If you’re reading this, please, do not accept any deliveries to the Ashdown Residences in downtown Chicago. I don’t even know if this will post, but I need a record of what’s happening.
It’s 2:13 AM. The rain is coming down so hard it feels like the whole city is rotting. I’ve been a night-shift delivery driver for three years, driving this exact route. But I swear to God, that building wasn’t there yesterday. It was squeezed between two massive glass high-rises in the financial district. The neon sign out front just flickered: “ASHDOWN RESIDENCES,” but the letters looked distorted, like they were glitching out of reality.
The app told me to go to Floor 47, Room 4711. Here’s the problem—the building only has 39 floors.
I was about to hit cancel and drive away. But the screen flashed an updated tip: $5,000. Before I could process it, I got a text from the customer. Just one line: “Don’t let them see you.”
My stomach dropped. I walked into the lobby. No security. No noise. Just the overwhelming, eye-burning stench of industrial bleach. The elevator was already open at the end of the hall. The panel only went up to 39. But as soon as I stepped inside, the doors slammed shut on their own. The digital display started climbing. 40… 41… 42…
I started mashing the “OPEN” button. Nothing. Then, the lights cut out completely.
In the pitch black, my phone screen lit up. Someone—or something—was sending me an AirDrop from a device right next to me. The notification read: “DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU.”
I froze. I could hear it. Slow, wet, rattling breaths right against the back of my neck, like human lungs filled with swamp water.
You won’t believe what happens next… the full story is waiting in the comments 👇 Open ALL the comments now… or say YES for Part 2 🔥
PART 2: THE 1994 BROADCAST
I shoved the deadbolt into place just as the first heavy thud hit the other side of the door.
It wasn’t a knock. It sounded like a wet, heavy sack of meat being thrown against the wood. Then came the scratching. Not fingernails—it sounded like jagged, calcified bone scraping against the mahogany, accompanied by a chorus of overlapping whispers.
“Thirty-two years late, Marcus.”
I backed away, my sneakers squeaking against the cheap, floral-patterned carpet. My chest heaved so violently I thought my ribs would snap. I swung my phone around, the flashlight beam cutting through the gloom.
This wasn’t a modern Chicago apartment. The air was thick, suffocating, and smelled intensely of ozone, stale tobacco, and… burning hair. The wallpaper was a peeling, sickly yellow damask pattern from decades ago. A massive, heavy tube television sat in the corner, its screen glowing with static that bathed the room in a pale, strobing blue light.
I looked down at my phone. The battery, which had been at 84% in the lobby, now read 9%. The signal bars were entirely gone, replaced by a strange symbol I’d never seen on an iPhone—a glitching, pixelated little icon of a fire.
“Okay, okay, think, Marcus, think,” I muttered aloud, my voice trembling. The microphone on my phone picked up the raw terror in my throat. I sounded like a stranger.
I hit the dial pad. 9 – 1 – 1. Send.
I didn’t expect it to ring. I expected a dead line. But it didn’t just ring; the audio that came through the speaker was completely distorted, swimming with heavy, localized static, like a radio broadcast bleeding through a thunderstorm.
Click.
“Chicago Emergency,” a woman’s voice answered. It sounded flat, metallic, devoid of the usual high-stress cadence of a 911 dispatcher.
“Help! I need police, I need everyone!” I screamed, pressing my back against the wall furthest from the door. “I’m trapped at the Ashdown Residences in the financial district! Floor 47, room 4711! There are people outside my door, they’re… I don’t know what they are!”
A long pause followed. Through the speaker, I could hear a strange crackling noise. It sounded like logs snapping in a fireplace.
“Sir,” the dispatcher said, her voice dropping an octave, dragging out the syllables unnaturally. “The Ashdown Hotel is located on 5th and Main. And there is no floor 47.”
“I am standing on it!” I yelled, tears of sheer panic blurring my vision. “Please, just trace my GPS! Send a squad car! They’re trying to break in!”
Another pause. The crackling sound over the line grew louder. It wasn’t just a fireplace. It sounded like a massive, roaring inferno.
“Marcus,” the voice whispered.
