The story below has been updated, rewritten, and reworked into a proper short story called “Theseus”, expanding the lore into a much darker and creepier story. I will share it below the original for those who are curious.
This is an actual account of my nightmare last night. It was incredibly disturbing. I realized after writing it down that it reads like a short story so I have decided to share it with you. That is also the reason for the abrupt ending.
I am sorry if the conclusion leaves you with more questions than answers.
Last night I had this dream. In this dream I lived in a massive city full of back alleys and tall skyscrapers kind of like New York but much more dark and eerie. This entire city appeared to be a polluted cesspool of filth. My house in the dream felt very similar to my real house but in a new location and with a 2nd floor. I also had an unidentified job and I lived by myself. It felt like I had a mild sense of amnesia because I could not tell you much about myself in this place. Every day I would walk to and from work down these dark dingy back alleys lined with garbage, stagnant dirty water, and old metal trash cans.
One day I was walking home from work and I heard someone or something calling to me with a raspy choked voice from the darkness of the alley way. I walked closer to inspect it and noticed the sounds coming from behind a group of old trash cans gathered next to an old filthy brick wall stained with years of smoke and pollution. I stepped closer hearing the gasps more loudly as I closed the distance between me and the trash cans. To my utter horror laying on the ground in a pool of dirty garbage water I found a woman’s severed head in a clear plastic bag lined with spatters of dried blood from a rotten stump.
Decay had set in long ago. Its lifeless eyes were glossy white and the skin was dirty, dark, and grey. The veins had blackened along with its cracked peeled back lips and dried out tongue. Its stump was a mass of flesh, torn muscle, and a broken spine. Suddenly, its lips began to quiver… The eyes were moving and the head was calling out to me in a horrible dead voice… It was asking me for help. It looked like it had been there for weeks with no one but the garbage to keep it company. No one seemed to have noticed or to have taken an interest in finding the person who left it here. In this dream I could not speak but only be spoken to so it was assumed that I must have agreed to help the head so I took it home and laid it on my floor next to the closet.
~After this happened there was a bit of a time skip (because dreams)~
During this period going back and forth to and from work down this alley way I seemed to have collected more and more of these severed women’s heads from the same location all in the same state of decay, their stumps carelessly hacked away. All of the heads had called out for help in the same choked voice and I had obliged.
Some time went by after that and my days were filled with paranoia and anxiety. There were no leads to track down and no evidence to follow, only the voices gasping out in the darkness of my bedroom. The decapitated heads spoke seemingly only to me though I had no evidence for my belief. After all I was the only person who had come in to contact with them, right?
One morning I awoke to all of the heads groaning and gasping in a much more frantic way than they had before. Their dead lifeless white eyes were open wide staring straight in to my soul full of fear and panic. They were shrieking out choked cries that sounded like a warning, telling me “Don’t look outside.” “Don’t answer the door.”
Then I heard a knock… Someone was here… Down stairs… I looked out the window and I saw a squad of police cars downstairs. They were banging on my door. A feeling of utter panic and terror swept through me because I did not know what to tell them. Would these cops believe my story? Would they be able to hear them speak too? Would they think.. I was the killer?
~Suddenly I awoke. The dog was barking. The dream had ended.~
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THESEUS
==April 21st 1992== [Old yellowed diary page with coffee stains]
I don’t remember when I first moved to this city. The memories before this eternal twilight have rotted away, like corpses in standing water. What remains are fragments that surface in my dreams – glimpses of sunlight that feel more like fantasy than reality. This place devours memories. It feeds on hope.
The city rises around me like a disease made manifest in steel and concrete. Buildings pierce the poison sky like broken teeth, their surfaces slick with perpetual grime that no rain ever truly washes away. The pollution here is a living thing, a thick miasma that coats every surface in a film of greasy black residue. It seeps through clothing, clings to skin, works its way into your pores until you feel it festering beneath the surface.
The air has weight, a physical presence that coats your lungs with each labored breath. It tastes of metal and ash, of burning plastic and rotting dreams. Sometimes I find myself spitting black phlegm into my sink, watching as it leaves oily trails on the porcelain. Beneath that metallic tang lurks something fouler – a complex symphony of urban decay that mingles the ripe sweetness of garbage with the sharp bite of industrial waste and something else, something older and more putrid that rises from the storm drains like the breath of some buried beast.
