First published in San Diego's Computeredge June 1991
Second appearence, Toronto Computes, September 1991
He was there again, following.
Stealing a sideways glance in darkness, Jenny quickened her pace.
Four weeks, now. Four weeks, following her home from night school, a shadowy figure in the dark at the edge of her awareness.
Who was he? And why? Why was he doing this?
Jenny shivered, feeling down the ring of keys in her hand. She mounted the front steps, stabbed repeatedly for the key entry, and fell in, to home and sanctuary. Swinging about, she homed the dead-bolt.
A quick breath, and she was up the stairs to the computer.
It had to be someone on the BBS. Someone who knew the phone number, and traced her address. In fact, she could pinpoint the very personality, but it wouldn't help. The real person lay hidden behind the shield of an alias; obscured and waiting.
Two months ago, the messages had started. Nasty, obscene messages, left privately to her, the Sysop. She'd lock out the caller, but they'd start again, under a different alias. In desperation, she restricted membership. No new callers were allowed on the board.
It worked. The obscene messages stopped.
Abruptly, the stalking began.
Last winter when Eric first moved out, she had seriously considered dismantling the board. Why continue a BBS that had been Eric's idea, Eric's pet?
But she was lonely. The many friends met through the ambe screen were hers alone - Jenny didn't want to lose them. Especially Nick.
Don't let it be Nick, she prayed.
Sometime in early spring, they had started conversing in the private mail area of the board. Soon after, Nick made a point of logging on shortly after ten each evening. So easy to sit in the back bedroom, and wait for his call. So easy to press F2, the key for Chat Mode, and address him online...
"Hi Nick! I was sitting right here and saw your message coming in..."
For two weeks, she sat patiently by the computer waiting for him to log on. For two weeks, he had not disappointed her.
She accessed the Sysop functions and pulled up the user log. Whoever had logged on in the last hour couldn't have followed her home, couldn't be outside the house at this moment. She scanned the list for names: Dedilus, Rambo and Michaela. No Nick.
The doorbell rang.
Jenny's eyes darted from the computer screen to the stairs.
It rang again.
Foolish to think that she was safe! Foolish to think that using an alias was protection, when her phone number was known. Every day in the city, women were attacked. It was in the papers: a woman molested every fourteen minutes by psychotics...
There was one at her door right now, pounding.
Fear paralysed her. No way to reach the phone; it stood in the kitchen, silent, inert, within sight of the front door, oblivious to the pounding.
Upstairs, an open window to the right of her computer table looked out on a first floor roof. Jenny pushed back from the keyboard to measure the drop, but before she could leave her chair, the monitor came alive with activity: someone was logging on!
Words cruised the amber screen ...name...password...she hit F2, saw the screen split, and began to type furiously:
"Nick - someone's following me - I'm scared! They're
pounding at the front door - ringing the doorbell - can you
call the police- I think it's someone from the board -"
Letters scrambled across the screen, above her own:
"where are you?"
"233 Balsam - oh God, he's kicking the door-"
The screen exploded in a line of unreadable characters. Bile rose in her throat as she read, "NO CARRIER".
The line went dead, the screen blank.
Downstairs, plate glass shattered with the force of a workboot.
* * *
So close. After all these months, Nick hadn't known she lived so close. Right on his jogging route, in fact. He ran it now, firmly and quickly.
He hoped the police were quicker.
Nick travelled the distance, heart pounding, mind agonizing. If only he'd been honest, she might be with him right now... safe.
It was all too easy on a BBS: exaggerate your looks, play the part of someone else, pretend to be who you wish you were. Hidden behind the alias, you could say anything! But like a pact with the devil, one had to remain hidden. And so Nick had been afraid to ask her out, afraid to meet, for then she would know he was an imposter.
How foolish it all seemed now, when the world hung on ten minutes.
If she was hurt - Jesus, if she was even touched...
Fear and fury propelled Nick. He ran the last mile without thinking.
233 Balsam was a small war-time two-story conversion. The shabby facade now presented a shattered front window; shards of glass hung from the bowed frame like crystaline icicles. Two police cars sealed the road frontage. An ambulance pulled away, its wail a banshee shriek in the night. Dread coursed through Nick like ice water.
Climbing steps two at a time, he elbowed his way through a small crowd of spectators, the neighbourhood vultures. Snatches of conversation bobbed in his wake.
"...out on parole..."
"...fell off the roof..."
Nick lunged through the doorway, bursting into a yellow kitchen. One officer leaned back against an ancient Frigidaire, notebook poised. A burly, fiftyish man in wrinkled grey tweed barked into a black wall-phone.
"...goddamn psycho spent too much time at the computer when he shoulda been practicing gymnastics...fell off the roof and busted both his legs...whadaya mean, did I help?" The big man's eyes locked on Nick. "You the computer-boyfriend who called us?"
Nick tried for his tongue but couldn't find it. A female voice cut through the fog.
"Nick?"
Heads turned.
At the bare formica table sat a young woman with glossy auburn hair. Nick thought of a pretty red fox in the wilderness; alone, but safe.
"You're a redhead." He blurted, voice thick with relief.
She smiled suddenly.
"You don't have a color monitor?"
Laughing, she rose from the shadows, and into his real life.
