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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Pprdge_Frm_Rmbrs on 2024-04-09 05:11:30.
It had been an ordinary Saturday night.
My husband, John, and I hosted our friends Thomas and Shannon Watson, and their son Emmett for dinner. John is a wizard on the grill, and prepared a delicious meal of steak, potatoes, and grilled asparagus for everyone while I gossiped with Thomas and Shannon, and Emmett played video games with our boys Noah and Liam.
We ate around 6pm and then the adults played cards while the kids watched a movie in the living room. It was around 9pm when the Watsons left and John cleaned up as I got our sons ready for bed.
I remember every minute of it.
Brushing teeth, pajamas, reading stories—kissing Noah on the forehead when he finally lost the fight to keep his eyes open—secretly turning Liam’s nightlight on for him, even though he claimed that nine was too old for such things.
When I began my own bedtime preparations, John came into the bathroom and wrapped me in a hug from behind. Even after twelve years of marriage and two kids, there was a flutter in my stomach as he pulled me tightly to him. Feeling a little frisky, having had a few glasses of wine earlier, I told him to go wait in bed for me to finish up and that I was about to, “give him the ride of his life.” Which meant we were going to have very quiet, under the covers, parent sex, and pray that neither of the boys woke up.
But as I was finishing brushing my teeth, I heard John’s chainsaw-esque snores ripping through the air. During the card game, he’d been drinking some bourbon that Thomas brought over, and alcohol always made him drowsy—he passed out the minute his head hit the pillow. I chuckled as I crawled into my side of the bed and he woke briefly to tell me that he was just “resting his eyes for a minute”—knowing that he would be out cold ‘til the morning. And, laying my head on his chest, I drifted off to the rhythmic rise and fall of his breaths.
Yes, it had been an extraordinarily ordinary evening—exceedingly mundane—unequivocally average. No different from any other time we hosted the Watsons, or the hundreds of times I’d put the children bed, or the dozens of times John and I made “intimate” plans only for one of us to fall asleep. Likely, in the years to follow, it would have never stood out from the background—I would have forgotten the details.
Yet they’re seared into my memory now—I make a point to drift through them every day—to immortalize every image, taste, sound, smell…feel…
Because it was the last ordinary night I ever had.
Because it was the last time that I saw my family.
****
When I awoke the following morning, I sensed something was different before I even opened my eyes.
You know how everyone’s house has its own unique smell? A scent built up over time—permeated into the very walls—changed and personalized over the years by the various occupants. One that the inhabitants become immune to quickly, but is noticed instantly by guests. You’d never quite be able to describe your own, but you’d know instantly if it changed.
That morning, I smelled my house for the first time in twelve years—for the first time since John and I moved into it and it was new to us.
And it was wrong.
Primal instinct triggered by the change in environment put me slightly on-edge, and I reached over to John’s side of the bed for comfort, only to find it empty.
John never got up early after a night of drinking, especially not after a night of drinking bourbon. When I fell asleep the night before, I had expected to wake in the morning and hear a still-storing John next to me—even planned to sneak noiselessly out of bed to make everyone breakfast.
But there was silence in the room.
It was strange, and the feeling of unease rose more, but I told myself I was being silly.
‘Maybe he wanted to surprise me and went downstairs to make waffles,’ I hoped—they’re my favorite, and on occasion, I’d enter the kitchen to find a giant stack of them waiting for me and the kids. It didn’t account for the difference in ambient smell, but as Spring was beginning, I wondered if that might just be due to flowers blooming or trees budding outside—could have been that John opened up a window somewhere.
I rubbed the sand from my eyes, and gave a groggy yawn as I sat up in bed—a small part of me worried that when my vision came into focus, the room around me wouldn’t be the same as the one that I went to sleep in the night before. But I was relieved to find everything looked normal. The walls were still blue, the comforter over me orange, the lamps on the wooden bedside tables were white, and a photo from John’s and my wedding hung next to the bathroom door.
Checking my phone, I was shocked to see it was nearing 9am as I hadn’t slept past seven since Liam was born, and I questioned how many glasses of wine I’d really had the night before. I also saw that I’d received a text twenty minutes earlier from ‘Hubby’ and opened it to find a message that read, “Imma make you pancakes—gone to the store for eggs.”
