It was still dark outside when I heard the pounding on my front door. I looked at the clock. 5:02 a.m.
No one knocks at that hour unless something is wrong. I pulled on my sweatshirt and went to the door, heart pounding. When I opened it, my next-door neighbor, Gabriel Stone, stood there.
His face was pale, his breathing uneven, as if he had run all the way over. “Don’t go to work today,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “Stay home.
Just trust me.”
I stared at him in confusion. Gabriel was quiet, polite, and rarely spoke more than a few words in passing. I barely knew anything about him other than he kept to himself and had moved into the neighborhood a year ago.
Seeing him like this, terrified, felt wrong. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “Did something happen?”
He shook his head slowly, but his eyes were sharp with warning.
“I can’t explain right now. Just promise me you won’t leave the house today. Not for any reason.”
Everything seemed unreal in that moment.
The cold morning air. The pink streak of sunrise just beginning on the horizon. And my neighbor, usually emotionless, now looking like a man about to fall apart.
I took a slow breath. “Gabriel, you’re scaring me,” I said. “Why shouldn’t I go?”
He hesitated.
Then his voice dropped into a whisper. “You’ll understand by noon.”
Before I could ask anything else, he stepped back, glanced around the neighborhood as if someone might be watching us, and walked quickly back to his house. He didn’t look back.
I stood there in silence, my hand still on the doorknob, my mind racing. A rational part of me wanted to dismiss it as paranoia. Maybe he was confused.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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