Authors: Stephen Graham Jones
We’d never built in a kill switch. I was going to have to go back in, release the gyroscope after the first pic. If I didn’t, the processor would lag, trying to run post-production on a stack of polaroids.
You can’t think of everything, though.
Before opening my door again, I checked behind me. Just to be sure.
Nothing.
I crashed on my bed, my back wedged into the corner like always, headphones cupping my ears, and checked the images.
They were empty.
I mean, my hall was there, and there was a smudge of disturbance at about chest-level, telling me something had tried to load in there. But it had aborted.
This is the way it goes, yeah. You duck in for a quick-fix, just to see how something works, and then nothing’s working.
It was probably the banner’s feed slot that was jacking with the fade-in, too. I was strict with always using all jpeg or all png or all gif in whatever I wrote, but RJ always said he could keep it straight, it’s not like he was going to do something global with them all at once, right?
Except the app
was
doing something global with the array it was pulling from the hidden directory.
Oh, wait: the hidden directory that
wasn’t there
.
Of course it couldn’t load the images.
Still, the way we’d written it, there should have been a big distortion in the hall, not a small, unenlarged one. And, if this app was going to work, if it was going to generate revenue, then that banner needed to quit jacking with things.
And, because we didn’t have sponsors yet, the banner RJ had dummied in, just to make sure it fit, it was Zelda. The old one.
It made me lean over, see if my NES console was still in the corner somewhere, tangled in its cords. Maybe one last turn through Hyrule would be the right send-off for RJ. The right thank you. Because—it’s stupid, but we’d never really left it behind. That first day RJ’s dad had mentioned red light, green light to us in the kitchen? Why I’d been the one sitting on the island, not RJ, it was because of Zelda. In the NES version he’d introduced me to in third grade, he’d always been fascinated with the boulders, with how, if you walked around some of them three times, then came back the other way, a door would open up.
For us in elementary, the same way the floor lamp in my living room had always been the robber, come to take me away, his kitchen island had always been our boulder. One time, spending the night, he even told me that’s where his mom had really gone, he was pretty sure. That he had walked wrong to the refrigerator, gone back for the butter he’d forgot by the toaster, then gone back the other way around the island, made some secret door swing open in her closet, and she had just reached through, fallen the rest of the way.
It’s stupid, but it’s real. Or, it was to us.
“You shit,” I said to him, just out loud, for making me think of all that again, but then . . . could that be it? This app
had
lived on RJ’s rig at the end, after all. What if the little image-reverse he’d built in, what if that was Link, turning back to go the opposite way around the boulder now? What if the doubletwist plus one necessary to open whatever door, what if it was just holding your phone upside down (1), backwards (2), and
then
flipping that image (3), which was already under so much strain just to stay straight?
That was just three things, though.
The boulders always required a fourth.
I checked my phone just before it shook in my hand, reminding me the images were ready—RJ’s idea.
I scrolled through them, still empty, and then the phone shook again, which was one more time than we’d coded for. Had RJ sneaked a
reminder
vibration in as well? But where? It would be scary, though, like the app was insisting, was trying to warn the user.
But one thing at a time.
I slammed the pics onto my laptop to try to figure if that distortion in the air could help me diagnose things.
It didn’t.
The scaled-back pictures that shouldn’t have been there, as their directory had been burned—there they were, stacked on my desktop. I clicked the top one, had a bigger screen now, and could zoom, see that it was just the crawling girl, scaled back to bug-size, hanging there in the air of the hall, not even remotely scary.
“Are you local or what?” I asked the top one, and thumbed through my phone’s cache.
No.
I wheeled the crawling girl close then far, close then far, like she was coming for me.
It wasn’t scary.
Still, before getting back to the real work of the night—it was completely possible my phone had cached those hundred images in some way I was too tired to lock onto—I decided to make sure the sampling was truly random, anyway, wasn’t just the first few from the array. Because that wouldn’t be nearly so easy a fix. Cracking RJ’s fake randomness, the 128 bit keys he liked to paste in, pretend he was hinging stuff on—it would be easier to just start over.
And maybe those keys were the source of the problem, even. Or the secret to keeping the lateral straight.
The top pic I’d already been seeing, of course. Crawling girl. Next was the shadow fingers we’d rigged reaching around a corner, but, just like all the
sneak_up
images in RJ’s hall, the app had placed them perfectly somehow, right on the edge of the doorway opening onto the living room.
