SELFIE
By Randy
Romero
I don’t
own a cell phone. Not anymore. Not after what happened to Tammy, Archie, and
Shane. For the record, my name is Elizabeth Marsh. My friends used to call me
Liz, back when I still had friends. Now I rarely leave the house. I know my
story sounds bizarre, absurd, ludicrous, but the truth is often stranger than
fiction.
It all
started on Friday, June 22, 2018. Graduation Day. The last time the four of us
were all together in one place. Tammy (Tamara Jones) had taken over a dozen
selfies that morning for her Instagram page. Then after we received our
diplomas, it was time for the group photo.
Shane
(Shane Duggan) hated pictures. His Facebook profile picture was and still is a
photo of his red Ford Bronco. Archie (Arthur Wright) wasn’t a fan, either. And
this may come as a surprise since I’m a girl, but I absolutely hated posing for
pictures. I didn’t have an Instagram or a Snapchat. If it wasn’t for my
friends, I wouldn’t have even bothered to open a Facebook account. But we
agreed to take a group picture to appease Tammy.
We all
huddled together, arms on each other’s shoulders, while a fellow student
snapped a picture with Tammy’s phone.
“You
ought to smile more,” Shane told me when we were done, as I was notorious for
never smiling in photographs.
“I smile
all the time when you’re not around,” I said. That got a big laugh from Archie.
Tammy
took her phone back and we all gathered around to see how the picture came out.
Shane was the first to point out the strange, shadowy figure standing in the
distance.
“What’s
that?” he asked. “Is there something wrong with your phone?”
“My
phone is brand new,” Tammy said. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“Maybe
it’s a glitch or something,” I shrugged.
“Looks more
like a person to me,” Archie said. “But you can’t really make out any of their
features.”
“Maybe
he’s in incognito mode,” Shane said and chuckled at his own lame joke.
Tammy
simply shook it off and we went our separate ways for the day. We all had plans
to go to the movies the next day, but Shane’s phone was turned off and Tammy
wasn’t answering any of my calls or texts.
Archie
and I drove to Tammy’s place first and knocked on the door for over ten
minutes. Eventually, she let us in. It was eighty degrees outside and I knew
something was wrong the instant I saw her answer the door in a wool sweater and
jeans.
She was
jittery, anxious, and she looked, for lack of a better term, disturbed.
“Everything
alright?” Archie asked.
“Yeah
what’s going on?”
“I’ll tell
you what’s going on…That thing we all saw on my phone yesterday, the thing referred to as a glitch…It’s not a glitch.
Archie was right. It’s a person. I went through my photo album and it’s in
every single photo that I took yesterday. And every time I take another
picture, it gets closer and closer and closer.”
She
showed us her phone and swiped through her photos. And with every picture, the
shadowy figure drew closer and started coming into focus.
“I’ve
been up since three o’clock this morning. Something…something attacked me in my
sleep.”
She
rolled up her sleeves and showed us the deep scratches covering her arms. She
had them all over her legs, too. And she had a strange scar on her forearm,
looked almost like a burn mark that resembled an arrowhead.
Tammy
refused to leave the house and begged us to leave her alone. Archie and I
didn’t know what to make of it. Tammy wasn’t depressed and she was never one to
hurt herself. The wounds didn’t look self-inflicted. It looked like the work of
a rabid animal.
We drove
to Shane’s after we left Tammy’s. It took some convincing for him to open the
door. Shane was much quieter than usual enthusiastic self. No smiles. No lame
jokes. He was dead serious. It took him a while to let us know what was
troubling him.
“Tammy
called me last night. She was freaking out about the selfies she took during
graduation. She insisted that the figure in the picture was a person and that
it was getting closer. I made a huge mistake, guys. I just wanted to prove her
wrong. I wanted to let her know that the thing in her pictures couldn’t
possibly be real. So I stood in front of the mirror with my phone and started
taking pictures. But Tammy was right. It’s in every picture. Every goddamn one.
And it keeps creeping closer and closer with every picture.”
He told
us about the strange dream he had that night, a dream about the shadowy figure
in the photograph. In Shane’s dream, the figure was standing in the darkest
corner of his bedroom. It lurched forward, revealing itself slowly. He described
it in vivid detail.
It was a
tall, lean man in a dirty polyester suit, with eyes as black as coal and long,
symmetrical fingers with jagged nails. It crept towards his bed, reached out
with one hand and rested it on Shane’s shoulder. That’s when he woke up with
what appeared to be a rash on his left shoulder that took the shape of an
arrowhead. He pulled down the collar of his shirt to show us.
It was
at that moment that I tasted copper in my mouth and I realized I had been
biting down on my lower lip the entire time, hard enough to draw blood.
