The power in the apartment killed over. In the absolute darkness, the only light came from the glowing red "Power" button on his monitor. It began to pulse like a heartbeat. The violin music stopped.
He looked back at the screen. The figure in the creek was gone. In its place was a line of text, written in a font that looked like scratched bone:
The screen didn’t flicker. It didn’t load a menu. Instead, his room went cold—a deep, biting chill that smelled of damp moss and old pine. On the monitor, the game began not with a title screen, but with a first-person view of a forest so photorealistic it looked like a window.
"I'll delete it," Elias choked out, reaching for the laptop power cord. "I'm deleting it now!"
But the music wasn't coming from the game. It was coming from the hallway of Elias’s apartment.