Mystery

The Silver Queen
"Who is the Silver Queen?" That's the question that has hit X-Zone Wrestling, a women's wrestling promotion that has been around for a dozen years. The promotion hasn't seen anything like it. The Silver Queen, a mysterious masked villainess in a silver and black outfit and cape, has spent the last five months going after up-and-coming talent, usually sending her henchwomen, Katherine "Ace" Bennett and Justine "Deuce" Paxton, to do her bidding. Details about the Silver Queen were few and far in between. All that was known about her was that she's a seasoned vet; at least 20 years of competing and dominating.
By Clyde E. Dawkins5 months ago in Fiction
Eden
The storm suddenly arrived. Rain hammered against the windows of Anora Kingsley's office as she sat buried beneath stacks of books, journal articles, and unfinished research.
By Amber5 months ago in Fiction
Eden
The earth groaned beneath the desert. Dr. Lucien Vale paused at the edge of the excavation trench, listening. The sound came again... A low vibration.
By Amber5 months ago in Fiction
After Midnight
There is something strangely powerful about the hours after midnight. The streets grow silent, the noise of the day fades away, and the world seems to slow down. For many people, these late-night hours are more than just a part of the day—they are a time of reflection, creativity, and mystery. Whether you are a night owl, a writer searching for inspiration, or simply someone who has stared at the ceiling long after everyone else has fallen asleep, you may have noticed that life feels different after midnight.
By Shoaib Afridi5 months ago in Fiction
To Not Go On. Content Warning.
Introduction I was attracted by this image shared by The Enchanted Booklet on Facebook but was not too sure how to approach it. This is not so much about the gorgon Medusa but about someone who has lost the will to continue.
By Mike Singleton 💜 Mikeydred 5 months ago in Fiction
A World Where Memories Are Sold Like Products
The Store on Every Corner The year was 2089, and memories had become the world's most valuable commodity. Every major city contained Memory Markets where people could buy, sell, trade, and experience memories just as easily as purchasing groceries or clothing. Wealthy customers bought memories of exotic vacations they had never taken. Students purchased years of expertise before important exams. Some people even collected memories like antiques, storing thousands of experiences inside personal digital vaults. What had once been considered impossible was now an ordinary part of daily life. In this new world, experiences were no longer limited to the people who lived them.
By Robert Redford5 months ago in Fiction
Every Time It Rains, Someone Knocks at My Window
Rain never used to scare me. Growing up, storms were comforting. I loved the sound of rain tapping against rooftops, the cold smell of wet earth drifting through cracked windows, and the occasional rumble of thunder shaking the sky. Rain meant staying indoors, wrapped in blankets, watching old movies with a cup of tea. But now? I hate the rain. Because every time it rains… Someone knocks at my window. It started six months ago, shortly after I moved into apartment 9B. The building was old—one of those forgotten brick apartments squeezed between modern glass towers. Cheap rent. Quiet neighborhood. The landlord warned me the plumbing was strange and the heating sometimes failed, but I didn’t care. I needed a fresh start. After my mother died, silence became unbearable. My apartment back home felt haunted by memories, so I packed my things and moved to a city where nobody knew me. I thought loneliness would hurt less if it happened somewhere unfamiliar. For a while, things were normal. Then came the storm. It was around two in the morning when I first heard it. *Tap.* I opened my eyes. The room was dark except for flashes of lightning leaking through the curtains. *Tap.* *Tap.* Three soft knocks. I frowned. My bedroom window overlooked an alleyway. On the seventh floor. No balcony. No fire escape. Nothing outside except empty air. I sat up in bed, staring toward the curtain. The sound stopped. “Probably a branch,” I muttered. But there were no trees near the building. Still half asleep, I ignored it and went back to bed. The next morning, I found something strange. Fingerprints. On the outside of the glass. Long. Thin. As if someone had pressed their hands against the window. I told myself there had to be an explanation. Maybe a maintenance worker. Maybe kids playing some bizarre prank. Maybe my imagination. Then it rained again. Three nights later. Exactly 2:13 a.m. *Tap.* *Tap.* *Tap.