chapter -0.4 Depth

I used to think the scariest part of being a cop was the crime scene.

The smell, the silence, the blood still warm when you get there first.

But I was wrong.

The real horror begins after — when the silence follows you home.

I’ve stopped opening the curtains in my apartment.

The city’s lights outside move like a slow pulse, the same rhythm as the red string on my board. Sometimes I wake up thinking I can hear them hum.

I don’t dream anymore — not really. It’s more like I’m awake somewhere else.

Same room, same files. But the case talks back.

Every unsolved question whispers.

Every photograph breathes.

And the killer, faceless as ever, lingers just at the edge of the dark.

I tell myself it’s the exhaustion. But when exhaustion begins to feel sentient, you start wondering if you’re chasing a criminal… or something that wants to be found.

---

The psychiatrist assigned to the department once told me,

"Arin, you need to detach. You can’t carry every corpse inside your head.”

But what if the corpse starts to talk back?

What if it knows your name?

The Investigation Report — Day 9

Location: East Dock

Body found near the water, positioned facing the moonlight.

Hands folded. Eyes open. A single mirror shard on the chest.

Fingerprint smudged. No blood splatter.

But written on the dock wall — a single phrase, in chalk:

“Look inward.”

I knew that handwriting.

I’d seen it in my own notes.

For a moment, the world narrowed to a single breath. I dropped the chalk piece into an evidence bag, pretending my fingers weren’t trembling.

Later, in the lab, Meera noticed it too.

“Sir… this matches your old handwriting style. Before you switched to block letters.”

I didn’t respond. I couldn’t.

Because she was right.

That night, I tried to sleep again.

But the dreams had turned into interrogations.

I was sitting in the dim interview room, only this time, I was the one across the table.

“Why are you still here?”

The voice came from the dark.

“Because I haven’t caught him.”

“Then why does he look like you?”

The lights flickered.

And when they came back — the reflection in the glass wasn’t mine.

It was grinning.

---

I woke up drenched in sweat.

3:12 a.m.

A sound — soft, metallic — came from the living room.

I grabbed my gun and flashlight. The beam cut across the dark.

Nothing.

Then, a glint on the wall — a piece of mirror I’d never seen before, small, oval-shaped, hanging by a thread. My flashlight hit it — and for a second, I saw the board behind me in its reflection.

Only this time, the word in the center wasn’t ARIN.

It said RUN.

The mirror cracked.

---

Morning.

Meera arrived to find me pale and shaking.

“Sir, you look—”

“Don’t,” I said. “Just brief me.”

The forensic report from the dock came in. The mirror shard —

traces of saline, sweat, and faint DNA —

mine.

Impossible. I hadn’t touched it. I hadn’t even been near the dock before the call.

But the test never lies.

------

My mind became a battlefield.

Memories collided — broken reels of case files and sleepless nights, flashbacks from the 1987 case that had haunted my father before he disappeared.

Was I following his footsteps — or repeating them?

Was the killer taunting me, or was I unraveling into something he left behind?

The thought came quietly, like a whisper I’d been waiting for all along:

“Maybe you didn’t find the case, Arin.

The case found you.”

---

That night, I stood before the wall again, tracing every line, every thread.

The pattern had changed on its own — new shapes forming.

At the edges, near the corner, small scribbles I didn’t remember writing appeared:

The eye sees what it believes. The rest it invents.

I felt something cold crawl up my spine.

Because that wasn’t written in my handwriting — not anymore.

---

And somewhere, outside my window,

a figure was watching the lights flicker.

When I turned to look —

it smiled and vanished into the dark.

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