Isolated
In childhood, Ryan’s body never made noise. Not in the normal way—he had a talent for holding his breath, for moving in such a manner that the floorboards and the radiator and the old dog under the kitchen table never registered his existence. When he passed through rooms, it was like a draft; a flickering of pressure, a cold spot. His mother used to say she’d walked through ghosts when he was young, but what she really meant was that he was there and then he wasn’t, with the suddenness of a coin trick. She said she ought to tie a bell around his neck, like a cat. But Ryan didn’t want to be a cat. Cats were noisy, arrogant, fussy. He wanted to be something finer. By the time he was eight, he had already catalogued every blind spot in the house. The narrow wedge of shadow beside the coat cupboard, the slope beneath the stairs where you could wedge your body flat and hold yourself up by tensing your arms and legs, the gap behind the mothballed linen chest in the laundry where if you exhaled slowly and completely, you could nearly disappear. His record for remaining still was two hours and fifty-two minutes, and if not for the cramp in his left calf, he believed he could have managed more. The memory of his mother’s face when she opened the linen chest and found nothing but linens, after four hours of calling his name—he savored that. The hiding led, as it often does, to the scaring. His older brother was the first to fall prey, then his younger cousin, then the neighbor’s boy with the peanut allergy. Ryan learned early that the best scares weren’t the loud, sudden ones but the long, quiet kind. The almosts. The half-seen face through a slit in the closet door. The breath on the back of a neck when the other person thought they were alone. The time he reached from under his parents’ bed and caught his father’s ankle in a pale, clutching hand, he nearly got a beating for it. Instead, his father yanked him out and stared at him, hard, with an expression that wasn’t quite anger. Ryan saw something of himself in his father’s look; a flicker of awe, and something else, unnamable. That had pleased him more than any victory at hide-and-seek. It was not long before he discovered that hiding wasn’t enough. Not really. He needed something more—a proof, a mark left behind. So he began to take things. At first, it was small, inconsequential: a pencil sharpener, a button from a favorite shirt, the little slip of paper his mother tucked inside her cigarettes to remind herself not to smoke too many. He took and he hid and he watched the aftermath: the searching, the blaming, the way the little world of their household came off its axis for an afternoon. When he tired of the domestic, he moved to the social. He stole his friend’s Gameboy for a weekend, then returned it Monday morning, slipping it into the lost-and-found bin at school. He took a girl’s hair clip and left it taped under her desk with an envelope marked “for you.” There was never a note, never any explanation. Sometimes he watched the confusion from a distance, sometimes he didn’t. The important thing was always the silence, the secret. He outgrew it, or thought he had, after university. By then he’d learned to mute the compulsion. The silent parts of him were dulled by the constant noise of adult life: lectures, internships, parties that all felt the same. His friends grew out of him, or maybe he grew away from them. He did not mind. There was a dullness, yes, but also a relief. For the first time, the world didn’t seem to expect him to be anything other than absent. That was good. He could vanish into his studies, then into his job, then into the background hum of city life. When he remembered the old tricks—the hiding, the scaring, the taking—it was with a kind of distant fondness, like the way you remember the taste of a cereal you ate as a child. Sweet, but unnecessary. He wondered, sometimes, what happened to people who never grew out of these things. Maybe they became pickpockets, or magicians, or something less reputable. Maybe they ended up as stories on late-night news programs, or in the weirdly dark corners of the internet. But Ryan didn’t think about that much. His own life was proof that the world’s little compulsions could simply burn out, leaving behind only a gentle vacancy. He liked that. He had always preferred the absence of things. Now, years later, his flat was nearly bare: no family pictures, no clutter, nothing he could not pack in an hour if he had to go. He found pleasure in the emptiness. Sometimes he even tried to remember the last thing he’d truly wanted, but it was like groping for a light switch in an unfamiliar room. There was nothing left to take, nothing left to steal. The old appetites had withered on the vine. Sometimes, in the evenings, when the light turned the windows into black mirrors, he caught a glimpse of himself in the glass—still and silent and utterly ordinary—and he wondered if this was what growing up was supposed to feel like. He hoped so. He really did. Ten years on and the flat was still empty. Not literally, but in all the ways that counted. There were chairs, of course—a chair at the kitchen table, a chair at the desk, a chair by the window for reading (though the light was poor, and Ryan rarely sat there). There was a