Entry 1
14/6
23 36
They all appeared on a day like any other, crawling among crowds of faceless people, scurrying beneath the frames of cars, hiding behind raindrops during a light shower, and walking along pavements in the skin of humans. Moments after their arrival, they made their omnipresence known and in a matter of days, no corner of the city was devoid of them. Even if you could find a place completely unreachable to their population, you'd still feel their presence somewhere.
Long since have they become a part of life as a result. Despite our initial, and current fears, we've long since given up on trying to be rid of them. Not only are they too numerous and durable or lacking in a physical form altogether, but efforts against or even acknowledging them tend to draw their ire. It took only a mere few weeks following their first sightings for the government to abandon any attempt at population control and instead resort to band-aid solutions.
In summary, over here in our world, the supernatural has unfortunately become the natural, and I, who have recently come across a tool to enable interdimensional communication, want to share it with you.
Entry 2
16/6
07 42
I think a good way to start a blog is to tell you how I got here, a world wide web that doesn't web around my world.
About 3 weeks ago I was running home from work on a windy Friday evening with rain seeping into my tattered jacket through all the wear and tear and evidence of my neglect leaving me sopping wet and my umbrella questioning its job security. Real dark it was, all you could make out were headlights, raindrops, and the blur of the Suzuki racing past you just inches away from the curb, splashing cold water not only on your clothing but also on your thoughts..
Stumbling back from that gratitude adjuster, I saw a blind homeless man by the road sitting just beside the entrance to an alleyway leading somewhere between the surrounding apartments. I don't know what possessed me that night, but I felt rather generous seeing him wrapped up in a damp mass of blankets, me suddenly feeling grateful for my cushy lifestyle tucked between a moldy mattress and the floor of a loud bastard of a tenant upstairs so I handed him a fifty-dollar bill.
That's right, fifty dollars. I saw his milky eyes light up at his hat rustling. he scrambled for the hat. Groped about in that empty cotton bowl and felt the paper crinkle between his decaying fingers.
"How much is it worth?" the man coughed out.
"Oh, nothing much sir, just a ten or five, more than enough for a meal though," I responded, "local restaurant's still open, go treat yourself." I lied.
The tramp's lips curved into some kind of satisfied smile as he leaned back against the cold concrete of the apartment. I even heard him snicker through his rotten teeth before he reached underneath those damp brown covers he sat atop. I instinctively stepped back, and as I'm writing this, felt like I should've taken two.
"Emile, is it? Lying to-" and out came a barrage of coughs before he kept going, "-absolve me of guilt, is that it?" the hobo rasps before chuckling.
Yes, that was it. Although I'm not exactly a saint myself, I can't say I didn't want the guy to head off to those pearly gates thinking he owed someone. But I was much too hung up on the fact he deduced my name from thin air. Then he spoke in this solemn tone:
"At least knowing there's people like you out there-" and two raspy coughs, particularly severe these were, "-is more than enough for me."
Then the man forced himself on his feet, pretty much trembling as he lifted his skin-and-bones body. Then he gave me this fatherly punch to the shoulder before walking past me into the mist and raindrops turning into a silhouette and disappearing.
I have never met this man in my life. I left for my apartment as soon as that interaction ended, pale as a ghost from his guessing my name. It would've ended right there, just a weird interaction in a weird city if it weren't for me learning the next morning of his passing. Some careless driver rammed a car right into the guy, blinded by the veil of rainfall, the vagabond just standing still on the road as if waiting for something when the iron grill met bone, a ribcage turned into a rib bear trap, and out a will came flying from his pockets into the hands of the police.
"Leave my belongings right there on the street. Someone will pick it up tomorrow. Tomorrow night, feel free to clear it."
Happened right in front of my apartment so the landlord sent a message to all of us tenants. Police even asked that he post the will in the group chat in case it was referring to any of the fifty or so of us. Hence I trudged on over to where we met to find the hat and bill untouched and his old brown blankets still lying there against the wall. I wasn't exactly happy to see my goodwill untouched. Not to say I wasn't happy about getting fifty dollars back. But the real focus was what was beneath the covers.
A computer.
