narrator.txt

You don’t know me. But perhaps you know my voice.

I’m a narrator. Specifically, I narrate horror stories online. I scour the internet with a raven’s eye, searching for gems buried amongst the thousands of short fiction stories posted to places like nosleep and Nightscribe. It’s a time-consuming task. Believe me, I’ve lost entire evenings descending deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole of the worst scenarios a human mind can imagine. There are more stories out there than a single person could read in a lifetime of lightless nights.

I discard many: those that are too amateurish, too derivative, or that are churned out by AI. But if I keep searching, I am rewarded with something truly terrifying, or thought provoking, or emotionally resonant. Perhaps even all three.

I read the story from start to finish. When I reach the end, a smile slowly creeps across my face.

“Yes,” I think to myself. “This is something I want to share with the world.”

I message the author, make sure they consent to me telling their tale. They often do.

And at that point, I cease to be myself. I forget about my day job, forget about the pile of unfolded laundry downstairs. I forget that I need to eat or sleep. I turn out the lights and take a seat in front of my computer. I open Audacity and adjust my Shure microphone to the perfect height. I take a deep, steadying breath.

I click record. And I begin to speak.

I become the protagonist of the story. Who I really am no longer matters. I’m just some guy in the dark. Or girl in the dark. It depends on the story. With only my voice, I bring the characters to life, leading them slowly down the path towards their inexorable doom. I pause, record a second take of an especially powerful line. My throat trembles with emotion as the account comes to its cathartic climax. I edit the recording together, add ambience to the mix to enhance the story’s atmosphere.

And then it goes online.

All across the world, people listen. Just a few at first, my regular audience. But soon, others drift in, following a link from somewhere else, lured in by the algorithm. They sit at the fringe of the campfire’s light as I speak. In their darkened rooms, in their cars, at their places of work, my voice narrates for them a tale of visceral imagination they may never have found by themselves. And just like that, the world becomes, harmlessly, a little darker, and a little more fun.

Harmless, perhaps, until today.

It’s a couple days before my weekly upload is due, so I went looking for a story to record. I poured myself a cup of black coffee, opened up tabs to the usual sites, and began my search. I have a simple rule: if a story doesn’t grab me within the first minute then I move on to the next. It doesn’t take much to grab me: a certain eloquence in the writing style, an interesting hook for the plot, even just a turn of phrase I find appealing.

Some days, I find the right story right away. Other days, like today, nothing seems to stand out. After an hour of scrolling up and down and clicking on every new submission, I still hadn’t found anything that held my attention. This happens, sometimes. I have ways of dealing with it.

I could narrate a classic, a creepypasta from the ancient past of 2010. Everyone knows the stories of Jeff the Killer and the No-End House, but they’ve never heard me tell them. I could write my own story, of course. I do that when time permits. But I didn’t think I had that kind of time today.

Or I could check the emergency folder.

This is where I save promising stories that didn’t stand out enough to get narrated first time, but still impressed me enough to warrant a second look. The folder is a haphazard jumble of text files, the stories copy-pasted from wherever I found them.

I opened a couple, scanned the first few paragraphs of each. Yes, I remembered why I’d saved these now. They were pretty good. A hiking trip gone wrong, a late-night encounter with a sinister stranger. Well-trodden concepts, sure, but the tale – quite literally, in my case – is in the telling. Even a story you’ve heard a hundred times before can be riveting if the details are just right.

I kept going, working my way down the list. And that’s when I saw it.

narrator.txt.

What was this? My first assumption was a list of saved settings for my microphone, or some other technical detail I hadn’t wanted to forget. Evidently, I had forgotten about it. I double-clicked the file, and a window expanded to fill my monitor.

“You don’t know me,” the first line of the story said. “But perhaps you know my voice.”

Interesting. It was a story about a narrator. Specifically, one who narrates horror stories online. I hadn’t seen many stories like that. The first few paragraphs described the concept of online narration and the community around it quite succinctly. I smiled at the mention of the Shure microphone. That’s what everybody uses for this kind of thing. I sipped at my cooling cup of coffee as the eponymous narrator described pouring their own. Whoever had written this clearly had a similar process to my own, right down to the emergency folder full of back-up stories.

I paused when I got to the part about them finding a file named narrator.txt.

My first instinct was to look back over my shoulder. I’m not sure why.

My chair creaked loudly as I turned and scanned the deep shadows of my room. There was nobody there. Of course there wasn’t. But when I turned back towards my monitor, I couldn’t shake the sensation of someone hovering just behind me. I could almost feel their breath on the back of my neck.

