Another window popped up. "Account deletion denied." Jack leaned forward and tried the process again. Again, his attempt to delete his account was denied. "What the hell?" he whispered.
And instant message popped up in the corner of his screen.
Jack's heart started to hammer. He felt unmistakably, uncomfortably like prey. He wanted to turn off his computer. Unplug it. Maybe hit it a few times with a hammer. It felt like if he abused the machine, the person taunting him might get a portion of the pain. A surge of anger gave him the courage to type.
BlackJax66: Who the hell are you?
He expected the message to be undeliverable, so he was shocked when the instant message window indicated that
Jack blinked at the screen.
Jack put his fingers on the keyboard, not sure how to respond. His hands trembled and he had this crazy idea that whoever was on the other end of the instant message could see them shaking. And that he was laughing at Jack. He had to type one line three times because he kept hitting the wrong letters.
BlackJax66: I don't know what you're talking about.
Jack's smart phone's screen lit up. A text message, ready to send, appeared. Jack's fingertips tingled with his surge of adrenaline.
To Phil Hollis: Has anyone ever told you what an unlivable prick you are? I don't care who the fuck your uncle is.
Jack's mouth went dry. This would be career-suicide. All the shit he'd eaten. All of the strides he'd taken to make it to the top of his department. Gone.
Jack wanted to scream. He was trapped, plain and simple. He typed his response quickly.
BlackJax66: Don't. I won't try to delete my account again.
*****
The more Jack thought about it, the madder he got. He hadn't done anything a million other people hadn't done. Everyone acted like assholes on the Internet. Was this really a troll? An honest to goodness troll, like, in the literal sense? His mind flew over everything that was run by computers: his paycheck, his medical records, his taxes...the list was endless. Could this thing effect all of that? Jack really, really didn't want to find out.
That day, when he got home, he moved his .38 revolver to his office drawer. Anna hated guns so he never told her that it was in the house. And he didn't know what sort of protection it would offer against a shadowy character like
Jack went back into his chat room the next night and struck up a conversation with someone who professed to be gay. They were the easiest targets. Sensitive, approval-seeking people that had a lot of self doubt. Jack blamed him for the spread of AIDS. He told the chatter that he deserved to be alone. Jack told him that God had abandoned him. The whole room rallied to the gay man's defense. Any normal night, he would have considered it a success.
Then he talked to a married woman who thought her husband was cheating. SuzieHousewife was her moniker and she was almost hysterical before BlackJax66 even started prodding her. It didn't take long before her spelling deteriorated and her posts became erratic. Jack left the chat room and put his head in his hands. When he looked up,
BlackJax66: I'm signing off.
BlackJax66: No. I'm signing off.
Jack logged off and turned off his computer before
His smart phone rang. There was no ID. Adrenaline heightened his senses, until it felt like each ring was a dagger in his forehead. He held the phone in his hand and looked at it. Finally, he pressed the screen and held it to his ear.
"Listen," he said in a low voice, "I did what you asked. I'm not going to stay in a fucking chat room all night. I'm not your bitch. Understand?"
Something like white noise sizzled over the phone. Oddly, numbly, Jack thought that he hadn't heard a sound like that since he had been a child and the televisions went to snow on certain channels. A voice seemed to form the noise into a word. Jack listened more carefully. The word was long and drawn out and it took almost a minute before he could really make it out.
"Raaaavenousssss."
Jack threw his phone against the wall as hard as he could. The face cracked and the battery fell out. Jack left the pieces on the floor and closed the door behind him.
*****
Jack didn't feel like having breakfast the next morning. Still, he sat there with coffee and toast while Anna prattled away. Something she said finally made him look up.
"What?" he asked.
"I made plans for us to go to Remington's tonight. I thought you might like a steak--"
"Damn it. Why didn't you ask me?" He couldn't go to dinner. What would the troll do if he didn't log into the chat?
Anna looked wounded. "It's just dinner. You have to eat, Jack."
"It's an hour's drive there and an hour back. I have work."
"You always have work."
He stood up, leaving his coffee practically untouched and his toast uneaten. "I can't do it. Cancel the reservations."
He left without looking back.
*****
Jack signed in as BlackJax66 that evening, but his heart really wasn't in it. For a while, he just watched the JavaScript scroll by. They were talking politics which was usually a ripe topic for getting people pissed. Jack just wasn't feeling it.
He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened then, he saw that there was an instant message in the corner of his screen. He blinked at it twice before he realized that it wasn't
SuzieHousewife: Do you really think my husband is cheating on me?
