"Texting"

First, I have to apologize for a few things. 

Number one, for those readers that are fans of Pigeons, it's going to be a couple weeks until the next installment. I know, living without finding out what happens is going to be tough, but please bear with me. 

Next, I have to apologize to my long-time fans. October is always a special month for me- I love scary stories, and typically October on my blog is the time when my macabre side is given time to shine. I've been neglecting my horror-loving readers this season due to other projects and commitments. 

No longer!

This is the first scary story I've written in a long time (the first short story period I've written in a long time actually), and it felt great to be back in the saddle. I've been watching scary movies all month in preparation for my favorite holiday of the year. I finished the four Scream movies last week. They may or may not have influenced this story. A little. 

"Texting"
Aaron M. Smith- October 2013

My phone dinged. One new text message. 

I paused the video I was watching on my computer and rolled the chair back from my desk so I could reach my phone on the bed. I unlocked it and read the message.

Hey hot stuff

I glanced at my phone again. Not a number I recognized. Not even an area code I recognized. Somebody must have texted me by accident. 

I stared at the text, thinking. I’ve seen a couple of these on the internet before- someone gets a text from an unknown number, they text back, the original texter has no idea, they keep going, hilarity ensues. 

I smiled. What the hell, let’s have a little fun. Not like I was doing anything tonight anyway.

Hey what’s up?

Nothin what r u n 2?
 

I received the response almost instantly, like whoever’s texting me is waiting to reply. 

Might go out for a drink, I reply.

Naw, u should come party with us

Oh, hello. This was getting interesting. 

Us?

Me and the girls, duh.
 

Oh hell yes. 

Cool, where u guys at?

The apartment, came the reply. 

Whose apartment?, I wrote.

Mine.

Aw crap. I might have to give myself up after all. I decided to take the gamble.

Where’s that again?

No immediate text back this time. Had she realized that she’d been texting the wrong guy?

1440 Broadway, #136 god ur forgetful 

Haha I know, I wrote, breathing a sigh of relief. 

Bring booze, she wrote back. 

I found a sweatshirt in my closet and pulled it over my head. I was already in my sock drawer taking out some of my personal stash when I caught myself. 

Woah. You don’t even know who this person is. For all you know this apartment is full of huge dudes who are going to rob you, beat you and leave you for dead. 

I slipped a little glass flask into my jeans pocket as I opened my dorm room door.

Nah. Nah, nothing’s going to happen. It’s going to be fine. 

And what are you going to say when you get there? An annoying voice in my head chimed in. Oh hi, you texted me accidentally so I thought I’d crash your party, by the way here’s some cheap tequila.

Actually, that might be exactly what I say. Beat sitting at home on Netflix on a Friday night.

1140 Broadway was only a couple blocks away, so I decided to walk it rather than walk to the student parking lot and get my car.

It only took about ten minutes, but by the time I got there I was cold and tired of walking. The flask of booze in my pocket was making my butt freeze in the November evening, and every step seemed to be one more reason to turn my frozen ass around and finally finish season six of Buffy.

But here I was, a crappy looking apartment complex on a not-great end of town at nearly midnight to meet… who? Some disembodied voice.

I could see the building where apartment 136 was when I stopped in my tracks. I stood there in the darkness for a minute, watching my breath cloud in front of my face. 

My phone buzzed in my sweatshirt, making me jump and making my phone tumble out onto the concrete. I groaned and picked it up.

Where u at?
 

I hesitated, then wrote Outside.

I watched as a tiny diamond of yellow light appeared in the venetian blinds of one of the apartments in front of me. Then a silhouetted head briefly blocked the light before it vanished.

There u are. Come on!

I walked to the door of the building, my mind spinning. Okay, time to think up a plan. Hi, no, sorry, I’m not the guy you were looking for, but I did get your text, and uh… look! Tequila! Yeah, that might work actually. Girls love tequila. 

That idea started to look less appealing as I climbed the stairs. For all they knew I was some serial killer who stalked and killed girls who accidentally texted his number. What if they maced me as soon as I walked in? Well might ruin my evening. 

No need to jump to conclusions, I thought as I reached the top of the stairs. For all I know these are perfectly nice people who’d love to meet someone knew. Someone who just happened to have a pocket full of tequila that he was willing to share. 

Number one-thirty-six. I walked up the door and knocked. Nobody answered for a moment. I tried the knob- locked. I pulled out my phone and tapped out a quick text- hey the door’s locked.

Oops, came the reply. I heard the knob click, but nobody opened the door. I waited a second, then tried the knob myself again. It was unlocked this time. 

When I opened the door, I was initially surprised to see that nobody was in the living room. There was music playing from a stereo in the corner, and some chick TV show was playing on the television on mute. I could see the kitchenette from the door- the door of the fridge was standing open. 

“Hey,” I called out. “Hey, I’m here!” 

I hadn’t anticipated this- would I freak them out if I walked into another room? At what point did the probability of getting maced outweigh the potential to meet a bunch of girls?

Determining I hadn’t met that threshold yet, I let myself in and walked through the apartment. There was only a short hall that led to a back bathroom and probably a bedroom.

“Hey, I got your text,” I said. “I, uh, I brought tequila!” 

