Unseen pt Three
1811 Words
The night didn’t start with thunder. It started with a silence that felt wrong.
William stepped outside, expecting the usual city noise bleeding through the alleys, but instead there was a strange stillness, like the whole neighborhood was holding its breath. The streetlights flickered—not the soft, lazy way they usually did, but sharp, staccato bursts like Morse code warnings no one understood.
Something was off.
He felt it first in his ribs, a crawling pressure, the kind that makes instinct scream before your mind even catches up. His phone buzzed in his pocket. He grabbed it, looked at the screen, and the blood in his veins iced over.
Unknown Device Access: Camera Triggered
Photo Taken: 1:17 AM
He hadn’t touched his phone. Nobody else should’ve had access. Yet there it was: a grainy thumbnail of him, standing exactly where he was standing right now, but taken from somewhere behind him.
He froze.
The air felt thicker. Like something huge was standing just out of sight, breathing slow, deliberate breaths into the darkness. He turned around too fast, half-expecting to see someone inches away, but the street was empty.
Empty… but watched.
A sudden metallic click echoed down the alley. Not a g*n. Not a pipe. A lens shutter. Another picture. Another angle. Closer.
He took one step backward, and the world around him reacted like he’d kicked awake something ancient and territorial. A dog three blocks away started howling. A car alarm chirped once, short and panicked, like even technology felt the threat sharpening.
Something moved behind the dumpster. Not a rat. Not human either. Too smooth. Too quiet. As if the shadows themselves shifted with intentional purpose.
His heartbeat hammered so loud it felt like it might shake the air.
He checked his phone again.
Another notification.
Photo Taken: 1:18 AM
This time, the thumbnail made his stomach flip.
The figure was visible now.
A silhouette. Tall. Wrong proportions. Head tilted too far, like its neck was considering snapping just to see how it felt. It stood in the mouth of the alley, watching him, but the camera had captured it clearer than his eyes could. The figure’s outline was crisp, too crisp, as if it wasn’t standing in reality but slightly overlapping it, glitching at the edges.
Then the temperature dropped. Not a breeze. Not weather. A targeted cold, wrapping around his spine like fingers.
The streetlights went out, one by one, marching toward him in a slow blackout.
He didn’t run. Not because he wasn’t terrified, but because something in him knew that running would make it chase—and whatever it was, it wanted that. It wanted the hunt.
Another notification buzzed.
He forced himself to look.
Photo Taken: 1:19 AM
This one was a close-up.
The figure was right in front of the camera. Right in front of him.
But he hadn’t seen it move.
Its face—if you could call it that—was a distortion. A smear of darkness shaped like something trying to imitate a human expression but failing with enthusiasm. And the worst part: the mouth-like stretch was open slightly, just wide enough to suggest it was whispering something he couldn’t hear.
Yet somehow, he felt the meaning.
It knows him.
It wants him.
And it’s been waiting a long time.
A sudden c***k echoed behind him. He spun. Nothing. The figure was gone, like it had slid sideways out of the world.
But the alley no longer felt empty.
And the next step he took… didn’t echo.
The ground under him absorbed the sound, like he’d stepped onto something that wasn’t pavement anymore.
Something that was breathing.
The alley should’ve felt familiar. He’d walked it a thousand times. But now the air around him was changing, thickening, compressing like the atmosphere before an explosion. The shadows weren’t just dark anymore… they were watching.
The ground beneath his foot pulsed again.
Once.
A slow, sickening thud, like a heartbeat buried beneath concrete.
He jerked his foot back, and the pavement rippled. Not visually—physically. As if something massive was lying just under the surface, pushing upward.
His phone vibrated. Hard.
Photo Taken: 1:20 AM
This one didn’t appear as a thumbnail. The image forced itself full-screen, hijacking his device like it wanted undivided attention. His breath caught.
It wasn’t a picture.
It was a livestream.
The angle was wrong. Too high. Too smooth. Like the camera was floating over his shoulder. He looked up, expecting a drone.
Nothing.
He stared at the stream again.
Behind him, in the video, a shape emerged from the far end of the alley. It slid into view with no footsteps, no sound. The darkness seemed to fold around it like fabric. Its limbs were too long. Its posture too predatory. And the angles of its body bent in ways that made human joints feel like a bad joke.
It c****d its head at the camera, as if amused it was being watched.
Then it looked up.
Not at him.
At the real world camera — the invisible one filming over his shoulder.
And it smiled.
The kind of smile that wasn’t teeth, but intention.
The livestream glitched, static rippling across the screen like something clawed the digital feed. The figure vanished for half a second.
Then reappeared.
Closer.
Then again.
Closer.
Then—
It was suddenly right behind him.
