Chapter 4: The First Night's Watch

Chapter 4: The First Night's Watch

The first act of war was to purge the corruption. Alex gathered the loaf of black-furred bread and the carton of curdled milk, his fingers barely touching them. He sealed them in a garbage bag, tied the knot tight, and then sealed that bag inside another. The sickly-sweet smell of decay seemed to cling to the plastic, a foul perfume he couldn't escape. He carried the bundle out to the apartment building’s dumpster as if it were a radioactive contaminant, his every step heavy with the knowledge that this was no longer just a haunting. It was an invasion.

Back inside, with the deadbolt thrown and a chair wedged under the doorknob for good measure, he began to fortify his position. His workbench, once a place of creative escape, was now his command center. He wasn't building a drone; he was building a trap.

His tools were his weapons. He took his newest smartphone—the one with the low-light camera—and a small, flexible tripod he used for filming his builds. He set it up on the bookshelf in the living room, positioning it carefully. The lens had a wide, clear view of the entire space: the pull-out sofa where Lily had slept, the path from the bedroom, and most importantly, the dark square of the bedroom doorway itself. He plugged it into a long charging cable, ensuring it wouldn't die in the middle of the night. Using a remote-viewing app, he linked it to his old, beat-up laptop. The grainy, wide-angle image of his own living room appeared on the screen, looking like the set of a low-budget horror film.

The second camera was the laptop’s own built-in webcam. He carried the laptop into his bedroom and placed it on his dresser, opposite the bed. The angle was perfect. It captured him, the bed, and a sliver of the hallway just outside. He turned on the recording software, a simple program that would save the footage directly to his hard drive. Two unblinking electronic eyes, now standing guard where his own would fail.

With his makeshift surveillance system active, there was nothing left to do but wait.

Night fell, not with the gentle fade of twilight, but like a black cloth thrown over the city. Alex made a pot of coffee so strong it was almost sludge and sat in his desk chair, which he’d dragged into the corner of the living room. From here, he could see both the laptop screen displaying the feed from the living room camera and the bedroom doorway itself. He was the warden of his own two-room prison.

The first hour was a torment of hyper-vigilance. Every creak of the old building’s pipes was the sound of something moving in the walls. The distant wail of a siren was a scream of warning meant only for him. The hum of the refrigerator wasn't a comforting drone but a low, menacing growl. He watched the live feed, his eyes burning, seeing phantoms in every flicker of digital noise, every shift of shadow as headlights from the street below swept across the wall. He was a man staring into an abyss, begging it to stare back.

By 2:00 AM, exhaustion began its assault. His eyelids were lead weights. The caffeine had turned on him, leaving him with a jittery body and a mind thick with fog. He kept his eyes on the screen, watching his own empty apartment. The stillness was absolute. Unnatural. Lily’s words haunted him: You didn’t make any sound. It wasn’t movement he was looking for. It was a silent, impossible appearance.

He must have dozed off, his chin slumping to his chest, for how long he didn't know. He was jerked awake not by a sound, but by a dream that clung to him like a shroud. In the dream, he was standing in front of the mirror in his bathroom, but the reflection wasn't his. It was him, but distorted, as if seen through warped glass. The reflection’s head was cocked at a painful, impossible angle. It didn't speak, but a sound filled his mind, a chorus of whispers that sounded like static, like a broken radio trying to find a station. It was the sound Lily had described. Then, the reflection’s mouth began to stretch, pulling wider and wider, the skin around its lips cracking under the strain, until it formed a smile that was a black, gaping crescent carved across the lower half of its face. A smile too big for his face.

He woke with a strangled gasp, his heart trying to batter its way out of his chest. The apartment was still dark, still silent. The live feed on the laptop screen showed the empty living room, unchanged. It was just a dream. A nightmare, born from his daughter’s terror and his own fear. But it felt too real, too specific. It felt like a memory. Or a message.

He couldn't risk sleeping again. He stood up, pacing the small confines of the room, his bare feet making no sound. He was a ghost in his own home, haunting the same space as his mimic. The sickly-sweet smell of rot was still there, faint but undeniable, a constant reminder of the unseen corruption.

The sky outside the window began to lighten, shifting from inky black to a bruised purple, then a sickly gray. Dawn. He had survived the night. The long, terrifying ordeal was over.

But the real terror was just beginning.

He stared at his laptop, the recording software indicating it had been capturing footage for seven hours and forty-two minutes. Everything he needed to know—or everything he feared to know—was trapped on that hard drive. His heart pounded in his throat, a frantic, desperate rhythm. It was a cocktail of pure, unadulterated terror at what he might see, and a burning, obsessive anticipation for proof. Proof that he wasn't crazy. Proof that the threat was real.

His hand, trembling like a leaf in a storm, reached for the mouse. He clicked 'Stop Recording,' the file saving with a soft chime that sounded like a death knell in the quiet room. He took a deep, shuddering breath, the gray morning light illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air. Then, his finger hovering over the play button, he prepared to watch the long, dark night unfold through the cold, unblinking eye of the camera.