Chapter 3: The Invisible Watcher

Chapter 3: The Invisible Watcher

The sun rose, indifferent and golden, painting the returned world in hues of normalcy. The power was back on. The digital clock on the cable box blinked 6:04 AM, as if waking from a brief, forgettable nap. The fog was gone, leaving behind no trace of its chilling visitation. No moisture on the windows, no otherworldly residue on the floor. It had retreated as perfectly as it had arrived, leaving Eli alone in the silent, aftermath-buzz of his house.

He felt hollowed out, a raw nerve exposed to the air. The memory of Danny’s stolen voice whispering from the whiteout was a shard of ice in his gut. It wasn't just a phenomenon anymore; it was personal. It was a predator that knew his name, knew his weakest point, and had used it against him.

His search for proof became a fever. He couldn't eat, couldn't think about anything else. He ignored his mother's worried glances, her suggestions of seeing a doctor, and locked himself in his room with his laptop. He had to have caught something. Anything.

He started with the outdoor cameras. He had three of them, cheap Wi-Fi models he’d bought with his own money—one pointed at the porch, one at the driveway, and one covering the backyard. He scrubbed through the footage from the previous night with a frantic energy, his eyes scanning the timestamps.

There was nothing.

At 3:16 AM, the footage showed a quiet, empty street, bathed in the gentle glow of the corner streetlamp. At 3:18 AM, the scene was identical. There was no power outage. No rolling, sentient fog. No moment of absolute darkness. The camera had recorded a seamless, utterly mundane night that had never happened. It was as if reality itself had been edited, the horrifying 17 minutes snipped out and the two clean ends stitched together, leaving no seam.

“No,” he breathed, pushing his hands through his already messy hair. “No, it happened. I saw it.” Was he going insane? Was this some elaborate, waking hallucination, so powerful it overrode his senses but left technology untouched? The thought was almost more terrifying than the fog.

His shoulders slumped in defeat. He was about to close the laptop when he remembered the fourth camera. It was an old webcam he’d set up on his bookshelf months ago, pointed at his bed. After his mom had mentioned his childhood sleepwalking, a paranoid part of him had wanted to see if he was still doing it. He’d forgotten all about it.

His heart began to pound a slow, heavy rhythm. It was a long shot. The camera was inside. Maybe, just maybe, whatever warped the reality outside couldn't reach in here.

He navigated to the camera’s saved files, his fingers clumsy on the trackpad. The folder for last night contained dozens of short, motion-activated clips—him tossing and turning, getting up for water. Then he saw it. A single file that made the breath catch in his throat.

The timestamp was 3:17 AM.

The file was flagged as corrupted, a jumble of nonsensical letters and numbers for a name. But the file size was significant. He clicked on it. An error message popped up. He ran a diagnostic, his mind racing. It wasn't the recording that was corrupted; it was the file index. A simple fix. As the recovery software worked, a progress bar crept across the screen, each percentage point a new knot of dread in his stomach. Finally, it finished.

The file name resolved itself into a clean, simple label: REC_0317.mp4. The duration: 17:00.

With a trembling hand, he double-clicked.

The video player opened. The first few seconds were a blast of digital static, a hiss of white noise that made the hairs on his arms stand up. Then, the image resolved. It was his room, cast in the grainy, monochrome of the camera’s night vision. He could see himself, a lump under the covers, his breathing slow and even. The digital clock on his nightstand was a bright, unreadable glare.

For the first two minutes, nothing happened. It was a still, silent portrait of a teenager sleeping. Eli started to feel a wave of foolish relief. It was just a corrupted file, nothing more.

Then, at 2:13 in the video, the bedroom door began to move.

It didn’t swing open. It crept open, a millimeter at a time, with a slowness that was utterly unnatural. There was no sound, not even the faint creak of the old hinges. It moved as if pushed by an infinitely patient, silent hand, opening just wide enough for someone to slip through before stopping.

Eli’s mouth went dry. He watched, mesmerized and horrified, as the empty doorway stood open for a full minute. Nothing entered. No shadow fell across the floor.

But something had come in.

His gaze snapped to the edge of his bed in the video. The comforter, which had been smooth, began to depress. It sank slowly, deeply, as if a very large, heavy person were sitting down on the mattress, not three feet from his sleeping form. The fabric creased and folded around the invisible weight. The mattress tilted distinctly toward the indentation.

Eli felt a surge of bile rise in his throat. He was watching his own bed. He was watching an invisible presence sit down beside him as he slept.

The unseen thing just sat there. For five minutes. Ten. It didn’t move. It just occupied the space, a heavy, invisible watcher in the dark. The sheer violation of it was a physical blow. The thing that whispered with Danny’s voice, the thing that commanded the fog, had been in his room. It had sat on his bed and watched him, and he hadn't known. He had been completely, utterly vulnerable.

The clip ended as abruptly as it began. At the 17-minute mark, the indentation on the bed vanished in a single frame, the mattress springing back to its normal shape. The image dissolved into static, and the video was over.

Eli shoved himself away from the desk, his chair screeching against the floor. He stumbled backwards, his legs weak, and fell onto his bed, gasping for air he couldn’t seem to find. The spot where the thing had sat felt icy cold through his jeans. He had proof. He finally had proof, and it was a thousand times worse than his own imagination.

He lay there, curled on his side, his mind a maelstrom of terror. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the image of that sinking mattress was burned onto the inside of his eyelids. It was real. It was in his house. It was in his room.

After a long time, he forced himself to sit up, his body shaking. He needed to think. He needed to do something. He ran a hand over his face, then across the comforter, as if he could wipe away the phantom presence.

His fingers brushed against something.

It was a small square of paper, lying on his pillow where his head had been. He hadn’t noticed it before. It was old, the paper yellowed and brittle at the edges, folded once. It hadn't been there when he went to bed. It hadn't been there when he woke up.

With a growing sense of unreality, he picked it up. The paper was cold to the touch. He unfolded it.

Inside, written in a spidery, shaky script, were five words. The ink was faded, a watery grey. But the handwriting, despite its apparent age and the tremor that must have guided the pen, was unmistakably, horrifyingly, his own.

It looked like a note he would write to himself seventy years from now.

It said: YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO SEE US.