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. It made her uneasy.

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 tossing and turning in bed. But on the third night, at precisely 3:13 AM, she noticed the footage had jumped.

One moment, the room was empty. The next, it was 3:14 AM.

Sixty seconds, gone.

She rewound. Played it frame by frame. 3:12 AM. 3:13 AM. Jump. 3:14 AM. No flicker, no static, no glitchy distortion. Just a clean, surgical cut.

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 3:10 AM and lay in bed, phone in hand, staring at the soft 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.

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 that danced as if alive. The corridor wasn’t silent, either. Beneath the hush, Mira heard something—a faint, rhythmic tapping, like footsteps. Not hurried, not hesitant. Deliberate.

She turned, but the corridor remained the same in every direction. No doors. No windows. Just endless, unbroken passageway.

She wasn’t sure if she was breathing. She wasn’t sure if she needed to.

The footsteps grew closer.

Mira tried to move, but her legs refused to obey. 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—snap.

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 video.

Mira hesitated, then pressed play.

Sixty seconds of perfect darkness.

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

A whisper.

“Almost time.”