Chapter 1: He's Here

Chapter 1: He's Here

The year was 2008. The world outside Liam’s window was a quiet tapestry of suburban twilight, painted in the orange and purple hues of a fading summer evening. Inside, the only light came from the soft, blue glow of the Nintendo Wii’s disc slot, a technological heartbeat in the stillness of the family room. At eight years old, Liam was a king in this domain of digital fantasy, but tonight, his kingdom felt small, its borders well-trodden.

Mario Kart had lost its charm. The familiar tracks were a blur of muscle memory, the victory tune a hollow echo. Super Smash Bros. Brawl was no better; he’d unlocked every character, mastered every final smash. He craved something new, something different.

His parents were out for the evening, a rare date night that left him in the "trusted" care of his sixteen-year-old sister, who was, as usual, glued to her phone upstairs. This was his chance. With the practiced stealth of a seasoned operative, he ejected the Mario Kart disc and navigated to the Wii’s main menu. He flicked the Wiimote past the familiar, friendly channels until he reached it: The Homebrew Channel.

It was a forbidden zone, installed by his older cousin with a conspiratorial grin and a whispered warning: "Don't tell your folks. This is where the real games are." It was a chaotic mess of amateur creations and pirated software, a digital back alley behind Nintendo's polished storefront. Most of it was junk, but tonight, Liam was determined to find treasure.

He scrolled through the list of oddly named files. Then he saw it. It wasn't flashy like the others. The icon was a simple, stark white smiley face, but it was slightly distorted, as if drawn by an unsteady hand. The file name was just two words: Getting_Closer.wad.

Curiosity, that potent, reckless engine of childhood, took over. He pointed the glowing blue cursor at the icon and pressed 'A'.

The screen went black. The Wii’s gentle hum seemed to deepen, the blue light flickering for a moment. There was no bombastic intro music, no developer logo. Just silence, thick and heavy. White, blocky text appeared, stark against the void.

ARE YOU ALONE?

Liam hesitated. He wasn't, technically. His sister was upstairs. But down here, in the glow of the screen, he felt a sudden, profound solitude. He aimed the Wiimote at the 'YES' option and clicked.

The game began. The graphics were brutally simplistic, like something from a console two generations older. He was a small, white stick figure in a labyrinth of jagged black lines. There was no objective on screen, no score, no timer. The only thing he could do was move. He pushed the analog stick forward, and his character shuffled into the dark maze.

Then he heard the sound.

It wasn't from the game’s world, not exactly. It was a low, grating noise that seemed to emanate from the TV speakers themselves, a dry, metallic scraping. Like a rusty snow shovel being dragged slowly across concrete. He stopped his character, and the sound stopped. He moved again, and it returned, a fraction louder this time. A knot of unease tightened in his stomach. He was being followed.

The first level was a confusing, nonsensical maze. He eventually found the exit, a pulsating red square, and was plunged back into darkness. New text appeared.

THAT WAS THE BASEMENT.

Liam’s blood ran cold. He glanced at the door to his own basement, just across the family room. It was closed, as it always was. A coincidence. It had to be.

The second level loaded. This one was different. It wasn’t a maze, but a long corridor with several branching paths. He recognized the layout immediately. The short hallway leading to a larger, open space. The two smaller rooms off to the side. It was a crude, blocky replica of his home’s ground floor. His kitchen, his living room, the family room where he was sitting right now. The scraping was louder, more insistent, echoing through the digital halls. He navigated his little stick figure with trembling hands, a desperate sense of dread washing over him. The red square appeared near the representation of the main staircase.

NOW, UPSTAIRS.

His breath hitched. This wasn't a coincidence. He wanted to turn it off. He wanted to yank the plug from the wall and hide under a blanket until his parents came home. But he was paralyzed, held captive by a horrifying, magnetic fear. The third level loaded. It was the upstairs hallway. He could see the blocky shapes of his parents’ bedroom, his sister’s room, the bathroom. And at the end of the hall… his room. The scraping was deafening now, a rhythmic, predatory sound that vibrated through the Wiimote in his hand. Scrape. Drag. Scrape. Drag. It was getting closer.

He guided his character to the last door, the one that represented his own bedroom. As the stick figure passed through the doorway, the screen changed one last time.

It was his room. Not a blocky interpretation, but a perfect, real-time, pixelated recreation. His bed with its rumpled blue comforter. The open closet door. The poster of a spaceship hanging crookedly on the wall. And there, on the digital version of his bed, sat a small, white stick figure, controller in hand, staring at a tiny television. Staring at him.

The scraping sound stopped. The silence that replaced it was somehow worse.

Liam’s heart hammered against his ribs. He couldn't tear his eyes away from the screen, from the perfect, terrifying mirror of his reality. He was in the game. Or the game was in here with him. The line was gone.

The text appeared again, no longer in the center of the screen, but directly over the head of the stick-figure Liam.

I’M HERE.

A floorboard creaked in the hallway upstairs. Liam’s head snapped toward the sound, his eyes wide with terror. It was his sister, probably going to the kitchen for a drink. He let out a shaky breath of relief. It was just a game. A really, really creepy game, but a game nonetheless.

He looked back at the screen. The text was gone. The room on the TV was empty. His character was gone.

Then, the metallic scraping sound filled the family room.

It wasn't coming from the TV speakers anymore.

It was loud, visceral, and real. It was coming from the corner of the room, right next to the television stand. Liam’s gaze was drawn to the screen, which began to fizz with static. The distorted smiley face from the game’s icon flickered into view, stretching and warping across the 42-inch display, its smile widening into a grotesque, jagged maw.

The hum of the Wii console died. The blue light blinked out. The scraping stopped.

For a heart-stopping second, there was only the sound of Liam’s own frantic breathing.

Then, the surface of the dark screen began to bubble and distort, like heat haze off asphalt. A shape, composed of flickering static and glitching polygons, began to push its way through the glass. It unfolded itself from the two-dimensional prison of the screen, its form shifting, its angles all wrong, a living error in the code of reality. It had no definite shape, but its surface swarmed with the eerie, grinning face.

A low hum of static filled the air, smelling of ozone and burnt plastic. The thing—The Glitch—finished its agonizing birth, its malformed, pixelated feet touching down on the beige carpet of Liam’s family room. It was out. It was real.

The distorted smile on its shifting face seemed to fixate on him, and a sound, like a corrupted audio file of a child’s laugh, echoed in the silent house. Liam opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. He was just a boy in a dark room, and the game had finally reached its end.