We aren’t permitted to talk about the episode that ended the show, something about legal reasons and the ongoing lawsuit. The lawyers said they would not be surprised if the lawsuit dragged on for years, just from the sheer insanity of the situation and how unbelievable it all was.

I had to agree, especially since my role in the whole thing is under the most intense scrutiny.

I was supposed to be monitoring the footage. I was the chief CCTV operator of the show, Remodeled: Locked In Edition. It was a popular show where homeowners, under the supervision of the show’s resident expert, Nick Sykes, tackle a major home renovation while being unable to leave for a week.

The show had been going on for about ten seasons by the point the incident happened. Everything had been boring - almost formulaic - for each of the twenty episodes of each season. The homeowner runs into something unexpected, they had to make do with what they had, and they ended up loving the result after putting good old-fashioned elbow grease in. So, when this episode started filming, I could not say I expected anything but the normal to happen. And so, instead of sitting in front of the screens for ten hours a day watching the same endless loop of the same story on repeat with different actors, I started the filming, briefly checked on it once an evening to make sure it was set to keep going, and hit the waves and beach for the entire week.

I’m sure you could imagine my horror when I came back at the end of the week to find that the residents and Nick were all dead. And you could imagine how pissed my employers were. Thorne & Loam was not a company to screw over. Their reach was far and wide: in real estate, film, construction, everywhere. But that paled in comparison to the fact that three people were dead because of me.

The first time I watched the film, I ended up in therapy. I’m still in therapy, and probably always will be because of how many times I’ve had to sit through it in all the legal proceedings.

Nick and the homeowners, Anna and Mark, were set to remove a wall and install a row of built-in bookcases as their project for the week. Simple enough.

“Are you ready to break ground on this project?” Nick said to the smiling homeowners with his signature smile.

They nodded enthusiastically and Mark took the first swing with the sledgehammer.

“I’ve never smelled dust so sweet before,” Nick mentioned. “It smells like honey. Do you smell it, too?” he asked Anna as Mark continued to take swings at the wall.

Anna shook her head no.

Mark continued swinging, but dropped the sledgehammer and let out a string of curses. Anna kneeled down, her hands covering her face. Nick held his neck and paced back and forth…and then they all started laughing.

They had discovered a badly decomposed body in the wall, and the three of them started rolling over the floor, laughing and pointing at the body. Then Anna and Mark started making out while Nick kept laughing and petting the wall next to the body. He muttered about how warm it was, and how he wanted to crawl into it to wrap itself in its cocoon.

The day concluded in much of the same manner, but night is where it started getting weirder. They all fell asleep in a pile on the floor, but at the same exact time, they woke up screaming. They started shouting, brushing off their faces like they were trying to brush off a collective spider web from their faces. And as quickly as it started, they all fell back to the ground and seemed to fall asleep.

The body presided over the whole thing, half nestled in the wall. It looked so strange, too. Before my job as a camera operator, I had worked as a medic in the fire department, and I had seen a fair amount of dead people. I ended up taking this job after a run of terrible calls, when I realized I could no longer take the mental strain. But, this was the strangest corpse I had ever seen. Its jaw was slack and the sockets were hollow, but its teeth were white and perfect on camera. I figured they might have been dentures, but it did not explain how it sometimes looked like it breathed.

The next day went on in the same strange manner, with laughing and kissing and the rest of the wall getting removed, all around the corpse. Nick began constructing the bookshelves, and even measured the corpse for shelving. But, at 2:03 pm, they all stopped what they were doing and started knocking on the living room wall at the same time, with the same rhythm for a full minute. At 2:04 pm, they went back to work on the shelves like nothing was different, saving for a few mutterings about how “it was finally getting ready” and “we’re doing important work, making room for it in the world.”

I won’t lie—the bookshelves looked good. Professional, even. That is, until the one that housed the corpse fell over and crushed Mark.

There were no tears from Anna. Instead she knelt by the crushed body and smiled and looked at the camera. She picked up the shelf, an impressive feat for being a tiny person, and fastened it in place.

“Are you ok, Mother?” Nick asked her. He tapped the wall at a perfect tempo.

