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I have worked as a paranormal investigator for close to thirty years. I always had believed there was more to our world than what most think. Like the submerged section of an iceberg, there is something under our choppy waters of regular existence.
I suppose there is little other reason to take this job other than that belief — it certainly isn’t for the money or respect — but I would be lying if I said my early years in this profession didn’t test my faith in the existence of the paranormal world.
For the first four years of my work I found nothing; no evidence of even a single paranormal phenomenon in any of the cases I took. There were hordes of unconfirmable ghost sightings, ‘hauntings’ that were explained away by natural phenomenon, and even the odd prankster or two. I felt like I was floundering. I started to wonder if I had followed a road that led nowhere, my destination nothing but a hazy mirage perpetually on the horizon.
That was until I took a case in 1997. My most haunting case, still to this day.
The case of the Grinning Man.
* * * * * *
“Do you mind if I record this interview?” I asked.
“No, that’s okay,” Audrey said. We were in the living room of her small home. Audrey sat on the sofa across from me, a thirty-five-year-old woman that looked closer to fifty. She was small, hunched over, as if a weight pressed on her shoulders.
I placed the tape recorder on the coffee table and pressed the record button. Inside, the cassette tape whirred to life.
“Audrey, thank you for calling me to investigate your problem. I want you to know I’ll take your claims seriously, and investigate them as such. Whatever the outcome may be, if the phenomenon you are experiencing is paranormal or natural, I’ll seek to find the truth the best I can.”
“Thank you.”
“Please, start from the beginning.”
She sighed and brushed some stray, frazzled hair behind her ear with one hand. I could see she was at her wits end. Her face bore deep wrinkles beyond her age, her eyes contained within dark-purple sockets, and her nails chewed away to ragged edges. Whatever she was experiencing, paranormal or not, was certainly real to her.
“Okay,” she began. “I guess it all started when I was a baby.”
“That far back?”
“Yes. My first memories are of seeing him.”
“Him?”
“What I call the Grinning Man.” She shuddered when she said it. “The thing that’s been haunting me my entire life. I can even remember him as a baby. It’s burned into my memory. He dresses like someone from the ’40s or ’50s, with a tan trench coat and black fedora. I was laying in my crib when I first recall seeing him. He gripped the crib’s bars while he peered down at me through them, looming over a little, helpless me like an ominous mountain. Just thinking of it turns my stomach.”
“And he was grinning at you?”
“Yes. Like he always is. Have you ever heard people describe a psychopath’s grin, where their smile is there and looks friendly enough, but if you look closely you can see their eyes hold nothing?”
“I think I understand.”
“His smile is like that. It’s like he has reptilian eyes. Unfeeling, cold, predatory. . . Evil.”
“Must have had quite an impact on you, considering you remember it from that far back. Has he been cropping up your entire life?”
“Yes. It’s sporadic. Sometimes I’ll go years without seeing him, other times I’ll see him multiple times a month.”
“What’s a typical encounter like?”
“Well, he’ll appear out of nowhere, then he stands as still as a statue and watches me with that sick grin of his plastered on his face. He could show up anywhere, at any time. Among the trees as I walk through the park. From a random house’s window as I walk down the street. The shadows of my own home when I get a glass of water in the middle of the night.”
“Does this entity ever say or do anything?”
“No. Always silent. Always unmoving. Just tracking me with his eyes.”
“Interesting. . . Do you ever feel anything when you see this entity?”
“Yes, an intense sense of dread and a tightness in the chest. Almost like he’s reaching out with imaginary, brooding fingers to squeeze my heart. And sometimes, when I see him, something terrible happens soon after.”
“You mean that a sighting of the Grinning Man is a precursor to a traumatic event?”
“Yes. Not all the time, but enough that when I see him my nerves will be shot, and I’ll walk around with this dark cloud weighing on me as I wait for the worst to happen.”
“Could you give me an example?”
Audrey sighed and tears swelled at the corner of her eyes. She averted her gaze and looked out the window.
“If it’s too difficult, you don’t have to—”
“No, it’s okay.” She reached for the tissue box on the coffee table, took a couple, sniffled and dabbed her eyes. “The worst incident was in 1993. I had been married for three years and had just given birth to our first child — he was four months old at the time. I was back at work by then, and I was coming home very late one evening. The roads were dead. A bad storm had just passed through, and I still remember the long, colorful glow from the traffic lights and streetlamps across the wet roads.
“I came to a stop at a red. I just happened to glance to my right. He was there, half-covered in shadows. He stood on the pavement by the crosswalk, the walk signal glowing green as if he had meant to cross. That grin he had sunk my heart as if it had turned it to stone. I don’t know exactly how long I stayed there, locked in his gaze, but when my light turned green again I got out of there as fast as I could. When I looked in the rearview, I saw his silhouette in the street, watching me as I fled.
“I knew I’d struggle to sleep that night. I was shaking and felt like throwing up. I had to take a valium, and that helped. I plopped into bed and passed out more than fell asleep. I was awoken by my husband frantically shaking me in the morning. His face was pale, a look of sheer, terror-filled panic I had never seen before. Our son had passed away in the night. The death was ruled a SIDS case.”
I sat in silence, giving Audrey a moment as she let her emotions out.
At the time, I wasn’t sure what to think. Her story was unique, far from the standard ghostly apparitions others saw. I was intrigued.
I did wonder if it was a mental condition. I had encountered a schizophrenic who had believed their hallucinations were a result of paranormal phenomena on a previous case, though their condition had been more apparent, even to me. If Audrey was ill, it was not obvious.
“Audrey, have you seen any medical professionals? It is possible that your sightings could be hallucinations.”
“Yes, I have. I had kept the Grinning Man a secret my entire life. After all, who would believe me? I even kept it from my husband. But after our son had died, I had to tell him. I don’t know why, but I just did. He was obviously concerned for me, my mental health. He wanted me to see a therapist. I refused at first. We had a lot of fights about it, and eventually he forced me to go see someone.”
“What did they say?”
“Well, I was put through the ringer. Eventually, I was diagnosed with psychosis. I was put on meds, went to therapy twice a week, and none of it helped. He would still show up. Eventually, I quit the meds, quit the therapy. Waste of time and money, as far as I was concerned. But my husband thought different. He didn’t like that I had quit all of it, and our marriage kind of fell apart from there. But I was — still am — convinced what I was experiencing is real. That’s why I came to you. I figured someone like you would at least take my story seriously.”
I nodded. “I do.”
“And there’s another reason I sought you out.”
“Please.”
“Well, I need help. I’ve been seeing the Grinning Man a lot more lately. He’s been appearing more frequently than ever before.”
“How often?”
“Every few nights for the past two or three months. He only shows up at night, now. Usually outside my bedroom window, and I did see him in the hallway last week. I never used to sleep with my bedroom door closed, but I do now. I don’t know if I can take it much longer. My nerves are shot. Dread suffocates my chest all the time. I think something terrible is going to happen soon. I’m scared of what he might do to me. . . but you can prove it, right? You can prove he’s real? You can help me get rid of it, right?”
“I’ll try, Audrey. I’ll try.”
* * * * * *
After the interview, I tested her home for Electromagnetic Fields. Strong EMFs can often be responsible for hallucinations of apparitions, or that creepy feeling that elicits goosebumps on the back of your neck. It often causes people to believe they are experiencing a haunting. In reality, it’s usually just poor electrical wiring, or old and dirty wall sockets bleeding electricity into the environment. Those EMFs can mess with people’s senses.
Though Audrey’s sightings of the Grinning Man were not tied to a particular location, I figured EMFs may be responsible for her latest string of sightings that occurred primarily in her bedroom. But after a sweep of the house, I detected nothing abnormal.
I then set up a camera on a tripod in her bedroom. It sat beside the head of the bed and had a complete shot of her room, including the window on the opposite wall, and the door on the right that lead into the hallway — both places she had seen the Grinning Man previously.
I showed her how to record and instructed her to do so when she went to bed. I also gave her a nightlight to plug into an outlet, so the camera could see (night-vision and thermal imaging cameras were well out of my budget back then).
I swung by her house the next two mornings to collect and review the tape. Those nights were uneventful. On the third night, I got a frenzied call from Audrey.
* * * * * *
The ringing jarred me awake. The clock on my nightstand read 2:08 am. I trudged to the phone, and as soon as I answered, Audrey’s frantic voice came over the line.
“He was here!” she cried. “He was here! He tried to hurt me!”
I arrived at Audrey’s a little over half-an-hour later. She paced back and forth in the living room, a neglected cigarette burning in her hand, the ash tip growing long and pale as bone. She muttered one thing over and over:
“No escape. No escape. No escape.”
It took a minute to calm her down. At first, she looked right through me as if I weren’t there, her eyes distant and fear-stricken as she continued to mutter can’t escape until the words burned in my ears. I eventually ushered her into the kitchen and sat her down. I found some cocoa in the cupboards and made her a warm cup. It seemed to help a little; her trembling stopped.
“I’m going to watch the tape,” I said. “Do you want to watch it with me?”
She shook her head adamantly.
She waited in the kitchen while I watched. She had a VCR player hooked up to a CRT television in her living room. I sat on the edge of the coffee table, rather than the sofa, for a closer view. I inserted the tape and the TV came to life with a view of Audrey’s room bathed in dim orange from the nightlight, and the window at the far end shined with a pale glow from the moon.
The footage wasn’t great, being comparatively rudimentary for what we have today. The picture quality was grainy, and sometimes wavered in the way those VCR tapes did, but it was enough to see what I needed to.
I fast-forwarded the tape until the text on the bottom right corner read 1:30 am. I sat with a pen and notepad in hand, and I still have my notes from what I saw on that tape:
1:30 am–Audrey asleep in bed. Nothing untoward.
1:35 am–Audrey becoming visibly restless. Flipping and turning violently in her sleep.
1:38 am–Audrey settled.
1:40 am–Dark figure crossed window on opposite wall.
1:42 am–Dark figure crossed window again, in opposite direction.
1:44 am–Dark figure standing in front of window. Figure looks like a person. Possibly wearing a hat. Figure too dark to make out features.
1:46 am–Static intermittently breaking up picture. Figure still standing at window.
1:50 am–The figure disappeared. Did not walk or move away. Simply vanished.
1:51 am–Audrey becoming restless again.
1:52 am–Bedroom door opened.
That was the last note I took.
My heart was pounding in my ears by this point. A few seconds after the door had opened — seemingly by itself — the man appeared from the darkness in the hallway, like a demon emerging from the depths of hell. I dropped my notepad and gawked at the television screen.
Even through the grainy footage and the worsening bursts of static, I could make out the grin plastered across the figure’s face.
The Grinning Man.
The nightlight suddenly went out, and the screen went black. It took a few moments for the lens to adjust to the dimmer moonlight coming through the window, and when it did, the Grinning Man was a dark silhouette just inside the doorway.
I stood and approached the television, bent over at the waist, face inches from the screen to get a closer look. The tape wavered badly, making everything unrecognizable. When the picture cleared, the Grinning Man had teleported from the doorway to the bedside, just in front of the camera. He peered down at Audrey.
My heartbeat thumped steadily in my ears.
The picture wavered again, for longer. When it steadied the Grinning Man had his arms extended downward, toward Audrey. She was now kicking and thrashing in bed, the Grinning Man’s hands appearing to be clasped around her throat. The blanket was flung from the bed suddenly, a big dark cloud moving across the screen.
Audrey thrashed, and the Grinning Man held on. The moonlight glanced off his teeth, making that diabolic grin a glimmering, silver blemish at the base of his darkened face. Like his grin, his eyes shined palely with manic glee.
A prolonged burst of static. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. The picture came back. The nightlight was on and Audrey sat upright in bed, grasping at her neck. The Grinning Man was gone.
I felt something in the air then, heavy like humidity. A powerful feeling that pervaded the house. . . a feeling of anger.
The VCR tape paused by itself, then began to rewind. The tape whined frantically inside the player with a high pitch. The picture on the screen sheered then went black. Smoke seeped from the vents of the player and around the edges of the opening flap. I mashed the eject button, hoping to save the tape, but the crinkling noise — that sounded like crumpling cellophane — left me with little confidence.
The flap turned back and the tape flew out as if shot from a cannon. The mess of cracked casing and wadded, tangled tape hit me in the chest and fell to the floor. The television flew off the cabinet suddenly, pushed from an unseen force, and landed before my feet with the screen shattering.
Audrey came in from the kitchen alarmed. She glanced at the TV laying busted on the floor, then at the tape next to it, and then at me. “What happened?”
“He’s real,” I said breathlessly. “I saw it. . . on the tape. He’s real.”
* * * * * *
Perhaps it was foolish to believe simply leaving the home would have helped, but it was the only thing I could think to do.
I took Audrey to a nearby motel and booked us into neighboring rooms. I sat on the edge of my bed, at a loss. I had completely underestimated what we were dealing with. Until watching that tape, I wasn’t even sure the entity was real. But not only was it real; it was dangerous.
I phoned a close acquaintance — one that wasn’t so happy to be woken at three in the morning — who worked for another paranormal investigation team. He was happy to help once I explained the seriousness of the situation.
He gave me the number of a good medium that could help give a reading, perhaps to identify what we were dealing with. I was also hoping she might have known methods to banish the entity from Audrey’s life, if it were at all possible. I decided to call the medium first thing in the morning, but it would be too late for her to do anything by then.
I lay down on the bed, my thoughts swimming in a fuzzy haze of fatigue and the comedown off an adrenaline spike.
I realized that, for the first time with true conviction, I had encountered something under the surface of the normal world; something sinister hiding in those deep and dark, murky waters below. You can live your life pretending that world is not real — many do — and sure, chances are you’ll never be affected by it. But you should know, that world is real. And it’s there, lurking in the darkest of shadows around us.
With some difficulty, I eventually fell asleep.
The short doze from three to dawn was restless. I had a nightmare I was drowning in black sludge as dark as the starless night sky above me. My arms and legs struggled through thick and oily liquid as I fought to keep my head above the surface. My breath cut short, and my chest squeezed tight. Panic flooded in through every pore on my body as the presence of evil prickled my skin. And then. . .
darkness.
I awoke to sunlight glowing around the edges of the grimy motel curtain. The bedsheets were a scrunched-up mess, and my blanket lay strewn over the floor. With a sick feeling creeping up in my gut, I realized how this scene closely mirrored what I saw in the aftermath of the attack on Audrey.
I rushed out of my room to Audrey’s next door. She didn’t answer the first few knocks, so I knocked louder. No answer. I called her name and pounded on the door. Still no answer. I rushed to the motel’s front desk, convincing them to let me into the room.
When we entered, Audrey was in the bed. Her pale face poked out from the blanket. Her lips were blue. Her eyes, vacant and lifeless, stared at nothing. My heart plummeted.
She was dead.
* * * * * *
I dream of that morning often; the moment we walked into that Godforsaken room to see Audrey drained of life. I’ll never forget that.
The case has stuck with me all these years. I’ve pored over the details many times. I relive my actions and question if there was more I could have done. I try not to blame myself — I know it’s not healthy — but I just can’t lift the weight of guilt that still sits on my shoulders (or perhaps it’s my liver that takes the brunt). Fact is, as I see it, she came to me for help, and I did not do enough.
I wish I could tell you I got revenge on this thing, that I tracked the entity down and vanquished it like a hero at the end of a Hollywood action movie. But life doesn’t tend to work like that. Besides my experience with Audrey, and that close brush I had that night in the dingy motel room, I’ve yet to cross the path of the Grinning Man ever again.
But that’s the nature of this line of work. Things don’t get wrapped up and topped off with a neatly tied bow. We deal with things that are on the edge, things that straddle the line between the world we know and the one we don’t. Things are hazy, transient, and often unknowable. Neat resolutions don’t find their way to us easily.
I can tell you that Audrey’s death was eventually ruled a case of Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome, or SADS. As you can probably guess, I have some doubts that that was all there was to it.
I still called the medium. We met a couple of weeks after Audrey’s passing. We went to the motel and booked the same room Audrey had died in (the worker at the desk was certainly curious as to why I insisted on that room, but I refused to say).
The medium’s face drained of color the second she stepped inside. She walked around the room in silence for ten minutes. She moved slowly, intently, closing her eyes and breathing deeply as she tapped into a strange, ominous world. Can’t say I envy her talents.
“Something incredibly powerful,” she eventually said. “It’s not here now, but I can still feel its vestiges. How long ago did this happen?”
“A little over two weeks.”
A grave expression crossed the medium’s face. “Yes, very powerful.”
“Do you know what the entity is?”
“Not precisely, but I can say that its soul is black and twisted.”
“That thing has a soul?”
“All intelligent forces do.”
“And what do you mean by ‘black and twisted’?”
“I mean the entity is a corrupted agent of Death itself.”
I was speechless for a moment as the weight of her words robbed me of breath. A drip coming from the sink in the bathroom was the only thing to break the crushing silence.
“What can we do about it?” I asked.
The medium smiled wistfully. At my naivety, I assume. I was young and inexperienced and ready for a fight; she knew that. Then her expression grew dark as she took one last look over the room.
“Not a thing,” she said.
|
Part 1
I am often asked how it was that I first became interested the true crime genre. It’s the sort of question I frequently get at conventions, book signings, panel meetings, and interviews, but the actual answer is fairly mundane. What I find more interesting is the source of that question, why people expect a compelling answer. I suppose we’re used to the idea we get from movies and television, where characters can often label one thing, one singular event that acts as the catalyst of their entire fictional lives. In reality, the truth is much simpler; some things just have a natural appeal to you. I couldn’t say exactly why I first found the true crime genre so compelling, or why I made it my life’s work for over two decades. However, I can say that what I find so appealing about the genre is what it has to say about the state of humanity in general, and how it edifies us about the curious blind spots of society and human behavior. In my youth I was satisfied with only with the macabre details of crime, hardly ever ruminating on the nature of the human beings involved in these gruesome dramas, and it wasn’t until my twenties that I fully grasped the social dimension of it all.
A fair amount of my fascination with the genre actually stemmed from a frustration with fictional crime, the kind you see in movies and on TV. I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s watching reruns of shows like Colombo and Hawaii Five-O, police procedurals and cop dramas with all-star casts and high-concept visions of modern crime. After the thousandth time watching the drama of a murderous knitting-society or professional rivalry gone wrong, I got frustrated with the idea that crime could be so banal yet so over-the-top in its origin. By contrast, true crime, while seemingly less interesting in its setup or execution, really highlights the remote regions of the social fabric that TV shows or movies rarely seem to acknowledge. But what I find most compelling is how a violent and heinous crime can stand in such stark contrast to a mundane, commonly-accepted reality. When I think of what human beings are capable of, I think of cases where a man murders his wife, yet is so convincing in their acts of innocence and grief that even the victims family can maintain their innocence for years. It’s hard to imagine that such individuals could possibly lead outwardly normal lives, never betraying their true character, while others of their ilk can so easily engage in barbarous crimes out in the open. Perhaps there is something to be said about what our society really values and how our expectations can be so easily subverted.
It was in my early twenties that I began pursuing the subject with great zeal, though admittedly at that point my interest had yet to mature beyond the level of decidedly juvenile fascination. I spent my college years and some years after roaming the back woods of Pennsylvania (my home state) and western New York playing the amateur detective, never concerned with money or adult responsibilities courtesy of my sizable trust fund. Yes, I was a rich kid, and during those golden years the object of money was never a barrier to my hobbies. I grew up in Mount Lebanon, an affluent suburb south of the Pittsburgh metro area, and my family was quite affluent even by those lofty standards. My youth was one of private schools and country clubs and other trappings of the wealthy, but I like to think that I was reasonably down to earth as far as that background is concerned. I would travel all over state pursuing unsolved cases in the rural heartlands, eating at diners, drinking in dive bars, and sleeping in motels, as if seeing how the other half lives was like a grand adventure. I would set myself up as a friendly nuisance in these towns and pretend that I wasn’t just another rich kid slumming it with the local color, all the while doing the junior detective bit with great interest but no great skill. With my “crew” of friends from college, we had an absolute blast traveling all over the state pursuing these gruesome mysteries, sometimes joking that we were like an R-rated version of “The Gang” from Scooby-Doo.
It seems kind of stupid when I think about it now, notwithstanding the tremendous fun we had doing it. I learned later that investigating crimes, particularly violent and heinous crimes like murder or kidnapping, can be a very dangerous business if you aren’t prepared and don’t fully respect the subject matter. After all, one can’t be too surprised if a known murderer might react in a homicidal fashion if they feel they might be cornered, especially if their pursuer is a civilian. In those early years I was blissfully ignorant of such hazards, never really taking any of that seriously. This was a lesson that I was destined to learn the hard way, but however much that experience terrifies me to this day, I am almost glad it happened. In a way, it was how my appreciation of the true crime genre genuinely matured, and how I learned to show the respect that the subject demands. Until that point, I had never been truly passionate about it, however much I cherished it as a hobby before then. I’ve lived my life believing that there is a distinct difference between simply having a “passion” versus being truly passionate about something, and the real difference is that sense of respect. And I distinctly remember the bizarre and outwardly unbelievable case that really hammered home that lesson in respect. It was in the late summer of 1989 when I investigated the mystery of Dutchman’s Hollow.
I was twenty-four years old at the time, still relatively fresh from my college years, pursuing my amateur investigations as energetically as ever. I had drifted apart somewhat from my old crew of friends from college, though I was still in touch with them. My old pattern of trolling the backwoods of Pennsylvania still occupied most of my time, and with my sizable trust fund my idle pursuits could very well have gone on forever. Failing at that, I still had what the Chinese call an “iron rice bowl”, a guaranteed well-paying job at the family business; I wasn’t too worried about losing my standing in this respect, as I was the youngest son and therefore would not inherit the throne anyway. I had a small collection of crime journals and old newspaper clippings that I regularly poured through for any new leads, and when I first stumbled upon the mention of the mysterious Dutchman’s Hollow, I felt like the luckiest junior detective in the whole world. The cases surrounding this place, though well documented, were not well-explored or investigated. In other words, it was fertile ground for somebody like myself to make their mark, and the fact that so little was conclusively known about these cases was very inviting for an inquisitive and none-too-cautious mind like my own.
The name “Dutchman’s Hollow” refers to a remote and isolated stretch of forest in the Susquehannock State Forest in north-central Pennsylvania, a place well off the beaten path even for that region. It lies in a hilly area at the north end of the Appalachian Mountains, and anybody who has been through that area knows how dense and lush the forests can be around there. At that time of the year the trees were still dense and lush with leaves, and still a brilliant and vibrant green in the weeks before the onset of autumn. I spent those days driving along remote stretches of road through the forest, with dense stands of tall elms and oaks looming over both sides of the road, like the ramparts of some primeval fortress. You could look into the trees but only see about thirty yards in before the forest growth and lack of light obscured the distance. The darkness of the forest cover is what made it particularly ominous in appearance, like gazing into the maw of some enormous creature. Dutchman’s Hollow lies well within this forest, with no direct trails leading to it, and a determined explorer has to deviate some ways off one of the trails to even reach it. I could hardly imagine even reaching a specific area in such a dense and maze-like forest, especially when visibility in any direction is so poor, and that is part of what makes the cases surrounding the Hollow so peculiar.
For a region so remote and sparsely inhabited as this, it might be hard to imagine that such a place could be hotbed of crime, and you’d normally be right. But according to old police records going back decades, the forest surrounding the Hollow is the scene a truly abnormal number of unsolved disappearances. From 1910 to 1980, there have been 136 known disappearances of people in this area. Just looking at the forest you might be inclined to think that people just got lost in and among the trees, hikers or wanderers that strayed too far in and couldn’t find there way out. This might account for some cases, but even then human remains might have been found. However, in nearly all of the 136 disappearances, no human remains were ever discovered, despite the efforts of large and well-guided search parties investigating the area. They would cover large swathes of the forest for several days, and yet no trace of the missing people would ever materialize. Most of the missing persons were not even locals in the area, being passing motorists, hitchhikers, or curious explorers, and their disappearance would typically go unnoticed for several days. Despite this area of the forest being relatively small, only about five or six miles wide in some places, they would never recover any sign of what happened to them. And that record only shows the number of disappearances up to 1980 or after 1910, and there’s very little record of disappearances before then or until I first explored the area in 1989. But there is one case, one out the 136 documented in that period, where a person was not only found, but actually found alive. This would be the case of one Raymond Hess, a strange case that only gets even stranger as it goes along.
Raymond Hess was twenty-six years old in the spring of 1977 when he disappeared while driving along the road between the small towns of Cross Fork and Galeton, Pennsylvania. He was a native of Altoona and an itinerant odd-jobber making ends meet in different occupations. He had been recently discharged from the U.S. Air Force, in which he had served as a radar technician in Germany and Turkey, and had most recently taken up work as a house-painter while learning to become an electrician. On Sunday, March 6th, 1977, he was driving to a job site in Clearfield, Pennsylvania when he disappeared. Though he was reported late for the job in Clearfield, this wasn’t considered unusual for roaming workers like him. It wasn’t until Wednesday, March 9th, that his absence was noticed by his family in Altoona, who had expected him home that morning. On March 10th, with his continued failure to show or contact his family, he was officially reported missing to the police. However, State Police authorities had relatively little to go on based on the known facts. He had set out from Galeton and failed to show for the job in Clearfield, but with no trace of him along that long stretch of road, the potential search area was quite large.
On March 14th, over a week since his disappearance, his vehicle was discovered *inside* the forest off the road between Cross Forks and Galeton. The vehicle, a blue 1969 Pontiac Tempest, was found roughly forty yards into the treeline and apparently covered with branches and leaves. This find, though somewhat encouraging, was considered quite bizarre by investigators. It was considered highly unusual for a car to not only be found so far off the road in a dense forest, but to also be consciously camouflaged from view. The original assumption was that he might have accidentally run off the road and injured himself, wandering into the forest in a daze, but the car was mostly undamaged. A speeding car plunging into the forest to that depth almost certainly would have struck a tree and been severely damaged, but the mostly undamaged car instead seemed almost like it was carefully driven into the forest. Furthermore, there was no blood or any sign of physical injury inside the car, which would likely have been present if it were an accident. Based on this, the assumption changed that Hess might have deliberately driven into the forest and walked further in for some reason, which they assumed might have been to possibly commit suicide. Though Hess was known as a solitary man with few friends, nobody in his family indicated that he was depressed or suicidal. The strange disappearance of Raymond Hess continued to mystify authorities for another week when it came to an unexpected and bizarre conclusion.
On Saturday the 29th of March, a young man was found wandering by the side of the road in the area where Hess had disappeared two weeks before. The man was found in a state of “general undress” according to the report, as well as dehydrated and suffering from hypothermia. When brought in by local authorities, he was quickly identified as Raymond Hess, the missing man. Investigators had been on the verge of abandoning the case and were astonished that he had turned up alive. He was quite dazed and delirious from his experience, but he made a fairly rapid recovery from his ordeal. However, when asked about his experiences during those two weeks, he claimed that he had *no memory whatsoever* of anything that transpired during his absence. He couldn’t say how his vehicle ended up inside the forest, or where he had been during those days, or if anybody else had been responsible. However positive the news of his reappearance, investigators were frustrated by this sizable lapse in his memory that prevented any true conclusion to the case.
The story of Raymond Hess did not end there, however. His later life was marred by personal difficulties and other unexpected and dark developments. In July of 1978, he was in Pittsburgh taking a job as an apprentice electrician when he was actually named as a possible suspect in the disappearance of a local woman. He was known to have been acquainted with the woman, another wanderer like himself, and he was actually said to have been the last person to see her alive. What was left of her was found in an overgrown ditch next to a junkyard. The remains had been dismembered and burned, with a number of deep gouges in the bones, as if portions of flesh had been cut off of them. She was identified by dental records from a bit of scorched jawbone found in the pile. Hess had an undeniable proximity to the crime, and though he was interviewed several times by police and even briefly detained, there was little to no physical evidence linking the crime to anybody in particular. Hess abruptly left Pittsburgh shortly after that, even quitting his promising job as an electrician. He resurfaced in Columbus, Ohio the next year when he was *again* named as a possible suspect in a similar disappearance and murder, this time of a man with whom he was also acquainted. Again, despite his proximity to the crime, there was no real evidence suggesting his guilt, and he yet again faded off the grid. This process repeated itself two more times in Ohio and Indiana. Then, in September of 1980, he suddenly left the United States, giving only a slight indication that he was moving to “somewhere in Latin America”.
The strange case of Raymond Hess would be a focal point in my investigation, but I resolved to start with towns in the general vicinity of Dutchman’s Hollow. I made the long drive from my home in Mount Lebanon to a town in the area called Renovo, a fairly small town of about 1,500 people on the West Branch Susquehanna River, a trip that took me about three-and-a-half hours. It was a long way to go for one adventure, but this was in the late 80s, when gas was practically cheaper than dirt, and the opportunity was too tempting for me to ignore. I made the trip in my steel-blue 1975 Cadillac De Ville, the two door convertible, and one of my cherished possessions. Renovo, only about six miles from the trailhead leading to Dutchman’s Hollow, seemed like a good place to act as a “base” for my investigation. Of course, it seems dumb now that I would so willingly attempt to explore such a remote area known for strange disappearances, but I was a sturdy young man still convinced of my youthful invincibility, and I wouldn’t be doing this alone, either. My friend Clarissa, part of the old crew, would join me in a few days, and *surely* between the two of us we would be safe.
I arrived in town on a Friday afternoon and began the typical routine I had formulated over the years, which started with a visit to the local greasy spoon. To my delight, I saw that the diner was also populated by two old men, local “good old boys” that could be an excellent source of information. I introduced myself in usual fashion, and over a cheeseburger and countless cups of coffee I got to know these two men, Ernest and Jed. We talked for hours about local legends and folklore, and I couldn’t have asked for anybody more knowledgeable about local goings-on. No doubt these two old boys were rather amused with the wandering rich kid taking such an interest in the local flavor, but I think we established a good rapport that could be invaluable. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that they knew all about the reputation that surrounded Dutchman’s Hollow, and the cycle of disappearances was an established part of older local legends. Not too many young folks new about those legends they said, that it was mostly the subject of myth by this point. But these two men were still firm believers in the stories about the area.
“You won’t catch me up there ever, not for a million dollars you won’t,” said Jed.
“Old folks around here will tell you the same thing. Young folks don’t know so much, but they don’t go around there anyways,” said Ernest.
I learned a lot from Ernest and Jed, and I was pleased to have made a good impression on the locals before starting out on my investigation. Later that evening I settled into a room at a local motel and kept up studying the reports and stories about the disappearances around the area, but all the while Ernest and Jed’s words kept running through my head. According to them, the local legends surrounding the area were an older phenomenon and few still heeded them. At first, this was reassuring, because if the stories were that old and had since faded away, then it might mean I could explore the area in relative safety. At the same time, I was starting to feel a growing apprehension about this whole misguided adventure, and having confirmation from the locals that there was something strange about the area made this feeling more pronounced. Nonetheless, I had resolved that I would do some exploring there myself before Clarissa arrived in two days. I had a rough route along a hiking trail sketched out, and with some moderate hiking provisions, I was physically well-prepared for the journey.
By ten o’clock the next morning, I stood at the edge of the forest leading to the Hollow, and my prior feelings of apprehension returned as I observed the path leading in. I knew the forests in this region were dense and wild, but standing immediately at the edge of it looking in was an ominous experience. The trees and brush here were closely spaced, with the tree tops forming a particularly dense canopy overhead that almost completely blocked sunlight. Further in I could see that the underbrush wasn’t too thick, but the upward slope and close together trees limited forward visibility to thirty yards at most. From the outside, I could only get a mild sense of the darkness under the trees, but actually stepping past the treeline changed the atmosphere completely. When I stepped into forest proper, it almost seemed like the time of day had instantly changed from mid-morning to evening, a startling shift that I hardly expected. Now I was starting to get nervous and rethinking my commitment to this investigation, but the alternative was sit on my ass back in town for two days until Clarissa showed up and restored my confidence.
Lacking any better ideas, I started on my way up the trail. I wasn’t sure if I would try to make it all the way to the Hollow, but going a little ways and getting a sense of the land seemed appropriate. The trail I followed was not well-maintained, occluded in many places by underbrush on both sides, so I had to go quite slow to maintain my bearings. I figured the whole hike would be about four miles round trip, not much of a challenge for me, but the land was steeper than I expected. I followed the trail religiously, only taking my eyes off it to scan my surroundings. Knowing the reputation of this place, I remained alert and stopped frequently to look around for anything suspicious. The forest was unearthly still, with only a slight breeze moving among the trees, rustling the leaves overhead. It occurred to me around this time that I probably should have brought a gun along with me, isolated as I was in a region that was known to be dangerous. This belated realization was yet another example of my decidedly poor planning of this expedition. All I had on me was a small utility knife, a multi-tool that I had been extraordinarily proud of earlier but would be a poor choice for self defense. I suppose it was better than nothing, but it struck me then that I was not well-prepared at all if I actually did stumble upon something around Dutchman’s Hollow.
To say that I felt like I was being watched would be an understatement. I’ve heard people describe this eerie feeling before, but they’ve never done justice to how profoundly unpleasant that feeling is. I trudged along the trail feeling this sensation grow stronger as I approached the point where the path to the Hollow breaks off the main trail. When I reached this point, I stopped to have a look at my surroundings and contemplate possibly going ahead. The “trail” that led off in the direction of the Hollow was barely a trail at all, instead being more like a faint string of bare spots in the underbrush leading off to the southwest. I don’t know if it was just me and my nerves, but I could swear the forest along this path was even darker and more ominous than the rest. The silence in particular was disturbing to me; a forest at this time in the summer should have been more active and noisy, with droning insects and warbling birds and all kinds of forest creatures. Some of that was present, but at a strangely low volume, hardly audible above the sound of trees rustling in the wind.
After about five minutes staring into the direction of the Hollow, I made up my mind to turn back and head towards the road where I had parked my car. I had quite enough this eerie forest for one day, and I was almost desperate to leave it behind. Before I turned back, I decided to get a picture of the trail leading to the Hollow, a picture that didn’t turn out particularly well due to the poor lighting in the forest, but I wasn’t interested in sticking around to get it right. I went back along the trail the way I came at a much brisker pace than before, not bothering to look around for any sign of danger this time. As kept going, I was struck by a powerful anxious feeling that I might be lost in this forest, that I might never find my way out because of poor visibility in all directions. I just did my best to keep my nose in dirt on the trail, and after about fifteen minutes, I was relieved to finally see the edge of the forest and beyond, the shoulder by the side of the road where my car was parked. Without ceremony I hopped in got my car going back in the direction of Renovo.
The first thing I did back in town was to visit that comfortable old diner. My fear and anxiety dropped off enormously when I crossed the threshold, glad to be back someplace sheltered and familiar. As before, Ernest and Jed were parked in their usual booth palavering over their endless cups of coffee, and they ushered me over as I walked in. I remember how glad I was to see their faces, and I greeted them with great warmth. Even though it was past lunchtime, I ordered a plate of bacon and eggs, to the amusement of my companions, but I wasn’t embarrassed. My experience in the woods had left me completely famished, and bacon and eggs was what I craved. Over my ‘lunch’ I told Ernest and Jed about my trip into the forest, which made their usually good humor instantly dissolve. They were astounded that I would do something like even after their stories and veiled warnings about having anything to do with that place. In Jed’s words, I was a “damn fool” for doing that, and Ernest had some words about how young folks don’t listen close enough when it comes to serious matters like this. I can’t say that I disagreed with them; I was in that forest and I know just what I felt being anywhere near Dutchman’s Hollow.
Despite their admonishments, Ernest and Jed were still reassuring and supportive to me, and even though their warnings were clear, I still resolved to return to the forest the next day. Perhaps it was the sense of restored well-being I received returning to town, or maybe it was some strange excitement at feeling vindicated for walking through those woods, but I was set on finding out all I could during my trip up here. I didn’t tell Ernest or Jed that I planned to go back there, but with their warnings fresh in my mind, I was intent on being more cautious. As soon as I left, I headed over to a hunting gear store to buy myself some more impressive means of self defense. This shop did actually sell some firearms, but I settled for a large hunting knife that must have been twice the size of my original utility knife. With the rest of the day to kill, and not intending to go back before tomorrow, I decided I would try to visit a library or historical society in the area to do some more research on local history. Ernest and Jed were pretty good sources of general knowledge, but I thought a more detailed history of the area might shed some light on what exactly I was walking into.
One thing I love about small towns: they care about their local history in a way that more cosmopolitan city folks don’t. In the library in South Renovo I found a whole section on the history of Clinton County and the surrounding areas going back to Pre-Colonial times. There were books on native tribes, notable settlers, the natural landscape, and all sorts of topics. In one book I finally found some information regarding the origins of the legend of Dutchman’s Hollow. In the year 1656, a Dutch settler named Wikus van der Heide and his family arrived in the New World through the port of New Amsterdam, which then was still part of the Dutch colony of New Netherland. He originally settled on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, today part of the state of Maryland, where he prospered as a trader in fabrics and pelts. He and his family would live there for nearly twenty years, until the year 1674, when in the aftermath of the Third Anglo-Dutch War the New Netherland colony was ceded to the British. Wikus and his family, possessing a strong antipathy towards British rule, left the colony in disgust and went north, into the wilds of the northern Appalachian mountains in modern day Pennsylvania. He and his family would settle in a very remote stretch of forest, far from British authority, in a region that would bear the name Dutchman’s Hollow after its original residents.
Though the region in which they settled was still populated by a native tribe, the van der Heide family was still determined to call the forest home. Early friction between the natives and the new settling family eventually gave way to a mutual understanding and tentative peace that would last for well over a century. Dutchman’s Hollow was situated in a part of the forest that had great spiritual significance to the local tribe, who feared and hated the region and regarded it as a dwelling of powerful and ancient spirits. Despite avoiding the region, they opposed van der Heide’s decision to the settle there, fearing it would provoke the wrath of the spirits said to inhabit the Hollow. This opposition to settlement would fuel much of the violence between the natives and settlers, but eventually the natives were driven from the region by another tribe, who permitted the van der Heide family to live there so long as they avoided contact with one another. Wikus van der Heide would call this area home for the rest of his life, as would his descendants, who would remain there for centuries, their backs to the outside world.
Other than that, not much was really known about the early settlers in the forest. Nobody has seen the family for hundreds of years, and it is thought they might have perished during a harsh winter in 1806, which was the last time anybody had ever seen them. Outsiders know little about it, and those who do generally avoid it out of habit and deference to local legend. Armed with this knowledge, I was now determined to return to the forest the next day to continue my investigation, my curiosity overriding my fear and apprehension. In an odd way, it was actually reassuring to know that the original natives shared my own fearful impressions of the forest, that they too were intimidated by its dark and ominous atmosphere. In my mind I rationalized my fears as being the product of that atmosphere, that despite the abnormal number of disappearances in the area the eerie feeling of dread was due to my own imagination running wild and overpowering my reason. Nothing was really wrong, I thought, I would be more prepared and cautious the next time, and nothing could get the drop on me so long as I was vigilant. Having thoroughly rationalized my fears, I found my courage restored and I prepared for another trip into the forest, hopeful that my newfound courage would hold out.
The next day I again found myself standing at the edge of the forest, suddenly reminded of why I was afraid of this place before. Worse, today was mostly overcast and now even less light made it through the forest canopy to the trail below. But I still held on to my previous rationale that my fears were overblown and nothing would happen to a plucky young fellow like myself if I was prepared and extra cautious. Once again I stepped across threshold of the trees and went my way along the trail. I remembered the trail well and my pace was much quicker than last time, but the feeling of being watched was even more pronounced than before. The fact that the forest was even darker than yesterday certainly didn’t help to reassure me. I pushed on regardless until I reached the point where I had stopped the last time and regarded the spotty, unclear trail supposedly leading to Dutchman’s Hollow. To this day I can still remember quite clearly the powerful feeling of dread that struck me while I gazed into that dense forest, a feeling that nearly forced me to turn right back around. It felt like I was trespassing in a powerful, inviolable place, and I felt terribly exposed, like somebody was watching me as I crossed the boundary. But there wasn’t any decision to be made. I was determined to get farther than I had yesterday, and so I took a deep breath and stepped forward onto the trail to the Hollow.
At first I felt relief when I made that first step, relief that nothing dreadful had happened immediately, that the forest around me seemed unchanged. I tried to keep my eyes riveted to the sparse trail ahead of me, a trail that was much choppier and less clear than before. The path mostly consisted of short clearings in the underbrush arranged in a general line, requiring short stops at each to spot the next one in the sequence to stay oriented. Now my pace was much slower, giving me time to appreciate scenery surrounding the trail. As I went on, the forest canopy seemed to get even more dense and came to a lower height the further I proceeded. The forest became thicker and more claustrophobic at every point, and now very little daylight penetrated to the forest floor. Thankfully the trail was now going down at a gentle slope, but the underbrush only seemed to get thicker and more tangled, consuming the energy I would have been saving going downhill. I had no idea just what I would find at the end of this trail; maybe an empty patch of forest, or the ruins of a old settlement, or even the remnants of a village littered with corpses of the people who have gone missing up here. Around this time my common sense was finally starting to regain control, and I thought better of pushing my luck further than I already had.
I came to a bend i
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Frank’s heart sank as low as it could go before he even finished reading the email. Another job opportunity was out of his grasp before he even had a chance to make it to a second interview. And he knew why.
“It was Rudy. I know it was. That fucking bastard.”
Rudy was his old manager from his old job. The one he had gotten fired from over ten months ago. He pictured the recruiter calling Rudy for a reference, and he could see in his mind the smug look that Rudy must have had as he listed all of Frank’s flaws and expressed in great detail the reason that Frank had been let go.
“It’s bullshit. I didn’t do a damn thing wrong,” Frank muttered as he pulled out a Marlboro from the pack on his computer desk. He lit the cigarette with his lighter as he stared at the computer screen in front of him, his glare directed toward his email inbox as though it had done something bad to him.
After slamming the lighter back onto the table, he took a very long drag from the cigarette. Blowing out smoke, he pointed at the screen. “I didn’t do anything to deserve this!” Frank screamed, the words barely audible with the cigarette dangling from his lips. “Fuck you, Rudy! Keeping food off my table for a couple of pictures? You dirty rotten piece of…”
Frank refrained from screaming more once he realized that it would be pointless to chastise a computer. He only wished Rudy was around so he could punch him right in the nose. The image of a bloody-nosed Rudy gave him a chuckle, which he suppressed with a cough that lasted longer than he would have liked.
Once his lungs were clear, he took another long drag. Then he sat back down at the desk, knowing that he would have to continue his search. He wasn’t sure how much longer he would last. His savings were being depleted slowly but surely. He’d been out of work for far too long. If he didn’t find something soon, he’d be in trouble.
He began to go back to one of the job boards online. As he skimmed down some job listings, he came across the one he had just been turned down for again. Rudy’s smug face popped back into his mind, a little less bloody in his imagination this time. A strong feeling of discouragement came over him like a tidal wave. Frank stood from his desk and began to pace his living room, continually taking drags on his cigarette as tried to walk off his anger. But the anger would not pass. He was really pissed off. At Rudy, at the recruiter for believing Rudy’s horseshit, and at the summer heat that filled his apartment.
“God damn, it’s hot in here,” Frank muttered as he turned his oscillating fan to its highest setting. He stood back and stared at it as it hummed and vibrated, unable to enjoy its lukewarm breeze within the confines of his steamy apartment.
“Forget this,” he said, almost growling his words.
Frank didn’t even bother to turn his computer off as he stormed out of his apartment, slamming the door hard behind him. He needed to clear his head. A walk on a sunny August day would hopefully do just that.
As he exited the front of his apartment building, he took a deep breath and tossed his cigarette butt into the bushes that adorned his building’s front yard.
It was a very bright afternoon and he felt much better just being outdoors. He had been cooped up in the apartment far too long, sitting at his computer, typing away, filling out endless applications. All he ever seemed to look at lately were applications. Each one filled with menial information sent to prospective employees who never even met him, yet had no qualms about turning him down and rejecting him coldly.
And of course it was always coldly. All of them were judging him based on an innocent pastime that had hurt nobody. Still and all, he felt the familiar pangs of guilt begin to consume him again.
“Should never have had those pictures at work,” he thought as he started to leave his block. He needed to get his mind off of things. But a mere walk down the very boring city streets he saw day in day out wasn’t enough. He needed tranquility. He wanted to immerse himself in nature, and escape to a new environment somewhere, not only physically, but emotionally as well. He wanted to find peace.
But his mind fought him at every turn, particularly with the job that had been taken from him returning to the forefront of his thoughts. How could he find peace when the world was against him? He figured the only peace he would ever find was when he was dead and buried.
That was when he thought of the cemetery. It was only a few blocks away and he remembered there being a duck pond located somewhere on the grounds. What sounded more tranquil than that? Peace, nature, and barely anybody around to bother him. Deciding that that was where he wanted to be, he turned left at the upcoming corner and headed toward Cedar Hill cemetery.
The large gateway greeted him as he arrived at his destination. As he walked in he scanned the area to see if there were any people out and about. He saw no one, figuring that because it was a weekday, most people would be working. They would be too busy slaving away for a company that didn’t care about them to mourn anybody, which meant he could mourn his own pathetic life without any gawkers present.
It only took him about twenty minutes to get to the center of the cemetery. Frank was happy to see only one single groundskeeper riding a tractor in the distance as he walked past the many tombstones on his path to the pond. He would be able to be by himself and stew in his own misery. But maybe not complete misery.
He approached the duck pond and cracked a slight smile. There were about six ducks wading slowly across the pond, and the water fountain in the very center was spitting two cascading streams of water back into the pond itself. This flow of water made the whole area seem to cool by about ten degrees, particularly in the shade of one of the trees looming over the side of the pond. It was the very definition of tranquility.
Frank sat down on one of the benches and took in the sunlit sights. His problems wouldn’t find him here. He could be at peace here. He fixated on one of the ducks that waded close to him. He grew envious.
“Lucky little duck,” he said. “Get to swim around all day with your family and get fed by people. Wish I could join you.” That was when he heard her voice.
“Hello,” the soft voice said.
Frank turned around and saw a little girl standing a few feet behind his bench. She smiled at him as she nervously twisted her upper body the opposite direction of her lower half, her hands coyly clasped behind her back. He made her out to be about eight years old. She wore a pleated pink skirt topped with a white sleeveless blouse adorned with a kitten design embroidered on the front. Her long hair was brown and straight, and her smile was warm and friendly. He addressed her in kind.
Hi, there,” he said with a smile and a nod.
“Are you here for the ducks?” she asked as she took two steps closer. “To feed them?”
“No. No, I’m just here to relax. And watch them swim.”
She seemed to take this as an invitation as she sat right next to him. She looked at him with an eager curiosity. “I love to watch them swim around. Sometimes they walk on the grass. But never close enough to touch. I want a duck for a pet. Do you have pets?”
Hearing her light airy voice amused him. “I used to have a dog a long time ago,” he said, actually enjoying the simplicity of the conversation they were having.
“Dogs are too big. And you have to walk them. And they eat too much. Then you have to clean up after them when they go in the grass. I’d rather have a duck. You just throw bread and they eat it and they’re done.” She had looked at the ducks with an appreciative awe in her face as she spoke.
Frank leaned in to look at her closer. “Do you ever feed the ducks?”
She shook her head. “No. I never did. But I saw the man that works here do it.”
Feeling at ease, Frank placed his arm against the back of the bench so he could get a better view of her. Watching as she swung her sandaled feet just above the ground, he asked what her name was.
“Sophie Larson,” she said, matter-of-factly.
He extended his hand for her to shake. “Pleasure to meet you, Sophie Larson. I’m Frank Tulley.”
She placed her small hand in his as he shook it gently. “Hello, Frank.”
Frank looked around to see if anyone else was present, but he saw nobody except the groundskeeper driving his tractor many yards away, almost on the other side of the cemetery. He leaned a little closer to ask her a question. He deemed it an important question but almost forgot to ask as he couldn’t help but pick up the sweet scent she wore. It must have been a body wash or shampoo. He loved it. It reminded him of some type of fruit. He couldn’t figure out which fruit, but he didn’t dwell on it long. He had his question.
“Is your mom or dad around?”
“My mommy is nearby,” she replied, pulling a tiny flower from off a bush beside the bench.
“Oh, yeah?” He looked around again, this time for effect. “I don’t see anybody.”
“What about your mommy? Where is she?” She asked this as she stood up from the bench, only to kneel down near the edge of the pond and give all her attention to the ducks. She put out both her hands as though she wanted to grab the ducks if they would come close enough. It was typical childlike behavior.
Frank shifted his body forward on the bench and tilted his head slightly. “My mother…passed away many years ago.”
Sophie turned her attention back towards him and now walked over to the other side of the bench and sat beside him. “Oh. Do you miss her?”
Frank shifted his body on the bench again to remain in her eye line. “Yes. But she was old and very sick, I’m afraid. It was her time to go.”
“I’m sorry.” She placed her hand on his arm to convey comfort. “Don’t be sad.”
Frank smiled and touched her bare knee. “Thank you. But I’m not sad. Not if I have friends like you. We can be friends, right?” His hand remained on her knee.
Her eyes lit up. “Can we be? I never had any grown up friends before.”
“You do now,” he said, smirking ever so slightly.
He suddenly noticed an elderly couple walking down the path that surrounded the pond and moved his hand quickly from her knee. He continued to talk to Sophie as he carefully kept ticking his eyes at the couple until they had finally walked out of sight. He was relieved they didn’t stop at the pond. It gave him the chance to get to know Sophie. They talked about games, and toys, and their favorite animals, all for a good twenty five minutes. Until Sophie got up to leave.
“I have to go now,” she said. “To see my mom.”
Frank looked disappointed. “Can’t you stay a little longer?” he asked, watching her start to walk off. “I could help you find your mom for you.” He figured she must be nearby visiting a departed relative.
Sophie laughed. “Silly, I know where she is. We can see each other again next time, Frank. I always come here to play.”
Frank sighed. “Okay. Well, it was nice meeting you.” He waved at her as she reciprocated with a wave of her own.
“Bye, Frank!” She started to skip off down the path.
Frank turned forward in his seat and looked at the ducks. He felt good. He hadn’t felt that good in a long time. Sophie had lifted his spirits during a brief period of despair. But now he had something to look forward to: Seeing his little friend again.
When he turned back around to get another glimpse of her, he saw that she was nowhere to be found. He tried to see where she could have gone, what path she could have taken to get out of his sight so quickly, but he didn’t think about it too much. Kids were fast. And Frank was hungry. It was time for lunch. He took one last look at the duck pond and walked off, heading to the nearest pizza place for a slice.
The next day Frank decided to visit the pond again. He didn’t feel like filling out applications at his computer when there was another beautiful summer day awaiting him. Besides, who knew if he wouldn’t get lucky and run into Sophie again?
Luck was on his side. As he approached the pond, there he saw Sophie, kneeling down at the edge of the pond, splashing the water toward the ducks that were several feet away. He approached cautiously at first, but once he saw that there was nobody else nearby, his enthusiasm kicked in.
“Hi, buddy!” he said in a loud, almost high pitched voice.
Sophie turned around and got up from her crouched position. “Frank!” She jumped up and down as she got nearer to him, signaling to Frank that she was happy to see him.
Frank sat on the same spot on the bench as the day before and Sophie stood directly in front of him. She could barely contain her smile. He felt the same way.
“Did you miss me?” he asked.
“Yes!” She sounded like she meant it. Frank liked that. It gave him confidence.
“Awesome!” He reached into his pocket. “And I have a surprise for you…”
Sophie clapped her hands as she jumped up and down in place. “Ooh! What is it? What is it? Tell me!”
He pulled out a small Ziploc bag with bread crumbs and held it in front of her. The joy that filled her was overwhelming. She could barely contain herself. With her eyes wide, she accepted the bag as Frank placed it in her small hands.
