“It shows you another world, I think.”
That was the first thing Barry said to me when he produced the battered camcorder. He’d been sending me cryptic texts for days about a camera he’d found in the lot of his office park. At first, he’d just sounded excited that the weird find had broken up the monotony of his work day, but then he got it home and began fiddling with it, finding an old adapter cord that he figured wouldn’t work or would fry the thing, but for a wonder, it did neither. A green light had come on, and two hours later it seemed to be fully charged.
Sitting in my apartment, he handed me the camera gently, my eyes going between it and his face as I tried to judge if he was joking. I felt my stomach begin to twist when I saw he wasn’t. My worry must have shown on my face—he frowned at me slightly and started shaking his head.
“I know what you’re thinking. But I’m not crazy.” He let out a short, bitter laugh. “Or I’m not any more crazy than I was before.” Barry furrowed his eyebrows at my silence. “And I’m taking my meds, and I haven’t had any paranoid thoughts or anything else odd.” He gestured toward the camcorder. “Just…this thing.”
I smiled at him and nodded, trying to keep my expression in check. Something was off—it had to be if he believed what he was saying—but I’d never seen him this amped up since I’d first met him five years earlier. He hadn’t been hospitalized since he was a teenager, and there’d only been one time since I’d known him that he’d had what I considered an “episode”—one terrible week where he seemed like a different person because he’d gone off his meds “just to see how it went”. It hadn’t went well, and once I finally convinced him to start back to taking them, he’d realized that for himself.
But this…this was different. He was excited and nervous, but he didn’t seem out of control. Maybe the meds just needed adjusting this time? I didn’t know, but I figured the best thing was to just hear him out and go from there.
“Okay, I believe you. Just…what do you mean, it shows you another world?”
Barry’s face was still guarded, but brightened slightly at my question. “Okay, okay. So like, first thing I noticed is it’s weird, right? I mean I’m not an expert with cameras, but this one is a little different from any I’ve seen. The way it’s shaped and how small it is for one thing, but also, I can’t figure out how it stores video. There’s no slot for a tape or disc or anything.”
I turned the small camera in my hand. It was made of some kind of smooth grey metal, but was still very light, fitting comfortably in my palm. There was a padded leather strap where your hand would go while shooting, and a small hole that I guessed was the port for plugging in a power adapter, but otherwise it was just a small ergonomic tube with a lens on one end and a viewfinder on the other. I glanced back up at him with a shrug.
“Well, I mean that’s not that weird, is it? I don’t know how old it is, but if it was made in the last few years, it probably uses internal memory like a phone, right? Shit, I’m kind of surprised people even make camcorders anymore. Doesn’t everyone use a phone or tablet now?”
He nodded. “Yeah, most do, at least until you get into high-end stuff like they use to shoot professional videos. And I figure it has to have internal memory, but wouldn’t it have a USB port or something to download it to something else? A hard drive or computer or whatever? I can’t find any hidden ports—nothing but where I charged it up.”
I examined the camera closer. He was right. The cool skin of the thing was seamless, and I saw no lines or latches, no labels or… “Hey, this is weird too. There’s no writing on it. Like none. No brand, no “wifi” logo, no button names, nothing.”
He was smiling again now. “I caught that too. It’s almost like it was homemade, but who would do that? How many people could do that? And if you were somehow able to make something like this, would you just leave it in a random parking lot somewhere?”
I frowned. “I don’t know. Maybe you download video wirelessly. But how do you even turn it on or do anything with it? It doesn’t have any buttons.”
Barry’s smile widened. “It does, they’re just hidden. Here, hold it like you’re going to take video or look through the viewfinder.” I did as he asked, slipping my fingers under the brown leather strap on the side. “Okay. You feel the little bumps under your fingers?”
I flinched a little as I realized I did. Turning the camera over, I looked at where my fingertips had been. There was no sign of raised domes there, but I’d felt them. When I slid my fingers back over the area, I could still feel those same bumps, though I still couldn’t see them when I checked again. Lips thinning, I glanced up as he continued on.
“The index finger is fast forward. The ring finger is rewind. And the middle finger is play.” He shook his head slightly. “There isn’t a power button so far as I can tell. It’s always on in some kind of sleep mode that stops when you pick it up. It has to have some kind of sensor, because the viewfinder doesn’t light up until you put your eye up to it. Either way, I haven’t charged it in four days and there’s no sign it’s giving out or anything.”
Something occurred to me. “What about a record button?”
