Chapter 3: The Third Floor Window

Michael woke to sunlight streaming through his bedroom window and the distant sound of traffic humming below his third-floor apartment. For a moment, blessed confusion clouded his thoughts—where was he? The familiar weight of his city mattress beneath him, the honking of horns from the street, the neighbors' muffled television through the thin walls—it all felt like a dream after the silence of the mountains.

He sat up slowly, his body aching as if he'd been in a car accident. His mouth tasted like copper and fear, and when he tried to remember how he'd gotten home, he found only fragments. The cabin. The thing in his bedroom. The closet door opening. Then... nothing. A blank space where memory should be, followed by the vague recollection of driving through the night, his hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel, checking the rearview mirror obsessively.

The clock on his nightstand read 11:47 AM. He'd lost almost two days somewhere in the gap between terror and safety. His laptop bag sat by the door, his hastily packed duffel dumped beside it. He didn't remember packing. Didn't remember checking out of the cabin or making the four-hour drive back to Denver.

Michael stumbled to the bathroom and stared at his reflection in the mirror. His face was pale and drawn, dark circles under his eyes making him look like he'd aged a decade in three days. There were scratches on his arms that he couldn't remember getting, thin red lines that looked almost deliberate in their spacing.

Stress, he told himself. Isolation psychosis. You had a breakdown from burnout and your mind created something to explain the fear.

The explanation felt hollow, but he clung to it anyway. As he showered and dressed, he built the rational narrative piece by piece. He'd been under enormous stress at work. He'd isolated himself in an unfamiliar environment. His city-trained subconscious had interpreted normal mountain sounds as threats, and sleep deprivation had done the rest. The mind was capable of incredible self-deception when pushed to its limits.

By afternoon, he'd almost convinced himself. He ordered Chinese takeout, caught up on emails, even managed to laugh at a YouTube video. The familiar rhythms of city life wrapped around him like a security blanket, each car horn and siren a reminder that he was back in the rational world where things could be explained and understood.

He called in sick to work—not entirely a lie, given his mental state—and spent the day deliberately not thinking about the mountains. He reorganized his closet, did laundry, watched mindless television. Normal activities for a normal person having a normal recovery from a normal stress episode.

The sun set behind the downtown skyline, and Michael realized with satisfaction that he felt genuinely calm for the first time since returning. The terror of the mountains seemed ridiculous now, viewed from his safe apartment surrounded by a million other people. Whatever had happened up there—hallucination, panic attack, psychological break—it was over.

He made dinner, watched the news, read a few chapters of a thriller novel. By ten PM, he was genuinely tired, the kind of healthy exhaustion that promised peaceful sleep. He brushed his teeth, checked that the front door was locked (a city habit that had nothing to do with mountain terrors), and climbed into bed feeling more like himself than he had in days.

Sleep came easily, deep and dreamless. His body finally relaxed completely, releasing tension he hadn't realized he was carrying. The sounds of the city—distant traffic, the hum of the building's heating system, a neighbor's late-night television—lulled him into profound rest.

At 3:30 AM, Michael's eyes snapped open to the sound of three soft taps on his bedroom window.

For a moment, his sleep-fogged brain didn't process what he'd heard. He lay still, listening to the familiar sounds of his apartment building—the elevator down the hall, someone's footsteps in the unit above, the ever-present whisper of urban life.

Then it came again. Tap. Tap. Tap.

The same rhythm. The same patient, deliberate spacing. The exact sound that had terrorized him in the mountains, now somehow impossibly present outside his third-floor bedroom window.

Michael's rational mind immediately began offering explanations. A tree branch in the wind—except there were no trees near his building. A bird—except no bird tapped with such mechanical precision. Something thrown by kids in the street—except his window faced an interior courtyard three stories up.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

He forced himself to breathe slowly, to think logically. This was impossible. He was thirty feet above ground level. There was no fire escape outside his bedroom window, no balcony, no possible way for anyone to reach the glass from outside.

The tapping came again, and Michael realized with growing horror that it was exactly the same as in the mountains. Not similar—identical. The same spacing, the same gentle pressure, the same patient politeness of something that had all the time in the world.

He slipped out of bed and approached the window, his legs feeling like water. The bedroom faced the building's interior courtyard, a small rectangle of concrete and dying plants surrounded by other apartment windows. Motion-sensor lights illuminated the space below, and Michael could see that it was empty except for a few scattered trash cans and a bicycle chained to a post.

The tapping came from directly in front of him, at eye level with his third-floor window. But there was nothing there. Nothing visible, anyway.

Michael pressed his face to the glass and peered downward, looking for any explanation—a ladder, scaffolding, another person leaning out a window. But the courtyard was exactly as it should be, and the building's brick facade offered no handholds or ledges that could support a person.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The sound was definitely coming from his window, from the exact spot where he was looking. He could even see the tiny vibrations in the glass as something struck it from outside. But there was nothing there—nothing visible touching the window, nothing that could explain the sound.

His hands shook as he pulled out his phone and turned on the flashlight, pressing it to the window to illuminate the darkness beyond. The beam showed only empty air and the brick wall of the building across the courtyard. But as he moved the light, he could swear he saw something—a shadow that didn't quite belong, a darkness that seemed to shift just outside the beam's reach.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

This time, Michael could have sworn he saw the glass actually depress slightly with each impact, as if something invisible was pressing against it with considerable force. The impossible nature of what he was experiencing made his mind reel. This violated every law of physics, every rational explanation his analytical brain could produce.

He backed away from the window, his breath coming in short gasps. This wasn't stress. This wasn't a hallucination born of isolation and exhaustion. This was the same thing that had found him in the mountains, and somehow—impossibly—it had followed him home.

The tapping continued, patient and methodical. Michael grabbed his phone with shaking fingers and dialed 911, but before he could hit send, he stopped. What would he tell them? That something invisible was tapping on his third-floor window? That he was being stalked by something that defied physical laws?

They'd send an ambulance, not a police car. They'd take him for psychiatric evaluation, and he'd end up medicated and under observation while the thing outside continued its patient vigil.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Michael sank into the chair beside his dresser, staring at the window in horror. The sound continued, steady as a heartbeat, and with each repetition, the terrible truth became more undeniable. His escape from the mountains had been an illusion. The safety of his apartment, the comfort of the familiar city—all of it meaningless against something that could apparently appear anywhere, at any time.

The thing that had found him in the isolated cabin had followed him home to his locked apartment on the third floor of a downtown building. It had crossed hundreds of miles and defied the laws of physics to continue its patient, methodical pursuit.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

As the sound continued through the long hours before dawn, Michael sat frozen in his chair, understanding with crystalline clarity that his life as he knew it was over. Whatever was outside his window—whatever had spoken his name in that chorus of static-laden voices—it wasn't going to stop.

It had marked him somehow, claimed him, and no amount of distance or denial was going to change that fact.

The city had not saved him. His apartment was not sanctuary. There was no safe place, no escape, no rational explanation that could protect him from the thing that tapped patiently on his window, waiting with inhuman persistence for him to acknowledge its presence.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

By morning, Michael Hayes understood that he was no longer being haunted.

He was being hunted.