“I brought bread for the ducks,” Frank stated, emphasizing every syllable. “You can feed them all you like today!”
Sophie seemed speechless. She only let out a happy sigh. This appealed to Frank.
“Thank you, thank you, oh, thank you,” she finally uttered, as she seemed to have trouble opening the bag.
“Here, sweetie, let me.” Frank took the bag from her. He opened it and took out one of the bread pieces as he stepped with Sophie toward the edge of the pond. “Now watch,” he said.
Frank tossed the first piece of bread far into the water and Sophie got all excited to witness all the ducks converge on the bread. The first duck snapped it up as the others swam toward Frank and Sophie, each looking to get their share of the lunch that had been brought to them. He handed her back the bag. She dipped her hand in.
“Go on, throw it like I did.” Frank couldn’t stop smiling as he watched her.
Sophie threw in her first piece, almost screeching with excitement as one of the ducks went aggressively for the floating meal. She threw in another, then another, clearly having the time of her life. She was jumping up and down, laughing and smiling. It was amazing how thrilled she seemed to be while taking part in such a mundane task.
Frank in turn was having his own fun. He couldn’t take his eyes off her silky smooth legs as she leaned over the edge to throw the bread to the ducks. He took notice of the fact that she was wearing the same exact outfit as the day before, but dismissed it on account of her having such a good time.
“I can make them go wherever I want!” she exclaimed with glee, continuing to throw the bread pieces into the water. “I can make them fight, too.”
Frank sat back down on the bench and reveled in her enjoyment. It was like he had created a work of art and was now able to take in what he had created. The young girl was a sight to behold in his eyes. So full of life. It was what he liked about kids. He pulled out his cell phone.
“Sophie, turn around so I can take a picture.”
She turned and posed with the bag of bread in her hand, smiling so wide her eyes were shut. Frank aimed the phone’s camera lens at her and took the picture. Then he took another.
Frank stood. “Sophie, why don’t you pose with one hand holding your skirt while pointing your toes?” Here, like this…”
He demonstrated the pose he wanted her to take, getting into a very feminine stature. She laughed when he did it, as did he. But she listened. She listened to every one of his suggestions, being sure to give him every picture he wanted. Once he felt he had enough, he sat back down. Content, he swiped through the pictures he had saved on his phone. He was very satisfied with his direction and particularly his subject matter.
“Don’t use up all the bread too fast,” he said as he leaned back in his seat.
“I won’t,” she replied, barely paying attention.
He watched as she threw more bread at the ducks. When she had used up most of the bread and the bag was looking empty, she sat next to him on the bench and they talked some more. He told her all about what he used to do when he was a kid, thrilling her with his stories of the movies he went to see and the fun things he used to do like camping, and fishing, and making model rockets. He had her complete attention by this point.
He was also quite impressed that he had captured her attention for almost two hours. With no interruption. Only one or two people had passed by the pond during the time. But not to intervene. They probably had mistaken her for his own daughter as they went about their business. But the question he kept thinking about was where her actual parents were. He decided to approach the topic.
“So tell me, Sophie… Where is your mommy? Does she mind you being here alone?”
Sophie played with one of the flowers off the bush next to her again, fiddling with it between her fingers, but not plucking it out. “No. She knows I’m a big girl.”
Frank started to stroke her hair. “That you are. But she must live nearby, right?”
Sophie nodded. “Yeah, we live over there.” Sophie pointed over the rear of the bench.
Frank looked over into the distance and could see the direction she was pointing: Past the graves and over the tops of the trees he could make out the apartment buildings that were just across the street from the cemetery, well past the fence on the other side of the grounds.
“Oh, okay. That’s not far. Do you have any other people that you live with? Brothers or sisters?”
Sophie shook her head. “Nope, just me and my mommy.” She got up and seemed restless as she started picking small flowers from out of the grass surrounding the area.
Frank was curious to know more. “But isn’t your mommy at work, right now? It’s a weekday.”
Sophie didn’t look at him. She just continued to pull flowers as she spoke. “She’s sick. Like your mommy was. She always stays home.”
Frank nodded to himself. It made sense. Sophie didn’t live far. Her mother was probably bedridden, sleeping while her daughter came outside to play for a few hours.
A few hours. That was all he would need.
Frank sat up straight and spoke with enthusiasm. “Guess what, Sophie? I have another surprise for you.”
His tone and words drew her attention from the grass. She stood and looked at him with pure eagerness filling her innocent face. “Another surprise? What is it?”
“Remember when I said I collected lots and lots of toys?”
Sophie’s eyes widened with anticipation. “Yeah…”
“Well I saved all of them over the years. I have a huge collection at my apartment. And I would love to show them to you tomorrow. What do you say? Wanna come back to my place and play?”
His heart raced as she jumped up and down with excitement. “Yay! I definitely want to! Can we go right now?”
He would have loved to go away with her right then, right there. But he had already spent two hours with her. Any further time spent away from her home could cause people to worry and come looking for her. He didn’t want to worry anyone. If he could spend two hours today, he surely could do the same the next day. That would be enough time to play. Plenty for what he had in mind.
“Not right now, but definitely tomorrow. I don’t want you to be away from your mother for too long. Besides, that will give me time to get some chocolate chip ice cream!”
She clapped her hands in delight. “Oh, yay!”
“That sounds good, right, sweetie?” He placed his hand on her shoulder, rubbing her arm up and down as he watched her nod in agreement.
“Oh, yeah, I love ice cream. I used to eat it all the time.”
He couldn’t contain his smile as he cupped both her hands in his and pulled her closer to him as he remained seated on the bench. “Well, tomorrow, you can have as much as you like. Just one thing…”
He paused, making sure that the most important instructions be made absolutely crystal clear. He spoke slowly as not to lose her attention. “Make sure this stays our secret, okay? Don’t tell anyone, not even your mommy, okay?”
She looked puzzled. “Why don’t you want me to tell her?”
He swallowed before speaking. “Well…she might not like you hanging out with a stranger. You know how adults can be. So it’s better if you don’t tell anyone. Because we know better. We know that we’re really good friends, right?”
She smiled. “That’s right. You really are my friend.”
“Super,” he said as he tapped the tip of her nose. “And that leaves more ice cream for us!” He grabbed her belly to gently tickle her as she laughed. “So meet me here tomorrow at 1:00 in the afternoon. Then we can walk back to my place. When we’re done playing with all my toys and games and stuffing our bellies with ice cream, I’ll bring you back. Okay?”
She nodded in agreement. “Okay!”
He placed his face closer to hers as he put his forefinger up to his lips and he whispered, “And remember… It’s our secret. Shhhhh!”
“Our secret!” She mimicked him, barely able to match his shushing noise as she laughed uncontrollably.
He watched her walk off after that, keeping his eyes on her the whole time as she disappeared down the path that led to the trees in the distance. Once she had moved out of sight, he turned and walked away, his heart beating faster than it had before. He was excited. There was much to do. The first stop on the way home would be the supermarket. He bought five different flavors of ice cream and rushed home with them as though they would melt if he didn’t hurry.
Once home, he pulled out all his game boards and collectable toys, set his video game console up to the TV in his bedroom, and tested a spot on the bed where they would both sit as they played. It was a small bed, but he got enough pillows and smoothed the sheets out to make sure it would be comfortable for two people to lay down on. Everything was perfect. There was just one more thing to prepare. Perhaps the most important ingredient.
He got his bottle of sleeping pills out of the bathroom cabinet. They were prescription strength. He knew they would work. But he had to test something. With a spoon from the kitchen, he mashed one of the many tablets into fine dust. Yes. That would work. Four or five of those would easily mix in with the ice cream he had bought. He was set for his visitor.
He could hardly sleep that night waiting for the next day to come.
He arrived fifteen minutes early at the pond. He sat on the bench and kept looking all around. The cemetery was as empty as ever. Once the time had reached 1:25 he began to worry that she wouldn’t be coming. He found this to be extremely disappointing.
He stood and paced around a bit, taking full notice of the dark storm clouds that were beginning to form. It looked like it was going to start to pour soon. But he hadn’t thought to bring an umbrella. And just when he thought she wasn’t going to show, the very second that he had the notion of forgetting about the whole thing, he turned and she was there, full of smiles and laughter.
“Hiya, Frank.”
“Hello, Sophie.” He stepped over to her and gave her a hug, dismissing the fact that this was the third day in a row she had been wearing the same outfit. It might have concerned him had he not thought it made her look absolutely adorable. The skirt was always a nice touch in his opinion. It showed off her slender legs, of course.
He sat with her on the bench. Eagerness filled his face as he heard the thunder start to sound above him. “Are you ready to have a good time?”
Sophie’s smile was present, but it began to fade as she looked up at the sky. “Yeah,” she replied, halfheartedly.
Frank noticed her sudden loss of enthusiasm. “What’s wrong, Sophie?”
She looked at him earnestly. “Maybe… Maybe we should go to your house another time. It looks like it’s going to rain.”
Frank waved it off. “Oh, it’s okay. By the time it starts, we’ll be at my place. Nice and dry. As long as we leave now.”
He stood and held out his hand for her to take, eager to get moving. Another faint rumble of thunder drew her attention toward the darkening sky. “I don’t know if I should. I can’t be out in the rain.”
Again he dismissed her concerns. “Oh, a little sprinkle won’t hurt you.”
She looked at him with a serious expression. “Oh, but it can. I should go home.”
Frank was getting a little irritated. But he didn’t want to show his emotions and scare her off so he laughed. Then he said, “Sophie, I promise you won’t get caught in the rain. But only if we leave now. You do want to see where I live, don’t you? I mean, after all, I bought all that ice cream just for you.”
She looked at the sky again for a few seconds as though debating on what was more important, rain or ice cream. She stared at Frank and then, with the faintest hint of her smile returning, said, “Okay.”
Frank smiled back. “Great.” He grabbed her hand without any warning or consent and began to walk off with her behind him, trailing him. His eagerness to get her home was growing. But she just wouldn’t make it easy.
Sophie halted, causing Frank to stop as well. “But I have to get an umbrella first. Just in case.”
Frank sighed, his impatience showing even through the polite tone of his voice. “But that’s only going to delay us. We’d save time if we just…”
Sophie took the lead now, pulling him by the hand as she walked down the path toward the apartment buildings on the other side of the cemetery. “Come on, Frank. I don’t live far. I just want to stop home for a second. Only a second.”
Reluctantly, he followed her, his hand firmly in hers as they walked down the path. “Are you sure…? Sophie, we really shouldn’t go…” He didn’t know how to convince a little girl that he didn’t want to be seen by anyone while with her. Especially not her mother.
He worried that if she went into her apartment she wouldn’t come back out. He envisioned her mother being awake because that was just his luck. Then she would ask about the strange old man and want to know what he was doing with her daughter. Or what if somebody that knew her saw her with him outside in the street? What would they think? What would they do? This little unexpected detour would surely ruin his plans.
“Sophie, it would be best if we didn’t go back to your house. Remember about our little secret? We don’t want to ruin the secret, right?”
“Don’t worry, Frank,” Sophie said confidently. “Nobody is going to see you with me. You don’t have to be scared about people finding out about you.”
Frank thought her words to be odd. It almost didn’t sound like her. The voice was still soft and airy, but Sophie’s words sounded too insightful. It was like she knew. Like she had peered into a part of his soul that he had never shared with her.
Not only that, but how could she understand? It sure sounded like she understood. At only eight years old? It bothered him. But her turn to the right, off the path that led to the apartments and onto the smaller path that led deeper into the cemetery immediately took his mind away from that former thought. Was this a shortcut?
Another, louder rumble of thunder roared overhead as she led him past tombstones and angel statues and crosses made of marble. They walked down the hill into the depths of the graveyard. The sky grew darker.
“Uh, Sophie? Where are we going?”
“I told you. Where I live. Before it rains.”
Frank noticed her pace increase as he followed her downhill, still hand in hand. “But don’t you live back there?” he asked, pointing at the building tops that were now shrouded by the leaves of the trees. Leaves that began to blow to and fro more fiercely now that the storm was approaching.
“Back where?” she asked, her pace steadily increasing as they rounded an upcoming row of mausoleums.
He increased his steps to keep up with her and get side by side, never letting go of her hand which suddenly felt icier than he had remembered. “Back there. In one of those apartment buildings.” As he spoke he looked up and could tell it was about to rain very hard very soon. The sky was getting much darker now. It almost seemed like dusk.
She giggled. In an almost a sinister way. “I don’t live there. I live here.”
He looked at her, confused as she started to slow her steps. “What do you mean? Where?”
She stopped in front of one of the mausoleums. “Here.”
He pulled away from her hand when he read the name inscribed in bold letters on top of the stone edifice. It read LARSON. Sophie’s last name.
The thunder rumbled once again as he looked at Sophie. She just stared at the mausoleum before her.
“Come inside with me, Frank,” she said in an unusually assertive voice. She was actually beginning to creep him out a bit. And she continued to do so with every further word she spoke. “Come and meet my mother.”
She looked up at the sky, then at Frank with a faint smile present. “It’s going to rain. I have to go inside.”
She then slowly started to walk down the thin walkway that led to the mausoleum’s front gate.
Frank reached out toward her halfheartedly, deciding to abruptly pull his hand back to his side, as though he didn’t want any part of his body near her all of a sudden. What a big change that was from only a few minutes earlier.
“Sophie, come on. Quit playing. You shouldn’t… You shouldn’t go in there.”
She reached the metal gate and swung it open toward her, turning back to look at Frank. She had an unnerving smile on her face. “Come on in. It’s about to rain really hard.”
She slipped inside leaving the gate wide open as if he were supposed to close it after following her in. He stood there, dumbfounded. She was acting so out of character compared to the girl he had spent time with the past few days. He looked all around and then back at the mausoleum. The open gate seemed to be calling him. But he really didn’t want to answer.
He wanted to leave. But his legs wouldn’t move. The thought of passing up a great opportunity like this kept him planted right where he stood. If he left now he would likely never see Sophie again. Girls like her didn’t come along that easily. Maybe she was just playing a game with me, he thought. I can follow her in, play along, and then bring her back to my place. He thought this just as he felt the first raindrop. Then another. Then another.
It began to pour. He didn’t want to stay out in the rain so he walked down the path toward the mausoleum. His steps increased as the rain beat down against the pavement and grass even harder. Upon touching the gated entrance he felt the chill of the crypt come over him. Once inside, he peered to see Sophie with her back to him, staring at the wall in front of her.
“Sophie,” he called out. “Sophie, what are you doing in here? We can get in trouble for being in here you know.”
She just stood, staring at the wall. He slowly approached.
“Sophie? Why won’t you answer my…?”
That’s when he noticed the tomb. She was looking at the plaque in front of her. He couldn’t make out the name because it was too dark.
“Come closer, Frank,” she said softly, almost innocently. “I want you to meet my mommy.”
He didn’t want to move so he remained halfway to her, and halfway to the exit. He looked back to see steady streams of rain falling like needles outside.
“So let’s go to your house and meet her then.”
“This is my house,” Sophie stated.
Her words were causing Frank more than just a tinge of nervousness. He wished she had led him to an apartment building. What he would give to shake hands with her mother and turn around and leave Sophie and totally forget all the things he had dreamed about all night long right now this instant. Oh, what he would give. But instead he was here, immersed in this macabre joke she seemed to be playing. He didn’t know what was worse. The creepiness of it all or how good she was at playing it.
He needed to talk sense into her.
“Sophie, this is a crypt.”
“I know. For my mother. Because she’s dead.” Her voice was different that time. It sounded more adult. More serious. Devilish even.
Her voice sounded so dark, so devoid of anything remotely human at that point. Was this a trick? Was somebody setting him up? Did they know his intentions? Frank tried to swallow, but he could not.
Frank felt adrenaline start to run through his veins. He spoke feebly. “Are you playing a game with me?”
“Yes,” she said as she turned her face to reveal the reddest of eyes. They resembled embers of coal lodged in her sockets. “I am playing a game. And men like you always play along!”
Her face had seemingly withered away. Her skin was pale and looked like a rotting carcass in the little light that illuminated the crypt. She lunged toward him with snapping sharp teeth. She sank her bite into his arm as he let out a howl from the pain she was in
|
He couldn’t see, or so I thought.
How wrong I was.
Nothing seemed wrong when I met him. My parents said it was normal for kids to have imaginary friends, but he didn’t seem so imaginary to me. Besides, if he was, then why can I still see him all these years later? Why is he sitting beside me as I write this? He was never imaginary, not in the sense most people think. He seemed so nice, so friendly… He still does and he’s been the only constant friend I have ever had.
Growing up I didn’t have a lot of friends as I was an awkward child. No, before you ask there was nothing wrong with me. No deformities that people would find weird or anything of the sort, I just preferred the world of books and my imagination. As I grew up my friends dwindled away until I had maybe one or two. I didn’t realize what was really going on until many, many years later.
When I was in elementary school, I met the man who couldn’t see. He didn’t seem so unusual to me. I met him one night after my parents had fallen asleep. I had awoken from a nightmare and had started to get up to get my parents when I heard a creak from the chair beside my closet. Looking over, I didn’t see anything at first but as the curtains blew in the soft breeze from my open window I caught the glimmer of silver. I tipped my head slightly though I felt no fear and started towards the chair. “Wh-who are you?” I asked as I looked up at the man in the corner.
The man in black turned to face me with a soft smile. “Hello there little one,” he replied. “I’m nobody special, just someone you can call a friend. My name is Axel.”
I looked up at the man as I sat in front of him, my eyes full of childlike wonder. I was only ten at the time. I couldn’t see what he looked like too well and for some reason I swear he heard my thoughts as he reached over and flipped on my bedside lamp. The first thing I noticed was the dark red color of his hair. It ran half way down his back and was tied off in a low ponytail then I noticed the rest of him. His eyes were covered in white bandaging and his clothing was leather, almost like a biker would wear. But what really shocked me was the collar around his neck. I had been taught early about the slave trades and things of that nature and the collar around his neck was one that a slave being sold would be forced to wear. But it was made of silver as was the chain that was attached to it. I tipped my head slightly and reached out to touch the chain, only to be stopped by Axel’s icy hand.
“No dear, please don’t touch that. You have no reason to know about that just yet.”
I nodded slightly and smiled looking up at Axel before me. “May I ask a question?”
“Of course,” came the soft reply.
“Why are your eyes covered? Are you blind?” I watched as Axel shifted slightly in his seat as he thought of the best way to answer me.
“In a way, yes I suppose I am,” he replied as he removed the bandages, gently setting them on his lap.
I looked up in pure curiosity and blinked a few times. His eyes were pure silver. “What happened?”
Axel smiled and shook his head. “That’s not something you need to know right now either. I’ll explain someday, just not right now. For now, you need to go back to bed.”
I frowned slightly and looked down. “Will you be here when I wake up?” I heard Axel stand, the leather of his jacket crinkling as he bent down and picked me up, moving me to my bed.
“Of course I will be,” he replied as he tucked my blankets around me with a smile. “What kind of friend would I be if I just left when we have so many games and fun things to do together?”
I smiled and snuggled into the blankets as he shut off my light and moved the chair closer to my bed. I heard him sit down and felt his fingers run through my hair. Soon after, I felt myself drifting off to sleep as he hummed softly.
The next morning I tried to get my parents to meet Axel but they said they couldn’t see him. I didn’t understand why, as he was standing right beside me. Why couldn’t they see him? I frowned when they said he was imaginary and made my way up to my room to get ready for school. I shut my door as the arguing started again. Always arguing. But at least they never did more than yell at each other, at least not that I knew of. I quickly got dressed and looked up when I felt Axel’s hand on my shoulder.
“Relax Jake, not everyone can see me. Only special people can.”
“Special people? Does that mean I’m one of them?”
“Well of course, but you’re the most special out of them all. You’re my friend.”
I smiled as I hugged Axel and picked up my book bag. “Will you come to school with me?” I asked as I opened my door once more.
“Not this time. Maybe some other day. Today I have a few things I have to do.”
I nodded and looked up noticing the bandages were back over Axel’s eyes once more and made my way out of the house, careful to avoid my parents in the process. I could still hear them arguing as I shut the door and I swear I heard something hit the counter, though I couldn’t be sure.
When I came home from school, dad was nowhere to be found. I had grown used to this, even at a young age. There had been many times I had gone home and my mom had said that dad would be home late because he was out with his friends, but most of the time we would have dinner and I would go to bed without seeing him at all. I figured this was no different until I saw my mom sitting on the couch. I didn’t think twice about it, I just said hello to her and went up to my room to read. Once my door was shut, I glanced around but didn’t see Axel anywhere. Shrugging it off, I settled myself on my bed and read until my mom called me down for dinner.
She looked like she had been crying and there were dark bruises covering her arms as well as a deep gash on her cheek. I had heard something hit the counter… I asked what had happened, and though I already knew the answer, she told me not to worry and to eat my dinner. I didn’t argue and just did as I was told, and of course, dad hadn’t returned yet.
Nine o’clock rolled around and I was in bed, just about asleep when I heard my door creak open. I jumped and looked over but quickly relaxed when I realized it who it was. “Axel, are you okay? I haven’t seen you all day.”
Axel smiled and shut the door, slipping his jacket off before he settled into the chair he had left beside my bed. “I’m fine, I promise. I’m sorry I haven’t been here but I told you this morning I had some things I had to take care of.”
The moonlight coming through my window illuminated the links on the chain hanging from the collar around his neck. Wasn’t there only three links yesterday? I recounted and was surprised when I saw four of them. But I chose not to question it. Instead, I settled back again and closed my eyes as Axel, beside me, sang in a language I didn’t recognize until I fell asleep.
Axel came with me to school for the next few weeks. Some of the other kids could see him and we enjoyed the games of tag or hopscotch that we played with him. He even showed us a game with marbles. But not everything was alright at home. My father had started to get worse with his drinking and his abuse towards my mother. I got home from a rather rough day of school and my mother was nowhere to be found. I asked my dad where she was but instead of answering me, he simply pushed me into the stairs and yelled at me to go up to my room.
Axel wasn’t happy, though he wouldn’t admit that anything was wrong, I could hear it in his voice. His normally soft tone changed to a much darker one but it didn’t scare me as he was my friend and I knew he would never harm me. A few days passed and the abuse from my dad became worse. I did the best I could to hide the damage, even going as far as borrowing some of my mom’s concealer to hide the bruises, but one of my teachers figured out what was going on and asked me to tell them who was hurting me and what was going on at home. I looked over at Axel then back at the teacher and spilled everything.
By the time I got home, my mom was there with a cast on one arm and plenty of bandages covering her other arm, shoulder and a few on her face. I’m sure even to this day that there were more that were hidden by her clothing. I didn’t question her. Instead, I hugged her as tightly as I could without causing her more pain and held on like my life depended on it. She told me that the police removed my dad from the house and it would be a very long time before I saw him again. I didn’t care. All I cared about was that she was safe.
Then she asked me a question that I didn’t ever expect from her. She asked me who the man with the bandages over his eyes was, the one who was always with me. I was so excited that she could see him! I did the best I could to explain who he was then smiled when Axel bowed and kissed my mom’s hand as a greeting. She stood with a smile and apologized for saying he was imaginary and went to start dinner with me close behind, more than happy to help.
The next few weeks came and went without incident until my father decided to break in. I heard the glass shatter but I thought it was a dream until I heard the scream. I jumped up from my bed and slipped quietly towards the door only to be stopped by Axel.
“Please lay back down, Jake.”
I shook my head with a whimper. “Wh-What’s going on?”
“It’s nothing important right now, okay? Do you trust me?” I nodded as I looked up at Axel. “Then go lay back down. Please.”
I did as I was told and got back into bed, though I knew I wouldn’t sleep anymore that night. We spent the remainder of the night talking until the sun came up. When Axel finally allowed me to leave my room, there were police cars outside. I looked around for a moment before my mom pulled me to her and explained what had happened. My dad had broken in and killed himself outside of my door. The police had assumed he was coming to kill me but ended his own life instead. It didn’t hit me until later, but Axel had five links on his chain that morning.
The years passed bringing me to my sixteenth year. I had noticed that fewer people could see my friend as the time passed and when I asked Axel about it, he told me that it was because there were less innocent people in the world as I grew. Then I realized what he meant when he told me I was special as a child. I was innocent and only the innocent could see him. I questioned him again one day after some people who were bullying me in school hadn’t shown up for a week, then we received the news that they were dead. Again, he refused to directly answer me, but the chain on his collar grew longer. Enough had become enough.
“Axel, I’m not a child anymore. You can tell me the truth now. What happened to you and, more importantly, what are you? I know you must have something to do with the deaths. It’s only people around me.”
Axel flinched slightly. “Jake, I’m only trying to protect you.”
“I don’t need to be protected! I’m sixteen, I think I can handle the truth!”
Axel turned his head towards me with a faint frown before he removed the bandages from his eyes and turned his unusual gaze towards me. “I suppose you’re right. It is time I told you the truth. But promise me something?” I nodded in reply, never once looking away from Axel, standing in front of me. “You’ll be honest with me if you think differently after I tell you this. If you do and you so choose, I shall leave and you’ll never be bothered by me again.” I nodded once more and sat on my bed. “I suppose I should start from the beginning. As you know, the majority of slaves were colored, but what isn’t told in most of the history books is there were Irish ones as well. I was one of the unlucky few who were sold, hence the collar around my neck. They never removed it even after I was bought. It was used to keep me from running away I suppose. But I digress. I was sold off to work at a hatter’s establishment and either they didn’t know or they didn’t care but there was a mercury leak and I was caught in it. Due to the primitive medicine they had at that point, they didn’t know what was wrong with me and tried to treat the fevers and other ailments with more mercury, thinking that it would cure the issues but it only made it worse in the end, hence part of the reason my eyes are silver.”
“Part of the reason?”
Axel nodded and looked down. “Yes, part of the reason. The other part is the fact that I had made a deal on my death bed. The mercury poisoning had gotten so bad that the doctors left me to die in a room and a black-robed figure approached me with the option of living for eternity or dying a very painful and slow death. I was young and absolutely terrified with no understanding of death or anything else and accepted the deal, being recreated into a creature that most consider a sandman. Instead of the entity from the fairy tales where they help children sleep, I use their dreams to kill them. I use their worst fears against them and use sand to either lock them in their nightmares and kill them there, or I use it to control them and make them end their own lives. That is why the chain on my collar grows. With every life I claim, another link is added to show my choices. I have been trying to keep you as safe as I can over the years by killing those who meant you harm. I was appointed to be your guardian and I have done the best that I could.”
“Which also explains why you said you were partially blind.”
Axel nodded as he looked up and met my gaze. “I have killed many people who meant you harm, including your father. I knew what his intentions were when he came back here after being removed and I was not about to allow him to take your life from you.”
I looked away for a moment then met my guardian’s unusual gaze once more. “Did you kill my father or did you force him to kill himself?” I asked quietly and watched as the ginger guardian before me lowered his gaze.
“I locked him into a dream state that affected him in his waking life. I had no way to fully put him under at that point and I had no intentions of waiting until he slept again to control his mind. As he approached your door, I made my move. He started to open your door and I made him step away. It was as easy as controlling a puppet on strings,” Axel said as he touched the chain hanging from the collar around his neck. “I made the suggestion that he went to the garage and got the rope. Like a child obeying his parents’ wishes, your father went and got the rope. He made his own noose and hung it in the rafters by your door. But, just as he had gotten everything in place, I lost my control over him when I realized you were awake. I had to focus on keeping you in your room so you wouldn’t see what was going on, hence why you heard the scream. He tried to back out of what I had caused him to do and slipped off the chair. The rest I’m sure you can figure out from there.”
I wasn’t sure what to think at first. My mind raced over multiple possibilities of what to say, how to feel, but before my mind could settle, I heard myself speak. “I feel no differently towards you. You’re still the best friend I have ever had and I wouldn’t trade any of what you have done for me for the world. I owe you quite a lot and believe me, I appreciate what you have done. Thank you for protecting me over the years. But… I have one question.”
“What would that be?”
“How would I become like you? A sandman?”
I noticed the way Axel shifted in his seat, the same way he had so many years before when we first met. “I would have to take your life, but I don’t recommend it. Not yet anyway. You still have your whole life ahead of you and you still have your mother who needs you.” Axel looked up and met my gaze. “When the time is right, I will make you into a creature like me. You will be given your own child to watch over and care for, alright?”
I nodded with a light smile and hugged Axel, whom I had come to call my friend.
My twenty-fourth birthday came around. Almost a year had passed since I had buried my mother and the weather was horrible. I pulled out of my driveway and was headed towards work. I knew I should have called off, the rain was so harsh, but I needed the hours. There’s an old phrase, ‘what you don’t know won’t kill you.’ I beg to differ, thank you. The roads were flooded and I had no knowledge of how bad it truly was or the fact that there was an accident just past the bend in my road. My car slid in a rather deep puddle and I lost control, adding my car and myself to the list of accident victims.
I awoke in the hospital and couldn’t move. Panic washed over me and I tried to get someone’s attention until I felt a cool hand touch my cheek. I recognized the touch immediately.
“Hello dear friend,” a soft voice said from beside me. I couldn’t turn my head very much due to the brace and I knew I couldn’t speak, so I simply leaned into Axel’s touch and listened to his words. “Your time came much earlier than I expected it to. I’m so sorry I couldn’t protect you from this pain and suffering.” I could hear the pain Axel felt as his voice cracked and I felt the tears that hit my face when he leaned down to kiss my cheek and took my hand. “Do you still want to join me? Squeeze my hand as tight as you can if you do, if not pull your hand away from mine.” I didn’t respond for a moment, simply staring up at the ceiling as I tried to figure out what to do then squeezed his hand with what little strength I had left in me. He leaned over me with a smile, pressing a kiss to my forehead. “Then rest.” I closed my eyes and I could hear the nurses run in as the heart monitor I was attached to started to flat line. The last thing I heard was one of the nurses asking where the man in black leather had gone.
When I awoke, I was sitting in a young girl’s room, no older than eight or nine. I could hear the soft sobs coming from under the blanket and quietly made my way over to the side of her bed then knelt down and moved the blanket out of the way, gently running a hand through her long blonde hair. “What has you so upset, child?”
The girl jumped and looked up at me, tears shining bright as they slid from her dark green eyes. “Wh-Who are you?” she asked, wiping away the tears.
I simply smiled as I wiped away the rest of her tears and replied the same way my own guardian had responded to me. “I’m nobody special, just someone you can call a friend. My name is Jacob, but you can call me Jake if that makes you feel any better.”
CREDIT: Jay Vakarian
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No one knows why fireflies glow. There are of course a few theories, but there are good arguments for and against each.
The first is the idea that the glow is a warning to other animals. A way of saying, “Nothing tasty here, stay away unless you want a nasty snack.” And many animals that would normally eat insects, especially high-calorie large insects like fireflies, do stay away. Bats won’t go near them. But raccoons will, they have been seen grabbing fireflies biting off the tasty half and then throwing the nasty glowing half down. So as a defense-mechanism it is only partially effective, and if you think about it, that really makes it completely useless. Sure the glowing makes the bats make a U-turn, but for the animals that are willing to eat you, well every time you glow you are turning on the buffet sign.
Another and more widely accepted idea is that the glow is for finding a mate. On the surface of it this seems more likely. You have all those crickets, frogs, and creatures of all kind cluttering up the airwaves with noise at night, trying to find their next hot date. So why compete with all that? Many daylight animals have courtship dances or bright colors to signal potential mates, but at night those don’t make any sense, but a blinking light sure does. Here is the problem, though: it has been tested on a couple of species of fireflies and while they couldn’t rule out they were using their lights to signal mates, they were also using pheromones. Scientists put females in black covered Petri dishes and even though they couldn’t see the light males found them.
The third possibility is predation, one firefly will signal to another firefly drawing them in. Most scientists believe the signals are mimicking mating signals and drawing in potential mates, and then killing them. I don’t disagree but I don’t know why that has to be the only case, because there are lots of scary implications with this possibility, one of those is that this represents bona fide communication in the firefly world. There are light patterns that have meaning behind them and a firefly can manipulate their own light to say whatever they want to say, so for all we know, the message could be just a call out to hang out that results in a trap or a firefly saying it needs a hand and requesting help. The idea of fireflies communicating ideas this complex is freaky in and of itself. It implies that they could have personalities and before you roll your eyes at that idea think about the other implication of the predation idea. It is other fireflies they are signaling, not other animals, which implies that fireflies communicate, that the average firefly is trusting enough to be lured in because the idea of murder wouldn’t occur to them, and that a small number of fireflies are cannibalistic serial killers. In short, some fireflies are evil.
All this I am about to tell you happened in the summer of 1985, the last weekend before school started back. My cousin and I went to different schools, but they started at the same time, so this was the last week of summer for both of us. I was 10 and he was 9, which doesn’t seem like much of an age difference but usually when you are a kid a year is a huge difference, the difference between lifting a half bucket of water or a whole bucket, the difference of being able to run to the end of the driveway in ten seconds or twelve seconds, the difference in being able to make a free throw or a layup. But in spite of this age gap, I was very close to my first cousin. We were close because we liked the same things, we liked being outside, we liked playing sports, we liked getting dirty, we liked exploring the woods.
We had spent most of the summer playing together, our grandparents were retired and our parents worked days so our grandparents watched us during the day. But despite all this time together, we wanted a whole weekend to play uninterrupted and to be able to stay up as late as we could playing games and watching TV. We asked our grandmother first and when she said it was up to our parents we both begged them until they gave in.
We had spent our Saturday tossing Frisbees and footballs, and working on our fort. The plot of land our grandparents’ house was on seemed to be cut straight out of the forest. There was a dirt road in front of the house, but on the other three sides of their home was forest, and it didn’t gradually become wooded. It was literally one step you were on my grandmother’s thick carpet grass and the next you were standing on leaves with tall oaks, pines over your head and a sprinkling of young trees fighting for every inch of sunshine. Behind the house, there was maybe 30 feet of grass and then you were in the woods and it sloped down slowly for maybe a 150 yards before it flattened out again.
At the beginning of the summer, we had started to build a fort down in this flattened area of the woods. We had found a reasonably opened piece of land and started clearing the leaves and pine straw, and we spent loads of time scouring the forest for trees that had fallen but weren’t so rotten they fell apart, but were still light enough for us to carry. As you could guess it took a long time, after a full summer’s worth of work the fort was about three and a half feet tall, we were shooting for at least four. We probably wouldn’t finish until spring but we had located a large piece of tin that could cover the top, so we could still climb inside and feel like we had our own clubhouse. We had spent the last of daylight on that Saturday down at the fort, we had been digging it out a little so that we could stand up inside of it, we would still have to hunch a bit but we were close. We had been digging with our hands because our grandpa would not let us carry his shovel into the woods. We were filthy, the ground was dry but we were still covered from head to toe with dirt, we didn’t mind. As the sun hung low in the sky our grandma’s voice rang out through woods, we heard clearly because we had been listening for it. I shouted back telling her we would be on our way back in a minute.
We stood up and dusted off, and headed back up the path we had made to the house. Our grandmother would not let us into the house until we had cleaned off, but we weren’t ready to come in. We compromised, Grandpa set up a folding table on the back porch and we ate outside, as the shadows of the trees crept further across the yard seeming to devour it.
Grandpa came out on the porch to sit and smoke his evening pipe. Grandpa was a man of few words and he sat there for a time smoking in silence. We had finished our meals and had joined Grandpa in his silent requiem. We had been running hard and chattering all day and now that we had finally gotten still it seemed that exhaustion might have caught us off-guard. Then Grandpa’s thick country patois startled us.
“Look there, boys.” Grandpa was pointing with his pipe towards the woods. “Fireflies are out tonight.”
We looked. We marveled at them, as they emerged from the woods. It wasn’t a swarm of them, I didn’t think they swarmed, but there did seem to be more and more of them emerging from the woods as the minutes went by. It reminded me of a nature video I had seen of bats emerging from a cave as night came in Mexico, which I guess is precisely what it was like.
It was my younger cousin that had the idea. He looked at me and simply said, “I bet I can catch more than you can.”
I laughed and flapped a hand to indicate how ridiculous that idea was.
“Winner sleeps on the couch, loser sleeps on the floor?” he proposed.
I pretended to ponder the challenge for a moment. I was going to agree, I always agreed to his challenges, but this time I didn’t feel bad about. When my cousin challenged me to basketball, badminton, or some other sport, I always felt bad because I would win, I was bigger, stronger, and faster. When he challenged me to board games and video games I felt the same way, I was a year ahead of him in school and my reflexes were just a hair faster, my brain a tad more developed. I didn’t hold back or ever let him win, he would have known and been mad if I did, he believed one day he would catch up to me and when he won he wanted it to be fair and square. This competition seemed perfectly fair though, no different than an Easter egg hunt or hide and seek and he had beaten me at those before. I held out my hand and he slapped it, the challenge had been formalized.
Our grandmother would not give us the jars we wanted to put the fireflies in. she re-used all her jars, but was willing to part with a couple of opaque ice cream containers, they had handles so that would make them easy to carry.
We took our buckets, stood on the edge of the porch and asked our Grandpa to count to 3. He slowly counted up, and on three we both jumped off the porch and ran in opposite directions trying to catch one.
If you have never chased fireflies, it is like playing Marco Polo. Instead of being blindfolded it is just dark and you can’t see a tiny bug. Instead of saying Marco, you are just willing the little lightning bug to light up. Instead of saying “Polo”, the firefly lights up for a second. Sometimes they stay lit for as much as two seconds, then will be black for as little as three seconds or as long as maybe ten or fifteen seconds. When they light up you run to where you last saw them, but just like Marco Polo, they aren’t there anymore, they have moved. You try to move in the direction you think they were headed, and hopefully they light up again right in front of your face and you snatch them.
They seemed to be everywhere and every couple of seconds I snatched one out of the air, I would then pop the lid up from bucket just enough to shove it in without looking, I was trying to track my next catch. I probably lost as many as I actually got in the bucket, but I didn’t care, this was summer and I was a boy and this was as good as life got. I hadn’t been paying much attention to where I was going as I chased the bugs and before I knew it I was at the edge of the forest. I glanced around and didn’t see any more fireflies in the yard, I watched for a few seconds and saw no more light up, I could see my cousin too and he stood there at the edge too, looking. The fireflies didn’t all disappear they just seemed to have moved to the woods. I watched them for a few seconds as the entire forest seemed to be full of glowing orbs. After a moment I glanced back at my cousin, expecting to see him walking over to where I stood. Instead, he was still rooted to the same spot looking into the woods. I started walking over to where he stood and then he looked over at me. He looked at me, and in the failing light I could see a devilish grin on his face, then he turned back to the woods and bolted into them. I was surprised for only a second and then I bounded into the woods myself without a second thought, our grandmothers voiced chased us as we dived in telling us not to go too far, stay where we could see the porch light.
That first 150 yards of woods that sloped down had a few young trees with low hanging branches, but it was mostly large old trees with big roots that bulged out of the ground all over the place. What I am trying to say, is that it wouldn’t have been advisable for most people to just go barreling out into this forest in the dark. But the woods had been our home for the last few years and every inch of this part of the forest had been well-traveled by us, we knew this area as well as we knew our bedrooms. I stepped over holes I knew were there and ducked under low hanging branches without taking my eyes off the fireflies. The air around me was thick with them and I was grabbing one out of the air every couple of seconds. They were constantly in front of me, every time their butts lit up they would be a foot of two further in front of me. I moved further and further into the woods after them.
I never glanced around at my cousin or wondered where he was, I assumed he was chasing his own swarm of fireflies down the hill too. My mind was full of nothing but the joy of the chase and a supreme confidence that I was winning. With that elation coursing through me the forest all of a sudden went completely black.
All at once every lightning bug blinked out and didn’t light back up. It had all been staggered up to that point; there was always some light from a fraction of the bugs. But now suddenly I was plunged into darkness. I wasn’t immediately frightened, I wasn’t a boy who was afraid of the dark and like I said I knew the woods. But I was disoriented.
I turned and looked back and could still see the porch light, I had come to the bottom of the slope that ran down from my grandparents’ house. The trees had cleared a bit and I was only a few dozen feet from the fort my cousin and I had spent the summer building. I debated what to do next, go back up to the house I figured, the game seemed to be over. I thought it was odd the fireflies all disappeared at once, but I wasn’t really inquisitive enough to wonder why that happened and I certainly didn’t read anything sinister into it. And just as I was getting ready to head back up the hill suddenly all the fireflies lit up.
It was the opposite of what just happened with them all going out, all of them near me lit up at once and stayed lit for maybe four seconds and then went out. They stayed out for a couple of seconds then lit back up for a couple of seconds. They were blinking all in time with one another. I stared slack-jawed at this. Once again, I wasn’t scared, in the wild animals act in strange ways sometimes. This was amazing and I was curious why they were acting this way but I didn’t feel scared until I realized something else, they were all around me.
The fireflies were circling me. There weren’t any fireflies ten feet away from me, none off in the distance ten or twenty yards. Literally every firefly I could see was within arm’s reach of me. I turned and they were completely surrounding me. The light was almost blinding because there was so much of it and when they went out the night blindness kept me from seeing anything else. This was all wrong, it felt oppressive and at first, I couldn’t put my finger on why and then I could, it felt like a blinking neon sign. The fireflies felt like a blinking “open” sign on a storefront, or maybe an “all-you-can-eat” sign blinking on a restaurant. At that moment I wanted to be away from them, I couldn’t even see how they could harm me in any way, but this fun evening suddenly felt scary and the bugs blinding me and pointing me out to the world felt menacing.
I was just about to take my first step towards home wondering how the fireflies were going to react when the forest felt different. I didn’t hear anything but it felt different. The forest felt heavy and quiet. I couldn’t hear anything and thanks to the lightning bugs I couldn’t see anything either, but nonetheless I felt something near and I felt like it knew I was here, too. Of course, it did; the fireflies were pointing right at me.
Panic was beginning to set into me, pushing out all rational thought, but before it did this last thought came to me.
“You can’t make it to the house, it’s too far. Hide in the fort and maybe it will pass you by.”
As terror wiped even that thought from my mind I darted for the fort, instinct took me straight to it. One of the last things my cousin and I had done was dig a small ditch under it because we could no longer climb in from the top, it was just deep enough to crawl under and wiggle into the fort. I went under it headfirst. When the upper half of my body was through, I suddenly felt stuck with my legs and butt naked and exposed. The fear that something would grab me and pull me out caused me to start weeping. I worked my body faster and faster in a panic, scared I wasn’t going to get in, finally my butt squeezed through the opening and I was in. I crawled to the very center of the fort, sat down and hugged my knees up to my chest and continued to sob.
Slowly, I began to get myself under control, and inexplicably felt safe and foolish. I just ran from fireflies. The longer I sat there the more together I got, I began to hope that my cousin didn’t see me running from the lightning bugs and that he definitely didn’t hear me crying. A new worry started to creep into me, how long had all this taken, were my grandparents worrying about me, maybe stomping around the forest with flashlights. I had just begun to crawl back to the exit when the fireflies came back.
Just like before it was all at once. One second pitch black the next every bug is lit up. They weren’t inside the fort, they had surrounded it. There was about an inch or so of space between each of the boards and it was all light every couple of seconds as they flashed their rears. I jerked back to the middle and curled back up. And this fort with its walls that felts so safe a second ago looked just like what it was, a pile of dead trees with a flimsy piece of tin on top.
I sat frozen staring at nothing and seeing nothing but alternating pitch black and light pouring in the through the walls. But after some interminable time, something was approaching. I sensed it before I heard it and saw it. As it approached it didn’t make a lot of noise, it took slow heavy steps and it didn’t seem to break branches but I could hear it rustling leaves as it moved, which made lots of sense; we had cleared out a lot of leaves from where the fort was so there were more than usual in the area around the fort. Its steps didn’t shake the ground but they did seem very much to thud. It seemed that when its foot came down, it put roots in the ground and would never move again, but then it would. Each step sounded final but for a long time, they weren’t. Soon, though, it was on the inside of the ring of fireflies.
Now when the light blinked on, there was a blank space in the light. Its shadow stretched into the fort each time they blinked. I wept silently and began to shake. I still had not looked at it, but I knew where it was and that it was staring at the fort, but not into it yet. I kept telling myself not to look, that looking wouldn’t do me any good, it would just make me crazier with fear, it might make me scream and call attention to myself. I had no covers to pull over my head but I was trying to act just like a child that does that when they fear the bogeyman is in the closet. The reason why the child does that and why I was doing that is simple, it is a stupid idea still stuck in the ancient lizard part of our brain that says that if I can’t see them they can’t see me. I was too old to believe this but I tried very hard to. The creature started to walk around the fort, the fireflies would blink out and then back on and that shadow would be in a different spot. Its heavy footfalls would continue for a bit and then stop.
At first, I had hoped the thing didn’t know I was in here and if I was just quiet it might move on. After a few minutes, I felt sure it knew I was here. It had to, and it was just taunting me, playing with its food before it smashed apart this pile of dead wood and snatched me out to my death. But that didn’t happen. It kept pacing but it never even bumped the fort. I was still terrified and most of my mind was just a white panic but I had begun to think again, I had an idea and I latched onto it, put all my hope in it, and willed myself to believe it. All these years later I am still sure my 10-year-old self was right.
It couldn’t come in, because this was a house. That is how I understood it then, over the years I have come to believe it like this. Whatever that thing was it can’t cross barriers. The borders we make in our world blocks it. It couldn’t come into the fort, and it couldn’t have come in my grandparents’ house. Hell, I don’t think it could have come up to their house. I think the edge of the woods would have stopped it. Where those trees end would be its border. What would happen if it crossed the border? I don’t know. Maybe it is just physically incapable the way you are incapable of touching your nose to your elbow, or maybe it would cause terrible pain, maybe it even would cause death. I really don’t have a clue, maybe it wouldn’t do anything and it was all in the thing’s head.
I was still terrified to the point of panic and only just barely holding on to my grip on myself. Then I realized that is exactly what it was trying to do, it was trying to scare me, it was trying to make me go into a blind panic. When an animal goes into a panic, it is just as likely to run into the arms of danger as away from it. It wanted me to try to run so it could catch me, I had no doubt it could, even though it was taking slows steps I was sure it had a faster speed. Knowing this calmed me a bit. If it couldn’t harm me inside the fort, all I had to do was wait it out. Soon someone, probably my grandfather, would come looking for me. Yes, this creature was big, and yes, it was clever, but my grandfather would have his rifle on him. I wasn’t sure this creature could be killed with a gun, but it seemed likely. It was clearly not an unstoppable, all-powerful monster. Otherwise, it would be able to pull a ten-year-old boy out of a child’s fort.
Feeling more confident and little less scared I finally decided to try and see what was hunting me. In the slowly blinking light of the fireflies, I couldn’t make out much about the creature. It was brown. Not a hairy brown, but a gnarled kind of flesh. It looked almost like tree bark. It was very tall, or it had very long legs, the fort stood just over 4 feet high and the only thing I could see were legs. I leaned forward to get a closer look.
The creature recoiled a bit and made a strange noise, it sounded a bit like someone shaking a maraca or a little like playing cards on the spokes of a bicycle tire, but lower and more guttural, it sent a chill down my spine and raise gooseflesh on my arms. Still, I leaned closer, and in response, the thing began to lean down to look at me and the fireflies blinked out.
Without their light, I was completely blind at first, but slowly I could see again and the first thing I saw were red eyes, not glowing red, but just a deep crimson with a spot of black in their centers. As my eyes adjusted further, I realized just how impressively tall this thing must be. It was almost lying flat just to look me square in the eyes. Its head was long and misshapen, with strange protuberances coming off it in places. Far down from its dead and disquieting eyes, I found its mouth. It hung open, and long daggers of teeth were visible. They didn’t gleam, though. They were stained dark. I could still tell that its teeth were white by looking at their bases, but the teeth themselves were dark, stained with blood, no doubt. Hopefully not fresh blood. Suddenly I remembered my cousin and hoped that this thing didn’t go to him before it came for me.
The thing studied me and even leaned in a little close, in response I leaned back a bit. It started its clicking noise again, and I knew I was about to scream, about to shout for it to go away. I was going to start bawling again, begging it to leave me alone. But before that could happen I heard my name shouted in the distance. The creature sprang up and I began to shout. Not shouting for the creature to go away, but shouting for my grandfather to hear me. I shouted, “I’m here!” I shouted his name, I shouted for him to watch out, and that there was something down here. The thing stood where it was for a minute longer and then it was gone in a flash and confirmed what I knew, that there would have been no way for me to outrun it. I continued to shout, and didn’t stop until my grandfather through off the tin from the top of the fort, then I stopped shouting and started weeping.
I raised my arms to my grandfather like a toddler wanting to be picked up, he was still a strong man and he scooped me up. I continued to weep, I said it was going to get me, he patted my back and I buried my face on his shoulder, he began to walk up the hill, I kept repeating it was going to get me, he said there was nothing to get me, I protested. The greatest relief I have ever felt in my life was when we emerged from those woods. Until that very moment I was sure I was going to die and at that moment I knew I was safe and nothing could ever make me go in there again.
Grandpa sat me down.
“Do you know where your cousin is?” he asked.
My heart dropped. I had hoped and thought he was here, finding out he wasn’t caused a wave of grief to slam into me. I dropped to my knees and began to cry, mumbling through my sobs that it got him. I saw my grandfather walk back towards the woods and realized he didn’t have his gun on him. I ran to him and grabbed him. I begged him not go; he said he had to, and that he would be right back. Finally, I just begged him to take his gun with him. He relented.
He didn’t believe I had seen anything, he thought maybe we went too far away from the house and lost sight of the porch light and panicked, maybe I heard something then and it scared me. But he didn’t believe there was anything dangerous in the forest. Not until he couldn’t find my cousin, even then I am not sure what he believed.
Grandpa had been gone over an hour and I was still sitting on the porch with my grandmother, she had given me some hot cocoa and had wanted me to take a bath and get ready for bed, I stayed on the porch though. Occasionally I would see a light in the woods and my heart would stop thinking it was a firefly, then I would realize it was my grandfather’s flashlight and I would ease up. He came back and they called the police.
The next couple of days are a blur. There were so many people, so many tears, and so many questions. No trace of my cousin was ever found though. I never told anyone exactly what I saw, having had some time to get myself under control I realized no one would believe me, best case scenario they would think I was traumatized and my imagination ran wild, worst case scenario they would think I was covering something up. In the end, I told a lie that was very close to the truth. I left out the circle of fireflies, I left out looking at the creature, just saying I hid in the fort and whatever was in the woods didn’t find me. The cops believed it, my parents believed it, and I thought given enough time I might even believe it.
My family talked in whispers around me for months. I finally heard what the official theory from some guys at school. This was still the 1980’s and the satanic panic was still a thing, most people believed that a cult had kidnapped my cousin and did unspeakable things to him. There was no cult, but I was sure unspeakable things were done to him. A few more rational people thought that he had just gotten very lost and maybe got bitten by a snake, or broke a leg and died in the woods. That was a perfectly logical theory, but he would have never gotten lost in the woods to start with and the family knew it. I think the family always believed the satanic cult theory, but it was never spoken of. Which almost made my cousin’s death worse, it is almost like he never existed.
I don’t know what that thing in the woods was, and I don’t want to believe there is anything supernatural about it. I want to believe it just something that evolved differently than us and that may be true, but there is something that seems mystical about the control it had on the fireflies and on the way it couldn’t come into my fort. I think it was a creature of intelligence but I don’t know if it was evil or just hungry. But I do think it is still in that forest and I wonder if it is alone.
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Note: There is some gore in this pasta. If you believe this will bother you, please skip today’s story.
