From then on she would only catch fleeting glimpses of Eileen, barely in her line of sight and only in reflections. She was always far off behind her, wandering around aimlessly with a vacant expression, as if she had been looking for something but forgot what it was. There were moments when Melanie wanted to reach out and ask how she was doing, but she would be gone the moment she turned around.

Meanwhile, work at the studio returned to being fully in person as the approach of spring thinned out the snowfall and brought commuters back out onto the street. Melanie was wrapping up designs in half the time it used to take her. She didn’t have much else to think about. Nothing she wanted to think about, at least. She tried swinging by the bar at the end of the day, but struggled to feel its charm again. The moody, swimming notes of the live musicians, the deceitful fruitiness of the cocktails, and the mystique of the strangers as they revealed themselves to her had all lost their luster and color. She never took anyone home, never even took their numbers or looked them up after. She just stumbled back into the apartment early in the evening, buzzed and disappointed. 

At the end of April she stopped seeing Eileen entirely. The feeling of her being in the room had vanished, the only proof of her existence being her box of photographs and the baseball bat still stationed against the wall next to the bed. On some nights when she couldn’t sleep, she would wipe the bat clean of dust and reposition it. She found some comfort in the routine, taking her time to make sure she didn’t miss a single spot. That was enough to carry her into the summer, to the heaviest of her workload for the year. June and July were a haze of days sweating over her tablet and computer, churning out graphic after graphic. She blinked and it was fall again. Another blink and it was winter. She opted out of the Christmas market and spent the day talking to her parents over a video call, keeping as vague as possible about how she was doing. Another blink, another season, until all four had flown by again and collapsed into a new year. Those two years were more than enough time for the pain of Eileen’s exit from her life to dull out. She was even seeing people again, albeit nothing past flirty texts and one night stands. Just enough to get by. Just enough to keep her promise. 

Then one morning in June an email came from her art director. The plan had been to extend her contract another year, but budget cuts were forcing the studio to lay off not only her, but a good chunk of the design team. She closed her phone, tossed it aside on the bed next to her and sighed. There was no point in protesting, and she was too tired to bargain even if there was. She got dressed and headed into the pouring rain outside, bracing herself for an awkward conversation with her coworkers. Thankfully, the room was almost silent when she arrived, everyone deeply immersed into their projects. The air felt stagnant and heavy, drained of life. She went straight to work, booting up her desktop and pulling her most recent project file out from rows and rows of other files that should have been deleted a long time ago. A double click and her illustration software opened, but instead of the usual loading text, a string of random characters and symbols staggered over the progress bar. She looked closer. 

6475123ssyou%2631333333

The line morphed.

854298czare55562%89

And again.

75621_a_5662621%5123

And again.

43653COWARD3622%1220

She jumped back and out of her seat, her chest exploding. Around the room her coworkers were looking at her, faces of concern peeking out under patchy fluorescent lights. She rushed out and into the bathroom, grabbing the edges of the sink with both hands. She barely recognized herself in the mirror. Her face was pale, eyes wrought with both exhaustion and anxiety, peering out through tangled bangs. She could feel the mask she had built for herself, the veneer of stability and control start to crack under a familiar pressure. Something was watching her. Something had been watching her. 

She couldn’t remember exactly when it started, but she could feel it. There was a presence following her, mocking her stress and fear, and it wasn’t confined to the apartment the way Eileen had been. It lingered sparsely and at enough of a distance that she could ignore it, until the moment she entered the bathroom and looked in the mirror. She saw the stall doors open slowly behind her. 

SLAM

All of them shut, the impact like a gun had gone off in front of her. “Fuck!” she shouted and covered her ears. Another noise made her flinch.

Click

It was pitch black. She screamed at the top of her lungs, in a way she had never heard herself do before. Her chest was pounding so hard it was all she could hear aside from her own ragged breathing. “Shit, shit, shit.”

