The Other Woman

The video had been playing for six minutes when Maya realized the woman was describing her nightmare.

Not a nightmare. Her nightmare. The one she'd been having for three weeks straight, the one that left her gasping awake at 3 AM with the taste of smoke in her mouth and the phantom sensation of drowning. The woman on screen—pale, dark circles carved beneath her eyes—spoke in a monotone that made Maya's skin crawl.

"The room is filling with water," the woman said, staring just left of the camera. "But it's also burning. The walls are on fire, but you're drowning. You can feel both. The wet heat. The way your lungs fill with water that shouldn't be hot but is, scalding you from the inside. And there's a smell—"

"Burning hair," Maya whispered.

"—burning hair," the woman finished.

Maya's hand trembled as she reached for her laptop, fingers hovering over the trackpad. She should close it. She should delete the email that had brought her here—that anonymous message with no subject line, just a link and a sender address that was her own email with one letter changed. MayaKline92 instead of MayaKlein92.

But she didn't close it.

She scrolled down. The channel was called "Night Terrors Archive." Forty-three videos, the oldest posted two months ago. She clicked on another one at random.

The same woman appeared, wearing a different shirt but with the same exhausted eyes. "I want to talk about what happened when I was seven," she began.

Maya's stomach dropped.

"My friend Sarah—S-A-R-A-H—and I were playing in her basement..."

No. No no no.

Maya had never told anyone the full story of what happened in Sara's basement. Not her therapist, not her parents, not even Sara herself after that day. It was the kind of childhood trauma that lived in the space between memory and nightmare, something she'd almost convinced herself she'd imagined.

But this woman knew.

She described it perfectly. The old furnace. The game of hide and seek. The moment Sara locked her in the crawl space as a joke and then forgot, going upstairs for dinner while Maya screamed in the dark for two hours. The spiders. The way the darkness felt *alive*.

Every detail matched except one.

"I remember the concrete floor was so cold," the woman said. "I can still feel it."

Maya frowned. It wasn't concrete. It was dirt. Wasn't it? She tried to remember, but the memory felt slippery now, shifting like something seen through water.

She checked the upload time: 2:47 AM. Last night. When she'd been asleep.

When she'd been dreaming.

---

Three days later, there was a new video.

Maya had called in sick to work. She hadn't showered. The apartment was dark except for the laptop screen casting its blue glow across her face. She looked, she thought distantly, a lot like the woman in the videos.

This video was different. The woman looked directly into the camera.

"I know someone's watching," she said. "I can feel it. Like eyes on the back of my neck, all the time now. When I record these, I wonder if you're there. If you have the same dreams. The same memories. Do you remember the basement, too? Do you wake up choking?"

Maya slammed the laptop shut. Her heart hammered against her ribs.

She tried to go to bed, but sleep felt dangerous now, like walking into a trap. Every time she closed her eyes, she felt herself sinking into that familiar nightmare, but now there was something new in it—a presence. Someone watching from just outside her field of vision.

At 4 AM, she opened the laptop again.

Two new videos had been posted. Both uploaded at 3:17 AM.

When she'd been asleep.

The first video showed the woman sitting in near darkness, just the faint glow of a screen illuminating her face. She wasn't looking at the camera. She was looking at something off to the side, and her expression was one of pure horror.

"You're not real," she whispered. "You can't be real."

The video ended.

Maya's hands shook as she clicked the second one.

This time, the woman was closer to the camera, her face filling the frame. She looked like she hadn't slept in days. She looked like Maya had looked in the mirror that morning.

"I've been trying to understand," the woman said, her voice cracking. "Why you. Why me. I think... I think we're the same person. Different universes, maybe, or different timelines, I don't know. But I can feel you bleeding through. Your memories mixing with mine. I can't tell anymore what's real and what's yours. Today I caught myself responding to a name that isn't mine. I turned around when someone called for 'Maya.'"

Maya's blood turned to ice.

The woman's name appeared in the video description: Elena Montgomery.

"I'm disappearing," the woman—Elena—whispered. "I can feel myself becoming you. Or you becoming me. It doesn't matter anymore. Soon there won't be a difference."

The screen went black.

---

Maya stopped trying to sleep.

She sat in front of her laptop, watching the view counter on Elena's videos tick upward. Only hers. One view per video. No one else was watching. No one else could see the channel when she tried to show her friends—it vanished from the search results, the link led to error pages.

Only for her. This was only for her.

The nightmares had stopped, but that was worse somehow. The absence of them felt like a held breath, like standing at the top of a staircase in the dark, knowing there was one more step down but not remembering where.

She started filming herself. Proof. Evidence that she was real, that she was Maya Klein, that she existed separately from the woman on the screen. But when she played the videos back, she couldn't shake the feeling that she looked wrong. That her own face was becoming unfamiliar.

On the seventh day, a new video appeared.

Elena sat in the same position Maya was sitting in now. Same slumped shoulders, same dead-eyed stare. Behind her, Maya could see a room that looked almost like her own apartment, but the furniture was arranged differently. Wrong. Almost right but not quite.

"I'm so tired," Elena said. "I've been watching too. Did you know that? There's a channel. Your channel. You don't remember making it, but you did. You've been documenting everything, just like I have. We're both watching each other. We're both becoming each other. There's no escape from this."

Maya hadn't made a channel. She'd recorded videos, yes, but she'd never uploaded them. They were saved locally on her computer, never shared, never—

She opened a new tab with shaking hands and searched her own name.

There it was. "Maya's Night Terrors." Forty-seven videos. The most recent uploaded twenty minutes ago.

