Playback

📅 Published on May 25, 2025

“Playback”

Written by Sam Garrison
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by N/A

Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on CreepypastaStories.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed, adapted to film, television or audio mediums, republished in a print or electronic book, reposted on any other website, blog, or online platform, or otherwise monetized without the express written consent of its author(s).

🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available

ESTIMATED READING TIME — 20 minutes

Rating: 9.67/10. From 3 votes.
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Part I

Elliot Varn had always found comfort behind the lens. Long before the fire—when his world revolved around university deadlines, lectures in poorly lit auditoriums, and late-night editing sessions in the cramped campus media lab—he had preferred to observe rather than participate. He believed the truth emerged in small, unguarded gestures: the twitch of a brow that revealed doubt, the momentary pause before a well-rehearsed lie. One of his documentary professors had often said, “The camera doesn’t lie. But people do—constantly, desperately.” Elliot had once clung to that idea. He had clung to many things before the fire.

Now, two years later, he sat in a brittle plastic chair outside the rehabilitation clinic, his knees drawn close to the chipped concrete beneath him. A worn, spiral-bound notebook rested on his lap, and he cradled an old pen awkwardly in his bandaged fingers. The effort to write had become alien to him. When words came now, they arrived not as thoughts to be captured but as whispers flitting at the edge of hearing—too faint to explain, too persistent to dismiss.

A black van rolled into the parking lot, and Elliot squinted into the glare that reflected off its windshield. The sunlight fractured at strange angles across the glass, warping the image in a way that left him uncertain whether the distortion came from the vehicle or from his own faulty vision. His right eye had never fully recovered. The doctors had preserved the eye itself, but the symmetry was gone. They had spoken optimistically about adaptation and neuroplasticity, but they had not mentioned the vertigo. They had not warned him what it would feel like to glance into a mirror and see a face that seemed ever so slightly off—as if it were attempting to be someone else.

He rose with care, returned the notebook to his coat pocket, and walked across the lot without glancing back at the clinic. His counselor had stopped asking him to speak weeks ago. Like everyone else who had tried, she had eventually realized that he was never going to talk about the fire or the days that followed.

The city bus that carried him west rattled with every crack in the pavement, its interior thick with the staleness of too many lives passing through too quickly. Elliot sat alone near the back, watching the world outside change from industrial bleakness to the sleek promise of urban renewal—glass condos perched awkwardly atop older buildings, skeletal construction sites fenced off with banners that promised “Luxury Coming Soon.” He had not returned to the site of his family’s house since the night it burned. There was no particular anniversary or memory that pulled him back now. Rather, something internal had shifted, quiet and undeniable, like a clock striking midnight in an empty room.

When the bus slowed near the block, he stepped off and began the familiar walk toward the ruins. The house had once been unremarkable in its warmth—two stories, blue siding, white trim, and a front porch his mother had always insisted on keeping clean. Now, it stood as a hollowed shell. The siding had been scorched into strips of brittle charcoal, and the windows, where they remained, gaped like open wounds. A few strands of city-issued caution tape drooped from rusted stakes, more symbolic than functional. No one had maintained the perimeter in months.

He ducked beneath the tape and stepped carefully into what had once been the living room. The floor groaned faintly beneath his weight, its surface littered with ash and splinters. Against one wall, a misshapen mass of springs and charred fabric offered the faintest suggestion of a former recliner. In the far corner, near the sagging remains of a bookshelf, something metallic caught the light.

He approached with slow steps and knelt beside the object—a scorched tin box, its lid partially fused at one edge. It had once held his father’s photography tools. He hesitated before prying it open. Inside, the remnants of filters and adapters lay in disarray, many melted beyond recognition. Nestled among the debris, however, was a single lens. The glass was cracked along the edge and darkened with soot, but it had otherwise survived.

Elliot recognized it instantly. His father had referred to it as “the truth-seeker,” a custom-built prime lens with glass that caught light in unusual ways. Every framed photo in their house had once passed through it.

His father had called it “the truth-seeker,” but Elliot remembered a stranger moment—once, as a child, hearing his mother mutter that the lens was cursed. “That thing sees too much,” she had whispered when she thought no one was listening. He hadn’t understood then. He wasn’t sure he did now.

