1️⃣ SUSPENSE
🕛 The Man Who Knocked at Midnight
Ahmad lived alone in a quiet Lahore street where life moved slowly—almost predictably. He liked routines, silence, and order. But that peace cracked the night he heard the first knock.
Exactly 12:00 AM.
Three soft taps.
Precise. Unhurried. Intentional.
He opened the door.
No one stood outside.
The street was silent except for the faint rustle of leaves. The air smelled unusually damp—as if it had just rained, though the skies were clear.
The next night, at the exact same moment, the knocking returned.
Again, no one.
By the fourth night, Ahmad was no longer curious—he was frightened.
He asked his neighbours the next morning.
They laughed, shrugged, or stared blankly.
“Nobody knocks at night here,” old Mrs. Riaz said. “Maybe you’re dreaming.”
But Ahmad was awake—too awake.
The knocking continued nightly, becoming louder, more urgent.
Desperate, Ahmad installed a small camera above his door. He sat awake, staring at the live feed on his phone, waiting for midnight.
At 12:00 AM sharp, the knocking began.
His hands trembled as he looked at the screen.
A figure stood outside—shadowed, hunched slightly.
“Who are you?” Ahmad whispered to no one.
The figure turned slowly toward the camera.
Ahmad froze.
It was him.
Older. Weary. Eyes full of pain.
The older version of himself lifted a trembling hand and knocked again—three slow taps.
Then he leaned close to the lens and whispered:
“If you don’t open now, you won’t be alive tomorrow.”
The camera glitched.
The knocking stopped.
Ahmad ran to the door and swung it open in terror—but the corridor was empty. Just that same strange smell of wet earth and distant rain.
Inside his apartment, the lights flickered, and the air turned unnaturally cold.
A soft whisper curled through the room:
“You should have opened sooner.”
And everything went black.
2️⃣ HORROR
👁 The Girl in House Number 13
Usman was a broke university student looking for cheap rent. So when he found House No. 13—dirt cheap, fully furnished, close to campus—he grabbed it. The owner barely made eye contact.
“Don’t open the storeroom,” the owner muttered. “It’s sealed for a reason.”
Usman didn’t care. Students care about two things: Wi-Fi and rent.
He moved in that same night.
At 2 AM, he heard it—
A faint whisper behind the sealed storeroom door.
He laughed it off. “Probably the wind.”
But the whispers continued every night. Soft, female, almost pleading.
“Let me out…”
“I’m still here…”
“You found me…”
On the fourth night, curiosity swallowed fear.
Usman dragged a chair, climbed up, and removed the wooden plank nailed across the storeroom door.
Inside was nothing but darkness… and a mirror leaning against the wall.
But in the reflection—
A girl sat on a chair, staring at him with hollow eyes.
“Hello Usman,” she whispered.
He stumbled backward, heart pounding.
“There’s… there’s no one in the room,” he gasped.
She smiled faintly from inside the mirror.
“They buried me here long ago. I can only appear in reflections now.”
She lifted her hands—bruised, broken.
“The last tenant promised to free me. Will you?”
Usman tried running, but the door behind him slammed shut. The lights flickered violently.
The girl’s voice grew colder.
“Don’t run. I waited too long. You opened the door… now you must finish what he started.”
The mirror began cracking. A pale hand pushed through the glass—
And the whisper became a scream.
3️⃣ SCI-FI
📡 The Last Signal from Islamabad Observatory
At 3:14 AM, the Islamabad Space Observatory caught an impossible transmission—a rhythmic pulse not from any satellite, star, or known cosmic source.
Its frequency matched human brainwaves.
Dr. Fariha, the lead astrophysicist, played it on loop.
It wasn’t random. It was speech—compressed, backwards, encrypted.
After 12 hours of decoding, a horrifying truth became clear:
The signal wasn’t coming from outer space.
It was coming from Earth’s future.
The message contained warnings—fragments of destroyed cities, collapsing climates, and failing technologies. A digital apocalypse.
One name appeared repeatedly in the data:
Aamir Siddiqui.
A young software engineer in Karachi. Unknown. Unremarkable.
The observatory team contacted him. Aamir panicked.
“I haven’t created anything dangerous!” he insisted. “I just build small AI modules.”
But the future believed otherwise.
A second signal arrived—this time showing a time-stamped image of Aamir standing in front of a machine he had not yet built.
Dr. Fariha looked into his terrified eyes.
“You haven’t created the system yet,” she said. “But you will.”
Aamir felt the room spin.
“What does it do?” he whispered.
Fariha hesitated.
“It ends us.”
4️⃣ MYSTERY
🖼 The Vanished Painter of Mall Road
For fifteen years, an old painter named Qadir sat near Mall Road, selling stunning portraits. He painted human expressions with uncanny accuracy—sadness so real it hurt, joy so bright it glowed.
One winter morning, he vanished.
His stall remained untouched:
His brushes.
His paints.
His last half-finished canvas.
The painting showed a man drowning in the canal at night.
People dismissed it as symbolism—until a body was found in the canal that same evening.
Inspector Sameer became obsessed.
He studied Qadir’s earlier paintings and found disturbing patterns:
Each painting bore hints of a tragedy before it happened.
Flood victims.
A fire in Anarkali.
A train accident.
Every event existed first in Qadir’s artwork.
But why?
Sameer traced Qadir’s last known movements.
He discovered that Qadir had been visiting a man… his own future killer.
Terrified, Qadir had painted a clue—his own murder.
But before he could warn anyone, he vanished… or was made to vanish.
Sameer stared at Qadir’s final canvas—the drowning man.
Behind the drowning figure, faintly painted into the water’s reflection, was another face:
Sameer’s own.
The inspector’s blood ran cold.
The painting wasn’t just predicting Qadir’s fate.
It was predicting his.
5️⃣ STRANGE ROMANCE
💫 Loving You in Another Timeline
Zayan was a poet who lived more in his imagination than in reality. One rainy evening in Islamabad, he met a girl named Arwa in a small bookshop.
She smiled as if she already knew him.
“You’re late,” she said softly.
“For what?” he laughed.
“For meeting me again.”
Zayan felt a strange pull—a familiarity he couldn’t explain. She knew his favourite poetry lines, his childhood fears, even the scar on his wrist he always hid.
“How do you know these things?” he asked.
She looked at him with heartbreaking tenderness.
“Because we loved each other once. Just not here.”
She told him they had been lovers in a parallel timeline—a world that collapsed, forcing her consciousness into this reality. She remembered everything; he remembered nothing.
“You’ll recall it soon,” she whispered. “Before the window closes.”
Days passed.
Zayan began dreaming vividly—dreams of a life with Arwa: a small apartment, shared laughter, a wedding under cherry blossoms.
But it wasn’t this world.
One night, Arwa vanished.
Her phone switched off.
Her apartment empty.
Zayan found a note under his pillow:
“Our love survived one world…
It will survive this one too.
Wait for me in the timeline where you live long enough to remember.”
And the room filled with the scent of cherry blossoms—
in a city where they never grow.
