by T H Paul
Classes got mixed around––not all students from Year Eleven had continued into A-level studies. In fact, nearly forty per cent had left that summer, some going to other colleges or similar courses, most dropping out of formal education for good. A large part of the void was filled with new people joining the school. That resulted in a new bunch of students––Penny had only been in class before with four of her original twenty-three strong group.
The sixth form had a separate building, mostly to themselves, taking over a historical mansion that sat on the school grounds. Teachers treated sixth form students like adults, and Penny noticed this change within days of starting her new school year. At least some things were changing for the better.
She survived that first week by keeping her head down––she fast realised she would need to freshen up her wardrobe the longer the week progressed––and spoke to very few people, besides Millie, her one-time dancing friend. Millie was amongst the new batch of students to join her college. They were now classmates.
With such a shared history––and not always a simple one––Penny was a little concerned as the week closed out if having Millie in that environment was now such a good move. Penny let those concerns drop. There was nothing she could do about it, and it wouldn’t have helped to have voiced those thoughts to Millie anyway, who was now Penny’s sole and dependable friend.
Penny woke on Saturday morning with a start. She’d had another nightmare. Such dreams were fast becoming an everyday occurrence for her, yet they were never the same. It was as if a collection of her past indiscretions were teaming together and taking turns to break into her sleeping thoughts and terrorise her. Jack often floated in––he always left by falling from the sky far ahead of her on the horizon and crashing into the sea. Joy was there too––as if watching from the sidelines, her face sad and downcast, her eyes condemning, though Penny had never actually seen Joy’s eyes. Abbey, Kelly, Dean and others from school often made fleeting appearances, though she couldn’t recall what they had done, if anything, to her that night as she woke that morning. Then there were the mainstays of her nighttime terrors. Mr Jenkins would often be lurking. He seemed as free in the nightmares as he was in the real world––he’d never been caught since escaping prison. Then there was the flasher, that homeless guy––Penny didn’t know for sure if he did sleep rough, but it fitted with everything she had seen about the creep––who surprised her one morning during her paper round. She was at least glad that those early mornings had stopped.
Penny rubbed her forehead, trying to get the last flickers of memory out of her mind after the latest batch, as she came around. It was not even eight. She was working that night at the pub, but other than that, had a clear day ahead. She threw on some clothes and grabbed her trainers.
Three minutes later she was entering the park that sat at the end of her road. She’d been a frequent visitor to that place in her early years, always with other kids, mostly with Abbey. Penny shifted into a slow walk––she’d been jogging the short distance from home––and headed towards the tree where it all started for her. It was the same tree she’d dropped Joy’s ashes after the Nigerian’s funeral. That day had been four months ago, to the day. Penny was there to mark the anniversary as much as to clear her head.
“I miss you so much,” she said, not even caring if others were around, though she was alone at that moment. It was too early. “I thought about you again last night. You and the dozen others who haunt my dreams.” She kicked around the base of the tree––there had long been no evidence that ashes had ever been there. It was just a symbolic spot for Penny now. It represented who she was. “I’m so sorry that you aren’t here anymore. I’m so sorry that I’m the reason for that.” She was on the verge of crying again now––something that a year ago, even six months ago, she would not have thought possible. After years of suppression, she’d just not been a crier. That dam had broken with Joy and the countless nights since. She was now crying silently to herself. For anyone passing by, she would have cut quite a figure––seventeen and trim, dressed in jogging bottoms and a grey t-shirt and standing with one arm on a tree with her head bowed. And crying.
Something moved in the undergrowth around her somewhere, pulling her to alertness. It was most probably a bird out for its breakfast or a mouse or something, though Penny couldn’t help but look all around her. There was nothing, and it was apparent no one was in the park.
Still, instinctively, she looked toward the far end of the park, her eyes taking her over the piece of ground she’d first seen Abbey running across, her mind adding the memory of the dog that was chasing her former friend. Still, Penny strained further, picking up the far entrance, which led out onto more beautiful streets, homes to which Penny used to deliver papers. In the clump of bushes to the right of the exit, the flasher had once resided.
Penny shook those images from her mind, coming back to her senses and moved down onto the main path, not before tapping her hand on the tree, no words spoken, it was her own silent way of saying farewell to Joy. It was Penny’s fourth return visit to that spot since she had sprinkled Joy’s ashes there.
Penny decided not to bother with a run. She’d not intended to do that anyway; she’d just needed to go to the spot, to mark the four months since losing Joy and venting some of the pain that the Nigerian's passing had caused. Penny had a lot to vent, but no one to now listen. She’d stopped seeing the therapist, mostly for financial reasons. Plus, it had never been the same as with Joy. She could never sit before someone and share her secret with a person who would be able to respond, who could give her up for testing or worse. Penny could only imagine she would be sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Declared insane, or locked away in prison as the danger to society she was. Penny didn’t feel dangerous, yet people around her kept getting hurt. She hadn’t used her gift on anyone in months. It was as if Penny suddenly understood the danger that it all involved. What she had wasn’t a toy. People had died because of what she could do. Joy had died.
