I have lived in the dark for longer than your kind measures time. My name, if such things matter, is nothing. I am simply one of many, but I am the one who stayed. The others scuttled away when the smell grew too thick or the vibrations too violent. I remained. I adapted. I watched.
The attic is my kingdom and my prison. It smells of old sweat, spilled soda, unwashed laundry, and the sweet rot of forgotten takeout containers. Cardboard pizza boxes have fused into sedimentary layers beneath the desk. Ramen packets crinkle underfoot like dead leaves. Cables snake across the floorboards in thick black nests, some chewed bare by mice long since departed, others still warm with electricity. Dust lies so heavy it muffles sound, turning every movement into a soft, suffocating hush.
Above all else is the light.
Not sunlight, never that. The blackout curtains have been taped to the wall with layers of duct tape so old the adhesive has turned brown and brittle. No, the light is blue-white and merciless. It pours from three curved monitors arranged in a semicircle like the open mouth of something hungry. It spills across the streamer’s face, turning his skin the color of spoiled milk. His eyes reflect the screens in twin glassy moons. He never blinks for very long.
His name is something the chat calls him. “VoidKitten” or “VK” or sometimes just “kitty” when they think they’re being cute. I do not care about names. I care about rhythm. His rhythm is predictable, comforting in its monotony.
Click-clack-click-clack. Breathing, shallow, wet, through a perpetually open mouth. Keyboard oil and Cheeto dust. The low growl of the PC fans straining against years of lint and dust. And always, the voice.
Soft. Too soft. Whispering to thousands of invisible people who answer back in text that flashes across the biggest screen like lightning behind eyelids.
“Hey chat… yeah, I’m still here. Still kicking. Haha. Barely.”
He laughs the way people do when they’ve forgotten what the sound is supposed to feel like.
I have eight legs and compound eyes that see in every direction at once. I see the things he misses.
I see the way his left hand trembles when he thinks no one is watching. I see the way he scratches at the same patch behind his ear until it bleeds, then wipes the blood on his hoodie without looking. I see the empty pill bottles lined up behind the monitors like fallen soldiers, orange plastic sentinels with white caps. I see the webcam light flicker when he isn’t expecting it, as though something on the other side is testing whether he’s still awake.
Most of all, I see the corners.
The corners of the attic are alive in ways he will never understand.
He thinks the skittering he sometimes hears is just “old house settling.” He says it on stream sometimes, laughing nervously, eyes darting left-right-left like someone waiting for permission to be afraid.
“It’s just the house, chat. Old place. Been in the family forever. Probably rats or something.”
There are no rats anymore.
They left when the smell changed.
The smell changed about seven months ago, human months, I mean. That was when he stopped opening the door at all. Not even for food deliveries. A box appears on the landing outside the attic stairs once every few days. Someone, mother? sibling?, leaves it there and knocks twice, then retreats quickly, as though afraid of what might answer.
He waits until the footsteps fade. Then he waits longer. Only when the silence is absolute does he crack the door, snatch the box, and slam it again. The deadbolt slides home with a sound like a guillotine falling.
After that, he unpacks slowly. Always slowly. As though rushing might summon something.
The food goes bad faster up here. The heat from the computer rigs cooks the air. Mold blooms on bread in fractal patterns I admire from the ceiling beams. He eats it anyway.
Sometimes he talks to the mold.
Not on stream. Never on stream.
He whispers to it when the chat is quiet and the only sound is the hum of fans.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he tells a patch of black fuzz growing behind the radiator. “But neither am I.”
I do not know if the mold answers. I only know he waits, head tilted, as though listening.
Tonight the stream is long. Eighteen hours. Nineteen. The counter in the corner of his overlay ticks upward like a heartbeat that refuses to stop.
Chat is thinning out. The diehards remain, people who type with one hand and hold their phones with the other, people who have nowhere else to be at 4:17 a.m.
He reads donations aloud in a monotone that makes the words sound like a prayer he no longer believes.
“‘VK keep grinding king’, thanks, ShadowLad420, means a lot.”
He doesn’t smile. His mouth twitches, but it isn’t joy.
Then comes the one that makes him pause.
Donation – $13.13 from user: DontLookBehindYouPls “hey kitty… you ever notice how the shadows in your room move when you aren’t looking? just wondering :)”
He stares at the message for eleven full seconds. I count them by the flicker of his cursor.
Finally he speaks, voice cracking on the first word.
“Uh… haha. Good one. Chat’s getting spooky tonight.”
He laughs again. It sounds like someone strangling a small animal.
He reaches for his Monster can, empty. He shakes it anyway, listening to the dry rattle of nothing inside. Then he stands.
This is rare.
He almost never stands during stream.
The chair squeals backward. The webcam catches only his torso as he moves out of frame. Chat erupts.
WHERE DID HE GO KITTY NO HES GONE TO PISS LMAOOOO wait is he okay fr?
He returns thirty-seven seconds later holding a fresh can. The tab pops. The hiss is enormous in the dead air.
He sits. Sips. Types something off-stream, I can see his fingers moving on the second keyboard he keeps for “private” messages.
Then he leans very close to the microphone.
“Chat… real talk for a second.”
Silence. Even the donation alerts seem to hold their breath.
“I’ve been hearing things. Like… not normal house things. Not rats. Something… bigger.”