A pristine laptop, devoid of any scratches or impurities as if it were brand-spanking new. So new, in fact, I spent over an hour debating on whether or not to claim it as my own and another hour wondering where a homeless man got such a thing. After those few hours wasted ambling back and forth, I took the hat, money, and laptop, ultimately. It was either me or the trashman. Back I went, all three objects ending up on my work desk beside a morning coffee and my overwhelming curiosity already clawing at the keyboard. On came the screen, my random typing piercing through not only the screensaver but the lock screen too. I'd like to think that I guessed the password first try, but it's more than likely there just weren't any users logged in. After watching those two screens sucked up into the upper edge of the computer, the curtain call revealed a sky-blue wallpaper with four squares on the horizon, and clusters of unfamiliar icons all over the place.
Curiosity was tugging at my sleeve and I was going to feed that hungry cat. I made efforts in trying to decode the computer's provenance, to no answer. All the necessary information (serial number, barcode, maybe a number to call) had been censored with whiteout. I don't have the necessary experience to open up a computer and appraise its innards on my own, so instead, I opted to do what I could: better understand the software. First, I struggled through the settings, I didn't know what 'Windows' referred to until after I mastered the search engine and managed to learn a bit about your world's history.
It was a certainly slow process to make heads or tails of the situation, let alone rejecting the possibility of this being a really elaborate prank and instead deducing that I possibly was dealing with my -and maybe your- world's first 'tool of interdimensional communication'.
Speaking of your world, after reading a few articles it seems your world's pretty split politically. Especially without a common enemy to unite under. I'd like to state that one of the few benefits of an unexplainable worldwide threat is that the bigwigs of this world are all scared witless, willing to unite to suppress the threat (or the public, apparently), shake each other's hands, and agree there are more important things to worry about before the representative of the west died suddenly after the 'Whitehouse Incident of 2018' and the east's was dragged into a lake by an invisible force never to be seen again.
As said before, since then they've resorted to band-aid solutions. Ignoring the problem does wonders for slowing its advance and I'd say that's much preferable to figuratively hiring firing squads to shoot at the wind.
Besides politics, plenty has also changed about modern etiquette and culture over here in recent years. It has become 'the standard' not to mention or even acknowledge the existence of the supernatural in formal settings to not draw their attention, however in more informal settings, sometimes people could talk for hours about the screwed-up creatures they've seen scuttling about or weird phenomena that they bore witness to. Also, spreading rumors is a sin taken much more seriously in this world. Urban legends, myths, warnings, rituals, or even things people make up on the internet tend to be more often than not true. Therefore, adding trash to the platter might as well put your head on one too. Other more superstitious people think that the existence of such canards is what gives birth to the monsters. Who knows?
So why am I bringing this up? Well, it's because I've been hearing certain stories circulating 'round Block 41 about the tech wiz of my apartment deciding to lock himself up in his room two floors down. Considering my lack of experience, I wanted to have someone crack open my brand-new computer to see if what was wrong with it was in the hard or software. Of course, I could just drop by a computer repair shop or something of the sort, but I didn't want to lose the last few green shreds that survived my previous spending spree, or worse, end up on a list somewhere for bringing in a dimension-surfing computer.
I still needed the computer examined so I showed up a while later, dressed to the zeroes, woozy, blinking rapidly to clear my vision of the morning allure from the sheets of my bed, with said computer pressed against my thigh by my hanging arm. Then, I gave the decrepit wooden door a good rap or two, pessimistic to get a response from behind the darkened windows.
"Rent's in the mailbox!"
"I'm not here for rent!"
"Emile?"
And then the doorway curved backward revealing a bare-bones frame of a human. Scrawnier than me even and I'm told I look like a skeleton. Well, not so much as a skeleton but you get the point. Besides being all skin and bones, another alarming feature immediately caught my eye.
"Goodness, Piper, when's the last time you slept?"
"A while. Can't catch a wink of sleep around them."
"Them?"
"Sprites. Little people. Gossip hasn't reached you yet?"
He hesitates. I raise an eyebrow but decide not to push further.
"I'm guessing you need something. Want to come in?"
