Only those who open their eyes in the mud can see the truth.
This city has never truly slept, especially at three in the morning. Beneath its weary neon eyelids, the lights linger like blood vessels that refuse to fade. And there are always people pinned beneath the cold glow of their screens by an unnamed wakefulness. I was one of them. For three days in a row, at this hour, my phone received a video. No sender, no title, and utter silence in the comments. Sometimes the footage showed the inside of an old mansion from a bizarre angle, its beams twisted like spasming intestines. Sometimes it showed a corridor in an abandoned hospital, its far end swallowed by darkness that seemed almost alive. Occasionally, it showed an empty subway car, with unrecognizable station lights flashing past the windows. They were like fragments flaking off the edge of the world, carrying a clinging chill. I should have swiped them away, but something sharper than fear drove me to watch... perhaps boredom, perhaps that damn curiosity with nowhere to go.
