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Lit Mag and National English Honor Society get spooky

Anna Kuruvilla, Staff Writer

November 24, 2025

The NEHS and Lit Mag fourth annual Spooky Story Contest had a record number of entries. Artwork courtesy of Lit Mag.

This fall season, the Lightridge Literary Magazine and the National English Honor Society (NEHS) hosted their annual spooky story contest. This most recent contest, which had four times more submissions than any previous year, was the fourth year in a row that the contest has taken place.

This year’s winner was sophomore Saumya Mittal, with her haunting piece, published below, titled The Spaces Between. The runner-up was senior Jemma Groeneveld, with her story Was and When.

“They’re really good this year. It’s a really good eclectic mix of different topics and different things that are straight horror and then a little bit of a thriller,” said English teacher Kirsten Cleary, contest judge and Literary Magazine sponsor.

The prizes, which are sponsored and chosen by the teachers running the Lightridge chapter of NEHS, vary yearly and can be anything from a gift card to a free book. This year the runner-up receives any book of their choice, and the winner receives any two. All winners have their stories published in the Literary Magazine’s website if they choose.

The Spaces Between

By Saumya Mittal

The first thing that vanished was the sound of the birds. Carrie noticed it on a Tuesday, standing at the edge of the woods behind her new house. The move from the city had been her parents’ idea. A “fresh start,” they called it. The air was supposed to be cleaner, the pace slower. But as Carrie strained her ears, the silence felt less like peace and more like a held breath. The ancient oaks and gnarled pines stood too still, their branches frozen against a sky the color of a day-old bruise. She shrugged it off, blaming her nerves.

But that night, the second thing vanished. It was the reflection of her bedroom in her vanity mirror. She’d been reading, and when she looked up, the rectangle of glass showed only the wall behind her. No bed, no lamp, no her. Just flat, black paint. She spun around, heart hammering. Her room was exactly as she’d left it. But in the mirror, it was gone. A cold knot tightened in her stomach. She approached the vanity, her hand trembling as she reached out. Her fingers touched cool glass. She could see the grain of the wooden frame perfectly, but the world it was meant to reflect had been erased. She waved a hand in front of it. Nothing.

“It’s an old house,” her father said the next morning over cereal that had gone soggy too quickly. “The mirrors are probably just tarnished. Silver backing degrades.” He was a practical man, an engineer. He dealt in facts and figures, not phantom reflections.

But the mirrors weren’t tarnished. They were empty. By Wednesday evening, every reflective surface in the house, the toaster, the screen of her turned-off phone, the glass covering a family photo, showed the same void. It was a hungry, depthless black that seemed to swallow the light around it.

Then, on Thursday, the third thing vanished. The doors stopped leading to the right places. Carrie opened the front door to check the mail and found herself staring into their

basement, the smell of damp earth and mildew washing over her. The bathroom door opened into her parents’ locked bedroom. The closet in the hallway now opened onto the empty, overgrown backyard. The house was no longer a structure, it was a shuffled deck of rooms, its internal logic unraveling. Panic began to set in, a thin, sharp wire drawn tight through the house. Her mother, a woman who usually filled silence with chatter, was now mute with a fear she couldn’t articulate. Her father furiously took measurements, tapped walls, and muttered about impossible spatial anomalies.

That’s when Carrie found the photograph in the attic. It was tucked inside a water-stained copy of Poe’s collected works. The photo was of the house, taken from the same angle as the one in the real estate listing, but older. The lawn was wilder, the paint more peeling. And in the upstairs window, the one that was now her bedroom, a pale, blurred face was pressed against the glass. Its eyes were wide, dark pits, and its mouth was open in a silent scream. Scrawled on the back in faded ink was a single sentence: It doesn’t steal things. It steals the spaces between them.

A cold understanding dawned on Carrie. The birdsong. The reflections. The doorways. They were all connections, the spaces between one thing and another. The sound between the bird and the ear. The light between the object and the eye. The path between here and there. This thing, whatever it was, was consuming the links that held reality together. That night, the unraveling accelerated. Carrie was in her room when the screaming started. It was her mother, a raw, terror-stricken sound that was cut off with the suddenness of a switched-off radio. Carrie burst out of her room and sprinted down the hall, but the hallway stretched, the floorboards elongating like taffy. The door to her parents’ room receded into the distance, the walls on either side bleeding shadows that thickened into a tangible gloom.

“Mom! Dad!” she screamed, her voice swallowed by the unnatural silence. She ran, but her feet felt heavy, as if she were running through deep water. The air grew cold and thick, resistant. The wallpaper, once a cheerful floral pattern, began to peel, revealing not plaster, but a swirling, starless void. The house was coming undone at the seams, its substance being replaced by nothingness. Finally, she reached the door. She threw it open.

It wasn’t her parents’ bedroom. It was the living room. But it was wrong. The couch, the TV, the rug. They were all there, but they were isolated islands in an ocean of the same hungry black she’d seen in the mirrors. There were no walls, no ceiling. Just the furniture, floating in an infinite, lightless expanse. And standing in the center of the room were her parents. They were turned away from her, perfectly still. “Mom? Dad?” she whispered, her voice small in the immense quiet. Slowly, they began to turn. It wasn’t a smooth motion. It was a series of jagged, disjointed movements, as if they were being animated by a broken projector. When she saw their faces, a scream caught in her throat, dying before it could be born.

