I barely slept.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw them—the faces of the dead. Pale. Burned. Eyes like empty wells. Their mouths moved silently, lips forming words I couldn't hear, but I knew were meant for me.
In the silence between dreams, The Watcher waited. A black silhouette with fingers like branches and a mouth that stretched too wide, too impossibly wide.
When I awoke, my sheets were soaked with sweat, and a single word was scratched into the wall above my head:
"REMEMBER."
At school, things got worse.
The lights in the halls flickered whenever I passed. Students whispered when I walked by—some in fear, others in confusion. A few stared at me like they recognized me.
And the whispers—they didn't stay in the old wing anymore.
They followed me.
In the library, I heard them behind the shelves.
In the bathroom, they echoed from the vents.
At my locker, the door slammed shut on its own, narrowly missing my fingers. Inside, someone had placed a scorched notebook.
The same one from Emily's journal. But we had left that box in Sarah's bag.
I confronted her at lunch.
Her face went pale. "I never took it out. I left it under my bed. You're saying you found it?"
Mike pulled the box from his backpack. It was still there—untouched. And yet, I held Emily's journal in my hand.
"It's like the school gave it back to you," Sarah whispered. "It wants you to keep reading."
I didn't want to. Every page felt heavier, darker. But I had to.
The next entry was dated two days before the fire.
Emily wrote:
"The Watcher has chosen someone. I don't know who, but I feel it. It's feeding off our fear. It speaks to me now. In dreams. In the walls. It told me it needs a host. Someone to carry its voice."
My hands trembled. I could feel something coiling deep in my chest, a cold pressure building inside me.
"Do you think.." I asked quietly, "it's chosen me?"
Sarah didn't answer.
Mike stared down at the floor.
The silence said enough.
That night, we broke into the principal's office.
We needed records—anything about the fire, about Emily, about The Watcher.
What we found was worse.
Hidden beneath the floorboards was an old leather file stamped 'CONFIDENTIAL'.
Inside were black-and-white photographs, dated 1965. They showed the old wing before the fire. Students standing in neat rows, smiling.
But in the back corner of every photo, there was him.
A tall figure. Always slightly out of focus. Wearing dark robes. Face obscured. Hands visible—and clawed.
The notes underneath the photo called him:
"Subject: 43 - The Observer."
"There was an experiment here," Mike muttered. "They were… studying something."
We kept reading.
One page had a short paragraph that chilled me to my core:
"Subject responds strongly to adolescent fear. Unclear whether entity originates from this reality. Believed to feed on trauma. Must be contained. DO NOT INTERACT."
It ended with a bloodstained fingerprint.
Sarah looked at me. "They knew. They knew this thing was in the school. And they covered it up."
"And the fire…" I whispered. "They didn't stop it. They let those kids burn."
The whispers returned that night, louder than ever.
I heard them in my walls, beneath the floorboards, inside my mirror.
"The Watcher sees you."
When I tried to run, my reflection didn't follow me.
It stayed, smiling.
I woke with scratches down my arms and ash on my bedsheets.
The school wanted something from me. The Watcher wanted to finish what it started in 1965.
And I had a horrible feeling it had finally found its host.