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The following incident occurred last Sunday. I was in my study typing an email for work, when I fancied I heard a noise coming from my kitchen. I disregarded it. The house in which I live is old and strange noises were not uncommon. Not five minutes later I heard the noise again. It was a clicking of some sort. I broke out into a cold sweat. It was the sound of the backdoor unlocking. I opened my desk, pulled out my revolver, and closed the drawer. I stood up and quietly made my way to the door of my study. I carefully opened the door and stepped into the hall.
Darkness greeted me, thick and awful – a shroud hiding whomever was lurking in my house. Then again, the darkness was my protector as well. Knowing my house like the back of my hand, I didn’t bother turning on the lights. If someone truly was here I wanted to get the jump on them. I moved down the hall as silently as possible and listened as hard I could. Silence. Could I have been imagining things? As I mused over these points a soft padding played its way from the direction of my kitchen to the other side of the house. No shoes or boots could make such a stealthy noise. Had the intruder removed his shoes before entering? The steps sounded lighter than a full grown man’s. They sounded like a child’s footsteps or those of a large dog.
At this point I decided to call out. “Hello!” I bellowed loudly, the volume of my voice causing me to recoil! “Get ahold of yourself, man”, I whispered to myself. I yelled out again. “I am armed and the police are on their way!” Stupid me! Why hadn’t I called the police when I was in the study?
I made my way to the kitchen, entered slowly and saw that I was very much alone. Everything seemed to be in its place yet when I turned the lights on I had to choke down a scream – the backdoor I had double locked for the night only two hours before lay wide open! Adding to the horror, I discovered 2 sets of small, muddy barefooted prints leading to the stairs. I closed the door quietly. “Who the fuck is in my house?” I thought, my mind beginning to race, “and how did they undo the locks?” I decided I would follow the footprints and… a new sound impressed itself upon my ears. The sound of muffled conversation came from above. Whoever was in my house had made their way to the upstairs bedroom.
I steeled my nerves and swallowed the lump in my throat. This was my house. Whoever was whispering in my bedroom was invading my privacy and threatening my safety. I had to deal with it. I made to the bottom of the steps, switched on the light and yelled, “Show yourself!” Weighted silence greeted me. “I have a gun and I will use it! Surrender yourself!” My adrenaline began to pump, and no longer cautious, I took the stairs two by two, slammed open my bedroom door, and leveled the gun at… nothing. My large bedroom, the only room on the second floor, was entirely empty. I looked at the floor found the same footprints that were in the kitchen, only they stopped in the middle of the room. My blood ran cold. I checked the closet and under the bed but there was no one to be seen. Was I going mad? I made my way back into hall when the door suddenly slammed closed behind me. I shouted in terror and bounded back down the stairs, through the kitchen, and into my study. I slammed the door and locked it tight. I collapsed in my chair and passed out.
Footsteps. I awoke just in time to hear them pad their way down the stairs, across the kitchen and – to my horror stop outside my study door. Locks seemed powerless to stop these entities and I waited for the knob to turn. Instead, I heard something that chilled my blood. A voice whispering in the hall. A horrible voice belonging to someone no longer alive! My heart pounded. My blood froze in my veins. My lips moved and my throat uttered a gibbering mess. The doorknob began to turn, the locks disengaging as if by magic. The door creaked open slowly.
Nothing. Emptiness. Darkness. I feared I had gone truly mad. Then again the sounds of footsteps, but this time going away from my study. The back door opened and closed leaving me in deafening silence. After what seemed like an eternity, I stood and shakily made my way to the kitchen. The light was still on and nothing seemed out of order. The back door was closed and I could see that the lock was again engaged. Looking around, I noticed a piece of paper on the table. I moved closer, picked up the note, and began to laugh horribly. It read, “Sorry, wrong house.”
Credit To – Big Dom
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“Daddy, why do they hate us?”
“Oh sweetie, it may seem like they hate us but really it is more like they chose us.”
“But Daddy, I didn’t want to be picked!”
“Neither did I pumpkin, but unfortunately it is the will of greater men and a greater God. This will be the last nuclear war the world will see. There is an old saying that one must destroy before they can create. It is like when you play with your Lego blocks. Once you build something don’t you have to take it apart in order to build something bigger and better? It is the same thing with men and cities.”
“Couldn’t they have picked other cities?”
“They have my baby, many others. But we have been chosen because we just consume too much. There isn’t enough food and materials to go around anymore. And because of that there is too much evil in the world now. You know how scary it can be when you and your brother come with us to the market, don’t you baby?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Now, it’s been nine minutes since the sirens have gone off, I want you to be brave my angel. We are going to be immortal after today. That means we are going to live forever. No more pain, no more hunger, no more hurt. That doesn’t sound so bad now does it? It’s time for us to tell each other goodbye…I love you so much my baby. I am so proud of you. Now let’s grab our signs and head outside.”
The Smith Family straps their hollow-stenciled signs over their back and above their head. As they position themselves in front of a large, immobile marble slab, they clasp hands in a row and close their eyes. The tears rolling down their cheeks evaporate immediately, as do their bodies, once the nuclear blast reaches them. Their permanent shadows burn against the marble, leaving a message for the survivors of the Great Reduction, “We Forgive You. Lest Not Be In Vain.”
Credit To – StupidDialUp
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In 1984, there lived an old widowed lady by herself in a two story house who was completely immobile and bound to her wheelchair. Ever since the mysterious death of her husband, she required the aid of a carer who would visit her daily to help her with everyday tasks. What made it even more difficult, was the fact that the two floors of the house were only connected by an old staircase inside. When the old lady needed to move between the two, the carer would have to carry her frail body like an infant, up and down the stairs. One day the police received a call from the widow. There had been a murder.
Since police units were scarce at the time, and the murderer had already fled the scene, only one detective was sent out to conduct the initial crime scene report. He arrived to see the carer’s body splayed out on the floor with her vocal chords ripped out in a pool of blood on the first level of the house, with the old lady atop the staircase in her wheelchair watching him, still and silently, seemingly in shock. He could immediately rule her out as a suspect, due to her inability to move up and down the stairs, and because she was trapped up there the time the murder took place. It was similar to the death of her husband many years ago, who had suffocated in his sleep on the couch downstairs.
The detective put on his gloves, took photos, swabbed for evidence, and covered the body until the coroner arrived later – all routine business. He scoped the house downstairs for any clues, then asked the old lady if he could look upstairs. She insisted that she was upstairs the whole time and no one apart from her had been up there that day, but regardless of this the detective ascended the staircase to which she hesitantly moved aside.
Beyond the staircase, there was a narrow corridor, with three closed doors along it. He checked behind each of the doors, the empty bedroom – nothing, the bathroom- nothing. He became anxious as he slowly made his way to the final bedroom where the old lady slept. He opened it and everything looked normal. A bed, a wardrobe and a bedside table with a lamp. He checked every wall of the room in horror, as it was not what he discovered, but it was what he didn’t discover that made him stop dead in his tracks and slowly reach for his gun in its holster. It was a detail so minor that they had completely overlooked it on the last investigation of the husband’s death. There was no phone upstairs. He suddenly heard a noise as he withdrew his gun and rushed out of the room, only to find an empty wheelchair atop the stairs.
Credit To: Jack
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This is a love story. Please try to remember that as you read this, love. It’s really about Julie.
I knew from the moment I set eyes on her that I’d do anything to have her. Fortunately though, I didn’t have to work very hard. I could see it in her eyes the first time I talked to her and asked her out. She wanted me to and she said yes before I even finished asking. Her eyes sparkle like diamonds, it’s one of my favorite things about her.
We were quick to say “I love you”, only a few dates in, but we were sure.
My place is full of my idiot friends and we’ve started talking about getting a place of our own. My best friend, Greg, doesn’t get along the best with her and isn’t very happy about me moving out but he understands. We all hang out together sometimes, see movies, bowl, normal stuff like that.
Well, I got a call a couple nights ago from Julie’s parents, who live out of state. They said they got a call from the police and that Julie had been in a car accident. Drunk driver crossed the center line, what a cliché right? Anyway, I was panicked out of my mind speeding like crazy to the hospital when Julie called me on my cell. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw her name on the called ID. I answered the phone not quite letting myself get my hopes up just yet. After all, it could have been someone calling me from her phone. Relief washed over me like rain when I heard her voice: “Baby? I’m okay, it wasn’t that bad, just some bumps and bruises. The airbags and seat belt did all the work, are you okay?” I don’t mind admitting, I pulled over and cried for a long time. She said she was checking out of the hospital shortly and I could pick her up there.
When I got to the hospital I had myself pretty well composed. I walked in and was just making my way to the help desk when I heard her call my name. I turned around and saw her, the sparkle was out of her eyes (which wasn’t that surprising, I thought, considering what had happened), but otherwise seemingly none the worse for the wear. I completely lost what composure I thought I had. I broke down again and we held eachother and she slid her hand onto the back of my neck and into my hair like she does when I’m upset, and after a minute or two we made our way to my car.
Julie told me the drunk driver had been killed, and I thought “good, better him than Julie” and I’m not the least bit ashamed of it. I would have killed him myself if I could have. But she was OK and that was all I cared about then.
When we got back to my place no one was home and the house was dark, which was odd since there was almost always someone home and those idiot roommates of mine always forget to kill the lights when they leave.
Julie was feeling a little chilly and she looked a little pale so we cuddled up under some blankets and fell asleep almost immediately. It had been a trying day after all. I remember the last thing she said to me as we were falling asleep: “I’ll love you forever, baby.”
I called into work the next day to stay home with Julie, she was feeling pretty stiff, again not surprising. I had some missed calls from family and friends, no doubt they’d heard what happened and were checking in. I’d get back to them later.
Maybe it was just the accident, or that I hadn’t seen Julie without makeup in… ever, but she didn’t look very good, I mean her color was off and her eyes looked slightly hollow. And the sparkle still wasn’t there. I suggested taking her back to the hospital, but she insisted she was fine, just tired and sore.
Well, a couple more days went by and I told work I was staying home with Julie until she was feeling better. But she wasn’t getting better. Her eyes were the worst of it. More hollow all the time, and her skin was downright cold to the touch. It was getting to the point where I was going to bring her back to the hospital, whether she wanted to go or not, and that was when I got the phone call. It was Julie’s mom. She had been crying and was clearly making an effort to stay composed.
Julie’s service was to be held the day after tomorrow she said. I asked her what she was talking about, service for what? I was confused.
Julie walked up to me as I stood there on the phone. She was looking right into my eyes when her mom said “I know this is hard for you, it’s hard for all of us, but Julie’s gone and we can’t bring her back, we all loved her but she’s gone.”
I still didn’t understand until I saw the look of horror in Julie’s eyes. She knew, this whole time she knew. She didn’t survive the accident yet somehow she was here and suddenly I understood. Her eyes: hollow and sunk in, the sparkle gone. Her skin, cold and discolored. She was dead and I was watching her slowly decay! My stomach dropped and I felt myself fall. Julie caught me, and I felt her cold hands and felt the coldness for what it was, death. I heard her mom on the phone, a tiny voice calling my name over and over. I picked up the phone and told her I was listening, Julie silent the whole time. Her mom repeated that the service was the day after tomorrow and her body would be cremated at noon the next day. Numbly, I told her okay, thanked her, and told her I’d see her then.
I hung up the phone and Julie and I just stared at each other for a long time. There was no doubt now, I was looking at someone who was not alive. Eventually I said one word: How?
She said she didn’t know, and she didn’t care. And you know what? Neither did I.
She came with me to the service, and it wasn’t like what happens in the movies, where people walk through her like she’s not there or anything like that. They couldn’t see her, that much was obvious, but somehow no one bumped into her, and when they made space for me, it seemed they made space for her to, although they didn’t seem to know they were doing it. When I talked to her parents she was with me, silent but strong, for me. When I viewed her body she was with me. Her hand, (cold now, so cold) finding that spot on my neck. She looked exactly as she always had, beautiful, healthy. But I knew it was makeup and artificial. Underneath she would look exactly like the Julie that had her cold hand on my neck. It was a hard thing, looking down at her, but she was so supportive and I knew this was why I loved her and couldn’t be without her.
We left and went back to my place. My roommates were home but stayed out of our way as we went to my room. That night we didn’t sleep, we just held each other and I didn’t care at all how cold she was. We cried, and talked. Laughed at the funny memories and cried more. We didn’t talk about what was happening or what was going to happen.
As darkness began to lose the battle and light filled the sky, a horrifying thought occurred to me, and somehow I knew it would be true. I was seeing Julie as she was. I mean, literally seeing her as her body was. And she was set to be cremated at noon. Do you understand? She was to be burned until nothing would be left but ash and I would have to watch it happen.
I was on the phone immediately to her parents, to the funeral home, to her church. No one would listen. They all thought it was grief. I felt rage and despair building inside me and was about to completely break down when I felt her hand on my neck, in that spot, and she turned my head so I was looking into her eyes, now very hollow and turning grotesque. She told me it was okay, it was okay. She told me she would love me forever and I knew in that moment what I was going to do.
Those last few hours we watched the sun come up and what became a beautiful day. We watched clouds turn into funny shapes. As noon approached I made an excuse to go to my closet and then we waited. When noon hit we were both crying again, but nothing happened. We were just starting to wonder what that meant when I saw the look in her eyes, just as before, she knew. She felt it before I saw it. She told me it didn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt baby. She began to smoke and her hair caught on fire. A cold calm set over me and I took her tight into my arms. The flames began to burn me to. She tried to push me away, to protect me. She fought my hold but her strength was fading. I could feel the flames now burning into me but I didn’t care, I wouldn’t let her go through this alone and I didn’t need to live much longer anyway. We didn’t scream, we just sat there together and burned. Her hair was gone and her face and skin turned black and I held her tighter and to my chest. I told her I’d love her forever and that I’d see her soon. I held her until she was ash in my arms and she fell through my fingers.
I reached for what I had taken out of the closet, and suddenly she was gone, not a trace of her left. No ash remained anywhere, nothing was burned, even my own burns were gone.
Was it grief? Did I imagine the whole thing? Was she ever here? I don’t know. But I wrote this so my family and friends know why I had to do this. I won’t stay here without her. I can’t. I’ll find her somehow and the sparkle will be in her eyes again and everything will be okay and like it was. I’m sorry about this mom, dad. But I hope you understand. I’m going now, I hope I don’t get blood on this
Credit To: Deloesian
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I just want to start off by saying if you want an answer at the end, prepare to be disappointed. There just isn’t one.
I was an intern at Nickelodeon Studios for a year in 2005 for my degree in animation. It wasn’t paid of course, most internships aren’t, but it did have some perks beyond education. To adults it might not seem like a big one, but most kids at the time would go crazy over it.
Now, since I worked directly with the editors and animators, I got to view the new episodes days before they aired. I’ll get right to it without giving too many unnecessary details. They had very recently made the SpongeBob movie and the entire staff was somewhat sapped of creativity so it took them longer to start up the season. But the delay lasted longer for more upsetting reasons. There was a problem with the series 4 premiere that set everyone and everything back for several months.
Me and two other interns were in the editing room along with the lead animators and sound editors for the final cut. We received the copy that was supposed to be “Fear of a Krabby Patty” and gathered around the screen to watch. Now, given that it isn’t final yet animators often put up a mock title card, sort of an inside joke for us, with phony, often times lewd titles, such as “How sex doesn’t work” instead of “Rock-a-bye-Bivalve” when SpongeBob and Patrick adopt a sea scallop. Nothing particularly funny but work related chuckles. So when we saw the title card “Squidward’s Suicide” we didn’t think it more than a morbid joke.
One of the interns did a small throat laugh at it. The happy-go-lucky music plays as is normal. The story began with Squidward practicing his clarinet, hitting a few sour notes like normal. We hear SpongeBob laughing outside and Squidward stops, yelling at him to keep it down as he has a concert that night and needs to practice. SpongeBob says okay and goes to see Sandy with Patrick. The bubbles splash screen comes up and we see the ending of Squidward’s concert. This is when things began to seem off.
While playing, a few frames repeat themselves, but the sound doesn’t (at this point sound is synced up with animation, so, yes, that’s not common) but when he stops playing, the sound finishes as if the skip never happened. There is slight murmuring in the crowd before they begin to boo him. Not normal cartoon booing that is common in the show, but you could very clearly hear malice in it. Squidward’s in full frame and looks visibly afraid. The shot goes to the crowd, with SpongeBob in center frame, and he too is booing, very much unlike him. That isn’t the oddest thing, though. What is odd is everyone had hyper realistic eyes. Very detailed. Clearly not shots of real people’s eyes, but something a bit more real than CGI. The pupils were red. Some of us looked at each other, obviously confused, but since we weren’t the writers, we didn’t question its appeal to children yet.
The shot goes to Squidward sitting on the edge of his bed, looking very forlorn. The view out of his porthole window is of a night sky so it isn’t very long after the concert. The unsettling part is at this point there is no sound. Literally no sound. Not even the feedback from the speakers in the room. It’s as if the speakers were turned off, though their status showed them working perfectly. He just sat there, blinking, in this silence for about 30 seconds, then he started to sob softly. He put his hands (tentacles) over his eyes and cried quietly for a full minute more, all the while a sound in the background very slowly growing from nothing to barely audible. It sounded like a slight breeze through a forest.
The screen slowly begins to zoom in on his face. By slow I mean it’s only noticeable if you look at shots 10 seconds apart side by side. His sobbing gets louder, more full of hurt and anger. The screen then twitches a bit, as if it twists in on itself, for a split second then back to normal. The wind-through-the-trees sound gets slowly louder and more severe, as if a storm is brewing somewhere. The eerie part is this sound, and Squidward’s sobbing, sounded real, as if the sound wasn’t coming from the speakers but as if the speakers were holes the sound was coming through from the other side. As good as sound as the studio likes to have, they don’t purchase the equipment to be that good to produce sound of that quality.
Below the sound of the wind and sobbing, very faint, something sounded like laughing. It came at odd intervals and never lasted more than a second so you had a hard time pinning it (we watched this show twice, so pardon me if things sound too specific but I’ve had time to think about them). After 30 seconds of this, the screen blurred and twitched violently and something flashed over the screen, as if a single frame was replaced.
The lead animation editor paused and rewound frame by frame. What we saw was horrible. It was a still photo of a dead child. He couldn’t have been more than 6. The face was mangled and bloodied, one eye dangling over his upturned face, popped. He was naked down to his underwear, his stomach crudely cut open and his entrails laying beside him. He was laying on some pavement that was probably a road.
The most upsetting part was that there was a shadow of the photographer. There was no crime tape, no evidence tags or markers, and the angle was completely off for a shot designed to be evidence. It would seem the photographer was the person responsible for the child’s death. We were of course mortified, but pressed on, hoping that it was just a sick joke.
The screen flipped back to Squidward, still sobbing, louder than before, and half body in frame. There was now what appeard to be blood running down his face from his eyes. The blood was also done in a hyper realistic style, looking as if you touched it you’d get blood on your fingers. The wind sounded now as if it were that of a gale blowing through the forest; there were even snapping sounds of branches. The laughing, a deep baritone, lasting at longer intervals and coming more frequently. After about 20 seconds, the screen again twisted and showed a single frame photo.
The editor was reluctant to go back, we all were, but he knew he had to. This time the photo was that of what appeared to be a little girl, no older than the first child. She was laying on her stomach, her barrettes in a pool of blood next to her. Her left eye was too popped out and popped, naked except for underpants. Her entrails were piled on top of her above another crude cut along her back. Again the body was on the street and the photographer’s shadow was visible, very similar in size and shape to the first. I had to choke back vomit and one intern, the only female in the room, ran out. The show resumed.
About 5 seconds after this second photo played, Squidward went silent, as did all sound, like it was when this scene started. He put his tentacles down and his eyes were now done in hyper realism like the others were in the beginning of this episode. They were bleeding, bloodshot, and pulsating. He just stared at the screen, as if watching the viewer. After about 10 seconds, he started sobbing, this time not covering his eyes. The sound was piercing and loud, and most fear inducing of all is his sobbing was mixed with screams.
Tears and blood were dripping down his face at a heavy rate. The wind sound came back, and so did the deep voiced laughing, and this time the still photo lasted for a good 5 frames.
The animator was able to stop it on the 4th and backed up. This time the photo was of a boy, about the same age, but this time the scene was different. The entrails were just being pulled out from a stomach wound by a large hand, the right eye popped and dangling, blood trickling down it. The animator proceeded. It was hard to believe, but the next one was different but we couldn’t tell what. He went on to the next, same thing. He want back to the first and played them quicker and I lost it. I vomited on the floor, the animating and sound editors gasping at the screen. The 5 frames were not as if they were 5 different photos, they were played out as if they were frames from a video. We saw the hand slowly lift out the guts, we saw the kid’s eyes focus on it, we even saw two frames of the kid beginning to blink.
The lead sound editor told us to stop, he had to call in the creator to see this. Mr. Hillenburg arrived within about 15 minutes. He was confused as to why he was called down there, so the editor just continued the episode. Once the few frames were shown, all screaming, all sound again stopped. Squidward was just staring at the viewer, full frame of the face, for about 3 seconds. The shot quickly panned out and that deep voice said “DO IT” and we see in Squidward’s hands a shotgun. He immediately puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. Realistic blood and brain matter splatters the wall behind him, and his bed, and he flies back with the force. The last 5 seconds of this episode show his body on the bed, on his side, one eye dangling on what’s left of his head above the floor, staring blankly at it. Then the episode ends.
Mr. Hillenburg is obviously angry at this. He demanded to know what the heck was going on. Most people left the room at this point, so it was just a handful of us to watch it again. Viewing the episode twice only served to imprint the entirety of it in my mind and cause me horrible nightmares. I’m sorry I stayed.
The only theory we could think of was the file was edited by someone in the chain from the drawing studio to here. The CTO was called in to analyze when it happened. The analysis of the file did show it was edited over by new material. However, the timestamp of it was a mere 24 seconds before we began viewing it. All equipment involved was examined for foreign software and hardware as well as glitches, as if the time stamp may have glitched and showed the wrong time, but everything checked out fine. We don’t know what happened and to this day nobody does.
There was an investigation due to the nature of the photos, but nothing came of it. No child seen was identified and no clues were gathered from the data involved nor physical clues in the photos. I never believed in unexplainable phenomena before, but now that I have something happen and can’t prove anything about it beyond anecdotal evidence, I think twice about things.
CREDIT: Anonymous
More classic Creepypasta stories can be found here:
Ticci Toby
Sonic.exe
Laughing Jack
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Hello. My name is Raymond Daws. This recording should be considered my last will and testament. It is intended for whomever takes possession of this house at 12874 N. Pryor Road. After setting aside some money for family and other concerns, I should have approximately three hundred thousand dollars left to my name, give or take, depending on how much longer I live, I suppose. That should be about three times the appraised value of the house and it will be given to you, once certain services have been rendered. The law firm of Little and Dobbs in town will have documents confirming this arrangement. So that you understand how vital it is that this request is honored and executed faithfully, I need to explain some things.
There’s nothing particularly special about me. I’m just a middle-aged guy. However, I have never been what you’d call a “people person”. It’s not that I dislike other people, for the most part, it’s that I just don’t identify with others very easily. As a kid, I didn’t get excited about the things the other kids did. I didn’t have fun the same way that they did. And now, as an adult, I still don’t understand why people care about most of the things that people care about. I find small talk annoying, which invariably makes me come off mean or grumpy. I’ve kind of always been a grumpy old man, really, even before I started getting old. But like any grumpy old man, I also got lonely when everyone did what I asked and left me alone.
Surprisingly (or maybe not), I’ve always been a staunch believer in the supernatural, ghosts in particular. There was never a time when I didn’t believe, and these paranormal encounters have always met the majority of my companionship needs. I don’t feel one way or the other about all the God-and-Satan drivel, but when it comes to ghosts, I have no doubts whatsoever. I grew up catching glimpses of them, or hearing them just around a corner. I used to think that it was my blind faith that allowed me to perceive them where other people didn’t, but to be honest, that was probably just delusion. I think everyone catches a glimpse from time to time, but for non-believers those glimpses get explained away or ignored and forgotten. Not so for me. Having the opportunity to witness the dead and trying to interact with them has been my very favorite part of being alive.
That’s where this house comes in. It was around the time that I started making some real money at my boring accounting firm that I also started to give up on the idea of traditional family life. As you may have guessed, I have never been good at dating. Eventually, I started looking for a house just for me. Before long, a realtor led me here, and I fell in love with it immediately. I loved the things about it that would turn most people off. I loved how it’s out in the middle of nowhere. I loved that it hadn’t been occupied for decades, as the last resident died during World War Two. It was well-built and still in good condition, though there was a thick layer of dust and cobwebs everywhere. It was fantastic.
The best part about the place was Mary. She was the woman who died here, and the place resonated with her. I felt her presence the first time the realtor ushered me in the front door, and I’ve felt it ever since. I was amazed and enchanted by how consistent she was. Spirits are fleeting, in my experience, gone almost before you know they’re there. Not so here, with Mary. Even when I couldn’t see or hear her, it was like the house itself was somehow . . . overwhelmingly content.
I quickly began researching her life and I was fascinated. Mary Erikkson was a young woman who married her high school sweetheart, Bill, as so many did back then. They were madly in love. Bill built the house for Mary himself in anticipation of their wedding day. They moved in that night, preferring to honeymoon in their dream home. They’d lived here blissfully for eight months when Bill was drafted by the Navy and called away to war.
Tragically, Mary died unexpectedly in her sleep only a few months after Bill shipped out, though it’s believed that it happened peacefully. She was found tucked into bed with a letter from Bill in her hand and a small, tranquil smile on her lips. The suspected cause was an undetected heart defect. In a strange way, it was a blessing. Only two weeks later, before he could possibly have received news of her death, Bill’s ship was blown to kingdom come in the South Pacific. He died instantly. So, they both died believing that the best was yet to come, knowing they just had to hold on for awhile and then they’d be together and happy once again, forever.
And I think that’s the best feeling, really, when you know something wonderful is coming and you only have to wait for it. Once it arrives, you might begin to find flaws with it, or get bored and take it for granted. But when it’s on its way? It’s still this perfect thing. That’s how Mary felt when she died, and all these years later, it was like time had stopped for her and she maintained that wonderful feeling. She could be a little somber sometimes, as people get when the one they love is away, but mostly, when I spotted her reading a book or looking out the window, she just seemed content to wait. I heard her singing faintly or playing a song on the piano sometimes, and I could tell that the song itself was a memory. It brought him back to her. I envied them that but it was a happy-envy, if that makes sense.
It occurred to me that I probably would not have enjoyed her company nearly as much if she was alive, if she were anything like most of the living. As a ghost, though, she was the perfect companion. She never asked me for anything, I didn’t have to make small talk, she was just there and she kept my loneliness at bay.
When I bought the place, I set about restoring it to its former glory. I made a point of sticking with the original décor as much as possible, cleaning and polishing and reinforcing as needed, never actually replacing anything if I could avoid it. I got the piano tuned. I could swear I felt her approval when I did these things. In all honesty, it was the best relationship I could have hoped for.
Mary and I coexisted in our refurbished home for three happy years. Then, something terrible happened to a dear member of my family, my oldest niece. Was done to her, actually. I was unaware until our next family get-together, though I knew that she’d had a brief stay in the hospital. I could tell that something was very wrong. She was emotional, tense, and jumpy – not at all like her usual self. She made it clear that she didn’t want to talk about whatever it was, but I felt compelled to find out. I’ve watched her grow into a lovely young woman, and while I’m unable to have a traditionally close relationship with her, I care for her deeply. If there was anything I could do to remove this cloud from over her head, I was damned well going to do it. So, I made quiet inquiries with her closest friends. Before long I had a good enough idea what happened and exactly who was responsible. Guy named Steve. Steven Miller.
At that point I was unsure as to what to do with this information. I’ve never been what you would call a man of action, never even got in any fights, unless you count a minor scuffle in grade school. Never messed around with the law and I had no desire to. But I knew that I would never feel right doing nothing. At the same time, I’ve never been quick to judge people, even if I believe they’ve done something terrible. Decent people hurt each other and then regret it enough to never do it again. A schizophrenic can break from reality and kill his best friend. Alcoholics do things that would shame them forever, then they don’t even remember the next day. Given the abhorrent nature of Steve’s attack on my niece, however, it seemed unlikely that he would be repentant. I needed to know for sure, though.
I found out where he liked to hang out, dressed myself down a little to fit Steve’s hole-in-the-wall bar scene, and I went fishing. In retrospect, it seems really stupid. Like, there are so many different bad endings to that plan. But it actually worked, somehow. I got to know him kinda like the way you’d get to know a cat. I bellied up to the bar a couple stools down from the dickwad, ordered a beer, then sat and pretended to watch the game, waiting for him to do something, anything at all. Eventually he said something stupid, so I replied with something stupid, and we were off to the races.
A few beers later, we were sitting side by side, and I was comfortable enough to tell him my “stories”. I’d thought up a couple of fake exploits that were basically about me being a piece of shit to women. I made them vague enough to not be disprovable, but with a few specific details to make them convincing. The idea was to see how he would react to someone bragging about stuff like that, and he did not disappoint. He smiled—I guess you could call it a smile, though it was more of a stupid smirk—and then he one-upped me. Several times. I could tell that his stories were the real deal, and probably only the tip of the iceberg. It was like being a terrible person was his playground [job?]. As he drunkenly regaled me with his loathsome stories, my uncertainty vanished. I felt nausea squirming in my gut, and the coldest rage of my life. He had no remorse. He would continue to do these things as long as the world allowed it.
I realized my façade was beginning to crack. I wasn’t ready for that, so I made an excuse and said goodnight. As I drove home, I knew that I was going to murder him. I’m guessing a lot of people who know me, or who think they know me, would be shocked by that. The truth is I had no qualms about it at all. My only concern was being caught, and I was certain I had the perfect plan to ensure that didn’t happen.
In less than a week I was ready. I made several more mercifully-brief visits to the bar and yukked it up with Steve. He displayed more disgusting behavior and ate up my fawning-deference act like it was slop-time at the hog farm. I felt ill and mentally drained every time, but I knew that I’d gained his trust. Steve loved having a sidekick.
I had a pre-dug a hole in my backyard and a tarp laid across my kitchen floor. I put up some fresh paint and left a few tools out so the tarp wouldn’t seem out of place. Then I met up with Steve. He was already half in-the-bag. Excellent. I told him I was hosting a pregame party and invited him out to help me set up some elaborate drinking games to impress all the hot girls who’d be attending. “I don’t hafta impress girls,” he slurred, but he followed me out of the bar anyway. When we got to my place in our separate vehicles, I invited him in and he followed me into the kitchen. I got him a beer from the fridge. He popped the top and took a long gulp. I pulled my .22 caliber pistol out of my waistband and shot him twice in the chest.
At first he only registered shock. I shouted that this was retribution for what he’d done to my family and all the other women. Then he turned to me, enraged. He threw the beer can aside and rushed me. His hands were at my throat and he slammed me against the fridge. I pushed the gun directly against his chest and shot him again. He was much larger than me and the rage made him inhumanly strong as he crushed my windpipe. For a moment I feared that I’d lose consciousness. Then, thankfully, the blood loss and organ damage overcame him and his hands went slack. He teetered, trying to breathe, and coughed blood in my face. He crashed to the floor, but his expression did not change. I stood there, gasping and gagging, waiting for him to die. It took a long time. I kept expecting him to become fearful or something as it became clear that he was going to die, but he never did. He glared at me from the floor and clenched his hands, choking snarls escaping from his bloodied mouth, flailing uselessly at my feet. Finally, his body stilled.
Honestly, it seemed like it had all worked out as well as I could’ve hoped. I wrangled his cooling body onto the tarp and wrapped him up as neatly as I could. I paused at the back door to listen for anyone coming down the gravel road just in case. Hearing nothing, I dragged him out to the hole, threw him in and packed the loose dirt back on top. I changed into workout clothes, drove his car into Wilson’s Lake and jogged the mile-and-a-half back home. Throughout the ordeal, I never saw another soul.
I scoured the kitchen late into the night – Steve had managed to leak all over the place, despite the tarp. It was after midnight when I heard the sound of Mary’s footsteps. They were her steps to be sure, but not like I had ever heard them before. It made me shiver even before I could make any sense of it; they were running, running frantically. A piercing sob ripped through the house. She was terrified.
Then I heard heavy footsteps. Deliberate and getting heavier with each step, following her down the upstairs hallway. The last step hit like a sledgehammer and she screamed unlike anything I’ve ever heard. And then there was silence. I stood in the kitchen, frozen in a cold sweat. After an interminable amount of time, I snapped out of it and crept upstairs. There was nothing there to be seen or heard. I could sense a presence, but it was nothing like the peaceful aura Mary had exuded. It was bad. It was really, really bad. It was a venomous blackness with teeth. I couldn’t stand feeling it all around me in that room another moment and fled.
I did not sleep that night. The next day I called in sick to my mundane job and started looking into anything I could find about paranormal activities. Hauntings, evil spirits, poltergeists, anything that could help me. What had been an idle hobby became full-time, fervent study. The next night I dug up Steve’s body, chained some old dumbbells to him, and threw him into the lake to join his car. But when I got back to the house I knew that the damage had not been undone.
I continued to study with every free moment, incantations and rituals of every kind. I looked up exorcists; they’re not as easy to find these days but there are still a few out there. I persuaded a sympathetic priest to come over. I asked him if he was bound to tell police about someone confessing to a crime. He told me he was obligated to tell them if someone was planning a crime, but if it was already done that he was bound to secrecy. I told him everything that had happened and he asked me if I wanted to ask the Lord’s forgiveness. I told him that I wasn’t sorry for killing him; I was only sorry for doing it here. He seemed taken aback at that, but after a moment of quiet reflection, he said that he was still willing to help me. We prayed together for a lengthy interval and he did all the things he knew to do to eradicate evil and bless my home. He wished me good luck as we parted at the front door, which seemed a little strange coming from a priest, and then he left.
That night I heard Steve again. He was laughing at me, maniacally. It was obvious what he thought about the priest’s efforts. That was fourteen years ago now. I have made no progress. He has delighted in torturing Mary and I every single night since.
Before all this happened, I would hope to see or hear something new from Mary every day. Finding her in a new place, doing something I didn’t know she did was the best feeling. She took such simple joy in everything that she did. It was contagious. In the years since that godforsaken night, I’ve heard a lot of new things, and they have all been nightmare-inducing. He attacks her every night, brutally. I’ve heard her scream a thousand different ways. I’ve seen her stumbling naked down the hall, eyes blackened and blood darkening her long auburn hair. I’ve heard her choking, and miserable wails, and begging.
I feel constant despair. Experiencing this is bad enough, but the fact that I know her misery is on me is unbearable. In my haste to do what I needed to do to avenge the horrific attack on my niece and to stop that monster, I invited the monster into her home. Her sanctuary. And I have trapped her with it.
There is nothing more important to me than a clean conscience and an end to this hell. However, it has become clear to me that what I must do to absolve myself is not something I can do while I’m alive. I can’t be certain that I can do it as a dead man, but it’s my only remaining hope. I don’t have the will to end my own life. I’ve made a few pathetic attempts, but I just couldn’t force myself to follow through. I do seem to be aging more quickly now, though, and that is fine with me. I have taken steps to ensure that whenever I die, however I die, it will be here as I no longer leave. I took early retirement, became a recluse in my home, and cut off regular contact with my family. I never told them what I’d done and don’t want them to ever see me this way. I pray that when I die, I will be able to remain anchored here, and that I will be strong enough to defend her, and to restore the peace that I stole from her.
This is where you come in. I don’t know what state the house will be in when you find it – the “vibe” it’ll emanate. But, if you have an open mind and an open heart, it will not take long for you to perceive it for yourself. If it is, as I hope, a place of peace and contentedness again, then please just take good care of it and enjoy it, or sell it to some happy old couple who can appreciate it as I did once.
If I have failed—if this is still a place of suffering—then I must demand that you burn this house to the ground. Spare nothing. See to it that every timber is ash, and turn the earth up over it. If she cannot exist here in peace then she must be set free to whatever the next stop for her soul will be. I don’t know what that is, but without a doubt, it’s better than this tortured existence. I owe her at least that much. In truth, I owe her a great deal more; but if that is the best I can do, then so be it.
For your faithful assistance in this matter, in addition to the monetary rewards, you will have my sincere and eternal gratitude.
Yours respectfully,
Raymond Daws
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Do you know what it’s like to live without a soul? Because I do.
It’s like watching a romantic movie that’s so perfect you find yourself falling in love with the character. Then the lights come on, and you suddenly remember that person doesn’t exist. And even if they did, they would never care that you exist.
It’s like running the wrong way on a race track. It doesn’t matter whether you ever finish or not, because everyone else has already crossed the line and gone home. You’ve run farther than anyone else, your legs are agony and there’s fire in your lungs, but you’re still running because you’re afraid of the silence when you finally stop.
Living without a soul is sitting in the eye of the hurricane. Life is moving all around you and sometimes it feels like you’re part of it when it passes too close, but in the end nothing and no-one can ever move you. And though the wind howls fierce in its savage glory and sweeps all the world from under your feet, you’ll never know what it feels like join that wild dance. And that’s okay. You tell yourself that at least you won’t be hurt like all those other fragile humans burdened with their souls, but deep down you wish you could feel that hurt. Just for a moment. Just so once in your life you know there’s something important enough to be hurt over.
I lost my soul when I was only six years old. My father didn’t want me. My mother told me so. She said I was the reason that he left, and I believed her. I was in first grade at the time, and our class project was to make a paper lantern which was closed at the top. The hot air from the candle was supposed to lift the lantern, although mine wasn’t sealed properly and couldn’t leave the ground. I was getting really frustrated, and after the fourth or fifth attempt I got so mad that I actually ripped the whole thing to shreds.
My teacher — Mr. Hansbury, a gentle dumpling of a man with a bristly mustache, squatted down next to me and gave me the lantern he had been building. I was so mad that I was about to destroy that one too, but he sat me down and said:
“Do you know what I love most about paper lanterns? They might seem flimsy, but when they fly they can carry away anything that you don’t want anymore. You can put all your anger into one of these, and the moment you light the candle, it’s going to float away and take that anger with it.”
That sounded pretty amazing to me at the time. I settled down to watch him glue the candle into place, concentrating all my little heart on filling the lantern with my bad feelings. It started off with just the anger at the project, but one bitterness led to the next, and by the time Mr. Hansbury was finished I’d poured everything that I was into the paper. All the other class lanterns only hovered a few feet off the ground, but mine went up and up and on forever — all the way to the top of the sky. The other kids laughed and cheered to see it go, and my teacher put his hand on my shoulder and looked so proud, but I didn’t feel much of anything. How could I, with my soul slowly disappearing from view?
I remember asking Mr. Hansbury if I could go home and live with him after that, but he said he didn’t think my mother would like that. I told him that she would, but he still said no. I don’t suppose it would have mattered one way or another though, because it was too late to take back what I did.
There’s something else besides the numbness that comes when your soul is gone. I didn’t see them the first night, but I could hear them breathing when I lay down to sleep. Soft as the wind, but regular and calm like a sleeping animal. I sat and listened in the darkness for a long while, covers clutched over my head; the breathing seemed so close I could feel its warmth billowing under the sheets. I cried for what seemed like hours, but mom didn’t come and I was too afraid to get out of bed. I don’t think I fell asleep until it was light outside.
Mom was angry at me in the morning for keeping her awake. She’d heard me, but she thought I would give up eventually. I didn’t get breakfast that day, and I didn’t mention the breathing again. That was only the beginning.
I think a soul does more than help you appreciate the things around you. It also protects you from noticing the things you aren’t supposed to see. And with it gone, they were everywhere. Beady eyes glinting from under the sofa, a dark flash at the corner of my eye, scuffling in the drawers and late-night knockings on doors and windows. I never got a good look at them, but they were always watching me. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and feel their weight all over my body, pinning me down. Rough skin against me, dirty fingers digging into my nose and mouth. Worse still, their touch penetrated my mind, inserting thoughts so vile that I knew they couldn’t be my own, although the longer they were in my head, the more difficult it was to be certain of that.
Did I want to insert a needle into my eye and see how far it would go? Probably not. Then why could I not stop thinking about it?
Were they making me think about beating my class-mates into bloody pulps? Or setting fires to people’s homes to watch them weep on the sidewalk? Or was that all from me?
The first few nights I lay awake and cried to myself, but I soon learned to be more afraid of my mom than I was of the creatures. As much as I hated the shadows, they never hit me after-all. I wouldn’t call it living, but I continued to exist for years like that. During the day I kept to myself: exhausted and numb. All colors seemed muted except for the glittering eyes which tracked me from unlikely crevices, all sounds muffled but for their scrapings and breathings. The only times I could really feel was when I was lay awake in the darkness, but these were the times I wish I felt less. Neither screams nor silence brought any comfort from the intrusive probings, and my mind was flooded with persistent images of violence, self-destruction, and despair.
Over time I found a trick to help me get through the insufferable nights. I convinced myself that my body was not my own, and that nothing it felt could do me harm. The real me was flying safe somewhere, high up in the sky inside a paper lantern. And no matter what happened to my flesh — no matter what my flesh did to anyone else — that had nothing to do with me.
I kept everything below the surface as best I could until I was fourteen years old. By then I’d lost all ability to distinguish the origin of my thoughts. All I knew is that I wanted to hurt someone — hurt them as badly as I wanted to be hurt in return. I picked fights at school. I pushed my classmates around and they stayed clear of me. I once drove a pencil into someone’s hand when they weren’t looking, grinding it back and forth to make sure to tip broke off inside the skin. I heard the creatures snickering at that, but it was a disdainful kind of laugh.
When I was called into the principal’s office afterward, I was surprised to see Mr. Hansbury there too. The principal was all rage, lecturing me and stamping around like the Spanish Inquisition. Mr. Hansbury didn’t say much. He just looked tired and sad. He didn’t speak up until the principal dismissed me, at which point he put his hand on my shoulder and leaned in real close to ask:
“Have you looked for it?”
I didn’t have the faintest idea what he meant. I gave him a stare that a marble statue would find cold.
“Your lantern. Did you ever try to get it back?”
I told him to go fuck himself.
“I’m sorry for telling you to send it away,” he added, gripping my shoulder to stop me from leaving. “I thought it would be easier than facing, but I was wrong. People can’t hide from themselves like that.”
The pencil was good, but it wasn’t enough. My thoughts matched the sardonic tone of the laughter, mocking me for my pitiful attempt. As the creatures crawled over me at night and their intentions mingled with my own, I decided to bring a knife next time. I considered a gun too, but resolved that it wasn’t personal enough. I’d rather look into one person’s eyes when the blade slipped into them than shoot a dozen scurrying figures from a distance. And what happened to me afterward? It didn’t matter, because the real me was safely floating in the breeze a thousand miles away.
It wasn’t going to be at school this time. I wanted to take my time and not be interrupted. Instead I went out at midnight, the taste of those dirty fingers still fresh in my mouth. I didn’t care who my victim was, as long as they could feel what I was doing to them. My neighborhood was quiet at night and there weren’t a lot of options though, so I decided to head down to the 24 hour gas station on the corner.
Kitchen knife gripped between my fingers, cold air filling my lungs, goading laughter and applause from the creatures thick around me in the darkness, I almost felt alive there for a second. Just like I did with the pencil, but this would taste better. Holding the knife, I felt like a virgin on prom night with my crush slowly unzipping my pants. I wasn’t in the eye of the storm anymore — I was the storm, and tonight would be the night —
that I saw a paper lantern floating in the air, just a few feet off the ground. The shell was so filthy and stained that I could barely see the light inside. It was impossible for the fragile thing to have survived all these years, more impossible still for the single candle to have burned all this time, but I knew without doubt that it was my light by the way the creatures howled. They hated it with a passion, and would have torn it to shreds if I hadn’t gotten there first. I plucked the lantern from the air and guided it softly to the ground, the shades screeching as they whirled around me, feral animals cowed by the miraculous flame.
Holding the lantern close, I found the note that was attached.
“I found this in the woods. Took a couple days to find it.” -Mr. H
I collapsed on the sidewalk, trembling for all the time I’d spent away from myself, blubbering and sobbing like an idiot until the flame guttered out from my tears. The howling creatures reached a feverish pitch, and then silence, all rising together into the sky with the last wisps of curling smoke from the lantern. It hurt like nothing I’d felt in years, but it was a cleansing kind of hurt. I didn’t hide from it. I didn’t send it away. I didn’t drown it with distractions or fight its grip on me. I won’t go so far as to say that pain is a good thing, but it is undeniably a real thing, and I’d rather hurt than send it away to live with the hole it leaves behind.
CREDIT: Tobias Wade
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“You are here,” said the man in the black suit, “because you are dentists.”
The man in the black suit stood in a bright room before ten men—ten dentists in a semicircle. They didn’t look at one another. They focused on the man in the black suit.
“Of all medical professions,” continued the man, “dentists have the highest rate of suicide.”
The men didn’t move. They kept their eyes locked on the man talking to them.
“I have invited you here to talk about . . .” the man in the black suit paused. He looked down at his feet and shuffled them a bit. Then he looked up. “I brought you here to talk about, the dream.”
A few of the men fidgeted. One uncrossed his legs. They looked at one another. They looked sharply, squinty-eyed, questioningly at the man in the black suit.
The man in the black suit folded his arms and looked at each of them. He waited.
Finally, one of the dentists spoke. “You a dentist?”
“No,” said the man in the black suit.
“Then why should we talk to you? It won’t do any good.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” said another dentist, sitting up in his chair.
“You wouldn’t understand unless you’re a dentist,” said another.
“You can’t understand it,” corrected another dentist.
“And even if you could understand our dream,” said another, “You wouldn’t really understand it. Not really.”
The man in the black suit listened to them. He nodded as they spoke. The dentists looked at him with scrutiny. The man shuffled a bit and cleared his throat. “Like I said, I brought you here to talk about the dream.” He reached into his black suit and pulled out a bundle of envelopes. He opened one and showed it to the dentists in their seats. “Each of these envelopes contains $5000.00 cash. You each get an envelope if you’ll agree to tell me about the dream.”
“Why do you care?” asked a dentist. “Is that your money? You a pharmacist? You gonna give us a pill?” Some of the dentists snickered. “What’s in it for you? Why should we . . .”
“Regardless of my reasons,” interrupted the man in the black suit, “I have a lot of money for each one of you if you will tell me the dream.”
The dentists sat in silence. Then they spoke and said more or less the same thing.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“You couldn’t understand.”
“No, you couldn’t understand.”
The room fell silent again. The man stayed standing in front of the dentists as they sat, arms folded in front of him. Finally, one of them spoke.
“Heck,” he said, getting to his feet. “I’ll tell him.”
“It won’t matter,” said another dentist. “He won’t get it. Nobody does, unless you’re a dentist. And he’s already told us, he’s not.”
“So what do we have to lose?” replied the other one. “I’ll tell him the dream, we’ll get our cash, and we’ll be on our way.”
Except for the few heads that nodded in agreement, the room stay still.
“So,” said the willing one, “here’s the dream . . .”
“Excuse me,” interrupted the man in the black suit, putting up his hand, “before you begin, I ask that this be recorded.” The man in the black suit clapped his hands twice, loudly. A door opened from the back corner of the room and an old woman entered, pushing some sort of typewriter on a chair with squeaky wheels.
“This is Ms. Crumb,” smiled the man as the woman approached. “She is a record keeper,” he said. “That,” said the man, pointing at the machine on the chair, “is a stenograph. Ms. Crumb will take notes.”
The old woman slowly made her way to the front of the semi-circle. The man in the black suit took the stenograph off the chair and Ms. Crumb sat down. He placed the stenograph with its large blocky keys on her lap. She shifted a few times and got comfortable then she looked up at the man in the black suit, expectantly.
“Okay,” smiled the man in the black suit. “If you are all in agreement, let’s begin.”
The willing dentist stood up. He cleared his throat. “The dream has to do with the amount of holes in a person’s head,” he began.
One of the dentists sighed loudly as if he’d heard the story a thousand times. “He’s not going to understand,” he retorted.
“Let him try,” said another.
The first dentist continued. “Every person has seven holes in their head: two ear holes,” he said, putting his index fingers on his ears, “two eye holes, two nostrils, and a mouth,” he said. “Seven.”
Ms. Crumb started typing quietly away on her stenograph.
“It’s a horrible dream. Really,” he continued. “The dream deals with a type of weaving that goes in and out of these different holes. And it’s always the same.”
The dentist lifted his hand and put his thumb and forefinger together as if he were pinching something. “I am standing over a patient with a needle and a piece of thread. I have an overwhelming need to . . . to . . .” the man squinted up his face like he didn’t want to say the next part, but he did. “I have an overwhelming urge to weave that needle and that thread through those seven holes. I put the end of it in an ear, and it must come out of another hole . . . say, the mouth. Then it must go into another hole and out another and in another and out another until the last one.” The dentist paused. “Am I right so far, fellas?”
“Right,” said one dentist.
“You got it,” said another.
“But,” the man continued, “because there are seven holes in the head, two ears, two eyes, two nostrils, one mouth, the needle and thread always end up on the inside . . . in the head. It’s in and out, in and out, in and out, and in.”
“And that’s a problem?” asked the man in the suit.
“See?” someone said, “He doesn’t get it.”
“It’s a huge problem,” continued the dentist. “There is something in the dream . . . uh, an aura, or uh . . . an entity, a compulsion—call it what you want—that mandates: What goes in . . . must come out. So there I am, bent over some man, sewing a thread through him like he’s a stuffed turkey.” He scrunched up his face again like he knew he’d said something distasteful.
“It’s hard to capture in words,” one of the other dentists interrupted. “But the dream is very clear and there is a very real sense of some sort of . . . urgency. I take that needle and that thread and I must go in through one of the holes in the head, and out through another. Until they’re all used. And every time,” he continued, gritting his teeth, “that dang needle ends up on the inside. So I pull it out and the patient is screaming and I start again and I’m up to my elbows in blood and . . .”
“You can imagine,” another dentist interrupted. “It’s horrific.”
“It’s absolutely horrible,” said another.
“It’s exhausting,” said another. “Completely exhausting.”
“And of course, it makes perfect sense when we’re awake,” said another, “that the needle and thread will always end up on the inside of the skull, but we do it over and over and over because it’s a dream. Going in and out, in and out, in and out, and in. The patient screams and you gotta pull the needle and thread out and you’re up to your elbows in screaming and blood, and because it’s a dream you just start again. And again. And again . . . ”
“What goes in . . . must come out,” whispered one of the dentists.
“In and out, in and out, in and out, and in . . .” said another
The man in the black suit listened intently. Nodding. Ms. Crumb sat silently—recording every word.
“Then,” said another dentist, “we wake up after a full night of needling and threading and go to work and there is a patient in the chair and the only thing on our minds is that dream and after a while, it is pretty dang hard to determine what is a dream, and what isn’t.”
“It’s why we drill so hard sometimes,” said another. “We think, if I can drill another hole in that tooth, in that head, then maybe, just maybe, I can dream of a patient with another hole in the head, and maybe the needle will come out!”
“And maybe the dream will stop,” said another.
“And,” said another dentist resolutely, “it’s most definitely why some of us put a gun in our own mouths and pull the trigger.” He looked around the room. Nobody looked at him as he finished. “It’s a bad thing to say, but that hole in our own head is the only sure way to end the dream.”
The man in the black suit listened.
The room fell quiet.
“Then we can sleep,” said one.
“Yes,” someone exhaled. “Sleep.”
“That’s the story,” said one of the dentists. He looked at the man in the black suit. “We just want to sleep.”
At this point, the man in the black suit got up from his chair and approached Ms. Crumb who had been recording every word on the stenograph. He stood directly behind her so the two of them faced the semi-circle of dentists. He placed his hands on her shoulders. She stopped typing.
“I would like all of you to come forward and stand around Ms. Crumb,” said the man in the black suit. “Go ahead. Come forward.”
The dentists got up. They approached Ms. Crumb and the man in the black suit. He looked down onto the top of her head and said, “Ms. Crumb, I want you to show these people your unique . . . characteristic.”
Ms. Crumb slowly lifted her chin, and tilted her head back until she locked eyes with the man standing above her. He gently placed his hands around the bottom of her chin and snugly cradled the top of her head with his forearms into his stomach. The man in the black suit looked up at one of the dentists.
“Come here,” he said kindly. “Come see.”
A dentist stepped closer and stared down at the old stenographer’s face. He gasped. “What is that?” he asked. He moved even closer until he was just a foot or so from Ms. Crumb’s face. He squinted and fumbled with his words: “How? . . . Why? . . . How is it done?” He lifted a pointing finger at the old woman’s face. “That is impossible!”
The man in the black suit looked up at the rest of the dentists, “Look closely,” he said, “all of you.”
Ms. Crumb remained in the man’s grip, staring up at the ceiling. As they came forward, she resumed her typing—recording the dentists as they came one by one until they had all witnessed for themselves the miracle of Ms. Crumb.
“She has no mouth,” said one.
“It’s just a line,” said another, pointing with a pinky finger. “Just a fake line.”
“She has six holes in her head,” said another with a half smile.
“No mouth!” they all exulted. “No mouth!” they cheered.
“In and out, in and out, in and out!” said one, pinching his fingers with an imaginary needle and thread. “In and out,” his hand went down and up, “in and out, in and out!”
“That means . . .” said another.
Another finished his sentence, “What goes in, must come out! In and out. In and out. In and OUT!!!” The dentists cheered. They smiled, wide-eyed, and patted each other on the back and looked at the man in the black suit.
The man in the black suit gently released Ms. Crumb from his grip, and she dutifully continued to record each statement, each observation, as the dentists walked around the chair, counting the holes in her ears, her eyes, her nostrils. Some counted the holes with their fingers. Others pinched their own imaginary needles—plunging and pulling imaginary threads into the air as they walked around her.
Some became emotional.
“She doesn’t have an extra hole,” said one. “She has one fewer! It makes sense!”
The man in the black suit cleared his throat. They all looked up at him. “She was created for you,” smiled the man in the black suit. “So you could sleep.”
“Thank you,” they cried to the man in the suit.
They each, in turn, bent down next to Ms. Crumb. “Thank you Ms. Crumb,” they said sincerely. “Thank you for existing,” they said. “Thank you for helping us sleep!”
“I am ready to hand out some envelopes,” said the man in the black suit, reaching into his suit coat, retrieving the bundles. “But first,” he said, pulling a needle and a long piece of black thread from his coat pocket, “Let’s make sure it works.”
|
There’s this thing – a phenomena, really – called the “Mandela Effect.”
This lady, Fiona Broome, coined the phrase back in 2010 and it’s some bat-shit crazy stuff, lemme tell you what. See, Fiona Broome swears up, down, and sideways that Nelson Mandela died some time back in the 1980s while imprisoned in South Africa. And she’s not alone. She, and a whole slew of other people claim to remember details about Mandela’s funeral, including alleged CNN news coverage and even a scuffle over publishing rights involving Mandela’s widow, Winnie.
But here’s the wonky thing: None of that happened. None of it. Zero.
Mandela was freed from prison in February of 1990, went on to serve as President of South Africa from ’94 to ’99, and didn’t pass away until 2013. So, Ms. Broome is wrong. They’re all wrong. Every last one of the thousands of people who remember Mandela’s prison death. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. It’s a fact. Yet, these folks insist that it isn’t; they insist Nelson Mandela died in the 1980s. They hold onto it like a religious creed, which is both fascinating and bizarre. And stranger still, more people are “remembering” this sequence of events all the time—it’s like a disease, spreading around the internet, infecting minds and memories.
And thus, the Mandela Effect was born. Or maybe discovered.
Now, this would be weird enough, except there are other, similar, instances. Lots of them.
There are loads of people who believe in the existence of a 1990s movie called “Shazaam,” where Sinbad plays a genie. Except that doesn’t exist either. There’s no film footage, no studio invoices (and there’s always a paper trail), no reviews, and Sinbad’s gone on record stating unequivocally that it never happened. Period. The end. But it’s not the end because people still believe—despite all evidence to the contrary—it happened. They can’t seem to get the notion out of their collective heads’. Then, there’s the Berenstain Bears—or is it Berenstein Bears?—controversy. And Billy Graham’s televised funeral, even though he’s still alive (2017). And what about Curious George? Tail or no tail? Or Jif Peanut Butter vs. Jiffy Peanut Butter (hint, it’s always and forever been Jif).
There’s an enormous Reddit forum entirely dedicated to the Mandela Effect, with more topics and more examples if you’re interested in seeing the weirdness of the internet in all its glory.
Now, some experts say the Mandela effect is a mass delusion; a false memory somehow contracted by thousands of people all at once. A type of collective misremembering. But there are other theories, too. Some people claim the Mandela effect is evidence of time-travel. No joke. They believe someone from the future went back and altered the past, creating these odd little ripples in time. Maybe, someone saved Mandela, causing the Berensteins to be replaced by their doppelgangers, the Berenstains, and poor Curious George ended up losing his tail—shwick gone. It’s the Butterfly Effect played out in the minutia of life; just these little innocuous tweaks here and there.
Maybe that’s it. Maybe not.
Ms. Broome, well she claims the Mandela Effect is the result of parallel universes—ones slightly off-kilter from our own—interacting. Rubbing shoulders while passing in the hallways of the cosmos or maybe slamming together on the subatomic level. Personally? That’s the way I lean. But what the hell do I know? I’m not an expert. I’ve never gone to college, and I work at a crappy security booth making minimum wage.
Okay, so if I’m not some diploma-wielding “expert” why do I bring all this up?
I’ll tell you why, because I’ve experienced the Mandela Effect, too. It’s not some big internet-breaking meme like the Berenstain Bears or Sinbad the not-genie. It’s smaller. More specific. More intimate. But if the fucking Mandela Effect is real, then this is it in spades. It has to be because I don’t know how else to explain it. My Mandela Effect has to do with the house on the end of North Cedar, and I know it’s real because the place almost fucking killed me. And it did kill Jackie Morgan and Mark Leaman. That’s a fact.
Murdered them both, though it all got blamed on train accident.
It wasn’t a train accident, though. Not by a country mile.
Okay, okay, let’s roll things back a skoosh.
I grew up in Lusk, Wyoming.
It’s this little dirt-speck town of maybe 1,500 people, sandwiching the US 85 like two pieces of stale bread, rotting from age. It’s the kind of place that hardly warrants map space. The kind of place people drive through, but only because they’re headed somewhere better, cleaner, nicer. Lusk has lots of old brick buildings—remnants from a different era—run-down motels, shitty glass-fronted dinners, and even shittery gas stations/truck stops. Every vehicle in town is liable to be a pick-up; all of them old, rusted-out, and, of course, American made. It’s a Podunk town, full of cow-shit covered farmers, bored-ass rednecks, and wrinkle-skinned retirees.
With all that said, there is one interesting thing about Lusk: and that’s the house at the end of North Cedar past Jefferson Street, all the way at the edge of the cemetery.
It’s an old dilapidated American Foursquare, perched on top of a small rise, snuggled back among a cluster of dark pines and leafy oaks. I can still see it perfectly in my head, just like an old photo. The sprawling front porch, framed by squat, square columns. The boards all worn and slightly warped. The white paint, stained and peeling. Dull windows running along the front, both upstairs and down, staring at the world like the menacing eyes of some giant spider. And it had this kooky weathervane on top—an antique brass rooster, riddled with green pockmarks—jutting up like a giant middle finger to the world. That damned weathervane always stands out in my mind.
Anyway, the place scared the absolute holy bejesus out of me as a kid.
Me and my pals, Jackie Morgan, Caroline Buckner, Mark Leaman (we called him Scooter), and Danny Carlisle, we’d go riding by it sometimes. We’d do it on a lark, just tear-ass past, pedaling our bikes a million miles a fucking hour, sure that something would burst out from beneath the front porch. Either that or come barreling out the front door, jaws yawning wide, yellow claws raking at the air, ready to disembowel the lot of us. I don’t know why we thought that. No one lived there—the place was vacant and perpetually empty—and we’d never seen anyone go in or out. But the thought, the fear, persisted nonetheless.
All of that is to say, I remember that house in razor-sharp detail. And I remember what happened there, back in June of ’95—and it did happen, God’s honest truth.
It was the second week of summer break when we went in for the first time. And for the last, I suppose. We were having a sleepover—a “camping trip” technically—at Caroline Buckner’s place, which was off of 4th and Holly by the elementary school. It’s weird thinking back to that. I mean, we were all fourteen—except Danny, who was fifteen, held back a year because he was a fucking retard—and we were still doing co-ed sleepovers. That’s the mid-90s for you, though. None of our parents cared about Jack-shit as long as there was a modicum of supervision, and technically Caroline’s dad was there.
In reality, Caroline’s dad was a full-blown alcoholic who was black-out drunk ninety-five percent of the day, so we were on our own. We could’ve been running trains back there, and that jackass wouldn’t have noticed.
I mean we didn’t, ’cause Caroline was basically one of the guys, but we totally could have.
What we did do, though, was steal a bottle of Vodka—it’s fuzzy in my head, but I’m pretty sure it was Crown Russe—and got shitty drunk around a big ol’ campfire. The booze tasted like paint thinner mixed with nail polish remover, but I remember drinking the holy-living crap out of it anyway. Burned my throat going down and left my eyes watering like I’d sliced a whole bag of onions, but I took slug after slug like a champ. All of us did. We stood around, smoking stale Reds (also stolen), bathing in a drifting cloud of blue-gray smoke, while we cracked jokes and told ghost stories in the flickering firelight.
Some of the stories were classic urban legend fare: the Clown Statue, Bloody Mary, The Hook. Oldies but goodies, one and all.
Scooter told a couple of stories from that book, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I still remember “Wonderful Sausage” and “The Red Dot.” And Scooter was a helluva storyteller. He had a real knack for it. Knew exactly how to pace things, how to hit all the cues just right and string you along like some gullible sucker at a used car lot. He did this thing, where he’d drop his voice real low, so you’d have to crane your neck to hear, then boom an explosion of noise or a clap of his hands, and suddenly you were on a one-way trip straight to Scare-City. But, those stories were all bullshit, and we knew it.
Even in the dark, alone, with the Wyoming wilderness at our backs, we weren’t scared.
Not really.
Not until Jackie told us his story about the house at the end of North Cedar.
“I’ve got a story,” he’d said, his brown eyes downcast, his shoulders slumped, his mousy body curled in on itself while he smoked.
He’d gone in, not so long ago.
Decided to check it out after he heard some seniors from Niobrara County talking about how there was all kinds of booze and cigarettes stocked piled in the basement like ratios squirreled away for the fucking Apocalypse. Loads and loads of old Whiskey and homemade moonshine. Good stuff, not like the swill we were drinking that night. So, Jackie went. Broke in through the back door, then trekked down into the gloomy basement all by his lonesome. But there hadn’t been any liquor waiting for him down there. Nope. Instead, there’d been a hole in the wall, beneath the basement stairs by the water-heater.
Inside that hole had been a man, or maybe not a man—Jackie seemed undecided about that. He wore old rags, this creep. Layers and layers of heavily stained coats and dirt-caked jeans. He looked like the most down-and-out Hobo Jackie had ever laid eyes on.
And if that weren’t enough weirdness, he wore pelts, too, all stitched together like a cape. Rabbit skins, stained with old blood and gore. Bits of antler and yellowed bone attached with on leather straps. His skin was ashy, Jackie said, and withered like a worm left out in the sun. At first, Jackie had genuinely thought the guy was dead. Laying in that hole in the wall, unmoving and stiff as an old board. But when Jackie backed away, making for the stairs like any rational human being would, the guy shot right up.
His eyes wide, back arched, arms rigid.
Jackie wasn’t an idiot, so he didn’t wait around to bullshit with the weirdo. Nope. No way.
He bolted for the stairs like an Olympic track star, legs pumping as fast as they’d carry him. He was most of the way up when the pounding started. Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump. A pair of fists beating furiously against the underside of the wooden steps. When Jackie got to the top of the stairs, he faltered. Run his mind clambered at him, run and don’t ever look back. But he did look back—it was a compulsion too strong to resist. A bit like watching an oncoming car accident: you know it’s gonna be fucked, but you just can’t seem to look away.
Well, Jackie looked, just a quick gander over one shoulder, and honestly, I can’t blame him. How often have I slogged up the stairs late at night, but then paused to look back down—to reassure myself some snarling beast isn’t tearing after me?
It’s instinct. Nature.
The man, loaded down with pelts, waited at the landing, one skeletal finger outthrust in accusation. Jackie lingered, fascinated and horrified in equal parts, his legs suddenly unwilling to cooperate or carry him any farther. The man-thing canted his head to one side, rheumy eyes squinting, and opened his mouth. At first, there were no words, just this long, building screech like a bag full of cats stuck in a cement mixer—Jackie’s words, not mine. It was a sound no human could ever make. Still, Jackie stood transfixed. Watching. That screech, it built and built, rising in a terrible crescendo, slowly morphing into actual words:
“LET ME IN! LET ME IN! LET ME IN! LET ME IN!”
The words were a constant stream, screamed from a thousand different voices all at once, each one slightly out of key with the other, but all coming from the same mouth. That awful racket, it seemed, finally broke the strange spell rooting Jackie in place. He turned, darted into the foyer, and right out the front door like Hell was on his heels.
Jackie shrugged when he finished telling us the story, then ran a trembling hand through his sandy blond hair. He tried to play it cool, but he failed—he was scared, and we could all see it. “Probably just some hobo hitching on the rails,” he’d said after a time.
That was possible.
It wasn’t unheard of for Hobos to occasionally stopover in Lusk for a day or two, since the Union Pacific Rail Line curved just north of town and south of the cemetery. We all bobbed our heads in agreement, but we also edged closer to the fire because none of us believed it.
The “Red Dot” might’ve been bullshit, but this was something different. We all felt it in the gut, I think. This was a real thing, a confirmation of something we’d always believed deep down. Sometimes, I wonder if our belief is what opened the door to that Hellhole in the first place. Doesn’t really matter, I suppose. We were quiet for a while, smoking our cigarettes, passing around the cheap Vodka, all the fun ghost-stories discarded and done away with like spent party favors. Everyone was shaken, but okay, right up until that moron Danny fucktard Carlisle had to go and open his drunk, idiot mouth.
If anyone should’ve died in there, it should’ve been him.
After all these years, I can still hear Danny’s voice echoing around the campfire, his words slightly slurred and blurred on the edges. “Holy shit guys, let’s fucking go there.” He swayed drunkenly on his leather shit-kickers. “I think Jackie’s full of cowpies. His eyes are turnin’ brown from all the horseshit he’s spoutin’. So, I say we call him out. Go over to that dump and march right down to the basement. And if there is some hobo”—he sneered and grabbed his crotch in a fuck-em gesture.
No one wanted to go, of course.
We all felt the weight of Jackie’s story, the uneasiness of his words.
But we were young, dumb, and full of cum, and even more importantly we were full of cheap Vodka. Way, way, way too much cheap Vodka. Fucking Crown Russe. Besides, even though no one wanted to go, no one wanted to say so and be singled out as a pussy. Even Caroline, who legitimately had a pussy, didn’t want to get slapped with that moniker. Shit, if anything, she was even more go-hung, eager to prove she was braver than any dick-swinging dude in our crew.
So, like the teenage idiots we were, we went.
None of us had a car, so instead, we loaded up on our bicycles—a mix of Treks, Huffies, and vintage Schwinns—and peddled our drunk asses across town, sticking to the dusty back roads to avoid getting caught, and up to that god-forsaken house at the end of North Cedar. It was dark as the heart of the ocean when we got there. The moon, a sickly thumbnail of silver hanging in the sky, was so obscured by rolling clouds it was as useless as tits on a helicopter. We had camping flashlights, though. Big ol’ yellow sonsabitches that required a battery as big as a baseball to run.
Danny was the first one to turn his on, cutting through the deep cemetery gloom with the yellow beam.
The house looked the same as it always did—same boxy columns, same chipped paint, same dull windows—except now, the front door was open. Waiting for us. Just a crack, understand, showcasing a thin crease of inky black. But it was fucking open. If there’d been one brain cell between the whole lot of us, we would’ve turned back right that second, and screw youthful pride right up its ass. But here’s the thing about being young: you think you’ll live forever. Everything’s a joke and a dare because nothing bad can happen to a fourteen-year-old.
Not anything really bad. Like death.
“Let’s do this shit,” Danny said, overflowing with false bravado, cracking his knuckles like he was getting ready to wade into a fistfight instead of the mouth to Hell.
“Yeah,” I replied with a nod, trying not to sound like a colossal piece of chicken-shit.
“Does that mean you’re volunteering to go first?” Scooter asked, his gaze shifting nervously between me and the barely-open door. His question hung in the air; every eye was fixed on me, expectant for my answer. You a pussy, dude? Those stares inquired. You all talk, or do you got the balls to back it up?
“Yeah, obviously,” I replied with a sniff and an eyeroll. “It’s just a shitty old house. And if there is some crackhead hobo?” I paused, bent over, and picked up a rusty piece of rebar laying on a pile of loose scree. “I’ll fucking show him what’s what.” With the rebar in one hand and my square flashlight in the other, I soldiered forward, leaving the others to trail behind me. I took a deep breath and trudged up the steps; the old wood bowed under my weight, letting out soft moans and groans as though the house were a living thing. I flashed the light across the windows, but the curtains—dreary yellowing things—were closed tight, obscuring the interior.
I used the length of rebar to nudge the door open, sweeping my beam into the foyer.
A fine layer of dust, recently disturbed by the passage of feet, Jackie, probably, covered the hardwood floors, which were heavily scuffed and stained. Floral wallpaper—bubbled, deeply cracked, and sporting more than a few splashes of graffiti—decorated the walls. I inched into the room and swept my flashlight left; the beam washed over a boxy living room with the same tattered and peeling floral print. There was an old couch pushed up against the far wall; an ugly thing of faded orange and yellow fabric, which had to be from the 60s. Most of the cushions were slashed open, trailing white stuffing like gory ropes of intestine.
There was also a stained mattress in the center of the floor, covered in empty beer bottles and old piss stains, which reeked like the inside of a hot Porta-John. The whole house smelled like that. Fucking gross.
Further on, connecting to the living room, was a square dining space with a great big ol’ table, which lay in pieces on the floor, all its legs ripped off and scattered. Nothing that way, either. I paused for a moment, stealing a peek over one shoulder at my friends who were lined up on the porch behind me, clustered together, looking small, pale, and frightened to their toes. “Come on,” I said. “The stairs must be over that way”—I jerked my head toward the right and moved deeper into the house.
There was a kitchen up ahead, the floors covered in green linoleum. The few appliances that remained—a beat-to-shit gas stove and a drunkenly leaning fridge with the door hanging open—were so dusty I could tell they hadn’t been used in ages. A lone chair, wooden and high-backed, sat in the middle of the room. There was a big staircase hugging the right wall, shooting up like an arrow, but I didn’t see the stairs leading down.
There were two doors, though, situated between the kitchen and the staircase, and both were closed up nice and tight. I adjusted and readjusted my grip on the length of rebar—my palm slick and sweaty—and headed for the pair of doors.
The floorboards squeaked and squealed as my friends followed, completely silent except for their footfalls and the sound of heavy breathing. I padded closer to the pair of doors, a creeping dread building in my stomach and clawing up my throat like a bout of nausea. I pushed it down, determined not to pussy out.
Which door to pick was a coin-toss, so I tucked the flashlight beneath my armpit and pulled open the one on the left, closest to the kitchen. I let out a ragged sigh of relief as my light splashed over the interior of a small bathroom with a chipped clawfoot tub, a porcelain sink, and a broken mirror—the jagged pieces carpeting the floor. One down, one to go. I scooted over to the next door, this time hesitating, my hand quivering on the knob. Sweat broke out across my forehead, and my heart thumped like a jackhammer in my chest. More than anything in the world, I didn’t want to open that door. I didn’t want to go down into the basement and meet the hobo in the furs.
“What’s the fuckin’ holdup?” Caroline taunted from behind. “You lose your nerve, Mack? Maybe you need to grow a pair? Might be, I have some I could lend you”—she grabbed at her crotch. That earned a chorus of nervous, muted chuckles.
I absently flipped her the bird in reply, steeled myself, and yanked open the door, ready for a faceless monster to pounce.
The door whooshed out, but there was no monster waiting. No man, loitering at the foot of the stairs demanding I let him in. I took the wooden steps slowly, descending into the dark as the hairs on the back of my neck stood stiff. There were spaces between each step and I couldn’t help but envision a pale white hand shooting out and wrapping around my ankle, clamping down like a vice, then dragging me away. But there was no hand or ankle grabbing, just like there’d been no murderous hobo.
The basement was gloomy and dank, but no creepier than the rest of the fucked-up house. Some old boxes—warped and moldy from the accumulated moisture—took up space against one wall and copper tubing, littered with spider-webbing, decorated the ceiling. There was a rusted, pot-bellied furnace, complete with an actual door for feeding in wood, in the left corner. Metal ductwork poked up from the furnace like gnarled fingers, disappearing into the ceiling. Beneath the stairs was the water heater, and just as Jackie had said, there was a jagged hole in the concrete next to it.
An artificial cave, six-feet high and four or five deep.
Tucked inside was a pallet made of old blankets, but no bum. There was, however, liquor. A shit-ton of bottles, some plastic, others glass. Wine, Whiskey, Vodka, Schnapps. Good stuff, too, though no smokes.
“Holy shit,” Danny said, spotting the treasure-trove, “we hit motherfucking pay-dirt here.” The others whooped and hollered, clapping each other on the shoulders in congratulations, the fear banished, replaced by adrenaline and greed. Jackie didn’t look relieved, though. He looked even more anxious.
“Well, let’s get the real party started,” Scooter said, shoving past me and into the hole, pulling free a full bottle of Goldschlager. He held it up, giving it a swirl, the flecks of gold dancing and weaving in the beam of my flashlight
We’d been drinking for maybe an hour when we heard the clunk, clunk, clang of something scraping and rooting around. It sounded like an animal, a big one. Everyone fell deathly silent, eyes going wide and wild as the sound came again. Clunk, clunk, clang. Louder this time. In the quiet, it wasn’t hard to tell where the noise was coming from: the potbellied furnace in the corner. Everyone scrambled to their feet, beating a hasty retreat for the stairs as the sound grew louder and more persistent. Jackie was the first one up the stairs, his shoes thudding on the wood, followed by Caroline, Scooter, Danny, and me, bringing up the rear.
Everyone froze, though, as the handle on furnace firewood hatch screeched open, and the metal door swung outward with a rusty groan. My hands trembled—flashlight wavering, rebar twitching—as I stared at a square of pitch black, hardly large enough to accommodate a small child, in the center of the furnace. There was nothing there, though, and for a second I almost chalked it up to coincidence. Maybe some sort of critter had gotten in. Like a possum or a large squirrel. But then a pallid face—completely bald, maggot white, and deeply creased like old boot leather—appeared in the opening.
A crude set of symbols were carved across its forehead, the wounds still red and puffy. After all these years, I can still see that damned symbol clear as day—like it’s tattooed on my brain or something.
The breath caught in my throat and I thought I might vomit as the thing stared at me with milky pink eyes. I would’ve said it was blind—how could it not be?—but then it winked at me, as though reading my thoughts, and offered me a sly lopsided smile. Its pencil-thin lips pulled back, revealing a mouth full of nubby, black teeth like pieces of broken glass. A tongue, chalky and white, slipped free, running around the edges of its too-wide mouth. Then, the creature—and I was sure as shit it was a creature and not a man—pulled itself from the furnace in the herky-jerky motions of bad stop-motion animation.
Spidery hands, tipped with dirt-caked nails, came first, attached to overlong arms as it wriggled and wormed its torso free. Its arms were bulky, as though it were wearing jacket after jacket, but it didn’t take long to notice the “coats” were moving. Shifting. I gagged. Not coats, though that was an easy mistake to make at a glance. Flies. Millions of the black-bodied things. And over the top of those, were the pelts. Rough cut garments, crudely stitched together into a tattered cloak of fluttering trophies. There were patches of pale pink flesh—almost like dried, uncured pigskin—woven into that grotesque mantle.
One piece of leather, a little larger than my palm, had a faded tattoo on it: a pair of praying hands with a rosary looped around them like a noose.
“Holy fucking, McFuckerson!” Danny screamed from behind me, grabbing my shirt with a meaty palm and pulling me on. His words, bristling with unapologetic terror, seemed to jar everyone to frantic motion, and we all broke like a herd of stampeding cows. Unlike Jackie, I didn’t pause when I reached the top; I didn’t need to because I could hear the thing scrambling and skittering over the concrete floor, drawing ever-closer. I knew it hadn’t made it to the stairs yet, but I could almost feel it reaching for me, its hot, fetid breath brushing up against the nape of my neck.
I darted through the entry; Danny promptly slammed the door shut behind me with a booming thunderclap.
“Get the fuck outta the way,” Caroline hollered, sprinting toward us with the lone chair from the kitchen. I shuffled back, head reeling from what I’d just witnessed, as she crammed the chair up beneath the door knob. And not a moment too soon. The second she had it wedged firmly in place, the door handle rattled and shook, followed by a fist slamming against the wood. Thunk-thunk-thunk. I stared at the door, trapped and immobilized. Then, the creature shrieked, an inhuman noise like a buzzsaw cutting into a piece of sheet metal.
“LET ME IN! LET ME IN! LET ME IN! LET ME IN!”
“Let’s go,” Danny said, tugging on my shoulder. I didn’t need much prompting. I wheeled around and beelined for the front door, except Scooter was already there, desperately turning the knob, trying to pry the door open. It didn’t budge, not an inch. “The windows,” I said, my voice oddly calm and detached, “bust ’em out.”
Jackie was moving before the words were even out of my mouth, sprinting toward the windows in the living room. He threw back the musty yellow curtains, but faltered, confusion and fear dashing across his face in turns. It was easy to understand why. Instead of cloudy glass, staring out on the forlorn graveyard, there was simply a sheet of implacable wallpaper. Smooth and seamless, as though no windows had ever existed there. Caroline tried the windows near the stairwell leading to the second floor.
More of the same. Just blank walls, covered in that gaudy floral print.
Another crash from the basement doorway drew my eye. The creature was still shrieking its let-me-in hymn, but now it was working over the door like a boxer going to town on the heavy bag. The door rattled in its frame, the wood bowing and splintering with each successive blow. “Backdoor, and kitchen windows,” I yelled at Jackie, “check ’em all. Everyone else …” I paused, glancing around wild-eyed. “Weapons. Find a weapon. Anything you can defend yourself with.” Everyone scattered, most heading for the living and dining rooms, while I made for the basement door.
Since I already had a weapon, and a decent one, I planted myself in front of the basement door, flashlight trained on the cracking wood, rebar raised and ready to go.
“It’s the same back here,” Jackie called out, scampering out of the kitchen, a pitted butcher knife clutched in one white-knuckled fist. “Door won’t budge, and there aren’t any windows.” He spun in a slow circle like an animal trapped in a cage. “What are we gonna do, Mack? What the fuck are we gonna do?”
I shook my head because I didn’t have an answer.
The others appeared a few seconds later, clutching an assortment of wooden table legs from the dining room and busted beer bottles from the piss-stained mattress in the living room.
“Alright, backdoor’s fucked, too,” I said, never taking my eyes off the basement stairwell. “Only way left to go is up.”
“You fuckin’ high?” Danny hissed. “Why would we go up? There’s five of us, one of him, and we got weapons. Let’s just bust this sumabitch up.”
“Shut the fuck up, Danny!” I yelled, rounding on him. “That thing isn’t human you fucktard—it’s a monster. A demon or some shit. I dunno. And you don’t even get a say because you’re the only reason we’re here. ‘Let’s fucking go there … Jackie’s full of cowpies.’ This is all your fault, jackass, now shut your mouth and get upstairs. Maybe the windows will work up there, and if not … Well, maybe there’s a way we can get to the roof.”
Jackie and Caroline went without hesitation, but Danny and Scooter lingered, heading over to the living room, preparing to take a stand. “Don’t be morons,” I said, backtracking for the staircase, happy as a pig in shit to get away from that screeching—“LET ME IN! LET ME IN! LET ME IN! LET ME IN!”—playing on repeat like a broken record. I was a few feet from the staircase when the basement door exploded outward, chunks of wood flipping through the air like shrapnel. The thing from the basement didn’t waste a second. Nope, it scuttled out on all fours like an overgrown, human-faced fly.
Mr. Flysuit, I thought deliriously.
“Let’s get this fucker!” Danny screamed, charging in, a broken table leg upraised like a medieval mace while his flashlight beam bobbed and weaved. Scooter was a step behind. I rounded the stairs, but had to stop—had to—and watch. I honestly can’t say why. Mr. Flysuit was skinny even with the layers of shifting flies carpeting its body, but it moved like a snake and hit like a Mac-Truck. Danny lashed out with his club, a wild swing, which sailed clear over the creature’s head. The demon shot inside his guard and blasted him in the chest with a closed fist, lifting Danny into the air, flipping him ass over tea kettle.
He crashed in a heap not far off, limbs splayed out, eyes hazy from shock.
I hesitated, eyeing the stairs then Danny, the stairs then Danny.
Finally, I rushed over, helping the moron to his feet, glancing up in time to see Scooter lung forward, thrusting a broken bottle toward the thing’s face. Flysuit batted aside the attack with lazy ease, then leaped like a pitbull, nails slashing into Scooter’s throat, drawing a deep line of red across the skin. Scooter dropped the bottle and staggered back, clutching his ruined neck, mouth wide as blood leaked between his fingers. Flysuit wasn’t done. It tackled Scooter around the middle, driving a shoulder into his gut, and bringing him to the ground.
I tore my eyes away.
There was nothing we could do here. Not for Scooter. Maybe not for ourselves. Instead, I turned and dragged Danny up the stairs, pursued by the gut-wrenching sound of Mr. Flysuit chewing and slurping. There was another door at the top of the stairs, but Jackie and Caroline were gone. Vanished. Danny and I shoved our way through, leaving Scooter to die, guilt riding my back like a monkey.
The door swung shut, and darkness enveloped us, save for the meager illumination our flashlights provided. But there wasn’t anything for our flashlights to illuminate. The room, if it was really a room, seemed to stretch on forever with no walls and no visible end. It was an impossibly big space, and there was no way to tell where we were or where we needed to go. There was no sign of Caroline or Jackie, either. Danny and I were lost in an ocean in the dead of night without any idea of where the shore lay.
“Where the fuck are we?” Danny asked in a harsh whisper, sweeping his light fruitlessly from left to right. “Where the fuck are we?” He said again, this time more to |
It wasn’t long ago I noticed a strange noise coming from the air conditioning unit, in the wall of the living room. At first it was almost imperceptible from the other noises such a device would typically make. It started out as a slight clanking sound, only when it was first turned on. I had just accredited it to the age of the apartments and the appliances within. Realistically they weren’t all that old in the grand scheme of things, but without constant upkeep things break down and fall apart relatively fast. Everything in the place made at least some kind of noise. The washing machine shook, the dishwasher sounded like a jet taking off and the fridge would kick on every few minutes and hum so loudly I’d have to turn the television up to hear anything over it. So you can see how it wasn’t such a big deal for the air conditioner to rattle a little. So I put it to the back of my mind as just something that comes with age.
That was until it started making it more and more often. I first noticed it when I turned it on and the rattling didn’t just go away after a second or two.
‘I had better tell the landlord so maintenance can come fix this’, I thought. After about a minute it once again stopped and the thought faded into memory.
A few weeks passed and I began to notice other strange occurrences, scratching in the walls, the electricity flickering in and out, the occasional thump in the night. Again things that could all happen due to the age of the wiring, maybe a mouse had gotten into the walls, or a noisy new neighbor had moved in. All pretty explainable, I thought. Besides, I worked a lot and really didn’t have a lot of free time to do much, so it didn’t bother me. But when things started to go missing in my tiny, one bedroom, apartment, I started to worry.
I hadn’t been home in what felt like a couple weeks, between work and friends, I was barely there at all besides to sleep and bathe. I figured I should do a thorough search of the place and see where my things could have gone. The TV remote, a calculator, several pairs of socks, and one shoe, were apparently misplaced. So I went through, room to room (which was really only 4 rooms) searched high and low to find my things and as I did this I noticed more and more small ineffectual things were also missing.
‘Strange’, I thought. ‘Where could these things have gone?’ I hit the power button on the TV and sat down in my once familiar armchair, now a stranger in my own forgotten home, and noticed something. The TV wasn’t on. I flipped the light switch up and down but nothing.
‘Oh for god sakes this is getting a little ridiculous’
I got up and twisted the knob on the stereo, nothing. I went around and tested all the appliances, to see if they were all still functioning. To no avail as not a thing in the place was still functioning, except, strangely enough the increasingly loud air conditioner. It came on with a loud rattle and ran that way for several minutes until it sparked, I heard a loud pop, and then it too died. ‘Maybe the power’s out and it will be fine in the morning.’ I thought half-heartedly. I had a hard time sleeping that night. The neighbors were especially loud and the being without power made me a nervous. I woke up the next morning to find that the power was still out.
I took a shower, got dressed and went over to my neighbors to ask if they were having similar problems. I knocked loudly several times but no answer. I decided enough was enough and went to the maintenance office to complain and hopefully resolve this issue. When I opened the door the smell of stale smoke swept into my nostrils. The place was a mess, papers and ashes all about the desk, peeling paint, smudges on the windows, and a TV with only static bolted to the wall. Sitting behind the desk was a thin, graying man who looked as if he hadn’t bathed in a week. I told him about how everything was suddenly not working but the A/C unit, until it sputtered its last. He gave me a sarcastic look and with a gruff he grabbed his toolbox and followed me back to my apartment.
“You see I would have called but for some reason nothing seems to be working, and I don’t think the electricity is out because the air conditioner was running and suddenly died.”
“Well let’s take a look at it.” he said. He went over to it and unscrewed the faceplate and peered inside. He clicked his flashlight on and went to work unscrewing and checking different things when he stopped suddenly and pulled out a tiny thing attached to a cord that didn’t look like it belonged. He looked at me with a raised eyebrow.
“This yours?”
I couldn’t even identify what he was holding. “I don’t believe so, what is it?”
“It’s one of those little spy cameras, you haven’t been havin girls over, secretly tapin em have ya?” He gave a sly grin.
“No! What the hell was that doing in my home?!” I was getting a scared, and a little irate.
He shrugged “Well let’s see where this wire goes, huh?”
He followed the wired with his hand and stopped to look inside.
“There’s a little hole in here, it goes into the wall.”
He pulled out his hammer and got to work taking chunks out of the dry wall and following the cord. I was freaking out. ‘Who put that there?’ ‘Was this dirty old man watching me?’ ‘Are there more of those?’ All these things went through my head as I watched him work.
“Well that explains a lot” he said under his breath.
“What? What is it?” I exclaimed.
“Looks like somebody rewired your outlets over here.” He backed away to show me what he was seeing.
“But, why?”
“My guess, stealing your power. You sure you didn’t notice anything?” His calmness put me on edge.
I thought back to the odd noises in my walls, the thumping, the flickering lights. What had once seemed such a normal thing had my heart racing.
“I noticed a few things here and there but I haven’t been here a lot lately. I thought it was just an old place.”
He gave me a skeptical look and continued following the ever expanding bunch of wires and cables throughout the place. Some wires would branch off to more tiny cameras, hidden in vents and just in the shadows, one even wired into the eye of one of my pictures. ‘How have I not noticed these?’ My heart had started beating faster and faster as he discovered more. He kept going and, one by one, found all of my electric had been rewired into one central bunch that led to the bedroom. My heart stopped.
“How long have these been here?”
“Not long I’d say. We check all the appliances and outlets before we rent the places out.”
“Well where does it all lead?”
He kept knocking holes with his hammer and following the dreaded cables until finally he stopped and looked into the most recent hole he made with a flashlight.
“The space between the walls gets a lot bigger here. I think I can fit in here I see something glowing just around the corner.”
He smashed a hole big enough for him to squeeze through and disappeared into my bedroom wall. He appeared a few seconds later with a grim look on his face and his skin had gone pale. He was no longer the calm, apparently fearless, man he was before.
“You aren’t gonna wanna hear this, but there’s a little room back there. Bunch of monitors set up all over and all sorts of crap scattered around. Looks like somebody was livin’ in there but no sign of em now.” He swallowed hard. “This place is starting to freak me the hell out. If I were you, I’d move.”
I packed my things and left for my mom’s that day, not wanting to spend another second in that place. Over the next few days the police came and investigated the whole scene. They found twenty different monitors all linked up to VHS players in that little room in the walls. Surprisingly though no tapes were ever found. And neither was the thing that had been watching me all those nights.
A few weeks had passed and a box arrived on my mother’s doorstep. It was unlabeled but inside was all the little things that had gone missing in my apartment. I also found a dirty ripped piece of paper with a barely legible message scrawled on it:
I LIKE YOUR NEW PLACE MUCH BETTER.
Credit To – Hairy Monster Man
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It may be hard to believe for those of us born in the digital age—when every embarrassing moment can potentially be uploaded to Youtube for posterity—but an estimated 70% of all films from the silent era are thought to be lost. Of the silent film directors whose works have largely vanished, perhaps the most intriguing, at least for me, is the German director Kai Winckelmann (1887-1926). Although influential in his own era, he has since been largely forgotten, for reasons which I believe will become readily apparent if you read further in this article.
Winckelmann was born on September 18th, 1887 in Offenbach am Main, the son of a butcher. He reportedly found the family business very distasteful and did not get along well with his father, who drank heavily. After serving on the Russian front in World War I—a period of Winckelmann’s life which left him permanently traumatized—Winckelmann married a certain Greta Schulz, a nurse whom he had met at a veteran’s hospital. He moved with her to her home city of Vienna, Austria, where he began making films for the pioneering producer Joe May. Winckelmann created many moderately successful films while working for May, several of which survive in whole or in part, but by far his most successful work was the Lord Lister serial.
The Lister series, based on a series of pulp stories concerning a gentleman thief named Lord Lister who goes by the nom de guerre Raffles in the criminal underworld, consists of six episodes, each about an hour in length. The films bear a somewhat superficial resemblance to their source material. In the original novels, as in the first two episodes of the Lister serial, Lord Lister is a somewhat sympathetic Robin Hood-like figure, à la Arsène Lupin, who rarely commits any particularly egregious misdeeds. In Winckelmann’s Lister serials, however, he became a much more sinister figure: a seemingly omnipotent mastermind of crime who is not above rape and mass murder. In the serial, as in the novels, Lord Lister is pursued by a Scotland Yard detective named Baxter. In the early installments of the serial, Baxter is portrayed as a figure of fun, an incompetent drunkard who is always outwitted by the master thief, but in the later episodes, Baxter becomes a tragic figure, an honest lawman who is helpless to prevent the atrocities of his implacable persecutor, Lord Lister. Although Lord Lister was played by several different actors—the idea being that his true face was unknown—Detective Baxter was always played by Winckelmann’s friend and confidant, actor Olaf Schneider.
Olaf Schneider became close friends with Winckelmann shortly after the latter began working with Joe May. The two could not be any more different in appearance or in temperament: Schneider was healthy, muscular, and a lover of fast cars and boxing, while Winckelmann was a recluse and often in poor health. Nevertheless, the two shared a close relationship, perhaps finding common ground over the tragedies in their respective pasts: Winckelmann had had an abusive childhood and was left mentally scarred by his service in World War I, while Schneider’s wife had committed suicide in 1918, leaving him to raise their infant daughter alone.
The contents of the first five Lister films, insofar as they can safely be reconstructed at all—only one of them survives, and even then only in an incomplete print—are as follows:
1. Lister tritt ein (Enter Lister): The screenplay of this first episode was written by none other than legendary director-screenwriter Fritz Lang. In this installment, Lister, who is living under the assumed name Lord William Aberdeen, manages to steal a valuable painting during an art exhibition. The bumbling Detective Baxter eventually manages to arrest Lister, but the latter escapes, switching identities with a guard in a clever ruse. A spectacular chase scene ensues, during which Lister, of course, escapes.
2. Lister schlägt zurück (Lister Hits Back): The film opens with an elaborate scene where Lister steals the pearl necklace off of a duchess’ neck at the opera house. Shortly thereafter, Lister boldly announces his next crime via a newspaper advertisement: he will still the family jewels of Lord Willmore at such-and-such an hour. Baxter and his fellow policeman stand guard at Lord Willmore’s side at his mansion, waiting for Lister to appear—but he never does. Just when he is about to dismiss the incident as a hoax, Baxter hears muffled cries and discovers the real Lord Willmore bound and gagged in a wardrobe; Lister had been impersonating him the entire night, and the real jewels had already been replaced with identical duplicates. Baxter realizes that the mansion is rigged to explode and barely escapes with his life. This is the only surviving Lister film.
3. Lister in Amerika (Lister in America): Detective Baxter receives a tip that Lister is hiding in the United States. Baxter boards an ocean liner, but half-way across the Atlantic, the voyage begins to go horribly awry: the passengers are falling mysteriously ill. It seems that Lister has planted plague-infested rats onboard, presumably in an attempt to assassinate Baxter. Upon his arrival in New York, Baxter is swiftly arrested for a series of murders that Lister committed, and a local judge, really Lister in disguise, sentences him to death by hanging. Baxter makes a desperate escape through the sewer system and emerges into the night air—where he is greeted with the sight of Lister taunting him from a rooftop. He is wearing his iconic costume: a black cloak, black gloves, and a black executioner’s mask. Lister mockingly crosses and extends his wrists, as if daring Baxter to arrest him.
4. Das tödliche Parfum (The Deadly Perfume): Detective Baxter investigates a series of grisly murders: someone has been replacing department store perfume with sulfuric acid, resulting in dozens of deaths and disfigurements. In order to uncover the truth, Baxter forms an alliance with a young woman who claims to have been Lord Lister’s lover. Despite being a married man, Baxter soon begins to succumb to her charms as well. The film ends with a shocking scene: due to the machinations of Lister, Baxter is forced to allow the young woman to be run over by a train in order to avert an accident that would kill hundreds of people.
5. Die schreiende Leiche (The Screaming Corpse): Little is known about the contents of this particular film, as contemporary reviews contain little but exclamations of disapproval. It is known to chronicle Baxter’s descent into alcoholism and depression after his repeated failures to capture Lister. The plot reportedly involved a deadly fire at an opera house and a surreal scene wherein Lister wears a man’s flesh as a mask.
Despite, or perhaps because of, their often morbid content, the films were quite popular with the contemporary viewing public—one might consider them the Saw of their day. As you might have guessed, the increasing darkness of Winckelmann’s films was accompanied by a corresponding crisis in his personal life: the affair between Winckelmann’s wife, Greta, and his closest friend, Olaf Schneider. Winckelmann seems to have known of the affair and tacitly accepted it, although eventually, this seems to have taken a considerable toll on his already fragile psyche. In a letter to his cousin, dated October 13, 1923, Winckelmann writes: “…And why shouldn’t she prefer him? A man like him can offer her what I, with my frail body and lacerated soul, could never hope to give her. My dark Muse has seized control of my life. I am powerless to do anything but obey its commands…”
This state of affairs continued for some time before an unthinkable tragedy put an end to both the Lord Lister serial and Winckelmann’s partnership with Schneider…at least for the time being.
In December of 1923, Winckelmann was away on business in Frankfurt, having left his 18-month-old son alone with his wife. The live-in housekeeper was away visiting her sister. According to the report that a distraught Greta later gave the police, she and Schneider were making love in the bedroom when suddenly she heard a loud thud from the child’s room. Her son had evidently climbed out of his crib, breaking his neck. Naturally, this created a gigantic scandal, and no one was particularly surprised when Greta disappeared one day, presumably to start a new life under an assumed name. As for Schneider, he emigrated soon thereafter to the United States, where he dropped out of the public eye.
Despite the horrendous personal tragedies that had befallen him, Winckelmann held up as well as well as could be imagined under the circumstances. Although he had been a doting father—at least when he was not distracted by his film-making career–he managed to bear his grief with a certain quiet dignity, even founding his own film company a few months later. Winckelmann’s studio was relatively successful at first, turning out several lucrative if unremarkable films. A few years after his son’s death, however, strange rumors began circulating around Winckelmann. It was said that he had fired most of his staff and spent his days wandering around his empty, decrepit Filmstadt. In an interview with the Vossische Zeitung dating to six months before his death, Winckelmann claimed that he had fully forgiven Schneider and, rather surprisingly, had been corresponding with him and planned for them to make a film together. To the surprise, and later dismay, of the viewing public, a final installment of the Lord Lister saga, entitled Listers Rache (Lister’s Revenge) was released in 1927.
Listers Rache was screened in only a few theaters before being permanently withdrawn from circulation. The film, only 40 minutes long, was much more surreal and expressionistic than any previous installment in the series—and much more unsettling. Contemporary accounts, though doubtless exaggerated, mention fainting fits and worse at advance screenings of the film. According to contemporary newspaper reports, the film begins with an intertitle explaining that Detective Baxter has lost his job with Scotland Yard and been abandoned by his family. Baxter is shown in a dirty, disordered apartment room, sitting at a writing desk; there is no other furniture around him. Baxter is writing a note whose contents we do not see and weeping all the while. He is surrounded by empty beer bottles and his appearance is unkempt and disheveled. The crying scene continues for an uncomfortably long time, after which Baxter leaves his apartment and wanders through the streets of London. The city is represented by a series of surreal matte paintings, reportedly very much in the style of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, full of absurd angles that would be impossible in reality. Sinister shapes can be discerned in the background: hanged bodies, weeping, disfigured faces, etc.
Detective Baxter finally pauses in the middle of a tall bridge, contemplating the rough waters and jagged rocks below. It is clear that he is considering suicide. Suddenly, a dark shape materializes at the other end of the bridge: it is Lister, wearing his usual executioner’s hood and cloak. Lister shouts “Jump!” (via an intertitle, of course), and Baxter, after a moment’s pause, manages to gather his resolve and chase after his nemesis. After a brief chase scene, Lister leaps into an enormous sinkhole, Baxter following close behind. In the next scene, the detective finds himself in an enormous cavern—presumably the master criminal’s base of operations. It becomes clear that the cavern is filled with furniture: a dining table with chairs, a wardrobe, a wash basin, even a book case. Baxter cautiously approaches the table, soon realizing, to his horror, that all of the furniture appears to be made of human bone. In the center of the cavern is an enormous pile of human body parts, casually stacked together like a compost heap. Baxter recoils in horror and attempts to run back to the entrance of the cavern, but it is too late: Lister, with two other masked men on either side of him, is swiftly approaching, carrying an axe. We see their shadows on the wall of the cave encroach on the detective’s, finally engulfing it completely.
The scene shifts yet again; Detective Baxter is shown inside a damp dungeon of sorts, his hands and feet manacled to the wall. He is bruised and bloodied. A large metal door swings open and Lister reappears, still accompanied by his two masked henchmen. One of said henchmen is carrying a struggling, wriggling form: a blindfolded little girl, around ten years of age. Lister tells Baxter “Now you and your daughter will be reunited, just as you wished!” With that, the two masked thugs hold the screaming and kicking little girl down on the ground while Lister withdraws a butcher knife from somewhere within his cloak and calmly, methodically slashes her throat. The two masked henchmen then place the dying little girl opposite the distraught Detective Baxter. Blood is oozing from her mouth and throat, but she is still breathing slightly. Lister declares “Leave him to his fate!” and the three masked men exit the room, leaving Baxter to watch helplessly as his daughter breathes her last.
An intertitle announces that three weeks have passed, and Baxter is still chained where Lord Lister left him. His clothes are ragged, his skin is covered in bruises and blisters, and his eyes have a wild, haunted look. Across from him is the corpse of his daughter, bloated and blackened. The iron door slowly creeps open, and Lord Lister reappears, once again shadowed by his two masked accomplices. This time, he is carrying what appears to be a burlap sack. The two henchmen unchain Baxter; he attempts to strangle Lister, but, in his pathetically weakened state, he is easily restrained. Lord Lister slowly pulls an object from the sack: it is a long-haired human head, still dripping blood. “Kiss your wife!” Lister exclaims. A horrified Baxter refuses, but the henchmen punch him into submission and restrain his arms. Lister forces the severed head’s lips against Baxter’s, the latter retching all the while. Baxter is then returned to his restraints, and the two accomplices proceed to savagely beat him with nail-studded wooden planks while Lister looks on. Lord Lister motions for his men to stop the beating, and Baxter looks up with dying eyes at his tormentor, lying in a pool of his own blood. “Do you realize now why you’ve never managed to catch me? Why you could never have won?” Lister says. Lord Lister begins to peel off his hood and turns around to face the camera directly. We see his true face for the first time—or rather, the space where one should be, for Lister does not possess one at all; his face is a blank wall of flesh with nothing at all to mark it as human accept a gaping black mouth. “I am Loss,” he says, drifting closer and closer towards the camera, as if threatening to break through it. Lord Lister’s jaw opens wider and wider, far wider than should be humanly possible; it reaches almost down to his waist, as if threatening to engulf the audience and all the world. And with that image, the film abruptly ends.
As mentioned above, Listers Rache was a resounding failure with audiences at advance screenings, and it was quickly pulled from most theaters. Evidently, the film was “too much” even for a movie-going public that had made Winckelmann a wealthy man for his earlier forays into aestheticized violence. Audiences had found the film’s gore effects to be disturbingly convincing—so convincing, in fact, that many suspected that they were not “effects” at all, and a warrant was soon issued for Winckelmann’s arrest. After the police had searched in vain for Winckelmann at his home, a fire was reported at his downtown film studio. Several hours later, Winckelmann’s body, having been pulled from the smoldering ruins of his Filmstadt, was identified using his fingerprints. Though his garments were badly burned, he appeared to have been dressed in black.
The bodies of Olaf Schneider, his ten-year-old daughter, and his former lover Greta Winckelmann were never recovered.
Like most of Winckelmann’s films, Listers Rache has vanished almost without a trace. Some copies were lost in fires—an unfortunately very common occurrence, as early film stock was highly flammable—while others were deliberately destroyed. There is an interesting, though almost certainly apocryphal anecdote in Christian Eichheim’s Moderne Schauermärchen aus der Stummfilmzeit about a rediscovered copy of Listers Rache, which bears repeating here, if only for its dramatic interest. In 1974, so the story goes, Peter Fleischer, an Austrian film collector, acquired a copy of Listers Rache at an auction. After viewing the film on his private projector, he began to experience headaches, nausea, and finally hallucinations. He reported seeing a figure in a black cloak out of the corner of his eye, but the figure would vanish as soon as he turned his head. At first, this figure would appear to be far away, but it seemed to come closer over time. Eventually, Fleischer began to suffer from insomnia—the figure would stand over his bed at night, but disappear as soon as the light switch was turned on. Every appearance of this figure would cause a feeling of intense despair and dread in Fleischer. After several weeks of agony, Fleischer finally burnt the film reel in his fireplace. The hallucinations ended, but an inexplicable smell of charred flesh lingered over the chimney.
The same book also offers a rather strange urban legend concerning an alleged curse that hung over the life of Kai Winckelmann. While serving on the Russian front during World War I, so the story goes, a dying prisoner of Romani descent who had been captured after a particularly bloody skirmish cast the “evil eye” on the young Lieutenant. “The weight of the deaths you have caused will follow you like a cloud,” the man is reported to have said. Perhaps this was the “dark Muse” Winckelmann spoke of in his letters? It bears mentioning here that Winckelmann’s sketch book from his stay at the veteran’s hospital contains numerous line drawings of a faceless, cloaked figure.
Regardless of what you think of the supernatural, ask yourself this: who is more real, Hamlet or Shakespeare, Dickens or Oliver Twist, Charles Foster Kane or Orson Welles? Some fictional characters have more life in them than you or I.
Credit To: Lucretius
DERPNOTE: This pasta is a Crappypasta Success Story. That means that it received enough upvotes during its time on Crappypasta for it to be posted on the main archive. You can find its Crappypasta entry here. Thanks, everyone!
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During the summer of 2003, events in the northeastern United States involving a strange, humanlike creature sparked brief local media interest before an apparent blackout was enacted. Little or no information was left intact, as most online and written accounts of the creature were mysteriously destroyed.
Primarily focused in rural New York state, self-proclaimed witnesses told stories of their encounters with a creature of unknown origin. Emotions ranged from extremely traumatic levels of fright and discomfort to an almost childlike sense of playfulness and curiosity. While their published versions are no longer on record, the memories remained powerful. Several of the involved parties began looking for answers that year.
In early 2006, the collaboration had accumulated nearly two dozen documents dating between the 12th century and present day, spanning 4 continents. In almost all cases, the stories were identical. I’ve been in contact with a member of this group and was able to get some excerpts from their upcoming book.
The Rake
A Suicide Note: 1964
As I prepare to take my life, I feel it necessary to assuage any guilt or pain I have introduced through this act. It is not the fault of anyone other than him. For once I awoke and felt his presence. And once I awoke and saw his form. Once again I awoke and heard his voice, and looked into his eyes. I cannot sleep without fear of what I might next awake to experience. I cannot ever wake. Goodbye.
Found in the same wooden box were two empty envelopes addressed to William and Rose, and one loose personal letter with no envelope.
‘Dearest Linnie,
I have prayed for you. He spoke your name.’
A Journal Entry (translated from Spanish): 1880
I have experienced the greatest terror. I have experienced the greatest terror. I have experienced the greatest terror. I see his eyes when I close mine. They are hollow. Black. They saw me and pierced me. His wet hand. I will not sleep. His voice [unintelligible text].
A Mariner’s Log: 1691
He came to me in my sleep. From the foot of my bed, I felt a sensation. He took everything. We must return to England. We shall not return here again at the request of the Rake.
From a Witness: 2006
Three years ago, I had just returned from a trip from Niagara Falls with my family for the 4th of July. We were all very exhausted after a long day of driving, so my husband and I put the kids right to bed and called it a night.
At about 4 am, I woke up thinking my husband had gotten up to use the restroom. I used the moment to steal back the sheets, only to wake him in the process. I apologized and told him I thought he got out of bed. When he turned to face me, he gasped and pulled his feet up from the end of the bed so quickly his knee almost knocked me out of the bed. He then grabbed me and said nothing.
After adjusting to the dark for a half second, I was able to see what caused the strange reaction. At the foot of the bed, sitting and facing away from us, there was what appeared to be a naked man or a large hairless dog of some sort. Its body position was disturbing and unnatural, as if it had been hit by a car or something. For some reason, I was not instantly frightened by it, but more concerned as to its condition. At this point, I was somewhat under the assumption that we were supposed to help him.
My husband was peering over his arm and knee, tucked into the fetal position, occasionally glancing at me before returning to the creature.
In a flurry of motion, the creature scrambled around the side of the bed and then crawled quickly in a flailing sort of motion right along the bed until it was less than a foot from my husband’s face. The creature was completely silent for about 30 seconds (or probably closer to 5, it just seemed like a while) just looking at my husband. The creature then placed its hand on his knee and ran into the hallway, leading to the kids’ rooms.
I screamed and ran for the light switch, planning to stop him before he hurt my children. When I got to the hallway, the light from the bedroom was enough to see it crouching and hunched over about 20 feet away. He turned around and looked directly at me, covered in blood. I flipped the switch on the wall and saw my daughter Clara.
The creature ran down the stairs while my husband and I rushed to help our daughter. She was very badly injured and spoke only once more in her short life. She said, “He is the Rake.”
My husband drove his car into a lake that night while rushing our daughter to the hospital. He did not survive.
Being a small town, news got around pretty quickly. The police were helpful at first, and the local newspaper took a lot of interest as well. However, the story was never published and the local television news never followed up either.
For several months, my son Justin and I stayed in a hotel near my parent’s house. After we decided to return home, I began looking for answers myself. I eventually located a man in the next town over who had a similar story. We got in contact and began talking about our experiences. He knew of two other people in New York who had seen the creature we now referred to as the Rake.
It took the four of us about two solid years of hunting on the internet and writing letters to come up with a small collection of what we believe to be accounts of the Rake. None of them gave any details, history or follow up. One journal had an entry involving the creature in its first 3 pages, and never mentioned it again. A ship’s log explained nothing of the encounter, saying only that they were told to leave by the Rake. That was the last entry in the log.
There were, however, many instances where the creature’s visit was one of a series of visits with the same person. Multiple people also mentioned being spoken to, my daughter included. This led us to wonder if the Rake had visited any of us before our last encounter.
I set up a digital recorder near my bed and left it running all night, every night, for two weeks. I would tediously scan through the sounds of me rolling around in my bed each day when I woke up. By the end of the second week, I was quite used to the occasional sound of sleep while blurring through the recording at 8 times the normal speed. (This still took almost an hour every day)
On the first day of the third week, I thought I heard something different. What I found was a shrill voice. It was the Rake. I can’t listen to it long enough to even begin to transcribe it. I haven’t let anyone listen to it yet. All I know is that I’ve heard it before, and I now believe that it spoke when it was sitting in front of my husband. I don’t remember hearing anything at the time, but for some reason, the voice on the recorder immediately brings me back to that moment.
The thoughts that must have gone through my daughter’s head make me very upset.
I have not seen the Rake since he ruined my life, but I know that he has been in my room while I slept. I know and fear that one night I’ll wake up to see him staring at me.
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My wife and I moved into our new apartment just a few months ago. Before this, we lived in a large cottage overlooking a beautiful lake. It was my wife’s dream home for the three years we lived there. We didn’t want to leave, but it was a necessary step for us.
You see, Jessica and I used to live down south. Everything was going well for a while, but my law firm decided to promote me out of the blue. It was unexpected, but I couldn’t have been more grateful. Unfortunately, the job entailed transferring to another one of our many branch locations. The one in question was in New England. We spoke long and hard on the matter, but eventually, Jess agreed to the move.
It’s important to note that the dollar doesn’t stretch as far up north as it does down south. It’s also harder to find employment. That’s why we were downgrading our living space. Until Jess could find another job, we would have to suffer. At least, that’s the way she looked at it.
Tensions were high the first few weeks after the move. I could tell Jess was irritable. She missed our old house, our old friends, and working a steady job. She had nothing to do with all of her free time, so she was bored out of her skull. This led to many fights. For a while, it seemed like we would never settle in.
About a month after the move, things started looking up. Jess found temporary work as a part-time editor at the local TV station. She loved the work and couldn’t have been happier with her co-workers. I couldn’t have been happier for her; everything seemed to be fine for a while. Not perfect, but fine.
This was when the sleep-talking began. It was to be expected, and honestly, I’m surprised it didn’t start up sooner. You see, my wife is a restless sleeper whenever there’s a big change in her life, good or bad. It happened when we got married, when we moved into our first home, and when she had the miscarriage (I’ll touch more on that later). Jess knows she sleep-talks because I used to bring it up from time to time. I would laugh each morning, recalling the weird things she said the night before. This always made her uncomfortable. She seemed to be embarrassed by it. That’s why, after her first night of sleep-talking in our new apartment, I didn’t say anything.
The sleep-talking went on for a couple of weeks. It was at this time that Jess’ temp job at the TV station came to an end. Without a job to keep her mind off of things, her nightly outbursts became much worse. She began screaming at odd times during the night, in which I would be forced to calm her down.
One night, her screams turned into tears. As she was crying, she said something I’ll never forget.
“I wish you were dead.”
I knew my wife was asleep, but as I sat there by her side, calming her the best I could, I felt the need to press the matter.
“You wish who were dead, hon?”
To my surprise, she responded.
“You.”
This caught me off guard. It’s a strange thing to want your husband dead, and even stranger while you’re asleep.
“Why?”, I asked.
“You’re ruining my life.”
Those four words cut deep. Whether they were meant or merely the product of a tired mind, they were the kind of words that demanded self-reflection. I wondered for a moment if I truly was ruining her life. Or at least if I were to blame for her night terrors.
My wife remained silent for the rest of the night. I know this because I stayed up. Contemplation and worry kept me from a good night’s rest. I didn’t believe for a second that my wife really wanted me dead, but her late-night antics were certainly a cause for concern. Between the screaming episodes and the morbid dialogue, this was the worst her condition had ever been.
The next morning, I came pretty damn close to telling her about what had happened, but I kept thinking about how she’d react and what she’d say. It was too much. I didn’t want to burden her any more than I already had, especially after she’d just been laid off. I also didn’t want to have another fight. In light of this, I kept my mouth shut.
The following night, the screams were gone. This was a comfort, but a fleeting one. Out of the blue, just as I was about to shut my eyes and call it a night, the sleep-talking commenced once again.
“Sometimes I think about how I’d do it…”
I chalked this statement up to pure, dream-induced nonsense, but then she continued.
“While you’re asleep in bed, I’ll get up and go to the kitchen.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, but as she kept speaking, it dawned on me. There were some moments of inaudible gibberish, but from the bits and pieces that were fluent, I could paint a pretty good picture of what she was describing.
“…reach into… grab knife… over and over again… blood oozing off the bed… can’t ruin my life anymore…”
My wife was describing her plan to murder me. As deeply unsettling as this was, I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself. It was just a dream, after all – nothing more. I can’t say I haven’t done some weird things in my own dreams – things I would never do in real life. Jess was mad at me over the move, and she was working out her frustrations while she slept. At least that’s what I convinced myself.
The sleep-talking continued for a few weeks. I hoped that Jess’ midnight venting sessions were doing her some good, but without a degree in psychology, I couldn’t be certain. All I could do was listen to her ramble about offing me each night and wait for her condition to run its course. The longest her sleep-talking had ever lasted was a month, so it was safe to say it would be over soon.
A month passed, then two. Jess didn’t let up. Every night, it was the same routine. Either incoherent nonsense or babblings about how she’d like to hurt me. It was getting old, but one night changed everything. As my wife slept, she uttered some words that tore right through my heart.
“I lost my baby because of you.”
My emotions swirled about and formed a sour concoction that rested in the pit of my stomach. This time, I had to know what she meant.
“What do you mean, hon?”
There was a brief moment of silence, but eventually, Jess offered me an answer. There was some more gibberish mixed in, but she was able to get her point across.
“…you made me want kids… you put life in me… now I’m alone…”
This struck a nerve and caused a few tears to roll down my cheeks. It was my idea to have a kid. Jess never wanted children, but she made herself want them for me. That’s why, after the miscarriage, I was surprised to find her absolutely devastated. I had no clue how much she’d warmed up to the idea of having a baby.
My tears were interrupted by more sleep-talking, of the worst variety.
“I will kill you. I promise.”
That was the last thing she said all night. It’s been roughly a week since my wife made that promise. As disturbing as that threat was, I could have easily brushed it off with the rest, assuming it too was the product of stress and was nothing for me to worry about. Unfortunately, I can’t stop worrying about it. Jess is scaring the crap out of me. I’m now taking short naps and sleeping with one eye open, and it’s all because of one thing…
Now, she’s sleepwalking.
The author of this story wrote it for free. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving him a tip. Any amount helps! Visit his donation page today. If you want to feature this story on your YouTube channel, don’t forget to follow the author’s narration instructions.
WRITTEN BY: Christopher Maxim (Contact • Other Stories • Subreddit)
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You know that horror movie trope about mirrors? The one where the protagonist is near a mirror and they look or shift away from the mirror for just a moment, and when they look back, a ghost, killer, or some other entity appears, and then usually rapidly disappears when they turn around? I’ve always disliked looking into mirrors, and for a while, I convinced myself that it was caused by an overactive imagination combined with seeing this situation one too many times in a movie.
But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that it’s much more than that. I don’t dislike looking into mirrors, I’m afraid of it. Something has always just felt…off about it. I recognize the image in my reflection as me, but it has never felt familiar. I brought it up to a friend once, and she goggled at me for a moment, and then laughed, though I could hear a tinge of fear behind it.
“What do you mean, you don’t recognize your reflection? How is that even possible? It’s the same reflection that you’ve been staring at your whole life!”
And she was right, of course. But that was part of the problem. My reflection has never felt normal to me. Not in the way that it should. Not in the way that it does to other people. I’ve observed the reflections of friends and family members when they’re standing near mirrors. It doesn’t feel the same. It feels connected to them. A simple mirror image. Even when their eyes meet mine in the mirror, I don’t feel the oppressive feeling of “other” that I get when I meet my own eyes in my reflection.
With no explanation that seemed to fit my experiences, I chalked it up to it just being a weird quirk and decided to just get on with my life. When I moved into my first apartment by myself, I removed all of the mirrors, except for one that I kept in my guest room. It stayed covered with a sheet unless I absolutely needed to use it. You’d be surprised how well you can get by without mirrors when you’ve been doing it your whole life. I even got pretty good at applying makeup without seeing what I was doing.
Every once in awhile, I’d catch my reflection in a mirror in a public bathroom or if I looked wrong into my rearview mirror, and it would set my heart racing. I always felt menaced when it happened and it would take me a few moments to calm down again. But all in all, I was doing fairly well with my mirror avoidance strategies. However, that all changed one day at work.
I work in the artifact restoration department at my city’s history museum. It’s typically fascinating, delicate, and detailed work and I love it. I mostly work with pottery or statues and carvings, but I always knew that one day someone would bring me an antique mirror to restore and I would have no choice but to do it. I had been at the museum for five years and it still hadn’t happened. I had almost convinced myself that I was in the clear. Alas, that was not the case.
It was late on a Friday when it was first brought to me. The museum director had it wheeled in under a sheet but I immediately knew what it was. I could tell from the dread that practically exploded inside me. He beamed at me as he whipped the sheet off.
“Isn’t it magnificent?” he crowed. “Early 1700s. French.” He smiled at me, waiting for my exclamations over its beauty, I’m sure.
My breath felt like it was caught in my throat as I stared down my full reflection for the first time in what had been years. It looked back at me, also with a petrified expression, but it felt different. Like my reflection’s face was an act. A mimicking of my face, not an exact copy. I stood transfixed for a minute, trapped under my own gaze. Suddenly the director stepped into my line of view, blocking the mirror from my sight.
“Well? What do you think? Gorgeous, isn’t it? Doesn’t look like it needs too much work. A little spit shine, maybe,” he said with a grin, winking at me.
“Yes, gorgeous,” I mumbled.
He must have noticed how white I had gone, because he re-covered the mirror and put his hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t stress about it. I know you’ll do a great job! And don’t worry about starting today. You can get cracking on Monday.” With that, he turned and left the room, leaving me alone with the mirror.
I put my head in my hands and rubbed my temples with my thumbs.
“Ok, you can do this,” I whispered to myself. “You have the whole weekend to prepare.”
I looked up at the clock. 5:15. I grabbed my things and headed for the door. I’d deal with the mirror on Monday.
I had almost made it all the way out of the building when I realized I had left my keys on my work table.
“Shit,” I moaned. But there was nothing to be done for it. I needed the keys to lock up the building.
Before I opened the door back to my workspace, I took a deep breath.
“It’s just a stupid mirror,” I said to myself.
I stepped into the room. Everything looked normal. I stepped quickly past the mirror to my desk. I bent to open the drawer where I kept my keys, and when I turned around, the sheet that had been covering the mirror moments before was in a pile on the floor in front of it. My knees went weak and I had to grab onto my desk to keep them from buckling.
“It just fell, that’s all,” I whispered out loud. “When I walked by it quickly, it made a breeze that knocked it off.”
I felt deep down that that was not what had happened at all, but saying it out loud gave me enough courage to approach the mirror to replace the sheet.
Once I was in front of it, I knelt down to grab the sheet, never once taking my eyes off of my reflection. As I straightened back up, I turned to face the mirror head on.
With one hand, I reached out and lightly pressed my fingertips against my reflection’s. My fingers stopped at the cold, hard glass. It was cold enough that the warmth from my fingers fogged up a little area around each tip. My reflection had the tiniest of smiles playing around her lips. I didn’t feel myself smiling, but it was such a small one perhaps I didn’t notice myself doing it. I rearranged my face into grotesque poses just to make sure my reflection did it, too. She did, but it brought me little comfort. I took a step forward until my face was practically touching the mirror. I could see every pore, every freckle. It looked familiar but it felt alien. I breathed onto it, fogging the surface in front of my face. I slowly traced a heart into the fog. I saw my reflection do the same, but then I noticed something odd. I couldn’t see the heart I drew in the reflection. My heart began to thump wildly in my chest. I hastily used my sleeve to wipe away the remnants of my breath. The fog in the reflection, however, remained.
I sucked in a sharp breath of air and took a staggering step back. I pressed my palms into my eyelids until I saw stars. I slowly counted to ten and opened my eyes. All I could see was my reflection staring worriedly back at me. She looked pale and faint, exactly how I felt. But it still didn’t look or feel quite right.
I threw the sheet back over the mirror and ran out of the building. By the time I arrived home, I had calmed down significantly. Enough that I was suddenly able to remember that I had a date that night. I groaned out loud. I didn’t really want to go, but I actually did like this guy. We had already been on a few dates and had hit it off well. So I pulled myself together the best I could. By the time Nick arrived to pick me up, I had shaken off the vestiges of my earlier terror.
While at dinner, he asked me how my day had been. I hesitated, not wanting to tell him about what had happened, or about my irrational and odd reactions to mirrors. But I suddenly realized that I had a desperate desire to tell someone about what had happened, even if it made me sound crazy. I relayed the story to him, never once looking into his eyes. I didn’t want to see what I knew would be reflected there. Fear, anxiety, disgust. But when I finished and did look up, he was simply studying me. After a moment, he reached out and took my hand.
“You know what I read, once?” he asked. I shook my head silently.
“It was on one of those micro-blog, social media sites. It said, ‘What if the only reason we can’t walk through mirrors is because our reflection blocks us? What if they know that the other side is horrifying and painful and they are trying to keep us from ever crossing over?’” He shrugged. “Just a weird thing I read. But it sounds like yours isn’t trying to protect you, it’s trying to get out of there,” he said with a laugh. “Wouldn’t that be something? That would explain why you feel like you do!”
I sat in stunned silence. My throat was as dry as the desert. I had to forcefully swallow several times before I could speak again. “Yeah, that would be something.”
My mind was racing with what he had said as we left the restaurant. His little “theory” perfectly described how I felt, but I didn’t know what to do with that information. It was nonsense, after all.
I wanted only to go home at that point, but Nick grabbed my hand. “I actually have something in mind for us to do tonight. But it’s a surprise!”
I sighed internally, but smiled at him. “Sure. Lead the way.”
We caught a cab and got out in front of what looked like an old abandoned warehouse. I might have thought that’s what it was, too, if it wasn’t for the line of people out the door.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“It’s an adventure space!” he said with a huge smile. “Kind of like a playhouse for grownups! I’ve seen it advertised all over the place. There’s supposed to be things to explore and climb on. Stuff like that!”
I couldn’t help but smile at his infectious excitement. “Ok. Let’s check it out,” I said with a giggle.
The first few rooms were indeed a lot of climbing and twisting and bending and crawling. We kept losing each other and then finding each other by the sound of our laughter. I was surprised at how much fun I was having.
He grabbed my hand as we moved towards the last room. “I think you’ll like this one the best!” he said, pulling me forward.
I was about to ask “why,”, but the word died on my lips as we walked through the doorway. It was a room full of mirrors. A much larger and more terrifying version of a funhouse made for children. He shoved me further into the room so that the door behind us slammed shut.
“To help you get over your fear,” he said with another shove.
Never before had I felt the level of fear that rose in my chest than at that moment. It was all-consuming. It wiped nearly every other thought from my mind. I was facing down hundreds of my own reflection, and they looked horrifying. I turned to Nick to beg him to help me out of there, but he had disappeared.
“Nick?” I croaked, my voice cracking with terror. “Nick!” I screamed. I heard him laughing as he shouted, “This way!”
I stumbled forward, hands outstretched, unable to tell which way was correct. Tears began pouring out of my eyes as I struggled to breathe under the weight of my panic. Every direction I looked was a reflection of myself, each one looking more ominous than the last.
I turned a corner and saw hundreds of reflections of the back of my head, all lined up in a row. I was paralyzed with fear.
I closed my eyes and took a few shuttering, deep breaths. “Nick?” I called out again. This time, I got no answer. I knew to get out I was going to have to open my eyes. There was no way I was making it out of there blind. I opened my eyes and was greeted with the same sight I had seen when I had closed them. I exhaled loudly, a tiny wave of relief hit me. I heard a noise to my right and turned my head that way. “Nick?” I asked again. When I looked forward again, all of my reflections were facing away from me…all except the one in front. She was facing me with a horrible grin plastered onto her face.
She beckoned for me. As if in a trance, I could only shake my head. When I didn’t move forward, her grin turned into a snarl and she began slamming her fists against the glass. I let out a bloodcurdling scream as I saw my vision go spotty. I stepped back in such a panic that I smashed into the mirror behind me. I felt a sharp pain in the back of my head as a shower of glass rained down around me.
I’m certain I passed out for a moment, both from pain and fear. When I came to, I could feel something warm and sticky dripping down my back. I reached up my hand and it came away bloody.
“Fuck,” I moaned. I could faintly hear Nick yelling for me. I dragged myself up into a sitting position, wincing as my hands and legs got further cut up from the glass.
Across the room, I could see Nick, and hundreds of Nick’s reflections, kneeling down in front of me. I closed and rubbed my eyes, shaking my head in the process. How could Nick be with my reflection when he wasn’t here with me?
“I must have hit my head harder than I thought,” I thought to myself.
I could hear him talking, but it sounded muted and far away. I heard the word “help” but not much more. He stood up and sprinted for the door.
I couldn’t tell if he was coming back or not, and as it seemed like I could get up and walk, I decided to try. I was still anxious to get out of this hall of horrors. I finally made it to the exit door. It had become extremely foggy and unseasonably cold while we were inside. The air had a terrible metallic tang to it that filled my nose and mouth. I shivered in the wind that whipped brutally around me. As I glanced around, I realized that I didn’t see anyone else nearby. No people, no cars, nothing. Grimacing, I whipped out my phone to call for an ambulance myself, but the battery was dead.
“Come on!” I yelled in frustration. I slowly started hobbling towards the road. I figured I could at least catch a cab. But there was no one on the road, either. I began to cry again. What a nightmare this night turned out to be. I staggered home, alone and freezing.
When I got back inside, I plugged my phone in. I needed to let someone know that I was hurt and where I ended up. When the phone powered on, a barrage of texts came in, mostly from Nick. But they were all jumbled up. A random mix of letters, numbers, and symbols. I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it. I tried to send a text back, but it refused to send. I couldn’t even get a signal to make a call. Panic, bitter like bile, threatened to rise up again, but I fought it off. I would deal with the shoddy cell service later. For now I needed to take care of myself.
Once I started to clean myself up, I quickly realized that most of my cuts were shallow or superficial. I was able to get the glass out and get everything cleaned up on my own. Well, every piece except one. I could feel one near the top of my head that I just couldn’t get a good grip on. I closed my eyes and let out a deep breath. I was going to need to use the mirror.
I hobbled into the guest room and slowly pulled away the sheet. Before, there had been nothing more frightening than seeing my reflection in the mirror. But that night, I realized there was one thing more terrifying than seeing my reflection in the mirror. Not seeing it at all.
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Dan was sick of rural America. He wanted nothing more than to be back in Chicago, far away from anything resembling a cornfield. Instead, he was driving through an Iowa winter with huge, white fields stretching into the distance on every side. Every five minutes a lonely farmhouse would appear off in the distance, a long, snow-paved driveway between it and the highway. The road felt like it was cut off from the rest of humanity, a single dark line through an otherwise pale, lonely world. It had been half an hour since he’d seen another car. Then there was the cold. Even with the car heater on full blast, the bitter cold seeped in through the windows.
Dan looked into his rearview mirror and saw a large, dark mass of clouds rolling across the sky behind him. He couldn’t tell which direction they were heading, but he hoped it was away from his destination. Looking back in front of him, Dan saw a road sign to the right. He only caught a glimpse as he went by, hoping to see that the town he was heading for was nearby. Unfortunately, ice and snow clung to the front of the sign, preventing him from seeing anything other than a C or an O. Dan was looking for a town that started with an O. As the turn approached, Dan decided that he needed a break from driving on the god-forsaken highway for a bit anyway. Even if it wasn’t the town he was looking for, maybe he could get something to eat and at least talk to someone. Eight hours of icy roads had taken its toll. Dan turned right down the smaller, but thankfully plowed and salted, country road.
Five minutes down the road, Dan saw a large sign saying “Welcome to Campsong”. He had never heard of the place and it definitely was not where he wanted to be. Checking his watch, he saw that it was nearly 7 o’clock. He had time to get some food and still make it before midnight.
As the first streetlights from Campsong came into view, a building appeared along the left side of the road. There was something off about it that made Dan want to take a closer look. Slowing down the car, he could see the structure illuminated by a single streetlight that seemed to be placed there just for it. It was an old, abandoned shop with a large, battered sign that read ‘Mallock’s Meats’ in faded letters. Most of the windows were shattered. Dan assumed kids had thrown rocks at them. There was the usual spattering of graffiti, some of it half artistic. And then there was something else painted on the front of the store, much larger than the other graffiti. It took Dan a few moments to realize that it was a skeletal eagle. The artwork was rough, but not bad. The skeleton’s head was rolled back, screeching up into the sky. Ragged patches of shadowy feathers hung beneath the arm bones. Dan stared at the painting for almost a minute before realizing that he had brought the car to a full stop in the middle of the highway. He took one last glance at Mallock’s Meats and drove on into Campsong.
More village than town, Campsong appeared to be about thirty buildings in the middle of nowhere. As Dan rolled to a stop at an intersection in the middle of town, an old pickup puttered through the road in front of him and pulled into a parking lot filled with two cars, three pickups, and a tow truck. Dan assumed that that must be the place to go in this town. Turning into the lot, Dan saw a sign above the door that read “M’s Tavern” in red, blocky letters. Dan parked the car in one of the few empty spots. Before getting out of the car, he pulled the zipper on his coat up to his throat. He’d paid a couple of hundred dollars for the insulated coat and on that night it was worth every penny. He hopped out of the car onto the cracked asphalt of the parking lot. Making his way towards the rough, wooden door, Dan had to swerve around a pile of cigarette butts in the middle of the lot. A small paper sign hung on the outside of the door reading ‘Saturday Special: Tenderloin Sandwich’. Dan didn’t think that sounded too bad as he swung open the door, hoping he didn’t get a splinter off of it.
As soon as Dan entered, the smell of tobacco smoke hit him. Apparently the law against smoking in bars was taken as a suggestion here. The hazy interior looked almost exactly as Dan had pictured it. The walls were all fake wood panels with random sports teams’ logos plastered to them. Several cheap-looking tables were surrounded by at least two different styles of chairs. Four patrons circled a pool table in the back. They appeared to be the source of most of the smoke in the building. The bar itself was to his left. It ran the length of the building and looked as though it might fall apart at any time. Four men sat at the right end of the bar, occasionally yelling at a TV showing a football game. Dan took a seat in the middle of the bar, not wanting to sit next to the other customers, but not wanting to make it look like he didn’t. He didn’t care about the football game. Dan was more of a baseball fan.
Almost as soon as he sat down, a man came in from the back of the room and slipped behind the bar. After making sure the men in front of the TV were okay, he walked down to where Dan was sitting.
“M, I presume?” asked Dan. The bartender chuckled. He was a nice-looking guy that Dan assumed was in his mid-30’s.
“The name’s Mike,” the man said in a calm, measured voice. “But yes, this is my place. Just getting into town?”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” said Dan. “Can I get a rum and coke and one of those tenderloins?”
“The cook just left for the night, actually,” said Mike, grabbing a bottle of rum and a glass. “But I can get you that drink.” Dan was annoyed that he couldn’t get his sandwich, but he wasn’t keen on making a scene in the middle of a dive bar. “Stopping here or going to Arbormill like everyone else?”
“Um…neither,” said Dan. “I’m heading to Odela.”
“Ah,” said Mike. “Then you came down the wrong road.” He sat the finished drink down in front of Dan. “Nothing this way but Campsong and Arbormill.”
“What kind of a name is Campsong?” asked Dan, taking a sip.
“Well, it used to be something French,” said Mike. “Then they changed it.”
“Why?”
“To make it less French,” said Mike, walking back down the bar to grab a few of the guys some more beers out of the cooler.
“What’s in Arbormill?” asked Dan as Mike walked over to the cash register in front of him.
“You haven’t heard?” asked Mike as he rang up the drinks. “Arbormill is the new ghost capital of the world.” He finished ringing them up and turned back around to Dan. “All sorts of stories started coming out of there a few months back and now every ghost hunter and their sister wants to go there.”
“And you’re making bank off the tourists?” asked Dan, taking a larger swig of his drink.
“Let’s just say I’m getting plenty out of it,” said Mike. “So what’s a city boy like you doing in Odela?”
“That obvious?” asked Dan. Mike just shrugged. Dan figured there was no harm in telling the bartender his business. He didn’t plan to be back in Campsong ever again. “My great aunt just died. I’m heading to the funeral.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mike.
“Don’t be,” said Dan. “We weren’t what you’d call close. And I’m pretty sure she moved back to the old family home in the middle of nowhere just so people would have to drive all the way out here.” There was more than a hint of spite in Dan’s voice that he was sure was not lost on the bartender. The customer closest to Dan had his head tilted just enough that Dan suspected he was listening in as well.
“Not a family man, eh?” asked Mike. Dan laughed a bit too loudly. He sucked down the last of his drink before answering. He could feel the alcohol barely starting to hit him.
“My family has a tradition when someone dies,” said Dan. “They get there as soon as possible, pretend to be sad, and then loot everything they can.”
“Sounds fun,” said Mike. “I’m sure your family reunions are a blast.” Dan sighed and glanced over at the group in front of the TV. A couple of them quickly looked away. It seemed like the out-of-towner was entertainment for the night. When he turned back to Mike, he found a fresh drink sitting in front of him.
“Thanks,” said Dan, not asking how he got that out so quickly. He took a sip from the new drink and then went back to talking. “The last time there was a family cash grab, the old lady grabbed something that was one hundred percent mine out of my parents’ house. I’ll be damned if anyone else is going to get it.”
“Well, good luck,” said Mike, avoiding the obvious question of what the item was. “And watch out in Odela.”
“Why’s that?”
“Arbormill has ghosts and Odela has monsters,” said Mike, half grinning. “Most of them are in the state prison there, though.”
“And what does Campsong have?” asked Dan, making a note to vacate the county as quickly as he could.
“We have a dive bar,” said Mike, breaking into a loud laugh. Dan heard a chortle from the group at the end of the bar.
“And apparently a quality butcher shop,” muttered Dan. Something changed in the room as soon as the words left his mouth. Everything suddenly got quieter. Even the men playing pool in the back had one eye firmly on Dan. Dan had already felt awkward, but for the first time that night, he felt a twinge of fear go down his spine. Mike leaned onto the bar towards Mike and looked him in the eye.
“Yeah, Mallock’s,” said Mike, his voice lowering. “That’s an interesting story.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” said Dan, checking his watch. The numbers were slightly blurry. Mike must have been making the things strong. Mike stood back up and looked around the bar with slight trepidation. Dan assumed he was just adding suspense, but there was something about the change in the other customers that gave him a sliver of doubt.
“It was back in 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression. A man called Walton Mallock came to Campsong and opened his butcher shop,” began Mike. His voice took on a strange edge as he told the story. It sounded like how someone would tell a ghost story around a campfire. “He came from Arbormill back when people didn’t trust anyone that came from there all that easily. There and Odela were the last couple of towns that had Malcaw blood left in them.”
“Malcaw?” asked Dan.
“Old Native tribe that used to live around here in Eldona County.”
“And people around here weren’t particularly fond of Indians?” asked Dan. Mike gave him a look that had the tiniest bit of anger in it. Dan shut up and took another drink.
“The Malcaw were a really old tribe that believed in really old ways,” said Mike. “Every other tribe around here was terrified of them. They used to say that dark gods walked in Malcaw villages. They said bone eagles flew overhead.” Dan thought back to the unnerving image painted onto the side of Mallock’s Meats. Looking around, he saw that everyone else in the bar was listening to the bartender. They’d probably heard it a hundred times, but they still had to listen to the obviously well-practiced story. “So no, they didn’t like the Malcaw. And most of them had what they called the Malcaw eyes; pale blue. Mallock had them too. So he was on the outs already with most of the town; until he actually started selling meat.”
“Then they liked him fine,” asked Dan, taking another swig of his drink.
“Oh yes, they did,” said Mike. “Cheapest meat in the state, courtesy of his brother’s farm back in Odela. And every Sunday he’d put up a sign for the Sunday Special. People would come here from miles around for the barbeque pork on Sundays.” Dan thought he knew where the story was heading. “And so everyone in Campsong was happy. Then, one day, a guy goes to see his sister in Odela. As he’s leaving, he decides he wants to go see Mallock’s brother and thank him for giving him the meat so cheap.”
“Let me guess,” said Dan. “There was no Mallock farm?” Mike scoffed as if he had planned on him asking that.
“Oh no, there was a farm all right,” said Mike. “And the man tells Mallock’s brother that the cows and chickens are all well and good, but where were the pigs for the Sunday Special? The brother tells him that he hasn’t had pigs in years. So he asks if there’s another Mallock farm in Arbormill. His brother says no, the only other Mallock in Odela is his other brother, the sheriff in at the jail.”
“And there it is,” said Dan, slurring his words slightly. “So he was sending him prisoners to cook?”
“Saw that coming, did you?” asked Mike, looking Dan straight in the eye.
“Kind of hard not to,” said Dan. Mike grinned, not looking as pissed as Dan thought he might for blowing the big finale. As Dan went to take another drink, he noticed that the group at the end of the bar was still watching Mike intently.
“That’s not the end,” said Mike. “After the man got back to Campsong, he riled up a mob and they headed out to Mallock’s to bring him to justice.”
“To lynch him, in other words,” said Dan.
“More or less,” said Mike. “So they drag Mallock out of his shop and he stands there in front of the mob and asks them ‘Is this how you treat me after I’ve fed you all for a year? You all still have money in your pockets because I saw a different way. We can still go back to that way if we stop this right now and nobody outside Campsong ever has to know.” Mike paused.
“What happened then?” asked Dan.
“They took a vote. The whole mob of fifty people decided right there whether to hang Mallock or let him keep doing his thing.”
“And?”
“You saw the butcher shop,” said Mike, bending down to where his eyes were inches away from Dan’s. “What do you think?” Mike whispered in a strange, eerie tone. Dan lowered his eyes to the bar while he considered. Mike suddenly slammed one hand onto the bar. Dan leapt back in shock and fell straight out of the chair onto the damp wood floor. A moment later, every other customer in the bar was laughing their ass off. Dan dusted himself off and got back into the seat. Although Mike wasn’t laughing, he was smiling very broadly.
“I couldn’t resist,” said Mike. “Yes, they lynched his ass. No more Sunday Special for them.”
Dan finished his drink with a long gulp and slammed the glass onto the bar.
“That a true story?” he asked, leaning back into the chair.
“Honestly, I don’t think anyone even knows anymore,” said Mike. Dan chuckled and looked down at the other customers. Apparently, after they got to see Mike scare the new guy, they had lost interest. Looking down at his watch, he saw that it was almost 9 o’clock.
“Wow,” said Dan. “I have really got to get going. How do I get to Odela from here?”
“It’s easy enough,” said Mike. “Just go back to the highway, turn right, and it’s going to be the first left after you go over the river.”
“Great,” said Dan, getting to his feet. “How much do I owe you?”
“Not so fast,” said Mike. Dan froze in place. “How about a shot on the house to remember Campsong by?” Dan had never heard a bartender offer free booze right before a guy was about to drive off.
“No thanks,” said Dan. “I don’t do shots. They’re the main reason I have an ex-wife.”
“Oh come on,” said Mike with a broad grin. “I have a very good house shot here.” He pulled a clear bottle of dark red liquid out from underneath the bar. “I call it the Mallock.” He poured a small amount into a shot glass and pushed it towards Dan. Perhaps it was because of the story, or maybe because of how much it looked like blood, but Dan wanted no part of that shot.
“It’s a very pretty shot,” said Dan. “But I still have to pass. I have a fair way to drive on some bad roads, you know.”
“I understand,” said Mike. The bartender picked up the shot and drank it in one gulp. “Your loss.” Dan grabbed a $20 bill out of his wallet and laid it on the counter.
“Keep the change,” said Dan. “For the entertainment.” Mike laughed and grabbed the money off the bar.
“You’re very welcome, good sir,” said the bartender. “You’d better get a move on though. Pretty sure I just heard them talking over there about a winter storm coming in.” Dan looked out the window and saw a spattering of snowflakes on the window. He let out a burst of profanity and ran for the door, hoping to some higher power that the storm didn’t get bad. Moments later his car sputtered to life and skidded out of the parking lot just as the snow really began to fall. Dan could feel the bartender’s eyes following him through the window.
Dan couldn’t believe how quickly the storm had rolled in. As he made his way through the intersection, he already had his wipers on full speed. As he sped past the last buildings in the town proper, the wind was howling around the vehicle, trying like crazy to blow it off the road. At his best, Dan would have had an issue driving in this weather, but with the strong drinks in him, he knew he had no business driving through that night. He had to make it to Odela, though. And he wasn’t going to stay in Campsong all night. Dan stared through the windshield as the wipers did their best to keep the snow off of it. He kept hoping the exit to the highway was closer than he thought it was.
As Dan moved slowly down the road, expecting his traction to go out at any moment, he began to hear something beneath the wind. A thump. A rattle. Sounds that he shouldn’t have been able to hear above the howling wind. He forced himself to pay full attention to the road, knowing that his drunk ass was just hallucinating sounds. It was at that moment that the sound came louder than before and from directly above his car hood. It was the sound of massive wings beating the air above him. As outright terror began to creep into Dan’s mind, a blast of wind hit the side of the car. Dan tried to straighten the car, but it was no use. The car veered to the right and off of the highway. Dan’s head began to swim and he was only aware of two things: a large object right in front of him and the sound of giant, bony wings.
Dan didn’t know how long it was before he woke up, but he immediately felt the bitter cold and a shooting pain in his shoulder. Looking around, Dan realized he was still in the battered shell of what used to be his car. It must have slid sideways into whatever he had hit because the passenger side door had been ripped off. A frigid wind blew in through the gaping hole in the vehicle, testing the limits of his heavy, insulated coat. Dan unfastened his seatbelt, which he assumed was the cause of the pain in his shoulder and also the reason he was alive. Wanting to get a better view of the situation, he shoved the driver’s side door open. Dan fell out of the car into foot-deep snow. He brushed the snow off his coat as he stumbled to his feet and found himself in a halo of light. He looked up through the still-falling snow to see a single streetlight that was now bent at an angle. He knew where he was. Dan looked past the light and saw the ruined façade of Mallock’s Meats.
The butcher shop looked almost ethereal through the gusting snow. It was there one moment and gone the next, obscured by the storm. Dan quickly decided that there was only one thing to do. He had to get inside the building before he froze to death. He could think up a more extensive plan once he was out of the blizzard. As he made his way past the front end of his car, he saw that most of the passenger side of the hood was crushed in. He was unsure whether his insurance was going to cover any of this mess. He stumbled through the mound of snow in the center of the abandoned parking lot and found himself standing before the painting of the bone eagle. He began to shiver as he looked up into the dark skeletal eye of the mural. It wasn’t entirely the cold that made him do so. Dan had to tear his eyes away from it once again as he went for the still-intact door to his left.
Dan was at least relieved to be out of the wind. The frigid air still creeped in through the broken windows, but at least the wind was at the other side of the shop. That was the only relief he found in the ruins of Mallock’s Meats. The main room of the store had a strange feeling. The pale light from the bent streetlight outside illuminated a room that felt as though time had stopped in it years ago. While it was true that the windows were broken and piles of snow lay around Dan’s feet, the rest of the shop looked as though it had not been touched by the last several decades. The tile floor was largely intact, as were three rows of shelves in the middle of the room. A long meat counter on the other side of the room was empty, but looked entirely functional beneath a thick layer of dust. The only signs of degradation were in the walls and ceiling, which were full of cracks and peeled areas of paint.
Dan moved carefully through the store and away from the windows. He saw a door behind the meat counter and thought he might be able to make it through the night in the back of the store. As he walked around the end of the counter and by three abandoned cooler doors, he took out his phone and turned on its flashlight. He considered calling someone for help, but after a moment of thought, Dan came to the conclusion that even if anyone knew where he was, they wouldn’t be able to get there until the next morning. He was on his own for the night. He reached the door behind an antique cash register that still rested on the counter. As Dan reached for the door, for the second time that night, he heard a sound that should not have been there. A low buzz emanated from behind the door. It reminded Dan of the sounds he had heard coming from meat counters while they were carving up slabs of meat. All he could imagine was a blade sawing through flesh and bone. Dan stood there staring at the door, trying to rationalize what he was hearing. It had to be the liquor making him hear things, like before in the car. He couldn’t have heard wings in the air. Dan ignored the sound, pushed open the door, and delved into the back room.
The buzz didn’t get any louder, but it didn’t go away. Dan shone his phone’s light around the room, illuminating the abandoned cutting room. He could make out a rusted metal sink, a long counter, and two doors which he supposed were the meat freezer and cooler. It had the same timeless look as the main shop room, but it at least it was slightly warmer. Dan sat down on the antique tile floor as a wave of nausea washed over him. The only thing he wanted was to pass out and figure out a way to get into Odela in the morning. He shut off his phone light and lowered his body onto the ground. He was seconds from unconsciousness when he rolled over and felt something cold and wet on his cheek.
Dan wiped the liquid off his cheek with a groan. He turned his phone light back on, expecting to see half-melted snow on his fingers. Instead, they were streaked with crimson. Dan slowly moved his eyes to the floor and saw a small puddle of blood where his head had been. He quickly began to feel around his head, searching for what he was sure would be a gushing head wound. Finding nothing but a matted area of hair, he rose to his feet and pointed his light at the counter above him. A gleaming meat cleaver lay on the counter, a small puddle of blood beneath it was running off and onto the floor below.
Dan jumped away from the blade and felt the antique sink dig into his back, a rusted edge jabbing into his back through his coat. The cleaver just lay there ominously. Dan struggled to remember whether he saw it when he came into the room. Was it another thing that wasn’t really there? As he stood there obsessing with his back against the sink, a loud cracking noise came from his right. This time, Dan could not suppress a frightened whimper from coming out of his mouth as he dropped shuddering to the floor. Something from earlier in the night came back to Dan: the state prison less than an hour away. It suddenly made more sense than anything that he had just found the lair of an escaped prisoner. Summoning what was left of his composure, Dan crept forward and grabbed the bloody cleaver off of the counter. The blade was as cold as ice. Drawing himself up to his full height and readying the cleaver, Dan spun into the doorway to face whatever was there. He instantly froze as he found himself staring into the empty eye socket of a skeletal eagle.
It stood atop the weathered meat counter, one claw perched upon the old cash register. The thing was massive, blocking his view of anything else through the doorway. Tatters of flesh and down clung to its skeletal frame. Its wings were barely cohesive masses of rotting ebon feathers. Its head bobbed back and forth, the dark socket fixed on Dan. He heard its claws scratching at the counter beneath it. Snapping out of his stupor, Dan did the only thing he could think of. He raised his arm and hurled the cleaver directly at the massive eagle. It was an awkward throw, but its aim was true. It flew directly into the eagle’s skull and passed through it. Dan could hear the cleaver land on the floor behind it with a loud thud. Dan collapsed to his knees as the vision in front of him began to fade. A moment later, the eagle was gone. It had been a hallucination after all. Everything had been. Dan was about to break into hysterical laughter when the loud cracking noise came again from behind him. Dan’s heart skipped a beat as he realized where he had heard it before. It was the sound of a freezer defrosting. He still heard the buzzing sound from before as well. It was the sound of electricity running through the building. The freezer directly behind him in the abandoned butcher shop was completely functional.
Dan took a deep breath and turned towards the freezer door. He had had enough of this night. Summoning all that remained of his composure, he began to move slowly towards the door. As he approached it, Dan could see light gleam off of the steel door; a door that looked strangely modern in the middle of the antique site. His innards felt like they had turned to ice as Dan grasped the handle on the door and pulled it open. The pale light from the streetlight outside shone just bright enough to illuminate the nightmare lurking within, where large, dark bags hung from the ceiling. The shapes inside the bags were not from any animals.
Dan didn’t scream when he saw the contents of the freezer. He didn’t run away or drop to his knees. A single thought just kept repeating in his head: I knew this was coming. The very second he had woken up in front of Mallock’s Meats he had known there would be bodies in it. And they couldn’t be real. After a few strong drinks and a probable head injury during the crash, of course he was going to be seeing things. The bartender’s tale had done a number on him and this was the end result. He had seen bloody cleavers, skeletal eagles, and now a freezer full of dead bodies. He just had to prove one thing. Dan walked forward and reached a hand out towards a large black bag, fully expecting that his hand would go right through it, returning him to a reality in which the only thing to fear was the biting cold. When he felt a thin layer of plastic over what could only be a human hand, the terror finally came. And at the very same moment, a calm, measured voice came from behind him.
“You should have taken the shot,” it said. “The rum was drugged.” Dan had no time to react before a large blow struck him on the back of the head. He fell face-first into the body bag in front of him and then collapsed onto the floor, reeling in pain. The world around him wavered slightly, but Dan remained conscious. He looked up and saw Mike the bartender illuminated by the pale light coming through the door.
“Mallock didn’t lose that vote, did he?” asked Dan in a low and distant tone. His hand groped around in the darkness, trying to find anything that might save him.
“No, he didn’t,” said Mike. “He won in a landslide.” The bartender pulled something out of his belt. Dan saw the shimmer of light off a blade. “He was my grandfather. And in his memory, Mallock’s Tavern still serves up the Sunday Special week after week, rain or shine.”
“Do they all know?” asked Dan in a whisper. “The whole town?”
“Some do,” said Mike. “Some of them suspect. But in the end, nobody does anything about it.” Dan was suddenly less annoyed that he hadn’t gotten his tenderloin.
Mike grabbed Dan and spun him belly up on the ground. He grabbed Dan’s two hundred dollar coat by the front and ran his blade top to bottom, shredding the front of the garment. Before he could protest, Mike had ripped the heavy coat off of him, leaving him defenseless against the cold.
“I like you, Dan,” said Mike, brandishing his knife. “So I’ll give you a choice. I can make it end nice and fast for you right here or I can lock you in and let you freeze to death if you want some time to make peace with things.”
“Fuck you,” said Dan, spitting out the words.
“Don’t say I didn’t try,” said Mike. He placed a foot on Dan’s chest and readied his knife. It was at that very moment that Dan’s hand felt a large, heavy piece of ice on the floor beside him. Finding a strength that he would not have believed he could muster, Dan gripped the chunk of ice and swung it wildly in front of him. Mike let out a loud scream as the block landed a blow directly on his kneecap. The bartender collapsed to the ground next to Dan grasping at his knee. Dan scrambled around and let out a wild kick at Mike’s face. It connected with a dull thud and Mike spat up blood. Dan’s head began to clear as he saw the open doorway with light streaming weakly through. He struggled to his feet and lurched out of the freezer. Stumbling through the cutting room and into the main store, he fell against the counter, grabbing it for support. Looking behind him, he saw Mike unsteadily rising to his feet. Looking towards the outside, Dan saw a spot of shining light on the floor. It was the cleaver he had thrown at the hallucination earlier.
Dan slid over the counter and landed roughly on the floor on the other side. Hearing footsteps behind him, he frantically crawled past the old shelves to where the cleaver lay on top of a mound of snow near the broken windows. Dan dove the last few feet and clutched the blade with both hands. He rose to one knee and was about to spin around and face Mike when he heard an engine revving from outside.
Dan froze in place, not wanting to look out the window. He forced himself to look up and through the now-dying blizzard. Two vehicles had joined his wrecked car around the lonely streetlight. The first was the tow truck from the tavern, which was in the process of towing his car away to somewhere no one would ever find it. The second was a large pickup with two men riding in the flatbed. Even with his clouded vision, Dan could see the scoped rifles they were holding. He was finished.
Dan’s arms went limp at his side. The cleaver gave a dull clang as it struck the old tile floor. Dan only had to wait a moment before the calm, measured voice came from behind him once more, albeit in a slightly more nasal tone.
“I really have to know now,” said Mike. “What were you going to get in Odela?”
Dan stared into the blizzard for a moment, and then began to laugh softly. Mike waited patiently as the laugh grew more frantic. It took a few seconds for Dan to compose himself again.
“It was an autographed baseball bat,” said Dan, tears beginning to well up in his eyes. “My favorite player from the local minor league team. It was in my dad’s room when he died. The old lady just took it. I just wanted it back.”
“I understand,” said Mike, after a brief silence. “And I promise you.” Dan felt the tip of a knife against the back of his neck. “If your family stops by the tavern on their way back home, I’ll bury it next to what’s left of you.” A split second before everything went dark, Dan thought he could hear the sound of bone wings echoing through the night sky.
|
Returning from the vending machine, I would often linger outside of my grandmother’s hospital room and watch my family before joining them. Dad usually stood by the window silently looking out past the treeline. My younger brother, Son-Ook would read a weathered comic book in a chair by the partition curtain. Mom sat on the edge of the bed crying and watching my grandmother make strange hand gestures in the air and mutter garbled words under her breath. Every so often, Mom would lean towards her and say in a broken voice “Hey, 어마. It’s me. Your Han-Eul. Remember me?” But each time, my grandmother’s stare remained drugged, glassy, and fixed on her withered hands that danced above the sheets.
From where I stood, I’d ponder This is what Alzheimer’s looks like. After a certain age, a grandmother’s mind starts lying to her. It pulls the worst sort of trick, swapping out the faces and voices of everyone she ever loved for those of strangers. The trick doesn’t stop at the grandmother, though. It’s also felt by those closest to her (stoic son-in-law, ambivalent grandson, devastated daughter). With the onset of the paranoia, the bed-wetting, and the hallucinations, the helpless bystanders also begin to forget the sort of woman that the grandmother was before the disease. She too becomes a stranger.
The task, then, becomes a kind of mental surgery, a separation of the gentle pre-Alzheimer’s grandmother from her diseased counterpart or, as I like to call it, “the monster.” Only after eight long years was I able to separate the two. Until recently, I would get just close enough to remember the way she smelled or how her cheek felt against mine before memories of the monster invariably muscled their way back to the front. I blame most of these intrusions on one particular memory from a night many Octobers ago. It was the night when I first met the monster face to face.
***
I grew up in a small fishing village in South Korea called Jinhae. The town is currently undergoing a building boom as contractors look to accommodate growing numbers of men commuting to neighboring Busan for work. However, as a child, I remember Jinhae for it’s narrow shadowy streets cluttered with fishing nets, barrels, and dirty dogs. Brightly-dressed grandmothers chattered at the thresholds of corner stores, waving their arms with hands full of roots and herbs freshly-picked from the mountainsides; withered old grandfathers peeked from dark windows and smoked forlornly; and brown young men squished over the docks in pink galoshes with cigarettes between their cracked lips, sloshing sea water from buckets to wash away the fish guts. The whole village was hunkered down before an emerald curtain of misty mountains that sent regular gusts of wind groundward, relieving residents of the lingering stench of squid and mackerel.
It may all sound picturesque on paper. But when I was young, I hated it. It was boring. I often begged my mother and father to move somewhere less rustic, to a town that had an arcade or, at the very least, a movie screen. Before even opening my mouth, though, I always knew what answer I’d get: We’ve been over this Eun-Young! Your grandmother doesn’t want to move. We can’t very well leave her here alone, can we? This, in turn, would send me running over to my “halmoni’s” (Korean for “grandmother”) house where I’d ask for perhaps the hundredth time why she wouldn’t consider living in a newer nicer place. As I saw it, the case practically made itself. My halmoni’s house was tiny. It was a one story concrete tin-roofed edifice with a sliding glass door and a bank of weathered windows along the front and side. She often spent her nights in one of the three rooms huddled by a smoky old charcoal heater changing out buckets that caught leaks in the ceiling. It was a dive and I couldn’t see why she wouldn’t want to live somewhere more comfortable. But, like my parents, halmoni always gave the same answer: “Eun-Young, you know that I want you to move to a place that will make you happy. I have told your mother and father so. But I cannot come with you.” When I asked her why, she would mutter some platitudes about old people being stubborn before scuttling into the kitchen. Even at a young age, I sensed that she was deliberately hiding her true reasons for not wanting to leave Jinhae. But in Korean culture, it’s disrespectful to question an elder’s wishes beyond a certain point.
Eventually, I just stopped asking. I resolved myself to the inevitable and buckled down for a tedious life that would likely culminate with a marriage to some sad forlorn fisherman. Ok. So, I could be a little melodramatic, but from the mind of a 10-year-old, this was honestly what my prospects looked like. Day and night I thought about little else besides getting out of Jinhae, getting to that place beyond the horizon where everyone was a stranger and the neon lights buzzed ’til dawn, where women wore dresses and men smoked European cigarettes. The city. That’s where I wanted to go. Seoul. Not Busan, the closer and smaller of the two. Seoul. That was the one. The Holy Grail, the full house, and the hole-in-one all wrapped up in a million dollar bow.
I had never been to Seoul. Only seen photos. That was one of the main reasons I liked to visit my halmoni’s house, for the “Photo of Seoul.” Despite becoming a borderline recluse later in life, as a young adult, she had done a fair share of traveling. This was largely thanks to a traditional Korean musical instrument called the “gayageum.” From a young age, she had excelled at this large wooden instrument played by plucking 12 thick strings. By middle school, she was one of the top players in the region. By high school, she was one of the best in the country. It was during her junior year of high school that she won top prize in a regional contest, thereby making her eligible to compete in the national competition held in Seoul each year. In the end, my halmoni didn’t place in the contest. Yet, that didn’t stop her from becoming a sort of celebrity both within the family and around town. So proud were Jinhae residents of little Eee Seul Bee’s trip to Seoul that blown up photos of her performing on stage were plastered all over town, everywhere from the post office to the sashimi restaurants down by the docks.
This is the same photo that I’d pore over for hours whenever I’d visit my halmoni’s house. Although framed and covered in glass, she always kept it in the lowest cabinet of a large dresser in her living room. I’d pull it out and hold it up to my face, centimeters from my nose. I’d note every detail. The V-shaped cut in the end of her “hanbok” (traditional Korean dress) ribbon. The ripples, shadows, and edges of the heavy gold curtain behind her on the stage. Her fingers forming cryptic signs, captured in mid strum by the camera lens. The fragile but set and certain eyes cast downwards towards the strings. More than anything else, though, I’d focus on a hidden look of pure joy in her face. She looked nervous, yes. Excited and confident, too. But there was also the unhindered starstruck joy of a country girl who had finally made it to the city. The photo itself was taken inside a large auditorium. It could have been anywhere. But what made it a “photo of Seoul” was that look on my grandmother’s face of being young and out of her element. I’d stare into the fragmented photographic grain of her eyes and share in her joy of escape from wind and salt and mackerel guts.
From the photo, I’d wander over to a tall dark wardrobe on the other side of halmoni’s living room and squeak the ancient doors open. Pushing past the blouses, coats, and slacks, I’d come to one garment wrapped in plastic. Her hanbok. The same one she’d worn at the concert some 40 years before. The skirt was rose pink. Iridescent gusts of wind swirled across its folds. The sleeves were of soft ivory and the vest and ribbon were a milky blue adorned with geometric symbols the meanings of which I’d never know. At that age, it was the most beautiful piece of clothing I had ever seen. I was convinced that it held magic powers. Were I to put it on, I somehow knew that it would transport me out of Jinhae back to the stage in Seoul where it had made its grand debut so many years before. I never never seemed to have the chance, though. My halmoni was a generous woman, but for whatever reason, she was particularly protective towards her hanbok. I could look at it all I wanted. But like the prized figure of a toy collector, it never left its package. Still, I often dreamed about wearing that hanbok. Luckily (or so I thought at the time), I got my chance a few months later.
It was around this time when halmoni began displaying some of the early signs of what everyone thought was run-of-the-mill dementia. She’d forget the names of ingredients while cooking, wear different colored socks, and confuse relatives with one another at Chuseok (Korea’s equivalent to Thanksgiving). Nothing all that uncommon for a woman in her 60s, we thought. But then the memory loss got worse. For instance, upon visiting her one evening, my mother found halmoni sitting in a dark kitchen with the table set for two. In a dazed way, she asked “언제 우리 아빠 가 집에 올거예요?” which in English translates to “When is your father coming home?” Not such a strange question, right? The problem was that my mother’s father (halmoni’s husband) had been dead for ten years. When my mother explained this to her, halmoni’s eyes contorted in disbelief. Her head drifted downward like a birthday balloon short on air, until she glared lost and bewildered into her lap. Within a month, she couldn’t be left alone for fear that she’d set fire to the house or wander off during the night. My younger brother and I gradually took over more chores at home as my mother started living at halmoni’s place. I would still see hamoni every now and then. Only now, those eyes that had once been so pleased by my presence had grown glazed, indifferent, and at the worst moments, even suspicious. My “hi, grandma” would be answered with a prying and guarded “너누군니?” (“Who are you?”). Eventually, I started going over to her house only when my mother needed me to bring something. And even on those occasions, I wouldn’t see my grandmother. My
mother said that it was for the best until my halmoni “got better.”
It was on one such visit to halmoni’s house (delivering eggs) when my mother met me at the door, clutching a bloodied dishtowel to her thumb. She had cut it while preparing dinner and needed to run to the doctor’s house to have it stitched. Looking pale but calm, she explained that my halmoni had taken her nightly sleep aid and was now sleeping deeply in her room. “Sit in the living room,” she said. “Color or listen to the radio. Just keep watch over the house and I’ll come back very soon, ok?” Before I could say anything, she was already around the corner, clopping down the street in her house shoes.
Inside, I did as my mother had told me. I sat down in the living room and tuned the transistor to a music station. There was a creased coloring book and a rusted coffee can full of crayon stubs on the bookshelf. I pulled them down and started coloring in the the few remaining patches of white. But after about 20 minutes, I got bored. My mind drifted to the “Photo of Seoul” over in the bottom cabinet of the dresser. I took it out and inspected it as I always did, noting the long lacquered plank of the gayageum, my halmoni’s lustrous eyes, and the hanbok, that dazzling gown of pink and blue.
It was while looking at the photo that a truly blasphemous idea popped into my little 10-year-old brain. Chalk it up to all children (even the best-behaved ones) being opportunists at heart. But by combining the two factors of my mother’s wounded thumb and the sleeping pills that my halmoni had taken, I, little Eun-Young, made a startling discovery. I was alone. I mean really alone. At that moment, there were technically no adults in the house. In other words, there was no one to stop me from engaging in the one activity that was strictly forbidden in my halmoni’s house, namely, the wearing of her hanbok. Upon having this epiphany, I sat motionless for a few moments just staring in the direction of the tall dark wardrobe. It seemed to stare down at me, judging me for the crime that I was yet to commit. I switched off the radio, got up, crossed the room slowly and silently like a tight-rope walker and pulled the doors open. And there it was, already separated from the other garments, down at the end of the closet rod, in full sight, as if it had been waiting for me. After taking one long look at the door of my grandmother’s room, after listening harder than I ever had in my life for a footstep or a rustle of sheets, I unhooked the dress from the rod, pulled the plastic up over the top and slid it from its hanger. I got undressed and stepped into the hole of floor surrounded by the skirt, splayed out in rosy ripples across the vinyl floor. I pulled it up, resting the straps on my shoulders, then adorned the ivory blouse, and finally the blue vest. I tied the ceremonial knot in the ribbon on the front, then rustled over to open the bathroom door, the other side of which had a full-length mirror.
My initial reaction upon seeing myself in the glass was mixed. It didn’t fit perfectly as it had in all of my dreams. The sleeves were too long. I couldn’t even see my fingers. And the dress was pooled all around my ankles. Yet, there was still a sense of magic in wearing something so precious, so charged with memories. It had been to Seoul. The city lights had shone upon it; perhaps taxis had splashed puddle-water on its skirt. Dropping my nose to its hem, I imagined that I could even smell the steam and grime of the subway. What I’d give to go where you’ve been, I thought as I nuzzled the giant collar with my chin. With eyes closed, I swayed there before the mirror, lost in my daydreams and the –
“너누군니?” (“Who are you?”)
I spun around to find someone (or something) standing in the doorway of my grandmother’s bedroom. It wore no pants or shoes. Only a large baggy diaper and a floral shirt with stains all across the front of it. Its arms and legs looked to be nothing but bone, covered in thin layers of bruised sagging skin. And the face. My God. The bottom row of gray crooked teeth jutted out from between two cracked and scowling lips. Red scratches and brown scabs covered its cheeks and forehead. One of the eyes was blackened, making the great staring orb in the center all the more piercing. Tilting its head back, it stared down the length of its prominent nose at me with that one large eye. My breath caught in my throat. I remember thinking that it was the most frightening creature I had ever seen.
“What are you doing in my HOUSE?!”, it wailed. The final word crackled with spit. It lisped as if there was something wrong with its tongue.
My house? I thought. What does it mean by my house? At the time, I was too frightened and shocked to put the pieces together (the diaper, the familiar shirt, the past month of not seeing my halmoni even once), to realize that the thing I was staring at was none other than my own grandmother. Because I couldn’t make the connection, my young mind came to the quick conclusion that this “kway mool” (and, indeed it was a “monster”) had broken into the house. What’s more, it seemed convinced that it belonged there. Not only was it a monster. It was also insane.
It took one step over the threshold of the bedroom, never taking its eyes from mine. “What do you want?!,” it hissed. “Money?! Jewelry?!” It dragged its bare feet forward another step. Instinctively, I backed up, but the bathroom door was still open behind me. I couldn’t go any further. Another step. “My dress?!,” it screeched. “Is that what you want?!” Its large wrathful eyes drifted down and ran greedily along every line and fold of the hanbok. Long ragged breaths broke from its chest. The smell of urine and decay wafted across the room from where it stood.
It stopped for a moment under the fluorescent light in the middle of the ceiling. The electric glare lit its withered limbs, but a wild nest of hair atop its head kept any light from reaching its face. Mouth, nose, cheeks, and chin seemed to disappear, leaving only the eyes…eyes that I’ll never forget until the day I die. They were the eyes of a creature that had strayed beyond the boarders of reason, sanity, and hope. Eyes that had seen hell and wanted nothing more than to do harm, to share the pain that was too great for them to carry alone.
“That dress,” it said, pointing a twitching finger at me. “TAKE OFF THAT DRESS!!!,” it roared. Mechanically, my fingers shot down to my chest and began fumbling with the knot on the front. But having never worn a hanbok before, I had tied the knot incorrectly. I couldn’t get it undone. No matter how I burrowed my fingernails under the folds, it wouldn’t loosen.
I looked down for just a second. When I looked back up, the thing had started to charge. With both arms outstretched, it ran towards me screaming. But at the last instant, I ducked to one side. The thing crashed full force into the mirror, hitting its head and shattering the glass. It bent forward, clutching its face and whining. When it took its hands away, I saw that the mirror had sliced it across the forehead. Blood dribbled down, covering its eyes, nose, and cheeks. It looked around for a moment, dazed. But when it caught sight of me, cowering in the opposite corner of the room, its bloodied face curled into a grotesque scowl. With another scream, it ran at me. Fortunately, a door leading to the back yard was just to my left. I flung it open and ran out behind the house. A path lead off into the woods to a square of cement where my halmoni kept rows of “onggis,” large earthen pots used for storing kimchi, daenjang, and other types of food. Having played among the pots for years, I knew that most of them were full. But a few particularly large ones near the back were empty. My halmoni kept gardening supplies in those.
I heard a snap of branches and a thud somewhere behind me. Looking over my shoulder as I ran, I saw that the kway mool had tripped and fallen, likely from blood running into its eyes. That gave me time to run to one of the three largest onggis, remove the heavy ceramic lid, pull out all of the shovels and gloves, and lower myself into a crouched position inside before replacing the top. From a chipped section in the lid, I was able to see out onto the path and the rows of pots in front of mine. Within a few seconds, the thing stumbled into view there on the path, in front of the onggis. Its face, hands, and shirt were covered in blood. After making a tentative glance further down the path, it turned its attention to the pots. Growling and breathing hoarsely, it began lifting lids from atop the onggis and tossing them onto the ground. There were about 20 pots altogether and I knew that it wouldn’t be long before it reached the back row and discovered me. I clasped a hand to my mouth to stifle the sobs that broke from me uncontrollably. Another lid crashed onto the concrete. And another. Wiping blood from its face, the kway mool grunted, lifted the top of another pot, and checked
inside. Crash! Then another. Crash! Another. Crash! Another.
Then there were only the three large pots remaining. I reached down near my ankles, feeling for any object that I had missed while clearing out the onggi, anything that could be used as a weapon. But my fingers came up with only dirt and sand. I prepared to spring out as soon as the lid was lifted off.
Then, just as the kway mool prepared to lift the lid of the onggi beside mine, a cry came from down the path, near the house. “어마!” (“mother!”), it screamed. It was my mother’s voice. “Eun-Young!,” it cried again. Footsteps thudded down the path. My mother arrived at the pots and screamed when she saw the filthy bloodied creature. But to my surprise, she cried out “어마!” again and ran to it. She embraced it, stroked its face with her bandaged hand, and checked the wound on its forehead. And all at once, the kway-mool that had shown such ferocity and rage moments before became dazed, bewildered, and docile. Its thin mud-spattered legs shook as if they’d give out at any moment. The diaper it wore was sagging and over-saturated. Its cold white feet matched the color of the concrete upon which it stood. Suddenly, it became the most pathetic thing that I had ever seen.
Stumbling towards my mother like a child wanting to be held, it suddenly sobbed “My hanbok! How can I compete without my hanbok?” It reached my mother and the two held one another. A cold wind whistled around them through the tall moaning trees. The orange sun dipped behind the treeline and the forest darkened. “Please!,” it begged my mother. “Bring back my hanbok! How can I win the competition without it? How can I win and get out of this horrible town?!”
At that point, in a state of exhausted confusion, I straightened up inside the pot and lifted the lid off of the onggi. My mother caught sight of me. When she saw the soiled hanbok, her teary befuddled eyes settled into a troubled stare of realization. Without being told, she seemed to know what had happened. “Are you alright?,” she asked over the creature’s shoulder. I nodded. “Then run to the house and call an ambulance for your halmoni.” And at that moment, as I clambered out of the pot, my young mind made the connection, arrived at the realization that had been blooming since my mother had called the kway mool “어마.” Before running to make the call, I stopped in front of my mother and the “kway mool.” Our eyes met. Mine and those of that shivering injured beautiful woman whom I’d known my entire life. My halmoni. My very sick halmoni. When she saw the hanbok, she crumbled into fresh sobs and pointed towards the garment with folded hands as if begging. Fingering the now dirty dress, I looked up at her. “I…I’ll wash it for you,” I said, “and return it in the morning. I know that you need it for the competition.” She nodded. Sobbing, she whispered “내”(“Yes”). And with that promise, I dashed down the path, letting the tears come as I ran.
***
My grandmother would never return home from the ambulance ride that evening. After having her forehead stitched up at the hospital, she was placed in a special facility where she’d be less likely to harm herself as per the doctor’s recommendation. She stayed there for three months. Often she’d be in a medicated state of sedation, usually following a particularly violent episode. When she wasn’t sedated, her moods would shift between two extremes. There were the fits of rage and bouts of agitation, sure. But as she approached death, her disposition during the final month became characterized more by a heavy look of loss and sadness. She’d spend hours by the window, her watery eyes squinted and darting about as if trying to piece something together. Speech eventually left her. When she did speak, it often came out as a jumble of incoherent sounds. We looked to the tone of what she said to determine its meaning. Most of the time, it was sad or inquiring. Asking a question or commenting on something or someone long since gone.
There was, however, one thing that was always sure to raise her spirits. Her hanbok. From the morning when I first brought it freshly-cleaned to the facility, until the day she died, just looking at that dress put a smile on her face. All of the anger, sadness, or bewilderment that she might have been feeling would melt away at the sight of it. Even after she lost her grasp on the names of people and things, my halmoni’s broken mind showed enough mercy to afford her one memory…her trip to Seoul. Even a week before her death, you could lean close to her lips and distinguish single soft words whispered on the air of her breath: “가야금”(“gayageum”). “대회”(“contest”) “이길요”(“win”). And as she spoke, her small thin fingers would strum invisible strings in the air over her hospital bed.