His hazel eyes skimmed over the words for what he knew had to be the twentieth time. His pupils darted back and forth over the lines, dancing rhythmically as they flowed toward the bottom of the page yet again. Braxton could feel his heartbeat quicken with each successive pass over the words. Small beads of perspiration began to form on his forehead, causing it to glisten under the soft, white light shining down from above his head. He felt a sudden pain in his jaw; he unclenched his teeth, which had tightened without his realizing it, relieving the growing pressure in his jaws. He could feel a low tremble building within his muscles, a product of the fear that was beginning to course through his veins, turning his blood icy.
He inhaled deeply, holding it momentarily before releasing it in a powerful whoosh. He closed his eyes tightly. He stood like that, motionless, for almost a full minute, the only movement coming from his fingers, which ran lightly over the pale white sheet of paper with the typed message. He listened to the low sshhh sound that wafted up to his ears from the paper. Before realizing that he was doing it, Braxton tore the paper in half and crumpled the two pieces into a tiny ball and hurled it across his small living room, where it bounced lightly from the wall and fell behind the tattered couch.
Braxton put his face in his hands, trying to regain his composure. Tears of fear and rage stung the corners of his eyes. He let out a scream, which was muffled by the palms of his hands. He raised his hands and ran his fingers roughly through his dark hair. His mind reeled at the implications contained within those now-crumpled words. Questions clouded his thoughts, prohibiting any course of action from being taken.
Where did this letter come from? Who brought it? How did this person get in and out of his house? And, most importantly, how did this person know the things that they did? Hadn’t he always been careful? He had always planned meticulously; hadn’t he?
Braxton felt his knees tremble slightly as his legs tried to give out. The room tilted to the left as a wave of lightheadedness washed over him, almost sending him to the dirty, yellowed linoleum floor. He reached out blindly, grasping until his fingers found purchase, feeling the smooth, yet slightly bumpy, texture of duct tape. He slid the barstool, well past its best days, towards him, scraping his palm on a torn piece of the vinyl cushion as he did so, and dropped down onto it. Using the first two fingers on each hand, he rubbed his temples softly, trying to focus.
This person obviously knows me, he thought. Somehow they know things that they have no way of knowing. In all the time he had led his double life, carrying out his acts of mischief (to him it was merely mischief. To others it was far more serious), he had never slipped up. He never spoke of his deeds. Under no circumstances did he keep souvenirs or trophies. A single camera, Polaroid or otherwise, was never used. And every single field trip that he took was at least three hours away from his home. He always did the proper reconnaissance beforehand, checking the weather, traffic flow of the town, and the habits of the local civilians. So how could this person possibly know what they do?
Braxton opened his eyes and sat upright as a sudden revelation, what he knew to be nothing but pure truth, dawned on him. The thought came with such ferocity that it almost bowled him over; literally almost knocking him to the floor as he sat up straight.
It’s a hoax, he thought. Someone broke in and left that note because they thought that it would be funny. It just struck a nerve because, by some stroke of luck, the house they chose happened to contain a resident with secrets.
Braxton stood up and began pacing the length of his small house. He nodded thoughtfully as the idea worked itself out within his mind. He slowly convinced himself that this could be the only plausible explanation. The idea that someone might know who he actually was was inconceivable. It was downright ludicrous.
What did the note really say, anyway, his train of thought continued as he stepped out of the shower and began to towel himself off. I know exactly who you are and exactly what you’ve done? Well, that was just too vague for his taste. If anyone really knew anything, they’d say something to prove what they knew. Give an example to authenticate.
Despite his best attempts to reassure himself, Braxton found himself obsessed with the locks, certain that he had forgotten to lock one, leaving him unable to go to bed. He walked through the small, two-bedroom house checking each lock, trying to raise the window afterwards. Once he had made his rounds, he began at the beginning once more, double- and triple-checking the locks.
Stop! he screamed to himself on his fourth pass through the house. This is insane. This type of scared, nervous behavior is the intended result. I won’t succumb to that. Now, it’s time to go to bed. Leave the locks alone.
And, surprisingly enough, he was able to do just that. He curled up in his bed, grasping his pillow in a tight embrace, and drifted almost immediately to sleep. He slept that way until he awoke the next morning, when he was greeted with absolute terror.
The thin band of yellow morning sunlight slowly stretched across the bed from the crack in the curtains as the sun rose. Braxton rolled over, still clutching dearly at his pillow, shifting the light into his eyes. His eyelids fluttered lightly as he gingerly rose from his sleep. He yawned loudly and stretched, groaning as he did so. His back popped audibly, and he chuckled at the thought of his age finally beginning to catch up to him.
“Good morning, Braxton,” a gruff male voice said from behind him.
Braxton flipped over quickly and scrambled away from the intruder. Reaching the edge of his mattress, his hand slipped, sending him toppling backwards. His head made a hollow thonk! as it connected with the floor. A piercing pain tore through his mind, and he could feel a trickle of warmth that he assumed was blood begin to run down the back of his head and neck. He pushed the pain aside, focusing his attention on the sudden unwanted guest.
“Who the hell are you?” he wanted to scream. He wanted to shout at the intruder. To demand answers. He opened his mouth to do just that, but only a small squeak managed to escape his throat. Instead, Braxton did the only thing that his body would allow; he continued backing away, relishing the illusion of safety that the distance managed to bring, until his back hit the wall just three feet away. He stared at the intruder, eyes wide. His breath was harsh and ragged. He inhaled deeply, unable to control himself. A wave of lightheadedness filled him, the quick, panicked breaths threatening to lose consciousness as he hyperventilated.
“Calm down,” the stranger instructed. “You shouldn’t lose consciousness right now. We have some things to discuss, you and I. I would think that it’s in your best interest to pay attention.”
The stranger sat in the old leather chair in the corner of Braxton’s bedroom. He was lounged back comfortably; legs spread wide, elbows resting on the arms of the chair. A sense of utter calmness radiated from him, as though breaking and entering was the most natural act in the world. A pair of smoky grey eyes stared out from behind the black ski mask that he wore. Those eyes were cold, calculating, showing no remorse. Light glinted from the scalpel that he held in his hands as he twitched it absentmindedly.
“Wh… who are you?” Braxton’s voice cracked and quavered, despite his best attempts to keep it level.
“That isn’t important.” The stranger leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “You may call me Teacher, for I am here to educate you.”
Braxton’s mind reeled. He fought desperately to understand the situation, but comprehension stayed just beyond his grasp. His face twisted into a look of confusion.
“You have led a horrible life,” the stranger continued, seeing the bewildered look that Braxton wore. “Your education will be one to show you the consequences of such a life; that is why I am your teacher. It has fallen upon me to show you the error of your ways.”
Braxton opened his mouth to protest, to deny the allegations that had been laid at his feet, but immediately closed it, a single sound unuttered, when the stranger raised his hand and shook his head. The gravity in the intruder’s movement said all that he needed to know: there was no bullshitting his way out of this. No quick thinking, followed up with expertly chosen words, would convince this threatening persona that he had broken into the wrong house, chosen the wrong pupil. Instead, Braxton remained silent. What the stranger said next was enough to confirm both his conclusion and his worst fears.
“August 10, 1994,” he began. “You were ten years old. In those days you had an affinity for fire. That night you snuck out of your window, a box of matches that sat on the mantel in hand. You wandered the streets for over an hour before finding the right location. It was a small, wooden house a few blocks from your own. You struck the match, using it to light a pile of dried sticks and leaves that you had placed by the front door.”
Braxton’s eyes continued to grow as he listened to the details of his life being recalled to him. The interloper spoke in a monotone voice, reciting the tale as if he were reading from cue cards.
“When the pile was lit, you rang the doorbell and ran. What you were unaware of was that an elderly woman lived there, all alone. She had taken out her hearing aid before bed, so she didn’t hear the doorbell. It didn’t take long for the old, dried wood to catch fire, quickly setting the house ablaze. The woman died in her bed. She never had a chance.”
The Teacher stood up, staring down at Braxton with reproach. “That was the first person to die at your hands, but it wasn’t the last. Although it was an accident, you found that you had a taste for murder. You craved it. It became an addiction, your own private heroin.”
He began to pace slowly around the room, hands resting behind his back, his empty hand clasped loosely around his wrist. “The time has come to right the wrongs. Now is the time of your redemption.”
“How do you know all this?” The terror rang through clearly in Braxton’s words, teeming behind each syllable.
“I don’t think that really matters; do you? The fact remains that I know. I know each and every detail of your horrid actions. Everything.”
He stopped pacing and stared down at Braxton, his cold eyes studying him calculatedly. Braxton felt as if those eyes saw past his outer appearance. It was almost as if they peered beyond the physical and into the metaphysical, into the nature of his soul. How else would he know such things? Those were things that no one had any way of knowing, or even had any right to know.
The black ski mask shifted, and Braxton knew that the man was smiling beneath that layer of cotton.
“I even know about the man that you planned to kill when you took your vacation from work in two weeks. You planned to do it slowly, to try out torture for a change.” His voice was grave. Braxton knew that the smile he wore beneath the mask was only for show. Perhaps it held back that raw emotion that he could sense lying behind the words, waiting to break forth.
“Jackson Humphries is his name,” he continued. “A middle-aged, mid-level executive at a pharmaceutical company. He’s a lonely man, but a good man. He gives regularly to charity, volunteers at a homeless shelter two weekends a month. You intend to subdue him at his house, keep him in his basement, and slowly torture him until he begs for death.”
Braxton was taken aback. The precision in these accusations was uncanny. It just wasn’t possible. What was going on here? Was this strange person some sort of demon sent to punish him for his deeds? How could he know things that he had only thought of, things that had never been voiced aloud, let alone written?
His eyes shifted upwards. He was just beneath his bedroom window. The bed separated him from the stranger. If he were to act quickly, he could be on his feet and dive through the window before the intruder had time to react. Braxton shifted his weight. His muscles tensed, prepared to move as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
“I don’t think that it would be wise to try and escape.” It was almost as if he had read Braxton’s mind. “To do so would only cause me to chase you. That would anger me. Anger could cause me to skip to the last lesson of your education, the lesson reserved for the possibility that you cannot or will not learn the others. Death.”
He was stuck and he knew it. Braxton decided on an alternate route. Simple denial. He licked his lips. Fear had sucked the moisture from his mouth, leaving only the horrid taste of morning breath in the barren wasteland that was his oral cavity. He took a deep breath. Here goes nothing.
“You’ve got the wrong guy,” he began. He no longer tried to hide the fear that drove his stammering words. Fear was good; it could destroy someone’s resolve. This he knew from experience. In the beginning of his mischief-making career, he had almost allowed several victims to slip through his grasp due to the weakening of his resolve from witnessing their absolute horror. He could only hope that the same was possible in this situation.
“I don’t know why you think I’ve done these things, but you’re mistaken.” He worked up some tears, letting them spill over and slide down his cheeks. He breathed in deep, wet sobs.
The stranger was over the bed in a flash, almost a blur of movement. He pressed the sliver of metal that was his scalpel blade, an eighth of an inch thick and sharpened to a deadly precision, against Braxton’s neck. Braxton didn’t need to see it to know that the blade was just above his carotid artery, the blade digging into his flesh. Only a bit more pressure, probably less than a foot-pound, and the vein would slice open, and he would bleed out in just a matter of minutes.
“Do. Not. Test. Me.,” the stranger commanded through clenched teeth. His face was inches from Braxton’s close enough that he could feel the weak puffs of breath, muffled by the mask. “I am giving you an opportunity to make amends, to rectify the wrongs that you have committed. Try my patience and I will kill you in ways so efficient that your final thoughts will be amazement at my prowess. Do you understand?” He pulled the blade from Braxton’s neck, revealing the thin cut that had been formed in his skin, a solitary bead of blood welling up.
“Yes,” Braxton stammered.
“Very well.” The stranger stood straight. He stared down at his pupil. “Sit on the bed. We’ve wasted enough time. Your lessons must begin now.”
“There are three lessons for you to learn,” the Teacher said once Braxton was situated on the foot of the bed. He stood across the room, leaning against the wall directly opposite Braxton. He had once again resumed the twirling of the scalpel. Whether his intention was to intimidate him, or if it was just a nervous habit, some deep need to keep his hands busy, Braxton knew not.
“Physical, mental, and emotional,” he continued. “Whenever you commit your heinous acts, you inflict pain of tremendous magnitude in these three areas on not only your victims, but their loved ones as well. It is for these reasons that you shall suffer greatly in these three areas. Do you understand what you are being told?”
Braxton nodded his understanding. He stared at the Teacher with a blank expression. Some part of him was still unable to accept that this was really happening. That part screamed that it wasn’t possible, that it was, absolutely had to be, a dream.
“I will not administer these punishments,” the Teacher went on to say. “There is no knowledge to be gained in this. Instead, it will be you who does this. Just as you administered this pain to your many victims. Your tasks will be set before you for you to accomplish on your own. Once these are completed, I will take my leave of you. Permanently. I will return later. Whether it be tonight, tomorrow, or next week, you will not know. You have until the sun sets to complete the tasks I have given you in their entirety.”
He crossed the room in a few quick strides. He leaned down, putting his face directly in front of Braxton’s, his hands resting on his bent knees. The anger in his eyes had dissipated, leaving only the gravity of his message.
“I cannot impress upon you enough the severity of the punishment should you fail to do as I have instructed. There is no escape from this. There is no ‘easy out’. You must follow the instructions to the letter. I will know if you do not. If you fail to do as I have asked, I will be forced to teach you the fourth and final lesson.”
Braxton, although terrified by what the answer would be, had to ask, “What’s the final lesson?”
“The answer should be obvious. Your education will end in the same place that your extracurricular activities did: death.”
Tears began to stream down Braxton’s face in thick rivers. He could feel them plopping gently onto his bare skin as they fell from his cheeks to his bare chest.
“Why are you doing this to me?” His voice was thick and watery.
“Why did you do what you did to the others? You must reform. You must learn the error of your ways. If you do not, you cannot be allowed to continue, to inflict this pain on anyone else. It ends today, one way or the other.”
He reached into his back pocket and pulled out three envelopes. In thick, black ink a number was printed in the center of each. He handed the envelopes to Braxton, who made no move to take them.
“Take them,” he commanded, his voice deep and guttural.
Tears fell with a renewed vigor as Braxton raised a shaking hand to receive the proffered envelopes. He wiped away the thick liquid that was running freely from his nose.
“Sunset tonight,” the Teacher reminded him. “Contacting the police will do nothing more than waste the precious time that you have. The fourth lesson will only be prolonged until they’re no longer protecting you. Like I said before, there is no escape.”
With that, he turned and left the room. His movements were quick and soundless, fluid and graceful.
Braxton sat, motionless, for almost a full minute. His entire body felt numb. Had that really just happened? If it weren’t for the envelopes that he held in his hand and the steady throb in his skull from falling from the bed in his mad scramble away upon awakening, he would be inclined to think that it hadn’t. Without moving his head, he cast his eyes downward in a desultory manner. He stared at the envelopes, seeing them, but still unable to feel them in his hand. Still in a daze, he stood and walked into the kitchen.
Pulling up the battered stool, he sat down at the counter and placed the envelopes on the counter before him. Spreading them out, he looked at each one closely. There was nothing extravagant about them, nothing more than plain, white envelopes. The numbers that had been printed on them were sequential, numbered one through three. He ran his fingers over the face of each envelope, then circled back, picking each one up and feeling it individually. Each of the three seemed to contain a single sheet of paper baring almost no weight whatsoever.
The thought crossed his mind to call the police. He dismissed this quickly, not seeing any way that this wouldn’t bring his favorite pastime to light. They would need an explanation, some reason as to why the psychopath had chosen him as a target. At best, the police would have no evidence, but would watch him carefully from now on. That would mean that he would have to quit. He didn’t think he could. Murder was like a drug, and he was addicted. Yes, he had found his own private heroin, without the use of a needle. Well, sometimes needles were used, but never on himself. He couldn’t help but smile at his own little joke.
He scooped up the envelope embossed with the number one. May as well get this over with. He glanced up at the clock on the stove in the kitchen. It read 8:07. He thought that the sun was setting around eight pm. That gave him about twelve hours to do whatever needed to be done. That should be plenty of time, right? He twirled the envelope in his hands for a moment, hesitating, before finally ripping the end off and sliding out the paper. He unfolded it quickly, his eyes widening as he read the words:
Mental
Before their deaths, you, intentionally or not, put each and every one of your victims through a rigorous mental torture. In the time before their deaths, they battled with themselves over several issues: why was this happening to them, what had they done to deserve such a fate, and, most importantly, whether they would live or die.
It is your turn. You know why this ordeal has been set before you. You have even been given the reason that you deserve this fate. Whether you live or die is completely up to you. In essence, your mental task is quite easy, compared to the trials of your victims. It is a challenge of memory. I want to see how much respect you have for your victims. This could possibly take all day, or it could take no more than an hour, to complete, it all depends on you.
Do you remember all of your victims? Or are they nothing more than tools to help you get your next fix, used and then discarded, from both mind and memory? We shall see.
Your eighth victim. Do you remember her? Do you remember where she lived? In that location her husband will be at the library all day. If you can get to him, find who he is, and confess every deed that you inflicted upon his wife to him, you may move on to the next task. He is well aware of your coming and the information that you bring to him. There are no cameras in the library; your identity will be safe, for now.
Braxton put the paper on the counter. He felt a burning in his chest and realized that he had forgotten to breathe. His hands trembled uncontrollably. Was he really meant to confess to the husband of his victim? Very well. If that was how it was to be, then so be it.
The name of his eighth victim jumped to his mind instantly. Tabitha Kinchen. He knew the names, faces, location, and how he disposed of each and every one of his multitude of victims, as unlikely as that may seem. From the moment that he had decided that he enjoyed killing and wished to pursue it further, he knew that he would never take a trophy. That would be reckless. It served as nothing more than the noose that tightened should the authorities ever catch wind of what was happening. No, he would not be so careless. Instead, he trained himself to remember each detail with clarity. Should he ever feel the need to reminisce, which he did frequently, as most do, all he had to do was look within himself to experience that joy and exaltation once more.
Braxton threw on some clothes: a pair of faded jeans and an old tee shirt. He grabbed a second shirt as he walked out of the bedroom. He grabbed his keys from the hook by the door and left his house quickly.
At this early hour, it took only twenty minutes to reach the small town where he had first spotted Tabitha. She was early in his career, before he had established his three hour boundary line, back when he was so naïve as to think that he couldn’t be caught, that he was smarter than the police. He had escaped capture and imprisonment several times before he rethought his plans and strategies, turning him into the efficient, ghost-like killer that he now was.
He parked his vehicle around the block from the library’s entrance. You could never be too careful as to who saw you coming and going. Grabbing the spare shirt, he tucked it into his back pocket snugly. He walked casually around the block and into the library.
He saw Tabitha’s husband almost instantly. He had watched the two together many times before he had ever approached her for the first time: eating dinner, leaving the movies, strolls through the park, once they even forgot to shut the curtains in the room and he watched as they made love (he watched for only a moment. He wasn’t a pervert. He never touched or raped his victims, male or female). Even if he hadn’t previously known who to look for, he would have been the obvious choice. The ten or so years since Braxton had last seen the man had not been kind. His face had a sallow, sunken look. His pale skin was hidden behind his mangy beard. His eyes still appeared to hide the grief of his loss, and darted around the room suspiciously, waiting for the one who would be approaching him. His dark hair was long and unkempt, probably hadn’t been brushed in ages. The clothes he wore were wrinkled and stained. Braxton thought that if he walked closer, he would pick up the aroma of body odor and despair. He tapped his foot rapidly, and constantly wrung his hands together nervously.
Braxton cocked his head to the side as he watched. Was the plan to make him feel guilty? If so, it wasn’t working. He had learned how to turn off his conscious many years ago. Yes, he was barely a teenager when he stomped on his Jiminy Cricket, squashing it out of existence forever.
He looked around until he found the sign that he wanted. He walked up to the anxious fellow. Without breaking stride, he nudged him with his foot as he walked by, grabbing the man’s attention.
“Bathroom. Now.” Braxton told him, and headed towards the bathroom sign that he had spotted. He never stopped to look back. The fool would follow; he was pushed by the unknown, too driven not to.
Braxton swung the door open, satisfied that the bathroom was empty. Never too cautious, he walked down the aisle of stalls, pushing the doors open one at a time. At the end, he turned, watching the door and waiting patiently.
“Lock it,” he told the grief-stricken husband as he entered the bathroom.
The man did as he was told and turned to face Braxton. “I was told that you know what happened to my wife.” His voice was anxious, his words eager for the answers that he had waited almost a decade for.
“Who told you that?” Braxton asked. The odds of this guy knowing were slim, but, hey, it was worth a shot.
He shrugged. “I never met him. He called me and told me that if I wanted answers, I needed to be here all day. That the one with the answers would be meeting me.” The pain in his eyes had faded now. In its place was a desperate need for closure, almost a sense of pleading. “Please tell me if you know.”
“She’s dead,” Braxton said coldly. “Her body is buried five miles north of here, down a small road. Tinkerton Way is the name. On your left will be a field. In that field is a small copse of trees in the northeast corner. She’s buried in the center of those trees.”
The man wore a look of bewilderment. “How could you possibly know that?”
“It’s easy,” Braxton smiled smugly. “I put her there.”
In a flash, the man was across the bathroom. He attacked without warning.
Although he knew he should have been expecting it, Braxton was caught totally off guard. The man’s haggard, weak appearance had been deceptive, and he had been lulled into a false sense of security by it. Perhaps he was only fueled by hate and pain, but Tabitha’s husband’s strength and speed had been well hidden beneath that exhausted exterior.
He crossed the bathroom in a few short strides. Before Braxton knew what was happening, the man had his shirt firmly clenched in one hand, and was swinging fiercely with the balled up fist of his other. Braxton’s vision blurred as his head was jerked to the side from the force of the blows. Bursts of light exploded across his field of vision. Braxton felt unconsciousness closing in, reducing his vision to a tiny prick of light as the darkness consumed him, as a volley of blows landed with concussive force.
Braxton went limp. The assailant released him, allowing him to slump to the floor in a heap. He could feel the heat rising from his battered face. His eye was already beginning to swell, leaving only a small slit open. He could feel his mouth and cheeks expanding as the puffiness began to break forth. Blood flowed freely from his nose and a small rill poured from his burst lips. The taste of copper was strong in his mouth as it filled with blood. He could feel a prominent sting on his cheek. Reaching up with a shaking hand, he felt the slice that had opened just beneath his eye, causing him to wince as he drew his hand away.
Tabitha’s husband, Charles, if he recalled correctly, stared down at the murderer, the one responsible for the rapid decline in his life, the loss of his beloved. Hatred filled his every feature; it teemed behind his eyes, waiting to be unleashed. He backed away from Braxton, never taking his eyes from the injured man on the floor. He looked down, examining his bloodied knuckles, his face twisted in a hateful sneer. He stared at his wounded hand for a few moments, then allowed his eyes to slowly drift back up to Braxton. Braxton felt a new sense of unease as he made eye contact with Charles. The hatred that was contained just behind his eyes was now gone; it had been replaced with something else, something fearsome. It was filled with something that Braxton knew quite well, an emotion that he had become well acquainted with over the years, like an old friend. Those eyes were filled with murder personified.
“Why?” His voice was harsh and ragged, strained through the exertion of his screams, mouthed through gasps of air. “What did she ever do to you?” His eyes were brimming with tears, glistening under the fluorescent lights.
Braxton stared vacantly at him.
“Answer me!” he screamed. His face flushed with rage, turning it a deep maroon. Veins bulged and throbbed beneath his skin. He began to tremble uncontrollably. He lashed out, kicking Braxton with all his might, connecting with his ribs with a hollow sound.
Braxton grunted painfully. He looked up at Charles, the anger that resided within him, always waiting to surface, began its ascent. It longed to be let free; it yearned for it always. “There was no reason,” he said defiantly, spitting his mouthful of blood onto the floor. “I was searching for a victim; she caught my eye. There was nothing more.”
Charles’ eyes widened in disbelief. He was clearly taken aback. His voice was full of incredulity. A bewildered look dawned on his face. He stared out blankly, his eyes empty.
“No reason?” He was talking to himself more than to Braxton, his words distant and almost dreamy. “It was nothing more than ‘wrong place, wrong time’?”
He looked back down at Braxton. “Get up,” he commanded, his voice stern and cold. As Braxton clambered to his feet, he reached around his back, pulling out the kitchen knife that he had concealed in his waistband.
Braxton stood, wobbling uneasily. His eyes widened as they rested on the knife, glinting in the light. He opened his mouth to protest, but closed it before he made the first sound; nothing he said would alter the course of events that were about to transpire.
“I’ve waited for this for almost ten years,” Charles said matter-of-factly. He watched the light flash from the blade as he twirled it in his hands. Without warning, he lunged at Braxton, brandishing the knife before him menacingly.
Braxton jerked sideways in a swift movement. He grabbed Charles’ wrist tightly and pulled. Charles’ eyes went wide in shock at the swiftness of Braxton’s movements. Had he not just been staggering, practically unconscious on his feet?
With a measured, precise movement, Braxton snapped Charles’ wrist back, forcing the hand open. The knife fell from his grip and hit the floor in a clatter. A yelp of pain escaped Charles’ lips. Grabbing Charles by the back of his shirt collar, Braxton slammed his head down on the sink with a loud hollow clink. Blood began to pour instantly from his forehead, rushing out in torrents. He threw Charles to the floor and stood atop him.
“You want to know what happened to your damn wife?” he said. His voice shook with fury, that familiar warmth washing over him, finally released from its confines within Braxton’s mind. He kicked Charles in the ribs with all his might, relishing the sound of pain that wafted up to his ears as he did so.
Braxton turned and picked the knife from the floor. He held it out before him as he turned around. “How about I just show you? You look like you’ve been in so much pain. Like you’ve missed her so very much. What if I help you get to her faster?”
Braxton bent down over Charles, who was still dazed from the blow to the porcelain sink. His eyes strugg
|
I was nine when it happened.
I grew up in a small town of about 800 people, along the south side of the Rocky Mountains. Our town was surrounded by forest, and during the summer it was the location for our greatest adventures as children. The older kids would accompany us, either for entertainment, or at the very least a sense of responsibility to keep us from a bear’s jaws. I wish it had been a bear’s jaws.
When I moved to the town I was only six years old, and thankfully transitioning from the city life of Vancouver to the rural life of the mountains was easier because of that. My mother introduced me to our neighbor Alex, who was already seven. We instantly bonded, he was brash and daring, and could always convince me to join him on magical quests through our yards chasing dragons and monsters. He always insisted on making me the damsel in distress, but I’d always make sure I still got one of his duct tape and cardboard swords in case I too needed to vanquish a beast. A year later we started to play in the forest. First only at the edges, darting in and out of trees, making sure our houses were always in view.
It was because, I was nervous at first, my mom had always warned me about bears. Then during his short visits home, my dad would tell me frightening stories from his logging job. Stories about vicious mountain lions and spiders that could kill you before you even noticed their bite. It was this nervousness that kept us on the fringe of the forest for the first few months. Then there was the snow and the danger of falling into a tree well, and slipping on the slick ground of the fresh melt.
By the end of spring though, I could tell Alex was getting antsy to enter the forest. I finally complied, on the condition we went with the other kids. I think he was a bit jealous, it had always just been us two playing, but his curiosity about the forest’s depths won him over.
The first time we went in, it was bright and sunny, and light filtered through the leaves into soft green hues, dotted with areas of inky black shade where the leaves and branches were too thick to let the early summer sun through. We were playing tag, and had been given sixty seconds to hide. I had played like this with Alex, and immediately found one of these inky spots so that I could scramble up its tree. In a few moments I was mostly concealed at the bottom branches, the pine needles and rough bark scraping at my knees and hands.
I heard a scramble above me and looked up to see one of the older kids little sisters. She was only three branches above me, and held a finger to her lips. I nodded, and looked back out into the clearing.
I held a bated breath as I heard giggling approaching us. Watching silently from the branches, I saw that most of the kids had already been found, but if I had counted right at the beginning, there were still three of us hiding. I would have been able to keep my spot too, but at that moment a drop of sap fell onto the back of my neck startling me and causing me to lose my footing.
In a long second I was lying on the spongy forest floor, a bit roughed up but okay. The eyes of the groups eldest widened and he jumped back, before quickly moving to my side and helping me up. I was fine and ready to help find the last few.
It only took us a minute to find Alex, he had hidden only two trees away, and he blamed me for making him move when he saw me fall. I just punched him in the arm.
Half an hour later though, due to my silly sense of honor to not share her position, my group had not found the girl. Because it was getting dark, the leader began to call out for her, and I quickly brought them to the tree we’d been hiding in.
“She’s a couple branches above where I was,” I pointed up to the west side of tree, before cupping my hands to my mouth and hollering up. “Hey! Game’s over! Come on!”
There was no response, only the light swaying of the tree’s branches in the evening breeze. The older kid, the one who was her older brother, quickly started climbing up, and there was a thick silence while we waited for him to return. The heavy branches and the quickly dimming light left us blind but for the occasional rustle high above us. In a few minutes that felt like hours, the boy dropped down, landing easily on his feet, jacket noticeably stained in the same inky sap that had fallen onto my neck. I couldn’t help but feel jealous about his landing, despite myself.
“She’s not up there, I circled the whole tree.” He turned to me, “She probably thought you would rat her spot out once we walked away.”
He counted us off, there were eight of us in total not including him. He pointed at Alex and I, and then towards the oldest person. “Take the kids home, if it gets dark I don’t wanna get in trouble for getting them hurt. The rest of us will go find her.”
I looked to Alex, nervous he would talk back, but in the setting sun and the tense air around our group, he for once seemed frightened into submission.
As our guide led us back in silence, the echoed calls of the group faded away, leaving a chill down my spine that I knew was from more than just the insetting brisk air that night time brought. I rubbed my hands at my sides, and jumped at every rustle as we headed home. In the corners of my eyes it seemed like the shadows were distorting, and the very forest itself seemed to be turning pitch black.
Once I was in sight of my house the sun had nearly set, blood red hues intermingling with flat yellow, creating a sickening sight. I bolted from the group to my doorstep, ignoring the startled call from the older kid. The world felt like it was moving in slow motion as I approached, and every color, every feeling was so vivid that I felt that I might just cease to exist with each step. Images were twisting in my mind, and I felt a heavy sleepiness unlike anything else I had ever experienced.
I remember reaching for the doorknob as the world faded to black, only hearing the pounding of my own heart.
I woke up two days later in a hospital room with a strangled gasp. I had been stuck in a world of pulsating night terrors, and it took me a few moments to come to attention. A doctor must have heard me, because suddenly there was a large hand on my shoulder, gently keeping me laying down as a reassuring voice told me that everything was alright.
I cracked my eyes open, not remembering closing them in the first place. My parents entered my vision first, smiling at me. I turned to the hands owner, a larger man in a white lab coat.
“What’s wrong with me?” My throat was dry and sore, and my voice came out hoarse.
My mother slowly approached me, still smiling. “Oh sweetie, it’s alright. You got scared, and sometimes when people get scared they have something called a panic attack. Because you’re so little, your heart had some trouble keeping up, and you passed out. It’s like falling asleep but not on purpose.” Her voice had that odd child like lilt she used when she thought I didn’t understand her.
“Oh.” I would have said more, but the doctor turned to my parents and began talking about medication. In a few more minutes he and my father left, and my mother took some day clothes out of her purse. I realized that I only had a hospital gown on.
My mother sat down on the bed next to where I was laying. She wrapped an arm around me affectionately and pulled me close to her. “Oh sweetie, we were so scared. Thank god you’re alright.”
I said nothing, still unsure about what had happened. It would only be in the following weeks that the nights memories would slowly return to me.
My mother must have taken my silence as fear, and she spent the next few minutes consoling me, before helping me get out bed and changed out of the gown. I was unsteady on my feet, and for the first minute it seemed the world was swaying slightly, but I recovered quickly.
Once I was dressed my parents rushed me through checking out, and I could see their anxiety to get home. There were noticeable bags under their eyes, and my father seemed to yawn after every other sentence.
The trip home was silent, the hospital I had been staying in was in a nearby town, about an hours drive away from home. I watched the trees, trying to spot wildlife as I often did on long car rides. When we had gotten home my parents allowed me to go to Alex’s, but only on the condition I didn’t overexert myself. I didn’t know what an exert was, or how one would over it, but I agreed readily.
Alex seemed overjoyed to see me, and was quick to hand me a sword to play. It only took a few swings before he began to fill me in on what I’d missed.
“They didn’t find her, you know,” he said as he waved his sword at me. I responded by putting up my shield and thrusting my sword back.
“The girl?”
“Yeah, they’ve even had big search teams out in the woods. They think it was a bear or sumthin’.”
I nearly corrected him on his pronunciation, but I knew it wasn’t really the time. “Did they see a bear?”
“No, they couldn’t find anything, Tim says she probly’ disappeared.”
Tim would say anything if you would listen.
“Anyways, now my mom n’ dad say we can’t play outside in the woods anymore.” He shook his head, and I giggled because he looked like my dad when he grumbled. “What’s so funny, doncha’ know what that means?”
I took advantage of his outburst to stab his chest with the tip of my sword. He gave a wonderful fake cry and dramatically sunk to his knees, looking to the sky. “The fair princess has killed the brave knight that was gonna save her. No!” He let the end of his ‘no’ trail on for a few seconds before collapsing on his side and laughing, his previous anger forgotten.
“So what does it mean?” I asked, after he had stood back up and our giggles had subsided. “It means,” he said with a dramatic sigh, “ that we can’t play in the forest anymore. ”
“Oh,” was all I said. I could tell he was upset but the forest had given me the creeps and deep down I was quietly relieved.
Several more weeks past and no child was allowed to enter the forest. I heard that a few of the older kids had snuck in anyway, but they were teenagers and I guess that means that they could handle themselves. I didn’t mind, I was content to play my games with Alex, but he seemed angry. When he spoke of it he acted as if it was this great injustice that was being performed only to upset him and no one else.
I shouldn’t have been surprised when he showed up on my doorstep that evening. He woke me by flinging rocks at my second story room. I open my window groggily, and he beckoned for me to come downstairs while raising a finger to his lips.
I complied, but I was confused about what he wanted. When I opened the door I saw he was holding a flashlight in one hand and his cardboard sword in the other. For a moment I thought he wanted to play with me in the night, which I thought was silly but at the same time it did seem pretty cool.
As I slowly closed the door, cringing when it creaked, he reached out for my hand. As I held it out, he put the flashlight into it and began pulling me towards the road in front of my house. Still thinking he just wanted to play I followed him. Instead of turning towards his own house, however, he turned towards the forest.
Confused I pulled my hand back, “No wait, there’s a bear out there.”
He turned to glare at me, “If there was a bear out there they would have found it.” He paused before stamping his foot against the dark concrete, ”I’m tired of waiting to play in the forest.” He reached out to pull me again, “I bet you she just got lost.”
Unconvinced I pulled back further, “If she was just lost they would have already found her. I don’t want to get hurt just so we can play hide and seek in the woods.”
“Don’t be such a baby, once we find her everybody’s going to know we’re the heroes. Our parents will probably even let us play out on our own.”
I was frightened and didn’t care for being a hero, but Alex was pretty much my only friend, and I didn’t want to lose him. “Fine,” I conceded.
“Good,” he handed me a pack of batteries as well. “Just in case the flashlight dies.”
He held up his sword daringly, and we slowly approached the forest’s edge. We had strayed here for so long that the first half kilometer in was like trekking our own backyards. Once the trees had covered our house, he waved his hand ahead of me, my signal to turn on the flashlight.
As we progressed slowly, the darkness of the woods was barely illuminated by the weak light. My arms were covered in goosebumps as the cold air licked up my spine.
After what felt like hours, though I now believe it was only minutes, Alex stopped and motioned at the ground.
“It’s that weird sap they found in the tree.” His voice was barely a whisper, pointing at a stain on a fallen branch.
“Weird sap?” I breathed, looking at the oozing black smudge, feeling something nudging a memory in my brain.
“Yeah,” his face was a bit pale, and I was almost relieved he was frightened as well. “The tree you were in was covered in it. They couldn’t tell what tree it was from though.”
I gently hit his shoulder, “Stop tryin’ to scare me.”
“I’m not lying,” his voice came out as an annoyed whimper. He stood back up, and returned to holding his sword heroically. He then raised it above me, and opened his mouth to say something, only to turn a shade paler and drop his sword.
“T… turn around.” His voice was mumbled and I could tell he was trying to not move his mouth.
I had thought he was still playing with me and trying to get me scared, so I did so quickly only to freeze as well.
In front of us was something black, it looked like a goopy mess of maple syrup that had been dyed to look like oil. I didn’t want to startle it, and had the flashlight shined at the forest floor, making it difficult to make out any feature other then two large white eyes, empty of feature, staring directly at us from the creature.
There was a heavy moment of silence before I whipped back around, grabbing Alex’s hand and yelling for him to run. I must have snapped him out of his daze, because it wasn’t long before his pace started to match mine.
The thing had been blocking our way home, and we had little choice but to run deeper into the forest, into areas that we had never been to before. I doubted any other human really had.
I could hear creaks of branches above me, and when I looked up I saw the moon was blotted out by an unseen force. The darkness had indeed grown, but I hadn’t noticed it in my panic.
We ran for several minutes, until even our adrenaline couldn’t sustain us. It ended quickly, as Alex tripped ahead of me and I heard a crash and a nasty sounding crack. I stopped, fearing the worst, and shined my light on Alex.
I only saw him for a few seconds. His eyes were wide and he was looking above my head. Around him there were fragments of some kind of white wood, or at least that’s what I thought it was in the short time I could see it.
Then Alex was swallowed by a dark shroud and all my flashlight illuminated were two large white eyes, only a foot from my face.
Fatigue forgotten, I turned around to the now unoccupied path and fled.
I reached the edge of the woods more quickly than it had taken to move into them. I had been able to follow our trampled path, and the under brush had been stomped down by us and no longer could inhibit me.
I bounded down the small hill and then down the short street lane to my house, pulling the door open and closing it with a slam, before locking it and running to my parents room.
I collapsed on their bed, and over the next few days I would lead a search party through the path Alex and I had made. We would find a small clearing concealed from above with purposely intertwined branches. In the clearing my mother would cover my eyes, but not before I saw dozens of skeletons, all identified as missing children over the last sixty years.
My eyes were only drawn to one though, a smaller nondescript one, hanging from a cedar tree, perfectly put together with a cardboard sword clenched in hand.
|
‘The first time I heard the legend of the Mad Hangman was from another inmate in our prison. He told me that there was a man with the ability to ward off death. That he was immortal. At first I thought it was a comforting fable for people who were about to be executed, but then I heard it from other places. ’
‘His name was August Atherstone. A master executioner in Britain in the 1800s.’
‘He hanged a countless number of criminals. There were rumours that the only way August could get so effective at killing was that he performed ‘unofficial’ executions. Favours for prisons who quickly wanted rid of an inmate.’
‘August said he had seen ‘reflections of the afterlife’ in dead eyes so many times that death and life became one. He was Death’s Messenger, and through this, entered into a pact with Death Himself.’
‘Some people say he was afflicted with eternal life. Some say Death rewarded him.’
‘He walks the earth now. Waiting by the graves of his loved ones for Death to finally come for him. But he never does.’
‘They say that some cults worship August as a God. They offer him sacrifices so that they too can live forever. I tried to find them. I couldn’t. That’s why I ended up here.’
– The legend of the Mad Hangman, pieced together by various letters found in an abandoned apartment.
Death Himself is a mystery; the milestone to which we measure life. We wait for him like we await an old friend, often attempting to delay his intervention, but never to defy him entirely.
He was my obsession. I longed to see the world through Death’s gaze. By the time monotony and routine had become the foundations of my existence, I had learned that life held no discernible meaning. Death would come for me, and I would be a name carved into stone, long forgotten before high winds prevented graveyard visits and overgrown wilderness masked the details of the dead on my colorless headstone. Through some divine inspiration; perhaps driven by the stale nothingness of reality, I unknowingly embarked upon a journey into the realms of the unreal.
I began contacting murderers, serial killers, terrorists, cult followers, cult leaders, mental patients, grave robbers, necrophiliacs, cannibals; any type of deranged mind I could locate the whereabouts of. Within a few months I had contacted notorious inmates such as John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy. It seems that I had a natural talent for eliciting a response from such people. I would study their victimology and work backwards, often posing as a woman, or a gay man, or a devotee of their interpretation of art. On the night Ted wrote his last letter to me, he had signed off with ‘your friend’, and it was no coincidence that he was executed the following morning. I always found it humorous how the prospect of death reveals true intentions, even from someone as experienced in the art of death as Ted was.
My interest in high-profile killers began to wane, as their stories were often elaborated to the point of fiction. My concern, then, moved onto lesser known evil. The nameless occult killer haunting the backstreets of small towns; the curious Satanist eager to offer his new God-deity his first sacrifice. After all, if I was to unlock the secrets of Death, would I not find it veiled in the unattainable depths of a morbid psyche?
What became clear through my correspondence was that although serial killers were the most egotistical people alive, they held a secret admiration for each other’s work. An admiration which existed only in the murderer’s collective conscience, never to be spoken of. It was not uncommon for me to play the part of the middle man, passing messages between psychopaths across the country. It was through this that I learnt the legend of the August Atherstone, the Mad Hangman, and his pact with Death Himself. Whenever a serial killer with occult connections was incarcerated, several murderers would try to contact them, and the subject of the Mad Hangman seldom arose.
Occasionally, I would be asked if I could contact certain people who I wasn’t familiar with. It was rare that this happened, but one name in particular kept arising; Baron. I had uncovered no details regarding such a person, but I was assured he existed. Robin Gecht informed me that Baron was an unstoppable, merciless killing machine driven by ritualistic delusions. Rod Ferrell was certain he had met Baron before, and that he was somehow affiliated with the cult which worshipped the Mad Hangman. Months of searching for this mysterious inmate yielded no results, until I received a letter from a cannibal in Britain.
‘He’s here.
There’s a cell in the basement we call the Throne Room, because it’s just a chair and nothing else. Some of the guards organise fights between inmates down there and a couple of guys claim to have seen an unknown prisoner in the Throne Room. I’ve overheard conversations between guards – he’s painted the walls with his own blood, his mouth has been sewn shut, he wears a mask, he’s been eating rats. I sometimes hear sounds coming from his cell. It isn’t screaming, or shouting, or any of the shit you usually hear in prisons at night. The noises coming from down there are not human.
I know from experience that he won’t be around long.
I’ve heard that the guards have been told to ‘get rid of him.’ They will unofficially execute him, August Atherstone style. If you want to see Baron, get here quick.
Stephen G, inmate #364, Wakefield Prison Monster Mansion’
I made arrangements to travel to Wakefield, not hesitating to leave routine and monotony behind.
Standing infront of the Monster Mansion itself, its gigantic stone walls cast a shadow on the sleepy town beneath. Cold January rain beat against the arched gates which slowly opened to reveal a gothic palace housing the most deranged criminals in England.
‘I have a visit scheduled to see Stephen Griffiths, inmate #364,’ I told the guard, who escorted me to our allocated room.
‘I’ll be supervising your meeting with Mr Griffiths,’ said the guard. He tied back his long hair with a hairband from his wrist and straightened his uniform.
‘It’s for your own safety, and to make sure nothing is given or exchanged. Do you understand?’
I agreed to the protocol, and soon found myself sitting face to face with Stephen – a sociopathic cannibal lusting for infamy. His shackled hands rested in his lap, and his gaze was primarily focused on the table between us. We made small talk, such as how I was finding my stay in England and what I did for work. Stephen’s crimes did not interest me in the slightest, nor did his life story. I had begun regular correspondence with Stephen so that my motives for entering Wakefield Prison would not be questioned. I suspected Stephen knew my true agenda, but who was he to reject friendship?
When I finally asked Stephen about what I needed to know; Baron’s whereabouts, his eyes met mine for the first time. Before Stephen could speak, however, the prison guard promptly intervened.
‘Visiting time is up,’ he said, and ushered in another prison warden to escort Stephen back to his cell. I had anticipated that this would be the case, and somehow needed to prolong my stay at the prison. The same guard forcefully ushered me out of the room and back to the courtyard.
‘Please follow me, sir,’ he said, walking in the opposite direction of the arched gates I entered from. ‘The exit is this way.’
I followed him across the empty courtyard, my visibility reduced by standard issue English weather. We passed between two stone pillars, bearing plaques honouring the architects who built Wakefield Prison. We passed through a picturesque scenic garden, decorated with benches and rose bushes. Despite its beauty, the place seemed more barren with every step we took. We eventually arrived at a spiraling concrete staircase leading down seemingly to the bottom of the world, and it wasn’t until then that I realised where I was being led. The guard was not leading me to the exit. He was leading me to where I wanted to go. His silence and blank stare told me all I need to know; he was one of us. A follower of the macabre, a seeker of Death.
Not a word was spoken between me and the guard, but like serial killers before us, we upheld a mutual silent admiration. At the bottom of the staircase the guard unlocked a steel security door which opened into a dimly-lit corridor. Once the scent of damp stone had subsided, I followed him through a narrow tunnel illuminated only by a single bulb in the distance. For the first time in my life, excitement coursed through my veins. It felt as though I was walking into the mouth of hell, and I didn’t care if I made it out alive. This was the closest I had come to Death’s realm since I first contacted John Wayne Gacy and those letters seemed like child’s play in comparison. Death had visited here; this I was certain of.
At the end of the corridor, it stood. The Throne Room, in the flesh. Just as Stephen had described in his letter. Albeit with one minor difference: the cell bore no prisoner. It was simply an empty chair, camouflaged against the grey stone wall behind.
‘I’m sorry to disappoint,’ said the guard, finally breaking the silence. ‘But Baron is no longer kept here. He was coerced into a fight to the death with another inmate just yesterday, if the rumours are to be believed.’
‘He’s dead?’ I asked.
‘Yes, or so I’m told. I didn’t witness it myself, although I had bet a lot of money on Baron to win. Such a shame.’
‘Why the hell would you do that?’ I asked.
‘There’s no death penalty in England, you see, so we have to find ways of keeping the prison population down. The official report will say that a fight broke out, resulting in the death of an inmate. No one really bats an eyelid when a criminal dies.’
‘Can you tell me anything about him?’ I asked. ‘Did you talk to him? Do you know about his crimes?
‘I can’t divulge any details. Besides, he didn’t say much. His lips were always sealed. His possessions are still in his cell if you’d like to take a look. Just don’t take anything.’
The posthumous items adorning the floor of Baron’s cell would be priceless to some of the deranged collectors I had come to know. A detailed sketch of a public execution with a sharply-dressed hangman holding a scythe. A masked man sitting atop a tombstone. Two crows encircling an empty grave. The only other item in the cell was a pack of playing cards, missing every card but one. The card in particular was the Jack of Hearts, and something had been hastily scribbled on the back.
‘355 Churchfield Terrace, WF6 4QZ’
An address. I slipped the card into my pocket when the guard was unaware. I thanked him for his time, and asked him to show me the real exit.
Grey skies set in overhead as I took shelter from the rain in the doorway of Wakefield library. My taxi arrived, ten minutes late, and took me towards my next destination.
‘That’s a ways away,’ the driver said. ‘Be about an hour.’
He was not wrong. The journey was made more treacherous by the sterility of the vast Wakefield countryside. Endless acres of woodland, with only hints of blackened skies visible through impossibly high trees. My drop off destination was what seemed to be in the middle of a marsh. No distinguishable path led the way and all signs of urban life had long been depleted.
‘Here?’ I asked.
‘No, not here, dummy,’ the driver said. ‘This is as far as I can go without driving into a bog. Keep walking that way,’ he said, pointing into the black expanse of trees. ‘Should come to a few houses eventually. Some right weirdos living ’round here.’
I followed his instructions as he drove away. I struggled my way across dead wildlife and broken tree branches, eventually arriving at remote territory resembling a domestic residence. It was more of an abandoned farm, but the worn plaque on the broken gate told me that this was 335.
Exactly what I would be greeted with, I was unsure. All I knew was that Baron had brought me here. Overgrown grass and weeds led a makeshift path to the front door of the house, which – despite knocking on for several minutes – no one answered. I edged around the side of the house, eventually stumbling upon a small window. A dim light flickered off the reflection of the glass, allowing me to make out a handful of details inside. A trophy cabinet. A white leather robe hanging from the wall. A painting of a tentacled eyeball.
‘I knew you’d come,’ said a hushed voice behind me.
I turned around, ready to run.
‘I just needed to know you’d take the initiative.’
A familiar silhouette appeared from the shadows. Waist-length black hair, no longer tied back.
‘My apologies for not being honest with you earlier. I couldn’t risk our conversation being overheard. I planted that address in Baron’s cell. My address. I needed you to come here.’
‘This is your house?’
‘Correct.’ he said. ‘I’ll explain everything soon, and I assure you you’re in no danger. Would you follow me please?’
The prison guard, or who at least I believed to be just a prison guard, led into his decayed farmhouse. Each room was more decrepit than the last, some of them barely held together by loose wooden panels. One of the rooms had a semblance of order; perhaps a living room, since lost to domestic neglect. A corridor led to what I assumed to be the room I had stared in from outside the house. The entranceway appeared different to the rest. It had been cared for. It boasted three steel padlocks and was made of corrugated iron.
‘Very few people have ever stepped foot in this room. Or even laid eyes on it. Please do not touch anything.’
The iron door took an age to swing open. Orange light from bare bulbs illuminated the rectangular room, showcasing wall-to-wall glass cabinets. Headless mannequins adorned the corners of the room, decorated in clothing from a previous age. Bizarre paintings of otherworldly demons hung in black frames.
‘I’ve read all of your letters,’ the guard said. ‘Your preoccupation with death goes beyond obsession, to the point where you are willing to travel blindly in the vain hope you might uncover something the rest of the world doesn’t know.’
I walked up to the first glass cabinet, unsure where to look first.
‘I know this,’ he continued, ‘because I’m the same. Every item in this room has, at some point, passed through the hands of Death Himself. All the artwork you see has painted by murderers, serial killers, sometimes with their own blood. The offspring of demented creativity and the paintbrush. I own genuine torture devices, used centuries ago in public executions. I am in possession of the bones of the most deformed man to have ever lived, who was hanged from a tree as he was thought to be an adversary of God. I own occult artifacts, murder weapons, a piece of skin said to be torn from the Devil himself.’
He walked towards a mannequin wearing a white mask and a frayed leather robe. Infront of the mannequin stood an empty altar. A visual straight from the scene of a cult sacrifice, albeit its human elements replaced with lifeless ornaments.
‘This is my collection. This is my obsession. All I’m missing is the ultimate item.’
His eyes glanced towards the empty altar, and took a breath to indicate that the piece was not wholly complete. That something should be perched atop; some priceless tome or grimoire.
‘Which is?’ I asked.
‘Please step this way. I have a surprise for you.’
A door – camouflaged between two glass trophy cases – became apparent when the guard placed his hand on its gold doorknob. He opened the door outward and proudly stepped back, as if revealing a master painting he had spent his life creating.
It appeared to be a storage room; perhaps for items deemed not important enough for viewing privileges in the guard’s personal museum of the dead, yet not. A sudden influx of shock blinded my rationality. How long I remained silent for, I will never know, but between breaths I eventually managed to ask the question:
‘Who is that?’
I needed not to wait for his answer. A man, bound with rope and chain sat in a chair, unconscious. Any other time, I would not have recognised him. His pale features and thin blonde hair – uncut for decades – resembled no one I had seen before. My realisation came when the prisoner’s head lulled to the side, revealing lips which had been somehow torn to pieces. His mouth had swelled to twice its normal size, and his lips pulsated with holes and fresh scars anew.
