It started with the smell of crayons. You know the smell—that waxy, synthetic scent that screams “elementary school.” It’s usually a smell that makes me smile, reminding me of simpler times, of learning to stay within the lines. But now? Now that smell makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It smells like dread.
My name is Sarah, and I’m a single mom living in a quiet suburb just outside of Portland, Oregon. It’s the kind of neighborhood where the biggest scandal is usually someone leaving their trash cans out a day too long. My life was terrifyingly normal. I worked a 9-to-5 in HR, drank too much coffee, and spent my evenings trying to convince my six-year-old daughter, Lily, that broccoli was actually “tiny trees” and therefore delicious.
Lily was a bright kid. Bubbling with energy, messy blonde hair, and an imagination that could rival Spielberg. She was always drawing. Our fridge was a mosaic of colorful scribbles—sunflowers, our golden retriever Buster, me with stick-figure arms that reached the ground.
But three weeks ago, the gallery on the fridge changed.
It was a Tuesday afternoon. The rain was hammering against the kitchen window—typical Oregon weather. Lily was sprawled out on the living room rug, tongue poking out the corner of her mouth in deep concentration.
“Whatcha making, Lil?” I asked, carrying a basket of laundry through the hall.
“A picture for you,” she chirped, not looking up.
When she finished, she ran over and handed it to me with that beaming pride only a child possesses. I wiped my hands on my jeans and took the paper.
It was a portrait. But it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Buster.
It was a figure. A tall, oval head with zero hair. The body was just a long, black rectangle, like a monolith. But the face… that was what made me pause. There were no eyes. Just blank, white space where the eyes should be. The mouth was a thin, jagged black line, pressed tight.
“Oh,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. “That’s… interesting, honey. Is this a monster from your iPad games?”
Lily shook her head vigorously, her pigtails bouncing. “No, Mommy. That’s the Night Babysitter.”
I let out a short, breathy laugh. “The Night Babysitter? Do I not pay the day one enough?”
“He comes when you’re asleep,” Lily said matter-of-factly, grabbing the paper back to go add more shading to the dark body. “He watches.”
I didn’t think much of it then. Kids say weird stuff. My nephew once told me he used to be a firefighter in the 1920s who died in a soup explosion. It’s just how their brains wire the world together. I stuck the drawing on the fridge, right next to a permission slip for the zoo, and started dinner.
I should have taken it down. I should have burned it.
Chapter 2: The Repetition
By the end of the first week, there were five of them.
Every day after school, Lily would sit at the kitchen table, bypass the yellow and pink crayons, and go straight for the black and grey.
Wednesday: The figure standing next to a bed. Thursday: The figure standing in a doorway. Friday: A close-up of the face. Still no eyes. Just that blank, fleshy emptiness.
It was becoming a fixation. I tried to steer her toward other subjects.
“Hey, Lil, how about we draw a castle today? Or a unicorn?” I suggested on Saturday morning, laying out a fresh pack of construction paper.
She looked at me with big, innocent blue eyes. “But he’s here, Mommy. I have to draw him so he knows I see him.”
That sentence sent a chill down my spine that felt like an ice cube sliding under my shirt. “So he knows you see him?” I repeated, kneeling down to her level. “Honey, is this… is this someone real? Did someone talk to you outside at school?”
The protective mother bear in me woke up instantly. Stranger danger. That was the real horror.
“No, Mommy,” she sighed, exasperated by my lack of understanding. “He’s only here at night. In my room.”
“In your room?”
“Yes. When you turn off the light and the house goes click-click.”
She meant the settling of the house. The pipes cooling down.
“Does he say anything to you?” I asked, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.
“No. He just stands there. He waits.”
“Waits for what?”
She shrugged, picking up a black marker. “Just waits.”
I tore the drawings off the fridge that night after she went to bed. I told myself I was just decluttering. But the truth was, I couldn’t stand to look at them while I poured my glass of wine. They felt heavy. They felt like they were watching me back, even without eyes.
Chapter 3: The Empty Sockets
Two weeks in, the atmosphere in the house shifted. You know how you can feel when you’re in a fight with your partner, even if no one is speaking? The air feels thick? The house felt like that. Charged.
I stopped sleeping well. I’d wake up at 3:00 a.m., straining my ears against the silence, listening for creaks, for footsteps. I checked the deadbolts on the front door three times a night. I checked the window latches. Everything was secure.
But Lily kept drawing.
The drawings were getting better—or worse, depending on how you looked at it. Her motor skills were improving. The shading was more aggressive. The “Night Babysitter” was becoming more defined. He wore a suit now. A dark, shapeless suit.
