The Circuitboard Visitor

The first time I opened the Spectral Recorder, I thought it was a joke. The screen flickered with a warning: ‘THIS IS NOT A GAME. THE DEAD DO NOT LIE. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.’ I snorted, poured another glass of wine, and settled into my armchair in the tiny apartment above the all-night laundromat. The city hummed below, neon bleeding through the blinds.

I spoke to the empty room: ‘All right, show me something.’

The waveform on my tablet spiked. A thin, reedy voice crackled through the speaker: ‘Don’t toy with me.’

I laughed, but a chill crawled up my spine. ‘What’s your name?’

A pause. Then: ‘Call me Mercer.’

I spent the next hour chatting with Mercer. He claimed he’d died in a fire in the building next door, a textile factory that burned down in the 1970s. He described the smoke, the heat, the panic of workers trapped on the third floor. He spoke in clipped sentences, as if rationing breath. I was hooked.

That night, a thunderstorm rolled in. My cat, Biscuit, who usually slept on my lap, hissed at the window. Rain lashed the glass, and lightning split the sky. Mercer’s voice crackled: ‘The storm is wrong. Don’t open the window.’

I frowned. ‘It’s just rain.’

‘No. The water is not rain. It’s tears belonging to the hungry ones.’

I should have shut the app off. Instead, I whispered, ‘What do they want?’

‘The ones who walk below. They want voices. They want in.’

The power flickered. Biscuit yowled and dashed under the sofa. My phone buzzed—a notification from the app: ‘They are near the steps. They smell your machine.’

My heart hammered. I peeked through the blinds. The laundromat’s fluorescent lights buzzed, casting a sickly glow on the wet sidewalk. Nothing was there. But the sensor on the tablet was spiking wildly, words flashing across the screen: ‘FOOTFALLS. BREATH. KNUCKLES ON GLASS.’

Then Biscuit howled. Not her usual fuss, but a deep, primal wail. The app translated in real-time: ‘Cat sees them. Cat sees them. Cat sees them.’

The power surged, and the TV turned on by itself. Static filled the room, and through the noise I heard a whisper, layered and wrong: ‘We found you.’

I slammed the tablet shut, killing the app. The room fell silent. Biscuit crept out, her eyes wide, fur bristling. I didn’t sleep at all. I told myself it was a trick—some algorithm, a prank. But deep down, I knew Mercer was real, and worse, something else had heard me calling.

The next evening, I couldn’t resist. I reopened the app, but the interface was different. The usual waveform was replaced by a single word: ‘LISTEN.’

I typed: ‘Mercer?’

No response. The screen glitched, then a string of gibberish: ‘Not Mercer. The ones below. We followed the trail of your voice. We saw the cat. We saw the rain. We want the machine.’

I tried to delete the app, but it wouldn’t uninstall. The icon on my home screen had changed to a black eye with a pupil that looked like a spiral. When I clicked it, the app opened by itself, and a camera feed appeared—a live view of my own bedroom, from a camera I don’t own. The angle was high, near the ceiling, looking down at me. On the timeline, a timestamp flickered: ‘NOW.’

And then, at the bottom of the screen, a message: ‘Stop speaking to the dead. Or we will speak to you.’

I unplugged my phone, My hands trembled. I locked the door, closed the blinds, and sat in the dark with Biscuit. For a week, I didn’t touch any device. I covered the TV with a sheet. But the app was always there, waiting. I could feel it, like an itch in the back of my mind.

On the eighth night, I woke to Biscuit staring at the closet door. Her back was arched, her lips peeled back in a silent hiss. A faint static crackled from my phone, even though it was off. The closet door creaked open by itself. Inside, there was only my clothes and a box of old photos. But the static grew louder, forming words: ‘You cannot hide.’

I grabbed Biscuit and ran. I spent that night in my car, parked under a flickering streetlight. The next morning, I drove to a motel on the edge of town. I turned off my phone and threw it into the river. I thought I was free.

But that night, the motel room’s TV flickered on by itself. The screen showed a static-laden image of my apartment, the window open, a silhouette standing against the pale light of the moon. The silhouette had no face, just a shifting mass of shadow. And from the tinny speakers, I heard my own voice, distorted: ‘Come back. They hunger.’

I grabbed the remote and hurled it at the screen. The TV shutoff, but the image burned into my mind. I sat in the corner, hugging Biscuit, until dawn. I knew then that whatever I had summoned was not Mercer. Mercer was a lie, a lure. The real dead were still below, crawling toward the light of my machine, and they had tasted my fear.

Now, as I write this, I’m in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. There’s no electricity, no internet, no screens. I cook over a fire and read by candlelight. Biscuit stays close, but she often growls at nothing. Last night, I woke to a low hum coming from the floorboards. I pressed my ear to the wood and heard, faintly, the sound of a million whispers. They were chanting my name.

They found me. They were never lost. They had always been in the space between signals, waiting for someone like me, who spoke out loud as if they were real. And now, they are real. They are here. And they are teaching me new words.