I want to tell you about the night I found the folder on my dead brother’s laptop.

Marcus passed away in February. Auto accident. Black ice on a road he'd driven a hundred times. The kind of death that makes no sense no matter how many times someone tries to explain it to you.

He was twenty-four. I was 22 years old. He was the kind of person who remembered everyone’s coffee order, arrived early to everything, and never made you feel like a burden. The world was certainly a worse place without him in it.

About two months after the funeral, my mother asked me to go through his things. She could not make herself do it. "I will," I said.

His laptop was on his desk where he always left it. Charging up. SCREEN FADES TO BLACK. Just stepped out like.

I opened it up.

His wallpaper was still the photo of the two of us at a lake three summers back. I had to sit with that for a minute before I could go on.

I was just going to back up his photos and music. Nothing intrusive. Just the stuff worth keeping.

But when I opened his documents folder I found something that stopped me dead.

A folder named MY BROTHER.

I looked at it a long time.

I opened it up.

Inside were hundreds of voice messages. Outdated. Four years ago. The last was three days before his death.

I popped my headphones in and hit play on the oldest one.

His voice came through and I wasn’t prepared for that. The way the dead sound just like they do. The lie is the absence of them and the voice is the truth.

Just talking. Stream of conscienceness. What happened that day. Something funny a co-worker said. Had something good for lunch. normal stuff. But then at the end of every single recording no matter what he was talking about he said the same thing.

He shouted my name.

And then he said I hope you are ok. Hope you are eating. I hope you know that whatever you are going through right now, it will be ok. You always figured it out. You'll know. You're going to figure this out.

I sat there crying listening to recording after recording of my brother talking to himself about his day and then at the end of every single one he would check in on me.

I didn't know he did this.

He didn't say it.

Four years of voice notes. Four years of him talking to me in a folder I wasn't supposed to find while he was alive.

I got all the way to the final recording. One taken three days before the accident. I hit play.

He spoke of work. He was talking about a book he was reading. He said he wanted to come visit me next weekend.

Then he paused for a second.

Then he said something he’d never said at the end of any of the other recordings.

I’m not sure why but I’ve been thinking about you all day,” he said. Like really thinking about you. Just so you know, if anything happened to me, I wouldn't want you to be sad for too long. I want you to be alright. I'd like you to continue. And I’m going to be talking to you like this. I want you to know wherever I end up. You might just not be able to hear.

After three days he was gone.

I’ve listened to that last recording more times than I can count.

And sometimes late at night, when the apartment is too quiet and the grief too heavy, I swear I can feel him in the room.

Not in a scary way."

In the only way that counts.

Like he had kept his word.

this one is from where i work guys.
I work night shifts at a data recovery company.

Most people do not think about what that means. They hand over a broken hard drive or a waterlogged laptop and they want their wedding photos back or a college thesis they forgot to back up. The job is quiet. Technical. Mostly just me and two other guys in a basement office that smells like solder and cold coffee and the particular kind of silence that only exists underground at 2am.

Three weeks ago a drive came in with no client name attached to it.

That happens sometimes. People drop things off in the after hours slot and forget to fill out the form properly. We log it anyway and wait for someone to call.

Nobody called.

Marcus the senior tech took a look at it first. He plugged it in and ran the diagnostics and told me the drive was fine. Not corrupted. Not damaged. Just locked behind a password that had been entered wrong so many times the system had frozen it. He handed it to me and said to see what I could pull before we shelved it.

It took me about forty minutes to get in.

What I found inside was a single folder.

No name. Just a folder sitting in the middle of an otherwise empty drive like someone had cleaned everything else off and left only this.

I opened it.

Photos. Hundreds of them. Maybe more. All organised into subfolders by what looked like dates going back about four years.

I opened the first subfolder.

A street. Daytime. Shot from a distance like someone sitting in a parked car with a long lens. In the middle of the frame a woman walking a dog. She had no idea the photo was being taken. You could tell by the way she was looking at her phone and laughing at something on the screen. Completely unaware.

I opened the next subfolder.

Same woman. Different day. Outside what looked like a gym. Shot from across the parking lot.

I kept clicking.

Same woman. A grocery store. A park bench. Getting into her car. Standing at her front door with her keys out. Sitting at a restaurant across from someone. Walking alone at night under a streetlight.

Hundreds of photos. All of her. All taken without her knowing.

I sat back in my chair and felt something cold move through my chest.

I kept going because I did not know what else to do.

The most recent subfolder was dated eight days ago.

I opened it and my hands went still on the keyboard.

The photos were different.

She was inside a house now. Shot through a window. She was at a kitchen counter making something. The angle was low like whoever was taking these was crouching in the dark outside the window looking in.

There were twelve photos from that night alone.

In the last one she was looking directly at the window.

Not at the camera. Not at anything specific. Just that thing people do when they feel something without being able to name it. That instinct. She was standing very still holding a glass and looking at the exact spot where someone had been watching her and her face had gone quiet in a way that made my stomach turn.

I closed the folder.

I went to Marcus and told him what I found. He looked at the drive for a long time without saying anything then picked up the phone and called the police.

Two officers came in around 4am. They took the drive. Asked us questions. Wrote things down. Told us we did the right thing and that they would look into it. The whole thing took less than an hour and then they were gone and it was just me and Marcus and the basement again.

I tried to go back to work but I kept thinking about her face in that last photo.

The way she was looking at the window.

The way something in her already knew.

I went home at 6am when my shift ended and I showered and I tried to sleep but I kept seeing the subfolders. The dates. Four years of someone's life documented by someone who was never supposed to be there.

I woke up at noon to a missed call from one of the officers who had come in that night.

I called back.

He told me they had tracked down the woman in the photos.

I asked if she was okay.

A pause. The kind that takes up too much space.

He said they found her that morning. That it appeared she had been missing for approximately six days. That they were still working on the details and could not share more at this time.

I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the wall.

Six days.

The most recent photos on that drive were taken eight days ago.

Someone had watched her through that kitchen window eight days ago.

She had been missing for six.

There is a two day gap I cannot account for and I have not stopped thinking about it since.

I keep coming back to that last photo. Her standing at the counter. The glass in her hand. That stillness in her face.

She felt it.

She knew someone was outside that window.

And she still turned the kitchen light off when she went to bed.

Just like the rest of us would have done.

Just like you will do tonight.

It was late one night, around 11PM. I was home alone with my dog and I went outside, with my dog, behind my house where it’s pitch black to look at the northern lights. As i walk back there i turn on my phone flashlight to see where i am going as the only light was on my front porch. Once i got behind my house i scanned the area quickly then turn off my light to take photos of the sky. The second i turn off my light, my dog starts acting strange and had his tail is tucked between his legs while he is pulling to head back inside. All of a sudden, I hear this screech that sounded like an Aztec death whistle coming from straight ahead of me. It did not sound like any animal or human noise, it was such a loud and terrifying sound that I cannot find anywhere. My dog instantly started running towards my door with me, but didn’t bark once which is strange as he would usually start barking. Once we were inside my house, where I had previously turned off all the lights, i lock my door and as i turn around my living room TV suddenly turned on, so I went and locked myself in my bedroom with my dog then as i lock door my bedroom TV suddenly turned on. Neither of my TV’s have any sort of way to turn them on other than the remote and there was not a power outage as my porch light remained on the whole time. Throughout the night I kept hearing strange noises like whispering and scratching coming from outside of my house. I still do not know what it was to this day. My house does have a small forest surrounding my backyard but not thick enough for any creatures to necessarily be hiding there, but as i stated it was completely dark outside so i could not see anything.