Hey, I am Dora. Being classical Gen-z, I experienced my childhood during the bloom of the Internet, with the Information Age engulfing our lives as little children every now and then. I fondly remember coming back from school, and unlike other children my age, who used to go and play at each other’s homes or play sports, I used to go and login to my family computer, a beauty my father had purchased with great passion. It was beautiful, that memory, that idea of slowly lurking into a virtual world of my own, bereft of any social interaction with society and just on my own. The early days of the Internet had some really weird stuff tucked in their pockets, which modern day newbies, with all their cybersecurity measures and algorithms don’t know. There were rabbit holes down which if you went, they could spiral down into the darkest mysteries of the World Wide Web. There was an encounter that still shakes my nerves to this day, and due to the recent events that have shaken my life, is evermore important to be penned down.
I was part of one of these chatrooms during the early days of the Internet, obviously without my mom or dad’s approval or knowledge. I loved talking to people through social networking. You see, talking through a computer screen cuts many barriers. You don’t have to be intelligent, charming, pretty or with the advent of AI chatbots nowadays, a human to interact with another person on the internet. My social anxiety coupled with me being an introvert often stalled conversations with peers at school, so I found my own solace in chat rooms.
The website where the chat room was hosted was called ‘be_my_friend.com’ and it was quite a contained website, in the sense that the small section of us that visited it to chat knew each other, or at least we thought we did. Out of nearly all other users there, miss_funny_ears stood out the most. The username had a knack for sharing reviews of just about anything, from books, to grillers to something as stupid as a screw.
The username was, now that I look back, quite eerie in many ways. Whoever was behind it had an odd way of writing, with huge spaces often in between words. At times the words were all capital and occasionally there were incomplete sentences.
Every alternate day, the username would post some review of some goddamn thing, event, etc. It reviewed a tooth paste like this-
“ XYZ’s toothpaste has a unique taste, you know, what they call barbecue making in Alabama, low and slow. That’s how the taste spreads in your mouth. Now surely, no toothpaste is supposed to taste like Godiva, surely, but this brand is just unique. It makes you want to brush. Y’all know what I am talking about. Most of us are ingrained to brush our teeth, as it has been taught to us since childhood. But with XYZ you know that one of the good things in a day is going to be brushing.
People might think I am an apologist for this brand, but no, I genuinely wanted to say this for so long. This toothpaste’s taste is enhanced with a bit of saliva and some amounts of blood. You must make sure that in order to maintain dental hygiene you just brush until your gums start bleeding profusely. And then, and finally, finally then, will you appreciate what the company has done for you!”
Yeah, I am not kidding, this was an actual review by that account posted there. A lot of mutuals would sometimes just for fun ask miss_funny_ears to post reviews of random items on the internet, and it never happened that the account ever denied or ignored a request. With time we would see miss_funny_ears review ammunition, a bottle opener, a dishwasher, stockings, hand towels, cheeseburgers from a very famous joint, etc.
Nearly all the reviews would start off well, but would gradually progress to become murkier as time passed. Others in the chatroom just thought that this was a troll account or something, and that’s what I thought for quite some time too, until a series of events occurred that would change my mind forever.
One Saturday afternoon, when I logged in to my PC and entered the chatroom, I saw that miss_funny_ears had sent me two personal messages. They read -
“Hey Dora,
You’ve liked all my reviews till now, and that has been one of the primary reasons why I post reviews with cutting-edge precision and passion here. However, you did not like the most recent review of the mosquito net that I did, and I wonder why.
Also, you do not use the markers of the brand that I suggested, which is sad, please do so, that would make me thrilled, please!”
I kept staring at the monitor for about 10 minutes straight. Firstly, whoever was this person, they were obsessed, that’s for sure. But how on planet Earth did they manage to know what brand of markers I use? It was a fact that I bought markers yesterday, I had to use them for a project I was required to submit by Monday.
I decided to permanently log out from the chatroom after that incident, it shook me to the core.
I cross-checked my room twice or thrice to check for any hole or leak or something, but I couldn’t find anything.
I was keeping something in my locker one day when I saw a note stuffed in its corner. I opened it. It read-
“We’ve united. You had the opportunity to wish us well and to heed our advice. Thanks to you, miss_funny_ears doesn’t share reviews anymore.”
I was dumbstruck, and after a few fine moments, I learned what fear meant finally. Here I was, in my school, which was bustling with activity, and I felt as if I was in a room all alone with a CCTV camera watching me 24*7. I didn’t know what to do as I stood there, sweating profusely, my mind racing.
The next few days of mine were spent in paranoia. I couldn’t even sleep at night peacefully. All the while I thought of miss_funny_ears and the terror it inspired in me. I still did not confide anything in my parents till now, as I was sure I was getting grounded for weeks if they even got a whiff of what I had done. I needed to remain calm.
One day my mom told me to go put the garbage outside, and while I went to do so, I saw Mrs. Martha, my neighbor, an elderly woman in her 60s, checking her mailbox. She smiled and waved at me and I waved back. She then showed me a mask of what looked like a goblin with massive ears.
“Some ol’ bastard sent me this, Dora, you see!”, she said rather indignantly.
“Moron thinks he can outsmart me. Got himself a fancy name, the moron has. Either way, I think he might be mistaken, as this was probably meant for you”.
She then pulled out a note out of her pocket, which read-
“Hello, Dora,
Please check the quality of this mask, wear it once, and go to school. Make sure to put the review on, umm… you know where. Since miss_funny_ears doesn’t share reviews anymore, someone else has to take up that mantle.”
“Must be some jerk, methinks”, Martha said.
