Fan Fiction
EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED
My name is Alan. I inherited my auntie's house, 'Ivy Cottage', six months ago. Since my childhood, I have been there many times with my parents. I knew the place inside out. I just moved in and started reorganizing the rooms to my taste. It is a house in a suburb of the city, near the national park. It is a little isolated house. I only have two neighbors, separated by the large garden of mine, making it very spooky when it is pitch black in the evenings. On the ground floor, it has a large two reception rooms, a modern kitchen with a downstairs toilet. Upstairs, there are three bedrooms and a bath. The typical nineteenth-century detached property needed little upgrading. I installed a video ring bell with intercom for security, allowing me to see who is at the door on my laptop or mobile, which has put my mind at rest. I thought these new gadgets had killed childhood games; Auntie's shouting to mum,
By kayhan egeli12 months ago in Fiction
ChronoSeed
Dr. Aris Thorne was a botanist of the absolute. Her laboratory was a sterile, silver bubble clinging to the side of a dying world. Outside, the air was a toxic haze, and the soil was a gray, lifeless dust. Her life’s work, Project Verdant, was a failure. Every genetically engineered super-seed she planted withered within days, unable to cope with the poisoned earth.
By Habibullah12 months ago in Fiction
Echoes of Solace
The knock came just after midnight. Three sharp, deliberate ramps that echoed through the apartment like a warning. I froze, gripping the edge of the kitchen counter, heart hammering. No one should be here. Not at this hour. Not in my building.
By Marlowe Solace12 months ago in Fiction
When the Stars Forgot to Shine
The night it happened, the world didn’t notice at first. The stars simply… didn’t come. No one could explain it. The moon hung lonely and pale in the dark sky, surrounded by emptiness. Astronomers called it a “temporary celestial blackout.” Poets called it “the night heaven turned its face.” But to Mira, it felt like a reflection of her own fading light.
By Muhammad zahoor12 months ago in Fiction
The Silence That Answers Back
The Silence That Answers Back By: Abdul Muhammad The knocking began the night after they scattered her grandfather’s ashes. It was a soft, rhythmic sound from within his old oak wardrobe, a patient tap-tap-tap like a heartbeat muffled by wood and time. It wasn’t a sound that frightened Elara; it was a sound that ached. It was the echo of his pocket watch being wound, the tap of his pipe against the ashtray, the sound of him puttering in his sanctuary. For a week, she lay in the spare room of the now-too-quiet house, listening. Grief was a heavy blanket, and the knocking was a thread she could cling to in the dark. Finally, on the eighth night, she rose. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic counter-rhythm to the patient knocking from within. She stood before the carved oak doors, took a shaky breath, and knocked back. Three timid raps of her own. The sound stopped. For a terrifying second, there was only silence. Then, with a soft, sighing creak, the wardrobe doors swung inward. There were no coats. No scent of cedar. Instead, she was looking into the sun-drenched living room of her childhood. There she was, seven years old, wearing a paper crown, her face alight with a joy so pure it was a physical blow. Her grandfather, young and vibrant, was laughing, his hands held out to present a towering, lopsided birthday cake. The scene was frozen, silent, and perfect, like a diorama in a museum of her happiest memories. A sob caught in her throat. She reached a hand across the threshold, her fingers passing from the dim bedroom into that golden afternoon light. As she did, a small, porcelain figurine of a bird on her grandfather’s nightstand flickered, its colors leaching away for a single, disorienting second before snapping back. She didn’t understand the cost, not then. She only understood the miracle. Over the following days, she became an archaeologist of her own soul. She knocked on the bathroom door and opened it onto the steam-filled room where she’d celebrated her high school graduation, her mother’s proud face beaming through the mist. She knocked on the kitchen door and found the silent, tense morning her father left, the memory so sharp she could smell the burnt coffee. Each door was a portal, each knock a key. But the present began to protest. The house, her anchor in the now, was growing thin. The pattern on the