One night, I was tucking her in. The room was bathed in the soft pink glow of her princess nightlight. She was clutching her stuffed rabbit, Mr. Hops.
I decided to confront it head-on. Maybe if I used logic, the fear would go away.
“Lil,” I whispered, brushing a stray hair from her forehead. “Can I ask you something about your drawings?”
She nodded sleepily.
“Why doesn’t the babysitter have eyes? Everyone has eyes.”
She shifted, pulling the duvet up to her chin. She looked small. Fragile.
“He doesn’t need them, Mommy.”
“Why not?”
“Because he stands very close.”
My heart hammered against my ribs. Thump. Thump. Thump.
“Close to where, baby?”
She raised a small, trembling hand and pointed to the empty space between her bed and the wall. A space maybe two feet wide. A space I had walked past a thousand times.
“He stands there,” she whispered. “Every night. Right after you close the door. He leans over.”
I looked at the empty space. It was just shadows and carpet. But for a second, I swore the air there looked darker. Denser.
“Does he… does he touch you?” I felt sick asking it.
“No,” she said. “He just breathes.”
I kissed her forehead, my lips trembling, and practically ran out of the room. I didn’t turn off the hallway light that night. I sat in the living room with the TV on mute, staring at the baby monitor I hadn’t used in years. It was audio only, and it was silent.
But “silent” isn’t really silent, is it? There’s static. There’s the hum of the world. And I swore, every now and then, I could hear a rhythm. In. Out. In. Out.
Chapter 4: The Eye of the Lens
The next morning, I did what any modern, terrified mother would do. I went to the electronics store.
I bought a Wyze cam. Small, unassuming, connects to Wi-Fi. It had night vision and a motion sensor that would alert my phone.
I told Lily it was a “monster detector” to keep her safe, to make sure the monsters stayed away. She seemed okay with that.
I set it up on her bookshelf, hidden between a stack of Dr. Seuss books and a stuffed giraffe. I angled it perfectly. It caught the entire bed, and more importantly, it caught the “Night Babysitter’s” spot. The empty patch of carpet.
The first night was agony. I sat in my bed, phone in hand, watching the live feed. The screen was a grainy black and white. Lily tossed and turned a bit, then settled. Nothing appeared. No shadows. No men in suits. Just a sleeping six-year-old.
I felt a wave of relief. It’s just imagination, I told myself. She’s processing something. Maybe she saw a scary movie trailer.
The second night was the same. Nothing. I actually managed to sleep for a few hours.
Then came the third night.
It was a Thursday. I was exhausted. Work had been brutal. I put Lily down at 8:30, checked the camera feed—all clear—and passed out in my own bed by 10:00.
My phone vibrated on the nightstand at 2:12 a.m.
It wasn’t a call. It was a notification from the camera app.
Motion Detected: Lily’s Room.
I woke up instantly, adrenaline flooding my system like ice water. I grabbed the phone, my fingers fumbling to unlock it. The screen was blindingly bright in the dark room.
I tapped the notification. The app loaded. The little spinning wheel seemed to take an eternity.
Loading stream…
Then, the image popped up.
At first, my brain couldn’t process what I was seeing. It looked like a glitch. A smudge on the lens.
Lily was asleep, curled on her side facing the wall.
But above her… beside the bed… something was blocking the view of the floor.
It wasn’t a glitch.
It was a mass.
It was darker than the shadows in the room. It absorbed the infrared light of the camera. It was tall.
I zoomed in, pinching the screen with trembling fingers.
It was a torso. Someone—some thing—was standing in the two-foot gap between the bed and the wall.
I couldn’t see the head; it was out of frame, too high up. But I saw the arm. A long, thin limb hanging straight down, perfectly still.
I couldn’t breathe. I stared at the timestamp. 2:13:05 AM. It was live.
Then, the mattress moved.
On the screen, I saw the indentation. The corner of the mattress, right by Lily’s head, depressed slowly. Like someone was leaning their weight onto it. Like someone was bending down to whisper.
The figure shifted. The dark mass moved lower.
I didn’t think. I didn’t plan. I didn’t grab a weapon.
I threw my covers off, sprinted down the hallway, and burst into Lily’s room, slamming the door against the wall.
“Get away from her!” I screamed, flipping the light switch.
The room flooded with blinding yellow light.
Lily sat up, screaming, terrified by my entrance.
“Mommy?!”
I scanned the room wildly. My chest was heaving. I looked at the spot beside the bed.
Empty.
I looked in the closet. Empty. Under the bed. Empty.
The window was locked tight. The paint on the sill was undisturbed.
There was no one there.
I grabbed Lily, pulling her into my arms, squeezing her so hard she complained. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. Mommy just had a bad dream.”
