“I can’t believe Kieran made us come in today,” I clicked my tongue, carelessly brushing my hand over a stack of last week’s laptops, nearly sending the top one flying off the counter, “As if we have nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon.”

Petrov grunted with what I could only assume was agreement, keeping his eyes glued to a scantily clad woman crossing and uncrossing her legs on the desktop of the latest PlumBook. I pursed my lips. Weren’t PlumBooks supposed to be like… virus-proof? This looked like a multipartite virus too - with a flash mob of tasteless gifs dancing across the screen.

“Looks pretty bad,” I sighed, nodding in his direction, “That one alone will take ages to fix. We’ll be stuck here for HOURS.”

Petrov winced slightly before turning to look at me. A hint of rouge had traveled up his collar and his eyes were darting wildly across my face, the way they always did when our gazes met. I put on my most convincing smile. Petrov was a nice guy, truly. Shy, modest, and a little unorthodox, but kind nonetheless.

I’d gotten to know him quite a bit since I’d started working here last spring. We’d even gone out for drinks a few times - as friends - during which he let slip about his love for rock-balancing and noodling.

“My parents own a lakehouse down south,” he said right after he’d clarified that noodling wasn’t a culinary skill, “It’s nice there in the summer. Maybe…you and I could go sometime..? When we’re not working, that is.”

That had been my cue to turn red as I racked my brain for a good enough excuse. I wasn’t declining because we were coworkers. No. I generally wasn’t too bothered about corporate rules. It was just that… Well, Petrov really wasn’t… my type.

I ended up telling him that my entire summer was booked up. It was my best attempt at sparing his feelings, which were ruthlessly seeping into his cheeks and even the tips of his ears. I also worried I’d been giving him the wrong idea, so we never went out for drinks after that, coming up with excuse after excuse, until he’d finally stopped asking.

“Perhaps the other ones will be easier?” he uttered, clearing his throat twice, “Why don’t you check the box?”

I squinted at it, an overwhelming sense of disdain bubbling up in my chest. Lauren and Mildred were no doubt at the spa by now. Probably in the process of comparing two identical colors of nail varnish for their pedicures. Probably laughing about how I was stuck at work on the weekend. Probably-

“I doubt it,” I said, slipping off of the swivel chair and making my way towards the box in question, “Ugh, I’ll bet you ten bucks that at least three of these have keyboard stains.”

Petrov let out an awkward giggle, “You’re on.”

I thumbed through the laptops without particular interest. Some were dense with stickers from video games, others covered in what I could only assume was black sharpie. One of them had vents so crusty, they actually made noise when I managed to pry the lid open.

“Gross!” I tossed it back onto the pile, wiping my hands on my jeans, “And to think the people who bring these in look so normal! If I didn’t know any better I’d guess they were pulled straight out of the dumpster.”

I turned to Petrov, my tainted hands outstretched in front of me, but he wasn’t listening. In fact, he didn’t seem to be looking either. His gaze was transfixed on something over my shoulder.

“Hellooo?” I sang, waving my disgusting hands in the air in front of him, “Earth to Petrov?”

Without saying anything, he placed his hands over my shoulders and pushed me aside. I flinched at the unexpected touch, but he was so absorbed in whatever he was looking at, I don’t think he noticed.

“What’re you…” I began, bracing myself to face a masked figure on the other side of the counter. Reactions like this were unlike Petrov. He was always so calm and collected, I couldn’t help feeling a pang of fear in my stomach.

But there was no masked man. No grizzly bear, coyote, or… catfish? I mean, he said he was into noodling, right? Could catfish theoretically evoke this sort of reaction? Relieved there didn’t seem to be any immediate emergency, I snickered at my own joke.

“What are you laughing at?” Petrov whispered with his back still to me. He was hunched over the same pile of laptops I’d just contracted, “Do you know what this is?”

He lifted the crusty-vented laptop for me to see.

“Uh…a revolting vessel of dried fluids?” I cocked my head to the side as though I was appraising a painting, before adding, “...Three-thousand?”

He sniffed, brushing my joke away into oblivion, and tapped against the aluminum finish, “Look at the logo, Ginny.”

I squinted at it, trying my best to ignore the crispy bits sticking out of the back vents, “Es…Esse…?”