She nodded, the same smile plastered on her face. She grabbed a paint brush and used Mark’s blood to start painting the other bookshelf, talking to the corpse about how red is the perfect color for an accent to make the bookshelves really pop, especially against the new black color of the living room. She would sometimes pause her painting to tap the floor.

The living room was still the same color on film.

The rest of the day of footage passed in much of the manner. Anna took her time painting, and cut into Mark’s chest cavity with the end of the paintbrush to get more blood for her project. As she covered the bookshelves in a thin red layer of blood, I could swear that in some of the frames, it looked like a face was painted there, only to disappear the next moment…

That night, Anna fell asleep next to Nick, her head in the dried blood-puddle next to him. She and Nick woke up at 2:03 am and started talking to each other in a language I had never heard before. They stopped exactly a minute later and fell back asleep, only to wake up at 8:00 am on the dot, as they had every other morning. But, today was different. They began arguing about where the bathroom was. They wandered throughout the house screaming at each other, unable to find it. Ultimately, Anna found it in the basement. Later that afternoon, after the 2:03 pm knocking session, they argued again about it. Nick found it next to the kitchen. The footage was not able to confirm that the bathroom had relocated, but the perspective of the cameras had shifted at some point. It was like the room had somehow gotten bigger and was not able to cover as much space as they had before.

From my time as a medic, I still had connections. One of the forensic analysts who investigated the scene, and who I happened to be beer buddies with, let it slip that he went through the house and found that the mold pulsed ever so slightly on the camera, and it matched the tempo they tapped and knocked. “Weird, but not sure what to make of it,” he said. He also mentioned that the language they were talking in was not one known to mankind. “This case just gets weirder the more we dig. Even if it is mold, there is not a known type that could cause collective hallucinations, and definitely not that rapidly.”

I shook my head. “I’m not sure, man.” I chugged another beer.

“There’s one more thing,” he said, leaning towards me. “Right before they fall back asleep, there is always a buzz of static, exactly at 2:04 am. We paused it right as the static hit. You’ll never guess what was in the static after we brightened it up and added some contrast.”

“I’m almost afraid to ask,” I said.

“Blueprints of the house. But, with a room that does not exist.”

The next night of footage was the point that I think truly broke me. At 2:03 am in the morning on the last night, they finished their knocking. But, instead of going back to sleep at 2:04 am, Nick walked over to the camera and smiled the same empty, terrible smile Anna had when she saw Mark’s body. “It’s almost time. It’s almost ready,” he whispered to the camera. He laid back down to sleep. But in the corner, in the reflection of the mirror that was at the end of the hallway, was my reflection next to the reflection of the corpse. It wasn’t even possible. The corpse was facing the opposite direction, not to mention the fact I wasn’t even there and never went in the house.

This frame was another reason I was embroiled in this horrible legal battle. Because I have proved over and over again that I wasn’t there, through text messages, cell phone pings, photos on social media. And yet, there was no logical explanation for my reflection being there.

As for Anna and Nick, Anna never woke up after the last tap that night.

And Nick, well, he just disintegrated. He laid down and in one frame, he was there, lying next to Anna. In the next, he was a pile of dust.

There was no camera glitch, no sign of movement or struggle. Just…gone.

No one’s explained that part. But I’ve watched it too many times to be able to question it anymore.

I’ve told the lawyers what feels like hundreds of times, I was not there. But, they don’t believe me. It’s hard to convince an ever-revolving supply of lawyers of this, at every turn it seems like someone has been taken off the case and a new one assigned. I have evidence to back it up, but the footage shows otherwise.

And sometimes, I’m not sure myself. Somedays, I wake up with a memory that maybe I did go in that house at some point. After all, the cameras had to get set up somehow. Nick sometimes would do it for me, but most of the time it was me. I don’t remember who set them up for this project.

If I did go in there, it would explain why I keep finding dust that smells honey-sweet in my house. And, why I wake up at 2:03 am every morning since then, tapping on the wall above my head. Or, even more chilling, if I didn’t go in there, can it somehow spread from watching the film?

The bathroom is not where it’s supposed to be anymore.

Maybe it’s starting to build something here, too.

Or, maybe it is already finished.

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