GOD HATES HEAVY METAL: THE RULE OF THREE

art and story by Justine Norton-Kertson

[TRANSCRIPT: FINAL VIDEO – @LanaHorrorTok | 3:03 A.M. | AUTO-CAPTION ENABLED]

grainy low light, distorted frame edges, occasional glitching and flickering background

LANA
(shaky, whispering)
Okay. Okay. I—I don’t even know if this will upload. It’s like… it keeps deleting itself. The drafts are gone. My phone—it won’t turn off anymore.
(nervous laugh)
Remember how I joked about haunted pixels? Yeah. Not funny now.

[glitch: frame skips – face blurs, reappears mid-sentence]

I did the video. You saw it. The Rule of Three. Three tellings brings her closer. Every third? She moves forward.

And now you’re here. You clicked. That’s one. Maybe two.
(inhale)
But I think I’m the third. I didn’t believe it either. Until the shadows moved without light. Until I started waking up in places I didn’t go to sleep.

[unintelligible whisper – auto-caption: "you brought her here"]

She’s not just a story. I thought she was a fake. I wanted her to be fake. But now she’s in the feed. She’s using it. Every share is a step. Every duet is a door.

[glitch: audio distortion – voice echoes multiple times]

I tried to stop it. I deleted the post. It didn’t matter. Someone saved it. It’s a sound now. It’s trending.

[screen flicker: behind Lana, a faint figure – white hoodie, head tilted too far to the left]

(crying)
You think it's a game. It’s not a game.

Please. If you see this—
[frame cuts to black and white static]
Don’t share it.
Please.

That’s how it spreads.
That’s how it gets out—

[VIDEO CORRUPTED – END OF STREAM]

[BLACK SCREEN]

Text appears:
THE RULE OF THREE

***

Lana Grant had built her entire brand on the fine line between fear and fun.

Her TikTok series, “3-Minute Myth,” had started as a side project during her last semester of college in upstate New York. Now, with nearly 800K followers and a growing YouTube mirror channel, she was one of horror-Tok’s most popular creators—equal parts skeptic, storyteller, and scream queen.

Lana didn’t do dances. She didn’t post thirst traps. She posted fear. Condensed, edited, and optimized for engagement.

And her audience ate it up. Today’s video setup was already getting traction. She was leaning against a red LED-lit backdrop in her home studio, eyes wide, tone playful but ominous. 

“Okay, horror fam,” she said, tapping the mic clipped to her hoodie. “So this one’s weird. Like, internet legend within an internet legend kinda weird.”

Cut to a screen recording of an ancient, lime-green forum post titled “Do NOT Share This Ghost Story (THE RULE OF THREE)” dated 2007. It looked like it had been ripped from a half-dead gaming board—username: fatalframefan88.

“It’s all fake, of course,” Lana said in voiceover. “But this one’s too juicy to ignore.”

The post told the story of L4vender, a gamer girl who reportedly died during a competitive livestream back in the early 2000s. The cause of death was vague—some said a seizure, others said suicide, but the legend claimed her last words were, “Don’t tell it three times. That’s how she comes back.”

According to the thread, retelling her story—specifically three times—summoned her spirit one step closer. First: she would appear in your game. Second: in your camera feed. Third: right behind you.

It was classic creepypasta—but with just enough specificity to make it feel real.

“The story’s obviously made up,” Lana told her followers, cutting back to her camera. “I mean, we’ve all seen this kind of thing before. Bloody Mary, The Rake, Momo—remember that one?”

She paused, smirking.

“But here’s the fun part: the Rule of Three has no known origin point. This forum thread? Already archived. The OP? Never posted again. And the username? Doesn’t show up anywhere else on the web. Not on Reddit. Not on Twitch. Not even on old stream databases. Spooky, right?”

The camera slowly zoomed in on her face.

“So. Let’s test it.”

Dramatic cut to black. A chime sound.