thin IKEA couch with a sullen, shapeless pillow. He kept the bed stripped of everything but a single, gray blanket, and in the bathroom, the towels were always bone dry, as if nothing in his life had ever needed tending. If you entered the place, you might think someone had just moved in, or was on the verge of moving out. There were no family pictures. No old friends’ graduation photos with that forced, desperate cheer. No trinkets, no souvenirs, no keepsakes. Even the fridge was nearly bare, hosting only a bottle of water, some eggs, and a jar of pickles with a label written in a language he didn’t read. When the cleaning lady came, she found her work half-done already: the bins empty, the floors immaculate, the bed unrumpled and oddly taut. Once, she left a note—“Sir, are you sure you live here?”—but Ryan never replied. He left her an envelope of cash every other Tuesday and did not meet her eyes when he passed her in the lobby. His job was everything people said a job should be: challenging, prestigious, consuming. He worked in a glass office tower downtown, and his business card was heavier than a playing card, the kind of stock that thudded in your pocket. He did not hate his job. He didn’t love it, either. He did it well because it was a way of being invisible. Most days, he rode the lift with people he saw only as shapes and smells. He said the correct number of words to his boss and to the receptionist, then walked home at night along streets glazed with sodium light, avoiding the eyes of delivery drivers and dog-walkers. Sometimes, when he passed the illuminated windows of neighboring flats, he would see whole families moving in silhouette. He watched them set tables, argue, laugh, then close the curtains. He wondered what they thought of him, the blank man with the briefcase, always walking alone. The days bled into each other, weeks flattening to a continuous, featureless ribbon. He counted time by the expiration of his tube of toothpaste, by the weekly ritual of laundering the same two shirts, by the hollow sound of the phone not ringing. He had, once, tried the dating apps, but the first message he received made his stomach clench and he deleted his profile before it could even be read. His mother called every month, always with an anxious edge, and he let the calls go to voicemail. He told himself he was too busy to talk, that he’d call back tomorrow, but tomorrow never felt urgent enough. At night, when he returned to the flat, he’d cook a single, perfunctory meal, eat it standing at the sink, and stare out the window at the dead-eyed supermarket across the street. Sometimes he turned on the TV for noise, though he never watched it. Lately, he’d gotten into the habit of streaming horror films. The cheap, digital ones that Netflix recommended after midnight. He liked the way the scares came on a timer, the way the tension ramped up and then resolved. It was a clean kind of fear, a predictable, cathartic rush. Nothing in real life ever felt that safe, that boundaried. And yet, in the last few months, something had begun to change. Not in the routines, which were as strict as ever, but in the way the flat felt. At first, it was just the faint, irrational sense of being watched. The feeling was strongest after dark, as if the boundaries of his body had gone fuzzy, the edges of the room slightly out of phase. He told himself it was nothing—residual nerves from the films, or just the city settling into its nighttime creaks. But then the noises began. It was never loud, never dramatic. A faint pop, like a finger snapped in another room. The scrape of a chair leg, though the chairs never moved. Once, a whisper of laughter from the corridor, just as he was falling asleep. He got up and checked, but the hallway was empty, and the only sound was the building’s ancient heating system, gasping in its pipes. He rationalized it: old wiring, structural warps, some neighbor two floors down. But he noticed, too, the way the hairs on his arms rose, the way his heart beat higher in his chest. After a while, the flat felt less like a refuge and more like a holding cell, a place where you waited for something to happen. On some nights, he left all the lights on and sat in the bright kitchen, scrolling through his phone until sunrise. He told himself he was being stupid. That it was only his mind playing tricks. Still, sometimes, when he got up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water, he could swear he heard footsteps behind him, perfectly synchronized, pausing when he paused, resuming when he did. He never turned to look. He couldn’t stand the thought that there might be something to see. He started sleeping on the couch, with the bedroom door locked. It made him feel marginally safer, though he understood this was an illusion. If something wanted to get in, it would. He knew that from the films, from his own experience. Sometimes, as he was drifting off, he’d remember the games he used to play as a boy. The hiding. The long, careful silences. The pleasure of not being seen. It didn’t feel pleasurable anymore. Late one night, with a half-watched movie flickering blue on the TV, Ryan caught himself staring at his own reflection in the window. The city was dark, but the room was bright, and his own image hovered ghostlike