wallpaper would blur, mimicking the floral print of her childhood home. The hum of the refrigerator would distort into the distant sound of a lawnmower from a long-ago summer. The more she visited the past, the more the present fought to become it. The real terror began when she saw the first patch of transparency. She had opened her own bedroom door onto the memory of learning to ride a bike, her grandfather’s steadying hands on her shoulders. When she closed the door, her reflection in the mirror was faint, like a ghost looking back. The scent of her perfume, a modern, adult fragrance, was gone, replaced by the faint, persistent smell of grass and birthday cake. She was being erased, replaced by the echo of what once was. She knew she had to stop. She packed a bag, determined to leave the house and its siren song of memory. But as she walked down the hallway, she heard it again. The knocking. This time, it wasn't from the wardrobe. It was coming from the front door—the real, solid front door of her present. Her blood ran cold. Who could that be? The past didn't knock from the outside. Tap. Tap. Tap. It was the same rhythm. Patient. Heartbeat-like. Trembling, she approached. She couldn’t knock back; she was too afraid of what might open. But she had to know. She pressed her eye to the peephole. Standing on her welcome mat was her grandfather. Not the frail man from the end, not the young hero from her memories, but the man from her teenage years. He looked solid, real. And he was smiling softly, his hand raised to knock again. “Elara,” his voice came through the wood, warm and clear. “It’s so loud in here. All these memories… they’re so bright. Don’t you want to come where it’s quiet? Don’t you want to come home?” It wasn’t an invitation. It was a retrieval. She looked back into the house. The hallway was wavering, the walls softening into the remembered pattern of her grandparents’ cottage. The past wasn’t just in the doors anymore; it was consuming the very structure of her life. The knocking on the front door continued, a patient, relentless rhythm. Tap. Tap. Tap. Her choice was no longer about revisiting the past. It was about where she would choose to live: in a fading present, or in a perfect, unchanging echo. Her hand hovered over the doorknob, the cold brass a final anchor to the woman she was, the woman she was about to erase forever. The silence behind the knocking was no longer empty. It was waiting. And it had finally found its answer.
By Abdul Muhammad 12 months ago in Fiction
When Stars Remembered Their Names
It began with a flicker. Not a satellite or a shooting star, but a deep, resonant pulse from Sirius, the Dog Star. Dr. Aris Thorne, an astronomer who had spent his life listening to the silent sky, saw it on his spectral analyzer. It was a pattern. A signal. It was a word.
By Habibullah12 months ago in Fiction
The Weight of Unanswered Doors
The Debt of Regret By: Abdul Muhammad Silas was a collector of ghosts. Not the kind that rattled chains, but the kind that settled in the soul with the weight of lead and the chill of forgotten mornings. He was a Regret Eater, the best in the city. For a price, he would listen, absorb, and take. He would carry the burden so others wouldn't have to. His apartment was a tomb built of their sorrows. Though it looked sparse and clean to any visitor, the air was thick with the phantom pressure of his accumulated cargo. The corner by the window held the crushing guilt of a businessman who had betrayed his partner. The space behind the sofa was heavy with a mother’s grief over a harsh word she could never take back. They were all invisible, but to Silas, they were as real as the floor beneath his feet, a constant, suffocating gravity that bowed his shoulders and etched lines into his face. The knock, when it came, was all wrong. It wasn't the timid, shame-filled tap of a client. It was firm, resonant, and carried a finality that made his bones ache. He opened the door to find a woman, her eyes not pleading, but clear and deep with a sorrow so old it had become a part of her. “I’m not here to hire you, Mr. Silas,” she said, her voice steady. “I’m here to confess. There is one regret I could never give away. It belongs to me.” Intrigued, and weary of the transactional nature of his work, he let her in. She sat on his single wooden chair, her hands folded in her lap, and began. “My name is Clara,” she said. “Twenty years ago, I was living in a small apartment on Elm Street. It was a stormy night, thunder shaking the windows. There was a knock at my