“The Night Siren”

Part I

It was the siren that woke him, though the sound at first didn’t register as real. It wormed its way into his half-dreaming consciousness, a drawn-out wail that ebbed and surged, pitching awkwardly between mournful and mechanical. Dennis blinked against the dark, lifting his head from the pillow as the noise crescendoed. It didn’t belong in his neighborhood. Not at that hour.

His hand found the phone on the nightstand and turned it over. The screen, dimmed by his do-not-disturb settings, still showed the time clearly: 3:03 AM. For a moment, he simply stared at it, trying to understand why that felt wrong, even though he couldn’t have said what time he had expected.

The sound grew closer. A Doppler rise, but not smooth. It was erratic, as if the vehicle producing it were drifting through uneven terrain or phasing in and out of range. Dennis sat up, glancing at the far side of the bed, which remained empty. Daisy, his twelve-pound terrier mix, was already off the floor and circling the room in anxious loops, claws ticking lightly on the hardwood.

He stood and crossed to the window, pulling back the curtain with slow fingers. The street outside was dark and familiar in the way that all sleeping neighborhoods become familiar—an expanse of dormant shapes, blankened windows, and washed-out streetlamps. But the siren was real now, undeniably present, echoing down the road and drawing closer by the second.

Then he saw it.

The ambulance appeared around the far bend of the subdivision, headlights low and sweeping, its red and white lights casting an irregular strobe across siding and mailboxes. Dennis narrowed his eyes. Something about the vehicle’s dimensions was off. It looked taller than it should have been, and narrower at the base. The color was wrong, too—not quite red and not quite white, but a sallow, jaundiced palette that made him think of old bones and nicotine stains. Even the decals, what little he could make out through the flashes, seemed misplaced—as if someone had tried to approximate what an ambulance should look like based on secondhand descriptions and failed to get the shape or proportion right.

Its movement was oddly silent apart from the siren, which stuttered and pulsed with unnatural rhythm. The engine made no sound that Dennis could hear. The vehicle glided instead of rolled, giving the impression that it was being pushed from behind or pulled along by invisible threads.

The driver came into view only briefly as the vehicle passed beneath the glow of a lamp post. Dennis leaned closer to the glass, eyes straining. The figure behind the wheel was hunched low, the shoulders pulled up almost to the ears, as though the bones beneath had collapsed inward. Its face—or the space where a face should have been—appeared incomplete and blurred, as if wrapped in static. The driver’s edges fluttered like heat ripples rising off asphalt, a constant shimmer that denied clear definition. Dennis felt an immediate, involuntary chill settle across his back.

For a moment, he convinced himself it was passing through. The siren had begun to taper, softening into the distance. But then, without any signal, without so much as a flicker of brake lights, the vehicle made a sharp turn and pulled directly into his driveway.

The siren cut off instantly.

Dennis didn’t move. He remained at the window, motionless, watching the silent ambulance idle no more than fifteen feet from his front door. There was no reason it should have stopped there. No one on his block was ill, no emergency had been reported—nothing to warrant a vehicle like that, at that hour, parking itself outside his house like it belonged.

Down at his side, Daisy began to growl.

He stepped back from the window slowly, heart beginning to drum, eyes still fixed on the shape of the thing parked below.

The rear door of the ambulance opened with a motion that looked both mechanical and utterly wrong. The figure that stepped out did not belong to any human form Dennis could comprehend. It moved like it had learned to walk from watching someone else do it once, and poorly. The limbs were jointed where they should not have been, the elbows reversed, the gait uneven. Its shoulders rolled too far forward, head angled downward, obscuring any remaining hope of a facial structure beneath the shuddering veil of its silhouette. The streetlight overhead failed to touch its surface, as though its body absorbed light entirely, or refused to be seen clearly at all.

Its arms hung too low, the hands at the ends of them curling inward like tendrils or the twisted limbs of old, dried vines. With each lurching step toward Dennis’s house, it seemed to drag something unseen behind it—perhaps a shadow longer than it had any right to be, or perhaps something that didn’t belong to this world at all.

Dennis remained at the bedroom window, frozen not by indecision but by the deep-rooted sense that movement might betray him. Below, Daisy’s growl escalated to a sharp, staccato burst of barking that grew more insistent with every second. She pressed her front paws against the windowpane by the stairs, her body taut with frantic energy. She was no longer barking to warn, Dennis realized—she was barking to protect.

