The Fifth Draft

I published it as a joke.

A fake horror story, stitched together from an old printout I found tucked inside a tattered paperback at the Salvos shop. The paperback was The Andromeda Strain, brittle with age, cover curled like it had survived a flood. The printout was folded inside, four and a half pages long, typed in Courier, no title. No author.

I didn’t think much of it at first. Just skimmed the first paragraph in the store and thought, This is weird. It opened mid-sentence — “...under the stairwell again. The smell was stronger now, like heat and metal, and the boy wouldn’t stop humming.”

That was it. No context. No explanation. Just creepy fragments. I couldn’t stop reading.

It felt like a writing prompt someone gave up on. Half a dozen paragraphs, maybe two characters, and a repeated phrase that made my neck prickle: "the fifth draft is the one they keep."

I didn’t know what that meant. Still don’t.

That night, I typed it out, fixed the formatting, and tried to finish the ending myself. It was stupid, really — I wasn’t even in a horror mood. But I’d just watched a bunch of short-form horror videos and had that leftover energy in my fingers. I added a final paragraph that hinted at something living beneath the city, something rewriting the maps and rerouting buses, and titled the story The City Below. Dramatic, I know. But I figured if you’re gonna be dumb, be dumb with style.

Then I uploaded it to a tiny self-publishing site I’d used once before in Year Nine for a class project. They’d never deleted my account. I gave it a fake cover — an AI-generated streetlight glowing in the fog — and clicked “Publish.”

Midnight. Thursday. No expectations.

The next morning, the story had over 800 views.

And the street near my school — Adderley Road — wasn’t called that anymore

I noticed it first because of the bus stop sign.

I walk past it every day on the way to school — it’s across from the bakery, just after the laundromat with the cracked window that always smells like lavender. I’ve waited at that stop hundreds of times. The sign has always said "Adderley Rd."

But today, it said "Ashlock Way."

I stared at it for a good thirty seconds, like it might blink back to normal. Even took a photo to prove to myself I wasn’t imagining it. Same sign. Same scratches. Same leaning pole with the flyer for a missing cat. But the name was different.

I pulled out Google Maps. It still said Adderley.

But when I tapped the little street view bubble, it flickered. Just for a moment. The photo tiles glitched, jumped, and the label shifted to Ashlock.

I shut my phone off and walked faster.

The next weird thing happened later that afternoon, in English class.

Jessie, who sits behind me and reads every creepypasta she can find, tapped my shoulder mid-lesson and whispered, “Hey. Did you write this?”

She held up her phone, the screen turned low-brightness. I recognized the thumbnail instantly. The cover I’d slapped on the story. The City Below.

I gave a casual shrug. “Sort of. Why?”

She tilted her head, eyes a little too serious. “Because this line’s about me.”

“What?”

She read aloud in a whisper. “‘She sat at the back of the bus, headphones in, one eye on the man in the brown jacket who always got off one stop early.’” She looked up. “That’s exactly what I do. Down to the guy.”

“Coincidence.”

“It also describes the little scar on my thumb.” She turned her hand over. A tiny crescent-shaped mark.

I swallowed.

“Are you stalking me?”

“No! Jessie, I swear—”

“I loved it, though.” She grinned. “Creepy as hell. Especially the bit with the signs changing. That was genius.”

I laughed too quickly. “Yeah. Totally made that up.”

By the end of the day, the story had over 2,000 views.

People started commenting strange things. One said it mentioned the cracks in their kitchen tiles. Another said the café described in paragraph three was a real place that didn’t exist yesterday.

Someone else wrote: “I know this sounds nuts, but this story showed me a street I’ve never seen before. I followed it today and it wasn’t there yesterday. No joke.”

I tried to log in and delete the story. The site wouldn’t let me. Password reset failed. Then it said: “This title is currently under editorial review.”

I never submitted it for that.

I closed my laptop, stood up too fast, and nearly knocked over my desk chair.

That night, I dreamt in black and white.

Not grayscale — actual high-contrast black and white, like an old surveillance feed. The city in my dream looked almost like mine, but too empty. Streetlights flickered above empty intersections. A train passed by with no windows. I saw my school from across the street — except all the windows were bricked up.

In the dream, I walked through the city with a piece of paper in my hand. It was a printed copy of The City Below. And with every step I took, more pages added themselves to it — curling up out of drains, fluttering down from lampposts, sliding across bus stop benches like they were alive.

