May 6, 2027

The Night of the Living Bedsheet
​by Alexander Grass

A strange apparition begins as a curiosity—but quickly becomes something dangerous. In this unsettling tale, a mundane job turns into a nightmare when a mysterious entity reveals its horrifying need.

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When my mom told her friends that I worked as a night janitor at a bloodbank, I think they believed I’d been sworn to keep the Holiest of Holy Secrets of Blood. I don’t know how else to explain their excitement. It was big news for the Catholic book club.
I think I spoiled it for them, however, when I proceeded to tell them that I never saw blood at work. It was my job to empty garbage cans and vacuum, after all. I wasn’t a phlebotomist.
That I had no special expertise in cleaning blood was particularly confounding to them. They had a look on their faces like children who’ve been told, all at once, that Santa isn’t real but that death is.
One of Mom’s friends looked at me like I was foreclosing on her house when she said, “But it’s a bloodbank. There must be blood everywhere.” (Translation: Does Santa die, too?)
“Not that I get to see.” (Translation: Everybody dies. Everybody.)
Pretty soon after that, I did get to see blood at the bloodbank for the first time, though it was my own blood, and I never had any intention of donating it in the way that I did. But I’m getting ahead of myself. 
First, I have to tell you about the sheet.
•
I was in the bloodbank’s bathroom Windexing the mirrors when I first saw it. I bent down to pick up a rag to wipe with from my carry caddy on the floor, then stood back up and saw through the mirrors’ reflection that there was something behind me. A single white bedsheet.
I turned around to look with my own eyes, only to find that when I did the bedsheet wasn’t there. I faced the mirror again. I looked in the Windex streaks like they held the premonitory secrets of tea leaves, or at least some sort of explanation. What I thought I’d seen was gone.
So, I saw something that wasn’t really there. You’re probably thinking: What’s the big deal?
When you’ve seen something that may be, in fact, not real, it isn’t a phenomenon you just chalk up to a ganky sandwich. Life is not a Charles Dickens yarn about moralizing ghosts. I was seeing things (or at least a single, illusory thing). And that concerned me.
Could I see a doctor about it? Technically, yes, but I was a little hamstrung by a super-high co-pay on my health insurance (commensurate with my position as a guy who spent a lot of time cleaning toilets). 
I thought of telling my mother, but she’d find Jesus in there somewhere. (My mother found Jesus in everything. Like if there was a version of Where’s Waldo? for the Son of God, my mom would be the Where’s Jesus? world champion.)
So what did I do? I did what anyone else without the resources for discreet psychiatric counseling would do. I ignored it.
I used my willful ignorance to pay the rent on a temporary peace, to the tune of a month and change. But like anything bought with ignorance, that peace proved to be impermanent.
I did stop worrying about it for a time. But only for a time.
•
A month or so went by.
I was in the bathroom Windexing the mirrors again when I saw it. It was right there in the mirrors’ reflection: the white bedsheet. Just hanging there like it was strung up on an invisible clothesline.
I shut my eyes tight and said something to the effect of, “It’s not real. Please go away. It’s not real.” But when I opened my eyes, it was still there.
I turned around to look without the mirrors’ mediation, hoping I would see nothing at all again. But I saw a white bedsheet hanging, with nothing for it to hang on, just hanging there, in mid-air.
I had an incredible urge to touch it. From time to time, touch can see those things your eyes can’t see. Maybe the sheet was attached to ultra-fine fishing line, or those strings they used to make actors fly in movies, back before CGI. I wanted to find out. I needed to touch it and find out.
I know that you might read that and think, no, no, no, that’s the last thing anyone should do, ever. The safest thing to do, many of you will say (and in accordance with everything I know about cursed objects from every spooky movie ever), would be to flee far and fast before the object could rub its bad juju off on me. 
You never touch the unexplainable thing.
But this was real life. I was not in a movie. My job was to clean and, to a lesser degree, organize the bloodbank at night, and I couldn’t imagine that didn’t include any and all rogue bedlinens. So I touched the sheet.
I swear, it made a sound. Like it was purring. Then it floated up toward the air vent over the last toilet stall, and slithered through the grill, then off to parts unknown.
•
I thought about it night and day for the next two weeks. Did the white sheet mean something? Was it a prank? Was it a magic trick? Was it a symbol of solidarity with phlebotomists, and if so, what kind of political movement was that?
I racked my brain and put whatever I came up with into Google: “do they hang sheets in bloodbanks?”, “white sheet bathroom prank”, “bathroom hallucinations”.