My blood ran ice cold. I hadn’t given her my name.
“The fire is already on the fourth floor, Marcus,” the dispatcher continued, her voice now perfectly matching the pale, dead-eyed news anchor from the TV broadcast I had seen in the living room. “The stairwells are blocked. The elevators have failed. Why didn’t you leave when you smelled the smoke?”
I dropped the phone. It clattered against the hardwood floor, the flashlight beam pointing straight up at the ceiling. The dispatcher’s voice continued to hiss from the speaker, no longer forming words, just a low, wet gurgling sound, like someone trying to scream with a throat full of boiling water.
I kicked the phone away and scrambled toward the center of the room. I needed a weapon. I needed a way out. I grabbed a heavy, brass table lamp from the nightstand, ripping the cord from the wall.
That’s when I noticed the smell was getting stronger. The temperature in the room was rising. Fast.
I aimed my phone’s camera toward the door. Smoke—thick, greasy, and black—was beginning to seep under the crack. But it wasn’t billowing naturally. It was crawling. It moved like a living organism, slithering across the carpet like black snakes, reaching toward my shoes.
Thud.
The door buckled inward. The deadbolt groaned.
I spun around, pointing the camera at the television. The static had cleared. It was no longer playing the 1994 news broadcast. Instead, it was showing a black-and-white, grainy, top-down CCTV feed.
It was a live feed of the hallway right outside my door.
I stared at the screen, my breath catching in my throat. The hallway was packed. Dozens of tall, impossibly thin figures stood shoulder-to-shoulder. Their bodies were pitch black, charred and smoking, their limbs elongated and twitching in violent, unnatural spasms. They weren’t banging on the door anymore. They were just standing there, vibrating, all of their featureless, burned heads tilted perfectly to the side, staring at the camera.
Suddenly, the angle on the TV switched.
It was no longer looking at the hallway. It was a feed from inside the room. From the top corner of the ceiling, looking down at me.
I watched myself on the screen, holding the brass lamp, my face pale and dripping with sweat.
But I wasn’t looking at myself. I was looking at the corner of the room, directly behind where I was standing. On the TV screen, the shadows in the corner were coalescing, pulling themselves up into a towering, seven-foot-tall figure. It had no face, just a gaping, vertical slit where a mouth should be, dripping thick, black ash onto the carpet.
It was standing mere inches behind me.
I whipped around, swinging the heavy brass lamp with all my might into the corner.
Smash.
The lamp hit the wall, tearing through the cheap wallpaper and sending plaster flying. Nothing. The corner was empty. The air was just hot and heavy.
I looked back at the TV.
On the screen, the entity hadn’t moved. I watched the black-and-white version of myself swing the lamp right through the creature’s chest. It didn’t flinch. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the entity on the screen raised a long, multi-jointed arm with fingers that looked like burnt twigs, reaching for the back of my neck.
It wasn’t in the room with me. It was only visible through the camera. It was in the recording.
My phone vibrated violently on the floor, the flashlight strobing. I dove for it, snatching it up. The screen was flooded with notifications. Not from the DoorDash app. From my own calendar.
Reminder: Ashdown Hotel Fire. 32 Years Ago Today. Reminder: You couldn’t get out. Reminder: They are in the room.
The heat was becoming unbearable. The smoke detector on the ceiling—a bulky, yellowed plastic thing from the 90s—finally began to scream, a piercing, mechanical shriek that drilled into my skull. The black smoke slithering on the floor began to rise, filling the room from the bottom up.
I couldn’t breathe. My lungs burned with every gasp. I ran to the single window at the far end of the room and threw back the heavy velvet curtains.
Beyond the glass, the city of Chicago stretched out into the night. But it was wrong. Completely wrong. The glowing, modern glass towers of the financial district were gone. The skyline was darker, grittier. The Sears Tower loomed in the distance, but the surrounding architecture was noticeably older. Down below, the streets weren’t lined with bright LED streetlights, but the dim, orange glow of old sodium-vapor lamps.
And the streets were filled with firetrucks.
Dozens of them. Tiny red lights flashing silently in the abyss below. I could see the tiny figures of firefighters aiming hoses upward, spraying water that turned into mist long before it reached my floor.
