Chapter 4: The Empty Room

Liam had barely slept. Every time he'd started to drift off, the memory of those round, unblinking eyes in the photograph would jolt him back to wakefulness. He'd spent the hours before dawn staring at the bedroom door, listening for scratching sounds that never came, watching for the door handle to turn again. But the house had remained silent, as if whatever had been wearing Chloe's nightgown had simply vanished with the approaching sunrise.

When morning finally broke through their curtains, Chloe stirred beside him, stretching and yawning before rolling over to face him.

"You look terrible," she said, her voice thick with sleep. "Did you get any rest at all?"

"Not much." He tried to keep his voice light, normal. "Just one of those nights, you know?"

She propped herself up on one elbow, studying his face with the kind of concerned attention that made his chest tight. "Liam, what's going on? You've been acting strange ever since we moved in here. The broken plates, the weird noises, now you're not sleeping..."

"I'm fine. Really. Just adjusting to the new place."

But even as he said it, he knew she didn't believe him. How could she? He looked like hell, felt worse, and was carrying a photograph on his phone that showed something impossible lurking in their hallway. The rational part of his mind kept insisting he should tell her everything, show her the evidence, let her help him figure out what they were dealing with.

The primitive part whispered that doing so would put her in danger.

"I'm going to make coffee," Chloe said, kissing his forehead before sliding out of bed. "And you're going to eat something. You're wasting away."

After she headed downstairs, Liam lay in bed for another few minutes, gathering the courage to check on Dan. His brother had been in the spare room all night, and Liam realized with growing unease that he hadn't heard any movement from that direction since the footsteps in the hallway. No toilet flushes, no creaking floorboards, no sounds of someone getting up and around.

Maybe Dan was just a heavy sleeper. Maybe he'd slept through everything that had happened in the hallway, blissfully unaware of the thing that had been scratching at their bedroom door.

Liam pulled on a t-shirt and padded down the hall to the spare room. The door was closed, just as it had been when Dan had said goodnight around eleven. He knocked softly.

"Dan? You awake?"

No response. Liam knocked again, a little louder this time.

"Hey, sleepyhead. Chloe's making coffee."

Still nothing. A cold knot was forming in Liam's stomach as he turned the handle and pushed the door open.

The room was empty.

Not just empty of people – empty of everything that would indicate Dan had ever been there at all. The bed was made with military precision, the comforter pulled tight and tucked at the corners. The pillows were fluffed and arranged exactly as they'd been before Dan's arrival. There were no clothes draped over the chair, no phone charger plugged into the wall, no indentation on the mattress where a body had spent the night.

Even the air in the room felt wrong – stale and undisturbed, like a space that hadn't been occupied in weeks.

"Dan?" Liam's voice came out as barely a whisper. He stepped into the room, looking for any sign that his brother had been there. A stray sock, a wrinkled pillowcase, anything that would prove the previous night had actually happened.

But there was nothing.

He pulled back the comforter and checked the sheets – pristine white, still creased from the package they'd come in. He opened the closet, checked under the bed, even looked in the small wastebasket in the corner. Every surface was clean, untouched, as if the room existed in a state of perpetual vacancy.

"Liam?" Chloe's voice drifted up from the kitchen. "Coffee's ready!"

He stumbled out of the spare room and down the stairs, his mind reeling. Dan had been here. They'd played FIFA, shared a six-pack of Budweiser, heard that impossible voice calling from upstairs. Dan had grabbed his shoulder, had pulled him toward the front door when the laughter began. They'd sat in the diner until 3 AM, talking through what they'd experienced, trying to make sense of the impossible.

It had all been real. It had to have been real.

In the kitchen, Chloe was humming quietly as she poured coffee into two mugs. She looked up as he entered, her expression immediately shifting to concern.

"Jesus, Liam. You look like you've seen a ghost."

The phrase hit him like a physical blow. He sank into one of the kitchen chairs, staring at the table's surface without really seeing it.

"Did... did Dan call this morning? Or text?"

