hell is he doing?" one of us asked.

​-"I don't know... Maybe he's looking for a faucet around the house?"

​We kept watching him for a bit. No. What he was doing didn't look like searching for something. That yellow glow would move a bit to the right, stop abruptly, and then move back to the left exactly the same way. It was as if, without any purpose at all, he was just pacing left and right in the pitch black. Back and forth, like a pendulum... Not taking a single step forward toward the house or backward toward us, just moving strictly left and right.

​-"Guys, what is Melih actually doing? Is he trying to mess with us?" Chief said. He was squinting, trying to make sense of that bizarre movement, just like the rest of us.

​This time, Melih's high-vis vest started moving left and right much faster, in a jagged, jerky way. From a distance, it was just a yellow light swinging wildly in the dark. We all fell dead silent, completely locked onto that absurd sight.

​I was the one who broke the silence.

​-"Screw this! Chief, we're dying of thirst! What the hell are they doing?!" I snapped angrily.

​-"Yeah Murat, you're right. Come on, let's go check this out together. Let's just get that damn water and bring it back. These guys have all lost their minds! Like this is the time for jokes!"

​-"You're right chief, let's go," I said, while the others groaned in agreement. We were genuinely sick of this water taking so long. We didn't even know if there was actually water there yet. One guy was talking about entities, the other was pulling stupid pranks.

​Chief and I started walking into the darkness. As we got closer to Melih, his meaningless left-right pacing was still going on.

​Right as we were getting close, Melih and his high-vis vest suddenly stopped dead in their tracks. Not a single flinch. He just stood there.

​As we quickened our pace, that yellow glow in the pitch black remained completely motionless. There wasn't much distance left between us now.

​-"Murat," chief said, suddenly pausing.

​-"Look, we've wasted too much time. You grab Melih and bring him to me. I'm gonna go toward the house, see if anyone's living there, ask for water or find a faucet. Come on, let's not waste any more time."

​-"Alright, Chief."

​As chief veered off to the right, toward the yard of the house, and left my side, I kept walking straight ahead toward that motionless yellow high-vis vest.

​-"Melih! Joke's over, come on man, let's go!" I called out as I got slightly closer.

​No answer. Not a chuckle, not a movement...

​When I was about 15-20 meters away, my footsteps naturally began to slow down. My eyes had fully adjusted by now, and the paver's headlights were still shining in this direction, even if they were weak at this distance. And in that moment, I felt a massive knot drop into my stomach. A hard-to-describe, ice-cold, bizarre feeling washed over me.

​Because the thing standing in front of me wasn't Melih.

​The high-vis vest was draped over a thick branch of a dead, twisted tree, just hanging in mid-air. There was no one inside it. Melih wasn't anywhere around. Just the vest...

​I stood rooted to the spot. I couldn't tear my eyes away from that empty vest. My mind was frantically thrashing around for a logical explanation in those few seconds. Okay, let's say Melih was pulling a prank... But we had been staring intently at that yellow reflective light the entire time, from far away until we got here. How did he take off that vest in the pitch black, without us noticing at all, and hang it on that tree branch with such professional stealth?

​How did he do it? Melih had just been standing there like a statue. If he took the vest off, we would have seen the movement. And in such a short amount of time? That glowing light had never cut out, never disappeared while we were watching. Or... if this vest had been here the whole time, what the hell was that thing we saw from afar, moving back and forth? And where was Melih?

​In the suffocating heat of the night, I felt a cold sweat run down my spine. I tore my eyes away from the vest and looked toward the dark wooded area.

​This place was genuinely terrifying. While I was trying to figure out how Melih did this, or where he was, trying to make sense of it all, I became fully aware of the sheer gloom of our surroundings.

​Not knowing what to do, I quickly turned my head toward the house. I saw chief walking through the door. He was stepping inside slowly; clearly no one was home, and he was going in to see if there was running water. He went inside, and then the door closed.

​And in that exact moment, something incredibly strange happened. The second chief went inside and the door shut... it was as if someone tripped a breaker. The headlights of the asphalt paver went out with a loud snap. Right at that exact second!

