The night the blood moon rose above the trembling earth, reality slipped from its hinges. Madness poured into the world like smoke through a cracked door, and with it came creatures from the edge of nightmares. These were not the monsters of storybooks or folklore. They did not hide under beds or in dark forests. They danced — grotesquely, fervently — to music only they could hear, spinning through the night in a frenzy of ecstasy and terror. This is the story of that night, a tale pulled from the whispers of the insane and the memories of those who will never sleep soundly again.
The Blood Moon’s Arrival: An Omen Ignored
The crimson moon wasn’t entirely unexpected. Astronomers had predicted a lunar eclipse for months. What they hadn’t foreseen was the color — not a soft copper, but a deep, arterial red that bled across the sky like a wound. Birds stopped singing hours before moonrise. Dogs howled and refused to be calmed. The air grew thick, pressing down on the skin like damp cloth. Some people noticed the change in atmosphere. Most didn’t. After all, eclipses are natural phenomena. But this was not a natural night.
Religious fanatics took to the streets, holding signs proclaiming the end of days. Scientists scrambled to explain away the strange electrical disturbances and the sudden malfunctioning of satellite systems. But by the time the moon was fully eclipsed, none of their explanations mattered. The veil had thinned. The dance had begun.
When the Walls of Reality Cracked
The first sign that something had gone horribly wrong was the silence. A sudden, total, unnatural hush fell over the town of Red Hollow — a silence so deep it seemed to press on eardrums like pressure underwater. Then, one by one, the clocks stopped. Time itself buckled. People reported seeing the same second repeat, over and over, like a broken film reel. Light flickered, shadows twisted into impossible shapes, and reflections in mirrors began to act of their own accord.
And then came the music. Not audible at first — more like a vibration in the bones, a hum that resonated with the parts of the brain most tightly wound to fear and madness. Slowly, it grew louder. Not music made by human hands, but something older. Something wrong. Instruments that had no names, rhythms that defied logic. The dance had begun, and the monsters emerged from the seams of the world, slipping through cracks in walls, in thoughts, in time itself.
Monsters That Shouldn’t Be: A Catalog of the Unnameable
To describe the monsters is to court madness. Still, survivors have tried. Some say they were tall as trees, with elongated limbs that jerked like puppets controlled by a drunken god. Others swore they crawled on dozens of legs, or none at all, their bodies hovering inches above the ground like jellyfish drifting through air.
Eyewitnesses describe faces that changed as you looked at them — a mother’s smile melting into a serpent’s grin, a familiar friend’s features unraveling into a writhing mass of tentacles and teeth. They danced. That was their constant. They danced in circles, alone or in groups, never stopping, never acknowledging those who watched in frozen horror.
One witness, a man named Jeremy Lyle, was found days later huddled in the bell tower of the Red Hollow chapel. He had torn out his own eyes but could not stop screaming about “the waltzing thing with wings made of screams.” He is still alive, but he does not speak anymore. He simply rocks back and forth, lips moving to a silent rhythm only he hears.
The Madness Spreads: Psychological Contagion or Something Worse?
Madness was the real contagion. Those who witnessed the dance began to fall apart mentally within hours. It started small — a stutter, a nervous laugh, an odd compulsion to tap out a beat on tables or walls. Soon, they were humming the tune they had heard, even though none of them could remember its melody. Doctors were baffled. Medications failed. The afflicted would sometimes disappear entirely, only to return days later, clothes torn, eyes wild, and feet blistered from dancing.
Sleep became impossible. Nightmares flooded in — grotesque images of being dragged into endless spirals of dancers, of losing control over their own limbs, of smiling creatures whispering alien lullabies. Whole communities were abandoned. Towns like Red Hollow became cursed names, spoken only in hushed tones by those who remembered the night of the blood moon.
Some believed it was a mass psychogenic illness, a form of contagious hysteria. But then the same events began happening on different continents, among people who had never heard of Red Hollow. That explanation no longer held. Something older, deeper, was stirring beneath the surface of reality.
Aftermath and the Question of Return
When the blood moon finally faded, so did the monsters. The music stopped. The silence broke. Time resumed. But the world was not the same. The cracks had been sealed, not repaired. Something had passed through, and though it retreated, it left its fingerprints everywhere.
In the weeks that followed, government agents cordoned off the affected areas. They claimed seismic activity, chemical leaks, mass hallucinations. But the people who had been there knew better. They knew what they saw. And some still hear the music in their dreams.
Today, the name “Red Hollow” appears only in redacted government documents and obscure conspiracy forums. But those who study forbidden texts — ancient grimoires, hidden cult records, cryptic archaeological findings — know the truth: the blood moon is a harbinger, not a one-time event. It is a key that turns the lock between dimensions.
