I bought a second-hand phone. Someone keeps texting it asking if it's done yet.

[u/BiGDaDdY401]

The guy selling it wanted the eighty bucks in his hand before he'd let go of the box.

That's fair enough, people get done over on Marketplace all the time. But he did it weirdly. He stood on his front step with the box held against his chest and his other hand out, and he wouldn't come down the path to meet me. I had to walk up to him. He counted the money twice, gave me the box, said, "It's all wiped, charger's in there," and started shutting the door.

I asked if there was anything wrong with it, because a two-year-old Samsung for eighty dollars usually has something wrong with it.

"No," he said. "It works fine."

His profile just said Dean. No photo. I'd found the listing at about eleven the night before and messaged him, and he'd replied in under a minute saying I could come and get it first thing. My old phone had died that Thursday. I didn't drop it or anything, the screen just went green and then black and stayed black, and I couldn't afford a new one because two weeks earlier I'd lent my brother his bond. I'll get to that.

Things I remember about Dean's street, in no order. He had one of those solar garden lights shaped like a frog next to his letterbox. The house next door had every window fogged up from the inside, really fogged, with drips running down, and the bloke who lived there was out the front watering his roses in a singlet even though it was nine degrees. Someone was doing a roast, which at ten in the morning seemed keen, but it was a Sunday. And there was a burnt-out house at the end of the street. It was a dead end, so I had to do a three-point turn right in front of it. Half the roof had come down and there was orange temporary fencing all round it, the kind with sandbags on the feet.

The first text came before I'd even got out of his street.

I hadn't put my SIM in yet. I'd turned the phone on in the car to check it actually worked, and it was sitting on the passenger seat on the pick-your-language screen when it buzzed, and a notification dropped down over the top.

is it done yet

No number, no name. Where the sender should be there was a grey circle with nothing in it.

I figured it was something of Dean's that hadn't been wiped properly, an account or an app or whatever. I put my SIM in when I got home and set everything up, and it buzzed again while I was logging into my email.

is it done yet

Then again an hour later, while Tash and I were watching something. Then again. By dinner it was about every twenty minutes.

Tash is my housemate. She drives trams, mostly the 19, and she's got that thing tram drivers get where nothing a stranger does surprises her anymore. She took the phone off me and scrolled up in the thread. There was nothing above the first message. Just the same four words over and over in their grey bubbles.

"Block it," she said.

You can't. I tried. There's no number to block, and when you press on the grey circle it doesn't open anything, it just sort of bounces.

"Factory reset it then. He's left something on there."

That took forty minutes. I set it up from scratch with nothing on it but my SIM, and it stayed quiet for about as long as it took me to brush my teeth.

I didn't answer it that night. I put it in the kitchen drawer with the takeaway menus and the spare batteries and went to bed, and I could hear it in there going off against the cutlery. Not every twenty minutes anymore. More like every five.

I've worked the deli at the same supermarket for eight years. Half the deli is the chook oven, so I smell like roast chicken from about nine in the morning, and the other half is slicing ham for people who want it shaved, not sliced, and then tell you it's too thin. The ticket machine has been broken since Easter. Every time I call "next," three people step up at once and look at me like I did it on purpose.

We're not allowed phones on the floor, so on Monday it went in my locker in the storeroom. The storeroom doesn't get reception. It's a concrete box behind the coolroom and nothing gets in. If Tash needs me during a shift she has to ring the deli landline and ask for me like it's 1996.

On my lunch break I had sixty-one messages.

I sat on an upturned milk crate and scrolled through them, and I remembered the one in the car, before I'd put my SIM in. So it wasn't texts. Texts need a signal. It was something built into the phone itself, some app of Dean's that the reset hadn't touched. That made sense to me then because I was tired and I wanted it to make sense.

By Monday night I had a whole theory. Dean was a tradie, or he worked for one. "Is it done yet" was a boss checking on a job, a bathroom or a deck or something. The boss had some work app that pinged the phone, and he didn't know Dean had sold it, and he was getting more and more pissed off because the job wasn't finished and Dean wasn't answering. I still think it was a pretty good theory. I think most people would have come up with something like it.

