Chapter Text
He wasn’t sure why he’d picked up the app.
Work was awful, working in a mailroom always was. He’d come to accept that, part and parcel with the whole experience. Ha ha.
He was lonely, sure, but nearly everybody was to some degree, so it wasn’t like he’d felt different from the crowd there. He’d even dealt with it better than most of the people he knew, being something of a rather solitary person to begin with.
He didn’t have any sort of relationship, but he wasn’t sure that he even wanted one, given that the last three had self-destructed in pretty terribly terrific ways.
So, when Tom had walked up and shown him this cool and creepy app that automatically edited a creature into pictures from your phone’s photo album, he really wasn’t sure why he was interested in it. The app’s description said that it was for people who felt lonely or awkward, giving you a virtual monster buddy that “accompanied” you. He didn’t buy that, but it didn’t really matter.
In the end, he’d downloaded it. He didn’t know why, maybe just a passing interest, maybe just out of having nothing better to do, but he’d installed it. Except… that the app didn’t appear on his phone, and never did. Tom said that was fine, that it didn’t come up on his phone either, but that it would send you notifications with images it’d edited.
Tom said it was a pretty fun little thing.
He’d said that if the thing was a phishing program, Tom’d be paying the difference.
Tom just laughed.
A week later, he’d stopped showing up at work.
That was what should’ve tipped him off, really. Rick wasn’t precisely a fanatic, but he’d seen plenty of horror movies in his time. Mysterious app that sends weird pictures to you, doesn’t seem to actually appear on your phone, and is recommended to you by a work acquaintance a week before they seem to vanish entirely? It should’ve been ringing all sorts of alarm bells, but he hadn’t seen any harm in it. The idea that something like this app might be responsible for the disappearance of a coworker wasn’t an idea that fit into the real world, didn’t mesh with how Rick saw reality. And besides, he barely knew Tom outside of the occasional times of covering for each other’s not so authorized breaks. For all he knew, Tom was just taking a sick day, or had quit their mutual garbage job in the chase for greener pastures.
And then, a day or two after Tom hadn’t appeared for his shift, the police questioned him, trying to find out where Tom had gone.
Tom’s apartment was a mess, from the pictures. The mirrors had been smashed, windows destroyed, metal surfaces scratched like somebody’d gone over them with steel wool. Furniture was overturned, a shelf of books tipped over, its contents scattered across a living room that had what looked like a barricade built in one corner.
Rick looked over the images in bewilderment, then looked up at the tired cop staring at him over the table.
“Why show me this?” His voice shook a little. The cop rubbed his eyes, then looked back at him.
“We asked around, looked for anybody who might have known what happened, where he went. People pointed us to you, said you were the closest thing he had to a friend in the office.” He shuffled some papers in the file in front of him. “Any idea where he might have gone? Did he tell you anything, give you anything, show you anything strange?”
Immediately, Rick’s thoughts went to the weird app Tom had shown him. About once a day, he was getting images of the Mal0 creature, taken from his own camera roll, and he’d taken to sharing them back and forth with Tom the last week or so. But… that wasn’t so strange, couldn’t have had anything to do with his disappearance. He racked his brain for anything else, but he couldn’t think of anything. Closest thing to a work friend he might have been, but he barely knew Tom, had been to his apartment maybe twice, and once had been for a work social event that Tom had been voluntold by their mutual bosses to host, or else. Maybe Tom’d taken out a loan from the mob, or been a Chinese spy- whatever it was, he wouldn’t have told Rick, of all people. He doubted that he was anything like Tom’s best friend.
“... No, I… nothing. He didn’t tell me anything.”
The cop nodded, and wrote something down on a notepad, checking a few boxes.
“Alright, then, you’re free to go. If you can think of anything else that you forgot, call this number.”
The cop took out a small, paper card, slid it across the table with two fingers. Rick took it, glancing at the words embossed in silver letters- officer Sam Calvin Polasky- and nodded. The cop, officer Sam Rick supposed, stood and offered his hand. He hesitated, then shook it, and allowed the cop to show him to the door.
