Chapter 1: The Threshold
The hallway light in our ranch-style house in Ohio flickers. It’s been doing that for three years, a loose wire I keep nagging my husband, Greg, to fix. Usually, it’s just an annoyance. But last Tuesday, under the staccato buzzing of that dying bulb, the hallway looked like the throat of something dying.
My five-year-old son, Leo, was standing at the precipice.
The “precipice” was the brass threshold strip separating the laminate wood of the hallway from the soft beige carpet of his bedroom. Usually, this is the part of the evening where he sprints in, dives onto his bed, and demands three books and a back scratch.
Tonight, he was frozen.
His small hands were white-knuckled, gripping the doorframe so hard his fingernails looked like little pearls. His Spider-Man pajamas were slightly too big, making him look frail.
“Leo, honey, come on,” I said, balancing a laundry basket on my hip. “It’s past eight. Daddy’s already reading the story.”
Leo shook his head. It wasn’t a defiant shake. It was a vibration. A tremor.
“I’m not going in,” he whispered.
I sighed, the exhaustion of a ten-hour shift at the clinic weighing on my shoulders. “Leo, please. Don’t start this. You were fine ten minutes ago.”
He took a step back, away from the door. He wouldn’t even look into the room. He kept his eyes glued to the wall, as if looking directly into the darkness would invite something out.
“She’s still there,” he said.
The air in the hallway seemed to drop ten degrees.
“Who is still there?” I asked, my voice dropping that “mom tone” and softening into confusion.
“The woman,” Leo said. “She’s standing where my toys used to be. She hasn’t moved.”
I looked into the room. The only light came from the hallway and the faint blue glow of his turtle nightlight plugged into the far wall. The room was messy—Legos scattered like caltrops, a pile of laundry, the toy shelf overflowing with stuffed animals.
“Leo,” I said gently, setting the laundry basket down. “There’s no one in there. Look.”
I walked into the room. I made a show of it. I stepped heavily. I waved my arms. “See? Just Mommy. Just Legos.”
Leo didn’t budge. He looked at me with eyes that were too old for his face. Eyes that had seen something primal.
“You walked through her,” he whispered.
Chapter 2: The Search
Greg came up the stairs, toothbrush hanging out of his mouth. “What’s with the standoff?”
“He says there’s a woman in his room,” I said, feeling ridiculous even saying it.
Greg chuckled, spitting into a cup he’d brought with him. “A woman? Like… a ghost? Or did Grandma come visit and get lost?”
“It’s not funny, Greg,” I snapped. I didn’t know why I was angry, but the fear in Leo’s face was contagious. It was vibrating off him like heat.
“Okay, okay,” Greg said, sensing the shift in the atmosphere. He wiped his mouth. “Hey, buddy. You want Dad to do a perimeter sweep?”
Leo nodded stiffly.
We did the whole routine. We made it a game, or tried to. Greg checked the closet, dramatically throwing the doors open. “Clear!” he shouted. He checked under the bed, lifting the dust ruffle. “Dust bunnies, but no bad guys. Clear!”
He even checked the en-suite bathroom, flushing the toilet for good measure.
“See?” Greg said, kneeling down to Leo’s eye level. “Empty. Normal. Safe.”
Leo finally looked into the room. He stared at the spot between the dresser and the window—the empty corner where we had cleared out his old toddler train set last week.
“She’s quiet now,” Leo said. “But she’s still standing there.”
“Leo—” Greg started, frustration creeping in.
“Can I sleep on the couch?”
The question broke my heart. Leo loved his bed. He loved his galaxy-print duvet. For him to trade that for the lumpy leather sectional downstairs meant he was terrified.
“Yeah, buddy,” I said, scooping him up before Greg could argue about building bad habits. “We’ll have a campout.”
That night, Leo slept curled into a tight ball, his knees pulled to his chest, facing the back of the couch. He refused to look down the hallway.
Greg and I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling fan.
“It’s just an active imagination,” Greg whispered, reaching for my hand. “He probably saw a shadow from a tree branch.”
“He said I walked through her, Greg.”
“Dreams bleed into reality for kids. He’s tired.”
I wanted to believe him. I really did. But as I drifted off to sleep, I couldn’t shake the image of Leo’s white knuckles on the doorframe. And I couldn’t help but wonder… if I walked through her, did she feel it?
Chapter 3: The Electronic Eye
The next morning, the sun was bright. The birds were singing. The terror of the night seemed silly, like a fever dream that breaks with the dawn.
Leo sat at the kitchen table, eating waffles. He looked better. The color was back in his cheeks.
“So,” Greg said, pouring coffee. “Ready to go play in your room?”
Leo stopped chewing. He looked toward the hallway.
