Continue Watching
The show was called Holloway, which is our last name, and it was sitting in the Continue Watching row on our living room TV, between a baking competition my wife likes and a documentary about submarines I’d fallen asleep to twice.
Season 1, Episode 4. A thin red progress bar under the thumbnail, about two-thirds of the way across.
I’m fifty-eight. I fix commercial refrigeration for a living. Walk-in coolers, ice machines, the big display cases in grocery stores. I’m not good with streaming menus, and my first thought was that I’d hit something by accident with the remote, the way I do. My second thought was that Lottie had started some prestige drama that happened to share our name. I called her in from the kitchen.
She stood behind the couch, drying her hands on a towel, and looked at the screen and said, “I’ve never seen that in my life.”
The thumbnail was a still of a kitchen at night. Dark, lit only by the small light over the stove. Shot from high up, in a corner, looking down. A white refrigerator. A round table with two chairs. A bowl of lemons on the counter.
It was our kitchen. The bowl of lemons was on our counter, in the next room, at that moment. Lottie turned around and looked at it.
I’ll tell you what I did, because I’ve read a lot of stories like this since, and the people in them never do the sensible thing.
I did the sensible thing. I went into the account settings and looked at the viewing history. It wasn’t there. Holloway wasn’t in our history at all, not under my profile, not under Lottie’s, not under the Kids profile that our grandson uses when he visits. I searched the app for it. Nothing. No show by that name in the entire catalog. I logged out of the account on the TV and logged back in. It was still there in the row, Season 1, Episode 4, two-thirds watched.
I changed the password. I called the streaming company and waited on hold for forty minutes and talked to a very patient young man who couldn’t find any record of it either, and suggested I uninstall the app and reinstall it, which I did. It was still there.
Then I unplugged the TV, and Lottie and I went to bed.
In the morning, it was Episode 5.
Lottie saw it first. She came and woke me up and didn’t say anything, just took my hand and led me out to the living room. She’d plugged the TV back in to check. The Continue Watching row: the baking show, the submarine documentary, and Holloway, Season 1, Episode 5, with the progress bar about a quarter of the way across.
The thumbnail was our bedroom. From high up in the corner, over the dresser, looking down at the bed. It was dark, but you could see the shapes under the blankets. Two people. Her on the left, me on the right, the way we sleep.
We had the house checked. I want to say that. A man came out from a security company in Spokane, and went over every room with a wand that’s supposed to pick up cameras and transmitters, and climbed up on a stepladder and looked at every ceiling corner in the house with a flashlight. He found a smoke detector and a lot of dust. Nothing else. He charged us three hundred dollars and told us, very kindly, that sometimes these apps get glitchy. He suggested we get a new TV.
We got a new TV. A different brand. I set it up myself, a fresh account on a different service. I didn’t sign into the old one at all.
When I turned it on, the first thing on the home screen, before I’d watched a single thing, before I’d even finished setting up my profile, was a row called Continue Watching. In the row there was one show.
Holloway. Season 1, Episode 7. The progress bar almost all the way across.
I didn’t want to play it. Lottie did. We argued about it for two days. I said that whatever it was, it wanted us to press play, and we shouldn’t give it what it wanted. Lottie said that whatever it was, it was already in our house, in our corners, watching us sleep, and she’d rather know what it saw.
She won. She usually does.
We sat on the couch together on a Thursday night, with all the lights on, and she picked up the remote and selected Holloway, and the menu came up with the episodes listed, the way it does for any show.
Episode 1: The Porch. Episode 2: The Garage. Episode 3: The Hall. Episode 4: The Kitchen. Episode 5: The Bedroom. Episode 6: The Stairs. Episode 7: The Living Room. Episode 8: —
Episode 8 had no title and no thumbnail. Just a gray square. It wasn’t available yet.
Lottie selected Episode 1.
It was our front porch, at night, from up in the corner by the light. The camera didn’t move. There was no music. The sound was the sound of our porch at night: crickets, the neighbor’s sprinkler, a car passing out on the road. It ran like that for a long time. Lottie scrubbed forward through it, and the timestamp in the corner of the screen ran forward with it, the date three weeks ago.