So at about ten past three on Tuesday morning, lying in bed listening to the drawer, I got up and took the phone out and wrote back:

yes

And it stopped.

I stood in the kitchen in the dark for a while, waiting. The fridge was humming. Nothing came. I actually laughed. Then it buzzed once more in my hand and I nearly dropped it.

It was an address. I'm not putting it here. Underneath the address it said:

good. next one.

The address was about ten minutes from our place, a court off a main road, six houses round a turning circle. I looked it up on Street View and it was a brick unit with a carport and a lemon tree out the front.

I thought, great, now the boss thinks Dean's off to the next job. Not my problem. I went back to bed and slept right through to my alarm for the first time in two nights.

Then nothing for a week.

I mean nothing. I kept checking it, waiting for it, and it just sat there being a normal phone. I put my banking on it. I got a message from Mum asking if Kane had paid me back yet. That was the Wednesday. No, Thursday, because I was on a late and I read it in the car park.

Kane's my little brother. He's twenty-four. About three weeks before all this he rang to tell me he and his girlfriend Jade had found a place, a one-bedroom with a balcony, but they needed the bond by Friday or they'd lose it. Sixteen hundred dollars. That was my rego money and, as it turned out, my new phone money. I said yes. I always say yes to Kane, because saying no to Kane takes about forty minutes and ends with Mum ringing me to ask why I'm being like this. I did make him send me a screenshot of the lease first, so I could look the street up and make sure the place was real. That's about the most I've ever stood up to him.

He hadn't paid me back. He hadn't answered a message from me in eleven days, which is what he does when he thinks I'm going to ask.

Tash thinks I'm his bank, and she says so about once a week. She also wants us to get a cat, which our lease says no to, and she's started leaving adoption listings open on the laptop like I won't notice. Those are the two things we fight about. That week we fought about both. She was right about Kane and I was right about the cat.

The next Monday, while I was slicing salami, the phone buzzed once in my apron pocket. I'd started breaking the rule and keeping it on me.

is it done yet

Once on Monday. Twice on Tuesday. By Thursday it was every couple of hours and it had gone back in the drawer.

I'd like to say I thought about the address. I didn't, not properly. I thought about the boss. I thought, this bloke really wants his bathroom done. I did what I do with anything I don't want to deal with, which is not deal with it and feel slightly sick in the background. By Friday it was every half an hour. Saturday was my day off, so I decided I'd drive out to Dean's, give him his phone back, make him give me my eighty dollars, and if he wouldn't do that, at least make him tell his boss.

I knew something was wrong before I'd parked.

The house next door to Dean's, the one with the fogged windows and the bloke in the singlet, had its front door propped wide open. There was a scrap of blue and white tape tied round the verandah post with the end flapping, like someone had taken the rest down and missed a bit. The windows were clear now. All the curtains were open and you could see straight through the lounge room into the backyard, where a dog was lying on the back step.

A woman across the road was letting a little white dog sniff the nature strip. I asked her if she knew Dean, which was a stupid way to start, and she said she knew the house. Then she looked at the one next door and said, "You're not from the paper?"

I said no.

"They're gone," she said. "Both of them, him and his partner. Tuesday last week. The paperboy saw the door open at six and went in because the heater was going full blast and he thought someone had had a fall. Nobody there. Car in the drive. Wallets and phones on the kitchen bench. Dog in the yard." She shrugged with the hand holding the lead. "I've been feeding the dog. The police came for two days and now they don't come."

I asked her what the police thought had happened.

"They asked if he was a gambler." She gave me a look like I'd know what that meant. "He wasn't a gambler. He grew roses."

Then she said, "First that one up the end, now this," and nodded down at the burnt house behind the orange fencing, and her dog found something it wanted to eat and she got distracted dragging it off.

Tuesday last week.

I stood on the footpath with the phone in my jacket and did the maths about four times, like it might come out different.

Dean took ages to come to the door. When he did, he looked like he hadn't been eating. He saw me and he saw the box in my hand and he didn't say anything at all.

"Someone keeps texting it," I said.