“Did she go yet?” he asked.
The silence in the kitchen was heavy. Greg lowered his mug.
“Leo, there is no woman,” Greg said firmly.
I touched Greg’s arm to silence him. “Leo, why do you think she’s there?”
“Because she’s waiting,” he said simply. Then he took another bite of waffle.
I didn’t answer him. Instead, I drove to the electronics store as soon as I dropped Leo off at kindergarten.
I bought a Wyze Cam v3. High definition. Color night vision. Motion tagging. Wide-angle lens.
I told myself I was doing this to prove him wrong. I told myself I was being a Rational Parent. I would show him the footage the next morning, speed through the night, and prove that the room was empty.
I mounted it high in the corner of his room, right above the doorframe. It had a perfect view. It covered the bed, the window, the closet, and most importantly, the empty space near the toy shelf—the spot Leo claimed she occupied.
I synced it to my phone. The feed was crisp. I could see the dust motes dancing in the sunlight.
“Big Brother is watching,” Greg joked when he got home, but I saw the relief in his eyes. He wanted proof too.
We put Leo to bed in his room that night. It took forty minutes of coaxing. I eventually had to promise to leave the hallway light on and the door wide open. Even then, he lay on the very edge of the bed, as far away from the toy shelf as possible.
“Goodnight, sweetie,” I whispered.
“She doesn’t like the camera,” Leo murmured, his eyes closed.
“What?” I froze.
“She knows it’s there. She says it’s rude to stare.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “It’s just a plastic box, Leo. Sleep tight.”
Chapter 4: The Glitch
I didn’t sleep. I lay in bed with my iPad propped up on my chest, the brightness turned all the way down. The Wyze app was open. The live feed was a silent, gray-scale window into my son’s room.
10:00 PM: Leo tossed and turned. He kicked the covers off. 11:30 PM: He finally settled. The room was still. 12:45 AM: The house settled. A pipe banged in the wall. On the screen, nothing moved.
My eyes were getting heavy. The rhythmic rise and fall of Leo’s chest on the screen was hypnotic. See? I told myself. Nothing. Just a quiet house.
I dozed off around 1:15 AM.
I woke up with a start at 2:12 AM. I don’t know what woke me. A sound? A feeling?
I looked down at the iPad. The screen was black. A spinning wheel in the center.
Buffering…
“Come on,” I whispered, tapping the screen. “Don’t disconnect now.”
The feed flickered. A burst of green pixelation tore across the screen. A digital scream.
Then, the image snapped back.
The room looked the same. Leo was asleep. The closet door was closed.
But… the wall.
The wall near the toy shelf looked… thick.
I squinted. I pinched the screen to zoom in.
The resolution was 1080p, but in the low light, things get grainy. There was a shadow on the wall. A tall, vertical shadow.
But there was nothing casting it. The moonlight was coming from the window on the opposite side. If anything, the shadow should be cast away from that spot.
I stared at it.
It wasn’t on the wall. It was in front of the wall.
It was a silhouette. Perfectly upright. Human proportions. A head. Shoulders. A long, shapeless torso that trailed off into the darkness of the floor.
It was standing about four feet from Leo’s bed.
“Greg,” I whispered, elbowing him. “Greg, wake up.”
“Mmmph? What?” Greg rolled over, groggy.
“Look at the camera.”
He blinked, rubbing his eyes. He looked at the iPad. “What am I looking at?”
“The corner. By the shelf.”
Greg squinted. He was silent for a long time. Then he sat up, wide awake.
“Is that… is that a coat rack?” he asked.
“We don’t have a coat rack in there, Greg.”
“Maybe it’s a stack of boxes?”
“We cleared that corner. It’s empty.”
We stared at the screen. The figure was absolutely motionless. It didn’t sway like a curtain. It didn’t breathe. It was a void in the shape of a person. A hole in the reality of the room.
“I’m going in there,” Greg said, throwing the covers off.
“No!” I grabbed his arm. “Wait. Watch.”
We watched for ten minutes. The timestamp ticked by. 2:22… 2:23…
The figure didn’t move a millimeter.
“It’s a glitch,” Greg decided. “It’s a sensor error. A cluster of dead pixels.”
“Dead pixels don’t have shoulders, Greg.”
“I’m going to check.”
Greg grabbed the baseball bat he kept under the bed—a relic from his college days—and marched out of the room. I followed, clutching the iPad.
We stood in the hallway. The door to Leo’s room was open.
Greg reached in and flipped the light switch.
The room flooded with yellow light.
Leo groaned, covering his eyes. “Mom?”
I looked at the corner.
Empty.
Just beige wall. Cream carpet. The toy shelf.
There was nothing there.
