The Motif

Chapter 7

Jennifer opened the message. It was pretty much just as Rachel had described it.

"jennifer omg u need to listen too this song...it is awesome! http://tmdbqdwkdur.org"

If this message had come from someone other than her sister, she could see how it might be convincing – especially since it started off by addressing Jennifer personally. But Jennifer knew from growing up with her parents that there was no way they would have stood for Kimmi resorting to 'text-speak.' Grammar and spelling were sacred under that roof. Mr. and Mrs. Carter would have rather discovered one of their daughters was a devil-worshipping anarchist bent on destroying the universe as we know it than to find out that she used text-speak.

But even so, the completely random string of letters would have raised her suspicion.

One thing that did puzzle her, however, was how the virus had obtained her name, since she had been careful not to list her name in her public profile, and none of the other spam messages she had seen had been that specific. Another question for Tim, perhaps. He'd probably just tell her that was impossible, also. She was getting kind of sick of impossible things happening. Lewis Carroll and his six impossible things before breakfast could all go have an orgy together in Hell, for all she cared.

She hesitated before clicking on the link. Did she really believe this was the cause of everything that had happened? No. But did she believe it was somehow involved? Yes, though she had no idea how it fit into the puzzle before her.

She tried to think of how this could backfire against her. As far as the computer virus, Jennifer was reasonably certain Kimmi's computer would already be infected, since Kimmi had told Rachel she'd clicked the link.

As far as the more mysterious questions she had about the virus, Jennifer wasn't worried about losing her own mind, any more than she would have been worried about Kimmi. Kimmi had apparently followed the link and not been affected, so Jennifer couldn't see a reason why she would be any different. And since she had only created her Twitter account for this purpose, and didn't have any followers, it's not like she had to worry about it being sent to anyone else who might become susceptible to whatever was going on.

Thereby determined that nothing could go wrong, and wanting to get to the bottom of this mess, she clicked on the link. Just as Kimmi had described to Rachel, it opened a web page that was, for all intents and purposes, completely blank except for an audio player in the middle of the screen which automatically started playing.

The music wasn't anything spectacular, really. It was just some instrument that sounded kind of like a synthesized music box. Nothing complex. Just a melody and simple accompaniment. At first listen, the tune was quite calming, almost hypnotic. But the more she listened, the more she began to sense a disturbing – almost subliminal – undertone to the music. Even though she was certain she had never heard the melody before, there was some element of it that struck her as eerily familiar. For some reason she couldn't quite explain, it made her think of Tim.

It only played for not much more than a minute, and then started over from the beginning – much like a real music box would. Jennifer listened to it a few times, to see if there was any variation, but it just played that same melody, over and over, so she stopped the player and closed out the web page.

She stared at the computer screen for several moments, the last vestiges of the melody hauntingly running through her mind.

Once again, this only raised more questions than answers, and she had no idea of what her next step should be. She needed to make sense out of all this senselessness, to bring order and reason to the madness, but could see no way to do that.