‘I apologise for showing him to you in such horrific appearance,’ said the guard, ‘his lips had been sewn shut for years. I’m no surgeon. I couldn’t help the trauma.’
For the first time, I felt that maybe I had come too close to Death. Maybe this was all some kind of error, and Death was not my reason or my obsession. Maybe something else entirely; literature, painting, poetry. Maybe I could take solace from a medium where Death was not immediate, not presented within touching distance inside a glass case.
‘Please, explain.’ I said. ‘I don’t know if I want any part of this.’
‘Being in the inner circle in the prison system gives me access to the information I need. The amount of inmates who pass through us without the public’s knowledge is immense. From there I can locate the killers who interest me, and be the first to get hold of their possessions. I convinced the courts to send Baron to Wakefield so that we could keep him hidden in the Throne Room. Most prisons are reluctant to take the high profile inmates because it’s not worth the hassle, so the courts were glad to send him to us.’
‘High profile?’ I asked. ‘No one knows who he is.’
‘Because we managed to keep his whereabouts a secret. Regardless, our instructions were simple; keep him hidden from public, starve him to death then claim it was self-inflicted. But last week the instructions from the courts changed; kill him immediately. The authorities had unearthed more of his victims, and they found a word carved into their skins – Nihil.’
‘Which means?’
‘This isn’t the first case we’ve heard of with this word being carved into victim’s flesh. The problem is it’s been occurring all over the country. Different victim types, different methods of body disposal. At first it was assumed to be some sort of underground trend; maybe killers were somehow contacting each other and this was their way of showing off.’
Thinking back through my correspondence with inmates, the word had made vague appearances in the sign offs of some of the lesser known murderers, often those with connections to the occult or Satanism. I assumed it to be a farewell of those initiated into Death’s circle.
‘It took me three days, but I finally got Baron to speak. Everyone who knows about him believes he’s dead, so I could do what I wanted to him.’
The guard cast a maniacal glance towards Baron’s shattered ankles. What little consequence was threatened as a result of his torture had manifested itself into violent interrogation. The guard did not strike me as psychotic, merely motivated by desperation at a rarer-than-rare opportunity.
‘I needed to know about Nihil. About what it meant. But what he told me was a lot more interesting.’
The guard leaned down and spoke to Baron’s swaying head.
‘Tell him what you told me, about the Executioner.’
A soft voice eventually began to speak, slowly, as if narrating a story he had told a thousand times. His arms and legs still shackled, his body leaning forward as if independent from his thoughts. He recanted the tale of the Mad Hangman, applying details of the story lost during its telling through the ages. Night turned to morning, and myth became reality. I left the guard’s house in the early hours, coming ever closer to a chance meeting with Death.
The guard financed me considerably. Money was no object to him, or so it seemed. Or at the very least he was willing to part with a generous sum of money for what he deemed ‘the ultimate item.’
August documented everything he knew about Death in his journal. A book unlocking the secrets of existence. It’s in possession of a cult who worship August as God, and his Book of Death as their Bible. A cult I was part of. They have used it to enter the realm of immortality.
Baron was certain he knew the whereabouts of the book, and even claimed to have seen it himself. I followed his directions to the letter, taking the west-bound train out of Redditch until it came to a stop in a tunnel while the tracks changed. I exited the train through a window and hid in the tunnel until I could safely move. I followed the tracks out into the ensuing greenery and into a backdoor town called Logslow. What windows were not whitewashed were boarded up, and a grey tint illuminated every building and path. After asking multiple Logslow residents for directions, and them denying its existence, I eventually found what Baron had assured me was August’s eternal home; Logslow Cemetery.
I waited until dusk and scaled the cemetery walls. The gigantic bolted gates showed no signs of allowing visitors. Nervous adrenaline propelled me into the waist-high grass from the atop wall, barely checking for any dangers below me. The graveyard was a forgotten sanctuary, unspoiled by human hands for decades. The dead here were calm; almost certainly.
I waded through grass and across frozen mud until I discovered the tombstone I was searching for. A blind angel atop a black headstone; the resting place of August Atherstone’s wife. In Baron’s version of events, August came to this grave after madness had claimed him. Unable to cope with the grief of seeing his loved ones pass away, he attempted to dig up the remains of his deceased lover. When he failed, he simply sat in this graveyard waiting for Death to take him, but Death never came.
I followed a dirt trail leading from the blind angel grave to a nameless mausoleum paying an unsung tribute to the dead.
The tomb leads below the graveyard. A private burial ground. It’s where they buried the men that August hanged. What you are you searching for is down there.
I followed a spiralling path into blackness, keeping my body against the wall. The shuffling sounds I heard as I ventured further in I attributed to vermin and large insects. I continued down, trying not to avert my eyes towards the few creatures which grazed my neck and hands.
Follow along the left-hand wall all the way down. There is a gap when you think you’ve come to the end. Get through it. It’s in that room. Take matches, there are torches along the walls you can light.
I struggled through the gap, barely wide enough to pass through a child. I felt along the walls and came to the first lamp, which lit without issue. I welcomed the sudden influx of light, heat offering a secondary comfort. I lit as many torches as I could find, and came to realise that the burial chamber I stood in was colossal, perhaps stretching the entire terrain of the graveyard above. Each lamp I lit exposed another until the whole room shone with radiant orange flame.
It took me several minutes of stunned silence to overcome the beauty before me. The room’s perfect architecture, its macabre decorations of bone and flesh. Coffins lined the floors, carcasses lay draped across detached headstones. Decomposed bodies hung from the walls in mimic execution; a nightmarish tribute to the legend of the Mad Hangman. It became clear why the entrance to this room was a single rupture in stone; the room had been sealed off. This crypt was intended to be inaccessible, yet it had been breached. Sanctuary was not to be found here. A sense of intrusion befell me, and looking back I vaguely made out a silhouetted figure between two lamps, watching me from behind the ruptured entranceway. He did not move as I backed away. My senses told me to sprint, and I ran. Far back into the catacombs beyond the reach of light. I trampled bones and tripped over corpses in my haste, but didn’t once slow down. Footsteps followed behind me. Slow, innocuous footsteps, cementing my fear that somewhere in this crypt I would reach an end. I found a darkened corner and hid. Perhaps awaiting my demise. Why now? Why, when I was so close to my answer to Death’s enigma?
I waited, breathing in damp air and the scent of putrid decay. I waited hours, possibly days. I will never know. My senses were rendered absent by fear and obscurity. My body failed me. It wasn’t until the unlit torch I leaned against brightened, and I was greeted face to face with an entity; a lifeless figure devoid of shape. A deformed mass of hanging cloth, his face concealed with a white mask. He said nothing, and stared at me with vacant eyes. He was not alone. Behind him, replicas of the bizarre man appeared. All wearing identical robes and masks.
I was terrified. The cultists held me against the cold stone floor. I protested my innocence; that Baron had sent me here. He had told me all about the Nihil Cult. He told me of their devotion to Death, and that August was their God. He told me that they kill as followers, so that each cultist can live in a world between worlds; in Death’s realm. Sacrifices to their God meant eternal life, and eternal life meant immortality.
My final vision was of an execution. The colossal burial chamber was my courtroom, and a horde of Death-worshipping cultists my jury. I pleaded with them to spare my life; at first with declarations of my acquaintance with Baron, and secondly that I was only there to retrieve the Book for a collector.
‘Baron failed his initiation. He is to be removed from paradise.’
The speaker; August. The hangman himself, passing judgement from atop a magnificent throne of human heads. His voice low, yet piercing. His features barely visible through withered skin.
‘And the book. The most treasured item in existence. The book is what keeps people searching. The book is the whispers of the condemned and children’s fears embodied. This so called Book of Death does not exist. A myth, created to bring people like you to us.’
And with these words, consciousness faded.
An afterlife called out to me. I awoke in the same crypt I had died. August’s throne sat empty. The gallows on which I drew my last breath announced no successful execution. The chamber lay desolate, no cultists in sight. I searched the cavern, hoping to find something which could explain recent events. I made my way out of the unending burial chamber and back into the graveyard, and what I saw was not a world I recognised.
At the center of the cemetery was a gallows, already with a condemned prisoner attached to a rope. A smartly-dressed hangman dropped him to his death to the applause of a thousand-strong audience baying for his blood. I watched his lifeless body be removed, and the rope be cut up and passed to audience members craving a token of death.
I now realise why August informed me that the Book was merely a myth. In life, yes. It exists to lure Death-worshippers to the burial chamber of a living Death God. For sacrifice? Perhaps. But I now realised that I was not executed; I was initiated.
I now see the world as I saw it before, but with remnants of death haunting every avenue. Along every road and on every street corner, murder victims replay their dying moments. Severed heads decorate barbed wire fences, and streets are awash with the wreckages of fatal accidents and bloodshed.
This place was not an afterlife, yet it was. It was neither hell nor heaven, but somewhere between. A private purgatory. A paradise in black and grey. This was Death’s realm; reserved for the chosen few who seeked him.
I returned to Wakefield. The guard waited for me to return with his ultimate relic, but I never did. I found it amusing to watch his sanity gradually slip. I eventually killed him, along with Baron. The guard’s occult collection proved useful in locating further devotees of Death, cementing my position as a member of the Nihil Cult.
I was assured that neither Baron nor the guard would be granted access to Nihil. They would simply pass out of existence, never to lust or desire again.
I’m afraid I can’t reveal my name, nor the exact whereabouts of Logslow Cemetery. Just know that I exist in your world, yet I live in Nihil; Death’s realm. I have no choice but to continue to walk the earth. Undead, yet unliving. Seeking Death more with each passing day.
Credit To – Joe Turner
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Part I
I’m driving maybe a bit too fast and smoking probably a few too many cigarettes.
I love this… this part of the tale. The story can go anywhere from here. You know nothing until I go on—whoever “I” may be to you. Sometimes I wish the story would go anywhere else but here—and that I could be anyone else but me.
But I’m not. I’m Dylan Adams, and I’m driving a big-ass Buick Century down interstate 89, away from my home in Concord, New Hampshire. I don’t know why I left or where I’m going.
But there’s a 9mm handgun in the seat beside me.
To answer the first and most obvious question: Yes, the gun is loaded. But to answer the second, less likely question: Yes, the gun is loaded with silver bullets. No, I’m not hunting vampires or werewolves. I may not be even hunting at all. Still, with what I do, you need to have something you believe to be unique—with the remote possibility of the metaphysical—to contend in this arena.
Keep in mind as you read this—stop every now and then, and remember that the story can still go anywhere from here. It’s important.
I try to keep my eyes lowered, focusing on each white line between lanes rushing at me and swooping under the hood of my car. I know that doesn’t sound necessarily safe; it’s actually not. However, in my case, it allows me to just focus on where I’m going rather than catching a glimpse of a pulverized car or truck, or of an eviscerated corpse splayed across the road.
No, the world hasn’t ended. The cars, the bodies; they’re not actually there… but they were. There’s something wrong with me, with my brain. There’s a lot wrong actually. ADD, schizophrenia, OCD, and at this point, definitely PTSD. And that’s only to name a few pieces of baggage. I couldn’t tell you how many doctors I’ve seen, how many different medications I’ve been on…
When I was a child, I was considered a rarity. They told me I had a photographic memory and an overactive imagination. That was putting it lightly. I would see things from memories, projected right in front of me as if I could touch them again. For example, I had this toy F-16 fighter jet. It was my favorite toy. Somehow, between moving from one home to another, it got lost. However, when I thought of it, remembered it, and wanted to play with it again; I would see it sitting wherever I looked next. The catch to that power was that the jet was never there. I would go to grab it, and my hand would pass through it like a hologram. Typically, once the illusion was revealed, it would disappear.
It wasn’t always fond memories that would re-emerge into my reality, but the deep dark fears that imprinted themselves into my subconscious. Things I saw on television, or instances from nightmares I had, would suddenly and without warning become very visible—very real—at the precise instant my brain pulled them into consciousness. The images, or projections, would appear before my mind had the time to realize they weren’t necessarily real.
Time passed, and my condition seemed to recede. The doctors told my mother this would happen. We were both so relieved. Finally, the night terrors and random panic attacks could finally end. But that’s not where my story went. No, whatever functional error in my brain was causing the eidetic projections to appear never went away; it only changed. Suddenly, it wasn’t just my memories I was conjuring. Eventually, it wasn’t memories at all.
For example, right now I’m passing mile marker twenty-eight, and as I glance up to look at the sign, I can see in my peripheral vision that someone is in the seat next to me. I know better than to look to see who—or what—is there. You see, as I have matured from a child into an adult, so has my condition matured from a brain dysfunction into something much more… complicated. Acknowledging the being next to me would trigger it to be something more than a projection, something tangible and lethal.
Without any reason I could offer you, I flip on my directional and begin to pull off Exit 12a leading into a town called George’s mills. From there, I take a left towards Sunapee. I then fish another cigarette out of my rapidly diminishing pack and slide it between my lips. Wherever I’m going, I’m almost there.
The road is mostly pitch black. Above me, dark clouds occlude any light the moon could offer, leaving me alone in a murk of shadows. Understand that for me, there’s no such thing as pitch black. Images of all kinds, beauties and horrors, come pouring out. Each new image overlaps the last one, and I have to shut my eyes and will them to be gone. It works less often all the time.
I pass by Otter Pond. Don’t ask me how I know where I am or what anything is called. While I go by, I look over and see a figure standing on the other side of the guard rail. As I approach, the headlights reveal it to be a woman in a nightgown, with long scraggly hair and blackened hands. Her eyes are gone, leaving large vacant sockets to stare back with. I don’t slow down, but accelerate instead. Just as I’m about to pass by her, I see her whirl in my direction. I hear her scream with rage. I pass by, and I don’t look back… but I know she’s running after me with everything she has. She won’t catch me. She’s probably already gone. If I remind myself that I’ve seen her before, that she’s just a projection of a memory, she’ll vanish into thin air.
If I were to doubt myself, however, and look in the rear-view mirror to check; she would be in the back seat behind me. She would be very real. She would probably kill me before I could grab the pistol in the seat next to me. That’s why I don’t keep any mirrors around. The projections tend to be stronger because of the innate anxiety people have towards reflections. When it comes to the game I play, my convictions have to be solid. I can’t doubt what I know is real or not, and I can’t let fear fuel that doubt.
That’s not always easy for me.
Now you might be starting to understand the silver bullets. If I believe in, or imagine, them working, then they will. Those conditions only work here and there, but I’ve been able to test that one so far.
The actual town of Sunapee is dimly lit against the night’s darkness. I drive through, surrounded by a small handful of houses and tiny businesses. As I drive through the town, I can see silhouettes in nearly every lit window, figures standing—watching me pass. Who knows which of them are actually there? I can’t guarantee that every one of them is just a projection.
You see, the most recent and dangerous side effect of my condition is that I can see… the impossible. My own mental projections are already maddening, however my damaged mind has given me the ability to see things that shouldn’t exist. There are monsters, true monsters, in this world; and they hide behind the lens of reality like invisible radio signals simply waiting for reception to make themselves known. Consider the opposite of color blindness; where instead of not being able to see existing shades of color, I can see shades of color that no one else has ever seen.
I can’t say if what I see is the supernatural or extra-dimensional or however one could explain them. All I know is that some of the things I see are more real than others. In fact, some of them are things I’ve never encountered or imagined in my life—they didn’t come from my head.
These are the enemy. They know that I see them, and they hunt me for it. Or maybe they need me to see them to become real in this world, and that’s why they seek me out. I can feel them coming. It feels something like the electricity in the air when a storm is approaching.
I know how crazy this all sounds, but if you keep reading, you might just understand.
Sunapee is disappearing behind me, and I find myself not in as much of a hurry as I was on the highway. I won’t speed anymore for the risk of being pulled over.
Another thing I’ve learned is that the enemy take advantage of positions of authority. A few months back, I had a flat tire, and a cop pulled up behind me. I figured it was to see if I needed help. Instead, he issued that I had a warrant for my arrest, and despite my protests, promptly detained me. I was in the backseat of his cruiser, hands bound with zip-cuffs, when a passing streetlight illuminated the inside of the car. The cop was staring at me… with completely blackened eyes in a head turned back 180 degrees. The look on his face was more analytical than anything leering. Still, I freaked, trying desperately to pull my hands free of the restraints. That’s when he swerved, there was a flash of headlights, and then I blacked out.
The car had rolled several times. The cop was killed in the initial head-on collision. I was alive, saved by the seatbelt the officer had insisted I wear—he even put it on for me. The doors to the cruiser had opened as it rolled, and they were pulled off like the wings of a fly. Luckily, I was able to make my escape.
That, so far, had been the closest they had come to killing me. But now, looking back: Why didn’t he just do it once my hands were bound? And why did he buckle me up if he was trying to kill me with a car crash?
After a few miles of darkness, I emerge into an armpit of a town called Newport. Here, it is hard to tell the difference between my personal living nightmares and the actual scenery of the town. Trash everywhere. One lawn has an old, stained toilet marking the end of its driveway. I had to laugh at the absurdity of it. No wonder this corner of hell has been calling me.
I drive through town along Sunapee Street, turning onto North Elm at a set of traffic lights. I look around when the light was red. On the corner, there is this clown. His jaw is hanging open, much wider than any man can possibly stretch. He doesn’t have fangs, but there is this long, black tongue protruding from the cavern of his mouth, twirling and lashing throughout the air. He’s holding balloons of all colors. My blue eyes meet his glowing red orbs, and he begins sprinting towards me. I close my eyes, and focus on the instance I had where I dreamt of the clown before. I open my eyes, and he’s gone. I take my corner slowly.
I go by a McDonald’s on my left. It’s on fire. People, families with children, are inside writhing and clawing at the windows, desperately trying to escape the flames that already have them enveloped. I turn on the radio to take my mind away from all that. Flipping through stations, I hear some country music—change it; talk radio—change it; then the next station is all static. I leave it, and let my thoughts be lost in the ungraspable white noise as I turn left onto Unity road.
There’s a vibration in my joints, and I feel like if I were to lightly clench my teeth together, they would hum with the sensation I am feeling now. I’m extremely close.
About a mile and a half down the long, empty road, I see a clearing to the left. Logging operation. There’s an entryway leading in, bordered with cement barriers. Between the barriers is a rope with a Do Not Enter sign strung on it. I pull my Buick in and let it hit the rope, which snaps effortlessly. I pull in and to the right, where I stop. I’m here.
I light a cigarette, grab my pistol, and step out of the car. The engine is still running, and the lights are still shining bright across the sandy clearing bordered by tall pines. I stand a few feet in front of the car, far enough so that my shadow doesn’t take up too much of the light shining in front of me. The pistol is in my hand. The safety is off, hammer pulled back. Whatever I had come to meet was almost here.
That’s right, whatever I was about to face has been coming my way just as much as I have been going to it, and probably from just as far away. That’s the gift to my sight. I know when they’re coming, and I can meet them far away from home.
In my head, I was expecting anything to materialize before my sight, because that’s how it works with them. They may be here, there; everywhere around us, but I finish the job of bringing them into existence with my tainted sight, and then I stamp them out with my fist and a loaded gun.
At this point, I urge you to pause. Remember me saying how the story can go anywhere from here? By now, I’ve limited the number of avenues it could take, but in this moment—as I am waiting for whatever dark horror will appear in front of me—anything could still happen. The same goes with what comes after it arrives. I have to be ready for anything.
“Hi, Dylan.” A voice chirped behind me.
I whirl around, stunned that someone had gotten the drop on me.
Behind me, like literally right behind me, is a small girl, probably eight years old. She is blonde, with a pink sweatshirt and tiny jeans on.
“What the fuck!?” I shouted. “I didn’t see… I didn’t make you!”
The girl giggled, an insidious little sound, and said, “Do you really think you’ve made any of us? What if we made you?” As she asks her question, she smiles to reveal a mouth full of jagged, metallic teeth. Her arms stretch out to her sides, and I hear her bones cracking.
I don’t think. Instead, I begin to raise the pistol to point towards her smiling, innocent little face. Then I blink, just once.
It takes an average of 300 milliseconds for a human eye to blink. My eyes were closed for that tiny, miniscule amount of time, and when they opened, I saw a monster—pale, hairless, and naked with reptilian eyes and sharp fangs—flying through the air towards me.
The pistol never lines up, and I don’t fire. The little she-beast hits me like a freight train and I fly backward through the air, landing hard on my back and shoulders. The gun falls out of my hand, landing somewhere nearby. The air is forced out of my chest, but I have no time to feel it. As fast as she had changed, she is on top of me, screeching like a pair of fighting wild cats. One clawed hand has me pinned down, the other she raises high above her head, lashing down in a wide swipe. My neck and face suddenly feel like they’re on fire. She raises her hand again, but this time I grab her wrist on its way down. Before she can move her other hand, I grab that wrist too. She lunges down with her face, screaming in what is now a deep roar. Vile spit flies off of her twisted teeth. She is leaning down to bite my throat like an animal.
I respond by surging my own head forward in a brutal headbutt. It works. The impact knocks her back, and I feel strength diminish in her thin, waxy arms for just an instant. I seize the opportunity to push forward, raising her back up straight. I then pull hard on her left arm. As she loses balance, I release her right wrist and proceed to deliver the hardest punches I could muster against her bald head. One, two, three… four brutal strikes and she’s off of me.
I know better than to try to find the gun yet. Instead, I take my turn to pounce on the creature. The second I’m on her, she begins to roar. When I say roar, I mean it was an ear-piercing, deafening howl, something impossible. I feel as though my head might explode at any second. The maddening scream coupled with the pain of headbutting her almost makes me black out, but I fight through it. One blow after another, I beat upon her face. Dark, putrid blood coats my hands as bone and sinew clash. Wet, meaty squishing noises begin to overcome the volume of her defensive howl. I raise my fist up high, and with everything I have, bring it straight down into her face. Her hands, which had been tearing my skin to shreds trying to fight me off, fall limp to her sides. I don’t let up. I take both of my thumbs and I press them into her black and amber eyes. They pop like grapes, and more dark blood rushes out as if her sockets were geysers. This time, her screaming is high pitched and full of pain, full of terror. The sound lionizes the fucked up gorilla that I am, and I find myself smiling despite my firmly clenched teeth.
“YOU FUCKED WITH ME!!” I roared, “AND THIS IS WHAT YOU GET!”
I pull my hands back and jump off of her. The way she thrashes in her agony and newfound blindness is reminiscent of an insect’s death throws. The pistol takes me only seconds to find. I reach down and scoop it up. When I turn around, she’s airborne again. We collide, and I am slammed back onto the hood of my car. My head crashes so hard, it dents the steel hood and I nearly bite my tongue in half. Even blind, she takes a swipe at my chest, and this time it’s deep. I scream out in shock from the searing pain. Also, this time, she has me pinned down. Her skin begins to surge, and hundreds of thin black tendrils start to poke through the flesh of her face. Each one, like the clown’s black tongue, curls and stretches towards me.
However… this time, I didn’t drop the gun.
As she goes to lunge her claws into my throat, I fire. The hole that the silver bullet leaves is impossibly large for a 9mm. The edges of the wound are cauterized. She stumbles back, holding her stomach in a sweet disbelief. The next shot is aimed at her knee, and it blows her leg off. She falls, wailing. Still, she claws at the sand, trying desperately to reach me. I shoot her arm off at the shoulder. Now she rolls onto her back, weak but not defeated.
She tries to claw at my legs, but misses. I stand on her wrist.
“What are you?” I demand, practically choking the words out.
Between labored breaths, she says, “I-I—am unstoppable. I—will—kill… all of you.”
I say nothing more, and put the five remaining bullets through her head and torso.
I nearly fall over, stumbling back towards the car, where I lean upon the fender. I’m bleeding badly, but I won’t be able to go to a hospital anywhere near here.
Panting, I look up to find that I’m surrounded.
Freaks, monsters, zombies, burned corpses of children, the clown, savage wolves with glowing eyes—claws, tentacles, fangs, and blood; horrors of every kind all around me. They are silent and staring.
I’m done, I think to myself. But I won’t let them enjoy seeing my fear. Grimacing, I push myself back up until I’m standing tall. I reach into my pocket and pull out a loaded magazine. Looking at every terror around me, I load the gun and take a few defiant steps towards my kill. Their eyes never leave me, but they don’t approach. A silent moment passes. Then, simultaneously, the all back away slowly, receding back into the ebony abyss of the forest.
Were they all projections, or something more?
I’m alone again. I waste no time getting back into the car. I’m hurt badly, and I’ll have a ways to go before I can see a doctor. The cuts in my neck hurt, but they weren’t bleeding like my chest was. I needed stiches, and maybe a transfusion. Most importantly, I still need to keep my wits about me.
I’m driving maybe a bit too fast and smoking probably a few too many cigarettes.
I lead my big-ass Buick Century away from Newport, New Hampshire towards interstate 89. Aside from fighting to not lose consciousness, my brain is tangled on the fact that the monster had seen me before I saw it. That’s never happened before. Then I thought of what the monster had said. She said she would kill all of you.
I never disposed of any bodies of the creatures I’ve slain. I leave them where they are in hope that someone will find and report them, but if they do—nobody hears about it. The enemy doesn’t come from my imagination, but somewhere else. Somehow they become tangible through my vision. But now I wonder if it’s that exclusive. Could someone else have conjured that little girl?
I won’t pretend to understand any of this, or hope that you will. I need to find a hospital. Afterwards, a computer. I will post this blog everywhere, explode the internet with it if I have to. Someone out there will see it, not just the words and the story, but the monstrous truth behind it.
I am Dylan Adams, and I am not a witch-hunter, I am a soldier. The game is changing, they are changing, and I have to modify my tactics as well. This story isn’t over; it can still go anywhere from here.
I never asked for this sight—this curse of fucked up synapses— but I have it, and it’s a responsibility. If you have it too, then find me. Clear your mind, imagine me, and you’ll know where to go
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There are three men standing at the intersection of a sewer. One of them is very lean and very tall. In fact he looks too tall and seems to sway on his feet, as if ready to topple at the whim of a strong gust. He grips a burlap sack in his left hand. The tall man has provided the firepower.
Next to him is a greasy mustache. The mustache belongs to a stocky Mediterranean-looking fellow with shifty eyes. He digs into his backpack with concerned intent. The mustached man has provided the intelligence and the tools.
Standing apart from the first two men is the clown. Wrinkled columns of green-yellow-blue support an ashen face of sweat and greasepaint. He wears a white glove on each hand. Thick locks of crimson explode from his head, aggravating the sweating. His face is on the verge of melting. The clown has provided the distraction, but he does not look happy.
The three men face a brick wall with a hole in the center. It is less a hole than a black gaping chasm, maybe a couple feet wide and stretching to infinity. Mustache maintains that this will lead them directly beneath the bank.
Clown is not so sure. He questions the men’s collective planning. Tall Man did not bother to load any of the handguns, ensuring them that a show of force will be more than enough. Mustache has apparently forgotten to bring a single flashlight, and curses. And Clown himself wonders why he chose to dress in full clown regalia <i>before</i> venturing into the sewers.
The sewers are filthy, as sewers ought to be. A noxious gas of human excrement floods each nostril with every breath. Layered above this stench is something more, something sickly sweet. Barely noticeable, but there. Pale green light bounces from the drainage channels as rats and other scurrying things patter along the rim. Clown stumbles on the walkway in comically oversized shoes.
Tall Man avoids the sight of Clown. He harbors a lifelong distrust of clowns, a distrust so deep it ventures into the realm of irrational fear. To make matters worse, this particular clown’s breath smells like sour milk. It’s nauseating so he keeps his distance. From the corner of his eye he thinks he sees Clown glaring at him. Glaring, or smiling? Tall Man can’t be sure in this dreary dungeon. He, too doubts the wisdom of Mustache’s plan.
Mustache defends the strategy. There were bound to be setbacks, he says, but the hole in the wall still offers the best chance for a clean escape. They will have to enter one by one and crawl on hands and knees to see the other side. Once inside the tunnel, turning around will likely be impossible. Tall Man asks how long it goes. Mustache answers that it should be long, but not too long. Tall Man asks how they are supposed to see anything in the tunnel with no flashlights. Mustache answers that they don’t need to see anything, they just need to crawl. All the same, he does have a book of matches which he offers to Tall Man.
Tall Man interprets this as his cue to go first. Something about the tunnel bothers him, but he would rather get on with it than suffer the continual glares (or smirks?) of Clown. He accepts the matches and faces the hole.
A soft breeze and low howl whisper from the opening. Behind him, Clown stares while Mustache runs some fingers through his oily hair. Tall Man teeters for a moment, turns around, and retrieves three 9mm pistols from the sack in his hand. Easier if you take these now, he says. All three men tuck the weapons into their waistbands. Not weapons, Clown reminds himself. Merely a show of force.
Tall Man turns back around. The bricks in the wall are the color of money. The water flowing through the channels is the color of money. Even the stripes in Clown’s suit are money-colored. Tall Man sees money everywhere, except in that black hole yawning before him. That is the only way to the actual money. Lots and lots of it, the kind you can touch and smell and trade for things that make you happy. Money is the prime motivator for Tall Man, for all of them. It is worth crawling through a slimy stinking hole for, he must tell himself.
Still, he hesitates. The black circle is so sharply defined it seems to hover in front of the wall, detached from its surroundings. Tall Man stoops. And stoops…and stoops some more. He stoops down until the black circle frames his face. He raises a wiry leg until the knee can rest on the lip of the hole. With a push from the other leg he slowly enters.
Funny: when the whole of his lofty body finally wriggles its way inside, the gentle breeze dies. The low howl changes too. Earlier it was constant, but now it pulses rhythmically in his ears. Low, deep, like a distant generator. The hum-hum-hum tickles Tall Man’s brain. He crawls on.
The ground is cold, chilling to the fingertips. His knees scrape along the smooth surface. His blind hands grope their way over cement and puddles and slime and gloom. All around drip invisible drops. Drip, hum, drip, hum, scraaape: the only sounds here in the belly of the sewers, intensified by the utter lack of visual stimuli. When that word, belly, comes to mind, Tall Man begins to perceive his environment as a living organism. He begins to feel like a piece of chewed meat sliding down a giant’s intestines. Drip, hum, drip, hum, scraaape: an organic symphony of endless digestion. He crawls on.
The air grows stale. Tall Man’s knees are wet and aching. He has lost track of time and can’t tell how long he’s been crawling. A good five minutes, at least. Still there is no light at the end of the tunnel. How much further? He needs to rest just a moment. He stops crawling.
The air is heavy, stagnant, waiting. The drips and humming sound muffled now. Tall Man retrieves the matchbook, tears off a match, and tries to light it. Nothing – it’s a dud. So is the second one, and the third. Tall Man starts to panic. He wants light, needs light, <i>now.</i> He fumbles with the fourth match, anxiously swipes it along the striking surface. A fizz of sulfur spells success. But that magic spark of life reveals something astonishing.
Mere inches from him stares a pallid face, smeared with gruesome makeup. Blood-red worms burst from the head. No…not worms but curls of hair. It is Clown’s face, lurching from the darkness disembodied, every muscle locked in rigor mortis. The eyes are dim and cloudy, but fixed upon his own. The match’s flame throws drunken shadows across the peaks and valleys of the ghostly visage. It alternately smiles and scowls at Tall Man, without really moving at all. Tall Man is stiff with incomprehension. Fear tip-toes down his spine and snuggles into his guts. He feels sick. The two faces stare frozen in silence for a brief eternity.
Suddenly the clown face leans forward and blows out the match. A whiff of sour milk fills the air. The abrupt return to total blackness shocks Tall Man’s senses into operation. He immediately scuttles backward, away from the face in the tunnel. His pants begin to shred at the knees but he doesn’t care. The only thought is retreat. Faster, faster, retreat. Hands and knees splash and scrape against concrete. He imagines the clown head gliding silent through the black tube after him, smiling yet scowling. The splashes and scrapes become a frantic staccato as he goes faster, faster. His knees must be bleeding now but he doesn’t care. Retreat, only retreat matters.
And then Tall Man finds himself falling backward out of the hole in the wall, landing at the feet of Mustache and Clown. Clown, who was in two places at once. They ask what happened, and when Tall Man finally calms down he raises himself on two shaky legs. Teetering, he blurts out his story but the two men do not understand. Mustache laughs while Clown regards Tall Man with suspicion. Impossible, they say, you only spooked yourself and were seeing things that weren’t there. But Tall Man insists there is a second Clown in the sewer tunnel.
Mustache strokes his namesake with two fingers. Fine, fine, he says, I’m going through and I’ll show you there’s no damned clown in there. Tall Man almost protests, wants to tell Mustache not to leave him here with Clown, but keeps quiet.
Backpack hoisted onto both shoulders, Mustache scrambles up and stuffs his body through the opening. He begins crawling. His speed is surprising in these tight quarters. They watch his figure rapidly dissolve in darkness down the tunnel. The instant he disappears from view, the sound of his crawling stops short. After a moment of silence, Clown and Tall Man hear a steady scraping, like something heavy being dragged across concrete. The sound quickly fades down the stretch of the tunnel.
Clown got him, clown got him, mutters a wide-eyed Tall Man. Clown tells him to shut up. Then what the hell was that, squeaks Tall Man, what was that sound? Clown doesn’t answer. The two men wait there in the sewer for any sign of Mustache. None comes.
After many minutes pass, Clown has grown eager and starts to fidget. Enough of this, he says. He must be on the other side waiting for us – I’m going through. The lust for money and a penchant for rational thought have clouded his intuition. He remembers he is mildly claustrophobic, but this fact also gets swept aside by his greed. Tall Man pleads with Clown not to go, says they should call the whole thing off and leave now. Don’t be ridiculous, replies Clown. I’m going through and you better not lag far behind me. He grabs the matchbook and faces the wall with the hole. He struggles with his big shoes but finally gets a good grip and hoists himself through. Tall Man does not follow.
What greets Clown in the hole are drippy wet echoes, a hum-hum-humming, and an uninterrupted dark. Clown crawls on. The humming and dripping are a hypnotic beat in his ears. The blackness is disturbingly uniform. It is a blackness smothered in blackness ad infinitum. It tugs and tugs at the eyeball that would try to pierce it, coaxes it from the socket with false hopes of a murky shape just ahead. The only respite is to close one’s eyes, for at least then smoky phantasms float beneath the lids. This blackness is a solid wall upon which nothing floats. So he closes his eyes as he moves forward.
Clown wonders if he might indeed meet his doppelganger in this strange subterranean place. He hopes not and crawls on. Gradually he becomes aware that the drips and humming have changed. They sound duller, muffled. The air has changed too. It hangs with the dead weight of a dozen corpses and sticks to his skin. He crawls on. Clown’s white-gloved fingers detect a third change. The ground no longer feels like solid concrete. It is softer, putty-like. His fingertips seem to sink in ever so slightly.
When he thinks he hears a faraway scraping sound, Clown’s eyes snap back open. They throb in their sockets with anticipation, starving for some speck of light to materialize in the distance, but it never comes. As his bloodshot eyes go hungry, his mind wanders.
He thinks of hordes of rats carrying a lifeless, mustached body down the tube before him. He thinks of thousands of little teeth gnashing into greasy flesh. He thinks of soiled clown suits clogging sewer drains. He thinks…he thinks he needs to stop thinking and start crawling. But he can’t. He advances no more than two feet before hitting an obstruction.
It feels like a wall. He fishes the matchbook from a striped pocket and tears off a stick. Three failed swipes later, he tears off another. It ignites on the second attempt and shows him a solid brick wall blocking the way. This isn’t supposed to be here. How is it possible he never ran into Mustache? The sight of the bricks is unnerving. Clown bangs his fist against them, tries to wriggle one loose. They do not budge. They stand there in the orange glow quietly mocking his proud logic, daring an explanation. Clown has no explanation. The match is almost spent so he drops it and moves backward. It is the only thing he can do.
Progress is slow and awkward. The ground is more malleable than he remembers. It feels like his knees are leaving small impressions behind. He crawls as the tunnel drips and hums at him. When his feet touch another wall, Clown gasps. He draws another match, lights it, twists his head around to look. What he sees isn’t a blocked path but an intersection. Two new passages branch off to the left and right, where before there was only one straight tunnel.
It makes no sense. Then comes incoherence. Anger. Most of all, indecision. Clown must choose a path. But which one? Which one? The right. It’s as good as the left. The match dies as he scoots back to face the new chasm, then crawls ahead. The dripping, the humming, the putty floor, the breathing…the breathing? Yes. Clown swears the tunnel is breathing now. He can feel the gentle inhalation, exhalation all around him. Somewhere far off the scraping sound comes again. He crawls, and crawls, and hits his head against another wall. Another match, another intersection revealed. This one looks smaller. He squeezes his way into another right turn.
The breathing changes now. Longer and slower. And there’s the scraping again, a little closer this time. He crawls. His body sinks into the gummy floor. A few paces forward, and another intersection, another match, another right turn. A few paces more, and another. The junctions keep coming, and soon Clown runs out of matches. He always chooses to go right, but it keeps getting smaller. At one intersection Clown turns around to retrace his path and try to find a wider opening. The maze does not care. It continues to breathe and compress. As Clown crawls blind through the network of tubes, the roof begins to scratch his back. It matches every movement with a downward push, regardless of his direction.
Incoherence. Anger. Most of all, claustrophobia. Before long Clown finds himself sliding on his belly. He slithers through endless corridors even as they threaten to crush his body. He has to keep going. Keep going, it makes no sense but keep going and get out. Hopeless. The ground is sticky and holds him in place as the walls close in from every side. Clown grits his teeth.
Tall Man stands alone at the intersection. He gazes at the black hole in the wall, transfixed. Every muscle quivers with expectancy. Yet he sees nothing and hears nothing save for a low steady howl. He blinks. Shakes his head. Looks up toward a grate in the high ceiling. A sinking sun casts down shimmering motes of dust which drift in odd patterns. Tall Man sways on his feet, covered in filth and bleeding at the knees. That sickly sweet scent from before is stronger now. He turns and bolts out of the sewers. He does not look back.
Postscript
The story doesn’t end there. In the next several years Tall Man will abandon his life of crime. At first he will try to make sense of the events in the sewer. He will research a variety of paranormal topics: everything from ghosts and cryptozoology, to bilocation, to the hypothetical existence of “hot spots” on Earth where alternate dimensions are said to bleed into one another. The search for answers will yield nothing but further questions.
In a strange twist of fate, Tall Man will eventually get a job at the very bank he tried to rob. Before closing one day he’ll be asked to fetch some old documents kept in the basement. He will walk down the rickety stairs and search through boxes of poorly-kept files. Amid his searches he is going to find a rusted iron trapdoor hiding under a box. Curious, he will lift the squeaky door and discover a ladder descending into a small concrete room. He will feel compelled to climb down to this space which the basement light struggles to reach.
Once there, he’ll find a bricked-over hole in the wall opposite the ladder. The implications will come in a flurry of breathless recognition. My God, he’ll whisper. At last, the other side. The mortar will be crumbling, the bricks loose. Without quite knowing why, Tall Man will begin to remove them, exposing the black hole little by little.
The fear will be gone, replaced by his long-lost thirst for answers. Tall Man will be surprised to find himself crawling through the tunnel with nothing but his lighter to guide the way. He won’t remember climbing in. It will be like a dream, with the dripping and humming ringing in his ears as before, asking him how he can be sure he ever left at all. He will crawl on.
Only when the air in the tunnel becomes leaden, only when the sounds deaden, only when the sour milk wafts through his nostrils will the creeping chill return. Then the lighter’s timid flame is going be snuffed out with a sudden rush of wind. Peals of crazed laughter will erupt from somewhere in the dark and rattle through his skull, so loud he’ll have to cover both ears. It’s so completely unexpected that he won’t be sure the shrieks weren’t his own, or an outright hallucination. Nonetheless, it will be enough to send him scurrying backwards.
The tunnel will seem different – sticky, sighing, angry. Tall Man will feel it contracting around him as he moves in reverse. Faster, faster, as before, as in a dream. Looking behind, he will finally see the dim light of the aperture. It will be closing.
At this point Tall Man’s memory will muddle. He’ll vaguely recall his escape from the writhing hole. It will feel more like being disgorged than anything. A regurgitated piece of meat, he’ll think. Tall Man will run to the ladder, turn around for one last look, and see something that will haunt him for the rest of his life. Witnesses will later tell him that he ran from the bank screaming a blood-curdling scream unlike anything they’d ever heard. He won’t remember that part.
He’ll pray that what he saw was the product of temporary insanity. He’ll try to forget the whole thing ever happened. But every time he closes his eyes, every time he dreams, the same image will come to him with terrible clarity: the hole in the wall shrunken to the size of a quarter, from which a single white-gloved finger pokes, squirms, points – and beckons.
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Last winter I was walking through a park near my apartment when I came across five young boys attempting to smash an object with a hammer. Granted, Chicago children are probably more violent than most, but I am not used to seeing such things in my particular neighborhood. I jogged over to them mostly out of curiosity, but also to make sure they weren’t torturing some poor squirrel or a pigeon or something. If I had known the sort of thing I was about to come in contact with I would have probably went home and bolted the door.
One of the boys was clutching some sort of dark wooden board covered with black paint, and holding it at arms length with his face turned away and his eyes closed. A second boy (I remember one of his friends calling him either Peter or Paul) was aggressively prying the hammer out of the hands of the boy who had been swinging at the wooden board moments earlier while the other two kids watched without saying a word. In spite of all the hammering and arguing, the surface of the board looked perfectly smooth and intact from the angle I was approaching. I put on my toughest adult voice and got the kids to quit yelling and fighting over the hammer just long enough to ask them what in the hell they were trying to do.
The boy holding the hammer (Peter or Paul) looked me straight in the face and said, “we’re gonna break the devil into six pieces and bury him in the woods.”
I was stunned but also amused. I figured he had seen something like this on television and sort of laughed it off as I asked, “so you kids thing this plank is the devil?”
Peter or Paul was clearly not pleased by this question and said something along the lines of “Are you stupid or what? That thing aint a plank!”
As I took my first look at the wooden board up close I was surprised to see that the entire surface had not been painted with black paint as I had at first thought. It was actually hand painted to the point that it was nearly covered with a language I wasn’t familiar with. It looked vaguely Asian or middle-eastern. It was entirely alien to me aside from the upper left and right corners, which displayed very detailed paintings of the sun and moon. In the center of both the sun and moon were unnerving faces with blank expressions. As I thought about this last detail it became clear to me that this board was some sort of antique hand-made Ouija.
Peter or Paul explained to me that his grandfather owned an antique store and was on his deathbed. He had requested that the boy’s mother take this board from his store safe and break it into six pieces and dispose of it immediately, burying each piece in the woods not less than a mile apart from each other. He would not say why this had to be done, but continuously referred to the board as “that wooden devil.” When the boy’s mother had refused, thinking it ludicrous as any rational person would, the grandfather had enlisted the boy and his friends, given them the store key, and told them the safe combination. I remember he kid telling me he was disappointed; he had always thought the safe held his grandfather’s stash of ancient pirate treasure.
Upon grabbing the wooden board from the safe, however, the boys had run into two problems. Firstly, the board was hard as stone and the best way to break the thing was turning into a point of argument now that the hammer had failed. The second issue was that woods in Chicago are scarce, and woods large enough for burying things miles apart from each other are even scarcer. Realizing it was most likely not the best idea to get in the way of a group of kids’ family issues when a hammer and a wooden slab are involved, I figured my best option was to break the thing myself to make sure the kids didn’t get themselves hurt, then be on my way.
This proved to be extremely difficult. I remember thinking that the board had to be reinforced with a steel plate or something. I was beating on the thing with the hammer for the hundredth time when I remembered that I had a hacksaw I had bought to remove a broken tree limb two years earlier, and had never touched it since. I told the kids to sit tight and jogged down the block to my apartment. By the time I got back it was snowing and the boys were picking up the snow and throwing it at each other in clumps rather than snowballs. It was an unusually mild winter for us last year and I think this may have been the beginning of the only snowstorm we had all year if I remember correctly. The five of them continued to play with the snow as I hacked into the board with my saw.
It took an unusually long time but it worked. When the first piece snapped off I picked it up and saw that the grain where it had been cut was unlike anything I had ever seen before, spiraling in a very distinct pattern that I can still picture in my head. The unstained wood was a deep reddish-brown.
When the board was in six pieces Peter or Paul grabbed the corner with the picture of the sun, then he and one of his friends ran a short distance into a wooded area on the edge of the park and buried it about a foot down. As this was going on the other boys explained to me that they were planning on spending the day riding the elevated train and taking the pieces to the various wooded areas they had come up with. They just needed one more place to bury the sixth piece and hadn’t come up with anything yet. As it happened to be a Sunday, if I recall, I offered to do it on the way to work the next day and they agreed that it was a good plan. As the five of them walked away toward the north I saw them enter a station for the Blue Line train and I never saw them again.
Later that night as the snowstorm started to get really bad I remember thinking that I hoped I hadn’t made a mistake by letting them go off on their own, but a strange adult hanging around with five neighborhood kids tends to give people the wrong idea, regardless of whether he’s looking out for their safety. I hoped they had gotten their task finished before the storm had really hit.
The corner of the board I had wound up with was the corner with the painting of the moon with the blank expression. I had really planned to bury it, I swear I did, but we all wound up snowed in the following morning and it ended up in the drawer of an end table. I don’t know if you’ve ever been snowed in during a Chicago winter, but when this happens they tend to send out these huge monolithic snow plows that push all of the snow into mountains on top of all the parked cars, none of which will be capable of moving an inch for at least two days.
The day was rather uneventful, but as nightfall approached I was taken by the eerie notion that someone was watching me through my living room window. I kept glancing toward it expecting to see someone peering in at me, despite the fact that I live on the third floor and my living room window faces the street. After a while I shook off the notion, and I believe I went to sleep around eleven.
Around one a.m. I was awoken by what sounded like a mechanical device humming loudly and assumed it to be my heater, possibly being overworked due to the snowstorm. I stood up and put my ear next to the vent, but the sound wasn’t coming from there. I walked into the living room to check the settings on my thermostat, and immediately every hair on my body stood at full attention. The sound was coming from the direction of my living room window, and as I turned to look I caught the ghastly image of a solid white face with a wide mouth and dark eye sockets on the other side of the glass. I quickly turned on a light and the face disappeared. The mechanical droning noise seemed to recede.
The White Face In The Window – Noise
Had it all been my imagination I wondered? When I was younger I once had an episode of sleep paralysis where I witnessed a tree devouring my neighbor’s dog through a bedroom window, but when I came out of it the tree was back to normal and the dog was perfectly fine. Had this been something similar? Nevertheless I hardly slept the rest of the night. I kept thinking I was hearing that deep mechanical drone somewhere in the distance.
By the next night I had regained my wits and fell asleep in my bed some time around midnight. I awoke once again, terrified, to the sound of the same mechanical drone as the previous night, but this time much louder. As I sat up in bed I saw the ghastly white face with sunken eyes on the other side of the window near the foot of my bed, no more than three feet from where I lay sleeping. It had no neck, arms, torso, nothing. It seemed to just float there above the streetlights below, emanating that horrible humming sound. I instinctively grabbed the drapes and pulled them closed, but the sound continued. Remembering what had happened the night before, I ran to the lights and flipped the switch. The noise slowly faded but I was too afraid to open the drapes for the rest of the night.
The next morning I was still unable to get to work due to my car being frozen beneath a seven-foot pile of ice, but I absolutely had to get out of that apartment. I thought that if the face was going to come back that I would have to be ready for it somehow. I went to a sporting goods store in the neighborhood and purchased a box of ammo for the .22 range pistol I hadn’t used in years. It wasn’t much but it was better than nothing. I also bought some caffeine tablets and a bag of coffee.
Before nightfall I set up camp in my living room with the pistol and a coffee pot, took one of the caffeine tablets, and rigged up a portable audio recorder that I sometimes use for work. I don’t own a camera and my cell phone’s video function had not been working for months, so the best I could do was attempt to snap some photos in the dark with the cell if the face appeared again.
It showed itself around three in the morning. I was beginning to crash from all of the caffeine when I began to hear the droning sound approaching from the distance. I readied my gun in one hand and my cell phone in the other but the face didn’t appear at the window. I began to wonder if perhaps the face was outside my bedroom window, and as I snuck through the dark toward the door the sound seemed to get louder. However, as I entered the room, the door slammed and locked behind me and I heard glass shattering in the living room. Suddenly the apartment was filled with the noises of things being smashed, thrown, and torn to pieces. The droning noise was deafeningly loud and I covered one ear and turned my head away as I clawed at the doorknob with my other hand, but it simply would not open. It was as if the lock had been welded shut. After about thirty seconds of this I raised my foot and smashed the door open with two kicks. Immediately the crashing in the living room stopped, but the room itself had been completely torn to pieces . And as I looked up above the debris at the shattered window I saw the face one last time staring at me from the other side of my demolished venetian blinds. It opened its mouth exposing a wide dark cavern the likes of which I hope to never see again, and the horrible sound got louder and louder as I snapped a single photograph with my camera and the flash went off.
Then in an instant the face was gone. All I have to prove my story is a single blurry photograph and the audio taken by my portable recorder in those last few minutes. But the thing about it that disturbed me the most is the corner of the wooden board with the painting of the moon was sitting atop the debris in the exact center of the room, and the face had been altered so that the expression was identical to what I had just seen in the windowpane with the wide, gaping, cavernous mouth.
I buried it in the woods the following morning.
Credit To – Nick Ledesma
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It had started in the farthest corner of my apartment; first as only the slightest hint of coppery red, before oozing from the ceiling and down the wall. I stumbled towards it, tripping over a laundry hamper and knocking it to the floor. It was funny looking, really. Against the yellowing wallpaper, it looked almost like a rookie’s graffiti, still fresh and drying. I lifted a hand to touch it, but thought better of it. Up this close, the stench was overwhelming like when the sink clogs and you pull out the stopper to find an enormous glob of hair. A smell mixed between bile and ammonia, a nauseous wave swept over me attempting to pull up last week’s dinner. In a panic, I ran to the window and was alarmed when it wouldn’t open. Furiously, I scrambled to unlatch the lock and rattled it up for the first time in years. As I swallowed the tastiest air I’ve ever had, I could only think, At least I know where the smell is coming from now.
One month ago had been a party for me. I’d gotten home early from my job mopping floors at a hospital and had even had time to pick up a pizza on the way back. Now, I don’t live in the best of areas, I’ll admit; and whenever I pull into the unpainted parking space of my building, I always get that feeling that something bad might happen that day. The apartment’s at least two hundred years old and it shows. From the chipped red bricks to the way it tilts slightly towards the top, “The Queen”, gives a sense of both unreliability and experience. And I’m sure it’s experienced a lot.
I push through the front glass door, complete with a head-sized hole, and begin the solemn march to the eighth floor and my room – number 48. I say solemn march because that’s what it is; I don’t want to see or talk to anyone here and that’s best done by staring at the floor as I walk, my face suitable blank. The first person I come across seems to have the same idea. He’s wearing cheap plaid over a greasy t-shirt and doesn’t even look my way as he slips into number 9: The Queen’s nightly brothel, if I’m not mistaken. The Queen’s a classy place.
I cross up the stairs past a room that has smelled heavily of curry since I moved here, the same screaming rock music playing like a theme song. The door is open and I see a huddle of kids shooting up heroin or cocaine or maybe even bleach mixed with water. Who cares? I certainly don’t. The walls up here are covered with what could either be mud or human excrement and I try my best to guide the bulky pizza box up the stairs without touching anything.
I see old man Taylor wobbling up the steps ahead of me. He’s got his veteran’s cap on again and he’s humming some sort of oldie under his breath. I feel bad for him, I really do. It’s hard to watch as his arms shake each time he releases the railing to climb up another step; his legs moving slowly with arthritis. Luckily, I’m on my floor now so I won’t have to wait thirty minutes before getting to my room.
