Chapter 5: The Girl Next Door

Chapter 5: The Girl Next Door

The pain was a grounding rod, a searing anchor to a reality he desperately needed to believe in. Aaron sat on the edge of his bathtub, the first-aid kit from under his sink spilling its sterile contents onto the grimy floor. The wound on his forearm was a nightmare made flesh: a deep, ragged canyon of torn muscle and weeping blood. He had spent a frantic hour under the harsh bathroom light with a pair of tweezers, pulling iridescent shards of confetti from the gash, each extraction sending a fresh bolt of agony up his arm. The tiny, glittering hexagons came out with a sickening resistance, as if they had already taken root.

He clumsily wrapped the wound with gauze, hissing as the clean white fabric turned a blotchy crimson. He needed stitches. He probably needed a tetanus shot and a team of bewildered psychologists. But how could he possibly explain this? “Yeah, doc, I got this fighting a giant praying mantis in a game show dimension that lives in my pantry.” They’d lock him in a padded room and throw away the key.

So he lied to himself, practicing the story he would never tell. A mugging. He’d fought back. Or maybe he’d fallen onto some broken glass behind a bar. He settled on the latter; it required less acting. He cinched the bandage tight, the pressure a dull, throbbing counterpoint to the sharp, incisive pain. His reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror was a stranger—a pale, sweat-slicked man with wild, haunted eyes. The static at the edge of his vision was worse now, a constant, fizzing irritation, like a television tuned to a dead channel.

The next morning, getting ready for work was an ordeal. He struggled into a long-sleeved shirt, the fabric chafing against his brutalized arm. Every unexpected noise from the hallway—a footstep, a closing door—made him jump. He was a cornered animal, convinced that one of those chittering, scythe-limbed horrors would come bursting through his front door. The apartment, once a symbol of his anonymous failure, now felt like a fragile, paper-thin barrier against a ravenous unreality.

He was fumbling with his keys, his left arm held stiffly at his side, when he finally dropped them. They skittered across the worn hallway carpet with a metallic jangle that sounded like a fire alarm in his frayed nerves.

“Damn it,” he muttered, bending awkwardly to retrieve them.

“Need a hand?”

The voice made him flinch so hard he nearly banged his head on the wall. He straightened up to see the woman from 2C, the apartment next door, standing a few feet away. She was holding a canvas tote bag overflowing with books, her keys dangling from a finger. He’d seen her a few times, brief nods in passing. He knew she was a student, but that was the extent of their interaction. Now, she was looking at him with an expression of mild concern, her gaze sharp and unnervingly perceptive.

“No, I’m fine. Just clumsy,” Aaron stammered, his right hand scrabbling for the keys.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said, her tone less mocking than matter-of-fact. “You okay? You’ve been making a lot of noise the last few nights.”

Aaron froze, his mind racing. The slam of the pantry door. His cry of pain. Had she heard? “Sorry,” he mumbled, finally closing his fingers around the keys. “Just… insomnia. Stress from work.” It was a weak lie, and he knew it.

He stood up, trying to angle his body to hide his injured arm. But her eyes missed nothing. They flickered from the dark circles under his eyes to the way he was favoring his left side, to the sleeve of his shirt where a dark spot of blood was beginning to soak through his clumsy bandage.

“Right. Work stress,” she said, her voice laced with a skepticism that made Aaron’s skin crawl. As he straightened, a few stray pieces of confetti, dislodged from his collar, fluttered down onto the drab carpet between them. Shimmering flakes of violet and gold.

He felt a jolt of pure panic, as if he’d just shed his own scales. He made to step past her, desperate to escape. “Have a good day,” he said, the words a rushed mess.

“Hang on,” she said, her curiosity clearly overriding social convention. She knelt, her long fingers deftly plucking one of the violet hexagons from the carpet. She held it between her thumb and forefinger, rotating it in the dim hallway light. Aaron’s heart hammered against his ribs. It was just glitter. Party confetti. Normal people wouldn't think twice about it.

But she wasn’t a normal person. She was looking at it with the intense, focused gaze of a scientist examining a specimen.

“That’s weird stuff,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. She tried to bend it with her thumbnail, but it remained rigid. “It’s not paper or plastic. Feels almost like… chitin. Like a beetle’s wing. Where did you get this?”

The question was a gunshot in the silent hallway. Aaron’s carefully constructed wall of denial crumbled. He couldn't breathe. She knew. She saw. It wasn't just glitter to her.

“A party,” he choked out, the lie flimsy and pathetic. “It was a party. It gets everywhere.”

He didn’t wait for her response. He turned and practically fled down the hallway, jamming his key into his apartment door with a shaking hand, not looking back. He slammed the door shut, leaning his full weight against it as if to barricade himself in. He heard her footsteps hesitate outside his door for a long moment before they finally receded.

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Later that evening, in Apartment 2C, Maya leaned over a large corkboard that dominated one wall of her living room. The room was an organized chaos of academic obsession, with stacks of books on mythology, anthropology, and forgotten histories threatening to overwhelm every available surface. The corkboard was her working thesis, a web of maps, newspaper clippings about unsolved disappearances, and arcane symbols copied from obscure grimoires, all connected by a spiderweb of red yarn.

Her neighbor, Aaron, had been a person of mild interest for a while—another lonely transplant, quiet and withdrawn. But in the last week, something had changed. She had heard a strange, booming voice from his apartment one night, like a distorted TV broadcast, followed by a triumphant fanfare. Then, last night, a gut-wrenching shriek of pain. And today, she had seen the truth of it. The haunted, hunted look in his eyes. The poorly hidden wound. And the confetti.

She held the violet hexagon she had picked up from the hallway under the bright light of her desk lamp. Chitinous. Iridescent. Resonant with a strange, unnatural energy. It reminded her of stories she’d read—tales from every culture, of trickster spirits and otherworldly entities that lured mortals into bargains. The Fae, Djinn, the Aos Sí. They all operated on a system of exchange, of risk and reward. And their gifts, their glamours, often left behind a physical trace, a little piece of their world that clung to the victim like a burr, a brand of ownership. Folklorists called it ‘fae-glitter’ or ‘witch-spit’—a physical marker of a soul that was no longer entirely human.

With a grim sense of purpose, Maya took a steel pin and pushed it through the center of the unyielding hexagon. It took more force than it should have. With a sharp click, the pin went through, and she tacked the strange artifact to the center of her board. It shimmered under the lamp, a tiny, beautiful, terrifying piece of a puzzle she was just beginning to understand. Her neighbor wasn't just stressed from work. He was caught in something ancient, something hungry. And whatever it was, it was living right next door.