The Watcher in the House

It started, as these things often do, out of sheer boredom. My friend Leo and I, fueled by cheap beer and a morbid curiosity, decided to dive into the "deeper" parts of the web. We weren't looking for anything in particular—just a thrill, something to make our skin crawl for a few hours before we logged off and forgot about it.

We finally stumbled into a forum that felt different. The text was cleaner, the users more succinct. It was called "The Observer's Gallery." The main page had a single, stark line of text: "Submit a photograph. Receive a perspective."

It was creepy, but in a pretentious, artistic way. Leo, ever the instigator, dared me.

"Come on, Mark. Let's give them a picture. What's the worst that could happen?"

I shrugged, opened my phone, and scrolled for a recent, innocuous photo. I settled on one from a barbecue a week prior. It was a great shot of my backyard: the new redwood deck I'd built myself, the lush green lawn, my wife Sarah laughing as she flipped burgers, the golden retriever, Duke, chasing a squirrel in the background. It was the picture of suburban bliss.

I uploaded it to the site. A black progress bar filled instantly, and a new message appeared in a private chat window.

Observer_7: An interesting tableau. The perspective will be delivered.

Then, we were booted from the site. We laughed it off, called it a lame ARG, and went to bed.

The next morning, an encrypted file appeared in a temporary email account I'd used for the site. Inside was a single image file. It was the same photo of my backyard, but... altered. The colors were inverted, giving it a sickly, negative look. And in the top-left corner, where the second-story window of my own house was visible, a figure was now standing. It was a tall, gaunt silhouette, featureless and black, just standing and looking down at the yard. It was undeniably in my house.

My blood ran cold. Leo and I had taken the original photo. There was no one in that window.

We wrote it off as a clever, if disturbing, Photoshop job. A good prank. But that evening, as I was grilling dinner, I found myself staring up at that window. It was dark and empty. Of course it was.

The second file came two days later. Another inverted photo. This one was a selfie I'd taken in my home office just the day before, my face lit by the computer monitor. In the altered version, the silhouette of Observer_7 was standing directly behind my chair, its long, thin arms hanging at its sides, its head tilted. I hadn't heard or felt a thing when that photo was taken.

Panic began to set in. This wasn't a prank anymore. They were in my house. They were watching me in real-time. I called the police, but they found nothing. No signs of break-in, no hidden cameras. They treated me like a paranoid husband seeing ghosts.

The third file broke me. It wasn't an inverted photo this time. It was a short, shaky video, filmed from a low angle, as if from the floor. It showed my wife, Sarah, sleeping soundly in our bed. The camera slowly panned up from her peaceful face to the headboard, and then to the wall above it. There, written in what looked like mud or ash, was a single word:

SOON.

I screamed. I tore our bedroom apart looking for cameras. I made Sarah stay at her sister's. I bought security cameras and installed them in every room. For a week, nothing happened. No files, no signs of intrusion. I started to think the nightmare was over, that I'd scared them off.

Then, last night, my security system sent an alert to my phone. Motion detected in the living room. My heart hammered against my ribs as I opened the live feed.

The camera showed a figure standing in the middle of the room. It was tall and unnaturally thin, its back to the camera. It was just standing there, perfectly still. It was the silhouette from the photos.

I was about to call the police when the figure on the feed slowly began to turn. It wasn't a fast, jerky movement. It was a smooth, deliberate rotation, as if it knew I was watching.

But it didn't turn its body. Its head swiveled a full 180 degrees on its neck, until it was staring directly into the lens of the security camera. The face was pale and waxy, with deep, shadowed eye sockets and no discernible features.

It stood there, looking at me through the camera, for a full minute. Then, it raised one of its long, spindly arms and pointed a single, bony finger directly at the camera.

My phone buzzed again. Not an alert from the security system. A new message in that temporary email account. The subject line was empty. The body contained only two words, but they were enough to shatter what was left of my sanity.

It read: "I'm upstairs."

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