When I looked down at the text, the words had changed.

They weren’t mine.

I woke up sweating, my phone screen pulsing with notifications.

I didn’t go to school the next day.

I told Dad I had a migraine. He barely looked up from his coffee, just grunted and nodded. We didn’t talk much, and he’d learned to stop asking questions after Mum left.

Once he was gone, I opened my laptop and tried again to delete the story.

The site still wouldn’t let me in.

This time, it gave me a new error:

“This work is now part of the permanent collection.”

What collection? There was no archive on the site. No publishing contract. No user agreement that let them keep stories forever.

Then the tab closed itself.

I stared at the blank screen. My fingers were shaking. I opened a private browser, searched for The City Below.

It was everywhere.

Readers had screen-capped sections, posted them on Reddit and horror forums. One person made a TikTok about how it “predicted” their night walk home — down to the same graffiti tag on a transformer box. Another said it mentioned a girl with a cracked phone case and a birthmark behind her ear. Her.

One comment said: “This is like the story watches you reading it.”

Another said: “Try deleting it. It comes back.”

I looked outside. The sky had gone weirdly grey, not cloudy — just drained. Flat and colorless, like the contrast had been turned up. I noticed a dog across the road standing still, staring at nothing, for a full three minutes.

My phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

Do not write more. Do not edit. Do not open Draft 5.

No sender. No timestamp. Just text.

I dropped the phone on the carpet like it might burn me.

By that afternoon, the city started changing.

Little things first. A sign above a café that used to say “Lenny’s” now said “Len & Len.” The bus timetable app began showing routes that didn’t exist. One route claimed to go “beneath the viaduct” — we didn’t have a viaduct.

The air got... thicker. Not smog. Just wrong. Like it had weight.

And people started seeing things. Or maybe not seeing them.

Jessie texted me saying she walked her usual way home but somehow ended up in a cul-de-sac she’d never seen before. One kid from school — Tomas — went to visit his uncle in the hospital, but said the building had “the wrong number of floors.”

The scariest one was a video that went semi-viral. A girl filming herself in a lift mirror. The reflection didn’t match her movements.

Behind her, the mirrored version of the hallway was empty — even though someone had been standing there a moment before.

She screamed. Dropped the phone. The footage ended.

The caption read:

“City Below. Entry Point 3. DO NOT LOOK FOR THEM.”

That night, I went looking.

I know. Dumb horror movie decision. But I had to see if it was all just coincidence, or if the story was actually leaking into the real world — like, reshaping it.

I went back to the Salvos shop where I found the original pages.

It was closed. Sign on the door:

“PERMANENTLY SHUT DUE TO BUILDING ISSUES.”

The windows were dark. The inside looked... wrong. Not just empty. Rearranged.

Shelves stood at odd angles. The counter was now on the other side. A single overhead light flickered like it was under water.

I didn’t go in.

Instead, I walked to the corner where the original story had mentioned a “green-lit newsstand that only appears on Thursdays.” That line had always felt random. The kind of spooky urban folklore I thought I made up.

Except it was there.

Old-fashioned. Green. One bulb glowing weakly above it. I walked past, pretending not to look, but something cold slid down my spine.

I doubled back a minute later. It was gone.

I stopped sleeping properly. Every time I closed my eyes, I dreamt of streets that bent in the middle, escalators that led nowhere, libraries where all the books were blank until you opened them — and the pages spelled your name.

In my dreams, someone kept whispering:

“You are the fifth. You finished it. You are the draft.”

I reached out on the forum where people were talking about the story. I messaged someone whose comment had scared me — the one who said “Try deleting it. It comes back.”

Their username was Cait_Redacted. No profile pic. Just a single post history: all related to The City Below.

I wrote:

Hey. I’m the one who uploaded the story. I think it’s doing something. I need to talk.

A few hours later, I got a reply.

Too late to talk. Too late to delete.

Did you type the last line yourself?

*If yes, that means it knows your voice. You’ve given it your pattern. It can seed through you now.

Stay offline.

Do not write anything else.

Do not describe what you see.*

And then the account disappeared.

I thought maybe I was losing it. Maybe I’d tricked myself into believing a story could change the world. But then people began posting photos.

The same building, different names.

Mirrors that no longer reflected their rooms.

A subway station where all the signs were in a language no one could read.