Upon halmoni’s death, my mother let me in on a secret that my grandmother had told very few people during her life: She had never really gotten over losing that contest in Seoul. She had seen it as her ticket out of Jinhae, a town which (like me), she had found a bit too small for her dreams. Placing in that contest would have meant automatic acceptance into one of the top traditional music conservatories in Seoul. It would have meant escape from the life of a fisherman’s wife, a fate that was likely to befall her were she to stay in Jinhae. She may have held her head high upon returning to Jinhae after losing the contest. But she cried at night for months afterwards over her perceived failure. With her parents having no money to pay for a university education, my halmoni did end up staying in Jinhae where she married my grandfather, a kind but close-mouthed fisherman. She gave birth to four children and, over the years, she seemed to obtain what some might call a sense of happiness or at least contentment.
But with the onset of the Alzheimer’s, my mother in particular discovered how haunted my halmoni had been most of her life by that missed chance in Seoul so many years before. “That’s why she’d never move out of Jinhae,” my mother told me, looking down. “After losing that contest, she became terrified of failure to the point where she refused to try anything new. Although you never saw that side of her, Eun-Young, she was a hardened pessimist at heart.” At that point, my mother walked over to the closet in our house and unhooked my halmoni’s hanbok from within. It had been kept there since her passing. My mother brought it over to me and laid it in my lap. “Your halmoni and I both know how much you loved it,” she said. “I think she would have wanted you to have it, Eun-Young.” It felt so heavy sitting there on my legs, so full, thick, and charged with memories and meaning.
I won’t lie. The dress also inspired a degree of fear in me. At that young age, I couldn’t help but continually associate the dress with that night, the night I had seen my halmoni deranged and deformed into something ugly and unrecognizable. Seeing the hanbok, I invariably saw the “thing” that had taken the form of my beloved grandmother. Though the memories grew duller over time, my dreams were haunted well into my teenage years by the “kway mool” and the wide watery hate of its eyes. I’d dream that it was hunkered in a dark corner of my bedroom at night, mumbling something as it slid blood clots and strands of hair between its dirty fingers. Suddenly, it would grunt and shoot a glance over at me. As it started to stand up, I’d try to squirm out of bed and realize that I was wearing the hanbok. And for some reason, the hanbok was heavy, so heavy that I couldn’t move with it on. Once it had reached its full height, the kway mool would just stand there for a moment, looking at me with those big mean eyes ringed in bruises and blood. A bestial screech would break from its lungs and it would stomp across the room at me. And just before it reached my bed, I’d wake. I never told my family about the nightmares. But for eight years, I never took the hanbok out of my closet…never even looked at it for fear that it would bring back memories of the monster.
Then, during my senior year of high school, I received a letter offering me a large scholarship to a prestigious university in Seoul. For some reason, the moment I opened the letter, my halmoni’s hanbok came to mind. And all at once, I knew what needed to be done with it. I packed the dress and brought it to Seoul with me when I moved into my dorm. On the night when my final exams ended for the semester, I took the subway out to Bukhansan National Park. There, among the pines, I gathered some stones into a circle and filled the center with leaves and branches. From a duffle bag, I pulled out my halmoni’s hanbok and placed it there in the middle. Within two minutes of lighting the kindling underneath, the ivory sleeves of the dress were winged with flame. After the gauzy undergarment of the skirt caught, the fire poured up over the vest and engulfed the entire dress.
As it hissed and cracked, I looked up above the smoke, above the treetops, and imagined a young woman starstruck and giddy, thrumming the heavy strings of a gaygeum before a stern city audience. I saw her years later as a sad gentle woman with graying hair who stole glances at a photo kept in the bottom cabinet of a dresser once her children had gone to bed. Then came a spindly old woman warped and contorted by disease and age. So mangled became she by her own mind that her own granddaughter didn’t recognize her and mistook her for a monster. Finally, I saw her withered and dying in a hospital bed with the garbled remnants of a dream murmured on her breath. To all of these women, I said, “I’ve brought your hanbok home, Halmoni. Jinhae is far behind. I have escaped that dirty old town for the two of us. And here I will live for you and me both.”
And with these words, the monster died.
CREDIT: Daniel DuBois
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My mother loved me.
From my first memory she was always there, pulling me out of harm’s way. I was a curious child, and was constantly reaching for the hot stove or wandering outside unsupervised.
Sometimes the harm she protected me from was my own father. Everything I said and did seemed to irritate him and any loud noise or even a single word he perceived as disrespectful could earn a back hand across the face, or a swift kick in the back to send you flying down the steps. I clung to her tightly in those years, as she was the only constant, never angry or impatient with me, but full of love and hope. She stood in between his hand and my fragile body, and I’m ashamed to say that I ran and hid more than once, as he took his anger out on my dear mother.
My grandparents lived across town and were anxious for me to get of an age where I could spend the weekend or the summer. Most little boys would be excited about a weekend at his grandparents, but I feared the time when I would be forced to endure the hard back breaking summers my older cousins had seen.
The grandparents thought that hard labor was the only way a boy would grow into a strong man. As they had a large farm to tend to, they made use of their grandsons by “raising “them for the better part of their childhood, usually starting around 5 or 6, depending on the constitution of the boy. My cousins slept in the leaky barn out back, and existed on whatever scraps were thrown out at the end of the day. By the end of the summer they permeated an odor that may never wash off, an odor of sadness and pain. My female cousins lived inside the house, and would never speak of the horrors they endured. Women weren’t valued much in my family, except for one thing.
When I was barely five my mother woke me up in the middle of the night, covering her hand across my mouth and signaling for me to keep quiet. Her bruised face was wet from tears, and her hand shook as she silently begged me not to do anything to attract the attention of my sleeping father. Without a sound we snuck out of the house, taking only my stuffed teddy bear, leaving behind everything I had ever known.
My mother and I kept to the back roads as we made our journey across several states, to the house on the river where her brother lived. Her brother made his living as a teacher at the small schoolhouse in town, and was a widow with no children of his own. By the time we arrived at his door we were weak from hunger and exhaustion. My mother hadn’t stopped to sleep the whole way, too afraid that my father or his family would catch up with her unaware. My uncle hadn’t always lived here, had arrived here only a few short months before, and as my mother had not been permitted to keep contact with her family, she knew of his location only by the chance meeting of a distant relative while selling some items in town.
Even at my young age, I was able to understand that this meant we were safe. They couldn’t find us here! Suddenly my world didn’t look so bleak and depressing. I would no longer suffer my father’s wrath for playing too loudly in the backyard, or getting up to get a drink of water after I was supposed to be asleep. I suppose that given my history I should have been wary of this new man, but he exuded a calm demeanor, and my natural instincts told me that he would never hurt me.
For two years my mother and I lived in peace in my uncle’s house by the river. My mother started working at a small shop in town, and I went to school with my uncle. At night we would eat dinner in the small kitchen and talk about our day. I spent my summers down by the river, fishing or watching the grass grow. I developed a fast friendship with a boy down the road, and we never spent a weekend apart, riding bikes and playing in the woods. It was a sweet time, the best of my childhood memories.
But nothing good lasts forever. My mother took ill in the winter I was 7. I was looking forward to Christmas and the break from school, and sleepovers and late night marshmallow roasting. But then my mother was sick and everyone got very sad. It seemed only a week passed where she went from happy and rosy to pale and withdrawn in her bed. On the morning of the parade in town I begged her to take me. My young mind didn’t understand real sickness, I had recovered nicely from the years spent with my father, and was now blessed once again with the innocence and selfishness of youth.
Mother pulled herself together and off we went. She held my hand and bought me caramel popcorn at the stand. We laughed and giggled for a few minutes she appeared healthy and whole again.
Then she fell. Right there at the parade in front of everyone my sweet wonderful mother who always protected me fell to the pavement, and I only stared in confusion.
My mother was rushed to the hospital in the next town, and I squeezed into a corner and cried silently. When the nurses came to me and asked me who my father was, what possessed me to utter his name? Why wouldn’t I say the name of my quiet uncle, at home at his house on the river? Shock, perhaps and confusion. I didn’t understand that they were asking WHO TO CALL, no I answered honestly and off they went.
The nurse pulled me into my mother’s room and quietly told me my father and my grandparents were both on the way to claim me, my father to comfort me and my grandparents to take me back to their farm to stay. “What a lucky boy you are, to have so many people who love you. You’ll be just fine. But now you should stay with your mother for a few minutes, and say your goodbyes, they will be here shortly.”
Inside I screamed in terror, wanting to run and hide, get away, get away from the miseries that were soon to come. But I couldn’t leave my mother; I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye.
As I held my mother‘s hand a let a silent tear fall, she opened her eyes. She smiled so sweetly at me and said two words before she passed from this world. “You’re safe.”
My mother passed at the stroke of midnight December 18, the year I was 7. I curled up next to her body and didn’t wake when my uncle scooped me in his arms and carried me home. I didn’t know that day what had happened to the two different cars traveling towards me in the night, to take me away to a terrible place. But I knew I was safe, because my mother had told me so.
I grew up in that house by the river with my sweet sweet uncle. When I was 10 he met a nice lady from town, and they married and had two children of their own. I was raised as another son, and I was always loved and cared for. Although my new aunt could never replace my darling mother, she took care of me throughout my childhood, and never was a word spoken in anger. Never did I sleep in the barn or live on scraps. Never did I have to duck to avoid the fist coming at me in the dark.
My first year in college, I became curious about what had happened to change the events that were unfolding in my life on that awful night. I did some research and this is what I learned:
At midnight, on December 18, the year I was 7, my father was traveling from one place in his old blue pickup. He had been working out of town when he received the message that his only son had been found. The pickup was old and in disrepair, still it was a surprise that at the stroke of midnight his truck suddenly swerved into the path of an oncoming semi, killing him instantly. The driver of the semi walked away with barely a scratch.
At midnight, on December 18, the year I was 7, my grandparents were traveling from their farm across town in their new car, purchased in the last year with proceeds from the farm, and apparently the prostitution of several of their own granddaughters. They were at home when they received word that their grand son had been found. The car was new and not the cheapest model, therefore it was a mystery why at the stroke of midnight the car suddenly pulled to the right while on a mountain road, causing the car to go through the weak fence, and down into the ravine. My grandparents were killed instantly.
There were investigations, even into my sweet calm uncle, as it was found to be a little odd that both of these events should happen at the exact time my mother passed from this world. My uncle never worried me with it, and the investigators finally gave up, as no one could ever prove how it happened.
I know how it happened. My mother told me when she uttered those two words. “You’re safe.”
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“No, absolutely not,” I told the doctor. Dr. Murdock maintained eye contact with me. Whether or not he had any personal feelings about the situation, I couldn’t tell. I always thought it was eerie how detached some doctors could appear, almost as though they were machines that could turn emotion and off at will. Hell, with some of the cases they faced, that’s probably a necessary survival technique.
“You’re certain?” Dr. Murdock asked. “You know his situation. Free health care is a wonderful thing in theory, but you need to understand that it will be years before his chart is even processed, and even longer until they approve or decline his kidney transplant. He came to America because he knew you were here. The tests are positive, you are a perfect candidate as a donor, and it would expedite the process greatly if you agreed to this donation. That’s not to say this is his only hope, but you would be doing him a kindness by alleviating all the anxiety of having to find another potential donor.”
“I don’t even know this man. We’re supposed to be related? I didn’t know he existed until I received that damned letter telling me to receive a so-called ‘relative’ at the embassy. He’s no one to me, why should I owe him a kidney?”
Murdock’s lips tightened into a thin line. Ah, finally some emotion. So this doctor did have an opinion.
“You understand, Mr. Erikson, that there are hundreds of willing donors who are complete strangers to Mr. Fyrafemsju, who, if they were appropriate donors, would simply donate the needed organ for the sole purpose of helping another human being. They don’t owe him anything either, and yet they’re willing.”
I scoffed.
“Fyrafemsju. Why the hell doesn’t he go by first name when his last name is so jacked up? I almost choked on my own tongue tongue trying to say it. Aside from which, if he’s family, then why didn’t they come to America when my mother immigrated? Why would his family have stayed?”
“Fyrafemsju is his only name, he simply identifies as a member of his clan, a tribe derivative of the Sami people in northern Scandinavia; a tribe whose name, I assure you, is much more difficult to pronounce than his given name. And the short answer to your second question, Mr. Erikson, is simply that I don’t know. I don’t know your family history, I simply know that Fyrafemsju is in need and he came to you for help.”
“Yeah, I know he’s a part of some weird-ass tribe; the guys at the embassy gave me the background of his weird little voodoo mysticism cult, and I don’t give a damn. Why is he even using western medicine anyway? He should just get his shaman to do a little rain dance, pump him full of peyote or whatever the hell they smoke up there, and leave me the hell alone.”
Murdock closed his eyes for a moment. He was obviously trying to keep his frustration from showing. Without a word, he handed me a clipboard with a paper attached.
“Sign here. This is a disclosure indicating that you decline to undergo the transplant procedure and that we’ll be free to continue looking for a suitable donor as soon as possible.”
“Fan-tastic,” I said and scribbled my name at the bottom of the page. Murdock wasted no time in leaving the room, and I followed suit. As I walked through the waiting room of the doctor’s office, I saw my ass-backwards cousin sitting in a hard-backed chair. He glanced up at me, a hopeful look on his face. I winked at him.
“Sorry Pal, what’s mine is mine.”
____________________________________________________________________________
“What do you mean you said no!” Becca shrieked on the other end of the line. I actually had to pull the phone away from my ear due to how loud she was screaming.
“Why should I have agreed?!” I yelled back. “What is it feminist women always say? ‘My body, my choice’? Well I’m invoking the same privilege!”
“You just gave this man a death sentence. You’re practically killing family, you—”
I hung up. I didn’t need this. I’d called my fiancee for support and hopefully to make plans for dinner or something. This was the last thing I’d needed after another 14-hour day at the office.
I was exhausted and had to get up in four hours to meet with a possible supplier for the moulds we needed to produce a single piece hardware required for the new product we otherwise were completely finished with.
One. Single. Piece.
Why the hell we needed to enlist a new supplier for something smaller than the size of a battery watch was beyond me. I know specialization is huge and everything in the modern economy, but let one of the other companies we’re already paying put forth a little damn effort and take this extra project! I handled dozens of projects at once, it’s completely unbelievable that a single product that can fit in one hand requires a different company for each piece of hardware. What a bunch of lazy-assed, pathetic wastes. I could make this piece myself, but they refuse on the principle of ‘industry’.
Like it mattered. We may as well have scrapped the project with how far behind schedule we were. We were supposed to have started production two weeks ago, and instead we’re meeting with weasels and sharks we who want to screw us over at every turn. I knew exactly what was going to happen tomorrow—we would exchange niceties, waste about two hours talking utter nonsense and pretending we didn’t want to stab the other person in the gums with the nearest relatively sharp object, listen as they explained their offensively high rates, pretend to haggle, and then walk away pissed off with another day wasted. If it were up to me, I’d just cancel altogether. Hell, if it were up to me, I’d just release the product without that final mould and find some famine-stricken village in Kiribati do it all by hand for pennies a day. It’d save us a hell of a lot of time and money.
I drove home in a fury, cursing the rain, cursing the traffic, cursing the ass-hat pedestrians who couldn’t figure out how a crosswalk works. A 15-minute car ride took over 45 minutes because apparently the world just loves to piss me off. Finally, I arrived at my complex, parked the car in my parking garage and made my way up to my room on the 44th floor. Psh, the 44th floor. That jackass who had the penthouse suite above me thought he was all that. He was never forward about it, but he rubbed in my face every day with his smug expression and condescending attitude. I’d board the elevator and there he’d be, on the way down from the floor above, greeting me with a smile on his face and an obnoxiously cheerful: ‘Hey Ben, how you doing today? Are we finally gonna grab lunch this week? My wife and kids want to finally meet you!’
The bastard.
When I unlocked the door to my apartment I nearly soiled myself. Standing, not even sitting, but standing like some kind of lunatic, in the middle of my darkened living room was a black silhouette. I reached into my Gucci jacket pocket and retrieved my taser, shooting without hesitation and, unfortunately, without taking careful aim. I’d hoped to see the son of a bitch fry.
The figure ducked out of the way quickly, with almost animal-like reflexes. With similar reflexes, I pressed a button on my smart watch and illuminated the room.
Ah. That’s why it was animal-like. It was my maniac forest monkey cousin. How long had he been in the country? Why was he still wearing his ridiculous hand-woven trash? It looked better than the day I met him, dressed all in furs, but still, he didn’t exactly look like a fully functioning human being with with his scruffy face and dirty blonde hair pulled back into a bundle of braids, forming some kind of ridiculous mega-ponytail. Nor did his handmade clothes help much. Long sleeved, forest green goat-hair shirts with leather boots lined with wolf fur don’t exactly scream “I’m American!”
“How the hell did you get in here?” I demanded, retrieving my phone from my pocket, already dialing 911.
“You…no want do,” he said in a thick, garbled accent reminiscent of a German gargling glass shards.
“Oh, so you speak English now?” I replied, still preparing to connect to the police. “Please, by all means, explain why I ‘no want do’.” He approached me slowly, his hands up so as to show he was unarmed, and spoke very slowly, a soft smile on his face.
“Because I have you gift.”
“You have my gift? What are you—”
I noticed he was whistling a soft tune as he approached. I don’t leave the city much, and I certainly never go into the countryside, but the whistling sounded like wind cutting through the trees. In some strange way, it made me feel nostalgic and at home. He had a very soothing manner about him and I no longer felt on edge or even nervous as he advanced. Gently, very gently, he removed the phone from my hand and set in the table. The whistle had evolved into a deep-throated hum, the kind of earthy noise you hear emanating from geothermal power reactors or when you’re deep inside a cave in the heart of a mountain.
He reached into a leather pouch affixed to his belt and pulled out what looked like a small drinking horn plugged tightly with some kind of tree bark or cork wrapped with animal skin. He removed the top, brought the horn to his lips and drank a sip. He then brought it to my lips. I was intrigued and confused, but most of all just at peace. I normally can’t stand people getting anywhere near my person, but this time, it didn’t bother me at all. In fact, I rather enjoyed it when he raised the horn to my mouth and let me drink. It tasted sweet, like nothing else I had ever tasted before. Strangely, the only word that came to mind to describe the flavor was:
Lammalse.
He took another item from the pouch, something that looked like a large bone, perhaps a femur, but far too stout to be a wolf or deer and far too thick to be from a rabbit or wild cat. He twisted, pulled, and it came apart in his hands in two halves. With one end he was very careful about keeping the opened end upright, and I quickly discovered it was because that piece contained blood, thick and visceral. He dipped his fingers in it and drew a pattern on my face, all the while quietly chanting something that brought me back to a home that I never knew.
Upon completion, he proceeded to draw what I presume to be the same image on his own face with remarkable detail.
When this ritual ended, he grabbed my face in his hands and stooped slightly so that we were at eye level.
“Broren min,” he whispered and pressed his forehead to mine. Then, in English, he said, “I take what I need. And more.”
____________________________________________________________________________
I woke up in my bed. I don’t even remember having gotten ready for sleep, the last thing I remember was that psychotic nutjob breaking and entering into my home. I scrambled out of bed and looked for any remaining footprints, droplets of blood, hair, fibers that may have fallen off his clothes, anything to prove that he’d broken in. If he left anything evidence, I was going to get his ass deported as fast as possible. Hopefully I could land him in prison instead. I darted into the living room, but saw everything was impeccable, perfectly spotless how I always left it. I sighed in defeat, wishing that I could get this mongoloid out of my life.
That’s when I noticed the clock.
“Damn it to hell…” I muttered. It was already 9:17. I’d missed the meeting by over two hours. I was going to catch hell for this from Dennis. Luckily, I always had a few excuses prepared. Confident that I could talk my way out of this, I returned to my room to grab my phone from off the end table near my bed. I went reach for it with my right hand, and saw something that stopped me dead in my tracks.
My fingertips were missing.
The ends of my fingers, the pads, the fingernails, they were gone, ending with the knuckle. Had that freak drugged me with that drink and cut off my fingers? Even if he had, a single sip of a drink couldn’t be enough to knock someone out cold and leave them so numb that they wouldn’t feel someone cutting off a part of their body.
This wasn’t possible. I pulled up my sleeves, checking the insides of my arms for apertures that would testify he had drugged me with some kind of intravenous sedative. What I saw were the same arms I’d seen my whole life, no new scars or marks. I lifted up my shirt and did the same, checking my torso for markings.
There was nothing.
Then how he did do it? How in the hell could he come into my room and sever part of my body without me waking up, without me noticing? I looked again at the nubs that that lay just beyond the furthest knuckles of my fingers.
Maybe a better question was how did it heal so fast?
The skin around the severed part of my fingers looked so natural, not even like it was a wound, but rather like I was born without fingertips. The blood drained from my face and I suddenly felt light-headed and nauseous. Dialing work with my left hand, I moved into the kitchen and retrieved a glass from the cupboard. Or I should say I attempted to. I was only missing the last inch of my fingertips and yet I seemed barely able to function. Without the pads of my fingers, I underestimated my reach and accidentally knocked the glass over with my new nubs, causing it to fall and shatter on the floor. It took two more attempts before I successfully grabbed a glass, awkwardly seizing with the base of my fingers, squeezing it tightly like a lifeline. I was shaking now, full on tremors. I lifted the faucet and filled the glass when I heard:
“Hello! Are you there, Ben?” Apparently my call had gotten through while I was fumbling around with the cupboard. Who knows I don’t know how long Alice, my secretary, had been waiting on the line. I raised the receiver to my ear.
“Uh…Alice, hi,” I stammered shakily.
“Ben, what’s going on?” Her voice softened. She could tell I was obviously upset about something.
“I—” my voice cracked with that single syllable. “I’m not coming in today. Tell everyone.” My voice betrayed me and I hung up before I heard her response. Involuntarily, tears began streaming down my cheeks. What was happening? How was this possible? If this man was capable of removing parts of my body without me noticing, what else could he do?
I take I what need. And more.
I suddenly became aware of just how real his threats were, and I began fearing for my safety. But what could I do? I couldn’t call the police, they’d take my claim as a stupid joke, or even worse, try to commit me to a mental hospital.
Becca. I had to talk to Becca.
I pounded on the door as hard as I could with my left hand. My right hand didn’t hurt, but I felt like I couldn’t use it, that by somehow using it would cause more pieces of my hand to fall off. Luckily, she answered on the second knock. The door swung upon and there she should stood, an overly large tank-top and sweat pants with her her soft brown hair tied into a ponytail. Was today a day off for her?
“Hey babe, I’m sorry I got so mad at you over the phone,” she started. “After thinking about it, I realized I think you’re right, you don’t need to…what’s wrong?” She asked, seeing the look on my face.
“This is what’s wrong!” I yelled, throwing my mutilated hand in her face. She stared blankly at it.
“I don’t understand,” she said flatly.
“What do you mean you don’t understand? My fingers are missing!”
“Yeah, like they always have been. You’ve never seemed bothered by it before, in fact I remember it took me until our fourth date before I realized that your fingertips were missing.”
They always have been? What was she talking about? My body was perfectly intact until last night, what did she mean that I’d been deformed since we first met?
She must’ve seen the anxiety and confusion pass my face, because she wrapped her arms around me.
“Hey, hey, calm down. You’ve been under a lot of stress lately, I think what you need is the day off,” Leaving one arm wrapped around me, she led me into her house where we sat down at her kitchen table and she went to fix some tea.
“So…ugh, I’m going to sound crazy, but I need to ask you something.”
She kept her back to me as she prepared a kettle on the stove, but answered with kindness and patience in her voice.
“You can ask me anything, sweetie,”
I sighed, “You don’t ever remember my hand having my fingers complete?” She paused for a moment, her eyes cast slightly upward like when she’s pondering something intently. I couldn’t tell if she was genuinely considering it or if she was just making a show of pondering to humor me. After several seconds she responded.
“No, but we’ve only been together for what, three years? Did you lose them before we met? I always just assumed you were born without them, but you never volunteered the information and I never found it important enough to ask.”
As she was talking, I furiously typed up a text and sent it to everyone in my contact list who had known me my whole life—my mother, my father, close family friends, and I asked a similar question. I got a lot of confused replies, many of them questioning whether I was joking or not. But it was unanimous.
They all said I’d been missing my fingers my whole life.
I began searching through photo albums stored on my phone and in my Cloud account, hoping to find evidence of me with my fingers fully intact, but as I traveled further back in time, year after year, all of the images attested that I never, at any point in my life had a complete hand. I ran my left hand through my hair, my breath shallow and close to hyperventilating.
“Hey, I don’t know what’s going on, but this is not normal,” Becca said, her voice full of genuine concern at this point. “You’ve been pulling 14 to 16 hour days for the last two weeks, I think it’s finally catching up with you. It’s only 4:00 pm, but you need the rest. Come on, let’s get you up to bed and I better not see you awake until at least 10:00 tomorrow morning. You may not feel like your body needs the rest, but your mind does, now let’s go.”
I didn’t resist.
____________________________________________________________________________
I woke up while it was still dark outside. It was 3:00 am. I’d slept a solid 11 hours uninterrupted. I rolled over and found Becca lying by my side, snoring softly. Normally snoring drove me insane, but hers was soft and cute, like a kitten. I could listen to it all day and it would never bother me. She looked so gorgeous in the moonlight, her delicate features softened and bathed in milky light. I didn’t know what was going on in my life, but I was grateful to have her. I was grateful that I had such an incredible person to be there for me, to support me when I needed it. I just wanted to embrace her, hold her close and feel safe, never letting go. I reached out to stroke her cheek.
“No,” I whispered. “No, no, no, no, no, no!”
Becca stirred.
“What’s up, honey?” She asked, groggily.
I stared at my hand. What was left of it anyway. Half of my hand was missing; only half of my palm and my thumb remained.
“My hand is gone!” I screamed. Becca flinched and backed away slightly, her eyes wide with uncertainty.
“Ben, you’re scaring me. We had this exact same conversation yesterday in the kitchen. Why are you suddenly so fixated on your hand? It never affected you until yesterday when you came over.”
“Yesterday, my fingertips were gone! Now it’s half my damned hand!”
“No,” she said, her voice reverberating with small tremors. I was making her nervous. “Yesterday you came over and you were freaking out because your hand was missing. That hand never had fingers, it doesn’t make sense that you’d say your fingertips were missing you’ve only ever had half a hand.”
“He’s doing it! Fyrafemsju is chopping pieces of me off, bit by bit!”
She pulled away much further now, all the way to the edge of the bed. Legitimate fear now shrouded her face, and she looked at me like she didn’t recognize the man in her bed.
“Who? Your cousin? You’re not making any sense,” she stammered.
“It’s him, I swear it! He’s trying to get revenge for refusing to give him my kidney!”
“Ben! Stop it!” Becca shrieked, tears spilling over her eyelids down onto her cheeks. “What’s going on with you? You’re scaring me!”
“He placed some sort of curse on me and now he’s stealing my body! Can’t you see?” I yelled, unsure if I was more furious at my insane cousin or horrified at the situation I faced.
“Ben, please, let’s go. You’re not well, you’re…you’re having a stroke or something! We need to get you to the hospital, they’ll find out what’s wrong. We need to get you help!”
It broke my heart to see her like this. She was terrified, unsure of what had become of her fiancee, and yet even while her body shuddered from fear, she still struggled to slide her arms into a jacket. Twice the jacket fell from her shoulder because her body was wracked so heavily with sobs. Even though she could barely hold it together, she was still trying to comfort me, to help me.
My cheeks burned from the trail my own tears had made. As much as it broke my heart, I knew I couldn’t continue doing this to her, I couldn’t emotionally torment this woman who loved me so much that she was trying to get me help when she, herself, so obviously needed comfort.
When she went to go get her keys, I left her house.
____________________________________________________________________________
Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it all to hell! How did I fall asleep? I’d taken uppers, I’d been feeding myself a steady supply of energy drinks and caffeine the whole night. I’d been watching marathons of TV shows on Netflix, and I’ve never been able to fall asleep with the unnatural glow of a television set burning into my eyes. There is no possible way I could’ve fallen asleep!
Sitting on the arm of the chair I was in was my cell phone, the green notification light pulsating. Most likely more texts or voice mails from Becca.
It had been two weeks since I’d officially called things off. I know she wanted to help me and she loved me, that she didn’t understand what was going on. But I couldn’t drag her through this. I couldn’t pretend that nothing was happening as I saw my body slowly disappearing piece by piece at random intervals. I may be losing my mind and my body, but that didn’t mean I would subject her to the same thing.
I reached out to pocket my phone
Alerted, I my attention was drawn to the most noticeable area that didn’t register. My right arm was even shorter now, ending in a round stump just beyond my elbow. Aside from that, the pinky and ring fingers of my left hand were missing. Something else was missing, I could feel it, I just didn’t know what.
I knew it was a bad idea, that I shouldn’t check to see what else was taken from me this time, but I had to know. And besides, it wasn’t like I wouldn’t find out eventually, so would the shock of finding it out now change anything in the long run? Hell, maybe I’d catch a break and my mind would finally just snap and I’d live like a vegetable, not having to think or feel or even know anything of what’s going on around me.
I rose out of my recliner to find a mirror, and after the first step almost fell to the floor. My slipper had fallen off when I stumbled, and I discovered that the front end of my right foot was missing now.
My leg ended in a misshapen chunk of flesh attached to a heel. There was so much missing compared to the first night. He was taking more. That first night was just a warning, showing me what he could do, and now he was coming in full force, trying to drive me into a panic.
And it was working.
____________________________________________________________________________
Everything felt so wrong as I rolled into work in my electric power chair. The people I worked with every day either ignored or didn’t register the look of depressed resignation on my face as I rode past them in the lobby. I got the occasional nod or casual greeting from people I knew, but for the most part almost nobody looked pleased to see me. Apparently whatever Fyrafemsju was doing to me only changed my body, it didn’t change how much of an asshole I’d been to everyone over the last couple of years.
I arrived at the elevator and reached for the button.
“Hey, don’t worry, I got that,” a cheerful voice said as he pressed the button for me. I looked up and saw the clean-shaven, youthful face of out intern. Probably the last person who treated me kindly.
Tears sprung to my eyes, unbidden. I’d treated this guy like dirt, I was purposefully disrespectful to him because of his status and mocked him at every turn, and what tore me apart was the fact that this is how he treated me even before my nightmare started, not that he knew of the hell that I was experiencing.
“Thank you,” I said, making eye contact with him. He smiled back at me, and I got caught in the reflections of his lenses. The image that stared back at me was hideous. All the hair on my head, including my eyebrows and eyelashes, was completely gone. My lips on the right side of my face concaved so far inward that the side of my head looked like a decaying pumpkin, an image not helped by the fact that the fleshy cartilage of my nose was now missing, exposing two large holes at the bottom of the bridge of my nose.
Even though I had an amazing tailor, even he couldn’t help my situation, as evidenced by the limp right sleeve of my jacket that dangled uselessly at my side. My left pant leg, too, was deflated and rolled so as to avoid getting snagged under one of the wheels of my chair. My only remaining fingers on my left hand were my index finger and thumb, which rarely got much use these days except for pushing elevator buttons and pressing the “answer” button on the BlueTooth touch pad embedded in the arm of my chair. Even with all these enormous changes in my life, my busy work life was remained as busy as ever.
We rode up together to the 52nd floor where I was to have my meeting. The meeting didn’t go well. Everything was a foggy haze and although I heard angry, yelling voices directed at me, I heard them as though underwater. They were unclear and muddled, and I couldn’t care less what they were saying. That is, until Dennis, my immediate supervisor slammed his hand on the table in front of me. I slowly looked up to see his fuming, hateful expression gazing back down.
“Did you just hear a damned word I said, or are you as deaf as you are mangled!” He screamed at me so forcefully that I could feel his breath blowing on my like a hot fan. People in every room three floors above or below us must’ve heard his angry bellow.
“No. I wasn’t listening,” I responded, my voice hollow devoid of response.
“Then let me say it again in language you can understand. Your work is SHIT! Get the hell out of my building, you don’t work for me anymore!”
I nodded, and using the remaining digit on my left hand maneuvered the joystick of my power chair to guide me outside the building.
____________________________________________________________________________
It must’ve been a month and half or two months since this curse started. Some days I’d wake up with everything intact, and sometimes I’d wake up with large chunks of my body missing. The process was so unpredictable that as soon as I though I was finally adjusting to a the lifestyle of invalid, I’d become even more limited. When I finally thought I was safe and nothing more would happen, I’d wake up to find a large section of my leg missing or a few more toes.
Nothing prepared me for this day, however.
I woke up with a full-length mirror hanging directly above my bed. It took me a moment to realize it because the image staring back at me barely resembled anything human. My lips and gums were completely gone, leaving two rows of exposed bone and teeth. My nose, similarly, was completely gone and was replaced with two skeletal holes that comprised the outermost pieces of my nasal cavity. My eyelids were intact, but my eyelashes, eyebrows, and all the hair on my head was still gone, leaving me with the appearance of a freakish skeleton wrapped with skin.
The skin of my torso around where my right shoulder should have been was smoothed over. My left arm ended just above where the elbow would have connected. The skin stretched across my chest was completely free of any natural markings, no nipples, no navel, nothing. I don’t know how, but Fyrafemsju somehow stripped the muscle and tissue away from my collarbone and the the most prominent sections of my ribs, leaving the bone in the areas exposed and glaring white.
Below my torso, my genitals were gone, removed. He made me into a eunuch. My right leg ended somewhere around the knee. There may have been an appendage, there may not have been. I didn’t care anymore. My left leg, as a cruel mockery, he left completely unaltered. It was the only part of my body he had left untouched ever since his perverse torture started. It was a reminder of what I once was, the person who I used to be. It was also the least useful appendage to remain. What was I going to do with a single leg? I can’t grip anything with a leg, I can’t walk on a single leg, he may as well have taken all of my limbs.
My body was destroyed, useless now, and the ironic part of it was that it looked like there had been no damage done, it looked as though this was how my body was supposed to have been designed from the beginning. Like someone had pulled a car from a devastating crash and polished it to a finish, my own body was malformed and incomplete in utility, yet so perfect, smooth, and flawless in finish.
It’s been like this for weeks. I’ve never left this bed since I woke up that morning and from what I can tell my neck muscles are locked in place, causing me to forever make unbroken contact with my own personal hell, the mirror above my bed. Although I’m perpetually thirsty and hungry, my body never thins nor does it show signs of dehydration. I never urinate and I never have bowel movements. I never sleep. All I ever do is lie and stare at my reflection. And every day, every minute of every day those words ring through my head, the words that could never reflect the true sadism of their intended meaning, the words that, had I understood what they actually entailed, would’ve caused me to take my own life the night that I had heard them.
I take what I need.
And more.
Credit To – nibris
|
It was the Christmas of 1965, before man had landed on the moon, before the wall had fallen, before many things good and bad. For me it was the last time that I knew innocence, before the creeping shadow which engulfed my family, before the madness, before death; before. It was the advent calendar, that damned thing which I had to have. Each door a promise of Christmas, and each window a misted reminder of the warmth and kindness of the festive season.
I was nine years old, and while the parents in my neighbourhood would have had no fears for their children in the past, allowing them to play freely in the icy December streets, those days were lost like breath on a mirror. If snow had fallen, there would have been no joy; no snowball fights in the darkened evenings, no sledges sliding carefree down the fields nearby – children could not be children. Though the young may have felt apprehension in the dark, it was the parents who were the most fearful; terrified of the ultimate loss, a pain they could never extinguish.
For the previous three Christmases, without fail, the worst had happened: a child had went missing. While I was very young, I remember it all as though it were yesterday. The suburb where we lived had become the most sombre of places. Such a tragedy can do that, slowly draining away any hope or happiness from a community like blood from an open wound. No Christmas tree nor carol sang could stem the flow.
The first to disappear was Tommy Graham. He was 11 years old and although I had seen him around, I didn’t really know him personally. I remember my mother crying about it. Just the thought of something terrible happening to a child distressed her greatly, and the pain that the parents must have been going through was often on her lips. That Christmas my dad held on to me tighter than he had ever done before, and I could tell that they were affected terribly by the disappearance just as the rest of the community had been. The following year, another Christmas came and another child was taken. Her name was Cheryl, and she was only four years old; tiny and fragile. Tears were shed, misplaced rage vented towards the police who were unable to find her, and by New Year it was the commonly held view that, like Tommy the year before, little Cheryl would never be found.
I, like many of my friends, had been scared by the vanishing children. It was the first time that I became aware that adults could do harm, even to the most vulnerable of us – that children were not always safe, and that those bigger and stronger than us could have unspeakable things on their minds. Yes, I had heard the fairy tales and frightening stories of the pied piper and the bogeyman, but what was going on in our suburb was far more gut wrenching, far more real, than any tall tale.
Despite this impact, it was not until the third child disappeared that I was truly heartbroken. His name was Fin, and he was one of my friends, a close one at that. We lived on the same street, playing football in a field by his house and walking to and from school together each day. My dad used to take us to the cinema most Sundays, buying us each a hotdog, and, when we got home, mum would serve us a beautiful Sunday roast. Fin was like part of the family, and I still think about him to this day. Where would he have been now? What would he have done with his life? How diminished have we been not knowing that boy or the adult he would have become. No laughs, no tears together, just an empty seat in the cinema, a vacant desk in the classroom. I remember his blue eyes and blond hair more than anything for some reason, that and his happy-go-lucky nature. I missed him then, and even now I wish that it were not true.
Like the others, Fin had been snatched from his bed as he slept on that most peaceful of nights – Christmas Eve. His parents had tucked him in, hanging his stocking over the fireplace, kissing his forehead, whispering a Merry Christmas as he fell asleep. They woke expecting to hear the excited scampering footsteps of their son rushing down the stairs to see what Santa had brought, what wrapped secret boxes he had left by the tree; and instead were confronted with an empty bed, the loss of their only child, and an open window sucking in the biting frost of Christmas day.
The parents of all three children would not let go – could not – nor would they assume the worst. Search parties were organised, flyers were continually posted through letterboxes, pasted onto bulletin boards and shop windows across the city, and the hope was always there that somehow, somewhere, the three children would be found, unharmed, and ready to come home. That year, on the 28th of November 1965, all hope was extinguished. In an old sewage pipe across town, the crumpled fragile bodies of Tommy, Cheryl, and dear Fin, were found stuffed unceremoniously into a corroded pipe in an old sewer, rotting in the waters below. The pain was palpable, the families inconsolable, and for all of us who new any of the victims, it was to be a bleak and shadow-ridden Christmas.
Three days later the month turned. Eyes moved towards Christmas and the shaking fear that something cruel and callous lived amongst us all. Three children in three years, now into the fourth. What would happen that Christmas Eve? Which family would be broken? Which child torn from its comfy warm bed, dreaming of Santa, only to be killed and discarded like a piece of fetid waste?
My parents were nervous, and who could blame them. I sensed the change in atmosphere around the streets where I usually played; families pulling their children in earlier and earlier before the dark came. At night, on more than one occasion, I heard hammering echoing out from an unseen source; no doubt windows being nailed shut to prevent any more children being snatched as they slept.
On the 1st of December my dad hung our Christmas lights outside along the gutter of our roof; little beads of glowing colour piercing through each cold winter night. We tried to continue on as normal and think of happier times. As always, he asked me to help.
‘You’re my wingman, kiddo’, he’d say from behind his bright red scarf, clambering up a set of wooden ladders to the roof above. He had flown for the air-force before I was born and still used the lexicon of those days in the military, but I didn’t mind, it made me feel special.
In previous years I had been too small, too young to be of any real use in decorating the outside of our home. But my dad always included me. I think he just liked to do things with me, to have some father son time. Standing at the bottom of the ladders looking up at him whistling Christmas songs out loud made me feel part of the accomplishment, part of the yearly celebrations. That December was different, however; it was the first time I was big enough to go up the ladders with him, to look out at the old street below and see the occasional blink from a weathered set of lights clinging to a neighbour’s fence or home.
My mum was terrified – she had visions of us both falling to our death – but my dad always seemed sure of himself. Not arrogant, just confident, and cheerfully reminding us all that things would be okay. Looking back, I think that’s what I loved about him the most when I was a kid, the fact that he had it all in hand, and did everything to reassure his family and friends. I never felt in danger up those ladders, always loved, always safe; always. Before we came down I remember looking at the rooftops poking out in regimented lines from the streets around. I noticed that the world seemed different from up there, and that to me, there appeared to be fewer Christmas lights than ever before.
That night, I knew what was coming. My mum tucked me into my bed, as my dad finished hanging some paper ring decorations from my bedroom ceiling. I always felt that those decorations protected me somehow. I’d stir in the night, scared of the dark, and yet at Christmas time I believed that somehow those pieces of coloured paper, that blinking Christmas tree in the other room; that those symbols, those pieces of good will would keep whatever monstrosities hid in the dark at bay. My mum kissed me on the forehead and left the room, and there was my dad, standing in the corner with his hands behind his back, smiling.
‘Well, wingman, you know what time it is?’ he said as we both began to chuckle.
‘Let me see, dad, please!’ I yelled, excited.
From behind his back he produced an advent calendar. I leapt for joy across the room and hugged him before snatching it from his hands and diving back under the covers. Sitting down on the bed, dad ruffled my hair with his fingers, watching me curiously. He knew I loved getting an advent calendar each Christmas, and I had worried that I wouldn’t get one that year as he’d told me that most of the shops were sold out of them. But, dad being dad, he’d spent hours driving around until he found one, and made sure that on the night of December the 1st, the first night of advent, there it was.
The calendar was beautiful, handmade with carefully crafted drawings on its front and back. The lines and sketched colours lovingly showed a Christmas street full of lights, with houses covered in snow, and the windows beaming with a warm yellow glow waiting for the night Santa would arrive. What I loved about each year’s advent calendar, the good ones at least, was that they told a story. They showed something wonderful happening. Each door or window would be opened night upon night revealing a picture, building until that magical climax of Christmas. I loved the anticipation of the holidays, and the advent calendar symbolised the hopes that Christmas held; not just presents, although as a child that was a big part of it, but spending time with my family, seeing my grandparents who usually lived in another part of the country, and getting to eat all the chocolates and turkey I could cram into my mouth. Getting to be away from the boredom of school, getting to play with new toys, getting to have fun with my friends…
It was the thought of friends which brought me down for a moment. There I was holding an advent calendar, each cardboard door numbered from 1-24; from the 1st of December until Christmas Eve. The same night that one year previous, my dear friend Fin had been taken, murdered, and left to rot down a sewer.
I began to cry, and almost instinctively my dad seemed to know what was upsetting me. He asked about Fin, and when he mentioned his name I sobbed deeper than I had since his death. My poor friend who would never again go on those carefree days out with me and dad, or walk alongside me to school laughing and playing. It was then that my father explained to me something about death, words which have always stayed with me:
‘You know something,kiddo? As long as you keep the memory of the people you’ve lost in your mind and in your heart, they’ll always be alive. They’ll always be with you; so Fin is right here’, he said, pointing to my chest gently.
With those words I felt a soothing comfort wash over me, and, all cried out, my dad tucked me into bed, kissed me on the head and said goodnight – knowing to leave my bedroom door open slightly, to let some light from the hall keep my room from the dark.
He had left the advent calendar sitting nearby, its closed windows facing me from my nightstand. And yet I was exhausted, and so my thoughts drifted from what lay behind those cardboard doors to sleep, and hopefully to a more rested state of mind; but that did not occur. I woke in the night from an horrendous dream about my friend Fin, little four year old Cheryl, and 11 year old Tommy Graham, crushed down a sewer pipe; the water running over their bodies into mouths which once spoke and laughed and smiled, only then to be rendered silent by an unseen brutal hand. In the darkness Fin’s voice cried out, garbled and drowned. A word came forth and clung to me like no other: ‘run’.
I leapt out from my bed, soaked in sweat, ready to cry out for my mum and dad, but then something strange caught my attention, shaking me to the core. I looked to the advent calendar, to the drawings of cosy houses covered in snow, their windows beaming out into the cold December night; sitting there waiting almost as I had left it. Yet something was amiss, something which I had no memory of – the first advent door had been opened, the cardboard left ajar like the one to my room. Stepping forward, the sweat dripped from my hand as I pulled the door back to reveal what secrets the calendar had in store for me.
In what little light there was, I squinted, my mind slowly piecing together the picture behind door number one. As my eyes adjusted, I recoiled in horror at the sight, and screamed for my family. Within seconds the light was on and my dad appeared, picking me up, consoling me as he put me back into bed. I pointed feverishly over to the calendar, telling him that something awful hid behind the door. Of course he looked, then smiled reassuringly: ‘It’s just a happy Christmas scene, kiddo’, he said handing it to me.
Looking closely I could see that the picture had changed slightly. It depicted an old stone bridge covered in snow. Children played on top of it happily. Yes, it appeared quite harmless, quite serene. My father left and soon I was drifting back to sleep. Yet my mind hazed over with two thoughts: of Fin screaming ‘run’ in my dream, and of what I could have sworn I’d seen in that first little calendar door. The bridge was there, but underneath in the dark, eyes looked out to the children playing gleefully above; eyes which seemed wracked with rage and hate.
The next day at school went quickly, but on my way home I dragged my feet over the bitter frozen concrete paths and pavements, thinking of Fin and how he had always walked with me. As my house came into view, I smiled for a moment at the lights dad and I had hung on the roof. They warmed my spirits, but when I entered my room, my soul was chilled stagnant once more – the next advent calendar door had been opened. This time I knew, I hadn’t been there to do such a thing in my sleep as I had assumed must have happened the night before. No, someone had opened it. I touched the yellow number 2 of the cardboard door, a number which should have promised a treat or a happy picture reminding me that Christmas was near. I hesitated and then looked behind it. Another street scene played out before me. This time a small boy pulled a red sledge behind him as other children threw snowballs at each other, grinning wide and happy. At first I sighed with relief that the picture had no hidden intruder, no eyes staring out of the darkness in contempt; but just as I sat the calendar back down onto my nightstand, I saw it. The faint outline of a person looking out towards me, almost invisible, yet hiding within that Christmas scene in plain view, sitting there on the boy’s red sledge.
I closed my eyes and rubbed them, fearful that they might reaffirm the figure’s presence once more when opened. But just as the darkened eyes had disappeared from under the bridge on the 1st of December, the faint outline of the unseen pretender had moved on from the picture. I knew that no one would believe me, and even worse I barely believed it myself. My nine year old mind could not comprehend such strange and ominous occurrences, yet I was not so removed from the idea of horrid things scuttling around in the dark; creatures which even parents could not protect you from. The figure had moved on, I was certain of it, and I knew that it must have travelled and hid behind the door for the 3rd of December.
The next morning, I told myself that I would not open any of the closed doors from the advent calendar. I promised myself. Yet someone, something, was doing it for me. That night I awoke in the darkness once more. The same dream playing out, poor Fin muffled and drowned by the putrid sewage water. Crying out in the dark. Crying out, and yet warning, pleading. ‘Run’, he said. ‘Run’. Again, I leapt from my bed, and once more the calendar door for that day had been opened by an unseen force. There in the dark I looked, compelled by the fear of not looking. The terror of not knowing what was to come. For in that 3rd picture it became clear to me, something was on its way. Something unspeakable was plotting and slowly but surely drawing closer. Behind that door lay another Christmas scene, families skating on a beautiful iced lake, and under that transparent barrier between the cold air and the icy water, there was a shape. Darkened, indefinite, but malevolent, a blurred form under the ice, eyes staring up in disgust at the families who happily skated above.
I screamed again, and yet the results were all too familiar. My mum and dad arrived tired, yet never annoyed at their child for waking them in the night. Mum put me into bed, and as she did so I explained frantically to them both that something was appearing in the advent calendar, that each door held proof of something which meant to do me harm. Yet there was no evidence of it, only three open doors showing happiness and fun at Christmas. Dad said I was having bad dreams, and that he and mum would sit with me for a while until I fell asleep. I heard them whispering about work in the morning, but they were more concerned about me than losing a few hours of rest.
The next day, again, I tried to ignore the advent calendar; tried desperately to avoid its doors. And again, I failed. In the night I awoke from the same hideous dream, and yet this time, the calendar was not open. The door with a yellow number four remained closed. I hoped that whatever strange thing was in those pictures had left, that I could forget the hateful haunting eyes, and that I could return to simply enjoying the anticipation of Christmas; but just as I nodded pack to sleep, happier than I had been since they had first found Fin’s body, I heard something – the sound of a thumb or finger pulling at cardboard. I opened my eyes and stared in utter disbelief as the fourth door was pulled open by an invisible hand in the dark.
It is strange that I did not scream, but since then I have heard people say that when you are as scared as you can possibly be, that you cannot move, nor can you cry out for help. I opened my mouth, and no noise came, a paralysis of fear which was overpowering. There I lay in the night, staring wide-eyed at the fourth door, wondering what disturbing depiction it would reveal, and even more so, terrified that whatever had opened it still lurked nearby.
I wish I could say that it stopped, that the horrid revelations ceased, but I cannot. Some nights the dreams of Fin yelling at me to run came, but on others they did not. The only constant was that at some point a calendar door would be opened, whether in the morning or at night. Each door would show a happy scene, and each time something hideous, which only I could see, would be momentarily present. One door showed a group of carolers cheerfully singing at night, warmed by the glow of an open window, and at the rear there stood an outline, something watching, something waiting, something moving on relentlessly to Christmas Eve – the last door. Another picture showed a small girl, no older than poor Cheryl who had been killed, placing presents into a stocking, and yet for a moment there was the faintest impression of a hand, reaching out from the stocking towards the girl.
By the 20th the horrific pictures had intensified, as too had the dreams. Fin now screamed my name, his voice echoing up through a drain, pleading with me to ‘get away’. And as those nightly terrors revealed themselves, the pictures had taken on more weight, more immediacy, for I was certain that they now showed the street where I lived. My dad found me crying that night and when asked what was wrong, I told him. I believed that there was something evil coming. Something horrendous which had snatched a child each of the previous three Christmas Eves. The same evil which had taken my friend. That hidden horror which on Christmas Eve would come for me.
Dad reassured me that this was not the case, that I was imagining things. When he looked at the pictures on the calendar he just saw nondescript streets, anonymous faces, nothing which suggested the place where we lived. But I saw differently; the drawings clearly showed house by house, inch-by-inch, that something was drawing nearer each day, fleeting glimpses of a faint figure waiting to gorge itself once more. My dad offered to throw the advent calendar away if it was upsetting me so much, but I pleaded with him not to. I needed to know. I had to see what was coming, what was on its way to snatch me from my family as it had done the other children.
The 21st, 22nd, and 23rd of December were torturous. While I should have been excited for Christmas day, I was not – I was terrified, for I knew that I would never live to see it. The calendar door on the 21st, opened by something unseen while I slept, showed a house come into view, one with glowing lights hung around the roof gutter, and the faint outline of something terrible approaching nearby. I was certain that the house was mine, and that the light which beamed outward onto the snowy landscape was from my family. Though as I peered out into the night from my window, there was no snow in reality, just a biting wind and a frost which covered everything like a shroud. I could not see a figure out there, but I felt it, somewhere close, just waiting for Christmas Eve.
On the 22nd, the figure drew closer to our home as the snow fell around it in the advent calendar, and on the 23rd the prowler had reached the gate to our garden. That night I had such a terrible vision. In my dream I found myself lying in the dark. I could not see, and all that surrounded me was the empty coldness of winter. Pain coursed through my body and the sound of running water pushed over it, forcing me deeper into an abandoned drain. Putting out my hand instinctively, my fingers touched the frozen mouth of another child. Slowly it moved against my hand, and its stagnant lips whispered as if weakened. ‘Run. Get away.’
I did not wake screaming, nor did I leap from my bed as I had the other nights like an animal fleeing from a predator. There I lay in the silence of the night, and in that stillness, I cried. The paper chains and decorations my family had hung from my room’s ceiling proved no protection from the pain or from the thoughts of the three children, how they had been taken, and how I would be next.
And then the day had come: Christmas Eve. I was frightened, but a distance took me, one which slowed my words and left me dispassionate about the festive season, about my family. I wish I had not been that way and had savoured every moment I had left, but I was drained, numbed by the lurking fear which had haunted me for weeks. Tired of it all. A strain which no nine year old should have had to bear.
My dad knew that I wasn’t my usual self, as I normally relished Christmas Eve like most children, excited and completely enthused for what would come. But there I was outside in the cold, helping him fix part of the lights which had come unhooked in the wind. I watched my dad on the ladders once more, the wind rattling everything around – the slates on the roof, the trees, the gutter. I thought about how Fin’s family, or little Cheryl’s or even Tommy Graham’s, would have been preparing for Christmas day like we were, happily unaware of the loss they were about to undergo. At least I knew, I had foresight, each hideous picture hinting at that faint figure coming closer and closer to my home; to open my window as I slept waiting for Christmas morning. To snatch me from my bed, to slaughter me, discarding my body down a sewer pipe, used and forgotten. As the wind howled and the lights chinked and jingled together, I looked back at the gate to our garden, to where I had last seen my future attacker. I could see nothing, just an empty street on the quietest night of the year, but in that absence I could feel eyes bearing into me.
My dad climbed down the ladder whistling merrily to himself, and as I looked up at him I simply asked, matter-of-factly, if he would nail my window shut. He didn’t ask why, he knew many parents had done the same, and so we went inside as the evening rolled in, carried by the promise of frost from the outskirts of the city. Dad got his toolbox out and drove a large series of nails into the frame of the window. Once I was confident that there was no way to open it, I thanked him and asked if he would do one more thing for m; only one – to sit next to my bed all night and look over me until morning. Unlike the other nights, he did not tell me that there was no monstrosity out there, nor did he say that the world was a safe place, for that would have been a lie. He placed his hand gently on my shoulder and said: ‘If you need me, I’ll sit right here until it’s time to open the presents.’
And sit there he did. My mother came in to kiss me on the head before returning back to the kitchen where she was preparing things for the dinner next day. I so wanted to see it. Presents meant nothing to me by that night, all I cared about was being there at the family table, laughing with Gramps and Gran, and knowing that the nightmare of December, 1965, was over. I fell asleep as my dad sat by the bed, reading his book.
It must have been two or three in the morning when I woke. I was unsure of the precise time, but what I knew was that my dad was standing at my window, looking down, out to the street below. I whispered to him and asked what was wrong, but his reply was hesitant: ‘Nothing, kiddo. Go back to sleep’.
Then I heard it, certain and laboured. The sound of footsteps slowly walking up our garden path outside, shambling forward towards our home. The sound frightened me, and my thoughts immediately turned to the advent calendar, to the faint outlined figure which had haunted me. From what little light there was I could see that the door for Christmas Eve was sealed shut, yet to be opened.
The footsteps continued, one after the other, slowly, steadily. My dad stared intently outside as I asked if he could see anyone there, but he just shook his head in disbelief. The footsteps ceased and silence covered everything like the frost outside. Suddenly it was broken by three loud booming knocks. It was at our door. I cried out in terror and started sobbing.
‘It’s come to take me dad, like Fin and the others!’ I howled in utter despair as the tears slid down my cheek.
‘Nonsense. It must just be a neighbour or something’, my dad said unconvincingly.
‘No dad, it’s here to take me away!’ I screamed as I handed the calendar to him. ‘Open the last door, open it and you’ll see. Christmas Eve, each Christmas Eve it takes a child and if you open that you’ll see it, I promise, you’ll see it!’
Three more loud knocks echoed out, and for the first time in my life I saw fear flicker across my dad’s face as I could hear my mum stirring from her room, shouting through asking what was going on.
Three knocks once more, this time more pronounced.
‘Please dad, look at the door, open it and you’ll believe me. It’s here for me.’
My father’s hand trembled as it held the calendar tightly. Slowly, he opened the last door to see what was shown. ‘God no!’ he yelled out, and with that we heard the most hideous of sounds. One which was laced with dread. A click of a lock. The turning of a handle. And the front door opening to the cold. Then, footsteps climbing stairs, looking, seeking, and then slowly coming down the hall towards my room.
‘Dad please, help me!’ I pleaded as the nightmarish thing in our house drew closer.
He looked at me, trying his best to hide his fear, but I could see it etched into his face, into his soul.
‘Listen to me son, as soon as I go out there I need you to grab all your things, anything heavy, and barricade your door. Don’t let anyone in this room unless it’s me or your mother’.
I believe in that moment he saw the utter despair in my eyes, and before he left the room as the footsteps reached the room next to mine, he spoke gently, patting me on the head. ‘It’ll be okay’, he said. Then he was gone.
I did as he said, and as soon as he had left the room I moved my nightstand, my chair, my books, anything I could against the door, sobbing my eyes out, praying that my parents were safe. At first I heard nothing throughout our house. Then suddenly violent shouting erupted, a struggle quickly followed with what sounded like furniture being thrown and glass smashed, and then the worst of it – my mother screaming. She cried and yelled and agonised. And finally, I could not bear it anymore. I could not leave her alone. Clearing the things away from my door, I opened it, and wandered down the darkened hall. A cold icy air blew through the house. The front door lay open, decorations swung in the frozen breeze, and outside knelt my mother, alone, terrified, screaming into the night.
Losing a parent is hard for a child, and to do so on Christmas Eve harder still. Yet the torture of that night cuts deeper than most. Few can know my true pain. Over the years I have tried to understand it more clearly, understand what my life was before and what it is now, to little avail. I cannot give solid explanations, nor can I say that my anger will ever truly diminish. I’ve tried to live as best I can, putting the mystery out of my mind each year, each year that is, until Christmas. When the memories flood back like a comforting blanket, soon torn away by a silent hand from the dark. My own children, now grown up, have asked me why I become a little distant at this time of year, and to that I have given no real answer. All I can say is this: I do know two things, both of which haunt me to this day. The first is that no one ever saw or heard from my dad again, my mother remained tight-lipped until she died about what had come into our house that night – what took her husband – and who can blame her. I also know what the last door of the advent calendar contained, and what had frightened my dad so badly. It was a drawing like the others, a happy Christmas scene, with one horrid addition. It showed a boy sleeping soundly in his bed on Christmas Eve; a child who looked uncannily like my poor friend Fin, unaware that his life would soon be over, and that he was being watched through the frosted window by his killer – whose face looked remarkably like that of my father’s.
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For as long as I can remember, strange things have happened to me. When I was young, my mother and I lived in my grandmother’s house; a big, drafty Victorian beast of a thing squatting in the middle of acres and acres of hilly country land. My grandmother was old and couldn’t take care of herself, and I often heard my mom whispering to her friends about how crazy she was and how she couldn’t wait to put her in a home and get on with her own life.
Me, being only three or four at the time, didn’t understand. I thought my grandmother was the most wonderful person on the planet, as little children do. She told me stories about “the little people” that lived in the hills around the house, and how long ago, when she was only a girl, she’d made a pact with the little people that allowed her to live on their land. My mother once overheard her telling me one of these stories and forbade Grandma from ever telling me anything like that again, claiming she’d just scare me. I wasn’t scared – I loved fairy stories. That’s what I thought they were – Fairy stories, and I didn’t understand why Mom was so upset. She’d grown up in that same house listening to Grandma’s same stories, right? But every time I tried to ask her about them, she’d shush me and tell me I’d get in trouble if she heard me and Grandma talking about the little people ever again.
Mine and Grandma’s closeness never set well with Mom, and as a child, I never understood the reason. I knew Mom and Grandma didn’t get along, and never had, but I didn’t know why. I didn’t press the subject; I loved my Grandma and I loved her stories. My mother, who was serious and dark-featured, took after my Greek grandfather more than anyone, while I looked like my grandmother. We shared the same awkwardly big ears, fair freckled skin, and thick red hair. I remember she would often stroke my hair and sigh, saying my mother would never have been prepared for the responsibility of having red hair, so it was passed down to me. I always thought she was making some sort of joke, but her face was a little sad when she said it, so I never further questioned what exactly she meant.
When I was six, Grandma died. She’d been sick all my life, always fragile in health, and one night she went to bed and never woke up. Though I was only a child, I usually helped Grandma get ready for bed – Brushing her long, still vibrantly red hair and braiding it, helping her into her nightgown and tucking her in. Mom always got angry, saying a boy my age shouldn’t have to do those things, but I enjoyed any time spent with my Grandma. The night she died was like any other, but as I tucked her in, her thin hand suddenly grasped mine in a vice grip.
“The pact is up, Gearoid.”
My name is Garrett, but Grandma always said it the traditional Irish way, Gar-roid, her lilting accent making my name seem special to me instead of the name of three other boys in my class.
“The pact is up.” She repeated herself, her voice sounding more intense than I’d ever heard it. “I’m sorry, Gearoid. There is nothing I can do. You must go from here, so they cannot find you.”
I was confused, and a little scared then, being only six. I held her hand close.
“Who will find me, Grandma? What’s wrong?”
She only clung my hand tighter, her voice a steadfast whisper. “The little people, Gearoid. The denizens of the hollow hills. The sidheóg. You must go from here.”
I wanted to ask her more, but her hand relaxed in mine, suddenly, and she was asleep. She looked peaceful, and I felt like I almost imagined the strange conversation we’d just had. I figured I would ask her more about it the next morning, but the next morning she was dead.
Grandma had left all her money to Mom in her will, but the house and surrounding land to me. Since I was too young to even think about owning a house, Mom decided we’d live there until we found better prospects. As a single mother with hectic hours at her job, a free house was too good to pass up.
I went to school, Mom went to work as a nurse, life went on. I continued to play in the hills and woods surrounding the house as I always did, despite Mom’s insistent warnings I did not. I thought she was afraid I’d fall in a ditch or accidentally get shot by hunters during hunting seasons, and my six-year-old bravado thought I was above this.
One day, on a warm August afternoon just before school started again (I must have only been eight or nine) I came back from the hills covered in scratches and bruises. She thought I’d fallen down the biggest hill leading down to the woods in our backyard until I told her “the little people had hurt me”. She didn’t believe me at first, who would? But I continued to tell her about the little people, how they came out to play with me ever since Grandma died, but they were never nice. They pinched me and scratched me and told me to leave, or else.
My mother turned white as a sheet and put down a lease on an apartment in town the very next day. Within a week we were moved out of Grandma’s house in the hills, surrounded by asphalt and car horns.
When I ask Mom about the strange things that happened to me in childhood such as this, she claims not to remember. But she always changes the subject, and her mouth gets in a tight little line. I know she remembers.
Moving into the city didn’t stop the strange things from happening to me. On the playground, I saw eyes in the bushes, watching me; I would blink only for nothing to be there. Walking home from school I would hear strange music on the breeze, music that jolted me to my bones and made my head hurt. It always sounded wrong, as if it was out of tune or played on broken instruments. Once I asked a friend if he heard the music, and he called me a freak and never walked home from school with me again. As I lay asleep in our small apartment, I would see lights bobbing just outside my window, lights that were definitely not from any of the neon signs of the inter-city. When I was ten, I wrapped myself up in my blankets and followed the lights, which seemed to whisper my name the way I remember Grandma saying it, Gearoid. My mother found me a five-minutes walk away from our apartment, about to take another step over the edge of a steep ditch. She never saw any lights, and made me an appointment with a psychiatrist the next day. I learned to keep what I saw hidden after that, and not to follow any strange lights that whispered my name.
Keeping the weird things that happened to myself didn’t stop them from happening, unfortunately. They still did, even into high school. By then I had learned to ignore them, to convince myself it was all in my head, just like my psychiatrist told me when I was a child. I never tried to figure out what was happening to me or who the “little people” were. Would you really want to know?
I was seventeen and an early senior, falling asleep in my literature class as my teacher droned on about speculative fiction. It was only when she said a word, sidheóg, that snapped me back into awareness with the force of a kick to the stomach.
“The sidheóg, in Irish folklore, are what we common people would call faeries. They have plenty of names, the Fair Folk, the Fey, the Shee, the little people. They’re not as we think of faeries today, small women made of flowers that grant wishes, but something between an angel and a demon that isn’t entirely of this world. They are cruel and delight in trickery, and can be vindictive and sadistic, particularly when their land is threatened. Most mortals, that is, you and me, can’t see them unless they’re born with the Sight. Ways to have the sight naturally were considered being the seventh child of a seventh child, or being born with red hair.”
She said more after that, but I wasn’t listening.
Little people. Between an angel and a demon. Their land. the Sight. Born with red hair.
The bell rang, and I almost fell out of my seat. I was breathing so hard and must have looked so pale that my best friend, Sarah, put her hand on my forehead to check for fever when she came to stand by my desk.
“Jesus, Garrett, are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
No. Much worse, I wanted to say, but didn’t. I just shook my head instead. “Fell asleep. Bad dream. You know how lectures get.”
She laughed, and we walked off to our lockers, with Sarah asking if I was still going to spend the night at her house that night. I said sure, and left for my car feeling like a husk with everything sucked out of me. I felt watched.
When I got home, I cursed myself for saying yes to Sarah’s offer. We hung out almost every weekend, but always at my house – A larger apartment my mother had bought further inner-city when she got a promotion a few years back. Sarah lived in a big farmhouse on the edge of the hills, and it reminded me too much of Grandma’s house for my comfort. I always made excuses on why I couldn’t come, but I’d been too distracted today to say no.
I finally knew now what had been stalking me all my life – little people, Fair Folk, whatever you wanted to call them. My grandmother’s stories suddenly made sense to me. Her father had built their house, unknowingly, on fey land. The faeries had probably tortured them and pestered them until Grandma, the only one able to see them, somehow made a pact with them to let her family live on their land unharmed for as long as she lived. When she died, it left my mother and I at their mercy. I had no clue what sort of pact Grandma had made, as she’d never said. I remembered her asking about it, but she would always pat my hand and say it was a story for another time. Now I almost didn’t want to know.
As I was waiting for Sarah to come pick me up, I heard the tapping.
At first it was faint, and I thought it had begun to rain and hit against the windows. I checked my phone, but there was only light rain scheduled for much later in the evening. I brushed it off, but it continued. It sounded as if someone were standing outside my window and slowly, rhythmically, tapping on the glass with one finger. I turned around to look at the window the tapping was coming from, and it stopped – Only to sound as if it were coming from further into the apartment. I must have spent five minutes running all over my house like a crazy person trying to find the source of the tapping, only to have it come from a different window each time I investigated. I was near angry tears when Sarah beeped her horn outside, jerking me out of my frenzy. Never had I been so happy to leave my house as I scooped my overnight bag off the floor and locked the front door behind me.
As I jogged to Sarah’s car, I chanced a glance into the bushes outside the window where I first heard the tapping and froze. There was a shadow in the bushes – The shadow of something huge and looming, gnarled and twisted. I felt the breath go out of my lungs as the shadow began to move – Away from me, further into the few trees planted around my complex. I don’t know how long I just stood there, staring into the darkness between the trees, until Sarah laid on her horn and stuck her head out the window.
“Gar-rett! Come on, you lazy-ass!” The sound of her laughter broke my trance, and I turned and ran headlong to her car, almost slipping on the pavement as I lurched into the passenger seat.
“Whoa. Are you okay? Are you sure you want to do tonight? Cause you looked pretty sick at school, and you look pretty sick now.” Her voice was almost worried, which was uncommon for loud, brash, unafraid Sarah.
“I’m fine. I just thought I saw something in the bushes – A dog, probably. The shadow freaked me out.” You’ll never know how much it freaked me out, I thought.
She shook her head as she put the car into gear. “You watch way too many horror movies, Garrett Carter. Now let’s go. I stole my dad’s Netflix password so the internet is our oyster.”
I forced myself to grin back as we pulled into traffic. I chanced a glance over my shoulder at the trees – Nothing. No shadow. I still kept my eyes on the spot until we turned a corner, and I could see it no more.
By the time we’d driven out to Sarah’s old farmhouse, the rain had begun. Sarah was annoyed, claiming her internet shorted out every time so much as a drop of rain fell from the sky.
“I guess that’s what I get for living out here with my family in the middle of nowhere,” She sighed as we unloaded the frozen pizza and french fries we’d picked up to make for dinner later.
I checked my phone to see what the weather predicted for later, but I had no signal or WiFi. Figures, as it was like she said, we were in the middle of nowhere. Her nearest neighbors were at least half a mile away.
We put dinner in the oven and set up her Xbox so we could watch Netflix, but as she said, the internet wouldn’t connect. She about threw her controller through a window but I suggested we just play video games instead, which calmed her down. We were trying to find a vampire in Skyrim when Sarah went to check on dinner, and I heard it again. The tapping. It sounded louder this time, but I figured it was just the rain until I remembered it had been raining for almost half an hour and it hadn’t tapped on the window like that once. I swallowed the panic in my throat and tried to ignore it as I fought off wolves and bandits in the game, but the tapping continued, and I realized Sarah hadn’t come back from the kitchen yet.
I called her name, no answer. But that wasn’t too odd, Sarah had a large house and if she’d gone upstairs or towards the back of the house she probably wouldn’t be able to hear me. I paused the game and stood up, intending to go look for her, when the tapping suddenly stopped. I’d been hearing it for so long now that the absence of its sound was almost louder than the sound itself, and I froze in my tracks. I was trying to psych myself up for taking another step when thunder suddenly rumbled deafeningly, shaking the glass in the windows. I’m ashamed to say I yelled, startled, as the power suddenly clicked off.
I was suddenly alone in Sarah’s dark living room when I heard my name being called. Not in Sarah’s cheerful voice, but in a hoarse whisper that sounded like a bow being sawed across violin strings that were drawn too tight. Gearoid, it whispered. Gearoid.
I managed to talk around the lump in my throat as I fumbled my phone out of my pocket, clicking the built in flashlight on. “Sarah? Sarah!”
There was no answer but the continuous whisper of my name, and I knew I had to find the source. I somehow willed my legs to move and navigated towards the voice, my flashlight illuminating the dark halls. The whisper became louder as I neared her parents’ bedroom, which I remembered too late had the largest window in the house; A big picture window with a window seat we used to sit on and read when we were in middle school. As I slowly opened the door, thunder rumbled again and my flashlight winked out. I thought I might have hit the off button with my shaking hand, but as I raised my phone to my face I saw it had died, even though the battery had been at 92% when I arrived at Sarah’s. As I stood on the threshhold of the master bedroom, my eyes squeezed shut against the darkness, the whisper became almost deafening, and I felt a cold, stale wind blow around me.
I had to go in, and as I stepped forward into the room, the door slammed shut.
As I opened my eyes, I fought the urge to run back through the door and leave, but I knew I had to find Sarah. There, at the picture window (which was open, despite the fact that it only opened from the inside and I knew her parents would not have left it unlocked) was a creature out of my nightmares.
Its shape was large, towering almost to the top of the eight foot high window, and it was crouched in the side garden like some monstrous toad. I had expected my first sighting of the shadow from the bushes to look like some sort of Eldritch monster, but this creature looked more natural than I could imagine. Its hide looked like bark, its long, wizened arms like tree branches, the hair hanging lankly around its head like moss. It would have almost looked like an enormous stump if not for the face, which was huge and pointed with a long, witch-like nose, and a mouth full of broken, green, grinning teeth.
“At last,” the creature said in a voice like groaning trees and snapped violin strings. “We meet.”
I had been frozen solid upon first sight of the creature, but I somehow found my voice upon hearing it speak. “What the hell did you do with Sarah? Why are you here? What are you?”
The creature looked at me, simply, as if it were appraising me, then laughed. Its laugh sounded like wind shrieking through the slats of an unkempt house, and its voice was slow, as if it had all the time in the world.
“Some call me the Old Man of the Crossroads. Some call me the One Who Answers. Some call me troll.” It grinned, as if this was amusing to him. “We have come for payment. The land, the land, the land. Caoime made the pact. The land, the land, the land was hers. But no longer. It is yours, and we have come for payment.”
I stared at the thing, uncomprehending, until it dawned on me. My grandmother’s name was Caoime, and she had made her pact for the land when she was seventeen – My age. After she died, the fey waited until I was of age, and came for me. For payment. For the pact.
I kept my distance from the window. “That doesn’t answer all my questions. Where is Sarah?!” I yelled over the howling wind, but the creature just chuckled its shrieking wind laugh.
“The girl, the girl, the girl. Perhaps she is under the hill. Perhaps we shall keep her there until the payment is made. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.”
I felt my blood turn to ice. These things had Sarah, my best friend, and they seemed to have no intention of giving her back.
“What do you want? I don’t care about the land, take it. Just give Sarah back and leave me alone!”
The creature sighed, as if it were thinking. Its earthen, hulking body shivered as it scratched its chin with one long, gnarled, tree-branch finger.
“You are a strong one. So was Caoime.”It chuckled, heaving another sigh as it settled its body further into the side garden, releasing a smell of overturned earth and damp moss.
“I will extend to you the same challenge I extended Caoime. For the land, the land, the land. And for the girl, the girl, the girl. Should you beat me at my own game, the land, the land, the land, and the girl, the girl, the girl, are yours. Should you fail…” The creature trailed off and grinned, its leathery face splitting in two as it showed all its broken teeth. “You are mine.”
I felt unable to speak, unable to move, unable to breathe. The thing – the troll was going to take me, my best friend, and most likely my mom to god knows where to do god knows what to us if I didn’t accept his challenge. I didn’t know what to do.
“Well, boy, boy, boy? Is your silence a refusal?” The creature ran one gnarled hand over the windowsill, and something dawned on me.
“If you want me so bad, why don’t you just come in here and take me?” It was a foolhardy thing to say, but I figured I could run from it – It moved slower than Christmas.
My question seemed to anger it, and its mossy eyebrows met in a snarl. “I cannot come inside unless you invite me, boy, boy, boy. Your friend was kind enough to come outside to me.” It grinned then, and chuckled. My anger reignited. I needed to get Sarah back.
“Fine. I accept your challenge, whatever it is.” At that exact moment, lightning cracked across the sky and for a split second I saw the creature in its entirety, which nearly made my heart stop. It was bigger than I imagined, its back humped and covered in fungi and moss, reaching nearly to the roof of the house. I swallowed.
“Delightful. I shall ask you three questions, boy, boy, boy. If you answer all correctly, the land, the land, the land, and the girl, the girl, the girl, is yours. We shall leave you alone.” It’s cracked smile didn’t falter. “But if you answer a single question wrong…” It trailed off, one wizened hand sweeping a grand gesture. I didn’t need it to elaborate.
I nodded, not sure I trusted my voice to speak as I sat on the edge of Sarah’s parents’ bed, staring at the creature, backlit by the storm. It rubbed its gnarled hands together in pleasure.
“Wonderful. It has been so long, long, long since one of your kind accepted my challenge. Now.” It paused, as if deep in thought before beginning, its voice a low, almost melodic rumble.
“My tines are long, my tines are short. My tines end ere my first report. What am I?”
I almost felt like laughing with relief when I heard the riddle. Grandma and I would spend hours telling each other riddles back and forth when I was a child, and I had gotten so good at them I would even leave her stumped and come up with answers to her hardest mind-benders. Whenever I asked her why she was so interested in riddles, she would just stroke my hair and say, You never know when they’ll come in handy, Gearoid. You never know.
I knew now. I wondered if Grandma had told me all the riddles trying to prepare me for the troll to come and ask for payment, or simply to keep her mind sharp. There was no time to think about it now as I mulled over the troll’s question.
“Well, boy, boy, boy? Do you give up?” It sounded pleased, thinking I was so easy to break. I glared at it.
“No. I was just thinking.” I glanced past the troll, just as a bright flash of lightning forked and hit a tree not far from Sarah’s horse pasture, and my eyes widened.
“Lightning. You’re lightning.”
The troll’s eyes narrowed, and I could tell he was surprised at my answer. “Very well.” He readjusted his bulk, his contorted fingers resting on the windowsill.
“Never ahead, ever behind, yet flying swiftly past; For a babe I last forever, for adults I’m gone too fast. What am I?”
I swallowed, my eyes glued to the floor to keep away from looking at the creature in front of me. I thought of how it must have waited all this years, watching, and how the rest of the fey hated me for being on their land; for being able to see them. I thought of the strange shadows I’d seen melting across my bedroom floor at night, only to disappear when I turned on the bedside lamp. The strange laughter and broken music I heard on winter nights, always out of reach when it swirled in on the freezing wind. How many other children had made fun of me for screaming that I saw squat, froglike creatures with sharp teeth grinning at me from the woods around the edge of the playground. How I nearly drowned one summer swimming in the lake on Sarah’s property when we were barely in sixth grade, because I felt webbed fingers latch onto my ankle and try to drag me down into the darkness.
“Childhood.”
The troll’s semblance of a smile twisted into a scowl, and I allowed myself the faintest of grins. I thought of my grandmother standing in front of this same beast at my age, terrified, but willing to go to any lengths to protect her family and friends. It made my smile wider.
“You are a clever boy, boy, boy, I see. Not clever enough for my final riddle, I know you are not, not, not.” Its deformed hand raised, and though it couldn’t get into the house, its shadow stretched across the floor and sent a bolt of panic through my chest.
“The thing that all things devours; Birds, beast, tree, flower. Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones down to meal. Slays kings and ruins towns, and beats the highest mountain down. What am I?”
I took a deep breath, my fists clenched against the quilt on Sarah’s parent’s bed. My smile had faded as the troll told the riddle, it was one not even my grandmother had alluded to. I refused to let the anxiety show on my face, but as I sat there staring at the ground, trying to think, the troll laughed. I had been silent for several minutes, and the storm was getting worse. Every second I delayed Sarah was stuck under the hill, and I had no idea what they were doing to her. They could already have my mom for all I knew, and I wondered how my grandmother did this. How did she live her life knowing there was a secret world all around her, and everything in it hated her? That she had to risk her and everyone she loved’s life just to keep them from mortal harm? She was stronger than me. I didn’t know how I was going to handle day-to-day life if I got out of here alive.
“Do you give up, boy, boy, boy? It is a difficult riddle. Do not be ashamed to admit defeat.” His green teeth showed as he grinned, and I could hear the violin strings snapping and branches creaking in his voice.
“No. I don’t give up. I just need more time.” I tried my hardest to keep my voice subdued as the troll shifted to its full height, fingers unfurling.
“Time was not in the bargain, boy, boy, boy. Either you answer or you do not.”
My teeth gritted as I opened my mouth to say god knows what, but I stopped. It was as if Grandma was sitting next to me, stroking my hair and shaking her head. The answer was right in front of you, Gearoid, you’re just too impatient to see it! She’d always say that in the earlier days of our game when I’d give up in a snit after taking too long to answer a riddle.
I knew the answer.
“Time. Time is the answer!” I stood up off the bed and grinned.
The troll scowled harder than I’d seen it, opened its mouth, and howled. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard before in my life, a cacophony of broken, screaming instruments and wailing animals and crying women; As well as wind ripping through trees and ocean waves crashing against rock. The window slammed shut with a crack, a few panes of glass shattering and falling onto the window seat. The power flickered on and off crazily, the lights dimming and brightening as the troll howled.
Then, as soon as it started, it was over.
I opened my eyes from where I’d taken cover behind the bathroom door, and the troll was gone. The only proof of its existence was the faint smell of moss and lichen blowing in from the cracked window, and what I knew had happened. Sarah’s parents arrived home not long after, and found me sitting under their window clutching an iron poker from the fireplace, and their daughter missing. I think I passed out when Sarah’s mom started screaming. I don’t remember much after that.
They found Sarah later the next morning, about three miles away from her house. She wandered into a neighboring farmer’s barn, claiming she’d been abducted by strange women with deer forelegs and hooves and men with ribcages for torsos. She told the police they forced her to answer riddles to avoid them feeding her strange food and hurting her, but wasn’t able to answer all of them – The bruises all over her body attested to that. But the police didn’t believe her story. I didn’t think they would, but I knew better. She didn’t. She was new to this, she told people.
Her parents sent her to a psych ward for three months. I visited her almost every day I could, and I told her I believed her. She cried, usually, and told me about how food had no taste and she was hungry all the time, and she couldn’t sleep because of the strange music and voices calling her name. The day she was released, she looked terrible. She was skinnier than ever, with dark shadows under her eyes and hollow cheekbones. She hugged me tight, though, and told me she was sorry with tears in her eyes.
I wasn’t sure what she meant until she vanished out of her bedroom that night.
When her parents let me in her room to see if I wanted any of her things, it smelled like moss and lichen. When I left, I saw a hulking shadow under her window, and I thought I heard laughter like creaky branches and storm wind on the breeze.
Sarah never came back. I’m not sure if I should be happy or horrified that she didn’t. Her time spent under the hill changed her, made her a different person. Maybe she was happier there, now that she was one of them. I didn’t know. I’d never know, thank God, though I felt terrible for thinking it.
I had Grandma’s house torn down, even the foundation. I refused to sell the land even though I had everyone from farmers to developers begging me for it, offering me a king’s ransom for the rich soil. I wouldn’t put anybody through that. I wouldn’t will it to my children, as if I would have any. When I died, whenever that was, the pact would die with me.
I still hear the voices, the music, the whispering. I still see shadows out of the corner of my eye and I still won’t swim in natural bodies of water because water fey are notorious for trying to drown people. I still hear them calling, though I’ve gotten better at ignoring it. I won’t go to them, and I won’t listen to them.
On late winter nights, when I’m up in the wee hours trying to write another chunk of whatever it is I’m working on before my publisher’s deadline, the call is the hardest to resist. Sometimes I find myself out of my chair with my hand on the doorknob before I remember Grandma, telling me to be strong, calling me Gearoid. I remember the troll, thinking he’d won. I remember Sarah, how vibrant and full of life she had been before the hill took her. It’s enough for me to lock my doors tighter, put my headphones on and drown out whatever it is I hear.
I know they won’t ever go away, won’t ever stop trying and reaching for me, and I know no one will ever believe me. But for as long as I can remember, strange things have happened to me. And they’ve probably happened to you too. So next time you hear an unexplained noise in the middle of the night, or see a mysterious light just beyond the hill, don’t go searching for it. Don’t follow it.
Close your eyes, walk the other direction and be glad you can’t see the things that I can see.
Credit To – Spellblades (formerly known as Herchansen)
|
((The following passage was found on an abandoned jump-drive two miles outside of Philadelphia. Though a somewhat longer passage, it has been passed on to, edited, and submitted by K.B. Miller. Original sources refused to disclose the exact location where such jump-drive was found. Therefore, certain names and events have been changed or redacted.))
****
I can’t believe I’m doing this.
Let me begin by saying I’m not sure how much time I have. I’ll try keep it short, to be as detailed as possible. The cowardice inside screams for me to get away, to not just sit here. But the author… she wants this written down, almost like a final verse in this sick play. All I just know is that the world needs to understand. They need to know the secret behind Spring Grove. I’m not good at writing this kind of thing. The more I speak of it, the more ridiculous it’s going to seem. But please. Just listen to me…
… I guess I should start where it counts: are you a fan of children? I was. I was never really fond of newborns, but any child beyond the state of toddler held a certain weakness of mine. Their deep, vibrant eyes, constantly sweeping the world; but nothing fascinated me more than their mind. Their minds are the image of purity, blank as a white canvas until our vile black paint stains it like poisonous ink. I witnessed that tainting. Right before my very eyes.
****
Preparations
My whole reason for getting myself mixed up in this crap was for a project, one that would assure my graduation from Art Institutes. It was simple enough: a short, meaningful documentary on a subject of our choosing. I was a film student, you see, and was no stranger in approaching random people and asking for a moment of their time in front of the camera. But I wanted to branch out. I wanted to be different, to be brave. I wanted to do something that no one else thought about looking into.
My brother had recently picked up his Play Station 4. All the better, since he hadn’t shut up about it since it was announced. A few weeks in, and he discovered that Red Barrels had posted a free download of Outlast, a horror game whose gameplay I couldn’t get enough of on YouTube. As I sat quietly in a corner after begging to observe his reactions like it was a staged comedy, I turned my attention to the game itself. Man, places like Mount Massive Asylums got a bad reputation through media like this. I had never truly entered an asylum myself. What could be the harm? Things like this were victim to Hollywood bull.
That’s it. I can expose an asylum for what it is. I could do more than present this as a project; I could pull a Steven Spielberg and publish this baby straight to Netflix.
Being the spastic, excited fool I was, I immediately began research for my first blockbuster. It had to be someplace close, since my car had a tendency to chew out my savings every tire rotation. They would also have to be comfortable in front of the camera. Avoiding lawsuits and invading privacy wasn’t exactly my forte. Any psychiatric facility would do. I didn’t ask for much.
Of course, all asylums in the immediate area refused any and all requests to even an interview. I never asked questions, and it never crossed my mind any of them had anything to hide. They probably figured I was still a student, and places like that could be dangerous for those without proper training. Yet, so were prisons, and I’ve seen plenty of cameras in places like those. I just flowed with whatever rolled my way, and one day… it paid off.
****
The First Day
Spring Grove Hospital Center was what they called it. I could care less of what it’s called, now. To me, it was Hell on Earth. But not then. Then, I was ecstatic that they even considered me, and I grabbed the first opportunity I had to begin my trek to suburban Baltimore. The drive was unpleasant, but the views were astonishing. I had only before experienced the great city, but Spring Grove’s campus was a breath of fresh air.
I swore at first I was driving to have a meet with a queen before pulling in. The buildings were spread and massive, almost medieval with a touch of modern technology. In fact, it almost resembled a few college campus’ that I had previously visited. But I knew better. This asylum was going to provide more experience than any education would. Speaking of which, I was quickly put in my place for even mentioning the word ‘asylum’. Apparently, I had to use the term ‘psychiatric hospital’ at all times during my stay, but whatever. Being politically correct is irritating as it is. A woman stood waiting for me at the door, as though my arrival was that of some kind of celebrity.
“You are Jacobson, yes?” She addressed me formally, with a broken accent I couldn’t exactly put my finger on. “Come. We show you around. You film camera whenever you like.”
She took me into the bowels of the building. Well, I can’t call it the ‘bowels’, exactly. It seemed quite pleasant at first, with plenty of light and fresh air amongst the living space. I was already having my doubts on this whole assignment. I was expecting medieval torture and massacres. This place was downright comfortable. Maybe it was just bias getting in the way. Filming this place as it was, whether it’s insane or a sanctum, was my mission. The truth. I took out my camera and already began getting some footage. The thought nagging at the back of my mind was that this was going to be a bit of a letdown back at the Institutes. Maybe I should just film a horror attraction instead, if that’s what they expected.
“Spring Grove was established in 1797. Is second oldest operating psychiatric facility in the nation.” The woman explained to me. “Is known for its research in schizophrenia.”
It wasn’t far into the asylum before she wanted to turn back. I knew in my gut we hadn’t seen the whole facility, and I hadn’t gotten nearly enough information for my documentary. She disregarded any attempts to go further, stating that was all she had to show me. I researched for days, drove for hours, for only ten minutes worth of material? It was NOT going to end like this. My college education (and my portfolio) were at stake.
So, I devised the ultimate plan: before we journeyed back to the entrance, I excused myself to the restroom. There, I waited patiently, faking whatever bowel movements I could, before I could slip out undetected.
I was feeling pretty good about myself, until it slowly began to dawn on me that the patients were becoming more and more scarce. I knew I was in the woman’s wing. About where we started, patients were pretty common, aimlessly roaming the halls or simply lounging outside their quarters. Save the occasional nurse or assistant, these halls were barren. It was somewhat unsettling, but not nearly as so when I came to a sign that read “Violent Patients” above an archway in the middle of the corridor. I had the distinct feeling in my gut that I had gone too far. I turned to begin my walk of shame back to the entrance…
“NO, NO, NO! MY GAME! PLAY THE GAME! PLAY THE GAME!”
At least, that’s what I thought she said. It was unholy shrieking like I’ve never heard before. It sounded much closer than it really was, as though the bloody wails were right next to my hear, blasting my eardrums to dust. I whipped about frantically, and found something not so dissimilar to a gremlin sprinting toward me. My first instinct was to take flight, but something rooted me to the ground. The creature stumbled and scrambled on the slick linoleum, foaming at the mouth and clutching something in the claws of her left fingers. As it slipped, it left a trail of blackish mucus behind it, like aged blood. It didn’t take long in my panic to notice that this was a young, hairless girl, no more than 5 years old, dressed in only a slim robe. I felt my heart pound in my chest, the blood pulsating in my skull. Oh god! Keep this creature away from me!
Though I swore she was mere feet from my face, employees tackled her a good ten yards down the hall. She fought, raking her razor sharp nails across the faces of her assailants and dropping the little device on the ground. It flipped open, revealing the duel screens that I recognized belonged to a Nintendo DS. She screamed at the top of her lungs, and I finally mustered enough strength to take a step back. One of the employees scooped the thing up, and pressed the others to return the patient to her quarters. I took the moment to wrench myself away from that place. I whipped around, turning the corner and trying to wipe the terrible images from my-
“What are you doing?!” I almost jumped from my socks. I had nearly forgotten about my escort. “You must leave! NOW!”
But I held my ground. I pleaded. Why did I plead? Perhaps the simple change in direction had knocked my brain stem loose. My mind was now hellbent on finishing this documentary. “W-What about her?! Can I see her?! Please?!”
“You leave! NOW!”
I was pressed out the door before I had a chance to take a second breath. The woman barred the entrance. I never even got her name. All the better, I didn’t care. I was angry. I was promised more than information, I was promised truth. This crap I picked up on my camera was nothing; I didn’t even get footage of the hairless girl. When I reviewed my results, any and all footage of her was obstructed and replaced with static. I figured in my panic I must have hit a button or some kind of bull. Everything I had traveled here for: gone.
I didn’t take my leave right away. In a fit of rage, I placed another dent in my otherwise ramshackle car. How could I have been so damn stupid?! There was a reason no one tread these kinds of waters: it was a complete waste of time and money! I took up my camera and shoved it back into its case. To hell with it! I wasn’t going to waste another moment in this fucking ‘mental hospital.’ I’m just going to go home and avoid trashing my cash on some gross hotel room. I got behind the wheel, nearly tearing my door handle off its hinges as I slammed it shut. Ugh, come ON! My keys fell to the carpet floor. I twisted myself in the most awkward of positions before hooking it on my finger.
As I rose, there was a loud KNOCK KNOCK of glass on boney knuckles. I startled, once more letting my keys escape my grasp. I sat there a moment with an exasperated sigh, before giving in and rolling down my window slightly.
“Ms. Nicole Jacobson, am I right?” The woman extended her hand in greeting through the window. It took a moment before I acknowledged and shook it. “I couldn’t help but notice what keen interest you have in our little asylum away from home.”
I perked up somewhat. “You use the word ‘asylum.’ Why?”
“It doesn’t much matter what we call it. It’ll always be home to the insane.” As ridiculous as I found it to keep the right terminology, her nonchalant attitude put me on edge. “How’s about you step out of the car and we talk about getting you the footage you want.”
I didn’t budge. “And just who are you?”
She smirked. It wasn’t a playful or devilish smirk. I couldn’t tell what it was. “The name’s Doctor Denise Waters, Clinical Director and Chief of Staff. So. Do you want that footage or not?”
****
The Second Day
It was a rock and a hard place. That night, Dr. Waters directed me to stay on campus in dorms normally reserved for medical students in training. It wasn’t very inviting, I must say. The dorms were poorly kept, and cobwebs dominated the corners of every room. I swore I caught a whiff of mold or mildew. Considering my other options, however, staying on campus was the only one that didn’t reek of failure, or rather, burn a hole in my wallet. The night was rough, nonetheless. As I lay with my gaze piercing the singular window, I could not shake from the back of my mind the creature that bed not a mile from me. The creature that I would have to face again come dawn.
The blood red sun had barely begun to peek over the horizon by the time I met Dr. Waters once more by the same building. I wasn’t fond of mornings, but then again, you can’t wake up early if you never slept. I shut my driver’s side door before I turned to get my equipment from the back. Waters held up a finger, halting me.
“Not today.” She bluntly stated. “She must get to know you first.”
“’Not today?’” I repeated in disbelief. “How long do you think this is going to take?! I only need an hour’s worth of film!”
“Six.” She said. “Days. No more. No less. You must prove to us, to her, that you are who you say you are.”
This woman was crazy. What do I have to prove?! They’re the ones who need to prove something to me! And there was no way that I was going to stay here for another five days! I turned around, ready to hop in my rusted Nissan for the long journey back home. No documentary was worth this.
“Remember, Ms. Jacobson!” Dr. Waters yelled after me. I wasn’t sure why her words had me freeze the way I did. It was though I was silently desperate for there to be a reason to stay. A reason… that would make the difference in everything I stood for. “If you run now, the world will never truly know what lay beyond these doors! You’re the final hope for this girl!”
“Or else what?” I glanced over my shoulder.
She needn’t answer me. I could tell by the mere dullness of her soulless eyes what fate await that young, innocent girl. Were these people really willing to stoop that low? Was the girl truly that dangerous? And… how was I being here going to change that? I had too many questions to ask at once. I did my usual thing, kept my mouth shut and my eyes and ears open, as she once more took me past that forbidden sign that read “Violent Patients”. Into the jaws of the beast. What have I to lose at this point? She was lucky that I had a week to spare during spring break.
I followed closely behind, head down, as I began to stride lightly. Pleasant wooden doors were slowly replaced by iron behemoths that could take a nuclear strike. Whatever the stoic guardians kept at bay did nothing to shield the sound that came from within: quite often we passed patients in the middle of their tantrums or inconsistent muttering. Some doors were solid; others held heavy viewing glass or barred windows. It was almost like prison in my eyes, and every step felt more and more like the corridors of Mount Massive Asylum. I took my eyes off my surroundings for one second to see the lonely door at the end of the hall… the one that held my destination.
My heart leaped into my throat. My collar had been grabbed onto, and wrenched to the side. My head met cold hard metal, the metallic noise echoing through my skull. Untrimmed nails raked into my neck. The woman’s warm breath seeping into my mouth and nose like smog. By the time my vision leveled, Dr. Waters had taken a hold of my shoulders, dragging me back in the opposite direction. It all happened so fast, I stumbled before regaining balance and looking my assailant dead in the eye. I didn’t even have a moment’s notice to scream.
“Don’t GO!” The patient shrieked, clawing the metal through the iron bars. Dr. Waters helped me to my feet, giving me a moment to compose myself. She began to walk me to the door, though my ears staggered behind. “The cursed child lives! She lives beyond that door! That cursed child! That CURSED child!”
Her voice gradually muted as we passed through the door, leading into a small transition room with yet another door. Dr. Waters fussed over me, checking my head for any signs of injury. “I’m terribly sorry about that. She’s one of our advanced cases of schizophrenia. Patients like her are the reason we don’t often let guests back here.” She gestured to the door. “Come, through here. This is the transition into the nursery.”
Nursery? I never thought of an asylum housing a nursery before. It was like any other, only with a little more padding. Nurses were constantly on watch in every corner of the room. Every toy, play thing, or activity was completely impact resistant, with little to no blunt edges whatsoever. Even the wallpaper was designed with air pockets, like entire sheets of bubble wrap were plastered to the walls. It was pretty spacious, and gave the children plenty of stimulus. The children themselves were all around the age of 10, though didn’t seem to have the mental capacity of a child over 8. Even with a scant amount of observation, I could tell that they were getting the best care possible here.
“Why is this room in the Violent Woman’s Wing?” I asked as the thought struck me. “I see both boys and girls here.”
Dr. Waters strode past me, gesturing for me to follow. “We believe that the presence of children are more soothing for the women here. Sometimes if they show enough good behavior, they can visit this room under heavy supervision. They are much safer here than in the Men’s Wing. Usually maternal instinct kicks in, and the children are quite safe.”
She took me to the far corner of the room. It wasn’t until now that I spotted it-… no, her… huddled by some blankets with her eyes locked on her Nintendo DS. She was pale, like her skin never knew sunlight, and frail like she never knew a good meal. A couple other children were sat immediately behind her, their focus only broken by our arrival. They stood, their intense eyes boring into my flesh, before trotting past to look for something else to do. The girl, almost instantly noticing the absence of her audience, took a glance around before looking up at her new visitors. Her eyes were bloodshot, but sparkled like none others in this godforsaken place.
“Faith…” Dr. Waters addressed her. “This is Ms. Jacobson.”
Faith’s eyes never left me. It was though she was sizing me up, or completely awestruck by what I was. I couldn’t think of anything else to do but smile. Maybe throw in a little finger wave. When she finally broke the searing visual contact, her gaze swept immediately back onto her hand-held. Her fingers didn’t resume their usual pattern over the buttons as I anticipated. Instead, her fragile palms lifted in my direction, presenting me with her greatest treasure.
“Play the game?” She asked, in a sweet, delicate voice.
I halted. Images from the other day swamped my mind. Was this really the same girl? Without so much as a hesitation, I put my hand up, grinning nervously. “Um, not today, dearie.”
She didn’t budge. In fact, she pressed the DS towards me more firmly. Before I had a chance to say anything more, Dr. Waters intercepted. “Ms. Jacobson is going to be your new friend and play with you for the next few days.”
“I am?” I frowned, only to pick the act back up when I saw the heartbreak in Faith’s face. I didn’t sign up for this. “I mean, yes, I am.”
Faith shut her DS and put it to the side. Somehow, this made me more comfortable. She spoke in a voice that sounded much older than it should. “So you’re here to replace Ms. Annabelle?”
“No, no.” Dr. Waters cut in again. “Not replace. No one can replace Ms. Annabelle. She’s just going to keep you company. Now, we’ll be right back.”
She took me back into the transition room, careful not to let any children slip through the cracks. I took a fleeting look back over my shoulder, half expecting Faith to scoop her device back up and resume whatever she was doing. But she didn’t. Her eyes never left me, and even as I saw her smile for the first time, I was not reassured. I could already tell this girl was going to test me in every way she knew I feared. It was not a sinister look. It was merely the look every student gave their substitute teacher. After the door was shut, I let the doctor see clearly my irritation.
“I came to make a documentary, not babysit!” I can’t remember exactly how this conversation went, let alone everything else, but this interpretation comes close.
“This is our deal, Jacobson. Take it or leave it.” Waters grew firm. “She is our youngest schizophrenic case we have ever received. You’re lucky to have even gotten a glance at her, let alone the interaction I’m giving you!… Look at it this way: you document her. You try to understand her. And while you do that, I believe you can help her!”
“How?! What can I do?!”
“That’s for you to figure out!… We’ve done all we can, Jacobson. She’s become a danger to herself. If Faith doesn’t make a breakthrough soon, her suffering may cause her to do something beyond harmful… maybe even fatal.”
“Isn’t it your job to make sure that doesn’t happen?”
Waters shook her head, prepared to put this dispute to rest. “This is different, Ms. Jacobson. You might not understand now, but this child is beyond our control. You either take this chance, or walk away now. Any questions?”
Too many, I thought. None of this made the least bit of sense. How did simply getting a few more minutes of footage plunge me into this? Every argument I had against this woman was null and void with my sense of humanity. I was too kind. I wanted to help Faith more than anything. How I was going to do that, I really had no idea myself. If the professional couldn’t help her, how could a film student? I wasn’t even really sure what my goal was. How was I to know if I had ‘helped’ her or not? Why was I asking myself all these hypothetical questions never to be answered? I don’t know. It was all bullshit.
“Well?” Waters growled. “Questions?”
I scoffed in frustration, grabbing a random thought from the back of my head. “Her DS. What is that for? She’s the only child who has one, it looks like.”
“That game thingy?” The doctor was somewhat confused at first. “I’m not really sure what it is or what she does on it. A nurse brought it in from the lost-and-found. One of the students left it behind.”
“So why does Faith have it now?”
“Well before, Faith was a very cold and spastic child. We figured all she needed was interaction with other children, but they were afraid to approach her, and she wanted nothing to do with them. When the nurse let her see the game, she calmed down, focused on it. She was made approachable by the others. So we figured, what the heck. Let her keep it. Since then, her outbursts have slimmed from constant to once every few days.” Waters turned with a flip of her brunette hair. “Now if you don’t mind, I have more important things to attend to.”
“You’re just going to leave me here?”
“Of course. I was called to a conference in Washington last night. You’ll be fine. There are many trained nurses around to lend a hand if need be. I wish you luck on your documentary, Ms. Jacobson.” She said, opening the door. Before slipping out, she turned back one final time. “You may or may not like what you find…”
… And that’s it. Thus would end as much as I can recall to that point in time. It’s somewhat scant, but so are the memories. It doesn’t help that every word I type builds on my rapid heartbeat. Thankfully, I don’t need to remember every detail. I thought ahead. After the second day drew to a close, I scrambled to grab whatever spare paper I brought along. I may not be a reporter, but I knew how to organize my thoughts like one. I found a small, clean notebook hidden among my knapsacks, and jotted down as much as I could on that every night. A log. I guess at the time I had figured I would use it as a narrative for the documentary-never-to-be. Now it’s just a hellish chronicle of the real horrors that lie beyond their doors.
And I’m about to share every word of it:
———-
– April 14th, 2014. Today was the first day spent with Faith.
– Shortly after being left to my own devices by Doctor Denise Waters, I joined her in the nursery. The first few moments were spent sitting there beside her, silently, observing her play on her Nintendo DS. I recognized it almost immediately, as I am a proficient gamer. It was one of the first games I ever played on DS myself. It was Kirby Super Star Ultra, and I must say she was pretty far into it for someone her age. She was already tackling the consecutive boss battles in the stage known as ‘The Arena.’ That particular stage took me forever to complete myself.
– After watching her get taken down by the boss Wham Bam Rock, she finally turned her attention to me and said, blunt as a stone: “I don’t like you.” I asked why. “You’re here to replace Ms. Annabelle. I liked Ms. Annabelle.”
– I had heard this name a few times now. My curiosity spiked. “Who is Ms. Annabelle? What happened to her?”
– Faith closed her DS and looked away somewhat wistfully. “He got hungry the other night. She fed him.”
– I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant by that. I’m guessing that when Ms. Annabelle took her leave, she mentioned to Faith that a pet of hers at home needed feeding. I settled on that theory, considering the fact that I couldn’t get anything more from her.
– Faith is a classic schizophrenic case. Luckily, I have brought my laptop to conduct research when I can. Unable to sleep last night, I searched up schizophrenia on Google to give myself a quick rundown. Like what I saw, Faith wasn’t exactly the most focused individual I’ve spent time with. Sometimes, it was thought she wasn’t even speaking to me. She was somewhat spastic, and constantly changing the subject to something random, most of the time having to do with that game. I was at least glad I knew what she was talking about; I’m sure anyone else in this hospital who managed to speak with her couldn’t hold a conversation about King Dedede’s hierarchy or the fundamental basis of the Heavy Lobster. She’s a smart kid, given her mental state.
– She began to take more of a liking to me after these conversations on her game started. At first, she was fixated on one thing and one thing only: getting me to play it. I held my ground and refused every time. I wasn’t very familiar with schizophrenic cases, and I was afraid of the consequences for touching her DS too long. Perhaps she may forget she lent it to me, and attack me to get it back. She certainly wasn’t too fond of the nurses taking it away from her the other day. Whatever the case, (as so many scenarios ran through my head), I wasn’t about to take a chance with this child I barely knew. She was persistent, but once she knew I had some kind of knowledge of the game itself, her pleads all but melted away.
– Even though she was through most of the game, she often asked me for tips on how to get further. Her whole world transfixed on this game. It seemed to be the only thing giving her life meaning, connecting her to those around her. The other children were fascinated by this little device that made her a local celebrity. I see why it is so dear to her.
– Once we got comfortable with one another, we began to do more together. A simple game of catch with a plush ball proved entertaining to her; somewhat surprising, considering the kind of stimulation she gets from her game. I suppose it wasn’t the game itself she craved, it was companionship. Maybe this is what Dr. Waters meant when she said I could help her. To be a filmmaker means to keep an open mind. It meant persistence and hard work, with little bias behind it. She might have made the right choice, calling to me. The rest of the day was spent doing random activities about the nursery, and soon, she even forgot to mention the game at all.
– I took it very slow, to the very end. By dusk, Faith was even sad to see me go. I didn’t find out much about her, but at least she is more comfortable with me now. She’s not who I thought she was. Unlike the other patients, she’s smart. She’s level-headed. She appears more and more… human, every second I spend with her. She knows what’s going on. She’s not mad like they say. She’s a child, like many I’ve seen before. Something seems out of place here… and I’m going to get to the bottom of it.
****
The Third Day
– April 15th, 2014. Two children were missing today when I got to the nursery.
– And that wasn’t the only odd thing to happen right at dawn. Last night about 1 PM, there was a severe power outage that lasted until noon the next morning. The wind hardly blew, and rain has been nonexistent since I arrived. I didn’t bother getting out of bed to ask how it happened; I just wanted to steal a single damn moment of sleep. Despite having made myself more comfortable in Faith’s presence, sleeping in the dorms still waft a feeling of dread. So, I lay there, motionless, until the sun finally sliced through the darkness.
– I decided to walk to the building today. The morning was crisp, and after all the bull I’ve had to put up with in the past few days, I needed some fresh air. The hospital campus is beautiful, after all; nothing like rest of Baltimore. As I strode over the lush green moor, I noticed a construction crew nearby, working around the clock to bring the grids power back online. Even from a distance, I could see they were in the process of hauling away a transformer, to replace it altogether. As the workers moved aside, I saw the extent of the damage like it came straight from a Spielberg film: it was though something had ripped straight through the center, like great claws had taken hold of it and raked through it like butter. Though I walked by without hesitation, it left me dumbfounded. No natural occurrence last night could have done that.
– When I walked through the front doors, I headed straight to the front desk and asked if they knew what caused the outage, taking note that the power was already restored in this building. The man behind the desk merely stated that there was a construction accident that caused one of the grid’s lines to be severed. Lies. All lies. Not only did I see the damage myself, but I ventured all over campus the other day. Not once did I see any construction taking place whatsoever. I turned away without another word. What do I know? It could have been just some fluke incident they were trying to cover up.
– When I made it to the nursery, I instinctively looked over in the same corner Faith was in the other day. There she was, fixated on her DS. Unlike yesterday, however, she perked up the moment I opened the door, as though she was expecting me. I smiled. It made me feel loved to have made a new friend. For her to drop everything and greet me was astounding from what I saw just a few short hours ago.
– It was then a nurse approached me with the grave news. Many cameras were set up along the corridors and positioned in every room, something I took note of but never really felt the need to point out. It WAS an asylum, after all. According to the nurse, the cameras naturally went offline during the outage, and in the short period of time spent getting the auxiliary power online, two children mysteriously disappeared.
– “I don’t understand it.” She said to me. “We kept such a close eye on them while the cameras were out. We don’t know if they slipped out on their own or if someone took them or what.”
– All she told me was to keep an eye out for them at all times, like everyone else was instructed to do. They two boys were brothers, as I could tell from the photos she showed me. Even Faith took a look a the photographs, but didn’t give any indication she knew who they were, at first. It was only until the nurse left that she spoke up.
– “They played the game with me.” She said. “But they didn’t really like it.”
– That was it! Those were the boys that were looking over her shoulder yesterday. Knowing this didn’t do me any good on finding them, but it still felt good to know.
– I finally got the chance to bring in my equipment today. I hadn’t even set up my tripod before Faith began pestering me once more. “Play with Marxie! Play the game! Please?!” She would say. I wasn’t as strongly opposed to it as the other day, but I still rejected. I still didn’t trust Faith enough to touch her DS. She did, however, add Marx to the plea, or ‘Marxie’ as she liked to call him. For those of you not Kirby-savvy, Marx was a prime villain in Kirby Super Star and Kirby Super Star Ultra, the game she had now. I guess she wanted me to play Milky Way Wishes, the stage he was on. By the time the camera was set up, Faith finally gave up once again.
– She was less fixated on the game today, and more interested in spending time and doing things with me. Of course, even though she didn’t focus on it directly, I could tell her thoughts on it were latent. In the midst of having some fun, she grabbed two foam noodles from the toy box. She hand one to me, telling me that I was Kirby and she was Meta Knight. We were basically reenacting a battle from the game. I thought nothing of it, really. It was typical fan-girl hysteria, being a fan-girl myself. Our playtime even attracted the attention of the other children, and it wasn’t long before every child in the room was armed with a foam noodle, much to the dismay of the nurses who had no sense of fun. Our shenanigans lasted about an hour, and it wasn’t long before most of the chi |
There are no more happy endings.
The forest across the canal loomed towards him. The worst ice storm Detroit had seen in a century had done its work well, transforming the entirety of the park into frozen sculptures. The trees seemed to grasp at the air as they swayed in the howling wind. Many of their branches had already broken under the weight, falling heavily onto the icy stream below.
He eyed the forest, standing on the other side of the worn stone bridge, hands buried in his pockets. He’d seen the bridge before in pictures and its utter mundaneness came as something of a surprise. The stones embedded in the concrete were ancient, stripped of the snow that had recently covered them by the wind. Whatever handrails had once guarded the edges of the bridge were gone, long since rusted away. Except for the thick, slushy trail of blood that ran up the center of it, there was absolutely no indication of what he knew was waiting for him on the other side.
He had an idea who the blood on the bridge belonged to. Lucille Gale had been the last of seven young adults who to have disappeared in a month. The first six had been found already, their bodies discovered in various locations along the bank of the Detroit river.
The first of them had his skin completely removed, expertly flayed off. The second was so badly ripped apart that it had taken a week to identify her. The third was found lying in an alleyway with lungs full of water and seaweed, a full hundred meters away from the river.
It wasn’t until a fourth teenager was found with her skeleton missing that his organization took interest. They’d swooped down onto the case overnight, so desperate to get him onto the scene that they’d sent him there via translocation. From the moment he emerged from the Detroit alleyway, shaking off the horror of what he always saw when he translocated, it had been nothing but investigation with the local police and terrified locals.
The FBI got involved when two more children turned up dead (exsanguinated and strangled with their own intestines, respectively) Federal agents were always the most difficult to deal with. They were suspicious of his badge, despite it being completely authentic. They were suspicious of how massive he was, towering over most of them, easily broader than any. They were suspicious of how much he already knew about the case, despite having arrived only a few days before they.
What made them more suspicious then anything was how quickly their bosses told them to shut up and get out of his way. The men who ran the Bureau from their offices in D.C. had no idea who he was, and none of them were interested in finding out. They had all heard the legends from those that had led the Bureau before them. They knew what happened when men like him showed up on the scene of a crime too terrible for words. The problem stopped, and it was better to not ask questions how. Any federal involvement was quickly terminated, and the assigned agents reassigned somewhere else.
They’d remember this case for the rest of their lives. They might one day have colleagues who had similar encounters with men like him, and endlessly discuss what organization he might have represented. Theories ranged from an obscure Homeland Security cell to the CIA Special Operations Group. They would jokingly refer to men like him as ‘The Others,’ ‘Those We Don’t Speak Of,’ ‘The Activity,’ or even as ‘The Men in Black’ if they were feeling sarcastic.
His organization knew all of this. There wasn’t much they didn’t.
The man took a reading. The palm-sized device lit up, whirring as he placed it on the ground. He stepped back, fishing out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket. The twin marbles of glass atop the reader spun faster and faster, the silver liquid inside them catching the bright blue light shining from the dozen or so diodes that covered the front and back of the device. After a few frantic seconds the marbles were spinning so fast above the device the man could no longer see them. A moment later the reader gave a frantic shriek. The globes exploded in a puff of powdered glass, the liquid flying through the air but evaporating before it touched the ground.
He sighed and lit his cigarette. “Initial readings suggest an unusually high breach in the Jovlin-Knight Barrier,” he said. “The presence of the remains of Lucille Gale confirms initial assumptions that she did not survive the hosting. Extreme weather patterns indicate the presence of a Midnight-Level Event occurring within the confines of the breach.”
He put his smoke to his lips again. The cherry flared brightly, a tiny speck of light burning defiantly in the darkness. The FBI and the police might not have a clue what the missing teens had in common, but he had known it the moment he had visited the morgue and seen their tortured bodies.
Each of them was psychic. Very, very psychic, and Lucille Gale most of all. He doubted that any of them were fully aware of it. Perhaps they had experienced vivid dreams that later came true, or had wondered whether or not they were at fault for the power outages that followed their every outburst. If left to themselves they would have grown exponentially more powerful, most likely to the point where they would have been targeted and killed by his organization. There were very few like them that managed to make it into adulthood, and none of them managed to die of old age.
Even at their nascent stage, however, they possessed more than enough raw ability to be of use to something on the other side. Something was trying desperately to come through, something that had no place even in a nightmare. The other six teens had proven unsuitable as doorways, but judging from the cataclysmic storm that had engulfed half the county, the man guessed that Lucille Gale would prove more than adequate.
Inhale. He felt the smoke burn a trail down his lungs as he considered his next words. “I still plan on crossing,” he said. “Regardless of what’s fueling the breach, I’ll ensure sufficient distraction or damage to allow Aegis translocation into the target area. Upon loss of communication, I stand by my original recommendation of an immediate kinetic on my last known position.” He paused. “Not that you ever listen to what I have to say.”
His answer was the howling wind, and a voice that spoke directly into his mind. He would have smiled at the response if smiling were something he was capable of. Instead he drew Jovlin’s gun from its holster on his side, the massive revolver fitting snugly into his equally massive hands. He squeezed the rubberized grip, fingers caressing the raised knotwork that adorned the barrel. The man took one last drag on his cigarette, flicking it away as he strode purposely onto the bridge, careful to keep his steps within the trail of Lucille Gale’s remains.
Normally crossing over required a tremendous amount of concentration and no small amount of luck. His repelling tattoos would burn so bad they’d singe his skin, and the tiny nodes lining the center of his brain would overload with static. Wearing an Aegis made it a bit easier, but even the best protection his organization could offer didn’t keep out the visions. He’d been there when Jovlin had died, and it was that memory that was returned to violent life every time he translocated.
This time there were no visions, no screaming ghosts from decades past. He simply stepped out of here and into nowhere, the symbols that were carved onto his flesh flaring briefly beneath his heavy clothing. The ease of the translocation confirmed his worst fears. It took a lot of power to rend such a huge hole in reality. Whatever caused this had been very old and very, very angry. For the first time, he wondered bemusedly if he’d been right to turn down assignment to an Aegis unit.
Regardless, he was relieved to see that the trail of human remains provided him a clear path through what was otherwise a land of absolute madness. Whatever thing had nested and birthed itself in the mind of Lucille Gale had not been kind to her. The thick, black-red smear on the ground led deep into the forest which now towered thousands of feet up into the air. He thought he caught a glimpse of something massive above him, moving in the storm clouds, its barbed coils swaying lazily from the sky. The frost-covered branches of the trees were all screaming with a woman’s voice, weeping and sobbing, crying for a mother and a father and the safety of home. He assumed the voice was Lucille’s.
He started off down the trail, booted feet splashing noisily in gristle that seemed to grow deeper as he walked. Around him the world shifted and rearranged itself at random. The trees exploded, sending ice shards the size of buildings crashing down around him. Something massive fell out of the sky, its leathered wings curling around its dead form, crashing to the earth behind a distant mountain range that abruptly forced itself out of the frozen earth. The wind intensified, and on it he could hear a name being whispered over and over again.
He didn’t recognize the name. He wondered if it was his.
The further he went along the trail, the more twisted reality became. He wondered how deep into the forest he was actually going in the real world. On more than occasion he had traveled for days inside a breach, only to find himself a step or two away from where he had started upon crossing out. Time and distance could have very little meaning in the Veiled World. Mercifully the laws of physics (usually) held sway, but those laws were easily bent or broken depending on what was causing such an awesome disturbance.
There was a place, he knew, where physics simply didn’t exist. Even as he walked he could see it, far on the horizon, a thin line of shadow that seemed to swallow up even the darkness. Calling it oblivion wasn’t accurate. There were things in the Nothing, things that made the horrors he dealt with on a regular occasion seem downright pleasant. He’d been to the edge before, watching reality and un-reality disappear into the howling claws of whatever waited for men and demons on the other side of existence.
Men smarter then he surmised that whatever it was had no power to enter or affect the world he sought to protect. He supposed this was true; it was hungry, and would have long since devoured the third dimension had it been capable.
The ground beneath his feet shook, and he suddenly found himself standing in a clearing. The storm-wracked sky was gone, replaced with a peaceful canvas devoid of any light save that of a full moon. The wind stopped abruptly. Snowflakes fell slowly through the air like the inside of a tumbling snow globe. A vast clearing spread out before him, the smeared remains of an overly ambitious psychic a vivid splash of red on the virgin snow.
There was a child in the clearing at the end of the trail. The boy was sobbing, his knees drawn up to his chest. The man approached him slowly. He tentatively took a step off the pathway and into the snow. His feet sunk into reassuring solid ground. The man began circling the boy, trudging through snow that came up to his shins.
“Go away,” the boy sniffled, burying his face in his arms. “Go away! I just want to be left alone.”
The man didn’t say anything. It was better to not talk to them if you could avoid. They’d played the game for eons; any word you spoke could be used against you. Instead he kept circling, trying to see the child’s face. He didn’t understand why this was important, but that was irrelevant. Gut instinct had kept him alive up to that point and he trusted it to take him further.
“Why did you follow me?” The boy screamed, kicking his feet into the ground. “I want to be left alone! Leave me alone!”
The world around them trembled slightly, and the man cursed under his breath. “You aren’t alone,” he answered. He had to buy himself more time. It needed to be tricked into revealing its true self, or it might simply push him back out into reality out of annoyance. “You’re with Lucille. Lucille Gale. Remember?”
Face still buried in his arms, the boy laughed. “Lucille. I remember Lucille. The other ones all ran, but Lucille wasn’t afraid. She stayed. She told me that she wasn’t afraid, that she wanted to help me. She held me so close…” His voice changed in an instant, becoming a tone no human vocal cord could ever hope to produce. “She’s rotting inside me. I cannot be bound. I cannot be harmed. I am eternal.”
“You might be eternal, but your son wasn’t, was he?” The warding tattoos on his skin started to prickle. That was a good sign. It was getting angry. “That’s who you’re pretending to be right now. Your son.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the boy sniffed, his voice that of a child’s again. “I’m just a little boy. I’m just a little boy, all alone out here in the woods.”
“No, you’re not. Your name is Claude Lachay. You killed your wife and son here, before it was a park. Before there were many people here at all. You started running, and when you couldn’t go anymore you killed a family that tried to help you. You ate them. Do you remember? You ate them, but even that couldn’t keep you from starving. You nearly died from hunger in the wilderness a hundred miles north of here.” The man cocked his head to the side, and decided to push the issue. “You pissed yourself when the wolves came. You screamed for your mother when they started eating you, like you screamed for her every day in Hell.”
The child exploded in a shower of blood. His face landed on the snow next to the man, steam pouring from its eyes sockets and laughing mouth. Where the child once stood was what his organization would call a ‘Class I-IX Paranormal Entity,’ unveiled in all its horrific glory. Its three heads sprouted from between its shoulders, each of them gnashing on a tongue that flickered like a snake. A pair of arms sprouted from between its legs, their fingers ended in leech-like mouths. The skin on its bloated stomach was stretched so far it was nearly transparent. Inside it he could see the tortured face of Lucille Gale, her hands pushing desperately to get out.
The thing that was once Claude Lachay, the first serial killer to walk American soil, thundered with laughter. Its voice echoed around the clearing where it had committed its first crimes nearly three hundred and fifty years prior. “I cannot be bound. I cannot be harmed. I am eternal. I am…God!”
The first round fired through Jovlin’s gun put an end to such boastful nonsense. Lachay roared as the round tore a fist-sized hole through the center of one of its heads. It clapped a massive hand to its face, reeling in agony. The man fired again and again, moving towards it at a flat-out run. While the danger of being forced out of the breach was over, he now faced the equally real threat of death at the target’s hands. Jovlin’s revolver was a powerful weapon against the denizens of the Veil, and the fact that it had already proved ineffective told him everything he needed to know.
He’d never survive a direct fight. Lachay had dragged itself out of the pit, and the mindless hate that allowed such perseverance had twisted it something wholly inhuman. Every heaving breath it took was the scream of a dying man; every guttural curse was the wheeze of lungs filling with bloody clots. It was a lord of death now, a corpse god, the grave incarnate.
The only way to finish this was to destabilize the breach enough to allow armored translocation. The only way to destabilize the breach was to kill the soul that was fueling it.
Each of the bullets he fired found their mark. By the time he had reached the target the man had already reloaded. He fired at point blank range, aiming at Lachay’s bloated stomach. A massive, scaled hand moved to intercept the rounds. The same hand struck him hard, tossing him through the air. He fired as he flipped head over heels, managing to keep the target at bay as he rolled on the ground. It was on him by the time he righted himself, choking as its tongues whipped towards his torso and legs.
He thought about evading, considered his options, and calmly decided against it. The barbs bit into his flesh and tensed, digging into his skin. He grunted, pain dampeners flooding his system. The venom hit him a second later. He vomited, body shuddering in the throes of a seizure as the poison reached his brain. The receptors in his skull were shrieking, fighting off both the toxins and the terrifying psychic power Lachay was unleashing through his unwilling host. He caught brief glimpses of the monster’s past; the last, confused looks on the faces of the Chippewa family he had butchered, the taste of human flesh in his mouth, the awful, maddening climb out of the bottom of torment back into the world of the living.
The man felt the barbs tense, followed by a violent jerking on his left leg. He looked down in time to see it come clean off, ripped away at the knee, disappearing down Lachay’s gullet.
He saw his leg floating inside Lachay’s bloated stomach as he fired into it again and again. Distracted, the target had no chance to defend itself. Its immense stomach popped like a blister, spewing digestive juices over the frozen earth. It dropped him as it stumbled backwards, yelping, its hands clapped over its stomach. Between its massive fingers, the half-digested form of Lucille Gale spilled out. She writhed in the snow, screaming through a mouth that had fused shut.
Lachay reached for her desperately, but it was already too late. The man fired a single shot. The high-caliber shell blew her head clean off.
The clearing was completely still for a moment. Then there was an earth shattering roar that sounded all too familiar to him. The breach shuddered and tilted. The whole world sloped at a downward angle, making Lachay stumble and fall. Both monster and man went tumbling head over heels towards the edge of the forest. The man’s fevered mind screamed at him to make sure he landed on the bridge. At the last second he reached out, his hand slapping down into the trail of blood, arresting his fall as he held tight to his only line back to reality.
There was another roar, and Nothingness came howling up towards them. The world below him almost completely vanished, the trees and the mountain ranges swallowed up by a mouth made up of nightmares. The power of Lucille Gale, wielded ruthlessly by Lachay, had been the only thing that had kept the breach open. With her death, the thin barrier between the Veiled World and what lay beyond came crashing down.
He saw Lachay land in the trees below. The monster leapt back into the clearing, scrabbling to find purchase in the snow. The man calmly fired his remaining rounds into the target, watching as each bullet hit home. With one last howl, the monster lost its grip and fell down into darkness.
The man didn’t have any time to feel satisfied. The breach was collapsing, shaking apart at the seams. Like a rising tide the Void came up to greet him, laughing and screaming. He could make up indistinct shapes as it came on; shapes that reminded him of Jovlin, the smell of her hair and the sound of her voice when she told him
I’ll love you until the day I die
and the look on her face when she fell, when she let go, when she LET GO! LET GO! LET GO!
LET GO AND FALL!
“Agent Hauser.”
The man looked up into glowing blue eyes. The Aegis was only a few feet above him, standing with its steel feet planted firmly in the bridge. The dying light of the breach cast strange shadows over its black armor and menacing weapon arrays. It reached out to him, its fingers strangely slender for such a massive construct.
“We haven’t much time, sir,”it said. “Please take my hand to initiate translocation.”
Hauser didn’t hesitate. He holstered his pistol in a single fluid motion and reached for its hand. Half a dozen ports on the Aegis’ back popped open with a pneumatic hiss. The construct’s translocation generator came online, emitting brilliant white light as it drank in the otherworldly energy of the breach
“Translocation imminent,” it intoned. “Brace for impact.”
Hauser looked down. Nothingness looked back at him, smiling. Reaching.
“Brace for impact. Brace for impact. Brace-“
He hit the snowy ground so hard it drove the air out of his lungs. He gasped, rolling onto his side. The wind that had been howling moments before seemed to calm by the moment. Soon it had disappeared entirely, the snow it had been driving left to tumble lazily to the earth. The entire world seemed to have become still and silent.
His eyes were drawn to the cigarette he had flicked away before entering the breach. It was inches away from him, still burning. He’d been gone only seconds in the real world. He reached for it with a trembling hand, the cherry flaring brightly as he inhaled. It was almost too damp to smoke, but he’d never tasted anything better.
The Aegis was already working on his leg. Hauser felt a brief twinge of pain as it spread anti-septic paste over his wound, spraying it from a small retractable hose attached to its hip. The paste quickly turned to a murky red gel as it stopped the bleeding. In a few seconds Hauser’s entire leg went numb, and he could feel the pain dampening drugs in his system start to recede.
It turned to look at him, the center eye of its forehead turning a bright green as it scanned his vital signs. I apologize,” it said. “I arrived as soon as translocation became possible. I had hoped to get there in time to assist you with the entity, and prevent such damage from occurring.”
Hauser managed a weak laugh. “Killing the psychic was the only way to make translocation possible, and this…” He waved his hand at his stump. “This was the only way to get close enough for a clean shot. I’m still glad you came. If it had finished me off, someone would have needed to finish the job.” Hauser paused, squinting up at the construct’s expressionless face. “Who is that in there?”
The Aegis gave a metallic laugh as its visor slid back. A female face stared back at him, pale and young and covered in scars. “You might not remember me, Agent Hauser,” she said, her voice soft and lilting. “I was in training for the Aegis program when you were sent on your last assignment.”
“I remember you. I was there when you were initiated and picked your name. Bellona. Agent Bellona.” He took another drag on his cigarette, staring up at the stars. She’d had fewer scars then. “Damned pretentious name, if you ask me.”
He heard the sound of her visor slide shut as a response. “Recovery units are en route,” she said in the sexless voice of a machine. “They will be here within the minute. Since he is certain your receivers have almost certainly shut down as a result of your psychic trauma, Agent Dolos has asked me to extend congratulations to you on his behalf.” Bellona cocked her head to the side, and Hauser could sense her smile even behind the impassive face mask.“He also says he would never have authorized the kinectic strike, even if we’d lost track of you within the breach. He said he will always give you a chance to find your way out.”
Now it was Hauser’s turn to laugh. “He wouldn’t say that if he had seen what was in there. One of these days, something is going to come through and we’ll have to blow the breach to kingdom come. One of these days, I’ll be right.” He leaned his head back into the freezing snow, letting it cool his head. The static from the destroyed receptors inside his skull was giving him a pounding headache. Taking one last inhale, he tossed the smoke away from him for good.
It landed solidly on the grisly path Hauser had taken into nothingness. Drowned in blood, surrounded by darkness, the light of the cigarette quickly faded and died.
Credit To – IlluminatiExposed
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I should’ve known something was wrong. What happened that night was fucked up, no doubt, and I had a lot to deal with, a lot on my mind. But how did I not notice something so obvious, something that was staring me right in the fucking face, WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH ME?!
I’d put Susie to bed several hours ago, her slipping eyelids and persistent yawn being all the evidence I needed that she lacked the fortitude to complete our Disney Marathon. “But daddy, I’m really awake, I promise!” she’d pleaded with me as I carried her up to her room in my arms. “Oh really?” I chuckled, playing with her, “Then what’s your middle name?”. I could almost hear the gears spinning in her tired little head as she desperately tried to find the answer, the one thing she needed to watch the stunningly climactic conclusion of Mulan 2, if indeed she could remain conscious long enough. She pulled a funny face and guessed, “Pretty?”. I laughed and touched her nose. “Alright, take me to bed.” She said moodily, looking defeated.
The move had been hard on her. She was only five, after all, and she’d had to grow up a lot faster than any child should ever have to. But she was so smart for her age, so understanding. She understood why we had to move so far away from all her family and friends, to this unfamiliar house in an even more unfamiliar city. She understood why she couldn’t see her mother anymore, that she wasn’t the same, that she’d forgotten how to love after the drugs took their hold. She understood that she’d probably never see her old friends again, that she’d have to make new ones. She, somehow, even understood why I’d suddenly had to start taking the little white pills from the little orange bottle every morning and afternoon (The stress of a long, drawn out separation from my wife, and waking up every morning to see the shell of the woman I once called the love of my life, had broken my heart, literally). “If my daddy gets too excited, his heart explodes!” I’d heard her telling some other girls one day when I was picking her up from school, much to their fascination. Not quite right, bless her, but it was amazing that she was so close because we’d never even spoken about it before.
“Don’t worry, we’ll watch the rest in the morning, together, I promise.” I reassured her as I tucked her into bed and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “But I must warn you, at the very end, Mula-” “Don’t tell me!” she shouted as she buried her head in the pillow and made the classic “I can’t hear you” sounds. I laughed again, told her I loved her, as I always did, turned off her lights and left her door open a crack before going back downstairs to watch some shitty late-night tv.
She was the strongest girl I’d ever met, bar none. Even during her infancy, she’d rarely ever cried. Even if something was upsetting her, even if something was really scaring her, or if she was in serious pain, she would just sit there, resolute, showing no weakness. I laughed as I recalled the memory of when she was only two. By that age, she already knew how to feed herself using a spoon, and I’d normally just sit her in her high chair with the bowl in front of her and let her get to it while I did other chores around the house. But one morning, she wasn’t eating. She was just sat in her chair with a sour, unhappy, pained expression on her face. She wasn’t crying, but I could tell something was wrong. Turned out that I had accidentally trapped her entire hand in the joint of the high chair’s folding table when I’d put her food down on it. She wasn’t hurt, luckily, but it just goes to show how tough she was, even as a baby. When I looked into her eyes, I didn’t see a child, I saw a woman. She was the only female I needed in my life now. I loved her, unconditionally, more than life itself and I knew that as long as we were together everything would be fine.
It got to that point in the night where the adverts for stretching super-hoses or pop-up gazebos begin to run together with the fake tarot readings and over-the-phone spiritual guidance, and I really thought I might die or, at the very least, become brain damaged to the point of incontinence if I watched another second. When even the tv strippers start putting their clothes back on, you know it’s time to hit the can. Switching the tv off with the remote, I quickly stood up and patted myself down to make sure I hadn’t, indeed, shat myself. I got the all clear and started up the stairs, fumbling with my pills, turning off lights as I went and preparing myself for bed.
That’s when I heard the scream. That bone-chilling, blood-curdling scream. That pained, gurgling scream. Susie’s scream.
I launched my pills into the air and sprinted up the stairs. I burst into her room, panting, scanning around for any sign of danger, and found none. Content that the room was empty, save for myself and her, I kneeled at her bed and stroked her face. “What’s wrong, honey?” I asked her gently. She just sat up in bed, frozen, paralyzed almost, pointing one shaking finger towards the foot of her bed and clutching her other hand close to her chest. This wasn’t really any surprise to me. Yes, she was a strong girl, but she was entitled to her share of childlike monster-in-the-walls-type fears that everybody goes through at that age. I’d been woken up many times in the small hours of the morning by her cries of “Monster in my wardrobe!” or “Ghost in my floorboards!” (The latter of which ended with me doing some weird, foot-stomping dance ritual to ward off evil spirits). One that had become more and more frequent of late was “Man at my window!”, which was one of the few I actually took seriously, but luckily there never was, at least not that I saw. This time was different, though. She hadn’t shouted out any of those usual complaints. She hadn’t shouted anything. She had just screamed.
That’s when I should have known, right then, right then and fucking there is when I should have realized. That I was too late. That the worst had already happened.
I decided to see if I could calm her down, have a little fun with it, try to get her back in the sleeping mood, y’know? I walked over to the other side of the room, where the wardrobe was. “Is it… IN THE WARDROBE?” I asked loudly, suddenly jerking the doors open to reveal nothing but clothes and hangers. “Nope, no monsters in there.” I concluded. “Unless… It’s Invisible Ivan!” I yelled, unleashing a flurry of kung-fu-esque moves into the empty closet. “Nope, Ivan’s not in there either.” Then I bent down and started rapping my knuckles on the floor. “Hmm… floorboards sound empty to me!” I stood up again, smiling, and looked at Susie. Her cold, terrified gaze just followed me around the room, her face the picture of absolute seriousness, her quivering finger unmoved from the end of her bed. The smile quickly melted from my face. My ghostbuster routine usually at least made her chuckle, I knew something had seriously scared her and whatever it was, she thought it was under the bed. “Down there?” I mimed to her, gesturing to the floor under where she sat. She nodded silently, then withdrew her hand and clenched it tight to her chest, like the other one. I got down on two knees, put my hands on the floor and prepared my scariest roar to pretend to scare away whatever imaginary creature lived there. I quickly brought my head down to floor level and was just about to shout under the mattress when what I saw made the breath catch in my throat; I felt nauseous, terrified and infuriated all in the same instance, but that’s not when I had my heart attack.
He was laying there, totally naked and on the erect, in an expanding pool of his own piss. His wrinkly, curdled, wart-covered skin was stuck to the floor by his stinking sweat, and I could see his yellow, rotting teeth, the few he still had, leaning pitifully towards me through his cracked, arid lips. He must have been in his late sixties, and his greasy, silvering hair, where he wasn’t bald, fell down over his face in messy knots and clumps. In one veiny, clawed hand he held a bloodied steak knife, rusted with use, a large stained burlap sack in the other. And he was under my daughter’s bed. He was under my daughter’s fucking bed. “Uh, listen friend, I-I can explain-” he started, half crying.
The sound of his bones crunching in the doorframe were not nearly as disturbing as his frenzied, animalistic screams.
About 15 minutes later, his near-lifeless trunk was getting loaded into the back of an ambulance, thankfully clothed and under heavy guard, and the police who’d arrived on the scene were filling me in on what had happened while a medic bandaged my bloody, misshapen knuckles. Using Susie’s bedroom door, I’d broken his jaw, his nose and the globe of his left eye-socket, cracked his skull, broken 6 ribs and seperated his spinal column at the 16th vertebrae. When the hinges splintered and the door fell from the frame, I resorted to using my fists and had shattered all 9 of his teeth, half-crushed his windpipe and left him with a major concussion, all of which made identifying him in any way very difficult (mainly due to the fact that his newly swollen and disfigured face could now have put Jocelyn Wildenstein in high spirits). We would have to wait for his fingerprints, luckily intact despite most of his digits being mangled and snapped, to be put through the database to be sure, but they believed I had just caught one Jeb Roberts, the perpetrator of a series of weird murders taking place accross the city. He had entered the house by climbing up the guttering and entering a slightly opened upstairs window. Reports indicated that he would stake out a house (was that the “man” at Susie’s window? I couldn’t be sure) before breaking in, drugging the child with strong trihalomethanes, and then harvesting their skin, bones and internal organs, using them to fashion creepy dolls and marionettes from dead, rotten flesh, leaving nothing behind but a soft heap of fat and muscle, lovingly topped with 20 little teeth.
I felt sick. I couldn’t believe Susie had almost become a victim of that manic cunt. I remembered watching a news report about the guy not 3 days ago; there wasn’t an actual name for what he was, but the general, one-size-fits-all terms such as “Paedophile”, “Murderer”, “Creep”, “Child-Killer”, “Communist”, “Servant of Satan” and “Straight-up fucking psycho” were getting thrown around a lot. The officer’s commended me for my brave and valiant action, and assured me that, if this was the right guy, and he lived long enough to stand trial, he would be getting nicely acquainted with Ol’ Sparky within the new year. Susie just sat there in silence, still clutching her hands to her chest and not moving an inch. I hadn’t heard her say a single word throughout the entire ordeal; she even silently dismissed the paramedics who tried to check on her, insisting instead that they focus on me. She didn’t look as scared anymore, but I assumed she was still too in shock to say anything or give a testimony to the police. They said that was alright, and that I could bring her down to the station whenever she was ready.
In hindsight it wasn’t the best idea, but I decided to wait until all the cops had cleared out, the investigators had taken their photos and left, the paramedics all piled into their car and sped away, and the sound of wailing sirens was no longer audible in the distance, about an hour in total. Then I sat Susie down on the couch and decided we needed to have a talk about what had just happened. I explained to her that a nasty man had gotten into the house, that he wanted to take her away, but that it was alright because Daddy had been there to protect her, and that that man was never, ever coming back. She placed a hand on my cheek and nodded, that nod she always did to show me she had understood everything I had just said, and everything I hadn’t, as the first tears I had seen in almost 5 years started to roll down her cheeks. “It’s alright, Suze,” I comforted her, “you don’t have to cry”. She still said nothing, but I didn’t question it too much. I hugged her lovingly, and she nestled her head into my shoulder, but she hardly hugged me back. Her arms were still clamped tight against her chest, as if trying to hide something valuable, afraid she could lose it at any second. “Susie, darling, what’s that in your hand?” She looked suddenly apprehensive, and that fearful expression crossed her face again. “It’s okay, you can show me, it’s alright, I promise.”
Only then, only then did I put two and two together and work out what had happened. I failed my daughter, the girl that meant everything to me, because I was too fucking dim to see what was right in front of my face, HOW FUCKING STUPID CAN YOU BE?. Now I’m gone, and she’s all on her own. I was meant to protect her… I was meant to protect her…
What I saw burned my very soul, and set fire to my chest. As she reluctantly uncurled her fingers, she opened her mouth in a wide, forced smile, revealing an entire mouthful of crimson-tinted teeth, as blood, still oozing from the sickly, throbbing stump, poured messily down her chin. In her precious, shaking hand, cruelly taken from her innoccent mouth, glistening in the first rays of morning sunshine poking through the window, was her own severed tongue.
That’s when I had my heart attack.
Credit To – Acaimo
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I don’t celebrate Halloween. When the trick-or-treaters come out and start prowling my street, I make sure to keep my front porch light off and pull the shades down. If someone rings my doorbell despite all my precautions, I hide in the bedroom and pray that they don’t ring it again. There’s always a fear that maybe it’s not a child in a ninja turtle mask or wearing a sheet over their head.
Maybe, just maybe, it’s Granny Clark.
Granny Clark is the reason I stopped celebrating Halloween. Abigail Clark, known to everyone in Hollisfield as Granny Clark, was the kindest, sweetest old lady in existence. She lived in a little green house at the top of Tamarack Lane, one that bordered a broad expanse of forest. She’d lived there as long as anyone could remember. Someone once told me she was over a hundred years old, and nobody within earshot challenged the claim. I absolutely believed them.
Juniper Street, the street I lived on, just happened to touch that same forest as Granny Clark’s. There was a path that wound through the woods, all the way up the hill to her driveway. Many an afternoon was spent playing in those woods, climbing trees, building forts out of sticks, or running down that winding path from Granny Clark’s driveway to the end of Juniper Street, pretending wolves were biting at my heels.
I always felt somewhat unnerved being around Granny Clark. Maybe it was the way she walked, all hunched over, her arms bent at the elbows like a Tyrannosaurus. Maybe it was her shock white hair that stuck out in all directions. Or maybe it was the way I could see her blood vessels clear as day through her translucent, liver-spotted skin, and the way her fingers seemed unnaturally long and thin.
My mother took me to see her once when I was seven. They were coordinating together on an arts and crafts table at the local fair. I remember that her little green house smelled like lavender and moth balls, and the rooms were lined with photos of children. Some of the photos were in black and white, or faded like they had been taken many years ago.
“Are these all your kids?” I asked Granny Clark.
She smiled and looked around the room. “These are all my lovely babies.”
Afterward, as my mother and I walked down the path to Juniper Street hand in hand, I told her how amazing I thought it was that one person could have so many children. She just laughed at me.
“They aren’t really her kids,” she said. “Ms. Clark doesn’t have any children of her own. Those were photos of other people’s kids.”
“Why does she have photos of other people’s kids?” I asked.
“Because their parents gave them to her.”
“Did you give her my photo?”
“Not yet.”
I looked up at my mother with concern. “Please don’t.”
She frowned, but said nothing the rest of the walk home.
Five years later, I got permission to go trick-or-treating with my friend Spencer on Halloween. Spencer lived over on Rosemond Ave, a street which connected with a number of others, including Tamarack Lane. The neighborhoods over and around Rosemond were considered the best area for trick-or-treating in town, far superior to the neighborhood down around my neck of the woods. Together, we convinced both our parents that we were old enough to go on our own.
What I didn’t know at the time was that Spencer had other plans.
When my dad dropped me off at Spencer’s doorstep in my pirate costume, complete with eye patch, black marker goatee, and stuffed parrot velcroed to my shoulder, Spencer was already outside, sitting on the front stoop. He was going as either a zombie or an accident victim—I never really asked. His clothes were all torn and covered in stage blood, and he’d used some sort of wax to create open sores on his arms and face. I was genuinely impressed with the amount of work he’d put into making himself look grotesque.
Once my father’s car rolled out of sight, Spencer grabbed me by the arm and hauled me around the side of his house to the garage.
“Listen,” he said. “You have to help me pull something off.”
“It better not be your pants.”
“Ha ha.” He gave me a serious look. “Josh dared me to prank old Granny Clark.”
Josh Gurrey was a kid in our grade who Spencer had a habit of butting heads with. They’d had a rivalry ever since Spencer pinned Josh in under a minute during gym class wrestling. Since then, Josh always tried to make Spencer look weak in front of the other kids our age, and Spencer refused to ignore it whenever he did, probably as a matter of pride.
“Granny Clark?” I didn’t like the idea of doing anything to anyone, let alone an elderly person.
Spencer saw the concern in my eye. “We’re not going to do anything serious.”
“What were you planning?”
“It’s simple,” Spencer smiled. “You distract her by trick-or-treating at the front door. Just keep her talking. I’m going to go in the back—”
“No way!” I hissed, “I’m not going to be an accomplice to breaking and entering!”
“It’s not breaking in. She always leaves her back door unlocked.”
That seemed like an odd thing to know.
“Anyway, I’ll go in the back, sneak upstairs, and toilet paper her entire bedroom.” As if to prove the legitimacy of his plan, Spencer pulled a large roll of bathroom tissue out of his trick-or-treat bag.
“What will that prove to Josh? That you can TP some half-blind old lady’s house?”
“Are you going to help me or not? Because you can always walk home if you want.”
We stared at each other through our makeup effects for a few moments before I sighed and gave in.
“But promise me we’ll do a bit of trick-or-treating too,” I said. “Otherwise my parents will know we were up to something.”
“Of course! I want candy, too. Jeez.”
With that, we set out. Trying not to seem obvious, we meandered around the neighborhood for a half hour, letting the sun set and waiting for most of the other trick-or-treaters to finish going down Tamarack Lane, trying to reduce the chances of someone spotting us. I got some candy to get started on my alibi in case I was questioned later as to my involvement in scaring an old lady to death. My stomach was very unhappy with me and made it known by clenching up like a fist. I was hot in my pirate costume, but my whole body shook with anxiety.
Finally, when the street lights had turned on and all the very small goblins and fairies were carted off back to their homes, Spencer nudged me in the ribs and nodded silently in the direction of the forest. I nodded back and we made a bee-line for Tamarack Lane, trying to make small talk to continue looking inconspicuous. When we got to the end of Tamarack Lane, Spencer threw his arm out, stopping me in my tracks. We both stood, looking at the little green house at the top of the hill.
The front porch light was off.
“Shit!” Spencer hissed.
“Welp, she’s in bed. Abort mission.”
I started to turn when Spencer grabbed my arm.
“Wait, I think I see her moving about in the kitchen.”
There was someone moving around in the kitchen. I couldn’t make out who, just a silhouette pacing around in the back of the house, right near the door Spencer was planning to sneak in through.
Spencer reached into his trick-or-treat bag, fumbling around for a minute before pulling something out and shoving it into my chest.
“Here, take this.”
I took what he handed to me and looked down at it.
“A walkie-talkie? Are you serious?”
“Stick it in your candy bag. Then go ring the doorbell, and if you can’t keep her busy, just reach in and click the button on the front twice. I’ll hear it and bail.”
“Dude, the porch light is off!”
Spencer looked at me, and I saw the desperation in his eyes. He had to prove himself to Josh in this stupid, juvenile, ridiculous way, and if I didn’t help him, he was probably going to do something even dumber. Or worse yet in his mind, go back to school and confess to Josh that he didn’t do it.
I sighed and dropped the walkie-talkie into my bag.
“Just go and get it done quick. Granny Clark gives me the creeps.”
Spencer ducked down low and crept off into the trees and bushes by the side of the road. He was out of my sight in an instant, though I heard him shuffling around, snapping twigs and cursing as he stumbled through the dark.
Once he was gone, I took a deep breath and looked up at the little green house. It seemed bigger and a darker shade of green than it had before, though I knew it was more my mind playing tricks on me than anything real. Through the window, the silhouette of Abigail “Granny” Clark shuffled about in her kitchen, occasionally disappearing out of sight around the corner, only to shuffle past in the opposite direction a moment later.
I ascended the front porch steps, my right hand sliding into the candy bag to feel the walkie-talkie and make sure it was face up for easy access to the emergency button on the front. My pirate makeup was probably starting to run down my face due to the sudden sweat I’d built up on my forehead. The stuffed parrot on my shoulder felt like it was getting heavier. Somewhere, deep inside me, a little voice whispered, I don’t want to be here, over and over again. I felt certain I was going to hurl at any second.
“Time to nut up or shut up,” I whispered to nobody.
I hesitated to push the doorbell button. Trembling in fear, my finger hovered there in front of it for a solid minute. Then the walkie-talkie in my bag squawked once, loudly, and I clutched my chest as my heart lurched.
“Okay, okay,” I snarled quietly at Spencer through gritted teeth, knowing he was sending me a signal.
I rang the doorbell.
The sound of busywork inside the house stopped. I hadn’t really been paying attention to the banging and thumping going on inside, but when silence settled over the house, I became horribly aware of the noises that had been going on as I approached. A sliding sound, followed by another thump, then a louder thump.
Should I ring the bell again? I thought.
Footsteps answered my question. Heavy, slow footsteps coming to the front door. The sound of their approach served to fill my tankard of dread even further. There was a hesitation in them, like Granny Clark wasn’t sure what to do. Or maybe she was waiting to see if I’d leave.
Please don’t make me ring the bell again.
The porch light came on, and I froze. It was like being cast suddenly in a spotlight. There I was for all to see.
Through the small, semi-circular window in the door, I caught a brief glimpse of someone looking out to see who had rung the bell. I couldn’t make out her eyes, just her eyebrows in the darkness. Then the door creaked open, and I was face-to-face with Abigail Clark.
She looked haggard. Her eyes were sunken and hidden in shadow. Her features were even more pale than usual, and her whole face seemed to hang off her skull. She had pulled a shawl over her head, hiding most of her shock white hair. I could only see a few strands hanging down in her face.
I swallowed the lump burning in my parched throat. I could barely squeak out the words, “Trick or treat?”
Granny Clark didn’t say a word. She just stood there, not moving, staring at me with her dark eyes and that sickly-looking face.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of movement behind her, in the kitchen, and knew Spencer had entered the house. I needed to fill the silence or he’d be busted for sure. I coughed loudly, then blinked several times, trying to think of something to say.
“Ms. Clark?” I stammered. “I’m sorry if we—if I woke you.” Oh shit, I said “we.”
“My mother insisted I stop by and say hello while I’m out trick-or-treating tonight, and I almost forgot. I knew she’d be disappointed if I went home and told her I hadn’t p-paid you a visit, so I was hoping that despite your light being off, you’d—”
Granny Clark opened the door further, stepping halfway out onto the porch. As she did so, I noted the heavy brown coat she wore. I also noticed a pair of thick gloves on her hands. She seemed to straighten and turn, reaching behind the doorjamb for what I assumed was a bowl of candy.
“Are y-you having trouble with the heat in your house, Ms. Clark?” I could hear myself, and it sounded like I was going to cry.
Why wasn’t she speaking?
One gloved hand beckoned me closer. Her breathing sounded labored and ragged, every exhalation gurgling like a diver using a snorkel. The expression on her face never changed. There was no sign of the joy or excitement I had seen every time I’d visited her in the past. She seemed like an entirely different woman, and I felt sensations of discomfort and fear battling each other in my gut.
I stepped closer, holding my bag out, when a heavy thump came from the back of the house, followed quickly by a clatter of dishes shattering on the floor. Granny Clark and I both stiffened.
Oh shit, I thought.
Granny Clark turned her head in the direction of the kitchen, where Spencer seemed determined to make as much noise as he possibly could. It sounded like he had started having a seizure back there and was flopping around on the kitchen tiles, slapping everything in sight.
Panic lurched out of the pit of my stomach. It felt like my eyes were going to bulge out of their sockets as I tried to think of anything to say to save the situation. My mind blanked, with the single word “GO” flashing like a neon sign in the center of my brain. Without another word, I turned away to make a hasty retreat.
Granny Clark’s heavily gloved hand clamped down around my wrist. For being over a hundred years old, she had a grip like a lumberjack. She squeezed so tight that my legs turned to gelatin, dropping me to my knees. My goody bag hit the ground with a loud clatter as I grabbed at her hand, crying out in pain.
“Ms. Clark, you’re hurting me!”
Her other hand behind the doorjamb appeared, holding not a bowl but a large box cutter. She extended the blade, looking at me with the same emotionless expression, and pulled me closer to her. The whole moment was so surreal that I just knelt there on the porch as she dragged me toward her, trying to understand what was happening. Why was she holding a box cutter? Where was the candy? What was going on?
It was Spencer who saved me. His voice echoed, at once screaming distantly from the kitchen while also crackling over the airwaves and coming out of the bag at my feet.
“RUUUN!”
Granny Clark turned again in the direction of the kitchen as she caught sight of Spencer dashing past, throwing open the back door and disappearing into the backyard. In so doing, her grip loosened on my wrist ever so slightly, just enough for me to twist my arm and squeeze through her fingers. She turned back to me, grasping at me with her free hand while the one holding the box cutter arched back threateningly.
Even then, kneeling on the porch, watching the kindest old woman in town come at me, the blade of the box cutter glinting from the streetlights, I tried to rationalize the situation. This wasn’t the Granny Clark I knew. I looked up at her, sobbing in panic and trying to find the words to calm her.
“Please!” I scrambled back a foot. “It was just a joke! I’m sorry!”
The left half of Granny Clark’s face seemed to sag like it was melting. Her eye looked funny, droopy. The guttural breathing suddenly sounded more like a snarl, feral and angry. She brought the blade down, and I instinctively raised my hands to protect myself, screaming in pain as I felt its edge slice through the fabric of my costume and open the flesh of my arm.
I did not give her a second chance. My legs that had initially surrendered to gravity now felt the intense burn of adrenaline pumping through them. Tucking into myself, I rolled backward, trying to gain my footing only to end up tumbling down the porch steps instead. White hot pain shot up my left side, and I screamed again, but I refused to pause. I was too driven by blind panic. I got to my feet in a hurry as the old woman on the porch straightened up, towering over me like a giant. She tromped toward the steps with a frightening determination.
Spencer, eyes wide with terror, came around the corner of the house at full tilt. He surveyed the scenario unfolding on the front porch, and a look of confusion washed over him for a second before he grabbed me by the arm and spun me around.
“Make for the woods!” And with that he was off like a shot, sprinting to the end of the driveway where the forest began.
I ran, hot on his heels, my arm and my head both throbbing. Dizziness and nausea swept over me, and I tripped over my feet, colliding with the side of Granny Clark’s car and pausing for the briefest of moments to vomit down the side of it. How had everything gone so wrong?
Before I could collect my thoughts, I heard the heavy thud of boots and, looking back, saw Granny Clark’s hulking form lurching toward me. Silhouetted by street lamps in her heavy coat with the shawl over her head, she looked massive, like a lumbering horror, hell bent on my destruction.
Nobody’s going to believe this. Even I don’t believe it, and I’m seeing it, I thought.
I shook it off and bolted for the treeline. I knew that, if I could just make it to Juniper Street, I’d be safe. The trail was a winding quarter mile, but it was all downhill, and I had enough terror-based energy pumping through my veins to keep me going. I’d run that path for years and knew every gnarled root that might trip me up, every change in the angle of the descent, every curve to avoid a tree in the dark.
Just get home.
The moon was out and it filtered through the branches, making beams in the dust kicked up by Spencer before me. It highlighted the path, and cast the forest in a creepy blue hue. Everything around me seemed to glow. If I hadn’t been running for my life, I might have stopped to take it in.
The adrenaline coursing through me made time slow to a crawl. Every footfall felt like I was slogging through thick mud. I’ve never been as perfectly attuned to my senses as I was sprinting through the forest that Halloween. I could hear everything around me: my breath coming out slow and focused, my heart thumping in my ears, the snapping of branches further down the path as Spencer, less familiar with the way, ran ahead…
…and the heavy clumping of someone coming down the trail behind me.
I turned to look.
I did it, knowing all the stories of people being told not to look back, and all the bad things that happened to them when they did. I did it, not wanting to really see what it was, because I knew. I did it, and all my hopes of making it home disappeared in a flurry of wings like a flock of startled pigeons.
Granny Clark was right behind me, thundering down the trail like a rampaging elephant. She was a good twenty paces back, but I could see her perfectly in every sliver of moonlight we both ran through. The most frightening thing about her was the look on her face. It wasn’t one of anger, or even of determination. In fact, there was no expression whatsoever. Her eyes were dead. Her mouth seemed to hang open. The left half of her face still sloughed down like melting candle wax.
And then the wind whipped her shawl off, and her face went with it.
It just slid off as easily as a Halloween mask, disappearing somewhere on the trail behind her as she closed in on me, as determined and frightening as ever. Where her face had been, there was blood. Just blood everywhere. But I could finally see her eyes through it all, and they stared at me with a terrible rage and madness like I had never seen before.
I thought I was going insane.
She bore down on me, the sight of her hate-filled, bloody face burning forever into my mind. Her hands reached out, trying to grab me and guide me to Hell, but all I could focus on was that scarlet face, the true fury within her finally revealed.
There was a sharp turn in the path, and I slowed for only a fraction of a second to make it. Granny Clark was not as familiar with the trail, her momentum driving her straight on. Her fingers licked past the back of my head and wrapped around the stuffed parrot on my shoulder. She tore it off just as she barreled headlong into the trees behind me, crashing to a stop with violent abruptness.
She can have the parrot, I thought.
When I burst out of the woods and onto the tarmac of Juniper Street, I was moving like all of Hell was on my heels. Ahead, I saw Spencer slowing down, trying to catch his breath as he reached the driveway to my house. Somewhere along the way, he had lost his own trick-or-treat bag, and most of his makeup had run off.
“Don’t stop!” I screamed at him.
He turned, seeing me hurtling down the road, and hurried up to the front door, banging on it and shouting.
I dashed up the front sidewalk, shoving him aside and throwing my shoulder into the door, having just enough sense to turn the knob and open it. We fell over each other on the landing and Spencer kicked futilely, trying to close the door behind him. I climbed over him and slammed it shut before dead-bolting it and leaning my full weight against it. I broke down into tears while clutching my arm.
“Jesus Christ!” Spencer yelled.
We both started shouting over each other, neither one listening to the other until my mom and dad, hearing the commotion, ran in from the living room to find us yelling and bloody. They looked us over with mild annoyance until my mom saw my shirt soaked red with blood and her eyes bugged out.
“What the hell happened?” she yelled at us.
I sobbed. My mind retraced through everything that I had just witnessed. “Her face—!”
“They took her face!”
“—It came right off!”
Both my parents looked equal parts concerned and utterly perplexed. I could tell they thought we had just spooked ourselves and gotten hurt running away. I waved my hands at Spencer to silence him, then told them everything. As my story unfolded, their expressions wavered between doubt, anger, and concern. Honestly, telling them that Granny Clark attacked me with a knife and then chased me through the woods before her face peeled off, I had a hard time believing it myself.
When I finished, Spencer told his side.
“When I went in through the back door, I could see Will and what I thought was Granny Clark at the front door. I tried to creep around to the stairs, but I tripped over a pair of legs. Ms. Clark’s legs. She was lying in the food pantry.”
I’d never seen Spencer cry before, but his eyes welled up with tears as he continued.
“Her face was missing. I could see all the stuff underneath. They had pulled it all right off, just like peeling an orange! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, they took her face!”
My mom disappeared into the kitchen, where I could hear her using the phone to call the police. My father stood there, shaking his head in disbelief at us. Spencer and I locked eyes.
“That wasn’t her,” Spencer’s voice cracked. “I realized it wasn’t her on the porch and I told you to run. I’m so sorry.”
I hugged him, forgetting the pain in my arm for a moment as he balled his fists up in my shirt and buried his face in my chest, adding his tears to the blood and sweat I was thoroughly soaked in.
“I’m so sorry.”
When the police got to Abigail Clark’s house, they found her just as Spencer had described. Her throat had been slit, and all the flesh on her face had been removed. In the woods, they found the remains of her face, cut from ear to ear and worn like a mask. They also found my stuffed parrot lying in the leaves by a blood-covered tree at the turn that had saved me. One of the branches on the tree was snapped and dripping with the blood. Even more was found where the path opened out onto Juniper Street, but after that, the trail went cold.
They found the killer a day later, an unemployed carpenter from two towns over with a history of violence. He checked into the hospital with a gouged-out eye, claiming he had accidentally impaled himself while hanging a picture. Apparently his blood work came back with two different types on him, one of which was identified as Abigail Clark’s. Thankfully, he confessed, saving the police from having to ask Spencer or I if we could identify him. Neither of us would have been able to, and neither of us wanted to ever see him again.
I do see him though, regularly, whenever the scar on my arm flares up and my dreams turn to running down that moonlit trail in the woods with him just ten steps behind me. Of course, the face I see isn’t his. It’s always Granny Clark’s face, devoid of emotion, yet every step filled with anger, determined to catch me and put me in the ground. Granny Clark, the most beloved person Hollisfield has ever known, is the monster that haunts my worst nightmares.
|
I know how this is going to sound. I know that it sounds impossible. Insane. Bat-shit crazy.
God knows I’ve been over it again and again. I’ve thought of every possible explanation. But I’ve come up empty every single time. Which means that what happened really did happen.
I need you to believe me. I know it won’t change much. What happened, happened – there’s no going back or changing that. But I still need someone to believe me – anyone. For me. For my sanity.
I am not crazy.
This might be my last chance to tell anyone what happened. Tomorrow I’m going into the “Attitude Adjuster” – as they call it here – and no one is ever the same when they come back out of that room. I probably won’t even be able to remember my own name, much less the crazy shit that went down seven months ago.
So I’m writing down everything in this little book. Call it a journal of sorts. I don’t know if they’ll actually send it to you like I asked, but I have to try. And I have to hope that they will.
Don’t feel guilty after you’ve read it. You wouldn’t have been able to change anything. You wouldn’t have been able to help. This is for me. Closure.
I hope it reaches you though.
It started when I moved to that new place in the old part of town. Remember how excited I was? God, if I’d only known. But at the time it was my second chance. My last chance. I had a new job, my debt wasn’t as crippling and I was sober for the first time in three years. Katy had even said that if I stayed sober for 6 months, she’d let me see the kids over weekends.
The place was pretty run down, but it was big. I’d figured I’d start restoring it, getting it back into shape after I’d saved for a couple of months. New paint, replacing the tiles, fixing the ceiling and putting in some new roof tiles were the major things I’d have to address. I’d rebuild the porch and replace the deck in the backyard for the family barbecues I dreamt we’d have. It had a large backyard for the kids and even a big, open basement I’d have liked to convert into a nice gaming area – once I’d installed a new floor.
The house was fairly isolated. Right at the end of the street. Number 113 Harriet drive. The closest neighbours were about a kilometre away, as most of the surrounding places were empty. It wasn’t the greatest neighbourhood, but I’d lived in worse. It was right on the edge of the woods, and there was a path that led down to a small stream where I’d have liked to take James fishing.
Moving in didn’t take long – I didn’t have much. A few pieces of furniture, my bed, my clothes and the kitchen stuff you sent me when I got out of rehab. It only took me half a day, even on my own. Two days later everything was in its place and I was settling in nicely. I’d even bought an extra chair and some cheap paintings to give the living room a more homely feel.
I was happy. It genuinely felt like I was getting my life back on track. I worked hard, and I was exhausted in the evenings, but it felt good. I was working on my second chance. Weekends I slept in, worked on the house through the day and watched old movies on the DVD player you sent me.
It was a simple life, but an honest one. I hadn’t really craved a drink for months and not at all since I had moved in. Like I said, I was happy.
About two months after I moved in, I took some time off. I had built up a considerable amount of vacation time and I wanted to really get cracking at getting the house into better shape.
Saving for the materials also went quicker than expected, since I didn’t have a lot of expenses and I still had some of dad’s money he had left me.
So I bought the materials and got started. I painted first. The whole house, inside and out. I hired a labourer – Kevin – to help, and I was surprised we managed to finish the first coat in one day.
Three nights later was when it started.
I had just finished making myself dinner when I heard it. A light knocking. I stopped, cocking my head and listening again. Nothing. Thinking someone might be at the door I headed over and opened it, but there was no one there. Shrugging, I closed the door and got my dinner. I was just about to sit down and put on another movie, when I heard it again.
Tap-tap-tap.
This time I could more or less pin point where it was coming from and it sounded like it was coming from down the hall. Setting my dinner down, I walked down the hallway, straining to hear the knocking again.
I was just passing the basement door when I heard it again.
Tap-tap-tap.
It was the basement door being knocked on.
I recoiled. Someone was in my house.
I slowly retreated back to the living room, keeping my eyes locked on the basement door. I reached for my phone on the kitchen counter and called the police, keeping the basement door in my sight.
A woman operator answered, asking me what my emergency was.
“I think there’s someone in my house. In the basement.” I whispered, picking up the large knife I had cut the chicken with.
“What is your address, sir?”
“113 Harriet drive, the Willows. My name is Derick Reid.”
“A unit has been dispatched. Are you able to leave the house?” she asked, just as I heard the knocking again.
“Yes. I’m moving to the door now.” I whispered, and started to the front door. Moving slowly, I tried to keep the basement door in my sights for as long as I could, and when I couldn’t anymore, I sprinted to the door, ripped it open and jumped down the dilapidated porch.
I stopped at the street, turning to look at my house. With the door standing ajar, it almost looked like a great monster was about to devour me. A chill ran up my spine at the ominous thought.
“Sir?” the operator asked.
“Yes, I’m outside. I’m standing on the street.”
“Ok, a unit was only a few blocks away, they should be there any second. Please wait for them.”
She had barely finished her sentence when I saw a police car turn the corner up the street, heading in my direction.
The car pulled up and two officers got out – a young woman and an older man.
“Are you the one who called, sir?” the woman asked, quickly summing me and the house up.
“Yes, there is someone in my basement.”
“Ok, sir. Please stay here.” she replied and they started toward the house. “It’s the third door on the left.” I called after them and she raised her hand in thanks. They stopped on the porch, pulled their weapons and entered the house.
A few minutes went by and I nervously watched the front door, every now and then scanning the area in case the intruder had managed to elude the police and make a run for it.
Soon the officers emerged from the front door. The older officer was talking into his radio and the woman approached me.
“It’s all clear, sir. There is no one in your house.”
I was relieved, but also embarrassed.
“Are you sure? Did you check everywhere?”
Patiently, she nodded. “There is no other exit from the basement except the door and all the other windows and doors in the house are closed and locked.”
“Sir, I’d like you to please put the knife down.”
Looking down I was surprised to see I was still clutching the knife. I was gripping it so tightly that my knuckles had turned white.
I dropped the knife on the sparse grass of my front lawn.
Looking up at the officer, I saw her eyebrows were raised.
“I’m sorry. I – I guess I was really scared. I just grabbed it. God knows what I thought I would do with it.” I ran a shaky hand through my hair.
“That’s ok, sir. Why don’t we go inside and you can tell us what happened.”
We went into the house, and I was somewhat cautious. Looking down the hall I saw that the basement door was open.
The officer placed the knife which she had picked up on the counter.
I took a seat in front of my cold dinner and the two officers stood opposite me.
“Tell us what happened.” I identified her as Julie Rossi by her name tag. The man was Greg Rickards.
I took a deep breath and told them about the knocking.
Officer Rickards raised his eyebrows.
“So you heard a noise coming from your basement and called the cops?” It seemed as if he wanted to grin.
“No! Well… yes. But it wasn’t just a noise. It was distinct knocking. Three knocks and then nothing. Then three knocks again. Against the door. What could have made that noise?”
“Well, any number of things. But my first question would be why an intruder would knock against the door in the first place.”
Officer Rossi gave him a disapproving glance, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Sir, while we can’t tell you what made the noise, it most certainly wasn’t an intruder. Maybe it was the wind, or the house settling down. Do you live here alone? Perhaps you have somewhere you could possibly stay? Just for tonight?”
“No, no, that’s ok. I’ll be fine. Thank you for responding so quickly.”
I walked them to the door and I actually heard Rickards chuckle as they crossed the lawn. Asshole.
Closing the door I turned and rested my head against the door. Taking a deep breath I crossed the living room and made my way down the hall.
I stopped in front of the open basement and looked into the darkness. Nightfall had come pretty quickly, but the basement was a dark place to begin with.
I flicked the light switch for the basement and waited as the fluorescent light bulb slowly flickered into life.
Taking another deep breath, I started down the stairs. The old wooden stairs creaked loudly as I made my way down. Everything was the way I remembered it. Nothing seemed out of place or odd.
Shaking my head a little I walked back upstairs. I switched off the light and pulled the door shut.
And just as the door latched the knocking came again. Loud and clear. There was no mistake.
I jumped back from the door, slamming into the opposite wall.
How? What? What the fuck? I was just down there! There was nothing there!
The knocking came again, this time much louder than before – and then it was followed by a giggle.
It sounded like a child – maybe a girl.
Without thinking I jumped forward and yanked open the door.
There was nothing.
I stood there, utterly flabbergasted, gripping the door and panting like a wild animal.
Slowly I closed the door and immediately the knocks came again. Before the third knock fell I opened the door and was met with the same sight as before. Nothing. Even the knock had been cut off.
I slammed the door and backed away into the living room. Collapsing onto a couch which had a good view of the basement door, I groaned a little out of fear and frustration as the knocks started up again. It seemed the pauses between knocks were random. Sometimes it was seconds and other times it was minutes. But it was always three.
Every now and then I could hear – or thought I could hear – a little girl giggling.
What the fuck was going on? What was doing that?
What I wanted to do was get out of the house, but I had nowhere to go. The knocks were freaking me out, but the laughter was pushing me to the point of absolutely losing my shit.
I could have gone to a motel, but then what? I had bought this place. I couldn’t stay in a motel indefinitely. Call someone. Who? Katy? Kevin? And say what?
I got up, and moved to the door. I opened it and then retreated back to the living room again.
I waited for almost five minutes, but nothing happened. So the knocks only happened when the door was closed?
I stood up and retrieved my cold dinner. Hungrily I ate, continuing to eye the doorway to the basement. Placing the dishes in the sink after finishing, I also drank a glass of water.
It had been almost half an hour since I had opened the door, and there had been no knocks since – and no giggling. I was feeling a little relieved, but apprehensively so. As if it was too good to be true.
I gathered my phone and headed to my upstairs bedroom, making sure to never turn my back on the basement. Running the last few stairs and the short distance to my room, I quickly turned and slammed the door, locking it for good measure.
I had left almost all the downstairs lights on, but had decided that this was a necessity. Breathing a sigh of relief at being seemingly safe and secure, I went about my pre bed business. It was still early, but I was tired. And besides, I didn’t want to be downstairs.
I got into bed and grabbed the book I was reading, planning to read for a few minutes and then go to sleep, but I must’ve fallen asleep almost instantly.
I woke to a bright and warm morning and for a few moments I had forgotten about the weird events of the previous night. I stretched and yawned, but mid yawn it came back to me. I stopped, and then actually laughed out loud. In the bright morning sunshine the curious knocking and giggling didn’t seem nearly as scary. I mostly convinced myself that it didn’t happen at all and that it had been the work of my over tired imagination.
You called the cops. Well… yeah, that was embarrassing.
I got out of bed, planning to go down and make myself a big breakfast – when I noticed that my bedroom door was open.
I stopped mid stride.
I locked it last night.
I stood welded to the ground, suddenly as cold as ice, despite the warm morning.
I nervously glanced around the room, and spotted footprints. They were small, barefoot and human – it could only have been left by a child. They were pitch black, as if whoever left them had walked through tar. They made their way in through the door and up to the side of the bed. They then turned around and headed back out the door. I stood motionless for several seconds more, trying to make sense of the bizarre scene in front of me. I looked down at myself for some reason, and I sucked in a breath. My torso, arms and legs were all covered in blood red scratches. I felt along the scratches on my left arm, but there was no pain – only the weird sensation you get after your leg or arm has stayed in the same position for a long time. Almost like pins and needles but not quite.
I was scared. Someone or – and before I could stop the thought – something had been in my bedroom while I slept. Someone had managed to open my locked door, come into my bedroom and do something to me. While I slept!
Slowly I crept forward, deciding to follow the tiny, black footprints.
They led away from my door and down the stairs. I followed, first gazing down the stairs for a few moments before taking the first step down. The black footprints never diminished as they would if you stepped in mud and then walked a few steps on. Each one was as black as the previous one, and the footprints going to my bedroom and those coming back were exactly the same shade of black.
I reached the first floor landing and saw that the footprints led to the closed basement door – the same basement door that I had left open the night before.
Fear had completely enveloped me, but curiosity drove me forward and before I could talk myself out of it, I had opened the basement door. I switched on the light and I could clearly see the footprints coming up the stairs and then going back down again.
My feet seemed to have a mind of their own, for they started down. My breath was coming in quick gasps.
The basement was stuffy, which was nothing new, but there was an underlying … smell in the air. A rotten smell – the smell you would get down by a creek or swamp. I was positive I had not smelt it the day before.
Reaching the basement floor, I saw where the footprints had started – and where they stopped.
They led to the middle of the room and then vanished.
I stood staring at the spot where they had started and stopped. There was nothing close enough which could be climbed upon, so that was no explanation.
Suddenly the basement door slammed and the light went out at the same time.
I screamed – literally like a girl. I tried to turn and run up the stairs, but in my rush I somehow tripped over my own feet. I went down hard and for a moment just lay there.
My heart was pounding like a jackhammer and my breathing was wild, but all else was deathly quiet. I could not see an inch in front me – I was in absolute darkness.
I was about to try to get to the stairs in a more calmly manner, when I heard a shuffle behind me – roughly where the footprints had started and ended.
I sat up and turned around. Another shuffle – this time it sounded like a wet footprint. A high pitched moan escaped my throat and I caught my breath, somehow thinking that if I stay quiet, that whatever it was would leave me alone.
A giggle came out of the darkness, a sound which caused tendrils of panic to run through my already tense body.
“Deeee-rick…” came the sing song whisper out of the darkness.
“Come play with me Derick.”
A cold and clammy hand gripped my wrist and I lost it. I ripped my arm away and sprung up, blindly scrambling toward and up the stairs. I stumbled again and again and almost fell back down the stairs, but finally I reached the basement door. I flung it open and tumbled into the hallway. Jumping up I quickly slammed the door shut, and collapsed against it. I heard another giggle coming from the other side of the door and then three soft knocks.
What the fuck was going on? A little girl? Was my house actually haunted? This shit doesn’t happen in real life!
Get out of the house, a different voice in my head said. Why are you still here? It almost pleaded.
But no. Something strange was definitely happening, but I had nowhere to go. This was my home and I was stuck with whatever was going on.
Eventually I got up and went back to my room. It was only then that I noticed all of the footprints were gone. I sighed. I had planned to phone someone – maybe the cops – but no one would believe me now without at least some sort of evidence. I quickly showered, deciding that it would make me feel better and while drying myself I saw that the scratches on my body were fading too, but a blue, almost black, hand print was forming on the spot where I had been grabbed. It was a small hand – like a child’s.
I was exhausted and it was only ten am. I decided to head out for breakfast, to clear my head and to try and make sense of what had happened.
I called Kevin to tell him that we wouldn’t be working today and headed off to a cafe close to my house.
I didn’t have much of an appetite, but I forced myself to eat a considerable breakfast, and after a couple of cups of coffee I was beginning to feel a little bit like myself again.
I went through all of the events of the previous evening and that morning and I could only come to two possibilities. Either my house was actually haunted; or I was going insane.
Exiting the cafe, I noticed a bar down the street, and something awoke in me which I hadn’t felt for a very long time. I had always called it the Thirst. Heaven knows the things that had happened – or which I had imagined – were cause enough to sit down and have a nice relaxing drink.
