There's something in my hallway that moves whenever I look…
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There's something in my hallway that moves whenever I look away from my phone
I haven't looked directly at my phone since 3:57 this morning. It's face-down on the carpet about six feet from me, and I know I have fourteen missed calls because my watch keeps vibrating even though I turned the display away. I'm sitting on the floor against my bedroom wall with the lights on, staring through the open door into the hallway. There is someone standing beside the bathroom.
I should probably explain that I live alone. My girlfriend, Nina, moved out in June, and although we're still technically together, she'd probably object to me describing it that way because the whole reason she moved out was to figure out whether we actually wanted to be. The house is a small two-bedroom rental, the kind where you can stand in the kitchen and see almost everything except the bedrooms. There isn't anywhere for another person to live in here without me noticing.
The first time I saw it was Sunday night. I was in bed scrolling through my phone instead of sleeping, which has become a bad habit since Nina left, and I'd been watching videos for maybe forty minutes when I looked toward the bedroom door and noticed what I thought was a coat hanging at the far end of the hall. There isn't a hook there, but at one in the morning I wasn't immediately concerned about the implications of that. I looked back at my phone and watched maybe fifteen seconds of a video about restoring an old kitchen knife before glancing toward the hallway again.
The shape seemed to be standing a little nearer. I remember squinting at it, then reaching for the lamp beside my bed, more annoyed with myself than frightened. The light came on and there was nothing there. My hallway contains a narrow bookshelf, a framed print Nina bought because she said the wall looked like a dentist's office, and a laundry basket I had been promising myself I'd put away for three days, and none of those things looked remotely human with the light on.
I got up, checked the front and back doors, and went back to bed. I didn't tell anyone about it because there wasn't anything to tell, and people see shapes in dark rooms all the time. The next day I went to work, forgot my lunch in the fridge, spent twenty minutes arguing with a supplier about an invoice, and called Nina on the drive home because we'd agreed to speak every few days instead of doing the mature thing and actually ending the relationship. By the time I went to bed Monday night, the shape in the hallway had become one of those little incidents you remember only because you were briefly embarrassed by how much it frightened you.
Monday night it was standing beside the bookshelf. I was awake when I saw it, and I wasn't half asleep or looking past a pile of laundry because I'd cleaned the hallway after work. It looked like a person facing me from maybe twenty feet away, tall enough that the top of its head was level with the framed print. I couldn't see clothes or a face, just the suggestion of shoulders and legs darker than the hallway around them.
My first thought was that someone had broken into the house. I grabbed my phone and opened the emergency-call screen, but before I pressed anything I looked up again. The person was now on my side of the bookshelf, only a few feet closer, but I knew exactly where it had been before because the shelf had been between us. I shouted, "Who are you?" and got no answer.
I got out of bed without taking my eyes off it and switched on the bedside lamp. The hallway became empty again. I checked every room, including beneath the beds, inside the wardrobe in the spare room, behind the shower curtain, and even the attic hatch although I would have heard someone pull the ladder down. Both doors were still locked from inside, and the kitchen window that doesn't close properly unless you lean your hip against the frame had undisturbed dust along the sill.
That was when I called Nina. I told her I'd heard something rather than admitting I'd seen a person disappear when I turned on a lamp, because I was still trying to preserve the possibility that I wasn't becoming the kind of man who sees intruders that aren't there. She asked whether I wanted her to come over, and I said no because at that point I'd convinced myself it had been a shadow again. Tuesday morning, after sleeping badly, that explanation still seemed reasonable enough to get me through work.
Tuesday itself was normal, and that detail is important to me now because I've started dividing the last few days into periods when this was happening and periods when I was still allowed to care about stupid things. I took my car in because the rear brake had started squealing, bought tomatoes I didn't need because they were on sale, and got annoyed when Nina sent me a picture of a bookshelf she'd bought for her new apartment. I remember thinking it looked cheap. That night, mostly as a joke to myself, I left the hallway light on before going to bed.