Because they weren’t aiming at the 47th floor. They were aiming at the 39th. The roof.
I am suspended in the air. A phantom floor. A floor built out of memory and ash.
I grabbed the latch on the window and pulled. It wouldn’t budge. It was painted shut, sealed tight from decades of neglect.
Behind me, the heavy wooden door to room 4711 gave a sickening CRACK. The wood splintered down the middle. Through the jagged opening, a charred, blackened hand shoved its way into the room. The skin was completely burned away, leaving only blackened muscle and white, blistered bone.
“Marcuuusssss,” a chorus of voices wheezed from the hallway. “It burns… it hurts so much… let us in…”
I raised the brass lamp and smashed it into the window. The glass shattered outward, raining down into the impossible abyss below. A blast of freezing Lake Michigan wind howled into the suffocating room, temporarily clearing the smoke.
I dropped the lamp and hauled myself up onto the windowsill, the jagged glass tearing through my jeans and slicing into my palms. I didn’t care. I threw my legs over the ledge and tumbled out onto the rusted iron fire escape.
The metal shrieked under my weight, the bolts grinding against the ancient brickwork. I clung to the icy railing, looking down. The drop was dizzying. A straight shot into a sea of flashing red lights and billowing smoke that belonged to a night thirty-two years in the past.
I raised my phone, hitting record again, my hands shaking so violently the footage is a nauseating blur of rusted metal and dark sky.
“I’m out,” I gasped to the camera, blood dripping from my hands onto the lens. “I’m on the fire escape. The building… the building isn’t real. Nothing is real.”
I looked back through the shattered window.
The heavy wooden door finally gave way, collapsing inward with a massive crash. The pitch-black, smoking figures flooded into the hotel room. They didn’t run; they moved in jarring, stop-motion jerks, their limbs snapping and popping as they swarmed toward the window.
But that wasn’t what made me stop breathing.
As I backed up against the railing of the fire escape, my foot kicked something soft. I looked down, aiming my dying phone flashlight at the metal grate.
Lying on the fire escape, covered in a thick layer of grey soot, was a thermal delivery bag. My delivery bag. The one I had brought up here.
Beside it lay a charred, melted piece of plastic. I reached down with a trembling, bloody hand and picked it up.
It was an Illinois driver’s license. The plastic was bubbled and warped from extreme heat, but the photo was still visible.
It was my face.
But the issue date wasn’t 2023. It was 1991.
The name read: Marcus Reed. And printed in stark red letters across the bottom of the ruined card was a single word: DECEASED.
Before I could even process what I was looking at, a heavy, rhythmic pounding started. But it wasn’t coming from the hotel room.
It was coming from the glass of my smartphone screen in my hand.
I slowly turned the phone around. The camera app was still open. But it wasn’t showing the fire escape. It was showing a close-up of a burned, white, pupil-less eye, staring straight through the lens, pressing against the digital glass from the inside of my phone.
And then, the voice whispered directly into my earpiece, bypassing the speaker completely.
“Look behind you.”
PART 3: THE MISSING TIME
“Look behind you.” The voice didn’t come from the phone speaker. It came from directly inside my own head. A localized, invasive vibration right behind my eyes.
I ripped my gaze away from the corrupted screen, my breath catching in my throat like shards of glass. I turned around.
Hanging upside down from the fire escape landing directly above me was the entity.
It wasn’t just a shadow anymore. In the ambient, strobing red light of the firetrucks below, I could finally see it. It was massive—at least eight feet of elongated, fused limbs. It looked like multiple human bodies melted together by unimaginable heat, their charred, blackened limbs tangled and jutting out at broken angles. But it had no faces. Just smooth, melted domes of hardened ash where heads should be, except for one massive, perfectly white, unblinking eye embedded in the center of its chest.
It was the same eye from my phone screen.
It didn’t climb down the metal stairs. It flowed over the rusted railings like hot tar, moving with a jerky, stop-motion wrongness.
“Marcus,” the entity croaked. It wasn’t one voice. It was dozens. Men, women, children. All gasping for air, all choking on smoke.
