There’s nothing more terrifying than the feeling of being watched. At least with horrible monsters, you know the extent of the horror based on their image. There is, however, a deep-seated fear within us all. Fear of the unknown, the mysterious, the unfathomable, unseen horror that lurks just beyond where you cannot see with your eyes.
The presence of cameras should come as a comfort against that horror. They show you, hopefully for the better, what the thing is lurking around the corner. They show you areas you cannot see, thus there shouldn’t be any fear of being seen by something you cannot see. This is all to say, cameras take away that fear. What is that fear replaced by then, when the cameras begin watching you?
I’m working this summer as an intern in an office, not a cubical farm by any means, the offices are separated from one another down one hallway. The hallway has two glass doors at either end, both lead outside. There’s also a large conference room towards one end of the office, right next to one of the doors leading outside.
Most of the time, me and my fellow intern are alone in the office. Ever since working from home became a big thing, other co-workers don’t show up nearly as often, while the two of us are required to come in. While this was a little aggravating at first, it’s actually been great. There’s no one to come in and tell us what to do, we can work at our own pace, and we can generally do whatever we want. This is within reason, of course, we’re still expected to do our work. Usually, this translates to working hard for a bit, goofing off for a bit, but still meeting the deadlines the company has set out for us. I usually come in the morning at 8 AM, this gives me some time to get coffee and get settled in before starting work.
The office has also gotten into setting up cameras around the place. There was already one pointing at the parking lot out the back door of the building, just to see if someone tries to break in. It also served the purpose of finding out who didn’t lock the door when they were the last ones out of the building. It’s mostly used for the latter, tracking them down and telling them about the importance of keeping the office space locked. Other than that camera though, there are cameras sitting around the office space. The company is only testing them for right now. Instead of drilling holes in the walls to mount them, they decided it would be better to set them up and see if they work well before actually putting them up. The cameras are sitting on top of buckets, and they are pointed around various angles.
As you enter through the back door, you’re immediately in a hallway that leads to the front door. The back door leads out to the parking lot behind the building. If you turn immediately left, there’s a short hall, about twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide, that leads to another door. I don’t ever go in there, it’s a rental space that the company rents out to another company, I don’t know the details. Going forward, the hallway that leads from the back to the front is about a hundred feet long and similarly about fifteen feet wide. The office has dotted along either side of the walls doors into office spaces for different people. On the left wall, the rooms are as follows from the first door to the last door:
Storage room, break room, hallway that leads to restrooms and warehouse, office.
Similarly, the right side is as follows:
Manager’s office, office, office, conference room.
It’s also worth mentioning that the hallway where the restrooms are down is about five feet wide, and fifteen feet long. It ends in another door with a small window in it that leads to another office space connected to a warehouse. There’s usually only one guy that works in there, and he pops over every so often.
The conference room is where me and my fellow intern, we’ll call him John, do most of our work. We have company-provided laptops that we do our work on and we just sit at the big table, our screens away from the door. John usually gets into the office at 9 AM, an hour after I arrive.
Now, about the cameras, let me tell you where all of them are.
The first camera was to the left of the back door, down the hallway as you enter, aimed at the back door. The second was further in the center hallway, aimed from the outside of the second office towards the front door, could see the hallway leading to the restrooms and the front door. The third was settled across from the second, at the corner of the office leading to the restrooms, it could see the three offices on the right side of the office, and the storage room and break room on the other side. It also had a good view of the backdoor. This one I could see from where we sat in the conference room. The last one was situated outside the conference room and aimed at the front door.
All of these cameras had a small camera feed in the storage room that could be connected via USB. They were constantly recording, and all of the data was saved to the cloud on a daily basis. Anyone could look at the camera feed by plugging in a device to it, so it was pretty handy to people inside the office.
The first day this happened was a day like any other day of the week. It was a Wednesday, John and I had been working on an application for the company for the past couple of weeks, and we were just chatting. I was about to break from my laptop to go get lunch, and when I looked up from where I sat, and out into the hallway, I saw the camera. The camera had been sitting atop the bucket of paint, like normal, except the camera had been turned to face down the hallway towards the other office’s door.
