I found the phone in the "untested" bin of a dusty thrift store on the edge of town—a cracked iPhone 6s with a faded sticker of a sunflower on the back. For five dollars, I figured if I couldn't fix it, I’d at least have some spare parts.

I looked at the date stamp in the file info:

After an hour of cleaning the charging port and a frantic jump-start of the battery, the screen flickered to life. There was no passcode. The previous owner hadn't wiped it; the gallery was empty, save for a single file in the "Recents" folder.

"I don't think it's following anymore," a girl’s voice whispered. She sounded young, maybe seventeen.

I looked back at the sticker on the phone's case. The sunflower wasn't a sticker. It was a hand-drawn doodle in permanent marker, identical to the ones on the "Missing" posters that had been plastered around my neighborhood ten years ago.

The camera spun around, the flashlight beam cutting through the dense woods. For a split second, the light caught something tall and pale standing behind a birch tree. It wasn't a person. It was too thin, its limbs segmented like an insect's, and its eyes—if they were eyes—reflected the light like polished chrome.

The girl gasped, and the running started again. The footage became a blur of dark branches and strobe-like flashes of light. Then, suddenly, the girl tripped. The camera tumbled through the air, landing face-up in the dirt.

I reached for the power button, but the screen stayed black. The battery hadn't died; the phone was cold, as if it had never been turned on at all.