My Friend Lost Years to Something in the Woods | Alien Encounter Story Animated

If you pressed your ear to a bedroom wall at 2 a.m. and heard someone reciting their own blood type in a calm voice, with small pauses between each answer as though reading from a form, would you knock on the door? I didn't. I'm a veterinary nurse trained to notice a breathing change, a stillness th

Chapters:
0:00 Have You Ever Watched Someone Disappear?
1:45 The Only Person I Trusted
3:29 He Went Very Still
5:10 The Mask Explained
6:32 No Engine, No Track
8:20 The Phone Stopped Too
10:09 Barefoot at the Wood's Edge
11:54 What That Interest Means

Written and narrated by Alice Kettleby.
Original fiction — names, places and events are invented.

Read the story

If you pressed your ear to a bedroom wall at 2 a.m. and heard someone reciting their own blood type in a calm voice, with small pauses between each answer as though reading from a form, would you knock on the door? I didn't. I'm a veterinary nurse trained to notice a breathing change, a stillness that shouldn't be there.

I told myself it was dreaming. I told myself that for months. By the time I stopped telling myself that, I was standing on the B4365 in the dark with two hours I couldn't account for. I was not easy to fool. Three years before all of this, I moved in with Joel, a freelance sound engineer who worked from home.

He was gentle and funny and the kind of person who remembered your coffee order without being asked. Living with him felt easy in a way I had not expected. Joel always slept in a pale fabric sleep mask. On the sofa, on summer afternoons, even dozing in the passenger seat. I never once questioned it.

Plenty of people are sensitive to light. It seemed like the smallest, most ordinary thing about him, and I left it at that. We shared a converted stone outbuilding on the edge of Clunton, a small village that barely appears on maps. There was a field on one side and a dense stand of birch and oak on the other, and the trees grew close enough that foxes peered through the kitchen window.

I should say this plainly. After a difficult few years I do not need to detail here, Joel was the only person I fully trusted. I would have done anything to protect that friendship. Which is partly, I think, why I kept finding reasons to ignore what I was starting to notice. The first sign came a few weeks after I moved in.

I heard Joel murmuring through the bedroom wall one night, low and unhurried. Not distressed. Something closer to conversational, with pauses between the murmurs as though he were listening and then answering, like a calm and patient interview. Three months in, it happened again at 2 a.

m. I pressed my ear to the wall. I heard Joel say his parents' names, his sister's name, his childhood address in Telford, his blood type. Each one clear and calm, with small pauses between, as though someone were ticking items off a form. I told myself he was dreaming, reciting something memorised.

As a vet nurse I know the brain does strange cataloguing work during sleep, sorting and rehearsing. People recite poetry, addresses, old phone numbers. It is not unusual. I nearly convinced myself of that. Nearly is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I ruled out sleepwalking. His door was always shut and I would have heard it open.

I ruled out a phone call. The next morning, out of sheer embarrassment, I checked our router logs. There was no outgoing data from his device after midnight. Not a single packet. At breakfast I mentioned it lightly, laughing, saying I had heard him talking in his sleep. Joel went very still.

It lasted only a second before he smiled and said he did that sometimes, old habit, nothing to worry about, and changed the subject so smoothly I almost missed the stillness. Months later I visited Joel's family in Telford for his mother's birthday. I told the sleep-talking as a funny story. His mother, his father and his sister all stopped talking at exactly the same moment.

Then his mother said, very quietly, we do not discuss that, and moved to refill her glass. Weeks later Joel told me himself. He sat at the kitchen table after midnight, both hands around a mug, and said there was another family. That they came once or twice a year. That they asked him questions the same way every time, like a checklist, and had done since he was nine.

He described it carefully. He was never frightened during the visits, only very heavy, as though gravity had doubled. The questions were not spoken aloud but he heard them anyway, somewhere behind his eyes. He answered honestly because it seemed important to them that he did. I asked him what kinds of questions.

He said things like whether he was well, whether the people around him were well, whether the air and the water in the area seemed the same as before. I called it a survey. He nodded and said yes, exactly like a survey. I asked then about the sleep mask, whether it was because of them.

He said it helped him feel less exposed when it happened. We both knew, without saying it, that a piece of pale fabric meant nothing to whatever was doing this. But some gestures are for the person making them. Late October. A Thursday. I drove home along the B4365 at half past ten, the road empty and black.

