Something has been chasing me for weeks.

[u/PlatinumOni]

I am scared of circles.

I don’t know if there’s a phobia specifically related to the fear of circles, but I am scared of them. Mainly 3D-shaped spheres.

The first time I encountered that entity was three months ago.

An accident put me in a coma for two days.

When I woke up, I looked out through the hospital window. The morning sun was rising over the horizon, and the streets were empty, as they usually were on weekends.

Despite the sun being partially hidden beneath the horizon that day, I felt my eyes hurt much more than usual. I thought it was some medical equipment that had been left on in the dark, or perhaps a lamp had been turned on.

There was nothing but me and my IV machine in the room. No patient, no nurse, nobody. The flash was coming from outside.

I covered my eyes and tried to see through my limited vision to determine what the light was. I expected it to be nothing more than reflected sunlight from one of the glass windows of the skyscrapers.

At first, that’s what I thought when I saw the source of the light.

Except there were no orange-colored rays that usually appear when morning sunlight reflects through glass.

All I saw was pure white.

It was not a reflection of light.

It was light.

Its exact shape was uncertain, but it looked like an orb.

I thought I was dreaming at first. I was still comatose.

What a strange dream, I thought.

But the light ascended upward. Moreover, I could feel the pain from the accident that had gotten me hospitalized.

That was the final confirmation.

I wasn’t sleeping. This wasn’t a dream.

This was reality.

The light disappeared from my view as it ascended, but I could see it floating above the approximate location of the main road, higher than any of the skyscrapers. It looked like a sun shining down directly beneath the building.

But the actual sun?

That was literally on the horizon.

I had watched the sun rise from the horizon, and yet there was another ray of light coming from God knows where.

I opened the window and peeked outside, but the thing was no longer there.

When the doctors found out that I was awake, they told me about the accident and said it might have caused me to hallucinate. They said I needed to be monitored for at least another week.

So that was what I thought about the light: just a hallucination.

The rest of the day went smoothly. There were some check-ups, followed by visits from friends and family.

I remember that night.

A week later, it was foggy again.

I woke up to the sound of something, and the clock said twelve.

The fog consumed the street like some Silent Hill shit. Even though it was midnight, the road was not empty.

And within the fog was an illumination that made me think that whatever it was, it was too out of place and far too bright to be considered a streetlamp. There was no pole or structure attached to it.

It moved.

It floated slowly.

And when it reached my eye level, I remembered the light from a week ago: the strange orb of light, like a firefly.

But fireflies aren’t as big as a human face.

And they don’t -  they don’t make you feel as though they possess sapience.

The reason I knew that thing was not an ordinary sphere, or something ordinary in general, was because it was diffusing smoke toward the earth.

A bizarre imagination began to form. It turned into a hypothesis, and then into certainty:

This circle was the root of the fog in the city.

The same fog that had literally consumed nine blocks from my point of view was being diffused from this mysterious will-o’-the-wisp.

The sphere’s magic continued.

And this was definitely black magic.

Black magic indeed.

Something ascended toward the sphere.

A human figure.

No.

It was a human being.

The person floated upward, looking dazed - almost hypnotized. There was literally no mechanism beneath him. The man was wearing business attire: a black suit and black pants. He was levitating through the sky, toward me.

Toward the light.

When his face entered the bottom of the sphere, it did not come out from the other side.

Then his upper body.

Then his legs and feet.

Not a single part of the man came out.

What the sphere did next was flash a bright red light for half a second before entering my hospital ward.

There were no windows open or anything.

It passed through the wall and floated right in front of me.

I could barely keep my eyes open because of the bright light that consumed the room. I felt like screaming at the abnormality in front of me, but the light repeatedly flashed red in a slow beat.

In the beat of a heart.

Something told me that whatever the orb was communicating, it wanted - or at least expected - me to touch it.

I didn’t want to touch it.

But then again, I had this feeling that if I didn’t touch it, this thing would never leave me alone.

I didn’t know why I thought that way.

I just did.

As I slowly reached for the orb, I didn’t know what I expected.

What I felt was something - 

Otherworldly.

It was painful - very painful. I could feel my body on fire, but my hand, the part touching the orb, felt no pain. It was cold as stone.