The figure reached the front porch and extended one of its grotesque appendages toward the door. Dennis watched with rising horror as its hand met the surface, the fingers splaying out across the wood like some gnarled, grasping starfish. The nails—or what passed for them—scraped against the paint with a sound that carried up the stairwell and into Dennis’s spine. Then the hand withdrew, reconfigured itself into something vaguely finger-like, and pressed the doorbell once, twice, three times in quick succession.

The sound it produced was somehow wrong, even though it rang with the exact tone Dennis had heard a hundred times before. Maybe it was the silence that followed, or the way the tone seemed to hang just a second too long in the air, but it echoed through the house like an accusation.

Daisy exploded into an unrestrained frenzy. Her nails scraped against the tile near the front entry as she bounded back and forth, barking so hard her whole body pitched forward with each breath. Dennis tore himself away from the window and moved to the stairs, trying to whisper her name, trying to hush her with gentle tones, even as the panic in his own voice betrayed him.

“Daisy, no—quiet! Come here, come here girl—quiet!”

She ignored him completely.

He descended halfway and crouched beside the bannister, trying to coax her back, but she wouldn’t move. The thing outside seemed to respond to her outburst. The head, which had remained slumped and twitching, suddenly turned upward with the stiffness of a marionette on frayed strings. It peered through the frosted glass of the door. Then, slowly, deliberately, it raised its face toward the second-story window where Dennis had stood only moments before.

Its gaze found him immediately.

Dennis recoiled instinctively, ducking behind the banister and pressing his back to the wall, mouth dry, stomach rolling. The creature had seen him. There was no question.

He backed up the stairs, forcing his legs to move despite the numbness blooming in his knees. From the corner of his vision, he saw the figure leave the porch. He didn’t hear footsteps—only the sound of something dragging across the grass and gravel, moving laterally along the face of the house.

Dennis retreated to the upstairs hallway, peeking from a crouch at the side window above the garage. The figure was there, its silhouette just visible in the moonlight as it moved toward the side gate. A low, rattling clatter followed, as though it had tested the latch without success. Then it proceeded onward, around the back.

He rushed to the rear bedroom and carefully peeled back the curtain. The creature came into view again, now pacing slowly past the sliding glass door, its form indistinct but undeniably purposeful. It pressed a hand briefly to the glass, leaving behind a greasy smear that shimmered faintly before fading. It moved like it knew the layout of the house already.

Then it vanished from view.

Dennis’s breath hitched as he stepped away from the window. He turned back toward the hallway—only to freeze as a soft tap came from just outside the window he had been watching from minutes earlier. A rhythmic, unnatural scuffling. Something was climbing.

He fell to his knees beside the dresser and crept toward the window again. He peered over the sill—and saw it.

• The figure had scaled the outer wall, its malformed limbs twisting like broken scaffolding, bent at angles that defied both physics and biology. Its head was now level with the window, and it was watching him. Not the room—him. Yellow eyes glowed from within a sea of shadow, vertical slits that pulsed faintly, blinking sideways in a motion that felt somehow wrong in both direction and intent.

Dennis fell backward and scrambled across the floor, nearly tripping over Daisy as she dashed into the room behind him. He seized her, wrapped his arms around her shaking frame, and crawled toward the closet, pulling the door closed behind them both.

Inside the dark, he sat trembling, Daisy whining quietly against his chest, the thudding of his heartbeat loud enough to drown out the world beyond. The creature was still out there.

And now it knew where to look.

Part II

Dennis had no idea how long he stayed in the closet. Time moved differently in there. Every breath felt suspended in syrup, every second dragged by the weight of waiting. Daisy shifted in his lap, ears perked, occasionally growling low in her throat. He didn’t dare open the door until her tremors lessened. Even then, he only did so inch by inch.

The hallway beyond remained dark and still. He rose slowly, every joint tight with tension, and edged back toward the bedroom window.

The figure was gone.

Dennis crept toward the glass and lifted the edge of the curtain. He expected to see an empty lawn or perhaps the ambulance still idling in the driveway. Instead, he caught sight of movement just as the original figure slipped around the far corner of his house, vanishing from view. For a moment, he allowed himself the hope that whatever it was had given up—or, at least, was retreating.

