The Unseen Sender

If Poe were alive today, how would he react to texts?

In the waning days of a bleak November, when the wind howled like a chorus of lost souls, I sat alone in my chamber, a prisoner of my own restless mind. The fire had dwindled to embers, casting feeble shadows that danced upon the walls, and the only sound, save the storm’s lament, was the incessant chime of my phone—a harbinger of messages that would not cease.


It began innocently enough. A text from an unknown number, its words innocuous yet strangely compelling: “Are you there?” I, in my solitude, felt a curious urge to reply, as though the sender’s very existence depended upon my response. My fingers, trembling with an unease I could not name, typed a simple “Yes.” Thus began the correspondence that would unravel my soul.


Each night thereafter, at the stroke of midnight, the phone would chime, its screen glowing with an unearthly pallor. The messages grew stranger, more insistent: “Why do you delay?” “Speak to me!” “I am waiting.” I, a man of reason, sought to dismiss them as the pranks of some idle tormentor, yet each unanswered text seemed to tighten an invisible noose about my heart. To respond was to invite madness; to ignore was to court despair.


I endeavored to trace the sender, but the number yielded no name, no origin—only a void, as if the messages emerged from the ether itself. I changed my number, yet the texts persisted, arriving with the same relentless precision. I hurled the device into the fire, watching its plastic shell melt and hiss, but by morning, a new phone sat upon my desk, its screen alight with the same accursed words: “You cannot escape me.”


My nights became a vigil of dread, my days a haze of exhaustion. I ceased to eat, to sleep, for each moment was consumed by the need to respond—or the terror of what might come if I did not. The messages grew cryptic, poetic, as though penned by a mind both ancient and unhinged: “In the silence of your reply, I am born; in your words, I am bound.” I began to see the sender in my dreams—a shadow with no face, its voice a whisper that echoed in my bones.


One night, driven to the brink of sanity, I resolved to end the torment. I seized the phone and typed a final message, my fingers slick with sweat: “Who are you? What do you want?” The reply came swiftly, chilling in its clarity: “I am you, and I want your voice.”


I stared at the words, my heart a drumbeat in my chest. The room grew colder, the shadows sharper, and I felt a presence behind me—a weight, a breath, a void. I dared not turn, for I knew what I would find: the sender, the self I had buried in the recesses of my soul, now freed by my own hand, my own words.


The phone chimed again, and though I swore never to answer, my fingers moved of their own accord, typing, typing, typing into the abyss. Each message bound me closer to the unseen sender, until I was no longer certain where I ended and it began. The storm raged on, the fire died, and in the darkness, I became the reply—a voice without a body, a text without an end.


And now, as I write this tale, I am but a flicker on a screen, a message sent to no one, received by none. Beware, O reader, the chime of the unseen sender, for once you reply, you are theirs forevermore.