door. Frantic, desperate. I was young, alone, and frightened. I… I didn’t answer. I just stood there, frozen, listening as the pounding faded away into the rain.” She paused, the memory a physical presence in the room. Silas felt a familiar coldness begin to seep into his bones, but this one felt different. Sharper. “The next morning,” Clara continued, her voice dropping to a whisper, “I read about it in the paper. A young man, caught in the storm, had been disoriented and lost. He’d been looking for help, trying to find a phone. He had knocked on a door, but no one answered. He stumbled back into the flood and was swept away.” The cold in Silas’s marrow intensified, crystallizing into a dread he hadn’t felt in decades. Elm Street. A stormy night. A story he knew not from the news, but from the deepest, most locked-away chamber of his own heart. “His name was Leo,” Clara finished, a single tear tracing a path down her cheek. “My regret isn’t just that I didn’t open the door. It’s that I never knew if I could have saved him. I have carried the weight of that unanswered door every day since.” The air left Silas’s lungs. The name was a key, turning a lock he had sealed shut a lifetime ago. The sparse apartment seemed to press in on him, the collective weight of a thousand regrets suddenly insignificant next to the anvil now sitting on his chest. “You’re wrong,” he rasped, his own voice sounding foreign and broken. “You couldn’t have saved him.” Clara looked up, startled by the raw pain in his tone. Silas’s professional detachment shattered. “I know,” he whispered, “because I was there.” The room swam. The carefully constructed dam holding back his own past burst. “It was my brother, Leo,” Silas said, the confession tearing itself from him. “He was coming to see me. We’d had a fight, a terrible one over money. I told him I never wanted to see him again.” He looked at Clara, his eyes mirroring her bottomless grief. “He was knocking on your door, but he was running from me. From the things I said. My regret… the one I could never bear to confess, even to myself… was that my anger turned him away. I am the reason he was in that storm.” For a moment, there was only silence, thicker and heavier than any Silas had ever collected. Two separate regrets, carried for two decades, now swirled together in the center of the room, intertwined and inseparable. Clara’s regret was the unanswered door. Silas’s was the one he had slammed shut. He had spent his life taking on the weight of strangers, building a fortress of their sorrows to hide from his own. Now, faced with the one burden he was truly meant to carry, he felt his knees buckle. The gravitational pull of their shared tragedy was crushing, a debt of regret that could never be paid, only shared. Clara didn’t offer forgiveness. He didn’t ask for it. Instead, she reached out and placed her hand over his. It was not a transfer, not a transaction. It was an anchor. Two souls, shipwrecked by the same storm, finally finding each other in the deep, dark water of what might have been. The weight did not disappear, but for the first time, it was no longer his to carry alone.
By Abdul Muhammad 12 months ago in Fiction
My Bones Pick Up the Signal
My Bones Pick Up the Signal By: Abdul Muhammad The silence had teeth. It was a cold, gnawing thing that bit at the edges of Elara’s consciousness the moment she turned out the light. For three years, since the Great Unraveling of her life—a divorce, a funeral, a quiet shattering—sleep had become a foreign country she could no longer visa into. Pills left her groggy and haunted. Meditation was a cruel joke. The only thing that worked was the static. It was an old Roberts analog radio, a relic from a junk shop that smelled of dust and forgotten Sundays. She would tune it to the empty space between stations, where the universe hissed. That white noise was a blanket, a woolly, amorphous sound that smothered the sharp edges of her own thoughts. It was in that blessed, mindless hum that she finally found respite. The change was subtle. One night, the static wasn’t just a hum. It shivered. A spike of pure, undiluted fear—cold and metallic—lanced through the speakers and into her spine. She sat bolt upright, heart hammering against her ribs. The feeling was gone as quickly as it came, leaving only the mundane hiss. She wrote it off as a waking dream. But it happened again. A wave of devastating grief so profound it drew tears she didn't understand. A flutter of secret, illicit joy that made her cheeks flush. The radio was no longer broadcasting