But then the back doors of the ambulance opened.

Dennis watched in breathless disbelief as something thick and black oozed from within, spilling onto the pavement in viscous ropes. It did not pour like liquid but instead gathered and rose, building height and form until four distinct shapes had assembled—each larger than the first. They did not move like the driver had; they did not stumble or stutter. Their movements were slow, steady, and with purpose.

Each of the new figures clutched something long and coarse in its grasp. Dennis squinted through the dimness, struggling to make out the details, until a gust of wind shifted the porch light just enough to illuminate them.

Ropes.

Coiled lengths of frayed rope, fashioned into crude, looped nooses, hung from their hands like trophies awaiting purpose.

The four figures began to disperse, each one breaking away from the others with mechanical rhythm. One made its way around the left side of the house, another toward the rear. A third disappeared toward the right, while the last advanced toward the front door where the driver had first stood.

Dennis moved to the other window and confirmed what he feared: they were encircling the house.

The air in the bedroom had changed. It felt static-charged and electric, humming with something unspoken. Dennis reached for his phone. His fingers trembled against the touchscreen as he tapped in the unlock code. He navigated to the keypad and hit 9-1-1.

No signal.

Not “poor signal,” not “searching,” not even a spinning wheel of anticipation. Just three plain, gray words in the corner of the screen:

No Service.

Daisy began barking again downstairs, her sharp, high-pitched warnings echoing against the walls. Dennis’s attention snapped toward the stairwell. The dog had positioned herself at the rear door, her body tense, barking directly into the glass.

He didn’t think. He moved.

Dennis descended the steps, taking two at a time despite the tightness in his calves, and turned into the kitchen. Daisy’s body stiffened as he approached, her tail bristled to full alert. She wasn’t just barking anymore—she was screaming in the only way dogs can, with pure instinctual terror.

He reached for her just as the door exploded with force from the outside, the entire pane shuddering in its frame.

One of the creatures had slammed into it.

Dennis stumbled backward, dragging Daisy with him by the collar. The figure on the other side of the door had spread its arms across the glass, pressing the tips of its fingers against the surface until they distorted and smeared. The shadows trailing from its hands didn’t stay outside. Instead, oily tendrils of black smoke began to seep from the corners of the doorframe, curling like steam along the kitchen tile.

The smoke moved with intelligence, snaking in loops and trails that avoided obstacles, navigating directly toward Dennis and the dog.

He turned for the drawer near the sink, where the knives were kept, yanked it open, and grasped the handle of a large kitchen blade. The metal felt absurdly small and useless in his hand.

Then his heel caught on the edge of a misplaced rug.

His legs went out from under him in a violent lurch. His spine collided with the floor hard enough to send stars scattering across his vision. His head snapped back, colliding with the tile behind it. There was a sickening crack he couldn’t immediately identify—bone, floor, or both.

The knife skittered across the tile and vanished under the table.

Dennis tried to sit up, but the pain that radiated from his lower back brought a yell to his throat that never made it past his lips. He rolled to his side and fumbled for his phone, still clutched in his right hand.

Blood smeared across the screen.

He tapped 911 again.

This time, it rang.

A hiss of static filled the speaker.

“Hello? Hello—this is 911, what’s—”

Dennis’s voice cracked as he tried to speak. “There’s someone here, something—please—”

The words on the other end broke into garbled shrieks and interference. He thought he could make out fragments of speech, perhaps a voice beneath the static, but they were fragmented, submerged beneath noise like a radio left to rot underwater.

“I can’t—please, they’re trying to get in—” he tried again, but his own voice sounded alien to his ears.

The line went dead.

He stared at the screen, blinking away tears of pain and frustration. The phone displayed a “Call Failed” message. He was still cut off.

And now, the shadows had made their way inside.

Dennis remained on the floor, limbs twisted beneath him at unnatural angles, the pain radiating from his spine sending sharp tendrils through his legs and into his skull. His head throbbed with a deep, hollow pressure that seemed to pulse in rhythm with the high-pitched ringing in his ears. He blinked against the haze in his vision, struggling to keep his eyes open, his body refusing to cooperate. The fall had taken more out of him than he had realized.

