The screen flickered to black. The hum of the hard drive died. Elias sat in the dark of his basement, the silence suddenly feeling much heavier than it had before. He reached for the mouse to delete the file, but his hand stopped.

He could have sworn he heard the faint sound of a crackling fire coming from the vents. AI responses may include mistakes. Learn more

As the final seconds ticked down, the Witch turned her head. For a brief moment, her eyes caught the light of the fire, glowing with an unnatural, feline luminescence. She stared directly into the lens, not at the cameraman, but at whoever was watching years later.

The basement was a graveyard of obsolete tech, a graveyard Elias was currently pillaging. He wiped a thick layer of dust off a generic black external hard drive, its casing sticky with age. Plugging it into his laptop felt like a digital seance. After a few agonizing minutes of clicking and whirring, a window popped open.

On the floor before her lay a traveler—a prop or a person, it was hard to tell in the grainy footage. The "Witch" began a low, rhythmic chant that seemed to vibrate the very speakers of Elias’s laptop. As the camera zoomed in, the scale of the scene began to shift. Through clever practical effects or perhaps something more unsettling, the Witch appeared to grow, her shadow stretching across the rafters like ink in water.

Nestled among folders of blurry vacation photos and forgotten college essays was a single video file: .