“You having a pardy t’night, boy?” His voice is raspy from smoking and muddled from time. I turn to have a look at him, hooking the box under my arm.
“Every night’s a party,” I remark, failing to come up with anything better, “Why, what are you doing tonight?”
“Not’ing, I just want to say hello. No one says hello an’more.”
I smile to him and nod, thinking about how cold the pizza must be getting. He smiles back, a toothless thing before returning to his journey upward as I jingle the keys into my door’s lock. Inside, I smile when I see the pile of DVDs on the coffee table, the humming fridge with various appointments and magnets stuck to it and the window overlooking the sleeping town. I’d survived another day.
I throw the pizza down on the side of my mildew-streaked couch and turn on the TV. The television is older than Christ and doesn’t have cable, but none of that matters. I put in my favorite television series, “That 70’s Show”, and begin the party with my best and only friends.
* * * * * *
My parents came for a visit three weeks later. The first thing they said when they walked in wasn’t about how messy the room was; it wasn’t about how I hadn’t called them since last Christmas or how they thought I could do better than this dump. They complained about the smell.
I blushed and pointed at the sink full to the brim with soapy water and old dishes, but they were sure that wasn’t it. “It smells like something died in here,” they said. I fought back the urge to reply, “Ya, my hopes and dreams.” Honestly, I couldn’t smell anything. Needless to say, they didn’t stay long and I was alone again.
That night, lying in bed, I began yearning for the past. I vividly lived through my childhood for what must have been the eighth time. I saw all the mistakes I had made and all the chances I never took. I saw her again. Standing by the pool, waiting for me; but I’d never show up. I had told myself it was because I hadn’t wanted to get my hair wet at the time. Now, it felt like self-sabotage and I investigated every what-if scenario that could have happened if I’d gone.
There was a sudden crash above my bed as if a television or even a small bookcase had been kicked over. I was jolted out of my self-pity and back into reality. The crash was followed by a much smaller thump that was somehow more rattling than the first. That old man lived above me of course; he might have fallen over for all I knew. And yet, I did nothing. It all went downhill from there.
* * * * * *
The next night I was haunted by what was the unmistakable sound of dripping. It was hard to hear, impossible during the day, but at night, when everything was quiet, that excruciating sound would begin. Like the ticking of a clock, getting louder and louder, never missing a beat. I envisioned a puddle of blackness being filled by an unnatural cloud; within, my loved ones were drowning. I would turn to my static-strewn friends, but still the dripping continued, taking bits of sanity with every drop.
And the smell; that horrible yellow smell, like a portal into Hell had been opened. I was reminded of when I found my parakeet trapped behind the couch as a child; its rotting flesh and fecal fumes leaping off its carcass. I had cried for my parents then as I did now. But what could they do? I was enveloped in this travesty and I had shut them out of my life.
Desperately, I searched my prison for the source of this evil. I pushed through all the toxins under the sink, scattered the mothballs under my bed, and checked the vents for dead creatures. That’s when I found something odd. It seemed as if the source was coming through the vents themselves and not from my room at all. Immediately I bought a roll of duct tape and sealed off every vent I could find with three layers of tape. Gradually, the air began to clear and I could finally begin to think rationally again. To finish the job, I sprayed air freshener into every corner of every room, and that’s when I noticed the spot.
A single, crimson red drip was gathering in the very corner by the window. Growing in size like a blister, I watched as the bubble popped and streaked five inches down the wall. Several other red stalactites appeared and grew in size before following their comrade down towards the floor. It was bizarre; they began to take the shape of an upside-down tree, its branches a glaring sea of blood. I felt dinner begin to rise up my throat and I hurriedly shoved the window open, gasping for breath.
I was even more shocked by what I saw below. There was a group of at least ten men in bulky, yellow hazmat clothing exiting two white vans and running into the apartment. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I pulled my head back inside to look at the growing red mark as it began to reach and soak into the carpet floor. I jumped back in surprise before the spot could reach my toes and headed for the door. Already I could hear the men as they charged up the stairs past my door, towards – my heart skipped a beat – old man Taylor’s apartment.
I slammed open the door and waived down an approaching hazmat man. I could tell he was out of breath without even seeing his face.
“Please exit the building, sir,” he gasped.
He didn’t wait for me to reply and so I did the only thing I could: I walked down the stairs with everyone else into the cold night air, on the eve of winter.
* * * * * *
Old man Taylor had been found dead, I was told later. It turned out he’d hung himself over a month ago, and there he had stayed, like clothes in a closet or beef on a meat hook. No one had even noticed he was gone. His family never called him, nor he them. He didn’t have any friends to speak of because he’d never spoken a word to anyone. By all accounts of the few who knew him, he was a lonely man because he never took the time to be anything else. Ether he felt he was too busy or he just didn’t care. And he died that way.
After a month of hanging there, his head had separated from his body. The crash was the body hitting the ground, and the following thump the rest of him. Everything inside him had flooded out and dyed the white carpet around him red before soaking through the floor to repeat the pattern in my room. The only reason he was noticed missing was from the smell and a missing payment for his rent.
I look back on this and realize with horror that we really weren’t so different. I had shut myself off from the world into a cold loneliness I’m sure Taylor was very familiar with up until the bitter end. I’ve started going out more as a result. I’ve shut off the television and sold all my DVDs. I even called her again. I almost didn’t, at first. But during the past month, I’ve learned that life is too short and sanity too fragile to lock myself in my room anymore. In the search for change, I’ve put away my noose for good.
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I’ve always had trouble sleeping at night. Noises have disturbed me my whole life. I found out years ago that I have hypersensitive hearing, picking up all sorts of background noises. They couldn’t fix it; only recommend the obvious techniques to mask the problem. Not that I hadn’t tried these already. Ear muffs, listening to music and even things like meditation. None of it worked. In fact it seemed to make it worse. It made her more desperate.
I hear her most nights. No one else can. Why does she only come to me? There’s always the dread of lying there each night in the dark silence, anticipating when she will come, and when I will hear her again. She usually likes to wait until I’m drifting to sleep, so that I jump back to my senses in fright to the sound of her there.
Most of the time it begins with a faint crying. She tells me that she “wants to make it end.” I know she’s getting closer to getting me and some nights I can even feel her cold breath in my ear. I can sense when she is lying close beside me in the darkness staring at me, and sometimes she whispers things like “It’s only me,” right into my ear. She’s toying with me, like a cat does to a helpless insect before killing it. The thing is, I could never see her, but it slowly felt like she was becoming more real.
The doctor later informed me that I suffer from schizophrenia. I have been taking medication for a long time but it wasn’t really working. It just made me feel more helpless. It was difficult for a girl as young as me to deal with this. At least now I could accept that she wasn’t real. It was all in my head and there was nothing real to be afraid of. That was until last night…
Last night her presence felt more real than ever. I could hear her whisper, feel the air on my neck and even smell her breath, it was all too realistic to handle. I got so scared that I fell back into my old habit of running through the darkness of the house into my mother’s bed to sleep beside her where I felt safe. Now that I was older, I knew she was hoping I had grown out of this phase, although I had only stopped doing it because it made her sad, and I didn’t want her to be disappointed in me anymore. She was all I had. If I had the choice I would be in there beside her every night without fail.
I knew my mother had been awoken by me, probably more saddened that I had reverted to old ways when she thought the medication had been helping me. But it wasn’t helping; I had just lied all this time to keep her happy and let her sleep in peace. I curled up in bed beside her and began to sob quietly. My mum looked uncomfortable from the noise I had made, and began stirring under the sheets so I whispered into her ear… “It’s only me.” She sat up abruptly, looking anxious. In the darkness I saw her reach over for her cell phone and begin to dial a number. I noticed on the screen that she was calling the doctor.
“The voices I used to hear,” she said. “They’re back…”
Credit To: Jack
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October 2nd, 2012
This story began about five days ago, but I’ve only now just gotten around to writing it down. I’ll take my time to make sure I share everything with you and the fact that this whole ordeal hasn’t once left my mind makes me feel certain that I won’t miss any details. It’s going to be a very long story, maybe too long for some people, but I just need some sort of explanation to keep me from feeling insane. I’m hoping that if I write it all down, maybe I or someone else can make some sense of it – as little as there may be.
Well, I suppose this story actually began 48 years ago, and the only reason I know anything about it is because of my Grandad. From the 60’s up until the late ’80s, my Grandad used to work on the ships as a deckhand. He worked on many different ships under the wing of many different captains, and so the sea – being the exciting place that it is – left him with hundreds of stories to tell. When I was a young boy, I would continuously ask him to tell me these stories – even the ones I had already heard. Some of them were gruesome, some of them were funny, there were even a few sad tales, but only one of them was genuinely scary. I remember almost all of the stories that he’d share with me, but I think it’s obvious which one stood out the most.
My Grandad was 23 in 1964, and he’d just been drafted onto a ship that was delivering cargo to countries in South America. It was no different than the other two ships that he’d previously worked on, except maybe it was a bit bigger. I won’t give the real name of the ship, but for future reference, we will call it The CWS. My Grandad began the story by explaining to me just how strange the captain of the ship was; how he was a lot happier and friendlier than other captains he’d worked with, but only during the day. Once the clock was nearing midnight, he would become paranoid, angry and agitated – the complete opposite to his day-walking self. He’d scurry around the ship, briskly rushing everyone into their private quarters, ignoring any questions they would ask. Then, just before locking each door, he would stare into their eyes and plead with them not to try and leave their rooms until the morning came… almost everybody listened.
At this point, I should mention that the captain had an annoying habit that the crew had to put up with. He would sing “Do You Want To Know A Secret?” by The Beatles, all day, every day without fail – and that’s the only song he would sing. Even in the night, they could hear him humming the tune from behind his locked cabin door.
After being on the ship for a week or so, all of the sailors were beginning to grow more and more annoyed at the actions of the captain. His seemingly split personality, his constant singing – all of his annoying traits – but most of all, it was the way he locked everyone in their rooms at night, almost as if they were children not to be trusted. That was until one night changed the way they were all feeling.
It was the usual time of night when the captain would dart about, clumsily rushing everyone into their cages, but one of the deckhands, JP, had a plan. Earlier on in the day, he had altered the lock on his door so that he could open it from inside of his room with ease by using a magnet. My Grandad was told that JP had the intention of getting everyone else out of their rooms for a party on the lower deck, so naturally, they were all excited and ready for a night of drinking. With his ear up against the door, my Grandad listened intently to what was going on outside of his room. Over the captain’ monotonous pop-song droning, he heard a lock snap open and the hushed creak of a lone, metal door. Just as footsteps began echoing throughout the empty halls, the humming stopped. As my Grandad winced at the door in annoyance, he heard – all of them heard – vicious thuds and screams of pain, howling and scratching at the floor while JP begged for help. His cries were growing fainter, almost as if he was being dragged through the ship, lower and lower into the steel abyss. As the fading remainder of his pain erupted from the halls, my Grandad stepped back in horror as all movement outside the door had stopped, and the damp corridor echoed silence.
The next morning as the doors snapped open, nobody wanted to step outside, but they had to. After mustering enough courage, my Grandad finally stepped out into the hall as the most putrid odor he’d ever smelt surrounded him. Holding his nose and gagging, he looked around, to see a small puddle of what looked like blood and oil mixed together. The only assumption that the crew could come up with was that the ‘inmate’ had simply gotten out and sustained an injury. Curious as to what the captain would say, they all got ready for a day of work. They sprinted through the foul-smelling hall and onto the upper deck. Once they arrived upstairs, they noticed the captain was already up there, singing his usual song as if he didn’t have a care in the world. In an uproar, the crew questioned him on what had gone on the night before, but they didn’t get an answer; he just sang. None of them ever saw JP again, and the next three months were the longest of their lives.
The rest of the time on the ship was dictated by the captain. The crew became quiet and despondent as The Beatles reigned over their eardrums. The work they once loved had become dreary, and the ship felt like a prison. The crew never questioned the captain and no one dared to leave their room after-hours. Until one night, a couple of months after what happened to JP, my Grandad finally had enough and curiosity got the better of him. He took on the same plan that JP had, except he was going to be more careful. As my Grandad said, “If it was the captain’s fault, I needed to know for the sake of us all.”
It was 2:03 am, and my Grandad finally mustered up the courage to approach the door. He took the magnet and slowly began to ease the lock to the left. A second or so before the lock snapped open, the humming stopped, and a huge bang echoed violently through the darkness. He forced the door forward with all of his strength, hoping that whatever was out there wouldn’t get in, but nothing tried to. He slowly inched the door towards him, enough so that he could peer into the dimly lit hallway in front of him. As he did so, he heard the quiet pitter-patter of something stealthily bounding towards him within the darkness far ahead. The smell came back and filled his room. After taking a moment to gag into his sleeve, as if out of nowhere, a heavy panting made itself known from just outside the door. After momentarily freezing, he slowly began to react to the situation he was in. I don’t know why he did it or how he got the courage, but he gazed back out into the hallway. My mind has never forgotten the look of sincerity and terror on his face as he described to me in detail what he witnessed in that corridor.
In my Grandad’s words, “It was a four-legged creature that had thick, razor-sharp hair that seemed to be coated in oil or tar. I don’t know if it was the smell or the fear I was feeling, but it made my vision quite hazy for a moment and gave me the worst pain in the back of my head. It was on eye level with me when it was on all fours, so I can’t imagine how big it would have been if it stood upright. It had black hooves on its hind legs, but it had what looked like black, clenched human fists on its front legs. Its face was the worst. Where its mouth should have been, there were just three holes in the left, right, and center of the usual place a smile would be. It looked as if they had been ripped to create something resembling a grimace, then joined together by two large slices in-between. Its eyes were shaped like that of a cat’s, but with a white sclera, all black pupils, much larger and turned on their sides. It stared right at me, eyes widened, and opened it’s mouth to reveal hundreds of razor sharp, dark yellow teeth and let out a deep, human shriek. That’s when I slammed the door, locked it, and passed out for the night.”
After that incident, my Grandad was never curious again. He still had another two weeks, and then he knew he was off The CWS for good. For the remainder of the time there, he stayed silent like the rest of the crew. Every now and then he’d go to tell someone what he witnessed, but he decided it would be best just to stay quiet. Leaving day couldn’t come fast enough, and as he hopped off the ship with rest of the crew, he looked back at The CWS for one last time, as the captain waved off into the distance, singing his song while his new crew got to know the ship. A year or so later, my Grandad heard from a friend that the ship had been found off the coast of Argentina, completely abandoned: after that, he never heard anything of it again.
My Grandad is 71 now, long retired and happy as ever. After I picked the local newspaper up last week, his memory was jolted and what must have felt like a dream – or a nightmare – made his heart drop. The CWS was docked at an old harbor, not three hours away from where he lives and is being used as an attraction to bring a bit more money to the area. I was sure that my Grandad would see it as a tour of his worst fears, but nonetheless, he looked at me – almost instantly – and said, “We have to go.”
So we did.
October 6th, 2012
It was only a few days after noticing the opportunity in the newspaper that my Grandad and I finally decided to go and experience The CWS in all of her former horror. We gathered everything that we would need for the trip and set off in the early hours of the morning. By the time we’d arrived at the harbor it was nearing midday, so we headed towards a nearby cafe for some lunch. I’d like to think that we were both hungry enough to merit a meal, but I had the feeling that we were just stalling for time.
We took a table with a window view so that we could admire the ship for as long as we wanted to before going in. My Grandad seemed so distant as he looked up at that rusted metal monolith, his eyes open wide as if trying to pierce the steel. In his fixation, he barely spoke a word for a good twenty minutes or so. After the food we had hardly touched went cold, he finally loosened his gaze and faced me. “I’m ready to go in,” he said.
Heading towards the floating structure, I began to realize how nervous I seemed to be, sweating profusely as huge metal butterflies crippled my stomach. Yet, I had no reason to feel this way. I suppose the story had a bigger impact on me than I had thought. We trudged through the puddles and black land surrounding the harbor until we finally hit the pier. Looking over at my Grandad, he seemed to be a lot more relaxed than I had anticipated. We climbed the stairs up towards a huge metal door on the right side of the ship and approached the ticket barrier. My Grandad being over sixty meant that he only had to pay £2, whereas I had to pay full admission. Not a bad price for brain deteriorating nightmares. Then, with a couple of deep breaths and what seemed like infinite hesitation, we stepped onto The CWS.
Once inside, we slowly made our way to the top of the ship to look around. It only took me a moment to realize how safe and well-kept it looked after all these years, so I began to relax as the images of a dark, damp ghost ship receded in my mind. We started off upstairs and had the intention of making our way down to the Orlop Deck, but after a second look at the small leaflet that had been handed to us, I noticed that we could only experience half of the ship. The bottom three decks had seemingly disappeared off the map, leaving us with only a part of the experience – although I’m sure my Grandad didn’t mind after all that had happened.
After re-visiting a few of the old stories he’d told me as a child, we finally decided to leave the Quarter Deck and head on down the stairs to the next floor. Up until now, we had only seen three other people wandering about on the ship with us – we just assumed that there were others on the lower decks – but once we went downstairs, there were no other people in sight. This deck seemed dirtier, and it didn’t really have anything to offer. It was mostly just empty space and a few metal doors that were sealed shut – even my Grandad didn’t have much to say about this deck. “There would usually be a few cargo crates on this deck,” he muttered, but that was it.
We reached the final deck that we were able to explore and made our way down the narrow corridors ahead. Looking left and right, we could see nothing – every door seemed to be locked, and other corridors were completely blocked off. After speeding through a metal maze for nearly five minutes without seeing anything worth mentioning and already having explored the other two empty decks, I couldn’t help but feel cheated out of an interesting experience, and my own money. As we neared the end of the deck, we finally reached a huge door that was actually open, but just as I turned around to express my disbelief, I realized that my Grandad had not been following me.
I stopped in my tracks at the edge of the door and peered down the path I had walked. I shouted for a full minute, but he was nowhere around. I know I should have backtracked to find him, but I had finally found an open door, and somewhere worth exploring. I assumed that he would find me shortly. After all, with all of the locked doors and blocked corridors, there was only one way forward. I stepped inside and scanned the room. It was a huge area with at least twenty tables in and an old, dirty kitchen. It was clear what this place was, but I couldn’t help wondering why everything was so neglected on this part of the ship when the Quarter Deck was so spotless. Maybe this room was meant to be locked too?
I made my way into the kitchen and began to look around. Everything was old, damp, and rotting. There were still plates on tables and coats on the backs of chairs. It was clear that I wasn’t supposed to be in here. As you can expect, I was getting a bad feeling from the place, so I decided to leave. Just as I turned to exit, I noticed a door in the far corner of the room. I didn’t want to approach the door, but I felt like I needed to. After all, it was probably locked anyway. Dodging tables and various stains on the floor, I slowly made my way over to the corner of the room. I placed my hand on the cold steel of the huge metal handle and mustered enough strength to pull it down. Then it opened.
A huge wall of damp air hit me as I recoiled and coughed into my hands. I examined the darkness to try and make out where I was, but I couldn’t hear or see a thing. At this point, I wasn’t sure what to expect – the door was unlocked, so for all I knew, it was part of the tour. I felt my way along the side of the cold wall to try and find a light switch. Then, as the lights flickered on, I realized where I was. I was stood at the top of a set of stairs and staring down into puddles of dim light at the foot of the steps. Now I knew why the other decks were unavailable for viewing.
I took the six steps down into the yellow light, so I could closer look around at what was hidden on the deck. The dim light showed a miserable labyrinth of cold metal and dripping walls, a rusted case of neglected memories. Once at the bottom of the stairs, I couldn’t help but think of the story and the way my Grandad described the setting. This all looked very familiar to the images in my mind. I navigated my way further into the dark – the murky lighting now only as strong as a candle. As countless drips echoed throughout the domain, I couldn’t help but remember the silence from not two minutes ago. “I must have wandered further in than I thought,” I mumbled to myself. That’s when I reached a small staircase leading further down into a red glow.
I made my way down the stairs and noticed eight doors – almost in a circle – surrounding me. One of the doors was bigger than all the others and centered at the back of the room. Above it, lit up with a small red bulb was the word “Captain.” It was then that I knew where I was. It was almost exactly how I had pictured it, but the fear I felt when imagining it was nothing like when I was there. It was always in the back of my mind that there was a chance my Grandad had just created the story for me when I was a child – or maybe even exaggerated a real experience he had – but now I knew that he’d had told me the truth all along. With my heart growing cold and pounding faster, I turned to head back upstairs, but I froze. That’s when I heard the singing.
“Listen, do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell? Closer, let me whisper in your ear…” I felt sick to my stomach as the song echoed through halls growing louder. It was impossible that this was happening to me. I headed straight back up the stairs – I’ve never run so fast in my entire life. Just as I got to the top, I heard a huge bang from below followed by a hideous, deep shriek. I carried on sprinting towards the dim light at the bottom of the staircase that I had so stupidly followed before. My head began pulsating with the worst pain I had ever felt, and I started to grow dizzy. As I ran, I could hear a quiet pouncing following me from behind, hitting the puddles and panting heavily. The worst smell hit me as I was almost back upstairs. I knew it was close, and I knew it was real. I reached the top and slammed the door behind me, locking it straight away. As I stumbled into a nearby table, a ferocious thud hit the metal, just once. I picked myself up straight away and headed back down the corridors.
I finally found my way out of the maze and back onto the quarter-deck, where my Grandad was stood. I was shaking as I tried to get my words out. He took me off the ship and back into the car. I never told him what happened and at the time, I wasn’t sure if he thought I was joking or if I really did experience something. I just wish he was there with me to have kept me from going through that door. I spoke to him yesterday and told him everything. Thankfully, he believed me and had me talk him through every little detail. Going over it so many times has helped me a lot more than I thought it would. I never witnessed what was following me through those halls, so I can’t give you details of its appearance, but I know it was definitely the same creature that terrified my Grandad all those years ago.
After a lot of research and countless phone calls to some of my Grandad’s old sailor friends, we finally found out some information. Apparently, the ship is docked at that specific harbor because the captain was born in the nearby town. In an eight-year run of the ship, he was the first and only captain that The CWS had, so out of respect, they placed the ship there. Nobody can explain to us how it went missing for 48 years and then suddenly appeared where it is now. It’s been five days since I was on the ship and I’m feeling a lot better than I initially did. That’s why my Grandad and I are going back to the ship – I know it sounds ridiculous, but we feel like we have to. Within the next couple of hours, we will be heading back to The CWS, but we are going to the nearby town first to talk to the locals and find out some more information.
October 11th, 2012
It’s been about three days since we got back from our trip to The CWS and the nearby town that we’d heard so much about. It took me a while to even process the fact that we were going back after what happened to me last time, but my Grandad seemed keen, and I suppose you could say I needed some kind of closure. After all the research, hassling, and phone calls we’d made, it seemed like we had no choice but to investigate further. If only I could have known the story we were digging deeper into, I would never have dreamt of getting involved.
We set off on Monday morning and decided to head straight on to the town, having no stops whatsoever. It was just approaching midday as we drove silently past The CWS. Remembering what happened to me and knowing that we would be back on the ship soon enough, gave me the worst feeling in my stomach. The supposed nearby town was actually a fair distance away from the where The CWS was docked. It took us almost another half an hour to witness the welcome sign, but we eventually made it.
Nearing the town – passing by the mounds of unkempt greenery and land – we expected it to be an old, desolate fishing town with few people inhabiting it. After all, the entire area we had passed up to now was horribly mistreated. Yet, we noticed as we were nearing the area, that what we could see up ahead was beautiful. We kept on driving until we reached a small bridge that took us over into the town – and what a town it was. It was very well kept and looked as if it got a good bit of business for a seemingly hidden little village. There were rows of shops either side of us: a small B&B, another harbor that held minuscule fishing boats, and a few rows of houses further back that were hidden behind the shops. I remember looking over at the fishing boats for a moment, then turning my head to the North to look at The CWS. I felt so small.
After we had gotten over the shock of how nice the town was, we decided it would be wise to start looking for information immediately. We wandered the streets, trying to find somewhere that we thought might be useful, and that’s when I spotted it. In the midst of all the bustling shops, there was a small, dark sweet shop in the far corner of my vision that caught my eye. I figured that maybe the person who owned the shop would know a thing or two about The CWS or The Captain, so we headed on over. At first glance, anybody would assume that the shop was shut. Nobody was going in, and it looked as if it hadn’t been in business for years, but when we approached the door, the sign told us otherwise.
As we went inside, we were greeted by a friendly old man who looked too frail to even be out of his own house. He gawked at us awkwardly, shaking with every breath, until my Grandad finally decided to ask him a few questions. The first of which was “Do you know anything about the ship docked a few miles away? The CWS.” A look of anger filled his face. “No,” he replied. My Grandad asked him another question, and he gave us the same answer again. He must have said “No” at least five times, each time getting quicker and louder until my Grandad couldn’t even finish his sentence.
We knew that he knew something, so we kept pushing the questions until he took a deep breath and wrote something down. “Take this and go see his sister, she might talk to you. Now leave.” He then hurried us out of the door and back onto the street.
After a quick bite to eat, we set off to find the house written down so that we could talk to the captain’ sister. We arrived at a huge house on the other side of the village and knocked on the thick wooden door. A thin, old woman opened up with a smile on her face. She said hello and happily invited us inside. It seemed like she hadn’t had company in a long time – her eyes were glazed over, almost as if she wasn’t completely with us. Once inside, I cut to the chase. There was no need in making small talk – she was either going to talk to us, or she wasn’t. I immediately asked, “Would you be willing to talk to us about your brother?” and to my surprise, she told me she’d love to. I let my Grandad ask her the questions as he knew more about the captain, the ship, the history. He had all of the knowledge. So I sat back and wrote down everything that was said in the interview. SA is my Grandad, and EB is The Captain’ sister:
SA: So The Captain of The CWS, he was your brother?
EB: His name was DB, and yes he was, a wonderful brother too. Very caring when we were children. Of course, I didn’t get to see enough of him when we got older; being the captain of a ship is very hard work.
SA: So when was the last time you saw DB?
EB: Oh, must be 53 years ago now. He died sadly. I remember it vividly. September 9th, 1965.
SA: How did you find out about his death?
EB: It had been reported that The CWS had been found completely abandoned off the coast of Argentina. No bodies, no missing lifeboats, nothing. My brother being The Captain, and both of our parents being dead, I received the call of his death. It was a very sad day for me. He just never knew how to stop it.
SA: Stop what?
EB: The thing that got rid of them all. They should have just stayed in their rooms. It would have been better for everyone. He wouldn’t have felt so guilty, I’d imagine. It wasn’t his fault, though.
SA: Stop what? What are you talking about?
EB: I know about it, you know. He told me everything. It was on Christmas in ’59 that he came back home to visit us. He was acting weird the whole time, twitching and mumbling to himself. He wouldn’t talk to any of us properly all day until he took me off to one side before he was leaving. He told me that he’d found something and it had followed him. Followed him from the sea to the ship, to the land. It just wouldn’t leave him alone – I felt so sorry for him. He mentioned something about thinking that it was all just a fisherman’s tale, so he had to find out. Then he kissed me on the cheek and left in a hurry. Later on, when I went upstairs, I saw that he had left me his journal on my bed. There was a lot of scribblings in there that hurt me to read.
SA: Did he tell you anything else? Was that definitely the last time you saw him?
EB: That was the last time. I’ll always remember it. The fear in his voice when he told me everything that had happened will stay with me until I die. As I said, he had seemed anxious all night, as if he had been followed. He went upstairs to use the toilet at one point, and everyone downstairs heard him shriek. He came down, shaking and awkwardly laughing, telling us that he thought he saw something in the mirror. It must have scared him terribly because he was very loud.
SA: Do you still have the journal? Can we look at it?
EB: Take it. It’s upstairs in a box under my bed. I’ve only ever read it twice. I don’t like the memories.
After that, we thanked EB and left with the journal. By the time we got out of the house, it was beginning to get dark, so we decided to stay at the B&B for the night and re-visit The CWS the next morning. As we were strolling down the street, heading for the B&B, I could have sworn I heard that same scream I heard on the ship. It echoed in the distance, but it shook me to the bone. That night, I read through the journal while my Grandad got his rest. It was interesting, chilling, disturbing, sad, confusing. As a child, I had never considered the possibility that the Captain may have been an innocent man, but I did now.
I’ll update you again as soon as possible with what I found out in the journal, as well as giving you the details of my latest experience on The CWS. I never thought that it could get any worse, but it did.
October 20th, 2012
It’s been over a week since the last time I shared my ‘investigation’ with you all, and a lot has gone on in that short time. Not only do I have to tell you all about the journal and my last venture onboard The CWS, but I also have some news regarding what has happened to me in the last nine days. None of what I’m going to tell you is good news, and it’s going to be the last chapter in this ongoing nightmare of mine, but so you all know right now, there is no happy ending.
As I sat in the corner of the room soaked in moonlight, I began to read through the old journal I had been handed by EB. Flicking through the first twenty pages or so, I could tell that the captain had once been a completely different man than the psychopath I had been told about in countless stories. He seemed like a friendly man, easy to get along with. I could tell that he was excited about his new job on the ship. He said he loved the feeling of being in charge and looking after his crew, and I could tell he meant it. He’d spend page after page describing the feeling he gets waking up in the morning and breathing in the ocean air, knowing that the rest of his life would be spent at sea. It wasn’t until about halfway through the journal that I noticed something that jogged my memory:
We docked in Brazil yesterday to drop off cargo at some local businesses. I saw a bar not too far from the ship as we were loading it all onto the pier. We all knew we’d end up there for a few beers, so the boys and I decided to head on down as soon as we finished offloading. I thought we were only going to have a few, but once you’re in the mood, you’re in the fucking mood! We’d gone a couple of months without booze and gambling, so we ended up there all night (and most of the morning too). It was about 2:00 am, and I was playing poker with the bartender’s son and a couple of his fishing buddies.
I’d just won with a full house when one of the guys said, “You think we should tell him the tale?” They all looked at me, eyes wide open and smiling, as one of them began the story. He said that there is a local myth, a fisherman’s tale of a beast called The Kazatrapp. It happened about six years ago and has been a sailor’s worst nightmare ever since. A salmon-hunter from the nearby village was out fishing one day looking for his daily produce. He’d been out there from the morning until the late evening, and he’d felt that he’d finally found enough. It was pitch black out, so he decided to make his way home, but in doing so, he heard a loud scream from within the rocks up ahead. At first, he assumed that he was hearing things, but then it happened again. From the screaming and grinding of the stones, he felt sure that someone had somehow gotten trapped on the rock formation. As he neared the rocks, a huge creature stood up, right in front of him and shrieked. He turned his boat around as fast as he could, but it was too late, the creature had already jumped on the ship. That’s when he ended the story. I asked him, “What? Is that it?”
Apparently, friends and family of the man noticed a considerable change in him. He was quieter and more wary of everything around him. He was on his boat a lot more too. Not long after, though, the man killed himself. Considering its reputation as “the nightmare of every sailor,” there wasn’t much to the story, but I suppose it was a bit frightening. I thought maybe it was true, but of course, it’s is just a fisherman’s tale, so it’s most likely bullshit. Although, if I’m ever out at sea and I hear a scream like that, there’s no way I’ll be going to check it out.
After finding that entry in the journal, I was curious to find out more. It wasn’t until the last three pages of the journal that I found something that made me shiver:
It actually happened. I don’t know why it happened to us, but it did. We got caught in a storm last night, so we all had to pitch in. All of us were working hard on the quarter-deck when one of the crew said that he heard something strange. We all laughed it off and joked about him for “hearing things,” but then it happened again. At first, I thought it was the radio, The Beatles were playing and we were all singing along, so every other sound was drowned out, but not this – we all heard it this time. It was an almost-human shriek. I immediately thought of the story of The Kazatrapp, but it couldn’t have been, it was a myth.
I looked over the right side of the ship and could just make out a shadow on some rocks. It looked up at the ship on all fours, screamed, then dove under the water. Again we heard the scream, but this time it was from the left side. We all made our way to the other side of the ship, and there it was. It stood up on its hind legs and followed us with its bright white eyes. It jumped from the fuckin’ rocks right on to the ship! I don’t know how, but it did. We looked it in the eyes as its mouth muttered words under its breath. I couldn’t believe it actually spoke. It was some kind of language none of us could understand. It sounded like hundreds of voices merged together – some talking, some screaming. After that, I was stood there, watching my entire crew being ripped apart. I just fucking stood there; I couldn’t move. It was so effortless. I watched it punish them, biting, ripping, and throwing.
After it was all done, it charged at me and pinned me down, screaming in my face. It shoved some of the flesh hanging from its jaw into my mouth. I vomited, I just couldn’t take it. It looked into my eyes and growled, “Mine.” Afterward, it charged right down to the bottom of the ship. I could hear the banging and feel the tremors all through the steel. I’m on my own in my room now with
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My life has been somewhat, ruined, by an experience I had when I was younger. I think so often back to the time my experience happened. Nobody ever believed my story at the time, so I decided to write it now, for the world to see.
It began really when I was 14 or so, when my family moved home. My Dad had been offered a job with better pay and a mere week later, we had sold our house and rented an apartment in the town we moved to. It was during the summer we moved, so it was simple starting at my new school. When term began I nervously walked from our apartment building to the school which was rather close. I hadn’t had the chance to meet any local kids so I knew nobody and was scared of having to make new friends all alone. I don’t recall really speaking to anybody that morning, I was too shy you see. I just took my timetable in a slightly trembling hand and looked to see what my first class was. Maths, in room 104. I checked the little school map hand-out I had been given, I looked at that map over and over. I couldn’t see my class room number at all. By then no staff were around me and I began to panic. Where the hell do I go?
I noticed on the layout of the building there was a whole section to the right of the school that seemed to have plenty of classroom sized rooms but no numbers. The class numbers on the far left of the school were numbers 300-310, the centre of the building had rooms designated in the 200-230 range. I decided my class room ‘104’ would logically be to the right. I walked down long corridors, most of the other students were not new, and so they had already made it to their classes whilst I contemplated my map. Because of this, the corridors were now deserted. In retrospect, I should have just found the help desk and asked them to give me directions but I was so shy I’d rather try and do it alone.
Anyway I followed the building layout and at the end of an eerily quiet and long corridor, my passage was blocked by rather old looking wooden double doors that didn’t open when I pushed. This seemed wrong. Like this part of the building was not meant to be entered. I played with the idea that someone had accidentally shut them or maybe I just wasn’t pushing hard enough.
I rammed into the doors with my shoulder and with a scraping sound of metal on wood, they opened. I realized then that I had broken the bolts on the other side of the door which were brittle with rust. Horrified at having broken a door lock on my first day, I was about to turn and run from the scene and just ask someone to help my find my class. I obviously shouldn’t be in this part of the school. The new corridor was old and dusty. The lockers were all hanging open and unused. A faint smell of mould hung in the air. But as I turned I noticed the numbers painted on the glass windows of the doors along the corridor. The one nearest to me read; ‘100’.
Perplexed I checked my timetable again to assure myself that I had read my class number correctly. It was clear; my room was ‘104’. And just along this corridor apparently. I began to walk slowly, looking into the windows of each class I passed. 100, empty, 101, empty, 102, empty except for a plastic skeleton hanging in the corner by a pile of yellowing student lab coats. Still, it was enough to make me flinch. As I checked 103 (empty) I heard the voice of an adult man coming from the room opposite. Room 104. I peeked through the window. Full.
Except it wasn’t what I expected to see. Sure, there was a teacher, wearing a worn brown suit and blue bowtie, and there were students, all focused on this teacher sitting apart from one another on old fashioned wooden tables. What made me pause was what they were wearing. Kids didn’t dress like that anymore, It looked like a classroom from an old film or show. The teacher stood beside a blackboard dusty from chalk.
Despite this oddity, I knocked on the door. I assumed the school had a poor budget.
The teacher didn’t notice my knocking, so I quietly opened the door and walked in. None of the students took their gaze away from the teacher, who also paid no attention to me.
I awkwardly apologised for my lateness, citing that I had gotten lost. I then made my way over to the only free seat in the room and sat down. I felt my cheeks burn with embarrassment. I must have interrupted the class I thought.
The teacher began his lesson a few seconds later rather casually. His name was Mr Telori. He began to chalk equations on the board and got the class to solve them. The lesson was rather ordinary; except for the fact no calculators were used. Whenever I raised my hand to answer a question, almost too try and win back favour from the teacher, he ignored it and always chose another student to answer the problem.
The lesson ended abruptly after what felt like hours. By the end of it I was bored and miserable. I just wanted to get home and complain about the way I was ignored.
When I left the room I felt pangs of hunger. I glanced at my watch and was shocked to see the school day had ended. A whole day of maths? Horror. I had decided I hated that school.
I walked slowly home, going over the day’s events in my mind. It was all very weird, but I supposed I would get used to this new school eventually.
When I got home my mother was talking on the home phone. Her face displayed confusion. She heard me come in and frowned when she saw me. She looked somewhat angry and asked whoever was on the other end of the phone line to hold, and then she accused me of skipping school.
Confusion followed. I told her I was in class all day, but apparently the school had phoned to say I wasn’t in any lessons and hadn’t seen me after I collected my timetable. I said I was in Mr Telori’s class in room 104 all day. I must have missed the register when I was late I thought.
My mum paused and told the school on the phone my story. Her expression froze after a few seconds and then she looked at me rather worriedly.
She hung up the phone and told me what the school had said.
Mr. Telori had not worked at the school in thirty-eight years.
Apparently room 104 was part of an abandoned section of the school that hadn’t been used since a school shooting nearly forty years ago.
The school thought I was playing some sick joke.
******
That night I went on the web to find out if what the school said was true. Quickly I had found old newspaper articles about the school massacre that had been archived.
A madman had simply walked into the school with a hunting rifle and shot a whole class dead. He had blocked the doorway and shot everyone in a maths classroom. An old grainy photo showed the class where the murders happened. I recognised it immediately. It was room 104.
An obituary showed tributes to the dead and photos of all that had died. I recognised them, too. Mr. Telori and all the students I had spent a day with.
My heart felt like it had stopped. I felt sick. I felt cold to my bones at that moment.
After that day I changed schools.
******
Now, years later I’ve written this, my account of what happened to me, which nobody had ever believed.
The reason, why now?
Yesterday I received a letter in the post. There was no address; it had simply appeared through my letterbox. It was a class reunion invite, signed by my old teacher.
Mr. Telori.
Credit To: A J M
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This is not meant to scare anyone.
Calling it a creepy story would be a bit of an insult, because it isn’t one. This is an expression of gratitude toward a friend, a friend who was always there for me. He watched over me as I was growing up and was the best friend any kid could ever have.
Even if I didn’t recognize it at the time.
He was always there, even though I couldn’t see him, and he was always acting in my best interests, even if I couldn’t understand. I’d like to take some time to share with you our story, because if you’re lucky, you might have a friend like this too.
I think I should let you read his letter first. In May of 2010, I bought a new computer and took my old one to the shop to have everything backed up. I’d brought the new computer home and had begun restoring my files from my portable hard drive and reinstalling programs when I noticed that there was a file in the Misc. folder that the shop’s technician had created for files with no other place. It was called HappyBirthdayBaby.txt.
Initially, I thought it was a message my mom had written for me that I’d never read as intended, but I opened it, and this is what I found:
You might find this one day… I’m not great at this computer stuff, but I’ve watched you tinkering with this machine lately, and I think I know how to save this so that you’ll find it. Seeing as it’s time for me to go, I want to leave you this last little message.
I know you never met your father, but to me he was Col. Marcus Andrew Stadtfleld, as I’m sure your mother told you. He was a good man, one with the pride of a lion, the strength of a bear and a heart of pure gold. Truth is, I was almost like his son long before you were born. I was his second in command and served with him for three years.
I watched as your mother wept when she heard the news, her belly swollen with your soon-to-be debut into this world, and I stayed with her every second of every day. That was, until the day you came into the world- then my focus shifted to you.
I watched as they cleaned you and handed you to your mother, and she seemed to look right at me with a knowing eye as I stood over the both of you, almost as if she’d known along, and I’d be willing to bet my last penny she did. I’ve watched you grow and I remember everything, even the things you don’t. You always were such a happy baby and you had seemed to have inherited your father’s sense of humor. When you were getting to be four months old, you would do just about everything to hinder your mother’s attempts at changing you, laughing all the while. You were a wild one at heart, just as you are today.
Just like Marcus.
When you were about six months old we would play all the time. We had one game in particular, where I would grab your toes and tickle your belly. You would love it, though when your mother came in l’d have to stop, and it always perplexed her as to why you’d abruptly start crying- after a while, she seemed to think you didn’t like her, which is when I realized that I had to back away some.
When you were one year old you seemed to develop a sixth sense for me and although you couldn’t really see me so much or so well anymore, you knew I was there. I couldn’t play with you as much as before because I knew it would only hurt you in the long run, but I always kept guard. I knew you remembered seeing me because you had a way of testing my presence, you’d throw toys into the corner where I stood and then wait to see if I would play with them. Now, I know you won’t remember this, but once you threw a bear and a ragdoll at me, and because your mother was busy in the kitchen making dinner, I kept you entertained by putting on a little show. It was nothing special, I just made them dance a little. You were laughing loudly and your mom came in to see what was so funny, but when she saw, she wasn’t laughing. I bet you could mention the bear and ragdoll dance even today and the colour would run right out of her cheeks, but do me a favor and don’t. I think it would be kinder to ask if you ever threw the toys into the corner, that isn’t quite as bad a memory for her as the dancing is.
Do you remember your first word? I do… “Love.” Hahah. your mother made damned well sure you knew just how much you were cherished by her, every moment of every day and she would always say, “Love you, baby…” I remember you tugging at my heartstrings something awful once, when your mother was changing you in the bathroom this one time. You seemed to have caught my reflection in the mirror behind her, and you pointed and said Love (well, more of a wuv, but your mother knew), and she laughed and affirmed it. It was your only word for a time, but as I walked out of the reflection you started getting restless and I knew again that I had to be more stealthy. You were growing more and more every day now, and I couldn’t afford to break my promise to your father, which is why I would have to retreat yet again.
I broke the rules many times to protect you, for that promise to your father was everything to me. I remember when you were three and had mastered walking, you were a regular little scout, hahah. You could never keep still- those little legs had opened up a whole new world to you and you weren’t shy at all about exploring it. One day you were with your mother in the market, and a lady with a shiny purse caught your eye. You went running after her, just as another shopper was running with her trolley in front of her, coming the other way. She didn’t spot you, and because you were running after the purse, you didn’t see her either.
Breaking the rules was not allowed, but allowing you to get hurt wasn’t permittable either. By the time you noticed her it was already too late, and you fell on your bottom before you could scamper out of her way. Left without any other option, I sent that trolley flying Into the side of a freezer and as it crashed, that woman screamed blue murder, “A-A-A man in a uniform!” she screamed. You simply giggled as the crowd gathered and your mother came running. When she found you at that scene you were safe and sound, and you pointed to the trolley that had smashed the freezer window. You know what you said to her then? “Love mommy.” I was hiding by then, embarrassed to have created such a scene, though I have to admit I was laughing on the inside.
As you grew and became more aware so did I, and I finally knew when I could and couldn’t intervene. Doing too much would hurt the both of us, so I chose my moments carefully. You were a smart kid, just like your father, and most of the time knew how to handle any and every situation. If there was an option, you took it, though I slipped up a few times as you were growing up, I do think I did well to keep an eye on you. It was just the little things to make your life a bit easier, things you probably won’t remember, like putting your piano music sheets into your bag at night, turning off your television when you fell asleep, pulling the sheets over you on the colder nights, sorting your drawers, setting your alarm clock, closing your windows and door… You caught me doing one or two of these things a few times, and I want to take the time now to apologize for scaring you.
This one time you were doing your homework and fell asleep at your desk, so I filled In all the answers for your math quiz. You’d made such a fuss to your mother earlier about how strict the teacher was about homework and I knew you knew the answers anyway, but you suspected more than ever when you woke up and found that whole half a sheet you left incomplete was done. You were older and had forgotten that we were friends, things you saw in the media about ghosts scared you- and you had every right to be afraid. I just want to say I’m sorry. I never meant to make you cry. If only I had taken a little extra care you’d never have known. I just wanted to keep you safe and happy.
As you matured you began to take form as a little lady and as such, and you began to know the evil of men. Though you had your wits about you, you were always taking stupid risks, and watching over you became a little more of a worry for me. Gradually, I had to expose myself more and more, most memorably that night when that no-good boy you brought home started putting the moves on you. Your mother was at work, he was only after one thing, and although I knew it wasn’t my place to choose for you, you were still only a baby girl, just fifteen years old… As he got on top of you and started undressing you, took his top off and began whispering those sweet nothings, your face said it all.
You were scared. And when you told him to stop and he wouldn’t, and when you tried to push him off and he got angry, when he struck you and finally tried to put his hand up your skirt, all the evil I kept inside of me broke free at that moment and it was something I couldn’t control. My rage boiled over as I began to growl, the lights flickering, the TV volume rising, the doors and windows crashing open and shut. The keys on your piano began to rattle and with your father’s roar, I yelled, “Get out of the house boy!” He ran out of that room and you tried to follow, but I slammed that door in your face and wouldn’t let the handle go until your mother pulled into the driveway… I’m so sorry kid, that whole thing traumatized you for a while… You became more frightened of me than ever, having such an experience, and I knew from then on in spite of how much I loved you, we could never be friends. Not after what I’d done.
Some nights you used to sit awake late into the evening, watching for me, and I’d have to sit in the darkest corner, looking right back at you, unable to reassure you that I wasn’t here to cause you harm. You used to scream, “I hate you! Get out! Leave me alone!” And just as you used to do as a toddler, you would throw things into my corner, only instead of toys for me to play with, this time it was heavy books, CD cases, anything you could get your hands on to get me to move. You used to sit in your bed watching that corner… I always felt terrible about what I did. I’d almost broken that promise to your father- but more importantly, I’d almost broken the personal promise I’d made to you.
It was like that until the night you tried to make peace with me, that night you sat up in your bed and said, “If you’re here, I’m sorry, you were only trying to stop him…” I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t, even as you shuffled around nervously and called, “You’re here right? Could you show me a sign?” I wanted so badly to give you something, anything to show you I was there and that I’d heard that, but fearing that you would lose it if I did, I kept silent and just nodded, in that dark corner where you couldn’t see me.. You have to know I was never mad at you, you were just a little girl and that little prick tipped me over the edge… Promise me you’ll never do anything like that again, won’t you?
It’s your eighteenth Birthday today, which is exactly why I’m writing this to you. I want to wish you a happy birthday. I’m sure your dad’s getting sick of keeping that bar stool open for me. Live a good life, try not to forget about me, and know you turned out great.
Your father would be so proud of you.
This letter is my present to you, and don’t you worry about the spooky corner anymore, my final order is complete. I don’t know about you, but I think this trooper deserves a drink; you sure were a handful, haha!
If you find this one day, try calling out to me
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Attention All Shoppers!
I’m going to post this here for one reason, and one reason only: because I am NOT a bad person. Yes, I had a few issues with family members growing up- nothing traumatic, and I’ve taken my fair share of teasing and bullying in high school but there is absolutely nothing mentally wrong with me other than I have had ENOUGH. I know the media nowadays likes to take stories like mine and try to find some sort of illness or something to blame…but rest assured: all my eggs are in the right basket, whether you agree with me or not.
Let me explain a little bit better. My name? Don’t worry about it. Where do I live? Don’t worry about that either. The only details I will give you about myself are the following: 1.) I work in a retail store that I am 99.9% certain all of you have heard of, been to, and shopped at at least once in your lives. I’ve worked there for several years now having held various positions from cashier to backroom to shelf stocking to my most recent position, the customer service desk. And 2.) Up until very recently, I would have never dreamed of harming another person. I was raised to be well mannered, sensitive, sympathetic, empathetic, caring and helpful, and I continue to be most of the time…
Multiple years in retail have given me the incredible skill of bottling up my emotions and hiding them super well. I could be boiling angry on the inside and still smiling and remaining cool as a cucumber on the outside. That said, it’d probably be good to give you some info on what exactly I do at my job: I know this is a lot of prefacing, but trust me, this is important for later. At the service desk where I work, we handle returns and refunds, process money transfers, cash checks, and sell and print money orders for customers. Sounds easy, right? Phff. Well, while the tasks themselves are not complicated in the slightest, the stupidity and attitudes of the customers make it quite the challenge sometimes.
Now, do you remember the “golden rule” from pre-school? If not, the golden rule simply says: “Treat others the way you’d like to be treated.” Sounds fair, right? Well, maybe it’s due to my upbringing in a mostly loving family combined with my strong desire as a child and even still in adulthood to make people happy, but I have always lived as if this wasn’t just a rule. To me, it was always the golden law; the “North” on my moral compass if you will. And here, I believe, I can begin my story.
Almost every Friday since I’ve been employed at that store, a particular woman has come in with whom I have had many, many issues. I believe the first time I had the misfortune of meeting her, she threw her DVD case at me because I, as store policy and my manager dictated, refused her return of an open copy of “Old Yeller”. The only reason I remember this is because I was thinking to myself what a coincidence it was that an older lady was yelling at me about a movie called “Old Yeller”. I know- I’m corny. Whatever. Anyway, she insisted she wanted to return it because she’d never watch it again because it was too sappy for her. Fair enough, but not permitted at our store. I smiled sympathetically and said “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do. If you really want to get your money back for it, I’d suggest trying to sell it on eBay or something. It’s easy and you may even end up getting more than you paid for it here!” She snorted indignantly and told my manager that I was “just trying to shut her up and get her to leave” to which my manager did nothing to reprimand me but still! The nerve of this lady! I was just trying to help! Since then, she’s been nothing but nasty to me. One time when I wasn’t looking, she stole my pen that I got while at my favorite vacation spot. Another time, she yelled at me in front of a whole line of customers because “I was going too slow, and if I can’t do my job quick enough then I shouldn’t be working here!” to which everyone in line behind her agreed, making me feel so humiliated and angry inside. You have to understand: to this day, our registers are not that fast! They’re old, outdated, and corporate refuses to upgrade. I can only work with what I’ve got, and I can only go as fast as my register can. I’m HUMAN!
I mentioned that I’ve been working there for several years now, though, and as they’ve gone by, they’ve only made her more belligerent, rude, and ignorant. She was already over the hill in the early years of my career there, and over the last few years, she’s been allegedly developing some “medical issues” which, if you ask me, are bullshit. I honestly think she’s just looking for attention because nowadays, she’ll come into the store with no cane, no limp, and virtually no signs of physical decline whatsoever, but then she’ll take one of the electric scooter carts that our store has as a courtesy to those who really are disabled. I am not even lying- this bitch once told a young lady who had only ONE LEG that she’d have to wait if she wanted to use it because, as she said, “I got here first!” I know! What kind of raging fucking lunatic!?
So, now that I’ve painted you a hopefully sufficient picture of how horrible this woman is to me, and to many other associates with whom I share retail tales, let me digress again to explain to you another key piece of information. I mentioned earlier that I had some issues with people in my family while I was growing up, however, this does not include my grandmother. She and I were incredibly close ever since I can remember, and I loved her more than just about everyone else in the world- with the exception of maybe my parents. Sadly, about 3 years ago, she was diagnosed with cancer, and was given about 6 months tops to live. Fortunately for me, my grandmother was one of the most stubborn people to ever walk this Earth and walked out of that doctor’s office and didn’t come back for almost 2 years. After that, her health really took a turn for the worse and I tried to spend as much time as possible with her because any second could’ve been her last, and I needed to be there for her. Of course, however, I still had bills to pay. College was expensive, car insurance and gas were expensive, and I had a maxed-out credit card with a boat load of money due in minimum payments every month. So, while I was at work, another family member would go up to my grandma’s house to keep an eye on her and tend to her needs, with specific instructions to call my cell if ANYTHING were to give them reason to believe that her end was near.