I looked down at the iPad. The feed was now in color mode because the lights were on.
The figure was gone from the screen too.
“See?” Greg exhaled, leaning the bat against the wall. “Shadows and light. Tricks of the eye. Sorry, buddy,” he said to Leo. “Go back to sleep.”
Leo sat up. He looked at the corner. Then he looked at us.
“She’s hiding because you turned the sun on,” he said.
Chapter 5: The Review
The next morning, I sent Leo to school, but I called in sick. I couldn’t work. I sat at the kitchen table with three cups of coffee and the SD card from the camera loaded into my laptop.
I needed to see the whole night.
I scrubbed through the timeline.
Midnight: Clear. 1:00 AM: Clear. 1:58 AM: Clear.
2:00 AM: The glitch.
I slowed the playback speed to 0.25x.
On the screen, the room stuttered. The pixels tore. And then, in a single frame—one thirtieth of a second—she appeared.
She didn’t walk in. She didn’t crawl out from under the bed.
One frame, empty. Next frame, occupied.
She simply manifested.
I watched the footage from 2:00 AM to 6:00 AM. Fast-forwarding.
For four hours, she stood there. The “Static Woman.”
She was facing the bed. Watching my son sleep.
But as the sun began to rise at 6:15 AM, the light in the room changed. The gray night vision switched to color.
And just like that, she dissolved. Like mist burning off a lake.
“She only watches at night,” Leo had said.
My hands were shaking as I closed the laptop. I felt violated. Someone—some thing—had been in the room with my baby.
When I picked Leo up from school, I tried to act normal. But he knew. Kids always know.
“Did you see her?” he asked as he buckled his seatbelt.
“I saw… something,” I admitted.
“She’s mad,” Leo said.
I almost swerved into oncoming traffic. “Why? Why is she mad?”
“Because you tried to catch her. She says she’s going to come closer tonight.”
Chapter 6: The Second Night
I wanted to take him to a hotel. Greg refused.
“We are not running away from our own house because of a camera glitch and a kid’s story,” Greg argued. “If we leave, we validate the fear. We teach him to run from shadows.”
“It wasn’t a shadow, Greg! I have the file!”
“It was a compression artifact! Sarah, listen to yourself.”
We compromised. Leo slept in our bed. Greg slept in the guest room down the hall (he snored, and tonight, nobody was sleeping).
But I left the camera running in Leo’s empty room.
I sat in bed, Leo snoring softly beside me, and watched the feed on the big monitor I’d brought in from the study.
11:00 PM: Empty. 12:00 AM: Empty.
I was starting to think maybe Greg was right. Maybe the “presence” required Leo to be in the room.
But then came 2:00 AM.
The screen flickered. The familiar green tear of pixels.
And there she was.
Standing in the exact same spot. The Static Woman.
But tonight… she was clearer.
The edges of her silhouette were sharper. I could make out the definition of hair—long, matted hair hanging down to her shoulders. I could see the curve of a dress, tattered at the hem.
And she was closer.
Last night, she was four feet from the bed. Tonight, she was three.
I watched, paralyzed with horror.
Then, at 3:03 AM, it happened.
The movement was so subtle I almost missed it.
The head of the silhouette… turned.
Slowly. Grind-ingly slow.
It rotated from facing the empty bed… to facing the camera.
I gasped, covering my mouth.
There were no features. No eyes. No mouth. Just a blank, black void where a face should be.
But then, the audio feed crackled.
The camera had a microphone. I had turned the volume up to max.
Through the static, through the hiss of the digital silence, a sound came through.
It wasn’t a whisper. It wasn’t a moan.
It was a mimic.
It was my voice.
“Leo… come… here…”
It sounded like me, but wrong. Distorted. Like my voice played through a speaker underwater.
“Mommy… is… waiting…”
Beside me, Leo sat bolt upright in bed. His eyes were wide open, staring at the bedroom door.
He hadn’t been looking at the monitor. He had heard it through the wall.
“She’s calling me,” Leo whispered.
He swung his legs out of bed before I could grab him.
“No!” I lunged, wrapping my arms around his waist.
“She said she has a present,” Leo said, fighting me with surprising strength. “She said she’s done waiting.”
On the monitor, the Static Woman was moving.
She wasn’t teleporting this time. She was walking.
She was walking toward the bedroom door. Toward the hallway. Toward us.
I grabbed the phone. I dialed 911. But as I pressed call, the screen went black.
The power in the house died.
The only light left was the battery-powered LED on the Wyze camera monitor, glowing in the dark.
And on the screen, the Static Woman was now standing in the doorway of Leo’s room.
She raised a hand. A long, spindly hand with too many fingers.
And she waved.
