Chapter 3: The First Rule

The blood was the first thing Ethan noticed when he came home from work the next evening. Not a lot—just a few dark drops on the white marble of their kitchen counter, dried to rust-colored stains that looked almost black in the overhead lighting.

"Lena?" he called, setting down his briefcase and approaching the counter cautiously. The drops formed a rough line, as if someone had walked by while bleeding from their hand.

No answer.

He followed the trail through the kitchen and into the dining room, where it stopped abruptly near their antique table. The chairs had been pulled out and arranged in a perfect circle, facing inward toward an empty center. On the table's polished surface, more blood—but this wasn't random droplets. This was deliberate.

Someone had drawn symbols in blood across the wood grain. They looked almost like letters, but not from any alphabet Ethan recognized. The strokes were precise, methodical, as if whoever had made them had been copying from a template.

"Lena!" he called again, louder this time, his voice echoing through the house.

"I'm here," came her voice from the living room, calm and clear.

Ethan hurried toward the sound and found her sitting on their couch, exactly where she'd been standing that first night. She was holding a washcloth pressed against her left palm, and when she saw him, she smiled with what looked like relief.

"You're home," she said. "Good. I was hoping you'd get here before it got too dark."

"What happened to your hand?" Ethan sat beside her, gently taking her wrist to examine the wound. It was a clean cut across her palm, deep enough to bleed freely but not deep enough to need stitches. "And what's all that stuff in the dining room?"

Lena looked down at her injured hand as if seeing it for the first time. "I... I'm not sure. I remember being in the kitchen, making dinner, and then..." She frowned, that familiar lost expression crossing her face. "Then I was sitting here, and my hand was bleeding."

"Lena, there are symbols drawn on our dining room table. In blood."

"What kind of symbols?"

Ethan pulled out his phone and took a picture of the markings, then showed it to her. As soon as she saw the image, her face went white.

"Where did you see these?" she whispered.

"On our table. You don't remember drawing them?"

She stared at the phone screen, her pupils dilating until her dark eyes looked almost black. "No. But I... I know what they mean."

A chill ran down Ethan's spine. "What do they mean?"

"They're a message." Her voice was barely audible. "A warning. They're telling me that time is running out."

"Time for what?"

Lena looked up at him then, and for a moment he saw not his wife but someone—something—else looking out through her eyes. Someone ancient and terrified and utterly desperate.

"Time to teach you the rules," she said.

Before Ethan could ask what she meant, Lena was on her feet, pacing to the window that overlooked their backyard. In the fading light, her reflection in the glass looked translucent, ghostlike.

"I've been trying to protect you," she said without turning around. "Trying to keep you out of it. But it's getting stronger, and I'm getting weaker, and if something happens to me without you knowing how to play..."

"Play what? Lena, you're scaring me."

She laughed, but there was no humor in it. "I'm scaring you? Ethan, I've been standing over your bed for hours every night, watching you sleep without blinking once. I've been cutting symbols into our furniture with my own blood. I've been having conversations with something that lives in the spaces where you're not looking." She turned back to him, and tears were streaming down her face. "I should terrify you."

Ethan stood slowly, his hands raised as if approaching a wounded animal. "Okay. You're right. I am scared. But I'm more scared of losing you. So tell me what's happening. Tell me how to help."

"You can't help," she said, but there was hope in her voice despite the words. "Not the way you want to. But you can... participate. You can learn to play the game."

"What game?"

Lena walked to their coffee table and picked up a notebook—one of her art sketchbooks. She flipped through pages covered with drawings that made Ethan's stomach clench. Dark figures with impossibly long limbs. Eyes that seemed to watch from every corner of every page. And repeatedly, obsessively, drawings of himself sleeping while a shadowy figure loomed over him.

"It doesn't have a name," she said, stopping at a page near the back. "At least, not one I can pronounce. But it's very old, and it has very specific rules."

The page she'd stopped on was covered in writing—not her usual flowing script, but harsh, angular letters that looked like they'd been carved rather than written.

"The most important rule," she continued, her finger tracing the jagged text, "is that someone has to be watching. Always. If there's no one watching, if everyone looks away at the same time, then it wins."

"What wins?"

"The thing that's been using me." Her voice was matter-of-fact now, clinical. "The thing that stands in your peripheral vision and disappears when you turn your head. The thing that makes you feel watched when you're alone."

Ethan's mouth went dry. "The thing from the cameras."

"The cameras see it because cameras don't blink. They don't get tired. They don't look away." She closed the notebook and met his eyes. "But they can be broken. Or turned off. Or their memory can be wiped."

"What does it want?"

"To exist fully. Right now, it can only exist in the spaces between attention—when you're not quite looking, when you're distracted, when you're asleep. But if it can get someone to stop watching entirely, to give up the vigil, then it can step completely into our world."

Ethan sank back onto the couch, his mind reeling. "This is insane. You're talking about... what, some kind of monster? A demon?"

"I'm talking about a predator," Lena said simply. "One that hunts attention instead of flesh. And I've been its prey for weeks now."

"Why you? Why did it choose you?"

Lena was quiet for a long moment, staring down at her bandaged hand. "I think... I think it's because I see too much. Artists do that sometimes. We notice things other people miss. Colors that don't quite match. Shadows that fall the wrong way. Spaces where something should be but isn't."