The quality of the answers I found on the internet was equivalent to how awful my need for them was. Truly, very awful answers.
But I narrowed it down to three (weak) possibilities. One, a vagrant who used the bathroom after hours had hung up his bedsheet to dry while I wasn’t looking, and the AC blower hiccuped and sucked it into the HVAC. Two, I was experiencing the slow and agonizing onset of schizophrenia (a theory that somewhat tracked since I was a man in my mid-twenties). Or, three, I’d drank an astonishing amount of NyQuil and then forgotten about it.
I’d lay awake in bed, tossing and turning and weighing impossible explanations in my head. I was convinced there was some deeper meaning that I had yet to grasp. Maybe it was a sign. Maybe telling my mother wasn’t the craziest idea. Maybe hearing her savior-centric speculations wouldn’t hurt me. I’d already scraped the bottom of the barrel by visiting WebMD.
I started to feel an alternating thrill and dread before I went into work. Some nights I cleaned the bathroom first, which only meant I’d be distracted till work ended (and inevitably run to go check if the bedsheet had materialized). Other nights I tried (and sometimes even succeeded) to hold off on cleaning the bathroom until right before my shift ended.
I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t eating. My health was suffering because of a (probably unreal) bedsheet.
•
And then it came back again, as it was bound to do.
I had my headphones in while I was vacuuming the reception area. I turned to whip the vacuum cord out of my way and there it was. I froze.
It was slack, as if carelessly draped over an invisible couch. It was bunched and twisted now, too, but it still levitated like it had done the other two times I’d seen it.
The bedsheet turned and floated away from reception and into the back office. Its shape changed as it wove between desks, cabinets, and water coolers. And as it wove, I followed its course.
It reached the secure door past which was the cold room full of fridges and freezers, where plasma, cryoprecipitate, and red blood cells were stored.
What happened next was a moment that was, I believe, unique to human experience. Something whose witness must be memorialized.
The bedsheet billowed and tumbled in the air, its fabric moving in and around itself. It started to form an object. When the bedsheet was done transforming, there hung in the air, right in front of my eyes, a hundreds-thread-count heart the size of a garbage can. A bedlinen myocardium contracted the heart’s white walls, pumping blood that wasn’t there.
A heart needs blood. There’d never been a more winning round of Charades played anywhere in the world.
“I can’t,” I said, as if I would even consider giving a bedsheet access to the bloodbank that employed me, “I don’t have the key. They don’t give us the key.”
The white heart beat its folds of bedlinens faster, stressing the urgency of its need.
“I can’t do it, I’m sorry. I don’t have a key. I have no way of getting in except with a key, and I don’t have one.”
The heart opened itself as it cracked like a bullwhip, and I startled back on my heels. It flattened into a lowly bedsheet once again. It became so rigid, and rigidified with such speed, that it was like a rattlesnake getting ready to strike. The goddamn bedsheet was angry at me.
Heaven help me, I pleaded with it. “I can’t let you in. I’m sorry, but I don’t have a key, and there’s no other way to get in there. I’m sorry.”
I made it clear to the bedsheet that there was no way for me to get it what it wanted. 
It attacked.
It rolled itself into a tight-bunched spiral, like a braided white rope. It wrapped around my neck. It dragged me away from the security door. I fought it but it had strength that came from outside the physical world. I was easily overmatched.
I felt the blood in my face trying to push out of my skin, my panicked pulse bumping in my ear like I had a stethoscope over my own jackhammering heart. It squeezed its white body tighter around my throat. The edges of my vision started to fade to black as the bedsheet whipped me onto my back and dragged me away.
It pulled me into the office supply closet. Why was it pulling me in there? There was nothing in there except for legal pads, pens, reams of printer paper…
And the paper cutter. Oh my God, the paper cutter.
When I realized what it was doing, I grabbed onto anything I could. I gripped the bottom of a rack of shelves bolted into the floor. But the bedsheet pulled me until, one by one, my fingers uncurled. It ripped me loose. I wedged my feet behind a defunct Xerox machine, but it was so powerful that it just hauled me forward until my sneaker came off.
The worst part was the moment before what happened, happened. My eyes saw the paper cutter but my mind saw a guillotine. The edge of the blade gleamed under the supply closet’s fluorescent lights.
“Stop! Let me go, I’ll get you blood,” I said, screaming, “just give me a chance, I’ll get you blood!”
For a split second, it completely loosened from around my neck. I felt the exhilaration of escape, a rush of relief. I thought it had set me free.
