"Warning; what we're about to show you may be disturbing. View at your own discretion."

A woman popped up on Jessamine's screen; she was recording herself, using a phone-camera, from what Jessamine could tell. Her big, chocolate eyes were wide with excitement, her breath blowing into the receiver. Luscious brown locks of hair flew over her tanned face, and she swallowed a few of the strands as she looked into the camera.

"This is it," she said, her voice deeper than Jessamine would have expected; smooth like silk, but with a sudden sticky sweetness like honey.

The woman panned the camera towards where she'd been walking—the exit of a forest, apparently. Heavy branches drooped over, cloaking the passage in near obscurity, almost making the exit impossible to see. But she'd seen it, and was strolling over to it. Her steps were cautious, but she was still breathing heavily, anticipating what she'd find. Had she been hoping for a street? A population?

Clumps of bushes lined the path she was on; a path barely wide enough for a car, covered in dirt and twigs that snapped under her weight. It was daytime, but light was fading, so it might have been early evening, possibly later, depending on when this video was recorded.

She shoved away the curtains of hanging branches and what looked like swaying vines and traversed the exit, arriving into a clearance of some sort; a circular area surrounded by high topped trees—pines and birch? Jessamine was no tree expert, but those resembled those one would find in a northern California forest.

The trees and the surrounding green scenery weren't what caught the eye most—it was the house that the woman's camera had panned to that sent sudden shock-waves through Jessamine's body. She couldn't explain it, but the vision of the house, standing there as if staring back at her with its invisible eyes, stilled her, suffocated her, surprised her. It looked familiar; had she seen it before? Had this house been discovered by some other famous paranormal investigator at one point, and broadcast all over the news?

She shook it off, but couldn't fight the ominous sensation developing in her gut, the questions popping in her mind.

"Whoa," said the woman, her earlier honeyed voice now lower in her throat, a bit distant, subdued.

She didn't move much closer, remaining right at the border between forest and clearing, keeping the camera focused on the house. It was big—bigger than what one would expect to locate in the woods—but with that abandoned air, that appearance of neglect, with chipped paint and worn-out white wood and rusty-looking doors. The windows were all boarded up, and the boards had sinister drawings on them—hard to tell what they were or what they said from where the woman stood.

The front door was made of a dark cherry shaded wood, and the woman zoomed in on it. It was scratched, like claw marks a dog or a cat would leave when demanding to come back in.

She zoomed out to showcase the entire area—the house, stark white in a field of flattened, browned grass, encircled by tall, scruffy trees with branches reaching heavenwards, and that swung slightly side to side in the wind.

"Ooh," said the woman, seemingly repressing a chill. "Bleep, this was not what I was expecting at all."

Despite the sky above indicating that it was, indeed, still daytime, there was a darkness that swept over the area; so sudden, one might have blinked and come back to find that night had fallen. As if a tide of obscurity had washed in through the trees and taken hold of the house and its surroundings and painted everything in shades of black and gray.

"What the..." The woman again zoomed onto the house, but not on the door this time; she concentrated on one of the boarded up windows. "Did I see that right?"

Jessamine, staring at the scene playing out on her own cell phone's screen, took a sip of her coffee. She squinted, unsure what the woman was indicating, but she struggled to keep fixed on the house for too long; it still prompted electric jolts up and down her arms.

"The lights!" The woman's screen grew a bit blurry as she set the zoom to the max. Once it refocused, though, Jessamine did see something flicker, so briefly she'd have rather written it off as her eyes getting tired.

"Nah," she took another sip and placed her mug on the counter, "I didn't see it."

The screen moved back to the front door, then the upper floor, then higher, zoning in on a smaller window. An attic, maybe? The board over this window appeared to be loose, allowing a narrow opening in its middle, large enough for one set of eyes to peek through. For a second Jessamine expected to see eyes—who knew who or what lived in that place, right?—but instead, a blare of blue light burst through it, quick but intense, nearly blinding Jessamine.

She swore, and almost lowered her phone, needing to blink away the blue light imprinting in her eyes. But the woman's shock drew Jessamine to the screen again.

"Bleep." She was still filming the house, but zooming out and walking backwards. "Bleep, bleep, bleep!"

Jessamine narrowed her gaze on the screen, unsure if what she'd seen was real. The house rattled, as if about to be swallowed by an earthquake, and the trees around began to shake violently, too. Yet the grass didn't move, and there was no gust of wind whipping into the phone's receiver; there was no wind.

A faint but eerie growl erupted ahead of the woman, coming from the house's vicinity. It was low, lingering; like those one would hear from a demon in a horror movie. Jessamine shivered and propped the phone up against the register as she hugged herself, feeling quite cold.

"Bleeeeeeeeep!"

