Chapter 3: A Glitch in the Feed

Chapter 3: A Glitch in the Feed

The silence that followed Becca's call was heavier than any sound. The cheerful afternoon light slanting through the kitchen window seemed obscene, a violation of the tomb-like stillness that had fallen over the room. Elara stared at the painting on her table, the grotesque portrait of her own face. It was no longer just a canvas; it was a relic, an artifact of some forgotten, blood-soaked ritual.

Sanguine pigment. The words echoed in her mind. Human blood. Two thousand years old.

"It's not possible," Liam said for the tenth time, his voice a low, ragged whisper. He was running a hand through his short brown hair, a gesture of frustration that was becoming terrifyingly familiar. "Carbon dating can be contaminated. The lab could have made a mistake. There has to be a logical..."

He trailed off, the word "logical" dying on his lips. Logic had fled this house the moment the first painting arrived. Logic hadn't saved her from the car crash. It hadn't explained how a two-thousand-year-old painting could predict an event two days in the future.

Elara’s own reality felt thin, like a watercolor wash about to tear. Her training as an artist, her knowledge of pigments and binders, was now a source of profound horror. She could almost smell the iron tang of ancient blood, could feel the malevolent weight of the centuries pressing down on her from that small, terrible canvas. She reached out and touched the faint, silvery scar on her forearm. It was the only thing that kept her grounded, the one piece of irrefutable proof that this was all happening.

"We needed a weapon," she said, her voice hollow. "And all we did was find out the monster is older than history."

Liam’s jaw tightened. His eyes fell upon the abandoned security camera box in the living room. Action. He needed action. He couldn't debug the supernatural, but he could damn well mount a piece of hardware. It was a desperate, defiant act against the encroaching madness.

"No," he said, his voice hardening with a resolve she knew was paper-thin. "It's not over. It still has to get the packages to you. It has to use the doors. And now, we're watching."

He worked with a furious, focused energy, finishing the installation of the camera above the front door. The whir of the drill was a small, angry sound in the oppressive silence. Elara watched him, hugging herself, feeling a strange mix of pity and gratitude. He was trying to build a digital wall against a phantom, and she loved him for it, even as she knew it was hopeless.

He came back inside, wiping sawdust from his hands. He tapped at his phone, his face illuminated by the screen's cool light as he configured the app. "There. It's done. Calibrated. Motion-activated. Live feed to both our phones. Anything, and I mean anything, that steps onto that porch, we'll see it."

For a moment, they just breathed. The camera was online. A digital watchdog was on duty. It was a flimsy shield, but it was something.

Then, a soft, melodic chime emanated from Liam’s phone. A notification.

It was a sound designed to be innocuous, helpful. But in the suffocating quiet of Elara’s house, it landed like a gunshot.

They both froze, their eyes locking in shared, instantaneous dread. Liam slowly raised his phone, the screen displaying the app's icon and a single line of text: Motion Detected at Front Door.

"No," Elara breathed, a knot of ice forming in her stomach. "We were just out there. No one came."

"I'll see the bastard this time," Liam growled, a feral note in his voice. He jabbed the notification, opening the app. The live feed loaded, showing the empty, sun-dappled porch. A few autumn leaves skittered across the wooden planks. There was no one there. No package.

"It must have been a bird, or the wind," he said, though his voice lacked any conviction. "A false alarm."

"But the notification, Liam..."

He didn't answer. His thumb was already moving, dragging the timeline bar on the bottom of the screen. "Let's check the history. I want to see the very first thing this camera ever recorded. The moment I activated it." He scrolled all the way to the left, to the recording stamped just ten minutes prior. "Just to make sure the baseline is clean."

The screen buffered for a second. Elara held her breath, leaning over his shoulder to watch.

The image that loaded onto the screen was not of an empty porch.

It was a perfect, high-definition digital image of the distorted portrait from the kitchen table. The fish-eye lens perspective, the terror-stretched eyes, the silent scream—all of it, captured by the security camera as its first-ever recorded frame. It had been branded onto the device's memory before it had even had a chance to see the real world.

Elara stumbled back, a choked cry escaping her lips. "How? How is that possible?"

Liam stared at the phone, his face pale. "It... it's a hack. It has to be a hack. It hijacked the feed, uploaded an image..." He was grasping at straws, trying to force the impossible horror into the comfortable box of his technological world. But they both knew. This wasn't a hacker. This was a violation of reality itself. Their brand-new shield had been corrupted before the battle had even begun. The entity had signed its work.

His finger, trembling slightly now, moved back to the timeline. His face was a grim mask of determination. The notification had to mean something. He scrubbed forward, past the impossible first frame, to the exact timestamp of the motion alert, just two minutes ago.

The recording began to play.

They watched the footage of the empty porch. The sun cast long shadows. A car drove by on the street, its reflection gliding silently across the living room window. One second passed. Two. Three. Nothing happened. It was utterly, peacefully normal.

And then, the feed tore itself apart.

For a single, violent frame, the image dissolved into a shrieking cascade of digital chaos. It wasn't just static; it was a visual scream. Bars of corrupted color flashed across the screen, the image fractured into a thousand screaming pixels, and a sound like a dial-up modem connecting to hell erupted from the phone's tiny speaker. It was the look of a file being written and corrupted at the exact same time.

The glitch lasted less than half a second.

Then, the image snapped back into perfect, stable clarity. The sun was in the same place. The shadows hadn't moved. The porch was exactly as it had been.

Except now, sitting squarely in the center of the welcome mat, was a new package. A flat, brown-wrapped parcel.

It hadn't been delivered. No one had walked up the steps. There were no footsteps, no shadow, no human presence. One moment, the space was empty. The next, after a violent tear in the digital feed, the object was simply there. It had materialized from nothing.

Liam dropped the phone onto the couch as if it were burning hot. The recording continued to play on a silent loop: empty porch, static scream, package. Empty porch, static scream, package.

They looked from the phone to the front door, and through its glass panes, they could see it. The package. Sitting on their porch, a silent, brown-wrapped testament to their utter and complete powerlessness. Their digital eye hadn't just failed to protect them. It had shown them a truth far more terrifying than any human stalker.

They weren't being haunted by a person. They were being haunted by a glitch in the world.