His entire body seized with raw terror. He didn’t feel breath on his neck. He didn’t hear steps. But something cold hovered inches from his skin, patient, calculating, savoring the reaction it knew it caused.
The kind of cold that sank straight to the bone.
William didn’t turn around. Couldn’t. Some primal part of him screamed that turning would mean making eye contact with something he wasn’t supposed to witness.
His phone buzzed again.
Photo Taken: 1:21 AM
He forced himself to look. His fingers felt numb.
The photo was from directly in front of him.
But he hadn’t lifted his phone.
In the picture, his own face was inches from something featureless and black, like a humanoid shadow leaning right into him, studying his expression as if searching for a weakness.
The eyes—two faint points of reflection—were the worst part. Not glowing. Not bright. Just barely catching the light enough to show they were real.
Staring into him.
His pulse hammered so violently he felt dizzy.
And then the alley lights blazed back on all at once. Not warm. Not steady. A blinding, sterile white that washed the world in a color that didn’t belong on Earth.
The figure was gone again.
But the air didn’t feel relieved.
It felt hungry.
The pavement vibrated harder this time. The ground cracked, a thin jagged line tearing across the alley like something underneath was about to surface.
He backed up, but the c***k followed, snaking toward him like a predator that had already picked its meal.
The buzzing in his pocket intensified. He glanced down.
The notifications weren’t photos anymore.
They were messages.
DO NOT MOVE.
DO NOT SPEAK.
DO NOT LOOK UP.
His throat tightened.
Then the final message hit.
IT’S STILL BEHIND YOU.
The alley didn’t feel like an alley anymore. It felt like a pressure chamber. Every sound was too sharp, too close. He could hear his own blood rushing in his ears, pounding like someone was knocking from inside his skull.
He didn’t look up.
He didn’t move.
He didn’t breathe too loud.
But the presence behind him… it shifted.
Not stepping. Not walking.
More like someone dragging a fingertip down the fabric of space itself.
He felt the air bend.
A soft static prickle climbed the back of his neck. The kind you feel when someone stands too close behind you. The kind that makes instincts scream that you’re about to be touched.
And then his phone buzzed again.
He flinched. The tiniest motion. Barely a twitch.
The presence responded.
It leaned closer.
Hot or cold, he couldn’t tell. The temperature swung violently in seconds, his skin burning and freezing at the same time. His stomach twisted, like his body couldn’t decide which terror to react to first.
He forced himself to check the message.
This time, it wasn’t typed.
It was a voice memo.
Recorded ten seconds ago.
There was no way. No one had spoken. The alley was silent. He hadn’t made a sound. His breath was stuck somewhere between his ribs and his throat.
His thumb hovered over the play button, shaking.
He pressed it.
A whisper poured out of the speakers—hoarse, strained, like vocal cords dragged along broken glass.
It was his voice.
“Don’t turn around. It copies movement.”
His knees nearly gave out.
He clamped a hand over his mouth before a sound escaped his throat.
Another message came in instantly.
Photo Taken: 1:22 AM
He didn’t want to look. But he did.
The image was from a completely different place.
Not the alley.
His apartment.
Specifically, his living room.
Lights off. TV screen glowing faintly.
And in the corner, standing behind his couch, was the same tall, glitching figure.
Only this time, the photo was crystal clear.
No distortion.
No blur.
Just a perfectly still silhouette, as if it wanted him to see exactly what it was capable of.
His heart was a jackhammer. His hands went numb.
He looked at the alley floor—the c***k beneath him widened, letting out a deep, guttural groan like the earth itself was gritting its teeth.
He took one step back.
And instantly—
Two hands clamped around his ankles from inside the c***k.
Not human hands.
Thin. Ridged. Fingers too long, joints too many, gripping with a cold so absolute it felt like his bones were turning to ice.
He was yanked downward.
Hard.
He caught himself on the edge of a dumpster, scraping half the skin off his palm.
The ground pulled again, something enormous and unseen dragging him as if it had been waiting under the pavement all night.
The presence behind him reacted too.
It straightened.
Its breath—or whatever passed for breath—shifted.
The air around him compressed, like the thing was annoyed something else had touched him first.
The c***k widened more.
The hands tightened.
And the presence behind him bent low, right beside his ear, close enough that he felt the faintest vibration of it trying to mimic a human sound it had never been taught.
A whisper.
But not words.
A warning.
A claim.
A promise.
He didn’t know what the sound meant.
But his body understood perfectly.
He wasn’t supposed to survive this alley.
He wasn’t supposed to see this thing.
He wasn’t supposed to be here at all.
Then his phone buzzed one more time.
One new message.
From his own number.
“RUN.”
- Writer