At street level, the city becomes a maze of shadow-choked canyons. Neon signs buzz like dying insects, their sickly light reflecting off pools of water that never seem to dry. The darkness here is hungry. It pools in corners and doorways, thick enough to touch, seeming to pull at your clothing as you pass. Even the rats stay hidden, though you can hear them scuttling behind the walls, through pipes that weep rust-colored tears.
The people here are ghosts, their faces masks of resigned despair as they hurry through the perpetual gloom. Nobody makes eye contact. Nobody wants to see what lives behind their neighbors’ eyes. We’re all infected by this place, carrying its corruption inside us like a cancer.
My footsteps echo strangely in these urban catacombs – sometimes they sound like my own, sometimes they carry a different rhythm, as if someone else’s steps are hiding within mine. The buildings lean inward overhead, their peaks lost in a smog that glows a sickly orange from the city lights below. At night – though true darkness never falls here – the shadows seem to breathe.
That’s where I found the first one, in one of those places swallowed by the darkness where the alleyways twisted into blackened arteries of brick and steel. That sound.. it was barely a whisper, a wet, rasping sound that could have been the wind through rusted pipes.
But wind doesn’t call your name.
A rasping sigh pierced the silence, emanating from a darkened corner beside an old rusted dumpster. The dumpster was a monument to decay, squatting in the corner like a bloated carcass. Its corroded metal walls oozed a sickly brown sludge, and deep rust scars flaked away in brittle chunks. Garbage spilled over the edges, forming a cascade of filth that stank of spoiled meat and sour milk. Flies swarmed thickly in the rancid air, their buzzing an oppressive drone that mingled with the faint, wet rustling of something moving deep inside.
Something pulled me forward – curiosity, fate, or perhaps something darker. The rancid stench grew stronger with every step, the air growing heavier, thick with decay and tinged with the faint metallic tang of blood. My footsteps slowed, the instinct to flee clawing at the edges of my thoughts, but my body kept moving as if propelled by something not entirely my own.
The shadows beside the dumpster seemed alive, writhing in the toxic glow of a buzzing neon sign above. They thickened as I approached, taking on a shape that shouldn’t have been there. At first, it was just a lump, indistinct and half-hidden in the darkness. But as I drew closer, details emerged – the vague outline of a head, wrapped in plastic, glistening faintly.
My breath hitched, and my throat constricted, every nerve screaming at me to turn back.
Then the eyes opened.
Like frozen pearls floating in yellowed pools, they fixed upon me with an intensity that froze the breath in my lungs. Despite their milky cloudiness, those horrible orbs tracked my every movement, held knowledge – terrible knowledge – and in that moment, I understood with horrifying clarity that this thing knew secrets about me that I had yet to discover. It wasn’t pleading or begging me to put it out of its misery. It was watching. Waiting. Judging. Without warning the wet, rasping whisper came again, so close now it felt like it was inside my skull.
It called my name.
My legs trembled as I drew closer, unable to look away. At first, it was just a vague lump, hunched and still, but as my vision sharpened, it began to take form. The glint of plastic caught the light, slick and taut, stretching over something unmistakably human.
The head emerged from the shadows like a grotesque unveiling. The head’s lips, cracked and peeling, pulled back from blackened gums in what my mind couldn’t decide was a grimace or a knowing smile. The stump of its neck was a nightmare of torn flesh and splintered bone, ragged edges speaking of violence I couldn’t bear to contemplate. The plastic wrapped around it was spattered with old blood turned brown with time, creating abstract patterns that seemed to shift in the weak light filtering through the smog.
Deep, wet rasps escaped from the ruined throat, struggling to form words through destroyed vocal cords. The sound was like wind through a slaughterhouse, carrying meaning just beyond my comprehension. What was left of the tongue moved behind broken teeth, and those eyes – those horrible, dead eyes – never ceased their relentless stare.
Science tells us that dead tissue doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. But science has no place in these alleys, where the laws of nature seem to bend like light through polluted water.
I should have run. Should have called the police. Instead, I found myself kneeling in that filth, reaching out with shaking hands toward the plastic-wrapped horror. It was heavier than I expected, dense with terrible purpose. As I lifted it, dark fluid ran down my wrists, hot and thick, nothing like the cold rain that perpetually drips from this city’s wounds.
That was the first one. I didn’t know then that there would be others. Didn’t understand that this was only the beginning of something far more terrible than I could imagine.
That night, I placed it on my kitchen table, unable to look away, unable to sleep. The plastic wrapping caught the dim light from my flickering overhead bulb, creating shifting patterns that seemed to form words I couldn’t quite read. Those eyes never closed, never stopped watching. Even when I retreated to my bedroom, I could feel their gaze burning through the walls.
