The Akula Building - Floor 13*
November 18th - 2:47 PM
"—so let me get this straight."
Zale leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled, studying the young woman sitting across from him.
Platinum bob with pink-tipped ends. Heavy winged eyeliner. Dark plum lipstick. Small black heart tattooed below her left eye. Designer corset over white mesh sleeves. Thick choker. Bridge piercing. Black mini-shorts, fishnet tights, platform combat boots.
Expensive. Committed. Not costume.
And bruising around her throat the choker couldn't quite hide. Dark purple. Small handprints.
"You found a cursed video online. Downloaded it. Watched it. Got cursed. Refused to spread it because that would kill someone else. Tried breaking it yourself—which failed. Then found me through desperate research. Now you're here with two days left and no money to pay."
She nodded, throat too tight for words.
On the TV behind his desk, news played on low volume:
"—tragic incident in Castle Rock, Maine. Donna Trenton and her son Tad were attacked by their family dog, a Saint Bernard named Cujo. Mrs. Trenton managed to kill the animal, but Tad succumbed to his injuries. Preliminary forensics indicate advanced rabies—"
Zale muted it. Another incident confirmed mundane. Not everything was supernatural.
He looked back at her.
"Tell me from the beginning. Every detail."
She took a shaky breath.
"It started three weeks ago."
***
THREE WEEKS AGO
Sable scrolled through the forum on her second monitor, energy drink going cold beside her keyboard.
Same subforum she always haunted. Deep web adjacent, invitation-only. Where people posted things that were probably fake but just plausible enough to be entertaining.
Tonight's pinned thread: Found this on a dead clearnet site. Don't watch alone. Seriously.
Posted by: ShadowArchive_94
The file link sat there. Innocent. Tempting.
CURSED_COPY_FINAL.mp4
"Sure it is," Sable muttered, clicking download.
She'd collected hundreds of these over the years. "Cursed" videos. "Haunted" footage. They always turned out to be student projects with corn syrup blood and terrible acting.
This one downloaded slowly. Odd for only 47MB.
Her antivirus flagged it immediately.
Sable clicked Allow Anyway.
The file appeared. She double-clicked.
VLC opened.
Static filled her screen.
Not digital artifacts. Real static. Analog. The kind that belonged to VHS tapes from the eighties, degraded and dying.
"Nice touch," Sable said, leaning back. "Retro aesthetic. I can respect that."
Then the images started.
Fragmented. Spliced wrong. Like a film cut into pieces and reassembled in the wrong order.
A well. Stone walls. Ancient. The wooden cover rotting, half-collapsed.
Someone was inside it.
Long dark hair falling over their face like a funeral shroud. White dress, torn and stained dark. Fingernails broken, bloody. They were climbing.
Scraping against stone. Pulling up. Higher. Desperate. Toward a circle of gray light above.
The sound was wrong. Not dubbed.There. Fingernails on wet stone. Labored breathing. Water dripping in darkness.
Sable's smile faded.
The perspective shifted without warning.
Now she was looking down into the well.
The figure stopped climbing. Looked up.
And her face—
Sable slammed the laptop shut.
Sat there in darkness. Heart hammering. Skin cold despite the space heater running.
"Okay," she said to the empty apartment. "You got me. Genuinely fucking got me."
Her phone buzzed.
She picked it up.
A notification had appeared. Not from any app she recognized. Just text, burned into the display:
7 DAYS
And beneath it, barely visible, a whisper that seemed to come from the phone itself:
"Seven days."
Sable stared at it.
Tried to swipe it away. It wouldn't dismiss.
She laughed. Nervous. Too loud.
"Malware. Has to be malware. Some kind of rootkit. That's actually pretty sophisticated."
She opened her laptop.
Navigated to her downloads folder to delete the file.
Empty.
Completely empty. Not just the video—every file she'd downloaded in the past month. Gone.
"What the fuck?"
She checked her trash bin. Empty.
The phone screen still displayed: 7 DAYS
"Factory reset tomorrow. Flash the ROM. It's fine."
She stopped talking.
The smell hit her.
Stagnant water. Rot. Mildew and decay. Like a pond sealed away from sunlight for years.
Sable looked around. Windows closed. Nothing damp. Nothing that should smell like that.
She checked her closet. Bathroom. Under her bed.
Nothing.
But the smell was getting stronger.
"I'm ordering pizza and going to bed early. Tomorrow this'll make a funny forum post."
She ordered pizza.
Ate three slices without tasting them.
Went to bed at midnight with every light in her apartment on.
The smell didn't go away.
***
PRESENT
"That was the download," she said quietly. "I thought it was just really good malware. Someone monitoring the forum, getting off on scaring people."
