Page 52 of White Noise

Eventually, the technician continues.

“The camera recordings from that window are corrupted.”

My stomach tightens. “All of them?”

“All of them.”

“Can you recover anything?”

Another pause, followed by a few quiet clicks on his end.

“No. The files are still technically there, but whatever happened during those eleven minutes overwrote the footage itself. There’s nothing usable left to restore.”

I stare at the dead television across from me.

“What do they show?”

“Static.”

My grip tightens around the energy drink.

“Just static?”

“From every camera.”

For a second, the kitchen feels too quiet.

The black television reflects the island, the stools, the pale morning light coming through the balcony doors.

And me.

Nothing else.

Still, my pulse starts climbing.

Because there’s no footage of Silas.

No distorted figure in the hallway. No proof he stood in my kitchen or a single image of him touching me or controlling the locks while I tried to get out.

Just eleven minutes of white noise that nobody can recover.

Fucking static.

Apparently that’s all he left behind.

The technician keeps talking, something about corrupted logs, a hardware inspection and sending someone out to check the system in person, but I stop listening somewhere around the third explanation that amounts to the same thing.

They have nothing.

Which means I have nothing either.

What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?

Tell someone a man crawled out of an old television, chased me through my house and disappeared back into static before the cameras conveniently erased every second of it?

Yeah. That should go over well.

“Ma’am?”