Chapter 3: 3:23 AM

The single strand of matted black hair lay on a clean white sheet of paper on his desk, a profane sacrament under the glare of his lamp. It was real. It was physical. It was an answer and a thousand more questions. The entity that haunted his house wasn't just a specter; it was shedding.

Rage, cold and sharp, cut through the fog of his terror. He was being treated like a mouse in a maze, prodded and observed by an unseen experimenter. It had taken his eye, so he would give it another, one it couldn't simply snatch away. The fear was still there, a knot of ice in his stomach, but his core identity—the logical, pragmatic IT tech—was fighting back. This was his house. This was his problem. And problems had solutions.

He didn't go to work. He called in sick, his voice a hoarse croak he barely recognized. Then he drove to the largest electronics store in the city, the bright, clean aisles and cheerful pop music a bizarre counterpoint to the darkness consuming his life. He bypassed the GoPros and consumer camcorders, heading straight for the networking section. He moved with purpose, a man who knew exactly what he was looking for.

He bought a top-of-the-line wireless IP camera. It was small, discreet, but its key feature was its ability to stream and record directly to a networked device. He would configure it to send the feed straight to his PC's hard drive. The entity could smash the camera, it could make it vanish into thin air, but it couldn't erase the data that was already stored and safe, miles of copper and fiber away from the bedroom. He was building a better mousetrap.

Back home, the silence felt heavier, more expectant. He set up his command center in the small room he used as a home office, linking the camera to his computer. A small window on his monitor flickered to life, showing a crisp, high-definition view of his bedroom. He returned to the room of his violation, the black strand of hair still on his mind, and mounted the new camera in the corner where the walls met the ceiling, angled for a perfect, panoramic view. It was less conspicuous than the GoPro on the bookshelf, harder to spot.

He forced himself to eat, to go through the motions of a normal evening. But when night fell, the ordeal began again. He lay in bed, the bait in his own trap, acutely aware of the tiny, blinking green light of the camera in the corner. He wasn't watching the live feed on his phone. He couldn't. The thought of seeing it happen in real-time was more than his sanity could bear. He needed the buffer of a recording, the safety of daylight. He closed his eyes and prayed for a sleep so deep it would be like a temporary death.

The sun woke him.

For a disoriented second, hope flickered. The room was bright, silent. He checked his body. No new wounds. He looked to the corner. The camera was still there, its green light blinking placidly.

He practically flew out of bed and into his office, slamming the door behind him. He slumped into his chair, his hands trembling as he navigated to the folder where the night’s recording was saved. A single, massive video file, eight hours and forty-seven minutes long, waited for him.

He clicked play.

The video player opened, showing the dark, grainy night-vision image of his bedroom. He was a lump under the covers, still and silent. He grabbed the playback slider, dragging it forward, the footage zipping by in a silent, ghostly blur. Hours compressed into seconds. 1:00 AM. 2:00 AM. 3:00 AM. Nothing but him, tossing occasionally in his troubled sleep.

A sliver of doubt crept in. Was it possible? Had he imagined it all? Was the hair just a fluke, a stray fiber from… somewhere? Was he losing his mind? He was about to scrub forward to the end when he noticed the timestamp on the video player. 3:22 AM. He let the slider go. The video resumed playing at normal speed.

For thirty seconds, nothing happened. The digital clock on the screen ticked over. 3:23:00.

A flicker.

In the top right corner of the frame, where the wall met the ceiling, the shadows deepened, coalesced, and then… moved.

Liam’s breath hitched in his throat. It unfolded from the darkness like a sick piece of origami. A shape. A human shape. But it wasn’t human. It was a girl, perhaps seven or nine years old, her form skeletal and gaunt under a thin, tattered nightdress. Her skin was the pale, luminous white of bone, and it was covered in dark, weeping wounds that seemed to pulse in the infrared light. Her hair was a matted, black tangle that hung over her face, the very hair he had found a strand of.

She didn't walk. She didn't float. She crawled.

With a series of silent, jerky movements, she scurried onto the wall, her limbs bending at angles that defied anatomy. Her small hands and feet found purchase on the flat surface as if it were the floor. Liam watched in abject horror as this creature crawled across the wall above his headboard, then onto the ceiling, her matted hair dangling down like dead vines. She moved with an unnatural, insect-like speed, a spider in the shape of a child.

She paused directly above his sleeping form, hanging there, head cocked. He could see his own body in the frame, so terribly vulnerable, completely oblivious to the nightmare suspended just feet above him. The girl hung there for a full minute, a silent, predatory observer. Then, she began to crawl again, moving across the ceiling directly towards the camera in the corner.

The perspective was terrifying. She was coming for him, the viewer.

Her shape grew larger, filling the frame. He could see the details of her suffering now, the raw-looking gashes that mirrored the ones on his own face. She reached the camera, and her head tilted, peering directly into the lens. The tangled mess of her hair parted just enough for him to see one eye—a dark, fathomless orb filled not with malice, but with an ancient, bottomless sorrow.

Then, her pale, cracked lips parted.

The speakers on his computer, which had been silent, crackled with a faint hiss of static. And through the static, a whisper. It was the dry, reedy sound of a voice long unused, a sound like dead leaves skittering across pavement.

“Night. Night.”

As the last syllable was breathed into the microphone, her face lunged at the lens. The image dissolved into a deafening roar of white noise and pixelated chaos. The feed was dead. The file ended.

Liam sat bolted to his chair, his body rigid, his mind a screaming void. The video was gone, but the image was burned onto the inside of his eyelids. The whisper echoed in his ears. "Night. Night." It wasn't a threat. It was a statement. A twisted, broken bedtime ritual.

He was staring at his monitor's blank desktop, the cheerful default wallpaper a grotesque mockery of his reality. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't think. The proof he’d craved was here, and it was infinitely worse than anything he could have imagined.

Then he heard it.

A sound. Not from the speakers. From the house. From the hallway.

It was a soft, dry, shuffling noise. The sound of something dragging itself across the wooden floor.

It was just outside his office door.