noise; it was broadcasting emotion. Raw, unfiltered, and terrifyingly human. Driven by an impulse she couldn’t name, she set up her canvas. She didn’t think; she just let the feelings guide her hand. When a thrum of lonely despair echoed from the speaker, her brush mixed murky greys and deep blues, creating a figure hunched in an endless, rain-slicked street. When a burst of frantic anxiety crackled, her strokes became jagged reds and furious oranges. She painted until dawn, exhausted, and for the first time, looked at what she had made. It was the best work of her life. It was alive. She called the series “Atmospheric Pressure.” The art world went predictably mad. Critics called her a visionary, a synesthete who could translate the zeitgeist into pigment. They didn’t know the truth. They didn’t know about the radio. As her fame grew, so did the clarity of the signal. The emotions began to coalesce, to form patterns. The fear had a specific taste—the coppery tang of blood from a bitten lip. The grief had a smell—old roses and damp earth. And then came the memories. Not hers. A small hand letting go of a balloon. The screech of tires on wet asphalt. A forgotten birthday. She was no longer just painting emotion; she was painting someone else’s life. The static was no longer a blanket but a window, and something was on the other side, pressing its face against the glass. It was during the final preparations for her solo gallery show that the voice truly found its shape. It didn’t use words, not at first. It used imprint. Knock. Knock. Knock. The sound wasn't in the room. It was inside her skull, three sharp, percussive raps that vibrated in her teeth. It was the same rhythm as her heartbeat when the fear-spike hit. “Stop,” she whispered into the dimly lit studio, the radio hissing on the desk. The only answer was a fresh wave of static, and this time, it carried a memory she recognized. Her memory. She was seven, hiding at the top of the stairs, listening to her parents fight. The sound of her mother crying. The specific, hollow thud of her father’s suitcase hitting the floor. Elara stumbled back from the canvas, a cold dread seizing her. This wasn't a random signal from the ether. This was a directed broadcast. And it was tuning itself to her. “How do you know that?” she demanded, her voice trembling. The radio crackled, and a feeling of intimate knowledge, of terrible familiarity, washed over her. It knew her. It had been listening to her sleepless nights, feeding on her quiet desperation. The static wasn’t her solace; it was its feeding ground. Knock. Knock. KNOCK. The sound was more insistent now, a demand for entry. The entity in the static was no longer content to be a muse. It was tired of being a ghost. It wanted a body. Her body. She saw it then, in the swirling grey of the canvas she was working on—not a painting, but a reflection. A face made of shifting static, with two voids for eyes that were fixed on her. Its mouth, a jagged tear of silence in the noise, was moving. Forming a word she felt more than heard. …home… It was coming home. To her. Terror should have made her unplug the radio, smash it to pieces. But a horrific, symbiotic bond had been forged. The static was her cure, her inspiration, her curse. Without it, the silencing teeth of the night would return, and now, they would be sharper than ever, filled with the knowledge of what she had lost. She stood before the radio, a prisoner before her warden. The knocking in her mind became a constant, pounding rhythm, a frantic fist on the door of her consciousness. It was breaking her down, splintering her from the inside. With a shaking hand, she didn’t reach for the power cord. Instead, she turned up the volume. The static roared, a tsunami of sound and sensation. It flooded her, a cold electric current rushing into the empty spaces of her soul. She felt her own memories being pushed aside, her fears becoming its footholds, her joys its weapons. Her last coherent thought was not her own. It was a broadcast, a final signal from a dying station. My bones pick up the signal, she thought, as the static settled into the marrow. My skin is the receiver. My heart is the speaker. Elara—the Elara she had been—closed her eyes. When they opened again, the brown was shot through with flecks of shimmering grey, like static on a screen. She picked up a brush, her movement fluid and alien. She had a new painting to finish. The silence was gone. It had finally found a voice. And it had so much to say.
By Abdul Muhammad 12 months ago in Fiction