I carried her into my room. We slept with the lights on. I held a kitchen knife in my hand under the duvet until the sun came up.
Chapter 5: The Smile
I didn’t send her to school the next day. I called in sick to work. I spent the morning drinking coffee, shaking, and re-watching the footage.
Every time I watched it, I tried to convince myself it was a shadow. A trick of the light. But shadows don’t depress a mattress. Shadows don’t have mass.
Around 10:00 a.m., Lily sat at the kitchen table. She was quiet, sensing my anxiety. She pulled out her crayons.
I watched her from the counter. I wanted to tell her to stop. I wanted to throw the crayons in the trash. But I was frozen.
She worked quickly this time. humming a little tune.
“Done,” she said, sliding the paper across the granite countertop.
I walked over slowly. I didn’t want to look. I really, really didn’t want to look.
I looked.
It was him. The Night Babysitter. The same oval head. The same long, dark body.
But something was different.
The empty spaces where the eyes should be were still there. But the mouth…
The jagged, thin line was gone.
In its place was a wide, curving U-shape. Filled in with red crayon.
It wasn’t just a smile. It was a grin. A wide, impossible grin that stretched too far across the face.
“Why is he smiling?” I whispered, my voice cracking.
Lily looked up at me, her face pale.
“Because he knows you saw him, Mommy.”
She paused, picking at a hangnail on her thumb.
“And he says he likes the camera. He wants you to keep watching.”
I looked at the drawing. I looked at the red grin. And then, for the first time, I noticed something else in the drawing.
In the background, behind the smiling figure, Lily had drawn something new.
She had drawn me.
I was sleeping in my bed. And standing over me, in my drawing, was another tall, black figure.
“He brought a friend for you,” Lily said softly.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. A notification.
Motion Detected: Master Bedroom.
I am currently standing in the kitchen. My bedroom is empty.
I haven’t opened the app yet.
Chapter 6: The Breach
The kitchen was silent, save for the hum of the refrigerator and the frantic thudding of my own heart. The sunlight streaming through the sliding glass door seemed mocking, too bright and cheerful for the cold dread pooling in my stomach.
Lily was watching me. Her small hands were folded on top of the drawing, right over the red crayon smile. She wasn’t scared. That was the worst part. She looked… expectant.
My phone was still buzzing in my hand. Motion Detected: Master Bedroom.
I didn’t want to look. I wanted to smash the phone against the granite countertop and pretend the 21st century didn’t exist. I wanted to grab Lily and run out the door without looking back. But I couldn’t. I had to know. If there was an intruder—a human one—I needed to know if he was armed. If it was something else… well, I needed to know how close it was.
I swiped the screen.
The feed loaded faster this time, thanks to the strong Wi-Fi signal in the kitchen. The view was crisp. My bedroom. The unmade bed, the pile of clothes on the chair I’d been meaning to fold for three days, the sunlight filtering through the blinds.
At first, I saw nothing. Just a messy room.
Then, I saw the distortion.
It was by the dresser. Unlike the figure in Lily’s room, which had been a solid, dark mass, this one seemed… inconsistent. It flickered like static on an old VHS tape. It was tall—impossibly tall. Its head brushed the ceiling fan blades.
It wasn’t moving toward the door. It was moving toward the nightstand. Toward my side of the bed.
I watched, frozen, as a long, smoky limb extended toward my pillow. It didn’t have fingers. It had tendrils. They brushed against the fabric where I laid my head every night.
Then, the audio kicked in.
The camera in my room was newer than the one in Lily’s. The microphone was sensitive. It picked up a sound that made my knees buckle.
It was a sniffing sound. Wet, heavy inhalations. Like a hound tracking a scent. It was smelling my pillow. It was hunting.
“He likes your smell, Mommy,” Lily said softly from the table. She hadn’t moved. She wasn’t looking at the phone. She just knew. “He says you smell like fear and lavender.”
I dropped the phone. It clattered loudly on the tiles, the screen cracking.
“We’re leaving,” I said. My voice sounded foreign, harsh. “Lily, shoes. Now.”
“But Buster is sleeping,” she protested.
Buster.
Oh god. The dog.
I realized with a jolt of nausea that I hadn’t seen Buster all morning. usually, he’d be under the table begging for toast crumbs. I hadn’t heard him bark. I hadn’t heard him click-clack his nails on the hardwood.
“Where is Buster, Lily?” I asked, grabbing her shoulders. I was shaking her a little too hard. “Where is the dog?”
She pointed toward the hallway. Toward the bedrooms.
“He’s playing hide and seek,” she said. “With the new friend.”
