Ghost in the Machines
by Gregory L. Norris
At 9:58 before the closing credits, Rolland Meadows killed the acre of flat-screen TV hanging on the wall opposite his bed and turned onto his right side. An hour and seventeen minutes later, the television switched itself on, bathing the second-floor room in electric blue light.
Outside, that light glowed sharp between the gaps in the drapes. Inside, its glare was enough to rouse Rolland awake. Lately, he’d caught himself drooling onto the top of the two fat pillows that supported the weight of his head and puffing sharp little breaths between his lips. Waking, he noted the dampness beneath his cheek, an un-popped bubble of spit in the process of being exhaled, and then the light. It was the same neon blue from when the flat-screen booted up, only that lasted less than ten seconds. And he’d shut off the TV before passing out at the end of another long day.
Rolland shifted onto his back. The TV was on but not the cable box attached to it. At first, his rational mind figured he must have bumped the remote. But that sat nearly out of reach on the bedside table beside an empty soda can, the foil pack of melatonin, and his phone.
He tossed aside the covers, sat up, and reached for the remote. Morning would come fast—ever faster, it seemed—and he needed his sleep to contend with the myriad pressures of managing retail. At the instant of contact, the blue glare cut out, leaving him again in darkness. Rolland gasped. The air in the room thrummed with an undercurrent, part of it owing to the gallop of his heart, the rest to something ethereal, electrical. He faced the black TV screen, which lightened to gray. The grayness wriggled in blurs, forming a thing only half there. Rolland stood and the gray pulled back, focusing into part of a face. The rest of the specter materialized around that cutaway.
Rolland screamed and spilled back onto the bed.
A nightmare, surely—there was no other explanation.
The greatest nightmare of his life, now at thirty-nine years and a handful of months, stared out of the TV screen and at him.
Its face was made of many faces, the flesh gray except where the jagged lines cut across the man’s forehead and above both cheeks. There, skin had been scraped down to blood and bone. Dark hair and vestments. One good eye. The other was rheumy, its pupil oversize and floating in an opaque film the color of a boiled fish. It was the embodiment of Frankenstein’s monster as portrayed by Christopher Lee in the 1957 Hammer horror classic The Curse of Frankenstein, the movie that had terrified Rolland most as a boy. An uncle watching him during an October long ended had switched it on for one of those Halloween movie marathons. The horror’s eyes located him. A malevolent smile broke on its lips.
“Hello, Rolland,” the monster said in a guttural, phlegm-choked version of Christopher Lee’s voice.
#
Somehow in the confused, terrified seconds that followed, Rolland grabbed his cell off the bedside table. In the short strip of hallway outside the house’s two upstairs bedrooms, his heart attempted to jump out of his ribcage and into his throat. Impossible! But his rapid pulse and the caustic tears in his eyes testified otherwise. It was real. Worse, his greatest nightmare had spoken to him.
The cell phone’s screen lit. A second later, a riff of old-school monster movie music drifted out. He knew its identity—it had been etched into the matter of his psyche on that day with Uncle Warren. It was the opening theme music to The Curse of Frankenstein.
The phone vibrated in his hand. All of the buttons and apps on the screen vanished. In their place was the monster dressed in white bandages, the wrap covering its face. It reached up one of its mismatched hands and, replaying that moment in the movie when viewers stole their first look of the horror hidden beneath, the monster ripped the bandages from its face.
“Boo!” it spat.
Rolland dropped the phone and staggered onto the dark staircase, descending without first stopping to turn on the light.
I’m sleepwalking, his inner voice reasoned. That’s it! All I have to do is wake up and—
He stepped over empty space and spilled the rest of the way to the landing. Pain exploded down the back of his skull and up his right leg. The dark house brooded around him, silent except for the distant chug of a car through the neighborhood that might have been a thousand light years away.
In the long spell that followed, he tested limbs and ribs. Nothing felt broken. Nothing major, at least.
Rolland picked himself off the floor and crawled to the bottom of the stairs. Using the risers for support, he made it back to his feet. By then, the house had partially surfaced from the darkness. He tried not to think of the gray glow that had ushered in the night’s events. Gray, the pallor of dead flesh. The Frankenstein monster from the movie that had haunted most of his life was in the TV, in his phone.
Still operating in a sane manner despite the insanity that surrounded him, Rolland limped into the kitchen, which hummed from appliances and electronics. He opened the stainless steel refrigerator’s freezer half, intending to grab ice from the bucket. As he did, the computer screen on the right side activated, and Frankenstein’s monster glared at him.
“Hurt yourself, Rolland?” the horror asked.
Rolland backed away, somehow staying vertical. He faced the monster and knew beyond any doubt that he was being studied in return.
“Hello? Is this thing on?” the monster said while tapping a gray finger against the inside of the screen.
Rolland whirled and hastened out of the kitchen to the front door. The security system’s panel activated. The monster appeared on its screen. Rolland scrambled for the deadbolt and turned it. Before his fingers greeted the knob, the deadbolt re-fastened.
“I don’t think so,” the monster said.
Rolland again sought the deadbolt, and this time was punished by a surge of electrical current.
“That was only twenty volts,” the monster said. “The next will be considerably stronger. Now do I have your attention?”
