28 days

      I woke up from a car horn. The vehicle I was in was still growling, but we stood in a place. On the outside I heard sounds of other cars and by the noise I could suppose that we were getting close to a city, quite a big one, or there were serious issues with traffic.       I settled more comfortably, rubbed my eyes and saw the same picture that was there before my short sleep: a car salon with two sets of seats facing each other and covered with black firm windows which didn’t give any view of the outside. Sam was sitting in front of me, in his reading glasses he was flipping through his notebook in which he sometimes had written some remarks of the future plans.       “You think we’re close?” — I asked with my sleepy voice, and Sam looked at me.       “I hope so. Can’t wait to see our place.”       Probably, I should tell more about what exactly is happening. And I think I should start from the beginning.       Me and my best friend Sam who I can even call a brother, that close we are, are quite popular youtubers. We didn’t hit our thirties yet, but gathered an audience of ten million people, and this number doesn’t stop there. And that in my opinion is a huge achievement because from some point of our lives we started to upload too specific content. And before you could make a guess, I should explain that in the first place, the content we make is paranormal.       Sam and I are that type of people who wanders in haunted places and tries to get some evidence of the existence of the afterlife. Kind of ghost hunters, except I don’t think that we ever will be able to “hunt” ghosts. But we are definitely able to walk around with different smart devices, which are supposed to in some ways react to something that a person can’t see and capture that on the tape. More than that, we are trying to present everything in a not so scary way so that it could be interesting for more people — in other words, we are goofing around where we can and sometimes even where we can’t.       And I should mention another important moment. Not so long ago, a group of researchers (to which we don’t refer in any way) held a paranormal experiment that was captured and later was released in a form of series. And our viewers in their turn watched this series and even more — inspired by it and this started a fire: since then every video that we made had comments that we should try this experiment too, in social media people were just screaming about that. And just due to that, we had to watch the series.       Since the first minutes, I realized that Sam and I are not ready to participate in this experiment at all. To make it more convincing, I should explain more. In this experiment, a group of people of two and more is accommodated in a haunted house for almost one month and see if they can learn all the secrets of the house in that time. This may sound quite easy, especially since our job is similar, but our time is limited to a single night. But that is not the point. If it were that easy, we would accept straight away, even though we had to spend nearly a month in the constant view of cameras.       But, firstly, for the experiment participants must not know about the place where they’re going to live and due to that they must be transported in the right way by someone else. And secondly, during all the time of the experiment participants have to be isolated from the outside world — they would not be able to go on the Internet, call someone or leave the place. And we would have to follow all the conditions or the experiment would just not be considered right. This was something that we couldn’t accept. Me — because I couldn’t imagine my life being locked in one place without the Internet, and Sam couldn’t spend that much time without his girlfriend.       But even though we weren’t ready to repeat everything, we had watched the series to the end. And I know, it would be cool to participate in such an experiment and maybe if I get lucky even develop some psychic abilities (some people told me that I could become more sensitive to paranormal stuff). However, the idea of the experiment quickly was moved further back in my memory and I could remember about it only if Sam could develop it into something worthy for our case. Because we ourselves could realize that if we removed one single detail out of the experiment, then its point would completely change. Possibly, in some time we could sit and brainstorm some ideas out of it, but it hadn’t happened — there was no need to.       It all changed with one single letter. At that time, I was checking our work mailbox. As always, it had several letters of our fans who tried to connect with us in any possible way. Quickly flipped through these letters, I couldn’t find anything important and with the peace of mind moved them in a special folder, so we could look at them later if we wanted to. And then I noticed one letter which supposedly came from someone from the series production team. The letter looked presentable, but I couldn’t believe its content. In a few words, it said exactly that Sam and I were invited on that experiment. It would be ominous if we actually were invited in just a few months after the release of the first season. But my intuition was screaming that I should at least check this letter before putting it away in a forgotten folder.       So I put on a random t-shirt and went to Sam’s room in our house. We’ve been living in the same house for quite a long time, and none of us had ever regretted it. I knocked on the door, waited until I heard a quiet “come in” and slid inside. Sam, it looked like, was editing our footage, and he started quite a while ago. I could see it just from an empty plate near the keyboard. And an open window of the video editor, obviously. Sam turned to me and I couldn’t help but smile, because aside from his computer glasses, he also had a pink headband with cat ears that was lifting his hair up from the forehead.       “Did Kat come here?” — I asked, not even trying to hide my smirk.       “Yeah, why?” — Sam frowned a bit. — “Goddangit, I forgot about that. I wanted to take this off when she would go.”       In a hurry, Sam pulled off the headband and put his hand through the hair trying to style it a little bit, but that was quite an issue. He struggled with it for a bit and got the hair completely ruffled, but not laid on his forehead as usual. Sam cursed one more time and I laughed. He looked at me with sad eyes, but this made me laugh even more. But in almost no time my best friend joined me, therefore I couldn’t feel sorry. Calmed down, I decided to get straight to the point:       “I know, you are editing, but can you open our business mail really quick?”       