This all took place about a month ago, near the start of summer. I’m not sure when I noticed something was wrong, but I guess it started with a power surge.
I work at the front desk of a hotel, doing the audit shifts. That’s actually where I am right now, writing this during some down time. I hadn’t been at work a full hour when the power surged, turning everything off and on again within the span of a few seconds. It surprised me at the time, but made sense, because we’re getting kinda warm up here and this is an old hotel. Heat and bad wiring don’t make a great combination. So I didn’t think anything of it when the second one happened. Same story. Everything turns off, then it turns on again, in under a minute.
At first I was happy about it, because our front desk computer runs 24/7, and it hadn’t been rebooted since it was bought and paid for with dirt. So I just ignored it, posted something in the group chat in case the power went down completely, and went on with my night. Nothing really happened for an hour or so.
Then I went out for a smoke break. It’s almost always dead quiet outside that time of night (about 1 A.M.), so I had room to let my mind wander. Being an avid horror fan, I have a tendency to let my imagination run away with me, in that “Wouldn’t this make a cool horror story or setting” kind of way that happens when you’re bored.
I now understand the answer to that question to be a solid NO.
Like I said, my mind was wandering, it’s dead quiet outside, and if not for the glory of artificial light and urban infrastructure, would be dark as pitch outside. In fact, even with all the street lights, signs, and backlit lettering on the nearby businesses, there were still some places I could stare at and not see a damn thing. I guess that’s what made it stand out.
The first thing I noticed was that the moon wasn’t as high in the sky as I expected. I usually see the moon floating over the local grocery store across the street when I go smoke, but I dismissed this as maybe remembering the wrong time of day or something. I go smoke every two hours, so maybe I was just thinking it was later than it was? Like I was remembering where the moon was at 3 every night, not 1 A.M. But it still felt weird. I had to peek around some trees to see it clearly, and I usually don’t have to. Again, I just assumed I’d remembered it wrong, or because it was getting later in the year the moon didn’t sit in the sky the same way. There was a single bright star above it, thanks to light pollution, but nothing else weird.
Then there was the flickering light on a signpost. Across the parking lot from the front desk there’s a little access road that has your typical tiny metal sign warning about traffic and suggesting low speeds. I noticed a weird flicker ling reflecting off the back of it, and thought at first it was a blinker from a car. It was a sickly orange blinking in a pattern, and held that pattern for a while, but I couldn’t see a car or anything with it’s lights blinking. So I ventured a little down the road, and saw that the mini mart at the far end (which is normally hidden from my point of view by a popular fast food chain building) with an outside light flickering pretty hard. I thought that was weird, too, until I remembered the power surge we had, and figured it must have messed up the lights on that building, as well. Even as I type this I can kind of see it flickering through the front window, through the trees. Nothing weird there, either. Although I don’t really remember a light being there. I don’t shop there much, but still.
The next thing I noticed was the lights in front of the grocery store. Now, I won’t say the name of the company, but all the signs on there letters are bright red. Then I noticed ALL the light reflecting off the front of the store was red. Which is perfectly fine, right? Big 3-foot tall red signs make lots of red light, right? Except I’d been shopping at this store for years, and I know that there’s a lot of white lights out front, both from the parking lot and from the sidewalk out front. Dark red lighting doesn’t exactly make someone want to buy snacks in the middle of the night from a 24 hour store, y’know? But this was a weird red. The kind of creepy red lighting that gave me flashbacks to that scene in Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark where the kid is stuck in the red room with that fat pale lady approaching from all 4 hallways. I could even see the bright white lights in the parking lot, all in their usual spaces, but the entire front of the store was just… red.
I’d started to weird myself out a little bit at this point, and told myself I was reading too much into things. It was late, quiet, and I was making connections where there weren’t any. Nothing special, just paranoia fueled by the kind of sleep schedule overnight workers aren’t proud of. I just wrote it all off and kept smoking. Mind you, all of these observations were made in the span of a few minutes, while I was still working on my cigarette. Easy to draw that many conclusions in such a short time frame, right?
I thought so, too, until I saw the light in the trees. Like I mentioned earlier, there’s some trees between me and the corner store down the way, behind the fast food place. The kind of city-planted tree arrangements city councils put in to make people think they give a shit about the environment. Near the top of one of them, I saw a white light reflected off the branches. THAT was new, I could tell. There’s no street lights down that road, and none of the parking lot lights were that tall. Also, it only shone between two branches, and didn’t illuminate anything else. If it was a street light or a light from the store I would have seen a little bit reflected on the street, but it wasn’t anywhere else. I had no idea what this one was.
Now, I’ve been working here for two years. Been on Audit shift the entire time. And my smoking routine has been the same the whole time: smoke right before work, smoke every two hours on break (or what counts as a break, since I’m the only one here and don’t really have actual breaks), smoke when I leave. I’ve stood out in that parking lot every night, four nights a week, for two years.
I had never seen this light before.
I was about to go investigate it when it… moved. It lowered quite a bit, raised up a little, dropped down to street level, then back to its original position. The movements were measured, mechanical. There was no way it was just some dude with a flashlight. It didn’t waver at all except the jerky movements from one position to the next, until it went back to its original position.
