One Viewer Left (eBook)

A Psychological Sci-Fi Thriller Where the Viewer Becomes the Victim

Bilal Salman (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
250 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-0-00-111910-9 (ISBN)

Infos

One Viewer Left
By Bilal Salman

When a dead body is discovered staged like a confession, Detective Mira Kade uncovers a livestream with no camera, no origin-and one chilling objective: to watch back.

As memories begin to shift and time itself unravels, Mira and Eli find themselves trapped in a digital feed that rewrites reality and erases identities.

The deeper they dig, the clearer it becomes-this story isn't just about them.
It's about you.

You are the last viewer. The feed is still active. And it's waiting for your ending.

Textauszug

Chapter 2

 

 

Mira didn’t sleep again that night. She lay on the couch with the blinds drawn tight, the hum of the refrigerator her only anchor to the real. The city outside pulsed faintly through the curtains—muted headlights gliding like restless ghosts, neon signs flickering their silent invitations into the rain-slick dark. Every few minutes she sat up, certain she had heard the floorboards creak or the faint scrape of something shifting against the window. But each time she checked, the apartment remained still.

And yet the feeling didn’t leave.

She could sense it—the weight of eyes where no eyes should be. A presence that pressed against her skin like static, a quiet pressure that reminded her of standing too close to a transformer humming with invisible power. It wasn’t sound. It wasn’t light. It was something older, quieter, woven into the silence itself.

At 3:11 a.m., she gave up pretending. She pulled on her coat, clipped her badge to her belt, and slipped her service weapon into its holster. Her hands were steady, but the steady came from long practice, not calm. She had been here before—the space where fear stopped mattering and habit carried her forward. She locked the door behind her and walked the quiet hall, boots scuffing lightly against the worn carpet. The building smelled faintly of mold and paint thinner, a lingering reminder that no one ever really cared for the place.

Downstairs, the street was nearly empty. A thin drizzle blurred the neon into smears of orange and pink, painting the asphalt in streaks of false color. Mira scanned the building across from hers, eyes narrowing. The stairwell where she had seen the figure earlier was empty now, nothing but rain-slick glass and a lone fluorescent tube buzzing faintly.

She told herself it had been a trick of exhaustion. A shadow. But her gut, the instinct honed over years of crime scenes and interrogations, whispered otherwise.

Behind her, a voice broke the silence.

“You saw it too, didn’t you?”

Eli’s voice was raw, frayed by lack of sleep. He stood on the curb, jacket clinging damp to his shoulders, hair plastered across his forehead. His eyes were wide, not with the manic edge of obsession, but with the quiet dread of someone who had realized the nightmare wasn’t ending when the sun came up.

Mira didn’t flinch. She only looked at him and nodded once.

He exhaled in relief, though the relief only deepened the fear. “I thought maybe I was—”

“You’re not,” she cut in.

For a moment, the rain filled the silence between them.

He stepped closer, lowering his voice. “I left my monitors on after I came here earlier. When I went back tonight, they were… different. Not recordings anymore. Reflections. I could see myself moving, but out of sync, like I’d already done it a few seconds before. Like it was predicting me.”

Mira’s throat tightened. She imagined the photo she had received, her reflection smiling when she hadn’t. “Mirroring,” she said quietly.

Eli nodded. “It’s not showing us what it sees. It’s showing us what we’ll see.”

The words lingered heavy, like wet cloth draped across her chest. She hated how plausible it felt.

They stood in silence until the drizzle thickened into real rain, cold drops spattering across their coats. Mira turned toward the diner on the corner—a twenty-four-hour place that smelled perpetually of grease and burnt coffee. She jerked her chin toward it, and Eli followed without argument.

Inside, the air was heavy with frying oil and the metallic tang of overused coffee pots. The neon sign outside buzzed faintly through the rain-smeared windows, bleeding red into the booths. A waitress with tired eyes dropped menus on their table without waiting for orders. Mira didn’t touch hers. She sat with her hands around the lukewarm ceramic mug, letting the heat sink into her fingers.

Eli rubbed his temples. “Rachel was right. It doesn’t just watch. It repeats. It loops. But why us? Why now?”

Mira stared into the black surface of her coffee. Her reflection looked back at her, distorted by the ripples, her own face warped into something unfamiliar. She thought of Alina Dorsey in the tub, posed with calm precision. Claire Wren. Mason Lyle. The etched numbers in glass. Every detail was deliberate. Ritual.

“Because we looked too long,” she said softly. “Because we didn’t turn away.”

