It was almost four o'clock in the afternoon, and the large suburban Edwin Macdonald High School had just let out for the weekend. A tall, mature-looking young man, Eric, stood alone in one of the classrooms, leaning on someone's desk and flipping through the rift of papers in his hands. A long weekend was coming up, and almost everyone had something due, so that afternoon had become a last hand-in opportunity. There were probably less than fifteen students still in the building.
A fair-haired, bespectacled boy about Eric's age came into the room and slammed his fair-sized backpack onto a desk. "Hey, you're still here?"
Eric simply glanced up, not faltered by the noise. "I have a lot of papers to put in, Ramsey."
"Everybody else is leaving now..." he gestured to the door. Three mousy-looking girls walked by, chattering. "You're still going to come over tomorrow, right?"
"I wouldn't drop my plans without saying," Eric said with a shrug. He often found himself the least energetic of the pair. Ramsey was a nice guy, but he was way too wild sometimes.
"Oh! By the way!" Ramsey pulled himself up to sit on one of the desks. "I heard a rumor about a deadly pop-up on the internet called The Red Room."
Eric finally looked up, his face disturbed. "You heard about what?"
"The Red Room!"
"Why is it called that?"
"I don't know, but it's like this..." Ramsey paused, smirking, trying to gather whatever story he had. "Someone will be on the internet, and everything's all normal at first, but a pop-up comes up out of nowhere. It doesn't say anything other than 'Do you like--?'"
"You could always close it."
"Well, that's the thing! If anyone tries to close it, they die!" Ramsey ended this with a hiss, wiggling his fingers in the air. Eric laughed a little.
"C'mon, that doesn't make any sense," he retorted, throwing his jacket on. "How do you know it even exists?"
"It just does! I have to test it to be sure..." Ramsey was agitated now. "I heard a couple of people have actually died from it."
Eric was at the door now. "I hope not, man. Now, I need to get these to Mr. Granger," he said with a wave of the papers in his hand.
"Sure. Just be sure to come over tomorrow!"
"I will."
"My sister's bringing her kung fu movie collection."
"I'm still not going to miss it."
"Good!" Ramsey waved him off. "I'll see you!"
Eric headed up the hall with a bit of a sigh. "Why would you want to do that to yourself...?"
It was about an hour before Eric finally got home. He had got some groceries on the way to the apartment house, and knew his father would almost certainly be working late at the office again. As he was stepping into their apartment, he called out, "Dad? I got some things."
Nothing but silence greeted him.
As he put away the groceries, his mind flipped back to Ramsey and the pop-up. Maybe there's some kind of news release or a death report, he thought. If the pop-up actually killed someone, there's got to be written word of it, right?
Eric sat down at the computer in his room, hoping to ascertain that the rumor was, or was not, true. He went directly to a search engine, typing in 'killer pop-up', 'death by pop-up', 'pop-up window murders' and a variety of similar things, but repeatedly, he found nothing. He assumed then that Ramsey had been pulled into yet another hoax, and let it be. He went off to check his e-mail and a few other sites.
