Page 30 of Possessed By Shadows

The video started a bit shaky and dark. Then my father’s voice could be heard whispering, “This is the second night of this…” He paused as if listening. Faintly I could hear creaking.

He paused the video and held up a set of headphones. There were actually several. I took one and put it on. Micah copied. “Listen,” my father instructed and restarted the video. Again, darkness and the quiet voice of my father, then above, the creaking was actually footsteps.

The video continued. “Thought it was Lukas last night. But that’s not possible,” he said. He was moving through the dark now. The only light was the flashlight on his phone. The time stamp said it was after two in the morning. As he headed down the hall, I recognized he was on the second floor, likely the first room we had passed before finding Lukas’s spaces. He paused at the top of the stairs, listening. The creaking had stopped, house sounding very still, and there was nothing on camera other than his faint breathing.

There was a sudden thud, like a heavy piece of furniture had been dropped, and then a racing of thumps across the floor above. My dad was moving then. Running around the edge of the stairs and to a narrow hall that had one of those built-in ladders dropped out of the ceiling. He reached the bottom of the ladder, shined the light upward into the darkness, and saw nothing.

“This is the only way up,” Dad’s voice said into the phone. He slowly climbed the ladder, holding the camera out in front of him, with the light directed to cast away the dark. At the top he had to stop, there was no way into the room. Boxes and furniture rose up around the hole to the what had to be the attic space, a barrier to entry. He tried to record around the wall of junk, light and camera seeping into the room, but showing nothing but heaps of boxes, furniture and stacks of teetering trash. There was no room to move up there. No way to get into the room. “Thought it might be a squatter. But it’s not possible for anyone to be up here,” his dad said in the video. “Not Lukas, no one.”

He moved the light around slowly. Micah gripped my hand, as he caught the flash of something, before I did. “Wait, go back a few seconds,” Micah directed.

My dad paused the recording, and dragged the slider back ten seconds. Replay and there was…a face? A real face or something my brain was trying to recognize as a face? The scene continued to pan, and when it came back over the same spot, the face was gone. A person hiding in that mess? Or something else?

The video ended and we both took the headphones off. Sky stared at the screens with her arms folded over her chest. “Did you see?” I asked Micah without putting words to thought. He was actually really good at catching the small changes in these sorts of videos. It was why he had a lot of them posted on his ghost tours website.

“What did you see?” My father demanded. “I didn’t see anything, just heard lots. Have been hearing for days.” He frowned at the screen. “Your brother said it’s the house settling. But I know what a house settling sounds like.”

Micah leaned over to drag the slider back to the time stamp. He knew how to use all this stuff, though his set up was done through his Mac rather than this giant production space. I had to admit it was much easier to see on the big screen.

He used the mouse pointer to circle the face, his gaze on me. “Yeah?” he inquired.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“That’s not…” My dad began but didn’t finish as Micah jumped ahead to the time stamp of the light going back over that same space and finding whatever that had been, gone. Of course he’d remember the time stamps. “What…”

The face was hollow-eyed, white, with a gaping mouth. “Pareidolia?” I wondered out loud. “Shadows or something?” It sounded wishful, like I was a little kid asking for assurance that there weren’t monsters under the bed even when they grabbed me often.

“It’s a face,” Sky said. “Not Lukas. Doesn’t really look like a person. But it’s gone a few seconds later.”

“It’s not possible. There’s not enough space to move up there,” my father said. “If there’s some kind of squatter…I don’t know how that’s possible.”

It wasn’t a squatter. People didn’t look like that. Even with the floodlight of modern camera phone flashlights directed at it. People still looked like people, not the floating heads of ghouls in a room full of junk.

“Is this the only video?” Micah asked. He was awake now, but sounded tired. I think we were both a little over being stalked by freaky shit.

“I have others, but I haven’t seen anything. Recorded the footsteps a couple times,” my father said. He turned back to the computer. “Your brother has a YouTube channel with tons of this stuff. Did you know?” He opened a browser and clicked it to a bookmark. It opened a content creator page for a ‘NOLADemonHunter.’ Demon Hunter? My brother was hunting demons? My demon? Or his own?

“He has a million followers?” Micah gaped. “No wonder he made the ghost hunting thing fulltime.”

I knew enough about being a content creator to know we had a quarter of that following for our craft tutorials, which Micah considered good. And his Facebook Group, which had a linked section for YouTube videos of stuff caught during tours had about a hundred thousand. Which he said was good. But I knew at one point he’d been a very popular cosplayer with almost five million followers.

“That’s good?” I asked.

“As long as they are monetized,” Micah agreed. He scrolled through what appeared to be months’ worth of videos. Highlight clips of dozens of hunts, including the one with me and that creepy bear.

“Um…” I didn’t really care to be the guy gaped at for being crazy on my brother’s videos. Nor did I like the idea of my dad seeing that.

Micah frowned, scrolling back to a handful of the very first videos, which appeared to be of reviewing evidence rather than live hunts like the more recent stuff. He clicked on one labeled,Night noises. My heart flipped over with anxiety. The date on the screen was over a year ago, and all it showed was a digital audio recorder replay. For a few seconds there was nothing. A white noise of nothing.

Then the scream. An animal-like sound that had become all too familiar. Not human, though beyond spooky enough to make goosebumps rise on my skin. Micah hugged himself as the audio was replayed a handful of times.

“What the fuck was that?” my father asked.

“He heard it…” Micah said quietly. “Years ago. He knew I wasn’t lying.”

It was faint on the audio. Not the screaming wail I knew both Micah and I were used to hearing, but clear enough to not be missed. There were four other videos. Old. Dated with times, and locations.

“These are all your old places,” Sky said. She stared at the screen. “Is that what it sounds like?”

“Louder,” I said. “Much louder.”

Sky’s gaze fell on Micah, her expression unreadable. Had she not believed him? I thought maybe she’d have heard it at some point? But maybe not.

Micah turned to me and curled into my embrace. No wonder my brother had believed him. He had evidence. Not even a one-off proof, but a half-dozen. There was even a handful from our current place. The camera clearly focused on our garden filled with gnome and cat statues, fairy lights decorating the tree. Recent footage withNight noises twelvemarked.

Fucking Lukas.