D5370.avi

The hard drive was a brick of rusted aluminum, salvaged from a flooded estate sale in rural Ohio. When Elias finally bypassed the corrupted sectors, he found only one file: . No metadata. No date. Just 1.4 gigabytes of silent data. He hit play.

The footage was grainy, overexposed. It showed a fixed shot of a kitchen table—familiar, yet wrong. The proportions of the chairs were slightly too tall. In the center of the table sat a bowl of fruit that didn't look like fruit; they were shapes carved from raw, grey meat. D5370.avi

For three minutes, nothing moved. Then, a hand entered the frame. It was long—impossibly long—with extra knuckles that clicked like dry twigs. It didn't reach for the bowl. It reached for the camera. The hard drive was a brick of rusted