A wall of concrete in the corner was but watching, rust-bordered and grimed. Watching, yes, that’s what he felt. He was being watched as he looked down and realised in horror that…
Breasts were peeking from his chest. Not male breasts, God no, but breasts, women’s breasts.
“The hell?” he muttered to himself, flabbergasted by what he was experiencing right now.
He dropped the toolbox, it thumped hard against the floor. His hand gripped his left breast. He had to know… He had to… But the breasts were real. They were full-bodied, B-cup size, to his eye. None of that made sense.
I need a mirror, something, NOW!
He had to. He had to make sure of it. It could be him going psycho, some schizoid episode. From all the relentless chase. From terrors that drowned him in the entire evening.
He picked up the toolbox again. It was too important to be left behind.
He found himself in that black reflection of one of the break-glass fire-axe cabinets. For a moment he couldn’t understand what he was looking at. The shape was… unmistakably his, the clothes… his, even the dumb expression was… his.
But the face. The face had changed with the rest of him: softer at the jawline, and those cheeks… familiar in the way a sibling might be.
He moved in close to the bulbous vision of still-himself, fingering his face, then neck. Every damn thing he did copycatted his moves perfectly. Yeah, it was his mirrored self.
I… I remember this face… from somewhere.
A…
Ai…
Aid…
Aida.
W—what?
The thought pricked more than the breasts did. He tried to recall last week, ten years back, but Nada. Nope. Memories faded, floated about, dragged sideways, elongated. They lynched each other into the omnipotent blur. As though all went fuck-backwards in his sorry existence, his livelihood got tampered with.
Was it him? Always?
“No, this can’t fucking be!” he throated.
Why, and why, for a damn sec, Aida felt more me than… than Aidan? Have I lost it?
Racing, racing thoughts were racing through the head of Aidan… or Aida. Laps and laps of them.
He stepped away backwards, pins and needles down his knees, making them soft and weak. He was about to collapse, heart pounding like a chugga chugga steam train. Now his back shoe caught on something on the way back. He wobbled, lost balance, and tripped on his back, elbows supporting him. Ouch.
Trays. Damn trays. But also something brittle under their stack. Something lurking beneath. He brushed the trays off with his good hand, the other hand now starting to radiate with flaming pain. Swollen.
And he saw a trapdoor.
Without a handle, a red rusted ring sunk in the wood floor with dust-mark fingerprints pressed into it all around. Someone had knelt here often. Not storage. No, no. That was something different, something improvised. Something the building had grown in secrecy, like cancer.
He lifted it a wee bit using the rusted ring, darkness down. There was only a red emergency-light hue all around. It was difficult enough to make out anything on this level, but down there… pitch-black impossibility.
Yet, be it adrenaline or some sharpened senses, he could just make out a fuzzy noisy shape.
A… mattress?
He peeked closer, head into the cavern of black mystery.
And sensation. Force. Like two coals on his back. He went down into it, into the darkness.
Pushed, fuck, someone just pushed me! flew through his head.
And then a laugh, a guttural low laugh when Aidan hit the hardwood of the stairs and rolled, his ribs taking the beating. His breasts, they were battered, bruised, flaming already. It was like kicks and punches and jabs the building had for him. One… two… three… four, and he lost count. Many, too many.
And the vision went all black.
***
There was a body on the floor in the tight basement room. Barely anything else was visible. It was a woman’s body, black hair, slender. She was in a white shirt, all bloodied, torn trousers.
The room was pure squalor, choked with a hoard of mattresses, random garbage, and tangled cables. An ancient radiator clung to the wall—a heavy-duty artefact you almost never see in the UK anymore.
Right in the epicentre of the wreckage lay the mattress. Filthy. Mapped with dark brown stains—something ancient and crusted over, built up drop by agonising drop.
Out of nowhere, the mattress heaved. A fraction of movement. You couldn’t make out what was lurking underneath, but something peered out. Something was watching. For a split second, it fixed its gaze on the body sprawled nearby—dead or just dead to the world, it was impossible to tell.
Then the mattress flapped down again, and the room was quiet again.
***
He came to… And the view was pitch dark, choked with brown blankets, scratchy and pilled up. A stained mattress amidst the centre of it. Junk everywhere. A tower of empty cartons. Dozens of… other stuff. A snowdrift of paperwork littered the floor around the mattress. Old timesheets tacked to the corkboard, then a printed rota, then an ID card — a work ID with the face blacked out.
Someone had been living in this godawful pit.