​It was a very long time ago. I was only in my mid-twenties back then. As I write these lines to you now, my hand can barely hold the pen... But I'm writing this, partly because I want to rid myself of the vividness of these memories, and partly, perhaps, to silence a pang of conscience that still haunts me from time to time. I don't know. But for some reason, I want others to know about it too.

​In our village, there was an old, abandoned house. It was located way out on the outskirts of the village. When I was a child, our elders would tell us never to wander around that house, that we shouldn't go anywhere near it. At first, with our childish minds, we thought they just made it up to keep us from straying too far from the neighborhood. But as we got older, we realized that the rumors spreading through the village weren't empty words at all. There truly was a curse on that house; people weren't warning us for nothing.

​One day, sitting around a campfire kind of gathering, we learned the full story of that house and why it was abandoned. Once upon a time, a sinister man and a woman had moved to that distant spot. They were the kind of people whose faces just dripped with hatred and malice. Even looking at them made you feel sick to your stomach. According to what was said, over time, they brought a sinister energy with them to that place. Dark magic, dealing with spirits... They were casting hexes. Strangers from outside who heard of their reputation started coming there too. In exchange for money, for gold, they would unleash the entities under their command to haunt people, just to get whatever they wanted. The place we lived in began to turn into a very restless, uneasy place. People started seeing and hearing things roaming the village at night—things that shouldn't have been there.

​Later on, whatever finally happened, screams began to echo from the house of that man and woman involved in those filthy deeds. Every night, the man and the woman would scream constantly, as if they were in agonizing pain. And no one dared to go and see what was happening. After a while, the sounds completely stopped... When the stench started rising from the house, they finally understood that the man and the woman had died a horrific death inside.

​They thought those sinister people had finally gotten what they deserved, but it didn't end there. Just when the whole village thought they were finally rid of those demonic things, after a while, the occurrences flared up again. The exact same screams started rising once more from the house where that man and woman had lived. Those things roaming around started showing themselves to people again from time to time. The villagers couldn't find a cure for this, no matter what. Whatever they did, they couldn't manage to rid themselves of that calamity.

​During the time that coincided with our childhood, the light in an upstairs room of that completely empty, old house would turn on after dark on certain nights. Even though there was no one inside, even though that house had long been an abandoned place...

​On nights like that, a heavy gloom would descend upon the area. The dogs would stop barking, the birds would stop singing. No one even wanted to step foot outside their homes. Naturally, no one went to see what it was; there wasn't anyone who even approached the house in those days anyway.

​I was in my mid-twenties when I learned all this. I remember how tense I got, how tightly I clenched my teeth when I listened to it. They told us we weren't children anymore, that this wasn't a game. It really wasn't just something the elders made up to keep us away from the area...

​Time passed, and a newly appointed teacher from the city was assigned to our village. He was an incredibly idealistic person. We liked him as soon as we met him. Every single one of us had made his acquaintance. Of course, after a short while, it came time for the story of that cursed house... We told him the exact same things I just told you.

​When the teacher heard the story, he laughed at us, saying;

 -"How could such a thing even be possible, my friends?"

-​"Teacher, don't laugh. If you only knew what we've suffered in this village for years because of that sinister house..."

-​"There is no such thing. Ghosts, entities, there are no such things. These are made-up fairytales. I am a man of science. I don't give credit to things like this.." he kept telling us.

 -"You've frightened yourselves. There must be someone among you exaggerating these stories, someone who sneaks into that house on certain nights and turns on that room's light just to scare you. Everything has a logical explanation."

​He didn't believe us. No matter how much we pleaded, he just wouldn't believe us.

-​"Look. The next time this famous light of yours turns on again, I'm going to go inside and check. I will prove to you that there is nothing there, that it's just a simple prank, or possibly an electrical problem. Please don't waste your minds on unnecessary metaphysical fairytales like this anymore. Let's stick with education and science. Let's leave these superstitious things behind..."

