Chapter 3: Siege of Light

Ethan never made it to his conference presentation.

He'd managed maybe two hours of fitful sleep before the tapping started in earnest—a soft, persistent rhythm against the hotel room window that could have been tree branches or could have been something else entirely. By 3 AM, he'd given up on sleep altogether and spent the remaining hours until dawn sitting in the desk chair, facing the curtained windows, a letter opener from the hotel stationary kit clutched in his white-knuckled fist.

When morning finally came, pale and gray through the heavy curtains, the tapping had stopped. Ethan called the front desk and claimed a family emergency, then threw his belongings into his suitcase with the kind of desperate efficiency that came from pure terror. He needed to get home. Needed to get to his apartment, his sanctuary, the one place in the world where he felt marginally safe.

The drive back to his Rogers Park apartment was a blur of highway and mounting paranoia. Every shadow seemed deeper than it should be. Every figure in his peripheral vision might have been wearing his father's face. By the time he pulled into his building's underground parking garage, his hands were cramping from gripping the steering wheel too tightly.

The garage was a concrete tomb of flickering fluorescents and oil stains, the kind of space that felt hostile even under the best circumstances. Ethan's footsteps echoed off the low ceiling as he hurried toward the elevator, his suitcase wheels chattering over the uneven pavement.

He was almost there when the lights went out.

Not all of them—just a section directly ahead, plunging the area around the elevator into thick shadows. The remaining fluorescents buzzed and flickered, casting everything in a strobing, nightmare quality that made it impossible to focus on any single point.

Ethan froze, every muscle in his body screaming contradictory commands. Run. Hide. Fight. His rational mind tried to assert itself—power grid issues, old building, perfectly normal—but his lizard brain knew better. Predators hunted in the dark.

A sound echoed from the shadows near the elevator. Footsteps, but wrong somehow. Too measured, too deliberate. The sound of someone who had all the time in the world and knew exactly where they were going.

Ethan backed toward his car, fumbling for his keys, when he saw it.

The figure emerged from the shadows like it was made of them, tall and wrong and wearing his father's face like an ill-fitting mask. In the strobing light of the dying fluorescents, Ethan could see details that his mind refused to process properly. The way it moved without quite seeming to touch the ground. The smile that stretched too wide, revealing teeth that might not have been teeth at all. The eyes that caught and held the flickering light like a cat's, but cold, so cold.

"Ethan." The voice was his father's but not his father's, familiar cadences wrapped around something fundamentally alien. "I've been waiting for you."

Ethan ran.

He dropped his suitcase and sprinted toward the garage entrance, his dress shoes slipping on the concrete, the sound of his panic echoing off the walls. Behind him, he could hear the thing that wore his father's shape following at that same measured pace, unhurried, patient as death itself.

The garage entrance seemed impossibly far away, a rectangle of gray daylight that might as well have been on another planet. Ethan's lungs burned, his heart hammered, and still those footsteps followed, never getting closer but never falling behind.

He burst out of the garage and into the weak morning light, gasping like a drowning man. The street was empty except for a jogger with earbuds and a woman walking her dog—normal people living normal lives, blissfully unaware that nightmares could walk around in broad daylight wearing the faces of the dead.

Ethan looked back at the garage entrance, expecting to see the thing pursuing him, but there was nothing. Just shadows and the distant hum of fluorescent lights struggling back to life.

He stood there on the sidewalk for ten minutes, shaking and sweating in his wrinkled conference clothes, before he worked up the courage to go back inside. But he didn't use the garage. Instead, he went through the main lobby, past the security desk where old Mr. Kowalski was reading his morning paper, up the elevator to the fifteenth floor like a normal resident returning from a normal business trip.

His apartment felt different the moment he opened the door.

Nothing was obviously wrong—his books were still on their shelves, his furniture exactly where he'd left it, his carefully maintained minimalist sanctuary intact. But the air felt heavier somehow, charged with the kind of tension that made his teeth ache.

Ethan dropped his keys on the kitchen counter and forced himself to do a methodical search of the apartment. Bedroom clear. Bathroom clear. Living room and kitchen clear. Everything exactly as it should be.

Except for the closet.

He almost missed it—a smudge of something dark on the hardwood floor just inside his bedroom closet. Ethan knelt down for a closer look and felt his stomach lurch.

Footprints. Dirty, muddy footprints tracking across his pristine floor, leading from the back wall of the closet to the bedroom and then simply... stopping. As if whoever had made them had vanished into thin air.

The prints were large, size twelve at least, and shaped like work boots or hiking shoes. His father had worn size twelve. Had owned a pair of Timberlands that he'd worn for yard work and weekend projects, boots that had spent years collecting mud and grass stains and the accumulated debris of suburban life.

