There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes with having a two-year-old. It’s not just the physical tiredness of chasing a small, drunk-acting human around a house for twelve hours; it’s the mental fatigue. The constant vigilance. The deciphering of babble. The negotiation over broccoli.
So, when Noah started the waving, I didn’t think much of it.
We had just moved into the new house in Oregon three months prior. It was a beautiful mid-century modern, nestled in a cul-de-sac that felt safe and quiet. It had high beams, large windows, and, crucially, a spacious nursery for Noah painted a soft, calming sage green.
The routine was ironclad. Bath at 7:00, milk at 7:30, book at 7:45, lights out at 8:00.
It was a Tuesday when it started.
I had just finished reading Goodnight Moon for the four-hundredth time. I tucked the blanket around Noah’s shoulders. He was lying on his back, clutching his stuffed giraffe, staring up at the ceiling fan.
“Night night, baby,” I whispered, reaching for the dimmer switch.
Noah didn’t look at me. He lifted his chubby little hand and waved.
“Hi,” he said softly.
I paused. “Who are you waving at, Noah?”
He giggled, a wet, bubbly sound. “The man.”
I smiled. Kids have imaginary friends. My brother had a pet invisible tiger until he was five.
“What man, sweetheart?” I asked, leaning over the crib rail.
“The man up there,” he said, pointing a finger directly above his head.
I looked up. White drywall. The ceiling fan (which was off). The smoke detector. Nothing else.
“There’s no one on the ceiling, baby,” I said, brushing his hair back. “Just the fan.”
Noah frowned. He didn’t look scared. He looked patient, like I was the one who didn’t understand how the world worked.
“He’s crawling,” Noah said.
That was the first time I felt it. A tiny, cold needle of unease pricking the base of my neck. Crawling was a weird word for a two-year-old to use in that context. Walking? Flying? Sure. But crawling?
“Okay,” I said, forcing a laugh. “Well, tell the crawling man goodnight.”
“Night night,” Noah chirped.
I left the room, turned on the monitor, and went downstairs to pour a glass of wine.
I told my husband, Mark, about it later.
“He’s probably seeing shadows from the streetlights,” Mark said, not looking up from his laptop. “Or he’s messing with you. You know how smart he is.”
“He said the man was crawling, Mark. It was… specific.”
Mark chuckled. “Toddlers are weird, babe. Yesterday he told me the dog was a dragon. Let it go.”
So, I did.
But the waving didn’t stop.
Wednesday night. Thursday nap time. Friday morning.
Every time I laid him down in the crib, Noah would immediately lock eyes with a spot on the ceiling.
Sometimes he would whisper. “Come down.”
Sometimes he would cover his eyes and laugh, like they were playing peek-a-boo.
On Saturday afternoon, I was changing his diaper. Noah was squirming, kicking his legs. Suddenly, he went rigid. He stopped crying. He stopped moving.
He looked past my shoulder, up toward the corner of the room.
“He’s watching you,” Noah said.
His voice was flat. monotone.
I froze, the diaper wipe in my hand. The air in the room felt suddenly heavy, like the pressure drop before a thunderstorm. I spun around.
Nothing. Just the sage green walls and the white ceiling.
“Noah,” I said, my voice sharper than I intended. “Stop it. There is no one there.”
He looked at me, his eyes wide and innocent. “He likes your hair, Mommy.”
I grabbed Noah, finished the change in record time, and practically ran out of the room with him.
That night, I checked the locks three times. I checked the window latches. I made Mark go into the attic with a flashlight to make sure there were no raccoons or drifters living up there.
“It’s empty, Sarah,” Mark said, coming down with cobwebs in his hair. “Dust and insulation. That’s it.”
“I don’t like it,” I said. “He’s interacting with something.”
“He’s interacting with his imagination,” Mark insisted. “We are safe. The house is alarmed. The motion sensors are active.”
Motion sensors.
The previous owners were tech enthusiasts. They had installed a high-end smart home system. One of the features was the smoke detectors in the bedrooms—they were hardwired Nest Protects, but modified. They had built-in wide-angle cameras that pointed straight down.
They were designed to detect the source of a fire. If smoke was detected, the camera activated so you could see if it was a candle or an electrical fire.
But they also had a “Night Watch” feature.
I had never used it. It seemed invasive.
That night, after Mark fell asleep, I downloaded the app for the detectors. I synced it to the hub.
Living Room: Active. Kitchen: Active. Nursery: Active.
