Chapter 3: It Follows

Chapter 3: It Follows

The darkness in Leo's apartment was no longer empty. It was a presence, a heavy blanket thick with unseen observation. The two messages on his monitor—I KNOW YOU'RE ALONE. and DON'T LIE TO THEM.—were burned into his retinas. He had acted on pure, animal instinct. He ripped the power cord from the wall, then, with trembling hands, he’d fumbled for a screwdriver, unscrewed the side panel of his PC tower, and surgically removed his solid-state drives. The machine’s brain. Its memory. He stuffed them into his jacket pocket, the cold metal pressing against his ribs like captured ghosts. He left the PC case on the floor, a hollowed-out metal carcass.

His desire was no longer for a thrill; it was for sanctuary. For a place with bright lights and another human being. A place that wasn't his hallway.

Maya.

He fled his apartment without looking back, slamming and locking the door behind him as if that cheap piece of wood could contain the digital phantom he was leaving behind. The city streets, usually a source of detached anonymity, felt menacing. Every CCTV camera felt like an eye. Every flickering screen in a shop window felt like a potential vessel. He was a man running from his own shadow.

Twenty minutes later, he was pounding on Maya’s door, his knuckles raw. When she finally opened it, the contrast was a physical shock. Her studio apartment was an explosion of life. A wave of warmth, smelling of turpentine, fresh coffee, and something floral, washed over him. Canvases in various states of completion leaned against every wall, their vibrant, chaotic colors a defiant scream against the sterile gray dread that clung to him. Uncapped paint tubes and scattered brushes littered every surface. This was a place where things were made, not deconstructed.

Maya stood there, a smudge of cerulean blue on her cheek, her hair a messy bun held together by a pencil. Her sharp, observant eyes took in his appearance—the pale, clammy skin, the wild, haunted look in his eyes, the way he clutched his jacket.

“Leo?” Her voice was a mixture of surprise and immediate concern. “What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Worse,” he choked out, stumbling past her into the warmth of the room. He felt like a refugee seeking asylum.

The obstacle was immediate and immense: how to explain the unexplainable without sounding completely insane. He was an IT guy, a man of logic and systems. He knew how technology worked. And what he had seen defied every law he understood.

He began to talk, the words spilling out of him in a frantic, disjointed torrent. He paced her colorful rug, his hands gesturing wildly, the captive hard drives clinking in his pocket. He told her everything. The old forum, the N0_FACE user, the final.exe file. He described the first three loops, the mundane repetition. Then he described the fourth.

“It wasn't just a hallway, Maya. It was my hallway. Every detail. The poster from PAX, the scuff mark on the baseboard… even the scratch on the wall.” He stopped, his voice cracking on the last words. That damned scratch. It was the linchpin of his sanity, the undeniable proof.

Maya listened, her expression shifting from worried confusion to deep, furrowed concern. She led him to her small, paint-splattered sofa and pushed a mug of hot tea into his shaking hands.

“Okay, Leo, slow down. Breathe,” she said, her voice calm and grounding. “A game that looked like your apartment. That’s… incredibly creepy. It sounds like a new kind of ARG, or a really targeted, sophisticated hack.”

“It wasn’t a hack!” he insisted, the frustration making his voice shrill. “I ran it in a sandbox. It had no network access. It shouldn’t have known anything. Then there was this… this thing. A pixelated model that looked like me. It walked towards me, Maya. And the lights in my real hallway flickered with the lights in the game.”

He told her about the cryptic message, DON'T LIE TO THEM., and the final, terrifying lines on his boot screen after he’d forced a shutdown. He pulled the hard drives from his pocket and set them on her coffee table. “This is all that’s left. I had to get them out of there.”

Maya stared at the drives, then back at his face. He could see the conflict in her eyes. She was fiercely loyal, his anchor to the real world, and she wanted to believe him. But her mind, like his, operated on evidence and logic. “Leo,” she said gently, “you’ve been working insane hours. You barely sleep. You live on caffeine and whatever you can get delivered. Is it possible you were just… exhausted? That you fell asleep at your desk and had a nightmare? A really, really vivid one?”

The suggestion, as logical as it was, felt like a betrayal. “This wasn’t a dream, Maya!”

“I’m not saying it was!” she countered, holding up her hands. “I’m just trying to find an explanation that doesn’t involve a haunted video game. Someone could have been messing with you. They could have found photos of your apartment online, used some kind of remote access trojan…”

“No,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “It was there. It was real.”

A heavy silence fell between them. Maya chewed on her lower lip, her gaze fixed on the hard drives. She believed he was terrified. She just didn't believe in the cause. For Leo, this was a turning point. He felt a profound sense of relief being here, in this bright, safe space. Her skepticism, while frustrating, was also comforting. It was normal. In Maya’s world, computer programs didn’t come to life. Maybe she was right. Maybe he was just cracking under the pressure of his own isolation.

“Okay,” she said finally, her voice firm with a new resolve. “Okay. Let’s prove it. Let’s figure this out.”

She took action. She disappeared into a corner of the studio and returned with her laptop, a sleek, silver machine that was her prized possession for her graphic design work. She placed it on the coffee table.

“This is a clean machine,” she stated, opening the lid. “I only use it for my art. It’s never been connected to your network, never accessed your files. Nothing from your digital life has ever touched it. We’ll connect to my Wi-Fi, and I’ll run a deep diagnostic on your drives. We’ll find the malware, the rootkit, whatever it is. We’ll find the logical explanation.”

It was the perfect test. A controlled environment. The promise of a rational answer was a balm on his frayed nerves. He nodded, watching as the laptop booted up, its screen glowing with a crisp, clean desktop. A beautiful, high-resolution painting of a mythical forest—one of her own creations—served as the wallpaper. It was the antithesis of final.exe.

“What’s your Wi-Fi password?” he asked, his voice steadier now.

She told him. He leaned forward and typed it in, his fingers hovering over the trackpad to click ‘Connect.’ For a moment, he hesitated. It felt like plugging a toaster into a bathtub. But he had to know. He clicked.

The result was instantaneous and absolute. The laptop connected to the network. And in the top right corner of Maya’s pristine desktop, a new icon appeared.

It wasn’t installed. It didn’t load. It was simply there.

A single, white, pixelated square, like a low-resolution ghost.

Beneath it, in a crude, blocky font, was the name: final.exe.

The surprise was a silent, shared detonation. The air in the room turned thick and cold. Leo felt the blood drain from his face. Maya, who had been leaning over his shoulder with a look of reassuring confidence, let out a small, strangled gasp. Her pragmatic skepticism, her carefully constructed wall of logic, crumbled to dust in an instant.

She slowly backed away from the laptop, her wide, terrified eyes flicking from the icon on the screen to Leo’s face. The horror in her expression was a perfect mirror of his own.

He hadn’t brought a virus into her home on his hard drives. He hadn’t carried it through the door in his pocket. It had simply arrived with him.

“Leo…” she whispered, her voice trembling. “It didn’t follow the drives.”

He looked at her, the last shred of hope dying in his chest. He knew the terrifying truth of her unspoken conclusion.

“It followed me.”