Beyond Reality : the beginning of the end : Ethan path

The next morning, Ethan returned to the case from the beginning.

He was no longer looking for the man.

He was looking for the pattern.

He opened the file and began reviewing the locations where the man had appeared over the past few days:

The station.

The hospital.

The store.

And the other places he had passed through, leaving behind nothing but blurry images and more questions than answers.

After hours of reviewing the footage, Ethan found the first real lead.

His finger stopped above the keyboard.

Two recordings were open in front of him.

The first came from a security camera at a train station.

The second was from a commercial street nearly eight kilometers away.

The problem wasn't the distance.

It was the time.

Ethan played both recordings side by side.

In the first, the man walked slowly past the station before leaving the camera's field of view.

In the second, the same man appeared.

At the exact same moment.

The same movement.

The same pace.

The same direction.

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Ethan slowly raised his head.

"Impossible..."

Even by car, he couldn't have covered the distance that quickly.

On foot, it wasn't even worth considering.

He replayed the footage.

Once.

Then again.

Then a third time.

There was no mistake in the timestamps.

Ethan stared at the screen.

The problem wasn't the man's speed.

The problem was that the distance itself didn't make sense.

He moved on to the other pieces of footage.

There wasn't much.

One of the cameras belonged to a nearby store, but the owner told him that old recordings were automatically deleted every night after being reviewed.

The other recording was so old that the system no longer had it.

Ethan let it go.

There was no point chasing something that no longer existed.

He returned to the only two recordings he still had.

This time, he wasn't watching the man's movements.

He was watching his eyes.

There was something the two recordings had in common that Ethan hadn't noticed at first.

The man wasn't avoiding the cameras.

He knew they were there.

In fact, he was looking directly at them.

At almost the exact same moment, he did the same thing at the other location.

He stopped.

Raised his head.

Looked at the camera.

Then shifted his gaze toward a specific point.

And at that exact moment...

The image shook.

Only for a second.

Then everything returned to normal.

Ethan frowned.

He replayed the scene.

Once.

Twice.

Ten times.

Then he stopped following the man entirely.

Instead, he focused on the direction of his gaze.

At the train station, there was a large sign above the platform.

He read it slowly.

BLACKWOOD.

He wrote the name down.

Then he opened the hospital footage.

The man was standing in front of the main entrance.

He wasn't moving.

He was looking at a notice attached to the door.

Ethan enlarged the image until the words became clear.

"We turn off the lights at midnight."

He remained still.

Then he read the sentence again.

Midnight.

The station.

Blackwood.

The hospital.

The man wasn't leaving messages.

He was pointing toward something.

Something connected to time.

Ethan lifted his eyes from the screen.

"Midnight..."

He had no real evidence.

Only a feeling telling him that none of this was a coincidence.

He opened the computer and typed:

Blackwood.

Several results appeared.

Then he found what he was looking for.

An old area outside the city center, which had recently become known for a luxury hotel built deep within the forest.

Blackwood Forest Hotel.

Ethan read the details.

An isolated location.

Dense forest.

A modern hotel.

And prices that made a person think twice before booking a single room.

He smiled.

"At least if my intuition is wrong... I'll lose the client's money somewhere beautiful."

He closed the laptop and picked up the file.

But he didn't move immediately.

He continued staring at the man's photograph.

Something about it bothered him.

He didn't know why.

Maybe it was the angle of the man's head.

Maybe it was that expression.

Or maybe it was simply his imagination after spending hours staring at the picture.

But for a moment...

Ethan felt that the man wasn't looking at the camera.

He was looking at him.

Ethan closed the file.

He didn't have time to waste thinking about it.

It was approaching four in the afternoon.

He had eight hours until midnight.

Eight hours to reach Blackwood.

Eight hours to find out whether his intuition was leading him to the answer...

Or to something far worse.

He put on his coat, took the file, and left.

Somewhere behind him, the man's photograph remained open on the computer screen.

As Ethan closed the door...

The image flickered for a moment.

Just a brief distortion.

Then it returned to normal.

As if something was waiting for midnight too.

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