Chapter 4: The Eye of the Lens
The next morning, I did what any modern, terrified mother would do. I went to the electronics store.
I bought a Wyze cam. Small, unassuming, connects to Wi-Fi. It had night vision and a motion sensor that would alert my phone.
I told Lily it was a “monster detector” to keep her safe, to make sure the monsters stayed away. She seemed okay with that.
I set it up on her bookshelf, hidden between a stack of Dr. Seuss books and a stuffed giraffe. I angled it perfectly. It caught the entire bed, and more importantly, it caught the “Night Babysitter’s” spot. The empty patch of carpet.
The first night was agony. I sat in my bed, phone in hand, watching the live feed. The screen was a grainy black and white. Lily tossed and turned a bit, then settled. Nothing appeared. No shadows. No men in suits. Just a sleeping six-year-old.
I felt a wave of relief. It’s just imagination, I told myself. She’s processing something. Maybe she saw a scary movie trailer.
The second night was the same. Nothing. I actually managed to sleep for a few hours.
Then came the third night.
It was a Thursday. I was exhausted. Work had been brutal. I put Lily down at 8:30, checked the camera feed—all clear—and passed out in my own bed by 10:00.
My phone vibrated on the nightstand at 2:12 a.m.
It wasn’t a call. It was a notification from the camera app.
Motion Detected: Lily’s Room.
I woke up instantly, adrenaline flooding my system like ice water. I grabbed the phone, my fingers fumbling to unlock it. The screen was blindingly bright in the dark room.
I tapped the notification. The app loaded. The little spinning wheel seemed to take an eternity.
Loading stream…
Then, the image popped up.
At first, my brain couldn’t process what I was seeing. It looked like a glitch. A smudge on the lens.
Lily was asleep, curled on her side facing the wall.
But above her… beside the bed… something was blocking the view of the floor.
It wasn’t a glitch.
It was a mass.
It was darker than the shadows in the room. It absorbed the infrared light of the camera. It was tall.
I zoomed in, pinching the screen with trembling fingers.
It was a torso. Someone—some thing—was standing in the two-foot gap between the bed and the wall.
I couldn’t see the head; it was out of frame, too high up. But I saw the arm. A long, thin limb hanging straight down, perfectly still.
I couldn’t breathe. I stared at the timestamp. 2:13:05 AM. It was live.
Then, the mattress moved.
On the screen, I saw the indentation. The corner of the mattress, right by Lily’s head, depressed slowly. Like someone was leaning their weight onto it. Like someone was bending down to whisper.
The figure shifted. The dark mass moved lower.
I didn’t think. I didn’t plan. I didn’t grab a weapon.
I threw my covers off, sprinted down the hallway, and burst into Lily’s room, slamming the door against the wall.
“Get away from her!” I screamed, flipping the light switch.
The room flooded with blinding yellow light.
Lily sat up, screaming, terrified by my entrance.
“Mommy?!”
I scanned the room wildly. My chest was heaving. I looked at the spot beside the bed.
Empty.
I looked in the closet. Empty. Under the bed. Empty.
The window was locked tight. The paint on the sill was undisturbed.
There was no one there.
I grabbed Lily, pulling her into my arms, squeezing her so hard she complained. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. Mommy just had a bad dream.”
I carried her into my room. We slept with the lights on. I held a kitchen knife in my hand under the duvet until the sun came up.
Chapter 5: The Smile
I didn’t send her to school the next day. I called in sick to work. I spent the morning drinking coffee, shaking, and re-watching the footage.
Every time I watched it, I tried to convince myself it was a shadow. A trick of the light. But shadows don’t depress a mattress. Shadows don’t have mass.
Around 10:00 a.m., Lily sat at the kitchen table. She was quiet, sensing my anxiety. She pulled out her crayons.
I watched her from the counter. I wanted to tell her to stop. I wanted to throw the crayons in the trash. But I was frozen.
She worked quickly this time. humming a little tune.