​He was an educated teacher from the city, after all. It was normal for him not to believe us.

​A short time passed after this conversation. And that sinister light of that sinister house suddenly appeared inside the house once again...

​That night, we gathered in the village square. That sinister, sickly yellow light was looking down at us from the second floor of the house again. The teacher was determined. He showed up with a huge battery-powered flashlight in his hand, wearing a thick coat over his shoulders. The village headman, the elders, us young folks... We all stood in front of him. We literally formed a wall of flesh.

-​"Teacher, please don't do this. Have pity on your youth, don't go to that house. This thing isn't what you think it is, it's not like what's written in books!" we practically begged the man.

​But the teacher couldn't care less. He looked at us in such a way, as if he pitied our ignorance and our cowardice. He smiled faintly.

-​"Wait for me here. In less than ten minutes, I'll find the mechanism behind that light and come right back. You'll all breathe a sigh of relief.." he said.

​And he slowly started walking down that dark path. We were left staring after him. At that moment, I won't lie, a glimmer of hope passed through me. Not just me, but I think everyone there felt it. Despite everything we had experienced, despite all the calamities and horrors we had seen with our own eyes, for a brief moment, we prayed silently;

-"I hope the teacher is right." 

We hoped that this was genuinely just a stupid prank played by some idle folks in the village, that he would walk out of that door laughing in a few minutes and make fun of us all. The human mind is like that, I guess we just wanted to take refuge in science, in logic in that moment.

​The beam of the teacher's flashlight moved toward the house in the pitch black... It moved closer... Then that rotting, heavy wooden door opened with a bitter creak. The teacher stepped inside.

​Not a single sound could be heard in the square. We waited, holding our breath. We first saw the beam of his flashlight sweeping across the downstairs windows. Then, that beam of light shifted toward the stairs. We understood; he was going upstairs, to the room where that sinister light was glowing. We couldn't hear his footsteps, but we knew he was climbing up.

​And then...

​Then, suddenly, a sound erupted from the house, slicing through that dead silence like a knife. It was a scream... But can a human being even scream like that? Believe me, I don't know. It was so primal, so full of a terror that seemed to tear the lungs apart... I can't describe it to you. It was the sound of someone losing their mind in that exact second, the sound of coming face-to-face with a mind-boggling evil never before seen in this world. Our blood ran cold. We just froze.

​The very moment that scream,which tore through our lungs just as it tore through that room, reached its absolute highest, most unbearable peak... Snap. That sickly yellow light went out instantly. The house fell completely dark. The silence of that moment was even more terrifying than the scream itself, believe me. It was as if that house had just swallowed something breathing, something alive, with its massive jaws, and having swallowed it, had drifted into a satiated sleep.

​We just stood there in the square. Our hands and feet were trembling. We couldn't even swallow. We didn't know what to do; we were stunned and devastated. Right before our eyes, a bright young man had walked into that darkness. We needed to go inside and check on him. But I won't lie, I don't like lying... Our blood had drained from us; we didn't have the courage to take a single step.

​Even so, a voice rose from among us, saying, -"We can't just leave him there!" Our conscience outweighed our fear. Everyone scattered to their homes and grabbed whatever they could find. Hunting rifles, pitchforks, axes, pickaxes, gas lanterns... Gathering strength from each other in groups of three or five, we charged into that house.

​The inside of the house was colder than the outside; a freezing air hit our faces. It smelled of dust and dirt, but beneath that, there was another strange, nauseating smell that burned the back of your throat, like mold and rusty iron. As those rotting floorboards of the stairs creaked under our heavy steps, our hearts were practically in our mouths. The barrels of the rifles were trembling in our hands.

​Finally, we reached the second floor, right in front of that corner room where the light had been on. The door was wide open. We shined our gas lanterns and flashlights inside. What does a person expect in a situation like this? Signs of a struggle, blood, a mangled body... Perhaps we even expected to lock eyes with that "thing," whatever it was. We had prepared ourselves for the worst.

​But what we saw, believe me, was far more terrifying than seeing blood.