I was thinking about going over to the corner store to investigate, but couldn’t: the front desk phone doesn’t get reception that far away from the building and I couldn’t see the lobby from over there; what if someone needed help? I couldn’t exactly explain why I wasn’t around to help a guest cause I was chasing a light in the trees a hundred yards away from work. I tried pacing back and forth in front of the building to get a better look, but that didn’t help. The trees didn’t give me a good angle without walking to far away from the hotel.
Then the light moved again. The same jerky movements, but in a different pattern. Up, down, up, farther down, back to start… then it ducked out of view. I couldn’t see it after that.
Around that time I was done with my smoke, so I just tucked myself behind the desk again and decided to write the whole thing off as an overactive imagination. Still, I couldn’t explain the light. Someone doing repair work on the flickering yellow light on the side of the building? But then why would the light be pointed away from it, and move so erratically. Also, nobody I’d ever met could hold a flashlight that dead still.
I thought about those old floodlights they used to put in front of car dealerships when I was a kid. Maybe they still do, I don’t know. There aren’t really any near me where I live now that would have them. They’d light up the clouds, they were so bright, and moved on timers. Could it have been a small one of those, or a similar setup? But then why was it pointed at the trees, and why did it move so weird? It only did the jerky movement thing twice, and disappeared. There was no pattern to it. Usually automated lights follow a preprogrammed movement set.
Now, here’s where I need to explain something about the front desk office. On one of the walls there’s a big flat screen with a live feed to the security cameras we have in the building. This is pretty standard in most businesses nowadays, but they kind of range in quality. Ours are pretty good, with automatic grayscale night vision for the parking lots outside and the rooms with motion-activated lights, like the breakfast and vending machine rooms.
About an hour after my smoke break, I noticed one of the outside cameras that is usually black and white right about then was lit up and in color. This only happens when it’s bright enough outside that night vision isn’t necessary, so yeah, it was weird. Then I saw a light again. It was reflecting off the side of a couple of guest’s cars, and made it kind of hard to see, because the reflection was bright enough for the camera to have a hard time adjusting. This was probably why the feed was in color now: any light bright enough to do that would easily convince the sensor it was daylight out.
But it was only on that one camera. And in that part of the parking lot, there’s multiple cameras that overlap their POVs. None of the others were in color, or even showed any kind of light in that area. So I watched the one feed. And just like I’d seen outside, it moved. Left, right, farther left, up, back to start. The same jerky mechanical motions, the same idle stillness when it wasn’t moving. I knew it couldn’t be a person, at least a normal one anyway, because the only thing on the other side of the lot is a little privately-owned house with a loud-as-fuck privately-owned rooster.
Once again, after a minute or so, it moved. Up and down, mechanical movements, until it dipped down enough to disappear. The feed went dark, and after a second, kicked back to grayscale. No weird light.
My next thought was that someone was fucking around with a drone or something. We get a bunch of recreational users in our area, so it wouldn’t surprise me if someone high on something thought it’d be hilarious to strap a high-visibility light to something and use it to freak people out in the middle of the night.
Although I couldn’t shake the part where the other cameras didn’t catch it, even when it moved around.
An hour later, after I’d written it off (nobody called to complain, and I hadn’t seen anything else weird, so I just threw it in the I Don’t Get Paid Enough For This(tm) brand Fuck-It Bucket), I went out for another smoke. I didn’t stay out quite as long though, because I immediately noticed a few things wrong. The lights in front of the grocery store were… more red. Almost burning red. Even the parking lights closest to the building had that horror-movie red tinge to them, and the ones farther away were starting to tint. The whole front of the store was as bright as the neon red letters, so much so I could barely make out the words on the front.
The flickering light was still there, but it wasn’t reflected off the sign anymore. It was flickering from the sign. I could see the sickly yellow bouncing off nearby cars, and even off my shoes a little. The pattern hadn’t changed.
The moon hadn’t moved. The star had. It was lower by inches, which in astronomical distance should be actual light years.
I decided NOBODY got paid enough for this, put my cigarette out, and marched back inside. I made it about two steps into the lobby when I saw the light again. The bright one from the trees and the parking lot.
Behind the front desk, shining in the door that leads to the break room. It moved around again, mechanically, the shadows it cast shifting like stop-motion shadow puppets. When it finally stopped, it was settled on the lobby. On me.
And I realized why id had been moving around.
It was searching for something. Searching for me.
It was blinding. Pure. The kind of white that can only be created artificially, with no traces of any other color. When I could see again, I was still standing in the lobby.
Three hours later.
I had no memory of those three hours. Nobody had come to the lobby in that time, I guess, because I didn’t hear anything about it. No complaints, nothing. But I know I was gone. And I have no idea where. I just can’t remember.
Except I can, kind of. Because the light is back. I saw it again an hour ago, moving around in the grocery store parking lot. I remembered. Not where I was, or anything like that. But I remembered it hurt. I remember I was screaming.
And I don’t know if I’m going to come back this time.