Then, a voice. Soft. Close to the microphone. “You’re still here.”
He didn’t.
Leo leaned forward. The man in the reflection turned his head slightly, as if looking directly at him.
The tab closed itself.
He never found the video again. The user had no other uploads. The link, when he tried to recover it from his history, led to a “Video Removed” page. But sometimes, late at night, when his laptop was off and the apartment was silent, he would hear a faint sound from the corner of his room. The sound of rain. Uneven, raw, dripping.
The apartment smelled of dust, instant ramen, and the particular metallic tang of a laptop that had been running for three days straight. Leo’s desk was a graveyard of coffee mugs, and the only light came from the bruised blue glow of his screen. On it, a Dailymotion tab was open. Not Netflix. Not HBO Max. Dailymotion.