Blip
I looked down at my phone and saw the notification from my smart camera app.
Notification: Movement detected in Living Room.
I swiped it off and went back to work. I work medical coding on the late-night shift, and the cameras have been a pain in the ass since I installed them. My wife and I put them in to keep an eye on our youngest, who likes to sleepwalk, and our oldest, who likes to slip out after curfew. In reality, however, it's been recording the antics of our two cats after everyone goes to bed. I spent all of last week checking the cameras every time something popped up. Now I've become kind of numb to it.
I remember the first night I started getting warnings about it. My phone had buzzed, and I had immediately opened it to check the camera feed. When I say that my youngest sleepwalks, what I mean is that he plays hide and seek in his sleep. My wife and I have woken up in the morning to find his bed empty. Sometimes he's in the living room on the couch, sometimes he's in the storage shed by the pool. Two weeks ago, he was in the front yard, asleep in his playset. The officer who found him was not amused since we had called them after tearing up the house and being unable to find him.
That was when my wife ordered the cameras. We'd gotten three, one for the living room, one for his bedroom, and one for our bedroom, where he sometimes sleeps. They were pretty neat. They are connected to an app, and you can see everything in a one hundred and eighty-degree angle in front of them. When something moved past a specific time, you get a notification to let you know to check the app. It all seemed kind of Orwellian, having cameras throughout the house, but I tried to ignore them as I went about my day. My wife checked them habitually, even when we weren't asleep, and she had discovered that you could talk through them if you weren't home, something that annoyed me to no end.
Blip
I looked down at the phone and silenced the notification again.
At night, I checked the notifications to make sure my youngest wasn't sleepwalking. Last week, I checked the notifications religiously. I wanted to see where he was going so I could call my wife and warn her that he was out of bed. I kind of wanted to catch my oldest sneaking out, too, just so I could scare him by yelling through the speakers.
Blip Blip
Two new notifications. I looked down and silenced them again. That close together, it was always the cats playing in the living room.
The first night, I got ten notifications within about three hours. I checked everyone, checking to see what had set the camera off. The first notification proved to be nothing. The camera moved to the movement's position, but no one was there. The second, one of the cats had jumped onto the couch. By the third, I was sure that this would be the one where something happened. I pulled it up and nearly gave my coworker a heart attack. There was a face staring right at the camera, staring back at me through the lens. I dropped the phone and jumped back a little, nearly upsetting my chair. When I went to look at it again, though, I had to laugh as I realized my mistake. The face belonged to Oscar, one of our cats, and he was sniffing at the lens curiously. When I started to laugh, I think my coworker's blood pressure probably normalized again.
By the second night, I think I was already beginning to understand how this would be.
The second night had seven notifications, all cat-related. Oscar jumping from the chair to the couch. Chester, our other cat, getting a drink. The two of them playing in the wee hours of the morning. There was a rather funny bit where Chester fell asleep and rolled off the back of the couch, but it was becoming a little annoying even by that point.
Blip blip.
Notification- Movement detected in Master Bedroom
Notification- Movement detected in Son's Room
I looked at the notification, finger floating over the button that would show me what was going on, but I ignored it instead. My son had likely left his room and gone to my bedroom. He did that some times, and it would have certainly set the cameras off. I went back to work, trying to put it out of my mind.
The next two nights last week had been the most infuriating. The cats had zoomed around the living room, fighting and playing. The camera pinged my phone every few minutes, roving from side to side as it tried to follow their antics. That was the first night that I ignored the notifications. It was just the cats, after all, and I had work to do.
Blip
Notification- Movement detected in Living Room.
I had barely even reached to silence the phone when another came over.
Blip
Notification- Movement detected in Living Room.
Blip
Notification- Movement in Living Room.
Blip
Notification- Movement in Living Room.
I made a disgusted sound and silenced my phone.
I had work to do, and I didn't have time to watch cats play. I heard the phone vibrating for the next hour, telling me about how there was motion detected in the living room, motion detected in the bedrooms, and then back in the living room again. Clearly, my son had left the bedroom doors open, and the cats have extended their play to the bedrooms. They were probably driving my wife nuts, but if she had enough of it, I guessed she would get up and close the doors.
Blip, Blip, Blip, Blip
I was quickly getting tired of this. The constant reminders were driving me crazy, and I was falling behind on my coding. It had to be the cats again. This was getting out of hand. I couldn't spend every night like this. Maybe if I yelled at them through the speaker, they would move off or settle down. It probably wouldn't amount to anything, but if nothing else, it would give me a laugh.
I brought up the camera menu and found the display that was connected to the living room. The hourglass spun as it loaded, and finally, I could see my living room in a soupy translucence of the night vision camera. In the dim glow, I saw the source of the movement. Their hand fiddling with the knob cover that we keep on the hinder my youngest was near the door, was someone in a dark hoodie, their back to the camera.
I felt a flash of anger. So it hadn't been the cats after all. My teenage son was attempting to leave in the middle of the night to do God knew what. I couldn't believe it! How many times had we had this discussion? How many times had we told him that curfews were for a reason? And now he was bothering me at work because he wanted to go smoke with his asshole friends?
Well, I'd put a scare in him.
