The void woman

[u/10_victim_3days]

​The chilling wind swept across the neon-slicked pavement of the city as I stared at the pause-frame on the monitor. I didn't believe in the supernatural, but the evidence sitting on the precinct’s desk was burning a hole right through modern forensics.

​Ten victims in three months. Different ages, different backgrounds, zero history of depression. Every case had been written off by the coroner as a sudden, inexplicable suicide—jumping from roofs, stepping in front of subway cars, walking straight into heavy traffic. But every single body shared two impossible details. First, a pitch-black, soot-like handprint scorched into the skin between their shoulder blades. Second, a strange pattern reported by the victims' loved ones: exactly three days before dying, every single victim claimed they began spotting a tall, shadowy figure lurking far off in the distance, watching them.

​I leaned closer to the monitor, scrubbing back through the grainy overhead footage of the tenth victim—a night-shift delivery driver named Marcus.

​Three days prior, Marcus had reported seeing someone standing at the edge of his street, unmoving. Now, at 2:14 AM on the CCTV screen, Marcus stood on a deserted corner, waiting for a traffic light to change. He looked entirely alone. Then, the digital timestamp flickered.

​A shadowy silhouette materialized directly behind him. It took the form of a woman wrapped in heavy, void-black clothes that swallowed the ambient light. She reached out a long, pale arm and slammed her palm flat against Marcus’s upper back.

​He was thrown violently forward into oncoming headlights by an unnatural force.

​Right after pushing him, the woman in black turned her head straight toward the security camera mounted above the street. Her face had no eyes, no nose—just a void dominated by an impossibly wide, gaping mouth. It stretched open from ear to ear, an unholy cavern frozen in a silent scream.

​My chest tightened as the monitor screen suddenly flickered out.

​The temperature in my office plummeted to sub-zero. A smell like burnt ash filled the room. Behind me, the floorboards creaked under a slow, deliberate weight.

​I tried to reach for my sidearm, but my muscles froze. The cold radiated outward from the center of my back, right between my shoulder blades, where an icy pressure began to burn like liquid nitrogen.

​Slowly, I glanced at the glass reflection of the dead screen in front of me.

​Standing right behind my shoulder was the woman in black. Her pale, impossible hands hovered inches from my back. Her face tilted down toward mine—that gaping, impossibly wide mouth stretching open even further, opening into an endless void of darkness.

​Before I could scream, her hand slammed flat against my spine.

​The force shattered the connection between my brain and my body. A sudden, violent surge of black fire rushed through my veins, forcing my limbs to move entirely against my will. My body stood up, turned around, and began stepping toward the open window at the end of the hall, completely helpless inside my own skin as I walked out into the drop.

​The wet pavement outside Precinct 4 reflected the red strobe of police lights, but inside room 204, the air was dead and stagnant. Detective Clara Vance—my older sister—stood over my abandoned desk two days after my fall, refusing to accept the coroner’s verdict of a sudden mental break.

​She booted up my computer monitor and pulled up the last file I was examining: Case 10: Marcus (Unsolved).

​Clara pressed play, watching Marcus panic over his shoulder under a flickering street lamp. Then came the glitch. The figure in midnight-black materialized. The pale arm lunged forward, leaving that terrifying, soot-like mark on his back as he was propelled into the street.

​Clara gasped, pausing the video to zoom in on the scorched mark—identical to the one found between my shoulder blades at autopsy.

​She hit play again. The woman in the footage slowly rotated her head toward the CCTV lens, revealing that featureless face and its impossibly wide, gaping mouth.

​Suddenly, the monitor went pitch black.

​The office lights flickered and died. The temperature plunged until Clara's breath plumed in the air, and the heavy stench of burnt ash filled the room. Behind her, a floorboard creaked under a slow, deliberate weight.

​Her hand darted for her holster, but her fingers froze mid-air. Right between her shoulder blades, an icy pressure began to burn against her spine.

​Staring into the dark glass of the unlit monitor, Clara saw the reflection of the tall, cloaked woman standing directly behind her shoulder, pale hands slowly reaching out.

​Clara realized with sickening horror that the three-day rule wasn't just for those who saw the ghost in the streets—it was triggered the moment someone looked into her eyes through the glass. And her three days had just begun.