#but i gotta be prompted to talk about it..............(it feels like spamming if im not asked lol) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

spookyspaghettisundae · 5 years

Text

Don't Answer the Texts

That night, a strange spectacle played out among the heavy clouds. Colored beams cast by corporate logos and bright floodlights danced to the muted tune of late-hour traffic of a sleepless city. Other lights in the sky joined in, flitting and darting about the busy skyline. She imagined them to be fairy lights or UFOs or some other outlandish thing.

Smoke burned in her lungs and it stung in her eyes as she took another drag from a joint. The high set in a while ago, blending with the buzz from downing a beer beforehand. A nip in the air made her wish she had slung on a jacket before sitting down outside on the tiny balcony and she suppressed a shiver.

After a few more hits, she snuffed the roach out in a small glass ashtray and waited for the smoke to trail off. Her nostrils flared as she savored the pungent scent until it, too, had passed. Her eyes darted back and forth, struggling to follow the dancing lights in the sky. The glow of her phone’s display flaring up inside her darkened apartment drew her attention away from the world outside. Even through the closed balcony window, she could hear the phone’s buzz in her mind.

She returned inside and shut the balcony door behind her, relegating the sounds of the city to an echo that existed only in her mind. The phone’s display had already stopped glowing and turned pitch-black once more, reflecting the dim light that continued to follow her from outside. She stared at the device, wondering if she should give the concept of a digital detox a try some time.

Dismissing the thought, she picked up the phone and its display sprung back to luminescent life.

Texts from an unknown number had arrived.

The two messages read: “This weird egg-like thing hatched. I can’t really describe it.”

She hesitated and pondered how to handle this. Immediately blocking the unknown number was her first instinct, but the messages themselves were so delightfully weird that they intrigued her and piqued her curiosity.

Instead of fully indulging that notion, she answered the texts with, “Is this a prank? Who is this?”

Expecting no fast response and in fact nothing at all to come of it, she put the phone down and made her way towards the kitchen to grab some iced tea. She froze just a few steps away when the phone buzzed, vibrating loudly on the coffee table. Her head swiveled to look at it and she saw the hints of text messages displayed on the lock screen.

Taking a deep breath, she returned to check those messages.

“Stop fucking around, Dave,” said the message. And then another flashed onto the screen, saying, “Come over NOW. Can’t find whatever came out of the egg.”

This prompted a shiver to run down her spine and she quickly thumbed through the display to block the number. She just wanted to sit down, watch her favorite show, and relax a bit. And her throat was beginning to feel a bit parched.

Once she had reprised the quick detour into the kitchen and taken some greedy gulps of the cold tea, she returned to the couch and slid into her favorite spot while switching on the lamp next to her in one fluid motion, stifling a short giggle that erupted from thinking about those prank texts and how random their wording was.

She almost choked on the laugh when the phone buzzed again and its display flared up once more. The buzzing sounded really loud, almost like thunder against the glass surface of her coffee table, causing assorted objects like her red plastic lighter and the tiny Ziploc bag filled with weed to quiver and vibrate along with it. Something about the rattling noise made her heart skip a beat and gave her a queasy feeling in the belly region.

Without even picking up the phone, the new message she had received was short enough for her to read it right on the lock screen.

“Don’t answer the texts,” it said. Again an unknown number.

She snatched the phone and swiped through the options with lightning speed. There was no way she was going to deal with this crap now.

Number blocked.

She exhaled sharply and wiggled her nose as the beginning of a sneeze began to tickle her. Dropping the phone onto the couch cushion so any future buzzing sounds would ring less violently than they had against the coffee table, she switched her TV on and pulled her blanket over herself, snuggling into it.

A few minutes into the show, it dawned on her how little she was paying attention to it. Instead, she kept stealing glances at her phone, sitting next to her on the couch. Why did she put it there? Was some part of her expecting more of these bogus texts to keep barreling in? She wondered.

She rubbed her tired eyes and blinked, struggling to maintain focus on the program on her TV’s screen in front of her. Pulling up her blanket until it covered the lower half of her face like a scarf gave her a little bit of comfort. Inspired by the Victorian-themed horror series she watched, it made her imagine another world or life in which she was a kick-ass huntress like the one in the red scarf on-screen, fighting weird creatures and demons in the foggy streets.

A split second before she even realized it, a clipped gasp escaped her mouth when the phone buzzed again. It indeed sounded less violent as it shook rapidly against the soft cushion, but its volume suffered little from the phone’s transition from coffee table to couch.