I nod in response, removing my shoes and stepping onto the tiled floor then venturing further into the poorly lit cave he calls a room.
Within the room are four walls, evenly spaced apart with each corner enveloped in complete darkness with the curtains taped down preventing even the slightest sliver of light into the room. However, at the center, equidistant from all four walls and the door by the entrance leading to the bathroom, which I almost missed considering how dang dark it is in here, is a floor table, a candle, a computer, and a set of work tools all laid neatly on the tabletop. Surprisingly neatly, might I say. They were placed in a formation all parallel to one another with the dangerous ends trained at the dark of the room's window with a terrifying meticulousness, as if fate itself predetermined their exact orientation.
The candle gives off a faint light barely illuminating the computer screen let alone the creepy silhouette of what I presume to be a bed in the west corner of the room taking the windows as north. I take a seat in front of the bed.
"So, Emile, why exactly have you come today?" he asks, him saying so whilst sitting down cross-legged opposite the computer's screen, dark eyebags faintly lit by the white of the background of a sale listing for cheap coffee.
I lay the computer beside him.
"A relative died and I got this."
Obviously, I wasn't going to up and tell the man that I got it from a stranger who forked it over for fifty dollars and offed himself. A relative dying and passing it down would be a significantly easier tale to spin.
"Oh, I'm sorry," his eyes suddenly became downcast,
"Well, if there's anything I can do-"
"Don't be," I force a chuckle, noticing his awkward expression, "it's some distant granduncle I've never met before."
"Oh, I see," his eyes lighting up again with the response,
"And you want me to take a look at it or something? I'm really not a 'tech wiz' as the landlord calls me, and I suggest you raise the concerns with the shop."
"It's another one of those supernatural issues, Piper. You know how places tend to react to issues like that."
For a minute, he turned pale. I think he turned pale. It was far too dark to properly read his expression or he was purposely concealing his discontent with the dark. Regardless, what I did see was his Adam's apple bob down, holding itself there as if waterboarded, then shooting up bringing with it a voice of well-founded concern.
"Emile, this one better not spread to me."
"It's a harmless one. I've messed around with it for a week and it hasn't done anything bad. Besides, haunted objects tend to not spread beyond themselves or their owners."
"But you know how the supernatural gets. You can never be sure."
I don't respond. I didn't have any response. Now that I reflect on my actions, I think it was rather selfish of me to ask him to inspect the laptop.
He gently replaced his computer with mine, it being nudged to the edge of the table as he forced the other one on. His efforts proved fatal, his touch was a tad bit clumsy causing his computer to tip over the edge and clatter to the floor uselessly sending its light projection frantically dancing on the room's ceiling before coming to a still halt. Something behind it is illuminated, and that 'something' proceeds to scamper off back into the darkness.
I squinted. He took notice.
"Ignore them. They won't do anything direct."
"What was it, a rat? A lizard of sorts?"
He silently activates my computer, this new source of light illuminating a scowl on his face. Pass the lock screen, the blue windows logo disappeared with the press of a spacebar beginning the curtain call and revealing a home screen of foreign icons. His eyes widen.
"So you changed the laptop shortcuts? A rainbow camera shutter? And what's with the weird background?"
What ensued afterward was a long and drawn-out explanation of my testing and hypothesis, an explanation of which you've already read. By the end of it, he looked really out of it. Staring off into the shadows of the room before jerking back into consciousness and kicking hard with his foot against the leg of the table. There, a thud resonated and another by the wall followed by the swishing of hands on a mat and another silhouette moving across the floor.
"Another one?"
"It touched my foot. They never leave me alone."
He then caressed his throbbing toe, the computer screen now illuminating his wincing, eyes squinting from displeasure looking like he just swallowed a lemon. After he gave his toe a quick blow or two, we then returned to the original topic.
"So, Emile, how exactly do you know it connects to an alternate dimension? Did the relative tell you so? It could be a prank."
"Isn't it too elaborate for some prank?"
"I'd be shocked if it was. You know the lengths some people would go to screw with people,"
A beat.
"Hey, are you screwing with me right now?"
"I'm not, I wouldn't joke about things like this."
"That's bull, Emile, you know how some people are. I already have enough on my plate as is!"
