Hi. My name is Ethan. Ethan Cole. This story happened to me a very long time ago. It happened to me when I was in my early twenties and just a young freshman at the Midwestern State University of the Liberal Arts.

  One day, when I was the last to leave the basketball court, long after my friends had all gone home or to dates or other engagements they had, I was walking alone. I came to an old, seldom used locker room in the university's gymnasium to take one final drink from the bubbler before heading back to my dorm room.

  Then I saw it...

  It was a locker. Half-hidden in the shadows, tucked away in the farthest corner of the room, separated from the rest as if forgotten or maybe intentionally left alone. The locker door wasn’t completely shut. It hung slightly ajar, as though it had been opened recently...or never fully closed in decades.

  At first, I thought nothing of it. Just an old locker in an old room. But then I noticed the dust, thick and undisturbed everywhere except that locker. It was like the surrounding dust stopped right at its feet, forming a sharp line that made it stand out even more. Something about it felt... wrong. Like it was waiting for me.

  My curiosity got the better of me. I walked over and placed my hand on the cold metal. There was a faint vibration so faint I thought maybe it was just my pulse echoing through my fingers. The nameplate was rusty, but barely legible. I rubbed it with the sleeve of my hoodie.

  D. Harper #337

  The name didn’t ring any bells. Maybe an old student? A faculty member? Who knew. But something inside me needed to know more. So I pulled it open.

  It wasn’t empty.

  Inside were old gym clothes neatly folded, stiff with age. A vintage leather basketball sat on the bottom rack. There was even a faded Polaroid photo taped to the back wall of the locker. It showed a group of students in black and white uniforms, smiling. One of whom looked eerily like me.

  At first I thought I was imagining it. But the more I stared, the more the resemblance was undeniable. The same jawline. The same eyes. Even the same awkward smile I’d been told I had since middle school.

  And then, as I reached for the photo... the locker door slammed shut.

  There was no draft. No one else in the room. Nothing but silence... and the sound of my own heart beating in my ears.

  I stood frozen. Something told me this locker had been waiting a long time for someone to come back.

  And somehow... that someone was me.

  I sensed a cold chill at that moment. it was then that I realized just how alone I was. I felt the stirrings of something creepy and decided then and there to high tail it out of there as fast as I could.

  I returned to my dorm room that I had all to myself and did the usual. Did some homework. Checked my notes and ordered some pizza to eat while I played Resident Evil 4 on my Nintendo Gamecube.

  Then when I got too tired I went and fell on my bed and drifted off into sleep.

  After that night, I couldn't stop thinking about the locker.

  I told myself it was just nerves, or maybe the late hour playing tricks on me. I tried to forget about the photo, the locker, even the name “D. Harper.” But sleep wouldn’t come easily, and when it did... it wasn’t restful.

  The first dream came to me two nights later.

  I was in a gym, but not my gym. Everything looked older—like a snapshot of the past. The floors were faded hardwood, the basketball hoops crooked and rusted. The walls were plastered with yellowed posters and championship banners from the 1970s.

  And standing at center court was him.

  Daniel Harper.

  I didn’t know how I knew it was him. I just did. He looked like the guy in the photo—the one who looked like me. Except now, he was staring right at me, eyes hollow but pleading. His mouth moved, but no sound came out. I tried to walk toward him, but it was like running through water. The harder I pushed, the further away he drifted.

  Then I woke up in a cold sweat. My sheets were tangled. My dorm room clock read 3:37 a.m.

  That number—3:37—would come to haunt me.

  Every time I woke up from one of those dreams, it was the same. Always at exactly 3:37. And each dream brought me closer to Daniel. His expression grew more desperate. Sometimes I’d see flashes of him surrounded by candles, books, diagrams drawn in chalk across wooden floors. He was trying to do something... something unnatural.

  I started skipping meals. I stopped going to class. I stopped talking to all the people I knew. Started to isolate myself from everyone and everything I had once know. I had to know the truth. It became my obsession. In time all this started to affect my grades. My best friend at the time, Jordan, tried to check in on me, but I brushed him off. I became consumed with finding out more.

  In the university archives, I searched for “Daniel Harper.” It took me days. The guy was a complete ghost. No friends. No family. And none of people I asked who were old enough to know anything did not remember anyone by that name. He wasn’t in any official yearbooks, and his name didn’t come up in student enrollment lists from the 1970s. But I finally found a match... in a missing persons report from 1975.