Their faces were blank. Smooth, featureless skin where their eyes, nose, and mouth should have been. They were erasures. The space between their thoughts and their expressions, their memories and their identities, had been consumed. They were still, vaguely human-shaped objects, but the people who were her parents were gone. From the darkness behind them, a figure emerged.

It was tall and impossibly thin, its limbs elongated and jointed all wrong, like a stick insect. It had no face, only a swirling, vortex-like depression where its head should be. It was the embodiment of the void she had seen in the mirrors, a walking, sentient absence. It was the Thief of Spaces, and it was hungry. It took a step towards her, not with feet, but with a soundless displacement of the void. The temperature plummeted. The last remnants of the living room, the

couch, the rug, began to dissolve at the edges, their atoms un-spinning into the nothingness that this thing carried with it.

Carrie stumbled backward, but there was nowhere to go. The doorway she’d come through was gone, replaced by more infinite black. She was trapped in this dissolving pocket of reality with the faceless husks of her parents and the entity that had devoured them.

The Thief glided closer. She could feel it pulling at her, not on her body, but on the connections that made her her. She felt a pull on the space between her intention to scream and the action itself. Her vocal cords froze. It was eating the context of her existence. Desperate, her mind racing, she remembered the photograph. It steals the spaces between. If it consumed connections, then maybe it couldn’t handle a paradox. A thing that was both itself and not itself. A closed loop. As the Thief loomed over her, its faceless head tilting, Carrie did the only thing she could think of. She didn’t try to run. She didn’t try to fight. She closed her eyes and focused.

She pictured the house. Not this dissolving nightmare, but the house as it was the day they moved in. The sun on the porch, the chirping of the birds she could no longer hear. She held the image in her mind, making it as real as she could. And then, she imagined the space between the real house and this unreal one. She focused on the contradiction, the impossible coexistence of two states in one location. She built a bridge of pure, illogical thought.

A sound, like tearing silk and shattering glass, ripped through the silence. The Thief recoiled, its form flickering. The void around her shuddered. It was working. The paradox was a poison to it. She pushed harder, thinking of her parents’ faces, both smiling and blank. Of the door to her room, leading both to her bedroom and the basement. She filled the stolen spaces with impossible, contradictory truths. The Thief let out a silent shriek that was felt rather than heard, a wave of pure negation that made her mind flinch. It staggered back, its form becoming less distinct, more like a smear of darkness on reality. The floating islands of furniture flickered, and for a split second, Carrie saw the living room walls, the ceiling, the floor.

But the effort was crushing her. It was like holding up a collapsing building with her bare hands. She could feel her own memories fraying at the edges, the space between her consciousness and her sense of self beginning to thin. She was using herself as the fuel for this paradox. With a final, monumental push of will, she imagined the one thing she knew was absolutely, undeniably true and false at the same time. I am here. I am not here.

The world exploded in a flash of blinding white and deafening silence. Then, impact.

Carrie gasped, cold air filling her lungs. She was on her knees on the rough, wooden floor of the living room. The morning sun streamed through the bay window, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. The couch was against the wall, the TV was on its stand, the floral-patterned rug was under her knees. It was all normal. Terribly, blessedly normal.

“Carrie? What are you doing on the floor?” She looked up. Her mother stood in the doorway, holding a cup of coffee, her face etched with mild concern. Behind her, her father was reading the newspaper at the kitchen table. They were back. They had their faces. Their memories. Their lives. Tears of relief streamed down Carrie’s face.

“I… I had a nightmare,” she choked out. Her mother smiled, a soft, familiar expression. “This old house. It creaks and groans all night. It’s enough to give anyone bad dreams.”

Carrie nodded, getting shakily to her feet. It worked. She had forced the Thief out, collapsed its stolen spaces back into reality. She had won. She walked to the kitchen, her legs weak, and poured a glass of water. Her hand trembled as she raised it to her lips. She caught her reflection in the dark screen of the microwave. For a fraction of a second, less than a heartbeat, she didn’t see herself. She saw a swirling, depthless black, and a single, pale, screaming face trapped within it. Her face. The glass slipped from her fingers and shattered on the floor.

“Honey, are you okay?” her father asked, looking up from his paper. Carrie stared at the shards of glass, her heart pounding a frantic rhythm against her ribs. She could feel it now, a cold, hollow echo inside her chest. A space where something vital used to be. The Thief was gone, but in that final moment, as she had created her paradox, it had taken one last thing.

It had taken the space between her and the void. And a part of it, a sliver of that endless hunger, had remained. It was inside her now, a silent tenant in the house of her soul. She looked at her parents, their faces full of normal, human concern, and she forced a smile. It felt like a mask she had to physically hold in place.

“I’m fine,” she said, her voice eerily calm. “It just slipped.”

She helped clean up the broken glass, her movements precise and automatic. The nightmare wasn’t over. It had just found a new home. And she knew, with a chilling certainty that settled deep into her bones, that it was only a matter of time before the thing inside her got hungry again.

About the Contributor

Anna Kuruvilla, Reporter

Anna is a sophomore and this is her first year on staff.

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Lit Mag and National English Honor Society get spooky

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