Tom was in the news for a few days after. The way his home had been so violently destroyed, but nothing taken, and the way that he’d just vanished into thin air without so much as a trace captured the interest of the media. Rick’s coworkers talked about it constantly, and badgered him for details. Somehow, after Tom had vanished, Rick had gone from ‘someone Tom shared the occasional chat with’ to ‘Tom’s best friend for life’, and the fact that he’d been interviewed by the police had only cemented it in their minds.
When Toms’ body was found, and the cops concluded that he’d been chased down and killed for seeing something the local mob had wanted to keep private, it was almost a relief. Rick felt bad for him, certainly, but the moment that his coworkers had the answers they’d wanted and Tom was no longer the office mystery, people stopped hounding him for all the juicy details of their nonexistent close friendship.
And all the while, the pictures from Mal0 kept coming in.
Some were humorous, others nonsensical, obviously a result of the algorithm that made the pictures not really knowing what it was doing beyond putting the skull-faced, dark-bodied thing into whatever images it could fit it into. A week before they found poor Tom, it’d started increasing in images per day, one to two to three- but Rick figured that was just the algorithm hitting its stride as it processed the photos in his phone’s gallery in the background. It never used all that much of his phone’s resources, so that’s how he assumed it was operating, shaving off whatever he wasn’t using and clocking CPU cycles while the phone was charging during the night. And then came the day of Tom’s remembrance.
Rick’s boss had insisted on it, spouting speeches about ‘company morale’ and ‘giving closure after a tragedy’. Everybody in the mailroom and out of it knew it was bullshit, of course, and they all were perfectly aware that their boss saw it as an excuse to get buzzed on company time and have the excuse of being sad that they’d lost such an upstanding and well-loved member of their workforce. It would have been a bit of an issue, if everybody else hadn’t already planned to do pretty much the same thing. For his part, being the person that Tom had been closest to- not that that was saying much- Rick thought it was… at least a little disrespectful. Sure, they hadn’t been close, but he’d never disliked Tom, and he’d had some good memes or games to share sometimes.
All that went out the window when he got the Mal0 notification.
When his phone dinged, he’d taken it out and looked at it casually. Everybody’d been milling about after their boss had given a (slightly slurred) speech on pulling together during the hard times, and they were all waiting their turn to get a slice of a rectangular cake that said, in a way that Rick guessed was supposed to be funny, ‘sorry you got shot by the mob, Tim’. He hadn’t bothered to correct them about the name. So, there’d really been nothing to stop him taking a look.
And that’s when he finally realized the alarm bells that should’ve rung the moment Tom vanished.
The image looked innocent enough, at first glance. There he was, morosely staring at the cake and it’s wrong name spelled out in icing that was a very inappropriate red. There, on the other side of the table, leaning over it and looking to be peering intently at the cake, as if attempting to figure out what Rick felt was so objectionable about it, was Mal0.
Mal0 was a figure that most people would’ve found creepy, scary, unsettling. It reminded him of something like a black-furred werewolf in an equally black coat that reached below its waist. You could never really tell whether the skull was a mask, or its actual face, but given the ears poking out to either side and the fur pressed down around the edges, Rick had always guessed the former rather than the latter. Tom had thought it looked metal. Rick had thought it made the figure look like an edgy dork’s fursuit.
And, yes, this picture looked rather like most of the others he’d received from the app. Mal0 always looked curious or bewildered by something, and that something was often nonsensical, like a coffee cup or a table or any one of a myriad of perfectly ordinary objects. Rick guessed that it was the program just selecting an object and a premade picture to render into it. The difference this time, of course, was that he’d never taken this picture. His phone had been with him the entire time- in fact, as he focused closer on the image, he could see his phone in his right hand, in the process of coming up to his face.
His breath caught in his throat. Had… the app scraped an image from somebody else’s phone? No, that… didn’t make sense. Somebody would’ve had to have taken the picture, because the app certainly can’t have just accessed their camera… could it? He wasn’t the most tech savvy guy, he wasn’t sure if an app could just do that or not.
