No one really knows what it means to hit rock bottom until they’re actually there, and when it happens it doesn’t come quietly, it hits all at once like a collapse you didn’t see coming, losing your job after ten years, catching your girlfriend with your replacement, and realizing you still have a loan to pay off feels like the kind of joke life tells right before it buries you. After a long night of sending out dozens of resumes and badly written cover letters, I passed out from exhaustion, and when I woke up the next morning I figured I had to at least try to make some money while waiting for something, anything, to respond. So I started doing surveys online, the kind that pay you in gift cards, pointless questions for barely anything, but it was better than doing nothing, better than sitting there staring at the ceiling thinking about everything that went wrong. Five hours later I was drained but had made enough to justify continuing, around forty an hour if you pushed through it, not much worse than my old job, which was a depressing thought in itself, and I was just about to quit for the day when I noticed something strange at the bottom of the page, a tiny ad, ridiculously simple, just plain black Comic Sans text on a white background that said “Surveys for cash,” and for some reason I clicked it.

At first it was normal, name, age, job, the usual data harvesting nonsense, even height and weight didn’t feel that weird, but then the first real question appeared and I just froze, staring at the screen longer than I should have, because it asked something that made no sense, “How much do you want to look behind you right now?” with options from not at all to very much, and even though I had no reason to be scared, something about it got under my skin, I held my breath and listened, silence behind me, nothing there, and after a moment I forced myself to turn around just to prove it was stupid, and of course there was nothing, so I laughed it off and picked “neutral” before moving on, but the next question was worse, asking why I would even consider looking behind me, and I typed “I don’t know” because I didn’t, not really, and kept going. The scenarios became increasingly disturbing, not violent exactly, just wrong in a way that didn’t sit right, like being alone on a plane with someone who disappears, or finding a cabin in the woods with a smiling woman inviting you in, questions that felt less like personality tests and more like something probing how you think under pressure, and I kept going even though I didn’t want to, because it felt like I had to, like stopping wasn’t an option anymore.

While I was answering, things started happening in my apartment, small at first, easy to ignore if you tried hard enough, but impossible once they added up, about thirty minutes in someone knocked on my door, and when I checked through the peephole I saw a man shaking his head over and over, whispering “no, no, no” like he was warning me, like he was already too late, and I didn’t open the door, not a chance, then my phone started ringing, a contact labeled “Auditor,” over and over, leaving voicemails filled with static and what sounded like someone reading numbers, or maybe screaming them, I couldn’t tell, and the longer it went on the worse it got, until even the silence in my apartment didn’t feel empty anymore. At one point I heard scratching coming from the radiator behind me, faint but deliberate, so I pushed the couch against it without even thinking, like that would somehow keep whatever it was contained, and I stopped looking behind me completely, even though I knew there was probably nothing there, because I wasn’t sure anymore.

When I finally reached the end of the survey, there wasn’t a final question waiting, just a message, simple and direct, “Do not let them in. They cannot be trusted,” and the second I read it there was another knock at my door, softer this time, more patient, like whoever was out there knew I’d be listening. I approached slowly and looked through the peephole again, and this time it was a woman, maybe in her twenties, wearing a heavy jacket even though it was hot outside, sunglasses covering her eyes so I couldn’t tell where she was looking, and after a moment she slid a piece of paper under the door. It said, “It’s a lie. Leave your apartment now.” I didn’t move. I didn’t open the door. I didn’t look back at the screen. I just stood there, stuck between two things I didn’t understand, both telling me opposite things, both feeling equally wrong.

Now it’s been about thirty minutes and I haven’t moved from where I’m standing, I can still see her shadow under the door, still hear something shifting faintly behind the bedroom door after I locked it, something that definitely wasn’t there before, something that wasn’t part of my apartment this morning, and I don’t know which one of them is lying, the survey or the woman outside, but I know one thing for sure, whatever this is, it started the moment I clicked that ad, and I don’t think it’s going to end unless I make the wrong choice.