Delusions of the Alternates

Chapter 1: The Realisation

Bri had always thought fear would feel loud.

She thought, when the moment finally came, when everything they had been running from stepped out of the static and into the open, there would be screaming. There would be panic. There would be the sharp crash of footsteps, shouted names, desperate instructions that no one would follow in time.

But fear was quiet. It was the sound of her own breathing, thin and uneven.

It was the rustle of dead leaves beneath her shoes. It was the camera in her hand clicking softly as her fingers trembled against the plastic.

And then it was Brian’s voice.

“Bri,” he said.

She turned.

He was standing at the edge of the clearing, half-hidden in the dark between the trees. His hoodie was torn. His face was pale, drained of everything that had once made him seem real. For a second, Bri almost felt relief.



Almost. Then she saw the way he was looking past her.

Not at her. Behind her.

Bri didn’t want to turn around.

Every instinct in her body told her not to. If she didn’t look, maybe it wouldn’t be there. If she didn’t acknowledge it, maybe this could still become something else. Another bad night. Another confusing recording. Another piece of the impossible puzzle they would all argue about later.


But Brian’s expression changed. His eyes widened. And then he was gone.
Not vanished.
Not taken in some clean, impossible blink.

He was pulled backward into the trees as if the darkness had hooked its fingers onto him.

“Brian!”

Bri ran without thinking.


The camera swung wildly in her hand, catching fragments of trunks, grass, sky, static. She heard Brian hit the ground somewhere ahead. Heard him choke out a sound that was too small for someone who had survived so much already.


When she found him, he was lying on his side among the leaves.


The Operator stood over him.


Tall. Still. Featureless.


It didn’t move like a person.

It didn’t breathe.

It didn’t hurry.

It simply existed there, in the wrongness of the woods, and the world around it seemed to bend away as if trying not to touch it.

Brian’s hand twitched once.

Then stopped. Bri froze.

“No,” she whispered.

The word broke something in her.

For a moment she wasn’t afraid anymore.

She was empty.

Hollowed out by the sight of Brian on the ground and that thing standing above him like it had always known this would happen.


Then another voice rang out from behind her.

“Bri, move!”

Jay.

He came crashing through the trees with a flashlight in one hand and something metal clutched in the other. A pipe, maybe. A weapon that suddenly looked ridiculous against the figure in the suit.

“Jay, don’t!” Bri screamed.

But Jay didn’t stop.

He charged at The Operator like anger could make him brave enough to survive.

For one impossible second, Bri believed he might.

The flashlight beam struck The Operator directly, splashing white across the blank space where a face should have been.

The image warped.

The air buzzed.

The camera in Bri’s hand shrieked with interference.

Jay swung.

The pipe passed through nothing.

Or maybe The Operator moved.

Bri couldn’t tell.

The footage would never tell her either.

It would only show distortion, a smear of black and white, Jay stumbling, and then the flashlight falling to the ground.

“Jay!”

He turned toward her. His mouth opened like he was going to say something.

A warning. An apology. Her name.

Then the sound cut out.

Not faded. Cut.

The whole world became silent as Jay’s body dropped beside the beam of the flashlight.

Bri’s scream made no noise. She felt it tear through her throat, felt the pain of it, but the clearing swallowed it before it could exist.

The Operator turned toward her. There was no face to read. No eyes. No expression.

But Bri knew.

It saw her.

It had always seen her.

The camera continued recording.

Its red light blinked steadily, obediently, like a heartbeat that wasn’t hers.

Bri stepped backward. Her heel caught on a root and she nearly fell.

The bodies of Brian and Jay lay between her and the thing that had taken everything piece by piece until there was almost nothing left to take.

Almost.

Her hand found the old tape in her jacket pocket.

The one they had argued over. The one Jay had insisted might explain everything. The one Brian had told her not to watch alone.

The one that had shown her the symbol.

The circle. The crossing lines.

The mark that appeared on walls, doors, skin, film.

A warning.

A doorway.

A wound.

Bri didn’t understand all of it. Maybe no one was supposed to.

But as The Operator moved closer, she understood enough.

This thing didn’t just follow them.

It connected to them.

Through the tapes.

Through the recordings.

Through memory.

Through fear.

Through her.

Bri looked down at the camera in her hand.

Static rippled across the small screen. In the flicker, she saw herself standing in the clearing, face streaked with tears, eyes wide and bloodshot.

Behind her on the screen, The Operator was closer than it was in real life.

Much closer.

Bri’s breath caught.

The image glitched.

For half a second, the screen showed something else.

A white room.

A chair.

Her own hands tied down.

A figure standing in the corner.

Then the woods returned.

Bri tightened her grip on the camera.

“No more,” she said.

The Operator stopped.

The air grew heavy.

Every tree seemed to lean inward.

Bri lifted the camera and pointed it directly at the blank face.

“I don’t know what you are,” she said, voice shaking. “I don’t know what you want. But you don’t get to keep doing this.”
The static rose.