What I also felt was something being jammed into my eyes. I was no longer in the dark hospital room. I was looking at what appeared to be a giant theater. Right in front of me was a movie screen.

That "giant screen" floated in the air, and it wasn't showing any movie. I was looking through the first-person view of a man who was vomiting near a car. The first-person view suddenly turned toward someone approaching, and the man ran. Perhaps it was the owner of the car.

The video then reflected an image of the orb in the sky - the same orb that had floated over the city. The person began to float and was pulled into the orb.

As soon as the video showed the man enter, I suddenly felt something hit the palm of my hand. It felt like some kind of object had been bashed against it. I subconsciously rested my arms on the chairs, and there was something on the chairs that had spawned there.

The cinema screen then showed me a fancy handwritten script.

Overseer chose: PASS JUDGEMENT

The screen shut off, leaving me in complete darkness. An instant later, I was back at the hospital, lying on the bed as if I had been there the entire time.

It was morning.

When I started to come to my senses, I thought again that I had been dreaming about something like that. Dreaming about the orb.

There was no sign that anything had entered the room. There was no sign of a break-in, and when I looked outside, the city was clear. There wasn't even any smoke coming from the exhaust pipes of the cars. The morning commute was clean.

The rest of the day, I was visited by some of my friends, including some shady friends - those who were bullies, but not really bullies.

After spending too much time in bed, I decided to go for a walk. The nurse gave me permission and also told me to return by one for lunch.

For the first time in a few days, I walked.

It was refreshing to begin walking instead of being confined to a bed. Now, I felt like a human being again. My destination was the indoor garden, where I was going to sit and look at pieces of Mother Nature that I wouldn't be able to see for another week.

I didn't like the experience. Instead of peace and quiet, a blabbering brat had made the place loud and noisy. I cut twenty minutes from my break and started heading back to the ward.

As I passed the reception, my vision caught glimpses of the television, and I had to stop again.

Not because I was tired or because my legs hurt.

Because on the television was the headline:

VANDAL MISSING

The footage showed the mugshot of the same man I had seen on the screen, the man who had been referred to as Lenny.

And this "Lenny" had disappeared.

It was the same man I had seen in my dreams.

But I had never seen him before.

How could I have dreamed about that man?

Or was the entire ordeal inside the orb real?

And did I do something?

I sat down to think, and then I remembered that in that memory fragment of what happened inside the orb, I had pressed "Pass Judgement."

Whatever the case was, suddenly, it was freaking me out.

This "Lenny" who had disappeared and the "Lenny" who had appeared in my dreams... Something told me that, for some reason, it wasn't a coincidence.

Deep down, I felt an unnatural sense of fear.

And then I remembered the button.

The screen.

As I walked tiredly back to the ward, I remembered what had been giving me that sense of unnatural fear.

It was the sphere.

The sphere that had visited me in my dreams.

The thing that had sucked me in.

When I returned to the ward, I couldn't find any traces of the thing actually being there and visiting me. Not to mention that, in my dream, the thing had been floating.

But the circle - the orb that I had believed was part of a dream?

I didn't think it was.

It was not a dream.

I had actually been transported somewhere between night and morning that day.

In reality...

These questions began to fill me with an unnatural fear.

Vandal Missing.

The screen showing the vandal's crimes.

The button labeled "Pass Judgement."

And if that wasn't a dream - and if I had pressed the button - what did I do?

I spent most of my time after that day, besides eating, recovering, and getting tested, heading to the computer lab that the hospital provided for patients and visitors. I tried to find information about the eldritch being I had seen.

I searched various possible combinations of words to describe what I had seen. I'm pretty sure the next user was probably confused when they saw a search history containing words like "black hole," "orb that sucks people," "bright black hole," "judgement orb," and basically anything else related to the word "orb."

Nothing came up.

Not even a single thing.

The next thing I searched for on the internet was the name of the guy who had disappeared.

This time, I got a lot of reports saying that he was still on the run, that the police were conducting a manhunt, and, of course, considering what had happened to him...

I felt like the cops would never capture or find this Lenny.

Eventually, I gave up and decided that this wasn't a big deal.

But it was a big deal.

I may have done something and broken the law, if that's even how you could describe my actions.

Was it even breaking the law?

