26 Mar Connection Lost

She stands in front of the house, staring up at the dirty windows and the sad roof. Sarah remembers it looking very different, full of vibrant hues. She’s not sure whether it’s her memories coloring the paint a brighter shade of blue than it is now, or if it’s simply time doing what time does—the rain and the sun beating down, year after year, wearing things out.

Her compact car, parked at the curb behind her, sags with every one of her earthly possessions: two suitcases of clothes and four boxes of plates, silverware, toiletries, medications, cables, a laptop. In a different town across the state, the empty apartment she left behind doesn’t have a single scratch on the walls or scuff on the hardwood floor. No sign that anyone lived there for three and a half years. Even the bathroom and kitchen are spotless, because Sarah doesn’t like leaving footprints.

The neighborhood is empty. There are no kids running around, no parents telling them not to wander off or that dinner will be on soon. It used to be lively, a place she was excited to visit and explore. Now it looks like a cheap rendering from some of the games she’s worked on, the ones without the time or a budget for animation, lacking details to fill out the world—a shell of a place, an approximation of life.

Sarah squeezes the key in her hand until the teeth bite into her palm, hoping the pain will make her move. She takes a first step, then another, repeating the motion until the house looms over her and she can see the patterns of flaked paint on its face, like liver spots and varicose veins.

It’s not until the key slides into the handle and turns that she realizes she hasn’t taken a breath since the car. If she’s honest, she’d been hoping the key wouldn’t work. That she’d have to go back to the lawyer and tell him it was all a misunderstanding. But to her chagrin, the handle turns, the door opens—and it’s too late to do anything but walk inside.

“Wouldn’t want to disappoint the empty street,” she says to no one at all.

The house stinks of mildew, that musty smell of trapped air. How many months has the house been locked up now? How long did the mice have it to themselves? She can almost hear the screams echoing through the hallway on her right, a five-year-old running up and down the house, playing the same game as always. A game with no name. Like tag, but with more rules.

The house is just sleeping, she thinks, but she doesn’t know where the thought came from.

She walks through the living room and stops to look down at where the carpet should be, now a hardwood floor. Then she enters the kitchen, where the sight of the refrigerator, of all things, is what makes her legs go soft, knees almost buckling. She has to place a hand on the wall for safety before she falls and cracks her head on the lime green linoleum, asking herself why she came here and claimed the house.

Sarah, you idiot. Sarah, you fool.

As she stands here in the kitchen, her head like an overinflated balloon, something glitters over the sink where a head would be if someone were washing dishes. Even dizzy and unmoored, Sarah stops and stares at the afternoon sun shining through the window, playing across the surface of a spiderweb. In it, she spies the husks of flies, drained of their blood, their dry wings shine in the sunlight. But the feeling of something more persists, a question in the air.

Did they even try to clean her grandmother’s blood out of the living room carpet before they ripped it up, or was there so much they didn’t bother?

* * * * * *

After she brings all her things in from the car, Sarah is tired enough to think about taking a nap on the couch. Not that she does, but she considers it. On the drive over, as she listened to her music as loud as her ears would allow, anything to drown out the thought of where she was going, she’d imagined it would take at least a week to consider sleeping under this roof. So the thought surprises her.

Sarah sets her things down in the living room, in the corner her grandmother used to use for sewing, or painting, or whatever current interest she held. Growing up, Sarah was amazed at how the woman could throw herself into something so deeply before abandoning it forever. To others, it might have made the woman seem flighty, but Sarah saw it as a kind of superpower, as if her grandmother could master any topic she set her sights on, yet not allow herself to grow so attached that she devoted her life to it.

That was more Sarah’s speed.

As she’s walking through the house, trying to get accustomed to where everything is, the doorbell rings. The man at the door introduces himself as Malcolm, the tech assigned to install her new router. Sarah is relieved he’s shown up so soon, considering how important it is to her work. He’s also, she can’t help but notice, fairly handsome.

“You just moved in?” he asks, looking around with one hand on his hip, the other gripping a duffel bag.

“All of an hour ago,” she replies.

“It’s a nice house. Good floors. Did you know the previous owner?”

Sarah blinks. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m not being nosy, just trying to figure out where the previous install might’ve been located.”

