Josh slumped down onto the chair inside his apartment’s makeshift recording studio. The silence hugged him like a blanket. This was his safe haven.
The silent room was both calming and overwhelming at the same time, and he liked it that way. The noise-reducing foam pads he used to line the walls created a vacuum that he dove into every night.
For hours, Josh and his friends live streamed video games for an audience of thousands. Their dedicated followers had made them a lot of money over the years and their stable of streamers grew all of the time.
And now they had 24-7 coverage with every three hours dedicated to either teams or solo acts, like the one he had, during the late hours of the night. This was the Graveyard Shift, and it was a pretty good name to boot.
Josh opened his eyes and winced at the light of his laptop’s iridescent screen. He dimmed the brightness and grabbed up his headphones. Will was doing a stream with Chad, and they were killing it.
“I can’t believe you just did that!” Will exclaimed. “Holy shit, what the hell did you just do?” He slapped his desk and laughed hysterically.
Chad groaned. “Shut up, Will.”
They were perfect together. The straight man and his foil. It was the perfect balance when used in moderation. Josh was up in about ten minutes. He leaned back.
It had been over six years since the channel began. He had been one of the founding members who brought his social media followers over in a leap of faith.
The last group he was part of had been pretty good, but here he reached new levels.
Sure, things had been rough for a while as advertisers were slow to hop on board and video game developers didn’t exactly like the acerbic way he dealt with their games, but his fans liked Josh and Josh liked to deliver.
There were always imitators out there who tried to copy his style, so many of them, but now they couldn’t keep up. He was the original and that gave him a certain amount of fame in the community.
A chilly breeze wafted into the studio from the cracks in the floor. Josh put up his feet on his chair and hugged his knees.
Will and Chad were finishing up their stream and saying their goodbyes to the listeners. Jodie, the program manager, was on Skype and had sent Josh a quick note telling him he was good to go any time.
Josh sat up and wrote, “Ok”.
He signed onto the stream and put out a greeting online.
Several people were already there talking about what had happened last time, what could happen in this time and potential ways they could help out. They had even started a wiki for all of the times they had helped him out a jam.
Josh did his best to keep up with everyone typing away until his wrists hurt.
Sometimes it felt like they ran the show, but deep down they all knew that Josh was the real reason they were there.
He flicked on his mic and saddled up for a long stream.
***
Every night the chat tittered away alongside the video.
Users from around the world sent in their insight and were sometimes rewarded with some recognition for a clever joke or for pointing out a screw up.
Once upon a time, Josh had been one of these chatter bots, but on other channels of course. It took a lot of concentration to pay attention to the game and to his listeners, but overtime he had found a good balance.
There were usually newbies in the chat early on and tonight one of them was quickly getting on the nerves of everyone else.
“What are you doing? Josh, seriously, you couldn’t fight your way out of a wet paper bag,” one user wrote.
Josh ignored the chat letting the other users beat haters down until they either signed off or had their personal details leaked.
After another ten minutes of harassment, Josh decided it was time to call the guy a little to keep things civil on the stream.
“Hey bud, why don’t we take things down a notch, eh?” Josh said over his microphone. “We like giving people on the chat the chance to speak their minds, but you’re just being a little b-itch right now.”
“Here! Here!” one of the other chatters wrote. “Kick him out! Kick him out!” another chimed in. Some said things that didn’t bear repeating, but the user got the message and didn’t comment again.
Sometimes the people in the chat were pretty hilarious using memes with pinpoint accuracy to best sum up how much he had just screwed up during the stream. Other times they were the worst people imaginable as was the case with this guy.
Another batch of new users hopped on as the second hour of the live stream got underway.
One of them was causing trouble, again, but it looked like his friends could handle it.
“Bag.” the user wrote. “Bag. Bag. Bag. Bag. Bag.” Over and over the user wrote the same thing into the chat until everyone was calling for Josh to boot him.
“Got any-thing good to say, bud?” he asked over the microphone. “Well if you don’t, why don’t you get off the chat, eh?”
“Bag.” the user wrote. “Bag. Bag. Bag. Bag. Bag. Bag. Bag.”
“What’s he saying?” one of the other people in the chat wrote.
Message after message appeared on the stream all asking what the user was saying to Josh. He blinked a few times looking at the screen.
“What do you mean?” Josh said over the mic. “Dude’s being a super creeper.”
“We can’t see what he’s saying,” another person wrote in.
Josh squinted his eyes and looked at the user in suspicion.
“Josh.”
It was clear as day what the user was writing.
“I see you.”
The last one caught him by surprise.
Josh looked around the recording booth only to see the walls around him. His laptop didn’t have a webcam built-in, so there was no way the user could be seeing him right now.
Invisible fingers played on his spine.
He took a closer look at the message, not that it would have done much good.
“Josh?” a user wrote in. “Where did you go?”
