I was watching a show at three in the morning when the ad break began. I sat with glazed eyes through a GIECO commercial and one promoting a new drink, but when the third one began, it immediately caught my attention.
“TWO FIFTY-FOUR HELTON STREET!”
The shout nearly blew out the speakers of my phone. Lurching upright in my bed, I held down the volume button until it was nearly muted.
The set of the advertisement was a simple plastic table in a small room painted the same shade of light grey over walls, floor, and ceiling. A man sat at a folding chair behind the table, dressed in a worn bathrobe. I could make out several coffee stains down the front. The man had uneven stubble poking out across his face and heavy bags drawn under his eyes. His most striking feature, however, was how crushingly sad he looked. His expression reminded me of my father’s when we attended his mother’s funeral; broken, hopeless, and uncertain.
He suddenly opened his mouth fully and screamed again, “TWO FIFTY-FOUR HELTON STREET!” Despite the energy behind the shout, his expression didn’t change in the slightest, and he went back to staring directly at the camera.
I looked at the top corner of my phone to see how much longer this would go on for, but the usual countdown had disappeared. Frowning, I tapped on the home button to close the app. No effect.
“Now serving Crackle Crackers,” the man said, sounding as if he were holding back tears. “Putting the pop in every bite!”
He took a rectangular wooden block from inside his bathrobe with one hand and drew a gleaming knife with the other. As I watched in bewilderment, he placed the block on the table and proceeded to slice it into neat slices with alarming speed. As the one hand fluttered the knife across the table, the other reached into the growing pile of wooden rectangles and drew a handful out.
“Putting the pop in every bite!” he repeated, with exactly the same intonation, and threw the handful into his mouth. He chewed slowly, maintaining direct eye contact with the camera. It felt as if he were staring right at me. Thoroughly freaked out, I waited for some punchline, but none came. The man finished slicing up the block, put the knife back into the depths of his bathrobe, and started eating the rest of the chips.
Then the feed suddenly cut out and I was back to watching my show.
I decided that I had had enough of the internet for the night and powered my phone off. I lay awake for a bit, wondering if I had only found that advertisement so disturbing because of how late it was. I had probably missed something that would be obvious when I saw it again sometime the next day.
I rose at the sound of my alarm and headed to work, somewhat groggy from staying up so late. I set up Google Maps on my car to check for any traffic delays, and seeing that the coast was clear, I drove off the same way I always did. The voice of the electronic assistant spoke at every intersection, guiding me along a route I already knew, but as I moved to turn right onto Main Street, it suddenly recalculated and instructed me to make a left.
“What?” I muttered, staring down at the console. No matter how severe traffic had become, there was no way that traveling down the rural back roads that way would make up lost time. I traced out the blue route, zooming the map out, and saw that it wasn’t heading toward my office at all.
Selected Destination: 254 HELTON STREET, it read. I shut the system off, feeling my heartbeat start to rise. What was going on? If someone was messing with me, it would have to be one of the more elaborate pranks I had ever seen. Or heard about, for that matter.
I couldn’t seem to escape that address for the rest of the day. On any website I went to, at least one of the advertisements would always be the man in the bathrobe, standing now against an all-black background, with that same dismayed expression and the address printed out in white text below him. There was no other information, no agency or publisher.
My suggested searches weren’t helping either.
How to get to 254 HELTON STREET
Best route to 254 HELTON STREET
What happened at 254 HELTON STREET?
I pulled up a private tab but the suggestions remained there too. Staring around the brightly-lit office, I mustered the courage to search for the address. Google popped up with the ‘No Results Found’ page. Not entries of other Helton Streets or anything close to it, but only the error message that I must have misspelled something.
I started to avoid my phone over the next couple of days, just to be safe, but that didn’t help at all. On one occasion I was watching live cable television downstairs when the ad cut to the man, his facial hair longer now, his lips dry and cracked.
“TWO FIFTY-FOUR HELTON STREET!” he screamed, with enough force this time that he broke into a fit of prolonged coughing. For minutes on end, he remained doubled-over, hacking his lungs away, until a small puddle of saliva had formed on the surface of the table.
“We’re out of crackers,” he said slowly, once he had recovered. “But other items remain. Try the new Summer Fun Pops, now with five new fruity flavors!”
He drew out a tray from below the table, containing the dirtiest patch of ice I had ever seen. He dug his fingernails into the surface, scraping away tiny flakes, then cupped them into his mouth and swallowed. Again he reached down, more frantically now, trying to tear chunks away from the material with no success.
“Please come quickly to get the best offer on these items.”
I fiddled with the remote to no effect as he stood, clawing at the blackened ice, repeating that last statement over and over with robotic accuracy. I finally stood up and unplugged the TV, and as the image darkened, I could have sworn that his face fell even further.
“Please-”
I straightened and decided that I had to do something about this. Reaching carefully for my phone, I opened Google and looked at the newest suggestion.
Death at 254 HELTON STREET
Swallowing dryly, I clicked on it, and a single article popped up with no source. It wasn’t more than a few sentences long, and it told the story of a somebody discovering the body of a loaner on the edge of town after he accidentally locked himself in his basement. He had died of starvation, but evidently not without lack of trying. The police later found gnaw marks on a pile of ice leading out from behind the door, the spat-out remnants of cut-up wooden beams, and even a half-eaten football lying in the corner. There was no date attached, but the article said that the person had died only a few days ago.
What would happen if I visited him? Does he want to be freed from his tomb?
Or is he looking for the next item to snack on?