I was born on October 27, 2001, eighteen years ago today. I was brought into this world in one of the delivery rooms at Empire General Hospital, my grandparents standing close by in a waiting room as my mother struggled alone in her labor. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, of course—her alone with doctors and nurses who didn't really know her or care. My father had planned to be there as well, holding her hand and talking to her as I was being born.
But three days earlier, on October 24th, he had disappeared.
The ghost of my father haunted my entire childhood. I could feel him when I looked into my mother’s sad and weary eyes or when my grandmother stopped talking when I walked into the room. I was reminded of it every fall when my mother would go out on the weekends to hand out fliers and talk to all the local agencies to see if there had been any new word.
Because my father was never found--truth be told, he could be happy and living across the country or two counties over. But my mother never believed that. She always maintained a resolve that he wouldn’t have left us willingly and that somewhere, somehow, he might still be alive.
I never asked my mother why she focused most of her efforts on finding him in October of every year. I think on some level I assumed that she was sadder close to the time he went missing and it drove her to try again despite the passage of time and the shrinking likelihood that there would be any new developments. Maybe that’s all it was. Or maybe she had such a connection with my father that she somehow sensed that the days leading up to Halloween were different somehow.
I never got to ask her. She was diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer in the spring of last year, and within a few months she had passed away. I live with my grandparents now, and while the last year has been very hard, in some ways it’s a relief too. The idea that my mother may finally be at peace, may even be with my father again…well, it’s helped me through a lot. And though I hate to admit it, finally being free of the shadow of his absence makes me feel lighter and freer somehow.
And then I found a birthday gift waiting for me early this morning at our front door.
It was a brightly wrapped package with a handmade bow expertly tied around it, and when I picked it up, I heard something shift slightly inside. I was curious and a little excited as I brought it back in--I had been about to go for a sunrise run around my grandparents’ neighborhood, but this surprise gift had banished any other plans for the moment. I saw from a small gift tag next to the bow that it was definitely for me, but who it was from or what it could be? I didn’t have the slightest idea.
I gently slid off the ribbon and tore away the paper, and inside was a small gray metal box with a brass push button latch. When I opened it, all that was inside was a USB drive. The oddness of it all was starting to cool my excitement, but I was still curious to find out what it could be. Maybe a funny video or some pictures from one of my friends? A weird gift from my grandparents who were trying to get me something they thought I’d like?
I went up to my room and got my laptop, opened up the USB drive, and saw that there were eighteen large video files there. Something stirred uneasily in the back of my brain. What was this? Holding my breath, I clicked on the first file.
It was my father. I had never met him, but I’d seen enough pictures of him over the years from albums and fliers to recognize him in an instant. And he looked the same as he did in those earlier pictures--young, strong, and kind. I felt my vision begin to waver with tears, but then a thought occurred to me.
How was this even possible?
This footage wasn’t from some old home movie. It was a video of him riding a bike down a quiet street. First off, who would have taken the video and why? Secondly, how could it be of such good quality? Did they even have digital cameras in 2001? And even if they did, I was pretty sure they didn’t have video that was this high res.
But still, here it was. Here he was. He was turning into a place that I recognized as Murphy Park on the north side of town. Inexplicably, the video continued to follow him, though he never seemed to notice and I couldn’t understand how any of it was being recorded like this at all. He rode his bike through the park until finally stopping at one of the park benches. Getting off his bike, he pulled what looked like a thick black envelope from his pack and stuck it under the bench. Looking around for a moment, he got back on his bike and rode on.
I recognized the path he was taking. It looked like he was headed back to the west side of town, to the area we lived when I was little. Maybe he was headed home. But then there was a buzz and he slowed to a stop. Pulled out a red thing that looked like one of those old Nokia phones. The video wasn’t close enough to see what the phone said, but I could tell he was reading something on it and frowning. He looked up thoughtfully at the way he was heading—a path that led back to us—and then he turned around.