This happened sometimes too. As much as I live and breathe horror stories, reading them for hours in the dark could lead to these little bouts of paranoia. When that happened, I usually took a break. So I grabbed my empty coffee cup and headed downstairs to the kitchen.

“Alright, mate,” my housemate said as I entered. He was seated at the counter, replying to a text on his phone. “How goes the recording?”

He and I have an understanding that he won’t make too much noise on nights when I’m narrating. Truthfully, I don’t think he really grasps what I do up in my room. He and I couldn’t be any more different, and he couldn’t be any less interested in horror. He’s more of a sports guy. But he’s easy to live with, so we get along just fine.

“Haven’t started yet,” I replied, rinsing out my cup. “Having trouble finding the right story.”

“Ah, you’ll get it, no problem.” He finished sending his text, stretched and yawned. “You won’t have to worry about me making noise, anyways. I’m off out with the boys in a sec.”

I busied myself with making a fresh coffee, offered to make him one with a raise of my eyebrows. He shook his head. “Naw, I’m good. If I mix coffee and booze it’ll be a long night, know what I mean?”

“I feel you.” Fresh cup in hand, I headed back towards the stairs. “Have a good night, man.”

“You too,” he murmured, already absorbed back in his group chat. I ascended the stairs, entered my room, closed the door behind me, locked it, took a seat back at my desk. The little break had done me good. I no longer felt the indefinable tension that had intruded upon me before.

Not until I read the next few paragraphs of narrator.txt.

“This happened sometimes too,” I read aloud. “As much as I live and breathe horror stories, reading them for hours in the dark could lead to these little bouts of paranoia.” My voice began to falter. “When that happened, I usually took a break. So I grabbed my empty coffee cup and headed downstairs to the kitchen.”

I trailed off into silence as I read the next scene, in which the narrator spoke to their housemate while making a fresh cup of coffee. It was the same conversation that I’d just had. Word for word.

This could no longer be a coincidence. A story about a horror narrator could have been about anyone. It’s not like I’m the only one out there. But a story that described my every action, every word, even my every thought… how could that be possible?

I rubbed my eyes and thought about it logically. Perhaps someone was pulling a prank on me. My housemate was the most obvious suspect. But he’d never read a horror story in his life, much less written one. And both of us respected the boundaries we’d set when we’d first started living together. We’d never entered each other’s rooms without permission. I just couldn’t see him doing this.

So what did that leave? Had I written it myself and forgotten about it? Was it a draft of a story I’d started and then abandoned, saved into the wrong folder? That seemed more plausible. But I really had no memory of doing anything like that.

I had an idea. I checked the file’s properties to see when it had been saved. Maybe I’d found it online six months ago, forgotten all about it, and was now subconsciously acting out the events of the story as the memory of it slowly resurfaced. Stranger things had happened.

It had been created today. At 20:38.

My eyes slowly travelled to the bottom right of my monitor, where the current time was displayed. It was 20:03.

If my computer was to be believed, this file wouldn’t even be created for another half-hour.

I took a swallow of my coffee. It was too hot, but it helped calm my nerves. There had to be a rational explanation for this. I looked back at the text file. There were several more pages of the story left to go. That tension settled across my shoulders again, cold and heavy as December snow.

Two thoughts hit me like a pair of punches, one to the gut and one right between the eyes.

First, what if this story actually was about me? And secondly, what if this story recounted something awful, like my own death? What if, just a scroll of my mouse wheel away, it described some psychopath charging into my room, burying an axe in the back of my skull? Or a horrifying face manifesting in the darkness, its skeletal jaws distending to swallow me whole?

If I read those words, would they come true?

Ridiculous. It seemed ridiculous. In that moment, it also seemed like something that could very conceivably happen.

Seized by a sudden impulse, I scrolled down to the very end of the story. If I was about to die, then I needed to know right now. Otherwise, this tension would kill me.

“Skipping to the end of the story won’t teach you anything,” I read. “You have to become a part of it yourself.”

That was the final line.

I felt like a novice chess player, hopelessly outmatched by a superior opponent, my every move predicted and turned against me. I scrolled back up, my eyes plucking out random sentences as I went. “They looked like nothing that words could describe.” “They were coming towards the door.” “I unlocked the door.”

I finally arrived back at the conversation with my housemate. Or rather, I arrived at the narrator’s conversation with their housemate, which coincidentally resembled the conversation I had had with mine.

Fine, then. This story, whatever it was, wanted me to read it from start to finish. So that’s exactly what I’d do.

