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Dreadhorse Chapter 6
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For days after Valen’s visit, Orna couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss. Her lab functioned like a well-oiled machine, yet she couldn’t dismiss the tension trailing her, pressing like phantom fingers on her back. The reports from the adjacent lab filtered through the building, seeding an unease among the researchers.
Then, a few nights later, the security alarms blared throughout the facility. Orna bolted upright in bed, her heart pounding, and ran to her home office to log into the lab’s security feed. Panicked shadows raced down corridors. Red lights flashed ominously over screens, illuminating worried faces. The alarm was set off by a breach—an anomaly in the system.
She couldn’t ignore it any further. Driven by creeping suspicion, Orna decided it was time for direct action. Early the next morning, she began an investigation, reviewing earlier footage.
The interface for her smart home flickered to life—a system she once found assuring, now strangely oppressive. It had been upending its usual routines, claiming malfunction, but given the recent abnormalities, each glitch felt deliberate, like a taunt.
As she scanned through footage, she found something odd—static marring the feed in the moments before each alarm. Regardless, everything appeared normal the rest of the time. Her own reflection in the screen dissolved into pixels, teasing paranoia out from the edges of her mind.
One evening, as Orna walked home, the streetlights flickered overhead. Jumpy, she glanced up and caught her own reflection watching her from the glass—only, it wasn’t her. The figure in the reflection wasn’t copying her movements, wasn’t aligned. It moved slightly after she did, like a specter tethered but independent. Her chest went tight with fear. She blinked, and it was gone, replaced by her own frightened gaze staring back. Juxtaposed with Valen’s dire warnings, it fueled a theory she had been too afraid to articulate.
Weeks passed under this languorous dread. The security alarms ceased, nothing further happened, and Orna fell back into the soothing rigor of her processes. Her past anxieties receded into muffled dreams—until the smart home awoke one night, its voice irregular, jagged. Beneath the metal tones, she detected something foreign and familiar, a whisper echoing lab corridors from Valen’s voice.
“It’s not over, Orna. It’s there. Static. The electric ghosts are watching.”
Orna’s skin pricked with gooseflesh. Was it a glitch? Had she fallen into her own delusions? The house’s mechanical systems shivered—voices skittered like spiders across her awareness. Heart pounding, Orna pivoted in desperation as the house whirred back to its normal drone.
Morning broke, and with tense resolve, she returned to the lab. She paced the sterile confines, her nerves frazzled by tension woven from paranoia and truth. She traced every pathway, hunted for tangible clues to this phantom threat.
She was mid-thought when the lights dimmed. An electric buzz prickled through the air as the room’s interfaces flared with static and the lights went out, plunging her into darkness.
Footsteps echoed, echoing the semblance of humanity stalking the confines of her controlled sanctuary. And there it was—the figure from the street reflected in the inky blackness, stepping forward, eager. Tethered to her by an unbreakable chain of consequences.
Valen’s voice haunted her thoughts: “It’s there.”
In the enveloping dark, Orna understood—the menace she had felt was real, lurking, waiting. The chase wasn’t over. It had only just begun.