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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/TheAtticStairs on 2026-06-04 22:10:17+00:00.

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I. Reese

When I was in seventh grade, I knew a kid named Reese who showed me something in his basement that I have not been able to explain to this day.

Reese was—to put it nicely—a little odd. It was probably due to his home life. His dad was gone and his mom was (looking back) definitely an alcoholic. I remember that she used to sit in bed all day, in their little ranch house on the edge of town, watching TV and drinking from a glass filled to the brim with ice cubes and vodka, eating barely anything. The house itself smelled terrible all the time.

I know all this because I was Reese’s only friend.

To be clear: I wasn’t the most popular kid myself, so it’s not like I had a ton of options where friends were concerned. But I was social enough and (if you don’t mind me saying) attractive enough that girls weren’t totally disgusted by me, and most of the guys at school either tolerated me or left me alone. I was, more or less, content with that.

Reese, on the other hand, was an island. He could barely speak due to a terrible stutter. He was lanky and awkward. And (I feel guilty saying it, but here it is) he smelled bad—just like his house. He was bullied constantly.

The thing is, Reese and I shared a common interest. Ever since I was young, I’ve been obsessed with video cameras. My dad was a TV weatherman for KMBC Kansas City, which probably had something to do with it. His life revolved around a camera, and my fascination with them goes back as far as I can remember. Reese loved them too. Bear in mind, this was the early 2000s, so we’re not talking 4K iPhones here. We’re talking handheld camcorders that recorded in 720x480, if that. Reese had one—a little Sony model, if I remember, that recorded to miniDV—that he would bring to school. He would sneak it out of his backpack and film people at recess, at lunch, even during class. One morning, waiting in the cafeteria for school to start, I noticed Reese shooting some of our classmates as they ate breakfast, keeping his camera half-hidden under a table. When I saw what he was doing, I pulled him aside.

He went white, practically shaking with fear, when he realized he’d been caught. I could feel the shame and embarrassment pouring out of him. He couldn’t say a word.

I told him I didn’t care that he was filming people, but that if certain guys in our class caught him, they would probably beat the shit out of him. Or, god forbid, if any of the more popular girls saw what he was doing, his reputation at school would be ruined.

As soon as he understood I wasn’t threatening to expose him, he softened a little.

“I actually like filming stuff, too,” I said.

He almost melted with relief. I told him: Maybe I could come over after school and we could play around with the camera. Walk around the neighborhood, see what we could shoot together. And thus, that day, I became Reese’s only friend.

That first hangout was more than a little disturbing. My family was relatively well off; I had never seen a house like Reese’s before, except maybe in the movies. It was tiny, cluttered, dirty. And of course, as I mentioned, the smell. Reese’s mom scared me at first—her unwashed hair, her puffy, red face, that look of utter deadness in her eyes. And the lack of a father around the home, the emptiness where he should have been, was an imbalance I had never felt before. Reese opened my eyes to what families less fortunate than mine went through.

We filmed a lot that day. We walked up and down Reese’s blighted street, filming the chain-link fences and boarded-up houses. We got shots of municipal gutters the city never bothered to clean, choked with leaves. We filmed telephone wires and broken mailboxes and a rusted swing set. As the sun started to go down, Reese told me to follow his lead, and we got a little bolder.

We snuck into a few backyards, crept right up to the windows of neighbors’ houses, and filmed inside. We recorded people cooking in their kitchens. Men watching TV and drinking beer. Even, in one house, a woman getting out of the shower. But at that point I made Reese turn off the camera. There were some lines I wasn’t willing to cross.

This went on for several months. I never asked Reese what he did with the tapes. I assumed he just collected them on a shelf somewhere, which is what I would have done. That was really the core of my fascination with film in the first place—the idea that you could preserve a moment in time, exactly as it happened, and keep it in physical form. I guess I figured Reese had a similar attraction to the medium. So I never asked what he did with all the footage.

Until, one night, he showed me.