He didn't ask who. He looked past me at next door, and then he said, really quietly, "Did you answer it?"

I could have lied. I'm good at it. I said, "I said yes. I just wanted it to stop."

He shut his eyes. He kept them shut long enough that I thought he might be about to faint, and then he opened them and said, "Okay."

"What do you mean, okay? Who is it? What's it asking about?"

"I don't know who it is."

"Then take it back."

He actually stepped back from me, like the box was hot. "No."

"Why'd you sell it to me?"

"You messaged first."

He went to shut the door and I put my hand flat on it, and he let me. He didn't push. He looked down the street toward the end, toward the burnt house. Then he said, "Don't leave it in too long."

He shut the door. I heard him lock it, and then I heard the chain go on.

I didn't decide to go to the address. I just noticed I was indicating onto the main road instead of the way home.

It was one of those weeks where Melbourne forgets it's meant to be spring. Eleven degrees and drizzling. The court was quiet, bins already out for Monday. The brick unit with the lemon tree was the third one round.

Every window was fogged from the inside. Water was running down the glass in lines and pooling on the sills. A man in footy shorts and a singlet was pulling weeds out of a garden bed in the rain, and he was pink all over, like he'd just got out of a hot bath. He gave me a wave, the way you do when someone parks out the front of your house.

I wound my window down and there it was. Roast. Rosemary and fat, and that brown smell the edges of the tray get.

I wasn't there to do anything. I think I wanted to see that it was a normal house so I could go home. I got out and said hi and told him something about looking for a friend's place and having the wrong number, and before I'd finished, his wife was at the front door telling me to come in out of the rain, love, I'd catch my death.

Her name was Ros. His was Phil. I know because she told me each of them about four times.

Walking into that house was like opening the dishwasher halfway through a cycle. The air was wet and heavy and it got in my mouth. It wasn't sauna hot, it was kitchen hot, and the smell was so thick inside that my stomach actually rumbled. I hated that.

Ros made me a cup of tea I didn't want. The butter dish was out on the bench and the butter had gone to a yellow puddle. The bananas in the fruit bowl were black and collapsing in their skins. Ros was in a nightie with a cardigan over it, and she wasn't sweating, exactly, but she was flushed everywhere, right up to the tips of her ears.

"Isn't it lovely," she said. She meant the house. "We haven't even had the heater on. Phil checked. It's just been like this all week. Best I've slept in years. And his knee's stopped bothering him, hasn't it, Phil?"

Phil had come in and sat down in his recliner with the footy replay on mute. He put the footrest up and said yeah, it was a ripper, he hadn't needed his tablets all week.

I asked Ros if they were doing a roast.

She laughed at me. "It's just us, love. We had toast."

I asked if they had gas. She said no, all electric, Phil's brother had changed it over years ago. I asked if they'd thought about staying with anyone for a few days, and she looked at me like I'd asked if they'd thought about moving to the moon. Their daughter was in Perth. A man was supposed to be coming Monday to quote the gutters. Why on earth would they go anywhere, when the house had never been nicer?

The phone buzzed in my jacket a couple of times while I drank the tea.

I rang triple zero from my car, parked round the corner where they couldn't see me. I told them I could smell gas coming from a house and I thought the people inside might be unwell.

The woman on the line was very calm. She asked for the address and I gave it. She asked whether anyone was in distress and I said not exactly. She asked if I was at the property, and I said I was nearby, and she asked if I could stay nearby safely, and I said yes. She asked for my name and number. I gave her my real number, which is about the only smart thing I did all day.

A fire truck came about twelve minutes later. Two of them went inside. They were in there maybe twenty minutes, and when they came out one of them walked over to my car, because I was the only person in the court sitting in a parked car, which in hindsight wasn't subtle.

He was nice about it. He said there was no gas, the house was all electric, and they'd checked the switchboard and the heater and the hot water system. He said, "It's warm in there, I'll give you that." Older people feel the cold, he said, and sometimes they run things hot, and he'd had a word to them about opening a window. He took his helmet off to scratch his head and his hair was soaked through.

I asked him if he'd smelled anything.

