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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/ShoggothDontTell on 2024-10-12 11:38:13+00:00.

DISCLAIMER: I’m fucking terrified, and honestly having this laptop open and an internet connection is all that’s keeping me from a full blown panic attack. With that in mind I apologize if this story is kind of frantic, I’m doing my best to relate everything as accurately and clearly as I can. Me and my girlfriend Kiera have tried Googling answers to what’s going on, but we can’t find anything helpful. It’s admittedly desperate coming on here with our story, but I am becoming increasingly convinced something paranormal or unnatural is taking place and figured perhaps someone in this community could have some obscure knowledge that could help us or at least give us some insight as to what’s happening. Thank you in advance.

Alright, so all of this started what I suppose was a few hours ago. After a glorious night of too much pizza and too much Netflix, me and Kiera made our way to bed. She got in bed first like she always does while I went and topped up our cat’s (Zelda and Pickles) food and water bowls. When I got to the bedroom Kiera was already under the covers waiting for me and scrolling on her phone. I joined her and no sooner had my head hit the pillow than a loud knocking sound echoed through the house. It was knuckles against glass, the glass of our back window. “Did you hear that?” I asked Kiera.

She nodded. Then the noise came again. It was oddly rhythmic, sort of like those knocks you and your friends would make up as a kid in order to be allowed into each other’s treehouses or forts. I don’t know what’s relevant information or if the knocking sound will even translate to text, but I’ll do my best below to transcribe the pattern. It went:

Knock Knock. Knock, Knock. Knock, Knock, Knock. Knock, Knock, Knock, Knock. Knock. Knock, Knock, Knock, Knock.

When the knocking started up again Zelda and Pickles both bolted down the hallway, into our room, and under our bed. No amount of coaxing has been able to get them out since they went under. It’s been nearly four hours since the knocking and they refuse to move, both me and Kiera have stuck our heads under there a few times and they don’t seem to be hurt in any way, just really scared, I get it, I’m scared too.

The pattern was strange, but at the time both Kiera and I assumed burglars. Before we started dating, I lived in a shitty apartment that got broken into all the time, so I was prepared for such a situation. I grabbed the bat I keep by my side of the bed, kissed my girlfriend, then started making my way through the house.

As I moved down the sleepy hallway to the back window, I embarrassingly started pounding a fist against my chest like Matthew McConaughey in Wolf of Wallstreet and mumbling old Mike Tyson fight quotes to myself in an attempt to be hyped up for the possible confrontation that awaited me. All that psyching myself up though, proved to be for nothing.

I got to the back of the house, flicked on the outside lights, and saw that nothing was out of place. Everything was as I’d left it and there were no signs of any intruders, not even from an animal. I double checked the other rooms in the house, then made my way back to bed.

“I don’t know what it was,” I said as I walked back into the room, “Can’t see…”

I trailed off when I saw Kiera pacing back and forth beside the bed, she was holding her phone up to her ear and sobbing uncontrollably. We’ve been together for five years, I’ve seen this girl go through a lot, but I’ve never seen her cry this much.

“What’s happened?” I asked, assuming there’s been an accident, or someone’s just died.

Kiera turns around, her mouth drops, and her eyes bulge out like a bugs, she looks like she’s seen a ghost. I move in to give her a hug. As I get close she hits me in the arm with her phone, I think she’s mad at me for a second, but she quickly embraces me. Through her sobbing I hear her say, “I thought you were gone…”

“Where’d I go?” I say, not yet understanding the situation.

Through the phone I hear the muffled voice of Kiera’s father, “Is that him? Is that him?” He asks over and over, “He’s alright?”

After a minute of the tightest hug, she’s ever given me, Kiera pulls herself away, resumes the call with her father, telling him that I’m fine now and there’s nothing to worry about. I’m confused as fuck at this point and after she hangs up the phone, I sit her down on the edge of the bed and ask what’s going on. She wants to know the same thing.

“I don’t understand,” I tell her.

She puts her phone up in front of my face and shows me the time. “You were gone an hour,” she says, “I thought you’d been kidnapped or killed.”

