Scary Short Stories †

forty one

My brother moved out of the house back in 2002 once he got his job as a Computer technician, and he recently went missing. When I went to his house, it was locked, with 3 sheets of printer paper taped to the front door.

"While coming home from work one day, I noticed someone had left their damaged grey laptop laying in the middle of my driveway one day. I got out of my car to examine it more carefully.

The LCD definitely showed signs of user related damage, as there was a large hole on the left side of the screen that fit a standard Phillips Head screwdriver perfectly. There was a webcam above the display as well, and it was also destroyed with the same screwdriver. Other than those, however, everything else on the computer showed minor signs of wear, like almost all of the keyboards keys were faded, but nothing to the extent that it could be considered unusable. I looked at the back of the display to find out what brand it is, and yet, I couldn't find anything. I looked at the entire laptop's shell and there was no text or logo stating what brand it is. In fact, there was no warranty sticker, no "Proof of licence" sticker on the bottom, no text whatsoever. What's even more odd was the fact that the only ports on the laptop was a VGA port for connecting an external display and a USB port. How long could this laptop have possibly run without a charging port to recharge the battery? It must have been a very low end laptop where you had to remove the battery pack and put it into it's own charging dock. Why did it exactly have a web cam, though?

Curious as to what exactly is on the laptop, I ran inside to my basement where my old desktop was currently being stored. The only reason it was down there was because I forgot to bring that behemoth to the local SarCan to recycle it. I would have been currently using it as my regular computer, but it takes 5 or 6 hours to fully boot because the system always goes through recovery mode every time you start it, and the processor is way to slow to "recover" everything on the 500 gb hard drive I had installed on it (A 120mhz Pentium processor doesn't get you far). Well, anyways, I removed the old LG CRT monitor from the desktop and plugged it into the laptop. I went to push the power button when...

... I stopped. There's no way this is going to work, the battery has to be dead by now.

I rummaged around the basement to find my battery voltage tester and immediately withdrew the battery from the laptop and checked the voltage. Low and behold, it had no charge. Well, might as well just leave it down here, I'll bring all of this computer junk to SarCan tomorrow morning. With that, I unplugged the display from the laptop, put it back into the desktop and simply left everything downstairs. After leaving the basement I went to go watch TV for about 3 hours or so before going to bed.

I was suddenly awakened from my deep slumber by the sound of the Windows 2000 start up jingle and fell out of my bed. It was so deafeningly loud I swore someone was holding a pair of speakers right next to my ears. After I fell out of the bed, I stood up in a groggy daze, and for a minute or so trying to figure out what that sound was. The desktop! I must have accidentally hit the power switch while trying to switch monitors! I simply walked to the basement, but froze in the middle of the steps. I just remembered there was no way my computer could have started up, because I have Windows 95 installed on my desktop. I was reluctant to go down the steps after that, but my common sense started kicking in and I thought I must be getting my OS's mixed up. When I walked down, I was shocked to see that my desktop wasn't on; in fact, I remembered it wasn't even plugged in. I had to make sure of it though. I checked behind the desktop and everything else was plugged in except for the tower. There's absolutely no chance of that laptop turning on, that's impossible. I removed the battery from the laptop again and re-checked the voltage.

This time, I couldn't get a direct number. The voltage tester was just going insane.

I re-inserted the battery pressed the power button on the laptop. Some indicator lights flashed, meaning the computer definitely started, except this time the start up jingle wasn't played at all. I need to see what's going on here. I connected the CRT monitor back into the laptop. And what I saw...