She had no one to talk to and yet had a thousand questions for which she wanted answers. Was she unique? Why was this happening to her? What was wrong with her? Something was eating at her, as if from the inside out, trying to devour her, demanding attention, demanding her soul. Something was changing. The longer she resisted using her gift, the stronger that feeling came. It now wouldn’t go a day without churning away, like a caged beast, desperate for escape, longing for freedom. Eager to roam, kill and conquer once again.
As Sunday afternoon came around, Penny was surfing the web. She’d worked the night before, home before eleven. Penny had been spending less time in the pub after her shift, knowing that she needed some time away from Clive and his crowd. She had kept things amicable––he was still a regular, after all––but didn’t see the need to spend more time in his circles than otherwise needed. Not for a while, anyway. She was due back for another shift in a couple of hours.
Breakfast sat half eaten on the table next to her laptop––she might finish the toast before going for a walk, though had had enough for the moment. She’d been eating rather modestly for the past month. Money seemed as tight as ever, especially with all the new school outfits she had needed to buy––and still had some way to go with, given her first week’s showing. Penny also didn’t see the need to cook for just herself. She didn’t feel she deserved the effort. Toast now made up the vast majority of her diet. She ate it with jam or peanut butter for breakfast, with cheese and salami at lunchtime, and mixed the two at dinnertime, sometimes adding chocolate spread as her dessert piece of toast.
She’d not been looking at anything in particular on the web but had come across a website that was crammed full of forums and groups. She couldn’t read what had been posted, as on closer inspection, transparent access was for members only. The website, however, boasted of its more than half a million users from right around the world, its professional level of anonymity and the fact there were forums and threads o
n nearly every subject under the sun. Penny doubted it had what she was looking for, though as that thought formed––her curiosity spiked––Penny reasoned she didn’t know what it was that she was seeking.
She clicked on the sign-up section. It stated most people used an alias or avatar, though real names could be selected if the user desired. It gave guidelines what to do in those circumstances, but Penny was more than happy with anonymity. If she found somewhere to open up, she would be glad that nobody would know who she was. After giving minimal information, she came to a field marked username. The system had required an email address, but only for their purposes, and this would not appear anywhere else. It was used to send notifications if those settings were applied, as well as to recover a forgotten password if access was denied.
Penny didn’t know what to enter as a username. She typed Who Am I? into the box and pressed on the check for authenticity button. An error message came back; Usernames could not be the same as forum threads.
“There’s a forum for people asking who they are?” Penny instinctively said aloud to herself. Her interest spiked even more. She clicked on the help box, which suggested avoiding using initials, stating most went with the format User and then allowed the system to populate the space after the word with a number. Penny tested that. She didn’t like the idea of being User267903 though marvelled that it was what half the signups had opted. She tried WAI––not her initials, of course, but a shortened version of her initial attempt. It gave her the option of WAI162.
“There cannot be 161 other people who had that same thought?” she exclaimed, though there would be no way of knowing. They wouldn’t have been very common initials, and the system advised against using such anyhow. Penny changed the number to 2001, making it a little more personal as well as memorable, and thankfully no other user using those three letters had apparently been born in that year, as it allowed Penny to select it. Welcome onboard, WAI2001 it said once she’d confirmed her choice. Penny went through the five-minute tutorial which gave her a whistle-stop tour around the site and landed back on the main screen. Now that she was logged in, she could see all the threads––quite literally, hundreds of thousands––as well as see the discussion happening on the threads that weren’t otherwise private. It soon was clear that most were private––the introduction had explained the difference––and she would need to request to join groups set up that way. The tutorial had also stated that some forums were invisible, unsearchable and only accessed by a current member sending a direct link via the messaging function. Penny didn’t know why any conversation would need to be invisible, though her investigations that month would explain all.
True to the site’s claim, it did seem to offer debate on nearly everything. Penny looked up the Who Am I group and could see there were over ten thousand members present, though it was a private group. She sent a request to join. Penny then got the system to list all the public threads, and spent the next half an hour randomly scanning through the thousands of conversations happening in cyberspace, some threads long since dormant, but most still active. She even watched discussions taking place in real time. Subjects of such threads consisted of anything from knitting tips to online stock trading, from the best drug cafes in Amsterdam to cybersex groups. She clicked on the latter, which linked to at least six dozen similarly active forums, each populated with thousands of users, all active and nearly exclusively anonymous. It figured. There could be all sorts of souls in such a setting. Straight or gay, married or permanently single, losers and friendly folk, freaks and no doubt plenty of nutters. It was a place for whom, it would seem, that part of the Internet existed.