I set the Nursery camera to “High Sensitivity/Motion Alert.”
I put the phone on my nightstand. I stared at the ceiling of my own room, listening to the house settle. Crack. Pop. Old wood breathing.
I eventually fell into a restless sleep.
I woke up at 2:17 a.m.
I didn’t wake up naturally. My phone buzzed against the wood of the nightstand. A short, sharp vibration.
I groaned, rolling over. I squinted at the screen.
Notification: Motion Detected – Nursery (Ceiling Cam)
I frowned.
The baby monitor—the audio one—was silent. Noah wasn’t crying. He wasn’t rattling the crib bars.
If Noah was moving around in the crib, the regular baby monitor would have lit up. But the Ceiling Cam was different. It was angled strictly at the ceiling and the top two feet of the room. It wouldn’t trigger unless something was… high up.
My heart started to thud in my chest. Maybe a moth, I thought. Maybe a large spider.
I unlocked the phone and opened the app.
The screen was black for a second as it buffered.
Then, the live feed popped up.
It was night vision—grainy, greenish-grey.
I saw the blades of the ceiling fan in the foreground. I saw the top rail of the crib at the bottom of the frame.
At first, I saw nothing else. Just empty space.
I was about to close the app, relieved.
Then, the pixels shifted.
In the corner of the room, where the wall met the ceiling, a shadow detached itself from the darkness.
It wasn’t a shadow.
It had mass.
My breath caught in my throat. I sat up in bed, clutching the phone with both hands.
A shape was moving along the plaster.
It was long. Impossibly long.
It looked human, but stretched. The arms were too thin, with elbows that seemed to have extra joints. It was naked, its skin pale and grey in the night vision. It had no hair.
It was crawling.
But not like a lizard. It was crawling belly-to-ceiling.
Its palms were pressed flat against the drywall. Its feet, long and prehensile, gripped the ceiling as if gravity had been reversed. It moved with a fluid, silent grace, limb over limb, sliding over the paint.
It was heading toward the center of the room.
Directly over the crib.
I tried to scream, but my throat was paralyzed. I elbowed Mark hard in the ribs. He grunted, rolling over.
“Mark,” I choked out. “Mark, look.”
On the screen, the figure stopped.
It was directly above Noah now.
Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the head of the creature turned.
It rotated 180 degrees, like an owl.
The face… oh god, the face.
It didn’t have a nose. It just had two slits. Its mouth was a wide, tight line. But the eyes were massive, dark pits that seemed to absorb the infrared light of the camera.
It looked directly into the lens.
It knew I was watching.
Then, it looked down at the crib.
The app buzzed again. Motion Detected.
Below the creature, in the crib, Noah stirred.
I watched, helpless, as my two-year-old son rolled onto his back. He opened his eyes.
He didn’t cry. He didn’t scream.
He smiled. A big, sleepy, happy smile.
He reached his little hand up toward the nightmare hovering five feet above him.
“Hi,” I saw his lips move.
He waved.
The creature on the ceiling paused. Its long, spindly fingers flexed against the plaster.
Then, slowly, it released one hand from the ceiling.
It hung there by three limbs.
And it waved back.
Its fingers were unnaturally long, rippling like seaweed in a current.
That was the moment the paralysis broke.
“MARK!” I screamed, a sound that tore my throat raw. I threw the covers off and scrambled out of bed. “GET THE GUN! IT’S IN HIS ROOM!”
Mark bolted upright, confused, disoriented. “What? Who?”
I didn’t wait. I dropped the phone on the carpet and sprinted down the hallway.
I heard the phone hit the floor. As I ran, I saw the screen flicker.
Notification: Camera Offline.
I burst through the nursery door.
I slammed the light switch on.
“NOAH!”
The room flooded with light.
Noah was sitting up in his crib, blinking against the brightness. He looked at me, startled by the noise.
“Mommy?” he whimpered.
I scanned the ceiling.
Empty.
The fan was still. The white paint was undisturbed. There was no pale, long-limbed creature. No inverted man.
I ran to the crib and scooped Noah up, clutching him so tight he started to cry.
“I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” I sobbed, spinning around, checking the corners, checking the closet.
Mark came running in a second later, a baseball bat in his hands (we didn’t actually own a gun).
“Where?” he shouted. “Where are they?”
“The ceiling!” I yelled, pointing up. “It was on the ceiling!”
Mark looked up. He lowered the bat.
“Sarah… there’s nothing there.”
“I saw it! On the camera! It was crawling upside down and it waved at him!”
