You roll back on your heels, fighting a sneeze from the thick layer of dust in the attic. As you rub out a crick in your neck, you wonder why you ever thought rummaging through your old things would be fun and nostalgic. After more than an hour of digging, all you've gotten is a sore back and a bad case of allergies. And great, a single ancient videocassette. You peer closely at the label, but the dust and the dim lighting make it impossible to read.

Giving up, you get up to see if you can find your VCR and promptly ram your head into the rafters. The impact forces out the sneeze building up in your nose, which rockets out with a couple of its friends. Muttering curses, you haul out the box containing old electronics, raising another cloud of dust and another round of sneezing. Fifteen minutes, another incident with the rafters, and several profanities later, you manage to find your VCR and untangle it from a mess of wires. Clutching that and the videocassette, you take them down to the kitchen and try futilely to clean off all the dust.

"Hon e Vi lcos" is written in neat black lettering on the peeling label. Home Videos. As you rub the lump forming on your head, you figure you might as well watch the video you nearly gave yourself a concussion over. You carry the equipment into the living room and unplug a tangle of cables from your DVD player. Weighing the cassette in your hand, you shrug and slide it into the VCR. You turn the TV to Video 3 and press Play.

After a confused burst of static-y, half-formed images, a hazel-eyed, curly-haired brunette winks into focus on the screen. She taps on the camera, peering into the lens from inches away.

"Is this on?" she asks the person behind the camera.

The camera dips down twice, nodding. You imagine the cameraperson giving a hearty thumbs-up to the brunette. She steps back, revealing a small, motherly-looking woman in her early forties. She stands on a concrete path in a well-watered lawn, squinting in the sunlight. If anything, she reminds you of a cheerful mouse.

"Great!" she squeaks, giving an exaggerated clap. "Well, I guess we'll start now!"

With a cheerful "come on!" wave, she bounces her way up the path, camera bobbing along after. She stops at a friendly wooden door, and after a moment you recognize the entrance to your own house. The color of the paint is different, and you never would've bought that hideous owl ornament, but it's definitely your house. It was probably taped sometime before you moved in, maybe for an open house tour.

"Hello!" The woman calls the cameraperson's attention and your wandering thoughts back to the door, which now stands open. Her head peeks out from around the frame. "Come on in!"

The camera crosses the threshold of the entrance, and the brightness adjusts automatically to the indoors gloom. You are now looking at some previous incarnation of the central hallway in your home. Certainly it's a lot cleaner than you ever kept it. As the cameraperson practices their smooth walk down the corridor, the woman is busy poking her head into each of the rooms and offering useless commentary like, "How quaint!" and, "There’s the bathroom!"

She ushers the cameraperson into each room with a cheery "Look at that!" then moves on before you can get a good look at "that." At one point, the camera swings into the living room you're sitting in, and the silly notion of seeing yourself on camera makes you briefly crane your neck around. As you mentally smack yourself for that, the camera moves on after a cursory sweep of the empty room.

When the woman reaches the bedroom she actually claps in delight. "Isn't this place adorable?" she squeaks. You're wondering what she's on to make her so darn happy. She practically skips inside, then into the attached closet and bathroom, chirping all the way. The cameraperson takes this chance to get a good look around at the blank walls and the puke-yellow carpet, which thankfully had been replaced sometime before you moved in.

Finishing up her squeaky inspection, the woman skips out of the room with the cameraperson in tow. The door swings shut behind them with a familiar squeak, and there is a moment of confusion as the woman and the cameraperson jostle in the narrow hallway.

When the camera straightens out and the woman comes back into view, you are facing an unfamiliar wing of the house. Instead of stairs leading up, the central hallway ends in a turn. This part of the house must have been taken out in favor of the garage.

The woman patters down the hallway, kicking up dust that coats the camera in a thin film. Your nose briefly threatens to sneeze at the memory of it, and you swipe at it with a hand. Looking around, you'd imagine cobwebs on the corners of the ceiling. But the camera resolution isn’t good enough to see any, even if they exist.

As the corridor stretches on, you notice that the light grows steadily dimmer. The murky darkness makes you want to wipe the camera lens, which doesn’t seem to be adjusting to the lighting. It feels like it's taking forever to get anywhere, but it's hard to tell because there aren't any doors to mark progress by.

“That’s odd.” The woman's muffled voice swims out from the darkness ahead. “I don’t remember this part from the floor plan, do you?”

