Chapter 3: The Harbinger at the Window

Chapter 3: The Harbinger at the Window

Time had lost all meaning, measured now only in the interval between pins turning red. Alex hadn’t left his apartment in two days. He was a prisoner in his own home, chained to the hellish blue light of his monitor. The world outside his window—the distant traffic, the drone of a passing plane—felt like a broadcast from another planet. His reality had shrunk to the dimensions of a single webpage, a digital graveyard where he was the sole, unwilling watchman.

After the Henderson family, the second yellow pin had been next. It was located downtown, in a sprawling, anonymous office building. For thirty-six hours, Alex had watched it, refreshing the page every few minutes, a compulsive ritual born of pure terror. He’d half-convinced himself the Hendersons were a fluke, a one-in-a-million coincidence. Then, yesterday afternoon, the pin had flickered. It had bled to red. When he’d clicked it, heart hammering against his ribs, the image that loaded was stark and clinical: an empty office chair pushed back from a desk, and on the floor, barely visible, the dark shape of a man’s dress shoe. The caption was brutally simple: David McMillan. 11.21. Fall from height.

That left one other yellow pin besides his own. A small house in the suburbs, not far from Mark Miller’s neighborhood. Alex didn't even have to wait a full day for that one. He’d dozed off in his chair, a fitful sleep filled with nightmares of falling, and had woken with a jolt to see it. The final pin had turned. A lurid, angry red that seemed to scream from the screen. He couldn't bring himself to click on it. He didn’t need to. He knew what he would see.

The map was now a sea of crimson markers, a testament to silent, unseen tragedies. A constellation of death. And in the middle of it all, one single, defiant beacon of yellow remained.

His pin.

He was the last one.

A profound, bone-deep cold settled over him. This was it. The countdown was over. The game had reached its final stage, and he was the prize. He stared at his own pin, pulsing gently over his building, a digital bullseye. He thought of the Hendersons, of David McMillan, of the unnamed family in the suburbs. Was he meant to be next? Was some invisible force going to compel him to simply… end it?

He had to know. His curiosity was a morbid, cancerous thing, overriding his fear. What did his own pin show? What fate was waiting behind that click?

His hand, slick with sweat, trembled as he guided the mouse. The cursor hovered over the yellow icon, his last bastion and his death sentence. He closed his eyes, took a ragged breath that did nothing to calm his racing heart, and clicked.

The screen went black for a half-second as the image loaded.

It was his room.

He saw the back of his own worn-out desk chair. He saw the peeling edge of the sci-fi movie poster on his wall. He saw the disorganized pile of programming textbooks on his shelf and the empty soda can he’d left on his desk just this morning. And he saw the back of his own head—the messy, uncombed black hair, the tense set of his shoulders.

His blood ran cold. This wasn't a pre-recorded image. This wasn't a stock photo. The angle was impossible, taken from somewhere high up, behind his right shoulder, as if a camera were floating in the corner of the room, watching him.

To test it, to dispel the terrifying reality solidifying in his mind, he slowly raised his left hand.

On the screen, the reflection of a pale, trembling hand rose into view.

It was live.

A strangled sob escaped his lips. He was being watched. Right now. Some malevolent, unseen eye was broadcasting his final moments onto the very website that had condemned him. He spun around in his chair, frantically scanning the corners of his room, the ceiling, searching for a lens, a hidden camera, anything. There was nothing. Just his room. His safe, familiar room, which was no longer safe at all.

That’s when he saw it.

Out of the corner of his eye. A flicker of movement outside his fourteenth-floor window.

He froze, his breath catching in his throat. It was probably just a bird, or a piece of trash caught in the wind. It had to be. He was on the fourteenth floor. There was nothing out there but empty air and the sprawling city below.

Slowly, deliberately, he turned his head to face the window.

Pressed against the glass, pale and indistinct in the twilight, was a face.

It was a young girl. Her face was deathly white, like bleached bone, framed by long, stringy black hair that clung to her cheeks as if it were soaking wet. She wore a tattered, shapeless dress that might have once been white but was now the colour of grave dirt and stagnant water.

Alex’s mind simply refused to process what he was seeing. There was no scaffolding, no window-washer’s rig. She was just… there. Clinging to the sheer glass-and-brick face of the high-rise, fourteen stories up, as easily as a spider on a wall.

As he stared, paralyzed by an impossible horror, she gave him a small, hesitant smile. It was a broken, pitiful thing that didn’t reach her dark, hollow eyes. A faint, tinny sound penetrated the thick glass of the window, a sound like a child’s whisper.

“Let me in.”

The voice was soft, pleading. It vibrated through the glass, a sound of profound and desperate cold.

“Please. It’s so cold out here. Just open the window.”

Alex scrambled backwards, his chair tipping over and crashing to the floor. He landed in a heap, crab-walking away until his back hit the wall. He couldn't scream. The sound was trapped in his throat, a raw, silent knot of terror.

The girl’s smile faltered. Her expression shifted, the manufactured pity melting away to reveal a raw, impatient hunger. The soft plea sharpened into a command.

“I said, let me in,” she hissed, her voice no longer a child’s whisper but a rasping, guttural demand.

And then her smile returned, but this time it was all wrong. It stretched too wide, splitting her pale face in a grotesque, predatory slash. It was a smile filled with far too many teeth, not the teeth of a human but of something that hunted in the deep dark—long, needle-thin, and impossibly sharp.

THUD.

She struck the window with her open palm. The sound was not the flat slap of a hand against glass; it was a deep, concussive boom that vibrated through the floor. The entire window frame rattled in protest.

THUD. THUD.

“YOU HAVE TO DIE!” she shrieked, the sound a high-pitched, unholy screech that pierced the glass and drilled directly into Alex’s skull. “IT’S YOUR TURN! OPEN THE DOOR AND LET ME IN!”

CRACK.

A thin, spiderwebbing fracture appeared in the corner of the window pane, radiating out from where her small, pale fist had struck with impossible force.

She drew her head back and slammed it forward. BOOM. More cracks splintered across the glass. She began pounding on it relentlessly, a frantic, explosive rhythm of pure malice. Her shrieks devolved into an incoherent, animalistic rage, her only clear words a repeating, demonic mantra.

“YOUR TURN! YOUR TURN! YOUR TURN!”

The window groaned, the sound of tortured, warping glass filling the room. It was going to shatter. In seconds, that… thing… would be inside with him. Cornered, trapped fourteen floors up, Alex stared at the splintering glass, his mind a maelstrom of pure, unadulterated terror. There was no escape. This was how it ended. The Harbinger was at his window, and she was coming to collect.