I fell asleep around midnight and woke at 2:40 because my phone vibrated on the bedside table. Nina had sent me a message saying she'd finally watched a series we'd started together and that I had been right about the ending being terrible. I typed half a reply before remembering the hallway, and when I looked toward the door someone was standing directly beneath the light. The light didn't make it disappear this time.
I dropped my phone onto the bed and stared. The person was about fifteen feet away, standing in the middle of the hallway with both arms hanging straight down, and although the ceiling light was behind it I still couldn't make out any useful detail. It wasn't a silhouette exactly; it was more like my eyes kept settling on the hallway around it instead of the person itself. Then my phone vibrated again.
I looked down automatically and saw Nina had sent, You awake? When I looked back up, the person was halfway to my bedroom. I don't remember deciding to get out of bed, but one second I was sitting there and the next I was pressed against the headboard with my feet under me, staring at the hallway. The person hadn't changed position while I watched it.
I stayed like that for maybe a minute before looking at my phone again. When I raised my eyes, it was closer. There wasn't any motion to see; I looked down, read the time, looked up, and the person was simply standing a few feet nearer than before. It was close enough now that I could see its hands.
I tried it again because fear apparently makes me scientific. I kept my eyes on the person and reached blindly across the bed until I found my phone, then held it beside my face without looking at the screen. Nothing happened. The moment I turned my eyes toward the display for less than a second, the person was standing at my bedroom door when I looked back.
I don't know how to describe what that did to me without exaggerating it. I didn't scream or faint or feel my blood turn to ice, because mostly I just understood with absolute certainty that I had been doing something all night that I needed to stop doing. I threw the phone across the room, where it landed face-up near the wardrobe with Nina's message still glowing on the screen. I stared at the person in the doorway and backed toward the opposite side of the bed, and for a long time neither of us moved.
Eventually I realized I could get to the bedroom window without passing it. I climbed out barefoot, tore the knee of my pajama pants on the sill, and stood in the side yard feeling like an idiot. When I looked back through the window, I couldn't see anyone inside. I slept in my car anyway.
In the morning I went inside with a hammer because it was the closest thing I owned to a weapon. There was nobody in the hallway, nothing had been disturbed, and my phone was still beside the wardrobe where I'd thrown it. I called in sick and spent most of Wednesday looking for an ordinary explanation. Carbon monoxide was the obvious one, so I bought two new detectors and tested the old one, checked the medications I take even though I've been on the same antihistamine for years, and searched for visual hallucinations caused by sleep deprivation until the internet convinced me everything from dehydration to a brain tumor could explain anything.
By noon, I had reduced the previous night to a sequence I could tolerate. I had been tired, frightened and staring into a dim hallway, while my bright phone screen repeatedly forced my eyes to adjust between light and dark. That explanation was so tidy that I almost resented myself for not thinking of it sooner. I told Nina most of the truth when she came over after work.
She stood where I'd seen the person and made me show her exactly where it had appeared. She didn't laugh, which was nice, but she also kept asking how much I'd slept lately and eventually said she thought I should stay at her place for a few nights. I told her, "I thought the point of moving out was getting space from me," and she gave me a tired look before saying, "I wanted space. I didn't want you hallucinating alone in a bungalow." She stayed until about ten, and by the time she left I was embarrassed enough that I nearly apologized for making her come over.
At 11:30 I turned off the television and saw the person standing in the kitchen doorway. This time I didn't reach for my phone, and the figure remained where it was, maybe twelve feet from the couch with one shoulder partially hidden by the wall. I stared at it while feeling along the cushion for my phone with my right hand. Nothing happened.
I found the phone and lifted it, and still nothing happened. I turned it so the screen faced me, but as long as I kept looking at the person it remained where it was. Then I looked at the screen. When I looked back, the person was beside the dining table.