​The room was completely empty.

​But I'm not talking about an ordinary emptiness. On the floor laid the accumulation of years: a layer of gray dust as thick as a finger. And on that dust, apart from our own footprints right at the threshold of the door, there was not a single mark! Not a footprint inside, not a sign of a struggle... The giant metal flashlight the teacher had was gone. The heavy, thick coat he wore was gone.

​It was as if the earth had opened up and swallowed the man whole. Or... As if he had never even stepped foot in that room, in that house.

​The village didn't sleep until morning that night. As soon as dawn broke, we reported the situation to the police. By noon, the village was swarming with police. They brought special search teams from the city, even search and rescue dogs, which were just beginning to be used back then. They tore the house apart from floor to ceiling. They searched the forest and the area around the house inch by inch for days.

​The result? A massive zero.

​The teacher had vanished into thin air. Not a drop of his blood, not a torn piece of clothing, nor a single item belonging to him was found. Since that day, not a single word has been heard from that man. That educated young teacher, who believed in science and laughed in our faces, was recorded not only in the files of that house but also in our hearts as an unhealing wound, simply as a "missing person."

​I kept blaming myself, wondering if we could have talked him out of it, if we didn't explain it well enough, if we didn't try hard enough to convince him. In the end, he was the one who wanted to go there, but we were the ones who let him...

​I continued living there until my late thirties. Then I left that place. While I lived with this remorse, that sinister yellow light still continued to turn on inside that cursed house on certain nights.

​Who knows. As long as that light is on, the entities of that house that swallow those who enter... perhaps they are still there, even to this day.

I checked the rules but couldn't find anything about self-promotion. To be honest, my main goal right now isn't self-promotion; even though I've posted the link in other promo subs, I just found this community. That's why I'm sharing it with you too, it's completely free until May 1st anyway. Since it's enrolled in KDP Select, I can't post the text directly here. Feel free to take a look if you're interested.

THE SHUTTLE TO THE OWNED VİLLAGE

​It's about:

Assigned to a mandatory post hundreds of miles from home, a young teacher boards a rusted night shuttle heading to a remote, forgotten village deep in the mountains of Anatolia.

​As the vehicle crawls through the lightless void, it keeps stopping in the middle of absolute nowhere. Out of the pitch-black darkness, passengers begin to step aboard, one by one.

​But these aren't travelers. They are silent, unsettling, nightmarish figures. They fill the freezing cabin without a word, and the unease rises until it becomes unbearable.

If you'd like, we can talk about it later. We can discuss other stories about supernatural entities, mystical events, and everything else. If you’d like to take a look, the Amazon link is below:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLTZGH1F

Assigned to a mandatory post hundreds of miles from home, a young teacher boards a rusted night shuttle heading to a remote, forgotten village deep in the mountains of Anatolia. As the vehicle crawls through the lightless void, unsettling, nightmarish figures begin to board...

Amazon Link:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLTZGH1F

What a mentality! Another team could be crashed like 7-2 or something. Bayern will finish the job in München 👍🏻

Assigned to a mandatory post hundreds of miles from home, a young teacher boards a rusted night shuttle heading to a remote, forgotten village deep in the mountains of Anatolia.

​As the vehicle crawls through the lightless void, it keeps stopping in the middle of absolute nowhere. Out of the pitch-black darkness, passengers begin to step aboard, one by one.

​But these aren't travelers. They are silent, unsettling, nightmarish figures. They fill the freezing cabin without a word, and the unease rises until it becomes unbearable.

​The young teacher realizes too late that they aren't just sharing a ride. They are here to reveal the terrifying truth.

​This place belongs to them.

Hello everyone,

I've been posting my links in the threads where self-promotion is allowed. So far, only 39 people have downloaded my free book. However, while hundreds of people in total have seen my paid books, not a single person has bought them.

​Is this just how Reddit works? Or do people simply not like what I write? I don't know, I can't be sure. What are your experiences regarding this? Has anyone here actually made any sales by posting their work on Reddit?