"Dan?" Chloe frowned, setting a mug in front of him. "No, why would he call? Is everything okay?"

"He was here last night. In the spare room."

Chloe's frown deepened. "No, he wasn't. You were home alone when I got back from dinner, remember? You said you'd just been watching TV."

"No." The word came out more forcefully than he'd intended. "No, he came over around seven. Brought beer. We played video games, and then we heard..." He trailed off, realizing how insane he was about to sound. "We both heard someone calling my name from upstairs."

"Liam." Chloe sat down across from him, reaching over to take his hands. "Honey, Dan wasn't here last night. I would have seen his car, would have said hello. When I came home around midnight, you were passed out on the couch with the PlayStation still on."

"That's not what happened." But even as he said it, doubt was creeping in. Had he really called Dan? Had his brother really come over, or had he just imagined the whole thing? The stress of the move, the weird incidents in the house, the lack of sleep – was his mind finally cracking under the pressure?

"Let me call him," Chloe said gently. "Just to check in."

She pulled out her phone and dialed, putting it on speaker. Dan answered on the third ring, his voice cheerful and familiar.

"Hey, Chloe. What's up?"

"Hi, Dan. How are you doing?"

"Good, good. Just getting ready for work. Sarah made pancakes, so I'm running a little late, but I'm not complaining."

Chloe glanced at Liam, her expression carefully neutral. "Did you talk to Liam yesterday? He thought you might have made plans or something."

"Yesterday? No, I don't think so. Been meaning to call him, actually. Haven't talked to him in like a week. Why?"

The phone might as well have been a knife sliding between Liam's ribs. He stared at the device, listening to his brother's voice – the same voice that had laughed at his FIFA victories, that had said "whatever that is, it's not Chloe" in a tone of growing alarm.

"No reason," Chloe said, still watching Liam's face. "Just checking. How's Sarah?"

"She's great. We should all get dinner soon, actually. Maybe at that new Italian place downtown."

"That sounds wonderful. I'll let you get to work."

"Tell Liam I said hey. And seriously, let's plan that dinner. It's been too long."

Chloe hung up and set the phone on the table between them. The silence stretched out, broken only by the tick of the kitchen clock and the distant hum of morning traffic.

"Liam," she said finally, "I think you need to see someone. A doctor, or maybe a therapist. This level of stress isn't normal."

He wanted to argue, to insist that Dan had been there, that they'd shared those beers and heard that voice together. But the evidence was overwhelming – the empty spare room, Dan's confusion on the phone, Chloe's gentle but firm certainty that he'd been alone.

Had he imagined it all? Had the isolation and fear finally pushed him over some invisible edge, causing him to conjure up a companion to share his terror? The alternative – that something in the house could make people simply vanish from existence, erasing not just their presence but all evidence they'd ever been there – was too horrible to contemplate.

"Maybe you're right," he said quietly, though the words tasted like ash in his mouth.

Chloe squeezed his hands. "We'll figure this out, okay? Whatever's going on, we'll deal with it together. But first, you need to get some proper sleep. Call in sick today."

He nodded, though he knew sleep wouldn't come. How could it, when he couldn't trust his own perceptions anymore? When his memories might be nothing more than stress-induced hallucinations?

As Chloe moved around the kitchen, preparing for her own workday, Liam sat at the table and tried to make sense of what was happening to him. The broken plates, the slamming doors, the voice that had called his name – were all of those delusions too? Was he having some kind of breakdown, manufacturing supernatural explanations for the ordinary stresses of homeownership?

But then he remembered the photograph on his phone. The impossible image of moving eyes in a window's reflection. That, at least, was real. That was evidence he could hold onto.

He pulled out his phone and opened the camera roll, scrolling back to the image from the previous night. But when he found it, his blood turned to ice.

The photograph showed exactly what he'd seen before the flash fired – an empty hallway, perfectly normal in every way. But the window at the far end, where those round eyes had been watching him, was just a window. Clear glass reflecting nothing more sinister than the opposite wall.

The eyes were gone. As if they had never been there at all.