/nosleep: My Stepfather’s Nanny Cam [Part 2.]

I shouldn’t trust him. But…

The first thing I did when I heard my stepfather’s car pull up into our driveway was to grab a kitchen knife. The second thing I did was conceal myself in my closet.

To be clear: I was not hiding from him.

I was cornering him.

He didn’t know that I got out of school early, and he was usually home before I was. According to the timestamp on his stupid god damn camera he set it up and started recording three days ago about an hour before I got home. I set the stuffed bear, the facade back where he had placed it. Then I waited.

Turns out, I did not have to wait long.

My stepfather, that creepy bastard wasted no time in getting inside of my room. He went straight to the bear. When he picked it up, when he noticed that it was lighter and that stuffing had been torn out, I opened my closet door. The knife held behind my back. I was not silent. I wanted him to know that he had been caught.

“What the fuck are you doing?!!” I yelled with a shaken voice.

He turned around. Deer in the headlights. The bear held impotently in his hand. “This is not what it looks like,” he said.

The silence was thick with indecision and fear. I took a step forward.

“I saw the videos,” I said with less confidence than I had hoped. He avoided my eye contact. I kept him in my gaze. Always.

“Then you’ve seen It,” he said, “you’ve seen the thing.”

I nodded my response.

“Let me see,” he said.

“What? So you can see me undress you pervert?” I said, knife still held behind my back.

He shifted his weight, and he fought off a smile. “That was not my intention,” he said as he looked me once over. Bottom to top.

He explained to me then that he had suspected that something was wrong. He explained that he was worried about me, that he thought that the child-like figure, that It was after me. He said that he needed proof, that if he was going to protect me he needed evidence. He said that he couldn’t ask for permission, that he couldn’t place the camera if I knew about it. I wouldn’t believe him until I saw “It”…

…And that is believable enough. All things considered, and with the benefit of the doubt, that seemed reasonable.

…With the benefit of the doubt, that is.

“You can keep the SD card,” he said. “If you saw It, if you believe me I don’t need to see it. But we have to do something about It.”

That last part, he was absolutely right about. I asked him what happened next.

“We start by putting up a barrier,” he responded, “We put a perimeter of salt around the house, keep it out.” He turned and began walking out of my room. “We need a lot more than what we have in the pantry, I’ll go and get some more.” Then he paused at the door, turned, and looked at me. “It’s probably best that we don’t tell your mom,” he said, “it would just freak her out.” And with that, he left.

I listened for his car’s engine. I waited. When he was gone, I put the knife under my pillow.

Something was bothering me.

He never said why he was suspicious.

He never said why he suspected that there was a figure on my dresser. Never said why he thought something was after me. I had left my room the night before, but he never once said that he saw me leave, or said that I was acting weird. Could that be new? Could he not know about that yet?

…what had tipped him off?

So I logged onto his desktop.

I checked his file history.

Apparently, that was not the only nanny cam.

That dread I had felt in my stomach? It was back in full force. There was at least a week’s worth of videos of me. Of just me. No figure, nothing out of the ordinary. The creepy bastard had been filming me for a week before It showed up. He knew something was up, only after he had been spying on me.

“It’s probably best that we don’t tell your mom,” he said. Creepy asshole.

The first night it appeared on my dresser, after a week of my stepfather just filming me, the void child pointed at the nanny cam. It never once looked at me. It held its arm up, perfectly still and pointed Its silent accusation at the camera. I skipped ahead. 10x speed. It did this for two more nights. Then It started talking to me.

At that moment I did not know who I feared more. The creepy pervert stepfather, or the void child. I knew that right at the dot, right at 2 AM It would be back, but my stepfather would be in the other room. I felt trapped.

I made up my mind then.

When he came home I acted as if nothing was wrong. I should get an award for that performance, mind you, because everything was wrong. I was thankful that he didn’t try and start any conversation. As he poured a ring of salt around the house I stayed behind him, never once giving him the satisfaction to leer at me. It was harder work than you think. You can’t rush that sort of thing, you can break your perimeter pretty quickly if you are not patient. “Everything has to be uniform,” he said, yet the salt in front of his and my mother’s bedroom was thicker than the rest.

“It’s going to come again tonight,” he said as we were finishing up. “It’s going to try to get in, to get to you, but this should stop it.”

I did not tell him what else I had seen. I did not tell him about my muddy clothes.

We waited to complete the barrier until after my mother came home, so she wouldn’t see it.

By the time my mother was home, it was night once more. Dinner was dead silent. My stepfather excused himself early.

I snuck outside around midnight. The air was chilly, almost oppressive, there was no moon. I felt gooseflesh prickle across my bare arms, saw my breath turn to cold steam. The darkness was nearly complete. I did not have to travel far, I did not have to stay out for too long. I marched up to the salt barrier.

I kicked a hole in it.

Then waited in bed for 2 AM.

[Part 1.] [Part 3.]