When he went back in the house, he heard Hannah talking. “Cool!” she was saying, and he felt his heart lift. There was something here she liked.
Hannah and Celia stood by his computer, their blonde hair glowing green.
“Did you know your house is haunted?” Hannah said. “This is the best thing ever.”
Celia didn’t look so sure. She chewed a plastic anteater.
William hadn’t worked that day, but three A15 forms were open on the screen. No one touched the keyboard, but numbers appeared in column 14B. The green light from the webcam glowed and the mouse darted across the screen. They watched the form complete itself, numbers appearing crisp and formal in the empty boxes, numbers like jokes: 666, 42, 69.
Sara took the girls home at nine. He’d hoped they would stay the night. He didn’t have beds yet, but he’d inherited the blankets and a whole stack of pillows. He’d imagined them all building a fort, cuddling together on the carpet. Then they’d arrived and he’d realized how big they were. The carpet fort would never work.
“I should tell you,” Sara said after she’d sent the kids out to the van. “Hannah has a new boyfriend. His name is Jeremiah.” Sara grinned like she was teasing him. “I thought maybe you’d notice, yourself. Would ask who she’s texting all evening under the table, but you’re distracted.” Sara touched his shoulder. “It’s okay, just make sure you talk to her about it. Do the Dad thing, you know?”
Hannah had been texting under the table? “It’s suspicious,” he said to the divot on the couch where Sara had been. “They’re not training them to use technology. They’re just training them to be sneaky.” What had Sara meant by “new” boyfriend? Did that imply there’d been an old one?
In his office, the computer was still filling out its own A15 forms. They were all worthless, full of values that made no sense. “777”s when the choices were “1” or “0.” The calculation programs would throw a fit, but it was still satisfying to see the forms, a full day’s work completed while he took out the trash.
He changed a “777” to a zero. The computer cleared the field and typed a “666.” He erased it again, tried a “1” this time. Sixes filled the field. The value was completely invalid—laughable, even, because the box wasn’t wide enough to show more than one number.
“That’s fine,” he told the green light. “You fill them out however you want.”
The computer opened another copy of the form, began to fill the boxes with letters, which was just ridiculous, made no sense at all. The letters were all uppercase, and they made words. “FORESTSWARM,” the form proclaimed. “FORESTSWARM WILL SWARM YOUR SOUL.”
Leaves crunched under the wheels of his desk chair as he opened the web browser and typed “Forestswarm” into the search box. He waited for the computer to delete or change, but the mouse slid itself over and clicked “Search.” He barely glimpsed the results before the computer began clicking things, opening windows, pulling up images, pressing “play” on a bunch of different videos. The speakers crackled with soundtracks and people all going at once. A man laughed; a woman moaned. He heard a hollow sound, like the wind blowing around something dying. He tried to mute, but the volume just got louder.
“Hey,” he told the green light. “Hey, I need to be able to read these, here.” The computer let him pause all the videos. It let him click through the images, but they didn’t make sense. In one photo, two boys played video games on a paisley couch. In another, a naked woman lay on a table while a man in a donkey mask buried his head between her legs. In another, an older couple sat eating lasagna while a cat looked up at them.
In one video, a man showed a fish he’d caught. In another, a woman harvested sweet potatoes. In another, a girl not much older than Hannah began to take her clothes off. She rubbed her breasts, reached between her legs. He closed out of the window.
“I’m a dad,” he told the computer. “Don’t show me that stuff.”
Immediately, a window popped up with a naked man shown from behind, another man pumping his fist in and out. “Fine,” William said. “Whatever.” He hid the window behind several others and clicked through the webpages. Most were forums guarded by I accept the risks statements. The computer clicked Agree before he could read them. Then he was looking at a board called “Forestswarm.”
“Those kids that shot that boy on the railroad tracks,” a user called PigBenis wrote. “They claimed the forest made them do it.” “That woman assaulted in the Safeway walk-in. She said it was trees,” Nubmuffin wrote. “Not one tree, but hundreds. A whole forest. She had splinters that could not be explained.”