rayaso

Idol Mini-Season 2018-19
Week 17.2
Topic: Vigilance

TH TYP WRIT R

“h ’s aliv h ’s h r b war A”

That was it; that was all that had been typed on the paper. Kent had found it cleaning out the attic of his old home. His mother had recently passed away and he was an only child, so the task of going through her life, of putting her possessions to rest, had been his alone. His father had died long ago, when Kent was only five.

He had found the note sitting by itself in an unlabeled dusty brown file. It was clearly old; the paper was faded and yellowed, and it appeared to have been typed on a manual typewriter with a broken “e” key. It had been crumpled, as if thrown away but then retrieved. It was also folded like a letter, although there was no envelope.

“What does it mean?” thought Kent, “and why did Mom keep it?”

But he was too tired for mysteries. His mother had squirrelled junk away in the attic for decades and sorting through it was a chore.

He didn’t give it another thought until he found an old Remington portable typewriter buried under some disintegrating knitting yarn. The hard, black case was filthy, but when Kent opened it, he found a well-used typewriter that looked like it might still work. There was a sticker on it that read “Property of W. Davis.”

“This must be Dad’s,” thought Kent, who felt a little less tired.

Over the years, his mother had discarded anything that had belonged to his father. She had been a hard, pragmatic woman, and since her husband had died, she hadn’t seen the point in keeping his things. Rotting yarn and broken radios, yes; but there had been no room for a husband who had left her to raise a five-year-old boy on her own.

If it hadn’t been for one photograph his mother had given him, he would never have known what his father had looked like. It had been taken in Egypt a month before he’d died. He’d been dressed in dirt-covered khaki shorts and a pith helmet. He had a scraggly mustache and a goofy grin. He’d looked happy.

“That was his big expedition,” his mother had once told him. “It’s just after your fifth birthday.”

William Davis had been a university graduate student specializing in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Professor Albert Stevens had taken him along on one of his trips to Egypt to bring back artifacts for the glory of the school because he had needed someone to decipher “those goddamn scrawls.”

“Your father was sometimes so sad,” his mother had told him. “I guess now you’d call it depression. Over in Egypt, it finally got the better of him and he ended his life. Just put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Blood and brains everywhere.”

She’d been generous with the details of his death, but sparing about his father’s life, even when he’d begged for stories about him.

The typewriter and maybe the old note were all Kent had that his father had touched, so he took them home and left the rest of the attic for another day.

After grabbing a beer, he took the typewriter out to his workbench in the garage.

“It doesn’t look too bad,” he thought. “Just needs a little work and a new ribbon.”

It took several days. The overhaul was easy, he even fixed the stuck “e.” But the ribbon was harder; he finally located one, installed it, then took the typewriter back inside and put it on his computer desk.

Finally, his father’s typewriter was ready. He started to type “the quick brown fox . . .” but before the fox jumped over a lazy dog, the keys started typing on their own.

Whatever Kent hoped to see, it wasn’t this. He fell over backwards in his chair.

“What the . . . !” he thought, rubbing his head. He could hear the typewriter slowly clacking on the table. It was not a welcome sound.

“What’s going on?” said Kent, now standing well back from his desk. “If typewriters can type,” he thought, “who knows what else they can do?”

The Remington had typed: “Awake at last! Where am I?”

“In my house,” said Kent. Since the typewriter was not going to kill him just yet, his curiosity started to get the better of his fear.

“The last thing I remember was typing, then a pistol at my head. I’ve been stuck inside this typewriter ever since.”

Kent had always been realistic and ghosts didn’t figure into his world, but nothing else came to mind. As long as whatever-this-is stayed put, he’d keep going, although his courage had severe limits when it came to the supernatural.

“Who . . . and what are you?” he said.

“I’m a typewriter. What did you think I am? And I don’t know my name, or much else,” typed the Remington.

“Are you the spirit of William Davis?” asked Kent.

“I’m a typewriter, not a Ouija Board. You can come closer. I can’t type you to death.”

Kent had gradually backed farther away from his desk -- he did not move.

“I only know that before I became this typewriter, I was sitting at a table looking at an old urn with strange drawings. Somehow I wound up here.”

Kent got out his father’s picture and a magnifying glass. Off to one side was a shade tent with a small table. On it was a typewriter. His father was standing near some kind of an ancient vase with hieroglyphics, along with many other artifacts.

