A nonspecific about an animal

This is a story I am working on. It is not done. It has took 3 weeks so far.

“The Animal That Wasn’t” 
There was an animal that lived in the in-between places—spaces that humans rarely noticed. Not in the forest, nor the desert, nor the ocean. It lived between two moments, under floorboards that did not creak, inside shadows that were not cast. If you tried to look directly at it, you would forget what you were doing. If you wrote its name down, the ink would curl off the paper like it was ashamed. 
It had no species. No family. It might’ve had eyes, but they did not see what you saw. Not even light. It saw… direction. Intent. The unspoken weight in a room. Your fear. Especially that. 
The animal fed, but not on flesh. It consumed conclusions. Beliefs. The things you knew to be true licked off the surface of your mind like honey. You would not even notice, not right away. Just a little pause. A little “wait, was it always like this?” moment. One or two? Nothing to worry about. But over time, your sense of certainty would soften, rot. 
One man lived in a farmhouse that the animal particularly liked. His name was Edwin, though he was not important. What was important was that he started finding things in the walls. Things that did not belong. 
One day: a single child’s shoe, size 3, full of dried pepper seeds. 
The next: a windowless door with no knob, nailed shut behind insulation. On the other side, just silence. Not silence—the absence of sound. Like the concept of sound had never occurred to that space. 
Later still: a mouse trap in the attic that held no mouse, but a perfect, three-inch wax replica of his own left hand. 
Edwin stopped sleeping in the upstairs bedroom. Not because he was afraid, but because the walls whispered math he did not understand and did not want to understand. One night, he made the mistake of writing down the equations in his sleep, only to wake up and find they had etched themselves into the floorboards, looping in on themselves like Möbius strips. 
He called a priest. The priest vomited up a ribbon of film negatives after stepping over the threshold. 
He called a scientist. The scientist stayed in the house for 48 hours, then appeared, blindfolded, and asked politely to be arrested. 
None of it stopped the animal. Because the animal was never really in the house. It just leaned on the house, like a forgotten breath fogging up your glasses. It was never there, and yet it knew every corner of your thoughts, every secret you did not even know you were keeping. 
One night, Edwin found a note under his pillow. It was in his handwriting, though he did not remember writing it. It read: 
“DO NOT BELIEVE WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN.” 
He stared at it for an hour. Eventually, he folded it and placed it inside the child’s shoe. 
The next morning, the shoe was gone. The walls were smooth again. No equations. No whispers. The house was silent and clean. 
But the fridge hummed in a slightly different tone. And the mirror over the sink showed him brushing his teeth before he lifted the brush. And when he tried to leave the house, the doorknob turned into his hand before letting go. 
People stopped visiting. Not because anything was wrong. In fact, everyone said Edwin was happier than ever. Except they could not remember his last name. Or the name of the town. Or where the road that led there went after the second left turn. 
Meanwhile, the animal continued—not watching, not waiting, just being. It did not have a name. But if it ever whispered something into your ear while you slept, you would not remember it in the morning. 
Only that you forgot something important. 
Something you never realized you knew. 
Chapter 2 
The mail stopped arriving. 
Not all at once. First, the envelopes came without stamps. Then without addresses. Then they arrived blank—inside and out—folded with uncanny precision, each corner meeting the others like a mouth shutting tight. Edwin kept them in a drawer that he no longer opened. 
He began to hear things that weren’t sounds. 
Not whispers, not voices, but the shape of attention—how a room leans in. The weight of something listening without presence. Sometimes he would walk through a doorway and forget who he had been before passing through it. Not his name, or his age, but the angle of his spine. The taste of what he’d once feared. 
One morning, Edwin found a photograph in the fireplace. Not burnt. Just resting there, as if placed by a hand that did not exist. The image showed the front of his farmhouse, taken from a height that did not correspond to anything nearby—no hill, no tower, no drone. The sky was the color of unspoken thoughts. The windows were all open, though he could not remember ever opening them. In one of the upstairs rooms, something stood behind the glass, visible. 
It wore a coat he had thrown away ten years ago. 
It had his smile, but none of his skin. 
 
He tried to call his sister. Her name sat just outside the edges of his tongue. He picked up the phone anyway, but it did not ring. It clicked. A soft, deliberate click, every few seconds. As if someone on the other end was slowly pushing their finger against glass, then releasing it. 
He counted forty-two clicks before hanging up. 
That night, he slept in the basement. Not out of fear, but because it felt further away from the places the animal liked to lean. The concrete down there was always cool, even in August. The old furnace whispered to itself in a language of rust and breath. He wrapped himself in a moth-eaten blanket and dreamed of symbols he’d never seen before—shapes of angels that slid out of memory as soon as he woke. 
But one remained. 
A ring, incomplete. A circle with a notch missing. Like a mouth waiting to bite. 
He drew it on the wall with chalk. 
The next morning, the circle was still there. But the chalk was gone. He checked every drawer, every box, every cabinet. Nowhere. Not even dust on his fingers. 
In its place, he found a seed. 
It was not like any seed he recognized. Smooth. Black. Heavy. Like a small, sleeping truth. 
 
