The video Baron had been watching was just a few minutes long. It was playing in a browser window on some kind of darknet website.
The video reminded me of that demonic student film that made the girl crawl out of the television in The Ring and Ringu, but this thing Baron had been watching felt much worse, darker, and more weirdly lo-fi.
The video begins with an impossibly tall shadowy figure hunched over a second figure seated on a metal chair. They’re in the middle of a small room. The walls are covered in countless thousands of tiny arcane markings. Every once in a while, the light flickers a certain way and the markings suddenly look alive, like so many tiny insects crawling the walls to try to escape the sudden unwelcome illumination.
A minute or so into the video, the tall shadowy figure leans down farther and whispers something into the seated figure’s ear.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the seated figure begins sinking into the chair. At first it looks like they’re simply sliding down, trying to escape the tall shadowy thing, but that isn’t the case. The seated figure isn’t sliding down at all—they’re actually disappearing into the chair.
They’re disappearing from the world.
This scene felt murky, dark, and far creepier than anything I’d seen in a movie or television show. Something terrible was happening to that person in the chair, and that something was real.
I heard a sound, distant at first, but as I focused my attention, the sound intensified. It was a kind of low whispering voice, and soon it was vibrating in my skull, a warm pleasant tickling feeling. I looked down. The sound was coming from Baron’s headphones, sitting on the floor at the foot of his chair.
I picked up the headphones and was about to slip them on when Chloe pressed the space bar and the video stopped playing.
“Are you fucking crazy?” she demanded. “You wanna end up peeing yourself too?”
The second Chloe pressed the space bar, the video and the link vanished.
I tried to refresh the page, but there was nothing there.
“It’s gone,” I said. The pleasant tingling sensation in my head was suddenly gone as well.
“Good.” Chloe closed the lid of Baron’s computer. “Because we have a little fucked-up something to deal with here.”
* * *
—
As soon as Baron got out of the shower, we sat him down at the table and fed him chicken soup and crackers.
“What’s happening? We’ve been calling and texting,” I said.
“Sorry, I’ve been busy. Working from home a bit.”
“What’s all…this?” Chloe said, pointing at his wall of photographs and ripped bits of paper.
“Work,” Baron said. “I can’t talk about it.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“They made me sign an NDA.”
Chloe took a closer look at the murder wall while I did the dishes.
“So, how’s working with Sidney Farrow?” I asked. “Is she amazing?”
He smiled and nodded. “She is. I’ll introduce you.”
“Cool.”
“You’d better introduce me too, fucker,” Chloe said.
“Of course.”
“Dude,” I said. “Seriously, I’ve been worried.”
“I’ve been working on something…” His voice trailed off. I could tell he’d completely lost his train of thought.
“What?” I asked.
But Baron could barely keep his eyes open. I had the feeling he might not even remember having this conversation tomorrow.
“I’m kind of tired,” he said. “Can we talk in the morning?”
“You promise?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Because we really need to talk about Rabbits,” I said. “We found some crazy shit. Things are getting…wild.”
“We’ll talk tomorrow, Scout’s honor.”
“You weren’t a Scout,” I said.
“What do you want, a fucking pinkie swear?”
I smiled and relaxed a little. He seemed a bit more like himself.
“We’re talking about all of this shit in the morning,” I said.
I heard him yell out “Scout’s honor, muthafuckas” as he locked the door behind us.
Chloe and I left Baron’s place and started walking to her car.
Chloe handed me her phone. “What the fuck, K?”
She’d taken pictures of Baron’s murder wall. The scribbles that covered the scraps of paper and Post-it notes were almost completely illegible, and the photographs were just as confusing.