“Done,” she said, sliding the paper across the granite countertop.
I walked over slowly. I didn’t want to look. I really, really didn’t want to look.
I looked.
It was him. The Night Babysitter. The same oval head. The same long, dark body.
But something was different.
The empty spaces where the eyes should be were still there. But the mouth…
The jagged, thin line was gone.
In its place was a wide, curving U-shape. Filled in with red crayon.
It wasn’t just a smile. It was a grin. A wide, impossible grin that stretched too far across the face.
“Why is he smiling?” I whispered, my voice cracking.
Lily looked up at me, her face pale.
“Because he knows you saw him, Mommy.”
She paused, picking at a hangnail on her thumb.
“And he says he likes the camera. He wants you to keep watching.”
I looked at the drawing. I looked at the red grin. And then, for the first time, I noticed something else in the drawing.
In the background, behind the smiling figure, Lily had drawn something new.
She had drawn me.
I was sleeping in my bed. And standing over me, in my drawing, was another tall, black figure.
“He brought a friend for you,” Lily said softly.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. A notification.
Motion Detected: Master Bedroom.
I am currently standing in the kitchen. My bedroom is empty.
I haven’t opened the app yet.
Chapter 6: The Breach
The kitchen was silent, save for the hum of the refrigerator and the frantic thudding of my own heart. The sunlight streaming through the sliding glass door seemed mocking, too bright and cheerful for the cold dread pooling in my stomach.
Lily was watching me. Her small hands were folded on top of the drawing, right over the red crayon smile. She wasn’t scared. That was the worst part. She looked… expectant.
My phone was still buzzing in my hand. Motion Detected: Master Bedroom.
I didn’t want to look. I wanted to smash the phone against the granite countertop and pretend the 21st century didn’t exist. I wanted to grab Lily and run out the door without looking back. But I couldn’t. I had to know. If there was an intruder—a human one—I needed to know if he was armed. If it was something else… well, I needed to know how close it was.
I swiped the screen.
The feed loaded faster this time, thanks to the strong Wi-Fi signal in the kitchen. The view was crisp. My bedroom. The unmade bed, the pile of clothes on the chair I’d been meaning to fold for three days, the sunlight filtering through the blinds.
At first, I saw nothing. Just a messy room.
Then, I saw the distortion.
It was by the dresser. Unlike the figure in Lily’s room, which had been a solid, dark mass, this one seemed… inconsistent. It flickered like static on an old VHS tape. It was tall—impossibly tall. Its head brushed the ceiling fan blades.
It wasn’t moving toward the door. It was moving toward the nightstand. Toward my side of the bed.
I watched, frozen, as a long, smoky limb extended toward my pillow. It didn’t have fingers. It had tendrils. They brushed against the fabric where I laid my head every night.
Then, the audio kicked in.
The camera in my room was newer than the one in Lily’s. The microphone was sensitive. It picked up a sound that made my knees buckle.
It was a sniffing sound. Wet, heavy inhalations. Like a hound tracking a scent. It was smelling my pillow. It was hunting.
“He likes your smell, Mommy,” Lily said softly from the table. She hadn’t moved. She wasn’t looking at the phone. She just knew. “He says you smell like fear and lavender.”
I dropped the phone. It clattered loudly on the tiles, the screen cracking.
“We’re leaving,” I said. My voice sounded foreign, harsh. “Lily, shoes. Now.”
“But Buster is sleeping,” she protested.
Buster.
Oh god. The dog.
I realized with a jolt of nausea that I hadn’t seen Buster all morning. usually, he’d be under the table begging for toast crumbs. I hadn’t heard him bark. I hadn’t heard him click-clack his nails on the hardwood.
“Where is Buster, Lily?” I asked, grabbing her shoulders. I was shaking her a little too hard. “Where is the dog?”
She pointed toward the hallway. Toward the bedrooms.
“He’s playing hide and seek,” she said. “With the new friend.”
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