Dial-Up

The summer of 2004 was hot and endless, the kind that made the air shimmer on pavement and turned houses into ovens. We were stuck inside, me and my cousin, cycling through burned cds and chain emails, watching pixelated flash animations on Newgrounds.

My aunt’s house was old. One of those places where the wallpaper always felt damp, and the wood creaked in a way that sounded like words if you listened too long. But it had a computer. A bulky beige compaq with a screen that flickered slightly at the edges. It ran windows 98, but it still had dial-up, which meant we had to be careful not to get caught online when someone needed the phone.

That night, cous found an AOL chatroom called "The Waiting Room."

It was nearly empty. Just us and one other user: guest_104923.

He typed:

“Yo. Who r u?”

A long pause. Then:

“been here long time.”

I felt a little chill. Something about the way it was typed—no caps, no punctuation, just flat and empty. 

"Cool, dude. U a bot?"

“no. just waiting.”

"Waiting 4 what?"

The cursor blinked. Then, instead of a reply, something else happened.

The modem let out a strange, sharp click. Not the usual screech and whine of dial-up. It was sharper. Like something unlocking.

Then the screen flickered.

The background turned black. The icons disappeared. The chatbox stayed, but now there was a new message.

"do you remember the yellow house?"

I felt my stomach drop.

The YH was a place from when Derek and I were kids, a small abandoned home at the end of our old street. We used to peek through the broken windows, daring each other to go inside. The last time we did, we saw something in the kitchen. A dark shape, barely human, standing motionless by the fridge.

No one ever lived there. The house was demolished when we were ten.

Derek didn't type.

The modem clicked again. The message box changed.

"it's still there."

The PC screen went black. Not turned off—just black, like it had been swallowed by something.

Then we heard it.

A slow, dragging sound.

From the hallway...