If it wasn’t for the amount of tears I’d have assumed she was fucking with me. I was gone barely two minutes, but sure enough the time on the phone showed that an hour had passed. I grabbed my phone off the bedside table, my time matched her phone too, an hour had passed.

“Did we go to bed later than I thought?” I ask.

“No,” Kiera insists.

“Daylight savings?”

“No.”

“It was two minutes,” I tell her, “This doesn’t make any sense… We must’ve got the time wrong.”

“We didn’t,” Kiera insists, “I’ve been checking my phone ever five seconds. You were gone an hour. Where did you go?”

I explain to her that all I did was go look outside, then check the rest of the house on my way back to bed. “I don’t think you’re lying,” she tells me, “But that can’t be true.”

Kiera then tells me what happened once I left the room. After a couple of minutes of hearing nothing from me she started shouting out for me, I should note that I didn’t hear her once while I was out of the room. After a few more minutes she gets up out of bed and starts looking for me, apparently, she was speaking aloud this whole time, convinced I was pranking her and begging me not to scare her; again, I heard none of this.

She didn’t just go to the back window, but also out into the backyard, she saw nothing out of place outside either. She then tries to call me, but quickly realizes I left my phone on the bedside table. She goes back to bedroom, at this point about fifteen minutes have passed and she is freaking out. Due to some of her family history Kiera is reluctant to call the police, and she’s also worried about what to say and still somewhat unsure if this is all just some prank I’m pulling, so she instead calls her father.

He’s woken up by the call. Kiera frantically tells him what’s going on, apparently this is the point she thought something really terrible had happened because she thought that if I was still nearby, I’d jump out and say something before I let her wake her father. They talk for a while and eventually her father decides to drive over to our place. He was halfway here when I walked back into the room, and it took us quite a bit of convincing to get him to turn back and go home to his place. I don’t love my in-laws, but in hindsight I kind of wish we’d just let him come over.

After telling me her side Kiera showed me the call log in her phone, and I could in fact see that she’d been on a call with her father for over half an hour. Apart from the minute it took me to feed the cats and the two minutes I took to check the back window we’ve been beside each other all night, there’s no way she could’ve made a call this long without me noticing, so even if we somehow mixed up the times, we were apart for drastically different lengths of time.

This doesn’t even include the fact that we were apparently both at the back of the house and she was even outside without either of us seeing or noticing each other. At this point we’re both freaking out and we start Googling for answers to what could’ve happened. We found nothing helpful, though to be honest it was hard to even know what to search for.

What we did next was admittedly very stupid, but in my defense, I was stressing out and knew sleep wasn’t an option until I got some kind of closure. “I wonder if it’ll happen again,” I said.

Kiera was no amused by the thought and didn’t want to talk about it, but like an asshole I pushed the subject forward and eventually managed to convince her to try an experiment. The idea was that I would slowly walk out of the room to the back of the house and back to the bedroom, stopping after each step and yelling out to Kiera, she’d yell back and that way we’d know if something unusual was happening. I’d also take my phone with me this time as well as an added safety precaution.   

I took a large step across the threshold and out of the bedroom, I could still see Kiera but called out anyway. I don’t know why, but the word that came out of my mouth was, “Marco!”

Kiera looked confused, but cracked a small smile, “Pollo.”

Another step, “Marco.”

“Pollo.”

I took another step; all I could see of Kiera now was her feet poking up underneath the blankets. “Marco!”

“Pollo!”

Another step and she was gone from my sight. I took a deep breath, my stomach started to curdle, and I felt my skin turn to gooseflesh. “Marco…” I said.

Silence. I felt my heart hammer against my chest. For half a dozen beats there was nothing. Just as I was about to sprint back to the room, a noise broke the silence. Knock, Knock.

A knocking came at the back window. Same rhythm, same pattern. I should’ve just went back to bed, back to Kiera, but reflexively I turned and ran to the back window. The pattern ended just as the window came into sight and I swear on my life I saw something move across the glass. A wide lum…

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1g1y7la/i_dont_know_how_much_time_ive_got_left_part_1/