The apartment smelled of damp plaster and old sickness—
the kind that sank into the walls and refused to leave.
Levi sat on the edge of his sagging mattress, elbows braced on his knees, staring at the wall as though it might finally answer him.
It never did.
The paint had blistered years ago, curling away in long yellowed strips that hung like dead skin. Beneath them, older layers showed through—faded floral patterns from some long-gone tenant's attempt at cheer. Now the flowers looked bruised, half-rotted, as if even the *memory* of beauty had sickened here.
He was twenty-eight.
The mirror across the room told a different story.
Its cracked surface fractured his reflection into jagged shards, a spiderweb of glass splitting him into pieces. In every fragment, the same man stared back—gaunt, hollow, worn thin by time that had moved too fast. Sunken cheeks. Eyes drowned in permanent shadow. Skin stretched translucent over bone, blue veins mapping his temples and hands like rivers on a dying chart.
When he breathed—shallow, careful breaths—his ribs shifted beneath his T-shirt like prison bars under wet paper.
For a moment, another image bled through the cracks.
A younger Levi.
Laughing.
Sunlight pouring through a kitchen window.
Arms wrapped around a woman whose face he could barely remember anymore.
She had left six months after the diagnosis, when the weight loss accelerated and the pain stopped pretending to be manageable.
"I can't watch you disappear," she'd said, voice breaking.
He hadn't blamed her.
He *was* disappearing.
The illness had no proper name—at least not one the doctors bothered to give him after the tests came back inconclusive.
"Progressive systemic failure," a resident had muttered once, flipping through charts with the same detachment one might reserve for a weather forecast.
Painkillers.
Anti-nausea meds.
A prognosis measured in *weeks*.
Maybe less.
The words had dropped into his life like stones into still water, ripples spreading until everything sank.
On the windowsill sat a row of orange prescription bottles, their labels peeling at the edges.
He counted them every morning.
Seven bottles.
Forty-three pills.
Enough for twelve days if he stretched them—skipping doses when the pain dulled enough to tolerate. Each night he marked the calendar nailed beside the window with a red **X**. The month was almost full now—angry slashes crowding the squares like bloodstains on cheap paper.
Outside, the city continued without him.
Through the grimy pane he watched the street five stories below—delivery trucks idling at traffic lights, people passing with grocery bags and earbuds, heads bowed against the bite of late-autumn wind.
None of them looked up.
Why would they?
He was just another shadow in another window—one more forgotten soul in a building full of them.
Once, he'd been down there too.
Working double shifts at a warehouse.
Saving for something better.
Dreaming of *more*.
Now the world below felt like a film playing on mute.
---
At night, the fear grew teeth.
Sleep came in fragments—thin, treacherous things. Every time he drifted close, a cold tug bloomed behind his ribs, like fingers made of ice hooking into his heart and pulling gently… insistently.
He would jolt awake gasping, sweat cooling on his skin, convinced something had been standing over him in the dark—
—breathing his name.
He'd heard the stories.
Everyone like him had.
They circulated in whispers—free clinic waiting rooms, soup kitchen lines, the darker corners of online forums where the terminally ill traded black humor and worse hopes.
**The Midnight Spell.**
A curse that didn't hunt the healthy or the fortunate.
It came only for those already marked.
Bodies failing.
Time borrowed—and nearly due.
It arrived at the stroke of twelve.
And it took you somewhere worse than death.
He remembered the first time he'd heard it clearly.
A woman in the oncology ward, skeletal beneath hospital sheets, whispering through the curtain divider.
"It don't come for just anyone," she'd said, voice papery and urgent. "Only us. The ones the world forgot. It offers a deal—survive its trials, and you get more time. Real time. Fail…"
She never finished the sentence.
She vanished two nights later.
Security footage showed nothing—no one entering, no one leaving.
Weeks after that, a nurse swore she'd seen her wandering the highway outside town—barefoot in the snow, eyes solid black, muttering about mountains that went on forever beneath a red sky.
Then there was the veteran at the downtown shelter.
Old Marine. Lungs ruined by something overseas.