He lifted it with both hands, holding it as one might an injured bird. When sunlight struck the fractured center, a subtle red halo spread across the debris-strewn floorboards.

Without fully understanding the impulse, he reached into his coat and withdrew a length of cloth. With steady hands, he wrapped it around the lens’s metal ring. From a nearby outlet box, he peeled away a strip of electrical tape and used it to bind the lens to his right eye socket. The tape adhered unevenly to the scar tissue, but he adjusted until the glass aligned with his vision.

The world that emerged through the lens shimmered at the edges. It bent in strange, fluid patterns, touched always with a hue of crimson. Yet for the first time in years, Elliot felt balanced—complete. His left eye showed what remained of the real world: the collapsed beams, the naked sky, and the remnants of a life consumed by flame. Through the right, he saw something more—movement without cause, distortion without source. Shadows moved where nothing stood. Light fell where none should have.

When he stepped outside again, the contrast between the two halves of his vision deepened.

Across the street, he noticed a man in a charcoal suit crouching beside a homeless veteran, who lay curled beneath a threadbare blanket. The man offered a paper cup—coffee, it seemed—and smiled broadly as the veteran stirred. Through Elliot’s left eye, it appeared as a moment of charity. But through the right, the scene unraveled.

The man’s face flickered unnaturally at the edges. His smile split just slightly, as if too wide for the structure of his skull. His lips moved in discord with his eyes. When he extended the cup, the gesture dragged too long, his fingers trembling with something not quite human. The coffee spilled, scalding the veteran’s lap. The man did not react.

His smile remained unchanged.

Elliot stepped back, placing himself behind the skeletal remains of a load-bearing beam. He watched the man rise, adjust his tie, and resume walking. There was no urgency in his gait. No one else seemed to have noticed.

Then, softly and unmistakably, a voice moved through the air—not spoken aloud, but threaded into the space behind his thoughts.

Now you see.

Elliot did not respond. He did not speak or cry or flee. Instead, he turned toward the direction the man had gone and began to follow. The lens filtered the afternoon in pulsing hues of red, rendering the world half-wounded and half-revealed.

He did not yet know the man’s name, his address, or his purpose. But he would learn.

Not because he wanted to.

Because the lens had reminded him what it felt like to stand and watch something burn—and do nothing.

Part II

Elliot had watched the man for six days before he was certain.

Reverend Nathaniel Merrow projected the kind of solemn dignity that made people lower their voices in his presence. From the stone steps of the cathedral to the morning radio segments that carried his voice across three counties, he cultivated an image of grace: unwavering, generous, and immaculately composed. He wore his white clerical collar like armor, greeting the desperate and the devout with the same practiced stillness. He was beloved for his outreach, for the food drives he organized and the shelter programs he endorsed. He embraced the suffering openly and without hesitation, which only deepened the impact of his words when he stood at the pulpit.

Elliot followed him not only through the lens but through the rhythms of daily life—parking lots, grocery store entrances, and cathedral corridors dimly lit by afternoon sun. Each time he observed the reverend through the red-tinted glass, the illusion slipped. The symmetry of Merrow’s expressions failed to hold. What appeared from one angle to be serene compassion, through the lens became something else: a calculated mimicry of warmth, designed to register in photographs and broadcasts but hollow when the spotlight dimmed.

The dissonance grew more pronounced as the days passed. Elliot noted that Merrow often spoke in carefully rehearsed patterns, his cadences modulated for maximum comfort. But when the cameras turned off, or when no one stood within earshot, his face would sag with something closer to boredom than fatigue. His posture changed. His voice lost its shine.

On the third evening, Elliot set up a parabolic microphone just beneath a broken vent in the rear wall of the cathedral’s rectory. He had discovered the space two days earlier while walking the perimeter and found that the small room beyond it served as a makeshift office for informal meetings. He crouched in the weeds outside and monitored the audio feed with his headphones, keeping the levels low to avoid peaking.

The voices arrived distorted at first, filtered through old plaster and the vibration of ductwork, but they soon stabilized.

“They come in here expecting absolution,” Merrow said. The lightness had vanished from his tone, replaced by a frank detachment. “You try to meet them where they are, but they want miracles. They want you to cry with them, bleed with them. It’s unsustainable.”