I screamed—a raw, ugly sound of pure, unadulterated terror—and scrambled backward. The metal grating of the fire escape tore at my jeans, scraping the skin off my knees. I couldn’t go up; the thing was blocking the stairs. I had to go down.
I hauled myself up, clutching the icy, rusted railing with my bleeding, glass-cut hands, and started half-running, half-falling down the steep metal steps.
Floor 46. Floor 45.
I kept the phone pointed upward over my shoulder, the flashlight beam cutting through the dense, greasy black smoke billowing out from the shattered windows above.
Through the lens, I saw it following me. It wasn’t using the stairs. It was crawling straight down the sheer brick face of the building, its melted, multi-jointed fingers digging into the mortar like insect claws. It was fast. Horrifyingly fast.
“Stay back! Get the fuck away from me!” I sobbed, my voice cracking. “I don’t belong here! I live in Logan Square! I’m alive! I am real!”
I hit the landing for Floor 42 and collapsed against the brick wall, my lungs burning. The smoke was getting thicker, stinging my eyes, coating my throat in a layer of bitter ash.
The entity stopped moving. It hung from the brickwork about fifteen feet above me, its massive white eye locking onto my camera lens.
Then, the ambient noise changed. The howling wind and the distant sirens completely cut out. A dead, suffocating silence fell over the fire escape.
“Are you sure, Marcus?”
The voice didn’t come from the creature. It came from my phone. I looked down at the screen. The video recording was glitching, flashing static, and overlaying images onto the feed.
It was showing me my own memories. But they were unraveling.
Video flashes: Me, sitting in my apartment, playing video games. Glitch. The apartment is empty. Dust covers the floor. The calendar on the wall says 1994.
Video flashes: Me, driving my Toyota Corolla last night, listening to a podcast. Glitch. I am sitting in the driver’s seat of an old, rusted-out 1989 Ford, the upholstery burned, my hands gripping a steering wheel that isn’t there.
“No, no, no,” I whimpered, dropping to my knees on the metal grating. “I have a life. I have a mom. I have… I pay rent. I have a phone! Look at my phone! This is an iPhone! They didn’t have these in 1994!”
The creature slowly began to descend again, its joints popping loudly in the dead silence.
“A comforting lie,” the chorus of voices whispered from the ash-covered throat. “The human brain is a powerful thing, Marcus. In the final three minutes of oxygen deprivation, as the smoke filled your lungs on the 47th floor, your dying mind tried to protect you. It built a future you would never live to see. It built thirty-two years of a hallucinated life. You’ve been wandering the streets of Chicago as a phantom, Marcus. A ghost delivering phantom meals to phantom people, holding onto a metal rectangle that doesn’t exist.”
“Shut up! You’re lying! It’s a trick! This is some kind of sick internet prank!”
I raised my hands to press against my ears. But as I brought my hands into the flashlight’s beam, my breath stopped.
My modern, dark blue DoorDash jacket was gone.
Instead, I was wearing a cheap, synthetic red uniform with the words ‘Gino’s Late Night’ stitched onto the breast pocket. A uniform I hadn’t worn since… since my first job out of high school. In 1994.
And my hands… God, my hands.
They were beginning to flake. The skin was turning a dull, lifeless charcoal grey. Edges of my fingers were crumbling into fine, black ash that blew away in the wind. I wasn’t burning. I was dissolving. The illusion of my modern body was failing.
The entity reached the landing. It stood up, towering over me. Up close, the smell of roasted meat and ozone was so overpowering I violently dry-heaved over the railing. I could see the individual melted faces trapped within its torso, their mouths stretched open in silent, eternal screams. They were the 89 missing people from the Ashdown Hotel fire. The bodies that were never recovered.
Because they never left. And neither did I.
“You are part of the architecture now, Marcus,” the entity said, reaching out a massive, smoldering hand toward my face. “Join the foundation. The fire never stopped. It just moved inside us.”
I looked at my phone. It was the only thing anchoring me to the reality I thought I knew. The battery was at 1%. But the 5G signal icon had miraculously reappeared. A single, weak bar. The signal was bleeding through from the modern world, slipping through the anomaly.