I stared at it for a few moments, a chill running down my spine. I looked over at John, I had been sitting next to him since 9 AM, but asked anyway, “Did you move that?” I pointed at the camera.
John looked up and over at the office camera, “No, I didn’t”.
We both stared, dumbfounded at the camera that had seemingly moved by itself. My mind fired off explanations for this occurrence but was struggling to come up with anything coherent. Eventually, I landed on the idea that the other guy from the next office dropped by and bumped the bucket. He doesn’t park in the same parking lot, so it would make sense why we wouldn’t know he was there.
I glanced up and down the hallway. Nobody was by the front door, and nobody was by the back door. All of the offices were closed and locked, no cars were in the parking lot save for mine and John’s. We were alone, like normal, but it didn’t feel like it anymore. I went over to the camera. It was just sitting there, turned to face the wrong way. I reached down with my hand and spun it back to face the proper direction. I walked down the hall to the break room and got my lunch ready.
After that, nothing happened for a little while, the next couple of days were pretty normal. The next thing happened after the weekend, on Monday. I was in at 8 AM again, and I was alone. John hadn’t arrived yet, and I was sitting in the conference room, nursing a cup of coffee and trying to get a little work done. It was about 8:45 when I heard a noise. It sounded like a light scraping. When I looked, I was startled to see the camera again, except time instead of pointing down the hall to the restrooms, it was pointed directly at me. I stared into its beady little red dot, and it stared right back at me. This time it was even more hair-raising, I was certain I was alone, and John was not here to move it. I didn’t hear the other office door open or close either. I stood up and walked to the door of the conference room, I glanced up and down the office again, but no one was there. I reached down, spun the camera back into position, and kept looking over my shoulder as I walked back into the conference room.
If this was some kind of prank, it was elaborate and well done. I thought it would be a good idea to go check the camera feed, to see if I could tell who was moving the camera. I brought my company laptop into the storage room, set it up, and plugged it in via a USB cord.
The camera feed was live, it was aimed properly down the hallway after I moved it. When I started my internship they walked us through how to operate the cameras and told us there are a few seconds of delay between real life and the live feed. I clicked through the application to find the saved recordings. I found the date that matched today and clicked on it. It popped open a new window in front of the live camera feed with a fifty-minute video. I clicked through the hour and watched the camera feed of the problem camera. I could see myself in the start entering, dropping off my lunch, heading to the conference room, etc. From there it was silence until around forty-five minutes in. I heard the same scrape I had when I was in the office but through the camera feed. There I was, sitting in the conference room, I looked up at the same time the scrape stopped and the camera feed cut over.
I saw myself get up, walk over to the camera, and turn it back to normal. Then I saw myself walk into the storage room with my laptop, where the video ended assumedly because I accessed the feed. I stood back dumbfounded, there was nothing else in the feed, but something had to have moved the camera. I remembered last week when the same thing happened and closed the window to see if I could look at last Wednesday’s recording.
The first thing I noticed was that the lights around the office were blinking in the live feed. They were beginning to fade, then jumped back to life repeatedly within a few seconds of one another. Then I noticed something else,
there was someone on the live feed.
I looked down the hallway, just outside of the room I was in, and there was a person peeking around the corner that lead to the other office space by the back door. It wasn’t a natural kind of peeking, as natural as that can be. Their head was perpendicular to the wall they were peeking around, at a strange 90-degree angle. Where the head was, was unnaturally tall, seven feet above the ground. The thing had long black hair that drooped down to the floor, longer than seven feet, it made almost a pool of black tangled mess. The most terrifying thing of all, however, is that it couldn’t be mistaken for a human. The thing didn’t have a face.
In place of a face, eyes, nose, a mouth, it had the large black lens of a dome camera instead. In the center blazed a large red LED light, blinking on and off, staring down the long hallway towards the room I was in. Even in broad daylight, it was hard to tell what it was with the blinking lights. The lights above made it almost disappear when they went out, save for the red light which still blinked out of rhythm with the ones above.
