I’m a fully-formed adult man, and I must be in my late twenties, judging by my physical appearance. My body and mind are ordinary, as far as I can tell. I understand how the world works. I have knowledge of language, history, and all other things that most people learn over the course of life. I am a human being. I am a person. I don’t doubt either of those things. But I am not like you.

I was born yesterday.

No, I don’t have amnesia, but I suppose it’s akin to that. I understand why you’d leap to that conclusion. People wake in hospital beds with no memory, but they retain the ability to communicate and comprehend the mechanisms of the world. Except that isn’t what happened to me. I haven’t simply forgotten the events of my life. There’s nothing to remember.

I was born yesterday.

Should I delve into the gritty details of my birth? Yesterday, at precisely 11:11AM, GMT, I entered the world. I wasn’t born through natural means, as I’m sure you’ve already inferred. I was birthed by a cave.

Yes, you read that correctly. My earliest memory is that of blackness, along with a terrifying sound that ceaselessly swelled. The crunch of limestone. Raucous rocks that tumbled and tumbled. And then a sliver of light, punching a hole into the darkness. The rocks parted, revealing an opening into the outer world.

As the hole enlarged and light filled the cavern in which I found myself, I started to fall forwards. In a flash, I lay face-first on the forest ground. A nude, newborn man with no understanding of how he had come to exist. I twisted my head to face the cave, but the hole in the rock wall sealed itself before I could catch a glimpse of what created me.

Lost in the woods, and utterly disoriented, I ran. I knew I had to find civilisation. I was cold and vulnerable. Physically depleted. I had no idea what was out there. And I felt the terrifying sensation that something was pursuing me. Not an earthly thing, for that matter.

I stumbled through the forest, naked and afraid, failing to piece together the impossibility of my very existence. In need of sustenance, I started to fade. I thought I might die of thirst or starvation before I even had a chance to discover why I existed. Dread doesn’t even begin to cover my thoughts, and I’ve scarcely scratched the surface of the true horror I would endure.

“What the… Are you okay?” A man asked.

Lying in a grassy clearing, on the verge of losing consciousness, I turned to face two hikers on the forest trail — a middle-aged couple. The man shielded the woman’s eyes, furrowing his brow at the frightened, naked fellow before him. I couldn’t believe that I understood his words. I opened my mouth to speak, and I was quite surprised to find that I could also do that.

“I need…” I began, before clearing my hoarse throat. “I’m hungry. Thirsty too.”

“Give him something from the rucksack, Gerald!” The woman said.

“Too right,” Gerald replied. “I’ve got a raincoat in there, Lara. That should cover him up.”

“I meant food and water…” Lara sighed.

“Oh… Right. There’s a packet of crisps in the side pocket. My flask’s in the main compartment — withthe coat,” He said.

Lara handed me the coat and the bottle of water. I graciously gulped the liquid, which tasted like my first dive into true life. Nothing felt quite as powerful as that first drink. At Gerald’s insistence, I eventually threw on the raincoat, before greedily tearing open the packet of crisps. I think he was just glad to hide my manhood.

The couple asked questions about how I’d come to find myself wandering the forest in the nude, so I fabricated a story about amnesia. As I said, that’s a concept people understand, isn’t it? And I know how the world works. I know that declaring I’d just been born would only have scared the pair.

The gentle couple rushed me to the hospital. I stuck to my amnesia story. I hoped that one of the doctors might be able to reveal something about my condition. I think I secretly wished that they would discover me to be something inhuman. That might have explained my strange and sudden birth.

However, nothing untoward showed up on my physical or mental tests. No government figures in black suits whisked me away to a secure testing facility. I’m a man. Nothing more. Just a John Doe with memory loss. That was the verdict given yesterday at the hospital, but there’s more to it than that. Surely.

And there’s no accounting for the terror that I experienced last night.

“Hello, chap,” Gerald said, entering the hospital room with his wife. “Are you okay? The doctor just told us that they couldn’t uncover your identity.”

“We had to stay to check that you were okay,” Lara added. “You must feel so lonely. So lost and confused.”

I smiled. “You’re both too kind. You’ve already done so much for me, and it was lovely of you to stay, but I don’t want to keep you. You don’t have to worry about me. Go on — you should head home.”

“Nonsense,” Gerald scoffed. “We’ve got nowhere to be, and, let’s be honest, neither have you.”

“Gerald!” Lara tutted.

