Hesitance Falls
an excerpt

Hesitance Falls

a novel by

Charles Copeland

Chapter One

It was supposed to have been a happy day.
Finally move into the new house, head down to the bank with the advance check, run off to Salem to buy that little Boxter they had both been eyeing, follow it up with a few hours of spending money like there was no tomorrow, and then come home for Chinese food --- ordered in --- and settle in to the only room they had have fully unpacked, which was also the room in which the most playfulness occurred, in addition to sleeping.
That was the plan. But, like almost everything else in Dwight Schultz’s world, plans rarely work much past the point of conception. Normally, things go a little off schedule and then get put back on track. Sometimes, though, things went so haywire that they just stayed that way, which caused a domino effect in which everything else imploded . . . you know, just to keep things going in the right direction.
Today had turned out to be a day of the second variety.
Oh, they had awoke at seven thirty, same time as usual, Pam had made breakfast for her husband --- a cheese omelet with four strips of bacon --- same as always, and they had settled in for a long day of writing right beside one another in the cramped den, same as every other day, but that was where the normalcy ended. After that the day swelled with phone calls from creditors and doorbells ringing to announce the arrival of another oil delivery they could not afford and a tow truck driver who’d come to repossess the Jeep they had just bought last year when things were going so much better. An email had greeted Dwight as soon as he logged on to Yahoo, telling him that the moving van had been involved in an accident on Interstate ninety five and caught fire, consuming almost everything they owned in the process.
You will be happy to know, Mr. Schultz, that no one was hurt in the accident.
They would actually had the balls to write that.
But that advance check was still there, was still slathered with all those zeros and still waiting there on the desk. At least there was that.
“Look at it this way, honey,” Pam said, filling her husband’s coffee mug for the fourth time this morning, “I would say there is plenty enough money there to make everything right. All we have to do is get to the bank and deposit half. The rest we can go spend.”
“Pam,” Dwight said, reminding himself that she was the morning person, not him, “I know you are trying to reassure me and everything, but we owe out more than half this money. As soon as we are done getting raped by creditors and replacing our furniture, there will only gonna be a couple hundred bucks left.”
“Do not be so gloomy all the time, will ya?” She was always so damn perky, and that was what Dwight figured he should be focusing on but could not. Even in the face of calamity, Pam Schultz saw silver linings. “The down payment on the new house cleared escrow so we do not have to worry about paying out any of the money for that. My sister’s still got three weeks before she will be home from Italy, so we can borrow her car until then and maybe even after because she always carpools with her new boyfriend these days. All we have to do is call a cab so we can go to her house and pick it up. If you think about it, after the furniture, all we really need right now is to go grocery shopping.”
“Did you call the cable and electric companies? Because I do not wanna get to the new house and have everything be ---”
“Already taken care of,” she said, pressing her index finger against his lips. “I got everything out of the way two days ago. We will be fine, honey. All we have to do is go to the bank and everything else will fall in line.”
“Yeah, well it better or we are going to run out of money.” Half a million dollars is a lifetime of wages for some folks, which is why it should have made Dwight giddy with delight just from looking at it. Three years of piled up debt, however, robbed him of that emotion. He shook it off then, glancing around the den and out into the hallway. “Where the hell is Zero, any way?”
“Damn it,” she said, darting out of the room and down the hall. “I forgot to let him out this morning!”
Five seconds later, as Pam realized she should have been more attentive to Zero’s early morning canine needs, only to discover the present in the middle of the kitchen floor because he could not hold it in any longer, she shouted the word that explained what it was that Zero had done, both out of anger and because it was what she said when making exclamations.
Shit, Dwight thought. Well, at least it is fitting in the context of how today is going.