I recoiled from the laptop. It was all I could do to just stand there and watch. I was too afraid to leave, too afraid to run, too afraid to even move. I looked back at the door, then back at the screen. Its head began to move. The red light disappeared as it creaked back behind the corner, its long mess of hair dragging on the floor behind it. It disappeared, the lights stopped blinking, and it was quiet. I stepped over to the door, peeked out, and nothing peeked back. I slid along the wall and peeked around the corner the thing I saw was standing, nothing.
I was well, and thoroughly freaked out at this point, I started whipping my head all around the hall to see if there were any other people. I was still alone in the office space.
I went back into the storage room, and accessed the camera again, this time looking at the other camera it had to be standing in front of while it was peeking. Nothing, no person peeking around the corner, not a car driving in the parking lot, absolutely nothing. I abandoned my laptop where it sat and walked back out into the hallway, checking around once more. The cameras were all pointed properly, all on and recording. I froze in my tracks and heard the back door open. I yelled out loud as I looked.
“You alright man?” It was John, and it was 9 AM.
I took comfort in having another human being there, and I eventually calmed back down. After explaining everything, John tried to reassure me that there was nothing inside the building and that there must be some reasonable explanation. It worked to calm me for a while, but after moving the cameras back into position, it didn’t stop me from checking. I moved the camera feed as well, from inside the storage room, to inside the conference room. I did this just in case I needed to quickly check. Every so often I would just hook it up to my phone and cycle through all the cameras, to see if something moved. Constantly streaming the camera feed was hell on my battery life, but it was worth it to make sure.
Then the end of the day came.
John usually arrives later and leaves earlier than me. He has a second job he usually runs to at around 2 PM, but we were happy for such flexibility in an internship. This usually means that I’m alone again after that time between 2 and 5. It’s when the sun gets a little lower, the quiet gets a little more eerie, like being in a liminal space. Maybe in the morning, you’re just too tired to care about how alone you are. At night, your senses tend to think a bit for themselves. You become hyper-aware of sounds and draw macabre conclusions about the circumstances. Then you write it off as just being paranoid. There’s something different about a place when you feel like you shouldn’t be there, something deeply unsettling.
By the end of the day, it was raining. Darkness ate the light outside and you could hear the clap of thunder after a brief flash of bolts across the sky. Rain should be comforting when you work, a relaxing patter ran across the windows of the conference room as I typed away. I was paranoid now, however, that comfort for me was damaged by an incessant need to look up towards the door.
That paranoia had its own curiosity though. I remembered last Wednesday, the first time I noticed the cameras moved. I accessed the cloud recordings of the day on my phone and looked at that first day when the camera was turned towards the other office. As lightning flashed, the feed pulled up. A dull rumble went through the room as I swiped my finger over the time, looking for something, anything.
I found what I was looking for. There was someone in the small window leading into the other office. The lights began to blink in the office space beyond the door as they did over here the first time I saw the creature. In between the pulses, there was a single red light visible in the window. When the lights came back on, it was there, the thing with the camera face. It peeked through the small window connecting the two offices. The lights continued to pulse in the office, it just stood there for a short while.
Finally, it moved, between one of the pulses I saw its head move THROUGH the door. Its body was half stuck in between the two offices, as it began pulling itself through without the door being opened.
And then my phone died. the battery had run out.
Chills ran all around me, and I suddenly had the unnerving feeling of being watched. The lights outside the conference room began to pulse again. They pulsed like they had when I saw the thing the first time. I glanced up at the camera outside the conference room just as a lightning bolt streaked behind me, bathing the room in a fading eerie glow. Then the low rumble of thunder shook my core. I looked to see the camera pointed at me again. The lights in the office pulsed, this time it was all of them in the building, from the hallway to the room I was in.
I quickly pulled the chord from my phone and jammed it into the laptop, not taking my eyes off the camera. The rumble of the thunder finally stopping. The live feed showed me tinkering on my laptop, with a few seconds of delay between my movements and the feed. Then I saw it, the thing peeking around the corner and in the other office…
Right outside the door.
It was just out of my view, standing on the left of the frame around the corner of the door. The head of the creature was cut off of the upper side of the frame, but its long black hair still trailed across the floor. At that moment, its body was visible. It looked like a long gown, ragged and tattered. The skin was sickly and pale, as though coated in a sheen of white paint. The limbs were the worst part, long, lanky, unnatural. At the end of its hands were sharp, jagged pieces of what looked to be a film reel.