She fumbled around for the light switch, running her hands wildly over cold tile. A hot breath touched her fingers. She screamed and flew back, barely catching the edge of the sink and stopping herself from falling. The breathing was now loud enough to hear, and getting louder. It was a deep, starved breathing that seemed human one second and animal the next. She swallowed hard. She had no other options. 

Her eyes hadn’t adjusted to the darkness yet, but there was no time for that. She ran forward as fast as she could. She disregarded the fear and doubt battering her at every angle and ran with everything she had. 

The door gave way easily, and she flew back out into the hallway, falling forward on her stomach. Her eyes stung from the sudden lights and blurry shapes, but she didn’t wait for them to settle. She pulled herself off the floor and bolted in the direction of the staircase. It was still pouring when she stumbled onto the pavement outside. She leaned against a streetlight and took long, jagged breaths, letting the rain wash over her. Her jacket and bag were back in the studio, but she wasn’t going back for them. “God, fuck!” she yelled at the sidewalk.

Up until then she had the pieces of her life almost together again. She had bounced back from her losses, managed to live with the loneliness and find something of a normal, stable life, but after all of that she was still running. 

Somehow she knew that whatever was stalking her was just waiting for her to reach her limit, for her regrets and discontent to catch up with her. She could move somewhere else, but it would follow her there, and it would corner her again. Running wasn’t an option. Some part of her had known that all along, that she was only going in circles, leaving behind a trail of loose ends she was too afraid to cut or mend. And now the end was all she could see. Either hers or the thing hunting her, and she knew exactly where she wanted it to happen. 

Melanie had walked through the apartment lobby a hundred times, but this time the lights felt dimmer, the shadows looked deeper, and the eighties rock playlist crackling through the old speaker system sounded oddly antagonizing. She walked slowly up the stairs, hyper aware of the creaks, her breath, and every drop of water that fell from her and hit the ground. As her floor came into view, a thought occurred to her. Is this what happened to Eileen?

She mentioned experiencing similar things before she died. The harassment on the street. The signs and the fire in front of the grocery store. It could have just been a coincidence, but at that point she was grasping at anything that could explain what was happening. Then she remembered George. The old man next door had been around when Eileen passed, and seemed to have been paying attention a good deal. He had to have seen something.

She walked up to his door and knocked gently. Her third knock pushed it open, and the tiny shred of hope she had crumbled into nothing. The apartment was completely empty, no furniture or appliances, like no one had lived there in years. Her  mind reeled. “No, no, no..” she whimpered into the darkness, “No, no, no, no!” She stepped back and shoved her face in her hands. “Shit!”

“Everything okay?” A woman’s voice called out behind her.

  She swung around and saw the maintenance woman standing with her arms crossed and an eyebrow raised. “T-The old man who lived here..” Melanie stammered and pointed behind her. “Where’d he go..?” 

The maintenance woman looked back at her confused. “You mean George?” she asked. “He hasn’t lived there in something like eight years now. Did you know him?”

“Yeah, yeah I know him..” Melanie answered. “I need to talk to him, do you know his phone number..?”

“Oh honey.. You can’t talk to him, he.. He passed away.” 

Melanie felt her heart sink. “He died..?” she asked weakly.

“Yes.. I’m sorry you had to find out like this..” 

“What, um..” she swallowed, “What happened to him..?”

The maintenance woman looked down with a look of deep contemplation. “Oh, well…” she replied quietly. “He hung himself in his bedroom..”

“Christ..”

“Yeah..” The maintenance woman looked back up at her. “Took a lot more convincing than I expected for a lonely old guy in a shit place like this.”

Melanie blinked. “I’m sorry..?”

“I had to pull out all the stops for him..” the maintenance woman smiled. “Same with you.”

The maintenance woman laughed. “Everyone always asks me that.” She stepped forward into a patch of shadow, and one of the young businessmen who harassed her at the train station stepped back out into the light. “I’m whatever you don’t want me to be,” he said with a grin. “Whatever scares you or makes you angry..” The lights around him flickered and died out, one by one, until they were standing on a tiny island in an ocean of black. “I am your misery,” he said as the last light vanished.