Greendog

Jordan’s torch found the hallway first, and I followed him in with the camera steady with him in frame.

The house had been sealed for nine years, according to council records, and it smelled like it. The interior was a chaotic tapestry of damp plaster, mouse droppings, rotting carpet and the sour tang of years-old wallpaper paste.

‘Lovely,’ Jordan said. He was already jumpy, shoulders up around his ears, doing that thing where he narrates in a higher pitch to the camera to keep himself calm, but I could tell he was bloody terrified. He’s hilarious.

‘Right, so we’re in the main corridor, looks like the kitchen’s through there, and this is the living room, I think, on the left. And I’m sensing the atmosphere here. It’s definitely creepy.’

I panned the camera across the walls, night vision on, to capture more detail in the gloom for our viewers at home. Floral wallpaper peeled in long strips like shedding animal skin. A light switch hung without its cover, and on the floor, a fallen calendar showed August 2013. ‘Yeah, that’s the living room. The state of it,’ I said, making out the edge of a sofa covered in magazines, rubbish, and pieces of the ceiling.

We’d filmed a hundred houses like this. The details changed, but the scene was similar. Someone had lived here, their memories absorbed into the plaster, and decades of tat and belongings once cherished left to gather dust on sagging shelves. Then that life had come to an abrupt end. The place now a sad old tomb. And here we were, the absolute lunatics we are, with torches, expensive cameras and microphones, hoping the walls would talk back.

They never did. At least, not in a way that we could confidently and conclusively say, ‘Yes, those two knocks we just heard were one hundred per cent old aunty May in her swaying nightgown talking to us from a parallel dimension.’

That was the thing nobody said out loud on channels like ours. You drove for hours and spent the night in a Holiday Inn or some collapsing building, and you asked your questions into the dark, and what you got was creaking timber, constipated pipes, and your own pulse in your ears. A lot of it, if I’m being completely honest, was the result of a sort of cognitive bias. Like a placebo effect. We heard things because we wanted to hear them. But over all these years of doing this, I believed in what we did because the footage was good, the stories were worth telling, and sometimes the houses gave us enough to make the audience start arguing with each other in the comments. It paid the bills. But I’d never once felt anything I couldn’t explain, and I’d stopped expecting to.

We spent the first hour doing what we always do. Jordan set up the EVP recorder in the kitchen and asked the usual questions: Is there someone here, can you give us a sign, we’re here to learn more about the afterlife. And the recorder picked up nothing but our own breathing and the creak of the house settling and decaying around us. I filmed the rooms methodically, checking corners and noting how bad the mould was on a wall, the dusty photos of university graduates and happy family gatherings, a child’s shoe under the radiator. Enough atmosphere to fill a few minutes of footage, but nothing that would convince anyone there were actually ghosts here. Our work was kept alive by that possibility, but we’d always go home knowing that Jordan’s jokes or the creepy atmosphere were doing the heavy lifting.

Jordan was losing energy. I could tell because he’d stopped narrating and started checking his phone between takes. We’d driven over three hours to get here after a viewer tipped us off, and it had taken an hour to find a way in that didn’t involve putting a brick through anything. So far, it had given us nothing more than a house in dire need of a 24-hour BBC makeover.

I went upstairs alone to check the box room at the near end of the landing. The walls were stained and bare. I could feel a draught even though the window was bolted shut. A wooden shelf unit leaned against the far wall with a few items still on it. There was a ceramic cat with a chipped ear beside a stack of VHS tapes, and next to the tapes was a plastic box lying flat that I recognised before my brain had time to process.

I picked it up. Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude on the Sega Mega Drive. The cover art showed the faded scene of the tanned character riding his skateboard, a cursed pendant dangling, and piranhas snapping. I’d played this exact game on my cousin’s console most Saturdays when I was about eleven. We’d spend whole afternoons trying not to get eaten in the Aztec temples, taking turns when one of us died, arguing about whether the game was hard or whether we were just terrible at it. The cartridge rattled inside when I tilted it, and for a second, I was back in my cousin’s living room with the curtains drawn, glasses of Ribena going warm on the carpet and my aunt’s Chicken Kiev in the oven.

I placed the game back where I found it and went downstairs to find Jordan standing over some magazines in the living room. He didn’t know the game, but he could see my energy had changed, and we set things up to ask questions again. I pointed the camera to get both of us and he spoke clearly, as he always did when he thought something might be listening.

‘Matt found something that means something to him. A Sega game? Can you give us a knock or some kind of sound if you know what this is?’

The house was quiet for long enough that I almost lowered the camera. Then a single tap came from above us, sharp and clean, like a knuckle on wood. Jordan looked at me, and I kept the frame steady.

‘Can you do that again?’

Two taps this time, faster, from the same spot above us. Jordan kept going, and the responses kept coming, quicker and louder and more deliberate with each question. He asked if the game belonged to someone who lived here, and three heavy knocks rattled plaster dust loose from the ceiling. My neck tightened. He asked if they wanted to tell us something, and a bang from the box room upstairs was hard enough to feel through the floorboards. ‘Shitting hell!’ Jordan yelled, and I flinched hard enough to lose the shot.

The house had been dead silent for over an hour, and now it was answering like a bored student who’d finally been asked a question they cared about.

Jordan was electric. This was now the best session we’d had in months, and he knew it. He leaned into every question with his voice level for the camera, even though his hands were shaking. He kept glancing at me between takes with his eyes wide and mouth parted, looking for confirmation, looking to see if I was feeling it too.

I said the right things, kept filming, and kept the frame steady because that was my job, and I was good at it. But something in my chest had tightened when those knocks came quicker and louder, and I couldn’t talk it loose. An hour of nothing, then finding the game, and then this. As if it had been listening the whole time, patient or dormant. That was the part I couldn’t rationalise. The timing of it. Pipes don’t wait for you to find a bloody Sega game before they start banging on cue.

I didn’t say any of this to Jordan. We stood by the stairs for a moment to catch our breath, checking battery levels and equipment. I told him the knocks were probably the heating system, or timber contracting under temperature change, and I could hear how much like bullshit that sounded, even as I said it. He nodded, but his thoughts were somewhere else. He just looked up the stairs, then back at me, and picked up his camera.

Jordan creaked up the stairs, me following, and he stepped into the box room. Still colder here than anywhere else in the house. We approached the shelf.

The lid rested against the wall at an angle, propped rather than fallen, and the cartridge had been set down parallel to the shelf edge as if someone had taken care with it. Laid out the way you’d set down a game you wanted someone to play.

Jordan grabbed my arm, and I kept the camera on it. Steady hand, steady shot.

But my breathing had changed, and I couldn’t make it stop.

. . .

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Alex