I'm not good at it. I'm a guy with a habit and no tools who goes in through sliding doors when people are asleep, because people who are asleep don't call anybody. I've done it maybe twenty times. I take cash, pills, jewelry that fits in a pocket, and I'm out in six minutes, because after six minutes my hands start.

How I pick a house: no dog bowl on the porch, no porch light, two cars in the driveway, because two cars means two walets. That's the whole method.

The one on Fairview was a split-level with the slider off the back deck. Broomstick in the track, which comes out with a coat hangar in ten seconds. I was in the kitchen by one-fifteen.

The kitchen was wrong and it took me a second to see how. Every light was off except the one over the stove, which is normal, except somebody had taped the switch for it in the on position. Then the hallway. Nightlights. Not one by the bathroom like you'd have for a kid. One every six feet, the whole way down the hall and up the stairs, so the house was lit up like a runway.

I should have left. I know that. But the bedrooms are where the wallets are, and I was already starting to sweat, so I went up.

The kids' rooms were at the top of the stairs. Doors open, beds made, nobody in them. The carpet between those two doors and the door at the end of the hall was wore down to the backing in a path a foot wide, like a trail deer make. Outside the door at the end there was a bucket. The kind with a lid. I didn't open it.

And through the door I could hear them breathing.

Four people. I knew it was four before I saw them, because I could hear each one, and they were doing it together. In, and in, and in, and out. Nobody breathes like that asleep. You breathe like that when you're waiting for something and you've been waiting long enough to get good at it.

I opened the door.

They were all in the bed. Mom, dad, a girl maybe ten, a boy smaller than that, the four of them in the one bed, sitting up against the headboard with the covers to their chins and their arms around each other, all four of them awake, and none of them looked at me.

They were looking at the closet.

The dad looked at me. One look, up and down, the hoodie, the screwdriver, the sweat, the whole picture, the look you'd give a dog that got into the garage. It took about a second. Then he was back on the closet.

"You're not it," he said. "Get in or get out."

All I could hear was that he wasn't afraid of me, and I had never in my life walked into a room where I wasn't the worst thing in it, and the thing he was afraid of was six feet away behind a closet door with a kitchen chair wedged under the handle.

The handle was turning.

Slow. Down, and back up. Down, and back up. Not ratling, not forcing, nothing that would wake a neighbor. Just a handle being tried, over and over, by something on the other side that had all the time there was and not quite enough strength, and it had been doing it long enough that the brass was worn bright where the chair back touched it.

The boy said, "Is this one staying?"

The mom said, "Eyes front," and he put his eyes front.

I didn't decide anything. I was already starting to shake, the early kind, the kind I can still hide, and the slider was two floors down through a house lit up like a runway, and every piece of me that had kept me alive for two years of doing this said the bed. Not the door. The bed. That's where the people had been, every night, long enough to wear a path.

The dad lifted the covers on his side without looking at me.

I got in.

I got into a stranger's bed, in my shoes, with his kids between us, and he put the covers back over all of us and put his arm across the boy and onto my shoulder, and the mom reached across the girl and found my wrist and held it, and nobody said anything, and we all looked at the closet.

There were rules. I got them one at a time, whispered, over the next hour. Nobody gets up. Nobody looks away. If you have to go, you don't. If it stops, nobody moves. Especially if it stops.

The handle went down, and back up. Down, and back up.

Around three it stopped.

Nothing from the closet. No handle. No breathing but ours, and ours had gone quiet, four people and me holding one breath between us.

And that's when my body did what it does.

It starts in the hands. Then the sweat, all at once, like somebody opened a tap in my back. Then the legs. I've had it in jail, in a bus staion bathroom, in my mother's spare room with her sitting on the end of the bed, and not once have I been able to hold still through it, and the rule was nobody moves, and the thing in the closet was listening for exactly the sound I was about to make.

The dad felt it start. His arm went tight across the boy and his hand closed on my shoulder and pushed me flat. Then the mom. She let go of my wrist and got her whole arm over the girl and across my chest and leaned her weight on it. The two of them held me down through their own kids, hard, like you'd hold somebody through a fever, and the girl put her hand over my mouth without being told, and I shook, and the bed didn't.

They held me like that until the window got light. Nobody has held me that long since I was ten.

Sometime before light the handle started again. Down, and back up. I was glad of it. The mom took her arm back. The dad let go of my shoulder and patted it twice.

At seven he got up like it was nothing, and the kids got up, and there were waffles, and nobody said one word abuot any of it, and I ate four. The handle kept going the whole time.

On the way out I stopped at the bucket in the hall. I lifted the lid.

