It arrived at 3:17 in the morning. No subject line. No sender name I recognized. Just an email address that looked like it had been generated by someone smashing their face against a keyboard. I should have deleted it. I opened it.
The body was nothing but a single sentence: We are already inside the walls.
That was it. No links. No attachments. Just that one line sitting in my inbox like it had been waiting for me specifically. I stared at it for a solid minute, trying to figure out if it was spam, a scam, or some kind of elaborate marketing campaign. Then the paranoia started.
What walls? My house? My computer? My brain? I checked the locks on my doors like that was going to stop whatever could send me a message like this at three in the morning. I turned off the WiFi. I unplugged the router. I sat there in the dark, waiting for something to happen.
And then more emails came. Each one stranger than the last. Stop looking at the windows. The clocks are wrong. We have always been here. They were coming from different addresses, none of them traceable. Every time I deleted one, another arrived. No pattern. No schedule. Just enough to keep me unsettled.
At some point I convinced myself it was a prank. Maybe a friend messing with me. But the messages started referencing things they should not know. A mug on my desk. The fact that my TV remote batteries were dead. The book I had left open on the couch. None of it could have been guessed. None of it should have been visible to anyone but me.
That was when I decided to stop responding. Not that I had ever replied, but I stopped clicking them open. I left them unread, thinking maybe they would stop. They did not. The latest one just said Don’t forget to check behind you.
I am writing this now with the screen brightness turned all the way down and my laptop camera covered. I know how it sounds. I do not care. Somewhere out there, or in here, something is watching. And it sends emails.