Writing Wednesday #5 ~ Clip

“You’re not scared of a few YouTube clips, are you?” He slid onto the couch, laptop in one hand, the other resting on top of her shoulders.

“Only you would find it funny to look up jump scare videos.” Although she didn’t mind jump scare videos herself, there was only so many times you could watch someone play Five Nights at Freddy’s before you started contemplating working there.

“There’s a rumour going round that these phantom clips are appearing. There’ve only been a few reports of it, but apparently they’re just a minute long, and when they’re done the video you actually clicked just starts playing.”

“I think they’re called adverts,” she quipped with a smirk.

“No, no, no. They’re different, they appear with no warning, then they’re gone. No title, no channel; people try and search them and they don’t exist. People who find them, they test their computers for bugs, search their files for phantom downloads. I want to find it!”

The maddened glee in his eyes was slightly perturbing, in all honesty. He was never particularly enthused by anything, but this, it brought an excitement into his voice, a gleam in his eyes, and she couldn’t deny him that.

He set the first YouTube video playing, sat enthralled, quickly switching to another video as soon as this phantom video did not appear. His eagerness dwindled with each passing video.

Two hours of browsing had left the two weary, her head drooping against his shoulder as the skies darkened outside. Finally, 150 minutes after that first video was set away, he shook her awake, pointing manically at the screen.

“There it is!” The black screen, dark as the room around them, was slowly filled with words, stark white, blinding them momentarily.

You shouldn’t be sat in the dark

He sucked in a breath, she looked blearily at the screen, eyes barely adjusting to read the words before they changed.

You never know what could be lurking

His eyes darted around, hands searching for his phone to add some light to the room, but he was caught by a changing of words once again.

I hope you don’t mind

A knock sounded against the door.

You looked like you needed some company

The word company graduated into red, painfully accompanied by the screeching sound of fingers on a blackboard. The phantom video ended with a picture of a sightless woman, eyes nothing but pitch voids that nonetheless seemed to be staring straight into his. With a click, the lights in the room awakened as the video switched to another gameplay of Outlast: Whistleblower.

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I know it's not exactly the season for this sort of thing, but it was the first thing that came to mind when 'video clip' was suggested for this week's prompt!