Chapter 6

I didn't sleep the rest of that night.

Sat in my living room with all the lights on, turning over those last signs in my head like stones I was trying to see the underside of. Now it's wearing your life. The memories are bait. I'm sorry.

The other me knew something. Something they couldn't fully explain in seventeen-second increments, holding up handwritten signs in the dark. Something that made them look at me with grief instead of fear.

I'm sorry.

What do you apologize to yourself for?

By the time the sun came up, I'd made a decision. I needed proof. Not proof for anyone else. Proof for myself. Some kind of objective record that would tell me whether what I was seeing at 3:33 was real or whether my brain had finally cracked under the weight of everything I couldn't explain.

I'd tried recording before. I'd set up my phone to capture my bed while I slept. The footage had shown me sitting bolt upright at 3:33, staring at nothing for seventeen seconds, then lying back down. No other room. No blue curtains. Just me, acting crazy in an otherwise normal bedroom.

But I hadn't really examined that footage. I'd been too freaked out by the closet footprints, too focused on the woman and her warnings. I'd glanced at it, confirmed it didn't show what I was seeing, and moved on.

Maybe I'd missed something.

I dug through my phone until I found the video. I plugged in my earbuds and watched it on the biggest screen I had, my laptop, with the brightness turned all the way up.

The footage was dark but visible. My phone's night mode had kicked in, casting everything in that slightly greenish low-light filter. My bed. My nightstand. My cheap gray curtains hanging motionless in the background.

For the first few hours, nothing happened. I fast-forwarded through footage of myself sleeping, an oddly vulnerable thing to watch. I shifted positions a few times. Mumbled something inaudible around 1 AM. Pulled the covers up to my chin at 2:15.

Then 3:33.

I slowed the playback to normal speed and watched myself wake up.

It was exactly what I remembered. My eyes opened. I sat up. I stared straight ahead at something the camera couldn't see.

But watching it from outside was different. Watching it as an observer rather than a participant.

My face was wrong.

Not wrong in an obvious way. Not distorted or monstrous. Just... off. The expression didn't match what I remembered feeling. I remembered fear, confusion, the desperate attempt to read signs in the dark. But the face on the screen wasn't afraid. It wasn't confused.

It was blank. Completely, utterly blank. Like someone had switched off whatever made me a person and left only the machinery running.

I watched myself sit there for seventeen seconds with that empty expression. No movement. No reaction. Just stillness and that horrible blankness, like a puppet waiting for someone to pick up the strings.

Then, at exactly 3:33 and seventeen seconds, I lay back down and closed my eyes. Smooth. Mechanical. Like a program completing its cycle.

I watched it three more times. Each time, the wrongness got harder to ignore.

That wasn't how I remembered it. I remembered being present during those seventeen seconds. Conscious. Aware. But the person in this video wasn't present at all. They were somewhere else entirely, and their body was just going through the motions.

Where was I during those seventeen seconds?

Where did I go?

I set up the recording again that night. Multiple angles this time. My phone on the nightstand, pointed at my face. My laptop on the dresser, showing a wider shot of the room. A cheap webcam I bought at the electronics store on the corner, positioned to capture the closet door.

If she came back, I wanted to see her. And if I went somewhere during those seventeen seconds, I wanted to see that too.

I also set up something else. A voice recorder on my pillow, right next to my head. If I said anything during the transition, if I made any sound at all, I wanted to capture it.

Then I waited.

Sleep came easier than I expected. Maybe my body had finally hit the wall, the point where no amount of fear could override the basic need for rest. Or maybe some part of me had accepted that whatever was happening was going to happen whether I was awake for it or not.

I dreamed again. The house with the blue shutters. The living room with the comfortable furniture.

She was there. Same white blouse. Same sad expression.

"You're trying to document it," she said. Not a question.

"I need to understand what's happening to me."

"You already understand. You're just afraid to admit it."

I wanted to argue with her. Wanted to demand explanations, answers, something concrete I could hold onto. But dreams don't work that way. The words wouldn't come out right, kept slipping sideways into nonsense.

"The other one is lying to you," she said. "They're not trying to save you. They're trying to save themselves."

"From what?"

She smiled. That same sad smile that never reached her eyes.

"From what you're becoming."

I woke at 3:33.

The room shifted. Blue curtains. The plant. The wooden headboard.

The other me was there, but they weren't holding a sign this time. They were sitting on the edge of their bed, shoulders slumped, head hanging. The posture of someone who'd given up.

I grabbed my flashlight. Aimed it at them.

They looked up. Their face was worse than before. Gaunt didn't cover it anymore. They looked hollowed out. Like something was eating them from the inside.