She clicked on it.

It was her. Sitting where she was sitting now, in her apartment, wearing the same unwashed clothes. She was talking about Elena, about the nightmares, about the creeping sense that she was losing herself to someone else's life.

She was describing things that had happened today. Things she hadn't filmed.

The Maya on screen looked directly into the camera, directly at her, and said: "I don't know if I'm the real one anymore. I don't know if there is a real one. Maybe we're both echoes of someone else, someone who doesn't exist anymore. Maybe we never existed at all."

Maya slammed the laptop shut again, but it didn't matter. She could still hear her own voice continuing in the darkness, tinny and distant through the closed screen.

She couldn't remember the last time she'd eaten. When had she last spoken to someone in person? Days? Weeks? Time felt negotiable now, unreliable.

Her phone buzzed. A text from her mother: "Honey, are you okay? You haven't returned my calls."

She couldn't remember any calls. She checked her call log. Seventeen missed calls over the past five days.

Had it only been five days? It felt like months.

She opened the laptop one more time.

One new video. Posted one minute ago. The thumbnail showed Elena's face, but something was different about it. The features were shifting, blurring. Becoming less distinct.

Becoming more like Maya's.

Maya clicked play.

Elena stared into the camera. When she spoke, her voice sounded like Maya's voice. "I know you're watching. I've been watching too. I'm so tired of watching. I want to sleep. Don't you want to sleep?"

Maya did. God, she wanted to sleep so badly.

"Just close your eyes," Elena said, and Maya realized she was crying. "Just let go. It'll be easier. We can finally rest."

The video ended.

Maya sat in the darkness of her apartment, the laptop screen dimming to black. Her eyes burned. Her head ached. She couldn't remember what her face looked like anymore. When she tried to picture herself, she saw Elena instead.

Maybe Elena was right. Maybe if she just slept, this would all make sense. Maybe in dreams, there was no difference between them. Maybe that's where they'd always been heading—toward the same point, the same person, the same ending.

She climbed into bed for the first time in days. The sheets felt strange against her skin, too rough, someone else's sheets. She closed her eyes.

The nightmare came immediately.

The burning room. The rising water. But this time, Maya understood. This wasn't just a dream. This was the doorway. The space between them had always been here, in the nightmare they shared. Every night, when they both slept, they met in this impossible room where water burned and fire drowned.

She could feel Elena on the other side of the flames, sleeping in her own bed, dreaming the same dream. The barrier between them was thin here. Thinner than reality. Thinner than skin.

Maya reached toward the fire.

The flames didn't burn. They felt like static, like the buzz of a dead channel. She pushed her hand through, and on the other side, she felt another hand reaching back. Elena's hand. Or her hand. It didn't matter anymore.

Their fingers touched.

The room fractured. Maya felt herself splitting, her consciousness peeling away from her body like old paint. She was being pulled through the nightmare, through the burning water, through the static between channels, between universes, between selves. She tried to hold on to who she was—Maya Klein, Maya Klein, Maya Klein—but the name dissolved in the heat.

She felt herself pouring into Elena like water into a vessel. Felt Elena's memories flooding into her in return. The basement. But it was Elena's basement now, not hers. Or both. Sara's name was spelled differently in each memory—Sarah, Sara—and Maya couldn't remember which was real because both were real, overlapping, merging.

She tried to wake up.

But which body would she wake up in?

She could feel herself fragmenting, spreading across the space between them. Part of her was still in her bed, still in her apartment, still Maya. But another part was somewhere else now, settling into different flesh, a different life, a different name. She was splitting like a cell dividing, and the pieces would never fit back together again.

The nightmare pulled her deeper.

Deeper.

Down into Elena.

---

Maya woke up.

No.

Not Maya.

The name felt wrong in her mouth, like a word she'd forgotten how to pronounce. Her neck ached from sleeping in the chair. The room was unfamiliar—almost like her apartment, but the furniture was arranged differently. There was a camera pointed at her. A ring light casting harsh shadows across her face. Her hands were on a keyboard.

The recording software was open. The red dot blinked steadily.

Forty-nine videos uploaded to "Elena's Night Terrors."

Elena. That was her name. Wasn't it? She tried to remember, but there was someone else's voice in her head now, screaming a different name. Maya. The voice kept screaming Maya, but that wasn't right. That was someone else. Someone who didn't exist anymore.

She looked down at her hands. They were wrong. The nail polish was a color she'd never wear, but she had worn it, she remembered wearing it, or did she? There was a scar on her wrist from when she was twelve, or was it from when she was nine? Both memories existed simultaneously, layered on top of each other like double-exposed film.

She'd had a friend named Sara. Sarah. Both spellings correct. Both spellings wrong.

On the screen, a notification appeared. Someone was watching the livestream. One viewer.

She felt them there, in her head. The fragment that hadn't made it all the way through. The piece of Maya still screaming in the nightmare, still reaching through the flames, still trying to wake up in a body that no longer belonged to her.

There was no going back. The door only opened one way.

Maya—no, Elena—no, both, neither—opened her mouth and screamed deep into the darkness that was starting to engulf Maya's consciousness as she realized what was happening now and what was going to happen when...

When what?

Elena—no, Maya—no, both, neither—placed a hand to her head and rubbed at their temple letting out a soft groan as the blue light from the laptop filled the darkness around her sttuff as the scream echoed into a soft head throb. "Sorry guys." Elena Montgumery's voice echoed in the darkened room. "Must've dozed off, I'm so exhausted...."