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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/abiroadwrites on 2024-11-26 19:12:49+00:00.

A little over a few months ago I noticed a change in my girlfriend, Charlotte. To go back before that, we met a few years ago when we were both working at the same crappy part time job. This is important, because long before we started dating I knew this was a woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with

I promise I wasn’t some creepy stalker about it, I was perfectly happy being friends with her. At first we only saw each other at work, a crappy pizza joint that only the worst people in the city seemed to visit. But every day when I got to work she was there with a smile and a joke, sometimes a snack to share. The more time I spent with her, the more I wanted to become someone she could be proud of.

At first we really only saw each other at work. Then I started picking her up to go to the mall together, we would get coffee or dinner once a week, then before long we were dating.

I worked hard at that job, and I’ve worked hard at every job I’ve had since I met her. She really makes me a better person and that’s not just a tangent about how much I love her, she’s such a wonderful person that everyone around her just kind of improves by default.

I say that because … I need you to know it for what I’m about to tell you next.

A while back my girlfriend (of two years at that point, I’ve known her for four and a half now) came home from a camping trip and started acting differently. At first it was little stuff, she totally lost her appetite for a while and didn’t seem to want to eat anything. We assumed it was a stomach bug, or stress from work, and she tried to dial it back to get more rest. At first that seemed to be what she needed, her appetite came back for a while and she even seemed better than before.

Then she couldn’t sleep at night. It started slowly, with her staying up on her phone for a few minutes longer than usual, then an hour, then I was waking up at 4 in the morning to find her pacing back and forth in the hallway of our apartment.

While that was going on (remember all of this developed over the last 6 months or so) she seemed to get more spaced out and day dreamy a lot. I would come home and find her starting out the window. When I would ask what she was looking at she would just smile and point at something I couldn’t seem to see. Other times I would wake up in the middle of the night to find her staring at a wall, or just standing in a doorway not doing anything. Every time I talked to her about it she promised me it was nothing, or that she would go see her doctor if it went on. I wanted to believe her as much as I wanted it to be nothing.

After that she started going out into the woods alone at night. It’s not a big forest, maybe a quarter acre or so, and spread out across a few people’s backyards. At first I didn’t really think much of it. Like everything else it started small and escalated. She would go out for a quick twenty minute walk right at sunset, then it was thirty minutes, then forty-five, then an hour. Before very long I would be long asleep before I felt her creeping into bed next to me.

Other than that, her behavior didn’t change. Despite hardly eating or sleeping she was still her kind and sweet self during the day. She was loving, thoughtful, and just as intelligent as ever. She also didn’t seem to be going through a lot of physical changes. A little weight loss which worried me, but she swore she felt okay.

That’s really why I didn’t think about it too much. She wasn’t acting too different from her usual self during the day, and if all she was battling was insomnia and nausea, then she could cope how she needed to. I think a part of me was worried about stressing her out even more by bothering her about all of it too much, so I sat by and waited.

That was foolish of me, in hindsight. But then again, we always tried to assume the best about each other.

Then it got a lot harder to ignore. When I would kiss her in the morning I could taste iron. Not overwhelmingly, but as if she’d had blood in her mouth a few hours before and rinsed her mouth out. And I don’t mean blood from flossing, I mean I could taste it in her mouth as if her mouth had been full of blood just a few hours prior. I started finding packages in the trash for raw steak. Sure she could’ve been cooking them without me knowing somehow, but there were so many of them. I couldn’t understand how she was eating that much steak in a week, especially after her problems with nausea.

That was when I finally started asking questions, but I was too afraid to press very hard. Instead I kept pretending everything was normal. We kept going about our new routine, pretending nothing was wrong, until the neighborhood pets started going missing.

I couldn’t take it anymore, I didn’t care if she spent another mortgage on steak or even hunted down squirrels and whatnot as long as that was making her happy, but she couldn’t hurt people’s precious pets. That wasn’t like her, and it wasn’t something I could let my girlfriend get away with either.

I basically had no evidence it was her, except the shift in her behavior at night (and the occasional episode of spacing out). But something deep inside me knew.

I waited up for her a few nights ago when she went on one of her nighttime strolls. When she got back, around four in the morning, she had blood around her mouth.

The strangest part though was that she looked different: her eyes were wider, more oval shaped than they’re supposed to be, her pupils were almost gray instead of black.

I sat her down on the couch and asked what was going on. Slowly her features seemed to shift back to normal, and as they did her eyes welled up with tears. I pulled her into my arms and she cried while she told me what had been happening.

She told me something happened after the camping trip, at least to the best of her knowledge that’s when the change occurred.

She said it started pretty much the way I saw it for her too. She couldn’t sleep, started eating a lot less, then the cravings started. All she wanted was steak, and at first she was cooking it. Then she realized she wanted to eat it raw, and started doing that. Then one night on her walks she saw a wounded rabbit, it seemed like somebody’s dog or cat had bit it and done fatal damage, but not been able to eat it.

She ate the rabbit, and she said it was the most exhilarating, perfect experience she’d ever had. She found that she wasn’t tired during the day either when she ate the little animals in the forest. She could go a whole day without needing to eat as much, just snacks here and there, as long as she was eating the occasional small animal from her nightly walks.

But then she found that she needed more and more animals to feel okay. If she couldn’t hunt enough rabbits or squirrels in a night, she felt sick and sluggish all day. She told me it didn’t even feel like a conscious thought for her. In the same way that I would walk to the fridge when I’m hungry, she would head out into the woods each night. All she knew was that there was something that could make her feel better, amidst all these weird changes she was going through.

So she kept hunting, trying not to overdo it, she would only kill and eat exactly as much as she needed. That was where the steak came in, it was the only thing other than raw living animals that she could eat and get any sense of fullness from. But eventually, the steak stopped doing it for her, and she was worried about over-hunting the woods behind our house. She stopped hunting for almost a week, she said she was trying to let the local wildlife recover, but she was starving. One night, during her fasting period, she got desperate and ate the dog that had attacked a two year old the year before (see, she’s always trying to do the right thing even in a moral grey area).

But that also became too little food very quickly. She needed more food, larger prey so to speak. Again, it wasn’t that she wanted to, the survival instinct seemed to kick in and take over.

She read an article about a man who attacked a child and was let out of prison He only lived a few miles from us, he was on the registry now so his address was public information. She said it wasn’t hard to find him. She said he made the perfect meal.

According to her humans are perfect because she doesn’t need to eat as often. She said most nights she can walk through the woods, eating only the occasional small animal.

Then on nights when she’s extra hungry and she’s had the opportunity to prepare in advance, she looks for what she considers to be a deserving victim, and she goes after them. Dinner and community service all at the same time (that’s my joke, not hers).

She sobbed as she told me all of this, said she hated herself for it but she couldn’t help it. She doesn’t want to be like this anymore. She wants nothing more than to live normally, go back to the way things were before whatever it was that changed her.

She was telling the truth. Say what you want, but I know this woman and I know when she’s lying. She was being honest with me, and it shattered my heart to see her so sad.

I told her I would help her look for a solution, some kind of cure for whatever was wrong, and that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve discovered the more she hunts and kills at night, the more she transforms at night. I don’t know if it’s a direct result of the hunting, killing, and eating, or if it’s just that the changes are o…

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