The Gloom

Edgar Phillips had always considered his writing a form of necessary bleeding. Each story, each poem, a carefully lanced wound, letting out the dark, viscous things that simmered beneath his skin. But then there was The Gloom.

It hadn't been written so much as regurgitated. A feverish, three-day blur of caffeine, nicotine, and a sense of profound, inescapable dread. He remembered little of the process, only the feeling of his fingers flying over the keys, the words spooling out like black thread from some unseen loom. When he finally emerged, blinking into the harsh light of his cramped apartment, he found a manuscript on his desktop.

He read it. And then he was sick.

The Gloom wasn't a story in any conventional sense. It was a sprawling, stream-of-consciousness descent into a mind breaking; a landscape of fear, regret, and the slow, insidious decay of memory. It spoke of unnamed horrors glimpsed in peripheral vision, of the scent of damp earth permeating the airless rooms of one’s own skull, of the gradual realization that the face in the mirror was no longer one that you would ever recognize. It felt less like fiction and more like a stolen confession, a transcription of the darkest corners of his own psyche he’d never known existed.

Edgar knew, with a chilling certainty, that The Gloom was never meant to be read. It was a catharsis, a self-exorcism, a venom he’d expelled into a digital file. It belonged to him, and to the silence of his hard drive.

Yet Edgar was also a writer teetering on the precipice of professional oblivion. Rejection slips papered his walls, agents ignored his emails, and the self-doubt, once a gnawing mouse, had become a rabid and ravenous rat. Several nights after The Gloom’s inception, fueled by a sweat-stained manic episode coupled with cheap whiskey and a desperate, suicidal impulse of defiance, he uploaded The Gloom to a popular self-publishing platform. He slapped on a minimalist, black cover and a deliberately vague, unsettling blurb: "Some truths are better left buried."

He didn't share the link. He didn't promote it. He just let it sit there, a digital phantom he’d set adrift in the vast ocean of the internet. A part of him hoped it would vanish, unread, into the ether. Though another, darker part yearned for it to be seen, to be validated, even if that validation came from the horrified gasps of strangers.

For weeks, nothing happened. The book sat at zero reads, zero reviews. Edgar felt a perverse sense of relief with an underlying level of disappointment. The monster in the gloom was contained.

Then, one Tuesday morning, he checked the dashboard.

"Reads: 1."

His breath hitched. One person. One poor, unsuspecting soul had wandered into his carefully constructed nightmare. A cold dread seeped into him, thicker than the morning condensation on his windowpane. He tried to tell himself it was just a number – a glitch.

The next day: "Reads: 5."

Then: "12."

And then, the first review appeared. It wasn't a star rating, just a comment, raw and unformatted:

“It felt like it was written for me. Like it knew. Who are you?”

Edgar stared at the screen, heart hammering. The comment was singular, unnerving. He made attempts to dismiss it as a lone eccentric reader, though part of him already knew better.

Soon, more reviews followed. They weren't typical critiques. They were desperate, fragmented cries.

“I can’t unread this. The shadows… they’re different now.”

“The smell. The smell of damp earth. It’s in my room. How?!”

“My dreams are not my own. This isn’t a book, it’s a virus.”

A month had passed, and The Gloom had reached over fifty thousand readers – a feat unheard of for such a short span of time, especially for that of a self-published author.

Edgar began to unravel. Sleep became impossible. Every creak of his old apartment building, every whisper of wind, sounded like the insidious prose of The Gloom slithering out of the pages and into his reality. He smelled it too – that faint, earthy scent, like a freshly dug grave, permeating his small living space. He looked out the window and noted the rain, pounding with chilled malice against the glass as if Mother Nature herself intended to wipe the world clean of him and his work. How long had it been raining, now? Ceaselessly, it seemed, ever since the first reader found his work.

He saw the lines. Not on the screen, but in the grime on his windows, in the patterns of condensation on his bathroom mirror. "The face in the glass is a lie." "The silence listens."

He tried to take the book down. He clicked the "unpublish" button repeatedly, but each time, the page refreshed, showing The Gloom still live, still available, its read count steadily climbing. It felt like the platform itself was mocking him, complicit in its release.

His phone buzzed. It was an email, sender unknown. The subject line was simply: "You shouldn't have." The body contained a single, chilling sentence, taken verbatim from the final page of The Gloom:

"Now that it has been seen, it can begin."

Edgar closed his email with a trembling finger. He wanted to take his mind off his wretched story and the cryptic fans that came with it. He opened Google and saw several news articles glowing accusingly at him – each header was worded differently, yet all held the same meaning.