A street ad for a film that didn’t exist — “City Below: Coming Soon” — with my fake cover image as the poster.

They were calling it ARG horror now. Saying it was marketing for some genius viral campaign. Nobody believed it was real.

But I knew.

Because the last photo someone posted was of a notebook. Old, spiral-bound, yellowed with time. And on the top corner, scrawled in tiny ink letters, was my name.

Maren C. — Draft 1

I stopped writing.

Stopped journaling. Stopped texting friends. Closed every notes app. Swore off Docs.

Because every time I typed more than a few lines, it came back. The tone. The rhythm. Sentences that weren’t mine began slipping into casual texts. I’d go to type “Be right back” and instead I’d write, “The line breaks here. The way down begins again.”

I deleted and rewrote and deleted again, but my drafts didn’t stay gone.

They reappeared. In different folders. Sometimes in slightly altered fonts. Sometimes as PDFs I didn’t make. One time, I found a printed copy in the school library’s lost property drawer.

My name was on the back page.

Typed. Not handwritten.

One night I woke to the sound of my printer — the old one we never use, barely connected — whirring in the dark.

I got up, heart pounding, and followed the green glow of the power light.

A single sheet slid out.

The header: The Fifth Draft – Final Copy

I didn’t read it.

I burned it in the kitchen sink with one of Dad’s old lighters.

The fire turned blue.

I tried warning people.

Left anonymous comments under Reddit threads. Messaged the self-publishing site to take the story down. Got an auto-reply saying:

“This title is now self-sustaining. It does not require further hosting.”

What does that even mean?

It was like the story didn’t need a server anymore. Didn’t need a domain. It had moved into the cracks — of emails, screenshots, bootleg PDFs, reposted captions, whisper chains.

It wasn’t living online.

It was living between things.

A week after I first posted it, the city changed again.

I saw it happen.

I was walking home, hoodie up, headphones in but no music playing. I passed a corner I knew — a mural of a bird in flight, the old church spire across the road, the pothole that always flooded when it rained.

And then it all flickered.

Just for a second.

Like a screen tearing.

Like a frame jump in a film reel.

The mural became a symbol — a spiral of teeth.

The church was gone.

The road sign was now in that same unreadable language from the photos.

And there were no people.

No cars. No dogs. No distant sirens.

Just this oppressive silence, like the world was holding its breath.

Then the lights buzzed, a tram groaned by behind me, and it was back.

Normal.

Except nothing felt normal anymore.

The next day, my school didn’t open.

No explanation. No news report. The building was just... closed.

Everyone’s texts said the same thing:

“We got told to stay home. No reason. Teachers don’t know either.”

The school’s name had changed on Google.

From Griffin High to GR/5-IN Placeholder Site.

I knew what that meant.

I was the placeholder.

I was the fifth.

I opened the original file. The one I typed up from the pages I found.

I went line by line, looking for clues. For a key. Anything.

And then I saw it.

Buried in the second paragraph — a phrase that hadn’t been in the printed version. I knew it hadn’t. I remember typing it exactly. But now it said:

“Draft 1 is ignored. Draft 2 is erased. Draft 3 is corrupted. Draft 4 is forgotten. Draft 5 opens the door.”

I stared at the screen for a long time.

Then I looked out the window.

There was a door across the street that hadn’t been there before.

I didn’t go outside.

Instead, I called Jessie.

She didn’t answer.

I messaged her. “Please tell me you’re home.”

Three dots. Then a reply:

“What’s a home?”

I called again. It went straight to voicemail.

My phone buzzed.

A new message. From no one. No name.

Just a single line:

“You opened the door, Maren. Now you’re the story.”

It’s been three days since then.

I haven’t seen my dad. Haven’t seen anyone.

No sirens. No traffic. The lights still turn on, but the power flickers like it’s borrowed from somewhere else.

I tried watching the news. It loops.

The weather is always “partly unknown.”

Every map app leads back to my block.

I think the city has stopped being a city.

It’s now the City Below.

And I’m still writing, aren’t I?

Even after I swore I wouldn’t.

But maybe this isn’t writing.

Maybe it’s documenting.

Maybe it’s part of the fifth draft — the part where the story finishes itself.

Or the part where it starts over.

If you’re reading this, close your browser. Shut the file. Don’t share it. Don’t quote it. Don’t say my name out loud.

Because every time you read this story…

It remembers you.