This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/APCleriot on 2024-09-29 16:19:29+00:00.

I wish she wouldn’t do that. I should have told her instead of burying my feelings until they exploded out of my mouth.

“Stop talking to me from another room!” I screamed from the kitchen.

My wife was in the front room, busy at something, probably the fish tank, and attempting to tell me about her day. We’d started the conversation in the kitchen when she characteristically left to do something else in another room.

I used to follow her around but it became apparent she would just keep leaving my vicinity until I gave up the pursuit. Then we’d have a scrambled chat filled with extended pauses and requests to repeat ourselves.

I was annoyed by this quirk of hers. I’m not sure how it didn’t drive her nuts. We never really conversed in any ideal or acceptable way.

Bills got missed. Chores left undone. We didn’t delegate tasks because our communication habits sucked.

“What?” she called back after my outburst.

“Fucking helllllllllll!” I roared. “God fucking damn fucking hell! Can you not stay in the same fucking room as me if you want to talk?! You started this fucking conversation!”

For a stretch of too many seconds, there was quiet.

“For fuck’s sake, answer me! Or better yet, get in here! Speak to me! To my face! Not from another room! Not from a different floor! Here! Now!” Spittle crawled through my beard like the frothing of a mad dog.

Again, nothing. No response. Fuck this. I scooped up my keys and intended to hit the road for the local pub. When I passed the front room, I hesitated. My wife wasn’t there after all.

“Fucking bullshit.” It didn’t matter where she was, only that she wasn’t in the same room as me. I was so pissed, I walked right by the car in the driveway - I usually parked on the street but didn’t that day for no reason I can remember - and couldn’t be bothered to go back.

As a result, I walked to some basement lounge featuring an awful band and skunky, overpriced beer. After spending too much to get inebriated, I left on the wrong side of midnight but before last call.

The calming effects of the alcohol, and time were a formula for guilt. I felt bad, and intended to apologise to her when I got home, unless she was sleeping.

Lights in the dining room and hallway said she’d waited up.

While fishing for keys, I drunkenly stumbled and shouldered the front door. It drifted open because it hadn’t been fully closed.

“Dear?” I called. “Everything okay?”

“Sure is!” she chimed, from the kitchen. The adjacent living room issued the noise of some reality TV show. “Why? What’s up?” A girlish giggle bubbled after the questions.

I sighed, already beginning to feel irked. With my shoes still on, I clomped down the hall and into the kitchen. “You left the front-” The lights were off, and so was the TV. She wasn’t there.

“Dear?” I thought she might be hiding behind the couch. Maybe she’d felt like drinking too, and believed a lighthearted revenge prank was in order. I probably deserved it, but definitely didn’t enjoy the prospect.

I went to the couch and, in the only hiding spot available, there was nothing. The only other place she could have gone would be the back deck, and I would have heard the sliding door open and close. Even drunk, however, I saw the lock had been toggled shut, a feature that only worked from inside the house.

“Dear?” I tried again, figuring I’d simply been mistaken about the TV, and her location.

“Yeah? What’s up?” This time her voice and queries seemed to come from the front room. However unlikely, she must have crossed the doorway of the hallway and gone through the dining area without my noticing.

Again, too much alcohol explained the inconsistency.

“Dear, I’m-”

Not in the front room either, but something had changed, evidence of her passing: the light had been switched off.

“Are you running away from me? I understand. I just want-”

“Dear,” she called from upstairs, “would you please bring me a glass of wine? The bottle on the counter.”

I huffed, but went to do her bidding, though fulfilling such requests always made me feel like a servant. A bottle of cheap merlot, the kind we drank when we were young and broke, waited accusingly by the microwave.

Half had already been drunk, another intentional symbol of what had been lost in our relationship. Pretty passive aggressive, I thought.

“Dear?” she called from our bedroom as I brought the wine. But again, the lights were off. She wasn’t there waiting.

“Dear?” I echoed back. “Where are you?”

