[REC] SPECTRAL SEEKERS - CASE FILE 073 - BLACKWOOD PLANT - 22:13
The timestamp throbbed in the corner of my awareness like a countdown to execution. I tried to move my head. Couldn't. My body belonged to the past, and the past had other plans.
The van's interior looked like a collision between Best Buy's security section and a teenager's disaster zone. Hard plastic cases stacked against coiled ethernet cables. Empty Monster cans rolled across the floor in rhythm with every pothole. A tripod had wedged itself between the seats at an angle that guaranteed someone was getting stabbed in the kidney.
Chloe gripped the steering wheel with the same intensity she'd probably applied to color-coded study schedules and five-year plans. Her spine formed that perfect vertical line even here, even driving through streets that looked like the city had given up on them years ago. The dashboard lights painted her face in sickly green.
Madison occupied the middle row, hunched over a laptop balanced on her knees. Purple highlights caught the screen's glow as her fingers moved across the trackpad.
Bree pressed herself against the window in the back. Her reflection stared at something in the darkness outside. Every few seconds her shoulders would twitch.
Jake controlled the stereo from his position beside me. His leg bounced hard enough to register as seismic activity.
"Alright, team." His voice carried that specific brand of forced enthusiasm people use when they're one bad jump scare from pissing themselves. "We need to get into the right headspace. Setting the mood is crucial for a successful investigation."
He plugged his phone into the aux cord.
Static crackled through the speakers.
Then the cheerful, tinny xylophone intro of "Spooky Scary Skeletons" filled the van.
Oh my god.
Chloe's exhale could have stripped paint.
"Really, Jake? This is your psychological prep?"
She didn't take her eyes off the road. Her knuckles had gone white against the steering wheel.
Madison looked up from her screen. Her eye roll could have powered a small generator. She slapped on a pair of headphones without saying a word. The gesture communicated volumes about her opinion on Jake's musical choices.
Past-me laughed. "You're such a child."
"Hey, it's a classic!" Jake bounced harder. "It sends shivers down your spine!"
He was trying so hard. Keeping the mood light. Staving off the fear that had to be churning in his gut the same way it churned in everyone else's.
The van lurched over a pothole deep enough to qualify as a sinkhole. Equipment shifted. An empty can went flying.
Madison pulled off one headphone and grabbed a small camcorder from the seat beside her. The perspective shifted. Now I was seeing through her lens as she panned across the van's interior.
"Okay, pre-investigation interviews for the log."
Her voice carried that flat affect people use when they're performing a task they've done a thousand times. Routine. Clinical.
She aimed the camera at Chloe first.
"Team leader. What are you hoping to find tonight?"
"Empirical evidence of post-mortem consciousness manifestation." Chloe's response sounded like she was reading from a textbook. "Quantifiable data that demonstrates awareness persists beyond biological death."
Jake got the next question.
"What are your initial feelings about this location?"
"Honestly?" His leg bounced faster. "I'm terrified and excited in equal measure. But mostly excited. This could be the big one."
Then the camera swung toward me.
The lens zoomed in slightly. Madison's finger adjusted the focus until my face filled the frame in uncomfortable detail.
"So, the 'muscle.'" A pause. "You don't seem like the type to believe in this stuff. What's the real reason you're here?"
"Someone has to make sure this idiot," I jerked my thumb at Jake, "doesn't fall through a rotten floorboard."
Madison's lips curved. Not quite a smile. More like the beginning of one that she decided to abort halfway through.
"Fair enough."
The camera held on my face.
"But Jake mentioned weird things tend to happen around you. Any comment on that?"
"Jake exaggerates. I've just had bad luck with landlords."
The deflection landed flat. Madison held the shot for three more seconds. Long enough to make the silence uncomfortable. Long enough to communicate that she knew I was full of shit.
Then the camera clicked off.
The perspective snapped back to the dashcam view.
She knew, I realized. Even then, she knew something was off about me.
The van passed under a series of streetlights. Sodium vapor bulbs that cast everything in jaundiced yellow.
They flickered.
On. Off. On. Off.
The skeleton song stretched.
Audio pitched down into something that shouldn't have been possible with digital compression. The cheerful melody became a demonic drone that vibrated through the van's frame. And underneath it, woven through the distorted bass, a voice whispered one word with perfect clarity.
"Mine."
Then the song snapped back. Normal pitch. Normal tempo. Like nothing had happened.