“Essence!” Petrov’s eyes were wide and gleaming. He looked like a child during Christmas, “It’s an Essence laptop!”

I snorted, “Well, that sounds about right, all things considered.”

But Petrov shook his head, “Do you know how old this is? Essence went bankrupt in ‘95!”

I pursed my lips, trying my best not to laugh, “I wonder why.”

Clearly unfazed by my sarcasm, Petrov flipped the lid open and started mashing the power button, “I haven’t seen one of these in fifteen years! I figured the last ones would be in a museum by now. I’m surprised it still works!”

I watched as the screen gradually came to life. Pixel by pixel it loaded up the cartoony desktop icons - a calculator app, a drab-looking media player, a notepad, and a folder named GPH.

“Hey, those are my initials!” I pointed at the folder, my acrylic nail making a rainbow indent on the screen, “Ginny P. Hopkins!”

He nodded, “Or it could also mean - gallons per hour, generalized proportional hazard, gestational proteinuric hypertension…”

“Just open it,” I scoffed. Petrov could be such a smartass sometimes, “Let’s see what it is!”

“Ginny… You know we can’t do that,” he protested, typing ‘control panel’ into the search bar, “Let me just figure out what the issue is. I’m not sure we even have the means to fix something like this. Do you know who brought it in?”

I shook my head, eyeing the rest of the laptops strewn across the counter, “I thought you knew. I wasn’t here for half of these.”

“Hm, must’ve been Kieran then. Hey, see if there’s a phone number or something in the…” he trailed off.

“What? What is it?” I crouched down beside him, trying to figure out what we were looking at, “Is it the folder?”

That last part was meant to be a joke, but Petrov’s expression remained grim.

“It might as well be,” he said to my surprise, “There’s nothing else on this laptop.”

I raised my eyebrow, “What do you mean there’s nothing on it? As in, no other files?”

He shook his head, “There’s nothing on it. No control panel. No applications. An empty drive.”

“But…what about all these?” I tapped the screen where the notepad, calculator, and media player were nestled, “I mean… they’re apps, aren’t they?”

Petrov didn’t respond, instead scooping up my hand in his and placing it on top of the mouse, “See for yourself.”

I swallowed, directing the cursor toward the calculator icon. Double-click. Nothing. I tried again, this time with the media player, clicking and dragging the cursor until the vein in my thumb bulged, “Maybe it’s just frozen…?” I suggested.

“In a way,” Petrov agreed, and then before I could find the ‘delete’ key, added, “It’s a wallpaper.”

I gawked at him, “A wallpaper?”

“Look,” he said, gently reclaiming the mouse, “I can’t move or click anything besides the folder.”

Once he said it, I could clearly see that the icons looked slightly washed out, but I’d thought it was just because of the twenty-five-year-old monitor.

For the first time in weeks, my curiosity was piqued. A laptop with nothing on it? How was that even possible?

“You wanna do the honors?” Petrov asked, giving me a little side smirk.

I snatched the mouse and double-clicked the rectangular icon. It flew open at once within a large white window that took up most of the screen. Inside, sat a single file with no preview thumbnail, named GPH.avi. Petrov and I exchanged glances.

“It’s a video,” I said, stupidly.

“It is,” he agreed, “Do you want to watch it?”

I hesitated. Mysterious videos on grubby laptops certainly weren’t my favorite. Hell, I never even clicked NSFW videos on social media, fearing the worst. If it was concealed behind an opaque cover, it probably wasn’t for me.

“What if it’s…” I gulped, “...something horrifying..?”

“Like what?” said Petrov, refusing to cooperate, “Think about it, Ginny. Why would anyone put anything illegal on a laptop that needed fixing? It’s probably just a video of someone’s family, or wedding, or - ooh, maybe it’s one of those old pirated movies…”

“Okay, okay,” I conceded, not wanting to back out of what was technically my own idea, “Just play it.”

“Well, er, technically I can’t,” Petrov admitted with dismay, “There’s no media player, remember? I need to transfer it onto one of our computers.”

I nodded, watching him fish out a USB stick from one of the drawers. Now this really seemed like a bad idea. A cold chill crawled up my bare arms and I realized the sky outside was growing dark. It was almost 5 PM. Only ten minutes to go until the end of our shift. Maybe I could still catch up to Lauren and Mildred at the spa?

