The hotel was not cool with me switching rooms - I asked at the front desk when we got back, hoping that it was late enough that they wouldn’t be expecting anyone without a reservation, so they might have an empty bed. They said that they were completely booked, though, so I headed back to my room. Thankfully, there were no ghosts right then, but since he showed up in the middle of the night the night before, I didn’t want to get my hopes up just yet.

I tried to head to bed immediately because by all rights, I should have been exhausted, but my mind kept racing, so I ended up sitting up in bed and turning the tv on. I tried to keep the volume as low as possible, but it wasn’t even ten minutes before I heard a light rapping on my door.

“Are there more ghosts tonight?” Liam asked, when I opened the door. I let him in, closely followed by Luke - I had expected them to go straight to bed as well, but they had been talking about starting to review the footage when they got back, so I wasn’t entirely surprised to see them together.

“No,” I answered, going to the kitchen area and starting a cup of tea. I held up the container of tea packets, and both of them shook their head. “Today has been disappointingly free of ghosts.”

“Not even Grady,” Luke agreed, sounding exhausted.

“Not even Grady,” I concurred.

“Do you have any idea why he wouldn’t have showed up for us tonight?” Liam asked. They both collapsed on the couch in my room, but while Luke looked like he was about to fall asleep, Liam somehow looked wide awake.

“No clue.” I sat down on the small chair on the side of the room, stirring my tea with the tea bag itself. “Some ghosts can be predictable, but that isn’t always the case. Maybe you’ve been there recently enough that Grady didn’t see you as a threat?”

“That wouldn’t make sense for you, though,” Luke countered.

I shrugged. “Maybe he just didn’t feel like coming out, then.”

Liam reached down to the bag he had brought with and pulled out a laptop. “Maybe not, but that’s unfortunately not going to look good to our viewers,” he said. “We have a new person come onto the channel, claiming to see ghosts, and then there are no ghosts the first time she’s there?”

I tilted my head, confused. “Wouldn’t that make more sense than me seeing a ghost every time, just because.”

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“Some of our viewers might agree with that,” Luke agreed. “But I could also see some being sus about it. Maybe we resplice the TikTok from earlier and add elements of that in, and then we can pad out some parts of her seeing Nancy’s husband with lore about them building the building. We’ll edit the Peters Building section down more than we would normally. It’l be like some of those ghost hunting YouTubers who only get to the haunted location an hour into the video, but I’d rather copy someone else’s video style for one video than show up with no evidence.”

I sipped my tea slowly, watching them work - Liam controlling the computer for the most part, with Luke jumping in to make suggestions here and there. After about an hour, Luke started visibly fading quick and excused himself back to his own room.

“Poor guy,” Liam said, a few seconds after the door closed behind Luke. “He used to have better energy to work on these in the moment, but he says he hasn’t been able to sleep well for a while, and you can really see it.”

I moved over to the couch so I could actually see what Liam was working on. It looked like he and Luke had already managed to kick out a rough draft for the first 30 minutes of a video. From what I’d seen, their videos usually were about an hour long. “I’m impressed that you managed to get that much of the video done already.”

“Thank you! But I’d argue that we got the easy part done, and now all we’ve got left is the hard stuff. A lot of this,” he said, gesturing to some of the earlier clips, “is stuff that has already been edited for other platforms, so we can pretty much just add it in. This,” he said, flipping to a different folder and circling hours of footage with his mouse, “is all stuff we will have to go through, just to see if we caught any ghostly activity. I know you said you didn’t see anything, but you weren’t with all the static cameras the whole night. Besides, the audience wants content - whether you see a ghost there or not, who’s to say what the cause is behind some of the bumps and creaks we heard?”

“I am,” I answered. “It was the building decaying around us.”

“Probably,” he admitted, “but it could also be a ghost! I remember seeing a clip with a ridiculously loud bang, hold on.”

He started clicking through a variety of clips and skipping through them trying to find the right image. I watched over his shoulder as images of the halls of the Peters Building skipped by, some moving along with our explorations and some staying still throughout the whole of the night.

“It’s this one, I think,” he said, as he clicked one last clip and skipped to about the midpoint of it. It was a clip from Luke’s solo investigation down in the basement. He’d proped the camera up on something (probably a shelf, judging by the fact that the height was not quite right) and was sitting in an office char that must have been left when the building was abandoned.

“It’s just me down here,” he said, wildly staring around into the darkness. “The others are all upstairs, so if you want to say something, now would be the time.”

“Regardless of whether there’s ghost activity or not, it’d be hard to say that this wouldn’t be a good clip for the video,” Liam whispered, but I shushed him, intent on watching Luke. It’s not that I didn’t disagree - in fact, I thought it would definitely be a good clip to add to the video - but it was that there was something about Luke that didn’t seem quite right. I couldn’t put my finger on it, though.

“If you want to say anything, we might not hear it now, but we’ll be able to hear it later when we watch the recording. If you would rather, you can say something just to me. You can play with this red light on the floor,” he said, nodding toward the REM Pod that he’d tried to explain to me earlier (it was just another piece of ghost equipment that definitely didn’t work - it was just a crappy red light that turns on at random). “You can touch me if you’d like.”

Nothing happened for a second, and then I saw a slight movement from up but Luke’s face. “Hold on,” I said, and Liam immediately pressed pause on the video. “Can you back up a few seconds?”

“I can go frame by frame if you want,” he said, clicking back frame by frame until I saw it. The edge of Luke’s eye, just at the very corner, distorted. It was just for a fraction of a second, and if I’d been watching from home, I most likely wouldn’t have seen it. But it was enough for me to see now.

“I think I know why Luke’s been so tired. He’s been possessed.”