Someone Is Typing…
The most dangerous messages are the ones you send yourself.
The fluorescent lights of the office hummed a familiar, monotonous tune that Maya had come to associate with the slow death of her soul. Another Friday night, another empty floor except for her and the glow of her monitor, which cast long, skeletal shadows across the stacks of files she'd been meaning to organize for months. Her fingers danced across the keyboard, the rhythmic click-clack the only music that mattered in this symphony of solitude. She was proofreading a contract for a client she'd never meet, a faceless entity on the other end of a dozen emails. Safe. Predictable. Boring.
Then, the cursor blinked. And blinked again. It wasn't her hand resting on the mouse, she knew that much. Her coffee cup sat untouched on the coaster, the liquid within already cold. The cursor moved with deliberate slowness, hovering over the document before clicking on the "New Message" button. Maya's breath hitched. She watched, paralyzed, as the address field filled itself with an email address she knew by heart: her own. The subject line appeared in stark, black letters: "Things You've Buried." Her blood ran cold. This wasn't possible. There was no hacker clever enough, no virus sophisticated enough to replicate the specific, intimate dread that was now flooding her system.
The body of the email began to populate, line by agonizing line. It wasn't a generic threat. It was personal. It was a memory she had tried to suffocate with cheap wine and busier schedules. The words "that night" appeared, followed by "his face," and then "the sound." Each keystroke was a hammer blow to her carefully constructed reality. She had told no one about what happened in the abandoned warehouse on the edge of town. No one. Her hands trembled as she reached for her keyboard, ready to smash the machine, to pull the plug, to do anything to stop this violation of her most private thoughts. But before she could, a new line appeared, one that made her blood turn to ice.
"The question is," the email typed, "what are you going to do when I tell him what I just told you?"