My headlights picked out the tree line on the left and the field edge on the right. Then both went dark. The engine died. Not a stutter. Just gone. I coasted to a stop. The dashboard was completely black. My phone screen was black. And the road was absolutely silent in a way a road in the middle of England never is, not even at midnight, because there is always a motorway hum somewhere beneath everything.

There was none. I got out to check the engine, because that is what I do. I lifted the bonnet and looked. The small torch on my key ring died before I could use it. I looked up because the tree line to my left was lit from within, a pale blue-white light moving slowly between the trunks.

I thought briefly of a farm vehicle. But there was no engine sound and no track through those trees. I thought of a torch. But the light was sourceless and even, the way you might describe the glow of a monitor in a dark room, only very much larger and very much calmer. Then I felt the heaviness Joel had described.

It started in my shoulders and dropped through my chest, not painful, just profound, the way your body feels in the last second before sleep when it decides it is done. I leaned against the car bonnet. I could not move away from it. The light in the trees grew brighter. At the edge of the treeline I saw a shape.

Tall, proportioned like a person, head slightly bowed, arms loose at its sides, wearing something long and dark. It was standing perfectly still. And it was watching me. I was certain of that. I wanted to call out but had no voice. I felt observed the way an animal on an examination table is observed, clinical and not unkind.

A hum I had not noticed until that moment began to drop in pitch. It settled in my sternum. And then there was a cut, like a film edit. I was sitting in the driver's seat. Door shut. Seatbelt on. The engine was running. The dashboard clock read 00:41. I had left the practice at 22:30.

The drive takes twelve minutes. I had been somewhere, or nowhere, for just under two hours. I sat and looked at that clock for a long time. I checked my phone. It had charge and signal, both perfectly normal, as though nothing had happened to it at all. The last outgoing thing was a voice message to Joel, sent at 22:28, saying I was leaving.

After that, nothing. As though my phone had simply stopped alongside me. I drove home shaking, not from cold. Joel was standing in the kitchen doorway when I arrived, sleep mask pushed up on his forehead, the warm light behind him. Before I could speak he said, quietly, it happened to you too, didn't it.

Not a question. He already knew. The next morning I found fine pale dust on the sleeve of my work tunic. A dry mineral smell I could not place, nothing I recognised from the road or the car or the practice. I am a vet nurse. I know how to preserve a sample. I sealed it in a sandwich bag and labelled it with the date.

I also found a small smooth mark on the inside of my left forearm. Oval, about the size of a pea, slightly raised, with a faint darker centre. It did not hurt at all. I photographed it every single day. By the ninth day it was entirely gone, as though it had never been there. I sent the dust sample to a friend who had studied chemistry.

She said it was mostly silica and calcium compounds, nothing exotic, possibly road grit. She said possibly. I thanked her and kept the bag anyway, because possibly is not the same as definitely, and I have never been able to stop thinking about that distinction. Two years later Joel phoned from Bristol, where he'd moved for work.

Late autumn again. He said it had happened the previous night, and when he came back to himself he was standing barefoot at the edge of the birch wood behind his new flat. His first words were: it happened again. I asked whether anyone else had seen anything. A neighbour three doors from Joel's Bristol flat told him the following morning that she had seen a light in the trees at around 2 a.

m. and assumed it was teenagers. She had no reason to lie, and no connection to either of us whatsoever. I contacted Joel's sister, asking if she remembered the birthday dinner, everyone falling silent at once. She said she had no idea what I meant. Joel had always been a vivid dreamer, nothing more.

Her voice was flat and careful in a way that did not feel like forgetting. I had one more experience of my own, quieter. A dream, or not a dream. A plain white room, a warm light above rather than a harsh one. Something looking at me from a distance with what I can only describe as patience.

And then nothing. And then morning. I have not been able to decide what it was. I no longer drive the B4365 after dark. I know how that sounds from someone who once prided herself on not being afraid of country roads at night. I have changed that route. I do not go back along that tree line after sunset.

I do not apologise for it. Some changes you simply make and keep. I cannot confirm what happened to me or to Joel or to his family. I will not pretend otherwise. But I think about the checklist. The patient questions. The way Joel said they seemed interested in whether the water and the air were the same as before.

I find I cannot stop thinking about what that interest means. I want to ask you something. Have you ever heard someone you trust murmuring in their sleep in that same patient, answering way, pauses between the answers, as though someone were ticking items off a form? Did you listen to what was being said?

Because I think, if you had, you might not have gone back to sleep.