One night, the night that stains my memory like red wine on white carpet, I was working from 1pm until 10pm. It was a Friday, around 6:00, and as usual, the rude bitch I described earlier walked in and sat her ass down in one of the electric scooters, as always. She parked it in front of my register at the service desk and stood up, demanding that I, for the umpteenth time, process a money transfer for her to send $500 to her daughter in Florida. I was just in the middle of counting the monster lady’s money, when I heard my phone ring loudly in my pocket. Panicked, and fully shifting my focus from this miserable old bat to my phone hoping that it wasn’t bad news about my grandma, I dropped her money onto the counter and whipped out my phone. I looked at the caller ID to recognize the number as my aunt’s, who was currently looking after my grandma. I instantly pressed “Answer” and my mouth went dry as cotton. I’ll never forget how much my legs were shaking or how my stomach dropped as I put the phone to my ear.
“Hello?” I asked, waiting for the worst news of my life.
“Honey, I’m so sorry. I-it all happened so fast…” was all that I heard my aunt say before I flipped it closed. I heard a loud ringing in my ears, my mouth was as dry as a desert floor, and I began to feel my face turn bright, bright red as it began to feel 100 or more degrees hotter than usual. At last, the tears. The tears poured down my cheeks like summer rain and my legs, quaking like a shifting fault line, finally gave out. Right there, behind the service desk of the store…I began to cry like a baby. It had finally happened. I remember to this day how I used to lay awake at night as a 5 or 6-year-old, terrified that my grandma was going to die someday, and now, she had finally gone. It was the worst nightmare I could never wake up from, and I realized that my life was never going to be the same again.
Naturally, the girl that was working at the register next to me knew exactly why I was crying. I was very open to my coworkers about how much I loved and cared about my grandma, and they were all on edge, praying for her health and for my mental strength during these rough times. She didn’t even have to ask me. She just placed her hand on my shoulder, gently rubbed my back, and that’s when I heard it:
“UMM! EXCUSE ME! I’m still WAITING here! What the hell is this little jerk’s problem!? I’ve got a lot to do tonight!”
If I have to tell you who it was that said this, you haven’t been paying attention. Instantly, tears stopped coming out of my eyes. I swallowed every drop of sadness and forced myself to stand up. Everything- and I mean everything from the ceiling, to the floor, to register buttons, to the merchandise sitting on the shelves down the aisle across from the service desk- suddenly had a red tint to it. Standing face to face with this bitch, I stretched my sleeves down past my wrists, dried my eyes, and choked out “Nothing. I’m fine. I apologize.” That was all I could spit out. One more word and I would’ve lost it again, but I knew I had to finish this transaction.
Would you like to know something funny? When you come to a store like the one I work at where you can send money to other countries and states, or cash a paycheck, or even return an item without a receipt, usually, you’re required to show some form of identification. While this thoughtless, ungrateful, unsympathetic, arrogant, ignorant, self-important, unbelievable bitch was standing at my register, proverbially kicking me while I was more down than I have ever been in my entire life, after years and years of tormenting me over stupid, petty bullshit, there, propped up facing me in between a small crack in the lid of the receipt paper printer, sat this bitch’s driver’s license.
I cracked. I admit it. But you know what? I don’t regret what I did. Not in the least. I had the procedure for transferring money memorized to the point where I didn’t even have to look at the screen to know what I was doing, so while my fingers did the work, my eyes burned the image of this lady’s name and address- which duh, I’m not going to share and incriminate myself- into my memory bank.
After I was certain that I’d given myself enough time to remember the necessary information, under the guise that my register was “being slow”, I finally gave the unsuspecting old hag her ID back, printed the receipt, collected her signature at the bottom, and told her to have a very nice night, and apologized again for the inconvenience my register and my emotions had caused her. There was no way in Hell I was going to give her any actual excuse to get me in trouble at this job. At that point, one tiny negative comment toward her might have given anyone within earshot a reason to suspect me of committing the atrocious crimes that I was secretly plotting.
Once she had left, I removed my worker’s vest, threw on my jacket and clocked out, sputtering “I have to go…Grandma…” as I passed my manager on the walk out the door. I had driven to my grandma’s house every single Sunday and sometimes other days during the week too for the last 6 years. Usually, I would stop off at the food store and pick us up a carrot cake for dessert or pull into the flower shop’s parking lot and get her a dozen roses just to make her smile. This time however, it felt like I was driving an entire world away. Every car that I got stuck behind seemed to be going 50 miles per hour too slow. Every red light I had to stop at seemed to be red 10 times longer than they normally did. And when I finally arrived, and parked outside her house, it seemed like a complete stranger’s house. The house that I had come to feel more at home at than even the house I’d grown up in now felt so sorrowful, depressing and cold. I ascended the front porch steps, opened the front door, and shoved aside family members who were already there and trying to console me and brace me for the impact of the sight of the cold, shriveling corpse of the woman who was not only my grandmother, but my very best friend in the entire world. I walked into her bedroom, saw her lying there under her blankets, limply snuggling the stuffed dog that resembled her old puppy, Bella, and immediately broke down.
I felt like I had failed her by not being there. I felt like I’d betrayed her. And I promised myself that I would never forgive myself for not being able to say good bye. I should have done more. I don’t know exactly what I could’ve done, but I could’ve figured something out somehow that would’ve allowed me to be there the moment she decided that her cancer was finally too much to bear, and that it was time to depart from this world. I know that if it was her choice, she would’ve waited to see me too, but it was my responsibility to be there for her. Not the other way around.
The funeral was beautiful. I’ve never seen so many people in one small room. And I’ve never seen so many people crying in the same room. She touched so many lives in so many ways. That night, my family and I had a party in her honor that consisted of 3 cases of beer, and a pyramid of empty cans that reached the chandelier hanging above the kitchen table. We told stories and shared memories of her and did the best we could to help each other through this terrible, terrible tragedy.
Something was still nagging at me in the back of my mind though: that bitch. The way she had disrespected me the night my grandma passed away was unforgiveable. It was the very, very last straw. She needed to be taught a lesson, and at the funeral, I vowed in a prayer while kneeling before my grandma’s urn that that rude, selfish monster would regret the day she had ever been rude to me. So, I began planning. And planning. And one night, I went shopping for the equipment I needed to bring my swift, iron-fisted justice. I bought a few feet of rope and a bucket from one store, a collapsible folding chair from another, a baseball bat from another, and some razor wire from another.
When I was sure enough time had passed to take any suspicion off of myself, using some latex gloves and a lock-pick fashioned out of a paper clip, I snuck into that bitch’s house in the dead of night. The house was old and empty, and as I prowled around her cozy homestead’s hallways, random floorboards would creak and moan. It was so dark, but I was confident and careful. After hearing an intruder ascend the staircase, she came out into the hallway threatening to call the police if whoever it was didn’t leave immediately. No. Way. In. Hell. I bolted toward the sound of her voice, bat in hand, and cracked her a good one right in the skull. I can still hear the thud her body made as she crashed cold onto the floor.
She awoke to me pouring a bucket of cold water on her in her basement. I had gagged her with a pair of her own socks and used the rope to tie her to the folding chair. She began panicking, surely wondering what was going on, who would do this to her, what did they want, and was this going to be the end? Her mind must’ve been racing a mile a minute, trying to figure out exactly who it was that she had wronged so badly that they would do something so horrible to her. But believe me: as long as I let her sit there in the dark, terrified and confused, contemplating and wondering, I never once came into her mind. I could tell when I finally turned on the light to reveal myself to her, by the look in her eyes- the look of shock, and then regret…and then disgust. Disgust! Even as my captive, she still looked at me as a piece of vermin; a cockroach that needed to be squished. She never once imagined that I- a piece of store-register-machinery rather than human- would ever be capable of finding her and punishing her.
“Hello, bitch.” I sneered. “Do you remember me? Do you recognize me? Sure you do.” She began wiggling in the chair, trying to break free, desperate to get the sock out of her mouth so she could doubtlessly spew more filth from that facial shit hole.
“I’ve come here tonight, pretty much at your own invitation.” I said. “You see, you’ve come into my store on a weekly basis for years and treated me, my coworkers, and our other customers, as if we owe you something; as if you are God’s gift to the God damn world. As you know, I have processed many money transfers to your daughter in Florida over the last few years, and you, foolishly, handed over all the necessary information that I needed to make your life absolutely miserable while you were doing it. You gave me your driver’s license with your address on it which led me right to you. Don’t you think it’s sad that I showed up here, knowing that you’re such a bitch that I wouldn’t have any trouble having to fight a husband or boyfriend? You’re just a miserable old hag who preys on the kind and polite because you know we can’t say anything back or else we’ll get in trouble with our managers. All we try to do is help you and do our jobs, but you just always have to find something to bitch about.”
Honestly, at this point, it was as if I was speaking to a deaf woman. Clearly, the severity of the situation was not sinking in, so I decided to just get right to the point. Why draw it out any longer than I needed to?
“Do you love your daughter?” I asked, scratching my head, in a tone that revealed that I was completely in control of the situation. Her eyes shot open wide as if to ask, “What do you care?”
“Well,” I explained, reaching into my pocket. “More than likely you do. I can’t even begin to fathom how you managed to trick some poor man into fucking you. I can only hope it was through the use of some form of date rape drug and that the poor man never had to face the sight of his own dick disappearing into your decrepit cunt. But your daughter? She’s probably the only person in this world you’ve ever treated like an actual human being, isn’t she? Someone you used to read bedtime stories to, and sing lullabies to, and take shopping during “girls days out” as you paraded through town treating store clerk after store clerk like me more and more like shit as the day went on?”
At last, I saw a tiny bit of reflection in her eyes as she began reliving tiny moments of her past with her daughter in this highly tense, unpredictable situation she was stuck in.
“I imagine your daughter is nowhere near as rude to others as you are.” I said. “She’s probably beautiful, and married, with kids of her own. Maybe that’s even why you’re so bitter.”
I carefully pulled the sharp razor wire out of my pocket and slowly approached her, letting it rest, dangling around her neck past her shoulders. She squirmed and began to panic even more, desperately trying to wriggle free, to no avail.
“It’s a shame you couldn’t have realized that people like me? We’re not going to take people like yours shit anymore. If you had…perhaps you might have saved your poor, beautiful daughter’s life.”
From deep behind the socks jammed in her mouth, I heard the enraged and confused screech that was most certainly the word “What!?”
“You heard me right, bitch. Your daughter is dead. So are her kids. So is her husband. And it’s all your fault. You led me right to them!”
Wait- oh, yeah. I never mentioned this part, did I? So, in order to transfer the money to someone at our service desk, we need not only the state that it’s going to, but also the city in which the recipient is going to be picking it up. During my bereavement time off from work, I took a quick flight down to Florida to “clear my head”, as I told my family. I took an even quicker drive to the town in which the bitch had sent money, and, using a good old-fashioned phone book, managed to find the exact address of the daughter’s house!
“I don’t know if your parents are still alive,” I said, “but I’m going to assume that they croaked many years ago considering how old and miserable you are, although I want you to know, if I had any information on them, they’d be my next targets for ever bringing a miserable creature like you into this world. Oh, and if you don’t believe me about your daughter, here’s a picture to prove it!” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small 6 by 4 piece of photo paper. It was a picture of her daughter, her husband, and their kids, all with slashed throats, sitting on their living room couch…with big red smiles painted with blood on each of their faces. Her eyes widened so far I thought they might pop out.
At last, the moment I had been waiting for! She started crying! She had stopped wriggling in her restraints and had finally just given up, bawling a river of tears down her cheeks. I had never seen her so powerless. Usually, at the store, she had a look of pure smug and superiority. Now, I had reduced her to a sobbing puddle of tied up skin and bones. It was wonderful. I had never felt so alive, but I kept my cool, and did to her exactly what she did to me. I furiously stomped my foot as hard as I could and shouted, “UMM! EXCUSE ME! I’m still WAITING here! What the hell is your problem!? I’ve got a lot to do tonight!”
It was over. I had completely broken her. She had learned her lesson, and I finally knew that I had proven my point. I removed the socks from her mouth and gave her a chance to speak.
“If you have anything to say to me, now is the time to say it.” I warned. She was crying so much she could barely breathe. With each sob she let out, I felt more and more relief and more sure that what I had done had worked. Sure, it was a shame that it had to come to this. But she brought it to this.
“You’re a monster!” she cried, humiliated and defeated. I laughed hysterically.
“Well! Then what does that make you, bitch?” I asked, but before she could vocally shit out one more word, I grabbed the ends of the razor wire wrapped around her neck and pulled them in opposite directions, severing her head from her shoulders. I then untied her, took the rope, the chair, the razor wire, the bat and the bucket and left her house before the sun came up.
Over the next few days, reports of the decapitated woman and her daughter’s slaughtered family dominated the news. Nobody could figure out a motive or reason why anyone would ever do this to an elderly woman and “her beloved family”. There were no prints found at the scene, no murder weapon found, and no incriminating evidence whatsoever was recovered.
As for me? Well…here’s something for you to think about. I’m still out there somewhere. Like I said, I’m not a bad person. If I was, why would I even be telling you all this? I want you all to hear this and let it serve as a warning: be careful how you treat others- no matter who they are, no matter where you meet them. You never know who you might push over the edge, and you never know what it might cost you.
CREDIT : SupFamImDrunk
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This is a continuation of The Fort, so please read that story first!
Ryan opened his eyes and squinted against the brightness of the hot, desert sun. He was dazed, and for a moment he struggled to remember where he was. Lifting his head slightly, he groaned as a trickle of something warm ran down his face. He sat up and as a flash of pain shot through his head, he remembered.
He was sitting in the middle of a narrow road. It was straight, and disappeared into the distance with hardly a bend or turn. He was sure it must have been wider at some stage, but the desert had reclaimed much of the road’s surface.
He inspected himself for any serious injuries, and was relieved to find that he only had the one minor gash on his forehead. Slowly, he got up and trudged over to his bicycle. Ryan lifted it onto its wheels and groaned.
“Fuck.” he sighed.
The front wheel was buckled. He wouldn’t be able to repair it.
He cursed himself for his own stupidity.
Ryan had been making good time, going along at a steady pace, until he had seen the sign that the next town was only 15 kilometres away. Short on water and almost out of food, he had excitedly sped up, hoping that the small city would have what he needed. He had passed through a couple of small towns the previous days, but they had offered the bare minimum. One town had been functioning fairly normally and had even had electricity. But the locals were suspicious of strangers and unwilling to help. He didn’t blame them. He had nothing to offer in exchange for supplies or shelter. Eventually an old man had given him some food and fresh water and politely asked him to be on his way.
Ryan had hardly sped up before he had struck something which had been buried in a pot hole and covered by sand. The impact had sent him flying over his bike and this object was what had crippled the front wheel.
He removed his rifle from the makeshift holster he had attached to the bike and tossed the mangled bike aside. He inspected the rifle for any damage and cursed again when he saw a large scratch on the butt. He would test it later to make sure it still worked. Taking off his pack he sat down again, deciding to take a break.
He took a few mouthfuls of water and looked into the distance. He thought he could see smoke rising in the direction he was heading. It was probably coming from Karasburg which he was approaching.
It was late afternoon already and he’d prefer not to have to sleep under the stars again. The cold desert night was not a nice place to be – not to mention the pack of jackals which he thought had been following him for the last couple of nights. He didn’t think they would attack him, but their calls and scurrying in the darkness, just out of reach of his campfires light were deeply unsettling.
Getting up and shouldering his pack and rifle, Ryan started in the direction of Karasburg.
He walked at a brisk pace, beginning to see more and more dirt roads turning off to farms and smaller settlements. A few abandoned cars were next to the road or sometimes in the middle of it as he neared the town, and he gave each one a cursory search for anything useful, but they were all empty – long ago searched and stripped of anything remotely valuable.
It had been 17 days since Ryan had left Prieska, peddling his bicycle for between 4 – 6 hours a day. He never pushed himself too hard, going at an easy pace – sometimes not travelling at all on some days – preferring to conserve energy and making camp long before nightfall each day. He always tried to find a hill or higher ground, which gave him a better view of his surroundings and he always camped a good distance from the road. Some nights he heard people passing down the road with vehicles or motorcycles, and though they might have been able to assist him on his journey to his father-in-law’s farm, he had always deemed the risk too great to show himself. It was a brave, new, fucked up world, and you just couldn’t assume that anyone had anyone else’s best interest at heart. It was about personal gain. Survival. Hadn’t he himself shown that to be true time and time again?
So he would kick out his fire and hide, out of view, watching as sometimes up to 6 vehicles passed at a time. He could never really see the occupants in the darkness, but he could sometimes hear their voices, laughing or talking, drifting over to him in the still night air.
Sometimes he would hear or spot a vehicle coming towards him in the day, and he would jump off his bike and scramble off the road, taking cover behind the nearest bush or hill. It was on one such day that he had almost lost his life for the hundredth time since the world had gone to shit.
He had been cycling like all the other days before that, just a couple of kilometres after entering Namibia through the Nakop Border post. He was quite content, having found a rifle with ample ammunition after using almost all of his at Prieska. The rifle had been hidden away in a back office at the border post, probably some official’s personal hunting rifle. The official had likely been planning on going hunting after work or over the weekend and had brought his rifle with, before something had changed his plans – had changed the world’s plans.
After Ryan had despatched a lone lurker which had been trapped inside the building with his brand new small axe he had found on the outskirts of Upington, he had searched every room. The rifle had not been in the safe – which was open – but rather had been cleverly stored beneath a desk. The desk was hollow underneath and Ryan had accidentally dislodged the weapon after slamming the drawer shut looking for anything useful.
He was pleased to see that it was also a Remington, though it fired a larger calibre and was much newer than his old rifle. It was in excellent condition and Ryan guessed that the previous owner had cared for it well. It also had a scope and after rummaging around a bit more underneath the desk, he found five full boxes of ammunition. Either the official was planning on shooting a lot of animals, or he had been a terrible shot.
He had cleaned and checked all the rifle’s components then and there to make sure it was in good working order. He didn’t want to pull the trigger an hour down the road and then nothing happened.
He was peddling along deep in thought some time later when he heard the groan of an engine behind him. Ryan cursed, realising that he should have heard it sooner, but that he had been deep in thought, thinking about the hunting trips his father had taken him on.
Jumping off his bike, he turned and saw an old Toyota bakkie coming along rather quickly. There was no time for him to hide, so he placed his old rifle on the ground and drew the new one, letting his bicycle fall to the ground.
The driver of the bakkie saw Ryan and slowed. Ryan chambered a round, but did not raise the rifle. It came to a stop about ten meters from Ryan.
Both front doors opened and two men climbed out. The driver was middle aged, with thick gray hair and a big beard while his passenger was much younger, no more than twenty three – his son, most likely. Both of them had fire arms, the older man carrying a type of shotgun and the younger one a pistol.
“As mens in vandag se dae so in die pad staan met ‘n geweer, is die kanse goed dat jy vrek geskiet gaan word.” the older man said in Afrikaans. Ryan’s Afrikaans had never been great, but he understood what the man said: “If a man stands in the road with a gun in today’s times, the chances are good he’ll be shot dead.”
Ryan looked at each in turn before replying in English. “That may be true, but the people doing the shooting better be damned sure they don’t get shot first.” He knew that he shouldn’t be combative, that he should try to de-escalate the situation, but Ryan had never responded well to threats.
The older man looked at the younger one and smirked. “Nogals ‘n soutpiel ook. ‘n Windgat soutpiel.”
Ryan’s eyes flashed. He responded even worse to insults. The man had called him arrogant and a slang term used to insult English people in South Africa. Soutpiel roughly translated to salt dick, implying that the person had one foot in the UK and one in Africa and that his penis was dangling in the Atlantic.
“I’d be more careful about insulting strangers when you have no idea what they are capable of.” Ryan replied, this time in Afrikaans, and the older man’s smirk faded.
They stared at each other for a few moments more, neither looking away or backing down.
“I think we’ll take those weapons of yours, boy.” the older man finally said when he realised Ryan wasn’t backing down.
Ryan cocked his head to the side, as if he couldn’t hear him.
“Just lay down the rifle, take ten steps back, and we’ll be on our way.” the man insisted, taking on a soothing tone, as if he was trying to calm down an upset friend.
Ryan cocked his head to the other side and smiled. It was a genuine smile, an excited smile. A smile of someone who knew what would happen next – and looked forward to it.
Ryan had by now accepted that confrontation was unavoidable, but he was for some reason looking forward to it. The long hours on the road, the boredom, the loneliness and the demons that he was still trying to best had reached a breaking point. And he decided that it would not be him breaking. He theorized that a fight, however unnecessary, might be just what he needed to refocus after what happened in Prieska – and before.
“Tell you what.” Ryan said, still smiling. “You put both of your weapons on the seats and start walking back the way you came, and I’ll let you live. I’ll look after your bakkie, I promise.”
It seemed as if the older man was about to laugh, but something in Ryan’s eyes gave him pause. He looked over at his son who gave the slightest shrug and then back at Ryan.
“Well? I’m waiting.” Ryan said.
“Let’s just go dad, leave him.” The younger man said nervously and for a second it seemed as if his father would oblige, but something kept him there and made him turn to Ryan once again. It was probably pride.
“I’m going to count to five.” the man said, cocking his shotgun. His son looked at him uncertainly, but also snapped the safety off of his pistol.
“One-” he began.
“Two.” Ryan said, not moving, though the smile had now disappeared.
The man hesitated, but then lifted his shotgun. “Three.” His son had now also taken aim with his pistol.
“Four.” Ryan said and turned his rifle slightly so that it was pointing forward, though he did not raise it.
The man hesitated again, but after a moment opened his mouth to say the final number.
“Wait!” Ryan cried, lifting his arms and holding the rifle in one hand. “Wait, I give up, I don’t want to die!”
Both men tensed, but then relaxed and lowered their weapons somewhat. The older man smiled smugly and was about to speak when Ryan interrupted him.
“Five.” he said quietly and the man’s smile was replaced by confusion. Ryan brought down his rifle and fired at the older man, but it was not his rifle. It was not the rifle that he had been firing since he was twenty one. It was a new, more powerful rifle. The shot missed, hitting the top of the windscreen. The man cried out in alarm and stumbled backward, falling over and firing into the air involuntarily. At the same time, the pistol of the younger man cracked and the round slammed into the ground at Ryan’s feet – also an accidental shot. The younger man seemed to recover and pulled the trigger again – but nothing happened. The pistol had jammed. Ryan needed to get out of the open before the old man could fire again and he set off at full tilt, bearing down on the younger man.
He struggled with the pistol, trying to un-jam it, and stealing glances at Ryan as he came sprinting at him. Finally he dropped the pistol and raised his arms in surrender and as Ryan reached him he struck him with the butt of the rifle in the stomach. The younger man collapsed, curling into a ball and coughing loudly. Ryan quickly scooped up the jammed pistol and shoved it into the back of his pants, then, ejecting the spent cartridge and chambering another round, he pointed the rifle at the young man’s head.
“Your son is on the ground and my rifle is pointed at his head. Try and be a hero and he’s dead. So, slowly come around the back of the bakkie, with your hands in the air.”
A few moments went by when all was silent, save the young man’s whimpering and coughing. Then, slowly, Ryan heard the footsteps of the older man approaching from the back of the bakkie. He appeared, holding his arms above his head, with the shotgun in one hand.
“Toss the shotgun into the back and then move away from the bakkie.” Ryan said and the man obliged. When Ryan felt he was far enough, he told him to stop.
“We weren’t out here alone you know. We have more people that should be coming by any minute.”
Ryan looked at the old man, but said nothing.
“Just let us go. Take the bakkie and go.”
“What’re your names?” Ryan asked.
“I’m Frik and this is my son Jannie.” Frik seemed eager to cooperate now. Perhaps he thinks if he can build a rapport with me they will get out of this alive, Ryan thought.
“So where were you headed and where were you coming from?”
“We’re headed to Ariamsvlei. There were no children there, so the town remains almost completely unaffected. Most days there is even electricity. We happened upon it a year ago. Right now we were coming back from Upington. We needed things that small towns don’t really keep.”
Ryan raised his eyebrows. “Such as?”
“Ammunition, tools for farming and engine parts for our vehicles and tractors.”
Ryan looked into the back of the truck and saw nothing. He raised his eyebrows even higher.
“It wasn’t a very successful trip. We struggled to get into Upington, it was crawling with swarmers.”
Ryan cocked his head at the word. He decided it described the lurkers well.
“Once we finally got in, we could hardly find anything. Everything was looted or burnt to the ground. And then we wasted too much time – we got caught after dark in an old auto shop. We couldn’t really defend it, most of the doors were damaged and they got in real easy. We lost six people that night.”
He looked down and Ryan could see he had trouble keeping his tears at bay.
“We spent a week crawling along back roads into every small town between here and Upington, but it wasn’t a very fruitful week. We lost two more people. We lost so much more than we gained on this donnerse trip.”
Frik was about to speak again when they heard another vehicle approaching. It was a Land Rover Defender and it was flying. Looks like Frik wasn’t lying, Ryan thought.
The Defender slowed as it neared, and then abruptly stopped, coming to a stop with screaming tyres and skidding over the built up sand on the road. Ryan guessed the occupants had seen the situation – a stranger holding their friends at gunpoint. Ryan quickly moved so that the Toyota was between him and the Defender, all while keeping his rifle pointed at Jannie.
“You better tell them to not do anything rash, or this day is going to go from bad to worse for you.”
Frik nodded and moved to go to the Defender, but Ryan stopped him.
“They’ll be able to hear you from here, you don’t need to go over there.”
Frik was about to argue, but stopped. He nodded and turned to the Defender again. Three men exited the vehicle. They were all middle aged, but looked younger than Frik. They were all carrying firearms – two pistols and a large revolver.
“Frik? Are you ok? What’s going on?” the driver called over in Afrikaans. He was tall and muscularly built. He had a full, black beard and wore a Stetson hat and sunglasses.
Frik looked at Ryan questioningly, his eyes asking how Ryan wanted to handle the situation. Ryan’s mind was racing. His odds of getting out of this alive were steadily declining.
“Tell him I’m taking the bakkie. I’m taking your son with me too and the Defender’s keys. I’ll leave them both five kilometres down the road, giving me a good enough head start. You get your son, I get better transport, everybody wins.”
Ryan could see that Frik hated the idea of letting his son go with him and probably also the thought of losing his vehicle, but he dutifully relayed the message over to the man in the Stetson whom he called Darren.
“That sounds fair.” Darren called back and Ryan breathed a small sigh of relief.
“I have a counter offer, though. If you come out right now and drop your gun, I’ll just shoot you in the head and you won’t suffer. But if you don’t, I will make it my mission for the probably limited time I have left on this earth to cause you the utmost amount of pain possible.”
Something in Darren’s voice scared Ryan. He believed every word that he had said. Ryan had leverage, true, but he was greatly outnumbered by armed men and his entire plan hinged on the assumption that they actually cared about Jannie.
“Give me the keys.” Ryan hissed to Frik.
“They’re in the ignition.”
“Get up and get in the driver’s seat.” he commanded Jannie, and he slowly got to his feet. He forced him to climb over the passenger seat and was doing so painfully slow until another hit with the rifle got him moving faster. Ryan quickly followed into the passenger seat and told him to start the Toyota and drive. He did as he was told, but not fast enough for Ryan. He turned to look at Jannie and scowled.
“I told you to drive, for fuck’s sake, now drive!” he growled and the frightened Jannie floored it. The engine roared, but almost immediately another sound was heard above the protests of the engine. Bullets were slamming into the back of the truck. Ryan looked back and saw the three new arrivals all firing at them, while Frik was waving and protesting, obviously concerned that his son might be hit. Ryan was about to lift his own rifle to return fire, when one of the tyres blew. It must have been hit by a round from the firing men, and although they could limp along, Jannie seized the opportunity and violently jerked the steering wheel right. Ryan was flung against the door and it was soon apparent that Jannie had lost all control. They flipped. They had not been going fast enough yet to cause a serious accident, but the sand covered road caused them to slide for a great distance on their side before finally coming to a stop.
Jannie had ended up on top of Ryan, and while his face was close to his, Ryan struck out with his head one, two, three times, breaking Jannie’s nose and cutting his lip. Blood spurted from his lips and nose.
“You little shit!” Ryan screamed, delivering another head butt for good measure.
Ryan quickly clambered out from underneath the dazed Jannie and recovered his rifle and the jammed pistol which had tumbled from his pants. Replacing the pistol and slinging the rifle over his shoulder he climbed to the opposite door and awkwardly clambered out. Just as he poked his head out of the Toyota, more rounds slammed into the chassis of the vehicle and he quickly ducked back inside. Unslinging the Remington, he took a deep breath and leaned out again, but this time he kept low. More rounds zinged about him, but he kept his hands and his breathing steady, and got one of the men shooting at him in his crosshairs. They were running toward the flipped vehicle, firing as they ran. Holding his breath, he squeezed the trigger and the rifle roared. The man dropped, and the other two quickly turned and ran back, ducking behind the Defender.
Ryan pulled himself up and dropped onto the ground, getting behind the Toyota and keeping it between himself and his would be killers.
He took a few moments to think and to settle down. There were about a hundred meters between him and the shooters, which meant that their small arms would be less accurate. At least there he had the advantage. His bicycle was about eighty five meters away. There was no way he could get away. He would have to deal with the shooters before leaving in any way or form.
He leaned around the flipped bakkie and peered through his scope. Nothing stirred around the Defender. Frik had also taken cover. He would need to eliminate them if he was to get away alive. He especially wanted to eliminate Darren. He intimidated him. He looked like a killer. Ryan had come across a few people like him since he left Johannesburg. People like him didn’t care who suffered or who they had to hurt to get what they wanted. They only cared about their own survival and gain. Confrontations with people like him rarely ended with both of them walking away.
Ryan thought he heard the Defender start. He looked through the scope again, but could see no one in the vehicle. They must’ve climbed in through the back door and were keeping low. The Defender started crawling forward. They were trying to close the distance.
He fired a shot through the windscreen, but the Defender kept coming. Ejecting the spent cartridge, he fired another through the windscreen, lower this time and he could see the headrest of the driver side shake as the round slammed into it.
Ryan took a moment to consider his options and then fired a shot into the engine. He quickly reloaded, and upon looking through the scope again, he could see what looked like water pouring out from underneath the engine. He hoped he had struck something important.
This time he aimed for the front tyres, and after four more shots, both had burst.
The Defender stopped, and as Ryan reloaded again, he saw it turn around slowly. Ryan gave a wry smile. They were retreating. He thought that they realised they wouldn’t be able to cover the distance without the Defender getting too damaged, or one of them getting shot.
Suddenly, he felt the Toyota he was leaning against shake, and looking up, Jannie was staring down at him. He jumped down, and Ryan could not raise the rifle quickly enough. Jannie landed on him, using his arms to shove Ryan away. He went sprawling, dropping the rifle. He was up quickly, and he sprang forward to prevent Jannie from picking up the rifle by landing a savage kick to his midsection. Jannie grunted and stumbled back, but in the same movement turned and ran to where the Defender was slowly retreating. Calmly, Ryan picked up the rifle and took aim.
He was angry at how things had gone, and Jannie had especially pissed him off by causing the Toyota to flip and by attacking him.
He held his breath and fired. The round struck him high up on the back and red mist lingered in the air as he fell.
He did not move again.
Lowering the rifle, he saw one of the Defender’s doors open and Frik jump out. He ran to where his son lay and Ryan had an internal debate.
He thought the Land Rover was crippled. There would be no point in trying to take it anymore. He could kill Frik easily as he came running, but he wasn’t angry at Frik and the Land Rover was heading in the other direction. He saw no point. Though, Frik might want to kill Ryan for killing his son.
Ryan pondered for a moment longer before lifting the rifle and firing again.
The round jumped next to Frik’s feet and he stopped. He looked up at Ryan and he could see through the scope the hate and anger on Frik’s face.
“Go back and bring my bike.” Ryan called cheerfully. Frik didn’t move. Ryan fired another shot and this time the round nearly took his foot off. Frik jumped, and glared at Ryan for another moment, before turning and jogging back to where his bicycle was lying on its side. He lifted it onto its wheels, and through the scope, Ryan could see Frik debate about whether or not to pick up Ryan’s old rifle.
Ryan held his breath.
A moment later, Frik was jogging toward him with the bicycle. When he reached Jannie, he sent it rolling toward Ryan before kneeling next to his boy. He gently turned him over, and was soon sobbing loudly.
The bike had fallen over a few meters away from Ryan and he cautiously moved toward it, keeping his rifle trained on Frik. He had almost reached it when he heard the sound of feet shuffling on gravel to his left. He snapped the rifle toward the sound, but could not see anything. A row of shrubs and bushes obscured everything a few meters back from the road.
A low moan rose from behind the shrubbery and Ryan’s blood ran cold. His breathing quickened and his heart pounded. He panned the rifle left and right, trying to look everywhere at once.
Frik had not heard anything through his sobbing, and he continued to cradle his son’s body.
Another moan came from behind the bushes and a moment later a single lurker emerged from the bushes. Ryan had not seen many lurkers since Prieska – a few in small towns here and there which he was able to easily avoid and the one at the border post. He guessed that this one had been around sixteen. The black veins covering its ashy grey skin seemed to suck up the ample sunlight, and its feral, yellow eyes were unfocused.
It spotted him, and quickened its pace somewhat. Images of the hundreds of lurkers charging at him in Prieska flashed through his mind and a small groan escaped his lips. It was late afternoon, and the sun was still shining bright, but Ryan remembered the frenzied insanity with which they had pursued him that awful night with frightening clarity.
“Shoot it!” Frik screamed. He was standing now, between the lurker and his dead son, as if protecting his body.
Ryan lifted the rifle, and was about to fire, when the bushes behind it seemed to vomit lurkers. Dozens emerged. Their moans and cries combined into a terrifying crescendo and all of them turned toward Ryan and Frik after spotting them. The commotion of the afternoon must have caught their attention and lured them from wherever they were coming from. Frik looked as if he would run, but glancing down at his dead son, he seemed to steel himself. He widened his stance and pulled a small hunting knife from a sheath at his side.
Ryand had time to think, Idiot, before sprinting to his bike. The lurkers were much slower and clumsier in the day – almost lethargic. Ryan always thought they looked drunk or high. They were fairly easy to get away from in the day, especially if you had a head start, and Ryan meant to do exactly that.
He quickly lifted the bike and holstered his rifle in the sheath he had made. Then, he started running next to the bicycle, building up some speed before finally jumping on and peddling furiously.
Looking over his shoulder, he saw that Frik had already taken down two lurkers, but that he was struggling with two at the same time and four more were quickly closing in. He has about one minute left to live, Ryan thought. He could also see the Defender slowly moving away from the scene in the distance. It almost seemed to be skulking – ashamed.
Looking ahead again, he screamed in frustration. Ahead, about ten or more lurkers were slowly heading his way. They were apparently coming from all sides. He thought about taking out his axe, but then remembered the pistol he had repossessed from Jannie. He stopped and took it out. The lurkers ahead were steadily making their way toward him, though he had a little time before the closest one would reach him. After removing the magazine and the spent cartridge which had caused the jam in the barrel – stopping the slide from moving – he checked how many rounds were in the magazine. Only one had been fired, which meant that he had fourteen more.
He reinserted the magazine, pulled the slide back to chamber a round and took aim.
The pistol cracked and the nearest lurker dropped, a chunk of its forehead missing. He fired again at the next closest lurker, putting it down as well. Firing a third time, he missed, but pulling the trigger again brought the third one to its knees. Ryan now had some space before the next batch of lurkers was upon him. Deciding that it really was now time to get out of there, he again started running next to his bicycle. Jumping on, he had kept the pistol in his hand and was soon flying toward the monsters that wanted to kill him.
He swerved between them, dodging and ducking as they lunged at him. He shot those he deemed to close before nearing them, but soon the pistol was out of ammo. A lurker almost got hold of his shirt, but its hand slipped free at the last second. Ryan had screamed when it had touched him, and another image of a lurker with its hands around his throat flashed through his mind.
Finally, he seemed to be in the clear. There were no more lurkers in front of him or to either side of the road. He kept up the furious peddling though. He wanted to put as much distance as possible between him and the scenes behind him.
Ryan looked back a final time before the scene was blocked out by a low hill. He could not see the Defender or Frik, but he could see a group of lurkers gathering on the ground near the flipped Toyota. Many of the lurkers seemed to be following Ryan, in their slow, almost lazy gait, and this made him peddle even faster.
Ryan peddled and peddled some more, until long after sundown. After sundown he had wanted to stop and thought about making camp, but a collection of shrieks in the quiet night air had encouraged him to keep going. Though Ryan knew that the screams had come from a long way behind him, he had not felt comfortable stopping yet.
It was almost midnight when he came upon something that he hadn’t seen since his initial exodus from Johannesburg. In the distance to the right off of the main road was a town. And the town had lights. The power was on.
That must be Ariamsvlei, Ryan thought, unable to stop a smile from spreading across his face. I’ll have to get in and out before Darren and his lackey gets back.
That was of course if these people would even allow him to enter.
Peddling much slower now, he turned onto the smaller side road which led to the town. The road was smaller but in a significantly better condition. It had been cared for.
Slowly, he approached Ariamsvlei. It had a single road leading into it, and Ryan saw that a flimsy looking chain link fence had been raised around what seemed to be the entire town. A large gate was closed across the road, and a Ford Ranger bakkie was parked there, with two men sitting in the back of the truck on camping chairs.
He called ahead, not wanting to surprise the men into possibly shooting him.
The two men quickly jumped up, the one lifting an assault rifle and the other switching on a mounted spotlight. Ryan stopped, impressed by the fire power. He blinked into the light, momentarily blinded.
“Don’t shoot please.” Ryan said calmly.
“What do you want?” the older of the two men asked.
“I was just passing on the main road and noticed the lights. If I could have shelter for the night that’d be great, but really I’m just looking for some food and water and then I’ll be on my way.”
The men talked amongst each other for a few moments and then the one jumped down and headed into the town.
“Stay there.” the other said firmly. The one with the assault weapon was left behind.
Ten minutes went by, and finally the man that had left returned with another, much older man. Ryan guessed him to be in his late seventies.
“If you would be so kind as to lay your belongings on the ground and approach the fence?” the old man said.
Ryan obliged. He was exhausted, and if there was even a small chance that a soft bed waited for him, he would be as friendly and cooperative as he could manage.
He stepped up to the fence and when he was about two meters away the man asked him to stop.
“What’s your name?” the man asked him.
“Ryan.” he said.
The old man looked him up and down, taking in the dirty clothes, the shoulder length hair, the wild beard and all the cuts and bruises.
“What brings you way out here Ryan?” the man asked.
“Just out for a stroll, mr…?” Ryan tried, not enjoying the fact that the man knew his name but he didn’t know his.
“Sebastian. I used to be the mayor of Ariamsvlei, though we only had about five hundred people. We were mainly here as a rest stop for trucks on their way deeper into Namibia.”
He paused. “Out for a stroll, hey?” he said and chuckled. “Well, you look a little worse for wear. I suppose you’d like to come in? Perhaps have a bath, some food and some rest on a soft, warm bed?”
Ryan’s heart soared and he couldn’t help but smile.
“I’m afraid that’s not going to happen.” Sebastian said. Ryan was about to say something, to protest, perhaps even to beg, but Sebastian spoke again.
“We are not in the habit of letting strangers into our little slice of heaven, and we’ve never let anyone in after dark. I am sorry, but these are our rules and those rules have kept us safe over the last couple of years.”
Ryan’s shoulders sagged and he looked down at his feet.
“We are however, not cruel people. We will give you food and water to hold you over for a while, but I’m afraid that is all we can offer you.”
Ryan
|
“This actually happened to my friend’s uncle’s roommate. I swear.”
Chloe looks at me skeptically. One eyebrow rose smartly, but she was smiling.
“Chris Thompson, you are full of shit,” She laughs.
“No, I swear to God… this is a true story. This guy and his girlfriend were out on an abandoned country road, making out in their car. Suddenly, a radio announcement came on, saying that there was a killer that had escaped a nearby asylum.”
“Chris… all asylums were either shut down or abandoned by the end of the 1960’s.”
I ignored here and went on. I knew that my story must be scaring her at least a little bit, considering how easily frightened she was. I began to lower my voice, making it sound creepy and even slightly demonic in order to punch up the dramatic tone.
“The announcement said that the inmate was armed with a knife, and he had a hook in place of his left hand. The boy wanted to stay where they were, but the girl insisted that they leave and go home after hearing a strange scratching sound on her side of the car door. So the boy takes off.”
Chloe rolls her beautiful violet eyes. “Let me guess… when they get home there’s a hook attached to the girl’s side of the car door.”
I balked in false surprise and looked at her suspiciously. “Shit… how did you know?”
“Everybody’s heard that old urban legend Chris. You’re going to have to try harder than that if you really want to scare me.”
Personally, I thought the tale suited the mood perfectly. Considering I was walking her home alone at night on a forsaken country road after a wild party at a friend’s house. Chloe began to shiver in the frigid winter air as a gust of wind tore through the trees. I hurriedly took off my coat and offered it to her, as I did every time I saw her discomfort, but as usual she refused me, and walked on.
“You can’t tell me that didn’t scare you a little bit.”
She hesitates momentarily before answering, “No way Chris, you can’t freak me out with your pathetic horror stories.”
I knew she was lying, but didn’t press the matter, and instead reached into my pocket absentmindedly and felt for the cool metal of my lighter. I brought it out as well as a cigarette from my special case and lit up in the near darkness that the streetlights were doing little to pierce. I admired how the flame shone against Chloe’s copper hair.
My friends had seen little in Chloe, being more interested in blondes with hefty breasts, but to me she had always seemed perfect, with the proper amount of knowledge and intelligence to even out her petite curves. We had started dating in our sophomore year, and had been going steady ever since. She wanted to be a doctor, and me a lawyer, so we conspired to go to the same college.
When she got an email announcing that she had been accepted into the UNC School of Medicine, one of the best colleges in North Carolina, and certainly the best colleges anywhere near Blackwood, where we both lived, she had stepped down, declining to go unless I was accepted also. When I was not, she stuck to her word and started making new college submissions.
I would have done the same thing for her.
She sees what I am doing and slaps my arm playfully. I know she hates it when I smoke, and it’s something I’ve been trying to give up lately, with her help, of course.
“Chris, I’m not going to kiss you goodnight if you have shitty breath,” She giggles.
In mock horror I yank the cigarette from between my teeth and stamp it out on the concrete.
“Will you kiss me now?” I ask playfully. “Of course.” She whispers, and brings me into a loving embrace, pressing her lips against mine. I run my fingers through her frizzy hair before tracing them down her back. She feels so warm against me…
That’s when we both hear it, at the same time, the subtle scrape of feet against the mortar of the road. Chloe breaks away from my hold and grasps my arm tightly, cutting of circulation in mere seconds. My blood freezes as I see the outline of a figure, approaching us in the dark from about a few feet ahead in the road.
I cast a protective arm around Chloe and back up slowly. She is surreptitiously reaching in her bag where I know she keeps a canister of pepper spray in case of emergencies. We say not a word, too frightened to speak as someone or something shuffles closer. My jaw quivering, I open my mouth and force out the words; “Hello? Who is that?”
We are met only with silence as the figure moves closer. He appears to have some sort of injury to his leg. His steps are misshapen. Although I cannot see, I can hear his movements in the dark. One leg moves forward steadily, and the other is dragged up to meet its partner. That’s when the smell hits me. The horrible stench of what can only be described as rot and death. I feel vomit rising in my throat as the vile aroma breaches my nostrils, and beside me Chloe gags violently.
Then the thing that had remained in the shadows until now steps below a streetlamp, and he is bathed in white light. Chloe lets out an earsplitting scream of terror, and I open my mouth to cry out as well, but all that comes out is a thin croak. I can only stare in absolute dread at the thing standing not ten feet before me.
It appeared to be a male, whatever it was. Half of its face had been ripped clean off. The flesh hanging from its profile dripped a greenish red liquid of what I could only assume was a mixture of blood and oozing pus. The white of his skull was visible, and it gleamed underneath, its teeth sneering at me with a grotesque and otherworldly smile. The half of its face that was not torn from his head was encrusted in thick layers of gore, making whoever or whatever this atrocity was unrecognizable. The clothes it had on, what appeared to be a white shirt and shorts, were also sanguine and tattered horribly, as if some great beast had tried to eat him but ultimately spit him out. As he took another step forward I saw with extreme revulsion that his leg was broken. It was bent at an awkward angle near the knee, and I could see the bone poking out through the skin.
I grabbed Chloe and pulled her backwards, grabbing her purse and rummaging inside, never taking my eyes off the thing until I had the pepper spray in my hands. It reached out his decaying arms, fingers quivering. A dreadful moan escaped its mouth, no, it’s jaw. It made a series of incoherent noises that gurgled from its rotting throat, as if it were trying to speak… With my heart pounding fast in my chest and my legs weak with fear, I held the pepper spray out in front of us, pushing Chloe behind me.
“Don’t come any fucking closer! Don’t move, stop where you are!”
I yelled at the thing loudly, trying to sound brave. It didn’t do any good, he just kept hobbling closer and closer to us, and I was backing up, my hand shaking aggressively. He continued to groan inarticulately, more frantically. He started to come toward us faster. I had no choice, I raised the pepper spray and stepped in close, thrusting my thumb down on the nozzle as hard as I could and sending a jet of liquid pain right into the eyes of the monster.
No effect. The pepper spray was virtually useless. The thing just kept lumbering forward with its arms outstretched, garbling incomprehensible words.
Then I was able to make out one single word that it was saying.
Chloe.
The deepest and most severe kind of fear rose in my chest. Expanding inside me like a balloon. It knows me! It knows us! Jesus Christ, somehow it knows who we are!
I lunged forward quickly and shoved the thing backwards with both palms, hard. It tried to grab me as it went down but I jerked my hands back as if I had touched something with a grievous disease attached to it. Its skin felt spongy and raw underneath that ripped shirt, and it toppled backwards, landing on the pavement with a sickening schlock.
“Run!” I shouted, and, clutching Chloe’s arm as hard as I dared, I took off, sprinting around and past that despicable creature which was now unleashing an inhuman howl, and attempting to get to its feet.
I was still running when the truck hit me.
Chloe saw it coming. She was looking ahead. I was peering backwards, trying to see the creature in the darkness. I had the bizarre fear that it would give chase in the obscurity of the late hours.
Then everything became unbearably bright. Chloe had let go of my arm and dove out of the way. She was screaming my name. I turned around to find myself face to face with a white Dodge that was speeding around a tight wind ahead in the road.
It was too late, and too dark to see me.
There was a shriek of the brakes, but not before I had been hit by the front bumper and fallen underneath the tires.
Agony as I had never knew it before rolled over me like a tidal wave. My face was completely lacerated by the front tires, and I let out an unearthly wail as I felt my leg break. Every part of my body hurt. The last thing I remember before everything went black was Chloe kneeling over my body, tears streaming down her cheeks as she tried to apply pressure everywhere I was bleeding on my torso.
I woke up. I was lying in the middle of the road, alone.
Everything was numb. Nothing hurt at all. The pain that I had endured what seemed like seconds before was gone. Although, when I looked down upon myself, I saw that I still had all my injuries.
Something was terribly wrong here…
Where the hell was Chloe?
Everything seemed so alone and desolate without her at my side. I needed her.
I decided I would have to try and get to my feet. To my surprise, there was no sudden flare of pain that forced me back to the ground. My whole body felt anesthetized, and, although it felt strange to get to stand up, I was able to do it without much trouble at all.
I stared down at the road before me in confusion. There were no traces of blood, no tire marks, and no sign whatsoever of the accident that had surely occurred. My mind was swimming. What could possibly have happened here?
I staggered forwards. I knew that I would have to get to a hospital. Everything would be explained to me there.
I set out in the direction of the party that I and Chloe had left. It was surely still going strong, and I could call an ambulance once I got there. I was expecting the task of walking to be difficult and painful just as I had expected the challenge of getting up to be demanding. But again, everything was easy as could be, with the exception of having to drag my broken leg around.
I had made it about a hundred yards before I heard voices ahead. I began to walk faster. They could help me; they could call the ambulance that I so obviously needed. As I came closer, bit by bit, I began to make out their voices.
“Chris, I’m not going to kiss you goodnight if you have shitty breath,”
I froze. I knew that voice all too well. It belonged to Chloe. There was a momentary pause in which I heard the scratch against pavement that indicated a cigarette had just been stamped out by someone’s shoe.
“Will you kiss me now?”
My voice, that was my voice… she was talking to me in some sort of twisted paradox… what the hell was going on?
I only barely caught Chloe’s whisper through the wind.
“Of course,”
It all became clear to me, devastatingly clear. I had to tell them about my own imminent death before it was too late!
I shuffled forwards quickly, opening my mouth and filling it with the cool Carolinian air. Preparing to say what I had to. Chloe and I were undoubtedly backing up now, reaching for that canister of pepper spray as they heard my footsteps emanating from the dark.
Then there came my own voice.
“Hello? Who is that?”
I keep going forward. Once I see myself I will be recognized, I thought to myself.
I was very much mistaken. As I move into the light of the streetlamp Chloe lets out a horrified scream. The other me whips out the pepper spray and holds it out in front of him menacingly, even though I can see from the shake of his arm that he is fearful.
I try to form the words to explain what was happening, but all that comes out is a mess of distorted gurgling sounds from deep within my throat… when the truck ran over me it must have destroyed my vocal cords.
I tried harder and harder to talk but everything I try to say to the other me is incomprehensible.
“Don’t come any fucking closer! Don’t move, stop where you are!”
When I continue to advance he steps in close and unleashes the pepper spray right in my face. There is, of course, no effect. Shock shows in his frightened features. I continue trying to talk to him, more desperately this time.
Please, I try to say, do this for Chloe. Try to understand for Chloe. You have a life with her. I have a life with her. Don’t waste it here and now.
That’s when I see the unmistakable terror in his eyes. He makes a sudden move forward, shoving me down onto the concrete. My already broken leg lands in a delicate position as he takes off running, dragging Chloe close behind him.
I make an attempt to get up, to follow, but it is for nothing. My leg is damaged beyond repair and I am unable to try to warn him any longer.
I give free rein to a roar of anguish that echoes throughout the area. But in the end, I can do nothing but listen to the squeal of the brakes in the distance before everything goes black.
|
Experimentation has always been for the benefit of mankind, even if it has not always yielded such fruit. For every smallpox vaccine we create…we get an atomic bomb. For every life we save…another dies, each for the “sake of progress”. The case is no different here.
I, Dr. Daniel Hoburn, was part of a government operation, designate: HERMES. I worked on it for over ten years. I worked closely with many esteemed scientists…but none more so than Professor Stoker. The man was smart enough to equate circles around me, and I graduated Harvard at seventeen. Working with him was the highlight of my academic, professional, and personal lives! I would follow him to hell and back.
Ultimately, Stoker, like me, had dreams. Fortunately for us, those dreams seemed to overlap. I wanted to be a successful scientist and invent something meaningful to our species as a whole, and he was just fulfilling a long held desire of his own. He loved the idea of teleportation. The ability to be in one place and then instantly travel somewhere else was an ability he had spent his entire life searching for, and we were on the cusp of it. He told me, “Just the idea of it…being free from the bonds of physics and this world”. He sold me on the idea, and I joined his team. That discovery was going to be the pinnacle of our research, and about a year ago…we cracked it.
The science was there, Dr. Stoker put the final equation in, and it all fell together. The energy in the lab was electrifying. All sleep stopped for me after that. Stopped for all of us, actually. How could we sleep? We were so close. It was truly an exhilarating time.
