Chapter 5: Man of the House

Chapter 5: Man of the House

The darkness inside the apartment was absolute, a thick, velvety black that swallowed the dim light from the hallway. Liam’s hand, still outstretched from pushing the door, trembled in the sudden, unnerving silence. The soft, wet scraping sound was gone, leaving a void that felt heavier and more threatening than the noise itself. The air that drifted out to meet him was stale and wrong, thick with the chalky scent of drywall dust and a faint, coppery tang that made the back of his throat tighten.

His mind was a tangled knot of the night’s failures—the humiliating arcade meltdown, Chloe’s rigid shock, the mortifying kiss. This new horror, the unlocked door, felt like the universe’s final, cruel punchline. He was a fool who couldn't even keep his own home secure.

He fumbled along the wall, his slick palm searching for the light switch. His fingers brushed against something gritty and uneven before finding the plastic plate. He flicked it up.

Fluorescent light flooded the room with a cold, sterile glare, and Liam’s brain simply refused, for a full second, to process what it was seeing.

The living room was desecrated. A constellation of freshly drilled holes peppered the walls, each one a dark, weeping wound in the cheap beige paint. A fine white dust coated every surface—his television, his console, the worn fabric of his sofa—like a layer of morbid snow.

And in the center of the room, standing with a strange, calm stillness, was the man from his nightmares.

He was no longer a flicker in a video feed or a phantom in the reflection of a pinball machine. He was real. Horrifyingly, physically real. He was naked, his body a grotesque sculpture of bone and translucent, paper-thin skin. The blue veins that snaked across his emaciated frame pulsed with a slow, sickly rhythm. He was impossibly gaunt, a famine victim, a walking skeleton who had somehow forgotten to die.

And he was smiling.

It was the same fixed, contented smile from the security footage, a lipless black gash in his sunken face. In one spidery, long-fingered hand, he held a yellow power drill. Its cord snaked across the floor to an outlet by the door. The drill bit, a wicked-looking auger, was caked in plaster dust and flecks of something dark and wet.

Liam’s breath hitched in a silent, choked sob. He couldn't scream. The sound was trapped behind a wall of pure, paralyzing terror. This creature, this man, had been in his apartment, boring into the walls, creating his own peepholes into the world.

The man’s head turned towards Liam. The movement was slow, unnatural, a jerky rotation of bone and sinew. His eyes, sunken deep in their shadowy sockets, were not the black voids Liam had imagined. They were a milky, clouded blue, ancient and weary, and they fixed on Liam with a look of profound, disturbing understanding.

When he spoke, his voice was not a monstrous roar but a dry, rasping whisper, like the rustle of dead leaves.

“Don’t trust the Wallflowers.”

The word, plural, hung in the air between them. Wallflowers. Not just wallflower_75. A cold dread, sharper than any fear he had yet felt, pierced through Liam’s paralysis. It wasn’t just one person. It was a group. A community of watchers.

The gaunt man’s smile seemed to widen, a final, terrible act of satisfaction. His purpose, it seemed, was fulfilled. He had delivered his warning.

Then, with a calm, deliberate motion, he raised the drill. The yellow plastic was a shocking splash of color against his corpse-pale skin. Liam’s mind screamed Run! Fight! Do something! but his body was a statue of ice and stone.

The man did not point the drill at Liam.

He turned it on himself, pressing the tip of the dark, grimy bit against his own temple. His cloudy blue eyes never left Liam’s, holding him captive in a final, intimate moment of horror.

He squeezed the trigger.

The drill shrieked to life, the high-pitched mechanical whine ripping through the silence. For a horrifying instant, the spinning bit met the resistance of bone. Then, with a wet, sickening crunch, it punched through.

The man’s body convulsed, a violent, spastic shudder. He slumped to the floor in a tangle of unnaturally long limbs, the drill still screaming, now buried deep in his skull. The sound went on and on, a monotonous, brutal hymn of self-destruction, until the cord was ripped from the wall socket by the weight of his fall.

The silence that rushed back in was absolute, broken only by the frantic, ragged sound of Liam’s own breathing.

He finally found his legs. He stumbled backwards, tripping out of the apartment and into the hall, his back slamming against the opposite wall. A raw, animal wail finally tore itself from his throat, echoing through the empty corridor.

---

The flashing red and blue lights painted the hallway in chaotic, pulsing strokes. The air was thick with the smell of cops and coffee. Liam sat on the floor, a scratchy wool blanket draped over his shoulders, his body shaking with a deep, uncontrollable tremor.

He had told them everything, the words tumbling out in a broken, nonsensical stream. The follower. The unlocked door. The naked man. The drill. He watched the detectives exchange glances, the weary, skeptical looks reserved for drunks, junkies, and the mentally unstable. He was the crazy kid from the arcade all over again, but this time the stakes were infinitely higher.

Hours seemed to pass. Forensics teams in white suits moved in and out of his apartment, their movements calm and methodical in the face of the carnage within. A detective, a stout, tired-looking man named Miller, knelt beside him.

“We identified him,” Miller said, his voice a low rumble. “Frank Elbert. According to the landlord, he was the tenant in your apartment before you.”

Liam stared at him, uncomprehending. “Before me? But where was he living?”

Miller’s face was grim. He stood up and gestured for Liam to follow him to the taped-off doorway of his apartment. The body was gone, but a dark, gruesome stain was spreading across the cheap laminate flooring.

“We found it when we were checking the structural integrity of the walls he’d drilled through,” Miller explained, shining a heavy-duty flashlight into the living room. “He’d pried off a panel in the back of the bedroom closet. There’s a crawlspace back there. An access void between the walls.”

He swept the beam of light across the room. “He was living in there, son. For months. We found food wrappers, water bottles, a bucket he was using as a toilet. He’d made himself a little nest.”

A wave of nausea washed over Liam, so potent he had to brace himself against the doorframe. The thought of it… this man, this creature, living just inches away from him. Sleeping while he slept. Listening to his every move, his every frustrated sigh, his every one-sided conversation with his silent stream viewers.

“But… why?” Liam whispered, his voice hoarse.

Miller sighed, the sound heavy with the weight of all the ugly things he’d seen in his career. He walked over to Liam’s desk, to the gaming setup that had been his only connection to the outside world. He knelt, aiming the flashlight at the wall beneath the desk, right where Liam’s legs would be while he was streaming.

“This is why,” he said.

In the bright, focused beam of the flashlight, Liam saw it. It wasn’t one of the new, raw holes. This one was older, smaller, no bigger than a quarter. The edges were worn smooth, stained dark with grime and oil from an eye that had been pressed against it countless times.

It was a peephole.

A perfect, direct line of sight to his monitors. To his face. To his hands on the keyboard.

The full, soul-crushing weight of the revelation hit him. The feeling of being watched wasn’t paranoia. It wasn't a ghost. wallflower_75 wasn’t just some random troll on the internet. It was Frank Elbert, the man in the walls, his most intimate and dedicated follower. He had watched every game Liam played, heard every word he’d said. He’d seen Liam watching Chloe through his own peephole. He had orchestrated the entire night.

The entity had a name. It had a face. And its home had been his own.