“Oh,” she says. “Well, unfortunately, you know as much about that as I do.” He smiles, a handsome smile, and has a look around. Sarah stands at the door, watching Malcolm move through the house, tracing his fingers along the edges of doorways and running his palm across the smooth walls.

He stops at one of the doors at the end of the hallway, the one near her grandmother’s old bedroom. Tries the door and finds it locked.

A memory comes back to Sarah, unexpected, like swallowing a fly. She was young, maybe seven. Her grandmother was talking to her mother about a room she didn’t use, a room that was off-limits to everyone and anyone. To be locked at all times.

“Hold on,” she says, going through the things the lawyer gave her, and comes back with a small, yellow envelope. She opens it and turns it over. A key of rusted bronze falls into her palm, the lawyer’s words returning to her.

“A skeleton key. They don’t make these much anymore. It was found on her when the police … well, they think she was locking up the house when she fell.”

Sarah moves to the door and tries the key, but the lock only turns halfway before coming to a halt. Sarah wiggles it once, twice. Just as she’s about to give up, the key feels as if it moves in her hand, turning the rest of the way. The sensation is slight, lasting only a moment, but it unsettles her all the same.

“We can try another room,” Malcolm offers, but the look on his face says he’s just as curious to see what’s inside as Sarah.

In response, Sarah turns the handle. The door sticks, needing a strong push to open. The air that drifts out smells old and untouched, even more so than the rest of the house. They step inside, first Sarah, then Malcolm.

The space is small and dark, sunlight barely piercing the thick layers of black paint on the room’s single window. In the corner is an old wooden chair, but otherwise the room is entirely unfurnished.

Malcolm kneels and shines his phone’s flashlight along the baseboards. “This is the best place for a signal,” he says, “but it’s up to you. I can find another spot.”

“I like it,” Sarah replies. It feels separate from the rest of the house. A place to work, disconnected from the memories that might distract her.

They talk as Malcolm sets up the router, the kind of easy conversation Sarah hasn’t had in a long time. Not since Lucy, the last of her friends, got married and moved away. Sarah finds herself watching his hands, the careful way he moves his fingers over wires. Effortless precision. She laughs when he teases her for jumping at the sound of a floorboard creaking.

When he finishes the installation, he runs her debit card through a card reader, has her sign for the job, and then hands her his business card.

“In case you have any issues,” he smiles. A handsome smile.

As he’s leaving, Malcolm turns at the front door. “I know you just moved in and all, but if you ever want to grab a drink or something, I wouldn’t say no.”

Sarah feels warmth rise to her face. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she replies.

And then he’s gone, and Sarah is alone again.

Sarah drags a small table out of the bedroom and into the unused spare room. As she moves it, her thoughts go to the window stained with paint. She considers scraping it off, but remembers how her grandmother had a practical reason for everything she did. Maybe it was to hide from the gaze of an unwelcome neighbor, a creep. Sarah doesn’t second-guess herself or her grandmother. In the low light, she finds a spare lamp, plugs it into the wall near the router, and lets its yellow glow light the room.

“My first office,” she says, and the newness fills her with excitement, a smile on her lips.

Her phone rings in her pocket, the fourth call from her mother this week. She lets it go to voicemail. Then, a text:

Can we at least talk about selling the house?

Sarah wishes her mother were here to see this. Not because the woman would be happy for her, but because she wouldn’t. There’s a reason Sarah’s grandmother left everything to her and not her mother. A thousand reasons, even. She sets the phone down, picks it up again, and switches it off. As she does, her laptop screen glitches, a brief flash of static that she ignores.

It’s time to get to work.

* * * * * *

Over the first few days, the computer problems seem small. The laptop screen flickers, pages load in odd sequences, and their images are smudged. The cursor stutters, then jumps ahead. Sarah tells herself it’s just the new network getting up to speed. She runs a few diagnostics, but nothing comes up out of the ordinary.

Then, there are the sounds.

Late at night, faint noises fill the old house. The creak of a floorboard, the soft shift of weight around corners. Sarah offers every typical explanation: the house settling, the wind whistling, or mice in the attic. Still, a quiet unease lingers beneath the surface.

And then, she finds the book.