But then it wrapped both ends of its roped body around the wrists of each of my hands. 
I screamed and screamed, but no one could hear me. 
When it pulled my right hand toward the paper clamp, I dropped into dead weight, turning every ounce of my body’s hundred and sixty-three pounds into an anchor. But the bedsheet lifted me up by my wrists like a parent bulldozing through their toddler’s tantrum.
It whipped me around so that my back was bent over the paper cutter’s table. All of a sudden, I couldn’t see the blade. 
There was something about being put on my back, about having to stare up at the fluorescent lights while I was being attacked, that was a violation greater than the sum of the night’s preceding violence. My panic gave me new strength with which to fight. But when I tried to twist my hands away, to lever my body weight, to buck and kick my feet in the air, to build up momentum to throw myself, I was restrained by something that felt like steel manacles bolted into a stone wall.
The bed sheet unfurled and twisted itself into a four-limbed starfish while it still kept hold of my wrists. It pushed my supinated hand under the paper clamp and, with one of its new limbs, turned the clamp’s spindle tighter and tighter. The pain that sent into my fingers was like dunking them inside boiling water. My hand was as pressurized as heavy duty tires. My blood tried escaping the constriction of my flesh around it.
“Help! Somebody, please help me!”
Slice.
I screamed. The bedsheet let go of me. I rolled on my side and around the table, my hand still clamped into the paper cutter. I stood up and reached for the spindle to let my hand loose, but the bedsheet still had one of its snaky limbs keeping the clamp tight.
I watched the bedsheet brush itself against the open wounds of my three fingers’ partial amputations.
My blood seeped into its fabric and started to spread. Once the sheet was soaked red, it let go of my hand. I dropped to the ground, barely conscious. I watched from the floor as the now-blood-soaked bedsheet transformed again. It changed into something shaped like a human face, without the details of eyes or ears or a fully formed nose, without a body. But it had a mouth.
I watched as the bedsheet screamed. If it was screaming in either triumph or anguish, I don’t know which it was.
And then I passed out.
•
I quit the night janitor job the next day. I offered no explanation to my boss and she didn’t ask for one. I think she could tell over the phone that something was wrong with me.
You probably want to know about my hand.
“What happened when three of your fingertips were chopped off?” is a question that probably answers itself. I am missing the index, middle, and ring finger of my right hand, at the knuckles right below where my nails used to be.
Of course my mother asked me what happened. I told her I closed my fingers in a steel door. Does she believe me? Not if rubbing her rosary beads and playing Where’s Jesus? with a new end times fervor is anything to go by.
I'm sleeping in a sleeping bag now.
•
I still felt the need to know the cause of what happened. Even if I was mutilated in the process, I experienced something unexplainable. I still had a burning desire to understand—either the bedsheet, or whatever force occupied the bedsheet—whatever that thing was.
But I couldn’t go back there. Not ever again. So I posted a description of what happened to me to an occult and supernatural phenomena message board and asked if anyone knew what “entity” I’d encountered.
The user account that sent me the private message explaining what I’d experienced was deleted as soon as I received their message. Deleted User Number X said they’d included in their message to me something from a German occult reference book called “Das Nachtnabel-Kompendium Ungewöhnlicher Phantasmen, or, ‘The Nachtnabel Compendium of Uncommon Phantasms’.” 
Below the book’s title was the following excerpt:
The blutgeist is the result of a misbegotten rite of the black mass. The theory proposed by the very originator of this volume, the Nachtnabel Hypothesis, puts forth that any human being chosen for ritual sacrifice at a black mass, and who is descendent from a biological parent dead by exsanguination, and then dies by exsanguination themselves, will return as a blutgeist through the medium of the last physical object the descedent touched while still living.
The blutgeist, simply put, is the unwittingly summoned victim of a black mass’s ritual human sacrifice, into the form of a ghost. Such a spirit forever seeks physical reconstitution for itself and appertaining ancestor, by subsuming the blood of others into its form. The subsumption is not parasitic, as its cause is spiritual need, not physiological hunger. The blutgeist seeks lifesblood not as sustenance, but as a means of payment on the toll road to its own resurrection into the physical world.
The Kompendium will take special note that since the blutgeist is an apparition, not an undead hemovore, none of the appurtenances of vampire-hunting shall avail against it.


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Alex Grass was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three kids. His recent work has appeared in Flash Phantoms, Maudlin House, Trembling With Fear, and other outlets. His last novel, A Boy's Hammer, was selected for inclusion in Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2022.
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