legends · 5 min read ·
Dead Air
A sleeping stream of an empty house gathers thousands of viewers, and the house starts reading the chat.
**[STREAM ARCHIVE: "quiet house, no commentary, sleep study" — 47:12:08 — channel: @tallowhours]**
**VOD description:** Leaving the camera on the kitchen counter and going to bed. No talking. The house is empty four nights while the landlord paints the porch. Chat is slow-mode so nobody gets banned for saying hi.
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**00:00:00** The camera sits on a stack of cookbooks. The back door, the sink with one mug in it, a calendar on the fridge with a dentist appointment circled for Thursday. The light is a plain white ceiling fixture. It hums.
**00:04:31** The fridge cycles off. The silence after it is wrong in a small way: the house has been making a sound all night that the fridge was covering, and now the sound is audible. A tick, regular, from somewhere down the hallway. It keeps time with nothing.
**00:11:02** [chat: 412 viewers] lol the mug
**00:12:44** [chat] who is that in the hallway
**00:12:45** The hallway is a dark strip. The bathroom door is open on the left. On the right, a child's drawing is taped to the wall: a house with a window, the window colored in with yellow crayon pressed so hard the paper has torn. Nobody is in the hallway. The frame is still.
**00:12:50** [chat] its just the coat
There is no coat in the hallway.
**00:19:17** [chat: 1,038 viewers] pause and check the back door
I didn't pause. I was asleep, or I believed I was. What I know from the footage: the back door stays shut all night. The deadbolt stays where it is. The chain hangs straight. Nothing comes through.
But at 00:19:20 the frame shifts by one pixel row, as if the camera has been nudged, and afterward the cookbooks are a few centimeters closer to the edge of the counter.
**00:26:00** [chat] why is the sink running
The tap is running. The water is clear. It goes down the drain with a sound like someone letting out a slow breath through a straw. The sound is coming from the sink. It is also, faintly, coming from the hallway, a half-second late.
**00:31:40** [chat] ok this is actually creepy
**00:33:02** [chat] DO NOT GO INTO THE KITCHEN
Nobody goes into the kitchen. The camera shows the counter. A cup of water appears at the edge of the frame, set down with its handle turned toward the lens, neatly, the way a waiter presents a drink for a guest who hasn't arrived. Then another. Then another, each placed a little closer to the camera than the last.
There is no hand in the frame.
**00:41:15** [chat: 2,706 viewers] who is the wave for
A movement in the hallway. A small disturbance in the light, a hand lifting and dropping, three times. It stops at the bathroom door and stays there. The bathroom light is off. Whoever is standing there has been there a long time.
**00:47:12** [chat] he's waiting for someone
Chat keeps saying "he." I have never known who the he is.
**00:53:20** [chat] TIMESTAMP, what time is it in your house
The stream clock says 23:58. It has said 23:58 for twenty minutes. The viewer count keeps climbing, and each time someone posts their time zone, the chat shows a time a few minutes before midnight, from the hundreds of places people are watching from.
**00:58:00** [chat] he's in the bathroom now
The bathroom door hasn't moved. But the light under it has changed from white to the soft orange of a night lamp, and the orange is bending the shadows in the hallway toward the kitchen.
**01:02:44** [chat] can we see him
The bathroom mirror is at the far edge of the feed. In it, if you lean toward the screen and stop breathing for a second, there is a shape a little taller than the frame. It is not facing the mirror. It is facing the lens, the way a person stands when they've been told you're the one they should look at.
**01:03:10** [chat] oh no
**01:03:14** [chat] he can see the chat
I turned on the chat. The setting is on by default and I left it. Everyone who came tonight came to watch an empty house, and the house, it turns out, can read the room.
**01:03:40** [chat: 4,411 viewers] the stream dropped
The stream did not drop. Every viewer sees the same frame now: the counter, the sink, one mug, the calendar with the dentist circled, and the back door, open about the width of a person.
**01:04:00** [chat] is he coming through
Nobody comes through. The door only opens wider, one hinge at a time, the way old doors open when the wind has been leaning on them for years.
**01:04:30** Chat has gone silent. The slow-mode timer reads zero seconds. Nobody can post.
**01:05:00** The lens shakes once, as if someone has bumped the cookbook stack from behind.
**01:05:01** The stream clock reads 00:00.
**01:05:02** The stream clock reads 23:58.
**01:05:03** The stream clock reads 23:58.
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**[SYSTEM: This broadcast has ended. Archive saved.]**
**[SYSTEM: Replay available. The camera position in this replay differs from the live feed. The counter is empty. The back door is closed.]**
**[SYSTEM: Comments are disabled on this VOD.]**
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I'm writing at the end of the archive because the channel owner asked me to put something here before they delete it. My name is on the account. I don't remember setting it up.
I went to the address once after the stream, in daylight. The landlord had finished the porch. The kitchen counter had a stack of cookbooks on it, and one mug in the sink, and the calendar still had the dentist circled.
The back door was open the width of a person. Nobody was inside. The hallway had a child's drawing taped to the wall, and the house in the drawing had a window, and the window had been colored in again since I saw it on the stream, yellow, pressed so hard it tore.
I didn't go in. I put my hand on the frame of the back door and felt the wood was warm, the way a door is warm after someone has held it a long time on the other side.
I want to say I'm sorry to everyone who watched. I should have turned the chat off.
The stream clock is still running. It's the only thing in the house that isn't expecting anybody.