Chapter 7: The Blackout
The darkness wasn’t empty. That’s the first thing you learn when true terror sets in. Darkness has a weight. It presses against your eardrums and fills your throat like cotton.
When the power died, the silence should have been absolute. The hum of the refrigerator, the whir of the HVAC, the buzz of the streetlights outside—all gone. But it wasn’t silent.
The air was screaming.
A high-pitched whine, like a dog whistle amplified through a megaphone, drilled into my skull. It was the sound of electricity dying, or maybe the sound of it gathering.
“Leo, stop!” I hissed, wrestling my five-year-old back onto the mattress.
He was fighting me with a strength that didn’t belong to a kindergartner. His small limbs were rigid, his skin cold and clammy.
“She’s here,” Leo chanted, his voice flat and monotone. “She’s here. She’s here.”
“Greg!” I screamed, my voice cracking in the dark. “Greg! Get in here!”
The battery-powered baby monitor on the nightstand was the only source of light. It cast a sickly, green-gray glow onto the ceiling. The screen was frozen on the last image it had captured: the silhouette in the doorway, waving.
Then, the monitor died too. Not a fade-out. A pop. A spark of ozone, and then total blackness.
I fumbled for the nightstand drawer. My hand knocked over a glass of water, the crash sounding like a gunshot. I ignored the wet coolness soaking the carpet and found what I was looking for. The heavy mag-lite I kept for storms.
Click.
The beam cut through the dark like a lightsaber. It was shaky, dancing frantically around the room.
The bedroom door was open. Beyond it, the hallway was a maw of shadows.
“Sarah?” Greg’s voice boom from down the hall. He sounded panicked. “Sarah, stay put! I can’t find the—ow!”
A crash. He had tripped over something.
“Greg, bring the gun!” I yelled. We didn’t own a gun. But I wanted Her to think we did. I wanted the intruder to know I was ready to kill.
“I’m coming!”
I grabbed Leo, wrapping him in the duvet like a burrito to stop him from thrashing. I hoisted him onto my hip, aiming the flashlight at the door.
“We’re going to Daddy,” I whispered. “We’re running to Daddy.”
We stepped into the hallway.
Chapter 8: The Echo
The hallway felt longer than it should be. The flashlight beam barely reached the end where the guest room was.
“Greg?” I called out.
“I’m right here, Sarah. Keep coming.”
His voice came from the top of the stairs, to my right.
I turned the beam toward the stairs.
“Okay,” I breathed, relief washing over me. “We need to get to the car. The power is out and Leo is…”
I stopped.
My flashlight beam hit the top of the stairs. It illuminated the railing, the family photos on the wall, the carpet.
It was empty.
“Greg?” I whispered.
“I’m right here, Sarah,” the voice said again.
It came from the stairs. The exact spot my light was shining on.
But there was no one there.
My blood turned to ice. The voice… it was Greg’s. The timbre, the pitch, the slight midwestern drawl. It was perfect.
But it was coming from thin air.
“Come closer,” the voice said. “She wants to see you.”
I scrambled backward, clutching Leo so tight he wheezed.
“That’s not Daddy,” Leo whispered into my neck. “That’s the Static Man. He helps Her.”
Behind me, from the guest room—the opposite direction—a door slammed open.
“Sarah! What the hell is going on?”
The real Greg burst into the hallway, holding a baseball bat and his cell phone, the flashlight app blinded me for a second.
I looked back at the empty stairs.
“Run,” I choked out. “Greg, don’t go near the stairs!”
Chapter 9: The Siege
We retreated into the master bedroom and slammed the door. Greg shoved the heavy oak dresser in front of it.
“Talk to me,” Greg demanded, his face pale in the harsh LED light of his phone. “Who was on the stairs? I heard you talking to someone.”
“It sounded like you,” I sobbed, checking Leo for injuries. He was sitting on the bed, staring at the blank wall, tracing patterns on the duvet. “It was your voice. But there was nobody there.”
Greg looked at the door. The handle jiggled. Gently. Then harder.
Thump. Thump.
“Open up,” Greg’s voice called from the other side of the door. “Sarah, let me in. It’s me.”
Greg stared at the door, horror dawning on his face. He looked down at his own hands, then at the door where his own voice was pleading for entry.
“What is that?” he mouthed.
“The Static,” Leo answered. He didn’t look up. “They take sounds. They take shapes. They’re hungry.”
“Hungry for what, buddy?” Greg asked, his voice trembling.
Leo looked up. His eyes were dark pools in the flashlight beam.
“For room. They don’t have enough room. They want ours.”
The banging on the door stopped.
Silence returned.
Then, the smell hit us.