But it wouldn’t just be one, would it?
No. It wouldn’t.
Turning my back on the bar I headed back to my car.
I spent the day window shopping and eating something small at almost every cafe or restaurant I saw. I was wasting time – I didn’t want to go home.
I was on my way to the next eatery I had Googled, when something occurred to me: Sooner or later I would have to go home, did I really want to get home at night?
This made me stop, and I knew I would have to get home before dark.
I sighed, said a small prayer and headed home.
Nothing was out of place. Everything was as I had left it and all the lights were still burning.
I was full from basically eating the whole day, so I decided to just head to my room.
I first stopped in front of the basement door once again. I opened it quickly and flicked the light switch, and to my surprise it came on. I debated about going down, but quickly scrapped that plan. I closed the door, leaving the light on and headed up stairs.
I locked the door again and moved the dresser in front of it. Looking at my makeshift blockade, I again pondered my sanity.
I took another scalding hot shower and brushed my teeth. It was still early, but I was exhausted.
I had just slipped into bed when three loud bangs erupted from downstairs. Not knocks. Bangs. As if someone was slamming with an open hand against a door or window.
I threw the covers off, but then froze.
I listened and waited and after a few moments the bangs came again. One-two-three. This was followed by a girl laughing.
Even the giggling has escalated, I thought.
I reached for my phone on the table but then paused. What if I called the police and they again find nothing? They would think I was wasting their time. Or that I was crazy. Maybe you are, an unfriendly thought answered.
Bracing myself with a couple of deep breaths, I got out of bed and walked to my bedroom door. I put my ear against the door above the dresser and listened, but I could hear nothing. Everything was deathly quiet.
I was just about to move the dresser and unlock the door when three more bangs slammed into my bedroom door. I yelled out and fell back. The bangs made the entire room and windows shake, and a photo frame of the kids I had on the dresser toppled over. I crawled backwards toward the bed, as another set of bangs rattled the door. And then another. The pauses between them were getting ever shorter, until there were no pauses. It was deafening. A girl was screaming on the other side of the door – hysterical, maniacal screaming. The room shook and the windows rattled and it seemed that the door would explode inward at any moment along with my eardrums. I pulled my knees up and hugged them and soon I was screaming at the top of my lungs, pleading for it to stop.
And suddenly it did.
With tears streaming down my face, I waited for the next set of bangs. But they never came. It felt like hours went by before I could summon the courage to get up. Slowly I moved to the door and listened. Again all was quiet.
Waiting several more minutes, I moved the dresser and unlocked the door. Peering out, nothing seemed out of place – except for a trail of small black footprints leading to and away from the door. The one picture I had hung in the upstairs hallway had fell from the wall and lay in a pile of broken glass. The other upstair doors were all closed, just like they had been before I went to bed. I slowly stepped around the broken frame and moved toward the stairs, trying to look everywhere at once. Reaching the stairs I stood there for several minutes, looking down. The footprints seemed to mock me.
I realized I was still gripping my phone in my hand and debated once more if I should phone someone. Anyone. But again I struggled to come up with an explanation or a scenario where I wouldn’t seem crazy. Surely the footprints would disappear again?
Just go look. If you don’t like what you see, get out of the house and then you call.
Slowly, I descended the stairs.
Everything was quiet. Reaching the first floor landing, I saw that all the downstair doors were open – except the basement. Moving cautiously forward, I glanced into every room I passed, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Again I did not turn my back on the basement, but rather turned and walked backwards toward the living room.
The living room was in disarray, with pictures and small ornaments on the floor and even the small table I ate my dinner on was toppled over.
I stood still for a moment, trying to figure out what to do when three more knocks came from the basement door. They were soft again, like the knocks I had heard the first time.
I turned to face the hallway, and was just in time to see the farthest door just before the stairs slam shut. And then the one next to it. And the one next to it. The doors slammed shut with a violence that seemed unreal and I found myself retreating for the umpteenth time that day. The final door slammed shut and all was silent again. But then the basement door clicked open. Slowly – painfully slowly – it swung open, its rusty hinges protesting.
And that’s when I heard it. The sound that made me lose the final bit of self control I had – the basement steps creaking. Someone – or something – was coming up the stairs. At first I was frozen. I was absolutely terrified. I couldn’t move or think or scream. I just stared at the open doorway to the basement. Another whimper escaped my throat and new tears started rolling down my cheeks. Whatever it was had reached the final couple of steps and I could hear shallow breathing coming from the darkness. Two eyes appeared, and it seemed that that was what I needed to regain control of my limbs.
I sprang toward the front door, reaching it in three bounds, but it would not open. I yanked and pulled at the door, while simultaneously trying to look back over my shoulder at the thing that approached. Looking down, I saw that the door was locked and cursed my own stupidity. I quickly unlocked the door, but it would not open. I could hear the thing approaching down the hall, the shallow, rattling breath getting louder. Despair almost overtook me then, and I knew in my heart that whatever was coming, was somehow keeping the door closed. With every ounce of my strength I pulled, and the door came unstuck. Spilling out my front door I risked a final glance over my shoulder but saw nothing.
I went sprawling. I had tripped on the edge of the sidewalk and I heard a girl giggle again.
“Deeeee-rrriiiiick,” the girl’s voice sang, though I knew that it was no girl. “Come play with me Derick.” I was up in a flash and went sprinting down the street.
When I thought I was far enough and relatively safe, I stopped under a street light and made the decision to call the cops. I explained that someone was in my house and that I would be waiting a couple of blocks down the street.
They took much longer to arrive this time, and I was surprised to see it was again officers Rossi and Rickards.
I was sitting on the sidewalk inspecting my wounds from the tumble I had had when they pulled up.
“Mr Reid. Are you alright?” Rossi asked as she approached me and saw the blood on my knees and elbows.
“Yes, I’m fine, I fell running.” I got up and she asked me to tell them what had happened.
Now I’m not an idiot. I knew how it would sound, especially after I had called them the day before. So I left out the part about me opening the door after the knocking to find nothing. I left out how I had found a child’s footprints in my room and that a girl was talking to me about playing with her; I left out the part about said girl grabbing me in the darkness of the basement – how my bedroom had shook from the banging and that a girl had been screaming hysterically minutes before. I left out how the downstairs doors had all slammed shut. I left out how the basement door had opened on its own and something had come trudging up the stairs.
I shortened it to me hearing something downstairs after I went to bed and seeing someone heading down to the basement.
So they put me into the back of the car, radioed the situation into HQ and headed down the street to my house.
Pulling up, they told me to wait in the car and they once more headed into my house, weapons drawn.
A couple of minutes later they reappeared and they then quietly spoke to each other on my front porch. Rickards then spoke into his radio and Rossi came and got me.
“There’s no one inside.” she said. And she looked at me as if she felt sorry for me.
“Are you sure?” I stammered, hugging myself like those grief stricken women you always see in the movies.
“Positive. We went through the whole house and nothing seems out of place.”
At this I cocked my head to the side.
“Nothing’s out of place? When I left here a while back the house was in shambles. Furniture was knocked over and pictures I had hung were on the floor!”
Rossi looked at me curiously. “Follow me.” she said and led me back to my front door.
I didn’t move.
She turned and saw that I was frozen to the spot. Her face softened – perhaps she could see I really was frightened.
“Come on Mr Reid, we are still here – you’re perfectly safe.”
After another moment I reluctantly followed her.
She led me into my living room – which was completely spotless. All the pictures were hanging where I had hung them when I moved in and all the furniture and ornaments were in their correct – and upright – positions. Even the dishes which I had failed to do the day before were clean and on the drying rack.
“What the f-” I whispered.
“Mr Reid, are you feeling alright?” Rossi asked me and laid a hand on my arm. My mind was running at a thousand miles per hour and when she touched me it brought me back to this horrible unreality. I jerked away from her touch, and she held up her hands.
“ Whoa, take it easy Mr Reid, we’re here to help.”
“I’m sorry. I’m just…”
She nodded her head that she understood. She sighed and looked me in the eyes.
“Mr Reid, have you been drinking?” she asked gently.
“What? No!” I cried. Having heard that question a million times before – what followed was never good.
“Are you on any strong medication?” she asked a little more firmly.
I sighed, suddenly angry. “No, I am not drunk, I am not on drugs and I’m not crazy!” I said a little more forcefully than I had intended.
“Ok, calm down.” Rossi looked over at Rickards who was still outside and he shrugged.
“Sir, I would really recommend that you stay somewhere else tonight. You have obviously had a very emotional day and getting out of the house, even if just for a night might be a very good idea.”
I was about to protest – to tell her to go fuck herself, but then I saw the logic in what she was saying. Tomorrow would be a new day and Kevin would be here to start on the second coat of paint. If something crazy happened again, at least I wouldn’t be alone.
“You might be right. I’ll go stay at a motel. Would you mind waiting for me so I can just throw a couple of things in a bag?” I asked, genuinely not wanting to be alone for even a second in this house.
She agreed and I quickly headed upstairs. I noticed that the broken frame was somehow repaired and hanging on the wall again. I paused in front of it, a shiver running through me. Was I going crazy? I put on some clothes and threw some more clothes, my toiletries and a book into a bag.
When I returned downstairs they were waiting for me in the living room.
“Ready to go?” she asked with a small smile.
“Yes, and thank you for waiting, I appreciate that.”
She smiled again and we headed outside. I locked up, thanked and apologized to the officers and then got in my car.
I headed to a nearby motel and checked in for one night. Walking to my room, I saw a bar across the street. Shaking the thought off, I entered my room and headed to the small bathroom. I splashed my face with water and looked at myself in the mirror.
Was I going crazy? What was going on?
A drink would help calm you down.
I straightened, frowning at the tired looking man in the mirror.
It was not the first time I had a thought like that since I got out of rehab, but I was always able to brush it aside. It never had any real power over me.
But this was different. It wasn’t just the silly, weak voice that had tried to get me to drink after rehab. This voice had substance. Power. I found myself actually considering it. A drink would calm me down. After what I had just experienced – or believed to have experienced – maybe a drink wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. And if I only imagined it, I was pretty much fucked already.
I stared into the mirror for a couple of seconds more.
No, you’ve been doing so well – been sober for so long. Don’t throw it away.
I sighed. I walked over to the bed and fell down on it. I would not go for the drink I so craved.
Switching on the TV I found an old documentary about crocodiles and settled in, hoping I might be able to forget about what was happening at my new house – or in my mind.
The night wore on. I couldn’t shake the memories of what had happened earlier and the more I thought about the police – the way Rossi had looked at me – the more I thought that I might have imagined it. Could it be? Could I have imagined everything? Was I going through some sort of psychotic break? A mental breakdown?
Suddenly I was back in my living room. I was standing at the kitchen counter again, staring down the hall at the basement door. Slowly it creaked open. Fear overcame me, and I was paralysed. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out.
A hand emerged from the basement. A black hand, with inch long nails. My legs gave in and I collapsed to the floor. A moment later, a great monster had stepped into the hallway. Its skin was black, and wrinkled, like old leather. Large horns grew from its forehead and it had flaming red eyes and long fangs.
It stood glaring at me, and a guttural growl rose from its throat. It sprang forward, moving as quickly as nothing I had ever experienced before. Bearing down on me I cowered into a small ball – and awoke a |
I was always terrified of doctors above all else, so by the time I finally steeled myself enough to go, the cancer had metastasized in both breasts. I sat numbly in Dr. Kerden’s office, as she droned on about my options. She never berated me for my stupidity. She didn’t have to; her bewilderment and restrained contempt bled through the sympathetic tones she spoke about chemotherapy in.
The bottom line was suffocatingly simple: if the treatments and surgeries were successful (Dr. Kerden could not have stressed the “if” more if she had scrawled it in lipstick on the desk)my chance of surviving more than five years was about twenty two percent.
I was only twenty four and all my plans – marriage to my fiance,future children, a full-fledged career in travel photography – had just been yanked from my feet and placed on a high shelf I had a seventy-eight percent chance of never reaching.
Oddly, out of all those bricks that had just crashed down on my head, the one that broke the dam and spilled my tears was the realization that even if -if!- I survived, married Ben, had children, I would never breast feed them. There was no chance of saving my breasts at that point. To this day, I’ve never figured out why that was what hit me hardest.
Normally I would have argued every inch of a medical procedure. Not this time. I signed papers numbly, barely glancing at the black print that swam in and out of focus. Waivers. Insurance proof. Next of kin. Emergency contacts.
I don’t even remember going home and packing my bag for the hospital that night. I must have talked to Ben, I know, because he was in that sterile room late into the night before the nurses finally kicked him out.
Dr. Kerden, as it turned out, was my polar opposite when it came to medical procrastination; chemo started within the next few days. Let me tell you right now, the chemo patients you see on tv shows and movies don’t tell half the story of the suffering you really go through.
When I looked in the mirror after the first treatment, I saw the most exhausted woman I’d ever seen looking back at me. By the third treatment, she looked more dead than alive. Yellowing skin, hollowed eyes, thin, cracked lips in spite of all the clinical chapstick the nurses gave me. Ben used to tease me for my “baby face” (because he was too sweet to straight up admit that my round face was a tad bit pudgy) and now that face was lined, the round cheeks sunken in. I looked forty.
I would feel dead if I wasn’t hobbling to the bathroom every day, the retching of my stomach gleefully proclaiming: “Yes! Yes we are alive! Ain’t it just fucking grand?!”
Four months. I caved and had Ben bring his electric razor. I was past crying at that point, watching shreds of black hair, once so soft and shiny, fall into a hospital trashcan. Ben hadn’t reached that point just yet, I noticed as he quietly sniffled. He would, I knew.
That night, after Ben had been kicked out by the night nurse, I gave up trying to sleep, and snatched my current forget-I’m-dying-of-cancer book off my bedside table. I had been limping through the book only a few minutes when it dawned on me that I wasn’t alone in my hospital room anymore; a small man in a patchwork coat and a battered top hat was sitting in Ben’s vacated chair.
I stared at him stupidly above the edge of the book, instinctively hiding my young-old face as much as I could. He smiled encouragingly and offered a little wave. His hair was all hidden beneath that oversized hat, but his curly beard was a very bright ginger.
“Um, visiting hours are over,” I offered after a moment.
His smile widened into a grin and he doffed his hat in acknowledgment. “True enough, lass, but visiting hours are only for visitors.”
I blinked in surprise. For his small frame – he didn’t look much bigger than my thirteen-year-old nephew – his voice was surprisingly deep.
“Can I help you with something?” I fumbled for the remote with the nurse call button. “Are you looking for someone? The nurse should help…”
He stilled me with a dismissive wave and a laugh. “Oh no need for that, lass. I was looking for you, as it happened.”
I squinted at him, less alarmed by his potential stalking than the fact that he seemed to be flickering in and out like a candle flame – now solid, now faint as a ghost. Relief washed over me as I finally figured it out.
“I’m hallucinating,” I explained out loud. “The pain killers are kicking in, and I’m hallucinating a homeless leprechaun in my room.”
The walls shook with his laughter, as he kicked his feet in glee. He wiped tears from the corners of his eyes.
“If I had known you would be this delightful, I probably would have come to you a lot sooner.”
Had I been in any normal, non-drugged state of mind, I would have summoned the nurse then and there. Instead I unconsciously loosened my grip dropped the remote on the floor.
“Who are you?” I finally thought to ask. “What do you want from me? I don’t have a lot of money to spare at the moment….”
He flapped his hand in good-natured dismissal again.
“I don’t want anything from you, Anna. If anything I’m here for your benefit. I’ve brought you a gift of sorts.”
The short bark of laughter that escaped me was nothing like the frequent belly laughs I had had four months ago.
“What? You’re going to cure my cancer?”
He raised an eyebrow silently. Abruptly, my laughter dried up and I felt my cynical smile slide off my face. All of my family’s sworn to be true tales about demons and spirits came crashing down around me at once.
“You’re the devil and you want my soul,” I accused him.
He sniffed as though offended. “I’m Eustace, not a demon,” he countered, “and YOU summoned ME. I’m just here to give you what you want.”
Eustace? “I didn’t summon you.”
He sighed. “You read the fifth word of the third paragraph on the twenty-sixth page of ‘Prince Caspian’ at exactly forty-five seconds past one o’clock in the morning on April the fourteenth. You summoned me.”
I gaped at him. “What the hell kind of ritual is that??”
He winked. “The kind I change about every five minutes or so. Makes the odds of someone actually calling me to them microcosmic.”
I paused. “You don’t want people to summon you? Why?”
He chuckled. “By now with all of your social media, all of you humans should have learned a long time ago – the biggest pricks are the ones who come seeking you out. The best people you ever meet will fall into your life by accident.”
I raised my hands in a warding off gesture. “Look, if I summoned you, I seriously did not mean to. I don’t want three wishes, or wealth or any of that crap. I don’t want to give up my soul or my first-born or whatever it is you trade in. Please go away.”
He peered at me earnestly, actually clasping his little hands together like one of Dickens’ orphans. “I told you, Anna, I don’t want your soul. There is no trade to be made; beating the odds enough to summon me seals the bargain. You have earned my luck, and I’m afraid it is yours whether you want it or not.”
“Your…luck?”
He nodded seriously and hopped up out of the chair. Standing, he would barely have come up to where my breasts had once been. He crossed over to my bedside and took my shock-limp hand in his own.
I realized with a start that behind his roguish grin and humor, his eyes were incredibly lonely. His hands held mine with deference, even gentleness.
“Yes, Anna. From this day onward, you will have my luck – however high the odds are stacked, you will always beat them.”
“And what do I have to give up in return?” The words fell nearly inaudibly from my trembling lips.
He smiled almost sadly. “A few minutes spent talking to a lonely old spirit that no one has summoned in a long, long time.”
I had no words left. There we were, a dying woman and an impossible spirit in the ICU at Mercy Hospital. Almost unconsciously, I felt myself squeeze his hand. I swear, a look of naked startlement flitted across his face.
Then the cheery, careless grin was back on his face and the moment was over. He patted my hand distantly and stepped back.
“One word of warning I must offer,” he said. “You humans rely on luck much less than you really know. This gift will change your life, and you must be prepared to change with it.”
He straightened his coat, doffed his hat, and winked out of my room.
The shrill beeping of my empty IV bag woke me up the next morning. I groaned. I felt like I had been hit with a truck; another unfortunate side effect of coming down off the painkiller cushion between you and the chemo.
The morning nurse came in swiftly and shut off the beeping and busied herself replacing the bag. I glanced at the clock. It was five-thirty, and time for my morning blood draw to see if I was dying any faster today than yesterday.
I pushed my encounter with Eustace to the back of my brain until a week later. I was spooning up the last of my jello cup when my current Doctor came in.
He smiled at me automatically over his clipboard as he flipped through the pages.
“Good morning, Miss Hall. How are you feeling today?”
I didn’t respond. He wasn’t offended. We both knew how I was doing. Suddenly he stopped flipping, gave the clipboard a hard look, and then, wonder of wonders, actually raised his eyes and looked me in the face.
“You’re in remission.”
“What?”
He shook himself, recovering from his slip. “According to your recent blood work and biopsy, the spread of the cancerous cells has stopped. It also appears that the existent cells seem to be dying at an increasing rate.”
I could feel my lips trembling. “The cancer is dying? So I … I beat it?”
He offered me a sympathetic smile. “It’s a little early to tell, Miss Hall. We are definitely going to be monitoring this closely, but things are looking up.”
As it turned out, things were more than looking up; I went home two weeks later. I would still be getting regular scheduled blood work, of course, and a whole score of other tests to make sure that my cancer was actually gone. There was a fair chance that in the next few years the cancer could reoccur.
You might be thinking that I’d be drinking champagne, eating all the food I couldn’t have at the hospital, and having celebratory I’m-not-dead sex with Ben for days. Honestly, all I really wanted was a Tim Horton’s ham and swiss sandwich, and then to sleep in my own bed, in my own apartment for as long as possible.
Ben swung us by Tim’s on the way home. Turned out they were having a mini-event; we were the thousandth customers that day, so our meal was half off, with extra donuts thrown in with no charge.
Eating that vanilla creme, chocolate-iced donut after four months of peach jello was barely short of orgasmic. I think I actually moaned as I ate it, melting chocolate smeared on my cheek.
We managed to beat every rush-hour clog and hit every green light on the way home. Ben punched the air in triumph as we pulled into the driveway. That asshole in 2B who always took my parking spot wasn’t there yet.
Ben parked the car, ran around the front, and opened my door for me. I was still a bit wobbly on my feet, so he offered his arm like a true gentleman. Leaning heavily on him, I stepped into our apartment for the first time in almost five months.
The next few weeks blurred by. I hadn’t expended all my medical leave at Harnon’s Travel agency, but they still allowed me to come back to work a bit early. My hands fairly itched to hold my camera again.
Out of respect for the in-town doctors visits that I would still need for at least another month, my boss kindly set me on largely local assignments.
My photos and article on Alden Park, the local arboretum, actually generated enough interest to bring in a fair handful of tourists. No one marked it as their sole destination, of course, but a fair number of people nonetheless vacationing higher in the mountains read my article and thought it worth a detour to check it out.
As it happened, one of the tourists was the head editor of an internationally famous travel magazine. I found this out when I came in to work and he was sitting in my dinky cubicle, my complete portfolio already picked up from my office manager.
He seemed a little off-put by my appearance: my hair had only just started growing back, and the lines remained etched on my face, even though I had begun to gain some weight back. Nonetheless, he greeted me warmly and shook my hand, shifting my portfolio under his arm.
“Miss Hall? I’m George Mann, Editor in Chief at World Travels.”
I froze. World Travels was a legitimate, big time magazine. “Of course, Mr. Mann. What can I do for you today?”
Turned out he had taken an interest in my photos – he felt that lately most of the photographers working for World Travels were overlooking what he called the “smaller gems” (read anything nature heavy) choosing to focus on growing high-scale restaurants and developing up-town regions in various cities.
To cut a long story short, within ten days of getting back to work, I was offered a position that could legitimately spark off a career as a photographer. What are the odds?
I would have been an idiot not to have started connecting the dots at this point. It was becoming increasingly obvious that Eustace had not been a painkiller hallucination after all.
Still, I have always tried to take a logical, sensible approach to every mystery I’ve ever encountered, so I came up with an experiment that would make or break my theory.
I played the lottery. Not the small-prize scratch cards. I mean the BIG one, the multi-million dollar jackpot. Ben and I watched, slack-jawed, later that week when the powerball numbers were announced, watching as one by one, they matched up with my ticket.
Of course I never mentioned Eustace to Ben. It was enough that I knew he’d been real.
The next five years passed by like a dream. Despite the high risk I was at for a recurrence of cancer, it never struck. My hair grew back in it’s original color, without so much of a sprinkling of the expected gray. Ben and I were married and immediately found our dream house, paid for with a chunk of the lottery money. I privately blessed Eustace, at least at first.
I was on my lunch break, deciding to mix business with pleasure and cover a new soul-food style restaurant downtown. The barbeque ribs were spicy, balanced with just the right amount of sweetness. I took a large bite, and immediately felt a glass-shattering pain in my mouth.
One emergency trip to the dentist later revealed that as an unfortunate side effect of both the chemo and some of the drugs I had been on for cancer treatment years earlier, all of my teeth were slightly more brittle than they had been before.
I had shattered a back molar down to the root. Fortunately, the dentist peering at my outraged tooth informed me that it was actually one of my wisdom teeth, and not a true molar. That was the good news.
The worse news was that given the damage dealt, an extraction was the only real option on the table. I hate dental procedures worse than standard medical.
The doctor prescribed a penicillin derived antibiotic for after the extraction. The extraction itself actually went alright; it was after I had been taking the pills for two days that a quick ER trip revealed that I had apparently developed an allergy to all drugs in the penicillin family.
One full-body rash and a antibiotic switch later, I was back to work. Mr. Mann had become a pretty big fan of my work, and was giving me regular assignments now. The assignment folder on my desk today was for a piece on a section of the Appalachian trail and the small town in Vermont it opened up in. Full expense for air travel paid of course.
Since Ben was mainly freelance writing at this time, and could work anywhere he had access to wifi, I convinced him to come with me. We could try some maple candy and do a little hiking ourselves.
The odds of a plane crashing are actually pretty small, as are the odds of surviving it. When the plane went down over Pennsylvania, I survived. Ben didn’t.
When I stood at the foot of his coffin during his burial, I held an umbrella against the rain. I got struck by lightning. Twice. The photographs I took of the scars it left down my left arm and leg, alongside the entire story of how they came to be there fully cemented my career as a respected photographic journalist.
Looking at how my life has fallen in and out of pieces since Eustace stepped into it, I can’t hate him. I can’t say he cheated me, because I never gave him anything. I can’t say he lied to me, because he never once promised that the luck would be good.
There will always be odds stacked, but sometimes they are naturally stacked against you. Sometimes they are stacked in your favor. Eustace never promised I would only win; he just promised I would always manage to beat the odds. I can only say that he’s right on that count.
So I learned to stagger the odds against myself now and then. Now when it’s raining, I wear as much metal jewelry as I can decently fit on my body. When I go swimming, I only do it after a full meal. I do all of my jogging through dark alleyway late at night with my headphones cranked all the way up. If I have to be somewhere in a hurry, I stall for as long as possible and go through the highest traffic areas I can. I even under-cook all of my meat and fish just a little bit.
So far I’ve never been mugged, my health has been fairly steady, my career is wonderful, and I have enough money for a very comfortable life. On the other hand, my bed is empty every morning. Ben’s cologne never seems to wash out of his pillow. I still have the list of the names we wanted to give our children.
I can’t even really talk to a therapist about this because of how crazy it all sounds. Although I do suspect that given my luck, I would end up with the one doctor who happens to hold an un-confessed belief in the supernatural. I can’t even talk to a priest to bless away Eustace’s gift because I know deep down he told the truth when he said he was no demon.
Like it or not, the gift will be mine forever. And as Eustace advised, I’ve learned to cope with it. I don’t take high-reward risks anymore, learning to take pleasure in the small things. No fewer than fourteen times I have managed to catch perfect pictures of mother deer milking their fawns in wildflower fields. I can always find some small gem in the grimiest second hand stores.
As much as I miss Ben, I can’t be truly lonely either. I think the true gift Eustace gave me was this; since I met him, I have encountered some of the wildest, freest, and brightest minded people in the most unlikely places. They are the best people I’ve ever met, and they all found me by accident.
If there is one thing I still can take control of here, it is this; the odds are split even fifty-fifty on whether I will live a happy life.
What can I say? When all other odds are stacked, life has a funny way of evening out.
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It was late October when my father told me that I would be going out hunting with him. I was thirteen, and this would be the first time I was allowed to join my father on one of his expeditions. Recently, some of our cows disappeared from our farm. A few days ago, my father found one of them dead on the edge of the property. He said it was either wolves or coyotes, judging from the bite marks. Being so close to winter, my father and I knew that we couldn’t afford to lose any more cattle. We would have to trap and kill whatever it was that found our farm to be its new feeding trough.
The night we set out, I was caught up in a blend of excitement and nervous anticipation. Most of the other boys in our village had already been out hunting, and they often made rude jests to remind me that I was still a whelp.
Even though a trace of summer warmth still touched the autumn air, my father told me to wear my wool coat as he checked and loaded our rifles. When we were ready, he grabbed the oil lamp from the front deck and stepped down the stairs.
He turned and said, “No matter what, make sure you know where you’re pointing that thing. If I take a bullet from you, I’ll haunt you forever!”
I let out a nervous laugh, but the thought made my stomach do a small turn. Ever since my mother and older brother passed away, my father and I had only each other to look after. Without him, I’m not sure what I would do.
Earlier, my father had taken some scraps from hogs that had been butchered the day before and set traps out along the forest path leading to Silver Mountain. It was the path he was certain was carrying the scent of the farm into the forest. It was the best lead he had anyway.
We crossed the pasture until we reached the fence on the edge of the woods. The moon was nearly full, and its light made it easy to see in the dark despite the light layer of mist that blanketed the open field. My father cursed something about needing to cut the trees back farther as he climbed over the fence. He had to help me make it over, the rifle being a new kind of burden for me. We reached the overgrown path, still trodden down to plain dirt in the center.
The path was too narrow to walk side by side, so my father led the way, igniting the oil lamp with a match as soon as the tall pines above us fully occluded the moonlight. I almost wished he hadn’t lit the lamp. Somehow the new light only served to limit how far we could see between the pillars of pine trees that surrounded us.
There was a brushing noise as something nearby scuffled its way over leaves and pine needles. The sudden sound caused me to draw in a gasping breath. I whirled around, fumbling to point my rifle in the direction of the noise.
“Wait!” my father hissed at me. We paused for a second, but there was no other sound. I turned to give my father an anxious glance.
“It’s probably just a squirrel,” he said quietly. “Don’t be afraid. There’s nothing around at night that isn’t there during the day.”
I nodded to him and readjusted my grip on the rifle. He nodded back and kept moving.
There were a few other noises, the fluttering of wings and a stick snapping in the distance. As time went on, I found myself more calm and less afraid of the dark. This was what all the other boys had gone through, and I wasn’t going to let myself stay under their shadows. More than that, I wasn’t going to disappoint my father.
“We’re coming up on the first one,” my father whispered. He hunched his shoulders down and slowed his pace, walking heel to toe with each step. I matched his posture and kept close to him.
To the right was a small opening in the pine grove. There, my father had set up a snare trap around a pile of entrails. He paused to let me catch up until I was standing by his side. He then raised the lamp and stepped into the clearing.
The entrails were scattered and slightly chewed up. What was more interesting was that the trap had worked in catching something, but we wouldn’t know what it was.
“Something got caught alright,” my father sighed in frustration, “but something else got to it first.”
He pointed to some ivy leaves on the ground, coated in blood. The pine needles around the ivy were spread out in a way that showed that something had been dragged away. Judging by the size of it, it was either a large coyote or a small wolf.
My father began to shake his head and curse, but then suddenly a shrill cry of an animal in distress rang out farther down the path. My father’s head shot up. Without hesitation, he ran full speed back onto the path and deeper into the forest. I wanted to shout for him to wait, but the noise would startle any animals around us and I knew it would upset him.
Instead, I ran as fast as I could to keep up. Ahead of me, the dim yellow light from the lamp twinkled and faded as he disappeared behind trees and brush. The sounds in front of us were definitely coming from some kind of wild dog. There was growling, howling, and cries that echoed out amongst the blackened sentinels. I ran, trying not to let my labored breathing make too much noise.
I rounded a corner, and ahead of me I could see the light of my father’s lamp re-emerge into view. Just then, I heard a loud gunshot, followed by the most haunting sound I’ve ever heard. My father screamed in a way that I never thought a man could. There was more growling to accompany his terrified cries. I abandoned all notion of stealth as I sprinted towards the light. I screamed for my father between painful, fiery breaths.
Jumping through a thicket of brush, I emerged into another clearing illuminated by the lamp, which was overturned onto the ground. The oil had leaked out and caught fire on the forest floor. My father was laying on his chest. Even in the light, the thing I saw hunched over him seemed like a creature made purely of shadow.
Without hesitation, I quickly raised my rifle. Lining my sights up with the center of the creature’s body, I pulled the trigger. The resulting muzzle flash illuminated the animal for an instant. The only thing I recall seeing were enormous claws and a mouthful of bloody, razor sharp teeth. That was all I saw. The thing moved so quickly that I didn’t know which direction it had gone. I know that my bullet had made contact, however, as the monster let out a painful wail unlike anything I would ever hear in nature.
It was as if the animal had two sets of vocal chords. One was that of a dog, the other… more human sounding. The double octave cry was incredibly loud, echoing throughout the entire forest. I was frozen in that moment, overwhelmed by what had just happened.
The fire which had been started by the overturned lamp had spread among the pine needles and leaves, emerging into a large blaze. The light shone on my father, who was now kicking and screaming on the ground; rolling and convulsing in a newfound agony. He was tearing at his shirt as if it too had caught fire. Beneath his collar, I saw a large bite wound that stretched across his shoulder from his upper back to just above his breast. Each fang had left a wide gouge that leaked blood as well as a thick yellow pus. Even though it had literally only been seconds since he had been bitten, the wound took on the look of a long-untreated infection.
His breathing became hoarse, and in between his agonized screams, I thought I could hear him trying to say my name. I rushed to his side, trying to find the words to calm him down, but I could only repeat, “Oh God, oh God, oh God…” over and over again.
I tried to grab him by the arm in a panicked attempt to get him back to his feet. I knew I wouldn’t be able to drag or carry him out of the forest. I could not let him die. Just as my fingers closed around his arm, I felt his other hand hit my chest, throwing me away from him and onto my back. Immediately after, I heard a loud snap followed by another terrifying wail of pain. I sat up to see my father lying on his back with his chest arched up high. His arms were raised up over and behind his head. It looked like he was being stabbed in the center of his back. There was another snap as he contorted the opposite direction.
The growing light from the spreading fire illuminated a sight that would stay with me until the day I died. My father’s back was not only breaking, it was stretching. He tried to reach behind himself in a desperate attempt to alleviate his torture somehow, and when he did, his arm snapped itself backwards at the elbow. There was this awful crunching sound as the bones in his arms broke themselves in multiple places. I saw that with each break, his appendages gained a few inches in length. That sound was accompanied by a tearing, pressured stretching noise as his skin and fleshed strained to keep up with the unnatural growth of his bones. His shoulders buckled together first before snapping about an extra six to ten inches apart. And his face… his face imploded as an invisible force suddenly broke all the bones of his skull, pushing his nose and mouth inward. His anguished, wild screaming was suddenly cut off as he continued to writhe upon the forest floor.
In his sudden silence, I realized that I had been screaming in horror the entire time. I fought to get back to my feet, realizing I had dropped my rifle. I looked my father in the eyes, weeping at the ungodly torment I could see in his own gaze. There was a popping noise and his face suddenly elongated to resemble a snout like a horse… or a dog. He choked and coughed, gagging on something apparently. Then, in a spew of bloody vomit, he spat out all of his teeth. The next time he screamed, I could see deadly-sharp points emerging from the bloody sockets in his jaws. His scream was… his scream was different now, accompanied by the sound of something inhuman, something wild.
Suddenly, I realized with a new kind of horror that the sound coming from him was the same double-octave scream-growl I heard coming from the beast I had just shot.
The skin around his eyes grew black, and that darkness spread over his face, leaking through the skin of his neck and spreading over his shoulders. Patches of thick, shining black hairs emerged from his flesh. In an instant, the thing I was screaming at resembled nothing of the man who raised me, the gentle person who taught me to fish, to ride a horse, and to skip stones.
His screams became less human and more animalistic, and the remaining ember of my sanity chimed one rational thought into my brain; the most unthinkable notion imaginable. I scanned the ground at my feet, and found the rifle I had come with. Tears streaked my face as I pulled the bolt back and then pushed a bullet into the chamber. Sobbing, I raised the rifle and lined the sights up to the spot between his eyes.
I didn’t blink when I pulled the trigger.
The unspeakable monster my father had become immediately fell still. My entire being was numb. I felt myself collapse as I sobbed like a child. There was no way to reach any small precipice of understanding what had just happened. I stared at the corpse in front of me, uncaring of the blaze which was now reaching its way up the pine trees and throughout the forest floor. I felt as though I wanted the fire to consume me, to take us both from this dark nightmare.
Then suddenly, I heard a howl from beyond the inferno. It was a sound from the deepest circle of hell. Before it ended, a chorus of double-voiced roars joined in. The noise pierced through my body, electrifying my spine. I wasn’t thinking. Instead, I channeled my actions through an unquestionable instinct to get as far away from the source of that hellish orchestra as I possibly could.
I turned and bolted in the direction of the farm. Terror had seized every inch of my body, and I sprinted with an adrenaline-fueled frenzy towards the safety of the village. The light of the fire quickly died away as I tore through the forest, jumping over roots and large rocks. I had no idea if I was on the path or not. I simply ran.
There was a point as I ran through the murky blackness of the forest that I realized I could hear more than my own panicked footsteps. A rapidly loudening rustle could be heard as something was chasing me. Given how quickly it was growing louder, I knew it was moving incredibly fast. In the darkness, I could still see my father’s horrified, agonized eyes looking into mine, and I begged God not to let that happen to me. I ran faster than I ever thought possible; my whole body numb to the fire of any exhaustion.
Behind me, the rustling had obtained a new attribute—a fervent, ravenous growl. I knew I was close to reaching the edge of my father’s property as I saw traces of moonlight reaching its way through the thinning canopy. In the growing light, I dared to look over my shoulder. Behind me, only several yards away, I could see the roiling figure of another dark beast as it charged after me on all fours. Behind it, two more were in pursuit.
I didn’t look back again. I was so sure that any second, I would feel the weight of a beast fall upon my shoulders. I would feel its claws first and then those awful teeth. Immediately after, the burning, the snapping bones and stretching flesh. Agony, terror, and then whatever hell would follow.
The edge of the forest came upon me faster than I could keep up with, and I ran full on into the fence. My torso flipped over the top of it, and I landed hard on my face and stomach. In any other circumstance, the fall would have left me breathless and incapacitated on the ground, but the adrenaline had me pushing my way back to my feet. Just then, I was ripped back as the beast had finally caught me. It snarled as it tore into my back. I wailed, but realized there was no pain. That’s when I noticed it hadn’t bitten into me, but into the thick wool coat my father had insisted I wear. I dropped the rifle I didn’t even know I was still carrying and rolled out of the jacket in a single turning motion.
Once free, I sprinted with a new top speed, fueled by a tiny flicker of hope. At some point, probably when I heard the chorus of howls ring out from the forest, the cattle had managed to break free from their pen. They ran in large circles around the pasture, panicked and trying to find some means of shelter. I ran through the stampeding cows towards my father’s house.
Behind me, I heard the distressed moaning of livestock being pounced upon by the hellhounds.
I glanced back to see that the beasts pursuing me had opted for easier, meatier prey. I wasted no time in putting more and more distance between them and myself. I ran right past my house, determined to reach the safety of the village, to the company and protection of other human beings.
My father’s farm was just outside of the small neighborhood. I ran, my legs and chest on fire with tears soaking my face, up and over the hill. The light of the village was my salvation, and I raced in that direction until I crested the hill beyond my father’s farm, the one that overlooked the village. When I saw the source of light ahead of me, my feet skidded to a stop on their own, and I fell to my knees.
Fire. Nearly the entire village was engulfed in flames. Even from the distance I was from those once beautiful little streets, I could see the figures of men and women frantically scrambling as they fled from larger, more menacing silhouettes. Screams of terror and anguish rose up with the smoke and fire, mixed with a growing number of ungodly howls and roars. The longer I watched, the fewer people I saw. More and more beasts, my former neighbors, darted back and forth among the flames.
Howling from behind me prompted my feet to move once more. I ran closer to the village, not knowing where else to go. I ran until I came across the small culvert just outside of town. Throwing myself off to the side, I fell into the stony river with a painfully shallow splash. Wasting no time, I crawled into the small opening of the culvert, hiding myself there under the road.
Above me, I could hear the sound of the beasts’ paws rapidly pummeling down as they raced to join the slaughter down the road. Exhausted, terrified, and shivering, I sat in a catatonic horror as I listened to the visceral chaos of my entire world being savagely torn apart by the fangs and claws of absolute nightmares. The terrified screaming of friends and neighbors devolved into agonized wailing which over time was completely replaced by an unprecedented number of double-voiced howls.
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The Culling
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
See also: Livestock culling
The Culling is the bi-monthly occurrence whereby between 1,000 and 6,000 human beings are rendered mute and unmoving for several minutes, have their bodies float out into an open space, and then move straight up into the atmosphere until they disappear from the sight of others.
First witnessed and reported on as a phenomenon in March of the year 2015, The Culling was widely agreed to be the occurrence of the Rapture (from Christian theology) whereby a group of people is left behind on earth after another group literally leaves “to meet the Lord in the air.” Although many writers and thinkers still utilize theological language and rationales when discussing The Culling, evidence of the arrival and departure of extra-terrestrial travelers to Earth timed to coincide with these mass disappearances has led most to conclude that non-Earth inhabitants are taking humans for some unknown purpose.
Contents
1 Origin of the term
2 The phenomenon
Floating stage
Moving stage
Departure stage
3 History
First Culling
Reactions to Culling events – 2015
Identifying alien objects
Attempts to interact with objects
Attempts to destroy objects
4 Impact on life attitudes
5 Victims group vs. supporters debate
6 Views on rationale
Origin of the term [edit]
The word culling comes from the Latin colligere, which means “to collect”. Historically, the term was applied broadly to mean sorting a collection into two groups: one that will be kept and one that will be rejected. The cull is the set of items rejected during the selection process. When done with intent, the culling process was repeated until the selected group was of the proper size and consistency desired. “The Culling” (used capitalized) was coined in early 2016 by Richard Farnsworth, then President of California Institute of Technology, when he and his team of Astrophysicists reported to the public that alien space travelers had been visiting Earth twice monthly. Used in this more recent context, it is unclear why some individuals are selected and others are not, and unclear whether the individuals taken or the individuals left behind should be considered the cull.
The phenomenon [edit]
Victims of The Culling experience three known phases, the initial floating stage, the moving stage, and the final departure stage. Mankind does not yet know what happens to the victims of The Culling after the departure stage.
Floating stage
During the floating stage (also referred to as the levitation stage), victims stop breathing and their hearts stop beating. Body position, facial expression and degree of eye openness remain as they were before. Previous activity (i.e., verbalizing or running) ceases immediately. Unless constrained by another object, victim’s bodies typically levitate immediately between three and four inches (just under nine centimeters) from their original location. Despite repeated testing, it is unknown to what extent consciousness remains. The floating stage lasts between 16 and 19 seconds. Biometric devices previously attached to victims during this stage indicate no cardiovascular, respiratory, muscular, or digestive system activity. Low level nervous system and endocrine system activity has been recorded (specifically in the Cerebrum, Thalamus, Hypothalamus, and Thyroid Gland), leading many to conclude that victims have not fully died.
Victim Kevin McDougal experiencing floating stage. Image taken May 6, 2016.
Moving stage
During the moving stage, when it occurs, victims’ bodies move from their original, levitated location in a direct path to the nearest open space at which the open sky is above. While some of the victims’ bodies move only inches or feet to get out from under tree branches or a building overhang, others move hundreds of feet to get out of buildings, subway tunnels, or caves. During this stage, bodies have been consistently measured to move at 3.1 miles per hour or 4.55 feet per second (5.0 kilometers per hour or 1.39 meters per second), equivalent to the average speed at which humans walk. This rate of movement does not change when additional weight is added (i.e., when a loved one jumps on their back). Body position, facial expression and eye openness remain constant during the moving stage.
If a victim’s body is unable to access an open space because it is in a closed building or vehicle, then it will experience up to six attempts to exit the space. These attempts involve 1) a reorientation of the body such that the feet are pointed in the direction of windows or doors and 2) steadily faster ramming movements into the windows, doors or walls. Attempts to leave a building or vehicle begin at the same time as most other victims experience the departure stage. While some victims exit the building after one attempt, many (especially during the first several months of The Culling) experience six attempts to leave. Six-attempts victims often suffer significant bodily damage as they are repeatedly forced into windows, doors and walls. Lower bodies and torsos are often crushed during the process.
When the 6th attempt does not lead to atmospheric access, victims remain crushed where they are, though no longer levitated. If a door is not opened during the subsequent Culling, then the body will again experience the floating and moving stages and the six attempts, damaging the body beyond recognition. (It is claimed that Aleksei Yesipov’s former body experienced the greatest number of 6th attempts – 68 – locked in a nuclear power plant outside of Minsk, though his body was no more than cellular pulp when emergency exit doors were opened in 2017.) If a door or window is opened during the subsequent Culling, then the body will move outside and experience the departure stage at the same time as do others. Opening a door or window in between Culling periods will not lead to any change in the movement or positioning of the victim body. Victim bodies can be moved in between Culling incidents, though alteration of the body’s integrity (i.e., though cremation) does not alter The Culling activity they will experience at the next full/new moon.
Departure stage
During the departure stage, victims move directly upwards, accelerating to a recorded speed of 213 miles per hour or 312 feet per second (342 kilometers per hour or 95 meters per second). Biometric devices previously attached to victims during this stage continue to indicate no cardiovascular, respiratory, muscular, or digestive system activity. Nervous system and endocrine system activity has been recorded at stronger levels during this stage than was true during the floating stage, though scientists have questioned the reliability of their measuring devices as they travel at high rates of speed several miles up in the atmosphere. Three-dimensional GPS tracking devices, developed soon after the identification of alien space travelers, have indicated that victim bodies travel on a path directly perpendicular to their Earth departure point until they reach the edge of the atmosphere (known as the Karman line – an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the Earth’s sea level, representing the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space). Beyond the Karman line, it is believed that victim bodies move straight toward one of eight waiting alien space ships.
In seven known cases, relatives have clung to victim bodies during the departure stage for more than thirty feet. In each case, the relative died due to injuries sustained in their fall back to Earth. During the 24-hour period after The Culling has ended, clothing and items stored in clothing (i.e., wallets and cell phones) have been found falling/drifting back to Earth. Medical devices (i.e., pacemakers) and body cameras from victim bodies have also been found back on Earth.
History [edit]
First Culling
On Thursday, March 5, 2015, at 18:07 GMT, at least 2,934 human beings left Planet Earth in a manner previously unknown and unrecorded. The distribution of this first set of humans mirrored that of the world’s population, with the most victims coming from China, India, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil. Given the simultaneity of the occurrences, losses were documented in the daylight and the nighttime. Lost humans included children as young as four days old (Charlotte Evers) and the elderly as old as 93 (Xiao Lu). All major racial, ethnic, religious and sexual/gender identity groups were represented among those lost. While two pregnant women were taken, no unborn children were. No non-human life forms have been known to be taken. Video images and sound from several dozen episodes were recorded by families, friends and strangers (i.e., see the documentary The First Culling). By the end of the next week, a list of the names of these individuals was collected and printed by the New York Times, London Telegraph and China Daily. During early March of 2015, only one reporter (Sven Lundquist from The Copenhagen Post) noted the “coincidence” that The First Culling occurred at the same exact time as the full moon.
Responses to these incidents were described at the time as both horrified and confused. Family members, friends and neighbors frequently reported their efforts to grab and hold on to victims during both the initial floating stage, the moving stage, and the final departure stage. Multiple reports described individuals whose bodies were thrust through windows and doors, causing damage to buildings and vehicles, before they were swept up into the atmosphere. In several hundred incidents, First Culling (initially referred to as “First Departure”) victims could not access the open air from inside planes, cars and buses after six attempts to break through the physical material/structure impeding them.
The Second Culling occurred on Friday, March 20, at 9:39 GMT and corresponded with both a total solar eclipse and a new moon. At least 5,038 humans left the planet on this date. For a complete list of all Culling dates and times, see The Culling dates.
Reactions to Culling events – 2015
By the end of the Third Culling, it was generally understood that Departure Events (as they were originally called) occurred at both the full and new moon. Anticipating the Fourth Culling on April 18th, many people actively planned to avoid leaving Earth by sheltering in a place with limited access to the outdoors. Interior rooms in buildings, buildings without windows (i.e., 33 Thomas Street in Manhattan), bomb shelters, and caves requiring transport via elevators became popular destinations for those hoping to stay behind. As the phenomenon of the six attempts became more widely known and studied, it was generally agreed that having your body repeatedly smashed against walls was not a desirable end-of-Earthly-life occurrence and was heart-breaking for friends and family to witness.
By the end of the Fifth Culling, reliable statistics were being kept regarding the number of victims worldwide. It was estimated that an average of 3,200 people experienced a Departure Event roughly twice per month. Given a world population of over 7 billion, it was estimated that each individual human has a one in 100,000 chance per year of leaving our planet. Compared to the entire world’s mortality rate, on average, humans are 100 times more likely to die from other causes than they are due to The Culling. Mortality rates for young (under 40) and healthy humans are similar to the annual rates at which young people were falling victim to The Culling.
In April of 2015, members of the media, social scientists and many others began to catalogue the qualities and characteristics of those who were lost. Individual names, birthdates, birthplaces, horoscope signs, personality types, religious affiliations, racial and ethnic backgrounds, criminal records, the existence of tattoos, “records of sin,” and recent activities (including travels, writings and interactions with others) were all evaluated in some fashion. Numerologists, astrologists, theologians, and even fans of professional sports teams began to make claims that they could characterize those who were departing and/or predict those who would be departing. The World Veterinary Association analyzed the biological and biochemical differences between humans and other animals to assess why other mammals were not departing. These evaluations of who had been lost in an attempt to assess why they were lost intensified significantly when it was learned that extra-terrestrial travelers were involved.
In November of 2015, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) decreed that all commercial air travel would cease twice monthly to correspond with the occurrence of Departure Events and to avoid instances when passengers’ bodies were repeatedly being flung against airplane doors or windows (i.e., see Ira Morgenstern). Soon thereafter, calls were made by civic and religious leaders to voluntarily end the use of all motor vehicles at Departure Event times to avoid collisions, property damage and the additional loss of life.
In December of 2015, social and traditional media outlets reported heavily on “Departure Parties” or “Departure Gatherings” (later called “Culling Parties”). Groups of people large and small gathered to celebrate their camaraderie, shared interests and their “shared humanity.” Doors and windows began being left open to avoid damage from six attempts. Just prior to The Culling time, many people assumed a body position selected as being memorable, dignified, and/or humorous during the Moving Stage (see Jim Carey). While some gatherings offered traditional party activities (i.e., music, dancing and alcoholic beverages), others included a shared activity (i.e., nature hikes, art-making, or sexual intercourse). Culling Parties have since become a bi-monthly, worldwide tradition for people to spend time with friends and family (in one location or connected digitally), engaged in activities seen as significant, life-defining and/or worthy of “My Last Act.”
Beginning in late 2015, Departure Grief Support Groups (later called “Culling Grief Support Groups”) were formed by relatives and friends of victims. Loved ones were/are mourned and remembered in these groups, many of which meet at every full or new moon (depending on when the person was lost). It is common for support group meetings to be offered free meeting spaces, counselling services, memorial messaging (i.e., print, radio, bill board, and television), and food by sympathetic area vendors. These groups often raise funds through Kickstarter and other social media sites for the families most impacted by the loss of breadwinners. A number of bereavement publications and websites have been created focusing on the unique emotional and community needs of victim families/loved ones.
During 2015, Culling/Departure events had little significant effect on international politics or business. While most national leaders openly acknowledged the uncertainty surrounding these events, discussed their concerns, and prayed for the victims and their families; small numbers of other officials 1) disavowed that their citizens were affected (i.e., North Korea), 2) claimed that God had chosen their citizens only (i.e., Pakistan and Indonesia), or 3) argued that their citizens were being victimized by United States and/or Israeli forces (i.e. Iran, Yemen and Syria). Many regional and national political leaders established support funds (some of them tax-supported) that offered financial support to the immediate families of those who had been lost. Other than bi-monthly closures of international stock markets (beginning December 2015), voluntary bans on travel, and increases in spending on both entertainment (i.e., movies, music concerts and “high-end dining” prior to full and new moons) and “My Last Act” activities/related-merchandise, international commerce was largely unaffected.
Between March 2015 and January 2016, as over 65,000 total people were being carried bi-monthly into the atmosphere, much of the world’s attention focused on the notion of the Rapture. Rapture is a term in Christian eschatology which refers to the “being caught up” discussed in 1 Thessalonians 4:16, when the “dead in Christ” and “we who are alive and remain” will be “caught up in the clouds” to meet “the Lord in the air”. For much of 2015, historians, theologians and many others deepened their studies of (and focused their media stories on) those who originated pre-tribulation rapture theology (the Puritan preachers Increase and Cotton Mather) and those who popularized it (John Nelson Darby, Grant Jeffrey and the Plymouth Brethren in the 1830s and the Scofield Reference Bible in the early 20th century). Theologians bolstered their arguments in support of the rapture with the “evidence” that the six attempts represented 666, the “number of the beast” or the devil. Those who argued that the Christian Rapture was occurring struggled to explain why the leadership of various Protestant denominations (i.e., Anglican Communion, Presbyterian Church, Methodist Council and Lutheran World Federation), the Pope and all Catholic Bishops did not “ascend to the heavens.” (In fact, during all of 2015, it was reported that only four Christian Clergy members, five Rabbis, three Muslim Imams, three Buddhist Monks, and one aide to the Dalia Lama were among those taken worldwide.)
Identifying alien objects
On January 13, 2016, Richard Farnsworth, then President of California Institute of Technology, called a press conference intending to “further mankind’s knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the mass human departures” that had been occurring. Joined by a team of eight scientists and six technicians from the Palomar Observatory, Farnsworth provided an overview of the data they had collected since April of 2015 “proving” that “multiple non-Earth-based objects” had been arriving just outside of Earth’s atmosphere at times that coincided with both the full and new moons, and with the instances when humans were levitating in the direction of outer space. Although no objects were visible to the scientists, stars and distant galaxies were lost from sight of the Hale and Samuel Oschin Telescopes in a manner indicating that objects were blocking the incoming light. Data collected indicated that at least four of these unknown objects were arriving at “Earth’s doorstep” directly above set positions, as if they were in Earth’s orbit. The Cal Tech team estimated that these objects became positioned at between 70 and 80 miles from the Earth’s surface (between 115 and 130 kilometers) and were positioned there for approximately eighteen minutes.
Data later collected by other observatories around the world indicated that the number of unknown objects was actually eight and that they were positioned at just over 78 miles above the equator’s sea level, (126 kilometers – with correspondingly higher or lower altitudes depending on the heights of mountains and the distance from the equator – see Equatorial Bulge.) The size of these objects as they face the Earth is estimated to be approximately 100 feet by 50 feet (30 by 15 meters – roughly the size of a basketball court). It was also learned that the eight objects were not spaced evenly into octants, as first assumed. Instead, as observed by MIT Human Geographer Arnold Spitz, the objects were spaced such that equal numbers of humans lived underneath each of them.
At this first press conference, Farnsworth refused to “venture a guess” whether the light-blocking objects contained or were controlled by “alien beings.” He did, however, offer his conclusion that humans were being taken away from Earth by “some force within these objects, as if in some kind of Culling.” He offered no explanation for why humans were being taken or what happened to them once they left this planet. He ended his comments by saying, “I’m not sure we will ever understand the reasons behind The Culling.” As has been widely commented on by the media and various blogging communities, Richard Farnsworth would later become a victim of The Culling on October 16, 2016.
After the January 2016 recognition that “non-Earth-based objects” were involved in The Culling events, international politics and business were impacted significantly. Over a series of five months, 193 United Nations member states agreed unanimously 1) to convene an ongoing special session and to keep their delegations in New York until the “threat has been averted” – February 2016, 2) to cooperate fully with a “Communications Committee” tasked with messaging the alien beings and attempting to discern their motives (see below) – March 2016, 3) to “apply all available resources” towards the goal of understanding The Culling events (including the biological reactions of victims; the physics of the floating, moving and departure stages; and further assessments of the qualities and characteristics of those who become victims) – March 2016, and 4) to share both rocket engine and guided weapon systems knowledge, along with launch pads and airspace, to prepare for the possibility that missiles might need to be sent to “attack Earth’s invaders” – June 2016.
During the first nine months of 2016, many employers began to implement bi-monthly “Culling time-off” for employees to be with their families. Major cultural and sporting events such as “March Madness” playoff games, Chinese Dragon Boat Festival, and television’s Emmy Awards show were rescheduled to avoid full or new moons. Universities avoided scheduling classes and hospitals avoided scheduling surgeries during Culling times. Governmental agencies organized “Buddy Up & Open Up” campaigns encouraging people to not be alone, and to keep doors or windows open and accessible during the twice monthly Culling Timeframes.
Attempts to interact with objects
In February of 2016, NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency, and the China National Space Administration, supported by the Union of Concerned Scientists, began making both navigational and tasking adjustments to 23 of the 1,100 active satellites orbiting the Earth. Satellites were selected based on their proximity to previously known orbital locations for the unidentified objects and on their ability to collect electromagnetic (or any other signaling) data coming from the objects. Other than confirming that “non-Earth-based objects” were temporarily positioned above the planet, authorities have indicated that “no currently understandable data” have yet been gathered. Without offering any explanation as to a cause, authorities have also reported that five of the satellites used for this purpose have cased functioning. Some members of the media (i.e., Dana Priest from the Washington Post and Matt Pearce from the Los Angeles Times) have claimed that scientists and leaders have learned more from these satellite studies than has been shared with the public.
After Elizabeth Bleacher wrote a March 2016 editorial promoting the idea in London’s The Sunday Times, individuals began purchasing and utilizing body cameras at the full and new moons. On the chance that the body camera owner became a victim of The Culling, the goal was to record both video and sound that would document the event. Loved ones left behind would have a recording of the victim’s last moments on Earth and scientists would have additional data they could comb through to better understand the phenomenon. The wearing of body cameras has been credited with the discovery that most victims are quietly humming/moaning during the departure stage. Regrettably, it’s been found that some form of electromagnetic interference ends all body camera signals soon after victims end their perpendicular trajectory and as they begin their movement towards alien ships. Body camera debris has been found among victim clothing/belongings that drift back to Earth. In December of 2017, the President of the People’s Republic of China declared that all Chinese citizens would be required to wear a body camera twice per month.
In March of 2016, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States, the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of the Government of the People’s Republic of China, and the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media in Russia, and an additional 78 governments agreed that “every organization broadcasting audio or video content via any electronic mass communication medium must allot “every minute of the three hour time overlapping full and new moons” to a series of Welcome to our planet messages.” These messages, in the language of the sending country, attempted to introduce the human race and also describe humanity’s “peaceful intent.” In the 16 weeks that these messages ran, they became increasingly desperate and hostile, ending in August of 2016 with some version of the following: “Because you have not responded to mankind’s repeated attempts to communicate with you, we are left with no choice but to assume that you represent an invading force. We intend to respond accordingly.” (See “Final Message.”)
In May 2016 through June of 2017, NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency, and the China National Space Administration combined forces with the commercial firms Virgin Galactic and SpaceX to send a series of probes to the region just below low Earth orbit (LEO) in an attempt to gather more information than had been gathered by existing satellites. These probes were specially designed to gather any and all signals that might be coming into or out of, and to transmit visual images of, the unknown objects, and to transmit them back to Earth in real time. They were also tasked with assessing the direction from which, and speed at which, the objects arrived and departed. Because the unidentified objects locate at an altitude that has proven to be impossible for man-made satellites to establish sustaining orbits (Sputnick orbited at an altitude 55 miles higher), scientists found that locating their probes at the proper altitude was problematic. As occurred with the satellites, the probes (named Culling One through 14) confirmed that “non-Earth-based objects” were temporarily positioned above the planet but did not provide any “currently understandable data” for scientists. Reports that three probes were destroyed “by external forces” (see Miami Herald and Houston Chronicle) have neither been confirmed nor denied by the authorities.
Attempts to destroy objects
In February through July 2017, several attempts were made to destroy the unidentified objects. The Laser Weapon System or LaWS (a directed-energy weapon developed by the United States Navy in 2014) was reportedly deployed first from the USS Ponce (an Austin-class amphibious transport dock) and then from a specially-designed platform at the rear of two different Antonov An-225s. The US Navy and US Air Force reported that in the firings from both the USS Ponce and the An-225, the targets were further away than LaWS was designed to strike and that the power of the beam was weakened by the distance it had to travel. (Note that the An-225 flies at a maximum altitude of 36,000 feet or just under seven miles, leaving it about 70 miles away from the targets.) It is not known if the laser beams directly hit or had any noticeable effect on the objects. Note that there are currently no known operative orbital weapons systems, laser or otherwise, based on a functioning satellite. The United States, China and Russia each claim to be developing such systems.
According to leaked reports, at least seven attempts have been made to date to destroy the unidentified objects with Tomahawk Missiles, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM), or similar non-nuclear weaponry. Although the United States, British, Israeli, Russian and Chinese governments are not responding to requests from citizen groups and the media for further information, officials from Lockheed Martin Space Systems and Raytheon have indicated that the directional precision of each of their respective systems was not built anticipating strikes on small objects (roughly 5,000 square feet in area – 450 square meters) located miles outside of Earth’s atmosphere. Self-propelled guided missiles were typically built to navigate within the atmosphere and are targeted through use of radiation, radio waves and/or visual contact, all of which have proved problematic for these targets. ICBMs were built to travel outside the atmosphere, but the accuracy of their strikes was intended to be based on available geophysical information related to the Earth’s surface (i.e., GPS) and not to target on air born/space born objects. Some in the media have questioned these claims of “missile incompetence.”
To date, no nuclear warheads have been used against the unidentified objects. Political and military leaders, members of the media, and bloggers across multiple nations have engaged in fierce debate regarding both the efficacy of, and the dangers involved in, using nuclear weaponry. Until recently, most arguments against “going nuclear” have included concerns regarding the potential for worldwide radioactive fallout and the fear of retaliatory strikes from aliens. As of late, more and more people have argued against attacking the objects by putting forward what some have called “fatalistic” claims that the alleged alien beings are unstoppable in their pursuit of human victims and/or are taking “sustainable” numbers of victims. Groups such as “Supporting The Culling” compare the 75,000 to 80,000 people who become annual Culling victims to a yearly net world population gain of 70,000,000 and argue that The Culling phenomenon is helping to mitigate this planet’s significant over-population challenges. Other groups, such as “Avenge The Victims,” have argued that “every possible military option” should be applied in order to “destroy the evil beings who have perpetrated these crimes against our species.” (See Victim group vs. supporters debate, below.)
Impact on life attitudes [edit]
It is generally agreed that mankind’s perspective towards life has been altered significantly by The Culling. After the collective initial experience of confused, fearful and angry reactions, the American Psychological Association (APA) and the International Association of Applied Psychology (IAAP) recently reported on studies that fully one-third of Americans and Europeans have both “accepted” the ongoing nature of The Culling and are either supportive or neutral towards its occurrence. After spiking dramatically in 2015 and 2016, instances of panic attacks and a broad category of Culling-related anxiety disorders have now been reportedly decreasing.
Given the continuing uncertainty regarding an explanation for The Culling, human use of protective charms, amulets and concoctions has become widespread. Many forms of jewelry, clothing, items located around the home, food, drink, and inhaled vapors have been claimed to protect the owner from The Culling. Some so-called “protective” items have been found floating/falling back to Earth (see Mjolnir or Thor’s Hammer), thus discrediting their efficacy.
In the three plus years since The Culling first occurred, participation in religious life has increased at the same time that the acknowledgement of secular/humanist world views has increased. In the United States, for example, social scientists (see Jane Ebel) have documented how the 70% of Americans who had previously described themselves as belonging to or being raised within one specific religious denomination (i.e., Catholicism or Methodism) were more likely to attend church/synagogue/mosque on at least a weekly basis than was the case prior to March 2015. In the same studies, Ebel found that the 30% of Americans who would have previously described themselves as being atheist, agnostic, a religious skeptic, or religiously unaffiliated were more likely to “admit to friends and relatives” their beliefs.
At first, The Culling was not being discussed in most of the world’s elementary and middle schools. Educators indicated that they did not want to frighten the children and that they wanted to respect each family’s right to present the facts and discuss the theories within the context of their unique values. Now, the National Education Association (NEA) and World Education Research Association (WERA) have each issued statements arguing that young children should be taught about The Culling, that they should not fear it, and that they should “endeavor to live a life rich with knowledge, connections and experiences” on the chance they may fall victim.
Despite “Supporti |
I visit my mother sometimes in the home that she’s in. She’s not actually old, she’s only in her fifties. But she hasn’t been able to take care of herself since we lost my sister. It’s difficult visiting her because I have a separate family now. I was raised by a nice childless couple after my mother became ill. I think of them as my parents now. But still, sometimes I do feel as though I should spend time with the woman who raised me till I was ten.
It makes me glad to see her looking clean and put-together in the home. It’s the closest she’ll ever come to being healthy and normal. They give her daily showers and dress her carefully in her own clothes. But somehow wisps of hair always escape from the bun they put her hair in and form floating tendrils around her head. She lets me hold her hand but she never makes eye contact with me. Instead, her eyes roam around the room, almost as though she’s looking at something. Sometimes she smiles and mutters at the thing she’s looking at. And sometimes she giggles helplessly. It’s difficult to watch. But I visit her because a part of me still remembers the woman she used to be, and I did love that woman. I remember what it felt like to be her son.
She used to dote on me because she had a hard time getting pregnant before she had me. I still remember the early years before my sister was born. My mother would spend hours playing with me while my dad was at work. We would build Lego houses and pillow forts. She would let me help her when she cooked. But everything started to go wrong when my sister, Rose, was born. She had a spinal defect that paralyzed her from the neck down. My mother’s life began to revolve around taking care of Rose. Rose couldn’t sit up or move on her own. She could only crane her little neck back and forth. My mother used to fret about her choking to death. This worry was so constant, and so all-consuming it even trickled down to me. I remember sitting next to Rose and just watching her tiny chest rise and fall with each precarious breath. I was only seven at the time.
It was gradual at first, but my parents started fighting more and more. And one day when I was 9 I woke up to a different life. My dad had packed everything he owned and left in the night. Just like that, he was gone from my life. It was just me, my mom and my disabled sister. It was difficult for my mother to find work. I don’t think we had much in the way of savings. And Rose was a helpless two year old who couldn’t even sit up on her own. She couldn’t be left alone and we couldn’t afford care for her. I remember my mother crying a lot during that time. She would sit slumped on our threadbare sofa and cry. I didn’t know what I could do to help. So I tried to take care of Rose as much as I could. I would wheel her around the apartment in her pram and have long, silly conversations about her dolls. Sometimes my mom would sit and watch us, dry-eyed and wooden. I knew not to bother her no matter how badly her expressionless face frightened me. It was a difficult time but Rose and I were too young to realize quite how bleak our situation was. We still had our old toys. We still had a roof over our heads. We didn’t know about bills and rent.
But then things appeared to take a turn for the better. My mom finally managed to find a job. And miraculously, it was a job that would allow her to stay at home and take care of Rose. There was a grand old hotel in the town we lived in. It had been really popular a few decades ago but its popularity had waned over time till it had been turned into a kind of bed-sit that was quickly falling into disrepair. My mother’s new job was to take care of the dilapidated old building. She was glad to take the job and even more grateful to take on the free lodging that came with it.
It’s difficult to describe the excitement I felt when we moved into Fairmont Hotel. It was so much bigger than our cramped three-room apartment. The hotel was four stories high and every story stretched out into long carpeted corridors. The hotel’s sheer size was a kind of unfathomable mystery to me. I was awed by its moldy, moth-eaten grandeur. I loved the peeling cream wallpaper and the stained rust-coloured carpeting. And I loved the dusty old chandeliers that tinkled ominously every time a truck drove by. I felt as though I had wandered into a fairytale, like I was the prince of a forsaken castle like the Beast from Beauty and the Beast. Most of the units were unoccupied so the third and fourth floors were kept shut up. But I could roam freely on the second floor and that’s where I used to play whenever I was home from school. My favourite activity involved wheeling Rose in a mad dash along the corridors. She loved the feeling of moving at speed and she would shriek her little lungs out. My mother would tell us to be quiet but she would smile as she said it. For the first time, in years, there were no frown-lines on her forehead.
But the hotel did have an odd effect on Rose. She had always been a happy child, in spite of the many discomforts associated with her illness. But she became cranky and restive. She could prattle on quite fluently by then but whenever we asked her about what was bothering her she would become silent and cry or mutter incoherently about some old lady. She was also having trouble sleeping at night. The two of us shared a room and she would wake me up at night sometimes. It was invariably the same thing. I’d wake to find her whispering furiously, her head craned to the side as though she was looking at something. I learned from experience not to ask her about it because that would always make her cry about the “mean old lady”. She also started getting odd bruises on her legs. It was hard to imagine where she got the bruises since we were always with her. When we asked her about it she’d say the old lady pinched her.
Still, we were happier than we’d been in a long time. And even though Rose was often pale and quiet, she was happy when I played with her.
But that’s how everything went wrong again. I have trouble talking about this. I can’t quite remember the exact details of what happened. It comes to me in flashes. But some of the images are etched in my mind. And I still see them over and over again whenever I close my eyes.
Rose and I were playing our favourite game. I was wheeling her along the corridor on the second floor. The second floor corridor curves lightly and then it leads into a spiral staircase that opens out to the lobby. Rose loved the thrill of it when I pretended to wheel her headlong into the curved wall at the end of the corridor, but of course at the last second I would pull her out to the side and we’d come to a halt in the landing of the staircase. We had been doing just that for around half an hour. I was starting to get tired from the running. But Rose begged for one last go. So I got behind the little pram and started wheeling her to the wall. Everything goes fuzzy from that point. I remember feeling exhausted. My arms felt like lead. But all the while my legs were pumping and pumping, and I was running faster and faster. The wall was rushing up at us like a blank white fist. I remember imagining us slamming into it. But of course I would pull out at the last moment. I always did. But something went wrong. Somehow I just couldn’t. I think it felt as though I had lost all control over my limbs. I think everything was foggy. The only thing I remember is that blank white wall rushing at us.
And I also remember the sound the pram made when it crumpled against the wall. There was a crack of broken plastic and then Rose was hurtling through the air like a rag doll. And she was falling down the stairs. When I close my eyes I still see her little neck coming into contact with the stairs and her body folding over her head. There was screaming everywhere. I think I was screaming. But my mother was too. She was sitting at the base of the spiral staircase with Rose’s crumpled little body in her arms and just screaming and screaming. It took everything I had to climb down to where my mother was sobbing over Rose’s body. She looked up at me but there was no recognition on her face. It was almost like she couldn’t see me through her tears.
And then the most incredible thing happened. There was a cough from the midst of my mother’s arms. And then another one. And then Rose’s lisping, toddler voice calling out for mom. But in the throes of her grief my mom was insensible to what was happening.
“Mom, mom! Rose is ok!” I had to yell it a few times before she would look at me.
“What?”
“I think she’s ok…” I pulled my mother’s arms loose and sure enough, Rose was blinking up at us, and amazingly she was smiling even though there was blood smeared on her face.
“How…” But another smile from Rose and she had forgotten everything. She was hugging Rose through her tears. I tried to hug Rose too but my mother wouldn’t let her go. I noticed there was blood dribbling down from Rose’s mouth and nose.
“Mom, there’s blood…”
“It’s nothing,” she said and rubbed the blood out with her sleeves. Rose’s neck turned oddly to the side as she did so.
“Mom, I think we should take her to a hospital.”
“Nonsense!” She bundled Rose up in her arms and carried her up. She was cooing to her like she was a little baby and Rose was chortling back happily.
I don’t quite like to think about the period that followed after. A part of me thinks I imagined it. But a part of me is terrified it really did happen. Rose was never the same after that day. There was something wrong with her. It’s possible she suffered some sort of internal damage from the fall. But somehow, I could never convince my mother to take her to the hospital. Her skin grew mottled and grey. And she started giving off a terrible smell. I had only ever smelled something like that once before. We had a dead skunk in the basement of my school and the smell filled our classroom with foulness before the cleaner removed the carcass. That’s what Rose smelled like. I don’t know if my mother realized it. But I think a part of her knew something was wrong. We used to live on the second floor near the few tenants the hotel had. But after Rose’s fall she moved us up to the fourth floor.
It was terrible living up on the fourth floor with my mother and Rose. The whole level was dusty and dark. Mom would only turn on the lights at the end where we lived. The rest of the corridor used to stretch out in complete darkness. It was like being buried alive, a sensation only compounded by the stench that clung to Rose’s tiny body. Rose scared me too. Her personality had changed. She hated me. I don’t know how I knew this. But I could sense it. Thankfully we no longer shared a room. Mother couldn’t bear to leave her alone at night so Rose slept with her in a tiny cot. I don’t know how my mother could ignore the smell that came off Rose in cloying waves.
I missed the old Rose. I missed her so much I even dreamed of her once. I was nodding off to sleep when it happened. She was sitting next to my bed like she never could when she was alive. And she was glowing and happy. But tears appeared in her eyes as she looked at me. And she reached out and touched my face. I felt a kind of peace I hadn’t known in a while but then she looked around in fright like she’d heard something.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“She’s here,” she said. And then she disappeared. I must have woken up at that point because I heard something too then, the sound of the door slowly creaking close. And I swear I heard the patter of a child’s tiny feet disappearing into my mother’s room. The sound filled me with a clammy kind of horror. I don’t know what I was imagining. But it wasn’t what I saw when I snuck over to peek into my mother’s room.
The room was completely dark, except for the street light streaming in through the window. My mother was sitting on the floor and playing with Rose. And Rose was sitting up and laughing. There was a cloth tied tightly round her throat, but her head still wobbled on her neck as she moved. They are batting at a tiny mouse together. And then Rose looked up and saw me. She went very still and a kind of hiss escaped from her blue, mottled lips. Mother looked up too.
“What are you doing out of bed?” she said.
“Mom why is Rose walking?”
“She’s cured. Can’t you see? She’s completely fine.” I couldn’t see my mother’s face in the darkness of the room but I could see Rose’s grey, sunken face. She didn’t look fine.
“Mom, can we take her to the doctor please? Please mom” I was whimpering and begging but I couldn’t help myself.
“Tell that thing to go away,” said Rose.
“Go!” Mom yelled at me.
My life was a kind of living hell after that. Rose would only walk about at night. She never left the room. No one saw her. No one knew what she looked like. During the day I had to go to school and pretend everything was fine at home. I knew Rose was too little to hurt me, but she worried me. I felt as though she was following me sometimes. I would hear that soft patter of tiny feet behind me but when I turned around there would be no one there.
And then one day, it finally happened. I was just about to run down the stairway when I heard a kind of gasp behind me. I spun around and came face to face with my mother. She was carrying Rose in her arms. Her face was pale and drawn. And her lips were drawn in a kind of grimace.
“Mom?”
“No. I am not your mother.” She shoved at me as she spoke. I grabbed at her, but all I managed to grip was Rose’s grey, rotten body. I felt myself losing my balance and as I fell, Rose tumbled down with me. Mom screamed for Rose as we fell. But it was too late. Rose’s little body broke my fall and was crushed in the process.
Mother has never been the same since. I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell the police that she pushed me. But they still took her away and put her in a home. Everyone assumed Rose had been dead for weeks. I was forced to see a psychologist. But they managed to find me a good new home.
Still, I try to visit mother as much as I can. But I think a part of her still hates me for causing Rose’s first accident. I think she pinches me sometimes, though I’ve never caught her doing it. I feel sharp pangs of pain sometimes when I sit with her. And she always laughs when it happens and mutters and coos at something only she can see. I try not to mind, though my arms and thighs are always blue and black with bruises after I visit her.
Credit To – Monica
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I’m not sure why I’m writing this right now. I’m not even sure if I am writing this now or, if I am, whether the words I’m seeing in my mind’s eye are the same as the words my hands are typing. I suppose the only way to find out is to check tomorrow and see if this is still here. If it is, and it still looks like this, then I’ll know it wasn’t some dream I was having with my eyes open.
‘Dream’. Even looking at that word right now makes some guttural part of me tense up. I’m not surprised though. After all, my dreams are the reason I’m even awake at this hour. Everyone else in the house is asleep right now. Well, except for my mum, but she always wakes up at 4 AM like clockwork. Hell, she doesn’t even need an alarm.
I’m looking back at what I’ve written so far and I realise I’ve been rambling. I tend to do that, simply because my thoughts just get scattered like dandelion seeds when I don’t completely concentrate. There’s only so much concentration you can give something when you keep getting flashes of terror every time you blink. It might just be that I’m doing it so that I can stay awake as long as possible by writing. Either way, I should probably at least explain what I’m babbling about some time before my parents find me awake like this.
I’ve been a student at London University for a year now, studying psychology. I would be in my second year, but I had to stop mid-way through, so this year is a resit. I was hoping at some point to be a counselling psychologist, to help people get past their problems without being the guy who forces a prescription down their throats.
It went fine for the first semester; I even managed to make a few friends, which is an achievement for someone as socially awkward as me.
For the first few months I would hang out with a small group of people, all of whom shared my weird interests: we’d talk about the usual nerdy pop-culture we’d digested that week, about how we all threw our shoes at the television when a certain character from one of our shared favourite TV shows was killed off very ignobly and needlessly by a bear, that kind of shit. Of course, as close as we got we never saw each other outside of lecture days, which suited me just fine.
I remember exactly the day that my current “predicament” started. I only call it that because even now, six months later, I still don’t know what the Hell it is.
It was February 2nd when we received a foreign exchange student from Canada. I’m not going to name him here, partly because he wouldn’t want me to and partly because I don’t want this to come back to him. It was clear on his first day that he wasn’t the talkative type, so it wasn’t surprising when he started gravitating towards our little clique. He seemed enthused about what we were saying, sure, and he even managed to get some of the references we flung out about some of the TV shows that was more localised to Britain, but none of our geeky bullshit would ever stimulate a reaction with him quite like his extensive knowledge of urban legends. I’m not talking “Sewer alligators of New York” kind of legends either: I’m talking about the kind you see on the darker underbelly of the internet; the ones that make your palms sweat and give you a nervous tick while you read about them.
The first time he ever mentioned his . . . “hobby” was after a lecture we’d been given on the neurotransmitters involved with fear. Our lecturer, on one of his slides, put up a rather disturbing image of a dog with a malicious grin across its muzzle in an effort to demonstrate one of the technical variations of fear. Needless to say, it worked.
After we left, our new Canadian friend told me and the group that he knew where that image came from, and then went into great length on the mythos surrounding what he called “Smile.jpg”. At one point, I remember him using the word “Creepypasta” and one of my friends, who we’ll call “Michael”, inquired, after the obvious quip about haunted ravioli, what he meant. After a quick explanation on what he meant, our friend continued on to say that, according to the Smile Dog myth, everyone who saw that image and didn’t pass it on to someone else would be plagued with nightmares from the creature in the picture.
After joking away the macabre subject and going our separate ways, I took the Canadian aside, curious about where I could find the original story. At that point, I thought it might give me a good laugh, and when he told me to listen to a narration on YouTube for the best effect, it didn’t take long to find what I was looking for.
Of course, being the cynical asshole I was back then, it did make me giggle a little to think that something as simple as a photoshopped picture of a husky could inspire such fear in people, but ever more curious, I kept going into the topic of Creepypastas to see what else I could find. Most of it was the same shtick about being stalked by creatures with no face or eyes as big as dinner plates with claws the size of your arm, or the trope about some kid picking up a bootleg copy of a nostalgic game only to find out that the main character had been warped into some sadistic shadow of its original self, but some of them actually sent a real, visceral chill down my spine, which really surprised me.
I think by about 2AM the next morning, I’d watched about twenty different videos of narrated Creepypastas and I was about ready for bed. I didn’t have anything resembling an early morning lecture the next day, but I knew I’d have to be up and about by around ten o’clock.
Now, I always considered myself a rational human being, not prone to believing in boggarts and the sort, but for the life of me I swear I couldn’t keep my eyes closed for five seconds without flinching from some gut feeling that there was another presence in my room, and in my mind’s eye it kept metamorphosing from one form to another, and after around half an hour of my futile attempt at sleep I decided that enough was enough and that I should go into the kitchen and get something to calm myself down.
As soon as I put my hand on the wood of the kitchen door on my way back to my room, a sense of danger jabbed at me inside my stomach, just like it had before in my room. I got that same irrational feeling that I wasn’t alone, and I spun around, my eyes scanning every facet of the brightly lit kitchen, even checking the doors of some of the cabinets, and saw nothing. I sighed, knowing that my binge on horror stories was getting to me, and that it was my own fault for listening to so many of them, especially so late at night, so I went down the corridor and back to my room.
As I opened the door, I did my best to swallow down the feeling of dread that was accumulating in my gullet like a stone, and when it was open all the way, I had to take a step back for a second. My breathing picked up as I stared wide eyed at the empty space where my bed once sat. Everything was gone, from the crates underneath to the posters on the wall, leaving a barren, white-walled corner.
As I stared in disbelief I heard a soft, muffled whisper of a chuckle from one of the nearby rooms.
Thinking that maybe one of my roommates was playing a prank on me, I smiled and looked back at the door behind me that led to Jenna’s room. Jenna was the only person I got along with on my corridor, and she even showed up in some of my lectures as her sociology course sometimes overlapped with my own.
I quietly knocked on the door, and when I heard the lock click I came in ready to confront her. “Alright, Jenna, I know you took my bed, so. . . .” my words died in my throat as I looked into Jenna’s room, or what should have been Jenna’s room. As I gaped blankly through the doorway, I saw my room exactly as it was, right down to the last detail, and sat on the bed was a young man with bedraggled red hair, exactly the same as mine, looking down at the floor. He was making some sort of sound as he held his face in his hands, and to this day I still don’t know whether it was laughing or crying, but it was a wheezy, choked noise that ran through me like a cold breeze.
I dared not move. I didn’t even blink, though my eyes were becoming itchy and irritated.
I blinked once, and in that short time between closing my eyes and opening them, something flashed against the inside of my eyelids too quickly for me to figure out what it was, and when my eyes opened again, I was face-down against the keyboard of my computer, which had grown tired of waiting for me to turn it off and gone into standby.
I let out a haggard, relieved breath. It was only a dream. Just a bad dream.
I was reassured the next night when my dreams returned to normal. Hell, I don’t even remember what I was even dreaming about that night. All I remember is waking up the morning after like I always did and getting on with my day. It was a long lecture day, though, and I remember being almost completely wiped out when I left the lecture hall at 6PM, cursing my allergy to caffeine. I would’ve killed for an espresso right then.
I remember feeling slightly on edge as I walked the path back to my hall of residence. I put it down to the cold winds and the darkness at the time, but I couldn’t shake that ominous feeling I held in my gut as my eyes darted around the darkened campus grounds. It was that same feeling as in my dream, that feeling of being watched.
I heard a sound against the wind buffering my ears. It wasn’t quite a giggle, but it wasn’t quite a sob, and it seemed choked and gargling, as if both had been stuck in the throat of whatever had made it and formed some odd chimera of the two.
The hairs raised on the back of my neck. I knew that noise.
The sound was getting closer with every quickening step I took, and no matter how hurried my stride it gained on me. I knew I’d look like a pussy to whoever was watching, but I had to run.
The sound was right in my ear by the time I touched the front door of my hall.
I jerked awake and looked around at the emptying lecture hall. I’d dozed off again.
I was, as you can guess, as unnerved as they come when I left the lecture hall. My hurried pace was brought into question several times by my friends but, unwilling to talk, I brushed off their questions. Placated by my repeated insistence of “It’s nothing, really: I’m just being silly”, they decided to leave me be and go off, disgruntled, in another direction.
It was about quarter-past -six when my hall was in sight again. That was when I heard that noise, that goddamn choking laugh again echoing in the distance. This time I knew not to take my chances. I bolted, and as my legs pounded and my body lurched forward from abject fear, I heard the giggle slowly ascend into a mangled cackle that grew louder and more fervent as I ran.
I didn’t even make the door before I felt a hand clutch my throat.
I awoke again in my room and looked at the clock, which had long since abandoned trying to wake me up, I recoiled in surprise: I’d woken up at 8:30 PM. I had to check twice to make sure it was in fact evening time and not just early in the morning, but it was.
I’d slept through an entire lecture day. Up until that point I’d never done that before in my life. Hell, I didn’t even take sick days when I was a kid, but now I’d missed a whole day for no reason.
But still, from the dream, I would’ve sworn I was in the lecture
The worst part was that that was the pebble that set off a snowball.
My dreams became worse and worse for the next few weeks. I’d awaken several times every night in a hard sweat and have to gnaw a little at the same spot on one of my fingers just to make doubly sure I was awake. If it drew blood, real blood that I could taste, and I felt real pain from it, only then would I calm down. I had a bandage on my finger for weeks, and people were starting to notice.
That man . . . creature . . . thing that I saw sitting on my bed was there in every single one of my dreams. It would always just appear in random places in my dream environments, always keeping its face obscured in its hair and always laughing that wheezy, throaty laugh, sometimes approaching me, other just keeping its distance and watching.
It was almost as if it was toying with me, playing on my subconscious irrational fears for sport.
Thanks to those dreams, my sleep patterns were getting so erratic that it even got to the point where I was awoken by security after having slept for five days straight. Jenna had called them after having missed me at a lecture and not seen me enter or leave my room at all that week, not even to eat or go to the toilet.
Missing lectures was starting to become a habit, and my grades were beginning to suffer from it. That only served to aggravate the problem, it seemed.
My coursework and assignments were beginning to suffer as well, but in the most disturbing ways. I’ll give you an example: at the end of February, we were told to carry out an assignment essay on the relative effectiveness of talk therapy on alcoholics and other chemically addicted people. I remember specifically that I’d finished it right down to the references and saved it before putting it away for later submission.
Being a meticulous student, I had the urge the next day to check it again to make sure I hadn’t missed any key points or references.
It wasn’t there. I checked the recycle bin frantically, thinking that maybe I’d accidentally deleted it, but it wasn’t there either.
I did find something else in that folder, though. It was a gigantic, unpunctuated wall of rambling nonsense, as if someone had gotten jacked up on cocaine and decided to write an essay on whatever random word would pop into their head until they got bored. Interlaced with the text were several disturbing images of the corpses of small animals, ranging in size from mice to squirrels. In each picture, the animal’s eyes had been removed.
When I checked the timestamp, it read “27/02/13, 15:45”, the exact same date and time I saved my last draft of that coursework.
As time went on, it was as if my idea of reality was beginning to unravel around me. As my constant nightmares began to erode my fondness of sleep, it got more and more difficult to tell when my dreams stopped and my waking moments started. When I was in the middle of working on something, I’d begin to see hands reaching for me that vanished when I turned to look, and when my stubborn refusal to sleep faltered, I’d hear a low chuckle in my ear and bolt awake again, terrified that it was too late and it had already dragged me into another dream. Sometimes it really was.
At one point, I was getting so distressed by these dreams that I began entertaining the possibility, against my better judgement, that it could have been that fucking dog in the picture my lecturer used in his fear presentation. After all, the Canadian told me that it’s supposed to haunt your dreams, right? Looking back on it now, it seems stupid, but I was desperate enough at one point that I actually had an email ready with a random ‘Smile.jpg’ picture I’d lifted off Google Images just in case.
I didn’t need to, it seemed. It showed me its face a month into the “predicament”. It’s a face that still haunts me this very second, and I see it against the blackness of my eyelids every time I close them.
It happened when I awoke one day after a peculiarly dreamless sleep. I tried not to think about it too much in case I jinxed something, but I let myself feel a small sense of relief.
It was patently obvious that I was in dire need of a shower it seemed, as I’d been wrestling with my “predicament” for weeks now, leaving little time for hygiene. As I walked into the shower room, I caught a glimpse of myself in the small mirror and nearly jumped out of my skin.
Having simply mistaken my reflection for someone else, it didn’t take long for me to calm down and assess my appearance: my eyes had devolved to pinkish orbs of irritated veins hooded by purplish-black bags of skin that attested to my lack of proper sleep and the utter destruction of my body clock. I’d grown a thick, prickly beard of red hairs across my chin, and my hair now lay dishevelled and greasy across my shoulders in long curtains. I chuckled: this shower was a long time coming.
That shower got rid of aches I didn’t know I had. I felt like a new man after I stepped out of the steaming glass cubicle to towel myself off. By this point, the mirror had fogged up beyond being a mirror, so to help get my hair in some semblance of order I decided to wipe it off and sort my hair out then and there.
I froze. The blood in my veins screeched to a halt, and my breath caught in my throat like a vice.
The figure that stared back at me from the now cleared mirror was not my reflection. It wore my face, but I swear on my life it wasn’t me. Its mouth nearly touched its earlobes and was contorted into a horrible rictus grin filled with yellowing teeth. The skin of its face seemed stretched over, like a mask, and its hair stuck to its scalp with a layer of shining grease.
It didn’t have eyes. The sockets were just empty, featureless craters, made all the more haunting by the sagging black bags beneath them.
Despite this fact, it still managed to look at me in a way that made my windpipe tense up like it had hands squeezing it.
It laughed. It laughed that same gargling chuckle I’d heard countless times over, but this time it felt as if, between its maniacal giggles, it was forming words with its croaking wheeze, repeating the same fragmented sentence over and over.
“Missed . . . you.”
I blinked, and the words were scratched all over the walls. Missed you. Missed you. It covered every bare patch of wall, scrawled frantically.
It was then that I finally snapped. I punched the mirror as hard as I could, knowing it had trapped me in another nightmare, and kept punching until most of the glass was either on the floor or sticking out of my hand.
It was only after the last of my anger had given in to a crushing sense of defeat and I slumped down into the corner that it dawned on me.
My hand was hurting.
I flipped out. According to Jenna, when I asked her about it earlier this year, I was inconsolable for the rest of the day. I was just sat in the shower room next to the pile of broken mirror shards letting my hand bleed out as I held my head in my hands, trembling and muttering in tongues. I apparently wouldn’t even let the paramedics come near me when the ambulance Jenna had called finally arrived. Of course, I remember none of this.
My parents, being the insufferable worrywarts they are, have insisted I live at home while I resit my freshman year so they can keep an eye on me. They’ve thrown me into a therapy program too, for all the good it’ll do me. Kind of ironic, if you think about it: I was going to be a therapist, but now I’m sitting here on the other end of the stick.
I did have a mirror in my room, one of those old vanity mirrors you sometimes get on top of chests of drawers, but it’s been covered up at the request of my therapist.
After I told my parents what I saw in the mirror, they went white and looked at each other as if I’d just threatened them with a knife. Then, with great reluctance, they told me that when I was just turning four I’d had an imaginary friend that looked exactly like me with what I described as “a nice big toothy smile”.
I called him “Timmy-Tom”, and explained that he was born without eyes, so naturally the best thing to do was find him a pair that he liked. It started out with household objects like sequins, buttons and marbles, so my parents never paid much heed, but soon it became apparent that these weren’t what he was looking for.
That was when they found me cutting out the eyes of a squirrel, and fearing for my sanity they had me . . . as they put it, they had me corrected.
Even now, months into my therapy, I still have those dreams sometimes: sometimes I’ll wake up in my old bed back in the halls of residence, wondering if everything up to that point was just another twisted dream; sometimes I’ll wake up in a padded room, the screams of other broken souls ringing through the little viewing slot in the door, and wonder if I’ve always been there. That last one seems to be its favourite place to send me.
It doesn’t matter where I wake up though. It will be in there with me when I do, giggling that mind-curdling giggle just to let me know that I’m still at his mercy, that I’m still its plaything.
It’s here now, just sitting in the darkest corner of my room watching me write this with that distended grin spread across its face, across my face.
It’s wearing my face.
It’s not even giggling anymore, it’s just . . . it’s just sitting there.
It’s still wearing my face.
It won’t stop looking at me with that goddamn eyeless smile.
It’s STILL wearing my face.
Maybe it just wants my eyes. It has the rest of my face, so why doesn’t it have my eyes?
Either way, if I didn’t have eyes, I wouldn’t be able to see it anymore. Maybe it’d get bored and go find someone else to drive insane.
Now there’s a thought.
Credit To – DementedEmperor
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“Come play with me.” That line…it’s a cliché for the horror genre, is it not? You all know what I mean, the unsettling apparition of a child, or maybe just the voice, beckoning to you. What is it about children that gives them the ability to be so damn creepy? Maybe…maybe it’s the fact that, generally speaking, children are helpless and anyone with a nurturing side to their personality wants to help them and care for them. I mean, if any one of us saw a child in trouble, I’m sure we’d rush to help in whatever way we could…and in normal circumstances, if a child said “come play with me” someone might just pass a ball around for a minute or two, maybe play hopscotch. Children are innocent, right? Safe enough to play with a child, right? I’m telling you you’re wrong.
This isn’t something I like to tell people, in fact it’s something only my mother and I know, but over the past few months it’s been building up inside of me…this urge to tell…someone. I need to tell someone what happened, even if it was nearly thirteen years ago.
This isn’t a story I’d consider telling people, but not because I’m afraid they’d think me crazy. I couldn’t give a damn about that. I don’t tell people this because it brings back some pretty painful memories for me, and even now as I’m writing this, it’s hard to talk about.
Anyway…I’ve avoided this long enough, it’s time. When I was a small girl, I lived in a trailer park with my mom and dad. I was an only child, and I had a normal life, for the most part. I don’t remember much. As I said, I was a small child. What I do know is that one night, my mother and father got into a big fight over dinner which resulted in my father throwing whatever my mother had cooked outside the back door and yelling at me, kicking me across the room at one point. The man had a temper, that was no secret, but he wasn’t usually like this, at least not around me. I don’t blame him or hate him for any of this, and to this day I’ll do anything to defend him. I love my father. However, this incident was a turning point for my mother. The next night when my father went to work, my mother told me we were going on a trip. She packed a small bag of my clothes, one of hers, and told me to grab anything else I might want. All I took was a small stuffed cat named Buttons that my father had given me for my first birthday. She called a cab and we went to a motel room for a few days. After that, she told me that we’d be moving into a new home called a “shelter.” She said there’d be other kids there, probably some of them around my age, and that I’d like it there.
She was right about there being other kids my age, and the house was beautiful. It was huge, with a playground out back and lots of room to run around. What I remember most though was the staircase.
I made friends quickly with all the kids there, but the one I liked talking to most was Sarah. Sarah was quiet and she always wore a dress and always stood at the top of the stairs and talked to me. She never did anything else really, and she didn’t talk to anyone else. I never went up to her, I just stood at the bottom and we’d talk like that. Sarah didn’t really like the other kids very much because she said they weren’t like us. She said they didn’t know what it was like to think like us. She didn’t really like that I played with the other kids, but she didn’t try to stop me either. She said she only wanted to play with me.
Not long after moving in, I met three kids that lived in the house next door. One of them was my age, the boy, and the two sisters were a little bit older. My mom said it was a good idea to get out of the house and go play with them for a while, so I did. They invited me to come inside and see their playroom, so of course I did. That sounded awesome! I’d never had a “playroom” of my own…a room especially made for playing? It sounded great!
The room itself was fairly empty except for a toy chest in the corner and several toys strewn on the carpeted floor. The walls were bare white, like the rest of the house, and the windows stood without a curtain just opposite the door. When we were in the playroom, the oldest sister walked over to the window and stared out, shaking her head. “Do you know what happened over there?” she asked. I walked over to where she was and looked to where she was pointing. She was pointing at the shelter, right in the window facing the one in the playroom. I shook my head. What did she mean? What happened there? “Do you wanna know?” She asked me, her brother and sister silent now. I simply nodded, keeping quiet so I could hear the story. “A long time ago, there was a little girl named Sarah who lived there…that was her room,” she said, pointing to the room across from where we stood. “Well…one night there was a fire. No body made it out. She almost did…they said they found her body at the top of the stairs, and that’s where she died.” I felt like I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to look out the window anymore. I couldn’t. “They remodeled the building a couple years ago,” she said, matter of fact.
“Stop being a know it all with your big words!” her brother said.
“Oh…” I said. That’s all I could say. Lucky for me, it was starting to get dark, and my mom came over to bring me back with her. I didn’t want to tell her because she might not let me play with my new friends again. I didn’t want to tell Sarah either. I stayed as far away from the stairs as I could.
The next night, the other family who lived in the house told us she and the kids would be gone for a couple of days. This meant that mom and I were, more or less, alone. I wasn’t feeling well, so a little break from other people would be nice. I laid down on the couch and mom turned the tv on for me, sitting at the other end of the couch. She asked me if I wanted to go upstairs to our room…I said no. I wanted to stay downstairs.
I must have fallen asleep. I can still remember that breathing was hard, my nostrils feeling crusty from running so much during the day. I woke up in the middle of the night to the fire alarm going off. Mom woke up around the same time I did and picked me up, carrying me outside. I heard sirens of fire trucks in the distance. I was pretty out of it when they got there, but I still remember what they said to my mom after they’d gone inside. They’d said “we couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary…I don’t know why the alarm went off.” How could it have been set off by just nothing? My mom said it was “probably just the weather” and took me back inside. I remember as she carried me back to the couch that I saw Sarah standing at the top of the stairs, watching me. I started to cry.
A week later, my mom said she found a new place for us to live, she said it would be our own apartment, not like the shelter. I was relieved…I hadn’t talked to Sarah since those kids told me about her, and I wouldn’t go upstairs alone. I hadn’t seen her since the incident with the fire alarm. However, I would hear her voice sometimes as I lay in bed at night. It was like she was calling out just to me. “Come play with me.”
The new apartment was close to the school I’d be going to kindergarten at and, like mom said, we had our very own place. There were three floors, each with one apartment per floor, and ours was on the very top. For several months, my mother and I lived peacefully in our new apartment, and I began to forget about Sarah. For several months, we were happy. I missed my father and thought about him all the time, but for the most part I was happy here.
Then the nightmares started. Each and every one were the same. It started as simply me lying in bed at night. This made it initially difficult for me to tell if it was a dream or real. In the dream, I would start to drift off…until the smell of smoke came to my nostrils. At this point, I would jump out of bed, coughing slightly, and looking around. I would cry out for my mom and I could hear her calling for me, but I couldn’t get to her. I stayed in the room for the longest time, waiting for my mom or the firemen to come save me. After a while, it became obvious that no one was coming to get me, and I was starting to get light headed. I managed to get out of my bedroom door to see that most of the apartment was engulfed in flames. In the dreams, I only made it to the top of the stairs before I passed out on the floor from breathing in too much smoke. The last thing I hear over the crackling of the fire before I wake is a voice. “Come play with me. I will find someone to play with me.”
The summer before I was to start first grade, my mother announced that we would be moving, yet again, to another town altogether. I wasn’t excited. This meant I’d have to make new friends and start over again. Secretly, part of me hoped it would make the nightmares go away. Mom said that we had until the end of July to move in to the new apartment, but that she wanted me to see it before we moved in. She took us both on a road trip to a town totally unfamiliar to me, and what seemed to be a long way away from what we called home. The town was bigger than what I was used to, and I remember being excited because we passed three playgrounds on the way to the new apartment. She took me inside and we looked around. This place was my favorite of all of them. It had windows everywhere that made it look bright and sunny and above all, happy. I couldn’t wait to move, and I was sad that we couldn’t move in right then and there. After a while, mom said we had to go back home, so we went and the car and drove back the way we’d come. As we pulled onto our street, it didn’t take long to notice that something was wrong. Lined up in front of our building were two fire trucks and a police car, all with lights flashing. My mom parked on the other side of the road and went over, telling me to stay in the car. I couldn’t hear what was being said, but I remember staring up at the black smoke still faintly smearing the sky and feeling my blood turn cold. It was coming from our apartment. When mom came back to the car, her face was drained of all color and she couldn’t speak right away. When she finally spoke, it was more to herself, and she could only get three words out. “Why just ours?” I thought I saw Sarah up in the blackened window of our former home.
Today, I sit at my computer writing this and thinking about her. I’m shaking, and I don’t know why. It’s months before my nineteenth birthday and I’m living with my dad, attending a community college in the area. My dad remarried years ago and now has a little girl from his second marriage. She’s quite a bit younger than me—six—and she reminds me a lot of myself at her age.
I guess she’s the reason I started to write this. I haven’t been able to get the events of yesterday out of my head. I was watching her while my dad was at work and I was outside with her while she played on the swing set. I heard the phone ringing inside, so naturally I went to answer it. This isn’t the part I can’t shake off. The thing is…when I went back outside, Rebecca looked at me and said “we have to go inside.” When I asked her why, she only said four little words before running back up the steps and in the house. Four little words, but they were enough to bring chills up my spine.
“Sarah wants to play.”
Credit To – Ashleigh Margaret
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It didn’t take long for me to realize that my freshmen college roommate was a very strange guy. But that wasn’t all that surprising as I’d heard about plenty of people that got saddled with weirdos as roommates their first semester of college. He wasn’t strange in the sense of being a LARPer or never taking showers or anything like that, but from the moment I met him, something just seemed…off.
Move-in day was pretty odd. The first thing I remember is being surprised at how old he looked when I met him. From the roommate info card that I had received from my university over the summer, I knew that my roommate’s name was Zach _________ and he was from a town called Zionsville, a suburb of Indianapolis. I thought that he was an 18 year-old freshmen like me, but he looked like he was maybe 4 or 5 years older than that. Oh well, I thought, it had been two months since I read that roommate card, so I figured I was simply mistaken and that he was just one of those guys that waited a few years before going to college.
Now all that Zach brought with him to move into our dorm was a duffle bag of clothes. No furniture, no computer, no belongings, nothing. He didn’t even bring bedding. I asked him if that was all that he had, and after an awkward pause he said that we was bringing the rest of his stuff later.
For the next hour, I went about setting up our room. Zach sat down at the desk that came with the room and pulled an iPod out of his back pocket. So he did have at least some other things, I thought. He put his headphones on and while doing so, he would just watch me or look out the window. I tried talking to him while doing this, but his answers would be pretty short.
“Are your parents here with you today?”
“No.”
“Do you know what you want your major to be yet?”
“No.”
“Do you know anyone else here at DePauw?”
“No.”
After another half-hour of feebly trying to converse with him, Zach says, “That’s a pretty girl. Who is she?” I was holding a framed picture of my girlfriend. “What? Oh. That’s Andrea. She’s my girlfriend. She goes to IU.” I set the frame down on the nightstand by my bed. And that was all he said.
After another 30 minutes of awkward silence, I have to get out of there so I go to meet up with the only other guy I know from high school, my buddy Joel. I tell Joel that I think my roommate situation is going to be disaster this semester, and then we go out to grab a bite to eat. I come back to my room to find Zach is gone, but see his duffle bag still lying on the floor. I finish setting up the room and go to bed around 1:00 AM. Zach still isn’t back by then.
I don’t sleep well that first night, but figure it’s due to sleeping in a new, unfamiliar place. I wake up to find Zach sleeping on his mattress with no sheets. During the day, anytime Zach isn’t in class, he is in our room just staring out the window with his headphones on. He nods his head if I said hello, but that’s about it.
I try having Joel over to our room one night, but Zach is there and it gets awkward fast because he just keeps looking out our window listening to his music the whole time we are there. After attempting to watch a movie for about 15 minutes, Joel makes an excuse to be somewhere else.
Frustrated, I angrily ask Zack, “Why do you just stare out that window all the time?”
“I just like to people-watch. There’s so many interesting things to see here.”
“You’re a strange dude, Zach. You need to get out more,” I respond. And with that I follow Joel out. When I catch up with him, he asks me, “What’s up with your roommate?”
“Yeah, sorry, I tried telling you he was a weirdo. He stares out that window all the time. He said he likes to people-watch.”
“Well, he was probably homeschooled our something. Maybe his parents were really strict and he isn’t sure how to handle the wild college life,” replies Joel.
“Yeah, maybe. It’s just that he looks like he’s 23. You would think that he’s lived a little.”
When I go to bed again that night, Zach is once again gone. I have another restless night and when I wake, I see that he is once again sleeping on his blank mattress. He must have come in quietly while I was asleep. I notice that my computer screen is on, which was odd, because I thought I had turned it off when I went to bed. Oh well, not the first time my screen turned on because a draft moved the mouse.
A few more days go by and I’m still not sleeping terribly well, but think it probably isn’t helping that I am staying up much later than I ever did at home.
Each night, Zach is gone when I go to bed late and he is asleep on his mattress when I wake up in the morning. I can’t figure out where he would be since I have never seen him talk to anyone other than me. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have any friends. Thursday night of that first week, I’m doing some homework at my desk and Zach, per usual, is just staring out the window like a creep, listening to his iPod.
“Hey, where do you go every night? You’re never here when I go to bed, and I’ve been up pretty late each night.”
He didn’t respond immediately, but finally said, “I like to go for walks at night. I like the quiet.”
“At 2:00 in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“Did you do that at home too? Did your parents just let you walk around late at night?”
Again, long pause. “I lived in a pretty small town, so it was safe. My parents didn’t care.”
“I thought you were from Zionsville. Isn’t that pretty much Indianapolis?”
Another, longer pause. Finally Zach says, “I’m going for a walk.” And walks out the door.
Late that night, I’m startled awake to find Zach just standing next to my bed, looking at me.
“JESUS! Oh God! Zach, what the hell are you doing?!? You about gave me a heart attack!”
“You look very peaceful when you sleep.”
“What?” I say groggily. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“You look very serene as you sleep. I envy that.”
Thoroughly creeped out, I say, “I gotta take a piss.” I didn’t have to pee, but just wanted to get away from Zach. I go to Joel’s room and tell him what just happened. It’s about 3:00a.m., so I’m not sure Joel is completely coherent, but he lets me crash on his couch.
The next day between classes, I share with Joel again how uncomfortable Zach is starting to make me.
“Have you tried Googling him?” asks Joel, “He’s got to have Facebook page or something online. Maybe you can find something out about the creep.”
“Yeah, I’ll check it out when I get back to my computer.”
After another class, I return to my room. Fortunately, Zach was at class. I typed “Zach _________ Zionsville, IN” into the search bar on Google. Google finds thousands of webpages instantly, but I stare in disbelief at the top listing.
ZIONSVILLE TEENAGER ZACH _________ STABBED TO DEATH, CULPRIT STILL MISSING
I click the link and see an article from the Indy newspaper about the brutal murder of my roommate, who was repeatedly stabbed to death in his bedroom two weeks ago. They show Zach’s senior photo. It is not the same person that I have been sharing a room with for the past week.
I close the browser and sprint to Joel’s room, but he has classes until 4:00. Wanting to be out of our dormitory, I text him, saying to meet in the student commons after his classes. I don’t want to be anywhere near my room if “Zach” should return in the mean time.
Joel finally meets me in the student commons and I tell him everything. I’m trying not to make a scene but as I’m sharing the story of sleeping in the same room as a murderer for a week, I begin to break down and sob. I can tell that Joel is still unsure until I pull up the news article on his phone, then his face turns grim. He says it’s probably best if we go to the police in person and tell them everything.
Joel doesn’t have a car on campus, so we have to go back to my room to get my keys. I’m incredibly nervous, but Joel says if we happen to see “Zach” we’ll just act normal and say we are going out to eat. No big deal.
I peek into my room and sigh with relief as I realize that he isn’t there. As I grab the keys from my desk drawer, I notice that my computer screen has two tabs open on it. One is my web history. The 2nd tab is the news article about Zach’s murder.
“Shit!” I scream, “He was here and saw this.”
I glance around the room and see that his duffle bag is now gone. “We gotta get to the police NOW! Who knows where this psycho is?!?”
As I’m running out of the room, I notice something odd. The picture of Andrea, my girlfriend, is no longer sitting on my nightstand.
Credit To – legendaryhero27
This is a small miniseries that will be posted in three parts over the next few days. Once the other parts go live, I will edit in links to their posts here. You can also track the Freshman Roommate Series tag to see all posts in this series.
This story first appeared on reddit’s /nosleep/ board and is being hosted here with permission from the original author.
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The drive out took a few hours. As I pulled off the main highway and onto the branching road, I was struck with the sense that I was going to be very alone out here. I’m an avid hiker but since many of the hiking trails I’d normally frequent had become almost crowded as of late, for this trip I’d settled on a trail I’d vaguely heard of but knew next to nothing about. It’d lead up towards some serious wild territory, with nothing around for hundreds of miles. The land was technically part of one of the nearby National Parks but was only barely mentioned on the Park’s website. I suspected this was because it was much further out than the regularly visited trails, only accessible from a branching road that pretty much led to nowhere.
My plan was to head into the wilderness and camp out overnight under the stars. I live in a desert State (no, I won’t tell you which one), and I figured there’d be some stunning views of the constellations in the cloudless sky at night, especially since it was forecast to be a moonless night. I’d already walked the popular day trails in the area, so I was looking into for something a bit farther afield – the plan was to camp out under the stars and head back in the morning. The deserted road suggested I was right in thinking that nobody came this far out. Should be a good chance to relax and get away from it all.
Eventually, I reached my destination and pulled off the asphalt of the road and into the gravel of the parking area, tires crunching as I slowed to a stop off to one side. “Parking lot” would have been too generous a title; it was really just an unsealed area next to the highway with a signpost announcing the entrance to National Park territory. The area was almost empty, only a single other car parked up. I got out and stretched, looking around and spotting the low sign that marked the trailhead. As I did, I took a second glance at the other parked car.
It looked like it’d been there for an age. All four tires were flat, although they didn’t look to be punctured. Every surface was dusty – I looked back at my car which was lightly coated from the drive in – but this was well and truly caked on. There were no broken windows, and it didn’t look like it had been stolen and dumped – it didn’t look damaged at all. “Must’ve been there a while”, I thought to myself, wondering why no one from the parks service had had it towed by now. I made a mental note to call them when I got home.
I opened the door to my back seat and got out my pack, hat and rifle. I’d thought hard about whether to bring the rifle – it was extra weight after all, and odds were I wouldn’t need it; but last time I’d been out hiking overnight I’d had a far-too-close encounter with a coyote that’d left me wishing I had something more than rocks to protect myself with. I figured since it was only a small .22 caliber it wouldn’t be too heavy, and I’d packed it into a light soft-case that’d fit alongside my pack. I reached into my pack for my sunscreen and slathered some on my arms and neck, before turning off my phone (I’d called my sister before I left town to let her know my plans) and stowing it and my keys away, shouldering my things and setting off up the trail.
I’d gone no more than a couple of hundred yards when I slowed to a stop, nose in the air. There was the slightest breeze, but with it came the hint of something behind it. I winced as the warm air hit my face, because the smell it wafted towards me was terrible. “Smells like something died…” I muttered to myself. The breeze died down and the smell went with it. “Ugh,” I said, setting off again and picking up the pace. I couldn’t see any buzzards around, but if there was something dead nearby I didn’t want to be anywhere near it if the wind kicked up again.
The hike in was uneventful – I won’t bore you with all the details, but it was great terrain, a clear and easy trail through the desert shrubland. Some hours in, I was breathing hard as I reached a slightly hillier bit of the trail. I came to the top of the rise and saw that the terrain flattened out ahead into a wide plateau. Looking at the sun, I saw it was mid-afternoon, and decided this was as good a place as any to set up camp for the night. I walked another few minutes before stepping off the trail – spotting a nice flat bit of land where the brush had been cleared away. There were the remnants of a campfire in the center, just a few bits of charcoal and some scorched ground. I nodded to myself, taking off my pack and rifle case and placing them on the ground near the old campfire.
I spent over an hour bringing in firewood, and another half hour breaking it all up into manageable pieces. There was plenty around, lots of low, dead bushes and shrubs around the place. I wanted enough wood for the fire to last easily through the night, the sun was just starting to go down and it was beginning to get a bit chilly. I stood back and looked at my woodpile – it was quite impressive, and probably way more than I’d actually need. “Better safe than sorry” I shrugged to myself. The last rays of daylight were peeking over the horizon as I lit the fire, building it up until it was crackling away merrily. I ate a couple of power bars I’d packed as a cold dinner, swigged some water and sat on the ground looking up at the stars coming out, feeling very peaceful.
That feeling didn’t last very long.
I heard the wind pick up before I felt it. It whistled between the rocks and shrubs, seeming to whirl around, passing me and then doubling back before arriving. It brought a warmth with it that was odd for the desert at night. That wasn’t the only thing it brought though; I sniffed as the breeze kicked up the flames in my little campfire, and screwed up my face. That stench I’d smelled earlier came with it – hot and rotten, like roadkill baking under the sun. I gagged and tried to hold my dinner down.
The campfire flared up as the wind hit it, throwing sparks in the air. I watched as they floated into the sky, bright orange spots against the black, almost blending in with the stars. As they burned themselves out the wind died down, the flames it had kicked up lessening as well. The stench had died back as well; it was still there in the background but not being blown in my face anymore. Once the light from the flare-up had dimmed, everything seemed a lot darker. I looked around and shivered involuntarily, realizing just how dark it suddenly was. I looked up at the sky and wished I hadn’t chosen a moonless night for my hike, looked back towards the fire and then stopped dead – something was wrong.
I blinked hard and looked up again at the sky – the stars… the stars were gone. One second they’d been there, and the next they just… weren’t anymore; as if the wind had blown them out like they were candles. There was nothing overhead; just a sudden blackness all around, seeming to press in against dome of light that my little campfire was throwing out.
“The hell!?” I exclaimed, looking about me. The air hadn’t changed temperature – it was still cool but not cold – but an icy sense of unease was settling over me. I shivered again and tossed a couple of branches on the fire, then drew my jacket closed and zipped it up. Where before I’d been able to faintly see the outline of the scattered shrubs and boulders by the faint starlight, now I couldn’t see a thing. There was no horizon anymore, the suddenly black sky blended in completely with where I knew the mountains in the distance were, and I couldn’t see anything in the darkness that was pressing in around me.
I grabbed my pack and pulled out my phone, turning it on and quickly navigating to the flashlight app. The phone’s flash lit up and cast a harsh light on the ground – and then flickered and died, the phone turning itself off again. I pressed the power button again but the screen stayed stubbornly black. “Shit”, I thought to myself, reaching back into my pack for my keys. I found the penlight on my keyring and turned that on, which also immediately flickered and turned off. I whacked it a couple of times to no avail, before giving up in disgust and stowing my keys and phone back in my pack.
I looked around me, shivering with unease again. It was very dark; I couldn’t see more than 20 feet on either side of the fire. It was almost as if the light was being forced back in on itself. I couldn’t hear anything other than the crackle of the campfire; the whistling of the wind had stopped. That god-awful smell was still in the background though, like there was something dead nearby and – what the hell was that?
I heard a noise, like someone clearing their throat – a thick, wet “heh”. My stomach dropped, my breath catching in my throat for a second. I wasn’t alone out here.
Looking in the direction the noise had come from, I saw a small flash in the darkness, and then another. A tingle ran up the back of my neck as I realized there was something out there, sitting just outside of the reach of the light from the campfire, watching me.
My sister has a little dog, and I remember staying with her once and it looking at me from a dark room down the hall while I was in the brightly lit lounge – I couldn’t see it at all but I knew it was there from the way the light bounced off its eyes, dim yellowy pinpricks in the darkness about a foot off the ground. What I saw was like that.
Only instead of the eyes in the dark being knee-height like my sister’s dog, these were six feet off the ground.
Too tall to be a coyote or even a mountain lion, I thought to myself almost absently, trying to control the fear that was bubbling up inside me. “Yah! Get out of here!” I yelled, standing and waving my arms in the air. It didn’t leave. Instead, the eyes came down a couple of feet, like the thing had lowered its head. I slowly moved to put the campfire between me and it, and it moved in turn. I kept moving around the fire, and it kept moving too. I stopped and stared at it, and it stopped and stared right back. Something else was strange – my feet had crunched the gravel as I turned to face it as it circled, but it made no sound at all as it moved. The darkness hid all but the barest outline and even that was fuzzy at best – apart from what I assumed were eyes, all I could see was a slightly darker spot in the blackness.
Crouching, I picked up a rock and chucked it in the direction of the eye flashes – the rock sailed through the air and I lost sight of it in the darkness, but I’d swear my aim was dead on. It didn’t hit anything; I just heard a ‘crunch’ as the rock fell to the gravel and tumbled away. The flashes in the darkness bobbed up and down slightly – whatever it was, it wasn’t afraid of me and it seemed to be moving closer.
Slowly, very slowly, I reached for the rifle case, unzipping it and taking out my little .22. I pulled the bolt up and back and then forward and down again, chambering a round. As I did, the thing moved again, the eyes coming back and slightly lower, as if it was coiling back on itself – like a cat ready to pounce. I moved my thumb to disengage the safety, pulling the stock tightly into my shoulder and aiming for where I guessed the thing’s center mass would be – a bit more than a foot below where the glint of the eyes were.
“Don’t make me use this!” I yelled at it again. “Just go away!”
I heard a wet sound, like a growl from a dog crunching food in its mouth – and squeezed the trigger.
CRACK!
The sound from my little rifle seemed deafeningly loud, splitting the quiet of the night like lightning splits the sky. I lowered it slightly, peering over the barrel towards the thing.
It hadn’t moved at all after coiling back, it’d stayed right there, ready to pounce. But there was no way I’d missed it, not at this range.
Work the bolt back, I frantically thought to myself – get another round in – re-aim, squeeze the trigger – CRACK! – work the bolt, aim, squeeze the trigger – CRACK! – again – CRACK! – Again – CRACK! – AGAIN!
Click.
The hammer came down on an empty chamber. My ammunition was spent, I’d only packed the single 5-round magazine and I had nothing to reload with, I hadn’t counted on needing any more than that. The thing shifted slightly, growling again as it moved. The flash from its eyes in the firelight disappeared, and I lost sight of its outline. I lowered my rifle with shaking hands, switching my grip to clutch the still-warm barrel like a club, ready to swing the stock into whatever that thing was.
THUMP – something solid hit me in the back and I screamed as I spun on the spot, swinging the rifle like a bat. It ‘whooshed’ through the air, hitting nothing. I took a step back, breathing hard as I saw that familiar glint in the dark, just beyond the border of where the light from the fire showed. It’d gotten behind me in seconds, and I hadn’t heard it move at all. But what had hit me, if it hadn’t come into the light? I looked down, and lying at my feet was a single hiking boot.
I glanced back up towards the thing – it hadn’t moved. It was just there, watching me. I looked back at the boot, which wasn’t in the best shape. The fabric was torn and it was caked in reddish-brown mud… “Hang on,” I thought, stooping to pick it up. I shifted it closer to the fire for a closer look.
Blood. The boot was caked in dried blood.
My head swam, and a fire tore through my nerves, the back of my neck prickling madly and my skin turning to gooseflesh. I found myself on one knee, breathing heavily as I mumbled, “Oh, shit… oh, shit…”
I looked back up towards the thing, which still hadn’t moved. I stood, and screamed at it, “WHAT DO YOU WANT WITH ME!?” It didn’t answer. I dropped the boot.
I jumped as there was a small ‘pop’ from one of the branches in the fire, but was suddenly struck by an idea. I moved closer to the fire and spotted a branch that only had one end alight. I pulled it from the blaze and turned to face the thing. It growled again as I held up the branch, which rose to more of a snarl as I threw it towards it.
The blazing stick lit up the night as it tumbled through the air towards the thing, and a horrified thrill ran up my spine as I caught a better glimpse of the outline of it, just for a second before it scuttled away from the light. It was huge – big as a bear but without any of the mass, lean as opposed to bulky. It was dark, so dark that it seemed to flow and blend into the gloom behind it. It had four long legs attached to an almost stumpy torso, but it hadn’t used all four when it moved – it used the front ones (arms?) to push itself upright onto the back legs and then danced madly away on those while its whole body and ‘arms’ jerked from side to side. God, it was so tall! Maybe eight feet high when moving on its back legs, and it never seemed to get fully upright.
The things that glinted in the firelight did seem to be its eyes, and the split-second glimpse of its face I caught was enough to make me take a step back in horror. It looked almost… human? Human but deathly wrong – like if you took a person’s face and stretched it forward so it was long, like a horses’ head. The mouth though, it wasn’t small like a horse’s, it stretched all the way back to where the face met the rest of the skull. The mouth was stuffed full of far too many rotten looking teeth, stained red in places. I think my legs gave way then.
I found myself sitting on the ground, hugging my knees and rocking back and forth. What in the hell was that thing, and what did it want with me? The bloodstained boot didn’t exactly fill me with hope that it was friendly.
I used a shaking hand to grab some more sticks out of my woodpile and feed the campfire. Whatever that thing was, it hadn’t come into the light, and it’d moved away when the fire came near it. I gave a silent thanks to whatever urge had made me drag in as much wood as I had. The eyes had stopped moving again, and it seemed the thing was content for the time being just to sit in the dark and stare at me. I stared right back, trying to think of what the hell I was going to do, and we stayed like that for a while, looking at each other.
Somewhere not too far away, a coyote howled. The eyes turned, and bobbed up and down slightly in the direction of the howl – was it sniffing the air? It turned back to face me and it… grunted? Whatever the noise was, it sounded dissatisfied somehow. The thing turned away again and I saw the barest smudge of an outline moving off into the dark towards the howls. Within seconds it was gone from sight, and as it faded from view so did its stench.
I sat there, frozen for a moment; and then burst upwards, boots scrabbling for grip on the loose gravel as I came to my feet. I frantically grabbed at my pack and swung it onto one shoulder, stooped to pick up my rifle and swung that by its strap onto the other shoulder, and then hesitated, torn by indecision. Dare I risk it?
I clenched my jaw and tried to swallow down the rising sense of fear. I picked up one foot and took a single step away from the fire, wincing as the gravel crunched underfoot, which seemed deafeningly loud in the silence that was broken only otherwise by the fire. I peered around, muscles tensing with anticipation, but saw no sign of the thing. I took another step – the gravel crunched again – still no sign of it. I relaxed ever so slightly, took a deep breath and started briskly walking towards the trail. Once I hit it, I could turn right and I was confident enough I could follow it back to the parking lot, even in the dark.
I’d taken no more than a half-dozen hurried steps when I stopped dead, frozen in place. I could smell it again, the reek bringing the bile up in my throat. Heart racing, I turned my head slightly to the left and saw that glint in the dark.
The light from the fire had dimmed as I’d moved away from it, but I was still just close enough for me to see that familiar reflection of the flames in its eyes again – a rumble came out of the darkness – a growl? I slid my front foot backwards, slowly moving back towards the fire, never taking my eyes off where it seemed to be in the dark. I reached the fireside and slid my pack and rifle off my shoulders, laying them on the ground and sitting down next to them.
As I did, I heard the coyote howl again. The thing seemed to grunt, and then it faded into the darkness as it turned away from me. What the hell was I going to do? It was like the thing was playing with me – but I wasn’t going to risk making a run for it again. No way did I want it to catch me in the dark. The darkness had seemed to kill my phone and flashlight when it settled in, and any flaming torch from the fire I took would burn out well before I made it back to my car. I still had my lighter, but there was no way that’d make enough of a difference to keep it away.
The coyote began to howl once more, but the howl cut off quickly, turning into a snarl. I listened closely as the snarls became pained and then desperate yelps, and held my breath as they cut off, replaced by the sounds of something snapping, crunching and splattering. I breathed deeply, listening as I tried to slow my hammering heart down. Nothing.
Once again, all I could hear was the crackling of the fire. I shut my eyes, listening harder, and shrieked as something hit the ground next to me, scrabbling backwards on my butt away from it; waiting for it to leap up and grab me. I’d gotten a few yards away when I stopped scrabbling and just sat there hyperventilating, staring at the ruined pile of grey fur and red gore that lay in front of me.
It was the coyote. Or, what was left of the coyote; it was a mess. It looked like every bone in its body had been pulverized and its front legs were completely missing, but raggedly missing, like they’d been torn away rather than cleanly cut or bitten off. Worst of all, its head was facing the wrong way, twisted around until it was entirely backwards. Blood seeped from the open mouth, collecting into drops that each hit the dusty gravel with a soft ‘splat’.
I shuddered, and hugged my knees tight, rocking back and forth slightly. This must’ve been the coyote I’d heard howl earlier, the one the thing went after. Oh shit – I stood – where was it now?
I circled on the spot, looking out into the dark – there! On the other side of the fire, just beyond the border where the light ended, that familiar reflective yellow double flash. It was still watching me. “FUCK YOU!” I screamed at it. I strode to the dead coyote, grabbed it by its still-warm tail and swung it around, casting it away from the fire towards the thing. It flumped to the ground not too far away from where the light ended. The thing didn’t move. I fought to get my breathing under control, kicking dust over the small patch of blood that had pooled where the coyote lay. I looked at my hands and they were sticky with blood too; I grabbed my water and rinsed the worst of it off, wiping my hands on my pants to dry them.
I heard a grunt, and turned to see one long, impossibly thin limb reaching in from the shadow to grab the dead coyote by the tail, slowly dragging it out of the light. It was hard to see any detail – it was almost as if it was radiating the darkness out from itself – but I could see that it seemed to end in a hand that again looked human, but wrong… The fingers were way too long, and they were jointed in too many places; it looked like someone reaching out with a collection of tarantula legs on the end of a stick.
It made a pained sort of sound while it was doing it – maybe the light hurt it? The coyote disappeared from view, leaving bloody drag marks in the dust, and I heard horrific ripping and squelching sounds; I guessed the thing was tearing it apart and eating it. The eating noises eventually stopped, and the thing grunted, but it sounded unsatisfied somehow. It went back to staring at me. Whatever this thing was, it wanted me, not just the coyote.
I picked up some more branches and built up the fire, then sat down and stared at the reflective eyes in the dark. I don’t know how long I sat like that for, it must’ve been hours. I built up the fire a couple more times and went back to staring at the thing. It’d grunt or growl every now and again, but then it shut up – for the time being, it seemed satisfied just to sit and stare. Eventually, I found my blinks getting longer, each time it was harder to open my eyes again. God, I was so tired… the adrenaline spike had long since worn off and I felt wiped out. Just a second, I’ll just close my eyes for a second I thought to myself, as my head began to nod forward.
I jerked bolt upright and wide awake at the thrill that ran up my spine as I heard a wet, throaty “heh” from behind me. I’d fallen asleep! The fire had burned down low and was mostly just embers, only emitting a faint glow – just enough for me to see that the thing had crept much closer as the light had diminished. I must’ve dozed off for an hour or more.
Leaping to my feet, I grabbed some branches from the pile and hurled them into the remnants of the fire, and then fell to my hands and knees so I could frantically blow into the embers, desperately trying to stir them back into life. The light flared up as they caught alight and I saw it sitting there, way too close – squatted on its haunches like a dog sitting; long back legs folded up so what I assumed were knees were up by the shape of its head, and arms extended down to the ground in front of it, holding its torso upright. The light glinted from its eyes as it shifted its head to stare at me again, and it hissed as it pushed itself backwards, retreating from the light. As I lost sight of it in the darkness I heard that wet sound again, like a long tongue smacking against lips.
I shuddered. I’d gotten a better look at its eyes in the light this time – they were filled with hunger (and… pain?) but there was an intelligence there. Human eyes, not entirely those of an animal. It went back to looking at me, only this time it wasn’t silent. It kept growling and grunting, and the noises it was making grew in volume and frequency, it almost sounded desperate. It circled the fire, eyes disappearing from view and then reappearing elsewhere where it’d growl from the dark, but it never came into the firelight. I didn’t say anything, I just fed the fire and hoped that my stock of firewood would hold out a little longer – I’d brought a lot in but it was diminishing by this point.
Then, finally, the thing made a noise I hadn’t heard yet – a hiss higher in pitch than anything else it’d made – and it looked up at the sky, before staring at me once more. It made a disgusted sort of noise, and then turned away. I heard the wind kick up and I could smell the thing’s stench again, and then all of a sudden it was just… gone.
As the thing went, the smell and the suffocating darkness went with it – and I realized I could see clearly around me again! The sky had that deep, dark blue color you see before sunrise and I could see a few pinpricks of light that could only have been stars. It got progressively lighter and lighter until – there! The sun peeked up over the horizon, and I’d never been as happy to see the light of day as I was now.
I waited another hour and a half, until the sun was well in the sky and things were starting to heat up before I dared to make a move. I picked up my things and got the hell out of there, shuddering as I passed the remnants of the coyote, just a bloody patch of grey fur and shattered bones. I jogged the whole time, never pausing, never stopping, and never looking behind me. Every time I slowed I’d hear the wind whistle again and I’d catch a whiff of something foul, so I’d pick up the pace again. Hours later, I was just about ready to drop when – there, the start of the trail! I could see down to the carpark. Without stopping my jog, I reached back and pulled my backpack off, holding it in one hand and awkwardly cradling the gun case in my other arm as I scrabbled in the pack for my car keys. I almost tripped as the hard trail gave way to the gravel of the carpark, but managed to keep my footing as I scrabbled towards the car.
I fumbled with the keys for what seemed an age, before throwing open the door, tossing my things across and slinging myself into the driver’s seat, both hands gripping the wheel with a white-knuckle grip. I looked at myself in the rear-view mirror, and was taken aback at the haggard, wild-eyed figure that stared back at me. There were rivers of clear skin in the dust caking my face, I realized I’d been sobbing with relief since I’d been able to see the end of the trail.
I looked back out at where the trail started, and saw the dust from the path swirl as the wind picked up once more. I hurriedly rammed the keys into the ignition. I gunned the engine, throwing the car into gear, pulling around quickly and peeling out onto the road. As I sped back towards the city, it wasn’t until I hit the main highway before my heart stopped pounding, and my breathing slowed to normal levels.
A few hours later (less time than it took to drive out there, I was not doing the speed limit) I was home, with my doors locked and the sunlight streaming in through the windows. My phone turned on after I’d plugged it in – “Now you work!” – so I messaged my sister so she wouldn’t call search and rescue. A day or so later, I called the parks service and told them that I’d been stalked by some mountain lions on the trail, and they removed the area from the information section of their website (nobody really went there anyway, they said). I didn’t mention the abandoned car or the bloody boot, and didn’t tell anyone what had really happened – and after all, who would have believed me if I did? There was no point in sending anyone else into danger.
Later, I started reading up on some local folklore, but stopped pretty quickly – I came across something that made me start to shake at the description of it. I’m fairly sure I now know what the thing was, but I decided I wouldn’t look anymore into it and I’d just try to put it all out of my head. It hasn’t really worked, my breath catches in my throat every time I go into a dark room while I fumble around for a light switch.
I don’t hike much anymore. If I do go hiking then it’s strictly along well-used trails, and I never, ever do an overnighter. I had work transfer me to a branch a long, long way away from the desert, I couldn’t deal with feeling a hot wind any more – I’m somewhere where it snows now. My encounter left me with a lot of unanswered questions, but one question ranks above all the rest, and it’s something I’m not really sure I want to know the answer to:
If that thing I read about is real, then what else is real – and hiding out there in the dark?
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I despise the sound of static. The vast emptiness of its white noise is heavily unsettling to me. Ever since I was a child, hearing it is synonymous with hearing the toll of death’s bell. This is because every time I’ve heard it, something horrific has happened in its stead.
When I was seven or eight, my boombox suddenly stopped playing music and began emitting that scratchy hiss. I had to hold my hands over my ears before shutting it off. An hour later, we got the call that my uncle had been in a terrible car accident. He didn’t survive. A flatbed that had been driving in front of him, transporting large sheets of glass, had swerved and one of the sheets flew through my uncle’s windshield. He’d been decapitated, dying instantly.
Six months later, I was perusing around the market with my mother. While she occupied herself in the produce aisle, I strayed toward the large television at the front of the store. At the time, it was playing Barney and Friends. I hadn’t seen it in a while, and having still been a child at the time, it was one of my favorite shows. A couple of other children joined me and all of us happily stared at that giant purple dinosaur for what seemed like hours. Out of nowhere, the show suddenly stopped and all it left was a peppery blanket of static. The other children merely slinked away, disappointed that the television seemed to have broken. I, however, clamped my hands over my ears and rushed around the store trying to find my mother.
I thrust my hand into hers when I found her at the checkout. She looked down and smiled, but her smile faltered into concern when she saw my look of discontent. I did not want to go home. I had a sudden fear of the answering machine. What would it say? The incident with my uncle left an impact. In a child’s mind, association is common. From that day I’d associated the sound of white noise with the coming of doom. I knew it was going to happen again. I was right.
When we entered the house, my mother dropped her keys into the bowl beside the door and pressed the blinking red button on the answering machine.
The voice that came through still sends a chill down my spine when I think about it. I hear it so clearly still.
“Mrs. Adams, this is Officer Steinbeck with the Kiowa County Police Department. I’m sorry to tell you…there’s been an accident.”
He went on to say that my father, who’d been working that day, fell from a cherry picker straight on to some power lines his crew had just started working on. He had been electrocuted and had perished. Watching those words sink into her, and seeing my mother crumple beneath them, was the most awful thing I’d ever witnessed.
These were only the first of countless experiences like this I had growing up. No matter how many times I tried to tell anyone about it, they never believed me. My mother refused to listen to it, especially after what had happened to Dad. The one person who ever truly listened, whether he believed me or not, was my older brother.
While Thomas wasn’t supportive of what I had to say, he believed that I believed it was happening. That was enough for me for a while. He was the one who helped me get rid of my boombox and the television in my bedroom. I didn’t want to be anywhere near them. I somehow believed that because I heard the sound, people I loved would die. That somehow my ears were the catalyst that snapped the wire and brought down death’s guillotine.
No matter how many times I tried to escape that sound, however, it always found me.
When I was fifteen, I was at school having lunch in the courtyard in front of the gym. My friends and I were trading cards, talking about class, and reminiscing about elementary school. All of us in that courtyard hushed when suddenly the principle came over the loud-speaker to tell us about the upcoming Homecoming Dance. Yet, in the middle of her announcement, the speakers suddenly bellowed with static. I dropped my food and felt my hands press into the side of my head. I’d never told my friends about my experiences, so all of them stared at me as though I’d gone mad.
I ran away from them and tried to find some place to escape the noise. I settled on cramming myself into my locker. I didn’t care if getting out from the inside would be impossible. I had to get away from it somehow. My arms and legs began to cramp from the lack of space after a while. My elbows crushed themselves into my chest as I kept my hands on my ears. Eventually, any outside noise suddenly became the static I tried to escape from.
I’m still not sure how long I stayed in there. It could have been hours, even days for all I knew. I spent a large amount of that time trying to quiet the fearful thoughts that began swimming their way through my brain. I couldn’t help but try to guess who it could be this time. In the years since the first event, after losing my uncle and father, I’d also lost my younger sister, two of my aunts, my grandparents, three pets, and a cousin. I was convinced that there was a paranormal force out to get me. I thought that somehow, whatever it was had begun slowly picking off my family one by one until I inevitably became the last remaining victim.
Eventually my best friend, Jeremy, found me in my locker. He asked me time and time again to tell him what was going on after that. For weeks he’d bring it up and I would just change the subject. When I finally told him, to my surprise, he believed me. He said that while there’s no evidence to suggest that static or white noise could be considered a death omen, he had read things to suggest that such things are linked to some kind of paranormal realm. I didn’t want to delve further into that notion, if anything it only made things worse.
When I got home that day, I found my mother crumpled on the couch, crying heavily into one of the decorative pillows. I didn’t even need to ask, I knew something had happened. I always knew. The only piece of the puzzle I wanted to find was who had gone this time and in what horrible way. That time, it was my infant cousin who had been born only a few short months before that day. Crib death, they called it. Whatever it was to the outside world, it tore my aunt and uncle to pieces. They were the only extended family left after that. At least until five months later, when I heard it again.
That time, it was so loud and so grating on my bones that I nearly passed out. Just an hour later, we got a call telling us that both my aunt and uncle had committed suicide. They were found in their bed, both of them had cut their wrists and held hands as they bled out on their white cotton sheets.
My mother couldn’t handle it. We were the only family we had left. Just me, my brother and herself. That was it. I remember my mother being practically catatonic for weeks after that phone call. She didn’t leave the house. Often, we’d find her sitting on the couch, mindlessly flipping through old family albums. Her hands would summon a mind of their own and casually toss each page aside every few seconds, she barely even glanced at them before moving forward.
Every day that went by, I tried desperately to avoid anything electronic. I even convinced Thomas to move the televisions from the living room and mother’s room to the garage. While he may not have fully believed me when I first told him, he seemed to give the idea some kind of credibility then. He unplugged the radio, his digital alarm clock, and any other object that could make that sound. For a while, it seemed to work. Six years passed without another incident.
I began to believe that whatever it was had been satiated with the blood of everyone it took from us and had moved on. At 21, I finally began to rest easy. Mom had eventually come back to herself and didn’t even seem to notice the absence of the electronics in the house. She took to reading again and even sewing. Thomas had moved out the year before I did into his own apartment across town. He’d promised to avoid getting a television or a radio and settled for a tablet for his entertainment. He promised to make sure to turn it off after every hour of use and leave it for a while, so it wouldn’t somehow suddenly break.
I refused to move out for some time. I became so protective of my mother that I felt my leaving would somehow prompt this thing to come back for us. We three were all we had left after so many years of decapitations, electrocutions, suicides, crib deaths, murders, maulings, car accidents, surgical accidents, accidental falls, impalements, heart attacks, accidental shootings, wild dog attacks, drownings, and work-related dismemberments. I became very aware of every object around us in those final months. While the static had been silenced for a long time, I still became convinced that death was simply quietly perched on the mantle of our home, waiting for its moment to strike. Like a venomous serpent coiled and poised before its prey, I imagined its eyes on us as we moved about our daily lives.
I never did tell my mom about any of it. I didn’t want to upset her more than she’d already been in the past 13 or 14 years. Losing my father had been hard enough on her, but to lose so many others after that and in the most gory, unsettling ways…To give her some hocus pocus story about a SOUND following us and killing the people we cared about would probably drive her to the breaking point. That is, if she even believed me. Or perhaps having that kind of explanation would have calmed her. I would never know.
I finally agreed to move out when she thrust college applications and apartment listings at me. She told me it made her sad to think that I was spending my life looking after her instead of living it. I couldn’t help it, I agreed with her. All I wanted was to do right by her, so I agreed and found my own place a week or so after that.
Jeremy and I decided to get it together. He agreed not to bring any electronics. He never stopped believing me after finding me in that locker so many years before. Living together was a breeze. We both had steady jobs, paid our bills on time, made compromises and bought our own food (but we still shared with one another). That year, things were perfect. We even fell in love with one another after a while. We became a couple, much to the happiness of our parents who had watched us grow up together. Mom was particularly enthused about the situation. She even began talking weddings after a while. While Jeremy and I were certainly happy at the time, it had only been seven months since we began dating. However, the notion didn’t seem to ward him off.
As the months went by, the memory of that horrible static seemed to slip away. Happiness made its roots in me, permanently it seemed. I was no longer paranoid. I still didn’t want to get a television or a radio, but I no longer felt like walking past the electronics section of the local Wal Mart would set off any booby traps. I slept easier, the nightmares I’d had since childhood seemed to waste away into nothing but surreal ones about talking animals and things of the like. I felt exquisitely normal.
A year and a half after Jeremy and I began dating, he proposed to me. I, overjoyed and ecstatic, accepted. My mother and Thomas were overjoyed as were Jeremy’s parents. After so long of having a three person family, we were expanding. Jeremy had three older siblings, two of whom had already married and had children. His parents were model in-laws. They adored me and welcomed me into the family long before then, when Jeremy and I met in kindergarten. His siblings were already like family to me too. In fact, his two older sisters were my bridesmaids. His brother and Thomas were his groomsmen.
The wedding was delightful. It was a quiet, intimate ceremony with only close friends and Jeremy’s family. Only 30 people were in attendance, but that’s what made it so wonderful. It felt safe, wholesome, and warm. A beautiful summer day, our alter was two willow trees that stood side by side in the park beside a small pond. We didn’t decorate much, we simply had some clean, white chairs for patrons and a few vases of colorful spring flowers.
While my fears had quelled somewhat, I still refused to have any kind of speaker system at the reception for music. Instead, I hired a string quartet. Everyone loved it. It was so ‘vintage’. I will never forget that day. It will always be the brightest light in the ebony void that was my life beforehand.
But all good things must come to an end.
We moved from our apartment not long after the wedding, deciding that in order to start a family, we would definitely need more space.
The most generous wedding gift we’d gotten was a $25,000 check from Jeremy’s uncle, who played the stock market. He told us a nest egg takes too long to grow, so he wanted to give us a fresh start. We took that check and put a down payment on a beautiful two story, colonial style house in the next town over. I loved every single thing about that house. From its sky-blue shutters, to the clean white pillars that held up the awning over the porch.
Moving day was almost like a big family gathering. Everyone seemed to be there helping us move all of our stuff in and unpack. We settled in so easily, it was as if we’d lived there all of our lives. At the end of the day, Jeremy’s sister, Lillian, sat with us on our porch while her two kids played in the front yard.
She told us that she’d gotten us a special house warming present earlier that week and that it would be arriving within the next few days. Both Jeremy and I were overwhelmed, we’d already been given the money to get our own home, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer.
When it came, I was alone, making sure that every surface in the house was clean and filled with our own clutter and knick knacks. I heard the door bell, answered, and signed for a very large box. I dragged it in and realized that the shape of the box resembled the kind that TVs are generally delivered in. I remember staring at it for a while, debating with myself about opening it. Those old twinges of anxiety played drums in my stomach and brain while I walked circles around the box, running my hand on the taped seams. I called Jeremy and told him what Lillian had sent us.
He was a little angry at first. He’d told Lillian that I was old fashioned and didn’t believe in having a TV (explaining away why we never had one). But, in my head, whatever had happened before had ceased and that maybe it was time to let it all go. I felt ready to set everything aside and grow up. I was 25 then, it seemed appropriate that I let all of the superstitions, fears, and paranoia slip from my hands and fall away. Before he got home, I unloaded the TV from its box, moved the coffee table against the wall in front of the couch, and carefully lifted the television onto it.
For a long time, I sat on the couch and stared at it, willing myself to plug it in and watch something. If anything, just to give myself that final push in to peace of mind. Jeremy came home while I was contemplating this. He watched me for a little while before plugging it in himself. I remember feeling my body jump a little off of the couch cushion when he turned it on. All that met us was a bright blue screen with the letters AUX in the top right-hand corner. Nothing was attached to it, we didn’t even have a disc player or a satellite service. Both of us chuckled at this. We finally had one and we couldn’t even use it.
For a few months, that’s how it remained. This giant black box merely sat in our living room, eerily catching our reflections when we walked past or sat down to read. We’d become so used to being unplugged that it was merely an ornament in our home for a long time. Eventually, I agreed that Jeremy could purchase a radio. I never even listened to the radio in our car. It had been years since I really listened to music on anything but an iPod. I never feared the static from one of those. I was never sure why. I felt that perhaps if we’d taken the step to get a TV, that a radio wouldn’t be so bad.
When he brought it home, I felt no sense of unease. This, to me, meant that I was really moving on. I remember listening to music with him on it that first night, dancing around our living room without a care in the world. We seemed to float away on it, losing ourselves in the plunky, up-tempo melody of some current top 40 hit.
Out of nowhere, there it was. That horrid, itchy, sporadic, menacing white noise. The endless void of millions of screams all rolled into one insane loop. I don’t know who got to it first, since both of us launched at it the moment it began to emit that gut twisting noise. Both of our hands laid on that off switch for a long time as we tried to catch our breath. I immediately went into a rant, telling Jeremy to take it back and never ask for one again. I told him to get rid of the TV too.
He calmed me for a moment, telling me that everything would be fine. That it was probably just a fluke.
Until we got the call.
This…thing…came back with a vengeance alright. It took not just one person, but five.
Jeremy dropped the phone and crumpled to the floor, consumed by an overwhelming grief. His brother, sisters, his brother in law, and sister in law, who had all been on a cruise together, had died. They were in the ship’s ball room, dancing and having a good time when the massive chandelier above them detached from its wires and crushed them. Because of this, his two nephews and three nieces were now orphans.
The funerals were all combined into one big one. There were so many people there…and as I looked into the saddened faces of each one I couldn’t help but blame myself. Perhaps if I had not allowed Jeremy to get that radio, their lives would be spared. They’d still be here. Their children…the looks on their faces still haunt me to this day.
Despite getting rid of the television and radio, it didn’t stop. It just kept coming in waves. No matter where we were, somehow it would find us. Our answering machine started it, taking Jeremy’s mother. She sank to the bottom of a river in a fishing boat while out with a friend. Her friend survived. Next, after having been off for years, the radio in my car suddenly howled at me one day, this time taking Jeremy’s father. He was a window washer, he’d become tangled in the ropes and part of one wrapped around his neck. Next, all of the televisions at the store suddenly went snow white while shopping one day. This time claiming his aunt and uncle in a skiing accident.
His other aunt and uncle went separately. One was shot in a robbery. The uncle who had given us the gift of our home, he shot himself on accident while cleaning his pistol.
The children…I don’t even want to reiterate what happened to them. They were under our care at that time. The investigations that came after that took four years of our lives away as well as them. In six years, Jeremy lost his entire family. He wasn’t able to handle it.
One day, I heard it from some guy’s boombox in the park. That was the day my Jeremy took his own life. Finding him was agony, I will never be able to get rid of the sight of his body lolling back and forth at the top of the stairs. I cannot erase cutting him down, desperately trying to resuscitate him, or watching the EMT zip up the body bag and roll him away from me.
Finally…it took the only two people I had left.
Seven months after Jeremy committed suicide, I moved back in with my mother. Even before then I’d been staying with her on and off, unable to walk into my own home without feeling the cold, withered hand of death grab me by the shoulders. I was nearly committed in that time. I became reclusive, increasingly paranoid, barely showered, and nearly refused to come out of my room unless I had to use the toilet. I didn’t eat either, I must have lost fifty pounds in that time frame.
After I moved back in, I didn’t change much. Thomas would come and visit every now and then, trying desperately to get me out of the house. I just couldn’t. I didn’t want to be cornered by it. I didn’t want to go out for groceries and have the store’s speaker system suddenly become corrupt. I didn’t want my car to suddenly sprout a new radio (I’d had it removed.) and explode into a mass of pure sound. I avoided everything and everyone for the most part. I didn’t talk on the phone, in fact my mother would constantly ask me if I’d unplugged it, which I did. I slowly began to feel the last strands of my sanity float away on the breeze, piece by piece.
Until one day, I was alone in the house and went downstairs to go to the bathroom. The upstairs one had a window that faced the neighbors, mother always forgot to fix it as it was stuck open for years. The neighbors played their radio around that time of day. I didn’t want to be in that bathroom if it went off. The downstairs bathroom had no window, so it felt safer.
As I sat there, feeling the cold porcelain of the seat press into my legs, I heard it. I panicked, pants wrapped at my ankles, shimmying around on that damn thing trying to find the source. When I found it, I cursed. Mom had gotten a shower radio that stuck to the wall on those little rubber suction cups, and it was screeching at me, echoing off of the tiled walls like the sound of a banshee’s cry. I fell forward, my feet tangling in my jeans, as I tried to reach it. I scrambled up and ripped it from the wall, slamming it to the floor under my foot. It just kept going, I felt I was about to snap. I continued to stomp on it until, of its own fruition, it ceased.
I stood there staring at it, feeling my bones trembling beneath my flesh. I flew from the bathroom and found my cell phone. When I dialed my mother’s number, all I heard was that horrid static, same with Thomas. I began bawling, screaming through my sobs at it to stop and to leave us be. Amid my screaming, my phone began to ring. I stared at the number on my caller ID, knowing full well what it was. I thought that perhaps if I ignored it, it would go away. That they’d be alright. I tried to rationalize that maybe the answering of the call was what really killed them and not the white noise.
Against my better judgment, I answered.
While crossing the road from the market with the groceries they’d gone to get for dinner, the breaks of a semi-truck had failed. It’d hit them straight on, obliterating them. The only possible form of identification was to look at their licenses, after digging for them through blood and debris.
There was barely enough of both of them for a cremation. I had their ashes combined with my father’s and laid to rest in this grave. I had their names added alongside his on his tombstone. At this point, I was the only one left alive to attend the funeral. The pastor spewed his usual garbage about release from this life and ascension into heaven. How could there be such a place when all I knew then was a never-ending plane of hell. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that my many loved ones were in some fluffy, cloud laden paradise when all of them died in such horrific ways. The graveyard around me had become a family plot at this point. So many of those grave stones had the names of people I’d once laughed with.
People I’d once cried with, shared a home with, shared a bed with…
And I was left alone. I couldn’t understand why. Why did this thing want me to suffer? What had I ever done? What had little seven or eight-year-old me done to bring down such a merciless wrath from this unseen force of nature?
I never learned why. That’s what makes it so terrifying to me, what always scared me. The question of why or how went silently unanswered. Some nights I felt I could hear a snickering in the blackness, mocking me.
In the years to follow, I became invisible. I never left my mother’s house. After I’d taken over the deed and inherited the property and all she owned, I turned that house into my own personal sanctuary. I rid the place of anything that could make a sound. I secured all of the furniture to the floor. I used only plastic utensils and dishes. I removed the curtain rods and secured the curtains to the wall. I did everything possible to create a space that even the most paranoid person could live in and feel safe. Of course, at that point, that person is who I had become.
I ordered a delivery service for groceries, I applied for disability payments, I even ordered from a weekly book club I found in the paper. I found a way to live completely unplugged. I even had the wiring in the house removed for fear that somehow, they’d even find a way to create that god-awful sound.
It’s been thirty years to the day since mom and Thomas were taken. I often see young children standing in front of the house, pointing and leering. I imagine I’ve become some kind of urban legend. I still have the newspaper clippings that reported the death of my final two family members. “A freak accident” is what they called it. The report went on to mention that I was the last remaining member of my family.
They’d dug back through the years and found every single incident, every last death that took them all away from me.
I’m only happy I never told another soul about the static. If I had, those idiotic children that taunt me from the curb would probably hold up radios or their phones and play that sound over and over until I officially went mad.
Well…whether they do or not, I know it will come for me one day. I know that this will be my final resting place and I won’t be found until my next food delivery comes. I know that by then I’ll be rotting into the floor boards, content on remaining a part of this house even in the afterlife. I don’t want to know where it took them, what strange underworld that thing sent my family to. I don’t want to be with them there. I want to be the one who beat it. I want to be the one who merely died in my sleep. I want them to know that I conquered it at long last. But I know it will try.
Somehow, someday, it will try come for me. It will cry out in the stillness and grab ahold of my throat and drag me down into the scorching, dry air of hell. It doesn’t seem to know that I have a plan.
I’ve sat with this ice pick in my hand as I’ve written all of this down. I’ve looked at its rusted, sleek features every now and again between pages and paragraphs. I’ve known what I want to do with it for years. I’ve only now worked up the courage to do with it what I know I should’ve done long ago to ensure nothing like this ever happens again. If it doesn’t try to take me, perhaps it will decide to continue taking bystanders. I can’t let that happen. If this thing works the way I think it does, then this plan will work.
You can’t torture what cannot hear you, now can you?
CREDIT : Nykolliboo
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Dear Mr. Livingston,
I understand that you are a man of business, often solely occupied in the matters that bring such a lively income to our estate. My good sir, I write you at this time imploring you to return home at once, for we have been visited by a great darkness at Whipertcher Estate. I shall recount to you the events of the last three days with as much accuracy as I can manage under the circumstances.
It began with a knock on the door and a strange girl begging shelter. She was but a little thing, perhaps ten years of age, drenched from the storm that tore across Whipertcher. Mrs. Livingston insisted that she enter. Ms. Devois and I fixed the little one supper. Mrs. Livingston supped with her, inquiring as to her name and why she was in this part of the country at night. The girl ate quietly, knobby little hands quivering, answering nothing. She only stared into her bowl of soup like a looking glass. I remember her reminding me of the little black rat that stole into the kitchen last week, sullen hands and features.
When the child finally spoke, her voice chimed off the glasses at the table.
“Do you not remember, Mother?”
“Whatever do you mean, child? Speak your name!”
“You never gave me a name.”
Mrs. Devois and I stared at one another, quite baffled. Mrs. Livingston’s face paled. She frantically pushed herself up from the table.
“Who are you? Who sent you? Tell me this instant, child! Which of my cruel neighbors has sent you to torment me this way?”
“You know who I am, Mother.”
“Why do you call me that? Why do you call me “Mother”? Oh, wicked child! Naughty child!” Mrs. Livingston wrung her hands, tearing the napkin from her neck.
Mrs. Devois and I knew not what to do with ourselves in this moment, for we stood paralyzed betwixt curiosity and bewilderment. My good sir, having served you for many years, I’ve known of your wife’s barren state. I’ve watched Mrs. Devois wash bloody garments month after month since the two of you wed ten years ago. Surely, the little villain was playing in a scheme, egged on by cruel neighbors who have been suspicious of your childless marriage. An evil thing indeed to do in return for such hospitality offered by the good Mrs. Livingston.
“I have no child! I have no child!” your wife clamped her hands over her mouth.
“Tell them, Mother.”
I rushed forward to seize the little thing, as Mrs. Livingston was in hysterics, violently weeping into her palms.
“Tell them who I am!”
“It’s not possible!” Mrs. Livingston sobbed.
I grabbed the girl by her shoulders and pulled her towards the door in the entryway. The little creature drew her head back and spat in my face. Mrs. Devois rushed to Mrs. Livingston’s side, fanning the distraught woman. I opened the front door and pushed the girl out into the rain.
“You shan’t return to bother Mrs. Livingston again. Run along now, you wicked thing!”
The girl turned. Lightning and thunder shattered the chorus of the pattering rain. The lightning illuminated the girl’s black eyes into the most hateful red. How my soul quaked at those eyes. I slammed the door and crossed myself at once. I returned to the dining room to find Mrs. Devois consoling your Mrs. Livingston. We put her to bed with a cross and a prayer, pleading the dear Lord to guard against the demons that haunt her sleep. Mrs. Devois and I extinguished each candle throughout the house, whispering in our hearts as the soft glow vanished between our fingertips.
Sleep seemed to dampen the previous night’s horrors, for in the morning, Mrs. Devois and I cheerfully set about making our Mrs. Livingston’s breakfast as pleasant as ever. A hot pot of tea and shortbread were served beside a poached egg. Mrs. Devois retrieved flowers for a centerpiece, placing the lovely little blues in a vase on the table. We waited patiently for our lady to emerge from her room.
We reheated the pot of tea twice while waiting. Mrs. Livingston didn’t enter the dining hall until nearly ten, her usual gaiety covered with wrinkles of exhaustion. Her normally kempt bun hung in disarray. The poor woman sat down in silence, sipping her tea without the usual deliberation accompanying her movements.
Finally, without turning her gaze from the vase said, “Those are lovely flowers, Mrs. Devois. They’re not the usual though. Pray, tell me what they’re called?”
“Forget-me-nots.”
Mrs. Livingston stopped the teacup inches from her lips.
“What… what did you say?”
“Forget-me-nots, madam.”
Mrs. Livingston spat, “Where did you discover them? Where did they come from?”
“Why, they must have sprung up within the last few days, madam. They’re growing all over the grass in front of the house!”
Your wife’s face turned a ghastly white.
“I want them all out! Throw them all out!” Mrs. Livingston rose rigidly, throwing her napkin down onto her plate, leaving the shortbread untouched.
“Y-yes, madam. I didn’t mea-“
“Throw them all out!”
Mrs. Devois quickly whisked away the vase. I followed Mrs. Livingston to the front room, where she had yanked open the drapes. I caught her as she stumbled back, gasping. Forget-me-nots covered the entirety of the front lawn, the rolling fog making the lawn appear as a blue sea in the storm.
Mrs. Livingston rushed to the door, scraping the locks open, jutting herself out the door.
“Madam! You’ll catch cold!”
Your wife cast herself upon the blanketed lawn. I hadn’t ever witnessed such behavior in a human being before. It was as though a wild beast had taken possession of the woman. She crawled on all fours, ripping flowers out in clumps. Mrs. Devois rushed to calm her. She attempted to hold her arms down, trying to take the flowers from her clenched fists. Mrs. Livingston struggled violently, thrashing about in her arms. I came to the aid of Mrs. Devois, and we managed to drag her back into the house. However, your wife bit Mrs. Devois’ arm, drawing blood and leaving marks from her teeth. The blood trickled all over the Persian rug in the entryway and all the way up the stairs.
My dear sir, we had no choice. We barred her in her bedroom, locking her door and placing a steel rod against it. She pounded at the door, howling. Oh, forgive us this treatment, Mr. Livingston. We meant no harm. Mrs. Devois tended to her arm, wrapping a bandage around, bloodying the white linen.
“You don’t understand! You don’t understand!”
We heard these howls from the bedroom for the duration of our morning. Violent sobs followed for hours. Mrs. Devois watched by the door with a pained expression and weariness in her bones. She and I traded places beside the door, ensuring that your wife posed no harm to herself. Finally, a silence rang from the room, lasting for hours. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when we unlocked the door.
Mrs. Livingston was squatting next to her bed, cradling a white blanket in her arms like an infant. Her hair hung about her shoulders in disarray, torn from a bun. She whispered incoherently into the blanket. We with the door open, staring in disbelief. Your Mrs. Livingston has always been a woman of propriety, never letting those in her company see her as anything but distinguished. I had always thought her to be an upright woman before God. I had always believed her to be benevolent. I had never questioned her as “good”.
Dear God, Mr. Livingston, did you know? In all of my decades of service, I had never heard such a tale as the one your wife wove, evoking the fabrics of disdain and darkness. She saw myself and Mrs. Devois standing in the doorway. Her eyes would not have been out of place in a mortuary. If asked to swear on my Holy Bible that the woman was alive, I could not have brought myself to do so.
Mrs. Livingston’s lifted her face from the blanket. Her thin lips quivered. In her agonized state, she had bitten off the top layer of flesh. Blood dripped down her chin, staining the white blanket in her arms. Mrs. Devois clasped her hands over her mouth.
“Dear Lord in Heaven… Madam?”
“Tell them who I am.”
A warbling hiss rippled through the room. I threw my arms around Mrs. Devois shoulder’s, stumbling back.
“Who is there?” I shouted into the wooden panels of the ceiling.
“Tell them who I am.”
Mrs. Livingston bit down on a clenched fist, shaking her head violently.
A black mist began to fall from the ceiling, and a small figure shrouded in darkness rose beside the bed. It was the devilish girl; cloudy red eyes illuminated in the mist. Mrs. Devois screamed. The girl bent beside Mrs. Livingston’s ear, gripping her shoulder with white hands.
“Tell. Them. WHO I AM!”
Mrs. Livingston began to weep, slamming her palms against the wooden floor, thrusting aside the bloody white bundle.
“Then tell them what YOU are.”
“NO! It’s not possible!”
“BRING NOT YOUR TREACHERY UPON THIS WOMAN!” I leapt forward, only to be driven back by the little figure snarling at me like a cat.
“Please… ” Mrs. Livingston begged, “I am innocent!”
She turned her face to us, tears streaming down a withered face.
“Oh, how I thought that my nightmares might end. How I thought that one night might bring comfort…”
The girl dug her nails into Mrs. Livingston’s shoulder. Your wife cried out in anguish. Finally, between sobs, she told us the cause behind this unspeakable evil.
“I was young. I had no choice! I had no choice!”
The girl threw back her head and emitted a hideous roar.
“I gave you away to a couple walking alongside the road where I birthed you. You were born in a field of forget-me-nots on a rainy day. Their fragrance still stings my nose with the stench of a broken soul. I was betrothed to James Livingston. My engagement would have been broken if anyone had found me out. I had no choice! You don’t understand! My family had no money. I was the last hope for my parents. We would have rotted in debtor’s prison!”
Our mouths gaped open. Our lady had not seemed capable of bearing a child, let alone at a young age. Oh, sir. Did you know?
“I was not at fault! The father of your body pushed himself upon me one night. Morris Angler! I was walking home one night when he attacked me! I wanted nothing of it! Now, I am unable to bear children to my husband. These years since your birth have wrought only the greatest cruelty! Oh, spare me! Oh, God! Spare me, for I have been broken!”
She keeled onto the floor, sobbing. The girl extracted her hand from your wife’s shoulder. The smoldering seethe of hatred slowly dissipated from her face into a look of consideration.
“Morris Angler.”
Again, the hiss echoed in our ears.
“He is the cause of my death. That couple treated me like a sick dog. They abandoned me. They left me to beg and starve. MORRIS ANGLER!!”
She leaned forward over the quaking Mrs. Livingston.
“We shall have our revenge, Mother.”
The creature stepped back and vanished, leaving behind a mist of blood.
Silence drifted into the room as the last rays of the day bled through the window. Mrs. Devois and I cleaned and bandaged the wounds raked on your wife’s shoulder. The five gashes were deep and required stitching. Her lips will require months to recover. We called on Doctor Tarwell to come tend to her at once. We have spent our days attending to your wife and the house with trembling hands and hushed tones.
Mr. Livingston, Morris Angler lives but three miles from our estate. Word has reached me that he was found dead in his barn late last night. Authorities think that he was attacked by an animal. His face had been torn through. His nether regions had been severed as well. But we know what has befallen the late Morris Angler. Oh, sir. Pray that this evil reside in our town no longer. Return home to your wife, who is under the care of those whom love her. She is ill with guilt and grief. She has injuries that will require months of repair and tending. She has the wound of a lifetime which will require perhaps the remainder of her lifetime to heal from. Return home to us as quickly as you are able.
May God watch over you,
Edgar Devois
|
“Name?” the man sitting across from my asked.
I coughed.
My mind had been wandering again. The man looked at me patiently.
“Name?” he repeated again.
“Edwin,” I replied. “Edwin Stroud.”
The man pursed his lips slightly as he checked the papers in front of him.
“Occupation?” He asked.
“Musician,” I replied.
His eyes looked up from the papers.
“S-sorry?” he said.
“Musician,” I repeated, smiling innocently.
“Hmmm, musician.” the man replied. Patronizing? Maybe just a bit. I was finding it a bit difficult to concentrate.
“Well, Mr. Stroud, why don’t you tell me about your ‘music’.”
The man was definitely patronizing me now. I wasn’t sure why. I wasn’t even sure who he was.
I struggled to focus my thoughts back as far as I could.
“It’s kinda strange. When I was a child, I suffered from extreme melophobia. You know what that is?”
The man nodded. He was looking at me very intently, not looking at me so much as looking into me.
“Well, all through my childhood, I had this fear. I would freak out if I heard music. Any kind of music. Do you know how difficult that is? How hard it is for your family? T.V. with the sound off. We used subtitles. No kids parties or days out, I was homeschooled, because I would just go berserk at any tune. I had panic attacks; music sounded like dragging nails down a blackboard. It had a physical presence, stifling me, battering me with its rhythm. I guess my home life was pretty stressful; My parents started drinking a lot. I can’t blame them, who would want a child to ruin their life. A child that, by one way or another, you love unconditionally. Yeah, I guess it was tough. Anyway, as I said my parents used to drink quite a bit, and I’d hear them shouting as I would go to sleep. That became normal. No lullabies, just tension and anger and fear.
One night, I remember, we did our usual bedtime routine. Trying to give my father a hug, him not being able to look at me, and me hugging his leg, his whole body tensed as though it took all his willpower not to lash out at me. My mother, smelling of raw alcohol, smothering me with sarcastic cooing and forced affection. I went to bed, and the usual nocturnal arguments began. They soothed me. Then I heard something, I guess it was music. I was half asleep, but the music seemed beautiful. I soon fell asleep, and the music was just a memory.
The next day, I asked my father about the music he was playing last night. He said that he and my mother had decided to split up, because it was a ‘self-destructive’ situation, that her drinking was way out of hand, and that he had put some music on after she’d gone, I guess it was a kind of parting ‘fuck you’. He never played that song again.
I figured I was over this phobia, but after never hearing music as long as I could remember it took a huge amount of willpower to actively seek it out, do go against everything that my brain was telling me not to do, like skydiving or bungee jumping. I remember I must have been about twelve, my dad was out and I turned the TV on. I turned the volume up slowly, tentatively. The saccharine advert jingle shot like electricity down my spine, it sounded discordant, metallic, it was jarring in its ferocity. I couldn’t move. I wasn’t over it. I started to panic, I collapsed on the floor. My father found me about an hour later, in the fetal position, rigid with fear and covered with sweat. We got rid of the TV.”
I blinked, the memories fading fast, and I was back in the room. The man was still staring intently at me, the fluorescent lights reflecting in his glasses. He pushed them up the bridge of his nose slightly and leaned forward, almost imperceptibly.
“Then what?” he said.
As he finished the sentence, his mouth curled in the corner as if he was somehow humoring me by listening to this story.
“By the time I was fifteen, my dad was hardly around. He would be out drinking all the time, and doing whatever else he did now that my mom had left. I found I could go out at night, There was less of a chance of idiots with loud car stereos, or TV noise, even people singing used to make me feel weird. So my dad would be out, and so would I. I was pretty much nocturnal, I would sleep in the day, and used earplugs in case the local ice cream van came round and sent me over the edge with its tinny, feedback-like howl. I would casually observe people from the safety of the darkness, Not like a peeping tom, I’m not a pervert or anything, I’m nothing. No-thing.
I should say at this point, that where we lived was not far from the edge of town. About half an hours walk away, and I used to head out on my own, in the dark (doesn’t that sound crazy nowadays?) and just listen to the night sounds. One night I was out laying on my back, looking at the stars when a car drove past and stopped. It was about a quarter of a mile away, I would guess. A man got out, and I could hear the music again. It was sublime. I wept, the melodies were incredible. The car drove off, but the singing remained. I walked towards where the car seemed to have been, but the music had stopped. I was alone in the silence again.
I decided to carry a tape recorder with me, just in case I heard it again. I mean, I couldn’t listen to most music, but this was somehow different. It didn’t terrify or smother. It comforted, it soared, I had to find it again. It was a few months later, I was heading out on my usual night time walk when I heard it again, it was somehow different than before, quieter too, but still good. I took out my tape recorder and hit the record button, hoping it wasn’t too low to register on the rubbish built-in mic. I wandered around, trying to find where it was coming from, but it just seemed to hover on the air. I looked around, but my only other witness in this search was an old dog resting under a bush. But before I could trace it, it was gone. Over the next few years, I managed to record some more tunes, but they were so rare and fleeting that I started to treasure each cassette, and hid them away from my father in case he smashed them like he smashed all the records when I was young. This was my music.”
“So you hid this music from your father? Why was that?” The man didn’t even seem to be blinking now. He was completely emotionless.
“Yes,” I replied.
“He wouldn’t have understood. All these years of not having music in the house, then finding my cassettes with beautiful music, it would have been too much for him. He got angry when he was drunk, and he was usually drunk.”
“I don’t think that’s the reason,” said the man. “Is it?”
These last two words were very deliberate. ‘Is. It’. Maybe he thought I was lying about my father. Maybe he thought I didn’t have these wondrous tapes hidden away.
“We found your tapes,” he said. “There were lots of them.”
I knew I wasn’t lying.
“When did you start making your own music?”
Again, the sarcastic tone. I didn’t understand why he was patronizing me.
I smiled.
“You know, it took a long time to figure it out. I was having to make do with finding these songs just floating on the air. They didn’t happen very often, but I would treasure them when they did. Then I found out how to make this music myself. It was not as hard as you’d think. The tricky part was finding musicians up to the job. Like they say about stories, everybody has one good one in them. Some have more than one. The trick is to get them to make music for as long as possible. That was where I needed to study, to tease these songs out of the chaos of thought, to write longer songs. At first, like any musician, I was clumsy, hours of work might only produce a few chords, maybe the beginnings of a melody. I did learn, though, and became more productive. The songs started to flow, and I began to fall in love with music. Because of my condition, I could only work with one musician at a time. I would record what they had to offer, then move on. I would mix the separate recordings together to make whole songs. I had to travel around to find people to work with, and I found talent everywhere.”
The expression on the man’s face seemed to change for the first time. He still looked ‘into’ me, but now he didn’t like what he saw. He was done humoring me now.
“You know, we also found your recording studio….”
The statement seemed to hang there, unfinished. Was he waiting for me to add something?
“Really? Impressive, isn’t it?” I replied, and smiled again, hoping to diffuse the tension that was quickly rising in the atmosphere.
“You were certainly busy,” the man replied through gritted teeth, directly to me, before turning to speak into a tape recorder. “For the record, I am showing Mr. Stroud the photos we took at his recording studio.” His tape recorder was just like mine.
He placed one photo after another on the table in front of me, all taken in a darkened filthy room. In the middle of the room was a sturdy wooden chair with leather straps hanging from the arms and legs. There was a dark patch on the floor. A microphone hung at about head height in front of the chair. One photo of a small tin containing teeth of various sizes. One photo of a severed finger. One of a metal table with various tools. One of a tape recorder.
“And now, the musicians,” he said.
The photos were falling faster on to the table now, as though the man didn’t want to even touch them in case he was somehow tainted by them. Photos of bloodied bodies, people of all ages, brutalized beyond recognition.
“This poor bastard,” he said as he threw the last photo down. “This poor soul lasted for three days after we found him. He died the day we got to you.”
“Ah, yes. He was very resilient,” I replied. “I had a week’s worth of music from him.”
I smiled again. The man looked at me and I could see his jaw tense.
“Take him away,” he said.
Two large men walked in through the door and hoisted me to my feet.
“It’s such wonderful music,” I said. “Beautiful, beautiful music.”
I was dragged down the corridor back to my room. I fell asleep to the sound of music drifting down the corridors.
|
Our trip started in late February as my three friends, John, Steve, Max, and I drove my truck deep into the backwoods of Boxwood Gulch to follow the North Fork of the South Platte River. Steve owned a cabin up in the backcountry, so we left my truck there and began our 57 mile hike into the wooded terrain following the river.
We had all of our camping and fishing gear packed, and enough food to hopefully last us the 3 day journey both ways. The pre-spawn bass wouldn’t be an easy catch once we reached the hole, but if we were going to endure this brutal cold, we wouldn’t go home without a fight. As we first set out in the early morning, a few light snowflakes began to fall. The terrain was heavily wooded and uneven making for slow going, but the cool mountain air rustled through the trees and sunlight streamed through the canopy, making the snowflakes glint and shimmer as birds chirped overhead. It was going to be a near perfect trip.
We stopped for a quick rest a few hours in. The weather had been slowly worsening since we had left, but it was only then that we realized how bad it had really gotten. The snow was whipping around us in a blinding flurry as the wind howled. The crooked, mangled trees creaked and swayed violently, almost threatening to snap in two. The ground had already accumulated a good 6 inches of snow.
It was about midday, but the sky was black.
And I don’t mean dark due to the ever intensifying storm; I mean that in between the gaps in the clouds, there was no blue, just solid black.
None of us really made a note of it at the time as it was hard to notice through the thick cascade of snow and the limited visibility. After continuing our hike for some time however, it became all too apparent that something was wrong.
In addition to the sky, we also realized that there was nothing in the distance.
There should have been some mountains or something like there had been at the start, but no matter which way we turned, the world only seemed to extend fifty or so feet around us, then it disappeared into the blizzard.
It was nighttime now, or at least, it was dark out. My watch however, read 2:00 in the afternoon.
As we walked forward, new things slowly came into view, but everything behind us disappeared, and although we could progress further, we couldn’t seem to double back. Once we left something behind us, we couldn’t reach it again. Steve had forgotten his lighter a little while back when we stopped to eat, but when we tried to turn around and go back, we were greeted by a wall of snow and fog impossible to see through.
Our flashlight’s beams didn’t penetrate the fog; they stopped as they hit it as if it was a physical wall. Tendrils of vapor danced across the indistinct surface, and the grey void behind it seemed to extend into eternity.
Curious, Steve slowly reached out and moved his hand into the fog. First his fingertips disappeared, and then his whole hand vanished into the haze. We all stood in disbelief, looking at the wall which was impossibly tall and extended as far as we could see. There was no real gradient to it. Things didn’t fade into the distance, there was a clear line where the wall began, and nothing was visible beyond that point. We were making a note of all this when Steve muttered something.
“What was that?” I asked.
“I . . .” He stammered, “I can’t feel my hand.”
He said this slowly, as if realizing it as he said it. Puzzled, he retracted his hand slowly, and then screamed.
His glove was shredded, almost disintegrated, and his hand looked like it had been forced through a wood chipper. Deep gashes revealed white bone underneath, and what fingers were left were stripped clean. We all panicked.
“Oh God, Oh God! This is bad!” Max cried.
Steve simply stood clutching what was left of his hand and hyperventilating. We had to get him to a hospital or he would certainly bleed to death, but we were almost a day’s walk from Steve’s cabin which was already remote enough. We were all frantically checking our phones for a signal when the worst happened.
Steve fainted. His eyes closed, his legs buckled, and he fell forward . . . into the fog.
None of us noticed at first, but when we finally did, all we could see were his legs protruding from the mist. We immediately, without thinking, rushed to pull him out. We grabbed his legs and strained to drag him back into view. Before we even saw him however, we immediately regretted doing so. We somehow knew what we would find.
The thing we dragged out was not Steve. Not anymore.
All of his skin was cleaved off, his ribcage ripped open with his entrails spilling out, and his face instantly burned into my vision, becoming an afterimage that haunts me to this day. Not merely because it was horrendously mutilated, not merely because his eyes had been torn out leaving only empty sockets, but because it smiled at me. A big wide smile that started small, but the gashes in his face allowed it to literally stretch . . . from ear . . . to ear.
