Page 107 of The Other Side
“It says the total files on the drive here.” He pointed to the screen. “But if I highlight all the folders and look at the properties, there are over a hundred more files listed in total.”
“That’s…weird.” I hadn’t seen something like that before.
Chance yawned and closed his laptop. “I can’t see straight. I’ve been staring at this thing too long.”
I closed mine in agreement. “Yours or mine?”
“Yours.” He gave me a peck on the lips before standing, his hand extended to help me up.
“Hidden files!” I shouted, scrambling up the trapdoor stairs into the lounge, knowing that Chance was already up there waiting for me, as I had volunteered to grab dinner from the kitchen that evening.
“What?” Chance came around the study table to take the food containers from me.
“I ran into Milton on my way to the dining hall—I asked him about the file number discrepancy, and he said they were probably hidden files.”
The food forgotten, I loomed behind Chance as he did an internet search, quickly finding directions for how to locate the files. A few clicks later, and boom, we were staring at the interview audio files and some photos.
“The transcripts,” I breathed.
Chance hit play on one of them, and Daniel’s voice could be heard through the laptop speaker.
“When did the grooming start?” Daniel asked. His voice sounded even younger than I remembered, but he was confident. My heart broke hearing him.
“It’s hard to tell.” The source’s voice was distinctly female, but it sounded as though she was using some sort of voice filter to modify it so it would be unrecognizable. “I went to Montgomeryfor four years, and he was always very nice to me, but it wasn’t until I was a sophomore that he started asking me to help him in his office, and then maybe a couple months after that was when he started touching me.”
I had to pause the audio, not wanting to hear more. I’d already read the transcript. I knew what was coming next. My stomach was churning. Hearing her recount it made it feel so much more real, so much more disturbing, and so much more heart-wrenching.
“The source is definitely female, but her voice sounded strange, kind of like auto-tuned. They must have had these interviews over the phone or internet,” I suspected. “What’s that?” I pointed to a single video file at the bottom of the folder. Curiously, it was dated right before Daniel went missing.
Chance double-clicked on the video and it began to play immediately. The footage was so dark, it was hard to see anything. Chance stopped the video and tried to brighten his screen, but it didn’t help much.
“I’ll turn off the other lights,” I told him, already on my way around the room. The fire couldn’t be helped; the lounge would be freezing without it.
“I think it’ll work!” Chance shouted across the room when I flipped the last switch off.
The video was still dark and very grainy, so fine details couldn’t be made out, but it appeared the video had been taken inside. Frankly, the room looked like something out of a horror movie. Dust and cobwebs coated much of the expansive space, the windows were covered by tattered, thick, heavy drapes, and everything else was in ruin.
I noticed a kitchen area in one corner, with cabinetry and vintage appliances, tarnished and dusty with age. Perhaps he had discovered an old residence on campus, hidden in the woods?
But there was something oddly familiar about the room, though it could have been anywhere on campus. There were plenty of unexplored and decrepit nooks and crannies around, long abandoned by past inhabitants. My lounge was a perfect example of how easily things were abandoned and quickly forgotten.
Because of the date of the video file, which was a few weeks before Daniel’s disappearance, I assumed it had to have been on campus, but I supposed we couldn’t be sure who had filmed the video.
“Oh shit!” Daniel’s voice came out of the video suddenly, startling both Chance and me. Then the camera started shaking violently, as if he was desperately scrambling to get as far from whatever had spooked him as possible. In the last few seconds of the video, the camera was a blur, jostling around as he ran, the sound of his panting breath the only audio, and then the video stopped abruptly.
Before Daniel shouted, there had only been sounds of muffled movement and Daniel’s soft breathing. Both of us were trying to catch our own breaths from the accidental jump scare.
Something was bothering me about the video. “Can you rewind, frame by frame?”
“I think so.” Chance tried pressing the arrow key, and sure enough, it worked.
“I want to see if he got on camera whatever scared him.”
Leaning forward to get a better look, Chance clicked back through the video at my instruction. There was a single frame, while the camera was swinging from one side of the room to the other, the split second before Daniel’s frantic escape, that was clear enough for us to see what had frightened him.
“No way…” Chance breathed.
Partially hidden under a dusty tarp was what looked like the mummified skeletons of two girls, their hair still framing their skulls.
Daniel had discovered Faith and Hope Marshall.
