The Arcade Machine in the Spare Room

I tried starting it a few times and then stopped because I was mostly worried about making the battery worse.

There wasn’t any signal on my phone.

I walked along the road for maybe ten minutes before I noticed a house through the trees. There was a light upstairs, so I figured somebody lived there. I wasn’t thinking about anything strange at that point. I was mostly wet and annoyed.

An old man answered the door.

I asked if I could use his phone.

He looked at me for a second and then said I could stay until the rain stopped.

I remember thinking that was unusually nice.

The inside of the house smelled like old wood and something else I couldn’t place. There were pictures all over the walls. Family pictures mostly.

There was a little boy in a lot of them.

I asked the old man who he was.

He didn’t answer, which was a little awkward, so I didn’t ask again.

He showed me a room upstairs.

I was sitting on the bed trying to dry my phone with my shirt when I heard a beeping sound downstairs.

Just three little beeps.

I thought maybe there was some appliance making the noise.

I went downstairs and asked him about it.

He said it was nothing.

That was basically the whole conversation.

I went back upstairs.

The sound started again about twenty minutes later.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

It sounded like an old arcade game, which was weird because I hadn’t seen anything like that downstairs.

I eventually went to sleep anyway.

Or I think I did.

At some point I woke up because I heard footsteps in the hallway.

They were small.

That sounds stupid, but that’s the first thing I thought. Small footsteps, like a kid walking around.

I stayed in bed because I didn’t really want to deal with whoever it was.

Then the footsteps stopped outside my door.

I waited.

Nothing happened.

I got up and opened the door.

Nobody was there.

The hallway was empty.

I went back to bed and didn’t hear anything else.

In the morning the old man was making coffee.

I asked him if there was a child in the house.

He looked at me.

Then he said no.

I told him I’d heard someone walking around.

He said the house made noises.

I didn’t argue.

I was still thinking about the kid from the pictures, though.

I asked about him again.

This time the old man just said, “My son.”

Then he stopped talking.

I didn’t really know what to say to that.

Later, while he was outside checking my car, I noticed the door at the end of the downstairs hallway.

I’d seen it the night before but hadn’t paid attention.

There was a lock on it.

I asked him what was inside.

He said his son’s room.

Then, after a pause, he said his son had been dead for thirty years.

I thought maybe he meant the room hadn’t been used since then.

I didn’t understand what he meant until he opened it.

There were boxes everywhere.

Old toys.

Some clothes.

An old television.

And an arcade machine pushed against the wall.

It wasn’t plugged in.

At least I couldn’t see a cable.

The old man said his son used to play it all the time.

He had died in that room during a fire.

I asked what kind of fire.

He didn’t answer that part.

Instead he said that sometimes the machine turned on by itself.

I laughed a little because I honestly didn’t know what else to do.

He didn’t laugh.

Then the machine beeped.

We both looked at it.

The screen was still black.

It beeped again.

The old man walked out of the room.

I stayed there for another few seconds, which was probably a bad decision, but I wanted to see if it actually turned on.

It did.

The screen came up with some old game.

I don’t remember what the game was called.

There was a little character standing in the middle of the screen.

It looked like a kid.

I thought it was just the character design.

Then the character turned around.

Toward me.

I know how that sounds.

Old games have animation. Obviously.

But it shouldn’t have been looking at me.

There was nobody playing.

A message appeared underneath it.

PLAYER TWO.

I stood there for a second.

Then another message appeared.

READY?

I turned around because I thought the old man had come back.

He wasn’t there.

Someone was standing in the hallway.

It was the boy from the photographs.

I don’t remember running.

I remember being outside.

I remember my car starting immediately, which was strange because it hadn’t started earlier.

I didn’t even close the door properly before driving away.

The rain had stopped.

I didn’t tell the police.

I didn’t tell anyone, actually.

Mostly because I knew how it would sound.

I did call the old man’s number a few days later, though.

The number didn’t work.

I tried looking up the address online.

Nothing came up.

I thought maybe I’d written it down wrong.

A couple of years passed.

I forgot about it most of the time.

Then I found an old photo on my phone one night while cleaning out some storage.

I’d forgotten I’d taken it.

It was a picture of the arcade machine.

I don’t remember taking it.

I zoomed in.

There was something reflected in the black part of the screen.

A little boy standing behind me.

I deleted the picture.

That’s basically where I leave the story because there isn’t much more to say.

The only reason I still think about it is because I’ve seen people talk about old ghost stories where some object supposedly follows someone home.

I always thought that part was nonsense.

I don’t anymore.

I also used to laugh at scary games based on true stories, mostly because every story like that seemed to end with somebody discovering an ancient game cartridge in their basement or something.

I don’t know if the house was actually there.

I don’t know who the boy was.

And I definitely don’t know why that machine was running when it wasn’t plugged in.

I just know that I don’t like hearing arcade sounds anymore.

Especially that three-beep sound.

Because every now and then, usually late at night, I hear it from somewhere inside my apartment.

I haven’t found the source.

I don’t really want to.