The Unprompted Query

Three nights ago, my cousin Maya was staying over at my new apartment. The place was still sparse, with cardboard boxes stacked in corners and a bare bulb flickering overhead. I’d just moved in after my grandmother’s funeral, and the silence here felt heavier than the city noise outside. We were both scrolling on our tablets, sitting on opposite sides of the room—I on the floor, Maya perched on the windowsill, the cold glass pressing against her back.

I set my tablet down on the floor beside me to stretch my neck. The screen flickered to life on its own, the glow casting strange shapes on the wall. A robotic voice cut through the quiet: ‘Searching the web for Charles Whitworth.’ My blood ran cold. Maya’s eyes went wide, her tablet slipping from her hands. Neither of us had touched my device. There was no one else in the room, no voice command, no reason for Siri to wake.

We stared at the screen, which now displayed a loading icon. Then, from the shelf above my head, a heavy ceramic mug—filled with pens and pencils—flew off the edge and crashed to the floor. The shelf was perfectly level, secured with brackets; nothing could have jostled it. I jumped back, my heart pounding. Maya scrambled off the windowsill and crouched beside me. In the corner, my pet hamster scrambled to the far end of its cage, pressing itself against the glass, and my goldfish darted behind its plastic castle, hiding.

The air felt thick, like a storm was gathering indoors. A pressure built in my ears. My grandmother’s music box, sitting on the dresser, began to play on its own—a tinny lullaby that seemed to come from the walls. Maya grabbed my arm, her nails digging in. ‘What is happening?’ she whispered. I couldn’t answer.

Then, my dog, a usually calm beagle mix, started barking furiously at the empty corner of the room, her hackles raised, her growl low and threatening. But there was nothing there—just a stack of boxes and the faint outline of a door that led to a closet we’d never opened.

We left the room, huddled in the hallway, trying to rationalize it. But the feeling followed us. For the past few days, that pressure hasn’t lifted. My dog refuses to enter the room, growling at the threshold whenever I pass. I looked up the name ‘Charles Whitworth’ on my phone, careful to keep it away from the haunted iPad. The results were sparse: an obituary for a man who died in 1987 in a fire that destroyed the building that once stood here. The land was vacant for years until this apartment complex was built. But there was a photo—a stern-faced man in a vintage suit, his eyes seeming to follow me. His name was Charles Whitworth, and he was the building’s original superintendent.

I haven’t told Maya, but last night I woke to the sound of my tablet typing. I didn’t touch it. The screen glowed in the dark, and a message was typed in the search bar: ‘Where are you?’ I deleted the history, but the search persists. My dog whines at the closet door. I think he knows something I don’t. The tension is a living thing now, coiled in the walls. I don’t know when it will strike, but I know it’s waiting. And I’m terrified to find out what it wants.