Forgive the long post, I've tried a few times previously but know what I know now, they may have disappeared intentionally.

Today is still Tuesday. It's been Tuesday for...I don't know, I've gave up on trying to keep track. It's been Tuesday, 10:24am for God knows how long and I can't make it stop. Time passes, sure, the sun goes down and comes back up, but no matter what every clock in the house says 10:24 and every digital calendar tells it's Tuesday. I've watched as time passes, 10:24 becomes 10:25, 10:26, 10:27...as long as I look at the clock. The minute I look away? 10:24am. And I can't get anyone on the phone. My wife, my boss, my daughter's daycare, my parents; straight to voicemail. I'm getting lots of texts and e-mails from everyone telling me there's nothing wrong, they're fine, but I CANNOT get anyone to answer the phone. I'm probably rambling, let me back up and explain.

When the COVID epidemic hit, like most companies, mine switched to working remotely from home. It worked out great for me, because our daughter was born just before things ramped up so we really needed to be home with her since her daycare shut down. Once things started opening back up, daycare did as well and at that point we REALLY needed her at daycare. My wife's office opened back up, but my company recognized we could do our jobs just as well, if not better, at home than in the office so they kind of let us working in the office or at home at our own leisure, provided we're getting our work done.

At some point, I can't even remember how long ago, my wife left to drop our daughter off at daycare and just...never came home. I typically get wrapped up in what I'm doing, so didn't notice at first, but every time I looked down at my phone the time still read: 10:24am. At first I thought something was going on with the clocks on my phone and computer, but then I noticed the microwave and oven didn't seem to be working either. Confused, I texted my wife, but she assured me there wasn't anything weird on her end. As the day went on, and I started feeling more and more paranoid, I asked her what time she had. After some convincing, she told me: 10:24.

I tried to explain NONE of the clocks changed, but she kind of just brushed me off and told me she was busy and couldn't talk. I'm not a goldfish, so I know that time is passing, so as the day went on I continued getting more and more anxious. I tried to call her, but all I got was voicemail. As the sun started going down and it started getting darker, I started to worry. I asked if she would be leaving soon to pick up our daughter, but she assured me she would get her in about 6 hours when she gets out of work.

Night fell, and she never came home. When she would answer me, which was only by text, it was to tell me nothing is wrong but she's really busy and can't talk right now. The following day, after a completely sleepless night of fear and anger I decide she's run off somewhere, and try to reach our daughter's daycare. Surely they could tell me when my wife picked up our daughter yesterday and maybe knew if something seemed wrong? I call the main office and...voicemail. I e-mail the director, and she assures me everything is fine and my wife dropped our daughter off on that day, Tuesday at 7:30am.

I've made countless similar e-mails and text messages, and it's all the same. And I could almost live with it, if it weren't for the fact that nothing in our house seems to change. Any food I eat reappears, garbage I throw away disappears from the garbage can, anything I put from one place to another materializes back in its original spot. Not right in front of my eyes, but if I leave the room? It's as if whatever I did in that room never happened.

I'll give you all an example. I've got a bowl of 5 bananas on the counter in my kitchen, which has been there for who the eff knows. I eat one, and now I've got 4. And there will always be 4, as long as I sit there and look at them. Or even as long as I'm in the kitchen. But if I walk away to go to the bathroom or get something out of my office? 5 bananas, in a bowl, yellow as the day we bought them.

And I'm almost positive, it's not like magic. Someone, or something, is doing it. And the only reason I say that at this point, is because I hear things. Our house is decent sized, not huge but large enough. We moved in right around when my daughter was born and COVID started. Our previous house was a one-story two-bedroom house, and with my wife and I working from home with an infant we were all always on top of each other. I joked with my wife when we first moved in how weird it was being in a house where I sometimes don't know where she was because we could always hear eachother no matter what part of the house we were in. What I'm trying to say is, it's a house where you can leave one room and not necessarily know what's happening in another.

And what's happening is often...something. When I leave a room, I hear things. Footsteps. Doors opening. Doors closing. Maybe a window every now and then?