“What do you mean? I’m over here.” She sounded happily confused.

The master bathroom. Light came from under the closed door. The showerhead hissed, and the glass door banged shut. She wanted to drink in the shower, of course.

But when I went in, there again, nothing was as it should be. No bathroom lights. No shower. No wife.

I began to feel uneasy. “Dear? What’s going on?”

“Dear?” she called from elsewhere. “The wine?”

“Where are you?” Each time I asked my voice seemed quieter.

“Over here,” she said, impatiently.

I went back into the hallway. She’d shut off the lights there too. There were two other bedrooms and another bathroom behind closed doors that always, always stood open before.

“Where-”

“Here!” she shrieked, and it seemed as if her lips grazed my ear. I spun. Some of the wine spilled onto the hardwood. “Over here, dear.”

The second bathroom. My hands trembled as I reached for the handle. Light slid from under the door. Another faucet came on. She had no reason to use that tub. We never used it. It was dirty from neglect.

Praying to a god I never believed in didn’t help. The bathtub wasn’t running. The lights were off. No one inside.

“What the hell is going on?!” I bellowed before shivering, and flinching when she called again.

“Dear?” Her voice became patient again, and seemed to be downstairs. Had she somehow slipped behind my back? The lights had to be a trick. The shower and the tub too. It could only be revenge. Nothing else made sense.

“Stop running!” I shouted. “I’m trying to bring your wine! The wine you asked me to bring!” I tried to laugh but the sound died in my throat as lights from the front hall stretched lazily up the stairs and into the dark hallway where I could hardly dare to move.

“Dear!” she shouted, again close.

“Dear?” Again far, possibly the basement or garage.

“Dearrrrrrrrrrr,” once more, like the final breath of the dead.

My nerves snapped and I wobbled forward to the top of the stairs. I had to get out of here. I had wandered into the wrong house, a nightmare. Down, down, down the steps into shadows instead of the light promised a moment ago.

Hands stiff and useless, I tried the door. The deadbolt had been thrown by me. I always locked up everything at night. It stuck a little sometimes. Pulling on the handle and turning the switch required two hands.

Remarkably, I hadn’t dropped the wine in my panicked state. Placing the glass on the nearby end table, I ignored another call from her.

“Dear, where are you trying to go? I’m not out there. No one is out there.” Her words overlapped one another. No human being talks like that! It cannot be my wife!

I opened the front door to be confronted by an unusually dense fog, full of swirling tendrils reaching forward, coming for me like clawed fingers. All of my short, rapid breaths inhaled the fumes, and smothered my airways. I fell to my knees. My vision began to fade, but not before I saw the legions of tortured visages in the gloom: all seemed to beg for relief until they realised I could do nothing. Their collective anger erupted into a cursed howl. Or maybe they were warning me.

I fell backward into the house before the first foggy finger could reach the threshold. Then I kicked shut the door, and fought unconsciousness until I could cough up whatever plague now lives in the new eternal night outside my home.

I could breathe. I could breathe. That’s all that mattered until…

“Dear? What’s up?” Cheerful. Too cheerful.

I practically whispered back, “N-nothing, dear.” I picked up the wine, and have been trying to bring it to her ever since. It’s an endless journey through my house. She does not let me stop. If I try, the calls come sharper, louder, and with promises of harm and death.

“The wine! The wine! I’ll have your skin!”

I write on my phone while on the move.

I cannot get out. I am going to die soon, I’m sure. This message is both a plea and a warning.

Help me if you can. Help my wife. I don’t know what she has become.

Be kind to your significant other.

You’ll miss those pet peeves when they’re gone. They are part of the person you love.

I should have been patient. I shouldn’t have given up following her. I shouldn’t have yelled.

I miss my wife. I’m afraid I won’t see her again. I’m afraid I will.

It’ll be the end soon if I don’t. It will be death, I know, if she lets me find her, if I see the horror I have made.