If I let the creature touch me, if I accepted the truth, I would vanish into the ash forever. The 2024 reality would close over me like water, and no one would ever know what happened. No one would know that the Ashdown Hotel is a purgatory trap waiting in the skyline.
I had to get the footage out. I had to warn them.
But I needed time to upload it. I needed an active connection, and the signal was strongest out over the ledge, away from the gravitational pull of the building’s supernatural field.
“I’m not part of you,” I snarled, my voice sounding hollow and distorted, echoing with the same static that surrounded the entity.
I gripped the phone in my left hand. With my right hand—the one crumbling into grey, flaky ash—I grabbed the heavy, rusted iron pipe of a broken fire sprinkler attached to the wall.
The entity lunged.
I swung the iron pipe with everything I had left. It smashed into the creature’s chest, right into the massive white eye. A burst of scalding, black fluid erupted from the wound, raining down on my arm like acid.
The pain was beyond human comprehension. My right arm instantly began to melt, the flesh boiling away, exposing blackened bone. I screamed, but I didn’t let go of the pipe. I shoved it deeper, pinning the thrashing, screeching mass of fused bodies against the brick wall.
With my remaining left hand, I held my phone out over the edge of the fire escape, leaning dangerously far over the abyss.
I hit the screen. Share. Upload to Cloud.
The progress bar appeared. 10%… 30%…
The entity thrashed wildly. One of its elongated limbs snapped forward, its twig-like, charred fingers wrapping around my throat. It squeezed. My windpipe crushed instantly.
I couldn’t breathe. The hallucination was ending. The true memory of my death in 1994 was flooding back—the choking darkness, the searing heat in my lungs, the desperate clawing at a locked door.
60%… 80%…
The creature yanked me backward. My feet left the metal grating.
99%…
UPLOAD COMPLETE.
With the last ounce of strength in my phantom body, I threw the phone.
I hurled it outward, away from the building, into the freezing night air. I watched the glowing rectangular screen spin end over end, falling down, down, down—piercing through the thick layer of 1994 smoke, plummeting toward the unseen modern streets of 2024 below.
I sacrificed my proof of existence to save anyone else who might get a delivery order to the 47th floor.
As the phone disappeared into the dark, the entity’s grip tightened, lifting me entirely off the ground.
Then came the sound of tearing metal.
The rusted bolts holding the fire escape landing to the brick wall finally gave way under the combined weight of me and the massive entity. The metal groaned in agony, a sound like a dying animal, before snapping completely.
The floor dropped out from under us.
(The camera is in freefall. The footage is a dizzying, terrifying spiral of blurred lights. The microphone captures only the rush of extreme wind.)
(Above, a massive, horrifying shadow falls along with the debris—a tangle of rusted metal, a giant, multi-limbed entity, and the small, burning silhouette of a man in a red uniform, screaming silently into the void.)
(Suddenly, the heavy smoke parts. The camera clears the anomaly.)
(The 1994 fire trucks are gone. The old streetlamps are gone. The modern, neon-lit, wet asphalt of a 2024 Chicago parking lot rushes up to meet the lens.)
(SMASH.)
PART 4: THE FINAL LEAK
[FILE NAME: CPD_BODYCAM_MILLER_J_05142024.MP4] [SOURCE: LEAKED TO 4CHAN PARANORMAL BOARD. CURRENTLY BEING SCRUBBED BY AUTHORITIES.] [NARRATIVE OVERLAY: REED, MARCUS – DIGITAL CONSCIOUSNESS / ANOMALY]
I thought the fall would kill me. I thought hitting the concrete would finally end the hallucination, break the loop, and let whatever was left of my soul rest.
I was wrong.
When you die in the Ashdown Residences, you don’t cross over. You become part of the architecture. You become part of the broadcast.
I am writing this—or rather, I am transmitting this—from the other side of the screen. I don’t have a mouth anymore. I don’t have lungs. I am just code, static, and memory, anchored to the shattered iPhone lying in the puddle on the physical plane. I am watching the modern world through the cracked lens of my own camera, and I am watching the police bodycam footage of the cops who found it.