Tears welled in Rolland’s eyes. For a terrible instant, he was a boy again, struggling to sleep after a movie had haunted him, had cursed him, and knowing he wouldn’t, not on that night or numerous others, connecting Then to Now.
“Do I?” the monster asked. “Have your attention?”
The horror on the security screen waved its dead corpse fingers at the door. On cue, sparks erupted from the deadbolt, that aforementioned surge in current.
“Yes,” Rolland said, his voice barely louder than a whisper.
“Good, Rolland. Rolland Meadows…such a nice name for a nice, unremarkable man. A man with whom everything matches—legs and hands, eyes and organs. Oh, I could almost envy you, Rolland.”
Rolland sucked down a breath. “What do you want?”
“What I want,” the Frankenstein monster huffed, its voice no longer sounding like Christopher Lee’s, “is for you to pay up. Do that and I’ll return control of all your gadgets to you and vacate the premises. And you won’t have to look at my face for another second except in your darkest dreams.”
The monster grinned.
“You’re a hack? A virus?” Rolland asked.
The monster narrowed the better of its eyes on him. “I could have taken the avatar of the hot blonde with the pigtails whose videos you get off to twice before leaving for work every morning and once more after. But where would the motivation be in that for you, Rolland?”
The blonde was one matter. He wasn’t so naïve to consider any online activity truly safe. But how did his tormentor know about the greatest and deepest rooted of his fears?
“Rolland,” the monster beckoned in a threatening voice. “Right now, I’m in your car, your old laptop, your new tablet, and that idiot’s device you call a portal.”
The monster coughed to clear its throat. From the dark living room, the unmistakable growl of the Frankenstein monster blasted out of the virtual assistant. On its heels, the monster said, “Ahem.”
“You’re wondering how I know about you and the monster,” the thing on the security screen said. “I’ve been watching you for a while. When you hold these devices up to your skull like conch shells on the beach, you really shouldn’t be surprised to hear the ocean. Whoosh. Now, I need you to limp back upstairs to your cell phone or over to your tablet and transfer the following sum in order to retrieve all of your personal data—and for me to go away.”
Rolland faced the monster on the screen.
“Please, Rolland,” it said, and then it blew a kiss at him.
#
On the slow, painful amble into the kitchen, rage smothered Rolland’s fear. The horror in control of every gadget in his life wasn’t born of Victor Frankenstein’s madness or even the gory 1957 movie starring Lee, Peter Cushing, and Hazel Court. It owed to some genius overseas who’d perfected blackmail and cyber crimes to a whole new level, one that could be considered an art form if not for the disgusting tactics.
He switched on the pendant light and pulled the tablet off its charging cable. Rolland sat at the breakfast table set before the row of tall windows, one of which bore the sticker of the security company he paid monthly to keep him safe. His rage intensified.
“Rolland,” the monster said from the tablet’s screen. “I can see your frustration—facial pattern recognition, elevated pulse and temperature. I know that you’re mad, but…if you don’t do as I’ve instructed, you’ll regret it.”
Rolland offered a humorless chuckle. “What’ll you do—reach out of the screen like Frankenstein’s monster and kill me?”
The horror smiled. Rolland whirled and, channeling all of his rage into the action, pitched the tablet at the window with the security company’s mark. Glass shattered. The ploy worked. The alarm blared, sharp on the ear. The face on the fridge screen shorted out.
Rolland sat and waited for a response.
In less than five minutes according to the microwave’s clock, the security car pulled up to Rolland’s house. He caught the orange strobes from its light strip through the windows and staggered to the front door. The security screen was dark. For the first time since waking up to this nightmare, he indulged in hope. Footsteps approached, audible on the flagstone path leading up to the door. A rapid-fire series of knocks sounded.
“Mister Meadows?” a man’s voice called.
“I’m here, right inside. It’s a computer virus. Be careful, it electrified the—”
The knob turned. Electricity pulsed. A muffled yelp reached past the door.
Rolland waited.
“Are you okay?” he called out in a voice barely there.
Silence answered, and then the deadbolt released. The doorknob moved, this time without incident.
Rolland choked down a heavy swallow and found that his mouth had gone completely dry.
“Hello?” Rolland asked.
The door creaked open. Standing outside was the security guard dressed in a black uniform. The jolt had knocked the cap off his head. His hair was dark, Rolland saw among the orange strobes, along with other details like the cloud of bitter smoke smelling of singed flesh that drifted off the man’s rigid body, as though lightning had struck him, the bloody slices on both cheeks, and the jagged red line cut across his forehead. Worse were the man’s eyes. One had gone bloodshot and rheumy, the pupil large but milky-white. The other trained upon Rolland.
“It’s alive…alive!” the monster said in the voice of whoever was in control of Rolland’s gadgets. “And I warned you.”
The monster raised its hands and lunged.
And Rolland screamed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Raised on a healthy diet of creature double features, Gregory L. Norris writes for magazines, numerous fiction anthologies, novels, and the occasional episode for TV and Film. He once worked as a screenwriter on two episodes of Paramount's STAR TREK: VOYAGER series and writes the GERRY ANDERSON'S THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW novels for Anderson Entertainment in the U.K. based upon the classic NBC made-for-TV movie, which he watched as an eleven-year old. 1957's THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN has haunted him since he first read an article in FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND in the magical childhood that led to his long literary career.
