While Emmy was cleaning up upstairs, Matt busied himself downstairs. He planned to clean up as well but his thoughts kept going back to the phone. Matt kept checking on it but it was drained. His constant attempt at turning it on wasn’t helping. He finally gave up on any pretense about cleaning up and sat in front of the laptop to review the feeds from the cameras instead.
He jumped the last time he remembered which was shortly after dinner and started looking at all the video feeds, both normal and enhanced. Half an hour later, Matt had found nothing.
He tried the phone again. It had charged enough this time that it was able to at least power on and make it to the home screen. He was a mixture of dread and curiosity as the device sluggishly loaded up. Matt immediately tapped the gallery app and played the first video.
The sluggishness of the phone and the cracks on the screen were enough to make him frustrated. Thinking that the phone might die again, Matt went ahead and copied the video to the laptop and used the CCTV cameras’ software to play the video.
The viewing experience was better. He tried to view the video with as distant a mindset as he could muster but emotions, uncomfortable ones, welled up inside him. He could see his daughter floating in the empty air while Jean and Emmy looked on in horror. He focused on the bed, the part where he saw the black figure through the mirror.
The figure did not show up in the video. What Matt found curious was the subtle warping of the area of the bed that was captured. The footboard appeared on video like it was bending. The areas around the bed that the camera captured appeared to pulse in a quick contract then expand sequences.
Although the video was already pixelated, the software allowed him to zoom in. Matt zoomed in on the bed itself. He was curious about the indentations. They matched up precisely to how he thought the dark figure squatted. The indentations were appeared to be almost twice the size of what Matt would make if he stood on the bed, and he had large feet.
He saw himself enter the frame. He saw his figure freeze and remembered it was during the time he noticed the figure on the mirror. His hairs stood up. He saw himself run to his daughter when her clothes started to slip off. Emmy came forward too. His jaw dropped when he saw both of them flying back. The video shifted slightly to the right as it recorded a thud, confirming how strongly he flew against the cabinet.
His emotions was a mixture of pity, anger, fear, and wonder as he watched the sequences onscreen. He gasped at how weightless he seemed when he was dragged across the floor and thrown into the other side of the room where he collided with his wife. He watched Emmy lurch when his body hit hers. His eyes widened to their limits as he watched Emmy and himself rise and got pinned on the wall. He teared up when he saw Gina thrown like a rag doll.
He was frequently shuddering, rubbing his palms against his shorts. His goosebumps persistently populated his bruised skin. When not rubbing his palm on his pants, he rubbed his forearms as if by reflex. The sound of Jean crying broke his heart. He watched her get thrown with her mom, she was the only one left almost untouched. He watched with bated breath as the child crawled and walked around the room, trying to make sense of the terrifying events unfolding before her.
He swallowed involuntarily as a recollection of something vague began to bubble to the surface. It was just before he passed out, when he was calling out to Jean to run. It was when his brain was trying to shut the body down. But he could not clearly remember what it was. Just a sick feeling.
He saw Jean stiffen and stare where the figure would have been. She walked in slow, measured steps that appeared almost like it was rehearsed towards the bed. Her gaze did not change. It almost seemed to Matt that she was seeing the figure.
Baby, what are you doing?!
The capture started to glitch. Several frames appeared only as dark. He tilted his head in confusion when he saw the curtains waving. Matt was sure the windows were closed. The chair he launched at the space where he thought the figure was floated and moved towards Jean in a flash.
The video turned black again. When pictures came back it was all blurry. Matt had to play it again while squinting until he realized that it was the phone itself. It was shaking. This puzzled greatly puzzled Matt. The camera was placed on top of the cabinets. The cabinets were bolted to the wall. Where was the wind coming from? Why was it shaking?
Matt slowed the video down to see just how much he could make out in the blurry mess. He exhaled aloud. Despite significant blurring, he could make out certain details in the room. Everything in the room that was not fixed was shaking. And it was getting stronger.
As if it wasn’t already hard to make out the details, the lights in the room started blinking. The more the seconds passed the longer it flickered. Matt had to jump back to certain frames several times just to be sure he was not seeing things.
He saw himself and his wife pinned against the wall, then they were thrown to the bed. Then it seemed they were thrown against the wall again, separate from each other, and finally they were thrown down on the floor together. The only advantage there was for the lights blinking rapidly was that Matt could make out more details although his phone was having a hard time switching between dark and light. He was able to ascertain that by the time they were thrown to the bed, they both have already lost consciousness. Some parts of the video started to have pronounced blurring.
He replayed back to the parts where the blurring began and played it at a quarter the speed. Matt was curious what those were and wondered if it was like those that was captured by the CCTV cameras. After several minutes, it became clear.
The blurs were objects. One of those objects was clearly the chair, or part of it that was throw into Jean before the video cut out. The objects were flying around at high speed towards the bed where the entity should have been, where Jean’s gaze was pinned at. In some frames, he clearly saw a photo frame fly off from Gina’s dresser headed in the same direction as the rest of the flying debris were.
Matt could not explain it. His mouth hung open. When he threw the chair, it went wide. Now, as he watched the slowed video, he could clearly see the objects bouncing off. The smaller, softer ones just fell off. And Jean was just there.
What the fuck does this mean?
The video blurred for good this time. Only the changing densities of the hues on the frame indicated it was still going. The old phone and the fluorescent, flickering lights was proving to be a challenging mix for the camera to capture anything identifiable. The sounds, however, inspired fear. It was like the howling of the wind in a hurricane. Matt felt silly but settled on the only explanation he could think of. Things were spiraling so fast that the camera could not keep up with it. The video shook and finally turned black for good before ending.
He sat motionless. He recalled the fearsome features of that monster. Throughout his life, the only things that scared him, at least for a time, were the trucker’s stories. All of those turned out to be just stories. This was not one of them.
He saw it through the mirror. Jean seemed to see it too. But when he turned his gaze towards the bed, and even when he chucked the chair at it, it didn’t seem to be there.
Was it there or was it not? If it was there, how long has it been there?