The first one appears on a Tuesday.
I find it when I’m toweling off after my shower — three parallel lines scored into the bathroom mirror, each about four inches long, spaced a finger-width apart. They look like they were made with something sharp. When I run my thumb across them, I feel the grooves in the glass.
I live alone. My apartment has a deadbolt and a chain, and both were locked when I woke up. The windows haven’t opened since I moved in eight months ago — the landlord painted over the frames and I haven’t bothered to fix them.
I stare at the marks for maybe thirty seconds. Then I get dressed and go to work.
That night I check the apartment. Every window. The front door, the deadbolt, the chain. Everything is fine. I eat dinner, watch something on my phone, go to bed.
Wednesday morning, there are three more lines on the kitchen counter. Same spacing, same depth, same length. Scored into the laminate like someone ran a box cutter across it in three clean passes.
I call my landlord. He says nobody’s been in the building. No maintenance, no inspections. I ask if I can change the locks. He says go ahead.
I change the locks on Thursday after work. New deadbolt, new knob, new keys. I keep the chain.
Friday morning, there are marks on the inside of the front door.
I start staying up. Friday night I sit on the couch with the lights on, facing the door. I make it to about three. I don’t remember falling asleep, but I wake up at seven with my neck stiff and the TV still on.
Three lines on the wall behind the couch. Right next to my head.
I set up my phone to record. I prop it on the dresser, aimed at the bedroom wall, and hit record. The battery will last about five hours. I go to sleep.
In the morning, there are marks on the wall the phone was pointing at. I watch the footage. Five hours and twelve minutes of me sleeping. No sound except the building settling and, once, a siren outside. At 3:47 a.m., between one frame and the next, the marks appear. One frame the wall is clean. The next frame, three lines, already there.
I watch that transition maybe forty times. There’s nothing between the frames — no shadow, no flicker, no movement. The marks simply exist where they didn’t.
I stay at my friend Danny’s place on Saturday night. I tell him my building’s being fumigated, which is the first lie I tell about it. I sleep on his couch. I sleep fine, actually — better than I have all week.
Sunday morning Danny asks me what happened to his bathroom mirror.
Three lines. Same spacing. Same depth.
I go home.
The marks accumulate. I stop counting after the first week. They’re on the walls, the counters, the door frames, the kitchen table, the bathroom tile. Always three parallel lines. Always about four inches. Always scored into the surface, not painted or drawn — cut, like something sharp was dragged across hard material in three precise, even strokes.
They appear only on hard surfaces. Glass, wood, laminate, drywall, tile, metal. Never on fabric. Never on paper. I figure this out by accident — I leave a notebook on the counter overnight and in the morning the counter has new marks but the notebook is clean.
I take photographs for a few days. I don’t know why. Nobody is going to look at them.
Three weeks in, the marks start appearing during the day.
I put my coffee mug down on the counter, go to the bathroom, come back. When I pick the mug up, there are three lines on the bottom. They weren’t there when I set it down. I was gone for maybe ninety seconds.
I start watching surfaces. I stand in the kitchen and stare at the counter. Nothing happens. I stare until my eyes water. Nothing. I look away to rub my eyes and when I look back there are three fresh lines near the edge, the scored laminate still showing white where the surface layer has been cut through.
They won’t happen while I’m watching.
At work I’m pulling cable through a conduit in a new office build. Standard job, nothing complicated. I strip a section of 12-gauge wire and the copper underneath is marked. Three parallel lines scored into the metal, running lengthwise along the conductor, visible once the insulation is peeled back.
I hold the wire up and look at it for a long time.
“Manufacturing defect,” my coworker Paul says when I show him. He barely looks.
“Inside the insulation,” I say.
“Yeah, I’ve seen that before. Happens in the drawing process. The die gets nicked.”
The marks look exactly like all the others. Same width, same spacing, same depth. But Paul doesn’t know that. Paul hasn’t been to my apartment. To Paul, it’s a scratch on some wire.
I throw the wire away and pull a new section.
The first ones on my body appear on a Thursday. I wake up and there are three lines on my left forearm, running from just below the elbow to mid-forearm. They’re not cuts — there’s no blood, no broken skin, no redness. They look like old scars, long healed. Slightly paler than the surrounding skin. Smooth to the touch.
I press on them. Nothing. No tenderness, no sensation at all. They feel exactly like the rest of my arm.
Friday morning there are more. Three lines on the inside of my right wrist. Three on my chest, just below the collarbone. I find them in the mirror.
Saturday: my back. Both shoulders. The left side of my neck.
They don’t hurt. They don’t itch or burn or ache. If I weren’t looking, I wouldn’t know they were there. They are completely, absolutely painless, and this is the worst thing about them.
I go to a doctor. I don’t make an appointment — I just go to an urgent care on Fulton Street and wait.
The nurse takes my vitals. My blood pressure is a little high. She doesn’t mention the marks.
The doctor looks at my arms, my chest, my back. He asks if I’ve had surgery. I say no. He asks if the scars are new. I say yes. He asks how I got them. I say I don’t know.
He refers me to a dermatologist. The earliest appointment is three weeks out.
After six weeks, I stop photographing the apartment. The walls are covered. Not uniformly — the marks appear in clusters, three lines here, three lines there, at various angles, overlapping in places. The apartment looks like something has been trying to get out of every surface.
I stop trying to catch them appearing. I stop staying up. I go to work, I come home, I eat, I sleep. The marks accumulate. They are not my problem to solve. They are just something that is happening.
Paul asks me about my hands on a Wednesday.
We’re wiring a panel and I’m stripping conductors and he looks at my hands and says, “Jesus, Tom. What happened?”
I look down. My hands are covered. Both hands, front and back, fingers and palms — three-line clusters overlapping, crosshatching, the skin a dense weave of pale scar-lines so close together that in places there’s more mark than unmarked skin. My hands look like something weathered. Like old wood. Like a surface that has been scored and scored and scored.
I hadn’t noticed. I don’t know when I stopped noticing.
“I don’t know,” I say. And then, because Paul is looking at me in a way that seems to expect more: “Skin thing. Seeing a dermatologist.”
He nods and goes back to the panel.
I look at my hands for another few seconds. Then I go back to work.
That night I stand in the shower and let the water run over me. The marks are everywhere now — arms, chest, back, legs, neck. My body is more marked than not. The three-line pattern repeats and repeats, at every angle, overlapping, layered. I look like a surface. Like a wall or a counter or a door.
The water runs off my shoulders and down my arms and I watch it pool around my feet. There is something in the water. Fine lines, dark and thin, like thread or like ink, running off my skin and swirling toward the drain.
I watch a line of water run down my forearm, carrying a dark trace with it, and where the water touches the shower wall it leaves a mark. A single thin score in the tile. Then another, parallel, a finger-width away. Then a third.
I pull my arm back. The three lines stay on the tile, sharp and clean, already dry.
I hold my hand up to the shower wall and press my palm flat against it. Water runs between my skin and the ceramic. When I lift my hand away, there are three new lines underneath, scored into the tile as if they’d always been there.
I stand in the shower for a long time. The water keeps running. The marks keep spreading — from me, off me, onto every surface the water touches. The shower walls. The glass door. The floor. Three lines, three lines, three lines, radiating outward from my body like something finally finding its way out.
I turn off the water. I dry off. I go to bed.
In the morning, the bathroom is covered. Every surface is marked — walls, floor, ceiling, mirror, door. Three-line clusters, hundreds of them, in every direction, overlapping until the room looks like the inside of something scratched hollow.
I brush my teeth. I get dressed. I go to work.