Chapter 7: The Daylight Escape
I made a choice in that split second—a choice that still haunts me when I lie awake at night.
I chose my daughter.
If Buster was in the bedrooms—if he was in there with It—I couldn’t save him. Not without walking past the threshold. Not without engaging with whatever was sniffing my pillow.
“We’ll come back for him,” I lied. I grabbed Lily’s hand, snatching her pink sneakers from the mat by the door. I didn’t let her put them on. I just scooped her up, her drawings fluttering to the floor, and bolted.
I fumbled with the deadbolt, my fingers slippery with sweat. Click.
I threw the door open and burst out into the cool Oregon air. The world outside was infuriatingly normal. The mailman was turning his truck around at the end of the cul-de-sac. Mrs. Gable next door was watering her hydrangeas.
“Good morning, Sarah!” Mrs. Gable called out, waving a garden trowel. “Running late?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I threw Lily into the backseat of my SUV, not even bothering with the booster seat straps properly, just clicking the main belt. I jumped into the driver’s seat, jammed the key in the ignition, and reversed out of the driveway so fast the tires screeched.
As I shifted into drive, I looked back at the house.
The front window—the big bay window of the living room—was dark. But for a fleeting second, just before I hit the gas, I saw them.
Two of them.
Standing side by side in the window. One slightly shorter, one taller and jagged. They weren’t hiding anymore. They were watching us leave.
And I swear, even from fifty feet away, I could feel them smiling.
Chapter 8: Safe Harbor
I drove for an hour. I didn’t have a destination. I just drove west, toward the coast, putting miles of asphalt between us and the subdivision.
Lily fell asleep almost immediately, her head lolling against the window. How could she sleep? How could she be so calm?
I pulled into the parking lot of a Denny’s near Tillamook. It was public. It was crowded. It smelled like bacon and coffee—the opposite of the sterile, electric smell of my house.
We sat in a booth in the back. I ordered pancakes for Lily and black coffee for myself. My hands were shaking so bad I had to hold the mug with both hands to keep it from rattling against the saucer.
“Mommy, are we going on a vacation?” Lily asked, drowning her pancakes in syrup.
“Something like that, baby.”
I needed help. I couldn’t handle this alone. I was a rational woman. I had a Master’s degree. I paid taxes. I didn’t believe in ghosts. But I couldn’t deny the video footage.
I pulled out my phone. The screen was cracked, a spiderweb fracture running right through the center, but it still worked.
I called Dave.
Dave was my older brother. He was a contractor, a guy who built houses with his bare hands. He was the most grounded person I knew. He didn’t believe in anything he couldn’t hit with a hammer.
“Hey, Sis,” he answered on the second ring. “What’s up? You catch me on a lunch break.”
“Dave,” I choked out. “I need you. I need you right now.”
His tone changed instantly. “Sarah? You okay? You hurt?”
“I… I can’t explain it over the phone. But I can’t go home. I need you to meet me.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at the Denny’s on Highway 6. Please, Dave. Bring… bring your gun.”
There was a pause. A long, heavy silence. Dave had a concealed carry permit, but he never talked about it, never flaunted it.
“I’m on my way,” he said. “Give me forty minutes.”
Chapter 9: The Skeptic and the Screen
When Dave walked into the diner, he looked like a lifeline. Flannel shirt, work boots, eyes scanning the room for threats. He slid into the booth opposite me, ruffling Lily’s hair.
“Hey, munchkin,” he said to her, before turning his hard gaze to me. “Talk.”
I didn’t say anything. I just unlocked my phone, opened the Wyze app, and went to the ‘Events’ tab.
I played the clip from 2:12 a.m. The one of Lily’s room.
Dave watched it in silence. He squinted at the small screen. He watched the mattress depress. He watched the shadow loom.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “Someone broke in. A squatter? Some creep?”
“Keep watching,” I whispered.
I played the clip from this morning. My bedroom. The flickering, tall entity. The sniffing sound.
Dave’s face went pale. He replayed the sound three times. Sniff. Sniff.
“That’s not… that’s not a person, Sarah,” he muttered. “That movement. The way the arm… stretches. It looks like a special effect.”
“It’s not an effect, Dave. It’s live. It’s in my house.”
He sat back, running a hand through his short, graying hair. He looked out the window at the gray sky.
“And you left Buster?” he asked quietly.
The guilt hit me like a physical punch. tears welled up in my eyes. “I panicked. I just grabbed Lily. Dave, the dog hasn’t made a sound all morning. If he was okay, he would have barked.”
Dave nodded grimly. He was a dog lover. This bothered him almost as much as the shadow monster.
“Okay,” he said, slamming his hand on the table. “Here’s what we’re going to do. You and Lily are staying at my place tonight. My wife will watch her. You and I? We’re going back.”
