I woke up around noon the next day, Saturday. Still fully dressed and lying in my bed on top of my sheets. I had more or less passed out right there. I rubbed my eyes and tried to recall the night before. We had all sat there in front of the stream and watched as basically nothing happened. We had discussed the figure we’d seen in the mirror and concluded that we couldn’t rule out natural causes. We had no idea what the inside of the house looked like in any other room than the two with cameras, so there was no way for us to know what could be reflected in the mirror, it could have been anything really. And the thing with Ben was just a weird coincident, we all agreed.
I had let the recording continue over night, just in case anything would happen, so I got up and still half asleep threw myself down in my computer chair and with the help of the desk pulled myself closer to the keyboard. I glanced over at the stream, which was still going. This time the woman we had seen last night in the kitchen, the presumed owner, was sitting at the dining room table located in the living room, drinking a cup of tea, or coffee, I couldn’t tell which. I drew my attention to the other monitor instead, which had the recording for last night now ready to play. I started it up and slowly drew the timeline-point from start to end to see if anything stood out during the night, I couldn’t very well watch it in real time, I would have been sitting there all day long.
Nothing of interest seemed to have happened after we all had given up and gone to bed. The only thing I reacted to was some weird lines on my monitor. At first, I thought it was the lighting of the house we were watching, but if that was the case, it should have changed with the sun rising, flooding her house with sunlight. But it didn’t, the lines stayed the same, very, very faint, light, curvy, wavy lines in no particular order going across my monitor in all directions. Maybe it’s the screen, I thought, not wanting to take that thought to the next step, knowing what these monitors costs.
My parents had taken my sister to a friend of my mothers, who also had a daughter my sisters age, that lived about 4 hours away. They would spend the night there all three of them, so I had the house to myself. I went down to the kitchen to grab some breakfast and saw a note from my dad on the counter, basic instructions with some tasks to do, to not forget to lock up at night, close the windows and so on. There was some money for pizza as well. I really looked forward to a night by myself, without anyone hassling me with chores or my pain-in-the-ass sister driving me up the wall. “Just a chill night with pizza and the guys,” I thought.
I did have some stuff to do though, and besides, the other ones would rarely be online until at least 6 pm anyways, so I could just as well complete the tasks my parents had left me now and be done with it. It wasn’t much, I was to rake the backyard and toss the fallen leaves in a garbage bag, take out the wet laundry from the washer in the basement and throw it in the dryer, and make sure the dishwasher was emptied.
I grabbed some breakfast and then got started. The dishwasher was closest at hand, so I got to it. Afterwards I got my jacket and shoes and went outside to clean up the backyard. Autumn had come with vengeance last night it seemed, the wind had ripped the leaves from the trees growing in and around our backyard. The sky was dark, filled with fast moving clouds that promised more rain any second. I shuttered and pulled my jacket closer and started to rake. We didn’t have a particularly big backyard, so it wouldn’t take that much time to get done. I walked around in my own thoughts when I out of the corner of my eye thought I saw something up above me. I glanced up and swear I could just make out the shape of a person withdrawing behind the curtain of a window on the second floor of our house. Actually, it was behind the curtain of my window, my bedroom window. A shill went down my spine, and I threw the rake aside and ran into the house, kicking my shoes off as I was running. Up the stairs two steps at a time and flung the door open to my room. Nothing. There was no one. “My mind is messing with me”, I thought, while eyeing every inch of my bedroom, breathing heavily after my short, but intense run. “I’m home alone, all the doors are locked, there’s no one here but me”, I told myself. Still, I couldn’t completely let go of the eery feeling that someone was watching me.
I calmed myself down and proceeded to go back downstairs and finish the yard work. The wind was picking up again, “bet there’ll be just as many leaves here tomorrow again”, I thought to myself. “What’s the point of this…” The air had that intense cold in it, the one that manages to creep past every thread of clothing you have on, no matter how thick and warm they might look. Chilling me to my core. Just as I was done and stepped inside, the rain started to drip once more. It didn’t take long to go from dripping to pouring, and it didn’t look like it would stop any time soon, the sky grew ever darker in the distance.
I ventured down towards the basement and the last of my chores. I pushed open the creaking door in the hallway that led to a steep narrow wooden staircase with only a bulb on a string above me to light the way. The washer stood up against the far wall and was beeping and flashing a green light, indicating that it was done. I opened the lid up and started to pull out the wet, entangled fabrics and toss it into the dryer next to me when I faintly heard the unmistakable sound of the basement door closing again behind me. I turned around and looked up the stairs just in time to see the door slowly close, all the way. I just stood there for a while, trying to comprehend what I just saw, before bolting up the stairs, convinced that I would find the door locked and myself trapped down there. But the door swung open as easily as ever. I took a deep breath of relief and thought it must had been a draft. After going down and finishing moving clothes from one machine to another, I went back upstairs and closed the door behind me, making sure it was indeed completely shut. I still had that creeping feeling that I wasn’t alone. I just couldn’t shake it.
