October 17, 2025 – 11:00 PM

Eliot wasn’t the kind of man who jumped at shadows. He debugged frameworks for a living, optimized load times, rewrote API endpoints in his sleep. His world was small, neat, and full of predictable logic.

Which is why the first login caught his eye.

It was tucked in the server logs: an active session opened at 03:12 AM, from a location in Nebraska. But not a town, not even coordinates—just a point in the middle of an empty field. “0 users in region,” the ISP database said.

It used his credentials.

At first, he assumed it was a bug. He rotated the password. Set up 2FA. Deleted the old session. But the login came back the next night. And the one after. Always at the same time.

And always followed by a change in his files.

Nothing major. A line in a CSS file adjusted by a pixel. A comment added to his code that matched the way he used to write, back in college. A log left behind that quoted something his grandmother once said—something no one else could have heard.

He tried telling a friend. Just to laugh about it, to push away the unease. But when he opened the chat window, there was already a draft message typed:

Don’t tell them. They’ll think you’ve lost it again.

He hadn’t typed that.

He started sleeping with the monitor turned off, the router unplugged. Still, sometimes he’d wake to the faint mechanical click of the mouse. The screen flickering. A line of code in a different font than his.

// I miss being you

And then—because the paranoia had to end somewhere—he drove out to the phantom location.

It wasn’t just flat land. There, half-buried in dirt and weeds, was the remnant of a house. A faint concrete outline, choked in wild grass. A broken chimney, just a stump. The remains of a hearth, like the jawbone of some forgotten animal. There was no roof. No doors. No rooms. Just the bones of what had once been.

But as Eliot stepped across the threshold of that crumbled rectangle, something shifted.

The light dimmed. The wind stilled. And then—he saw it.

The house. Not the ruin, but the living house as it had stood in the 1890s.

Wallpaper—sun-struck and yellowed. A rocking chair gently creaking near the fire. A coat hung beside the door. Stairs that rose into shadow. A child’s voice, distant and soft, calling someone’s name.

He didn’t imagine it. He knew what he saw.

And then, like the breath of some unseen thing, it was gone. The ruin returned. The weeds moved again.

His phone vibrated in his pocket.

Incoming message: FROM ELIOT

You look older than I remember.

He backed away from the hearth, from the memory, from the echo. Drove home with the windows down, as if the air might burn.

The next morning, he found a new user in the system.

phantom.user [admin privileges granted]
Created: October 18, 2025 – 03:12 AM

He tried deleting it.

It returned.

He changed the root directory, wiped the repo, even destroyed the backup drive. But every night, the phantom returned. His cursor twitched on its own. The speakers hummed like breath through wire.

Then came the final message. Not in the logs. Not in code.

A sticky note on his desk.

It’s okay, Eliot. You can rest now. I remember everything.