That was the moment I stopped thinking I was hallucinating. I spent the next hour testing it, even though I know how ridiculous that sounds now. If you're imagining yourself in my position, you're probably imagining you would leave immediately and never come back, but I had already left once and by daylight the entire thing had collapsed into something explainable. I needed something I couldn't explain away in the morning.
I put my phone on the coffee table and stared at the figure for five minutes. It didn't move, but when I looked down long enough to read the battery percentage and then looked back, it was closer. I did it again by opening a message from Nina, and again after typing I think you're right. Something is wrong. By then it was standing at the edge of the rug, so I stopped testing.
I kept my eyes on it while using voice control to call Nina. The phone rang on speaker from the table, and when she answered I told her there really was someone in the house. She told me to call the police, and I said, "I can't look at my phone," which produced a short silence before she asked what I meant. I told her I couldn't look away from him.
Nina asked, "Who is him?" I told her I didn't know, and she said she was coming over. I don't know whether hearing another person's voice distracted me or whether I simply blinked too long, but I remember glancing toward the phone when she said my name sharply. When I looked back, the figure had crossed the rug.
I ran through the laundry and out the back door without looking behind me. I didn't stop until I reached the service station at the end of the road, and Nina found me there fifteen minutes later wearing no shoes and holding my keys hard enough that the teeth had cut into my palm. I stayed at her apartment that night. Nothing happened.
Nothing happened Thursday either. I went to a doctor, who listened to the story with impressive professionalism and asked about drugs, alcohol, sleep, stress and family history. He suggested that acute stress and sleep deprivation could cause perceptual disturbances without necessarily meaning anything more serious. I didn't tell him I'd conducted repeated experiments with the hallucination because I wanted him to continue looking at me like a patient rather than a problem.
Thursday night I slept for almost nine hours. Friday morning I woke feeling better than I had all week and checked my phone before I was fully awake. The person was standing in Nina's bedroom doorway. I screamed her name.
Nina woke up, saw me pointing, and looked at the doorway. She asked what I was seeing, and when I asked whether she could see him she said there was nobody there. That should have made me think the doctor was right. Instead, I looked at my phone again.
When I looked back, the person was standing beside Nina's dresser. I left her apartment before breakfast because I didn't want to explain why, and the drive home took twenty-two minutes. Before starting the car I put my phone in the glove compartment and didn't touch it once. When I got home, the house was empty.
I turned the phone off and put it inside a kitchen drawer. I spent the whole afternoon waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. By evening I was almost euphoric, and I cleaned the kitchen, did two loads of washing and cooked actual food instead of eating cereal over the sink. At some point I started believing the phone itself really was involved, which sounds absurd now but felt considerably better than the alternative.
Around nine I saw the person standing at the far end of the hallway. The phone was still switched off inside the drawer, and I stood in the living room staring at him while nothing happened. I remember thinking that maybe the phone didn't have to be on, or that perhaps just having it in the house was enough. That is the sort of theory your mind produces when it desperately wants a problem to remain mechanical.
I decided to throw the phone outside. The kitchen drawer was behind me, so I kept my eyes on the person and walked backward until my hand found the counter, then felt along the cabinets without turning around. I opened the wrong drawer first, found the right one on the second try, pulled out the phone and dropped it onto the floor without ever looking at it. The person didn't move.
I nudged the phone toward the back door with my foot. Nothing changed until something outside hit the fence, probably a cat, and I looked toward the sound without thinking. When I looked back, the person was standing six feet closer. I don't know how long I stood there before understanding.
The phone had never mattered. I looked at the clock on the wall, then back at the hallway, and the figure was closer. I looked at the kitchen window and found him closer again, then looked down at my own hand and saw the distance shrink once more. The only reason I'd connected it to the phone was because the phone was what I looked at most.