It started under the door. A gray, wispy smoke. It smelled of burning plastic and wet dog.
“Fire,” Greg shouted. “They set the house on fire!”
“No,” I said, coughing. “That’s not smoke. Look at it.”
I shone my light on the “smoke.” It wasn’t drifting like smoke. It was twitching. It was composed of millions of tiny, gray specks.
It was static. Like the snow on an old TV channel, but three-dimensional. It was pouring into the room, dissolving the carpet where it touched.
“The window,” Greg ordered. “We’re going out the window.”
We were on the second floor. Beneath the window was the roof of the back porch. A ten-foot drop to the grass from there. Doable.
Greg smashed the window pane with the baseball bat. Glass shattered outward. The cold night air rushed in, but it didn’t clear the static. The gray mass was rising, filling the room like water.
“Go!” Greg lifted Leo and passed him through the jagged glass. I climbed out next, my bare feet slipping on the shingles of the porch roof.
Greg followed, vaulting out just as the bedroom door exploded inward.
I looked back for a split second.
The dresser hadn’t been pushed aside. It had been disintegrated.
And standing in the hole where the door used to be was the Static Woman.
She was clearer now. She wasn’t just a shadow. She was a roiling mass of black and white noise, shaped like a woman in a tattered dress. Where her face should be, the static swirled faster, creating a vortex.
She reached out a hand—fingers lengthening like taffy—toward Greg’s ankle.
“Jump!” I screamed.
Greg launched himself off the roof. We tumbled onto the wet grass of the backyard, rolling to absorb the impact.
Chapter 10: The Driveway
“Car,” Greg wheezed, scrambling up. He had twisted his ankle; I could see him limping. “Get to the car.”
We sprinted around the side of the house. The neighborhood was pitch black. No streetlights. No lights in the neighbors’ houses.
“It’s the whole block,” I realized. “She took the grid.”
We reached the driveway. My SUV sat there, a silver beacon of hope.
Greg fumbled for his keys. He pressed the unlock button.
Nothing happened.
“No, no, no,” he muttered, mashing the button. “Don’t do this.”
The electronics were dead. The entity’s field had drained the battery.
“Manual entry!” I yelled.
Greg jammed the physical key into the door lock and twisted. The lock clicked. He threw the door open.
“Get in!”
I shoved Leo into the backseat and climbed in after him. Greg jumped into the driver’s seat.
He jammed the key into the ignition and turned it.
Click. Click. Click.
The starter solenoid chattered, but the engine wouldn’t turn over.
“Come on!” Greg slammed his hands on the steering wheel.
From the darkness of the front yard, the sound returned. The high-pitched whine.
I looked out the window.
They were coming.
Not just the Woman. There were others now. Smaller shapes. Distorted, child-sized shadows emerging from the bushes, from behind the mailbox. They moved in choppy, stop-motion jerks.
“Greg,” I whispered.
“I know! I’m trying!”
He tried the key again. The dashboard lights flickered weakly.
Then, Leo leaned forward from the backseat. He placed his small hand on the dashboard.
“Go away,” Leo whispered.
He wasn’t talking to the monsters. He was talking to the car.
A spark—a literal blue spark—jumped from Leo’s finger into the dashboard.
The engine roared to life. The headlights blazed on, cutting through the darkness.
“How did you…” Greg stared at him.
“Drive!” I screamed.
The Static Woman was right in front of the car. The headlights passed through her. She was translucent in the beams.
Greg slammed the gearshift into reverse. The tires squealed. We shot backward out of the driveway, missing the Woman by inches.
As we spun the car around to flee down the street, I looked back.
The Static Woman wasn’t chasing us. She was standing in the middle of the road, bathed in the red glow of our taillights.
She raised both hands to her head. And she pulled.
She tore her head apart, the static dissipating into the air like a cloud of bats.
Chapter 11: The Reflection
We drove for twenty minutes in silence. Greg didn’t slow down until we hit the interstate, where the streetlights were actually working. The world here seemed normal. Trucks rumbled by. A 24-hour gas station glowed in the distance.
“We’re going to my mom’s,” Greg said, his grip on the wheel loosening slightly. “She’s three hours away. We’ll figure this out in the morning.”
I exhaled, sinking back into the seat. “Is everyone okay? Leo?”
I turned to check on him in the backseat.
Leo was sitting perfectly still. He was staring out the window at the passing lights.
“Leo?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
“He’s probably in shock,” Greg said. “Let him rest.”
I nodded, turning back to face the front. I pulled down the visor mirror to check my face. I had soot on my cheek and a cut on my forehead.
I wiped the blood away. Then, I adjusted the mirror to see into the backseat, just to keep an eye on Leo without turning around.
I froze.
