Chapter 2: The Girl in the Window

Chapter 2: The Girl in the Window

Trevor scrambled backwards, a choked gasp escaping his throat. His legs tangled with his chair, sending him sprawling onto the hardwood floor with a painful thud that rattled his teeth. For a heart-stopping second, all he could see was the afterimage burned onto his retinas: a perfect, glossy, black circle of an eye, impossibly present in the solid wall of his apartment.

His mind screamed denial. A trick of the light. A knot in the wood of the lath behind the plaster. A hallucination brought on by exhaustion and too many energy drinks. But the primal terror clawing its way up his spine knew the truth. It was real. He had been looked at from inside his own wall.

He crab-walked away until his back hit the opposite wall, his eyes glued to the tiny, jagged hole. He half-expected a hand to splinter its way out, or a voice to whisper from the opening. There was nothing. Just the silent, damning hole.

Slowly, shakily, he got to his feet. He glanced at his monitors. The game’s victory screen was still glowing. And in the chat box, the name wx11flow3r_75 sat there, a silent sentinel. The sole witness. The cause.

With a surge of panicked revulsion, he lunged for the PC and slammed the power button, plunging the room into near darkness. The oppressive silence of the apartment rushed back in, ten times heavier than before. He stood there, panting in the gloom, his body trembling. The only light came from the streetlamp outside, casting long, skeletal shadows from his unpacked boxes. Every shadow seemed to coalesce into a watching figure.

Sleep was not an option. He spent the night on his lumpy couch, a golf club clutched in his white-knuckled grip, staring at the wall until his vision blurred. Every creak of the old building, every groan of the pipes, was the scratching sound starting again. He was a prisoner in his own home, besieged by an enemy he couldn't see or comprehend.

By morning, exhaustion had sandpapered his nerves raw. He looked like a ghost, his face pale and gaunt in the thin morning light. He had to reclaim some semblance of normalcy, or he would go insane. He made coffee with shaking hands. He took a shower, flinching every time the water dripped in the pipes. He tried to convince himself it was a prank. A neighbor with a drill and a sick sense of humor. But how could they have known about his stream? About his loneliness? How could they have timed it so perfectly with that goddamn message? I like watching you when you think no one is there.

The thought of turning his computer back on filled him with a stomach-churning dread. He couldn't. He wouldn't. He would delete the streaming software, pack up the monitors, live in the silence. The silence was better than that.

But as the day wore on, the silence began to work its own insidious magic. The quiet wasn't empty anymore; it was filled with a sense of anticipation. A listening stillness. He found himself glancing at the hole, now covered with a hastily slapped-on piece of duct tape that did nothing to soothe his anxiety. The apartment felt like a baited trap, and the lack of noise was just the predator holding its breath.

By late afternoon, he couldn't take it anymore. He was caught between two terrors: the watching presence and the crushing isolation that had invited it in. With a sense of grim resignation, he walked back to his desk. Maybe if he just streamed, acted normal, it would go away. Maybe ignoring it would starve it.

He booted up the PC, his heart hammering. He launched the streaming software, his hand hovering over the 'Go Live' button. This is insane, he thought. I'm inviting the monster back into my house.

He clicked it. The red icon blinked to life.

VIEWERS: 0.

For five minutes, he sat in absolute silence, not even loading a game. He just stared at the viewer count. Then, it flickered.

VIEWERS: 1.

A cold sweat broke out on his brow. The username appeared in the list: wx11flow3r_75.

Trevor’s resolve crumbled. He couldn’t do this. He reached for the mouse, his cursor hovering over the ‘End Stream’ button. “Nope,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “Not doing this. I’m done.”

As his finger tensed to click, a new message pinged in the chat. The first since last night.

wx11flow3r_75: Please don’t go.

The simplicity of it, the almost human plea, was more terrifying than any threat. It wasn't just watching anymore. It was begging. It needed this. It needed him. The parasitic nature of it washed over him, and a wave of nausea followed. He felt a phantom itch behind the wall.

He shot up from his chair, grabbing his keys and wallet. “No,” he said to the empty room, to the camera, to the thing behind the plaster. “No.”

He fled the apartment, slamming and locking the door behind him, not stopping until he was out on the street, sucking in the humid summer air. He walked aimlessly, his only goal to put distance between himself and apartment 3B. He needed to be around people, to see life happening, to drown out the memory of that unblinking eye with the mundane noise of the world.

He ended up at a small park across from his building, sinking onto a hard wooden bench. From here, his apartment building looked depressingly normal. A simple brick facade, a few windows with plants on the sills. Nothing to suggest the wrongness festering within its walls.

His gaze drifted across the courtyard to the adjacent wing of the complex. He scanned the windows, each a little square portrait of a stranger’s life. A cat sleeping in a sunbeam. A flickering television screen.

And then he saw her.

In a window directly opposite his own, a young woman was painting. Her back was mostly to him, but he could see vibrant, messy auburn hair tied back in a loose ponytail, and the intense focus in the set of her shoulders. She wore a dark green jacket over a band t-shirt, and she moved with an unconscious grace, dabbing at a large canvas propped on an easel. The entire scene was bathed in the warm, golden light of the late afternoon. She had a smudge of paint, or maybe charcoal, on her cheek.

Trevor was mesmerized.

He watched as she stepped back to consider her work, head cocked to the side, a small, thoughtful smile playing on her lips. She seemed so completely alive, so effortlessly a part of the world. She was everything he wasn't: confident, creative, at peace in her own space. She was the personification of the normal, happy life he craved.

He sat there on that bench for nearly an hour, a silent, unseen observer, finding a strange, calming solace in watching her. He didn’t feel like a creep; he felt like a lonely castaway spotting a ship on the horizon. She was real. She was a tangible anchor in a world that had suddenly dissolved into supernatural horror.

Then, a sudden, chilling realization washed over him, turning the solace to acid in his stomach.

He was sitting in the dark, watching a stranger through their window without their knowledge.

He was doing the exact same thing that was being done to him.

The parallel was sickeningly perfect. His desperate yearning for connection had led him to commit his own act of voyeurism, a pale, pathetic imitation of the malevolent presence haunting his apartment. The girl in the window was his wx11flow3r_75.

A shiver traced its way down his spine, a cold wholly unrelated to the evening breeze. He felt it again—the distinct, prickling sensation of being watched. He glanced around the empty park, but he knew the feeling wasn't coming from here. It was coming from across the street. From the dark square of his own window. From the tiny, taped-over hole in the wall, where a glossy, black eye was waiting for him to come home.