What often happens is something like this: I'll eat a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee, wash them, and put them in the dish strainer, eat an apple or a banana, and sit around my living room getting work done. I used to work in the office, but now I need to be in the center of the house for my own sanity. Eventually I'll get up to use the bathroom or grab my slippers or just get something I need, and I'll start hearing it. A door opens somewhere, maybe there's footsteps, maybe there's not, maybe another door somewhere closes. I walk back into the living room, whatever dishes I've used are back in the cupboard and I've got 5 bananas or apples again. And maybe, MAYBE I could live with all of this, if it weren't for the fact that I can't leave.

I don't know why, for some reason I can't leave the house. I haven't been outside in I don't know how long. And believe me, I've tried. I'm not sure what a panic attack feels like, but it's like I get a major panic attack any time I try to walk out the door. I don't know if it's all in my head, or if I'm being drugged, or haunted, or hell maybe I'm in a coma and this is what a coma is like in 2020 (if it even still is?) All I know is, I miss my wife, I miss my daughter, and I have no idea if they're really okay.

So here I sit. Screaming into the void. On a Tuesday, at 10:24am.

The next day I'd gotten the idea to record what's been going on in other parts of the house when I'm not there, which I hadn't thought of, so I decided to try that first. And I almost wish I hadn't.

I had a couple options to do that, and I'm not super tech savvy, so first I tried setting up the webcam on my Chromebook by setting up a Zoom session. I left a few random dishes and food out on the kitchen out to try and catch who or what might be in my house. I then went back into the bedroom, on the other side of the house, and sat and waited. And waited. After a while I used the stopwatch app on my phone to record how long, and it was about 5 hours, and nothing seemed to be happening. Nothing moved on its own, no one came in, and I couldn't hear any noises in any part of the house.

Then the chromebook closed everything out. Just shut the video session off. I swear I heard something on the other side of the house but couldn't be sure, and I rushed down the hall. By the time I got to the kitchen, there was no one there, but everything had been placed back where it was.

At this point I was more frustrated than confused, and I check my chromebook. Still plugged in so the battery was at 100%, and it was still on. It was as if the program running had just been closed out. Which I definitely did not do. Determined, I came up with another idea.

My daughter has a video baby monitor, which is fairly low tech and isn't connected to our Wifi or anything, so I decided to give that a try. It's only black and white and a bit grainy but it's always worked well enough. I set up the camera in the kitchen, again left a ton of stuff out, and turned on the monitor. At this point it was dark, and I figured if I'm being watched I may as well let whoever think I'm going to bed. So I crawled into bed, pulled up the covers, put my hand around the baseball bat I've been keeping under my wife's pillow, and laid there to watch and wait. And wait. And wait.

Until. I started to see movement. Underneath the sink, I watched the cupboard door creak open. And a man crawled out. I wish I could say I sprung out of bed, grabbed the bat, raced into the kitchen and confronted this man. I can't say I'm a brave man. So I laid there. Frozen.

I can't say for sure because I couldn't focus, but he seemed to be fairly bald, somewhat thin, in a dark shirt tucked into jeans. He crawled out onto the floor on his hands and knees, stood up, walked over to the camera, and clicked it off.

I don't know how long I laid there alone in the bed I shared with my wife unmoving. I listened closely for any kind of noise. Footsteps. Voices. The hallway is hardwood, but our bedroom is carpeted. I could likely hear him coming down the hallway, unless I'd already missed it, but I'd never hear him walk across the soft carpet floor until it was too late.

I don't know where he went, but by the time it started to get light out he had never come into our room. Bat in hand, I slowly crept down the hall into the kitchen/living room, ready to swing. No one seemed to be there. But all the food and dishes I left out were back where they belong.

I opened the cupboard under the sink, but found no one. I frantically swung all the cabinets open, but found nothing. It was then I noticed the sliding door. Our kitchen faces the backyard, and has a sliding glass door that opens out onto our back porch. Our house has a fairly open floor plan, so when you walk in you can go up a set of steps into the living room, dining room, and kitchen, and down the hall you'll find our bedroom, my daughter's room, my office, and the bathroom. Back by the front door, there's another set of steps that go down into the finished basement, which has another two doors and a crawlspace in the laundry room.