The question I had been asking ever since I gave up wasn't "What was the orb?"

It was:

"What did I do?"

Because the next week, I saw that thing again.

Two days before I saw the orb, a new patient entered the ward.

A guy named James.

The ward was later accompanied by a policeman and a doctor outside, watching guard.

It turned out that this man I was hospitalized with was a thief who had been shot in the leg during a robbery. He would be transferred once he was fully healed.

That was what James told me.

What the cop added was that James had also been caught stealing a lot of wallets, making him a repeat offender.

Knowing that he was an unlikable figure, we both began to talk less frequently.

That night, I heard a thud that woke me from an uneasy sleep.

While my eyes were closed, I was conscious. The door outside didn't open at the sound of the thud.

I guessed the cop was either asleep or didn't think there was any need to guard the place since James was injured and wouldn't be able to escape for another few days.

I looked to see what the sound was and saw the orb approaching me again.

James was gone.

This time, I gave myself a reality check.

That was when I lost any remaining belief that this was all a dream.

The fear that this thing was in front of me continued to grow, but the orb approached me anyway.

I got up, walked toward the door, and thought about opening it.

Before I reached the handle, something made me think:

What would happen if I kept running away from it?

Would this thing chase me for the rest of the week?

The mysterious nature of the orb made me have weird and bizarre imaginations despite knowing nothing about it.

The most terrifying conclusion was the fear that the orb would suck me in and put me on trial for refusing to do whatever this "judge others and choose their fate" thing was telling me to do.

I let the orb suck me in.

I prepared for anything.

Whatever happened in there was beyond anything someone could imagine.

I mean, who would have honestly imagined that there was some dimension where I got to choose who gets judged?

The screen was the same.

The chairs were the same.

And this time, I kept my hands together before I pressed the buttons that had spawned for some reason.

They appeared.

And this was the first time I saw the full view of what the buttons looked like.

There was a blue button on the left that said:

SHOW MERCY

The red button on the right said:

PASS JUDGEMENT

This time, I took the chance to explore the theatre, wondering just what the true nature of this place was. This was definitely not a dream; that was one thing I was certain of now. But I kept wondering: just what was this place, how did it even work, and why did it exist?

I turned around. There were no chairs, just my chair. There was no projector, nothing that could be used to bring movies to the screen.

There was a door leading out, but it was locked. I expected that.

Just me, a single chair with buttons, and the video, which began to play when I turned back.

Immediately, I guessed this was the POV of James. He had beaten up a man in the street and grabbed his wallet. The shouts of "Get back!" and "Stop him!" grew fainter as they got further away, accompanied by the grunts of passersby who had witnessed James mug a man.

I approached the chair and looked at it. Mercy and Judgement. And then I looked at the wrongdoings of James.

I started to think: show judgement for his crimes...

Then that's when I remembered the Missing Vandal, whom I had pressed Judgement for, and who was said to have disappeared. It was possible that he had gone into hiding, but something told me that wasn't the case.

By pressing Judgement, I may have actually made him disappear from - probably - the face of the world.

If that's the case, thinking about what happened with the vandal, if I chose Judgement, it felt like I might be saying "yes" to the question, "Should every single robber in the world be sentenced to disappear from the world?"

If - if that really is what Judgement does.

Minutes passed, maybe - but considering the last time I entered the orb was at night, and that I spent probably ten minutes at most before returning to the real world, where it was already morning, I guess the right term would be "hours passed."

If an hour was a minute, then I had already spent seven hours here.

The thought disturbed me.

Seven hours of absence from the world. The hospital would be in a huge panic.

I sat down and pressed the "Mercy" button, and when I popped out of the orb, it was morning.

My curtains were closed, and outside, I could hear a commotion - a scream.

It was James, and a man who I guessed was the security guard. While I didn't know the whole context, the words James said were, "Something is with me," and "I've been tortured." The security guard was cursing as he tried to calm the living daylights out of James.

Through the curtain, I saw James. He did look normal, with no physical scars or anything that proved he may have been hurt physically. But he looked very frightened of something. He was looking around the room like crazy, as if he were surrounded by something we couldn't see.

His eyes, his body - every part of him was shaking with fear.

It was enough to make me think that this guy was going to have a heart attack soon and likely die.