over the street below. He looked older than he remembered. There was a new tension in the jaw, a slackness around the eyes. He pressed his palm to the glass and felt the cold seep into his skin. For a moment, it seemed as if there was someone else’s hand, just on the other side, matching his fingers perfectly. He pulled back and laughed, but it sounded strange, like an imitation of laughter. He went to sleep that night and dreamed of nothing. When he woke, he was sure he had heard the front door close. But when he checked, the chain was still on, the lock still bolted. The only thing out of place was a single black hair, long and fine, lying on the bathroom sink. Ryan stared at it for a long time, unable to remember the last person who had been in the flat. He picked it up, rolled it between his fingers, and let it fall into the bin. That day, he stopped by the supermarket and bought a bottle of bleach, though he didn’t know why. He cleaned the entire flat, scrubbing every surface, every corner. It made him feel better, at least for an hour. But by midnight, the old sense of wrongness had returned, and the empty rooms seemed to breathe around him, expanding and contracting with his own pulse. He sat on the couch, waiting for dawn, watching the pale shapes move across the walls as the city lights changed. In the end, he decided that there was nothing to be afraid of. That he was, at heart, just an ordinary man, in an ordinary apartment, living an ordinary life. But the next time he heard the soft, deliberate footfalls in the hallway, he pressed his hand to the wall and did not move until the sound had passed. When sleep refused him, Ryan would sit at the kitchen table with his laptop open, the screen’s cool glow the only light in the apartment. He told himself he was working—some half-baked excuse about catching up on industry emails or prepping spreadsheets for tomorrow’s meetings. But he never made it past the browser homepage before distraction set in, and the next thing he knew, he was deep in the labyrinthine message boards of the internet. He started with the rational stuff. News sites, crime reports, articles on urban paranoia. There was a comfort in reading about other people’s misfortunes, their break-ins, their half-glimpsed prowlers. If the stories matched his own, it made him feel less uniquely targeted. He searched for any mention of burglaries in his building, but the most recent was two years ago, a theft from the communal bike shed. He read about ghost hunters and urban explorers breaking into abandoned asylums. He even looked up the blueprints for his own apartment complex, just in case there was a secret hatch or crawlspace he’d never noticed. He never found what he was looking for. After that, the searches turned darker. He started on Reddit, but the threads there were stale—mostly teenagers making up stories for the rush of upvotes. Then he found a forum called DarkWitness, buried two pages deep in the search results, a no-frills site with black text on a gray background and an air of practiced secrecy. The users posted under names like SUMMONER and TRAGIC_MIRROR. The topics ranged from haunted objects to missing persons to unsolved murders, all of them tinged with a kind of hungry superstition. At first, Ryan lurked, reading the stories in silence. There was a sticky thread at the top titled “INHERITANCE—The Case Files,” and he clicked on it out of boredom, expecting nothing. Instead, he found a spreadsheet, hundreds of rows long, cataloging deaths from across the country. Most of the entries were forgettable: overdoses, disappearances, suicides in bland hotel rooms. But every few lines, there was a cluster of cases that all bore the same, unnerving footnote: victim had no known friends or close relatives; last seen alive several days before discovery; scene showed evidence of presence, no forced entry. He scrolled through the list, watching the names blur together, the cities and dates forming a pattern he couldn’t quite see. The most recent entry had been logged the day before. For the first time in weeks, he felt something like curiosity. He made an account—HANDLE: BLINK—and posted a reply, just to see what would happen. Within minutes, he got a private message from a user called HOLOPHAGE. The message was brief: “Do you feel it yet?” Ryan hesitated, then wrote back: “Feel what?” HOLOPHAGE replied instantly. “The pressure. The presence. That’s how it starts.” Ryan stared at the words, his hands hovering over the keys. “You think something’s after me?” A pause. Then: “Not after. With.” There was a click as the fridge cycled on, a low electrical hum in the silence. Ryan found himself grinning, a nervous, incredulous tic. “I’m not crazy,” he typed. “I just hear things sometimes.” This time, the reply took longer. “That’s how it works. You’re alone, it comes closer. All it wants is for you to see it. It feeds on solitude.” Ryan closed the laptop for a moment and pushed back from the table. He poured himself a glass of water, drank it in three big gulps, and stared at the blank kitchen wall. He could hear his heart, slow and deliberate. He opened the laptop again. “What are you?” he typed. He watched the three dots of typing for a long time before HOLOPHAGE replied. “Just someone who sees.” The conversation