In the mirror, I could see the backseat. I could see Leo’s booster seat. I could see his Spider-Man blanket.
But I couldn’t see Leo.
The seat was empty.
I whipped my head around.
Leo was sitting right there. Physically. I could touch him. I reached out and grabbed his knee. It was solid. Warm.
“Mom?” Leo looked at me, confused.
“I…” I looked back at the mirror.
Empty.
I looked at Greg in the driver’s seat. I looked at his reflection in the rearview mirror.
Greg was there.
I looked at my own reflection. I was there.
I looked at Leo’s reflection again.
Nothing. Just the upholstery of the seat.
Leo smiled at me. It wasn’t his smile. It was a little too wide. A little too tight.
“Why are you looking at me like that, Mommy?” he asked.
And then, his voice changed. The pitch dropped. It became the voice from the hallway.
“She is still watching.”
The car’s radio turned on by itself.
It wasn’t music. It was static. And through the white noise, a thousand voices whispered in unison.
WE ARE IN.
Chapter 12: The Dead Zone
The interior of a car at night is usually a sanctuary. It’s a bubble of warmth, soft dashboard lights, and the rhythmic thump-thump of tires on asphalt. But our SUV had become a cage.
I sat in the passenger seat, my body rigid, staring into the side-view mirror. I couldn’t look at the backseat. I physically couldn’t turn my head. My brain was screaming that if I looked at the thing wearing my son’s face, I would snap.
“Sarah?” Greg asked, his voice tight. He was gripping the steering wheel so hard the leather creaked. “Why is the radio doing that?”
The radio display was dead—just a black screen—but the sound was deafening. It wasn’t just white noise anymore. It was a layered, chaotic sound. Like a thousand people whispering in a library, overlaid with the sound of tearing paper.
Sssshhhh… mother… sssshhhh… hunger…
“Turn it off,” I whispered.
“I can’t!” Greg snapped. ” The volume knob isn’t working. The power button isn’t working.”
In the backseat, the thing that looked like Leo giggled.
“It’s the song of the wires,” the boy said. His voice was oscillating—loud, then quiet, then buzzing. “Do you like it, Daddy? It tastes like aluminum.”
I looked at the rearview mirror again.
The backseat was still empty in the reflection. Just the beige upholstery.
But then, I saw movement. Not in the car, but in the mirror.
In the glass, a small hand pressed against the surface from the inside. Then a face.
It was Leo. The real Leo.
He was trapped inside the mirror. He was screaming, pounding on the glass, his face contorted in terror. But there was no sound coming from him. He was mouthing one word over and over again.
TRAP.
“Greg,” I choked out, tears streaming down my face. “Look in the mirror. Don’t turn around. Look in the mirror.”
Greg glanced up at the rearview.
The car swerved violently into the left lane.
“Jesus Christ!” Greg screamed, correcting the wheel. “He’s… he’s in the glass!”
“And who is in the seat, Greg?” I asked, my voice trembling. “Who is sitting behind you?”
Greg’s eyes met mine. The denial finally broke. The reality of the nightmare crashed down on him.
“Stop the car,” Greg said.
“No!” I yelled. “If we stop, we’re trapped with it. Keep driving. We need light. We need people.”
“We are not bringing that thing to my mother’s house,” Greg said, his voice dropping to a growl. “We are not bringing it anywhere near people.”
Chapter 13: The Override
“I’m bored,” the False Leo said.
He kicked the back of Greg’s seat. Thump.
But it didn’t sound like a sneaker hitting leather. It sounded like a heavy, wet sandbag. Thud.
“I want to drive,” the thing said.
“Sit back!” Greg shouted, trying to sound authoritative.
“No,” the False Leo said.
Suddenly, all four door locks clicked. Chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk.
The windows rolled down simultaneously. The wind roared into the cabin, freezing cold and deafening.
Then, the steering wheel locked.
“Sarah!” Greg yelled, wrestling with the wheel. “I can’t steer! It’s frozen!”
We were doing seventy miles an hour on a curved stretch of I-71. The guardrail was rushing toward us.
“Let go!” I screamed at the backseat. “Let go of the car!”
I unbuckled my seatbelt. I didn’t think. I just turned around.
The False Leo was sitting in the middle of the backseat now. He wasn’t buckled in. His eyes were pure white—no irises, no pupils. Just glowing LED white. His mouth was open too wide, unhinged like a snake, and static was pouring out of it like smoke.
He had his hands raised, mimicking a driving motion.
I lunged over the center console. I grabbed him.
He didn’t feel like a child. He felt like touching an exposed wire. A jolt of electricity shot up my arms, seizing my muscles. My teeth slammed together.
BZZZZT.
