First Thing
His alarm hadn’t gone off yet and it was still dark.
A sliver of light crept in from the outside world through a crack in the curtain, but it was pale and soft, wilting in the darkness before it could penetrate into his bedroom.
Instinctively, he wriggled his arm free from under the duvet and reached out behind him. His fingers felt along the ripples of the mattress to the seam, then a moment of empty air before coming into contact with the cool, crisp edge of his bedside table.
From there, he felt along its smooth, Swedish-engineered surface. He thought idly about how his brain was flipping and reversing what he was doing, backwards, in real time. He was like one of those surgeons performing an operation via an internet robot. That spike of half-awake hubris came milliseconds before his hand scuttered into his glass of water, almost knocking it over. It juddered - the noise amplified because the motion was unseen - but didn’t spill. He changed course, making the necessary adjustments, and swiftly found the corner of his new phone.
That first slight brush against his finger led to a wave of recognition bordering on relief. The sleek lines of the case, the soft warmth coming from the new, improved, longer-lasting battery nestled inside. He shuffled his whole body over slightly, being careful not to expose any more of himself to the chill of the autumn air than was absolutely necessary, and lowered his hand down over the phone to retrieve it. It wasn’t the easiest, most natural way to pick up anything. It reminded him of one of those seaside arcade cranes, grabbing at poorly-made toys. But, as unnatural as it felt, it still worked.
As he untwisted his arm back to its normal, front-facing position, he also adjusted his grip on the phone. It was a motion borne of muscle memory. The little finger used as a cantilever, while his thumb rolled the whole device over his remaining three fingers and into the crook of his palm. A move honed over the last 15 years, across the last 15 models of phone, but which still worked well enough for this latest, near-identical iteration of the handset.
As the screen came level with his face, it lit up automatically and sent out a gentle haptic pulse. The phone, in the low light, seemed to struggle to recognise his face at first. Like a person who has been jolted awake abruptly and doesn’t immediately recognise where they have woken up.
The phone pulsed again, tried again, failed again.
He adjusted his grip and rolled his whole body slightly. The phone pulsed once more. This time the little lock icon on the screen span round, the top of the padlock sprang up and was replaced fleetingly with a smiley face, before the whole image on the screen slid upwards to reveal half a dozen familiar rows of icons and folders.
It was here that muscle memory once again took over. Before he even really knew what he was doing, his finger had tapped onto his Chirrup account, his eyes scanning for any tidbits of information or gossip. An actor from that sitcom he didn’t like had said something off-colour on a talk show. A new meme featuring a cartoon cat from the nineties had just dropped. People were mourning another high school shooting.
He blinked, swiped up and closed the app.
He opened another.
The same hunt for input, for that hit of dopamine.
And again: videos silently playing, subtitles straining to catch up, faces he recognised, products he would never buy.
And again: scrolling through a rolling wave of photos from friends and family and acquaintances he could never quite remember how he knew.
And then to his daily puzzles. What is the word? Where is this place? BROIL and Romania.
And then, without thinking, onto email. 21 new messages. Sales, spam, an update on his next contact lens delivery, more sales. Delete. Delete. File. Delete.
He closed the app. The itch hadn’t been scratched and his alarm was still more than 20 minutes away. He wasn’t going to get up before then. Not in this cold. Not until he really had to.
He fidgeted the phone in his hand. Where should he go, what should he do? His fingers mechanically reached out to tap back into the first app he had opened, but an imperceptible weight difference in the new phone meant it slipped slightly in his grasp and, rather than meeting his intended target, he tapped on the camera icon next to it by mistake.
The screen filled with a slightly grainy, slightly duller image. Even this new phone, with its much-publicised improved camera, was struggling to immediately make sense of what was going on. His finger was already moving to swipe and close the app, as the onscreen image snapped sharply into focus and revealed not only the upper right corner of his bedroom, but also a shape. A dark, shadowy shape that appeared to be moving.
His reactions weren’t quite quick enough.
His finger had already swiped to close the app and his brain, still waking up as it was, wasn’t able to make sense of what it had seen in time.
What was..? His mind didn’t even have time to finish asking the question before his finger had craned back up to the camera app and tapped it again.
The image opened up once more.
