The Static Player

I was twelve the summer my family rented that cabin in the pine woods of northern Minnesota, a place with no neighbors and a porch that creaked in the wind. My uncles used to tell me stories about the things that lived in those trees—tall, pale things with too many joints in their fingers—but I was a rational kid, too old for such nonsense. I had my tablet, a stack of board games, and a father who believed fresh air was good for the soul. We stayed for a month, long enough for the silence to get under my skin.

One evening, I was hunkered down on the living room floor, tablet in hand, a pile of laundry at my feet. The game was a simple puzzle, but I was deep into a level, my thumb hovering over the screen. The room was bright with the harsh glare of the overhead light. Then the bulb buzzed, flickered, and died, plunging me into absolute black. I blinked, dizzy for a second, and went to get up. Out of the corner of my eye, something streaked across the room—a thin, dark shape, like a wisp of smoke with sharp edges. It passed through the laundry pile, and the clothes scattered as if kicked. The pile landed in a heap, and the shadow was gone. I screamed, but no one came. The light flickered back on a moment later, and I stayed frozen on the floor, staring at the tumbled shirts and socks. I convinced myself it was a trick of the light, a mouse, anything. I didn’t tell my parents. Kids are good at that—hiding the things that scare them most.

A few days later, I realized my tablet was missing. I searched my room, the kitchen, the car. Finally, I checked the hall closet, the one with the heavy oak door that always seemed to stick. It wasn’t a place I went often, not after I’d once felt a draft there even in summer. I pulled the door open, and there it was, sitting on a shelf among dusty board games. The screen was lit, and a game was running—not the one I’d been playing, but another, a simple endless runner I didn’t remember downloading. The character on the screen was moving, jumping, as if someone’s ghost were playing it. I stood there, sweating, and then I noticed the cold. It rolled out of the closet like fog, sharp and raw, even though the heat was blasting from the vent in the hallway. My breath misted. I grabbed the tablet and slammed the door shut.

I didn’t touch the tablet for the rest of the trip. I left it on the nightstand, face down, but every morning I found it in a different spot—under the pillow, in a drawer, once in the bathroom sink. The screen would be warm, sometimes buzzing with static. I began to sleep with the lights on, and I never opened that closet again. The last night we were there, I woke to the sound of something tapping on the glass of the window. I was too afraid to look. In the morning, the tablet was lying on the floor, its screen cracked and black, but the battery was dead, drained to zero. I threw it in the trash at the gas station on the way home.

We never went back to that cabin. My parents sold it a year later without explanation. And now, as an adult, I still think about that shadow, those fingers of cold, and the way that game was playing itself. I’ve read about glitches, about sensors and Wi-Fi quirks, but none of that explains the tapping on the window, or the fact that, sometimes, even now, I’ll swear I feel a cold spot in my own apartment, and I’ll hear a faint, muffled sound—like static, or cloth falling, or a child’s laugh just out of reach. I never told anyone, not even my uncles. Because I know what they’d say. I know they’d tell me to believe. And I’m still not sure I can.