When midnight came, I learned it from pop-up warnings on my phone and laptop. I had set the alarms to make sure I got some sleep after the long day, but I dismissed both of them in disgust. All the lights in my room were off and my eyes were straining at the screen, yet sleep wasn’t going to happen, not anytime soon.

I wasn’t making it any easier on myself with the subject of my surfing. Instead of studying math, I’d been scouring the most popular video sites, and some lesser-known ones, too, on a hunt for anyone else who’d seen what I’d seen. My initial searches, limited to subjects like “sewer drains” and “locker rooms,” came up empty, but after ninety minutes of tweaking I’d found a second layer of content, videos so unpopular and poorly indexed that you had to learn a new language of misspelling to have a shot at uncovering them. Most of these were blurred snippets of absolutely nothing, while drunken voices hollered off-camera, “Look at that! Look at that right there!”

It was when I began noticing location tags that I started to sweat. I found no less than six videos posted within the past six years uploaded from right here in Saint B. To call these videos amateur would be putting it nicely, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t something moving through those dimly lit alleys and behind those distant dumpsters. The videos were marked with only one or two “likes” and underscored with comments along the lines of omg so fake. But to someone who’d seen hands and feet and shoulders of unimaginable dimension, the shapes looked eerily familiar.

It got so I couldn’t take any more. I tore out my earbuds. Right away I wished I hadn’t done it. The stillness in the house was unnatural. I can’t put it better than that. It was as if there were new mouths in the house sucking up our supply of air. I could hear things I normally couldn’t: the buzzing from the front porch security camera, Dad’s breathing from his bedroom.

The idea that someone could be inside, though, was insane. The place was a fortress. You couldn’t get through our doors without a chainsaw and blowtorch, not to mention the screaming of multiple alarms and the arrival of three different security company vans. Through the crack in my door, I could see the proof on the other side of the living room: two red lights signifying that the various security systems were armed. I had been watching those two lights from bed all my life. So why did they seem wrong to me?

The two lights blinked.

Yes, that’s what was bothering me.

They weren’t console lights at all. They were eyes.

I lay there, unable to breathe, as the red eyes shifted about. Floorboards moaned beneath a great weight. I heard an exhale like the nickering snort of a horse. And then the red eyes moved from the far edge of the living room, revealing the much smaller security console bulbs behind it. Whatever it was, it was coming toward the bedrooms. It was about the worst thing I could possibly imagine. Until the next thing happened.