The Night of the Mind (eBook)

Cristi Cruceanu (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
271 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-0-00-107714-0 (ISBN)

Infos

The Night of the Mind

No ghosts. Only your own demons.

Jonas thought the silence in his apartment was just loneliness.
Until the clocks began to tick backward.

Each night, the walls breathe. Shadows whisper his name. Time folds in on itself, trapping him in a house that feels alive-and it wants him to remember what he's tried to forget.

As the hours collapse and reality unravels, Jonas must face the voice inside that knows him too well-the one asking the only question that still matters:

Do you want to live?

A haunting psychological horror about depression, guilt, and the war between light and the mind's darkest corners.

For readers of The Haunting of Hill House, The Silent Patient, and House of Leaves, this literary descent into madness will stay under your skin long after the last page.

Textauszug

Chapter 1 – Fading Light

 

The Patient House

 

The key groaned in the lock. The door gave way.

Jonas stepped into silence.

Not ordinary silence—the kind filled with humming appliances and the muffled pulse of the city—but a hollow, pressing quiet, as if the house itself were holding its breath.

The smell hit him first. Smoke. Old, faint, soaked into the walls as if a fire had burned here years ago and never fully left. He sniffed again. Nothing burned. Not anymore.

A lamp on the counter flickered, struggling against the dark. Its glow was weak, barely enough to outline the living room. Shadows clung to corners like cobwebs. Furniture leaned at wrong angles, as if nudged by unseen hands. The mantel clock twitched between ticks—forward, then back—unable to decide which way time should move.

Jonas rubbed his face with both hands. Fatigue. That had to be it. Too many sleepless nights, too many memories clawing through the cracks. Clara’s absence was everywhere—in the quiet bed, the unanswered messages, the way every room felt emptier than the last.

He told himself the distortions were tricks of grief. But even lies rang hollow when the floor creaked under his boots in a rhythm too deliberate to be chance. Slow. Steady. Almost like breathing.

“Jonas…”

The voice wasn’t a sound, not really. More like oil sliding across the surface of his mind. His body froze anyway.

The air thickened, clinging to him, heavy as wet fabric. He scanned the walls, the ceiling, the dim hallway yawning deeper into the apartment. Nothing moved—except the shadows, which stretched long fingers toward him when he wasn’t looking.

Then he saw it.

A teacup sat on the counter, steam rising from its surface.

His stomach dropped—he hadn’t made tea in days.

Jonas’s throat went dry. His eyes flicked to the front door. Still closed. Still locked. He hadn’t heard anyone come in.

He reached for the cup, hand trembling, then stopped short. The porcelain quivered, just barely, as if the house itself were exhaling through it. Steam curled toward him, beckoning.

Jonas stumbled back a step. The lamp flickered, shadows lurching across the room.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. A single word lit the screen: Where are you?

Clara.

Jonas swallowed hard. He didn’t answer. Couldn’t. His eyes stayed on the teacup, its quiet breath steaming in the dark.

The house was waiting.

For him.

 

The Arrival of Dusk

 

Jonas walked fast, collar up, hands jammed in his pockets as though he could hide inside himself. The streets looked wrong—too long, too narrow, stretched thin between buildings that leaned inward as if conferring, deciding what to do with him. Windows stared back like unblinking eyes, and puddles caught the dim glow of streetlamps, rippling with reflections that weren’t his.

Jonas… do you see?

The whisper slid into his chest like a hand pressing against his heart. He froze, breath catching, pulse stumbling. He turned sharply left, then right. Nothing. Just the wind rattling a loose sign above a shuttered bakery. Just the hollow hush of a street that should have been busier.

Behind him—footsteps.

Slow. Certain. Too close.

Jonas spun. The street was empty. The puddles rippled again, though no one had stepped near them.

He swallowed, throat dry. “Hello?” The word left him brittle, a mistake. No answer.

Above, a balcony lamp flared without warning. Shadows spilled across the brick like black water, twisting into warped shapes that leaned toward him. They twitched when he stared too long, recoiling when he blinked.

His phone buzzed again. The vibration startled him, too loud in the hush. Another message.

Answer me. Please.

Clara.

Jonas typed: Something’s wrong. He stared at the words, thumb hovering. No. He deleted them. He typed again: I think I’m being followed. His hand shook. He could almost hear her voice reading it back, a mix of fear and frustration. He couldn’t send it. Not without sounding insane. He locked the screen and shoved the phone back in his pocket, chest tight with shame.