Eli’s laugh was hollow, brittle. “So it punishes curiosity?”

“No,” she said, her voice sharpening. “It uses it.”

He fell silent at that, staring at her across the table, the din of clattering dishes filling the gap. The rain outside intensified, drumming against the glass.

Then Mira’s phone buzzed again.

She didn’t want to look. Every instinct screamed to leave it face down, to walk out, to never touch it again. But her hand moved on its own, lifting the device from the table. A new message glowed against the dark screen.

Session: A10B
Start: 04:00
Viewers: 2

Beneath the text was a still frame.

Not Alina. Not Claire. Not Mason.

Mira and Eli.

Sitting in the diner booth.

Frozen mid-breath, their reflections already caught, the red dot glowing in the corner.

Eli swallowed hard. “It’s not waiting for us anymore.”

Mira’s pulse thundered in her ears. She set the phone down slowly, as though moving too fast would make it worse.

“No,” she said. “It’s starting.”

 

The diner’s neon light washed the booth in restless red, casting Mira and Eli as silhouettes in their own frozen photograph. The screen on her phone still glowed between them, the still frame of their bodies locked mid-conversation, timestamp ticking forward as though the moment had already been lived. Mira’s chest felt tight, the air too heavy to breathe cleanly. Every inhale tasted faintly of grease and scorched coffee, thick as smoke.

Eli’s hand hovered near the phone but stopped short, fingers trembling above the glass. “It’s ahead of us,” he whispered.

Mira forced herself to look again. She studied the frozen image the way she would study a crime scene—every corner, every shadow, every irrelevant detail that might suddenly matter. The coffee mug in front of her was tilted just slightly more in the photo than it was in reality. The neon smear across the window behind Eli had already stretched an inch further down in the frame, as though rain that hadn’t yet fallen was captured in advance.

Her stomach twisted. It’s not showing us the past. It’s showing us what we’re about to do.

Eli’s voice cracked. “Do you think… if we move differently, we can break it?”

The thought was ridiculous. But she didn’t say that. She needed to know too.

She reached for the mug with her left hand instead of her right. Slowly, deliberately, she lifted it and set it down on the opposite side of the table. The ceramic clinked softly against the formica. She stared at the phone, pulse hammering, waiting for the frame to shift.

It didn’t.

The frozen image remained exactly the same—her right hand poised over the mug she had never touched, Eli leaning forward with his eyes fixed on the glass.

Eli’s throat worked. “It doesn’t matter what we do.”

The waitress arrived just then, a tired woman with crow’s-feet etched deep around her eyes, carrying their plates without ceremony. She slid the greasy hash browns and eggs onto the table, muttered something about “holler if you need more,” and moved on. Mira tracked her in silence, then glanced back at the phone.

The frame had changed.

Now it showed the plates already half-empty, her fork resting across her plate, Eli’s hands smeared faintly with yolk. Neither of them had taken a bite yet.

Mira’s gut clenched. The sound of the rain outside seemed louder now, as if the world itself was leaning in closer to listen.

“Do you feel it?” Eli asked softly.

She looked up. His pupils were wide, reflecting the red neon, his expression caught between terror and fascination.

“Feel what?”

“The pull. Like we’re not deciding to sit here. Like we’re being kept here. Fed forward. One frame at a time.”

Mira’s jaw tightened. She hated the accuracy of it. Hated the way his words gave shape to the unease rotting in her chest. Every second spent here felt less like a choice and more like inevitability—like they were characters in a film already spooled, destined to hit their marks no matter how they resisted.

She pushed her plate aside, untouched. The scrape of ceramic against the table was louder than it should have been. “We’re leaving.”

Eli nodded too quickly, relief flooding him. They slid from the booth, Mira dropping cash on the table without looking. She didn’t care if it covered the bill. Money meant nothing against whatever had its grip on them.

Outside, the rain had thickened to a steady downpour, the streetlights painting wet pavement in long, trembling streaks. The cold slapped her skin, sharp and real, grounding her for a moment in the here and now. She pulled her coat tighter, scanning the street as if the shadows themselves might lean forward and claim them.

Eli fell into step beside her, his voice low. “Where do we go? Because home isn’t safe. Work isn’t safe. Anywhere with walls feels—”

He cut off.

Mira followed his stare.

Across the street, in the diner’s window, two silhouettes still sat in the booth. Hers and his....

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 9.12.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• ISBN-10: 0-00-111910-9 / 0001119109
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-111910-9 / 9780001119109