Daisy was still barking, but her voice had grown thin and distant, as though muffled by something thick and invisible. He couldn’t tell whether the change was in the room or within his own hearing, but the result was the same: her frantic warnings felt as though they came from the end of a long hallway, one he could no longer reach.

The shadows continued to bleed through the edges of the house, moving not with force but with purpose. They came through vents, drifting like ash on a reversed current. They seeped beneath window frames, pooled beneath the floorboards, and rose in veins along the drywall, creating patterns that throbbed with malicious intent. The house wasn’t just being entered—it was being claimed.

Dennis made a half-hearted attempt to move, forcing himself to one elbow, but the pain in his lower back seized control of his body like a vice. A wave of nausea rolled through him, and he lowered himself again with a groan that was more exhale than voice. He could only lie there and watch.

From his vantage point, he saw one of the creatures drift toward the living room window, the largest of them all. Its shadow pressed against the glass, and the surface bent inward, warping and flexing like elastic stretched too far. Its hand—or what served as one—dragged across the pane with a motion too fluid, as though its bones had melted. It left behind no fingerprints, only a trail of condensation that didn’t fade, a smear that looked less like moisture and more like memory.

The lights overhead began to flicker again. The ceiling fan sputtered and stopped. A distant hum, like the grinding of a far-off engine, grew steadily louder and then—abruptly—cut out.

The silence that followed was not total. The house still breathed in its unnatural way. The shadows still moved. And then, breaking the dreadful rhythm of the moment, came a sound so out of place that it didn’t register as real at first.

A knock.

Not a scrape, not a slam, not the insectile tapping that had preceded every unnatural presence thus far.

A knock. Human. Measured. Three solid raps against the front door.

Dennis blinked hard, his mind working to catch up to the moment. Another knock followed, this time accompanied by a voice.

“Sir? Emergency services. Are you alright in there?”

He felt tears prick the corners of his eyes—not from emotion, but from the sudden release of tension that came with the sound of a real, human voice. His jaw trembled. He tried to answer, to call out, but his voice came as little more than a strained rasp.

Then the front door opened, hinges creaking wide as two uniformed paramedics stepped into the entryway, halting in place almost immediately.

Dennis watched them from the kitchen floor. Their faces twisted into confusion, then concern. One of them coughed, waving a hand in front of his face as the faint haze of black smoke met his nose.

“Jesus,” the first muttered. “What the hell happened here?”

They moved quickly after that. The second paramedic crossed the room and knelt beside Dennis, shining a small penlight into his eyes. Dennis tried to speak again, his tongue thick, the words clumsy and crowded.

“There was… another ambulance,” he managed. “Before you. Wrong colors. Wrong everything. It came here first…”

“Let’s worry about that later,” the paramedic said, cutting him off in a tone not unkind. “You’ve taken a serious fall. There’s some bleeding at the back of your head. Do you know your name?”

Dennis nodded. “Dennis.”

“Good. Can you feel your legs?”

“Yes. They just… hurt. Everything hurts.”

“We’re going to get you stabilized and out of here. Try not to move.”

Dennis caught a glimpse of Daisy barking in the background as the paramedics unrolled the gurney. She was still positioned near the back door, tail rigid, her body bristling with defiance as she growled at something Dennis could no longer see.

They worked quickly but carefully, lifting him onto the stretcher with practiced hands, securing the straps across his chest and legs. His vision faded in and out as they wheeled him across the floor and into the night air.

The moment the cool air touched his skin, he shivered. The scent of smoke and something older still clung to him, woven into the fabric of his shirt and hair. He turned his head slightly and caught sight of the real ambulance parked in his driveway—standard white and red, marked with clean lines and official logos. There were no shadows around it. No wrongness. It hummed with the quiet of a well-maintained engine and nothing more.

They loaded him inside. One paramedic climbed in after him while the other circled around to the driver’s seat.

Daisy’s barking continued behind him, sharp and high as a fire alarm. For a brief, impossible moment, Dennis wondered whether they would let her come. But then the doors closed, sealing him inside.

And for the first time that night, he believed he might actually be safe.