ended there. For the rest of the night, Ryan refreshed the page compulsively, but HOLOPHAGE never responded. The next day, he tried to focus on work, but the thread—“INHERITANCE—The Case Files”—stuck in his mind, as persistent as a headache. That evening, the paranoia sharpened. Every time he passed a window, he was convinced he’d catch a glimpse of movement in the reflection. Once, he opened the closet to find his own coat sleeve caught on the door, but for a split second, he was sure a hand was reaching for him. He ate dinner standing up, his back to the wall. At 2:00 a.m., he heard a long, low scraping from the hallway—like something being dragged—and then a soft, almost playful tapping on the door. He held his breath and waited. The sound never repeated. The next night, Ryan went back to the forum. There was a new message in his inbox from HOLOPHAGE: “It’s getting closer.” This time, Ryan didn’t answer. Instead, he clicked through to the spreadsheet, combing through the list of victims. They all had the same thing in common: no family, few friends, solitary work. In several of the cases, the police had commented on how “ordinary” the victims’ lives were, as if the lack of drama made the deaths harder to solve. He recognized himself in the pattern. On a hunch, he scrolled further, looking for any mention of his city. There were several entries, all within a few kilometers of his building. The most recent was dated six weeks ago—someone in a high-rise two blocks away, found dead in their apartment, doors locked from the inside. No sign of struggle, no injuries. The official cause was a massive heart attack, but the notes from the scene officer mentioned something odd: the body was discovered sitting upright at the kitchen table, hands perfectly folded, face turned toward the window as if waiting for a visitor. Ryan sat there for a long time, staring at the screen. He returned to the thread and posted a new message: “Has anyone survived?” No one replied for hours. At 4:00 a.m., just as he was about to shut the laptop, HOLOPHAGE responded. “Survival isn’t the point.” That was it. No further elaboration. Ryan slammed the laptop shut and went to the bathroom, splashing cold water on his face until the skin tingled. When he looked up, his reflection in the mirror seemed off. The eyes were glassy and wide, the mouth a fraction too tight. He blinked and the illusion broke, but the discomfort lingered. The next day, at work, Ryan couldn’t focus. The world outside his office looked too bright, too brittle, the people in the lift too close, their eyes too hungry. He pretended to type but accomplished nothing. By the time he got home, he was sweating, every muscle in his neck knotted and sore. He didn’t open the laptop that night. He sat on the edge of his bed, staring at the closed closet door, then at the gap beneath it. He turned on all the lights in the flat, then turned them off, then on again, as if by changing the pattern he could break the rhythm of his thoughts. He waited for the noises to come, but they didn’t. Instead, the silence stretched and stretched, until it felt like something had been wound tight and was about to snap. In the morning, Ryan found a note slipped under the front door. The paper was blank except for a single printed sentence: “I am here.” He didn’t go to work. He spent the day searching the internet for any explanation, any rational cause. But every attempt led him back to the same thread, the same chilling list of case files. He opened the spreadsheet one last time and scrolled to the bottom. The final entry was marked “pending.” The address was his own. He closed the laptop and sat very still, listening for the next sound. It didn’t take long. The first time Ryan saw the thing, it was not in the flat. It was on the street, after midnight, walking home from the shop with a carton of milk and a pack of paracetamol. He’d chosen the scenic route—up through the new park, past the playground and the abandoned rec center—because the longer he was outside, the less he felt the pressure building in the walls of his own place. The city at night was empty, the way he liked it. But that night, a strange movement caught his eye: a black flicker at the corner of a playground slide, a piece of shadow that moved wrong, with a quick, folded-in motion, like a spider folding its legs. He slowed, eyes watering from the wind, and watched the spot for a long time. Nothing else happened. There was only the creak of the swings in the breeze, the sodium lamps tinting everything the color of jaundice. He turned to leave and saw, in the glass doors of the rec center, the reflection of a figure standing behind him. Not a real person—he checked, spinning on his heel—but a tall, narrow impression of darkness, like an afterimage burnt onto his retina. He ran all the way home, dropped the groceries at the door, and didn’t stop moving until he was locked in the bathroom with the shower running, steam fogging the mirror. He told himself it was just a trick of the light, an artifact of too many nights staring at screens. The memory didn’t fade, though. In fact, it sharpened, so that every time he closed his eyes, he saw the way the figure bent at the waist, the uncanny length of its arms, the impression of a grin—enormous, fixed, cartoonish. He’d