Quickly, he made some excuse, retreating from the noise of the party and to one of the side halls. The steel door shut behind him, cutting off the noise from the mailroom, and he was plunged into an echoing sort of silence. Above him, bar lights hummed in their sockets, and the pipes that ran on the concrete walls occasionally rattled slightly or made some manner of noise as liquid flowed through them, but it was quiet enough that he could think, at least.
He ran his fingers through his hair, thinking. This wasn’t a prank played on him by Tom and the others; too elaborate, and he didn’t think for a second they could get the media on board if they tried. It was far too long-lasting for some kind of reality show, too many elements there as well. Something was happening, but he had no idea what, and he couldn’t help but think of the state that Tom’s apartment had been in. He was…
He breathed out, leaning against one of the walls and rubbing the bridge of his nose. He was freaking out about nothing, if he was honest with himself. What was he so scared of, an odd picture? This wasn’t a horror movie, and, for a moment, he felt… immature, maybe. What, was he scared of some monster in some spooky pictures? Was he going to hide under his covers, maybe get his neighbors to check under his bed at night? He laughed at the idea.
And then the laugh died as his phone buzzed again.
The good mood that he’d worked himself into evaporated like a puddle in summer, gone as suddenly as it came. He was still holding his phone, echoes of the vibration ringing through his fingers, muscles tightening as something heavy curled deep in his stomach. His breath curled in his lungs as he stared down at his hand, his phone’s screen facing into his leg. He could see the light playing across the side of his thigh- the phone screen was still on, the texts from the app still open. If he turned it, just a little, he would see it, see what he had been sent. It was there, just beyond his gaze and just a slight motion of the hand away. He clenched his other hand, shaky and uncertain, and turned his hand.
And then he brought the phone up completely, staring at it in confusion.
He didn’t know what he’d expected to see. Perhaps, there had been some feeling that he would sight the thing in the images staring at him, looming over him. Or, maybe, he’d thought that it would be a picture of claws, dark as midnight, slowly wrapping themselves around his throat. The human imagination was, after all, the source of our greatest fears, the thing that creates the monster lurking in the shadows just outside the meager light of the campfire. The greatest horrors are those conjured from shadows and the slightest noise by the depths of our own minds.
The image that his phone displayed, however, was very different from what he expected. If he had expected something from a horror movie, intimidating and chilling, he would’ve been entirely disappointed. The monster, for what else could it be, was there, sure: it was taking up half the image, with himself taking up the other half. However, it appeared that the image had been taken in the moment that he’d burst out laughing.
The large, dark-furred, skull-faced creature had apparently been completely unsuspecting. It appeared that its reaction to his sudden laughter was to draw back, startled, paws pulled up against its chest and fingers curled. Its white light eyes appeared wide open in surprise, its mouth slightly agape, and as he looked, he realized that it was a far few inches off the ground. Not hovering, no- it had literally jumped in surprise.
“That’s… not scary in the slightest.” He muttered.
To his surprise, the phone immediately buzzed again. This time, the large, dark-furred creature had retreated from him somewhat, and was now covering its face in what he could only describe as… embarrassment? Shoulders hunched, one eye peering out from between its furred fingers. Lord help him, he couldn’t be scared of something like that. He rubbed his eyes with his fingers and sighed. Well… he didn’t think he could get rid of whatever it was, at this point, without maybe chucking the phone, and he didn’t even think that would work. Something supernatural was at play, but hell if he could figure out what or how. He slid down the wall until he was sitting against it, cold concrete underneath his rear as he groaned softly. Another buzz; this time, the creature was leaning over him, paws lowered slightly, watching him in obvious curiosity.
No point just sitting here, he supposed.
“Hello?”
Buzz. The wolfish creature was tilting its head, though he couldn’t tell what emotion that was supposed to be.
“Can you, uh, understand me?”
Buzz: head tilted in the other direction. He really couldn’t tell if that was an affirmative, or if it was just responding to his query with curiosity. Its paws were lowered to its stomach, where it appeared to be folding them together, perhaps in nervousness or just being uncertain what to do with them. He scrolled up a bit, to the picture of it staring at the cake, and it occurred to him that it really did look as if it was attempting to figure out what he thought was so wrong about it.
