Scary Short Stories †

forty four

TRIGGER ALERT: The story below contains mature content. If the title and that NSFW label didn't tip you off already, consider this your formal notice. That being said, anyone expecting hardcore erotica is going to be severely underwhelmed. This is a story about people. And people are gross. You have been warned.  

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Part 1: Initial Transcripts

I seem to find darkness wherever I go. It's a bad habit that I clearly have no idea how to break, which is why my current situation should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention. Apparently that's a list that doesn't include me though because, upon finding an old desktop computer tower hidden behind the water-heater in my girlfriend Alice's condo, my first reaction was to bring the computer home and dig through its files. In my world that's called "asking for it."

I already had the remnants of a similar Dell model stashed in a closet at my place complete with a compatible monitor, A/C cord, etc. which made setup quite easy. I turned the computer on and was greeted by a Windows XP password-entry screen for a user named "Enid." Apparently, the original owner of this computer was a 90 year-old woman.

Because a lot of my friends are terrible people, I knew that there were ways around Windows passwords that required little more than a thumb-drive and several dubious keyword searches. But first, out of simple compulsive habit, I typed "password" and hit ENTER. And of course it worked.

The computer unlocked to reveal a desktop with a painting of the DC villain Harley Quinn as its background. Yup, definitely a girl's computer, though maybe "Enid" wasn't 90 after all, but simply the victim of parents with an unfortunate taste in names.

At this point, I feel it's worth noting that I am not a monster. I wasn't on some mission to invade this poor girl's privacy. I wasn't looking to steal anyone's identity. I was simply curious.

The maintenance guy had found the tower when he was replacing a part on the water-heater, which was located at the back of Alice's bedroom closet. Enid was most likely a former tenant of my girlfriend's condo who had used the closet for storage but that doesn't explain why she had felt the need to wedge her computer behind a water-heater.

There were seven folders on the desktop along with a small assortment of program icons: Microsoft Word, Photoshop, a program for live-streaming video that I had never heard of, etc. The seven folders were labeled, from top to bottom: "music", "movies", "pictures", "art", "writing", "video", and finally "logs."

Call it the power of placement, but I clicked on "logs" first mainly because every other folder had a name that was self-explanatory. The "logs" folder contained over a dozen Word documents. The name of each document was a month followed by a year, starting on "February, 2012" and ending with "January, 2014."

The computer itself was from the mid-2000s at the latest. If my girlfriend's condo complex hadn't been so upscale, that fact wouldn't have bothered me so much. But I had to wonder what someone who could afford over a grand a month on rent was doing using a computer from '05 in 2014. I started skimming through the earliest log and it quickly became obvious that Enid was no air-traffic controller.

The following is a transcript of the first page of the earliest document.

TUESDAY, 7

BESTinLIFE – starts: 12:40 AM

Client requests that I position myself with my spread butt cheeks held close to the camera and stay that way while occasionally calling him a "dirty little limp-dick slave boy."