seen that smile before, somewhere, but couldn’t place it. The apartment’s atmosphere curdled. There was a new dampness in the air, a moldy tang rising from the drains. The walls felt closer, as if the rooms had shrunk by a few centimeters overnight. Ryan began to sleep in short, involuntary bursts, never more than an hour or two, waking each time with a ragged gasp as if surfacing from underwater. The sounds in the flat got louder, more articulate: a shuffle, a sigh, a soft click like teeth closing. Sometimes, at the edge of sleep, he heard voices. They sounded like his mother, sometimes, or like himself at a younger age, repeating phrases he’d forgotten. “You were always so quiet, Ryan,” or “You’ll get used to it.” One night, he heard his own name said with perfect clarity, right beside his ear. He leapt up, heart stuttering, and flung open every closet, every cupboard, searching for the source. The search became routine. He began to spend his evenings methodically checking every square inch of the flat: under the bed, behind the sofa, in the space beneath the kitchen sink. He opened and closed the fridge for no reason, just to hear the sound. He set up elaborate barricades of furniture in front of the doors, stacking chairs and books in absurd little towers. It didn’t make him feel safer, but the ritual was soothing in its predictability. He wrote down the patterns, just in case he forgot. “Check bedroom window.” “Stack chairs at door.” “Listen for voice—don’t answer.” He stuck these notes to the fridge, the mirror, the back of his phone. Sometimes he’d wake up and find new notes he didn’t remember writing, with stranger instructions: “Hide in closet.” “Don’t let it see you.” “Lock bathroom and wait.” He did these things, even when he didn’t believe in them. It was like giving in to a superstition: illogical, but somehow necessary. The hallucinations—or whatever they were—grew more convincing. One evening, sitting at the kitchen table with the lights all on, he saw the figure crouched beneath the window. It was almost comical, the way it pressed itself into the corner, as if it didn’t want to be seen. But when he turned on his phone’s flashlight and shone it toward the corner, the darkness was empty, undisturbed. He laughed, a strangled, breathless sound. He turned off the light, and for a split second, the shape was there again, frozen in the act of rising. He started to think he was losing his mind. Not in the cinematic, spectacular way, but gradually, like someone slipping down an embankment in the dark. At first, he tried to keep notes about his symptoms: “Visual disturbances: persistent.” “Auditory hallucinations: likely.” “Paranoia—unable to rule out.” But after a while, the notes became gibberish, slanted lines of words with no clear meaning, like fragments of a language he’d never learned. In the dead of night, the voices sometimes argued with him, or with each other. He’d listen to them through the wall, his ear pressed flat, and hear snatches of angry whisper, then laughter. The laughter was the worst. It was high and thin, and once, he recognized it as his own. He started skipping work, using up his sick days. It didn’t matter; no one from the office called. He suspected they had always regarded him as a ghost anyway. The only thing that drew him outside was the need for supplies: food, bottled water, more paracetamol. Each trip out was an ordeal, and he found himself dreading the return, the moment when he’d open the apartment door and feel the pressure in the air. Once, after a night spent awake and trembling, he saw the figure standing in the living room. Not crouched, not hiding—standing in plain sight, tall and impossibly thin, its face all teeth and eyes, a smile stretched too far. Ryan wanted to scream, but his throat locked up. The thing just stood there, a silhouette against the window, its arms dangling like cords. He blinked, and it was gone. But he knew it would be back. From then on, the boundaries between dream and waking grew blurry. He’d fall asleep in one room and wake up in another, not knowing how he’d moved. He’d find himself holding objects—kitchen knives, heavy glass bottles—without memory of retrieving them. Sometimes the walls seemed to breathe, bowing inward and out, as if the whole building were a lung. He stopped eating. He stopped showering. The only thing that kept him anchored was the ritual of searching, of barricading, of writing notes to himself. He stopped using the laptop; the idea of seeing his own reflection in the black screen was unbearable. On the fourth day of his self-imposed siege, he woke on the living room floor, shivering and damp. The room was nearly dark, except for the faint glow of the streetlamp through the curtains. He sat up, every muscle in his back screaming, and saw that the furniture had been moved—his own barricade dismantled, the chairs stacked neatly along the wall. The front door was wide open. Cold air drifted in. He crawled to the door, peered into the corridor. It was empty, but he heard the familiar scrape, the dragging sound, coming from somewhere below. He almost followed it, but something in him rebelled, and he slammed the door shut, wedging his body against it. He sat like that for hours, staring at the blank wall opposite, waiting for