I am both the viewer and the monster now.
[BODYCAM FOOTAGE BEGINS]
TIMESTAMP: 03:15:22 AM LOCATION: Empty paved lot, Financial District, Chicago, IL. OFFICER: Miller, J. (Badge #4092)
(The footage is crisp, HD video, a stark contrast to the grainy, corrupted nightmare of my phone. The camera is mounted on Officer Miller’s chest. A small, subdued American flag patch is visible on the edge of his tactical vest. He is walking across a wet, glistening asphalt parking lot. The modern glass skyscrapers of Chicago tower on either side, reflecting the orange glow of the streetlamps.)
There is no building here. The Ashdown Hotel burned down thirty-two years ago. The city cleared the rubble, paved it over, and turned it into an overpriced private parking lot for bank executives. It’s completely empty tonight.
“Dispatch, this is 4-Adam-20,” Miller says, his breath pluming in the freezing air. “We’re 10-97 at the location. No sign of a disturbance. No fire. No jumper. Honestly, Brenda, it’s a completely empty lot.”
(Radio static crackles from Miller’s shoulder mic.)
“Copy, 4-Adam-20. The 911 call was… weird. Automated ping from a cell phone. Apple Crash Detection, but the altitude data read as a negative elevation drop from a structure that doesn’t exist. Caller ID came up as Marcus Reed.”
“Yeah, well, Marcus Reed must have dropped his phone out of a drone or something, because there’s nothing out here but puddles and rat shit.”
Miller sweeps his heavy-duty Maglite across the wet pavement.
From my perspective—trapped somewhere between 1994 and right now—I can see him. But he can’t see me. I am standing less than ten feet away from him, near the edge of the chain-link fence.
I look down at myself. The modern DoorDash jacket is gone permanently. I am wearing the cheap, red synthetic uniform of Gino’s Late Night from 1994. My skin is pale, almost translucent, except for my hands and neck, which are charred black and flaking away into the freezing wind. I try to speak, to yell at the cop, but my mouth is fused shut, melted together by phantom heat. All that comes out of my nose is a faint wisp of black smoke.
I am becoming one of them.
(On the bodycam footage, another officer, Davis, approaches from the squad car parked at the curb. The red and blue lights flash silently against the brick walls of the adjacent high-rises.)
“Find anything?” Davis asks, shining his own light.
“Just a lot of nothing,” Miller replies. “Dispatch says a phone pinged a massive drop. Crash detection.”
Davis stops. His light hits a dark puddle near the center of the lot.
“Hey. Over here.”
Miller walks over. The bodycam points downward. Lying in the center of a puddle of dirty rainwater is my iPhone. The screen is shattered into a spiderweb of cracks, the metal casing warped and bent from a forty-seven-story fall.
But the screen is glowing.
It shouldn’t be possible. The battery was at one percent when I threw it. It hit the pavement at terminal velocity. The internal components should be pulverized. But the Apple logo is faintly glowing, pulsing in the dark water.
“Well, there’s your jumper,” Davis says, chuckling grimly. “Someone definitely chucked this off the roof of the Chase building next door.”
Miller crouches down. His thick, black-gloved hand reaches into the freezing water and picks up my phone.
Don’t look at it, I scream in my mind. Don’t look at the screen. If you look at it, you acknowledge it. If you acknowledge it, you let it into your reality.
But he does.
Miller wipes the dirty water off the cracked glass. The phone doesn’t require a passcode. It bypasses the lock screen entirely. It opens directly to the Photos app.
To the video I just uploaded.
“What the hell…” Miller mutters.
He taps play.
(The bodycam records the screen of the iPhone. Because of the glare and the cracks, the video is hard to see, but the audio is crystal clear. It echoes in the empty, silent parking lot.)
My own voice, raw and terrified, blasts from the phone’s tiny speakers. “I’m out… I’m on the fire escape. The building… the building isn’t real. Nothing is real.”
Davis steps closer, looking over Miller’s shoulder. “Is this a movie? What is that?”
On the screen, the camera pans to the fire escape. It shows the impossible drop into the 1994 skyline. It shows the charred, melted ID card.