Jack sighed. His hands paused over the keyboard. Why would this woman come back for more abuse?
BlackJax66: Honey, I don't know.
SuzieHousewife: You said yesterday that if I think that he's cheating, he probably is.
BlackJax66: Or you could give the poor bastard the benefit of the doubt.
Another instant message popped up on the other corner of his screen.
Jack's anger sometimes made him do stupid things. He could feel one of those stupid moments coming on. It was almost freeing.
BlackJax66: Screw you. I don't have to be an asshole in every conversation I have.
Both
SuzieHousewife: I don't want him to make a fool out of me.
Jack knew that
BlackJax66: If you love him that much, he's only making a fool out of himself.
Another burst of triumph. Jack almost felt like he was getting back to his old self. Consequences be damned.
BlackJax66: If you don't like how I'm handling this, why don't you answer her yourself?
There was a pause.
SuzieHousewife: Thanks Jax.
Jack felt a strong sense of calm for the first time in days. He watched the chat room scroll by and didn't bother to comment. Whatever
*****
"Where were you last night?" Anna asked him at breakfast.
Jack gave her a sharp look. Probably sharper than it needed to be. "What do you mean, where was I? I was in my office working like I always am."
"You didn't come to bed."
"Yes, I did. You were just asleep."
"I don't remember feeling you."
Jack sat back in his chair. He had never been one to accept being questioned and that was twice as true right now. "What the hell are you getting at?"
She crossed her arms, looking like a stubborn little girl. Jack found it annoying. "Where's your phone?" she prodded.
"I broke it."
She rolled her eyes.
"If you have something you want to say, Anna, now is the time," he snapped.
She looked down at the table. Jack knew that he had won but he wasn't sure if that was a good thing. He consciously softened his voice. "The pieces of my phone are upstairs in my office. I lost my temper and threw it against a wall. Go look if you want. I was there, working, until midnight."
Anna's dark eyes filled with tears. Usually, that was enough to end an argument but he wasn't feeling like being manipulated by yet another person just now. "I'm sorry," she said softly. "It's just you've been working so much lately and I miss you."
He managed a tight-lipped smile. "When this project is over, we'll take a vacation like you suggested. Somewhere with a beach and no Internet access."
Anna offered a shaky giggle. "They make places like that?"
"I'll look into it."
Her answering smile was tight, but it was a smile.
*****
The next day went by without a single message on his office phone, instant message on his computer, or non-work related e-mail. Jack's wife didn't even bother him with the usual bullshit about dinner plans and random "I love you" phone calls. It was his first decent day in weeks.
Until he got home.
Anna sat on the couch in the living room, her computer on her lap, tears streaming down her face. He stopped in the doorway without even dropping his bag. "What's the matter?"
"You're a son of a bitch, you know that, right?"
He was too numb to even get mad right away. "What did I do?"
She gave a high, brittle laugh that Jack had never heard before. "You were just working last night. Worked all the live-long day. That's all you were doing."
Jack got a chill. "Yes, that's all I was doing."
"Bullshit!"
Jack dropped his bag and crossed the room to his wife. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"How long did it take for you to figure out it was me, huh? God! I'm so stupid."
For a moment, Jack was thoroughly confused. Was Anna confessing to being
"Look. Calm down--"
"Don't tell me to calm down!" She held out his cracked smart phone. She had replaced the battery. A text message was burnt into the screen.
Beth Carlotti: My panties are wet thinking about the other night. Come over. Don't make me beg.
Jack's mouth opened and closed. That fucking troll. He couldn't explain that text. And it was the perfect set-up, actually. Anna had been jealous of his leggy, smoldering secretary since day one. "Listen to me, Anna--"
"I believed you," she said. "I was even going to follow your advice. 'Give the poor bastard the benefit of the doubt'. God!"
Jack went colder. "SuzieHousewife?" he breathed. His wife was suzieHousewife? Jack had all but given
"Listen to me, Honey. Someone probably chatted with you last night. You can't listen to anything he said--"
"Shut up, Jax! I know exactly who was talking to me." Her voice turned snide when she used his moniker. She lifted her hand and for a moment, he thought she was just pointing an accusing finger at him. Something she knew he hated, but would probably put up with, considering the circumstances. Then he saw the dark metal in her grip and backed away a step. "It was all there, right on your computer in your office. 'Go look if you want' you tell me. So I did. You must think I'm a real idiot. You didn't even bother to sign out of the damn chat room. Didn't think I actually would go into your office, did you?"
"Anna, put down the gun--"
"Your gun. The one you promised me that you didn't buy."