In fact, going back through image after image, the only real emotions that the figure seemed to display were a sort of curiosity. It appeared to watch its surroundings with fascination, and at several points in the earlier images, ones that he’d actually taken rather than being grabbed from the aether, it appeared to be looking at the camera with uncertainty or questioningly. In the earliest pictures, however, it appeared to merely stare blankly into space. Scrolling back and forth, he realized that he could actually see the slow beginning of reactions, expressions, and body language from the bipedal wolf creature. It had been slow enough that he hadn’t noticed it, over weeks of receiving the images, but all compressed like this…
Another buzz made him scroll to the newest image, where the being, creature, monster- whatever, was crouched in front of him. It leaned over, a small amount of red tongue poking out of its mouth as it stared at the phone in his hands. Maybe it was examining its older work with him? That was an odd thought. It seemed somewhat… he wasn’t sure how to describe what he was seeing. Certainly, the wolf didn’t seem to like what it was seeing, but he wasn’t sure if it was because it disliked the older images or what. Well, looking closer, its reactions had slowly become more nuanced, so perhaps it just didn’t like seeing itself in a simpler state?
He was theory crafting about a monster appearing in texted images. He really wasn’t sure if he was going insane or not. Well, if it was something in the water cooler or in the air or what, it’d certainly already got to Tom as well as anything could, and he was already neck deep in whatever it was. Maybe, if he just didn’t fight it, it wouldn’t be an issue.
“Fuck it.” He decided finally, pushing himself to his feet.
At least if it killed him, he wouldn’t have to come in to work tomorrow. And with that thought, he went back to the party, where he promptly received another texted image of the wolf looking startled and disgusted as his boss vomited into one of the sinks. That one he saved to his camera roll.
Over the next few days, now that he was actually paying close attention to the images whenever they arrived, he noted that they rapidly picked up in frequency. He was reminded of movies where a demon or a ghost picks up in activity because the people it’s haunting pay more attention to it, slowly ramping up over the course of days. Though, in his case, the thing haunting him wasn’t a particularly scary demon, or some cursed ghost who’d died horribly and now sought revenge on the living.
He’d started calling the thing Wendi, which was a rather grim thing to be calling it despite the very vague resemblance, but he couldn’t not think of it. As he paid more attention to Wendi, he noticed how the creature seemed to be curious about everything around it. It examined TV sets, tried to look at people’s books and laptop screens over their shoulders, expressing childlike glee at things that it had apparently never seen before. Multiple times, it was looking in his direction while excitedly pointing at something new, and he often couldn’t help but give a little smile whenever he received those pictures. The wonder that Wendi displayed at his job, watching people cart around packages and correspondence for an entire office tower, often made his day that much lighter.
One day, about two weeks and change after the odd little party and its revelations, he received an image. In it, Wendi was frowning in contemplation at a particular package, specifically at the white square listing out its addressee. He thought nothing of it; Wendi’s curiosity at such things was, at this point, well established. However, right after it, he received another image.
This one was from the same angle, with him in the background at his desk, and Wendi front and center with the package on a table. This time, however, the creature was pointing one paw at the package, and the other was extended towards one of the many boxes on the walls. For a few moments, he didn’t know what to make of it, that confusing little image. And then, he received another, with Wendi insistently pointing to the same box, staring at where he was sitting and frowning at his phone. He tilted his head slightly, then pushed himself to his feet.
The package was pretty typical, a box taped shut with packing tape and slapped with a label. The label listed the sender, the department of the receiver, and the receiver’s name and either the number of their cubicle or office. Sure enough, there was the label, clearly marking this as intended for a Miles in accounting. A sudden thought, and he looked to the side, where the box labeled ‘accounting’ sat- right where Wendi was pointing.
“Huh.” He said. And then he smiled, and nodded.
Wendi sent a picture a moment later, the creature throwing its arms in the air in obvious glee. Rick couldn’t help but chuckle in response.