We built his machine, and we did it in less than a month. Working overtime, we barely took any breaks. The future was so close to our grasp. The construction was simple, and we were told the government was giving us all our funding. I knew Stoker was in close contact with some DSA, whatever Department that stands for. It doesn’t matter now…it all ended the same.
Once we’d built the machines (four of them, each with their own partner platforms), we ran the first test. The first item to be “teleported” was Dr. Stoker’s old desk chair. We placed it on the platform under that cone shaped head, and we backed off. The machine disassembled it molecule by molecule. We watched as energy sparked around it, a weird, reddish energy. All around the chair it sparked and crackled like red lightning; then the chair fell apart like ashes. Each little piece kind of hung in the air, and they all seemed to shrink away into nothingness. Moments after it’d disappeared completely, it reappeared with the same energy. Small pieces appeared and grew, turning from ash back into the form it held before. The chair was put back together, and it maintained all of its structural integrity. We celebrated all through the night.
Experiments continued the very next day…that damned day.
Dr. Stoker never left that room. He did everything next to that machine. All of his work, eating, drinking. Hell, he didn’t even leave for a bathroom break. He just kept testing.
First, it was as simple as moving the chair from one platform to the next. That was done easily, and repeated at least one hundred times. No problems. We would try different objects of varying sizes and densities. They all worked. Multiple items at once, moving objects, it all ended the same.
Our only minor problem came when we sent the first rat through. The thing squeaked and squealed as it was taken apart, and when it was put back together it just lay there. It was dead. The professor showed a little discouragement, but I knew what happened. This being my chance to impress him, I drew up a formula…an equation to use the energy to jumpstart the rat’s heart back to life after teleportation. Dr. Stoker laughed and embraced me. It was the happiest moment I’d had in those ten long years. I had finally helped that brilliant man.
The next fifty or so tests proved positive. The rats came back, alive and well. The teleporter was working! It was all thanks to me! The Professor made sure to remind me of that every single minute. But, as the day went on I saw a new look on his face. He made longing glances at the platform between tests. We all knew what he wanted to do.
I don’t think I can describe to you the feeling when the Professor said, “Ok, time for human trials.”
The first feeling may have resembled excitement, or joy. I was so proud of myself, maybe pride is a better word. But I was happy that our work had the Professor so confident. Then the second thing to hit me was confusion. The teleporter had only been through a couple hundred tests at most, and sure they’d nearly all been positive results…but something put me off. I mean, the machine had only been operational for a little more than a day. The other scientists felt it, too. They all thought the same as I did. The Professor was moving too fast…and one scientist tried to talk him out of it. The Professor wouldn’t hear any of it, forcibly telling that scientist that if he didn’t like it he could leave. He didn’t, none of us wanted to miss out on this chance of a lifetime.
Stoker offered himself to be one of the first.
Three other scientists volunteered as well. Dr. Gregory Hopkins was given the honor of being the first. He was older, and had been working on the basic formulas long before Stoker. After him were Dr. Gina Thompson, and Dr. Sandra Weaver. They all seemed about as excited as the Professor was, and were keen on joining him in this revolutionary voyage. I wasn’t as keen. I tried to talk Gina out of it. She was so young, so beautiful…I didn’t want her to be hurt. She simply told me that this was her Armstrong moment. Every scientist dreams of being the first to test a new technology. I understood, so I stopped my pushing. I wasn’t going to take this moment from her.
God, I should have stopped her…
They all entered the platforms. The Professor was surprisingly calm for an undertaking as dangerous and unpredictable as this. I didn’t question it at the time, I merely took his display of confidence as a sign that all would go well. I sat at the controls. Dr. Stoker had told me earlier, “You’re the only one I trust Daniel”. So I did it, for him I sent them off.
I asked them if they were ready, and I received their responses.
They were unanimously, and confidently, “Yes”.
I reached down to activate the teleporters, and something stopped my hand. Call it a whim, call it forbearance, call it nerves, but something wouldn’t let me press that button. I fought it for a few seconds, and all eyes turned to me. I could feel the Professor staring at me…glaring at me. His eyes bore through the back of my head, and I heard him yell…
“DO IT!”
He forced my hand.
The teleporter carried Dr. Hopkins away first. He left without a sound, but it looked like his body started convulsing spastically and violently. Dr. Weaver went next. She went screaming, and I had to close my eyes, not that it helped. After her, Gina quickly, much faster than the others, she tried to say something as she left…but we couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Her eyes looked right at me before she vanished…longing. Dr. Stoker, however, went without movement or sound. His eyes simply closed, and he smiled. This was the realization of his dream after all.
So then we waited…in the echoing silence of that lab we waited. Each machine smoked…and we watched their twin platforms carefully. As we waited, I had a guilt about me…my stomach danced around inside of me, my heart in my throat. My eyes never blinked, not once.
Something was wrong…they’d taken longer than the other items sent through. They weren’t reappearing. I turned to the computer, and I searched the programming…I looked for any clue as to where they went. Time went by. One minute. Two, three, ten…nothing happened. Only one thing caught my eye, there was an extra code in the programming. I never got a chance to work it out.
This is when it started…
As I was trying to figure out what happened, a light crackling came from behind me. On the nearest platform, there was a small, popping noise. I didn’t turn around until I smelt something…the unmistakable and overwhelmingly unpleasant smell of rot. It made me turn to the teleporter, and as I did the potent aroma hit my nose like a bus. Then, the crackling came again. Instead of electricity, though, I swore…and I still do today…that it sounded like a tortured scream. It built and intensified, the red lightning-like energy started spewing from the head of the machine…then it came.
Dr. Hopkins’ body had come back…but at first w-we didn’t even realize. His damn limbs were twisted and mangled, his body hunched over, his head bent sideways at an impossible angle. Hopkins’ eyes begged for help, as he reached out with one of his long, misshapen arms. The energy stopped, and with the last strike it caught his twisted form on fire. He screamed…oh, God, he screamed. It came out as a gurgled cry of horror with blood coming from his mouth. He collapsed off the platform, and blood started to pool where he lay.
The screams of the others in the room reached a roar. As their terror flooded the room and my ears…the second platform started sparking. Dr. Weaver was coming back…but we’d all wished she hadn’t.
She rematerialized differently than Dr. Hopkins. Her eyes materialized first, and we met her gaze. We watched as her entire skeleton was put together. It stood there, unmoving, only the eyes glanced around the room. As her muscles started to form she started to scream and cry. Her hands reached up to her face. Then her skin formed. She was bloody, her skin torn to ribbons in some places. She lowered her hands to reveal a badly mutilated face. It was absolutely horrible. Her clothes, torn, burnt, and soaked in blood were the last thing to appear, and as soon as they did she turned her focus to me.
I sat there in horror. As a looked I saw in her, in the way she moved and stared, a primal, animalistic ferocity. There was nothing there but hatred…a rage that sent a chill down my back. My body was rigid, my heart fought against me…trying to escape. My mind told me to run…but I didn’t listen.
Dr. Weaver roared like a wild animal and lunged at me. I couldn’t even bring my hands up to save me…all I could do was yell.
“You!” she yelled, her fingernails digging into my arms. “You knew! I’ll kill you for it! End it now! He’s almost free! Shut it down!”
She’s was begging…pleading…but I couldn’t respond.
“MOVE!” She pushed me over, onto the cement floor. I broke my arm from the fall…and I couldn’t even yell in pain…that’s how frozen I was. She took the chair I was sitting in, picked it up, and smashed the computer. She smashed it all to hell. Pieces of the computer screens and the chair flew all around me. She destroyed two of the three screens completely. The desk nearly caved in from her incessant beatings. The whole time she never stopped that horrid screeching.
She managed to catch her breath for only a moment before the guards arrived. They unloaded no fewer than five rounds into Dr. Weaver. She fell to the ground, not a single protest escaped her lips. She hit the floor hard, and her face stared blankly at me. There were tears streaming down her face, and her mouth was agape as if in a cry. She didn’t look at peace even in death.
In the commotion…no one had even noticed that the third teleporter had sparked. As I got up, through my own pain and horror I saw her. Gina….just sitting on the teleporter platform. Her legs crossed, she was leaning forward…twiddling with her thumbs…humming a song. No one dared to even breathe…and we listened. I asked around later, but nobody knew the song she hummed…all we could agree on was that it was the single most depressing tune we’d ever heard.
She stared down at her hands, at least we thought…her greasy hair covered her face. No one moved. I don’t think anyone could…after the two horrors they’d just witnessed. After a while my breath came, heavy and forceful, my body shaking. I was going into shock, and that first loud breath I took…that was what made her look up. Her hair still covered her eyes, but her mouth had been twisted into a smile of an almost playful malice. I still remember her words perfectly.
“You did it Daniel…” She said…it wasn’t Gina’s voice…not the one I knew. “You are the true monster here. Was it worth it? Worth it all?”
I didn’t answer her, I-I couldn’t even stand up. She chanted a song-like rhyme, quietly as if singing to herself.
“He was trapped and now he’s free,
He’s out for pain and misery.
Caged like a rat, betrayed by men,
But now is now and that was then.
Oh, the ones who trapped him here,
Will soon be known the true face of fear!”
Her head sharply turned to face me. In doing so, the black hair that covered her eyes was thrown to the side…and I saw.
Her eyes…different from the two before. There was no begging expression in them, no sorrow or pain…her eyes were full of blood. It leaked out and streaked down her face like tears. There was no way she could see a thing, but they still looked right at me. She could see me, and she watched me. She said nothing more. She kept smiling through it all.
Her gaze turned away from me, and she hunched her head back down…humming again. I slowly got to my feet, and I went to see what was left of the computer. Amazingly, one of the screens still flickered on…I had to see about Professor Stoker. I held on to the hope that at least one would make it out of this ok. He had to make it out ok. Just one…
Then, I thought the computer was busted. It read on screen “Delivery complete: All Four Subjects Returned”. I turned to Dr. Stoker’s pad…nothing. He wasn’t there, but the computer told me he was. I wanted to wait, I wanted to make sure he was ok. Of course, I wasn’t able to. The security force arrived in full detail a few minutes later. They carried me out of there…and I never took my eyes off that platform. The Professor never came back.
In many ways he was like a father to me, one who actually seemed to care for me. I thought I’d miss him. I truly meant it. Then, as of late my feelings have changed drastically for the late Dr. Stoker. Eventually, everything would start to piece together.
The quarantine team came in and the machines were scrapped. This…DSA, whatever it stands for, came in and confiscated everything. All research, logs, security footage…everything. I’m told, and have been told every time I asked, that Dr. Thompson passed away minutes after we left. Supposed exhaustion from whatever tragic ordeal she went through. It’s been three weeks and I still miss her dearly…I should have asked her out…but I was always too afraid.
A few of my colleagues who’d seen her more up-close than I did said she had scars on her hands…one’s that weren’t there before. Fully-healed scars, they claimed. Scars take a considerably long time to heal the way they did. The implications of this…I don’t even want to think about it. I don’t know where they went…and I most certainly don’t want to imagine any of them being there for any extended period of time.
They were my friends.
Speaking of friends, Dr. Stoker never came back. Never had a chance anyways with the machine busted. Still, I couldn’t help shake the feeling I was missing something. I tried to at least locate the man’s family to let them know…I figured it’d be best if someone close to them explained the whole thing. Government orders be damned, I had to tell his family.
However, upon further investigation…nothing. No relatives or family in this country or any. There were no Stokers who claimed to know the Professor. Many said they’d never heard the name before. Stoker isn’t a common name, and I checked with a lot of people. I realized something pretty strange during all of this. My interactions with him over ten years, and the man never once mentioned anything about his family.
So I decided simply to check around. Using my old hacking skills, I discovered several shocking truths.
The first being that we’d never received proper funding for the experiment. The DSA turned us down on the grounds that “The risks to human life were too great”. They knew something was wrong from the get-go, and Stoker made us continue anyways.
The next point was that I could never replicate the code I found. I only saw it for a second, and the parts I saw didn’t make sense. Stoker had added an extra command, and I will probably never know.
Finally, I discovered that within the personnel profiles for our operation, there was no official folder for Dr. Stoker. At all. At this point, my mind flooded with confusion and theories. The most insane asked if Dr. Stoker had been, somehow, erased from history.
The reasoning why this made no sense quickly became obvious. How could he help us? How did I remember him? No, it had to be something more. I thought back to every event that day. Something I could have missed. What did I miss in those ten years I knew him that could have hinted at the blazingly obvious truth before me?
Then, I remembered something Gina had said.
Immediately, with a macabre fascination…and a nervousness I hadn’t felt since that day…I called a colleague of mine whom I hadn’t contacted since the incident. They were a computer tech, and I knew they hated government interference more than anything. I simply asked him one question.
“Do you have a copy of the security footage?”
His answer being, to no surprise to me, a yes; I raced over to his house, and we decided to flip the footage on.
The first thing we did was watch the whole incident again. Watching for a second time, I don’t know how I stood it the first time. At the sight of Dr. Hopkins I vomited almost immediately. My body broke into a cold sweat, and I struggled to watch the whole thing. But I made sure I listened to Dr. Thompson’s…Gina’s words again. I listened very close to everything.
“Rewind it.” I told my friend, my voice unsure. He waited a moment, judging whether or not he actually wanted to…then he reluctantly did as I asked. He took us back to the moment when the teleporters started activating…and I told him to play it frame by frame. We watched it, very carefully. Everything seemed “normal”…until we reached the frame right before Dr. Stoker disappeared…
My friend jumped backwards, for he had no idea. Me? I just stared at the screen in disbelief. I had a hunch, but I didn’t want it to be true. I simply recalled two things said, one by Gina…and the other by Dr. Stoker. Spoken to me years ago, on our very first meeting, and repeated almost every day after that for years.
“What is that?” My friend asked.
“Gina was right.” I said, my throat in a knot. “He was trapped…but now…”
I looked at the picture before me. A black demon, with bony features, black eyes, and a toothy grin stared at the camera. He stood right where Dr. Stoker had stood. He smiled right at the camera, and I knew it was meant for me…for because of me…
“….He’s free…”
|
My name is Robert Krandall, and I play a marginal part in the following story. I am attempting to post on this site for scary stories on behalf of the author, my friend Jonathan Tally. Jon is currently serving a prison sentence for manslaughter. I hope that seeing this published in a public forum will help ease his mind. His mental state has deteriorated considerably, as you’ll see. I am not a superstitious person, so I have no trouble seeing it as the hallucinations of a mentally disturbed individual. If you are superstitious, I recommend not reading it.
So here it is, reproduced, word for word, from Jon’s letters he wrote while in solitary confinement. He has pleaded repeatedly, almost desperately, to post it on some internet site where it will be read. As of last week, he has been threatening to kill himself if he is not able to see it published on the web. For the record, I did NOT do what Jon accuses me of at the beginning of the story. To Jon: you will see this soon, and I hope it brings you some measure of relief.
**********
I should tell you now, dear reader, I’m writing this story from prison. Solitary confinement. I have been in solitary confinement for a few days now, and it is for the best. I only hope that this reaches as many people as possible. These are the events that happened to me leading up to the murder and my incarceration. Whether you believe me or not is your business, but it is the truth.
This is New York City. I’m getting back home late at night after a fine evening of friends and drinking. It starts to rain really heavily, but luckily I’ve just made it to the subway station. So I go down into the subway. I get into the car, it’s empty. One stop later, one person gets on and sits in the middle of the car, on my side. A young guy, early twenties. He is sitting with strangely straight posture, staring at nothing. Head slightly tilted. A kind of wild look in his hair and eyes, like he hasn’t slept in a long time. I put my earbuds in to listen to music on my phone. Led Zeppelin, nice!
Two or three stops later, I happen to glance up and notice strangely that the distance between this guy and myself seems to have lessened. He’s still sitting the same way, back completely straight, head tilted, eyes wide and staring at nothing. This is weird, but maybe I misjudged the distance before. I turn back to my phone. One stop later I look up and he is three seats away from me. Ok, now it’s getting creepy, and I know this guy was getting closer to me for some reason.
“What the hell?” I say. “Look dude, there’s plenty of seats on the train, I don’t want any trouble.” He turns to look at me briefly, there’s a wildness in his eyes, but he turns back, facing forward. I’m watching this guy closely now. Suddenly, I notice that his clothes are completely dry. He got on three stops after me, after it had started raining, and yet he had no umbrella and was completely dry. I could only conclude that he had not come from above — he had been down in the subway tunnels the whole time. At first I’m thinking he may be homeless, but his jacket looks too new, and he isn’t dirty. Oh well, it’s New York. Sometimes there are weirdos on the train. He is kind of thin and pale, and I’m confident I could take him in a fight, but man I don’t want this shit tonight, and I’m still a little dizzy from the booze.
Suddenly I hear a loud gasp, the guy turns, and stares at me with a horrified look on his face. “What?” I shout. Part of me is getting pissed off at this asshole, yet I feel a shiver down my spine. His face is locked in a tableau of fear, like the exact instant when something terrifying surprises you. This guy is not acting, he’s afraid. Seconds go by, feeling like hours. The guy’s face is still completely frozen in fear, and by now I’m sure he has some kind of mental issue. And then he whispers something hurriedly.
“This embind do.”
“What?” I say again.
“This embind do, this embind do, this embind you.”
His whispering is fast and insistent, but I still can’t make out what he’s saying. “Speak slower.”
He gets slightly closer and leans in, still looking afraid. “This embind you, this men bind you, this a man bind you.”
“Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you!” I’m shouting now.
He grabs me by the shoulders, and my body shakes from an adrenaline rush.
“There is a man behind you.” The guy whispers in my ear and let’s go, leaning back. His face is still wild, but now it’s different. Like he’s no longer scared for himself, he’s scared for me.
I can’t help it. The incident is so weird, so creepy. I turn and look over my shoulder. Of course, there is nothing there.
And then I turn back, seeing nothing. The guy is gone! Completely! There is no one in the subway car but me, I am utterly alone. Somehow in the time I looked back, the guy must have ran into the next car. I hurry over and look, but all I see are two elderly ladies who give me a weird look. Shivering, I sit down and think.
Now, dear reader, I am a logical man. I’m not religious, I really need to see something to believe it. I don’t believe in the supernatural, in fact I’m sure most “supernatural” incidents have perfectly logical explanations based in reality, even if they have not yet been discovered. The problem is that people want to believe, and so they do. There is only one logical explanation for this vanishing wild-eyed person — someone spiked my drink. It was a hallucination, had to be. As soon as I get out of the subway and above ground, I call my friend Rob on the phone. He was at the bar with me, and he’s been known to be a joker. I wouldn’t have put it past him to slip me something.
“Dude, Rob, what the fuck?” I said as he answered. Rob pretends like he had no idea what was going on. “You give me some acid shit? I was fuckin hallucinating all the way back home!”
“Jon, man, I really have no idea what you’re talking about. I swear.”
Finally I consider the possibility that he’s telling the truth. There were other people at the bar tonight. “Fine, man, but if I find out you’re fucking with me, I’m gonna kill you.” And I hung up. I called everyone I knew who had been at the bar that evening. Finally, I call Dave. Of course, same old, deny deny.
“Are you sure? Dude, I trust you, but I don’t trust everyone else. What about what’s-her-name? Jessie’s girlfriend, she was there by herself, which was weird. Maybe they just broke up and she was looking to date rape some guy like me by slipping lsd into their drink.”
No luck. No one poisoned my drink, and there was no reason to suspect anyone did. Yet what explanation was there for a disappearing crazy guy?
For the next few days I didn’t think anything of it. Life slowly got back to normal. I didn’t really think of the creepy incident on the train. I hung out with friends, went to work, drank at some bars. I even was able to take the subway without remembering what happened just a few days prior.
And then the weird stuff started happening. Just a light brush against my body here, a soft whisper there, an occasional breath. It felt like there was someone behind me. But whenever I turned to look, there was no one. Each time it happened, I was reminded of the subway man’s declaration: “There is a man behind you.”
A few days later I’m walking home after buying some cigarettes. I not only feel a breath, but hear it, directly behind me, like someone’s face is only a few inches away from my neck. My arms jerk backward, expecting to push away some horrible creeper, but I find only thin air, and I whirl around to face an empty street. Terrified, I run straight home and get right to bed, too scared to think about showering or brushing my teeth. Thankfully the feeling is gone. I’m lying face up, and the mattress feels soft and safe against my back. I don’t dare turn on my side or back for fear that the man will come back, hovering over me like some ghastly, evil apparition you always see in horror movies.
For a few weeks after nothing happened, and I started to feel better. Annoyingly, I became the butt of some jokes, people thinking I’m doing acid again. I keep telling people, I don’t do that shit anymore. I took the stuff years and years ago, but only a couple times. And there’s no way it’s a fucking flashback, people ask me that so many times and it pisses me off. No one came forward saying they drugged my drink, so I assume it was some desperate lonely girl in the bar, hoping I’d become woozy and she’d be able to swoop in and “save” me. Bitch.
But then, I began getting this weird feeling that someone was watching me. Behind me, just staring at me. A man behind me. I would be walking down the street and swear that the man was following me, only to turn back and see nothing. The worst of these incidents was in a restaurant, with my date, Julie. Immediately after sitting down, I get that feeling again. I sense him sitting at the table behind me and feel his eyes burning holes in the back of my head. The man is here, in the restaurant, watching me with that cold, obsessive stare. That terrifying expression, half a grin, half a growl. He has bloodshot eyes, wide open and staring, and crazy, untamed white hair. He is wearing a disheveled vintage wool coat. Don’t ask me now I know this, for some reason I just do. Julie starts complaining about how I keep turning backward, and she “wonders aloud” why she isn’t entertaining enough to keep my attention. Finally, I whisper to her, “There is someone watching me. Some man, behind me that is staring at me. Do you see him?” And she frowns at me, and looks over my shoulder behind me. Looks directly into what I am sure is the man’s face, that horrible face. I nearly expect her to scream out in terror. Instead: “I don’t see anything.” She looks at me strangely. She thinks I’m crazy, and maybe I am, but I know the man is there. After this night, Julie never called me or sent me another message. Bitch.
Up to this point I had thankfully never encountered the man inside my apartment. It had always been on the street or in some public place. I began to avoid leaving my apartment, and this gave me some small measure of respite. I took off from work and went for days without leaving my apartment, and those blissful days I never felt the man’s presence. I began telling everyone that I was sick as an excuse to stay in the apartment. If people asked to stop by, I obliged but pretended I had a cough and runny nose.
Dear reader, everyone has a weakness. Some trait that becomes his or her undoing, the one thing that friends and foes alike know and can use to their advantage. For me, this weakness is beautiful women. Hot chicks. I am smitten, always. I’m not terribly ugly, I have good hygiene and a decent paying job, and I try not to be an asshole, so I’ve done relatively well in the dating game. But I am currently single, and most of my friends know this. So my friend Jimmy sends me a text and a picture (asshole, I won’t forgive you for this). The text reads:
“Dude, this hot girl wants to meet you.”
The picture, sure enough, is a smoking hot Italian chick, college age, my absolute fave. I text back: “She wants to meet me or she wants to fuck me? :)”
“Keep it in your pants, dude. She said ‘meet’. But maybe more, I dunno? I sent her your picture and she seemed really into you.”
“Ok, sounds good. Where should I meet her?”
“Come to my party! You’re both invited! 7pm tonight my place. :P ”
As it turns out, there is no fucking girl. Jimmy took the pic from some dating site and baited me into coming to his lame-ass house party in Queens. He tells me everyone has been asking why I’ve been so anti-social lately, but I’m too pissed off to care. I just want to go home. And as I turn to leave, that’s when I feel it. It hits me like a brick, oh so familiar and yet still so terrifying. The man is here. The man is behind me, somewhere, staring.
I turn, and I SEE him! Or, rather, I half saw him for an instant before someone passed in front of him. By the time the person moved, he was gone. But I swear I saw him, and I knew him instantly, even though I had never actually seen him before. Crazed, wild white hair, a head that was slightly too large and bloodshot red eyes, wide and insane. And his grin. An expression that could either be a grin or a growl, impossible to tell. He was of average height. Probably as tall as me.
Jimmy has been insisting for several minutes that I tell him about my problems, completely oblivious to the horror on my face. Finally, I say to him, “Fine, Jimmy, the reason is … I’ve been avoiding someone. And … and he’s here, at your party.”
Jimmy gives me a weird look and starts looking around, confused. “Dude, you know everyone here. WHo are you talking about?”
“A man. A crazy, white-haired man that just stares at me with this horrible grin on his face, I think he’s stalking me.”
Jimmy laughs. “Is it, like, some gay guy or something?”
This pisses me off. “No, Jimmy, it’s not some gay guy. I wouldn’t care if it were some gay guy. In fact, I’d love it if it were just some gay guy. No, this guy is like some psycho serial killer, man. He just looks at me like he’s hunting me, like he knows I can’t get away and all I have to do is leave the house and he’ll find me.”
“Ok,” Jimmy says, humoring me. “Let’s go find this psycho killer and at the very least kick him the fuck out of my party. He leads the way, room by room, noting every person we pass. I don’t feel the man anywhere, but I’m sure he is in the house somewhere. All of a sudden, I get the same overwhelming sense of dread. He’s behind me, I’m sure of it. I turn around, and I see a closed door.
“Dude, what’s in there?” I whisper, pointing at the door.
“That’s a fucking closet, Jon,” Jimmy answers.
“He’s in there, I’m sure of it.”
I look at Jimmy, and I can tell he knows I’m not messing with him. I’m genuinely terrified, and it’s making him really uneasy. He asks the people in the room if they saw anybody go in the closet, and everyone answers either no or they weren’t paying attention. Jimmy slowly creeps up to the door. As he gets closer, the rest of the party around me seems to fall away, as if there is nothing but me and Jimmy and the door. And the man. Jimmy gets within five steps, and I can’t help it. I freak out, I know that the man is behind the door and that he’s coming for me. He seems almost gleeful, like he’s been toying with me this whole time, but now he’s ready to come for me. For real.
I turn, and I run as fast as I can out of the house. I vaguely hear Jimmy screaming at me that there’s no one there, that the closet is empty, but it doesn’t matter. I know the man is there, and I know he’s coming for me. My lungs are nearly bursting as I reach the subway entrance. I hop over the entrance rail and just barely make it onto the train as the doors close a second behind me. I turn back, exhausted. The man has stopped. He’s above the steps, at the subway entrance, standing just out of sight. But he knows, and, more importantly, I know, I’ve escaped. For now, at least. I sigh, letting the fear drain from my body.
There was only one person on the train with me. A big burly guy, dark brown beard, mid 30s, probably had been to the gym every day since he was 15. Just on a whim, I went up next to him and said, “Dude, there’s a man behind you.”
He looked at me and his face scrunched up. For a second I felt like I was going to get punched, then he bellowed, “Fuck off, you crazy bastard.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. Yeah, it sounded so stupid. I threw my hands up defensively. “Sorry, man, I’m just drunk. Don’t beat me up.” I didn’t have a drop of liquor in me. Hadn’t had a single drink since that other night on the train with the other guy the night this whole fucking nightmare started.
When I get out of the train, a gust of cold wind blows past me as the door to the train closes. My brain screams in terror. The man is here. Somehow, he is here, and we both know that now I’m alone. I bolt up the stairs and into the night. I don’t dare look behind me for fear of what I see, but I know what’s happening. The man has given me a slight head start, but he is now running, sprinting down the street at an unnaturally fast pace. He is going to catch me, I can feel it!
I have my keys in hand as I make it to my apartment building and jam the key into the lock. I sneak a glance back. The street is dark, but I can see the hazy outline of his shape as he runs toward me. His white hair flapping up and down with each step. I finally get the door open, hurry in, and slam the door behind me. Relief washes over me so quickly that I almost black out. My heart is pumping a mile and a minute, and I’m gasping like a madman, but I can’t help but laugh. I feel safe. Looking out the window, I see him. Or, I don’t see him, but I know he is there. He is standing in the darkness, just slightly beyond the range of the nearest street lamp. If I focus hard, I can barely see the outline of his white hair.
After this incident I stopped pretending to be sick. I didn’t go out, and when people asked why, I gave them no reason. I took some phone calls, but I did not let people into my apartment, even if they visited and knocked on my door. Other people came and went, so I couldn’t prevent the man from getting into the building, but I sure as hell wasn’t about to let him into my apartment. If my friends insisted that I open up, I just got angry with them until they left.
Slowly but surely, the inevitable happened. I made it through everything in my fridge. Then all the canned goods I had stocked up. Then everything in the freezer. The last day before my hell really started, I had nothing but a bottle of whiskey. Whiskey is made from grain, right? It’s like eating a loaf of bread. I downed half of it. Didn’t help. I was still hungry as all hell.
I can’t help it, I cave. I order take out. After about half an hour, the Chinese delivery guy arrives, and I press the button to let him in the door. In less than a minute, I hear his footsteps. My stomach is grumbling in anticipation of getting some real, actual food. As my doorbell rings, I stare out through the peephole.
It’s an Asian kid. Either late high school or early college age. As I open the door, he gets a look at me, and gives a start. Suddenly I become self-conscious. I probably look like a mess, I haven’t really been taking care of myself. “Ten dollars and thirty cents,” he says.
I get a ten and five dollar bill and thrust it into his hand, and snatch my food. “Thanks, I don’t need change,” I say, eager to just close the door.
“Thanks, mister!” the kid says, smiling, and I smile back briefly and start to close the door. But then, just before it closes completely, I notice it. His smile. His grin. His growl. The man, he’s the man! I stare out the peephole, and my breath catches in my throat. There is no one there. I look down. I stare at my open hands. There is no food. Suddenly, my apartment is chilly.
The man is not here, but something still feels terribly wrong. Like some protective barrier has been broken, and I’m now at the mercy of the man. Like the lighting has changed. The sunset colors outside my window seem more pale and foreboding than usual. Cold and hungry, I lock both the locks on my front door and hurry into my bedroom. Under my covers, I sigh as a feeling of safety returns. I try to reassure myself. Even if the young delivery guy was the horrible man, he is still outside.
My sleep that evening is dreamless, but I still wake up with a start, drenched in cold sweat. It is now completely dark outside. I look at my clock, it’s 4:17 AM. And my bladder is completely full, like a tight water balloon that could burst at any moment. When I can’t stand it any longer, I leap out of the covers and hurry into the bathroom. I start peeing, and it is the most glorious pee I’ve ever had in my life. I stand there for nearly a minute even after I finish, sighing with relief. Finally I wash my hands, deciding I’m just going to go back to bed, screw the fact that I haven’t eaten anything today. I’m feeling slightly nauseous, and I realize it’s because I’m hungover from the whiskey. As I leave the bathroom, I notice that there is a weird light in my apartment, and that’s when I see — MY FRONT DOOR IS FUCKING WIDE OPEN. With a strangled yell I rush over and slam it shut with a ferocity that surprises even me. It’s no use. He’s here. The man is here, he is behind me. I turn on the light, but the man is … nowhere. He is behind me. No matter where I turn. He is always behind me!
Finally I catch my reflection in a mirror. I stare at myself. I can see the wild terror in my eyes, and my heaving chest as my breath rushes in and out. But I see behind me, and he is not there. Not there. For a moment my mind can’t resolve this conflict. I flip flop between this overwhelming mental sensation that the man is behind me, and the visual proof from the mirror that he is not. First the mirror is truth, then a lie. Then truth, then a lie.
This conflict is strangely comforting. I go right up to the mirror and look past my reflection into the room behind me. He’s not anywhere in the room, and yet, I know in my mind that he is there. That the man exists. If I can just make it to my bed, I know I’ll be safe. I dash away from the mirror into my bedroom and crawl under the covers. The relief I feel is short-lived. Even lying on my back, I know he is there. HE IS BURIED, UNDER THE MATTRESS, JUST UNDERNEATH ME, AND I FEEL HIS ARMS COILING AROUND MY RIB CAGE. Even though my head is against the pillow, I can feel his breath against the back of my neck.
I scream and jump out of my bed and into the corner of my room. The man stays buried in my mattress. Suddenly he sits up, staring at me with those same intense, angry eyes, and his mouth locked in a grinning growl. I can’t look up, I’m too scared, but I know what he looks like and what he is doing. He cocks his head slightly, and whispers:
“No escape.”
Dear reader, you may have felt fear before, but you don’t know fear the way I knew it in that instant. To have the man staring at you, and you knowing you can’t escape. Frozen in fear. I sat like that, literally, feeling like that for hours, but it might as well have been days. The man never moved, never said anything else, just sat there, half buried in my bed, head cocked, and bloodshot, angry eyes staring at me. There I sat, in the corner, my head down, completely paralyzed, cold sweat dripping from my forehead.
The sun came up. Something was weird about him, though. Like the light was different for him than it was for everything else in the room. As if the sunlight was not reflecting off him properly. Feeling overwhelming fear for so long, other thoughts finally started to creep through into my mind.
He is feeding off of my fear. Yet, he hasn’t really done anything. He has looked at me creepily, he has chased me down, but he hasn’t actually done anything physically to me. Somehow I find the courage to stand up and rush out of the room. As I do, I feel him behind me. Every step I take, he takes one too, in perfect lock step, always close enough that he could wrap his arms around me if he wanted.
I figure if I can just get my mind off him. Maybe if I can just ease this feeling that he is behind me. My phone is nearly dead, but not quite. Grabbing ear buds, I thrust them in my ears and turn the sound up as high as it can go. And I play a song. Anything, anything just to take my mind off the man behind me. Nothin’ But a Good Time by Poison starts blaring in my ear drums. By the time the lyrics start, it’s starting to take the edge off my fear.
Now listen
Not a dime, I can’t pay my rent
I can barely make it through the week.
By the time the chorus starts, I’m thinking this might work. I might actually just be able to take my mind off my fear. I start to become delusional, that I might be able to break the man’s hold on me with the power of rock and roll!
Don’t need nothin’ but a good time
How can I resist?
Ain’t looking for nothin’ but a good time
And it don’t get better than this.
And right as that line ends, my arm twists violently behind me, and I feel his clammy, dead hands on my wrist, and cold breath on my neck. “You think you can shut me out?!” comes a cold, reptilian voice. I scream as I feel the skin on my back splitting open. I whirl around, seeing a bloodied butcher knife on the table. To this day, dear reader, I try to argue that the slash on my back could not possibly be self-inflicted due to its angle. But physicians noted that my arm was twisted as well, allowing for the possibly that I slashed my own back myself. They don’t believe me, dear reader, that the arm twist and slash on my back were both inflicted by the man.
Still feeling the man directly behind me, I grab the bloody knife and whirl around, expecting the knife to cut into the man’s face. Instead I find air. Of course. Still holding the knife, I dash out of my apartment, not bothering to lock the door. I fly down the stairs and out the building. The man is right on my tail. I run out into the street, but he is right behind me. Every time I turn, he rotates with me, like some horrifying cartoon character that you can’t shake. I turn around fast, but he is faster, and still behind. I turn again, but he is still behind me. I turn one more time and stab downward – one of these times, I will catch him … and my knife sinks six or seven inches into an elderly lady’s eyeball.
So that is the story. I committed manslaughter. To this day, that is the part I regret the most. I regret that my fear of this man, whether or not he is a hallucination, caused the unintended death of another person. I am sorry beyond what any words can express …
DO NOT LOOK NOW, DO NOT MOVE
… and I would like to once again convey my condolences to Mrs. Carpenter’s husband, and her son, and her son’s family. She did not deserve this, and if I could go back in time …
THERE IS A MAN BEHIND YOU, RIGHT NOW
… I would turn the knife on myself instead of her. If it had been my death there instead of hers, it would have been better for all parties.
Now, dear reader, here I make an apology. Did you look? Or even if you didn’t, did you want to? Any slight doubt, any pang of anxiety? If so, then, like the young guy at the beginning of the story, I have probably disappeared from my cell. I am sorry for what you will go through, but please believe me when I say I just desperately need relief from the man behind me, even if it means passing him on to a stranger such as yourself. Remember that it starts with a brush here, and a whisper there. A slight sound, a footstep, passing breath. A rustling you can’t explain, a sudden prickle on your back. My only advice: DO NOT IGNORE HIM, IT ONLY MAKES IT WORSE. Good luck!
Credit To – SmileyJack
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I recall when we first found the grove. The trees glowed, illuminated by late sunlight coming in shafts down into the valley, the thick smell of decaying fruit rising up toward us, sweet and sour and wonderful.
I was part of a six-person research team looking into water quality fluctuations in the Sierra valley system, following watercourses and comparing their biodiversity. In pursuit of one specific stream, we’d squeezed through a narrow crevice canyon that eventually opened up into a verdant, enclosed ecosystem rich with plants and animals previously unknown to science. That sort of thing isn’t unheard of in the region – the Andean mountains are full of such tiny pockets of life, totally cut off from each other by high mountain walls, creating Galapagos-like isolation.
But the trees – those really were the discovery of a lifetime, for any botanist or explorer – and I was both. The local natives (Puruhá) called them ‘Witch Berries’, or something like that, according to our guide. I speak very little Quichua, so I had to trust his translation. It’s not an unfitting name, though – they were bewitching. Endemic to just one valley in Ecuador, which was later made into a protected reserve, the small trees were not only beautiful, with arching, pendulous boughs and long, distinctive leaves; green above and pink below, but they also produced flowers and fruit in amazing quantity.
Walking into the grove, the berries were everywhere, emitting a heavenly scent, and we could not resist sampling, even knowing we risked poisoning. Taking some back to camp, they were run through our field toxicity test without any problems, and after we’d gone several days without any ill effects, we went back to the grove and picked hands-full of the fragrant fruit. Orange-pink, grape-sized oblong berries with a thin, fig-like skin, and a ripe mango texture. And the flavor – like burnt brown sugar and melted butter drizzled on perfect strawberries. They also dried easily, and held up unrefrigerated for nearly a week before spoiling. Almost immediately, talk of cultivation and marketing overtook our discussions, we foresaw ‘witchberries’ being the next big thing in supermarkets all across the world – and our visions soon danced with the money to be made!
The Puruhá didn’t seem too happy about us taking branch samples or eating from the trees – no doubt we were offending their religion and angering their Gods somehow – they had some sort of taboo about eating the fruits raw, which we didn’t understand, and dismissed as superstition. They used the berries for various medicinal and ceremonial purposes, cooking, drying, and grinding the fruit into a fine powder. It was easy to categorize their reverence as being similar to other cultures’ superstitions about pomegranates, apples, or honey.
So we took the cuttings back to our greenhouses in Kent, only to be pleasantly surprised by how readily they rooted and grew, thriving in warm, humid shade. Inside of five years, they started flowering, and we arranged an industry party to celebrate and taste the first crop grown in the UK. I lost track of how many people shook my hand, congratulated me and my teammates, and gushed positively about our find.
Oh but of course, we couldn’t say we -discovered- the plant, the indigenous people of the region knew about them long before us, and we had already made plans to send a small portion of the profits from our venture to the Puruhá, to improve their lives and to protect the tiny valley the trees came from.
The tasting party went off without a hitch, and we got a plethora of preliminary offers, not only from within the UK, but Europe and the USA as well. Of course, the fruit still needed FSA approval, but since the trees produced year-round with sufficient fertilizer, we could start shipping as soon as we were certified. Since our own labs had already investigated them pretty thoroughly, we knew it wouldn’t be a long process. With luck, we’d be able to get the next crop out by December, just in time for the big rush on tropical fruit for the holiday season. And when the certificates arrived, I brought in some champagne for us all.
We were, of course, fools. Not stupid, we were all educated scholars. Well, except Paul Dimsey, he was a photographer. But no amount of research or knowledge could have prepared us for the worst. I, in particular, was so blinded by fortune and success that even when I saw the signs that something was wrong, I didn’t pay attention to them. I didn’t want to. And for that I take full responsibility.
There’s a disease called ‘Pica’ that affects people with certain neurological conditions or dietary deficiencies, and it is characterised by the sufferer eating non-food items or substances. In some cases, pennies, buttons, small sundry objects… in others, clay or dirt. It was the latter that I caught Nick Blessed up to in the greenhouse, perhaps three days after we’d packed our first shipment and kissed it goodbye. He was eating the moist black soil straight out of a large plastic bag, and when he saw me watching him, he immediately stopped, guilty-faced and stuttering. He called me ‘Miss Torgersen’, instead of my first name, and tried to hide what he had been doing.
I asked him if he was feeling alright, and he abashedly admitted to me he’d had the condition his entire life, it just… happened to come and go at odd times. I told him I understood; though really, I was surprised. He’d never mentioned it, and he’d always seemed very open and jovial about his life. But then, I’d reasoned, some people act that way to better hide their secrets. Still, something felt off about the entire thing.
I regretted not listening to my instincts when Dr. Hanlon came to my apartment a little less than a week later. He asked to come in, and I offered him a drink. “Bless you, girl.” He said, and I poured us whiskey on the rocks. We weren’t best friends, but we’d spent a lot of time talking on our trip. I think our mutual love of a good bottle pushed us into each others’ company – the others in our team didn’t drink, and didn’t find our rowdiness after a few as mutually endearing as we did. Dr. Hanlon; Eugene outside office hours, hadn’t come for my delightful presence, but to talk to me about something far more problematic.
He asked me if I had felt any strange urges recently, for example, the urge to eat anything… unusual. Eugene was edging around the true crux of his question, so I supplied it for him.
“You mean like soil?” As I said it, his face stiffened. I’d hit the bullseye. I told him I’d walked in on Nick earlier, and he nodded, then told me it wasn’t just the one. He liked to sneak into the greenhouses for a tipple here and there between his appointments, and he’d spied three people – all members of our expedition – snacking on black humus. We discussed the situation for a good long while, consuming half of my bottle of Glenfiddich.
The possibility of having brought back with us some exotic tropical parasite came quick to our minds, though Eugene and I weren’t experiencing any odd urges yet. Still, I was worried, and sought a clinic as soon as they were open the next morning.
I went back to the campus in the afternoon, to ask Eugene to help me convince the rest of the expedition team to get themselves tested. There was initial resistance, everyone seemed to feel fine, even those who we knew were snacking out of the garden bed. Especially those, which just made us more worried. Our concerns were taken seriously by the department head, who ordered mandatory testing for everyone who’d been on the expedition – as well as anyone who’d been in extended contact with us, or been in the greenhouses for any length of time.
Everyone in the department submitted to various scans and samplings without argument, including the soil-eaters, their smiles so certain that nothing was amiss. And they seemed to be right. There was nothing new or unusual in any of their samples, no strange bacterias, viruses, nematodes, no extreme nutritional elevations or deficiencies, nothing to indicate why some of them were having such odd cravings.
Testing did reveal those who were affected – crapping dirt is hard to miss. Seven people came up positive for soil-eating, which meant that whatever it was had spread to at least four people who had not gone to Ecuador with us. Suddenly, the situation was -far- more serious. If the disease could be spread, it could get out, and nobody had any idea what it was, or how it was transmitted. More people started showing symptoms, some reporting right away – others only admitting their condition after they’d succumbed to dirt hunger. All the while, the lab techs ran themselves ragged looking for an explanation, but it was only after ruling out just about every cause for the symptom they could think of, that one of the techs finally noticed something common to those who’d been afflicted: Witchberry.
Well, we’d all been eating them. Some more than others, apparently. But these folks most of all. More specifically, they were finding -lots- of chewed seeds in the subjects’ stool. When asked about it, all of the unaffected said that they specifically avoided eating the seeds, while the others did not. So we had an obvious suspect, but we’d waited too long before looking at the fruit. Hundreds of pounds had already been shipped all around the world, and while we could shut down the farm and stop production, a recall and the potential panic it could cause seemed unreasonable. If we could just figure out how to mitigate the effects, maybe the situation could be salvaged.
And then the symptoms just… went away. The dirt-eaters’ cravings evaporated a few days after they’d stopped eating the fruit, starting with those who’d developed them first. They’d experienced some mild withdrawal symptoms, but it seemed the problem had resolved itself. Still, we had a lot of work on our hands. If it was just the seeds that were the problem, we could deal with that, all was not yet lost.
So we halted shipping, and on the advisement of our legal department, sent out a statement advising people not to eat the seeds, or, if they had already been eating seeds, to stop doing so. Arrangements were coming along nicely to buy a modified olive-pitting machine, that would target and elimiate the problem area. A lot of our profits were going down the crapper, since cut fruit wasn’t as shelf-stable, and we needed special packaging to keep it from spoiling – but some income is still better than none. Or none and a legal fiasco. Looking back, I would have taken that legal fiasco happily.
Dr. Godorr had been transferred to another office, so I didn’t hear about him right away. He’d been depressed since the Pica incident, and talked about quitting, but it was still strange that he’d just disappear. A police detective came by to ask us a few questions, but I got the impression he wasn’t very optimistic.
Two weeks later, another member of the expedition team went missing. She just didn’t show up one morning. The same detective came back around, but didn’t seem to remember having talked to me before. He just gave the impression of general disinterest in the case. There was a lot of pica talk in the department, both of those who’d vanished were recovered dirt-munchers. It quickly became a department-wide rumor – the witchberry curse. One of the others who’d showed symptoms early on became so anxious that she simply quit, another went on extended vacation, and a third came into work high until he got a suspension. I never heard from any of them again.
It was fall when I received a letter on my desk. I opened it to find a complaint from the resource management office, upset that our department was using a greenhouse unit we hadn’t requisitioned or been granted the use of, and that if we didn’t move the new plantings, they would be destroyed.
New plantings? I called Eugene Hanlon first, and then Maggie Hershbaum, the only other people who might use the greenhouses for personal projects. Though even then, they’d have needed to apply for them with resource management. Neither of them admitted to knowing anything about it.
I asked them to meet me at the unit mentioned in the letter, curious (and slightly irritated) about what was going on. I’d rarely even been in that unit, since it was out on the end row, a long way from our crops. Even if I felt like putting anything in, there was no logical reason to go do it out there. After work, I hiked up to the last row of greenhouses in grey drizzle. Maggie was already there when I arrived, and Eugene made it only a few minutes after. The unit in question was unlit, and I flipped the switch so my companions could read the letter. They agreed it was odd, but sometimes our students get odd ideas for projects, and they’re notorious for failing to follow procedure with some of these things.
As promised, there were a number of seedlings growing in one of the plots. They were perhaps seven or eight inches tall, representing a couple weeks’ growth. Healthy and robust despite being in an unheated, unlit unit. They had the elegant pink and green leaves of Witchberry.
“Maybe someone’s trying to selectively breed them.” Eugene rubbed a leaf, “Make them hardier.”
“Noble, but misguided.” I noted a spade left on the floor in the aisle, and picked it up. “We’ll need to move them. Maggie, could you get a pallet?”
I remember pushing the spade into the soft, loose soil around the seedlings, working down and pulling up. I remember the -rip- of fabric, and when I lifted the spade, the dull sound of dirty brown bones coming up all tangled with the roots. I didn’t recognize what I was seeing until I looked closer, down into the hole I’d made, and saw a human jawbone with still-white teeth shining out of the dark, loamy earth.
I think I went into shock at that point, since I don’t recall much else of that night, and had to be filled in later by Maggie. Within an hour, police had swarmed the greenhouses, Eugene, Maggie and I were taken to a hotel and questioned repeatedly. I was in a daze, Maggie told me, and not very responsive. Forensics specialists dug up all the greenhouse plots with any sign of recent soil disturbance, including the original crop trees, which were moved into a storage facility in plastic tubs. The bones I had found had been those of Paul Dimsey, who had actually been the first of our expedition to go missing – but he wasn’t an employee of the university, having been hired on contract, and he lived alone. I hadn’t even known he’d gone absent. Five corpses were found inside the greenhouses – and three more in some nearby woods, each one indicated by a small cluster of pink and green saplings.
Evidence suggested that the deceased had actually buried themselves, sometimes using their bare hands to dig a hole big enough to lay in, and then pull the freshly-turned earth back in over their own bodies. Of course, not everyone who’d eaten the seeds ended up in self-made graves. A couple were found decaying in their beds, with sprouts attempting to grow through the blankets. Others were still alive, but now experiencing fatigue and abdominal heaviness. And a good percentage showed no symptoms at all, regardless of how much of the fruit they’d eaten.
CT scanning revealed what earlier tests and X-rays had missed: Some of the seeds, swallowed whole, had implanted themselves into the victims’ intestinal walls, and germinated there. Invisible to the immune system, they’d quietly spread soft, fine roots all through the bodies of their human hosts, feeding and storing energy until they were ready to progress to the next stage. Somehow, the plants made their hosts want to bury themselves, their corpses providing fertilizer for the fast-growing trees.
Efforts were made to remove the parasitic plants from the still-living victims, but the surgery proved more deadly than the parasites. And worse, new cases of soil-eating Pica were starting to emerge in every place we’d shipped the damned berries. A full recall was ordered, the fruit gathered and destroyed, but there was little way of knowing how many people ignored the recall, or had already been infected.
Eugene and I went to be more thoroughly scanned, and again, we came up clean. We went for a few drinks to celebrate our one small mercy, and talked about the future. We were pretty certain the entire department was going to be scrapped. We’d be lucky to keep our jobs once the full legal reprecussions came down on us. It would be the last time we’d see each other.
It’s quite amazing how efficient the media and government can be at hiding a crisis in plain sight. The public was scarcely aware of any of this happening. Witchberries vanished from collective awareness, and a few (dozen) people came down with an unrelated illness in each of the countries we’d shipped to.
A cure was, in fact, discovered in time to save some of those people. There was a pattern to who did or did not get infected – the immune were all regular drinkers of hard liquor, like Eugene and myself. I don’t know about Maggie, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Beer or wine wasn’t strong enough to kill the seeds, it had to be something at least 30 proof. Hospitals prescribed vodka and scotch, and patients drank to their health.
Sadly, this came too late for some. Once they’d passed the Pica stage, the growth in their bodies became resistant to treatment. Or, even if they did manage to kill the parasite, the damage it had done to the host’s organs by that point was often irreversible and terminal. Some waited too long – or simply did not, or could not, seek medical treatment. This included a lot of people in the United States, who lacked any form of medical coverage. For those who got such a prognosis, suicide was vastly preferred over letting nature take its course, but the numbers didn’t make much of a blip on the world radar. People kill themselves all the time.
Witchberries are now illegal, though I’m certain there’s a black market supplied by backyard growers. The cure for infection is now well-known folklore, and new cases of dirt-eating Pica are rare.
I’ve moved on, I don’t work at the university anymore, I rarely travel, and I prefer meat and bread over greens. I do not eat fruit of any kind. And now and again, when I see a sapling coming up with pink and green leaves, I kill it.
Credit To – Smoke
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I always admired my grandfather’s courage. He had fought in the war on what we nowadays think of as the wrong side, but he had never been a believer in the cause. Sometimes a rifle is pressed in your hand and your choice is either to fire and worry about being shot from the front, or not to fire and be sure that you’ll be shot from behind.
He was young when he was drafted, barely 16. Before he left he gave his first kiss and a promise to a girl. She waited five years until the end of the war, surviving on just five or six letters that she kept as treasure.
The war ended but even the defeat was celebrated. Not openly, but in the hearts and eyes of the people. People never wage war, it is politicians that wage war. No soldier that ever stood in the line of a rifle believes that war is heroic, only those divorced from reality, those that sit in tidy offices, those dream of war.
Soldiers came home with thin bodies and bandaged limbs. They hugged their wives and women before they fell onto beds and relived the front in dreams that made them toss and turn and wake up from their own screams.
His girl watched with tears in her eyes while her sister and mother each welcomed their men home. She heard the men scream at night and each scream lodged a stone in her throat. She prayed that the man she had kissed did not have to scream and then she prayed that the man she had kissed was alive enough to scream. Then she prayed for forgiveness for her selfishness.