I backed toward the bedroom without taking my eyes off him. He didn't move, and the distance between us was about ten feet by then, close enough that I could see he was wearing something dark and ordinary, maybe a jumper and trousers. His face was pale but indistinct, not blurred exactly, just difficult to hold in my mind. I reached the bedroom and closed the door without looking away until the last possible second.
For perhaps ten minutes, nothing happened. I sat on the floor with my back against the door until I heard a soft sound from the hallway, not footsteps exactly, but more like someone shifting their weight. That was when I realized closing the door had created a problem I hadn't considered. I couldn't see him anymore.
I opened the door. He was standing immediately outside, and I slammed it again so hard a picture fell off the wall. I pushed the dresser against the door and told myself that whether he could move or not didn't matter if there was a locked door between us. For almost three hours, I heard nothing.
Then I needed the bathroom. I tried to ignore it for another forty minutes before finally moving the dresser enough to open the door. He was halfway inside the room. The dresser hadn't shifted and the door had still been shut, but he was simply standing partly through the space where the door had been, as though whatever allowed him to come closer didn't particularly care about walls.
I stared at him and he remained still. That was when I noticed my eyes hurt because I had been trying not to blink, so I forced myself to blink normally while watching him. Nothing happened, and for maybe five minutes that helped. Then I started thinking about Nina.
I wondered whether she'd called again. The person moved, even though I hadn't looked away. I had been staring directly at him when it happened, and one moment he was near the doorway while the next he was nearer the bed. I stopped breathing for a second because I understood the second mistake I'd made.
It wasn't about where I was looking. It was about what I was paying attention to. I tried to prove myself wrong by staring at his face while counting backward from one hundred, but somewhere around ninety-three I wondered whether counting itself counted as distraction. He moved again.
I focused on his left shoulder and tried to think about nothing else. The moment I noticed myself thinking about whether I was concentrating properly, he was closer. I repeated the word shoulder silently in my head because I thought giving my attention one fixed point might help, but that only gave me another thought to monitor. Every attempt to concentrate created another thing to concentrate on.
That was around 3:57. I put the phone face-down and stopped trying to call anyone, because every attempt to solve the problem was giving my mind somewhere else to go. He's beside the bathroom now, farther away than he was before only because I moved into the corner of the bedroom while keeping as much of my attention on him as I could. I don't know whether distance works normally for him or whether I'm inventing another explanation because explanations make this easier.
I'm not typing this. I turned on voice dictation without looking at the screen and have been speaking for I don't know how long, which seemed clever when I started. The problem is that every time I think about what sentence comes next, he gets slightly closer. I can see his face properly now.
He's an ordinary-looking man, maybe fifty, with thinning hair and a grey jumper. His mouth is closed and his arms hang comfortably at his sides, and there is nothing about him that would make you cross the street if you passed him during the day. That's somehow worse than if he looked monstrous. I don't think he's angry, and I don't think he's hungry, but I have no idea whether he wants anything from me at all.
I think he just comes closer whenever I stop giving him my full attention. I've been trying to remember when I first saw him on Sunday, and I keep coming back to the fact that I had been looking down at my phone for almost an hour before I noticed him. I have no idea where he was when I started. Thinking about that made him move again.
He's just outside the bedroom now. I can see enough detail to know his eyes are open, and he's looking directly at me. I thought that was obvious until a few minutes ago, when I realized I've never once seen him look anywhere else. My phone just vibrated again.
I didn't look. It vibrated a second time, and I'm keeping my eyes on him while trying not to wonder whether it's Nina. I need somebody to come here, but if she does I'll have to think about the door, listen for her car, answer when she calls my name, or decide whether to warn her before she walks inside. Even thinking through those possibilities has already brought him closer.
I'm going to stop talking now. The voice-to-text should keep whatever it has already captured, and maybe I can send it without looking if I can get the assistant to do it, although even thinking about that is becoming another distraction. I understand now why the phone seemed so important at first. It was never making him move; it was just the easiest thing in the world to make me forget he was there.
