Elliot sat cross-legged on the cold wooden floor of his small apartment, surrounded by piles of old VHS tapes. At first, they seemed like a peculiar relic of family life—harmless snippets of birthdays, holidays, and mundane moments. But then he noticed himself in nearly every frame, even in years he couldn’t remember being filmed. The more he watched, the stranger it became.

Unable to shake the growing unease, Elliot dove deeper. He cleared his weekends, quit answering calls, and began cataloging the tapes obsessively. His job as a freelance editor offered the flexibility to spiral unnoticed. He organized them by date, scribbling labels on sticky notes: “June 1997,” “October 2001,” “Summer 2004.”

But gaps began to emerge. Months—sometimes years—were missing.

“Where are the rest of them?” he muttered, running his hands through his hair. The collection felt incomplete, and the void gnawed at him. He’d watch for hours, staring at the static-ridden footage, hoping the next tape would fill the growing gaps in his understanding. Instead, they revealed something worse.

***

The early tapes had an innocent charm: a child’s birthday party, a family picnic, Elliot learning to ride his bike. But as the dates progressed, the camerawork shifted. The lens began lingering in odd places—too long on Elliot as he read alone in his childhood room or talked to himself in the mirror, rehearsing something he couldn’t recall. Some tapes were shot at night, showing him fast asleep in bed, the faint sound of his breathing overlaying the eerie hum of the camera.

On one tape, a chill raced up his spine. The footage showed Elliot in his teens, sitting at his desk, sketching aimlessly in a notebook. In the reflection of the window behind him, a dark figure stood motionless in the yard. The figure’s face was obscured, but the faint outline of their shoulders and head loomed like a shadow.

He paused the tape, heart pounding, and rewound. When he slowed the footage frame by frame, the figure was still there—silent, unblinking. Elliot’s pulse thudded in his ears. Had anyone else seen this? His parents? His friends? Why hadn’t anyone said anything?

He rewound it again, staring at the figure until his eyes watered. “Who are you?” he whispered into the empty room.

Over time, recurring patterns began to emerge. A symbol—a crude circle with an X slashed through it—appeared in several tapes, etched onto objects in the background. First, it was carved into the wooden fence in his backyard. Then, scratched onto a lamppost outside his school.

It was never the focal point of the shot but always present, as if the camera had been guided toward it intentionally.

And then there was the voice. Muffled at first, buried under static and ambient noise. But as he replayed certain tapes, he realized the voice repeated the same cryptic phrase: “He doesn’t know yet.” The words were barely audible, distorted and fragmented, but unmistakable.

“Doesn’t know what?” Elliot’s voice broke as he spoke aloud. The question lingered like a bad taste.

***

The paranoia crept in slowly. At first, it was small things: a strange itch between his shoulder blades, as if someone were watching him. The feeling of being followed as he walked home from the grocery store. He began double-checking the locks on his doors and windows, but even that didn’t help.

One night, as he sat at his desk watching yet another tape, he heard the faint sound of a car engine idling outside. His heart skipped a beat. He turned off the TV and crept to the window. The street was dark, save for the dull orange glow of a streetlamp. But the sound was unmistakable. A low, steady hum just beyond his line of sight.

He stayed there for hours, barely breathing, until the engine finally cut off and the silence rang louder than the noise.

The next morning, Elliot found his front door slightly ajar. He froze, staring at the narrow crack, his mind racing. Hadn’t he locked it the night before? He was sure he had. With trembling hands, he pushed the door open wider, half-expecting to find someone waiting on the other side. But the apartment was empty, eerily untouched.

Still, the unease lingered. He began noticing subtle changes: his coffee mug moved slightly to the left on the counter, a book out of place on the shelf. Small, insignificant details that felt monumental in his hyper-aware state. He stopped sleeping, his nights spent staring at the shadows on his ceiling, his mind replaying the tapes over and over.

By the third sleepless night, he thought he caught a flicker of movement outside his bedroom window. He bolted upright, heart hammering, but saw nothing but the empty street below.

It was a week later when he noticed the newest anomaly on the tapes. As he cataloged them chronologically, he found one marked “March 2023” that hadn’t been there before. It sat on top of the pile, its label written in the same shaky hand as the others. But that was impossible. He hadn’t pulled this one from the auction—he was sure of it.

Against his better judgment, Elliot slid it into the VCR and pressed play. The screen flickered to life, showing a shaky shot of his own apartment. He watched in horror as the footage panned across the room, stopping on him. There he was, hunched over the same tapes, staring at the TV just as he was now.

His chest tightened, his breath shallow. The camera zoomed closer until the screen was filled with his own face, his tired eyes wide with panic. And then, just as abruptly, the screen cut to static.

Elliot’s hands trembled as he ejected the tape, his mind racing. He grabbed his phone and dialed the police, but his voice faltered when the operator answered. What would he even say? That he’d found tapes of someone filming him in his sleep? That he felt watched, followed? Without proof, they’d dismiss him as paranoid, unwell.

He hung up without saying a word.

***

Desperate for answers, Elliot revisited the tapes, searching for something he’d missed. He scrutinized every frame, every second. The figure. The symbol. The voice. Each fragment felt like part of a puzzle he couldn’t solve.

Late one night, as exhaustion gnawed at him, he heard a knock at the door. Not the polite rap of a visitor, but a slow, deliberate thud. He froze, every muscle in his body tensed.

The knock came again. Louder this time.

He grabbed a kitchen knife and crept toward the door. “Who is it?” he called, his voice shaking.

No answer.

Swallowing hard, he pressed his eye to the peephole. The hallway outside was empty, silent except for the faint hum of a lightbulb. Slowly, he opened the door, stepping cautiously into the corridor. A chill ran through him as he spotted something on the floor: a single VHS tape, unmarked, its black casing gleaming under the fluorescent light.

He stared at it, his breath caught in his throat. Then, against every instinct, he picked it up and retreated back inside.

The tape was shorter than the others, only a few minutes long. But it was the most disturbing yet. The footage showed Elliot standing in his apartment, staring at the camera with wide, vacant eyes. His mouth moved, but no sound came out. Behind him, the shadowy figure loomed closer, its outline sharper than before.

The screen went black, and a single sentence appeared in white text: “He knows now.”

Elliot’s scream shattered the silence, but the only response was the low hum of the VCR. For the first time, he understood the tapes weren’t just a record of his past.

They were a warning of his future.

To Be Continued …