Phones. Dozens, cracked and dead, dust on the ones at the bottom, and the one on top still had a line of battery, and the lock screen was my mother's dog.

The dad was behind me with a dish towel.

"They always come in through the slider," he said.

My Printer Started Printing Maps of My House

At 3:06 in the morning, my printer turned itself on and printed a floor plan of my house.

I lived alone in a townhouse in Fort Collins, Colorado, and worked remotely as a GIS technician. My second bedroom was my office, so I had the usual collection of electronics in there: a wireless printer, my work computer, a router, and a robot vacuum that mapped the house as it cleaned.

The page that woke me up was sitting halfway out of the printer when I walked into the office.

It was crude, but unmistakable.

Kitchen.

Stairs.

Office.

Bedroom.

Someone had drawn the basic layout of my townhouse.

There was also a red square over the patio door.

My first thought was that someone from work had accidentally sent something to my printer. I deal with maps for a living, so it wasn't completely impossible.

I sent a picture to our IT department the next morning.

They checked.

Nothing had been sent through our system.

I changed my Wi-Fi password and unplugged the printer.

For two days, nothing happened.

Then I needed to scan a receipt.

I plugged the printer back in.

Before I even touched the controls, it started printing.

The second map was much better.

It showed my couch.

My dining table.

The desk in my office.

It even showed a dotted line leading from my bedroom downstairs to the coffee maker.

Two red circles had been drawn around the ground-floor windows.

That was when I called the police.

There wasn't much they could do.

Nobody had entered the house. Nothing had been stolen. There were no damaged locks or footprints.

They told me to document anything unusual and secure my network.

Then a third page printed.

This one scared me more than the others.

Beside the upstairs bedroom was:

7:42 — LEAVES

A line followed the exact route I normally took downstairs in the morning.

Bedroom.

Bathroom.

Kitchen.

Front door.

Someone wasn't just mapping the house.

They were mapping me.

I opened my router settings and started checking connected devices.

There was one I didn't recognize.

It was connected to an old guest network I'd created months earlier for friends and completely forgotten about.

The device name was generic enough to mean nothing.

What caught my attention was the signal strength.

It would suddenly become strong.

Then weak.

Then disappear.

Over the next few hours, I realized something else.

Whenever the connection became strong, there was usually a dark SUV parked across the street.

When the SUV left, the device disappeared.

I gave that information to the police.

They found the vehicle once, but there wasn't enough evidence at that point to search it.

So I started documenting everything.

That's when I discovered how much information my robot vacuum had actually collected.

I had always thought of it as a dumb appliance that knew where the furniture was.

It wasn't.

Its app contained a detailed map of the house.

Its obstacle camera had also captured images while navigating around furniture.

My account history showed a login from a device I didn't recognize.

Someone had accessed it.

They had my floor plan.

They had images from inside the house.

They could see where the furniture was.

And apparently, they knew when I usually left for work.

That night, I disconnected the townhouse from the internet.

Router off.

Guest network gone.

Printer still plugged in, but no Wi-Fi.

I put the printer on the floor beside me and waited.

At 1:20 a.m., its wireless indicator suddenly lit up.

The dark SUV was across the street.

Then the printer started.

A single sheet came out.

It showed my front door.

A black arrow pointed inward.

I called the police immediately.

Officers arrived before the SUV could leave.

The driver told them he was waiting for someone.

Eventually, investigators got enough evidence for a warrant.

They found several laptops in his possession.

One of them contained copies of the maps my printer had produced.

It also contained images downloaded from my robot vacuum.

But mine wasn't the only house.

There were files from six different homes.

Police determined that he had obtained compromised smart-home credentials and looked for houses where only one person appeared to live.

He used unsecured or forgotten guest networks whenever possible.

The maps weren't meant to scare people.

They were reconnaissance.

He was learning entrances, windows, room layouts and daily routines before physically approaching the houses.

There was one folder on his computer called:

CONFIRMATION

Inside were photographs taken after each set of maps had been sent.

They were apparently used to confirm that the person still lived there and that the house layout matched the data.

There were several pictures of my townhouse.

One showed my kitchen window.

Another showed the patio door.

Then police showed me the last one.

It was me.

I was standing in my upstairs office holding the second map the printer had produced.

The photograph had been taken through the window.

But the angle was wrong for someone standing on the street.

The police checked the property.

The only place that angle made sense from was inside my fenced patio.

So sometime after sending me those maps, he hadn't just been watching from his SUV.

He had already crossed the fence.

He had already been standing against my house.

And while I was staring at a piece of paper trying to figure out how someone knew the layout of my home...

he was outside taking a picture of me reading it.

If you prefer narrated horror, there’s an audio version of this story on TRIFILIM. You can find the channel through my profile.