“The House Where Thursdays Disappeared”

The house was too cheap to be true.

Two stories. White picket fence. A porch swing that groaned like it remembered better days. Daniel loved it. Mae was cautious.

"Why is no one else bidding?" she asked.

"Because people are afraid of old houses. Ghost stories, creaky pipes, bad plumbing. It's superstition."

He wasn’t entirely wrong.

They moved in the following weekend, unloading boxes under grey November skies. The neighbors never waved. The street always seemed too quiet, like a town paused mid-sentence.

The first Thursday disappeared without them noticing.

One minute Mae was washing dishes on Wednesday night. The next, she was sipping coffee Friday morning, bleary-eyed and unsure why her schedule felt wrong.

"Did we skip Thursday?" she joked.

Daniel blinked. “Huh. Weird. I thought it was Thursday too.”

They laughed it off. New house stress. Maybe too much wine. Maybe they’d both slept hard.

But it happened again.

And again.

By the third week, Mae started keeping a journal.

Wednesday, 11:42 PM: Finished sorting books. Weather humid. Daniel snoring. Set alarm for 7AM.

Friday, 8:13 AM: Alarm never rang. Thursday is gone. Again.

They went to a sleep specialist. Got blood work. Bought matching fitness trackers.

Everything came back normal.

Mae began recording voice memos before bed. "It's Wednesday night. If you’re listening to this on Friday and don’t remember Thursday… it’s happening again."

She always was.

Daniel installed security cameras inside the house—six of them. Living room, hallway, kitchen, bedroom, front and back doors.

“I want to see what we’re doing on Thursdays,” he said.

Mae agreed. But the idea curdled her stomach.

The first recording they watched changed everything.

They sat huddled on the couch, laptop open. Wednesday night footage played normally. They watched themselves go to bed at 11:57 PM.

Then the screen glitched—static.

The timestamp jumped.

Thursday, 12:01 AM.

Mae appeared in the hallway camera.

Naked. Standing still. Not blinking. Her head tilted slightly, her mouth moving—but no sound. The hallway light flickered.

Daniel appeared next. Crawling.

Not walking. Crawling.

His limbs were too fluid, his back arched like a spider.

On the footage, "Daniel" twisted its neck toward the camera.

And smiled.

Not his smile. Something worse.

A stretched, rubbery grin that opened wider than it should have.

Mae slammed the laptop shut.

They stopped watching the footage. But the fear grew.

Mae started finding odd bruises. Dirt under her fingernails. Scratches on the walls neither of them remembered making.

On one Friday morning, Daniel woke up with mud on his feet and a missing front tooth. No blood. Just... absence.

“I don’t think we stay in the house,” Mae whispered. “I think... something else moves in.”

They tried sleeping elsewhere. Booked a hotel on a Wednesday night.

Friday morning came. No memory of Thursday.

Daniel checked their fitness trackers. Heart rates spiked at midnight. Thousands of steps recorded—but not on the hotel’s floor plan.

Mae finally called the woman who had sold them the house. Her number had been disconnected.

They searched property records.

The house had been sold five times in nine years.

All couples. No children. No long-term owners.

Daniel wanted to burn it.

Mae wasn’t sure fire would help. "What if it's not the house?" she said. "What if it’s… us? What if it's copying us?"

That night, they made a pact: one last Thursday. They would stay awake. Cameras rolling. Lights on. Weapons ready.

They didn’t sleep. They took turns holding a flashlight and a kitchen knife.

The clock ticked to midnight.

Mae blinked.

Friday, 6:23 AM.

The lights were off. The cameras were unplugged.

The knife was buried in the wall.

Mae stood in the kitchen, barefoot, humming a tune she didn’t know.

Daniel was outside, shirtless, standing in the rain, face tilted up, eyes closed.

They didn’t speak about it again.

Two weeks later, the real estate agent found the house empty.

No sign of Daniel or Mae. Just an open journal on the floor.

The last entry:

“If you find this: We don’t think we’re the originals anymore.”

“The house doesn’t want visitors. It wants residents.”

“Especially the kind that don’t know what they are.”

The page was smeared with muddy fingerprints.

And something that looked like a smile, drawn in blood.