Max screamed and shoved Steve’s mangled body back into the fog. We ran as fast as we could, the only way we could, deeper into the woods. Just as before, the snow and fog parted before us, but swallowed up everything we left behind. As we ran and ran, the scenery around us began to slowly change, the trees surrounding us were now withered and dead; the grass was flattened and bleached white.
In fact, everything around us was lifeless and dull. Colors had all but disappeared leaving only shades of grey and an intensified feeling of loneliness and death.
“Guys,” I shouted while I ran, not daring to stop for even a minute, “We can’t turn around and go straight back, but maybe we can circle around back to Steve’s cabin. Then we can get the truck and get the hell out of here!”
John and Max nodded their heads and we turned 90 degrees right and continued running. Eventually, we ran through what appeared to be a herd of deer. All of which were laying on the ground. Grey and lifeless, hacked to pieces. Blood soaked the snow covered ground.
As we ran through the heard, dodging corpses, it was hard not to notice that their dead lifeless eyes seemed to follow us.
When we felt confident enough that we wouldn’t be doubling back on ourselves, we turned towards Steve’s Cabin – towards safety.
We ran for at least another hour, eventually however, none of us could run any longer. Our bodies simply wouldn’t allow it, and we were forced to stop. After some time, Max, John and I managed to get a fire going despite the snow and damp tinder. We had hoped that it would bring some sense of warmth and security, but we were wrong.
The flames were a bright orange hue, bleeding some color into the greyscale world. It clearly did not belong, nor did we.
The longer the flames crackled and popped, the more we began to hear something: distant and quite at first, but slowly growing closer, louder, and more numerous. A chorus of bloodcurdling wails and moans soon filled the stagnant air around us.
Focused on the fire and pretending to be safe, mesmerized by its beauty, we didn’t immediately notice a mangled deer carcass slowly dragging itself out of the fog and into view.
Nor did we notice the second . . . nor the third.
Finally, we snapped out of our trance just in time to scramble to our feet in terror as a myriad of different animal carcasses clambered out of the fog, drawn to the strange light of the fire. We were intruders in their world. I was paralyzed by fear, unable to breath. The corpses moved with a surreal and broken haphazard toss of limbs, as if poorly animated puppets.
I turned to my friends to find that they were no longer beside me. They had taken off running, leaving me behind. I turned around to run after them, but something grabbed me by my shoulder. I didn’t need to turn around to know what it was. I could tell by the hand gripping my shoulder. A hand that looked as though it had gone through a wood chipper.
I flailed and managed to free myself before it could get a good grip on me and took off running. I didn’t look back. No way did I want to see that face of what was once my friend.
I could no longer see John or Max, and I assumed that they must have been ahead of me, but I was the one with the keys to the truck and Steve had the keys to the cabin! They wouldn’t be any safer if I couldn’t meet up with them, so I ran and ran faster and for longer than any human could possibly do under normal circumstances.
Finally, after god knows how long, I could faintly make out a structure in the distance. It was the cabin. I felt a twinge of hope. The wails continued to ring out in the night air, but I seemed to have a lead on them at the time.
I reached the truck, unlocked it, and jumped inside. I scanned the area for Max or John, but could see neither. I couldn’t just leave them, but I couldn’t wait forever either! I sat sweating and shaking nervously as the wails grew closer and louder. I had just about made up my mind to leave when I could suddenly make out someone sprinting towards me. It looked like Max! I started up the truck and motioned for him to run faster.
But for some reason . . . I found myself subconsciously pressing the switch to my left, locking all of the doors.
My instinct told me that something was wrong. I looked down at my hands, they were shaking like crazy.
I looked back up and Max’s horribly mutilated face was pressed up against the driver’s window, staring at me, smiling. He was trying to open the door.
I slammed my foot on the gas and drove off, shaking like a madman and holding back the vomit.
As I drove home, the sky slowly brightened back up into a blue hue and I could eventually see the sun breaking through the clouds. It was 9:00 in the morning. I began to see other cars on the road and the people inside waved at me as I waved at them. Nice normal people. I went straight home and asked my girlfriend to marry me.
I’m sorry. That’s just not true.
I’m sitting in my house now, door locked and barricaded, windows boarded up, and I’m writing this story . . . and I felt happy for the first time in a long time writing that ending. I hardly even remember what a blue sky looks like, but I just wanted to picture it in my mind one last time. I just needed to imagine a happier world, because in reality, that’s not how it ended.
The truth is, as I drove, the sky did not brighten up, the sun did not reappear, and the fog still surrounded me as it now surrounds my house. I hear wailing all around and knocks at my door constantly, and when I look through the peephole, all I ever see is some THING smiling at me. The stench of death is everywhere. The phone doesn’t work, the TV and radio broadcast nothing but static. I hear the locks on my door being undone at night and I must constantly keep watch and re-lock them. I’m simply waiting for the night they get into my house when I forget the check the door, or when they break through a window, or when I wake up in the middle of the night to see them next to me. Their smiles . . . inches away from my face.
|
This is a call for help.
I don’t know how much longer I have. My iPad, my last connection to the outside world, is down to 10 percent. A few more minutes to send out this desperate message is all I have left.
You see, I’m stuck here, and I guess I have to fill you in on how exactly I got stuck in this shitty situation.
It was an ordinary day. I woke up, got ready for the day, ate breakfast, school, homework, you know, the daily routine. As per my routine, to finish the day, I was to take a shit.
So I did.
Before anything else, I have to say that my bathroom is different from others. For reasons I don’t know, the owner had a stall for the toilet, like those you’d find in those shitty public bathrooms.
Perhaps he didn’t want to see his fucked up face in the mirror the toilet faced.
It didn’t really matter though. I’ve gotten used to closing and locking the stall every time I used the toilet. Call it a force of habit, or an obsessive compulsion to use everything I come across.
Next to the stall was a window and a narrow ledge, where I put all my tissue. The ledge caused a small gap between the stall door and the window. Great for stuffing more tissue or the occasional magazine I’d bring along.
Nothing absolutely extraordinary or strange, but it was different.
Anyway, I pulled my pants down, sat, and felt the cold plastic on my bare ass. With nothing left to do but let nature take its course, I pulled out my iPad and started reading.
Of course, I started reading some creepypasta. It was late, quiet, and I was all alone: a perfect time to get a few goosebumps.
As I was reading and literally getting the shit scared out of me, I noticed a faint scratching on the stall door. It was as if a dog was scratching the flimsy plastic door except it was slower… more deliberate.
It stopped moments after I noticed it. I was unnerved. I didn’t have a dog. It couldn’t have been the wind. Those noises couldn’t have been fake.
I was scared as fuck, but I dismissed it. It must have been the plastic flexing from the temperature. Yeah, that was it.
I continued to read. I was almost done shitting, to be honest, but I couldn’t just leave my seat without finishing the story.
Then I heard a drop, a soft thud. The stack of tissues wedged between the door and the window collapsed. It fell forward out from my reach.
I checked the window outside. The night was as still as it could be. It couldn’t have been the wind. It was something else, something from the inside.
No, no, I was scaring myself. I slowly chuckled to myself. The rolls were probably just unbalanced in the first place.
So I continued. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong though. I set aside my iPad and slowly unlocked my stall. I gave it a slight push, but it wouldn’t budge. I reasoned that it must have been rusty.
I pushed harder, and harder, and harder, as hard as my seated position could muster, yet it wouldn’t move. It was as if someone on the other side was pushing back, holding me here.
I was panicking. Some malevolent force was keeping me here. I knew what was to happen next. I would be killed, or flayed, or mutilated, or driven to insanity.
The scratching began again. Louder, louder, louder. I could feel the plastic slowly being ripped to pieces.
I swear, it was toying with me.
Then I saw it.
A hand, if you could call it that, crept up to the gap, reaching in. This was it.
The hand was a rotting shade of green and grey, like it had just freshly dug itself out of the grave. It was putrid, and overpowered the already foul smell of the stall.
It’s slender, bony fingers ventured into my stall, grasping for something, seeking to rend the flesh from my bones.
I was frozen in fear. Imagine an end like this, caught with my pants down, found dead on a toilet.
The hand inched, closer and closer. I could almost feel the cold death permeating from its cold, pale flesh.
I was ready to die.
It suddenly rushed.
I closed my eyes and screamed. Tears came out of my eyes, sweat came out of every single pore, hell, I even pissed myself on the toilet. I waited. A few seconds, a few slow agonizing minutes. I did nothing.
I mustered up my courage and opened my eyes. It was gone! I was saved. I breathed deeply. No, I wasn’t ready to die, and I’m glad I didn’t.
I pushed the door once more, and I was greeted by an empty bathroom.
It took me awhile, but eventually, I realized.
My tissue.
It was gone.
All of it.
This is a call for help.
Please, somebody save me.
I like triple ply.
Credit To – Urich Victorino
|
Jonathan sat trembling in the dark. He stared at nothing, his eyes not penetrating the circle of blackness that surrounded him. A single lamp illuminated the round table he sat at, allowing him enough light to see the edges of it and nothing more. A tea pot and half-empty cup sat in the centre. With a trembling hand he reached toward it and took it towards his lips, not truly looking at it as he drank. He set the cup down on a plate. The cup rattled against it, the only sound save for the thunder that rumbled in the distance.
He heard a switch flick. Jonathan shut his eyes for a moment, temporarily blinded by the harshness of the light that filled the room. He opened them again to see a small, white kitchen. A single window and two doors broke the array of cabinets the covered the walls.
Standing in an open door was Chris, Jonathan’s friend and housemate. He had a hand on the light switch.
“John, what are you doing? It’s after midnight!” Chris asked.
Jonathan kept staring forward and didn’t reply.
“John, answer me. This is the third time I’ve caught you up like this. What are you doing?”
After a moment’s pause Jonathan replied, speaking in a dry, quiet voice. “I had the dream again.” He still stared unblinking toward the window, though he didn’t seem to notice what was behind it. Chris flinched.
For months now, Jonathan had been experiencing the same recurring dream. In it, he stood outside his own life, looking in at it. He saw himself live his own life, going through the same daily routine and experiences over and over again. However, something about it all seemed unreal. All his actions were artificial, all his conversations seemed planned. A strange feeling that something wasn’t quite right filled him and grew and grew. Slowly, and so gradually he barely noticed, his actions were replaced with words. Instead of seeing things happen he read them in a massive wall of text that described his every movement. His conversations came in quotation marks which he read instead of spoke. Soon his entire life seemed to be a novel, running forward toward a conclusion that was always surrounded in haze. When he got to the end, he always awoke, but the feeling never left. Even sometimes when he was awake he began to lose his feelings of normality. For brief moments, barely noticeable, he saw objects described in text rather than in their own form, and his own movements seemed to be described by a nameless narrator.
Chris sighed and walked forward. He rested a hand on Jonathan’s shoulder and spoke in a reassuring voice. “Listen, John, I know you are worried. But you have to remember, it’s just a dream! You have been very stressed lately and started having nightmares. It happens, and its nothing to worry about.”
Jonathan chuckled slightly. “Oh no, no it isn’t.”
“What do you mean? Look, John, get back to sleep. You’re starting to worry me.”
For the first time that night, Jonathan stood and faced Chris. He was taller than Chris, and the shadow he cast obstructed Chris’ face. “Don’t tell me you haven’t had that feeling! That creeping, inching suspicion that something isn’t right? Doesn’t everything just seem too dramatic, too convenient? THIS ISN’T HOW REALITY SHOULD BE! THIS ISN’T HOW PEOPLE SHOULD BE SPEAKING, IT ISN’T HOW THEY ACT!” Jonathan realized he was shouting and stopped. He breathed heavily and tried to calm down, resting his head in his hands.
Chris looked at him with worried eyes. “Alright, John, here’s what we are going to do. Just go back to sleep for now. Tomorrow we are going to make an appointment with Dr. Limestone. She helped you with the dreams before, and…”
“No.” Jonathan said, shaking his head. “No, I am not going back to Dr. Limestone! She isn’t going to fix this, she isn’t going to solve the problem. She isn’t part of it and I don’t even think she is a character.”
“John, what are you talking about? A character in what?”
“THE BOOK! Don’t you get it yet? I don’t know if it’s a comedy, or a drama, or what… But we are all part of it, and I don’t think she is.” That was the most horrifying part of his dreams. He felt as if hundreds of eyes were reading the text along with him, learning his every movement as if they were plot points in a story. He still had the feeling at that very moment, that in a strange, twisted way, he was being watched.
Chris stared at him, not knowing what to say. Jonathan stood up out of his chair and faced him, holding his hands in front of himself as if pleading Chris to understand. The tea cup fell from his hand, shattering on the ground. “Look, isn’t this all just too convenient? Doesn’t it ever feel that way? Listen to that thunder. Doesn’t it seem like a perfect setting? And everything is like that! The lights when you entered, the tea cup, by god, even the way I’m standing! This isn’t how things work! They don’t come together to make themes! Weather shouldn’t just suit my mood like this. Do you not see it!?”
Chris was taken aback. “Well uhh… John, that’s all just ridiculous. Storms happen, whether you are angry or not. The tea cup was an accident, and we can get a new one. Now what is this about Dr. Limestone? What do you mean she isn’t a character?”
Jonathan went back to holding his head in his hands. “I know I am not going to see the doctor because she hasn’t been described. I have no idea what she looks like.”
“What?”
“If this was real life, then there would hundreds of little, insignificant things happening. I would know dozens of people and unimportant details. But this isn’t real life, and anything that isn’t part of the story won’t be described. I am not going to see Dr. Limestone. Outside of this conversation, she doesn’t exist, and we don’t even know what she looks like.”
“John, that’s ridiculous! This is beside the point…”
“Really? Describe her.”
Chris opened his mouth to respond, then stopped. He realized he truly had no idea.
“Well, she was a psychiatrist…”
“that had helped me with the dreams before? Is that what you were going to say? Because that was established for this conversation. You have no idea what she looks like, do you?”
Chris paused. That was exactly what he was going to say, down to referring to Jonathan in the third person. It did seem odd. “Well that doesn’t mean anything! We’ve just forgotten, that’s all. We haven’t seen her in months. Anyway, it isn’t important, what is important is that…” Chris said.
“STOP TRYING TO RATIONALIZE WHAT SHOULDN’T BE! There is no reason for us not to know what she looks like. It’s just a freaking plot device, that’s all it is. Even what you just did there, trying to change the topic to hide parts that haven’t been fleshed out! This isn’t how people act Chris.”
“Well, all right, but still that doesn’t mean anything. It’s just one person.”
“Oh really? Describe our neighbor’s to me. Describe your PARENTS. Describe anyone who isn’t directly related to this conversation, and I will believe you.”
Chris stared at him in shock, not knowing what to say. He searched his mind for anything, for his neighbours face, for his parent’s image, and found nothing. Over and over again he tried and came up blank.
“Well… Oh god… I don’t know. Maybe we are all just tired.” Chris said.
“Thank you Chris. Haha, Chris or Christ, my want to be protector and savior, who shines a light into my darkness! Nice imagery there, eh? Just like the storm? Alright then. What did you have for breakfast this morning?”
“I don’t know! It’s not important!”
“EXACTLY! ITS NOT IMPORTANT! We don’t know anything that isn’t directly important. Why is that? Why the hell should that be? It’s just too god damn convenient! Look, if this is actually a house we have been living in, you should be able to answer me this question at least. What is behind that door?” Jonathan pointed toward the closed door at the other end of the kitchen.
“I… I don’t know. I don’t know what to say.”
“Exactly! There is no reason for two people who have lived in a household for years to not know what is behind a single door. It just wasn’t relevant when you turned on the lights, so it wasn’t described. ”
“Alright John, alright. Say you are right and we are just in a story, what then? Do we open the door?”
“I don’t know. It is there for a reason now, we have drawn attention to it. Now there has to be something important.”
“Oh god, so now you think just be talking about things we can influence the freaking universe? That’s insane.”
“No, it must be! Look, it’s like the tea. I had the tea so that the rattling glass and the broken cup could represent my emotions. Now that we have drawn attention to that door, it must represent something. This is how it works, yes? You turned on the light, flooding light into my darkness, but I denied it and put you into my shadow.” For a second he closed his eyes. He hadn’t seen Chris hit the switch, but the words “he had a hand on the light switch” flooded his mind in black lettering. “It’s all foreshadowing! So when the kitchen had two doors, one open and one closed, there is something important behind the closed one. Chekov’s Gun, right? You came in from one to help me sort this out in part one. Part two occurs behind that door.”
“Well what then, should we open it?”
“I don’t know. We don’t know what is behind it. We don’t even know what type of story this is!”
“That’s true… This could be a drama, an action, a comedy… That wouldn’t be too bad. Perhaps this is all just a joke!”
“Really? You want to live in a comedy? Do you realize people would be laughing at us, our every move? What if we are just two buffoons for people to mock? God, If we were just two cartoonish idiots, would we even have the intelligence to tell?”
“I… I hadn’t thought of that. It is still better then a tragedy.”
“I… I don’t know. Look, we can work this out. It can’t be an action, neither of us really knows how to fight or carries any weapons.” Jonathan spoke, realizing he established it as fact as he said it. “I don’t think it is a comedy, because we would probably be able to remember funnier things happening. Then again, maybe we wouldn’t as part of the plot… I don’t know.”
“Hopefully it’s a drama, or a romance. Imagine if this entire thing was just to set us up with some perfect woman?” Chris said hopefully.
“I don’t know. Look, we should be able to tell what this is from our surroundings. The writing and descriptions should reflect what the plot is. We should see foreshadowing, maybe we can pick it out.” A slow realization began to dawn on Jonathan. Though he kept guessing, in his heart he knew exactly what sort of story he was in.
“Alright, well then what can we learn from this kitchen?” Chris asked.
Jonathan thought for a moment. “Everything in this conversation, and the things we have talked about, revolve around myself. I think it is safe to say I am the main character here.”
“Alright” Chris said, nodding and following along. “Then what has happened to you recently?”
“I’m worried Chris. With the thunder, the darkness, the nightmares, the falling cup… I don’t think this is a happy story. Something bad is going to happen, and it is going to happen soon.” As he spoke, thunder once again boomed on the horizon, and a flash of lightning filled the window with jagged light.
Chris swallowed. “Alright then. Do we open the door? Neither of us knows what is behind it, I think it’s safe to say we weren’t supposed to know. Somehow you’ve broken the mold. What do we do?”
Jonathan squeezed his eyes closed and gripped the back of his chair. He hadn’t even realized he had stood behind it. His knuckles turned white. Finally, he spoke. “If this is the sort of story I think it is, I don’t think we have a choice. Either we go through that door and figure out what is behind it, or it is going to come and get us. If we are the main characters, then we should be safe. Usually they survive.”
“Usually? Not always?”
“Usually.”
Chris looked at Jonathan, then toward the door. “Alright then, we might as well get it over with. If I am the sidekick here, I guess that’s my job. I’m Christ anyway, right? I bring light into dark areas? I’m the sacrifice?”
“Chris! Don’t joke about that! Look, I don’t know…”
“Don’t worry! Like you said, we are safe, right? We are the main characters. We never die in the first act. Maybe it will just end up being a big joke anyway.”
Though he was still terrified, Jonathan slowly nodded. He couldn’t help but think that, by breaking their own plot line, they would no longer be safe as the heroes in a story. He feared to voice the complaint, as by saying it, he knew he would make it fact. He watched Christ walk forward and open the door carefully. The hinges squeaked as it opened, and a cloud of dust came into the kitchen. It was clear the door hadn’t been opened for a long, long time.
Beyond the door was near pitch black. Chris reached into a nearby drawer and took out a flash light. He turned it on and shone it into the darkness beyond, revealing a narrow wooden staircase that descended between two stone walls. He walked slowly down the stairs. Jonathan came behind him and followed into the unknown darkness.
Chris reached the end of the stairwell and paused. He turned to face into a small room, shining his light around.
“Dear.. Dear god John. This isn’t a comedy. This is a horror.”
Jonathan followed his gaze to find his worst fears confirmed. The floor of the room was covered with fine black dirt. Scattered across it were dozens of broken bones and skeletons along with ancient weapons. The walls were covered with blood red writing scrawled in dozens of languages, from ancient runes to modern letters in languages neither person could understand.
“RUN CHRIS! WE SOULDN’T HAVE COME HERE!” Jonathan shouted as he sprinted up the stairs. The entire building began shaking. The low rumbling he had once thought was thunder became a continuous noise that seemed to come from every direction at once. He ran toward the kitchen, but stopped in the doorway. The cabinets at the far end of the kitchen began to lose their form. They blurred then turned into written words, becoming replaced with descriptions of themselves. “Large white cabinet, with a silver handle. Small thin cabinet, with a golden handle. Electric oven, four stoves on top, black wit rnis of stl as black mltae slag asdf sdg
dsg sdfsdg&helli
p;” sdg dsg sdfg
sdgf gf
f
sd
d
The letters began to slide down, mixing and forming indecipherable gibberish before disappearing into an ever growing sea of inky darkness. Jonathan realized that, having found out the truth and broken his role, he had removed the very thing that held his plot together. By going outside his own story he had destroyed his fictional universe.
Chris didn’t stop when Jonathan did. He ran into Jonathan’s back, and they both fell forward. Chris didn’t seem to notice what was happening and crawled forward, calling to Jonathan to keep running.
“NO! DON’T GO IN THERE! IT ISN’T REAL!” Jonathan shouted. Chris screamed as he finally saw walls melt around him. He crawled and clawed back towards the stairwell, but was overcome by the descending wall of letters. His feet began to change slowly. His face contorted in a look of incomprehensible horror as he saw his legs dissolve into letters, then disappear forever. He kept crawling forward, but nothing he could do would change his fate.
Jonathan watched in terror as his friend dissolved into oblivion. The very universe he lived in was dissolving around him. He turned and began to run down the stairs again, preferring the horror of the skeletons to the certain death in the kitchen.
He stumbled at the bottom and collapsed onto the dirt floor. His head scraped along the ground, forming a long gouge over his right eye that blinded it with blood. With his good eye he turned to see his fate. The oncoming wall of letters kept coming down the stairs, then stopped at the base. The letters molded together, filling in all the white space and forming a black wall. Jonathan felt it, and realized it became part of the same stone wall that now surrounded him. Using the dropped flashlight he looked around. He was trapped in a square stone room no more than twenty feet across.
Jonathan sat in the centre of the room, not knowing what to do. Time seemed to slip away, and he had no knowledge of its passing. He had no idea if he was there for minutes, or days, or years, or even centuries. He simply remained trapped alone in the darkness. Though he may have guessed he was there for days, the flashlight never dimmed, and the blood never stopped pouring from his head. There was nothing for him to do and he felt no reason to move.
Alone with an eternity to himself, he began to contemplate what had happened. He thought oh his own life, of his existence, and how he had come to be. He thought about himself. It seemed wrong to think that way.’Himself’ implied he was an actual living being, and he wasn’t sure if that was truly fitting. It suited him more to think in the third person, as he would have been written in the story. Was it fair to say he was ever anything more then that, a fictional creation?
His thoughts turned to the room. He had no idea where he was, or how the poor souls who had become the skeletons that surrounded him had found their way into the small, black cell. Perhaps he would join them. Perhaps someone else would come to inhabit the small space, and he would be gone forever. Perhaps it had already happened, and without a sense of time he hadn’t realized it. The thought sent a chill down his spine. He didn’t know what was worse- an eternal life in a cage, or simply ceasing to exist with no sign that he ever was. With no sense of time in this strange world, who was to say that it hadn’t already happened? Perhaps both were true in their own way. He realized he needed to leave some kind of permanent mark, so that somehow, maybe, another person might know he existed. He had to tell his story. With all the time imaginable to spare, and no time at all to lose, he thought about what he had to do.
After some time, though he had no idea how much, he stood up again. As if compelled by an unseen force, he walked toward the wall. He dipped his hand in the blood that flowed down his face and put it on the stone. He made lines which formed letters, then the letters formed words, and finally the words formed a story.
It began “Jonathan sat trembling in the dark…”
Credit To – Eric
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I don’t know why, but for whatever reason, I’ve always been naturally sneaky. Without putting any effort into the endeavor, I was always scaring people, or at the very least making them jump. Sometimes even when I approached from the front, people wouldn’t notice me until I was right upon them. Then they would gasp and flinch, and ask me why I snuck up on them. I guess I’m just naturally quiet and unobtrusive.
As I got into my teen years, I got “better” at it. I would be there one moment, and after looking away for a mere second or two, I would be gone. Or of course, vice versa, appearing seemingly from out of nowhere. A joke even began to manifest itself around my high school, that I was related to, (usually the son of), Michael Myers, because of my seemingly preternatural ability to know the precise moment when someone was going to look away from where I was. (Also, being named Michael didn’t help any.)
I remember walking into anatomy class one day 20 minutes late, and the teacher never even noticed. Neither did most of the students. And I didn’t even try. I was late. Oh well. Wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last. I just walked in the door, set my books down and sat in my seat. Having a last name near the front of the alphabet, I even had a seat in the front row. When the teacher finally noticed, she said something to the effect of, “Oh, I’m sorry Michael, I had you marked as absent.” She corrected her “mistake” in the attendance book and went on with class.
It was around then that I began to actually practice this peculiar ability.
We all know what they say; practice makes perfect. And boy did I ever get good at sneaking. In fact, I think I actually added new verbs into my repertoire. I excelled at sneaking, and also creeping, sidling, slinking, and skulking. I actually bought and read a book on ninja techniques for hiding, diversion, and silent movement. I even went as far as to rent and watch all the old Halloween movies so I could study how Michael Myers actually did his silent creeping, despite him being a fictitious character from a movie, with all the benefits of special effects and camera trickery. Every October I volunteered to work in the local haunted house, and whatever room they placed me in was routinely noted by customers to be the scariest in the entire place. At some point I acquired a certain pride over my ability, happy that I was able to do something that few, if any others, could not. To say the least, I had gotten pretty proficient at this odd, god-given talent.
I know what you’re all probably thinking. At some point I’m going to begin using my stealth abilities to go on some sort of rampage, stalking and dispatching my enemies in terrifying, horror movie worthy murders. However, I am a peaceful and nonviolent young man, and had no designs with my ability for anything more than occasional benefits, and harmless practical jokery.
This preface concerning my ability is essential if one is to believe the veracity of my story, which happened a few years ago.
I don’t recall the exact day or date. I believe it was either Tuesday or Wednesday. I was still living with my father as a poor, but working 20 year old, on the corner of our street, in literally the corner of our exurb, bordered on three sides by a nice forest that went for a few miles before running into the lake. It’s not like we lived rurally or anything, but our section of town was pretty secluded and out of the way.
I returned home after work on the night in question, exasperated, and ready to relax. My pops wasn’t around, which wasn’t odd; he often spent long nights down at the bar with some of his old union pals. I unwound for a while, enjoying the freedom the empty house presented, playing my tunes as loud as I desired, and smoking like a chimney. After I deemed I had enjoyed a sufficient amount of recreation, I settled down and prepared to actually get some things done. Seeing as how there was a full load in the laundry basket, I grabbed it and headed for the basement where the washer and dryer were located.
When I was younger, I hated going into my basement. Like any other unfinished basement, it’s dark, it’s musty, it’s stone cold and hard, and there are innumerable shadows and places for all nature of dark beings to hide. Plus, when going down the steps into my basement, you’re walled in on both sides until you reach the very bottom, so there’s no way to see what manner of ghosts or monsters may be lurking down there, waiting to jump on you and rend you to pieces. As time went on however, that irrational fear began to fade, until it might as well have been a ghost itself.
So, basket in hands, I had decided to make the trip to the basement as stealthily as possible, always proud to use and practice my ability, especially when hindered in some way, (carrying something, noisy clothes, creaky floorboards etc.). Quick, deliberate steps, careful to distribute as much of my weight across as much surface area of my foot as possible, always planting toe first when going down stairs, I was successful in descending the basement steps silent as the grave, even skipping the third to the last step because there was simply no way to put weight on said stair without it making a creak of some kind. A diversion or additional ambient noise would be needed to use that stair without spoiling the effect. No need to turn on any lights. Although it was well after 8 pm, the summer sun was only starting to dip below the tree line, filling the basement with streams of auburn light falling in from the few windows. Besides, this was a stealth mission, no lights allowed.
When I got to the bottom step though, I froze. Since I had made absolutely no noise on the way down, it was easy for me to recognize odd sounds coming from the basement, just around the corner, to the right, (the left was just more wall). Nothing loud and over powering, just a low, gruff sort of grunting. There were other noises as well, accompanying the grunting; a soft kind of scraping maybe. The noises conjured visions of one of those gremlins from the movies of the same name trying to push a huge, heavy trunk across the floor, little by little. I wondered if perhaps my dad was the source of these sounds, but that didn’t make any sense. He certainly would have heard me jamming earlier, and he absolutely hates it when I crank up my tunes. It’s not like him to refrain from coming upstairs and telling me to knock off the racket. And what would he be doing down there for hours anyway? So if it wasn’t my father, it had to be some critter from the woods that found its way in and was probably trying to make off with some food it had found.
Many animals are known for their ability to hear and smell far better than us humans. I wondered if perhaps I were good enough in my stealth abilities to sneak up on an animal that was probably very aware of its surroundings, seeing as how they can be eaten, or any number of horrible things if they are not observant and alert at all times. It presented an interesting challenge to my strange skill.
So, I clenched my jaw, tensed my muscles, and prepared to make the attempt.
And once again, I froze.
The weird sort of grunting became a vocalization of a different sort, and louder. It sounded like actual words being spoken, albeit in a language I couldn’t comprehend. However, it still sounded as if it were a gremlin making the noise, or at the very least, some old crone who smoked 3 packs a day.
The language itself was intriguing. It sounded a lot like Latin, or something similar, but definitely was not. After a few moments of genuine interest, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I was too preoccupied with my musings to realize something.
This was no animal.
There was a person in my basement. A person who was doing god knows what, other than…..speaking in tongues? What the hell was going on down there? My heart rate instantly doubled, but being a strapping, macho young man, even with no one around I wasn’t about to let myself be scared by some strange old foreign woman, or whoever the hell had broken into my basement. It was then that I got a little angry. How dare someone break into my house. This was where I lived. What kind of dirtbag would just break into someone’s house? Right about the time my nape hairs and goose bumps had retreated to their normal positions, a new sound began emanating from the basement, this one louder, but completely alien to me. I had never heard anything like this before in my life, (or since) and describing it proves difficult. It was something between a powerful gust of air, and a high pitched, metal scraping on metal sound, both occurring simultaneously. That’s the best I can do, and trust me, whatever sound you’ve conjured in your head to imitate it, most likely doesn’t come close. Seeing as this was the only time in my life that I’ve ever heard the noise, I may not even remember it correctly. All I know is this: this sound scared the bejesus out of me. Strapping young man or not, this unnatural sound went right through my ears, bypassed my brain, and cut straight to my spine, unleashing a cold rush within me and freezing my limbs in place. My eyes gaped wide, and I’m pretty sure my eyelids were nonexistent at this point, because I could not bring myself to shut them, or even squint a little bit. The sound happened, and quickly faded, but still here I stood, on the bottom landing of the basement steps. Still unable to see around the corner into the rest of the basement. Thankfully, whatever was on the other side of the wall couldn’t see me either. I hoped.
Standing there doing my very best statue imitation was not easy at this point; sweaty palmed, breath firmly imprisoned in chest, eyes as dinner plates. I think it was about then that I began to actually fear for my safety, and I wished I hadn’t been holding that gah-damned clothes basket. It was also about then that that weird language began again; deliberate, but incomprehensible words.
After a few more moments of listening to this infernal monologue, my curiosity simply got the better of me. All fear aside, I simply had to see what was happening in my basement on the other side of the wall. And so, I exhaled as quietly as I could, drew in another deep breath, and noiselessly, slowly began to lean forward.
Little by little, more and more of the basement was slowly revealed to my personal panorama. First, the old 8 million pound tube tv that should’ve been thrown out decades ago. No mysterious guests so far. Next, the work bench further back, tools in place and undisturbed. No monsters, ghosts, or creatures there. Then, towards the back corner, the washer and dryer, undisturbed and silently standing sentinel in their normal place. And next……….HOLY SHIT!
As quickly and silently as a ninja’s ghost, I re-straightened my spine, standing upright and stock still. If my eyes were like dinner plates before, they were as satellite dishes now.
I had seen it. I had seen what was speaking in that unnerving voice, in my basement. But what exactly had I seen? It was humanoid, bipedal, and crouched down near the ground. I didn’t get too good of a look at it since I shot straight back out of sight before IT saw ME. What in the hell was that???
If that was human, that was one hell of a costume. All my initial espying had yielded was a purplish-reddish ball of fur covering a vaguely human body, crouched low near the ground, and speaking in that horrid tone and cadence. Whatever it was, I had never seen anything like it before. I wasn’t sure if anyone had. Seems my odd skill did come in handy, because if it heard me, or detected my presence in any way, it did not display it. Although I couldn’t see it, the monstrous chanting never slowed, stopped, or even broke cadence, leading me to believe it hadn’t noticed my sweating, shaking presence.
Listening closer to what it was saying, it was clear these were definitely words, and not just some strange guttural groans, or random atypical vocalizations. This thing was speaking with purpose; with a defined goal on its mind that it was seeking to accomplish. But of course that inspired the questions: Who was it speaking to, (if anyone), and what did it want?
Almost instinctively, I began to slowly lean forward again. I was pretty positive this thing wasn’t ordering a pizza or lilting one of its favorite tunes. If I wanted any hope of determining what this thing wanted, I needed to know more about just what the fuck it was. The thing had had its back to me when I peaked the first time so that I couldn’t see the face, or any details about its front. I hadn’t leaned out far enough the first time to even see its head anyway. Slowly, inch by inch, and silent as the grave, I again leaned out past the wall.
Here we go again.
The old tube tv. The sun was steadily finding its way below the horizon, ceding space to the lengthening shadows.
Then the work bench. Every inch I leaned seemed to add decibels to the wild incantations the thing was spitting out.
Now, the washer and dryer. Muscles strained, adrenaline pumping. And then..…purple-red fur, including a blood red tail.
Fuck me! A tail!
Again, on instinct, I straightened back out. Fuckballs. OK. So it clearly wasn’t human. I needed to stop ducking back behind the wall and just person-up, (unisex version of man-up), so I could get a look at the intruder in my basement. Damnit. I wished again that I hadn’t been holding that fucking laundry basket. My spine had seemingly just reformed itself into solid matter again when the chanting stopped, and that horrid metallic, wind noise began again, re-melting my spine and causing my heart to beat so hard I was afraid the thing on the other side of the wall might hear it. After what seemed like hours, (but surely was only a minute or two), the wind/metal noise stopped, and predictably, the vicious chanting and dreadful scraping resumed. I should have went back up the stairs when I had a chance, but was compelled to get a firm look at this being. I mean, how often does one discover a previously unheard of creature making noise in their basement? Was it aggressive, or amicable? Benign, or dangerous? And what the fuck was it doing? In my basement. Was it a demon? An animal? A mythical creature of some kind, like a little violet and red sasquatch? I had to know.
And so, with courageous curiosity beating out debilitating fear, I began to lean out once again. You know the drill.
Old tv. Should’ve been thrown out years ago. Work bench. Looks like dad could use a new crescent wrench. Washer and dryer. Would I ever get to do the load of laundry, sweatily clutched in my arms?
And finally, it came into view.
Wispy red fur, leading to a slender, slightly curved and motionless tail. The blood red crimson of its tail darkened into various hues of violet and purple, deepening in color as it got closer to the torso. It was crouched on its two legs, indeed bipedal, and had a wild mane of shocked, wispy red and purple hair coming off its head in an Einstein-ian sort of afro, only with longer strands than the deceased German physicist. The hair was clumped in places in dread-like protrusions that ran down the back of the body, giving the appearance of spikes running down its spine and the back of the arms. Its body was slender, but wiry, and all of it that I could see was covered in that same blood red fur that descended into a deep violet as it got closer to the center of the body. The feet were furred, up unto the very tips, and kind of resembled a cat’s paws. It was completely still except for movements it was making with its hands, (or forepaws, or claws, or whatever the hell it had), and small undulations with its head, coinciding with its wicked sounding cadence. It was impossible to say for sure, but it looked like if it stood up, it would be about my height, (6’2), give or take a few inches.
I watched it for a little while, my fright induced adrenaline enabling me to hold stone still, whilst this being went on about its surely nefarious business. The oration and scraping were simple enough to figure out, but even through my fear, I was very curious about what that metallic whooshing was about. I leaned out just a bit farther, (as far as I would dare), in hopes of getting a look at what, if anything, this creature was crouched over.
Whatever it was, it had to be pretty small, because the slender being greatly obscured what it was crouched over. All I could obtain during this time were quick glances of an indistinguishable black object. The chanting itself became more haunting and sinister on this side of the wall, sounding as if there were two or three beings speaking in unison. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it might literally leave a bruise on my chest, and I noticed for the first time that I had such an absolute death grip on the laundry basket, that the plastic edges were digging painfully into my hands. My breath was shallow and silent, and I was pretty sure my eyes hadn’t shut even once in the past 3 to 5 minutes.
I watched in graveyard silence, undetected, while this being went on about its work. Before much longer, it stopped all movement, the scraping and vocalizing again ceasing. Without warning or preamble the creature raised both arms above its head. In that time, I could see that its hands and fingers were furred as well, except the palms, and colored in that same dark crimson as the tail and feet. Its fingers were human-like, with opposable thumbs, but there was one very defining characteristic. The index, or pointer fingers on each hand were extraordinarily long. They were at least twice as long as the other fingers, and furred only about halfway up, with long black protrusions jutting out of the red fur. At first I thought they were finger nails, but they were pliable and appeared jointed like a normal finger, (a normal human finger anyway). They were very fine and slender, ever so slightly curved, pointed at the tip, and looked like they were probably very sharp.
The appearance of the sinister looking claws did not do well to reconcile my mania. In addition to its size, this creature also came equipped with features that would enable it to seriously injure or kill me, and all I had was this fucking laundry basket. I didn’t even have my pocket knife on me. I suppose I could have used a pair of knee socks like nunchuks, but I doubt a parodied ninja weapon would be much use against those claws.
It was all a moot point anyway, because almost immediately after raising its arms, (I forgot to mention that it raised its arms in a crisscross fashion, because those claws kinda took precedence at that moment), it brought them down again, uncrossing them as it did, and producing that whooshing noise, (a process which it repeated over and over again.) It also abraded its claws together as it swept its arms downward, which produced the high pitched, metallic scraping noise. Being able to see the thing also added a new phenomenon to the mix. As it brought its hands downward, the abrasion of its two claws appeared to create some kind of energy, evidenced by a reddish glow emanating from the hands. The glow grew more and more intense with each x-shaped swipe of its talons. After a dozen or more repetitions, its hands were barely visible, with dark red auras, resembling crackling clouds of crimson smoke, surrounding its hands.
When it finally stopped, I could perceptively feel the energy coming from its hands, like it was creating a soft wind, or gently pushing against me. Not enough to move me, but enough to be perceived. You’d have to experience it to truly understand, but it felt nasty somehow, almost viscous, or slimy. It placed its hands on the small black object in front of it, (I still couldn’t tell what it was), and resumed its perturbing incantations.
At this point, I was completely lost. Mentally, I had nothing, (which isn’t far removed from normal), and all I could do was stare, wide eyed and gaping. Shock, fear, and amazement all amalgamated into a single, thousand pound medicine ball being bounced around my head, replacing my normally functioning brain. With no activity going on up top, my eyes and muscles decided I was to keep standing there like a lump, and see what happens. I found out later that my fight or flight instincts didn’t fail, but simply didn’t activate because the creature didn’t know I was there, and choosing one of those options would have alerted it to my presence. (Thank you instincts.)
The incantations were really creeping me out. I desperately wanted to see what it was crouched over, feeling that this bit of information was immediately valuable to my well being. I would swear that the creature was saying the words louder than before, and as it went on this time, its voice definitively began to rise. The increase in noise gave me the little fortitudinal boost I needed to attempt stepping out and peaking at what the creature was crouched over.
With great care, I took a single noiseless step out onto the concrete floor, still gripping the ridiculous basket of clothes. With wide, probing eyes, I slowly leaned further. Just a tad bit more and………and a sock fell out of the tilted basket in my hands, crashing softly to the floor, mere centimeters from colliding with the creature’s foot.
My muscles, every last one of them, tensed and froze. I quietly cursed myself in my head, and when I say quietly, I mean even my inner monologue whispered, out of fear of being heard by the mysterious monster in my basement. I was now so close to it that I could detect an animalistic scent, somewhere between a lush, sweet forest breeze, and the slight stink of a rotting carcass. The creature seemed oblivious though, and after insuring nothing else would jeopardize my stealth, I prepared to take the final step that would afford me a view of what the creature was crouched over. I was successful, and it afforded me a view of what the creature had in front of it………
Twas a kitten. That’s right. It was a little black kitten, lying motionless on the floor. It looked dead to my eyes, and its fur was matted with blood, more blood than this little kitty could have possibly contained. Its entire coat was absolutely smattered with it.
I knew this kitten. It had belonged to a family a few houses down. It was part of a litter their full grown tabby had just had. It was the only black one of the bunch, and it had died a week or so after being born, the family knew not how. By what manner this goblinous being had come to possess it, I knew not how. Or why. The absurdity of the situation I found myself in seemed to know no bounds.
The creature’s hands were still illuminated with those snapping clouds of crimson energy, and it was moving them all about the dead kitten, almost like a magician would before doing a sleight-of-hand trick. The light and energy given off by its aura-enclosed hands was sickly and felt dangerous, but at the same time, was beautiful and mesmerizing. It was a strange juxtaposition to experience. I wasn’t sure, but I felt like the energy that this being was manipulating could greatly harm me, or possibly be amazingly beneficial. Kind of like fire. Applied correctly, its uses are virtually endless, and remarkably beneficial. But it can also be exploited for very dire, and horrid purposes. In retrospect, I feel like the power this being was utilizing could be employed in a similar fashion. This monstrous, demonic-looking, creature looked apparently ready to use such energy.
At this point I began to wonder; should I try to stop this thing? It didn’t seem to be up to anything cataclysmic, like the destruction of the Earth, or the enslavement of all mankind. I’d like to think such things cannot be accomplished with some energy (albeit of an unknown origin) and a dead kitten. But all I had was my feeble human musculature, and a fucking laundry basket full of clothes. This thing probably had all the agility and ferocity of a mountain lion, as movies and comics have taught me all creatures of this manner do. Not to mention it had either stayed hidden for…..however long it had been alive. Or had killed anyone who had ever seen it before. Not promising prospects for my future.
This had been foolish of me. There was no way to know there would be a frightening monster doing god-knows-what to a dead kitten in my basement, but it had been my decision to investigate further. That was just stupid. I should have tried to creep back up the steps to call the cops, or grab a weapon, or anything other than sneaking up on an unknown monster that could surely do horrible things to me.
So there I was, standing there sweating, heart pounding, mouth agape, eyes opened wide, less than two feet from a previously unseen creature, holding a full laundry basket. Fear, (and common sense) finally won out over curiosity, and I made the decision to try to sneak back upstairs.
As I just started to slowly creep my way back to the landing, the creature’s steadily louder orations began to crescendo, freezing me in place again. It flung its arms wide, hands still surrounded by the reddish purple auras of energy it had conjured, (and almost giving me a charley horse). As it spoke its final indecipherable word, (its voice now channeling Mumm Ra from the Thundercats cartoon), it thrust both hands, grabbing onto the kitten, transferring the red auras from its hands to the deceased catling. It seemed to be exerting itself, the bloody corona engulfing the kitten swirling and billowing, and almost seeming to crackle with actual miniature lightning as the creature gently held its hands to it.
I began to question my own sanity at this point. This situation I was in was getting more and more bizarre, almost as if I were dreaming. Just when I thought nothing stranger could occur, it would, pushing my heart rate and my sanity closer to the brink. I really have no idea how I didn’t go running for the hills screaming bloody murder at this point. I guess I was literally too scared to run for my life.
After a couple centuries passed, (mere seconds I’m sure), the glow from the aura faded and eventually winked out. The creature removed its hands from the kitten slowly, and to my surprise, did not resume the chanting. This entire situation had blown all of my assumptions out of the water at every turn, so I decided not to make any, and just watch.
My brain must have secretly made assumptions without my approval, because I was stunned once again when the demonic looking being began to speak again, only this time softly, and directly to the kitten. It was practically cooing to the little creature. And even more amazing, the kitten answered back! It began to mewl softly, its tail lightly thumping the concrete. A moment later it stood up, and unless my eyes deceived me, it was no longer covered in blood. It took a few shaky steps, then proceeded to meow lovingly at the strange monster that had just resurrected it.
Well. That was a relief. I half expected it to eat the kitten, or rip it apart, or turn it into some giant dire monstercat, or something. It was such a relief in fact, that I let out a loud and exasperated sigh.
Fully alerting the creature to my presence.
Crap.
The creature whirled immediately, and I finally got a look at its front and face. Especially the face, for when it turned around, it was right in my face, and it shrieked an unholy roar at me. Its face was leonine, especially with its wild red and purple mane of dreads, and the mouth and snout were protruded, further resembling a mutant jungle cat. It had fangs at the front of its jaw, top and bottom, with smaller fangs behind it forming a row that dove far into its mouth, which was spread wide as it roared at me, its hot breath like wind blown over a fire. I was close enough to notice horrid looking bits of who-knows-what amidst the teeth and strands of saliva.
It didn’t roar for long. It wasn’t a drawn out, I’m a t-rex and I own the world roar, but more of a primal scream. It took a wild swipe at my torso with a hand and one of those massive claws, but luckily, on pure instinct (read: I flinched), I raised the basket full of clothes, effectively parrying the strike. Which was lucky because the basket received one hell of a gash. Also lucky was what happened next: it left. After the wild swipe, the creature made another noise; a more confused sounding noise. In a flash, it turned, and on a combination of bipedal and quadripedal movements, it almost instantly galloped/ran/leaped its way to the back wall by the washer and dryer. And amazingly, it didn’t stop there, for as it made its way, its hands began glowing red again, and it jumped at and into the wall, red aura-ed hands out stretched towards said wall. A moderate dark red explosion occurred, leaving a large cloud of crimson fumes, and when the scarlet smoke had cleared enough to see, there was no trace of the wild creature.
I stood there, dumbfounded. No. More than dumbfounded. Flabbergasted. There was the possibility that the thing would return, try to claim the life of possibly the only eye witness to its existence, but I just stood there. I eventually turned the clothes basket in my hands to see the long gash the creature had left in its side. The basket had a long wound ripped through one side. Some of the clothes were even ribboned, too. The kitten was exploring the basement, mewling along oblivious, as if it hadn’t just been brought back from the dead by an unknown monster who just jumped through some kind of teleportational vortex, or whatever it had just utilized to leave my basement. I scooped the little feller up, threw em in the basket, and went back upstairs, mouth still agape.
When I told my dad what had happened, he asked me for the number to my dealer. He also said we couldn’t keep the cat. It worked out. I ended up giving it to my sister, (there was no way I was just gonna drop off a kitten, that had just been resurrected by a strange being, at the humane society. If the thing grows up to be a monster demon cat, it’s MY monster demon cat). She agreed to take care of the little guy. I tried to tell her the story of how I came to possess it, and my sister reacted in much the same way as my father. I figured she ought to know, considering the cat could turn out to be something sinister, and although she wasn’t as skeptical as my father, I could tell she didn’t believe me either. I didn’t really expect her to.
After that day I spent considerable time searching online for any sort of link or connection to what I had just gone through. Everything I found was scant and vague. No pics, no stories, no nothing that even scarcely fit the description of what I had experienced, (while researching the creature online is how I came across creepypasta actually).
All I know is this: my sister still has the cat, he hasn’t turned into any monstrous beings or exhibited a strange reddish glow, and I am stealthier than a silent ninja fart, for I snuck up on something that comes from the dark, hides in the shadows, and goes bump in the night. And I scared IT.
Credit To – Shape Shafter
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To read about the horrific events caused by my freshmen roommate leading up to this, click here for the beginning and here for the 2nd part.
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Had I been thinking clearly, I would have made sure that Andrea didn’t see the pictures that “Zach” left me on his iPod. But, by the time I looked up from crying, she was already viewing the images, a look of shocked horror on her face.
She asks, “Eric, what kind of monster is this?”
“He’s a psychotic killer. And I think he’s out to get me because I found out his secret. I know that he’s the one that killed the real Zach and he’s trying to stop me before I can go to the police.”
Just then, my cell phone rings. I’m surprised to see that it’s my mother who is calling. My mom never calls me this late at night…
“Hello? Mom?”
“Eric, honey, I think you better come home tonight.” Her voice sounds strained.
Starting to panic, I ask, “Mom, are you ok? What’s going on?”
“Eric, just, please come home. Your father and I need to see you.” And with that she hangs up.
I’m gripped with fear that “Zach” has somehow found his way to my parents’ house. I don’t know if he is playing a sick game, but I need to make sure my parents are safe.
“Andrea, I’ve got to go home to check on my parents. You need to go somewhere safe. Go to your parents’ place. He shouldn’t know where that is. I’ll call you when I can. Then we can go to the police.”
“Eric, I don’t want to go alone,” she retorts.
“You gotta trust me. I think “Zach” might have my parents and I don’t want you anywhere near there. Just go home as fast as you can. You’ll be safe at home with your folks.”
My mind is racing during the drive home. How could all this be happening so fast? Zach _________ was just a name on a roommate info card 8 days ago and now his killer has pretended to be him while living with me, stalked my girlfriend, killed my friend, and is now terrorizing my parents.
It’s very late when I pull into our cul-de-sac. I’m immediately shocked to see police cars with flashing lights all around my house. Could my parents have somehow contacted the police? Maybe they’ve already captured “Zach.”
I park the car and sprint toward my house. After a few seconds I hear someone yell, “There he is! Someone grab him!”
I start looking around anxiously, hoping to identify “Zach” as he’s trying to dash away. All of a sudden, the wind is knocked from me and my vision blurs. I’ve been slammed to the ground.
“What the hell!?! Get off of me! What’s going on?” I can feel my arms being twisted behind my back and I feel cuffs locking.
“Eric, you are under the arrest for the murder of Zach _________. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do will be used—“
“What are you talking about?! I didn’t kill him!” I scream. “My roommate at DePauw has been pretending to be Zach, but he’s the murderer! I can help you catch him!”
I continue to try to make the police officer understand, but he continues to escort me into my house where I see my parents sitting at the kitchen table. They look distraught and pained when they see me walk in.
“Mom? Dad? Are you guys ok? Did my roommate try to hurt you? Was he here?!” I anxiously ask.
“Eric…” my mom starts to say.
“Mom, the cops are making a mistake. They should be arresting the guy that’s been my roommate at DePauw. He’s been pretending to be my real roommate, but he murdered him! And he killed Joel!”
“Eric,” she starts again quietly. “They found something in your room…”
A large police sergeant comes over to me. “Eric, I’m Sergeant Rosado. We received a tip tonight that you might be responsible for the murder of Zach _________ two weeks ago.”
“What?!?” I yell incredulously. “That’s ludicrous. My roommate killed Zach! Who told you it was me?”
“The caller identified himself as a friend of yours from school,” responds the Sergeant. “He said you were acting strange and thought it had something to do with the death of Zach.”
“But… that doesn’t make sense…”
“We weren’t convinced either. That is until we came here and found this under your bed.”
As he said this, another cop brought in a duffle bag, the same duffle bag that had been sitting on the floor of my dorm room for the past week. “Zach’s” duffle bag.
“Does this look familiar?” As he opens the bag I can see a small cooler inside. He flips open the lid to reveal human organs and ice. A heart, a liver, and a few others.
Stunned, I blurt out, “This is crazy! I’m being set up! My roommate is framing me for the murder that he committed! Ask anyone on my floor at school. They’ll all tell you how strange he’s been acting all week! Call Andrea. She’ll tell you how he’s been leaving origami flowers in her room! He’s framing me somehow! I didn’t do this!” Tears begin to stream down my face.
“Son,” Sergeant Rosada says. “You’re going to need to come with us tonight.”
As they walk me out of the house and to a squad car, I can hear my father ask the sergeant if it’s possible that I’m telling the truth. Is it possible that my roommate is framing me? I hear the sergeant respond that they’d look into it, but that it’s very unlikely.
I spend a long, sleepless night in a holding cell at the police station. A few times I try to plead with the officer on duty to talk to my friends at DePauw. I tell him to ask them about the guy that I’ve been sharing a room with. He just ignores me.
Late the next morning, I’m taken to an interrogation room. Sergeant Rosado walks in holding a manila folder and sits down.
“Eric, can you tell me, in detail, about this person who has been your roommate this past week?” he asks.
So, I tell him all about my roommate “Zach.” I tell him about all the weird things that he did that week: the staring out the window, the sleeping without bed sheets, the late night walks, and the creepily staring at me while I slept at night. I then go into detail about what happened the day before, starting with my discovery of the news article revealing that the real Zach had been murdered two weeks ago. I share about meeting with Joel after class and then having him to go to the police while I went to check on Andrea because I thought “Zach” was after her. And finally, I explain to him about driving down to Andrea’s and finding out “Zach” had been coming there at night and how we found an origami flower and iPod with the images of the murdered Joel on it that had been left by the door while we talked.
“So you have to stop him. He killed the real Zach and he killed Joel yesterday.”
Sergeant Rosado just stares at me and sighs. “Eric, we went up to your dorm room this morning to verify your story. We found this.” With that he opens the manila folder to reveal a set of photographs. The pictures show the same scene that I saw on the iPod that “Zach” left me. But the police photos were taken further back to reveal that Joel was killed and placed into my bed in my dorm room. I stare at them in shock.
“He killed Joel in my room… These are just like the pictures that he left for me on the Ipod—“
“An iPod that only has your and Andrea’s fingerprints on it.”
I pause. “I’m not sure I follow…”
He continued, “Don’t you find it peculiar that there is nothing on the other bed in your dorm room?
Isn’t it strange that your roommate doesn’t have any clothes or personal possessions?”
“That’s what I’ve been saying!” I scream. “He’s always been super weird. He’s a psychopath!”
“Eric,” he calmly says. “We talked to the other people that live on your floor. No one has ever seen or heard of this roommate of yours. The teachers say they’ve never had this ‘Zach’ in any of their classes. Eric, you’ve been living alone for the past week. You never had a roommate.”
—
EPILOGUE
The hearing and the trial went by in a blur for me. I was tried and convicted for the murders of both Zach and Joel. Additionally, they are currently trying to link me to two similar unresolved murders that happened in the past month, all in Indiana.
I never got to speak to Andrea again and I only saw her once during the whole process. It was when she testified on the stand about her relationship with me and about what happened to her that fateful week. She only looked at me once and I could see the revulsion and fear on her face.
It didn’t make sense! I don’t remember doing any of these things. I pleaded with them that I was framed and that if Joel were still alive, he could confirm meeting my roommate, the real killer. He knew how crazy “Zach” was and he helped me figure everything out. The prosecuting lawyer said it was awfully convenient that the only other person who had seen or spoken to my supposed “roommate” was now dead.
After the trial, they put me in a prison for the criminally insane. They said I have dissociative personality disorder; that’s why I don’t remember killing anyone. I’ve been here for months now and I’ve been told this so often that I’m starting to believe that maybe they’re right. Maybe I did kill those people…
This morning, I received a letter. A rare surprise in this hellhole. I opened it up to see a folded origami flower and picture. On the flower was written a note in handwriting that I immediately recognized:
She looks so peaceful when she sleeps, Eric. I envy that.
The picture was the photograph of Andrea that was taken from my nightstand.
Credit To – legendaryhero27
This is the last entry in a small miniseries that was posted in three parts. For the prior two entries, you may visit the links at the start of the post or track the Freshman Roommate Series tag to see all three posts.
This story first appeared on reddit’s /nosleep/ board and is being hosted here with permission from the original author.
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“I gotta tell you, Connor, this is one amazing story,” Kurt said, plopping down on the couch next to him. “You’ve got me believing in the boogie man again. I actually checked under my bed last night.”
Connor laughed, taking the manuscript back. “Well it did take first prize in that contest, so I would hope it’s good.”
Kurt put an arm around Connor’s shoulder and proclaimed to the imagined masses in front of them. “I can see it now, Connor. We’ll both head to college after the summer. You will write an amazing horror film and I will shoot it. It will get wildly popular on YouTube, some Hollywood exec will see it, and we will be rich beyond our wildest dreams.”
Connor shoved Kurt’s arm off him with a grunt. “Right, just like what happened with these guys whose series you’re showing me. What’s it called again?”
“Marble Hornets,” Kurt said, pulling out some DVDs. “And, well, they’re not rich and famous yet, but they should be.”
“And it’s about a tall man or something?” Connor said, settling into the couch.
“And you call yourself a horror buff,” Kurt said scornfully as he put the first DVD in. “It’s Slender Man. And he’s scary as hell.”
“We’ll see,” Connor said as the DVD started.
A few hours later Connor stood up and stretched. “That was surprisingly good,” he said.
“I know, right?” Kurt said, popping the DVD back out. “Who would’ve thought a tall faceless dude could be so scary?”
“Not me,” Connor said, turning to look at the clock. “I’m gonna head home. I still have finished packing for our camping trip.”
“My dad is totally stoked for this,” Kurt said. “I think he’s more excited than I am.”
Connor laughed. “My dad’s tolerating it. You should have seen all the bug spray he bought.”
“You want me to drive you home?” Kurt asked as Connor headed for the door.
“I live three blocks away, I can walk,” Connor said, as he opened the door.
“I just don’t want to the Slender Man to get you,” Kurt said.
“Cute,” Connor said as he walked outside. He waved. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Kurt.” Putting his hands in his pockets, he strolled across the lawn and down the street.
As he walked, Connor’s brain turned over the concept of the Slender Man in his head. Why was he around? What exactly did he do besides stand around menacingly? And more importantly, how would he use him in a story?
Connor stopped as something black and white flashed by him in his peripheral vision. Heart beating, he turned to look to his right. “Hello?” he said. A click on the pavement behind him made him jump. “Who’s there?” he said, whipping around. A wagging tail greeted his vision and friendly brown eyes. He sighed and laughed at himself. “Hello, Daisy,” he said to the black and white dog in front of him. “Did you jump your fence again?” Daisy just wagged her tail in response. “Come on then,” he said, patting his leg to get her to follow him. “I’ll take you home.”
The next day Kurt, Connor, and both their dads piled into a Suburban packed tight with camping gear. “Let’s get this trip started!” Kurt hooted from the back seat.
“All right!” Kurt’s dad said as he turned on the ignition. Connor’s dad grunted in the passenger seat.
“So, you lose any sleep last night?” Kurt said, shoving Connor.
Connor yawned. “Yeah, I had more packing to do than I thought.”
Kurt gave an exasperated sigh. “Not that.”
“What then?” Connor asked, puzzled. “Oh, Slender Man.” He shrugged. “It was good, Kurt.
Scary even. But I’ve been writing stuff like this for a long time. I know it’s not real.”
“Killjoy,” Kurt muttered, settling back in his seat.
They spent the rest of the ride chattering about the park they would be camping in and the college they would be going to. Kurt’s dad piped in enthusiastically about hiking trails and fishing streams, while Connor’s dad told them about his old fraternity days whenever Kurt’s dad stopped for breath.
They pulled into the state park early in the afternoon and found their campsite. After they set up camp, Kurt grabbed Connor’s arm. “My dad says there’s an awesome hiking trail close by that leads to a nearby lake. Let’s check it out.”
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” Connor said, sitting on the ground. “I could use a nap.”
“Connor, come on,” Kurt said tugging on his arm.
“Stay together,” Kurt’s dad called after them as Kurt bounced off and Connor trudged behind him. Kurt grabbed his pack as he passed his tent.
“It’s not gonna be that long of a hike, is it?” Connor asked.
“Be prepared,” Kurt said with a mischievous grin. Connor sighed and grabbed his own pack.
The trees quickly closed in on them as they walked away from the campsite. “Ooo, he could be here,” Kurt said, spinning around slowly in place.”
“Uh-huh,” Connor said, slapping at his neck. He was beginning to wish he had grabbed some of his dad’s bug spray.
“Hey, hold up a second, I gotta take a leak,” Kurt said, shifting his pack and running off into the woods.
“Kurt, wait, stop!” Connor hollered after him, shifting his own pack. “We’re supposed to stick together!”
“You wanna watch me pee you perve?” Kurt hollered back.
“Not particularly,” Connor said to himself leaning against a tree. He sighed as he waited for Kurt.
A few minutes later, Connor bolted upright when he heard a panicked yell. “Connor, Connor! Get over here, quick!”
Connor dropped his pack and leaped off the path. “Kurt?” he yelled.
“Connor!” Kurt yelled back.
Connor followed the sound of his voice deeper into the woods. “Connor!” Kurt yelled again, close by. Connor rounded a corner and came to a stop as a black and white suit flew at him from high in the air. “Geez,” Connor said, throwing himself backwards. He thrashed for a moment before he realized the suit was empty. He lay back down. “Funny, Kurt,” he said.
He heard laughter above him and looked up. Kurt was sliding down a nearby tree. “Oh, no, Slender Man doesn’t scare me,” Kurt said, grabbing the suit and stuffing it back in his pack.
Connor cuffed the back of his head. “I’m going back to camp,” he said. “Come on.”
Kurt followed him, still giggling. Connor shook his head. “Could you please stop with the giggling? You got me, okay?” Kurt stopped giggling. “Thank you,” Connor said, continuing forward. Then he realized it wasn’t just the giggling that had stopped. Kurt had stopped walking completely.
Connor turned around. “What now?” he said. Kurt was standing open-mouthed, staring at something behind and above Connor. Connor turned around and looked. Trees, trees, and more trees stood in front of him but nothing else.
“No,” Kurt whispered. “It can’t be.”
Connor turned back around. “Look, the suit was funny but you need to knock it off, Kurt.”
Kurt wasn’t listening to him though. He was slowly backing away with his hands up. “I can see you,” he whispered. “Isn’t that enough?”
Connor took a step towards Kurt. “Kurt, “ he said slowly, worry creeping into his voice. “What are you talking about?”
Kurt screamed, high and shrill. It should have been funny. Connor should have been joking about what a little girl Kurt sounded liked. But all Connor could see was they very real terror in Kurt’s eyes as he scrambled backwards, waving at something Connor could not see. “No, no,” Kurt was shrieking, holding up his hands. His eyes locked with Connor’s. “You have to see him,” he screamed. “He says he’ll kill me if you can’t see him!” And then a spurt of red slashed across Kurt’s chest and he screamed again. Connor ran forward then. He couldn’t see what was hurting his friend, but that wound had to come from somewhere.
But even as Connor ran forward, Kurt moved back, only Connor wasn’t sure it was under his own power anymore. It was more like he was skidding as someone pushed him. More red slashes appeared on Kurt’s arms and face and he tried to cover himself as his screams grew quieter. “I didn’t believe, not really,” he whimpered. And then a single deep red point appeared in the middle of Kurt’s chest. He gave one final wail, and then fell silent.
Connor finally caught up with Kurt. He knelt down and shook him by the shoulder. “Kurt, Kurt!” he yelled. Kurt’s body crunched the underbrush and Connor shook him more urgently. “Kurt!” he screamed, his own terror full-throated now. But Kurt didn’t answer. Connor let his hands drop from Kurt and slowly he stood up backing away. There was no doubt in his mind to who the “he” Kurt had been screaming about was, but that wasn’t possible. “You’re not real,” Connor said, voice shaking. But, a squiggling little doubt wormed into his mind. As he backed away, his eyes turned towards the shadows cast by the trees. And then one branch’s shadow seemed to move and snake. And then two. And three. Slowly Connor turned around. A glimpse of black and a head far far too high in the air.
He didn’t scream again. He was too far gone for that. He just ran, heedless of where he went. He didn’t dare look behind him. He knew, knew that if he did he would be lost. Trees flashed past. His stumbled and fell in a briar patch. Hands stinging he shoved himself up. His knees felt wet. He was bleeding. No time to stop though. Just one breath then the next.
Eventually at the top of a steep incline, he lost his footing and fell. End over end he tumbled, neck turning awkwardly at points, but always stopping just short of a break. He came to a stop on his back and out of breath at the bottom of the hill. He looked up at the sky, dazed, seeing the sunlight patter through the branches above him. He was vaguely aware that he appeared to have landed in a patch of mushrooms, that were now encircling him on all sides. And then, something very thin and very tall moved above him.
He was falling again and Connor wondered if he had imagined stopping at the bottom of the hill. But it was dark now. He couldn’t see anything. Just a sensation of weightlessness. He flailed his arms and legs and met nothing.
Something thin but strong encircled his right wrist. Automatically, he pulled away, but he found he couldn’t move his arm. Whatever was around his wrist was twining its way up his arm. Breathing hard, he pulled with all his might. His left hand felt through the pitch black, scratching and clawing at the thing that was moving up his arm. But it was implacable. Nothing he did stopped it. And then it was on his shoulder and wrapping around his neck. He stiffened, wondering if it meant to choke him. But ,though the tendril was firm, it didn’t crush his neck. It snuck around his head and then he felt, rather than saw, it hover just above his right eye. “No, no, no!” he said as he felt it suddenly plunge forward. Vitreous humor dripped down his cheek, but Connor had scant time to worry about that.
For as the tendril plunged into his eye, visions began to play in his mind. He saw small children on a playground, laughing and running. But as he watched, it was if the very air grew unstable and it wavered. He felt heat as he had never known, felt his arms breaking into blisters. He heard crackling all around him as if he was sitting in a fireplace, and he prayed that the fire would take him. The laughter of the children melded into screams. Screams of pain and, worse, screams of terror. Something malevolent moved towards them through the flames, something that had come to claim them. They should have died in the flames, should have moved on. But something was holding them back, tying them into this one moment of agony, and holding them there until they forgot they had ever known anything else. And Connor was with them in that moment, held suspended between life and death, and he cried, his tears mixing with the jelly pouring from his right eye.
Then more tendrils came and shook him, shook him by his shoulders, back and forth. The screaming became deeper and less panicked. And Connor thought this was odd, because he wasn’t screaming anymore, and the kids’ screams had been so high-pitched it was odd to hear such a mature tone coming from them. Had they been trapped here so long they had grown? The shaking came again and Connor heard his name. “Connor, can you hear me?”
His eyes flew open and he saw far above him a crescent moon rising above the trees. He bolted up, hand flying to his right eye. It was whole, and as he removed his shaking hand, he found he could see fine. “Connor?” someone questioned next to him, but he ignored it. He pulled his right sleeve up, but his arm was whole and unblemished. Trembling, he tried to stand up, but felt hands pushing him back down, a voice urging him to take it easy. The voice was shouting to others now. Connor turned towards the voice and a small corner of his mind registered that it was his dad who was now hugging him and crying.
“Dad,” Connor said voice cracking. His dad hugged him tighter as Connor heard other people stumbling down the hill. “Dad,” Connor began again. “Where’s Kurt?”
His dad pulled away and looked him in the eye. And Connor knew without a word that Kurt was gone. And he wondered if Kurt was really gone or tied to that one moment where you hung between worlds. Burying his head in his hands, Connor sobbed.
“Patrick,” somebody said to Connor’s dad as he continued to sob. “They caught the sonuva bitch that killed Kurt.”
Connor looked up, confused. “But how could you catch him?” he asked. His dad just patted his back and said something about shock. And then firm arms were helping him up and moving him, and Connor, confused, tired, and frightened, let them lead him up the hill and out of the woods.
* * *
Connor sighed as he looked out the window. “I can’t believe it’s been ten years.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe this is our last visit.” He turned his head to look at the woman behind the desk.
She smiled. “Our last scheduled visit. You’ve come a long way from when I first met you. Screaming about the faceless man who killed your friend.”
Connor sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “It all seemed so real Dr. Kennedy. Sometimes I still see him . . . it in my dreams.”
“It’s to be expected,” Dr. Kennedy said, folding her hands and placing them on her desk. “You will probably always associate this ‘slenderman’, as you called him, with your friend’s death in some manner. It was easier for your mind to associate the brutal killing of your friend with a monster than with a man. The medication should continue to help with the bad dreams. And if you ever need me, day or night, you can always call.” She opened a drawer on her desk and pulled something out. “By the way, before you go there’s something I would like you to do for me.”
Connor stood up and walked over to the desk. “What’s that?”
Dr. Kennedy looked up at him and smiled. “Your book, By the Fire’s Light. Would you sign it for me?”
Connor laughed as he reached over and slid the book to himself. Dr. Kennedy handed him a pen. “You know, you were right,” he said, as he scrawled his name and a small note of thanks on the inside cover. “Writing it out, the faceless man and the fire and the kids, really did help me to get it out of my head. I didn’t think I’d be turning it into a book when I started.”
“I think it’s good,” Dr, Kennedy said, taking the book back from Connor. “You’ve taken something destructive in your life and turned it into something constructive.”
“Just one last thing to do, I guess,” Connor said, looking out the window.
Dr. Kennedy cocked her head. “So you still plan to visit Kurt’s killer today?”
Connor nodded, still looking out the window. “I just want to hear it from him. Why he did it.”
“This could be closure you need,” Dr. Kennedy said, standing. Connor turned back to her. “I think it’s a good thing. Just like your book.” She smiled again. “The critics are eating it up from what I’ve seen. It’s starting to sell like wildfire.”
“Heh, right, wildfire,” Connor said, repressing a small shudder. He reached out a hand. “Well, thanks for everything, doc,” he said.
Dr. Kennedy took his hand and shook it. “Good luck to you, Connor.”
Fifteen minutes later found Connor on the way to the State Penitentiary. His blue Corolla rolled down the Interstate. A feeling of anxiety had been building in him all day. Normal, he supposed, he was going to confront his friend’s killer. He shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck again. A flash of black and white next to him on the road made him catch his breath. Checking the rear view mirror, he saw a man in a business suit on the shoulder of the road, looking at a car with smoke pouring from the hood. Connor sighed. “Get a hold of yourself, Connor,” he murmured as he pulled off at his exit. “You’ve just put your life back together.”
A guard tower, three buzz-ins, and keyless, cell phoneless, and anything that even looked like a weaponless later, Connor sat down in front of a plastic barrier. Next to him was a beige telephone. In front of him was a tall burly man. Jared Holloway, Kurt’s killer. Jared’s hair was practically shaved off with only a small bit of dark fuzz showing. His brown eyes were hard and his fingers gnarled. Jared picked up the phone. Connor did the same.
“So,” Jared said, a sneer on his face. “I suppose you’ve come to find out why I did it.”
Connor looked into Jared’s face, at the sneer, the hate. He looked into Jared’s eyes, and saw, just for a moment, a flame flicker in them. “No,” Connor said, surprising himself and Jared. “No,” he said again, wonderingly. He put the phone down for a moment and looked around them. The guards were alert for any wrong-doing but they weren’t really paying attention to what he was saying. He picked the phone up again and turned to Jared. “I want to know why you took the blame.”
Jared’s eyes widened for a split-second and then narrowed. “What are you still crazy? Crazy as when they found you after I lost you?” He leaned forward. “It’s simple. I took a knife and sliced your friend up. His blood still dripping from my hands, I turned on you and you ran like a little pansy. You got lucky and I lost you. End of story.”
Connor leaned forward too. “Yes, that’s what you told the cops, the court, everyone.” His eyes locked with Jared’s again. “But it’s not true, is it?” he whispered.
Jared’s eyes flickered back and forth rapidly. Again, for a second, Connor saw a flame dance in them. Jared closed his eyes and shuddered. “Look,” he rasped, voice low and close to panic. “If I say that’s what happened, it’s what happened.” He shook his head. “I may be on death row, but there are things worse than death.” And then before Connor could say anything else, Jared hung up his phone. Connor sat and watched as the guard took him back and wondered.
That night Connor sat in his apartment in his small kitchen dining room area. The only light came from a small lamp on the counter. He looked down at the book in his hands and leafed through the pages. Dr. Kennedy was right, it was selling well and his publisher was already clamoring for a sequel. He should be happy. But he was more apprehensive than ever. Putting the book down on the counter, he grabbed a kettle off the stove and filled it with water. He needed to relax. A cup of tea and then bed. Turning back to the stove, he turned it on. It clicked for a moment as it tried to ignite, and then flames shot out it in a gigantic whoosh.
With a yell, Connor flung himself backwards over the counter. The flames were shooting straight up, impossibly high, licking the wooden cabinet above the stove. The cabinet began to burn, turning black as smoke curled away from it. It was burning as if gasoline had been dumped on the fire, racing across the cabinet door. Connor turned, reaching for his fire extinguisher, and then stopped. In the corner, by the front door, was tall thin space of black that was darker than the surrounding apartment. Connor froze staring at it, even as he felt the heat from the fire behind him lick his back. And then it moved towards him. “No, no,” Connor screamed, bolting towards his bedroom door. He shoved it closed and locked it, for all the good it would do. Even as he closed the door, he could hear the fire whooshing, growing. There was an orange glow coming from the crack beneath the door. Backing away, Connor looked around him. He was on the fourth floor. The only way down was a long jump. He backed against the window. “Why now,” he whispered. “Why have you come?”
There was no answer as the door crackled and the room began to fill with smoke. Vaguely Connor was aware that smoke alarms were going off and that people in the hall were running for the fire escape. But more importantly he was aware that flames were licking through the door now and in the smoke he could see dancing tendrils weaving in through the cracks.
With sudden resolve he lifted the window. “You may have taken them,” he said, turning to the door one more time. He climbed up into the window as a business suit came into view, smoke and flame obscuring his view so he couldn’t tell if the tie was red, or just black reflecting the flame’s light. “But you won’t take me.” And then he pushed backwards, not daring to look below him.
Wind whistled in his ears as he fell. Connor didn’t feel fear. Instead he felt a certain giddiness. And when what looked like a head popped out of his window, he waved cheerily for just a second before his body hit the concrete sidewalk. There was jarring pain all through him and stars flooded his vision. “At least I get to leave,” he thought, hearing screams and running feet distantly. And then he thought no more.
Credit To – Star Kindler
|
You get a phone call from your Mother. Since her car has been in the shop, she asks you to go to the grocery store and pick up a few odds and ends for her. Bread, milk, cereal, and chicken breasts.
After writing down a small list you reluctantly get in the car and pick up the items at the store. The lady cashier makes an odd remark to you, “You know, we’re in no danger of a milk shortage.” Upon arriving at her house you knock several times. No answer. You decide to try the door. It opens. You place the grocery bag on the counter. Strange. There seems to be six other grocery bags, each with identical contents. In a couple, the chicken and the milk has gone bad. “Mom,” you call out, but no answer. You make your way thru the kitchen and into the living room. Sitting on the couch, with her head cut off and neatly resting on her lap, is your Mother.
Naturally you call the police who come over to investigate. They mention that she has been dead for nearly a week. Furthermore, the police psychiatrist is at the scene and talks to you after you give your initial statement. Sitting on the front steps, you overhear the psychiatrist talking with the crime scene investigator. “It’s not uncommon for people suffering from schizophrenia to get locked into a series of repetitive behaviors,” he says.
You think to yourself, “They can’t be talking about me. Schizophrenia? Nah. Repetitive behavior? Do they think I did this?” Suddenly your cell phone goes off. “Hello?”
“Hi hun, it’s me. Could you stop at the store and pick up some chicken and milk. Ohh, and I need some bread and cereal too.”
“No problem Mom. I’ll be right over…”
|
Roxy’s Lounge. It was the sort of dimly-lit, mid-century styled bar that was too classy for me by half. In the real world, it’s the kind of place I’d have gone to get shit-faced on overpriced cocktails at a Game Developer’s Conference after-party. But that was in the old days, back when there was still a studio to foot the bill. Thankfully for me—here inside the simulation—money was of no concern.
But it wasn’t just the promise of inebriation that led me through Roxy’s neon entrance that night. It was a name. A name I’d stared at in the user list, incredulously, before walking my ass here from across town.
It can’t be him, I thought. When the hell did they jack him in?
“Oh, Jesus Christ…” the words escaped beneath my breath. The cringe that followed could not be stifled. All I could do was avert my gaze to the ebony hardwood floor and let the involuntary expression run its course. When I unbuttoned my face, there he was, sitting at the bar.
Madcow.
I waved away my holographic display. The translucent overlay of user names, locations, and notes shrunk and vanished into my peripheral vision. What remained was my old lead programmer, wearing a cow print suit and fedora. The infamous cow print suit and fedora, looking as ugly as it was expensive. He was hitting on the bartender. I felt aftershocks of cringe return.
“You son of a bitch,” I said as I approached close enough to be heard over the murmur of other patrons.
He spun around in the barstool and sized me up behind a pair of ruby-tinted aviator glasses. He made an exaggerated frown. “Tell me you don’t look that old in real life,” he said.
“Life comes at you fast. You on the other hand,” I gestured at his entire outfit, “are apparently thirteen years old again.”
He scoffed, and reached out to grab my hand. The handshake quickly became a pat on the back, and then a full-blown hug. I hadn’t seen Lukas, aka Madcow, in nearly ten years. Already memories were flooding back of never-ending crunch nights at Dark Room Entertainment, our game studio. Memories of passing out at our desks, on couches, or occasionally the floor. It all seemed like a lifetime ago, now.
I took a seat next to him, and signaled the bartender.
“What’s the fun of living in a simulation,” he said, “if you don’t peacock it up a bit? Have you even played with the closet options yet?”
“You look like a confused pimp. Anyway, what’s with this about living in a simulation? Buddy, I just work here. And when you got me this job, you didn’t say I’d have to work with you.”
“You think I’d pass on this sort of opportunity just because I—” he stopped. But I could finish the thought for him*. Because I’m still a well-paid programmer with a career.*
The pause turned awkward, until the bartender broke the silence.
“Is this guy giving you a hard time?” she asked. I met her gaze, and must’ve held it a moment too long. She cocked an eyebrow.
“Y-yea,” I finally said, “he’s an asshole.”
She chuckled, and shot Lukas a playful grin.
“Please try not to scare away my customers, Mr. Madcow,” she said.
“A thousand pardons, Ms. Roxy,” Lukas said, and leaned into the bar. “Say, could I convince you to whip up my usual and… a gin and tonic for my colleague here?”
Good memory.
“Sure thing. What sort of work do the two of you do together?” she asked.
“We’re Quality Assurance,” Lukas winked at me. “We’re probably the best-paid beta testers in the world.”
“This world, at least,” I said, but that only earned me a slightly confused look from Roxy as she got to work mixing our drinks.
“Isn’t she something?” Lukas said once she’d stepped out of earshot. “I’ve been giving her my own personal Turing test all evening.”
“I’ll bet you have,” I shook my head. “You know there’s an easier way to tell if she’s real.”
I waved my holographic display back on and pointed to the purple diamond that appeared over all the simulated character’s heads in the overlay. A new translucent box rolled out beside Roxy with her name and background information. I waved it away.
“There’s no fun in that,” Lukas said, “and I’m being serious. This sort of thing, this level of AI… This is the type of stuff I used to dream of working on, back when I was at Dark Room. She really is perfect—everything here is, in case you haven’t noticed. And do you know what the worst part is?”
“What’s that?” I mumbled, staring as Roxy twirled ice cubes around a highball glass.
“The worst part is they didn’t need me to code it. I always thought it would be you and I that built a place like this,” he sighed. “At least we’re still part of it, I suppose.”
Roxy presented our drinks, garnished with lemon and sprigs of rosemary. Lukas took his with an appreciative nod, and sipped.
“Even the goddamn alcohol is perfect,” he said. “Anyway… how’s the testing coming along on your end?”
My reply was cut short by a crash of shattering glass—then screaming. It was guttural, so intense and unexpected that my concentration was immediately broken. I felt a surge of panic, like ice water down my spine. I spun around and saw the lounge table flipped on its side, the man convulsing on the floor. A woman rushed to his side but he grabbed her arms, hurling her backwards.
“Stay the fuck away from me!” he yelled as she staggered back.
I set my drink down too hard, sloshing gin onto the bar. With my hand free I flicked my overlay back on, confirming that the people were also human testers. Lukas was already on his feet, rushing over to help. I followed after.
“I can’t breathe!” the man screamed. “I can’t fucking breathe! Wake me up! None of this is real! It’s freezing! I’m drowning in the fucking pod! Let me out!”
“What happened?” Lukas asked the woman. She looked frightened.
“He was fine a minute ago,” she sniffled. “Suddenly he thinks he’s dying in real life. That I’m not actually real, because I’m not feeling it too, I guess.”
“Sounds like A.S.S.” Lukas said, staring down at the man.
“Ass? “I blurted out, stupidly.
“No, idiot. Did you even read the forms they had us sign? Acute Solipsism Syndrome, it’s a potential risk of total immersion.”
Lukas knelt down beside the man, who was now shivering with his head propped uncomfortably against the leg of a lounge chair.
“Hey, buddy,” Lukas said, “You’re going to be all right. You’re not drowning. You’re breathing just fine in real life. They told us to watch out for these symptoms, remember? It’s nothing serious. You need to get up so you can report it.”
“The techs would be helping him if there was really a problem,” I said to the other tester. It came out more like a question than a statement. She gulped, and nodded. I saw a familiar face over her shoulder.
Mara?
Mara was sitting back at the bar. Her long dark hair framed a strange expression, something like pity, as she watched the commotion. I thought for sure she’d step in to help—the simulation was her project, after all—but instead she took what appeared to be a martini from Roxy and drank it in a single gulp. After that she said something to Roxy I couldn’t hear, stood up, and left.
“You’re really here,” Lukas reassured our colleague, still playing the role of paramedic. “Try remembering how you got here.”
I looked back at Mara’s empty seat. Roxy was wiping down the counter. I felt a pit of unease settling in my stomach.
Remember how you got here, I thought.
* * * * * *
The elevator ride was so long that I nodded off. I woke up startled, like I’d been falling, and shrank with embarrassment. If the other people packed into the freight car had noticed, they spared me any acknowledgment. The only one looking at me was my own bloodshot reflection in the elevator’s chromed paneling. Jesus, I looked like shit.
Fucking jetlag.
But how long had we been descending? I had barely finished unpacking when the Foundation staff knocked on my door. They ushered me downstairs with the other prospective testers, into the basement of the mountain lodge. From there we boarded the elevator. It was minutes ago, but it already felt like yesterday.
I giggled stupidly, remembering the excruciatingly-long load times in most of Dark Room’s games. It became something of an inside joke, to trap our players inside elevators as a new level was loading. It was a necessary evil, to maintain immersion. Some of our more masochistic fans even found it endearing.
“So, is this where you’ve hidden the loading screen?” I said to break to the ice. No response. Either these weren’t gamers, or they too were jetlagged past the point of zombification.
Or maybe I’m just not funny.
“No, that is much further down,” a woman finally said from beside the controls. She faced me and smiled knowingly. Well, at least she looked to be well rested. Flowing black hair draped down her lab coat to the edges of her name tag.
Dr. Mara Droste.
“It’s getting really cold,” a man said. I realized I could see my breath, and wrapped my arms together.
“It has to be cold for the computers to function,” Mara said. “That’s why all the servers are kept so far underground. It saves the Foundation a fortune in maintenance and cooling costs.”
The elevator chimed. When the doors opened, whatever was left of my grogginess vanished in a wave of awe.
Lukas, what the hell have you gotten me into?
We stepped out into what felt at first like an infinite black void punctuated with sharp points of white light. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out wires suspending the lamps from catwalks further above us. As bright and numerous as the lights were, they could barely scrape the volume of the massive underground cavern. Only the faintest impression of light reached the walls, just enough that I could discern the whorl of marbled stone in the distance. Up above the crisscross of man-made catwalks, the vaulted ceiling peaked in utter darkness.
“Welcome to the bunker,” Mara said. She beckoned us down a path of lamp posts, further into the cavern.
It looked as though someone had teleported the guts of some research facility deep into the mountain. Cold steel and concrete were fused to the natural stone with practicality that couldn’t conceal the strange beauty of the caves. We passed through an imposing bulkhead door and across a bridge that spanned a lake of water gleaming like black glass.
“The Foundation really built this place?” said a woman, awestruck. “It must have cost a fortune!”
“Not exactly,” Mara said without breaking stride. “Actually, people have been building this place for thousands of years. Ancient people explored these grottoes and discovered their salt deposits. They mined it for centuries, all throughout the dark ages, until it was sealed.”
“Why was it sealed?” I asked.
“The records are unclear about that. What we do know is that the Soviet government excavated it to use as a fallout shelter, in the event of nuclear war. We have them to thank for most of the infrastructure, including the geothermal extractors. After the cold war it was sealed again, until we purchased it. So, to finish answering the first question—yes, it did cost a fortune.”
I followed along with the tour, wondering just who was investing so much capital into the Foundation for the sake of virtual reality technology. Sure, we’d have loved to get our hands on it at Dark Room. But even at the height of our success, we were in no position to buy a fucking underground Russian base. Something didn’t add up.
Still, the pay was on a scale barely fathomable to someone who teaches game design to college students. And there was something else, almost nostalgic. It felt like whatever this was, it was a chance to get in on the ground floor of the next new thing. If this proved to be groundbreaking, maybe I could make a name for myself in the Industry again.
We came at last to a second massive vault, clearly reshaped by some heavy machinery into a smooth, perfectly rectangular warehouse. Fluorescent lights shone through grated catwalks that ran above dozens of stainless-steel cylinders, each of them barely larger than a person. The soft thrum of machinery reverberated throughout the room. Technicians scurried between computer terminals along the outer walls.
“Come,” Mara beckoned our group up the stairs onto the catwalks. “The first group has already been at it for a week. Have a look. Others will be joining you inside the simulation.”
From atop the walkway we could see down into the cylinders. Many were empty, the rest held people floating upright in some kind of liquid. They wore breathing masks, not unlike scuba regulators, and appeared to be unconscious.
“The pods are total sensory deprivation,” Mara continued, “closer to suspended animation, in fact. In that state, your brain can interpret sensory stimuli from the simulation as a genuine substitute for, well, what you’re experiencing now.”
Mara looked down at the occupied tanks. “They are in a whole other world, now. The town we’ve constructed for you to test is just the beginning. There really is no limit to the worlds we can build…”
When Mara looked up, she seemed to read the expressions on our faces. “Everything is perfectly safe,” she added quickly. “We have a full medical team on site, 24/7. I’ve been immersed several times myself, and will be joining you all inside. Does anyone have any concerns?”
“We’re probably already inside,” a woman mused. Everyone just slowly turned to her, and she explained. “Think of what we’re on the threshold of here. If we can ever truly run simulations of reality, and there’s only one true reality, then the odds are we’re in some form of simulated reality right now.”
Someone objected, and the group seemed to explode immediately into a deep philosophical debate on the topic. The term Quantum Hall Effect was spat back and forth quite a bit. I more or less capped out at high school physics, and tuned the discussion out. I just stared at the half-naked people below, floating in some kind of lucid dream.
Fuck it, I thought. What have I got to lose?
* * * * * *
There was no Hell, until we built it.
It’s what Mara had said to Roxy, during our colleague’s panic attack. I’d asked Roxy out of curiosity, after the situation had calmed down.
“Do you know what she meant by that?” I inquired.
“No idea,” Roxy said, and then asked if I wanted another drink.
“I really should get back to work,” I declined.
“All right then, good luck with the beta test,” she winked at me.
I left Roxy’s alone, to continue my nighttime exploration. There were no rules to this job, per se. We just had to spend our time in this place however we saw fit, and report any flaws in the experience.
I decided that to give myself some structure, I would pace out the boundaries of this town. It was modeled as a quaint little resort settlement in the mountains. The street outside Roxy’s followed a bend around the edge of town. Storefronts faced a low cobblestone wall on the other side of the road. Beyond that, the hill sloped down into a procedurally-generated forest of pine trees that stretched out to a foggy horizon. It was clearly based on the real terrain above the bunker, but the town itself was a work of fiction.
I strolled from street light to street light, dragging my fingers along the rough texture of the stone wall. A mild breeze rustled the silhouettes of trees and brushed gently over me. I closed my eyes and breathed the fresh, evergreen scent in deeply. Every minutiae of sensation was as real as anything I’ve ever experienced.
I daydreamed about the generation of games that would surely spawn from this technology. Even Dark Room’s most immersive VR titles would seem primitive and obsolete going forward.
Suddenly, sharply, the breeze became uncomfortably cold. Some primal sense told me to snap out of the daydream. Something was wrong.
Mara’s cryptic words came back to me.
I realized I’d been walking in darkness. The streetlights were out. I turned around, confused, to see I’d passed half a dozen blown-out lights without noticing it. The storefronts too, were vacant and dark. I wondered if I’d stumbled into some unfinished area. The sound of the wind had changed, too.
No, not the wind—the trees.
Behind me, where the streetlights still worked, the trees stirred in the gentle breeze. But in the dark area they stood perfectly still, as if frozen. I was already thinking of how to word this in the bug report when I realized I wasn’t alone. Up ahead, leaning against a broken streetlight, was the shadow of a man.
I walked towards him, hoping for some validation that he too was seeing the same thing. But I hesitated halfway between my streetlight and his. Something was wrong with him. He was twitching strangely, as if caught in the throes of some spasm. For a moment I thought of the tester at Roxy’s, convulsing in pain. But no, this was different. This man was sobbing.
“The cold got in,” he wept in a raspy voice, seemingly to himself.
I was about to ask if he needed help when the clouds parted, bathing us both in moonlight. My blood ran cold. The old man was withered and emaciated, little more than a skeleton. He wore nothing but the same neoprene shorts and nylon harness we were all given in real life, before entering the pods. The vertebrae of his spine jutted sickeningly against the pale, glistening flesh of his back.
In disbelief, I waved for my holographic overlay. Nothing happened. I needed to know if this was real — if he was real. I waved again, and then again. It wasn’t working.
Impossible, I thought, and kept trying. My frantic gestures must have gotten the old man’s attention, because he finally raised his head. Long strands of white, wispy hair parted to reveal the same breathing apparatus we all wore. Where his oxygen tube would be was only a torn, tattered rubber scrap. His bloodshot eyes opened wide with shock. They fixed on me with the same surprise and horror that I must have been reflecting back at him. I could hear his tortured breathing intensify.
“You shouldn’t be here!” he finally snarled. He lunged towards me. Stupefied, I was too late to react. His wet, freezing hands found my neck in a choking grasp.
“You need to wake up!” he growled, and tightened his grip. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t scream. Only panic. I tried to pry his hands off my throat but they were too slick with that same goopy liquid from the pods. My hands slipped down his wiry arms, and that’s when I noticed it—that stupid fucking tattoo.
Dethsqwurl: a squirrel holding a katana in shitty black ink.
Madcow had gotten me so drunk at the launch party for our first game that he was able to convince me to get that damned thing. It was my own alter ego on my forearm, to match his. And there it was, blurry and faded—but unmistakable—on this skin and bones man. He had my tattoo. I stared at his face, even as I struggled to breathe. The recognition washed over me in a wave of cold terror that swept my sanity away.
It was me.
He was me.
The absurdity of my situation gave me a sudden burst of strength—dreamlike vigor—and I hurled the ancient doppelganger off. It staggered, and I gasped for air. Just when I thought it would charge at me again, something flashed in the distance. Suddenly, just for a moment, the sky was brighter than daytime. The abrupt brilliance stunned the creature, and it stared, horrified, at the source beyond the horizon.
“No…” it whimpered at the lingering glow of the explosion. I seized the moment and ran. As I did, a sound like the crack of thunder smashed through everything. More explosions burst across the horizon like lightning. Every illuminating flash revealed the town as something else—shattered ruins, desolate and decayed.
“They never finish it!” the creature screamed. “They’ll never finish it!” Its cries became an incoherent wail of rage and agony, and then disappeared entirely in the roaring boom.
When at last I made it back to the well-lit area, the entire cacophony ceased. There was only the gentle sound of the breeze, and a slight tinnitus in my ear. My overlay finally responded. I kept running as I searched Mara’s location on the user list.
* * * * * *
I found her on the rooftop deck of the tallest building in town. She was sitting on the ledge, smoking a cigarette and sipping wine from a crystal stem. She greeted me without taking her eyes off the panorama of the town laid out before her.
That I was a frantic, gibbering wreck gasping to catch my breath didn’t seem to faze her. I tried to explain what had just happened. She only faced me to refill her glass from a bottle resting beside her. Her wind-tousled hair framed that same, pitying expression she wore at the bar.
“What the fuck was that thing?” I demanded.
She shrugged dismissively, and turned away again. She seemed to be staring at the shadowy part of town I’d just fled from.
“An anomaly,” she said.
Her lack of concern was exasperating. Hadn’t she been listening? Didn’t she care?
“I want out,” I said firmly. “Wake me up, now.”
She took a drag off her cigarette, then flicked ashes off the side of the roof.
“I’m afraid that isn’t possible,” she said.
I took a deep breath, trying to contain my anger.
“Dr. Droste,” I said slowly. “Mara, I’m sleeping in one of your pods. I know you can revive me.”
She seemed to find this amusing. But there was something else cracking in her persona, as if she were trying to cope with something herself. Was she drunk?
“I already did revive you,” she finally said, “a long time ago.”
“What are you talking about?” I said incredulously. “We’re right here. We literally just started.”
“This instance just started,” she said as if she were clarifying the situation. My confused expression must have told her otherwise. “It’s all so lifelike isn’t it?” she continued, gesturing across the entire landscape. “We had you testers to thank for that. It was an iterative process. Every time we re-ran the simulation your experiences helped us tune it just a little bit more. We got a little closer to perfection, every time.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I gritted my teeth. Mara was supposed to be the one professional we could all rely on. She was our lifeline. We trusted her. Now, she was spouting nonsense. “How can I be in the simulation right now talking to you, if you’ve already woke me up?”
“Because you’re an instance, too,” she said, “a copy, of your original mind.” She finished her cigarette and tossed it away. “That’s why you had to be in those pods as long as you were. A frozen scan, we called it.”
“Why…” I began to mutter, but I felt a shortness of breath. I was beginning to feel dizzy, dissociated. This couldn’t be right.
“It was the entire purpose of the Foundation,” she said. “It’s one thing to build a perfect virtual reality. Our benefactors wanted us to prove it was possible to upload minds to it. They wanted to live forever, on the inside.”
She went on, but I couldn’t follow her jargon, something about discovering the neural correlates of consciousness. “No—” I cut her off in a snarl. My head was swimming now. “I mean if this is all true, why are you telling me this?”
“It’s not like it matters anymore,” she shrugged. “Every time the simulation iterates it deletes the previous instances and begins again with fresh copies.”
Every time…
My thoughts flashed back to those long nights at Dark Room. Sitting at my desk, pacing the hallways, crashing on the couch in the break room, all the while strung out over the latest build of our game. The polished final product was the result of countless iteration. Meetings at the whiteboard, debugging and redesign, again and again, version after version. That was just to make a videogame. But something as complex as this place? How many versions had it taken to get this far? Dozens? Hundreds?
“So, you’ve murdered us,” I said, confronting her gaze, “over and over again…”
“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,” Mara said.
I wanted to scream what other way is there!? But knew it was futile. There was nothing for me to do here with all my anger and confusion. I decided to leave Mara alone and do the one thing I could, which was to march back to Roxy’s and get mind-numbingly drunk as soon as possible.
I was about to head downstairs when I remembered something, and turned back to her.
“Why did you say what you did back at Roxy’s?”
“What?” it was her turn to look confused.
“You said there was no Hell until we built it. If this place is so perfect, why did you say that?”
She shook her head, and looked again to the dark, static part of town.
“The anomalies…” she said, “you’re not the first to see one. But I… I don’t remember them. Not from previous iterations. I should be able to remember…” She hung her head down, and closed her eyes. “I wasn’t lying back at the bunker, when I told you I’d been immersed before. I’m as much a copy as you are. The only difference is that I scan in regularly. I should remember every previous version, unless… unless I’m not around to scan in anymore.”
She took in a deep breath, and shuddered. “And a glitch on that scale doesn’t just happen randomly, or overnight. It’s a sign the hardware is failing—has been failing, for some time. But our servers were custom-built for billionaires that want to live forever. They’re kept deep underground in perfect conditions. They could run for a thousand years, maybe longer.”
“If nobody were left to turn them off…” I said, connecting the dots. She turned to me with fresh tears streaking her face.
I thought of the bunker, the frigid void of empty caverns deep beneath the mountains. I thought of terminals flashing, attended only by withered skeletons. Geothermal extractors whirred behind ancient and ominous Soviet bulkheads, sealed now and forever against some outside apocalypse. And somewhere deeper still, within some still-running computer, my own long-dead ghost was still trying in vain to wake me up from a simulation stuck in an infinite loop.
Out past Mara’s gaze, the dark patch of town seemed to grow larger, the ink-black tendrils of its desolation spreading from one streetlight to the next. The wind became chill, and with it came a distant sound—faint, but familiar—like the wails of something lost and afraid.
I waved open my holographic display and began a bug report:
A.S.S.
|
My friend recently bought a foreclosed home, and while helping him clean it out of the previous owner’s leftover belongings, I came across a box of journals in the attic. What I learned in the early entries was that the man who lived there, Allan, was agoraphobic. For those unfamiliar with the term, agoraphobia is the fear of places or situations that might cause panic, helplessness, or embarrassment. In its most extreme form, agoraphobia can lead to the sufferer being confined to their home, fearful of the entire outside world. Allan fell into this category. I thought it would be interesting to get a peek inside the mind of someone who confined themselves to their home, so I decided to read them. I noticed they started when he was somewhere in his late 30’s. At first, the entries were pretty normal, and gave a little insight into the man’s psyche. It’s quite sad, actually. Anything he would have to go outside for, be it food, home necessities, etc., his sister takes care of and then delivers to his house. But towards the end of the first journal, and mainly beginning with the second, the man started talking about really weird happenings, and it seems he was under the impression that his home, his only safe place in the world, was haunted. Without further ado, let me transcribe these journals. The following are from 2012. They become more frequent in the following years, if you are interested I will continue to transcribe them.
* * * * * *
May 12th, 2012
Today was difficult. I promised Mary [his therapist who visits him at home] that I would try to walk into my backyard today. After throwing up a few times, I finally mustered up the courage to try. I opened my back door, unlocked the screen door, and stood there for about 15 minutes. I hyperventilated more than I care to admit, but finally I opened the door to the outside. After another 10 minutes, I took my first step outside in about 8 months. I immediately felt dread flood over and through my body. I brought my second foot out and planted it on the concrete. My hands began shaking violently. I jumped when I heard the screen door close behind me. I immediately turned around to go inside, but then, the main door slammed shut. It doesn’t really make sense, but I’m chalking it up to the wind. Anyways, I felt like I was trapped outside. I flung open the screen door and tried opening the main door, but it wouldn’t budge. I began hyperventilating again, and eventually passed out on my back porch. When I awoke, my back door was open again. I rushed inside and closed and locked the door behind me. Part of me wonders if the door was ever even closed, or if it’s something my mind made up to justify the panic attack. Either way, I won’t be going outside again any time soon. I’m now waiting for Anne [his sister] to get here with my groceries. I highly doubt I will get any sleep tonight, as my nerves are at an all-time high.
June 8th, 2012
My birthday was today. Anne stopped by with some cake, that was nice. After she left, though, I went to use the restroom, and on my mirror, in red lipstick, was written “Happy Birthday”. This didn’t seem like something Anne would do, and when I called her, she claimed she had no idea what I was talking about. I’m sure she’s just playing a joke on me though. She always has been a jokester. My third year in my home for my birthday actually somewhat made me miss the outside world. Not enough to ever think about returning to it in any regular capacity, but I do miss spending my birthday around people, with no offense intended to Anne. I know I’m safe here though. I don’t mind it.
October 31st, 2012
I always hate Halloween. In my neighborhood, houses who are participating in trick-or-treating are supposed to leave their porch lights on, and houses who are not, leave their lights off to let children know to skip that house. But every year, without fail, kids seem to “forget” about this rule, and I get my doorbell rung about a thousand times. And if that’s not enough, some of the more free-spirited children choose to yell at me from outside, angry that they see lights on inside and yet I’m not handing out candy, like I’m supposed to feel bad about that. I’m glad I never had kids, but if I did, I would certainly teach them to respect the wishes of another man who chooses to not interact with the outside world. Not that the kids know that about me, but they don’t have to. I’m rambling now. Something of note, though, is I’ve been hearing strange things since last night.
I woke up at around 12:30 am to what sounded like footsteps coming from my attic. I grabbed my gun from my bedside drawer and quietly walked to check each door. Both doors, as well as every window in my home were as I had left them before bed, closed and locked. There is a chute that opens and has a ladder fall down for one to ascend into the attic, but it was closed. It can’t be pulled back up from the attic, so it didn’t make sense that anyone could be up there. The sounds stopped, and I attributed them to an animal, which I would take care of when I woke up later that morning. I went back to bed, but when I did, I heard what were unmistakably footsteps travel from across the attic, to directly above my bed, and stop there, and they ceased to pick back up. I have to say, it made me feel very uneasy. I eventually drifted back off to sleep, and had no further problems until I woke up later this morning.
When I awoke, my alarm clock had been unplugged from the wall, causing me to wake up late. I checked my phone, and it was 9:40, a full two hours and 10 minutes past my normal wake-up time. I know I didn’t unplug it, and I can’t definitively say what did. As I went into the kitchen for breakfast, I heard more footsteps, but this time they seemed to be coming from directly behind me. I would stop and turn around, but there would be nothing there. They seemed to follow me all around the house, but every time I looked back, they would stop, and there would be nothing there.
I’m sure I’m just going crazy….er than I already am. But it’s quite unsettling. Trick-or-treating went as it usually does, with a significantly increased number of asshole kids yelling things at me from outside. Little bastards.
November 1st, 2012
Today I went up to my attic to make certain there was no one there. I heard footsteps again last night, but only for a brief moment. I was sure I was going to find an animal when I went up there, but I found nothing. Instead, I found a large number of my belongings outside of their boxes. Not in a mess, mind you, but neatly organized next to their boxes. Part of me wonders if Anne was doing some organizing at some point and I forgot about it; it has been quite some time since I’ve been up here, but I don’t recall her ever being up here. What happened next I can’t explain. My ladder to the attic was pushed back up and the chute closed and locked from the bottom. I heard footsteps run away from below, and a faint laugh echoed through the ceiling to my ears. I immediately called the police, who had to break my door to enter, and when they arrived, they let me down. I did a search of my house, and I found that nothing was missing or altered in any way. Also, not one of the doors or windows were open or unlocked, leaving me to wonder how the intruder was in here in the first place.
November 5th, 2012
These footsteps won’t stop. I have been hearing them every night since I was locked in the attic, and that’s where they’re coming from. I had Anne go up and check this morning, but she found nothing and no one. They’re usually most prevalent in the night house, between around 11 pm and 6 am. I’ve been losing sleep over it. They seem to walk around the attic in no discernable pattern until finally, they travel to directly over my bed and stop. Then they pick up the next day, every once in a while seeming to be behind me as I walk through my house again. I remember back when I tried going outside, the door slammed behind me, and now that I think about it, I believe it to be related to this.
I just want the footsteps to stop. I am certain no one is up there, but I hear them, I know I do. I’m not crazy. Well, I am, but not auditory hallucination crazy. I haven’t gotten a decent night’s sleep in a week. I got so frustrated a little while ago that I screamed at the top of my lungs for it to stop, and much to my surprise, they did. When I yelled, they were at the other end of the attic, and they never made their way above my bed. Not that it helped me sleep at all, I was too anxious from expecting them to resume.
December 8th, 2012
The footsteps have stopped. I’ve resumed my normal sleep schedule, and it feels fantastic. I’m beginning to think that everything was just in my head. I think I was under a considerable amount of stress, and I think that that stress manifested itself in auditory hallucinations. The whole attic thing must have been a fluke. I’m not crazy though, I really just think it was all stress-related. I feel good today. I feel optimistic.
December 19th, 2012
Last night. I’m so scared. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know if I was dreaming or not. I don’t know if it was real or not. I just don’t know. But last night, at about 3 am, I woke up, and when my eyes adjusted, I saw someone standing in the doorway to my bedroom. He was very tall; the top of his head was covered by the doorframe. He had yellow eyes that sparkled even in the dark. He didn’t do anything, just stood there, breathing in and out slowly, but loudly. The only movement he made was when he put his hands on each side of the doorframe. But he never tried to enter, and never tried to communicate. Which I think was more terrifying. I sat in my bed paralyzed with fear, and just stared at the…thing while blinking as little as possible. I didn’t know what else to do. At about 4:30, he simply turned around and walked down my hallway. About two minutes after that, I heard footsteps in my attic, walking from the point where the stairs drop, to directly above my bed, and then silence.
I have never been more scared in my entire life. I’m not ashamed to admit I cried when the ordeal was over. I have no clue who it was or what it wanted. I almost feel as if it was some sort of horrible nightmare. That’s the only explanation. It couldn’t have actually happened. It was a nightmare.
January 2nd, 2013
Another New Year’s spent alone, watching TV, wallowing in my own self-pity. On top of that, I’m fucking terrified. The visitor stayed in the attic since the first time he appeared in my bedroom doorway. Until about 1 am this morning. I woke up again, and this time, he was in my room. The moonlight shone through my window and partially illuminated him. He has long stringy hair, abhorrent yellow eyes, and his lower jaw hangs down, much farther than it should. It looks almost like it’s unhinged. He has rotting teeth and if I’m not mistaken, putrid breath. He was wearing tattered clothing, I actually think his apparel was some of my clothes from the attic. He stood there for two hours, at the halfway point between my bed and the doorway. I tried…I really did try to say something. But I couldn’t. The only movement he made besides his chest heaving in and out from breathing was his eyebrows arched, giving him an angry look. Just when I thought he couldn’t get any more terrifying, he changed his expression to mad. When he was satisfied, he turned around and went back to the attic. I don’t know how he gets up there, because the attic chute doesn’t come down (it’s very loud), but he always ends up standing directly above my bed.
January 18th, 2013
He comes every night now. Since the last time I wrote in here, he’s been here every night. I don’t sleep anymore. I tried going to my couch, but he just came to the archway in my living room. He just breathes very heavily, watches me, and leaves. Then goes up to the attic and ends up directly above wherever I’m lying. I can’t deal with this. I don’t know what to do.
January 20th, 2013
Anne spent the night at my house last night, and of course, nothing happened. I don’t know what the hell to do.
February 19th, 2013
I have to leave the house. I can’t leave the house. I have to leave the house. I can’t leave the house. I have to leave the house. I can’t leave the house I have to leave the house. I can’t leave the house. I have to leave the house. I can’t leave the house I have to leave the house. I can’t leave the house. I have to leave the house. I can’t leave the house.
February 28th, 2013
Whatever this thing is has become more malevolent. At about 3 am last night, I got up to use the bathroom. When I walked out, the hallway light bulb exploded, and a chair flew across my hallway from the living room to my kitchen. I spent the rest of the night in my bathtub with the light on. I got up this morning and walked into my kitchen, splinters of chair littered the ground. As I was cleaning, all of my cabinets opened and one by one, my dishes were pushed out onto the floor. I had a panic attack and woke up face down on my living room carpet. I don’t know how I got there. He probably put me there. He probably moved me. I don’t know if I’m just going crazy, or if this is really happening. It doesn’t make sense. I wish I knew.
March 9th, 2013
Last night, something that hasn’t happened before happened. People started walking by my windows. Slowly. Looking in. They all had the same yellow eyes as whatever the thing is that harasses me inside my house. They all had the same weird hanging jaws. After about 3 hours of them just walking back and forth, they stopped. Two at each window, and stared at me until the sun rose. Then they just walked away. The one inside the house just wandered around in the attic all night, stopping right above me every 15 minutes or so.
On top of that, my television kept going on and off. Even after I unplugged it. It kept going on to the channel I had it on, CNN, stayed on for about five seconds, and then shut off. Today, I stood at my front door for four hours, contemplating leaving. I don’t know who I’m trying to kid. I’ll never leave. I’ll die in this house. Nothing can change that. These things are going to kill me. I can’t do anything about it. Maybe I should just kill myself.
April 1st, 2013
They filled in my living room last night. Everybody came from some unknown entrance into my home, and they gathered in my hallway, right up to my bedroom. And if that wasn’t enough, they hummed. Not a song or anything, just a barely audible, monotonous tone. For two hours. Then they all left. WHAT THE FUCK WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME I DONT BOTHER ANYBODY WHY CAN’T I LEAVE I WANT TO LEAVE
June 8th, 2013
The big 4-0 today. And I’m a huge pussy who can’t leave his house. I’ve boarded up all my windows and barricaded the back door. I put a board over the attic chute, and it still doesn’t help. They still show up, they still hum. It’s like I’m living with roommates. I now sleep during the day and stay up at night, staring into yellow eyes and being overcome with the gut-wrenching stench of their breath.
June 13th, 2013
Mary said I have to try to figure out where my “irrational” fears are coming from. Irrational….bullshit. But I was thinking about it, and I remembered a nightmare I had when I was a young boy. I would start off in the pitch black, but I would already know I was in my childhood home. I would feel my way around, and the walls would be sticky with an odorous grime that would cling to my fingertips when I removed them. I would then reach the door to our enclosed porch and exit to the almost-outside. When I finally got out there, the pure darkness before me would little by little start to be lit up by yellow eyes. Once I realized what was happening, I would get scared and try to find my way back inside, but in the dark I wouldn’t be able to find where to go. The walls would become soft and collapse into a sea of the filthy sludge that was the walls. I guess the only applicable part to take from this is the yellow eyes. I don’t know if they mean something, but they are the same eyes I see every night by the crowd that gathers to watch me (attempt) to sleep.
July 5th, 2013
There was a part of me, deep down inside me, that KNEW I was just being crazy. It has been over a year of being terrorized by these things, and I’ve gotten used to only sleeping a few hours a night because of them. But part of me knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are not real. Mary said so. My sister said so. I knew it. Until last night. I was laying on my couch, I don’t know if I mentioned it but I do not sleep in my bedroom anymore, haven’t for some time. But I was lying there, and only the one, the very first one I ever saw, showed up. I sat up and looked him dead in the eyes. Then he started inching closer to me. It took some time for him to reach me, but I couldn’t do anything about it. This was a whole new fear for me. This hadn’t happened before. I closed my eyes and repeated to myself that it wasn’t real, that I was simply just crazy and seeing things. But then I felt it. It rested a finger in my arm and dragged it along my skin. It felt wet. Sticky, slimy. My closed eyes flooded with tears but I still was unable to move. Then it stopped. I opened my eyes and saw nothing. I heard the footsteps in the attic above me, but he was no longer in front of my face. I looked at my arm, and the light layer of hair that covers it was caked in a thin line of black grime. I was sure I was just hallucinating once more, and went to sleep, still too scared to get up. I slept for what felt like days. In reality, it was about 5 hours, far and away the longest solid block of sleep I’ve had in months. I woke up feeling so rested. But the line on my arm was still there. Now a dried, chipping line of black sludge. The smell was too much to handle and I vomited. I have to leave this house today. That’s all there is to it.
July 7th, 2013
It has been two days since I tried to leave my house through my front door. I have been on the floor of my living room since it happened. I haven’t eaten or slept since. I am not safe anywhere. In my house or out of it. I opened my front door just a crack and saw the sunlight pour in, something I hadn’t seen in over a month due to my blocking out all my windows. I felt the cool breeze of summer slip in through the slight opening, and it chilled me to the bone. I opened it a little farther, and that’s when I heard it. The breathing. I took a peek out and saw him. I finally saw him in full light. He was disgusting. The breeze brought the smell inside and it attacked my nostrils once again, this time even more putrid, which I attribute to it baking in the hot summer sun on my porch. I was transfixed on the man’s dripping body until I got my bearings and slammed the door shut. I got inside and collapsed from a panic attack. And I’ve been here since. I only moved to grab this notebook. I can’t do this anymore. I just want to die.
July 9th, 2013
I got up last night finally. It was late at night, I don’t remember what time, but I hadn’t seen any of the visitors. Just heard the one up in the attic. I was feeling decidedly brave after what was basically an eternity curled up in the fetal position, so I poked at the ceiling of my kitchen with a broomstick three times. Whatever the thing up there is, responded in kind. Tap. Tap. Tap. I tapped three more times. Once again, he did the same. Tap. Tap. Tap. His responses frustrated me, being so calm and nonchalant. I jammed the broomstick up to the ceiling, creating a much louder tap. What happened next is what I would refer to as “an unreasonable response”. There was a slam from the attic, that broke the glass outside of the boards that covered the windows in my kitchen. The light hanging from the ceiling dropped down to the floor, shattering everywhere. Plates and other dishes that were resting on the counter next to the sink fell to the floor; all of this creating a cacophony of sound that sent me right into another panic attack. I came to from this one fairly quickly though. I’m so tired.
July 18th, 2013
He spoke. He finally spoke. He told me I’m not allowed to sleep anymore. That’s not right though, is it? I mean I have to sleep. I guess I’m going try to stay up as long as possible, and only sleep when I absolutely need to. Since I can’t leave my house, I feel compelled to obey him. As stupid as that is. I don’t know what else to do. I hate this. I just want to die.
July 21st, 2013
He can the tell me to awake… Not fair. Why me when can’t leave my house WHY ME WHY ME WHY ME WHY ME WHY ME WHY ME WHY ME
July 23rd, 2013
I’m pretty sure my body forced me to sleep after that last journal entry. I just woke up, and I slept for over 24 hours. I see my punishment for disobeying him. I have dried, smelly black sludge covering my feet. And it hurts. It stings. It’s disgusting. I wish I could leave. But I know I can’t. While I stay awake now all I can think about is slitting my wrists, while gripping a gun and blowing my brains out, while stepping off a stool with a noose around my neck, in a house that’s been filling with carbon monoxide. If only the world were so perfect.
Whatever he is, is angry. He’s been tearing my pictures and things off the walls, tore the ceiling fans out of my two bedrooms, and broke the glass on the rest of the windows of my house. Next time he comes down from the attic, I’m going to try to talk to him, even though when he appears I get a wave of fear over me that’s utterly paralyzing. I think since I’m so nihilistic now I just don’t care. If he kills me, good.
July 25th, 2013
My feet feel like they weigh a hundred pounds each. It takes everything I have to walk just across the room. I soaked my feet in the bathtub and the dried, cracking grime came off, but it must have seeped into my skin because it still feels like there are small boulders attached to my ankles. I basically drag myself around the house. I accepted long ago that this house would be my tomb, but I never thought it would be under these conditions.
Whenever I move about my house, the thing in the attic follows me up above. I can hear the creaking of the floorboards follow me wherever I go. This is the first time I’ve ever wanted him to appear, so I can try to speak to it. I have to find out what it wants. I need it to take the grime out of the insides of my feet so I can walk properly again. I am in this position because of it, and I now need its help. I’m so pathetic.
July 27th, 2013
He finally showed up. And I was happy. I can’t believe it, but I was actually happy. He slowly entered my living room from around the corner of the hallway, He dripped black grime as the odor of rotting…everything permeated the air, filling the space between my walls and ceiling and floor with a nauseating stench that threatened to further empty my already empty stomach. I forgot if I wrote down that I don’t really eat anymore. Getting to the kitchen is too arduous of a process. When I do go, I bring out a few days worth of food so I can just stay in the living room. I have a bucket I use for relieving myself that I empty into the toilet twice a week. I’m off topic though.
I gagged as he turned the corner. He leaves a trail of black sludge wherever he goes. It’s disgusting. But anyways, he walked into the living room, and after I calmed down my hyperventilation, I managed to squeak out some things that passed for words. I asked him what he wanted with me. His response was simple. He just said he was “hungry” and that I “feed him well”. I don’t know what to make of this because he’s never tried to eat me. Then I asked what happened to the rest of the things like him that were terrorizing me months earlier. He said something along the lines of “You are mine. Not theirs. Now they know”. I sat there not knowing how to respond. All of a sudden, from his foot, a puddle of the black sludge began forming that coated his body under his clothes. The puddle got bigger and bigger until it reached my feet, and then bubbled up, before bursting, getting all over me. My face, in my mouth, all over my clothes. Then he simply turned around and walked away, leaving his mess behind him. Since then, every hour or so I’ve been vomiting this black sludge. I don’t know where in my body it’s coming from, but it’s there. Trust me. It’s there.
August 14th, 2013
I finally stopped vomiting. I’ve lost 36 pounds since the last time I wrote in here. I have a headache. He visits me every once in a while. He doesn’t say anything. He just comes to me, wherever I am, and traces his finger along somewhere on my body. He leaves a line of the grime on me, the smell of which I’ve gotten used to. I chip it away, and sometimes it takes some skin off too. He then comes back and collects the chips and pieces of skin. I don’t know what he does with them. I have a really bad headache. And I’m hungry. I wish I did not have this headache!
September 1st, 2013
I have lost all the skin on my left arm and hand, up to the elbow. He’s been leaving a much wider line of grime on me that adheres to my skin, and each piece that chips off pretty much just takes the skin beneath it with it. My left arm is a mess. I’ve never quite seen that hue of pink before. I asked him what he was doing with all of it, and he ignored me. I’m getting tired of this. I think it’s time to go outside.
September 8th, 2013
I don’t know why I forgot what happened the last time I tried to go outside. After standing at my front door for three hours, I finally got up the nerve to leave. I swore I was going to do it. I couldn’t live like this anymore. Anne had brought a doctor friend of hers over to check on my arm, I was all bandaged up properly. They tried telling me I had to go to a psychiatric hospital. And I would’ve, were I actually a crazy person. They didn’t know what I was dealing with. They didn’t see the grime that I spend 6-8 hours a day cleaning up from his previous visit. They don’t have to deal with the smell that I use 4 cans of Febreeze a day covering. My sister thought I was crazy for needing that much Febreeze. She’s the crazy one. But I digress. I opened my door, fully prepared to leave. I think. But there he was. He pushed the door open, knocking me to the ground behind it. He then loomed over me. He told me I had to stop seeing my sister or he would send his “friends” to her. As mad as I was at Anne, I wouldn’t do anything to put her in harm’s way. Then, as punishment, he traced a line across my forehead. Pretty much covered my whole forehead in the grime. I had a small panic attack as he left. I closed the door behind me, all my confidence flew away in the outside wind.
September 12th, 2013
The lack of skin on my forehead has gotten rather infected over the last few days. It burns quite badly. But he needs it. And he can have it. I don’t want it anymore. What is it? What is he? What this? Why
October 1st, 2013
My entire upper body is skinless. My face, my torso, my arms and hands. I am in constant pain every day. I can’t continue this. He wins. I give up. And that’s what I told him. He said we will be ending everything tonight. He told me it will be quick. That’s all I ask. This life is not for me anymore. I’ve kept myself imprisoned for so long, and I don’t care to be like this anymore. I’m done being haunted. I hope no one ever has to go through what I went through. To the poor soul that lives in this house after me, good luck. To Anne, I’m sorry I could never show you what’s been haunting me for so long. I wish he would’ve slipped up even once covering his tracks. To Mary, thank you for your help, I made it much longer than I would have without you. Goodbye.
And that was it. That was the last page. Now, we checked out the whole house, the attic included. There was nothing and no one there. All the windows were boarded up, and the broken windows lined up with the windows that were broken in the journal. There was a SHIT-TON of garbage that filled up half the kitchen and smelled awful. A bunch of broken dishes. Everything seems legit. The one weird thing about the journal was that the last page of the notebook was stuck together with the back cover, with a black, chipping substance that seemed to be whatever Allan was talking about. It had a smell to it too. And I assume it’s just my friend fucking with me, but tonight is his first night in the house, and I just got the following text:
Dude, not even kidding… there’s footsteps coming from the attic.
I called him right away and his phone was off. It’s probably a joke.
|
It was cold. Morgan woke up shivering, his breath coiling in the air before him. Why was it so damn cold? Key West was known for a lot of things but its frigid mornings weren’t one of them. Quickly pulling himself from the sheets and throwing on his robe, which did nothing to impede the chill, he hustled to the digital thermostat in the hall; the wood floor like ice against his bare feet. Thirty-two degrees…that couldn’t be right, could it? True…it did feel accurate, but when had the tip of Florida ever been thirty-two degrees in August?
Morgan clicked on the heat and the little, old house groaned its disapproval, the furnace sputtering its way to life. It had been, what…at least a decade since he had last turned it on? It was remarkable that it worked at all. He placed his hand over the vent to verify that a feeble stream of heat was actually coming out and then hustled back to the bedroom closet for something warmer to wear. Much to his chagrin, and as he expected, there was very little to choose from by way of warmth.
Tropically flowered silk shirts and a varying array of cargo shorts and bathing suits pretty much made up his wardrobe. He had exactly two pairs of pants: a pair of paper-thin, linen slacks he wore when he was going “fancy” and a pair of painter’s coveralls. Morgan settled on both and a seldom used blanket from the linen closet as a coat. The sun was blaring through every window at the same time and he wondered just how in the heck it could be so sunny and bright out and still so cold at the same time.
Curious to inspect the afternoon, he opened the front door to a blinding, white light which he had to shield his eyes from until they could adjust to the difference. What he saw on the other side of the second, glass door welded him to the floor, unable to move and shocked beyond the ability to comprehend. The vibrant green paradise he left outside when he went to bed the night before was no longer. It was replaced by a clean, white nothingness…it was snow; and not just a little bit. It came to the middle of the door, easily four or five feet in depth and had completely buried everything.
“What the…” was all he could gasp as he desperately tried to wrap his mind around what he was actually seeing. Slowly returning to mobility, Morgan pulled the glass door open. He had to see…had to know that this wasn’t some type of hallucination. Thick, white, fluffy snow came spilling into the house covering the sand he tracked in the day before. It was real, alright. The air was piercing and furious, a blizzard still in progress and he closed the door, shivering all over again.
His mind was racing…but to no helpful ends. It just made no sense. Eleven years ago he had gone to Ann Arbor to watch his sister’s oldest son graduate a Wolverine from the University of Michigan. In the days following, the entire dysfunctional family went to north to Mt Holly to do some skiing. Morgan remembered thinking that he would never see that much snow again for the rest of his life…he was wrong.
He then ran to the kitchen window to see what the ocean-side view consisted of but not before, cursing to himself, he put on the one set of clothing that he hated to wear the most: socks. The sight was normally his favorite as his little piece of retirement heaven sat directly on the beach, but today it was the most disturbing thing he had ever laid his eyes on. Green palm trees, golden sand and brilliant blue waters were replaced by a clean sheet of white. The snow that continued to fall did nothing to improve the view, but he was acutely aware of where the island ended and the Atlantic began and that line could no longer be seen. There was nothing on the other side of that window that would have indicated that he was anywhere near a body of water; no waves or rocking…just a smooth layer of omission. It shook him.
Grapping the remote from the kitchen counter, Morgan flipped on the outdated, thirteen-inch television that sat next to the coffee maker.
“…which officials have called a ‘bomb-cyclone’. Again, officials are warning all residents to stay inside and…wait, ok we’re going to Sam now with the latest update…Sam? Thanks Jane, this is definitely unprecedented. This storm is the first of its kind in recorded history and the combination of conditions that needed to come together to produce this ‘storm of the century’ are seldom seen in…” The signal cut out and the high pitched tone of the Emergency Broadcast System filled the room, bouncing off the linoleum floor and wicker cabinets. Morgan had been half expecting it to kick on at any minute anyway.
“This is the Emergency Alert System,” the familiar, robo-toned voice informed. “This is not a test. We repeat, this is not a test. FEMA and the National Weather Service have issued a severe weather storm warning for the Florida Keys region. All citizens are encouraged to…” The screen went black and the lights followed. Morgan could hear the furnace clicking its way to a stop. The power was out. Everything else about this freaky storm was foreign to him but this…this he could handle.
On Stock Island, Florida, at the very tip of the Keys, they weren’t unfamiliar with inclement weather. In the last decade alone, hurricanes had become something of an ever-present threat; a new moniker always just waiting in the deep of the Atlantic to come say ‘hi’. The population of Stock Island included just a little over twelve-hundred residents and it was fair to say that at least two-thirds of them had become was the media like to call “preppers”. Hardly any of those were like what you might see on a reality show with bunkers and arsenals, but after getting your butt handed to you storm after storm…you learn to prepare the basics.
The emergency generator had been installed nearly twenty years ago after Hurricane Georges decimated the area and, while a little outdated, stayed perfectly dry in its concrete hovel connected to the kitchen by a tiny, half-door in the wall behind the refrigerator. Morgan had the spot created so that he would be able to access it from inside the house while the fumes it produced stayed outside; all while staying nice and dry from potential torrential waters. It took a moment to roll the fridge out of the way and even longer for the machine to come to life but eventually he could hear the furnace grumbling again and he breathed a small sigh of relief. Never in his wildest dreams would he have considered the possibility of freezing to death in this house.
Morgan flipped the TV back on but there was no longer a signal coming in on any channel; just static snow. Just like outside. It was the same on the good television on the living room. He fell onto his couch and sighed. It was still cold, but at least he couldn’t see his breath anymore. He needed to take inventory. The majority of the supplies he had managed to collect were outside in the metal shed he shared with his neighbor, Frank, so at some point he would have to venture out there.
Morgan wondered for a moment if Frank was okay but really only so much as to hope that he had been able to restock his supply before this freak storm came along. Frank was not only his neighbor, but his weed dealer as well, and maybe…maybe…his friend, although he didn’t really care for the guy most days. It was a small community, however, and Frank was the closest thing he had to a buddy. Plus…he needed more pot. There was no way he was going to suffer through this thing sober. He had just about decided to pick up his cell and call when the act was interrupted by a pounding on the exterior front door; hard enough to rattle the glass in its frame.
The urgency in the knock brought him to his feet quickly but whoever was at the door was already working the glass door, which swung both ways, open into the matted snow. It didn’t matter as the main door was deadlocked but that didn’t stop them from rattling the handle before Morgan could get to it.
“Morgan!” they screamed at the top of their lungs. It was Frank…he sounded freaked. Morgan flipped the lock and Frank, in his chinos and golf shirt, nearly fell on top of him trying to get through the door. Morgan fell back against a wall and Frank slammed the door shut, locked it and then threw his back against it, panting. Eyes, wild and darting, he looked like a feral animal.
“What the hell Frank?” Frank didn’t say a word and, after a moment, hurried to the bottle of Jim Beam he knew would be tucked away on the book shelf and threw back two large gulps. “Frank?” Morgan asked again, following the other man into the living room and then the kitchen as he paced with the bottle of bourbon in hand. “Frank!” he finally demanded after several minutes of his semi-psychotic behavior.
“Have you been outside?” he said finally turning his attention to his neighbor. Morgan just kind of shrugged.
“No…I mean, I opened the door. This is crazy…right?” Frank looked at him like he was speaking gibberish and knocked back another swig, easily his sixth or seventh shot in the last few minutes before emitting a sarcastic chuckle, devoid of any real happiness.
“Crazy…?” Frank shook his head. “Man you’ve got no idea what’s going on out there.” That was all Morgan could get out of him though as Frank slowly slid into a dining room chair, clutching his bottle of whiskey and lost in his own thoughts. The guy must have gotten really messed up last night; that and the combination of waking to the storm probably fried his circuits. He was pretty close to a burn-out as it was. Morgan wrapped his neighbor in a couple blankets from the closet and set himself to the task of forming the warmest outfit possible. He was going to need to hike out to the shed, no matter how bad it was out there. It was where all the food, water and supplies he was going to need were located.
With the use of some towels, belts, socks and almost all his shirts, Morgan was able to cobble together an outfit that, while looking like a deranged, Arab clown, felt like it should have been warm enough. It wasn’t terribly accommodating as he waddled himself back into the living room and took a look over his shoulder at Frank who still staring off into the unknown and muttering about the snow. A few laborious steps later and he was unlocking the door and pulling open both doors at the same time as they had frozen together. The cutting wind that came through immediately pointed out the defects in his snowsuit design and bit at areas he didn’t even know were exposed. He needed to be quick or he wouldn’t make it at all.
The door never made it all the way open, however, because Frank, with a speed Morgan didn’t know the bigger man was capable of, had run across the room and lunged at the door; ripping the handle from his hand and slamming it shut. No longer in his state of catatonic nerurosis, Frank had returned to the wild-eyed and frantic person that first came in and used his body to block Morgan’s access to the door.
“Jesus Frank!” Morgan screamed with more than a little surprise. “What the hell, man?”
“You can’t go out there.” Frank’s voice was hushed, barely above a whisper and not at all in line with his current demeanor. “There’s…things…out there.” Morgan could only shake his head with frustration. The world was going to frozen shit outside and he had to deal with this? Frank had obviously gotten a hold of some bad shit…it wouldn’t have been the first time he had said ‘okay’ to joint laced with PCP, but could there possibly be a worse time for Morgan to have to babysit his neighbor’s bad trip?
“Frank…” Morgan tried to keep his voice as even and calm as possible, despite his desire to smack the other man senseless. “You need to come sit down.” Gently, he led Frank by the arm to the aging couch. Taking a seat across from him, Morgan did his best to keep eye contact between them. “Frank…there are always things out there. I know it looks a little freaky.” Morgan had no idea if Frank had even seen snow before. “But it’s just a crazy storm. They said it’s a ‘storm of the century’.” He didn’t appear to be getting through. Frank shook his head venemantly.
“No. No. No. I can’t let you go out there.” He seemed adamant and Morgan pulled out his last joint from the drawer in the coffee table where he kept his paraphernalia and lit it. The familiar odor of marijuana seemed to draw Frank back to reality a bit and after a few hits he was somewhat calmer so Morgan tried to readdress the issue.
“Frank…we can make it through this. It’s just a storm. We have all the supplies we need in the shed; somebody has to go out there and get them though. Do you understand?” Frankly, he didn’t give a damn if Frank understood or not, he just wanted the fool to stay out of his way long enough to actually get things done. At the rate the snow was coming down, every second they waited added to the difficulty of the thirty-yard trek. Sure it would be great to have his help, but at this point Morgan would settle for his just not being a detriment. Frank inhaled half the joint while considering his words before finally responding.
“If you go out there…you won’t come back.” Morgan could hear the sincerity in his voice and sighed. He went to the kitchen before returning with a pair of all-weather walkie-talkies that they sometimes used when they went kayaking together.
“Frank,” he said as he handed one of the radios to his neighbor. “You’re having a bad trip man. Look at me.” He did. “You know I wouldn’t lie to you about that. There’s nothing out there but shitty weather and there’s nothing in here but Fritos and Corn Flakes. If we want to eat more than one crappy meal and keep the generator running more than twelve hours…it has to be done. I have to walk out to the shed. Do you understand?” Morgan thought maybe he was beginning to. He was going to try to be sympathetic either way as Frank had once talked him down from the roof of a house party many years ago when Morgan was convinced he could fly. We’ve all been there.
Finally, after several more wasted minutes and the remainder of the joint, Frank agreed to let Morgan go out to the shed. The big guy promised to monitor his progress from the house as best he could. Morgan considered asking about getting more weed from Frank’s place but it had taken long enough to progress to this point, so he let it go for the time being and made his way into the snow. Frank shut and locked the door behind him.
Morgan instantly regretted his decision to go out. It was like trying to walk in cold, wet quicksand and every step was as much of a workout as he had done in years. His “snowsuit” became wet after a couple of feet and began to harden and freeze a few feet after that; digging into his skin like frozen glass. His entire body was aching and numb and he realized very quickly that he needed to pick up the pace; if for no other reason than to not freeze to death in his driveway.
Morgan had walked every inch of that yard at least a thousand times; he could make his way to the shed blindfolded if he chose to do so. Today was different, however. The wind and snow was blinding and he found himself becoming turned around several times. He might as well have been in Antarctica. When he finally settled on what he thought was right direction Frank piped in over the walkie to say he could barely see him but he thought Morgan was going the wrong way. What should have been a twenty second walk was pushing twenty minutes and Morgan would have turned back had his tracks not been already covered. Every step was a battle to keep momentum with the cutting wind and snow drifts working against him; every foot sinking a little bit further than the one before.
Desperate and terrified, his muscles beginning to refuse their commands, Morgan picked up the radio to let Frank know that he wasn’t going to make it when the saw the hazy silhouette of the shed coming up before him and cast out a small prayer of thanks. His fingers struggled to move as he navigated the combination lock on the door and the irony wasn’t lost on him that he might die having made it to, but not into, his destination. He did finally get the combination in but the lock still took a couple additional smacks against the door to shatter the ice holding it shut.
The temperature was barely any different inside the metal shed, but Morgan knew exactly what he needed the second he saw the box labeled “Michigan”. As quickly as he could with massive, cold-induced delirium tremors, Morgan peeled out of his ice-cubed clothes and squeezed into insulated ski suit he wore on that trip so long ago. It wasn’t as easy as he had hoped. While the TV commercials made sitting on the beach with a Corona Light in your hands look relaxing…and it was, they never really advertised the body type that activity would give you. After so many sunsets and so many beers, the portion of the ski-suit around his belly was more akin a girdle. It was uncomfortable as hell trying to get it zipped up but at least it was warm and Morgan could feel his body temperature returning to a less critical level.
“Morgan…are you okay?” Frank broke in on the radio.
“Yea man,” he answered, “I made it. I had to change clothes. I thought I was going to freeze to death.”
There was a long pause and then, “Morgan…I think they’re out there again.” Oh hell…not this again.
“Frank there’s nothing out there, man. Listen…I’m going to gather what I can carry and I’ll be back in a little bit.” Frank didn’t reply and Morgan set himself to gathering what he could into a laundry basket that wasn’t already in the large ‘bug-out’ bag he could throw over his shoulder. Mostly it was MREs, water, a couple tanks of fuel, and a few of the outfits and coats he wore on the trip. It was highly unlikely that anything would fit Frank’s larger frame, but considering he was wearing a blanket as a dress, maybe they could make something work. Deciding that he had just about all he could carry, Morgan was stopped from opening the shed door by a noise.
With a resounding thud which vibrated down the walls, something fell onto the roof; at least that’s what he thought at first. Perhaps a chunk of ice from the coconut trees? Maybe a frozen coconut, itself? Whatever it was it had some mass to it. Letting the initial spook subside, Morgan was ready to open the door again when it began to move…to walk? There were a series of loud clicks like screwdrivers tapping against the corrugated metal roof as it moved around. As insane as the thought was…it sounded like a giant insect. Morgan’s gloved hand froze just shy of the handle; he didn’t move a muscle…just listened.
A second thud as something else hit the roof…landed? And then there were two of them clicking their way in circles a few feet above his head. So many disturbing thoughts and images came flooding into his mind it was impossible to organize them; a cavalcade of every monster movie he had seen since the third grade combined with the newsman saying, “storm of the century” and…oh geez, worst of all…friggin Frank. Frank really did see something…and then that son-of-a-bitch let him go outside? He’ll say he tried to warn you. No…that wasn’t a warning. He said “things” …he didn’t say “flying monsters”.
“Morgan?” Frank broke through on the walkie-talkie and suddenly it was way too loud. The clicking came to an instant stop and Morgan fumbled with the radio in his gloved hands, desperately trying to turn it off before he could say another word. “Morgan?” He was too late. Both of the…things…on the roof quickly clicked their way to the point directly above him and Morgan tore off his glove with his teeth to turn down the volume before it could happen again.
“Frank…” Morgan hissed into the radio. “There’s something out here.”
“Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. I told you.”
Morgan was suddenly enraged with his friend but the fear still won out and he kept his voice at a whisper. “No…Frank…you did not tell me this. You fucking said that there were ‘things’ out here. You didn’t say shit about monsters.”
“Monsters?” Frank sounded frantic. “You’ve seen them? You know what they are? They’re monsters? Jesus Morg…” Morgan turned off the radio…they were moving again, walking around with what sounded like many legs. Next to the door hung a machete, which Morgan hadn’t planned on taking but was now lashing to his waist. After several agonizing minutes of praying, whatever had been on top of the shed apparently grew bored and just disappeared; either jumping off the tiny building or flying away. Morgan switched the radio back on.
“Frank?”
“Oh Jesus Morgan…I thought something happened to you. You scared the crap out of me. Literally…I’m taking a dump right now.” He didn’t want to hear that.
“Geez Frank…TMI man. TMI.” Morgan took out a head lamp and strapped it to his hood. “I’m going to try and come back in a second. I need for you to keep a watch out and help direct me. I’ve put a light on my head so hopefully you’ll be able to see it.” Morgan then grabbed a couple of tennis rackets and strapped one to each foot with a bungie cable. It wasn’t pretty but it would have made MacGyver proud.
The wind smacked him in the face again but with significantly less bitter intensity this time; the ski-suit made a world of difference temperature wise. However, being squeezed into it like a sausage and having a hefty bundle to carry, the progress wasn’t a lot better once he got outside again. If it weren’t for the home-made snowshoes it might have been worse. Frank was able to make visual contact with the head lamp and did an adequate job giving him directions, although it could have been better since he kept mixing up his left and right with Morgan’s.
Morgan had just about reached the half way point between the shed and the driveway when something caught his eye just off to his right; which was surprising since he could barely see anything at all, even with the ski-goggles on. It was something in the snow and, after putting the basket and duffle bag on a drift, he decided to investigate. It had only caught his eye for a split-second and he couldn’t even be sure that he saw it, but it made enough of an impact on his psyche that he felt compelled to check it out. Unfortunately, it was what he originally suspected and hoped he had been wrong about…it was blood.
Bright red against the spotless array of white, there was a lot of it beginning to freeze on top of the snow; and it led off in a trail away from his property and towards the Ashburn’s, an elderly couple that lived catty-corner to him. Morgan followed the trail for a few feet before realizing that he was going to have to decide just how far he was going to go here. It didn’t look like it was ending any time soon. Should he go all the way to the old people’s house to check on them? Probably not…probably best to get the supplies in the house and make a plan from there.
Morgan went a few more feet but, remembering how quickly he lost his own trail before, decided to turn back for now. He would have too if something else hadn’t stood out to him next to the trail of blood. Getting down on his knees as best he could, Morgan tried to get a better look at what looked like a little, white bean or something poking out from the snow. Brushing some snow away it became clear…it was a finger. Morgan brushed more snow away to reveal the hand it was attached to. Sheathing the machete, he grabbed it with both of his to pull free the poor soul who had become buried in the cold and pulled with all his might.
The hand, which was severed from its owner at the wrist, easily came free sending Morgan sprawling backwards and onto his ass, half buried in snow himself and screaming in repulsed horror. He flung the frozen appendage and scrambled to his feet with as much speed as the environment would permit. His heart pounded against his ribcage as he hustled back to his provisions. Every moment of this day had upped the ante. It went from strange to scary to what in the holy hell was going on here; and escalating by the second.
Morgan found his way back to his supplies and was working to wedge them free from their frozen mold when something buzzed past his head. Initially he thought it was just the wind but when it happened the second time he realized it wasn’t. It sounded like a giant wasp…giant as in, the size of a dog or cat. For a split-second he considered the possibility of drones; it was about the right size of some of the ones he had seen flying around the island but…who in their right mind would be out flying drones right now? That and those damn things he heard in the shed quickly convinced him otherwise.
Brandishing the long blade again, Morgan kept his head on a swivel desperately trying to make out anything in the hazy, winter fog swirling around him. Any noise, any shape, any…thing, and he was ready to split it from head to toe. Hell would freeze over before he ended up like ‘Handy’ back there…if it hadn’t already. A couple of times he thought he heard something and he thought he saw something, slicing the air both times, but nothing came at him and so he grabbed the radio.
“Frank?”
“Yea man?” Thank God he was still there.
“Can you see me?” Morgan shook his head a little to emphasize the light.
“Yea man…barely.”
“Do you see anything else out here?”
“Shit man…like what? Monsters? Are there more monsters?” Frank was getting himself worked up again.
“Will you just stop with the ‘monsters’ already? It’s not helping. Just…do you see anything at all?”
“No,” the fear was still in his voice. “I just see you. I think you need to hurry up.” At least they agreed on that.
“Yea…I know. Listen man, I’m gonna make for the back door; I think it’ll be quicker. So be ready to let me in.”
“Roger that.” Morgan threw the bag back over his shoulder, grabbed the laundry basket and tried to balance all of it with the machete still in hand. At this point it seemed like the most valuable asset he was carrying and the last thing he would ditch if he had to. The backyard which was usually just a small patch of grass surrounded by beach sand, was deeper, if that were possible, than the front had been. The snow he used as the ground kept going up and up until he was eye level with the gutters and tiles on his roof by the time he reached the house.
“Frank,” he sighed, “we got another problem. The back door is buried. I’m going to have to go around front after…” something heavy flew by him, a blinding flash of white, and knocked the communication device from his hand sending it spilling onto the roof; his sentence left unfinished. With the weapon still firmly grasped, Morgan began slicing wildly at the air around him. There was something there…several somethings…flying through the air around him, just beyond the point of revealing any detail. Occasionally he thought he saw a wing or something white whipping past him. Something white that looked kind of like…fur? It had to be an optical illusion. Whatever the things were, they were big and they were many and if he didn’t get the hell out of there, they were seemingly partial to all body parts but hands. Screw the walkie-talkie.
He could hear Frank calling out his name as he did his best to drag the basket and bag while still remaining defensively ready. Using the upper portion of his house as a brace and something to keep at his back, Morgan carefully made his way around, sporadically dropping everything to take a few swings at the eddying air. The fear kept him anxious and ready but he had to admit one thing, he wasn’t cold anymore; a thin layer of sweat was building between him and his thermal suit.
Sliding over the corner of the house and down a straight slope, getting to the front door was the easiest part and Frank was there waiting for him, having correctly anticipated that the back door was out of question. Morgan slid the basket and bag across the frosty walkway into Frank’s waiting hands and had nearly crossed the threshold himself when something icy and sharp, like talons, tore through the back of his suit and jerked him back into the winter abyss, actually lifting him several feet from the ground in the process. Despite the snow, the fall was hard and it knocked the breath from his lungs.
Keenly aware that he no longer had his blade in hand and with his lungs desperately gasping for any bit of air, Morgan’s panic reached a crescendo…or so he thought. That would, of course, be the moment one of them would land on his chest and stare him straight in the eye. The moment played out in surreal slow-motion, like time out of time, and felt like he was watching it happen from outside his own body. The insect was like nothing he had ever known and yes…his first instinct was that it was an insect of some type.
It had strong arachnid qualities but not like any spider he had seen on National Geographic. It did have eight legs and an array of black, lifeless eyes, but it was easily the size of Mrs. Matthew’s beagle and was the adorned with the same white hair. Brittle and sharp, the hairs were long and brilliant white and did an outstanding job at concealing the thing within its snowy environment. The absolute topper, however, had to be the wings. Silver and white, two wings resembling what one might see on a dragon-fly, protruded from its back and flittered in the air as it cocked its head from left to right, surveying its prey.
Morgan knew, with complete certainty, that this was it. This was how he would die. When the creature unhinged its mandibles revealing rows of spiked teeth it did nothing to dissuade the thought. He watched as it lunged for his throat and wondered how quickly he would die. Would it remove his head with one swift bite or would he have to endure some degree of…being eaten? It was a question he was happy to have not needed the answer to as Frank, from out of nowhere, cleaved the dog-sized bug into two pieces with the machete he had dropped.
Drops of thick, blue blood sprayed out as the creature unleashed a deafening shrill of anguish before its two parts stopped twitching. The blood, if that’s what it was, froze the second it touched his ski-suit and the small drop that hit his cheek burned intensely as it immediately froze the skin beneath it. Seemingly similar to hydrochloric acid, Morgan could only imagine what type of damage any more than a drop would have caused. Frank grabbed his arm and began to drag him into the house and, although his breath had yet to return, Morgan did his best to help him. Lying in the foyer panting, the two men stared at each other wordlessly after finally getting the door closed and locked.
They spent the next two hours unhinging cabinets and doors, salvaging as much wood as they could use to properly seal all the windows with hammer and nails. Since there wasn’t enough wood to go all the way around Morgan had to get creative in the living room with his bookshelves and entertainment system. All in all, it was as secure as it could be, but at the same time they appeared to be getting buried beneath a mountain of snow so if those things could only stay airborne they were probably okay. If they were burrowers also, well…that was a different story.
It was around six in the evening when they got around to eating anything and, although there should have been daylight for another two or three hours at least, it appeared to be night time. It only took a little investigating to realize that they were completely buried, even the front door. Sunlight couldn’t have gotten through if it wanted to. They ate their freeze-dried meals in glum silence and when they were done, Frank set about messing with the hand-crank radio while Morgan tried to treat the aching blackened spot on his check with some aloe. From in front of the bathroom mirror, Morgan heard the shortwave crackle to life as Frank apparently found a channel.
“…I don’t know. Nobody knows.” It was a man’s voice, gravely and deep. “But they’re everywhere. All I can say right now is: stay out of the snow! I repeat: stay out of the snow! US Interstate One is unpassable at all bridges, not just the Key West connector; so don’t even try it people. We’ve been receiving sporadic reports which we’ll try to relay but the information is scarce at the moment. Some people on the northern keys are reporting cell service returning but…” The radio went dead and Frank set to frantically cranking the handle again while Morgan retrieved his last bottle of whiskey…the good stuff. It had been t |
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT
“Huh?” I jerked up as my cell phone buzzed loudly, emitting an insultingly bright light. I rubbed my face and winced as I slapped at the screen in a half-ditch effort to shut the damn thing off. There was a muted thump as my hand brushed the edge of the phone and knocked it off the desk on to the carpeted floor.
I groaned and wiped at my face again. A thick, sticky glob of drool smeared across my hand in the process. Lovely. At some point a few hours earlier I’d evidently face-planted into my keyboard and passed out there. My ten page research paper on gender politics in American film was now twenty pages of unbroken lines of “g’s.” I squinted at the clock on my laptop screen. 3:30 A.M. My paper was due in five hours.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT
“Shit,” I hissed as I reached down and patted around blindly for my dropped phone. By chance the tip of my index finger brushed the corner of the rubber Otter Box case. I strained and managed to hook my finger over the edge of it and tease it into reach from there. I scooped it up with a triumphant grunt. And then I saw the message and my chest went cold with dread.
She had texted me three words: “Come get me.”
I snatched my car keys off my desk and bolted out the door without bothering to put shoes on. My hands were shaking so badly it took me three attempts to unlock my car door and another two to get the car started. Once I managed to get the engine to turn over, I peeled out of the small parking lot fast enough to leave twin strips of rubber in front of the dingy apartment building.
Nicki was my former roommate and the best friend I’d ever had. She and I had been friends since high school and we had only grown closer when we were accepted into the same small college in Oregon. We promptly put in a request to room together, and we started off our college experience practically holding each other’s hands. I dove into Literature and Environmental Studies classes while Nicki went straight for Art; drawing, painting, and sculpture.
I was steady in my classes but Nicki blossomed like some exotic flower showered by the praise of her professors and classmates. Her side of the room was quickly papered with sketches ranging from bowls of fruit to people wearing old fashioned cloaks and whimsical jewelry. Strange, lacy shapes danced from page to page, darkly unique and beautiful.
By our sophomore year I trusted her capabilities as an artist – and a friend – enough to let her design a tattoo for me. I gave her complete freedom with no input from me other than the request that she make it as true to me as she could, whatever that turned out to be. Less than two weeks after I commissioned her, it curled in delicate feathery fronds of green and blue around my left bicep. It was vaguely plant-like, and more than a little alive; it was perfect and I loved it.
At the end of our sophomore year, we managed to land a cheap off campus apartment together, largely to make room for Nicki’s ever-expanding collection of canvases, oil-paints, and sketch books. Her creativity blazed so bright that sometimes I was almost a little afraid of her.
She would disappear into her room for days at a time over the summer, only coming out to eat or use the bathroom, streaks of jewel-bright color dripped and smeared and dried all over her skin and clothes. In a rare move in the tenure of our friendship, I was forbidden under pain of doing all the dishes for six months to so much as peek around the door into her room until she invited me.
”Not until it’s ready,” she said solemnly, extending her pinky finger towards me.
“Not until it’s ready,” I repeated, hooking my pinky around hers and sealing the unbreakable oath that is the pinky swear.
One day, midway through July, she asked me to come in with so much excitement in her voice that her words trembled minutely. Her excitement was contagious. I raced up the stairs to her room and skidded to a full stop in her doorway, thunderstruck. She had created an entire world in there.
A castle bathed in strokes of a brilliant sunset crowned a distant hill in the first painting by the door. I caught my breath, imagining a warm summer wind blowing through the ancient stone. A tangled forest, lush with a multitude of greens and alive with clever, brown, elfin faces peeking through the foliage here and there bloomed on the opposite wall. A tavern nestled far back against a line of houses painted of timbers I could practically hear creaking. Portrait after portrait of characters so vivid I more than half expected them to step out of the frames.
I was too entranced to be startled when she slipped in beside me and laced her fingers through mine. I finally tore my gaze from the living, breathing paintings before me when she gave my hand an insistent squeeze.
“Well?” she asked, her lips quirked in that half-smile she always had when she was nervous and trying to hide it. “What do you think, Rose?”
I turned back to her room, struggling for the first time in years to find the right words to say to her.
“What do I think? It’s… Nicki, it’s incredible! I don’t know what to say here, it’s just…” I broke off, my focus dragged back to the fantasy world framed around us. Never in my life had I more keenly longed to plunge into a world outside of our own.
Finally I looked her right in the eye, taking her other hand in my free one.
“If I could step through those picture frames and live the rest of my life there, I would die happy.”
A relieved smile broke like the sun through the clouds of her nervousness. “You mean it, Rose?”
Spontaneously, I leaned forward and laid a quick, light kiss on her cheek. “I absolutely mean it, Nick.”
I grinned at her and nodded towards her paintings. “Why don’t you show me around and tell me all about them? I want to know everything.”
And she had. By the time we had stepped out of her room, we were both surprised to realize we’d been in there for three hours. It had felt like three minutes. Periodically throughout the rest of the summer she’d call me in to check out a fresh painting or meet a new character. I came to know her secret world almost as well as our own.
The ash-blond man with pointed ears and the tattered maroon cloak was Eldin, a pirate who scourged seven kingdoms. The tall woman with brown skin and blue beads braided into her thick, black hair was B’dera, a healer who roamed freely across all borders in search of a hidden secret. The little girl sitting cross-legged on a mossy log and grinning at the purple tongues of fire cupped in her small hands was Meda, a young conjurer who always skipped out on her magic lessons to play in the woods.
I grew to know them, and many dozens of others even better than our real-world friends. When Nicki inevitably started running out of room for her paintings and sketches, I immediately volunteered my walls and all the unused space in our shared living room. In those three months, Nicki burned like a new star, and I eagerly waited to see each new painting, watching her world unfold like the petals of some rare flower in our home.
And then our junior year started up and it took less than six weeks for it all to come crashing down. Nicki didn’t come home one night in late September, although I admit I was too focused on my homework load to really notice until she stumbled in the next morning with her hair in disarray and a sheepish smile on her face. Turns out she’d met someone in her Art History class.
Was I maybe secretly a little disappointed? Probably. But I was her friend first and foremost, so of course I enthusiastically threw my support for her being with this guy as he seemed to make her happy. At least I did until the day she brought him over to meet me and show him her secret project.
I know everyone says they knew it from the start long after everything is out in the open, but I sincerely felt it when her boyfriend reached out to shake my hand; there was something very, very wrong with him. His name was Jesse, and he was (to my irritation) undeniably handsome. Piercing eyes, strong features, thick, dark hair, and nearly flawless skin. I wish it was just jealousy on my part, I honestly do, but there was something in his little half-smile that immediately struck a wrong chord with me.
I came to see more than I wanted to on the subsequent times Nicki brought him over. He was complimentary of her paintings of course, but there was something in his tone that was always just a few steps away from mockery. He never looked directly at her if she was talking to him, I noticed one day. Not that he was blatantly looking away exactly, but either just above or just to the side as though she wasn’t really worth his attention. He’d sometimes let out quiet little amused snorts, so soft I wondered if I imagined them when she showed him a new painting she was particularly proud of, like he was privately making fun of them and wanted her to know it.
I was so focused on him that I didn’t realize what was happening to Nicki until it was too late for me to do anything about it. She had been withdrawing into herself so quietly I didn’t notice the signs at first. Her chestnut hair gradually lost its shine and her skin began breaking out as she slowly began showering less and less frequently. Her weight yo-yo’d as she’d go from eating nothing but McDonald’s one week to practically nothing the next. She began wearing the same outfit day after day, and never washed her clothes unless she was washing Jesse’s for him too.
Looking back all the red flags were there, but I swear to God they happened so slowly that with my focus primarily directed at my classes, I didn’t put them all together until mid-October. I came home from my last class, mulling over our latest research assignment and almost tripped over Nicki as I came in the front door.
She was sitting on the floor hunched over a sketchbook. She didn’t even look up as I came in. Carefully I slipped my heavy backpack off and crouched next to her, craning over to get a look at what she was drawing.
A cloaked figure turned away from the viewer, one leg hiked up on a boulder as though surveying a distant landscape that hadn’t been drawn in yet. Other than that one leg, well-muscled and vaguely feminine, there was nothing discernible about the character. I blinked, puzzled. It wasn’t like Nicki to draw someone like that; normally she’d be sure to have at least half of her character’s face visible.
“What are you drawing, Nick?” I asked softly, reaching out to touch her shoulder. She flinched back.
I dropped my hand back into my lap as she flashed me an apologetic grin. Her eyelashes were suspiciously clumped together, as though she’d been crying recently.
“Oh hey, Rosie, I didn’t hear you come in.” She shrugged, closing her sketchbook. “I dunno yet. I have this idea for a character, but it’s like I can’t really see her yet.”
I frowned. “That’s weird,” I commented.
Nicki had told me once over the summer that she always started by sketching a basic figure in a random pose and suddenly all the other details: Face, name, outfit, even backstory would just flood into her head all at once and be on the canvas before she had time to process it all. She wasn’t bragging – she never bragged about her artwork – she was just stating a fact. That she didn’t know anything about this new character was how I finally figured out that something was wrong.
“Thalia,” she said abruptly, interrupting my dawning realization.
“What?”
“Her… her name. It’s Thalia.” She smiled at me then, and I saw a flicker of the old Nicki. “That’s all I know for now, but I feel like she’s important.”
I smiled back, hoping my worry didn’t show on my face. Maybe it should have. Then maybe I could have stopped her when she told me she was moving in with Jesse a week later and he wouldn’t have been able to twist my concern into jealousy to make my concerns sound petty and unnecessary. I tried so hard to talk her out of it, but it was too late. She wasn’t listening.
Nicki did ask if her precious paintings could stay with me for a while, as well as her canvases and all her art supplies except for a few sketchbooks. I agreed, of course, dread twisting in my gut; she quickly explained that it was because there wasn’t room at Jesse’s place, but I knew that was bullshit. He just didn’t want her to get drawn into her own world and stop paying attention to him even for a small amount of time. It was like he was slowly starving her of her creativity.
I saw very little of Nicki over the next few months. When I did manage to catch a glimpse of her on the quad or on the sidewalk between classes, she was always gone before I managed to catch up to her. She barely answered any of my texts beyond generic “I’m fine’s,” she bailed on every plan, and stopped coming by to work on her paintings. Nonetheless I knew what was happening well enough just in those passing glimpses.
She had grown desperately thin, her clothes hanging like old bags of her bare frame. Her hair was starting to look thin and patchy. Sometimes I could smell her before I saw her; stale body odor and cigarette smoke. Sometimes she wore long sleeves in weather way too hot for them. Once in a while the skin at the corner of her mouth or high on her cheekbone would be suspiciously dark, like a badly concealed bruise.
Then all of a sudden, I stopped seeing her. I tried not to worry, but as days rolled around into weeks, my texts became more and more frantic. She never responded. And then a mutual friend who worked in the admissions offices tracked me down and told me that Nicki dropped out. It hit me like a gut-punch. She dreamed of getting this degree, then her Masters and becoming an artist. If Jesse had sapped this much of her dream out of her, I was terrified of what might be left.
I drove to Jesse’s place just once to check in on her. I was too angry to be afraid when I pounded on his door. After what happened next I was too afraid to go back. He let me in calmly, even courteously, as though this was a normal social visit between friends. Nicki was huddled up on his couch with her knees hugged to her chest, eyes fixed on the ground.
I never got to bring my concerns up as it turned out, because before I so much as opened my mouth Jesse had pushed me into the wall and pinned me there. It wasn’t pain but shock that kept me silent as he started talking.
“Listen up, you fucking dyke,” he snarled. “You’re going to turn that bitchy little ass of yours around, get back in your car, and leave. Nicki doesn’t want you here. I don’t want you here, and you aren’t going to come anywhere near her again. Got it?”
I gaped at Nicki, silently begging her to get up, to do something, tears streaming down my face. She still stared at the floor, but her shoulders were shuddering. I’d apparently taken too long to respond. Jesse grabbed my neck and squeezed until I gasped for air, clawing uselessly at his hand.
“Got it??” I nodded until I felt like my head was being bobbed up and down on a puppeteer’s string.
“Good.” He let me go and I slumped against the wall. “Now get out and don’t come back.”
I slumped against the wall struggling to catch my breath. Behind Jesse, Nicki finally raised her eyes to mine. They were blazing with a rage I never suspected she could have in her.
“Go,” she mouthed.
And I did. I fled like a coward and didn’t try to contact her again. A few months passed. And now she was calling me for help. From the moment I read her message asking me to come get her, it took me all of ten minutes to get to that fuck-head’s apartment. The minute I pulled up, Nicki came flying out the front door, sketchbook hugged to her chest. With my headlights shining into their apartment, I could clearly see Jesse running down the stairs after her. Nicki reached my car just ahead of him, slid into the passenger seat and screamed: “GO!!”
She didn’t have to tell me twice. We roared out of the parking lot, leaving Jesse behind.
“Will he follow us?” I asked, quietly cursing my voice for trembling.
Nicki shook her head, “No; he knows I’ll call the cops and he’s too much of a coward to deal with that.”
Bitterness laced her words like poison. “He’ll send some angry messages and then spend the rest of the night drinking til he passes out. Getting me back is too much effort. Give him two days and he’ll move on to someone else.” She shook her head in disgust.
“Do you think you should call them anyway? Do you need a doctor? Are you hurt?” the questions came pouring out in a flood.
But Nicki just shook her head. “No, I’m not hurt. And I don’t want to deal with anything like that tonight. Honestly, I just…” she trailed off for a moment, staring out her window. Then she turned and offered me a wan smile. “I think I want to paint.”
I risked taking my eyes off the road for a brief second to shoot her a look of surprise.
“I mean it, Rose,” she insisted. “I feel like more than anything in the world right now it’s what I need to do.”
I nodded. I thought I understood. We drove on in silence until we pulled into my apartment.
“I know who she is now. Thalia, I mean,” Nicki broke the silence suddenly.
I strained back my memory to the cloaked figure. “Who is she, Nick?”
“She’s an assassin. A freelancer. And she is very important,” she responded, fiddling with the corners of her notebook.
I was too tired and too strung out on emotions to ask any more questions, so I just nodded and unlocked the front door for her. She immediately sat down at a blank canvas and started sketching the bones of what would be her new painting. I watched her for a moment, relief spreading like warm water through my chest. Nicki was finally building her world again. I headed upstairs; the excitement of the night didn’t make the reality of my paper’s deadline go away. And I had ten pages worth of “g’s” to erase.
I finally put the finishing touches on my paper and electronically submitted it around 5:00am. I could faintly hear the metallic pop of paint bottles being uncapped downstairs. I smiled to myself and laid down on my bed. I drifted off to sleep on the comforting smell of fresh oil paint. It was the best sleep I had had in a very long while. I slept through my first, second and third alarm and didn’t wake up until nearly 2:00pm.
I laid there for a few minutes, snuggled up in my fluffy comforter. The whole apartment smelled of fresh paint. I rolled out of bed and staggered downstairs. Nicki had evidently painted all night: The finished canvas was set up on an easel and she was curled up asleep on the floor in front of it, paintbrush loosely resting in her hand. Her head rested on her sketchbook like the world’s flattest pillow. I glanced at her fondly and headed into the kitchen to make coffee before checking out her new painting.
It was stunning. The backdrop was sparse: a few slim, bare trees against a soft wintry fog of white and gray. It could have easily been blank for all the attention the main figure commanded. She still wore a long, slate-gray cloak, but now her hood was thrown back, allowing her chestnut hair to hang down in wild ringlets past her shoulders.
Her cloak was likewise slung back behind her shoulders, revealing a compact, muscular frame. Silver knives and corked vials of poison green and orange liquids dangled like deadly fruits from her leather belt. She was posed similarly to her initial sketch, one leg propped up on a boulder, but now she stood half-turned to face the viewers. One hand clutched a small, bulging drawstring bag; a coin purse, I assumed. The other hand was painted in a rather odd position towards the viewer: palm forward, fingers spread, as though she were pressing her hand against a wall or a window.
Her face is what really stole my attention though: almond-shaped eyes a brilliant shade of green, burning with ferocity. Her teeth were bared in what could either have been a snarl or a feral smile. She was beautiful of course, but then again, I’d always found her beautiful.
She had given herself elven ears and a thin scar that neatly divided her right eyebrow, but the face sneering defiantly from the canvas was definitely Nicki’s. All of the passion and fire that Jesse had sapped from her blazed stronger than ever from the figure on the canvas. It was in the determined set of her jaw, the flinty look in her eyes, even in the cold glint of her bared teeth. This was the Nicki I had only ever seen glimpses of; a fiercely strong, proud, wild woman.
I stepped closer to the canvas, edging carefully around the sleeping artist on the floor. Something about those eyes drew me like a magnet. I stopped less than a foot from the canvas, feeling something odd in my chest, something like pride and pain. Unconsciously my hand drifted up to her extended one, my fingertips coming to rest in the blank spaces between hers.
The painting never moved, how could it? At the end of the day it was nothing more than colored oils arranged in a lovely pattern on a sheet of canvas. But I felt it, nonetheless, when her fingers interlaced with mine, as warm and living as they had always been, and gave my hand one last fond squeeze. The smile on her painted face looked softer then, less teeth and more laughter.
I don’t know how long I stood there in front of the canvas, but when the moment ended and I stepped back, my cheeks were stiff and itchy with dried tears. I instinctively knew it down in my bones the minute I felt her fingers twine with mine. Nicki wasn’t sleeping. I kissed the tips of my fingers and lightly pressed them to the inert image before me.
“Goodbye, Nicki,” I whispered.
I called 911 immediately of course, but they just confirmed what I already knew. Nicki had been hurt after all. Jesse, as it turned out, was a master of aiming his blows where they could be easily covered. While I had typed away on my term paper, she had somehow created her masterpiece while she internally bled to death from a ruptured kidney.
Jesse got an unfairly light sentence, I thought; just ten years. He ended up serving less than a month though; late one night, someone somehow slipped into his locked jail cell without alerting the guards or any of the other prisoners and neatly slit his throat while he lay in his bunk. It was so skillfully done with so few leads that the newspapers termed it a professional hit rather than a murder. I had my theories of course, but I felt it would be wiser to keep them to myself.
I offered Nicki’s paintings to her family but to my mingled relief and annoyance, they politely rejected the offer. I finished my Bachelor’s program, received my degree, and quietly packed up my belongings and moved out to a small cabin out in the Cascade Mountains. I didn’t intend to stay there indefinitely; I just needed some time alone to process. I couldn’t bear to bring the paintings with me… not yet. I had them stored safely and securely in the meantime.
I spent the next few weeks eating simple meals and walking through the woods looking for exotic plants and flowers. There is a lot of living beauty to be found in the deep forests. I found I would go days without speaking. There was no need for it here. Gradually I found peace in the mountains, but there was still deep pain I had no idea how to even begin to address. I retreated into my grief and very likely would have stayed there if not for Nicki’s last gift to me.
I woke early one morning about a month into my self-imposed exile. I wasn’t sure what woke me, but I had no intention of getting up just yet. I stubbornly rolled over and reached for my second pillow, planning to cuddle it until I fell asleep again. My pillow wasn’t there. Instead of soft cotton, my fingers found the edge of something slim and stiff.
I bolted up. Nicki’s sketchbook lay innocently on the bed next to me.
“It’s not possible,” I insisted to the empty house.
But there it was, even in the face of my denial; penned neatly in black sharpie on the maroon cover: This book is the property of Nichole Thalia Quaid.
My hands trembled as I picked it up. For a moment I debated whether I really dared to open it. Maybe it was a trick of a drafty house, but the pages fluttered briefly, flipping the cover open. I caught my breath. There, sketched in subtle color on the first page was a full-blooming, perfect rose.
I found myself turning page after page. Nicki permeated every page. Playful designs, mystic swords, flowers blooming in deep clearings. Jesse hadn’t managed to take it all from her after all. She had continued building her world in tiny pencil sketch increments up until the end. And then I reached the last page.
It was a character sheet. Penned in Nicki’s looping script was the base description.
“Amara. Half-elf. Scholar. Deeply, deeply loyal to her loved ones. Known for taking on too much responsibility. Dearly loved by all her friends. Often looks to the natural world for answers. Wise and should always be trusted, even by the most stubborn of asses.”
The accompanying sketch was simple, but gorgeous. Amara knelt in a grassy field, wearing a plain blue tunic and leggings. She was busily engaged in examining a bright orange flower. Even if I had somehow failed to recognize the short, choppy black hair or deep brown eyes, I could not fail to catch the strange, feathery green and blue tattoo coiling around her bicep.
The pain festering deep in my chest seized once, like a clenching muscle, then released. It wasn’t gone, by any means, but I knew deep down that for me the worst of it was over.
At the very last, even when Nicki felt the need to escape further than anyone ever had, she still brought part of me with her.
|
For the past couple of weeks now I’ve been noticing a few odd things in my apartment. It started off with food mysteriously disappearing from my refrigerator and pantry while I’d be away at work. I didn’t think much of it at the time, since every now and then I’d lose track of my daily eating habits due to my busy schedule, so I simply brushed it off. Eventually it didn’t stop there. Almost every night I could’ve sworn I could hear shuffling sounds coming from within the walls, and sometimes when I got home late from work I’d find both my computer and TV turned on, even when I distinctly remembered turning them off before I left. Strangely, the TV would always be tuned to the local news, and my computer’s search history would show several results for nearby takeout restaurants. Needless to say, it was freaking me out.
The building I lived in had tight security, with officers frequently patrolling the area, and it was located in the part of the city where crime was pretty scarce. Considering that I’ve given a couple of my friends copies of my apartment key to make sure that I wouldn’t misplace them (which I so often do), I thought perhaps that one of them was trying to mess with me. I was eager to get to the bottom of this, so I asked if either of them were the culprit; however, they both blatantly denied it. This, of course, put me on edge, so I asked my landlord to check the security footage on my floor for any suspicious activity. He immediately began searching through two weeks of recorded footage, looking for any unfamiliar faces entering my apartment. He finished his investigation the following week, and said that he’s found nothing out of the ordinary.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” he assured me. “It’s probably all in your head, man.” At the time I was considering the possibility that maybe he was right. Being a domestic abuse lawyer, I’ve had to deal with a lot of stressful cases and work overwhelmingly long hours. Perhaps the numerous caffeine fueled nights and constant headaches were starting to get to me.
On one particular snowy day I was coming down with a nasty cold, and had to call in sick for the next few days. Despite having to reluctantly waste some of my days off on such a gloomy occasion, I was still glad to be temporarily free from my hectic obligations. It was around 7:30, and I was getting really tired. I had finally made it near my apartment on the 6th floor. I just got back from picking up some remedies at Walmart, and was anticipating a nice long night of peace and relaxation.
Just as I stood in front the door I immediately heard a faint shuffling in the distances. My eyes scanned the hallway for any signs of life. Nothing. Suddenly I could hear footsteps quickly creaking on a wooden surface. After listening in closely I made a chilling realization of where these footsteps were coming from. Inside my apartment. This couldn’t have been one of my friends, as I had recently changed the lock on my door due to all the strange things that’ve been happening. A sudden chill went up my spine, because I knew right then and there that an intruder had somehow broken in. At that moment I felt really uneasy. I wanted to run downstairs and call for help, but I knew if I left the hallway at this point the intruder would definitely make a break for it. Being the naïve young man that I was I was determined to go inside, grab my gun, and try to apprehend whoever was inside.
Taking in a deep breath, I slowly unlocked the door and creaked it halfway open. I was instantly hit with a powerful, ghastly odor that made me want to puke. It smelled like something had been decaying in there for quite some time. Ignoring it, I cautiously proceeded to the kitchen to grab the gun I kept hidden in the top drawer. I grabbed it and opened the lights. To my surprise, the first thing I noticed were several pizza boxes and takeout bags scattered across the ceramic tiles. This struck me as rather odd, because I knew I didn’t order any takeout that day.
I also noticed that there were food-covered footprints leading directly into the living room. Someone was definitely in here, and it looked like they were in a hurry to remain hidden from me. I slowly made my way into the Living room with my gun at the ready. The footprints lead right next to the boarded up wall that was stationed on the other side of the room. There were a couple half of broken planks in the middle of it that I haven’t gotten around to fixing yet.
Very carefully, I walked towards the wall for a closer inspection. My heart was beating with every inch I took. I stopped walking around a few feet away from it, and began closely examining it. I couldn’t make out anything inside, so I moved my head in even closer to search for any signs of life. Again, nothing was completely visible, as it was pitch dark inside, so this time I pulled out my phone, put it in the wall, and turned the screen on. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I saw two amber red eyes staring directly at me. My heart dropped like a rock. I quickly stumbled backwards, trying to keep my balance. A sudden rush of adrenaline swiftly filled my entire body. I quickly spoke in the most intimidating voice I could muster up.
“If you don’t get the fuck out from there right now I swear I’ll blow your fucking brains out!” I exclaimed. Silence subsequently followed. I was half expecting some demented lunatic to rush out from there and attack me out of nowhere, so I prepared myself for an epic battle. “Didn’t you fucking hear me!? I’m not messing arou-” before I could finish my sentence I was interrupted by a faint sobbing coming from within wall. The intruder took in a deep breath, and spoke in a soft tone.
“Please don’t hurt me, I’m really sorry about what I’ve done!” the intruder replied. The voice sounded like it belonged to a frightened little girl, around the age of 13. This really wasn’t the dramatic response I was expecting. I lowered my gun, as the tension in the room quickly shifted to that of confusion.
“Jesus kid, you nearly scared me half to death,” I said. “Who are you? And what exactly are you doing in there?” No response. It seemed like my initial reaction shook her up a bit. “It’s okay, you can tell me. I promise I won’t hurt you.” I slowly backed away from the wall to assure her that I wasn’t a threat. “See?” After a brief moment of silence she replied once more.
“My name’s Maple,” she said in a jittery voice. “I didn’t mean to cause trouble, I only wanted to get away from my mean parents.”
“Maple?” I paused for a minute, trying to recollect where I’ve heard that name before. Then it hit me. Maple was the little girl that went missing in the area several weeks ago. The media reported that she allegedly ran away from home after her parents had physically abused her last Christmas. She must’ve slipped in my apartment when I forgot to lock the door that day. At that moment I felt genuinely sympathetic, mostly because I’ve dealt with quite a few runaways in my line of work. Poor thing must’ve been scared to death. I guess when I ran out of food she decided to break into my neighbor’s apartment and help herself to their leftovers. She probably dropped all of it on the floor and made a break for it once she heard me come up to the door. I remembered at this point that there was a police car parked right outside of the building. I figured that I should first try to comfort her before calling the cops over.
“It’s okay sweetie, everything’s going to be alright,” I assured her. “Just please, come out so I can make sure you’re okay.”
She suddenly stopped sobbing and became quiet. Dead silence filled the room, as I anxiously awaited a response. She was almost starting to freak me out. After about a minute passed she finally said something.
“Okay, but could you first put the gun on the floor and come closer, I need help getting out.” Her voice sounded slightly deeper this time. The sudden shift in tension kind of threw me off at first. I wanted to comply with her demands, but I had this strange, eerie feeling deep inside that something was off. At the time I couldn’t make out what it was though. Giving in to my paranoia, I thought it was best if I just left her there while I went to go get help.
“Oh, um… actually. Just wait here Maple. I’ll be back soon with the…”
“Wait, don’t go!” she interrupted in a surprisingly loud and desperate plea. The sudden outburst made my whole body flinch. “You can’t leave me here! My ankle, it hurts really badly. I think I twisted it when I slipped on the floor. I don’t think I can get out on my own. You have to get me out of here right now! This place is really creeping me out.”