I saw its legs beginning to bend, the knees bent inwards. I heard a sickening crack from outside the door, its legs shook and faltered as it lowered its head into the frame. The dome head of the camera lens came into view, staring into the camera, staring at me.
The next pulse of the lights made the hall go dark, when the feed had returned the creature was standing upright again. I saw it lean forward, its hair dragged across the floor. It was unnatural, with no muscle, just sinewy movement that cracked and churned. Its head started moving towards the door, to look at me.
I looked up at the door, watching, waiting for the thing to come into view. The lights continued to pulse. I stood up and stepped away from the laptop. I started considering my options.
Run up and close the door? I was on the right side for it. There wasn’t any way that could work though if it was right next to the door. Jump through the window? I was on the ground floor, but I’d need to somehow get enough force to ram into it. Smash the window. Smashing the window was my only option.
The lights went dark, no longer pulsing, off. I grabbed a chair and threw it at the window, not a crack. I heard a sharp sound from behind me, it sounded like someone saying psst.
When I turned around, I couldn’t see the door. It was dark outside, raining, and the lights were all off. It was so quiet, so silent you could hear every drop of rain. I saw a red light in the doorway, blinking, staring at me.
Then the lightning flashed, illuminating the room for a moment, and that was all it needed.
I saw it, in the doorway. It was crawling underneath the door frame, bending down to walk under it. Its head tilted at me as the flash erupted, janky and quick, I thought I heard its neck crack as it did. It looked emaciated, thin, lanky, but with enough control to pounce. It creaked deeper into the room as the lightning faded. I was once again plunged into darkness, its red light simmering on me.
I felt like screaming but was frozen with fear. It didn’t move for a few moments. The only other way out was through the door it was standing in front of. It just stared at me, taking me in. It stood there for as long as the thunder rumbled. We stared at each other, perhaps waiting for one to make a move.
Lightning fast, another lightning flash coated its body. It clambered onto the table in front of me on all fours. I saw a deep gaping maw appear on its face. The dome camera split in half, when it opened this god-awful, mechanical mouth, I could see hundreds and hundreds of human eyes within, writhing, watching me, staring at me. Its maw extended deep into an unseen void that descended forever. I was gazing into a valley of stars, though it was just glints of light off of the iris of the eyes. Blinking, watching, recording, they all gazed upwards to a light that would never be reached.
MOVE! My mind screamed, as its head gnashed towards mine. I ducked my head, scraping it against the creature’s chin. I heard the crash of glass as its face reconnected at the center of the seam. I dove underneath the conference room table, rolled to the other side, and sprinted into the hallway. The thunder rumbled under my feet as I hooked around the door, towards the back door of the office, and towards my car. I could hear the thing fumbling behind me, the table sounded to almost being thrown across the room. I heard the scrape of metal on metal as it let out a howl so menacing it cut me to my soul. It sounded like a deep, metallic scream of a man in pain.
I shouldn’t have looked back as I sprinted towards the back door, when I did I saw the red light gaining quickly. Lightning flashed again, its arms were stretched outwards towards me, its mouth agape. The jagged film reel fingers reached out towards me, trying to claw at my back. I sprinted harder, and eventually crashed through the door leading outside. I felt the rain coating my face, and I stumbled down into a puddle at the foot of the door. I crawled the rest of the way out into the parking lot.
When I looked back, the lights in the office were blinking again. The creature stood at the door, staring out at me. In between pulses, seemingly without moving its body, it got further away from the door. I saw it move back a few paces, move back a few more on the next pulse. Then, it went into the storage room, its head peeking out of the door. Finally, on the last pulse, it disappeared from view. The lights stayed on after that, solid, bright, powerful, and safe if you didn’t know what lurked inside.
I ran to my car and got the hell out.
I never went back to the office. Part of me wondered if there was another reason why work from home was so popular amongst our co-workers. I told John not to go into the office if he could help it. I didn’t bother answering calls from the company and did everything I could to find something else.
I don’t know what that thing was, and to this day I still have a striking fear of dome cameras. I stare and wait for them to split open, to devour me whole.