Helen's notebook became Eleanor's new anchor, and a deeply unsettling mirror. She read from it each night, not sequentially, but at random, seeking patterns, solace, or simply confirmation she wasn't utterly mad. The concise entries—about leaning roses, misplaced objects, dream details coinciding with reality—precisely described the warping she was experiencing, only in slightly different forms. Her grandmother had called it "calibration." A silent, minute adjustment of reality, as if the "attention" was trying to comprehend its subject by tweaking the environment to test reactions, or simply to achieve a sharper "focus."
Parrish's "labyrinth" method seemed to hold in the days that followed. The prickling sense of being watched diminished. The nights, while still punctuated by wakefulness, no longer featured the long stretches of fully alert agony. The warping of time became occasional, minor "skips," like a glitch in an old film. She even began to sleep, though lightly, her dreams abnormally vivid and logically bizarre, their details lingering upon waking as if not random brain firings but carefully edited shorts.
Yet, the calm was fragile. One entry in Helen's notebook caught her attention: "It draws notice through absence. Look for the small things that vanish and reappear."
Eleanor started paying attention. A single earring vanished from her dresser where she distinctly remembered leaving it. Two days later, it was in the refrigerator's crisper drawer, icy against a head of broccoli. Her favorite pen disappeared from the desk. A week later, it was found by the long-empty goat stake in the backyard, its tip driven deep into the soil.
These small disappearances and reappearances held no threat, yet were more unnerving than direct horror. This was an interaction. A silent dialogue, with one party posing questions ("What will you do if a valued thing goes missing?") and the other, confused or annoyed, searching for answers.
Parrish called once, his tone one of professional concern. "Stabilizing? The focal point holding?"
"Some improvement," Eleanor answered cautiously, not mentioning the notebook or the recent disappearances. "But… things still move. Small things."
A pause on the line. "Inertia of the residual intent. It's exploring the physicality of space, and your emotional ties to objects. As long as there are no more invasive signs, consider it a positive signal—its activity is confined to a smaller, more predictable range. Continue to reinforce your psychic boundaries."
His calm irked her. To him, this was just a fascinating phenomenon. To her, it was her life.
She decided not to wait passively for "calibration." If "it" was interacting with her through the environment, perhaps she could try too. Not through Parrish's labyrinth, which felt like setting a trap. But through… display. An actively offered, controlled "trace."
She chose the mantelpiece in the sitting room. It held nothing but a pair of old candlesticks. One afternoon, she cleared a spot meticulously, then took a pinch of dry, white clay from the backyard (the act itself sent a shiver through her), mixed it with water into a paste with her fingers. On the clean wooden surface of the mantel, she drew a simple symbol—not the wing-and-flame, not the labyrinth, but a circle with a dot in the center.
The most basic symbol for "self" or "focus." A bullseye.
She expected no immediate response. It was more of a declaration: I am here. I see you seeing me.
The next day, the symbol remained. The clay had dried to a pale grey, adhering firmly to the wood. Nothing changed.
But on the third morning, coming downstairs, she found three ginkgo leaves on the floor in front of the mantel. Vibrant yellow, perfectly formed, like golden fans. It was the wrong season for such color, and for intact leaves to appear inside her sealed house. There were no ginkgo trees indoors.
The leaves were fanned out, their stems all pointing toward the clay symbol on the mantel.
Eleanor stood there, staring at this silent, beautiful, bizarre reply. Not fear, but a strange, cold excitement gripped her. Communication had been established. Abstract, symbolic, but established.
She picked up the leaves. They were dry and fragile, yet carried a faint, clean scent not belonging to any particular plant. She placed them beside the clay symbol.
The interactions that followed became more regular, more… ritualistic. She would place a smooth river stone on a windowsill. The next day, a hair-thin, almost silvery line would appear etched into it, as if by a tool of impossible fineness. She played a classical music record; during a particularly complex fugue, the lights in the room would flicker, almost imperceptibly, once, in perfect sync, then return to normal. She began to record these interactions, not as anomalies like Helen, but as this strange "dialogue." She called it "trace exchange."
