Chapter 4: The View from the Dark

Chapter 4: The View from the Dark

The looped video on Liam’s phone played on, a silent, damning testament. Empty porch. A scream of digital static. Package. The phone lay discarded on the couch, its tiny screen repeating the impossible birth of the object now sitting on their front porch. The melodic chime that had announced it felt like a funeral bell.

Liam stared at the front door, his knuckles white. The pragmatist in him, the tech-savvy problem solver, had been bludgeoned into submission by a half-second of corrupted data. All his plans—the camera, the digital fortress—were a joke. The entity hadn't just bypassed his security; it had used it to mock him, to show him the raw, incomprehensible mechanics of its power.

"I'm getting it," he said, his voice a low growl. It wasn't a question. It was a statement of defiance against an enemy he couldn't see or comprehend.

"Liam, don't," Elara whispered, her hand flying to the faint, silvery scar on her forearm. It was an instinctive gesture, a desperate touch to the proof that this all started with a simple painting of a car crash. Now, the horror was no longer predicting the future; it was manifesting on their doorstep.

"We can't just leave it out there," he shot back, his fear transmuting into a hot, directionless anger. "We can't let it think we're too scared to even open our own door."

He moved past her, grabbing a heavy, mag-lite flashlight from the drawer by the door—a pathetic, makeshift club against a thing that could rewrite reality. Elara watched, heart hammering against her ribs, as he unlocked the deadbolt and pulled the door open. The autumn air that rushed in felt unnaturally cold. He snatched the package from the welcome mat, his movements jerky and aggressive, and slammed the door shut, locking it again with a loud, final thud.

He carried it to the kitchen and placed it on the table, right where the other one had been. His chest was heaving, his breath coming in ragged bursts. The simple brown paper seemed to hum with a latent energy.

Elara’s gaze drifted from the new package to the empty space beside it. "We should..." she began, intending to say they should compare them, but the words caught in her throat.

The spot was empty.

The grotesque, fish-eye portrait of her face was gone.

"Where is it?" she asked, her voice a thin thread of sound. "Liam, where's the other painting?"

He spun around, his frantic energy deflating in an instant, replaced by a cold, sinking dread. "What? I didn't move it. I thought you..."

They both knew she hadn't. It had been sitting there, an object of their shared horror, for hours. They had stared at it, taken a sample from it, felt its oppressive presence poisoning the very air of the room. And now it was simply gone.

A frantic, useless search began. They checked the countertops, the living room, the trash can, their minds refusing to accept the only possible conclusion. The logic was simple and devastating. To place the new package, the entity didn't have to come inside. But to retrieve the old one, it did.

It had been in the house. While they were installing the camera, while they were waiting for Becca's call, while they were reeling from the impossible revelation of the blood pigment, the artist had slipped through their walls like a ghost, taken back its previous work, and left a new one in its place. The house wasn't a cage. It was a gallery, and they were the unwilling exhibits.

The fight drained out of Elara, replaced by an unnerving, icy calm. The terror was too vast now, too absolute. It was like drowning; after the initial struggle, there was only a quiet, cold acceptance. She walked to the table and placed her trembling fingers on the new package.

"Elara, wait," Liam pleaded, his voice cracking.

"What's the point?" she asked, her tone devoid of emotion. "It wants us to see it. It's already been in here. The worst part has already happened."

Her fingers, no longer clumsy with fear but moving with a numb, robotic precision, tore away the paper. It was another canvas board, the same size as the last. She took a steadying breath and turned it over.

The image was of them.

It was her and Liam, curled up on her bed just a few hours ago. They had tried to watch a movie, a futile attempt to inject some normalcy into the day before Becca’s shattering phone call. The scene was rendered in the same hyper-realistic, impossibly detailed style. The soft glow of the laptop screen illuminated their faces. Liam’s arm was protectively around her shoulders. Her own face was a mask of anxiety, her eyes wide and unfocused even in the gloom.

Every detail was perfect: the rumple of the duvet, the specific pattern of the pale yellow wallpaper, the way a stray strand of her dark hair fell across her cheek. The artist had captured the exhaustion, the fear, the fragile moment of comfort in a world that was falling apart. The colors were deep and rich, the shadows impossibly black. Elara stared at the dark umber of Liam's shirt, the crimson of the throw blanket, and felt a wave of nausea, knowing now that these vibrant hues were mixed with ancient, sacrificial blood. The artist wasn't just capturing reality; as Becca had said, they were giving a piece of themselves to make the image real.

It was a staggering violation of their privacy, a snapshot of a moment they thought was theirs alone. But as Elara’s eyes traced the lines of the composition, a new, more profound horror began to dawn. It was the perspective. The angle.

The painting wasn't rendered from the doorway, or from the foot of the bed. The point of view was slightly elevated, looking down at them from the far corner of the room. It was framed on the left by the dark, vertical line of a doorjamb, and at the top, just barely visible, were the faint, horizontal lines of slatted wood.

Her gaze slowly lifted from the canvas, across the living room, and down the short hallway to her bedroom door, which she’d left ajar. To the corner of the room. To the closet.

The perspective was unmistakable.

The painting had been rendered from inside her closet.

The silent, unseen artist hadn't just been in the house. It had been in her bedroom while they were in there, hiding in the shadows, watching them from the dark. Breathing the same air.

"Oh god," Liam whispered, following her horrified gaze. He understood. "Elara..."

She shook her head, a single, tearless sob escaping her lips. This whole time, they had been operating under one last, desperate assumption: that the entity was tied to the house, to the land, to this specific location. They had talked about researching the property's history, about finding the source of the haunting.

But that was a lie they had told themselves.

The first painting had predicted her accident on a street miles away. The packages appeared wherever she was. And now this—this intimate, terrifying portrait of them in her most private space.

The entity wasn't haunting her house.

It was haunting her.

She could run to Liam’s apartment. She could flee to another state, another country. It wouldn’t matter. There was no escape. The artist didn't need a door. It didn't need to follow. It was already there, watching from the dark corners of her life, waiting to paint the next moment of her terror.