“Because of what happened to the precinct feed,” Miller whispered, looking toward the curtained front window as if he expected someone to be listening. “When the clip finished playing on our monitor, the camera didn’t shut off. It kept recording. And… the image started changing.”
He took a ragged breath, rubbing a hand over his face.
“The shadow didn’t leave the porch,” he continued. “It turned around. It pressed its hands against the glass of your storm door. And then the timestamp on the video… it started counting backward.”
“Backward?” I echoed, the word feeling heavy and absurd in my mouth.
“The system didn’t capture a recording of what happened ten minutes ago,” Miller said, his eyes locking onto mine with terrifying certainty. “It’s a live broadcast of what’s going to happen. The system is buffering a delayed feed from the future. And in the video on our screen… you opened your phone.”
Silence stretched across the living room, thick and suffocating. The house felt suddenly too small, the air too cold.
“What happened when I opened my phone?” I whispered.
Miller didn’t answer. He just stared at me, his jaw tight, his breath coming in short, shallow hitches.
My thumb twitched against the side of my phone. The screen lit up in the dim room, illuminating my face. The notification blinked at me, inviting, irresistible.
1 New Motion Detected.
“Miller,” I said softly. “What was on the video?”
“It showed you,” Miller said, his voice dropping so low I had to lean in to hear it. “It showed you staring down at your screen. And while you were reading the notification… the shadow reached through the wood of the door, grabbed you from behind, and pulled you inside out.”
My heart hammered against my ribs. “That’s impossible. That’s insane. You’re trying to scare me—”
Ping.
The loud, sharp chime of my doorbell camera echoed through the house, shattering the quiet.
I jumped, dropping my phone onto the rug. It landed face-up. The screen automatically woke, displaying the live view from the front porch camera.
The timestamp at the top right read: 3:27 AM.
On the screen, Officer Miller was standing on my porch, rain dripping from his hat, knocking on the front door.
I stared at the phone screen, then slowly looked up at the man standing in my living room.
The man wearing the uniform wasn’t dripping wet. His jacket was bone dry. He had no badge on his chest. And as he looked down at me, his face began to stretch into a wide, unnatural, featureless smile.
“I told you,” the thing in my house whispered, “not to watch.”