They raised one hand. Not holding a sign. Just raised it, palm out. A gesture that might have meant stop or wait or goodbye.

Their lips moved. I couldn't hear them, but I could read the shape.

"It's too late."

Then the seventeen seconds ended.

I sat in the darkness for a long moment, processing what I'd seen. The resignation in their posture. The finality of that gesture. The words I couldn't hear but understood anyway.

It's too late.

Too late for what?

I grabbed my phone first. Pulled up the video that had been recording my face.

The footage showed exactly what I expected. Me, sitting bolt upright at 3:33. That same blank expression. That same mechanical stillness. Seventeen seconds of emptiness, then lying back down.

But there was something else this time.

At 3:33 and fifteen seconds, two seconds before the window closed, my lips moved.

I rewound. Watched it again. Definitely movement. Definitely words being formed.

I couldn't tell what I was saying from the video. The angle was wrong, the resolution too low in the darkness. But my lips were definitely moving, forming shapes that looked like language.

I grabbed the voice recorder.

The audio was mostly silence. Hours of nothing but my own breathing and the occasional creak of the building settling. I fast-forwarded to 3:33, watching the timestamp tick up.

There. A sound.

I rewound. Played it again with the volume at maximum.

My own voice, barely above a whisper, slurred with sleep or something else entirely.

"She's almost done."

I played it again. And again. Making sure I'd heard it right.

She's almost done.

Not "I." She.

Like I was reporting on something. Narrating someone else's progress.

Almost done with what?

I pulled up the laptop footage next. The wider shot that showed most of the room.

Same thing. Me sitting up. Blank face. Seventeen seconds of nothing.

But the closet door was open.

I froze the frame. Zoomed in as much as the resolution would allow.

It had been closed when I went to sleep. I was sure of it. I'd checked it three times before I let myself lie down. But in the footage, starting at exactly 3:33, the door was open about six inches.

I couldn't see anything inside. The angle was wrong, the darkness too complete. Just a gap where there shouldn't have been one. A space that hadn't been there before.

I scrubbed through the rest of the footage, looking for the moment the door opened. Looking for movement, for any sign of what might have pushed it.

There was nothing. At 3:32 and 59 seconds, the door was closed. At 3:33 and 0 seconds, it was open. No transition. No motion. Like reality had simply decided that the door had always been open and edited itself accordingly.

The webcam footage was worse.

I'd pointed it directly at the closet door. It should have captured everything.

But when I pulled up the file, there was nothing there. Just static. Seven hours of perfect recording, and then static from 3:32 to 3:34. Two minutes of visual noise where the most important footage should have been.

The file wasn't corrupted. Everything before and after was crystal clear. Just those two minutes, gone. Replaced with snow.

Something didn't want me to see what happened at the closet door.

Or something wanted me to know I couldn't see it. Wanted me to understand that there were limits to what I was allowed to document.

I sat on my bed and stared at the closet. The door was closed now. Had been closed when I woke up. But I'd seen the footage. I knew it had been open during those seventeen seconds.

She'd been in there. Had to be. Standing in the dark, watching me while I sat up with that blank expression and whispered about her progress.

She's almost done.

What was she building? What was she completing?

And what happened when she finished?

I thought about the other me. The way they'd looked tonight, hollowed out and hopeless. The gesture that might have been goodbye. The words I couldn't hear.

It's too late.

Too late for them. But maybe not too late for me. Not yet. I still had time, whatever that meant. Still had a chance to figure out what was happening before she finished whatever she was doing.

I grabbed the laptop footage and rewound to the moment the door appeared open. Frame by frame. Looking for anything I might have missed.

There. In the gap between the door and the frame. Just barely visible in the darkness.

Movement.

Not much. A slight shift in the shadows. Something adjusting its position. Something settling in to watch.

I zoomed in as far as the resolution would allow. The image pixelated into uselessness, just blocks of dark gray and darker gray. But I could see the outline of something. The suggestion of a shape.

It wasn't standing.

It was crouching. Low to the ground. Compact. Patient.

Like an animal waiting for its prey to stop moving.

I closed the laptop. Walked to the closet. Stood in front of it with my hand on the door handle.

I didn't want to open it. Every instinct I had was screaming at me to leave it alone, to walk away, to pretend I hadn't seen what I'd seen.

But I was done pretending. Done looking away. Done letting things happen to me in the dark while I told myself they weren't real.

I pulled the door open.

Empty. Just clothes and shoes and the same mundane mess I'd had for months.

But on the floor, in the corner where the shadows were deepest, something had scratched words into the wooden boards. Fresh scratches, the wood still pale where it had been gouged.

"ALMOST"

I stared at that word for a long time.

Then I got a hammer from my kitchen drawer and nailed the closet door shut.