Chapter 1 - The Eye Behind the Baseboard
The heavy leather sectional groaned as Mr. Henderson and I shoved it across the red oak planks. The sound was harsh, a dull screech of wood on wood that violated the stillness of the three-in-the-morning quiet.
Beside me, Arthur Henderson was breathing heavily through his nose. He was sixty-eight, a retired utility surveyor with a bad hip and hands that shook when he was startled. Right now, his hands weren't shaking from age; they were vibrating with pure adrenaline.
The couch shifted three feet toward the center of the room. The cold draft from the living room wall hit my bare ankles like needles.
Arthur lifted his heavy maglite. The beam of white LED light sliced through the dust motes and struck the exposed baseboard.
My breath stopped in my throat.
There was no snake. There was no creature from the woods behind our suburban cul-de-sac.
Protruding from a neat, circular two-inch hole bored through the bottom of the drywall was a flexible, corrugated black tube—the kind used in medical endoscopes or specialized fiber-optic borescope cameras. The tip was tipped with an anodized metal casing no larger than a child's marble.
And as the beam of Arthur’s flashlight hit the glass lens at its center, a microscopic red diode flared inside the housing.
The lens swiveled. It didn't twitch randomly; it made a faint, high-pitched mechanical whine, tilting upward to center on my face.
"Step back, Emily," Arthur whispered. His voice was cracked, reedy, stripped of its usual gruff neighborly cadence.
"What is that?" I asked. The words came out thin, fragile, like dry paper. "Arthur, what is that wire?"
Arthur didn't answer right away. He dropped to one knee, ignoring the loud pop of his arthritic joint, and leaned in closer to the hole in the drywall. He aimed the flashlight directly into the aperture where the black tubing emerged.
Behind the baseboard, the drywall hadn't just been punctured; an entire rectangular section of the plaster had been cut away and replaced with a recessed steel panel, anchored directly into the structural wall studs with heavy hex bolts. Running from the panel were four separate braided cables, disappearing down through a drilled hole in the subfloor, leading directly into the crawl space beneath our foundation.
Arthur’s face went completely bloodless. In the glare of the flashlight, his gray skin looked translucent, like wet parchment.
He slowly stood up, turning his back to the wall as if he were afraid the black lens could hear him.
"Emily," he said, keeping his voice down to an urgent, raspy murmur. "Where did David tell you he was going?"
"Chicago," I said, my voice rising half an octave. My heart was slamming against my ribs like a trapped bird. "The midwest architectural summit. He left at noon yesterday. He sent me a text from O'Hare when his flight landed at four."
"Did you hear him call you from the airport?"
"No. He texted. He said the reception in the conference hall was terrible."
Arthur looked at the black lens. The red diode blinked once, twice, and then the camera slowly retracted four inches back into the wall, sliding smoothly into the dark hollow between the studs until only the circular opening remained.
Someone was controlling it remotely. Someone was watching us right now from the other side of that data feed.
"Call the police immediately," Arthur whispered, grabbing my forearm with a grip that bruised my skin. "Do not call David. Do not text him. Take Lily out of this house right now, walk across to my porch, and dial nine-one-one."
"Arthur, you're scaring me. What is that equipment? Is it a home security monitor? David hired contractors last spring to rewire the HVAC—"
"That’s not an HVAC monitor, Emily," Arthur cut me off, his knuckles white around the flashlight barrel. "I spent twenty-two years inspecting municipal substations and secure telecommunication corridors for the county. That is military-grade, fiber-isolated surveillance hardware. It has its own dedicated cellular bypass. And whoever drilled that hole into your living room didn't do it from inside your house."
I looked down at the hole. The baseboard had been cut from the rear, with the dust pulled outward, away from the living room.
May you like
"It came from underneath," I breathed.
"Yes," Arthur said, pulling me toward the front door where Lily sat wrapped in her yellow fleece blanket on the bottom stair, watching us with wide, terrified brown eyes. "Someone has been living under your floorboards."