In a bedroom drawer, mixed in with fabric scraps and forgotten sewing kits, Sarah discovers a small book with worn leather binding. She opens it, startled to see it’s a diary going back several years.

She recognizes her grandmother’s handwriting instantly.

September sixth. Sarah phoned today. She’s excited to be starting college. I’m excited for her as well. She’s so bright, so curious. I wish I could see her more, but I know she visits whenever she has the time, and that she’s always thinking of me.

Sarah wipes her eyes dry and reads on. Every night afterward, in fact, alone in her grandmother’s old bed, she reads from the journal. At first, the book seems to be a simple record of daily chores and worries, colored by the slow loss of independence. Gradually, though, the tone changes.

The house is different when the lights are off. I hear things where nothing should be. The radio crackles. Last night, the television turned on by itself, nothing but static. At first, I thought it was a coincidence, but the truth is there’s always been something left unsaid here. It was quiet for so long, but I think it’s starting to come back now. It’s waking up, and not at all happy.

Sarah tells herself it’s just age or even early dementia making her grandmother sound that way. But then, one night, she reads an entry that makes her sit up in bed:

I made the mistake of listening, and heard my own voice answering back. It knows my name. It wants more. Wants to spread. I don’t want to say its name, to help it be known. That’s all it ever wanted, I believe, to spread like a cold. To infect one and then another.

Sarah stares at the words, finding it hard to imagine the gentle woman she knew writing something so unsettling. Nothing makes sense. She places the book on the nightstand and struggles for half the night to fall asleep.

* * * * * *

After a few days, the glitches are so bad that Sarah can barely get any work done. She tries everything she knows to troubleshoot the issues, with no improvement. Things hit rock bottom when her system crashes and restores to a previous drive state, resulting in the loss of half a day’s progress. Desperate to solve the problem, Sarah finds Malcolm’s card and calls his number.

He answers on the first ring. “Hey, I was hoping you’d call.”

“It’s more of a business call,” she confesses, and by the tone of his voice, she can tell he’s disappointed. “It’s my internet. I think it has a tumor or something.”

He laughs softly. “That bad, huh? Well, I don’t have any jobs at the moment, so I can come over if you want.”

“That would be amazing,” she says, caught off guard. She’s not used to people being available, emotionally or otherwise. Twenty minutes later, he arrives, duffel bag in hand.

“How are you getting settled?” he asks, setting the bag down. She thinks of the journal on her nightstand, the nights spent listening to the house.

“It’s slow.”

“I get it. Have you owned a house before or just rented?”

“Just rented. Not even houses, just apartments.”

He nods. “It’s a totally different beast. Lots of room. Too much, sometimes.”

“Totally. I don’t even know what to do with it half the time.”

“Throw a party,” he shrugs.

“No one would show up.”

“That’s not true,” he says, as if to mean, I’d show up. They share an awkward pause. Malcolm smiles at her, his handsome smile, then gestures to the spare room. “Should I …”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“No, not at all.”

Sarah leads him to the room, then opens her laptop and tries to show him what’s been happening. But everything appears to be working normally. No glitches, no lag. “Of course it’s fine now,” she sighs.

“We’re kind of like exterminators,” he offers. When she doesn’t take the bait, he adds, “The bugs hide from us.”

Sarah laughs for the first time in days. She remembers why she liked him so much on their first meeting. The air feels lighter with him around, and the daylight is a little warmer.

While he works on the router, Sarah heads to the kitchen to make coffee for them both. With the smell of percolating coffee in her head, she feels, at least for a moment, some sense of normalcy. Maybe you can trust him, she thinks. Maybe you can let him get close. How long has it been?

As she pours the first mug, steam rising to her face, she looks up to see Malcolm walking out of the spare room and toward the front door.

“Don’t tell me you fixed it already,” she says, excited that she might be able to get back to work without all the troubles and frustration.

Then she gets a look at his face and his body language. His spine is stiff, his face pale, and he mumbles something about needing to leave. Before she can say anything, Malcolm gathers his duffel bag, nearly dropping it on the way out the door.

“What’s wrong?” she asks from the open door. Already halfway down the driveway, he says nothing, throwing his duffel bag into his car, then himself, before starting it up and driving away. Back in the office, she finds the router unplugged, the job unfinished.