“THE RULE OF THREE // PART 1”

Lana began narrating the urban legend in full—voice layered with static, eyes wide like she was being watched, occasional flickers in the footage like corrupted video. She described L4vender’s livestream, her sudden silence mid-game, the chat freaking out, the blank stare before the screen cut to black. Lana reenacted it all, eyes rolled back, twitching at the exact timestamp the ghost supposedly “entered.”

She ended the video with a wink and her usual signoff.

“That’s today’s 3-Minute Myth. Don’t forget to like, comment, and follow for more horror and hoaxes. Stay spooky.”

She hit publish. And within minutes, the numbers started climbing.

By the time she grabbed coffee and came back, the video had 52,000 views. By lunch, it was trending under #urbanlegendtok. The duets started rolling in—people re-enacting the ghost’s death, lip-syncing her last words, even modding her into Minecraft builds.

Lana chuckled, scrolling through the chaos. “Y’all are ridiculous.”

One comment had over 4,000 likes already

“this is part 3 for me 😳 guess i’m dead lol”

Another:

“bro i legit saw a girl in a white hoodie on my feed RIGHT after watching”

And one more:

“what happens if we ALL tell it 3 times at once?”

Lana sipped her drink and shrugged. “Well,” she said to herself, “guess we’re gonna find out.”

By the time Lana woke up the next morning, her notifications were completely unmanageable. Her Rule of Three video had exploded overnight—1.6 million views with over 30,000 shares and climbing. TikTok’s algorithm had officially crowned it horror content royalty. It was stitched into gaming fails, makeup tutorials, dance trends. Someone even autotuned her “Let’s test it” line and set it to a lofi beat.

She scrolled through comments over coffee:

“this is part 3 for me 😳 guess I’m the sacrifice lol”
“yo anyone else hear whispering in her audio?”
“WAIT was that someone walking behind her?? 2:37 timestamp.”
“tell it again tell it again tell it again”
“bro my stream glitched during this I’m not even kidding”

Lana laughed, heart buzzing with that strange cocktail of joy and dread that only came from going viral. The comments were in on the joke. The myth was building itself. Exactly what she’d wanted. 

But by the afternoon, things started to feel... off.

She went live to celebrate hitting 850K followers. The first twenty minutes were normal—fans spamming emojis, asking about upcoming videos, joking about whether she’d summoned L4vender yet.

But then someone commented, “who’s behind you?”
Then another. “deadass look behind her someone’s there”
And another. “white hoodie 👀”

Lana flipped her camera to show the room—her usual LED-lit setup, horror posters on the wall, nothing unusual. “Y’all are tryna Bloody Mary me on my own stream,” she said, rolling her eyes.

The chat laughed. But the comments didn’t stop.

She noticed that her shadow looked strange in the corner of the frame—elongated, slightly curved like her head was tilted—but her posture was perfectly upright.

She shut down the stream early.

That night, she received a DM from a new account—no profile picture, just a string of numbers for a username. It said, “You told it once. Your viewers told it again. The third is you. She’s at your door next.”

She screenshot it and posted it with the caption, “okay but this is excellent creepypasta energy.”

Most of her followers agreed. But a few didn't. One user stitched her screenshot into a video where they sobbed into the camera, whispering “It’s real, it’s real, I saw her, why did I share it—”

Another uploaded a split-screen of themselves watching Lana’s video—only the playback glitched, freezing on Lana’s eyes, which appeared completely black in a single frame. The user screamed, threw their phone down, and ran out of frame.

Lana thought it was hilarious. Creepy editing was half the fun. But she still downloaded the video. Froze the glitch frame. Zoomed in. 

Her pupils weren’t black. They were missing.

The next night, she recorded a follow-up. “Okay, horror fam,” she said, sitting in front of her ring light. “So apparently y’all broke the internet with L4vender. I’m officially canceling my own funeral.” She laughed nervously. Her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“Seriously though,” she continued, “people are saying she’s real. That the story’s spreading like a chain curse. Some of y’all are sending me videos that are... uh, disturbing. And I get it. I love the lore too. But remember—it’s a story. It only has power if we give it power.” She winked. “So let’s not give it power, yeah?”

