If you saw an elephant in your living room that suddenly vanished, what would you do? You'd check for footprints in the carpet, for the lingering scent of pachyderm. You'd search desperately for any physical evidence it had actually been there.

But what if you found nothing?


Then the problem isn't with the elephant—it's with you.

For the next few days, that's exactly what I did. I became obsessed with that wall. Every shift started with me in that maintenance passage, tapping each tile methodically, listening for hollow spots. Nothing. Each one solid as bedrock.

I traced every grout line with my fingertips. Smooth, uniform, exactly as they'd always been. I even doused the wall with industrial-strength cleaner and attacked it with a wire brush, hoping to scrub away whatever "disguise" it wore. All I accomplished was making that section gleam brighter than any other wall in the building.


A week passed. Nothing changed. The wall remained stubbornly, infuriatingly normal.

I started seriously considering the obvious: I was burned out. Years of night shifts, chronic sleep deprivation, mounting stress. The brain might be sophisticated, but it breaks down like anything else. Maybe I'd experienced some ultra-vivid waking dream or momentary psychosis. The most reasonable explanation. I desperately wanted to believe it.


But I couldn't. Because things started happening.

One night, I'd just finished mopping a section of floor, the surface still glistening wet. I turned to grab a "Caution" sign, and when I looked back—a footprint. A perfect, wet impression of a man's work boot stood in the middle of my clean floor. No trail leading to it, no trail leading away. Just one impossible print. I gaped at it, fumbling for my phone, but before I could snap a picture, the water evaporated before my eyes, leaving no trace.

Another time, I was cleaning a lab's glass door. I set my bottle of glass cleaner on my cart—second shelf, right side. I'm absolutely certain of it. When I turned back seconds later, the bottle sat on the top shelf, left side. The cart hadn't moved. Nobody else was there.

But the lights were the worst. The fluorescents in that corridor started flickering in patterns. Not random electrical surges—these had rhythm, sequence, varying durations. As if someone was using the entire lighting system to tap out Morse code.

I was losing it. Sliding toward the edge of sanity and picking up speed. I needed proof. Something objective, something external to confirm whether what I was seeing was real or if my brain was betraying me.

I decided to record everything.

That night, I duct-taped my phone to my cleaning cart's handle, positioning it to capture the entire corridor and my work area. I hit record.

"Eleven thirty-five PM," I announced to the camera, my voice cracking slightly. "Leo beginning routine maintenance of B2 level corridor. This recording will document any unexplainable phenomena occurring during my shift."

I sounded like a budget ghost hunter from some terrible cable show.

I worked methodically, keeping every movement routine. Mopping, wiping, emptying trash. That night, nothing happened. No self-relocating bottles. No phantom footprints. The lights behaved normally, with only the occasional flicker from voltage fluctuations.

I recorded for a solid hour. Afterward, I retreated to the break room, plugged in my earbuds, and reviewed the footage.

My pulse quickened as I scrubbed to the timestamp where I'd sworn the lights were going crazy. On screen, they burned steady without a single flicker. I jumped to when I thought I'd felt something move behind me. In the video, my cart sat undisturbed, everything exactly where I'd left it.

The entire recording showed nothing but a janitor doing mundane, repetitive work. The most ordinary night shift imaginable.

The world captured on video was perfectly normal. Which meant I wasn't.

I stared at my digital self working silently on the small screen, overwhelmed by a profound loneliness. Not the loneliness of being alone, but the isolation of perceiving a different reality than everyone else. Like being the only person in a theater seeing a completely different movie than the rest of the audience.

Was this it? Accept I was losing my mind and book an appointment with the campus shrink?

Just as my thumb hovered over "delete," something compelled me to drag the progress bar back to the very beginning.

I watched myself setting up the phone, then addressing the camera: "Eleven thirty-five PM…"

I cranked the volume to maximum.

Beyond my voice, I could hear the familiar squeak of my cart's bad wheel and the steady drone of the ventilation system.

Then I heard something else.

A sound so faint it was nearly buried in the background noise. It sounded like… Morse code. Intermittent dit-dit-dah patterns with exactly the same rhythm as the light flickers I'd witnessed.

The sound continued throughout the entire recording.

My mind went blank.

Why? Why would the video capture the sound but not the visual phenomenon?

Just then, my phone screen dimmed and locked itself. In the black mirror of the screen, I caught my reflection—ashen and wide-eyed.

I glanced up at the wall clock. Exactly midnight.

Something seized me then—an overwhelming compulsion. I bolted from the break room and sprinted toward that maintenance passage. I couldn't explain why—pure animal instinct driving me forward.

I skidded to a halt at that familiar section of wall.

And froze.

It was back.

Same position, same dark gray metal door. Sitting there embedded in the wall as if it had never disappeared.

This time, I didn't hesitate.

Staring at it, all my doubts, fears, and internal conflicts evaporated. In their place settled one cold, crystalline thought.

This was no illusion.

I had to go in and discover what the hell was really happening.