Faces in the Surveillance Feed

Faces in the Surveillance Feed

Under the hum of fluorescent lights, the security room kept time for us all. The screens flickered with the same routine: gate cams, lobby cams, stairwell with its echoing steps. Then, without warning, the faces began to arrive—not in the sightline, not in the obvious frames, but tucked into the edges, a tilted gaze here, a half-smile there, like smoke rings escaping the corners of a room.

“If a face is not there when you blink, does it vanish, or did you just stop seeing it?”

It started as a joke among night staff, a superstition teased into the coffee machine steam. But jokes die when the tape grows into you. On the fourth night, I caught them: a line of pale faces pressed along the edge of the lobby camera, each one staring through a glass that wasn’t there. They blink in unison, then vanish like rain from a windowpane. The timestamps creep backward, then snap forward, as if time itself hiccups to accommodate the visitors who wear smooth, expressionless expressions.

• Faces only appear when the building is supposed to be empty, never during the day shift.
• They line up along borders—doorways, frame edges, the seam between light and shade.
• They never speak, but their silence carries a rumor of the thing they are not allowed to say aloud.
• Sometimes a mouth forms a single word, but only for a fraction of a second, as if the sound is being erased from memory.

I began keeping a log, a quiet rebellion against the creeping chill. I compared frames, I noted the angles, I listened to the hum of the server grow louder as the faces refused to vanish. The more I documented, the more I felt watched by something that had always watched me: the room itself, breathing with a rhythm that wasn't mine.

“Who do you see when you look back at the feed?”

When the cameras finally flickered to a perfect, warning silence, I slid my chair back and stood. The screens winked as if blinking back a memory. In the reflection beyond the glass, I glimpsed a face I recognized from childhood—the same neighbor who vanished years ago, the same eye that had haunted my first dream. The faces had learned my name, and now they needed my presence to be complete. They would not disappear until I joined them on the tape, until I became another edge in their silent gallery.

Now I watch, not to save the building, but to learn the last lesson the feed has to teach: that watching is the act of losing yourself, and that some doors only open from the inside.