A normal person would have deleted it immediately. Elias, fueled by a mix of caffeine and curiosity, double-clicked.
Just as the figure reached the screen, reaching out a hand made of pixels and cold wind, the program crashed. The monitor went black.
Panic surged. Elias tried to shut down the computer, but the power button was dead. The "Procession" was moving closer. The tenor note grew louder, layering upon itself until it sounded like a thousand voices screaming in perfect, haunting harmony.
When the file finally settled on his desktop, he right-clicked to extract it. But as the decompression finished, something was wrong. Instead of a folder full of .wav or .flac files, there was only one: Procession.exe .
Elias sat in the dark, breathing hard. The silence had returned, but it was different now. It was the silence of an empty chapel. He looked down at the folder. The .rar file was gone. In its place was a single text document titled Thank_You_For_Inviting_Us_In.txt .