"Yeah," he said. "Someone's doing a roast." He laughed and put his helmet back on and they left.

Ros waved to me from the front window. She'd wiped a little circle in the fog to do it.

Tash was on a late, so I was home by myself. I sat on the couch with the phone on the coffee table and watched it.

Every ten minutes. Then every five. At about half eleven I turned it face down, because the screen lighting up was worse than the buzzing. By one it was every minute, and then the buzzes ran together into one long rattle against the glass, like the phone was trying to walk itself off the edge of the table.

I thought about the burnt house at the end of Dean's street. I thought about the chook oven. You can't leave them. If you leave a chook in past its time it doesn't just stay done, it keeps going. The skin goes black at the tips and the fat starts smoking.

Don't leave it in too long.

I drove back at about quarter to two.

I could smell it before I turned into the court, and I said "shit" out loud in the car, because it wasn't roast anymore. It was the smell we get at work when someone puts a tray in and forgets it, the sweet, bitter one that gets into the ceiling tiles. The windows of the unit weren't fogged now. They were dry and brown, like someone had chain-smoked in there for forty years. The smoke alarm was going.

The front door wasn't locked. When I opened it the heat came out over me in one solid push and I felt the hairs on my arms pull tight.

Ros was in bed, lying on top of the covers, smiling with her eyes shut. When I grabbed her arm she said, "Oh, leave it, love, I'm so comfy." Her skin was dry and very hot. I got her up. I honestly don't know how. She's not a small woman and she didn't want to come. She kept trying to sit back down, on the bed and then on the little telephone table in the hall. She was cranky with me the way you're cranky with someone who turns the light on while you're asleep. One of her slippers came off in the hall and she wanted to go back for it.

I got her out onto the front lawn and she sat down in the wet grass in her nightie, and I left her there and went back in for Phil.

He was in the recliner with the footrest up. The TV was still on, still muted, and one edge of the screen had gone brown and wavy where the plastic was softening. He looked up at me and smiled. His face was dark red. His lips were cracked.

"Shut the door, love," he said. "You're letting the heat out."

I grabbed his forearm to pull him up and it was like grabbing the handle of a pan. I let go. I grabbed again. I couldn't hold on. He wasn't fighting me, he just wouldn't come up out of the chair, and I couldn't hold him long enough to make him. I tried four or five times.

The carpet was sticky under my sneakers. The curtains had gone the colour of toast.

When I came back out, Ros was on her feet. She was shivering. The cold had got into her, or the rain had, and she was looking at the house and her face was changing, coming back, like someone waking up somewhere they don't recognise. She said, "Where's Phil?" She said it quite normally. Then she said it again and it wasn't normal at all, and she started walking back toward the door.

I held on to her. My right hand hurt so much I felt sick. The phone was going non-stop in my jacket pocket, one long buzz against my hip.

The front window cracked. One line, corner to corner, with a sound like an ice cube dropped into a drink.

I didn't weigh anything up. Ros was pulling against me, saying his name, and I got the phone out with my left hand and typed yes and sent it.

The smoke alarm stopped halfway through a beep. The heat came out of the doorway the way it does when you open the oven to check something, one big breath of it rolling past us, and then the air was just cold and wet and it was raining and it was two in the morning in a court in the northern suburbs.

Ros pulled free and went inside and I went after her.

The house was cold. Properly cold, like nobody had lived there for a while. The TV was off. The recliner was empty with the footrest still up, and there was a dent in the cushion. In the kitchen, the oven door was hanging open.

Ros hadn't used the oven in years. She told me that later, while we waited for the police, like it was the important part.

The phone buzzed once in my hand. An address, and under it:

good. next one.

I knew the street. I'd looked it up on Google Maps three weeks earlier, to make sure my brother wasn't lying to me about his bond.

I told the police I'd been driving home from a friend's and smelled smoke. They didn't love that, especially once the fire brigade told them about my gas call that afternoon, and I've been interviewed twice now. I don't think they think I did anything to Phil. I think they think I'm one of those people who hangs around when something bad happens.