Parrish's labyrinth seemed to still function, containing the bulk of the formless "gaze" within the bag in the storage closet. But these "trace exchanges" happened elsewhere in the house, and felt different—more specific, more intentionally curious. As if, with the main, diffuse body of attention constrained by the labyrinth, a finer, more inquisitive "filament" had separated off to engage in this silent play.
She did not tell Parrish of these developments. Some instinct warned her this was not the direction he wished to guide her. He wanted control, containment, study. She, unwittingly, was on a more dangerous path: attempting understanding, even participation.
One night, she had a particularly vivid dream. She stood in the clay pit, but it was dry, its walls made of countless tiny, neatly arranged ceramic fragments, each glinting with a part of the wing-and-flame symbol. At the center stood the shadowy outline of the Keeper, but it held no menace this time. It simply stood. At its feet was the strongbox, lid open. Inside was no contract, but a small, dark mirror. Looking into it, she saw not her face, but a shifting topographic map—the floor plan of her house, the layout of the backyard, the nearby woods, with lines and markers flickering and moving across it as if displaying the flow of some energy or the focus of attention in real time.
She woke, her heart beating steadily, every detail of the dream-map etched in her mind. This was no ordinary dream. It was a schematic. A diagram of how "it" perceived this place, and her position within it.
She sketched it immediately on a blank page in the notebook.
Shortly after she finished the sketch, the doorbell rang. Not Parrish. Two men in city worker uniforms looked apologetic.
"Ms. Wren? Sorry to disturb. We've had reports from nearby residents about unusual odors in the woods behind your property recently, chemical or burning-like, sometimes late at night. Just a preliminary environmental assessment, checking for illegal dumping or subsurface contamination. Can we take a look at your backyard and the tree line?"
Chemical burning? Late at night? Eleanor instantly thought of the coarse salt Parrish had used at the pit, the salt she'd thrown, the "sound" of the shadow dissipating. The clay marks.
"Of course," she said, stepping aside, alarm bells ringing in her head. This was no coincidence. Nearby residents? The closest neighbor was half a mile away. Could smells travel that far?
The workers were professional, taking readings with instruments in the backyard and along the tree line. Their expressions shifted from routine to puzzled. "Odd," one said. "Minor anomalies, not standard pollutants… more like a high concentration of certain mineral salts and… ceramic dust? But there's no kiln or similar facility here." They took soil samples.
Before leaving, the older worker hesitated. "Ms. Wren, you live here alone? Noticed anything unusual, or anyone unusual around lately? We're not police, but… the neighbor who reported the smell also mentioned seeing strange lights near your house the past few nights. Not indoor lights, like flashlights, but moving… oddly."
Eleanor's blood ran cold. "How oddly?"
"He said the lights seemed… discontinuous. Like they'd be here one second, then several meters over there the next, with no movement in between. Could be his eyes playing tricks, light's tricky in the woods." The man shrugged, clearly not believing it himself. "Anyway, just be mindful. We'll send the samples off, let you know."
They left. Eleanor stood in the doorway, icy. It wasn't "it." Someone was watching the house. Discontinuous lights? Parrish? Or others interested in "residual intents" or "the witnessed"? Helen's notebook had warned: Parrish was interested, but there might be others.
The dream-map took on a new, sinister meaning. It didn't just show "its" perception; it might also show her vulnerability, exposed to the sightlines of others.
That night, the "trace exchange" stopped. No new lines appeared on stones, no lights flickered in response to music. The house held only a heavy, waiting silence. Even the labyrinth bag in the storage closet seemed to have lost its presence.
What Eleanor felt now was not the prickling of observation, but a newer, more mundane fear. She had broken a non-human contract and might have drawn human scrutiny. Ancient attention and modern curiosity were forming a dangerous pincer movement around the old house.
She went to the west window, looking out into the dark woods. No lights. But she knew something was out there. More than one kind.
The game had leveled up again. Now, she had to navigate not just an intangible "Witness," but real people walking in the shadows with flashlights and sampling kits. And she could no longer tell which side was more dangerous.