The toolbox… Where the hell is it? I had it before.
He glanced over his shoulder. It was on the floor, cracked wide open, spilling its guts, splaying tools everywhere.
He limped. His battered leg in agony, his body screaming.
Through the hole in his trousers, he could see it was now frail. Wasn’t he built bigger than this? Thicker? He could have sworn that. Now it was a slim piece of meat on the bone, perforated by the slice. The cut was still dripping crimson down his leg, his shin, in tiny, small bloodlines.
On the floor in front of him, he now saw screwdrivers, bolts… a hammer.
A big fucking hammer. Looked sturdy enough it could mash someone’s head to blood-wet pulp.
It sat fine in Aidan’s hand. Just perfect. He glanced down at his chest, two breasts sticking out, shirt open, all on display. Black-to-purple bruise dots everywhere: ribs, chest, shoulders. Mottled like a bloody dalmatian. He had his limits, beaten, bleeding, running on a near-damn-empty tank. Only some ancient animal surge was keeping him alive, telling him to survive. Nature’s overdrive.
“There you are.” Struck a chord, snapping Aidan’s spine straight up.
He whipped around. A black hood. There, right in front of him. Face to face with the killer, he was. In that second, he thought something was off. The hood was bleeding alright, but he… he bore wounds.
Strangest of all, the wounds sat in the same places as Aidan’s. A deep cut on the collarbone, a fucked up thigh slice, and likely, the hand looked odd too.
What the actual fuck?
The thought was a fast flash, and Aidan found himself swinging the hammer already, aiming, pouring his force at it. His arms oddly hollow, delicate, too underpowered. Breakable.
Yet it was a haymaker of a swing, near a baseball bat arc. The killer was quick, too quick for that, and ducked under the mighty slash, while sliding a knife out of the sleeve.
Now an upward thrust followed up, aimed for Aidan’s downbelly.
Aidan arched his torso backwards, pumping out the last bits of his adrenal surge. The tip of the long blade barely bit his skin as a result, and the cut was shallow. Barely a death’s kiss.
Now or never.
He sprouted his off-hand around the killer’s wrist, like moss, something unwilling to let loose. He then pushed the knife-arm away from his guts. Now aligned for it, he backhanded the hammer, its claw driving fast toward the hood’s skull.
The claw caught and tore the cotton fabric of blackness, latching onto it. This wasn’t very successful, but Aidan didn’t stop there. He pinned the knife-hand against his ribline, then dragged it up under his armpit. The murderer’s hand was locked tight in a lock of a thousand keys. A desperate, yet effective grapple. It worked. It damn worked.
The hood roared at that, angry, pissed-off, trying to wriggle and shrug himself into freedom, but Aidan’s grip was powerful. Too strong to let him go. Aidan’s muscle memory recalled an old practice trick from Judo classes when he was a kid. He drove the outside of his leg behind the killer’s calves and swept hard.
The killer’s feet flew up. He hit the floor, back of the head first, with a crack. The knife clattered onto the floor, handle down, then skittered a few feet away, almost in the shadows now, out of sight. But Aidan was fast. Already on top of the black hood, straddling, gripping the almighty hammer with both palms now. One of the hands was hurting, badly cut and swollen. At this moment he could barely feel it.
He raised the hammer high above his head.
And he brought it down like a god of thunder.
A splack gave way to the crunch of bone. Up. Down. Again and again, Aidan was hammering until the black head flattened into the floor itself. Yet again and again, unable to find the brake pedal to his instinct, to his own rage. He kept swinging even after the steel started sparking against bare concrete under the wooden panelling.
And now his grip failed. The hammer dropped. Aidan was exhausted. He slumped back onto the floor.
Weak, but relieved, he let go. The world went full black.
Again.
***
Aidan woke up in the hospital. Someone, somewhere in the streets, heard the cry for help and called the police. They swept through the offices and found, well, quite the scene down at his Poland Street 55 offices.
Two officers, Constable Fury and Superintendent Barnes, were at the side of his bed when he woke up. Those two were ready to take a statement from Aidan… or Aida, as they referred to him. Apparently his ID checked out, and he was actually a woman.
This caused a whole array of uneasy feelings, as he could hardly remember being a woman most of his life. Sure, he had no wife and kids to corroborate anything, but he remembered himself as a man. His body. His voice. Being called Aidan. Even stupid little things from years back. Although those memories felt odd to him now, as if not entirely his, or fuzzy, or else distant, more distant than they’d ever been.
