The Footage That Watched You Back

When the city slips into its second spine of darkness, I stay with the monitors. The old municipal building sighs through cooling vents, cameras humming like tired insects. On the grainy feed, faces begin to arrive—first a man with a hat, then a girl with pigtails, then a pale figure in a raincoat—each appearing where there should be emptiness, each lingering just long enough to be noticed, then vanishing as if they had never been seen at all.

I'm a night-shift security operator named Mara, and the first few instances felt like glitches. But the faces keep returning, more deliberate with every passing night. They stare not at the doors or the floor, but at the camera itself, as if the lens is the final doorway they want to cross.

The phrase “The Footage That Watched You Back” starts to echo in my mind. The faces appear at the edge of screens, never in the center, like whispers pressed against glass. They do not blink; they do not breathe; yet their eyes hold mine, and in those eyes I feel a cold demand: acknowledge us, or become one of us.

One night I notice a pattern: every time a new face shows up, the monitors in the hall behind me flicker in unison, and the air in the room drops a few degrees. The building seems to keep a ledger of the departed, and I am suddenly part of that ledger, a line item in a record I cannot see but can feel with the skin on my arms.

Then a face slips into the main lobby camera: a grandmother, hers, though she died years ago. The timestamp repeats, a looping 02:13 that never shifts. My hands tremble as the old woman smiles, not with malice, but with the quiet knowledge that I am now part of the room's memory too.

Notes in a stubborn notebook stretch into a confession:

• Faces appear in spaces that should be empty.
• Each visitor seems to know when the camera is watching.
• They leave an unnerving trace: a drop of cold air, a scent of rain that wasn’t there, a sense that time bends inward.

The night comes again, and I realize the building is not recording history; it is reconstructing it, verbatim. The faces are memories trying to pass through the barrier of glass and lens, seeking a viewer who will listen. When I finally look up from the main screen, the room feels watched in a way it never did before, as if the entire building has learned my name and waits for my next frame.

And then the screen changes. A new face fills the lobby, not stepping through, simply arriving as if it had never left. The gaze trains on me, matched, patient, inevitable. The footage does not merely show what happened; it becomes the moment that happens next. The watchers have found their way to the watcher, and now the watcher becomes watched.