* * *

Moving was pretty easy now, since the only things left to move were the two card tables that doubled as desks, both computers, what clothing they had had in the closet and dresser, toiletries, lunches that Pam had packed last night, and Zero and his bowl.
They did not bring the present Zero had left on the kitchen floor.
The cab ride had cost thirty eight dollars they could not afford, gassing up Pam’s sister’s honkin’ big Impala ran another thirty four dollars (did the woman never fill that damn tank, is what Dwight heard himself ask in the back of his mind), and let us not forget the eighty six dollar connection fee the cable company hit him with when the technician showed up to run the Internet connection through the wall and up the stairs. They finished off what had been left in Dwight’s wallet by picking up a twenty pound bag of food for Zero, because the other twenty pound bag had dropped and spilled in the mud when Dwight tried to carry too many things out to the car at one time. It was two thirty five AM now, and the bank closed at three o’clock on Tuesdays.
“Get your butt in the car if you want to cash that check on time,” Pam said. “We will go back to the old house for the sheets and blanket when we are done at the bank.”
Dwight muttered something about never wanting to see the sheets and blanket ever again and turned to grab the car keys off the kitchen counter, but they were not there. He checked his pockets, which was the first place he always checked when he realized he had misplaced keys. They were not there, either. They had not fallen in the sink when he had let three bags of compact discs slip out of his grip and slam onto the counter. They were not hanging from a nail hammered in the side of the cupboards. Ditto for the back of the front door. They were just . . . not to be found any place.
“Pam, you see what the hell I did with the car keys?” He realized from the moment he had said it that his tone would make her laugh. Damn her for being so bubbly all the time. “I had thought I had set ‘em on the counter here, but . . .”
“Did you lock them in the car?” She was stifling a grin, but the chuckle in her question said what needed to be said.
“I have not done that since that one last time in Palm Springs.”
“In the middle of August,” he heard her say, though he had to ask her to repeat it because she had said it so low the first time he had not heard it. Now he wished he had not asked her to repeat it.
Her grin burned into the flesh on the back of his neck when he turned to go outside. If the keys were locked in the car this time, he figured, it would be time to string them around his throat, the way he had to when he was a boy because he lost his house and school locker keys at least once a week.
There were no car keys in the ignition. He did a complete search through the grass on his way back up the walk way to the front door, along the side of the three stairs and in the door’s dead bolt. Again, they were not to be found in any place what so ever.
That was when he saw them, glittering in the afternoon sunlight, almost as if they were beckoning him from their hiding place, the result of some hide and seek game gone too far. Hanging overhead, set in a fixture he did not even have the proper tools to open, was a light bulb the realtor had forgotten to turn off last night. Inside the light bulb, peering down at him, were the car keys.
“What . . . the . . . fuck?” he said, barely audible.
He had misplaced keys hundreds of times before.
But never this misplaced.

* * *

Tools or no tools, Dwight had freed the keys from their overhead dungeon, making a mental note to sweep up the glass before morning so he would not end up with shards all over the bottoms of his feet when he fetched the newspaper. He did not tell Pam where the keys had been or what highly delicate method he had used to retrieve them --- she would not have understood the need to use the biggest rock lining the walk way any how. Some times, when things went wrongly enough, the only solution was to smash them back to normal. After all, Dwight considered, why else would God have made rocks if He did not intend for them to be used to “delicately open” light fixtures?