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I haven't looked directly at my phone since 3:57 this morning. It's face-down on the carpet about six feet from me, and I know I have fourteen missed calls because my watch keeps vibrating even though I turned the display away. I'm sitting on the floor against my bedroom wall with the lights on, staring through the open door into the hallway. There is someone standing beside the bathroom.
I should probably explain that I live alone. My girlfriend, Nina, moved out in June, and although we're still technically together, she'd probably object to me describing it that way because the whole reason she moved out was to figure out whether we actually wanted to be. The house is a small two-bedroom rental, the kind where you can stand in the kitchen and see almost everything except the bedrooms. There isn't anywhere for another person to live in here without me noticing.
The first time I saw it was Sunday night. I was in bed scrolling through my phone instead of sleeping, which has become a bad habit since Nina left, and I'd been watching videos for maybe forty minutes when I looked toward the bedroom door and noticed what I thought was a coat hanging at the far end of the hall. There isn't a hook there, but at one in the morning I wasn't immediately concerned about the implications of that. I looked back at my phone and watched maybe fifteen seconds of a video about restoring an old kitchen knife before glancing toward the hallway again.
The shape seemed to be standing a little nearer. I remember squinting at it, then reaching for the lamp beside my bed, more annoyed with myself than frightened. The light came on and there was nothing there. My hallway contains a narrow bookshelf, a framed print Nina bought because she said the wall looked like a dentist's office, and a laundry basket I had been promising myself I'd put away for three days, and none of those things looked remotely human with the light on.
I got up, checked the front and back doors, and went back to bed. I didn't tell anyone about it because there wasn't anything to tell, and people see shapes in dark rooms all the time. The next day I went to work, forgot my lunch in the fridge, spent twenty minutes arguing with a supplier about an invoice, and called Nina on the drive home because we'd agreed to speak every few days instead of doing the mature thing and actually ending the relationship. By the time I went to bed Monday night, the shape in the hallway had become one of those little incidents you remember only because you were briefly embarrassed by how much it frightened you.
Monday night it was standing beside the bookshelf. I was awake when I saw it, and I wasn't half asleep or looking past a pile of laundry because I'd cleaned the hallway after work. It looked like a person facing me from maybe twenty feet away, tall enough that the top of its head was level with the framed print. I couldn't see clothes or a face, just the suggestion of shoulders and legs darker than the hallway around them.
My first thought was that someone had broken into the house. I grabbed my phone and opened the emergency-call screen, but before I pressed anything I looked up again. The person was now on my side of the bookshelf, only a few feet closer, but I knew exactly where it had been before because the shelf had been between us. I shouted, "Who are you?" and got no answer.
I got out of bed without taking my eyes off it and switched on the bedside lamp. The hallway became empty again. I checked every room, including beneath the beds, inside the wardrobe in the spare room, behind the shower curtain, and even the attic hatch although I would have heard someone pull the ladder down. Both doors were still locked from inside, and the kitchen window that doesn't close properly unless you lean your hip against the frame had undisturbed dust along the sill.
That was when I called Nina. I told her I'd heard something rather than admitting I'd seen a person disappear when I turned on a lamp, because I was still trying to preserve the possibility that I wasn't becoming the kind of man who sees intruders that aren't there. She asked whether I wanted her to come over, and I said no because at that point I'd convinced myself it had been a shadow again. Tuesday morning, after sleeping badly, that explanation still seemed reasonable enough to get me through work.
Tuesday itself was normal, and that detail is important to me now because I've started dividing the last few days into periods when this was happening and periods when I was still allowed to care about stupid things. I took my car in because the rear brake had started squealing, bought tomatoes I didn't need because they were on sale, and got annoyed when Nina sent me a picture of a bookshelf she'd bought for her new apartment. I remember thinking it looked cheap. That night, mostly as a joke to myself, I left the hallway light on before going to bed.