* The same rhythm. The same careful knocking. Slow. Patient. Almost polite. Fear crept into my stomach. I stood frozen beside my bed. The knocking came again. Three taps. I forced myself toward the curtain. Every instinct screamed not to look. But curiosity won. I pulled it open. Nothing. Just rainwater running down the glass. Dark sky. Empty alley below. I exhaled shakily. Then lightning flashed. And for half a second— I saw a face. Pressed against the outside of the window. Pale skin. Black eyes. A smile too wide to be human. I screamed and stumbled backward. When lightning struck again— It was gone. I barely slept that night. The next day, I called my landlord. “You’re not the first tenant to complain,” he said quietly. I laughed nervously. “About noises?” “No,” he replied. “About the knocking.” Cold spread through me. “What do you mean?” Long silence. Then: “Apartment 9B stays empty for a reason.” I almost moved out that same day. But fear mixed strangely with curiosity. I needed answers. That evening, I visited the library and searched through old newspaper archives about the building. I wish I hadn’t. Twenty-three years ago, during a violent thunderstorm, a woman named Eleanor Vale disappeared from apartment 9B. Neighbors claimed she’d called the police repeatedly. Said someone was knocking at her window every time it rained. Nobody believed her. Until officers arrived one stormy night. The apartment was empty. No signs of forced entry. No struggle. Only one disturbing detail. Written repeatedly across the bedroom wall in shaky handwriting: “Don’t let it in.” I stopped reading after that. Rain started again three nights later. Heavy. Violent. Thunder rattled the walls. At exactly 2:13 a.m. Tap. Tap. Tap. I sat frozen on my couch. The knocking continued. Steady. Patient. Like something knew I was listening. My phone buzzed suddenly. Unknown Number. I answered with shaking hands. Static. Then breathing. Heavy breathing. “Hello?” A voice whispered: “Don’t open the curtain.” My chest tightened. “Who is this?” “It pretends.” The voice sounded terrified. Broken. Familiar. Thunder exploded overhead. The knocking grew louder. Tap. Tap. Tap. “It gets stronger when you look,” the voice whispered. “What are you talking about?” Silence. Then: “You looked last time.” The line cut dead. A chill crawled up my spine. Because somehow— The voice sounded exactly like mine. I locked myself in the bathroom. Hours passed. The knocking never stopped. Three taps. Pause. Three taps. Again. Again. Again. By sunrise, the storm ended. And so did the knocking. I didn’t sleep for two days. Instead, I installed cameras. Locked every door. Covered the bedroom window with blankets. But rain returned. And so did it. 2:13 a.m. Tap. Tap. Tap. Then— A sound inside the apartment. Footsteps. Slow. Wet. Moving across my floor. I checked the security footage. Nothing. No one entered. Yet the footsteps continued. Closer. Closer. Stopping outside my bedroom. Then came a knock. Not on the window. On my bedroom door. Three soft taps. I stopped breathing. Something scratched softly against the wood. Then a whisper. “Why won’t you let me in?” My knees nearly gave out. Because the voice belonged to my mother. My mother, who had died six months earlier. Tears filled my eyes instantly. “Mom?” Silence. Then crying. Soft crying. Exactly the way she used to cry when she thought I wasn’t listening. “You left me alone,” the voice whispered. Guilt crashed through me. Every memory. Every regret. Every missed phone call. Thunder shook the apartment. “I miss you,” I whispered. The crying stopped. Then came laughter. Low. Wrong. Twisted. A voice changed. Deepened. Became something impossible. “That always works.” The door handle moved. Slowly. Turning. I ran. Grabbed my keys. Rushed downstairs barefoot into the rain. Behind me— Three knocks echoed from somewhere above. But not from my apartment. From every window in the building. One after another. Like the whole place had awakened. The next morning, I packed everything and left. I never returned. The building was demolished four months later after structural damage. But sometimes, during storms— I still hear it. Three soft knocks against my bedroom window. No matter where I move. No matter what floor I live on. And last night— For the first time— After the third knock… I heard my own voice whisper from outside: “Please don’t ignore me this time.”
By Diana Joseph 5 months ago in Fiction
StarMan
Introduction This is for Leslie Writes' "What am I?" Challenge, which you can check out here: I can't draw, so it had to be simple.
By Mike Singleton 💜 Mikeydred 5 months ago in Fiction
The Boy by the Pumpkin Patch
It had been years since I last held a cricket bat, and honestly, my nerves were shot. To make matters worse, Swarup was bowling. He was the local fast-bowler of our village, and the opposing team had already put up a massive score. We all knew that if we could even manage half of their runs, we’d celebrate it as a moral victory.