How the keys could have gotten inside a light bulb in the first place was another story entirely, and one Dwight could not tell even if he had to. Now, back at home, he hung the keys on the hook on the back of the door. They would be safe there. Sun set had snuck up on Dwight, leaving him disoriented enough to wonder what time it was. Eight thirty o’clock at night. He had not written a single word all day. Hell, he had not even set his computer up in the writing room yet.
Writing room. It felt so good to be able to call it that. They had the den for the writing room in the old house, but he was never comfortable calling it a writing room when he had to step over and around rarely used chairs and boxes full of trinkets that had not seen the light of day in years. None of that would happen in the new house, in the new writing room. Of course, it helped that every thing that used to be in the way in the old house had been turned into ashes on Interstate ninety five. And maybe there would be a tidy little bonus in store with in the next few weeks, in the form of an insurance check. He caught him self smiling at that. Another man’s junk, after all.
Out side, Zero stood staring up at nothing. Dwight noted how much of a chore it had been to get Zero to come in the house when they had first brought him there, as if some foul smell wafted its way out from inside and offended his canine nostrils in ways no one else could sense. Zero was always fussy to begin with, Dwight remembered, but never to the extent where he had to be dragged in to the house. Poor bastard started growling even before we pulled in to the drive way, Dwight thought then, comparing it to how Zero seemed to know he was being driven to the vet’s office even before arrival and voiced his disapproval at such shenanigans. But this was different. When he spun his head in the house’s direction, still a block away, he seemed . . . afraid.
And now he was not only staring upward, he was also barking, and not that ‘gimme my ball’ kind of barking. No. This was the kind of barking he spouted off with when the mail man showed up. No, Dwight thought. This is even worse, like the time the next door neighbor tried to hit him with his cane for shitting in his flower bed. He had been scared enough to bite then.
“Zero!” Pam shouted from an up stairs window. “What is your problem, boy?”
Dwight strode out side. Zero stood at the right corner of the house, staring straight up, barking so fast that for a moment Dwight could not tell where one bark ended and another began. There were no squirrels peeking down at him from the roof, no mail men pinned against the lattice running up to the second floor window for fear of finding out if Zero’s bark was worse than his bite, no old neighbors swinging canes from imaginary car windows. He was barking at nothing.
“Make him stop that, would you?” Pam said, glancing up and down the street. “Before the neighbors call the damn cops.”
All it took was a single step in Zero’s direction before man’s best friend wheeled around and bit Dwight on the forearm. Doberman Pinchers bite like the best of them, and for a moment that in fact seemed much more like an eternity, Dwight thought he would lose the entire arm. Zero pitched his head to the left and to the right, shaking and pulling back ward as he clamped down, pulling ligaments from bone, ripping muscle and flesh. And the growling . . . the growling was unlike any thing Dwight ever heard. Though he wanted to pull his arm out and jump back ward, tried to, he could do nothing but try as hard as he could to make sure he gave as much of his arm to Zero’s furious grasp as he could. It was the only way to stop the attack. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the onslaught ended.
And Zero turned again, back toward the house, then spun and bolted out into the street, where he ran . . . and ran . . . and ran, barking all the way.
“Zero! Zero!” Dwight shouted, wincing from the searing pain in his fore arm. He shot a confused gaze up to Pam, whose face had been drained of all of its color. “Jesus, if he makes it all the way down to the intersection, someone is going to hit him!”
Dwight ran for the front door then, hoping he could catch Zero with the car before he covered the half mile.
And there, before his eyes, was the ignition key, off its ring and imbedded straight up in the door glass, as if it had been sealed inside the glass all along.