I fell asleep around midnight and woke at 2:40 because my phone vibrated on the bedside table. Nina had sent me a message saying she'd finally watched a series we'd started together and that I had been right about the ending being terrible. I typed half a reply before remembering the hallway, and when I looked toward the door someone was standing directly beneath the light. The light didn't make it disappear this time.
I dropped my phone onto the bed and stared. The person was about fifteen feet away, standing in the middle of the hallway with both arms hanging straight down, and although the ceiling light was behind it I still couldn't make out any useful detail. It wasn't a silhouette exactly; it was more like my eyes kept settling on the hallway around it instead of the person itself. Then my phone vibrated again.
I looked down automatically and saw Nina had sent, You awake? When I looked back up, the person was halfway to my bedroom. I don't remember deciding to get out of bed, but one second I was sitting there and the next I was pressed against the headboard with my feet under me, staring at the hallway. The person hadn't changed position while I watched it.
I stayed like that for maybe a minute before looking at my phone again. When I raised my eyes, it was closer. There wasn't any motion to see; I looked down, read the time, looked up, and the person was simply standing a few feet nearer than before. It was close enough now that I could see its hands.
I tried it again because fear apparently makes me scientific. I kept my eyes on the person and reached blindly across the bed until I found my phone, then held it beside my face without looking at the screen. Nothing happened. The moment I turned my eyes toward the display for less than a second, the person was standing at my bedroom door when I looked back.
I don't know how to describe what that did to me without exaggerating it. I didn't scream or faint or feel my blood turn to ice, because mostly I just understood with absolute certainty that I had been doing something all night that I needed to stop doing. I threw the phone across the room, where it landed face-up near the wardrobe with Nina's message still glowing on the screen. I stared at the person in the doorway and backed toward the opposite side of the bed, and for a long time neither of us moved.
Eventually I realized I could get to the bedroom window without passing it. I climbed out barefoot, tore the knee of my pajama pants on the sill, and stood in the side yard feeling like an idiot. When I looked back through the window, I couldn't see anyone inside. I slept in my car anyway.
In the morning I went inside with a hammer because it was the closest thing I owned to a weapon. There was nobody in the hallway, nothing had been disturbed, and my phone was still beside the wardrobe where I'd thrown it. I called in sick and spent most of Wednesday looking for an ordinary explanation. Carbon monoxide was the obvious one, so I bought two new detectors and tested the old one, checked the medications I take even though I've been on the same antihistamine for years, and searched for visual hallucinations caused by sleep deprivation until the internet convinced me everything from dehydration to a brain tumor could explain anything.
By noon, I had reduced the previous night to a sequence I could tolerate. I had been tired, frightened and staring into a dim hallway, while my bright phone screen repeatedly forced my eyes to adjust between light and dark. That explanation was so tidy that I almost resented myself for not thinking of it sooner. I told Nina most of the truth when she came over after work.
She stood where I'd seen the person and made me show her exactly where it had appeared. She didn't laugh, which was nice, but she also kept asking how much I'd slept lately and eventually said she thought I should stay at her place for a few nights. I told her, "I thought the point of moving out was getting space from me," and she gave me a tired look before saying, "I wanted space. I didn't want you hallucinating alone in a bungalow." She stayed until about ten, and by the time she left I was embarrassed enough that I nearly apologized for making her come over.
At 11:30 I turned off the television and saw the person standing in the kitchen doorway. This time I didn't reach for my phone, and the figure remained where it was, maybe twelve feet from the couch with one shoulder partially hidden by the wall. I stared at it while feeling along the cushion for my phone with my right hand. Nothing happened.
I found the phone and lifted it, and still nothing happened. I turned it so the screen faced me, but as long as I kept looking at the person it remained where it was. Then I looked at the screen. When I looked back, the person was beside the dining table.
