Do You Believe in the Black-eyed Menace

Hello. This is my first post here. Tell me if I’m doing it wrong. Hopefully someone here has experienced something like this or knows something about it.

This happened last winter. It was the first Saturday morning after New Years day. Half the world was in flames, literally or metaphorically. Not nearly enough people were serious about Covid. We were about to bomb someone. Or we had already bombed someone. Or someone had bombed someone. It was raining though, at my house. Had been for days.

I was writing at my desk. Streaming music set the mood with a channel featuring ambient horror music, edgy, dark, slow. I love it, like the background to Prince of Darkness. Creepy.

Yes, I write horror. Please don’t hold it against me.

I have a ten-year-old speaker, and it connects by cable, jacks into my phone or PC, whichever I’m using at the moment. A week earlier, the wire snagged on my chair when I was getting up. Since the other end is wrapped around the metal post on my desk to keep it out of the way, the chair ripped the sheathing right off the cable and snapped several of the copper fibers beneath.

I patched it back together, five inches shorter, and taped it up, but the cable no longer worked. My best guess was that I had ripped the connection in the jack. No big deal, I thought. I’d just get a new one.

Over the weekend, I went to a local second-hand store and picked up a new audio cable. This one was weird, had a metal box with glass sides over strange tubes and microchips. It looked Steampunk, and that suited me just fine.

I bought it, expecting it not to work, but thinking I might be inspired by the box. I do love my Steampunk. When I plugged it in, though, the cable worked fine.

Back to the Saturday in question.

I was three pages into my cyber-horror short story when I realized someone had spoken. I glanced at my phone, checked that I was still on the track I thought I was on. Right song, right cover art.

This track had no dialogue.

A voice cracked over my speakers. “C_n you h__r me?” A woman.

“What the--” I said. I paused the music.

“Hello? Can you __ _e?”

“I can hear you,” I said. “Who are you?”

“If ou _an hear me, ty_ __ response on your sc___n. I can see that, but c’t hear _ou.”

I put my hands over my keyboard to reply. “I can hear you.”

“Oka_. G__d. My _ is Harriet. Who  you?”

I typed my name.

“That’s gr___. Hi, Prest__. This is ortant. I don’t __ow how much t_me we ha. They’re track_ng m.”

Tracking? Who were “they?” For that matter, who would be pranking me like this? My brother was in Nevada. My sister in Utah. My only friend is online, and my landlord never talks to me.

“What’s going on?” I typed. “Who is tracking you? How are you talking to me.”

The speakers popped. The reek of hot metal filled the air.

“Look, there isn’_ a lo_ of time. Can you _ out of the _ouse?”

“Get out of the house? Why?”

Static, then, “--tend I’m your old_st frie__ and we’_ _alk_ng on  phone. You ha o tru_ me. Take your ___kers. __pe on your phone.”

I didn’t move. A prank was still the only logical explanation that came to mind.

“Preston,” she said, “you have __ _et moving.”

I switched my speaker to battery and grabbed both speaker and phone before slipping into my flip-flops and going to the kitchen door. It was 4:30 A.M. and dark outside, so I flipped the light on. I looked for a car. Maybe my friend, Alex, had driven down from Minnesota to surprise me. It didn’t seem likely, but I was running out of ideas.

“Go, Pres___,” Harriet snapped.

I slid the door open, then paused to grab my coat. It wasn’t rain-proof, but it would do for a bit. The rain was cold on my feet and hands, but with my hood up and my phone in one pocket and the speaker in the other, I made my way out onto the driveway.

“Get way from __ _ouse,” she told me. I crossed the gravel drive and went up into the trees and yard adjacent to the trailer.

The acrid stench of hot metal came to me again. I checked my speaker, then my phone. When I held up the cable with the metal box, one corner had turned a faint reddish color from heat. I nearly dropped the thing.

“I see t. We don’t h__ uch time. I don’ know what ’re going _ do, but at least _ out of th house.”

I pulled my phone out and navigated to my notes app. “Who are you talking about? What’s going on? Where are you? Who are you?”

The speaker popped, and I lost track of Harriet’s next words as loud snapping and cracking from overhead made me step backwards a few paces. Something heavy smashed through tree-limbs. I retreated several steps. A large blur crashed down out of the enormous maple beside the trailer and slammed into the roof in the corner, near the window of my little office.

I shined the torch light on my phone at the roof once everything had settled.

“ton? I can’t see  now. _ still there?”

A limb from the tree jutted from the roof, easily two feet wide. Right in my office. With my computer.

I ran inside, ignoring the popping and static on my speakers, and went down the hall to my office. The bottom end of the limb skewering my trailer had stomped like a dinosaur foot down on my desk and PC. The only thing I could think at the time was that Harriet had known something was coming.

“Harriet?” I typed into my phone as I staggered towards the kitchen.

No answer. When I held up the metal box, the red glow was gone, but the glass tubes and electronics inside had turned blackened and smoking. The cable insulation on the end oozed and bubbled from the heat, curling back on one side, retracting like the leg of a freshly dead spider.

To this day, I have had no additional contact with Harriet. Who was she? How was she able to see and talk to me through the strange box on that cable?

I’ve had the box analyzed a couple of times. One guy told me it was junk electronics, like someone pieced something together for a movie prop or something. Another guy told me he’d seen that kind of wiring in the computer hardware in the surface-to-air missiles they (someone? Us?) used in Iraq. When I asked for more details, he looked at me like I was crazy.

I am a little crazy, by now. I’ve been to a couple of doctors this year. Neither of them thought I was prone to hallucinations. I hope some of you can help. You can stay anonymous. A name to search for, or a site to look up. That’s all I need.