Chapter 4: 3:17 AM

Chapter 4: 3:17 AM

The sleek, silver laptop sat on Maya’s coffee table, unplugged and silent. A shroud of a half-finished painting was draped over it, as if to ward off evil spirits. It had been three days since the icon for final.exe had manifested on her clean machine. Three days since Maya’s vibrant, paint-splattered studio had transformed from a sanctuary into a shared prison cell. They hadn't dared to turn the laptop on again.

Leo’s desire had shrunk from a grand escape to a single, humble plea: one night of uninterrupted sleep. He was camped out on her sofa, a fortress of pillows and blankets built against a horror he couldn't see. But sleep offered no refuge. Every time he closed his eyes, he was back in that digital hallway, the jagged scratch on the wall mocking him, the pixelated Echo of himself striding towards him with its dead, polygonal eyes. The phrase DON'T LIE TO THEM. played on a loop in his head, a question with no answer that was slowly eroding his sanity.

Maya was trying. She painted with a frantic energy during the day, filling the apartment with the sharp scent of turpentine and the rhythmic scrape of brush on canvas, a desperate attempt to drown the suffocating silence with normalcy. She made him food he barely touched and talked about gallery submissions and obtuse art theory professors, her voice a lifeline he clung to. But he could see the fear in her eyes. Every time his phone buzzed, she would flinch. They were both waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The obstacle was no longer just the entity; it was time itself. Specifically, the sliver of dead time in the deepest part of the night.

The first time it happened, he’d actually managed to drift into a shallow, fitful sleep. He was jolted awake by a vibration against his cheek. His phone, lying on the cushion beside him, was buzzing. He fumbled for it, his heart already hammering against his ribs. The screen was lit up, showing an incoming call.

But there was no name. No number. The space where the caller ID should have been was completely blank.

Hesitantly, his thumb hovering over the screen, he answered it. He didn't say anything, just held the cool glass to his ear. For a moment, there was nothing. Then, a sound flooded his ear—a wall of white noise, a harsh, crashing static like a detuned radio station broadcasting from the edge of the universe. It was loud, abrasive, and utterly empty. He was about to hang up when something shifted within the noise.

Whispers.

They were buried deep in the static, faint and sibilant, like leaves skittering across pavement. They weren't distinct words, but the cadence was there. It sounded like dozens of voices all speaking at once, their phrases overlapping into an incomprehensible, chilling murmur. He strained to make out a single word, a single voice, but it was impossible. It was the sound of a secret he wasn't meant to hear.

He snatched the phone away from his ear, his finger jabbing the ‘End Call’ icon. The static cut out. Silence returned. His hand was trembling. He looked at the time on the screen.

3:17 AM.

The next night, he was awake, staring at the ceiling as the minutes ticked by. He told himself it was a glitch, a spoofed call, a freak occurrence. But when 3:16 flipped to 3:17, his phone, sitting on the coffee table ten feet away, lit up the dark room. The screen showed the same blank, anonymous call.

He didn't answer it. He couldn’t. He just watched it ring, the silent, pulsing light a beacon of his own personal torment, until it finally stopped. He had refused the ritual, but the dread it left behind was just as potent. He didn't sleep at all.

This was the new pattern. A nightly, one-sided appointment. His paranoia grew, metastasizing like a cancer. His phone, once a connection to the world, now felt like a leash held by an unseen master.

Maya’s concern deepened. The dark circles under his eyes were becoming permanent fixtures. He was jumpy, irritable, and losing weight. “Leo, we have to do something,” she’d said that morning, her voice tight with worry. “Go to the police. See a doctor. Anything.”

“And say what?” he’d snapped back, his nerves frayed. “That a ghost in my computer is making prank calls? They’ll lock me up, Maya. That’s what it wants! I KNOW YOU'RE ALONE. It’s trying to make that true.”

The entity, it seemed, agreed with him. It was intelligent. It knew Maya was his only support, his only tether. And it began to actively, maliciously, cut the rope.

The turning point came with a simple text message. He was in the bathroom, splashing cold water on his face, when he heard Maya make a small, confused sound from the main room. He came out to see her staring at her phone, a frown creasing her brow.

“Did you mean to send this?” she asked, showing him the screen.

It was from him. A message sent just a minute ago. I need some space. Can you just not talk for a while?

Leo stared at it, his stomach clenching. “I didn't write that.”

“Leo, it’s right here,” she said, her voice strained. “From your number.”

He scrambled for his own phone. He scrolled through his sent messages. There was nothing. The message he had supposedly sent to her did not exist in his log. “It’s not here, Maya, I swear. It’s the entity. It’s messing with us.”

She looked from her phone to his, her expression a painful mix of fear and dawning suspicion. She wanted to believe him, he knew she did, but the alternative was so much easier to grasp. He was cracking.

The action from the entity was subtle, but devastatingly effective. It began deleting her messages to him. She would text to ask if he needed anything, and he would never receive it. Hours later, he’d ask her why she was being so quiet, and she’d look at him, hurt and confused, and say she’d been trying to talk to him all day. They’d compare phones, and the conversation threads wouldn't match. It was a slow, deliberate campaign of technological gaslighting, designed to make them doubt each other, to make him seem unstable and her seem neglectful.

The final, devastating surprise came late last night. He had finally succumbed to utter exhaustion, collapsing into a deep, dreamless sleep on the couch. Maya had been working late on a project, the soft glow of her desk lamp the only light in the studio.

His phone, lying face-up on the end table, suddenly lit up. She glanced over and saw a new message preview on his lock screen. It was a text to her.

I can't do this anymore. You're making it worse. Just leave me alone.

Her heart broke. She saw him there, asleep, looking so fragile and broken, and the cruelty of the message, the raw pushback against everything she was trying to do for him, was a physical blow. Quietly, so as not to wake him, she packed a few of her brushes and a small canvas and retreated to the art department’s 24-hour studio at the college, just to give him the space he seemed to be so desperately, cruelly, demanding.

When Leo woke up in the morning to an empty apartment, a cold knot of dread formed in his gut. He found a note on the table.

“Got your message. I’ll be back later. Get some rest.”

He checked his phone. No sent message. No record of anything. He called her, his voice frantic. “Maya, what message? I didn’t send you anything last night! I was asleep!”

Her voice on the other end was flat, exhausted. “Leo, I saw it. I’m just trying to do what you asked.”

“It wasn’t me!” he pleaded, his voice cracking. The walls of her apartment, once a haven of vibrant color, suddenly felt gray and constricting, just like the hallway in the game. He was alone. It had won.

He hung up, a profound sense of desolation washing over him. The entity didn’t need to attack him directly. It was smarter than that. It had found his greatest weakness—his dependence on his only friend—and it had poisoned it.

He sank onto the sofa, the silence of the empty apartment roaring in his ears. His gaze fell upon his phone. It was a black mirror, a conduit for the whispers, a weapon turned against him. He was trapped here, in this temporary home that no longer felt safe, with a traitor in his pocket.

With a shaking hand, he picked it up and checked the time.

3:13 AM.

The nightly ritual was about to begin again. And this time, there was no one else here to hear him scream.