I chuckled at his comment. An involuntary reaction, but it was the first spark of joy in my few hours on Earth. Now, a day later, I wonder whether it might be my last joyful moment.

“Look, we want to help you,” Gerald said. “Help you figure out your name. You must have family.”

“Yes! They must be… They must be missing you,” Lara said tearfully, and Gerald consoled her.

I knew that I had no family, other than a supernatural cave, and my initial urge was to say that, but I stopped myself. They needed it. I could see it in their eyes. They needed to help me.

“I guess I need a name. Just call me John Doe for now,” I said, grinning.

Lara rolled her eyes. “Creative, aren’t you? Well, how would you feel about staying with us for a little while, John Doe? You’ll need somewhere to live until you’ve found your feet.”

“Oh, that’s lovely of you, but I couldn’t impose,” I said.

“You could, and you should,” Gerald replied. “Lara and I discussed it whilst you were waiting for the results of your tests. We have a room that… We have a room.”

I didn’t pry, but I had suspicions. Those suspicions were confirmed when the couple drove me to their house and showed me the room that would become mine. Clearly the room of their son — a funeral booklet on the dresser was dedicated to a young man named James.

After dinner, Lara tearily excused herself, but Gerald stayed up for a little while, showing me where things could be found in the house. The man skirted around the unspoken topic until we went to bed. He hovered in the doorway of his son’s room, looking at the funeral booklet on the dresser.

“It’s, er…” He sighed. “He was called James. And he would’ve only been a few years younger than you. He was taken too… Well, anyway, I hope you don’t mind sleeping in his old room.”

“I’m so sorry, Gerald,” I said. “Thank you for saving my life, but is this… Are you sure it’s okay for me to be here?”

Gerald sniffled, clearly stifling tears of his own. “I think that finding you might’ve saved my wife and me, John. Listen... I just want you to know that we’re here for you, and-”

Gerald didn’t finish his sentence. Standing in the doorway, he seemed to be trapped in a moment of time. His complexion lost its colour, and his eyes were rapidly coated in red veins. He seized and shuddered, finally releasing a final gasp of horror, before — in the space of a split second — his neck twisted in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree rotation.

The snapping sound was terrible. I screamed as the man’s body crumpled to the carpet. And that was only half as terrible as the emptiness in the corridor behind him. Nothing had killed him. No, not nothing. There was something, but there was also nothing.

I don’t expect you to understand what I mean. In the darkened upstairs hallway beyond my empty doorway, something stood and watched me. Something unseen. Something too horrendous for human eyes to comprehend. Perhaps so horrendous that eyes see it but the mind must place a blank void in its place.

All I know is that it petrified me beyond anything words could relay. It was the shadow that we all see in the periphery of our vision. The faceless, shapeless, ghoulish thing that fills us with existential dread. Existential dread itself, perhaps. The unstoppable horror which cleans up the mistakes of the universe.

Things that should not be. Things like me.

I felt it scratching at my flesh. Trying to claw me out of existence. I thought of Gerald — the poor man who had simply been in the way. But why did he deserve to die? For saving me in the forest? Saving an abomination of nature? I don’t pretend to understand the motives behind the terrifying force that hunted me. I only know that I felt it in the shadows from the moment of my birth.

Why didn’t it kill me? How am I posting this?

More questions that are hard to answer. I crawled out of my bed, feverishly clawing at my skin, which seemed to tighten against my skeleton with every passing second. Haunting thoughts filled my mind, whilst I endured what I believed to be my final moments of life — a life far too brief.

What am I? What is so wrong with me that I should deserve this fate? I didn’t ask to be born. Nobody does.

Suddenly, my skin loosened. The hallway was empty. It had always been empty, of course, but I mean truly empty — ridden of the ghastly thing that stalked me. Did it hear my internal pleas? Did it decide that I deserved a chance at life? That’s what I assume. Perhaps the unseen force’s universal design hasn’t been corrupted by me.

I woke Lara, and the news about Gerald destroyed her. Until the medics deduced that his cause of death had been a heart attack, the poor woman thought I killed him. I was a stranger in her house. I don’t blame her. And I suppose she was right. It’s my fault that he’s dead.

I don’t know how long I have on this Earth, but I know I will spend every day repaying the debt that I owe Lara. If she needs to believe that my family can be found, she can believe that. But I have nobody other than her. I don’t know what created me. A cave? There has to be more to it than that. I only know one impossible thing.

I was born yesterday.

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