Chapter 10: The Friend Who Believed

Chapter 10: The Friend Who Believed

The phone felt like a lifeline and a lead weight. Alex’s thumb hovered over Sarah’s name, her own reflection a ghostly, distorted mask on the dark screen. Making the call was an act of supreme desperation. It was one thing to be trapped in a waking nightmare; it was another to invite someone else in to witness it, to risk the final, crushing judgment of being labeled insane. She remembered Sarah from the party, quieter than the others, her eyes holding a thoughtful depth that Liam’s boisterous skepticism lacked. She remembered a late-night conversation years ago about Sarah’s grandmother, a woman who read tea leaves and spoke of spirits as if they were just troublesome neighbors. It was the flimsiest of hopes, but it was all she had.

She pressed the call button before she could lose her nerve.

“Alex? Hey, I was just thinking about you. Everything okay? You’ve been a ghost.” Sarah’s voice was a warm, welcome intrusion of normalcy.

“Sarah, can you come over?” Alex’s voice was a raw croak. She cleared her throat. “Something’s happened. I… I need you to see something.”

A beat of hesitation. “See something? Like, right now? It’s almost ten.”

“Please,” Alex begged, the word cracking with a desperation she couldn't hide. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t… important. Just please come.”

The raw plea in Alex's voice cut through the late-night inertia. “Okay,” Sarah said, her tone shifting from casual to concerned. “Okay, I’m on my way. Twenty minutes.”

The twenty minutes that followed were a new form of torture. Alex paced the small, clear path between her kitchen and the door, a frantic caged animal. She’d managed to wrestle the floor lamp back into its proper position and had righted the sofa with a strength born of pure adrenaline, the muscles in her back screaming in protest. But the rest of the room remained a testament to the entity’s power: the upside-down pictures, the inverted books, the monstrously flipped coffee table. She needed Sarah to see it. Proof. Witness.

When the buzzer finally rang, she nearly jumped out of her skin. She buzzed Sarah up, her hand trembling as she unlocked the three deadbolts on her front door.

Sarah stood in the hallway, a canvas tote bag over her shoulder, her expression a mixture of worry and curiosity. “Hey, you look awful. What’s going on?” she asked, stepping inside.

And then she stopped dead.

Her eyes went wide, sweeping across the living room. She took in the coffee table with its legs pointing at the sky. She saw the perfectly aligned but inverted spines of the books on the shelf. Her gaze flickered to the photos on the wall, each one a familiar face trapped in an upside-down world.

“Alex…” Sarah’s voice was a whisper of disbelief. “What is this? Is this… some kind of performance art piece? For a client?”

It was the exact rationalization Alex had expected, the one she had dreaded. The search for a logical explanation in the face of the impossible.

“It’s not art, Sarah,” Alex said, her voice flat with exhaustion. She gestured numbly around the room. “I woke up to this. This morning.”

Sarah walked slowly into the room, her tote bag slipping from her shoulder to the floor. She ran a hand over the rough underside of the inverted sofa. She walked to the bookshelf and pulled out a volume of art history, staring at the upside-down text as if it held a secret code. “No. No way. Someone did this. Someone broke in and… did this as a prank? A really, really messed-up prank?”

“The locks were all set from the inside,” Alex said, the words tasting like ash. “Nothing was taken. Nothing was even broken. Do you have any idea the strength, the silence, it would take to do this?”

Sarah was shaking her head, her mind clearly racing, trying to assemble the pieces into a picture that made sense. “But this is impossible. Alex, are you… are you okay? Have you been sleeping?”

The question was gentle, but the implication was a knife twisting in Alex’s gut. The psychological evaluation had begun. “I’m not crazy,” Alex said, her voice trembling with the effort of holding back a flood of tears. “I’m being haunted.”

Sarah looked at her, her eyes filled with a deep, pitying sorrow that was a thousand times worse than disbelief. “Alex…”

“I know how it sounds,” Alex cut her off, her voice rising. “But it started that night. The party. The door. You were there. I gave it a game, Sarah, and it’s been playing ever since.”

Sarah opened her mouth to reply, to offer a comforting platitude or the number of a good therapist, but Alex held up a hand.

“Just… sit. Please. For five minutes. Just sit with me in this room.”

