I Woke Up To My Own Laughing On The Baby Monitor… But I Was Still In Bed

Chapter 1: The First Smile

I woke up at 3:12 a.m. to the sound of my own voice laughing in the dark.

Not a dream. Not a memory. It was coming from the baby monitor on my nightstand — the one I still kept after my daughter moved out last year. The screen was on. Grainy night-vision green filled the frame, showing my living room downstairs.

I was sitting on the couch.

Except I was lying in bed right now, heart hammering against my ribs.

The version of me on the screen turned slowly toward the camera, as if it knew I was watching. It smiled — wide, too wide, teeth catching the infrared light like wet bone. Then it raised one hand and waved.

I didn’t wave back.

My real hand was gripping the monitor so hard the plastic creaked. I hadn’t been downstairs in hours. I’d gone to bed at eleven, exhausted from another double shift at the hospital.

The thing wearing my face kept smiling. Then it spoke, voice crackling through the tiny speaker:

“Hey, buddy. You should come down. We’ve been waiting for you.”

I slammed the monitor off and threw it across the room. It hit the wall and went dead.

For ten full minutes I sat there in silence, listening. The house was quiet. Too quiet. No footsteps. No breathing. Just the low hum of the fridge downstairs.

I told myself it was a glitch. Some hacker fucking with the old Wi-Fi camera. Or maybe I was sleepwalking and the footage was from earlier. Yeah. That had to be it.

I forced myself to go downstairs, turning on every light as I went. The living room was empty. The couch cushions still had the dent from where I’d sat watching TV hours ago. Nothing out of place.

I almost laughed with relief.

Until I checked the camera app on my phone.

There was a new recording, timestamped three minutes ago.

I pressed play with a shaking thumb.

The living room appeared again. I was sitting on the couch, staring straight up at the camera with that same unnatural smile. But this time the angle was different.

It was filmed from the ceiling corner.

And in the bottom of the frame, I could see the top of my own head — the real me — standing frozen in the doorway, looking up at the thing that wore my face.