A second voice responded, male and softer, with a faint trace of amusement.

“You could always say no. Send them elsewhere.”

Merrow’s answer arrived without hesitation.

“No. That’s worse. At least here I can control the narrative. Keep them from unraveling too publicly. If I had to feel everything they brought in, I’d never sleep again.”

There was a pause, followed by the soft click of glass being set down.

“It’s easier when you stop thinking of them as individuals. That’s what I tell myself. People become… petitions on legs.”

The other man chuckled, but Elliot muted the audio before the sound completed. His hands remained steady as he rewound the recording, isolating the section that revealed the reverend’s internal calculus. In the safety of the storage unit he had converted into a workspace, he replayed the clip several times before beginning the edit.

He worked with the calm deliberation of a surgeon, trimming pauses, adjusting volume levels, and removing the second voice entirely. What remained was the reverend’s voice stripped of any mitigating context, speaking alone into a vacuum.

“It’s easier when you stop thinking of them as individuals. People become… petitions on legs.”

The lens hummed faintly as he pressed the final cut into the battered cassette recorder. The red light in the corner of the unit flickered once, and for a brief moment, Elliot felt the air shift around him, like static rising before a storm.

That night, Elliot returned to the cathedral. He had spent the afternoon preparing the reverend’s private study, which was accessible through an old cellar door on the north side of the rectory. The entrance, once reserved for storage, had gone unused for years. The lock had rusted through. There were no alarms, no surveillance. No one questioned why a man like Merrow needed privacy.

The room bore the scent of cedar and aging leather. Rows of books lined the walls, and a single lamp stood atop the desk, casting a golden circle across the polished wood. Elliot unplugged the lamp, unscrewed the bulb, and replaced it with one wrapped in red-stained celluloid film. When he turned it back on, the glow spread outward in dark crimson waves, saturating the corners and bleeding into the spines of prayer books and framed portraits.

At the center of the room, he placed a high-backed chair beneath the light. He angled a cracked thrift store mirror directly across from it, taping the edges and bracing it against the far wall. The final detail was the cassette recorder, which he positioned on a narrow table beside the chair, its play button primed.

The reverend arrived just after midnight.

Elliot had left a message in Merrow’s mailbox that morning, handwritten and unsigned, folded into a plain envelope. It read only: Emergency confession. Please enter through side cellar door.

Elliot watched from behind the bookshelf as Merrow entered the room. The red light struck the reverend’s face immediately, painting his features in bruised crimson. He hesitated in the doorway.

“Hello?” he asked, his voice quieter than usual, touched by an uncertainty he rarely allowed to surface. “Is someone here?”

Elliot stepped forward and pressed the play button on the cassette recorder. The reverend’s voice echoed from the device, altered slightly by the speaker’s tinny reverberation.

“It’s easier when you stop thinking of them as individuals… petitions on legs.”

Merrow’s head turned sharply toward the sound. “Who—who are you? What is this?”

Elliot said nothing. He moved with purpose, circling around Merrow and gesturing silently toward the chair. The reverend resisted, backing away with a raised hand, but his retreat was tentative, confused.

“I don’t want trouble,” he said, his eyes scanning the room for signs of who or what confronted him.

Elliot reached into his coat and revealed the knife—not with aggression, but as a warning. The blade gleamed under the red light. He did not raise it; he only let the reverend see it.

Merrow’s breath quickened, and he stumbled backward into the chair. Elliot stepped forward and fastened plastic ties around his wrists before the older man could fully process what was happening.

The mirror reflected the reverend’s face in broken symmetry, the fracture across the glass bisecting his expression. His eyes, wide with disbelief, flicked between the mirror and Elliot.

“Please,” he said. “Whatever this is, I don’t understand.”

Elliot leaned in, his right eye obscured behind the mounted lens, the red glare warping his features into something barely human. He whispered with conviction.

“I want you to see yourself.”

The knife moved with clinical precision. He began at the corner of Merrow’s mouth and cut upward, tracing the arc of his cheekbone. Blood spilled down the clerical collar and onto the lapels of his jacket. Merrow screamed, but the acoustics of the old study swallowed the sound.