I was dumbfounded and kept staring at the goblin-like mask. Its ears, I noticed, its ears were just, to put it simply, different in a way that they were deliberately made to look funny.
“Miss_funny_ears- I thought rather loudly in my head- the jerk had to send this mask”.
“You’re right Mrs.Martha, this is surely some prankster, this isn’t mine.”, I retorted rather feebly.
“Be careful though, Dora,” said Mrs. Martha,” I am hearing cases of young girls like you going missing rather a lot nowadays”.
Saying this she staggered back to her house, with me still holding one of the trash bags suspended midair. That was certainly true, there was more and more news of girls my age disappearing apparently out of thin air. Very recently, Agatha Green’s parents had come to school with some grim-looking cops to investigate, as she had never come back from her evening guitar lessons in the school. Before her, Liz Carlos never returned after going on a biking excursion on a Tuesday Evening.
Could this all be related to… miss_funny_ears…
No, I was certainly overthinking.
A few days later my parents decided to install CCTV cameras throughout the house, the reason that they cited was that it was a good preventive measure, but deep down I knew that they were scared for me, as were other people in the town for their daughters.
I had slept on my couch playing a new Mario game when I was awoken by a screeching sound. Initially sleepy me just knocked it off as a mild disturbance, but then it started to gradually increase, until the point it awoke me from my slumber completely.
I looked around, with my weary eyes trying to adjust to their surroundings, as objects slowly began to take shape. I saw that the DVD player was on, and the screeching sounds were coming from there. That was a bit odd, as I hadn’t used the DVD player for days now.
I turned off the player and went down to the kitchen to get a glass of water. As I was drinking, I saw a silhouette slowly move out of my view towards the garage. I was shit scared by that point, but still kept mum, my fear being so profound that my mouth couldn’t produce a single syllable.
I slowly walked to the edge of the staircase and peeped sideways to the garage door, to see that it was slightly ajar. I screamed as loud as I could.
Dad ALWAYS closed the door to the garage before lights out.
My parents awoke. Dad went to go and check the garage. When he came back upstairs he told Mom to call 911.
Dad told us he had found hundreds of pictures littered on the floor of the garage, which was locked from inside. All the pictures were of me, sleeping, caught from different angles.
The police carried out their investigation, and what they found was beyond terrifying. They dug the floor of our garage, only to find a circular steel lid covering what looked like an underground tunnel. Upon opening the lid, they found a full-fledged underground tunnel beneath our house.
Our township was built during the Cold War era, with many people living under the threat of nuclear attack from other countries during that time. At times many built bomb shelters under their homes and forgot about them decades later. It was a well-known rumor that our town council then had built a full-fledged underground system of tunnels, that contained an underground school, and even an underground grocery store just in case.
We all knew now that it was true. The police found out that whoever had entered our house that day was bleeding while traversing through the underground tunnel, as they got cut by a rusted poking nail while on their way down.
The blood trails went up to 50 m leftward, right below Mrs. Martha’s house, after which they vanished.
Mrs. Martha’s house was raided by the police, where they found out some horrific details.
There were the bodies of Liz and Agatha there, with Liz’s body rotting off in the garage, and Agatha’s body converted into a doll-like figure, was found sitting on a tea table with other dolls, wearing the same goblin-like mask.
The CCTV footage was reviewed, and that brought more horrifying details into the mixture.
For the past 15 days, Mrs. Martha sneaked into our house through the tunnel, walked up to my bedroom, and just stared at me for hours, often changing her standing position and taking pictures of me sleeping. On the last day before her being caught, just before leaving, she placed a DVD in the player and played it before leaving.
There was one aspect of this deadly nightmare that shook my bones to the core.
The police found out that the underground tunnels led to every house in the township, and tracked down the infamous underground school that everyone talked about. It was more of a glorified classroom.
They found 32 corpses of young girls, seated as if they were in a class, facing toward the blackboard. Nearly all of them had the ears of some other animal fixed to their body instead of their own. They also found Mrs. Martha’s notebook at the teacher’s table and her laptop, upon opening which they found out that she was writing a review of a chalk brand using her id ‘miss_funny_ears’.
There were exactly 34 reports of missing girls in our town throughout the past 10 years, and all 34 of them were found after that incident. Mrs. Martha had been a schoolteacher for years, before being expelled from the local government school. Reason for the expulsion-
Too much time spent on the computer in the library, inefficiency in work, too critical of other people’s preferences in their own private lives
It seems that Mrs. Martha had been going to ‘teach’ in that underground school every night for the past 10 years, and after every ‘lesson’, she posted a review of an item that she recently saw/ had purchased online.
Mrs. Martha was transferred to a mental institution, and life went on smoothly, with the entire town recovering from an era of shock and terror that had engulfed them.
I am 31 years old right now. A few days ago we all heard the news that Mrs. Martha died in her bed at St. Martin’s Mental Institution. She committed suicide, by slitting off her wrist, deep in the depth of the night.
I was unsure what to feel about this.
Yesterday was my birthday. I got a lot of messages, and it was a great day indeed.
The next day I was scrolling through my inbox responding to some birthday messages that I forgot to respond to reply to on my birthday, and saw one by an anonymous number.
It was an audio, so I thought someone took the time to send me a voice message to wish me well, and I clicked on the play button.
I heard a familiar voice, it was the voice of Agatha, one that I unmistakably recognized, she was crying and pleading, followed by an equally familiar screeching voice that I heard decades ago.
I don’t know what is going to happen next. All I can tell y’all is that if you see a review by miss_funny_ears anywhere on the internet, DO NOT REACT TO IT.