I was thrown back against the dashboard, gasping for air. The smell of ozone filled the car.
“Mommy is sparky,” the thing giggled.
Greg slammed on the brakes. The pedal went to the floor, but the car didn’t slow down.
“It cut the brakes!” Greg screamed. “We’re going to crash!”
We were drifting toward the median—a grassy ditch that separated us from oncoming traffic.
“The mirror!” I gasped, clutching my numb arm. “Leo is in the mirror! Smash it!”
“What?”
“If the reflection is the trap, maybe breaking it lets him out! Or maybe it kills the connection!”
It was insane logic. It was dream logic. But we were living in a nightmare.
Greg didn’t hesitate. He raised his right fist and smashed it into the rearview mirror.
CRACK.
The glass spiderwebbed but didn’t shatter.
The False Leo screamed. A high-pitched, digital shriek. He grabbed his head, clawing at his face.
“Hit it again!” I yelled.
Greg struck it again, harder, ignoring the blood on his knuckles.
SMASH.
The mirror exploded, showering the dashboard in shards of glass.
The scream from the backseat stopped instantly.
The car’s engine died. The power steering died. The lights died.
We were a two-ton metal brick hurling through the darkness at seventy miles an hour.
Chapter 14: The Wreckage
The silence returned.
“Hold on!” Greg yelled, bracing his arm across my chest.
The SUV hit the rumble strips. BRRRRRRR.
Then we hit the grass.
The world became a violent tumble of noise and motion. We spun. I saw the sky, then the ground, then the sky again. The airbags deployed—POOF—hitting me in the face like a solid wall, filling the car with white powder.
We slammed into the cable barrier in the median. Metal shrieked against metal. The car tipped, threatened to roll, and then slammed back down on its wheels with a bone-jarring crunch.
I couldn’t breathe. The dust from the airbag clogged my throat. My ears were ringing.
“Greg?” I coughed.
“I’m… I’m okay,” Greg groaned from the driver’s seat. “You?”
“Alive.”
We both turned to the backseat.
It was empty.
The door on the driver’s side rear was torn open, hanging by a single hinge.
“Did he fall out?” Greg asked, unbuckling his belt with shaking hands.
“That wasn’t him,” I reminded him, kicking my door open.
We stumbled out onto the grassy median. The highway was empty. No other cars. Just the wind and the steam hissing from our crushed radiator.
I looked at the ground.
Leading away from the car, into the darkness of the opposing lanes, were footprints.
Scorched grass. Black, smoking footprints.
And lying in the grass, about ten feet from the car, was a small sneaker.
Leo’s sneaker.
“Leo!” I screamed, running toward the shoe.
I picked it up. It was warm.
“He’s here,” I sobbed. “Greg, he’s here. The mirror broke. He has to be here.”
“Sarah, look,” Greg whispered. He was pointing toward the treeline on the other side of the highway.
Standing at the edge of the woods, illuminated by the moonlight, was a figure.
It was small. It was wearing Spider-Man pajamas.
It was standing perfectly still, staring at us.
“Leo?” Greg took a step forward.
The figure raised a hand and pointed into the woods.
Then, it turned and ran.
But it didn’t run like a boy. It ran on all fours. galloping like a wolf, its limbs moving in a blur of unnatural speed.
It vanished into the trees.
Chapter 15: The Frequency
“We have to go after him,” Greg said, already moving across the asphalt.
“Wait,” I grabbed his arm. “Greg, look at the sky.”
Above the treeline where the creature had vanished, the sky wasn’t black. It was purple. A bruising, swirling purple mist was rising from the forest.
And the sound…
The static was back. But it wasn’t coming from a radio. It was coming from the air itself. The trees were vibrating with it.
“That’s where they live,” I realized. “The crash didn’t stop them. It just let them out. The car was a vessel.”
“I don’t care,” Greg said, pulling away from me. “That’s my son.”
He ran across the highway. I followed, clutching the single sneaker to my chest.
We entered the woods.
The transition was immediate. The moment we crossed the treeline, the temperature dropped thirty degrees. My breath plumed in the air.
The flashlight on Greg’s phone was flickering, the battery draining fast.
“Leo!” Greg shouted.
His voice didn’t echo. The woods swallowed the sound.
We walked for what felt like miles, but my watch said only ten minutes had passed. The trees here were wrong. They were pale, stripped of bark, smooth like bone.
We came to a clearing.
In the center of the clearing stood a structure.
It looked like a transmission tower. A massive, rusted metal pylon rising hundreds of feet into the air. Cables hung from it like vines.
And at the base of the tower… was a pile.
It looked like garbage at first. But as we got closer, I realized what it was.
Toys.
