In Seattle, April rain felt less like weather and more like an incurable, chronic disease.
From dawn to dusk, the sky maintained a leaden gray. The rain didn't pour; it hung over every building in the city like a dense, freezing web, silent and unrelenting.
Arthur's rented apartment was located in an old brick building on the edge of Capitol Hill. The rent was cheap, but the trade-off was nonexistent soundproofing and a lingering smell of rotting wood. The window seals had perished long ago, letting in drafts that made the ancient blinds rattle with a soft , rhythmic clack.
At 5:30 PM, the room was as dark as the dead of night. Arthur hadn't bothered to turn on the lights. He was sunk deep into a sagging thrift-store couch, a thin blanket draped over his legs. The blue glow of his phone screen illuminated his sleep-deprived face.
As an independent courier specializing in expedited night-shift inner-city deliveries, his biological clock had flipped a long time ago. This was the hour he should be waking up, washing his face, and getting ready for his first meal of the day. Instead, drained of all energy, his thumb mindlessly scrolled through the r/Seattle subreddit.
Lately—perhaps due to the oppressive, endless rain—the forum had been spawning cries for help.
Arthur's thumb stopped. His eyes locked onto a post that had just been pushed to the top of the hot page, tagged with [URGENT HELP].
The title read: I think my landlord hid a micro-camera in my room, but I can't find the wiring.
It was posted by a newly registered throwaway account named "Sleepless_in_SEA99." Arthur shifted into a more comfortable position and tapped the post.
I don't know if posting this here will do any good. I already called the cops, but patrol just looked around and told me I was hallucinating from work stress. They didn't even file a report before leaving.
But I am absolutely certain there is something in this room.
It started last Tuesday. I live in one of those old 80s wooden houses with hollow drywall. At first, I just felt like someone was watching me. You know that feeling? When you're alone playing games or have your back to the door, and the back of your neck gets tight and prickly? Your instincts screaming that there's a gaze on your back.
Initially, I thought the soundproofing in this dump was just terrible, and some creep next door was peeping through a crack in the wall.
Night before last, I finally snapped. I turned off all the lights, took my phone flashlight, and inched along the baseboards. I thought I'd catch the glare of a pinhole camera lens.
I found a tiny fissure, maybe a few millimeters wide, just above the baseboard.
I shined the light on it and leaned in close. There was definitely something reflective in the gap. It looked wet, like a tiny piece of glass. I was furious—I thought I finally had proof of my landlord being a creep, so I grabbed a needle, intending to poke the 'lens' out.
Right as the needle tip was about to touch it...
The 'lens' blinked.
I swear to God I wasn't seeing things! It wasn't a glass lens at all. It was a heavily bloodshot eye! It was wedged deep in that narrow drywall seam. I was so close I could see the murky yellow spots around its iris. It had no emotion. It just stared at me, dead and unblinking.
I got so scared I fell back onto the floor. When I shined the light back into the gap, there was nothing but a dark, dusty hole.
If it stopped there, I could have convinced myself my eyes were playing tricks on me.
But this morning, everything spiraled out of control.
They multiplied.
I got up to go to the bathroom, looked down, and saw a pair of eyes looking up at me from under the metal grate of the sink drain. I opened my closet, and the spaces behind the overlapping wooden louvers were packed densely with eyes. Behind the plastic slats of the AC vent, inside the gap of a drawer left slightly ajar...
Anywhere in this house that has a 'crack,' no matter how narrow, there is an eye looking out. They don't make a sound. They just silently watch me.
I'm terrified to go outside. I'm afraid that if I open the front door, the hallway space beneath the door will be full of them. I spent the entire afternoon digging out all the packing tape I had, and like a madman, I sealed the wall cracks, the AC vents, the closet doors—all of them! Three layers thick!
I thought that would fix it. I thought I finally shut the gaze out.
But now... I'm sitting on the corner of my bed typing this. The room is quiet. So quiet that I can hear a faint, persistent rustling.
It's eyelashes.
It's the eyelashes of those things. Deep inside the walls, behind those splits, they keep blinking. It's the sound of them slowly brushing against the clear packing tape. Skritch... skritch... skritch...
Wait.
I just realized something.
The tape on one of the cracks wasn't stuck down properly. A corner peeled up. I just saw the direction the pupil is pointing.
The eye is looking sideways.
The dozens, maybe hundreds of eyes hidden in the crevices of this room... they aren't looking at me at all.
Their gazes are all bypassing me, converging on the exact same focal point.
They are staring at the corner right behind me... right under the bed I'm sitting on.
I think I feel something moving under the mattress. I don't dare look down. What should I—
The post abruptly cut off. No punctuation, no conclusion. It was as if the poster was interrupted by something violent the moment they typed the last word.
Arthur's throat went dry. His fingers clamped down hard on the edges of his phone. A bone-deep chill shot straight up from his tailbone, creeping along his spine to the base of his skull.
Outside, the rain continued to fall, the sound of drops hitting the glass feeling suffocatingly heavy.
Arthur stiffly turned his neck, his eyes sweeping over the corners of his own apartment that he usually ignored. The blackened gap where the old floorboards met, the peeling paint in the ceiling corner, the thin, dark shadow lurking in the half-open bathroom door...
In that moment, his perfectly normal living space felt like it had morphed into a massive honeycomb, riddled with unknown voids.
"Fuck," Arthur cursed under his breath, desperate to break the suffocating silence of the room. He rubbed his face vigorously and looked back at the screen, swiping his thumb down to refresh the page. He wanted to see if anyone had replied, or to confirm that this was just some trashy creepypasta written by a troll.
The loading circle spun twice.
Then, the entire webpage flashed. The dense block of text vanished without a trace, replaced by a blank white screen with a single line of bold, gray system text in the center:
[This content has been removed by administrators for violating community guidelines.]
Arthur froze. He tapped the poster's username. The page redirected, displaying only four words: "Account does not exist."
Gone.
Just like all those other threads he'd stumbled across on the forum over the past half-month. Whether it was someone claiming to have picked up a hitchhiker with no body temperature on a midnight interstate, or a user receiving a grotesque package with no return address, as soon as these posts generated even a fraction of traction, they were erased by some invisible hand within minutes.
The speed of it was staggering. It was as if some omnipresent surveillance system was filtering the city's network 24/7.
"What the hell are they covering up...?" Arthur tossed his phone onto the coffee table with a dull thud.