Chapter 2: The Silent Film

Chapter 2: The Silent Film

Sleep hadn't come. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that too-wide grin, those empty sockets where eyes should have been. And every few seconds, my own body betrayed me with that hideous, out-of-sync blink. Right. Left. Open. Open. A constant, maddening reminder that something was wrong with me.

I walked into work the next day feeling like a ghost myself, raw and hollowed out. The boardwalk was already buzzing with its usual daytime energy—the shrieks of kids on the spinning teacups, the barkers calling to passersby—but it all felt distant, muffled, like I was hearing it from underwater.

I found Maya and Liam in the breakroom, a windowless closet that smelled permanently of stale coffee and microwave popcorn.

"Whoa, you look like death warmed over," Maya said, lowering her phone. "Bad night?"

"You could say that." I sank into a lopsided armchair, the springs groaning in protest. I had to tell them. I couldn't carry this alone. "It was him. The Michael Jackson guy. He was at my window last night."

Liam, who was trying to fix the broken toaster with a butter knife, looked up. "No way. For real? What'd he do, ask you for a quarter?"

"He was… wrong," I said, the words feeling flimsy and inadequate. I rubbed my face, the rhythmic flutter of my left eyelid making me cringe. "He asked me a weird question. He asked me for the name of the old man."

Maya and Liam exchanged a look. It was the look I dreaded—the one that mixed concern with pity. The 'Alex is being dramatic again' look.

"The old man who died in '98?" Maya asked carefully. "That's… super specific for a random weirdo."

"Exactly! And then… I don't know, I must have blacked out or something. I lost almost half an hour. When I came to, he was gone." I took a breath. "And look."

I stared at them, blinking deliberately. Right. Left. Open. Open.

Liam squinted. "What am I looking at?"

"My eye! My left eye, it's lagging. It wasn't like this before he showed up."

Maya leaned in closer, her expression softening. "Alex, you're exhausted. You've been pulling doubles all week. You probably just stared at your monitor too long and got a weird twitch."

"It's not a twitch!" I snapped, my voice louder than I intended. "This is real. He did something to me. We have to look at the security tapes. Camera Six points right at the ticket booth. It'll show you."

Liam put the knife down and sighed, running a hand through his greasy hair. "Alex, the security system is a piece of crap. It barely records half the time. And you really want me to scrub through hours of footage for a boardwalk weirdo who spooked you?"

"Yes," I said, my voice low and insistent. "I need to see it. I need to prove I'm not crazy."

The desperation in my voice must have finally cut through their skepticism. Liam sighed again, a long, drawn-out sound of resignation. "Fine. But if all we see is some guy in a bad wig, you're buying the pizza tonight."

The security office was even smaller than the breakroom, a cramped box packed with humming servers and a chaotic tangle of wires. The air was hot and smelled of dust and melting plastic. A bank of monitors displayed grainy, black-and-white images from around the Manor: the silent contortions of the animatronic ghouls, the empty, echoing hallways, the vacant ticket booth. This room was supposed to be our all-seeing eye, our place of control. Today, it felt like a trap.

Liam sat down at the main console, his fingers flying across the grimy keyboard. "Okay, Booth Cam Six. You said around 8:15?"

"Yeah, just after Maya's break," I said, leaning over his shoulder, my heart starting to pound again. Maya stood behind us, arms crossed, still looking unconvinced.

He found the file and the footage flickered to life. There I was, a grainy monochrome version of myself, reading a book. There was Maya, leaning in the window, laughing. The timestamp in the corner of the screen read 20:14:32.

"Okay, here we go," Liam murmured, fast-forwarding slightly.

We watched as Maya left and I settled back into my chair. A minute later, a figure shuffled into the frame. Him. Even in low resolution, the jerky, puppet-like movements were unmistakable. The sequined glove was a smear of glinting white pixels.

"Creepy," Maya admitted from behind me.

He pressed his face against the glass. We couldn't hear anything—the exterior cameras didn't record audio to save data—but we could see my reaction. I flinched back. I was talking, gesturing. He was just… staring. That awful, fixed grin a static slash of black on his face.

"Okay, he's a weirdo. You were right," Liam said. "So what?"

"Just watch," I whispered, my eyes glued to the timestamp. 20:15:58.

The figure on the screen tapped the glass. I continued talking. He tilted his head. The timestamp hit 20:16:11.

And then the screen dissolved into a blocky, pixelated mess. A loud screech of static erupted from the speakers, making us all jump. For a split second, the screen was just a cascade of green and purple digital noise.

Then, just as quickly, the image returned.

I was sitting in the booth, alone. The man was gone. I was looking around, panicked, before grabbing my bag as the footage Liam appeared.

"See? He just left," Liam said, but his voice lacked conviction.

"No," I said, my throat dry. "Liam. Look at the timestamp."

He leaned closer to the screen. His eyes widened. "What the hell?"

The red numbers in the corner now read 20:43:02.

Twenty-seven minutes. Gone. Vanished in a single second of static. It wasn't just a gap in the recording, where the tape would be black. The timecode itself had leaped forward, as if that entire block of time had been surgically removed from existence.

"That's… not possible," Maya breathed, her skepticism finally shattering. "That's a system error. A massive one."

"Rewind it," I urged, my voice trembling. "Play it back, right before the static."

Liam’s hands were shaking slightly as he worked the controls. He rewound the tape and played it in slow motion. We watched the man lean in, his face pressed to the glass. 20:16:10. The image began to break apart. 20:16:11. Static. 20:43:02. The clean image of the empty boardwalk.

"Frame by frame," I said. "Go back. Go through the static."

He slowed it down even more. The screen flickered. A normal frame of the man at the glass. Click. A frame of pure digital noise. Click. A frame where the man's body seemed to have stretched, his arm elongating into a black smear against the side of the booth. Click. A frame where his grinning face filled the entire screen, distorted and monstrous, his mouth a gaping, black maw.

Maya gasped and took a step back.

"It's just compression artifacts," Liam stammered, trying to rationalize it. "The system must have freaked out and corrupted the file."

But we all knew it was more than that. This wasn't a glitch. This was an impossibility. It was like the camera had tried to record something it couldn't comprehend, and the effort had broken it.

I pointed at the screen. "Go back. Before the glitch. Look where he's looking."

Liam brought the footage back to a few seconds before the time jump. The image was grainy, but clear enough. The man was pressing his face to the glass, his empty eyes fixed forward. But he wasn't looking at the me on the screen. His gaze was directed slightly past my shoulder, through the glass of the booth and into the darkened archway of the Manor's entrance behind me.

He wasn't staring at me. He was staring into the haunted house.

And as the last clear frame played before the static consumed the feed, his head tilted. It wasn't the twitching spasm I remembered. It was a slow, deliberate motion, as if he were listening. Listening for something deep inside the building.

He hadn't been trying to scare me. He hadn't been interested in me at all. I was just the gatekeeper.

He was waiting to be let in.

Silence descended on the small, hot room, thick and suffocating. The hum of the servers sounded like a rising scream. Liam stared at the screen, his face pale. Maya was chewing on her thumbnail, her eyes wide with a terror that now mirrored my own. I was no longer the crazy one. We had all seen it. The silent film on the security monitor hadn't just proven my story. It had revealed a truth far more terrifying than a simple boardwalk prank. The monster wasn't just outside our door anymore. It wanted in.