Chapter 474: Eyes
“Remember, don’t blink!”
“You’re dead meat if you blink!”
“Don’t avert your gaze!”
“Keep your eyes on it, don’t get distracted!”
“Don’t blink! Don’t blink no matter what...”
“Everyone, I wish you good luck...”
...
Inside the office of the mayor located in the city hall, Parsons watched the “Response Protocol” sent by the hacker. The same video was also sent to plenty of confidential departments in Northern America. It included the picture of the statue, detailed information of its behavior, and its method of claiming its victims.
“Statues that broke people’s necks? There are all kinds of strange happenings these days...”
Parsons turned off the video and seemed to not take the entire thing too seriously. He turned to Mu Liao and asked, “Has the police sealed off the Herrank Warehouse District?”
“It’s already sealed off.”
Mu Liao answered promptly, “Sir Mayor, our men have entered the warehouse district and are searching for these murder statues following the protocols stated in this video. Based on Blacklight Biotechnology’s predictions, there should be four statues lying in the Herrank district.”
“Ridiculous...”
Parsons shook his head, feeling speechless. If not for the White House constantly sending notices, he would never heed the advice of the hackers himself.
Since when did the great Northern American government listen to some foreign forces whispering in their ears?
Parsons was largely dismissive of this event. Suddenly, there was a knock on the door to his office.
“Come in.”
Parsons turned to the door and saw another one of his staff coming inside with a hard drive in hand. “Sir Mayor, we’ve ordered people to go through the surveillance footage in the Herrank Warehouse District, as according to your instructions. We’ve successfully found the statues you described. It’s inside this hard drive now.”
“What took you so long?”
Parsons frowned with mild irritation.
“I’m very sorry, the surveillance in the Herrank Warehouse District isn’t connected to the Internet so we had to head to the area ourselves and collect all of the footage manually to look for the culprit for this incident. Before we could pinpoint a specific culprit, we received orders that you wanted to look for the statues...”
The reprimanded staff answered dejectedly.
“Alright, work faster next time.”
Parsons finally got up from this seat and took the hard drive with faint interest before plugging it into his computer.
Parsons seemed to have thought of something before he played the video. He proceeded to turn to Mu Liao, “Why don’t you head out first, close the door for me.”
“Alright.”
Mu Liao nodded and exited the mayor’s office with the other staff that delivered the hard drive.
After closing the office door behind him, Mu Liao chatted with the staff, “Mr. Robinson, are the technical department busy recently?”
“It’s alright, things are getting better.”
The staff answered plaintively, “Looks like there’s going to be a lot of work to do tonight though.”
“Hahaha, there’s no helping it, I suppose.”
Mu Liao clapped Robinson on his shoulders and asked curiously, “Where did you buy these lenses?”
“Lenses? I’m not wearing any lenses...”
Robinson was slightly startled by this and proceeded to rub his eyes. “I think it’s just my eyes drying up which makes them appear redder than usual? I’ve been looking at the surveillance footage for a while.”
Mu Liao did not think too much of it and only shrugged. The two split up after turning a corner to work on their respective tasks.
Inside the mayor’s office, after asking Mu Liao to get out, Parsons moved the cursor on his computer.
Just as he was about to play the video, he suddenly thought about the hacker who seemed to have eyes everywhere. With this in mind, he disconnected the computer from the network.
This way, he would not have to worry about the hacker stealing this video. It was time to settle everything himself.
The operations in the Herrank Warehouse District were severely outdated, so most of the areas did not have proper surveillance, which included most of the warehouse interior.
There were some surveillance cameras installed along the roads of the warehouse district more than a decade ago. Most of them were damaged or malfunctioned after years of weathering the rain without proper maintenance. Most of them were hardly functioning at all anymore.
Fortunately, upon thorough inspection, the technical department discovered that a few of them were still in working condition. It was considered a small miracle.
With this, Parsons double-clicked the video inside the hard drive.
The angle of the video made it clear that it was shot by a surveillance camera located under a streetlamp. Since it was nighttime during the time of recording, the entire video was shot in a black-and-white palette instead of being colored. There were pitch-black warehouses on both sides of the camera. The scene was quite plain.
Parsons could tell that the video was only a short clip extracted by the technical department when he looked at the progress bar. The length of the video was displayed to be less than a minute although the full surveillance footage should be very lengthy. This fifty-nine-second footage was the only part that contained a clue to the Herrank Warehouse District murder case.
Parsons watched the video with this in mind.
One second, two seconds, three seconds...
The clock slowly ticked away but even after thirty seconds, there was still nothing notable appearing on the screen. Parsons frowned slightly when he saw this. He wanted to drag the progress bar and skip to the later parts of the video.
Then again, he figured that he may as well finish the video patiently since there was only half a minute remaining.
At the thirty-one-second mark, something finally happened on the display. He saw a frenzied man running from the top left of the screen to the bottom right. This man continuously looked over his shoulder as he ran. There was no way to make out what he was running away from due to the limitations of the camera angle.
Despite the poor resolution of the footage, added with the time of recording being set at night, Parsons could still make out the faint appearance of this man. This man was one of the eight victims during the second incident.
This video had successfully roused Parsons’ interest. He leaned closer to the screen and waited for whatever was pursuing the man to show up on the screen.
The figure of the man only appeared in the video for three seconds before he ran out of the surveillance camera’s range. However, the pursuer did not appear on screen at all. When Parsons checked the progress bar, he noticed that it was at the fifty-five-second mark already.
Just as Parsons wondered if the technical department made a mistake with the video clipping, the footage suddenly became distorted. The entire video turned into a blur as if there had been a signal disruption but the progress bar was still moving along despite all this. A second later, the pixels were restored. The image of a statue appeared on the screen seemingly out of nowhere.
