The first picture arrived on Tuesday morning. I woke up, checked my messages and discovered one by a number not in my contacts.
Still half-asleep, I opened it, only to be greeted by a picture and a line below it.
The picture was nothing but a blurry, incomprehensible mess. The only thing of notice were two tiny numbers in the bottom right, thirty-two and seventeen.
‘Hope you enjoy, beautiful,’ the line below it read.
What the hell? Probably a wrong number. Still, it was weird.
In the end, I just ignored it. Yet, the mysterious sender didn’t ignore me. A day later, another message arrived. It was almost identical. The line was the same, and it contained another blurred picture.
When a third and fourth message arrived, I grew annoyed and blocked the number.
I thought that was it, but a day later, I got yet another message from another, different number.
This time, I sent back an angry message, telling whoever was trying to mess with me to leave me alone and blocked them again.
The problem was, whoever was behind it didn’t leave me alone.
In the end, as the messages kept coming, I decided to just ignore them. It wasn’t worth getting worked up. Yet, I still opened them occasionally.
It was my colleague Susan, who finally shed light on things. While I sat at my desk, staring at yet another message, she spoke up.
“Why are you looking at the corner of an eye?” she asked.
I turned around, staring at her in confusion.
“Corner of an eye? What do you mean?”
“Well,” she started, took the phone from my hand and turned it around. “If you turn it this way, you can clearly see it.”
She was right. This was getting creepy. A second later, I opened another picture. After staring at it for a while, I realized I was looking at skin and a few tiny hairs.
At that moment, I remembered the numbers at the bottom. I rechecked a few of the other pictures and noticed that they were always different.
Then I got an idea.
“Are those… coordinates?” I mumbled to myself.
“What?” Susan, who was still standing next to me, asked.
“Those numbers, what if they are coordinates and these are all part of a bigger picture, you know, like a collage or something?”
Susan just stared at me, but I connected my phone to my laptop and put all the strange blurred images on it.
Using Photoshop, I began putting them all together. Slowly, something appeared. First an eye, then a nose, and finally a mouth.
Once I was done using more than a hundred pictures, Susan gasped.
Yet, I couldn’t even do that. No, I just sat there in pure and utter terror.
What I was staring at was my own sleeping face, laying in my bed.