I hesitated for a moment. Believe me, I wanted nothing more than to help her out, but there was something about her tone that made me feel like she wasn’t completely telling the truth. My intuition’s usually pretty good at judging whether or not someone was lying, so I was inclined to follow my gut feeling.
“I’ll only be a couple minutes. Hang in there, kiddo. I promise I won’t be long.”
I quickly ran out my apartment before she could say another word. After a brief elevator ride down I sped across the hall, out the spinning doors, and into the freezing weather. To my relief, I found a slightly chubby officer talking to his slim partner right across the street from me. I ran towards them, eager to tell them everything that went down. Before I could make it halfway there, however, I froze. My heart sank, as I remembered something that will forever send a chill down my spine. I couldn’t believe I didn’t realize this until now. That couldn’t have been the same missing girl, because last night she was found murdered a couple blocks away. Her lifeless body was discovered stuffed inside the wall of a vacant apartment. It was all over the news this morning. Struck in awe, I was left nervously wondering who the hell was hiding in my walls this entire time.
I wasted no time as I rushed to the police and frantically told them everything like a nervous wreck. At first they thought it all sounded a bit sketchy, but after I persisted for a few minutes they were finally persuaded to follow me and take a look. Without catching my breath I ran back to my apartment with the officers following closely behind. When we made it to my living room I showed them where the intruder was hiding. The chubby officer told me to step back, as they both drew out there guns and pointed them at the wall.
“This is the police! I want you to get out from there right this instant and put your hands on the ground!” The officer’s demands were met with silence. “You have five seconds to comply or else I’m dragging you out!” Still nothing. The slim officer nodded, cuing his partner to go in. His partner pulled out a flashlight and slowly walked towards the wall with his gun still drawn out. I anxiously watched as he made his way to the wall and put his head inside. He began thoroughly searching both sides.
“Did you find anything?” the slim officer asked.
“Nope, it’s all clear,” he replied. “But I can tell someone’s been hiding in…” Before he could finish his sentence he paused. He puts his head in deeper for a closer inspection. “Hold up, I think I see something!” Judging by the surprise in his voice I had a feeling that he was about to discover something really disturbing. I could feel it in my bones.
“What is it?” His partner called out. The chubby officer took his head out of the wall and looked at his partner with a shocked expression.
“I think… I think I can see a couple of bodies inside!” Those words made my entire world turn upside down. I almost couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“Are you sure about that?” the slim officer asked.
“Ye… yeah! I’m sure of it!” he exclaimed. “My god, I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire life! These bodies, they look so… mutilated. Just what the hell happened in here?”
The unsettling thought that I had just stood feet away from human corpses made my stomach turn. The powerful stench of decaying flesh made me want to puke my guts out. I knew right then and there that whoever had been hiding in my walls this whole time was definitely not a little girl. “Help me break down this wall, one of them could still be alive!”
The slim officer put his gun back in his holster and walked towards the wall. I watched from about fifteen feet away as they both started breaking down the old planks one by one. They quickly teared off three rows of them with ease while blood started pouring out in excessive amounts. Suddenly, out of nowhere, several lifeless, dismembered bodies fell right off the wall and onto the floor. My eyes grew wide with shock. Most of their flesh looked like it was violently bitten off, and their mutilated faces were completely unrecognizable. The disturbing thought of the immense pain these victims must have suffered through was simply too much to take in.
Upon taking a closer look at the type of clothes they had on I made a chilling realization of who they were. They were all food deliverers from several nearby restaurants. I could barely make out the restaurant logos on their violently shredded and blood soaked shirts. I wanted to look away from the gruesome sight, but there was something above the bodies that had caught my eye. It looked like there was something written in blood on the inside of the wall. At first I couldn’t make out what it said through the darkness of the room, so I slowly walked closer to read it more clearly. My entire body shook to its very core the instant I realized what it said.
“You’re lucky you didn’t do what I asked.”
|
As noted in the title, this is a sequel to The Fort and Survival.
“Baby, come on! We need to go!” Ryan yelled as he slammed the trunk of their Hyundai sedan.
“I’m coming!” Carla called from inside the house, appearing seconds later carrying a gym bag. “I just got some clothes for Kyle.”
She jogged down the steps to Ryan, and he took the bag from her, tossing it on the pile of other stuff on the back seat.
He turned to look at her, fear and trepidation in her eyes.
“Have we got everything?” he asked and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Everything on the list and a couple of extra things I thought of.” she replied, glancing up at the intersection as a siren screamed past. A bang in the distance made her jerk, and he squeezed her shoulder reassuringly.
“Come one.”
He quickly ran up to the house and collected his rifle and ammunition from the table on which he had placed them earlier. Quickly locking the door behind him, he returned to the car and put the Remington on the backseat and threw a blanket over it.
Carla got in the passenger side and Ryan started up the car, backed out of the driveway and headed down the street.
“So when you spoke to him, you made sure he understood that he was to wait for us, right?” Ryan asked, as he slowed at the intersection, before turning right.
“Yes. He understood. He said Graham’s parents weren’t planning on going anywhere and that he was welcome to stay until we got there. But I haven’t been able to get hold of him or them since this morning. Network’s down or something. We should’ve gone straight away.”
Ryan glanced at her, a flash of annoyance running through him.
“We’ve been through this. We don’t really know what’s going on, or how long it’ll last. We can’t just blow out of here without some kind of plan. Look around you Carla, does it look like we’ll be able to stop at the grocery store for food and water and a chocolate?”
She looked as though she wanted to argue, but she slumped back into her seat and said nothing.
The streets were eerily quiet, but Ryan spotted people frantically packing cars, running up the street or speeding past in cars and on bikes.
Reaching another intersection, Ryan slammed on the brakes just in time as a fire truck flew past, sirens blaring.
He took a deep breath and then started forward again, heading to his son’s friend’s house, where he had spent the previous two nights.
The plan was simple. Pick Kyle up and get to Carla’s father’s house. He had a large house in Saxonwold – an up market suburb of Johannesburg where they would stay for a while, waiting for whatever this was to blow over – or to make another plan. Ryan’s older brother Matt stayed in Pretoria, and Ryan had tried to convince him to join them, but Matt had been stubborn. He had insisted that everything was under control and that panic wasn’t necessary. After arguing for a time, Ryan had finally relented and insisted that if he changed his mind they come and join them. He had also been unable to get hold of him since then.
He had seen the reports about children becoming violent – even killing. But so far the authorities had no real explanation. Carla maintained that it had something to do with the asteroid crashing in Texas, but she had always been a bit paranoid. And she loved her space stories way too much in his opinion.
It had been two days since the first big attack in an informal settlement close to the airport. That evening they had agreed that Kyle could spend a couple of nights at his friend’s house, as it was the weekend and the single attack had not concerned them too much. But the next day the attacks had been a consistently growing occurrence and each incident appeared to be getting closer to their area.
Finally, they had started hearing an inordinate amount of sirens and bangs – neither would just come out and say gunshots – and this had prompted Carla to suggest getting to a safer haven. She had argued that their single story house was right on the street in a heavily populated area. At first Ryan had balked. He had said she was overreacting, and that they were perfectly safe, but the next morning footage of children sprinting through the night, attacking every living thing in sight helped change his mind. The news had called it some kind of virus that only affected children, causing them to become extremely violent. They did not know if it was infectious, but all indications seemed to support that assumption. They could however, not guess as to how it was spreading or if it was curable. Adults remained unaffected.
They had phoned her father and he had urged them to hurry. Calling Kyle next, he had assured his mother that he was safe and that he would wait for them.
Carla had wanted to leave immediately, but Ryan had convinced her that they needed to be prepared. So they had made a list of supplies they thought they would need: water, food, clothes, medicine, flashlights. They basically packed everything they would take on a rugged outdoor camping trip – even tents. Soon they had run out of space however, and they had unpacked a lot of lesser essentials, eventually giving up on taking the tents too.
It had taken much longer than planned, and three hours later, when they were ready to leave, Carla was unable to reach her father or son by phone. The radio and TV still worked, giving updates on attacks and emergency numbers, and asking people to stay inside their homes.
“Ryan! Oh my god, oh my god, Ryan!”
Ryan looked to where Carla was pointing and slowed the car.
Three people had exited a house and were running toward them. They were followed by a group of about six teens, who slowly shambled after them. The last of the three was a middle aged man who seemed to be limping, and Ryan saw dark red stains on his shirt and pants.
“Help! Help us!” the first person shouted as the car slowed to a stop. It was a woman of about the same age as the limping man and she was hysterical.
Ryan hit a button and the doors of the car locked.
“What are you doing? We have to help them!” Carla cried and moved as if to unlock her door.
“Stop!” Ryan ordered. “We don’t know what the hell is going on here! What if it’s just a trick to get our car?”
Carla stopped mid movement and sat back.
“How can we be sure?”
“We can’t, but we have to assume the worst. We have other priorities right now. We have to go get our son.”
She seemed to accept this, but she didn’t look happy about it.
“Help, please! They attacked us!” the woman shrieked as Ryan slowly started forward again.
The woman banged on the windows and tried to pry open the doors. She was joined by the second in their group, a young man in his early twenties.
“Come on, man! Let us in!” he cried, tears of desperation streaming down his face.
Ryan picked up a little more speed, and at the same time the group of teens caught up to the injured man.
They pulled him to the ground, and Ryan watched transfixed as one of the teens sank his teeth into the man’s throat, ripping back in a slow, determined motion.
Carla screamed.
The other teens piled onto the man, biting where they could, or punching and kicking in the same slow, methodical way. They looked drunk or high. Dazed somehow, as if they were unaware of where they were and what they were doing.
The young man jumped onto the hood of the car, looking Ryan in the eyes.
“Let us in, man!” he screamed again. “Can’t you see what’s happening?”
Ryan only shook his head.
“Ryan!” Carla exclaimed through tears. “We have to help them!”
Ryan looked at her pleading face, the tears causing her face to shine. He slowed, and was about to stop when a gunshot shook the inside of the car. A hole appeared in the windscreen, and Ryan heard the round exiting through the back window.
The young man had drawn a pistol, and was now pointing it at Ryan.
“Stop the car!” he screamed.
Without thinking, Ryan floored the pedal and jerked the wheel to the side, even as another shot rang out. Carla screamed again, and Ryan jerked the car from side to side, keeping his foot mashed to the floor.
Finally the man lost his grip and tumbled off the side and Ryan straightened the car and kept the speed up until they had put three kilometres behind them.
Carla was sobbing softly in the seat next to him, and he tried to comfort her by putting his hand on her leg, but he kept his attention on the road.
What the fuck is going on? Is everyone going crazy? he thought angrily.
They saw more and more of the dazed children wandering the streets, and a few more people tried to wave them down for assistance or a lift.
Ryan kept going. They saw many cars, fully loaded with people and supplies heading in the direction of the highway and a few near misses with other vehicles eventually forced Ryan to slow down even more, lest they have an accident.
After what felt like hours, but was in reality only twenty minutes, they pulled into Graham’s street. Ryan realised he didn’t even know what his parent’s names were.
He slowed down to a crawl, slowly scanning the street and neighbouring houses. Except for a family hastily loading a mini bus three houses down, the street looked deserted.
Ryan’s eyes were drawn to the family busily packing their bus. The father and mother were running back and forth between the house, returning with boxes and bags, while their young daughter sat on the grass next to the bus. Ryan guessed her at about nine, and she hardly seemed to move. She sat cross legged and stared vacantly down the street, but as Ryan’s car passed, the girl’s head suddenly jerked up and she looked straight into Ryan’s eyes. They looked yellow, and a chill ran up Ryan’s spine. The girl’s face was expressionless, and it looked as if she was covered in sweat.
“The next one. With the black gate.” Carla said beside him and his attention was brought back to his driving.
As he pulled up to the house, he glanced in the rear view mirror, but the girl and her parents were gone. The bus was still parked outside, so they must’ve gone inside.
Carla got out of the car and he followed, nervously looking up and down the street. It was still empty.
Carla trotted through the gate and up to the front door and knocked sharply three times.
A few moments went by and then the door was opened by Graham’s father. His face flooded with relief.
“Kyle, your parents are here!” he called back into the house.
“Thank god. We didn’t want to wait any longer. We’ve decided on leaving as well. We couldn’t get hold of you, so you know… we assumed the worst.”
He nervously wrung his hands.
“My sister… she stays in Jeffrey’s Bay… small town. We’re leaving shortly. We figure as soon as we get out of the city it should get better. We hope.”
Kyle came running out of the house and embraced Carla. She crouched and looked him in the eyes. Ryan felt himself relax a bit. His son was safe.
“Are you ok?
“Yeah, mom, I’m ok.”
He hugged Ryan fiercely.
“Come on, buddy. Let’s go.”
They thanked Graham’s dad and headed over to the car.
Ryan turned the car around and headed in the direction of his father-in-law’s house, about a thirty minute drive on a normal day.
As they passed the house where the bus was still parked, they heard a scream and glass breaking. Ryan stopped and looked at the house.
“Ryan?”
“Dad, what are you doing?”
Ryan needed to see the girl again. He needed to see if she had changed into… whatever it was they were turning into.
“That bus is stocked to the max with supplies. I’m just going to check it out.”
“You’re going to steal it?” Carla asked, shocked.
“What? No! I’m just going to… check if they’re ok.”
Carla was about to protest, but Ryan spoke before she could.
“Get behind the wheel when I get out and leave the car running. Wait ten minutes, then go – no matter what.”
“Ryan-”
“No. Matter. What.” he repeated.
She opened her mouth then closed it again. She licked her lips.
“Ok.”
He quickly reached back and took up his rifle. Taking a handful of rounds, he opened the door.
“Lock the doors.” he said and quickly got out. Standing next to the car he loaded his rifle. Slowly, he started forward.
He looked into the bus as he passed, and saw large containers of water, boxes of food and other supplies. He couldn’t see the keys.
Approaching the front door, he saw that it was open and he heard noises from inside. He heard a thud and then something fall and break.
Gently, he pushed the door open and raised his rifle. He took a step forward and then another, and moments later he was inside the house. There was ample natural light and he took another few steps when he heard a shuffling coming from a doorway ahead of him.
Taking a deep breath, he spun into the doorway with his rifle at the ready.
The girl was standing in the center of the living room. Her mother and father lay next to her, the father jerking sporadically. The amount of blood made Ryan nauseous, and a steady stream was still spurting from a wound in the man’s cheek. It looked like a bite mark.
Ryan fought to keep his stomach under control and he started shaking. He couldn’t tell if it was the nausea or the almost crippling fear he suddenly felt.
The girl stood motionless, looking down at the floor, blood dripping from her face and hair.
“What have you done?” Ryan whispered without realising he was going to and the girl looked up.
She started forward toward Ryan, her face still as expressionless as before and he pointed the rifle at her chest. Her eyes were a feral yellow, and her skin was very pale – gray, like ash. Ryan thought he saw thick, black veins running down from her neck.
“Stay back!” he cried, but the girl only trudged forward, as if she didn’t hear Ryan speak at all.
Ryan took a step back, and then another.
“Stay back, goddamnit! I will fire!”
He took another step back and his foot caught on something. He tumbled over backwards and landed flat on his ass, the rifle spilling from his hands. He had backed into another room and had tripped over more supplies waiting to be loaded.
The girl came a little faster now and she opened her mouth in a low, almost mournful groan. Ryan scrambled to where his rifle lay and scooped it up. Turning to face the girl again, she lunged forward and sunk her teeth into his forearm holding the rifle. He cried out in surprise and pain and ripped his arm back, shoving her back forcefully with his other hand. She stumbled back, falling over backwards. He was bleeding, but it wasn’t serious. Shock and horror almost engulfed him, his eyes wide and his mouth open. Looking up from his wound, he saw the girl getting up again and he realised he was trapped. The room had only one entrance.
He raised the rifle again, his hands now shaking so badly that he was almost unable to keep the rifle pointed at the girl’s chest.
“Please,” Ryan pleaded, choking up, his voice a whimper. “Please don’t make me do this.”
A scream from outside made the girl lift her head and turn. Ryan saw it as an opportunity and lunged forward, knocking the girl aside. He tore down the hallway and out of the house.
A woman was stumbling up the road, headed to where the car was parked. She was bleeding from a wound in her side and she was crying hysterically. Two young boys – twins – of about fourteen were shambling after her.
Ryan reached the car and ripped the door open. He waited for Carla to move to the passenger seat, then jumped inside and handed the rifle to Kyle.
“Ryan – what ha-”
“Kyle, the rifle is loaded, please take out the rounds.” Ryan said crisply, slammed the car into gear and took off down the street.
“Ryan? What happened?” Carla asked, unable to keep the panic out of her voice.
“It’s ok. It’s fine. Let’s just get to your dad.” And he could hear his voice shaking and cracking.
Carla put her hand on his leg and squeezed, and she looked at his bloody forearm questioningly. To her credit she said nothing.
They made it to her father’s house without anymore incidents. They saw more children shambling around, more people begging for help, more injured people and even a few car accidents. Emergency personnel were few and far in between and at the places they were, it was crowded beyond belief by people needing assistance.
They made it to Paul’s house a few hours before sundown, and the feeling of relief when the tall, thick, iron gate rolled shut behind them was immense.
The walls were high and thick, with spikes and electric fencing on top. The inside perimeter walls all had motion sensors in the ground and video camera’s covered almost every inch of the property. The house itself was not as secure, as large windows and glass doors made up most of the ground floor.
I guess the plan is to stop anyone before they get to the glass house, Ryan thought for the hundredth time.
Paul was very wealthy. He was a senior partner for a powerful law firm representing dozens of hugely successful companies. He also had a private pilot’s licence and was an avid hunter and firearm collector. Ryan loved going hunting with his father in law, because of his wide variety of weapons.
They might just come in handy sooner rather than later, Ryan thought as they unloaded the car.
Carla’s mother had died many years before from lung cancer, and since then Paul had enjoyed buying and learning exotic things to pass his free time. He was not the type of man who would marry again and when he wasn’t working, he was usually flying or hunting or diving.
When they had unloaded the car and were all inside the house, Carla cleaned and bandaged Ryan’s arm while he told her what had happened. Paul was busy setting Kyle up with the Xbox he had bought for when he came to visit. When he returned, Ryan told the story again. They were horrified and disbelieving, but the clearly human tooth marks on his arm were difficult to argue with. Paul activated the perimeter alarm system and switched the television in the kitchen to show the feeds of the security cameras.
“You think your security company would actually respond to the alarm with all the shit going on out there?” Ryan asked and nodded his head in the direction of the gate.
“I don’t know, but at least the system can warn us if we get an unwelcome visitor.”
Ryan nodded, hoping that it wouldn’t come to that.
Carla and Paul prepared a simple dinner of sandwiches and crackers as the sun set, but Ryan could not stomach even the lightest meal.
The scene with the girl kept replaying over and over again in his head. He would see the blood and become nauseous and then he would again see the girl slowly walking toward him and he would start to shake and break out in a cold sweat.
They were all huddled around the television watching the news, with a second smaller one set to the camera feeds.
The news was a collection of disturbing images: car accidents, mass attacks by children and police gunning people down. Most news channels were reporting that sources had confirmed that it was somehow linked to the asteroid. They were calling the asteroid Revelations. A press release was planned for later that evening out of the United States, which would disclose all the information they had on the virus.
“Ryan.” Carla whispered and he looked at her.
Kyle was asleep on her lap. She motioned for him to take him to the bedroom.
He got up and gently lifted him. He looked peaceful, and his sleep untroubled. Ryan was relieved that his son could sleep. He had been worried that he might have nightmares, given everything that had happened over the last couple of days. He took him down the hall and into the second guest bedroom and gently laid him down. He took off his shoes and pulled the covers over him. Switching off the light, he was about to close the door, when Kyle stopped him.
“Dad?”
“Yeah, champ, I’m here.” He walked over to the bed and sat down.
“Are we going to be okay? You know, with everything that’s going on?”
Ryan sighed quietly. “Sure, buddy. I know it’s a little crazy right now, but it’ll get better soon, you’ll see. All this has just taken everyone by surprise. It’ll take a couple of days before they get a handle on everything. But for the time being, rest assured that we’re safe and sound.” Ryan smiled reassuringly in the light pouring in from the hallway, but Kyle did not look comforted.
“Why didn’t we help that woman? The one on Graham’s street. The crying one.”
Ryan didn’t respond immediately. He was unsure of how to proceed.
“Well, the thing is, like you’ve seen, things are a little crazy right now,” he started. “And not everyone out there is a good person, or is honest when they say they need help. Some people will try and take advantage of others that are trying to help, and you have to be careful who you try to help and who you accept help from.”
Kyle seemed to ponder this for a moment.
“But how can you be sure someone doesn’t really need help? How can you be sure we couldn’t help that lady?” he asked earnestly, his eyes welling up with tears.
“You can’t, buddy. Not really. These are decisions a person has to make for himself. I decided not to help, because I had you and your mom with me in the car, and I decided that I didn’t want to take the risk – that I didn’t want there to be even a small chance of either one of you getting hurt.”
Kyle thought for a moment longer and then seemed to give a small nod, as if he understood and accepted this explanation.
“Get some sleep, champ.” Ryan said and put his hand on Kyle’s forehead.
Kyle was burning up and his forehead was moist with sweat.
Alarm bells chimed in Ryan’s head.
“You feeling ok, buddy?” Ryan asked gently, pulling back the covers.
“Just a little hot and I’ve got a headache, but I’m okay.”
Ryan quickly got up and switched on the light.
“Dad?”
“Stay here, I’ll go get you something for your headache.”
Ryan left the room and trotted to the kitchen. Carla followed him.
“What’s wrong?”
“He’s got a fever, just getting him something to help.”
“Is he okay?”
He didn’t answer. He opened the cabinet where Paul kept his medicine and pulled out three aspirin and poured some water.
He headed back to the room, dropping in the aspirin to dissolve.
Kyle was sitting upright in bed. He had taken off his shirt.
Ryan handed him the glass, and Kyle waited for it to dissolve completely before downing it.
He handed the glass back. “Thanks dad.”
“No problem, champ. Now get some sleep.”
Kyle lay back and Ryan pulled the covers over him.
He exited the room and switched off the light, pulling the door closed behind him.
Carla was waiting for him in the hallway.
“Is he okay?” she asked.
“I’m sure he’s fine. He drank the aspirin and he’s trying to get some sleep.”
Carla looked worried.
“Come on, baby. Sleep would do us some good too.”
They headed to their room, calling goodnight to Paul.
*****
“Ryan! Ryan, wake up!”
Ryan opened his eyes and lifted his head, blinking into the light. Carla was standing next to him, her face contorted in barely controlled panic.
“What is it?” he mumbled, trying to come awake fully.
“It’s Kyle.”
That did it. He sat up and shook his head.
“What about him?”
“His fever is worse and…” she trailed off.
He stood up. “What is it Carla?”
She motioned for him to follow her and he did.
Paul was sitting on Kyle’s bed and the light was on. He moved aside when he saw Ryan enter and he moved toward Kyle.
His son was soaked with sweat. Thin, black veins, were visible on his neck, running down to his shoulders, arms and torso.
“He’s unconscious. We can’t get him awake.” Paul said softly.
Ryan sat on the bed and leaned down to Kyle’s face. He muttered a quick prayer and then gently opened his son’s eye lids.
They were almost yellow – feral, like a cat’s.
He sat upright and sighed.
“This may be a pointless question, but did you try a doctor?” he asked.
Paul nodded. “I tried with my landline. Some of the emergency numbers ring, but no one answers.”
“What do we do?” Carla asked, her voice cracking.
Ryan didn’t answer and after a couple of moments Paul spoke. “We can only try to bring the fever down.”
They drew a bath of lukewarm water and gently submerged him in it for a couple of minutes. When it felt as if the fever let up, they took him out and dried him off, putting him under clean, dry covers again.
His breathing had become raspy, and the dark veins were becoming darker and thicker at an alarming rate.
All through that day, they watched over him, dabbing his head with a damp cloth and dipping him in a bath when they felt his fever spiked too high.
Kyle regained consciousness once during the late afternoon, but he stared blankly around the room, looking at each in turn as if he didn’t recognize them. His eyes were a deep yellow now, and his skin was pale. After clumsily trying to get up, but held down by Ryan, he drifted off again.
It was around eight o’clock that evening, when all three of them were forcing down some food and drink in the kitchen, that they heard a thud coming from down the hall.
They looked at each other for a moment, and then they hurried down the hall to Kyle’s room, Ryan in the lead. He burst into the room, and found Kyle standing on the opposite side of the bed, with his back to him.
A moment of relief burst through him, but then he noted how still his son stood and it was replaced by dread.
“Kyle? Champ?” Ryan ventured, taking a step into the room.
Kyle’s head snapped around, and Ryan recoiled. His face was contorted in anger and what Ryan thought was hate. His eyes were a deep, wild yellow and his skin was gray like ash. He noticed that the black veins criss-crossing his body looked like they had multiplied and were much darker and thicker.
“Kyle?” Carla asked behind Ryan, stepping into the room and around him.
Kyle lunged. He took one step, planted his other foot on the bed and flew at Carla. Ryan grabbed her by the waist instinctively and shoved her aside, and Kyle tackled him to the ground. He shot his hands up and grabbed Kyle by the chin to keep his mouth away from his face, the image of the bite mark on the dead man’s cheek flashing through his mind.
“Kyle, what are you doing?” Carla shrieked hysterically, but he paid her no mind. His teeth was gnashing as he tried to bite his father, saliva dripping from his mouth like a rabid dog. His arms flailed around him, as if he was unsure what to do with them, but a moment later he started hitting his father, landing fists and open palms against Ryan’s face and neck.
A moment later, Kyle floated into the air off of Ryan, flailing and screaming like a maddened ape. Paul had grabbed him by the waist and had lifted him off, but Kyle fought and resisted with such ferocity that he was battling to keep hold.
Ryan jumped to his feet. He stole a glance at Carla to make sure she was alright. “Get out of the room!” he yelled, but didn’t wait to see if she’d comply.
He started forward to try and assist Paul, but Kyle’s elbow connected Paul’s temple, causing a loud thud. Paul staggered back two steps and then Kyle was free. As soon as he hit the ground, he lunged at Ryan again, but his time Ryan was a little more prepared. He quickly moved low and to the side as his son attacked, and Kyle missed, landing harmlessly a few feet from the door. At first Ryan thought he would turn and attack again, but Kyle’s attention was drawn to Carla standing by the door, looking indecisive about staying or going.
Kyle flung himself forward with a high pitched scream and Carla’s eyes widened.
“Run!” Ryan yelled and Carla hesitated for an instant longer before taking off down the hall. Kyle followed and Ryan took off after him. As he rushed through the door of the room, he heard Paul follow.
“Carla, get to the garage!” Ryan yelled. The garage had a thick, sturdy door and he was sure if she could get through it she would be safe.
He saw Kyle ahead of him, running hunched over. He was extremely quick and he was gaining on Carla.
She wouldn’t make it.
“Carla, left!” he screamed, hoping she would understand that he meant for her to duck into the kitchen.
She had always mixed up her rights and lefts. When she gave directions to him in the car, she would say “Turn at the next one on my side” or “Your side”. He found it endearing and it was one of the many things he loved about her.
So when he said left, she went right – into the living room. The kitchen had a narrow doorway, and he had hoped Kyle would miss the exit, so to speak, and she would have had a few extra moments. But it was not to be.
The living room was a large open space, with comfortable couches and a large, glass coffee table. She ran around a couch, and was out of his sight as the wall obscured his view.
Kyle hardly slowed down. He changed direction and slammed his leg into the couch, causing him to fly forward, right into the coffee table. It shattered with a resounding crash. Ryan winced as Kyle went tumbling over the ground and broken glass, but Kyle had hardly come to a stop, before he was up again, looking around wildly.
“Kyle?” Ryan said, having come to a stop a few feet away. Kyle whipped around to face him and Ryan saw glass shards protruding from his arms and torso. A large piece had impaled his cheek and Ryan gasped, but it seemed as if Kyle hardly noticed, even as the blood streamed down his face.
Ryan was about to speak again, when Kyle opened his mouth and let loose a bloodcurdling shriek. The hair on Ryan’s arms stood on end, and he took a step back involuntarily.
Kyle lunged at him once more, and Ryan had a moment to think Well, shit, before his son tackled him to the ground for the second time that night.
This time he was too late to get his hands up, and Kyle sunk his teeth into his shoulder. Ryan screamed in pain and with all his strength he bucked and shoved and Kyle went flying. He fell against a couch, his head cracking against the wooden leg of the sofa, but it did not seem to slow him down. He was up in a flash, and was poised to lunge at Ryan again when a sofa cushion struck him in the face.
Kyle blinked, and turned to look at Carla, standing on the opposite side of the living room in front of an open door. Before Ryan could say or do anything Kyle charged his mother, but at the last second she fell down onto her stomach and he stumbled over her and through the open door. She quickly jumped up and pulled the large glass door shut and locked it.
She retreated deeper into the house as Kyle turned and ran at her, slamming into the glass door, causing it to shake in its frame.
Paul came to a stop next to Ryan, a pistol in his hands. Ryan looked at the pistol and then at Paul questioningly, but he avoided his gaze. Carla had reached Ryan’s side, and standing in line, they watched Kyle’s insanity. He kept running into the door, headfirst, until fresh blood gushed from his forehead.
Every time he struck the door, he gave a shrill cry, almost as if in frustration.
“What do we do?” Carla whimpered.
They stood in horrified silence, watching their son and grandson continuously run headfirst into a glass door.
Paul was the one who noticed the cracks first.
“The door’s not gonna hold.” he said quietly.
Ryan noticed the hairline cracks appearing around the impact zone. Frankly he was surprised the door hadn’t broken yet.
“Load the car.” Ryan said. Paul and Carla both looked at him, but said nothing.
“We have to get him help. We have to find a doctor, or … or someone.” He could hear the whine in his own voice, but he was powerless to do anything about it.
“A doctor? Haven’t you been paying attention to the news? No one knows what’s going on, or why this is happening, or how to stop it. A doctor won’t help.” Paul countered, actually sounding a bit angry.
“I don’t care, we need to get him to a doctor. Maybe a doctor can do something… anything!”
Paul sighed audibly. “How? How do you want to get him to a doctor? The streets are insane! You saw what is happening out there. And even if you get to a hospital or clinic, there’s no guarantee anyone will be there. And that’s assuming we can somehow get him in the car in the first pl-“
Ryan rounded on him, rage and grief boiling beneath the surface. His voice had taken on an ominous buzz. “What do you want me to say? What do you want me to do? Do you want me to abandon him? Do you want me to kill him? What? Tell me?”
Paul looked down. “That is not your son anymore.” He said quietly.
All the fight went out of Ryan and his shoulders sagged.
The door cracked audibly as Kyle ran into it again.
Kyle suddenly looked to his right, toward the gate, as if something there had grabbed his attention. Shrieking again, he ran out of sight.
Moments later, an alarm screamed shrilly through the quiet house.
“It’s the perimeter alarm. He must’ve set it off.” Paul said.
They moved toward a window looking out at the gate and they saw Kyle pausing. He turned back to the house, the alarm obviously recalling his attention back from what had drawn him first. A moment later Ryan thought h |
Hey, all. You don’t know me, but I’ve been in this group for about four years now, even if I never really said anything. I’m just not really the social network type of person – I’m one of those old-fashioned guys who prefer face to face contact to blog posts and messaging, so I never saw much appeal in engaging in an online discussion, even if I rather enjoyed reading your posts. Well, the time has come for me to make my first, and most likely only, post here. In all honesty, I’m expecting a swift and permanent ban from NetWeb after this, but I don’t really care. There’s something I need to tell everyone, and it’s going to sound crazy and nonsensical, but I assure you every word is true.
My message is simple – do NOT buy an RT!!! I can not stress this enough. Do not purchase an RT, a used one or especially a brand new one. Let the fad die off. Please. I know what you’re thinking – “But Trevor, RTs have the potential to change the world! If we use them right and monitor them properly we’re looking at an age of prosperity!” And yes, I do agree that the fantasy that IGT has been trying to pitch us for the last three years sounds pretty great, but in reality it’s disgusting, inhumane, and not to mention highly illegal. I have no concrete proof for any of my beliefs, so I’m not going to outline them in plain text. All I’m going to do is tell you the story leading up to the creation of this post and let you reach your own conclusions.
It’s important to note that I lost one of my legs to a soft tissue sarcoma last year. By the time we caught it, it had already spread to the rest of my body, but with proper treatment the doctors are expecting me to live for at least another 25 years, which, while not ideal, is way more than cancer patients with my condition lived for only half a century ago. Still, the treatments leave me in a lot of pain, and the aforementioned lack of one leg makes it pretty difficult to move about, even with my prosthesis. And since I’m both disabled AND terminally ill, I more than qualified for IGT’s charity which provided free RTs to people who really need them. When I received a message from one of their PR people asking me if I would like to get a free model to help out around the house, I was ecstatic! Sure, I knew that this was all in their best interest, not mine – their donations are tax-deductible, and they’re also getting free marketing through exposure to boot. Regardless, as someone who’s never had a proper girlfriend and got disowned by his parents years ago, I knew I could really use the help. And besides, who wouldn’t want the hottest, latest piece of technology for absolutely free? I was certainly not going to say no to that, even if I had to play the cancer card to get it.
For the next several weeks I was in negotiation with the PR guy (whose name I won’t disclose, because I sincerely doubt he knows anything about what’s going on), sending documents back and forth, familiarizing myself with the terms and conditions of their deal and that sort of thing. Yes, IGT really do run a charity with terms and conditions attached to their donations, because IGT. But anyway, I was told that I’d receive a 2060 “GRETA” model – not the latest, even at the time (the story happened in early ‘62), yet still pretty damn great, costing north of half a million. The package was delivered to me on a Monday, straight to my door, and after that I set about assembling the RT unit myself. The process was, admittedly, a lot easier than I expected – the body and head were already in place, so all I had to do was attach the limbs, which required just a little bit of unscrewing and soldering, and then activate the unit. Honestly, while RTs look super realistic in ads and on store shelves, in real life they fall a bit in the uncanny valley, especially upon closer inspection. You know that horrible artificial skin they use on the expensive prosthetics, the kind that really looks like skin, but feels like cheap plastic? My RT was covered in that, head to toe.
The assembly took about 25 minutes in total, which I know some people in this group will consider to be way too slow, but keep in mind that I’m not really the type of person who’s ever had to work with this kind of stuff. When I was a child I wasn’t allowed anywhere near the tools, which were the exclusive domain of my father and older brother, and during high school and beyond I only ever did some basic soldering, like the type they teach in shop class, so go easy on me. Anyway, soon enough my RT was ready to go. The GRETA model’s system software came pre-installed (no messy work required there), but the unit hadn’t been activated yet – I had to do that myself so that it could imprint. For the five of you unfamiliar with the process, imprinting is pretty much the most important part of the setup. The first person the RT sees upon its activation becomes its… well, for lack of a better word, its Master. That person will always receive top priority when it comes to issuing orders or being cared for, and the RT will never wander off when its Master is less than 500 meters away.
Upon turning the unit on for the first time, it… Well, I guess after activation it’s not really an “it” anymore, is it? Upon turning the unit on for the first time, she began the imprinting process, and to hide that fact recited a pre-recorded message, just your standard fare about the rules I’d have to take into account, such as feeding her once a day, letting her sleep for at least five hours, caring for her as if I’d been caring for a real person… Kind of ironic, considering the fact that she was supposed to care for me, but whatever. The instructions also stated rather sternly that I was not to penetrate the skin layer of the RT under any circumstances, and that upon malfunction I was to bring her to an IGT-certified repair shop only, or else I’d be voiding my warranty. I didn’t pay it much mind, though.
Once the instructions were complete, so was the imprinting, and my RT’s life, if you can call it that, began. That machine which uncannily resembled a young girl looked around, her artificial eyes flickering and moving just like real ones would. She finally introduced herself more informally, explaining that I had to do some basic tasks before she could be useful to me. It was fairly simple stuff, such as giving her my schedule, setting alarms, feeding her info like my social security number, that kind of thing. She also asked me to name her, which I really didn’t feel comfortable doing. I’m probably very weird in this regard, but I don’t believe in choosing somebody else’s name – it’s like you define part of them without their knowledge or consent, forever. But then again, maybe I’m just biased. After all, when I was born my parents named me Marissa, so suffice to say, that didn’t really stick for too long. Legally changing my name to something more fitting felt empowering, like I was finally in charge of defining who I was. So I told her she could pick her own name, when she felt ready. She suggested Greta, like her model name, but I disagreed – I wanted her to choose something that she, herself, would feel was right for her. It’s funny – even at that moment, I subconsciously knew that she was more than just a computer in a humanoid body, like IGT was advertising. But I didn’t get confirmation until she began dreaming.
According to my research, RTs dreaming during sleep is not uncommon at all. In fact, it happens roughly as frequently as it does in humans, and just like us, they dream of recent events, people they have met, the works. Their software is sorting through the data collected during the day, placing the most important bits on the HDD and deleting the rest, and that process may sometimes “glitch” into dreams. I’ve seen a lot of people in this group, and beyond, report being weirded out when their RTs woke up and began telling them about their dreams, but at least those could be easily explained by the information transfer process I described above. What’s less easy to comprehend is when an RT begins dreaming about things and people they’ve never seen before. After all, if that explanation is true, then how can RTs possibly dream of objects they don’t have a recorded memory of? It didn’t make any sense at all, it was like a camera having pictures on its memory card that you’ve never taken. My own RT, who by that point began going by the name Laura, started experiencing this phenomenon about a month after she imprinted.
It was always the exact same dream – a white house, with two floors looking like cubes stacked upon each other. The peculiar thing about them was that the upper “cube” was turned several degrees to the side, so that its corners protruded above the lower floor’s walls. It was an interesting architectural decision, one that I was positive I’d never seen or even glimpsed before. And yet Laura recalled it flawlessly, down to the finest detail. The first time she told me about this dream I dismissed her pretty casually, thinking it was just something she spotted while on a shopping trip. The second time caught my curiosity. Then the third, fourth, fifth and sixth times all convinced me that there was something very weird happening here. Worried that my RT might have a serious issue, I asked her to draw a sketch of the house, and then sent that to IGT’s customer support alongside an explanation of the problem. This is the response I received:
“Dear Mr. Kingsley,
I regret to hear about the issues you’re experiencing with your aRTificial. Our engineers here at IGT are working hard to troubleshoot every single unit we ship in order to assure that our customers receive only the highest quality product, but considering the demand and the limited time we have to spare on quality assurance for each unit, sometimes mistakes (known as glitches) in the unit’s memory occur. Your particular issue, while inconvenient, is not too uncommon, and we are pleased to inform you that it will cause no issues or long-term problems with your aRTificial’s function. It stems from the fact that, during QA, the engineers use stock photos to “flash” a unit’s short-term memory and make sure it’s functioning. The particular image you have sent me shows an uncanny resemblance to one of the stock images we use for the process, which I have attached to this e-mail. While the issue will fade away over time, if you would like you can bring your unit to an IGT-approved maintenance workshop so that its memory can be formatted. That will solve the issue once and for all.”
As always, I am keeping the IGT employees’ names out of this until I become certain of their involvement. Anyway, I downloaded the picture and, wouldn’t you know it, it was the exact same house that Laura had drawn, right down to the very last detail. Immediately, a lamp in my brain lit up and I was like “Conspiracy! They photoshopped this image to throw me off!”, but no, a reverse image search brought up plenty of sites hosting that particular stock photo, which was apparently uploaded quite a few years ago. Problem solved, right? The customer support guy’s story checked out right down to the very last detail, and more importantly, it made sense. So then why couldn’t I put it out of my mind? And I wasn’t alone – day after day, Laura would wake up and excitedly told me about the dream she’d had as she prepared breakfast for us. That dream was, of course, always about the house, in some way, shape or form. Sometimes she dreamed that she was very tiny and standing in front of the house, other times she was closer to her current height and walking up to it, and a few times she even dreamed that she was inside the house, facing the two pine trees just outside. When I asked how she knew this was the exact same house and not another, Laura told me that it just felt right. It became pretty obvious to me that she had a connection with that place, but I genuinely couldn’t understand what it was. So, like the good no-lifer that I am, I decided to spend my time doing research.
I discovered that the house was built by one Nigel Winston, an architect who also doubled as an artist. He’d built over a dozen houses during his career, each of which had some sort of quirk to it. The white one he called “House of Cards”, which, honestly, didn’t make much sense to me, but I’m sure it did to him, at least at the time. “House of Cards” was built in 2044, and for a time Winston himself lived in it alongside his family, but if the home’s listing in a real estate site was to be believed, he’d moved out about a year ago. An e-mail to the real estate company quickly got me his e-mail, and, interestingly, only his e-mail. While I did prefer something a bit more personal, such as a phone number, I was informed that Nigel Winston was a very private person and rarely, if ever, spoke to anyone. That led me to believe that my e-mail was going to be completely ignored if I revealed the truth about my research’s purpose, so instead I pretended to be someone interested in purchasing the house. I asked the standard questions – is it in a good neighborhood, are there stores or landmarks around, that kind of stuff. On top of it, I also asked more information about the house’s history, such as why it was built, how the stock photo came to be taken, and why he moved out and chose to sell one of his works of art. I am copy/pasting his response below, in full, and leaving the conclusions to you.
“Dear Mr. Kingsley,
I’m pleased to learn of your interest in purchasing the house my family and I called home for over 16 years. Despite its unique design, thus far you have been one of the very few people who expressed a genuine interest. As you can see, my House of Cards is in pristine condition, inside and out. There are multiple family-owned stores about five minutes away from it, as well as a MarGet roughly 15 minutes away. A school and a hospital are both within short driving distance away from the house, as a matter of fact, that’s the reason I chose that place in particular to build it. Its sole reason for existing was to give me and my family shelter, so I deliberately found a spot that would be great for raising a child. One drawback of the house is that it only has two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room, as well as a bathroom on each floor, so there’s no place to, say, set up an office or a storage room. You could, however, convert one of the bedrooms into that if you need it, or you could build an additional structure in the backyard. We used to have two pines growing there that my wife had a liking for, but when we decided to sell and move those were removed, leaving enough empty space to attach another room or even two. The neighborhood is quiet and calm, trust me on this. The reason we moved has nothing to do with the area, or with any external factors. The truth is, my youngest daughter disappeared roughly a year ago, and once the investigation was closed we found that the house just held too many memories. I would prefer it if we no longer dwell on this depressing matter, yet I would also appreciate it if you can keep my Laura in your prayers tonight. If you have any more questions, or would like to set up a meeting, feel free to respond to this e-mail.
With respect, Nigel Winston”
Credit To: RaidenDP1
|
As younger siblings tend to do, I absolutely worshipped my older brother Calvin. He always seemed like the coolest person in the world to me. Everybody liked him. He was president of his class, a star baseball player, and just had an all-around great personality. All the girls thought that he was such a stud, much to my surprise. And although he was older, Calvin wasn’t the stereotypical monster. I think that’s why we got along so well.
For one thing, he would never dream of hurting me in any way. When I told my psychiatrists this, they couldn’t believe it. An older brother that never once tortured his younger sister? There was no way one of those existed anywhere. But Calvin was different. His bedroom door was always open whenever I needed someone to talk to. He’d let me lie on his floor and listen to his records with him while he did his homework. I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.
As the two of us grew up, in a small town in the middle of Rhode Island, we only became closer. Maybe it was because of our family situation, but we both needed each other greatly. Our father was an alcoholic. He’d come home drunk most of the time, and take out all of his anger on us. Calvin never let him get to me, though. He would let me sleep with him in his bed most nights, so I wouldn’t have to hear our parents fighting through the bedroom walls alone.
Our mother was helpless, but tried her hardest. She was controlled by him, and was stuck in a bad situation. She often thought about leaving with us, but with our control freak of a dad, it was out of the question. Sadly, Mom died when I was thirteen. The autopsy showed that she had had an overdose on painkillers. They ruled it as accidental, but I was never so sure. After she was gone, our father only got worse. It got so bad that the second he graduated, Calvin moved into an apartment on the other side of town, and took me with him. Our father barely protested. I’m pretty sure he never wanted kids in the first place.
From then on, it was just Calvin and I, on our own in the big world. He attended the local community college, and worked part-time at a grocery store. It wasn’t the most glamorous thing, but it helped to get food on the table. I was hard to look after. I was deeply disturbed after such a tough childhood. I wasn’t good at making friends or being friendly. But my brother never turned his back on me. We were away from our broken home, and were happy just to have each other.
It’s at this point in our lives that we made the biggest mistake we ever could. The two of us didn’t know it at the time. But to this day, I still regret picking up that phone more than anything.
It was the end of summer, around 1976. The winds were brisk, as early September was approaching fast. Calvin and I had been on our own then for about two years. I was fifteen; he was nineteen. I remember that I was sitting at the kitchen table, finishing my homework. Calvin was working on fixing frozen TV dinners. The phone was in the living room. I jumped up immediately when it started to ring.
“Hello?” I asked into the receiver. It was Joey Malone. Joey was my brother’s best friend in high school. The two of them were practically joined at the hip, until they went their separate ways for college. Joey was in Miami, and I could hear the longing for his friend in his voice. After we caught up for a brief moment, he turned serious.
“Hey, lemme talk to your brother real quick,” Joey said. “I’ve got some news that I think he might like.” I rolled my eyes playfully and handed the receiver to Calvin. I could hear my brother laughing from the living room as he caught up with his old friend. They must have been on the phone for a good hour, because I had already taken our TV dinners out of the oven and had finished mine by the time Calvin walked in.
“Hey, sorry about that, Laurel,” He smiled softly, taking a seat across from me. “Man, you’ll never believe what Joey’s been up to!” I cocked an eyebrow suspiciously.
“Is he locked up in prison already?” I joked.
“No, but he might as well be. His neighbors are going away for Labor Day weekend, and he’s throwing a monster party in their house while they’re gone! He’s invited us to come and crash it! Can you believe it?” He chuckled, taking a bite of frozen chicken.
I should have known right then that we shouldn’t go. It was illegal to break into someone’s home, but even more illegal to throw a party in it. I should have known that it wasn’t a good idea. But I was naïve, fifteen-year-old girl. So of course, I agreed.
Calvin and I planned to drive up to Joey’s house. It would take us a while from Rhode Island, but the two of us were so stoked, we didn’t even care. We spent the long car ride blasting the Doors on the radio, and singing the lyrics way off key. This was definitely when I felt most content. Little did I know the terror that we’d be thrown into later that night…if I had, I would have made Calvin turn the car around and drive off a cliff.
We had been in Calvin’s truck for who knows how long. It was around nine o’ clock that night when we noticed that we were in a nowhere land. Our map said we were in New Jersey, but it didn’t seem like it.
“Are you sure we aren’t lost?” I asked my brother as I chewed a wad of bubblegum. He kept his eyes firmly on the road ahead of us, nodding his head.
“Of course we aren’t. Joey told me the directions himself.” I rolled my eyes, blowing a bubble.
We must have been driving through nothing but trees for another hour before I finally declared that we were lost. My brother had the crazy idea that his best friend was some kind of genius, but I knew better. Calvin was getting tired. I was getting restless. I had been sitting in the same position for too long, and I couldn’t feel my legs.
“Can we please pull over somewhere?” I whined.
“Don’t you think I would have about two hours ago? There’s nowhere to pull over to.” Calvin replied, stifling a cough. It turned into a slight wheeze, which caused my ears to perk up.
“Are you okay?” I asked him, concern filling my voice. He nodded, brushing it off as just a tickle in his throat. Usually that would have been enough to disinterest me. But that night, I was on full alert. Calvin had really bad asthma. I’d almost lost him many times because of it, which was scary to think about. Almost as scary as the endless road in front of us.
It was about thirty minutes later that Calvin began to get frustrated.
“Shit,” He’d grumble to himself. “That jackass had no idea what he was talking about.” I didn’t reply. I knew he wouldn’t admit that I was right. I was beginning to feel really uncomfortable with our surroundings. It was weird that we had driven hours through nothing but trees, only seeing another passing car every fifty miles or so. I didn’t want to admit it, but I was scared. Where were we going to sleep? On the side of the road? Just the thought of that creeped me out.
Both of us were hungry. At one point, Calvin had asked me to check the map to see if there were any rest stops or motels anywhere close. There weren’t. Not until it was about ten thirty. Calvin was practically falling asleep at the wheel, when my eyes fell upon a small speck on our ancient looking map.
“Calvin! Get up!” I shook him, excitement rising in my voice. “There’s a restaurant coming up in about twenty miles!” His eyes popped open.
“Are you serious?” He asked.
“Yeah! There should be an exit up ahead somewhere.” I couldn’t believe our luck. It did strike me as odd that this was the only sign of civilization for hundreds of miles, but I was so hungry, I didn’t care. I gave Calvin the directions to the place. There weren’t any signs in the pitch-black forests, but I knew that we were getting close.
Pretty soon, Calvin turned, and there it was. The place looked like your typical 1950s-styled diner. It was a small building with large glass windows, making it easy to look inside. I could see a few people sitting down. Calvin parked on the dirt road outside. I jumped out anxiously, dying to stretch my legs. It was a lot colder in that area. I pulled a sweatshirt over my head, as Calvin buttoned up his jacket. I could smell coffee and homemade pie drifting out through the sliding glass door.
Calvin and I walked side by side. As I looked up at the sign, I noticed there was another part to it that I hadn’t seen before. It flickered every now and then in the moonlight:
O’MALLEY’S FAMILY RESTAURANT
(MOTEL ON EAST SIDE)
We stepped through the door. The floors were checkered, and the rows of red vinyl booths were almost all filled. There were a few bustly looking men over at the counter, sipping hot coffee out of mugs. A woman sat with her young daughter, the two of them giggling softly as the ate plates of pancakes. A group of teenagers in leather jackets stood over by the jukebox. One slipped a dime into it, and some ancient tune by Buddy Holly started to play.
An unbelievable feeling of dread immediately fell over me. It came out of nowhere, but it wouldn’t go away. I immediately regretted pulling up there.
I didn’t even hear the woman come up to us.
“Can I help you, kids?” Her voice was soft like butter. I glanced up and was met with the dark eyes of an elderly woman. She wore a red dress and matching shoes, a dirty apron draped over her front. Her apple doll face smiled down at us, her silver hair gleaming in the lights overhead. I didn’t speak. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t open my mouth.
“Yes, ma’am,” Calvin said with a smile. “We’d just like a quick bite to eat before we hit the road again.” He poked me in the back, and I nodded my head feebly in agreement.
“Well, come on in! My name is Millie, Millie O’Malley. Welcome to our restaurant. ” Her laugh had years of age visible in every syllable. Yet, it made me cringe.
“It’s nice to meet you, Millie. I’m Calvin Duncan, and this is my sister Laurel.” I still didn’t feel right as I reluctantly took her hand in mine. She was somebody’s grandmother. But something about her made me uneasy. I guess I got that way around anybody new that I met, but bad vibes were coming off of her.
“Laurel. That’s such a lovely name.” I managed a weak smile as Millie let out another laugh. “Well, I don’t want to keep you kids just standing around. Come on, I’ll find you two a booth.”
Calvin and Millie were talking up a storm. I hung behind them, pretending not to notice. I learned that Millie and her husband Ted had opened the restaurant a couple of years ago after retiring. She was the hostess, and he was the cook. They didn’t have any children, which is why Millie enjoyed it so much when younger people stopped in. Calvin was always so polite. He laughed at her jokes and told her our sob story. When she learned that we didn’t really have any parents, her expression changed. Almost to one of…delight.
“Oh, you poor things. Well, consider me your mother for the night.” She handed us our menus as I took a seat across from my brother in the booth. As she walked away, Calvin opened his with a smile.
“Isn’t she just the sweetest woman you’ve ever met?” He beamed, his light brown bangs falling over his eyes. I didn’t reply. I slouched down in my seat, not bothering to look at meal choices. I suddenly wasn’t hungry anymore. My eyes wandered elsewhere. I watched as the teenagers by the jukebox drank Cokes straight out of the bottle and talked amongst themselves.
“What’s the matter? Are you feeling okay?” Calvin asked, concern in his voice. I just nodded my head. I didn’t answer when he asked me what I wanted to eat. I knew that I was getting on his nerves, but I honestly couldn’t care less. When Millie came over to take our orders, I remained quiet. Calvin ordered us pancakes and hot chocolate with a warm smile. As she walked away, he turned back to me, his expression annoyed.
“What’s your deal tonight, Laurel? You’re acting like a little kid.” He snapped.
“Don’t you feel the least bit uncomfortable around her?” I raised an eyebrow. Calvin looked at me, confused.
“What are you talking about?”
“Mrs. O’Malley. Don’t you feel it? She’s weird. Something about her doesn’t seem right to me.” I don’t know how he couldn’t see it.
“She’s just being nice. God, stop acting stuck up and try to appreciate what she’s doing for us.” Calvin shot back harshly. I rolled my eyes and didn’t speak to him for the remainder of our meal. I now wish that I would have. I didn’t know then that that would be one of the last moments I would ever spend with my brother again.
When our food arrived, Calvin thanked Millie for me. I picked at my food and stared down at my shoes. Calvin pretended not to notice. We never fought. We would have squabbles, and this was one of them. Calvin was always so patient with me. But I wasn’t an easy kid to look after. I often wonder if that’s what got my father so angry. I had trust issues from growing up in a home where I didn’t feel safe. I came off as cold a lot of the time, and my brother was usually the only one who could comfort me. But even he sometimes got fed up.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” I spoke for the first time in half an hour. Calvin just nodded his head, taking a sip of his drink. I slid out of the vinyl booth and made my way to the back. I locked myself in a stall and stood against the wall. I don’t know how long I was in there. I just needed to be away from that table.
When I returned, however, Calvin was talking to Millie and who I assumed was her husband, Ted. He was a bigger man, with a few gray hairs still clinging to his balding head. His greasy apron hung over khaki pants and a green flannel shirt. They were all laughing about something, Calvin stopping to cough now and again. I walked over to the table as quietly as I could. Calvin looked up at me and smirked.
“Well, speak of the devil.” He joked, motioning for me to come and sit by him. He must have forgiven me, or at least have been faking it in front of the O’Malley’s. I didn’t care. I clung to my brother tightly.
“I’ve been wondering what brought you kids all the way up here,” Millie said suddenly, her unsettling smile growing wider. “We don’t get many visitors up here.”
“We’re driving to Florida, to visit some old friends,” Calvin replied. “I’m glad that we found this place, though.” Millie glanced at Ted. He blinked, his expression changing to one of pleasure. They stayed silent for a moment, as if contemplating an answer.
“We’re a bit in the middle of nowhere, I guess,” Ted chuckled hoarsely. He was missing a few teeth. The remaining ones in his mouth were all yellow. I turned to look out the window. I watched the truck as the three of them continued to talk.
“Well, we’d really like to thank you folks for your kind hospitality. How much do I owe you?” Calvin asked, reaching for his wallet. Millie shook her head.
“No. It’s on the house.” When my brother tried to protest, she put a bony finger to his lip. He smiled in gratitude, getting up to leave. I jumped out of the booth and was just about to reach for the door when Ted blocked my way.
“Hey, what do you kids think you’re doing? You can’t go driving out now. It’s nearly one o’ clock in the morning.” I wouldn’t know. There were no clocks or signs of time anywhere in the diner. It was like we were in the Twilight Zone. I glanced worriedly up at Calvin, trying to signal him to keep walking.
“You two look like you’ve been driving all day.” Ted continued. “I don’t think it would be wise to be behind the wheel when you’re tired. Come on in the back. We’ve got a nice little motel where you kids can stay until morning.” I froze. There was no way in hell that I was spending another second with those creeps.
“That’s alright,” I tried to object. “We’ll be fine.” But my brother wasn’t so sure.
“I don’t know, Laurel. I’m really tired, and you’re still underage. I don’t want to put our lives at risk by falling asleep at the wheel.” Calvin said feebly. I shook my head and grabbed his hand. He was stronger than me, though. I got pulled back onto the checkered floor.
“Calvin!” I tried to object. But he ignored me, and walked back to Millie.
“I think we’ll take a room for tonight.” He smiled, pushing me behind his back. Millie grinned and winked at her husband.
“Wonderful. Ted will show you two to the motel across the way. If you’ll give me your car keys, I can go fetch your luggage for you.” My mouth was dry. I watched as my brother pulled his keys out of his back pocket. I couldn’t believe it. I grabbed on to the back of Calvin’s jacket as I watched Millie walk outside. He just brushed me off.
I trailed behind hopelessly. Ted led us into another building a few feet away from the restaurant. It was smaller than the diner, but only by a little. It was also made entirely out of logs, as if Abe Lincoln had built it only weeks prior. He and Calvin were chatting away about who knows what. Ted pulled a key out of his pocket and quietly pushed the door open.
The inside of the motel was depressing. The walls were made completely out of wood, and portraits of mountain landscapes hung on them in rows. An oriental rug lay on the floor, just underneath the front desk. There was a guestbook, a cactus in a small pot and a vintage looking handbell on top of it. I shuddered. There was a heavy draft in there, and it looked as if there had been a vacancy for years.
“Well, this is the place. I don’t think it’s necessary to have you two sign in the guestbook, so I’ll show you up to your room.” Ted smiled, his grotesque teeth glimmering in the light. He led us up a staircase on the right side of the lobby.
The hallway was lit by a few mothy, overhead lamps. It was long, and just like the rest of the motel, wooden. There were about five rooms on each side of us, the doors closed. It was a bit dusty, which started up another round of quiet wheezing for Calvin. I rolled my eyes. He got us into this. I felt no sympathy.
“Ah. Here we are.” Ted finally exclaimed. He stood in front of a room and pulled open the door. There were two twin beds with quilt blankets and feathered pillows. The carpet was a rusty red, the wallpaper slightly peeling at the edges. Some more paintings of mountains and seasides hung around on pathetic looking nails. I swallowed thickly. Ted reached over me, placing a meaty hand on the light switch above my head. The room didn’t look any better, as it was flooded with an eerie, orange-ish light.
“It looks very homey. Thanks a lot, Ted.” Calvin smiled. I slowly descended inside and sat on one of the beds. I could distantly hear Ted telling my brother where the bathroom was, where to go for breakfast, things like that. I watched silently as Millie returned upstairs with our luggage. I must have zoned out for longer than I thought, because when I looked back, the door was closed and Calvin was unpacking our suitcases.
“We shouldn’t be here.” I spoke for the first time in what felt like forever. Calvin remained silent as he tossed me my pajamas.
“What are you going to tell Joey? We’re supposed to be at his house by tomorrow.” I heard my brother let out a loud sigh. It was the kind of sigh that your father might let out at the end of a long day.
Calvin must have sensed my uneasiness. He walked over slowly and took a seat beside me on the bed. I felt his arm wrap around my shoulder and squeeze it tightly. We didn’t say anything. He rested his chin on my shoulder. I could hear his raspy breathing in my ear.
“We’re going to be okay, Laurel. You need to sleep.” And with that, he kissed my cheek and turned back to his side of the room. We faced opposite directions as we undressed and got into our pajamas. I reluctantly slipped under the moth-eaten blanket and cold sheets after sitting up in uncomfortable silence for nearly half an hour. There was no way I was going to sleep. I looked up at the dirty ceiling for what felt like hours, listening to Calvin’s breathing.
I don’t know what time it was when I woke up. I must have dozed off, yet I don’t remember it. Calvin is what woke me up. I heard him hastily throw his quilt onto the floor. His breathing was labored, as if he had just run a marathon. I lay up in bed.
“Cal? Are you okay?” I asked into the darkness. I didn’t get a response. The zipper to his suitcase was unzipped, and I heard my brother quickly rustling through his clothes. Eventually, he found what he was looking for and walked towards the door.
“I-I’m fine. I just need some fresh air.” Calvin gasped out, clutching his inhaler in his hand. Light flooded our room as he stepped into the hallway quietly. He had these episodes a lot. I always felt so helpless when he did. There was nothing I could do except watch with wide eyes as he struggled to breathe. I don’t know why I didn’t go after him, but I wish I would have. Those were the last words that I ever heard him speak.
He was out there for about twenty minutes before I finally walked out to check on him. It usually took him a little while to calm down from his asthma attacks.
But when I opened the door, Calvin wasn’t there.
My feet were freezing in the brisk air of the hallway. I rubbed my arms as goose bumps started forming on my pale skin. Looking around, panic slowly started to rise in my throat. I checked in the bathroom to see if Calvin was in there. He wasn’t. There weren’t many places he could go.
“Calvin?” I called out into the hallway. There was no response. I quietly walked back into our room and put on a pair of slippers. I snuck down the hallway and raced down the staircase. He wasn’t in the lobby either.
There is no worse feeling than being completely alone in a place that you don’t know. It’s even worse when the only person you want to comfort you isn’t there. One of the hallway lamps flickered overheard. I couldn’t help the tears that streamed down my face. My mind was racing with possibilities of where my dear brother could have gone. I wondered if he had stormed off and left because I was just that annoying. I was so caught up in my panic that I didn’t see what I had tripped on. I went flying face first onto the oriental carpet. As I turned my body around to try and ease the pain, my eyes widened in shock.
Calvin’s inhaler was lying on the ground. It was just outside the door to our room, where I had seen him go out earlier. It was then that I knew that something was seriously wrong.
Calvin wouldn’t leave that lying around by choice. He wouldn’t just drop it by accident. It suddenly dawned on me that wherever he went, he went unwillingly. I let out a sob. I called out his name one more time. I reached my shaking arm out and took the inhaler in my hands. I rolled the plastic around in my palm as I stood up, placing it in my pocket. We needed to get out of there. I didn’t care if he didn’t agree. Once I found him, we’d drive away and never come back to this fucking freak show.
I dashed back into our room and grabbed the car keys off of the bedside table. I didn’t bother grabbing anything else. My only focus was getting the hell out of there. I tiptoed down the staircase, the wood creaking underneath my feet. Pushing open the door, I ran as fast as I could towards the diner, my only exit to the outside world. The lights were still on inside, much to my surprise. I tried not to pay attention to the menacing trees leaning over me as I raced to the back door. I was prepared to pound on it until my knuckles were red and bloody, but it opened almost immediately. I quietly slipped inside.
I could see Calvin’s truck on the other side of one of the clear glass windows. It looked so close, yet so far away. I don’t know how much adrenaline was pumping through my body at that exact moment, but it took every ounce of strength I had not to just bolt then and there. The only thing that stopped me was the sound of a metal object clattering to the tiled floor behind me. It echoed loudly into my ears.
As far as I could see, there was no one besides me in the building. All of the customers were long gone. I spun around quickly. The doors to the kitchen were closed. When I tried to pry one open, it was locked. I kicked it as hard as I possibly could. I screamed out into the emptiness of the diner, for somebody, anybody, to come to help me. It felt like I’d been in there for years.
A dizzying wave of nausea overtook me. I heard that object clatter again, as well as a few barely audible whispers. Someone said “Shit!” and was quickly shushed. I had to hold my breath just to hear them again. Whatever it was was close by. My neck craned, trying to peer into the kitchen once more. The glass windows were hidden behind a black curtain, hung up so I couldn’t see inside. That had not been there earlier. I snuck around behind the counter and pressed my ear against the murky walls. There was a sudden silence. And then, the shuffling of feet on the tiled floor.
I don’t know what urged me to do it. It could’ve been the adrenaline, or the hopelessness that had overwhelmingly taken over my body that night. On the counter, there were rows of ketchup bottles and silverware. I grabbed a fork out from under a napkin and clutched it in my sweaty palms. I knew there was somebody, or something, behind that window. I wasn’t alone in there. I jammed the fork onto the glass. After about thirty seconds, the glass was starting to crack. I kept banging and banging it until it shattered in front of me. The millions of pieces seemed to fall in slow motion. I didn’t step back, though. For as I pulled away the sheet, nothing on earth could prepare me for what I was about to stumble on to.
A stream of smoke poured out through the broken glass. But even through it, I could see that the O’Malley’s kitchen was a typical diner kitchen. There were a few stoves and ovens. A refrigerator in the back held week’s worth of food. But that was not what caught my attention. The overwhelming stench of burning flesh filled my nostrils. I coughed and gagged, struggling hard to get a breath out. My eyes started to tear up. I flailed my arms in an attempt to clear a path, but found myself unsuccessful. The grotesque smell made me want to puke.
“Who’s there?” I recognized the voice. It was the voice of the man who had taken Calvin and I to our rooms a couple of hours before. I didn’t make a sound. I still couldn’t see, but eventually the smoke cleared through the broken window. My watery eyes soon adjusted to the fluorescent lighting. My mouth fell open in horror.
Ted and Millie O’Malley stood in the middle of the kitchen. There was a silver pot, about the size of a record player, resting on a table in the center. It was the first time that I got a good look around me. Blood was splattered on every inch of the walls surrounding us. It dripped down in streams and formed small puddles on the floor. There was cleaver clutched in Ted’s meaty fist, gleaming menacingly in the light. Millie stood beside him, a wooden spoon at her side. It was wet and covered in what looked like oversized worms. Intestines. I didn’t speak.
My attention turned to the pot, still boiling and bubbling. I saw my brother’s pajamas strewn into a pile in the corner. I could see clumps of his hair sticking to the sides of the pot. My feet stayed frozen in place as the stench of his burning flesh filled my head and every inch of my body. My eyes burned. My mouth was dry. I couldn’t even utter a scream.
“Grab her!” Millie snarled in a cackling voice. Ted lunged for me, but I was too quick. The fat ass fell on his front, face first into a puddle of Calvin’s blood. Millie grabbed the cleaver and threw it at the door, just as I pried it open and ran like hell. I ran outside the diner and flung open the door to the truck, jamming the keys inside. I could make out Millie’s body racing towards me in the night, but I started the car up faster. It sputtered for a moment, and then shot out like a rocket. I had no experience with driving, but that was not my top priority. I needed to find help.
Tears were streaming down my face, blocking my vision. I was having a mental breakdown as I whisked unsteadily through the New Jersey trees. I let out howls of despair. Occasionally, I’d spit up whatever food I had left in my stomach. The smell of that flesh wouldn’t leave me. I’m sure I nearly drove off the road at least three times. But I didn’t care. They had killed Calvin. They had killed my brother, and chopped him up and fucking cooked him. I pounded my head on the wheel, the horn blasting into the night. I could feel the blood trickling down the side of my face, seeping into my hair. My vision was starting to show spots.
I don’t know how long I had driven until I finally found a car on the side of the road. There was a man kneeling down to examine one of his tires. I jerked to a stop and flew out of the truck, slamming the door behind me. Vomit clung to the sides of my mouth, dried blood on my face, tears still gushing like a waterfall. He was an older man, with a wrinkled face and skunk streaks in his dark hair. I frightened him, for he stood back in fear. I knew I looked like a mess, a drug addict, whatever. I sounded like one too.
“YOU NEED TO HELP ME! THEY KILLED MY BROTHER! THEY KILLED HIM THEY KILLED HIM THEY CHOPPED HIM UP AND THEY KILLED HIM!” I remember falling to my knees and howling in pain. The man tried to pry me back up but I thrashed around in his arms. He groaned loudly as I kicked right in the gut by accident. I could distantly hear his panicked voice trying to get an answer out of me.
“Who?” He yelled through a thick Jersey accent. “Who killed your brother?”
I shook my head rapidly, gasping for air. The wind pounded at my ears as I tried to speak. The last things I could make out were his eyes gleaming in the darkness as I wheezed out the name through the pain. I fell hard to the asphalt.
* * * * * *
They tell me that I was practically frothing at the mouth when they found me. I had blacked out for a moment, and the cops assumed I was dead. But I woke up. I was screaming for Calvin, screaming for somebody to help him, screaming for someone to believe me. Yet, to this day, no one does.
O’Malley’s Family Restaurant had been torn down in the late 1950s. Once word got out that the seemingly friendly owners trapped their victims in their motel and ate them, it was barricaded and destroyed. Theodore and Millicent O’Malley were given the death penalty in 1956, twenty years before my brother and I pulled up that summer night. I later learned that they had killed over twenty travelers who crossed their paths, including a gang of motorcycle riders, a group of teenage greasers, and a woman with her young daughter.
When the man who found me finally brought me over to the police, I was in hysterics. I was handcuffed and thrown into the back of a patrol car. They drove me back to the exit where Calvin and I had turned earlier that night. Where the restaurant had stood mere hours earlier was just an empty lot. The sign wasn’t there. The building had disappeared. There was no motel, no sign that anybody had been there for years. It was just an empty patch of dirt, no sign of life anywhere. No sign of Calvin. I tried to explain. I cried for what felt like years. Yet, no one believed me.
The police searched for months on end, but they never did find my brother’s body. His final resting place had vanished into thin air. They never found any evidence of anything. I still had Calvin’s inhaler, in the pocket of my sweatshirt. I can’t tell you the number of times I shoved it in those cop’s faces, telling them that it was the key to finding out where he was. But I was a lost cause. They even had the audacity to accuse me of murdering him. My case was eventually out ruled due to lack of evidence, but my years of pain never stopped. The judge was convinced that I was mental and needed to be locked away. So they threw me in here, which is where I have been since the early autumn of ‘76.
I’m a grown woman now, writing this story down as a cry for help. I’m hoping that somebody out there will believe me, someone who knows what I’m talking about. I swear to God that I am not insane. I felt it. I lived it. It survived it. It’s not all in my head, yet that has been what all of these doctors and psychiatrists have been trying to convince me for years.
They said I’ve imagined it all. All this medication pumping into my body has turned my brain to mush. But I know that I didn’t. It was too real to have possibly been a dream. The only thing I still have to remember that night by is Calvin’s inhaler. I hold it on to it every day, never letting it go. It’s the only thing I have to remind myself that my brother was real. It’s the only piece of evidence that I have. It’s the only part of him that they will never be able to take away from me.
You won’t find anything about th |
I stumbled on this unsettling story of an obscure Pokémon bootleg/art-hack that I thought might be neat to share on here. I think this originated from 4chan, so I’ve no idea if this hack actually exists. It probably doesn’t, but it’s still a great concept/tale!:
I’m what you could call a collector of bootleg Pokémon games. Pokémon Diamond & Jade, Chaos Black, etc. It’s amazing the frequency with which you can find them at pawnshops, Goodwill, flea markets, and such.
They’re generally fun; even if they are unplayable (which they often are), the mistranslations and poor quality make them unintentionally humorous.
I’ve been able to find most of the ones that I’ve played online, but there’s one that I haven’t seen any mention of. I bought it at a flea market about five years ago.
Here’s a picture of the cartridge, in case anyone recognizes it. Unfortunately, when I moved two years ago, I lost the game, so I can’t provide you with screencaps. Sorry.
The game started with the familiar Nidorino and Gengar intro of Red and Blue version. However, the “press start” screen had been altered. Red was there, but the Pokémon did not cycle through. It also said “Black Version” under the Pokémon logo.
Upon selecting “New Game”, the game started the Professor Oak speech, and it quickly became evident that the game was essentially Pokémon Red Version.
After selecting your starter, if you looked at your Pokémon, you had in addition to Bulbasaur, Charmander, or Squirtle another Pokémon — “GHOST”.
The Pokémon was level 1. It had the sprite of the Ghosts that are encountered in Lavender Tower before obtaining the Sliph Scope. It had one attack — “Curse”. I know that there is a real move named curse, but the attack did not exist in Generation 1, so it appears it was hacked in.
Defending Pokémon were unable to attack Ghost — it would only say they were too scared to move. When the move “Curse” was used in battle, the screen would cut to black. The cry of the defending Pokémon would be heard, but it was distorted, played at a much lower pitch than normal. The battle screen would then reappear, and the defending Pokémon would be gone. If used in a battle against a trainer, when the Pokéballs representing their Pokemon would appear in the corner, they would have one fewer Pokéball.
The implication was that the Pokémon died.
What’s even stranger is that after defeating a trainer and seeing “Red received $200 for winning!”, the battle commands would appear again. If you selected “Run”, the battle would end as it normally does. You could also select Curse. If you did, upon returning to the overworld, the trainer’s sprite would be gone. After leaving and reentering the area, the spot [where] the trainer had been would be replaced with a tombstone like the ones at Lavender Tower.
The move “Curse” was not usable in all instances. It would fail against Ghost Pokémon. It would also fail if it was used against trainers that you would have to face again, such as your Rival or Giovanni. It was usable in your final battle against them, however.
I figured this was the gimmick of the game, allowing you to use the previously uncapturable Ghosts. And because Curse made the game so easy, I essentially used it throughout the whole adventure.
The game changed quite a bit after defeating the Elite Four. After viewing the Hall of Fame, which consisted of Ghost and a couple of very under leveled Pokémon, the screen cut to black. A box appeared with the words “Many years later…” It then cut to Lavender Tower. An old man was standing, looking at tombstones. You then realized this man was your character.
The man moved at only half of your normal walking speed. You no longer had any Pokémon with you, not even Ghost, who up to this point had been impossible to remove from your party through depositing in the PC. The overworld was entirely empty — there were no people at all. There were still the tombstones of the trainers that you used Curse on, however.
You could go pretty much anywhere in the overworld at this point, though your movement was limited by the fact that you had no Pokémon to use HMs. And regardless of where you went, the music of Lavender Town continued on an infinite loop. After wandering for a while, I found that if you go through Diglett’s Cave, one of the cuttable bushes that normally blocks the path on the other side is no longer there, allowing you to advance and return to Pallet Town.
Upon entering your house and going to the exact tile where you start the game, the screen would cut to black.
Then a sprite of a Caterpie appeared. It was the replaced by a Weedle, and then a Pidgey. I soon realized, as the Pokémon progressed from Rattata to Blastoise, that these were all of the Pokémon that I had used Curse on.
After the end of my Rival’s team, a Youngster appeared, and then a Bug Catcher. These were the trainers I had Cursed.
Throughout the sequence, the Lavender Town music was playing, but it was slowly decreasing in pitch. By the time your Rival appeared on screen, it was little more than a demonic rumble.
Another cut to black. A few moments later, the battle screen suddenly appeared — your trainer sprite was now that of an old man, the same one as the one who teaches you how to catch Pokémon in Viridian City.
Ghost appeared on the other side, along with the words “GHOST wants to fight!”.
You couldn’t use items, and you had no Pokémon. If you tried to run, you couldn’t escape. The only option was “FIGHT”.
Using fight would immediately cause you to use Struggle, which didn’t affect Ghost but did chip off a bit of your own HP. When it was Ghost’s turn to attack, it would simply say “…” Eventually, when your HP reached a critical point, Ghost would finally use Curse.
The screen cut to black a final time.
Regardless of the buttons you pressed, you were permanently stuck in this black screen. At this point, the only thing you could do was turn the Game Boy off. When you played again, “NEW GAME” was the only option — the game had erased the file.
I played through this hacked game many, many times, and every time the game ended with this sequence. Several times I didn’t use Ghost at all, though he was impossible to remove from the party. In these cases, it did not show any Pokémon or trainers and simply cut to the climactic “battle with Ghost.
I’m not sure what the motives were behind the creator of this hack. It wasn’t widely distributed, so it was presumably not for monetary gain. It was very well done for a bootleg.
It seems he was trying to convey a message; though it seems I am the sole receiver of this message. I’m not entirely sure what it was — the inevitability of death? The pointlessness of it? Perhaps he was simply trying to morbidly inject death and darkness into a children’s game. Regardless, this children’s game has made me think, and it has made me cry.
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“Daddy, I had a bad dream.” You blink your eyes and pull up on your elbows. Your clock glows red in the darkness—it’s 3:23.
“Do you want to climb into bed and tell me about it?”
“No, Daddy.”
The oddness of the situation wakes you up more fully. You can barely make out your daughter’s pale form in the darkness of your room.
“Why not sweetie?”
“Because in my dream, when I told you about the dream, the thing wearing Mommy’s skin sat up.” For a moment, you feel paralyzed; you can’t take your eyes off of your daughter. The covers behind you begin to shift.
CREDIT: Anonymous
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Part 1: Good Will Hunting
I’m a producer for Alone, the TV show on History. This story is about a participant we had in season 2, whose footage we had to cut. I’ve never felt comfortable talking about this before, especially because it opens me up for liability. After all, giving away TV show secrets is a bit of a faux pas, especially a survival show. But I feel like people should know the truth.
One of the things you may not know about the show is we often have nearly double the number of participants actually part of the show, and in editing, we choose the most entertaining people and only include them in the actual season. That way we can weed out the boring people, super survivors who could literally last years alone (who we have to “force tap,” or otherwise make them quit), and also get rid of the ones who can’t even handle a single night alone in nature. That happens a surprising amount. But these people don’t make for entertaining TV.
Season 2 took place on Vancouver Island, a densely-forested land with just as much fish as it has rain. The weather – the chill, the numbing wind – took care of most of our contestants. And if you watched the season, you’d know the “winner,” Dave, lasted 66 days. Long, but, as I said, there were other “super survivors” who lasted longer. We let them stay out longer as an experiment to see just how long it might take. These men – all the women had tapped by then – had built impressively sized cabins from the surrounding forests. All except Will, that is.
That was his name. When Will sent us his application and video, he seemed like a normal guy. Well, for a survivalist. He was the kind of guy who came off as a good guy to know both at the local bar and should the apocalypse hit. The kind of survivalist who hunts for sport but you know could really stay out there for some time. He had professional training, would take others on managed hunts, and spent a lot of time in nature preserves camping by himself. Really personable and had the looks for the show, too. We knew he’d be popular.
But the image wouldn’t last. When we picked up the footage on day 90 and reviewed it, we found a very different person.
Describing his story isn’t exactly easy. See, one thing about the show is these guys are really alone. Like, really alone. We drop them off, give them their chosen 10 items of survival gear (knife, ax, tarp, fishing line, stuff like that – they get to choose the 10 items themselves), video equipment, and say good luck. Oh, and there’s the emergency satellite phone they use for when they finally tap. It also allows us to track their movements. Usually, at least. Of course, out in the wild, with tall, dense forests and the typical cloud cover of Vancouver Island, connections can be tricky. We leave them be until they hit the button to come home except in the cases of super survivors. And for Will.
Days 1-38 were normal for Will. Compared to the others, he struggled no more or no less. Typical footage of failed fishing, some successful drop-falls (a way to catch small rodents). But he wasn’t desperate enough yet to eat insects. From the looks of it, he was doing well. No real mental struggle. Not even a single “night scare,” which is what we call the footage participants take when they’re awakened by a rummaging animal – usually a mouse or other small rodent, but sometimes a wild hog or bear gets nosy. He’d talk about missing his family – his parents and brothers and sister – but every participant does that. But something happened on day 58 that seemed to change Will.
We know something happened on day 58 because when Will reappeared on footage on day 59, he was a markedly different person. After not having taped anything since day 39, the footage seemed to come at daybreak, with Will’s face covered in blood. We figure it must have been deer blood, as he had been tracking a small group of deer that seemed to live maybe a quarter to a half-mile away. He hadn’t been too concerned about the local bears. They’re big and dangerous, but he had only seen one in his entire time there, and wasn’t planning on hunting any, and the other game was too small to be worth the energy. He was stringing up his kill; too blurry to make out the animal but, as I said, we’re pretty sure it was a deer. He hadn’t cooked it yet, and we couldn’t see if he had started a fire. It was just him across the camp, tying the animal up to a tree so he could gut it. The video seemed to come on and off without any movement from him at all; none of the “pushing the button on the camera” that you would typically see when starting or ending a shot. It just stopped. The video lasted 49 seconds.
The participants are supposed to tape every day – and preferably as much as possible – so that we can splice together a ton of shots. Nature shots, instructional shots to show how they created their cabins, weapons, or the trinkets like necklaces that some of them enjoy making to pass the time. The next video from Will came on day 70.
Will didn’t look like Will. Up until day 58, he had kept a pretty clean-shaven face. He wasn’t a big fan of beards, and took care to use his survival knife to cut as close as possible to keep that quarterback-turned-model image we saw in that application video. But now he looked old. Dirty. Dried blood flaking from his face. Newer blood than day 58, but old enough to where it shouldn’t be there hours or days after hunting and eating the kill. It was just different. He spoke, though. He apologized for not taking video as much as he should’ve. Said hunting was a little more difficult lately, and he felt like he was losing weight too fast. That he would dream of steak and of prior hunts and of family and of Thanksgiving dinner. He thought about tapping but said it was too late for that. The video ended.
As he had promised, the video started back up on day 76. This time he was ranting – yelling – at the forest. He talked about his food rotting too quickly despite the freezing temperatures, not being able to find any “others” to eat, and starving. This was far past frustration we typically see from participants. This was anger. Deep-seated anger. The footage ended abruptly after he threw his hatchet at the camera.
He didn’t tape again until day 82. But this wasn’t normal footage. Not even like before. The video came on, and it’s just him standing there. Silent. Still. Not in his tent. In the middle of camp, though the video was zoomed in closely on his face. No blood anymore, and no movement from him, either. Not to turn on the camera. Not to make sure the shot was in focus. Just standing. This continued for three days. We thought the video must’ve inadvertently paused, but I am not joking. We even checked the GPS records on the emergency phone. For three days Will stood in his camp without movement. Trees around him shaking in the wind. Rain and snow falling from the sky. Will remained still and looking off into the distance until the video shut off in the afternoon of day 85. The battery and video card on the camera should’ve run out two-and-a-half days prior, but they didn’t. It captured it all. We never did see or even hear any animals in the footage for those three days, though, which was weird.
To be honest, we aren’t sure what happened to Will. You see, we arrived at his camp on day 90, and Will wasn’t there. That’s not all that uncommon; sometimes we get there and they’re off hunting. We checked the GPS for the phone, but it was nowhere to be found. We waited in camp all day until it started getting dark. We had already loaded Will’s belongings, including the camera equipment, into the boat. A couple of guys stayed behind in a tent to see when he’d show up. He never did.
About 3 miles away down the coast, another suspected “super survivor,” Benjamin, had made camp. In his last scene, he’s fishing along the coast, stick-as-a-rod in hand, and line in the water. He looks up from the river towards the camera, white-faced and wide-eyed, and the video abruptly stops.
It was day 58. We never found him, either.
Part 2: Voices
You’d think that having been a producer for History’s Alone TV show since the beginning, you’d just about seen everything by now, but sometimes things happen that surprise you, things that you just can’t find an explanation for.
Dennett was your prototypical Alone contestant, a somewhat gruff-but-good-looking guy who grew up hunting and fishing, and ran his own “naturalist survival” outfit in the backwoods of Maine. He taught people how to survive in the woods for days, weeks, or even months, but did it in even more of a naturalist way, or at least that’s what he claimed. Instead of bringing manufactured tools along, he insisted on bringing only tools he made while out in the wild. But what made Dennett really different from most contestants were the voices.
It’s not that he claimed he could hear voices; it’s that we could. Dennett would take hours of video footage, as he’s required to, except that there seemed to be other voices in addition to his, almost like an echo. At first, we figured he might’ve been trying to cheat, and he had brought other “teammates” along with him. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened. We’ve had more than a few cases of contestants trying to get an advantage by doing anything between hiding supplies in the forest and tending to them off-camera, to actually getting supplies airdropped to them from a small plane they arranged before taping. So I wasn’t surprised we were seeing something new here, with a guy somehow arranging for friends or teammates to join him, and then just keep them off-camera.
Except there were no friends or others around him. After we heard the voices and suspected he was cheating, the next time we went in for a medical visit we also put up a camera around his camp, unbeknownst to him, and streamed the footage into our camp, but there was no one to be found.
At this point, we figure there must’ve been a problem with the equipment we gave Dennett. So we switched all of the gear out. Everything. All the cameras, memory cards, even the tripods. Everything.
Except the voices didn’t go away.
Instead, when we reviewed the footage after each visit, the voices seemed to get louder and louder, though we still couldn’t make out what they were saying or what the source was. All we could do was review the tape and try to remove the ambient voices, as we started calling them. But things got more complicated as the voices became louder.
The voices, it seemed, were coming from Dennett. Where before the voices were low enough that we thought maybe even we were a bit crazy for even thinking they were voices, now it was clear. As Dennett would speak to the camera, the other voices were talking at the same time, but were not exactly intelligible, at least not at first. We figured maybe there’s a chance this guy is just duping us with some kind of ventriloquist-like act, looking for his 15 minutes of fame. Or maybe he was legitimately crazy, and was having some type of psychological event. Watching the tape became more and more distracting, so much so that we started simply writing him off as a participant. We’d still do medical checks, including a new mental health check that he passed each time, but we wouldn’t dedicate as much time to editing his footage as we would some other contestants.
But it was hard not to watch. Admittedly, some guys would laugh at the footage, but I was more sympathetic. This man was seemingly having some type of odd psychological breakdown, or some appearance of schizophrenia or something, but was somehow passing every mental health check we gave him. We had no idea what was going on. But the laughing soon stopped.
Dennett’s voices became clearer. While he was otherwise doing a self-interview, explaining how hungry he was after not having had any luck with fishing the past few days, the voices were saying far more disturbing things.
“We need help,” it said in a loud, pleading voice. “Please help us.”
Another voice simultaneously exclaimed, “GET HIM OUT OF HERE. MAKE HIM LEAVE.”
Except what was heard was different for everyone who watched the tape. I might hear Dennett and one voice, and other person heard Dennett and another voice. No one seemed to hear exactly the same thing. Just different voices, or slight variations, or different things entirely.
We visited Dennett that night, and tried our best to explain some of what was happening. He wasn’t really having it.
“You’re just trying to get me to lose,” he said. “If I tap out then you can give it to someone who you like more.”
He wouldn’t watch the footage. He outright refused, and was getting angrier by the minute. The tone in his voice changed. “Fuck you if you think you can make us go. Come back with this bullshit again and you’ll see what we can do.” We left him for the night.
After reviewing the footage of the interview and hearing more of the voices pleading for help, some with impenetrable screams, some of the crew left the production camp, refusing to work any further. We didn’t know what we were dealing with, but we felt like we were in danger. We also felt like he was in danger, but we didn’t know how to deal with that, either. At the request of the remaining crew, we flew in a local pastor, but even he didn’t last through one viewing of the latest tape. He demanded to get out – now – especially after his Bible suddenly and mysteriously turned damp and black, so much so that it was as if an entire jug of ink had exploded in his backpack, but got on nothing else. We had to copter him back to civilization that same day.
We decided at that moment that we would reduce our checks on Dennett, and all checks would have at least 10 crew members present. For insurance purposes, we’d keep asking him for footage, but we knew he wouldn’t appear in the actual show, and we would figure out how to manufacture his exit later.
It never reached that moment. On our next visit, we showed up to an empty camp – no shelter, no fire, no remnants of food or someone having lived there at all – the only thing left being the camera gear strewn about the forest floor. A simple note hung from the tree that used to hold up his structure. “Going now. Watch and you will follow.”
The middle of his camp, where his campfire had been, was now nothing but a hole in the ground that was so deep you couldn’t see the bottom. We agreed we wouldn’t watch the video, and our camera operator melted the card using his lighter and then threw the card down the hole. As we walked back toward our boat, we heard a distant scream coming from his camp and the water around our boat turned black as ink. On that day we made a pact never to return.
Years later I heard a rumor that the cameraman had actually burned and threw an empty card down the hole, keeping the one Dennett left. When I went to ask him if the rumor was true, it turned out he had disappeared some months prior much the same way as Dennett had: he went out camping alone, never to be heard from again.
Part 3: Bloodless
If you’ve ever seen the History Channel’s TV show Alone, you’ll know that the animals our participants encounter are often some of the scariest things about the show. Sure, many starve themselves (willfully or not), hook themselves in the hand, cut their legs, and whatnot, but there’s nothing more dramatic than when the dark of night overcomes their camp and they hear a rustling and grumbling right outside of their shelter. But one of these moments you’ve never seen is the story of Timothy, who tried to fight back against his aggressor and lost. For the first time, this is his story made public.
Timothy wasn’t exactly our more impressive participant on the show. Many of the men tend to be burly prior-military or skinny-ish survivalist hippies. Timothy was just about right in the middle, not usually someone we’d put on the show. Vegetarian, never hunted, good with tools but not particularly impressive, could start a fire with some help from his ferro stick, but what he had that many candidates lacked was authenticity. He just seemed like a downright good guy, albeit insecure. So we wanted to have him on to serve up something different to our audience.
In that way, he didn’t disappoint. He did things differently than most participants typically do. Most participants establish a shelter first. Timothy was hungry, so he found some field with a weird-ass flower and started chowing down for a couple of hours. “Can’t build on an empty stomach,” he said, as if he hadn’t eaten right before being dropped off at his location. He then essentially built himself a mini-pool of sorts, it being pretty warm in Patagonia at that time of the year. He claimed he wanted a good place to “hang out” where he could be certain no “fishes were going to bite his toes,” where glacial fjords might not afford such confidence. It was certainly unique, if nothing else.
He did eventually build a shelter, though. And it was surprisingly nice. He did a fair job at choosing the right wood, stringing it all together, using a little paracord tie everything tightly, and some foliage nicely compacted down to create an as-comfortable-as-it-can-get bed. Everything seemed to be going quite well at first.
But sometime around day 3, things started to get a bit weird for Timothy. He had been lying down in his shelter, just talking to the camera about whatever-and-whatnot when there was a rustling just on the other side of the wall. It clearly startled him; he jumped up and did the usual “HEY!” toward the sound, and then silence, listening to see if it was still around. “GET OUT!” he yelled out, and you could hear whatever-it-was scramble away.
This isn’t uncommon. After all, we’re the strangers temporarily invading some other animal’s territory, so it can take a couple weeks or so for both to get used to the idea of being in a new place or having someone else take up residence. Usually it goes pretty smoothly, though we’ll often see a competitor or two get too scared and drop out during this time.
Wildlife in Patagonia is different, though. Sure, we had giant black bears in Vancouver Island, but there’s something a little different like Patagonia’s puma, otherwise known as a cougar. You might not be too familiar with cougars, but are more familiar with other terms for them: mountain lion and panther. These aren’t small cats the size of a Puma shoe or so. These are 7’ long, 200 lb predators. They’re not something you want to be staring down at, especially not in the night when they can see and you can’t. That’s one reason Timothy was rightfully pretty skittish. To his credit, though, he didn’t tap out like two others did.
But there are times when it can be too much. The push themselves too far. Suppress the fear that keeps you alive. Timothy realized this, I assume, but maybe it was too late. The competition made him ignore the warning signs. Rustling in and of itself isn’t a warning sign. That’s just the animals scoping out what’s going on. We’ve been over that. A warning sign is like that of finding a young, dead goat, drained of blood, sitting at your shelter’s door, its eyes wide open in fear toward the opening. Except no sound had been made all through the prior night, and nothing was caught on the outside bringing it up and setting it there.
When Timothy woke up to this sight, he was visibly shaken on camera. I would be, too. Sure, my house cats bring me gifts, but this didn’t have the same tone. Anthropomorphizing aside, this seemed to send some message. It was something far closer to “get off my lawn” than “here’s some food, dad.” He didn’t seem to get that, though. Maybe it’s hindsight that makes it obvious. But for Timothy it was a scary situation, still pretty early in the competition, that was really nothing more than an animal leaving it there by chance, but the way the goat was killed was horrific in and of itself.
Timothy seemed to get the message eventually, though. Every few days thereafter, there would be something new. A large pile of scat. The lifeless body of a bloodless baby boar. Once it was a pile of small teeth. Something weird was going on at his camp.
Except Timothy, instead of tapping out like most might’ve, decided to get to the bottom of it. The cameras, no matter how many he put out or where he put them, never really caught anything interesting outside of a flash of a tail, something around fur or quails, on the very edge of one camera view.
Instead, on the night of day 86, Timothy decided to wait up for it, machete in hand.
According to footage, at around 1:40 AM a sudden scream came from just outside of camp, accompanied by violent rustling in the direction of some heavy brush. Timothy sprang up from where he was sitting in his shelter and grabbed his flashlight in his other hand and rushed toward the entrance, leaving his emergency satellite phone behind.
On one outside camera view, you could see Timothy round the front of the shelter, ready to light up the mysterious animal. As he ran just out of view of that camera, a second outside camera picked him up, still running toward the brush, accidentally running into a thick branch from a nearby tree, knocking the flashlight from his hands, dropping to the ground and illuminating the camera’s view far too bright to see anything.
What we heard next on the camera can’t be adequately described, nor would I want to, as I’ll have to live with those desperate screams, yells, and cries for the rest of my life. From what I could tell, it was over quickly, lasting about a minute between the sounds of Timothy and those of continued violent rustling.
When we arrived at his camp on day 87, we found his body on the edge of camp, completely drained of blood and his organs missing, the only superficial wounds being some superficial claw marks and three holes in his abdomen. After finding him dead, we quickly had another crew fly over to the only other competitor still in the running and evacuated him, and later faked his crowning after a couple of weeks back in the United States, after we knew everyone was safe. That’s why, in the show, the winner was crowned the day after the last competitor was medically tapped. He wasn’t really the runner up. That was Timothy.
Timothy was a good guy with a great heart, but sometimes things get to us, whether it’s curiosity or ego or something else. For him, for the first time in his life, he was ready to face his fears, but he chose the wrong battle.
We still don’t know what exactly attacked Timothy. We assume it was a puma. Some locals claimed it was the Chupacabra, a mythical creature they had warned us about that ruled the woods and would come out at night to attack livestock. We’ll never know, though, as we’ll never go back to Patagonia again.
Part 4: Why We Won’t Tape a Kids’ Version Ever Again
After picking up all of the children for the kids’ version of our TV show Alone, I knew Adam was a little different than the others. As one of the producers, it was my job to validate our casting department’s choice of participants, and kids are always hard to read from their Skype interviews. But when Adam showed up acting cool and calm, which was very different than his Skype interview — and from how most of the other kids acted upon meeting them at the airport – I thought that was strange. That would be just the first of many strange moments with Adam.
Taping kids’ versions of adult shows is somewhere between really fun and really terrifying. Alone, being a show about survival, where we’ve had contestants get hurt, starve themselves, and, as you’ve read before, disappear, this fell somewhere far closer, if not over, the line of really terrifying to tape. After all, we’re taking responsibility for 12 kids’ well-beings. To alleviate some of our concerns, and especially the concerns of over-protective parents, we put into place special safeguards: we set up more cameras, we help set them up and did all the tape and battery exchanges ourselves, a flashlight and pot were part of the equipment we gave all the kids, and we would do three-times-per-week check-ins instead of the weekly check-ins we instituted after the whole Will situation.
But that isn’t to say it’s all bad, taping a kids version. There are certain benefits to it. First, it’s good ratings. They like kids. They do and say funny things. Even these kids, who were mostly pretty serious outdoors people already, hunting, foraging, and camping with their families. Plus they’re innocent. Except for Adam, apparently.
The Adam we met in the Skype interview was clearly nervous. Brown hair, blue eyes, freckles, small, skinny, a little on the runt side, which wasn’t surprising as he was the youngest of six kids. Not just came from a big family, but a family big in prepping, though didn’t seem to be into it as much as his dad was. Sure, he had hunted, camped, been on adventure excursions (which I gather were more like militia training sessions), but he didn’t really seem to be all about it. But his dad signed him up for the casting call and arranged for the Skype session, and we thought his combined innocence and knowledge of survival tactics would play well to viewers.
The Adam I picked up, though, was different. Cool, calm, and collected, as the saying goes. The nervousness was gone; not exuding any sense of innocence. It was like he was prepared, he’d been here before, was confident he’d win, and I couldn’t so much as get a small laugh out of him to my terrible dad jokes. He just sat there in the passenger seat looking out the window, taking note of where we were going.
The kids never met each other before the competition, and part of that was because of Adam. Unlike the other kids, all of whom flew into Vancouver proper, I picked him up at the local airport on Vancouver Island. So we never got the entire cast together before taping, which for a kids show would have been nice to get that b-roll/intro footage. He actually came in on the same day that we started taping, so half the kids were already in their spots when I picked him up, and we drove right over to the docks, where we met a film crew and headed straight to where we determined he would make camp.
One of the odder parts about Adam was that he brought less than half of the things he intended to bring. The kid participants, like the adults, get to bring 10 items with them, which they buy while at home, and we reimburse them for the cost. We get a list of these items before they come, so when Adam showed up with nothing more than a hatchet, that seemed odd. But he insisted that’s all he needed, and he didn’t even want the flashlight and pot we gave all the kids, though we left them on shore for him along with the rest of his items when we dropped him off. But the fact that he didn’t bring a sleeping bag, tent, saw, fish hooks and line, or anything else you’d normally see was odd.
As I said, though, we would check in on the kids three times per week, generally each Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, weather permitting. And, of course, each kid received a satellite phone for if they needed help or were ready to tap out. We’d do the same for Adam, of course, and debated checking in on some every couple days since he brought so few items.
He proved us wrong, though. Right from the start, he created an impressive shelter, a nice, sustainable fire, and found a hearty bush with berries that would sustain him for a few days or weeks until he found other food sources. Adam thrived where we thought he’d fail.
Some other kids thrived just as well as Adam did, but then strange things started happening to them. One mysteriously lost his bow and arrows, another had a tent blown away, I guess. People lose things out in the wilderness, though; especially when they accidentally drop a black ferro rod or inadvertently drop it into the fire.
But then we got other strange reports from the kids. Some reported seeing another child far off in the woods, crawling around outside of camp or even looking at them, or, at least in one case, when the kid came back his camp, he heard some rustling at the edge of camp and the thing ran off quickly. But by the time the kid would go and investigate, the strange child or thing would be gone.
We checked each kids’ tapes and didn’t see anything nefarious from any participants. None of the cheating we sometimes see or wandering off too far was happening. Even if the kids’ camps were closer than the adults’ camps usually were, we’re still talking about miles of dense forests, creeks, rivers, and mighty hills between them. So we were fairly certain it wasn’t a kid.
One day, though, Adam came back from a hunt wearing a coonskin cap. He didn’t take that with him. He told us he found it far off in the hills. There’s a lot of hunting out there, so that wasn’t particularly strange. Plus, participants are told they can use anything they find. But what was strange was he came back from the same hunt with something, some type of meat we couldn’t readily discern on camera. He had already butchered it and skinned it, so the most could figure was maybe it was a portion of moose thigh, a large feral hog, or something of that sort, though taking those down with nothing but a hatchet would be difficult. By the time we saw it on tape and came back to camp and asked questions, he had eaten it all and discarded the rest in the river, he told us.
After that, though, we started getting reports of even stranger things happening around some kids’ camps.
Emily was another participant who encountered weird things. While fishing, she spotted someone on the opposite shore watching her. She called out, and got nothing in return. When she looked away for a moment and then looked back, the person was gone. Later that evening she said the person came back: a small person with brown hair came ran into her camp, stole her hunting knife, and ran out. She took chase but got clothes-lined by fishing wire that had been set up between two trees outside her camp. She didn’t set it up.
William, a kid near to Adam’s camp, woke up being strangled by someone on top of him. He struggled and passed out, and when he awoke he found his camp on fire. He got out and couldn’t find his satellite phone, and had to flag down a fishing boat that was passing by, who got in touch with us. We wanted to check the tapes, of course, to figure out who did it and what happened, but the fire melted everything, and even caught about an acre of woods on fire. He chose to drop out of the competition even after we said we’d help him find a new camp.
The strangest thing to happen, though, was when some being appeared at several camps at the same time. Three different kids, spaced out about 8 miles from each other, reported seeing the same thing at the same time: a small person with brown hair peering in their direction from outside of camp, and immediately afterward, a fire came from that direction and spread into camp, forcing them out, at which time the small being chased after them for miles, while they could hear the zooms of arrows fly past them. It was bizarre.
It was at that time we decided to go ahead and end the competition and taping. Something weird was going on and we couldn’t explain it, and we were legitimately worried about some type of predator, human or otherwise, stalking the children.
When we got to Adam’s camp, he was gone. We waited around for him to come back while the other kids were picked up by other crew members. Very late that night, Adam finally returned and we told him we had ended the competition and would be sending everyone back home, which Adam didn’t react to. We took everyone back to a hotel to rest for the night, let their parents know that we ended the taping, and arrange for tickets. After I dropped Adam off at his hotel room, I called his parents to let them know he would be returning the next day.
“What do you mean Adam will be returning tomorrow?” his dad said on the phone.
“Yeah, we had to end the competition early since we were concerned for the kids’ well being with incoming bad weather,” I told him, brushing off the real concern.
“I don’t understand,” his dad replied. “Adam has been here at home the entire time.”
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Part 1
Tess stood at the mirror applying her eyeliner. It was Saturday night and, although she didn’t officially have any plans, she was sure that, at any moment, she would get a call inviting her to go out somewhere.
She stepped away from the mirror suddenly, evaluating her work. She’d never been any good at applying make-up. She wasn’t even sure why. Both her mother and her aunt routinely wore the stuff. Surely she must have picked up some of their finesse with a pencil or a brush somewhere along the line?
“If you’re going for that whole raccoon look, you’ve got this down,” she murmured as she gazed at her reflection.
She was just getting ready to lean in closer to the mirror once more in a futile attempt to fix the mess she’d made, when her phone suddenly lit up next to her on the vanity. She automatically sighed with relief. It was after five. She was starting to worry that no one would call. Without even looking, she answered the phone.
“Hello?” she asked, trying to hide her enthusiasm. After all, she didn’t want to seem too eager and desperate.
“Hey,” said a familiar voice.
It was Kelli. Tess didn’t know whether to be happy or leery. Kelli. She had a reputation as a manipulator, mostly because she was a master when it came to the classic bait-and-switch tactic. She was the sort of girl who’d invite you out and pay for your iced tea at the fast food restaurant, but then ask you to cover her shift at the church garage sale the night before the event. She’d call you and ask you to see a movie, and even pay for your ticket, but then turn around and ask you to drop off one of her friends… conveniently forgetting to mention that his house was nearly an hour away. In short, Tess had reached the point where she almost preferred to just say “No” to all of Tess’s invitations because she didn’t want to deal with all of the strings attached.
“What’s up?” Tess began, trying to keep her voice neutral.
“Whatcha doing?” Kelli inquired in a sing-song voice.
“Putting on my make-up,” Tess answer cautiously. She certainly didn’t want to come right out and admit that she had nothing going on.
“Oh, so you have plans?”
Tess knew it was a loaded question. Kelli was either going to suggest something for them to do together or she was going to try to unload some responsibility. It was always a roll of the dice.
“Kinda,” Tess replied vaguely.
“Well, watcha doing?” she asked pointedly.
“Why do you wanna know?” Tess returned, just as abruptly.
“Why are you being so secretive?”
“Because I’m talking to you,” Tess answered somewhat sarcastically.
“Oh come on, I’m not that bad, am I?”
Tess tried not to feel ashamed. After all, had Kelli not been so manipulative she wouldn’t have felt the need to lie to her, right?
“No,” she lied, “I just always get suspicious when you start drilling me with questions.”
“I’m not drilling you. I’m just asking you what you’re up to,” she replied sweetly.
“What do you want Kelli?” Tess asked, trying to cut to the chase.
There was a long pause. Here it comes, thought Tess. Here comes the ridiculously insensitive request. Tess often wondered if Kelli suffered from some emotional disorder that made it impossible for her to feel any empathy for others. How else could she explain Kelli’s complete lack of common decency or tact? Kelli thought nothing of asking someone to pick up one of her cousins from the airport within hours of their scheduled arrival time. Or, she’d ask to borrow clothing that still bore the tags and return them ruined. Then, when she’d ask to borrow something else, she always seemed confused as to why she was refused. Tess couldn’t imagine being so clueless. Then again, she was the sort of person who wrung her hands if she had to ask someone to borrow ten bucks.
“Why do you always assume I want something?” Kelli returned, somewhat sharply.
“So, you’re not calling to ask me for anything?” Tess challenged.
There was another long pause. Clearly, Kelli had planned to use her fool-proof switch tactic, but Tess had gotten wise to it. Now, she was frantically scrambling around for some way to back herself out of the corner, but there was no way to do so without admitting that Tess had been right about her.
“Look,” Kelli sighed, deciding honesty was probably best under the circumstances, “I kinda told these people I’d watch their kid tonight, but then Mario called me and asked me if I wanted to go see a movie. You know how long I’ve liked him,” she paused, “I’m just afraid if I say no that he’ll get the wrong idea.”
“Why don’t you just tell him you have to babysit and ask him if you guys can go out tomorrow?” Tess suggested.
“He’s gotta work tomorrow. Besides, going out on Sunday night is lame and you know it.”
“Well, I dunno what to tell you,” Tess answered, unmoved. She’d covered for Kelli so many times without compensation that she was able to face the guilt trip without difficulty, “I guess you’re just going to have to figure something out.”
“Come on,” she whined, “please? I’m begging you. I can’t ask anybody else. Everyone already has plans.”
“How do you know I don’t?”
“Because if you did, you would have just told me. The fact that you hedged said it all,” Kelli replied.
“Alright,” Tess began, determined to get something out of the arrangement, “so what’s in it for me?”
“Well, supposedly the guy’s loaded. They’re friends of my dad’s from the office. He and his wife have some benefit to go to. I guess he’s just got one little girl. She’s, like, five so she can go to the bathroom on her own and stuff. I bet he’ll probably even tip you. You could make serious bank.”
“For how long?” Tess asked, growing more intrigued by the proposition in spite of her reticence.
“Just until midnight,” Kelli answered plainly, “so, what? Five hours? The shift starts at seven.”
“That’s in less than two hours!” Tess whined, “And these people don’t even know me. They probably only asked you because they know your dad. They’re not gonna go for this. And what about your dad? He’s gonna be ticked that you pawned this off on somebody else.”
“I’m gonna call them, Tess,” she sighed, “Jeez, it’s not that big of a deal.”
“It’s their only child,” Tess argued, “and they’re loaded. Their whole world probably revolves around this kid. I don’t think they’re gonna go for it.”
“Well, just let me take care of it,” she answered decisively. Tess knew Kelli would probably figure out some way to hoodwink the couple into accepting her terms.
“Okay,” Tess replied, rolling her eyes.
“But you’ll do it?” Kelli tested.
“That depends,” Tess muttered, “you never did answer my question.”
“What question?”
“You never said what was in it for me,” Tess returned.
“You get to babysit one kid in a mansion for good pay. That’s not enough for you?”
“If it’s so great, why are you on the phone right now begging me to do it for you then, huh?” Tess argued, “And don’t say Mario. We both know darn well if this gig was as awesome as you say it is, you’d make up some excuse so you could still do it. Face it, Kelli. It’s not all that.”
“Fine,” she almost spat, “what do you want?”
“You still haven’t paid me back the thirty bucks you owe me. Plus, you ruined my new t-shirt. That’s another twenty bucks. If you want me to do this job for you, I want you to swing by my house in the next twenty minutes with my fifty dollars. If you don’t wanna do that, then I suggest you make other plans with Mario.”
“That’s totally ridiculous and you know it,” Kelli answered.
“Oh, you mean like driving your pal, Greg, clear out to Harrisburg Junction after the movies last month? Kinda like that?”
“You act like that was my fault.”
“I don’t care whose fault it was,” Tess replied, “I just know it wasn’t my responsibility.”
Kelli paused for several moments. She knew Tess had her where she wanted her. She had asked a lot of her lately and she’d given back almost nothing in return. She didn’t really have a leg to stand on, but twenty bucks was all the money she had in the world at the moment. And, it wasn’t as though she could ask her parents to borrow any. If she went to either of them they’d tell her to wait until the end of her babysitting shift… a shift they didn’t know she was hoisting on someone else. Ugh… what a mess!
“Well, I only have twenty bucks,” she began, “I swear. I was planning to bring that tonight so I could eat, but you can have it.”
“Don’t even try making me feel guilty,” Tess answered, “you’ve had months to pay this back. Just think of all the times you came into school wearing new clothes and I never said a word to you about it.”
“Alright, alright,” she sighed, “I’ll drop off the twenty bucks.”
“And what about the rest? When am I gonna get that?”
“Next week,” she said, “I promise.”
“Okay, but until I’m paid in full, you don’t get to ask me for anything, you got it?”
“Fine,” Kelli answered without emotion.
“So,” Tess said, “where am I going?”
Had it not been for the static female voice of her GPS feeding her turn-by-turn directions, Tess would have thought herself lost. She’d left the city limits behind her fifteen minutes earlier and now she was driving through a wooded wilderness that seemed impossibly isolated. It was beautiful though. Sometimes the road would open up into a vast, treeless area and it seemed as though the hills and valleys were heaving waves on a moonlit ocean. But, just as quickly, she would enter the trees once more and the road would wind and turn this way and that until she was utterly confused.
“I should have left earlier,” she murmured as she glanced at the clock. She hoped she’d arrive soon, otherwise she’d be late. It was already after 6:50 and she had no idea how much road still lay ahead.
But, that wasn’t Tess’s only concern. She wondered if Kelli had bothered to follow through on her promise to call the family. What had she said about their names? Oh, yeah, the last name was Edwards. That was it. Katherine and Paul Edwards. The little girl’s name was Lillian.
“Sounds pretty highbrow,” Tess mused as she turned another corner. It was 6:55. She’d probably just make it.
As if on cue, the GPS instructed her to make a left turn through a metal gateway. The long lane was lined with trees and hanging lanterns. Tess marveled at the effect; it was both charming and strangely eerie. Maybe because of the mist rolling off of the lake nearby? Tess had no way of knowing. She was totally out of her element. She’d known there were enormous houses located on the outskirts of town, but she’d never seen any of them, mostly because the vast majority were locked away from curious on-lookers in gated communities. The Edwards didn’t live in one of those, but they were located so far away from the regular folks of Lake Harbor that they didn’t need to concern themselves with trespassers. The only visitors they encountered on a day-to-day basis were the occasional raccoon or heron.
The laneway wound around the wooded lot, until, slowly, the house came into view by degrees. Even in the dark, its beauty was impossible to ignore. It was done in a modern Tudor style with a series of pitched gables accented by stonework. Beveled glass windows reflected the light of a series of lanterns lining the sidewalk, and the rich green ivy making its way up the stone surfaces seemed to twinkle in the moonlight. Everything was perfectly manicured, impossibly neat. Indeed, Tess was so impressed by the house that, even after parking, she found it difficult to pull her eyes away from the lavish exterior long enough to make her way to the front door.
She would have stayed in her car even longer, but the home’s front door suddenly opened to reveal a man dressed in a tuxedo. Tess instinctively glanced at her car clock. It was 6:58.
“Crap, I gotta get moving,” she hissed as she grabbed her purse and her car keys.
She all but jogged up to the front door.
“I’m so sorry,” she began, apologetically, “I meant to get here on time, but the drive took longer than I thought it would. I hope you won’t be late on account of me.”
“You’re not Kelli.”
Tess stopped her forward movement immediately. She hadn’t called. That irresponsible, no good, double crossing Kelli had failed to follow through… again. To be fair, she had stopped by Tess’s house to drop off the twenty dollars, and thank heavens she had. Otherwise, Tess would have had no way to fill up her gas tank and drive out to the middle of nowhere, as needed. But, the other part of the deal? Tess figured her friend must have decided it just wouldn’t be worth all of the drama it would create. Better to just throw poor Tess into the lion’s den. That’s the ticket, Kelli. Throw your friend into the fray face first…
“No…” Tess looked away helplessly. She was ashamed, although she wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t as though she’d done anything wrong.
“What’s the matter, Paul?” a feminine voice called out from inside the house, “Is something wrong?”
“It’s not Kelli,” he answered simply, “it’s some other girl.”
“Well, who is she?” asked his wife, coming out onto the porch also.
Tess couldn’t help but draw in her breath. Katherine Edwards’ dress was beautiful. It was a pale pink accented by thousands of tiny crystals that made her shimmer with every move she made.
“That dress is incredible, Mrs. Edwards,” Tess murmured, unable to help herself.
“Thank you,” she answered automatically.
“Where’s Kelli?” Mr. Edwards asked more pointedly.
“For heaven’s sake, dear, invite her in,” Katherine fussed, “don’t just leave the poor girl milling about on the doorstep. Come in, won’t you?”
Tess moved passed Paul Edwards somewhat sheepishly. He was angry and confused, and Tess couldn’t blame him. She’d arrived within minutes of being late, and she wasn’t the person they’d been expecting to watch their little girl. The three moved into the foyer as Paul closed the front door behind them.
“Now, can you please explain to me what the heck is going on here?” he asked sharply, “Where’s Kelli? She was supposed to babysit for us tonight. It was all arranged with her father.”
“I know,” Tess began nervously, “Kelli asked me to cover for her because something came up suddenly and she didn’t want to leave you hanging. She told me she was going to call you so you’d know to expect me. I dunno why she didn’t.”
“Well if that isn’t the most scatter-brained, irresponsible–” he ranted, walking away from them angrily.
“Well, it wasn’t totally irresponsible. At least she sent someone else to cover for her,” Katherine argued.
“Yeah,” he huffed, “some girl we don’t even know. We know nothing about her. You can bet your bottom dollar I’ll be calling Frank Collins about this!”
“How do you know Kelli?” Katherine asked, turning to Tess in a futile attempt to take the edge off her husband’s words.
“We go to school together. We’ve known each other for years,” Tess explained, before adding, “Look, if you don’t want me to stay and watch Lillian, I totally understand. I wouldn’t want some stranger watching my kid either.”
“And she said something came up suddenly?” Katherine continued, “Did she say what it was? Was it some family emergency? I hope everything’s alright.”
“I dunno,” Tess shrugged, “she didn’t say. She just said she was in a jam and she needed somebody to watch a little girl for her tonight.”
“She’s in a jam alright,” Paul spat, “this had better be something serious, or so help me…”
“Paul,” Katherine hissed, “you’re scaring the girl. She can’t help what happened.”
“Well, you be sure and tell Kelli that we are not happy,” Paul continued, pointing a slim finger in Tess’s direction, “I can’t believe Frank’s daughter would pull something like this. He’s so reliable, you can practically set a watch by him. Now this.”
“Well, what do you want to do, honey? Do you want to go or do you want to call Jack and tell him we’re not coming? We’re going to have to make a decision.”
Paul sighed audibly as he paced around in a tight circle. Finally he paused and rubbed the bridge of his nose vigorously with the thumb and middle finger of one hand before turning to face his wife.
“What do you think?” he indicated Tess.
“I think she seems nice,” Katherine replied, “to be honest, I kind of like her better than Kelli. She seems more mature.”
Paul looked Tess up and down then also. It was clear he agreed somewhat with his wife. Then he turned to face a nearby staircase.
“Lillian,” he called, “come down here and meet the sitter, baby-girl.”
A little girl, who had been sitting at the top of the stairs from the moment the three had walked inside, suddenly appeared on the steps. She was wearing a ruffled t-shirt and pink sweatpants bearing the insignia of a cartoon princess. Her hair was fixed into a dark brown braid that hung in a single strand to a point between her shoulders.
“Honey, this is Tess,” Katherine introduced her, “why don’t you come down and say hello.”
Lillian moved down the stairs cautiously, unsure what to make of the new presence in the foyer. However, when she finally reached Tess, it was clear that she wasn’t opposed to her.
“My name’s Tess,” she volunteered, kneeling down so that she and Lillian were looking into one another’s eyes.
“I’m Lillian,” she returned, extending her tiny hand.
“You’re very lady-like,” Tess commented.
“Thank you,” Lillian smiled. The two sat eye-to-eye for several moments before Lillian asked, “Do you like to play princess?”
“I don’t know how to play princess, but it sounds like a lot of fun,” Tess smiled.
“Well, she seems to like you alright,” Katherine mused, “she doesn’t let just anybody play princess with her. What do you think Paul?”
“Well, it’s after seven. If we’re going to head out, we’d better do it. I’m going to go and get the car. You show Tess where we keep all the phone numbers and whatnot.”
“Alright,” Katherine nodded before turning to Lillian, “honey, you go on upstairs for a minute. Tess will be up soon, okay?”
“Okay,” she nodded before moving to hug both of her parents. A moment later, she disappeared up the steps.
Tess followed Katherine into the living room, through the dining room, and then into the kitchen.
“Wow,” Tess sighed, “this house is really something.”
“Thank you,” Katherine beamed, “it’s been a labor of love. Paul is quite the collector. It’s hard to find places for everything that catches his eye.”
“Yeah, I noticed you have quite an art collection. It’s really impressive,” Tess commented.
“Paul’s got very eclectic tastes,” Katherine smirked, “sometimes we agree on what’s pretty, and sometimes we don’t. I love several of the paintings in the back near the sunroom. You might want to check those out if you enjoy art. Other pieces…”she didn’t finish, “let’s just say Paul’s got some rather avant garde busts and sculptures that are sure to catch your eye.”
“Sounds exciting,” Tess chuckled.
“It’s less exciting than just plain weird if you ask me, but that’s my opinion,” she laughed.
“Are you ready?” Paul’s voice echoed through the downstairs.
“Just a minute. I’m almost finished,” she returned, before turning to Tess, “I’d better hurry up. Okay, here are the emergency numbers. This is my cell phone, and this is Paul’s. This here is the closest neighbor. They know we’re going to be at this benefit tonight. Mr. Walters said he and his wife will be home so feel free to call them if you need someone right away. The rest of these are just your standard emergency numbers, but I doubt you’ll need them. It’s pretty quiet out here.”
“Yeah,” Tess nodded, “you’ve got that right.”
“We’ll be calling to check in with you about every two hours or so. It’ll probably be close to 9:30 when we call the first time. We’ll call again right before we leave. I can’t imagine we’d be home any later than twelve. Do you have any questions?”
“Nope. Not that I can think of.”
“Well, if you think of anything, don’t hesitate to call or text one of us. We’ll have our phones on us all night.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Edwards.”
“Oh, call me Kathy,” she murmured before grabbing her clutch from the counter-top, “you two girls have fun tonight, alright?” she said before heading toward the garage. She stopped a minute later, however, “Oh, and just so you know, Paul and I decided to disengage the security system until we get home. That way if you open the door or go out onto the patio for some reason, you won’t have to reset it. If that thing goes off, the whole police department will show up and they’d be none too happy if they found out it was a false alarm.”
“Got it,” Tess nodded, before adding, “You and Mr. Edwards have fun tonight, okay? I’m sure Lillian and I will be fine.”
“Good,” Katherine nodded, “we’ll talk soon.”
A moment later she disappeared down an adjoining hallway.
Tess moved through the house slowly, taking it all in. She’d never been in a house like the Edwards’ before. Oh, she’d had friends who considered themselves wealthy, of course. They were people like Tina Hall whose dad worked in management at the local power company. She always bragged about the fact that she had over 60 pairs of designer jeans and wouldn’t wear anything except name brand hoodies. And then there was Diane Howard who always felt it necessary to mention her family’s yearly skiing trips and her mother’s lavish inheritance. But, as Tess made her way through Paul and Katherine’s home, it became immediately clear that both Tina and Diane were still planted firmly in the middle class, albeit at the high end of things. However, the Edwards were something else altogether. They weren’t just coasting on the edges of wealth, they were swimming in the deep end.
“I wonder what he does?” Tess wondered aloud as she gazed at a family portrait hanging over a marble fireplace, “Kelli said he works with her dad, but Mr. Collins is just some middle management stiff. He doesn’t even have good dental.”
“Who are you talking to?” a little voice asked.
Tess looked up to see Lillian standing at the top of another staircase. There must have been several of them winding their way through a house that size, Tess mused silently.
“Myself,” Tess answered, “I do that sometimes.”
“Are you coming up?”
“Absolutely,” she nodded, “I believe we had plans to play princess, didn’t we?”
“Yeah!” Lillian rejoiced happily as she disappeared down the long hallway toward her room.
By eight-thirty, Lillian was fast asleep on a fainting couch in her bedroom. Tess smiled as she looked at the little girl. She still wore the princess Halloween costume and sparkly crown that she’d donned an hour before. Tess rose and carefully draped a blanket over her before tip-toeing out of the room and shutting off the lights. She closed the bedroom door only partially and left the hall light burning. She remembered her own childhood too vividly to risk plunging the entirety of the upstairs into darkness. A moment later she was making her way downstairs again.
She wanted to explore the house a little further. She didn’t want to snoop around, per se, but she was curious about the kind of life Paul and Katherine lived every day. She wondered what it would be like to live in a house like theirs, full of marble and glass and priceless collectibles. She doubted she’d ever get the chance to explore such a house again so she figured she’d better take advantage of the situation while she could.
“Hmm, I guess old Mr. Edwards has some pretty strange tastes though,” she muttered. It was then that she remembered what Katherine had said about the artwork hanging down by the sunroom. She vowed to go check it out immediately.
She wasn’t exactly sure where she was going, but she figured the room in question must be somewhere toward the back of the house. She moved along a long hallway past a series of rooms before she arrived at an open den. She hit the light switch casually. The ceiling rose almost to the roof. On one side of the room, a wall decorated with various types of stones ended in a lavish fireplace. On the other, a wall of glass provided an open view of what must have been the backyard. Tess knew the sunroom must be nearby.
She moved down a series of small steps into a curved room full of plants and small trees. When she came to another light switch, she flipped it and the back patio area lit up. Off to the right, Tess could plainly see an enclosed area accented by canvas-covered arm chairs, wicker furniture, and pastel artwork. Clearly, this was the sunroom.
Tess wasn’t sure about the artist, but she had to agree with Mrs. Edwards regarding the subject matter. Each picture was tied thematically to the one beside it, and all four pieces depicted some aspect of coastal life. In one, waves heaved along a rocky shore. In another, a lone lighthouse waited for lost travelers. Tess moved from one to the next, admiring the craftsmanship and obvious skill of the artist.
When she’d reached the last painting, she shivered involuntarily. There was a draft coming from somewhere, she was sure of it. Tess looked this way and that, but could find nothing to account for the cold air blowing on her neck until her eyes lighted on one of the windows in the sunroom. It had been left ajar. Tess moved toward it immediately and closed it securely, locking it at the top.
“I guess rich people forget stuff too sometimes,” she smirked.
She left the sunroom and the den, turning off the lights behind her. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to explore next, but, at least on some level, she knew she wanted to see Paul’s strange art collection. Katherine had made it sound so bizarre. This struck her as odd because Paul seemed so straight-laced. He didn’t seem like the sort of man who’d collect anything weird, least of all objects of art. Then again, sometimes the most typical people were the ones with the most outlandish tastes.
She turned a corner and headed down another partially lit hallway. It would have been darker, but there was light coming from the exterior of the garage shining through the skylight overhead. Tess glanced upward to look through the glass, but what caught her eye instead was the railing of a balcony. Stepping sideways, she was just able to make out a few artistic pieces.
“There it is,” she murmured, “I was starting to think Katherine was making it all up.”
Glancing around, she was able to locate the staircase without too much difficulty. She climbed up the steps in the half-light before flipping a switch at the top of the stairs. Suddenly, the whole area was awash in indirect illumination.
The collection was impressive. Two paintings, reminiscent of Lichtenstein and Mondrian, adorned one wall. On another, brightly colored artwork stood out against plain eggshell white. Tess approached them and read the names Cheng and Chandni. She didn’t know much about art, but she liked the energy of the pieces.
There were sculptures too. She read the place cards beside them: Eames, Berneds, and Veil Han. The sculptures looked as though they belonged in a museum somewhere.
“This stuff must have cost a fortune,” she observed.
As Tess moved from piece to piece, she thought of Paul and Katherine. She could see why Katherine wasn’t a fan of her husband’s artistic choices. The collection in the sunroom was realistic, muted, almost serene. The artwork on display in this room was vibrant, expressive, and visually loud. It demanded attention. It excited the pulse and grabbed the eye. Tess wasn’t sure which art she preferred more.
Of course, there were a few pieces Tess KNEW she didn’t like. For example, there was a wire sculpture that resembled a giant praying mantis that was just weird (in Tess’s opinion), and a few of the paintings looked as though someone had thrown paint into an oscillating fan. Tess wasn’t sure she liked those either. But, the one sculpture she knew she despised, even at a distance, was the one of a full-sized standing clown at the far end of the room.
Tess had always had a strong aversion to clowns. She wasn’t even sure why. Maybe it was because her cousin had chased her around wearing a clown costume one Halloween when she was little. Maybe it was the nightmares she’d had after watching the horror film It. She couldn’t be sure. The only thing she knew for sure was that she hated the clown sculpture.
Part of her wanted to get close, to examine it fully, but she found that she couldn’t. It was just too unsettling. Maybe it was the dirty looking shoes or the shabby trousers? Maybe it was the wrinkled clown shirt or the tattered red ruff around its neck? Or, maybe it was the eerie, unblinking stare of the thing as it observed the wall across from it? Ugh… what on earth possessed Paul to buy such a thing? Tess shivered unconsciously before turning to leave the room.
She descended the stairs rapidly. The statue had unnerved her to her bones, and she didn’t like the idea of that dark room looming up behind her in the shadows. To calm herself, she decided to go to the front half of the house and check on Lillian.
Tess made her way through the house with swift feet. When she finally entered the soft glow of the front hall, she felt calmer almost immediately. Taking the steps two-by-two, she made her way toward Lillian’s room. In the bedroom, the little girl lay sleeping peacefully. She really was darling. Tess hoped Katherine wouldn’t mind that she’d allowed Lillian to sleep in her princess costume.
Tess’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the phone ringing downstairs in the kitchen. Hastily, she jogged through the house, reaching the phone on the fifth ring.
“Hello?” she asked, out of breath.
“Doing a little cardio in the home gym, are we?” Katherine teased.
“Actually I was just upstairs checking on Lillian.”
“She asleep?”
“Yeah,” Tess answered, “she nodded off about an hour ago actually.”
“Good.”
“I hope you don’t mind. We were playing princess and she fell asleep in her costume. I didn’t want to wake her up,” Tess explained.
“Oh, that’s fine. She loves that thing. I got it for her last Halloween. I don’t know what she’s going to do when she outgrows it,” Katherine chuckled before adding, “so, it sounds like everything’s pretty quiet.”
“Yeah,” Tess nodded, “I’ve actually been taking a little tour of the house since Lillian fell asleep. You know, checking out the artwork.”
“And?” Katherine laughed, “What do you think of Paul’s collection? It’s pretty out there, right?”
“I actually liked some of it. Like the picture of the girl flying the kite. That was pretty neat. I also liked those pictures in the sunroom you were telling me about. The one with the lighthouse is great.”
“Yeah, I picked those up on vacation one year. We were up in Maine somewhere. Beautiful area. You should go if you get the chance.”
“Some of your husband’s stuff though,” Tess chuckled, unable to finish.
“Paul’s got some unique tastes.”
“Like that clown statue,” she shivered, “that just gave me the creeps.”
“Clown statue?” Katherine asked.
“Yeah,” Tess nodded, “it looks life-sized. It’s at one end of the room, by that big swirly silver thing.”
“Oh, you mean the Yoshi. Hmmm. Must be something new,” Katherine shrugged, “he was in Aspen a couple of weeks ago. Who knows? With him, it’s hard to tell. You never know what’ll catch his eye.”
“Well, he probably should have left that one where he found it,” Tess teased.
“Sounds like it. I’ll be sure to check it out when I get home,” she mused, “well, I’m going to get back to the benefit. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to call me, alright?”
“No worries,” Tess smiled, “I’ll see you when you get here. Have a good time.”
“You too,” she smiled, “try not to let my husband’s taste in art give you nightmares.”
“I’ll try,” Tess laughed before hanging up.
Katherine made her way back into the main hall and across the crowded dance floor. Every person of any status in the whole county must have been there. The governor had come with his wife. The Mayor and her husband had also made an appearance. Then there were the Benoits, the Lloyds, and the Kirklands. It was a virtual who’s who of power and prestige.
Katherine spotted Paul across the room having an intense discussion with Walter Darburg and decided not to interrupt him. A second sweep of the area garnered a quick smile from Debbie Whitcomb. Katherine remembered her from the last benefit and decided she’d be a good choice for idle chit-chat.
“Hey Deb,” Katherine began, “I thought that was you.”
“Oh yeah, I never miss these things. I couldn’t, even if I wanted to,” she laughed, “any time Randy gets the opportunity to sell somebody on another one of his business schemes, he’s out in force. How about you?”
“I’m here with the hubby. This is the first time we’ve been out anywhere together in over a month. You just get busy, ya know?”
“Got a sitter, eh?”
“Yeah,” Katherine nodded, “she seems really nice. The girl who was supposed to have come had to cancel at the last minute and this other girl was kind enough to fill in for her. Thank God too. I don’t know what we’d |
Carol Simmons smiled shyly at herself in the mirror as she held up a simple blue dress to her body. She loved the fit and how the neckline dipped, but she felt that it washed out her pale face too much and made her look too much of a hick along with her blonde hair.
“Mom?” Carol called out, wanting to ask her advice on the dress.
She had a date that night that she was nervous for. She had never met the guy in real life and they had only talked online. She had learned so much about him in the last few weeks like how he had a border collie named Chett and how much he wanted to travel to Australia so that he might get to see his mom for the first time in five years.
Carol waited patiently for her mom to come, but resorted to picking up her dress and going to her herself. The old wood floors creaked under her feet as she headed to her mother’s office. The hall was lined with pictures of her family; pictures of Carol’s mom, dad, and of herself. She considered their family to be happier than most. Sure, they got into their fights, but they always figured out a way to work it out in the end.
She knocked on the door to the office and when she heard her mom say the okay to enter, she opened the door. The room was dimly lit with dark panels of wood lining the walls and floor. The walls were covered in the hunted heads of animals such as deer and hogs. Carol’s mom sat at her desk with only a lamp to allow her to see the bullets she was loading into her shotgun.
“Hey sweetheart,” she murmured, fully invested in what she was doing.
“Do you really think that thing is necessary?” Carol asked as she looked at the gun.
“Of course, honey. What if this guy tries to pull something funny? I know that you’ve been on plenty of other dates before, but it still makes me nervous, ya know?”
Carol sighed as she pulled up a chair and sat by her mom.
Carol had been told that she looked like a mirror image of her mother. They both had the hay colored hair and bright blue eyes that was so common in the south. Her mom was developing crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and the skin on her hands became thinner, but instead of making her look old and worn out, Carol thought it made her mom look tough and wise.
“You know I’ll be okay. I’ve done this tons of other times and they’ve all went great.”
Her mom looked at her with sad eyes, like she wasn’t quite ready to give up her little girl.
“Alright, I trust ya. Now, what do you have there? Is that your dress? It looks real lovely. Isn’t that the one your cousin bought ya?”
“Yea, I think it washes me out though. Do you think I look alright in it?”
“I think you look beautiful.”
***
Darren Welles admired himself in the mirror as he straightened his tie. He wore a dark blue business shirt and black pants to match. He thought about Carol and just how beautiful she was in her profile picture as she was in real life. They had never met face to face before, but after studying some of her pictures online, he determined the area and the neighborhood she lived in. All that it took to find out which house she lived in was do the slack jaws of some of the neighbors and a charismatic smile.
He took one last look at himself before he began to clean up his room. He wanted the place to look nice even though the house looked ready to fall over and the neighborhood had three murders on it in the past year. His plan was to chat her up and pretend that he was interested in what she had to say. He would seduce her into his car and drive her back to his place. Then, he would give her a nice glass of wine traced with something to knock her out quick. He would proceed to tie her up in his basement and have some fun with her for a couple of days until he grew bored and beat her until her heart stopped. He always did like to give them a proper funeral by throwing them in a dump.
The memories slipped into his mind like a snake. He was hiding in a closet as he listened to the whimpers of his mother in the room. Her blouse had been torn at the sleeve and she had blood trickling down her face to match its color. Her brown hair had been turned into a nest of tangles and bald spots from where his dad had ripped it out. He watched as her head flicked from side to side as she took each punch from his father’s massive fists. His dad screamed, “I saw you looking at the young waiter. I saw that you had eyes for him, how you gave him that big tip. Don’t you pretend you don’t know what’s going on!” He remembered how her body had stopped struggling. How when her face turned toward her precious son hiding in the closet, her eyes were empty, but his dad kept hitting her until he grew tired and threw her body back onto the ground. He kicked her one last time for good measure before he left the room and came back with a garbage bag and stuffed her inside. Darren had never thought you could fit a person inside one of those until his father did it. His dad dragged him out of the closet by the collar of his shirt and made him come along. He watched as his dad threw Darren’s mother into a garbage truck and walked away like he had just taken out the weekly trash.
With veins popping from his forehead, Darren pulled at his hair and launched himself into a wall trying to fight the memory away. He just wanted it to go away. He always remembered the one thing his father had told him after he had killed his mother, “She was a whore Darren. A filthy skank. All women are. If they’re dead, they can’t go and sleep with other men.”
Darren smiled, knowing that this was going to be the last night that Carol Simmons was going to be seen alive.
***
Carol heard the doorbell ring and hurriedly slipped on her heels. She took one last look at herself in the mirror and, pleased with what she saw, marched to the door. She stood in front of the door, took a deep breath, and opened it to a handsome smiling young man. She gave him a nervous smile back, but she kept reminding herself that she had done this a million times before and this was no different than the others.
“I’m off, Mom! See you at eleven,” Carol said, waiting for a response.
“Bye, Hun. Be safe,” she replied.
“Should we go, then?” Carol suggested to Darren.
“Of course,” he said as she closed the door behind her and they headed off down the street.
Carol’s mom had told her not to get into his car since this was their first date and they had only met online, so she was glad when Darren agreed to a simple walk around the neighborhood so that they could get to know one another.
“You look absolutely stunning,” Darren complimented.
“Thanks, you too. You look handsome in blue,” she said back.
“This old thing? This was worn on my dad’s wedding day. He wanted me to wear it for tonight. He thought it would give me good luck,” he laughed to himself.
Carol laughed as well. Darren knew women always liked to think that men have tight bonds with their family because it makes them seem gentle, kind, and understanding. It was a tactic he had used with the others.
She thought about her mother and how she always liked to follow her and her dates in a car, but she had seen none go by. She hoped that maybe her mom had finally learned to trust her judgement and leave her alone for once.
“How’s Chett doing? I know that it’s been a couple of months since you got him. He must be really big now,” Carol said.
It took a moment for Darren to understand what she was talking about until he realized that he had mentioned how he had gotten a dog and named him Chett. He had actually bought a dog out of curiosity. A rough and tumble little border collie pup, but the damn thing kept pissing all over his carpet. When he went to kick it to teach it a lesson, it flew into a wall and never took another breath.
“Yea, he’s doing alright. Little guy’s already up to my knee. Never stops eating and grows like a weed.”
“That’s good,” Carol said as she searched for another subject to talk about. “Oh, how about Australia? Do you think you’ll be heading there soon to see your mom?”
Again, it took Darren a second to figure out what the hell she was talking about. It irritated him how much she was remembering from their conversations online.
“Yeah, I think I’ll be going there pretty soon. You know what? You should come with me. You’ve helped me so much over the past few months to gain the courage to go and find her. I think it would help me a lot to have someone as strong as you by my side,” he said, trying to make her think that he trusted her, but he could see her smile falter.
“Oh, I’m not sure. We just met and all, but maybe I’ll think about it. How about that?” she suggested, beginning to feel nervous that he would ask something like that so soon.
Darren knew that he had made her feel uncomfortable and that she might ask to go home soon. He had to act quickly.
Carol was nervous to see that no one was outside, but it had grown later and most people were probably asleep. She tried to reassure herself that everything would go to plan, but she found herself trying to see if her mom’s truck was somewhere nearby.
Darren was delighted that no one was out and that the neighborhood was small enough so that there were no cameras keeping an eye on the streets. He knew he had to get her soon or he would miss his chance. He began to untie a long piece of rope that he had wrapped up his arm when Carol noticed what he was doing.
“Why are you reaching up your sleeve like that?” Carol asked as she stopped walking.
“Oh, just a little itch I have…” and before she could even respond, he punched her in the face hard enough to knock her out. He watched as she took a few steps back, but remained conscious. She faced him, but instead of a face of fear, there was just pure anger. “What the hell…” Darren said to himself as Carol slipped off her heels and ran at him.
She tackled him to the ground and began to punch him over and over again, her eyes burning with fury. Right as his consciousness was about to leave him, he managed to grab onto her arm, flip her over to that she was on the ground, put his thumbs on her windpipe, and squeezed. Horrible squeaks and gurgles came from her mouth as she fought for breath. Her hands tried to reach for his throat, but he was able to easily avoid them.
Carol’s world was beginning to leave her as the darkness crawled into her vision and her body felt weak and fuzzy with lack of oxygen. She tried to kick and punch, but they only came out of her body as spasms and twitches. She didn’t want to end this way.
“Looks like the hunter’s been turned into the hunted,” Darren said with a cruel laugh, but Carol could barely hear him.
Darren’s eyes were wide with excitement as he saw Carol’s consciousness nearly slip from her, until he suddenly blacked out instead.
The weight was lifted from Carol’s throat as she took in ragged breaths. She felt like she wanted to vomit and her legs shook from fright and shock. She looked up to see her mother looming over her with her gun.
“Did ya…?” Carol began.
“No, I only knocked him out with the butt of the gun. We need him good and ready.”
Carol nodded, just trying to focus on the ground.
“Thank you for coming,” she said weakly.
“Hell, kid. I knew you weren’t ready to handle one like him on your own. You almost had him, but your anger got in the way.” She laughed. “You should’ve seen his face when you ran at him. Ya nearly had ‘im.”
***
Darren woke up to a hunter’s moon shining in his face. He was in a small shed that was empty except for pictures that lined the wall. He still wore his dress shirt and black pants that he had worn the night of the date. He didn’t know what day it was, but as he got up, he noticed how the pictures on the wall had Carol had her mother posed with the animals they had killed. Some were with deer and there was even one with a bear, but there were others that caught his attention.
They were there, looking almost like regular pictures, but they were the very opposite. Besides the pictures with the animals, they posed happily with the lifeless bodies of people. Carol and her mother gave broad smiles as the corpse of a person lay between them, mouth and eyes open as if they had died screaming. It wasn’t just one picture. He saw the pictures line the walls of the shed like wallpaper. His heart quickened and sweat began to bead on his forehead. As he looked closer at some of the pictures, he saw that the people were labeled. Some were labeled “child molester” or “rapist” or “murderer”. There were many other titles, but the one that was framed and in the center was one labeled “Dad” and “Domestic Abuser”. He frantically searched for a way out, some kind of escape.
He found the door quickly, but before he could pull it open, he saw a walkie talkie tied onto the handle. He took it off and looked at it curiously.
“Hello, darlin’,” came a sweet voice from the speaker.
Darren dropped the walkie talkie out of fear and backed away into the corner at the sound of Carol’s voice.
“I bet you’re wondering what you’re doing here. Well let me explain some things. We knew that there was something wrong with you when you showed interest in me online even though I was under age and you were ten years older. We knew that there was something very special about you though when we noticed you sneaking around our house trying to spy on me, so we decided to do some spying on you as well, and guess what we found? We saw you throw the dead body of a beautiful young woman into the dump and leave her there. That isn’t a very gentlemen thing to do, so we had to take it upon ourselves to give her a proper funeral and let her family know that she was finally at peace.
We thought ourselves so blessed to have found ourselves the notorious trash can butcher. We have seen you all over the news, leaving women in dumps for others to find. I’m sure you have some tragic backstory that explains why you feel obligated to end the lives of young women, but frankly, I don’t care. We have left you in an extensive forest in the middle of nowhere with enough provisions to last you for a few days. We will hunt you until you are dead and then we will take a lovely picture of you so that you can join the others on the wall. It looks like the hunter’s been turned into the hunted,” Carol finished with a twisted laugh.
In the distance, Darren could hear a horn sound along with a pack of dogs barking. He grabbed his pack and left the shed with now wet pants and frightened eyes, never to kill another soul again.
|
Have you ever played One Word Story? It’s a very simple game: a few people take turns, going around to make a sentence. Each person adds one word, until the sentence is complete, then someone says “period” and it’s read back. It’s actually pretty fun if you play with the right people, but I’m pretty anti-social and only have one or two friends. They don’t like the game as much as I do, so I use a random-chat site to play with strangers. It’s completely anonymous, so my identity is supposed to be safe. Anyway, it was late afternoon on a Saturday, and I was in the middle of a game when my apartment went dark. It was probably caused by the weird heat; all week, other tenants in my building had complained about the power cutting short around this. It only lasted a few minutes, but when the power came back on, I saw I had been disconnected from the site. When I tried to reenter, I couldn’t, it kept crashing or something and I kept getting disconnected.
I’m easily bored, and was a little more than pissed that I hadn’t finished my game. So, I took to Google, and searched “Chat Room, Anonymous, One Word Story.” After “0.18223 seconds,” I had 23,000 results. I scrolled down the page and tried a few sites out, but either the players weren’t very good, or I was led to an anonymous sex chat site. It wasn’t until the third page of results that I found something interesting: MicroFiction.com. I clicked the heading and entered the site, then I logged in as a guest. I was really surprised to see how dedicated this site was to an overall simple game; mystery, parody, anime, music, cartoons, horror, film, superstition, and superhero were just a few of the categories that people could use to play One Word Story. For no particular reason, I went to Mystery first and played a few short games, then I went to Horror, then to Music, and to a few others. Eventually, I went to take a bathroom break, and made sure to bookmark the site, so I could visit it in the future. The site was pretty well managed; under each main heading – for example, horror – there were subheadings. These were games being hosted by members. Some games only had a few people in them, others had thirty or forty. Some were open to anyone, others were private games that you could only get into if you had a password that the host had sent you. I played for a few hours, really enjoying myself because everyone here took the game just seriously enough to make each sentence interesting, and also had enough fun to make the whole story funny to read out loud, while still making sense.
It was ten now, and ten-thirty was my self-imposed bedtime, so I resigned to play one more game before going to sleep. Going to Mystery for the last time that night, I found a private game. Being a guest on the site, I couldn’t message the person to ask to join, and I would’ve kept looking for a Public game, except that the page froze. I refreshed it, and saw that the game had been changed to Public, with room for one person. I thought about that: a one-on-one game of one-word story, and I felt excited at the possibility that this guy would be just as good as I was, and we could create something really unique. So, I joined. The host, username Doppelgänger1221, went first; “I,” appeared on the screen almost instantly. I was impressed with this guy’s bravery, as using “I” in this game usually led to embarrassing sentences in the long run. So, I rewarded him with a simple enough word that would keep the sentence going: “see.” He responded almost immediately with “you.” This was honestly a very amateur tactic. It would make the game harder to finish, and the “unsettling” approach was never enough to make me quit. I decided to humor him though, and typed, “through”. His response: “your”. I thought about where the sentence was going, and noticed that my living room window was still open from the afternoon; I typed “window.” His response was a period, signaling the end of the sentence.
“I see you through your window.” I chuckled to myself, realizing this guy was a “creep,” a player who tries to make unsettling or disturbing sentences to scare his opponents into leaving the game. He probably had a friend with him, and they were thinking up ways to scare me. I didn’t blame them, my sister and I did that last Halloween when I babysat for my parents. I started the next sentence: “You.” His reply: “are.” My reply: “not.” His reply: “safe.” My reply was a period, ending the sentence.
“You are not safe.” Again, I chuckled, and watched as he started the next sentence. “I” appeared on the screen. I typed “am,” which was followed by “coming”. I thought about ending the sentence there, as a slight punishment against the guy for not taking the game seriously. Instead, I typed “for” to see if he would type what I thought he would. He typed “You.” I was right on the money, and typed a period.
“I am coming for you.” It wasn’t funny anymore, just boring. There was a chat, so I used it to tell the guy to cut the “creep” stuff. I told him it wasn’t funny, and if he didn’t cut it out, I would leave the game. He actually replied.
“Look out your window.” That caught me off guard, but I did what I was told. Across the street, a light post had burned out its bulb, which I hadn’t noticed before. It was pretty dark, and I couldn’t really make out any shapes. I turned back to the monitor. Doppelgänger had typed “I,” and I saw in the chat that he had posted another comment. Basically, he was telling me what to write. I was becoming fed up with him, but ten-thirty was just five minutes away, so I reasoned to just finish, and did as he asked. I typed “Have.” He typed “A.” I typed “Gun.” He typed “To.” I typed “Your.” He typed “Head.” I finished the sentence with a period.
“I have a gun to your head.” I sighed aloud, and closed my eyes, stretching at my desk. I just wanted this game to be over. It was my turn, and he had sent me another list of words, so I typed “I.” He typed “Am.” I typed “At.” He typed “Your.” I typed “Window.” He typed a period.
“I am at your window.” Reading it aloud, I realized the game was over: we had made the “story” relate to our first sentence. Out of habit, I read every sentence out loud.
“I see you through your window. You are not safe. I am coming for you. I have a gun to your head. I am at your window.” I finished reading, and rested my head against my chair, yawning. I was drowsy, and thought about sleeping in my chair when a loud, cracking sound echoed across the empty street outside and I noticed the crack that was spider-webbing from the center of my computer monitor. I blinked to full alertness and saw it: the glint of a bullet, sticking out of my screen. I turned my head behind me, and screamed as I saw someone in a mask staring in through my window. Out of panic, I dashed out of my chair and into my bedroom. I hid in the closet, under a thick pile of dirty laundry, and waited, trying to control my rapid breathing as my eyes adjusted to the uncomfortable darkness.
It was a few minutes before I heard soft footsteps. The maniac was in my bedroom; I could see his dark boots and leather pants. He fired the gun again at my bedsheets. He must have thought I was hiding in the covers. He rummaged through my drawers, and took something that I thought was money or my prescription medicine. I saw him stalk towards my bathroom, and fire a shot into the shower. He looked around in there, before turning around, and looking under my bed. He was almost level with the floor, so I could see his features: he was at least six feet, and dressed in all black, except for his mask, which was white with red tear-tracts under the eyes and a painted set of crooked, beast-like teeth; he seemed to see perfectly in the dark. I could really only see him because his clothes seemed to be darker than the already lightless interior of my bedroom. After what felt like hours, he stood up and walked out of my room. I stayed in my closet all night, eventually falling asleep, covered in my unclean socks and underwear. I smelled horrible in the morning, and the first thing I did was take a shower. As I did, I stepped on the bullet that had torn a hole in my shower curtains.
Afterwards, I called the police, who told me to come down to the station. I got ready to go, but couldn’t find my keys anywhere. While looking through the drawers of my desk, I complained internally about my monitor being busted. I could still see the site, the chat room, and the game, and took a picture of it with my phone for the police. Now, in the kitchen looking for my keys, it hit me that I had kept them in my dresser-drawer, and ran into my room to see that what the psycho had taken was my keys. I groaned, and was about to call my buddy for a ride when I accidentally opened my photo gallery. I was very annoyed with myself, until I took another look at the picture I had taken. Something was different in the picture than I had remembered from last night. There was a new line in the chat. A single word. A simple question. A word I had used so many times over the words, after a game was over. I never thought that this word would send shivers down more spine nor turn my blood to ice in my veins.
“Rematch?”
|
It must have been the most run-down, filth-ridden, motel room I had ever seen – the kind of place where cockroaches didn’t feel the need to scatter at the flash of a light bulb. I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole civilization of the nasty things were living between the walls, laying their repulsive egg sacks wherever they pleased, and multiplying faster than an Asian kid on Adderall. I was seated at the edge of the bed, shifting uncomfortably atop its warped mattress while trying to ignore the rank funk radiating from a pile of unwashed sheets bundled up in the corner. It was the type of room people did everything but sleep in. That was fine by me – I didn’t come there for shut-eye, anyways. In my left hand was a half-drunk bottle of Jack Daniels. In my right was a 32 caliber Smith and Wesson.
The extraordinarily depressing location was poetically fitting in a way – I was extraordinarily depressed after all. It was my wife who was the cause of my misery. She had broken my heart, leaving me with nothing but a vacant grief-stricken soul, like a teenager who listens to Fall Out Boy and writes poetry on Tumblr. For a while suspicions of infidelity had loomed over our marriage, but I had always chalked up my conjectures as nothing more than paranoid delusions. They say denial is the best remedy for heartache. It wasn’t until I stumbled across a series of implicitly sexual emails between her and the pastor of our church (a married man in his own right), that I was faced with the morbid reality of my wife’s secret sexcapades.
Pastor Alonso was a slick, fast-talking, cut-throat, shark who dressed more like a U.S. senator than a man of the cloth. He pulled in a far bigger salary than one might expect a holy man to earn. A lot of people would be surprised to find out just how profitable the preaching business can be, especially when you head up the 2nd biggest mega-church in California. Alonso had a taste for life’s opulent luxuries and wasn’t afraid to flaunt it. It wasn’t uncommon for him to drive a Mercedes Benz to church or showoff his collection of Rolex watches during Sunday services. I guess that’s why my wife gravitated towards him. She always did have a weak spot for material things.
There was one thing that all the pastor’s money couldn’t buy him though: kids of his own. His wife, Darcy’s, on again off again battle with the big C had thrown a monkey wrench into his plans to start a family. Recently, her cancer had taken a turn for the worse and while she lied up in the hospital on her death-bed, the pastor and my wife were getting together for some “extra bible study sessions”.
When I confronted my wife about the emails, things got ugly. Names were called, expletives were hurled, and threats were thrown out (by her mostly). She explained to me that the pastor invited her and the kids to move in with him once Darcy passed – an offer my “better half” had accepted. She said she was going to give him the family he always wanted – my family. I didn’t have the money to fight a long drawn out custody battle or hire big time lawyers, but Pastor Alonso did. Couple that with the fact women usually win these kinds of disputes (even if they don’t always deserve it) and you can see why things were looking so bleak for me. Another man had stolen my wife, my children, my life, and there was nothing I could do about it.
The room slowly started spinning and I realized my good friend Jack was up to his old tricks again. Nausea was beginning to settle in and I didn’t want to spend my last moments alive vomiting the Carl’s Jr. cheeseburger I had wolfed down an hour earlier, so I decided to stop stalling and finish what I came there for.
I placed the revolver’s barrel in my mouth and rested my finger on the trigger. In case you were wondering if my life flashed before my eyes, allow me to be perfectly blunt – it didn’t. I was thankful for it too. I’d have rather taken a bubble bath with Bruce Vilanch and Ron Howard’s little brother than relive all the agony that woman put me through. I shut my eyes as tight as possible in preparation for the bullet to pass through my brain.
**
They say that he who hesitates is lost. In short, the proverb means that spending too much time deliberating on an important decision can ultimately lead to disastrous consequences. Although in my case, one tiny minute moment of pause may have actually prevented said consequences and saved my life. The cold metallic taste of the revolver’s barrel on my tongue caused me to question my actions for only the briefest of seconds, but sometimes even that can be more than enough time to change a man’s fortunes. As I sat there, trying to talk myself into pulling the trigger, the telephone in my motel room began to ring. I slid the gun out of my mouth, sat good old Jack (the only friend I had left) down on the nightstand, and answered the phone.
“Hello?” I said in my best possible not-about-to-kill-myself voice.
“Jacob! I’m so glad you picked up!” I had no idea who the voice on the other line belonged to. I never heard it before, but whoever it was, they seemed to know me. “Listen, Jake,” he continued, “before you go and…redecorate the walls with the inside of your skull, we need to have a talk first.”
I hadn’t told anyone where I planned on being that evening, but this guy not only knew my name and location, but even the fact that I was contemplating punching my ticket to that big toga party in the sky. Had he been watching me? I needed some answers. Using every working brain cell in my head, I came up with the most rational, thought-out, intelligent question I could construct.
“Uhh…what?”
“I said we need to have a talk, Jacob. Now sit tight, I’m on my way over to your room right now.” And with that he hung up the phone.
I stared blankly at the wall, completely dumbfounded – my mind still trying to process what happened. I wondered for a moment if I had just been the victim of a prank call. It seemed from our short conversation, that the guy on the other end of the line had been watching me. My first inclination was that he might have been some sort of pervert. After all, the motel wasn’t exactly a four star accommodation and I did notice that the place looked to be a magnet for weirdos, freaks, and other types of seedy characters when I checked in. I took a swig of liquid courage. For some reason I always felt braver when Jack was around.
Knock Knock
The knock on the door nearly caused me to lose control of my bowels (that Double Western Bacon Cheeseburger was coming out one way or the other). I tried to convince myself that I was just being neurotic, but something about the call made me feel uneasy.
I had become aware of a dark inexplicable feeling that began bubbling from within the pit of my stomach the moment the phone first rang – an awful combination of dread, fear, hate, and a myriad of other terrible emotions all simmering together into some kind of unspeakable brew.
“Who is it?” I called out. No one answered. I waited for a response and then tried again, this time with a little more base in my voice, “Who is it?”
Knock Knock
I stood up from the bed, tucked the gun into the waistband of my pants, and zipped up my jacket, making sure it was properly concealed before making my way towards the door.
Knock Knock
“I SAID WHO IS IT!?”
“House keeping.” The voice on the other side of the door sounded like it belonged to an elderly Hispanic woman.
“Oh,” I chuckled at myself for letting a maid get me so riled up. “Please come back later. Thank you.”
Knock Knock
“House keeping.”
“I said come back please.”
“I clean now?” By this point, the woman was seriously trying my patience. Either she didn’t speak English or she was a complete moron. “I come in?”
“There’s a sign on the door knob! Can’t you read!?” I swung open the door, ready to give the woman a piece of my mind, “It says do not dist – ”
There was no one in the hallway. I leaned my head out of the room to see if the irritating maid wasn’t bothering some other poor sap, but the corridor was as empty and barren as a Blockbuster Video store. Convinced that I had officially lost my marbles, I retreated back inside and closed the door behind me.
Knock Knock
Not a second later the knocking started up again.
“House keeping.”
“GO AWAY!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. Where had she come from? Just moments earlier I was alone in the halls.
Knock Knock
“I change towels?”
“Listen, please just leave me alone,” I begged. “There’s no way in hell I’m letting you in.”
It was getting harder and harder to ignore that strange dark sensation that was still stewing inside my stomach.
Knock Knock
“I SAID GO AWAY!”
Once more I opened the door and once more there was not a cleaning woman in sight. This time, however, I was not alone. Doubled over in laughter before me, was a teenage boy, no older than sixteen. He was wearing a forest green hoodie and a matching flat-billed baseball cap tilted off to the side – a fashion choice that made him look spectacularly douchey. His baggy jeans sagged halfway down his ass, exposing a pair of striped boxers and accenting his douchiness even further. A black bandanna hung out of his back pocket as if he was some kind of gangbanger. I found this to be particularly stupid since he appeared to be type of suburban white kid whose mom drove him to soccer practice in a minivan.
“Can I help you!?” I said. I was about ten seconds away from ringing the little twerps neck. By the way he was convulsing in laughter, it was clear that he was the mastermind behind my harassment.
“Ho-ho-ho man!” he managed to squeeze out between breaths, “You should have seen yourself. You look like you just got caught with your dick in the family goat!”
“What?”
The boy wiped a tear from his eye and took a deep exhale in an attempt to rein in his laughter, “Damn, did that go over your head? Sorry, now that I think about it, the expression is a little before your time. It originated in Scotland in the mid 1700’s. A lot more people owned goats back then so I guess it used to be funnier. When you’ve been around as long as I have, it’s hard to stay caught up with the latest lingo. What are all the kids saying these days, Jake? Is YOLO still a thing? You know what, never mind. I came here to talk to you about something else. May I come in?”
“No, you may not,” I extended my arm across the door frame to block the entrance of my room, “Why don’t you get the hell out of here kid? I’m busy.”
“Oh yes, I can see that, but I’ll only take a minute of your time.” The boy ducked under my arm, scrambling past me before I could stop him. Once inside he paused for a moment, surveying the room, and smiling snidely to himself. “Jeez Jake, this place is a dump! Why the blazes would you want to blow your brains out here? I personally would have chosen the Ritz Carlton uptown if I was going to off myself. Oh, but not before ordering some of those delicious sweet potato truffle fries from the bar in the lobby!”
“You’ve got about three seconds to get out of here kid!”
“I’m shaking in my boots.” He giggled to himself briefly before continuing, “Honestly man, intimidation isn’t your forte. I promise I’ll leave in a second, but as I said before, I wanted to have a little chat first.”
“What do you want?”
“To help you out.”
“You can help me by getting out of my room.”
“A bit snippy aren’t we? Jacob, I know you’ve had a rough day, but it doesn’t have to end the way you think it does. So what if your wife hurt you? Buck up! There is a way to remedy this situation.”
It was then that I realized the darkness inside me had never gone away. Instead it had been flourishing – spreading from my core as it pervaded throughout the rest of my body. How did this kid know so much about me? For a second time that evening I was so rattled I could hardly spit out a sentence.
“Wh-who are you?” I said. He leaned in and cupped his ear like an old man who’s hearing had waned over time. “Were you w-w-watch – ”
“Was I w-w-watching you? Is that what you were going to say? Learn to ENUNCIATE man! Sorry to interrupt, but if I let you do all the talking we’re going to be here all night and believe me when I tell you, I’ve got other places to be. Now then, why don’t I answer your second question first? Yes, I was w-w-watching you, but not in a creepy staring at you through the window kind of way. You know, like Ryan Gosling in Drive? Did you ever see that movie? It’s surprisingly good. And that Gosling, he’s got chops I tell you! The guy is so damn handsome too! Some lucky bastards just hit jackpot in the genetic lottery, am I right?”
The kid was giving me a bad vibe. I slid my hand into my jacket pocket and felt through the fabric for the handle of my revolver. All the while, he continued to blabber senselessly about how The Mickey Mouse Club was the greatest thing to ever happen to the entertainment industry. I needed to somehow get control of the situation.
“Shut the hell up kid! You better give me some straight answers right now. Why were you watching me?”
The boy’s smile quickly disappeared. He scanned me up and down, probing me with his eyes as if he was examining every inch of my body – a look of utter disgust on his face. It was bizarre; his very stare made me feel ashamed and violated. “More questions, huh? First off, you should probably make sure the hammer isn’t cocked on that little lemon squeezer of yours. You’re going to shoot your dick off and then you’ll really have a reason to kill yourself.”
Somehow he knew about the gun I was hiding under my coat. I unzipped my jacket and pulled it out from my pants. He was right. I had left it cocked.
“I was watching you because I saw a doomed soul – a lost spirit so to speak, who was about to let the bad guys win and I just couldn’t bring my self to allow you to do it.” He moseyed over to the television and dragged his finger down the screen, leaving a spotless streak across the otherwise dust-covered glass. “Take it from a guy who’s been there before. I know exactly how you’re feeling right now. I too have been betrayed by someone I loved – cast down and thrown out in favor of another.”
He paused for a moment, looking at the dust that collected on his fingertip when he wiped it across the screen. “But I haven’t answered your first inquiry yet, have I? Who am I? Well, that’s a loaded question. I’m a man of many epithets. Over the years I’ve been known as The Bearer of Light, The Son of Perdition, even The Proud One. In a story he once wrote, Washington Irving referred to me as Old Nick. I have been anointed a prince, while at the same time branded a beast.”
“You’re telling me that you are The – ”
“Please to meet you! Hoped you guessed my name!”
“But that’s impossible.”
“Why? You go to church, don’t you? Is it so hard to believe that asinine little book – the one you people so arrogantly proclaim to be God’s true word, actually got something right? Don’t go patting yourself on the back for being a Christian though. The bible’s filled with more half-truths and garbage than a supermarket tabloid.”
I was completely taken back by what the boy was saying. A couple minutes earlier I was getting ready to lodge a bullet in my brain, now I was talking to a teenager who had just declared himself to be the embodiment of evil.
“If you’re the devil,” I asked, “then why do you look like a kid?”
“Why not? I do as I please. I can appear as whatever or whoever I want. You think this is weird, once I made myself look like a snake just so I could talk to a hot naked chick.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Neither did Carlos Mencia’s comedy career, but it happened anyways. By the way, I assure you I had nothing to do with that.” He shook his head, “I suppose it’s proof you require, eh? I miss the old days where you people would blindly take me for my word. It made it so much easier to cheat at poker.” The boy gave me a mischievous wink. “Alright, why don’t you pick up the phone? There’s someone who needs to speak with you.”
Not a second later a shrill, earsplitting, sound cut through the motel room. The telephone on the end table was ringing. I shot a skeptical look over to the teenager. He was holding his hand to his ear as if there was an invisible phone in it.
“Hello?” I said as I picked up the call.
“House keeping. I clean now?” As the boy’s lips moved I could hear the cleaning woman’s voice over the telephone. “No hablo Ingles. I come in?” He burst into a fit of laughter.
I was floored. I tried to play it cool, but I’m certain he could read the shock on my face.
“Check this one out.” He cleared his throat. “I’m leaving you, Jacob.” Now he sounded like my wife, “Pastor Alonso has a bigger house than you. As a matter of fact, that’s not the only thing that’s bigger.” This sent him into another round of giggles. After he had his laugh, his voice returned to normal. “Not bad, right? I mean, I’m no Danny Gans, but I bet I could still play The Nugget.”
And when he said that he smiled, but it was just a little too wide – wider than a mouth should stretch. Ever so briefly I caught a glimpse of his teeth. It was as if hundreds of tiny daggers were protruding form his gums. He shifted his head ever so slightly and his peculiar facial features had disappeared. Once again he looked like a typical douchebag teenager.
“You can’t have my soul,” I said, “It’s not for sale.”
The boy scoffed, “Come now, do you really think I just go around buying people’s souls from them? Ye have little faith in humanity, Jacob. Most people are too smart to fall for that kind of thing. What’s a lifetime of happiness compared to an eternity in hell?”
“Then why are you here?”
“Like I said before, I do as I please. And it would please me very much to do a favor for you. No contracts or souls involved. Honest Injun!”
“What kind of a favor,” I asked.
He turned and started out the door. “Why don’t you accompany me for a walk and I’ll explain? Oh, and bring that little pistol with you.”
As the boy exited my room, I picked up the phone again and held it to my ear. I didn’t hear a dial tone, so I followed the cord only to find that it wasn’t even plugged into the wall. Jack was still sitting on the nightstand, waiting to provide consultation for me if I needed it. He was going to have to wait just a little longer. I followed the boy out the door.
**
I caught up to him halfway down the hall and together we headed down the rusty metal stairs that lead to the parking lot.
“I see that you’re in a bit of a bind, Jacob. You’re wife of fifteen years is leaving you for that idiot pastor, and taking the kiddies with her. What were there names again? Oh yes, Hunter and Elizabeth. Such darling children – ”
“Leave my kids alone!” The mere thought of him mentioning my kids sent my anger into a tailspin.
He stopped halfway down the stairs and jabbed a bony finger into my chest.
“Listen here, tough guy. Just because I look like the lost member of the Backstreet Boys, doesn’t mean I won’t turn into some sort of ten foot tall Lovecraftian monstrosity and bite your legs off if you continue to disrespect me, capiche?” I nodded my head. “Good, I don’t know what all the fuss was about anyways. I love children. I’d have one of my own, but it’s so hard to find a suitable candidate to bare the antichrist. There’s something about heralding in a millennium of Hell on Earth and bringing about the apocalypse that turns most women off. The only people whoever volunteer for the job are nut balls and whackos. And trust me Jake, I don’t want no baby mama drama anymore than you do!”
I think he was making a joke because he paused for a second and glanced over to me as if he was expecting to hear laughs. He continued talking once he realized I didn’t find him amusing.
“If you ask me, you have three options.
Option number one: You go back to your room and blow your brains out. You never see your kids again, and your wife continues fucking the pastor.
Option number two: You don’t do anything like a pussy. Go back to your boring and now lonely existence. You’ll see your kids the second Saturday of every month, and your wife continues fucking the pastor.”
“I suppose this is where you tell me about option three?”
When we made it to the base of the stairs, he gestured towards the parking lot indicating the direction he wanted to walk. “Smart man,” he said. “Option number three is this. You take that 32 caliber Smith and Wesson over to the pastor’s McMansion tonight. You’re wife’s there right now, discussing church business.” He made a set of quotations in the air with his fingers. “I’m sure he’s got her down on her knees taking communion as we speak. You know? Accepting the holy body inside her mouth and all that – ”
“Ok, ok, I get it, but that’s a terrible joke. We aren’t even Catholic. What are you trying to say? You want me to kill Pastor Alonso?”
“Kill the pastor, kill your wife – hell, kill his annoying little shih tzu while you’re at it. You have to kill them, Jacob. Don’t let them take your children from you. End their lives for trying to ruin yours. I’d do it for you, but no killing is one of the few rules I’m bound by on this miserable plane of existence.”
I have to admit, it was an idea that had crossed my mind earlier that night – more of a fantasy than anything. I never actually considered going through with it. “But that would be a sin,” I said, “Now that I know Hell exists, there’s no way I’d do anything to risk damnation.”
“Look who you’re talking to, Jacob. Don’t you think I have a little bit of pull down there? For this one particular night I will absolve you of your sins. Think of it as a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card. And don’t worry about the fuzz either. I have friends in high places. You won’t even be considered a person of interest in the murder investigation.”
I couldn’t believe I was even entertaining the idea. I had become so engrossed in what the miniature Kevin Federline was proposing that I didn’t even realize he was leading us to my car until we were standing right in front of it. “So if it’s not my soul you want, what are you getting out of this?”
“Ah! I see my reputation precedes me. Like I said before, I’m just doing you a solid, man.” He stuck his fist out waiting for me to bump it. I left the devil hanging. “Maybe one day in the future, you’ll repay the favor…or not. You certainly wouldn’t be obligated to.”
“What kind of favor?”
“I don’t know, pick up my dry cleaning? I haven’t thought of it yet. Who cares? I may never even bother you after tonight.”
I reminisced back to when my wife and I were young. We were so in love and now I was standing in a parking lot, under the neon lights of the worlds dirtiest roach motel, letting the baby faced demon talk me into murdering her. How did it come to this? “She’s my wife,” I said. “Part of me still loves her. I don’t know if I could do anything that would harm the mother of my children.”
He rolled his eyes, “Oh and clearly she loves you too! Why else would she be on her back right now letting that idiot pastor plow her into next week?” And when he said that his voice got deeper – a thousand octaves lower than anything I’d ever heard in my life. The sound was maddening. It made me want to bury my fingers into my ear canals until my eardrums burst. “You’re adulterous, whore of a wife sins with that slimy, two-faced, sorry excuse for a human being as we speak! If that wasn’t enough, she plans on ruining you by taking your children! And for what? Because you don’t have a big house or a fancy car? She used you, until something better came along and he did the same thing to his wife. Hell is filled with men and women like them! Send them where they belong.” It felt as though his voice was microwaving my brain from the inside. I grabbed my head and fell to my knees. “That pastor sins in God’s name and you’d really sit there and do nothing!? Send them to hell, Jacob! Send them to me and I will make sure they suffer until the end of time!”
“OK! I’LL DO IT!”
“Excellent!” his voice had conveniently reverted back to normal. “Let’s get started, shall we? I’ll meet you at the pastor’s house. I’d ride with you, but I’m The Lord of Fucking Darkness and you drive a Prius so…you know.”
**
Even though he wasn’t in the car with me while I drove over to Pastor Alonso’s home, I knew that I was far from alone. Every time I doubted my sanity, every time I started to question if what had transpired was even real, he was there. Standing on a street corner, waiting at a bus stop, even watching me from the windows of other cars as they passed me by. I realize now that he was keeping an eye on me, making sure I didn’t get cold feet. It came as no surprise to find him already waiting for me on the front steps of the pastor’s massive home when I pulled up.
He placed a hand on my shoulder when I got near and spoke some final words of encouragement to motivate me, “Do it for your children Jacob.”
From the moment I nudged open the pastor’s gaudy, oversized, front door, I could hear he and my wife wailing away from the bedroom upstairs. I drew my gun and followed the moans up the steps.
“Jeez, Jake. It sounds like a couple of pigs getting slaughtered in there. Is that what it was like when you two used to bump uglies?”
I brushed off his inconsiderate quip and leaned against the door. The boy was licking his lips in anticipation. It seemed as if he wanted them dead worse than I did. Doubt began to seep into my mind. I was no killer. The very thought of murdering the mother of my children was beginning to make me feel sick.
Perhaps sensing apprehension, he started whispering in my ear, “Do it Jake. Send them to hell.”
His words were easy to ignore. I was too busy thinking about my kids. Could I really take their mother away from them? Even though I had let the boy manipulate me that evening, I still had my free will. I knew that I had the power to walk out the front door if I wanted to. No one needed to die.
“He who hesitates is lost, Jake.”
How could I even pull the trigger? For God sakes, I still loved the woman. That’s when that dark inexplicable feeling that had been growing inside me started to dwindle. In its place I felt hope. Hope that maybe if I could talk to her, even hear her speak, I would come to my senses. Then, almost on cue, her voice rang out, resonating through the air like a magnificent melody plucked from the fingers of a master harpist.
“Fuck me preacher man!”
I kicked in the door.
**
My gun had six bullets, but it only took me three. It would have been two, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to relieve the pastor of his holy scepter. It’s strange how draining murder can be. All I did was point my gun and pull a trigger, yet my body felt like I had just ran a marathon.
“I knew you had it in you, Jacob, but holy hell, I didn’t expect you to blast off his pecker too!”
It wasn’t his wisecrack that startled me. His voice had changed. It was deeper than a teenager’s now, more dignified too. Perhaps most alarming, it was a voice I knew very well – one I heard echo off the stained glass windows of my church every Sunday for years. Pastor Alonso’s voice. I whirled around to see the man I just shot smiling at me from the doorway.
“Relax,” he said as he entered the room, “It’s just me, Lucifer, King of The Underworld, Father of Lies, yada yada yada.”
I looked back to the bed. The real pastor’s bullet riddled body still lied motionless next to my wife’s corpse, their cadavers entwined within a set of tacky bloodstained bed sheets. “Wh-why did you make yourself look like Pastor Alonso?” I asked.
“Why does it matter? I do as I please.”
Before I had a chance at a follow up question, the thunderous sound of the pastor’s front door being slammed shut carried through the house and up to the bedroom. My heart began to race as a bevy of heavy footsteps made their way up the stairs.
“What the hell is going on!?” I demanded, but he didn’t answer. The wicked grin painted across his face sent a wave of fright through my body.
“Do you know what they’re going to do to you in prison, Jacob?” he said. Two uniformed police officers strode into the room.
As the policemen made their way towards me, my panic began to intensify. All I could think about was wasting the rest of my life away in an orange jumpsuit and playing housewife at the behest of my cellmate, a tattooed skinhead named Knife Face.
I still had three bullets left and I knew there was one way out of the situation. I raised the revolver to my temple as the cops marched towards me. I don’t know if I really would have pulled the trigger if they attempted to arrest me. Thankfully I didn’t get the chance to find out because instead of drawing their guns on me, they brushed right by without saying a word. I watched in awe as they started wrapping the pastor and my wife’s bodies’ in the soiled silk sheets. To my surprise, they appeared to be cleaning up my mess.
You-Know-Who fell to the floor and began howling. “HA! Now you really do look like you got caught with your dick in the family goat!” He thrust a finger into my bewildered face. “I’m just joshing you, Jake! These fine gentlemen are with me. Them too.” He motioned over to the doorway. Two more men I hadn’t noticed before wearing plain clothes, but still brandishing badges were waiting in the doorway. “Jerry, come over here for a second!”
The older heavyset man sauntered towards us. His somber face and reluctant gait made him look like a kid who just got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. The no-longer-baby-faced-demon patted him on the back, “Do you know who this man is, Jacob?” I shook my head. “Jerry here, is the head of the police department. That means he’s very important.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said. I really wasn’t, at that point all I wanted to do was distance myself as far away from the pastor’s house as possible and forget the whole night ever happened. The police chief remained silent. The shame and discomfort in his eyes told me the feeling was mutual.
The demon gestured over to the other man still standing at the door. “That guy over there just made detective.” He turned his head in the detective’s direction. “Congratulation’s on your new promotion, Bill!” The man looked away to avoid eye contact. Once again he focused his attention on me. “Guess who’s going to be heading up your wife’s murder case?”
“What about the Pastor?” I asked, “Who’s going to be looking into his murder?”
He stretched his arms out and twirled around as if he was showing off a brand new coat. “What are you talking about? Pastor Alonso wasn’t murdered? He and his wife just decided to move away so they could do missionary work in Africa. See? Everything wraps up neat and tidy and you get off scot-free. Now Jacob, before you leave tonight, I wanted to speak to you about that favor.”
“What?”
