B1340.mp4 -

At the five-minute mark, the audio changed. The hum vanished, replaced by the sound of someone breathing directly into a microphone. It was heavy and wet. The boy on the screen froze. He didn't turn around; he just slowly started to dismantle his tower of blocks, one by one.

As he placed the last block, a hand entered the frame from the left. It wasn't a human hand. It was too long, with fingers that had an extra joint, casting a jagged shadow across the carpet. The boy didn't scream. He just looked up and whispered something. b1340.mp4

It was a fixed-angle shot of a suburban living room from the late 90s. You could tell by the chunky CRT television in the corner and the olive-colored wallpaper. A young boy was sitting on the floor, playing with wooden blocks. He was completely silent. Every few seconds, he would look toward the camera—not at the lens, but behind it, as if someone were standing right where I was sitting. At the five-minute mark, the audio changed

I tried to close the window, but the "X" button did nothing. The video kept playing. The long-fingered hand reached for the boy’s shoulder, but right before it touched him, the screen went black. A single line of text appeared in a basic system font: The boy on the screen froze

Suddenly, my own webcam light flickered on. The video file didn't just end; it refreshed. Now, the living room on the screen was gone. It was replaced by a grainy, low-res feed of my own room, taken from the corner of the ceiling.

I paused the video and zoomed in on his lips. He was saying a sequence of numbers: My heart stopped. That’s today’s date.

I found the file on a bloated, 128MB thumb drive I bought at a garage sale for a dollar. It was the only thing on there, nestled in a folder titled “DO_NOT_RECODE.”