“No,” I shook my head violently. “No way.”
“Sarah, we have to. We need clothes. We need your laptop. And we need to find the dog. If Buster is hurt, we can’t leave him there to die. And if there is some… thing… in your house, we need to know what we’re dealing with.”
He leaned in closer. “And if it’s a person playing a sick joke with a projector or something? I’m going to put them in the hospital.”
Chapter 10: Into the Lion’s Den
We arrived back at the house at 2:00 p.m.
The sun was high. The neighborhood was quiet. The house looked infuriatingly normal. The beige siding, the white trim, the wind chime spinning lazily on the porch.
Dave parked his truck in the driveway, blocking my car in. He reached into the glove box and pulled out his handgun. He checked the chamber and tucked it into the back of his waistband. He also grabbed a heavy-duty flashlight and a crowbar.
“Stay behind me,” he said. “If I say run, you run to the truck and you drive away. Do not wait for me.”
“Okay,” I whispered.
We walked up the path. The front door was still standing wide open, just as I had left it. It swung slightly in the breeze.
We stepped across the threshold.
The smell hit us first.
It wasn’t the smell of crayons anymore. And it wasn’t just the “fear and lavender” Lily had mentioned. It was the smell of ozone—like the air after a lightning strike—mixed with something sweet and rotting. Like spoiled meat covered in perfume.
“Jesus,” Dave muttered, covering his nose with his sleeve.
“Buster?” I called out. My voice trembled. “Buster!”
Silence.
We moved into the living room. The TV was off. The rug was undisturbed.
We checked the kitchen. My coffee cup was still on the counter, cold. Lily’s drawings were scattered on the floor where I’d dropped them.
Dave pointed the flashlight down the hallway. “Bedrooms,” he signaled.
We moved slowly. The floorboards creaked under Dave’s work boots. Every sound sounded like a gunshot in the quiet house.
We reached Lily’s room first.
It was empty. The bed was made (I had made it automatically before the chaos started). But the wall…
I gasped.
The wall beside the bed—the spot where the Night Babysitter stood—was marked. The cream-colored paint was peeling, curling away in long strips as if it had been burned by intense heat. And in the center of the peeling paint, scratched into the drywall, were three words.
I SEE YOU.
The writing was jagged, deep. It looked like it had been carved with a claw.
“Dave,” I whimpered.
He touched the wall. “It’s cold,” he whispered. “Sarah, this wall is freezing.”
We backed out of the room and turned to the Master Bedroom. The door was ajar.
Dave pushed it open with the tip of the crowbar.
The room was trashed.
The mattress was flipped over. The dresser drawers were pulled out, clothes scattered everywhere. The mirror—the big vanity mirror—was shattered.
And in the middle of the chaos, lying on the pile of my clothes… was Buster’s collar.
Just the collar. It was buckled. Intact. But there was no dog.
Dave picked up the collar. It was covered in a thick, black slime. It had the consistency of tar.
“He’s not here,” Dave said, his voice tight. “Sarah, we need to go. Now.”
“But where is he?” I was sobbing now.
“I don’t know, but we are not staying to find out.”
We turned to leave. We were halfway down the hall when the door to the attic—the pull-down hatch in the ceiling—slammed open.
BANG.
The stairs didn’t slide down. Just the hatch fell open, swinging violently.
And from the darkness of the attic, a voice drifted down.
It wasn’t a human voice. It sounded like rocks grinding together. It sounded like audio played backward and then slowed down.
“Mo… mmy…”
It was mimicking Lily.
Dave didn’t hesitate. He raised his gun and fired three shots into the darkness of the attic hatch.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The deafening noise rang in my ears. Dust rained down.
For a second, there was silence.
Then, a laugh. A dry, wheezing laugh that echoed from the attic, then from the walls, then from the floorboards beneath our feet.
“Run!” Dave screamed.
We sprinted. We didn’t look back. We scrambled over the drawings in the kitchen, slipped on the hardwood, and practically fell out the front door.
We jumped into Dave’s truck. He threw it into reverse, peeling out of the driveway, taking out Mrs. Gable’s mailbox in the process.
As we sped away, I looked back at the house one last time.
The attic window. The small, circular window at the very top of the gable.
It was pressed against the glass. The face.
The pale, oval face. No eyes. And a smile that stretched so wide it seemed to split the head in two.
It lifted a hand. A hand with too many fingers.
And it waved.
Chapter 11: The Residue
We didn’t stop until we reached Dave’s house, three towns over.
