He saved one forum photo as a joke. The next night the photo came alive and started knocking at his classroom door. Wells Fernandez is a senior bored by late-night threads until a doctor's post about a corpse that walked out of a hospital goes viral. Curiosity pulls him into a live nightmare: a slow-knocking sound that can summon the dead, a forum audio that draws an old, corpse-like “Knocker,” and a dark space—called a ghost-domain—that traps the living. When Wells is shoved into a locked toilet and nearly dies, something worse than survival claws into him: a parasite-eye that lets him see the rules of the ghost-domain—and starts to eat at his life. Now he must run, bargain, and fight. Allies are scarce: Gideon Schuster, a haunted international investigator; Fernanda Hayes, a terrified classmate who becomes more than a passenger; Evelyn Conway, a scientist who sees profit in the thing that eats people; and Felix Ward, whose secret “future papers” may be a map—or a trap. Every victory costs Wells part of his humanity. The more he uses the parasitic sight, the more the oncoming thing—the Knocker, the baby ghost, the living-skin parchments—learns to use him in return. This is about bargains you make to survive, the small, savage choices that feel like survival at the time, and the knock at the last door you really fear. The first sound is still echoing.
32 Chapters