As Josh got closer to his screen, his speakers erupted in noise. He fell off his chair knocking the mic off of its stand. The sound filled the recording booth.
“We’ll be right back after this short commercial break,” Josh yelled putting the live stream on pause.
He checked the user’s ID and the email they used to sign up for the account on the site as the computer continued to scream.
He slammed a hand onto the laptop and held the “fn” and “f11” until the sound died away.
Josh sat panting in his chair. The red headphones he used during the streams were still plugged in. There was no way sound should have been coming out the speakers. The chat on the stream had erupted asking of Josh was all right and what the sound was on the other end.
Raising the volume little by little on his laptop, it seemed like the sound had stopped.
Whoever this user was he had someone hacked his way into the stream and used a mic to broadcast a message over the show. The user was back on the chat.
The text made Josh sweat.
“Woods.” it read. “Bag.”
The other people on the chat didn’t know what to make of what had just happened.
“I think we’re going to call it for now,” Josh said over the microphone. “Sorry guys it looks like we have some technical issues, but tune in later tonight at 11 pee-emm for more. Joshy-boiii signing out.”
Josh closed the lid of his laptop, left the studio, and put on his shoes.
***
October had been unseasonably cold this year, Josh thought as he huddled inside his thick leather jacket.
He snuck out of his apartment into to a small alleyway around the side that lead to a series of garages.
Inside the furthest one was a shovel. He grabbed it up and made his way down the street trying to keep it hidden. The user’s text kept flashing in his eyes as he walked.
Down into a small ravine, ducking under some branches, and finally reaching a clearing, Josh stabbed his shovel into the cold, hard ground.
This was the spot.
After ten minutes of digging, Josh picked himself up off the ground and sat clutching something. The plastic had started to decay. He flicked away a few flecks of the white material and tossed the back into the hole.
A few moments later, he had dumped all of the upturned soil back from where it came.
His heart was beating in his throat from the effort and the cold.
Back on the street, Josh ditched the shovel in a bush.
Three blocks to go. Two blocks to go. One block to go. Up the stairs, through the front door, up three flights; key out, key in, key turned, inside, lock door.
Josh panted as he took off his coat. Paranoia had almost won this time. It was 11 p.m., the second part of his live stream was supposed to be starting any time soon. Jodie was probably freaking out that he hadn’t contacted her over Skype.
He checked the website on his phone.
“This is Joshy-Boiii coming to you live from the Graveyard Shift tooo-night with part twelve of our play through of‒” a voice said.
Josh’s hands went slack and the phone dropped from his grip.
A great, black void had opened in his stomach. The lights in the makeshift apartment studio were on. Someone was broadcasting.
“And it looks like we have a special guest with us tonight too,” the voice said eerily.
Josh grabbed a knife from the kitchen and gripped it tight.
“Let’s see if he’s interesting in t-aking part,” the voice said cheerily.
Josh crept over to the studio door. It was sturdy and wooden, but the thin walls of the studio were covered with a light plastic tarp. Josh carefully cut a hole in the plastic and then a hole in the foam.
His hands were sweaty.
As he bent down to peek through the hole, a wave of nausea hit him. It made his eyes water as he tried to stop himself from heaving.
“Let’s take a com-mercial break,” the voice on the other side of the wall said. “Stick around.”
Josh could hear something stepping toward the door, but it stopped.
Through the hole, Josh could see someone moving around in there, but he couldn’t see their face. Whoever it was stood unmoving and facing the door nose about an inch away from it.
Josh stood and stumbled his way to the door knife held in front of him.
“Who the hell are you? What are you doing in here?” Josh wailed flying into hysterics. “What‒”
Josh vomited on the floor. He grabbed his stomach that was blossoming with pain dropping the knife onto the floor. As he knelt to grab for the knife, the door spoke .
“You.” it said.
The voice, though it was muffled, was unmistakable.
“The.” it said.
Josh’s knees buckled and he writhed in pain on the floor. The doorknob began to turn.
“Other.” it said.
Josh stumbled back toward the apartment’s door and tried to wrench it open. Something was blocking it from the other side. He slammed his shoulder into it, but he couldn’t.
“You.” it said.
Josh dry heaved on the floor, the smell of the blood on his hands had started to rise from the floor. Bits of plastic were falling off of the recording booth’s frame and onto the hardwood floor.
He screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed, but no sound escaped his gaping maw.
Silence leaked from the recording booth into the apartment.
Josh watched as the door handle turned and the door opened.
***
The next night, the chat was filled with people talking about what had just happened.
It was getting close to October, so they figured it must have been the lead up to some really special Halloween prank.
Josh smiled as he watched the flurry of spectators hypothesize whipping themselves up into a frenzy. He loved every second of it.
He signed onto the chat and put in his two cents asserting his own retelling of the events.
He sent Jodie an “ok” and started up the live stream.
It was going to be a long night, but a new set of users were already moving into the chat.
one user said.