John woke with a start.

The nightmare had returned. Always the same: half-waking haze, darkness behind his eyes, whispers first. A hundred voices, circling, murmuring, genuflecting, words he could not hear. Slowly, the whisper became a hum. A chant. One word repeating, rising, building, until it shook him from sleep.

Then the flies.

They came like a living storm. Millions of black wings. Crawling, biting, burrowing into eyes, ears, throat. His skin burned with their touch. He screamed. He thrashed. The swarm consumed him, suffocated him, filled him. Always he woke.

This time, he woke to the familiar darkness of his bedroom. Dim lamplight painted shapes across the walls. Sweat cooled on his back. Elyse lay beside him, wide-eyed, still. Pink lips. Pale blue eyes catching shadow like a painting.

“John?” she whispered.

“Just a dream,” he muttered.

3:30 a.m. Always.

Sleep would not return. Elyse drifted lightly against him, phone buzzing. Each vibration grated on his nerves. The nightmares had begun to erode him. He felt the tension coiling in his chest, in his skull, ready to snap.

Morning came with coffee and silence. Elyse twirled her hair, flipping through a magazine. She smiled at her phone. John’s chest tightened. Simon. He could see it. Her messages. The way she smiled. He tried to reason. Perhaps it was nothing. But doubt gnawed.

“Do you remember Matt’s friend Simon?” Elyse asked.

John nodded.

“He came by work yesterday. Asked about you.”

He clenched his jaw.

“He wanted fixtures for their house. I said maybe we could all meet sometime.”

John stared. Her shrug was careless. “We text sometimes. Movies. Nothing serious.”

“You’re lying,” he said.

She scoffed and walked away. His imagination became a mirror of horrors: Simon’s hands, her lips, her laughter.

Later, she returned, tense. “Flies in the bathroom. In the drain. Can you check?”

John froze. The word tore at memory. Nightmares leaking into reality. Still, he descended into the basement, heart hammering, senses sharp.

At first, nothing. Just shadows, the faint hum of the pipes, dust motes in the bare light. Relief flickered. Maybe it was only his mind.

And then:

Darkness. Thick and suffocating. A hundred voices boomed: “Hail Beelzebub!”

The swarm returned. Flies poured from the shadows, black clouds devouring light. They burrowed, crawled, fused with his skin. The formless dark took shape.

Eyes first: black, red-veined, staring through him. Then the face. Sculpted, godlike. Wings unfolded; vast, terrible, magnificent.

“It will be my wife now,” whispered the figure.

A cold, foreign kiss pressed to his lips. A spirit forced inside him. Consciousness slipped.

He saw Elyse with Simon. Ecstasy and betrayal played in infinite loop. Helpless to look away.

A voice, not his own, spoke in his mind:
“The wife will be mine. She is the blood of the new union. The bond that shall not break.”

John woke again. The night hung heavy, and still. He knew what must be done.

Dinner passed with terse words. Elyse noticed his silence.

“John, what’s wrong?”

He didn’t answer. His eyes darkened. Veins bulged. “Someone is in the basement,” he whispered. His voice was alien. His teeth were grinding.

Panic seized her. She ran for her phone, dialed Simon. The lights flickered, then died. Darkness swallowed the house.

The wedding dress appeared. Pale, drifting, hovering beside her.

Then John emerged. Ghostly white, eyes black, flies forming a circling, sickening crown atop his head. Blood streaked his face. Hair not his own matted across his skin in clumping, stinking strands.

He advanced. Elyse tried to resist. The swarm obeyed him. Hands tore at her scalp. Pain beyond words. Screams drowned in buzzing.

“Now it will be my wife,” he intoned in a voice not his own.

Simon arrived too late. The basement had transformed into a waking nightmare: Elyse, scalped, lifeless. John, crowned in flies, wearing her hair, an avatar of Beelzebub. Flies adorned him like jewels.

“Hail Beelzebub,” he said, mouth unmoving. Behind him, a godlike figure, wings flexing, dragonlike, terrible.

Simon ran.

The police found only Elyse. John and the other—the lord of flies—were gone. Simon never slept again. 6 Henderson Street became legend. Sometimes, at night, if you listen, you can still hear the hum.his life, haunted to the end of his days by what he’d seen down there in the basement of that house. The years went by and the case went cold, and the murder of Elyse Miller at 6 Henderson Street faded into urban legend. But at that house at number 6 Henderson Street, all these years later, sometimes you can still hear the hum of the flies in the middle of the night as you drift your way off to sleep.