Short Story

I brought you back -Now I regret it.. Content Warning.
I used to think the dead stayed dead. Until I brought her back. I was twenty-six when Evelyn died. One moment she was smiling over dinner — red wine staining her lips, laughter in her throat — and the next, her car was wrapped around a telephone pole, her face blank in the coroner's photos. Everyone called it a tragedy. I called it unfinished. Grief hollows you out. It doesn’t just take love — it takes logic. In the weeks that followed, I began to read things I shouldn't have. Old texts. Forums in corners of the internet with black backgrounds and flickering sigils. I met a man in a subway bathroom who spoke Latin backwards and sold me a book bound in something that felt like skin. He told me: If you bring her back, she will come. But she won’t come alone. I thought it was metaphor. The ritual was simple. Dirt from her grave, a piece of her hair from the brush she’d left in my apartment, a circle of salt, candles — black, always black. The book had instructions etched in something rust-colored and flaking. It worked. I know how that sounds. But I swear to you — she opened her eyes on the cold floor of my apartment, breath shuddering back into her lungs like someone drowning in reverse. Her skin was cold at first. Her lips trembled when she spoke. “mark?” God help me, I smiled. Cried. Held her until her skin turned warm again. I whispered, “I brought you back.” For a time, she was Evelyn. She laughed again, made coffee in the mornings, danced barefoot across the kitchen tiles. She didn’t remember the crash — just waking in my arms, alive. But then, the shadows began to move. It started small. The cat — Evelyn’s favorite — refused to come near her. Lights flickered when she entered a room. I thought it was just bad wiring. Then she stopped sleeping. Not out of insomnia — she simply didn’t need to. I’d find her standing in the hallway at 3 a.m., eyes fixed on the wall, whispering to something I couldn’t see. One night, I caught her watching me as I slept. Her head tilted too far, her smile stretched too wide. I asked what she was doing. “Listening,” she said. “They don’t like the silence.” I asked who. She didn’t answer. From then on, the smell started. Like damp soil, like rotting flowers. She began bringing things home — dead birds, teeth she swore she found on the sidewalk, small bones she strung on a necklace. She said they were offerings. When I asked to whom, she laughed. “To what came back with me.” The air in the apartment changed. Cold, always. Mirrors warped. My reflection would linger a second too long. I heard scratching inside the walls. I thought I was losing my mind — until I checked the baby monitor app I'd once used as a security cam. It picked up voices. Whispers, dozens layered over each other, speaking in a language I couldn't place. Sometimes they laughed. Sometimes they screamed. Then came the knocking. Always at 3:33 a.m., from inside the walls. Three knocks. Then silence. I tore open the drywall once. Found nothing but darkness — and a smell like burnt copper. I confronted Evelyn. I demanded to know what she was. She cried. She said she didn’t know anymore. “I remember dying,” she said. “It was like falling. Forever. But then something caught me. They pulled me out when you called. I didn’t come back alone.” I asked what they were. She said, “They call themselves the Hollow Choir.” She said they wanted to live. That they used her as a door. I packed a bag that night. But as I reached for the doorknob, it turned hot — blistering — and my shadow twisted on the floor behind me, reaching out like it wanted to pull me back. Evelyn stood at the end of the hallway, her eyes dark hollows. “You can’t leave,” she whispered. “They won’t let you.” That night, I dreamed of a place beneath the earth, made of bone and ash, where voices screamed in song. I saw Evelyn in the center, her body dissolving into smoke, her mouth open wide as they poured through her. When I woke, I couldn’t move for hours. Sleep paralysis, they’d call it. But I know what I saw. I tried to reverse the ritual. I burned the book. I drew circles of salt. I prayed — to God. But they were already inside. I brought her back — and I opened a door. Now, Evelyn sits in the living room for hours. She doesn’t speak anymore. Her eyes bleed sometimes. The TV turns on by itself, showing static that whispers my name. And every night, at 3:33 a.m., I hear the choir singing in the walls. The last time I tried to run, I blacked out. Woke up with soil in my mouth. My fingernails torn like I’d been trying to claw out of a coffin. The worst part? I still love her. Whatever wears her face, whatever watches me sleep and leaves claw marks on my skin — some part of her is still inside. Trapped. Screaming. Begging me to end it. I see her in moments. The real Evelyn. When the light hits just right. When the voices stop. When she cries blood and begs me to kill her. I keep the knife under my pillow now. But I haven’t used it. Not yet. I don't think I can.
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