The Translator’s Glitch

The old farmhouse on Cedar Lane had always hummed with a quiet, uneasy energy, but my mother, Ruth, had never been one to dwell on such things. She was a practical woman, a retired nurse who found comfort in routine and the familiar drone of daytime television. That autumn, her sister’s daughter, Chloe, had come to stay for a few weeks, bringing her friend Mara along. The house had two cats, Salt and Pepper, who spent most of their days sleeping in sunbeams or staring at blank walls with unnerving focus.

One drizzly Tuesday afternoon, Ruth and the girls were in the living room, a SpongeBob DVD playing to keep the pre-teens entertained. Ruth was half-dozing, her knitting needles clicking softly, when she noticed something odd. The DVD’s subtitles, which they never used, had turned on by themselves. The text at the bottom of the screen flickered between Spanish, English, and French, but that wasn’t the strangest part. The English subtitles were not the script. Instead, they scrolled phrases that cut far too close to home. ‘The debt is due by Friday,’ read one line, exactly what Ruth had been dreading from her bank. ‘The test will be a failure,’ another, as Chloe had been panicking about her math exam all week. Ruth dropped her knitting, her heart hammering against her ribs. She grabbed the remote and tried to turn the subtitles off, but they kept cycling through languages, mocking her efforts.

The girls were oblivious, laughing at SpongeBob’s antics, but Ruth felt a cold knot in her stomach. She pulled the DVD out, but the subtitles remained, projected onto the blank TV screen, still flickering. Then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped. The screen went black, and the DVD player clicked off. Ruth stood there, trembling, not sure if she had imagined the whole thing.

That night, Chloe’s room, which was in the far east wing of the house, had always had a temperamental light fixture. It would hum and flicker, but usually, it was just an old bulb. However, when Mara went to fetch her phone from the room, the light turned off the moment she stepped inside. She flicked the switch, but nothing. She left, and as she crossed the threshold, the light clicked on. She turned around, heart pounding, and went back in. It shut off. This continued for hours—the light responding to whoever entered or left the room, as if it were toying with them. Ruth called an electrician the next day, but he found nothing wrong. The wiring was old, he said, but sound. When he left, the light was on, and it stayed on until Mara entered the room again, when it flickered and died.

I, Ruth’s son, had come to visit a few weeks later. I was sleeping on the living room couch, and I woke in the dead of night to the sound of typing. A slow, deliberate clack-clack-clack, coming from the den, where the old computer sat. I crept toward the den, my bare feet cold on the worn floorboards. The computer screen was glowing faintly, and there was a figure sitting at the desk, but as I approached, the room went dark. I stumbled back, my heart thudding. When I found the light switch, the computer was off, its cord unplugged. Yet I could still smell hot circuits, a faint ozone tang. And on the desk, in a fine layer of dust that had settled over the years, there was a single word traced: ‘LISTEN.’

I didn’t sleep that night. I sat in the kitchen with the lights on, Salt and Pepper keeping me company, their eyes never leaving the doorway to the den. Ruth came down at dawn, her face pale. She told me about the subtitles, and the light, and the strange feeling she’d had for months that the house was not empty. We decided to have the house blessed, but the priest found the air ‘too heavy’ and left before the ritual was complete.

A week later, Ruth called me, her voice a thin whisper. She had just been in the basement, looking for old photo albums, when she saw a shape in the corner—a tall, thin figure with no discernible features, just a dark silhouette. It stood there, motionless, and then it was gone, leaving behind the smell of dust and old paper. She ran upstairs, and the light in Chloe’s room was strobing, and the DVD player in the living room turned on by itself, the TV flickering with static that resolved into a single, cryptic sentence: ‘IT’S ALREADY INSIDE.’

We moved out two weeks later. We took the cats, but the house still stands on Cedar Lane, its windows dark, the light in the east room flickering on and off, waiting for someone to come back, to listen to what it has to say. I don’t know what it wanted, but I know that wherever we go, we carry a piece of that house with us, like a splinter under the skin, and sometimes, in the quietest moments, I see that word in my mind’s eye: ‘LISTEN.’