Barry shook his head. “Nope. Not that I can find. I even tried voice commands, but nothing. It just always records. Always. That’s another thing that’s weird. It seems to always record the same amount of footage, constantly deleting a second for every second it adds. I’ve timed it. It’s just over thirty-seven minutes worth.”
I let out a slow breath. “Okay. So you’re saying this weird camera is always on, always recording, and it keeps the last thirty-seven minutes all the time? Like you can rewind and watch it and it changes over time?”
He nodded. “Yep. There’s no flip out screen, so you have to watch through the viewfinder. And it’s recording even when it’s playing, so if you watch for fifteen minutes from the beginning, that fifteen minutes will be gone by the time you rewind to start over again. If you fast-forward and watch the last five, when you rewind, a little more than the first five of that thirty-seven minute recording will be gone, because its recording window will have shifted forward during the time you fast-forwarded, watched, and rewound.” He grimaced. “That’s what’s so frustrating. I can’t show you some of the things I’ve seen with it because they’ve already gone. All I can do is take you to places where you’ll notice the difference and record new footage.”
I eyed Barry warily. “Different because the camera shows you another world?”
“Yes. And yeah, I know it sounds crazy. That’s why I’m going to show you rather than try to convince you. Just…look at the recording as it is now, okay? So you know it’s not some trick or prank I’m pulling. Rewind all the way and watch the footage through the viewfinder. Just hit the button under your ring finger and it’ll rewind in just a few seconds.”
Hitting the hidden button, I thought about saying something more, but I wasn’t sure what would help. This was all really strange, but there had to be a reasonable explanation. Maybe someone was messing with him. Uploading new footage wirelessly to make it look like a magic camera? I didn’t know, and the only way I knew to figure it all out was to follow Barry’s lead until I knew enough to help him.
So I looked into the camera.
Immediately the viewfinder seemed to brighten, though it was hard to say for sure when the scene looked so dark. I hit play with my middle finger, and at first I thought something was wrong. The screen was just greyish black, and I was about to ask if I was doing something wrong when the scene brightened somewhat, showing what I guessed was the parking garage across the street from my building. The angle was odd and jumped rhythmically, but I could make out enough to see that while it was the parking garage, it looked different. There was graffiti covering most of the walls, and as the camera moved, I saw several cars that looked strange or covered with the dust of disuse. I’d never noticed any of that before, and I’d been in the garage just that morning. And why…
“Why is the camera like this? All bouncy and shaky?”
Barry’s face grew a little pale. “Because it was in my bag as I was walking. What you’re seeing is probably when I was on my way over here.”
I frowned. “What, did you have it sticking out through a hole or something? It’s not very good footage.”
He shook his head as he held up his bag and turned it for me to see. “No, no holes. If it was recording over here, it’d be showing the inside of my bag or be dark. I put it in my bag when I left home and didn’t take it out again until just now when I showed it to you.” He gave me a nervous grin. “But it wasn’t recording over here. It was recording the same spot over there, wherever there is, and over there there’s no bag to block its view.”
I felt my hands growing cold. I wanted to argue, to tell him it’d been a great joke but he needed to drop it. That I was getting irritated with the whole thing. But I didn’t. Because I knew he wasn’t lying, and if it was a joke, it was being played on him too. And my growing anger wasn’t at him anyway. It was as the fear growing fat in my belly.
Taking a deep breath, I put my eye back to the viewfinder.
At first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. The view seemed to be of a dark wall periodically punctuated with metal rails and bits of wire as the camera seemed to float upward. Shooting Barry a questioning look, I showed him the viewfinder for a moment. He gave a shaky laugh.
“Yeah, that threw me at first too, but I’ve seen in with a couple of buildings now. It’s when I was coming up the elevator. I guess it doesn’t work over there, so you’re seeing the shaft instead.”
Swallowing, I watched again. The view was going down a version of my floor’s hallway, the paint chipped and dirty under sickly flickering fluorescent lights. A pause and then passing through a door into my apartment, except this version was filthy, with piles of trash in the corners and different furniture scattered in disarray across the room. I didn’t see any sign of a person, and I was grateful. My heart was already hammering harder and harder as I felt the last threads of my disbelief beginning to fray. When Barry spoke, I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Sorry. Yeah, it’s a lot to take in, I know. What I was saying is, fast-forward now. Index finger. Catch back up and then move the camera around in real-time.”
