Sleep never came that night.
I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, the diary locked inside my drawer like a living thing—awake, alert, listening. Every creak of the house felt deliberate, as if the walls were shifting to hear my thoughts. The ticking clock grew louder after midnight, each second a reminder that time, like ink, never truly disappeared.
At 12:07 a.m., I heard it.
A soft scratch.
Not from the walls.
Not from the window.
From the drawer.
My breath caught in my throat. I sat up slowly, the bedsheet tangled around my legs like it was trying to hold me back. The scratching stopped the moment I moved, replaced by a heavy, expectant silence.
"You're imagining it," I whispered.
The drawer slid open on its own.
The diary rested inside, its cover trembling faintly. I hadn't unlocked it. The metal clasp hung loose, as if it had never been closed at all.
I should have run. I should have left the room and never looked back. But secrets have gravity—they pull you toward them no matter how hard you resist.
I lifted the diary.
The pages were warm again. When I opened it, the smell of ink was stronger now, sharp and metallic, almost like rust. A new entry waited at the top of the page.
Midnight makes liars honest.
My heart pounded. The handwriting was changing—still mine, but tighter, angrier, as though written by a version of me that had stopped pretending.
I read on.
You remember more than you admit.
You just don't remember remembering.
My hands shook. Images flashed through my mind—broken glass on a floor, someone crying my name, a door slamming shut. I pressed my palm to my forehead, trying to force the memories back into darkness.
"Stop," I said aloud.
The pen beside the diary rolled on its own and came to rest against my fingers.
I hadn't touched it.
Slowly, against my will, my hand closed around the pen. The moment its tip met the paper, pain shot through my wrist—sharp and immediate. A thin line of blood mixed with the ink as the pen began to move.
I wasn't writing.
The diary was using me.
You promised you'd never tell, the words formed.
But promises made in fear don't survive the truth.
Tears blurred my vision. "I didn't have a choice," I whispered. "You know that."
The pen paused.
Then wrote—
You always had a choice.
The room felt smaller now, the air thick and difficult to breathe. I noticed something I hadn't before: a page number at the bottom.
Page 47.
I flipped back frantically. Page 12. Page 23. Page 38.
Every page after that was torn out.
My stomach dropped.
"How many secrets did I write?" I asked the empty room.
The diary answered.
Enough to destroy you.
The clock struck 12:30.
The ink on the page began to spread, bleeding into shapes that looked disturbingly like fingerprints. One final sentence appeared, slow and deliberate.
Tomorrow, you will visit the place where it began.
I snapped the diary shut, my chest heaving. Outside, the rain started again, heavier this time, as if the sky itself was trying to wash something away.
But I knew.
No amount of rain could erase what was written in blood and ink.
The diary had started its confession.
And I was running out of pages.