Elliot repeated the incision on the other side, mirroring the first. The reverend’s face split into a grotesque parody of the smiles he had so carefully performed for years.

Elliot stepped back and allowed the man to take in the reflection.

Merrow sobbed now, his voice broken and ragged.

“You don’t have to do this,” he pleaded. “I’m not… I’m just a man.”

The recorder clicked, advancing to the next clip.

“If I had to feel everything they brought in, I’d never sleep again… I stop thinking of them as individuals.”

Elliot switched off the device. The silence that followed felt absolute.

He left the recorder on the reverend’s lap and draped a strip of bloodied celluloid across his forehead like a crown. Then he extinguished the light, stepped back through the cellar, and disappeared into the waiting dark.

The whispers that had guided his hand faded to a hush, but they did not disappear. They lingered behind the silence, patient and expectant.

Part III

Tess Marlowe left the community center each evening with a posture that suggested purpose rather than fatigue. She moved with the composure of someone who believed her work mattered, who had seen enough to know how easily people broke and still returned the next morning to try again. She smiled at the receptionist, waved with both hands to the janitor, and paused often on the front steps to watch the sky, as though sunset offered something more than a fading day. Elliot observed from across the street, his coat drawn close, his face partially turned away. He had followed her for eight nights.

Unlike the others, Tess did not fracture beneath the lens.

Most of those Elliot studied had revealed contradictions the moment he adjusted focus. He had come to rely on the red-glass distortion not as a hindrance but as an instrument of truth. Through it, the gestures of liars became exaggerated; their pretenses cracked like brittle shells. The lens rarely failed to uncover something—hypocrisy, cowardice, cruelty beneath polished veneers. But when Elliot trained his vision on Tess Marlowe, no such fracture occurred. Her image remained whole.

And still, the whispers persisted.

“She let them suffer. She turned the page and walked away.”

Elliot had first come across her name while reviewing a cluster of case summaries tied to the city’s child welfare department. He had begun reading those records days after Merrow’s fall, searching not for a person but for a pattern—something to account for the voices’ increased urgency. Buried within the documentation of a closed foster care review, Tess Marlowe appeared as an administrative signatory. The case involved a child who had suffered repeated injuries while in the custody of a state-licensed foster guardian. The medical records detailed multiple hospital visits. The interviews painted a picture of escalating concern. Yet no intervention had occurred. The child remained in place for over seven months—until a neighbor contacted the media.

The case was sealed shortly afterward, but a memo remained accessible. Tess’s name appeared on the approval line. It authorized continued placement.

“She saw it. She let it go.”

Elliot printed the file and folded it until the paper held sharp creases that cut through the text. Each time he opened it again, the words seemed more certain in their condemnation.

He followed her through parks, across intersections, and into quiet storefronts where she volunteered on weekends. He watched her restock shelves at a food pantry and calm a screaming toddler whose mother appeared at her breaking point. He listened to her read from a tattered children’s book beneath a canopy in the freezing wind while a small crowd of kids gathered near her boots. He recorded her voice during these encounters—soft fragments, lifted from moments she would not have remembered. He later reviewed the clips in his storage unit, stripping each one of ambient noise to isolate tone, cadence, and inflection.

The lens revealed small aberrations that made him pause. Occasionally, her face would shift at the edge of a gesture—one side of her mouth rising into a smile while the other remained neutral, or one eye appearing brighter than its twin. He blinked and recalibrated, yet the irregularities lingered in memory.

The whispers grew louder.

“She pretends. Just like they all do.”

Still, Elliot hesitated. With Merrow, he had felt no need for restraint. The evidence had shaped itself into certainty. But with Tess, the contradictions refused to resolve. If she had failed to protect a child, how could she still walk among others with such ease? If she had knowingly looked away, how could she hold a crying stranger’s hand with tenderness that read as genuine even beneath the lens?

In the storage unit, Elliot laid out the materials for his next project: a thrift-store mirror with a dull, hairline crack; a folding chair that creaked when touched; the same red-dyed film stretched across a salvaged floodlight. He cued up audio clips from Tess’s public conversations. One excerpt came from a forum where she had stammered in response to a question about policy enforcement. Another was from a voicemail she had left for a coworker, her tone clipped and uncertain. He replayed these segments repeatedly, allowing them to reduce in his mind to breath and tension.