Ethan backed away from the closet, his mind racing. Someone had been in his apartment. Someone had walked out of his closet—which was impossible because closets didn't lead anywhere except to the back wall of his building—and then disappeared without a trace.

His phone rang, shrill and sudden in the silence. Ethan lunged for it, desperate for any connection to the normal world.

"Ethan? Thank God." Sarah's voice was tight with concern. "I've been trying to reach you all morning. You missed your presentation, and nobody knew where—"

"I'm fine," he lied, staring at the muddy footprints. "Family emergency. Had to leave early."

"Bullshit. This is about last night, isn't it? That thing in the courtyard." Sarah's voice dropped to a whisper. "I called the hotel security. They said there were no cameras covering that area, but the night janitor found muddy footprints by the fountain. Size twelve work boots."

The phone nearly slipped from Ethan's numb fingers. "Sarah—"

"Whatever's happening to you, you don't have to deal with it alone. I can catch a flight, be there by tonight—"

"No." The word came out harsher than he'd intended. "I mean, thank you, but no. It's not safe."

"What do you mean it's not—"

Ethan hung up and immediately turned off the phone. Sarah was a good friend, maybe his only real friend, but he couldn't drag her into this. Whatever was hunting him, it was focused on him specifically. Anyone else was just collateral damage waiting to happen.

The sun was setting by the time he finished securing his apartment.

It had taken most of the day, but Ethan had turned his home into a fortress of light. Every lamp was on, blazing at maximum wattage. He'd bought three industrial work lights from the hardware store downstairs and positioned them strategically around the living room. The bedroom had two more lamps plus a string of Christmas lights he'd found in a box in the closet—the same closet where the muddy footprints had appeared.

He'd cleaned up the prints, but the stain on the hardwood remained, a dark smudge that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Ethan had pushed his dresser in front of the closet door and piled boxes on top of it. Not much of a barrier, but it made him feel marginally better.

The apartment hummed with electricity now, every surface bathed in warm, safe light. No shadows anywhere, no dark corners where something could lurk and watch and wait. Ethan sat in his kitchen with his back to the wall, a baseball bat across his knees and enough coffee to keep him wired until dawn.

The thing—whatever it was—seemed to need darkness. In the parking garage, it had waited for the lights to fail. At the hotel, it had stayed in the shadows of the courtyard. Even the footprints in his closet had appeared in the darkest corner of his apartment.

Light was safety. Darkness was death. The equation was that simple.

His laptop sat open on the kitchen counter, the screen casting its own small pool of illumination. Ethan had spent hours researching everything he could find about shadow people, doppelgangers, manifestations of grief, anything that might explain what was hunting him. Most of it was obvious nonsense—conspiracy theories and ghost stories that belonged on late-night radio shows.

But some of it felt uncomfortably familiar. Stories of entities that mimicked the dead, that fed on grief and loss and the desperate love of the living. Creatures that could only exist in darkness, that grew stronger the more their victims believed in them.

The problem was that belief seemed beside the point. Ethan had seen the thing twice now, and Sarah had seen it too. This wasn't a hallucination or a psychological break. This was real, physical, undeniably present in the world.

His father's face, but wrong. His father's voice, but hollow. His father's shape, but moving with the patient certainty of something that had never been human at all.

The lights flickered.

Ethan's head snapped up, his grip tightening on the baseball bat. Just for a second, just a brief brownout that might have been nothing more than the building's aging electrical system protesting the sudden drain of so many lights running simultaneously.

But in that moment of dimness, he could have sworn he saw something move in the reflection of his kitchen window. A shadow detaching itself from the darkness outside, pressing against the glass like it was testing for weaknesses.

The lights steadied, burning bright and clean and safe. The window showed nothing but his own reflection staring back, pale and wild-eyed and holding a baseball bat like it was the only thing standing between him and the abyss.

Ethan checked his watch: 11:47 PM. At least six hours until dawn, six hours of sitting in his fortress of light and hoping the electricity held. His coffee cup was empty, but the thought of crossing the apartment to refill it made his skin crawl.

Outside, Chicago went about its normal nighttime business. Cars passed on the street below, their headlights cutting temporary paths through the darkness. Somewhere in the building, a neighbor's television played too loudly. Normal sounds of normal life continuing in blissful ignorance of the fact that impossible things could stalk the living through suburban parking garages and hotel courtyards.

The lights flickered again, longer this time.

In the brief dimness, Ethan saw his reflection in the kitchen window shift and change. For just a moment, it wasn't his face looking back at him.

It was his father's, wearing that terrible, too-wide smile.

The lights came back up, and his reflection was normal again. But the message was clear: the walls of light weren't as solid as he'd hoped. And the thing wearing his father's face was running out of patience.

Ethan settled deeper into his chair, bat across his knees, and prepared for the longest night of his life.

Outside, the darkness pressed against his windows like a living thing, patient and hungry and full of familiar faces that were no longer quite human.