She sat back down beside him, but maintained careful distance, as if afraid of contaminating him with her proximity.

"It started small," she continued. "Feeling watched while I was painting. Seeing movement in my peripheral vision. I thought it was stress, or too much caffeine, or just the normal paranoia of working alone in a big house." She laughed bitterly. "I was so stupid. I tried to ignore it, and that just made it stronger."

"How long has this been going on?"

"Three months. Maybe four. It's hard to tell—it messes with your perception of time. Days feel like minutes. Minutes feel like hours." She looked at him with desperate eyes. "The night you found me in the living room? That was the first time it took complete control. I was trying so hard to stay awake, to keep watching for it, that I... I went somewhere else. And it stepped in to fill the space I left behind."

Ethan reached for her hand, then stopped when she flinched away.

"Don't," she whispered. "Please. Not until you understand what you're agreeing to."

"What am I agreeing to?"

"To be my watcher. To keep your eyes on me, always, so that it can't take complete control. To never look away, never blink at the wrong moment, never let your attention drift." Her voice was growing more intense, more desperate. "Because if you do—if you look away even for a second when it's trying to take over—then I forget how to be me. I forget how to stop."

"Stop what?"

She didn't answer directly. Instead, she opened the notebook again and showed him a page he'd missed before. This one was covered with drawings of knives, of blood, of himself lying motionless while a figure that looked like Lena stood over him with raised hands.

"It feeds on attention," she said quietly. "But it also feeds on fear. And terror. And..." She swallowed hard. "And death, if it can get it."

The room felt suddenly cold, as if all the warmth had been sucked out of the air. Ethan stared at the drawings, his mind struggling to process what she was telling him.

"You're saying that if I don't watch you, you'll try to kill me?"

"I'm saying that if you don't watch me, the thing wearing my face will try to kill you. And I'll be somewhere else, somewhere dark and quiet, while it happens." Tears were flowing freely down her cheeks now. "I can feel it, Ethan. When it takes over. I can feel myself getting smaller, further away, while something else moves my body and speaks with my voice."

Ethan stood abruptly, pacing to the window where she'd stood moments before. Outside, the sun was setting, and shadows were growing long across their manicured lawn. In the glass, he could see Lena's reflection watching him, but when he turned around, she was looking down at her hands.

"There has to be another way," he said. "Some way to fight it, or get rid of it, or—"

"There is no other way!" The sudden violence in her voice made him jump. "Do you think I haven't tried? Do you think I've just been sitting here for months, letting this thing eat me alive, without fighting back?"

She stood and walked to the mantelpiece, where several of her paintings hung. With deliberate movements, she turned them around, revealing the backs of the canvases. Each one was covered in more of those angular symbols, drawn in what looked like blood mixed with paint.

"I've tried everything," she said, her voice hollow. "Protection spells, binding rituals, cleansing ceremonies. I've burned sage until our house smelled like a forest fire. I've drawn salt circles around our bed. I've worn iron jewelry until it left marks on my skin." She turned back to him. "Nothing works. The only thing that slows it down, the only thing that keeps it from taking complete control, is constant observation."

"But the cameras—"

"The cameras help. But they're not enough. It needs to be human attention. Human eyes. Human consciousness focused on the target." She moved closer to him, and he could see the exhaustion etched into every line of her face. "It needs to be you, Ethan. Because you love me. Because your attention isn't just mechanical—it's invested."

Ethan felt like he was drowning in the impossibility of what she was asking. "You want me to watch you twenty-four hours a day? That's not humanly possible."

"Not twenty-four hours. Just... when it's active. When I'm vulnerable." She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small device—a motion sensor, the kind used in security systems. "I've been tracking its patterns. It's most active between midnight and dawn. And when I'm alone. And when I'm..." She hesitated. "When I'm not completely myself."

"What does that mean?"

"When I'm tired. Or stressed. Or emotional. When my defenses are down." She looked at him with desperate hope. "That's when I need you to watch me. To keep me anchored. To make sure that what's looking back at you is still me."

The weight of what she was asking settled over him like a lead blanket. To never fully relax, never completely let his guard down, never trust that the woman he loved was actually the woman he loved.

"And if I can't? If I fail?"

Lena's face crumpled. "Then you run. You leave this house, you leave this town, and you never look back. Because if it wins, if it takes me completely..." She met his eyes one last time. "Then the thing wearing my face will hunt you for the rest of your life. And it will be very, very patient."

Outside, the last light of day faded, and the house settled into evening shadows. Ethan looked at his wife—really looked at her—and saw not the confident artist he'd married, but a woman balanced on the edge of an abyss, held in place only by the thin thread of his attention.

"Okay," he said quietly.

"Okay?"

"I'll watch. I'll learn your game. I'll keep you here." He stepped closer, and this time she didn't pull away when he took her uninjured hand. "But we're going to find a way to end this. Whatever it takes."

For the first time in weeks, Lena smiled—really smiled, with warmth and hope and love.

"Thank you," she whispered.

Behind her, in the darkening window, Ethan caught a glimpse of something tall and angular moving across their yard. When he looked directly at the glass, there was nothing there.

But Lena's reflection was smiling too, and somehow, that smile was completely different from the one on her actual face.

The game, it seemed, had officially begun.