==April 24th 1992== [Small dark fluid stains splattered at the corner of the page]
The whispers started three days ago. At first, just at night – barely audible murmurs that might have been the building’s ancient pipes or the wind through poorly sealed windows. But they grew clearer, more insistent. “You already know why,” it seemed to say, the words slithering through my consciousness like ice water down my spine. “You were there. You’ve always been there.” The meaning felt like a knife twisting in my gut, though I couldn’t understand why.
The whispers followed me into my dreams, led me through the city’s twisted arteries to places I would never have ventured on my own. Each night, the head’s raspy voice grew more precise, each new utterance leaving me more terrified than the last.
I found the second one behind a crumbling wall, half-buried in decades of urban debris. This one’s hair was longer, matted with something dark and sticky. Its eyes opened the moment my fingers brushed against the plastic, and I swear it smiled. The whispers grew louder that night, two voices now, speaking in unison but slightly out of sync, like a corrupted audio recording. In the depths of night, a single phrase emerged: “We’ve been waiting for you to come back.”
Time became… fluid. I’d find myself in strange parts of the city with no memory of how I got there, my clothes stained with substances I couldn’t identify. The heads – I couldn’t remember how many I had now – filled my apartment with their presence. Sometimes I’d wake to find them arranged differently than I’d left them, their eternal stares focused on something I couldn’t see.
They were trying to tell me something. Something important. But I needed more. They were incomplete, these fragments of a larger truth. Each new discovery brought me closer to… to what? I couldn’t remember anymore. Couldn’t remember so many things.
The third one I found in the subway tunnels, far beyond where the trains still run. I don’t remember going down there, don’t remember the walk through those lightless passages. Just the moment when my flashlight beam caught those familiar milky eyes, and that voice – different from the others but somehow the same – whispered, “Your hands.. they remember the work.”
I looked down at my hands then, really looked at them, and for a moment I saw them covered in… no. No, I couldn’t have seen that. The memory slips away like smoke whenever I try to grasp it.
The heads speak more often now, though never when I’m fully awake. In that space between sleeping and waking, their voices blend together like a diseased choir. Sometimes I catch glimpses of memories that can’t be mine – hands moving with surgical precision, the gleam of steel, the wet sound of… no. No, those aren’t my memories. They can’t be.
==April 27th 1992== [Pages slightly wrinkled, faint copper-colored spots along edges]
Last night, I found another one inside a drainage pipe. Or was it the night before? The days blur together now. This one was different – its eyes weren’t clouded like the others, and when it spoke, the words came clearer: “Soon you’ll understand why we chose you.” The sound of it made my skull feel like it was splitting open, memories trying to surface through a haze of static and screaming.
The atmosphere in my apartment has changed. The other heads – however many there are now – all seem to be shifting when I look away, to orient themselves toward this new arrival like compass needles finding north. The air is thick now, and I swear I can hear a low humming, just at the edge of perception, as if they’re all vibrating at some frequency my human ears can’t quite detect.
Even now, as I write this, I can feel their collective gaze, but this new head… its stare burns the most. It knows something. Something about me. Something about why I’m collecting them, why I can’t stop, why my hands sometimes move with a purpose that feels both foreign and horrifyingly familiar. I tried to quiet my racing thoughts, convince myself that sleep would wash away these delusions. But as I lay there in the darkness, a whisper slithered from the kitchen, clear as breaking glass:
“I was the first.”
==April 30th?? 1992== [Several spots of damp black fluid visible]
I’ve started losing time. Hours, maybe days. I’ll catch my reflection in windows or puddles, and for a split second, I don’t recognize myself. There’s something different about my eyes now. Something hungry.
The whispers are getting louder. They’re telling me there are more to find. How many? I try to count the heads in my apartment, but the number changes every time. I am exhausted, but the fear.. the fear keeps me awake. They watch me always, never flinching, never blinking, their plastic shrouds glistening with condensation that smells of copper and decay.
I don’t know why but I moved them into my bedroom a few nights ago. There was no conscious decision, just an overwhelming compulsion that seized my body like a puppet’s strings. I fought it – God, I fought it – but my hands moved of their own accord, gathering each head as tears streamed down my face. Every step down the dark hallway felt like wading through thick mud, my muscles obeying some terrible force I couldn’t understand. Each head pressed against my chest left those dark stains, spreading across my clothes like an infection.
