We all watched as Warren entered the house from the external camera, and seconds later showing up on the two internal ones. First, just a glimpse from the living room camera as he walked past the mirror that we’d seen before, then as he showed up in the kitchen cam, which also showed a bit of the hallway, and the woman that still laid there.
“Look for yourselves!” Warren said and flipped the camera towards the hallway floor. And just as he said, there was no one, nothing. Not a trace of anyone. We could clearly see him on the kitchen camera doing all the things we saw through the video chat. We saw him film the floor and surroundings, only when we saw it through the security camera, the woman was clearly laying right by Warrens feet.
A shill so cold that it’s almost impossible to describe went through my spine as I saw in my peripheral view how the woman on the kitchen camera suddenly slowly got up from her position that she had been in for several hours now. It almost looked like someone dragged her up, as if she didn’t tense up at all as you do when you’re sitting up from a lying position. She just sat there now, in the hallway, staring straight ahead.
We all saw how Warren was speaking into his phone, but all we heard were static now, and the video feed in the chat was just pixels breaking up.
Warren was still not noticing the woman, and clearly not hearing our cries for him to leave. Still slowly going through the living room, stopping to inspects books on the bookshelf, looking at pictures on the wall. At the same time, the woman had now gone from a sitting to standing position, her head was turned to the left, towards the living room, like an animal, listening for its pray.
The woman slowly started to walk into the kitchen, towards the living room. Warren stood there, with his back to her, a book in his hands inspecting it. It looked like he was talking and filming it, like he hadn’t even noticed that there was no connection in the chat anymore. There was nothing we could do but scream his name and pray he’d hear us. The woman was closing in, one slow step at a time, and still, he didn’t seem to notice her. I was literally shaking my screen, screaming out his name, as were the others, but we all saw how the woman finally came up behind him, and with a slow movement, raised her arm as to grab him by the shoulder.
The second the woman’s hand touched Warrens jacket, both cameras went out and there were static everywhere. A screech so loud it almost pierced our eardrums came screaming out of the headphones. I threw them of in a pure instinctive move and just sat there, staring at the two monitors showing nothing but black and white lines rushing across the screens.
We all got back in position in front of our screens, but Warren was nowhere to be found. The rooms were empty, the woman too, was gone.
Jen disappeared from her mic so we couldn’t overhear her conversation. We others just sat there in silence and utter disbelief over what we’d just witnessed. I got up from my desk and walked over to my window. It was like we all were trapped in the twilight zone or some other dimension or something. I couldn’t comprehend what was going on.
Again, we sat and waited, staring at the three camera angles. The minutes felt like hours before we finally saw the Police car once again come up and stop in front of the house. Just like before the two Police officers, I couldn’t tell if they were the same two as last time, went up to the front door and knocked hard, announcing they were from the Police. Just like when Warren knocked, it seemed like the door slowly opened by itself, and the Police walked inside, this time with weapons drawn.
We followed their every step on the stream as they searched the house. The walked straight forward, just as Warren had done, through the hallway in to the kitchen. From there they turned left and slowly cleared the living room. It looked like one of the officers motioned the other to pay attention to something above them. They moved back out into the hallway and presumably upstairs. There weren’t any cameras there, we all sat dead quiet like on needles waiting to catch a glimpse of them again when the silence all of a sudden was broken.
It was Warren!
“I got it on video…”, I said quietly. Remembering that I had the external drive connected, recording everything. Just then we saw the two officers exit the house again on the external camera, getting back into their car and after a few minutes, driving off again.
I stopped the recording and located the file, but when I went to open it nothing happened. Just a warning about the file being corrupted.
“God damnit!”, I shouted. “The damn file is corrupted! It won’t play! I’ll see if I can fix it somehow”.
“Guys?” Warren asked.
I managed to open the file in a video editing software and shared my screen with everyone.
Only, the recording didn’t stop there.
The video kept on recording past the point what we had seen live. We all fell silent again, our eyes fixated on the terrifying events playing out right in front of us. After the woman had laid her hand on Warrens shoulder, he immediately fell to the ground, like a house of cards in the wind. The Woman then really slowly turned around and stopped dead in her tracks straight in front of us, with her stare locked on the living room camera. She moved forwards, just as slow as before, closer and closer towards the camera. There was something off about her appearance. Her face was, blurry, hard to focus on. Closer and closer she came, until her pale, blurry, out of focus, almost static-like face covered the entire screen. Then we heard a faint whisper over our headphone.