the next move. When it came, it was simple. He heard a voice—his own voice—speaking softly in the bedroom. He got up, hands shaking, and crept down the hall. The voice spoke again, and this time it said something he couldn’t make out, a string of syllables that sounded like his name spelled backwards. He stepped into the bedroom and found the figure there, standing at the foot of the bed. It smiled at him, lips parting to reveal a mouth full of glittering, needle-like teeth. For the first time, Ryan saw the mask: pale, featureless except for the smile, and for the hollow black holes where eyes should be. He realized, with a jolt, that the mask was not covering a face—it was the face. The thing reached out a hand, impossibly long and thin, and beckoned. Ryan wanted to run, but his feet wouldn’t move. Instead, he found himself walking toward it, unable to stop. The figure’s other hand came up, holding something—a black, greasy object, the size and shape of a heart. It pressed the heart into Ryan’s chest, and for a moment, there was nothing but cold and silence. When he woke, it was morning, and the apartment was quiet again. The door was closed. The barricades were gone. The walls looked normal, the furniture in its proper place. Ryan got up, made himself coffee, and sat at the table in the same chair as always. He felt different, though. Lighter, in a way. As if something inside him had been scooped out, and the absence was finally complete. He spent the rest of the day sitting in the sunbeam that crossed the kitchen at noon, feeling nothing at all. That night, Ryan dreamed of hiding. He was in a closet, or a wardrobe, the kind with slatted doors that let in blades of dusty light. He crouched on a pile of coats, knees to his chest, and watched through the crack as a woman moved around the room. She was humming, folding laundry into small, perfect squares. There was a sweetness to the moment, a domesticity that felt both foreign and achingly familiar. He wanted to stay hidden forever, just watching. But then the woman turned, her head cocked as if she’d heard a sound. She walked over to the closet, slow and deliberate, and put her hand on the knob. Ryan tried to press himself further back, into the darkness, but there was no more room. The door creaked open and she peered in, her eyes meeting his through the narrow gap. She screamed, dropping the laundry, and the noise was enormous—a shriek that made the whole house shudder. Ryan wanted to say something, to apologize, but when he opened his mouth he felt his lips stretch into a smile, wide and cartoonish, and the sound that came out was wrong, all teeth and laughter. He woke gasping, clutching the blanket to his chest. For a long time, he sat on the edge of the bed, the dream replaying in his head on a loop. The fear was different now: not the creeping, ambient anxiety of before, but something sharp, immediate, a conviction that the thing in the dream—the smiling thing—wanted to kill him. He went to the bathroom and splashed water on his face. He looked in the mirror and forced himself to smile, slowly, watching for any sign that his reflection would slip or break. It didn’t. It just looked tired. He dried his face on a towel and went to the kitchen, where the sun was just coming up. He made coffee and sat at the table, trying to think. He needed a plan, a way to defend himself. Maybe he could call someone—a doctor, the police, his mother. He imagined the conversation, how he would explain the demon, the voices, the feeling of being watched. He couldn’t do it. They would never believe him. He turned on the TV for noise, flipping through the channels until he landed on the evening news. He let it play in the background as he stared at the coffee, tracing circles on the rim of the mug with his finger. He barely heard the first part of the story: another local murder, the victim found in her apartment, no sign of forced entry. But when they showed the woman’s photo, something in Ryan’s brain went white-hot. He recognized her. Not from real life, but from the dream—the woman folding laundry. The one who screamed. He turned up the volume and leaned in, listening to the details. The anchor mentioned that the police had no suspects, no witnesses, but were asking for information about a piece of jewelry the woman was known to wear. They flashed a picture of it: a silver chain with a pendant shaped like a tear. It was distinctive, beautiful, and Ryan felt a cold certainty bloom in his chest. He’d seen that necklace before. In the dream, yes—but also somewhere else. He couldn’t place it, but the memory nagged at him all day, until his hands shook and he had to sit down. He tried to tell himself it was a coincidence, a trick of the mind. But as night fell and the shadows in the flat grew long and angular, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the necklace was important. That it was meant for him. He paced the rooms, opening drawers and cupboards, looking for—what, exactly? He didn’t know. He checked under the bed, behind the sofa, in the pockets of his own coats. The apartment yielded nothing. He went to the kitchen and opened every cabinet, every tin and box, even the ones he never used. Still nothing. Finally, desperate, he went to the closet under the stairs. It was a