It was 9 PM.

The silence in my apartment was a heavy, living thing. To fight it, I scrolled mindlessly through my camera roll, the glow of the screen a poor substitute for company. A half-eaten container of cold lo mein sat forgotten on my lap. My thumb stopped its mechanical swiping on a picture from just last weekend—a vibrant, sun-drenched group selfie from my cousin Liza's graduation.

We were all there, crammed into the frame, a chaotic mess of grinning faces and proud eyes. And right in the middle was Aunt Carol, her arm wrapped tightly around Liza, her smile the widest of all. It beamed with a pure, uncomplicated joy that made my heart ache.

It was the last picture we had of her.

Aunt Carol passed away three days ago in her sleep. A sudden, silent heart attack, the doctor said. The funeral was tomorrow, a thought that felt like a stone in my stomach.

A heavy, syrupy sadness settled in my chest. I zoomed in on her face, tracing the familiar laugh lines around her eyes. Her smile was so full of life, a perfect, frozen memory.

But then, a cold prickle started at the base of my neck. It feels like I'm being watched.

The thought was irrational, but the sensation was unmistakable—a pressure, like someone standing just behind my shoulder, their gaze fixed on the back of my head. I shook it off, forcing my attention back to the screen.

I zoomed out. Took in the whole photo. Then zoomed in again, my focus narrowing. My breath hitched.

In the photo, everyone was looking at the camera lens, at Liza who was holding the phone. Everyone except for Aunt Carol.

Her head was tilted down just a fraction, and while she seemed to be facing the camera, her eyes… they weren't focused on the moment. They were looking directly forward, as if staring right through the screen, right at me. And that proud, beaming smile I remembered now looked strained at the edges. The more I stared, the less it looked like joy and the more it looked like a tight, knowing smirk.

A violent shiver racked my body. "It's the grief," I whispered to the empty room. The feeling of being watched intensified, the air growing thick and cold around me. I had the sudden, insane urge to turn around, but I was too afraid of what I might see in the dark, empty space behind my couch.

I locked my phone with a decisive click and tossed it onto the couch cushion beside me as if it had burned me.

My phone buzzed instantly, lighting up the dark room.

The screen glowed with a notification. A direct message.

It was from Aunt Carol.

My heart seized, a cold fist clenching in my chest. This wasn't happening. It couldn't be.

With a hand trembling so badly I could barely control it, I picked up the phone. I tapped the message.

It was the same group photo from the graduation.

But in this version, the vibrant colors were washed out, tinged with a sickly grey-green hue. Everyone in the background—Liza, my uncle, my other cousins—were all blurred into unrecognizable, shadowy smudges. Only Aunt Carol was in sharp, horrifying focus.

And she was no longer smirking.

Her face was a mask of pure, wide-eyed terror. Her skin was pale and waxy. Her mouth was stretched open in a silent, desperate scream.

A small, pathetic sound escaped my lips. The feeling of a presence in the room was now overwhelming, a cold spot forming in the air to my left. I couldn't bring myself to look.

Below the grotesque photo, a new message bubble appeared. The three dots pulsed.

"I wasn't smiling then, anak."

A pause. The dots pulsed again.

"I was trying to warn you."

Before I could process the words, my phone erupted in sound and vibration, jerking in my hand. The screen changed to an incoming video call.

The caller ID, illuminated in stark white letters against a dark background, made the blood drain from my face.

It simply read: Aunt Carol.

And against every screaming instinct in my body, my thumb, moving as if possessed, hovered over the green "Accept" button.

My thumb, slick with a cold sweat, hovered over the glowing green "Accept" button. The phone's vibration was a frantic pulse against my palm, a trapped hummingbird of pure dread. Every instinct, every shred of self-preservation screamed at me to swipe red, to hurl the device against the wall and shatter this impossible reality.

But I was paralyzed. The ghost of Aunt Carol's silent scream from the corrupted photo was a hook in my soul, pulling me toward the abyss.

I pressed accept.

The screen did not show a face, nor a room, nor anything recognizable. It erupted into a churning storm of grey and white static, a blizzard of noise trapped behind the glass. A hiss, loud and abrasive, filled my ear. And underneath it, a voice—or something mimicking a voice. It was low, guttural, and distorted, as if filtered through broken machinery and decaying vocal cords.

"...not... smile..." the thing crackled, the words stretching and breaking apart like bad reception from a grave. "...danger..."

My own breath hitched, a frozen knot in my throat. The air in my apartment grew cold. "A-Aunt Carol?" I stammered into the phone, my voice a pathetic, thin whisper against the overwhelming static.

The noise on the screen flared, a burst of violent white. The whisper sharpened into a piercing, electronic snarl that made me jerk the phone away from my ear.

"...WRONG... NAME..."

The call dropped.