Now they squat in the corner by my closet door, an obscene pyramid of corrupted flesh and dead white eyes. The plastic wrappings have melded together in places, creating a wet, translucent membrane that pulses subtly in the darkness. Worst of all are their expressions – what started as frozen masks of horror have twisted into something else. They’re smiling now. All of them. Even the ones on the bottom of the pile, barely visible through the layers of plastic and seepage, have curved their blackened lips into knowing grins. Only the clear-eyed one maintains its serene, neutral expression, but somehow that’s even worse. Its gaze follows me with such intensity that I feel it like a physical touch, crawling across my skin as I lie in bed, unable to look away.
Sleep has become… impossible. Even when exhaustion drags my eyelids down, their whispers keep me tethering on the edge of consciousness. “Your turn is coming,” the clear-eyed one says, its voice cutting through the wet murmurs of the others. “You’ve always known this moment would come.”
==May ??== [Dark fluid has seeped through from previous entry]
Last night, I caught movement in my peripheral vision – one of the heads, mouth working silently, neck stump twitching like it was trying to crawl. When I turned to look directly at it, it was still again, but its eyes… its eyes had moved to focus on my hands.
I’ve started wearing gloves. I can’t bear to look at my bare hands anymore. There are memories trapped in the lines of my palms, memories that feel like razor blades when they try to surface. The heads know these memories. They see them written on my skin even through the gloves.
The pile grows. I don’t remember collecting the newer ones. They’re just there when I return to consciousness, fresh plastic wrappings glistening with that dark fluid that never seems to dry. Sometimes I wake to find myself already standing in the corner, staring at them. My gloves are always wetter on these mornings.
==May ?1992?== [Pages are sticking together, smell of copper growing stronger]
Last night, the clear-eyed one spoke again. “The others were practice,” it said. The words seemed to echo in my skull, setting off explosions of half-formed memories. “You’re different. Special.” The other heads’ grins widened at this, stretched impossibly wide beneath their plastic shrouds.
I tried boarding up my bedroom window today. Can’t remember why. My hands moved automatically, hammering nails into wood while my mind drifted. When I finished, I noticed I’d arranged the boards in a pattern. It meant something, I know it did, but looking at it made my nose bleed.
The whispers are different now. Excited. Hungry. They speak in unison more often, their voices harmonizing into something that makes my teeth vibrate. “Almost ready,” they say. “Almost complete.”
I think… I think I know what they want now. I catch glimpses of it in my dreams – flashes of steel, the wet sound of separation, a perfect circle finally closing. But I can’t hold onto these thoughts. Won’t hold onto them. Because if I do…
==May ?? 1992== [Several pages appear to have been smudged with black liquid or partially torn out]
I… no. That’s not it.
..and they just kept staring.
Why did it not work..
I’ll fix it..
..but who was that outside the window?
==May ????== [Pages crumpled, dark stains spreading from the binding]
Always watching… cant sleep.. they keep moving when I’m not looking.. are they getting closer?
==June ??== [Pages stuck together with unknown substance]
I found my medicine this morning. My head feels a little clearer now. Maybe if I can just get some sleep. He’s still watching from outside the window. Who is he? He looks like… me?
==July 1992== [Page smeared with black fluid.]
The walls of my bedroom are sweating now. At first, I thought it was just condensation from my ragged breathing, but the liquid is too dark, too thick. It runs down in rivulets that seem to form patterns – the same patterns I see when I close my eyes, the same patterns my hands keep trying to draw in the air when I’m not paying attention.
The pile has become something else. The plastic wrappings have fused completely, creating a translucent cocoon that throbs with a rhythm that matches my heartbeat. Their smiles have grown impossibly wide, stretching past where human jaws should be able to reach. Only the clear-eyed one maintains its serene expression, watching me with that burning gaze that seems to peel away layers of my sanity.
==August== [Pages shredded and pasted back together with unknown substance]
I found another head in my bathtub this morning. I don’t remember bringing it home. My gloves were soaked through, and there was a new tear in my coat that I don’t remember getting. This one’s different though – the plastic is wrapped tighter, more precisely. The work of experienced hands. My hands.
“Look how far you’ve come,” the clear-eyed one whispered last night. “Remember the first time? How clumsy you were?” I wanted to scream, to deny it, but my throat closed around the memories trying to surface.
The boards on my window have started to warp, bending inward like ribs around a hungry mouth. I can hear something scratching behind them, something that sounds like plastic rustling against glass. Or maybe it’s coming from inside my closet. I can’t tell anymore – direction has become meaningless in this room.
