The indoor camera arrived two days later, a cheap motion-sensor unit she mounted above the closet door facing the living room. “Just for peace of mind,” she told herself as she synced it to her phone. She expected it to catch absolutely nothing, just like the exterior building cameras.
At 1:47 a.m., her phone pinged with an alert. The next morning over coffee, Yelena watched the recorded clip, her thumb freezing on the screen. “Oh my god,” she breathed. It showed a shadow low to the ground near the floor vent by the closet—there and then gone, too large and deliberate to be a mouse, moving with absolute confidence.
She watched it four times, her coffee growing cold. “It’s not a draft,” she whispered, her hands shaking. It wasn’t a larger animal, or a trick of the infrared light either. Her blood ran cold as she finally let herself finish the terrifying thought: whatever this thing was, it hadn’t come through her door, and it hadn’t come through her window. It had come from underneath.