Page 58 of Possessed By Shadows

Chapter 18

“This was all the last day we heard from him?” I asked Micah as I studied the date and time stamp in the corner. Almost a week he’d been gone. The camera had been there the whole time? Did that mean he hadn’t meant to be gone this long? Was I about to see something terrifying happen? Like a demon dragging my brother to hell or something? I sucked in a breath and started the playback.

It started off benign enough. Lukas setting up the camera, focusing on a small area of the space. A sleeping corner perhaps? There was a sleeping bag, and some basics like flashlights and a few recording devices that he laid out near the wall. A bit of a base camp, perhaps, though he kept a healthy distance from the actual corner of the room that the camera was focused on.

I couldn’t recall really seeing a difference, or any of his stuff in that area. It had also already been storming and dark as fuck. Maybe we had missed something.

He was wearing a familiar backpack in the video, pale teal blue with cats in banana suits. I hoped that meant he had water and food, maybe some first aid stuff. “He looks alive, and mostly sane,” I remarked.

He seemed to be talking to himself about camera placement and times? Not all of it was clear as he was a long distance from the camera, and facing away. But it could have been me. Some days my hearing really sucked. Life in the military had really messed with that. I’d probably need hearing aids by the time I was forty. I’d have to see if Micah could make out what he said.

I cranked up the volume, which added a layer of white noise behind his chatter. Again, nothing overtly weird, though it did sound like he was talking to someone.

“We can figure this out. Find a way to move on. I hate leaving anyone behind. Makes me sound like all the movies with the military guys, though I know that’s not really how they operate. My brother was in the military. Came back messed up. Physically, mentally, but he’s doing better now. You’d like him. He’s good at taking care of people. He probably would have saved you.”

Lukas peered into the corner the camera was on, talked about sharing a sandwich or something along those lines. After a while he crossed the room and knelt near the space. The camera catching an odd glow around him from the limited lighting.

“I need something more solid,”he said after a while.“To prove that it’s worth the time.”He let out a long sigh.“To everyone else, to me it’s been important for a long time.”

He rubbed his face, like he was brushing back tears.“I know I failed, but give me a way to help you find peace. He can’t keep you. I won’t let him. He can haunt me the rest of my days, but he can’t have you. Let me help.”

As far as I could tell, he didn’t have a bunch of lamps set up, and was only relying on the light from outside. Since it was daytime, that meant there was some semblance of visibility. Though with the windows boarded up, and only a handful of them broken, it was a bit scattered and distant, heavily cast in shadow. The space, little more than a dystopian mess of broken pasts, gave an eerie vibe even with the light of day flitting through.

“I always wondered, you know?”Lukas said.“I mean I wasn’t in New Orleans during Katrina, but I saw it on the news. Did you go to school here before? Is that why you ended up back here? Or was it just a convenient place? Maybe some place you heard about?”

Lukas stared into the darkness for a while, not moving or saying much. He had something in his hand. A voice recorder, maybe?

“Not on official records,”Lukas said after a while. He gave a self-deprecating laugh.“It never is, is it? How many things were taken out of my reports? If people knew how often this stuff got swept away, buried in paperwork, or a few words changed to alter an outcome…”He shook his head.“But not you and me, man. We’re onto this mess.”

He turned his head fast, like he’d seen or heard something. Whatever it had been had not been captured on audio. The camera caught a reflection of light in his eyes. I had never realized Lukas wore contacts until that moment. But I’d never thought to ask either. I had been showing signs of maybe needing readers myself, but hadn’t taken that step yet. Was it terrible to know so little about my twin? I didn’t really have anyone to ask, at least until we found him.

He stood up from his crouched position and stalked across the space, disappearing beyond the camera. The camera didn’t pick it up more than his footsteps walking away. I watched for a few minutes longer, but he didn’t reappear. I forwarded to the next time stamp.

Lukas wasn’t in this one. The sun had set, and there was very little light in the room at all. The area in the corner, illuminated only by the night vision mode of the camera, was still for a few seconds.

But that wasn’t a ghost, even while it tried to slink across the screen like one. Ghosts didn’t need flashlights. The beam of the light rolled over the space until it hit the little nest Lukas had set up.

The wide angle of the lens caught the movement and face clear enough. We’d probably be able to use it to identify him. But Micah had the time stamp written clearly on the paper, which meant he had already seen the man. Did he recognize him? I didn’t.

An older male, probably fifties or sixties? White, I think, though in the gray light of the camera it was hard to tell. He was a big man, wide through the shoulders, with a bit of a belly, and a thick neck. His hair was buzzed short, almost military, but he didn’t move like any military man I’d ever met. Too clumsy. He began removing things from the sleeping area.

The man glanced in the direction of the camera, but didn’t notice it. Had he not seen the light on top? Usually that little red recording light could illuminate across a giant space like that. He didn’t react to it.

I recalled from the space, that it had been a pretty large room at one time. Even with the collapsed bits of flooring and ceiling everywhere, dissolving pianos and such, it had to be something like a music hall or auditorium, maybe a choir room. Though whatever seats had remained were little more than debris now. A couple dozen yards of space between the man and the camera, in bad lighting.

Micah often put a piece of tape or even putty over the red light when he set up stationary cams. It was part of the ghost hunting thing, no outside sources of light to taint the scene. Maybe Lukas had done that? And from a few dozen yards of distance, would the outline of the camera have been visible in near pitch blackness? Maybe not.

The man crumpled things up, and shoved them haphazardly into a bag.

My heart flipped over. Lukas’s backpack. How did I know? Because I’d bought him that backpack on a whim at a convention. It was teal-blue, covered in cats hiding in banana skins. Silly and cute, something stupid for men our age to be toting, yet Lukas had been using it. He had it that night we’d been in the Bayou. He had taken the creepy bear out of it. And when I’d watched the first clip, he’d been wearing it.

The camera only caught the design because the man shined his flashlight on the bag while he shoved stuff inside of it. If he had Lukas’s bag, but no Lukas, that couldn’t mean good things. My heart began to race. I’d been worried about ghosts, or even mental boogey men unraveling the framework of Lukas’s damaged psyche, but someone taking him from the abandoned school?

“Who the fuck was that?” I said, not really expecting Micah to know. I watched a while longer. The man took the bag and disappeared off screen, until nothing but stillness settled again. He didn’t return, and neither did Lukas.

The last time stamp I forwarded to was hours later. The time on the camera feed showing after three in the morning and that the battery was low. No Lukas or stranger in this one. Just a shadow. Something still, unmoving, yet forming a visible dark shape on the feed, crouched in the corner.

I watched it materialize, wondering if this is what Lukas had been searching for, or whomever he’d been talking to. It didn’t become anything recognizable. Perhaps the camera couldn’t catch that? My handful of on-film encounters had ended up much the same. I might be able to see it if I were there, but to the lens of digital loops, they looked like vacuums of light, pools of darkness and all that poetic shit.