The Thirteenth Window

I first noticed it at the end of March.

Our Monday morning team meeting ran at ten o'clock and had always consisted of twelve people. Tadokoro, the project manager. Four backend engineers. Three frontend developers. Two designers. Then me, and one female intern. Twelve in total. The screen arranged us in a tidy grid of three columns and four rows. That was how it had always been. That was how it was supposed to stay.

That particular morning I had been recording my screen to compile the meeting minutes. When I replayed the footage that evening, my breath stopped for a moment. In the lower right corner of the grid, there was a thirteenth window. Small. Dark. It looked as though someone had switched off every light in a room and then sat down in front of a camera. The name displayed beneath it read "――――" — four hyphens, nothing more. Almost nothing was visible inside the frame. If pressed, I might have said there was something pale within the dense shadow. Something that could have been a face.

I dragged the scrubber back and watched that section again and again. The thirteenth window had been there from the moment the meeting began until the moment it ended. Not a single word spoken. The microphone icon was neither muted nor active — it simply did not exist. Nothing written in the chat. No record of anyone leaving. I sent Tadokoro a message on Slack: "There seems to have been an unknown participant in today's meeting — did you happen to notice?" His reply came back in a single line: "Huh, was there? Probably just your imagination."

The following Monday I printed out the participant list before the meeting started. Twelve icons lined up on my screen. I counted. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Good. The meeting began. Tadokoro started reviewing last week's progress. I glanced up from my notes and looked at the grid again. Thirteen. In the lower right corner, that dark window had returned. "――――". This time I was not watching a recording — it was there in real time. I nearly cried out. But no one said anything. Tadokoro went on talking without pause. Sayama from the backend team sipped his coffee with a look of mild boredom. Could it be that no one else could see it?

After the meeting I sent a direct message to everyone: "Did the call today seem to have thirteen participants?" Eleven replies came back. Every one of them said they thought there had been twelve. Only one person did not respond — Kirishima, one of the designers. Late that evening, a separate message arrived from her. "Hey. You can see it too, can't you?"

I called Kirishima on video. Through the screen she looked pale, with deep shadows under her eyes. "I noticed three months ago," she said. "At first I only caught it in recordings. But last week it started appearing in real time. Same as you, right?" I nodded. "What do you think it is?" She paused for a moment. "I don't know. But there's one thing that's been bothering me." She shared her screen — a recording from two weeks earlier. "Look at this," she said, and enlarged the thirteenth window. The pale shape within the dark shadow. It did carry the outline of a face. But the eyes, the nose, the mouth — none of them were where they should have been. What belonged in certain places was absent, and something occupied places where nothing should have been. I looked away. "I don't think we should look at it closely," I said. "I already have," she answered. Her voice was slightly farther away than it should have been.

I filed a report with the video conferencing platform's support team, explaining that an unknown user was appearing without showing up on the participant list. A reply arrived a few days later: "We were unable to reproduce the issue you described. The problem may lie with your local environment." I switched browsers. I switched applications. I switched devices. I moved from my laptop to a desktop, replaced the camera with a brand-new one, rebooted the router. None of it mattered. Every Monday morning, the thirteenth window appeared. Name: "――――". A wrong face inside a dark frame.

In the middle of April, Kirishima stopped coming to work. Her Slack status read "Away" and never changed. Tadokoro mentioned she was apparently unwell. I called her personal mobile. No answer. I sent messages. They were never marked as read. A week later, Tadokoro sent a notice to the whole team: "Kirishima has resigned for personal reasons." That was all. No farewell gathering, no final message — she was simply gone. I looked up her social media. The last update was dated April fourteenth. The final post was a single line: "I was looking out the window, and the window was looking back at me. But there are no windows here."

Through May, the thirteenth window kept coming. I stopped telling anyone. I had learned it was pointless, and besides, I had begun to notice something else — a kind of gravity that took hold whenever I became aware of that window, a pull that made it almost impossible not to keep looking. During meetings I fixed my eyes on Tadokoro's face. I buried myself in the minutes. I refused, absolutely, to look at the lower right corner. But last week, just once, I looked without meaning to.

The dark window was slightly larger than it had ever been before. And beneath the "――――" where there had previously been nothing, there was now something new. Small text. Something written. I could read it without zooming in. It was my name. My full name. With the reading in phonetic script beside it.

Today is Monday. The meeting starts in two hours. I am sitting at my laptop writing this, trying to arrange my thoughts by putting them into words. It is not working. Because since last night there has been something I cannot stop noticing. The video conferencing software is not open. And yet the lower right corner of my screen feels, somehow, dark.

I turned off the display. The room went dark. But in the lower right corner, faintly, I thought I could see something pale. I closed my eyes. Behind my closed eyelids, it was still there. As though it had always been there. As though it had been watching all along. And slowly, I am beginning to understand. The thirteenth window has not been joining our meetings. Our meetings have been showing inside the thirteenth window — and they always were, from the very beginning.