A soft squeak echoed from behind the door. Leo stood up, his heart hammering against his ribs. He slowly pulled the door open. The hallway was dim, the air still—except for a bright flash of red bobbing near the ceiling. A red balloon.
In the photo, a single red balloon hovered near the ceiling at the far end of the hall. Leo looked toward the door. The hallway was empty. He looked back at the screen, then at his watch again. Download Snapchat 553547857 jpg
He lunged for his phone to take a photo, but as he opened Snapchat, a notification popped up from an "Unknown User." It was a snap of him, taken from the perspective of the computer screen, looking at the very file he had just opened. The caption read: “Don’t look behind the laptop.” A soft squeak echoed from behind the door
He had found it in a buried folder of an old hard drive, a relic from a summer ten years ago that he barely remembered. When he clicked "Open," the image didn't show a blurry party photo or a grainy selfie. Instead, it was a high-resolution shot of an empty hallway—the very hallway he was currently sitting in. The timestamp on the photo read: . Leo looked at his watch. It was 05:47 PM. The hallway was dim, the air still—except for
The code flashes across the dark screen of Leo’s laptop, a cryptic string of digits attached to a file named Download_Snapchat_553547857.jpg .