The Shape In The Static
Right in front of me.
The words burned into my skull as though branded there. My breath fogged the glass of my apartment window, each exhale quick, uneven, betraying the dread crawling beneath my skin. I leaned forward, eyes locked on the man—or the outline of a man—standing under the lamplight across the street.
He was still there.
Unmoving.
The bouquet of roses at his feet hadn’t shifted in the wind, and the single matchstick he held glowed faintly, its ember refusing to die. My rational mind whispered explanations—hallucination, exhaustion, maybe a trick of light. But none of them stuck. I knew what I had seen, and the body’s posture was too precise, too deliberate, too…familiar.
I blinked, and in that moment, he was gone.
Not walking away. Not fading into shadow. Just…gone. Like someone had sliced him out of the world.
My chest tightened. The street was empty, washed in pale orange glow from the lamplight, nothing but the drizzle and silence.
Right in front of me.
I tore myself from the window, pacing the room as if motion could stop my thoughts from collapsing inward. I grabbed my phone and scrolled back through the footage Langley had sent earlier. The grainy figure from the traffic cam. Same posture. Same tilt of the head. The roses. The matchstick.
It wasn’t coincidence.
I pressed a hand against my forehead, nails digging in. If he was standing out there, so close I could count the folds of his coat, then this wasn’t just a case file anymore. It was personal. He wanted me to see him. He wanted me to know.
And that meant the game had already started.
---
The next morning, I sat in the precinct briefing room, my badge clipped neatly to my lapel even though the weight of it felt heavier than ever. The projector hummed, casting still frames of the latest victim across the screen. Roses. Blood. Silence.
Langley gave his report with the nervous confidence of someone who wanted to impress but didn’t trust his own words. “No usable prints. No eyewitnesses. Traffic cams caught the suspect in the area, but facial recognition failed to pull a match. No prior arrests, no hits in the system.”
I nodded, jaw set. I could feel Rourke’s eyes on me from across the table, his silence both approval and suspicion. He trusted me, but he also knew when I was holding something back. And I was.
I hadn’t told anyone about last night.
Not Langley. Not Rourke. Not even the flickering shadow I’d seen inside my own apartment, where the wallpaper had shifted like water. To say it out loud would be to invite questions I wasn’t ready to answer.
Instead, I leaned forward. “Pull every case file linked to unexplained vanishings over the past ten years. Not just in Gravenloch. Statewide.”
Langley frowned. “That’s—”
“Do it,” I cut in. My voice had that edge, the one that shut down protest.
Across the table, Captain Rourke narrowed his eyes. “You think this isn’t new.”
“I think,” I said carefully, “that we’re not seeing the whole picture.”
---
By evening, I found myself in the city archives, where the air smelled of dust and mildew, and the silence was broken only by the low whir of fluorescent lights. The records clerk had long since gone home, but I still had my keycard, a privilege of rank and obsession.
Stacks of missing persons reports littered the table before me. Men, women, children. Some cases solved—runaways found, kidnappings resolved. Others left open. Cold. Forgotten.
I flipped through page after page until my eyes blurred. And then I froze.
Case file #1473. Year: 1999. Victim: Daniel Ellison.
My brother.
My throat tightened. The report was as clinical as I remembered: Male, seventeen, vanished walking home from school. No witnesses, no evidence, no suspects. Just absence. Just silence.
The file was thinner than it should have been. A life compressed into a few sheets of paper, reduced to ink and failure. I clenched the folder so hard the edges cut into my palms.
And then, at the bottom of the last page, something I’d never noticed before. A handwritten note.
One word, scrawled in faded ink.
Watcher.
My blood ran cold.
---
The following night, the storm returned, drumming against the city like an endless warning. I couldn’t stay in my apartment, not with the echo of that word haunting me. Watcher. I needed answers.
So I drove to St. Jude’s Shelter.
Father Marlowe greeted me at the door, his face lined with exhaustion and something sharper—fear disguised as faith. He led me into his office, where the air was heavy with incense and the walls cluttered with crosses, paintings of saints, and stacks of worn books.
“You’ve seen it, haven’t you?” His voice was low, as though the walls themselves were listening.
I stiffened. “Seen what?”
“The Watcher.” His eyes, pale blue and unflinching, bored into mine. “It’s been here before. Long before your case. Long before the roses.”
I didn’t respond, but my silence was enough.
Marlowe leaned closer, his fingers trembling around the rosary he held. “It doesn’t take them. It erases them. That’s why you can’t find prints, or DNA, or witnesses. The Watcher removes them from the world’s memory. But some of us remember. We always do.”
His words clung to the room, thick and suffocating.
I pushed back from the desk, shaking my head. “You’re talking about superstition. I’m looking for evidence. Hard proof. Not stories.”
“And yet,” he whispered, “you saw it. Right in front of you.”
The hair at the back of my neck bristled. I hadn’t told him. I hadn’t told anyone.
Before I could speak, a loud crash echoed through the shelter.
We both froze.
Another crash followed, closer this time, as though the building itself groaned under invisible weight. Marlowe clutched his rosary tighter.
“Stay here,” I said, drawing my weapon.
I pushed open the office door, the hallway dimly lit and empty. My footsteps echoed against the tile as I moved forward, past rows of rooms where the residents slept in uneasy silence.
Then I heard it.
Static.
Faint at first, like a radio struggling to catch a signal. It grew louder with each step until it rattled in my teeth, until the lights overhead flickered and died, plunging the hall into stuttering darkness.
And then I saw him.
The figure. Standing at the far end of the corridor, roses at his feet, matchstick burning bright.
Right in front of me.
And this time, he moved.