The Glitch That Called My Name

It starts small, the way break-ins do. [Name] is up past midnight fighting a nine-thousand-word essay when her computer stops obeying her. A chat window opens by itself, and a word appears in messy red letters: Hello. When she deletes it, it types itself back. She pulls the plug; the screen glows anyway. The thing inside her laptop knows her name, her nightmares, her front door, and it plays by rules of its own: it asks, she answers, and every honest answer teaches it more about her than she knows about herself. It is not a virus. Viruses do not play games, and viruses do not promise that one day they will kill her in person.

Then the game walks out of the screen and knocks on her front door. Ben Drow, blonde, polite, pointy-eared, is the live-in tutor her parents hired and the roommate she never asked for. He is also BOB, a glitching phantom out of Slender's mansion, and [Name] is the mission target he was ordered to gut like a pig. Nobody warned him what to do when she screamed his name in the dark and something in him went soft, because in that house, going soft gets you executed.

The mansion finishes swallowing her. Behind its walls there is a basement guarded by a red hound, a dying girl named Sadie and a switch of pink dresses and blue wigs, EJ's operating room kept dark and waiting, and a knife that will not cut whatever is not real. At the school party Ben finally kisses her, and his eyes go black, because something in the house is done waiting. Her best friend Harriet never comes home from her quiet walk, and [Name] wakes strapped to a chair beside her, close enough to hear her cry.

A doctor has a tidier version. Everything, the glitch, the phantom, the mansion, the deaths, is, he explains, the architecture of a delusion: hallucinations, a split personality, a life that is all made up. His documents say so. His documents were not typed in red.

Two years after she escapes, in a crooked house at the end of a lane far from the mansion, a screen she thought was dead lights up with a second Hello, and this one knows everything she survived and everyone she loves. Every screen in the kitchen counts down from eight minutes. The house goes quiet enough to hear the cat's tail thump once. Under the apple tree, in the ground, lies the machine Ben buried and swore was closed. And the figure that waits in the woods wearing Ben's voice might not be Ben at all, because the house always kept a copy, a seed, a small obedient version of the ones it could not break.

To end it, [Name] must break every rule the house wrote into the people it owns and answer the question the glitch has asked from the start, out loud, together with the boy who was ordered to kill her. The glitch that called her name is done waiting. This time it wants a goodbye.