cramped, low-ceilinged space, mostly empty except for some old cleaning supplies and a toolbox. He pulled everything out and crawled inside, running his hands over the floor and walls. At the very back, behind a warped panel, he felt an unevenness—a small, rectangular patch that sounded hollow when tapped. He used a screwdriver to pry it open. Inside was a shallow cavity, barely big enough for a shoebox. He reached in and found a plastic bag, knotted tight. His fingers trembled as he pulled it out and unwrapped it. Inside was a tangle of jewelry: earrings, rings, bracelets, none of which he recognized. At the very bottom was the necklace from the news—the silver chain, the teardrop pendant. He stared at it, willing himself to remember where it came from, how it got here. He could not. He sat on the floor, surrounded by the odd little trophies, his breathing shallow and uneven. For a long time, he didn’t move. He just looked at the necklace, rolling it between his fingers, feeling its weight. It was real. It was here. He couldn’t make sense of it. He thought of the spreadsheet on DarkWitness, the pattern of lonely deaths. He wondered, not for the first time, if the thing haunting him was not a demon at all, but something inside his own head. He sat in the darkness, the jewelry cold in his palm, and tried to remember who he was before all this started. The answer did not come. Ryan stared at the heap of jewelry on the floor, the evidence of his own secret life. The cold rational part of his brain—what remained of it—offered explanations: sleepwalking, psychosis, a fugue state brought on by stress or grief. But none of these excuses mattered. The items were here, the necklace was real, and somewhere a woman had died, her last memory a grinning face peering out from the shadows. He retreated to the living room and sat on the floor, knees drawn to his chest, the necklace digging into his palm. The smell of sweat and metal was thick in the air. He tried to cry, but nothing happened. He tried to pray, but could not remember the words. He tried to scream, but the only sound that came was a quiet, childish sob, quickly swallowed by the silence. He considered calling the police. It seemed the right thing to do—a way to end the story, to put himself away somewhere safe. He imagined the conversation, the flashing lights outside, the neighbors staring as he was led away in cuffs. He wondered if they would believe him, or if he would simply disappear into a padded room, another lonely statistic in the spreadsheet. The thought of it made him nauseous. He thought, too, of ending things himself. The ways to do it played out in his mind, efficient and clean. It would be easier, he reasoned, than waiting for the thing inside him to finish the job. He even went so far as to line up the pills on the kitchen counter, counting them out with the same precision he used to stack the barricade of chairs. But when it came time to act, his hands would not obey. He put the pills back, one by one, and sat down in the dark, waiting for the next move. That was when the voice started speaking to him again. Not in the slippery, ambiguous way of before, but with clarity, as if someone were sitting beside him. “You’ve always been good at hiding,” it said. “But you can’t hide from me.” Ryan pressed his hands to his ears, but the voice was inside, coiled around his thoughts. It was patient, gentle even, a whisper of reassurance. “It’s all right,” it said. “You were made for this.” He shook his head, tried to drown it out with his own voice, but the thing persisted, speaking over him in a steady, comforting murmur. “Don’t you see? This is what you’ve wanted, all along. The silence. The absence. You didn’t lose yourself—you found me.” Ryan opened his eyes and saw the mask, the wide, permanent smile, floating in the darkness across the room. It was impossible, a hallucination, but it felt more real than anything else. He reached out, fingers trembling, and the mask drifted closer, as if drawn by the gravity of his need. The voice grew bolder, filling the emptiness. “Let me in,” it said. “Let me stay. I can keep you company. You’ll never be alone again.” The offer was obscene, but also irresistible. Ryan felt a surge of warmth, a sick comfort, at the thought of no longer being himself, of never again having to answer for his own actions. He could give in, and the thing would take over, and all the fear would melt away. He thought of the woman in the dream, her scream of terror. He thought of the pile of jewelry, the bodies in the spreadsheet, the empty names stacked up like bones. He thought of his mother, his father, their disappointed faces at the other end of the line. He closed his eyes and breathed in, long and slow. “All right,” he said, aloud, his own voice sounding foreign. “I’ll let you in. Just—just promise you’ll never leave.” The smile seemed to widen, the eyes growing brighter in the dark. “I promise,” the voice said, and for the first time, Ryan believed it. He sat there, unmoving, as the mask drifted closer and the boundaries between them dissolved. He felt himself open up, hollowing out, making room for the thing he’d spent a lifetime denying. The apartment was very quiet. He did not feel alone. Credit: T. 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