==1992== [Paper appears to be scratched repeatedly with something sharp]
its too late
its too late
its too late
they’re coming through
==13== [Paper soggy and deteriorating, writing becoming erratic]
Tonight, I woke to find myself standing in front of my bathroom mirror, gloves off, hands pressed against the glass. There was something wrong with my reflection, something wrong with my eyes. They looked clearer somehow. Like the one in the pile. Like the one that’s been waiting for me all along.
“It’s time,” they’re whispering now. All of them. Even the new one. Even my reflection. “It’s finally time.”
==August 14th 1992== [Pages soaked through with dark matter, writing becoming increasingly frenzied]
My bedroom door won’t open anymore. I’m not sure when it sealed itself shut. The wood has taken on the same sickly sheen as the plastic wrappings, and sometimes I swear I can see it breathing. Not that it matters – I couldn’t leave now even if I wanted to. The heads wouldn’t let me.
They’ve started moving more openly now. No more pretense of stillness when I look directly at them. The pile writhes like a nest of serpents, heads rotating to keep their grins fixed on me. The sound… God, the sound they make. Wet plastic sliding against wet plastic, punctuated by the soft click of teeth.
The clear-eyed one spoke to me using my mother’s voice last night. Then my father’s. Then voices I recognized but couldn’t place – people I must have known, must have… No. No, I can’t think about that. Those voices, they stopped speaking years ago.
My gloves dissolved an hour ago, melted right into my skin. My hands don’t look like my hands anymore. They’re darker, slick with something that won’t wash off. The fingers are longer, and they move with a purpose I can’t control. They keep reaching for things that aren’t there. Yet.
The pattern on the boarded window is complete now. I understand what it means. What it’s always meant. The heads are humming, a sound that makes my bones feel like glass about to shatter. The clear-eyed one’s gaze has become unbearable – like staring into a mirror that shows what you really are.
“The circle must be completed,” they whisper in unison. “One final addition.”
My hands are moving again. They know what to do. They’ve always known.
I think I’m smiling now too.
The walls are breathing in sync with the pile now. That dark fluid runs down in sheets, pooling at my feet, but it never rises past my ankles. The boards on my window have curved completely inward, forming that spiral pattern I’ve been seeing in my dreams. My nightmares. My memories.
I’m sitting cross-legged in front of the pile. My hands – these things that used to be my hands – rest in my lap, fingers twitching with anticipation. The plastic cocoon has split open, releasing a smell that should be revolting but feels like coming home.
The clear-eyed one has worked its way to the front. Its grin is different now, softer, almost tender. “You were always meant for this,” it says, using my own voice. “From the first moment, from the first cut, this was always your destination.”
The other heads have arranged themselves in concentric circles. Their smiles stretch wider and wider until they meet at the back of their heads, creating perfect rings of teeth. The whispers have become a song, a lullaby I remember from somewhere deep in my past. Or maybe my future.
My hands are reaching up now. They know their purpose. They remember.
I’m not afraid anymore.
I’m smiling.
I’m still smiling.
I’m still..
[The rest of the pages are ripped out except for a small torn piece of paper folded neatly inside a flap in the back of the diary.]
==April 14th 1992== [Page yellowed and creased, but well-preserved]
Something unsettling happened today. I was taking a shortcut home through the industrial district when I noticed someone down in the drainage ditch. At first, I thought it was a maintenance worker, but something felt wrong about the way he moved. He was hunched over one of the large pipes, doing… something. When he heard me, he turned and stood.
I felt my heart stop. He was wearing clothes identical to mine, down to the scuffed boots I bought last month. But that wasn’t the worst part. When he looked up, I saw my own face staring back at me. Not similar – identical. He smiled, and there was something horrible in that expression, something that wasn’t quite human.
I ran. God help me, I ran. When I looked back, he was gone. But I can still feel his eyes on me. Still see that terrible smile.
This can’t be real. My own face… how is that even possible?
Dr. Huber did warn me about potential side effects from the new medication. That has to be it. Just my mind playing tricks on me.
Has to be. People can’t just replace you.
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This story was originally conceived from a nightmare I had that I posted to r/Nightmares 8 years ago. I fleshed out the story a bit and changed the ending and then I used a few different AI programs to help me fix grammar and proofread it. I also used it to make several alterations and flesh out several scenes to be more descriptive though all of it was iterated upon numerous times and edited by me. I just want to be forth coming about the usage of AI in this story in case it matters to anyone.