The show on TV flashed along, but she only saw from the corner of her eye how their costumed figures moved. They talked in the show, but her focus on the phone’s screen rendered the dialogue into unintelligible background mumbling.

“the stuff animals r moving,” said the text on the lock screen. Unknown number. Another message followed right after, saying “im scared”

She unwrapped a hand from the human burrito that she was in her warm blanket, and reached out to her phone. Her hand trembled. It took her fingers so long to reach the device that the phone’s screen went black again.

A sense of cottonmouth took over. She swallowed emptily, as if that would help untie the knot that her stomach had just turned into.

She almost dropped the phone when it vibrated again in her hands as another text message arrived.

"they wont listen to me,” the follow-up said. And then a fourth message, reading, “but their telling me to find sum scissors!!”

She quickly blocked this number as well. And then she really tried to pry her attention away from her phone and focus on the show on TV, but it was just shifting figures and blurs of backgrounds and random lines being spouted and none of it registered in her mind. Her mind raced in between wondering how many people might be pranking her at the same time and quelling pangs of guilt over not responding to what might be an actual emergency.

However, she had never set the phone down and it vibrated again, this time in her palm. The sound was much more muted but the buzz of it wandered down her arm like a jolt of electric energy.

Her heart raced to the pace of a million beats a minute and she turned the phone ever so slightly to see the message she had received this time.

“You gotta call the cops, someone is lurking around granny’s grace,” said the message. From yet another unknown number.

She blinked and began to piece things together. Through the thin fog of a haze in her mind from the buzz, sifting through the pings of paranoia accompanying her every thought, she began to form a clear explanation: she was being targeted. Some dumb jerks, whether she knew them or not, were harassing her. It had to be easy for someone with the technical savvy to keep spamming her with different spoofed numbers, right?

“Fuck off,” she replied in a text message. “I’m calling the cops alright,” she added in another message, typing it out with tremendous speed and fury.

“*grave,” came an immediate response, impossibly being a reaction to her own—a correction of a typo in the first one. Then another anonymous text that read, “This is creepy af.”

She groaned in frustration and blocked this number as well.

And then she did what she now thought she should have done several texts ago. She dialed 911 on her phone and let it ring.

Someone picked up and answered, “911, do you need police, fire or medical assistance?”

“Police, please,” she replied to the feminine voice on the other end of the line. The calm tone on the other end gave her a brief respite, a trace of relief.

“What’s the address?”

“It’s, um,” she frowned and stashed the weed baggy in the pocket of her trainer pants as if that helped hide anything. “I don’t think that’s needed, uh, it’s not about something happening here, it’s about harassment calls to my cell.”

“We still need your address for the records. And you are at home right now?”

Answering in the affirmative, she then stammered through the entire address of her apartment building and gave her name. She gulped again, licking her lips as the sensation of thirst and cottonmouth kicked into overdrive.

“Alright ma'am. What is the emergency?”

“I am getting a lot of texts from a lot of different unknown numbers, and I keep blocking them, but I keep getting more and more.”

She must have sounded like a crazy person. Or paranoid. Or panicked, even. She was now scared of the cops arresting her, though.

“But there is nothing actually happening at your home right now?”

“Uh, no. Isn’t there, like, something you can do remotely by just having my phone number or whatever? Like cybercrime or whatever?”

The operator on the other end paused before giving an answer to that, “I am not clear on how to handle this, but please give me a second.”

“Okay,” she said to the operator.

The call went silent. Her phone buzzed in her hand, vibrating against her ear. She dared not check what message she might have received this time.

“Alright, help is on the way. A police officer has been dispatched to your address. I just have a few more questions, okay?”

She bit her lip, getting more nervous at the thought of cops showing up after she had smoked some weed.

“Uhuh. Uh, wait, you know what? I don’t think this is necessary. I think I can just contact my phone provider and sort this out on my own, thanks, bye,” she said with the words cascading out in a nervous stream. She hung up right away and started swearing in a hushed tone while pacing back and forth in her living room.

With hasty moves, she quickly hid the drugs and anything that might suggest her habits.

Her phone buzzed again, but she had dropped it onto the sofa, display facing down. The thin line of glowing light shone out from underneath it, but she could only imagine what creepy text message she had received this time.

The flashing of blue and red lights outside her apartment window grabbed her attention and made her swear again, cursing how quickly time flew by whenever she was high. A glance outside the balcony window confirmed that a patrol car without blaring sirens had pulled up and parked in front of her block. The lights on the car died off and a silhouette of a figure got out of the driver’s side, slammed the door shut, and entered her building.