“Weakness,” the voice whispered. “Guilt in the breath. Guilt in the pause.”

He closed his eyes and leaned back in the plastic chair, listening to the loops blur into abstraction. The recordings lost semantic value, transforming into rhythms of apprehension.

That night, Elliot dreamed not of fire but of overlit hospital corridors and linoleum floors. In one room, he saw a girl seated beside a hospital bed. A child’s book rested in her lap. Her voice carried the cadence of someone unsure whether the patient could hear but unwilling to stop reading. Her hair was pulled back by a faded ribbon. Her face remained obscured by the angle of memory, but her presence settled into something familiar.

The next morning, Elliot searched the volunteer logs for the hospital where he had undergone burn treatment. He combed through names associated with the pediatric wing during the summer of his admission. When he found her name, the confirmation struck like an impact: Marlowe, Tess. Volunteer. Pediatric Trauma. Consistent attendance. Excellent with long-term patients.

The memory aligned suddenly with the dream. She had read to him during those long hours when language seemed foreign and human contact unbearable. He had not remembered the stories, only the way her voice filled the room with something other than pain.

Later that afternoon, he returned to the storage unit and retrieved the cassette he had prepared. He pressed play but listened differently now. Her words no longer sounded clipped or evasive. They carried the fatigue of someone who cared too deeply and knew how rarely that was enough.

The whispers returned, but they arrived fragmented, their tone less commanding than before.

“She knew… she signed… she smiled…”

Elliot responded, but not aloud. His mouth formed shapes that never became sound. He sat on the floor beside the mirror, resting his head against its cracked surface, watching his reflection blur. For a moment, both eyes returned to symmetry. Then the lens caught the light, and the distortion reasserted itself.

The tools he had arranged—blade, speaker, recording device—remained untouched.

He closed the cassette lid slowly and turned off the light.

The whispers receded, but they did not vanish.

They pulled back like a tide does before it returns with force.

He would act.

But not tonight.

Part IV

The theater had once stood as a symbol of family ambition, passed down from Elliot’s grandfather to his father as a legacy of celluloid dreams and Saturday matinees. Nestled between shuttered delis and antique shops whose window displays gathered more dust than business, it had managed to survive decades of progress without ever truly evolving. After the fire, and after the insurance claim dissolved into litigation that never resolved, the building was left untouched. The letters on the marquee dislodged themselves one by one until none remained. No demolition crew arrived. No real estate signs appeared. It was not condemned, only forgotten.

Elliot pried open the side door with a crowbar shortly after sunset. The lock gave without protest. He entered without hesitation, pulling behind him a wheeled trunk filled with equipment and a bundled canvas roll that bumped softly against the peeling tile floor. The air inside was dense with dust and the faint acidity of rotting plaster. His footsteps echoed across the velvet-lined aisles, scattering the silence like dust in the projection beam of a film long since ended.

He worked without speaking. Near the base of the stage, just beneath the curve of the old orchestra pit, he positioned the mirror—larger than the others he had used, its surface shattered in an elaborate web of hairline fractures. The mirror stood upright, held in place by weights and clamps, its surface tilted slightly forward to capture and distort whatever sat before it. In the center of the stage, facing the mirror, he placed the high-backed wooden chair. Around it, he affixed red-gelled floodlights to the overhead scaffolding and tested their glow. The color they cast resembled dried blood, soaking the dust-coated boards in the illusion of a shallow pool.

Two large speakers flanked the chair, each connected to a playback unit Elliot had rigged earlier that morning. On a small table beside the chair, he arranged a spool of aged film, a cassette recorder, and the blade.

Tess Marlowe regained consciousness with a soft gasp, her hands already bound to the chair’s armrests with cloth restraints. Elliot had loosened the canvas enough to expose her to the light but not to disorient her completely. Her breathing quickened as she adjusted to the glow that surrounded her, the saturated red casting deep shadows that obscured the edges of her vision.

“Where am I?” she asked, her voice unsteady but not panicked. She turned her face away from the light and blinked several times, as though searching for meaning in the blur.

Elliot stepped forward into the frame of her sight. The lens still clung to his right eye, its crimson glint catching the full intensity of the floodlight. He held the cassette recorder in one hand. The other remained empty, open at his side.

