I’m writing this from a hospital waiting room. My parents are unconscious, hooked up to machines, and the doctors have no explanation. They call it “unprecedented,” but I know what happened.
It started just a week ago. I had just finished my final exams and came home expecting normal life again. Instead, I found my parents sitting at the kitchen table with a stranger.
He was tall, pale, and silent, with long black hair and eyes the color of a bruise—bright, jaundiced yellow. He sat in my chair, eating cereal in slow, mechanical movements. My parents introduced him as a “distant cousin,” even though I know for a fact we have no relatives. Their smiles were too wide, too forced. Something was wrong.
From that moment, the entire house shifted. My parents spoke to him constantly, but he never answered. They began serving him food first, forbidding me from touching mine until he finished. Soon I wasn’t even allowed to address him directly—everything had to go “through them.”
The worst was the upstairs spare room. They cleared it out for him, locking themselves inside with him for hours. I couldn’t take it anymore. Last night, I knelt by the old keyhole and looked inside.
Candles covered the floor. The air shimmered like heat waves. My parents were kneeling, bowing, whispering frantic gibberish to the man who stood motionless with his arms raised. They weren’t hosting a guest. They were worshipping him.
I panicked. I ran to my room and called the police. Minutes later, I heard a knock at my door. Slow. Polite. When I opened it, he was there—smiling at me for the first time. A wide, cruel grin that told me I had made a mistake.
He left before the police arrived. I watched him walk down the street. But when the officers pulled up the security camera footage, there was nothing there. Just me, screaming at an empty doorway.
Now my parents are in a coma, their minds seemingly erased. And I overheard one of the officers whispering into his phone:
“This is the fifth family this year. Same story. Parents catatonic. The kid saw a man with yellow eyes. No trace on the cameras.”
He’s still out there. And I don’t think I was supposed to survive.