She rushed into the bathroom and sprayed on some deodorant and perfume. She quickly gulped up some mouthwash and gargled it before spitting it out, and no second too soon.

Someone rang her doorbell. She washed her hands and face, scrubbing them down, taking her time to be thorough and make sure she got any sort of yellow discoloration or weed residue off and out from underneath her fingernails.

Then the pounding began. Someone just hammering away at her apartment door with their fist, slamming against it and causing a deep baritone thunder to ring out throughout her humble home, making her heart drop down into her pants. She scurried over to the front door and the pounding stopped with the same abruptness as it had begun.

Peering through the spy hole, what she saw defied every expectation. She had expected someone dressed in a police officer’s uniform and an according badge. Instead, she looked at someone dressed in a firefighter’s attire, holding a fire axe in one hand.

She had expected a man to be standing there, but what greeted her was something that only looked like a man at first glance, save for one small detail. Where his eyes should have been were just hollow sockets. Blackened around the edges as if something had scorched and burnt the jelly of the eyeballs right out. She stared into the void of those eye sockets and saw something move inside there, like worms, or a roiling mass of flesh and teeth.

Her stomach churned and she stumbled away from the door. The door bounced in its hinges when the strange visitor began pounding against it again. He—or it?—began ringing the doorbell at the same time, slamming against the door with vigorous force.

She whimpered and ran to her couch to get her phone.

Just in the process of unlocking it, she saw some of the messages she had received in the meanwhile.

The top one read, “This shit is beige or brown and it sticks like glue. Tf r u?”

Unknown number.

“im not goin crazy theres whispers in the walls,” said another text message.

Unknown number.

Her brain barely grasped the content because she quickly thumbed through to her contacts to call a friend. But the sight of her contact list confused her. The thundering punches against her front door in the background compounded her confusion, distracting her and making her heart get in sync, adding to her terror.

Some sort of glitch had jumbled up all the names and numbers in her contact list. No matter how far down she scrolled, all she could see were strings of random characters and numbers all over the place.

A sudden incoming message made her fumble her grip on the phone, causing it to bounce between her hands and giving her just enough time to glimpse the text before she could focus on the useless contact list again.

“Someone’s right outside my bedroom, you need to help me,” said the text.

She swiped it away and tapped one of the entries from her contact list—any one, it did not matter which one—and initiated a call.

It rang a few times. The not-officer-fireman-with-no-eyes outside continued to hammer against the door. Then he stopped. The phone rang some more. The not-man outside started striking the door now. She knew how, too: not with his fists, but with his axe.

Whomsoever the number belonged to that she had blindly called, that person picked up.

Her voice trembled even more violently than her body now when she immediately started pleading, “Help, some crazy person is trying to—”

Screeching. She yanked the phone away from her ear. The device emitted obnoxious static and ear-piercing screeching noises. Axe strike after axe strike landed against the outside of her door. Only wasting some seconds to stare at her phone in terror and with tears welling up in her eyes, she tapped the screen to hang up the call.

Wood splintered as the axe’s head breached the front door.

She scrambled and almost tripped over her coffee table as she charged into the kitchen to find a knife. She rifled through the drawer until she gripped the biggest one. The door splintered some more, with a beam of light from the hallway outside pouring in through the hole that this evil thing had created.

As if it would help at all, she held her breath and her heart raced, blood rushed in her ears. Reality and survival instincts set in and some part of her knew that she had no chance and that this psycho-monster—whatever it was—was going to murder her.

She furiously started typing a message to one of the random numbers on her list.

First, she sent her address. A gloved fist broke through the hole of her door, splayed its fingers, and pawed blindly at the locks. When it found purchase, it removed first the chain, and then twisted the lock. Clickety-clack. She tapped away one-handed, writing a second message. The doorknob twisted.

“Send help. Dont call the cops. Cop dressed like fireman, eye sockets are hollow and have teeth—”

The front door swung open and the heavy boots stomped in as the creature entered.

Without finishing it, she sent the message.

It did not even look at her, for it had no eyes—it sensed her blood and soul. It approached with a raised axe. Running on the intelligence of its sinister hive-mind, the creature acted without hesitation and without remorse. Everything fell into place, like the axe into the skull. The confusion was flawless, like the terror in this victim’s face. The carnage would be spectacular, just like her agonized screams, and her knife drawing blood from the chest of this useless vessel to no effect just confirmed what the hive-mind already knew.

This invasion would succeed.

—Submitted by Wratts

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