Mark looked at me with a mixture of fear and concern. Not fear of a monster, but fear for his wife’s sanity.
“Let me see the phone,” he said.
I was shaking. I carried Noah into the hallway where I had dropped my phone. Mark picked it up.
He opened the app.
“It says the camera is offline,” he said.
“It cut out,” I said. “Right after it waved.”
Mark sighed. He walked back into the nursery. He dragged the step ladder from the closet and set it up under the smoke detector.
“I’m going to check it. Maybe it shorted out. Sarah, you’re tired. The shadows…”
He climbed the ladder. He reached up to inspect the device.
Then he stopped.
“Mark?” I asked, stepping into the doorway.
He didn’t answer. He was staring at the ceiling, just a few inches from the smoke detector.
He reached out and touched the white drywall.
He pulled his hand back and looked at his fingertips. They were black.
“What is that?” I whispered.
Mark looked down at me. His face was pale. All the skepticism was gone.
“Sarah,” he said, his voice trembling. “Get the car keys.”
He pointed at the ceiling.
I stepped closer.
There, on the pristine white paint, directly above where Noah’s head had been, were prints.
They looked like handprints.
But they weren’t human.
The palms were elongated. The fingers were needle-thin and stretched out nearly eight inches long. And the substance wasn’t dirt or soot.
It was an oily, viscous black sludge. And it was smoking.
As I watched, a single drop of the black liquid detached from the ceiling and fell.
Drip.
It landed in the crib, right on Noah’s pillow.
It sizzled, burning a tiny hole through the fabric.
“We are leaving,” Mark said. “Now.”
We didn’t pack a bag. We took Noah, we took the car keys, and we drove. We checked into a hotel three towns over.
I didn’t sleep. I watched Noah like a hawk.
At 4:00 a.m., sitting in the hotel armchair, I got a notification on my phone.
The smoke detector camera in the nursery was back online.
I didn’t want to look. I knew I shouldn’t look.
But I had to know.
I opened the feed.
The room was empty. The crib was empty.
But on the wall, written in that same black, sizzling sludge, were jagged, frantic letters. The creature had used its long fingers to scrawl a message while we were fleeing.
I zoomed in.
HE IS OURS.
WE ARE COMING.
And then, the motion detector in the hotel room triggered.
I looked up.
Above the hotel bed where Mark was sleeping.
A panel in the drop-ceiling shifted.
And a long, pale finger slid out.
Article: Part 2
Story Title: The Inverted Man (Continued) Word Count: Part 2 of Series
The finger was the color of old parchment—yellowed, grey, and impossibly long.
It didn’t just poke through the gap in the drop-ceiling tile; it hooked around the edge, gripping the fibrous material with a strength that made the tile crumble. Then came a second finger. Then a third.
I was paralyzed in the armchair, my phone screen still glowing with the message: WE ARE COMING.
Mark was snoring softly on the bed, oblivious. Noah was curled into a ball between us, thumb in his mouth.
Above them, the ceiling tile lifted.
It didn’t fall. It was pushed aside, sliding over the adjacent tile with a dry hiss.
A hand emerged.
It was massive. The palm was wide and flat, like a spade, and the fingers were multi-jointed, rippling as they sought purchase on the metal grid of the ceiling frame.
Then came the arm. Thin. Elongated. The elbow bent backward, like a cricket’s leg.
And then the face.
It hung upside down from the hole in the ceiling, swaying slightly.
In the dim light of the hotel microwave clock, I saw it clearly. It had no nose, just wet slits that flared as it inhaled the scent of my sleeping family. Its eyes were black voids, wide and unblinking, fixated on Noah.
Its mouth opened.
It didn’t have teeth. It had needle-like ridges of bone.
It smiled at me.
A drop of black sludge fell from its lips.
Splat.
It hit the white hotel duvet, right between Mark’s shoulder blades.
Mark flinched in his sleep. The sludge hissed. Smoke rose from the fabric.
“MARK!”
The scream ripped out of me, shattering the paralysis.
The creature hissed—a sound like a tire losing air—and pulled itself fully out of the hole. It didn’t drop to the floor. It defied gravity, flowing onto the surface of the ceiling tiles like oil on water. It scuttled backward, retreating into the corner of the room, its limbs moving with terrifying speed.
“Mark! Get up! GET UP!”
I lunged for the bed. I grabbed Noah, ripping him from the covers. He wailed, startling awake.
Mark sat up, groggy. “What? Sarah?”