I read about the narrator wrestling with the concept of the story coming true. I read about them scrolling to the end of the story, only to find that final sentence waiting for them like a punchline. I read about them scrolling back up and reading about a narrator wrestling with the concept of the story coming true. I read about that narrator scrolling to the end of the story, only to find that final sentence waiting for them like a punchline.

I saw something about a loud knock at the door, and exhaled a sigh of relief. Without being conscious of it, I’d been holding my breath. But now that something was happening in the story that hadn’t happened to me, it proved that the story was just that: a story, a fiction. Maybe I needed to drink less coffee at night. It was making me paranoid.

There was a loud knock at the door.

“Who’s there?!” I called, my voice cracking.

There was no response.

My eyes flicked back to the text of the story. The next few lines described the narrator calling “Who’s there?!” and then flicking their eyes back to the text of the story, where they read about the narrator calling “Who’s there?!” and flicking their eyes back to the text of the story.

The next line described them opening the door to investigate.

Stupid idea. Stupid, stupid idea. Hadn’t this narrator ever seen a horror movie? What kind of genre fan were they?

I got to my feet, and cautiously approached the door. Stupid or not, there was no way I could go back to reading now. And besides, it was probably just my housemate. Maybe he needed to borrow something before he went out.

I unlocked the door. The hinges squealed as it opened. I’d been meaning to oil them for a while, but hadn’t gotten around to it.

There was nobody in the hallway. My eyes bulged as a floorboard creaked around the corner of the corridor, towards my housemate’s room. “Hey, buddy?” I called, unable to hide the tinge of fear in my tone. “You still around?”

No answer.

“Come on, man,” I continued. My voice sounded small, insubstantial. “This isn’t funny.”

I shuffled to his room, knocked on the door with a trembling fist. I listened, ear pressed to the grain. Not a sound from within.

I gripped the doorknob, turned it. I gently opened the door. My mind was conjuring all kinds of deformed figures with distorted faces, ready to rush at me, but there was nobody there. After twenty seconds that lasted an eternity, I closed the door again and crept back downstairs. My fight-or-flight response felt like it was jacked up to 200%. I was ready for literally anything, but I had no idea how I’d react if I actually saw it. Would I run? Would I lash out? Or would I simply shut down from sheer terror?

Reading these stories aloud every week was one thing. Being the main character of one was something else entirely.

My housemate’s shoes weren’t in the foyer. He’d already left the house.

Upstairs, I heard the slam of a closing door.

I knew that, if this were one of the stories I was narrating, I’d be internally screaming at the protagonist to get out of the house. Just go somewhere safe, you idiot. Somewhere public. Be smart. Use your head.

But this actually was a horror story, wasn’t it? It was all written down in a text file on my computer upstairs. The final line said that skipping to the end wouldn’t teach me anything. That I had to become a part of it myself. It didn’t matter if I ran away. It would just be delaying the inevitable. I could leave the house for hours, even days. But these kinds of stories never ended that way, with an easy escape. Sooner or later, I would have to come back and finish it. I would have to accept whatever fate was written there.

My feet felt like they were encased in concrete as I climbed the stairs, as did my heart.

My bedroom door was closed. I knew for a fact I hadn’t closed it.

I tentatively tried the handle. It wouldn’t turn. Whoever was in there had locked the door.

I don’t know why, but I knocked, loudly. My fist was a lead weight strapped to the end of my arm. It felt like it belonged to somebody else.

“Who’s there?!” came a muffled cry from inside.

I was too shocked to respond. It was my own voice. It sounded just like it did in my recordings, cracking with emotion as it read the final few lines of a story.

I heard footsteps approaching the door. Fear gripped my throat like a leather-gloved hand. I was convinced that behind that door, just a few inches away, was another me. And I knew that if we made eye contact, even for a second, we’d both lose our minds. This wasn’t supposed to be happening.

The other me was unlocking the door. The hinges squealed as it started to open.

As quickly as I could, I ducked around the corner of the corridor, cursing the creak of a floorboard as I did. I opened the door of my housemate’s room and slid inside, closing it silently behind me.

“Hey, buddy?” I heard from the hallway. “You still around?”

It was my own voice again. It sounded small, insubstantial. “Come on, man. This isn’t funny.”

They were coming towards the door. I threw myself to the floor, crawled under the bed, and held my breath. I heard the doorknob turn, the door crack open. I closed my eyes and counted the seconds. Five. Ten. Fifteen. I didn’t want to see myself, and I didn’t want them to see me. Something awful would happen if we saw each other. I didn’t know how I knew that, or what it would be, but I knew it was true.

