On-screen, his avatar turned. Its face was his face, but the mouth was stitched shut with red thread. It pointed down the hall. Toward his little sister’s room.

Then it raised a hand. In its palm: a tiny, blinking orange light. The same light the PS2’s disc drive made when it was about to open.

Leo lunged for the console’s power strip. He stomped the red switch.

Not off-black. The screen is dead black. Leo felt his pulse in his thumbs. He reached for the power cord, but the speakers crackled.

He’d found it at a garage sale that morning, buried under a pile of Madden ’02 and FIFA Street. The old man running the sale had just stared at it for a second, then waved Leo off. “Free, kid. Take it.”

It wore a gray PS2 memory card around its neck like a dog tag. Its face was the startup screen of Silent Hill 2 —just the static, the fog, the sense of something waiting.