I

People at their most vulnerable help me get my rocks off. There is no way to pretty that up in the slightest, so I don't intend to.

It started years ago when I found cam girls on the internet. I could interact with them, pay them, demand certain sexual poses from them for the money, but at a certain point, that felt too similar to regular pornography. It wasn't enough. There wasn't any kind of risk to it. I might as well hire a prostitute. I wanted the real deal. I wanted the amateur quality that you can't get out of porn or cam girls. I wanted reality. Vulnerability. A person's essence. I wanted to know them better than anyone else. It's really quite beautiful.

So, I took the huge windfall of cash after my father's passing and bought an apartment complex with wide hollow walkways hidden within the walls for maintenance workers to shimmy through. Perfect.

I renovated the place, making the hidden walkways more comfortable, drilling holes in the ceiling over every bedroom, setting up surveillance equipment. I would have people paying me to prey on them. Within six months after the initial purchase of the property, I was able to begin looking over applicants. The first several were families or single men. I pondered as to whether or not I should shred these applications but figured it may look strange if the entire complex was occupied by single women. I did not want to draw any attention. The background checks and paperwork were easy enough.

Ten rooms. Two of them with single women. One blonde. One red head. I watched them when they showered. I watched them when they would get ready for work. I watched them when they slept sometimes. It was orgasmic. The sheer pleasure I received from looking upon their still forms while they lay in their beds is beyond description. That was the beginning, really. Then I moved on. They bored me. Of course, I moved on to the men. Then the families. Don't get your panties in a bunch, you freaking saints. I never watched the children shower or use the bathrooms. I never watched the children sleep. They were strictly off limits.

But the things that men do, and yes, it's mostly the men that do it, are lots of fun to watch. When they believe they are entirely alone, and they strip themselves down to their skivvies and click over into the incognito mode on their phones or computers. Some of them like to look at the strangest things. Delightful. It may make your skin crawl, but it makes mine ripple and quiver.

I’d taken up in one of the units. The only one on the very top floor. It was a nice place. I'd had the workers take all the walls down so that I had one massive floor to myself. One corner had my desktop with the monitors. When I wasn't squeezed into the walls or ceilings of my tenant's living quarters, I was sitting there. I made sure that the door to my unit was very secured with its many locks.

Then that urge I've lived with my entire life came back. Looking in on those people was no longer enough. I exercised my right as their landlord to check in on the units while they were away. Sometimes I would eat cereal out of their cabinets or curl up in their beds. The smell of these strangers was intoxicating. I wanted to swallow their sheets and choke on them. I wanted to strip down and have them walk in on me with my birthday suit entirely exposed to them. How delightful.

I hid in the red head's bedroom closet. She was messy, using the closet sparingly, instead opting to drop her articles on the floor like some mish mash rug of sporadic clothing. I stayed in there for two days without her knowing it, using one of her tall leather boots as a waste receptacle. I am sure she will find it soon enough. How delightful.

I stole one of the male tenants’ cats. He notified me of it, and I responded that we had a zero-tolerance policy on pets. He dropped the issue immediately, stuttering something about how he was just cat sitting. Don't worry. I keep the cat in my fish tank.

Sometimes I take the blonde's tennis shoes and wear them around town. I know I'll be caught one day. I know it, but don't care. That's a part of the allure, don't you understand? It's so delightful.

For about the last week, I'd taken a hiatus from tormenting my tenants from the shadows. My unit needed to be cleaned as I'd been so entirely preoccupied on this titillating hobby of mine. I wiped the dried fluids off the underside of my desk. I mopped and did my laundry. The strong smell of freshly cut onions stuffed beneath my arms had begun to follow me everywhere I'd go. A well-respected landlord of this little community couldn't be going about like that, now could he?

I found a camera lens in the drain of my shower. It was something I'd almost missed, but it was there. It shined, peeking at me from the little metal cross section in the drain. Strange. I had never implemented any surveillance in my own unit.

The demo of the shower was quick work. I removed the plastic tub and found that the camera was attached to all manner of wiring underneath. They ran into the walls and upon further inspection, I found that one of the wires ran the length of the wall in my unit until it exited the inside of the wall again through a hole I'd never noticed before. The wire ran directly into the back of my computer. I'd never seen the port. It wasn't ethernet. It wasn't USB. I couldn't find anything online about the kind of wire I was dealing with at all. I rebooted the computer and found a program on the desktop I'd never seen before. It pulled up a video feed.

There was gaunt sickly man sitting in a swivel chair at a desk with too many monitors. The camera was peering in at him from somewhere behind. I lifted my arm over my head while looking at the monitor. The man in the feed did the same.

It was me.