  He was a junior at the university. Star basketball player. Honors student. Disappeared without a trace after evening practice. No foul play suspected. The report noted he was “increasingly reclusive” and “reportedly obsessed with esoteric books and dream studies.”

  That’s when I remembered the journal.

  I had gone back to the locker earlier that week, unable to stay away. And on that second visit, buried under the old gym clothes, I’d found a leather bound notebook. I hadn’t opened it yet. Something about it made my skin crawl.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  But that night, I flipped it open. I had to know what the hell was going on with me. I felt like I was going crazy.

  It was filled with Daniel’s handwriting. Dense, erratic, and meticulous. Diagrams of astral projection. Notes on lucid dreaming. Rituals. One entry stood out:

  "Fools. They think the body is all we are. But I’ve seen the space between dreams. The threshold. There’s a way to cross it. I just need more time. If I don’t make it back, maybe someone else will.”

  Someone else?

  Me?

  Was that what this was all about?

  I started following the steps in the journal. I didn’t even question it anymore. The incense, the mantras, the altered sleep cycles. It all felt... right, like I was continuing something I’d started before. My dreams became clearer. And Daniel, he wasn’t just appearing. He was communicating.

  One night, he finally spoke.

  “Help me. Please. I didn’t mean to stay.”

  The last thing I remember before waking up was his hand reaching out and mine reaching back.

  That was the night the boundary between our worlds finally broke.

  I didn’t remember falling asleep. Or maybe I wasn’t asleep at all. I don't remember everything so clearly nowadays.

  I opened my eyes and found myself standing in the locker room but it wasn’t the same. Everything shimmered faintly, as if the air itself was humming with energy. The walls were brighter, but colorless. The world was...lighter, unbound by the weight of gravity or time. It felt like being inside a dream but not one I could wake from.

  This was the threshold. The liminal space between dreams and death. I’d crossed it.

  And he was there. Daniel.

  He stood beside the locker, the same one I had found all those weeks ago. But he wasn’t ghostly or hollow anymore. He looked alive. Worn, but alive. Human. His eyes held centuries of weariness, but also gratitude.

  “Ethan,” he said, with a soft, almost reverent tone. “You found me.”

  I nodded, unable to speak at first. My throat was dry, my heart pounding, even in this place where hearts shouldn't beat.

  Daniel looked around at the endless nothingness stretching behind him. “This place isn’t heaven. Or hell. It’s the in-between. I found it when I left my body. I thought I could come back…but I didn’t realize I was already too far gone.”

  He smiled sadly. “I was foolish. I wanted to escape. From life. From people. From pain. I thought knowledge would be enough. I thought that if I just knew more, if I could see what lay beyond the veil, it would replace the loneliness.”

  He looked at me. Really looked at me.

  “But it doesn’t. It never did.”

  We began to walk, side by side, through that ethereal version of the gym. He spoke quietly, as if confessing something to a priest.

  “I never had anyone,” he said. “Not really. Not when I was alive. I was afraid. Afraid of being seen, of being mocked, of being rejected. So I shut the door before anyone else could. I buried myself in books, rituals, dreaming techniques. I convinced myself I didn’t need anyone.”

  He paused, staring into the glowing horizon.

  “And in the end, I rejected the world. I turned my back on it, and this...this is what I got. Years. Decades. Wandering the borderlands of consciousness. Watching people come and go. Laugh, love, live. I saw students become artists, teachers, parents. All while I remained behind the glass.”

  We arrived at the glowing locker in the astral world. Its door now pulsed with a soft white light, like the promise of morning.

  “I see a lot of myself in you,” he said. “You’re bright. Curious. But you shut people out. You think you can carry everything alone?"

  He looked me in the eye again.

  “Do you have friends, Ethan?”

  I hesitated. “I...I guess I do. Jordan. He’s always been there for me. Ever since we were sophomores in high school. He’s my best friend, I think. And... everyone’s been worried about me. I pushed them away.”

  Daniel smiled. “That’s good. You still have time.”

  I swallowed hard. “Did you ever have a friend?”

  Daniel’s smile faded. “No. Not a real one. I never let them in.”