We sat in his kitchen, trembling. His wife, Julie, took one look at us and poured two stiff whiskeys without asking questions. Lily was in the living room watching cartoons, blissfully unaware that her mother and uncle had just declared war on a nightmare.
“It knows we left,” I said, staring into my glass. “It knows where we are.”
“It’s a house, Sarah,” Dave said, though he didn’t sound convinced. ” ghosts are haunted houses. They don’t… travel.”
“Lily said he stood close. She said he didn’t need eyes.” I looked up at Dave. “The slime on the collar. Did you keep it?”
Dave reached into his pocket. He had wrapped the collar in a shop rag. He placed it on the table and carefully unwrapped it.
The black slime was still there. But it was moving.
It was bubbling, dissolving into the fabric of the rag. And as it dissolved, it gave off that smell again. Ozone and rot.
“I’m calling a priest,” Julie said, crossing herself.
“No,” Dave said. “Priests are for demons. This… this feels biological. It feels wrong.”
“I’m checking the camera,” I said.
I didn’t want to. God help me, I didn’t. But I had to know if they were still in the house.
I opened the Wyze app.
Connection Failed.
Camera Offline.
They had killed the power. Or the Wi-Fi.
But then, a new notification popped up. Not from Wyze. From my email.
I opened it.
Sender: Unknown Subject: We are hungry.
There was no text in the body of the email. Just an attachment.
It was a picture.
A picture taken inside Dave’s truck. From the backseat.
It showed the back of Dave’s head. And the back of my head. Taken while we were driving away.
We thought we had escaped. We thought we were alone in the truck.
But something had been sitting in the backseat with us. Something invisible. Something that knew how to use a phone.
And if it was in the truck…
I slowly turned my head toward the living room, where the sound of cartoons had suddenly stopped.
“Lily?” I called out.
Silence.
“Lily!”
I ran into the living room.
The TV was off. The remote was on the floor.
Lily was gone.
The back door, leading to Dave’s wooded backyard, was wide open.
And leading out the door, stamped onto the hardwood floor, were footprints.
Black, tar-like footprints.
They weren’t shoe prints. They were bare feet. But they were long. Too long. And they had no toes.
Chapter 12: The Trail of Tar
Panic is a cold thing. People say it’s hot, like fire, but it’s not. It’s ice. It freezes your lungs and makes your fingers numb.
I stood in Dave’s living room, staring at the open back door. The cool Oregon breeze drifted in, carrying the scent of pine and that other smell—the sickly sweet rot of ozone.
“Julie, call the police,” Dave barked, snapping me out of my trance. He was already moving, checking the magazine of his handgun again. “Tell them my niece has been abducted. Tell them we are pursuing a suspect into the woods behind the property. Do not mention the monsters. Do not mention the slime. Just say a man took her.”
Julie was sobbing, clutching the phone to her chest. “Dave, you can’t go out there. It’s dark.”
“I don’t care if it’s hell,” Dave said, his voice dropping to a gravelly growl I’d never heard before. “Sarah, grab the flashlight. Stay on my hip. If you see movement, you yell.”
I grabbed the heavy Maglite from the counter. My hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped it.
We stepped out the back door.
The footprints were distinct on the wooden deck, burning into the varnish like acid. But once they hit the grass, they became harder to track. The black slime matted the grass down, creating a faint, glistening trail under the beam of our flashlights.
The woods behind Dave’s house were dense. Douglas firs, ferns, tangled underbrush. It was a labyrinth even in the daylight. At night, it was a mouth waiting to swallow us.
“Lily!” I screamed. The name ripped out of my throat, raw and painful. “Lily, baby! Mommy is coming!”
“Shh,” Dave hissed, stopping abruptly. He held up a hand.
“Don’t shush me, Dave! She’s my daughter!”
“Listen,” he whispered urgently.
I strained my ears against the ambient noise of the wind in the trees.
At first, nothing. Then, from deep in the treeline, about a hundred yards north… a giggle.
It was high-pitched. Innocent.
“I’m hiding!” the voice sang out.
It was Lily.
“Lily!” I shouted, sprinting toward the sound.
“Sarah, wait!” Dave lunged for me, but I was already running. I didn’t care about the dark. I didn’t care about the thing with the oval face. I just heard my baby.
Chapter 13: The Distortion
I crashed through the ferns, briars tearing at my jeans. The flashlight beam bounced wildly, illuminating tree trunks and spiderwebs.
“Lily! Keep talking to Mommy! Where are you?”
“Over here!” The voice came from the left now. Closer.
I veered left, sliding on a patch of mud. I scrambled up, panting.
“I see you!” the voice giggled.
It sounded wrong.
I stopped, my chest heaving. The adrenaline was fading just enough for my brain to process the sound.