In many ways, that moment lasted forever. It had no beginning, or end.

Finally, the door closed again, and I heard footsteps descending the stairs.

When I was sure they were gone, I darted back to my own room, slammed the door, locked it again. On my monitor, waiting for me, was narrator.txt. My eyes felt huge and white in the darkened room as I took a seat and continued to read. I didn’t have much time. The other me would be back any minute now.

I read about the narrator searching their housemate’s room, going downstairs, returning upstairs to find their door locked, knocking on the door. My eyes flicked past paragraphs of text describing an endless loop of narrators chasing each other around an empty house. I read about the narrator returning to their computer, their eyes huge and white in the darkened room as they took a seat and continued to read.

Several words from the next paragraph caught my eye, before I had any context for them. “Blood.” “Scream.” “Death”. The words came at me like bullets fired from point-blank range, thudding into my skull. I reeled back from them, my chair skidding across the bedroom floor. My breath burst from my lungs like startled birds exploding out of a tree.

It took intense concentration just to control my hands. I gripped the mouse so hard I heard the plastic casing creak.

I closed narrator.txt and deleted it. The mouse clicks echoed in the silent room. I even emptied the Recycle Bin.

I waited for something to happen, but nothing did.

It was over now, right? I couldn’t be trapped in a horror story if the story no longer existed.

If this were one of the hundreds of stories I’d narrated, this would be the part where, after a moment of false hope, everything got real bad. Silence filled my room, spreading and thickening like smoke.

I screamed as the knock at the door began again, louder this time. This wasn’t a knock for attention. This was a fist pounding against the wood. This was the sound of someone trying to break through. A violent, incessant sound.

How could this be happening? The story didn’t even exist any more. I’d deleted it myself, before I’d even finished reading it. And then I remembered.

“Skipping to the end of the story won’t teach you anything. You have to become a part of it yourself.”

I looked at the clock. It was 20:10.

There was just enough time. I opened up a text editor and began to type.

“You don’t know me,” I wrote. “But perhaps you know my voice.”

The words flowed out of me. From memory, I typed out the story just as I remembered it. The process of finding and narrating horror stories. The discovery of narrator.txt in my emergency folder. The conversation with my housemate. Skipping to the end of the story, skipping back. Hearing a knock at the door. Knocking on that same door myself. The words “blood” and “scream” and “death”. And then I began to write new words, words I hadn’t already seen. I described the deletion of narrator.txt. The pounding at the bedroom door. I typed about typing the story again in my own words, which were the same words that it had always been written in.

I wrote about the sentence I am currently writing, a sentence that must always have been a part of the story, even as I see it now for the first time.

I wrote about writing this sentence. And this one. And the next.

This was my story now. And it had always been my story.

Another blow against the door, then another. It sounded like the wood was about to splinter. Like the lock was about to give way. My words hadn’t described the assailant. If they actually broke down that door, they would be indescribable. Maybe they looked just like me. Or maybe…

They looked like nothing that words could describe.

I wrote about writing the final lines of the story, even though, as I type this now, I haven’t typed them yet. The time was – or will be – 20:38 when I typed the final line and saved the file as narrator.txt.

The most terrifying thing about time travel stories is the tenses.

I opened Audacity and adjusted my Shure microphone to the perfect height. I took a deep, steadying breath.

I clicked record. And I began to speak.

“You don’t know me,” I recited, “but perhaps you know my voice.” The knocking had finally stopped, because I hadn’t described it as ongoing. Silence had settled upon the house once more. Anyone listening to this narration would just hear my voice, and the ambient sound I would add later to enhance the atmosphere.

“I’m a narrator.” I continued. “Specifically, I narrate horror stories online. I scour the internet with a raven’s eye, searching for gems buried amongst the thousands of short fiction stories posted to places like nosleep and Nightscribe. It’s a time-consuming task.” Already, I was beginning to lose myself in a story that was about myself and nobody at all, that had been written by myself, and myself, and nobody at all.

Who I really am no longer matters.

I stared into the nylon darkness of my pop shield, and I told a tale as if I were sitting at a campfire, an audience of wide-eyed friends and strangers all around me. I took my time, speaking slowly and carefully. Stories like these are not to be rushed. The soul of them cannot be summarised in a few bullet points. You have to inhabit them. Live in them, just for a little while. I paused, recorded a second take of an especially powerful line. And my throat trembled with emotion as the account came to its cathartic climax.

Skipping to the end of the story won’t teach you anything. You have to become a part of it yourself.