“It’s here!” I screamed, pointing at the corner. “Look!”
Mark looked up.
The Inverted Man was crouched in the corner where the walls met the ceiling. Its knees were pulled up to its chest, its head rotated 180 degrees to look down at us. It looked like a gargoyle carved out of pale, diseased flesh.
“Holy…” Mark scrambled backward, falling off the bed.
The creature shrieked. It wasn’t a vocal sound. It was the sound of grinding metal.
It launched itself.
Not at me. Not at Mark.
It sprang from the corner, reaching across the ceiling with its long arms, aiming directly for Noah.
“Run!” Mark yelled. He grabbed the heavy brass lamp from the bedside table and threw it.
The lamp smashed into the creature’s midsection. The thing didn’t even flinch. It swatted the lamp away mid-air, sending it crashing into the TV.
But the distraction bought us a second.
I bolted for the door, clutching Noah to my chest. I fumbled with the latch, my hands shaking so violently I couldn’t grip the deadbolt.
“Mommy, don’t go,” Noah whispered in my ear. “He wants to play.”
“No!” I sobbed, finally snapping the lock back.
I threw the door open and burst into the hallway.
Mark was right behind me, barefoot, his shirt smoking where the black sludge had burned through.
“Car! Go to the car!” Mark shouted.
We sprinted down the carpeted hallway. The hotel was silent, the rows of doors indifferent to our terror.
But above us, I heard it.
Thump-drag. Thump-drag.
It wasn’t running on the floor behind us.
It was running on the ceiling above us.
I didn’t look up. I knew if I looked up and saw that pale face hovering inches above my hair, I would collapse.
We burst into the stairwell. I took the steps three at a time, nearly dropping Noah. Mark slammed the stairwell door shut and leaned his weight against it.
BAM.
Something hit the door from the other side. Not at handle height.
At the very top of the door.
The metal frame groaned.
“Go! Go!” Mark pushed me.
We scrambled down to the lobby. The night clerk was gone. The automatic doors slid open, and the cool night air hit my face.
We ran to our SUV. Mark fumbled for the keys, dropped them, cursed, snatched them up, and unlocked the doors.
We dove inside. Mark slammed the driver’s door and locked it. I threw Noah into his car seat in the back, not bothering with the buckles, and scrambled into the passenger seat.
“Drive!” I screamed.
Mark twisted the key. The engine roared to life. He threw it into reverse, tires screeching.
As the headlights swept across the front of the hotel, I saw it.
It was clinging to the brick facade of the building, just above the entrance. It was spread-eagled, covering the sign that said Reception.
Its head turned. It watched us.
And then, it began to crawl down the wall.
Mark floored it. We peeled out of the parking lot, blowing through a stop sign and tearing onto the main road.
“What is that thing?” Mark was hyperventilating, gripping the wheel so hard his knuckles were white. “Sarah, what is that thing?”
“I don’t know!” I was twisting in my seat, watching the rear window. The road behind us was empty. “Just keep driving. Get on the highway. We need lights. We need people.”
“It burned me,” Mark said, wincing. “It spit on me and it burned.”
“Is it following us?”
I stared into the darkness behind the car. “I don’t see it.”
“Mommy,” Noah said from the backseat.
His voice was calm. Too calm.
I turned around. “Noah, baby, are you okay?”
Noah wasn’t looking at me. He was looking up at the roof of the car. Specifically, at the sunroof.
We had the shade drawn, so it was just fabric.
“He’s fast,” Noah said.
My stomach dropped.
“Noah, who is fast?”
“The crawling man,” Noah giggled. “He’s surfing.”
Thump.
A heavy, dull sound came from directly above our heads.
The car shuddered.
Mark swerved slightly. “Did we hit something?”
“No,” I whispered. I looked at the ceiling of the car. The fabric liner.
Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.
The sound of claws on metal.
It was on the roof.
“Get it off!” I screamed. “Mark, swerve! Shake it off!”
Mark yanked the wheel to the left, crossing the double yellow line. The car lurched violently.
SCREEEEEECH.
The sound of metal tearing filled the cabin.
A dent appeared in the roof of the car, right between the driver and passenger seats. The metal buckled inward.
Then another dent.
It was punching the car.
“It’s trying to get in!” Mark yelled. He slammed the brakes, hoping the momentum would throw the creature forward.
The car skidded to a halt in the middle of the empty road.
We waited.
Silence.
“Did it fall off?” Mark whispered.