“Here it is,” Petrov’s voice interrupted my thoughts, “Ready to play?”

I chewed my inner lip. I knew Petrov was only doing this because I’d expressed a desire to open the folder, and I couldn’t let my principles go now. Besides, what if it was something life-changing, like the location of a treasure, or the answers to a cold murder case?

“I’m ready,” I mumbled, less confidently than intended.

For the first few seconds of the video, the screen was black.

“Maybe it’s the forma-?” I began, but was immediately cut off by a faint sound of static. A black and white image came into view. Well, it seemed like an image at first, before I realized it was the feed from the overhead security camera pointed at the counter.

“It’s security footage f-from…” I choked up, “From this store?”

I felt Petrov tensing up beside me. What the hell was going on?

I could tell the video was playing by the horizontal lines dancing across the screen, but there were no people in the shot. The store was completely empty. I squinted at the timestamp at the bottom right of the screen.

12 / 03 / 2022 Sat 01 : 46 : 14

Petrov must have had the same idea because before I could even open my mouth he whispered, “It’s from…yesterday?”

Last night, to be precise. The footage was shrouded in darkness and the digital clock at the bottom indicated that no one had set foot into the store for at least seven hours.

“What…” my mouth was dry, “Why would… How can last night’s footage be on that laptop…”

It was supposed to be a question, but Petrov didn’t answer. He was leaning forward now, inspecting some invisible speck on the screen.

“What? What is it?” I demanded, leaning in closer to see.

He pointed to the wall adjacent to the counter, “Look at that.”

I inched closer, “What? I don’t see it.”

“The vent cover,” he paused the video to zoom in, “It’s on the floor, see?”

I saw. The large, rectangular wall vent that was always such a nuisance when it came to decorating for Christmas was now wide open, with its cover lying idly on the floor beside it.

“Maybe Kieran…” I began, but stopped short.

A woman with a short bob and glasses was navigating through the shelves. She moved slowly and awkwardly, her palms outstretched in front of her, as though she was sleepwalking.

I heard Petrov draw in a whistling breath next to me and my stomach lurched.

“Is that… you?” he whispered, his voice laced with something…I couldn’t tell what.

Sweat was pooling under my arms and a lump rising in my throat, “No, it’s…” I croaked, “It couldn’t be…”

We watched in stunned silence as the woman made her way to the counter and disappeared into the vent, pulling the grate cover back into place behind her, and then the screen went black.

“I… I don’t understand,” I wailed, turning to face Petrov, “That wasn’t me…”

Petrov looked introspective for a moment, “But the camera…”

“I don’t care about the camera! Last night at 1 AM I was sleeping in my own bed, ten miles away! And -” I added for good measure, “I don’t sleepwalk!”

Silence descended upon us again, and I found myself growing restless and uncomfortable. It was exactly 5 PM now, time to go home. The sky outside was blue-black and a low rumbling in the distance was foreshadowing rain. But Petrov didn’t move.

“Well, if it wasn’t you…” he said slowly, as if considering every word, “Then…we must have had an intruder in the store…”

“Or maybe,” I suggested, “Kieran hired someone to-”

“To what? Sleepwalk in her pajamas around the vents at midnight?” the corners of his mouth twitched, but his expression remained shrouded, “You ever wonder what’s down there?”

“Where?”

“In the vents. Plenty of space for a person, maybe even two - must lead somewhere, right?”

“I didn’t even know you could go in there! What the hell, Petrov, you’re freaking me out. Let’s just go home?”

He contemplated it for a moment, “Maybe just a quick little peek?”

I stared at him, “You wanna go into the vents? Right now?”

“Why not? Shift’s over, store’s closed, might as well do some exploring!”

I bit my lip, “I’m sorry, Petrov, I promised my friends I’d meet them for dinner, but maybe next time, okay?”

I slid off my chair and headed for the locker room when a metallic rattling stopped me in my tracks. I spun on my heel to find Petrov kneeling in front of the vent cover, meticulously dislodging its corners with his hands. He set it down on the floor with a faint clatter.

“What are you doing?”

He turned to look at me, a playful smirk on his face, “Well, if you won’t join me, I guess I’ll have to go alone.”

And with that, he disappeared into the vent.

​

Part 2