"Felt it coming," he'd said over watery coffee, voice like gravel. "Like drowning in reverse."
He woke up somewhere else.
Cold stone beneath his back.
Air tasting of metal and pine.
Things moving in the dark—*big* things.
He disappeared one midnight.
Came back three days later with scars that hadn't been there before—long pale lines across his arms and chest that glowed faintly when the lights were off.
Stronger too.
Lifted a dumpster one-handed to retrieve a dropped wallet.
He never talked about where he'd been.
Only said, "Don't fight it when it comes for you. Just don't."
Most never came back at all.
The common thread was always the same:
The Spell offered a bargain.
Cruel.
Impossible.
*Real.*
Survive its trials and earn more time.
Fail—
—and you stayed there forever.
Levi hated that the stories gave him hope.
A small, traitorous spark he couldn't quite smother.
He scrolled those forums late at night on his cracked phone, rereading the same threads until his eyes burned. Then he'd delete the app in disgust.
*Stupid,* he'd think. *Wishful thinking for the dying.*
The next night, he'd download it again.
---
Night fell hard.
The single bulb overhead flickered—once, twice—then steadied, bathing the room in weak yellow light.
**[SFX: *bzzzt—click*]**
Levi paced the narrow strip between bed and sink.
Six steps forward.
Six steps back.
His heart stuttered, irregular enough to make him stop and press a hand to his chest, counting until it settled.
He hadn't slept properly in a week.
Caffeine helped—but the good stuff was long gone.
On the counter sat his last resort: a dented can of off-brand cola, warm, two years past expiration. The label had faded into illegible smears.
He picked it up anyway.
Anything to stay awake past midnight.
He cracked it open.
**[SFX: *psssssht*]**
The sound felt too loud.
The smell hit first—syrupy sweet and metallic, like pennies soaked in sugar. He grimaced and drank anyway, forcing down thick, sludgy gulps. Artificial cherry. Chemicals. A faint burn at the back of his throat.
His stomach churned.
He kept drinking.
When the can was empty, he crushed it in one hand and tossed it toward the trash.
**[SFX: *clang—roll*]**
It bounced off the pile and vanished beneath the bed.
The wall clock ticked louder as the evening wore on.
**[SFX: *tick… tick… tick…*]**
"Just one more night," he muttered. "One more and maybe it'll skip me."
Poems.
Cold water.
Slaps to his own face.
Nothing worked.
**11:47.**
**11:53.**
The city outside seemed to hold its breath.
**11:58.**
His eyelids sagged.
Pain felt distant.
Then—
**Midnight.**
The minute hand snapped into place.
**[SFX: *click—CRACK*]**
The room exhaled.
Pressure shifted. His ears popped.
The bulb dimmed for a heartbeat, then flared back to life.
A new scent crept in—ozone and pine, sharp and electric.
Levi's head dipped.
He jerked it up—but the pull behind his eyes was irresistible now.
Whispers bloomed.
Soft.
Intimate.
Voices he almost recognized.
*Levi…*
*Come…*
*It's time…*
*You want this…*
The clock face glowed faintly red.
**12:00.**
The cold tug behind his ribs became a yank.
---
He didn't remember standing.
Didn't remember leaving the building.
Suddenly he was outside—barefoot on freezing pavement, drawn forward by something deeper than thought.
The street was empty.
Not quiet—*empty*.
Every streetlight burned a dull blood-red, staining the buildings like rusted wounds.
And in the center of the road—
A door.
Tall.
Impossibly tall.
Crimson as fresh arterial blood.
No walls.
No frame.
Carved serpents and thorned vines writhed across its surface, shifting when he wasn't looking directly at them.
Red smoke seeped from beneath it, curling like living things around his ankles.
Cool.
Insistent.
The whispers surged.
The door opened—
**[SFX: *creeeeeak*]**
Beyond lay darkness, pulsing with crimson light.
Jagged peaks under a sky the color of open wounds.
Levi tried to scream.
No sound came.
The smoke swallowed him whole.
And the darkness rushed in—
—to claim what little time he had left.