Chapter 3: The Sleep App

Terry had insomnia—or rather, he'd had insomnia, the kind that started in his late twenties (coinciding with the promotion to senior account manager, though whether the insomnia caused the promotion or vice versa was one of those chicken-egg questions that Dr. Mehta seemed to find more interesting than Terry did) and which he'd been managing, with varying degrees of success, through a combination of melatonin (3mg, the gummies that tasted like artificial berry and always got stuck in his teeth), white noise (specifically: rainfall sounds, not ocean waves, which Karen said made her need to pee), and an app called SleepTrack Pro.

SleepTrack Pro—$4.99/month after the initial free trial, which Terry had forgotten to cancel and which had been automatically renewing for approximately eleven months before he'd noticed it on his credit card statement—monitored sleep patterns using the phone's accelerometer and microphone. It tracked movement, logged ambient sound, created charts showing REM cycles and deep sleep percentages and something called "sleep efficiency" that Terry had never quite understood but which the app assured him was important.

Terry pulled up SleepTrack Pro with fingers that were still shaking, though less violently now, having downgraded from "earthquake" to merely "caffeine overdose" level trembling.

Last night's data loaded slowly, the little spinning circle that appeared whenever his phone was thinking seeming to take longer than usual, as if the phone itself was reluctant to reveal what it knew.

The graph appeared: Sleep duration: 6 hours 23 minutes. Sleep efficiency: 71%. Movement detected: 47 instances. And then, below that, in the section labeled "Anomalies"—a section Terry had never paid attention to before, had never even noticed existed until this exact moment in the Whole Foods parking lot with the Mediterranean wrap congealing on his lap and his entire understanding of consensual reality beginning to exhibit structural cracks—there was a red flag.

"Significant movement detected 3:04-3:51 AM. User appears to have left bed."

Terry tapped on the anomaly. A detailed view expanded, showing a timeline. At 3:04 AM, the accelerometer had registered what the app categorized as "vertical movement consistent with standing." At 3:11, it had logged footsteps—the phone had been in his pocket, apparently, had been moving with him as he walked. Twelve minutes of walking, based on the step count. Then stillness. Then, at 3:43, return movement. Back to bed at 3:51.

And but so the thing that made Terry's vision actually narrow, made the edges of his visual field darken in that way that precedes either fainting or vomiting or both, was the audio recording.

SleepTrack Pro recorded ambient sound in ten-second clips whenever it detected anomalies. There were three clips from last night.

Clip one, 3:11 AM: footsteps (confirmed—he could hear them, hear himself walking, apparently, though the sound was muffled, distant). Background noise that might have been breathing or might have been the white noise machine or might have been something else.

Clip two, 3:17 AM: a voice. His voice. Saying something he couldn't quite make out, the audio quality degraded by compression or distance or the phone's position in his pocket. He played it again, turned up the volume, pressed the phone against his ear.

"—ceiling fan should—" (muffled section) "—exactly like we discussed—"

Clip three, 3:43 AM: a sound Terry initially couldn't identify. Something metallic. Scraping. Then a click, very distinct, that reminded him of—

A door locking.

Terry sat in the car and tried to remember. Tried to recall getting out of bed, walking anywhere, speaking to anyone. The last thing he clearly remembered from last night was Karen kissing him goodnight (perfunctory, the kind of kiss that married people give each other when they're tired and tomorrow is a work day and romance has been successfully domesticated into a bedtime routine), and then lying in bed scrolling his phone, looking at Twitter, reading something about Supreme Court decisions or cryptocurrency or possibly both, his attention fragmenting in that late-night way where nothing quite sticks.

Then: morning. His alarm at 6:30. Karen already up, in the shower.

Nothing in between.

Except apparently there had been something in between. Forty-seven minutes of something. Something involving walking and talking and ceiling fans and doors locking.

His phone buzzed. A text from the unknown number.

"Now check your photos."

Terry opened his photo library, feeling the way people must feel when they're watching horror movies and the protagonist is about to open the door that obviously, manifestly should not be opened.

The most recent photo had been taken at 3:24 AM.

It showed a ceiling fan. A white ceiling fan with four blades, mounted in a room Terry had never seen before. And hanging from the fan, wrapped around one of the blades, was a length of rope.