"Get your ass back to bed, and don't you dare let me catch you up again!" I shouted as loud as I could.
When the figure didn't immediately act terrified and have a minor heart attack, I knew something was wrong. My son fancies himself a bit of badass, but he'd easily startled when it comes to loud noises. The figure didn't act surprised in the least bit. They just stood by the door, still as a statue, and I could almost believe that the camera had frozen. I stared at them through the camera for what felt like hours before they turned and began to walk towards the fireplace where I had set up the housing for the device.
They were wearing a mask, something like a rubber animal mask that was difficult to see with the hood pulled up. As they got closer, walking slowly as they tried to get a better look at the camera, I could see the long snout of a pig as it looked from the wide black mouth of the hoodie. He came right up to the camera, the eye holes blocking some of his ability to see, I supposed, and just stared into the little glass eye.
He was still long enough for me to think I had lost signal again, and when he swung whatever was in his hand at the camera, I jumped back in surprise.
The feed went dead, and I was on my phone to police before the notification dinged across.
Notification- Living Room Camera Disabled.
I'm in a little room now, one that they usually assign for people under interrogation. I don't honestly know what to do. The police have gone to my house, but I already know what they're going to find. I reviewed the alerts I received, the screengrabs telling a tale that makes my blood run cold. If I had taken them seriously, everything could have gone very differently.
If I had just checked the cameras, I could have warned them.
The Intruder came in about eleven-thirty, just as the first notification came through. I watched him walk through the living room, Chester walking up the couch to sniff at him curiously as he looked around. Chester was always a little too curious for his own good, and it was his downfall then. The second notification had been the Intruder as he stopped and looked at Chester, turning his head weirdly, like a robot trying to loosen a stuck hinge.
The third bing had been to let me know that the Intruder had brained him with a crowbar before heading to the back of the house.
The next two bings had been Oscar going to inspect the body of his dead friend.
The man had proceeded to the bedroom I share with my wife then. At first, he just stood there, watching her sleep, cocking his head in that odd way that I was beginning to think of as a tick. This was when my youngest, probably after hearing some noise, left his room and headed to our bedroom. The next notification was a twenty-second shot of the man standing over my wife. He had triggered the camera when he swung the crowbar down onto her face, bludgeoning her death with a dozen sharp strikes. I could see, even in the dim light, how the pillow she sleeps with over her head turned red as he turned her skull into pulp.
I could also see, in the corner of the room, my son standing in the doorway, watching all this go down.
My heart leaped when I saw him. Was I about to watch him die as well? I couldn't imagine how scared he must be. He was four years old, watching his mother being brutally murdered by a man in a pig mask who had seemingly stepped out of a nightmare. I expected him to cry out, to scream in terror. For some reason, though, all he did was move as quietly as he could into the living room.
That had been the notification after that.
The very next one had been the Intruder sticking his head into my son's room, tilting his head as he looked for him.
Then he had triggered the camera again when he moved into the living room too.
That was the second most nerve-wracking time. I could clearly see my son crouching behind the couch, knees to his chest, as tears ran down his face. I was crying by then myself. He must have been so scared. As the Intruder came into the living room, I knew that this would be when I watched him die too. The Intruder should have been able to see the top of his head. The Intruder should have been able to clearly see him crouched there or hear his quiet sobbing. Oscar's body could still be seen across the back of the couch, but the other was nowhere to be seen. It was just the Intruder and my son, alone.
When he stopped behind the couch, looking around as the crowbar dripped messily, I held my breath.
But then he turned and left instead.
The next notification had been to show me the Intruder leaving to return to the back of the house.
The one after that, the most heartbreaking, was my four-year-old son dragging himself by sheer will to the cabinet under the sink and closing himself in. Two of the next three reminders had been Oscar, probably running to hide, too, as he zoomed towards the laundry room. If my son was making noise under the sink, I didn't hear it on the camera. If the man had killed my oldest son, I wouldn't know until the cops told me.
The next notification had been when I was aware of the Intruder when I had screamed at him to get his ass back to bed.
The last notification was when he had destroyed the camera.
I say last because when I started writing this down, hoping that writing it down would help me keep it clear in my head, it was the last notification.
I got another notification about thirty seconds ago, a notification that I don't know what to do with.
The cops had been there, of course. They called and told me that they searched the house and found my wife and oldest son dead in their beds. Of my youngest, there was no sign, but they didn't find the Intruder either. They believed this meant he had left, the front door had been open, and they believed they may have taken my son. They were going to start a search immediately, but I don't know what good it will do.
"We'll leave a few cops outside to watch the residents, but we want to get people on this as soon as possible."
I got a notification from the camera in my bedroom just after hanging up the phone.
Notification- Motion detected in Master Bedroom.
I pulled it up and couldn't breathe for a few seconds.
He was holding a sign in one hand and the limp body of my youngest in the other. The dark eyes of his pig mask stared across the miles and saw me as I sit here in this uncomfortable plastic chair. My son didn't look harmed, but he wasn't moving, and he is always moving. I had already lost so much already, and I was truly afraid of losing him too.
The sign read, "Tell the cops to leave if you ever want to see your son alive again."
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