Archie
loved comic books. And he loved to doodle and sketch. “Every great hero needs
an equally great villain,” he explained as he sat at his desk, sketching. He
drew exactly what Shane had described. He even gave it a name based on Shane’s
dumb joke at graduation. COG, short for incognito.
I stayed
at his place Saturday night. He was gracious enough to give up his bed and
sleep on the floor. I offered to take the floor but Archie insisted. I didn’t
care where I slept. I was freaked out and I just didn’t want to spend the night
alone.
I kept
calling Tammy the next day. I must’ve text her at least thirty times. No reply.
Finally I gave up and tried her house phone. Her mother answered. She had Tammy
committed after seeing the cuts on her arms and legs. “No phone calls or
visitors allowed,” her mom had told me.
I went
home to check in with my parents and that’s when Archie called me with the news
about Shane. He supposedly fell asleep at the wheel of his Bronco late Saturday
night and crashed his car into a tree. He didn’t make it.
He
wasn’t wearing his seatbelt at the time of the accident and was ejected from
the vehicle. Much later on, I made the mistake of Google searching the images
of the accident. His neck was twisted in such a way that his head was
practically backwards.
There
were no drugs or alcohol in his system. No skid marks on the road or anything
to indicate that he had actually fallen asleep or lost control. The police were
baffled. But Archie and I knew better. We knew that COG had gotten to him.
That
night, I got the call from Tammy’s mother. Tammy was hysterical and they had to
restrain and sedate her in order for her to get some rest. She died in her
sleep. Doctors couldn’t really explain it. They called it “sudden heart failure.”
Her heart simply stopped beating. But again, Archie and I knew the truth. COG
had gotten to her, somehow, someway. Maybe while she was sleeping. Maybe in her
dreams. But COG had taken her from us.
I slept
over Archie’s house again on Sunday night and woke up around three in the
morning. Archie was in a trance, standing in front of his bedroom mirror,
shirtless, snapping pictures of himself. Click. Click. Click. Click.
“Archie!
Archie, wake up! Wake up!”
I
smacked the phone out of his hands and he snapped out of it.
“What
happened? Where am I?” He didn’t remember a thing and attributed it to
sleepwalking. But I had a feeling there was another factor at play. Someone, or
something, had been pulling his strings, controlling his actions.
I left his house that morning and went back home. I needed to
be alone, to think, to clear my mind. I managed to eat something despite my
lack of appetite. Then I took the longest nap I’ve ever taken. I woke up and it
was almost dark outside.
My phone rang. It was Archie.
“He’s
marking us,” Archie said. “We’re all marked for death.”
“We
don’t have any marks yet. Maybe it’s not too late for us.”
“It is
for me,” he said and text me a picture of the red mark on his wrist shaped like
an arrowhead. “He was in my bedroom last night, right before you woke up. I
thought I was sleepwalking or dreaming, but it was no dream. He was here, in
the same room with us. I’m not going to let that son of a bitch get the best of
me. I’m going out on my own terms.”
“Archie,
please don’t do–”
“I’m
sorry, Liz. Goodbye.” The line went dead.
I tried
calling him back, but he turned his phone off. I tried calling his parents, but
they disconnected their phone a while back. I thought about racing over to his
house, to stop him from doing the unthinkable. But Archie was a bright kid, the
smartest kid I knew. I never thought he’d be foolish enough to take his own
life.
His
parent found him in his room that night. He had smashed his mirror and used a
jagged piece of glass to cut his arms vertically. He left a few notes along
with his sketches. One simply said “Beware of COG.” The other said, “He won’t
let me go. I’ve seen his face. He left his mark. He won’t let us escape. This
is the only way out.”
I
decided to put this to rest once and for all, to prove that COG was not real,
just a figment of our vulnerable imaginations. I grabbed my phone and stood in
front of my bedroom mirror and snapped picture after picture. I thumbed through
them. COG was in every photo, drawing closer and closer until he was
practically standing over my shoulder.
And
there it appeared, standing right outside my bedroom window; tall and slender,
wearing a dirty polyester suit. Pale, milky skin, and eyes as black as coal,
just as Shane had described. It waved with its long symmetrical fingers and
tapped against the glass with its ragged fingernails. A creepy grin edged
across its face, a wide, angular smile. It was grinning from ear to ear, if it
had ears, but they appeared to have been severed.
I
screamed and hurled my phone to the floor, stomped on it repeatedly until I
smashed it to pieces. I looked up and it was gone, but my right arm was itching
like crazy. The pain was searing.
I still
bear the mark of COG to this day. I don’t know why he hasn’t tried to claim me
like the others. Maybe he wants me alive to spread the word of his existence.
But I know he’s out there, waiting. Just a selfie away. He preys on our vanity,
on our weaknesses. Narcissism is the downfall of our generation. And COG is the
one waiting for us to fall.
