You should be Studied

Warning! This story is based on true events

It started the night my mother died.

I had been at her bedside, watching the shallow rise and fall of her chest beneath sterile hospital sheets, her lips moving without sound. The machines hummed their mechanical dirge, counting down the final beats of her life. And in the cold fluorescence of the ICU, I saw it.

A ripple in the air.

A bending of space just above her body, like heat shimmering off blacktop in the dead of summer.

For the briefest moment, something was there. Something watching.

I blinked, and it was gone.

The doctors pronounced her dead at 10:47 PM. The nurse jotted something in a chart, eyes glazed with routine. My mother was reduced to a clipboard and a plastic bracelet with her name misspelled. But I had seen it.

And it had seen me.

The whispers started that night.

At first, they were buried in the spaces between things. The hush of air through vents. The electronic thrum of the refrigerator. The static murmur from the television when I flipped through channels too fast.

You should be studied.

It was almost playful at first. A stray thought that wasn’t mine. A suggestion, barely more than a breath.

I chalked it up to grief. Exhaustion. The brain's way of misfiring in the absence of sleep.

But the words followed me.

They curled into the edges of my dreams, slithering between the cracks of memory. I woke to them stitched into the silence of my bedroom, carved into the pause between my own heartbeats.

And then the men came.

They weren’t normal men.

They had the shape of men. The height, the posture, the mannerisms. But their suits never wrinkled, never stained. Their skin was the color of old wax, and when they smiled, it was with too many teeth.

They never spoke. They only watched.

I’d see them across the street when I left my house. In the reflection of shop windows as I passed. Standing just outside the glow of streetlamps at night, where the dark swallowed their edges but couldn’t quite erase them.

I tried to tell myself it was paranoia. Just grief twisting my mind into knots. But paranoia doesn’t leave notes.

One morning, I found a single sheet of paper slipped under my door. The paper was thick, aged, like something pulled from a forgotten archive.

The message was typewritten:

We have been watching you, Nathan.

Your mind is a door. Let us help you open it.

I wasn’t named Nathan.

But the more I read it, the more I felt that I should have been.

The television stopped working a few days later.

No matter what button I pressed, it only displayed static. But buried in that static, barely visible beneath the shifting monochrome snow, was something moving.

A shape.

A silhouette with too many joints, unfolding in the white noise.

I shut the television off.

The screen stayed on.

And in the flickering haze, I saw my own face staring back at me.

But it wasn’t me.

It was something wearing my skin.

The patterns started soon after.

The streetlights buzzed and flickered when I walked beneath them. The radio stuttered in my presence, the voices in the music stretching and distorting like a record played at the wrong speed.

Numbers repeated everywhere. The clock froze at 3:33 AM every night. My grocery receipts always totaled $33.33. The same phone number called my cell daily, but when I answered, there was only breath on the other end.

Not human breath.

Something deeper. Hungrier.

One night, I saw movement in my peripheral vision and turned toward the bathroom mirror.

My reflection wasn’t moving.

It just stood there, staring at me.

And then it smiled.

That was when I stopped sleeping.

Sleep let them in. I knew that now.

Because one night, when exhaustion finally won, I awoke to find myself somewhere else.

A white room.

No windows. No doors.

Only walls covered in endless, spiraling scrawl.

I stepped closer, my pulse a drumbeat in my throat.

It was my handwriting.

You should be studied.

You should be studied.

You should be studied.

Over and over, the words carved into the walls with something sharp enough to splinter bone.

Something dripped onto my foot.

I looked up.

There was no ceiling—only an endless, black void above me, something shifting just beyond the edge of sight. A presence. A watcher.

A researcher.

My skin prickled with recognition. I wasn’t supposed to be awake.

I wasn’t supposed to know.

A sound like grinding teeth filled the air.

The walls shook.

And then—

I woke up in my bed.

Everything was normal. The notebooks were gone. The letter was gone.

The television played mindless sitcoms. The streetlights no longer flickered. The men in suits had disappeared.

But I knew.

Something had changed.

And then, as I stood in front of the mirror, my reflection smiled again.

This time, I smiled back.

Because I finally understood.

I wasn’t the subject of the study.

I was the result.