Then, the audio changes. The sickening, wet popping of the entity’s joints.
The two cops freeze. The casual boredom vanishes from their body language. Miller’s grip on the phone tightens.
“Turn it off, Miller,” Davis says, his voice suddenly tight. “That’s… that’s messed up. Turn it off.”
“I… I can’t. The screen isn’t responding.” Miller taps the glass frantically.
From my spot by the fence, I watch them. I can feel the temperature in the parking lot dropping. The air pressure is changing. My phantom lungs inhale, and I smell it. The ozone. The stale tobacco. The burning hair.
The Ashdown is waking up. It smells the fear. It feeds on observation. By watching the footage, these officers have opened a doorway.
(On the bodycam, the video reaches the climax. The massive, multi-limbed entity drops onto the fire escape. The horrific chorus of burning voices screeches from the phone speaker: “You are part of the architecture now, Marcus.”)
“Jesus Christ,” Davis steps back, his hand instinctively dropping to the handle of his sidearm. “Miller, drop the damn phone!”
Miller drops it. The phone clatters against the asphalt, face up. But the video keeps playing. It reaches the part where I am thrown off the edge.
The sound of rushing wind fills the parking lot. The cops watch the screen as the phone falls through the smoke, clearing the anomaly, and showing the very parking lot they are standing in.
Then, the video on the phone ends with the sound of the wet, rattling breath.
Silence returns to the financial district. Just the distant hum of city traffic and the idling engine of the squad car.
“What… what was that?” Miller breathes, his chest heaving under the bodycam.
“Some sick prank,” Davis says, but his voice is shaking. “An AR game or something. Deepfake. Bag it, we’re taking it to evidence.”
Miller reaches down with an evidence bag.
But before he can pick it up, the radio on his shoulder clicks open.
It’s not Dispatch.
It’s a heavy, localized burst of static. Then, a voice comes through. It’s female, flat, and metallic. The exact same voice of the 1994 news anchor. The exact same voice of the 911 dispatcher I spoke to in room 4711.
“Officers,” the radio hisses. “There is no parking lot on 5th and Main. You are standing in the lobby.”
Miller rips the radio mic off his shoulder. “Dispatch, repeat? Who is on this frequency?”
(The bodycam footage suddenly glitches. A wave of heavy digital artifacting rolls across the video. When the pixelation clears, the lighting in the parking lot has changed.)
The modern LED streetlamps are dead. The squad car’s red and blue lights are gone.
Instead, the area is bathed in a sickly, flickering yellow light. The concrete beneath the officers’ feet is no longer concrete. It is a floral-patterned carpet, stained dark red.
“Davis?” Miller says, spinning around.
Davis is gone. The squad car is gone.
Miller is standing in a long, narrow hallway. The walls are covered in peeling yellow damask wallpaper. The smell of industrial bleach and smoke is overpowering.
He is inside the Ashdown.
(Miller’s breathing becomes rapid, panicked hyperventilation. He draws his Glock 19, aiming it down the endlessly dark hallway. The bodycam flashlight beam cuts through thick, rolling black smoke.)
“Davis! Davis, where are you! 10-13! Officer needs assistance!” Miller screams into his radio.
Only the crackle of a roaring fire answers him.
I am watching him from the end of the hall. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is standing on the 47th floor.
I step out of the shadows.
On the bodycam footage, I appear as a distant, blurred silhouette at the far end of the corridor. I am wearing the red Gino’s uniform. But my head is tilted perfectly to the side, my neck broken at a ninety-degree angle.
Miller’s gun snaps up, aiming directly at me.
“Chicago Police! Drop to the ground! Put your hands where I can see them!” he screams.
I can’t obey him. My body isn’t mine anymore. I am being puppeted by the collective will of the building.
I raise my arm. My charred, flaking fingers point directly at his chest.
Not at his heart. At the bodycam.
Suddenly, my jaw unhinges. It drops unnaturally low, the skin tearing to reveal blackened muscle and ash. I don’t speak, but my voice—my old, human voice—emits from the speaker of Miller’s own radio.
“Don’t look behind you, Miller.”
THE END.