What I'm trying to get at is there are multiple ways in and out of the house, and I've left them all locked for quite some time now. Except the sliding door in the kitchen was now unlocked. Which could make some sense, because it can't be locked or unlocked from the outside. So, if you were to go out that door, you could close it but you couldn't lock it.

At this point I was done. I had to get out, and I would push through whatever anxiety that was forcing me in the house. I sprinted down the front steps to the door, and a wave of panic and nausea overwhelmed me. I tried to pull myself together and reached for the doorknob, when the doorbell rang. I instinctively ducked down. I don't know why, for all I knew my wife was finally home with our daughter and couldn't get in with the door locked. I peeked out the window, unsure what I would find, and saw a man standing there.

From what I could see, he did not seem to be the same man I saw last night. He was a little heavier, with dark hair and a tie-less suit jacket. After some debate with myself, I decided to open the door. He was either here to kill me or save me, and at this point I couldn't care either way.

I opened the door, and asked him who he was and what he wanted. In short, he explained to me that someone has seen my post on here, which he stated should not have happened. Shouldn't have "gotten through" I think were the words he used. He told me I was being watched, and needed to stop what I was doing and leave things alone. He said he wasn't supposed to be there but wanted to offer me some advice, to stop eating my food. "Not safe" was what he said. He seemed anxious, and looking around a lot. I kept trying to see what he was looking at, or hell, if I could see any of my neighbors around.

Then I heard something, I can't quite describe it. It was a low and quick sound. He seemed to hear it too and looked around as I did. He then fell over and dropped to the ground. Shocked I stood there looking at him, his body motionless and his mouth and eyes wide open. I was sure of it. He was dead. There's a dead stranger on my front step. And I still can't leave. Out of morbid curiosity, I look down at my phone, and as if mocking me, it's still 10:24am. And it's still Tuesday.

I close the door on instinct, unsure of what to do next. Is someone out there? I opened the door again, and to my shock he was still there. I pushed through the sickness I’d been feeling and looked down at him. He was definitely dead, and there were drops of red blood forming on the concrete porch. I dialed 911 knowing I likley would get nothing, and as I expected the call was dropped like I was out of service. I don’t know what I would have even told them.

I spent the rest of the day pacing around the house, trying to think of my next step. I decided to try and make another break for it. I don’t know if someone’s out there, but my chances were better trying to get out than waiting for them to get in. As I discovered last night, they’re in already anyway. I made my way back to the front door, opened it, and stopped. He was gone. Like he was never there. I looked down closer. Wait. Like he was ALMOST never there. I spotted 5 drops of red blood on the steps. He was there, and he was real. And someone took him away.

I felt at this point it might not be safe. I don’t know if it’s my headache from standing at the door for so long, but I felt the best course of action might be to try and sleep, reset, and formulate something tomorrow. I remembered what that man said about the food. Don’t eat anything. “Not safe.” Against my better judgment, I avoided eating or drinking anything. As the day went on I was losing energy and focus, and needed sleep.

But first, I needed some more research. I set up the baby monitor in the kitchen, and made a huge mess. Tons of food out on the counter, pots and pans, I even broke a few plates. I then remembered, we have another camera. When he got the baby monitor, it came with two cameras, one that we typically take with us when we’re going out of town, so it’s tucked back in my daughter’s closet and I’d forgotten about it.

I felt I had the first floor fairly well covered, and would try and make out if anything is happening in the basement. I’ve been doing laundry regularly, and like most containers in my house I’ve drawn a line on the laundry detergent to measure the volume when I use it, and you may or may not be surprised to know the level always returns to where I marked it. I threw in a good week’s worth of clothes, dumped in half a bottle of detergent, and ran it.