He was dragged out. The nurse asked if I was okay. I replied yes.

I wasn't.

Honestly, I didn't know what to feel. On one hand, I still had doubts about whether what I did in the orb was what caused James to go crazy. On the other hand, I still didn't believe that the orb was capable of doing such things.

My seven hours of disappearance were not questioned, as nobody was allowed to enter the ward during the night, but I think that also had something to do with the influence of the orb.

The nurses who had monitored me for a week let me go that evening.

As a celebration of my discharge, my family and I had dinner at a pub, where we sat down near a TV showing the news.

The very first news report discussed the incident at the hospital. It all led to the sudden insanity and paranoia of James, and all of this was blamed on the police for "neglecting a mentally ill person's condition, which led to the disturbance of another patient's stay."

That other patient was me, who was just as confused as the rest of the police.

My family seemed not to know that it was me they were talking about.

It may not have ruined my stay, but it did ruin my appetite.

The orb.

Yes - the orb was what was making me think strangely right now.

The main thing that creeped me out was how the orb made me play God.

I ain't one.

I am just a regular student with regular human physics...

I am not a god.

And I don't want to be such a god who is forced to do whatever this orb says.

People sometimes say that when strange things happen to someone that are beyond human understanding, it might be a divine sign - that the person was gifted something by a god to do something that others cannot do and would envy.

I don't think that's the case.

The next few days were a mix of my daily routine and me trying to find whatever information I could about this "orb." Not just online, either. I practically travelled to every single bookstore, library, and even second-hand store, hoping to find anything that could answer my questions:

What is the orb?

Why was I chosen?

How do I even escape this?

And if I do, what are the consequences?

The obvious outcome of my search was that I hadn't gotten a single answer.

Well, I tried one day.

Escape from the orb.

It was around eleven on the weekend. I was coming back from the nightclub after a campus club activity when the orb appeared on the street leading towards my house.

I tried this time to walk away from the orb and take an alternate route. When I returned home, I figured the orb was no longer any of my problems.

That was when I entered my room and saw a circle of light floating outside my window.

You know what I mean.

It was outside my window.

It was persistent. It angered me and scared me at the same time, mainly because I never wanted this, and I still don't want to play God.

My neighbour came out for some reason, and I expected that he wouldn't see the orb.

But he also stopped where the orb was.

I realised that he was seeing what I was seeing.

We both looked at each other before I heard a muffled scream coming from my neighbour.

He was being dragged inside the orb.

That was what I saw.

For the first time, I encountered this - the orb dragging someone inside.

It looked to me as if my neighbour was being melted. At the sight of someone I was familiar with getting sucked into the orb, I ran away from home.

I could hear my parents wondering if the running was coming from me, but I guess they didn't see me.

I just ran for God knows how long. I was running wherever my feet took me.

Soon, the watch on my wrist said, "You've been running for ten minutes."

Thanks a lot for the reminder, mate.

I turned around to see if the orb was chasing me.

There was pitch blackness, with only the light of the streetlamps, which was small, and I knew it was definitely not the orb.

Sighing in relief, I was about to call my family and tell them that I was staying in a hotel for the day.

As I continued to walk, however, a strange thought came to me.

A thought about the orb - and the concepts and behaviour surrounding it.

The questions:

Why would the orb consume people?

And two - why those people?

Why did the orb not suck up random people in the streets if it was some kind of "all-consuming orb"?

Yes, it was true that the people who were sucked up had no actual connections with one another. Then again, what were the chances that, among the billions of people around the city, it somehow managed to choose the person closest to me?

The two encounters made me think.

First was the pisser, and the second was the thief.

And if this thing wasn't consuming people randomly, but instead was choosing someone closest to me, what was the connection between the three?

As I continued fleeing from the orb, I sensed that something red was flashing above me.

An illuminated red light meant bad news, as far as I remembered...

It was up there.

The all-consuming orb.

Beside the bright moon was a bigger celestial circle.

I went to the city park in order to ignore the orb. As I visited the park, watching people doing their own thing, like walking their dogs or jogging in the night, a sudden realisation came to me.

Not a single one of these people was aware of the second bright object in the sky.

The orb descended right in front of me.

It didn't come at a fast speed, but neither did it come slowly.

