Chapter 7 — The Camera

The camera went up on a Saturday morning. David and Nora together on the bathroom roof — him holding the ladder, her doing the positioning, the compact wildlife camera zip-tied to a bracket David had fashioned and screwed into the fascia board. A clear angle to the small attic window.The window, Nora noticed, was opaque from the outside. Not dirty — though it was dirty — but opaque in a way that didn't respond to the direction of the light. She had expected to see something through it, even dimly. She saw nothing."It's not going to show anything except a dark window," David said."We'll see."She aimed the camera at the window and checked the feed on her phone. Clear enough.They waited two days.On Monday evening, Nora reviewed the footage on her laptop at the kitchen table while David cooked dinner and the kids did homework. Sixty-three hours of a single attic window. She set it at 8x speed.For the first fifty-one hours: nothing. The window, the roof in the background, the sky shifting through light and dark and light and dark.Then: hour fifty-two, which worked out to approximately 1:17 AM Sunday night.Something in the window.She stopped the playback. Went back. Let it run at normal speed.The window was still opaque. Still dark. Still showing nothing.But there was a shape. Pressed against the glass from inside, in the darkness — not clearly, not with any detail she could resolve, but a shape that was the suggestion of a person. Standing at the glass and looking out.Or looking down.She was directly below that window.She sat very still for a moment. The sounds of her family went on around her — David clattering a pan, Owen laughing at something on his phone, Lily humming something tuneless in the next room.She watched the shape at the window.It stood there for six minutes and forty-two seconds. Then it receded, and the window was just a window again, and the sky outside the house went grey with approaching dawn.She closed the laptop.She sat at the kitchen table and listened to her family moving through the house and thought about Eleanor Hargrove's face when she'd said: I know what it sounds like to hear your child's name spoken by something in a wall.She thought: we have to leave.She thought: David won't go without seeing this himself.She thought: I have to tell him tonight.She opened the laptop again.The shape in the window was gone.The footage counter read: 63:14:02.The footage counter had read 51:something when she'd stopped it.She scrolled back. And back. The sixty-three hours of footage were intact. She found the moment again — hour fifty-two, 1:17 AM, the shape at the glass.Except now the shape was different.Now it was turned toward the camera.