Silence. Thick, heavy, and absolute. The screen went black, reflecting nothing but my own pale, wide-eyed terror back at me. I sat there for what felt like an eternity, the frantic thumping of my heart the only sound in the world. The silence wasn't empty anymore; it was charged, watchful. My eyes darted to the dark hallway leading to my bedroom, to the deep shadows under the kitchen table. The familiar geometry of my home felt alien and threatening.

With trembling hands, I navigated back to my messages. My heart sank. The entire thread from "Aunt Carol" was gone. Vanished without a trace. A cold sweat broke out on my forehead. I frantically scrolled through my camera roll, my thumb slipping in my panic. The original graduation photo was still there. But something was different. The vibrant colors from earlier seemed muted, washed out in a sickly yellow tint. And Aunt Carol's smile... it no longer looked like a knowing smirk or even a proud beam. It looked strained, a grimace of pain, her eyes wide with a fear I hadn't noticed before. Had it always been like that? Was my mind, frayed by grief, constructing this entire horror?

As if in answer, my phone buzzed again, a violent shudder on the coffee table. I flinched back as if it were a live scorpion.

It was a notification from the "FAM" group chat.

Liza had sent a message. It was a single, chilling line of text.

"Guys... what is happening?"

Beneath it was a screenshot. It was of her own camera roll. It showed the same graduation photo we had all taken. But in her version, where Aunt Carol's face should have been, there was nothing but a dark, shapeless smudge, a void that seemed to suck the light from the rest of the picture.

My blood turned to ice water in my veins. It wasn't just me. This was real.

Before my numb fingers could form a reply, another message popped up, this time from my Uncle Dan. His words were terse, frantic.

"Everyone, stay off your phones. Don't answer any unknown calls. Don't look at the pictures. I'm calling the police."

A cold dread, deeper and more profound than any simple fear, solidified in the pit of my stomach. This was no longer a personal haunting. The warning in the static wasn't just for me.

Whatever had used Aunt Carol's name was now hunting my entire family.

Uncle Dan's command to stay off our phones lasted about ten minutes. Ten minutes of me sitting in the crushing silence, jumping at every creak of the old apartment building. Ten minutes of staring at the black screen of my phone, feeling it pulse with a malevolent energy.

It was Liza who broke first. Her message was a single, tear-streaked word in the group chat.

Liza: Please.

It was followed by another screenshot. This one wasn't from the graduation. It was a recent selfie of her, taken in her bedroom just this morning. In the background, reflected in her vanity mirror, was a blurred, dark shape standing in her doorway. A shape that hadn't been there when she took the picture.

My phone rang, the generic tone shattering the quiet. It was Liza. I accepted the video call without thinking.

Her face filled the screen, pale and streaked with tears. "You saw it, right? The photo? The call?" she gasped, her voice raw.

Before I could answer, her eyes widened, staring at something past her own screen. "What was that?" she whispered, her head whipping around to look behind her.

"Liza? What is it?"

"I... I thought I saw something in the hall." She turned the phone's camera, panning it across her tidy bedroom. The screen was a mess of digital artifacts, the video feed glitching. "The connection's bad," she muttered, swinging the camera toward her open bedroom door, into the dark hallway beyond.

The feed stuttered, froze for a second, and then cleared.

There, in the center of the hallway, stood a tall, indistinct figure. It was made of shadows, a man-shaped void that the light from her room refused to touch. It was perfectly still.

Liza, seeing my expression, spun back around. "What? What do you see?"

The figure was gone. The hallway was empty.

"Nothing," I lied, my voice trembling. "It's nothing."

We hung up, the fear a living thing between us. I couldn't sit here anymore. I had to see the original photo. Not the digital copy on my phone, but the real one. The physical print my Uncle Dan had framed on his mantelpiece.

I drove to his house in a daze, the streetlights stretching and distorting in my vision. The house, usually a beacon of warm light, was dark except for the single lamp in the living room. I found Uncle Dan not on the phone with the police, but sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace, surrounded by a sea of old photo albums. The framed graduation photo was in his hands.

He looked up as I entered, his face decades older than it was just this afternoon. "The police," he said, his voice hollow. "They said there's nothing they can do. Told me it was a prank, a hacker."

He thrust the framed photo toward me. "But look."

I took it. It was the same photo. But in this physical copy, the one that couldn't be hacked or digitally altered, the anomaly was even more chilling. There was no smirk, no blur. Instead, just behind Aunt Carol's right shoulder, clear as day, was the same tall, shadowy figure Liza and I had just seen. It was in the background of the original picture, hiding in plain sight. And its featureless head was tilted, not towards the celebrating family, but directly at the person holding the camera.

It had been there all along.

Uncle Dan pointed a shaking finger at the shadow. "She saw it," he whispered, a tear finally escaping down his cheek. "That's what she was trying to tell us. That's the warning. It wasn't about her. It was about that."

He looked at me, his eyes filled with a terrified realization.

"It wasn't her in the call. It was never her. It was that thing... and now it knows we've seen it."