Let him get close? she thinks. Trust him?

Sarah, you idiot. Sarah, you fool.

* * * * * *

She stares at the phone in her hand, Malcolm’s name still on the screen from the call he didn’t pick up. She exhales, presses her palm to her forehead, and then does the most reckless thing she can think of.

The line rings three times before her mother answers.

“So you finally decided to call me.”

Sarah closes her eyes. Here we go. “Mom, I—”

“Three days, Sarah, three days of calling and leaving messages. I was starting to think you were in a ditch somewhere.”

Sarah swallows. “I’ve been busy.”

“Busy with what? Sitting around in that house full of dust? You don’t belong there.”

Sarah feels her nails dig into her palm. “I belong where I say I belong.”

“Oh, please. You have no idea what went on in that house. Not when you were a kid and not now. You didn’t know your grandmother, Sarah. Not really.”

A chill runs through her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you never should have taken that place. I don’t know what she was thinking, leaving it to you. Maybe it was one last way to stick it to me.”

Sarah clenches her jaw. “She left it to me because she loved me. Because I actually cared about her.”

“And I didn’t?”

Sarah laughs. It sounds bitter, in a way she never wanted to be. “You tell me. You barely visited her. You never even tried to—”

“Oh, don’t start. You were a kid, Sarah. You don’t know the full story.”

She grips the phone so tight she hears the strain of plastic. “Then tell me. Tell me why you hated her so much.”

Silence. For a long moment, there was nothing but the faint sound of breathing on the other end.

“There are things you don’t understand.”

Sarah shakes her head. “That’s not an answer.”

Another silence. Then, in a lower voice: “Sell the house, Sarah. Sell it now.”

At that, the line goes dead. Sarah pulls the phone away, staring at the blank screen. Did her mother hang up, or did the line cut out before she finished speaking?

* * * * * *

Nighttime comes too soon. Sarah tries to work as fast as she can, making up for lost time. She ignores the glitches, the lag, and her stomach. Bedtime comes and goes but she keeps it up, not even feeling the hunger anymore.

Sometime around one in the morning, the laptop screen flickers, showing her reflection. But something is wrong with it.

It moves a second too late.

She freezes. The reflection is still typing, though her hands have stopped.

And then, ever so slowly, it looks up. Its mouth stretches into a grin.

Sarah’s eyes open. She must have drifted off at some point, coding even in her sleep. Her reflection is normal, following her movements perfectly, the way it always has. The way it should.

She slams the laptop shut all the same.

* * * * * *

The final entry in her grandmother’s journal is labeled September 26th. It’s a date Sarah could never forget.

The coroner had needed to estimate her grandmother’s date of death, on account of her not being found right away. So the man did his dark math, counting up all the ways bodies decompose, and came up with the number six. Six days she’d lain there before her body was found by police, following an anonymous call from a concerned neighbor. The policeman, whose name was on a report in one of the lawyer’s folders, had to break down the door. It was locked from the inside, same with the windows.

No broken glass, a door locked from the inside, and an old woman, living alone, now deceased. The only voice she had left was the one in Sarah’s head as she read the final journal entry.

I made a mistake. I thought I could ignore it, that if I left it alone, it would leave me alone. But I was wrong. It doesn’t forget. I think it’s learning from me. Now I know. I’ve allowed the sickness in this house to linger too long.

Sarah, her skin slick with cold sweat and her heart pounding, reads the final lines:

If you’re reading this, Sarah, I’ve failed to stop it. Please don’t give it a voice. A way to spread. That’s all it ever wanted.

She needs to leave this house, she decides. Not in the morning, but now.

As she throws her clothes into her suitcase, a low hum begins to vibrate through the house—a deep, bone-rattling frequency, like an electrical current bleeding through the walls. She turns, and for a split second she sees something standing in the doorway—a shape, featureless and hollow, its edges flickering.

Her breath stops in her throat. Then, it’s gone. Was it real, or an afterimage, burned into her mind from the screen in her dream?

Sarah’s phone rings. She jumps, a gasp escaping her. She scrambles to pick the phone up from the bed. On it is a familiar name.

“Malcolm?” she answers, hope mixing with fear.

