The Empty Socket

Short Fiction by Abram Dress

The metallic scrape of Janice’s key turning in the deadbolt usually sounded like a welcome home, a final punctuation mark on a long commute. Tonight, it was a hollow clang swallowed by an unusual, oppressive darkness. She looked up. The porch was black. The light was out.

“Fine,” Janice thought as she stepped into her home, slipping off her work heels and dropping her briefcase. Just a burnt-out bulb.

The next morning, armed with a ladder and a fresh 60-watt LED, she investigated the porch light. It wasn’t burnt out. The socket was empty. The bulb had been deliberately removed.

Janice felt a tiny prickle of unease. Not stolen—it was a cheap bulb—but deliberately removed. Someone had walked up her driveway, climbed two steps, and unscrewed it. She dismissed it as a bizarre, one-off prank and screwed the new, bright white LED into place. She remembered the flyer the mailman had left last month: “Neighborhood Watch Alert: Increase in Petty Vandalism and Garage Break-ins.”

Two days later, she returned home from a late gym session. The porch was dark. Her chest tightened. The new bulb was gone.

It wasn’t a random theft. It was a message. A taunt: “I was here. I can come and go as I please. And you can’t prove it.” The manipulation felt familiar. She rubbed her forearm that still hurt from the break two years ago. The last time Jake had played games, she had ended up in the emergency room. Was Jake back in town? Despite the restraining order?

Janice didn’t sleep well that night. The next morning, she walked across the lawn to her next-door neighbor Terry’s house.

“Hi, Terry, sorry to bother you,” Janice said, trying to sound casual. “Have you seen anyone messing with my porch lately? There have been some break-ins nearby, and now this.”

Terry gave her a tight, polite smile. “Strange? No, Janice. Why, are the squirrels getting to your bird feeder again?”

“It’s my porch light,” Janice forced the words out. “Someone keeps stealing the bulb.”

“Weird. Is it that asshole boyfriend of yours? Or maybe someone local you’ve been chatting up?”

“No,” Janice said, forcing a casual tone. “His case manager says he’s out of town. I check every day.”

“Still, you should look at a security system. And we’ll keep an eye on things.”

Janice smelled the lie under Terry’s Este Lauder perfume. Of course Terry would recommend a security system; her husband Leo sold them.

“Thank you.”

The ritual repeated twice more. This wasn’t a criminal looking for opportunity—this was a manipulator looking for control. They weren’t taking her belongings; they were taking her peace of mind.

After the fourth theft she went straight to the Guardian Systems store. She described the problem, but Leo already knew the details.

“Probably just the standard package for a vandal like that,” Leo smiled. “For you, discounted to five-hundred bucks.”

Janice smiled back, her flirtiest grin, but her voice was tight. “How about the professional package, with extra interior cameras? I also need coverage in the main living space. They remove the lightbulb, Leo. They’re playing a game.”

“Alright. The ‘Sentinel’ package,” Leo said with a wink. “Excellent remote access and tamper alerts. If they’re playing a game, the Sentinel will win. Creeps hate being watched.”

“Yeah, he is a creep.” Janice liked Leo. More than she should. “Terry told me to come straight to you. She said you always take care of the neighbors.”

Janice left with the sophisticated system and installed all four cameras. She set the exterior one high on the eaves for a perfect, unblinking view. Let the creep play his little game. She had finally put a referee on the field.

The next morning, the porch light was there. That evening, it was still there... Janice felt a smug sense of victory.

But on Friday night, as she pulled into the driveway, her headlights cut through the familiar, sickening blackness. The porch was dark.

“Got you, asshole,” she thought.

She ran inside, slammed and bolted the front door, and ripped open the security app on her laptop. She navigated to the event log. Motion detected at 3:17 p.m. Motion cleared at 3:18 p.m. She tapped the video feed for the porch.

The footage showed the empty porch for twenty seconds, then followed by a sudden, jarring cut. The screen went blank, showing a corrupted file error code. When the feed flickered back to life four minutes and eight seconds later, it showed the empty socket in high definition. No figure, no flash of a hand, no shadow. Just a gaping, edited hole where the proof should have been. The manipulator hadn’t been deterred; they had adapted. They knew the system and had flawlessly overwritten the file.

Janice’s fingers shook as she pulled up the logs for the interior cameras. She found it instantly: short, sporadic gaps—three to ten seconds long—in the hallway and living room footage from the last forty-eight hours. No motion alerts, no system errors. Just tiny, precise cuts, suggesting an unseen presence that knew exactly when to pause the feed, always out of sight.

The person hadn’t just taken the light; they had erased the memory of the act and proved they were already inside.

She stood paralyzed, her brain cycling through impossible scenarios. “It’s him. It has to be him. I knew he was close.”

She took a step toward the front door, then stopped. What if he was trying to manipulate her to leave the safety of her house?

She flew through the house, checking the back door, the kitchen window—all secure, all mocking her with their useless locks. Where was safe?

The bedroom. Her inner sanctum.

She bolted into the room, slammed the door shut, and leaned her weight against it, fighting to regulate her ragged breath. She grabbed the solid, heavy lamp from the bedside table, ready to use it as a weapon. She was so disoriented. She needed light, a solid point of visual certainty. She reached for the switch, but her fingers froze barely an inch away.

Her vision swam, focused in the darkness on the small, empty fixture of her familiar bedside lamp. The bulb was gone.

The violation was no longer outside. It was here, inches from her pillow.

A cold ribbon of air snaked across the back of her neck. She didn’t reach for her phone. She didn’t move.

“Stupid bitch, you were so easy,” a cruel voice whispered.

Janice gasped as the knife pierced her back. She breathed a hint of Este Lauder.

As Janice fell, Terry hissed, “You’ll leave him alone now.” She twisted the knife. “Won’t you?”

–END