That was the moment I stopped thinking I was hallucinating. I spent the next hour testing it, even though I know how ridiculous that sounds now. If you're imagining yourself in my position, you're probably imagining you would leave immediately and never come back, but I had already left once and by daylight the entire thing had collapsed into something explainable. I needed something I couldn't explain away in the morning.
I put my phone on the coffee table and stared at the figure for five minutes. It didn't move, but when I looked down long enough to read the battery percentage and then looked back, it was closer. I did it again by opening a message from Nina, and again after typing I think you're right. Something is wrong. By then it was standing at the edge of the rug, so I stopped testing.
I kept my eyes on it while using voice control to call Nina. The phone rang on speaker from the table, and when she answered I told her there really was someone in the house. She told me to call the police, and I said, "I can't look at my phone," which produced a short silence before she asked what I meant. I told her I couldn't look away from him.
Nina asked, "Who is him?" I told her I didn't know, and she said she was coming over. I don't know whether hearing another person's voice distracted me or whether I simply blinked too long, but I remember glancing toward the phone when she said my name sharply. When I looked back, the figure had crossed the rug.
I ran through the laundry and out the back door without looking behind me. I didn't stop until I reached the service station at the end of the road, and Nina found me there fifteen minutes later wearing no shoes and holding my keys hard enough that the teeth had cut into my palm. I stayed at her apartment that night. Nothing happened.
Nothing happened Thursday either. I went to a doctor, who listened to the story with impressive professionalism and asked about drugs, alcohol, sleep, stress and family history. He suggested that acute stress and sleep deprivation could cause perceptual disturbances without necessarily meaning anything more serious. I didn't tell him I'd conducted repeated experiments with the hallucination because I wanted him to continue looking at me like a patient rather than a problem.
Thursday night I slept for almost nine hours. Friday morning I woke feeling better than I had all week and checked my phone before I was fully awake. The person was standing in Nina's bedroom doorway. I screamed her name.
Nina woke up, saw me pointing, and looked at the doorway. She asked what I was seeing, and when I asked whether she could see him she said there was nobody there. That should have made me think the doctor was right. Instead, I looked at my phone again.
When I looked back, the person was standing beside Nina's dresser. I left her apartment before breakfast because I didn't want to explain why, and the drive home took twenty-two minutes. Before starting the car I put my phone in the glove compartment and didn't touch it once. When I got home, the house was empty.
I turned the phone off and put it inside a kitchen drawer. I spent the whole afternoon waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. By evening I was almost euphoric, and I cleaned the kitchen, did two loads of washing and cooked actual food instead of eating cereal over the sink. At some point I started believing the phone itself really was involved, which sounds absurd now but felt considerably better than the alternative.
Around nine I saw the person standing at the far end of the hallway. The phone was still switched off inside the drawer, and I stood in the living room staring at him while nothing happened. I remember thinking that maybe the phone didn't have to be on, or that perhaps just having it in the house was enough. That is the sort of theory your mind produces when it desperately wants a problem to remain mechanical.
I decided to throw the phone outside. The kitchen drawer was behind me, so I kept my eyes on the person and walked backward until my hand found the counter, then felt along the cabinets without turning around. I opened the wrong drawer first, found the right one on the second try, pulled out the phone and dropped it onto the floor without ever looking at it. The person didn't move.
I nudged the phone toward the back door with my foot. Nothing changed until something outside hit the fence, probably a cat, and I looked toward the sound without thinking. When I looked back, the person was standing six feet closer. I don't know how long I stood there before understanding.
The phone had never mattered. I looked at the clock on the wall, then back at the hallway, and the figure was closer. I looked at the kitchen window and found him closer again, then looked down at my own hand and saw the distance shrink once more. The only reason I'd connected it to the phone was because the phone was what I looked at most.