Whatever this was, the spirit of his father or something else, it was too far outside Kent’s world for him to accept it, so he moved still farther away. He thought about getting his gun out of the desk drawer, but stopped himself.

“It’s a typewriter – it can’t fly,” he thought. “If it’s my father, I . . . .”

He didn’t know what he wanted. He couldn’t exactly give it a hug or take it out to a ball game, all the things he’d missed as a boy.

“It’s hard to hear you,” the Remington typed. “I don’t have ears. Can you type what you say?”

“If it wanted to kill me,” thought Kent, “it would’ve done it already, and if I wanted to smash it, I’ve had my chance. Time to go all in.”

Kent made up his mind. He picked up his chair and sat at his desk, then reached out his hands, fingers at the ready. As soon as he touched the keyboard, he felt a massive electrical shock run through him, as if the sun had exploded in his brain.

“At last,” cried Anubis, the Egyptian God of Death, taking over Kent’s body. “No longer imprisoned in the typewriter!”

“This mortal’s a fool,” he thought, “just like his father. He was weak and died before he could warn of the return of the mighty Anubis.”

After thousands of years confined in an urn sealed by powerful spells, Anubis had been released when William Davis had opened it, disregarding the hieroglyphic warnings as superstitious nonsense.

Lacking a physical existence, the God of Death was forced to occupy William as he now controlled his son.

Before Anubis’s full strength could return, William had fought to remain himself and had managed to start typing a warning. Losing his battle, William had managed to grab his pistol and had sacrificed himself in the vain hope that it would also destroy Anubis. This had only forced Anubis into the nearest object, the typewriter, to wait for a new host.

Professor Stevens had sent the unfished warning to William’s wife, along with the typewriter, where Anubis had spent all those years, just waiting for someone to open the case, start typing, and release him.

In taking him over, Anubis could not yet destroy Kent’s consciousness; he was still weak, just as he’d been when William first released him from the urn. But not for long.

“Gun,” Kent struggled to think.

He opened a desk drawer, grabbed the pistol, and pointed it at his temple.

“Not again!” thought Anubis.

Before Kent could pull the trigger, Anubis transferred his essence to Kent’s computer.

During his brief time occupying him, Anubis incorporated all of Kent’s knowledge into his own essence. Anubis knew that the computer was a portal to a whole new world, one he could use to spread himself to countless human vessels.

All he needed was to become a file to send over the internet, one which would entice as many people as possible to open it and release him into unsuspecting users.

He titled his evil file “Watchfulness Healed My Life – Here’s How!” and prepared to send it to as many web sites as possible. He loved the sound of “clickbait,” and anyone who opened it deserved to die, absorbing Anubis’s essence and creating an endless supply of hosts.

Fortunately for mankind, Anubis’s knowledge of computers and the internet was limited to Kent’s, and Kent’s computer time was mostly spent looking at cat macros, the news, and his various interests. None of it involved mass hacking into web sites to plant a file containing the Egyptian God of Death. It was a slow start for Anubis, who was rapidly reaching end-of-the-earth rage.

There was another problem to having shared consciousness with Kent that Anubis, in all his divine glory, had not counted on. Kent knew Anubis’s plans once he left his body for the computer.

While Kent was stunned by Anubis, he wasn’t stupid. Anubis left him on the floor, within reach of the surge protector. Both the computer and router were plugged into it, and when he pulled its plug, he trapped Anubis in the computer before he could reach the internet.

Kent then took a nearby baseball bat and used it to smash the computer.

“Always hated Windows 10,” he thought, after crushing the computer and router, turning them into shards of plastic.

Without a physical object to inhabit, Anubis, God of Death, had finally met his own end, never to return.

It had been the worst and most exhilarating day of Kent’s life. No one would believe him, but he knew he had to tell his story.

His computer was dead but his father’s typewriter still worked, so Kent pulled up his chair, put in a fresh piece of paper, and finally understanding the heroism of his father’s sacrifice, he began at the beginning, typing where his father had left off.

“He’s alive! He’s here! Beware Anubis . . . .”

His father was dead, but he would live on in Kent’s words, a little bit of him preserved, succeeding where Anubis had failed. And without clickbait.