I looked at the sunroof shade.
Slowly, a dark stain began to spread across the grey fabric. It smelled like burning electrical wire and rotting meat. The stain sizzled.
Drip.
A drop of black sludge burned through the fabric and landed on the center console/gear shift.
It began to smoke.
“Get out!” I yelled.
We scrambled out of the car into the pitch black of the country road.
I grabbed Noah. Mark grabbed the tire iron from under his seat.
We stood on the asphalt, shivering.
The car sat idling, headlights cutting through the fog.
The roof of the car was empty.
There were massive, clawed gouges in the metal. The sunroof was shattered. But the creature was gone.
“Where is it?” Mark spun around, brandishing the tire iron. “Come out!”
“Up,” Noah whispered.
I looked up.
There were no trees. No buildings. Just the open night sky.
“There’s no ceiling, Noah,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “He can’t walk on the sky.”
Noah pointed.
“The stars are the ceiling,” he said.
I looked up at the vast expanse of the Milky Way.
And I saw it.
It was impossible. It broke my brain to look at it.
High above us, silhouetted against the stars, a shape was moving.
It wasn’t flying.
It was crawling.
It was crawling on the sky as if the atmosphere were a solid surface. It was hundreds of feet up, a spider on a glass dome, moving directly over our heads.
“It’s… it’s inverted,” Mark whispered, dropping the tire iron. “The whole world. To him, the sky is the floor. Or the ceiling. I don’t…”
“He’s coming down,” Noah said happily.
The shape above us stopped. It grew larger.
It was descending. Like a spider on a thread of silk, only there was no silk. It was just lowering itself through the air, limbs flailing, face angled down.
“Get back in the car!” Mark yelled. “We have to find shelter! Something with a roof!”
“No!” I pulled back. “It tears through roofs! We need… we need to go underground.”
“Underground?”
“A basement. A tunnel. Somewhere without a top.”
“My parents’ house,” Mark said. “They have a storm cellar. It’s concrete. Six feet of dirt on top.”
“How far?”
“Twenty miles.”
We jumped back into the battered car. Mark drove like a madman.
We didn’t look up. But we could hear it.
Thump.
It landed on the roof again.
This time, it didn’t scratch. It just rode.
We could feel the weight of it, pressing down.
Noah was waving at the sunroof again.
“Open the door,” Noah said. “He’s cold.”
“Noah, stop talking to it!” I snapped, immediately regretting it as he started to cry.
We screeched into Mark’s parents’ driveway twenty minutes later. The farmhouse was dark.
“Run for the cellar doors,” Mark commanded. “I’ll distract it.”
“No, Mark!”
“Go!”
Mark slammed the car into park. He jumped out and started yelling, banging the tire iron on the hood. “Hey! Ugly! Over here!”
I grabbed Noah and sprinted for the side of the house. The storm cellar doors were old wood, angled against the foundation.
I looked back.
The creature was uncurling from the roof of the car. It stood up on its hind legs—legs that were far too long, with knees that bent backward. It towered over Mark, easily seven feet tall.
It looked at Mark.
Then it looked at me.
It smiled its needle-tooth smile.
It leaped.
It didn’t jump at Mark. It jumped at the house.
It landed on the siding and scurried up the wall to the roof in the blink of an eye. It vanished over the peak of the house.
Mark ran to me. “Get inside!”
We threw the cellar doors open and tumbled down the concrete steps into the cool, damp darkness. Mark slammed the doors shut and threw the heavy iron bolt.
We were in total darkness.
“Flashlight,” Mark panted. “Phone.”
I turned on my phone light.
We were in a concrete box. Shelves of canned peaches and old tools lined the walls. It smelled of earth and mold.
“We’re safe,” Mark said, sliding down the wall to sit on the floor. “It’s solid concrete. No ceiling tiles. No drywall.”
I held Noah on my lap. He was quiet now.
We sat there for an hour. Listening.
Silence.
Then, my phone buzzed.
Notification: Motion Detected – Nursery (Ceiling Cam).
I froze.
“Mark,” I whispered. “The notification. It’s from the house. Our old house.”
“Maybe a glitch?”
“Look.”
I opened the feed.
The nursery in our house—miles away—was visible. Empty. Quiet.
Then, the camera shook.
Something picked up the Nest Protect unit.
I was looking at a close-up of the creature’s eye.
It hissed into the lens.
Then, the view spun. The creature was holding the smoke detector. It was carrying it.
It was carrying it outside.
