The Lazarus Pager

In the autumn of 2003, my world had settled into a quiet routine after the sudden loss of my fiancé, Adrian, in a car crash that the police ruled as negligence on his part. We had worked at the same tech firm, and Adrian had been the one to brighten my mornings with quirky emails and playful pranks on my workstation. A year after his funeral, I finally agreed to meet our mutual friend, Elena, for a drink at a dive bar near our office. Elena had been close to Adrian for years, and we had bonded over our shared grief.

As we sat in a dim booth, sipping amber whiskey, Elena recounted Adrian’s antics: how he’d sneak into the IT office early to reset my keyboard to a different layout, or leave a small rubber duck on my monitor. I laughed, the first genuine laugh in months, and raised my glass to him. Just then, my pager buzzed against my hip. I fumbled for it, expecting a mundane work alert, but the number displayed was my own direct office line. That was impossible—I was the only one who used that line, and it had been disconnected after the company downsized. Elena leaned over, her face pale. ‘That’s his old extension,’ she whispered.

We stared at the pager, the screen glowing like a malevolent eye. ‘It’s a prank,’ I said, but my voice trembled. ‘No one has that number anymore.’ I tried to dial the number from my cell, but the automated voice said it was no longer in service. A chill crawled down my spine as I remembered Adrian’s final days: he had been obsessed with a project he never finished, a predictive text algorithm he called ‘Ghost Net.’ He’d said it could send messages from the beyond, and I’d laughed at his morbid humor.

The next morning, I arrived at work to find my office exactly as I had left it the day before, save for a single rubber duck resting on my keyboard. Its beady eyes seemed to mock me. I brushed it aside and powered up my computer. My email inbox had a new message from an unknown sender, with the subject line ‘Good morning, sunshine.’ The body contained a single word: ‘Remember.’ I chalked it up to a prank by a colleague who knew my history, but the sender’s address was a string of numbers—Adrian’s employee ID.

That evening, I called Elena, my hands shaking. She confessed that before he died, Adrian had given her a sealed envelope with instructions to mail it to me if she ever heard from him ‘beyond.’ She thought it was a joke but had kept it. We opened it together. Inside was a handwritten note: ‘If you’re reading this, I found a way. The pager is the key. Meet me at the server farm on the 13th.’ The server farm was the old building where we used to work, now abandoned and rumored to be haunted.

Against all reason, I drove there alone. The building loomed in the fog, its windows dark. I had to force the rusted door open. The air smelled of dust and decay. The server racks were still humming, powered by some backup generator. On the main console, a terminal blinked with a single line: ‘Missed you.’ I typed a response: ‘Adrian?’ The screen flickered, and then it filled with a flood of data—emails, chat logs, and voice memos from our past. But at the bottom, a new message appeared: ‘I’m stuck in the loop. The pager is the trigger. Please, end it.’

I didn’t understand. Then the pager buzzed again, showing a sequence of numbers: 13-13-13. The terminal screen went black, and a low hum filled the room. The lights flickered, and I felt a presence behind me. I turned to see a silhouette—tall, familiar, but its face was a shifting mass of static. ‘You came back,’ the voice said, but it was garbled, like a corrupted file. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to drag you into this. The accident was my fault, but… I saw something, Celeste. I saw the other side. And it’s not peaceful. It’s a prison of data.’

The silhouette lunged, and I screamed, stumbling backward. But instead of touching me, it merged with the server rack, and the room erupted in sparks. The pager exploded in my hand, burning my palm. I fled the building, my heart pounding. When I reached my car, I looked back, and the entire server farm was engulfed in flames, the fire devouring the building in minutes.

The next day, I found a new email from the same unknown sender: ‘Thank you. I’m free. But remember, the dead sometimes get trapped in the wires. Don’t let them call you again.’ I tried to delete it, but it kept reappearing. It’s been weeks, and my pager—despite being destroyed—still buzzes at odd hours, displaying my old office number. I never answered, but part of me wonders: was it really Adrian, or something else wearing his digital corpse? And if I ignore it, will it find a way to reach me again? The only thing I know for sure is that every time I see a rubber duck, my blood runs cold.