The Counter-Hex

I’m not entirely convinced it was the flu that kept me in bed for a week, but the doctor’s note said ‘viral exhaustion,’ so I’ll take it. Still, even with the fever and the aches, I couldn’t stop thinking about the house. Not my house—the digital one, Ossuary Hollow. I’d been building it for years, a sprawling virtual haunted house with dozens of rooms, each one a tableau of decay and dread. My pride and joy. But it had been neglected for months, and the thought of its broken links and outdated plugins itched at me like a scab.

So, on the first day I was allowed to sit upright without feeling like the room was tilting, I dragged my laptop to the kitchen table and opened the code. The afternoon sun slanted through the blinds, but the screen’s glow felt brighter, more immediate. I had a plan: make the whole thing responsive, ensure it worked on phones and tablets, fix any dead ends, and maybe add a new room or two—something involving a mirror maze, perhaps. A fun project.

But as I delved into the file tree, I started noticing things that made no sense. In the room ‘The Desiccated Nursery,’ which I knew had a hotspot on the crib to trigger a baby’s giggle, the clickable area was now a foot to the left, hovering over nothing but wallpaper. Another hotspot, once on the door of the ‘Bone Chapel,’ now sat on a candelabra on the opposite wall. I chalked it up to the new CSS I’d half-remembered from a tutorial I’d skimmed while feverish. I began to adjust them, but each time I resaved a file, the coordinates would drift again. I’d set the hotspot back, save, and when I reloaded the browser, it would have moved back to its errant position. Not just slightly—but with a deliberate, mocking precision.

At first, it was frustrating. Then it became unsettling. I’d open a page and see the hotspot flicker, as if it were alive, winking at me. I closed the laptop and made tea, telling myself I needed a break. But my mind kept circling back to the code. There was a logic to the shifts, a pattern I couldn’t pin down. I remembered a hidden subdirectory I’d called ‘cache’ that I’d never cleaned out, but I ignored it.

The next day, I opened the project and went straight to the nursery. The hotspot had moved again, this time to the shape of a rocking horse. My hand trembled on the mouse. I right-clicked and inspected the element, and there, in the HTML, was a comment I had not written: ‘They see you in the dark.’ The font was the same as mine, but the wording—I’d never type something that cliché. I deleted the comment, but it reappeared the next time I refreshed.

I started to document everything in a notepad, but the notes themselves seemed to change. Words I’d written would be slightly altered—’move’ became ‘remove,’ ‘check’ became ‘seek.’ I wrote ‘I am tired’ and later saw ‘I am theirs.’ By Friday, I was sleeping with the lights on, my laptop locked in a drawer. But the dreams were worse. I’d dream of the hallways of Ossuary Hollow, but they were real—damp plaster, peeling paint, and everywhere, the sound of something scraping against walls, just out of sight.

On Saturday morning, I decided to delete the entire project. I selected all the files, hit Shift+Delete, and empty the trash. But when I closed the trash, a folder called ‘Resurrection’ appeared on my desktop. Inside was a single file: the room I’d been working on, renamed ‘The Crawlspace.’ I opened it, and the code was a mess—hundreds of lines of obfuscated JavaScript, and at the bottom, an array of coordinates. I copied them in a panic and pasted them into a mapping tool. They plotted a path through my apartment building: from my kitchen, down the hall, to the basement door, and ending in a tiny storage unit I’d never used.

I should have called the police, or a priest, or just run. But I put on my coat and walked to the basement. The storage unit was locked with a rusted padlock, which I broke with a crowbar from the janitor’s closet. Inside, the room was exactly like the one in my digital house: same peeling wallpaper, same rotting floorboards, same rocking horse in the corner. And on the wall, scratched into the plaster, was a hotspot marker—a circle the size of a dinner plate, with a date: my birthday.

I didn’t need to click it. I knew what it would do. I backed out, ran up the stairs, and went straight to my landlord. He said the basement had been sealed for decades after a ‘problem’ with a previous tenant. He wouldn’t say more. I’m writing this from a hotel room, my laptop smashed and left in a dumpster. But I keep thinking about the title of the file I saw just before I destroyed it: ‘The Counter-Hex.’ And I keep feeling something under my skin, like a hot spot, waiting to be triggered.