Chapter Two

Later in the evening, as Zero waited in the car, Dwight sat as calmly as he could in the hospital waiting room in Salem. There were times when he was alone in his little corner of the room, when coughing kids with endlessly running noses wandered around bugging some one else. Then there were times when some poor slob would take the open seat beside him, though there were nine others open along both walls, and bitch and moan about how slow the service was. Sometimes Pam would join him there in the corner --- in between pestering the nurses at the emergency room desk because the service really was slow and checking to make sure Zero had not chewed his way out of the car and made another get away attempt --- but mostly she spent her time running from one place to another. All Dwight wanted was to be stitched up, sent home and told to have a pleasant evening.
As for Zero’s antics at the new house, Dwight did not quite know what to think. That did not mean he did not have a few hunches, how ever; Zero had been prone to fits in certain situations. But this was not just some certain situation, the way he wanted it to be. It seemed to have stemmed directly from some thing in side the house, or perhaps on it, or as if it had some thing to do with the house it self, and that was what worried Dwight the most. All of the aggression seemed to have sprung right from a single incident that neither Dwight nor Pam could under stand. Zero had never been so vicious, even that day when the neighbor tried to hit him with a cane.
Pam had her opinions about what had happened; things she thought might have spooked Zero enough to cause him to turn on his best friend. If a tree branch had caught just enough of a shadow and cast it in just the right direction so as to make it seem like a giant arm was waving an even more giant hand on the side of the house, that might well be enough to make Zero skittish about going in side a house about which he knew nothing.
Dwight had made every effort to under stand the situation that had led to the attack (he had even tried to think about it from a canine point of view; had tried wondering what had gone through Zero’s mind in the moment he saw his owner stepping toward him), and he thought he under stood . . . but only to a degree. On one occasion Dwight had droned on for more than fifteen minutes about how he might have bitten some one who approached him in such a threatening fashion, but he did not think the fashion in which he had approached Zero was threatening. He had only taken a single step in Zero’s direction. It was nothing he had not done thousands of times before.
Now, at ten forty five and sitting in the emergency room in Salem, he wished the entire day had never happened. “This is one of those days when I wish I had stayed in bed,” he had said as he tried to fill out page after page of insurance forms upon arrival at the hospital.
He and Pam had sat there, waiting, and waiting, for nearly four hours, though Pam had done much more pacing than sitting. Midnight would be sneaking around the corner soon. The entire day had been one big mess, right from the get go. Pretty soon it would be bed time, and he had be spending it at the fucking hospital.
“Mister Schultz,” one of the nurses said, reading off a clip board. She swept a pen across the attached form, checking a box that Dwight was sure said something brilliant such as ‘Is the patient alive?’, waited for him to stumble to his feet and traverse the endless ocean of ‘sickies,’ as he had called them, and smiled a big, toothy grin that said I do not give a frosting filled fuck what your ailment or injury is . . . I have an hour to go in my shift and then you can choke and die for all it concerns me. “Right this way, sir. Doctor Bernard will be along in a minute or two to see how bad the damage is.”
That was a load of Christmas crap and Dwight knew it. What the nurse should have said was ‘Doctor Bernard will be along any when ever he damn well feels like tearing him self away from which ever sweet assed young intern he happens to be chasing this week.’
That was how things really went in any hospital Dwight had ever been in.
The nurse led Dwight and Pam down a corridor to a room where he expected to wait another hour or more, but cocked his head to the side when he saw the doctor already in the room.
“Well . . . You are a lucky guy, Mister Schultz,” the nurse said. “I thought Doctor Bernard was still on his lunch break.”
“Dwight Schultz?” The doctor’s mouth almost reached the floor. “Are you the Dwight Schultz? The horror novelist?”
“Yeah, but tonight it is more like Dwight Schultz the walking dog food poster.”
“I have all your books,” the doctor said.
Yeah, well that will do. No medical attention necessary now. Random statements had always been enough to cure cancer and mend broken bones before, Dwight pondered, so of course nothing else was needed now. Slap a couple of compliments across the gaping hole in his fucking arm, tape it all up with a stupid grin, and sign off on the paper work with all the gushing stutters of a super fan who does not know when to do his fucking job and shut up about it. Stitches and pain medication were no match for gawky idol worship and no attention paid to the reason for the damn hospital visit, even if it was to the E-M-E-R-G-E-N-C-Y R-O-O-M. And sorry about bleeding all over the floor and all . . . how rude of me to think puddles of blood as far as the eye could see would be enough to warrant any amount of medical care.
“Nice to know I have fans who can patch me up when I need it,” Dwight heard himself say instead of what he really wanted to spurt out.
“I particularly enjoyed Council of Guardians,” the doctor said, and held out his hand.
“Maybe if you had caught me six hours ago, shaking your hand would be a much easier thing to do,” Dwight said.
“I am terribly sorry. I am Michael Bernard. Now let us get a good look at that bite wound.”
What a fuckin’ nifty concept, Dwight thought. Why had I not thought about that the very second I entered the room? Oh . . . wait . . . could it be because I am not the fucking doctor? (he wanted so badly to grab hold of the stethoscope hanging from the doctor’s throat and scream in to it how exciting it would be to actually have his damn arm not only stared at but also fixed up). Doctors were usually pretty easy to figure out. Complicated, yes. But they usually had their shit together enough to fix what needed fixing. Maybe he would get taped up right if Pam went out to the car and brought Zero to the room to meet the doctor. “I am afraid it is not very pretty, doc.”
“Well, that is why I am a doctor. I can take it.”
“I do not know what happened, doc. I was talking to my dog and then the next thing I know he chomped down on my arm.” Dwight peeled off the make shift dressing on his arm.
Nausea hit Dwight like a tsunami then, when he saw the extent of the damage. It was all he could do to remain standing. “Please tell me it is not too bad.”
“I was a combat surgeon in Viet Nam. I have seen a lot worse.”
Dwight nodded as if he expected precisely that answer, and wished he had a cigarette in his other hand. And that struck him as odd, because he had quit smoking more than a year ago. But what happened next struck him as more than just odd . . . and it made Pam turn and run to the bath room down the hall, vomiting on her way.
Doctor Bernard spread the wound open and . . . used a four inch long surgical clamp to grab at and pull out . . .
. . . was that a key that came out of his arm?