It was Lily’s voice. But the cadence… it was too perfect. It was a loop. The giggle was identical every time. The inflection on “I see you” was exactly the same as when she played peek-a-boo three years ago.
“Sarah!” Dave crashed through the brush behind me, breathless. He grabbed my arm, spinning me around. “Stop running. You’re walking into a trap.”
“She’s right there, Dave. Didn’t you hear her?”
“I heard it,” Dave said grimly, sweeping his gun and flashlight in an arc. “But look at the ground.”
I looked down.
We had lost the trail of tar. The grass here was clean. Undisturbed.
“Over here!” the voice called again. This time, it came from behind us. From the direction of the house.
I spun around. “What? But she was just…”
“Up here!” The voice came from above now. High in the canopy.
“I’m hiding!” The voice came from the right.
“It’s throwing its voice,” Dave whispered, sweat beading on his forehead. “Or there’s more than one.”
Then, a new sound cut through the woods.
It wasn’t a giggle. It was a scream.
But it wasn’t Lily’s scream. It was Buster.
My dog. The dog we had left behind miles away.
The sound was a horrific yelp of pain, cut short by a wet crunch. It sounded like it was ten feet away, behind a massive oak tree.
“Buster?” I whispered.
Dave raised the gun. “Stay behind me.”
He moved toward the oak tree, circling it slowly. The flashlight beam sliced through the dark.
He reached the other side of the tree.
“Oh god,” Dave choked out.
I peeked around his shoulder.
There was no dog. There was no blood.
Stuck to the bark of the tree, at eye level, was a small, black speaker. A Bluetooth speaker. The kind kids clip to their backpacks.
It was oozing that black tar. The slime was pulsing, moving in and out of the speaker mesh like it was breathing.
And from the speaker, the sound came again. Buster’s yelp.
“It’s… it’s playing recordings,” I realized, horror dawning on me. “It’s using technology. The phone in the truck. The camera. It’s learning.”
“Destroy it,” Dave said. He smashed the butt of his gun against the speaker, shattering the plastic. The black slime hissed, retreating into the cracks of the tree bark.
“Mommy?”
This time, the voice was faint. Weak. And it didn’t sound like a loop.
“Mommy, I don’t like this game.”
It came from further down the slope. Toward the creek.
“That’s her,” I said, tears streaming down my face. “That’s really her.”
Chapter 14: The Gallery in the Glade
We moved slower this time. Dave kept the gun trained forward. I swept the beam side to side.
The woods began to change as we descended toward the creek. The trees… they didn’t look right.
The bark on the pines wasn’t rough anymore. It looked smooth. Waxy.
“Dave,” I whispered, touching a tree trunk. “Look.”
My finger smeared the bark. It wasn’t wood. It was crayon.
The trees were turning into drawings.
The further we went, the more the reality degraded. The ferns looked like green scribbles. The ground beneath our feet felt spongy, like layers of paper. The air smelled intensely of wax and ozone.
“We’re in it,” Dave muttered. “We’re in the damn drawing.”
We burst into a small clearing by the creek bed.
And there she was.
Lily was sitting on a large, flat rock in the middle of the shallow water. She was holding a stick, swirling it in the water.
But the water wasn’t water. The creek was flowing with black ink. Thick, viscous ink.
Standing around the clearing, like sentinels, were five figures.
They were crude. Rough shapes made of tangled branches and black slime. They looked like stick figures brought to horrific, three-dimensional life. They had no faces. Just smooth, black ovals.
They weren’t moving. They were just… watching.
“Lily!” I screamed.
She looked up. Her eyes were glassy. She looked like she was sleepwalking.
“Hi, Mommy,” she said dreamily. “They wanted me to draw the ending.”
“Don’t move, sweetie,” Dave said, his voice trembling. He aimed the gun at the closest stick-figure. “Sarah, grab her. On three. One… two… THREE!”
I splashed into the ink-creek. It was cold and sticky, like molasses. I scrambled up the rock and grabbed Lily.
She felt light. Too light.
“I’m not done yet,” she murmured, resisting me. “The Night Babysitter needs a face.”
I looked at the rock she was sitting on. She hadn’t been swirling the stick in the water. She had been drawing on the stone.
She had drawn a face. My face.
But she had crossed the eyes out with frantic, heavy black circles.
Chapter 15: The Hunger
“We are leaving!” I yelled, hoisting her into my arms.
The moment I touched her, the five stick-figures moved.
They didn’t walk. They snapped. Their limbs jerked in unnatural, stop-motion angles. Crack. Snap. Crack.
They closed in on the circle.
BAM! BAM!
Dave fired. Two shots hit the closest figure in the chest.
