At 5:03, Mrs. Templeton came back in; she must have forgotten something. But she didn’t. She bought the same pack of cigarettes as before, and the same newspaper. She paid with another twenty. That’s odd, I thought, but then again, she’s a little absent minded. I thought Jeremy should have told her she already got her smokes, but it’s not against the rules to sell somebody the same thing twice. That’s when Ron came in again. He bought another tank of gas (for his motorcycle again–I later checked the outdoor camera because I thought maybe he had another car he wanted to fill up) and the same pack of beef jerky. He paid with his credit card again.
No big deal, I figured this was just a weird coincidence. Mrs. Templeton is forgetful and Ron probably owns more than one Harley. That’s when the guy in the cowboy hat came back in. I felt a chill run down my spine. “Don’t get diesel, don’t get diesel,” I found myself whispering to my empty living room…but he did. He got forty dollars worth of diesel fuel and paid with another hundred dollar bill. Every move he made was identical to his first visit, right down to the way he scratched his nose before he walked out. Either this guy is rich, owns a lot of trucks, and just moved into town, or something really bizarre was happening. I kept watching.
Every customer for the next hour was the same as before. Every single one. I was seriously freaked out, and then at 6:03, Mrs. Templeton walked back in. She bought her cigarettes and newspaper again, and paid with a twenty again. I thought I was going to lose it. I only watched another half hour before I started fast forwarding through the rest. It was all the same. Every customer would come in at the exact same times, exactly one hour apart.
Now I know what you’re thinking. That sneaky motherfucker Jeremy had messed with the tapes. He had run a loop of his first hour of business over and over. That wasn’t the case. There are windows around the cash register area that the camera covers, and I watched the sunlight fade as time ran on. Jeremy’s routine didn’t loop over–he swept, mopped, restocked, and did all his duties exactly how you would expect. But the same customers kept coming in.
I was panicking at this point. Something was seriously wrong with what I was seeing, and I had no explanation for it. I skipped ahead to when he locked up and walked out to his car. He hadn’t stolen anything, but I kept watching, just to make sure. I fast forwarded one last time, to about midnight.
At exactly 12:03, out of nowhere, Jeremy’s face pops up on camera. I don’t mean he moved his head into view, I mean that one second the store was empty, the next second his face was all I could see. He wasn’t looking at the camera, he was looking at me, I was sure of it. I screamed and fumbled for the remote. By the time I grabbed it, he was gone, just as soon as he had left. One frame he was there, the next he wasn’t. My hands were shaking like crazy, but I popped in another tape. The other indoor camera shows the back area, by the cash register, and I would be able to see how he got up to put his face in the camera like that. I skipped ahead to 12:03, but there was nothing. I would have been able to see him standing on a chair or something on this tape, but he wasn’t there. I didn’t see him enter the store at all after he left. It’s like he wasn’t really there. He doesn’t know the security code, and no alarms were triggered that night after he locked up.
What I did see, however, was that at 12:03, the motor oil vanished off the shelf. All of it. Same as Jeremy’s face, one second it was there and the next it wasn’t. I turned that tape off and went to bed, but I didn’t get a wink of sleep. My body is exhausted right now, but my mind is racing. That tape was undoubtedly the creepiest, most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
I work in a few hours. My boss asked me to bring the tapes back in and let him know what I found, but really, what the hell am I going to say? Jeremy works the night shift tonight, directly after me, and the plan is for my boss to come in just before I leave and confront him with me (as I’m supposed to be the one who caught him stealing). I have no idea what I’m going to do. I suppose I’ll have to show my boss the tapes, but I don’t want to watch them with him. I never want to see something like that again. I can’t get the image of Jeremy just smiling directly into the camera out of my mind; it was the creepiest look I’ve ever seen on another human being’s face.