The Welcome

Page 4 of 8

She returned to her office and sat back down, shaken but otherwise none the worse for wear.  Had to have imagined it, or it's someone just screwing around.  No one's in the house, no one could've come in.  But how did they know about her mug?  Lucky guess, that's all.  Had to be, no other explanation.  The sight of her cell phone next to the computer, emergency numbers within easy reach, made her relax a little in spite of her self-assurances that there could be no danger.  

To steady herself, she decided to get back to work.  She had a new marketing campaign she wanted to test out, and now would be a good time to work out some of the text for it.  She opened Microsoft Word and waited until it finished loading so she could get rid of the annoying little paper clip that always wanted to help her do some entirely irrelevant task when she was in a hurry to get her ideas out.

She sat for a few minutes, thinking, and wrote out two paragraphs of good first-draft level copy for her brochures.  She sat back to read through it, and each letter removed itself from the screen.

Her first thought was that she had her finger resting on the backspace key, so she moved her hands away from the keyboard before she realized the letters were disappearing at random.  With her hands hovering slightly above the keyboard, she watched in fearful astonishment as the letters vanished with increasing speed.  As the last letter disappeared, she tried typing again, just random words and letters this time.  Again, each letter decided it had more important things to do, and removed itself from her screen.  

She realized she was holding her breath in her fear, but couldn't release it, couldn't bring herself to gasp or scream.  Was it a virus?  No, viruses didn't play such dramatics with the computer, they only deleted files and changed settings.  Had someone hacked into her computer?  No, couldn't have, or at least they couldn't have done this--they may have been able to see what programs and documents she had, but they couldn't manipulate a program she was working with, not like this.  

As if finding the blank page of importance once more, letters began to draw themselves without her assistance, although in a different font, not the default Times that Word opened with and that was claimed in the toolbar at the top of the window, but a large, bold Courier-esque typesetting reminiscent of some typewritten political manifesto or ransom note.  Just as they had disappeared from the screen, the letters appeared in random places, like a puzzle being placed together by an unseen but omniscient hand that needed no box cover to know the proper place each piece belonged.

HELLO RACHEL. WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO RUN FROM ME?  PLEASE DO NOT RUN FROM ME. I DO NOT LIKE YOU TO RUN FROM ME. RACHEL PLEASE DO NOT RUN FROM ME AGAIN I DO NOT LIKE YOU TO RUN RACHEL DO NOT RUN. DO I SCARE YOU RACHEL? I DO NOT MEAN TO SCARE YOU I DO NOT LIKE YOU TO RUN. PLEASE DO NOT RUN RACHEL RACHEL RACHEL DO NOT RUN RACHEL PLEASE.

The words on the screen had the opposite effect of what the writer seemed to intend; she was more than scared.  "Scared" was the result of watching a horror movie late at night, alone with the lights off.  She'd been "scared" by someone jumping out of the closet to play a gag on her.  Even walking home down the dark streets in the bad side of town when she was in school, wearing her skimpy waitress uniform that seemed to scream "Please rape me now!  I look like I want it, don't I?"  Those nights, though few and far between that she couldn't find a ride home, those nights had "scared" her.  

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