Chapter 286: The Possessed TV
We had barely stepped back inside when the television that I didn’t even know was still on started to scream at whoever would listen.
And I wasn’t joking about the whole screaming thing. The blast of static was loud enough to cause me to break out into goosebumps as I turned to face the possessed TV.
Seriously, I was expecting Samara Morgan to come crawling out of it and into my living room.
Then again, one look at the mess around us, and I was pretty sure that she would be crawling right back inside.
The next time the TV decided to scream at us again, everything stopped all at once. The drill near the front entrance died, the hammering overhead cut off in the middle of a strike, and even the people arguing in the kitchen had finally shut up.
And for one beautiful second, there was nothing but peaceful silence inside my house.
Then the static came again. Cause third time and all that.
The TV sitting in the middle of the living room blinked out of the white snow and a long, broken wave rolled over us before part of a human voice managed to push through it.
"—come to the—"
The rest of the sentence disappeared beneath another burst of static.
I looked at Yuche and raised an eyebrow. "Did we join a horror set that I didn’t know about?" I asked, because yeah, everything was top shelf creepy right now. He still had my hand in his, our fingers tangled together from when we were standing outside, but his attention had already shifted toward the sound.
"What did that say?" Fang Lihua demanded from somewhere behind us. "We’re supposed to go where?!?"
"No idea," Luo Qing replied as she shrugged. "Frankly, I don’t really care."
The television crackled again, but this time, there was something else beneath the static.
Gunfire. A whole gun fight in the space of seconds.
Qin Fen straightened from where she had been hiding behind the television like some fucked up jack-in-the-Box. Her hair was doing its best to escape from whatever she had used to tie it back and a black streak of electrical soot across one cheek. But it was the panicked look on her face that was making me want to laugh.
"I didn’t turn it on," she announced her hands up by her head like that was the only way to prove her innocence.
"Then that sounds like something you should probably fix," I pointed out, since the TV was very clearly on and doing its best to become haunted.
Her eyes narrowed like I had said something stupid. "It turned itself on," she hissed at me like it was my fault that the TV was possessed.
Frankly, it was defemination. I didn’t go out to actively buy a haunted TV. It just happened... apparently.
Xu Zhenlan crossed the front hall toward the living room without waiting to see whether anyone else intended to follow him. Zhou Chenghai moved directly behind him even as the workers began drifting away from whatever they had been doing and gathering around the wide doorway.
No one wanted to admit they were curious, but they didn’t even have to open their mouths for the truth to come out.
I could only hope that curiosity didn’t kill the construction worker.
Yuche glanced down at me and raised a brow silently. Rolling my eyes, I couldn’t help but let out a long sigh. "Fine," I grumbled. "Let’s go watch."
But I would like to put it into writing right now that if this resulted in any ghosts, spirits, or long dead witches coming out to kill me, I was going to haunt Yuche for the rest of his natural born life.
It was not like I was interested. I was simply making sure the mysterious screaming television did not somehow set my living room on fire.
And considering everything that was going on, it was a perfectly reasonable concern.
By the time we entered the living room, most of the workers had already crowded around the extremely large sectional or gathered near the doorway. The television mounted on the wall was filled with grey and black lines, and the picture jumped every few seconds, flashing pieces of a room before dissolving again.
A desk appeared first, followed by a broken window, someone’s shoulder, and a wall covered in smoke. Each image vanished before I could make sense of it, but if you asked my opinion, the whole thing screamed ’conjuring’ and ’curse’.
Fuck my life.
Qin Fen crouched beside the television stand with several wires spread across the floor and the electrical panel beneath the screen hanging open. She checked one connection and then another, but nothing she touched changed what was happening on the television.
"What channel is it?" Xu Zhenlan asked. "Most of them would have been long gone by now. Maybe try another one?"
I blinked at him. Was he really trying to mansplain Qin Fen’s job to her? Surely he wasn’t that stupid....
"It isn’t a channel," hissed Qin Fen, her eyes shooting flames out of them as she looked at the man.
"Then where is the signal coming from?" demanded Zhou Chenghai like the other woman would have a crystal ball to pull the answers from.
I was pretty sure that she just already answered the question.
"If I knew that, I wouldn’t still be staring at it." Her voice was so soft I was worried that I would have to clean a mess of blood out of my sectional that I didn’t cause.
The speakers popped loudly enough to make several people flinch, but whatever it was, it seemed to have done the trick.
A man appeared on the screen, his eyes so wide that it would have been impossible for him to make anything out through the fear in them.
Well... that wasn’t good.
Only half his face was visible at first because the camera had been knocked sideways, leaving the room behind him tilted at an angle that made the ceiling look like a wall.
He wore a military uniform, or at least what remained of one. Blood covered the front of his jacket, and one side of his face was black with soot. But those freakishly white eyes with absolutely no color to them would probably haunt me if Samara Morgan didn’t kill me in the next five days.
Whoever he was, whatever he was, the man grabbed the camera with both hands and dragged it upright, briefly clearing the image.
"If you can hear this, get out while you still can!"
