Part 8
Nathaniel "Nat" Westwood wasn’t sitting in the dark to hunt ghosts, but because the silence helped him think. He sat on the edge of the flat roof of an old garage, surrounded by devices that hummed and blinked quietly. Most people in the area considered him an oddball, a geek lost in sci-fi and conspiracies, and honestly, Nat didn't mind. It was easier than explaining why his eyes sometimes burned when he stared into the void for too long.

His grandfather once told him strange stories. "Nat, most people walk through the world with their eyes closed because reality is too sharp for them. But we are the ones who cannot blink." Nat had always considered it mere senile babbling, a romantic metaphor from a man losing touch with reality. He preferred to trust technology. Digital sensors and thermal imaging were tangible to him, unlike "family gifts."

Originally, Nat was just tracking the movement of stray cats in the gardens below. Through the thermal monocular, they looked like familiar orange-yellow blobs of heat. It was a peaceful evening until 8:25 PM.

In a single moment, all the cats below him froze. Nat saw their muscles tighten sharply on the thermal monitor, and a second later, they scattered in sheer panic. Nat rubbed his eyes. He attributed it to fatigue, but when he pressed the monocular to his face again, he saw something that made no sense.

A shadow swept across the gardens. It should have been just a gust of wind or a flicker of light, but Nat felt he saw an unusually sharp detail that his brain should have ignored at that speed. Through the monocular, he saw an empty street, but when he looked over the device, he glimpsed a gray-brown creature. It was a semi-synthetic phantom, a hybrid of a predator and a television character.

The being leaned into the turn with supernatural precision, its tail steering through the air and its paws barely touching the ground. The thermal imager in his hand blinked confusedly—it couldn't decide whether it was sensing heat or cold. Then the creature vanished into the darkness.

Nat remained paralyzed. His heart pounded wildly, and he wasn't sure what he had actually seen. Were his eyes deceiving him? Was it just an optical illusion triggered by exhaustion? For a split second, it seemed he caught familiar features in that phantom that belonged to Christy, but he immediately suppressed the thought. "That’s stupid," he scolded himself internally, "you’re just tired and you’re seeing her everywhere." He was in doubt whether he truly saw familiar features or if his own desire to see someone he had been thinking about all day was deceiving him.

"I have to find out," he whispered into the night. He knew that if he didn't go after that shadow now to see for himself that his senses hadn't failed him, that doubt would never leave him. He had to know if what he saw was reality or just a figment of his overloaded mind.

He quickly started packing his gear. His hands shook as he tossed the devices into his backpack. If that phantom was real, he had to find the answer where an ordinary person would never look…

***

Nat climbed down the ladder so clumsily that the backpack strap dug unpleasantly into his shoulder. He stood for a moment, leaning against the cold wall of the garage, trying to calm his racing pulse. The street below looked insultingly ordinary in the dim glow of the lamps. No phantoms, no magic. Just a quiet suburban idyll where an empty plastic cup rolled lazily in the draft.

He looked again in the direction where the strange phenomenon had disappeared. "Did I really see something there?" he asked himself, a worm of doubt beginning to gnaw at his mind. Maybe his grandfather was right that people see what they want to see. And Nat wanted to see Christy—wanted to see her so desperately that perhaps his brain had assembled an image that made sense to him out of shadows and reflections.

He broke into a run, but it was no determined sprint. His figure looked a bit heavy-handed in the night, and the backpack bounced on his back with every step. Every breath burned in his throat, and he cursed himself inwardly. "You're crazy, Westwood. Christy is somewhere on her way to a party, and you're running after an optical illusion."

As he ran past one of the houses, he saw an unfamiliar old man calmly shaking out a doormat on the porch. The man was looking exactly in the direction where the phantom should have run, but there wasn't a hint of wonder on his face. He just tiredly wiped his forehead and looked at Nat. There was nothing in the old man's eyes but a fleeting annoyance with someone making noise and disturbing the peace of the street at night.

Nat slowed down for a moment. "Either he’s completely blind, or I’m seeing things that don’t exist," he thought. His grandfather’s talk about "not blinking" suddenly seemed more like a symptom of early dementia than a family legacy.

He turned into a dark, anonymous alley that was a shortcut to the old center. The air here was strangely heavy, saturated with the smell of rain and dust, but he thought he smelled something else too—something like burnt rubber. He stopped and took a deep breath, but the scent was gone as if it had never been there. Uncertainty stifled him. He wanted to trust the devices in his backpack, but at that moment, they showed nothing but darkness.

At that moment, he thought he caught something in the shadows. It was just a slight movement, maybe just a stray cat or the reflection of the moon in a puddle, but it made him hold his breath. He had a vague feeling he wasn't alone in the dark, but he immediately suppressed it. "It's just nerves, Nat. Just stupid nerves." He adjusted his backpack and, feeling like he was making the biggest mistake of his life, stepped forward. He only needed one piece of evidence—anything that would confirm his senses hadn't truly deceived him.

Nat ran into the dark, neglected alley he had only known from a distance until now. His heart was in his throat, and the backpack with his gear bounced clumsily on his back. The smell of wet paper and rot from an overflowing dumpster hung everywhere. He stopped and leaned against the cold brick wall, trying to catch his breath. "You're crazy, Westwood. No one's here," he muttered to himself while adjusting his glasses.

That’s when it happened.

A few meters away, heavy metal doors opened with a soft creak. Nat instinctively froze and pressed himself deeper into the shadow. A dim, unnaturally clean light burst from inside the building, casting a long shadow onto the dirty concrete of the alley.

A figure ran out of the door.

Nat's world stopped in a second. It wasn't a person in a costume. The being standing before him moved with the agility of a predator. Its gray-brown surface shimmered with a semi-gloss in the twilight of the alley, exactly as he had seen it from the roof moments ago. Christy—if it was her—stopped in the middle of the alley, her digitigrade legs quietly adjusting to the uneven surface and her tail twitching nervously from side to side.

In that moment, she became aware of his presence. Her new, large ears on top of her head snapped sharply toward him.

Nat felt the spell of obliviousness, which he had only suspected until now, hit him like an invisible wall. His brain screamed at him that nothing was there, that he was only looking at a pile of boxes in the shadow. But his eyes, those eyes that according to his grandfather "did not know how to blink," saw the truth with painful sharpness. He saw every fold of her skin that shimmered artificially; he saw her heterochromatic eyes, which now glowed faintly in the dark.

"Christy?" Nat blurted out before fear could stop him. His voice sounded weak and uncertain in the quiet alley.

The creature froze. She fixed her predatory gaze on him, and for a moment, Nat saw a flash of human recognition in it. It was the same stress, the same uncertainty he used to see in her at school, but now it was wrapped in something wild and dangerous.

"Nat?" came a voice that was Christy’s, yet sounded deeper, as if coming from a throat that was no longer entirely human.