The Shape That Watches

The rain hadn’t let up. By the time I reached my apartment, my clothes were clinging to me like a second skin and my boots had taken on more water than the city’s gutters. But it wasn’t the storm clawing at my nerves. It was the book. The one Eliza whispered about. The one I’d found wedged inside an unmarked envelope in my mailbox, with no return address, no postage, no fingerprints.

It didn’t have a title. No publisher. No author’s name.

Just a charcoal-gray cover that absorbed light like ink and a symbol etched into the center — three intersecting circles forming a distorted eye. I didn’t remember carrying it in. I didn’t remember unlocking my door.

I set it down on my kitchen table, careful not to let the pages fall open.

It didn’t feel like paper.

It felt like skin.

I watched it as I peeled off my coat and lit the single lamp above the table. The book didn’t move. But I had the uncanny sensation it was… breathing. That if I turned my back, I’d hear the whisper of parchment shifting against itself, rearranging, listening.

I didn’t sit.

I stood over it.

Then opened the cover.

The first page wasn’t written. It was drawn — a sketch in graphite of a skeletal tree, its roots splitting into veins, its trunk splitting into spines. Below it, one word burned into the page like a scar.

SYMBIOTE.

My breath caught. Not because of the word, but because it felt like something had just shifted — not in the room, but in my chest. A sudden prickling awareness. Like I wasn’t the only one inside my body anymore.

The next page was worse.

The Ink Beneath the Skin is not a book. It is a binding. It does not record. It awakens.

You are now part of the Pact.

The Pact?

I turned another page. The text twisted like it was being written as I looked at it.

You carry it. It carries you.

Then the words blurred. Shifted. Faded into something new.

The Roses are only the beginning.

I slammed the book shut and stumbled back. The lamp flickered. The window creaked. And somewhere beneath my skin, a heat began to bloom — not pain exactly, but pressure. Like ink flooding my veins.

I looked down.

There was something moving under the surface of my wrist. Just below the skin.

A shape.

---

I slept with the lights on that night. If you could call it sleep. My mind wandered places it shouldn't have, replaying images of roses, matchsticks, and women with their eyes left open to the dark. I saw Eliza’s face, pale and trembling, whispering about something she didn’t name — not “The Ash Protocol,” as she'd mistakenly said before. No, this was different. She’d called it “The Pactum.”

A name that didn’t exist in any of the databases I searched. But on an occult board buried three layers deep into the dark net, I found a post — ten years old. One sentence.

“The Pactum is not written. It is awakened through blood.”

I touched my wrist again.

Still warm. Still tingling.

Still wrong.

---

Morning came like a hangover, all static and sour taste. I needed answers. I needed Eliza.

But when I got to the safehouse, the shelter had been turned upside down.

“Gone?” I stared at Father Marlowe, barely able to keep the edge out of my voice.

“She left sometime after midnight,” he said, clearly shaken. “Didn’t say a word. Just… vanished.”

No witnesses. No sightings. Just a cold bed and a folded note.

It was addressed to me.

Detective Hart,

They found me. If you’re reading this, it’s already too late. Don’t follow me. Burn the book.

—E.Q.

I folded the note slowly. Methodically. Then slipped it into my pocket.

Burn the book?

She didn’t understand. It wasn’t paper anymore.

And I wasn’t just reading it.

I was bound to it.

---

Back at my apartment, I tried not to look at the book. I made coffee, fed my goldfish — the only living thing I hadn’t driven away — and tried to pretend it was a normal day.

Then I noticed something new.

A second mark had formed on my skin. This one at the base of my spine. A symbol I couldn’t decipher unless I twisted to look in the mirror — three crescents interlocked, like a warning hidden in geometry.

I hadn’t drawn it.

But it was there.

My phone buzzed. An alert from precinct dispatch.

Third body. Female. Alley off Mercer and 19th.

I didn’t hesitate.

But I brought the book with me.

---

This one was different.

Still the roses. Still the black ribbon. Still the matchstick tucked into the knot. But this time, something else had been left beside the body — a scrap of leather, almost like torn binding.

And carved into her skin — not written, carved — was the symbol from the book’s first page.

The distorted eye.

Langley stood beside me, swallowing hard. “Someone’s… escalating.”

I didn’t answer. Because I knew. I knew in my bones this wasn’t escalation.

This was a message.

And it was meant for me.

---

I was halfway back to my car when the nausea hit. Not just queasiness — vertigo, disorientation, heat in my limbs and a spike of something electric between my ribs.

I dropped to one knee.

The city swam.

And then I saw her.

Eliza.

Standing at the end of the block. Watching me.

She looked… wrong. Hollow-eyed. Lips parted like she was trying to speak, but no sound came.

Then she turned and vanished down the alley.

I followed.

Slipped into shadow.

And found only a dead end.

Except for the words scrawled in something too dark to be paint:

You’ve opened the door. Now walk through.

---

I didn’t sleep that night.

The book opened on its own.

A new page had formed.

Drawn in the same ink, a figure — female — marked with the same sigil now burned into my back. Beneath her feet, roses grew from cracks in the pavement. Above her head, a constellation I’d never seen.

And beneath the image, more text:

The Host has seen. The Ink remembers.

Next: The Mo

uthless One awakens.

---

I heard it before I saw it.

Breathing.

Not mine.

Not human.

Coming from inside the walls.

Then, the floorboards shifted.

And the lights went out.