By Muhammad 5 months ago in Fiction
The Elevator That Stops at a Nonexistent Floor
The Building With a Strange Reputation When I accepted a night-shift security job at the Ashcroft Tower, I thought the stories were nothing more than office gossip. The building was one of the oldest skyscrapers in the city, a forty-story structure that had survived decades of renovations and ownership changes. Most employees left before sunset, leaving only a handful of cleaners, maintenance workers, and security staff inside after dark. During my first week, several coworkers warned me about the elevators. According to them, one of the lifts occasionally stopped at a floor that didn't exist. I laughed it off as another urban legend created to entertain bored night workers.
By Robert Redford5 months ago in Fiction
My Dead Grandfather Keeps Sending Me Letters
The First Letter Three months after my grandfather's funeral, the first letter arrived. The envelope carried his familiar handwriting, the same careful script I had seen on birthday cards and holiday notes. At first, I assumed someone in the family was playing a cruel joke. Then I noticed details nobody else could know. The letter mentioned a conversation we had shared alone beside a lake ten years earlier. It ended with a sentence: "Check the attic before next Tuesday. Trust me, please, Samuel."
By Robert Redford5 months ago in Fiction
The Watchmaker of Blackwood Lane
The coastal town of Oakhaven was known for its dense morning fog and its utter lack of excitement. That was until October 14th, when Alistair Vance vanished into thin air. Alistair was an eccentric, reclusive watchmaker who spent his days inside a cramped, three-story shop on Blackwood Lane. He rarely spoke to townspeople, except to deliver beautifully repaired antique pocket watches. When he failed to open his shop for three consecutive days, the local sheriff, Arthur Pendelton, decided to investigate. What he discovered inside didn't just spark a missing person investigation—it left the entire community questioning the very fabric of reality. --- Week 1: The Lock from the Inside Sheriff Pendelton expected to find a break-in or perhaps an elderly man who had fallen ill. Instead, he found the front door securely bolted from the inside with three heavy iron latches. After breaking through the window, the scene awaiting him was eerie. The shop was perfectly pristine. There were no signs of a struggle, no missing money from the cash register, and Alistair’s favorite woolen coat still hung by the door. On the workbench sat a half-eaten meal, with a cup of tea that had long gone cold. But the most disturbing detail was the sound. Alistair’s shop housed hundreds of clocks—grandfathers, cuckoos, and delicate pendulums. Usually, they filled the room with a chaotic symphony of ticks and tocks. Today, they were ticking in perfect, terrifying unison. Every single clock in the room beat at the exact same millisecond, like a collective mechanical heartbeat. Week 2: The Room That Kept No Real Time As the investigation deepened over the next forty-eight hours, forensic teams uncovered anomalies that baffled experts. * The Blueprint Discrepancy: When compared to the town’s official architectural blueprints, Alistair’s shop possessed a hidden architectural void—a four-foot gap between the second-floor workshop and the third-floor living quarters. * The Watch Project: On his main desk, Alistair had been working on a gold pocket watch unlike any seen before. It didn't have numbers. Instead, its face was engraved with complex astronomical constellations and ancient geometric symbols. When an officer picked up the gold watch, the collective ticking in the shop suddenly stopped. The silence was deafening. Even more bizarrely, when the forensics team checked their own digital wristwatches, they discovered that inside the shop, their modern watches had all slowed down, losing exactly twelve minutes per hour. Week 3: The Message in the Gears A week after the disappearance, a breakthrough came from an unexpected source: Alistair’s estranged apprentice, a young man named Julian. Armed with a magnifying glass, Julian began inspecting the gears of the unfinished astronomical watch. Deep within the microscopic mechanism, etched onto the main spring, was a hidden inscription. It wasn't a standard manufacturer’s mark. It was a hastily scratched sentence: "I have finally synchronized the friction. The gap between seconds is open. They are coming, or perhaps, I am already going." The date of the etching was exactly October 14th—the night Alistair vanished. --- The Verdict: An Unsolved Horizon Two years have passed since that foggy October night. The shop on Blackwood Lane remains locked, preserved as a historical anomaly. Extensive police searches using tracking dogs, infrared cameras, and structural demolition found no secret escape tunnels, no hidden rooms, and absolutely no trace of Alistair Vance's DNA outside his usual workspace. How does a man walk out of a room locked tightly from the inside without breaking a single window? Some locals believe Alistair was a victim of a meticulously planned foul play. Others whisper a much stranger theory in the local taverns: that the old watchmaker didn't escape through space, but rather through time itself, finding a way to step inside the very gears he spent a lifetime perfecting.
By Shoaib5 months ago in Fiction