Chapter 3: The Floating Man

Chapter 3: The Floating Man

Lily didn’t move. She couldn't. His gaze, even through the double-paned glass and the deepening twilight, felt like a physical restraint. It pinned her to the spot, a moth on a collector’s board. The silence in the house roared in her ears, a vacuum where all rational thought had been. How long did they stay like that? Seconds? Minutes? An eternity spun out in the space between two houses on a quiet suburban street.

Then, with a slowness that felt both deliberate and reptilian, Mr. Bell turned his head and continued his walk back to his own dark house. He didn't hurry. He didn't look back. He simply receded into the shadows of his overgrown yard and disappeared through his front door, which closed with a soft, final click.

The release was so sudden it felt like a physical blow. Lily stumbled back from the window, her breath exploding from her lungs in a ragged gasp. Her hand flew to her mouth, stifling a sob that was half terror, half relief.

He knew.

The certainty was absolute, a block of ice in her gut. He knew she had the journal. He knew she had seen the photograph. His cryptic comment about her mother’s “beautiful mind” wasn’t the rambling of an eccentric neighbor; it was a threat. A confession.

Her sanctuary, this house of memories, was now a glass box. He could see right in.

Panic gave way to a frantic, primal surge of action. She ran through the downstairs, her bare feet slapping against the hardwood floors. The click of the deadbolt on the front door was deafeningly loud. She did the same to the back door, then raced through the house, checking the lock on every single window, her movements jerky and paranoid. Each latch she secured was a tiny, futile prayer against the impossible thing that lived at the end of the street.

Her fortress secured, she retreated upstairs, clutching the journal to her chest like a shield. Her bedroom, her childhood haven, felt different now. The familiar shapes of furniture cast monstrous silhouettes in the pale light filtering in from the streetlamp outside. The flickering bulb, once a comforting, rhythmic pulse against the darkness, now made the shadows dance and writhe with imagined life. Her room was no longer a sanctuary; it was a watchtower.

She sank onto the edge of her bed, the journal falling open in her lap. Her mother’s words were a lifeline to the past, a terrifying map of the path she was now walking herself. Her desire to understand, to find a rational explanation, warred with the instinct to hurl the book into a fire and run until this town, this street, this house was nothing but a speck in the rearview mirror.

But where would she go? This was all she had left.

With a deep, shuddering breath, Lily forced her eyes back to the page. She had to know what her mother had seen. She had to know how deep the madness went.

She flipped past the entries about the metallic tea and the constant surveillance, her heart hammering with each turn of the page. The handwriting grew increasingly erratic, the elegant loops devolving into sharp, panicked slashes. The words were a torrent of fear, a mind documenting its own dissolution.

January 5th, I don’t sleep. I just wait. He comes out when the street is dark. When the whole world is asleep, he comes out. He thinks no one is watching, but I am. I’m always watching now.

January 9th, It’s the way he moves. There’s no sound. A man his size should make a sound on the pavement. A footstep. The scuff of a shoe. But there’s nothing. Only silence. He glides.

Lily’s skin crawled. She glanced nervously at her own window, half-expecting to see him standing there, his black eyes fixed on her. The street was empty, bathed in the sickly orange glow of the flickering lamp. She was alone. For now.

She forced herself to read the next entry. The ink was smeared in places, as if her mother’s trembling hand could barely control the pen. The words were crammed together, desperate to be recorded before they were lost to the fog. This was it. This was the entry that broke her mother’s mind.

January 21st, I saw it tonight. God help me, I saw it. I can’t un-see it. It was late, maybe three in the morning. The streetlight was out, so the darkness was complete. A deep, velvet black. I was at the window, as always. And his door opened.

He came out, wearing that same black coat. He stood on his porch for a moment, and he looked up at the sky. Then he stepped off the porch. But he didn’t fall. He didn’t walk. Lily, my sweet girl, if you ever read this, you must believe me. He floated.

He floated off his porch and into the street. His feet were a good six inches off the ground. There was no sound, no effort. He just… drifted. Like a drop of ink moving through still water. Perfectly smooth, perfectly silent. His movements were wrong. Inhuman. There was no friction, no concession to gravity. He drifted down the center of the road, a dark shape suspended in the night, his head turning from side to side as if he were searching for something.

He moved toward the woods at the end of the cul-de-sac. He didn’t step over the curb; he just glided over it. I watched until he was swallowed by the trees. A floating man. I’m not crazy. I saw him. A man who does not age and who does not walk. What is he? What is living at the end of our street?

Lily slammed the journal shut. A strangled cry escaped her lips. Floating. The word was absurd, the stuff of children’s nightmares and cheap horror movies. It was utterly, completely insane.

But was it?

She thought of the man in the photograph, unchanged by seventeen years. She thought of his flat, dead eyes that held no light. She thought of his chilling words, “a taste for beautiful minds.” Her mother’s mind, once so vibrant, had been consumed, hollowed out, leaving behind a husk. Had her mother gone mad from grief? Or had something been actively, purposefully unmaking her mind, feeding on it piece by piece?

The journal had given her the answer. Now she had to accept it. Mr. Bell was not just a creepy neighbor. He was not just a recluse. He was a monster. A real, honest-to-God monster, hiding in plain sight, and her mother had seen the truth of him.

Reading about it wasn't enough anymore. The account was too fantastic, too horrifying to just accept. She had to see it for herself. She had to know, with her own eyes, if her mother was a victim of a terrible disease or the witness to an impossible horror.

Lily stood up, her body trembling not just with fear, but with a cold, terrifying resolve. The paranoia was gone, burned away and replaced by a singular, obsessive purpose.

She dragged the armchair from the corner of her room and positioned it directly in front of the window, a throne in her watchtower. She pulled an afghan off her bed and found a bottle of water on her nightstand. She turned off the lamp, plunging the room into darkness, leaving only the faint, flickering glow from the street outside.

The vigil had begun.

She sank into the chair, her gaze fixed on the dark, silent house at the end of the cul-de-sac. She didn’t know what she would do if she saw it. She didn’t know if she would scream, or run, or simply break. But she knew she wouldn’t look away. She would wait all night if she had to. She would stare into the abyss until it stared back. She would wait for the floating man.