She hit record and started editing—layering the video with captions, glitched effects, some creepy background ambiance to play into the vibe. That’s when the lights went out. The room plunged into darkness, her monitor casting eerie light across her face.

She froze. A single pop echoed from her bedroom wall—like a bulb bursting. Then came the second one. Closer. And then the third. Pop. Pop. Pop. Three sounds. Three steps?

Her phone buzzed. The screen showed the TikTok app... open to her own draft. A new caption had appeared—one she didn’t write.

“Tell it again. Finish what you started.”

Lana stood, phone shaking in her hand. “Okay. Not funny.”

The hallway outside her room remained pitch black, but she thought she saw movement—just for a second—a figure too tall, head angled like a marionette with a loose string.

She turned back to her setup. Her webcam light was on. Bit it had been off when she stood up. She tapped the mousepad. Nothing. The camera remained on. Streaming. But she hadn’t hit “Go Live.”

She reached toward the power strip and flipped the switch. Nothing turned off. Behind her, on the dark monitor, a white-hooded figure stood at the edge of the frame, watching.

Lana didn’t sleep that night. She sat on the floor of her apartment with every light on—ring lights, string lights, even the emergency flashlight she’d kept since freshman year. Her camera gear lay untouched on the desk. Her laptop stayed closed. But the whisper of her webcam fan still hummed, like it knew it wasn’t done yet.

By morning, she’d made a decision. She would end this. Not with a joke, not with a wink, not with a “Stay spooky.” This time, Lana would kill the story. On camera.

***

The follow-up dropped at 11:11 a.m.—on purpose, for the symbolism. It was low-lit and raw, no effects, no filters. Just Lana, sitting cross-legged on the floor, her hoodie drawn up, her face bare and pale.

“Hey. This isn’t a 3-Minute Myth. No jump cuts. No skits.” She looked directly into the camera. “Let’s break the chain. I’m the third, and the last. No more stories.”

She told her audience everything—the glitches, the disappearing drafts, the whispers, the figure on her webcam. She told them about the knock pattern, the DM that warned her, the videos her followers had sent—one of which had been taken down for “disturbing content” less than an hour after it was posted.

“I know this started as a bit,” she said, voice cracking. “But I think we’ve created something. I think we made her real. Or... maybe she always was. And now we’ve just given her the signal boost she needed.” She paused briefly. “Either way, don’t repost this. Don’t duet. Don’t use the sound. Let this one die here.”

She ended with a final line, “L4vender stops with me.”

No outro. Just fade to black.

But the internet had already moved on. Within an hour, the video was clipped, remixed, and  reposted. People layered the last line over dance tracks. Some added her crying face to meme templates. Others started using the phrase “Let this one die here” as ironic captions for TikToks of failed cooking attempts and bad haircuts.

The original audio became a sound trend.
The hashtag #RuleOfThreeChallenge reached over 10 million views by sundown.

And Lana could feel it. The chain wasn’t broken—it was fortified.

The nightmares began immediately. At first, she thought she was sleepwalking. She’d wake up standing in the hallway, mid-sentence, whispering something she couldn’t remember. Her phone would be in her hand, the camera open but never recording. Once, she found her livestream screen pulled up with the words “Going Live In 3...2...” frozen in place, never reaching 1.

Then came the nosebleeds. They didn’t gush. They leaked—thin trails down her upper lip, spotted on her pillow, drying before she noticed. It was only when she checked her bathroom mirror and saw three bloody fingerprints on the edge of the sink that she started to panic.

She didn’t remember touching the mirror.

She didn’t remember bleeding.

She didn’t remember anything from 3:03 a.m.

