Chapter 3: Borrowed Time

Chapter 3: Borrowed Time

Alex stumbled back into his dorm room like a man returning from war. The pre-dawn light was beginning to bleed through his window, a sickly grey that offered no comfort. He hadn't slept. After fleeing the computer lab, he had wandered the deserted campus for hours, the ghost’s words seared into his terminal and his mind: You left me in the dark.

His eyes immediately darted to the floor where he’d dropped the bear. It wasn’t there. A surge of frantic hope—maybe it had all been a hallucination—died in his throat as he saw it sitting primly on his desk, its single eye aimed at the door as if it had been waiting for him. Had he put it there and forgotten? Or had it moved on its own? He no longer trusted his own memory.

Exhaustion was a physical weight, pressing down on his shoulders, making his thoughts thick and slow. He needed to sleep, to reset his brain. But the thought of closing his eyes, of being vulnerable in the dark with that thing in the room, was impossible.

He collapsed into his desk chair, his gaze sweeping over the chaotic landscape of his life: textbooks, empty coffee mugs, printouts of code. His eyes landed on a corkboard pinned with photos. Tucked in the corner was a picture from freshman orientation three years ago: him and Chris, grinning awkwardly, two strangers on the verge of becoming friends. A real memory. Solid. Verifiable.

He focused on it, trying to anchor himself to that moment. The smell of the humid September air, the drone of the Dean’s welcome speech…

And then, a flicker. Like a glitch in a video file.

The memory shifted. He was younger, maybe ten years old. Sunlight streamed through the leaves of the massive oak tree in his childhood backyard. He was holding a hammer, nails sticking out of his mouth. The air smelled of freshly cut pine and sawdust. He looked over at the half-finished platform of the treehouse, and Chris was there, laughing as he nearly dropped a plank. “Careful, dude!” Chris yelled, his voice a prepubescent squeak Alex had never actually heard. “My dad will kill us if we waste this wood.”

Alex recoiled, shaking his head violently as if to dislodge a fly from his ear. The image shattered, leaving him dizzy and nauseous. That was wrong. All wrong. He’d built that treehouse with his dad. And Leo. Leo had been too weak to climb, so he’d sat below, directing them like a tiny, frail foreman and drawing plans for the “fortress” in his sketchbook. Chris wasn’t there. He couldn’t have been. He lived three states away and Alex wouldn't meet him for another eight years.

He squeezed his eyes shut, his knuckles white as he gripped the edge of his desk. It was the lack of sleep. That had to be it. His brain was misfiring, cross-wiring old memories with new ones. A logical, biological explanation.

But when he opened his eyes, another memory bloomed behind them, unbidden and intensely vivid.

He was twelve, standing on the edge of Miller’s Pond, a fishing rod in his hand. The water was murky, the air thick with the buzz of dragonflies. He felt a sharp tug on his line and started to reel it in, his heart pounding with excitement. Chris was next to him, cheering him on. “It’s a big one, Lex! Don’t let it get away!” They pulled the fish onto the muddy bank, a small, flapping sunfish, and celebrated with a high-five that felt as real as the chair beneath him.

But Chris wasn't there. That was the day Leo had hooked his own thumb with a fishing lure. Alex remembered the sight of the blood, Leo’s terrified scream, the frantic car ride to the emergency room. It was one of his worst memories. Now it was being… overwritten. Paved over with a sunny, happy falsehood.

Panic set in, cold and sharp. The entity wasn’t just communicating; it was editing his life. It was digging into his past and planting a virus, replacing his most foundational memories—the ones that defined his relationship with his brother—with Chris. It was a targeted, malicious act of replacement. He was living on borrowed time, in a life that was no longer entirely his own.

He scrambled for his phone, frantically swiping through his photo gallery, searching for proof. He scrolled back years, past college parties and high school graduations, back to the grainy, low-resolution photos of his childhood. There. A picture of the finished treehouse. It was just him and Leo, waving from the platform, Leo’s smile wide and genuine. No Chris.

The relief was so profound it almost brought him to his knees. He wasn't crazy. The memories were false. But the fact that they felt so real, so visceral, was a new kind of terror.

He let the phone drop, his head falling into his hands. He felt a deep, primal exhaustion, the kind that transcends the physical need for sleep. His soul was tired. Just for a minute, he thought. He would just rest his eyes for a single minute. He slumped forward, his forehead resting on the cool surface of his desk, and fell into a black, dreamless void.

He woke with a jolt, unsure if he’d been out for seconds or hours. The grey light outside was brighter now. His neck was stiff, and a line of drool had pooled on a stack of papers. Everything was quiet. The bear sat in the same spot, its gaze unchanging. For a moment, it felt like the spell was broken. It was just a normal morning.

Then he saw it.

Resting beside his keyboard, on the exact spot where his head had been, was an object that hadn't been there before. It was a small, thick stack of index cards, maybe fifty of them, held together with a heavy-duty black binder clip.

A flipbook.

His blood turned to ice. This was Leo’s medium. Before he got too sick to hold a pencil for long, Leo had created dozens of these miniature animations. Little stick figures battling monsters, spaceships soaring through starry skies, a blooming flower. They were relics of his brother’s imagination, sacred objects Alex kept stored in a box at his parents’ house.

With a hand that trembled so badly he could barely control it, he picked it up. The cardstock was crisp and new, the drawings done in Leo's unmistakable style—the same confident, slightly scratchy ink lines, the same way he drew hands, the same expressive dot-eyes. But the subject matter was a nightmare.

He placed his thumb on the edge of the stack and began to flip.

The first few cards showed a single, perfectly rendered cell, floating in a black void. It was beautiful in its simplicity, a perfect circle with a nucleus at its core.

As the pages flew by, the cell began to quiver. It elongated, preparing to divide. Mitosis. Alex had studied it in high school biology.

But the division went wrong. Horribly wrong.

Instead of splitting into two identical daughter cells, the cell tore itself apart, reforming into two grotesque, misshapen parodies. They were cancerous. On the following pages, these new cells divided again, faster this time, each generation more monstrous than the last. They grew jagged edges, multiplying with a rabid, uncontrolled ferocity. They began to consume each other, a cannibalistic war on a microscopic scale. The clean lines of Leo’s early drawings devolved into a chaotic, frenzied scribble of ink.

The final image, the last card in the stack, was a static drawing of the end result: a chaotic, malignant mass of black ink, a tumor that seemed to pulse with a life of its own on the small white card.

Alex stared at it, his breath caught in his chest. This was more than a memory. This was a physical object. It was a perfect imitation of his brother’s art, depicting the very disease that had consumed him from the inside out. It was a message, a grotesque gift left for him while he slept.

He finally understood. He wasn't going crazy. He wasn't misremembering.

He was being haunted by an artist. And the canvas was his entire life.