Before any of us could say anything, we could hear Warren’s heavy breathing. He was on the brink of losing it completely. He swallowed hard and sobbed.
We sat in silence for a while, I was thinking about looking at the recording again, take it frame by frame to see if I could catch anything else. But honestly, I too, were scared shitless at this point. I couldn’t watch that blurry, distorted face again, it was too much. At the same time, I realized it was late as hell, and I hadn’t heard anything from my parents since yesterday.
I logged off and turned my computer off completely, making sure I checked that no monitors or anything else was on standby. I’d seen enough shit for one day. I grabbed my phone and called my dad, but it went straight to voicemail, I tried my mom as well, but it was the same thing there. “That’s weird”, I thought. They usually always make sure they’re reachable in case something happens. “It could be the storm though”, I told myself. Maybe a cell tower was affected or something. I didn’t think much more of it and tucked the phone down my pocket and walked downstairs.
I came down to the living room and went over to our patio door, a big glass door leading out to the backyard. I stood and watched how the trees still fought the immense winds trying their best to break every single branch and at the same time ripping the remaining leaves from them, making them dance in the wind like possessed souls with no control of their own. I checked the time, one thirty am. “I should try to get some sleep”, I thought, knowing full and well that I probably wouldn’t be able to get even a minute after what I had just seen. I sat down on the couch, staring into the blackness of the powered off TV. My eyes fixated at some non-existent point in there, like when you sometimes just stare out into the open while your mind is somewhere completely else. I kept replaying the last bit of the video in my mind, over and over. Her utterly, insanely creepy way of moving towards the camera, how Warren just fell to the ground. How she just sat up as if not even making an effort to do so. I kept trying to tell myself how it must all be explainable, but I couldn’t come to any sort of conclusion. I stood up and was just about to get up and go to the kitchen to get something to eat, when all the lights in the house suddenly went out accompanied by an electrical buzz that shot through the air, like if there had been an overload somewhere.
I looked around, and for a split terrifying second I could swear I saw Warren standing outside the patio door, with panic in his eyes and mouth wide open like in a mid-scream, but without the sound. With a blink of an eye, he was gone again. I had to sit back down again and catch my breath. “Man, this thing is really fucking with my mind”, I thought. I started to feel claustrophobic inside the house, I needed to go outside, get some air, even though I’d risk getting roof panes and branches flung down on me by the wind. I couldn’t be in the house right now. I grabbed my Jacket and keys and stepped outside.
Immediately I started to feel better, even though the wind was tossing me around like a five-year-old kid going nine rounds against Tyson, and the rain feeling more like I was surrounded by sandblasters trying to peel my skin of, than water. I pulled the hoodie of my jacket over my head and buried both hands deep in the pockets and started to walk aimlessly around the block. I had always liked storms and ominous weather. Somehow that kind of weather had always had a soothing effect on me, unlike many others who shrugged and got moody as soon as the sky turned dark, and the wind picked up. But this weather was another kind of rough, like nothing I had experienced before. Still, I walked slowly, not really paying attention to where I was going, taking a left turn there, a right turn here, I didn’t care, I knew these streets like the back of my hand and could have navigated them blindfolded and still found my way home. Or so I thought. After having walked for about 20 minutes or so, all the time staring straight down towards my feet, trying to shield my face from the rain, I came to a stop.
I carefully tilted my head upwards to get my bearings, and to my surprise, I couldn’t for the life of me understand where I was. I didn’t recognize this street at all. I slowly looked around, looking for anything that looked familiar to indicate what direction home was. There were small streets going of in all directions from this main one I was standing on, different sized houses stood all along the way. I kept going a bit further, the houses looked nice, I passed one with a homemade swing in a tree out front, the wind was having all kinds of fun with that thing, whipping it this and that way. The next house had a very neatly cut lawn and, before the storm hit, what looked like a very nice flower bed surrounding the house. These were now unfortunately ripped from the soil and drowning in rainwater. The third one… wait a minute. This one I recognized; I know I had seen this little fountain before. “Wait…”, I thought, realizing what I was thinking, but not accepting it.