I backed toward the bedroom without taking my eyes off him. He didn't move, and the distance between us was about ten feet by then, close enough that I could see he was wearing something dark and ordinary, maybe a jumper and trousers. His face was pale but indistinct, not blurred exactly, just difficult to hold in my mind. I reached the bedroom and closed the door without looking away until the last possible second.
For perhaps ten minutes, nothing happened. I sat on the floor with my back against the door until I heard a soft sound from the hallway, not footsteps exactly, but more like someone shifting their weight. That was when I realized closing the door had created a problem I hadn't considered. I couldn't see him anymore.
I opened the door. He was standing immediately outside, and I slammed it again so hard a picture fell off the wall. I pushed the dresser against the door and told myself that whether he could move or not didn't matter if there was a locked door between us. For almost three hours, I heard nothing.
Then I needed the bathroom. I tried to ignore it for another forty minutes before finally moving the dresser enough to open the door. He was halfway inside the room. The dresser hadn't shifted and the door had still been shut, but he was simply standing partly through the space where the door had been, as though whatever allowed him to come closer didn't particularly care about walls.
I stared at him and he remained still. That was when I noticed my eyes hurt because I had been trying not to blink, so I forced myself to blink normally while watching him. Nothing happened, and for maybe five minutes that helped. Then I started thinking about Nina.
I wondered whether she'd called again. The person moved, even though I hadn't looked away. I had been staring directly at him when it happened, and one moment he was near the doorway while the next he was nearer the bed. I stopped breathing for a second because I understood the second mistake I'd made.
It wasn't about where I was looking. It was about what I was paying attention to. I tried to prove myself wrong by staring at his face while counting backward from one hundred, but somewhere around ninety-three I wondered whether counting itself counted as distraction. He moved again.
I focused on his left shoulder and tried to think about nothing else. The moment I noticed myself thinking about whether I was concentrating properly, he was closer. I repeated the word shoulder silently in my head because I thought giving my attention one fixed point might help, but that only gave me another thought to monitor. Every attempt to concentrate created another thing to concentrate on.
That was around 3:57. I put the phone face-down and stopped trying to call anyone, because every attempt to solve the problem was giving my mind somewhere else to go. He's beside the bathroom now, farther away than he was before only because I moved into the corner of the bedroom while keeping as much of my attention on him as I could. I don't know whether distance works normally for him or whether I'm inventing another explanation because explanations make this easier.
I'm not typing this. I turned on voice dictation without looking at the screen and have been speaking for I don't know how long, which seemed clever when I started. The problem is that every time I think about what sentence comes next, he gets slightly closer. I can see his face properly now.
He's an ordinary-looking man, maybe fifty, with thinning hair and a grey jumper. His mouth is closed and his arms hang comfortably at his sides, and there is nothing about him that would make you cross the street if you passed him during the day. That's somehow worse than if he looked monstrous. I don't think he's angry, and I don't think he's hungry, but I have no idea whether he wants anything from me at all.
I think he just comes closer whenever I stop giving him my full attention. I've been trying to remember when I first saw him on Sunday, and I keep coming back to the fact that I had been looking down at my phone for almost an hour before I noticed him. I have no idea where he was when I started. Thinking about that made him move again.
He's just outside the bedroom now. I can see enough detail to know his eyes are open, and he's looking directly at me. I thought that was obvious until a few minutes ago, when I realized I've never once seen him look anywhere else. My phone just vibrated again.
I didn't look. It vibrated a second time, and I'm keeping my eyes on him while trying not to wonder whether it's Nina. I need somebody to come here, but if she does I'll have to think about the door, listen for her car, answer when she calls my name, or decide whether to warn her before she walks inside. Even thinking through those possibilities has already brought him closer.
I'm going to stop talking now. The voice-to-text should keep whatever it has already captured, and maybe I can send it without looking if I can get the assistant to do it, although even thinking about that is becoming another distraction. I understand now why the phone seemed so important at first. It was never making him move; it was just the easiest thing in the world to make me forget he was there.
#entertainment
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