The camera pans around briefly, trying to get more information from the empty hall. Then it jostles a bit as the cameraperson trots to catch up with the woman. She's stopped in front of a closed door, the only one you've seen so far. She fumbles with the doorknob and says, “I'm sure they just forgot!” As if people forget entire wings on floor plans?

The woman pushes open the door and pokes her head inside. A draft of wind blows a lock of her hair into the camera, and you can almost smell the dank mustiness that must be wafting from the room. The camera can’t see more than an arm’s length beyond the open door, which lets in the weakest shred of light possible.

“Oh dear,” the woman remarks, waving her hand in front of her face. Before you can grunt a useless protest, she disappears into the gloom, mumbling something about a light switch. The cameraperson hesitates a bit longer, then inches inside.

There is a moment of confused shuffling in the dark, and the cameraperson’s breathing rushes over the mic once or twice. Every few seconds, a dim rectangle of light swings into view then disappears again, as the cameraperson periodically turns to reorient with the still-open door.

The woman is still busily searching for a light, mumbling to herself. As the cameraperson tries to locate her, the detached sound of her voice floats around eerily in the dark. The whole scene is like some low-budget horror movie.

Right on cue, a tinny scratching sound briefly drowns out the woman's muttering. The cameraperson hears it, too, though you can't tell the direction from the shoddy mic. The camera swings again to the rectangle of light, which now fits completely in the frame. The scratching sounds repeat, and for an instant it looks like something large and furry is blocking the light from the door.

Evidently the cameraperson has seen what you have, because the darkness comes back, and the mic is overwhelmed with shuffling cloth and running footsteps. The woman's oblivious mumbling gets louder until the cameraperson is practically on top of her.

Then two things happen almost simultaneously: the woman gives a delighted “Aha!” as she flicks an invisible switch, and somewhere behind the cameraperson the door slams shut.

Bright light washes everything out, and you get a brief upside-down look of a garage-like space. Then the woman squeaks and the cameraperson is running, or maybe both of them are running, and the camera is tilting wildly out of control. Everything is a mess of motion blurs and pumping feet, all lit up by the harsh white light. Instead of a sound track, there's a bunch of scrabbling and some squeaky yelling from the woman, and behind it all there's a lot (do you hear three sets?) of heavy breathing. You’re itching to grab that camera and point it at something sane, but you can only watch the world careening wildly onscreen. What the hell is even going on?

Then everything stops with a loud CHUNK as someone or other runs into something else and the camera crashes to the floor. You get a brief glimpse of a pair of neat, buckled shoes before the video flickers off.

Before you can get up, the video flickers on again. It takes a second for you to parse the scene. Everything is perfectly still and washed out in the light. There's a buckled shoe still lying in view, with a foot inside it. It's weird, because the foot just sort of ends where the ankle is supposed to be.

There's also something wrong with the camera. Random pixels are out, and a neat band at the bottom edge is black. The blackness extends out into the scene, pooling around that weird detached foot.

A sudden thump makes you jump about a foot into the air. Your brain latches onto the new activity with desperate attention. There's a frantic scrambling, and the camera gets knocked to the right. It hangs for a moment balanced on one edge, then tips onto its side with a noisy splat. Your stomach does an acrobatic move up into your chest.

The cameraperson is thrashing around now, making a high-pitched animal noise. Nothing is happening on screen, except a slow oozing that you refuse to understand. At one point the cameraperson splashes down just behind the camera, and the high-pitched animal noise turns into words. "Please, please, please..."

Before you or the cameraperson have the chance to screech like a little girl, the camera dies with a final click, and the video is over.

You’re not sure how long you stare at the blank screen, listening to the steady whirring of the VCR. Eventually, the cassette reaches the end of the tape, and with a click and a whirr, the tape begins to rewind itself. The mechanical whine wakes you up with a little jolt, and you shake your head at your stupidity. Here in your well-lit living room, the video goes back to feeling like a low-budget horror film. Probably something that the previous owners left behind to freak out the new people. Besides, that wing of the house doesn't even exist any more, if it ever did.

Anyway, thinking about it happening in your house gives you the creeps, so you shake it off and get up to grab the tape. You reach over, but your finger freezes over the Eject button. Up close, the whir of the rewinding tape suddenly turns into a high-pitched animal noise. Your stomach falls from its newfound height in your chest, because "Please, please, please" is running through your head, and you're beginning to realize that the cameraperson's voice is the exact same vaguely familiar, not-quite-right voice that you have when caught on video.