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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Theeaglestrikes on 2024-10-29 02:01:40+00:00.

My name’s José, and I (49m) have been married to Kelly (42f) for 6 years. We met at Mexico City International Airport in 2014 — both of us were waiting in a bar for a late-night long-haul to London. She quickly clocked my black epaulettes, each bearing four yellow stripes, then swivelled in her barstool to smile at me. It was an unconvincing smile. I remember that. She looked like she’d been crying.

And I also remember her asking, “Are you flying somewhere far, far away?”

When I revealed my destination, this pretty stranger laughed and said that she would be on my flight. I don’t remember much of what I said, truth be told, but I quipped about her not needing to worry because I’d just read Flying for Dummies. I know. I’m not the first captain to make that joke.

In all honesty, as scummy as it seems, I wanted to impress this heartbroken wife. She captivated me. After all of these years, I still remember every last thing she said. On the other hand, my words and feelings are fuzzy memories. Have been from the get-go. My mother used to say Kelly had put a spell on me.

Anyway, without being prompted, the sullen woman told me her story. That she was enjoying a honeymoon in Mexico, but she’d booked an early return flight home. Kelly explained that her husband, Michael, wasn’t the person he’d purported to be. He was an abuser. A liar.

“And he’s making me tell lies too,” she said. “He emptied me.”

That bizarre and unsettling choice of words would ring in my head for the next 10 years. And only one day ago, after I found and watched that cursed tape, did I finally understand what Kelly meant. I think, at that airport bar a decade ago, she might’ve been warning me to stay away from her. I think that’d been a glimpse of the real Kelly.

But I’m not making sense. Let me explain.

It could’ve ended at the end of that conversation. We could’ve parted ways. I wish we had. But I was compelled to see Kelly again. I know that’s awful. It’s not a habit of mine — falling for a married woman. I just felt something indescribable. Something I now realise may not have been love at all.

I spent a week in London before the return flight to Mexico, so I frequently met up with Kelly at her hotel to check that she was okay. She was too frightened to return to her hometown in Cambridge, as she believed that Michael would find her. Kelly ignored my pleas to report everything to the police, which seemed strange even at the time.

To cut a long story short, we quickly formed a bond, and things didn’t end when I returned to Mexico. I visited Kelly every time I flew to England. She moved to Brighton, so I took the train to see her, depending on where I landed. I once took a short-haul flight from Paris to London just to see her.

A year later, when our relationship inevitably became something more, I’d already made the decision: I wanted to move to England to be with her. I’d been training to become an airport technician, and I secured a job at Heathrow in late 2015. By early 2017, Kelly and I had bought a house together. In 2018, we got married.

I’m obviously fast-forwarding through the ins-and-outs of our relationship, but Reddit isn’t built for essays, is it? I’m here to tell you what I found yesterday morning whilst tidying a storage cupboard.

Kelly’s clusterfuck of clutter, as I like to call it, came tumbling out of the open door and washed over my feet. A stark reminder that weekends shouldn’t be wasted on chores. If I’d been relaxing on the sofa, I might not have discovered what I discovered. Maybe Kelly would’ve disposed of her own clutter, and we would have lived a happy 50 years together.

But I was the one wading through the puddle of forgotten belongings. And what caught my eye during the tumble was a camcorder, surfing atop the junk-heap, which spilled out of its bag. Landed at my feet.

I picked it up and chuckled. I knew Kelly and I were old, but not that old. I had no idea she owned such a relic. And curiosity got the better of me, obviously. Who wouldn’t want to check the contents of a spouse’s dusty tape locked away for who-knows-how-many decades?

When I plugged in the device to charge it, an error message displayed on the ancient screen. I thought I’d been thwarted by tape or hardware degradation. But I fixed everything, unfortunately, by cleaning out filth from the tape slot. Then I rewound the recording and pressed the play icon.

The white, pixelated text read: 10/09/2014.

For Americans, that’s September 10th, 2014. And I quickly realised that was a week before I first met my wife. Everything slotted together horribly when Kelly stepped out of a hotel bathroom in wedding lingerie.

I realised what kind of tape I’d found.

