Ethan Carter first noticed the change one morning when brushing his teeth.
A second row of molars had sprouted overnight behind the first. They were white, gleaming, and perfectly shaped—almost too perfect. He poked at them with his tongue, repulsed. No pain. No blood. Just more teeth.
He called a dentist, who took one glance before recoiling in horror. "I've... I've never seen anything like this. You need a specialist."
But the specialist never called back. His receptionist said the doctor had gone missing.
By the end of the week, Ethan's gums bulged and writhed like worms under wet paper. Each morning he woke up with more teeth—sometimes thirty or forty new ones. They grew in layers, pushing through his cheeks, crowding beneath his tongue, even curling down his throat. He couldn't breathe properly anymore unless he pulled them out.
He started using pliers.
The first few removals were easy. He'd grip the new teeth—smooth, alien, unfamiliar—and yank until the roots tore free. But they were long. Inhumanly long. The roots wriggled like tapeworms, coiling around his nerves, his jawbone. Once, he pulled a tooth so long it was as thick and knotted as a vine—and it screamed when it hit the floor.
His bathroom was now a slaughterhouse of enamel and blood.
Ethan stopped going out. He stopped eating. The teeth were growing faster—by the hour. The pain came later: burning nerves, bleeding gums, dislocated jawbone. He could only sleep in twenty-minute intervals before waking up gagging on teeth that had slithered halfway down his throat.
Each one had to be yanked out before it rooted. If he waited too long, the pain was unbearable. Worse, some would fight back—tiny roots latching onto the bone, twitching violently when pulled. One night, a molar cracked in half while he tried to remove it, and the shard burrowed back in, embedding deeper, as if angry.
They weren't just growing.
They were spreading.
He began finding them in other places. A small tooth embedded in the pad of his thumb. One poking from the inside of his thigh. A canine beneath a fingernail.
They sprouted from pores, eye sockets, the soft hollow behind his ears. One grew straight from the tear duct and dangled there, swaying slightly whenever he blinked.
He filled bowls, buckets, trash bags with what he pulled. He buried them in the yard, flushed them down the toilet, even burned them once—only to find them in the sink the next morning, intact and grinning.
By the second week, his apartment smelled like a dentist's office and an abattoir. The floors were slick with bloody gauze. The mirror had spiderweb cracks from where he'd slammed his head in frustration.
He screamed for hours some nights. Not from pain, but from the feeling of things moving inside him. Crawling just beneath the skin—like they were exploring. Searching for space to bloom.
Sometimes, in the silence, he thought he could hear them clicking.
Communicating.
One night, he woke up choking. A hard lump had formed in his throat—blocking his airway. He crawled to the bathroom, barely conscious, and used the pliers to dig.
He pulled five teeth from his windpipe. The last one came out with a wet pop, twitching like a hooked fish. He didn't pass out. He wished he had.
There was no way to stop it.
Ethan tried filming the process, but the footage always came out warped. Teeth would shift and multiply between frames, like a stop-motion tumor blooming. One video showed a tooth growing backward into his eye socket. When he checked the mirror—nothing was there. Yet.
He stopped recording. Some things weren't meant to be seen.
Then the dreams began.
He was underground, deep in some moist, breathing cavern. Walls of molars, ceilings of canines, the floor a shifting mass of grinning incisors. He walked naked, bleeding from every pore. Behind him, the sound of teeth grinding on stone.
Ahead: something enormous, pale, and pulsating, chewing him slowly, piece by piece—starting with his feet.
He always woke up screaming, covered in new teeth.
The final day came without warning.
He looked in the mirror and didn't recognize himself. His face had become a landscape of white, his skin stretched and broken by rows upon rows of jagged pearls. His eyes barely peeked between gaps of molars. His mouth could no longer close—too full. Too dense. Every breath sounded like wind through a keyhole.
That morning, the teeth began growing from the walls.
They emerged from the grout. From wood. From the fabric of his clothes. Some even cracked through the windowpane. They didn't just want him anymore. They wanted everything.
Ethan tried to run. But his feet had rooted to the tile. Long molars had pierced through his soles and fused with the floor. When he screamed, a cluster of baby teeth erupted from his tongue and muffled the sound.
He fell.
The pliers clattered to the floor, lost under a tide of growing bone.
By evening, the apartment was silent.
Only the faint clicking remained.
And beneath the bathroom tiles, something pulsed.
Weeks later, a realtor unlocked the door, responding to complaints about the smell.
The key stuck in the lock like something was resisting entry. The door creaked open with effort, groaning as if peeled away from something sticky on the other side. The lights didn't work. The windows were covered in a strange, yellow-white crust—translucent but too thick to see through. Inside, the air was hot, wet, and sweet, like rotting milk.
Everything was bone.
Not like bones-as-decoration—actual bone. Every wall was coated in a dense mat of teeth, molars and canines and bicuspids arranged in spiraling, organic patterns like seashells or tumors. The floor squished underfoot, pulsing faintly. The realtor gagged.
In the center of the living room was a human shape.
At first, it looked like a collapsed mannequin. But when the realtor stepped closer, flashlight trembling, they saw the details.
It was Ethan.
His face was still vaguely intact—cheeks stretched and riddled with tiny incisor-pits, his eyes cloudy and motionless. His mouth was open in a frozen scream, but the scream had been filled in, sealed by rows upon rows of teeth packed vertically down his throat like bricks in a well. His jaw no longer moved. His lips had been pulled back and stapled to the corners of his skull with small hooked teeth, creating a permanent grin that spread nearly to his ears.
Teeth had erupted through his skin like mushrooms—forehead, shoulders, chest, fingertips. Some had grown so long they'd curled back inward, piercing his body again. His hands were fused into jagged white knots. Where his nails had once been were full-grown molars.
His torso rose and fell—slowly.
He was still breathing.
The realtor stumbled backward in horror, but something wet tugged at their ankle. A thin, nerve-colored root had slithered out from under the floor and looped around their leg. Then another. And another. They screamed and turned to flee—but the door was gone. Replaced by a wall of polished ivory, as smooth as a tooth's crown.
Ethan's eyes moved.
Just slightly. Not enough to scream or cry—just enough to show that something behind them was aware. Watching. Trapped.
Begging.
But from somewhere deep within his hollowed chest cavity, the realtor heard another sound: a wet, low gurgling, like something laughing through blood.
Then the teeth in the walls began clicking in unison, faster and faster, a round of applause made of jaws.
The realtor was never seen again.
But weeks later, a neighbor passing by swore they saw someone waving from behind the calcified window. They had a face full of teeth, just like the posters—the ones of that missing man, Ethan Carter.
But they were smiling.
And something inside the house smiled back.