Hand trembling, I did as he asked. After a few seconds I was caught up to the present, and when I panned the camera, the scene in the viewfinder moved in sync, though it was still showing me that other version of my home.
I could hardly breath as I lowered the camera again to stare at Barry. “I…how is that…it has to be fake, right? Some kind of AR trick or something?”
He shook his head. “It’s not. I’ve done all kinds of tests. I don’t claim to be an expert, but how could it make those kinds of changes in the moment? It’s showing us some other place. A place that’s very similar to ours, but isn’t the same.” When I just kept staring, he nodded. “It’s hard to believe, I know. It was for me too. That’s why I want you to go for a walk with me.”
We went down to the street, Barry’s hand tight on mine like a lifeline as I stared through the camera and into that other world. The street and sidewalks were largely the same, but much of the rest was different. Stores sometimes had different names or weren’t the same kind of store at all. Several buildings were abandoned and a few had been burned. When I asked Barry about that, he told me there were a lot of places like that all over, and that nearly every house of worship he’d come across, be it a church, a synagogue, or a mosque, had been burned down or otherwise destroyed.
“The couple that haven’t…” His gaze trailed away from me as his lips grew thin. “…I think they’ve been converted into worshipping something else.” Barry gestured at the camera. “Keep looking though.”
I put my eye back to the viewfinder. It was the same time of day as where we were, a late winter afternoon that was quickly ripening into a grey twilight. In our world, people passed us by frequently, but in the camera’s view, there was no one at…I let out a gasp as a man rounded the corner in the viewfinder. He looked slightly disheveled, but otherwise seemed normal. Pulling away from the camera, I looked for him in the world, but no. There was a woman and her small child waiting at the crosswalk ahead, but no man in a tattered overcoat trudging in our direction. Looking back through the viewfinder, the man was about to pass us, pass through us, with no sign of seeing us.
Of course that made sense. We weren’t there, after all.
I handed the camera back to Barry shakily. “What…I…what are you going to do with it? Should you tell someone?”
He frowned and shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. If I show it to people, someone will just steal it or take it away. I want to use it more and try to figure out more. Like does it always show the same world, or does it go between different places? I think it’s the same one, but it’s hard to say for sure.” He looked scared but excited. “It’s great though, right? Kinda spooky, but it’s like having a magic mirror or something.”
I rubbed my arms. “I guess. I just…how do you know it’s not dangerous? Or that it wasn’t put out for someone to find? Like a trap or something?”
Barry nodded. “I know. I’ve thought about that, and I can’t say for sure. But I can’t just let go of something like this without trying can I? It’s like throwing away a miracle.”
I let out a shaky laugh. “My grandma used to say that people only call things miracles if it goes the way they want it to. The stuff that doesn’t…that’s just bad luck or the devil.”
Barry smiled uncertainly. “Well, I guess that’s true. Not everything turns out good.”
I shook my head slightly. “No, that wasn’t her point. She said that everything turned out good. Turned out exactly the way it was meant to be. That every extraordinary thing was a miracle to somebody, even if it hurt others. The thing that changed wasn’t the miracle.” I glanced back down at the camera with a shudder. “It was who the miracle helped.” Reaching out, I gently gripped his arm. “Just…just be careful with it, okay?”
Something passed across his face then, maybe a moment of doubt or a more potent strain of fear, but then it faded again. Nodding, he squeezed my hand. “I promise, I will be.”
Barry disappeared two weeks later, and there’s been no sign of him in the months since. He has no family, so I was the one that packed up his stuff when his lease ran out, renting a storage unit to keep it in until he hopefully returned. When I didn’t find the camcorder among his belongings, I thought it was strange, but it was also a relief. Though I didn’t know for sure, I figured the camera was connected to what had happened to my best friend, and if it wasn’t going to help me get him back, I didn’t want it around me at all.
Then last week I got a package in the mail. No return address and the next-day mailing label had been printed by one of those package drop-off stores. When I tracked it down, it was a place in northern New Hampshire. I called, but they said they didn’t remember who had come in with the box. That was okay.
I thought I already knew.
Because inside the box was the camera. It had to have come from Barry, and so I thought maybe there was something on it that could give me some clue. Heart pounding, I picked up the camera and watched the last 37 minutes of footage.
It amounted to little. Just sitting out in that dirty hallway and then floating into the other version of my apartment as I discovered it and brought it inside. No clues of what had happened to Barry or caused him to send me the thing that had most likely ruined his life.