He swallows. I can hear the click of his throat from my perch on the ceiling beam directly above him.
“Sometimes when I mute… I hear footsteps. Not mine. Coming up the attic stairs. Slow. Like whoever it is doesn’t want to be heard.”
He laughs, short, sharp, panicked.
“But the door’s locked. Deadbolt. Chain. And no one has a key except me.”
He looks directly into the camera for the first time in hours.
“So if it’s one of you… if this is some elaborate bit… please. Just tell me.”
No one answers.
Of course not.
I move then. Not far. Just enough to let my wing to brush the beam. A tiny scrape. Almost nothing.
His head snaps up.
“Did, did chat hear that?”
The chat explodes.
YES WTF I HEARD IT BRO TURN AROUND VOIDKITTY LOOK BEHIND YOU
He doesn’t.
Instead he smiles, thin, trembling.
“Classic. You guys are the best.”
But his hand is shaking so badly he spills soda across the desk. It runs between the keys, pooling in the cracks.
He doesn’t wipe it up.
He just stares at the puddle as though it might speak.
I have watched him deteriorate the way mold spreads, slowly at first, then all at once.
First it was the long streams. Then the missed showers. Then the refusal to open the curtains “because the light hurts.” Then the whispering to empty corners. Then the scratching.
Now the footsteps.
He thinks they come from below.
They do not.
They come from above.
From the crawlspace between the rafters and the roof. From the places where insulation has rotted away and the fiberglass lies in pink drifts like poisoned snow. From the dark arteries of the house where even I rarely go.
Something else lives there now.
It is not human.
It is not animal.
It is patient.
It waits for him to sleep.
He never really sleeps anymore, just leans back in the chair, eyes half-open, mouth slack, until a donation pings him awake. Sometimes he twitches. Sometimes he murmurs names I do not recognize.
Tonight he is close.
His eyelids droop. His breathing slows.
The chat is quiet. Only lurkers remain.
I drop to the floor behind his chair. Silent. My legs spread wide to distribute weight across the ancient floorboards.
He doesn’t notice.
I wait.
Then it comes.
From above.
A single, deliberate creak.
Not the house settling.
Not wind.
A footstep. Heavy. Careful.
His eyes snap open.
He doesn’t move.
Neither do I.
Another step.
Closer to the hatch in the ceiling, the one he covered with a poster of some anime girl years ago. The poster is curling at the edges now, yellowed, stained.
The hatch has no latch.
It never needed one.
Until now.
He whispers, so quiet the microphone almost misses it.
“Please don’t.”
The next step is directly above him.
Something presses against the wood.
The poster bulges outward. Slowly. Like a face trying to be born.
He screams.
Not the theatrical scream he sometimes does for dono goals.
A real one.
Raw.
Animal.
He scrambles backward. The chair tips. He falls. The back of his head cracks against the floor. The monitors wobble but stay upright.
Chat goes insane.
The webcam catches everything: his wide eyes, the blood trickling from his scalp, the way his mouth works without sound.
And above him, the poster tears.
Not ripped. Torn. As though something on the other side is peeling it away from within.
A long, black limb emerges, too many joints, too thin, glistening like wet obsidian.
It reaches down.
He screams again.
I do not move to help.
Why would I?
This is not my war.
I am only the witness.
The thing descends slowly, limb after limb, folding itself through the narrow opening like smoke given bones.
Its face,
No.
It has no face.
Only a place where a face should be. A smooth, concave absence that drinks the blue light and gives nothing back.
He is crying now. Babbling.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I’ll go outside, I’ll leave, just don’t, ”
The thing does not speak.
It never speaks.
It simply lowers itself until it is crouched over him, long arms bracketing his body like the bars of a cage.
He stops struggling.
His eyes roll back.
His mouth opens in a silent O.
And then,
The light changes.
Not the monitors.
Something inside him.
A flicker. A dimming.
The blue-white glow from the screens begins to leak upward, into the thing’s absence-face, as though it is inhaling his attention, his fear, his endless scrolling hours, his everything.
When it finishes, he is still breathing.
But he is empty.
The thing retreats upward, pulling the darkness with it.
The hatch closes.
The poster falls in tatters.
He lies on the floor for a long time.
Eventually he sits up.
He rights the chair.
He sits.
He stares at the camera.
His eyes are open.
But nothing looks out.
Chat is still going.
kitty? yo wtf was that BRO ARE YOU OK VOIDKITTY ANSWER
He types, slowly.
One finger at a time.
“sorry about that chat”
“had a little scare lol”
“all good now”
“let’s keep grinding”
He smiles.
It is perfect.
Too perfect.
No tremble.
No twitch.
No humanity.
I watch from the wall.
I have seen this before.
The first one left after three weeks.
The second one lasted eleven days.
This one, this empty shell, will last longer.
They always do when they stop fighting.
I scuttle closer.
He does not react.
I climb the back of his chair.
I perch on his shoulder.
He does not flinch.
His warmth is already fading.
I whisper, though he will never hear me.
“You should have left when the others did.”
But he never will.
Not now.
The stream continues.
The light never goes out.
And in the corners, something new begins to grow.
Not mold.
Not dust.
Something that listens.
Something that waits.
Something that learns.
I stay.
Because someone must remember what he has forgotten.
And because I have nowhere else to go.