I moved across the room, watching the man in the feed mimic my motions. Where was that damned camera? It took a little trial and error and a lot of me looking back at the monitor to see where I was relative to the camera angle, but I eventually found the thing snugly tucked away in the vent on the wall opposite the desk. It was well beyond my understanding of tech. The camera was no larger than my thumb.

The small camera smashed into a thousand tinier pieces as I pelted it against the wall. The speakers at my desk squeaked and I dashed back over to the desk, sitting in my swivel chair. The screen was black now. I alt f4-ed out of the program and it stuttered before closing.

I then went to the surveillance program I used on my tenants and clicked it open. All of the monitors came to life at once with live video feed from the units below. Eyes stared back at me from all of them.

In shock and awe, I reared back in the chair and flipped onto the floor. Slowly, I crept back over the edge of the desk to look at the feed. They were dead eyes. No. They were never alive. They were all mannequins. Motionless, porcelain white skin, staring through those illusive cameras I'd set up. I moved to the nearest window and peeked out through the blinds. The complex's parking lot was empty except for my own blue Mazda.

I shut the computer off, trying to get my breathing under control.

After staring at the blank screens for about an hour, I decided to physically check in on my tenants. Apartment after apartment. Nothing but frozen mannequins. Some of them were pressed against spots that I knew had hidden cameras, some of them were in the middle of daily routines they would never finish. One stood over a plate of scrambled eggs at a kitchen counter. Another lay in bed with their eyes staring directly up into the ceiling.

I retreated back to my unit, being sure to secure every single lock in the door. I turned the computer back on and clicked from camera to camera. Every single mannequin was gone.

Instead there was a message scrawled on paper and placed in front of each of the cameras. The word repeated in every frame, in every frame.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Hi. Was all it said.

My stomach churned. My mouth was dry. The familiar smell of thick sweat broke out. This was not delightful.

II

I skittered away from the desk and ran through my apartment unit, searching the vents for cameras. There was an audio recording device attached to the back of my TV, there was a camera in one of the cereal boxes in the cabinetry above the sink, there was a strange metallic thing inside of my pillowcase. I collapsed back into my swivel chair, exhausted. Looking over the innumerable wires and mics and lenses lying haphazardly over the desk rained a futile disposition down on me. This wasn't all of them. This wasn't even the tip of the iceberg. It seemed that everywhere I looked had some new surveillance device hidden. How long had they been there? How long had my tenants been spying on me?

Without even thinking, I threw the mess of wires off the desk, allowing everything to clatter to the floor. I unplugged my computer and monitors then double checked the locks on my door. They were secure. This was fine. Everything was fine. No one was going to burst into my room and force me onto my knees at gunpoint. No one was going to tie me up and murder and burgle me. Everything was fine.

I settled into my chair and rolled over to the window once again, staring out at the apartment complex's parking lot. Still, the only car there was mine.

Nighttime was approaching and the shadows in my apartment went long. I microwaved some ramen and sat at the window, watching, waiting. At some point, one of the tenants would pull into the parking lot and set my worried mind at ease. Isn't this the thing that I'd always wanted? No, of course not. The thrill of being caught was something always in the back of my mind, sure, but not this. I never intended to actually be found out! This was too much. I slurped my noodles and stayed sentry at the window.

No splash of headlights over the ground beneath the window, no straggling tenants, nothing but birds fluttering among the trees lining the parking lot. Silence. Then the hooting of an owl. I wasn't sure it was there at all then it hooted again. There was an owl sitting directly to the left of the window, perched outside on the ledge lining the bottom of the window. I stared it. It spun its head totally around and stared at me. I slurped another noodle as it watched me. We maintained this staring contest for quite some time before it decided to make another noise. It hooted. I sat the bowl of noodles to the side and opened the window, putting out my hand. The owl hopped closer to me, still staring at me. There was something about its eyes. It blinked and the camera lenses inside of its head refocused. My heart skipped a beat and I reached for my bowl of hot noodles, throwing the bowl at the owl. The bowl bounced off of the wall of the outside of the building. The owl dove from the ledge and pushed the air beneath it with its stunning wings before spasming and falling to the ground.

I watched the still form of the outstretched bird below apprehensively.

Grabbing a kitchen knife and holding it close to my chest, I scampered down the stairs, taking them three or four at a time. I exited the building, searching the dark ground for the dead bird. I found it and dragged it by a wing to one of the overhanging lights speckling the sides of the complex. I flipped the thing over and hunkered down over its corpse, prying its eyes open with the kitchen knife. They were cameras. I dug at the side of one of its eyes with the tip of the knife, attempting to dislodge the camera inside of its skull. The sound of the knife against the insides of the bird’s face made a metal scraping sound, affirming my thoughts that this bird was some kind of new age spy drone. That's what it was. That explains it. Delightful.

I popped the camera out with a satisfying clank of the mechanical gears shifting and pulled the ball lens out of its socket.

