Chapter 4: The Face in the Glass

Chapter 4: The Face in the Glass

The drive back to the warehouse was a journey into the belly of the beast. Every streetlight Leo passed seemed to stretch the shadows on the passenger seat into long, skeletal fingers. He parked in his usual spot, the gravel crunching under his tires like brittle bones, and for a full minute, he just sat there, engine off, staring at the monolithic silhouette of the building against the bruised purple of the twilight sky. It no longer looked like a place of work. It looked like a mausoleum.

His boss's voice echoed in his head—Just get through tonight. It sounded so simple. So rational. But rationality had fled the moment he'd heard that scrape on his apartment floor.

The key felt cold and alien in his hand as he unlocked the main personnel door. The heavy thud of it closing behind him sealed him in, and the oppressive silence he had once craved now descended like a physical weight. The air was frigid, stagnant with a sense of ancient stillness, as if the very molecules had been waiting for him.

His first stop was his office. The splintered door frame was a raw, gaping wound in the hallway, a testament to the night before. Inside, everything was as he’d left it, save for a yellow strip of police tape stuck to the damaged wood, a flimsy ward against a danger it couldn't comprehend. He avoided looking at it, focusing instead on the task at hand. The projector shipment. Get it done, get out.

The manifest was on his desk. He grabbed his scanner, the plastic cool and familiar against his palm, and headed out into the cavernous main floor. The towering aisles of shrink-wrapped pallets felt like the teeth of some great, sleeping creature. He found the shipment—three pallets stacked high with identical brown boxes—and began his work, forcing himself into the familiar, methodical rhythm. Scan a barcode, tap the screen. Scan, tap. Scan, tap.

He was trying to build a wall of routine around his fear, but the silence kept breaking through. Every distant creak of steel, every hum from the freezer units, was a potential threat. He found himself glancing over his shoulder every few seconds, his flashlight beam cutting nervous arcs through the darkness between the shelves.

He finished the first pallet and set his scanner down on top of a sturdy cardboard box while he cut the shrink-wrap off the next. His back was to it for no more than ten seconds. When he turned back, it was gone.

Leo’s heart leaped into his throat. He scanned the top of the box. Empty. He swept his flashlight across the floor around the pallet, his breathing growing shallow and quick. Nothing.

Did it fall? Did I knock it off?

He crouched down, peering into the dark space beneath the pallet. And there it was. Lying on the concrete nearly six feet away, nestled deep in the shadows, as if it had been casually tossed aside. It was impossible. There were no vibrations, no incline. He hadn't touched it. Yet there it lay.

He snatched it up, his hand trembling, and backed away from the pallets. The feeling of being watched intensified, a crawling sensation on his skin so potent he almost expected to feel a physical touch. He abandoned the shipment and retreated to the relative safety of his glass-walled office, his mind reeling. It’s starting again.

He sat at his desk, staring out into the warehouse, his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. The scavenger’s words swirled in his thoughts. He plays games. Was this the game? A petty, psychological torment? Moving things just to watch him unravel?

A sudden crackle of static made him jump. It came from the old PA speaker mounted on the wall above his office, a dusty relic from the Ironworks era that hadn't worked in the five years Leo had been here. The static hissed for a moment, a dead sound from a dead system, and then, through the electronic fuzz, a voice whispered.

It was a dry, rasping sound, like autumn leaves skittering across pavement. It was faint, distorted, and undeniably ancient.

“…Le-o…”

The sound was intimate, right beside his ear and a million miles away at the same time. The blood in his veins turned to slush. It knew his name. The entity—Janus Krieg—was no mere echo. It was aware. It was present. And it was speaking to him.

Panic, pure and undiluted, finally broke him. He couldn't stay in this glass cage. He needed walls. Solid walls. He bolted from the office, his footsteps echoing in the vast emptiness, and ran for the only other enclosed space he knew—the old administrative section on the second floor, a part of the building Med-Supply never used.

He took the grated metal stairs two at a time, the sound of his flight a frantic clang that chased him upward. He burst onto the second-floor landing, a dusty, forgotten corridor lined with frosted glass doors bearing faded titles: Accounts, Scheduling, Foreman’s Office. He threw himself against the nearest door and found himself in what must have been a breakroom. Old tables and rusted chairs sat like skeletal remains in the gloom. The air was thick with the smell of decay and rust.

At the far end of the room was a large, single-pane window, caked with decades of industrial grime. It looked out over the flat, featureless expanse of the warehouse roof. Beyond that, a sheer drop of thirty feet to the asphalt below.

Leo paced the small room like a caged animal, his breath coming in ragged bursts. This is real. This is happening. The logical world he clung to had been peeled away, revealing a nightmare beneath. He was trapped in a building with the ghost of a sadistic foreman who knew his name.

He stopped, catching his breath, and happened to glance at the filthy window. He saw his own reflection, a pale, terrified shape against the dark room. He stared into his own wide eyes, trying to will his heart to slow down.

That’s when he felt it. The unmistakable pressure of another’s gaze.

Slowly, his eyes refocused, looking not at his reflection, but through it, at the grimy glass itself. A shape was resolving out of the darkness on the other side. Not a reflection. Something outside.

A face materialized, coalescing from the night. It was long and gaunt, the skin stretched tight over sharp cheekbones and a hollow jaw, like a skull draped in parchment. The deep-set, cavernous eye sockets were pools of absolute blackness, but within them, two points of malevolent, intelligent light burned like dying embers. Its thin, bloodless lips were pulled back from grey teeth in a grotesque approximation of a smile.

It was the face of Janus Krieg. And it was floating outside the second-story window, where no man could possibly stand.

Leo was paralyzed, pinned in place by that terrible, knowing gaze. The face just hung there in the void, its burning eyes fixed on him, its silent smile promising an eternity of suffering. This wasn't a trick of the light. This wasn't paranoia. This was a violation of reality itself, a monster staring into his soul from a place where nothing should be. The hunt was on.

As suddenly as it appeared, the face dissolved back into the blackness, leaving only the grimy glass and Leo’s own horrified reflection. He stumbled backward, his legs giving out, and he slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, gasping for air that wouldn't come.

The last vestiges of his denial shattered. He was not going crazy. He was being hunted.

And then, a new sound cut through the ringing in his ears. It came from the factory floor far below, sharp and clear in the dead silence.

It was the unmistakable, metallic sound of a heavy, ornate brass key turning in an old iron lock. A deep, resonant click, followed by the solid thump of a deadbolt sliding home. It wasn't one of his locks. It was something older, something that belonged to the building's very bones.

Janus was no longer just watching. He was locking the doors. He was setting the board for the next phase of his game.