“You know? We talked about this. I said that maybe one day I might ask you to return the favor I did for you.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I remember. I guess I didn’t expect it to come so soon.”
“Well, life’s funny like that sometimes. Don’t worry though. It’s really nothing you can’t do in your sleep! I’m not going to ask you to pick up and dispose of dead bodies like these guys.”
“What do you want?”
He leaned in close and looked at me with a solemn expression on his face. “Listen to me, Jacob because this is the only favor I will ever ask of you. It is imperative, that you never attempt to contact Darcy Alonso. Do you understand?”
“What?” his request had left me puzzled for numerous reasons, “But Darcy Alonso has cancer. She’s dying.”
His lips curled into a devilish smirk. “Well, let’s just say I did her a little favor.”
“What are you going to do with her?”
“What’s it matter to you? I do as I please.”
I waved my finger in his face, “But you said I’m not obligated to listen to you right? If I wanted to, I could go over to the hospital right now and tell her about everything that happened tonight.”
“Of course you can, Jacob! Like I said, there’s no binding agreement between us. Your soul is yours and you’re free to do what you want with it. As a matter of fact, I stake no claim to any of these men’s souls. They’re just people who were kind enough to repay the favor I did for them!
I’ve done favors for a lot of people, Jacob – cops, judges, lawyers, even pedophiles who take pleasure in the rape and murder of children. Hey that reminds me, don’t your kiddies walk home from school every day?” And when he said that, he looked me right in the eye. It was as if his stare caused my mind to play out a thousand different scenarios, each one more heinous and vile than the last. It was like looking through a window into Hell. “Darcy and I are going away,” he continued. “All you have to do is forget about her. Forget about this entire night if y |
The inventor was frustrated. He had spent years, decades, researching the nature of time, and his work had finally come to fruition: he had invented a — theoretically — functioning time machine. With this he knew he could silence all the naysayers who had repudiated the underlying goal of his research. They had told him, time without number, that time travel was impossible. Otherwise, one could create a paradox by, say, going back in time and killing one’s grandfather before he had any children. In which case, the time traveler would never even exist, and so wouldn’t travel back in time to kill his grandfather, thus ensuring the grandfather’s procreation, and the time traveler’s eventual existence, enabling the latter to go back in time and kill…
Fah. He had long ago dismissed such nonsense, but as he achieved greater and greater success in his research (always in the comfort of his lab at home rather than at work) the problem grew in his mind. It did not occupy his conscious mind, but his unconscious thoughts were frequently considering it, weighing particular solutions, allowing the better ones to step up to the next floor in his mental architecture. This was actually how he did most of his thinking, with the result being that by the time an idea actually manifested itself in his conscious mind, he was essentially already decided on a course of action.
Obviously, he had concluded, a man could not travel back in time and prevent the circumstances by which he traveled back in time in the first place. Just as obviously (thus the paradox) there would be nothing to stop a man from doing precisely that once he had already traveled back in time. Therefore, both conditions must be true. A man could travel back in time and kill his grandfather. But then he would continue to exist: and upon his return to the present, he would discover that his grandfather had not been killed. Time travel, in other words, would only allow for observation, not interaction. No one would have to worry about accidentally stepping on a bug and somehow causing a volcanic eruption or whatever. This led to important side issues: were one’s actions actually happening somewhere (or somewhen)? What would happen if one then got stuck in the past where the apparent event had taken place? Etc. But his subconscious was already working on potential solutions to these questions.
As to the main question, he had already decided what to do. Before he would bring his time machine to the attention of his colleagues (and the world for that matter) he would first have to divest them of this notion of paradoxes. To this end, he would travel back in time, perform an action that could not have happened, and then return to the present. He would do this with other people so they could verify that he had, in fact, done the impossible act in the past without endangering the present in any way.
First, though, he would have to do it alone in order to have empirical verification (of a sort) in hand before approaching his colleagues. He did not want to kill his grandfather, and was certain his explanation would not be believable if he got stuck 80 years in the past. So instead, he would travel five years into the past and kill himself — his self from five years ago, that is. If, per impossibile, he got stuck there, he was pretty sure his presence would prevent any murder accusation from getting off the ground, the alleged victim being alive and well.
He took his time machine (which was about the size of a shoebox) and a pistol into the hallway outside his lab, turned the number dial on the time machine to “5”, the units dial all the way up to “year”, the directional switch to “past”, and activated it. Not much changed, but he hadn’t expected it to; he had always relished continuity (which made it a little unusual that he, of all people, would invent a time machine), and so his furnishings had remained almost entirely unchanged over the thirty-plus years that he’d been living in this house. He expected to find himself at work in his lab, and so walked over to it. The door was open a crack, and he was able to look in and see that, yes, he was indeed sitting at his desk, looking at something. He raised the pistol, pushed the door open, and before his old self could react to the sound of the creaky hinges, he shot himself in the head. His old self.
He paused for a moment to see if he noticed any differences: did he have any new memories? Did he still exist? Would one notice if one stopped existing? At this last thought, he chuckled, stepped into the room, and then pushed the return button on the time machine. Apart from the disappearance of his body — his old body — and the door closing most of the way behind him, nothing changed. After pausing again to see if he noticed any differences (he didn’t), he went over to his desk to record the results of his experiment. He looked at the time machine and called up the exact coordinates it had recorded, and began writing them down.
But something was wrong. The coordinates were not what they should have been, not even close. As he finished writing them down, he looked back at the time machine to see what the problem was. The first thing he noticed was that, although he had pushed the directional switch down for “past”, the switch was sticky and it hadn’t clicked over. The second thing he noticed was that, while he had turned the category dial all the way up to “year”, he accidentally pushed it too far: and since the dial had no stopper, it reset to the smallest unit.
He hadn’t traveled five years into the past. He had traveled five MINUTES into the FUTURE.
And behind him, the door hinges creaked.
Credit To – Jim S.
|
It was a few weeks ago that the hay bales started creeping slowly away from the house. Every morning when I woke up, each had moved a few hundred feet from where it was before. I assumed it was pranksters with nothing better to do, and I so I ignored it. Within a few days, though, the bales began to approach the boundaries of the farm. I was tired of the whole game by then, and decided to move them back. It took a tedious hour to bring them all from where they were to over near the house again, and by the time I was done I was ready to snap the neck of whatever little pissant was deciding to screw with me.
The next morning, I found each and every one of my horses messily decapitated. The smell was what woke me up. Each one was slumped over against the side of its stall. There were no signs of the heads. I spent the rest of the day cleaning up the mess and burying the remains. It was only when I was done that I noticed the bales of hay had all returned to their positions from the day before, scattered far out into the fields. This time I left them where they were.
That night I sat on my porch with my shotgun in hand and a pot of coffee on the table beside me. I sat for hours, straining my eyes into the fields to catch a glimpse of who was moving my hay bales. Finally, I was beginning to nod off. I would have, but just as my eyes began to close I heard a clamor and a rustling of trees from the nearby woods. I leaned forward, my heart racing with excitement; I was going to catch the bastard. I fumbled with my gun and fidgeted in my seat, waiting anxiously for whoever it was to get close enough to ambush. It was only when the thing got close enough for me to make out its silhouette in the dark that I was frozen still. The thing that crept into my fields from the nearby woods didn’t seem to notice me sitting there. It stalked, hunched and deliberate, through the field with the posture of a tiptoeing thief. If not for the fact that it must have towered to over ten feet tall even in its crouched position, it might have seemed almost frail. The thinness of its arms and legs and the emaciated, caved-in quality of its chest reminded me of a starving animal. Still, this thing was undeniably strong, and I watched it hoist each bale up into its arms with ease, and set it down carefully a while away, taking only a few strides to cover the distance. I watched it work, moving each bale thoughtfully. Every once in a while it would straighten up to look around at the other bales’ positions in the field, before adjusting the one it was working on ever so slightly.
Before it left, it looked towards the house. I felt its eyes sweep over me in the dark, but whether it saw me or not I couldn’t tell. Then, it turned silently and crept back the way it came, disappearing into the dark of the woods. It took me an hour before I had the courage to move at all. I went inside after a while, but didn’t sleep that night. It was only when the sun rose that I dared step off my porch into the fields. The hay bales were where it left them. Strangely, it didn’t move them as far as it had in the previous days. They were approaching something invisible in the fields, and as I looked at them I realized that they seemed to be marking some line. Indeed, as I walked around the house, I saw the distinct circle that they formed with me at the center. At first I thought the bales were just being haphazardly moved away from the house, but now I could see that they were instead being moved towards some boundary. The thing was sending me a message. I slept uneasily that night, and only because I was exhausted.
The next morning the bales hadn’t moved at all. They didn’t move at all for the rest of that week, in fact. They were finally where the thing wanted them. I made myself sick trying to interpret them. Why would this thing expend so much energy moving my hay bales, and threaten me with such violence should I try to interfere? Killing my horses was just that – a threat. An intelligent threat, at that. It knew what would scare me, and it knew that I would understand the implications.
The sound of an automobile working its way along the road to my farm one morning gave me a little rush of excitement. I’d been planning to abandon the farm since I saw the thing, but I couldn’t hope to leave on foot without risking it treating me like it treated my horses. But, if I could get in the car with whoever was coming my way, I might be able to escape before it could stop me. I didn’t know or care who it was. I decided that the moment they stopped the car, I would jump in the passenger’s seat and tell them to get the hell out of here. I didn’t get the chance.
The car worked its way slowly along the road, trundling across the uneven ground. I urged it silently to hurry. It was when it passed between the two bales placed on either side of the road that I began to hear a booming clatter from the woods. The thing burst suddenly from between the trees, sprinting on all four of its terrible, gangly limbs towards the car. Within a few seconds it was there, pouncing on the automobile like a predatory cat. Within moments it was picking and peeling the vehicle’s steel frame apart, working to get at the driver. The man, whoever he was, screamed all the while and I could hear him even over the crunching of metal and the shattering of glass. It was only when the thing crushed him carelessly in its hand that the screaming stopped. It tossed him away, and straightened up to look at me once again. In the sunlight, I could see the inhumanity of it. It was composed entirely of something awful and alive which was lashed together in a messy semblance of a human form. Whatever it was made of looked so polished and hard, that if it weren’t for the minute writhing of the stuff, I’d think it was made of granite.
The thing retreated back into the woods, and I was left to my shock. My eyes wandered to where the car sat, the engine still sputtering, between two of the hay bales. Suddenly, I understood. The message was clear. I am this thing’s captive, and I am not allowed visitors. Nothing may cross the borders it has set. I’m trapped here, by the thing that stalks the fields, and it demands nothing except that I never leave. Still, I don’t know if I can handle being that thing’s canary. I’ve been thinking hard for the last few days since I saw it crush that man’s chest, and silence him before he could finish his scream. If I crossed the hay bale border, it’d probably do the same. It’d smash my skull before I could put my hands up to protect myself. It’d go and find a new pet, and probably keep looking until it found someone who could stand knowing that it was waiting just outside, watching it at all hours with its shiny, insect eyes.
I’ve been thinking hard for the last few days, and I might just make a run for it.
|
Round 1
I received an envelope in the mail recently. I thought it was a bit odd since I had just moved in to my new home, but it was sent to “current resident.” Technically that was me. I figured it was just one of the fake ads that gets sent through the mail, but I was incredibly wrong.
When I opened up the envelope all that was inside was a USB drive. I wasn’t stupid enough to plug it in to my own computer. Who knows what kind of virus could be lurking on this thing. I was a bit curious about it though, so I took it to one of the computers at my local library.
I plugged it in to the library computer. The USB opened up and there seemed to only be a single video file. I put in some headphones, took a quick look around to make sure no one else was watching, and then I played the video.
The video began to play, but it was only a black screen. After a few seconds a distorted voice began to play though. I’ll do my best to recreate what it said here:
“Congratulations, you have been selected as one of the 64 contestants in the first ever Serial Killer Showdown! We have been watching, and have carefully selected our contestants. You have been selected as a lower seed. This means you will be hunted in the first round. Your opponent has been given your name, face, and address. Your opponent will be given one week to eliminate you. Should he fail to do so within the time frame, or if he is killed, then you will advance to the next round. Any contestant that fails to compete shall be dealt with accordingly. Good luck!”
Before the video ended the face of a man appeared on my screen with the text “Your Hunter.” Then the video closed on its own, and the entire computer began to show lines of code. After a few seconds the computer returned to normal, but the USB drive was now empty. I tried removing it and plugging it back in, but this achieved nothing.
I thought this had to be some kind of prank. Serial killer showdown? It sounded like a terrible indie movie. Still, the idea it could potentially be real freaked me out a bit. If it was real, it had obviously gone to the wrong person. I was not a serial killer. I had issues killing house flies. It must have been meant for the person who lived in my home before me.
I decided that it would be best to visit my local police. I took them the flash drive and tried explaining what I had seen, but of course it still contained nothing. They probably thought I was high or crazy, but in the end I got them to accept the flash drive, and they said they would send it off to techs to get it examined. They couldn’t do anything else though.
I still wasn’t sure that this was real, but I didn’t like the idea of someone hunting me down. I packed my essentials from my home, and found a cheap hotel. If what the video had said was true, then I would only have to hide out for a week. It shouldn’t be my name or face that was shown to the other person, but rather the person who had lived at my home before me. So I had nothing to worry about right?
That was what I thought at least.
On the third day of living away from my new home I decided to drive by my house after work. I just wanted to take a peek, because I was certain I had just let paranoia get the best of me. This whole thing had probably just been a prank, and I had been the sucker who fell for it.
When I drove by my house however, there was a car parked nearby. I noticed the tags were from a couple states over. This seemed a bit odd to me, but not entirely out of the norm. It could just be guests visiting the neighbors. I decided not to stop though, and to go back to my hotel.
Once I arrived back at the hotel I began to prepare myself for bed. It had been a long day at work, and I had had to do overtime again. All this added stress wasn’t helping either. Just as I was about to crawl in to bed I heard something.
Knock Knock
There was someone at the door. This was definitely strange. It was not the time of day that room service would be here, and I had not ordered anything.
“Hello? Who’s there?” I yelled at the door.
No response.
I walked up to the door and looked through the peep-hole. There was no one on the other side. I opened the door and peeked out in the hallway. It was likewise empty. I shut and locked the door, making sure I placed the deadbolt on. Was this whole situation driving me crazy?
I went back to my uncomfortable hotel bed. Despite how anxious I was, I still managed to fall asleep quite quickly. I had been exhausted.
I was woken up in the middle of the night however. I looked over to the hotel clock. It read 2:20 a.m. I wasn’t exactly sure why I was awake, but I had to use the bathroom. So, I got out of bed and decided to do so.
I had just made it in the bathroom door when I began to hear noises from the front door. On instinct I quickly swung the bathroom door shut and locked it. Just as I did so I heard the main door click open. I heard the door catch on the deadbolt, but only for a second. Next I heard the snapping of metal as the deadbolt was broken. Inside the bathroom I realized my biggest mistake. I had forgotten my cell phone.
I wasn’t sure how much good screaming would do me. This hotel was cheap as I had mentioned, and I hadn’t ever seen any other guests. The kind of people that stayed here most likely wouldn’t flinch if they heard someone scream.
I began to scour the bathroom for some type of weapon. There really wasn’t much. I turned on the coffee maker all the way up and poured some water inside. Then I armed myself with a plunger I had found in the corner.
I guess the intruder hadn’t immediately realized that I had hid in the bathroom, because he seemed to walk in to the hotel bedroom first.
I thought about making a run for it then, but my wallet, keys, and phone were all in the bedroom. Not to mention I wasn’t in the greatest part of my city, and it was the middle of the night. I was a cornered animal.
After spending a few minutes in the bedroom I heard the intruder’s footsteps come back towards the front of the room, and closer to me. Eventually, he paused directly in front of the bathroom door.
Knock Knock
“Listen, I don’t know who you are, but you have the wrong guy!” I shouted at the door.
My pleas fell on deaf ears though. I heard the man take a few steps back, and then he began to ram the door. It didn’t entirely break the first strike. Which was surprising seeing how shitty this hotel was. I knew the door most likely wouldn’t withstand the second strike though. So, I began to ready myself.
I took a deep breath as I heard the man take a few steps back again.
The stranger barreled through the door this time. As he did I doused him in the now boiling hot water from the coffee pot. My aim had never been better as it splashed directly on his face. He immediately recoiled. I took this opportunity to swing with all my might with the plunger. The first strike only made him fall to his knees, but the next few got the job done. I didn’t kill him, but he was certainly going to have a huge headache when he awoke.
I called 911 and they came to pick him up. I was brought back with them for questioning. Once again I explained to them about the flash drive, and once again they thought I was crazy. Considering the events, they took my story a bit more seriously, but in the end they didn’t seem entirely convinced.
The man who had attacked me had been from a few states over. This raised some red flags with the police. He didn’t have a previous record though. They would have to look more in to him in order to find a motive. After a few hours of seemingly pointless questions they released me.
I had just hoped that his whole thing was over. I was given my things from the hotel room, and I decided to just go back to my home. The man chasing me was apprehended now, so I shouldn’t have anything to worry about.
Just as I walked through my front door I heard an odd ring come from my phone. I hadn’t remembered setting that sound to anyone. In fact, I had never heard that ringtone before. I pulled out my phone to see I had 1 new message from a name that was just a random assortment of numbers and letters. This is what is said:
“Your opponent has failed their task. Welcome to round 2!”
Round 2
I never expected to be involved in a tournament for serial killers, but here I was in round 2. Even though I had made it here, I still hadn’t killed anyone. Yet two weeks after the first round had concluded, I received my second envelope.
I thought about taking the envelope directly to the police, but I had to be sure. I opened it up, and once again it contained a flash drive. That wasn’t all it contained this time though. No, it also contained a smaller envelope with the word “Motivation” written on it. I couldn’t stop myself from opening it, but I really wish I hadn’t.
Inside the envelope was a single photograph. It was a picture of my parents, but it wasn’t any normal picture of them. They were tied to chairs with gags in their mouths. Placed between them was a digital clock showing the date and time. If the clock was to be believed, then this photograph had only been taken one day prior to me receiving it. There was a message on the back of the photo, this is what it read:
“No more assists from the police. Good luck!”
Of course I tried to call my parents, but it was no use. No matter how many time I called they couldn’t answer. After a few attempts I realized I was wasting time. I picked up the USB and didn’t hesitate to put it in my personal computer.
Once again I was greeted with a black screen and a distorted voice. I’ll do my best to recreate it again:
“Hello again. We’d like to start by congratulating all 31 competitors who made it to round 2. Unfortunately, we did lose one potential contestant to a stunning double-kill. Competitor #13 was the quickest to eliminate their target in a time of 36 hours 22 minutes. As a reward, they will be given the unexpected bye this round. The rest of you shall have your roles reversed this round. Any conflicts have been settled by a coin toss. We are also upping the stakes this round. Only deaths will be accepted for advancement. If a hunter fails to eliminate their target in the time frame, then their location shall be exposed to their opponent. If this still fails to produce results, then we will send in our own hunters, and both contestants shall unfortunately be disqualified. The theme of this round will be blood. Whoever has the bloodiest finish will receive a bonus going in to the next round. Good luck!
You are a hunter this round. This means you will be tasked with pushing the action against your opponent, but as you know, they will fight back. You have been given a 12-hour head start in order to make travel plans. You have one week to eliminate your target. We hope that we have provided you with adequate motivation to perform this task. You will have 30 seconds to copy the information about to be shown on the screen.”
After this message a face popped up on my screen. Along with the face of a man there was text at the bottom of the screen. The text provided me with the man’s address, name, place of work, and the car he drove. I tried to take a screenshot on my computer, but all my controls were locked. I quickly got up and sprinted to get a pen and a piece of paper. I was barely able to finish jotting down the information before I was once again met with lines of code, and an empty flash drive.
I sat there blankly for a minute. How was I supposed to kill someone? I had never really thought about killing anyone before. Of course, maybe I had a fantasy here or there, but never anything serious. Whoever was behind this all had my parents though. If I failed, would they die?
Not to mention my target. He was supposed to be a serial killer right? It seemed unfair. He had experience with this, and he had obviously passed being a hunter in the first round. Would I even be able to beat him at his own game? I wasn’t sure, but I had to try.
I began to pack my things. The location I had been given was several hundred miles away, so I needed to get on the road as soon as possible. I didn’t have a gun, and there really wasn’t time to purchase one. What I did have was a replica samurai sword. I had bought it somewhat as a joke, and partly because I thought it was badass. I wasn’t sure I would use it, but it was the biggest weapon I had, so I grabbed it. I also packed an assortment of smaller, but still potentially deadly knives that I had.
I hit the open road. I still had no idea what I was doing, but I had a long journey to plan something out. As I was filling up at the first gas station on my trip I had an idea. I purchased a few gas cans and filled them up. I figured they may come in handy at some point.
I continued to try and formulate some sort of plan on my way to my target, but it seemed impossible. He knew I was coming, and he probably had something planned out for me. Yet here I was floundering trying to think up anything. I did have a week to figure it out, but that still didn’t seem like nearly enough time for something like this.
It was about 15 hours later when I arrived in my target’s city. I had been slowed down a bit by traffic, but otherwise the trip had been fine. It was the middle of the night and I was exhausted, but I decided to drive by my target’s home first. I just wanted an idea of what I was up against.
I followed my GPS to the address I had been given. I was led to a two-story home in the middle of a neighborhood. Nothing really stuck out about the home, but the vehicle in front did also match the information I was given. The house did seem a bit large for a single person. Did he have a family?
I didn’t linger on the thought. I drove a decent distance away to a hotel and crashed.
I woke up around 1 p.m. I quickly got around, and began to head back to my target’s home. He should be at work right now, so this would give me some time to explore.
The tricky part would be breaking in to his home in the middle of the day without getting caught. Luckily there was an alley-way behind the home. He had a large fence surrounding his backyard, so it shouldn’t be too challenging at all.
I donned a large hoodie and a mask. It would certainly make me stand out more if I was seen, but I would rather risk that than being identified.
I easily hopped the fence to the backyard. When I got to the back door I began to attempt to pick the lock. I wouldn’t recommend watching videos while driving, but I had watched several on my road trip, and learning how to pick a lock was one of them. It took far longer than it should have, but I was eventually able to open the door.
I silently made my way in to the home, just in case. It wasn’t necessary though, I was alone. For the most part the home seemed normal. I was able to breathe a little easier when I saw there were no signs of children living in the home. I scoped out the first and second floors, making sure to take note of the layout. I was about to leave when I noticed one last door.
I opened the door and was immediately hit with a putrid smell. I had thought something had smelled a bit off when I was exploring the home, but I wasn’t entirely sure. Now I knew for certain that something was not right. The plastic mask I was wearing didn’t do much to guard me from the smell.
The door led downwards to a basement. I absolutely did not want to go down there, but I knew I had to. The further I went, the more intense the smell became.
The bottom contained a small room. There wasn’t much to the room, but in one of the corners there was a large freezer. I knew immediately the freezer was the source of the smell. I approached it knowing what I would find inside.
I braced myself before opening the freezer. After a deep breath I opened it to see what it contained. If you guessed it was a body, you guessed correctly. It was a girl, mid 30’s. She was well in to the process of decomposing, but I’m sure the freezer had slowed it down somewhat. Was this his previous target?
My thoughts were cut short as I heard something. I turned and looked in to the opposite corner to see what had made the noise. There was a camera, now fixated on me. I moved out of range of the camera, and watched as it continued to follow me. He was watching me.
I sprinted out of the home. He knew I was coming, but now he knew that I was here. I was supposed to be the hunter, yet here I was running again. I got back in my vehicle and retreated back to the hotel.
I still had no clue what to do. I wonder how many cameras the man had. The one in the basement couldn’t have been the only one. Had he been watching me the whole time I invaded his home? I knew I was a bit of an underdog here, but I had hoped to have some advantage.
I decided it was all-or-nothing now. I was going to wait until night, then I would return to the home. One of us had to die. I just hoped that if it was me, that my parents would be released.
Night came all too quickly. I prepared my weapons, as well as myself. It could have very well been my last night alive. I could only justify what I was about to do by knowing what might happen to my parents, and knowing what he must have done to the girl in his basement.
I once again made my way to the man’s backyard. This time I brought along the sword, and a few knives. I had also made a makeshift Molotov cocktail. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to use it, but it was one of the few things I knew I could easily do.
When I reached the backdoor I prepared myself to pick the lock again, but I didn’t need to. The door was already unlocked. It didn’t feel right, but I was already committed. I slowly stepped inside.
I immediately noticed the door to the basement was open, and that the light was on. I wasn’t sure he was down there, but I knew I didn’t want to go back down. So, I lit the Molotov and threw it down the staircase. It burst in to flames, and slowly began to spread.
I heard frantic movement coming from below. I moved out of the way of the door and placed my back against the wall while drawing my sword. I began to hear rapid footsteps coming up the stairs. I took a deep breath. When they were almost at the top I wound my sword back and began to swing it downwards.
My swing connected with the man, but it wasn’t a direct hit. The moment he saw me he had jumped sideways just in time to dodge what would have been a killing blow. His right arm however wasn’t so lucky. It had come off clean, along with what it was holding. His now disconnected arm fell to the floor and dropped the gun it had been gripping. A silenced pistol.
The man fell to the floor gripping the stump that had once contained his arm. The cut had been surprisingly clean, and was bleeding a lot less than what I would have expected. After a moment the man made an attempt with his left hand to go for the gun, but I simply kicked it away.
“Please, don’t do this. They have my wife. I had to do it. I have to save her.” The man pleaded with me now on his knees.
“I’m sorry.” This was the last thing I said before I swung the sword once more. This time the man’s head came off clean. I watched it roll to the bottom of the basement.
“I had to do it.” I said to myself out loud.
I had just killed a man. I felt the tears begin to roll down my face underneath the mask. I didn’t have time to contemplate the situation anymore though. The flames coming from the basement had now begun to spread further.
I ran from the home as the flames continued to consume the home. I made it to my car and immediately began my journey home.
I stopped along the way to burn the clothes I had been wearing, and I found a random field to bury the sword in. I didn’t stop to sleep; I don’t think I would have been able to anyway. I felt empty, like part of my soul had been taken from me. The worst part is I knew it wasn’t over.
When I arrived home I received what I expected. Another text. This is what it read:
“Outstanding work, and all on your own this time! We wanted to be the first to welcome you to the Killer Sweet Sixteen. We’ll be in contact soon.”
Round 3
I had inched past not one, but two rounds now in a competition meant for serial killers. Now there was blood on my hands though. I had played right in to the hands of the people who had kidnapped my parents, but did I have any other choice? These people seemed to be watching my every move. Would the police even be any use?
Speaking of police, they had contacted me shortly after my return from round 2. They had planned on charging my attacker with attempted murder. That was until they found him dead in his cell. He had used his bed sheets to hang himself. When the guards found him he was already long gone.
I was somewhat relieved from this news, but it also frightened me in another way. Had he really hung himself of his own accord, or was this some sort of punishment? I doubt I’ll ever know, but I can have my suspicions.
Almost a month went by and there had been no third envelope. I was starting to go stir-crazy. These people still had my parents, and I had killed someone. I had reported my parents missing as soon as I had returned home, but of course the police had come up with nothing so far. I also doubted the fire covered up all the evidence I may have left behind. My anxiety had reached its peak. I was taking over the counter sleeping pills to try and force myself to sleep, but even those weren’t working anymore.
After what seemed like an eternity, it finally arrived. The third envelope. I tore it open the instant it was in my hand. There was no photo inside this time. Just the USB like the first time. I’m not sure if I really wanted to see another photo of my parents being held prisoner, but I did want some sort of proof they were still ok. It was highly possible my parents were already dead, and if that was the case I didn’t want to play this game anymore.
I placed the flash drive in my pc once again. This time I decided to try something. I wasn’t sure what it would accomplish exactly, but I wanted to try. I pulled out my phone and hit record. I clicked on the single video file, and it began:
“Congratulations to everyone once again. We are down to our final 16 competitors. Going forward there will no longer be Hunters and Hunted. Each round will pose a new challenge. For this round each of you will be given an address. Once this video has concluded you will have 24 hours to reach the address, and once there you will receive further instructions. No outside weapons will be allowed this round. We will be watching. As for the blood bonus, competitor #47 eliminated their opponent by inflicting so many minor cuts that they eventually bled out entirely. We have to admit we were quite impressed. They will receive their bonus at their marked location. For the rest of you, good luck!”
That wasn’t the end of the video though. After the distorted voice stopped speaking I was shown an actual video. It was my parents. They were no longer tied to chairs. They were huddled together in a corner. They had chains connected to their legs. There were trays of food in front of them. They were both still alive, but it was obvious they were absolutely terrified, and who could blame them. After a few moments of focusing on them the camera was moved downward and began to focus on a piece of paper. It was a newspaper. A newspaper from 2 days prior. This gave me some hope, and perhaps that’s exactly why they showed it to me.
The video then abruptly ended, and once again the file deleted itself. I stopped the recording on my phone. I went to replay the video from my phone, but as I hit play the startup logo for my phone overtook the screen. My phone proceeded to restart itself. Once I regained control of it everything was gone. Not just the video, but every other piece of media or contact information I had had in the phone. It had been completely reset.
I was able to restore almost everything from a backup save I had on my pc, but of course the new video was long gone. I was beginning to understand how hopeless of a situation I was in.
After I finished restoring my phone I received a text message. It was of course the promised location. It was around a 20-hour drive away. I would have to leave almost immediately. They had given me just enough time to reach the destination by car. It was fine though, I wasn’t going to be getting any rest anyway.
I packed some clothes and set off. They had mentioned no weapons, so I didn’t have to worry about finding something useful this time. At this point I knew they had eyes everywhere, so trying to sneak in something would only backfire on me.
After minimal stops for gas and bathroom breaks, I arrived at the marked address. With an hour to spare as well.
It was a quite large building. I’m not sure what its purpose was. It didn’t make sense; this building was completely out of place. It was in the middle of nowhere. The closest town was about an hour away. It didn’t look very old, but it was already abandoned. I had been instructed to park on the backside of the building. Once there I noticed that there was a reserved parking space. There was something strapped to the sign in front of the space however.
I pulled in and approached the sign. The item attached to the parking sign was a tablet. It had a timer on it. It was seemingly counting down the hour I had had left to arrive. I tried operating the tablet, but it didn’t cooperate. It seemed like I would have a little time to relax before receiving my instructions.
I rested my eyes while I waited for the timer to tick down. It would have been a bit ironic if I fell asleep now. Luckily, that didn’t happen. I opened my eyes just as the timer was about to hit 0. Once it did the tablet opened up and began to play a video. This is what is said:
“Welcome, we’re glad to see you made it on time. You are probably wondering why we instructed you to come here. The building in front of you will be your arena for this round. Your match-up for this round is on the opposite side of the building. Any weapons you find inside the building will be viable for this round. Any use of outside weapons will result in disqualification. Only one can remain. Good luck!”
On that note, the video ended. I’m not sure if it was the sleep deprivation, but I was a bit confused at first. My senses came to me quick though, and I sprinted off towards the building.
I didn’t want to run in to my opponent too early, so I searched for a staircase first, and climbed a couple flights of stairs. The building was 10 stories high, so I climbed to the 5th and began to look for some sort of weapon.
The rooms were mostly empty. Finding a usable weapon wasn’t easy. I managed to find a decent sized pipe in one of the bathrooms on the floor. I also found throwing stars by one of the windows on the floor, but I had no experience with them. So I left them. I wouldn’t be able to make use of them, and they would just take up space. It seemed like this floor was a dud.
I went back to the staircase and climbed two more floors. Lucky number 7 right? Just before I entered the door, I heard the door at the bottom of the staircase swing open. Looks like my opponent was done with the first floor. I prayed it had been a dud like my floor had been.
The 7th floor would turn out to be quite lucky after all. In the corner of one of the empty rooms was a wooden baseball bat with a gift ribbon attached to it. I dropped the pipe in exchange for the bat. The pipe was heavier, but the range of the bat was much better, and it was much easier to grip on to. In one of the rooms that appeared to be an office space I found a satchel containing an assortment of smaller knives.
As long as my opponent hadn’t found something crazy like a gun, then I thought I had a decent chance. I wasn’t sure if I should confront him now, or continue searching for something better. That would also give him time to search though, and I had no clue what weapons he had already picked up.
I decided I would search the 10th floor, and after that I would confront whoever I was up against.
When I entered the 10th floor I was immediately greeted with a new weapon. It was a bow. There were only two arrows next to it. I had never shot a bow before, unless video games count. I had to take it though. This was my best chance at a ranged weapon.
I searched the rest of the floor, but there didn’t seem to be anything more useful than what I already had. As I was making my way back to the staircase I began to hear footsteps. Someone was approaching. I quickly found a corner to hide behind, and I waited.
When I heard the person reach the top of the stairs I peeked around the corner. The person I was looking at was a very large man. He looked like he could be an NFL linebacker. He was wearing a hockey mask, and in his left hand was a machete. Seriously?
I got caught up in the moment and stared too long, because soon enough his eyes locked with mine. He raised the machete and pointed it at me as he slowly began to walk towards me.
I took this opportunity to string the first of the two arrows. I aimed it directly at him and fired. He didn’t even try to dodge, but he didn’t need to. The arrow veered off to the side, coming nowhere close to the man. It turns out shooting a bow is much harder than it looks in video games.
I made the executive decision to run further back in to the floor. As I began to do so I felt a sharp pain in my right leg. I almost immediately tripped and I found myself on the floor. On the ground I could now see the throwing star sticking out of my calf. Maybe I should have taken them after all.
I could tell it was in quite deep, and I wouldn’t be able to run. The man continued to get closer. I had no choice but to attempt to use the second arrow. I pulled it back as he was only about 10 feet away. This time I managed to hit him directly in the center of his chest. This didn’t seem to faze him too much however. He continued menacingly walking towards me. Was this guy actually Jason?
I began to scoot myself backwards as I tried to think of something I could do. It was no good. Soon the man was standing almost directly over me. He moved his machete overhead and began to swing it down.
Last second I was able to move the baseball bat in front of the swing. I’m not sure what wood this bat was made out of, but it was able to withstand the blow from the machete. The machete was now lodged halfway in to the bat.
I used this miracle as an opportunity to use my good leg to kick the man in the groin as hard as I possibly could. This caught him off guard and he toppled over to the ground for just a moment. That was all I needed.
I jumped on his back like a wild animal as I pulled one of the knives from my satchel. I began to stab the man over and over. I continued to stab him even after he went limp. It wasn’t until I noticed the blade had become dull that I finally stopped.
I rolled over and took a good look at my leg. The star was even deeper than I first thought. I bit down on my shirt as I slowly began to pull it out. It was the most painful experience I’ve ever had. Once the start came out my leg began to spew blood. I cut off part of my shirt and used it to hold together the wound on my leg, it would have to do for now. I would have to stitch it up later myself.
I painfully limped my way down 10 flights of stairs back to my car. When I got back in my vehicle the tablet I had been given was now flashing. I opened it to find my victory message:
“That was a close call, but you managed to pull it off! We’re excited to welcome you to Round 4!”
Round 4
There are now less than 10 people left in the sick game I’ve been dragged in to. I’ve killed 2 people with my own hands. I just barely scraped past the last round. I really shouldn’t be alive, but somehow I still am.
I had to stitch together my leg on my own. I could have made up some excuse at a hospital, but I didn’t want to take the risk. I had taken a high school class that gave me the basics of sewing. I just had to watch a few tutorials on YouTube, and a few bottles of liquor later my leg was as good as new. I just have to hope it doesn’t get infected.
I’ve noticed I’m starting to lose more of myself. If I were to die now I’m not sure I would care. Just as long as my parents were released. I’ve been able to sleep again. I expected night terrors, but I haven’t experienced them yet.
I quit my job. I couldn’t keep making up excuses for why I was missing. Despite this, money has still been flowing in to my bank account. I can guess where it’s coming from. It’s just enough to pay my bills and feed myself. This gave me more time to dedicate to research, and allowed me to rest my leg.
When the fourth envelope arrived two weeks later, |
Part One
The wind howled like a the forgotten cries of a madman as it came whipping down from the high mountains, flushing the valley with the bitter cold that all winter’s bring. Herds of Blackhorned Elk huddled together, eyes keeping vigilant against the creatures that stalked the night, and the creatures that would try and stalk the young they had encircled within their ranks. Their great horns, easily wide enough to handle even the largest of bears or the nimblest of wolves, were covered in thin sheets of frost, icicles dangling from their shaggy coats which provided them some measure of protection from the primordial cold that seemed to seep through Wetterstein Mountains every winter’s night.
The largest of the elk, a male that stood twice as tall as a man, raised his head as, over the shrieking winds, he heard the movements of the beast that the herd had come to fear; a beast they had always feared. He snorted loudly, drawing the other males’ attention, shifting his horns slightly to motion into the darkness around them. The woods were heavy with snow and ice, but the hoof-carved paths were still passable to those long of leg, and strong of spirit. Unlike the strange fire-walkers of the stone forests dotting the mountains, the Great Elk could see fairly well in the dark. Sitting at just the edge of his vision, was the horror that had stalked his herd for the past three nights.
A tall, hairless beast that stood not on four legs but two, like the fire-walkers. But unlike the frail little creatures, this being’s arms reached the ground as it stood, stooped over a snow covered boulder, watching the herd as a hungry wolf might. But this creature was far more dangerous than any wolf that the Great Elk had ever encountered; it moved with an almost unfathomable speed, sometimes using its gangly arms to grip a low branch and swing forward as it would chase you down. Other times it would stalk you for days, leaving naught a trace of its existence save for the faint smell of the rotting flesh caught between its thin, black teeth in its vertical, flat maw that split the center of its head down the middle.
The herd had been unable to sleep or rest due to this creature’s relentless pursuit, doggedly keeping pace with their own, always allowing its presence to be felt. The last time the herd had relaxed, it had claimed two calves, one in each massive hand, before stalking off into the darkness. The tortured cries of the calf’s had lasted all night, and the Great Elk had been forced numerous times to keep the cows from going out into the darkness to try and save them.
He knew a trap when he saw one.
Just as dawn had broken this morning the calves had finally fallen silent and upon further investigation, the herd had been most distraught to find both hanging from the trees a scant few yards from where they had been standing all night, pinned to the thick branches by their own splintered ribs, chests left wide open and organs, now laying in rime-laden pools beneath them. Large sections of their backs and legs were missing, torn free by the beasts’ horrible maw though a good deal of glistening meat still sat frozen on the twin corpses, untouched by the strange creature.
Now it sat there, leaning back on the corded muscles of its haunches, watching the herds every movement with six yellow slated eyes positioned around the creatures bizarre mouth. It was slowly scooping snow into its right hand, a wide and cruel tool ending in three barbed talons, letting the wet mess slide through into a messy pile at its hooves. The Great Elk could smell the rotting meat of its own, knowing that the smell was coming from the beasts own breath. It was taunting him…
Well, it would taunt him no longer!
The Great Elk burst into a sprint, head lowered in preparation of ramming the creature with its sharpened horns. Three young bucks were right beside him, running headlong in a straight formation that they had used a number of times to trample wolves that had proven too brave or hungry for their own good. A small tree shattered into splinters as the elk’s left horn caught it, severing it at shoulder height and sending it crashing down into the deeper recesses of the forest. Several more joined it as several tons of solid muscle quickly closed in on the strange monster, which had yet to even acknowledge the charging menace closing in upon it.
And then it was upon them, leaping over their sharpened horns and hardened skulls, slashing at the flanks of two of the brave young bucks that had charged along with him. The talons ignored their frozen shell of fur and thickened hide, tearing deep gashes open with but the barest of ease, the air now taking on the sickening scent of copper and fear. The young buck didn’t even have a chance to shriek in pain, as the beast was immediately upon it, gripping his horns and twisting violently about, snapping his neck like so many dry twigs beneath a hoof. As he twisted the dislocated skull of the cool corpse about, he rammed it into the chest of another young elk, causing the sharpened bits of horn to rend through his surprised brethren in a most horrid manner, a crimson spray of freezing mist rising up and painting the grey monster’s face with spattered traces of fur and meat.
The Great Elk watched in horror as the beast dispatched the last of his younger comrades, breaking its back with a mighty leap from the connected corpses of his younger brethren. The buck yelped in agony in sync with the sound of his upper spin snapping, just before his head was torn free from cords of thickened muscle and sinew, only to be tossed aside carelessly as the monster casually stepped down from the collapsing body, staring balefully with all six yellow slits into to the eyes of the Great Elk.
And for the first time in countless seasons, the greatest elk in the herd felt fear. And as he tried desperately to gore the offending monster as it somehow appeared beside him, he howled in anguish and frustration as he felt his front two legs snap, dropping him suddenly to the sloshy red snow with a sickening thud. Kicking and bucking in vain, all he could do was wail and cry, doing his best to let the herd know he’d failed in his charge, failed to keep them safe, and that they needed to run before they too became the creature’s next meal.
As the warmth of life slowly gave way to the chill of winter, the cold snow pressed around the Great Elk’s muzzle stained red with his own blood, he could hear the crunching of the snow as the monster slowly padded its way around his body, until the great hooves stopped in his direct line of vision. The pain was intense, and from his vantage point on the ground he could only see one of his severed legs and up to the first joint of the creatures pale, muscled leg, but the Great Elk could sense the predatory eyes wandering over his body, wondering where next would be the best to cut into, where the Great Elk had the juiciest selections of savory flesh he could sample.
The Great Elk was to die and he knew it, because he’d been too sure of himself and his own strength. His younger brethren too had fallen prey to their own confidence; foolishly rushing the monster that had proven too strong for them, proven it was as cunning as any wolf and as strong as any bear. Their pride had led to their, and by extension the herds, destruction, this the Great Elk knew…
And then the Great Elk knew nothing.
Part Two
The Beast snarled as he pulled his hoof noisily from the crushed mess that had once been the strange animal’s skull, enjoying the sucking noise that came along with the sensation of the creatures grey matter sticking messily to his sharpened hooves. He’d wandered into this valley weeks ago and been overjoyed at the fact that it was so full of life, despite the freezing conditions of the season. Everywhere he went he could find animals to hunt, from the great horned deer like these to the gigantic black-furred bears that seemed to dwell in every sizable cave worth noting. He’d even had the chance to stalk some creatures similar to the Hell Hounds back home, great grey-furred creatures made of nothing but toughened sinew and fang.
He snarled as he yanked one of the great antlers free of the fractured mess, shaking it a few times to free it of the hanging flesh and fur still connected to it. A worthy trophy for his growing collection! On his third night in this strange mountain chain he’d located a suitable lair, a large cave (of course inhabited by a pair of unimpressive bears that had quickly become the beginning of a large pile of semi-tanned furs that the Beast was now using as a bed) that had several smaller chambers leading deeper into the mountainside. It’d become a new shrine to pain and pride, two of the greater sins that the Beast thrived upon; he’d been slowly creating an arsenal of primitive torture devices, carved from the harvested bones of his kills, as well as numerous small tables and chairs that would serve him well in future endeavors, when he finally worked up the courage to try and raid one of the human settlements dotting the numerous valleys in the surrounding area.
The Beast grinned at the thought of his future victims, lazily lapping at the sizzling hot spittle leaking from his mouth with a sinuous tongue. But no, he decided, pulling back to the here and now. Now was not the time to daydream, not with dawn approaching. He’d made do the past few days by burrowing into large snow banks, to avoid the harsh rays of the sun. With terrible thoughts of torture and pain echoing throughout his dirty mind, the Beast grabbed hold of one of the deer’s remaining legs, slinging the heavy beast over his shoulder and onto his sloped back: home was but a few minutes away if he were able to travel through the trees, and dragging the beast back would most definitely leave a suspicious trail that he wanted to avoid.
For now.
While the Beast didn’t fear humans (he feared nothing!) he knew revealing his presence now could lead to complications for further hunts, further games of sport. And the Beast would not have any of that. He hadn’t seen a human that he was allowed to harm in over a decade, and while in the long term his slight sojourn into this valley might be viewed as treasonous, a fresh supply of fear and pain were too much for the Beast to simply ignore and walk away… or worse, fall back and report their location! Then his brethren would come, swallowing up the whole lot of them like a swarm of locust over a budding crop of wheat.
And that simply wouldn’t do. No, he would take his time here and sup on the unspoiled Eden for as long as possible. If push came to shove, he would do as all his kind did and merely lie, and offer whatever survivors remained to his Lord in exchange for mercy. For now, he had a good enough reason to remain within the valley, away from the rest of his Clan.
The Beast grunted as it leaped into the air, one clawed hand clamped over his heavy burden while the other sought purchase on a frost-coated branch. His hooves dug into the bark of the trunk with the ease of fire through wax, and he steadily scaled the tall tree until reaching a branch sturdy enough to hold him aloft.
Down below, he could see the rest of the herd of deer moving in to sniff at the corpses of their heroes, looking about in wonder at what had felled their greatest with such ease. Their fear wafted high and thick, filling the Beast with a sense of ease that nothing else could sate. He lingered for a few moments longer, allowing their fear to fill his gullet, satiating a great thirst he had been harboring for days now. The two younglings had served well enough for an evening’s worth of entertainment, but their fear had vanished far too quickly, instead replaced by a sense of morbid confusion that all animals seemed to get when being tortured.
They just didn’t understand, the poor things…
They had served well enough the slaking the lust for fear just long enough for the Beast to hunt another night, their pain giving him more than enough to feed off of for the time being.
A sharp crack echoed through the silent woods, causing the Beast to whip his head about to look for the source of the noise, spreading out his senses in hopes of catching a new source of fun that he could bring home with him. Dozens of small rodents and birds were close by, hiding within their hollow burrows in the ground and in the trees, and the deer were milling about below, not sure what they should do now that their alpha had been slain… but nothing else. Strange, the Beast thought as his eyes scanned the forest floor. What made that noise then?
The answer came in the form of a three-foot arrow snapping through the air, piercing straight through the meaty corpse of the deer on his back and through into his own chest cavity. Humans! The Beast howled to the sky, letting go of the deer and allowing it to slide from his back. He had no need of it now if he had humans to hunt!
Sadly, this was not a great idea (which the Beast quickly realized) as the great weight of the deer, which had been so carefully balanced on his back during his ascent into the trees, was now drifting backwards at an alarming rate. This wouldn’t be a problem if the damned arrow that had just struck him hadn’t pinned the animal to his back as well. The Beast flailed its arms about, wind milling them in hopes of gaining balance, but to no avail; he toppled backwards and began his second great fall from the sky (though this one was far less dramatic, if the Beast took but a moment to ponder upon it).
He landed roughly in the midst of the grieving herd, landing hard atop the corpse of one of the smaller horned deer with a pained grunt as the dead creatures horns dug into his side rather painfully. Belly down, the Beast could only grunt again as three more arrows embedded themselves in his back, further pinning the dead weight of his latest trophy to him in a most undignified manner. Growling, he pushed himself onto his hooves and stood high, spreading his arms out wide and letting loose a bellowing roar. If the humans thought their meager arrows were of any consequence to him, they were sorely mistaken.
His eyes could see them now, there dark silhouettes concealed by the trees that they stood by. Each wore a solid white smock over boiled leather jerkins, their faces covered by white leather masks topped with wide-brimmed hats and ending in long, hooked noses. The Beast grew more excited as he took in the sight before him.
Ravens.
He had stumbled upon a secluded set of valleys that just so happened to house his mortal enemies, humanities last true hope at reclaiming their world… oh the delicious irony! The Beast let loose a deep laugh, swatting at his knees as he fought to contain his mirth.
“You win little birds…” He shouted to them in Aramaic, already noting with general unease the tingling in his back where the first arrow had pierced him. His prize package had absorbed the brunt of the arrows damage, as well as the majority of the poison that the arrowhead was drenched in. The following three arrows, while all having a similar issue, would be more than enough to subdue him. The more he moved, the faster it would spread. “Come on out and claim your prize!”
Their response was another round of arrows into his chest, this time from the front and without having to pass through any other material other than the Beast’s hardened hide itself. He hissed in pleasure as the arrows sank deep into the thickly corded muscle of his upper torso, the pain quickly ebbing away as the poison quickly spread, numbing all of his nerves at a rapid rate.
“Have you no questions for me, little birds? I’ve heard tales of how you like to question us before killing, in hopes of learning our ways.” He continued, dropping to one knee as he lost control of the leg. “I would think you all have earned but a simple answer from me, for my lack of thought and carelessness.”
They remained as silent as the grave as they watched him collapse into the snow, remaining still until the Beasts breathing became heavy and labored.
“No questions then?” He gasped, still shouting out to any who would listen. “Then do what would have saved your people centuries ago and seal the deal! Your sin of pride will be, and has been, your downfall… as surely as it has been mine.”
Three more cracks echoed through the snow-laden woods, the last of the herd of black-horned deer scattering as the Beast’s vision darkened.
And then the Beast knew nothing.
Part Three
The last three arrows we had fired into the demon had pierced its skull and neck, one going through the upper part of its mouth, another piercing one of its many eyes, the last embedding itself in its neck. I’d have to lecture Jonathan about his aim later, as the neck shot was virtually useless in any instance but this.
I motioned for Jonathan to move forward with me, using prepared hand signs to tell Samuel to keep guard. He nodded once before notching another arrow in his longbow, aiming straight at the great demons back while Jonathan and I moved forward. The beast had been bellowing in its last few seconds of life though for the life of me I haven’t a clue what it was saying. The elders back home say they all speak the language of God, referring to it as the Old Tongue… I don’t really know about any of that though. I never cared for any of that spiritual talk… if these creatures were truly fallen angels, the remains of some great race of creatures that an all-powerful being created to serve him, I doubt that we would stand any kind of chance against them.
As we approach the demons prone form, I stop every few feet to look at the small gem dangling from my wrist, hoping against hope that it would continue to diminish in brightness. Rosary Beads, as we like to call them, glow in the presence of evil (so the Elders say). I don’t know about all of that, but they sure as hell light up if any demon comes within fifty miles of us. Not the best security system in the world as they can’t really tell us where the intruding demon is, or if it’s one or a thousand of them; just that there is a demon within fifty miles, the light growing brighter the closer you get to them.
Despite their rather glaring fault in detection, they did have one added benefit that I find particularly helpful: they don’t shine around dead demons. And my Rosary is growing dimmer by the second.
Jonathan slides a bit over some ice-slickened path, stumbling forward clumsily into my shoulder. I glare at him and shove him back. “Dumb bastard! Stay back and be prepared for anything… I know this is your first night on patrol, but that’s no excuse to be so damned stupid!”
Jonathan’s face is just as covered as mine, but after years of staring into similar masks I can sense the sneer behind the hood. “The demon’s dead, no need to be so paranoid Ivan. What’s it gonna do, come back to life?”
“…just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” I quoted from memory, watching the demon’s corpse slowly gather small flecks of falling snow over its pale hide. “You’ll find that anything we call a demon can surprise you. Better safe than sorry, you know?”
Jonathan remained silent as we stopped a few yards from the corpse. The Rosary dangling from my wrist had finally grown dull, now merely a darkened red opal dangling from a silver chain in place of the small crimson sun that had been glowing for the past few days. I heaved a sigh of relief, waving the all clear sign to Samuel, as well as an order to break camp in the boughs of one of the many Silver Fir’s around us; we deserved a rest after this hunt, and a day of sleep followed by a night under the stars worry free as we returned to the Nest would indeed be a fine gift.
“Hey,” Jonathan piped up, having approached the abominations corpse, kicking it idly with the tip of his boot. “Why’d it take the deer with it?”
I merely shrug as I pull my bow over my shoulder and begin to rebind the Rosary chain around my wrist. “Trophy probably. They tend to gather little trinkets, or parts, from the things they kill.”
“Why?” Jonathan asked, kneeling over the corpse, poking at it errantly with a heavy-hilted dagger. “Don’t they just exist to kill, to reap the souls of His children?”
I fight back a sigh and enjoy the confines of my own hood as I roll my eyes at the little fanatic. I may be a Raven, but I’m hardly a believer in everything the old texts claim; Hell, I sometimes even doubt whether or not He really exists, what with the way the world has fallen into such disarray.
“They live to hunt yes, but they have lives outside of that,” I answer after a few moments of watching the snow fall about, drifting through the pitch black lazily around us. “Most take up art, actually.”
“Art?” Jonathan asked with surprise, struggling to lift the dead demons heavy three-clawed hand.
“Well, what they call art at least,” I mutter with a shrug, still watching the snow fall, eyes wandering the horizon, in search of… something. “They derive sustenance from pain in the way we do from dry bread, but each demon hungers for something else, something far more sinister. They hunger for the emotional aspects of at least one of the Seven Sins.”
“Like envy and lust?” Jonathan asked with a hint of disgust, dropping the claw to the ground as if it had suddenly become something toxic.
Well, more toxic.
I shrug again. “Those are far rarer from what I’ve read; most feed off of things like anger or fear, things that they can easily instill in victims that they take captive.”
“I didn’t know demons took captives,” Jonathan said with a low whistle, shuffling around the body to look at the creatures ruined head. “Cor, this thing is hideous.”
“Yeah, they tend to be a little disturbing to look at.” I dryly comment as I walk past him, smacking him upside the head. “Just retrieve the arrows and sever the head; don’t need this thing pulling a resurrection on us. Plus proof of a slain demon, easy sixty crowns for that.”
“That’s twenty a piece!” Jonathan exclaimed before pulling out his dagger once more, taking a firm grip of one of the arrows lodged in the skull to gain better access to the creature’s neck and began sawing. “So you think he has some captives?”
“What?” I say, turning from the horizon to look at him, not really understanding the question.
“Captives. You said they sometimes take captives.” Jonathan explained, nodding his head to the great elk carcass harpooned to the demons back. “And that they don’t eat meat, right? That’s why he’d bring this back, to feed captives.”
“No, they never keep captives long… oh God, he must have someone with him!” I realize suddenly, all plans of a relaxing trip back home now banished from my mind. “Look him over; does he have any markings, like tattoos or anything?”
“Um… yeah, one right here on the back of his claw, burnt into his skin. Why, what’s that mean?” Jonathan said, looking at the prone hand in question, the strange diamond shaped sigil burned into the grey hide standing stark against the white snow and the blackened, simmering blood that was seeping from the demons corpse as he was sawing into thick sinew and tendon.
Crack!
Jonathan launched back several feet as one of our special arrows rocketed from the darkness, ramming into, and through, his chest just beneath his right clavicle with a sickening squelching noise akin to the bursting of a rotting pumpkin. He hit the ground rolling, limbs slack and eyes wide as the life ebbed from them forever.
I roll to the left as another arrow soars past me, crashing through the underbrush behind me. As I roll up into a low crouch, I pull a long edged dagger and a small handheld crossbow; tools ill-advised for use against demons or the undead, but perfect for fighting a human.
“Samuel!” I shout, my voice echoing through the woods as if to mock me, the only response being a sudden torrent of wind and snow whipping through the trees, further obscuring my vision.
“Samuel is mine now, Raven.” A voice silky replies from the darkness, up close to where I’d left the younger man, a deep husky voice that could only belong to a woman. “Though I must thank you, I had wondered what I was going to end up calling him. It suits him.”
“Witch!” I hiss, cursing my arrogance and blatant laziness during the hunt. I could hear my old master in my head now, lecturing me to always check a demon for a mark, to see if it had a mortal servant or worse, a mortal master. If scarred, then they own man. If burned, than man own them.
“Come now little bird, you know you’ve lost; come out and meet the maker you so blindly follow, see if he has a reward for his favorite pet parakeet waiting for him in the afterlife.” The witch haughtily laughs, her voice coming from seemingly everywhere at once. Another arrow whizzes past me, forcing me to seek cover behind a tree.
She’d either enthralled Samuel or worse, killed him and reanimated him; either way he was a lost cause now. The only thing I could worry about was making sure this witch died before dawn… we had only stumbled upon the demon by luck, luck fueled by an old artifact that had given us a heads up. All of the other Ravens would now think the threat was gone and merely wait for me to return, or assume the mission had killed me and my men.
We really don’t have a long life expectancy, so it wouldn’t really be a farfetched idea.
But to leave a Witch roaming free? That was totally unacceptable.
With the mad woman cackling from all directions, I did my best to try and think of a way to kill her, hopefully without getting myself killed in the process. Each of my crossbow bolts was essentially a hollow wooden syringe full of an opium concentrate, while my dagger was coated in silver blessed by a priest on all-hallows eve, smeared with a putty-like mixture of salt, lemon juice and alcohol. Really either weapon would do, assuming I could actually land a blow on her. Sadly, my skills against Witches are hardly up to par.
That was what that fool Jonathan had been brought aboard for, due to his propensity for White Magic; now he was worthless to me, just another cold corpse laying in a freezing pool of his own fluids, due to my own arrogance.
A sudden smile graces my features as I stare at Jonathan’s corpse, a crazy idea coming to mind. Hell, I think morbidly, it’s worth a shot.
Part Four
Jotelf grinned with unholy abandon as she twisted the mind of her newest consort with but a simple gesture of her hand, ordering him to ready his bow for another volley. The coming snow flurries from the high mountains was making it more of a chore than necessary, but Jotelf was more than willing to savor her victory over the supposed protectors of mankind.
The demon they’d slain had been an utter beast to control, and an even bigger pain to command, so while she was truly annoyed at the loss of the asset, she was relieved at the same time
Ensnaring the demon had been a labor of love almost, leaving captured children out in vulnerable areas around a region well known for Demonic activity. Whether a rift to Hell existed somewhere in those hills or it was merely a tribe of demons that had escaped the abyss, Jotelf didn’t care. She could remember slowly coaxing the demon away from its pack before slamming it with some of her most offensive spells, crackling waves of lightning and great mounds of animated earth ripped free from the ground used as battering rams. She’d had to kill three other demons that had been close by before crippling the one she ended up Branding that day.
Now without the constant drain upon her magical reserves, she could begin tooling about with other branches of magic that had always interested her, especially now that she had a whole mountain range of virtually defenseless test subjects, thanks to her efforts well-spent getting into the mountain range.
Floating mere inches above the thick frosting of snow coating the forest floor, Jotelf’s lack of protective wear more than compensated by her own twisted magics, she floated forward to gaze down the slope where her demon had fallen. Just before she was about to call out another taunt to her trapped prey, she gasped in shock and awe as she saw him jogging up the hill, a long spear held in one hand and a curved knife in the other.
“My oh my, you are a stout one aren’t you!” She cried with glee, thinking of all the wonderful games she could play with him. Tugging at Samuel’s strings, she smiled as she mentally ordered him to fire at will, but to try not to kill him outright.
Samuel loosed his arrow; the javelin sized projectile connecting solidly with the lone Raven’s shoulder, causing him to stumble momentarily. His face, if not masked by those ridiculous hoods they all insisted on wearing, was blinded by the coming storm, the twisting winds roiling about them as if it were some behemoths heart beating, the howling winds too loud to even hear the Raven’s scream as the serrated arrowhead pierced his shoulder.
As Samuel cocked another arrow, Jotelf chose to end this charade once and for all, summoning forth her own internal energies into the physical realm, a tortured shriek filling the air as a crackling crimson orb began to form mere inches from her breast. She knew this spell well, having grown quite fond of it due to its propensity to causing widespread damage due to its explosive nature, and its propensity to cause the wounds of those that survived the blast to rapidly become infected.
“Goodbye little bird, I wish I could say you were worth the effort, but I do ever so much hate lying.” She muttered to herself as she swatted the crackling orb towards the advancing form of her enemy, his spear and dagger held low as he tromped up the hill sluggishly. The orb lazily hovered before her before darting forward, bobbing to and fro like a firefly trying to escape the clutches of a hungry bat.
Her aim was off by a few inches, the static orb striking him solidly in the chest rather than near his head. The effect was roughly the same, with a piercing cry and a low keening wail the orb burst like an overripe melon, great arcs of crimson energy lashing out with a razors edge. A font to blood sprayed from the gaping wound where his chest once was, scattered pieces of twisted leather and bits of bone exploding forth from the point of contact, throwing the insolent man back, his weapons falling from hands that were likely now dead.
The howls of the damned filled her ears, a private moment between her and her unholy patron that occurred whenever she tapped into her infernal powers. She’d long ago traded her humanity for something far greater, giving her once meaningless life as a nameless serf a sense of purpose. She shivered with untold lust as the gentle caress of her lord swept across her voluptuous features, down and over her curves like the hands of a lover. He was excited, she could tell.
Excited about receiving a new soul to sup upon. The foolish archer she’d ensnared in her enchantments would remain with her for the time being, as these cretins had actually managed to dispatch her personal guard and she was in need of a new one. But her newly disemboweled Raven now dying in the snow?
Meat for her Master.
Whispering the forbidden words of power, she stalked closer to the steaming corpse before her, once again gathering her mystical energies to serve her sadistic desires; the soul of the recently departed lingered for a time, and for one with the right knowledge, and the right skills, said soul could be bound into service to a Witch of significant enough power, to be used however she wished.
Her power was more than enough to ensnare the loosened soul of this cocky warrior, and a new soul for her infernal master would promise her a night of passion that she would not soon forget. The very thought of it brought a fluttering to her stomach and sudden warmth to her core… licking her lips sensually, she kneeled by the corpse, smiling at the work her spell had done.
The man’s armor had spared him the indignity of being blown to pieces though only just. All of his ribs were charred, with great scores of lines running along them as if someone had taken a knife to them. His insides were merely a cesspool of liquefied organ, a steaming caldron of human waste that was bubbling from the sudden heat of her fiery orb. Muttering the incantation slowly, she dipped a hand into her robe and pulled a crystal vial, dipping it into the impromptu soup she had made from her victim.
Dawn was quickly approaching, and she had yet to have anything to eat thanks largely in part to the pesky birds swooping in on her hunter. While perhaps not the most wholesome of foods she had eaten |
Whether a precocious elementary-schooler or a senior waiting to leave for college, all of us kids in Plainfield found ourselves counting down the days until Mescalune’s Mobile Cinema rolled back into town. There were no advertisements for it posted anywhere — especially not the public notice boards at the library or the town hall. Nor were particular return dates announced after the last screening. Nor did the mobile cinema have a set schedule by which to calibrate our internal clocks. We would always learn of its return from a rumor. Somebody would mention hearing of a showing two towns over, meaning our turn would come tomorrow night; or else someone would have heard on good authority from a friend of a friend that Plainfield would be the next town on the circuit, making next weekend the one we’d all been waiting for. And sure enough, one of those rumors would be true. We’d gather in the fields at the edge of town, and there would be Mr. Mescalune himself, dressed in his tattered top hat and patchwork tuxedo, standing outside the modified trailer that contained the rarest movie house in the world.
We would enter through the back of the trailer — if we were one of the lucky few to be admitted. Inside, the trailer contained a few rows of metal folding chairs welded to the floor, with a narrow aisle stretching down the middle. The chairs faced a stark white wall, onto which a projector dangling from the ceiling would beam whatever film Mr. Mescalune had to show us.
They were always worth seeing. Every one. Because you could see nothing like them anywhere else. Maybe we were biased, since Plainfield didn’t have a movie theater of its own. Or a roller rink. Or an arcade. Or anywhere else for kids to go for entertainment. Our parents weren’t big on such things. All the same, long after some of us had left Plainfield for greener pastures and had seen the kinds of movies everybody else had enjoyed, we had to admit that nothing was ever as exciting as the films of Mr. Mescalune.
We never knew exactly what to expect going in for a screening. Sometimes his films were no more than ten minutes long; others ran for over three hours. We could never recognize the actors and actresses onscreen — partially because we never had the chance to learn about and grow enamored of movie stars through magazines and gossip rags, since anything not a textbook would be confiscated at school. Mostly, though, it was because Mr. Mescalune’s films used no professional actors. Maybe he picked them for their looks, or for the sounds of their voices; maybe his casting selections had no logic whatsoever. It didn’t matter. The actors always showed real emotion in his films, no matter how large or small the role. You could tell they were giving it everything they had. You’d be forgiven for thinking they weren’t faking.
You could be sure of only one thing when you sat down to watch one of Mr. Mescalune’s films: somebody was going to die.
Their death wouldn’t always be gory. Sure, there were the bloody ones: the machete to the skull; the thousand strategic cuts of the razor; the gunshot at close range. Sometimes they went cleanly — garroted by a masked figure, for instance, or left twitching in a chair after drinking a glass of something toxic. Whatever the method, no matter how creative, the filmed death would be more realistic than you could imagine. And so too would be the performance leading up to it — the tears, the pleas, the screams.
That, we thought, was the chief virtue of Mr. Mescalune’s films. How real they were. How true they were. Having endured the blandness and falsehood of the whitewashed novels and television shows our parents forced on us, it felt as if we were seeing the world as it was meant to be seen for the first time in our lives. It was like being born, or reborn. We were all grateful to Mr. Mescalune for it. We greeted the end of each film with a standing ovation, and Mr. Mescalune, ever modest, would doff his grungy hat and give us a low bow.
We never told our parents about Mr. Mescalune. Not only because it would entail revealing that we had sneaked out of our rooms at night, and violated our curfews. We predicted that they’d claim he was the Devil, like they had with our trading card games and fantasy anthologies, and prohibit us from ever visiting him again.
He never charged us money for admission to his screenings. All he asked is that we enter his lottery. To each kid he admitted into the trailer, he provided a paper raffle ticket with a handwritten number on it. Once the film ended and our applause subsided, he’d reach into his hat and fish around inside until his gloved hand emerged holding a slip of paper. He’d read the number in his quiet, soothing voice, and check whether any of our tickets matched it. If none did, he would simply smile, shake hands with anybody who stayed behind to thank him for the show, and let us out into the moonlit fields, where the lingering crowd of the curious unadmitted anxiously questioned us about what we had seen.
For several years, we did not know what would happen if one held a matching ticket.
Then there came the night when Chris P— won the drawing.
Mr. Mescalune reached into his hat like usual, and we scarcely paid attention, accustomed as we were to the slim odds of having the right number. When he announced the winner, half of us didn’t even bother to glance at our tickets. Calm as ever, Mr. Mescalune repeated the number. That was when Chris, sitting in the front row, raised his hand. It was as if lightning had struck us, and melded us to our seats. This was something even more unprecedented than the films we came to see! We started clapping, and Chris stood and nodded to us politely as Mr. Mescalune came over to congratulate him. All of us were eager to learn what Chris’s prize would be, but Mr. Mescalune sent us on our way, keeping only Chris behind. Some of us waited outside the trailer for a long time afterward, but nobody emerged. Given the late hour, we had to head home, lest our families awaken and discover we weren’t where we should have been.
Chris’s absence from school the following day surprised nobody. Who wouldn’t take the day off after staying out so late? When he didn’t appear the day after, we were perplexed. Once an entire week elapsed, we were downright curious. Even so, we didn’t dare tell an adult. What would become of the mobile cinema once they learned of it? For that matter, what would become of us?
We didn’t glimpse Chris again until the next time Mescalune’s Mobile Cinema parked in the outskirts of town. Those of us who gained entry waited eagerly for the projector to warm up and give us what we needed to see. And when it finally flickered to life, dust motes swirling and sparkling in its beam, we beheld none other than Chris P— on the screen before us, sitting shirtless against a concrete wall. We erupted into thunderous applause. Our friend looked more alive on film than he ever had on the streets of Plainfield.
He looked up at the camera and stared forward, as if he were looking into each of our eyes. He knew who we were, after all — he knew we’d be there, watching, enjoying. We could feel that he dedicated this performance to us. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, tentatively, as though he had a monologue to recite, but couldn’t remember any of his lines. After a few attempts, he clenched his jaw, and fixed his gaze someplace beyond the camera. It was like he looked through us at that point. Like we were transparent. Or like we were ghosts. Like something that didn’t exist anymore, because we weren’t real enough to be worth acknowledging.
A shadow fell over the frame from the foreground, climbing up Chris’s face. At first, he stayed expressionless — resigned or stoic or simply refusing to emote. Then a low rumbling burbled over the speakers. Soon it gave way to a loud, unmistakable whir — the sound of a readied chainsaw. The tears began to stream from Chris’s eyes, as if they had a life independent of him. In another minute, the rest of him had caught up, and his body began to shake as he broke into convulsive sobs.
A figure wearing all black, with face obscured beneath a black ski mask, entered the frame. A chainsaw rattled in the figure’s gloved hands. Chris regarded the newcomer, and murmured something inaudible beneath the chainsaw’s whine. The words weren’t important, anyway. He could have narrated a shopping list, and it would have seemed imbued with purpose and meaning and vitality. He had us riveted.
The figure raised the chainsaw over Chris’s head. Our friend closed his eyes, trembling. The blade lowered toward his neck. The figure feinted once, twice. Then, in one powerful downward swing, the chainsaw bit into Chris’s spine. He yelped, but the sound was cut short as the blade did its work. His head flopped forward, then fell to the ground. The figure nudged it out of view, then left the screen.
For a minute and a half, the camera lingered on the headless body. The pool of blood widening beneath it was the sole sign of movement. Then the camera cut to black.
We could feel the realization percolating through us. What we beheld was no ordinary film. A scene that realistic could not have been faked. And gradually it dawned on us that Chris’s screen debut was not the exception, but the rule. Every film we had viewed at Mescalune’s Mobile Cinema documented the final moments of someone’s life. And we understood the price we paid for coming to see it.
We spent a few seconds figuring out how to react. We’d be lying if we said we hadn’t been moved. Somebody began a hesitant clap, and shortly thereafter, everybody else joined. The applause fed on itself, and grew. Some whistled. Others cheered. We were all on our feet within a minute.
And Mr. Mescalune stood beside the movie screen, and bowed, and held out his hat for the lottery drawing.
None of us were picked that night. We all went out into the fields, into the crowd, and relayed what we had learned. We let the news settle over us like fog. We didn’t talk about it, because there was nothing to say. Each of us mulled it over in our own personal silence. When we dispersed, all the stars in the sky glowed more brightly as we walked home.
Not one of us has drawn the winning number since Chris P— all those years ago.
But the night may yet come.
Because, even though we know the great secret of Mescalune’s Mobile Cinema, we have never missed a screening.
And the crowd that gathers at the edge of town for a chance to see one of Mr. Mescalune’s films is larger every time he visits.
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It was 4:03 in the morning and I woke up screaming. It was my dream. In my dream, I watched everyone I ever knew or loved be killed by the creature. It had a short fat body, and long slender arms, which ended with claws that looked more like swords than claws. Its eyes were slits that glowed red in the darkness, and its teeth were long like horns, and sharp like steak knives. It looked at me before it killed them, and laughed each time before it ripped apart my loved ones with its sharp claws. How had it found us? It tricked me into letting it into my home, by mimicking the voice of my father; it couldn’t come in without permission it told me after it ripped out my Mother’s heart. The dream ended with the creature laughing its evil cackle and slowly walking towards me, dragging its claws on the floor, I screamed, and sat up. I was in my room, in my bed, safe again. 4:03, I hear a knock at the door, I froze up instantly.
“Tommy, I heard you screaming, are you alright?” I heard my mother say. What a relief, Mom’s here.
“I’m fine Mom, just a bad dream” I replied, the relief washing over me
“Okay honey, I got you a glass of water, do you want it? Mom said back to me
“Sure, come in” I said. And as those words left my mouth, I remembered that it was September, and I had moved back into my college dorm 3 weeks ago.
Credit To – Hunter
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I was with two of my friends Ben and Nick on holidays when it happened.
We were in an isolated part of Greece, somewhere that doesn’t show up on Google maps for some reason, travelling down a long stretch of road in our hire car in search of the next major city to party in. After initially planning on driving through the night, we accepted that we had lost our way and it was getting too dark to continue so we pulled into a gas station for directions on where we could stay. The old man handed us an old brochure of a nearby village and insisted we go check it out. Since we were completely lost, we were left with no other option. Something different we thought, but just how different we could never have guessed, as we took the next left turn and ventured into the headlight lit darkness.
The only form of lodging out there was in remote cabins, separated far apart from each other for privacy we guessed. The self-contained cabin had a bathroom, kitchen, queen bed and single bed; all that we needed for one night. Nick won the rock off for the single bed, so Ben and I would be sharing. Nick snores anyway, so I was cool with that.
One feature of the cabin that unnerved me however, was the large square curtainless window that occupied the entire area of the vacant wall. It bothered me especially now because night had fallen and the light was on inside, so it acted as a sort of two-way mirror. Anyone wearing black could easily look through without being noticed…
We made plans to go out that night to the village bar, have some drinks, tell stories and see where the night takes us. We discussed that would leave the key under the rock by the front porch, and if we were to split up, whoever came home first would leave the door open for the others to get in.
“Why don’t you say it louder so everyone can hear where we hide it,” Ben joked.
To which Nick found the pleasure in yelling it at the top of his lungs. Luckily our cabin was isolated out here and there was no one close by, I thought to myself as we drove off…
It was a surprisingly fun night at the bar. We had plenty of shots of the local drink Ouzo, until the bar staff informed us we had drunk their stocks dry; it was cheap though, in Greece.
The next thing I knew, it was late, the bar was closing, and we had lost Ben. He must’ve left without us, though I don’t remember him telling us he was leaving I thought, slightly concerned by him acting out of character. So we left without him, taking the car.
“I need to piss badly,” I adjusted in my seat, as the car headlights momentarily lit up the cabin and we turned into the driveway to the sound of gravel crunching under the tyres. We checked under the rock for the key. It was gone. We tried the doorhandle. Locked. “What the fuck?” we both looked at each other. Ben must’ve come home before us, and he’s locked us out!
“BEN! OPEN UP! We need to piss!”
“Hurry up Ben!”
We banged on the door. I heard a stumbling inside like someone literally crawling awkwardly on all fours out of bed. Damn he must be drunk!
“I can’t hold this piss in anymore,” I said, as Nick and I went to separate sides of the cabin to urinate as Ben finally opened the door. It felt good urinating, but that feeling was harshly interrupted by what caught my attention on the large window, sending a large shiver up my spine. There was this long thin set of handprints, only visible on the window from the mist outside. It looked longer than any human’s hand, but much, much thinner. “Holy shit,” but I quickly cleared my mind of the scary and irrational images it was creating, as it was certainly just a regular human hand that had been smeared, causing the illusion that it’s longer… Right? Either way, it occurred to me that someone or ‘something’ might have been watching us…
I hurriedly finished my business and rushed inside. We are NOT turning the light on I thought, to prevent anything from looking in at us. As I locked the front door and we went straight to bed.
Nick fell asleep instantly, snoring before his head had even hit the pillow. And after a few minutes of tolerating Nick’s inconsistent snore, my drooping eyes fell weary so I closed them. As soon as they shut, I couldn’t help but get the burning feeling that Ben’s eyes had opened suddenly and were staring straight at me…menacingly. My body rose in temperature and my heart beat quicker as I sensed this. As if Ben was holding his breath, vision fixated on me angrily through the darkness. Sorry if we hadn’t gone home with him, jeez… why would he be so angry? After a few minutes of calming myself from this irrational fear, I drifted off to sleep.
Knock Knock Knock “Open up, you said you wouldn’t lock it!”
THUD THUD THUD! It grew louder. “Open the door its fucking cold out here!”
This was the single scariest moment of my entire life. And the most paralyzing sensation swept over my entire body. It was Ben at the door.
Suddenly there was a movement in the sheets next to me… Something stirring.
I got up faster than I ever have in my life and ran to the door; Nick had awoken and come to the same horrific realization as soon as me, right behind me in kicking the door open and fleeing outside to the car, not once did we look back. I started the car and beckoned Ben to follow. But he didn’t know what had happened. Still facing into the room he turned on the light to see inside…
This was a true story. It really happened. You can ask Nick if you don’t believe me. But I wouldn’t ask Ben. He doesn’t say much anymore after the incident. And whenever questioned about what he saw that night, his face turns pale and expressionless and he will immediately shut the nearest curtain.
Credit To: Jack
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In 1983, a team of deeply pious scientists conducted a radical experiment in an undisclosed facility. The scientists had theorized that a human without access to any senses or ways to perceive stimuli would be able to perceive the presence of God. They believed that the five senses clouded our awareness of eternity, and without them, a human could actually establish contact with God by thought. An elderly man who claimed to have “nothing left to live for” was the only test subject to volunteer. To purge him of all his senses, the scientists performed a complex operation in which every sensory nerve connection to the brain was surgically severed. Although the test subject retained full muscular function, he could not see, hear, taste, smell, or feel. With no possible way to communicate with or even sense the outside world, he was alone with his thoughts.
Scientists monitored him as he spoke aloud about his state of mind in jumbled, slurred sentences that he couldn’t even hear. After four days, the man claimed to be hearing hushed, unintelligible voices in his head. Assuming it was an onset of psychosis, the scientists paid little attention to the man’s concerns.
Two days later, the man cried that he could hear his dead wife speaking with him, and even more, he could communicate back. The scientists were intrigued, but were not convinced until the subject started naming dead relatives of the scientists. He repeated personal information to the scientists that only their dead spouses and parents would have known. At this point, a sizable portion of scientists left the study.
After a week of conversing with the deceased through his thoughts, the subject became distressed, saying the voices were overwhelming. In every waking moment, his consciousness was bombarded by hundreds of voices that refused to leave him alone. He frequently threw himself against the wall, trying to elicit a pain response. He begged the scientists for sedatives, so he could escape the voices by sleeping. This tactic worked for three days, until he started having severe night terrors. The subject repeatedly said that he could see and hear the deceased in his dreams.
Only a day later, the subject began to scream and claw at his non-functional eyes, hoping to sense something in the physical world. The hysterical subject now said the voices of the dead were deafening and hostile, speaking of hell and the end of the world. At one point, he yelled “No heaven, no forgiveness” for five hours straight. He continually begged to be killed, but the scientists were convinced that he was close to establishing contact with God.
After another day, the subject could no longer form coherent sentences. Seemingly mad, he started to bite off chunks of flesh from his arm. The scientists rushed into the test chamber and restrained him to a table so he could not kill himself. After a few hours of being tied down, the subject halted his struggling and screaming. He stared blankly at the ceiling as teardrops silently streaked across his face. For two weeks, the subject had to be manually rehydrated due to the constant crying. Eventually, he turned his head and, despite his blindness, made focused eye contact with a scientist for the first time in the study. He whispered “I have spoken with God, and he has abandoned us” and his vital signs stopped. There was no apparent cause of death.
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FACILITY ARCHIVE RECORDS SEARCH – SEARCHING…
SEARCHING…
SEARCHING…
COMPLETE – FOUND 19 RESULTS FOR SEARCH TERMS “Patient #0017983″
CHRONOLOGICAL LISTINGS FOLLOW:
1.) ADMISSION FORM, PATIENT #0017983 – 11/18/05 15:12
Involuntary admittance requested by patient’s relatives in response to apparent self-destructive behavior cycle. Self-harm evident in physical exam: signs of past abrasions on head and neck, apparently due to self-inflicted scratching, and both fresh and partially-closed surface lacerations on arms and legs. Signs of extreme fatigue also evident – in examination patient admitted insomnia for, as quoted, “longer than you’d believe.” Patient unable to give exact time for length of insomnia, likely due to extended period of insomnia itself. Confusion and moderate delerium evident. PRELIMINARY MEDICATION ISSUED: Triazolam 0.25mg for insomnia, topical Bacitracin for wound care.
2.) ADMISSION EVALUATION, PATIENT #0017983 – 11/18/05 16:56
PERFORMED BY: Dr. Emil Lafayette. Self-harm confirmed. Patient removed dressings from arm lacerations, reopened wound while waiting for interviewer. Definite evidence of somniphobia in patient justifications for harm; patient refers to sleep with anxiety, and consistently acts against self to cause pain in response to lengthy periods of silence or other lack of stimuli. Issue of insomnia needs immediate attention, given evidence of exceedingly prolonged duration. Likewise possible agoraphobia. Patient requests an isolated bed, becomes withdrawn/agitated when request is denied, refuses to cooperate further with interview. Offers vague suggestion of hostile “other” in justification, but will not elaborate, as quoted, “because you’re not going to believe she exists until she hurts someone anyway.” Evidence for likely paranoid schizophrenia. Recommend further interview with full psychological spectrum testing for exact diagnosis. FINAL RECOMMENDATION: ADMIT PATIENT. PRELIMINARY MEDICATION ISSUED: Cancel Triazolam, instead 5mg Diazepam twice daily for insomnia, anxiety, and probable sleep disorders.
3.) FINAL ADMITTANCE REPORT, PATIENT #0017983 – 11/18/05 17:13
Patient issued bed in Room 409. Current occupant(s): Patient #0017802, Patient #0017983. Clothes from admission remanded to family of patient, three sets of common dress issued for immediate needs. Further psych eval scheduled for 10:00 11/19/05, determining future length of stay.
4.) WARD EVENT REPORT – 11/18/05 17:30
During routine new patient room check, Patient #0017802 places request with staff for transfer to, as quoted, “some other room.” Appears agitated, claims Patient #0017983 has been disturbing him. Patient #0017983 likewise requests transfer, to isolated bed. Both requests denied. ORDERLY NOTE: Followup room check suggested to avoid possible intrapatient conflict.
5.) WARD EVENT REPORT – 11/18/05 19:00
Followup room check. Patient #0017983 claims Dr. Lafayette has ordered him moved to Isolation. Patient #0017802 backs claim. Administration records demonstrate no such order. Upon informing room occupants, Patient #0017983 attempts to assault staff and Patient #0017802 becomes uncontrollably agitated. Additional personnel required to contain incident. Both patients restrained, sedated, forced into early lights out. ORDERLY NOTE: Exercise caution in all future room checks for 409.
6.) WARD EVENT REPORT – 11/18/05 23:57
Staff on Hall 1, Floor 4 report loud sounds from room 409 after facility lights out, disturbing other rooms and patients. Patient #0017983 found awake, extremely agitated and struggling against restraints. Demands lights be turned back on, as quoted, “before she comes.” Self-sustained injuries to wrists and ankles at points of restraint. Patient attempts to struggle against staff during trade to more comprehensive restraint, requiring additional personnel to contain incident. Additional sedation required for Patient #0017983. Patient #0017802 does not respond during course of event, likely due to sedation from earlier incident. ORDERLY NOTE: Maintain restraints on Patient #0017983 until further notice. Sedate patient before removing restraints for any reason. Recommend anti-psychotic be considered in future psych eval.
7.) WARD EVENT REPORT – 11/19/05 00:20
Staff on Hall 1, Floor 4 again report loud sounds from room 409. Patient #0017983 found catatonic on floor, with severe self-inflicted scratches on head and neck. Restraints are severed at connection points, with severe bruising on limbs possibly indicating more severe injury at restraint points with patient. Patient #0017802 is found deceased. Severe disfiguring wounds to face, complete with destruction (ORDERLY NOTE: Ingestion?) of patient’s eyes. Moved to room 101, locker 2, awaiting autopsy. Patient #0017983 transfered to Isolation, room 626, given injected dose of 100mg Zuclopenthixol on attending physician’s orders to control acute psychosis. ORDERLY NOTE: Recommend video observation to allow better control of future outbursts. Stay at least an arm’s length away from patient upper body restraints at all times. Just in case.
8.) AUTOPSY REPORT, PATIENT #0017802 – 11/19/05 09:44
PERFORMED BY: Dr. Julius Tweed. Ragged lacerations prominent around subject’s head and neck, increasing in severity and depth on the regions of the face itself – at several points, the flesh is cut to the bone. More disconcertingly, subject’s eyes appear to be violently removed from their sockets and are missing. CAUSE OF DEATH: Exsanguination from wounds. FINAL JUDGEMENT: Homicide. CORONER NOTE: Recommend consideration of Patient #0017983 as dangerous to staff and facility residents. Urge continued maintenance of restraints and isolation from contact with others in patient population. Also recommend digestive endoscopy to determine fate of missing tissues for staff cohesion purposes – orderlies from Floor 4 suspect cannibalism, promise to refuse Isolation shifts until such belief is disproven.
9.) MEDICAL REPORT, PATIENT #0017983 – 11/19/05 10:07
PERFORMED BY: Dr. Antoinus Cayle. Patient is cooperative, if withdrawn, during examination. No outbursts or threats. Current drug regimen appears effective. No unusual tissue or objects discovered in digestive endoscopy. Radiology tests discover hairline fractures in tibia, fibula of right leg. Severe abrasions evident on skin of restraint points, also head and neck, necessitating topical treatment. Troubling instability in vitals – BP is acutely elevated, pulse rapid and weak for patient’s size. Extended stress from anxiety, elevated mood, and insomnia likely cause. PHYSICIAN NOTE: Patient must sleep to begin recovery process. Recommend elevated dosage of Diazepam to encourage this result. Firm contact-point restraints not recommended for this patient due to risk of further injury. Full-body restraint must be considered as alternative.
10.) PSYCHIATRIC EVALUATION, PATIENT #0017983 – 11/19/05 10:39
PERFORMED BY: Dr. George Tulling. Definite evidence indicating disassociation of identity from actions. Patient expresses remorse for death of Patient #0017802, yet refuses to admit responsibility for actions in said event. Instead externalizes blame into antagonistic female “other.” Same figure, apparently referenced in prior evaluation, seems to be central actor in patient’s paranoid psychosis. Behavior and actions of said “other” justified through magical thinking, despite recognition of depicted individual’s illogically-defined capabilities to sustain reported antagonism. As quoted, “I don’t know, you don’t know, and she doesn’t care.” Patient requests observation of room be terminated, grows agitated when request is denied, makes threats, refuses to continue interview. DIAGNOSIS: Paranoid schizophrenia manifesting in somniphobia, violent psychosis, and disassociative episodes. MEDICATION ISSUED: Up dosage for Diazepam to 10mg twice daily, on 11/24/05 begin issuing 2.5mg doses of Haloperidol twice daily for psychosis. INTERVIEWER NOTE: Utilize patient observation protocols and ward rounds to check for possible drug interaction effects, followup immediately if found or on 11/30/05 otherwise.
11.) WARD EVENT REPORT – 11/19/05 14:32
During standard rounds Patient #0017983 requests that observation of room be terminated. Warns staff of perceived threat inherent in observation protocol. When request is denied, begins struggling against restraints and screaming warnings to staff, observation camera operator regarding disassociative, antagonistic “other.” ACTING PHYSICIAN NOTE: Reject recommendations from orderlies to sedate Patient #0017983 unless medically or procedurally sound. Sedatives are not a safety blanket. ORDERLY NOTE: They say this guy is at his sedative limit, and he was nearly pulling his bed off its bolts. Use double staff if at all possible when dealing with him. Whatever’s in his head… it’s strong.
12.) STAFF COMMUNICATIONS – 11/19/05 16:53
FROM: Charles McKinney – Head of Patient Care Division
TO: Patient Care Staff List
SUBJECT: RE:FWD:Patient #0017983
This has officially gone far enough. I did not intervene in this matter before, because I was under the impression that the men and women under my supervision were beyond such things as this, but circumstances have proven me to be mistaken and I will not allow these rumors to progress any further. The only thing “wrong” with Patient #0017983 is that he is seriously ill and dependent upon us for care and assistance in his recovery. He is not the first patient with explosive episodes we have treated, he is not even the only one currently in our facility, and he will not be the last. It thus pains me to discover that one singular breach of safety, which WAS properly addressed by facility protocol, has left my staff whispering superstitions to one another and accepting the delusions of our patient as truth. We are better than this. There are indeed risks inherent in this profession, risks we all knew about upon assuming it, but that is the burden we bear to render aid to those who find themselves in our beds.
Until otherwise noted I will not approve of any shift changes from scheduled Isolation hours. Our staff counselors are always available during standard hours for those who need to consult with someone in light of the recent event and associated workplace anxiety. It is a fringe benefit of working in mental health, and I suggest anyone having difficulties make use of it. This matter is closed, and I want to hear no further mention of it. As previously stated, I expected more from all of you.
– Charles
13.) WARD EVENT REPORT – 11/19/05 20:44
During standard rounds Patient #0017983 requests that lights be left on after scheduled lights out time. After consultation with attending physician and therapist, request granted. Room check proceeds uneventfully until staff move to depart, at which point request is made for observation to be terminated. Upon denial of request, patient instead requests for lights to be doused as usual. Request granted. Another request is made, now for red-bulb sleep lights to be doused during scheduled lights out time. Patient understands that low-level light is necessary for room observation – as quoted, “that’s why I want them off.” Warns observation camera operator against Her. Attending therapist denies request. Sorry Jacob…
14.) STAFF COMMUNICATIONS – 11/19/05 21:12
FROM: Dr. Emil Lafayette
TO: Patient Care Staff List
SUBJECT: Lights in 626
I happened to notice tonight while in final checks that the sleep lights in Isolation 626 were turned off after standard rounds – without my knowledge, or consent. As I am sure you are all aware, this is a SEVERE breach of facility protocol. When video observation of a patient is recommended and approved, there is a reason for such a decision to be made. Patient #0017983 has violent episodes and MUST be monitored to minimize the risk of him causing further harm to his already precarious physical state. You have ABSOLUTELY NO authority to override decisions made by the medical personnel of this, or any other, facility. NONE.
I have been hearing talk around the halls that some of you are AFRAID of this man. He is bound to a bed, under the highest sedation we can medically provide, and both physically and mentally suffering from acute fatigue. Do you also jump at shadows? Regardless of the reason, I will NOT permit untrained orderlies to begin interfering in the care provided to our patients. If such an event occurs again, I will inform Mr. McKinney and see the entire night’s orderly staff barred from the premises. Do I make myself clear?
– Dr. Emil Lafayette MD, FACEP, MHSC
15.) WARD EVENT REPORT – 11/19/05 23:27
[PATIENT #0017983, NAME REDACTED] won’t stop screaming. It just won’t stop. Hours of it. It echoes in my ears, in my skull. Whenever he’s coherent he begs us to turn the camera off, or the lights off, or just make everything go away. I’m sorely tempted, poor [SOFTWARE CENSORED], but Doc Lafayette pulled Jacob from observation and is watching everyone from the video room for the rest of his shift thanks to Michael’s business with the lights earlier. Last I saw of him, he was headed for the elevator with his jacket saying he “just can’t do this to my kids.” I don’t know why I’m here anymore. I just keep staring up at the cameras. Is that [SOFTWARE CENSORED] busier watching his patient, or us?
I’d only need one needle to stop the screaming…
16.) WARD EVENT REPORT – 11/20/05 00:01
It stopped. Just… stopped. No one’s willing to check why. I think [PATIENT #0017983, NAME REDACTED] is gone. I pray She is gone.
17.) STAFF COMMUNICATIONS – 11/20/05 00:04
FROM: Dr. Emil Lafayette
TO: All
SUBJECT: Patient #0017983 AGAIN
I SAID NO ONE IS TO ENTER ISOLATION 626 WITHOUT MY EXPRESS PERMISSION, GOD [SOFTWARE CENSORED] YOU ALL! I WILL HAVE ALL YOUR JOBS FORohgod
i will be good mommy
please not the belt please
heLPmehELpmehElpmehelpMeHelpmeHelpmEheLpmehElpmehelPmehelpmeHelpmeh
ElpmehelpMehElPmeHelpmeheLpmeSavemeHelpMehElpMehelpmeHelPmEhelpmeHel
pmehelPmeheLPmEhelpmehElpmehelPmehELpmehelpmEhelpmeHElpmehElpmehelpM
ehElpmehelpMehelpmehElpMekillmEhelpMEHelpmEhelpmehElPMehelpmehElpmeheL
pmeHelpmeheLpmeHelpMehelPmestopmeHeLpmEHelpmehElpmehelPMehelpMe
hE iS dEAD i aM dEAD sHE iS dEAD wE aRE dEAD aND
we. all. fall. down.
18.) ADMISSION EVALUATION, PATIENT #0017986 – 11/20/05 9:25
PERFORMED BY: Dr. George Tulling. Former staff. Patient discovered in locked observation room setting fire to equipment and recordings. Attempted suicide in flames before rescue by staff. Claims to be antagonized by same female “other” as former Patient #0017983. Possibly involved in death of said resident. If so, evidence obvious for disassociation of self from actions. Likely paranoid schizophrenia. Patient will not respond to further questions – as quoted, “Don’t go looking for her. She’ll find you.” FINAL RECOMMENDATION: ADMIT PATIENT. PRELIMINARY MEDICATION ISSUED: 2.5mg doses of Haloperidol twice daily for schizophrenic psychosis.
19.) STAFF COMMUNICATIONS – 11/20/05 9:36
FROM: Dr. George Tulling
TO: Charles McKinney – Head of Patient Care Division
SUBJECT: I’ve just heard.
Seal him in Isolation, wait Her out, cremate both bodies. As far as the relatives are concerned, Patient #0017983 died in the fire set by Lafayette in committing suicide. That’s all anyone needs to know.
Let’s just hope the rest of us don’t wind up needing time in these beds as well.
—
This was found on /x/ by forums member PastaLover, so the author is unknown. If you are or know of the original author, please contact me if you wish to have credit or want the story removed.
ETA: Source seems to be here.
|
I don’t do ‘cold readings’ anymore. I don’t tell fortunes. I don’t read tea leaves.
And I do not do contact ‘the other side’.
Look, don’t judge me alright? It was an easy gig. I mean, the first time I did it, it was a joke. I did it just to impress a girl. You’ve been there, right? It was something I’d read about online and I thought I’d give it a go.
Cold reading.
I don’t need to tell you that there’s no such thing as a psychic. It’s just extremely convincing educated guessing. I know, I know, if you believe in this stuff you’ve definitely got a story to tell me that starts ‘Yea most are fake but this one time…’ and you’ll tell me some incredibly specific thing that they couldn’t possibly have known. Honestly though? If I could have been there when you got your ‘revelatory message’, you gave them everything they needed, they just connected dots.
See, people aren’t desperately unique, not really. Hell, you only need 23 people before there’s a 50% chance that two of them have the same birthday. You give me a crowd of 50 people and I’ll find someone born in August with an important ‘L’ in their life (Luck, Leeds, Louise) and I’ll have everything I need. It’s not hard. People like a sense of pattern in their lives. It gives them a sense of control. It’s why people like conspiracy theories. It’s hard to think that everything really is as shit and meaningless and random as experience would imply. When someone flies a plane into a building it’s easier to think it’s just another cog in some grand scheme than face up to the fact that, actually, it really doesn’t take all that much other than a fuck-up and a box cutter to completely ruin everything.
Similarly, when you’re holding the hand of a five-year-old girl long after her long black hair has fallen out and she’s looking at you for help and you can’t, maybe it’s easier to think it’s just a crappy part of a bigger plan. You’re both just changing lines for a bit but you’re heading to the same destination.
So look, I’m not defending myself, I’m not saying I’m not a twat in all this. I’m just saying that I never wanted to deceive people. I mean, not maliciously. I just thought I was providing a service, you know? An outlet, maybe.
So when I did my cold readings, I got quite good at them. It’s pretty simple really, you’re just a salesman. If you can sell a used car, you can sell a reading. It all boils down to two things; confidence and knowing your audience.
Like, alright, I’ll tell you a story. One of the first times I did it was in a bar. It was a chain bar, one of those where the menu was the same in every town and the Happy Hour hasn’t changed since 2008. I was being introduced to a group of my girlfriend’s friends and so I was on my best behavior. Captain Charming, you know? So when Maria, all olive skin and deep brown wavy hair, said that the women in her family always had a sort of gift for talking to the beyond… I saw a chance.
So I read her. My girlfriend was 24, and they were university friends so I guessed that Maria was likely a year either side, maximum. She was thus probably a child of the early nineties. Young enough that likely her parents were still alive, but that she may have lost a grandparent or two. There were no rings on her fingers so I guessed she wasn’t married, and the way she was poured into that red cocktail dress pretty much counted out the chance of her being a mum.
So, grandparents were the way in. The most common first letter in first names are J for men and A for women (for men this is especially useful as it takes care of all the Johns, James and Jacks which have had staying power during the generations too).
“There’s someone who wants to speak with you”
Maria’s eyes flicker with excitement. This is a good sign.
“I’m getting an… A?”
No reaction at all from Maria. Luckily, it’s an easy conversion.
“No, not A… it’s a J.”
Another flicker. She takes in a sharp breath.
Bingo.
“I think it’s a James? Or a John?”
“John! Yes, John! My grandfather!”
“He’s here with us now.”
Now, most people at this point are still pretty skeptical. Maria was taking the bait with gusto but most people would still be sat back in their chairs at this point, single eyebrow raised. Now you gotta hit ‘em with something a bit more personal.
With grandparents, it tends to be a pretty positive relationship that you’re playing on. I mean, if it’s a dead partner there can be all kinds of baggage to unpack, but dead grandparents are usually a big bag of happy memories.
So that’s the card you play; if they’re wanting to talk to grandparents, it’s because they want to feel that same safeness again. First though, gotta pull them in with something that seems specific.
“I see him watching over you, but I see a blackness in his chest… or abdomen. That kind of area.”
(It’s a fair shot usually; something north of 85% of deaths of men over 65 are due to some form of complication around there).
“But he wants you to know he’s at peace, and he says that he sees you struggling with something… A choice, perhaps? He’s saying that you should follow your heart, and that you shouldn’t worry about the money.”
See, that seems really personalized, but actually, when are we not toying with some kind of big choice? Even if it’s not imminent, people are always juggling the idea of moving house or job or changing something up with their partner. And what big choice doesn’t have financial implications? Or, moreover, who isn’t worried about money literally all the time?
Same as ever; feels personal but applies to everyone.
Maria is almost breathless at this point, and starts asking really direct questions that would expose me if I tried to answer them honestly.
“No, he’s… Fading. He’s gone back over”
Boom.
So that’s how I got started. But then it got out of hand. See, Maria had bought the whole act. She told a friend who told a friend who told a friend. Soon I had people ringing me and texting me, asking for readings.
Then they started offering money.
Well, cut a long story short, that’s how I ended up on stage here, earning £2000 for a two-night performance in the conference center of a shitty airport hotel outside Manchester.
The first night was like any other night. The venue was about 1/3rd full. I was wearing my black suit with the open-collared blue velvet shirt. Very 80s Butlins Entertainer outfit. I was scanning the room for easy marks – someone clutching at jewelry or a picture. The ticket asks them to bring something belonging to the person they wish to contact, so the second you see anyone with their hands full you know you’ve got a gullible mark.
And there she was; nervously spinning her wedding ring with a photo resting on her lap.
Dead husband. My bread and butter.
I sat with her and… well. There’s a reason I don’t do these anymore. I played it safe at first;
“I’m getting a…. J.”
She took a deep breath, and started to react.
Before I could get a chance to read her reaction, another voice called from the other side of the room.
“It’s him!” came the voice.
Sometimes, you get someone who’s a bit over-enthusiastic. Someone who’s so desperate to get in touch with their beloved that they’ll assume that whatever voice is coming through is trying to get in touch with them, regardless of who the current mark is. It’s why I stay away from ‘sensing’ the letter R – between the Richards and Dicks and Roberts and Bobs half the sodding room thinks they’re being contacted. I got ready to politely ask the interrupter to sit back down.
But there was nothing. No one.
I turned back to the widow. She was steeling herself to get in touch with her ‘J’. I caught a brief glimpse of what I thought was the name ‘Alan’ on the wedding photo in her lap and was ready to fix my pitch accordingly when the voice came again.
This time, just a single word rang through so loud it arrived with a blinding white.
“HIM.”
My eyes focused again on the widow in front of me. She was taking little shallow rasps of breath and staring at me with eyes like a startled deer.
I spun round to try and find the source of the yell, but there was no one.
“Did anyone else hear that?!”
The crowd, assuming it was part of the gig, simply shook their heads.
Catching my breath, I tried to get back on track.
“No, not a J, it’s an A -” SLAM – another bullet train of sound to the back of my mind.
‘HIM. IT’S HIM.”
I was knocked back a few paces. Panting, beads of sweat form on my forehead. I pulled at my tie to loosen it.
“Please” I pleaded with the crowd “try not to shout when the voices are coming to me, it makes it hard to concentrate”
What had been amused half-smiles at what they assumed was showmanship became puzzled, silent exchanges with the people sitting near them as I asked the silent crowd for quiet.
I went a third time to speak to the widow but the voice rung out again; popping in my ears, as though it had been trapped in a bubble.
“THIRD ROW. RED SHIRT. HIM. HE KILLED ME.”
I was still catching my breath. Panting heavily. I scanned the crowd and, sure enough, there he was. Third row. Red, casual-fitted shirt that looked expensive. Short brown hair in a modern, professional cut framing a neutral, polite smile. Light brown chinos and brown leather shoes. Arm draped around the shoulders of a nervous-looking blonde woman. I couldn’t see her face as she held an unbroken look with her lap. Her hands gripped the blue velvet clutch on her knees. Her legs were pinned together with vice-like strength. Her shoulders drooped under the weight of his arm.
Even as I met his eyes, he didn’t let that neutral salesman grin drop. It was the grin of the man who’s sold the car and is going in to sell the paint job.
‘HIM. IT’S HIM. IT’S HIM.’
My knees cracked with the punches of the sound and I fell to the floor. I could hear the gasps in the audience. People were out of their chairs, craning their necks and crowding to see what was happening.
I told you that this gig is all about salesmanship. This was me losing the pitch. They wanted enthusiasm, not seizures.
Back on my feet, the widow well at the back of my mind, I managed to rise, zombie-like, to my feet.
I raised a pointed finger at Mr. Red Shirt.
“I’m getting… a voice.” I croaked.
I pinched the bridge of my nose and put out an arm, evangelical style.
“What…. What’s your name?”
“GEMMA. MY NAME IS GEMMA.”
“She… says her name is Gemma. Does that mean anything to you?” Red Shirt’s grin spreads.
“Sorry, pal, nothing to me,” was his only reply.
“She’s saying she… knows you.”
Red Shirt laughed. “Never known a Gemma in my life.” His companion raised her head at the mention of the name. Her eyes were wide and pricked with tears.
Gemma’s voice in my ears got louder and shriller and more panicked. I could feel my heartbeat in my eyes. Soon I was simply parroting her words.
“She’s saying… She’s saying you killed her. You killed her and buried her body out the back of Bleacher’s Woods, by the A55. She’s saying you were waiting for her after she finished work and you came up behind her and clocked her round the head and put her in the back of your white Ford Transit.”
The crowd was bustling by now. This was not what they’d paid for. They wanted financial advice from Granddad or to know that little Robbie is happy in heaven after he came off his bike and fell under the 681 bus to Salford. Not to have some sweating charlatan shouting accusations at innocent audience members. People were grabbing their bags and starting for the doors. I couldn’t stop though, by now I was just a puppet for Gemma’s voice.
“You thought I was out cold, you fuck, but I was just barely conscious. I felt everything. I felt you tearing my clothes, I felt the way you scraped my underwear against my thighs when you were too weak to tear them off in one. I felt the dirt as it landed on my back. I heard you pat down the soil before one type of darkness gave way to the next.”
The steadfast grin on Red Shirt’s face was back.
“I was alive, you bastard!”
Not even a hint of his grin slipping.
Gemma’s voice was fading. Like someone being dragged away in a noisy bar. Her voice replaced by the din of silence.
“No! Not yet! You have to warn her! Amy! Amy!’
And with that, Gemma was gone. And like a puppet with the strings suddenly cut, my shaking knees buckled and I fell to all fours and emptied my guts over the worn and dirty brown carpet flooring. People were streaming out now, muttering criticisms under their breaths.
“Worst show ever”
“Macabre nonsense”
“I told you we should have gone to the cinema”
Red Shirt strong-armed his partner out of her seat and started marching towards the door. I reached out from my prone position to try and grab the hem of her skirt but she was already out of reach, and I could barely stand.
Through the sweats and the panting, I looked up to see Red Shirt ushering the woman out of the door. I thought I saw tears in her eyes. In the confusion and bustle of the crowd leaving the room, I thought I saw her reach out towards me. But Red Shirt had a firm grasp on her shoulder.
He stared back at me, that same salesman grin on his face.
And he winked.
And they were gone.
I stumbled to my feet, standing in my own vomit as I started towards the door. I burst into the foyer, desperate to try and find Red Shirt and his crying companion. But in the bustling crowd I couldn’t see either of them.
I just stood there.
A wave crashed through again. A final hurrah from Gemma;
“Useless”
* * * * * *
Complaints about my performance flooded the venue and they were forced to cancel the second night’s performance. Of course, I’d already paid for the hotel room, so spent the second evening sat at the bar, trying my best to forget about Gemma.
I was on the third whiskey when a tail end news report caught my ear about a missing woman.
The prim news reader stated:
“Police are appealing for witnesses in the disappearance of Amy Hockstetter, a woman from the Salford area who was last seen leaving the Quays Hotel Conference Centre with an unidentified man. She had been attending an event hosted by alleged psychic, Theo Capewell, an event that she’d attended because, according to friends, she’d been hoping to contact her sister, Gemma Hockstetter, who disappeared last year. Anyone with information should contact….”
The rest of the report was lost to the din of the bar.
Like I said;
I don’t do cold readings anymore. They’re not cold enough.
|
It’s that time of the year again. I know how I’m going to be spending Halloween. Same way I have for the past two years, slowly nursing a beer in the bar. Watching the glass sweat on that smooth wooden counter, staring at it till it goes warm in my hand. I’m not there to get drunk. I’m there to escape. I never want to be alone at home over Halloween night again. I promised the Deputy that I wouldn’t talk about that night. The town didn’t need it. Hell, I even deleted the video. But now, with Halloween around the corner, it all comes back. Well, small-town law enforcement doesn’t care too much about the Internet.
I live in a small house at the end of the lane. Another non-descript house down a row of its sisters. Pre-fabricated mostly. Far enough off the beaten path to be cheap, not so far as to be rural. But close, pretty damn close. I didn’t expect many kids to call around trick-or-treating come Halloween. It’s a long road, and most children manage to fill their baskets long before they get to my place. Besides, I quite like the peace and quiet. Halloween used to be a good night to settle down and catch some of the classic horror movies on TV. I kept a couple of bags of candy around just in case some kids actually made it all the way down the lane, but mostly it would be an evening all to myself.
I can’t quite remember what I was watching that night. Probably because I’d been enjoying an after-dinner beer and I may have gotten carried away, dozing off after one too many. I woke with a start. My beer had gone warm on the side table, my hand still curled around the can. I winced as I unwrapped my fingers. Something had woken me up. The TV droned on in the background, the senseless drivel of late-night programming flickering across the room.
Maybe it was just some high school kids out after some Halloween party, out on the streets, making some noise that woke me up. I checked the time. Past midnight. I was glad that I’d invested in a little security for my house. Just the basics, really. A good camera to cover my front lawn. Motion-activated lights around the front and back.
I was trying to make the tough decision of whether to clear up the mess right there and then or to just kick the can down the road till the next morning when a loud rapping at the door shattered the silence. The can bounced off the floor, warm beer spraying across the bottom of my track pants. The shock left me too numb even to swear. I had just set the can back upright when the knocking sounded again. That arrhythmic rap increasingly impatient, the tempo building up as I stepped towards the door. I peered around the edge of the window. I saw nothing but my pale face in the glass. It was pitch dark outside.
Why wasn’t the light working? The knocking stopped.
A tree branch perhaps. Or something else tapping on the porch. The peephole glared at me, that little glass orb suddenly bulging with some half promised horror. I swallowed. Or I tried. My throat was dry, the warm beer on the floor suddenly inviting.
“It’s nothing,” I said out loud. Hoping that the familiar echo of my voice off the walls would ground me somehow. I walked up to the door and peered out, only seeing the orange cones cast by the halogen street lights, a distance away.
Nothing. I thought to myself, feeling childishly stupid. I sucked in a deep breath, feeling my lungs strain, then let the air stream out slowly. Then, another knock.
I turned back around to face the door. My heart punched at the inside of my chest, its crazed dance playing counterpoint to the knocking. I wasn’t surprised to see my hand shake as I reached for the doorknob. Our town was a safe one, far from the troubles of the big cities, or so we’d read in the papers. We had little more to fear in the night than seeing our trash strewn across the yard by the nimble fingers of raccoons.
I threw the door open. The porch lights winked on, suddenly blinding me. I blinked away the white spots from my vision. A pair of children stood on my porch. They must have been nine or ten. I couldn’t see much more off them, because they were in the classic Halloween getup, a simple sheet draped over each of them, a pair of holes cut out for them to see through. A pair of small baskets for candy broke the smooth lines of the sheets. The toes of brand new dress shoes peeked out from under the sheets. A boy and a girl, I thought.
“Trick or treat.”
Such a common refrain. I’d expected the words, but not the delivery. There were but two figures in front of me, yet their voices seemed to come from a great distance away.
“Trick or treat.”
The pair spoke again. I felt a little discomfited at the distortion in their voices. More than the weird volume, their voices seemed to blend into each other’s, with some strange harmonics at play at the edges. It seemed almost as though there was a choir of two, just there, speaking to me.
“Treat, I guess,” I said. More than anything, I wanted those two away from my house. The whole situation felt wrong, the familiar veneer of the season concealing something deeper. Something rotten, like that small panic when biting into a fruit and feeling that lack of resistance, your teeth sinking into soft mush instead of sweet flesh. For a moment, I blamed the haze of alcohol, the dregs of sleep clouding my judgment, but adrenalin had swept those far away. My fear was true.
I turned to the counter where I kept my keys and grabbed for the bag of candy I had prepared for the occasion. I was half hoping that the two figures would be gone when I returned to the door. That they’d been a figment of my imagination, perhaps a shadow of some dream brought on by cheap horror movies and cold pizza. I had no such luck, the pair hadn’t moved an inch.
They each raised their baskets. There was already an assortment of candy there. They’d had a good day.
“A bit late for you guys to be out, isn’t it? Where are your parents?”
The only answer I got was an impatient shaking of the baskets, the rasp of candy wrappers rustling. I held out a handful of candy, ready to drop it and call it a night. I expected to see a small pale hand clutching at the handle of the basket. Instead, I saw the anemic matte sheen of plastic. The basket was draped off the plastic hand of some kind of store mannequin. I was more than thoroughly creeped out by this effective little trick. I shrugged. Maybe the voices were recorded, a little technology to bolster an otherwise traditional costume. I felt the fear melting away as I explained it to myself in my head. Just some clever little children, probably with the help of an adult. Smart, I thought. It had certainly got me going for a while.
“Stay safe,” I told them, dropping the last of the candy into the baskets. They didn’t acknowledge me, they just stood still on the worn wooden boards of my porch. I shut the door on them. The window darkened as the light on the porch shut off. Odd, maybe the motion detection stopped working. Some unbidden instinct told me to stay there and wait. I heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps on the porch as the two walked off. Still the light stayed dark.
My relief grew as the odd strangers left my property. Still, something didn’t sit right. Something wasn’t right. The light was working. It turned on when it detected me. It saw me. It didn’t see the kids. The sensor was working. It was state of the art. Passive infrared. Detected motion by detecting changes in temperature. Like a human body. Like mine but not the kids’. Whatever was under those pristine white sheets wasn’t warm at all.
The realization washed over me, like an ice cube running down my spine. My breath came in short rasps. I had to see. I had to know. I could barely bring my hand to the curtains, they were shaking so bad. When I pinched the edge of the curtain between my thumb and my finger, the curtain began to undulate wildly. I filled my lungs and peered out through the glass.
They were still there, barely twenty yards away. Doing nothing. Just standing there, motionless, facing the street. As I watched, they both swiveled their heads, in perfect tandem, to affix two pairs of fathomless eyeholes on the window.
There was no way. There was no way they could have seen me come to the window. I had to put the back of my hand in my mouth and bite down hard to keep from calling out. They knew. They knew I was there. I backed away from the window, dragging my leaden feet over the carpeted floor. I barely noticed when my heel knocked the can back.The beer leaked out onto the carpet, leaving a widening patch in front of me. I couldn’t believe the raw, animal fear those two had summoned up in me. Every instinct I had told me to run. Run. Get help. Anything but stay and be trapped in my own house.
What could I do? Call the Police and tell them that I was scared of two little children trick-or-treating? Call one of my friends past midnight and ask them to come over like a little boy crawling to his parents’ room after a nightmare? The situation was ridiculous. My mind told me so. That there had to be a rational explanation for everything. But I could not explain away the light, fluttery feeling in my stomach. I could not rationalize the prickly lump at the back of my throat. They’d only said three words to me, in those unearthly tones. Who knew how cold those lips were?
I shut the door to the kitchen, the sound echoing through the empty house. I turned my chair to face the front door. And then I waited, white-knuckled, for the dawn to come.
* * * * * *
I must have fallen asleep sometime during that long, cold wait. Not daring to move from my chair, paralyzed with fear that one of those shrouded children would appear at my window, or worse yet, behind me. But even that manic store of energy wore out as the night wound to a close.
I was woken up by a polite knock on the front door. I sat bolt upright, nearly falling off my chair. I stumbled to the door, a hint of the dread from a few hours ago still lingering like a stale funk in the air. I checked the peephole again. This time, I was confronted with the well-scrubbed face of one of our town deputies. We’d been to school together, it was that kind of smallish town where you’d know almost everybody your age if they had a history there. He was an earnest man, tough but fair.
“Good morning, officer.”
“Good morning,” he replied. The sour look on his face told me that it was anything but that.
His nose twitched as he took in the stale sour smell of beer steaming off the floor in the morning sun. “Had a good night last night?”
I thought back to the night before. “No, I didn’t.”
The lawman was quick to see the fleeting shadow of doubt wash across my face. He pressed home his advantage. “You care to explain why you stole the two mannequins from the store, dressed them up and put them on your lawn?”
He shifted to the side and past his door-filling bulk I saw two familiar shapes on my lawn. My lungs wouldn’t fill with air. They were still there. They’d been there the whole time.
“You okay, buddy?” The big man leaned in, blocking my view and steadied my shoulder with one of his strong hands.
I brushed his hand off and lurched out into the yard, mindless of the freezing dew on my bare feet. The pair stood there, the draped sheets joined in between them. They were holding hands. The two of them were holding hands. I brought my palm down gingerly on the head of the one nearer to me. Hard. I felt hard plastic. I whipped the sheet off with one smooth motion. I gave a strangled cry as I stared into the empty green eyes of a child mannequin.
I backed away. Too quick. I ended up on my ass on the cold grass, clawing and scrambling backwards, until I bumped into the solid legs of the Deputy behind me. He’d been quick to recognize my unease earlier, he was just as quick to realize genuine fear. He hoisted me back to my feet and helped me back into my house.
“Mind telling me what that was all about?” He’d dumped me on the office chair in front of my computer. I tried, but I couldn’t force the words out.
The Deputy sighed and settled onto my couch, wrinkling his nose at the empty beer cans on the side table. He leaned forward. “First call of the morning after Halloween and I’m chasing down some bullshit break-in to a store in the middle of town. Now, I’ve got you hungover and scared shitless from a damned pair of dolls on your front yard. What I know is someone got into a store, smashed up the glass, stole sheets and a couple of mannequins. Bloody kids again. Except the glass…”
The lines on his brow deepened. I watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down. “The glass was on the outside of the shop only. Damndest thing. You’ve got a camera on your yard, don’t ya?”
I nodded, numbly.
“What say you give me another ten minutes of your time, tops. We go through that footage. I see who put those things on your lawn and then I’ll be out of your life, hopefully for good.”
I turned to face my computer and called up the stored videos on my hard drive. They were all transferred by wi-fi. Convenient, for the time that I bought the cameras.
“Just put on double speed backwards. We’ll see who set them there soon enough.”
I hit the reverse play key and upped the speed. I saw the two of us scuttle from the house to the lawn and back again. Then, the first rays of the sun retreating from the grass, pulling back over the pair of figures, until they were back in darkness. The two of them stood there, motionless, for the longest time.
When the two figures moved, all by themselves, in a jerky, swaying motion, back from my lawn to my front door, the cursor danced a little jig in the corner of the screen as the shakes returned, stronger than before. The sharp hiss behind me told me I wasn’t alone in my discomfort.
I shuddered as I watched myself on screen, so close to the two abominations, giving them a handful of candy each. I slowed the recording back to normal speed. On-screen, I saw myself turn back into the house to retrieve the candy. The two figures stood there, impassive. As one, they both fixed those dark eyeholes on the sheets on the camera. There was something else unmistakable. There was a slight pulse in the sheets, a small undulation. The mannequins were breathing.
“I’ve seen enough.”
I turned to look at the Deputy, his face as white as the sheets on the shrouded figures on the screen, his hand tight around the grip of his sidearm. That, of all the things, scared me most of all. A symbol of law and order, who had seen the worst of what our little community had to offer, just as scared as I was and ready to pull a gun in my house. I clicked the window shut and got up. I wandered over to my cabinet. I pulled out a pair of tumblers and a bottle of the good stuff. The bottle gave a couple of contented glugs as I sloshed the rich golden whiskey into the glasses. I set one down in front of the other man and took a sip from my glass.
A lawman could lose his job, drinking on duty. The Deputy didn’t hesitate when he emptied half his glass. He didn’t look at me when he spoke.
“My old nan wasn’t from around here. She was back from the old country, across the sea. She hated Halloween. Said there were things out that night that weren’t meant to see the light of day. One night a year, she told me, for one single night, some things were set loose. The candy and costumes were a new thing. Back in the past, on All Hallow’s Eve, good folk crossed themselves and prayed and stayed in. Whatever’s on that recording, it’s not what our town needs, you understand.”
“Dumb high school kids,” I said, the lie taking shape and form in my mouth. “Fooling around.” The lie fleshed out, took on a veneer of credibility. That would be the explanation. No one had to know the dark kernel of that story.
“And your camera, it was having technical difficulties that night.”
“Never was a good piece of equipment. Regretted buying it the same week.”
He stuck out his hand and we shook on it. And I have kept my word to now.
There isn’t a good reason why I broke my promise. I’d never known true fear till that night but I replay it in my head, over and over. The recording is long gone, of course, but every detail of that night has been branded on my mind. I remember the fear but I cannot think of a single action the two of them had done to threaten me. Eerie, unnatural but without a drop of malice.
It’ll be Halloween soon. I know where I’ll be on that dark night. Some things roam the streets that shouldn’t be there. The masks and costumes aren’t always for the children. Sometimes they’re there for the adults. For our own protection.
After the Deputy left, I watched the video, forwards, just once. I remember seeing the two figures on my lawn, slowly inching their hands up, locking them under the sheets, and waiting for the sun to rise. Things that shouldn’t be out on this good earth. But sometimes, just sometimes, they just want the simple things. Like one last trick-or-treat.
|
I was part of Project Atlantis. Among the various scientific endeavors undertaken by the Russian government throughout the mid-late 20th century, underwater exploration was always kept quiet. Attempts had been made to source renewable energy, document new species, and of course explore new oceanic ecosystems that could perhaps hold the key to future human civilization.
I was among the lucky first. Chosen from a selection of cosmonauts, pilots, and obviously marine specialists. My task was to assist in the early development of oceanic vessels. My marine specialization and expertise in trench ecosystems made me an obvious fit.
The government, or to be more specific, the Ministry of Medium Machine-Building (MMMB), was fanatical about results. Results, results, and more results. Whether it was new algae or just a trench deeper than we had originally thought, we were always expected to produce positive justifications for why the budget should continue to support this endeavor. An ambitious aim with a modest budget, but regardless, failure was never an option.
We were the new frontier of the Sovetsky Soyuz, and with that, we carried the banner of Soviet might. Even if that meant planting the flag in a part of the planet that even the sun would not go to.
I am not supposed to go into too much detail about any of this. In fact, during our military training, we were constantly forewarned about the consequences of open-talk, as they put it. I still find myself constantly debating whether the good of truth outweighs my loyalty to the Soyuz. I feel like I owe it to my shipmates though. My loyalty to the Sovetsky Soyuz is unquestioning and I have come to believe that the ministries in question, specifically the ministry of nuclear development, have buried unfavorable research for budgetary increases. Thus, it is with loyalty to the Soviet I tell this, against the corruption of bureaucracy. I have made my decision to tell this story. I shall make no refrain from detail and my only omissions are that of memory, not of choice. As the Russian saying goes, Семь раз отмерь, один раз отрежь – Measure seven times, cut once.
Project Atlantis ‘Атлантида’ was set in motion with the aims to establish a living space on the precipice of one of a number of Oceanic Trenches. These living spaces were called Life Zones. They are self-sustained pods that can theoretically hold up to 6 people comfortably at any one time. Life Zones are secured to the seafloor beside the trenches. High powered beams emit constant vital information to High Command about water pressure, oxygen levels, and so forth. The pride and joy of the Operation Atlantis was the prototype, ‘Cask-Life’. It’s a Life-Zone on the precipice of the Kuril–Kamchatka Trench. Almost 8,500 meters to the seafloor and only a few meters from the trench wall.
The trench itself was another 10,000 meters deep. Into the abysses. You have not heard about it because you are not supposed to hear about it.
The Ministry of Medium Machine-Building (MMMB), held Cask-Life with great pride. The actual power and sustainability of the marine life vessel relied on volcanic activity from the Trench. The waters and volcanic eruptions were harnessed and repurposed for everything in the vessel. It was stable, running, and the three-man Soviet crew was expected to give daily assurances of its successes.
It was 1 of 7 original prototypes launched during Operation Atlantis. While two others have greenlit their success and stability, Cask-Life’s harnessing of volcanic activity as renewable energy made it special.
You will find books upon books re-affirming the failures of marine living but the truth is also bittersweet, For our three successful attempts at marine living, we also filled warehouses with crushed, decompressed, and damaged ‘Life-Zones’. Many of those were manned as well.
Warehouses and graveyards. Those are not in any books.
My first mission involved Cask-Life. Her automated vitals appeared to be stable; oxygen levels, core pressure, electricity, and so on. High Command had direct access to the diagnostics of the vessel but the reports, their daily expected liaisons with the crew had gone silent. Day after day nothing. The three individuals who had lived in Cask-Life were still alive and seemingly enough well. Carbon dioxide levels and oxygen levels were naturally balancing. The oxygen levels were unaltered but in terms of actual human contact, we were in the dark.
In other words, we knew three men were breathing down there. We knew three were down there.
Paranoia had already set in among High Command. Rumors of a mole began to spread around. A U.S covert was among the three and had turned our loyal soviets against us. But before the paranoia fire could be dispelled by rational debate, High Command had immediately ordered an exploratory mission to the non-abandoned but silent Cask-Life. I was among this mission. Everything was fine. Everything was by the plan. Until it wasn’t.
This is where my story must begin. If you want to know what happened to my comrades, to me, to the Cask-Life, and their crew then this is what truly happened in the depths of the Oceanic Trenches.
It was a cold, dark night in Petropavlovsk, the most westerly point in the Soyuz. Rain rattled the steel roof exteriors of the shipyard while the North Pacific Ocean relentlessly swept anything that wasn’t tied down across the wooden platforms.
The Kuril–Kamchatka trench was south of Petropavlovsk and by travel, it would take just over 2 days to get to the seafloor. Weapons were also stored, in the off chance that our mole theory was proven correct. I unloaded my belongings from the military transport and walked briskly towards the shipyard, coat turned up to shield the biting wind and rain. I, along with 2 others was to use a small three-man marine traveler and make the first break with Cask-Life. As I saw my two crew members idle around the vessel, I began smiling.
“Mikhail, you cyka!”, I launched forward and embraced my fellow crew member.
“Ah, fuck! Sergei, my friend, it’s been a while!”, Mikhail returned the embrace, “they managed to wrangle you into this as well. The Cask-Life! This is monumental”, his voice dipped as he realized that perhaps information should be kept as a need to know matter.
“This is Vlad, you have not met him, he’s medical division.”
Vladimir shot him a look.
“Shit, Vladimir I mean, sorry, anyway, this is Sergei, Vladimir.”, he pointed towards me.
I stuck out my hand and Vladimir grasped it and tightened his grip. I felt the blood leaving my hand as he let go. With no more than a grunt, he heaved his enormous body down the top hatch of the vessel and began reorganizing it in, what can only be said as, ‘his way’.
As I took in my surroundings I noticed a buzz about the place. Men in darkened suits and military spec vehicles were busying themselves around the yard. Two large machines were being tinkered at within a large warehouse.
Although, I could not make out much, the large doors of the Shipyard building was left ajar. Very few people I recognized. In fact, many faces I had never seen before.
Both Mikhail and Vladimir had been briefed and once a very formal readout of our mission was given, we joined Vladimir in our new home, “VILLA2”. A military officer of some esteem, at least by the shiny medals adorning his jacket would indicate, gave us an even briefer brief. It would take just under 2 days, no interruptions assumed, to reach Cask-Life. When we make contact with her crew, we were to make medical and technical surveys and to leave the following day. A short trip.
If injuries were sustained by the original crew we were to take them with us. If no injured were assumed, we were to immediately return and High Command would ‘deal with the insubordination’ in their own way. I didn’t want to think about that. We boarded the medium-sized vessel, that was marooned on the edge of the quiet shipyard.
Loud voices barked orders and with a whirl of noise and movement, the submersible was lowered by two heavy cranes. Mikhail, the chief engineer and crew captain of the VILLA2, began routine vitals and marine diagnoses. The top hatch was a double secured steel door with an air chamber for decompression and so once both were sealed the outside world was muffled to us three.
Green and blue lights lit up the board emitting an artificial hue in the control chamber The control board and the main chamber were connected by a small tunnel, large enough to squeeze through but none of us could stand upright in it. Sitting beside me in the main chamber was the recently acquainted Vladimir. An extraordinarily stoic man. Large and burly, cramped into this vehicle like a caged animal, no one would believe he was, in fact, a qualified nurse. Excuse me, ‘health specialist’.
Mikhail’s eyes never left the control board as he shouted orders.
“Vladimir, where is the UMT?”, Mikhail yelled, far too loudly for this vessel, “control put motion sickness tablets in it, get them. I don’t know what to expect, but I am sure none of us has been 8,000 meters under the sea”, he laughed.
Vladimir, saying not a word, heaved his large body towards the medical kit and removed 2 small wrapped bars. He threw one to the back of Mikhail’s head and towards me and then reclined back into his seat.
Conserving energy? I thought.
“Sergei, Sergei!”, Mikhail turned towards me, “As we lower, listen out for steel compression, this cyka may not be as enthusiastic for the water as we are.”
I looked over at Vladimir, now more or less asleep, and thought, “it better be.”
The creaking leviathan plunged into the cold ocean. Underneath the water, there was a serenity and calmness. We began our 8,500-metre descent towards Cask-Life.
Mikhail’s mechanistic expertise was impressive. I always respected his keen eye for machinery because he spent many hours of basic training modifying, re-adjusting, and in many ways improving Soviet mechanics. A wiry thin individual, he could always maneuver around engines picking them apart like an expert painter would his art. We had spent an inordinate amount of time in base camp for this mission, but when he left for specialized training in marine engineering I had not seen him until now. No different. Still the quick-witted Moscowian I had known and grown to care about. Seeing him there though, whizzing back and forth, it appeared as if he was engaged in a dance.
“You do not expect me to maneuver this by my lonesome do you, Sergei?, Mikhail threw me a smile, “because I will sail her right up to the Moskva river and be home for dinner!”
I laughed, “as if Zoya didn’t have enough to worry about Sergei, there’s a reason they sent you to the other side of the Sovetsky Soyuz!”
“And the reason I’m still here..?”, he said.
“The money?”, I smiled.
“The money!”
It felt comforting to be back with a familiar face. The brief moment of levity cooled my muscles as I reclined into my seat and reviewed the information given to us by High Command. Guiding VILLA2 wasn’t a task in itself. She had an automated gauge and beyond slight manual adjustments to the equilibrium of the vessel, we were heading straight towards Cask-Life. After 7 hours of slow descent in the darkness of the ocean, Vladimir had eventually woken from his hibernation and prepared three MREs (Military Rations, Meals: Ready To Eat). Tinned compressed meat of some sort, dry crackers, and black coffee with the standard sugar, milk, and broth. We had enough to last 3 round trips which would be luxurious if we had actually come to like the taste. Mikhail sat down beside us, adjusting his loosened shirt and began worrying his short black hair with a compact comb. Vladimir sat as if his shoulders were trying to embrace one another to the detriment of his chest and heart. His block clean-cut face looked chiseled from stone, although as I was about to find out, in terms of personality, I would wager a statue may just hold a conversation better.
Although Mikhail and I had shared memories and basic training with one another, the introduction of the plain and quiet Vladimir was neither a nuisance nor asset, he merely was.
Something I had pondered since descent, “the machines, and those men, who were they, Mikhail? The black suits, I didn’t recognize them from Command or training?”
Mikhail nodded, he understood exactly what I was alluding to, “I’ve been thinking of just that question since the drop.”
“Ministry of Culture and Nuclear Development”, Vladimir said.
“Ministry of Culture? The suits? What would they want with us, and why are they this far out from Moscow?”, I asked.
Vladimir darted Mikhail a look, shrugged his massive shoulders, and went back to his book, How The Steel Was Tempered.
I looked back to my friend, “Mikhail, what could they want from us? Surely they have more important things to be doing?”
“I stopped asking those questions when I realized the answers were not worth asking questions in the first instance”, he said coldly then looked down towards his meal. I knew what he meant. Questions breed subversion, and subversion is the fire for disloyalty. It had been ingrained in us since our training.
“Although Sergei, that building, did you see the construction near it? Two new warehouses. I was in Petropavlovsk during my specialized training, we were given the full spec for these beauties”, he banged the steel roof, “but since then two new warehouses and a control tower were built. Either my memory is going or some big construction has been going on.”
I looked puzzled, “no, that was my first time there, I just saw a lot of people moving some pretty heavy equipment in there. It’s a dead town though right Mikhail? Vlad?
“Vlad…imer is my name, not Vlad”, his eyes never left the book.
“Right, sorry, anyway, no I didn’t notice anything really Mikhail.”
In an unspoken but mutual agreement that line of inquiry was left there, unanswered. It was a strange paradox, we are trained to question, review, plan, and so forth. We were expert tools of the motherland yet we naturally, instinctively knew when to stop asking certain questions.
“Is it exciting no? The training, the regime, the routine, everything, for this”, Mikhail’s eye lit up. “I will be wearing the Ushakov if the mission is a successful one.”
“They’ll give you the Uskakov Mikhail when they make me First Secretary of the Union”, I said.
In a moment of genuine unanimity, we laughed, including Vladimir. It was brief, but I will not forget it.
We finished our MREs and we returned to our duties. As night drew in, at least from what the internal dials told us was night, we made preparations. The 5 portholes that gave a full view surrounding the VILLA2 offered no clue to our environment. It was only due to the sensors, and high tech that we could pinpoint where exactly we were, and where exactly we intended to go.
The fold-out military hammocks provided comfort while the low hue of green and blue that bounced across the tight walls was as if the vessel itself was assuring us it was healthy and intact.
The slow murky ocean is a universe in its own right. Its own ecosystem and life. We were but explorers, no different from our cosmonauts. Just like space, the ocean is untamed and owes no person a safe passage across, let alone down. What marine life would revolutionize our dry civilizations? Was she the new world that our society must push into? Like the brave soviet warriors who fought the German scourge, do we need a brave band of soldiers to take what we need and create what we want? What could we bring from her like a gift to our Union? We did not know. We knew we did not know but, we knew we wanted to find out. At least we thought we did. Tomorrow we would reach Cask-Life.
Red Sirens awoke me. A howling alert system drowned out everything. I fell out of my hammock and looked across the chamber. Mikhail was in a flurried panicked state. His glasses were slipping down his nose as he began manually overriding the system and regaining control of VILLA 2. I lifted myself up and ran towards the controls. Mikhail pointed to a flurry of indicators on the board. ‘Pressure – Orange, Equilibrium – Orange,’ stood out.
I quickly realized what was happening. VILLA2 had an internal chamber and a separate exterior. Like a ball within a ball. It would balance itself to the best of its ability if small adjustments had to be made during descent or ascent. In other words, we would never be thrown upside down by an underwater current. What it could not do was spin the balls in two entirely different motions. The portholes only showed steel indicating the exterior ball had been completely misaligned. VILLA2 had slowly turned itself sideways and our internal ball was straining to keep the equilibrium.
If she blew the inter-costal cogs and machinery, we would go dark. In a few tense minutes, Mikhail and I had slowly regained control. The red blinking lights stopped and the angry orange temper of the control board subsided. We aligned the chamber doors back up and ran an automatic survey. Although there was superficial damage, Vladimir pounced up. Sweat pouring from his face.
The behemoth had awoken.
“Is it the fucking Americans?”, he leapt towards a Makarov pistol still in a daze.
I dive tackled him with little success, but enough to keep him out of reach of the weapon. In that brief moment, he managed to grab his breath and look around. He fell backwards onto Mikhail’s hammock and quietly assessed what had just happened. Mikhail let out an audible sigh of relief and looked up at the clock. It was breakfast.
“We are on shifts from now on, that was stupid of me to even allow this to happen,” Mikhail said as he directed Vladimir off of his bed.
Once diagnoses were run and no main structural damage had occurred, Mikhail began manually directing VILLA2. Estimations suggested that we would reach Cask-Life in less than 6 hours. I reached for the documents and began analyzing the biographies of the three crew members we were about to meet. I did not recognize two of the names, Boris and Viktor. But one stood out. A Moscow native by the name of Anatoly.
“Anatoly. Anatoly, nuclear specialist…engineering…Moscow..”, I looked at Mikhail, “It isn’t?”
A grin broke the tension of Mikhail’s face as he ran his eyes over the crew, “Ah! Fuck, Anatoly, yes that’s him, look at the specialization and prior deployments”, our eyes darted across the biography.
“Oh man Mikhail, he’s going to hate it when he sees you. Do you remember basic training, do you remember when you, Alexander, and Povetkin put that salt in his coffee?”
“Do I fucking remember? He threw a wrench at Povetkin, nearly smashed his skull. He wasn’t angry Sergei, he was ready to kill. He didn’t speak to us until specialized deployment. Sergei, what will we say when we see him? We could pretend we have no idea who he is! We could say Command said we were sent because a stow-away was on board the Cask-Life.”
Mikhail wiped tears of laughter from his eyes, and I burst into laughter, “we could say we found out he was related to Eisenhower, and he has to return to Command to answer for being a traitor of the Soyez!
“No”, Vladimir interrupted.
“Sergei and I are joking Vladimir”, Mikhail rolled his eyes.
“No”, Vladimir re-stated.
“Well argued my friend, do tell me when are you being promoted to chief speechwriter for the general secretary?”, I mocked.
Vladimir’s expression never so much as moved. As if we were the wind blowing past his head.
“Anyway, we should be at the seabed soon enough, get yourself packed and ready, it won’t be too long now”, Mikhail said. He went back to the controls and peered out the blackened large porthole above the controls.
I reorganized my material and read over the command instructions. Cask-Life was nearing and that meant we had three new crew members. At least that is what we thought.
After another few hours, the chambers began to feel smaller. The steel which offered us the only protection from Mother Nature’s iron grip was beginning to feel as if it had developed its own sort of pressure. The air was hot but my body felt cold. One of the things they do not prepare you for is just how close your field of vision is to everything in your proximity. Looking out beyond a horizon, seeing the open expanse is a somewhat underrated feeling, one that I missed. Vladimir was resting and reading, as he usually does.
Mikhail was lethargic re-adjusting dials and buttons just to keep himself busy. “Sergei, I need to speak to you. I feel bad about this but you should know”, Mikhail moved towards me and threw down some sealed folders.
“Read this, and if you have any questions, ask me, but I think you’ll understand why we are here.”
Looking quite confused and intrigued, I picked up the folder. I looked over to Vladimir who had not stirred. I could tell Mikhail was serious. I began reading. Page after page, diagrams, physics, and of course marine studies. Most of it, was regarding Operation Atlantis, obviously. I understood it and it made sense to me. But then I began reading about a new Operation. I read and read, never lifting my head once.
After 3 hours of intense reading, I rubbed my eyes and fell back into my seat. This was not what I signed up for.
The success and eventually the aims of Operation Atlantis morphed. The Cuban Missile Crisis changed everything. It spooked high command. Once they knew the viability of the Operation, the wheels of our departments began spinning. Our propaganda was and is exceptional. We claimed that ‘we cannot survive down there’, that ‘trying to go there is wasted resources’. We filled journals with lies upon lies about the trenches and oceans, just like we filled books with false physics for our moon missions. These were sent out into the West to deter, slow down, and mislead their own Operations. While the capitalists sifted through our ‘findings’, we, in the glow of the Soviet genius, used our real information and technology and made advances no capitalist country could even dream of.
Although I had always supported the right of our government and people to resist the aggression of U.S imperialism, the movement of nuclear weapons near the self-determined Cuban freedom fighters was not without risk and reward. In the military board rooms across Russia, Cask-Life became ‘militarily advantageous”. Our science was intermixed with military research. Although non-functioning, for the moment, a small nuclear core reactor was also installed into Cask-Life.
Within the more lofty goals of ‘living underwater’ as a safe and secure alternative following nuclear fallout, there was also a military aim. This second aim was to assess the viability of a manned nuclear station at the depths of the ocean. A stable nuclear silo complete with nuclear deterrent capacity.
It was in the remit of our scientific curiosity to also provide military support to the new, aptly named and secreted Operation “железная рука”, known among the sailors and marine specialists as ‘Operation Iron Hand”.
Mikhail turned around and pointed at the folder.
“Listen, Sergei, Cask-Life is the blueprint for a potential nuclear launch base, right under the noses of our enemies. Here.”
Sergei leaned towards me and handed me a layout of the Cask-Life.
“Look, there”, He pointed to something new. A large block addition.
“Once the crew successfully managed to live and sustain themselves, word got back to High Command about the potential for a new frontier of war. Operation Iron Hand would weaponize these Life-Zones”. Mikhail stopped talking as the vessel began shaking, once is calmed, he continued. “Only two of the Life-Zones had these nuclear reactors put into place”, he pointed at the building I had never seen before.
His eyes lit up and excitement poured from his voice.
“A manned nuclear deterrent hid from sight but ready to come to our aid should we need her. No longer would weak pacts with communist sympathizing Latin America be our negotiating table. We could have nuclear weapons loaded in every Trench. Operation Atlantis and Operation Iron Hand would work to create a new frontier of warfare against capitalist aggression. This is part of history, we will be wearing medals by the end of this!”
I shook my head. Did he realize what he was saying? We weren’t going to a Life-Zone, we were going to a prototype nuclear base.
“Mikhail, I do not even know where to begin. This sounds incredibly dangerous. What is there is a leak on Cask-Life? We could be walking into a death trap.”
“No, no Sergei, High Command have been getting clear radiation readings and the reactor was completely inactive!”
“Was?”
Before I could protest more in indignation that the entire mission had been kept from me from the get-go, Vladimir sounded the warning that Cask-Life was in view. Leaning forward he flipped two large steel switches on the control board. Two massive beams of light appeared from overheard external floodlights. Mikhail and I pressed our faces against the larger porthole at the bow of VILLA2 in a vain attempt to see Cask-Life. Sure enough, as we smoothly descended towards the seafloor a large object came into view. A massive steel dual chamber like two iron lungs. At the bow of Cask-Life was a control chamber, although compact it was clearly two floors accessible by a small ladder. Surrounding her are high powered beams automated on turrets they continually provide illumination in the immediate seafloor.
What makes Cask-Life even more impressive is that just meters away from the two main chambers is the Kuril–Kamchatka trench. Apart from the invisible to human eye volcanic heat utilized by Cask-Life, it was an abyss of pitch darkness. No life. No sound. Nothingness. As I tried to envision the sheer expanse of nothingness, I picked out something that I had only just come to know existed. I saw that the nuclear reactor that had been installed. The reactor was bolted and secured close to the Trench and was connected to Cask-Life by a small tunnel. Its low red hue meant it was churning out power. A small but functioning reactor. It was massive in scale, almost twice as big as the living chambers. Reddened water surrounded and swirled around it.
Mikhail had to physically secure the two vessels to one another. Utilizing his expertise, connecting the VILLA2 to Cask-Life proved to be routine. Mikhail made it look easy. Resting on top of her was a small shortened tunnel that would physically latch onto our small tunnel underneath VILLA 2.
One of the two tunnels connected into one shortened steel legs would connect into specifically crafted holes along the top of Cask-Life. We braced for impact as he reversed two propellers on each side of VILLA 2 in order to soften the momentum of the vessel’s sharp drop. After a few moments of slow descent, we made the first break. Once the two half tunnels were connected, they became one unified front and access up and back was granted. Any water contained within the small chambers valves was ejected out with a pressure release.
VILLA2 was now balanced on top of Cask-Life which was almost 3x the size of our vessel even excluding the nuclear reactor.
Mikhail sighed in relief and turned his attention towards me, “look, Sergei, I wish I could have told you sooner, but it was imperative to keep it as quiet as possible, we wanted to keep the pool of confidants as small as we could” said Mikhail.
“Why though?”, I replied.
“High Command, paranoia, I don’t know the full details, there’s even stuff we still don’t know, I think if they said it was a nuclear reactor, Vladimir and you wouldn’t have gone.
Vladimir was only briefed just before you turned up at the Shipyard. Probably explains why he hasn’t been talking too much” Mikhail shrugged his shoulders.
We grabbed their belongings and once green dials flashed on the control board we knew it was safe to open the hatch. Mikhail and Vladimir went ahead of me. Still angered by the fact I was left out of the loop on the nuclear reactor, I sluggishly made my way to the hatch.
I continued down the steel ladder until finally, I dropped a short distance onto the cold floors of Cask-Life. With a sigh of relief and breath of air, I took in what we just did, how monumental it was. I guess in the grand scheme of things, I was part of Soviet history.
I turned around to face the crew, no doubt they would have just as many questions as we would. Standing just in front of me a completely silent Mikhail and Vladimir. Eyes wide nervous.
I looked at both of them and then straight ahead. then I realized what makes them freeze in the spot. Standing right in front of me were two of the crew.
Anatoly and Viktor. Silent. Unmoving, Smiling.
They were expecting us.
We stood there for what felt like forever. Although Cask-Life was much bigger than VILLA2, I felt encased in something tight and unnatural.
Yellow beams encased the steel panels and it had a dome-shape to help in the distribution of external pressure.
Anatoly was a short stout fellow with black hair. His clothing was a mess; untucked and unkempt. His skin was pale and sickly. His eyes were the only thing fresh about him. Viktor beside him had not shaved and his hair was far longer than would normally be allowed. He must have been working on something mechanical by the looks of grease and oil on his white t-shirt. On his neck was some light bruising. I didn’t make anything of it. Eventually, and to my surprise, Vladimir mustered up a few words.
He pointed to himself, “we are crew support. High Command. You are Viktor and Anatoly?” He reached out his hand. Obviously, Vladimir had been studying the brief.
Anatoly smiled, “we are Anatoly and Viktor, Crew Support!”, he clasped his hand around Vladimir’s. For a short and out of shape man, his grip was like a vice. Vladimir winced just as the grip was released.
In the close proximity of Anatoly, I had wondered why he had not recognized either I or Mikhail. I decided not to press the issue, perhaps it was a blessing he had suppressed the memories of our annoying pranks at basic training. Yet still, nothing. A glazed yet relaxed face. It’s almost as if he knew nothing of us, the mission, or even himself.
“Yeah, That’s Vladimir, I am Sergei, and this is Mikhail. High Command sent us because they were worried about you. They said they had not heard from any of you in quite some time”, I said, “but from the looks of it, it seems everything is fine? Is that right? Where is…Boris?
Anatoly put his fingers to his lips indicating silence. His smile never left his face. He pointed to the second chamber to our immediate left. He gestured coughing. He then stepped out of the way and pointed to the control chamber behind him. I nodded and squeezed by them. We walked past the two men and into the control chamber. The main room was like VILLA2 in the sense that it was connected to the control chamber via a tunnel. Although since Cask-Life was bigger in almost every respect the narrowed tunnel that VILLA2 had was more like a short corridor in Cask-Life.
I leaned down and inspected the sprawling complicated mess of controls, dials, switches, and buttons. Numerous lights flickered and emitted low electrical hums. Then I saw the communication box. To my shock, it was irreparably damaged. Wires were cut. Dials were cracked. It appeared as if someone had tried to rip it out in a frenzy of anger or despair.
I pointed to it. Mikhail leaned down, catching his glasses as they slipped down his nose. He frowned. Something was not right.
Our intuitions kicked in immediately. We must not let on that anything is unusual. Not until we get to the bottom of this mystery at, coincidentally, the bottom of the ocean. Vladimir readjusted his belt. I saw he had the Makarov pistol from earlier.
Mikhail turned towards the two crew members, “this makes sense why guy guys weren’t saying much to High Command! I have seen it before. Let me guess”, he pointed to the fire extinguishers concealed in the two apartments above our heads, “one must have fallen and smashed off of it?”
Viktor threw his hands up in the air and Anatoly laughed. He laughed and laughed. Then he went quiet and his gaze turned to a quiet unrelenting stare. Whether that was an affirmation of Mikhail’s hypothesis was unclear. Either way, we knew that this was of design and not an accident. Fire extinguishers don’t leave the appearance of clawing. I knew from my own studies of prototype Life-Zones that the isolated and enclosed environment can lead people to mental fatigue. Perhaps being down here for such an extended period of time had scrambled their ability to interact normally.
Nonetheless, those types of people are the last ones who should be near a nuclear reactor.
Mikhail took out a small la |
I was driving through rural New Jersey when I saw him.
A hitchhiker, standing by the side of the road. Surprisingly well-dressed – black suit, slicked-back hair, narrow briefcase.
Now, I know I shouldn’t pick up hitchhikers. But I’m 6’ 4”, 230 pounds, with all kinds of hunting equipment in the back of my truck. It’s not like this prissy-assed businessman is going to beat me to death and leave me on the side of the road.
Besides, I need gas money.
“Hey, man,” I said, pulling over to the side of the road. “I’ll give you a lift, if you pay me for gas.”
“Of course,” he said in a polite, almost British, accent. He reached for his wallet, and pulled out three crisp, $20 bills. “This enough?”
I grinned. That’s way more than enough. I greedily snatched the money from him and clicked the locks. “Get in, bud.”
He climbed in. His blue eyes shifted from the crumpled Wendy’s wrapper on the dashboard, to the mysterious, sticky goo on the middle console.
“Sorry, the car’s not clean. I’m going hunting,” I said, turning back onto the highway.
“Hunting. Interesting,” he said, in a strangely enthusiastic tone. “Have you always liked to hunt?”
“No, it’s the funniest thing. Never thought I’d ever hunt. Love animals, got three dogs at home. But there are so many deer around these parts, when the winter comes… a lot of ‘em starve to death. Not to mention all the car accidents they cause.” I trailed off, and we fell into uncomfortable silence.
“Just hunting for the day, then?”
“No, my buddy Matt and I will be out there the whole weekend.”
He let out a laugh. “The whole weekend? Your wife’s a saint for letting you go.”
My wife? How did he – But then my eyes fell on the steering wheel, and the silver ring on my finger. “Ah, yeah. Mary’s a doll. She’s actually pregnant, you know. 5 months with a little girl.”
He gave me a crooked smile. “A girl, huh?”
“Yeah.”
I could feel him staring at me long after we had fallen into silence. It made me feel uncomfortable; I clicked on the radio.
“How did you meet Matt?” he asked, fiddling with the dial. All that came through was static.
That’s a weird question, I thought. “Um. He and Mary were close friends. So when we got married, I got to know him well.”
“Mmm-hmm,” the man said. He stroked his chin thoughtfully, and I was suddenly reminded of a psychiatrist.
“Are you a psychiatrist?” I blurted out.
He laughed. “Definitely not. I work in finance.”
“What type of finance?” It was my turn to ask the questions, now.
“Futures,” he replied, noncommittally.
I glanced over at him. A small smile was on his lips, and I noticed his fingers had gravitated from his lap to the briefcase at his feet.
My heart began to pound.
Click, click. He undid the clasps; the case creaked open.
“What’s in your briefcase?” I asked.
“Work.”
“What kind of –”
His long fingers disappeared into the darkness of the case. He was pulling something out! My body began to seize up; the steering wheel felt like ice under my fingers. “I have a lot of hunting equipment back there,” I said, “so you better not be –”
I stopped.
He was only pulling out a sheet of paper.
For a few minutes, he was quiet. Reading the paper, intently and silently, as if his life depended on it. Scrtch, scrtch – his fingers slid over it, as they traced the text.
Then he slipped it back into the case, and snapped it shut.
What was he reading? I thought. But before I could get the question out, he turned towards me. I could barely see his face in my peripheral vision; but I knew he was staring at me, for minutes on end.
Then he broke the silence.
“Don’t go hunting,” he said, his ice-blue eyes boring into me.
“What?”
“Turn the car around. Go home to Mary.”
“What?!”
“She needs you.” He paused. “Madeline needs you.”
I paled.
I never told him we were going to name our baby Madeline.
“How did you –”
“He’s going to make it look like an accident,” he said, his voice gravelly and halting. “Just a simple hunting accident. The most punishment he’ll endure is thirty-five minutes in the police station, writing out his statement.”
“But –”
“Let me off at that diner, up ahead. I like their Cobb salad very much.”
“Matt’s going to kill me? What are you talking about?”
He turned to me, eyes wide. “What are you talking about?”
“About what you just said!”
“All I said is I’d like you to let me off at the diner, please.” He pointed to the exit, curving off the highway. “You’re going to miss it if you don’t slow down.”
With a shaking hand, I clicked on my blinker. Pulled off the exit, into the parking lot. My heart pounded in time with the click-click-clicks of the cooling engine.
“Thank you for the ride,” he said, pulling his briefcase out with him. “Have a good drive, will you?”
I couldn’t squeak out a reply before the door slammed shut.
* * * * * *
I didn’t believe him. But my nerves were too shot to continue the trip, either. I texted Matt that I was sick, turned around, and went home to Mary. Mary was thrilled; Matt was disappointed. A little too disappointed, if you ask me.
A month later, after ignoring most of Matt’s calls and texts (which became increasingly frequent and desperate), I heard a faint thumping noise at the door. When I flicked on the porch light — there was Matt, hunched over our doorknob.
Holding a lockpick.
We called the police. Since then, life has been great. Just a few months later, our wonderful little Madeline was born. And as soon as we got back from the hospital, on our doorstep was a little teddy bear, a pink bow sewed on its head. There wasn’t a return address, or a card of any kind.
But I think I know who it’s from.
|
My name is Wess Kellerman and to save time, I will spare you all the agony of reading my whole life story and keep the details of who I am concise. I’m twenty five years old with short blonde hair and green eyes. I go to the gym regularly to ensure my weight doesn’t get too out of control since, I work night security at a local restaurant/tourist hot spot. I’m single and spend most of my days working, sleeping, reading, and watching Netflix. Not much going on in the life of Wess, well, that is until recently.
I found an old journal while working late at the Luna Rossa Winery the other night. For those who don’t know, Luna Rossa is located in Stillwater, Minnesota and in order for things to make a little more sense, I’ll need to update you on the town’s history a bit. I’m not a history buff, so some details may be slightly off and I apologize. Stillwater was constructed on a large hillside in 1837, with a small chunk of the downtown area built into a sandstone bluff that housed a network of manmade tunnels dating back to before the 1800’s. The Joseph Wolf Brewing Company bought the cave system in 1896, using the tunnels and natural springs in them to store and craft their signature beer. In 1899, three brewery workers stumbled upon an unmapped section of the cave. Two of the workers were buried alive in a cave-in just minutes after the discovery. The one who survived maintained minor injuries, though a few months later was admitted to the hospital’s psychiatric ward, after going into a never-ending rant about a demon lurking within the depths of the cave. He disappeared a couple of weeks later. Eventually, the cave fell under the ownership of the Luna Rossa Winery, and with reports of the cave being haunted, it became a popular touring site for visitors. That leads me back to my job, working security at the winery. Basically, I patrol the cave after hours ensuring no one ‘wanders’ into the cave to spend the night or steal any of the antiques. I have been monitoring that cave for two years without a single paranormal incident until yesterday, when I found the journal.
It was around eleven PM, and I was just making my way past the old cave-in site when I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. I watched as some loose pebbles and dirt fell away from the larger rocks and onto the floor. Moving closer to investigate, I noticed the half-buried journal. I removed it as carefully as possible, and immediately after retrieving it, I heard a faint noise coming from the other side of the rubble. I leaned forward to listen and heard the faint sound of scraping against the rocks.
“Hello?” I whispered. The scratching noise ceased abruptly, and after combing the area with my flash light, I dismissed it as echoes from a mouse or some other rodent that may have been wandering around the cave. I returned to the security room and began texting my supervisor about the buried book I had found. I stopped just as I was about to send the message, deciding that it would be pointless to contact her that late, not to mention, she would more than likely try and take credit for my finding it.
So, unwilling to part ways with my discovery, I smuggled the old timey book home to read it’s contents. I couldn’t believe it at first, but after reading a few of the journal entries I was able to identify who it’d belonged to; Hector, the brewery worker who’d survived the cave-in. I stayed up late that night reading, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t bored out of mind and slightly disappointed. I had spent hours reading about some dude’s day to day life. Other than it’s age, there wasn’t anything remotely interesting about the journal, but as I began to doze off, I convinced myself to hold on to the book, at least until I was finished reading it.
I arrived at work early the next night. Carlos, the guard on the shift before me, gave me a hasty greeting and darted over to his locker. He was in more of a rush than usual. When I asked him about it, he hesitated before responding.
“I can’t believe I’m admitting this, but I’m starting to think this place is actually haunted,” he said.
“You’re kidding me right?” I mocked him, “I thought you didn’t believe in that crap, what made you change your mind?”
His face paled as he seemed to search for the right words, “It started right after I locked up for the night. I saw something move in one of the feeds and could’ve sworn it was a person. I went to investigate and couldn’t find anything. During the next two rounds, just before you arrived, I kept getting the feeling that I was being watched and I swear I heard someone whisper my name once!”
“Please tell me you see the irony in that?” I teased, “First of all, there are cameras all over this place! So technically, you were being watched the entire time. Secondly, the whisper you ‘heard’ was probably just a stray breeze entering the cave. They have been known to sound an awful lot like voices at times, just saying.”
“Fine, since you’re going to be an ass about it, I guess you’ll just have to see for yourself. Good night Wess.” He waved to me irritably and sped out of the security room.
My first walk through the site was uneventful, and after giving all the security feeds a good once over I decided to read more from the journal to pass the time between rounds.
It continued much the same as it had left off, with him writing about his work days, his family and coworkers, etc… but at the end of his entry for June 13th, 1899, three days before the cave-in, things finally got interesting. He mentioned he and his two coworkers heard scratching coming from behind one of the cavern walls. Thinking someone may have gotten lost and into trouble, they brought it up to their supervisor who went over the cave layout with them. After a short search and running over a few possible scenarios of what the noise could have been, they all drew the same conclusion that I had – they were just hearing rodents scampering around the cave.
I glanced up briefly to check the security monitors, then did a double take before shooting out of my chair to view one of the feeds more closely. The camera was pointed at the opening of a larger tunnel that was nicknamed Boat Alley. We called it that, because halfway down the tunnel there’s an antique row boat on display from when the caves were flooded many years back. A cold chill slowly crept through my body once I registered what I had just seen. Something, or someone, was in that tunnel, and I had seen them just before they disappeared completely under the boat. I pulled up the security log and left a voice recording, doing my best to remain calm as I spoke.
“This is Wess Kellerman, ID 99009. The date is Monday, January 14th 2016 and the time is 11:23 PM. I’m documenting a possible break-in, in Boat Alley and I’m on my way to investigate.”
During the day the tunnels are lit up like the fourth of July, with bulbs and light strips in every nook and cranny, so that customers don’t get too claustrophobic or trip over the uneven ground. At night, it’s a whole different story. In order to save money, only the floor strips are left on and at the dimmest setting possible. It forces us guards on the night shifts to rely on our flashlights for vision. I readied my light and taser, pointed them at the upside-down boat and stood a good fifteen feet away. I ordered the intruder to come out multiple times, and each time I was answered by the whistling of wind as it crept past me. I cautiously inched closer to the small vessel, and after taking a deep breath, I dropped to the ground to peer underneath.
“Asshole.” I breathed to myself, as I read a note from Carlos taped to the underside of the boat.
“GOTCHA! SEE YOU AT WORK TOMORROW LOL!”
•CARLOS
Just incase Carlos had stuck around to scare me, I took extra precautions as I continued my rounds. I had just reached the middle of my walkthrough near the cave-in site when I heard the loud clamor of rocks falling onto the floor behind me. I jumped around in surprise, shining my light just in time to see a beachball sized boulder tumble to the ground, breaking off from a considerably sized hole where it was once lodged. I gawked at the opening for a few minutes, allowing the cloud of dirt and dust to clear before observing the surrounding rocks for any structural damage. By the time I established it was safe, I was unable to contain my curiosity, and I peered into the narrow hole. It snaked for a few feet, widening as it went, before opening up into a large chamber. A moment later, I was army-crawling through the tunnel entrance and standing at the edge of the large cavern. What I saw… was breathtaking. Stalagmites were speckled throughout the chamber and each one glistened as the beam from my light reflected off the condensation that coated them. I made my way to the center of the room and after winding around a couple of the pillars, a small pond entered my limited field of vision. After examining the floor of the cavern, I immediately deduced that it must’ve been left over from when the caves were flooded. I didn’t see them at first, but as I looked over the small pond, I noticed small flakes scattered in small piles around its edges.
I carefully approached the tiny pool–trying my best to avoid kicking any loose flakes or sediment into it and disturbing it’s mirror-like appearance. Unlike the other chambers, this one lacked the normal clutter of sound produced by plummeting water droplets and stray breezes finding their way through the caves hidden orifices. It was completely sealed off from the outside world and the silence it manufactured was unbelievably peaceful. The fact that I was standing in the tomb of two dead men never really occurred to me until now; I guess I was just too caught up in the moment to realize it then. Even now, picturing the unreal stillness of that pond brings about a calmness I never knew existed.
After what felt like hours, I reluctantly turned away from the pond to leave and ran right into one of the stalagmites. I swore loudly in surprise as it split under my weight, taking the top half of the structure with me as I fell towards the floor. I braced myself expecting to have the wind knocked out of me, but to my astonishment the piece I was still clutching practically disintegrated against my body as it broke my fall. I quickly hopped to my feet and was met by a terrible odor, one so foul that it’s difficult to put into words. If I were to try to describe it, I’d say it smelled like a mix of spoiled milk, burnt rubber and cigarette ashes. Needless to say, I threw up as soon as the stench hit my nostrils. I hurriedly covered my nose and mouth with my shirt to mask the smell as I went to investigate the source. If you’re squeamish, I suggest you skip this part because, there’s no sugar-coating what I saw. The smell, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, was coming from the part of the stalagmite that was still standing.
I shined my light at the now knee high structure, doing my best to keep my distance while I studied what was left of it. The base wasn’t thick and round like a normal stalagmite– This one had a bipod base that gradually merged into a single body, and it wasn’t the only one either. After scanning the rest of the room, it was very clear that they all shared the same unorthodox shape, and as soon as I fully examined one that was unscathed, it didn’t take very long to recognize their all too familiar shape.
My breathing became labored as I viewed the remnants of the broken structure, hoping to disprove the thoughts running rampant through my mind. The inside was coated in a rust-like residue and appeared to be hollow at first. I leaned forward to get a better view and noticed the entire base was filled with some sort of lumpy, muddy liquid. Using a pen, I flipped over and scraped off some of the liquid from one of the larger lumps. I let out what started as a soft whimper and once I had fully processed what was in front of me, it instantly turned into a ear splitting scream.
The structures weren’t stalagmites… they were people being used as some kind of shell to preserve their organs and covered in god knows what.
I hauled ass out of that room and practically dove into the small tunnel, clawing desperately at the loose dirt as I scrabbled through the narrow exit. I tumbled down the small mound of rubble at the tunnel’s opening, and after hobbling to my feet, I sprinted towards the security office. I had reached the final stretch and was halfway across the elevated catwalk when I heard a series of light metallic taps coming from behind me. I whipped around to illuminate the grated walkway before I scanned the rest of the small chamber. I held my breath and tried to listen past the white noise of my heart pounding and water droplets splashing. Suddenly, my flashlight flickered a few times then burned out.
I’ve had similar things happen to me in the past, where I’m part-way through my routine and my light suddenly goes out. I just follow the light strips back to the office and replace my light, then finish up from where I left off. No biggie. But after my grim experience in the cavern, I felt guilty for blowing off my co-worker Carlos. For the first time in my life I was afraid of the dark, because in that moment I knew I wasn’t alone, and something was watching me. I took a step backwards and heard the noise again as it echoed off the cavern walls. It was like listening to someone tap their nails on a soda can.
*Tap,tap,tap,tap…tap*
When I turned to make a run for it, a woman’s voice called out from behind me in a soft whisper and stopped me in my tracks.
“Please stay Wess…” She begged as my flashlight began to flicker again. I whirled around and pointed it in the direction of the voice, hoping to find it’s source through the flickers of light.
“Don’t leave me alone!” The voice pleaded to me as five pale, willowy fingers emerged from holes in the metal floor grating, brandishing long, dagger like claws that were blacker than obsidian. They clinked against the grating as each finger closed in around it.
*Tap,tap,tap,tap…tap*
I ran as fast as possible, stumbling once or twice as I fumbled my way through the darkness.
Once I reached the door to the guard’s room, there was a series of loud metallic screeches, followed by the thunderous bang of something landing on the catwalk. I paused in front of the door to contemplate whether I should try to catch a glimpse of the thing pursuing me or not, and immediately decided against it. I shoved the door open and nearly fell through the doorway, before slamming it shut and locking it behind me. I started to dial Nine-One-One on the security room phone, but stopped once I realized how crazy my story would sound. Frustrated, I slammed the phone down onto the receiver and glared intensely at the door I just came through, as a young woman’s’ voice crooned from the other side.
“Wess I promise I won’t hurt you… it’s so cold out here. Please let me in, I’m so cold Wess.”
It occurred to me at that moment that I should’ve just left the winery. The door to the lobby was only ten feet further down the corridor. I was in such a hurry to put a wall between me and that thing lurking underneath the catwalk, leaving the building never even came to mind. To think… I could have gone home, put in my resignation letter in the morning, and never came back to Luna Rossa.
I took a deep breath to calm myself. Despite how terrifying the idea was, I knew I had to figure out who or what exactly I was dealing with. I turned to view the camera monitors and my stomach dropped. All but one of the feeds were displaying static, and to make matters worse, when I tried to go over the old footage I realized I’d forgotten to turn on the VCR recorder at the start of my shift. Not only could I not view the footage from earlier, there was no video evidence of what tampered with the cameras. Desperate for answers, I opened up Hector’s journal once more and breezed over his last few entries. What I read not only terrified me, but confirmed everything I had experienced.
On June 15th 1899, Hector and his two cohorts, Ben and Daniel, were on their way out of the caves when Hector playfully shoved Ben. This caused him to fall into and through the same tunnel wall they had been hearing noises through the other day. Breaking protocol, they decided to investigate the new chamber (sound familiar?) on their own, each bringing their own lantern. The first thing they noticed were the hundreds of human shaped stalagmites scattered throughout the chamber and at the center of them all was the small pond. Ben and Daniel both wandered to the center of the chamber, while Hector observed the man shaped structures. When they reached the pond, they found a naked woman lying at its edge with her lower half completely submerged. Figuring she was dead they ordered Hector to get their supervisor. As he was leaving, he heard a woman’s voice, followed by Daniel’s scream as he came rushing toward him. He spurred him on, confused as to why Ben and the girl weren’t with him. Daniel was only an arm’s length away when a pale, clawed hand shot out from the darkness and grabbed his friend by the ankle. Terrified, Hector grabbed a nearby pickaxe and began chipping away at the opening of the cavern, causing the cave-in of 1899. Just before the opening was completely buried, Hector claimed he saw a stalagmite resembling Ben’s figure at the edge of the pond, still holding his lit lantern. Behind that, he witnessed what he described as a creature that had the body of a woman from the waist up and the body of a demon from the waist down. It was caressing “Ben” from behind. A week later, he returned to the site in secret, just before he was taken to the asylum, and left his journal there as a warning for those who were willing to believe him.
Not really knowing what to do next, I did the only thing I could think of at the time, which was sit and wait it out. Those next few hours were the longest of my life. The creature called to me in a whimpering female voice every few minutes, sounding weak and distressed at first, begging me to help her. After an hour or so it tried a more… seductive approach. Again, using the same female voice, it would moan my name over and over while tempting me with sexual fantasies I could only dream of, if I opened the door for her. When the teasing didn’t work, there was a brief window of silence before the creature began screaming and lashing out at the security room door. I vaguely remember wrapping my uniform top around my head, hoping to muffle the cacophony of scraping nails and ear splitting shrieks that were being amplified by the surrounding cavern walls. The noises were so horrifyingly loud and painful, at one point I actually contemplated opening the door just to make it stop. Then, just like that, it was dead silent.
With my ears still ringing, I checked the time on my phone and realized the opening crew would be in soon. Reluctantly, I got up out of a fetal position and removed myself from underneath the security desk, then made my way to the rusty metal door on the other side of the room. I hesitantly pressed my face against its cool, rough surface, listening for any movement on the other side.
“Hello, Wess it’s me,” Carlos’s voice echoed loudly, causing me to jump, “I accidentally left my smokes in the security room and am just picking them up real quick.”
The door handle wiggled slightly as he tried to open the door, then swore under his breath.
“Hey man, the doors’ locked and I left my keys in my ride, could you get the door for me please?”
“Yeah,” I muttered, “sorry bud, it’s been a long night.”
I reached for the lock and froze. The voice was his, sure, but I had two good reasons to believe it wasn’t Carlos behind the door. One, Carlos didn’t smoke (that I knew of) and two, he didn’t own a ‘ride’, which I knew because he always bragged about how he biked to work everyday. I pretended to unlock the door and a millisecond later, there was thunderous bang as the creature tried to plow through the door it thought was open. Reverting back to the woman’s voice from before, it cackled manically and slowly, with each passing second, it began to fade. Thinking it was returning back to the depths of the cave, I grabbed my things and without hesitation, seized my opportunity to leave. I darted out of the security room and up the stone steps. I burst through the door to the main lobby and sprinted out the front entrance to my car. When I got home, the first thing I went for was the pistol I kept in my nightstand, before barricading myself in the bedroom.
Later that evening, I was woken up by the sound of my phone ringing. I fumbled around trying to find it, but by the time I did, I’d already missed the phone call. I had thirty missed calls/ voicemails and twenty text messages from my boss. I figured she would be upset at me, I mean, I left without locking up and I can only imagine what the security door looked like after the creature man handled it for hours on end, not to mention the large hole at the cave-in site. I figured I had a lot of explaining to do. When I called her back though, things did not go as expected. When I started to confront her about the things mentioned, she told me everything was locked up tight and made no mention about the cave-in site or the security room. She asked if I could come back to the Luna Rossa for questioning by the police. It took everything I had to muster the strength to do so, but I did as I was asked.
When I arrived I was directed to the security room, where the police were waiting for me. I stopped briefly just before I entered the room to observe the door and to my horror, there wasn’t a single scratch on it. Then, as I walked in, I caught a glimpse of the security feeds… all of them were working perfectly and the hole at the cave-in site was no longer there.
The police interrogated me for about an hour, with most of the questions centered around Carlos. When was the last time I had seen him, what was his attitude like, etc… Apparently, Carlos never made it home after his work shift. His wife thought he might have went to the bar afterwards with some friends, but after calling around and finding out none of them had seen him, she made the call to the police. This is where things get even more creepy!
Security footage showed Carlos leave the security room like normal, then sneak back into the caves while I wasn’t looking. He then made his way to boat alley and crawled underneath the old boat (They played my audio report about the intruder at this point in time). As I was leaving the security room, a couple of rocks fell from the cave-in site, leaving a small tunnel behind and Carlos left his hiding spot to investigate the noise. The video showed him crawl into the tiny tunnel and shortly after, it collapsed with him still inside. They apologized for the formalities but they needed to rule out foul play and offered me their condolences. Once I got the okay to go, I left, without saying another word.
When I got home, I went straight to my computer and began typing out this message. It’s taken me almost a month now to write it, because I can still hardly believe what happened. The recording from that night, the one the police had found, shouldn’t have even existed, seeing as I had forgot to turn on the video recorder! I don’t know how, but the creature must have tampered with the footage and somehow repaired the damage it had made to the security room door. I know, it all sounds insane but it’s the truth… at least I think it is. I couldn’t have hallucinated the whole thing, could I?
If I’m not going completely bat-shit crazy, that means some paranormal creature is going around kidnapping people, storing them in the cave and covering it up. Think about it for a second, there were hundreds of people in there! Just how old is that thing? How long has it been holed up in that cave, waiting to pick off some unfortunate passer-by? I have a lot of questions, but I sure as hell am not going to stick around to find the answers and be labeled as a whack job or worse, turned into human jerky.
I put in my two weeks notice right away and used what was left of my PTO days, so that I never had to return to that god awful place, but that doesn’t change the fact that my mind still does. Almost every night, I can hear her or it calling to me, begging me to return, like some sick, siren song playing over and over in my head.
Now, if this tale wasn’t enough to keep you away, I can’t physically stop you from going there and I wish you the best, but to those who were willing to listen, please, heed my warning and stay clear of the Luna Rossa.
|
I am awake. I don’t recall falling asleep and am not real sure how I got into bed, but I am awake now. There is a very distant ringing in my ears, sort of like the aftermath of a concussive blast that makes you deaf, only this ringing seems far off inside my head. Must have had a rough night I suppose, although honestly I can’t really recall the previous evening or any evening for that matter. Yep, must have been one hell of a night.
I roll out of bed and my feet hit the cold, hard tile floor of my bedroom. Rubbing my hands over my face I try to shake the cobwebs of sleep – and whatever I may have drank last night – out of my head. Glancing out of the nearby window I see a gloomy, overcast sky and a light rain falling on the leafless forest of trees that surrounds my property. Is it Fall? I honestly cannot remember. Ugh! I swear, God, I will never drink that much again. I have made that same hollow promise a hundred times before I am sure.
Moving off of the bed, I walk down the hall and descend the staircase that leads to the main level of the house, the top three stairs creaking under my weight as they always do. Midway down the stairs, I can see outside through the Amityville Horror-style window over the entryway that the drizzle and clouds have settled in and are likely going to be hanging around a while. I’m not going to go to work today.
Wait. I don’t have to work today, right? It’s the weekend, isn’t it? I shake my head vigorously and make that same hollow promise to God again. This day is going to be far worse than my night must have been.
The kitchen has a digital clock, so I stumble in to check the day and time just to be sure I don’t need to call in – ahem – sick. Clock says 9am – I’m late if it’s a weekday – and it is Sunday. Excellent. Time to crash on the couch and do nothing. My God I am tired. That couch is calling my name right now.
I leave the kitchen and move through the archway into the living room, noticing that the hardwoods are just as cold as the tiled floors upstairs. A small shiver moves up my spine and I make a turn towards the thermostat to crank the heat up before lying down and covering up with the throw blanket hanging over the back of the couch.
The worn, cold leather of the couch creaks under my weight. I hear the familiar click of the thermostat as the heat kicks on and pull the blanket in tighter, close my eyes and try to fall asleep. Maybe this hangover – worst one I ever had and I still can’t remember the party. Hell yeah! – will be gone after a good, late morning nap.
The whispers start immediately. I bolt upright on the couch, throwing the blanket aside as I do, and scan the room. Aside from me, the living room is empty.
The upstairs bathroom fan is running. Did I leave it on? Did I even go in the bathroom this morning?
I sneak quietly from the living room, through the kitchen and peek around the corner. Silent as a church mouse. I had to have been a ninja in a past life or something. I look up the stairs and see that the bathroom light is on and the exhaust fan is definitely running. Maybe I destroyed the toilet last night and left it running to kill the smell before stumbling to bed, I think.
But the whispering starts again and it is coming from the bathroom. No time for subtlety now, so I bolt up the stairs – the top three creak as usual – and burst into the bathroom. If there is someone in here they are about to get their ass kicked. But the bathroom is empty and the whispering has stopped.
Okay, I am far more hung over than I thought. I flip the bathroom wall switch to kill the lights and the fan then realize my bed isn’t far away at all. Sleep. I need sleep. I am so tired. The bed is there, in my room, dark and inviting. I will just sleep this off and wake up feeling much better. Time for that nap.
I lay down on the bed, sinking into the mattress like butter melting on a hot pan, pull the covers up to my chin, close my eyes and sleep.