Part III

The inside of the ambulance was bathed in sterile fluorescence, the kind of cold light that seemed to erase texture from skin and dull the sharpness of blood. Dennis lay strapped to the gurney, every bump in the road radiating through his spine like a percussion hammer. Though the straps were snug and the stretcher bolted into place, he felt a growing instability under him, as if the very act of movement were a betrayal of balance.

The attending paramedic—short-haired, middle-aged, with weary eyes that spoke of too many long nights—sat beside him and checked the IV line for the third time. His voice was calm but clipped, the practiced tone of someone trained to manage panic without ever naming it.

“You’ve got a mild concussion. Your spine’s not broken, but you’ve definitely done some damage. Probably hairline fractures in the lumbar. You’ll be okay, but you’re going to need scans.”

Dennis tried to focus on his face, tried to keep his thoughts tethered to the inside of this vehicle, but his eyes kept drifting toward the rear windows. The world beyond them was dark and uneven, an indistinct wash of rural roads and scattered trees. Then he saw it.

It was back.

The other ambulance, the wrong one, followed them at a distance, just barely visible in the gloom of early morning. Its headlights weren’t on. It didn’t need them. It moved with the eerie, stuttering glide of something not subject to the same physics as the rest of the world. It bore no sound, no rumble of tires or churn of engine. It simply closed the distance.

Dennis’s mouth worked uselessly for a moment, the words catching on the ragged edge of his throat.

“It’s behind us,” he finally managed. “The one from before. It’s following.”

The paramedic turned and peered through the rear window, frowning. “There’s nothing there.”

“There is,” Dennis said, his voice rising. “I saw it pull into my driveway. It sent them—those things. I’m telling you, it’s following us now.”

The man’s brow furrowed, and he leaned back to the console to radio something to the driver, but Dennis wasn’t listening anymore. He had twisted as far as the restraints would allow and was staring into the dark. The other ambulance had drawn closer. Its shape was clearer now—the distorted height, the unnatural proportions, the off-color panels that looked more like slabs of discolored skin than paint. The driver was still visible, hunched over the wheel, flickering like a half-rendered memory. Its face remained a smear.

Then the vehicle accelerated, still completely silent, gaining on them in impossible increments. The distance closed in heartbeats. It was coming too fast.

Dennis shouted, “It’s going to hit us!”

The driver’s response was inaudible from the back, but Dennis saw the man’s silhouette shift with alarm. The paramedic beside him turned toward the window again, saw nothing, and looked back with a confused expression that never had time to evolve into fear.

The collision struck like a bomb. The ambulance lurched violently, tires screaming, the metal frame twisting with a sound like screaming steel. The road vanished as the vehicle veered off the shoulder and tumbled down an embankment, bouncing against rocks and scrub. Dennis felt the straps dig into his chest and thighs, his body weight shifting unnaturally with each roll. Everything became inverted—floor to ceiling, then back again. The fluorescent lights burst, showering the interior with sparks and shrapnel. Somewhere, glass shattered.

Then—silence.

He didn’t know how long he was out. When his awareness returned, it did so in fragments. There was a high, whining tone in his ears, and his vision pulsed at the edges, collapsing inward and rebounding like a dying heartbeat. The smell of burned wiring and blood filled his nostrils. The world was sideways.

He lay trapped, half-pinned beneath a crumpled cabinet, his legs twisted beneath the collapsed gurney frame. Across from him, the attending paramedic hung limp in his harness. A thick stream of blood trailed down the side of his neck. His eyes were open but unseeing.

The only other movement came from the driver’s side. The second paramedic—alive, though barely—was crawling toward the back of the ambulance, dragging his body with one functioning arm. His face was torn, a long gash running across his forehead. He coughed, spat blood, and blinked through tears.

Dennis tried to speak, but his lungs refused air.

Then came the sound of doors opening.

But not the real ambulance’s.

The sound didn’t match the hardware, didn’t echo with the same weight or mechanical complaint. It was lower, wetter—like something peeling open. A new shape appeared in the shattered rear windows.

The other ambulance had followed them down the embankment.

Its rear doors yawned open wide. From within, the shadow figures began to emerge.

They did not climb or step out. They spilled, poured onto the ground like thick smoke given form. Their arms ended in fraying cords of muscle and darkness. Their faces, if they had ever possessed any, remained obscured in a haze that throbbed with low, unnatural heat.