“Hey. Look, I’m sorry I left so quickly before,” he says, sounding embarrassed. “The truth is, I thought I saw something in that room.”

Sarah grips the phone tighter. “What?”

“It was like a man, but… not really a man. I can’t explain it. I called because I feel terrible about leaving without—”

The call cuts off, his words lost in static. Sarah checks her phone. No signal. She slips it into her pocket, takes a breath, and walks out of the bedroom.

The hallway stretches before her, dark except for a light from the office flickering in uneven pulses. The door stands open to her in invitation.

Sarah swallows, her throat dry. Everything in her body tells her to turn around and run, but she needs to understand and know what her grandmother knew. She walks forward, breath shallow, and crosses the threshold.

The office is just as she left it. The small table, the router, the thickly painted window. And yet her laptop screen is alive, pulsing with distorted light—calling for her.

Her fingers tremble as she reaches for the trackpad. As soon as she makes contact, the screen spasms, pixels twisting into grotesque shapes. A face—no, the idea of a face—materializes. A twisted mouth. Empty eyes. It stares out at her, its form jittering with corrupted data. The eyes move in separate directions, the mouth stretching in a silent scream.

The screen spasms. Words appear, jagged and broken:

LET ME IN.

The laptop flickers faster, the screen pulsing like an open wound. The voice in the walls, in the wires, is no longer whispering. It’s inside her.

Her arm jerks up, then the other, then her shoulders, as she realizes she isn’t breathing.

Sarah feels something enter her mind, a presence worming its way through her thoughts, pressing against her memories. She fights, but it’s like drowning in white noise.

Her body isn’t hers anymore, fingers moving against her will. She tries to pull her hand away, but she can’t. Her wrist locks, muscles rigid, bones burning like they’re filled with static. She tries to pull her hand away, but the laptop isn’t done with her.

Cables erupt from the keyboard, snapping around her fingers and wrists. A sick, wet sound fills the air as they tighten, digging into her skin.

Sarah screams, buckles, but the wires refuse to let go. They pulse against her flesh, vibrating and feeding. Her blood seeps into them, disappearing as if drained through the cords. The pain is unbearable, white-hot and electric.

Move, she screams at herself. Move!

With all her strength, Sarah wrenches herself free. Her skin tears open, long, deep gashes carved into her arms. Blood spatters across the keyboard, blackening as soon as it lands. The laptop shudders, the screen glitching as if reacting to the warmth.

Sarah stumbles back, barely able to stand. Her vision swims as she staggers out of the office and into the hallway. It twists around her, stretching into impossible lengths. The walls ripple as the hum begins again, that deep, vibrating whine that rises in pitch, filling her skull.

Sarah runs for her life. She doesn’t know where she’s going, she just moves. The floor tilts beneath her. She crashes into walls, blood smearing along the old wallpaper as she pushes forward.

Finally, she bursts into the living room, the same room where her grandmother died. Her phone vibrates violently in her pocket, heating up. Sarah screams, slapping at her jeans, but it’s too late. It erupts in flame, the smell of scorched metal and circuitry filling her sinuses. She rips the phone from her pocket and throws it across the floor. The screen cracks, its final flicker showing the words MALCOLM CALLING before it dies completely.

She collapses onto the bare floor, gasping, the pain in her arms pulsing in sync with the throbbing whine surrounding her.

Then, the cables return.

They slide toward her like coiling worms, spilling from the hallway, the walls, even the floor beneath her. Wrapping around her legs, her waist, and her throat.

Sarah thrashes, choking on terror. Something pushes into her mind. Cold. Hollow. The voice doesn’t speak in words, doesn’t give, only takes.

Her thoughts fracture. Fear is consumed. Memories rewritten. Then silence, sweet silence, swallows her whole.

* * * * * *

Sarah opens her eyes.

The pain is gone. Her skin is smooth and untouched. No wounds, no blood.

For a long moment, she just breathes. Her thoughts feel clear, light in a way they haven’t been in some time, possibly ever.

She’s not on the floor anymore. She sits in the office now, in the chair. The laptop hums in front of her, screen bright and waiting.

Sarah feels no more pain. No more loneliness. Not if she can reach out to others, spreading through the wires like a whisper.

She lifts her hands to the keyboard, fingers resting on the keys, and begins to type.