Tess stared at him, and a flicker of recognition passed across her face. Her lips parted slightly.

“I know you,” she said.

Elliot did not respond. He pressed the play button.

“She let them suffer. She turned the page and walked away.”

Her brow furrowed, but she did not look away. “What is this?” she asked. “Why are you showing me this?”

He advanced the tape.

“They told her. She signed. The child stayed.”

Her expression changed as understanding dawned. Her eyes shifted from Elliot to the mirror, then back again. The fractures in the glass rendered her reflection unsteady, her features fragmented by the geometry of old wounds.

“I remember that case,” she said quietly. “I didn’t approve the placement. I signed the review summary. That’s not the same thing. I flagged the injuries. I followed up.”

She drew a shallow breath and continued before he could interrupt.

“I was overruled.”

Elliot moved closer, and the red light deepened the shadows along his jawline. The whispers swelled at the edge of his hearing. They rose in rhythmic pulses, as though driven by breath or heartbeat.

“She lied.”

“She saw and did nothing.”

“She knew what you became.”

Tess turned her gaze directly upon him. Her voice trembled, but her eyes remained fixed and clear.

“I know who you are now,” she said. “You were in St. Vincent’s. Pediatric burn unit. Summer rotation, six years ago. I read to you every Tuesday afternoon. You never spoke, but you watched me. You wouldn’t look at anyone else, but you always watched me.”

Elliot’s posture shifted, though he said nothing. His grip on the recorder tightened.

“You were so small,” she continued, her voice softening. “Your hands were bandaged like mittens, and your face—your face was mostly covered. But your eyes were open. You listened to every word. Even when you couldn’t speak. Even when you couldn’t move.”

She swallowed once and leaned forward as much as the restraints allowed.

“I wondered what happened to you. You weren’t there the following week. You just disappeared. I assumed you died.”

Her voice cracked, but she steadied it again.

“I hoped I was wrong.”

The whispers inside Elliot’s mind grew layered and discordant.

“She sees you.”

“She betrayed you.”

“She kept you alive.”

He raised the blade and stepped into the full light, casting both himself and her into the mirror’s chaotic surface. Her image refracted across dozens of angles. Some versions of her looked afraid. Others looked calm. None looked away.

His arm hovered.

“I never forgot you,” she said, her voice strained but unwavering. “I thought about you for weeks after. I asked about you, but no one told me anything.”

Elliot’s hand faltered. The blade remained suspended, its reflection multiplied across the glass.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

She nodded slowly.

“I know,” she replied. “But I am.”

The silence that followed was absolute.

“You are the frame,” the voice said from within.

“You are the crack.”

Elliot lowered the blade.

He crouched beside the table, placed the weapon down gently, and switched off the recorder. The speakers hissed once, then fell silent.

Tess exhaled, her shoulders trembling. Her eyes remained on him.

“I don’t know what you’ve become,” she said. “But it doesn’t have to end like this.”

Elliot stood without a word and began to untie her wrists. The cloth bindings slipped away without resistance. He stepped back and allowed her to test her fingers. She flexed them slowly, wincing at the stiffness, but she did not recoil.

She looked at him again, her expression unreadable but open.

He turned without speaking and walked down the aisle, the red glow from the floodlights receding behind him until his figure disappeared into shadow.

When Tess finally stood, she approached the mirror. Her reflection remained broken but still recognizably her own. Beneath the chair where she had been bound, scrawled in ash across the stage floor, she saw a message written in uneven, deliberate strokes:

Some lies echo. Others end here.

In the days that followed, Elliot kept his ear to the shifting frequencies of the city—talk radio, police blotters, whispers in online forums. Reverend Merrow had resigned without explanation, citing health reasons. A single grainy photograph surfaced: the former pastor leaving the cathedral with his face bandaged, flanked by two silent aides. No charges. No statement. The tape, if it had surfaced, left no public trace.

Epilogue

Three days after the incident at the abandoned theater, Tess Marlowe stepped out onto her front porch just after sunrise and found a small, unmarked package resting on the welcome mat. The box bore no postage, no label, and no return address. A single strip of black tape sealed its top, stretched taut across the seam. The cardboard had been crimped at one corner, as if handled carelessly or pressed too hard during wrapping.