They approached the wreck, and not one of them gave the surviving paramedic a second glance.

Dennis’s body was still too battered to resist. He screamed, or thought he did, though the sound remained trapped in his chest. Two of the shadows reached inside, slid their hands beneath him as if he weighed nothing at all, and lifted him free of the wreckage. The straps that had once held him snapped like rotted thread.

The injured paramedic watched, paralyzed with pain and horror, as Dennis was carried through the broken door, his limbs dangling, his head lolling.

They took him not to safety, not to help, but to the back of the wrong ambulance, where the shadows opened the doors wider and received him without ceremony.

The paramedic, blood drying on his skin, remained where he had fallen, every breath a contest between will and pain. He did not cry out again. He did not move. Somewhere nearby, a siren began to rise—not the warbled, shrieking cry of the first ambulance, but something familiar and real, winding up through the trees like a lifeline climbing toward the stars.

Red and blue lights flickered across the tree trunks minutes later. Voices followed, shouting directions, radio chatter slicing through the murk. Flashlights speared the darkness.

A new ambulance appeared at the crest of the embankment, flanked by two sheriff’s cruisers. Within moments, medics and deputies were scrambling down the incline, navigating the wreckage with practiced urgency.

They found the paramedic barely conscious, his head rolling to one side as someone pressed gauze against his wound. He tried to speak, but the words emerged fractured and feverish. He gestured toward the woods, toward the direction where the wrong ambulance had vanished, and kept repeating the same thing:

“They took him. They took Dennis.”

It took hours to secure the crash site and stabilize the injured. Daylight crept in beneath the canopy before the wrecked vehicle was pulled out with cables. Paramedics and firefighters combed the embankment for a second body.

They found nothing.

Not a footprint. Not a scrap of clothing. No blood trail. No signs of movement into the underbrush. No secondary vehicle. No indication that Dennis had ever left the ambulance.

* * * * * *

Later, after the surviving paramedic had been airlifted out and stabilized, law enforcement worked to reconstruct what had happened. The vehicle’s onboard systems had been badly compromised in the crash. The dash camera was shattered, its SD card cracked and unreadable. The front-facing collision sensor had failed mid-transit. Emergency dispatch logs confirmed the initial route, but GPS data dropped off just before the vehicle left the main road and descended the embankment.

No second vehicle had been recorded on nearby traffic cams or roadside sensors. No tire tracks other than those belonging to the responding unit were found near the point of impact. Officers searched the surrounding forest and ravine for hours. Drones were deployed. Thermal scans were taken. Cadaver dogs were brought in. They found no sign of Dennis. Not in the woods, not in the wreckage, not anywhere.

One of the search techs, interviewed days later, said he thought he’d seen something strange on one of the heat maps—a smear of heat moving uphill, against the incline, far too quickly. But when the scans were reviewed later, the data was corrupted. The anomaly was gone.

In his official statement, the surviving paramedic recounted every detail he could remember. He described the approach of the other ambulance, the silence of its movement, the moment of impact, the way the shadows had slipped inside the broken doors. He described how Dennis had been lifted out and taken—not by people, but by things—and how the vehicle that carried them simply left, soundless and without resistance, vanishing into the woods.

The detectives didn’t argue with him. They didn’t accuse him of lying, either. But the questions grew shorter, more cautious. Their pens slowed. And when the interview was over, the report concluded only that “due to incomplete data and the absence of a second identified vehicle, the cause of the crash remains undetermined.”

A formal investigation into Dennis’s disappearance followed. For a time, his name appeared in local newspapers and online bulletins. A missing persons alert was issued. Search parties were formed. Drones were flown again. But after three weeks with no evidence, no sightings, and no leads, the case went cold.

There was no body. No trace. Nothing left behind.

Eventually, the attention faded. The articles stopped. The posters were taken down.

But the paramedic never forgot. Not what he’d seen. Not what he’d heard. Not the way Dennis had looked at him—not with terror, but understanding—as the shadows had drawn him away.

Because even though none of it made sense, even though no one could explain what happened, and even though the world moved on as if Dennis had never existed, he knew what he saw.

And Dennis?

Dennis was never seen again.