Uncle Dan's command to stay off our phones lasted about ten minutes. Ten minutes of me sitting in the crushing silence, jumping at every creak of the old apartment building. Ten minutes of staring at the black screen of my phone, feeling it pulse with a malevolent energy.
It was Liza who broke first. Her message was a single, tear-streaked word in the group chat.
Liza: Please.
It was followed by another screenshot. This one wasn't from the graduation. It was a recent selfie of her, taken in her bedroom just this morning. In the background, reflected in her vanity mirror, was a blurred, dark shape standing in her doorway. A shape that hadn't been there when she took the picture.
My phone rang, the generic tone shattering the quiet. It was Liza. I accepted the video call without thinking.
Her face filled the screen, pale and streaked with tears. "You saw it, right? The photo? The call?" she gasped, her voice raw.
Before I could answer, her eyes widened, staring at something past her own screen. "What was that?" she whispered, her head whipping around to look behind her.
"Liza? What is it?"
"I... I thought I saw something in the hall." She turned the phone's camera, panning it across her tidy bedroom. The screen was a mess of digital artifacts, the video feed glitching. "The connection's bad," she muttered, swinging the camera toward her open bedroom door, into the dark hallway beyond.
The feed stuttered, froze for a second, and then cleared.
There, in the center of the hallway, stood a tall, indistinct figure. It was made of shadows, a man-shaped void that the light from her room refused to touch. It was perfectly still.
Liza, seeing my expression, spun back around. "What? What do you see?"
The figure was gone. The hallway was empty.
"Nothing," I lied, my voice trembling. "It's nothing."
We hung up, the fear a living thing between us. I couldn't sit here anymore. I had to see the original photo. Not the digital copy on my phone, but the real one. The physical print my Uncle Dan had framed on his mantelpiece.
I drove to his house in a daze, the streetlights stretching and distorting in my vision. The house, usually a beacon of warm light, was dark except for the single lamp in the living room. I found Uncle Dan not on the phone with the police, but sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace, surrounded by a sea of old photo albums. The framed graduation photo was in his hands.
He looked up as I entered, his face decades older than it was just this afternoon. "The police," he said, his voice hollow. "They said there's nothing they can do. Told me it was a prank, a hacker."
He thrust the framed photo toward me. "But look."
I took it. It was the same photo. But in this physical copy, the one that couldn't be hacked or digitally altered, the anomaly was even more chilling. There was no smirk, no blur. Instead, just behind Aunt Carol's right shoulder, clear as day, was the same tall, shadowy figure Liza and I had just seen. It was in the background of the original picture, hiding in plain sight. And its featureless head was tilted, not towards the celebrating family, but directly at the person holding the camera.
It had been there all along.
Uncle Dan pointed a shaking finger at the shadow. "She saw it," he whispered, a tear finally escaping down his cheek. "That's what she was trying to tell us. That's the warning. It wasn't about her. It was about that."
He looked at me, his eyes filled with a terrified realization.
"It wasn't her in the call. It was never her. It was that thing... and now it knows we've seen it."