I walked into the bedroom. 

The girl hanging from the ceiling fan was obscuring the light from the single fixture, silhouetting her body against the harsh yellow light. 

I screamed and backpedaled right into the door frame, then slipped and fell on my butt on the carpet, bruising my tailbone on the glass flask in my pocket. 

The girl had probably been beautiful once- short blonde hair cut in a bob framed her face, which had turned purple-gray in asphyxiation. Her grey-blue eyes were wide opened and nearly bugging out of her head. The whites had been stained red from her blood vessels rupturing. 

I finally managed to tear my eyes off of her and turned to the bathroom, which was adjacent to the bedroom. I barely made it to the toilet before I completely emptied my stomach. I wretched until I dry heaved and could only taste the bile. 

I spat into the toilet until I was sure I wouldn’t puke all over the carpet. Then I stood and walked back into the bedroom, carefully looking at the dead girl’s feet instead of her face. She was wearing a light blue nightgown. I carefully touched one exposed ankle with two fingers. She was cold and clammy- she’d been here a while. A stool was on its side a few feet away.

That was when I noticed it. Something else on the floor, near the stool, a little black rectangle. Her phone. 

I couldn’t look at it. I knew what I’d see when I did, Instead I took my phone out of my pocket to call the police. 

My thumb slipped, and I accidentally dialed the last number I’d been texting. 

The phone on the carpet at the feet of the dead girl began to buzz. No. No, no no this was impossible. I was going crazy. I couldn’t even be here right now, could I? 

A creaking noise made me jump, and I turned back toward the living room. I could just make out the voices over the sound of the stereo. I tiptoed back toward the entry.

Someone was talking, just on the other side of the door. Two voices, one man and one woman. 

Five heavy thumps on the door nearly made my heart stop. I held my breath, sure that my fevered mind had just imagined them, the sound of my heartbeat in my own ears magnified a thousand times in the apartment of a suicidal girl. 

“Police, please open the door,” came an authoritative man’s voice. 

Oh, shit.

The prospect of opening the door didn’t even cross my mind. I ran to the second bedroom. It was painted light pink with a pink-and-brown patterned bedspread. A guitar and some books and a cheap desk filled the tiny room. I looked out the window- it overlooked a different side of the parking lot than I’d come from, and in the darkness I could make out a little patch of grass beneath the window. 

I opened the window and looked down. The drop was probably fifteen feet to the ground, maybe less. Five more heavy thumps sounded on the door, followed by more authoritative shouting.

“Police, please open the door.”

Who the hell had called the police? I didn’t have time to consider it- I had one leg out the window when a thought struck me. I ran back into the other bedroom and kept my eyes locked on the floor until I saw the girl’s phone. I snatched it off the carpet and crammed it into my pocket before I could think twice about the idea. 

Then I slipped out of the small bedroom window.

Something popped in my ankle when I landed, and I cried out as I fell onto my knees and rolled before ending up on my back in the grass and dirt. 

I gritted my teeth- what if another cop had heard that? I stayed low to the ground and listened- nothing. I winced in pain as I started to walk, going as quickly as I dared without looking too conspicuous. Hot lances of pain raced up my leg with each step. I could taste metal- I must have bit my tongue when I landed. God, I regretted ever opening that stupid text message. 

That reminded me about the phone in my pocket. I fished out the girl’s phone and unlocked it- it didn’t have a password. I opened her text messages and saw, right at the top, the conversation she and I had been having. 

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I read back through the text message conversation in reverse, staring with the most recent. It was dated ten minutes ago. How the hell was it dated ten minutes ago? That girl had to have been dead for… hours. Days, maybe. After a moment I realized that my feet had stopped walking- I had to force myself to keep moving, get back to my room.

Wait. Something was wrong. I scrolled back through the messages, all the way to the first one she sent me on accident. 

Or, it should have been the first one. There were others, sent from my phone.

Nice meeting you tonight

Hey, let’s hang out

Don’t you know I love you?

Just who do you think you are?

YOU THINK YOU CAN JUST IGNORE ME

YOU THINK I’LL JUST GO AWAY

I’m not going away

I’ll show you

Two weeks. The conversation went back two weeks. As I walked I removed my own phone from my pocket and compared them. Of course it was in my phone, too. The timestamps matched up perfectly. 

I hadn't written those messages. I couldn't have. They sounded crazy. 

You've been getting texts from a dead girl all evening. You just walked into her apartment, stole her phone, then broke out when the cops arrived. Are you absolutely sure you aren't crazy?
 

What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t call the cops. How could I explain how I got this girls phone? Oh god, the cops. They were going to find my DNA and fingerprints all over that apartment. Who was this girl, anyway? Had she told anyone else about me?

No, she couldn’t have told anyone about you because you’ve never seen her before! A hysterical voice screamed inside my head. 

I needed to get back to my room. Get back home, go to sleep, and maybe this whole nightmare would be over when I woke up. Yeah. Clear my head, get everything straight. This had nothing to do with me.

I put the foreign phone back into my pocket as I idly scrolled down to the end of the message on my own phone. 

The last line of the text was different this time. There was another message from the other phone, sent… oh god. Just minutes ago. It said,

Why r u leaving? The party just started.