Or at least I think I went to sleep. I am definitely awake but I don’t recall falling asleep or dreaming. The darkness has crept into the room like a cat burglar, casting shadows on the far wall that look like little demons ready to jump out of their two dimensional wall canvas and attack as full blown three dimensional horrors. Must be night time because I can’t see anything through the window, but I can still hear the faint pattering of the rain on the roof.
I throw the blankets back, sit up and rub my face again. Still tired and groggy. And hung over. I leave the demons behind me on the bedroom wall and head to the bathroom. The light is still off so I flip it on. The light from the molded glass fixture dances all over like miniature crystal ballerinas and the exhaust fan comes on. I sneak a peek into the toilet – Nope. No prayers offered up to the porcelain god in here, I think to myself.
As I turn to the mirror to face myself and dreading the site I will behold in this rough state, sounds from downstairs freeze me in my tracks. It is the unmistakable sound of silverware on plates. Someone is eating dinner in my house.
The top three stairs creak once again as I fly down to the first floor, burst into the kitchen – throwing the door wide as I enter – and head towards the dinner table by the bay window. There are plates here, remnants of a half-eaten meal on each of them. But whoever was here, eating my food, left in a hurry when they heard me coming.
The hardwood floor leading to the front door sounds like a herd of elephants is holding a track meet on it. The bastards are running out the front door. As I quickly head to the entryway, I see the door close and hear the deadbolt click into place.
They have a key? They must have because they just locked the door from the outside. I peer through the stained glass window slits that are on either side of the front door but I cannot see anyone in the blackness of this rain-soaked night. Enjoy the weather you pieces of shit.
The idea that someone was in my house, eating my food and has a key disturbs me. There was clearly more than one and while my past life ninja skills might help me fight them if they return, I don’t want to pin my survivability hopes on reincarnation theory. Besides, I am just so tired. Let the cops do their job.
I grab the phone off of the wall and dial 911. Nothing. I hang up and try again. Still nothing. There is no dial tone. Did they cut the lines? Bastards.
Now I am pissed. They were in my house, eating my food and now they have cut the phone lines? Well, they don’t have a car because I would have heard it fire up and drive off. Their asses are mine.
As I storm out of the kitchen towards the front door, I leave a trail of dinner plates, silverware, half-eaten food and anything else on the counters strewn on the floor. That dull ringing in my ears has intensified a bit, I am tired and groggy, but I don’t care. I am pissed.
I open the front door so fast I don’t even feel the brass handle in my palm. It slams shut behind me. Taking long, determined strides into my fog-covered front yard – seems the rain has let up – I start scanning for assholes and elbows because I am sure those fuckers are running away. I spend the next hour searching the yard along the tree line but don’t find any sign of people. Whoever they were, they are long gone now and dammit I am still tired as hell. I don’t have time for this.
As I head back to the house, I notice that the lights in the entryway are on. They cast a glowing image of that Amityville window above the doorway onto the stone slab porch and front yard.
And the front door is open.
I don’t remember closing it but I know I heard it slam shut behind me. I break into a full run and charge into the house, stirring up a vortex of wet, dead leaves in my wake. I notice that the ringing in my ears has increased in intensity and I can hear the din of whispers over the tone in my head.
As I storm onto the cold, slick floor of the entryway I see three people. The first is clearly a priest of some sort. He is holding up a rosary with one hand and has a small, opened Bible in the other. The second person is a short, sad looking woman with a floor length coat pulled tight around her, its fur-line trim and collar cinched closed with little wooden pegs.
The third person is my daughter.
I almost forgot I have a daughter. How could I forget her? She is beautiful, standing there in front of me. I have a tremendous sense of loss and realize I miss her so much, but cannot figure out why. Didn’t I just see her the other day? Well, didn’t I?
Images of a beach, the warm salty air on a windy day flash through my mind. My little girl is there and we are flying a kite. I can hear the waves crashing onto the sugar-sand shore and my daughter laughing as we run through the surf flying a kite. It was a great day. And she was so young, beautiful and full of life.
She is crying now, mouth covered by her hands as she scans the area of the entryway we are all standing in. She looks at me quickly then her gaze moves on, searching, but for what?
The sad, little woman with the fur-trimmed coat, however, looks right at me. She has a grim look on her face as she pats the priest on the shoulder and shakes her head. The priest stops waving that stupid rosary around, goes silent and then moves to hold my daughter as if to console her.
“He is here,” says the short woman.
My daughter lets out a sob and the ringing in my ears gets loud.
“He is confused and angry. He doesn’t understand yet.”
My daughter uncovers her mouth and her lips quiver. She squints her eyes as if to hold back more tears. “Can he hear me? What’s he saying?” she asks.
The short woman shakes her head. “It doesn’t work like that. He can hear you, yes. But I don’t hear what he says. Just emotions. Feelings. You can speak to him.”
My little girl, little no longer as I realize she is a full grown woman now, wipes tears away from her eyes, sniffles and offers a smile. I sort of laugh because she must think she is looking at me but instead she is looking just off to my left. But why wouldn’t she be able to look right at me? I am standing right in front of her.
“Dad, you can go now. We are going to be okay. Mom and I love you and miss you so much but you have to go. You will be better off.” My daughter laughs a little and smiles that smile I always loved to see. “Don’t worry, I won’t let Mom sell the house. I know you love it.”
The ringing in my ears is nearly deafening now but I do not care. Why is she talking to me like this? Why does she want me to leave? And why is she not the ten year old girl from my memory?
I realize I am screaming these questions at her. The ringing has become full blown pain in my head but I don’t care. I press my hands to my ears trying to block out the noise, shake my head side to side and continue screaming questions at my daughter.
The short woman shakes her head again. She casts a sad look towards my daughter. “He is angry. He is yelling at you – I can’t hear the words – but he doesn’t understand why you are saying these things. He is very, very confused. He doesn’t know it is time to move on from this life.”
Wait. What did she just say? I stop screaming and lower my hands. The ringing in my ears is subsiding and instead begins a slow decent into a single, harmonious tone. What does she mean that it’s time to move on?
My daughter smiles again. I have missed that so much. “Daddy, we love you. It is time for you to move on. You can’t keep scaring the hell out of Mom and I. We appreciate you staying with us to make sure we are okay – and we are – but you need to go.”
Behind my daughter, the kitchen doorway suddenly flares to life with the brightest light I have ever seen – pure, clean and inviting. That harmonious tone grows louder. Not painful, but inviting. I look away and to the three people standing before me. They do not see the light. It beckons me, so I begin to walk towards it.
The short woman pats my daughters hand a nods her head. Her smile tells me she knows what is happening even if I do not. I move closer to the light, its beams of white falling over me like loving arms pulling me into their embrace. The tunnel entrance is so close now but I stop and turn to look at my daughter one last time. I mouth the words I love you knowing that no sound will come from my lips. The short woman whispers to my daughter. She sobs briefly then says “I love you, too, Daddy.”
I step into the tunnel and let the light take me. The tunnel isn’t very long and the light near the end begins to shift. I can smell warm, salty air and I hear the crash of waves on a sugar-sand shore. My little girl giggles.
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‘Tis a fine house, lad, to be sure, and well built. And ’tis sure I am that you and young Maglyn will be more than happy here till the end of your days. But I’ve said it afore and I’ll say it again—I wish I knew what possessed you to build so close to the cairn of Draugs Teigh and so far from me and your ma.
Now, calm yourself, lad! Calm yourself! I meant no harm! But you are my son and I am your father. You can’t blame your old da for worrying now, can ye? You know as well as I the stories about those old stones and the darkness that lives there. And with that evil place being home to no less a nightmare than the Naera himself, well…
What’s that you say? You, twenty years of age last winter, and I never told you the tale of the Naera? Well, I suppose there’s no surprise there. Sure, ’tis a dark tale of twisted magic and betrayal—and one I am loath to tell. Wise folk make a point of avoiding it for fear of attracting his attention. ‘Tis said even the saying of his name will bring the fiend who stalks that hill to knocking.
You want to hear it, do ye? Well, I suppose ’tis best to be forewarned or so ’tis said. Go on, then, and bring your da some fresh ale afore I get to the telling. There’s a good lad.
Now, let’s see… ‘Twas some time back when Faeral committed the deed that cursed that place—almost three hundred year ago now, or so the story goes. Took the lives of many of the townsfolk, he did. Aye, Faeral was a wicked man to be sure—a summoner of the dead. No one knew from whence he came, really. Come here from some land far away where such things are more commonplace, I suppose. The folk here in the valley never took too well to his dark ways. Feared him, they did. All over the countryside, they avoided him as if he were the grim specter of Dathruk himself. ‘Course there were no denying that he resembled one of the death god’s harbingers with his thin, hawkish face and boney limbs.
Indeed, it weren’t far from here that he practiced his terrible arts—built a great tower of stone deep in the forest not more than three leagues from this very spot. Oh, a monstrous place it was, with great stone faces glowering down at passers-by from a parapet that ringed the uppermost floor, their eyes aglow with unhallowed light that froze your blood right in your veins. ‘Tis said they were watchers of some sort, guardians who alerted their master of any foolish enough to get too close. That tower has long since crumbled to ruin, no longer held together by the arcane forces that built it, but folks say they can still hear the ghosts of Faeral’s victims a-crying and a-wailing through the hills.
Now, the first one to come upon that eyesore were the miller. Out looking for one of his mules run off from the mill, he was. ‘Course chasing green fairies was probably more like it, if you take my meaning. He was known to be a bit too fond of the drink. Still there he was, tramping through the brush, brambles tearing his britches and ripping at his legs as he stumbled into the clearing. Run straight into the tower, he did!
‘Twas then that a strange cry above him caught his ear, a sound unlike any bird he’d ever heard. Glancing upward, his eyes caught a line of foreign symbols etched into the stone before his gaze settled on one of those ghastly faces. Sure as I live and breathe, there it was scowling down at him, its eyes shimmering with malice. Afore the full realization of what he was seeing could set in, the thing let loose another cry like a cat being murdered. Scared the living daylight out of the miller! What could he do but shite himself and run?
Straight to the tavern he went, legs aquiver and naught but gibberish pouring from his pallid gob. Took a full four pints afore they could calm him down enough to understand what he were saying…and even then not a soul believed him. They laughed at his crazy story, figured he’d had a bit too much of that barley brew he was so fond of… But they didn’t scoff for long. The necromancer would soon make his way to the village.
In the beginning, Faeral kept to himself mostly. A homely, disagreeable man he was and rarely seen—which was all right by the townsfolk. Once in a great while, he came to town and spent a bit of coin at one of the merchants but the rest of the time, he remained locked away in his tower. What he did up there was anybody’s guess, though everyone had a good idea. You see, shortly after his arrival, folks started noticing great gaping holes in the cemetery—graves with nothing left in them but a broken pine box!
One evening as the sun slipped into its bed, the temple priest set out to perform his nightly duty to Dathruk—the pouring of libations on his shrine and asking the Lord of the Grave to look after the souls in his care. As he walked down the path to the shrine at the cemetery’s center, he noticed something strange in the distance. From where he stood, it looked as though someone had piled a heap of broken wood and earth near one of the graves. As he got closer, though, he could see that was not the case at all. The grave was fully opened, the dirt thrown roundabout as though the perpetrator were in a great hurry! The wood he’d seen were really the broken planks of the coffin laying littered about the place.
The body, buried only days before, was nowhere to be found. Puzzled, the priest stared in disbelief, not knowing what to think. He’d performed the service that laid the poor bugger to rest himself! As he stood there scratching his head, he noticed another pile several graves over, and then another further on still. Shaken, he began slowly to turn about, looking around in all directions and seeing more and more of the telltale mounds—a full score, at least!
Well, everyone knew who were responsible, didn’t they? Faeral the Necromancer! How he’d managed to steal so many bodies in but one night no one could figure. And ‘course that weren’t the most exasperating part of the whole ordeal. The people were outraged that he’d desecrated the remains of their kin but none had the courage to stop him. Not a one wanted to end up on his butcher’s block, that’s for certain. So they let him be, grudgingly allowing him to carry on whatever gruesome endeavors he got up to. At least he were only taking the dead, they reasoned, and not the living. If only they’d known what horror was to come, they’d have burnt him up in his tower as soon as the first sign of grave robbing occurred. But as things were, he hadn’t harmed a living soul and so they left him to himself.
Things went on this way for some time until the day that Faeral met young Maeve. Hair the color of summer wheat, eyes like emeralds, and skin the color of fresh milk. Oh, a beautiful lass, she was, but wild! Nary a drop of modesty nor honor in her at all!
Maeve came from good, solid stock, she did. Her parents were honest, hardworking folk. Her da was the town blacksmith and her ma…her ma was a master weaver. I tell ye, lad, you never saw such things as came from that woman’s loom! Her skill, a gift straight from the goddess of the arts herself, was widely celebrated. Many a prince and noble house commissioned her services to weave wonders for their estates. Aye, and they paid her well for it, too. Magical things, she made—the characters in her tapestries were so real they moved of their own accord, playing out their scenes over and over to the delight of all who laid eyes on them. She tried to pass her knowledge on to Maeve but the girl had no interest in the art of weaving. Her interest lay solely in the art of seduction. ‘Tis true she spent her days doing chores for her ma as any dutiful daughter does but her nights… oh, her nights were another matter altogether.
To the shame of her parents, Maeve prowled the tavern at night, taking a new lover as often as a man takes a breath. Discretion was never her concern. Husband or bachelor, it mattered not to Maeve. She flitted from man to man as a hummingbird darts from flower to flower, taking a sip of each but landing on none, if you take my meaning. She left many a suitor in shambles, promising eternal love to one even as she slipped into the bed of another.
Her folks tried to reel her in, to tame the wild streak in her, but she’d have none of it. And when she caught sight of Faeral in the shops, saw how the townspeople recoiled from him… well, there was no stopping her. They tried to convince her, to warn her of what often comes of those who share the bed of evil but she wouldn’t listen. They reminded her how ugly he was, how much like a gargoyle he looked, but nothing mattered to Maeve. True, a handsome man Faeral was not—he was too thin of body and his face was pinched—but Maeve didn’t want him for his looks. ‘Twas his sinister reputation that enticed her.
Maeve cared not a whit that everyone despised the foul necromancer or that he’d defiled the graves of her friends and ancestors. She reveled in the scandal it caused and her beauty wove a spell of lust over the lanky mage. Oh, he resisted at first, turned his nose up and snorted derisively at her brazen attempts to seduce him but she soon wore him down. No matter how warped his nature was, Faeral was a man still! With each passing meeting, Maeve’s charm snaked its way into his blackened heart and sank its fangs in deep. Aye, caught in her web, he was—enthralled and in love.
What’s that? Did he not know of her reputation? I suppose he did—gossip traveled just as fast and as far in those days as it does now and she made no bones about what she got up to in the wee hours. Maybe it were his own arrogance made him believe she’d not cross him as she had the others, but who can guess? A body in love can convince themselves of any number of fictions and Faeral was a man obsessed. What I do know is that as his love for her grew stronger, his desire for her grew in a most twisted way.
He lavished her with expensive gifts, some clearly from the corpses he stole and others from lands unknown. She accepted all with squeal of glee, smothering him with kisses and other favors. But no matter what promises she made him, no matter what gifts he brought, her dalliances continued. Day by day, he became more covetous, more jealous of her not-so-secret trysts until one night he caught her in the arms of yet another man.
‘Twas the night of a dark moon. The sun had set with a bloody hue. The townsfolk, taking it as an ill omen, had locked themselves in their homes and barred their shutters. Only two people took no heed. Maeve and her newest plaything, a traveling peddler, lay tucked away in a tavern room, delighting in each other’s caresses. Outside in the darkness stood an indignant Faeral, his eyes locked on an open second-story window from which slithered the soft sounds of lovemaking. As he listened, every oath of fidelity she’d taken, every time she’d sworn that she’d never again take another lover but him came flooding to the fore of his mind. Each moan of betrayal from above drove a nail through his withered heart.
His very soul aching, he whispered a few strange words and the tavern doors swung open before him without making a sound. Silently, he slipped inside and made his way to the room where his inconstant love and her latest conquest lay spent and covered in sweat. With a wave of his hand, the door splintered and burst afore an enraged Faeral stepped across the threshold.
The room was lit by a single lamp—its small flame guttering in the breeze from the open window. Without a word, Faeral crossed the floor and gutted Maeve’s stunned lover like a trout before he was even free of the coverlet. Turning on Maeve, Faeral demanded that she be loyal to himself alone from that night forward on pain of death. Yet, as he stood there recounting to her the many oaths she’d sworn to him, the steam of the peddler’s newly liberated entrails rising at his feet, what do you think the stupid girl did? Why, she laughed at him! And a cold, callous sound it was. The gods never made a woman of colder stuff than Maeve! Why, said she as she clutched the bed sheets to her chest, would he think that she could love a wretch such as him? Did he think he was the first she’d made such promises to? He was naught more than a passing fancy, a frivolity that brought her pretty baubles. As she mocked him, his anger built with each scathing word. Finally, her venom spent, she glared at him haughty as a queen, contempt written on her face.
Faeral stared at Maeve in agonized silence, an inferno of pain and treachery raging in his belly. “You and I shall be one, Maeve, one way or another,” he vowed, a malicious grin spreading across his face as he took his leave amidst her ringing laughter.
For several weeks after, no one saw nor heard from Faeral. He did not come to visit the merchants; he did not come to see Maeve. A few of the braver sort tried to organize a search for him in his tower, intent on hanging him for the murder of the peddler, but fear of the necromancer’s power quelled their fervor. The townsfolk hoped he had died of a broken heart or had gone back in disgrace to the place of his birth. Most were just relieved that he was gone. For her part, Maeve thought that it would be only a matter of time afore he returned as all the others had, bearing gifts and begging her forgiveness. By the gods, how wrong she was. How wrong they all were.
You see, ’tis not a love of death that consumes a necromancer but a love of life! He lusts for mastery over death to prolong his own existence! ‘Twas this search for immortality that kept Faeral going and he had come very close to this aim through his grisly work. For years, he had worked toward his goal of unending life and god-like powers… but a gift demands a gift. To obtain the boons he sought, Faeral willingly had to give of the one thing he held most dear. All his life, the only thing that held that place in his heart was his necromantic endeavors but that had changed when he met Maeve. Until that fateful night in the tavern, the love burning in his breast had kept him from sacrificing her to his thirst for eternal life but now…now that she had rejected him, and in so humiliating a manner, what reason had he to stay his hand? He would complete his great work, he reasoned, and keep Maeve with him forever through this final act.
‘Twas in short order that the townsfolk found their hopes of Faeral’s departure dashed. Rumors of missing travelers began trickling in from around the countryside. Tales were whispered through trembling lips of a demonic figure ambushing groups of grown men in the dark and dragging them screaming into the shadows. Hunters would return from the wild shaken and pale, terrified by horrific cries heard echoing through the wood in every direction. Folks walking home from the tavern at night vanished. Everyone knew it to be the handiwork of Faeral but not one of them was brave enough to hunt him down.
Finally, it happened one morning that young Maeve did not return home. As I said, ’twas no secret that she often shared a late night with whatever man had caught her fancy. But when the sun had reached its mid-point in the sky and there had been no sign of Maeve still, her mother began to worry. From home to home, from tavern to shop she went, searching in vain for her daughter.
Immediately, the townsfolk’s thoughts ran to the necromancer Faeral and the tale Maeve had told of their last encounter. The final straw had broken. Fear gave way to fury. Grabbing whatever they could to arm themselves, the men of the village marched to the tower, intent on bringing the girl home if indeed she was captive there. Long and hard, they searched but found nothing. By all appearances, it seemed as though Faeral’s tower had been abandoned for some time so they fanned out, searching the surrounding hills.
And that, my boy, is where they found them; there, where the cairn now stands. Through dark magic, the power-mad wizard had set up a circle of stones. In the center stood a great stone altar, black and slick with the blood of his many victims. The stench of decaying flesh rose from piles of half-eaten corpses—some still recognizable as the missing men from the village. Upon the altar, Faeral crouched over the lifeless body of Maeve, her throat torn. The gathered men were stunned at his transformation. His skin was taut and pale, his eyes sunken into his skull—so much so that his face resembled a death’s head! In his hands hung bloody strips of flesh, wrenched from Maeve’s body with his own clawed fingers. Turning to the sickened crowd, he grimaced and then, as if in defiance, he gobbled it down in a frenzy before tearing even more meat from her corpse.
It took several moments for the shock of this horrific scene to wear off the menfolk, but wear off it did. Clubs and plowshares held high, they rushed at the lunatic. The fear they had felt for so long came spilling forth in a wave of primal fury. Like men possessed, they attacked him. Oh, he fought back all right, and with an unnatural strength at that, but I don’t think any force in the Heavens or the Hells could’ve saved him from the wrath of those men. It weren’t long afore he was overcome.
When their rage finally abated, they looked down on the vanquished body of Faeral, bashed and broken on that vile altar. Figuring him not deserving of proper burial rites, they interred him with the very stones of his accursed circle. Pulled them down, they did. They got ropes and horses and leveled the place right on top of him!
He’s up there still… but the old villain doesn’t rest in peace, oh no! How could the townsfolk have known that that their actions served to consummate a pact made between the necromancer and the dark god Faruk? By killing him, they brought about the beginning of a terrible curse. Faruk the Corrupt, son of the death god Dathruk and the goddess Isenea, he who sowed the first seeds of corruption into the world, gave Faeral forbidden knowledge, promising him eternal life in return for his devotion and sacrifice. The murder of Maeve, Faeral’s only-ever love, sealed this pact and remanded her broken soul to unending slavery in Faruk’s realm. As for the necromancer, the foul god kept his promise and gave him eternal life through undeath. But Faeral did not rise as the lich he had hoped to become. Instead, he was transformed into a ravening ghoul—the Naera, or Night Caller, as they’ve come to name him—driven by an insatiable appetite for living flesh. To this very day, when hunger or some other force calls him forth from his tomb, he pulls himself free of the rocks and roams the countryside peeking through windows and knocking on doors trying to flush out a bit of fresh meat.
Now, my boy, pay special heed to what I’m about to tell ye. I’ve spoken his name enough times in the telling of this story so as to wake the creature ten times over. That in mind, you listen to your ol’ da and you listen well. If you wake from sleep to the sound of rapping at the door, let it be. He always comes a-calling in the darkest hours of night. The wind may blow, the snow may fall, and still he’ll come a-banging on the doors and a-tapping on the shutters. But don’t you make a sound—not a peep! And he hears but a pin drop, you and all your house will be lost! Family and friends who call on ye next morning will find naught but gnawed bone and blood. He leaves no flesh behind, the hellish glutton. ‘Course, that’s not all…
Oh, he’s a sly one, that old ghoul, and he’s got a bag of tricks as can help him gratify his bedeviling hunger. He can mimic the very voices of the gods themselves, or so they say. Many a man has lost his life and loved ones to Faeral’s trickery, thinking ’twas his own children crying for help outside in the darkness. No matter what you hear, even if ’tis my own voice calling ye out from your bed pleading with ye to save me life, you just lay yourself back down and cover your ears.
Are you feeling all right, lad? It’s that you’re looking a bit pale is all. Oh, now don’t you go fretting about old Faeral. You just remember what I’ve said and you’ll be fine. As for me, I’d best be getting on. Your ma will be looking for me and I’ll not keep her waiting much longer. Besides, night will be falling shortly and I don’t like the look of that fog settling up on the cairn.
Credit To: Tara Grímravn
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It was a dreary kind of day. It always was in this small suburban town. On the edge of this town,there resided a deep forest which gave a little life to the otherwise plain residence. The large oak trees swaying in the playful breeze, the few gentle rays of light peeking through the grey clouds were speckling through the forestry onto the foliage below, it is quite a sleepy little forest, the loudest sounds coming from the occasional wildlife passing through. That is except for today. Today all silence was broken with a loud pop and a flurry of fluttering wings followed by apish hooting and hollering. The culprit of these sounds? A group of boys who often frequented this otherwise quiet little forest. These boys had been friends since elementary school and it was common place for them to meet up after school and walk through to the edge of the local park into this forest. It was their “secret hideout”. Normally their games were innocent enough, kids just being kids goofing off and throwing sticks at each other. But today was different, today was “special”. The oldest of the group had just turned thirteen and had received a pellet rifle for his birthday. He was told repeatedly that it was not a toy and he could only use it with an adult around. He was even promised by his uncle that they would go out and shoot some targets at on Friday after school, but that was several days away and he was of course eager to show his best friends his newest treasure and what better place to do it then their secret hiding spot? So here he was proudly holding his recently fired .22 caliber pellet rifle smugly grinning at his accomplishment in hitting his first ever target. Before him just a few feet away in a mass of twitching black feathers was a small black bird, its spastic movements slowly ceasing.
“I can’t fucking believe you hit it dude!” the youngest of the three squeaked, excitedly running over to examine the fallen bird.
The oldest snorted “Of course I hit it, Uncle Joe used to let me shoot his real rifle all the time before this.”
He got a playful punch on his shoulder from the youngest boy. “Yeah right dude, I saw how your hands were shaking, you’ve never even used a pea shooter before.”
“Fuck you dude” the oldest replied with a wry grin.
The youngest chortled and rummaged through the leaves until he found a medium sized stick. He bent down to examine the animal. “Still Tommy,” he said turning the bird over, its head lolling limply over its snapped neck, now no longer moving. “It was a nice shot, you got it straight through the head, Aw sick its eye is even missing dude!”
“Just leave it the hell alone already Jake, let’s just go.” The last member of the trio was fuming. He had made it clear to his friends when Tommy brought out his smuggled birthday present that he was uncomfortable with them playing with the gun and was even more distraught of the idea of them hurting a harmless creature with it.
Tommy rolled his eyes. “Quit being a fucking pussy dude, it’s just a damn bird. What are you going to cry over it?”
James’s face grew hot “No! I-It’s just not fucking cool alright?! We already know how good your gun works can we just leave now?”
Tommy and Jake both gave each other knowing looks, letting out an exaggerated sigh, they both loved James, he was quiet and reserved, but smart and quick witted. However he was a rule follower and always got very nervous whenever the boys were doing something they “weren’t supposed to be doing”.
Tommy walked over to where James stood indignantly with his arms crossed and eyes glaring. He clasped a hand on his shoulder, James flinching away slightly, still miffed. “Hey dude, I was just messin with ya, Look I’m sorry I shot the thing, I was just really excited about this gun and when I saw the bird sitting right there on that low branch, it was like I couldn’t help myself you know? It was just right there calling to me like come on Tommy, shoot me shoot me!” He finished his sentence in a squeaky high voice drawing a giggle from James.
“Seriously dude, I didn’t mean anything by it and I promise it won’t happen again, let’s just walk around a little more and I’ll only shoot trees or shit like that alright? I promise!”
James looked unconvinced but sighed and nodded his head. “Fine, but you better keep your promise dude or I’m so kicking your ass.”
“I’d like to see you try Jamie-boy” Tommy replied with a smirk. “But seriously James, it won’t happen again.”
James knew Tommy could be an un-tactful asshole sometimes but knew he never did it purposely.
“It’s cool man let’s just hurry up, it’s getting late.”
James bent down and scooped up the broken bird and set it next to a tree where he brushed some leaves over it.
Tommy and Jake shook their heads, James was such a softy.
“Come on then slow poke, I know just the place to really try this puppy out!” Tommy began sprinting deeper into the forest, Jake and James following closely behind.
The boys finally reached their destination; it was a wide open area of the forest with the trees forming almost a perfect circle around it. There was a variety of stumps and fallen trees of all shapes and sizes, some seeming to come out of the ground like giant reaching arms, perfect for climbing or jumping off of. It was by far the boys’ favorite part of the forest.
“I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, this’ll make a great shooting range! James, I’ll even let you go first this time.” Tommy held the butt of the gun out to the boy but James just shook his head and shrugged.
“Nah, that’s okay, I think I’ll just watch you guys.” With that, James plopped himself down in the soft grass and began picking at the weeds that resided there.
Tommy shrugged, “suit yourself dude, hey Jake come here!”
The youngest stopped kicking toadstools off the tree stumps and ran over to Tommy and James.
Tommy slid his backpack off his back and tossed it over to Jake. “Here get these set up why don’t ya.”
Jake opened the backpack to find various bottles and cans. Perfect practice targets for a pellet gun.
“Fine I’ll set up the first round but you are setting up the next one.”
Tommy waved a hand nonchalantly in Jake’s direction. “Yeah yeah, sure.”
Tommy looked over to where James sat. James seemed to be finding whatever he was picking at in the grass to be very interesting. He sighed and moved closer to the boy.
“You sure you don’t wanna try? I know guns aren’t your thing and all but you gotta admit, this thing is pretty bad ass.”
“Uh huh.” Came a disinterested reply.
“You don’t believe me but just watch this!” Tommy looked up at a large twig that was hanging loosely from a branch a few feet above them. “I betcha ten bucks I can shoot that twig loose!”
James rolled his eyes “You don’t even have 5 bucks dude.” Still, curiosity won him over and he stood up standing beside Tommy. “Alright you win, impress me.”
Tommy smugly grinned and took aim at the softly swaying limb, licking his lips and breathing slowly to keep his mark steady. He was about to pull the trigger when a loud squawk startled him. He and James both looked over to a nearby tree to see a group of black birds staring back at them. James chuckled at Tommy who then received a glare from the older boy.
“Ha ha, very funny.”
James shrugged. “Karma’s a bitch dude.”
Tommy snorted “Karma my ass dude, they are just a bunch of dumb birds.” With that he lifted his gun again to his desired target. Before he could get a proper lock on it, the branch began to bob up and down slightly. He looked over to find that one of the birds had decided to use the branch as its perch, its beady little eyes staring into the boy’s. Tommy smirked. “Fine, if you have a death wish, who am I to deny it?”
He started to aim his gun slightly over to the right but James had been watching and knew exactly what his friend intended. He stomped over and grasped harshly onto the nozzle, aggressively pushing it away. A soft flutter of wings could be heard as the small bird flew off the branch into the trees.
Tommy was shocked and then angered by his friend’s actions “What the hell man?! Do you wanna get shot in the face? Let the fuck go!” He tried forcefully yanking the gun out of James grasp, but James had a firm grasp and was not giving in. James was seething, gripping the nozzle in a white knuckle grip. Tommy swore that if looks could kill, he would be dead a hundred times over by now.
“You fucking promised Tommy! You promised you wouldn’t shoot anything else! I’m sick of this bullshit dude, you weren’t even supposed to be out here with this dumb thing. ” He shook the nozzle in his hand for emphasis. “Tell Jake to pack up, we’re leaving.“
“Screw you man, the stupid thing was asking for it. You know, all day I was trying to be extra nice to you cuz I know you don’t like this shit but you are being a total stuck up bitch right now and it’s killing our mood. Know what? You can pussy out and go home by yourself. Jake and me are actually gonna have some fun. Now let the fuck GO!” With that Tommy jerked the gun sharply upward. James, whose resolve was slightly broken by Tommy’s hurtful words, let his grip slip causing the gun nozzle to slip out of his hands rather easily with Tommy’s excess force exerting on it. This caused the nozzle to swing higher. Tommy who in his loss of temper tried to get a better grip on the gun, accidentally put his finger on the trigger. With a loud pop everything went still. Tommy’s red face quickly turned pale, the sound of his gun slightly ringing in his ears. His anger quickly forgotten as he looked up to see James swaying heavily, a look of bewilderment in his left eye, his right was not visible due to the gushing crimson stream coming from it. He made a gurgling guttural sound before his knees gave out and he crashed to the forest floor in a heap convulsing and twitching.
Tommy was still comprehending what had just happened when he was startled by a large crash and clinking of metal and broken glass. He looked back to see Jake staring wide eyed in their direction mouth agape, the back pack unceremoniously laying on the ground, broken bottles and cans littered at his feet. Jake stood motionlessly as if he was still trying to comprehend what had just happened, and then broke into a sprint towards the boys screaming words that Tommy couldn’t quite understand, his mind was buzzing. He was sure it was something along the lines of “What the hell did you do?” He looked down again to the prone form of James. He was completely still now, no longer convulsing just very still.
Jake pushed past Tommy and slid to his knees next to James. Hands hovering over him wanting desperately to help but afraid he might hurt him more. Jake tried calling out James’s name, eliciting no response. He careful turned him over taken aback at the bloody mess on his friend’s face. He then began gently shaking him and tapping his face. When that too failed to gain a response, he became more aggressive in his attempts to stir the boy. Jake laid his ear on the boy’s chest. White face, he turned up to Tommy. “I-I can’t hear anything, His chest ain’t moving neither. I-I think he’s dead Tommy.” Jake’s eyes began brimming with tears.
That snapped Tommy out of the stupor he was currently in. He dropped to his knees next to James practically pushing Jake out of the way. He roughly grabbed the boy’s wrist pleading to any god that would listen that he would find a pulse. There was nothing. He grabbed his shoulders roughly shaking the boy. “Come on Jamie wake up. I’m sorry, God I’m so sorry! Just please wake the fuck up!” James head lolled lifelessly back and forth. The gore from his eye socket spreading further down his pale face.
Tommy was now breaking down into sobs. He’d killed one of his closest friends. He got up pacing back and forth reeling at the horror he now faced.
“We gotta go Tommy, we gotta go get someone.”
Tommy snapped his head back to Jake, his face twisted in a wild expression that made the younger boy flinch.“The hell we do, do you know what they’ll do if they find out what I did?! They’ll put me away Jake! I’ll go to prison!”
“B-ut it was an accident right? They’ll underst-“
Tommy strode quickly towards the small quivering boy and hefted him up by his shirt. “No they fucking won’t Jake! They won’t understand! I wasn’t even supposed to be playing with this in the first place! You know that! I’m gonna spend the rest of my life in prison!” Tommy forcefully let go of Jake causing him to stumble backwards and fall. He looked up at Tommy, his face was etched in fear, tears now streaming freely down his face.
“W-what are we going to do Tommy?”
Tommy glanced down at James’s limp form, studying the ruby red glistening on the boy’s face and shuddered. What would he do? What would James want him to do? He felt himself shivering but he knew it wasn’t from the cold.
“WE are not going to do anything Jake. YOU are going to go home and if you still think of me as a friend you won’t tell anyone about James. You said it yourself, it was an accident. Do you think James would want my life ruined over an accident?”
When Tommy didn’t get a response, he looked back over to Jake, the boy was trembling, lip quivering and wavering eyes gazing up at his, there was true innocent terror in those eyes, He knew his friend was fighting with himself on what the right thing to do was. Tommy held his gaze, his glassy eyes wordlessly offering an apology for what he put his friend through, what he was about to burden his friend with.
“Just go home Jake, as far as you know this day never happened.”
With that Jake carelessly scrambled up from his position in the leaves, not caring if he got a few scratches by doing so and took off quickly. After a few minutes when Tommy could no longer hear his friend’s hurried footfalls, he let out a heavy sigh and bent down to his burden at hand.
He circled around to where James head lay and hooked his hand underneath his armpits and began dragging the boy deeper into the woods.
———-
After what felt like hours he finally reached his destination, what he and his friends had called “the pit”. The pit was a deep slanted ditch that led to what they could only assume was a very large tunnel,almost big enough to be called a cave. The boys could only assume this hellish dugout was created by some large animal. It would be a common game for Tommy and his friends to dare each other into getting as close to the entrance as possible without chickening out. Tommy had only ever gotten as far as sticking a foot into the abysmal darkness before scrambling out.
He slowly worked his way down the slope, his trek made awkward with James. By the time he made it down to the tunnel entrance, he and James were both covered in mud, the earthy smell of wet leaves and grass was heavy in Tommy’s nostrils.
Tommy looked into the open burrow. It looked more intimidating now with his impending task at hand. It looked like an open mouth of some horrible creature. He could swear he could even hear breathing echoing through the hollow space.
He looked down again at James. Despite being dragged through the forest, which was evident by the mud and grime on the boy, he still looked peaceful. If it were not for the gore on the side of his face, Tommy could have sworn he was just sleeping. Tears made trails down the boy’s grimy face which he furiously wiped away.
“I’m so sorry buddy, God I’m so sorry.”
With that he rolled the boy into the entrance of the burrow. He was startled when the boy’s body rolled forward further into the space without more coaxing on his end. He heard rapid loud rustling echoing through the tunnel which ended in a loud thump. He peeked his head in further and reached out. He felt nothing through the thick darkness. He had never realized that the tunnel went so deep let alone have such a steep entry way. He briefly thought how lucky it was that his friends were never brave enough to further down the intimidating burrow.
With his task done he let out a heavy sigh, muttering more grief filled apologies to his friend and climbed out of the ditch. Just before he reached the top he felt a warm breeze breathe from the tunnel. His hair stood on end as he could swear that with it, he could hear a voice whisper “wait”. The boy had never run so fast in his entire life.
He had almost reached the exit to woods when he heard crunching and felt something squishy underneath his foot. He looked down and felt his heart stop, he had stepped on the mangled body of the black bird he had shot earlier, its bloody eye socket staring up at him. Hadn’t James set the thing’s body closer to the trees? Why was it in the middle of the trail?
A strong wind shook the trees around him and once more they carried a voice that seemed to plead this time. “wait”.
Tommy was gone before the wind could die down.
—————-
Tommy slammed the door to his bedroom, wild eyed and heart pounding out of his chest, he could not stop pacing back and forth, the floor boards creaking loudly in time with his panicked breaths.“It’s done, it’s over. Nobody will ever know what happened.” He reassured himself. He ran a hand through his hair and pulled back to see it grimy with mud, sweat and what appeared to be, blood. A shudder wracked through his body and he fought the urge to vomit. He ran into the bathroom and spent a good while scrubbing himself almost raw to be sure he got any evidence of today’s happenings off of his body and he went to sleep. His mother came home a few hours later and quietly rapped on his door asking if he wanted dinner. He declined saying simply that he wasn’t hungry.
That night Tommy awoke to short sharp tappings at his window. He groggily looked up towards the sound and the tapping stopped. From what he could see, nothing appeared to be there. With a huff he flopped back down onto the pillow and tried to get back to sleep.
He was just about to drift off when he heard it again, only it was louder this time, and more aggressive. He wearily turned over again to see what it was. This time his eyes shot wide open. It was faint and the boy only caught it due to some passing headlights, but just for a second he saw what appeared to be light reflected off of two small beady orbs looking at him through the window.
“Tap Tap Tap.” He jolted again at the sound. He slammed down on the bed, whipping the covers over his head, he felt like he was suffocating with each shuddering breath under the heat of his comforter but he did not dare pull the blanket off. The Tapping was persistent and always in the same pattern. Sometimes the sounds were quiet, but sometimes it sounded loud enough that whatever was doing it would break through the glass. Mercifully, the tapping stopped and the boy was once again able to fall asleep.
Tommy again was jolted awake by banging, only this time it came from his door.
“Tommy, you better get up or you’re going to miss the bus!” He heard his mother call through the door.
He flew back the covers. The sun was shining warmly through the windows lighting his room up in a soft yellow.
“Was I dreaming?” Tommy thought to himself. He looked towards the window and froze. There was a small black bird sitting outside on his window sill just staring t him. It seemed eerily still not once turning its head in any other direction, it kept its beady eyes trained on Tommy.
The boy was unnerved but also angry at the thing for keeping him up all night. He stomped towards the window, but before he had a chance to open it, the bird flew away.He exhaustively rubbed his hands on his face and half thought about telling his mother he wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t go to school, but decided against it. He didn’t want to bring up any suspicions.
He begrudgingly got dressed and headed out to the bus. As he was about to walk out the door, his mother called out. “Hey Tommy, Have you seen James? His mother called this morning and said he never came home last night, she sounded pretty worried. You guys were hanging out last night right?”
Tommy felt a lump forming in his throat, his hands slightly shaking. He swallowed thickly and answered in as a controlled voice as he could muster.
“N-no Ma, It was just me and Jake last night, he said he didn’t want to come with us after school because he wasn’t feeling well.”
His mother’s eyebrows furrowed in concern for her boy. He seemed so upset but she didn’t question him figuring he must be worried for his friend.
“Okay sweetheart, well try to have a good day at school today alright? I’m sure your friend will turn up.”
Tommy gave a curt nod walking quickly outside, fighting the sob welling in his chest.
————
School was absolute hell for Tommy, his teachers had all asked if they had seen or what they had seen James doing the previous day and to report anything suspicious if they did. Tommy could only think about his friend’s cold pale body slowly being feasted on by whatever creatures lie in the depths of the pit, that bloody eye burning into his own. There were a few times he wanted to just stand up in the middle of class and scream that he did it, he murdered James and left him to rot in some hole in the forest. That desire would quickly bet smothered by the fear of what the repercussions for committing such a crime would be.
Tommy had seen Jake only a few times, the boy looked as horrible as Tommy felt. His clothes and hair were completely disheveled and his face held a tiredness that shouldn’t belong on a child’s face. He ignored Tommy completely and the few minute glances Tommy caught from Jake were filled with sorrow and accusation towards him.
—————
Tommy again skipped dinner that night, dismissing his mother’s worried glances with a quick “I’m fine, just tired” and threw himself on the bed not bothering to change out of his school clothes. He wept himself to sleep that night.
Unfortunately, his sleep did not last as he once again was awoken by that dreaded sound.
“Tap, Tap, Tap.”
This time however, it almost sounded like it was coming from inside his room.
“Tap, TAP, Tap.”
He hesitantly looked over towards the direction the sounds were coming from. It was too dark to see in the dark, but it sounded like whatever was making the sounds was coming from inside his closet.
“TAP,TAP,TAP.”
He was shaken by the much louder sound and sat up completely. Just then a car passed by through his window casting a light in which once again caught the reflection of two beady orbs set deep in the closet.
Tommy was too scared to move and could barely mutter out. “G-go away, whatever you are, just g-get out of my room and leave me alone!”
Tommy felt an icy chill over his body as whatever lay in the closet answered back.
“Pleaasssse.”
The voice was light and raspy, as if it were being carried on an unfelt breeze. The unearthly sound shook Tommy to his very core.
“Please Tommy, I just want go home. Just bring me home.”
Tommy hid once more underneath the covers shaking violently, barely suppressing the sobs wracking through his chest.
“I’m not angry Tommy, It waassss an accident. I just want to go home.”
“I can’t do that James, you k-know I can’t!” Tommy desperately pleaded through the thick fabric covering his trembling body.
“It’s sssoo dark and cold Tommy, I can’t seeee. I want to go home. Pleaassee, Bring me home.”
Tommy couldn’t control his sobs any longer and cried into his pillow. He stopped when he heard creaking slowly heading towards the direction of his bed. They stopped just by the side of his bed. He heard deep raspy breathing, and almost screamed when he felt a cold clammy hand slide under the blankets and gently grasp his wrist.
“I want to go home Tommy. Bring me home.”
It was said calmly but Tommy could sense a terrible anger behind it. He felt hot urine running down his legs as he shook all the more violently.
“Al-alright James, tomorrow I’ll g-go to the police, and we’ll bring you h-home alright? I-I promise!”
All at once, the cold pressure on his wrist disappeared and he didn’t hear another sound. He timidly peaked from under his blanket and felt an overwhelming relief wash over him as he saw that his room was empty.
He shakily got out of bed, his legs feeling wobbly and weak as if he had been running for the past five hours and slowly made his way to the bathroom to change.
Tommy decided he could not get back to sleep and crept down to the den were the family television was and flipped it to some infomercial. He didn’t care what he was watching, he just needed a distraction from his now buzzing thoughts. How was he going to tell anyone what had happened? What were his parents going to think? What was going to happen to him? The boy curled up in a ball shaking with distress and desperately tried to concentrate on the happy smiling people on the screen.
————
That morning Tommy was in a daze, he was surprised to find himself waking up in his bed. He could of sworn he had been watching infomercials downstairs a minute ago. Had last night all just been a dream? He heard his mother’s familiar rapping on the door and reminder that the bus would be here and slowly got up out of bed.
He warily walked over to his closet and froze. A chill swept over him as a familiar reflection of light caught his eye. He shakily crept over against his better judgment and moved over the clothing piled there to find the source. He let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, a huge wave of relief washing over him. He pulled out the long shiny black metal that was his pellet gun and resisted the urge to whip the thing across the room, settling for shoving it underneath his bed.
“That must have been what I saw last night, the reflection off the damn things metal, everything else musta just been a dream.” After that thought, he was startled by the sound he had come to dread.
“TAP, TAP, TAP.”
He whipped his head towards the window to find what he could only assume was the same bird from yesterday morning staring in at him. It held his gaze with its cold beady eyes. Tommy couldn’t explain it, but he felt like it was angry. Before he could get up, it was gone.
———————
As Tommy wearily got off the bus he froze. There was a group of police officers standing outside the school talking to the principal. Tommy assumed they were probably here to help find James. Tommy’s grip on his school bag tightened and felt himself start to tremble.
“This is it, just go up to the cops and tell them what happened and this can all be over.”
Tommy couldn’t get himself to move. “Last night was just a dream right? James is long gone, nothing bad’s gonna happen if I just keep my mouth shut.” With that final thought, Tommy brushed past the police and endured what felt like one of the longest days at school he had ever been through.
——————–
As soon as Tommy got home, he started making his way to his room but his mother stopped him.“Honey, you aren’t planning on skipping dinner again are you? I know you are worried about your friend but you have to eat, keep up your strength you know?.“
Tommy said nothing just kept his head down and tried desperately to keep his composure.
His mother wrapped her arms around him and hugged him tightly.
“It’s okay honey, everything is going to be alright. How about we order pizza tonight?”
Tommy just slowly nodded his head.
“And remember, tomorrow after school, your uncle Joe is coming down from up north to pick you up to go try out your new birthday present. I know how excited you’ve been for that. You guys should have a fun weekend huh?”
Tommy felt his stomach drop, the absolute last thing Tommy wanted to do was to touch that thing again.
“Y-yeah. Sure it will be mom.”
His mother smiled. She gave his shoulder a comforting squeeze before fetching the phone to order the pizza.
———————————-
After dinner, Tommy thanked his mom and then headed straight to bed. However, not surprisingly he couldn’t sleep. He was dreading what kind of horrible dream would haunt him tonight. He waited and waited until he heard his mom shut her bedroom door, she too going to bed but there was nothing. no horrid tapping, and no malicious eyes glaring at him in the dark. With an exhausted sigh, he closed his eyes and drifted to sleep.
“TAP, TAP, TAP.”
Tommy’s eyes shot open, and his whole body immediately began to tremble, a whimper escaping his throat.
“You said you’d bring me home Tommy. You promised. You promisssseed”
Tommy screwed his eyes shut. “You’re not real, you’re not real, you’re not real.” He continued his mantra as he heard horrible scratching sounds make their way towards his bed.
”I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go hoooommee.”
The voice vibrated loudly throughout the room. With the last rasping word, there came a freezing chill that swept over Tommy. The boy couldn’t even find the strength to pull the covers over his head. He laid there trembling and sobbing.
It was then he heard the sound of fluttering wings and gasped when he felt something plop onto his legs. He could feel sharp needles poking into the thick fabric of the blanked into his legs, almost hard enough to draw blood. He could hear slow steady breathing, each breath beginning and ending in that horrible rasping sound.
Tommy himself was breathing so fast that he was sure he was going to hyperventilate. He slowly turned his head to see what hellish being sat on his legs. He felt his mouth open to scream but found that he couldn’t. Not with those glowing red orbs burning into his own.
“BRING ME HOME.”
Tommy did scream then.
—————————-
Tommy’s mother stood in the hallway outside room 324 of the psychiatric ward in their town’s local pediatrics hospital. Her eyes were puffy and red from crying, a well used tissue crumpled in her hand. Her brother had a solemn and tired look on his face as he tried to console his distraught sister.
“I-I just don’t understand it doctor, how could he-“ She paused stifling a sob. “How could he do THAT to himself?!”
Joe glanced in through the small window of the ward that now held his nephew. Tommy was strapped down to a gurney, although he was not struggling, in fact he didn’t move at all. Just a few minute twitches, his lips muttering wordlessly. A thick band of gauze was secured across the boy’s eyes.
The Doctor held the mother’s eyes with an almost apologetic glance. “It is really difficult to say, violent psychotic breaks of this caliber usually come from severe mental illness or are a result of extreme trauma. Since there is no sign of mental illness in the family I have to ask again, are you absolutely sure nothing traumatic has happened to Tommy recently? I know you said he had been upset over his friend’s disappearance but has he been under any other stress?”
Tommy’s mother just shook her head, stifling another sob.
The doctor nodded grimly. “Alright well, I’ll go over his physical condition now. Aside from the self inflicted damage to his eyes, the rest of him seems to free of any signs of self-harm. We also ran a drug screen to see if any hallucinogens may have had a part in this behavior but his blood work came up clean…As for his eyes.” The doctor paused to take in the state of the mother before continuing. “Unfortunately as you know, he completely ripped out the optic nerve along with the entire eye in both sockets. There is unfortunately nothing we can do to repair his eyesight.”
Tears welled in her eyes and she gripped onto her brother’s arm for support as the doctor continued.
“As for his mental state, well…” The doctor sighed heavily. “Your son is completely catatonic, he hasn’t moved or said anything since he came in this morning in the ambulance. He won’t even react to pain or any other stimuli. We think it may just be shock but it’s hard to tell with a psychotic break like this. I’m going to be honest with you mam, I have never seen an episode like this in a child so young with seemingly no trigger.”
The poor woman squeezed her brother’s hand and looked up glassy eyed at the doctor.“What are our options for treatment?”
“Come, let’s go into my office to discuss those details, we can visit Tommy again in a bit.” The doctor gently ushered the distraught pair down the hall.
————–
Meanwhile, in room 324 Tommy was lying still. His unseeing eyes staring up at the dim buzzing fluorescent lights flickering above his head. A bloody tear leaked down the boys face through the gauze. He opened up his dry cracked lips. His throat was raw from the screams that ripped through him the night before, however he was still able to mutter in a raspy voice:
“I want to go home.”
Credit To – MandaMute
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I used to work in this pretty old building. It was originally the courthouse for the city I live in. I remember when I first started working there, people would tell me about odd goings-on, like strange noises, lights flickering or turning off completely, weird smells, etc. It seemed like everyone I worked with had some sort of “experience.” I never put much stock into that sort of thing. “Paranormal activity?” There had to be a logical explanation.
After working there for awhile, I felt like I had the building figured out. Clink-clank-clink – the heater turning on (we were in the middle of the basement of the building and all of the pipes led to the boiler room adjacent to my office), hisssssss – the ac unit in my office turning on (like I said, we were smack dab in the middle of the basement, air didn’t fluctuate too well so we had a separate ac unit for our office) clunk-clunk-clunk -the ice machine in the fridge in our “break area”, whoosh – the toilets being flushed and the water running through the pipes above me. As for the flickering lights, I’m sure it would lead to faulty wiring. The building had been condemned, twice. And the odd smells, I just blamed on the people.
I worked as a security dispatcher for a school district, and I usually ended up working the graveyard shift. We were located in the district office which was a three story building, four including the basement. We had surveillance cameras in various areas of all of the schools as well as every floor of our building, and outside. We also had a dial up alarm system. When the system was armed, any noise would set off an alarm, and I could dial up the area and listen to exactly what set the alarm off. The system also brought up the camera of whatever area was triggered.
Looking back, I think my first experience was the elevator. Our custodial crew left at 0015, so after that, there shouldn’t have been anyone inside the building. One night, I received an alarm from the lobby area of our building on the first floor. I listened to try to figure out what set the alarm off as I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary on the camera. I didn’t hear anything either. This sort of thing happened. Sometimes the system was faulty and we received bogus alarms. I cleared the alarm and almost automatically I received an alarm from the lobby of the basement. I didn’t need to listen to see what the cause of the alarm was. The elevator doors were opening and closing. I went out to investigate, it was just down the hall from where I was. I could hear the elevator doors continuously opening and closing. I’d never had that happen, but it was an old building. As I walked up, I kind of got the creeping feeling like I was going to find something inside the elevator, but it was empty. I hit the call button and the doors stopped. I stood there for a minute looking inside the elevator, checking the doors. I’m not one for elevators so I didn’t step inside. When I stuck my head inside, I smelled a putrid smell. It filled my nostrils and seemed to burn my throat. I pulled back and gagged and then the elevator doors seemed to slam shut. I was slightly unnerved, but brushed it off and went back to my office. I called the elevator company and scheduled for them to come check it the next morning. The rest of the night was quiet.
I had the next two days off, and forgot about the incident. I went back to work on the graveyard shift and started my routine. It was about 0230 and all had been quiet. I received an alarm and saw that it was from the third floor of our building. I checked the camera and once again saw nothing. I dialed up the alarm and…. I heard something. It sounded at first like a fan blowing, but after listening for a little bit, it started to sound like someone whispering. I saw no one, but the cameras didn’t cover every angle of the building. I started to wonder if someone had stayed late. No one notified us, and people were aware of our protocol, but not everyone followed it. I decided it would be best to have one of our guards on call to check it out. It took him about 15 minutes to get to the building. The guard radioed and told me he had arrived. The “whispering” was still going on. I was beginning to wonder if it was a fan or some sort of machinery making the noise. I told the guard the area of the alarm and waited. As the guard moved through the building, alarms were being set off and I could see him walking via the cameras. He made it to the third floor. I watched and saw him make it to the area where the “whispering” was coming from. He stopped just under the camera. I could see the back of his head and body, but not his face. He stood there for what seemed like minutes. I dialed up the area and the “whispering” seemed louder now. I could almost make out words, but it was so fast. It sounded like the same thing was being repeated over and over. All of a sudden, the guard turned his face toward the camera. His eyes were wide and his mouth was wide open like he was screaming, but nothing was coming out. I was pretty freaked out. I didn’t understand what was happening. I radioed him and asked what was wrong, my voice was trembling. He didn’t respond, just kept staring, unblinking into the camera. I asked my coworker if they were pulling a prank, and he looked freaked out as well, and shook his head. He gasped and I looked back at the screen. He was gone, walking back the way he came. I watched as he made his way through the building and down the stairs towards my office. Then he was at the door. We kept the door locked, but there was a little glass window cut out. I saw him look inside. My heart was beating fast. Then, as if nothing happened, he said, “Hey guys! What’s going on? Let me in!” He had a playful look on his face. I went up to the door and smelled a hint of that awful smell again. Without opening it I asked, “What just happened up there? What the hell were you doing?” He looked at me confused. “What do you mean? I checked the area and there was nothing. I came down to give you my report.” I was furious! I yelled, “Were you messing with us right now? Why would you do that? That was horrible!” He really looked confused then. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about. I went and checked the area and found nothing and now I’m here trying to give you my report.” I cracked the door open and the smell was stronger. I grabbed the paper and slammed the door. He walked away, head shaking. I watched as he left the building. I went to complete my report, somewhat unsure what to write. The sound seemed to have stopped once the guard left the area. I decided just to say “area was found secure.” I grabbed the guards report from the table, having set it there without looking at it. When I read it, I was filled with a variety of emotion. His report read: I’m watching you as you try to watch me. I can see you, but I am unseen. I tried to reach the guard on the radio, but he did not respond. I emailed my supervisor and notified him of the situation. The rest of the night was uneventful.
The next afternoon I received a phone call from my supervisor. He said he had tried repeatedly to reach the guard from the night before, but had been unable to. He wasn’t very happy about the incident either and wanted to know what happened. He said he would let me know as soon as he talked to him. I went into work that night, but I felt a bit off. Walking through the stairwell and down the hall to my office, I felt as though I was being watched. And not by the cameras, it was….. something else. I got goosebumps all over and realized it was really cold. I walked a little faster and made it to my office, but not before smelling that rancid smell again. I slammed the door behind me. My counterpart was already there and the other crew left. Fifteen minutes later, we saw the custodial crew leave. They usually turned and waved at the camera when they left, but not that night. They kept their heads straight ahead and left the building. For a moment as they walked out the door I thought it looked like one of them had her mouth widely ajar. I thought it was weird and assumed I caught her in a yawn. I checked my email and saw that my supervisor had sent one stating that he was still unable to reach the guard and said he left a voicemail and email telling him not to come to work until he spoke to him about the situation. Another guard would be covering his shift until then. I felt a little relieved. I really didn’t want to see that guy again for awhile, if ever.
A few hours had passed, we received some alarms here and there from a few school sites. All uneventful. Then, I received an alarm from the second floor of my building. I was slightly apprehensive to check the alarm, but it was my job. The camera was blacked out. I thought it odd and made a note to have someone check it in the morning. I dialed up the alarm and bit my lip. Nothing. I kept listening for awhile. Sometimes silence could be really unnerving, but what broke the silence, even more so. I heard it clearly that time, it wasn’t whispering. It was a deep male voice saying over and over, quickly, “I’m watching you as you try to watch me, I can see you, but I am unseen.” Then there was a deep rumble that almost sounded like laughter. I was really freaked out. I didn’t think it was possible for someone to be in the building. I got on the radio and said I needed a guard asap! We only had one guard on duty and he said he was wrapping up at a school across town so it would be at least 30 minutes until he would arrive. I looked at my coworker who was biting his nails and staring at the screen with the cameras. Then I saw his eyes grow large and he went pale. I turned to look at the screen and saw why. The camera screen wasn’t black anymore, I could see the area now. It was a hallway on the second floor, but in the middle was a dark human figure. It looked like a shadow. All I could make out was a silhouette that looked to be made up of a black mist. Then suddenly through our speakers I heard in a hoarse, crackling voice, “Can you see me now?” And then there was a wailing so loud I had to cover my ears. Everything went black and silent. All I could hear was my heart beating.
After a minute, the emergency lights kicked on. The room was dimly lit and I didn’t see my coworker anywhere. The generator kicked in for the security system and it was rebooting still so I couldn’t check the cameras. I turned and looked at the door and it was wide open. My heart felt like it was going to beat out of my chest. I didn’t know what that thing was, but in that moment, I believed in everything. I made the decision to get the hell out of there. The job wasn’t worth it. I shakily started to make my way through the dark basement. The emergency lights helped in making the situation all the more creepy. I started to sob when I saw a human form at the end of the hall. The smell was back too and stronger than ever. I tried to cover my nose and mouth with my sweater, but it didn’t help much. I got my phone out and turned on the flashlight. “Charlie?” I called to my coworker. I felt completely uneasy that he was just standing there, his back to me. I was about 10 feet away when he turned suddenly, his eyes wide and mouth wide like he was trying to scream, just like the guard. I screamed and turned to run the other way when I saw another human form at the other end of the hall. I heard that hoarse, cracking voice again, “Can you see me?!?” I had seconds to make a decision and I decided to run back in the direction of my coworker. That was the quickest way out of the building. He stood there unmoving as I ran past, but made an awful gurgling sound. It sounded like he said, “I see.”
I felt as if I might faint, but as I saw the stairwell that would lead to the exit, and my freedom, I felt a burst of adrenaline. As I made it to the top, I felt a coldness and then I heard that voice again, “LOOK AT ME, PAMELA!” I didn’t turn around. I reached the door, ran out and slammed it shut behind me. I kept running through the parking lot until I reached my car. I was opening the door and I heard something behind me. Something grabbed my shoulder and I screamed and turned and saw it was the guard who I had called to inspect the alarm. He looked at me with concern and asked what had happened and if I needed assistance. I told him I just needed to get away from the building now. He told me I wasn’t driving anywhere and to get in his car. It was out on the street and I ran towards it and got inside. I knew I was probably in shock and shouldn’t drive and I knew the guy well enough. I couldn’t look at the building. When we were far enough away, I told him what happened. He looked at me like I was insane, I don’t think he ever had had a call-out to the building. I had him drop me off at my boyfriends apartment.
The next day, I didn’t want to go back, but I had to get my car. So my boyfriend took me over and said he would stay with me. I saw my supervisor in the parking lot. When he saw me I could tell he was furious. “Where the hell did you go? Charlie called me this morning and told me that you walked out in the middle of your shift!” “Charlie called you and told you that, huh? Well I have one thing to say, I QUIT!!” He looked shocked and opened his mouth as if to say something , but then just walked away. I got in my car and have never set foot in that building again.
About a week after I left, I heard that the guard from the night I first heard the whispers was found hanging in his apartment, eyes and mouth wide open. A few days later there was a report about a string of suicides of employees from that building. The two custodians and Charlie were all found to have committed suicide, and all found with eyes wide and mouths agape. I did some digging around online and found these were not isolated occurrences. Even as far back as 1922, when the building was a courthouse, there were reports of multiple employee suicides. I have no idea what happened those nights or what is in that building, but I am a believer. It’s been a few years since then and I try to avoid that building as much as possible. But sometimes I do have to drive by, and I can’t help but look up at it, wondering what might be looking back at me.
Credit To – Scarlett’s Amorous Kiss
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The town of Saluzar, Arizona existed in its own world, and its citizens liked it that way. The town was accessible only by way of a little dirt path, and if anyone had ever stumbled upon it by accident, they probably would have turned back, unaware that anything lurked behind the row of elm trees. And had anyone somehow come across the town, they probably would have felt uneasy, as if they were disrupting some sort of enchanted burial ground. They would have felt unwelcome. This isn’t to say that the people of Saluzar, Arizona weren’t friendly. It’s just that everyone in the small town knew each other, and their ancestors knew everyone else’s ancestors too. And in a town like that, where you know everything, when someone or something comes along that people know nothing about, it can be unsettling. But the people of Saluzar were as nice as you’d find any other place— they were just shy to the idea of any change visiting their humble town
The town, it was readily accepted, started at the giant church building, which doubled as a town hall, and which was the very first building built in Saluzar. And, fittingly, the town’s boundaries ended at the cemetery in the fields beyond the schoolhouse. Every person who’d ever lived in Saluzar was buried in the cemetery, as there was no other area in which to bury them. And while cremations sometimes occurred, it was uncommon. Even after death, the citizens of Saluzar wanted to be a part of their town. Why, they wondered, would anyone want to end up in an urn? The burials were always conducted by the Thade family, who ran the Saluzar funeral home. The current chief undertaker, Evan Thade, had learned all the secrets of embalming that had been passed down from father to son for generations. Evan Thade looked like an undertaker. He had a brow that was permanently furrowed, and his spine was perpetually in the shape of a question mark, the result of years of hunching. His hair was brown, but anyone would have sworn it was black; not because the hair was dark, but simply because it felt like it should be black. His eyes, likewise, were overshadowed by the blackness of his pupils, although if one were to look closely, they would have noticed that his eyes were actually a piercing, vibrant green. It was among Evan’s duties as town undertaker to conduct the autopsies on the dead, since the town did not possess a licensed mortician, but Evan had never been trained in that practice. Embarrassed, Evan had never told anyone, and so the cause of death was always listed as “natural causes.” But, whatever skill he may have lacked in performing autopsies, Evan made up for in terms of embalming. Evan Thade was a true master of preservation. The Thade’s were artists, and their canvas was the dead.
Between the church and the cemetery, were a variety of small homes, and enough shops to keep people occupied. Mildred Snipes, now 82 years old, had a clothing business which she ran out of her little cottage– the same house she’d grown up in as a little girl. Mildred, despite, several strokes, and a healthy dose of arthritis, had managed to maintain her good looks. She aged as one with wisdom might, not as one who had given up. A gifted seamstress, Mildred had spent since the age of 16 sewing clothes for the various townspeople. Be it socks, hats, shirts, dresses– whatever someone needed, they went to Mildred and she’d make it for them. Her favorite garment to make was suits. Something about the fitting of suits exhilarated Mildred. She felt alive when making them. The smooth lines of the pinstripe as they run down the jacket or the pant leg, the crisp formation of the collar. Her father had been a button maker, and so each suit had a different custom set of buttons. Some were metal, some were wood, some bone. As she had studied violin as a young girl, she was the only member of the town who could read music, and therefore had been chosen as the town organist each Sunday. When not playing, she’d stare out at all the men sitting in the pews, admiring her handiwork on each of their Sunday suits.
The church was the closest thing to a town hall. Despite Saluzar’s intimate setting, those Sunday church sessions were the only times the whole town would gather together. Although most members of the town were religious, even those who did not consider themselves so would go weekly, in an attempt to fulfill their social obligations to the town. For two years now, Father Todd Luger had been the town’s only priest. And while serving an entire town of parishioners alone seems a daunting task, Father Luger hadn’t given a sermon for the past ten months. He accomplished this through a program where he’d invite the members of the town to be what he called “guest priests.” It was an attempt to make church a more interactive and enriching experience, he said. Some of the older generation, such as old Mildred at the organ, though, felt that Father Luger was simply shirking off his priestly duties, and longed for the days of Luger’s predecessor, who had staunchly followed all of the parochial rules to the very letter. But, the “guest priest” sermons did at least serve to enhance that social feeling that church seemed to provide the people of Saluzar.
“These days, you can be ordained in an instant. On these computers. Why can’t ordinary folks be allowed to give sermons as well?” thought Father Luger one Sunday morning, as he slept through Egan Ammon’s impassioned speech concerning the Gospel of John.
The only person in Saluzar who was never in attendance at Sunday services was Martin Glinser. From the time Martin had shown up for the first day of kindergarten wearing aviator goggles, he had been pegged as the weird kid. Perhaps because of that label, Martin’s readily apparent genius was ignored. By the age of seven, he’d constructed blueprints to create a flying bicycle. At ten, he’d developed a unique and, to his knowledge, undiscovered fungus culture. And by the time he was twelve, he’d created an effective and non-toxic deer repellant for folks to spray on their gardens. But even if someone had recognized the brilliance that Martin Glinser possessed, it would have been greeted with the same response.
“Kid, you’re from Saluzar, Arizona. And no one from Saluzar, Arizona ever goes anywhere or does anything.”
As such, the days where Martin should have been at MIT were spent huddled in a small broom closet which he referred to as his lab. His hair had gone grey early in his twenties, a trait he inherited from his father, and he felt so cheated by this fact, that he’d allowed his hair to go into complete disrepair. Never combed, it had gone past the point of being unruly, and was now permanently matted to the spot. The aviator goggles he wore in his youth had now been replaced by thick glasses. They were much thicker than he actually needed, but he liked the feel of the extra weight the lenses provided, and so he’d worn the overlarge glasses for some time until he got used to it. He had denounced God completely, and so found church unnecessary. So, despite the distinct impression he inevitably left on those he met, there was no one in the town who he ever considered a friend. The one person Martin had gotten to know well of late was Evan Thade, the reclusive undertaker. Martin had recently seemed to have developed a profound curiosity for Evan’s line of work, and the ordinarily shy undertaker had been more than happy to talk about the subject he was so familiar with, and which no one else seemed eager to talk about. And while they could never prove anything, some of the older schoolchildren had even mockingly commented on the relationship between the two bachelors, upon seeing them walking in the cemetery during school hours. When they shared this with their parents, the response was generally quietly encouraging.
“Good for them. Everyone deserves to have someone in their lives,” people would say. It was indicative of the overall mentality of Saluzar. The town liked to think of itself as open-minded, and filled with open-minded and good people.
Aside from menial errands and his daily walks and conversations with Evan, the only other times Martin emerged were when he came to present one of his inventions to the town council. The council was made up of the most prominent citizens of Saluzar, Arizona, and were in charge of allocating the small budget the town had. Despite having meetings in the church every Tuesday from 3:00-4:15, no one ever attended. The only time the council had anything to actually do at the meetings was when Martin had an invention, hoping to get funding to mass produce it. And while Martin’s inventions ranged from good to not so good, the town’s response was always the same.
“Kid, you’re from Saluzar, Arizona. And no one from Saluzar, Arizona ever goes anywhere or does anything.”
But, whether through obliviousness or blind optimism, Martin was feeling assured on this day as he approached the altar to begin the presentation on his latest invention. It was a good one, he was sure of it. With any invention, Martin brought it to the council with the confidence of a child whose watercolor is hung on the refrigerator, sure that one day they’ll be a great painter and that the work will sell for hundreds of dollars. This time, however, was different. The product simply called out, ringing like a siren in Martin’s ears, and there was no way it could be ignored. Surely the town council would hear the importance of this one, surely they too would hear that ringing.
“Hello, everyone. I’ve um…I’m glad you could all make it.” Martin paused to carefully wipe the sweat from his knuckles. His palms, amazingly, were dry, but his knuckles were the ones glistening under the bright lights. “It should only take a minute.”
“Yes, well, weekly meeting. Meetings are open for all to come. Share ideas,” said Saul Moon, mayor of Saluzar. Mayor Moon had always been a fair man. He felt strongly that the town should be able to weigh in on all of the town’s decisions, even if they weren’t part of the esteemed council. It was level thinking like this which made him so popular amongst his constituents, and which had allowed him to run unopposed for the past thirty odd years.
“No one comes anyway,” laughed Egan Ammon, hitting Moon in the side. Ammon, a retired traveling string salesman, was the most recent member of the council. When not in the surrounding towns, pitching various strands of twine to housewives, he had claimed his own bench outside the barber shop, where he would wax poetic about the world. His job meant that he’d seen the whole state, and so was among the more cultured members of the town. Each day, Egan would sit on his bench and talk. Even if no one was there to listen, his voice kept himself company, reciting and inventing proverbs and mantras by which he’d live out his coming week. And if anyone felt that he was an unbearable bore, those opinions were never shared.
“Well, Martin’s here, right? That’s someone,” replied the mayor.
“Yes, and when Martin’s here, it’s the only time we have anything to talk about!”
“So, we should give him a chance, shouldn’t we, Egan?” said Mildred Snipes, nodding to Martin with grandmotherly eyes. “What do you have for us today, Martin?”
“Well, I think this is a big one. I think that this could, well, change the way that we live.”
“Hrrumph,” snorted R.C. Goose, a local businessman and the richest man in all of Saluzar.
“What was that?” asked the startled inventor.
“I said Hrrumph!”
“Hrrumph?”
“Yes. Hrrumph. I mean, really Martin, this whole ‘changing the way we live’ thing. You say this each time.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“It’s a charade!” growled Goose. “Every new invention, you claim it’ll be the biggest thing since non-iron shirts. It never is. What was that last one- a solar powered lamp.”
“Well, yes, I…that was energy efficient.”
“But, if you need sunlight to power it, then why would you need the lamp?” asked Goose. The portly man checked the time (he had a pocket watch, of course) and, once again, let out a resounding “Hrrumph!”
“I know you’re a busy man, R.C., but I can’t see the harm in letting him speak,” said Father Luger. Luger and Goose had never really seen eye to eye. Luger was constantly looking for more money to be allotted for the church. Goose felt that, since he owned the only lucrative business in the town, and brought in most of the town’s revenue, it should be his business which received a bigger share. And yet, both found common ground in that neither felt that Martin Glinser or any of his inventions should get anything.
“Thank you, Father.” Martin wiped his knuckles on his pant leg. “Um, well…I was thinking that for every disease, there is a cure. For every ailment. You have a headache, we can cure that. You have the flu, we can cure that. I mean, you have a broken bone, we can even fix that. Anything that our bodies do to us, we can, well, we can fix it.”
“So, is this some sort of medicine?” asked Mildred. R.C. Goose yawned.
“Not, well, not exactly. See, we can’t actually fix everything. There’s one thing we can’t ever fix, we can’t ever reverse. Once it happens, there’s no way of treating it.” A small bead of perspiration fell from his right knuckle, hit the stone floor and melted under the hot, orange light coming in from the stained glass window. “The one thing we cannot ever treat, we cannot ever fix…this one thing that our body does to us, is, well…we cannot fix death.” The council’s eyes were blank. “But, now, well, I’ve fixed death. I’ve cured death. This potion, it can bring the dead back to life.”
Everyone instinctively stared at Cameron Ward, the final member of the town council, who sat at the end of the pew. Ward had been a soldier in the Vietnam War, where he lost three of his toes at the age of seventeen. Once back in Saluzar, he’d cared for his mother, Cecilia Ward. Mrs. Ward had raised Cameron alone, as her husband Oliver had died when Cameron was two. Upon Cameron being drafted, Cecilia had descended into insanity, fearing she’d lose her son as she’d lost her husband. The past forty years, Cameron had kept her inside as much as he could, in an attempt to avoid embarrassment. Every Sunday, he and his mother would carefully go into the church, sit in the back row, and leave. Cameron was the perfectly dedicated son. And Martin’s news was especially welcoming to Cameron. Cecilia Ward had died only a month ago, making her Saluzar’s most recent casualty, and still fresh on everyone’s mind. Cameron felt the gazes of his council members, and chose to be silent. After a while, Mayor Moon felt the need to respond.
“You can fix death?”
“Revive the dead, yes.” Martin stared at them. “I mean, I really…I think, and I don’t believe I’m mistaken, but I think it will change the way we live.” The silence echoed through the church, bouncing off the organ pipes, the stained glass windows, the high ceilings. Finally, it was Egan Ammon who spoke.
“Any dead person?”
“Any recently dead person,” corrected Martin. “As long as they were properly embalmed and are still preserved, this potion will bring them back.” There was silence. “And Evan Thade ensures me that all of the dead have been properly embalmed,” he added. It was Egan Ammon who spoke first.
“You mean, with this potion, I would be able to bring Chloe back?” Chloe Ammon had died the previous year, just one week after her and Egan’s fifteenth anniversary.
“Well, this is preposterous!” exclaimed R.C. Goose. “You don’t really expect us to believe that you can revive the dead. That you’ve CURED death?”
“But, I have. It’s this potion right here,” said Martin, reaching into his coat pocket and pulling out a little glass vial, filled with a viscous vermillion liquid.
“That, why that looks exactly like cherry cough syrup!” cried Goose.
“I know it doesn’t look like much, but it truly is a miracle potion,” insisted Martin.
“It’s black magic. Witchcraft!” hissed Father Luger. “I’ll have no part in it!”
“If it even works at all,” scoffed R.C. Goose.
“Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” reasoned the mayor. “If what Martin tells us is true, this would certainly be a remarkable invention, one that we shouldn’t just discount.
“The devil’s work,” crowed Father Luger.
“But, perhaps, perhaps we should see if it works. Just see. We don’t have to use it, but just see if it works,” said Mildred. Cameron Ward cleared his throat, and then nodded in agreement.
“I’m with Mildred,” said Egan Ammon. “We don’t have to use it, just see. What do you say, mister mayor?” The five other town council members immediately turned to stare at Mayor Moon. He looked at Martin.
“You, uh, you say this works? This potion as you call it, it revives the dead?”
“It does.”
“Do, you mind if we, well, if we experiment before we attempt this?” asked the Mayor. Martin shook his head.
“I promise, you won’t be disappointed.” said Martin. “I believe, if you want proof, I know where we can go.”
***
“Yes, do come in. All of you, all of you. My, there are a lot of you, aren’t there? Watch for that!” Evan Thade jumped to stop the fall of a glass jar. The jar, containing a hand suspended in green liquid, had been disrupted when the rotund frame of Egan Ammon bumped into a cupboard.
“Formaldehyde,” continued Thade “you can never get it out.” Ammon mumbled something in apology. “Besides,” lamented Thade “this hand has sentimental value to me.”
“Please forgive us for barging in like this, Evan. We know you’re probably busy. This should only take a minute” said Mayor Moon, eyeing an unenbalmed corpse lying on the table. It was not anyone from the town. “Might I ask who…”
“It’s for practice,” interrupted Thade, hurriedly covering the corpse with a sheet. Thade’s lab was situated in a dimly lit stone cellar. The space had been used by the Thades to brew their own ale during prohibition. From that time, two large copper vats remained, pushed into the corner. For several years, the Thade family had tried to remove the now useless vats, but they were too large to get out of any of the doors or windows in the space. Which raised the question of how the vats were first brought to the basement in the first place. Thade had built two crude wooden cabinets. In one he kept his various chemicals, sorted by color and purpose. All the preservatives on one shelf, the sanitizers on another. In the second, he kept his utensils. Various syringes, pumps, and a treasured Mary Kay makeup kit, used to dress up the bodies for open casket funerals. Lining the cabinet tops were various morbid objects: books on death, assorted dark wooden boxes, mummy figurines, and the stuffed body of a raccoon. With the town council distracted by these objects, only Cameron Ward noticed what appeared to be a pile of small mouse bones piled up in the far corner of the room.
“Yes, thank you, Evan, for letting me, um, use your space.” Martin Glinser shook Evan Thade’s hand. “Could you please get me the specimen.” Evan Thade went atop one of his cabinets, and removed a small mahogany-paneled box. Evan put the box on the table. The six council members peered to view the box, as if by arching their necks, they would see what was inside. The box, however, was closed, and all they could see was the lid. On the lid, written in Evan’s scraggled handwriting, was the name “Edgar.”
“Open the box, Mr. Thade” said Martin, smiling with the feeling of someone who had practiced the line countless times in front of the mirror. Evan Thade did so. The box was lined with a rippling dark blue velvet. On the inside lay the lifeless body of a rat. The sleek fur was impossibly white, as if it had been completely untouched by anything. As if fingerprints would leave a blemish. It’s eyes were closed, peacefully, but the red cornea was peeking through an almost imperceptible slit– a tiny, morbid sliver of ruby.
“Mr. Thade, is this rat dead?”
“Yes, Martin. He’s most dead.” At this point, the ceremony had to pause. Egan Ammon insisted on testing the rat’s heartbeat for himself, and he ultimately concurred with Evan Thade’s assessment.
“All good. That’s one dead mouse,” announced Ammon, after his examination.
“His name is Edgar,” muttered the undertaker.
“Yes, so, as we have determined, the rat is dead,” chirped Martin. “But, as you can see…” he picked up the vial, and inserted into it an eye dropper. With Evan’s assistance, they opened up the dead rodent’s mouth, and carefully applied three drops of the potion.
“Now that we’ve applied the medicine, you wait just one second…” said Martin. The rat was still. Then, after a moment, the nose twitched slightly. Then its right hind leg. In almost no time, the rat had turned over and scampered over to Evan, as he always used to do before his passing. Evan reached into his pocket and gave the rat a piece of cheese. Edgar, happily and harmlessly, nibbled on the square of cheddar. Evan stroked its head with his pinky finger.
The council was silent, the exception being Egan Ammon who gasped.
“Chloe…Chloe can come back,” Egan gaped.
“It’s a miracle,” whispered Mildred Snipes. Cameron Ward was speechless. R.C. Goose looked at Father Todd Luger.
“I don’t believe it,” said Goose. “I just don’t believe it. Is it witchcraft, father?”
“Well, I…hmmm…” Father Todd Luger knew deep down that such a thing went against God’s plan. You live, you die, and then you were supposed to go into the afterlife. To bring people back would go against everything God had planned. And yet, there was no denying this curiosity. A potion to bring back the dead was, no doubt, remarkable. And Father Todd Luger felt that perhaps it would be best if the church remained silent on this specific issue. “It is intriguing,” he finally concluded.
“And you believe this same potion can be used on people?” asked the mayor.
“Absolutely. It’s the same process. A life is a life. If it works for a rat, why not a human?” replied Martin, who looked at his shoes.
“Well, could we, say, test this out?” The mayor eyed the corpse under the sheet.
“You don’t want to bring this one back,” warned Thade with a grim chuckle. “He killed four people a few counties over. Death penalty. I’m…well, I use him for practice.”
“I see,” said the mayor, quickly looking away from the sheet. “No, we wouldn’t want to bring him back.”
“Perhaps,” chimed Martin, “well, perhaps…perhaps if we were to bring just a few people back. A few that we would want to bring back. If it works on them, on this, well, this test sample, then we can always do more.”
“But, who are these few people? Who would they be?” asked the mayor.
“Well, we have all of you. All of you here. The town council.” said Thade. Martin Glinser agreed.
“Each of you could bring someone back. And, Mayor Moon, you could decide if it’s a success.” Martin glanced at the townspeople. The mayor considered this.
“Yes, yes, we could. Egan, you would bring back Chloe I’m guessing.
“And Cameron’ll bring back his crazy old mother,” exclaimed Ammon. Cameron Ward said nothing.
“I could bring back Father Shanley,” piped in Luger, referring to his predecessor at the church. R.C. Goose stared at the priest in amazement.
“You’re on board with this?”
“Well, it is intriguing, R.C. And, when one thinks of it, is it really so terrible? If God has given Martin this potion, then perhaps he intends for us to use it. And, besides, wouldn’t you like to see Mark again? You were such a good team.”
R.C. Goose considered it. For years, he and Mark Leyman had been partners. Goose & Leyman was the most lucrative business to have come out of Saluzar in its entire history. The town’s only export, coal, had been outdated for some time, being replaced by fancier forms of fuel. Yet Goose & Leyman had a near monopoly on all of the coal in the state, so while business was slow, the pair did well enough to make by. Goose dealt with the personnel part of it. Making sure they had willing customers, figuring out what was the lowest they could charge and still make a profit (then he’d double that number.) Leyman dealt with the books. The two would split the profit 50/50, until Mark’s untimely death last July. The business partners had been inseparable, each owing their success to the other. The sign on the door still read “Goose & Leyman,” and not a church service went by where R.C. Goose did not at some point think of Mark.
“But, I have nobody. Who could I bring back?” asked Mildred. Mildred Snipes had never been married, although there had been offers. For one reason or another, none of the offers had ever come to fruition. Mildred, instead of a husband, kept cats. Many cats. She used to always take in the strays, care for them. Whenever anyone had a sick animal, they took it to Mildred. She was the closest the town came to having a veterinarian. Mayor Moon pointed out that if the potion could bring back a rat or, as Martin claimed, a human, why not a cat? And so it was decided that Mildred would bring back her most recently deceased pet, a tabby named William.
“Tomorrow, then. We will meet in the cemetery and bring back our friends and family,” said the mayor.
“Even my Chloe?” offered Egan.
“Yes, Egan, of course. Your Chloe.”
***
Cameron Ward sat at home and stared at his vial of potion. He ran a freckled hand through his straw-blonde hair. He sighed.
“Here, take this, watch after it, it’s yours, and be sure to bring it with you tomorrow,” Martin had said down in the Thade cellar. Cameron removed his left sock and applied some topical ointment to the stumps where his three toes used to be. Blown off by a shotgun. The wound had mostly healed after all these years, but Cameron didn’t care. He was still fearful of contracting gangrene on the foot, and besides, the ointment felt nice. It soothed any pain, massaged all of the tension out. The vial was on the table.
“Oh, ma,” he said to the empty room.
According to Martin, each body that came back had full memory of its past life. In fact, memories would be more vivid. It would be as if the body came back reborn, refreshed, a brand new mind full of the same old memories. Cameron’s heart had seized. His mother, if the potion worked, might no longer be insane.
Cameron went to the refrigerator and took out a beer. He always kept beer in the house in case there was company, as he himself rarely drank. He had always felt that if he were to drink, he’d become an alcoholic like his father, Oliver. All Cameron had ever known about his father was his name (he could never forget it, his father’s first name was his own middle one) and that his dad had drunk himself to death, as his mother put it. When Cameron was a boy, his mother had instilled in him that even a drop of alcohol would eventually lead to an untimely death. But, as he grew up, he learned this to not be true, that alcohol in moderation would not kill you, but he still felt an obligation to his mother not to drink.
“Such a dutiful son,” everyone always said about Cameron Ward. And, it was true, Cameron Ward had cared for his mother well after the breakdown. And while he gladly would have continued, the vial which held the magical potion to bring her back seemed to be taunting him. What if his mother came back and was not insane? And what if she remembered what had caused her mental breakdown? And what if she told people? Cameron felt his neck go clammy. He couldn’t let this happen.
Perhaps it was growing up with no father figure, as his mother had often reasoned, but Cameron had never been strong. And when he received the notice that his lottery number had come up in the draft, Cameron didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t go to war. The draft was an all-consuming entity, swarming through Cameron’s life in his peaceful childhood town. But more importantly, there was his mother. With his father having died, he was the only man in his mother’s life. Were he to die in the war, she’d have no one at all. It was with this reasoning that he had gone out back, picked up his dad’s old shotgun, said a prayer, and blew off three of his own toes.
When his mother heard the gunshot, she ran out into the yard, weeping. She screamed and hugged her son. Cameron did not cry.
“It’s okay, mom. It’s going to be okay. They can’t make me go to war now.”
Cecilia Ward looked down. She saw the smoke still trailing out of the wound, saw the shotgun in her son’s hand, and Cameron’s ever stoic expression.
“I see,” she finally said.
Cameron expected relief, perhaps even praise. After all, by sacrificing three toes, toes he didn’t even use anyway, he had insured his own perfect safety. He would not abandon his mother as his father had done. But, he could not have anticipated the look of shame and anguish in her eyes. A fly flew towards her and she twitched to avoid it. And in that twitch, Cameron could see something within his mother snap.
“No son of mine’s a coward!” she calmly seethed, and then walked into the house.
Cecilia locked herself in her room, refusing all of the food and water Cameron attempted to bring her. Despite his best efforts, Cameron couldn’t save his mother. He watched her wither away. Her mind, deprived of nourishment, shut down. Cameron found her one night, violently writhing on the bed, near to death. He phoned the doctor, then fled, vowing not to return until the war had ended.
When he finally did return to Saluzar, he was surprised to find that he was greeted with a hero’s welcome. Cecilia Ward told everyone her son had been dutifully serving in Vietnam. The doctors claimed she’d been so worried about him that she’d stopped eating causing her to lose her mind. And so, she’d told everyone that her son was in the war, bravely fighting for the cause. She had forgotten the incident, and it was Cameron’s belief that the story she had concocted was her mind protecting itself, her one solace once her mind had shut down. From what the doctors said, it would be best not to upset her, and so Cameron shyly went along, always shrugging off the praise, agreeing to his mother’s story. In that way, he felt he could perhaps meet her expectations.
And yet, Cameron Ward still felt guilty. Guilty enough to care for her for nearly forty years. When she’d died, he’d thought he could breathe easy, his secret would never be out. But, if she were to come back…what if she were to tell everyone? If she were to reveal Cameron’s secret shame? This town, the people that Cameron had come to know, would they shun him as his own mother had? If the whole town rose up against him, Cameron even feared for his life. The vial taunted him. The red liquid looked just like the color of the lipstick Cecilia used to wear every Sunday when they went to church.
Cameron took a sip of beer. In less than a minute, he’d finished the whole can.
***
R.C. Goose, meanwhile, sat in the office of Goose & Leyman. Business was done for the day, and had been for a while, but the stout businessman felt like it was where he needed to be at the moment. It had only been a year ago that R.C. Goose last sat in the same office with Mark Leyman. The men had been business partners for fifteen years at that point. It was evening, the curtains were drawn, and the only phone in the building was situated on the table in front of them. Leyman yawned and glanced at his partner.
“You’re welcome to go home, you know,” he told Goose, smiling wearily.
“Not at all. You probably get lonely sitting here all alone each night.”
“True. But I’m used to it at this point. You never stay this late.”
“I thought that my company would be a welcome change,” Goose taunted, using his index finger to pick some stray chicken breast from between his bottom teeth.
“Not at all! You know I enjoy your company.” Leyman nibbled on his fingernail. Goose stared at him for awhile, then let out a guffaw.
“I know, I’m just teasing you, Mark. Are they normally this late?”
“No, no. I don’t know what’s happened. The shipment normally gets in an hour ago.”
The pair certainly made a strange picture. Compared to Goose’s plump figure, Leyman’s figure was incredibly gawky and angular. His gaunt face was accentuated by a pair of copper wire glasses which framed his eyes to look irate at any moment, and which harshly left red footsteps on the trunk of his nose. The Arizona humidity chapped his slender lips, and so his mouth was constantly covered in bits of dead skin. It was Leyman’s unofficial job to sit and wait for their customers to call and say the shipments had arrived. It required very little attention, simply the ability to pick up a phone. The train would get in, the distributor would pick up the coal, and call the office. Leyman would warmly thank them for their business, and go home for the night. Most shipments got in at around six. This one was nearly an hour late.
“It’s bad weather |
“Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness. Sometimes we lose them there again.”
-Stephen King, “The Green Mile”
***
I’m a grown woman and I’m well past needing my father to come save me, but even so I wish he were here now. I guess I never realized before just how much he’s always been there for me. Sometimes I wonder—
Wait, let me start from the beginning.
When I was six years old, I became obsessed with seeing the pirate show.
I overheard a kid at school talking about it. He said it was a puppet show about a little girl who’s friends with pirates, and that it was on in the afternoon. Once I heard that, I had to see it. You know how little kids get obsessed with one particular thing for no reason? For me that thing was pirates. I’m still not sure why but, hey, I was six.
The boy did not want to tell me what channel it was on, but after I pestered him enough he gave in. After school I ran to the TV to wait for four o’clock, but when the time came nothing was there; the channel was just static. I flipped through all the stations looking for the show. The next day I accused the boy of making the whole thing up, but another girl in the class said no, the show was real, she’d seen it too. I asked her why I couldn’t find it and she didn’t have an answer. The boy said that really I shouldn’t watch it anyway, but he would not say why, and after that he stopped talking to me at all.
Every day at four I sat in front of the TV, hoping that the pirate show would magically appear. I even asked Dad to call the local affiliate and ask about it (Dad would do almost anything for me…), but they said they’d never heard of it. I was crushed.
Months went by, the school year ended, and I became less zealous in my four o’clock vigil, but I would still check from time to time. One day I went down to the basement where Dad kept the old black and white TV in his workroom. Back then I had the idea that different TV sets showed different shows, so I would always check both if I couldn’t find what I wanted on. It was four o’clock and I turned to channel 58, just like always, but this time something was different: I heard static, but underneath it, just barely there, I heard music. Strange, bouncy calliope music. And although the channel was still scrambled, I could just barely make out a picture.
There, after all this time, was the pirate show. There was the little girl, and there were the pirate marionettes, and there was the ship with the talking figurehead. It was just like the kids at school described. Of course, the picture was a mess and I could only hear half the dialogue, but I didn’t care. I was ecstatic.
I don’t remember much about the program. It was half over by the time I turned it on. The only thing I really do remember was the part where the little girl and the pirate are standing outside of a cave and the ship tells them: “YOU HAVE. TO GO. INSIDE.” Just like that. I guess it doesn’t sound like much, but at that moment I became very scared, and I turned the TV off and almost ran out of the basement. Suddenly, I wasn’t interested in the pirate show anymore.
That should have been the end of it, and in fact I’d like to think that it was. I’d like to think that what happened next was all a dream or the product of a six-year-old’s imagination. For most of the last forty years that’s exactly what I have thought, but now I’ve started to wonder.
That night, probably around two o’clock in the morning, I went to use the bathroom (I was never scared of the dark when I was a kid, and in fact I was a little proud of how I felt brave enough to wander around our old, creaky house with no lights on). On the way back, I noticed that the basement door was open, just a crack. And I heard something down in the basement: It was that strange, jumbled circus music from the show. It was still playing.
I stood there for a long time, not sure what to do. I heard the music and the voices of the characters drifting up the basement steps, plain as day. They were very loud, and there was no more noisy static. I told myself that I had simply left the television on (even though I knew I hadn’t), and that Dad had somehow missed it before going to bed (even though I knew he never would). Yes, that would almost make sense. Except that it didn’t explain why a kid’s show (which up until that afternoon seemed never to be on at all) would be on at two in the morning.
I was, as I’ve said, never a child afraid of the dark, or of much of anything else. So despite the strange circumstances, I resolved to go down and turn the old TV off and go back to bed. It didn’t seem like a completely good idea, I’ll admit, but I certainly wasn’t going to run away from a television. I opened the basement door all the way and would probably have gone down if not for the fact that at the very moment I prepared to put my little bare foot on the first basement step I heard that voice again:
“YOU HAVE. TO GO. INSIDE.”
But it did not sound as if it were coming from the television.
There are limits to what even the bravest six-year-old will do, and I had reached them. So I ran all the way to Dad’s room and woke him up. He listened, very calmly, to my story, and when I was done he picked me up and carried me with him to the basement door. There was no music now, and no voices, just darkness and silence. He set me down and as he prepared to go downstairs I wanted to stop him. I was sure, all of a sudden, that whatever was down there, I didn’t want my daddy to be down there with it. But I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I just watched him as he marched down those dark steps, one at a time.
I have never been as frightened as I was for those minutes that my father was down in that basement. A part of me was certain he was never coming back. I even imagined that, maybe, something else would come back instead. But I wasn’t sure what…
But of course, he came back. He said that I’d left the TV on, just like I thought. I asked him what was on it and he said, “Nothing.” Just that: nothing. And then he tucked me back into bed, and sang to me and stroked my hair until I fell asleep.
I loved my father very much.
After that I more or less forgot about the whole thing. If it ever crossed my mind in the years to come, I chalked it up as a nightmare. Dad never mentioned it either. There is one thing I noticed, though, that I never really thought about until tonight: Dad got rid of that old TV shortly after. In fact, he stopped watching television altogether, and he stopped working in the basement too. After I went to college he cancelled the service and got rid of the other TV, and as far as I know never got another one. I wonder about that now.
Just like I wonder about those times, as a little girl, when I would catch my father staring off at nothing with his head tilted a little to one side, like he was listening to something, a song or a voice that only he could hear. And I wonder whether it’s just my imagination or time tampering with my memories or if my father didn’t have a strange look on his face when he came out of the basement that night. And had his voice quavered a little? And hadn’t he been down there just a little longer than it should have taken simply to turn off a television set?
I guess those are questions only my father could have answered, and now he never will. Today was his funeral, and that’s why, tonight, for the first time in twenty five years, I’m sleeping in the old house alone. As they lowered his casket into the ground, the unwelcome image of him marching down those basement steps came back to me, and I shivered. This time, when my father went down into the dark, alone, I was sure he would not be back. That was the first time in a long time I’d thought about the pirate show or the night in the basement. I’d prefer not to keep thinking about it, especially since I have so much else on my mind, but I’m afraid I don’t have much choice.
You see, when I came in tonight, the basement door was open. I can hear music down there, and voices, ones I haven’t heard since I was six. And I’m sure that if I open the basement door all the way and stand at the top of the stairs I’ll hear another voice telling me that I have to go inside.
But I’m sure there is no television down there.
I don’t want to go. I want to run to my daddy’s room, and wake him up, and have him sing me to sleep again, but of course, I can’t. I do not think it’s a coincidence that this is happening the same day we buried him. I think, somehow, that this is something my father has been protecting me from for a long time.
Or maybe not. Maybe there was nothing sinister in the basement forty years ago, and maybe there’s nothing down there now, and maybe this is just the stress of the funeral making me crack. They tell me that grief can induce hallucinations, sometimes. It could be there’s nothing to be afraid of down in the dark after all. I would very much like to think that that’s true.
I guess once I go down and see I’ll know for sure. I guess, if I don’t come back, you’ll all know too.
Good night, Daddy. Sweet dreams. I love you.
Credit To – Tam Lin
|
Before you read my girlfriend’s side of the story, you may want to read my first post that also contains last night’s unfortunate update. Here is the update copy/pasted:
Okay guys, I realize I am a bit late with my girlfriend’s story, but when you read my latest update, you’ll see that I was quite consumed with what was happening to us. Nothing happened since the incident last night. Police called to check in with us this morning; they still have no clue what is going on really.
So her story… Let me begin by telling you a bit about us. As I said before, I was born in Bosnia, moved to a nearby country in Balkans where I grew up. I came to the US over 6 years ago. My girlfriend was born in India, grew up in Kenya until she was 3, when she moved to Canada. I met her little over a year ago, and we’ve been together since.
So, my girl, let’s call her Lila, did have few encounters with Rose. First one that she remembers was on the plane. She was a flight attendant for Air Canada for several years. One day, about 6 years ago, she was flying her regular flight, but she can’t remember what destination it was. It lasted maybe two hours. Once they took off and seat-belt signs went away, she got up to serve complimentary drinks. Halfway through her section, she met Rose. She didn’t know it at the time, of course. She said that something was terribly off about the woman; she had this creepy grin on her face, was really pale and kept staring at her. When Lila offered her a drink and some snacks, she got no answer, only a wider and creepier fucking smile. Then, Rose spoke.
“I have something for you.” She said in a voice that definitely wasn’t natural for a woman her age. Her voice belonged more to a teenager than an adult. There was something playful but terrifying in it.
Now, Lila has seen some shit while flying, so she wasn’t taken back by this interaction.
“Yea? What would that be, ma’am?”
“Don’t patronize me, you bitch.” She said that fast. Like really fast. Her jaw was closed while saying that. Then she started grinding her teeth, never letting go of that fucking smile. This was a red flag for Lila. When passengers get aggressive, attendants walk away unless there is physical contact.
“Alright, well, you have a pleasant rest of the flight ma’am, okay?”
“I have this for you.” She whispered it holding taking an orange from behind her back. Never moving a muscle on her face. Still a teenage voice. Like when a 12 year old hits puberty kind of voice.
“No, thanks.” Lila decided to call it a day with the crazy cunt and walk away.
“Oh, but you should. Or one day, you know, one day.”
And that’s that. Lila gave her the fuck off look and walked away. Lady never bothered her again during that flight. During that flight.
Lila went home few days later and didn’t think much of what had happened. When her mom asked her how her flight was, Lila smiled and said “Good, other than one really crazy lady.” Mom wanted to hear more, so Lila started telling her about what happened. By the time she said the word “orange”, her mom started crying. Lila was in shock. It was story time. Well, apparently, when my girlfriend was a baby in Kenya, she had woken her parents up a few times with loud crying. When they’d walk into her room, she’d have an orange next to her in her crib. Everything in the house would be locked though. Windows, doors, everything. It got to the point where her parents moved the crib into their room and installed security cameras. Well, on Lila’s third birthday, that morning, when they woke up, they saw an orange laying on Lila’s chest. They were absolutely taken over by horror. They called the police; police came and looked over the camera footage. Cameras clearly showed a woman opening the front door (that was locked), walking into their room, placing an orange on Lila and just standing there. For like an hour. Just standing there, with her head tilted to the left, looking at her. By this point, it is unnecessary to say that Lila was completely horrified. Her mom wasn’t doing much better either. Anyways, to keep the story going, her parents didn’t know what to do. Police couldn’t find the mysterious woman, and no security measure (other than 24/7 bodyguards which they couldn’t afford) was enough. Some of their family was already in Canada and were pressuring them to move, so this incident was a final push. They moved and left this creature with an orange behind. Until that day, on that flight.
Lila was completely unable to do anything for the next few days after that conversation. She didn’t eat much, didn’t communicate with anyone. After a while, she got better. There was no sign of further horror, so she started believing it was all a fucked up coincidence. And she went on with her life. She hasn’t seen Rose in years after that. Last time she encountered Rose was one month before she (Lila) met me.
Lila did many transatlantic flights. She loved those. Long travels, decent money, seeing the world. She had it all. One month before we met, she was coming back from a Hong Kong trip. She flew to Toronto I believe (she’s asleep, and I don’t remember exactly, I believe it was Toronto though). Crew had a nice hotel, everyone had their own room. Lila was on the third floor. She loved drinking at that time, and got pretty drunk that night. She passed out at about 1:00 am. At around 4am, she heard a knock on the door. Then another one, and then another one. But they weren’t loud or fast knocks. No, they were slow and silent, yet loud enough to wake her drunk ass up. She rolled out of bed thinking it was one of her equally drunk crew members. Not thinking much, she opened the door and there she stood. Lila said that lights in her room were off, but TV was on. Light from the screen was shinning on Rose’s face. Shining on the grin. Shinning on the pearly white teeth, bright red lipstick and a white face paired up with tilted head. You know how when you’re drunk and some scary shit (accident, cops, etc.) happens and you sober the fuck up immediately? Yea. She just let out this helpless sound of horror. They both stood there. Rose started rocking back and forth. Every time she’d rock back, she’d reveal red shoes hidden underneath her white dress. Her teeth were grinding. Then she pulled out an orange.
“Wh…what do you want from me?” Lila begged.
Rose kept rocking with a smile.
“Please, just leave me alone. I don’t have anything.”
“You take it. You take it now. He will too.” She said that with that same teenager voice, only a little more playful tone was used this time. Like a happy-ish child.
Don’t know if it was her defense mechanism activating, but Lila took the fucking orange and threw it over Rose’s head and screamed “Get the fuck out of here, and take this shit with you, you freak!”
That was the first time either of us saw Rose lose her smile. White teeth disappeared underneath the thick red lips. Head went back from a gentle tilt into its natural position.
“I will see you two soon.” She said it in adult voice. And this voice was scarier than the teenager one. Lila says its because it sounded real. Like a conscious, normal person making a threat. Of course, at that time Lila didn’t know me and had no idea who “you two” were. She assumed it’d be her mom.
That brings us to today. Yea. If you read the update from my previous story, you saw that our room was broken into by Rose (logical assumption). Pictures of the break-in were taken before police came. They will be up on here today. Some stuff in our room was moved around. We are scared as fuck, clueless as to what’s going on. I will be skyping with my mom soon to see if she has any answers. Lila will talk to her mom as well.
I am personally just shocked at these developments. I never believed anything like this was even possible. Quite honestly, if one of you wrote this story here, I wouldn’t believe shit you said. And I cant blame you if you don’t believe me. But if you have any idea about what this might be, I’m all ears. I assume it’s some sort of a cult, but the only thing that fucks with my head is the fact that Rose knew my girlfriend before I did. Everything so far could’ve been explained in a logical way, but this took it to a super-fucking-natural level. Were they putting an effort into getting us together? How’d they do that? And more importantly, why? For what possible benefit? Fuck this man, fuck this.
Credit To – Milos Bogetic
NOTE: This is the second in a series of several popular Reddit posts documenting some seriously creepy experiences. We are publishing them here with express permission of Milos Bogetic aka inaaace, the original poster. The story is in multiple parts, and will be published completely over the next few days – much like what I did with the ‘Bedtime’ series earlier this year. After the stories have all gone up, I’ll edit each post with links to the other parts.
The OP has finished the book that he promised during his successful kickstarter project.
You can find the paperback and Kindle e-book versions here: The Story of Her Holding an Orange by Milos Bogetic – full disclosure: our referral link is included.
I know that this will not be new material for all of you, but for those of you who – like myself – don’t use Reddit, I wanted to post it so that you guys could enjoy it as much as I did after having it brought to my attention. Thanks again to Milos for letting me post it, and enjoy!
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It was a regular Friday night and I was up late chatting to my friend Bradley on this virtual chat room we had found online. He told me and the other guys who we had just met, that he was able to stay up as late as he wanted, because his parents were away until the weekend and he had the house to himself. We stayed on there for a few hours having fun with these random people, and I noticed Bradley had taken a liking to one girl in particular. Soon enough, my mum began calling out for me to go to sleep. As I was about to log off, I asked Bradley what he was doing tomorrow, thinking he might want to stop by my place. He didn’t reply for a while, until:
“Bradley is typing a message.”
Then it went blank.
“Bradley is typing a message.”
Nothing again.
“Whatever man, I’m going to bed we’ll talk about it tomorrow.” I said. It was strange for him to just stop replying like that.
I didn’t hear from him again until the next day when I logged on to the chat site and he was on. He apologised for not replying last night and said he had just been busy. We had a brief exchange, and he said he would come over soon, saying it was urgent. That was fine, but queried him why he didn’t want to wait to see his parents first, who would be home any minute. He insisted there was no time because he had something really important to show me, and then logged straight off. I thought that was out of character for him, as he usually put his family before anything, and I grew curious at what he wanted to show me so badly.
I expected him to be over soon, as he only lived about twenty minutes away, when I received a disturbing phone call. It was Bradley’s parents, who had just come home and were sounding extremely worried. They asked if I knew anything on Bradley’s whereabouts, to which I told them not to worry, because he was in fact on his way over. The phone fell silent for a moment until I heard a deathly scream from the mother in the background on the other end of the line. The father drew a deep breath, and bravely strung together a sentence that I’ll never forget. “Get out of the house now. Bradley’s here… He’s dead.” They had found Bradley’s lifeless body hung up like a coat in the wardrobe. I ended the call in shock, as it became apparent why he had asked if I would be home alone, when suddenly I heard the back door creak open.
Instinctively, I did the first thing I could think of and quickly crawled under my bed to hide. I heard the sound of footsteps coming closer, ever so slowly. I dared not to open my eyes, but when I dreadfully peaked through my fingers, I saw these pale white, cold, bare feet coming in to my room, almost in slow motion. I would hate to see the person such feet belonged to. As they slowly approached the bed, you could hear the dampness of the footsteps peeling away from the floorboards; my heart was pounding in my mouth and I held my breath. Just when I couldn’t possibly get any more scared, my phone let off a loud beep to notify me that I had received a message. It was from Bradley’s phone and read: “Where are you?” as the feet stopped abruptly, dead in their tracks…
Credit To: Jack
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Hi, I’m Seth. I’m writing this note, bottling it, and tossing it in the brook by my house. Writing helps me keep my sanity. Hopefully somebody who still reads will pick it up and come help me.
It started a month ago. I was down in my basement office on my computer watching old Mystery Science Theater 3000 reruns. The phone rang next to me, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. It was never for me; on the off occasion it was, it was usually my brother, and half the time we were on the phone my nephew would be trying to grab it and talk to me himself. Mom yelled down the stairs that the phone was for me. Yeah, I lived at home with my folks. Sue me. Anyway, I picked up.
“Hello?” I said, paying more attention to the antics of the robots on the screen.
“It’s begun.” The voice was little more than a whimper, a plea. I didn’t even recognize the voice.
“Excuse me?” I asked, wondering who on earth was calling.
“They’ve come, I don’t have much time, Jeff; you told me to call if what we did caused trouble.”
Now a little worried, I said, “I think you’ve got the wrong number, this is Seth, not Jeff.”
“DON’T GO OUTDOORS!” The person shrieked. Completely freaked out, I disconnected the call. Must’ve been some prank caller, but I wasn’t amused. Rattled, I put the matter behind me.
Much later, I finished watching videos and shut the lights off to head upstairs. It was pitch black, but I knew the way. The dark seemed a little more oppressive this time, though. I shrugged off the feeling and went upstairs. As I passed through the living room, I chanced a look out the window. There were people outside, on a walk or something; I checked my watch and it said 3:00 am. “That’s weird,” I muttered. I stumbled up to my upstairs room and drifted off to sleep.
I was a fool that first night. If I’d recognized what I’d seen, I would have saved myself the terror and just stepped outside.
The next morning, the news was on; odd, since my dad usually turned to the sports channel before we went off to work. I didn’t even glance at it as I threw on a tie and stumbled into the bathroom. An uneasy feeling crept into my gut as I did my morning routine. I usually had to fight for bathroom space, but today there wasn’t a sound. I peeked out of the room and saw that the front door was open, but the glass storm door wasn’t. There wasn’t a sound. Looking outdoors, I saw those same people as I’d seen the night before.
I opened the door.
Immediately their heads snapped towards me. I recoiled and leapt inside as quickly as I could, feeling something catch at my ankle as I did so. Their faces were fixed in expressionless gazes, their mouths slightly agape and dripping blood. I looked down and saw one right next to the porch, withdrawing its arm; it had tried to grab me. With a dizzying feeling of horror, I recognized my little brother. Slamming the door, I locked it tight and stumbled back into the living room. The television was reporting that a disease was spreading south from Canada across the U.S. I shut it off, and pointlessly called out to see if anyone else was in the house.
No answer.
So began my solitary existence. The news ran for a few days, before they were caught. Kept making the stupidest mistake, going home every night. The electricity has stayed running; I guess someone left the switch on at the factory. Or maybe it’s just northern New England that’s been overrun, I dunno. The internet’s been out too, so that’s annoying.
While the news was running, they called them zombies, going back to that old standby. I guess it works. I mean, they don’t do a whole lot, and they’re definitely dead; they walk around until their legs rot out from under them, then they crawl until they literally fall to pieces. While they’ve got legs, though, they’re fast. That’s how they jumped my family, I suppose. And the police car that drove up to the house to see if there were any survivors. That wasn’t fun to look at every morning. They overturned my car while chasing him, so I’m stuck. Cops to the rescue again. They didn’t really need food, so they didn’t finish eating the poor guy. But they dismembered him; that’s why he couldn’t get up and join them. I could see him gnashing his teeth fruitlessly, though.
For about a week, a guy on the radio hopefully pointed out that they were falling to pieces, so all we needed to do was wait them out. Then he got impatient, went outdoors. Nobody’s been on the radio for two weeks.
I’m in trouble, though. You see, the house has no food left. I can’t wait for them to all to fall down dead all over again. I’ve made a couple expeditions to the general store. Lucky I had that sword collection upstairs. They’re all too slow to catch me when I run, but there are so many that I sometimes panic. Last time, they nearly got me. I broke the front door getting back in; now the cold seeps in every night, and I can see one standing out on the porch right now, not ten feet from where I’m writing this. You’re safe indoors. Don’t ask me why they abhor coming inside. Whatever the reason, it’s been my lifeline. Unfortunately, they seem to know that there’s someone alive in the house. Don’t ask me how; this fellow on the front step doesn’t even have eyes anymore. Maybe they can hear a heartbeat, or smell sweat. Or blood.
I spent a couple days naming them. Some of the faces I recognized, and gave their old names to them. The same old gang’s been hanging around here for the last few weeks, slowly dropping in number as they fall to pieces. They’ve never wandered off, though. There’re 79 who were once men and 63 who were once women out there. Once, just to see what would happen, I shot one in the head with our shotgun. You know, to see if the old “shoot a zombie in the head and they die for good” adage had any truth. So I’ve actually got 79 who were once men, 62 who were once women and 1 who was once a woman and decided to keep standing even after losing about 80% of its head. And I’m down one shotgun shell.
So they wait. And I’m losing it. I talk to myself constantly, and I ate a stuffed animal last night. The cotton went down hard, but it felt good to have something in my stomach again. There are no fruit trees around, and anyway, it’s November. Water has been getting scarcer. The tap water stopped working eight days ago; lucky I’d filled the bathtub and every bottle I could find before it stopped.
Oh, great. Now the lamp’s getting brighter and I hear a buzzing sound. I wonder if the power’s going ou
Well, that wasn’t fun. Total loss of power for four days. Ever try sleeping in the dark knowing that there are things just outside that’ll kill you and make you one of them the first chance they get? Probably, since these things are everywhere, as far as I can tell. Quick update: I mentioned Herschel, that guy on my porch? One of his legs fell off, so he’s sitting down, sniffing at it. Thank God they lose all higher brain functions. I’m pretty sure the soul isn’t held captive in these things, and that this is all the disease (or whatever) trying to spread itself as far as it can in the population.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, reader, but the animals just don’t seem affected. It’s a small comfort. Of course, they die if they eat the flesh, but they don’t get back up once they die. Weird, huh? I’m getting hungry, and desperate. Maybe, just maybe, I can load the old .22 and bag a squirrel from inside. But how will I go get it?
On one hand, I’m a bit more optimistic that you’re out there now, whoever you are. The power couldn’t have come back if there weren’t people out there working to restore order. I’m feeling lucky; time to grab a sword and go drop this in the brook. Maybe this whole thing is almost over.
Maybe. On the other hand, if it is almost over…
Why are there fresh faces outside today?
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Credited to Master Kenobi.
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It’s funny how the strangest traditions seem ordinary when you’ve grown up around them. One of my friends can’t get through Thanksgiving dinner without someone spanking the turkey, and another kid in my high school said they threw a tea party to celebrate every A. I’ve heard about another family who never wore clothes at home, the poor kid couldn’t figure out why everyone started laughing at him when he visited a friend’s house and promptly began to undress. It simply hadn’t occurred to him that nobody else lived quite the same way, and why should it? None of their traditions were more arbitrary than a cake on your birthday or an inside tree on Christmas.
My name is Elizabeth, and my family has their own tradition.
Every night after dinner, my dad would take a plate full of leftovers and bring it down to the basement. Every morning, it would be clean. My father said it was for the “spirit of the house”, and my mom would just roll her eyes and smile. My dad is a big man—6’4″ and over 250lbs—and it wouldn’t have surprised either of us if he just wanted to save a little extra for a midnight snack.
I guess I never gave it much thought until my history class watched a video on the Black Death in Europe. They talked about how the rats would infest granaries and spread disease, and how some people actually exacerbated the problem by leaving food out to appease the angry spirits. I mentioned how we always leave out a plate for our spirit, and my whole class seemed mortified by the thought. The teacher (Mr. Hallwart) spent the rest of the class blatantly circumventing my desk as though I was the one carrying the plague.
That night I had a terrible nightmare about rats swarming through the house and eating our leftover food. I woke in a cold sweat, lying half-awake for a long time as my sleepy brain tried to separate the quiet night from my encroaching dreams. I was about to drift back to sleep when the pitter-patter of light feet clearly distinguished itself in the still air.
I was fully awake now, lying very still with my ears straining against the oppressive dark. Scratch scratch scratch. Like fingernails dragging along a rough piece of wood. I pulled the blankets up over my head, more to block out the sound than to offer any real protection. Maybe this had been going on a long time, and I simply hadn’t distinguished the sound from the creaking house or the night air playing through the wind chimes.
Now that I was focusing on it though, I couldn’t hear anything else.
I thought about calling for mom, but I was 15 years old and trying to build a case to convince them I was mature enough to have my own car. Running around crying about a nightmare was as good as giving the murder jury my bloody axe. I crept out of bed in my underwear, using the flashlight on my phone to steal through the hallway and down the stairs.
The sound grew louder as I approached the basement door. If this was a rat, then it had to be the biggest rat in the history of the world. I froze at the sound of a chair being pushed across the concrete floor. Half of me wanted to turn on the light to scare it off, but the other half declared much more loudly that it was better not to risk being seen. I turned off my own flashlight and carefully opened the door…
Something snarled and I immediately shut it again. I pressed my back to the door and tried to catch my breath. I hadn’t realized how fast I was breathing, or how loud. I let the air out in a gasp and slowly inhaled through my nose, trying to be as quiet as I could. Scratch scratch scratch. Right on the other side of the door. I turned around and saw the doorknob beginning to turn. There’s no way it was a rat in there. I can’t explain how my curiosity overpowered my fear in that moment, but I put my hand on the doorknob too. I must have believed my dad when he said it was the spirit of the house. We had been taking care of it after-all, so why would it want to do me harm?
The door opened and I stood face to face with a pale girl a few years younger than me. Her sunken dark eyes vanished beneath her mangy bangs, and her lace nightgown failed to conceal the terrible thinness of her limbs. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that. I slammed the door as hard as I could and turned to run. I sprinted up the stairs, locking my room behind me and diving into bed. I held my breath until it felt like I would burst, until there – the pitter-patter of soft feet climbing the stairs and approaching my room.
The doorknob began to rattle. I couldn’t hold it any longer – all that breath I was holding in was released in one noisy rush and I screamed for all I was worth. The doorknob stopped and lights sprang to life around the house. In about a minute, there was a pounding on my door.
“Honey? Everything okay in there?” It was Dad. I ran to him and unlocked my room. He was standing there, looking dazed and confused, ready to collapse back into bed. Now that the lights were on and he was here, I felt like an idiot for being afraid. I’d feel even stupider telling him about the girl.
“Sorry,” I said. “I thought I heard something downstairs.”
“Damn, who needs an alarm when you can scream like that,” he said.
“It was probably just a bad dream. Sorry for waking you.”
Dad looked around behind him, making sure we were alone. Then he leaned in close and whispered “Was it coming from the basement?”
I nodded. His smile was nothing but relief, and I couldn’t help but feel it too. At least until he added:
“That’s just the spirit, honey. Don’t bother it, and don’t tell mom, okay? It’s not going to hurt you.”
I nodded. I didn’t know what else to do. He grinned and ruffled my hair before plodding back to his room. I gave the empty stairs a quick glance before locking myself in again and climbing back into bed. I don’t need to tell you that I didn’t sleep until the sun began to repaint my room.
I slept in late that day, but by nightfall I was ready for answers. I tried asking dad again, but he just told me every house had a spirit and not to worry about it. He must have been lying though, considering how my class reacted, and it was clear he didn’t want to talk about it. That’s why I waited until both my parents were in bed to creep down to the basement and wait.
The basement door was open when I got there. I turned the light on in the kitchen which connected to it, but didn’t dare go down the stairs. Three pieces of leftover pizza slices sat in their box on the table, and I poured a large glass of soda to go with it. I just sat there with my hands folded in front of me, waiting for her to come again. If she was a friend of the house, then I wanted to meet her. And if she wasn’t… well surely we’d know by now.
My mistake was to watch the door. She was corporal; she ate food, she turned doorknobs, so she must go through doors, right? Wrong. Despite my resolve, it was impossible to hear the scratching sound above my head without my entire body tensing up. I watched a ventilation grate in the roof slide out of place, and then the girl dropped through as lightly as a shadow. Her hair was hanging over her face, but I could imagine it all too clearly as the animal snarl began to rise in her throat.
She was as alien to me as death. I didn’t even know if she could speak or understand. Her movements were erratic and unpredictable, her eyes darted like a caged animal, but we did have one thing in common which has bridged greater differences than ours: we both liked pizza, and when I offered her some, she smiled. The girl swiftly choked all three pieces down with savage gulps, although I was able to make out a few of her muttered words which she slipped in-between.
“Kevin (my dad) won’t let me go.”
“It’s okay. I don’t want to leave. He takes care of me.”
“He said he loves me. He promised to marry me when I turned 13.”
“Stay here in the kitchen, okay?” I said. I hope she didn’t notice the revulsion in my voice. I couldn’t believe what she was saying. I couldn’t believe any of this, and I didn’t know how to handle it alone. I wanted dad to come and tell me it was all okay again, but if what she was saying was true…
I came back in five minutes with mom instead. It was pretty tricky shaking her so that dad didn’t wake too, but as soon as I mentioned the spirit she was out of bed in an instant. She said she never believed in that sort of thing, but the wild fear in her eyes made me think that was a lie. When we got back to the kitchen, the pale girl was still chugging through the soda which sprayed her face with foam.
“Who are you? What are you doing in my house?” my mother roughly pushed me behind her. I pushed back.
“It’s okay mom. She’s not going to hurt us. She needs our help.” I was beginning to regret telling mom what the girl told me.
“I’m Sandy,” the pale girl said. “Who are you?”
“I’m Kevin’s wife, that’s who. The one you’re making up lies about.”
Mom took an indignant step forward. I tried to hold her back, but she was livid.
“You better tell me how you broke in, or I’m going to call the police.”
“I didn’t break in,” the pale girl stood from the table and faced us belligerently. “Kevin brought me here. He loves me.”
Maybe my mom was angry because she thought the girl was lying, but I think it was because she was afraid Sandy was telling the truth. I should have tried harder to stop her, but I hadn’t expected my mom to snap like that and slap the girl across the face. Sandy’s head turned sharply from the blow, but then began turning back in small, jerky increments. I think my mom was too angry to even notice the bones rearranging themselves in Sandy’s neck as it turned.
“You come into my house, steal food from my family, and make up these disgusting lies about my husband?”
Mom was usually the sweetest thing in the world, but she had a temper that sometimes took hours to wind down.
“Mom you’ve got to stop…”
“I don’t care if you do got nowhere else to go, where I’m from you got to ask before you take something.”
“Mom just look at her! Can’t you tell she isn’t normal?”
“Now who else you been telling this perverted trash to? Sweet Jesus, I want you out. Out of my house right this instant.”
“What’s all this noise down there?”
My dad thundered into the room. He froze mid-step as he instantly appraised the situation.
“Dear God Kathy (my mom), have you lost your mind?”
“My mind?” mom screamed, turning to face dad. “Don’t tell me you’re going to defend that creature in our house.”
“I only hear one of you yelling, and don’t you dare call Sandy a creature.”
I’ve never seen either of them so worked up. I think I was the only one who heard Sandy whispering.
“Is it true?” It wasn’t just the girl’s voice that wavered. Her whole body seemed to somehow glitch and distort like a corrupted video. “He married her? He lied to me?”
She looked absolutely heart broken. I couldn’t even begin to formulate a response.
“Tell me the truth,” Sandy insisted. “Does Kevin still love me?”
How was I supposed to know? I looked helplessly between mom and dad as they yelled at each other, and I was just stressed and overwhelmed and scared. The idea of my dad being with this child almost made me sick. All I could tell is that she shouldn’t be here. I shook my head.
“No he doesn’t,” I said. “He loves my mom. You should just go.”
“Thanks for telling me,” Sandy replied. “I’m going to get even now. Please don’t watch.”
I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it. Mom didn’t see it coming though. The air was distorted with a pale blur, and before I could even open my mouth I saw thin white fingers tearing out my mother’s throat. Most of her neck was still intact, but the trachea was pulled straight out through the skin. I don’t think she suffered much on account of how quick it was, but that was a very small comfort.
Dad wasn’t so lucky. I thought he would have a chance to fight her off because of his size, but he didn’t even put up his arms to defend himself. He just stood there until the white fingers punched through his chest and ripped out his heart. There was a horrible moment where the heart was entirely out of the chest but still tethered by a network of veins and arteries, and I could see the strain on his face while she held it in her hand.
“I never forgot you,” were the last words he ever said.
Sandy distorted again, and then she was gone – fleeing back down the basement stairs and wailing like a little girl. I rushed over to my dad, but it was already too late.
When the police swept the house later that night, they didn’t find anyone in the basement. They listened to my statement, but I didn’t see any of them writing it down and I don’t think they believed me. I was sobbing so incoherently, I wouldn’t have trusted my testimony either. I just know what I experienced and later, what I saw.
The police investigation did unearth a collection of photographs hidden in a shoebox in the basement. Sandy was in them, except that she glowed from happiness where she stood next to a young boy her own age. I recognized the boy as my father at once. The police didn’t investigate them or entertain it as a possibility, but I did some research of my own and found out that dad used to live next door to a girl named Sandy Withers when he was growing up.
They had been best friends, more than best friends apparently, but she had died in a diabetic coma when she was 12 years old. Written in my dad’s blocky lettering on the back of one of the photographs was:
“I’ll never forget you.”
I don’t know what happened to make her stay in the world, but it looks like my dad never was able to let her go. It’s been three years now, and even though everyone has pressured me to sell the house and move, I’m still living here. I guess I wasn’t any good at letting go either, because I still practice the same tradition I have all my life.
The only difference is that I now leave out three plates of food every night, and collect three clean dishes every morning.
WRITTEN BY: Tobias Wade
(If you want to narrate this story, contact the author by clicking HERE)
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My brother has always had a dream of being a great filmmaker.
For as long as I can remember it’s been his obsession. He got a video camera for his eighth birthday and would literally film everything with it, even the most mundane things. He would have us do ‘interviews’ for the camera, make little movies for himself. I thought it was cute at first, I really did. I would always help him with whatever little ‘project’ he was doing this time.
As time went on though something started to change. I can’t really say what made him the way he was but he became increasingly arrogant, increasingly difficult. Our parents definitely spoiled him. Spent a small fortune making sure he got the education he needed to pursue his dream of becoming a director, paid for any of the expensive equipment he needed for making and editing his own little movies, helped pay the salaries of any crew or actors he hired for the little short films he produced.
Maybe it was that which made him become so arrogant and mean spirited. But increasingly he became that worst kind of cliché…the ‘artist’ obsessed with their ‘vision’ and treating everyone in their lives like crap, the self-centered, petulant child in an adult’s body. I’d like to say that I called him out on any of this but the sad fact is that I went right along with him on it.
It started in his teens. Verbal abuse and the occasional slap any time that I didn’t do something right or quickly enough for his liking. I should have stood up to him, told him to get lost. But I found myself totally under his thumb, unable to say no or simply get him out of my life. To be honest, looking back, I can see just how unhealthy the whole thing was.
Now before you go getting the wrong idea there was never anything incestuous here. My brother was just a bully, a little tyrant who enjoyed bossing people around and I basically became his personal servant. He would belittle me and everything I thought, said or tried to do. Any time I tried to build myself up, he’d tear me down and make me feel like I couldn’t accomplish anything on my own, couldn’t even survive out there without him.
I should have known better I suppose but it had started from when we were so young that honestly a part of me came to genuinely believe the things he said. A part of me was too scared of trying to make it out there in the big wide world by myself that I put up with my brother’s constant bullying and taunting and increasingly shrill, angry demands because I was scared of being alone, being cut off from the only family I had left.
Our parents had passed away by this point and we had no contact with the rest of the family. Without my brother I’d be all by myself…his overbearing presence in my life had prevented me from making any real friends and the thought of trying to build a life for myself BY myself was one that just terrified me.
So I did as I was told.
He would say ‘Joan, get me coffee’ and I’d drive all the way across town to the one Starbucks he liked to get him coffee. He’d say he needed extras and I’d devote weeks of my life to arranging and carrying out interviews. He’d demand some expensive piece of equipment and I’d spend however much it cost to get it.
That was my life now. My brothers P.A/maid.
The subject of my brother’s short films and mini-documentaries had become increasingly dark and surreal over the years. He would create short, strange and frightening little pieces designed only to unsettle and scare. Or sometimes just ones that were so bizarre, so utterly devoid of plot, logic or reason that it was impossible to tell what, if anything, he was trying to achieve or convey with them.
His documentaries were much the same. He would either film about gang crime, serial killers and rapes or else create disjointed scenes. He once filmed a dog, starving and injured on the street for several hours. Just filming it struggling to move, to breathe. Just filmed the thing’s pain. Some nights when I went down to get a glass of water I would see him sat there in the lounge, in the dark, watching these movies he made. Just staring at the screen.
And then one day he told me about what his newest film was to be about.
It turned out that he’d begun to hear stories of an urban legend in the film industry. It wasn’t something that was widely talked about or acknowledged and the people who DID talk about it always seemed to do so with a certain nervousness and paranoia, as if afraid that even mentioning it was dangerous.
It was called Better Films.
Supposedly it was a studio or individual who made incredibly strange movies. None of those we talked to who would admit to having watched a Better Films production would go into any detail about what was on the tapes (And the films were ONLY available on VHS from what we could uncover) but all of them seemed to be incredibly disturbed by what they had seen.
One had gone so far as to remove anything from their home that could play video or audio.
A guy who ran a small DVD and video store told us that he’d met with some representatives of Better Films just once, a pair of men dressed in red suits. He’d described them as looking like they’d been ‘Mutilated’ and claimed that one had been missing an eye and an ear while another was minus a hand and his nose. The scarring around these wounds looked ugly and raw.
They’d given him a business card which had nothing on it except for the logo (A cartoonish, childlike drawing of a frowning face) and the tagline ‘Making Better Films for a Better Audience’ along with a website address where they claimed he could purchase their titles for his store if he wished to help ‘Support independent art’.
He’d checked it out, expecting some kind of artsy foreign stuff in black and white. He had instead found a site full of strange and confusing clips that left him scratching his head and that provided no clear way to order ANYTHING. He said the whole web page appeared to be in Japanese.
And yet a week later a black bin bag was on the front step of his shop and inside were several tapes, all with the Better Films logo on their labels. We asked him if he still had the tapes and my brother in particular was very insistent that we get to watch them. The man refused and my brother offered him increasingly large sums of money to buy or borrow one of the tapes. Finally, the man just held up a finger to my brother’s lips, before speaking.
“Now you listen to me and listen good, boy. I’ve seen your type. I know the look you got in your eye right now. I get a lot of weirdos in here, browsing the adult section, asking if I’ve got anything ‘Stronger’.
“I know what you’re after. I know what you’re thinking. So I’m gonna tell you this and then you’re gonna leave my store.
“What’s on those tapes ain’t no illegal little thrill for some gore hound trying to find himself a real life snuff movie.
“What’s on those tapes isn’t anything like what you’re imagining.
“What’s on those tapes is WORSE.
“And I ain’t selling or renting them to no one…especially not some half-wit little pervert with more money than sense.”
My brother stormed out in a rage with me following close behind. As I left the store owner called out to me. I turned to see him looking at me, with an expression of genuine concern on his face now.
“You want my advice, you stay away from him, Miss. Things he’s looking into, you don’t want nothing to do with.”
I suppose I should have taken his advice. But by this point I doubt there was anything that could convince me to abandon my brother, so great was the hold he had over me. And so I continued to assist him as he dug deeper and deeper into the mystery of Better Films.
We managed to piece a few things together. The earliest encounter anyone seemed to have had with their work seemed to be in the mid-sixties. One person we spoke to claimed that he’d known someone who’d been in a movie for them in the mid-seventies, a porn star who’d been hired right off the set of a film he’d been doing and had gone missing for almost seven months. He’d come back with a lot of cash and a hell of a lot of bad dreams.
Another said that the company went back even further, that there’d been something called Better Productions back before there’d even been silent films. Said her mother had told her stories that she’d heard from her grandmother who’d heard them from her grandmother. Some spooky bogeyman stuff about some performer named Elizabeth Walker.
We even found someone who claimed to have grown up watching a TV show Better Films had made. Sunshine Street, she said it had been called and she went on and on about how strange it had been and how she’d always remembered that logo…it was the first thing that had come to mind when she’d heard the name. She said it always used to creep her out, the way the frown would curve into a smile at the end of each episode. The animation looked eerie, that was how she described it.
And then my brother came home one day with a woman. A woman who he claimed was a producer who worked at Better Films.
I was dumbfounded. For all the work we had put into this I hadn’t expected us to get anywhere. To be honest I was pretty much convinced the whole thing was just some ghost story, that if there ever had been a ‘Better Films’ there was nothing more to it than some low budget production company that had made a few creepy little flicks and then folded up. All the weirdness around it, all the little hints and dark suggestions we’d gotten about there being something more sinister about the whole thing, I’d put that down to just people making stuff up.
Or at the very least, people having heard various stories about Better Films from unreliable sources and then passing them along.
But here was someone who claimed to work for the company, in the flesh.
She introduced herself as Ms Kismet. Her hair was a bright red, almost certainly dyed. I can’t believe that any hair could be naturally as bright as hers looked. She dressed in a red suit and like the men our ‘friend’ at the video store had described, she looked as though someone had gone out of their way to mutilate her body.
One eye was missing, as was an ear and her nose. Three fingers were missing from her right hand as well. I tried hard not to stare but all of these looked like they had been done so crudely, so violently that it made me wince.
She and my brother spoke at length for some time. I was not allowed to listen in or take part in whatever they were talking about but after a while they stepped out of the lounge and my brother asked to speak with me alone for a moment.
He told me that he had convinced the woman to let him actually come to the filming of one of Better Films movies and to meet with the director responsible for their work. To actually interview people who worked at the highest levels of this production company and get the real story about what it was they did.
However to secure this he’d had to offer the woman a form of ‘Payment’ he said. And that payment was her getting to spend a night with me, where I would do anything she wished.
I could have slapped him.
I wanted to hit him. Instead I just yelled, told him that this was too much. That I wasn’t going to have him selling me like his personal property, like a slave. He shrugged, seeming not to care about my anger, my hurt.
“It’s not that big of a deal. You like women, right? You’ll probably enjoy it. And she’s promised that you won’t be hurt in any way.”
His tone was cold, emotionless. It was clear that he couldn’t care less whether I’d be hurt or not, couldn’t care less what this person he knew nothing about and had only just met wanted to do with me. That he didn’t give a damn about my wellbeing or my safety, that I was just another tool for him to use to make his damn movies.
“Oh well that makes it perfectly okay then! And while you were selling me off to this total stranger did it occur to you to ask what I thought about it? To ask for my consent, my opinion on whether or not I want to have to spend a night with some woman who for all we know makes a hobby out of making snuff movies?”
He stared at me for a few moments, his expression totally unreadable. And then, slowly, he spoke.
“If you don’t like it then of course I can’t force you to do it. You can say no. You can refuse.
“Just like I can refuse to let you continue to live here with me. Just like I can refuse to support you financially anymore.
“But don’t worry. I’m sure there are plenty of job opportunities for ugly, witless, talentless little things who barely made it through high school with no real skills or likable qualities.
“I’m sure the local burger joint is just desperate for someone to mop their floors and clean out their grease traps.
“And who knows? Maybe after a year or two you’ll be able to afford a place that barely has any roaches or rodents scurrying about in it. It’s not like anyone will be able to stand you long enough to come visit so really it won’t matter what it looks like.
“You’ll be the only one living out your sad, lonely life in it.”
I felt like I would cry. I wanted to tell him he was wrong, to go to hell. I wanted to storm out and never see or talk to him again. But part of me kept telling me that he was right, that I was everything he said I was. A loser, an idiot without any skills or good qualities about me. A stupid, pathetic child who wouldn’t survive without him.
I felt like garbage, like dirt. I felt the way he had always made me feel, for as long as I could remember now. And meekly I just mumbled that I would do it, that I would agree to spending a night with Ms Kismet.
We met at a motel, a sleazy looking place on the edge of town. She had sorted out a room for the night and told me to come alone, with one of my brother’s cameras. I was terrified, more and more as I walked to the room she had told me to come to, terrified of what she might do to me, of what could happen. If she killed me my brother would probably help her hide the body.
I knocked and I heard her familiar voice tell me to enter. The room was pitch black as I stepped in, almost impossible to see. I could make out Ms Kismet, sat in a chair beside the bed. There was a knife on the table beside her. I have never felt more scared, more utterly frightened for my life than I did in that moment.
“Sit on the bed. And start filming,” she said. My legs shaking, I somehow managed to make myself walk over to it and do as she asked, sitting down and swinging the camera up to film her. I began to ask what she wanted me to do, what she wanted me to film. She just told me to keep the camera rolling and not stop until she instructed me to. Nothing else.
She whistled loudly and from the bathroom a dog came limping out. It looked like it hadn’t been fed in days, thin and unhealthy looking. As I watched, Ms Kismet picked up the knife from the table…and began to slice lines into her hand.
My jaw dropped. As I watched, as I filmed, she cut deeply into her own flesh, blood beginning to pour from the wound. She lowered her hand to within reach of the starving animal and allowed the dog to lap at the blood now trickling from the fresh cut. After a while she would withdraw her hand and repeat the process, cutting into her hand and then her arm, slicing deep wounds into her skin and letting the dog drink her blood.
I felt ill. Worse was the look on her face as she did it, that rictus grin that never changed, never left her. She kept that horrible forced smile on her face no matter how much or how deeply she cut herself, looking like something out of a nightmare. Sat there in the dark, smiling that awful smile.
Finally she put the knife down and reached into the drawer of the table it had lain upon. She withdrew a pair of scissors and, as I watched, placed the little finger of her right hand in-between them. Slowly, she closed the blades around that digit.
Do you know what it sounds like, the crunch of bone as a finger is severed by a pair of scissors? I do now. I could feel the vomit rising in my throat as she slowly cut off that finger, the grin still fixed to her face as she cut through flesh and bone. It fell to the floor, the dog pouncing on it. And finally she told me I could stop filming.
I was shaking, feeling ill, feeling worse than I had expected to feel. I didn’t know what this was or why she had asked me to do this and I didn’t want to know.
And then suddenly her arm shot out, grabbing me by the leg, her faces inches from mine. The grin was gone now, replaced by a look of pure terror, of the worst kind of fear I had ever seen on another person’s face. Her eye darted side to side, her body shook. I could feel the blood from her fresh injuries soaking into my clothes.
“HELP ME!”
The words were desperate, spoken as if it actually caused her pain to say them, coming out as a broken and pathetic whimper.
“For the love of god…please…she’s going to kill us all. Don’t you understand? She’s going to kill us all.
“She’s…”
And then she stopped, her words cutting off. A little squeak of pain came from her as if someone had grabbed her by the throat.
And I realised we weren’t alone in that room.
Stood in the dark, in one corner of the room was another woman. She was dressed in a tuxedo, with a featureless white latex mask over her face. There were no eye holes in the mask and yet somehow, as she stood there motionless in the dark, I felt that she was looking at us. That she could see us, could see me. That she was studying me intently, watching me very closely indeed.
I felt more afraid than ever before. That motionless woman in the white mask, stood silently in the blackness made my heart pound, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I had to get out of this room. I stood up, turned and ran. I ran out of the room, down the stairs, out into the parking lot. I didn’t even bother to get into my car, I just ran out into the street and away from that motel.
Away from Ms Kismet.
Away from the woman in the white mask.
It was the next day that Ms Kismet showed up at my brother’s home. She was all smiles once again and thanked me for my time. My brother had asked no questions about what had happened, most likely because he couldn’t care less. And he was happy to hear that Ms Kismet would now arrange for him a meeting with their director, at the set of the current production they were working on right now.
Kismet made it quite clear that this invitation was for my brother only, which suited him just fine. He told me to stay at the house and work on editing the footage we’d put together so far and said he’d be back as soon as possible with the interviews with the director and actors involved in Better Films newest movie. He was beaming, clearly happy that he’d gotten his way. That now he would get to finish his movie with actual footage of what Better Films did.
As much as I hated him, in a way I wanted to tell him not to go. In a way I was actually scared for him, worried about what might happen. He was a bastard but he was my brother. But I kept my mouth shut and let him go off with Ms Kismet, waiting for his return.
And I waited.
And waited.
After it had been several hours I started to worry.
When he hadn’t returned at the days end I called the police. They told me that I had to wait a few days to file a missing persons report and told me not to worry, that most of the time people showed up long before that time had passed.
My brother didn’t. And so I went to the cops and I told them about him and about what he’d been working on and about Ms Kismet. I described her to them and told them about Better Films which they reacted to sceptically…I can’t say I blame them. I told them about the woman in the white mask and they looked at me like I was crazy or making it up.
Again, I really can’t hold that against them. The whole thing was so bizarre and unsettling that I don’t know that I would have believed it if someone told me about it. They told me they would look into it and said they would be in touch with any developments in the case, anything they managed to turn up. They told me not to worry about my brother, that they were certain he would turn up.
The longer I waited without news, the less I worried though. The less I cared about him at all. Finally free of his bullying, his endless taunts and insults I found myself becoming more confident, more assured. I began to go out. I began to talk to people, to actually start to make friends. I even met a girl at a little bar not far from my brother’s house who I began to see as more than friends.
I started sorting out job interviews. I started feeling good about myself, looking in the mirror and not feeling like crap for once. I felt happy, actually happy for the first time in a very long time indeed. I felt like I had worth and value and that I could make it on my own.
A package came a few months ago. It had no stamp, no address and nothing written on it. Just a brown package, left on the doorstep of my brother’s place. I opened it up to find a video cassette inside, with a label on it that simply read ‘We make documentaries too’
I was worried now. Nervous and yet curious at the same time, not wanting to know what was on the tape and needing to know at the same time. I walked over to the television and slid the tape into the old VCR my brother still owned that I had never bothered to throw out since he had gone missing. It began to play.
It was footage of us. Footage of us going around to talk to people about Better Films. Footage of us going into the video store where we’d met the man who claimed to have seen some of Better Films movies, footage of us going to the homes of those people we’d interviewed about this, footage of us walking down the street going to and from places.
On several occasions it zoomed in on my brother, whoever was behind the camera seeming to be focused on him. I stared at it, a chill running through me. How long had they been filming us for? How long had they been following us, watching our every move? How long had they known about us before Ms Kismet had met with my brother?
The tape went to static for a few moments and I thought it was over. I was wrong. Red light spilled out of the screen as the picture returned, bringing with it an agonized chorus of screams and howls of agony. On the screen was my brother.
He was suspended by what looked like metal hooks, rusty metal hooks, his body hanging from them in a veritable maze of razor wire. The wire wound around his body, cutting into his flesh, seeming to move like metal snakes. Whoever was manipulating the wire was off-screen but the effects were very clear. He was missing a hand, a leg and his ears, his mouth open wide.
Screams were all around. The source of them was not visible but I could hear what sounded like dozens of voices all screaming with him, all howling and shrieking in pain. His eyes were wide and terrified, his body jerking and twitching as he screamed the same words over and over again, the same two words.
“HELP ME!”
I stood there, staring at the scene for a moment. My brother trapped somewhere, in what appeared to be a private hell on earth. Having god knows what else done to him by these people for reasons I would probably never know. I walked over to the set. I turned off the tape. I unplugged the VCR and the TV.
And, knowing that I would never mention this tape to anyone I knew, I whispered a few words to myself.
“No, I won’t, brother.”
I burned the tape.
To this day my brother has never been found.
|
I know they say Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year, but for me it’s Halloween. I deck the hall with cobwebs and fake spiders. It’s just such a special time.
Autumn is here and the leaves are beginning to fall. It’s a time for dressing up and suspending reality. We sit in our cozy homes with our jack-o’lanterns and candy, scaring ourselves, and almost will ourselves to see something otherworldly.
My daughter has always loved scary Halloween stories, and last year was no different. We were at the kitchen table, hollowing out our pumpkins and drawing scary faces on them ready to carve. As we scooped the stringy seeds into a large bowl on the table she asked,
‘Is it time yet? Time for stories?’
‘Okay,’ I smiled at her. ‘Where should we start? How about the Monkey’s Paw?’
‘No no, that’s an old one,’ she grimaced. ‘Tell me something new.’
‘Okay, okay,’ and I glanced out of the window and saw the moon disappearing behind a cloud. ‘Right, I’ve got one for you.’ And as we scooped and carved this is the story I told her…
Once upon a time, long ago there was a boy named Jacob, and he lived with his father in a house on the outskirts of a forest. One night his father roused him from a deep sleep.
‘My son,’ he whispered. ‘I have to go out. One of the women in the village is about to give birth and I must be there.’ Jacob’s father was the village doctor and much respected.
‘But, father,’ Jacob mumbled sleepily. ‘What about the wolf?’ There had been sightings of a large wolf around the edges of the village and the forest and the villagers were living in fear.
‘Don’t be afraid, son,’ his father reassured him. ‘I’ll lock all the doors and windows, and you’ll be perfectly safe.’
The boy’s chin trembled, but he trusted his father and agreed to try and go back to sleep. Once his father had gone out Jacob couldn’t sleep. Every noise and creak in the house seemed amplified. He took his blankets from the bed and curled up in front of the window, waiting for his father to return. He saw the full moon through his window and was comforted by the light. Smells of the night forest wafted through his window and he dozed fitfully.
Eventually, he saw the lights from his father’s car coming back up to the house. He was so relieved he ran to meet him.
Jacob’s father saw a huge wolf bound out of the house towards his car, but before he could do anything he heard the sound of a shotgun, and the wolf fell to the ground. From the edge of the forest, a group of villagers appeared. They had formed a posse and been out hunting the wolf. At first, they didn’t understand the doctor’s anguished cry.
‘What have you done?’ he yelled, and he ran to the spot where the wolf had dropped, grabbing its body and cradling it in his arms. As it took its last breath the villagers were horrified to see the wolf’s massive furry body transform back into that of a child.
‘So the doctor’s son was the wolf?’ my daughter asked, her brown eyes wide. ‘That’s a sad story, mommy.’
‘I guess it is, sweetheart, but sometimes horror is sad as well as scary. Anyway, I think these are ready to be lit.’
Our pumpkins were finished and we carried them into the living room. We put them on the low table in front of the TV and lit candles in them. Tradition dictated now it was time for spooky cartoons.
She’d seen them many times before and quickly got bored. She picked up a dusty pack of tarot cards from the table.
‘Tell me my future, mommy.’
I sighed. ‘I don’t like to use those anymore, honey. How about I tell you another story?’
‘Is it about tarot cards?’ she asked.
‘No, although the magician in it did use cards to do some of his magic tricks. This story is called Smoke and Mirrors.’
She curled into me on the sofa and I began:
Once upon a time, there was a man and he made his living doing magic tricks. He did children’s parties and very small venues. He wasn’t very good and most of the time people could tell when he switched cards or pulled things from up his sleeves. Then one day he was browsing the local newspaper when he saw an advertisement:
FREE TO GOOD HOME. PAIR OF MAGIC CABINETS. AMAZE YOUR AUDIENCE!
Well, he was very keen. He didn’t earn much money and that was the kind of thing he would love to use in his act but could never afford. He quickly rang the number on the avert and arranged to go pick them up. When he saw them they were more than he could have ever hoped. They were roughly six feet tall and hexagonally shaped, each outside wall was covered in full-length mirrors. The doors on the front swung open noiselessly and the interior was lined in plush black velvet.
The magician couldn’t believe his luck, and asked why the man was just giving them away. The seller just replied that he had no use for them anymore.
‘So, how do they work?’ asked the magician.
The seller disappeared back into his house for a moment and came back carrying a large cage with a parrot in it.
‘I don’t know how this works’ he admitted ‘it just does’ and he put the parrot into one of the cabinets. He walked to the second cabinet and knocked on the door three times. ‘Welcome back’ he boomed in a very theatrical tone. A hissing sound came from the first cabinet and smoke could be seen coiling from the cracks around the door. He opened the door of the second cabinet, and there was his parrot in its cage.
‘Oh, these are marvelous!’ squealed the magician excitedly. He loaded them into his dilapidated old van.
‘Just one word of caution,’ said the seller. ‘When I procured them I was told under no circumstances to use a human being when doing this trick. I suggest you invest in a parrot yourself.’ The magician nodded his head eagerly and went on his way.
After this, things quickly picked up for the magician. While the rest of his act was still mediocre at best, people were very impressed with his magic cabinet act. He would leave the cabinets where people could examine them during his performance and do his ‘transportation trick’ last. For most of his act, the audience would be barely watching, poking and prodding at the cabinets and trying to work out their secret.
The magician was very proud of his new act, but something was bothering him. He currently used either a rabbit or a goldfish in a bowl for his cabinet trick, and he felt there was something a little dull about that. One day as he was reaching the finale of his show, he realized his rabbit had escaped. He tried to explain but the audience began to jeer him. Someone from the crowd shouted out that they would quite happily get into the cabinet. In desperation, he agreed.
A tall, muscular man made his way through the audience and got into the first cabinet. The magician was very nervous. He knocked on the door of the second cabinet and loudly announced ‘Welcome back’ Clouds of hissing smoke roiled from the first cabinet, and the door of the second cabinet swung open. The tall, muscular man stepped out. He looked a little dazed but none the worse for his experience. The audience clapped and that was the show over.
For the next few months the magician carried on with his show, sometimes two performances a day, only now he used audience members for the transportation trick. He thought it looked more impressive and the audience loved it.
One evening after a busy day he was sitting relaxing watching TV, when he saw something that made his blood run cold. There was a story on the news about a man who had gone crazy and killed his family with a kitchen knife. The magician recognized the man instantly, the tall muscular man who had been the first to go into his cabinet.
He couldn’t eat or sleep and nagging fears ran through his mind. In the end, he determined to go visit the killer in prison.
He faced the killer through a thick glass pane. He picked up the phone on the wall next to him and gestured for the prisoner to do the same.
‘You may not remember me,’ he began.
‘Oh, I know who you are, magic man,’ the killer interrupted. ‘and I’m glad you’ve come. I wanted to thank you.’
‘Thank me?’ stammered the magician. ‘For what?’
‘Why, for welcoming me back into the world,’ smiled the killer.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s so much cooler here,’ the killer smirked. ‘So much cooler and so many opportunities.’
‘I don’t understand,’ repeated the magician. ‘Why did you kill your family? What happened in the box?’
The killer began to laugh, it was a sound that chilled the magician to the bone.
‘So it was an accident?’ he laughed harder ‘You stupid little man, didn’t you know? Your cabinets are portals. We have been watching and waiting for so long. We can’t fit into parrots or fish or rabbits, but give us a human body. A demon can fit nicely into a human body. How many people have passed through your cabinets, magic man?’ and with that, he dropped the phone and got up and walked back into the prison.
The magician sat numbly. In his estimation, it was well over a hundred.
‘Ooooh,’ my daughter’s eyes were like saucers. ‘So, a hundred demons on the earth?’
‘Oh, at least,’ I chuckled. ‘I’m not sure the magician’s maths was very good. Anyway baby girl it’s getting very late now. It’s time we tucked you up in bed.’
We headed up the stairs and got her settled. She was very sleepy now. It had been a long night.
‘Tell me the Halloween story, mommy?’ she asked.
‘Now which story would that be?’ I teased. ‘How about the one about the hitchhiker? She shook her head.
‘The Halloween story, mommy,’ she giggled.
‘Okay, okay,’ I smiled ‘Now you’re sure you won’t have bad dreams?’ She shook her head more vehemently and grinned. I would never understand why my daughter loved this story so much but I began,
‘Once upon a time there was a kindly queen and she lived in a big castle in a kingdom far away from here. Her husband the king, however, was mean and cross almost all the time and one day he threw her down the castle stairs. The queen was badly hurt and after that, she couldn’t have any children. She had always loved children and every Halloween she would invite all the children from the surrounding village to the castle, which would be decorated with hundreds of carved pumpkins and thousands of candles. She’d give them the finest treats and the children always had a wonderful time.
‘Eventually, the king died, and the queen was left alone. Now, I know you probably think she’d be pleased that the evil king was dead, but all that happened was that she got more and more lonely. She realized what she had missed out on in her life and became sad and bitter. Her heart grew cold and black.
‘She would look from the castle tower and see the little children playing in the courtyard and it no longer gave her joy. Their laughter grated on her like nails on a chalkboard and an evil plot hatched in her mind.
‘The next Halloween she shooed the cooks and the maids from the kitchen and prepared all the Halloween treats herself. They were the most sumptuous candies and cookies, made with only the finest ingredients. There was one ingredient she used that had no place in her recipes. She liberally mixed rat poison in with the sugar, and there was sugar in everything she made.
‘Just like all the years before, the children came to her Halloween party, and like every other year, they stuffed themselves with all the goodies the queen had provided. As usual, they all had a wonderful time and at the end of the night their parents came and took them home.
That was a terrible night in the village. Some of the children were terribly sick, and a lot of them even died.’
I heard a tiny snuffle from my daughter and looked down to see her sleeping peacefully. I kissed her forehead and made my way quietly out of her room. If she made it to the end of the story she’d always say, ‘And that’s why I’m not allowed to go trick-or-treating, isn’t it, mommy?’
I thought back to the inspiration for my cautionary tale. That terrible Halloween night six years ago, when some crazy woman had poisoned the children’s candy. The sound of sirens filled the night air and there were parents panicking and crying in the street. My neighbor came rushing out of his house, holding his limp son in his arms. The jack-o’-lantern on the step tumbling down in front of him and splattering into mush on the sidewalk, while he made a noise of pain so terrible it barely sounded human. I stood on my porch and stared at it, unable to comprehend the horror unfolding in front of me. Some of the children were dead before an ambulance even arrived.
The clock on the mantlepiece downstairs struck twelve pulling me back to reality, and I turned and looked back into my daughter’s room. The witching hour had come and gone and our special day was over. Her bed was empty.
|
Publisher’s Note: This is the Jeff the Killer reboot. For the original Jeff the Killer, click here.
The day Jeffrey Woods and his family arrived at their new home, the sky was overcast and the weather was muggy. The gray skies seemed to punctuate his mood. Jeff was not thrilled to be here. Their new home was beautiful though, a true example of his father’s new found success, but still, it wasn’t the home he’d known.
A week after they’d settled in, Jeff and Liu woke up early. The sky was a crisp and gorgeous blue, and although the Louisiana heat was playing its usual cruel tricks, the brothers decided that a morning bike ride to explore the area would be just the right ticket to combat the slight pangs of homesickness that they’d both been experiencing over the last week.
“I miss home,” Liu blurted out, as Jeff was smearing salsa on the microwaved burrito that would serve as his breakfast.
“Me too Liu, but I guess this is home now, so we just sort of have to make the most of it.”
“I know, but all of our friends and stuff are back in New Orleans. Remember that building we’d always sneak up on top of and watch the city lights come on, I miss that,” Liu responded, sounding down.
“Yeah, and ZM Video, the owner knew us and would always let us rent R-Rated movies without our parents, and he’d always hook us up with a free video game rental if we got a few movies… yeah, I miss that too, but Liu, we have to…”
Liu interrupted, “I know, we have to make the most out of this, but still, this place just seems so fake, and mom and dad still treat us like we aren’t even here.”
“Yep, they do. I was sort of hoping the new house would improve their mood, but what can we do?”
Liu had no answer.
Jeff finished his breakfast and the two boys left the house to mount their bikes and explore around a bit more. As it turned out, the subdivision they moved into was rather close to a cluster of stores in a small shopping center.
Village Shopping Center was the name of the short row of businesses. Within these were a Pizza Hut, a Chinese restaurant, a tobacco store, a Sprint store, and, what Jeff and Liu were most excited about, a video store.
“We’ll have to get mom or dad to come down here and open up an account so we can rent movies,” Liu mentioned as Jeff flipped a box over to read the description of a horror movie.
“Shit, you’re right,” Jeff snapped, feeling a bit of frustration at this thought. He knew getting his parents to actually come down here and set up a membership would take forever, since their usual after work routine was to go off into separate rooms until they got hungry enough to come out and speak.
Jeff glanced over at the girl working behind the counter, “Maybe I can go over there and sweet talk her into giving us accounts,” he joked.
“Yeah right Jeff, one look at you and she’ll probably ban us,” Liu remarked back, a smile broad on his face.
“You doubt me little man?”
“Doubt you? The guy who’s kissed two girls and almost touched a boob, never, please go on over and lay on all the charm.”
“Whatever, I totally could have banged that girl, but her parents came home and….”
“Last time you told me that story, you said her parents were out of town and her sister came home…”
Jeff became flustered and while in the process of trying to make yet another come back, the girl behind the register removed all doubt by speaking to the boys herself.
“Hey, aren’t those your bikes?” the young woman asked, pointing towards the glass window.
Jeff and Liu looked over and saw three boys outside, two of which were riding around in circles on the Woods brother’s bikes. They would spin them around and then jump off, letting the bikes crash onto the pavement, just to stand them up and ride them again. The two boys riding the bikes were both slim in build, while a heavier boy stood on the sidewalk, drinking a Red Bull and watching.
Jeff and his brother made their way towards the doors of the video store, when the fat kid saw them coming. Jeff couldn’t hear what he said to his two friends, but he made some sort of gesture while shouting, and the other two boys dumped the bikes where they lay, and walked towards the sidewalk, directly towards the two brothers.
“Those your bikes?” one of the boys asked as Jeff and Liu entered the summer heat.
“Yeah, why are you riding them?” Liu asked sharply.
“We just saw them there man, relax, figured someone just left them out for us,” the same boy responded, as his two friends joined him on either side.
Jeff, determined to make a good start here, tried to change the course of this confrontation.
“Well, they’re ours. We just moved here about a week ago, we live over on Fairmont Avenue, a few blocks from here. We were just checking out the neighborhood.” Jeff hoped that a civil tone could turn things around, but he could tell by the insolent look on the kid’s face that this was a difficult gamble.
“Good for you, you moved somewhere,” the fat kid remarked.
“Oh yeah Troy,” the first boy spoke, “they moved into that piece of shit house with the gravel driveway. I was wondering who would move into that place.”
“Well Randy, now we know,” the big kid, apparently named Troy, replied.
Jeff, still trying to salvage the conversation, tried peaceful banter one more time. “Okay, so you’re Troy and you’re Randy, well I’m Jeff and this is my brother Liu, we just moved here from New Orleans.”
“You ain’t in New Orleans now,” the third boy, who’d just now decided to speak, remarked.
“Yeah, and who the fuck said you could call us by our names?” Randy asked, that insolent, privileged smile never leaving his face.
Jeff smiled and responded to Randy, “Well, I guess I could have called you a fucking asshole but I figured I would give you the benefit of the doubt.”
In that moment, a flare of rage replaced the smirk that had rested on Randy’s face throughout this entire exchange. The other two boys, Troy and the still unknown third member of his band, seemed to be momentarily struck silent. Perhaps they weren’t used to being stood up to.
“Oh I’m sorry, was that language too adult for you?” Jeff asked. “And you, quiet boy, we know this isn’t New Orleans,” Jeff stated to the slim kid that had reminded him of his geographical locations, “because if this was New Orleans you three would already have gotten your asses kicked for touching someone else’s shit.”
The slim kid looked back and forth at his two friends, however, Randy, clearly the leader, seemed to know what to say. “Keith, you gonna let this little bitch talk to you like that?”
Jeff knew this part. And while he wanted quite badly to sock Randy and his pals around, a real concern suddenly invaded his mind. If he and Liu got into a fight on their first week in this new neighborhood, their parents would freak. He could practically hear it now. And while things had been far from perfect in their home, even after the move, there was a peace that had fallen over the family, and Jeff, fighting his urges, decided to do his best to keep it.
Jeff looked over the three, very well dressed, very privileged looking suburban kids before them, and dismissed them. “You guys are boring, come on Liu, let them continue their play dates without us.”
Liu laughed at that and followed behind his brother towards the bikes. However, Randy and his little gang of would-be toughs would have none of that. They moved to block Jeff and his brother once again.
“Where you going pussy?” Randy asked, shoving Jeff. Jeff could tell that shove had no real conviction. Randy was trying to figure him out, seeing where his buttons were. He’d push harder eventually, but Jeff swallowed the slowly building anger within him once more.
Liu took a bit more exception to the shove.
“We’re going to your mom’s house, me and my brother saved up a couple dollars from doing chores and we hear she doesn’t charge much.”
As the words left Liu’s mouth, Randy appeared to only register a small portion of it all. Randy Hayden had grown up in Mandeville. His father was a partner at a local firm that made a lot of money, something else that Jeff would soon come to learn. Randy and his friends, while the same age as Jeff, had grown up in very different circumstances. They were used to being listened to; they were used to being feared.
In fact, Randy, the target of the insult, just stood there. It was actually Troy, the fat kid who stepped forward, fist balled, eyes squinted in anger.
“Who you talking to?” Troy shouted, and took a wild swing at Liu.
Liu, who was both in better shape and had sparred with Jeff a time or two during his time spent boxing, was able to avoid the punch, but just barely. Had that been all, it may have once again ended there. Troy was clearly taken by surprise at Liu’s speed, and actually didn’t attempt another punch. However, these were bullies, kids that ran in a pack for a reason. The skinny one, Keith, stepped around and threw a punch that connected with the left side of Liu’s face.
Jeff had seen enough. He’d been shocked at how quickly this evolved into blows, even though he’d expected it from almost the start. When he’d first met Randy and his friends, he’d been curious. From there he’d developed an annoyance with them, and slowly that annoyance had evolved into anger. However, upon seeing Liu punched, seeing the small trickle of blood form on his brother’s lower lip, upon seeing the smug look of satisfaction on Keith’s face, that anger that Jeff felt, suddenly exploded into a rage that he’d never felt before in his life.
Jeff Woods did not hesitate. He stepped forward, his feet automatically falling into the correct stance that he’d learned from the boxing classes his father once enrolled him into, and delivered a powerful right hand to Keith’s face. The skinny boy had no time to register shock or pain. The punch caught him by surprise, and his knees buckled. Keith went down to the ground in a heap of confusion and dawning fear.
Randy, the so called leader here, was almost too shocked to move. He’d had quite a lot of experience starting fights, but no real time logged in losing them. He’d never felt control of a situation slip. He was used to being in charge. So now, seeing one of his friends go down so quickly and easily, left him in a state of shock that he had no idea how to address.
Troy on the other hand seemed to have a plan, throw another punch. He moved towards Jeff deceptively faster than his weight would seem to allow, and threw two equally fast punches. Jeff however had no problem side stepping both attempts. Troy, seeming lost for actions, actually dropped his arms, as if to say, ‘gee, what do I do now?’
Jeff had the answer. He moved in, throwing three hooks to Troy’s stomach. The hefty kid’s eyes went as wide as pie pans, a fitting analogy, Jeff thought. He staggered back, clutching his throbbing stomach. Jeff wasted no time, and stepped in once more, fetching a sharp punch to the big kid’s jaw, causing Troy to promptly fall on his ass. Jeff was reminded of King Hippo from the Punch Out game he used to play. He couldn’t help but smile.
Jeff now turned his focus on Randy. He advanced on the boy, feeling something new forming inside of him. He still felt the anger, the rage actually, at the antics of these three assholes. They had the nerve to mess with their bikes; the nerve to insult two kids they’d never met before, and of course, the ultimate offense, touching his brother. However, mixed in with this rage was also a sweet, enjoyable pleasure. Not only was he kicking their asses, but he was loving every second of it. It was as though the joy of showing them up was perfectly blending with the rage he felt towards them. Together, it formed into a sadistic, controlled sense of power.
That was, until Liu stepped in front of him. “Jeff, stop, that’s enough!”
“Why stop now Liu, they wanted this,” Jeff replied in a flat voice that Liu had never heard come from his brother’s mouth.
“She’s calling the cops, look!” Liu shouted again, and this time, Jeff came back to reality long enough to listen. He glanced over at the video store clerk, and saw her on the phone, talking frantically and pointing towards the parking lot. Suddenly, Jeff’s strange sadistic haze collapsed, and he regained his former self.
“Fuck, let’s go!” he stated quickly, and he and Liu mounted their bikes and rode towards the parking lot exit.
“Yeah, you better fucking run!” Randy called behind them. Jeff and Liu paid no mind and peddled away.
A few blocks down the street they dismounted their bikes and began to walk them together. At first, neither brother spoke, then Liu broke the silence.
“Jeff, thank you for standing up for me back there, thank you.”
“Yeah, those guys were pieces of shit, they had it coming,” Jeff replied, looking down at the street as they walked.
“What… what happened? I’ve never seen you like that before?”
“Just defending myself Liu, what was I supposed to do, let them beat you up?”
“I bet they go to our school, I bet we’ll see them there, and they won’t forget this.”
“Who cares? We didn’t ask to move here, we didn’t ask for any of this. Mom and dad just wanted a bigger house in a nicer neighborhood, and we were along for the ride whether we liked it or not. Think I give a shit what these rich asshole kids think of us?” Jeff stated, and went back to looking at his feet.
“Think we’ll get in trouble?” Liu asked.
“For what, defending ourselves?”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right, they did start it,” Liu answered, and to the brother’s, the matter was closed.
However, things were far from over.
They found that the trouble they believed they’d escaped was in fact waiting for them at their front door. Jeff and Liu saw the police cars well before they arrived at their driveway. Two cop cars, both parked in front of their house. Both of them felt their stomachs drop, as they well knew why the police were there.
The brothers entered the living room, to see their parents sitting on the couch, the two cops standing up, leaning on the wall, writing in their notebooks.
“What did you two do?” Shelia practically screeched as the two boys entered the house.
Liu, younger and less centered than Jeff, began to fall on the defensive, “Some kids tried to jump us down by that video store, they were messing with our bikes, and when we went outside, they got in our faces!”
“That’s not the way we heard it!” Matt Woods interjected, his voice firm and ripe with anger and dissatisfaction.
“No dad, that’s what happened,” Jeff began to explain. “We were down at Friendly Video, looking around the store, when these three kids started riding around on our bikes. All we did was walk outside, and the kids started talking trash to us, trying to provoke a fight. When we tried to leave, one of them punched Liu.”
Finally, one of the two cops spoke. His name tag read Williamson. “Boys, we have some serious complaints about the two of you. From what eye witnesses at the shopping center say, you two started the confrontation with Randy and his friends.”
Jeff took notice at how familiar the cop’s tone was when he said Randy’s name. This was a small town after all, and there was a good chance that this cop coached Randy in little league, or drank beers with his dad. Hell, it was even possible that this cop could be an uncle to one of the bullies.
“No sir,” Jeff replied, “we didn’t start it, they did. We just wanted our bikes, we just wanted to leave. They blocked us.”
Williamson continued, as though he’d heard nothing Jeff said, “Several witnesses, including the video store clerk, say that you swung first. They say that the boys were riding your bikes, but let me ask you this, did you chain your bikes to anything, or did you just leave them outside the store?”
“What’s that matter?” Liu demanded.
“Well son, if you just left your bikes lying around in the street, you can’t exactly blame Randy and his friends for riding them, now can you? It’d be different had you secured them somehow, but you just left them there.”
“Mom, dad, you’re not buying this crap are you? You know me and Liu don’t start fights, when have we ever? These three punks messed with us, and if you can’t tell that these cops are taking their sides, then you need to open your eyes!” Jeff knew he was skating on thin ice, but that rage, it demanded some sort of satisfaction.
“Jeffrey, do not speak about these officers in that tone of voice, and do not speak to us that way either. Now, it’s pretty obvious that you two aren’t happy here, that you miss your old home, but starting fights in the street isn’t going to change anything!” Jeff’s mother snapped back.
“Listen boys, you’re lucky. None of the parents want to press charges. This will be reported as a simple scuffle between teenagers. But be advised, you’re both on notice. This is a quiet town, not like New Orleans. We don’t tolerate this sort of behavior over here. If you see Randy, Keith or Troy, I highly suggest you tell them you’re sorry. We’ll be keeping an eye on both of you, so don’t let this happen again. You don’t want to have an arrest record, do you?”
Jeff felt his anger bubble over, and he could not hold his tongue. “Who is he to you Officer Williamson? Is Randy your nephew? Is he a friend’s son? Or maybe you go over and screw his mom while you’re on duty? Which one is it Officer?”
“That’s it, both of you go to your rooms!” Matt Woods apparently found that he wasn’t a mute after all, as he ordered his sons out of the room. Jeff and Liu walked up the stairs, however, they refused to hang their heads in shame or feel any regret.
Neither of their parents spoke to them for the rest of that day. Jeff and Liu stayed upstairs, venting their shared frustration to each other. They’d been screwed over, even at their young ages, they knew that. They took some solace in the fact that they at least hadn’t been arrested or cited, but still, they saw what was really going on here.
“That cop, he was protecting Randy,” Jeff whispered to his younger brother.
“No shit,” his brother replied.
“We have to watch ourselves; we have to take care of each other. You saw it down there, even our parents didn’t stand up for us.”
“Yeah, what the hell was up with that?” Liu asked.
“Imagine, their fucking image, that’s what’s up with it. All they care about is fitting in here. They want to make sure they blend in with the rest of the Stepford families. No more fighting, if we see Randy or his two fuckhead friends again, we just walk away, okay?”
“But Jeff, you can kick the shit of them, why would we walk away?” Liu asked.
“Because I can’t kick the shit out of the cops Liu, I can’t kick the shit out of mom and dad, and that’s what would get us. Fucking Randy and his pals are protected here, you and me, we’re not. So, if we see them, just avoid them, okay, please?”
Liu nodded, “I feel like a little bitch though, I owe Keith for hitting me.”
“No you don’t, I paid him back for that, and paid his fat friend too. I hope they just leave us alone now,” Jeff sighed.
Jeff and Liu didn’t hear from their parents for the rest of that day. They remained in their rooms late into the night, and finally came down to eat after they were sure their folks had gone to bed. Liu said that he felt relieved about that, but Jeff had a sinking feeling that the worst was yet to come. Jeff was correct,the next morning, when the two brothers came down stairs together to eat breakfast; their parents were already sitting at the dining room table, staring at the boys, approving of nothing they saw.
“Sit down,” Matt stated flatly.
“What’s going on?” Liu asked.
“Sit….down!” Matt stated again, anger dancing on the words.
The boys complied without further question.
Matt Woods began his diatribe, “Whatever that was yesterday, beating up some kids for touching your bikes, mouthing off at the police, disrespecting both me and your mother, that stops today!”
“We didn’t beat anyone up for touching our bikes!” Jeff blurted.
“Shut up Jeff, this is a one way conversation!” his father barked. “That kid, Randy Hayden, his father is a partner at my firm, did you know that? Did you even think about that when you were assaulting him over your godforsaken bike?”
“You just didn’t think, did you Jeff?” Shelia added.
“How could I have known that?”
Matt continued, “Well, I’ve spent the entire morning talking to his father on the phone. His dad is willing to let it all go, but shit son, I have to deal with that at work now. Do you have any idea how much damage this could have done to me, to our family?”
Jeff felt that rage coming back, and fought with all his might to keep it stifled.
Instead, he once more tried to appeal to the two adults’ parental side, “Mom, look at Liu’s face, they split his lip, can’t you see, it’s still swollen!”
Liu turned his head to better showcase the injury.
“My god Jeff, so some kid played a little rough with your brother, is that any reason to fight them? I wanted to make friends with some of the other families in this neighborhood but thanks to you… I just don’t know…”
No sooner could Jeff or his brother construct a proper defense, than their father began speaking again. “So, your mother and I have talked this through. Since there are only a couple weeks of summer vacation left, we’ve decided that Liu should spend the rest of the season at Aunt Marcy’s place. We’ve already spoken to her, and she is willing to let him come out there and stay.”
Both Jeff and Liu were floored by this decision. Both boys began to protest at the same time, but they saw the look on their parents’ faces. The decision was made.
“Why can’t we both just go then?” Jeff asked, a last ditch effort to at least get away from his parents.
“Marcy doesn’t want both of you there, she says you two are too rambunctious, and frankly we agree,” Shelia answered.
And so it was, Liu was shuttled off to his Aunt’s place in Abita Springs, Louisiana, a place even smaller and duller than Mandeville, if one can believe that. Jeff watched his brother leave, and then walked back to his bedroom. He felt that rage; however, it began to feel almost… pleasant to him. He couldn’t explain it. He was furious at this turn of events, his parents had turned their backs on their own children. However, through it all, these new feelings he was experiencing weren’t all terrible. This anger for example, he could almost taste it. It felt like thick, sweet syrup, stirring around in him. Of course, he knew the extra ingredient that would complete the flavor. That satisfying joy he’d felt when he had Randy and his friends on the ropes the day prior, that mixed perfectly with the anger, to create some intoxicating product that Jeff almost craved now. He fell asleep lying on his bed thinking about that syrup, that thick, viscous that seemed to work its way into the very fabric of his soul. He wanted it, yet he knew that it was destructive, and that nothing good could come from sampling it again.
Several days passed, and tensions were high between Jeff and his parents. Without Liu around, there was nothing for him to do except sit in his room and play video games. He went outside but didn’t venture far from home. He knew if Randy and his goons showed up again, it would likely result in another fight.
For a few days, that worked well, and Jeff believed he could get through this. However, his mother changed all of that on an early Saturday morning. Jeff was awoken suddenly by sharp sunlight striking his face. He heard his mother humming, something that she rarely did. Even in his half sleeping state, he knew that humming was forced. She was doing it to wake him up, and figured the added sunlight would get things there even faster. When she noticed Jeff’s eyes cracking open, she sauntered over to his bed, and began speaking in a tone that simply oozed false joviality.
At first Jeff had refused. Could his mother be serious, did she really expect him to go over and make friends with Randy? He was still in bed when his mother stopped her incessant humming long enough to tell him to get up and get dressed. Once he learned why, he’d told her no, no way in hell. However, his mother was a shrewd manipulator, and she’d know exactly what would get the job done. She promised Jeff that if he did this for her, went over and made it work with Randy, that Liu could come home the next day. She’d sandbagged Jeff right into the corner with that one. He’d no choice but to agree.
A short time later, Jeff and his mother were pulling into Randy’s driveway. Randy’s mother answered the door.
“Hi, you must be Jeff,” she greeted.
Jeff smiled wanly and confirmed that was in fact who he was.
“Hello, I’m Shelia Woods, nice to finally meet you in person!” Jeff’s mother announced, barging past her son and extending a hand to Randy’s mother.
“Shelia, so pleased to meet you, I’m Bridgette Hayden. Sorry to hear that our boys had a little mishap the other day. You know how it is though with teenagers, hormones going crazy and all. Randy never gets into fights, but he explained to me that Jeff and his brother are still new to the area, and haven’t quite learned how we do things in Mandeville yet, isn’t that right Jeff?”
Jeff couldn’t resist a small jab, “Yeah, sorry about that Miss Hayden. Me and Liu had no idea that it was okay for your son and his friends and mess with our bikes without asking.”
“Bridgette, he gets that mouth from his father, never knows when to shut up. How about you and I go in and have some coffee and you can tell me all the great gossip around Mandeville while our boys get to know each other the right way.”
“Randy is in his room Jeff, upstairs, second door to your left. I’m sure you’ll hear the sound of his video games or something,” Bridgette stated with very little humor to her voice.
“Thank you ma’am,” Jeff answered, and entered the house.
Jeff knocked and heard Randy answer with, “Come in.”
“Hey, so, I guess you heard, our parents want us to hang out, get to know each other,” Jeff stated with little conviction.
“Yeah, that’s my mom alright, she doesn’t like drama. Honestly I think she worries too much, I mean, I’m cool if you’re cool.”
Jeff sat down on the floor next to Randy and struck up a conversation. “So, turns out your dad is my dad’s boss, he freaked out about the fight in the parking lot. He was actually worried that he’d get fired or something.”
“My dad is like, everyone’s boss. I fucking hate it. I think half the kids at my school talk to me because their parents are somehow connected to my dad’s firm.”
“Why do you hate it?” Jeff asked.