II. Mr. Nowhere

I was sleeping over at Reese’s house, which had become a regular occurrence. We were hanging out in his bedroom, as we had done so many times before, uploading the footage we had captured that day onto an ancient computer Reese had built himself from parts picked up at the used electronics store in town. While Reese worked, I absentmindedly opened the bottom drawer of his desk.

Inside, stacked in piles, were dozens of manila envelopes—all sealed, stamped, and postmarked to the same place:

Mr. N

P.O. Box 119

Evergreen, KS 66102

I lifted one of the envelopes out to look at it. There was a strange, off-center weight to it. I knew immediately what was inside: a DVD in a jewel case. I could feel it right through the paper.

When Reese looked over and saw what I had discovered, he freaked out. He snatched the envelope from me and slammed the drawer shut. He went white and shook with fear again—the same look I had seen when I caught him filming people in the cafeteria.

I told him to relax. “It’s me,” I said. “Whatever this is, I’m sure it’s cool. Just explain it.”

Eventually, he calmed down. I asked again what the envelopes were for. He studied me for a long time, as though trying to decide if he could trust me. I will never forget the look in his eye—a dark mixture of excitement and shame—as he finally said, “Follow me.”

He took me down to the basement. By this point, it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. Reese’s mom had long since passed out in her bed, her glass of vodka nearby. The whole house was dark and perfectly quiet.

There was an old rabbit-ears TV in one corner of the basement—the kind that got grainy local channels and not much else. Reese looked at a clock on the wall. It was 2:48.

“Twelve minutes,” he said.

He knelt in front of the TV and focused all his attention on the dark little screen. He didn’t even turn it on. For twelve minutes he sat like that—perfectly still. I didn’t say a word. At that point, he was starting to freak me out a little, but I didn’t want to break his concentration. Whatever was happening was, obviously, extremely important to him.

When 3 a.m. hit, Reese flipped on the TV.

At first, the stations all seemed to be static. Reese turned an old-fashioned dial to change the channels, moving upward through the numbers with extreme care, like he was trying to crack a safe. He barely blinked. In the darkness, his eyes glowed white.

Channel 2...

Then 3…

Then 4… 5… 6…

Until, finally, he arrived at channel 17.

The static snapped away and was replaced by an image—still very grainy—that I have struggled to describe ever since.

It was one of those low-budget, public-access channels where anyone can book time on the air to film their show. But rather than the tiny soundstage you usually see on those programs, this set looked like a cavernous black-box theater, impossible to fit inside any local TV studio. It was so vast I could barely make out the edges of the room, which were shrouded in black curtains. The floor was covered, wall to wall, in black carpet. The space was lit by a single, dim light, somewhere far overhead.

In the middle of this wide, dark space was a hole in the ground. A perfect square opening that descended into darkness. The camera was motionless, clearly on a tripod, focused intently on this hole. All was silent.

I watched Reese stare without blinking at the screen for several minutes—a look of eager anticipation, almost glee, on his face. I didn’t make a sound; it seemed that, if I did, I would interrupt some kind of dream state Reese had entered. He was like a little kid, cross-legged on the floor, his eyes glued to a screen that had a power over him he didn’t need, or want, to understand.

Then, with a flicker, something happened in the TV. A face emerged slowly from the hole in the floor, floating upward. At first I thought it was someone in a mask. Then I realized—the mask-like features were the face. It was a middle-aged man. His skin was ghostly white, almost glowing. He was severely balding; the little bit of hair he had was slicked back with shiny gel. He was rail-thin. His high, sharp cheekbones cast twin shadows down his face, and his long, sinewy neck looked like it had been stretched to an impossible length. He wore a rumpled black tuxedo with a poorly knotted bow tie. And most unnatural of all: His face was twisted into a grotesque grin. Even today, it’s that grin that I remember most. He never stopped smiling.

He climbed out of the hole (there was some kind of ladder in the space beneath the floor) and moved slowly toward the camera until his face filled the frame. He looked out through the TV, and Reese looked back at him, a connection separated by only a thin layer of glass, as though he w...

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