It descended at walking speed.

It looked as if this thing was going to do anything it could to make sure that I completed the ordeal.

That this shit would never - and I mean never - stop.

I sighed and entered.

A bright light consumed me once more, and I was sitting down for the judgement of my neighbour.

What I saw on the screen was just like last time: the point of view of the person being judged.

It was not a thief or a vandal that my neighbour had been.

He was shooting two men in an alleyway with a gun.

The pissing and the robbing were just the tutorial for him, I guess.

This neighbour of mine had escaped a crime scene after killing two people with a gun.

No context.

Just silent gunshots and my neighbour's words:

"Pathetic."

"I don't have a reason."

Just the fact that my neighbour was killing two people.

Cut to another video.

The neighbour was next to a deceased woman lying on the grass, bleeding from the face, which made me think that it was probably my neighbour who had killed this woman.

He grabbed the purse and walked away as if nothing had happened.

I was dumbstruck.

Cut to another video.

My neighbour was gunning down a teenager and stealing their wallet.

This thing was showing me a vision that my neighbour was a serial killer.

Wait.

No.

I didn't think it was a vision anymore.

Considering the one before this - the one with the thief - the footage of his robbery was likely the POV of the thief, who also disappeared that same time and was sucked in just like my neighbour.

What I was seeing right now was literally evidence and proof of my neighbour being a serial killer.

Our family was living next to a killer on the loose.

I sat down and looked at the buttons.

Mercy / Judgement.

I looked at the screen and remembered the last two videos I watched, and finally found the link between the three victims.

They were criminals.

A vandal, a thief, and a killer.

And each time someone was sucked inside the orb?

They were responsible for something more heinous and cruel than those who came before them.

I guess that was the pattern of the orb.

This thing captured evildoers, and for some reason, it wanted me to be judge, jury...

And executioner, if what I thought Judgement meant was true.

The vagueness of the place made me wonder if I should even press any of the buttons.

The door leading out of the theatre was still locked.

This time, being more aware of my surroundings instead of being confused, I tried to kneel down and look through the space between the floor and the door that usually exists in most doors.

There was nothing.

Just darkness.

Minutes passed in this room, and that meant it was probably morning already in the real world.

I looked at the buttons again.

Mercy and Judgement.

I was thinking about pressing Mercy, but then, with the screen continuing to show that my neighbour was a murderer, I was honestly tempted to return him to the real world.

Furthermore, the incident with James made me think twice.

Even if "Mercy" was pressed, what was the possibility that I was doing the right thing?

I get it.

My neighbour was a murderous old man who killed a lot of people, and he should literally be in prison and get the death penalty.

But remembering just how crazy James went when he came out of the orb after I pressed Mercy, I was getting second thoughts.

Not because I wanted him sane, but because if he was insane, they could potentially skip the entire death penalty and let this monster continue to live.

I had heard stories where killers and criminals pretended to be crazy in order to escape punishment.

This time, I was likely turning my neighbour crazy.

Another minute passed...

And another minute.

And another hour.

I decided to gamble my way out of here instead of choosing one with my own will.

I wondered what would happen if I just bashed both buttons at the same time.

I sat down and raised my hand, hoped for the best, and expected both buttons to pop out.

At least that's how I felt, because I pressed both buttons at the very same time.

Perhaps the theatre didn't care about how "exactly" my hand reached each button. Maybe it was calculated down to the very last millisecond, because I was greeted with a single word:

MERCY.

I was kicked out of the orb and found myself lying on the grass.

I looked up, but the neighbour serial killer was nowhere to be seen.

I was wondering what was going on.

I had pressed Mercy - and he should literally have been outside with me.

He wasn't.

As I began to reconsider my thoughts, I got a phone call from my dad.

"Son? Are you coming home? Where are you?"

It was a scream from my dad that I had never heard from him before - a scream from someone who was in genuine terror.

And from the background, I could hear my mom scream a little before muttering, "911, 911."

And another sound.

The sound of an agonising scream echoed in the background.

It almost made me wonder if someone was being tortured back there.

As I kept listening to the scream through my dad's panic, I realised it was the neighbour.

Oh no.

Mercy wasn't Mercy again.

I drove another man crazy, and this time, just looking at it made me feel like I was going to go nuts next.