Aidan told them everything he knew that had happened. Starting from the office overtime, through the wild goose chase, and surviving down the pit of the Soho office.
The officers then went away and came back the next day. He slept like a child throughout, not remembering much of it, heavy on opioids and the drip. Yeah, the drip had the good stuff in it.
When he woke again, he saw the same couple with the notepads hawking at him. For some reason, something around his arms and chest seemed very tight, much tighter than the day before.
“Alright, Aida, so here’s what we established after your statement,” Fury nodded and proceeded in that dry and bleak voice. “The identity of the killer and the file. First of all, we couldn’t find the file you described. And the identity doesn’t check out either. Company records don’t show anybody serving as Tech Lead at that time. The closest match we found was the Lead Engineer, Marcus Heinemann.”
“Wait, b—but…”
“Let me speak, Aida.”
There it was again. A stab. Just hearing that name felt like a dagger to the chest.
“Marcus doesn’t work with your theory either,” Fury continued.
Theory? What the hell? thought Aidan.
“Because, to put it kindly, bluntly, erm… correctly…”
“He’s a wheelchair user,” interrupted Barnes, speaking for the first time since they’d arrived. He was mute and mysterious.
Fury nodded. “Has been for years. So he couldn’t have been running after you, up and down seven floors, could he?”
“N—no,” Aidan hesitated. “But I know what I saw. I didn’t make this shit up!”
“Hold your horses, lady…”
Lady. That pierced again.
“Where were we? Ah, yeah. Second thing that doesn’t work is the forensic evidence. We found nothing belonging to an unidentified second person. No blood, no prints, no DNA that shouldn’t have been there. Nothing.”
“What do you mean? How about Kalo?”
“Yeah, Kalo’s DNA is there. He works there. Yours is everywhere too. But apart from you and people we can account for, there wasn’t anybody else down there.”
“But—but how about Kalo? Maybe that was him and his DNA proves it?”
Fury looked at him and sighed.
“Not really. Kalo had a bit of a problem that night. He went with his little one to the ER. She had breathing problems. There’s footage of him at the hospital. Time-stamped. He was there while you were still in the building.”
“Stop! Stop it!” cried Aidan, and for the first time he recognised his voice clearly as a female voice.
That stopped him more than anything they’d said.
Constable Fury looked down at his feet, a bit ashamed and not knowing what to say next.
This was when Barnes stood up from his chair, buttoning up his long black duster coat, readying himself to leave.
“A bit of advice, miss.”
Miss. There it was again.
“We suspect, for your own good, that it’s a simple psychiatric issue. You know, this can be fixed or… or tamed with certain medication under observation, maybe. So don’t be afraid, I’ve seen lots of people getting better…”
Aidan looked left, through the window, staring blankly, eyes watering rapidly.
Maybe he really was a loony. Maybe this was the entire explanation. Simple, yet dreadful.
“…See,” continued Superintendent, “We believe these wounds are self-inflicted, and you are simply not safe with yourself, not right now. We want the best for you, we really do.”
Aidan said nothing.
Barnes nodded at Fury, and Fury nodded back. He gave Aidan a small, awkward smile, and they both turned toward the door. He looked at them leaving, and still said nothing. He was lost for all words.
Suddenly Aidan became aware of that tightness again.
He tried to move his arms. He couldn’t. He threw the blanket forward by doubling down. He saw his arms strapped down against the sides of the bed. White restraints were around them, tight enough he couldn’t turn either hand free.
This was the beginning of the end.
And he burst out crying.
***
The hospital CCTV showed the hallway somewhere in the hospital. The feed was a silver monochrome, old-make. It was an empty view, and nothing in the whole world moved there at first for a good few minutes. The view caught a part of the nurses’ station, nurses being absent, likely supporting a patient. Behind, the hallway narrowed in view, adorned by the straight strip of corridor lights stretching on and on. Some were blinking, some not.
Then, in a blink, a figure crossed the frame from the side and stopped in the middle, its side to the camera. Wearing black, hooded.
Waiting, it was waiting now. God knows for what, but it stood. A black hood.
The head turned slowly, very slowly, to the camera.
And the face beneath the hood was clear now.
It was a familiar face....
It was...
It was Aidan’s face.
A grin split its face so wide it almost tore it open.
Third Eye Horror
© Mac Sitko, 2026
All rights reserved.
Sweet! Did not see that coming!
Wild ride in 4 parts. Part 2 was especially strong. Really good slasher vibes.