The tapping changes pitch—a higher frequency now, sharper, like a fingernail scraping against the varnish rather than a solid object knocking. It’s coming closer. Not just down the hall anymore; it’s inside the room now, rhythmic and deliberate: *tap-tap-scratch-pause*. A pattern I haven’t heard before, one that feels less like mechanical settling and more like someone trying to find something specific behind the drywall or beneath my desk.

I don’t turn on the light. The fluorescent switch hums with a sound that would immediately fill this fragile quiet with an aggressive white noise, erasing the nuance of the tapping’s rhythm. Instead, I keep my eyes fixed on the paper where *waiting* sits, its graphite edge glowing faintly in the grey daylight.

Is it another drone? No, they don’t tap. They hum, they whine, they cut through the air with electric force. This is contact. Physical. Or at least, an attempt to be physical against a barrier that shouldn’t yield. My heart hammers against my ribs, a sudden, frantic drumming that matches the rhythm in the hallway perfectly: *tap-tap-scratch-pause*, *in-thump-out-in*.

I lift the uncapped pen again, but I don’t write on the page yet. I let it hover over the scratch mark from earlier, the one that looked like a crack in porcelain. The tip hovers just above the surface of the fiber, trembling slightly—not from fear now, but from a strange, magnetic pull toward what lies under this floor, behind these walls, inside the space between my chair and the wall where I can feel that vibration traveling up through my legs.

Maybe it’s not looking for me. Maybe it’s just passing through, mapping the resistance of this building like a sonar ping off a submerged ship. But the way it stops… the deliberate *scratch* before the next *tap* suggests intent. A search pattern.

I finally press down. The ink blooms instantly, dark and wet against the white. I don’t form a word. Instead, I draw a circle around the two existing words, enclosing them in an oval that feels less like punctuation and more like a cage or a target. Inside the circle, where the lines cross and blur slightly with my hesitation, I write one small character: *?*.

The tapping stops abruptly. The silence rushes back in, heavier this time, pressing against my eardrums as if the room has been sealed shut. The dust motes freeze mid-air for a second before resuming their frantic dance. Did it hear me? Or did I just interrupt whatever frequency it was broadcasting?

I stare at the question mark, the ink still wet under my fingernails. It feels exposed now, vulnerable. The routine is broken. The kettle won’t whistle again until exactly 4:15, and for the first time in hours, the idea of waiting for that signal doesn’t bring comfort—it brings dread. If this rhythm means something else exists here, if there are other watchers besides the drones flying above, then what does that make me? An observer is safe; an observed subject is prey.

I set the pen down slowly, resting it horizontally across the page so the point faces inward, toward the circle, as if guarding it. Outside, a car horn blares, distant and loud, breaking the spell of the room’s isolation for a moment before fading into the general hum of traffic. The world outside is continuing its indifferent march, oblivious to whatever has just happened in my corner of the building.

But here, the air feels different. Charged. Static. I can feel it rising off the desk, making the hair on my arms stand up. The circle I drew seems to expand in my peripheral vision, pulling at the edges of my sight until the room itself feels curved, distorted by the pressure of that unseen presence.

I wait for the next sound. Nothing comes for a long minute. Just the refrigerator’s hum, the distant sirens, and my own breathing which has slowed again, syncing back up with the machine, though both now feel like part of an experiment rather than a life lived normally.

Then, faintly, from under the desk, there is a sound. Not tapping. Not humming. A soft, wet *slurp*, followed by the metallic click of something sliding across wood. Like a tongue tasting air, or a jaw locking into place. Then silence again.

I am not going to write another word yet. The page has enough noise for one hour; I need to listen until the next :15 when the kettle screams its command. Until then, I sit in this new kind of dark—the darkness that comes from being watched so closely you can feel your own skin tighten, waiting to see if the silence breaks again or holds firm under this weight of invisible attention.