Emails

Recently, I've been receiving a lot more emails than usual. I've never had many friends, so my inbox has always been empty other than the odd spam or chain letter. Five days ago, however, I thought maybe my luck was changing. Perhaps some of my old friends wanted to get back in touch with me.

When I checked my inbox, there were fourteen messages. It seemed strange at first and I figured it was probably spam and junk mail, when I looked who sent them, they were all my friends and ex-friends. At this point, I got excited and began hurriedly reading through all the messages. By the time I got to the fourth email, I realized there was something strange about them.

The way they were written made it seem like they would never see or talk to me again. I continued reading through them and when I had gotten through all of them, I decided to call my friends to see why they had written the emails in such an odd way.

I made my first call to who I would consider my best friend, but all I got was his answering machine. It didn't even have a message like, "Please leave your name and message after the beep." There was just dead silence and then the tone.

I left a message anyway, saying I would like to talk to him and maybe get together to do something because I hadn't seen him in what seemed like years. I tried calling the next friend, but there was more of the same. There was no answering machine message - just silence then the tone.

I was a little freaked out by this point and didn't try calling any more of my friends. Instead, I decided to go visit them. This was when things got really weird.

At my best friend's house, I knocked on the door and waited for him to answer. After two minutes of knocking and ringing the doorbell, there was no answer. I didn't hear any movement from inside the house, either. It was odd, considering his car was parked in the driveway.

I decided he was probably sleeping and began to walk away, but suddenly felt compelled to look in the windows. I had to make sure no one was there to answer the door. I peeked in the windows, but it was dark in the house. Before walking away, I noticed that the living room carpet was dark reddish-brown. It used to be beige, I think. It was getting late by that point, so I went home and went to bed.

In the morning, I immediately got up and went to the computer to check my email. My eyes grew wide as I noticed there were 102 new messages. They were all from the same fourteen people who had sent me emails the day before.

I began reading through them. By the time I had read the first three, I was scrolling through them and barely reading any because all of them were virtually identical. They all said something about how much they missed me, followed by a question about why I did it, or how could I have. I didn't know what they were talking about. What did I do?

I spent the rest of the next three days like I normally would, except for the fact that I kept getting more and more emails every day. I kept getting more paranoid because the letters started to become furious, hostile, and sometimes hysterical. They always had an overwhelming feeling of sadness.

It's been five days since the emails started coming and I feel like I'm going insane. Today, however, the emails were different. They were happy instead of sad, but they were still accusing me of doing something. Now, though, they were saying they knew they would see me soon instead of never again. They couldn't wait for me to join them.

I've received 588 emails so far. I've never received so much attention in my entire life, but I've never felt so alone or so scared. It's 11:59PM now. I don't think i can sleep until I read tomorrow's emails. My instant messenger program just informed me that I have 78 new messages.

I've read through them all now, even though I could have stopped after the first. I felt like i had to read them all because I'm too afraid to listen to what the messages say. They all say the same thing, though.

"We're here now. We see you now. It's time for you to come with us. Turn around. Don't worry. We can wait."