Chapter 1: The Face in the Window

The keys felt foreign in Joey Miller's trembling hands as he stood before apartment 4B. The brass was cold against his palm, a small anchor to reality that he desperately needed. Behind him, the psychiatric facility's discharge papers rustled in the manila envelope tucked under his arm—proof that he was sane, that he was cured, that the year of therapy and medication had worked.

You're fine now, he told himself, the same mantra Dr. Henley had drilled into him during their final session. The episodes were stress-induced hallucinations. You've learned the coping mechanisms. You're in control.

The lock clicked open with a satisfying sound that made something tight in his chest loosen. His new home. His fresh start. Joey pushed the door open and stepped into the sterile emptiness of his salvation.

The apartment was exactly as the rental agent had described—sparse, functional, forgettable. A single room with a kitchenette, a bathroom barely large enough to turn around in, and one window facing the alley. Perfect. The fewer windows, the fewer places for his mind to conjure up things that weren't there.

Joey set down the single duffel bag that contained his entire life and surveyed his domain. The walls were painted a neutral beige that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. The carpet was industrial gray, the kind that hid stains and footprints equally well. Even the furniture—a narrow bed, a small table, two chairs—seemed designed to be as unremarkable as possible.

Invisible, he thought with satisfaction. Just like I want to be.

He'd chosen this place specifically for its anonymity. No concerned neighbors asking questions, no familiar faces to trigger memories, no family photos on the walls to remind him of what he'd lost. Just him, four walls, and the blessed silence of solitude.

The first few hours passed in mechanical routine. Unpacking took less than twenty minutes—a few changes of clothes, toiletries, his medications, and the book Dr. Henley had given him about managing anxiety. He arranged everything with precise care, as if the perfect placement of his meager possessions could somehow order the chaos in his mind.

As evening fell, Joey found himself standing by the window, watching the city lights flicker to life in the distance. For the first time in years, he felt something approaching peace. No whispers in the walls, no shadows moving where they shouldn't, no faces—

He froze.

There, reflected in the glass, was a face that wasn't his own.

Joey's breath caught in his throat as his body went rigid with recognition. The face was pale, gaunt, with hollow eyes that seemed to bore straight through him. It was the same face that had haunted him for most of his life, the one that had driven him screaming into the night and ultimately into the psychiatric ward.

No, he thought desperately. Not real. It's not real.

He spun around, his heart hammering against his ribs. The room behind him was empty, exactly as it should be. Just his sparse furniture and the oppressive beige walls. He turned back to the window, and the reflection showed only his own frightened features staring back.

Joey pressed his palms against the cool glass, his breathing shallow and rapid. "Stress-induced hallucination," he whispered, reciting Dr. Henley's words like a prayer. "Visual distortion caused by anxiety and sleep deprivation. It's not real."

But even as he spoke, he couldn't shake the feeling that something had fundamentally shifted. The apartment no longer felt like a sanctuary—it felt like a trap.

He forced himself to move away from the window, to go through his evening routine as if nothing had happened. Microwave dinner, medication, the breathing exercises Dr. Henley had taught him. In for four, hold for four, out for four. The rhythm was supposed to calm him, but tonight it only seemed to count down to something terrible.

By ten o'clock, Joey was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to convince himself that sleep was possible. The medication made his limbs heavy, but his mind remained hyperalert, cataloging every small sound in the building. The hum of the refrigerator, the distant murmur of a television through the walls, the occasional footstep in the hallway.

He must have dozed off eventually, because he jerked awake to complete darkness, his body slick with cold sweat. The digital clock beside his bed read 3:17 AM. Something had woken him—a sound, a movement, something that set every nerve on edge.

Joey lay perfectly still, listening. The building around him seemed to hold its breath, as if waiting. Then he heard it: a soft tapping at the window.

Tree branch, he told himself. Wind.

But the tapping had a rhythm to it, deliberate and patient. Tap. Tap. Tap.

His body moved before his mind could stop it, rising from the bed and walking toward the window like a puppet on strings. He knew he shouldn't look. Every instinct screamed at him to stay in bed, to pull the covers over his head and wait for morning. But he couldn't stop himself.

The face was back, pressed against the glass from the outside. But this time, Joey could see that it wasn't alone.

More faces crowded around the first one, a dozen or more pale visages staring in at him with hollow, hungry eyes. Men, women, children—all bearing the same expression of terrible longing. Their mouths moved silently, as if they were trying to speak, trying to tell him something urgent and awful.

Joey stumbled backward, his legs tangling in the bedsheets. He hit the wall hard enough to rattle the cheap picture frame hanging there. The faces remained at the window, patient and persistent, their eyes never leaving his.

"You're not real," he whispered, but the words felt hollow even to him. "You're not real. I'm medicated. I'm better."

As if responding to his denial, one of the faces—a young woman with stringy dark hair—pressed closer to the glass. Her breath fogged the window, and in that condensation, Joey could swear he saw something being written. Letters forming and fading too quickly to read.

The tapping grew louder, more insistent. Not just at the window now, but from the walls, the ceiling, as if the entire building were being struck by invisible hammers. The sound seemed to echo from inside his own skull, matching the frantic rhythm of his heartbeat.

Joey pressed his hands to his ears, but the sound only grew louder. The faces at the window multiplied, pressing against the glass until it began to bow inward. Their mouths opened and closed in perfect unison, and though he couldn't hear their voices, he somehow knew they were all saying the same word, over and over again.

His name.

The glass began to crack, a spider web of fractures spreading outward from where the first face pressed against it. Joey watched in horror as the cracks deepened, as the window began to buckle under the weight of too many impossible presences.

Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, everything stopped.

The tapping ceased. The faces vanished. The cracks in the window disappeared as if they had never been there at all. Joey found himself standing alone in his apartment, gasping in the darkness, his heart hammering so hard he thought it might burst.

He staggered to the light switch and flooded the room with harsh fluorescent illumination. Everything was exactly as it should be. The window was intact, showing nothing but the dark alley beyond. His medication bottles sat undisturbed on the table. The book Dr. Henley had given him lay open to the chapter on managing visual hallucinations.

But something was different. Something that made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

In the silence of his supposedly empty apartment, Joey heard the soft whisper of movement behind him. Not the creak of settling wood or the hum of appliances, but something that sounded distinctly, unmistakably alive.

He turned around slowly, afraid of what he might see but unable to stop himself.

The room looked the same as always, but now he knew with absolute certainty that he was no longer alone. Whatever had been at the window, whatever had been tapping and whispering and calling his name, was no longer outside looking in.

It was inside with him.

And as Joey stood frozen in the harsh light of his sterile sanctuary, he realized that his year of treatment, his careful medication regimen, his desperate hope for a normal life—none of it had worked. The things that haunted him weren't stress-induced hallucinations or the products of an unbalanced mind.

They were real, they were patient, and they had found him again.

The fresh start he'd dreamed of was already over, and his real nightmare was just beginning.