The camera switched to the forest as the woman ran. She was panting, the phone shaking, pointed downwards, showing her black Converse shoes shoving through earth and leaves, struggling to hop over vagrant branches, to not slip and fall. Whatever that growl had been—if Jessamine hadn't imagined it—had sent the poor woman into a frenzy and she wouldn't stick around to figure out what would come out of that house.

She kept running, faster, and spun once to view the exit to the clearance, filming how it'd grown dark, nighttime dark. And she twisted to film ahead of her, where clear daylight shone down through the trees. She turned again, witnessing the darkness coming to her, seeming to approach, crawling past the bushes she'd passed moments before.

How such a phenomenon was possible Jessamine had no idea. Nor was she sure how those watching this on national television would react, and how many would speak up trying to debunk it. But she knew what she was seeing: night was chasing day, dark was swallowing light, and this woman wouldn't be fast enough to escape it. And whatever it contained—this mystical darkness cast the entire area in a cloud of obscurity so thick it was like closing one's eyes—she didn't want it to catch up to her.

"It's too late," said the woman, slowing her pace, filming the darkness as it continued to reach closer to her. "Quick," she gasped, "I gotta save this, I gotta send it out." She held the camera up, trembling and having difficulty keeping her arm steady. "Bleep, hurry, dammit!" Her breathing was ragged, and between breaths Jessamine detected another growl, this one louder and much, much closer. Was the house overrun by wolves? Carnivorous humans?

As the obscurity came within feet of gulping the woman up, the screen went black.

A reporter showed up on the screen, at the news studio. "That was the last we saw of Amy LaRoya, who managed to send this footage to one of her associates before tragically disappearing. It's unclear where she was filming. Per her associates, she usually gave coordinates or addresses in her YouTube famous show, Haunt Me, but this time... she didn't." The man, evidently disturbed, swallowed and looked down at his notes before resuming looking at the screen. "If you or someone you know has any information on Amy's last investigation or current whereabouts, please call the number listed at the bottom of your screen."

Jessamine had known where this was going—she'd read the headlines earlier that day and had gotten wind of Amy's disappearance, as it was all over TV—but she hadn't had a free moment to watch the actual reporting on it until now. The coffee shop was empty, her co-workers were on a break, her boss was holed in his office doing who-knew-what; it had been the right time.

But now, as she locked her phone screen and slipped the device into her apron pocket, she regretted it. She didn't watch spooky stuff, with reason; the things she saw, though normally fake, sat with her for days and haunted her. She wasn't a fan of creepy forests and monsters in their depths; this video was exactly that.

"Ugh, why do I torture myself like this?" A raging migraine was developing, searing across her forehead.

As someone tapped her on the shoulder, she shot around, jamming into the register counter, hitting her back hard.

"What the—" Her heart hammered in her chest—now was not the time for her to be surprised by patrons who'd snuck in while she wasn't paying attention. There'd been no one in the shop last she'd checked.

A kind but startled face—that of her mother—stared back at her, immediately alerted that she'd scared her.

"Oh crap, Jessamine, sorry," she said, grabbing Jessamine's upper arms and squeezing, anchoring her in real life. "I thought you heard me." Her dark green eyes were the same shade as the pines Jessamine had witnessed in the video, and she had a hard time dissociating them from what she'd watched.

"Heard you?" Jessamine wiped a layer of sweat that had grown over her forehead. "How? Where'd you come from?"

Mrs. Spencer indicated the EMPLOYEES ONLY door behind her. "Came through the back, I needed to speak with your boss for a second."

Jessamine rolled her eyes. "Mom—"

"—nothing embarrassing, don't worry. I was telling him I spotted some strays on the way here." Mrs. Spencer's cheeks were flushed, and she moved her hands to Jessamine's chin. "What was that you were watching?"

There was no point trying to hide anything from Mrs. Spencer, Jessamine knew.

Twenty-five going on thirteen; she'll never let me be an adult, will she?

Calming down, Jessamine turned to the counter and rubbed her lower back, where she'd hit it. That was going to leave a bruise.

"That video of the woman who disappeared. Amy LaRoya?"

Mrs. Spencer walked around the counter and propped before it, carefully watching Jessamine as she set her hands onto the wooden surface. "Ah."

"Ah?" Jessamine crossed her arms. "You've seen it too, then?"

Mrs. Spencer winced. "I have. Everyone has. Jessamine..." She grimaced, as if recalling a batch of bad news she had to deliver; which wasn't uncommon with her. "Are you okay? After watching that, I mean."

"It was creepy as fuck," Jessamine waved off her mother as she flinched at her cursing, "but yeah, I'm fine, why wouldn't I be?"

Peering at the floor, slightly hunching, Mrs. Spencer sighed. "Well, I saw the footage on the news, too. And I'd recognize that house in the video anywhere." Her chin tipped up, and her earlier flush was gone, the color having drained from her face. Her shoulders straightened, and she gripped the edge of the counter, fixed on Jessamine with a soft but strange gaze. "It was the one where you were found three years ago, almost to the day."

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