"Oh goddamn!" I looked up and saw an older man with wispy hair standing on the sidewalk. He wore shorts and carried two jogger's weights, one in each hand. He wiped his forehead with his arm and sent the sweatband their rubber-banding off his head. I stood and began to approach him with the knife at my side. I wanted to ask him if he was one of the people spying on me but as I walked towards him, he dropped the weights and broke into a full sprint down the sidewalk.

"Come back!" I called after him. He was lost immediately by the dark night.

I returned to the unmoving bird and withdrew the camera from its skull and an endless cord came with it. I sliced the cord and took the camera with me as I returned to the complex.

Quickly, I moved back into the building and ascended the stairs until I came to the top floor where I saw my door ajar. My whole body was cold.

The walls were covered in sticky notes. They all said the same thing. Hi.

I swiped the notes away with the flats of my hands.

The owl seems to have left some oily residue on my clothes from me messing around in its internal mechanisms. I'll have to get myself cleaned up. How delightful.

III

I wandered through my apartment, sure that my tenants had been playing some cruel joke on their helpless landlord. How terrible. How crude. How dare they?

In a game of cat and mouse where I had assumed the role of the cat, I was suddenly feeling smaller and smaller in this macabre game of shifting rules. Looking over the sticky notes I'd knocked to the floor, I noticed something strange. They all seemed to have been written in the same style, meaning that a single person had set to the arduous task of writing the word 'hi' thousands of times. What kind of sick mind would do this? I had to laugh at myself on that thought. My sick mind would have, wouldn't it have? I've never been normal. The thought that I had totally lost touch with reality was not beyond me, but that was the very reason I was sure I'd not spilled my marbles. Of course not.

All I had to do was sit and think about what my next moves would be. Did I even have any? The expansive top floor of the apartment complex began to feel as though it was shrinking all around me and so I concentrated on my breathing and participated in something approximating meditation, but it was hard doing what with all of the notes staring at me. I moved through the apartment, sweeping the notes off the walls and floors into a large trash bag. They were even all over the inside of my fridge. Was it a real possibility that I had written them and forgotten? No way. I would not even allow myself to fall into the spiraling pit of paranoia that would send me into. Of course, I had not. Of course, they had cameras everywhere. I need only to pull the owl's eye out of my pocket to be sure of that.

As I was cleaning up the apartment and berating myself for being such a sick pervert, music began to play all around me. Subtle at first but growing in measure. I touched my hand to the walls and felt the drywall vibrating. There must have been speakers in the damned walls. It was some jazz number with piping horns and wild piano, but it never grew to the point that I would call it unsettling or torture. If anything, I would have called the music calming.

"Alright you bastards!" I screamed at the walls, "You've had your fun! Now come out and face me!" The music coming from the walls began to swell mildly in response. "A man is not your puppet! I am not your goddamn plaything! I'm not." The last two words fell out of my mouth as though I weren't the one saying them at all and as they hung there in the air before me, I was confronted with the thing I'd known all along. This was revenge. I'd known it of course.

"Oh yeah?" I asked. I moved to the kitchen and picked up the meat tenderizer hanging on the rack there. I pivoted and swung the hammer-thing into the wall, smashing a great big hole into the drywall. Wires and metal fragments spilled from the wall as though I'd sliced open the gut of a pig. The circuitry was a sight to behold. Thick silicone wrapped around thin wires of all colors. I stepped from the wall and moved to my bed in the great big single room.

The jazz played over my cries of desperation so that even I could barely hear them.

Then came a familiar noise by the window next to the bed. A bird. I moved across the bed on all fours and swept the curtain of the window out of the way, exposing a group of the flying creatures hovering outside of the window without moving their wings. Some among the ranks were owls, sure, but there were also blue jays and robins and hummingbirds. All of their beaks were open unnaturally wide. That same hip jazz number bellowed out of their shallow metal bellies in a rattling cacophony.

"Hi." Came a voice from the bird-speakers. My own voice.

I remained in shock, unsure of what to say in response to this totally fantastical display.

"You, no doubt, are wondering why this is happening to you. Why would this terrible fate befall such a stand-up member of society?" A pause where I am sure the voice stifled laughter. "Don't you think it's all so delightful?"

*

I don't remember very much of how I came to this place. It's so totally dark here and if there are any walls to this room, they are so far out of my sight that I've never seen them. No windows. Just a desk with a multitude of monitors and a chair that I am strapped in forevermore. I have access to anywhere on the internet. I can watch anything I want. But there is a program on this computer that has a video feed that I am so often drawn to.

The feed has a gaunt looking man illuminated by a multitude of monitors. He looks sickly. He has no eyelids, and he watches something in front of him endlessly. No matter how often I click off of the feed, I am always pulled back to it.

I can't stop watching him.

He can't stop watching me.

Delightful.