Her drafts began editing themselves. She’d open her TikTok queue to find strange, glitched thumbnails. Some showed her mid-sentence, her mouth stretched impossibly wide. Others showed just static, with captions she hadn’t typed:

“Tell it again.”
“She’s watching.”
“You are the content now.”

When she tried to delete them, they reappeared moments later—unchanged, unalterable.

She recorded a voice memo to herself. “Okay. Maybe if I say it out loud, it loses its power. Just data. That’s all this is.” But when she played the recording back, her voice wasn’t hers. It was layered. Slowed. As if someone else was speaking through her.

“Tell them,” it whispered. “Tell it three times. We’re listening.”

Her followers began DMing her stranger things.

“I had the dream,” one message read. “Everything was black. No sound. Just one screen. One glowing figure. White hoodie. Watching.”

“She waved at me,” another said. “I woke up with her handprint on my chest. It’s like I was tagged.”

“Can’t stop dreaming in loops,” someone else wrote. “I hear the knocks. Three. Over and over. Like a metronome for dying.”

Lana blocked the accounts. Deleted her app. Uninstalled everything. It didn’t help. Because at 3:03 a.m. the next night, she woke up to three knocks. Not loud. Not aggressive. Just precise.

Knock.
Knock.
Knock.

She bolted upright in bed, the air gone sharp around her, like she’d inhaled static. Her bedroom door was open. She hadn’t left it open. She didn’t remember going to sleep. She didn’t remember recording anything. But her ring light was on. And her camera was rolling. On the screen behind her, the audio bar pulsed.

A sound was playing on loop:

“Let this one die here.”
“Let this one die here.”
“Let this one die here.”

Only it wasn’t her voice anymore.

It was deeper.
Distorted.
Wrong.

And underneath it, just barely audible, someone was laughing.

Not her.

***

The final stream was unannounced. No countdown. No teaser. No viral trailer edit. Just a sudden ping at 2:56 a.m. that lit up thousands of phones at once:
@LanaHorrorTok has gone live.

It opened with silence. No background music. No intro graphic. Just Lana, sitting in the dark. A single ring light illuminated half her face. The other half was swallowed in shadow, like the light itself couldn’t reach all the way in anymore. Her eyes were rimmed with exhaustion. Dried blood caked under one nostril. Her hair was unbrushed, her hoodie zipped all the way to the neck like armor. For a moment, she just stared.

The chat exploded:

“Is this real?”
“She looks sick omg”
“Where’s the sound??”
“THE LIGHT’S GLITCHING”

It was. The light flickered—not in a normal way, but like it blinked. Once. Twice. Then stuttered back to steady. The same way a person might hesitate before saying something awful.

Lana inhaled slowly. “I’m not scared.” The mic hissed with static. “I’m going to face her. Live. No edits. No cuts.” She leaned forward, so close her breath fogged the camera lens. “You all made her real. I helped. I let her in.”

The chat surged:

“don’t do this”
“i swear to god she’s already behind you”
“GET OUT GET OUT”
“why is the background flickering??”
“her shadow isn’t moving”

The space behind Lana began to dissolve—not fade, not blur, but digitally decay. Pixels broke into static. Her bookshelf vanished. Her framed “100K Followers” plaque bled away into black noise.

She didn’t react. 

“She’s not a story anymore. She’s not a myth. She’s watching. And now so are you.”

More comments:

“her eyes just changed”
“yo her mouth didn’t match the audio???”
“i can’t click out?? wtf”

Lana twitched. It was small. Barely a shoulder spasm. Then again—harder this time. A sudden jolt, like a marionette string getting yanked. She gritted her teeth.

“This is not content.” Her voice cracked. “This is not a story.”

The light snapped off.

Total black.

Silence.

Then the mic picked up breathing—ragged, layered. Not one person breathing. Two. Maybe three. Maybe more.

The screen flickered.

Lana was still there—but distorted now. Her face was stretched at the edges. Her eyes were solid white, glowing softly like flashlight bulbs. Her hoodie moved like something underneath was pressing outward.