"I know but--"
"Fuck you, Jack. You made a fool out of me. And you won't again."
Jack didn't have a chance to flinch. Or move. Or even really, truly take in what was happening. There was a loud explosion of sound, a simultaneous splintering pain in his head, and then blackness.
*****
Anna wrapped a towel around Jack's shattered head. There was an awful lot of blood. And the gun had been loud. She hadn't been ready for that.
She sat down in front of her computer, wiping her blood-smeared fingers onto a napkin. She was logged into the chat room.
SuzieHousewife: Are you there?
An instant message popped up in the corner of her screen.
SuzieHousewife: I don't know. I'm scared.
SuzieHousewife: The gun was loud. There's blood everywhere.
SuzieHousewife: Promise?
SuzieHousewife: What's that?
THE CALM
James S. Dorr
In any industry, you'll see practitioners studying the product of a peer--mechanics with cars, tech people with software/hardware, and writers with stories. "The Calm", which originally appeared in New Mythos Legends by Marietta Publishing in 1999, is one of those for me; I just loved the hell out of the flow that James--who has two collections through Dark Regions Press (Strange Mistresses: Tales of Wonder and Romance and Darker Love: Tales of Mystery and Regret) and has appeared in places like Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine--has created. You can find him at jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com.
It was on a bright summer's day in the Year of Our Lord 1755 that they came to the village. They had mustered out of Massachusetts, under the flag of Governor-General William Shirley to fight the French, and the wind had pursued them. It had followed them from the well-kept farms and ordered towns that they had grown up in, west and then north as their detachment, commanded by Captain Laurence Pindar, broke off from the main body, up through the Berkshires and into Vermont, a mixed troop of British regular army and raw colonials. It whistled after them through Brattleboro and Newfane and Windham, as they marched up, first, the West River valley, then, hoping to meet with the Battenkill and then the Mettawee and Otter Rivers--either of the latter of which could bring them to Lake Champlain--into the sow-backed ridges and valleys of the east slope of the Taconic Mountains.
Possibly of them all, Philip Latham, himself from the western part of Massachusetts and elected corporal of his town's militia, knew the wind best. Le vent de la mort, the French trappers called it, the few that, before, had come down to the lands of the English settlers.
The wind that presages death.
This was a Huron superstition, or so he had been told, brought east from the Great Lakes and shared by the Iroquois tribes, that a wind that persisted could only bring
ill fate. Especially a wind, as this, that even as they pressed into the mountains, still rustled the treetops. Still lay in wait for them to swirl their hats off whenever they broke to the infrequent clearings, the patches of grass where they fell out and rested while their officers grazed their horses.
He kept this lore to himself, of course--no sense spooking the others. Enough men were being lost to desertion. Enough there was to make men away from their homes for the first time, as most in his group were, to feel uneasy about their own shadows, much less the brooding, patch-shadowed peaks they caught glimpses of from time to time, as, hacking their way through tangles of honeysuckle and wild grape surrounded by forest, they pushed ever upward.
Until, at last, they came out on a ridge-top and saw the village.
The captain halted them. "Lieutenant Barnstone," he called, "bring the maps up." Still well outside the village proper, the men looked down on it, its empty town square with its well in the center, its rough-granite church standing squat on the far side with signs in its churchyard of recent activity, while the officers were conversing. They looked for signs of life, seeing no movement, the houses on its square's three other sides all barred and shuttered tight.
But shuttered against what, Corporal Latham wondered. Perhaps a coming storm? Beyond the small town stood a half-mile high mountain, its peak lost in darkened, fog-like clouds that hugged its cragged sides, not spreading out in the sky as most clouds did, but huddled close to its bare-rocked surface. But as for the wind that would bring a storm to them -- he realized now that, for the first time, the wind appeared to be dying.
He looked toward the other men, then to the captain and his lieutenant as the officers called him over with the other noncoms. "This village should not be here," the lieutenant began. "At least it's not on any of our maps, which gives us a problem. Not knowing what this village is, we have no way of knowing which side its inhabitants support. Whether they'd welcome us with open arms, or--"
"Or whether they'd shoot us, if they had the chance to," the captain said for him. "We may as well be blunt. I know we've lost men every mile of the way once we came in these mountains. The hard march. The unfamiliar surroundings. The men need resting, a chance for cooked rations. And so I propose that we take a risk and make camp in the town here, but not all go in at first. I want some of you men to take the horses--we passed a small meadow not a mile back--and the wagons with them. See that they're hobbled there, then be ready to join back with us the instant there's any sign of trouble. . ."
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