The Unraveling Tapestry of Society: Exploring the Roots of Global Discontent

6 Historical Events That Mirror Today’s Global Panic

Are We Witnessing the Rise of a New Era of Social Upheaval?

How to Stay Safe During Global Unrest: A Guide for Urban Dwellers

Coping With Fear and Paranoia: Mindfulness Techniques for Troubling Times

7 Major Cities Experiencing Chaos: Understanding the Unrest

Edgar didn’t need to read the news article to understand what they meant. He knew. Somehow, deep in his aching soul, he knew why.

He screamed a raw, animal sound that tore his throat. He threw his laptop across the room. It shattered against the wall, but the screen, cracked and spiderwebbed, continued to glow, displaying the cover of The Gloom, its blackness pulsing faintly as if it were alive and watching him with smug satisfaction.

He barricaded himself in his bedroom, pulling the curtains tightly shut, blocking out the view of the endless rain outside. But the gloom was already inside him. The words he had spilled onto the page had begun to corrode the walls of his mind. The curtains began to unravel, and he saw his own reflection in the darkened windowpane, and it was gaunt, eyes wide and hollow, the mouth a gaping maw. It was the face from his book, the one that was "no longer one that you would ever recognize."

Then the whispers started. Not from outside, but from within his own skull. They were the voices of the readers, mixed with lines from the book, and something else; something ancient and hungry. They told him he was merely the vessel, the accidental gatekeeper. He had opened the door, and The Gloom had walked through. It wasn't just a story – it was an entity, a parasite, feeding on the collective fear and anxieties of those who read it, and its author was its first, and most potent, meal.

Days bled into weeks. Edgar stopped eating, stopped sleeping. He mumbled constantly, repeating lines from The Gloom as if they were holy incantations. His apartment grew cold, damp, and smelled perpetually of earth and decay. The computer lay shattered on the floor, but he knew The Gloom was still out there, stalking the streets and haunting the continents as its readership doubtlessly grew, each new pair of eyes adding to its strength.

One morning, when the last vestiges of his sanity finally detached, Edgar found himself hunched over the splintered remains of his laptop. He picked up a shard of the screen, its edge sharp, reflecting his distorted face. He saw not himself, but a conduit – a husk.

“It felt like it was written for me.” The first review echoed in his mind.

Outside, Edgar could hear naught but the constant pattering of rain, and screams of terror as hapless people ran for an unseen and unknown intent outside the safety of his cold walls. He smiled, a terrible, wide, knowing smile that split his cracked lips. He understood now. The Gloom wasn't just a story that was never meant to be read. It was a story that needed to be read. It was a seed that required the rich soil of human consciousness to sprout. And now, fully grown, it had its roots deep in him.

A random sprout of curiosity emerged from Edgar, and he took out his smartphone. He wanted to Google The Gloom, just to see what the world was saying about it. He intended to scroll and scroll, but the very first result was enough to fully pique his interest.

On the thumbnail, he saw a Hollywood director, one whom he was a fan of and always thought did justice to the movies that… that were based on popular books. Edgar clicked play on the video.

“It’s going to be an invigorating challenge,” the director commented. “In all my years in this line of work, I don’t think there’s ever been anything written quite like Edgar Phillips’ The Gloom. There’s just such a variety of emotion and winding plots, you know? But yes, I am pleased to announce that we are turning The Gloom into a movie. There are lots of people out there who don’t read, so this story never got to them, and that’s where my crew and I come in. I can’t go into too much detail about it right now, but expect this movie to be a love letter to the book – we want it as accurately depicted as possible so that the whole world can witness and understand this groundbreaking piece of literature – I think you’re all going to like it.”

Edgar was surprised at himself when he didn’t laugh maniacally. He had just assumed he had been too far gone to feel anything but joy at this revelation. But truth be told, he didn’t feel anything at all. This progression simply felt natural, like it was meant to be. No different than the setting of the sun or the turning of the tides, or the endless torrent of rain at his window. He picked up a pen. His hand, shaking, began to write on the dusty floorboards. Not his words, but its. A single, evolving sentence, weaving new, terrifying narratives, flowing from his very being.

He found himself lost in endless ranges of tall grass. The sky above him was gray and hateful, and the first raindrops of a heavy storm began to fall as the emerald sedge waved and caressed his self. Amidst the fields of green, something was watching him, and it laughed.

Because Edgar Phillips was gone. All that remained was the space where he had been, now filled with the pulsating, ever-expanding consciousness of The Gloom, writing itself into existence, one tormented reader at a time, ever finding new authors in the silence after the scream.

And it had so much more to tell.