The bullets passed straight through the slime and branches, thudding into the trees behind it. The figure didn’t even slow down.
“It’s not working!” Dave shouted. “Run, Sarah! Get up the bank!”
I scrambled off the rock, slipping in the ink. Lily was dead weight in my arms.
“He wants to be real,” Lily whispered into my ear. “He needs more paper. He needs more skin.”
One of the figures lunged at Dave. A long, branch-like arm whipped out, striking him across the chest.
Dave flew backward, hitting a tree with a sickening thud. He groaned, the gun flying from his hand and landing in the creek.
“Dave!” I screamed.
I was torn. My brother was down. My daughter was in my arms. The monsters were closing in.
The figure that hit Dave loomed over him. It lowered its blank face. A slit opened where the mouth should be—a vertical slit, not horizontal.
“Leave him!” Dave coughed, clutching his ribs. “Go!”
I turned to run, but the largest figure—the one wearing a tattered suit made of shadows—blocked my path.
It stood seven feet tall. It had no eyes. But it had the smile. The red crayon smile Lily had drawn that morning. It was etched into the black flesh of its face, glowing faintly.
It reached out a hand.
“Give… us…”
The voice wasn’t audio this time. It vibrated inside my skull.
“Give… us… the… maker.”
They wanted Lily. She was the architect. Her imagination was the fuel. They were formless thoughts, hungry for shape, and she was the factory.
I looked down at the black ink rushing around my ankles. I looked at the Maglite in my hand.
Drawings. Wax. Paper.
“Dave!” I screamed. “The lighter! Do you have your lighter?”
Dave was a smoker. He always had a Zippo.
Dave looked up, dazed. He saw me staring. He realized what I meant.
The world around us—the waxy trees, the paper ground. It was flammable.
“Burn it!” I shrieked.
Dave fumbled in his pocket. He pulled out the silver lighter.
The entity in front of me recoiled. It sensed the intent. It shrieked—a sound like tearing metal.
It lunged for me.
I ducked, clutching Lily tight, and swung the heavy Maglite with everything I had.
CRACK.
I hit the entity square in the knee. It didn’t break bone; it sounded like hitting a bag of wet clay. But it stumbled.
“Dave, now!”
Dave flicked the lighter. The flame sparked.
He dropped it into the creek.
Chapter 16: The Inferno
The reaction was instantaneous.
The black ink didn’t just burn; it exploded.
WOOSH.
A wall of blue and orange fire erupted from the creek bed. The heat was blistering.
The waxy trees caught fire instantly. The ground—the spongy, paper-like moss—ignited.
The entities screamed. It was a chorus of agony. The fire seemed to hurt them more than bullets ever could. The one blocking my path burst into flames, its shadowy suit curling up like burning plastic.
“Run!” I screamed, shielding Lily’s face from the heat.
I grabbed Dave’s collar and hauled him up. He was wheezing, but he found his footing.
We scrambled up the muddy bank, the fire roaring at our heels. The woods were turning into an oven.
We didn’t look back. We ran through the burning, scribbled forest. The illusion was breaking. The trees were snapping back to normal wood as the “glamour” burned away.
We burst out of the treeline and onto Dave’s lawn just as the first sirens wailed in the distance.
I collapsed on the grass, clutching Lily. Dave fell beside me, coughing up soot.
I looked back at the woods.
The fire was raging, but it was… contained. It was only burning the section near the creek. The flames were strange—blue and silent.
“Did we kill them?” Dave wheezed.
I looked down at Lily. She was awake now. Her eyes were clear. The glassy look was gone.
“Mommy?” she asked, looking at the fire. “Why did you burn the pictures?”
“Because they were bad pictures, baby,” I sobbed, kissing her soot-stained forehead.
She looked at me, dead serious.
“But Mommy… you can’t burn the ones in the cloud.”
My blood ran cold.
“What?”
“The pictures,” she said, pointing to my pocket where my broken phone lay. “The Night Babysitter said he lives in the cloud now. He said he sent himself to everyone.”
I froze.
The email. The photo from the truck.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone. The screen was cracked, but it lit up.
Upload Complete.
Sent to: All Contacts.
My work email. My family group chat. My Facebook friends.
The image of the smiling, eyeless face.
And below it, a caption I didn’t write:
Do you see me? I need you to draw me.
My phone started buzzing.
Notifications. Comments. Likes.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
Hundreds of them.
“Cool drawing, Sarah!” “Is this for a movie?” “My kid saw this and wants to draw one too!”
I looked at the woods. The fire was dying.
But in the smoke drifting up into the night sky, I saw it.
Not one face.
Thousands.
Forming in the clouds.
[THE END]