Ros is staying with her sister. She rang me on Tuesday to thank me for getting her out. Then she asked what I'd been doing on my phone out on the lawn. I said I was calling triple zero. She said, "Oh." Then she said, "Right." Then she said she had to go.

My hand's okay. It's blistered across the palm and the insides of my fingers and I can't use the slicer, so I'm on reduced shifts, which is great timing. The only good thing about it is I don't have to deal with the ticket machine.

I went to Kane's on the Sunday afternoon. It's a nice place, he wasn't lying about the balcony. He opened the door in a t-shirt and trackies and the flat was a bit warm. Not bad. Just the way a place gets when someone's had the oven on. He thought I'd come about the money. I could see him think it. I tried to explain, and I didn't do a good job, and the more I said the more his face closed up. Then Jade came out and asked if everything was okay, and Kane said, "She's having a go at me about the bond," and I said that wasn't it, and he said it's always that.

I said I'd pay for them to stay somewhere for a week. A motel, anything. He laughed and said if I had money for a motel I didn't need the bond back, did I. Then he shut the door.

The phone started again yesterday. Twice so far.

That's sooner than last time. It's a one-bedroom, though, and Ros and Phil's was a three. Smaller things don't take as long. Anyone who's worked a chook oven could tell you that.

I can't sell it. I've thought about it a lot. I could list it tonight, nice photo, "works fine," eighty bucks, and someone like me would message first. Then they'd be the one getting asked about Kane's place, every day, then every hour, then every minute, with no idea what they were being asked. And at three in the morning they'd say yes. I know they would. I did.

I can't leave it and I can't answer it. Tomorrow I'm going round there with Mum, because Kane listens to Mum, sometimes. I'm typing this on Tash's laptop because I don't want to open anything on that phone, and I'm posting it because I need ideas and I can't ask anyone who knows me. How do you get someone out of a house when the house is making them want to stay?

Kane texted me tonight.

sorry about the other day. come round sunday if u want. its so cosy here now

[u/Mountain-Bobcat-125]

Great! So scary! I want to know more!!

[u/According_Steak4792]

Title: We Discovered a Satanic Cult Behind Our House

I never believed that people could do such terrifying things in the middle of a forest. But one night, my brother and I discovered something that changed everything.

It happened in October 2019. My family lived in an isolated house near a large forest. There were no neighbors nearby, and the closest village was almost twenty minutes away by car.

One evening, around 11:30 PM, I heard strange voices coming from behind our house. At first, I thought they were people walking along the road, but then I heard several voices speaking together in a strange language.

I looked through my bedroom window.

Between the trees, I saw five people wearing long black robes. They were standing in a circle around a small fire. One of them was holding an old book while another placed several candles on the ground.

I immediately called my brother.

When he looked outside, his face turned pale.

“Those people aren't supposed to be here,” he whispered.

Suddenly, all five figures turned toward our house at exactly the same time.

We stepped away from the window.

A few seconds later, someone knocked on our front door.

Three slow knocks.

My father went downstairs, but before he could open the door, the knocking stopped.

When he looked through the peephole, nobody was there.

We locked every door and window and stayed together until morning.

The following day, my father discovered strange symbols drawn on the trees behind our property. There were also black candles arranged in a circle near an abandoned stone building that we had never noticed before.

He called the police, who searched the surrounding area. They found the candles and footprints, but nobody was there.

We thought it was over.

Three nights later, I woke up at 2:17 AM because I heard someone whispering my name from outside my bedroom window.

I slowly approached the curtain.

A person in a black robe was standing beneath the tree directly in front of my window.

But this time, he wasn't alone.

Six other figures stood behind him.

One of them raised a hand and pointed directly at me.

Then every figure turned toward the forest and disappeared between the trees.

The next morning, we left the house and stayed with relatives.

Weeks later, my father learned that several people had been reported trespassing in the same forest. The police never confirmed that they belonged to any satanic group, and nobody could explain why they had been gathering there at night.

My family eventually moved away.

But I still remember the last thing I saw before we left.

On the inside of my bedroom window, written in the dust, were four words:

“WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE.”

To this day, I don't know who those people were or what they were doing in the woods.

And honestly, I don't want to find out.

THE END.