It appeared!
Parsons perked up when he saw the statue. Before he could further inspect the make of the statue, the footage became distorted again and a second later when it reverted to normal, the statue had disappeared!
With that, the progress bar had reached the ending mark. The video had ended.
Parsons was still at a loss after the video ended. He frowned and pondered on what he just watched.
“Could this be the statue the hacker talked about? The one that if you look at it, it becomes a solid statue but starts to move the moment you take your eyes off it?”
Parsons mumbled to himself, “But why is it that even the surveillance camera cannot capture the image of it moving?”
Upon contemplating this, Parsons dragged the progress bar back to the fifty-five-second mark and replayed the final four seconds of the video many times.
No matter how many times he replayed it, the statue disappeared entirely before he could get a closer look at it. The video became distorted at the fifty-six-second mark. The statue appeared at the fifty-seven-second then the video distorted again at the fifty-nine-second. The statue only appeared for the entirety of a second on tape.
“Based on the guidelines provided by the hacker, the one-second window where the statue appeared on the screen should be when the escaping man turned around to look at it. This still was coincidentally captured by the surveillance camera and as soon as the man took his eyes off the statue, it disappeared again instantly...”
After making a brief deduction of what happened, Parsons replayed the clip for the fifth time and looked for the right timing to pause the video. He stopped the video at the fifty-seven-second mark!
Just as Parsons intended, he caught the still of the statue on screen.
Although the resolution was poor due to the quality of the camera, he could faintly make out the shape of a half-spread open wing behind the statue. It reminded him of the statue of angels seen in churches.
The statue was facing toward the bottom right of the screen, which was also where the now-deceased man ran toward.
Though he was still reluctant to believe it, Parsons was slowly coming to be convinced of what the hacker stated. Perhaps this was not a simple ploy to deceive the Northern American government...
Parsons started to get agitated upon arriving at this thought. He took out a cigarette and used a lighter set on top of the table to light it.
After lighting the cigarette, Parsons took a strong puff and inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs before turning to look at the screen again.
What he saw when he looked at the screen made him jump a little.
There was no telling if it was all in his head or not. It seemed as if the statue was now facing a different angle than it did previously.
Was it his wrong impression?
Parsons raised an eyebrow and took another closer look. It seemed like the statue had turned its head to face the camera, looking straight at him.
Parsons was demented by this, he was no longer certain if it had always faced this angle all this time. Was it him who had the wrong impression or was he looking at another video?
Parsons looked at the progress bar which still showed that it was the fifty-seven-second mark. This was also the only video the hard drive contained.
Perhaps he got the angle the statue was facing mixed up in his head...
Parsons raised his head, feeling somewhat confused by all this. His heart dropped the moment he looked at the screen again! He saw the statue on the screen now had its entire body turned to face the camera. Its pair of hollow eyes seemed to burn themselves through the display and looked square into his soul!
Parsons fixed his eyes on the display. His heart began to drum and thump repeatedly as sweat started to pool around his forehead. He felt a numbing chill coursing through his body. He was certain that it could not possibly be his mind playing tricks on him. The statue was moving on the screen!
“But, how is this possible...”
Parsons muttered. The warning issued by the hacker flashed across his mind. The hacker mentioned that it was vital to keep one’s eyes on the statue. Otherwise, the statue would rush forward and snap its victim’s neck the moment the victim took his or her eyes off it...
He was under the impression that this rule only applied to the physical statue. Who would have expected it to apply to a statue inside a video as well?
“D*mn, the warning issued by Blacklight Biotechnology didn’t mention that even footage of this cursed thing can trigger it!”
Parsons complained angrily. Years of experience as a mayor of a city had honed his reaction speed. He immediately darted the cursor to the top right corner and clicked the X b.u.t.ton!
Another window popped up on the computer and asked for confirmation for closing the video. Parsons quickly tapped the “Yes” selection which closed the video and reverted to the image of his desktop on the screen.
“Phew, it’s over?”
Parsons was just about to celebrate when he saw the statue disappear. That was when there was a sudden flash on the desktop. The video that he had just closed was opened automatically and jumped to the frame with the angel on screen!
Parsons felt his soul seeping out of his body the moment he saw this. Again, he reached for the b.u.t.ton to close the window. However, the video of the surveillance footage did not even close this time. It flashed for an instant after his selection and then froze in place!
Even after repeatedly tapping the close b.u.t.ton dozens of times, his efforts still yielded zero results. Parsons got down and reached for the power b.u.t.ton and shut down the computer but no matter what, the display refused to turn off.
Somehow, the computer had completely frozen. Even the power b.u.t.ton was useless!
Also, in the span where Parsons turned away from the screen to reach for the power b.u.t.ton and got back up, the statue drew closer to the display. At this point, the statue nearly had its entire face crowding the display and it looked like it was inches away from bursting through the display and coming into the real world!
In this moment of life and death, an idea suddenly occurred to Parsons. He immediately got down and unplugged the computer. He had never moved this fast in his entire life!
“Pop!”
With a gentle and abrupt “pop”, the computer was shut down completely!
Parsons got back up, his expression was frozen with horror. When he saw that the computer display had turned dark, he finally managed a sigh of relief. He got up on his trembling feet and rejoiced at surviving the ordeal.
“I was this close to dying, this cursed thing!”
When Parsons rubbed his eyes, he felt the touch of something tiny and hard. He looked down to investigate it and saw what was what seemed like a tiny piece of white sand, barely the size of a sesame seed. It disappeared when he blew on it.
Parsons did not have the mind s.p.a.ce for further speculations or whatnot at this moment. There was no chance that he was going to remain in this office any longer after what had just happened to him. He shouted Mu Liao’s name out loud while leaving his office in a hurry...