“Because it’s fake, this whole damned town is fake. You’ll figure it out as you go, but trust me; everyone who lives here is just trying to pretend they’re something else. My parents make me do all this shit, all the trophies and stuff, just so they can brag, that’s it.”
Jeff smiled, “I know how you feel. My dad had me in boxing class a year ago, because some co-worker of his had a brother that worked at the place or something. As soon as that guy quit though, I was out of that gym the next week.”
“I wish it was that easy,” Randy responded, “I hate playing baseball, but my dad will sure have me out there again next summer, and the summer afterwards. It’s like, he knows I hate it, but wants to make sure I’m out there with his stupid company name on the back of my jersey.”
“Randy, why did you and your friends fuck with our bikes the other day?”
“I told you, this town is fake, and boring as shit. There is nothing to do here. We have to find stuff to do. I mean, there are only so many times you can go hang out at the video store, or ride the dirt paths in the woods. All the girls here are stuck up, all the stores close early, there’s no mall and the movie theatre is across town. We were just bored man, so, sorry for that I guess.”
“It’s cool,” Jeff replied, “I guess I’m sorry for too. Things went too far.”
“You mean the fight?” Randy asked, “That shit was actually cool. Those guys, Keith and Troy, they just leech on because of my dad. It’s like I told you, I’m pretty sure their parents make them hang out with me.”
The afternoon went on, and Jeff soon forgot that this was a mandatory arrangement. He actually started to find himself liking Randy, sure, their first encounter was a little sketchy, but he was coming around to the guy, finding that he wasn’t so bad once his idiot friends were removed from the equation.
About an hour later, things took a new turn. Jeff heard the twin pops of two car doors shutting in near unison, and then heard the engine start up. He dropped the game controller and peered out of Randy’s bedroom window, just in time to see his mother and Randy’s mother backing out of the driveway.
“Our parents are leaving,” Jeff said.
“About time, I figured my mom would eventually talk your mom into going shopping, or going to get coffee, or something like that.”
Jeff heard Randy pause the game.
“Hey Jeff, come down stairs, I want to show you some cool stuff,” Randy invited, and Jeff followed.
Randy led Jeff out to the garage. It was hot in there, with the main door shut. The garage was well kept though, and Jeff observed stacks of magazines underneath a work bench, as well as tools and various other utility items stacked about.
Standing in the small, closed in garage, with the late summer heat lingering about, Jeff began to feel a bit uneasy. Despite the fact that he and Randy had seemed to bond over the last few hours, Jeff couldn’t ignore a sense that things were different now that the adults were gone.
“What did you want to show me?” Jeff asked.
“Hold on, let me get it,” Randy replied, moving the magazines out to reveal a small, red box.
Jeff watched as Randy removed the box and opened it.
“Check it out, my dad’s flare gun,” Randy announced, and waved the red, tubular gun about.
“Woah, be careful with that!” Jeff shouted, more out of shock than real concern.
“It’s fine dude, don’t be a pussy, it’s not even loaded,” Randy said. However, Jeff watched as he fished one of the flares out of a back compartment. Randy then continued to fiddle with the flare gun, popping it open and loading a flare. “Now it’s loaded,” he announced. “My dad showed me how to use this last year when we went out boating. Sometimes I take it out back and shoot flares at the trees. But, maybe this time I don’t need a tree.”
The change in Randy’s voice and demeanor was impossible to ignore.
“Okay, well cool gun. Let’s get back in the house though, it’s hot out here, plus, I’m getting hungry, what do you have to eat?”
However, as Jeff turned to walk through the small door leading back into the house, his path was suddenly blocked by two more familiar faces.
“Where you going Jeffey?” the fat kid, Troy, blurted out, as he and Keith stepped forward into the garage.
“Took you two assholes long enough to get here, I’ve had to babysit this faggot all day,” Randy shouted, a wicked joy was present in his words.
“Sorry Randy, but Keith here had to mow his front yard before his parents would let him come out,” Troy said, a sheepish tone to his voice.
“It’s cool, we’re here now,” Keith said.
“What the fuck is going on?” Jeff asked, staring at Randy. He noticed that Randy still had the flare gun in his hands.
“I’ll tell you what’s going on Jeff; you owe Keith and Troy an apology for what you did. You sucker punched them, and then ran away. You didn’t even have the balls to fight them fair, so now, you’re going to pay them what you owe!”
“I’m not going to fight you, okay, I’m done with that shit,” Jeff replied as he glanced about the room for an exit.
“You’re right about that, you’re not going to fight. You’re going to stand there and let my boys get their licks in. Then I get mine, and when that’s done, you get the fuck out of my house. I’ll tell my mom that you got sick and walked home, and after that, if you see us again, you better walk the other way.”
“I’m not going to stand here and get hit by you or your friends, so just let me go home, how about that. I’ll tell my mom that we’re cool and everyone wins, okay?” Jeff asked.
Randy then raised the flare gun towards Jeff. “No, you stay pussy; you stay and take your licks.”
Jeff felt that sensation once more, that sick, rich dark matter that swirled about inside of him. He could taste it now, it was heaven. In his mind, he imagined himself diving into it, swimming in it, letting it swallow him whole. He looked around and the sensation only grew. He saw Randy, standing there holding the flare gun. It was limp in his hands though, and the hammer was not cocked back. Jeff knew that Randy had no intention of firing it. He looked over at Keith, skinny and pathetic, a kid born to follow. Troy, fat and sweaty, breathing a bit heavy from his walk over, and of course, in the middle of it all, Jeff himself. He felt that pleasure begin to mix with the rag |
“Have you ever heard of The Sallow Man?”, That’s what Timmy Morrison asked me in seventh grade. Timmy was my best friend. We did nearly everything together. It was Friday, and we were sitting in lunch period discussing what we were going to do when he came over to stay the night after school.
“No, what the hell is that?” I asked him, rolling my eyes because I figured this was going to be another one of Timmy’s story’s that his sister told him. Timmy’s face put on that he’d always put on when he was talking about something that someone hadn’t heard of before.
“My sister told me about him, she said he comes to you if you say some words in front of a mirror, I don’t remember it all but I wrote down what she told me. I figured we could try it out at your house.” I rolled my eyes to make it seem like I thought it was childish, but in truth I was interested. Creepy stuff like that always interested me, even though I knew it wasn’t real, I just liked hearing the stories. I didn’t want Timmy to know that I wanted to hear about it though, because then he’d just have something to be smug about.
“Is this just more of that ‘Bloody Mary’ crap where she just comes out of the mirror to kill you?” I asked him, pretending to pay attention more to my mashed potatoes than the conversation.
“NO! The Sallow Man comes out of the mirror after you recite his poem, then he kills anyone you ask him to, that’s what my sister said anyway.”, Timmy said as he turned to eat at his own tray. ‘There was a poem involved?’ I thought. Now, I really did have to know more.
“What do you mean, what poem?” I asked him. Timmy lazily reached into one of his many folders that he carried around for school and pulled out a piece of paper that was a bit crinkled. He slid it over to me on the cafeteria table, and I examined it without picking it up. This is what it read.
In dark halls within the after,
From those halls you hear my laughter.
Dark thoughts entreat your mind,
To for now break down my bind.
I will take what ails you in this land,
And I will leave no trace, for I am Sallow Man.
I nearly laughed as I read the last lines. I was up for anything spooky sure, but this was really corny.
“Timmy, you don’t really believe this crap do you? Your sister was probably just messing with you.” Timmy didn’t say anything at first, he just concentrated on his tray for a moment, then he said,
“Brandon, do you remember last year when my parents were fighting a lot? My Dad was drinking all the time and I stayed over at your house nearly every night for a while?” Of course I remembered that, Timmy WAS over at my house every night. My parents allowed it because they knew what was going on. It was a small town, everyone did.
“Yeah Tim, I remember.” I said, the mood now solemn. “My Dad hit my Mom a lot, and whenever me or my sister was home he would call me a bastard and he would call my sister a whore. It was a nightmare.” I could sense Timmy’s gaze turn towards me so I looked up from my tray as well. He stared at me for a moment, waiting for me to say something, so I did.
“I thought your Dad stopped drinking though, and everything was okay?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood a bit. Timmy responded then, with anger starting to edge into his voice.
“Yeah, he stopped drinking, but nothing got better. Sure he stopped hitting Mom, but she barely speaks to him or anyone else in the house anymore. I know it’s because of him, I know she’s still afraid of him.” I was a bit shocked, Timmy had never mentioned anything about that before. I just figured once Timmy started staying at his house again everything was fine.
“So what, are you going to sic the Sallow Man on your Dad? Timmy that’s nuts. It’s just some story that your sister probably heard from one of the other seniors.” I told him.
“But what if there’s a chance it would work? I need to try Brandon, but I want you to be with me.” Timmy looked dead serious.
“I don’t know Tim; it just seems silly” I told him.
“Please Brandon, I need you there, please.” Timmy gave me a look of pure desperation, and I felt sorry for him. I decided that I’d be there to support him. He lived in a broken home, and he was grasping at straws. I knew it couldn’t be good for him, but he was my best friend, what choice did I have?
“Okay Tim, I got your back. Let’s summon a ghost.”
The next thing I knew, it was after school, and Timmy and I had locked ourselves in my small downstairs bathroom at home.
“Do the lights need to be off or anything?” I asked.
“No, at least I don’t think so. I think all I have to do is recite the poem in front of the mirror, and then he appears.” Timmy pulled out the piece of paper with the poem on it that he had in his back pocket, then cleared his throat. I stood back and leaned against the wall with my arms crossed. Usually when people did this sort of thing it was in the dark, maybe with a lit candle or two. But the lights were on, and the floral wall paper that was all around my bathroom didn’t exactly inspire fear, so I felt pretty stupid in that bathroom with Timmy. I was just thankful Mom and Dad were still at work so they didn’t catch us and wonder what was wrong with their son. Timmy finally began to speak after what seemed like minutes.
“In dark halls within the after,
From those halls you hear my laughter.
Dark thoughts entreat your mind,
To for now break down my bind.
I will take what ails you in this land,
And I will leave no trace, for I am Sallow Man.” Timmy spoke loudly and clearly. When he finished, he held his breath, waiting for something to happen. At that point I was absolutely convinced Timmy was wasting his time, I sighed and closed my eyes waiting for him to realize the same thing. I heard him gasp, which I took to be a sound of defeat. I opened my eyes and was about to console Timmy, but then I saw the real reason he had made a sound.
When I opened up my eyes, I saw the mirror no longer showed our reflections, but a long dark hallway. The hallway’s floor, walls, and even its ceiling seemed to be moving, Undulating back and forth like the insides of some giant worm. The hallway was poorly lit by some unseen source, and at the very end of it I could see the shape of what looked like a man moving toward the mirror. For a moment, I was stuck in disbelief. I couldn’t move, I could only watch as the figure in the mirror came closer and slowly, its features became clearer and clearer. It was a man, or what seemed to be a man, bald and completely naked. His skin was a pale, sickly yellow. He was skinny, so emaciated that his jaundiced skin was taut against his skeleton, and every one of his ribs were visible. With thin and lanky legs, he walked ever closer to the mirror with a shambling gait. His long, ghoulish arms dragged his knuckles along the hall as he walked, parting the undulating floor for fleeting moment before the floor came back together. When I noticed this I squinted my eyes to try and sharpen my vision in an attempt to see what it was that was making the floor and walls quiver like they were. The cause of the moving floor became clear as they started to move from within the mirror, and out into the bathroom. Cockroaches.
The insects began to spill out of the mirror and onto the sink and floor below. That was enough for me, Timmy and I had to get out of that bathroom. I reached out for Timmy’s arm and tried to pull him away, but he would not budge. He stood transfixed, his eyes glued to the mirror and the nightmare that was approaching. I tried a few more times to pull him away, shouting at him to snap out of it, but he wouldn’t move. It was if something unnatural was holding him in place, and wouldn’t let him go. I gave up, and I turned tail, hauling ass for the door. As soon as I reached the door handle, thousands of cockroaches moving impossibly fast covered the handle and immediately after the door, leaving the door obscured completely by writhing and hissing insects. I yelled, cursing and screaming as I turned around to go for the window on the other side of the bathroom. I was silenced when I was met with the sight of a room, no longer recognizable as my bathroom, but was now more reminiscent of that hallway in the mirror. The walls and ceiling was covered in insects. When I looked down, I saw that the roaches covered the floor below, making only two small spaces where my feet stood. I dared not move then, I didn’t know what would happen if I were to step on one of those bugs. I had the awful thought that if I were to move at all, the insects would strip my bones completely of flesh.
I lifted my head slowly to the now dimly lit room, flashes of light would strobe here and there as the roaches crawled along the light shade on the ceiling. I could now that two yellow and gnarled hands had appeared on either side of the mirror, and I knew the Sallow Man had come. Timmy stood there, his eyes still wide, his stature still unmoved. I distinctly remember a smell then, a sickly smell that called to mind dirty bed pans, and I had to cover my mouth and nose not to gag. Still, this didn’t seem to bother Timmy what-so-ever. When the awful smell came, so did then did the Sallow Man’s head emerge from the mirror. His bald head was faced downward, and his neck stretched far into the room until his head was inches in front of Timmy’s face. A voice came then, a hissing voice that seemed to come from the insects, and echo all around the room.
“Who is the one to be taken to the after?” The voice said. Timmy moved then, for the first time since he recited the poem, by smiling a wide and unnerving grin.
“My Father!” Timmy said, loud and clear, as if delivering the death sentence himself. In retrospect, I suppose he was. There was a murmuring sound then, as all of the insects began to vibrate loudly. Then after a moment, the insects parted and swarmed around the wall to the left of the mirror, and a man; who I recognized to be Timmy’s father, rose from within the wall of swarming bugs. His face was pale and his eyes were wide with fear. The insects were swarming him, presumably pinning him to the wall. I’m sure he would be screaming if the cockroaches weren’t covering his mouth.
“This is the one to be brought into the after?” That awful hissing echo came again, entreating an answer from Timmy, and without breaking his grin Timmy said.
“Yes!”
As if heeding the call of Timmy’s word, the insects then began swarming into Timmy’s father’s mouth. His eyes showed his desperate fear as thousands of cockroaches began eating him from the inside out. I would say it was gruesome, but the insects were quick with their work. They devoured every bit of Timmy’s father within seconds, leaving nothing left. Had my eyes not been glued to what was happening I might have blinked, and I would have missed it. I looked back to Timmy, who had a satisfied and almost, relieved looks on his face. But his look soon became one of terror as the Sallow Man spoke once more.
“Now, you will join me in the after, boy. Such is the price to be paid.”
Timmy didn’t move at all, save for the horrified shock that crawled over his face. I don’t know if it was terror that kept him in place, or if it was the Sallow Man. But Jesus Christ, I wish I didn’t see what happened next.
The Sallow Man lifted his head slowly, revealing a face that had no features. No eyes, no nose, and no discernable marks what so ever as far as I could tell. The only thing there was a mouth. The Sallow Mans lips, like the rest of him, were stretched tight, making his human-like and yellow teeth seem bigger than they were. Stunned into helplessness by my own fear, I could do nothing but watch as the Sallow Man’s jaw unhinged and stretched to an impossible size. He then reached for Timmy and grabbed him, picking him up just as easy as if he weighed nothing at all. The Sallow Man then shoved Timmy into his mouth whole. Just like that, gone. Impossibly, my best friend was thrown into that awful ghoul’s throat. I didn’t even hear Timmy scream as the thing swallowed him. Tears were falling from my eyes freely as the Sallow Man closed his maw and turned his attention toward me as the insects began to retreat into the mirror behind him. Just before the Sallow Man disappeared behind the mirror, he smiled at me. I could feel his eyes, eyes that he did not have, burn into me. A buzzing sound filled my ears then, and I began to faint. Just before I hit the ground, I saw the Sallow Man duck his head back into the mirror and disappear.
My Mother arrived home from work at around four o’ clock, and she found me on the bathroom floor passed out with the door closed. When Mom woke me up, my head was hazy, and it took me a moment to recall what had happened, and it was hard to think with Mom asking over and over if I was okay. But when I remembered I became frantic, telling her something had happened to Timmy, and he disappeared, but I left out the part about the Sallow Man. My Mother looked at me like I was crazy.
“Who’s Timmy, dear?” She asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Mom you know Timmy, he’s my best friend!” I yelled.
“Oh you made a new friend, what do you mean he disappeared?”
I started to tell her that Timmy had been my best friend all my life, I was going to tell her that he had stayed over almost all of last year. But a sinking feeling in my stomach stopped me, and I pushed passed my Mother to the house phone. I was going to make a call to confirm my suspicion, but I hoped on hope I was wrong. I dialed Timmy’s number, and his Mother answered.
“Hello?” I took in a deep breath and asked.
“Hello, is Timmy there?” I asked.
“I don’t know any Timmy, maybe you have the wrong number sweetie?” Timmy’s Mother sounded much happier than I ever had heard her before, it wasn’t enough to stop the tears from forming in my eyes, but it did prompt the next question I asked. “Are you married?” I asked, knowing how silly it sounded, but I had to know.
“No, but I don’t see how that’s any of your business, does your Mother know you’re using the phone?” I didn’t reply, I just hung up. I turned and went up into my room, I dodged all my Mom’s questions and I went straight to bed. As I lie there, I thought hard about everything that had happened. I wondered if Timmy would want things this way. It was clear from the look of terror on his face, that he had no idea he would have to pay such a heavy cost. I wondered if his Timmy’s sister knew about that part of the deal, if she left it out on purpose, or if she just didn’t think it mattered, because after all it was just a stupid poem. But the biggest question that I kept asking myself, was Timmy still alive? I saw that thing swallow him whole, but was it possible in whatever world he was in, that he was still there with the Sallow Man? I hoped not, but hopes or not, I got my answer when Monday morning came.
In class, all I could do was stare at Timmy’s empty seat, and it was making me sick thinking about it. I asked my teacher if I could use the restroom, and was excused. I went straight to the sink once I made my way to the bathroom and turned on the tap. I turned the hot water on all the way, and began to splash water into my face. When I was done, dried myself with paper towel, and my eyes met the now fogged-up bathroom mirror. There, in the condensation, were three words.
‘HELP ME BRANDON’
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Janie awoke with a start, jerking out of her nightmare back into reality. She looked about her room reassuring herself with its familiarity. The feel of the cotton sheets that she had washed till they were as soft as silk, the scratchy blanket her grandmother had given her for her eighth birthday, and the scent of smoke and lumber rising up from the basement. But as she settled back into her senses things began to seem a little off. Her sheets seemed a touch too rough, the blanket felt like a slightly different material, and the smell of the room was a little too sharp, almost mechanical.
She figured she was just a little rattled from the nightmare; it had been quite a doozy. She remembered being immersed in ice-cold water with a forest of wires coming in and out of her. There had been a cold mechanical eye hovering above her, suspended by a mechanical arm that hung from the ceiling, the blank red glare from its stare had bored into her eyes.
She decided that a hot glass of milk would fix her up, and send her right back to sleep. She ventured downstairs almost breaking her neck in the process. It seemed the stairs were just a bit shorter than her feet remembered; a misplaced step sent her tumbling down them. Luckily there was a landing to break her fall halfway down. Breathing heavily from the fall, and still shaken up by her nightmare she tiptoed into the kitchen to get a glass of milk. But far from calming her down, the midnight beverage made things much worse.
The milk tasted funny, not like it had gone bad, but just off. The mug felt too rough in her hands, and the beeps of the microwave were a few pitches off. She hurriedly finished her drink, wanting desperately to go back to bed. Surely when she awoke she would be back in the world she knew. She went to return the milk to its shelf in the fridge. But as she reached out to grasp the handle, she saw in the reflection of the polished refrigerator door, the cold mechanical eye from her nightmare.
She screamed in fright, dropped the milk, and whipped around ready to confront the demonic machine, but nothing was there. She cursed herself for being so stupid, and got a rag to clean up the milk that had spilled from the container. As soon as it was mopped up she hurried back upstairs, wanting desperately to lose herself in her sheets.
She leaped back into her bed and hunkered down eager for this strange experience to be over. But as she laid there she felt something watching her, that mechanical eye from her dreams was haunting her waking thoughts. She decided to turn the lights on, she knew she was being silly but it would make her feel better. She flipped the switch on her bedside lamp, and looked about as light flooded the room.
Nothing was there, just as she ought to have known. There was no mechanical eye hiding in the corners. But something was odd, the light, a curly fluorescent bulb that normally threw off a brilliant white light, was a few shades too yellow. It was almost unnatural, and it cast everything in a sickly light. Janie knew something was wrong, but she had no idea what it was or how to fix it. She turned to lie back down hoping she could bury her problems in her dreams, but as she turned her eyes caught the picture on her bedside table.
It was from a Christmas several years ago. She was standing next to her brother, with their parents behind them, and her dog sitting at their feet. They were all wearing goofy Christmas sweaters, and shredded wrapping paper was strewn about the floor. They each had a grin as wide as the Mississippi plastered across their faces, but above each grin sat a pair of cold, dead, mechanical eyes.
Janie screamed, flailed, and crashed to her bedroom floor. She picked up the picture and hurled it into the back of her closet. Janie knew for certain now that something was wrong, something had been wrong since she had awoken, something was here.
It took Janie several minutes to calm down, and she dared not look into her closet where the picture lurked. As she collected her thoughts she started to realize more and more things were wrong. The grain of the wood floors ran the wrong way. Her walls were baby blue, not robin’s egg. Hundreds of tiny details were wrong with her room. She had no idea how all of these things could have changed while she had slept.
It began to dawn on her, the only explanation for all the changes. she had never woken up. She was still asleep trapped in the most vivid dream she had ever had. So if she was asleep then the solution was simple. She just had to wake up. Janie tried pinching herself, hoping that small act would bring her back to blessed familiarity, but no such luck. She tried pinching harder, more vicious, but it seemed no amount of pinching would end the nightmare. She tried kicking the bedframe but she received nothing from it but several throbbing toes. She thought maybe a shower would do it.
She went to her shower and turned the faucet on. She turned the knob to its coldest setting, hoping the shock of the water would awaken her. She pulled down the end of the faucet and water began to shoot out of the showerhead. She undressed quickly, feeling goosebumps ripple across her body as cold droplets of water escaped the curtain and splashed her. She stepped into the shower dreading the cold shock, but praying it would wake her up. It didn’t. She stepped out and turned the knob all the way in the other direction, hoping hot water could accomplish what cold water could not. As she waited for the water to heat up the bathroom began to fill with steam. After several minutes she was sure the water was plenty hot enough, and its touch would rescue her from this nightmare. She stepped into the shower. The water burned, she wanted to scream out in pain, but she stayed as long as she could hoping enough pain would wake her up.
Eventually, when she could take no more she stepped out into her steam-filled bathroom, her body was covered in angry red streaks from the scalding hot water. As she looked about her for her clothes she noticed the steam was sinking to the floor, as though it were unnaturally heavy. Janie began to worry, what if she could never wake up? She dried off and threw her clothes back on. As she went to leave she looked into the mirror, and behind her, hanging from its lifeless mechanical arm, was that cold mechanical eye.
Janie screamed and sprinted out of the bathroom, and down the stairs. She needed to wake up now, that thing was growing bolder, and it was coming for her. She didn’t know what else to try, what could possibly wake her up? As she thought she began to hear mechanical whirring and clicks from the hallways. She retreated to the center of the kitchen getting as far from the noises as she could. The noises grew louder and drew closer. She began to sob, praying to god that this whole thing would just end. She just wanted life to be normal again. An idea began to form in Janie’s mind. There was one thing that always woke you up from your dreams. Whenever you were about to fall to your death, you woke up. Whenever the psychotic murderer was about to catch you, you woke up. Janie just needed to die, and she would wake up, but she couldn’t let that thing be what killed her. She didn’t know how, or why, but she knew if it caught her she would never wake up.
The noises drew closer and Janie began to cry again, but her desperate plan filled her with a grim determination. She crept to the corner where she kept the knives. It was gruesome, but she knew what had to be done. She opened the cabinet and pulled out a small paring knife. It didn’t need to be large to get the job done, just sharp. The noises drew closer and increased in volume, filling Janie with dread. She began to draw the knife down her arms, opening large slits in the belly of her forearms. She watched as blood poured out across her arms and spilled onto the counter. She laughed as she watched, too mentally exhausted to care. She worried only about waking up. She looked up from her arms, feeling woozy, and in the doorway of the kitchen hung the cold mechanical eye. Janie screamed, she wasn’t awake yet; she wasn’t dying fast enough, her fear coursed through her filling her mangled limbs with strength. She grabbed a large butchers knife from its holder and slammed it into her own chest. She laughed manically as she watched her lifeblood pour out of her chest. It was a sickly unnatural shade of red. She looked up and saw the cold mechanical eye advancing towards her. She sobbed and shrieked as that monster drew closer. She pulled the knife out and drove it home again. Blood came thundering from her chest. As it rushed out of her and pooled on the floor Janie collapsed, she lay on the ground, her vision fading, and she smiled in victory knowing she had beat that demonic machine. She was waking up.
Janie lay in a Plexiglas container, surrounded by ice water. A forest of wires and tubes led in and out of her body. Her body jerked spasmodically, she appeared to be fighting some invisible foe. The system watched as she struggled with her virtual reality. She was quickly becoming a very interesting subject. No one had ever noticed it was an illusion so quickly, and so many times in a row. This was her fastest time yet. Only thirty minutes and she had successfully terminated the sequence. Her mind had even managed to retain some images of the system itself. The system was impressed. In a few more trials the subject would be approved for cloning. Her genes could prove quite valuable for future science. The cold mechanical eye lowered itself to Janie’s container and began running diagnostics on the events of the last sequence. Hopefully she would improve again. Some subjects suffered too much psychological damage to continue testing. Such subjects were bad for science. Some may call Janie’s treatment torture that it was not proper science, but she was still alive, and that was more than you could say about many of her fellow subjects. The mechanical eye completed its diagnostic procedures, and reset the sequence.
Janie awoke with a start, jerking out of her nightmare back into reality.
CREDIT: RedBullReptar
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Entry 1
I made a terrible mistake. I thought I was just paranoid, but now I know it’s following me. It’s never going to let me forget about one stupid mistake.
I’m not sure what “it” looks like. The only name I can call it is Karma. I thought it would protect me… I was wrong.
Let’s start from the beginning. There’s a rarely heard of ritual, called the Judgement of Karma. For reasons you’ll come to understand, I can’t describe the ritual in writing. It’s far too dangerous.
I was told of this ritual. The basic myth of it is, after you perform this simple ritual Karma will judge you. If it decides you are a truly good person, it shall make your life a paradise, otherwise… Well that’s why I’m writing.
It must’ve been a mistake. I really am a good person, or so I thought. I thought the ritual simply didn’t work but it became apparent fast that I was cursed. As soon as I finished the ritual and fled home I found my beloved dog had been sliced open and had been laid out in my bed. I prayed to gods I didn’t even believe in that this was the work of a regular human being.
So far, I haven’t been able to sleep in three days, regardless of how many sedatives I take. Every time I look out the window or at a mirror, in the corner of my eye I see a dark figure for a split second, then as soon as I try to focus on it, it disappears.
I hope writing this can help in some way. So far it’s at least calmed my nerves. Okay that’s enough writing for today.
Entry 2
I can’t go to sleep. When I sleep it plans to kill me in ways so terrible I can’t describe it. I almost fell asleep last night, my eyes were shut for 5 seconds. When I opened them I saw it! Karma was right in front of my eyes. It takes the form of a small boy with messy brown hair and wears poorly sewn together black rags from neck to toe. Also, it’s- or HIS mouth had been sewn shut for reasons I don’t want to know and he had a look of shock and hatred in his tiny green eyes.
As soon as I had looked up at him and had his image permanently scarred into my mind he seemed to disappear. Frightened, I noticed a sharp pain up and down the skin of my entire body. I rushed to the mirror and found bleeding scratches that appeared to be from human fingernails all over my abdomen, back and legs.
Entry 3
This is day five without sleep. To keep from falling into the trap of sleep I’ve been taking adrenal energy pills and getting lots of caffein. I’ve began to get tired so I’ve started the habit of making small cuts on my arm with the blade from a box cutter, each a centimeter from the previous one on on my forearm each time I dose off. So far there are 8 cuts.
I’ve been locked in my house ever since yesterday when I shopped for the supplies to keep me awake. If I go outside I might accidentally share my misfortune with others. As far as the legend goes, anybody who concerns themselves by learning what the results of my endeavor may become judged by Karma. That is why when I’ve finished writing I plan to burn my house down along with my computer, so what I’ve written can never come in contact with the Internet.
I hear somebody at the door…
Entry 4
I’ve lost track of day and night. Last night(I think it was last night) I duct taped all my doors and windows so he can’t watch me. I also took all the mirrors in my house and threw them into a large pile in the back yard before barricading my back door.
I got very tired today and the cuts that now cover my left forearm weren’t helping. So, I put an empty pan on the stove and kept the fire burning, then I took a butcher knife from my kitchen and sliced off the pinky toe from my left foot. Then I pressed the hot pan against the wound to stop the bleeding. This was a small sacrifice to keep my life.
Entry 5
He spoke to me. I can hear it whisper through the house. It speaks of a life before it was what it is. It was a tortured soul. At a very young age whoever was raising him began to torture him in awful ways. They would whip him and sew his mouth shut. Every time he would sleep they would beat him in new and more painful ways. To this day he seeks revenge on every person who deserves it.
I don’t know why he told me these things but I actually feel bad for that thing. That may be his point.
I’ve been awake for as long as I can remember. I’ve cut off all of my toes and the last three fingers on my left hand. I’ve burnt all the stumps to stop the bleeding, of course.
Entry 6
I found it difficult to cut off my left foot. It was probably the most painful thing I’ve ever felt, but at least I won’t sleep.
I’m shaking as I’m writing this. Fortunately, I’ve always obsessed over grammar so even that can’t stop my writing.
Recently, I noticed cuts along my lips that weren’t there before. I think he did it while I wasn’t paying attention. I think the worst thing about not sleeping is never having anything to focus on other than harming myself to stay awake…
Entry 7
I can’t believe I’ve gone this long without sleeping… I can’t believe it… I can’t believe it… This shouldn’t be medically possible.
Entry 8
I can’t stop seeing it everywhere I look. I keep hearing it scream from below me even though I don’t have a basement… But what’s new is, I hear somebody screaming threats back at it. It’s the voice of an adult, probably the person who put him through this.
I’m done. I’ve covered the floor of my house with lighter fluid. I wont give him the satisfaction of killing me. This is my final entry. When I finish writing this, I plan to burn my house down.
—
Psychiatric evaluation, Dr. Henry Rogue.
Patient suffers from an advanced state of psychosis and the worst case of insomnia I’ve ever seen. He has self inflicted wounds covering his left arm and has cut off his left foot, all of his toes on his right foot, and all of the fingers on his right hand. It would appear that this was brought on by very serious post traumatic stress disorder. His previous psychiatric files show that he was tortured as a child by his parents (which explained the aged whip lash scars on his abdomen, back and legs, and the scars on his lips from where they were once sewn up) until he was forced to kill them. He kept looking straight past me with those shocked green eyes of his and saying “Karma will make me pay.”
—
Personal note, Dr. Henry Rogue,
The patient’s computer was found in the wreckage of the fire. I’ve read over a file of entries he wrote during the course of his lack of sleep. The things I’ve found out have shocked me. I’m going to send the file to some colleagues of mine to help me decide what I should do.
PS: since reading that file, there have been disturbing coincidences happening to me. I’m afraid to sleep.
Credit To: Sean
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A young girl is playing in her bedroom when she hears her mother call to her from the kitchen, so she runs downstairs to meet her mother.
As she’s running through the hallway, the door to the cupboard under the stairs opens, and a hand reaches out and pulls her in. It’s her mother. She whispers to her child, “Don’t go into the kitchen. I heard it too.”
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You’d be surprised at how certain things trigger these subconscious responses from deep inside you. Involuntary cues that bubble to the surface whenever that certain thing strikes that precise note. For me it was the creak of that damn door. It’d drive me insane, and no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, it would never be silent… And just like that, it became a part of my life. Ingrained in my mind, the sound would haunt me from the day we first moved in. I haven’t slept completely for three years because of it.
Three years ago, give or take a month or so, Karen and I moved into our new apartment. The floor plan was simple, a bedroom that’s connected to a bathroom, a kitchen, living room, and designated washer room. Simple, yet effective… Moving in was one of my fondest memories. We ran around the mostly empty space for the majority of the first few hours. The hype of being free and independent in “our” own space was exhilarating. It was later that same night that I first noticed that creaking sound the door to the bathroom made when moved ever so slightly.
“God that’s a horrible sound,” I remember remarking, “The hinges probably need to be greased.”
“Dearest, you nitpick the strangest things, you won’t even notice it in time,” Karen said with a teasing chime.
She always knew how to deal with my quirks.
In time the creaking didn’t subside, nor did my perception of it. Whenever the door was opened or closed the sound would pierce through my ears and dilute my thoughts. Though Karen was wrong about it leaving me, she probably knew that I’d adapt to it. The sound never became less annoying, don’t get me wrong, I still hate it, but my patience for it grew out of necessity. Though even with my increased tolerance the creaking was enough to stir me from slumber whenever Karen rose to use the toilet. Maybe I’d never fully adjust after all. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sprayed grease into those old hinges on that seemingly older door. The owners of this complex must’ve cut some serious corners to have recycled doors, but the price for rent was cheap enough. You get what you paid for.
Now aside from the creaking of this door everything else was perfect, that is until I started to notice the door was taunting me. Sometimes Karen would leave the door open, and the air conditioning would kick on only to move the door. The door would sway slowly and the slight movements were enough to sound the alarm… to make that drawn out creeeeeeak in the dead of night. That sound would scratch at my brain until I rose from the bed and closed the door. Sure enough, like some sick joke, the door would seem to open itself by some force of magic. With one long creak it would torment me… but how? I closed it. The door must not be catching. So, more firmly, I’d close it, and that’d be the end of that.
Every time I had to do this dance with the door, and I’ve done this frequently, I felt a strong sense of unease well up in my chest. It was as though I was five years old again and I was peering into a pitch black hallway. The fear felt reminiscent of those days, and so I pushed it out of my mind… I’m too old to be afraid of the dark still. I’d talk to Karen about these occurrences and my unease with the situation and she’d just jokingly dismiss it, teasing me.
“Oh hunny, should I start checking the bathroom for monsters and oogey boogey?” She’d say with a smile, which faded when she’d see my expression wouldn’t change.
She meant well enough, and usually her humor would be returned with a quip of my own, but this… this was different. I could not shake this feeling. So it was then that we got into the habit of securing that door at night, though that never actually worked. Every night was the same. I’d never fully sleep because of the creak. During the day it posed no threat, outside of annoying me.
Life moved on and so did we. It became easier with time, but from time to time there would be instances where I would hear the creak once more and neither Karen nor I were up to open the door. When I would groggily glance up to see if the door somehow forced itself ajar I’d see a closed door. Maybe I’m just imagining things, or maybe not.
One time, on a restless night, I heard the creak, and without sleep to blind me I jolted up to see what I can only describe as a slate white face… but it had no discernible features. I reeled back hard enough to smack against the headboard of my bed, which caused me to choke on the gasp of air I had drawn in. The choking noise, or maybe the back of the headboard crashing against the wall, or maybe it was just the sudden movement of all of this happening at once woke Karen up with a start. When she turned to me she saw my face pale and my eyes unsteadily staring at the door… which was closed.
I could tell that Karen was concerned, because she started to treat me with tender care. It was a little insulting. I wasn’t fragile. I know I saw something… or did I just dream it all up? I hadn’t slept well since we moved in.
No other incidents occurred after that. The door still creaked. Sometimes it’d pry open because it was on a crack. Nothing like that night though…
By the third year Karen went to a conference for something or another in England, and I was alone in the apartment for a month. All went by smoothly, perhaps because I expected the worst. With work and games to keep me busy the first three days sailed by like a gem. I hardly noticed the creaks, though they did wake me. Then there it was, without fail, a long, drawn out, high-pitched creak.
I had been playing games all night. It probably was a bad idea to delve into the horror genre when I’m all alone and paranoid, but it was the newest “Quiet Rise” game, and it was scary as hell. Just as I laid my head to rest it sounded. Like the devil’s very own grinding teeth it tormented me with its wicked shriek. CREEEEEEEAK. It let out a second shrill note as though daring me to glance up. Click. The door closed.
“Wha-What the fuck was that…?” I managed to utter softly.
“A-Am I just dreaming things up again…?” I remember thinking, or rather praying. My chest ached as I drew rapid breaths from under my blanket. I could feel every single strand of hair on my neck and arms prick up at once. I felt an overwhelming, yet cold, pressure bear down my throat and crush my chest. I wanted to believe it was nothing more than my overactive imagination jumping into extremes in the dead of night, because I stayed up a little too long. So I didn’t dare move. I was safe in my blanket, this I’d like to believe. Eventually sleep caught me, though it was fitful, and before I knew it the light of the morning breached my eyes. I lived to see another day. No more horror games though.
I didn’t tell Karen about what happened, I didn’t want her to worry. I just ignored it. The next night nothing happened. So my mind must’ve played a foul trick on me… right?
The night after, I managed to get to sleep quickly. I was exhausted after work and the day went well. Sleep was going to be rewarding, I could feel it taking me already. A few hours into that unfulfilling rest I felt something tug at the back of my mind. It felt sharp, like a little clawed hand was pinching the softest part of my subconscious and pulling firmly. It was uncomfortable. The feeling was enough to break my already frail slumber and make me painfully aware of my environment all at once. Creeeeeeeeak. Reluctantly I opened my eyes and dazedly lifted my gaze to the door. The door was wide open. Wide fucking open… but nothing was there. At first my sleep deprived mind made me call out, “Karen?” but the inquisition was fruitless. It dawned on me she had been gone for nearly a week. I felt like I wanted to cry out, curse whatever cruel person installed this demonic door. Instead I just rolled over. I didn’t have the energy to fight it.
The next day I studied the door thoroughly. Nothing made sense. There should be no reason for it to open every night. I looked around the bathroom area and tried to find some source that could be causing this. Maybe someone was playing a prank on me. Maybe Karen had been up to something the whole time. I couldn’t find a thing.
The days went on after that and days turned into weeks. Three weeks in and still I couldn’t sleep peacefully. My mind grew frenzied. I was reaching the tipping point. What was going on? In time this question, and lack of an answer, consumed me. It got to the point where the fear was overridden by madness. I hated that door. I hated that creaking. I needed to end it. I went out and bought two cameras that day, if I couldn’t see anything, maybe they could. I set up one camera just above the headboard so that it would face the door. The other was on a desk parallel to the bed against the wall. I placed a camera there to watch me.
That night I slept. It was a miracle. I didn’t wake, but I didn’t feel rested. I felt empty, but at least I didn’t hear the creaking. Ironic that this would happen when I set out for the truth. It would have almost driven me insane if it wasn’t so funny. Now wasn’t the time to dwell on this though, I had to view the tapes. First I removed the memory card from the camera affixed to my headboard and uploaded the video onto my computer. The first few hours were tame, and I felt my skin flush. Had I been acting nuts this whole time for nothing? Was the lack of sleep the cause all along? Maybe all I needed was a good night’s rest. I fast forwarded the video. Nothing for the next couple of hours… then there was movement. I hit pause, backed up, and played it a few minutes before the movement began.
My skin felt like an army of ants with needles for feet marched across my entire body. The door opened with that earsplitting creak. At first I wondered why I hadn’t woken up. Every other time the sound of the door was enough to take me from sleep. These thoughts were washed from me instantly as I saw it. The door had not opened on its own.
A black… entity, formless and slightly translucent held onto the doorknob with what I can only imagine to be a hand. It was… a shadow. No. That’s not right… but that’s the only word to describe it. It was like a shapeless silhouette, humanlike in make, but with no definition whatsoever. Its “body” melded into one long mass as it reached from the floor to the ceiling. It had no legs or feet. As it moved it glided slowly across the floor. The top of it extended and narrowed slightly, forming a round top, which leaned forward and away from the rest of it. Periodically something would bubble at the end of what I would call its “head”. It looked like melting flesh when it happened, just black and almost see through. This melting motion seemed to create a face in great torment.
If I focused on it hard enough the face would seemingly stared pleadingly in despair straight past the camera and into my eyes as it continued to melt. At that moment my ears began to ring. I thought my ears would burst. I tried not to look at those faces after that.
It moved toward my bed… Why didn’t I wake? The shadowed thing finally took a spot by my bed. It hovered over me as its “arms” sank into its body. There it stood idle. I felt my stomach churn violently. I retched, nearly falling over as I fought back the heaves and continued watching the video. The only movement was from the continual emerging and melting of that tormented face. Its eyes never left me through this cycle though, and that unsettled me most of all.
More appeared through the opened doorway now. One after the other and with each one that passed through the door cried out with another howling creak. I never budged. I never moved. I was completely oblivious. They all had continually melting faces which all bore a different face of agony, pain, anguish… all of them were different, and yet they all inspired the same feeling of dread deep inside of me. Each one would take a place standing next to the one before it until they circled my bed completely.
They stared… never moving for two whole hours.
Just as I thought I could stomach no more I saw something emerging from the back. The translucent blackness that made up these things covered the figure that was appearing like a veil, but I could still see it moving. It moved through the doorway at a snail’s pace. I could clearly see long… limbs? It was slate white, devoid of color. The arms that emerged from the darkness of the doorway were wiry and very… very long. The muscles pulled at the visible bone from under the skin as it moved. It began to pull itself through the doorway more and more.
Then its face made its way through the dark. My eyes blistered as tears immediately swelled past the surface and began to fall freely. My breath was ragged and spiteful as each attempt to breathe set my throat aflame. That face… it was the same face I saw so long ago. That featureless face moved closer and closer. Everything about it was elongated. It moved like a sloth, slowly reaching out with a hand and digging its gnarled claws into a grip to pull itself along. When it made it to the shadowed things they let out the most gut wrenching wails. With an indolent swipe it dragged one of its long arms through each and every one of the black entities. Their wails grew so loud that my ears burned. I felt sorry for them for some reason.
As they all screamed at their demise they faded into wisps in the dark, disappearing from sight. The white one continued to claw and creep over me. Its claws dug into my headboard and its legs lifted it over me from the end of my bed. I could hear its bones crackling with every move it made… That’s how close it came to me and the camera. Its neck extended further, growing as its vacant face met mine only inches away. The face began to crack and tear, opening up to reveal a “mouth” as blood seeped from the newly torn rip. A guttural growl gurgled through the blood that pooled in its “mouth”. It lifted its head to the camera and cocked it to the side before letting out a terrifying screech.
The camera was overwhelmed with static and the image began to corrupt and break as the screech drew out. It lasted maybe ten seconds before the video cut to black. Minutes passed and it remained black. Then the video flashed back to show a mostly empty room, save for me sleeping soundly.
For the longest time I sat there. Was I going crazy? Was this just a dream? Was it a hallucination from sleep deprivation? Maybe, but when I started the next video it was the same thing. I didn’t watch the second video… I couldn’t. I sat there for a while before I actually focused enough on my hands. There was blood, and not just on my hands, it was all over me. I got up and dashed for the bathroom slamming the door behind me. The mirror showed blood steadily streaming from my eyes, ears, nose and mouth… I glanced down at my shirt through the mirror, which was drenched in blood. I lifted it. A “bite mark” bled freely from my side. It bit me and I never stirred. I didn’t even feel it until now. My body was shaking uncontrollably. What the fuck…. What the fuck… What the fuck.
Creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeak. I could have sworn I closed the door behind me…
|
In Edmonton, Alberta, there is a hotel called the Canterra, off of Jasper Avenue and 109th Street. During the night, go here and ring the doorbell. Should you be let in, look to see who the guard on shift is. If the man looks in his mid twenties, yet the hair on his head and face both are white as snow, take a seat beside the security desk. If it is any other guard on shift, leave and return in a week’s time.
Here you must wait. The guard will say not a word, nor answer any questions you may ask. He hears you, but he will not respond. He will only give you a sad look, as if knowing something terrible awaits. When the time is 2:52 AM, the guard will rise to perform a patrol of the building. Follow him only on this patrol – if you follow him at any time before 2:52 AM, you will be forcefully removed from the hotel, and lose your chance.
Say not a word as you walk the halls behind the guard. He will check that the rooms are all locked, as well as patrol the stairwells. When you both reach the 5th floor, you will notice that it is remarkably colder than the last four. Yes, the floor is deafeningly quiet – it is normal. When the guard secures all the rooms on the floor, you will both stop at a door that seems much older than any other door you’ve yet seen in the hotel. This is room 512. Only this particular guard has access to this room, Take note of the key of which the guard uses to unlock this door – it will be important later.
At this point, the guard will open the room for you and allow you to pass through. It will be quite dark, but do not yet be afraid – the worst is yet to come. Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and step through the doorway. Do not open them until you hear the door close behind you, for seeing the transition can be maddening.
It will be almost unbearably hot, here. You will find yourself in a long hallway with numerous turns. There will be thirteen doors lining this hallway – do not open any of them. Take note which door has a splash of white paint on it, this will be critical soon. When you reach the end of the hallway, you will find yourself in the living room of the suite. In each corner of the room you should see a tall figure, each with burnt flesh. They should all be sitting on the floor, hugging their legs with their heads upon their knees and facing their respective corner. Their fingers will be chewed away until their tips are nothing but sharp, boney talons. Do not address these figures; do not touch them: they are Her guardians.
In the centre of this room, there She should be. She will be sitting in an old, ragged reclining chair. It is impossible to say how She will look, for Her appearance changes for everyone. She should, like her guardians, be asleep. Do not awaken her from her slumber.
For now, you have time to rest. There will be food and drink set out upon the coffee table in front of Her, and you are welcome to it. Do not partake in the pie, however, for it will numb your legs.
Should you be so bold, take a look outside the window. It will resemble a hellish version of the avenue which the hotel is on. The buildings will be burnt-out husks of their former selves, the river valley beyond will be dry and cracked. Fire will appear to be on the horizon, and the ever-burning sun will resemble blood set ablaze. Should you stay for hours on end, you will find no reprieve from the heat – there is no night here.
Now, look to the streets – you will find the same figures there as the ones in the room. They, however, are awake – shuffling, screaming and wailing from their back maws. They have no eyes in their sockets, but by some twisted means they can still see. Take care not to attract their attention, for they will follow you back to our world and this venture will be for naught.
When you are ready, stand before Her and speak clearly these words: “Save me, Mother, please.”
Say nothing else and wait. You should start to hear Her breathe.
At this point, one of two things will happen. Remember the key which the guard opened this room with? Should She place that same key on the table in front of you, count yourself lucky. Should She, however, place a different key upon the table, you will need to give Her an offering. A knife that was not previously on the table will now be present. The blade will be rusted, bloodied. Take this knife, and sever a finger, placing it beside the key. Wait.
If She places the same key as the guard’s on the table, you may take it and leave. If not, remove another finger. This will only occur a maximum of four times before the right key will be produced.
Once the key is in your possession, She will once again return to Her haunted slumber.
Now pay attention, for you only have a short amount of time. The Guardians will be stirring, now. Slowly they will rise from their sleep and turn in towards the room to face you. If they see you, they will slaughter you. Run. You have 10 seconds before they will fully turn from their corners.
Remember that door with the white splash of paint? That is the door you will need to use to remove yourself from this hell. If you hear screaming from behind you, the guardians are fully awake and are coming. You don’t have much time. Find the white-marked door, and get out!
You will find yourself inexplicably outside your own home, exactly a week after you entered the hotel. Keep the key on you at all times, wherever you go.
One day in the future, distant or near, a ragged old door with the number ‘777’ will appear wherever you happen to be. Use the key and open this door immediately. Leave anyone with you behind.
Wherever it leads, it will be far better than what is about to happen to this world.
—
Credited to T Striethorst.
|
So, what’s it like to be a zombie?
I’ll save you the effort of asking because we both know that’s what you’re thinking… right? Or, more to the point, what the best part of being a zombie? Well I’ll tell you one thing: it’s not the loss of dexterity. I’ve really only got two fingers capable of typing so this tale will be a significant labor of time. However, in a fortuitous twist of fate for you, dear reader, time is something I suddenly seem to have a lot of. My schedule has opened considerably, what with the apocalypse and all, and I no longer find myself monitoring the clock and placing any importance on its significance in the progress of my day. The person who said, “I have all the time in the world,” had no idea what that truly meant.
While I digress, I feel it’s only fair to inform you that leaving a point open-ended or letting a train of thought never reach the station will probably be a consistent theme throughout my narrative. Since this wasn’t really an issue when I was… I don’t know… let say: alive; I can only surmise that this may be due in some part to the fact that my brain is beginning to rot in my skull. I do my best to keep my head cool (in regards to temperature) but there’s only so much a guy can do these days. No power mean no air conditioned duplex. No air conditioned duplex means a cool creek can do in a pinch. Everything has a fine line though; everything. Even in a cool brook one has to keep a close eye. The second you see a bit of hair or a chunk of flesh go merrily, merrily, merrily down the stream you got to get the hell out.
So what were we talking… oh yeah; the best part. Well let’s see, there actually more to consider than you might think. Is it the general sense of comradery and sharing of resources in the zombie community? Perhaps it’s the ability to re-discover the real world after being held so tightly in a virtual one for so long? You probably have no idea how nice it is to just unplug your intelligence and free yourself from the thoughts that imprison you; except for the hunger for brains, of course. Is it the freedom of schedule and the opportunity to finally see this great country? The cardio is fantastic and if you can hook up with the right horde you’d be amazed at how entertaining a long road trip can be.
Plus, I probably don’t need to tell you as I’m sure it would go without saying, but the women… oh man. The ladies of the horde are aplenty and as dirty as I’m sure you would imagine them to be. While it’s true that the dirty is literal, plenty of mud, blood, fecal matter and whatnot in a horde, these girls can be freaks as well. Zombie chicks are the shit. Imagine really hot Goth chicks hell bent on getting some meat in their mouths. Now imagine them in a significant state of decay, writhing and fighting to eat the living. Granted, it’s not ideal, but easier to make work than you might think.
But even the constant party atmosphere isn’t the best thing about being a Zombie. It’s the fact that I’ll never have to buy another piece of useless crap again for the rest of my undead life. I will never again have to walk into a Walmart or a Target for milk and bread and walk out with a shower curtain, garden-hose, pasta strainer and a “Snuggie”. I will never again need to walk into a post office for stamps to mail my rent and utilities to the only companies left who don’t believe in electronic payments. If I do ever find the need to enter a post office again it would only be because a young Hispanic mother and her eight-year-old daughter had barricaded themselves inside and were making their last stand with their golden retriever whom they called Lala and which barked incessantly over their terrified sobs. Just as a hypothetical of course.
That is the best part. You’ve not tasted true freedom, my friend, until you’re at a point in your life where you don’t have to worry about the free market grind. You know what thoughts I never have? Did I grab my wallet? Do I have my credit card? Do I need gas in my Yugo? Should I pick up a six-pack of Zima? Do I want to buy Aerosmith’s new album or Kool Moe Dee? If I stop at a Blockbuster, which VHS cassette should I rent? What aerosol hair spray should I get? (I guess I should mention that I died in 1987).
Do I need this or do I need that? Do I have enough of Product A or Product B to get me through the night? Honestly, the only product I really think about at all is, well… tasty brains; but if we are being truthful then I have to admit that’s really only an indulgence as well. I’m not eating out of necessity and you really don’t want to know where the things that I do eat ends up. Let’s just say smooth running bowels aren’t really synonymous with my condition. Indulgence might not be the right word for the brains. I don’t need them in the physical sense but the urge can be so strong sometimes that “addiction” would be a better fitting glove.
I was actually really embarrassed by the compulsion at first. I thought it was my own personal failure and kept it very close to the vest. I called them my “private delicacies” not wanting to give away the true nature of my revolting cravings. Turns out, the symptom was more wide spread than I’d imagined. So wide spread, in fact, that there is actually a bit of competition for my delicacies. If I’m being perfectly blunt; some of these fools are really starting to piss me off. You put in a good, hard day’s work: tracking and stalking a victim and the second you get to the good stuff you’re surrounded by a crowd of bums trying to wrestle in on your action.
I will beat a fool who comes after my goodies. I will tear their arm off and beat them into a pile of mush. I will tear my own arm off and mush them. I’m a bit of a work-a-holic. Sorry, that’s not true; it’s more of a hobby I’m greatly invested in: a hobby that I find myself singularly focused on with laser intensity. If you must put yourself in my shoes then think about how much time you spend looking at porn and you should be able to equate.
I’m aware that I have a problem but the one thing the zombie community is painfully short on is any type of outreach or self-help programs. There’s no, “Hi, I’m chuck and I’m addicted to chowing grey matter.” So given the circumstances it’s only to fair to warn you of the consequences. You don’t want to mess with my delicacies. If someone’s cool and shows respect and patience then… yeah, I’ll share with them. It’s not like I don’t have a heart… I think, kind of hard to say at this point but you get the gist: don’t mess with my brains and I’ll do my best to manage my addiction.
It’s really quite silly anyway. I can’t actually taste anything; not at all. Frankly I don’t know where the compulsion comes from. I can’t taste anything and for the most part I can’t feel anything. I consider this a benefit as well. Could be a firm handshake or could be you just cut my hand off; if I’m daydreaming at all I wouldn’t know the difference. I keep telling the guys from the horde, “You gotta pay attention. It’s crucial, you gotta pay attention.” Do my pleas fall on deaf ears, you ask? Considering the majority of the ears were no longer attached… you could say that.
I know that you might find this to be detrimental, but let me ask you this: how do you feel right now? I don’t get headaches or a sore back or arthritis or hangovers or any of the things that you get all the time. I don’t get sleepy or sneezy any other issue of diminutive stature. I get plenty of fresh air and exercise and don’t worry about stubbing my big toe… or the next to the big toe. I believe I’ve lost my big toe but that’s beside the point. At this point, I’m sure you’re thinking to yourself that this sounds too good to be true. Zombie life (or Trans-human as the left-wing undead like to call it) sounds like the only way to go. Why on earth would I ever want to keep living as a Walker?
Oh yeah… we call you guys “Walkers”. You know, because of the way you guys are able to… just, well… walk around and stuff; most of us can’t really do that too well. That being said, the term “Shufflers” is highly offensive and you may not be looked upon in high regard if you choose to use it. If you hear one of us say it, that’s different. We can use that word. Within our community it’s seen as a form of unity and is us taking the hateful power that you walkers gave to it away. You should only refer to us as Zombies or Undead-Americans.
Anyway, I can see that you’re ready to turn in your walker status and join the wave of the future. You’re ready to join Team-Zombie and take your first steps onto the ladder of success. These feeling of excitement are natural we want you to know that we’re just excited about the prospect of you coming aboard and contributing to the greater success of the enterprise while impacting on a personal level. We think you are Zombie material and believe that the one thing that could push us over the top… is you. I know, I know; I feel it too.
Before you can jump into this exciting endeavor, however, you need to be told about the down-sides. I don’t want you to walk away from this today, dear reader, having thought that I was some type of snake-oil salesman who tried to sale you the happy side of a donkey without revealing its ass as well. Everything in life has two sides: the sun and the moon, the yin and the yang, the mountain and its reflection in the lake, the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen… who has a penis. You need the entire bill of sale before you make such a momentous decision. You need to know it’s not all team-building exercises and seminars on synchronized swaying. There are a few… let’s just say… quirks that you may not be thrilled with.
The first of which would have to be the permanence of the transition. It is very much that: permanent. The actual procedure is quite expedient and depending on your ability sustain a number of bites in a short amount of time can be nearly instantaneous. Of course, there are scenarios where the process can take a bit longer depending on your ability to remain unbitten and, of course, hack and shoot well. But these are extreme circumstances which agents rarely encounter in the field and really not worth devoting a lot of time towards. So yeah… permanent.
Also, there have been occasional issues with fairly isolated cases of crew members losing various body parts due to extemporaneous deterioration. That being that, we’ve been able to do some amazing things with duct tape and leather jump-suits. Are these corporate BS puns doing anything for you, by the way? Another consideration I should mention is the maggots. You really can’t feel them at all but I’ve been told by some that they’re a… irritation. It’s hard to keep them out and one you get them… well, you know how when you go to the beach you keep finding sand everywhere for weeks after that? It’s a little like that. If you fixate on the critters you’ll start picking and then you won’t be able to stop.
I knew a girl named LaTasha who literally picked herself apart. That poor little white girl picked and picked until she was half a torso and one arm. Even then she couldn’t stop. Poor, sweet LaTasha picked until her arm and head fell way. Don’t get too upset please, dear reader, imagining this sweet mother of three lying in a pile of separated limbs and flesh. She was able to get rid of all the maggots which was a tremendous victory for her personally. Also, she was anorexic and the loss of weight had greatly improved her self-body image.
A mutual friend set her head up with a guy named Winchester, who was also just a severed head. Being an interracial couple some people had their doubts, but they’re still together today and living with his mother and her “boyfriend” who we suspect is putting his hands on her but no one can prove it. You’d think it wouldn’t be that hard to do since he’s the only one in the household with actual hands. Not to mention being a player. Leroy’s a slick one. He’s got an excuse for everything.
Why are you with that woman, Leroy?
“Ah, well, see, she said she knew a guy who had some brains for us down the way, so I was just gonna see if I could get some brains for us, because you like brains baby and I like you, shit, Love you. So much love and brains because… I’m your man, and… brains.”
Why are you coming out of that woman’s bedroom, Leroy?
“Yeah, um, see, yeah… you see, this crazy woman I DO NOT KNOW, asked me to walk her dog and I said ‘bitch, I ain’t walking your dog; I’m gonna eat your dog!’ and then, so… then I ate her dog and that’s when you saw me coming out of there… plus… I was getting you some brains, baby.”
There’s really no catching him in a lie and now we don’t even try. F- Leroy! Why did you even bring that punk-ass up? Kind of off-point, wasn’t it?
So anyway, before I was so rudely interrupted… maggots. They can get behind your eyeballs. Usually they’ll just push your eye so that it’s looking in a slightly difference direction. I know it might seem like a disability, but I’ve seen some amazing people overcome this to not live their amazing lives. Sometimes, what you focus on is more important than what you see. Worst case scenario would be the maggots pushing your eyeball out of your head completely.
This usually works in two ways. First would be a complete exodus of your eye from your physical persons at which you’d have the brief sight of your face from an angle you’ve never seen it before for your memory banks and then… nada. The second version is the one which keeps your eye attached to the optic nerve and dangling from your skull. I’ve been informed that this is not entirely undesirable and provides the different outlook on things; think Go-Pro camera. Also, maggots will eat your penis away. Some reports seem to reflect some dissatisfaction to this regard, but c’est la vie I say, easy come easy go.
Other than that… the maggots… it’s all peaches and cream and grey-matter sundaes. No life is perfect, dear reader, but I think we both know that this is the life for you. It’s time for you to stand tall and join the revolution. You will be in the In-crowd for once. You can’t cast aside your inhibitions and start sporting the “Morgue”. You can use that, by the way, if you want to. I’m trying to get it trending. Remember Madonna’s “Vogue”? It’s supposed to be like that. I’ve already gotten it copy written before you get any ideas, douchebag; but again, feel free to use. “You look pretty badass, lady and sir.” “Thank you, we’re Morguing. So just put your hands up and… Morgue.” I know, right?
Since I can tell you’re confident about the decision to go Zombie, I’ve got some good news for you. I know you’ve been hem-hawing about the way to go. Should I go with a little nibble? Should hang myself in the closet? If that’s confusing, I’ll clarify. You already have the Zombie virus in your bloodstream and all you have to do now is die to turn. Yeah, that stupid continuity filler is actually a thing now. Don’t blame our apocalypse on Hollywood’s lack of originality.
Aaannnyway. You need not fret over the particulars of your transition. I’ve made the experience painless and nearly unnoticeable. A small speck of infected blood mixed with an epidermal absorption chemical dropped onto a small area can be enough to turn a walker. A small area, like say the down arrow on a keyboard. A little drop and keep someone occupied for just enough time to read a short story.
See you soon.
|
It was cold the night it happened. The air was heavy with a thick fog, the likes of what I’ve never seen before. It felt unfamiliar and foreign and it burned my lungs a little. I took a deep breath, new smells I had never experienced before wafting into my nose across the breeze. The word “alien” came to mind and I gave a little involuntary shiver. I turned around in the doorway to find my two little ones staring at me with eyes as big as the stars in the sky, their faces filled with fear. No doubt all of the commotion and noise had roused them from their beds. I managed a little smile.
“Don’t worry, my loves. I’m sure everything is fine. Go on and fetch your mother.”
I watched them scurry further inside. As soon as they left my field of vision, my frown returned. What was that out there?
Across the wide field that stretched in front of me, through the fog, I could see lights where there hadn’t been any moments before. I couldn’t say that I really believed in the supernatural, but even I had to admit that lights didn’t just appear in the middle of a field at night out of thin air.
“Darling?” a soft voice warbled from behind me. I turned to find my wife clutching the hands of our children, worry etched onto her face.
I reached for her and stroked her head reassuringly.
“Nothing to worry about,” I said with a toothy grin at the three of them. “I’ll just go and check it out in the morning.”
As I was closing the door, Rocket, our beloved family pet, dashed in-between my legs and shot outside.
“Rocket!” my children cried.
“Damn creature!” I cursed. “Rocket, get back here!” But he didn’t heed my yells.
“Daddy, you have to go get him!” my youngest wailed.
I knew I couldn’t leave him to fend for himself out there. He was such a stupid little thing. He wouldn’t last 10 minutes on his own. But he was just as fast as he was dumb. I already couldn’t see him through the tall crops in the field.
Cursing mentally, I grabbed my jacket and a light. I hoped Rocket could telepathically hear me saying how sorry he was going to be when I got a hold of him.
I was about to step outside when my wife’s arm shot out and grabbed mine.
“Don’t you think you should take your gun?”
“My gun?” I replied. “Really, my dear, what do you expect me to find out there?” If only I had known then what horrors lay in the dark, I would have heeded her suggestion.
With another deep breath I stepped out into the night. After just a few feet I could no longer see my family in the doorway, nor the lights across the field. I walked forward in a straight line, pausing every few steps to see if I could hear Rocket making any noise.
I was startled by a sudden rustling behind me. I whipped around and lifted my light towards the noise. “Rocket?” I whispered.
I exhaled loudly when the face of my eldest child poked through the stalks. I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding my breath.
“What are you doing out here?” I demanded angrily.
He looked up at me sheepishly. “I just wanted to help you find Rocket.”
My anger flared briefly, but subsided when I looked down into his face. He looked genuinely sorry. I could see that his worry for his pet was overcoming his fear of what was out in this field. “Ok,” I said, reaching down to take his hand. “But you stick right by me. Don’t run off, or I may lose you, too.”
We walked for another few minutes, calling out for Rocket every once in awhile, but we neither saw nor heard him. I was about to call it quits when we heard a loud bang and then Rocket’s distinct howl come from far to our right.
“That didn’t sound right, Daddy,” my son said, worriedly. And he was right. It didn’t. Rocket sounded like he was terrified and in pain. I hoisted my son up into my arms and started to run towards where we had heard his cry come from.
After running for a few minutes, we burst into a wide section of field that had been cleared. It struck me for one second how it was strange that just this section of field was cleared, but that thought was quickly erased when I saw Rocket. He lay in the middle of the clearing, whimpering. We rushed to him, but as soon as we got there, I could see it was too late. Poor Rocket had been hit with something. I had no idea what, but he was covered in tons of deep wounds. I pushed my son, who was now sobbing, away from the scene. I couldn’t have him see this.
I lifted Rocket into my arms, his blood spilling down my front. He gave me a little cry and that was it. I saw the life leave his eyes. I gently laid him back down and stood up, suddenly very aware that it was clearly not a good idea for my son and I to be out here in the dark.
“We need to go back,” I said in a harsh whisper, still looking down at Rocket. But my son didn’t respond. I looked up to find him staring off into the crops, wide-eyed and terrified. I turned my attention to where he was staring and felt my heart leap out of my throat.
Standing at the edge of the clearing, not even 20 feet from us, were three of the most hideous creatures I have ever seen. They were tall, thin, and so pale I swear I could almost see their insides. Almost entirely hairless, they were the very embodiment of the extraterrestrials I had seen in cartoons as a child. They wore odd garments and carried long weapons, the likes of which I had never seen before. The longer I stared at the hate and malice in their eyes, the harder it became to breathe. None of us moved for a minute, the tension mounting by the second. Finally, I reached forward to grab my son, but he was frozen, just out of reach. I stepped forward to pull him back to my side but when I moved, the tallest of the three shouted loudly at me.
“I-I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I don’t understand.”
At the sound of my voice, the tallest raised his weapon over his head and screamed. His screams riled up the other two until all three were making a racket louder than I could have thought possible from three beings.
I had no idea what to do. They were yelling at us in a language I had never heard before and couldn’t understand. And then, before I could even comprehend what was happening, they had leveled their weapons at my son and fired. He was thrown backwards with an insane amount of force. I cried out and rushed to his side. Much like Rocket, he had been shot through. Sobbing, I scooped him up and ran as fast as I could back into the field. I could hear whatever their weapons were firing whizzing past my head as I ran. Tears clouded my vision as I raced back towards my wife and youngest child. It felt like I was taking too long to get back to them. Panic pushed me to run even faster.
When I finally got back, the door was wide open. I staggered inside, yelling for my wife. I started to tend to my son, still calling for her and my other child. I raced into the room where we kept the medical supplies but when I got there, I could only fall to my knees in disbelief. There lay my beautiful mate in a pool of blood, with my now headless child clutched in her arms. They had been slaughtered. There was no other word for it. I wailed in an anguish I have never felt before. How had this night gone so wrong so quickly?
Suddenly remembering my other child, barely clinging to life in the other room, I lept up to go back to his aid. But just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, they did.
Turning the corner, I saw the aliens from the field standing in my doorway, plus two others who must have been lurking inside. They were gripping my son by his neck, dangling him in front of me. One of them raised a blade and slid it straight into his chest. He let out one last gurgle and then went limp. The alien holding him dropped him and turned to me. He pointed the blade at me, and at that moment, I didn’t need to speak his language. I knew that he meant that I was next. For one single moment, I welcomed death. How could I keep living without my family? In slow motion, I watched the five of them come at me. Saw their cruel, twisted, ugly features advancing. Heard the blades whooshing through the air as they came down. Felt their cold stings as they sliced into my flesh. But then I realized, I couldn’t just give up without warning others of these beings. These murderous creatures who felt no compassion for anyone or anything. I had to alert the rest of the population of what existed out there in deep space.
I felt a surge of strength as I lept up. I struck the creature closest to the door and somehow made it outside. I ran as far as I possibly could before my lungs gave out and I succumbed to the blood loss. I managed to make it out of the field into a wooded area.
So here I lay. It has been two days that I’ve been here, awaiting death. Making this, what will be my final transmission, to send back to my home planet of Sonaruk. On the 100th day of Gleebar, year 5,060, my ship’s engines began to fail. I thought I might be able to make it to the next galaxy, but it soon became clear that I would have to make an emergency landing. I chose Earth. And I chose wrong. The stories of Earth are all true, my fellow countrymen. There are aliens here, and they are hostile. Do not attempt to stop here for any reason. Send out my transmission to as many planets as possible. These creatures are better left alone, and in dark about any other life forms out there. We must never attempt to make further contact with them. In my short interaction with them here, I have seen that no good can come of it.
End Transmission
|
Ryan reached the top of the hill and looked down onto the town of Prieska. It was a small, one horse town in the Upper Karoo desert. The old church in the middle of the town still stood tall, the clock tower casting a long shadow in the late afternoon sun.
The town looked like it was in a fairly good condition compared to many of the other places he had passed through, though it seemed just as abandoned – which was seldom actually the case.
He sighed, and scanned the streets and buildings for any sign of life.
He had been walking for hours and he was exhausted. The old Ford Focus he had managed to get running in Potchefstroom had finally given in about twenty five kilometers back and he had been walking since. The hot desert sun had not made it easy, but he had made it. He needed to find food, shelter and new transport, and hopefully he would be on his way to Namibia sooner rather than later.
Ryan pulled the pair of binoculars he had out of his pack and scanned the town again for a couple of minutes.
There were a few shops in Prieska which had sold food and supplies, though these would more than likely have been looted since. He was inclined to check the general store, seeing as Prieska was a farm town, but it would probably also be empty. Surrounding farms could prove fruitful and might warrant a trip out, but he would avoid prolonging his stay close to town if he could. Where there were towns, trouble was usually not far off.
A slight movement caught his eye in the window of a building he was examining. He quickly jerked the binoculars to focus on this particular window, and he thought he just caught a glimpse of someone moving out of sight. He examined the building for a few moments longer, waiting for another glimpse at what had caught his eye, but all was quiet once again.
Ryan sighed again. Of course the town wouldn’t be empty, why would anything ever be easy?
Lowering the binoculars he glanced up at the sinking sun. He had to get under cover before nightfall – especially if he wasn’t alone.
He packed away his binoculars, shouldered his pack, picked up his rifle and started down the hill.
He knew Prieska well. In the native Korana tongue, Prieska translated to “The Place of the Lost She-goat”. His grandparents had lived there for many years, and growing up he had often visited. The butchery was where they sold the best biltong he had ever tasted and the small corner shop often gave him free candy when he entered. But his favorite place in town was the old fort on the Prieska Koppie. The British had built it during the Anglo-Boer War, and the sense of history he had felt when he first visited it had always lured him back. He looked up and could see it on the other side of the town. It seemed to watch over the small town in an ominous silence.
Ryan descended the hill and reached the edge of town as the sun was lowering behind the buildings. Time to focus, buddy.
He cocked his Remington and took a few deep breaths to steady himself.
He didn’t know what to expect, and after all this time he still wasn’t sure what he dreaded more; coming across bandits or lurkers. One thing he had learned on his journey from Johannesburg, was that people were capable of unparalleled cruelty, and they could be just as fear inducing as any lurker he had come across. And he had come across many.
He quickly moved up to the closest building, looking in all directions as he approached. Slowly he peered around the wall and down the street heading into Prieska. Nothing stirred.
Cautiously, he headed down the street, staying low and close to the building. It was some sort of government building and held no real interest for him.
Shelter was now his number one concern, as the lurkers became particularly active after sundown. This he had learned early on in his exodus from Johannesburg, when he had at first opted to travel only by night to avoid the desperate people looking for help – and those people who always seemed to thrive in humanity’s darkest times. These people seemed to enjoy the lawlessness – and the suffering, and they were more than willing to add to it if it benefited them.
Reaching an intersection, he quickly scanned both ways and behind him before proceeding.
The residential area started only a few blocks ahead of him and he figured he would be able to hole up in an abandoned house for the night. It was now fully dark, but the full moon gave a generous amount of light.
Ryan had crossed another intersection when he heard a groan and footsteps around the next corner. He froze, and backed up a few steps. Raising the rifle, he steeled himself for what would emerge.
Another groan and then a hiss came from around the corner, and a few seconds later a small figure stepped into view.
Ryan recoiled. He had seen many lurkers, but this was new even for him.
A boy of no more than three stood a few feet before him.
At least, it used to be a boy.
The boy’s eyes were a feral yellow – unfocused and crazed. He was bleeding from his mouth, and his skin had a gray-ish hue to it – like ash. Black veins were all over his body, thick and bulging as if they were struggling to pump the blood through.
This was the youngest lurker Ryan had ever seen. They were always young, but never this young.
He looked up at Ryan, and at first it seemed as if he looked right through him.
Then his eyes seemed to focus, and hate and anger filled them. He hissed like a snake, and sprang forward, coming at Ryan at full tilt.
The scariest thing about lurkers were their speed and what took him off guard even more, was the agility of the young – former – young boy.
Ryan had been frozen when he saw the boy, but now, with a hissing, feral lurker charging at him, his survival instinct which had kept him alive for so long quickly kicked in.
He raised his rifle and fired a single shot, hitting the lurker mid leap and instantly dropping him.
The gun shot’s echo thundered through the small town, and now Ryan was in trouble. If there were more lurkers around, they would come running. If there were bandits around – so would they.
Usually Ryan dispatched single lurkers with the trusty hand axe he kept at his side, but the young lurker had shocked him out of his wits.
Quickly chambering another round, he started forward again, this time jogging.
An instant later he heard a shriek to his left, which was answered by another to his right.
Well, shit.
He started sprinting.
He heard shrieks, screams and hisses approaching from both sides and Ryan started to panic.
He was desperately looking around for a place of safety, anything that could save him from the oncoming death rush.
He glanced over his shoulder, but the street was empty – for now. He spotted a small side street a couple of yards ahead and ducked into it. Clambering onto a nearby dumpster, he was able to reach the roof of the adjoining building and quickly hoisted himself up.
He rolled away from the edge and took a few calming breaths.
Slowly, he peered over the edge just as a dozen or so of the lurkers poured into the street from each direction.
Searching for the cause of the gunshot, they sprinted up and down the street, teeth gnashing. The black veins crisscrossing their bodies were visible to Ryan even from a distance. They quickly found the body of the one he had killed, and anger seemed to ripple through the group. Their gnashing and hissing intensified, and they raced up and down the street, looking for the one responsible.
It had been three years since Revelations – the media had named it after the book in the bible – had crashed into the desert of Texas in the United States. The large asteroid had done considerable damage to the area, but as it had crashed in a fairly deserted area, few human lives were lost. It was what came after that had given the asteroid its name.
Days after the asteroid hit, reports began to come in of first responders dying of some sort of disease. Doctors were baffled, as it started very much like flu, but quickly escalated with ebola-like symptoms. Soon the afflicted would die of massive organ failure, only hours after the first symptoms showed. After the scientists that visited the scene began to die as well, the connection was made to the asteroid and the crash site was quarantined. The last few people to have come in contact with the asteroid quickly died. The families and anyone who had come in close proximity to the responders and scientists were also quarantined, as they had no idea if the disease was infectious. But after days of tests and monitoring, it was concluded that the disease was in fact not infectious and the quarantined people were allowed to leave. They were so, so wrong.
Ryan’s attention was brought back to the present when a lurker entered the side street he had used to get to the roof and started sniffing around the dumpster.
Ryan had quickly learned a few important things about them through his various encounters. They were extremely fast; you can’t outrun them. On top of that, they had incredible endurance – they never stopped coming. Once they saw you – or smelled you, which was another thing that made them difficult to evade – they would pursue you relentlessly, risking self injury and even death to try and reach you – they had no inclination to self preservation whatsoever. The only thing that seemed to drive them was their need to kill. They did not feed on humans – in fact, Ryan had never seen them eat anything – they merely killed them. The only way Ryan knew how to get a lurker off of your tail, was to kill it, or to put enough distance between yourself and it. And that meant kilometers.
Ryan watched the lurker continue sniffing the dumpster and suddenly, it looked up – somehow Ryan had expected this, and was just able to duck behind the edge in time to avoid being spotted. But if it had his scent, it would soon attempt to follow him onto the roof.
Ryan quickly scanned the roof and summed up his options. He saw the neighboring building was a two story and that he might be able to jump onto the balcony. Not really having much choice, he quietly sprang up and carefully made his way to the edge.
The balcony was slightly lower than he was, but it was a fair distance away. He shouldered the rifle and took a few quick breaths. Tensing his whole body, he managed a few quick steps and jumped. His hands caught the railing of the balcony and his body slammed into it, causing it to rattle. He tried to pull himself up, but his left hand slipped on the cool metal, and he almost dropped into the alley below. Hanging by one hand, he looked down and saw several lurkers speeding this way and that. They had not looked up yet.
With a great effort he managed to get his left hand onto the railing again, and started to pull himself up. He was soon able to use his legs to help himself up and seconds later he was on the correct side of the railing.
He was panting, and Ryan stood with his hands on his knees, looking back the way he had come.
He was about to turn, when he heard the click of a revolver being cocked behind his head.
“Slowly straighten. Then drop your rifle and pack on the ground. Don’t turn around.”
It was a female voice, with a thick Afrikaans accent and he guessed the person behind it fairly young.
“Look, I don’t want any trouble. I’m just running from those things, please.” He spoke calmly and clearly.
“I don’t really care. Do as I say or you’ll soon join them down there.”
Ryan slowly straightened, unslung his rifle and pack and carefully laid them on the ground.
The woman stepped forward and Ryan could hear her crouch to grab his rifle. In a flash, he spun around the other way, in the same movement drawing his small axe from its sheath beneath his coat. He grabbed the wrist she was holding the revolver in and jerked it sideways, causing her to drop the weapon. He then spun her around and in another swift movement pinned her arm behind her, slammed her against the wall and brought the axe up to her throat – this all happened in maybe three seconds.
She tensed, but mostly seemed shocked by the speed at which he had disarmed her.
“I don’t want to hurt you. I’m just passing through town and I got attacked. I didn’t even know there was anyone in this place.”
She tried to look at him, but he still held her firmly against the wall, her cheek flat against it.
“Now I’m going to let you go. I don’t want to hurt you, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t – if you leave me no choice. Stay calm, don’t do anything stupid, and we’ll both live through the night so that we can die tomorrow. Do we have an understanding?”
She seemed to think for a second, but then slowly nodded.
Ryan released her and stepped back, quickly stooping to retrieve her revolver.
She turned around, rubbing her wrist and then her cheek.
She was beautiful and young. Ryan guessed her at no more than twenty. She was the youngest person that he had seen since everything had started. Well, the youngest normal person. She had wild, curly black hair and bright blue eyes. Even in the moonlight he could see that she had freckles. She was a great deal shorter than him and was slightly built.
She looked him up and down in return, but remained silent.
“What’s your name?” he asked, opening the revolver and seeing that it was empty.
“Helena.” she said, looking at him and the revolver with indifference.
“Do you even have bullets?”
She folded her arms and shrugged. “I found it a while back. Could never get it open to check.”
He handed her the revolver and picked up his pack and rifle.
“Do you stay here alone?”
She looked back into the room, but it was dark inside and he couldn’t see past the door.
“Not when it started.”
She didn’t elaborate so Ryan decided not to ask.
“I’m Ryan.” He held out his hand and she looked at it for a couple of moments before she shook it.
“I’d say nice to meet you Ryan, but you did just slam me into a wall and nearly tear my arm off.”
Her lip curled into the slightest of grins, though he thought it was just nerves.
“Says the one who held a gun to my head and threatened to throw me to the lurkers.”
“Is that what you call them? Lurkers? Why?” He sighed, looking back down into the alley. It was deserted.
“Have you ever seen them in the day? They walk around slowly, as if they were high or drunk, right?”
She nodded.
“Well, at night they move much quicker, and they walk sort of hunched over. To me it always looked like they were lurking.”
“Huh. I just call them crazies. Are they still human?” She hugged herself and Ryan got the impression that this was an involuntary moment.
“To be honest, I don’t know. But the way they attack you definitely isn’t.”
“Have you killed any of them? Was it your gunshot I heard earlier?”
“Yes and yes.”
She looked him up and down again, this time with what seemed to be a little more respect.
“How did you do that?” she asked as he sheathed his axe.
“Do what?”
“Take my gun away from me so quickly. Are you some kind of soldier?”
He chuckled humorlessly. “I’ve just been on the road a very long time and it’s something I had to learn along the way.”
She looked impressed. “Where are you from?”
“Joburg. Look, I’ll answer all the questions you want, but can we please go inside?”
She looked him up and down and nodded. She headed into the room and he followed.
It was pitch black inside and he could barely make out what he thought was some furniture.
He turned and she closed the glass sliding door. Then she closed a heavy, sturdy looking metal gate, which she then proceeded to lock with two bolts and a key. After this she moved to a corner close to the door and lifted what looked like plywood, which she placed in front of the door and locked in place with improvised latches. Finally, she drew the curtains closed. They were thick, black and spilled all the way onto the floor.
Taking a few steps into the room, she passed Ryan and then bent down. A second later a match sparked into life and she used this to light a lantern. She took the lantern and switched on two more camping lights.
She turned to look at Ryan. “They’re solar powered, so that makes things easier.”
As his eyes adjusted, he looked around. They were in what Ryan guessed was probably the open plan living room of a larger flat. He could see a makeshift kitchen and there were two couches, an armchair and a bed in the corner of the living room.
She saw him looking around. “I used to live here with my mom and sister. There is a downstairs as well, but after … I didn’t need that much space and it felt … safer being up here. I only go down there when I have to go out and then only in the day.”
“That’s smart. They’re not very active in daylight.”
“Why is that?” she asked.
“I really don’t know. So you’ve been on your own since the beginning? How have you survived?” He was really interested, but he knew as soon as he said it that it came across as an insult – literal amazement that she was still alive.
“Hey, fuck you buddy.” she said fiercely.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I meant how did you survive literally – what did you do for food, supplies? Were there bandits and how did you dodge the lurkers? That’s all.”
She glared at him for a couple of seconds, but said nothing.
He looked down at his shoes and then back up at her.
“How did you manage to block off everything like this?” he said and gestured to the fortified door they had just passed through.
Her look softened a little and then she smirked. “I’ve just been alone a very long time and it’s something I had to learn along the way.”
Ryan smiled.
“Are you thirsty? I’ve got quite a lot of water – even a couple of bottles of booze.”
“Water would be great, thanks.”
She moved off to the kitchen while Ryan chose the comfortable looking arm chair that gave him a great view of the door that he assumed led downstairs and the door they had just passed through. He sank down onto it and it really was comfortable. Laying his pack and his rifle next to him, he sat back in the chair and sighed deeply. He had had a very long day and he was exhausted. He closed his eyes.
A few days after the quarantined people were released, the news started reporting some very disturbing things. At first it was only isolated reports in Texas, but soon these reports were coming from all over America. Children were attacking and killing their parents. Well, at first it was their parents, then, it started to look like anyone was free game. News reports about children killing their parents in their sleep were heard. Stories of whole classrooms turning on their teachers and ripping them to shreds came to light. Videos of children throwing their parents and bystanders off of balconies in shopping malls became all the more frequent. Something was making the children in America crazy.
Soon some people started connecting the dots, noting that some of the first attacks by kids were by the children of first responders. The same first responders who had died due to a mysterious disease. Some believed that the disease they had died from had somehow passed to the children, making them insane.
It was around this time that other countries started reporting the same horrific stories. South Africa was one of the first. It had always been a popular tourist destination.
Scientists then concluded, that the only way this ‘sickness’ would be able to spread so quickly, was if it was airborne. It was theorized that adults could carry it and helped to spread it, even though no symptoms were ever noted in adults. Within a few weeks, containment measures were put in place, but it was too late it – it was global and the authorities had no plan, no way forward – and no cure.
Only a couple of days before entire countries started going dark, scientists released the last, and perhaps the most disturbing finding. Babies – foetuses – in the womb were also susceptible and countless pregnant women had died. Though the explanation was hard to swallow, their unborn children had killed them from the inside. Even after the mother had died, and the foetus had been removed, it still showed heightened agility and aggression.
It was also theorized that children up to the age of seventeen or eighteen were still susceptible, but it seemed to also depend on the individual. Some sixteen year old’s remained unaffected, while some young adults of up to twenty years of age were afflicted.
It was literally the end of the world. Not only was all the youth of the world going into murderous rampages, but no new children were being born.
It was the end of man.
Ryan was jerked awake by a loud bang. Grabbing his rifle he jumped up and looked around, fighting off the sleep which he had so recklessly allowed to take him.
He saw Helena standing in the kitchen, eyes wide with fear.
The bang came again and Ryan realized that it was coming from the door through which they had entered earlier.
“Fuck!” he hissed. “They must have followed me here.”
Glass shattered and he knew that they had broken the glass door. The large metal gate rattled.
“We need to move now!” he said to Helena, but she remained still, staring at the covered door.
“Helena, now!”
Ryan slung his pack on and moved toward her.
“The gate will hold, they can’t get in!” she whimpered, tears beginning to stream down her face.
He reached her and took hold of her shoulders.
“Look at me! Helena, look at me!” he ordered and she finally looked into his eyes.
“I know you’re scared. I am too, but we have to get out of here. Nothing holds against them forever – they will get in.”
She sobbed again, but nodded.
“Grab whatever food and water you have, quick!” Ryan turned, keeping an eye on the door while she hurried about the small kitchen, throwing cans of food and bottles of water into a backpack.
The gate was still being attacked, and Ryan heard something break. One of the deadbolts must have broken.
Ryan waited as long as he could, but after a couple of seconds more he felt they had to move.
“Ok, that’s enough, we have to go. Which door?” he took her arm and led her to the two other doors in the room. She pointed at the one opposite the balcony.
Ryan opened it, and found another large piece of plywood blocking their path. With a savage kick he sent it tumbling down the stairs leading down. Quickly, but cautiously, he led the way down, his rifle raised and ready.
The first floor was pitch black, but he sensed that it was a much larger room than the one upstairs.
“Which way?” he whispered, as the racket upstairs continued.
“The back door’s that way, it comes out below the balcony.”
“Front door it is.” he replied.
She took his arm and led him to the right, around the obstacles. As his eyes adjusted, he thought he saw two bodies against a wall, but he couldn’t be sure.
Helena moved out in front of him and bent down. He heard two clicks and then she stood up and he heard two more clicks. She removed another large piece of plywood and a wooden door with a small window was revealed. Light streamed in and Ryan couldn’t help but look back at where he thought he saw the bodies. His night vision had proved to be correct, as two skeletal bodies were propped up against the wall in sitting positions. The one looked to be no more than a child and the other adult.
He looked back at her and saw her staring at them too.
She looked into his eyes and new tears were flowing freely.
He looked down for a moment and then stepped up to the door. Looking through the window, the street looked empty.
A loud crash came from upstairs as the gate came down.
“Come on.” he whispered and tried opening the door. It was locked, but Helena quickly stepped forward and flipped the deadbolts and removed the chain.
He opened the door an inch and peered out. Quickly he stepped out and allowed her to follow, and then quietly shut the door. They could hear the lurkers crashing down the stairs, looking for them. Ryan headed in the direction of the fort, hoping to hide there until sunrise. He felt they needed to get out of the center of town, away from the obviously large concentration of lurkers.
“Where are we going?” Helena whispered behind him.
“To the fort.”
“Why?”
“They’ve got my scent, that’s how they followed me to your place. We need to get out of town and away from them – put some distance between us. If we hide somewhere in town they’ll quickly find us again.”
They stayed close to the buildings, trying to keep low. Ryan had them move quickly, and they could hear the sounds of the lurkers echoing through the town. A couple of times they ducked into doorways or behind trees when they spotted one. It was chilling seeing these former children running rabid around the town, knowing that at any moment, they could be seen and attacked.
The final stretch was open ground. They’d have to cross a road, a small field and a graveyard before reaching the bottom of the koppie.
Ryan scanned the area looking for lurkers, but spotted none.
“Come on.” He started jogging and Helena followed.
They had just reached the graveyard, when they heard a shriek behind them. The same lurker who had sniffed around the dumpster had spotted them – or tracked him. It was about sixty meters away and it was a large one. Ryan guessed that it had probably been a sports star in the old world.
Its shriek had alerted others, and within seconds six lurkers were bearing down on them.
“Run!” Ryan screamed, and Helena took off into the graveyard.
Ryan raised his rifle and got the closest one in his sights. Squeezing the trigger the rifle fired and the lurker dropped. The others didn’t seem to notice – they only kept coming.
Ryan chambered another round and fired. Another one dropped. Ryan again chambered a round and brought another one down.
He turned and sprinted after Helena, reloading as he ran. The remaining three were after him and they were gaining quickly. Reloading while running was not easy, but Ryan had managed it on previous occasions. Finally he was done. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that they had gained significantly, and were only a couple of meters behind him.
He was about to turn to take down one or two more when his foot caught on a broken head stone protruding from the ground. He went sprawling and the rifle flew from his hands. Landing hard, he could hear the gnashing, hissing monsters approaching. He desperately crawled forward to where the rifle had landed, panic threatening to take hold. Reaching it, he grabbed it and turned, still lying on his back.
A lurker was almost on him, and he fired immediately, striking it in the chest. It crumpled to the ground, almost landing on top of him. He quickly ejected the spent cartridge and chambered another, but before he could pull the trigger, the next one was on him.
It dived onto him, causing him to once again lose the rifle. Ryan managed to get his hands up, keeping it away from his neck as it tried to rip his throat open with its teeth. Soon its hands were wrapped around Ryan’s neck and it started squeezing.
Ryan started panicking as his windpipe was cut off. With his right hand he let go of the lurker and reached under his coat. Drawing his small axe, he put it to the creature’s neck and with all his strength and both hands he jammed it upward. Blood spewed from the wound, covering Ryan’s face and chest, but the lurker became limp and Ryan threw it aside.
Coughing and retching, he got to his knees before he was shaken by the sound of another gunshot.
His head whipped up, just to see the final lurker dropping, most of its head gone. Ryan looked to where the rifle had dropped and saw Helena standing there, the rifle in her hands and the barrel smoking.
Ryan collapsed into a sitting position, taking a few more moments to cough and to get his breath back.
Finally he looked up at Helena, who had walked over and was now crouching beside him.
“Thanks.” he managed before bursting into another coughing fit.
“No problem.” she smiled back.
Ryan looked at the one she had shot and saw that it was the big one that had tracked him.
“We have to move, the gunshots will draw them here.” he wheezed, and got to his feet. He took the rifle back from her and reloaded. He only had a dozen rounds left.
They headed to the fort, now looming over them in the night sky, the moon right behind it. In the dark it looked like an old castle. It made Ryan think of Dracula.
They had just started climbing the hill, when they heard more shrieks behind them. He looked back, and saw dozens, maybe hundreds of lurkers pouring into the field.
“Go! Go! Go!” he yelled, and they double their pace.
The hill wasn’t very steep, but the climb was tricky due to lots of loose gravel and rocks. Twice in a matter of seconds they both slid back several feet.
Halfway up, Ryan glanced back and saw that several lurkers had already reached the bottom of the hill. The only thing going for them at this stage, was that the lurkers attacked the hill with such speed and aggression, that they too constantly slid back down.
Ryan thought about firing off a couple of rounds, but there were too many and the effect would be minimal. He focused again on scaling the hill and eventually they reached the top.
They were both panting, and looking down they saw that some of their pursuers were already half way up.
“What now?” Helena asked, panic seemingly just under the surface.
Ryan took a moment and looked around. The fort was a couple of meters in front of them and a small shed was to the right of it, no more than a few meters wide. The fort was about six meters high, and the rock it was built from protruded slightly, giving Ryan an idea.
“Climb the fort.” he said simply.
Helena looked at him as if he was mad.
“What?”
“Climb the fort. We get on top. It has no door so we can’t go inside. They’ll break down that shed in seconds and we can’t go running into the night over flat plains, they’ll catch us before we had made a kilometer. If we make it to sunrise, we might have a chance. They’re not the best climbers and I still have a couple of rounds left.”
She stared at him for a couple of seconds more, internally debating what he had said. Making up her mind, she ran to the fort and he followed.
He gave her a boost, and followed after she was more than halfway up. They reached the top fairly easily, as there were several good gripping places along the wall. Ryan only hoped that the lurkers’ blind aggression and insanity prevented them from finding them too.
They sat on the edge of the roof and waited. The original roof had caved in many years before and it had been replaced by flimsy corrugated metal. It looked very precarious. They heard the sounds of the creatures struggling up the hill and it was becoming louder and louder. Ryan had given Helena his axe, and he sat ready, waiting with his loaded rifle.
“Was that your mom and sister?” Ryan asked gently.
She didn’t respond immediately.
“Yes.” she said quietly.
“It wasn’t long after we began seeing the things happening in Johannesburg and Pretoria that it began happening here. It was just a street kid here or there, attacking adults on the main street and in front of shops. They were quickly dealt with, either locked up and some were even shot.”
“But then the local kids began getting aggressive as well. My mom was smart enough to keep my sister in the house as soon as she saw the news stories on TV. She always was over protective and paranoid like that. It kept my sister … herself for much longer than the others.”
“Soon the community started breaking down. There were lots and lots of kids in the township on the edge of town and one night they all stormed into Prieska, killing everyone they came across. We hid upstairs in the closet, and the next day we started boarding up the flat. We didn’t have a car, we couldn’t leave. I was just visiting from university and my mom worked in the post office for fuck sake.”
She had started crying.
“So we hid. I went out in the day with a butcher knife if we needed something, and in the evenings we boarded up the house, kept the lights off and hid.” She laughed through her tears. “I don’t know what we thought I would do with the knife if I ran into real trouble, but it made me feel safer.”
“It was about a week after that initial attack that my sister started to change. She became agitated, snapping at us over the smallest thing. Two day later she began running a fever, and her skin became pale. It was almost dark that day when my mom sent me out to look for some antibiotics and something to help with the fever. I could see she didn’t want to, but I insisted. I had to help my little sister.”
“That was the only time I had been out after dark before tonight. Finding the medicine wasn’t that hard, the town was abandoned pretty quickly and most people left everything just like it was.”
“When I got back to the flat, I could hear a commotion |
You’re right to be scared of the dark.
You know that feeling you get when the covers are pulled up to your face? When you’re lying in the dark with your eyes open but too afraid to look? That feeling that makes you a child again, holding your breath while you say to yourself, If I don’t look, maybe it’ll go away?
If you muster your courage to stare back at the watcher in the dark, it’ll be gone…
…if you’re lucky.
I’m not.
Let me tell you about when my life fell apart.
It was 1982.
I was in the kitchen. Mom said that there were no such things as monsters. I can hear it, now, clear as day.
“You’re too old for that crap.” She spoke over her shoulder from the stove.
I’d been having nightmares and she couldn’t keep waking up in the middle of the night. Work started early and ended late.
“That’s kids’ stuff, Johnnie.” I saw the dark circles under her eyes and the way her face sagged with fatigue. She was working double shifts to make ends meet and it was wearing her thin as a coin passed through too many hands.
“I need to rest,” she said. She wasn’t telling me as much as she was pleading, and even as a kid I could hear the difference. That made my part in it worse.
The pan rattled across the burner and I could smell the sausages browning. It was Sunday, so breakfast was more than Wonder bread and peanut butter.
Gran-dad sat in the kitchen, too. He was drinking his coffee from an off-white mug with a chipped rim.
He had a cigarette in his other hand, and when he wasn’t taking a drag, his hand was on the table next to his GPCs like he was guarding them. Gran-dad called them Good People’s Cigarettes.
His nose was almost as red as the Marlboros he couldn’t afford once he’d been laid off. He coughed, his face blue with the effort. But as soon as he could breathe again, the cigarette was back in his mouth.
Mom dropped two links on my plate from the sizzling pan.
“When I was your age, I was already working odd jobs to help out.”
I didn’t know what to say so I kept my mouth shut.
“And I wasn’t keeping my folks up half the night.”
Gran-dad rescued me. “He knows, Tammy. Give it a rest.”
He looked at me, and I could see that he was asking for assurance. I was just a kid, but also somehow the fulcrum on which the family’s troubles pivoted. Maybe that’s not entirely true, but it seemed that way to me: I was a mouth to feed, a knot keeping the ends from meeting. Those dark circles, that tired sag that pulled at her mouth—one way or another, life was using Mom up. By stealing her sleep, I was tightening its grip.
Shame’s heavy, and it bent me just then.
Gran-dad noticed me sag in my chair. “Johnnie’s just shook up. He’ll be alright.”
He didn’t look so sure, but he gave me a nod anyway.
“Right?”
“Yeah.” I knew I was lying.
So did Mom, but she kept her peace and dropped two dollops of scrambled egg next to the links on my plate.
High-cotton. That’s what Gran-dad said about sausage and eggs. I didn’t feel it, though, not that morning.
He used a fork to cut the links into bits and to mix everything together. I usually liked mine separate and made sure no egg touched sausage, but I watched them meet in the middle as though they were best friends. I had lost my appetite somewhere so far off that even the smell of Jimmy Dean couldn’t call it back.
He watched me scooting my sausages around, took a long pull from his cigarette, and winked. His eyes were playful, conspiratorial even.
Mom joined us with a plate of her own.
“Shit!” she said suddenly. “I forgot the toast.”
In a moment, she was back with a small plate stacked with five or six slices of white bread, a bit more burnt than brown.
“Eat up,” she said. I did, one joyless bite at a time.
High cotton. That’s what Sunday morning meant.
Sunday afternoon was a lazy affair at my house and this one was no exception. Gran-dad leafed through old magazines, nodding off now and then. The pages were dog-eared and he’d read the stories before, but he didn’t mind. Mom washed her hair in the bathroom sink and took a long nap.
I went outside while Mom slept. It was sunny and hot and I decided to poke around in the shed. It was under an old maple and dappled with shade and sun in summer camouflage.
The shed was never locked because there was nothing worth stealing. I opened the door and stepped in. It smelled like rust and oil and old wood and the light that shone through its only window spotlighted the dance and swirl of the dust in the air.
I poked around a bit, looking for something—anything—that might take my mind off my Mom.
I had a file in one hand and I was wearing away at the head one of the bolts attaching a beat-up vice to the worktable. Each push gave a raspy sound and the glint of shiny new steel. One push carried my knuckles too far and I scraped them across the sharp edge of the vice. It peeled the skin back and the blood welled up under the curl.
I stuck my hand in my mouth and tasted the metallic tang. My knuckle stung and I winced as I ran my tongue over the flap of skin.
Then I saw it.
In the corner of my eye, I could just make out a shadow, blacker than the black against which it stood. Two long arms with long hands and long fingers that looked more like claws to me.
It was just my imagination.
No, it’s not, John. My father’s voice.
My eyes were on the workbench but I focused on the shadow without looking.
It grew, stretching in the dark, raising those long-fingered hands.
My breath caught. I dropped the file and it clunked on the wood floor. I forgot about my knuckle. The hair on my arms stood up and I could feel my heart skipping, starting, faster, pounding, trying to escape my chest. I was too scared to look at it directly. I thought about running for the door, but the shadow was right there, just beside it.
It had long arms. I’d never make it.
I edged into the light from the window, trying my best not to look.
I thought that maybe if I just ignored it, it’d go away.
But you tell yourself that, too, don’t you? Late at night?
Something in me knew better. Something in you does too, I bet.
It was moving, inching toward the mostly closed door.
I was pretending not to look, but I took another sideways step into the light. I could feel the sun on my skin. In the light, the darkness deepened.
I couldn’t make out the shadow anymore, but I knew it was there.
It’s there alright, Johnnie. Don’t you doubt it. Now the voice was Gran-dad’s.
The door closed with a thud.
My chest ached from the effort of keeping my breath in check.
I had to do something.
I grabbed a hammer—a big heavy one with a painted red wooden handle.
“You stay away from me!” I yelled. “I mean it! You just…”
My words died in my throat.
It was there. I could see it now, blacker than black, getting darker every second.
It was creeping closer, sliding like it was on rails.
My hands shook and I my lower lip begin to quiver. White-hot panic burned in my mind and every thought but RUN! was smoke in its wake. But I was frozen and my feet wouldn’t budge.
It stopped at the edge of the light.
It slid around the side, staying just beyond the patch of white on the floor.
It was close, really close. The light was small but it was everything.
Mom wasn’t much on church and she never taught me to pray. But I prayed my heart out that some passing cloud didn’t happen by, just then.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t holding my breath—I was trying to take one and it wouldn’t come.
We stood like that for a long time. The hammer got heavy and my arms ached, but I didn’t dare lower my guard.
It was trying to get behind me when the shed door opened.
“What the hell are you doing?” Mom asked.
She noticed the wet patch on my jeans.
“What the hell, John? I mean…”
I stood there, lip quivering, hammer held high, until she took me by the arm and dragged me out into the yard and the sunlight
Sunlight!
and into the house.
She was angry about my wet jeans but I didn’t care.
Mom was making dinner in the kitchen.
Gran-dad and I were in the living room. He was on the couch. I was on the floor, sitting Indian-style.
He turned off the TV. I wasn’t watching anyway.
“What’s wrong, Johnnie?” He took a long pull and breathed out through his nose. His face was wreathed in blue smoke.
I eyed the window. The sun was setting and it would be dark soon.
“Nothing,” I said, trying to guess how long the light would hold, watching the shadows grow across the front yard.
“Doesn’t look like nothing to me,” he said. “Come up here and talk, man to man.”
I joined him on the couch and he crushed the nub of his cigarette into the ashtray. It was brown glass, made to look like amber.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, tousling my hair.
“Nothing.”
He could see that it was something and the tousling stopped.
He caught my eye with a long, sideways look of one milky, brown eye.
“Some men think they should keep their troubles to themselves. Not me. A trouble shared is a trouble lessened, I say.”
He paused for a breath or two and I could hear how bad his lungs were.
“What’s your trouble, Johnnie?”
“In the shed…well…” It was too ridiculous to even say.
Kid’s stuff. It was Mom’s voice in my head. You’re too old for that crap.
“What about the shed?”
“Well, I…”
“You saw something, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“I thought you might. The nightmares…” He coughed, one of the really bad ones that doubled him over and brought tears to his eyes.
“They’re not just nightmares, Johnnie.” He wiped his eyes and his voice was high and tight and wheezy. “Some folks are more…sensitive. The nightmares let you know when it’s around.”
That got my attention like a slap. “What’d you mean?”
He had recovered and his hand wandered over to the pack of GPCs. “Well, some folks see things other folk can’t or won’t.” He had my eye again and I could feel his intensity.
“You follow me?” He fished a cigarette out the pack and held it, unlit, rolling it in his fingers.
“I guess,” I said.
“You’re at that age, now, that age when either you stop seeing it, or start seeing it more than you’d like.”
The way he said it quickened the hair on the back of my neck. Every follicle was alive and tingling.
“The shadow…?” My voice was barely a whisper.
“Yeah,” he said.
I was stunned. It was like I’d known a secret that no one else can share and suddenly I found out that everyone already knows. Gran-dad knew. He’d seen it too. As real as the shadow had been, this was impossible to believe.
“You see it, too?” I asked.
He looked at the cigarette in his hand and then back at me.
“Yeah.”
“Really?” I asked.
He nodded, a slow-motion move of his head.
“You be careful, Johnnie,” he said. Some things lose their power when you say them aloud. I found out then that this wasn’t one of them. It was way worse after he had admitted that it was dangerous. Way worse.
I was about to ask more when Mom came in. She didn’t want to hear this and I knew it and I couldn’t bear to make it harder on her.
“Dinner,” she said.
“Later,” Gran-dad said. “We’ll talk about it later.”
Mom had a double-shift the next day and went to bed early.
Me and Gran-dad waited till we were sure she was asleep.
I watched the windows like a hawk. It was full dark and the hair on my arms was at attention.
He took one last glance at the hall. Then, his voice as low as a cricket’s belly, he said, “Johnnie, you got to watch out now.”
Hearing him say it gave me the shivers.
“Once it knows you can see it…”
“It’ll come for me, won’t it?” I asked, barely able to get the words out.
He was having the same trouble so he nodded.
Millions—hell, billions of parents tell their kids that there’s nothing in the dark that’s not there in the light. You’ve done it yourself, haven’t you? You repeat it until you believe it, or nearly so, and you hope your kids believe it too. But maybe it’s you who need to believe, maybe it’s you who need the consolation. Maybe because you know, deep down, that there are things that go bump in the night.
I knew it and so did Gran-dad.
“I’m gonna watch over you tonight. You’ll be safe as houses, I promise.”
That helped a little.
“But I’m not always going to be here.” I shook my head but he continued. “And when I’m not, you’ll need to keep watch yourself.”
“You hear me?”
“Yeah.” The word was more breath than speech.
“Good. When the nightmares come on heavy, that’s a sign it’s around.”
“Why does it…”
“I’m not sure. Maybe it feeds on us at night, stealing a little bit of you when you sleep…”
He lit a new cigarette from the old one and puffed it to life.
“I think it comes for those who can see it and maybe it ignores them that can’t, or won’t. You know what I mean.”
I did. Even if Mom saw it, she would convince herself that she hadn’t.
I said so and he nodded.
“Yeah.” His tone told me that he wanted to be a little more like Mom.
“But what can I do? I mean to stay safe?”
“The light, Johnnie. Stay in the light.”
Neither of us could bear to talk about it anymore. There are things you can say in the daylight that you won’t dare in the dark.
Instead, we watched Hogan’s Heroes and Sanford and Son with the volume down low so as not to wake Mom. Normally, we’d have been laughing, but that night we didn’t even crack a smile.
It was getting late and Gran-dad told me to get ready for bed.
I had the covers up like a shield.
The lamp was on and my room was fairly well lit. The overhead was busted, but it had always been busted and there was a problem with the wiring.
Gran-dad was in the corner in a battered fabric chair. He was wearing his red and black plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up and he had a big, silver Rayovac Sportsman with him, the kind that took two D-cell batteries. Something about the chrome reminded me of a knight’s a sword. I felt a lot better with him there.
“I’ll watch over you,” he said.
I tucked my head under the blankets. I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to see it.
I was tired and scared but my eyes were heavy. At some point, I fell asleep.
I woke up suddenly. Gran-dad was still in the corner, but his flashlight was on and he was shining it under the bed.
I sat up and he saw that I was awake.
His face was pale as fresh paint and the Rayovac shook in his hand. I could hear the batteries rattle.
“Don’t get out of bed,” he said.
“Wha…? Why?” I rubbed my eyes. I was still groggy.
“It’s under the bed, Johnnie.”
I was wide awake then.
“Don’t get out the bed!” he repeated. He wasn’t asking.
I jumped to my feet, the saggy mattress bouncing slightly under my weight.
“What’d you mean?”
“It’s under the fucking bed! Don’t move!”
I was ten years old and I’d never heard Gran-dad so much as say “shit.” This was bad, real bad.
I couldn’t stay on the bed—no way, no how—so I ran the step or two the end of the mattress and jumped for all I was worth.
“No!” Gran-dad yelled.
I traveled too far and too fast and hit the window in mid-air, flattening the blinds and tangling in them, ripping them from the wall when I fell backward toward the bed.
Toward the bed.
Gran-dad was off the chair in an old man’s flash, but my hand was falling into the shadow even as I tried to stop it.
Upside-down on the floor, I could see it too, flat as a doormat in the shadow under the bed.
I snatched my hand to my chest as it reached for me and not even a hair’s breadth separated its fingers from mine. It was cold and misty, like my hand in the freezer to get ice.
“Jesus, Johnnie!”
“I’m OK! I’m OK!” I said, finding my feet. I hopped up and down like it was Christmas morning. “I’m OK! I’m OK! I’m OK!” I was yelling, but I didn’t know it. Gran-dad didn’t either, but we figured it out when Mom burst through the door.
“What the hell!” she yelled, her bathrobe trailing behind her like a cape. “John? Mack?”
“What the hell is going on?”
Her hands were on her hips and her face was as red as Gran-dad’s nose.
She pointed a finger at Gran-dad. If it had been a gun, he’d have been be dead.
“You! Out!”
He gave me one long, pitiful look that said, “What can I do?”
Mom stood her ground like a titan and he trudged into the hall past her, his head down, defeated, worried, afraid.
Then it was my turn.
“You! In the bed!”
“But…!”
“Now!”
What was I supposed to say? That there was a monster under the bed? That I needed Gran-dad to keep watch?
Haven’t your kids said the same thing?
I picked up the Rayovac and leapt into the bed. Not flounced, not jumped, leapt. Like Bruce Fucking Jenner in the Olympics.
“When I get home, John…” That threat needed no conclusion.
She turned and slammed the door.
But not before she switched off the lamp.
I sat with the flashlight on and I knew it wouldn’t be enough.
I was on the tracks tied to the rails and the train was coming and there was no hero waiting just off screen to run in and save the day.
It was really dark in there and there wasn’t even a light peeking under the door.
It was in its element.
I could hear Mom giving it to Gran-dad in the kitchen down the hall, but I couldn’t concentrate on the words. My heart was at least as loud as her cursing and my mouth felt like it’d never known a sip of water.
I had the Rayovac in one hand like a spear, and I was shining the light at the edges of the bed, moving frantically from this side to that, from the headboard to my feet and back again.
It was waiting, savoring my fear.
You know how it does that, don’t you?
That’s when Mom came in.
In the instant before the bulb blew up, she saw it and her mouth dropped open and her eyes grew just like the did on Saturday morning cartoons.
I heard her take a loud breath, the substance of a scream filling her lungs, but it was black now and there was a rush of air and she was gone.
She was gone.
Gone.
I was screaming, tearing at the doorknob, running down the hall toward the light. My socked feet slid on the kitchen floor and I smashed into the cabinets hard enough to send my head spinning. The Rayovac skittered across the tired, yellow linoleum.
Gran-dad overturned the table. He saw something, too, because it was few minutes before I could get him to see me or answer my frantic questions.
It had been right behind me in the hall all the way to the edge of the kitchen.
We waited there till morning.
That sounds crazy—I know it—but we did.
Even then, every light in the house was on as we searched my room for Mom.
Of course we never found her.
Folks think she ran out, just like Dad did. That the double-shifts and bills and me and Gran-dad were just too much in the end.
We knew better.
I knew better.
That was 1982. A long time ago.
Gran-dad and me had a hard time of it, and soon enough, I was working those odd jobs to make ends meet. They never really did. Not even close.
Gran-dad passed before too long and I got more help from the state and foster care. The Willis’ weren’t so bad, and Fred and Rita did as well by me as they could.
I sold the house when I turned 18.
I’ve got stacks of bulbs in the kitchen closet: 60 watts, 100 watts, fluorescents—you name it. My lights are all rigged to a master switch in each room, too. One flip and everything’s lit.
I won’t have it any other way.
When the nightmares come—and they do come—I keep the lights on all night. The Rayovac’s been replaced by a Maglite rechargeable, and I keep a Q-Beam by the bed, just in case. Every room has a few lamps and an overhead. The wiring’s like new.
I want you to know that when you get that terrible feeling, that feeling of being watched from the dark, you’re not alone. When you pull the blankets up like a shield and slide your head down and pull your feet up, I do too. When you feel it watching from the dark or pull back a cold hand dangling over the side of the bed, when you feel like a kid and try to tell yourself there’s nothing there but your imagination, even though you know there’s something there…
…there is.
Kids go missing all the time don’t they? And sometimes they die in their sleep even though there’s nothing wrong with them.
And sometimes parents just get up and go when they’ve had enough.
But maybe, just maybe, not all those kids ran away. And maybe, them that die see something before they do. And sometimes, just sometimes, those parents didn’t run off when times got hard.
And you’re right to be afraid of the dark and what’s in it.
|
It’s worth noting the few minutes I’ve had to spend clenching and unclenching my hands in order to regain the control of my nerves; just enough to put down in plain words, the events that continue to fester in the back my mind.
Unburden the soul – that’s why people make confessions, right?
I admit now that these memories continue to redevelop my childhood fear of the dark.
As I write this, I realize what I’m searching for is a shared experience. Somebody who can simply say…you’re not alone.
==
For a while my parents were renting out this property a few miles from where we lived. They were struggling to find the ‘right’ tenants and in some cases keep them. The upkeep itself was becoming a burden and generally it just wasn’t generating enough money for them to keep it going.
As I was in that transitional stage of seeking my own place anyway, I realized that this was a perfect opportunity for me to fill the void of my parent’s much needed tenants. After some persuasion I was handed the keys under two conditions: that I would pay half of the rent and continue to look for my own apartment. I recall my dad added jokingly not to burn the place down as he dropped the key into my hand.
I was prepared for the house to get lonely, even creepy at times, but these things noticeably developed into something far more pronounced as the days grew short and my working nights long. I’ve always been aware of my tendency to stay up late, finding peace in some knowledge that I wouldn’t fall prey to a sombre thought or bad dream…not until I reached that point where I simply couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.
To pay my half of the agreed rent I continued to work late as a freelance web designer. This would have been sometime between 1 and 5am when I first heard that calm tap of heeled shoes upon the concrete path outside. In the silence of my room at an hour where cars would seldom pass, this casual tap had stirred me from my work. I never really believed it to be completely out of the ordinary, just a girl walking home from a late night of drinking.
I know now this was something else.
The days continued to be a bright and welcoming change from the cold nights before it; a life of independence that left an even brighter smile upon my face. Inviting a couple friends to hang out – like old times – we’d kick back with some terrible horror film and drink and few beers before I needed to settle back into some work.
My friends had left me that night with a lingering taste for beer. Usually, at this point I’d make myself a cup of tea and remain confined to my bedroom until morning. Some nights I’d hastily move across the darkness of my landing to the sanctuary of my bathroom, brush my teeth and dart back. (I never did buy a bulb for that landing)
This time I grabbed a beer from the fridge and like clockwork, checked that the back door was locked and the windows were firmly shut before heading up. I continued to top up my courage with a sip of beer as I walked along the creaking boards of the landing. My room – as always – a static blur in the darkness as I approached; Feeling that familiar emptiness of the staircase below my feet, I took another sip.
That night I remember the progress of my work coming to an abrupt end. Uninspired I sat listening to the wind through my open window until slowly my ears detected a particular sound fading into the wind.
………tap…..tap…..tap…..tap…..tap…
I frowned realizing what I never did before, that the street was a cul-de-sac. There was a single detached house beside my own before it would end; overlooking the hills of my town.
She must live next door I thought listening to that cold tap pass slowly from one end of the window to the other. Remembering the hour at which she passed suddenly sent hairs on the back of my neck to clamber out of my skin.
It was after that night that things began to occur more frequently. Perhaps it was because I was suddenly paying attention to the noises around me – living by myself I was already susceptible to anything out of place, but it became as though these sounds – although discreet – were made by want of attention. I’m being paranoid I thought. That’s generally the rational of somebody emotionally detached, isn’t it?
Maybe I was working too hard.
The following day I stepped out, walking the slight incline of my drive holding a small bag of rubbish. Truthfully I needed an excuse to study the house next door, the house at the end of my street.
It appeared empty…In fact, all of the houses appeared empty I thought. Recalling the street and its recurring stillness I felt unnerved by its silence. Initially, my quick observation was that of a peaceful neighbourhood. Then and there against a brisk winter chill something ominous stirred in my feelings toward the street where children never seemed to play.
It was that afternoon I received a phone call from my mother. She was concerned about my health: what I was eating and how stressed I was becoming. I most likely answered with a recurring yes that made me want to start eating the phone, moving swiftly towards a burning question I needed to ask about the street. I asked where everyone was for a start and I remember her explaining how it was simply a peaceful area. She believed the rural surroundings would be a selling point yet it was apparently one of the main reasons why a lot of tenants declined residency. I eventually ended the call with her peace of mind, and in a way my own.
Night fell as one with my spirit, sitting alone in the darkness of my room with nothing but a single lamp to aid the light of my laptop. I worked, paying close attention to the time as it seemed to move ahead in bounding leaps.
I was becoming increasingly tired when my heart suddenly clenched at the sound of a wailing cat. With the window closed I could hear its screech become low and malicious, fading down into the derelict street. It was deathly quiet for a long time after that.
I was a ball of nerves, considering an earlier night than usual when my attention was drawn to that eerie slow tapping of heels. I jumped out of my chair and switched off the lamp. Moving closer to the window I pushed the screen of my laptop and the remaining light down with it. In darkness I crept ever closer the drawn curtains. The steps continued, louder and possibly slower than ever as my heart started to flutter painfully like a hummingbird’s wing.
Tap………….tap………….tap………….tap………….tap
It stopped…and for a moment I stood in complete darkness with a cold bead of sweat upon my brow. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for in that moment but what followed had suddenly drained all of the warmth from my body as the tapping became rapid, comparable to a tap dance that was irregular and crooked. Between the heavy taps was a fragile scraping of shoes, as if somebody were painfully dragging their feet up off the ground.
The shadow of my hand trembled as it was raised to the curtains edge. I moved closer. Like violent breathing the scrapes thickened whilst the taps continued to rattle into my ears. I could smell the heavy drapes as I pushed ever closer, asphyxiated by the material.
I needed to see it.
As I inched the curtain away the street slowly formed, the path emerged, but the sound…it was gone. It took a delayed moment to realize this as my adrenaline replayed the remnants of that hideous tap in my mind. I started to move the curtain more, revealing an empty path. My eyes lingered for an anxious moment; following the line of distant street lamps where pools of light lay undisturbed. My heart calmed as I moved away…tracing my sight back as I let the curtain fall I caught glimpse of that slender face staring up at me from the drive way.
Fear consumed me.
Remembering my shroud of darkness I remained stock still. Listening to the empty house I cast my mind back in dread….did I lock the back door?
Clearing my mind of the grievous thought I found myself asking how far I’d go to be certain. I never wanted to answer this question but something instinctive encouraged me to move regardless of my legs resistance. Passing my laptop on the desk I carefully opened the lid for a light that wasn’t there; replaced now by a screen that mirrored my dark surrounding. Wary of any revealing light I crept blind toward my door. Lowering the handle inch by inch, the landing revealed itself under a new haze of darkness; distorted and filled by an unfamiliar presence.
Stepping cautiously onto a creaking board I rapidly withdrew my step. Rigidly stirred by a bitter chill that raked across my skin I moved, down into the tunnel of my hallway toward the stairs. A descent leading down into the bowels of house that became suddenly very unfamiliar.
Transfixed on the bottom I took my first step. Five down and I could see the front door; dark and monolithic it stood tall amid distant shadows. I considered my escape.
With the exit in sight I made my decision to run. Inhaling deep into my lungs I felt almost prepared when a sudden crack snatched my breath from the air. Terrified I listened to it thudding its way across my living room floor. Though I became frail I turned to run from the emerging sound below; twisting back and bounding across the hall I felt something brush against my feet. Filled with panic I stumbled back into my room, and spinning on my heel stole a glance that carved fear deep into my soul. Slamming the door shut between me and that face squeezed between the railings, I cried out. I heard then a sound of barking floorboards, louder and louder they grew closer as the jagged tap rhythm convulsed along the way. I leapt over to where my guitar lay upon the bed, driving the head quickly beneath the handle as it began to lower. I pushed the guitar up with fleeting strength whilst locking my foot at the base. Feeling the handle grind down into the wood of my old guitar as it erratically tried to enter. For a moment I felt its desire to inflict harm course its way through the handle. The door began to thunder and shake uncontrollably in the moments that lead to its abrupt and final end.
Rooted to the floor I slowly felt my legs give in. Sliding down the wall, I sat cradling the guitar in its locked position for what would be the longest night I’ve ever had to endure. That night I listened for something…anything that suggested it was over, yet nothing changed. The door was again lifeless and ordinary.
As the night faded from black I remained frozen at the foot of my bedroom door. Fighting to stay awake I found myself wavering from the nightmares that lay in wait; fighting until the grey shades of morning bathed my room in new light. Silently I stared at the ceiling. There were no birds to be heard this morning I thought.
As my mind began to reel itself back into a flawed sense of peace, a sudden sound shattered that silence and any sense of calm.
A floorboard cracked gently, and then another moving quietly away from my door. Realizing it had stood in complete silence…just two feet away behind that door left me sick to the stomach and welled up in fright. Was it listening? …waiting?
Since moving back with my parents I’ve replayed these events every night since. My parents had encouraged me to file a police report in hope that an investigation would lead to this person’s arrest. I knew then as much as I know now that this was no person. Regardless, my parents had changed the locks and found new tenants who appear to be extremely happy.
I guess, sometimes a presence like that doesn’t find itself confined to a place but rather a person.
Sometimes I think I can hear that steady tapping pass by my window in the dead of night, but always, when I close my eyes – I still see that wide eyed face smiling up at me through the railings.
==
____________________________________________________________
Police Report
Salisbury Police Station
Wilburn Road
Salisbury
SP4 5YR
Tel: 0845-579-6000
____________________________________________________________
Incident Type: Missing Person
Case: #1167350302
Date/Time Report Made: 19/11/12 – 11:55am
Surname: Fowler
Forename: Josh
Last Seen: 17/11/12
Last Seen Location: Green Crescent
Age: 21
Gender: Male
Height/Weight: 5’8″, 160ibs (Aprox)
Details of Disappearance:
Disappearance from family home, 14 Green Crescent, Salisbury, on the evening of Nov. 17.
Josh was found to be missing from his bedroom after his father checked in on him at approximately 12:30pm on Nov.18. His belongings including his cell phone, wallet and clothing were left behind. His room according Mrs. Fowler was left unchanged.
Detective investigation has lead to the discovery of one unpublished account, experienced by Josh between the dates of 01/11/12 – 14/11/12
External reports indicate Josh to have shown recent signs of experiencing severe hypnagogic hallucinations.
Police continue to use this written account for further investigation. Due to which investigators have acquired reasons to believe a female suspect could be linked to the disappearance of Josh Fowler.
Curiously, a large number of unsolved cases have been found to include a similar female suspect. The details of this female remain limited whilst related victims appear unconnected.
Common depictions portray this suspect as a gaunt smiling woman. Her eyes recalled to be unblinking and her legs broken.
Credit to – Danny Lamerton
|
“Hell is other people.” –Jean Paul Sartre, No Exit
Things had gone terribly wrong. I wasn’t one to ever really be concerned with history—I had failed it three times in college—but even I knew things had gone terribly wrong. If anyone survived any of this, it would be up to them to decide what the cause was, record it in the annals of history, and try to avoid the mistakes of the past, but that wasn’t my job. My job was to survive, and it didn’t matter whether I blamed the sun for entering some strange new cycle and turning most of the world into barely livable desert, blamed the government for embroiling all of us in so many conflicts that there weren’t allies and enemies as much as it was a coliseum free-for-all, or blamed science for creating so many biological weapons that were used with no regard for the outcomes. It just didn’t matter, because most of the humans that could be blamed were dead, and there was no use blaming the dead. I considered blaming God, but I wasn’t sure if he existed any more. If he did, then this must be the apocalypse and I was fairly certain there was no way I was ever going to meet him. If he didn’t, then I would just be blaming the dead yet again, and it’s no use blaming someone who can’t ever atone for their crimes.
Things had gone terribly wrong, but I was alive, and for today, that was enough. When it wasn’t any more, ammo was easy to find, and I already had all the guns I needed to fix that scenario. Until then, we got by. You see, I had been camping with a few others, mostly just to see another human face when I woke up in the morning. There was me, Wolf, the Rev, and Chickadee. I know those weren’t their real names, but it didn’t really matter anymore what names were, since there usually weren’t enough people to share it with anyways. Besides, keeping nicknames made it a lot easier to pull a corpse from a tent and chuck it into a deep hole without burying yourself down there with it each time. There had been more of us at one time, but for a lot of those folks, being alive just wasn’t enough anymore. They all found an out some way, be it through guns or just disappearing one night into the wasteland, they got out when they needed. The four of us got along pretty well, but we didn’t get along much. The camp was pretty quiet most of the time, unless one of them things wandered close, but they didn’t really bother us often.
They were nasty looking creatures though. I had always wondered if those zombie theories were true, and in the end, they weren’t. Something else did take over once we humans moved on, but our corpses hadn’t passed Darwin’s survival test, so they didn’t come back as shambling and stupider versions of ourselves. I’m not sure where the things came from, but they were there and they were dangerous. They could rip a person apart in just a matter of minutes, and those bodies definitely never got back up. Maybe they were the next step of evolution. All I knew is that they were ugly to look at, and overall pretty bright creatures despite their appearance. They walked and looked like humans, but their limbs were a little longer, with sharper claws and teeth like our animal counterparts. Their skin was solid black, which probably helped out with them living in a newly desert world. It looked cracked, charred almost, but I never really got close enough to tell you much. For the most part, they were solitary, but you could hear them talking at night, hissing and spitting in some language I didn’t try to understand. It gave me chills to hear it, and so I hated the days I got stuck with night watch, knowing they were talking about us just beyond the firelight. Made it so my nightmares became the only kind of dreams I knew.
But, like I said, they mostly left us alone for a long time. Left us to try and build some sort of community with the four of us, but none of us were very good at that. Our trained isolation is probably what saved us in the beginning, and maybe it is what will doom all of us in the end. I told you I don’t know history, and I certainly don’t know the future.
Chickadee was a smart woman, nice to look at. Before the end of the world, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed her, but in this desert sand, her blond hair and blue eyes turned her into a goddess of limitless beauty. We slept together a few times, but it was mostly going through the motions and neither of us really seemed driven to make it a normal occurrence. It was nice to have some comfort when the booze wasn’t enough, but something about the new emptiness and the constant sense of doom made even sex bland and undesirable. She was smart, and we talked a bit. Mostly she talked and I nodded. The sound of her voice was a pleasant break from the silence otherwise. I had always lived in the country, but this quiet was a different kind. It was absolute. For me, it was an adjustment, but for her, a born and bred city-dweller, it was almost unbearable. She talked about that a lot. Not too sure about who she was before everything, but she was with us after it all went to hell, and we looked out for her. Her sister had been one of the first to take their out, and I was sure for a while Chickadee would follow along, but she stuck it out, seemingly growing more resolved to fight through day by day. I never saw her breakdown, though I heard her some nights crying softly in her tent. I think she was probably the strongest one of all of us.
Wolf was a different story altogether. I assumed I wouldn’t like him when we first met, and I was right. Alcohol was all of our friend, but Wolf was involved in a tempestuous affair with it. I’m not sure I ever knew him fully sober, especially not after we had to leave the city and start our lives out in this wasteland. He was impulsive and loud, two traits which should have gotten him killed, but at this point I was certain nature just wanted to keep the least desirable parts of our species alive to ensure it died out quickly. At the same time, he was very protective of all of us. I think he took it personally when someone escorted themselves out of this world; he definitely took it harder than the rest of us. You could measure his grief by the empty bottles by his tent each night. He talked a lot, said very little, but if anyone really wanted a community from our ragtag band, it was him. He wasn’t made for this world, but he was alive, and that was enough each day.
The Rev was a thin, quiet man who assured all of us that this was God’s judgment on us all. When you asked, he would discuss his past sins and how this was his chance for penance, to bring souls back to the Lord. We didn’t do too much listening to him, but that didn’t stop him from proselytizing. The Rev always wanted my soul. He was a killjoy, arguing against our alcohol and celebrations. There wasn’t much to celebrate, but every time we tried, he reminded us that we were punished sinners. He didn’t like when I told him his God was probably dead, too busy decaying to worry about the pitiful lives of us forgotten sinners. He pointed to the wasteland around us as evidence something divine was present and cleaning up the mess of the world. That certainly wasn’t a God I wanted anything to do with, but the Rev clung to him, even going so far as to leave camp every week or so for solitary prayer, proclaiming his Lord’s protection over him. I guess it worked for him, but I didn’t trust the Rev. Not a bit. He was always a secretive sort, and he was adamant that his precious holy water, kept in a flask at his side, could not be used by anyone. We all nearly died of dehydration before we got camp set up, and the Rev refused to part with a drop. For a while I thought we all might kill him just to get that little bit of water, but fortunately we found a well before it came to that. It all makes a little more sense now.
So that was what was left of our group of survivors. There had never been many of us, maybe ten at the most at any time, but now being down to just four, it sure felt lonely. Loneliness is the new human condition, I suppose, and maybe that’s for the best seeing as how we messed everything up in the end. The days and nights of our lives were pretty much monotonous motion from one posture to the next, nothing significant to mark the change in day besides a new division of watches. It seemed foolish having the watches in some sense, cause those things out in the desert really seemed to leave us alone for some reason, but fears of what could happen kept us alert. No one wanted to be responsible for a shredded pile of what used to be a friend.
There was one time they got really close, and I was sure it was over. It had been a week or two since we set up camp—I can’t remember how long exactly since there was no real way to identify one day from another. We always heard them sniffing and prowling around the camp at night, but this time it was broad daylight and they were circling. There were three of them, looking dry and hungry. All those whispers and hisses started up again, though I couldn’t tell if their mouths were moving to be honest. For some reason, I had the distinct feeling they were not. They looked like humans, but now they were almost crawling, loping around on their hands and feet as they circled the camp. They were pockets of midnight on the brilliant plains, pitch black from head to foot, eyes included. We were all alert, watching, waiting. The Rev was praying. We waited, feeling our hearts begin to sink as they began to tighten their circle, moving in on us, the cornered prey. Wolf and I pulled out the supply of guns we were hoarding and began loading up, resolved to at least go down fighting. We never got our chance, though, because the Rev had abruptly stopped his mumbling recitation to walk towards those nasty things. They stopped, looking at him, expectant in a way. I knew they were going to lunge, rip his throat out before a bullet could reach them, but instead they waited.
“Be gone!” cried the Rev, his words flying back to us on a stiff breeze, bringing with it a rotten smell from those things. “This camp is under the protection of my Lord, and none shall oppose him any longer!”
I thought for sure the Rev had found another out, walking straight out to those damned things. But instead those creatures stood and walked away with just a few lingering hisses in the wind. They didn’t go far, but they went far enough away that we couldn’t smell them any longer and they had turned into tiny black specks on the perimeter of our camp. I have to admit, I began to think I should start listening to the Rev a little bit more.
Chickadee felt the same way, only she was a lot more trusting of the Rev than I was. That night, she spent the whole evening talking to him about his faith, his God, his Lord. The more I heard it, the less I thought his miracle was in fact miraculous and more it seemed just lucky. It was the most ridiculous information I had heard, about how his God decided to start anew on this world, replace those who had defied him with creatures of his own design. How he, the Rev, was a prophet to bring humanity into the fold once again, allow it to thrive in this new existence under the comfort of the Lord. How his past improprieties and disloyalties had been burned away in redemptive fire, just as the world had been scrubbed clean by the desiccating rays of our new sun. How he would save us all.
Chickadee fell for it instantly. She had never mistrusted him, and I felt betrayed to see this woman cast aside my arguments. I had always thought she was the strongest, and what if she was right? I didn’t feel too sure in my own mind to hear the way she talked. I thought I was missing out big on what could be the only redemption from this hell. But at the same time, I couldn’t buy it, not from him. There was some sneaky, glassy look in the Rev’s eyes that held me back, kept me from buying in. Some form of snake oil was being sold, and I didn’t want to be swindled out of the only thing I had left, a soul all my own, with no claim from God or man.
Chickadee wanted to be one of the redeemed, and so Wolf and I figured the rev would be forced to part with some of his precious holy water to consecrate her, but apparently that wasn’t the case. This holy rite was some secretive ordeal, meaning the Rev and Chickadee would have to step out just beyond the visual perimeter of our camp, some place where they would not be seen by our unbelieving eyes, in order to perform this rite. Wolf and I argued with them, but there was something about Chickadee which made her hard to refuse. She was dead set on it.
We let them go on the condition Chickadee took a weapon in case any of those things got to close. Wolf and I watched them walk away, Chickadee with all the decorum of a new convert, her eyes watery with tears and smiling for the first time in a while. Maybe this religion stuff wasn’t all bad, I thought.
All that came back was the Rev, one of those things shot dead by Chickadee’s gun, and some bloodied hair and clothes that were the only salvageable remains. The Rev told us they had snuck up on them, tightened the noose until one grabbed her. He got the gun, he said, and was able to take a shot. The others fled after one of them fell. We never heard the gunshot, so they must have been out a lot farther than the Rev initially said.
Religion must be all bad. Things had gone terribly wrong, again, and this time it was the Rev’s fault.
I could have been angry with the Rev, but he looked about as broken hearted and terrified as any person could. I was numb. Wolf added another collection of bottles outside his tent. I missed the soft sobs from her tent at night. It made it too quiet again. Our Chickadee was gone, and now the country silence turned unbearable for me.
Our little community tore apart a little more. Now we were nothing but a group of three who happened to share the same space. It seemed like watch shifts began to be the entirety of my existence. If I wasn’t being haunted on the perimeter by my own mind, I was sleeping and living through some new daily nightmare. Talk by the fire grew quiet, and more and more I began to feel like a ghost pacing the same forgotten route day after day, searching for that light to enter.
I wasn’t surprised when a shot shattered my watch one night. It came from the tents, which was no shock. The silence and isolation had become suffocating, and I had begun to wonder if it was enough to just be alive anymore. It seems someone must have agreed with me. I was shocked to return to camp and find Wolf’s tent spattered with blood and viscera. The mostly empty bottles on the floor were not surprising, and probably helped explain what had happened. Alcohol can provide some healing, but it eventually burns you out from the inside, leaving nothing there to stand against its will. I guess either Wolf or the booze needed his out.
Now it was the Rev and I. I was ready to pack up and leave, take my chances in the field, but the Rev was adamant that we should not split. He kept saying he couldn’t let me leave without protecting my soul from the horrors out there. Horrors was a pretty good word for those things, but I still wasn’t ready to trade in my soul for his peace of mind. And so he followed me as I packed up and set out to find something better than a ghost town in this desolate world.
After a week or so of travel, the Rev started to look bad. His skin looked dry and red, burned deeply by the sun. His eyes were sunken, his hair beginning to dry and fall out. He looked sickly and frail, and I was certain it would only be a matter of days before I was alone in this world again. Just being alive wasn’t enough for me anymore, but I couldn’t leave him alone.
His proselytizing grew more and more passionate as his body grew weaker and weaker. Even when his throat was dry and his voice cracking in the desert heat until blood tinged his lips he continued to preach his gospel, promising freedom through purifying fire, just as our world had been so purified by the blazing sun. I began to feel guilty holding out on him. While I didn’t believe, there was also the thought that it was unnecessarily cruel of me to refuse a dying man’s wish. Besides, if I didn’t believe in God, no rite the Rev could perform would convince me otherwise. Maybe it would hurry him along into death, finally being at peace with his life’s work, and leave me to my own way out.
When I agreed, I saw light flicker back into his eyes, and it left me unsettled. The smile and gleam in his eyes seemed hungry and crazy, almost animalistic in its wild fury. I wanted to back out, but I reminded myself that he was dying fast, and it wouldn’t hurt me to give in to one silly fantasy. He had me kneel out in the sand and put his feeble hands on my shoulders. He said a lot of words, words that I thought would have been Latin, but sounded more like those hisses and whispers the Horrors used to call across the desert. Suddenly stronger than I thought, he pulled me to my feet until we were eye to eye, facing one another just a step apart.
His eyes were mesmerizing to me, because as he spoke, they seemed to open up. He had always had dark eyes, and now they seemed to be pits spiraling into his skull and beyond. At the bottom of his impossibly deep eyes, I began to notice flames simmering down there, steadily roaring to life. As they grew closer, I began to feel the heat on my shoulders were his hands dug into my body. I began to feel flames licking along my body, ripping away whatever human was left of me, “purifying me” as the Rev had promised, into one of those things, those Horrors. As I watched his face, unable to change my gaze, only able to scream into the nothingness of wilderness, I saw his skin begin to rejuvenate, flesh turning young and soft again. He began to look as I remembered him from the first few weeks of our journey.
I didn’t know what was happening at first, I only knew that the burning in my body pushed me to the brink of consciousness with its pain before it began to fade away. I felt detached from my body, just a floating soul left without a home. I could see myself, a charred husk shaped into one of the Horrors by some dark design I did not begin to understand, and I could see the Rev as a smiling creature who was nothing more than a demon in human clothing. I had been taken in and the wolf had raided the hen house.
I got it now. I knew who his Lord was, and I knew that he certainly was god of this God-forsaken world.
Now free of my body, I began to wonder what came next. Where would that bright light be? Would I find heaven waiting after trudging along this hell? Just as my freedom began to sink in as an uplifting reality, I heard the whisper-hiss of the Rev speaking something terrible. I could feel it as terrible even if I couldn’t understand the words. I saw him open that flask of what we had assumed was holy water, watched him lift it to the lips of my hollowed body and let that thing drink. And then I felt something dragging me back down, ripping me from my escape and caging me. As some new spirit flowed from the flask into the creature, my own being filled the flask. I got to keep the one thing I had left, but only because that was the only thing left of me. Just a collection of thoughts and feelings without anything to tether me, I was a caged soul, still my own, but unable to do a thing about it. Unknowingly, I had traded my soul—and along with it everything I am—to the Devil.
It’s a daily living hell. I don’t get my out anymore. I’m alive for today, and tomorrow I will be as well, cause I don’t have my bullet savior. I’m not what I was, I have nothing left but my own thoughts, and most days that isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to be alive and thinking when I see the terrible things done with what was my body. It’s eternal reflection on the Horrors and all that I have done. It’s a private hell made up by my own self-loathing. Now it’s just a matter of waiting until this prison rips away whatever humanity I have left and the Rev pours me out to fill up one of those Horrors.
Guess those things get us all in the end. Sure not how I pictured going out, but things have gone terribly wrong, so why should this be any different?
|
I suppose when I say, “Noroi Gakkotsu,” most of you would guess I was talking about some exotic delicacy, or maybe some holiday resort in the far east. You’d be dead wrong. A Noroi Gakkotsu is a very nasty object that has been part of Japanese folklore for centuries, maybe even millennia.
Please keep reading! I know that folklore, especially folklore from a completely foreign culture, bores a lot of people to snores. I can assure you, I’m no fan either. But please believe me when I say that it’s essential that you read this and understand what Noroi Gakkotsu are and how they work.
As best it can be translated, “Noroi Gakkotsu” means “Devil’s Jaws” in English. According to Japanese tradition, a Noroi Gakkotsu is made of two thin boards of wood, one upon the other, that are bound together on one side with either a strip of leather or length of twine, so that the boards can be opened and closed like a book (or a set of jaws!). A certain spell is then written upon the boards to give the object its dark powers. Basically, so long as they knew the magic words, anybody could make one from household objects.
Noroi Gakkotsu were used to strike a bargain with something they called “Kofuko-oni Koun,” which I’m told means “He who pays for his food with good luck.” Don’t be fooled, though. Even though the name might sound benevolent, Kofuko-oni Koun was regarded as a cruel, evil creature and was greatly feared.
He was believed to have sway over the forces of luck and a person could request him to turn a near-certain failure in their future into a glorious victory, by writing what they wanted upon a piece of rice paper and placing it inside a Noroi Gakkotsu. But there was also a catch.
Kofuko-oni Koun would only honor the request if you nominated your payment for his ‘services’ on the top of the message – and the only payment he would accept was the life of someone you held dear. It had to be someone you truly cared for, though not necessarily a family member, it could also have been a close friend. If you named someone who you didn’t care for, or even someone you actually wanted to die, somehow the Kofuko-oni Koun would know and the wish wouldn’t be granted.
But if the Kofuko-oni Koun approved of the nominated payment, then the person who made the wish would be blessed with the best possible luck in whatever matter they’d asked for the Kofuko-oni Koun to help them with. After that, the nominated victim would mysteriously disappear almost entirely without a trace.
The worst part of the story is that after it had claimed its price, the Kofuko-oni Koun would leave a “souvenir” outside the front door of the person who made the wish. Sometimes it was the victim’s bloody clothing, or some other personal affect. But more often than not, it was part of the victim’s remains! Some people believe that it did this to traumatize the person who had made the wish; to remind them of the terrible fate they’d placed upon their loved one. Others apparently think that it was more like the Kofuko-oni Koun leaving a ‘receipt’ behind for the person who made the wish, acknowledging that it had received its payment and that their business was concluded.
Either way, making a Noroi Gakkotsu and striking a bargain with Kofuko-oni Koun were forbidden practices in Japan, punishable by death. So once the deal was done, the person who had committed the crime would usually destroy all the evidence: the Noroi Gakkotsu, and whatever traces of the victim had been left upon their doorstep.
Even if you are into old monster legends, I’m sure you’re probably just reading this and thinking that it’s just some old superstitious hokum. Well, a few days… hell, probably even a few hours ago I would’ve agreed with you. But not anymore.
I can’t tell you too much about who I am or how I know what I know. What I can tell you is that I have connections in the missing-person-turned-homicide investigation of a teenage boy somewhere in the Midwest.
About a year ago, in the lead-up to Halloween, there was this meme going around with a picture showing the top of a skeleton: the skull, neck and shoulder blades. People would forward it on with MMS’s, tweets and the like with simple messages like “Happy Halloween,” or “Boo!,” etc. You might’ve gotten one yourself.
Eventually, the meme found its way to somebody with a bit of knowledge about anatomy and they realized that the skeleton in the picture was awfully realistic. They reported it to law enforcement. But it would be weeks before the report made it through the bureaucracy to a medical examiner who verified that the image did indeed warrant some an investigation.
The M.E. was convinced that the skeleton was indeed the genuine article, but of particular concern to her was the pinkish tone of the bones, and the trace amounts of what appeared to be blood and flesh still on it. What also concerned her were a series of scrape marks that could be seen on the bones when the photo was examined at high resolution. They appeared to encompass the entire skull and the M.E.’s opinion was that these were made when the flesh was stripped off the body – by something with very sharp and very hard teeth.
There seemed to be no legitimate reason for a photo like this to be circulating among the public. Law enforcement determined that it was either a leaked crime scene photo, or evidence to an as-yet undiscovered crime. They considered that the photo might’ve been taken by some callous private citizens (read asshole kids) who’d found a dead body, photographed it, published it online, and never reported it to the cops. Even more disturbing was the possibility that the photo was published by the psycho who had done this and wanted the world to admire his handiwork.
The trouble was that we had only one photo to go on, which made it really hard to determine whether or not the photo was even related to an active or solved case. The exif-data; the data buried within the jpeg file that detail where the photo had come from, what camera had taken it, when it had been taken, etc., had all been wiped clean; which isn’t hard to do if you know what you’re doing. All we had to go on was the photo itself.
I won’t bore you with the technical details, but suffice to say that the computer forensics techs made a thorough sweep of the national crime scene photo database and determined that the photo didn’t pertain to any case in the digital archives.
Several other analyses were run on the photo, but the one that paid off was the facial reconstruction simulation – a piece of software that scans the photo of the skull and determines what the guy would’ve looked like when he was still alive. Eventually, we were able to match the reconstructed face to an active case file out-of-state: the skull belonged to a teenage boy, let’s call him “Jack,” who had been reported missing.
While the photo itself was being investigated, the meme was also being examined. We were charting its course back from the concerned citizen who initially reported the image to the police, to the first person who’d ever sent the image. It wasn’t easy as the meme leapfrogged back-and-forth across several popular messaging services along its way. Just over a week after the victim’s identity was confirmed, we were able to determine who had started the meme. We’ll call her “Jill.”
What was of immediate interest to law enforcement was that Jill’s name was already on record in Jack’s case file – she was apparently a school friend of his and one of the last people to see him alive.
A warrant was issued for Jill’s cell phone and she was brought in for questioning. The phone was thoroughly analysed and an MMS was recovered containing the skeleton photo. But while the phone had a definite record of receiving the message, it was later discovered that Jill’s service provider had no record of ever transmitting it to her.
Another weird thing was that the sender ID for the MMS didn’t contain any numbers; it contained only unicode Japanese Kanji characters. This is technically impossible! The way the system is set up, the phone should only be able to log a series of numeric digits into the sender ID field! The characters in the sender ID spelt out “Anatano Shitauke.” This isn’t someone’s name; the techs translated it and discovered that it roughly means “Your employee,” or “Your business partner.”
Under interrogation, Jill recalled receiving the MMS. She said that the message “kind of creeped her out,” especially because it came from an “unknown sender” (which is what the messaging software told her, because it wasn’t able to interpret the invalid sender ID). But because it was close to Halloween, she assumed that one of her friends sent it as a seasonal thing and so she forwarded the “cool, creepy photo” on, starting the meme.
According to the MMS’s timestamp, she received it only a few hours after Jack was last seen. But Jill claimed she never linked the message to Jack’s disappearance in her mind because at the time she received the MMS, she didn’t even know Jack was missing. The detectives grilled Jill for over three hours, but when she began to get really upset, her father ended the interview and without harder evidence, the detectives couldn’t hold her.
The tech who analysed the phone… well, let’s just say that he’s very thorough at his job, and he didn’t give up on the mystery of how this phone could’ve received an impossible MMS, that its service provider had no record of ever sending. He dug deep into its software, looking for his explanation. Eventually, he came upon a curious anomaly embedded in the phone’s firmware: more unicode Japanese characters, this time a long block of them. The firmware is supposed to be just universal machine code that tells the phone how to work. Japanese text, or text in any human language for that matter, doesn’t belong in there. But as intriguing as this discovery was, it still didn’t explain the impossible MMS. At least, that’s what we thought at the time…
You see, the Japanese text was ‘garbage data’ – which means it was worked into the firmware in such a way that it had no actual effect on how it worked. It was on the phone, but it wasn’t doing anything.
By this point, I was involved in the investigation. When I learned about the Japanese text in the firmware I got curious, so I ran it through google translate. It didn’t translate well, though. A quarter of the words weren’t even recognized and the ones that were didn’t make any sense together. Frustrated, I called upon a Japanese-American acquaintance to translate for me. I’d expected it to be the manufacturer’s copyright on the firmware code, or perhaps even the programmer signing his work. But it actually turned out to sound more like a somber poem of sorts. My Japanese-American friend agreed, saying that the language was far more elegant than day-to-day Japanese and more than a little archaic.
Seeking answers, we phoned up the phone manufacturer’s development lab in Japan. We eventually got through to the manager of the team who developed the phone’s software and, with my friend acting as translator, we asked him about the mysterious text in the firmware, and also if he had any explanation as to how a Japanese phrase could be recorded as the sender ID for an MMS on one of their phones. He very politely denied knowing anything about either of these matters and assured me that any garbage data in the firmware was of no consequence.
Still wanting answers to at least one of the mysteries, I phoned a professor of Japanese literature at Tokyo University to see if he could recognize the verse in the firmware. Before my colleague could finish reciting the verse, the professor cut him off. He recognized it, all right.
Despite the language barrier between us, I could hear the discomfort in the man’s voice as he explained that the “verse” was the incantation written upon Noroi Gakkotsu to give them their dark powers. It was at this point that my colleague explained the Noroi Gakkotsu legend of his culture to me. He knew the story well, he just had never heard the actual incantation used to create one, until now.
While this was all quite educational, it really didn’t get us anywhere in terms of the investigation. But I kept thinking about the problem of the MMS and eventually I had this crazy thought: The fact that Jill had received a photo of Jack’s remains was eerily similar to the part of the Noroi Gakkotsu legend where the monster would leave behind some proof of his victim’s death.
I suppose just for fun, I skimmed through the rest of the case notes to see if there were any other parallels between the murder and the Japanese legend. I almost wish I hadn’t.
When I read through Jill’s original witness statement – the one taken when police were just investigating Jack’s disappearance as a missing person’s case – she remarked that she remembered the last day she saw him clearly, because it was the same day her history teacher had returned a test that she’d surprisingly aced, even though she’d thought she was sure to flunk it.
My stomach sank when I read that statement. Because I was quite familiar with the contents of Jill’s phone and I remembered reading about this history test before. About 3 days before Jack’s disappearance, Jill had typed a text message into her phone: “I need to pass this history test.”
Jack’s name was marked at the top of the message, as the intended recipient.
The similarities between the old stories I’d been hearing and the murder were suddenly clear as day. Jill had a phone that for some reason contained an old Japanese spell used to summon a monster. She typed what could be interpreted as a demand for a good history mark into the phone, with her close friend’s name on the message, and just like in the stories, Jill aced her test, Jack disappeared without a trace, and Jill received a sick memento of his death.
If you’d pointed this out to me at the time, I would’ve chuckled and said, “Yes, it is a weird coincidence, isn’t it?” I wanted to believe that that was all it was. I really did. But deep down, in that hidden ‘doubting Thomas’ part we all have that doesn’t completely trust modern rationality to be our salvation, I was frightened.
Then, a couple of days ago, which was about a week after I’d called the phone manufacturer, I received a package in the mail. There was no return address, but the postmark was from Osaka, Japan.
Inside, were a heap of papers. On top of the stack was a cover letter explaining what the package contained. It was written in bad English, although I was able to get the gist of what it was saying. The sender didn’t identify themself, but it’s clear that they must work for the manufacturer of Jill’s phone and that they were aware that I’d been asking questions about the hidden text in the firmware.
My informant was part of the development of the phone series that Jill’s phone belonged to and he/she had an explanation for how the Noroi Gakkotsu incantation had gotten into the phones’ firmware.
There was a guy on the development team; smart, but a real emo-loner type. Not the shy kind of loner, the crazed-gunman-in-the-making kind. People would try to be friendly and reach out to him and he’d stare daggers at them. For whatever reasons, the guy had issues.
Shortly before the phone series’ went into production, the guy hung himself. My informant believes that before he died, the guy implanted the hazardous spell into the phones as his ultimate “screw you” to the world.
Within a few months of the phone’s release, somehow the company’s executives got wind that there was a problem with them ‘receiving’ disturbing MMS’s that the phones seemed to be generating themselves. The company began to investigate the problem quietly themselves, secretly querying all their active phones remotely. They found scores of incidents where a phone had a record of an incoming MMS from “Anatano Shitauke” (“Your business partner”), containing a single jpeg file. Most people who had received these messages had subsequently deleted them. But in several dozen cases, the jpegs were still on the recipients’ phones and were retrieved by the company.
An upgraded version of the firmware – with the incantation removed – was developed, but ultimately never implemented because it was discovered that the phones kept rejecting it. The guy who put the incantation into the firmware had also rigged it so that it would never allow itself to be overwritten.
Two months before Jack’s disappearance, the company abruptly terminated their investigation. By this time, they were aware of nearly 800 instances of MMS’s being received from “Anatano Shitauke.” An unspoken agreement was made that the problem was unsolvable and that their best course of action was to simply turn a blind eye. Everyone involved in the informal investigation was forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Orders were issued to destroy all the records. But my anonymous contact managed to keep copies of most of them, which he/she has sent to me.
It’s taking me a while to get through the documents he/she sent me, as most of them are written in Japanese. But luckily their list of the phones that received an “Anatano Shitauke” message was written in regular digits. I ran all the American numbers on that list through our database and all of them, every single one, belongs to somebody who was questioned in relation to a missing person case that began within days of them receiving that message!
But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that my contact also sent me printouts of all the jpegs they could salvage that turned up during the manufacturer’s investigation. They are all just like the photo of Jack’s remains that began this entire case: a realistic skeleton grinning into the camera, covered in the scrape marks left by whatever sharp-toothed nightmare stripped them of all their flesh. I don’t have access to the advanced software that synthesized an accurate face for Jack’s skull. At least, not the kind of access that allows me to use it without answering a lot of difficult questions first. But I scanned the photos and overlayed them with photoshop on to the case photos of the missing person associated with their recipient. I admit I’m no expert, but as far as I can tell, every one of those skulls fits perfectly inside the face of one of those missing people.
I can’t tell you the name of the manufacturer involved, nor the name of the phone series. Suffice to say, they’re a well-known company and the phone series is quite popular.
I wish I could tell you more, but if I do, I have no doubt that the company will have this warning suppressed as defamation and that can’t happen. The word has to get out and I figure that half a warning is better than no warning at all.
There’s a common series of phone out there with an evil curse marked inside them. You may well be carrying a Noroi Gakkotsu in your purse, or pocket. And even if you aren’t, someone who cares about you may be.
So please, be wary of typing out what you wish for, or hope for, or even think you ‘need’. But most of all, be especially careful of whose name you place on those messages…
Because you just may be sending them into the devil’s jaws.
Spread the word.
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All great writers claim to suffer from insomnia at least once in their lives, although I’m sure a bulk of them misuse the term and glorify the disorder. After all, all artists “struggle” and it seems that lack of sleep runs common among those who strive to hammer out the next big thing.
I wasn’t immune to this, and at the risk of sounding cliché, I simply worked better in the wee hours of the morning, unless I happened to be suffering from writer’s block, which also seems to plague those of us who starve for our art.
I recently moved to my home, which is perched neatly up on a hill. It’s a ranch home, so there’s not much around. Sometimes when my fingers are tired from typing and my brain feels like it will explode, I’ll go into the kitchen, make a cup of tea, and look out into the night. Below me there is another ranch home that I could see from my window, although it had been empty for quite some time.
The house below me wasn’t unlike my own. Sitting alone atop of dried grass and dirt, it was two stories, white, with a wrap-around porch. For being empty, it was well kept, although there were weeds sprouting everywhere and one of the windows (I had guessed the kitchen’s, assuming the home’s layout was anything like my own) was broken.
I hadn’t noticed it until a few months after my move, but on one of those nights where I was pushing 4:00 AM, I noticed the lights on in that house. Immediately my brow creased into a curious expression, knowing that the house had been abandoned and it didn’t seem like anyone would be moving into it anytime soon. I leaned over the sink and put my face as close to the window without touching it, but could see no movement from within the house.
A few days passed until I noticed it again, although looking back now, I can confidently say it had been happening every night since the moment I moved in. The second time I noticed it, I took a quick glance at the clock sitting over my dining room table. It was 3:30 AM, and again, I could see nothing out of the ordinary other than the fact that the lights were on.
The next night it happened again, and on the night after that, although I probably would have been awake otherwise, I forced myself into the kitchen at 3:25 AM, stirring my tea and staring intently at the window. I began to feel anxious even though the notion of the lights turning on shouldn’t be strange, but given the fact that it was occurring nightly in an empty house around 3:30 AM was a bit unsettling.
I watched the minute hand on my clock swipe to thirty after, and I turned my head towards my window. Sure enough, the lights flicked on, just like they had the other three nights. I leaned over the sink once again, this time pressing my forehead all the way up against the glass (as if doing so would give me a better view), but still couldn’t see anyone moving about. I leaned back, frowned, and shrugged. Logically it could be anything, ranging from squatters to a rare electrical issue, but at the time I figured I would just let it go, because I couldn’t be bothered to worry about something so seemingly insignificant. I had a writing deadline and needed to make that my top priority.
Two weeks passed, and although I tried my hardest not to stroll into the kitchen every morning at 3:30 AM, I failed miserably and observed the same thing every night. It even got to the point where I would stay in the kitchen for hours before and after the lights would flick on, simply to spot traffic either in or out of the house, but as far as I could tell, nobody ever entered or exited, even during the day. The lights would eventually turn off around dawn and wouldn’t turn back on until 3:30 AM.
During the third week I ventured over to the home, looking for cars or anything hinting at human life, but the closest thing I found was a bike tire leaning against the back porch steps. Given the weeds growing around it, it had probably been there for a while. The house sat empty as a recently dug grave, and in that moment I couldn’t help but feel a little sorrowful. It really was a beautiful home, but the lack of anyone living in it made it exude a sense of nothingness and despair.
I went around to the broken window, and my assumption that it belonged to the kitchen was correct. I peered in, although from what I could tell, nobody had been in that room for quite some time. A thin, visible layer of dust covered both the counters and floor, and cobwebs had made their way across the sink faucet, as well as the ceiling corners. Although I’m no detective, I noticed the dust-covered floor had no footprints, and this disturbed me for obvious reasons. In order to alleviate my fears, I told myself the lights turning on had to be some type of electrical anomaly and I stepped down from the porch. I walked backwards until I could see the entire house in my view, shielded my eyes from the sun, and took one last look. I scanned from left to right, hoping to see any hint of anyone or anything living there, but just as before, there was nothing but emptiness.
That night a freak thunderstorm rolled through the area, and for once it wasn’t the writing that kept me awake. The thunder sounded like bombs falling, and before I knew it, I was up in the kitchen at 3:00 AM making tea. I finished my last sip when the lights turned on in the house below, and although it was a sight that was familiar to me then, I still got up to look out the window. I couldn’t see as well as other nights because of the rain, but sure enough, all the lights were on like usual. My hands rested on the edge of the sink, and just then a clap of thunder exploded. My hands tightened and I jumped, but calmed down rather quickly.
About thirty seconds passed, and the power went out.
I was only able to register the lights going off in the house below me for a mere second before I heard a knock at my back door. I jumped again and gripped the edge of the sink even harder. It was completely dark, and I could barely see a thing. I stood there, breathing heavily then, waiting to see if I would hear the knock again. I tried to convince myself it was just thunder, but five seconds later, another knock.
I slowly walked towards the door. Being too scared to look behind the blinds, I walked as closely to the door as possible to see if I could hear anyone outside. The rain made it difficult to hear, but I listened as hard as I could.
“Is anyone there?” a voice said from the other side.
It was a woman’s voice. It sounded shaky and troubled. I kept quiet, too confused to respond and too frightened at the aspect of someone standing outside my door this late and in a storm.
“Please, if someone is there, I need some help,” she said.
Although by that time a layer of goosebumps had covered my skin, I answered back. After all, if this woman needed help, I couldn’t just leave her outside alone.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“My name is Sandy. I live in the home below you. My power is out, and I have no lights or candles. I can’t be in the dark. Not at this time.”
I frowned. Either this woman was lying or I was going crazy, because there was no way there was a woman living in that house. But that wasn’t the most frightening thing at that moment – it was the fact that the power went out mere seconds ago, and there was no way this woman could have walked from her home to mine in that amount of time.
“That house has been empty since I moved in.” I responded.
“Please just help me. I need the lights on or else.”
I rubbed the space between my eyes. Even if this woman was real, she was making no sense.
“I’m sure the power will be back on soon. It will be okay,” I said.
She responded with a huge sigh and I could tell she was sobbing now. A few seconds went by. I calmly waited to hear if she would say anything else. After thinking she gave up and I could rest easy, I heard her say, “I saw you, you know.”
My eyes widened and my stomach dropped. I quickly thought back to my visit at the house, making sure my memories were correct in the fact that I saw nobody at the home.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“I saw you looking in my home, through the kitchen window.”
A moment went by. My breathing quickened. I felt my heart beat in my head, and just then, thunder rang out again. I jumped and squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them, she responded again.
“He saw you too.”
I paused and fear seized my heart. I was completely sure there was nobody at the home, let alone two people.
She continued talking:
“He comes at this time, and unless I get some lights on, he will take me. He’s tried before.”
At that point I was completely confused and unsure of how to respond, so I replied, “Sandy, like I said before, I’m sure the lights will be back on soon. Just go home and wait it out.”
She began crying again.
“As soon as I step into the darkness again, I won’t ever be able to come out. And when he’s done with me, he’ll be after you. He’s seen you now.”
She laughed a little, the way those who feel exhausted from crying often do.
I stepped closer to the door again, and slowly pulled the corner of the blinds away. I had to see for myself if there really was a woman out there and I wasn’t just going crazy. Just then a bolt of lightening came across the sky, lighting up everything in my immediate view. To my horror, there was nobody standing on the other side of the door. My porch was completely empty.
It wasn’t until well into the next morning that I felt any sense of calm, and decided I would go looking into the history of the house.
After a week or so of searching online and asking around with the locals, I found out the most disturbing information.
About three years earlier, a woman named Sandy Carmichael lived in the home below me. Given the fact that rumors spread like wild-fire, I’m not sure how much information was the truth, but apparently she began telling her closest friends and relatives that a being was living inside her home, and came to her around the same time every morning. Apparently this being had attacked her when she was standing in her kitchen (which lead to the broken window), although as soon as she turned on the light, it went away. Long story short, she continued turning on the lights, at the same time, every night in order to keep this being away (Why she hadn’t just moved is beyond me, although I’m sure her story would be the same for every other person who chooses to stay in an alleged haunted house: it was her home).
The story continued that after about six months (again, this is hearsay), her doctor prescribed her a sedative, and finally one night she slept through the 3:30 AM mark and never woke up. Her death was said to be a suicide, but some have come to believe whatever Sandy babbled on about may have been responsible.
I couldn’t help but think of the night of the thunderstorm with utter terror, and am quite convinced the ghost of Sandy Carmichael visited me. One may ask why I believe this, especially those who are skeptical of the supernatural, but Sandy Charmichael said that whatever was terrorizing her was going to start terrorizing me.
The lights haven’t appeared in the home below me since that night, although this hasn’t done anything to calm my fears. I’ve started to hear strange noises in my home, and I’m worried things will escalate. I’ve debated whether or not to turn on the lights in my own home at 3:30 AM, although doing so would be admitting for sure that I thought something unnatural was in my house, and I’m not quite ready to do that.
There’s another thunder storm going on right now, however, and I’ve made sure to have plenty of candles and a flashlight just in case. I keep telling myself that all rational human beings carry extra candles and flashlights in thunderstorms and that I’m not admitting anything, but the lights have already begun to flicker. Every time they do, my stomach turns over.
It’s 3:04 AM. I’m hoping the power stays on.
Credit To – Aja
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“Do you know what the problem is when it comes to ghosts in this city?”
“Chains are last season’s look?”
“All the cool ghosts moved to Portland?”
“I’ll think our waitress is a ghost if she doesn’t hurry with those drinks.”
“Scoff if you all will, but I’m making a point here: To have ghosts, first you need the dead. And nobody is ever dead in this city.”
“You must not read the police blotter.”
“I never said nobody dies here, what I said is that no one is dead. We get rid of the dead right away, and we all know where they go.”
“Oh god, I hate that town.”
“It creeps me out too.”
“And it should. But it’s even worse than you think: There are probably some things none of you know about the dead. Living here, you wouldn’t have many opportunities to learn. And what’s where my story comes in…”
***
It was, as it happened, a dark and stormy night. The dead man could hear the rain, even, as he was, trapped in a cold box under the ground, smothered by the weight of the earth. He was tired, but he felt a potency in his dead limbs and a sudden, unexplainable sense of urgency that allowed him to press the lid open and drag his aching bones up through the dirt and out into the fresh air and the black night and the world of the living again. The dead man left his grave and he knew where he was: the city.
No, not quite, he corrected himself. He was in the town ten miles south of the city. They buried no bodies in the city itself. A hundred years ago the city passed a law against any new burial sites and they even moved the ones they had, evicting the dead, and this town sprouted like a mushroom on the city’s southern border to hold all those dear departed who no longer had a place in the city itself. It was a town of cemeteries and mortuaries, a town of coffin makers and embalmers, a town of mausoleums and headstones, where the city’s dead migrated for their eternal rest. A town with a thousand occupied graves for every one occupied house. The north became the city of the living; the south became the city of the dead.
For the most part the two kept to their respective cities and existed in peace. But tonight the city in the south was sending an emissary: the dead man. And his mission was to increase the population of the dead city by one. There was someone in the living city who did not deserve to be there. The dead man sensed his target and knew, instinctively, who it was: his killer. The dead man remembered everything about his killer: his voice, his face, even the way his killer smelled. Death could not rob him of this knowledge. He would find him.
Tentatively, the dead man tried to walk. His legs were stiff and tired after so many years in the grave. The cold rain felt good on his face. One step at a time the dead man learned to walk again and when he was ready he walked down the hill, away from his headstone, through the little cemetery gate and out onto the highway. Yes, this road he remembered. He could follow it north the whole way. The dark night and the rain would hide the dead man’s face from what few drivers and pedestrians there were.
As he walked he tried to make sense of things. He remembered dying in a far-off city in another state. His parents must have had his body shipped back and buried here, close to home, close to the city he grew up in. Were his parents alive now? Should he look for them? No, he decided; best that they not see him like this. Best that they never know. The dead man understood (with the same ingrained, reasonless certainty that directed him northward) that his killer was both alive and nearby. That was enough to worry about for now. He would have business with no other living person.
The dead man had left his own cemetery behind but others dotted the roadside. If he strained his ears he could hear them, the other dead men and dead women down in their graves. Most of them snored away an eternal slumber, occasionally shifting to a more comfortable position in their coffins. Some of the restless ones muttered to themselves, or even had smothered conversations with those buried nearest them. A few talked about coming up, like he had, but no one else seemed ready to do it tonight. He suspected they often talked about such things without actually doing them.
The dead man did wonder, though, whether he shouldn’t pause for a conversation with a few. Why, right over there Joe DiMaggio was buried. Imagine the talk they two could have. And over there was Wyatt Earp’s grave, and over there was Turk Murphy, and Vince Guaraldi. Doc Barker had been buried out here somewhere too, after he died trying to escape from Alcatraz. Lily Coit, Charles De Young, even Emperor Norton himself, they were all here, and surely they wouldn’t mind trading a few words with the dead man? Surely they were just as lonely as he was…
But he had no time. Revenge was too precious, and had been too long coming already. So the dead man slogged on, through the rain, past the graves, toward the city lights reflecting off those great shining glass towers like lighthouses for the fates. The dead man had always loved those great buildings. They made him feel young again.
Something appeared then, a long, snaky, blazing apparition screaming its banshee wail into the night as it flew through the air. The dead man fell, panicked, terrified, scrambling for a hiding place while the impossible thing slowed and then seemed to hover overhead. He clung to a concrete column, praying it did not see him. He tried to hold his breath only to realize it was now not only impossible but unnecessary. There was a snapping sound, and then a ball rang, and then, strangely, the sound of feet tromping overhead, like a column of soldiers marching on thin air. He dared look up and then realized what the glowing specter really was: an elevated train. The column he hugged supported the tracks. Late-night commuters filed onto the platform twenty feet overhead and when the doors slid shut again the entire shrieking assemblage streamed off into the night.
The dead man felt foolish. Clearly things had changed in the years since he died. Once his embarrassment wore off, he realized the rail-line was a boon for him; it would lead into the city, and if he followed underneath it he would encounter fewer late-night pedestrians than on the main highway. Staying close to the lights on the tracks he followed them, into the heart of civilization, and closer to his prey.
The pouring rain made rivers and streams of everything. He was glad that it seemed to be relieving him of the grave smell. The city by night was a strange thing: dark and vacant but still teeming with artificial animation, with the glare of electronic lights and the low whine of tires on asphalt. He did not belong here; the people of the dead city kept in their place. It was the unspoken law of the dead. But tonight the rules bent. The dead man scampered beneath overpasses, through alleys, along ditches and across vacant lots. Those few people who saw him took him for another homeless vagrant in his shapeless, foul-smelling clothes. The heavy rain hid face from them. He was tracking using senses he did not realize he had. Maybe it was the spirit of revenge itself that guided him. He came to one block, one street, one house. It was one of the tall Victorian homes that they called the painted ladies. Yes, this was the sort of house his killer would live in. His killer was a rich and powerful man, so powerful that he was never punished even though everyone knew he’d killed the dead man.
The dead man crept up to a window streaked with rain and squinted into the soft yellow lamplight inside. The living room was filled with boxes, and the floor lined with newspapers that suggested painting project. Of course, the dead man thought, that explains why I’ve come back tonight: My killer has only just come to live here in the city. The dead man smeared the glass with his blackened fingers, rage welling up in the hollow of his chest where his heart once sat. There was movement in another room. He clamored over a fence and into a side yard, creeping up to a bedroom window. Yes, there he was! The dead man felt poisonous joy at the sight of his enemy.
The killer wore a faded blue bathrobe as he picked through the rooms of his new house, feeling the stacks of boxes with his hands. But how old he was! He’d become gray and bent in the years since the dead man last saw him. And what was this? The killer’s hands moved over everything with such delicate care, and a faithful dog trotted at his side at all times. He’s blind, the dead man realized, blind and all but helpless. But why the lamps? Then the dead man spotted the tire tracks in the wet driveway. Someone else lived here too. A caretaker, or a wife? Whoever it was, they surely wouldn’t leave the old man alone for long. The dead man wanted to break through the glass and seize the old man, to break his bones and twist his limbs (his body was tired and clumsy but strong, terrifyingly strong.)
But no, he had a better idea: He’d get the old man to open the door for him. Yes, open the door and invite him in, never realizing that he was bringing doom into his home. The dead man went to the front door and knocked as loudly as he could. The door opened, just a crack, and a voice (his killer’s voice! Old and frail, but the same voice that the dead man knew so well!) said:
“Who’s there?”
For a moment the dead man wasn’t sure he was capable of speech, but when he opened his mouth the words came, though they sounded garbled and strange. “Sir,” the dead man said in his voice like brittle leaves, “I’m a poor man with nothing in the world, and the rain has wet me to the bone. If you don’t mind, I’d like permission to rest a while here on your porch, and hopefully dry out a bit.”
The slim yellow line that indicated the door opening wavered for a second, as if the house itself were pondering. Then the door opened and the old man (the killer) beckoned him in. “Can’t have you freezing out there. Come in and dry yourself off properly.”
The house was warm. The dead man felt the change in temperature vaguely, as if it were happening to someone else and he was only observing it. “You must excuse me,” said the killer. “I have not moved in yet.”
“The first night in a new house is always the loneliest,” said the dead man, following his killer deeper inside. The old man walked with two canes, one to hold himself up and the other to find his way. Even the dead man walked faster than his killer did.
“That’s very true,” his killer said. “But when you get to be my age, any night can be a lonely one. I find I’m loneliest of all when someone is with me.”
“It’s the same with me,” the dead man said. He dripped rainwater on the hardwood floor, water black and green with the residue of his body. The rain, he knew, would cover the smell of his moldered flesh even to the blind man’s sensitive nose, but not for very long. That was all right. He would not need long. The old man’s dog crouched near the door, tail between its legs. It looked at the dead man with head cocked to one side. The dead man put a finger to his lips as a signal: Shhhhh. The dog ran away.
The killed grunted. He’d reached a chair and was doing his best to sit in it. He told the dead man his name. “And who are you?” his killer said.
The dead man told him.
The killer was quiet for a moment. Then he said: “I’m sorry. I don’t think I heard you right. What’s your name?”
The dead man said it again.
The killer dropped his cane. Somewhere, the dog was crying.
The old man began to shake. When he opened his mouth no words came out. The dead man stood over his killer’s chair, dripping rain. It was a long time before the old man spoke. When he did the only words he said were: “I’m sorry.”
“You murdered me,” the dead man said.
“No!” said the killer, and the dead man’s anger boiled over. He screamed:
“Don’t lie! You murdered me, you bastard!”
“You don’t understand,” said the killer. He was crying, feeble old man’s tears.
“No, I don’t,” the dead man said. “Because I’ve never killed anyone. But I’ll understand soon.”
“But I had to do it,” said the killer. “Don’t you see? It had to be done.”
The dead man touched his killer’s cheek, gently. “Answer a question,” said the dead man, “and I may let you live.”
The killer’s old, blind eyes looked up at him.
“How many?” said the dead man.
“How many what?”
The dead man wrapped his fingers around his killer’s throat. “How many people did you kill?” Outside, the rain was loud, like a thousand wet, clammy hands beating on the walls and windows. “Do you even know how many there were? Tell me that our lives meant at least that much to you, and I may let you go.”
The killer blinked. He furrowed his brow. He stammered: “I…I…”
And he started to sob.
Slowly, very slowly, the dead man reached for the lamp. He turned out the light. In the dark, there was a sound like the last bit of water swirling around the drain. In another room, the dog began to howl, and then he began to cry.
And then everything went quiet.
***
They read about it, as the saying goes, in tomorrow’s paper:
A blind retiree was murdered in his home late Saturday night, stunning this quiet residential neighborhood, and police say his assailant is still at large.
“His wife had gone out to the store. They just moved in and there was no food in the house,” a police spokesperson told reporters. “She came back to find the door open and her husband dead.”
Police identified the victim as Martin Coughlin, 79, a former assistant district attorney from Reno. Coughlin had been both strangled and bludgeoned. Police said there were no signs of a break-in and it appears that Coughlin opened the door for his attacker. Coughlin was blind due to complications from surgery to remove a brain tumor two years ago.
During his career as a Washoe County prosecutor Coughlin tried over 700 homicides. He achieved national notoriety after petitioning for the death penalty in the case of Dante Riggs. Riggs was accused of abducting and murdering a seven year old girl while on a gambling trip. He was executed in 1995, but the conviction was overturned posthumously when new evidence was discovered. The public outcry against Coughlin’s handling of the prosecution prompted his retirement.
“We came here for a fresh start,” said Martha Coughlin (70), who made a brief statement to the press. “It’s hard to know what to think. I guess I’d really hoped that, in this place, maybe, after all these years, we could finally be free of the ghosts of the past.
“But now it looks like the ghosts are all I have left.”
***
“…and that’s why we’re the only city in the world that banishes our dead.”
“Wait, why? I don’t understand what that has to do with the story?”
“When the dead stay too close to the living they always want to come back up and cause trouble. If you put a little distance between the living and the dead, it means that only really important business can get them back up again.”
“Well I don’t think I understood it. He wasn’t really even a ghost, was he?”
“And if you’re saying this story was true, then how do you know about it? Who told you?”
“Who do you think? I work in one of those cemeteries. The dead get chatty sometimes. They don’t have very many occasions to talk, you know, so when one comes along they’re hard to shut up. They’ll tell you almost anything.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“I don’t expect you to believe me. But you’ll all understand, someday. None of us can stay in the living city forever. Sooner or later we’ll all take that trip south. And then you’ll see.
“Anyway, that’s my story. Does anyone have another?”
Credit To – Tam Lin
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Subsets and Splits