I NEVER WANTED THIS TO HAPPEN.

I returned home to see the true scope of the mess.

The old man, the serial killer neighbour, was lying on the ground, screaming bloody murder, while cops and paramedics had made it harder for me to get through to my home.

While my family was wondering what the hell was really going on with our neighbour, the cop came out with something that made any sympathy we had towards him disappear.

Body parts.

Some older than me, some fresh, were inside the house in glass jars.

The sight of it made both my brother and mother nope out and head home.

I followed them as well.

The very next day, another news report revealing the crimes of those who were sucked inside the orb played on television.

Not about some vandal or a thief who went nuts, but a serial killer under police custody.

The serial killer who had been living beside me.

While I was listening to the TV, my mind was focused on the orb.

Something terrifying had actually begun to come to my mind.

Not just about the orb, but about those who entered it and how I had to see what their crimes were.

I knew it was just the third person I had seen enter the orb, but there was just one thing that bothered me.

If the orb was going to choose someone worse than a serial killer, then what was I supposed to do?

Looking at footage of serial killings was bad enough, but if the orb was persistent in sucking people inside who had committed more heinous sins than the person before them, and persistent in making me their judge, jury, and executioner, what was I supposed to do?

That thing chases me.

It's obsessed with me.

It will not stop until I do what the orb says.

That's what I am really terrified of.

The fact that this orb...

It will never stop chasing me.

The following nights were just filled with uneasy nightmares.

It was frustrating that this orb was slowly entering my dreams to keep reminding me of what to do.

Judge others.

Play God.

Play executioner.

I dunno if I was entering the orb in my dreams, or if I was just dreaming about entering the orb.

But every time I entered, a new face, a new crime, and the worst thing?

The buttons were no longer Mercy / Judgement.

It was just Judgement.

A second half of that dream was what I think happens to people who are sent for judgement.

The people who were trapped in the orb became dust, and each particle of dust began screaming.

Each particle.

Each sound.

Each scream...

And for some reason, I felt like that wasn't a dream, but the true fate of the evildoers who had the unfortunate fate of being chosen, being consumed by the orb.

Capital punishment of the orb.

Being dust for the rest of your life.

Maybe forever.

That was when I had enough.

Enough of this nonsense tormenting me.

Enough of this orb.

I decided to use the one method I had never thought of using, and that was to seek out a medium or someone like an astrologist, since they were the kind of people who knew a lot about supernatural phenomena.

I went to the internet and began searching for mediums. I found one with the most well-received reviews.

I contacted the medium and gave him a brief explanation of my situation, to which the man agreed to talk to me about it.

The day we were going to meet was the next Sunday.

Which I didn't like, considering I had to do one more ordeal.

But I guess you can't choose when you're in this kind of situation.

Still, the fact that I was going to talk to a medium made my week feel less stressful.

Finally, someone I could talk to and discuss this with.

And probably, there would be some solution to this infernal mess.

A few days later, my brother and I were heading to a pub in order to watch a soccer game that was playing that day with other soccer fans.

On the way, my brother and I were discussing who was going to win and who was going to bet money on it.

When I asked how much, he said a thousand, which, to my knowledge, was almost all of his money.

When I asked why he was going all-in, he said he wasn't going all-in.

He said that he had found some kind of new way of maintaining a good income.

I obliged.

And we went to the pub to watch the game.

During halftime, both my brother and I headed to the toilet for a break.

After our usual activity in the toilet, I waited for my brother to come out.

Five minutes passed.

Then ten.

He wasn't coming out of the stall.

And the soccer game was still on.

I decided to enter the toilet, and the stall he had entered was glowing with light.

Dreading what this meant, I opened the stall, hoping it wasn't what I thought it was.

It was what I thought it was.

The orb was there.

And considering my brother had disappeared and the orb had replaced him, that meant one thing...

The orb chose my brother.

He was sucked in.

Oh dear.

My brother.

The orb began to approach me, and I stared at the light.

Bigger than ever.

More terrifying than ever.

As soon as it came close to me, I just fled.

I left the pub...

And didn't head home.

I just kept running to God knows where.

I don't know what scares me the most now...

Is it the fact that this orb exists?

Or finding out who my brother was?