Elias felt a chill. The figure didn't have a face, just a smooth, pale surface where features should be. It raised a hand and began to mimic a knocking motion in the empty air. Thump. Thump. Thump.

February 7, 2023. He tried to remember that night. It had been a Tuesday—unremarkable, except for a heavy fog that had rolled into the city, swallowing the streetlights.

The video ended. The file vanished from the folder. And then, from the other side of his bedroom door, he heard the same jittery, frame-skipping footsteps approaching.

He double-clicked. The extraction bar crawled with agonizing slowness. When it finished, a single MP4 file sat in the folder. It had no thumbnail, just a black icon. He hit play.

The video was grainier than it should have been for a modern phone. It was shot from a high angle, looking down into a narrow alleyway Elias recognized instantly—it was the view from his own bedroom window. But the perspective was wrong. The camera wasn't behind the glass; it was mounted on the exterior brick, inches away from where his head would have rested while he slept. In the video, the timestamp in the corner read .