Looking utterly lost, Sarah perched on the edge of the now-upright sofa. Alex went to the kitchen and poured two glasses of water, her movements slow and deliberate. She placed one glass on the floor next to Sarah and set the other on the one surface that remained an island of sanity: a small, sturdy end table next to the sofa.

Then they sat in silence. The thick, unnatural quiet of the apartment settled around them. It was a physical presence, the silence of a predator that Alex could now feel coiled in the corners of the room. Sarah fidgeted, clearly uncomfortable, her gaze darting around the bizarre, inverted landscape.

“Alex, maybe we should go get some air,” Sarah began, her voice strained. “We can talk about this…”

“Shh,” Alex whispered, her eyes fixed on the glass of water on the end table. “Just watch.”

They waited. The seconds stretched into minutes. The only sound was their own breathing. Sarah sighed, a puff of frustrated air, and started to stand up. “Look, I think you’re exhausted and you’re not thinking straight…”

And then it happened.

The glass of water on the end table, which had been sitting perfectly still a foot from the nearest edge, began to move.

It wasn't a jolt or a sudden tip. It was a slow, deliberate, and utterly impossible slide. It moved with a smooth, frictionless grace across the polished wood of the table, leaving a faint, thin trail of condensation in its wake. There was no vibration. No sound. Just a silent, purposeful journey towards the edge.

Sarah froze mid-movement, her eyes locked on the glass. The color drained from her face, replaced by a waxy, grey pallor. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.

The glass reached the edge of the table. It paused for a single, theatrical beat, hanging in defiance of gravity. Then, it tipped over and shattered on the hardwood floor, the sound of the crash as loud and violent as a gunshot in the tomb-like silence.

Sarah screamed. It was a raw, terrified sound that ripped through the stillness. She scrambled backward on the sofa, trying to put as much distance as possible between herself and the shards of glittering glass, her eyes wide with a terror that finally, finally mirrored Alex’s own.

“You see?” Alex whispered, the words a mixture of vindication and horror. “You see?”

Sarah could only nod, her body trembling uncontrollably. She was staring at the empty space where the glass had been, her mind finally surrendering to the impossible truth. She looked at Alex, and for the first time, there was no pity in her eyes. There was only pure, unadulterated belief.

The dam of Alex’s isolation broke. Relief, so potent it was nauseating, washed over her. She wasn’t alone.

For the next hour, the story poured out of her—the drunken party, the upside-down girl, the frantic call to her mother, the scuttling, the reflection in the monitor, the horrifying discovery of Max’s shredded toy, the two rules, the failed strategy of ignoring it. Sarah listened, her initial shock hardening into a grim, focused intensity.

“A hungry thought,” Sarah said, latching onto the phrase. “A Tulpa. I’ve… I’ve read about that. On weird internet forums. It’s Tibetan, I think. The idea that you can create a being out of pure concentration.”

“My mother thinks I created it with a joke,” Alex said, rubbing her tired eyes.

“Then we need to figure out how to un-create it,” Sarah said, her voice firm. A new energy sparked between them, the frantic energy of two soldiers in a trench.

They spent the rest of the night huddled over Sarah’s laptop, the single blue-white glow a small fortress against the oppressive darkness of the apartment. They typed in keywords: "Tulpa," "thought-form," "egregore," "parasitic psychic entity." They fell down a rabbit hole of obscure occult blogs, paranormal forums from the early 2000s, and scanned pages of forgotten folklore.

The information was a chaotic, terrifying mess. One source claimed the only way to destroy a Tulpa was to withdraw all attention, to starve it until it dissipated—a strategy Alex knew had backfired spectacularly. Another, more aggressive forum advocated for direct confrontation, for creating rituals to banish it, warning that passivity was a sign of weakness. A third, chillingly, suggested that intense study and focus on the entity, even with hostile intent, could be another form of food, making it stronger and more self-aware. Every potential solution was contradicted by a dire warning. There was no easy answer.

It was almost dawn when Sarah’s tired finger stopped scrolling. She pointed to a line of text in a long, rambling post on a dusty corner of the internet, written by an anonymous user recounting their own supposed experience.

“Alex, look at this,” she whispered. The screen cast long shadows on her pale, exhausted face.

Alex leaned in, her eyes struggling to focus on the small font. The sentence seemed to leap off the page.

The one sacred rule, the one thing that gives you power, is knowing its primary limitation. It has no imagination of its own. It cannot create. It can only take what is yours.