Zale said nothing. Just watched her with eyes that seemed to see more than they should.
"Day One was when I realized it wasn't a game."
***
DAY ONE
Sable stood in the shower, scrubbing at her eyeliner with more force than necessary.
"It's just malware," she muttered. "Really sophisticated malware. That's all."
The file was gone. The notification stuck. But explainable. Someone had coded something clever.
She'd post about it tomorrow. Warn others. Maybe reverse-engineer it.
She reached for her facial cleanser.
Glanced at the mirror through the steam.
Her reflection blinked.
She hadn't.
Sable's hand froze. Eyes locked on the mirror.
Her reflection stared back. Eyeliner half-removed. Water running over both of them.
Then the reflection smiled.
Not her smile. Too wide. The corners wrong, like someone had forgotten how the muscles actually worked.
"What the—"
The water went arctic.
Ice-cold knifed into her skin. Sable yelped, jumped back, hit the wall, scrambling for the temperature dial—
Scalding. Boiling.
She screamed. Stumbled out. Feet slipped on wet tile. She went down hard on one knee, caught the sink edge.
"Jesus Christ—thermostat's it's fucking broken—"
Her eyes went to the mirror.
Bruising around her throat.
Dark purple. Almost black. A perfect circle wrapping completely around her windpipe.
Like small hands had gripped her and squeezed.
"No."
She looked down at her actual throat. Touched it. Felt normal.
Looked back up.
The bruising was there. Clear. Undeniable.
"I'm hallucinating. Stress hallucination—"
She touched her throat again.
Cold.
Her fingers found the bruising in the reflection. Found the spot on her actual neck.
And it was cold. The tissue itself frozen, like it had been dipped in liquid nitrogen from the inside.
"This isn't happening."
Behind her reflection, something moved.
Sable spun so fast she nearly fell.
The bathroom was empty.
Shower running. Steam dissipating. Nothing else.
"I'm seeing things. I'm tired. I just need sleep."
She looked back at the mirror.
Words traced in the condensation. Neat. Deliberate.
6 DAYS
Sable stood there. Dripping. Shaking. Hand pressed to her throat where the impossible bruising throbbed with unnatural cold.
The smell was stronger now. Stagnant water and rot, thick enough to taste.
"This isn't real."
She grabbed her phone with trembling hands.
Pulled up the forum thread.
Error 404: Thread Not Found
User profile. ShadowArchive_94.
User Does Not Exist
"No. No no no—"
File recovery results: Zero files recovered.
But on her home screen: 6 DAYS
Sable wrapped herself in a towel and sat on the cold bathroom floor.
"It's a prank. Just an elaborate prank."
She called her friend Riley.
Three rings.
"—the fuck, Sable? It's almost midnight."
"Riley, I—" Her voice cracked. "I think I downloaded something bad."
"Like a virus?"
"I don't know. There's this notification that won't go away and—"
"Babe. Just factory reset it tomorrow. I'm going back to sleep."
The line went dead.
Sable sat there on the tile floor.
Looked at the mirror. The words were fading.
But she could still see the bruising.
She turned off the light.
Went to bed.
Lay there with her eyes open.
Didn't sleep at all.
***
DAY TWO
Sable jerked awake to dripping.
Loud. Rhythmic. Directly above her.
She stared up at the ceiling through darkness.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
She grabbed her phone. Turned on the flashlight. Pointed it up.
Dry. No water. No damage.
But the dripping continued.
She got up. Walked around the bed.
That's when she saw them.
Footprints.
Muddy. Small. Walking across her ceiling.
From her window—fourth-floor window, locked—to directly above where she'd been sleeping.
"I'm dreaming."
She pinched her arm. Hard. Drew blood.
Felt it.
"I'm awake and those are footprints on my fucking ceiling."
Child-sized. Wet. Fresh. Leaving droplets of dark water that clung to the ceiling, defying gravity.
Sable grabbed her keys. Jacket. Wallet.
Her phone displaying 5DAYS.
She ran.
***
She came back at dawn with coffee and desperate hope.
Opened her apartment door.
The smell hit her first. Overwhelming. Like opening a door to a mass grave.
Her sheets were soaked.
Completely saturated. Water pooling in the mattress, dripping onto the floor.
She looked up. The ceiling was dry.
The apartment above hers had been vacant for two months.
"Where is the water coming from?"
She touched the sheets.
Ice-cold. Smelling like stagnant pond water.
Every window had handprints.
Small. Muddy. Pressed against the glass.
Inside and outside.
Perfectly aligned. Like something had pressed both hands against each window from both sides simultaneously.
She walked to the nearest one. Looked at the prints. Then looked down.
Four-story drop. Concrete below. No fire escape. No ledge. No tree branches.
Nothing could have reached her windows from outside.
