Lurker

Come on, Laurel, pick up.

The phone rang twice and a hiss of static filled her ear. “Laurel?” she asked. The static rippled like someone crumpling a paper bag, pausing, then crumpling again. “Laurel. It’s me, Mandy. Laurel?”

“This isn’t Laurel,” a rasping voice said. Whoever was on the line sounded old.

He also sounded amused. Behind his voice, that crunching, crumpling sound grew faint and then burst forward, nearly deafening her.

“I’m sorry,” she said into the phone. Her speed dial must have glitched, and she got the wrong number. “Good-bye.”

“See you later,” the man said. The word was followed by what sounded like a cough. Or a laugh. Then the static erupted and the line went dead.

CUL8R

Mandy looked at the phone, terrified. Her heart thumped hard in her chest. Behind her, in the brush that ran beside the sidewalk, a twig snapped. Branches rustled.

She ran. At first she sprinted down the sidewalk, but her fear intensified. Someone could leap out of the bushes, drag her in. Oh God. Checking for traffic ahead and behind her, Mandy ran into the middle of the road. In her mind, terrible things happened: the Witchman shot out of the brush, his stooped form moving with inhuman speed to catch her; he appeared as if by magic in the road ahead of her, one long finger pointing at her chest before he raced forward and lifted her from the street; he threw her over his shoulder, carrying her screaming to his special place behind the library, where he would…

Cut her open…. She was totally butchered.

Mandy let out a cry of fear and ran faster, trying to keep the Witchman out of her head. But it didn’t work. With every step, his beaklike nose, his pointed chin, his wild eyes were with her. The fear of his outstretched fingers reaching for her back made her charge desperately down the street.

The familiar houses of her development, aglow with lights, fell in around her. She slowed her pace, caught her breath. A couple, chatting quietly, walked their dog on the sidewalk ahead. Behind the walls and windows of the homes, men, women, boys, and girls sat down to dinner. TVs showed syndicated reruns of popular sitcoms and the national evening news. Eight blocks away, her mother would just be getting home from work.

It was still early, but for Mandy it felt very late.

Laurel held the slice of double cheese pizza in front of her mouth and looked at Mandy like she’d just said, “I want to work the drive-through window at Meaties.” Laurel put down the slice and wiped at her lips with a finger as if she’d actually taken a bite. “You’re trippin’,” Laurel said. “I didn’t text-mess you.”

They sat in the kitchen of Laurel’s house with a large pizza that had arrived two minutes after Mandy. Mandy didn’t want any. She was still scared, and the fear tied a knot in her stomach, twisted it up tight so she couldn’t even think about eating. She could barely get sips of iced tea through the tension in her throat. She was so upset, and all she wanted was some kind of rational explanation. The message must have come from Laurel.

“That’s not funny, L.”

“And I’m not joking, M.”

“I called here.”

“But the phone didn’t ring. Look, when have I ever been down with practical jokes? That was Naughty Nic’s bag, not mine. Yeah, I get my giggle on bustin’ some chops, but I don’t play the mind screw.”

“Then who sent that message?”

“Uh, Dale?”

“No,” Mandy said. “The more I think about it, the more I’m sure he didn’t do it. Hiding his ID like that would be too complicated for him. Even asking Matthew to do it would be too much effort.”

“What about your new boy, Kyle?”

“I didn’t even know Kyle the night of Nicki’s vigil.”

“Doesn’t mean he didn’t know you.”

“Oh, come on,” Mandy said. “That’s ridiculous. Why would he?”

Laurel shrugged and retrieved her pizza from the plate. She took a bite and pulled back, cheese stretching like suspension wires between her mouth and the slice. She washed the bite down with a swig of her iced tea and leaned back in the chair.

“Your problem is, you’re too rational,” Laurel said. “You expect everyone else to act rationally. But that’s not how people are. They want to be, and they can explain every weird-ass thing they do, but that doesn’t make them rational. Even psychos got reasons. It’s that method-to-the-madness thing. Now, you think someone is playing you, and you figure it’s got to be someone that has a reason to be playin’. I’m just sayin’ that some folks don’t need a reason. Some folks get their giggle on just knowin’ you’re scared, whether they know you or not.”

Mandy tried to think of an argument, but everything she considered struck her as overly rational. Laurel was making sense.

“And let’s not forget,” Laurel continued, “people say ‘see you later’ all the time. Now, I can see why you got the creeps in you. I won’t go anywhere near that library myself these days, but it’s not exactly a death threat, you know?”

“It was that voice, though,” Mandy said. “When I thought I was calling you. The guy’s voice.”

“Old people are scary,” Laurel said.

Mandy laughed.

“It’s not that he was old. He just sounded, I don’t know…He sounded wrong, but I can’t really describe it. It seems kind of stupid now. Maybe it was just being by the library that scared me.”

“Let’s talk about it upstairs,” Laurel said. “Dad is floating around in the living room, and I don’t need him finding something new to freak over. He’d probably make me drive a tank to school or something.”

“Okay.”

“Now, eat. Or I’ll put this fine cheesiness away by myself, and my skin so doesn’t need that.”

Before going up to Laurel’s room, Mandy picked at a single slice of pizza. Her appetite didn’t return, and the whole thing seemed to be annoying the hell out of Laurel. In her room, with Mandy sitting on the bed, Laurel went to her computer and killed the screen saver. Her wallpaper, a field of bright yellow sunflowers, burst across the monitor.

“The first thing to do,” Laurel said, “is forget about that phone call. We both know that nobody can jack into a line like that, unless they’re FBI or magic or something. The signal got mixed up, and you called a wrong number. Unfortunately, you got some old dude with Satan’s voice who says ‘see you later’ instead of ‘bye.’”

“I know,” Mandy said. But part of her didn’t know. At the time, she’d immediately connected the wrong- sounding old man with the earlier message. It was hard to sever that connection now, no matter what Laurel said.

“So, that really only leaves the text messages.” Laurel typed while she spoke. “And, I think I have an answer to that. When we were talking downstairs, I remembered something. Here, come read.”

Mandy walked across the room and leaned over Laurel’s shoulder to look at the screen. Her friend had loaded a news page from a tech site with the headline Cell Phones New Frontier for Hackers. She read the first two paragraphs, which described a series of cell-phone specific viruses.

“Does it say anything about receiving blind messages like I have?”

“No,” Laurel said. “But they only talk about a few of the service problems people have with these. See, a hacker doesn’t know anything about you, but he’s groovin’ on knowing that he’s messin’ with your life and everybody else’s. It’s like I was sayin’.”

Mandy read another paragraph of the article, but every third word was tech slang that she didn’t understand, so she gave up. She’d take Laurel’s word for it. After all, it made perfect sense. Neither of the messages, when taken out of context, was threatening in the least. One was just hahaha, and the other CUL8R, one of the most common phrases she’d come across. She used it herself.

“God,” Mandy said. “What jerks.”

“True enough,” Laurel agreed. “But before you call customer service, let’s check out one more thing.”

“Okay. What?”

“Kyle.”

MC9010025: Missed u lst night