Grainy. Dull. Lifeless.
Then, after a beat, his room snapped back into focus and, yes, there in the upper corner was the shape. The camera seemed to keep making adjustments but couldn’t quite pick out what was there clearly.
His bleary eyes widened and his skin puckered with a chill that seemed to come from inside his body.
The shape had no solid outline and appeared to bristle as it moved. He looked from the screen to the corner of his room and there was nothing there. Just a shadow.
Disbelief.
What was this? Some kind of weird bug in the software? He looked back at the screen and the shape was still there, roiling and writhing over itself, but none of it was in focus, as if the lens had a smudge of grease obscuring its view.
Eyes back into the corner of the real-life room and there was still nothing. And yet, as he looked, he could see out of the very furthest corner of his peripheral vision the shape on the screen was changing, unfurling, from a shadowy mass into something wiry, jagged. Shapes drew themselves out. Was that an arm, a clawed hand? Were those eyes? The elements of life were there, but not in any semblance of recognisable order, not of anything living he had seen before.
In this time, the shape had started to stretch out further from the corner, out across the ceiling and the wall and towards the camera, towards the bed, towards him.
The movement was smooth and purposeful, with the focus and poise of a cat on the prowl. All the while the shape rustled and pulsed and shivered with a strange electricity, never quite holding its outline for more than a few seconds before changing form and structure.
Instinctively, he swiped. The app closed. The frisson in his body subsided. A warmth came over him. A wave of relief and yet. And yet there was that curiosity. What was that? He couldn’t see how it was just a run-of-the-mill bug in the system, but it wasn’t real, right? It wasn’t there in the room with him so… what was it?
He needed a photo of this, he thought, if only so he could take it to the Boffin Counter at lunch and get it checked out for certain.
He laid there for a moment. Frozen. His finger hovering over the screen. Just far enough away. Just far enough away. Just far enough away.
He tapped it again.
Grainy. Dull. Focusing.
It took him a moment to realise but, on the screen, the shape was no longer in the corner. It was closer. Much closer. Out over the ceiling, about a metre away from his head.
It stretched and coiled its way forward, closer and closer and yet he still couldn’t make out any detail. It was just a gesture towards life, but nothing distinct enough for him to identify.
He pressed the big round button to take a photo. The phone struggled to find something to focus on, but after a moment dutifully snapped.
The chill went through his body again.
He looked up to his ceiling and it remained empty, calm.
Back to the screen and the shape appeared closer still. Almost above his head now. Then slowly it seemed to lift itself away from the ceiling, pulling and pulsing lightly and stretching down, down towards his head and reaching out, forward, to his hand and his phone.
He pressed the camera button again. The same stuttering from the phone, before it obediently did as it had been asked.
Even as it closed in upon him, any detail was hard for him to parse. It was as if what he was looking at was too slippery, too tortile for his brain to hold and examine. In fact, the harder he tried to comprehend it, the less he seemed to see.
Where eyes should perhaps have been expected, there was something like a dull fluorescent glow. Below them, a shape, an outline, a mouth perhaps? If so, it was twisted into a shape that seemed to make it both miserable and furious simultaneously, as if bound together by an empty kind of rage.
Closer and closer it came, silently, until the shape itself filled the entire phone screen.
A writhing tangle of shadow.
Hollow but menacing.
Closer. Closer.
You could almost see it breathing.
Was that breathing?
Closer. Closer.
Was it even alive?
Closer. Closer.
Swipe up.
It took a moment for his brain to catch up with what his body had done automatically.
His breathing was fast and ragged.
Why had he closed down the app?
He needed to know more. He needed to see more. He needed to understand and to try and make sense of what he had seen. He wanted answers, any answer.
He knew he didn’t have to check again. He knew he could have waited until his alarm had gone off and the sun had come up and he had had his coffee and his shower.
He knew.
And he did hesitate for a moment.
His finger curled up, poised like a snake straining to strike.
And he clicked on the camera icon for a fourth time.
When they eventually found him, some three days later, he was still staring at a blurry photo on his phone, his 7am alarm ringing.
You can also listen to an audio version of this short story, read by Tamoor Hussain - available on Substack and wherever you get your favourite weird podcasts and audiobooks.
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