Eventually my mind settles, so I return to my computer, and for a split second, a chat message seems to appear on the bottom right of my screen.
Suppose I imagined it. But after a moment longer, my supposition is completely shattered. Another chat popup. Unmistakeable, and unexplainable. By a user under the name xoLisBeth.
But when I open my friends list I see no unread messages. And the only person online at all is my childhood friend Carl.
Surely this has to be some kind of cruel joke. But how? Someone would have to be monitoring my activity, somehow circumventing the security of my machine and the messenger application. Way too much effort, and way too quick, for that to be the case.
I feel a sweat break out and the skin on my arms turns to gooseflesh. Something is wrong here. I've either had a psychotic break, been hacked in an extremely elaborate way, or the ghost of my long-dead friend is making contact over the Net. I'm not prepared to cope with any of these scenarios. After spiralling over this for a while a realisation hits me: Carl was a mutual friend of ours. That asshole. He's messing with me! Without any delay I take a screenshot the moment the next message emerges and I open our chat to confront him.
12:31 AM - Jessica: Hey, what the hell is this about? Can you stop?
12:31 AM - Jessica: It's really freaking me out.
12:31 AM - Jessica: [ATTACHMENT]
12:36 AM - CarlGuy09: Sorry Jess, what's wrong? I was about to go to bed.
12:37 AM - CarlGuy09: What am I looking at here? Your wallpaper?
12:38 AM - Jessica: What do you mean! Look at the picture. xoLisBeth.
12:38 AM - Jessica: How could you?
12:41 AM - CarlGuy09: i don't see anything in that screenshot you sent me
12:41 AM - CarlGuy09: and i don't know why you're bringing her up out of the blue.
12:42 AM - CarlGuy09: what exactly am I being accused of?
I want to scream and curse him out. I open the screenshot in my editor to highlight the message so this idiot can't deny it, but then I notice something; he's not lying. The chat popup is not visible in the picture at all. I must have mistimed the screen capture. The next message from xoLizBeth comes in, and I make one hundred percent sure I time the capture correctly. But when I paste it in and preview it, it's still not there.
12:49 AM - CarlGuy09: ...Jess? you all good over there?
12:50 AM - CarlGuy09: what's going on?
Over the course of the next two hours I want nothing more than to shut down my computer and go to bed. But something has me frozen in place, and I begin to feel almost as though I'm in another world. I want to respond to Carl, to beg him to drive over here and help me. I want to get away, to stop looking at the increasingly creepy messages as they slowly roll in one after another. Yet they are not visible in any chat log. Aside from these popups, making themselves known only to me, there is absolutely zero proof that these messages are real.
I'm unable to look down, but I can feel what I assume to be fingernails digging into my chest, working their way into my body via the gaps between each of my ribs. I feel a too-warm breath directly in my ear followed by a hoarse, gutteral voice. It asks me, so slowly that I feel I won't make it long enough to hear it, "Do you miss me?"
It's as though my very essence is leaving my body. Unable to cope any longer with the pain, nor with the rapid spinning of my head, unconsciousness befalls me a moment later.
Continue to Part Three →