At 3:11 a.m. by the timestamp, something came up the porch steps.
It came in from the bottom of the frame. It was hard to see. It was the shape of a person, but too tall and too narrow, and it moved wrong, all at once, like something that has read about walking but never done it. It went up the steps and stood at our front door. It stood there for twenty minutes, not moving at all. Then the screen went dark.
Episode 2 was the garage. The same shape, standing between my truck and the deep freezer, very still, its long head tipped to one side, as if listening to the freezer hum. It had gotten in somehow. I’ve never figured out how.
Episode 3 was the upstairs hall. It stood at the top of the stairs, outside our bedroom door, for most of the episode.
Episode 4, the kitchen. It stood at our table. It picked up a lemon from the bowl and held it for a long time, close to where its face would be. It put the lemon back exactly where it had been.
Lottie was holding my arm so hard I had bruises the next day. I said, “Turn it off,” and she said, “No,” in a voice I’d never heard her use.
Episode 5 was the bedroom.
I’m not going to tell you all of it. I’ll tell you that it stood at the end of our bed for the whole episode. And that near the end, it bent down, slowly, folding in places a person doesn’t fold, until its head was very close to the pillow on the right side of the bed, my side. And it stayed that way, close to my face, while I slept, until the episode ended.
Lottie turned it off then. We didn’t watch 6 or 7.
We left. Of course we left. We drove to our daughter’s in Coeur d’Alene that night, and we stayed in her guest room for a week. We didn’t take anything but clothes. Our daughter thought we were having some kind of joint breakdown, and I didn’t blame her.
Her guest room has a TV on the wall. I didn’t turn it on. I unplugged it the first night and turned it to face the wall.
On the fourth night, I woke up at three in the morning, and the guest room was full of a faint blue light. The TV was on. Unplugged, facing the wall, and the light was spilling out around the edges of it onto the wallpaper. I got up and turned it around.
The home screen. One row. Continue Watching.
Holloway, Season 1. Episode 8: The Guest Room.
The progress bar was moving.
Slowly. A pixel at a time. Filling in from the left as I watched, the way it does when something is playing. Somebody was watching it right now. Not me. Not Lottie, who was asleep behind me. Something was watching Episode 8 of our lives in real time, from wherever it watches.
I looked up at the corner of the guest room, above the closet door. Where the camera would be.
There’s nothing there. Just the ceiling, and the shadow where the walls meet. I looked at it for a long time.
And then I did something I’ve never told Lottie. I raised my hand and waved.
I don’t know why. It felt like the polite thing. I’m from a small town and I was raised to wave. And on the screen behind me, I heard the soft click the remote makes when it pauses, though no one had touched the remote. When I turned back to the TV, the progress bar had stopped. A little red line, almost all the way across.
And a new row had appeared under Continue Watching. Just one thumbnail in it. The row was called Because You Watched Holloway.
It was a show called Pettibone. That’s my daughter’s married name.
We went home the next morning. I don’t know what else to do. I think it follows the people it’s watching, and I’d rather it watch us than them.
Our new TV is still on the living room wall. I don’t unplug it anymore. Every morning I check the row. There’s always a new episode. The Back Steps. The Basement. The Bathroom, Morning. It’s starting to watch us in the daytime now. I don’t play them. I don’t need to. I know what’s in them.
Last night there was a new one. Episode 14. It had a title I didn’t understand at first.
The Viewer.
The thumbnail is our living room, from up in the corner over the window. It shows the couch, and the TV on the wall, and on the TV, very small, a thumbnail of the living room. And in front of the TV, in my recliner, a man sits in the blue light, with a remote in his hand, looking at the screen.
And behind him, very close, bending down in a way that a person doesn’t bend, there’s something else watching it too.
I haven’t turned around yet. I’m typing this on my phone with the TV on in front of me. The progress bar on Episode 14 is moving.