She picked it up without immediately bringing it inside. Instead, she stood for a moment beneath the awning, the chill of the morning settling across her arms. The neighborhood remained quiet, still suspended in the pause before the first engines turned over and the morning routines resumed. She turned the box over once, then again, and saw nothing to indicate where it had come from or who had left it there.

Inside, she placed it on the kitchen counter and peeled the tape away carefully, as though expecting something fragile to shift beneath her touch. The box contained a bundle of soot-stained cloth, folded tightly around a single object. She pulled it open and uncovered a miniDV cassette. The label had been burned away entirely, and the plastic casing showed signs of warping along one edge, but the tape reel itself appeared intact.

She stared at it in silence for several seconds before retrieving an old handheld camcorder from the back of a cabinet. The device had not been used in years. It still bore a faded sticker from the nonprofit where she had once recorded volunteer training sessions. The battery light blinked amber but did not die. The device accepted the tape without resistance.

The screen flickered, held briefly in static, then resolved into a dim, steady image.

The frame showed a narrow room—likely the projection booth above the stage of the old theater—lit only by a dull, red-tinted bulb hanging from the ceiling. Elliot sat at a table, his posture uneven, his shoulders hunched slightly forward. His face remained half in shadow, but the fractured lens still covered his right eye, reflecting the low light with a muted gleam. He looked thinner than she remembered, and there was a heaviness about him that had not been present before. Yet something in his bearing suggested clarity, as if some portion of the weight he carried had finally begun to settle into place.

He did not speak immediately. For nearly half a minute, he remained still, the only sound the faint whir of the tape inside the camcorder.

Then, finally, he raised his head and spoke.

“I thought the lens helped me see what people were hiding,” he said. His voice had shed its former tension. It emerged low, unguarded, and stripped of accusation. “I thought if I looked long enough, I’d find the truth underneath the lies.”

He leaned forward slightly and rested his elbows on the table, his fingers laced loosely together.

“But sometimes the lens doesn’t reveal. Sometimes it distorts. It shows you what you fear, not what’s real. Or maybe it shows both, and the difference is something you’re not equipped to recognize until it’s too late.”

He reached up and touched the lens with two fingers. It shifted slightly, no longer as firmly fixed as before.

“I used to think people forgot too easily. That they smiled while things burned because they were never really watching in the first place.” He paused, his gaze drifting momentarily toward the far corner of the room. “Maybe I watched too long. Maybe that’s the cost of seeing clearly—your reflection stops looking back.”

At that moment, the red gleam in the lens changed. Tess leaned in toward the camcorder screen. For a brief instant, the surface of the lens no longer reflected Elliot’s face. Instead, it appeared to show hers. The image was subtle, faint enough to pass as a trick of light or contrast. Still, the recognition struck her. It was not a reflection from the glass around her, and the angle did not match the camera’s placement.

Elliot looked into the lens once more and gave a slow, measured nod.

“I don’t know what comes next,” he said. “But I hope you’ll keep watching. Even when it hurts. Especially then.”

He did not say goodbye. The video did not fade to black. Instead, the final frame froze—his face caught in half-shadow, the lens glinting softly, and his eyes no longer clouded with anger or confusion, but something quieter. Tess could not name it.

She sat in silence for several minutes after the tape ended. The camcorder continued to hum gently in her lap, though the screen had gone dark. She reached forward and removed the cassette, holding it for a moment in both hands as if it might shift or speak again.

Outside, the first sounds of the day had begun to rise—engines starting, doors opening, voices passing on the sidewalk.

She looked up toward the window.

In the faint reflection cast by the glass, she saw her own eyes—whole, undistorted, and watching.

And far from that quiet morning street, beyond the reach of traffic and light, the lens blinked once more.

Rating: 9.67/10. From 3 votes.
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🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available


Written by Sam Garrison
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by N/A

🔔 More stories from author: Sam Garrison


Publisher's Notes: N/A

Author's Notes: N/A

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Pages of Dust: Volume 4
Year's Best Hardcore Horror: Volume 2
Bleeders: Book 1, The Red Death
Daylight Dims: Volume One

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