Sam turned back to the computer and I moved closer to him. Without a clue, he opened the first letter and started reading.       “What do you think?” — I asked when Sam got to the end of the letter. — “Should we trust them?”       “It looks quite believable,” — my friend thought. — “But still, we could make sure it’s genuine.”       “You are saying to call them using a burner phone or what?”       “What? Where did you get this from? I meant that we could send a genuine letter with our phone numbers right in their office.”       “And how would it help?” — I couldn’t get it.       “Look, we have Google,” — Sam opened the browser and found the correct address there. — “This address is exactly the same as the one in the letter. I don’t think that scammers could hack Google. Even if it is a scam letter, if we send a letter to the office, I don’t think that we will fall into a trap.”       “I get it, I get it. I will write a letter,” — I sighed and started walking back to my room and heard Sam’s “good luck”.       And this is how we started our collaboration with the team of “28 Days Haunted” by which we’ve been invited. It all wasn’t a joke, and soon Sam and I decided to accept the offer. Mainly, it happened because we would be allowed to keep all the footage that we could shoot on our cameras in the process of the experiment. And later we could turn it into our videos which would be allowed to post after the official release of the series in case not to give away all the spoilers. In the next month, we discussed and talked through the rest of the details. We even drove to their office to firm the papers and everything.       The time of shooting, or, in other words, spending quite a while in a haunted location, was put at the end of the spring. And the rest of time before this Sam decided to spend by making the videos which could be posted while we will be isolated. Therefore, with that and a bunch of other things, the end of the spring came faster than we would’ve imagined. And here we are, getting close to the place where we will be living for the next 28 days.       At some point our car turned and slow moving through the traffic turned into fast driving. Sounds of other cars' presence rapidly became quiet, and for some period of time I heard only a couple of vehicles. Soon our car moved off the asphalt and one of the drivers knocked on the partition.       “Guys,” — called Charlie — one of the people who had to observe us. — “Sam, Colby.”       “Something happened?” — Sam asked, usually he was the one taking care of talking to other people.       “We are getting close, will be there in like fifteen minutes or so,” — Charlie informed us. — “Get ready to shoot.”       Sam put his notebook away and stretched. We cleaned all the stuff from the seats into our backpacks, and as much as we could, freshened up. In our contract, we agreed to put on blindfolds, so we couldn’t see our place too early — more for the show than for ourselves. But we’d agreed to it, and we were ready to do that.       I pulled out a camera and pointed it at Sam, turning it on. He brushed his hair with a hand and gave me a thumbs up, so at the count of three I started shooting.       “We are almost there,” — said the friend of mine. — “Still haven’t seen anything beside the car, and we’re quite tired from the road.”       “Yeah, we can’t see anything,” — I slowly turned the camera to the windows and then pointed it at myself. — “What do you think, what will we get?”       “Well,” — Sam hesitated. — “It is definitely an old building, I can tell it from the road.”       “Or they chose this road with a purpose to trick us.”       “Or that,” — he nodded. — “Anyway, we will know this in a bit.”       When the car stopped, Sam and I looked at each other and put on the blindfolds. A few seconds later, one of the drivers opened the door and asked:       “Are you ready, guys?”       “Sure,” — Sam said with a smile in his voice. — “Can’t wait to see the place, to which we’ve been riding for an entire day! God dang it!”       The last sentence was said because my friend stumbled when getting out of the car blindfolded, therefore the ending of his speech came off not so positive. I heard Sam move away for some distance and got up, holding on to the car and keeping the camera turned to my face.       “Give me your hand,” — Charlie asked, and I felt a touch on my left hand.       I grabbed onto the driver, carefully felt for the ground and with the help got down.       “Wow, thanks,” — couldn’t help myself, I said with a smirk.       Charlie led me somewhere and helped me find Sam’s arm. Placed my hand onto my friend’s shoulder, I asked:       “It’s time?”       “Yeah, on the count of three,” — Sam suggested. — “One, two, three.”       On command, I took off the blindfold and saw the place, where we would have to live for nearly an entire month.       “Did they do this on purpose?” — gasped Sam. — “It is literally like the Conjuring house!”       “I mean, it’s possible,” — I muttered and finally turned the camera to the building.       It was an ordinary house, old, but looking like all the numerous farmhouses which were quite common for the towns of the USA. It had two stories, an attic, small balcony and front porch with two wicker chairs and a table. The wooden walls looked almost black — that’s why Sam said that it looked like the real Conjuring house, because beside it there was almost nothing similar. Except maybe that this house also stood on a small clearing in the woods. Aside the house was another small building — probably it was a barn or a warehouse before, but now it was turned into a small house for those who will be keeping an eye on us.       Also, everything in that house screamed that it was haunted. The same expression as of the Conjuring house, that Sam and I were able to visit before. And the memories from those times weren’t the best ones. Sure, we got huge evidence of the paranormal, but it was also quite a scary process. And if this house was actually similar, then we wouldn’t be disappointed.       “Are we going inside?” — I wanted to know if Sam was ready.       He nodded, so we grabbed our backpacks from the car and went to, for the first time, investigate the place where we had to live.