That afternoon, a woman knocked on the door. 
Her eyes were the wrong kind of familiar. Not in color or shape, but in recognition. Like she knew things about him he hadn’t learned yet. She smiled at the way people smile when they’re about to leave a room they never entered. 
“Do you still have the mirror?” she asked. 
He did not ask how she knew about it. He only nodded. 
“Good,” she said. “If it ever starts reflecting you after you’ve left, cover it with salt.” 
He opened his mouth to speak, but she was already walking away, down the long dirt path that hadn’t been there the day before. He watched her go, and for a moment—just a moment—he remembered something impossible: 
The animal had not always been an animal. 
It had once been a question. 
But no one had wanted the answer. 
 
That night, he woke to find the seed sprouting. 
Not in the soil. On his chest. 
A single black tendril had pierced the skin over his heart, growing inward. Feeding not on blood, but on conviction. He could feel it threading through forgotten certainties, softening the walls of memory. 
He did not scream. He did not tear it out. 
Instead, he whispered to the darkness around him: “What are you?” 
The shadows shifted. Not in movement, but in mood. Something leaned closer. It said nothing. But a silence fell over the room that was shaped like yes. 
 
And miles away—between two streetlights that never turned on, in the breath between one blink and the next— 
 The animal turned its head. 
If it had one. 
And listened. 
Chapter 3 
The next morning, Edwin woke up twice. 
Once in the basement, lying on the concrete, breath caught in his throat. 
 And again, upstairs, standing in the hallway outside the locked door that didn't exist yesterday. 
He blinked. The basement memory felt real. The chill of the floor still clung to his spine. But he was standing, barefoot, hand already reaching toward a brass handle carved like an hourglass. He did not remember climbing the stairs. He did not remember this door. 
It pulsed faintly beneath his fingers. Not warm, not cold, expectant. 
He stepped back. The door did not move. But behind it, something changed direction. 
 
The mirror in the bathroom had been quiet all morning. He checked it often now, but not to look at himself. Not really. He watched for delays. Off-tempo echoes. Smiles he hadn’t given. 
So far, it behaved. 
But the reflection had started to breathe. Only when he wasn’t watching. Just enough for the glass to fog, faint and circular. Once, he wrote a question in the condensation: 
“Are you me?” 
It answered: 
“Not yet.” 
 
The seed grew. 
It didn’t hurt. Not the way pain is supposed to. It itched in a place his nerves did not map. It bloomed inward. At night, he could feel it opening, petal by invisible petal, absorbing the shape of his beliefs. Things he’d once known began to fade, like old photographs too long in the sun. 
The capital of France. 
 His mother’s voice. 
 The sound a kettle makes when it boils. 
He still knew these things. But not from memory. More like suggestions whispered by the room. 
 
A week passed, or something like it. Time had grown soft. 
The air inside the house began to stretch. Rooms shifted places when he wasn’t looking. Closets led to pantries that led to staircases that looped back to closets. The house was folding inward, knotting around some invisible gravity. A kind of spatial shrug. 
He began marking the walls with charcoal. A simple “X” for every door that still led where it should. By day three, only two remained. The front door was not one of them. 
He heard scratching one night—inside the walls. Deliberate, measured. Not claws. Not fingernails. Something like bone on wood, carving letters too slowly to read. 
The next morning, he found a new symbol under the basement stairs: the ring again, now complete. The missing notch had closed. 
Something had answered. 
 
On the eighth day, or maybe the second month, the woman returned. 
Same coat. Same wrong-familiar face. But her eyes had changed. Less knowing. More… borrowed. 
“You kept the seed,” she said, not a question. 
“It kept me,” he answered. 
She nodded, satisfied or resigned—it was hard to tell. “It will take root soon. After that, you’ll stop asking.” 
“Asking what?” 
She smiled again. “Exactly.” 
He wanted to ask who she was, what she was, but the words slipped through his mind like eels. He had the sense that names didn’t hold anymore. 
Still, he tried. “Why me?” 
Her face flickered. Just once. Like a radio signal skipping a beat. 
“You noticed.” 
Then she turned and walked into the broom closet. Which, now, contained a forest. 
The door closed behind her. He did not open it. 
 
That night, the fridge hummed a song in reverse. The shadows beneath the table spelled something in braille he did not understand. The door—the one upstairs, the one that pulsed—opened a crack. 
Edwin did not touch it. 
But from the other side, something breathed out a single word. Not aloud. Not in sound. It arrived inside him. 
“Soon.” 
 
And somewhere, not far, but never near— 
 Between the pause in a skipped heartbeat and the stillness of unblinking eyes— 
 The animal stirred. 
Not hungry. Not restless. 
Just… curious. 
Curious what shape Edwin would take 
 when he forgot what shape he had ever been. 
 
 
 
 
Creditsssssssssss!!!! 
Me: Everything besides some things 
ChatGPT: The title of the first chapter 
Allie Brosh: Full tittle inspiration 
My demons: The inspiration 
Also, I'm 100% ok lol, this was simply made to creep out Jonah =P 
 
 
“We are the things that others fear.” — Anne Rice 
 
 

Thats a little creepy but otherwise its a good story! (9.5/10)

Im so bored that I actually read the whole thing

Thanks!

"Everything besides some things" is so funny. Nice story bruv!

: D