She opened her mouth—

“Thi—this—this—this—”
“This is—”
“notnotnotnotnot—”

The audio looped. Words repeated mid-syllable. Her voice warbled, dropped an octave, then two. Background noise spiked—low thrumming, like a broken hard drive spinning up to die.

“This is—this is—this is—” She grabbed her head. Blood dripped from both nostrils now. “This is not—this is not—”

Then she stopped. Her eyes locked on the camera. For the first time, they weren’t afraid. They were empty.

The chat slowed, frozen in fascination and terror.

“she’s smiling”
“why is she smiling”
“is she... humming???”

Yes. A soft hum filled the air. It wasn’t Lana’s voice. It was high-pitched. Familiar. Familiar because it was hers—auto-tuned from the lofi remix of her first Rule of Three post.

The looped sound drifted through the stream like a lullaby.

“Let’s test it.”
“Let’s test it.”
“Let’s test it.”

Lana opened her mouth again. “This is not content. This is not a story. This is—”

Her webcam light died. Her feed cut to black. The stream ended. Just like that. No outro. No “Thanks for watching.” No “Follow for more.”

Within seconds, viewers flooded the comments.

“was that the end???”
“yo she got possessed fr”
“IS THIS PART OF THE BIT”
“someone go check on her”
“omg it logged me out during the stream what the hell”
“3 knocks. i heard them. swear to god.”

The stream replay was unavailable. The profile showed “Content not found.”

Then someone uploaded a screen recording. A blurry capture of the last minute. In the final frame, slowed and enhanced, there it was—

A faint silhouette.
White hoodie.
Head tilted too far left.
Standing behind Lana.
Smiling.

***

The room is dark, save for the faint blue glow of a laptop screen.

A bowl of popcorn sits untouched. A soda can sweats on the desk. The fan hums softly, steady and unaware. The timestamp on the bottom right corner of the screen reads: 3:01 a.m.

The viewer leans in closer.

They're watching a re-upload of Lana’s last video—a grainy screen-record from another user who swore they captured the whole thing before it vanished. It’s blurry and jittery, the frame occasionally freezing or flickering like corrupted VHS. On screen, Lana’s face is halfway gone. Her eyes glow white. Her mouth is open in the middle of that looping phrase—

“This is not content. This is not a story. This is—”

Then—black screen. Just like before.

The viewer shivers, a slow chill rolling up their spine. They pause the video. It freezes on the final frame—barely a blip, easy to miss if you blink. But now that they’re looking, it’s unmistakable. A pale, white-hooded figure in the background, half-hidden in shadow.

The viewer stares at it. Then down at the caption options. They hover over “Repost.” Their cursor lingers. They’re not sure why they do it. Maybe they want to be part of something. Maybe they think it’s fake. Maybe they want the clout.

They click it.

The repost goes through instantly. The app makes a little chirping noise. A red checkmark flashes: “Shared successfully.”

The viewer leans back in their chair, lets out a shaky breath, and rubs their arms to chase away the cold. The video closes. Their laptop returns to the home screen. For a moment, all is quiet.

Then they catch something in the reflection. At first it’s subtle—just a shape behind them in the laptop screen. Too tall. Wrong posture.

They blink. It’s still there.

White hoodie.
Head tilted left.
Motionless.
Watching.

Their breath catches. They turn around slowly. 

There’s nothing there. 

The fan keeps humming. The popcorn still untouched. The soda can hisses as a drip slides down the side.

They turn back to the screen. The reflection is still there. Closer now. Their cursor shakes on the trackpad. They reach out to shut the laptop. But before the lid can close—

A ding.

New message. Anonymous user.

No profile picture.

No handle.

Just text:

“Congratulations. You’re the third.”

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Justine Norton-Kertson is the co-founder of Nerd Horror Media, publisher at Android Press, and co-Editor-in-Chief of Solarpunk Magazine.