I smiled as I typed out my response, “You’re the best! Oh, and if you’re still there, grab fruit snacks for Noah; we’re out.”
Climbing out of bed, I put my phone in my pocket, stretched, and left the room anticipating the sounds of my boys playing games or watching TV downstairs—worrying about what messes they might have already made in the twenty minutes since their father left. However, my ears were met with more silence as I walked through the hall.
It was unexplainably eerie to me. There was a stillness to the morning that I hadn’t felt in the nine years since Liam had been born, and even less so in the six after Noah came along. John hadn’t mentioned taking them with him to the store in his message, but I supposed it was possible that he had. Approaching Liam’s door, I decided to poke my head in and see if he, his brother, or both of them might be inside.
“Liam?” I called, as I turned the knob. And, when I peered within, I froze.
It wasn’t Liam’s room.
At least, the contents of it weren’t Liam’s.
Where a child’s bed usually sat under the window, there was a desk with a computer. The bookshelf on the far wall wasn’t filled with toys and Lego models—it contained thick, heavy books. On the walls that should have been adorned with posters from video games, there were framed college degrees.
It was unmistakably an adult’s office.
“What the shit?” I said aloud, as I closed my eyes tightly and reopened them several times—thinking I must somehow be hallucinating and eventually Liam’s things would reappear in front of me.
But the office remained.
Backing out into the hallway, I scanned both directions to ensure I’d opened Liam’s door, but as a mother, I already knew that I had. There was no amount of tiredness, or hangover, or whatever I was experiencing that morning that would have made me mistake my own child’s room—I’d found it in the pitch-black many times before—knew the number of steps from my bedroom to his without even having to count them.
As well, we didn’t have an office in our house and never had. John’s a carpenter and I’m a nurse—we had no need for one as neither of us ever worked from home.
“Liam?! Noah?!” Anxiety rising, I shouted my son’s names, but received no answer. I ran down to Noah’s room and ripped the door open to find that it too was changed. It full of exercise equipment. No dinosaurs on the walls, no toy trucks strewn across the floor.
It was a home gym…
“What the fuck is happening…?” I whispered to myself before then screaming, “LIAM?! NOAH?! JOHN?! This is a prank, right?! Come out, now! It’s not funny!”
But even as I said the words, I didn’t believe them. There was no way that the three of them could have completely overhauled both rooms overnight without me waking for any of it.
As I was starting to hyperventilate, my phone buzzed—I got another text from ‘Hubby.’
“Who’s Noah?” It read.
Instantly, I called him, and as soon as I heard the line pick up on the other end, I launched into questions.
“John, what the hell is going on? Where are the boys? Why is Liam’s room an office and Noah’s a home gym?”
But it wasn’t John’s voice that answered me.
“Honey, slow down. Who are Noah and Liam? And did you call me John? Are you okay?”
It was Thomas—Thomas Watson was on the other line.
Suspecting I somehow hit the wrong button when I made the call, I pulled the phone away from my ear to check the Caller ID.
It said, ‘Hubby’ at the top of the screen.
“Thomas?! Why do you have John’s phone? Where is here? WHERE ARE MY SONS?!”
I was sprinting through the house checking for any sign of them as I yelled at Thomas on the phone. There wasn’t a single piece of evidence anywhere that children had ever lived there—no toys, no stains on the carpet, no height marks in the kitchen to track their growth. The wall leading down the stairs that had contained at least fifteen photos of each of them the night before was bare.
“Kara, please try to calm down. Look, I’m leaving the store now—I’ll be home in twenty minutes. Maybe you had a nightmare or something? Just try to breathe and talk to me.” He said. His tone one of reassurance.
But I could not “calm down.” My sons were missing—all traces of them lifted from my home. Everything else about the place remained the same—the furnishings, the paint colors, the decorations. Yet it was as if Noah and Liam had never existed—every picture, every drawing they’d done for me, their game systems, children’s books and movies—gone.
“Where…
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1bzhvdw/my_name_is_kara_logan_and_i_just_want_to_go_home/
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