The Missing Minute

Mira had always been a light sleeper, which was why she installed the camera in the first place. The noises at night under her bed—soft scratches, the faint shuffle of movement—were too subtle to be rats but too irregular to be the house settling. The security camera wasn’t fancy, just a cheap model above her bedroom door, bluetoothed to her phone. It captured everything, motion-triggered and timestamped. She let it run for a week before reviewing the footage.

At first, nothing. Just the usual: her natural movements asleep in bed. But on the third night, at precisely 3:13 AM, she noticed the footage had jumped.

She rewound. Played it frame by frame. 3:11 AM. 3:12 AM. Jump. 3:14 AM. No flicker, no static, no glitchy distortion. Just a clean, surgical cut. Sixty seconds, gone.

A fault in the camera, maybe? Mira scrolled back. The night before, 3:13 AM disappeared again. And the night before that.

She set an alarm for the next night, waking her at 3:10 AM. She lay in bed, phone in hand, staring at the blue glow of the camera’s indicator light.

At 3:12 AM, nothing happened.

At 3:13 AM, the room flickered. Mira felt an impossible sensation—like being yanked out of her body, as if she had stepped between two film frames and fallen into the gap.

She wasn’t in bed anymore.

She was standing in a corridor. No doors. No windows. The air was dense, thick with the smell of damp stone and something metallic, like old blood. The walls—if they were walls—stretched endlessly in both directions, made of something rough and uneven, like brick but colder. She reached out instinctively, fingertips grazing the surface. It was wet.

The darkness wasn’t total. A dim, pulsing light flickered from an unseen source, casting long, jagged shadows along the walls. The corridor wasn’t silent, either. Beneath the hush, Mira heard something—a faint, rhythmic tapping, like footsteps. Not hurried, not hesitant. Deliberate.

The footsteps grew closer. Mira tried to move, but her legs would not respond… A whisper brushed against her ears—not a voice, but the sensation of sound just before it forms, like a word caught at the edge of existence.

Then—she was back in bed, the weight of the duvet pressed against her. Her phone was still in her hand. She gasped, lungs burning as if she’d been holding her breath for too long.

3:14 AM.

A notification buzzed. The recording was available.

Mira hesitated, then pressed play.

Sixty seconds of perfect darkness.

Then, at the very end, in the silence between frames—

The voice.

“Almost time.”