I looked a bit further down the road, the last house on the corner. Yes, there it was, a Victorian styled house with a small tower. “That means…” I thought, while slowly turning 180 degrees and looking over the street. “Holy fucking God!”, I said out loud to myself. The Streaming House. It was right in front of me! At first, I could barely move. “How the hell is this possible, I’m on the completely different side of the country as this house! It’s like three thousand miles away!”. My mind was racing! I didn’t even notice that I had slowly started to traverse the street, moving up closer to the house.
I didn’t realize what I was doing until I stood at the front door, raising my hand about to knock when I snapped out of it and steadied my hand. But before I could even think, the door swung open and there, not three feet away, stood Warren, again with panic in is eyes, screaming his lungs out like before, mouth wide open, only this time there was definite sound, it sounded like the ear-piercing screech we had heard while watching the woman subdue Warren. It was so loud I thought my head would explode. I tripped over my own feet trying to back of and fell backwards and hit my head hard on the ground. Everything went black.
I woke up my couch in my own living room in a panic. “What the hell…” I thought while getting up, patting myself down checking if I was hurt, and feeling the back of my head for blood or bruises, nothing. I breathed hard and fast and tried to calm myself down while looking around, familiarizing myself with my surroundings. “I must have fallen asleep on the couch before”, I tried reasoning with myself. “It was just a dream!” I laughed in relief as I gradually managed to slow my breathing and think more reasonable. Of course, it was just a dream, “but holy shit that sure felt real”, I thought as I took a deep breath, leaning over and steadying myself on my knees. I pulled myself together and started to walk back out from the living room into the hallway. I went into the kitchen and sat down by the kitchen island. “The power’s back” I thought while noticing the lights working again. “Or maybe it never was out in the first place”, I thought. I had no idea where reality ended, and the dream started. I managed to make myself a sandwich, all while thinking about that dream.
That was so messed up, it literally felt like I was right there. “I’ve never had a dream feel that real before”, I thought. I glanced up on the clock on the wall, four thirty am. I had been asleep for about three hours. I gobbled down the sandwich in three bites, downed a glass of water and decided I needed to try to get a good night’s sleep. But as I walked out into the hallway again about to turn up to the stairs, I felt something cold and wet stroke my arm. I shrugged and pulled my arm closer. I looked over to my side. There, beside the front door, was my jacket, completely soaked in water and dripping all over the floor. I grabbed the sleeve and felt it, I tried to take it in, to understand how. It was just a dream… wasn’t it? The logical part of my brain tried to remind me that I was in fact three thousand miles away from that house, but the other parts of my brain kept remining me of all the other weird shit we’d seen the last couple of days that we couldn’t explain either. And here I was, holding my rain-soaked jacket, even though I hadn’t been outside…had I?
I let go of the sleeve and slowly continued upstairs, my mind still trying to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together. I was almost to tired to even freak out more about it, but for some reason I didn’t go straight to bed. Almost as if it was a pre-programmed move, I sat down in my computer chair and turned everything on again. I leaned back waiting for everything to start up while looking over towards my bed, wondering why I didn’t just go to sleep already. But something held me there, in the chair. The screens illuminated the dark room as the came on, one by one, and my fingers started to type on the keyboard as if disconnected to my brain. The stream suddenly showed up on my main monitor. It was still the three cameras, nothing on them, no woman, no Warren. Nothing on the external camera, until there was.
I fumbled to grab my external disc and hit record as I watched myself on the stream, slowly move up to the door. “What the fuck!”, I said loudly. It felt like all the blood in my body came rushing over me as a tsunami, I felt dizzy as if I had vertigo, I wanted to throw up. This wasn’t possible, there’s no way! I watched myself come up to the front door of the house and almost knock on the door. I saw myself trip when the door opened, and fall over on the ground, hitting my head, just as in my dream. That’s where I woke up, but that’s not where stream ended. I watched as the woman exited the door and stood looming over me for several minutes before slowly tilting her head upwards to the camera, her face blurry and distorted as before, and soon another whisper was heard through my headphones, resting on the desk next to my keyboard; “This was just your first visit, but you’ll be back, you all will, and next time, you’ll stay.” The stream suddenly ended, the browser turning itself off, and my screen was once again just casting its blue dimmed light over my room. I stopped the recording and just sat there.
“We need to get to the bottom of this shit…”, I thought.