Chapter 2: The Seven-Eyed Door

Chapter 2: The Seven-Eyed Door

Sleep offered no escape. Kevin’s dreams were corrupted files, looping replays of the woman in the black hoodie. He saw her taking a bite of a burger that wasn’t there, her impossibly calm face superimposed over the moaning purple void. He would wake up with a jolt, the ghost of her neutral gaze imprinted on the back of his eyelids, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against the silence of his sterile, 42nd-floor apartment.

For two days, he was a ghost himself. His routine, the carefully constructed scaffold that held his sanity together, collapsed. He didn’t scroll through old forums or binge-watch shows from a dead world. He sat in the food court, nursing a single, perpetually cold bottle of water, and watched the footage. Again and again.

There. Frame 14,236. That’s when he stood up. Frame 14,281, he called out. Frame 14,350, he stumbled back from the service corridor, a confused and pathetic figure chasing nothing. The camera was absolute. It was a digital god, and its gospel was clear: he was losing his mind. The woman in the black hoodie was a phantom, the first major crack in the crumbling architecture of his psyche.

But he couldn't accept it. The memory was too solid, too real. The way she held the burger, the slight sheen on the wrapper under the food court lights, the utter normalcy of her presence—it was a memory with weight and texture. It was more real to him than the duct tape on Gary’s eyebrows.

His desire had curdled from curiosity into a desperate obsession. He had to find a single shred of evidence to prove she existed, if only to prove to himself that he wasn't becoming one of them—another resident lost to the quiet madness of The Lucent.

The obstacle was the footage itself, a perfect, unassailable alibi for a sane reality. Every time he watched it, a cold wave of doubt washed over him. Maybe Brenda’s endless burpees and Gary’s froyo sermons were the sane responses to this place. Maybe his insistence on logic was the real delusion.

On the third day, he couldn't take it anymore. Staring at the screen was an act of self-torture. The truth, if it existed, wasn't on his hard drive. It was in that hallway.

Pushing his laptop aside, he stood up. The movement felt momentous, a declaration of intent. He strode across the food court, his focus a tight beam that cut through the usual ambient insanity. He didn't glance at the CrossFit Coven, now performing what looked like synchronized lunges with Cinnabon trays. He didn't look at Gary, who was anointing a new recruit's forehead with a dollop of original tart frozen yogurt. He fixed his eyes on the double doors behind the Burger King.

His action was a pilgrimage to the site of his potential breakdown. He pushed through the doors into the stale, greasy air of the service corridor. It was exactly as he remembered: short, windowless, and ending in the impassive steel of the loading bay door. A dead end.

He ran his hands along the grimy, painted cinderblock walls, searching for a seam, a hidden switch, a loose panel. Nothing. He kicked at the baseboards. Solid. He examined the floor, looking for scuff marks, anything to indicate a secret passage. There was only dust and the faint, sticky residue of a long-ago soda spill. The reality of the corridor was aggressively, disappointingly mundane.

Defeated, he leaned his head against the cool metal of the bay door, the low hum of the void outside vibrating through the steel and into his skull. It was over. He was crazy. The woman was a hallucination.

It was then that he noticed the other door.

To his left, almost hidden in the dim light, was a simple, grey-painted wooden door with a small, rectangular window of frosted glass. A standard janitor's closet. He must have seen it the first time, but his panicked mind had dismissed it. It was too normal.

But something was wrong with it now.

He squinted, stepping closer. The door itself was unremarkable, but embedded in the wood, clustered right below the doorknob, was… something else. It was a knot of flesh, a round, fleshy growth the size of a grapefruit, from which seven eyes stared out at him.

They were human eyes, all different colors—a brilliant blue, a milky brown, a startling emerald green—and they blinked, slowly and out of sync, with a placid, almost polite curiosity. They weren't monstrous or threatening. They were just… there. Watching him with an unnerving serenity.

Kevin’s breath hitched. He took a reflexive step back, his hand flying to his mouth to stifle a cry. This was new. This was a fresh, high-resolution nightmare painted onto the canvas of his world.

The result of his investigation wasn't an answer; it was a deeper, more terrifying question. He had come looking for a ghost and found a multi-eyed, sentient door.

He stared for a long moment, caught between terror and a morbid, scientific fascination. Slowly, cautiously, he reached out and tried the doorknob. It was cold, brass, and utterly immobile. Locked.

"Hello?" he whispered, the sound swallowed by the thick silence.

The seven eyes blinked in a gentle, asynchronous wave. No other response.

This was the turning point. His quest for proof had led him to a dead end that was somehow more impossible than the one he’d started with. The woman could have been a hallucination. This door, with its calm, blinking eyes, felt like a fundamental law of physics being violated in front of him. It was a statement from the universe: You think that was weird? You have no idea.

He backed away slowly, never taking his eyes off the cluster, until his back hit the double doors to the food court. He pushed through them and stumbled back to his table, collapsing into his chair. He was shaking.

He needed the comfort of his laptop, the solid, predictable logic of code and electricity. He flipped it open, his fingers fumbling on the keys. He needed to see the familiar desktop, the orderly grid of icons, the unwavering Wi-Fi signal in the top corner that proved some rules still applied.

But they didn't.

The Wi-Fi icon, usually a solid, reassuring curve, was flickering erratically. He watched, mesmerized, as the network name—Lucent_Guest_WiFi—vanished. For a split second, it was replaced by a string of garbled text, a flash of digital gibberish. And then it was back to normal.

His heart pounded. It was a glitch. He’d never seen the network glitch before. It was as reliable as the daily food reset.

His hands flew across the trackpad, opening the system logs, his old Geek Squad instincts kicking in. He scrolled through lines of code, looking for the timestamp of the network error. He found it. A single line of corrupted data. Most of it was unreadable, a mess of symbols and broken code, except for one fragment that was chillingly, perfectly clear.

ERROR: UNSTABLE_REFERENCE_U347

Kevin stared at the line. U347. Unit 347.

He knew that number. Everyone in The Lucent knew that number. It was Ted’s apartment, down on the 34th floor. The place where it had all started. The place where some idiot programmer had tried to summon something with a book he’d bought online. The epicenter. The seal on the door had been unbroken since the first day, a silent tomb no one ever dared to approach.

The clue wasn't a secret passage or a dropped ID card. It was a system error message.

A horrifying new clarity washed over him. He hadn't been chasing a ghost. He had been chasing a bug in the system. And that bug, that impossible woman, had just led him to a breadcrumb, a single line of corrupted code pointing directly to the heart of their prison.