Outside, the wind had picked up even more, and the rain was coming down hard. I laid down on the couch in the living room and turned the TV on, flipped through a few channels until finally stopping at an old black & white movie. It didn’t take long for me to fall asleep, lying there with the rain hammering on the windows and the wind whistling outside, making the whole house creak and moan as well. My mid-day nap was filled with weird dreams about people moving in the shadows, stormy nights, surveillance cameras and video static. I woke up in a cold sweat, my heart racing, and didn’t feel at all rested. I checked my phone, 6 pm. I had been asleep for about three hours, but it felt like 5 minutes. I felt almost more tired now than before. As I stood up, I heard my stomach groan and I suddenly felt extremely hungry.
I decided it was time to eat and I dialled the local pizza place while I slowly walked upstairs to see if anyone was online yet. After ordering my pizza I sat down in my chair and moved the cursor around to awake my computer from its slumber. The monitors lit up and I checked the chat, didn’t seem to be anyone there yet. I didn’t know if I was imagining things, but I thought the weird squiggly lines on my monitor had multiplied, very vaguely, but there certainly were more than before, I thought. A sudden hard gust of wind outside made it sound like my whole window was about to implode, and I was reminded of the absolute hideous weather outside. I pulled out a sweatshirt from my closet and put it on. Even though it wasn’t that cold inside the house, just the mere thought of the wind and rain outside chilled me to the bones.
I yawned and scuffled closer to my keyboard and saw that the livestream seemed to have been frozen, the woman stood dead still in the living room in what looked to be mid-step, one leg in the air and one on the ground like she was about to walk out. I hit the update button and let the window reload, but she was still right there, mid-step. “Must be some issue with the cameras”, I thought.
“Ding”
Another “ding”-sound notified us both that someone else had joined the chat. The little bears head lit up as Jen let out a loud “Heeeey everyone!”.
“Maybe she caught the ghost and killed the stream?” Jen suggested in a corky voice. “Or maybe the ghost is just messing with you guys “, she laughed. “I’ll log back on and see for myself what’s going in.” Two more “ding”-sounds echoed in the chat, notifying us that Ali & Warren too were back online. Everyone said their hello´s and we caught them both up to speed. We were now all of us looking at the stream, agreeing that it must be a glitch somewhere, either in the cameras or with the woman’s internet connection or something. That is, until Warren pointed something out.
Before anyone could add anything else, there was a slight flicker in all our screens, and the next second the woman landed on the foot that just seconds before had been suspended mid-air for quite some time now, and calmly walked out of the room and out of sight.
“Thanks’ man”, I said and handed him the money, with an extra twenty on top of the normal tip. I closed the door behind me and went back upstairs with the warm, but wet pizza carton in my hands. I sat it down on my desk while sliding back into my chair before opening it up and grabbing a slice. The smell quickly filled the room and once again I was reminded of exactly how hungry I was.
It was the pizza guy again. I opened the door up and looked at him with a confused look.
I got back up to my bedroom, still utterly confused and sat back down in front of my computer. Was it just a Deja Vue? Was I losing it? I decided not to mention anything to the others, they would just think I was crazy as well, I thought. But as I was sitting there, contemplating the recent events around the house, Ali started to talk.
“Yeah, I know” Ali said, “but it just seemed so real”.
“Actually,” Jen interrupted, “I’ve been having some off shit happening here as well”, she sounded almost embarrassed. “My dad’s cat, who usually never hangs around me, has been sitting in my room since yesterday, staring up at one of the corners and hissing and making all kinds of weird noises, her fur standing straight up. I’ve never seen her like that.” I cleared my throat and started to tell them about all the things that had happened to me over the course of the day and ended it with the pizza guy-incident just moments earlier.
We all agreed, but at the same time, we who had experienced stuff knew what we had seen and felt. But we didn’t push it any further. There wasn’t much more activity on the stream for the rest of the night, we didn’t see the owner, or anything out of the ordinary. We took a break from movie-watching, and everyone was doing their own things, and after a while I felt I needed to go to bed. I said my goodbyes and shut the computer off. After brushing my teeth, I crawled into my bed and pulled the covers close, the wind and rain had in no way diminished during the night, it felt like a continues storm raging outside, it was both soothing and menacing at the same time.
I was seconds away from falling into a deep slumber when something dimly lit the room up. I squinted from under the covers, and realized it was the bears head lighting up behind my chair, on the desk. “What the hell, I turned the computer off”, I thought while getting up to double check that everything indeed was turned off. The stand-by light on my left monitor was glowing faintly green, indicating that it still had power, and when I moved the mouse, the screen came back to life. Just that one screen though, and what I saw caused me to fall back over the chair and down to the floor. My heart beating so hard I thought it would jump right out of my chest. The faint squiggly lines that had been slowly forming over the course of two days where now much brighter, and not at all random. They spelled out eight words in a sentence;
“Soon it’s your turn to host the stream”.