"I need to call the police."
She pulled out her phone.
The screen was damp. Moisture appearing instantly, cold and foul-smelling.
She tried to dial.
The screen flickered. Went black. Came back.
5 DAYS
Battery: 8%
She'd charged it to 100% an hour ago.
Her laptop wouldn't boot. Just displayed static.
Then text appeared:
5 DAYS
Her TV turned on by itself.
Every channel: static.
And in the static—barely visible—she could see it.
A well.
Someone climbing.
Getting closer to the top.
Closer to out.
Sable unplugged the TV.
It stayed on.
"Fuck this."
She grabbed a bag. Started throwing clothes into it.
Her phone buzzed.
A text. From her own number.
You can't leave.
Sable stared at it.
Typed back: Watch me.
Another message appeared:
You already watched.
She threw the phone across the room.
It bounced off the wall. Screen cracked.
But kept glowing.
5 DAYS
***
DAY THREE
Sable spent the night on Riley's couch. Hadn't slept. Hadn't explained beyond "leak in my apartment."
Now she walked to her car in broad daylight. Public street. People around. Safe.
She saw a puddle near the curb. Rainwater from last night's storm.
Glanced down as she passed.
Saw her reflection.
Normal. Platinum bob. Corset. Fishnets.
She took another step.
The reflection didn't move.
Sable stopped. Turned back.
The reflection stood still. Not mimicking her. Just standing there, staring down at something at its feet.
Something circular. Stone. Old.
A well cover.
Sable looked at the actual sidewalk. Concrete. Cracks. Cigarette butt. No well.
She looked back at the puddle.
The reflection's head tilted. Slowly. Mechanically.
Then smiled.
Sable ran.
Got in her car. Locked the doors. Fumbled the key into the ignition with shaking hands.
Drove to a coffee shop three miles away. Corporate. Bright. Full of people living normal lives.
She ordered something. Didn't taste it.
Sat in the corner with her cracked phone and opened a private browser.
"Research. Figure out what this actually is."
She typed: cursed video seven days entity
Results flooded the screen. Forum posts. Wiki entries. Survivor accounts.
All describing the same thing.
A girl. Psychic powers. Thrown down a well by her mother. Left there.
Seven days of darkness. Terror. Starvation.
Her rage manifested as a curse. Pain made transmissible. A virus of suffering that spread through moving images.
Samara Morgan.
"Every survivor did the same thing," Sable whispered, reading account after account. "Copied the video. Showed it to someone else. Passed the curse on."
She looked at her phone.
4 DAYS
"I could send the file to someone."
The thought sat there. Cold. Simple.
"The curse transfers. I live. Someone die."
Her contacts were right there.
Thirty seconds and seven deaths.
"That's murder."
But it's survival.
"It's still murder."
She closed the phone.
Opened a new search: how to break curse without transferring
***
Six hours of research.
Deep diving into the same forums where she'd found the video. Into archives most people didn't know existed.
Most of it was garbage. But some threads felt different. Felt real.
She found one from 2009. Archived. Locked.
Title: SURVIVOR PROTOCOL - NON-TRANSFER METHOD
Posted by: [DELETED USER]
Inside: detailed binding ritual. Latin phrases. Sigil configurations. Salt circle specifications.
Instructions written by someone who'd tried this before.
At the bottom:
Attempted this November 2008. Curse paused for 72 hours. Then returned at doubled intensity. Binding only works if the anchor is stronger than the entity. Mine wasn't. Yours won't be either.
If you're reading this, you're already dead. I tried to find another way too.
I'm sorry I failed.
I'm sorry you will too.
The account was deleted three days after posting.
Sable screenshot everything.
"Maybe they didn't do it right. Maybe—"
Her phone buzzed.
4 DAYS
"Maybe I can succeed where they failed."
She didn't believe it.
But she had to try.
***
PRESENT
"That's when I knew it was real," Sable said, exhaustion hollowing out her voice. "That I was actually going to die. That she was real."
Zale was silent. Studying her.
"You said you tried to fight it," he said finally.
Sable nodded. "Yeah. Day Four. I found that binding ritual. Thought maybe I could trap her. Contain her. Break the curse without spreading it."
"How did that work out?"
Her laugh was bitter. "About as well as you'd expect when you fight a vengeful ghost with instructions from a dead forum user."
Zale's lips twitched. Not quite a smile. But close.
"Tell me," he said.
[END CHAPTER 10]
A/N:- Tried something new—showing the story from
Sable's POV instead of just Zale's.Wanted the horror to hit harder by putting you in the curse instead of just hearing about it . Did it work, or should I stick to Zale's perspective?
Anyway, would love to hear your thoughts. And thanks for reading this far. Means a lot.