First Night
The facility never became louder.
That disturbed Ethan more the longer he stayed inside Somna Labs.
Even hours after orientation ended, the underground research center remained unnaturally quiet beneath its bright artificial lights. No distant conversations echoed through the hallways. No busy medical staff rushed between rooms. No machinery hummed behind the sealed laboratory doors lining the lower corridors.
God.
A place this large should’ve felt alive.
Instead, it felt paused.
Ethan Vale sat alone inside the common lounge around midnight nursing his third cup of coffee while rainwater still dripped faintly from his jacket hanging over the chair nearby. The room looked almost comforting on the surface — soft couches, bookshelves, a television mounted against the wall, even a snack counter stocked with energy drinks and packaged food.
Yet something about the room’s design bothered him.
No windows.
No clocks.
No sense of time passing naturally underground.
Only the digital wrist monitors Somna Labs issued to each participant tracked the hours now.
And Ethan had already noticed all of them occasionally flickering strangely for fractions of a second.
Across the lounge, Mira Solis sat cross-legged on the couch flipping absentmindedly through a magazine she clearly wasn’t reading.
“You feel it too, right?” she asked suddenly without looking up.
Ethan frowned slightly. “Feel what?”
“That something’s off here.”
Fair point.
Daniel wandered into the lounge seconds later carrying two cans of energy drink and immediately joined the conversation.
“I checked the hallway cameras earlier,” he muttered quietly while dropping into the chair beside Ethan. “Half of them aren’t even recording.”
Mira lowered the magazine slowly. “How do you know?”
“Red standby lights.” Daniel cracked open the drink. “Most surveillance cameras show solid blue while recording.”
God.
Why was he checking cameras already?
Ethan rubbed tiredness from his eyes. “Maybe they’re old.”
“No,” Daniel answered immediately. “They’re disconnected.”
That word settled strangely inside the room afterward.
Disconnected.
Like pieces of the facility weren’t functioning correctly.
Or intentionally weren’t being used.
The automatic lounge doors slid open again before anyone could continue the conversation. Leah Hart entered quietly carrying a plastic cup of coffee while avoiding eye contact with everyone else.
She looked exhausted already.
Not physically.
Emotionally.
Like someone who’d been tired for years before arriving here.
Mira gave her a small smile. “You okay?”
Leah hesitated briefly before answering.
“Did any of you hear knocking earlier?”
Silence.
Ethan frowned. “Knocking where?”
“My room.”
Something cold crawled slowly up Ethan’s spine.
Leah sat carefully at the far end of the couch while wrapping both hands tightly around the coffee cup.
“I woke up around eleven because someone kept knocking on my door.” Her voice stayed quiet the entire time she spoke. “Three knocks every few minutes.”
Daniel frowned immediately. “Probably security.”
“That’s what I thought too.” Leah swallowed visibly. “But when I checked the hallway…”
She stopped speaking.
Mira leaned forward slightly. “What?”
“There was nobody there.”
God.
The room suddenly felt smaller.
Daniel forced an awkward laugh afterward. “You’re already hallucinating and we haven’t even passed the first night.”
Nobody laughed with him.
Because deep down, all of them already felt the same uneasiness spreading slowly through the facility.
Then suddenly the lounge television turned on by itself.
Everyone jumped.
Static flickered across the screen for several seconds before a grainy black-and-white camera feed slowly appeared.
One of the facility hallways.
Empty.
Silent.
The image quality looked old enough to belong to another decade entirely.
Ethan stared at it uneasily. “What the hell…”
The hallway feed remained motionless for nearly ten seconds.
Then someone walked across the screen.
Not one of the participants.
A woman.
Tall.
Wearing a white hospital gown.
Her face remained hidden beneath long black hair hanging unnaturally forward while she moved slowly across the corridor before disappearing beyond the camera frame.
The television immediately shut off again afterward.
Complete silence filled the lounge.
Daniel stood first. “Okay, no. Absolutely not.”
Mira looked pale now. “Was that prerecorded?”
Ethan honestly didn’t know.
Because something about the footage felt wrong.
Not fake.
Old.
Like the recording itself shouldn’t still exist inside the facility.
Then the automatic lounge speakers crackled softly overhead.
Dr. Mercer’s calm voice echoed through the room immediately afterward.
“Participants are reminded that sensory distortion may occur during prolonged wakefulness.” Her tone remained perfectly controlled. “Please report any visual or auditory irregularities directly to staff.”
The announcement ended.
And somehow—
that explanation made everything worse.
Leah slowly looked toward Ethan afterward.
“I never told anyone about the knocking.”
Nobody answered.
Because the implication sat heavily between all of them now.
The facility already knew.
Hours later, around 2:40 AM, Ethan finally left the lounge alone after Mira and Daniel returned to their rooms for mandatory medical check-ins. The underground corridors of Somna Labs looked even more unsettling at night beneath dimmed artificial lights and endless silence.
Every hallway looked identical.
Smooth silver walls.
Observation windows.
Long stretches of empty floor disappearing around corners.
God.
It would be easy to get lost here.
As Ethan walked toward the sleeping quarters, he noticed something else strange.
The clocks mounted throughout the hallways now worked normally.
All except one.
At the far end of Corridor C, a single digital clock above a sealed security door still displayed frozen red numbers:
3:17 AM
Ethan slowed instinctively.
The hallway beyond the security door looked dark compared to the brightly lit sections of the facility surrounding it.
Restricted access.
No cameras visible.
No staff nearby.
And softly—
from somewhere behind the sealed door—
he heard whispering.
Not clear words.
Just low overlapping voices moving faintly through the darkness beyond the corridor.
God.
Someone was definitely back there.
Ethan stepped closer to the door carefully.
The whispering stopped instantly.
Complete silence followed.
Then slowly—
something knocked from the other side.
Three times.
Ethan physically stepped backward.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
The sound echoed softly through the empty hallway beneath flickering lights.
Then came a woman’s voice.
Quiet.
Almost pleading.
“Please let me out.”