Then I got into bed, turned on the monitor, and waited. It had to have been a few hours of waiting and switching back and forth on the two cameras, when finally noticed movement again in the kitchen. The cupboard under the sink started to open, and the same man crawled out. I quickly switched to the camera in the laundry room, but nothing yet.

Switching back, I noticed something I wasn’t expecting. As he stood up, another arm reached across the camera, around the back, and switched it off. Like I feared, there was more than one of them. I didn’t stand a chance in a confrontation. I switched back to the laundry room in time to watch the panel for the crawlspace pop off the wall and clatter onto the ground.

A thin woman climbed out. She had short dark hair, and some kind of shirt and pant combo I couldn’t identify. She stood up and walked towards the camera. Then she stopped, looked at me, smiled, and switched the camera off.

I couldn’t take it anymore. Whoever they are, they’re everywhere, and they know I know they’re here. It was only a matter of time before they came for me.

Baseball bat in hand, I slowly crept out of bed and moved towards the window. I looked once more at the monitor, switching between the laundry room and kitchen. No one in sight. Then I heard footsteps coming down the hall. Slow and deliberate. Letting me know they were coming.

I opened the bedroom window and climbed out.

Fortunately, our bedroom opens out onto the ground on the side yard, so I quickly dropped down and broke into a sprint. I ran down the driveway, into the street, and around the corner. Our neighborhood sits on top of a hill, and our house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac. I got to the top of the hill and ran as fast as I could, down the hill and using gravity to my advantage to speed up.

Halfway down the hill, I picked up too much speed and my feet gave out. I flipped head over feet, at least 5 or 6 times, down the paved hill. I felt the skin on my face scrape off as my shoulders and knees slammed into the pavement. I eventually came to a stop at the end of the street and watched as the bat bounced across the road into the ditch on the other side.

Trying to pull myself up, I moved towards the other end of the street when I heard a large vehicle speed towards me. I looked up as a large dark van stopped in front of me. Two hands grabbed me by the face and pulled me in. We were in motion again before the door closed and I was slammed onto the empty floor of the van.

I looked up at the two large men standing over me. I spotted another man driving, and a fourth stood in the back of the vehicle. Trying to get my bearings, I weighed my options. I’m not much of a fighter, and this man didn’t look to be either, but the other two standing over me surely were. The driver likely wouldn’t be able to get into the back fast enough, and most definitely not without stopping or crashing.

I tensed my body to pounce toward the man in back first. If I take them all by surprise, maybe I have a chance. As I prepared myself to attack, he said, “Your wife and daughter are safe.” I stopped and sat back down. “They’re alive, and it will stay that way if you stop what you’re doing.”

I asked him who they were, what they wanted, what they were even doing. He wasn’t menacing, but spoke with almost indifference. Like when you run into someone at the grocery store and you just don’t have time to talk.

“We’re conducting a test,” he told me.

I asked him, “A test for what?”

“To see what would happen. And you will let us continue, if you want your family to stay safe. They think you’re dead. So does everyone. And that is how it will stay.”

It made no sense to me. I shook my head in disbelief, but he offered me no more explanation. Then I remembered what that other man said about the food. “Not safe.” The groceries we bought years ago that I ate so long ago must surely have been replaced, countless times, by these people. Whoever they are. That might explain the panic attacks, headaches, and nausea whenever I’ve tried to leave. And why I made it so far outside tonight. I haven’t had a bite to eat since yesterday. I don't know what, but they must be doing something to anything I eat. Drugged it with something, I don't know what.

Before I know it, we’re pulling up to my house and I’m being tossed through the front door. I was back home. In my prison, Where I now must stay if there’s any hope of my wife and daughter staying safe.

Whoever, or whatever, they are, are everywhere. They’re in my phone, my computer, answering any of the messages I thought I was sending out to the world. Changing the clocks. 10:24am. They’re in my house, in my walls for all I know. Rearranging and replacing anything to make it seem like anything I do didn't even happen.

For reasons I don’t understand, they want me to believe I am living in this single point in time, as the world goes on around me. So here I sit. It’s 10:24am, and today is Tuesday.