The ground seemed to tilt beneath her.

She pulled the tape from her pocket and forced open the camera compartment with shaking fingers.

It didn’t fit. It wasn’t supposed to fit.

Nothing about this made sense, but sense had died with Brian in the leaves and Jay in the flashlight glow.

The tape slid in anyway.

The camera screamed.

A high, piercing sound exploded from the device.

Bri cried out and nearly dropped it, but she held on.

The noise drilled into her skull, sharp enough to make her vision blur. The Operator flickered, its shape stuttering like bad footage, appearing first in front of her, then to the left, then directly beside her. Bri didn’t run.

She pressed record.

The red light blinked faster.
The symbol appeared on the camera screen, black against grey static. Then it spread.

Across the screen.

Across the trees.

Across Brian’s still hand.

Across Jay’s fallen flashlight.

Across Bri’s own skin.

Lines burned up her arms like ink beneath the surface, and she screamed again, this time hearing it for one brief second before the ringing swallowed everything.

The Operator leaned toward her. The camera screen turned white.

Bri saw Brian standing behind it. Then Jay.

Both of them stared at her with empty eyes.

Not alive.

Not dead.

Waiting.

The ringing grew louder.

Louder.

Louder.

Until there was no forest.

No bodies.

No camera.

No Operator.

Only sound. Only white.

And then—

Bri woke up.

She shot upright in bed, gasping so hard her chest hurt.
Morning light spilled through the curtains in pale strips. Her room was quiet. Normal. Dust floated lazily through the air. Somewhere outside, a car passed by. Somewhere downstairs, someone laughed at something on TV.

Bri stared at her hands.

No black lines. No burns. No blood.

She pressed her palms to her face and let out a broken, relieved laugh.

A dream. It had been a dream.

A horrible, vivid, impossible dream.

Brian was fine. Jay was fine. Everything was fine.

Bri swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. Her knees nearly gave out, but she forced herself toward the desk. She needed water. She needed to call them. She needed to hear their voices and prove to herself that her mind had finally snapped under the pressure of too many tapes, too many nights without sleep, too many shadows moving where they shouldn’t.

Then she saw the camera. It sat in the center of her desk.

Bri stopped breathing.

She hadn’t left it there. She knew she hadn’t.

The battery light blinked red.
Once.
Twice.
Like a heartbeat.

Bri approached slowly, every part of her begging her not to touch it. The camera was cold when she picked it up. Too cold, as if it had been left outside all night.

There was a tape inside.

Her fingers trembled as she opened the screen.
The recording was already paused on a single frame.

The woods.
Brian on the ground.
Jay beside the flashlight.
And Bri standing in front of The Operator, staring directly into the camera.

On the wall behind her desk, something scratched softly.
Bri turned.
At first, she thought it was a crack in the paint.

Then she stepped closer.
A circle.
Crossed by lines.
Carved into the wall from the inside out. Her stomach dropped.

“No,” she whispered.

The television downstairs flickered. The laughter stopped. Someone called her name.

“Bri? You awake?”

She looked toward the door.

For one wild second, she almost answered. Almost ran downstairs. Almost told them everything. Brian. Jay. The woods. The camera. The symbol. The white light.

But then the camera screen buzzed. A new image appeared. Her house. Filmed from outside. From the tree line beyond the yard.

The footage was live.

Bri’s blood turned cold. Slowly, in the corner of the screen, a tall black shape stepped into view.

The Operator.
Waiting.
Watching.
Hunting.

“Bri?” the voice downstairs called again.

She snapped the camera shut.

Her hands shook so badly she almost dropped it, but she shoved it into the back of her closet beneath a pile of old clothes. Then she pulled down a hoodie and covered the symbol on the wall with a poster, pressing the tape hard against the corners until it stuck. When she opened her bedroom door, she forced her face into something calm. Something normal.

“Yeah,” she called. “I’m awake.”

Her voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. She walked downstairs and smiled when they looked at her. She said she was fine. She said she had slept badly.

She said nothing about Brian.

Nothing about Jay.
Nothing about the camera.
Nothing about the thing standing beyond the trees.

Because if she said it out loud, it would become real. And if it became real, everyone else would know. Everyone else would be next. So, Bri kept the secret.
She buried it behind quiet smiles and locked doors. She stopped answering calls from numbers she didn’t recognize. She avoided mirrors when the lights flickered. She pretended not to hear the ringing that returned every night just before sleep.

But The Operator did not leave.
It appeared first in reflections.
Then in windows.
Then at the end of the street.

Each time closer. Each time clearer. And Bri understood, with a horror that settled deep into her bones, that whatever had happened in the woods had not ended anything. It had chosen her. Brian and Jay were gone. The others were still in danger.
And The Operator was coming.
Not for them. Not yet.
For Bri.
Bri then sees Tim running into the forest nearby, not wanting to lose anyone else, she runs after him.