At home again, at three o’clock in the damn morning, Dwight’s thoughts turned to the chunk of card board covering the hole in the front door where the window pane used to be. There was nothing in any of the laws of physics that allowed for a car key to end up in side a sheet of glass. Even if there was, neither he nor Pam had the capacity for what ever knowledge would have been required to pull off such a feat. The damn car key had been slipped off its ring and some how deposited in side a light bulb, too. And okay, the key found in side a bite wound in his arm was not the same car key as before; not a car key at all, actually. But just exactly how did a fucking key end up in side his torn open arm, any how?
And then there was that comment Doctor Bernard had sputtered about the new house. That got under Dwight’s skin more than every thing else --- no pun intended. Answering the doctor’s small talk bull shit while he stitched up the wound, Dwight had said he and Pam had bought the brown house at the end of Prospect Street. That was when the doctor shook his head and . . . said what he said.
“I would not buy that house if you paid me three hundred and fifty one thousand dollars.” He had had his head turned when he said it, but turned to face Pam when she asked what he had meant by it. “I mean, it has all of that violence surrounding it, all of that evil.”
And when he added “But I suppose it is just perfect for a horror novelist” before clearing Dwight to leave, it was all Pam could do to not make him stay to hear the whole story.
Dwight had started worrying out loud if they had made a bad mistake buying this particular house. Pam gently cupped his hand in hers, stopping him. “No,” she said. “You will see. Tomorrow morning the delivery truck will show up with all the new furniture from Levitz, and the whole house will feel normal. Good, even.”
What surprised him was that he wanted to tell her she was wrong, that she could not have been more wrong. In the morning --- just when things began to look sunny again and hope could once again be found orbiting Dwight --- the delivery truck would suffer the same fate as the moving truck had the day before. That was how Dwight’s life had been written well in advance, the way Brutus Thornapple from the Born Loser cartoon knows things will eventually cave in on him if he just waits long enough. Gladys Thornapple knew too, though she was never so quick to admit it. Pam Schultz, on the other hand, was always so chirpy and that was what made Dwight all the more aware of his assigned lot in life.
“You do not think there is some thing wrong with this house?” Dwight asked. “I mean, you have not seen some of the things I have seen here so far, Pam.”
“The house is fine,” Pam said. “You are just getting a case of cold feet.”
“Maybe,” he said, unwilling to say any thing more about the strange occurrences --- how the keys kept ending up where they had no business being, for instance. Some things you do not feel comfortable telling your own wife. That was mainly because you figured she would nod and call the people with the white coats to come get you.
“I will tell you what,” Pam said, easing into the bundle of blankets they had laid out on the bed room floor because the bed would not be there until tomorrow . . . if it made it there at all. “If you still feel strangely about every thing in the morning, after the delivery people come we will head up to Rockport for the day and you can sit on the rocks at Long Beach. Maybe we can find that secluded spot you mentioned and I can do that little bit of dancing you always want me to do for you.”
“Deal,” he heard him self say with out another moment’s thought, and they both grinned that sly grin that warned of cheesy porno music chiming in. Sleep always seemed to come a little faster after sex. Maybe she was right. Hell, he was probably just imagining things any how.
The sixty one staples holding his arm together throbbed then, reminding him that imagination was not all it was.