Thousands of them. Dolls, trucks, stuffed animals, bicycles. They were piled high, a monument to lost childhoods.
“What is this place?” Greg whispered.
“The lost and found,” I said, a wave of nausea hitting me. “The place where the missing things go.”
And sitting on top of the pile of toys, swinging his legs, was Leo.
The real Leo.
He looked tired. There were dark circles under his eyes. He was missing a shoe.
“Leo!” I cried out, starting to climb the pile of plastic junk.
“Don’t come up, Mommy,” Leo said. His voice was his own. Small. Scared.
“Why not, baby? We’re going home.”
“Because of Her,” Leo said.
He pointed up.
I looked up the length of the tower.
Clinging to the metal beams, about fifty feet up, was the Static Woman.
She was huge. Here, in her domain, she wasn’t a shadow. She was a titan of noise. Her body wrapped around the tower, her limbs elongated and multiple. She was feeding on the tower, absorbing the electricity, the signals.
And she was looking down at us.
Her face—that terrible, empty face—opened.
A mouth appeared. A vertical tear in the static.
“EXCHANGE,” the voice boomed. It shook the ground. It vibrated in my teeth.
“ONE… FOR… ONE.”
Chapter 16: The Bargain
Greg stepped forward. He climbed the first few feet of the toy pile.
“What does she mean?” Greg yelled at Leo. “Come down, Leo!”
“She can’t leave,” Leo cried. “She needs an anchor. I was the anchor. If I leave, she needs a new one.”
I understood.
The entity needed a connection to our world to feed. Leo, with his imagination, his innocence, was a battery. She had latched onto him. If we took him, she would starve—unless someone took his place.
Greg looked at me. Then he looked at Leo.
He didn’t say a dramatic goodbye. He didn’t make a speech.
He just looked at me and nodded. A small, sad nod.
“Take him,” Greg said to me.
“No,” I grabbed his shirt. “Greg, no. We fight. We burn it down like in the movies.”
“Look at her, Sarah,” Greg pointed at the titan on the tower. “We can’t burn that. We can’t shoot it. It’s physics. It’s energy. It needs a ground.”
He turned back to Leo.
“Leo!” Greg shouted. “Run to Mommy! Now!”
Greg scrambled up the pile. He wasn’t running toward Leo. He was running past him. toward the metal leg of the tower.
“Greg!” I screamed.
Leo slid down the pile of toys, crashing into my arms. He felt solid. He felt real. He smelled like sweat and grass.
“Daddy!” Leo sobbed into my shoulder.
Greg reached the tower. He grabbed the cold, rusted metal with both hands.
“Hey!” Greg screamed up at the monster. “Hey, you ugly bitch! Look at me!”
The Static Woman shifted. Her massive head turned toward Greg.
She sensed it. An adult. Stronger emotions. More anger. More fear. A richer fuel source.
She uncoiled from the upper beams and descended like a spider made of oil.
“ACCEPTED,” the voice boomed.
A bolt of gray lightning arc-ed from the entity’s hand and struck Greg in the chest.
Greg arched his back, screaming. But he didn’t let go of the tower.
His body began to change.
His clothes dissolved into gray noise. His skin began to pixelate.
“Run, Sarah!” Greg’s voice distorted. It became robotic. Run… Sarah… Run…
I grabbed Leo’s hand.
“We have to go,” I choked out.
We ran.
We ran back through the bone-white trees. Behind us, the forest lit up with blinding white light. The sound of Greg’s scream merged with the static, becoming a deafening roar that filled the sky.
We burst out of the treeline and onto the highway.
The purple sky vanished. The normal, black night returned.
The wrecked car was still there, steam rising from the engine.
I didn’t stop. I dragged Leo down the highway, flagging down a passing trucker who had slowed to look at the accident.
Chapter 17: The Signal
It’s been six months.
We live in an apartment in the city now. No more quiet suburbs. No more dark hallways. We have lights on timers in every room. We have a generator. We have no mirrors.
Leo is okay. He talks to a therapist about “the bad dream.” He’s forgetting. Kids are resilient.
But I’m not forgetting.
Every night, I sit by the radio. An old ham radio I bought at a pawn shop.
I scan the frequencies. Searching.
Most nights, it’s just noise.
But sometimes… late at night, when the atmospheric conditions are right… I find a dead channel.
The static clears for a second.
And I hear him.
“Sarah… is the light… on?”
It’s Greg. He’s still there. He’s the anchor. He’s holding the door shut from the other side.
And sometimes, in the background of his voice, I hear Her.
She’s not screaming anymore.
She’s humming. A lullaby.
And I know, one day, the anchor will rust. One day, the signal will fade.
And she will come back to collect the rest of us.
[THE END]