I saw the streetlights of our old cul-de-sac.
Then, the view changed to a blur of motion.
“It’s running,” I said. “With the camera.”
“Where is it going?”
I watched the feed. Trees blurred by. The road blurred by.
“It’s coming here,” Noah said.
I looked at my son. “How do you know that?”
“Because,” Noah said, pointing at the corner of the cellar. “He’s already here.”
I swung the flashlight beam to the corner.
Nothing. Just concrete and spiderwebs.
“Noah, there’s nothing there.”
“Not there,” Noah said. “In the phone.”
I looked back at the screen.
The creature in the video feed stopped running. It held the camera up.
It was looking at a house.
Mark’s parents’ house.
It was standing in the driveway, holding our smoke detector camera, pointing it at the storm cellar doors.
I was watching a live stream of us hiding.
And then, on the screen, I saw the creature’s free hand reach down.
It grabbed the handle of the cellar door.
CLANG.
The real door above us shook violently.
The bolt rattled.
“It found us,” Mark whispered. “It tracked the phone. It tracked… us.”
CLANG.
Wood splintered.
“Noah,” I said, grabbing his face. “Noah, listen to me. Why does he want you?”
Noah looked at me. His eyes were dark.
“He doesn’t want me, Mommy.”
CRACK.
One of the cellar doors split down the middle. A long, grey hand reached through the gap, feeling for the bolt.
“Then what does he want?” I screamed.
Noah smiled.
“He wants to trade.”
“Trade?”
“He’s tired of the ceiling,” Noah said. “He wants the floor. He needs a boy to hold the ceiling up for him.”
The bolt slid back.
The doors were thrown open.
The Inverted Man stood framed against the starry sky, looking down into the pit.
He didn’t look scary anymore. He looked… expectant.
He reached a hand down.
“Mark!” I screamed.
Mark lunged with the tire iron. He swung it with all his strength at the creature’s arm.
The creature caught the tire iron. Caught it mid-swing.
It twisted the metal like it was a pipe cleaner.
Then it backhanded Mark.
Mark flew across the small room and hit the concrete wall. He slumped down, unconscious.
“MARK!”
I backed into the corner, shielding Noah.
The creature crawled down the stairs. It moved like liquid mercury, filling the space. It brought its face inches from mine. The smell was unbearable—ozone and rot.
It extended a finger.
It touched Noah’s forehead.
It didn’t burn him.
It left a black smudge.
“Up,” the creature hissed. It was the first time it had spoken. Its voice sounded like dry leaves skittering on pavement.
“No,” I wept. “Take me. Take me instead.”
The creature laughed. A wheezing, clicking sound.
“You are heavy,” it said. “He is light.”
It grabbed Noah.
I fought. I clawed at its grey, rubbery skin. I bit its arm. It tasted like ash.
It didn’t care. It pushed me aside with a strength that broke my collarbone.
It took Noah in its arms.
And then, it did the impossible.
It walked up the wall.
It walked up the vertical concrete wall of the cellar, carrying my son. It walked out onto the underside of the open cellar door.
And then it stepped up into the sky.
I scrambled up the stairs, screaming Noah’s name.
I ran out onto the grass.
I looked up.
The creature was crawling away, ascending into the night sky, moving higher and higher among the stars. Noah was in its arms. He wasn’t crying. He was waving.
“NOAH!”
I collapsed on the grass.
I watched until they were just a speck. Until they disappeared into the darkness of the atmosphere.
That was six months ago.
Mark survived. We live in a basement apartment now. No windows. No high ceilings.
We don’t talk much.
But I still have the app. I never deleted it.
The camera is still active. The creature took it with him.
Most of the time, the screen is black.
But sometimes… sometimes the feed comes on.
It’s usually just a view of the tops of clouds. Or satellites passing by.
But last night, the notification buzzed.
Motion Detected.
I opened the app.
The camera was pointing down.
I saw a floor. A white, pristine floor that stretched on forever.
And crawling on it… was a child.
He looked older. His limbs were slightly too long. His skin was pale.
He crawled up to the camera.
He rotated his head 180 degrees.
His eyes were black voids.
But he smiled.
And he waved.
I waved back at my phone.
“Hi, Noah,” I whispered.
He put his finger to the lens.
And in the dust of the camera lens, he wrote one word.
SOON.
Then the feed cut to static.
I looked up at the ceiling of my basement apartment.
A small, wet spot of black sludge appeared on the concrete.
It’s starting to drip.
THE END