I almost threw it away. It was an unclean thing that had infected Barry and now it was going to infect me, if it hadn’t already. But then there was the fact that Barry had sent me the camera in the first place. He wouldn’t have done that without a good reason, or if he thought it would hurt me, would he?
So I kept it. Started using it carefully. At first it was with the hopes that I could somehow figure out something that would lead me to Barry, but as time went on, I found myself sinking deeper and deeper into the larger mystery of it all.
That other world it showed me…it was a wrong place. A bad place that had gone sour down to its core. The people there…half of them seemed twisted and the other half looked exhausted and terrified. Just watching for a few minutes drained me, but by the fourth day I was using it every couple of hours, going to different places around the city to compare my version of a place to its dark twin.
When I got back home, there was a letter in my mailbox. The postmark was from Vermont a week earlier, and the address was written in Barry’s large and shaky script. Mouth dry, I tore it open and took out the note he’d written inside.
I was wrong. It’s not a miracle for us. They have cameras too. And they can reach through.
I didn’t use the camera for two days. I was too scared. But the more time that passed, and the more I thought about Barry’s letter, the more terrified I became of not at least taking an occasional peek, if only to reassure myself that nothing was looking back at me.
So I went for a walk yesterday afternoon. Just a short walk, following roughly the same path me and Barry had taken that first night he’d shown me the camera. At first it was fine. I could never get used to the strangeness of seeing that other world, but there was no sign of anyone noticing me. I was putting the camera away to head home when something made me stop and turn around. There was nothing there. I had to calm down. It was understandable that I was jumpy, but if I started freaking out at every little…
My skin grew cold as a thought occurred to me and I lifted the camera back to my eye.
Thirty feet away there was a woman, standing still as she held a camera up to her face, its lensed eye staring straight at me. She began to smile as she saw me notice her, the camera bobbing slightly as she gave a small nod—a small greeting or confirmation that she was seeing me just like I was seeing her.
I started to backpedal, and as I did so, she began to walk toward me. As we picked up pace, she began occasionally peeking out from behind the camera, presumably to watch where she was going while still following me. It was one of these times that I saw her face.
It was me.
The world turned upside down as I slammed into a trashcan and went sprawling. Between going backwards and being too afraid to leave the camera’s view and lose sight of her, I’d have likely run into the street if not for the steel can bolted to the corner. I felt pain flare in my hip and elbow as I landed, but I managed to roll over and get to my feet after just a couple of breathless seconds. I had to get the camera back and see where she…
My eyes found the camera, lying in the street and broken in half from either the fall or the car that had passed over it a moment before I saw where it had landed. Letting out a moan, I darted forward to grab it, but even before I touched it, I saw there was no point. It was crushed beyond any hope of repair, even if someone in this world were capable of working on such a thing.
And I could feel that pressure, that presence, growing closer behind me. Even without a camera, I could sense that other watching me, following me, as I began to run. I didn’t want to go home in case it didn’t know that’s where I lived. So instead I ran the other way, panting with fear and exertion as I tried to distance myself from that terrible prickle on my scalp that told me I was still being pursued.
And it worked, if only a little. By the time I stopped running, the feeling was still there, but was fainter. I was ten blocks away from where I’d fallen, and across the street I saw the bus depot. Patting my pockets, I was grateful to find I’d brought my card wallet with me. Maybe if I took a trip somewhere for a day or two, I could throw her off the trail for good.
At first, it seemed to work. I went to Springfield, and when I got off the bus, there was no warning tingle at all. I got a motel room and began weighing the risks of returning home the next day.
But that night, as I was coming back from grabbing dinner at a restaurant near the motel, I felt it again. Strong like the first time. I couldn’t see her, but I still knew. Her or someone like her, someone that could see into this world, had found me again.
I write this on a late night bus headed for the west coast. My money is going to run out soon, but I don’t know that it’ll matter. As we push through the night, I imagine I can feel a dozen roving eyes turning toward me as we pass. I think looking into their world has marked me somehow, made me easier to see across whatever veil might separate us from them. A veil that, according to my friend, they can reach through as well.
And something is following me. No matter how far I go or how hard I try, I can feel an invisible hunter stalking me and drawing closer all the time. Maybe it’s that other me I saw on the sidewalk or maybe it’s something else, but the details of that aren’t what scares me the most. It’s the fact that I can feel myself losing the race with every midnight mile. And it’s the question that follows those dark moments when I realize that I’ll eventually run out of road.
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