Chapter Three

The writing room was dark, mysterious. Horror writers often prefer it when their writing rooms are dimly lit. Sort of adds to the flow. The writing room at the old house was not dark, but that was because it was a converted den that had more windows than a room really needed. Dwight pondered the reason for the installation of so many windows in a room that faced the woods and almost always sat cloaked in long shadows (I would think the original owner would have wanted a good view of the yard or something, Dwight had once said, but there just is not any yard to look at before the woods come rushing in) and it was this estimation that led him to long for a writing room that truly was becoming of horror. As far as murkiness goes, this new writing room, replete in its utter lack of window coverage, did the job. Mostly what Dwight had been looking for was an aura of doom in which he could immerse him self and calculate his horrifying meanderings as he tapped them onto his key board. Mission accomplished. This was one of those rooms.
Now that the delivery truck has come and dropped off the new furniture and he and Pam have spent the morning arranging the room in the most pleasing way possible, he could let ‘er rip and see if he could go back to the good old days of turning out gut wrenching fiction. When people came in to see the writing room now they would see darkness permeating the room, making it self right at home, haunting the writer’s faculties. A fire place to the left of the desks would heat the room, equipped with one of those not quite real logs that never needs replacing, steel masquerading as bark through the top and bottom of which would spew gas flames. Beside the fire place was an oak book case, home to all the old classics by Shelley and Stoker, King and Koontz and, of course, Poe. (Dwight will go on to tell visitors that every damn home in America ought to be lined floor to ceiling with the words of the gods --- at least those who were gods to him.) Across the room is a plasma screen TV hung on the wall. It is where Dwight will turn when the writer’s block monsters come calling and he needs a few minutes to wipe the mental slate clean before hitting the ground running again. Certainly today’s events with in the world are enough to make one forget all of one’s personal problems and focus more on the bigger picture. At least that is what Dwight Schultz thinks. In any case, he thinks world events follow right along with the age old phrase he repeats so often to him self while writing: Truth is stranger than fiction. That much is apparent where ever he looks these days. All he needs to do is check his pants pockets for car keys or inevitably bump his stitched up arm on the kitchen table to remind him self of that. Truth is strange, all right.
This writing room will bear witness to the primordial creation of a great many gruesome works, and Dwight knows his ego will flourish in this room, too. When he delivered the option book on his contract from writing committed from right here in this room, he’d have the upper hand.
He could dictate the terms of his next contract.
If his next book was good enough, he might own the publishing house in the end.
He had three hundred and twenty-seven story ideas lined up and waiting to be written; he is a goldmine waiting to be claimed.
Fuckin’-A-Right, I’m a walking bestseller, he considered, thinking with all the ego-driven gravity of someone who had never received more than a handful of compliments in his life, ego-driven because he’s spent that life assuring himself that, one day, he’d be the one to whom people would turn for answers.
“I’m gonna be pretty tied up with writing for most of the day,” he’d told Pam not more than an hour ago. “The writing room has a wicked vibe to it that I wanna take advantage of right away.”
“I’ll bring up some coffee as soon as I make it,” Pam had said. “I’m gonna spend some time arranging the kitchen and living room.” She threw that last location in as something of what she hoped to do, because they would almost certainly spend little time in there, if any. Chances were better that she’d mow down all the boxes scattered across the living room floor, slipping brand new dishes into their cupboards, draping tablecloths across tables and lining drawers in which silverware would almost definitely go mostly untouched.
Out in the backyard, Zero was already chasing squirrels and chipmunks up trees, exploring the very outskirts abutting the woods, and otherwise making the best out of what had been, for him, something of a harrowing experience at the new house so far.
Dwight sat and watched the computer monitor flicker to life. An incandescent bluish haze flooded the air directly around it.
God knows Dwight had better hit a grand slam with this next new novel. Anything less and there wouldn’t be another contract. If he missed and delivered a ‘shitwad’, as he called some of his work, he might well have to resort to self-publishing for the remainder of his career, and that, he’d always known, is a death knell. So yes, a bestseller was in order. But it wasn’t an impossible task, and one which might well be attainable in this ambiance. The room had characteristics all its own that made it perfect. Chilling. Unsettling.
Almost sinister.
Then he saw the notepad document on the desktop, titled:

~Read Me~
It wasn’t anything he’d saved. He never left documents on the desktop. They cluttered up the place. And besides that, they got in the way of viewing the Attkins Soul wallpaper.
He double-clicked the icon and waited for it to open. When it did, he read:

i love you and i need your help.

needyourhelpneedyourhelpneedyourhelpneedyourhelp
i love you.

Pam brought him a fresh mug of coffee then, displaying that expression that told him she didn’t have time for games, so don’t bother asking because I’m likely to snap at you if you even try it.
“What’s this all about, Pam?” Dwight asked. “What do you need help with, and how the hell did you type this up and save it to my desktop without me knowing? We’ve been together every second since we got home from the hospital.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“This notepad document. What did you mean by it?”
“What?” Pam peered down at the monitor screen. “That’s not mine.”
“It has to be . . . I didn’t write it.”
“I’d love to stand here all day and debate the accuracy of your indictment, but I’ve got lots of work to do downstairs. The dishes aren’t gonna put themselves away, you know.”
She kissed his forehead and left the room. He palmed the remote control and turned on the TV. Almost silent Family Guy characters paraded across the screen, immersed in their hijinx as Dwight tried to figure out how to turn up the volume. He couldn’t. Not because he was unable to decipher the buttons and their functions . . . but because no matter how he pushed the buttons, aimed the remote, or moved closer to the TV, nothing happened. Dammit, he thought. Brand new remote, brand new batteries. What the hell?
When he turned back to the computer monitor again, there was another notepad document to the left of the first one. It was titled the same. He double-clicked the icon and waited.

Help
I NEED YOUR HELP
I LOVE YOU

Before he could react, he watched as letter after letter appeared on the screen.

You have to help me
You are the only one who can help
You will help me
YOU
WILL
HELP
ME
Or else
Helphelphelphelphelphelphelphelphelphelphelphelphelphelp
I love you

The next hour went by almost unnoticed, during which Dwight never looked away from the notepad document. He reckoned it could’ve been a new kind of incoming email message, but the cable internet hookup wasn’t even scheduled to kick on for another day. The cable wasn’t even connected to the jack in the computer tower.
It can’t be happening, he thought. It can’t.
But it had.