He rode toward the center of town, finally coming to a stop outside of an old building that I recognized. It was closed now, but up until a few years ago it had been a post office. The thing is, it looked different in the video somehow, and not just because it was eighteen years younger. I paused the video and studied it for a moment, looking at my father’s frozen form as he walked toward…
The alley.
In the video, there was a large alley separating the right side of the building and the next building--a furniture store that had been around for over fifty years and was still open today. The thing was, that alley didn’t exist. I’ve grown up in Empire. I’ve been down that street a thousand times. And there is no fucking alley there.
But as I started the video back, my father walked into it.
As always, the ghost videographer followed him, the view showing him glancing around before seeming to find what he was looking for. A small red box attached to the wall halfway down the alley. Maybe it was where his payment had been left for the delivery? Or maybe it was something else entirely. I don’t know, and a moment later, the question left my mind as I realized something had changed.
Everything was quiet.
My father had not spoken in the forty or so minutes I’d been watching him make his park delivery, start home, and then head for this place that shouldn’t exist, but the video had still had sound. The whir of his bike’s wheels, the ratcheting click of him changing gears, the sounds of cars and people and birds, they had all been there. Now, from one step to the next, everything has fallen silent. My first thought was that the audio had just cut out or ended, but then I realized I could still faintly hear sounds from the street outside of that alleyway. It was only my father’s place in the world that had gone quiet.
He noticed it too. He had looked inside the red box, but either it was empty or he was too distracted to take what was inside, as he let the box’s top flap close as he began rubbing his ears and snapping his fingers. He was clearly getting scared, maybe thinking that he had suddenly gone deaf, but then I saw him look back toward the street. He could hear things from out there too.
He ran back out to the street, looking around with some relief for a moment before he paused, his expression growing concerned again. He snapped his fingers, but there was no sound. He clapped his hands next to his ears, but the video gave the gesture no noise and I could tell he didn’t hear it either. After several more tries, he got back on his bike and started to ride again, only to stop after a few feet. He was thinking the same thing I was.
The bike no longer made any noise either.
When he started to ride again, he was moving far faster than I’d seen him go before. He shot across town and back to my childhood neighborhood, running up the steps to our house before barreling through the front door. He was clearly terrified, and as he entered the house, he was yelling, or at least that’s what it looked like, though again, there was no sound.
He found my mother, younger than seemed possible and nine months pregnant with me, sitting in the living room watching television. She didn’t look up when he called to her silently, didn’t stir when he drew closer and tried to get her attention. He reached out to touch her, but his hands just slid away, as though there was some impassable membrane between them that he couldn’t breach. He tried to turn off the television, knock over a table, anything, but every time he would somehow glide past the surface of the world, everything just out of reach.
The video ended with him on the floor weeping, utterly alone as he sat five feet from the family that would never see him again.
I was in shock after the first video, but in a way that helped me keep going, keep clicking on the second and the third and the fourth. The rest were all much shorter--ten to fifteen minute clips that seemed to be roughly a year apart judging from my age and surroundings. I couldn’t say for sure, but I’d guess the videos were showing every October for the last eighteen years.
What I do know is that my father is in all of them. Watching my mother and me. In the second video he seemed to talk a lot, though I still couldn’t hear him. In the third, he talked less, spending most of his time just watching us.
By the final one, which I recognized as from last year, he wasn’t talking anymore. He hadn’t aged or changed at all over those videos, but he still somehow looked ancient. There was a dead look in his eyes as he looked at me and my grandparents, as though he was staring at memories of a life he no longer really remembered.
There was a long moment toward the end of the video where he turned to stare at whoever or whatever was recording all of this. There was some momentary flash of recognition, of fear, and then the scene shifted again. It was showing the street where he had gone that day. The alleyway that didn’t exist. Cars passed by, people walked down the sidewalk, all oblivious to the dark hole that lay waiting just a few steps away. The video continued to show this scene for over two minutes before ending abruptly with no explanation. Maybe it was a warning.
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