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Nate continued to monitor the door video for the next few days.

It did fine, for his channel. A bump in views, a busy comment section with people arguing whether or not it was the wind. Nate checked the video’s performance twice a day, reported the numbers to Leo, and went back to the wiring. That was Tuesday, Wednesday.

On Thursday, somebody posted a compilation.

Nate found it because his notifications had stopped making sense. Strangers were linking something back and forth in his comments, and when he finally clicked through, he was looking at his own footage.

Except it had been stitched together and uploaded by someone else, an account Nate didn’t recognize. It had no other uploads, no description, and an avatar of a bow tie with little duckies on it. Nate had the vague notion that he’d seen it before. Maybe in his comment section.

Was this one of his subscribers?

He looked at the title of the video. “Every unexplained moment on natefllips’ channel, in order.”

The door was the finale. Before it came things Nate had forgotten he’d filmed. The crash upstairs during the kitchen walkthrough, the one @punkfish had caught before. A paint can wobbling at the edge of frame. Three seconds of knocking from the day he’d measured the basement, which he’d assumed hadn’t made it onto audio.

A few other things that must have slipped Nate’s final checks.

Mostly from the dining room demo. A door at the edge of frame drifting shut. A thud from the ceiling. Another. The light fixture swaying, just barely, while onscreen Nate went on prying at plaster like nothing was happening.

Now Nate was watching with his coffee going cold.

He remembered filming that. He remembered exactly when that was.

Those were the three days Leo had spent in the turret, screaming. Nate had worked through them because there was nothing else to do. He couldn’t help Leo, couldn’t reach him, so he’d torn out a wall to drown out the noise of the house.

And now it was content.

“What is that?” Leo asked, appearing behind his shoulder.

Nate’s hand moved to close the laptop. He stopped himself. They were in this together.

“Somebody went through all my videos,” he said. “And they collected the strange moments.”

Leo leaned in. Onscreen, the dining room door drifted shut, and the ceiling thudded, and Nate-in-the-video kept prying at the plaster.

“I don’t remember doing that,” Leo said.

“You wouldn’t. You were up in the turret, and I think you were out of it.”

“I was not.”

Nate licked his lips. “I went up there to check on you, and I couldn’t get your attention at all.”

“Oh.” Leo looked like he didn’t know what else to say. Nate sympathized. It couldn’t be nice, having your worst moments captured on camera like this.

But Leo wouldn’t be Leo if he hadn’t found a way to brush it all off like none of this mattered to him. “It’s good, isn’t it?” he asked. “People will love this.

“I suppose so.”

But that didn’t mean Nate had to feel good about it.

Regardless of Nate’s feelings, the compilation kept collecting views. And it boosted Nate’s channel too. By Friday, his subscriber count gained a comma. The new people arrived by the hundreds, and they all arrived with ideas about what was causing the supposed haunting.

His comment section consisted almost entirely of arguments about fishing lines, magnets, servos and phone apps. The crowd was split between those who thought Nate was a fraud and those who wanted to believe.

And all of them were calling for Nate to make a statement, to take a stance.

Nate did not.