  His voice cracked slightly as he stepped closer to the locker.

  “I need to go now. I think I’m ready. But before I do, will you do something for me?”

  “Anything.”

  “Burn my books. All of them. All my journals. No one else should follow where I went. There are some secrets mankind was not meant to know.”

  “I promise,” I said, my voice breaking.

  He looked up at the white light. His body began to dissolve at the edges, like mist in sunlight.

  “I’m going home,” he whispered. “It’s all right now. I know that. Thank you, Ethan.”

  He took one step forward—and turned into light.

  As his soul rose upward, his voice echoed all around me:

  “Don’t isolate yourself, Ethan. Don’t build a cage of intellect like I did. Let people in. Let yourself be seen.”

  A final warmth passed over me, like standing in front of a fire on a winter morning. Comforting. Gentle.

  And then it was over.

  I woke up on the cold tile floor of the locker room. The lights buzzed overhead. The air smelled of dust and sweat. But something was different.

  The locker, Daniel’s locker was empty. The photo, the clothes, the journal...all gone. Just a clean, hollow space, like it had never been opened in the first place.

  I stood up slowly, my legs trembling.

  I kept my promise.

  Later that night, I took the journal, the notes, everything I’d found... and I burned them behind the gym, under a clear, silent sky.

  The flames danced in silence, and for the first time in weeks, I felt still.

  And I knew, somewhere, beyond the veil of sleep and death, Daniel Harper had finally gone home.

  It was so strange. After burning Daniel's research I went back inside.

  I laid on the cold locker room floor for a while trying to take it all in. I had wanted to see if some residual energy remained in that place for me to reminisce on. But there was none. It was over. In a way it made me feel sad. I don't know why.

  Then I slowly got up. I must of wandered in a daze for a while.

  Eventually I found my way back to my dorm. I didn't speak for the whole of the next day.

  I slept through it all. I think. I was in a funk. And my memories are getting hazy.

  God, that was such a long time ago. I had a full set of hair then. The longer I live, the more I've come to realize just how fast time really is.

  It’s been over twenty years since I found that locker in the old gymnasium at Midwestern State. The building’s gone now by the way. I remember hearing from my younger sister Jessica that it was torn down during the renovations a few years back. They put up a sleek, modern wellness center in its place. I visited once. It’s beautiful, bright, full of life. No shadows in the corners. No echoes of the past. But sometimes…sometimes, when I pass the area where that hallway where the old locker room used to be, I swear I can still feel the warmth of that final light.

  Daniel’s light.

  I never forgot what he told me. His last words echo through me even now, like an old melody that’s never left my soul.

  “Don’t isolate yourself, Ethan. Let people in. Let yourself be seen.”

  For a long time, I didn’t know how to do that. But I tried. One small moment at a time.

  Jordan was the first. I knocked on his door one morning after weeks of silence and just...talked. He didn’t say anything at first. Just hugged me. That hug, maybe it saved my life.

  Years later, he was the best man at my wedding.

  Yes, I got married. Her name’s Laura. She’s warm, fierce, and has this way of looking at me like she’s known every version of me. Past, present, future and still chooses me every time.

  We have two kids now. Claire and Thomas. They laugh like I used to dream laughter sounded. Full, rich, free. And when I tuck them in at night, sometimes I wonder if they’ll ever find something hidden and strange like I did. And if they do, I hope it teaches them something worth keeping.

  I stayed in touch with the old college crowd too. Jordan’s a counselor now. Go figure. He helps kids like I once was. The closed-off ones. The loners. I think Daniel would like that.

  I still have moments when I retreat too far into my own head. It’s easy, sometimes, to fall back into the habits of solitude. But then I remember Daniel’s voice, gentle but firm:

  “Let yourself be seen.”

  He never got that chance. And maybe that’s why I owe it to him to live as if I do.

  Some nights, when the world is quiet, I sit on the back porch and watch the stars. I wonder if he’s out there, somewhere beyond the veil, watching. Or maybe he’s moved on completely. Maybe that final light was a door he was always meant to walk through.

  Whatever the truth, I carry him with me. Not as a ghost, not as a curse but as a quiet reminder.

  To reach out.

  To love.

  To stay.

  Because in the end, we’re not meant to walk this world alone. Not in life. Not in dreams.

  And certainly not in death.