She came out of the latest thread she’d been reading––she had no intention of joining any of them and was confident most, if not all of the people present, were not really who they were pretending to be. The last thread had contained an actual ongoing and active, as they called it, cyber-orgy.
Penny changed the search radius to private groups and started typing away. After her first word was displayed, forums that fitted that description and set to private began to populate the screen. It seemed the more bizarre she tried, the more results kept coming up. If she could think it, the group no doubt existed. Sex and the Dark Arts, It’s Better With Three, Pets Make the Best Lovers, and The Permanent Orgasm were among the most colourful group names Penny spotted. Penny left that and went back to the main screen.
She typed in superpowers and clicked enter, though, at first glance, it seemed the threads were mostly about superheroes and comic books. Not what she had in mind. Listed in the results, however, were some other forums the website deemed as linked to the search result. One of these was titled Paranormal and the World in which we Live. It spiked her interest. She didn’t deem what she could do as paranormal, though as it was an open group and Penny didn’t have access to any others of note, she clicked through. Most of the threads inside the forum were old, though a few were still quite active. She clicked on one of these, titled by User161091 with the question Have you ever made someone do something they couldn’t possibly have otherwise done? I have, and I don’t know what it means. Penny reread every word. She could imagine herself, aged thirteen, say precisely that the first morning after the dog incident in the park with Abbey. The thread was three months old. There had been five responses in the conversation that must have followed, one from the original user, the others from two users with the names User176981 and User123456. Penny pondered if that last person had explicitly picked those numbers that ran in sequence or if it had been chance. She thought it must have been chosen. They could have been on the website for years.
Frustratingly, besides that opening question from User161091, all the other responses had since been deleted. All it left was the date and time of posting. The original thread had started three months before––a month after Joy had died, as Penny reminded herself––but there had been no response until User176981 had come on two weeks ago. That answer and the four others had all happened within five minutes of each other. A three-way conversation and then it had stopped. There had been nothing since and all the responses had been deleted.
Penny checked the time at the bottom of the laptop. She swore. Penny was late. Shutting things down immediately, Penny would have to hurry if she was going to get to the pub on time.
2
That conversation on the forum stayed with me for the rest of the day and into the following morning before school. What got shared that needed deleting? Had the other two been threatening to the original user and that was why it had all got shut down? Was that the type of website I’d joined? But then again, I’d seen other threads and while there were some on them who just wanted to cause trouble, these people had always been shouted down by others. None of those threads got deleted, and I’d seen some hairy stuff written.
So I didn’t know what had happened. I somehow felt it was important, however. I would return to that thread several times over the coming week, though there would be no further conversation there.
That morning, however, as I made it into school for the start of the second week, I should have known things couldn’t have remained normal around me for too long.
I was about to be labelled. And the accusation hurt. Not because it was unfounded––quite the opposite. I was afraid, already, that is was who I had become.
Penny was taking three A-Levels, not counting General Studies, that particular subject running for the last time as it had been dropped for future years. The whole class had been automatically enrolled as an add-on. She had opted for English Literature, History and Biology, the same three core subjects as Millie, which meant they were able to sit next to each other for the entire week.
As Millie was new to the class, she valued Penny’s presence and friendship now more than ever. The pair had grown closer over the previous year––allies through adversity, at times––since first being in the same dance class as young teens.
The trouble had started with a
core of Millie’s old school students who had also made the switch to that particular college. While not overly close to Millie––the boys, anyway––she had been around friends in her old school who also now had connections to that current group.
During the crazy months of earlier that year––the pub sessions, culminating in the rave, where both Millie and Penny had been involved in things more than they had expected––word had got around, somehow. Millie’s exploits then had been hailed as something of a spectacle, if not believed fully by most. Indeed to the boys, for whom Millie had always remained a girl outside of their reach, they viewed the legend that had grown around such wild events as wholly fabricated. They knew Millie had not been alone, but no one had the name of the mysterious friend who could otherwise back up the rumours.
Then Millie arrived at college and was always with Penny.
Penny, too, had been an outsider, groups of both boys and girls with their reasons to avoid her or look with jealousy upon her. With the mix-up in classes that the sixth form had caused, and even though some of the troublemakers had left the school altogether, the connection of these two former, unrelated groups, now produced colour to be added to the previously sketchy picture. People started to talk among themselves.
First, it was mostly nothing. Penny took the occasional question from some of the girls––students who had barely said hello to her the previous year, but seemingly more mature and open now they were Sixth-formers––as nothing but them trying to get to know her a little. Had she known Millie before, did they go way back? Millie, when not with Penny, was also asked similar things.
Like a burning fire behind a closed door, the rumours started to grow, the flames lapping higher and hotter until there was no taming the blast.