For a moment, I think his voice raised in pitch. I turned to read his expression but it was concealed by the darkness. He lowered the brightness of the screen.
"Sorry, I haven't been doing good lately. You know, the being haunted thing and all."
I nod. He doesn't notice. He probably felt like I nodded though.
"I'm going to be honest. I can't say I buy into your story. Strange things like this may happen quite regularly but this is the first anyone's heard of something interdimensional contact. I know I should expect the unexpected and all, but this is just too…"
His face contorts, the corner of his lip rising with his eyes narrowing as if having swallowed a lemon. I'm not the best at reading expressions, but I'd say it's a mixture of disgust and cringe,
"I'm not exactly in the mood to poke around your computer's software either."
I nod again. He notices, nodding much more subtly in response.
"Can you at least check if there's anything strange with the hardware?"
"I can at least do that. Once again, sorry."
Delicately he lays the computer on its back exposing its underbelly of dark slits and whiteout, where logos would've been found blotched out by curdled masses of white.
Taking notice of the whiteout, he mutters a comment about how strange my relative must've been as he twists the screwdriver's head into the edges of the computer dimly lit by my phone's flashlight. And then out comes his metal ruler to pop the bottom off, exposing wires, warm chips, circuitry, and all the other things I don't understand. Warning labels, solder and the like. I look at his face expectantly for a diagnosis but all I get is his neutral expression and a complaint that I'm not holding the flashlight still.
"Nothing wrong with the hardware. You should raise this problem to professionals."
"Thank you, Piper."
By that point, the room's mounting tension was greater than my curiosity, and having got what I wanted, I figured it was about time I returned his solitude to him and took my leave.
I shifted to my side, Piper collecting the computer and wedging it between my armpit then giving me a slight pat on the back of my thigh as if to show that there would be no hard feelings between us. He was still noticeably upset about my presence though, especially so at my computer, watching the thin thing as if it were going to snap open and leap at him.
I remember giving a passing 'get lots of rest, Piper' or something along those lines before heading off. I shot a departing glance, saw that he didn't turn back, so off I continued on my path home.
To conclude the story, I still have no idea how this computer works. Since digging up information thus far only resulted in more holes forming, this was the part where I called this case quits. Just like every other phenomenon thus far there seems to be no reasonable explanation for its mechanics, just the simple absolute truth that it exists and occurs.
Entry 3
19/6
23 15
Since that interaction, no discoveries have surfaced. Part of it due to my inexperience in searching for such things and the other part due to my train of thought shifting from wanting to learn more to brainstorming on how to profit from it. Nobody's going to spend ludicrous amounts of money on a computer that can't connect to the internet (or at least my World Wide Web) so selling it is off the table, and stripping this for parts just seems like a waste. Thus, I was left mulling it over for the rest of the next few days.
Which brings us to about a week ago when I started writing this blog.
I'm sure you, the reader, are wondering what a blog's doing on a creative writing site. It's in essence my answer. If I can't profit from it, I might as well use it for entertainment. Reading, watching, and of course, playing the many forms of entertainment your world provides. And naturally, that eventually led me here, where I spent a day or two gorging myself with lines of text.
It was a lovely time. Like rediscovering the internet I so fell in love with many years back. But then, while I was reading a web series I was particularly fond of about 5 days ago, I suddenly got the idea of contributing some of my own stories to the stream.
It's not like I'm doing anything better with my life than earning enough pay to get by and getting by enough to earn pay, and I haven't tried anything new in a while so why not pick up writing? I heard it's fun. People also say it's fulfilling. I can't draw or program so there's no better medium to express myself. It's a great way to interact with people of an alternate universe and better yet, I don't live in your world so nobody can hold me accountable for anything I express. A risk-free venture.
Maybe if I'm lucky this blog'll even get attention. You guys are crazy over monsters and it's not like there's a limited supply over here. My mundanity is your fiction and at most, I'm one or two calls away from finding somebody else's sorrows to turn into fiction so it's a pretty simple enough venture too.
So, that's the gist of it. Expect plenty of stories of strange and unnatural phenomena on this blog in the near future.
Until next time.
Emile Scheele