Chapter 3

He wasn’t going to traumatize the army of teens N1ghtm4re had at his disposal. On the off-chance that all of this was real and it wasn’t just in his head, Aaron wanted to be careful. With an unsteady hand, he wrote. 

“Jamie Bains.
On Tuesday 14th at 21:42, ends his stream early saying he feels tired.
He then lies down in bed and suffers a fatal heart attack.”

Aaron’s head was swimming. His head was swimming. He didn’t know what had possessed him to write that. What he thought would happen. All this wasn’t real anyway, was it? So why did he feel nauseous? Why did he feel terrified? He looked at the stream. 21:41. N1ghtm4re seemed fine, currently making fun of a picture of someone on Twitter, saying something about how he “could always tell”, whatever that meant. 

He picked up the phone and paced back and forth. The clock ticked over to 42. Nothing happened. Aaron looked at the phone for a few seconds longer and then let out a barking laugh. Of course it hadn’t been real. Relief washed over him like a cold shower, and he shook his head, laughing at how silly he’d been to think for a second that the notebook had been the real thing. Something in his gut had told him that writing down that name would have major consequences, but gut feelings, famously, could be wrong. 

He stood up and walked to his door. He was going to grab a coke from the fridge, doomscroll for a bit, and then probably pass out and get up early the next day to do some studying. He’d almost reached the door when he realized his phone was still on his desk. 

“I think I’m going to call it an early night, guys,” Jamie Bains said on the little screen, and Aaron’s veins turned to ice. “I’m getting kinda tired.” Then the phone went quiet. Aaron bolted across the room and snatched up his phone. The little clock at the top of the screen seemed to dare him to refute it. Like it was mocking him. 

21:42.

No. Nononononononono. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck. What?! Fuck!

Aaron stared at the screen. N1ghtm4re’s chat was full of concerned chat messages asking him if he was okay, but the stream itself was dead. “Offline. Stream has ended.” There was no way, right? That had to have been a coincidence. 

You know that’s a statistical improbability.

He rubbed his face again, hoping that maybe if he rubbed it enough his whole face would come off and this would all prove to be some kind of weird dream. But dreams weren’t this coherent, were they? 

This isn’t coherent. This is completely outlandish. I’m losing my mind.

But he felt like he had never been more sane. Every thought burned itself across his brain in glowing white letters, a splinter in his mind. Something was wrong. Was it him? Was it the universe? He looked at the Death Note. It was still, completely unassuming on his desk. There was no dark evil pull, no malicious energy emanating from it. Just a little notebook, open on the first page.

Okay. 

Okay. 

He looked at his phone and went over to N1ghtm4re’s Twitter account. Maybe there was something on his timeline? If he tweeted something, that meant he was still alive. Streamers usually did shoutouts, right? Like a “thanks for stream everyone” type thing. Clicking through until he found the account, he quickly scrolled down. It was 21:51.

There was one tweet. “9s ago”. The breath of relief got stuck in Aaron’s throat. He almost choked. 

“Everyone,
Jamie was just rushed to the hospital. Everyone please pray for a speedy recovery.”

Aaron dropped the phone, immediately realized that no amount of dramatic slow motion was able to pay for a new phone, and caught it with his other hand. For a brief moment, he felt very cool, then a little disappointed realizing nobody had seen him do it, and then giggled hysterically because he had managed to get caught up in the idea of looking cool when he might have just killed someone. He froze. 

The breath stuck in his throat had evolved into a lump. He had just killed someone. He had just taken an action, and that action had led to the death of another human being. This always seemed so much simpler in films and anime and books. He always wondered what it would’ve been like to kill someone, had always rolled his eyes when someone broke down crying just because they’d saved their own lives instead of relief over having survived something, or feeling triumphant. 

Aaron didn’t feel very triumphant. He felt sick, to his very core. He understood. He’d just killed someone, hadn’t he. Pacing the length of his apartment, scenarios ran through his head. Well, there was no proof he had anything to do with any of this. This wasn’t going to come back to haunt him. He held the notebook in one hand, his phone in the other.

Wasn’t it?

He remembered something else from the show. About the previous owners of the Death Notes. If what he had just done had actually just happened, then the other thing was also going to happen. And he was terrified. Everything he knew about the world… it was all about to come crashing down around him. 

There was a shadow in the corner of his room that hadn’t been there before. He could see it just in the periphery of his vision, and he didn’t want to look at it, didn’t want to acknowledge it. Because he knew what it was, and he didn’t want to think about it. 

There was a shadow in the corner of his room, and it smiled.

For the second time that night, Aaron ran, too out of breath to scream.