Chapter 1

My name is Ellie.
The year was the early 2000s.
I was a student at UC Davis in California.

Keyword: was.
A word that shouldn’t have meant anything.
But it did.

My parents had never been fond of the idea of me studying so far from home.
They always said I wasn’t mature enough, responsible enough — despite being twenty-one.

But honestly… the three days I went back during mid-term were soft.
Gentle, even.

My mum wasn’t cold.
My dad cooked my favourite meals.
It felt like being eight years old again — wrapped in something warm I hadn’t felt in years.

When I left their house at 8:47 PM, I almost didn’t want to.
But traffic was brutal, and by the time I reached campus, it was 11:23 PM.
The sky was black.
The parking lot empty.
The dorms silent.

I tossed myself onto my bed, exhausted, and tried to sleep.

I couldn’t.

Maybe it was the Red Bull.
Maybe it was the travel.
Maybe it was just one of those nights.

Eventually, around 2:22 AM, I gave up.

My friends had been talking about some new site — Reddit.
I wasn’t into chat forums, but MySpace was blowing up, and apparently Reddit was “the next big thing.”

So I grabbed my laptop.
The fan groaned awake, the screen flickering with that old, uneven hum.

I typed “reddit.”

The homepage loaded.

A sign-up box appeared.

And then — something slid in beneath it.

Fill Login?

Not smoothly.
Not normally.
The autofill box didn’t slide in — it appeared, like it skipped a frame in reality.

As if the device already knew an account existed.
As if someone had logged in before.

But this was my dorm laptop.
I lived alone.
And I had never — not even once — used Reddit.

I stared at it.
But it was late, and I brushed it off as a glitch.

I clicked it.

A username populated instantly:

ArabicSpeaker55

Weird.

I didn’t know anyone Arabic.
I didn’t know anyone who spoke Arabic.
And none of my friends would ever choose that username — we all grew up in the same tiny California town.

But still… no alarm bells.
Not yet.

The account logged in.

And that’s when I saw it.

A list of posts.
All from the same user.
All posted to a subreddit I’d never heard of:

r/obsessedwithE

My stomach tightened.

I clicked it.

Inside was… nothing.

No banner.
No description.
No members.

Just one user.

I swallowed and opened the top post.

My body froze.

The photo was of me.

Sleeping.

I clicked the next one.

Me.

Sleeping.

Another.

Me.

Asleep.

Different days.
Different nights.
Different clothes.
Different rooms.

I felt the world tilt — slowly at first, like my brain was trying to protect me.

I kept scrolling.

Post after post after post.

Dozens.

Then hundreds.

All nearly identical —
dark room, flash glare, my face turned into the pillow.

Then I recognised something.

The wallpaper.

Pink horses.

My childhood bedroom.
From when I was six.

Some of the oldest posts had timestamps from years before Reddit even existed.

My breath thinned.
My fingers went numb.

My ears rang — high, metallic —
yet the room around me was dead silent.
Too silent.
Like the walls were holding their breath.

And then the page flickered.

It refreshed itself.

A new post appeared at the top.

My eyes watered instantly.

It wasn’t me.
Not this time.

It was my parents’ house.

My mum on the sofa, half asleep under a blanket.
My dad next to her, watching television.

The angle was wrong —
too low, too close.

Someone was standing in the kitchen doorway, taking the photo.

The kitchen behind the camera was pitch black.
A void of darkness.

Someone was there.
Tonight.
While I was gone.

My hands shook violently.
I felt dizzy.
Lightheaded.
Barely attached to my own body.

I reached for the phone on my desk —
the old rotary home phone my parents insisted I bring for “emergencies.”
The beige plastic felt ice-cold under my fingertips.

I spun the dial.
Each number clicked back slowly,
one by one,
the sound stretching into the quiet room like something breathing.

When the last number rolled back into place…
I realised something.

The only sound in the room
was the phone.

No hallway hum.
No passing cars.
No wind.
Just silence.

A silence that felt intentional.

Too quiet.

I pressed the receiver to my ear, waiting for:

“911, what’s your emergency?”

Instead, I heard:

tap.
A pause.
tap.
Another.
tap.

Then static — warped, uneven — like a wire scraping metal.
A wavelength noise slithering through the line.

I tried to speak, but before I could —

The call hung up.

Silence.

I redialed instantly.

This time, a voice answered.

Not a dispatcher.
Not a prank.

A scared, trembling voice:

“Hi, can I order a large cheese pizza with pepperoni…
Yes…
No…
Yes…
No…”

It didn’t feel like the caller was talking to me.
It felt like they were talking through me.

I froze.

This wasn’t someone ordering food.
This wasn’t a mistake.

It was someone trying to speak in code.
A victim.
Someone terrified.

Someone who somehow got connected to my line when I tried calling the police.

I opened my mouth — to speak, to warn them, to ask who they were —

“Hello, can I have a piz—”

The line cut off.

And then—

tap.

Not from the phone.

tap.

Behind me.

tap.

Against the glass.

I froze.

I felt a cold breath on my neck.

I turned —
but there was nothing.

Only a thin wisp of white fog drifting in the dark,
as if the room had suddenly turned freezing.

But when I exhaled…

nothing came out.

No mist.
No warmth.
No sign of my breath at all.

The cold wasn’t mine.

Very slowly,
every nerve in my spine crawling,
I turned fully toward the window.

…

The tapping came again.

tap.

From my window.