Jake's laugh came out strangled.
"Whoa, signal interference."
Madison was already typing. Her fingers flew across the keyboard with practiced speed.
"Major EMF from these old power lines. It's interfering with the unshielded speaker cable."
She had an explanation. Perfectly logical. Completely rational.
But the temperature in the van had dropped ten degrees.
"See?" Jake forced brightness back into his voice. "Totally explainable. We're going to document so many phenomena tonight. Speaking of which, what do you call a ghost's true love?"
Collective groaning.
"His ghoul-friend!"
Past-me laughed. Or tried to. The sound that came out was mostly genuine, with an edge of nervous energy that suggested he'd started questioning his life choices.
On the dashcam's audio feed, my laugh tore apart.
A scream ripped through it. Desperate. Terrified. The sound of something being hollowed out while still conscious. It lasted maybe half a second before cutting off.
No one in the van reacted.
They hadn't heard it.
But I heard it. Crystal clear. The sound of my own future terror bleeding backward through corrupted memory, leaving traces in the static between moments.
My nonexistent stomach tried to empty itself.
Chloe turned onto the final approach. The city lights vanished behind a ridge of dead trees. The only illumination came from the van's headlights carving a tunnel through darkness so complete it felt solid.
The dashcam pixelated.
Three frames of corrupted video.
In those frames, something stood at the edge of the headlight beam.
Impossibly tall. Impossibly thin. Limbs that bent at angles that violated basic anatomy. A silhouette that my brain kept trying to rationalize as a tree or a street sign or literally anything except what my eyes were telling me it was.
The footage corrected itself.
Empty road.
Chloe slammed the brakes hard enough to throw everyone forward against their seatbelts. Equipment crashed in the back. Madison's laptop nearly went flying.
"What the hell was that?!"
Madison was already rewinding the dashcam feed. Her fingers shook slightly as she worked the trackpad.
The corrupted frames played again.
That figure at the edge of darkness.
She froze the image. Enhanced it. The processing software tried to fill in the missing data and produced something that looked like a nightmare filtered through broken mathematics.
"Nothing." Her voice had gone tight. "The feed corrupted for a second. Compression artifact from the EMF interference."
She couldn't meet anyone's eyes.
No one spoke.
Jake reached forward and turned off the music. The sudden silence felt aggressive. The only sound came from gravel crunching under the tires as Chloe eased the van forward at maybe five miles per hour.
Turn around, I thought at them. Turn around and go home and forget this place exists.
But the van kept moving.
The headlights swept across a chain-link fence. Rust had eaten through the metal in patches, leaving holes big enough to walk through. Warning signs hung at crooked angles. PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. DANGER.
Behind the fence, the Blackwood Meatpacking Plant rose against the night sky.
Four stories of brick and broken windows. Industrial architecture from an era that prioritized function over aesthetics. Every window was a black void. Every door was a mouth waiting to swallow.
The building shouldn't have been imposing. Just another abandoned factory in a city full of them.
But something about it pulled at my awareness. Even locked in this memory, even unable to move, I felt it. A gravity that had nothing to do with mass.
Chloe killed the engine.
The dashcam switched to night vision mode. Green-tinged footage showing the plant's entrance in stark detail.
The massive rusted door groaned.
Metal scraping against metal. A sound that shouldn't have been possible from a building with no power, no mechanisms, no reason to move.
The door opened.
Just an inch.
Just enough.
Black smoke poured from the gap. Not smoke. Something thicker. Something that moved with intention as it spilled across the ground and dissipated into the night.
Bree made a sound in the back seat. Not quite a whimper. Not quite a gasp. Something caught between recognition and terror.
"The veil." Her voice floated soft and distant. "It's so thin here. I can hear them screaming."
"Who's screaming?" Jake's question came out barely above a whisper.
"Everyone who died here. Everyone who bled into the concrete. They're still here. They've been waiting."
She turned from the window. Her eyes found mine in the rearview mirror.
"They've been waiting for you."
Past-me's heart rate spiked. I could feel it through the memory. Adrenaline flooding my system. Fight or flight responses kicking into overdrive.
Run, my body was screaming. Run run run run run.
But past-me stayed in the seat.
Because Jake was there. Because backing down meant admitting fear. Because seventeen years of foster homes had taught me that showing weakness only made things worse.
So I stayed.
The dashcam timestamp continued its relentless march forward.
22:47.