Maybe the width of the hall did matter.
I nodded, went to the next.
It was the smoke. Like a progression.
Maybe that was a good idea, too, if we ever did that fake animation on the paid version: sequence the stock images, build some logic in that wouldn’t let this one pop unless that one had.
I clicked ahead, looking at my door instead of the screen for no real reason, and, when I came back to the laptop I felt a new hollowness in the deadspace behind my jaws, pushed the screen away so hard it shut.
My lungs were trying to hyperventilate or something.
No, my head, my
head
was doing that.
Same difference.
I looked to the door again. It was still shut.
I came back to the laptop, its side-light telling me it wasn’t asleep yet, no. That it was waiting for me.
What I’d seen, what was there, it was—but it couldn’t be.
A boy, about twelve. Washed-out and black and white. Skinny, shirtless, his pants just hanging off him.
RJ in sixth grade?
I wanted it be him, yes, because our summer romance wasn’t over. Then
he
could be the fourth time around the boulder, right? The app only hits hyperdrive or whatever after satisfying 1, 2, 3, and a strange fourth, which, like Cedric had been for him, could be somebody close to you, dead. A blood sacrifice, to lubricate those doors that shouldn’t open.
But it wasn’t RJ.
RJ would never pull a lampshade over his head and stand there like that, just waiting for me to see him.
It was my dad when he was a kid. I knew. All his anger, his rules, his haircuts and talks, it was all there in the empty spaces between his ribs. The muscles that hadn’t grown in. The bruises, the white lines of old cuts, burns above the sleeve lines.
I shook my head no, please, not him, not this.
Anybody but him.
But it couldn’t be, either.
I was still being stupid, like with the mirror. Had to be.
I breathed down to a rate that didn’t scream panic, watched my hand cross that bedspread space between me and the laptop, and opened it.
The image was gone, the hall empty again.
Was that worse or better, though?
“Mom?” I called out, then called again, louder, and then my phone shook in my hand again, stiffening that whole side of my body.
“No, no,” I said to the phone, and only opened it because I was afraid it was going to ring if I didn’t, which would definitely set me screaming, kickstart the kind of feedback loop I could never claw my way back from.
There was no image on my screen, no lamp-headed boy.
Just the app, waiting, primed. Insisting.
I turned the phone around, to see the lens—maybe RJ had figured out how to sonar the flash to control the lateral?—and just when it got vertical enough, it snapped a takeback pic of me.
I dropped it again, but it was still plugged into my laptop.
The image resolved on my screen.
It was me, like it should have been, but behind me, instead of the glare of my wall, my posters, my bulletin board, there was all this open space. Years and years of emptiness to fall through.
And then the light on my ceiling fan sucked back into itself.
I opened my mouth to scream but before I could the bulb flashed back, dying, bathing the room in its fast blue light.
Standing at the end of my bed was the lampshade boy.
I straightened my legs, pushed back, away from him, and my phone rang. It was the single loudest thing ever.
I fumbled it up before its ringer could split the world in two, slammed it to the side of my head and, in her sleep voice, my mom asked if I’d been calling her, if I needed anything, where was I?
I tried to say something, to tell her, to tell her all of it, but, in the glow of my laptop screen, in the light from my phone, the room was empty again.
For now.
The Coming of Night
At first you might consider them your competition, but as the week unfolds, they will more than likely become your last resort.
And you’re not even certain they’re real, is the thing.
But isn’t that always the case?
Example: at the second bar, you noticed her because the bartender was ignoring her with the exact same level of contempt he was ignoring you. Because you were each nursing your drinks, trying to make them last. Using them in the same way a duck hunter might use a blind: to hide behind; to blend in. To go unnoticed.
Did she notice you as well, though?
You have to allow that. Underestimating your opposition, that’s a thing you only ever get to do once.
So, though it made you physically ill, made you lurch to the bathroom, risk losing the thread of the night altogether, you ordered another drink, and another after that, and downed them in neat succession—not like you haven’t made sacrifices before—even set the tumblers back onto the bar harder than necessary, to be sure she would tune in to your display.
Of course she couldn’t be bothered.
But, if you were her, then you would feign the same nonchalance, wouldn’t you?