The air shifted. A gust swept down the street, rattling shutters and carrying the faint smell of ozone—sharp, metallic, like the aftermath of a storm. Shadows bent toward him in the wind’s wake, recoiled, bent again, like predators rehearsing their lunge.

The hum started then. Low at first, almost beneath hearing. A vibration rising from the pavement into his shoes, threading into his legs, syncing with his pulse. It wasn’t the city breathing. It was the city listening.

Jonas’s knees weakened. He braced a hand against the cold stone wall. His reflection in a nearby window looked back—paler than he remembered, eyes wider, jaw tight. The reflection blinked a moment later than he did.

His stomach dropped. He stepped back.

The whisper returned, curling close, tender and terrible, brushing the inside of his skull:

Are you ready?

Jonas’s chest heaved. His instincts screamed to turn, to run, to vanish back into his apartment and slam the door. But even the thought of retreat felt useless, childish. The street had shifted, stretching itself into something unfamiliar.

He glanced once more at his phone. No new messages. Just Clara’s last words hanging on the screen: Answer me. Please.

He wanted to. God, he wanted to. But the words in his chest weren’t ones she’d believe.

Jonas took a step forward.

The puddles quivered. The buildings leaned closer. The shadows stuttered like broken film.

And the world rippled around him—subtle, undeniable, wrong.

There was no turning back.

 

The Rooms Breathing

 

The apartment wasn’t still. It breathed.

The walls exhaled in slow, uneven intervals, bowing inward before releasing again. Shadows pulsed at the edges, retreating, advancing, retreating—like the tide of some black ocean Jonas couldn’t see.

The chair by the window sagged, its cushion depressed as though an unseen weight had just risen from it.

On the coffee table, a book lay open, though he hadn’t left it that way. The pages twitched under his stare, letters shifting like insects. Words writhed, syllables collapsing into each other until the text blurred into nonsense. He blinked hard, rubbed his eyes. Still, the words squirmed, refusing to stay still. It felt less like misprinted ink and more like the book didn’t want him to read.

The lamp flickered violently. Shadows stretched across the walls like grasping fingers. The blinds rattled, though the air was still. Each sound felt deliberate, orchestrated.

Then came the voice—low, coaxing, intimate as breath against his ear:

You notice, don’t you?

Jonas froze. His hand shot out to steady himself on the counter, but the surface quivered beneath his touch—alive, recoiling like flesh. His stomach twisted. He yanked his hand back, shaking it as though burned.

A crack sounded behind him. He turned.

A door emerged where no door had been. Its frame bulged out of the plaster like a tumor, wood pushing through the wall with grotesque patience. The outline quivered, edges glowing faintly. Then it began to pulse—throbbing in time with his heartbeat, grown, not built. The doorknob twitched.

Jonas’s breath caught. He stepped back, nearly tripping over the chair.

His phone buzzed. Clara’s name lit the screen.

Where are you? I’m coming if you don’t answer.

Jonas stared. For a moment, he almost hit call, almost begged her to come. But his eyes drifted back to the new door.

It was breathing. In. Out. In. Out.

The shadows gathered around it. The air thickened, charged, like the instant before a storm. Jonas could feel the choice pressing against him: open it, or run.

Every instinct screamed to leave, to tear open the curtains, to break the window if he had to. But something deeper whispered with merciless certainty:

The house wasn’t letting him go.

 

Time Distorted

 

Jonas huddled in the dim corner, knees drawn tight, when the first fracture appeared: time refused to behave.

Seconds stretched, elastic and wrong. The clock hesitated, deciding what time should be. Its second hand jerked backward, then forward, as though it couldn’t remember which direction life was meant to move. The tick scraped across his nerves like a blade.

His phone glowed beside him. Clara’s last message still burned:

Don’t vanish again. Not tonight.

He hadn’t answered. Couldn’t. The words pressed against him like a lifeline he couldn’t grip. He imagined her waiting, her patience thinning. He imagined her giving up. The thought gnawed deeper than the shadows.

The walls hummed—a low vibration syncing to an irregular beat. It moved through the floorboards, through his bones. Each warped second pushed him further from the ordinary, further from her. Clara belonged to the steady world outside, and he could already feel that world sliding away.

A ceramic cup trembled on the counter. Ripples bloomed across its surface, without cause. Jonas’s breath caught. He waited for logic. Nothing came. Only the ripple, mocking the silence where her voice should have been.

The shadows shifted—folding into impossible angles, blooming like black flowers, then collapsing silently. The lamp’s glow fractured across the walls, revealing glimpses of geometry that shouldn’t exist: rooms...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 13.10.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 0-00-107714-7 / 0001077147
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-107714-0 / 9780001077140