Don’t think less of me for watching. It wasn’t like that. Even degenerates, I assume, don’t want to watch the person they love share such intimacy with someone else — let alone an abusive ex-husband. And Michael was abusive. Kelly wasn’t lying about that. But she’d only ever told me fragments of the story.

So, even though I expected a raunchy sex tape, I wasn’t watching for that reason. My eyeballs weren’t springing from their cartoon sockets. Well, okay, I was watching the video keenly, but fear rendered me wide-eyed. Not lust. I just knew that something was wrong with the hotel room. The only natural thing in the footage was Kelly.

And as I watched my wife sprawl across the bedsheets, waiting for her filming husband to join her, I eyed the room’s cream-coloured walls. I didn’t give a rat’s rear about the interior design, but something hidden in the paint made me sick. You wouldn’t understand unless you’d seen the video for yourself.

Then something in my head started to ache sharply, much like a migraine brewing behind my sockets. But it wasn’t that. It was a painful urge which prompted each of my squeaking eyes to twist. I looked, without even wanting to look, at the edge of the screen. Searched for something that was only just beyond both the border of the video and Kelly’s vision.

I wanted to scream at the younger version of my wife as she lay still. As she watched Michael with caving dimples and a provocative grin. I wanted to scream at her to run, though I didn’t know why I wanted to do so. That was the most terrifying thing of all. I didn’t fear the obvious horror of watching my wife and her ex make love. I feared something else in the room. Something I didn’t understand.

“Get rid of that camera,” Kelly whispered, before wagging her index in a come-hither motion.

Michael’s heavy breathing was not the breathing of a lustful man. It was the laboured breathing of something hungry. Hungry in a way that neither food nor sex could satiate.

“We need to preserve this moment,” Michael said.

Kelly rolled her eyes. “Is that right?”

In response, the man stopped breathing, and my wife’s face changed. Her sultry smile morphed into not a frown, but downturned lips. Lips hanging open in the same horrified expression that I must’ve been wearing whilst watching the tape.

Michael hacked, as if bringing up a hairball, then promised, “I’ll put it down.”

He placed the device on the dressing table and walked over to the bed, but Kelly did not thank him. She whimpered and recoiled. Not due to Michael leaving the camera recording — I don’t even think she’d noticed its red, blinking light.

No, my wife was still frightened because she sensed a presence. Not her husband. Not the room’s seedy atmosphere. Not even the claustrophobic nature of the walls. She sensed the same thing that I sensed, though neither of us knew exactly what we sensed.

“I’m not in the mood anymore…” Kelly whimpered as Michael climbed onto the bed.

He hushed her, stroking the backs of his twitching fingers against her trembling cheek. “Don’t be like that, darling. It’s time to consummate.”

Then Michael gasped like a punctured tyre and shot his head towards the empty corner of the room. He nodded slowly, but neither I nor the recorded version of Kelly saw what he saw.

“If I must,” he told the empty air.

Then came something I still don’t know how to explain.

The plaster rippled as something behind the wall pressed against it. Tried to get out. Like a hand forming a shadow puppet, something about the shape was illusory. It could’ve been a man. Could’ve been a monster. Its outline rapidly changed from a tall thing with arms and legs to a misshapen blob of indiscernible segments.

After less than a second or two of the wall bulging, its plaster flattened again, and the living shape was gone. Kelly screamed in synchronicity with me, but she hadn’t even noticed the anomaly. She was staring, unblinkingly, into her husband’s eyes.

“WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOUR FACE, MICHAEL?” she cried.

What terrified me was that, even when the camera caught his face, I didn’t see any supernatural change in Kelly’s former husband. Didn’t see anything other than a very human man — one with an unkind smile and dead eyes, perhaps, but still a man. However, Kelly saw something. Something I didn’t.

Still, all of that pales in comparison to what happened next.

Michael thrust his hand into Kelly’s open mouth, prompting her eyes to open just as widely. Her husband’s whole forearm plunged into her jaws, muffling her series of screams. Then my wife wriggled and squirmed as Michael propelled his upper arm down her throat. Pushed deeper and deeper until his shoulder met her lips.

Another impossibility followed. One that …

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