The other men, when they came, were often so thin that their women, when they welcomed them, were scared of hugging them too tightly for their spines or ribs might break. Especially those that came from the East were thin, the skin of their faces sunken into their cheeks.
Two years after the war a scarecrow knocked on her door. An old man, forty at least, the arms thin like bare bones, a hard and dirty beard that had long stopped growing for want of nutrition and his skin a gray with blue and black patches. His lips stretched into a black-toothed smile. She stepped back into the house. The door was closing fast.
“Wait,” he said. “It’s me.”
Even after hot meal and shower and shave she still recognized nothing except his eyes and the shape of his nose. It took two weeks before she thought that he was true and another two before she was sure.
Sometimes, on those days where she took him along to the market, the sellers called him her father. The man in the leather chair had to ask her twice and then demand another witness to make sure that he was the man he claimed to be and not his father or uncle or another older relative.
The war had stolen his youth.
When my grandfather spoke about the war he never spoke about his experiences. He spoke in the abstract, the way you speak about a movie or a book, not even the way you speak about history.
“They were overrun. Hundreds of kilometers, there was no resistance at all. Then General Winter, as the Russians call it, attacked.”
“The troops still got further. There were villages, poor people. It wasn’t a choice; the supplies weren’t coming. Everything was taken. All those that didn’t run were shot.”
Sometimes he talked about the early phases of the war, when everybody was hopeful, when things were going far too well and easy. He always said, not with pride but in a matter-of-fact way, that the war would have been won if it had been against one or two or five countries, rather than against half the civilized world.
But my grandfather refused to speak about the things that happened at the end and after the war. When he was asked he didn’t reply. He only shook his head and looked away.
My grandmother said that she heard strange things when he was asleep. She heard him begging for food and water, for a blanket. She heard him beg that someone stop. She heard him beg that someone let him go. She heard him beg for forgiveness.
As long as I can remember I asked my grandfather about the war. Despite his warnings, for me those were stories of adventure and courage. I only heard when he spoke about trenches and gunfire, not when he spoke about catching rats for food and drying puddle water and trousers so soiled that it was better to rub them clean with mud and dry them in the rare moments of sun than to leave them as they were.
I didn’t understand that my questions hurt him, that I forced him to relieve a time that he would have given an arm to forget.
And yet, all those times when I made him tell stories in his odd unemotional and descriptive way, he refused to speak about the end. Once I baited him enough to say that he did not remember how he got home; sometimes riding on trains and sometimes by foot, but always just following the direction of the setting sun until he stumbled upon street signs that he finally could read.
He came from far in the East. Places he either did not remember or did not want to remember. And every time I asked his stories ended with the village that they pillaged, where they condemned men and women and children to death because they themselves did not know how else to survive.
As said, I always admired my grandfather for his courage. He paid that war with his youth and on his return decided that, for this heavy price, he at least wanted to be a good man.
I could recount countless times when I saw him, an old man by then, chase down young rascals that had egged a house or stolen a handbag. He jumped in when neighbors needed help. He passed a burning house and thought he heard a child caught still inside. He told me to stay where I was and without a thought slammed his shoulder into the door until it broke from its hinges and he himself disappeared in black smoke. In the end there was no child that needed to be saved. My mother called him a fool for breaking his shoulder like that. For me he was a hero.
My grandfather taught me that we all dream of being courageous but that very few of us take our chance to be a hero when it is offered to us. In our lives we pass countless times where we could save, but we drive past and look for excuses. “I have to hurry home.” “It didn’t look that bad.” “Others were helping already.”
Being scared and comfortable is easier than being courageous. And to make ourselves feel good we imagine the heroic acts we would have done if we had had the time or if it had been that bad or if others hadn’t been there.
There was only one thing my grandfather was scared of. Dark rooms.
Their house had a basement but they rarely, if ever, used it. There were strong lights installed and the light switch was outside the basement door, but there was nothing inside except for old furniture never to be used again and a few old tires that should someday have made a swing.
My grandmother did not mind entering the basement, but he forbade her to use it.
“There are things,” he said. “That live in such darkness.”
At night he made sure that everyone else was upstairs and in their rooms. He turned the flashlight on and the living room lights off and, faster than he should have moved in his age, hastened up the stairs.
The guest room was right next to their bedroom. So many times and years I heard him run up those stairs, slam the door and breathe heavy air into his lungs. My grandmother never complained. She never told him that he had to stop or that he was risking his life.
She understood. She knew. He had told her.
My father’s parents had died in a car accident when I was young. For me they are a hazy memory, more photos than people. That might be why my mother’s parents were so important for me. They were my personal grandparents, the ones I had and the ones I loved.
They had always been very healthy. When I was young my grandfather still ran and played soccer with me. But in the last few years their age was beginning to take its toll. I noticed that they lost their ability to focus, then their ability to remember recent events, then their ability to remember me.
My grandmother and grandfather still followed their routine. They cared for themselves and didn’t need our help except for tax matters and other administrative duties that some government official had decided needed to be complicated. My parents visited often to make sure that the house was in order and food in the fridge. They kept me updated on my grandparents’ health and happiness.
For Christmas I finally managed to visit. It’s not a nice thing to admit but my parents and I – with my mother as her parents’ only child and me as my parents’ only child – made sure to be there and not have any other plans because we thought it might be the last Christmas that we would have together as a family. I was happy to see them and hug them again. I felt guilty, in a way, that I hadn’t provided any great-grandchildren yet and had not even a girlfriend or wife to present.
I was surprised how confused they were; that they did not remember who I was. My grandparents did not seem to remember my parents’ names either, but they still recognized their faces. I was a stranger, face and name alike and during the meals and songs and conversations I felt as if I was an intruder in bygone lives that they were reliving with glassy eyes.
It was the 26th of December. My parents and grandmother went to see the Christmas market. I stayed home with my grandfather and his aching knee to drink tee and play scrabble.
I was in the kitchen when he called out.
“Son!”
With the teapot I walked back into the living room. He sat in his armchair, upright, his eyes suddenly clear and right on me.
“Son!” he said again, loud and forceful.
“Yes?”
“Make sure the lights are on.”
“Sure, grandpa.”
I walked towards the light switch. His eyes followed me.
“They come when the lights are off,” he said. “You know that, right?”
“I’m not sure who comes, but I’ll keep the lights on for you.”
“They!”
His voice was not frail anymore; it thundered through the room.
“They come! Those things! I told you about them!”
I turned the light on.
“I don’t think you told me,” I said. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Don’t fool me, boy!”
“I’m sorry, I really don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, I told you. I know I told you. I taught you to keep the lights on.”
“You told me to keep the lights on, but you never told me why.”
There was anger in his face.
“Why? Why? I saw them and I saw what they do to us and you doubt me?”
“You saw things in the dark?”
“Three years I saw them. Three years they held me and the others.”
“I never heard about that.”
“Oh,” he said. “Then you should.”
That evening, in less than twenty minutes, my grandfather told me about his last years at the front.
One year before the war ended they were ordered to retreat. They fled in small groups through the countryside they had pillaged and burned just weeks before, past houses with the frozen dead still inside.
There was a church, he said, a large old church made of stone. It was the only building still intact in the village, the only place to seek shelter from the wind and cold.
They made a fire with old church benches and sank to their sleep right next to it. Seven men in total, two injured and moaning and the other five just scared and weak.
My grandfather said he woke up from screams all around him. The room was pitch black. The stone floor was moving under his body. He struggled to get on his feet – and only then realized that his feet were being held. The floor was still; his feet were being pulled.
Then he too screamed.
He said they were pulled down stairs. His weapon and knife were gone. Then he heard more people, moaning and screaming. A suffocating stench punched into his lungs.
He was thrown onto a heap of warm bodies. Something bit his leg and he kicked and a man screamed in pain.
The room was pitch black. Another man was thrown on him. A door fell shut and was locked.
He said they moved away from the heap of bodies, but the cold soon drove them to get closer. Every few minutes somebody screamed. He could hear flesh ripping and teeth grinding.
He said there must have been hundreds of people. He said they tried to hammer against the metal door and scream for help and the voice of an old man laughed at them from behind. He said in broken German that the door was thick and nobody there that could hear them.
But once every while the door opened. Something dark moved inside and when it came inside the room grew cold and the humans moved closer to one another. My grandfather said he felt the energy being drained from his body and a panic and dread rise in his soul.
Soon the dread started even before the door opened.
They all adapted. There was no problem with water. It ran occasionally down the walls and if it was not licked off it accumulated on the floor to join with the layers of excrement and sweat. He said that he tried to hold out, but that after days of hunger you choose desperate measures. He said that he never killed one there, that he only took pieces from those that had died or at least those that he thought had died.
Every few days more were thrown into the room. Every few days there was a struggle, some of the old against some of the new.
They tried to stay together, the brothers in arms that had fought together, but soon that too broke apart.
He said that some day the number of new people started decreasing. There were only a rare few and the numbers in the room dwindled. He sat for most of the time on a higher stone, one that the others seemed to not have found. He only climbed down when he knew that a struggle had ended, that one was dead, that something could be eaten.
But no matter the struggles, every time when the dread came and the door opened, they all huddled together. They all felt the same exhaustion and cold and panic in their souls.
And then, one day, long after no more new people arrived, when only three or four or five were left, there were footsteps outside. He was scared because he didn’t feel dread. The door opened and a man with a torch stood there. A gun fell from his hand and his mouth opened and he ran and scrambled up the stairs and he threw up while running.
The door was open. There was a glimmer of light from upstairs. That was how my grandfather left. He said he didn’t turn to look who or what he left behind. Something behind him scrambled up the stairs too, but he was the first to get out and he was the first to reach the forest and eat grass and bugs and other things that he found close to the ground.
He found a piece of cloth first, then a rotten uniform on a corpse and later, when he had scrambled far enough and when his strength returned, he found a village and stole a dry uniform from a laundry line and a bag of potatoes from the same place.
“I don’t know what they are,” he said. “But they live from the warmth and spirit we leave behind.”
I nodded.
“They live off us,” he said. “Do you understand? They need you to exist. They want to catch you. They want to drain you. They want that you forget about the light.”
“The light?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “The light. They held us in the darkness. Three years they drained me and lived off me and made me do things I don’t even want to think again.”
He cleared his throat.
“And,” he said. “I know what that dread feels like. It is not like any other. It is at the core of your being, you feel it in your spine and back and gut. Three years I felt it and after that it never went away.”
“It never went away?”
“Of course it didn’t,” he said. “Because they always stay. They always wait. They will always be there, consuming what spirit you leave behind, and hoping that one day you become careless, that you forget about the light. And then they strike.”
I glimpsed outside, where the world was slowly turning gray.
“They are here, right now?”
My grandfather nodded.
“They wait,” he said. “They come and consume what we leave. But they hope for more. They hope that one of us grows careless and ignores the dread. They wait until one of us stays when the room is dark.”
We sat quietly, his eyes meeting mine.
“Okay,” I finally said.
“Good,” he said.
He nodded silently, then looked outside. A moment later his eyes seemed glassy again.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He turned to me and frowned.
“Who are you?” he asked.
It was the last conversation that I truly had with him. Since January his condition got worse, he talked about dead men. He spoke about hunger and fear. He asked for the girl that he had kissed when he was 16 and neither he nor she noticed that the girl sat right next to him, patting his hand.
I loved my grandfather. I miss him. I wish I had been there rather than a six hour drive away and that I could have taken care of him rather than leave him alone. I wish that it had been me or my parents and not the girl that waited seven years for his return that had to find him.
But most of all, and I know that sounds cruel and wrong and selfish, I wish that he would have died in his bed or in the hospital, during the day.
I wish so much that she didn’t have to find him in the morning, on the living room floor, with the flashlight off and his mouth wide open.
Credit To – Anton Scheller
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There’s a strange face in the woods outside my window. Mum and Dad won’t listen though. It stares and stares… Little brother hates hearing it about it. He thinks it is meant to scare him, the story about the man with no face.
The face watches me all hours of the night and day…
Big sister says that it is all lies; she says that Mum and dad should call in head doctors.
It doesn’t matter how many times I tell them about him, the man in the dark, no one listens. I don’t like when Mum says I have to play outside, because I have to be close to him- he is too tall. He is too thin. Like he doesn’t eat!
The man doesn’t move when he watches me, he just makes me cold, makes it so I can’t run. I don’t like when he is around and I think I should stay away from the fence. Mum has to drag me inside for dinner because I can’t stop staring, she is angry at me for being out so late in the cold, can’t she see him? The tall man that is now standing in our yard.
After dinner tonight, Mum is making me sit in my room- no TV- because I didn’t come when she called. I sit at my desk with my homework, trying to finish it before Dad comes in to check, when I see him standing in the yard. The man without a face; the tall man, standing to close to my window. He is always there now, even when I point him out to mum and dad; I don’t know why they can’t see him.
My dreams are full of him now, he is standing in the background as I do real magic for my friends. He stands in my dreams watching, I have told him to leave me alone, but only in my dreams.
–
Mum called the doctor today, she says I am very sick, I keep coughing up blood and I can’t sleep. She says I’m not eating very much, she tells him of the tall man I see, I don’t think it matters anymore. The doctor says I will need to go to hospital, he says that maybe something is wrong with my brain and I will need scans. The coughing is bad now, it hurts a lot, the tall man is still watching.
Mum sits with me in the night time to make sure I am ok, she asks me what I am humming and I can’t tell her. I don’t know the words, I didn’t even know I was humming. She tucks me in and kisses my head, the tall man isn’t outside my window anymore. He hasn’t been there for a whole day, but he is still in my dreams. His long, long arms reaching for me.
The music is loud in my ears, I can see mum reading to me- her lips are moving- but the music is so loud. I cough and cough, lots of blood come up this time. She sits on the end of my bed staring at me, waiting for it to stop, but it doesn’t. I wish it would because I need to tell her something…
The tall man isn’t outside the window anymore, the tall man isn’t in the yard, he isn’t even in the woods…
The coughing is too much and I feel like I am falling asleep… I try to fight it very hard because I need mummy to know…
The tall man is the corner now… He is in my room…
Credit To: Mara
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I never wanted to reveal my story, but it has to be done. It’s been so long, and nobody’s known. But now I confide in you, the reader, to read my story, and attempt to comprehend the horrors I experienced. My fingers stutter and shake and tears cascade down my cheeks as I try to type this. But I warn you now, what you are reading cannot be unread.
It was just an ordinary night in my apartment. I was tired, the days at the office had been so stressful lately, and I looked forward to the quiet release of sleep. It always seemed to make everything better.
But this night was different.
The wind seemed ominous. The sky seemed darker. And as I relaxed in my chair watching my favorite sitcoms before bed, I saw what appeared as a strange silhouette standing outside my window. I focused my full sight on what i thought was there.
Nothing. Just darkness.
I figured I was just over-tired. Just a little too much work today, that’s all. I finished watching my show and retired to my bed. As I tried my best to sleep I heard the door at the end of my bedroom creak. I dismissed it, too tired to get myself worked up over nothing. I then got the sense something was watching me. I tried to shake it off, I just wanted to sleep. Finally, I heard something breathing heavily and slowly. At first I thought it was me and that I was psyching myself out, so I held my breath for a moment.
It wasn’t me.
I jolted upward from my bed and opened my eyes. I became frozen as I saw, at the foot of my bed, a young girl with long, black hair, around the age of 6, in a white night-gown. She stared at me with unblinking eyes and a wide smile. She had deep cuts covering her face, and her hands that hung at her side were covered in crimson. We both sat and stood staring at each other for a good moment, until she let out a horrifying, inhuman scream. At that moment I tried to race for the door but she leapt on me, digging her nails into my face, her dark, black eyes inches away from mine, screaming all the way. The screaming became deafening and I soon lost my balance and hit my head on the table next to my bed. I lost consciousness.
I awoke in what appeared to be an empty basement. My clothes remained on, except for my shirt. I struggled to find my balance. My head was covered in dry blood. I looked at my arms. There were cuts all down them, writing down words. I found the words read “Will you play with me?” It was also written on both my sides. I gazed around the room in horror and found an iron door with blood seeping at the base. I slowly made my way there. There was no sign of the girl, though I feared she may be behind the door. Despite my fear, I had to go in.
I had to.
What I saw was horrifying, bodies lay spread across the wide room all the way to the stairwell on the opposite corner. Men, women, children, all of them laying still. Cuts on their arms and legs, similar to mine, read “will you play with me?” Except these victims had something I didn’t have. I looked at a nearby women in horror.
She laid on her back, her stomach split open, as I came closer what came into my sight was a large toy fire-truck shoved in with her entrails. I choked back vomit and backed away. A man laying against the wall had metal jacks stuck into both of his eyes. His skull had caved in, and what lay next to him was a broken baseball bat, snapped in half in a pool of blood. A young boy lay lifeless in the very middle. His mouth was wide open and sticking out of it was the beginning of a toy car track, it had been shoved down his throat. His chest was cut open and his heart lay next to his body. In place of his heart were the dismantled pieces of a doll.
I lost my control and vomited. I cried for a moment, but then the thought struck me.
“Where’s the girl?”
I didn’t think this wanting to know where she was, of course. I thought it very briefly before noticing the stairwell that stood at the corner of the room. I started walking towards it, but then I stopped…
Something behind me was breathing heavily.
I turned around, and there stood the girl, after having stood in the corner in wait the entire time I was examining the bodies. She then said, in a high voice that pierced my ears with terror.
“Will you play with me?”
She began screaming. I turned to run away, but she was on me. Knife-sharp nails driving into my back and my neck. I struggled and eventually I threw her off of me and onto the ground.
I ran for the door, but it slammed shut. I banged on it and cursed, blood running down my back. It would not open. She was on me again, I elbowed her face, she drove her nails into my back. I managed to push her off and turn around. As she lunged I caught her. Her big, black eyes inches away from mine, her nails plunged into my face. Her screams deafening my ears. She raised one hand, smiling ear to ear, and her hand plunged down on my eyes.
Everything went black.
I woke up in the hospital, bandages covering my body, including both of my eyes. A police officer stood in my room, speaking with a doctor. They saw I was awake, and smiled. They informed me I was the only survivor of a mass murder, and that the suspect, a middle-aged man, had been captured. I told them about the girl. They said no girl was found at the scene. They didn’t believe me. They told me “I should rest.”
Two weeks passed, and I was cleared to leave. As I exited the hospital, permanently scarred on my arms, face, back, and sides, I passed the waiting room. It had some toys lying on the ground. The game jacks, a toy fire-truck, a doll, and a toy car track. Sitting with these toys was a small girl with long, black hair. She wore a white gown. She looked up at me and smiled widely, and in a voice that pierced every cut on my body, she said:
“Will you play with me?”
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There it is again! What is that thing?! I can’t take this anymore. It’s like everywhere I go all I see is this horrible, tall, thin and seemingly faceless creature. It’s been haunting my dreams as well ever since I first saw it; all it does is stand there, and watch me. I can’t shake this constant feeling of being watched, it’s like I’m never alone. I hate it. I can’t sleep, I can’t go outside, and I can’t function as a normal person anymore without… It being there.
I done a lot of research on it the last couple of days, Googling what I can best describe it as. All I could remember was it being an impossibly tall, thin man. I say impossibly because no human could be that height and that thin, it’s just not goddamn natural. I tried my best to remember its face, I figured that would help narrow the search, but there wasn’t one. I have no memory of seeing this thing’s face. It was always just a blur. But then, I could never look at it long enough without feeling uneasy. I usually just walked in the other direction or something. Or if it was a dream, or a nightmare at that, I would always wake up before I could get a clear look. Well, the search provided me with something called “The Slenderman”. What the fuck is a Slenderman? This mythical creature is the thing that’s been stalking me? No, it can’t be. I refuse to believe it.
I’ve not left my house in two days. I’ve been held up reading all these Slenderman stories and accounts. Needless to say sleep has eluded me for the duration. Nothing’s going right anymore. I think I’ve angered it by not letting it in my dreams. I keep hearing banging on the windows late at night, and creaking of the floorboards as I’m lying in bed. I know they say houses do that on their own, but this is different. The creaks aren’t that of the house settling, there’s weight behind them. Like soft footsteps. However, every time I go to look there’s nothing there, but when I re-enter my room I always get the sensation I’m being watched.
Tell me, have you ever been sitting in a room by yourself, windows and door closed, when suddenly the door opens for no reason? I think everyone has, but I’m different. I swear it’s not the draft; I’ve had all the windows locked for about a week now. I’m not one to believe in ghosts or anything of the sort, but this just has an eerie feel to it. Whenever the door spontaneously opens, it gets noticeably colder in the room. The second I leave the room however, all the other rooms are back to normal, so it’s not like my thermostat’s on the brink. Any room however, except my own. My room has been getting cold recently, real cold. I’ve resorted to lighting candles all around the room to try and heat up the place. I don’t know what’s happening; I’m starting to lose it.
I went outside for the first time in over a week today. I thought maybe my delusions were coming from being cooped up and spending too much time scaring myself reading about the Slenderman. I went through my day to day life, as best I could and to my surprise, no sightings of that…thing. Everything was going fine, in fact, I was starting to forget about the whole thing. That is, until I was heading home.
I was walking through the woods, trying to take in as much fresh air as possible before I went home, when I stumbled across a piece of paper lying there on the middle of the footpath. I’d normally have just written it off to be some litter left by someone, but it was crisp white. It looked like it had been carefully placed there, no longer than perhaps 20 minutes ago. I picked it up and turned it over.
It was a drawing. A drawing of that thing, the Slenderman. A very crude sketch depicted him with the words “NO NO NO NO NO NO NO” scribbled down the sides of the page. As I tried to decipher the page the clouds quickly darkened, turning to a heavy black. I best get home quick before the rain hits, I thought to myself. Now I’m home, sitting staring at this fucking picture going out of my mind trying to figure out just how it got to where it was, thinking about how new it looked and wondering what sick fuck drew this and left it there for me. I’m just gonna go to bed, I’d be as well to get some sleep.
I swear that picture’s cursed! Slenderman was in my dream again last night. It seemed so real, I was lying in my bed in the dream, and I had woken up and seen him standing there, in the corner of my room. I tried to scream, move, do anything. But I couldn’t. I lay there, frozen in fear wondering what would happen. He just lifted his arm and stretched it a good 10ft to the headboard of my bed and rested his hand (I say hand, but they didn’t feel like hands, more like…tendrils) over my eyes and I went back to sleep. When I woke up there was nothing. What a fucked up dream.
Oh, and d’you know what else has been happening since I brought that picture home? My electronics have been fucking up. My laptop shuts down on its own, even with full battery, my tv randomly turns to static, my phone keeps getting no reception. Along with the opening of doors, the constant sound of footsteps at night. You get the picture. I’m burning it tonight. I’m taking out the back and setting the fucker alight.
No. No no no no no no no. This can’t be happening. I watched that get burned last night. I took that piece of paper outside last night and watched it burn. How can it be back?! What kind of twisted bastard would put a duplicate copy through someone’s mailbox? This really isn’t funny. I can’t even phone for help because my electronics won’t stop acting up and I’m too paranoid to leave the house. I don’t know what to do.
Things are getting too much to cope with now. Day after day more and more of those damn pictures keep coming through, nothing works in the house and I keep thinking I’m seeing him in the house. Whenever I leave the room I think I catch a glimpse of him in my peripheral vision, or in the corner of a mirror I pass by. It’s driving me insane. Has this thing really invaded my home? If so there’s no safety to be had. If it can get me here it can get me anywhere. Doesn’t mean I won’t go down without a fight though.
Okay, I’ve locked my doors and all the windows and took enough food and water from the kitchen to last me about a week. I’m going to hold up in my room for as long as possible. I don’t feel safe outside nor do I feel safe in my own home. This is my last resort. I know he’s got something sinister in store for me, I just know it. Why else would he go to such lengths to scare me to the brink of my sanity? Well, I’ve barricaded myself in my room for now. Nothing’s getting in here without my say so. It’s getting late, I’m going to try and get some shut eye.
Shit. What was that? I swear I heard something move. It must have, because it woke me up. This is no ordinary footstep that I heard at the beginning of all this, oh no, that was a loud and deliberate thud. It must be messing with me. The Slenderman knows I’m here. I would get up out of bed to turn the light on, but there’s no point, he’s been messing with the electrics. I lay here scared out of my mind, staring into total darkness.
I know this sounds crazy, but have you ever seen a darker shade of black that normal? Like, when you’re in a dark room with only a little light and everything casts a shadow, but some shadows seem darker than the others? I swear, even though I’m currently in near blind darkness, that corner is darker than the rest. It’s the same corner that was in my last nightmare! It’s like, the darkness is moving. My night vision is getting better now, I can see in a little more detail.
Oh no. No. No no no no no no. I can see the outline of a man form in that corner. A really tall, thin man. It looks like he’s wearing…a suit. Oh God. It’s…him. He’s here, just like in my dream. I lay here, frozen in fear wondering what’s going to happen. He lifts his arm and stretches it across my room and over to my head. He rests his hands, no, these aren’t hands, these are…tendrils on my forehead. I thought about grabbing his arm and trying to push away, or getting up out of bed and trying to break down the door, but something told me there’s no use. Nothing would help me now. His tendrils grew in length and snaked down my entire body, slowly wrapping themselves around me into some sort of blackened cocoon. Before I could scream the blackness reached my face and covered my mouth. As it enveloped my head the last thing to be covered was my eyes, which were firmly shut the whole time. I decided to open them, one last time. I looked directly up, and he was there. Standing directly over me, looking down. That was the last thing I saw before the darkness claimed me.
Although he has no face, I swear, he seemed to smile.
Credit To: Josh Dean
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I used to look out the rusted iron bars of my window and dream about being a bird.
The chain that shackled me to my bed was just long enough to reach the windowsill, and so every night after my father would visit my room I would lie awake and wait for the first rays of light to creep over the horizon, then walk over to my window to listen to the morning’s first few notes of birdsong.
Their melodies were so beautiful, I knew that they must have been singing about places far away and wonderful, about sailing on the wind through endless blue skies, looking down at the treetops that dotted the land below.
Then, one morning as I lay in bed, something impossible happened. I had fallen asleep the night before, and would have missed my morning birdsong but for a tapping on my window. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and sat up to see a crow sitting outside on the sill, tapping my window with his beak.
I crept over to the window and smiled at the bird.
“Hello, Mr. Crow,” I said.
“Hello little girl,” said the crow.
I stood there dumbfounded for a moment, not knowing what to say. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, I forced myself to speak.
“You know how to talk?” I said.
“All birds know how to talk,” he replied. “It’s just that not all humans know how to listen.”
I pushed my window open a crack until it hit against the bars. The bird cocked its head in curiosity.
“Why are you in a cage?” it asked.
“I think it’s my destiny,” I said. “It’s always been this way.”
“You look rather thin,” replied the crow. “Would you like something to eat?”
My stomach gave a weak growl.
“Yes,” I said. “That would be wonderful.”
Without another word the crow took flight. A few minutes later he returned with a small branch of figs. The crow watched me as I greedily devoured the fruit. After I had finished he stared at me for a moment before speaking again.
“I didn’t know they put people in cages,” he said. “Do you think they mistook you for a bird?”
“I don’t think so Mr. Crow,” I said.
We whiled away the rest of that day talking. The crow told me all about what it was like to fly, how there was no better feeling in the world. He told me about the far away lands he had visited when he was a young bird and could still make the journey north with the changing of the seasons. Finally, evening came and the crow said that he had to go. The next morning he was back, however, with two more branches of figs.
I thanked him for his generosity, and we talked another day away. That day he even sang me a song. He didn’t have a voice for singing, but I thought his song was beautiful anyway.
We passed the entire fall that way, and the bird’s visits became the only bright spot in my life. He brought me not only figs, but cherries and walnuts too–anything small enough for him to carry.
Soon, however, winter came, and with it the frosts that destroyed the figs and cherries that the crow had used to bring me. His gifts became fewer and fewer, and I could tell from his tired voice that he was flying farther and farther away to get them.
One morning, when the first snows of winter had fallen, the crow asked me a question.
“What would you do to leave this place?” he asked, cocking his head to the side.
I thought for a moment, but I wasn’t sure how to answer. Finally, I told the truth.
“I would do anything to leave this place,” I said. “Anything at all.”
The crow solemnly nodded and said, “The frost isn’t the only thing that winter brings.”
He flapped his wings once and jumped from the windowsill, and I didn’t see him for three days. I began to fall into a deep depression. Every morning I would still listen to the birdsong, but it sounded forlorn and empty without my friend there to listen with me.
The morning after the third day my crow friend returned. It was so beautiful that day; the sun had come out from behind the clouds to melt the snow–one of the last green days before winter came in earnest. As the shadow passed over the valley in which we lived, I first mistook it for a storm cloud, but then I heard the sound. It was loud enough to crack the sky, but it wasn’t thunder–it was birds.
Thousands upon thousands of them descended on our house. A whirling storm of beating wings and shrieking caws, they crashed into the walls and windows, pecking at them with wild ferocity. The house shook under their assault, and their calls were so loud that I didn’t even hear the windows breaking.
They were not so loud, however, that I could not hear my father scream. It was over in a matter of minutes, and the key to my shackles slipped under the door. I rushed over and picked it up with trembling hands, sliding it into the metal cuff around my ankle and turning it.
The cuff came loose with a heavy click, and for the first time I was free.
The key to the door slipped under the jamb as well, and I opened the door to the rest of the house. The place had been all but destroyed. There was splintered wood and broken glass everywhere, and in the center of the living room was what remained of my father–a pile of bloodstained feathers.
The birds had all flown off, but Mr. Crow sat on top of the living room fireplace, regarding me with a curious look.
“Now you can fly free, little girl,” he said. “No more cages for you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Crow,” I said. “Will you come with me?”
Mr. Crow shook his head.
“I am an old bird,” he said. “And my journey is coming to a close. But yours is just beginning.”
Mr. Crow flapped his wings and took flight, and I never saw him again. As I stepped out of the front door my bare feet touched the grass for the very first time, and I could smell the flowers on the breeze as it drifted over me.
At that moment, though my feet were firmly on the ground, my heart was soaring through endless blue sky, far above the world that I had left behind.
I still wake up every morning to hear the birds sing, and when the first few notes break the silence of the early dawn, I think of Mr. Crow and smile.
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I first knew something was wrong when John didn’t return before the first snow. I woke up and looked out the dull, pitted glass window to see white clinging to tree limbs and dusting the barn roof. The image of him smiling as he slung his rifle across his back came to me unbidden.
“I’ll be back before the first snow,” he promised. “Might as well fill up the smokehouse before winter. Got to take care of the both of you.”
He laid a warm hand on my belly, and I had smiled while rolling my eyes. I’d thought he worried too much about this winter, that spring would be the time that tried us most when the baby came. Looking at the snow, though, I felt as if a cold fist had closed over my heart. The unquestioning faith I had in my husband suddenly seemed that much less stable.
Days passed, and I kept as busy as possible. I saw to our livestock, I preserved some of the fruit from our garden, I darned socks and mended fences and knit and chopped firewood and checked our supplies again and again and again. No matter how I busied myself, though, I looked past the line of trees, willing him to return.
Thoughts returned to me as I went about my chores and even created new ones to busy my hands. When John suggested staking out a claim on the frontier, I had been excited. It wasn’t that I didn’t like our life in the city, but there was adventure in my blood. My father had been a trader, and my memories of childhood were in traveling with him. John wanted a bit of land to call his own, to work and make his own way, and he practically split his face grinning when I was so enthusiastic about the suggestion. “I married a tough woman,” he’d said proudly. “She’s not afraid of anything.”
At the time, it’d been true. I took on each of the new hardships with ease, helping John as he built our cabin and searched deep in the woods for logs to fell. I learned all the things a proper frontier wife should know to keep the farm working on my own while he was off hunting or away trading with the natives or in town. His plot was nearly a whole day’s travel from town, and even then the little village was hardly a match for the city where we met. I didn’t care at the time. I liked the quiet. There was something about watching our cabin and farm grow and knowing that it was our achievement alone. We could take a trip into town every month or two and show off our crops or buy some new amenity with pride. We were happy.
The quiet and isolation I’d loved made things worse now. As the days passed and nights grew longer, I longed for something to occupy my thoughts other than the gnawing worry in my heart. I wasn’t worried about myself, mind, or the baby. If I was in danger, I knew the way to the road and always was a strong rider. Not only that, but if we didn’t make it into town after a couple of months, I knew someone would come to check on us. I had food aplenty to last until then. But what of John? What of my husband? It had been weeks, and I was running out of excuses for why he hadn’t come back yet. Maybe the snows came earlier than he anticipated and were slowing his progress, I thought as I knit next to the fire. Maybe game was harder to find than he expected, I reasoned, as I repaired a hole in the chicken coop. Maybe he’d fallen and injured himself, I began to fret as I shoveled a path between the cabin and the barn. Maybe I was now and forever alone.
It was late at night that I first smelled it. It was a clear night with a full moon, and I awoke in the darkness of our cabin to the scent of fragrant wood smoke. My heart jumped in my chest, daring to believe my prayers had been answered as I ran to the window. I could see a shadow moving outside near the smokehouse, and when he turned I felt the tears run down my cheeks. It was John.
I wrapped myself in a shawl and ran outside in bare feet, heart racing, as I ignored the cold and ran to his side. I made such a racket in my enthusiasm that he heard me coming, and shut the door to the smokehouse to greet me halfway across the yard. “Go back inside. It’s too cold out here for you,” he started to say, but I flung my arms around him nonetheless. Finally, I could rest. Finally, I could relax.
I was still weeping and trying to tell him how worried I’d been as he walked me inside. He listened quietly as I spoke, moving slowly and sitting heavily in a chair while I lit the lantern. As I turned I let out a shriek. The firelight showed his face ashen gray, his eyes dull. I put a hand quickly to his forehead, but he grabbed it gently before I could test to see if he was feverish.
“It’s alright,” he said, his voice husky and tired. “I’m fine now. Just promise me you’ll rest.” His other hand reached out to grope at my belly, slightly larger than when he left, and his grip changed to hold me close. “We’re together now,” John said slowly. “Everything will be fine, wife.”
I was not so easily dissuaded. I wrapped him in furs and set him in front of the fire despite his protests, and told him to warm himself while I prepared a bowl of hot soup for him. I set it in his hands, and he watched me go about my business, ignoring the food in his hands. “Go to sleep,” he said heavily. “I’m fine, but you need rest. I’ve worried you with my absence.” Grateful that he was back, that my fear was for nothing, I felt the exhaustion that came with relief. As I climbed into bed, I told him to eat and recover from his journey, but he simply watched me drift to sleep.
When I awoke, John was already hard at work outside. I walked to the window and watched him at work, and the relief of last night washed over me again. It hadn’t been some dream; he was really home. When I tried to join him outside, however, he sent me back with the short words “You need to rest.” My chest tightened slightly at his rejection. As I returned inside and watched John chop wood and haul feed, I noticed his color was still off. His demeanor was tired and slow, and I worried that he wouldn’t let me help with the chores. At first, I thought it was his concern over my worry at his absence. I tried to assure him over the next few days that I was fine, that I had tended to our homestead well enough on my own. With forced smiles and kind but firm words, he rejected my aid.
His color didn’t improve as the days passed. His face remained gray and tired with lines where there had been none before. He moved as if pained, slowly and deliberately, and his voice was low. He kept bundled up as if the warmth of the fire never reached him, his skin cold to the touch whenever I managed to lay a hand on him. I tried to warm him with furs and soup and offer him rest, but John was persistent. “You must rest, wife,” he would say, reaching out to touch my belly with an almost longing look in his eye. My worries grew.
About a week had passed before I realized something odd. Well, odder than John’s apparent illness and refusal to let me tend to him. He spent most of his time outside working the farm by making preparations for winter, and the time he spent inside he used to doze in his chair or fret over me. It was as he was chiding me for going outside to check the hens for eggs. “You have to stay warm, wife,” he said, but the words seemed off to me. And then it struck me: John had not once called me by name since returning home from his hunting trip. Of course, I hadn’t found it peculiar that he called me simply “Wife.” John found it endearing from time to time. But as I searched through my memories of the past week, watching John add more meat to the smokehouse, I realized that he hadn’t once spoken my name. The realization gripped my heart with fear in a way I hadn’t felt before. Something was wrong, but what?
With chores outside denied to me, I found myself with too much time and too little to occupy my thoughts. I busied myself as I could, cooking and cleaning and sewing, but John would interrupt me if he found my actions too strenuous for my condition. This was also new. He hadn’t feared to leave me behind for the sake of my pregnancy before, had never commented on my desire to make this home as much mine as his. As I sat in front of the fire brooding, I searched for more differences between John as he was and John as he had returned.
Some of the changes were quick to spring to mind. The cabin was quiet and seemed less warm since he returned. John’s attitude had shifted from good-humored to somber, and he rarely spoke to me with the same affection as he once had. Not to say that he was unkind, but there was an intensity in the way he spoke. His care for my health had an urgency and desire to it that I couldn’t explain. It was as if the idea of me was more important than I actually was. He spent more time outside, was constantly wrapped in heavy clothing, he insisted on watching me go to sleep at night, and he was awake before I was every day. Other things were smaller, an observation that seemed almost absurd before I started actively looking for clues. I found I couldn’t remember him eating a full meal in front of me since his return. This concerned me greatly because eating properly is the key to getting well again. When I told John I was worried, he would make a show of holding a bowl at night, but the only times I saw him eat was when he pulled bits of meat out of the stew I’d made.
One morning, I woke up to the smell of roasting pork inside the cabin. I opened my eyes and saw John’s back to me as he held a haunch of meat to the fire. The smell made me sick, and I spent the rest of the day ill in bed. I asked him what it was since it definitely didn’t seem like venison. John was quiet, then he told me he’d killed a boar in the woods when he was off hunting. The words were matter-of-fact, but he paused for a while before answering, and later as I drifted off to sleep I heard him gnawing hungrily at the bone as if he hadn’t eaten in days. The sound turned my stomach, and the smell of meat mingled with his unwashed clothes in a sickeningly sour stench. It occurred to me then that I hadn’t seen him disrobe or change his clothes since returning, in spite of all the heavy lifting he’d been doing and sweat he surely must be shedding. The next morning I woke to find the meat and was gone, and John was back at work in the barn.
I couldn’t bear the change between us. I tried to make conversation, to bring back some semblance of brightness that our cabin once possessed. He never strayed far, yet I never felt so lonely. His gestures of affection felt clumsy and unsettling as he reached out to touch my belly or stroke my hair. And he only called me “Wife.” I can’t stress how unnerving that was. My mind was searching for a cause for his change in a way that made sense and didn’t beggar belief, yet I could come up with no answer that agreed with reason. It was odd, I told myself, but it wasn’t bad. I still had hope. I tried to talk about the future, to plan for the baby. When he remained silent after I asked for suggestions for the baby’s name, I suggested he look through the family Bible for relatives to honor. He stared at me blankly a moment before I pointed to the shelf where it rested. He stood slowly, I turned to tend to the beans on the stove, and suddenly there was a crashing noise and howl of pain. I shrieked in alarm, turning to see the shelf on its side and John clutching his hand before brushing past me into the cold night with a slam of the door.
I waited in silence, afraid for John and yet afraid of him as well. He was hurt, yet I hesitated to go after him. I stared at the bookshelf on its side, the papers and books strewn on the floor and the Bible laying open, its gilded pages gleaming in the firelight. I wanted to set things straight, put the books back in order, restore the Bible to its rightful place, but I was afraid. What had happened to John? What would he say if he saw me setting it right? It seemed an age, but finally I moved to the window to look for John. Light snow was falling, and I saw his footprints in the snow leading to the smokehouse. Apart from the crackling fire behind me, there was only silence.
It was then that I began to let a truth inside of me that I had been rejecting since the night I woke up to the smell of wood smoke. There was something terribly wrong with John, something unnatural and dangerous. Once I realized that, I quickly bent to right the shelf and set the books back. I didn’t know what had happened, but I wanted the Bible where it was supposed to be.
I’d eaten and climbed into bed when John returned. I called out to him with concern, and his voice replied in a wooden tone that he’d knocked the shelf onto his foot and needed snow, but he held his hand at an awkward angle. The answer wasn’t a surprise to me, so I smiled at him and told him to be more careful. “I will,” he said quietly. “Just rest.” He sat heavily in his chair, and I shut my eyes as if falling asleep. In truth, it took all my concentration to even my breathing and play the part of sleeping wife convincingly. My mind was racing. I needed answers, and I needed to plan.
The moon was high in the window when I chanced opening an eye again. John’s head was bent low over his chest, his shoulders rising and falling in even rhythm. I stayed still watching him in silence for a moment, observing his appearance for the slightest sign of what could possibly be wrong. Still, his skin was pallid gray, wrinkled and sagging in places. He seemed to have aged years in the past few weeks. The smell was growing, too. It was more than unwashed clothes and skin, though. It smelled fouler. I hadn’t mentioned the scent to John other than to offer a change of clothes, but he had kept his distance all the same since returning. And still he wore the clothes he’d worn on the hunt. Still he bundled himself up.
I took a deep breath, and still John didn’t move. I had never felt him climb into bed with me, but I had seen him dozing in his chair since his return. Convinced he was asleep, I carefully slid from under the quilts and stepped across the floorboards to the window. The snow had stopped, and the moon was bright, just as it had been the night of his return. I chanced a look back at John, but he was still and silent. His boots stood by the door, and I slipped my feet into them and tied them as tightly as I could. If he found the footprints in the snow, they would be the size of his feet, not mine. I wrinkled my nose in disgust at the sour smell, but some burning need was pulsing through me. I had to see with my own eyes what John was keeping from me.
I wrapped myself in a woolen shawl and stepped outside in naught but my nightgown, long underwear, and John’s boots. I took a deep breath as I stepped delicately across the new snow, trying hard to avoid making too much noise. The air was still, and I held my breath as I crossed the yard to the animal pen and barn. Carefully I pulled the door open, and a horrid stench rushed to greet me. I held a hand over my mouth as I peered inside. The livestock crowded the far corner of the barn as if terrified of me. The horse shrieked at the movement of the door, but quieted when I entered, almost as if with relief. I gagged at the scent of dung and urine and shut the door quietly to keep myself quiet. It hadn’t been mucked out, I realized. What was John doing out here? I saw hay haphazardly strewn inside, but the quivering animals looked thin. Stepping away from the barn, I checked the chicken coop. It was in an equal state of disarray. Bloody feathers were strewn about, and I saw a hole in the fence. A rotting egg lost somewhere made the air heavy with the scent of decay.
At the far end of the clearing that marked our homestead was the smokehouse sending wisps of smoke into the still night. The scent of burning wood lingered on the cold air, and I remembered how John had intercepted me before I’d reached him the night of his return. It had been the first time he’d tried to keep me from something. I moved as though in a daze, fearing each step I took yet resolutely walking further. As I did, the smell of meat mingled with the smoke, and I grit my teeth against the feeling of illness that rose in my chest.
As I opened the door carefully, my eyes did not register what I saw at first. The flickering embers that slowly burned the wood in the center of the small room, the hanging haunches of meat that smelled strongly of salt and smoke, and the soot stains along the wall were familiar and normal, as opposed to the disarray of the barn and coop. As my eyes scanned the corners of the smokehouse, I finally saw the fingernails. Torn and bloody, they lay on the ground forgotten as if dropped carelessly. Slowly I looked up, and suddenly the haunches of meat took form into recognizable shapes, and I held my hand over my mouth to stop myself from retching and screaming. Without skin, cleaned and prepared and salted, I saw the torso and arms and legs of what smelled like pork but could only be human.
Time seemed to stop as I stared, the muscles seeming so much more obvious than before. Thoughts whirled through my head in silent horror, questions that leaped to mind and imagined answers that only made me sicker with terror. Finally, I shut the door and leaned against it, breathing in the cold air as I struggled to make sense. I was right. Something was terribly wrong. My unborn child and I were not safe here. First, I had to know how bad it was. The fear that John had hunted human was too much to bear, and I slowly turned and opened the door again. I counted possible limbs and torsos, and to my great relief, I could only see two possible thighs, two arms, and one torso. The rest were sides of meat too large or easily recognizable.
The relief fled quickly as I suddenly realized the implications. His skin was gray and loose, I thought. His hands and feet were always covered, he never washed his clothes, and he stank more and more each day. It dawned on me that I was never reunited with John until this moment. The thing that wore his face never called me by name because it didn’t know my name.
|
I sent the text to my friend max, reading, “Dude, are you at school?” The bus was already a good 20 minutes late.
It was late November, and it was cold.
So damn cold.
My eyes burned against the outside air, and each intake of breath was like swallowing razor blades. Everything was dim, tinted a dull blue, and all was eerily still, seemingly frozen in time. Mercury in the thermometers had settled to the bottom, refusing to budge.
I could see my breath as it shimmered against the thin air, warping and climbing upwards in despair before vanishing. Even the trees, long dead, with crooked, empty limbs, appeared to be shaking against the cold. Frost and ice glinted sharply in the faded sunlight, clinging on and threatening to overtake the trees. The occasional glimmer of sunlight was nothing short of an ironic and cruel sight as its warmth could not be felt. It seemed so distant, its hazy blue glow so utterly small and insignificant against the frozen vastness. The crunch of snow could be heard as I walked – a crisp, sharp sound cutting through what was otherwise dead silence before disappearing into the oblivion with nothing to return an echo.
I stopped for a minute.
It seemed as if I was the only one in this world; a world of cold, of stillness, of nothingness. Neither the heat of a friend, nor the joy of their company existed here.
I was taking a note of all this with my eyes closed, so as the keep them from freezing, when I began to hear the crunching of snow. It was Sarah. I always met her at the bus stop, or had been anyway, for the past two weeks. I was glad of it too. I used to hang out with my good friend Jenna, but she hadn’t been showing up for the past week or so and now it was just Sarah to keep me company.
I opened my eyes slowly, wincing at the frosty wind. I could see Sarah walking towards me, pace slow and steady. Her balance wasn’t affected in the slightest by the now increasing gusts of frigid air whipping snowflakes around like small needles. She wore a fuzzy wool purple hat that sat lazily atop of her head. It didn’t obscure her face at all however, and I could still see her eyes of the purest blue you could imagine. They were only highlighted by her flushed red cheeks, no doubt due to the cold. She was absolutely beautiful . . . sweet and funny too, but for some reason, I never really saw her with any friends. I suppose this was because she had just moved in. That and because all the guys I knew were too afraid to even talk to her.
I guess that’s why she was stuck with me all the time. In fact, she actually seemed incredibly lonely when I wasn’t with her.
I suddenly snapped out of my thoughts to realize that I was staring at her. She saw me looking and gave a slight giggle with an exaggerated wave. I quickly blushed and only managed to choke out an awkward “hey” before turning away.
I quickly whirled back around however as I realized that something was wrong. She was wearing nothing but a t-shirt, a pair of short shorts and her backpack. I practically tripped over myself as I ran to her.
“Sarah, what are you doing?!” I cried. She stood in front of me, shivering and taking short staggered breaths. Her attire was certainly strange, but there was something else wrong too. Something was different about her.
“Did you walk all the way here like this?!” I asked, dumbfounded.
She had said earlier that her house was a good 20 minute walk from the bus stop.
“John is worrying about me!” She cried, her face lighting up as her eyes widened and stared straight into mine. She paused for a minute before sheepishly continuing, “I thought . . . maybe I could use your coat.” Her voice trailed off as she looked down at the ground.
I couldn’t believe it! I had on several layers of jackets and I was still freezing! I couldn’t even imagine how cold she must have been!
“Oh my God! Sarah! Of course!” I cried, taking off layer after layer and wrapping her in them. “Did you not have enough time to grab a jacket!?” I asked incredulously, now down to just a t-shirt myself. “You must be freezing, and the bus is already really late, you had plenty of time!”
She shook her head. “I wanted to use yours!” She giggled, wrapping her arms around herself and the jackets she was now wearing, smiling with eyes closed. I was taken completely aback. This wasn’t like her at all.
“You-” I stammered, “you did this on purpose?”
“I’ve never felt so close to you.” She smiled, leaning her head on her shoulder. My mind was racing. I had NO idea what to say to that.
“Sarah, why are you acting so strange all of a sudden?” I asked. She didn’t respond at first, and didn’t seem to have heard my question.
“Awww! Won’t you be cold now!?” She suddenly cried, forcefully grabbing my hands in hers. My mouth moved but words were nowhere to be found.
“It’s . . . It’s ok, haha, I’ll just freeze to death.” I finally joked as I often do when I’m uncomfortable. Her face erupted in horror, her eyes going wider than I’d ever seen.
“No!” She screamed in anguish, beginning to unzip my jackets, meaning to give them back.
“No! Haha, I was joking!” I cried, grabbing her arms to stop her. The instant my hands closed around her, her face flushed bright red and she stopped in her tracks.
“John.” She stammered.
“You need them more than I do.” I laughed awkwardly, sickening concern encroaching on my heart.
Her face changed then . . . Distorting . . . Twisting, and giving the widest smile I had ever seen. I found myself backing up and letting go of her arms. Her smile was misplaced somehow, erroneous and deranged. It crawled across her face like a disease and just kept spreading. Her eyes didn’t blink and stared straight towards me but weren’t really focused on anything.
The areas in which they normally seemed to sparkle now seemed dull and flat. It was incredibly disturbing, so much so that I began to sweat despite the cold.
“So, are you ready for school?” I asked nervously, trying desperately to change the subject or do anything to get rid of that smile.
“School?” She questioned, straight faced, her eyes slowly coming back to focus, “We don’t have school today, silly. It’s a snow day because of the storm that’s coming.” She giggled.
“What?!” I cried, “Gosh dangit! I didn’t get an email or anything!”
She said nothing, but looked at the ground guiltily. Then I saw it. A smile began to slowly carve out her cheeks.
I was dumbfounded.
“Did . . . Did you . . .” I started.
“I wouldn’t have been able to see you if you knew there was no school.” She said, matter-of-factly, as that twisted grin continued to stretch her face further and further, eating away at her pale skin. The wind howled and crystalline needles bit at my exposed skin.
Suddenly, she laughed, grabbing onto my waist.
“You better stay close,” she giggled, “otherwise you’ll catch a cold!” My mind was in full retreat mode now as I began backing up.
I tried to wiggle free of her grasp saying, “Haha, yeah, I guess. I think I’ll go home now and maybe get some more coats, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow then if the weather improves. Ok?”
Seemingly not hearing me, she snuggled in closer and closed her eyes. My hands were in the air, my body rigid and taut as my heart convulsed with unease. I drew several shaky breaths and looked down at her. Her smile now appeared . . . rather peaceful?
“Is this really all that bad?” I thought to myself. “A lot of guys I know would do anything to be in this position. She just wanted to see me was all . . . Yeah! It’s actually really sweet, albeit a little drastic.”
I relaxed a little, almost hugging her back, when I suddenly saw the dark crimson stains on her arms. My muscles tensed.
I choked, my voice faltering as I stammered, “Is that blood?”
Ignoring the question, she pressed herself even closer and looked up at me.
“Let’s go to your house!” She squealed, her face like a child’s on Christmas. “Don’t you need your coats? I’ll take them for you!” She grabbed my hand, looking at me to lead the way. Her big blue eyes glimmered with hope. I felt sick, torn between concern and fear.
But surely she was just having an off day, or messing with me in a cruel drawn out joke. It didn’t really matter though. We can’t stay out here forever, I thought to myself.
Taking a deep breath, I slowly nodded my head and began walking towards my house. She clung to me tightly as we walked and I tried desperately not to shiver and send her on another episode. We were nearly to my driveway when I got the text back from Max. I awkwardly wiggled my phone out of my pocket with my left hand as my right was still in Sarah’s vice grip.
I was still walking as I brought the phone up when I was suddenly jerked back, almost losing my balance on the slick ice.
I turned around to see that Sarah had stopped cold, her hands gripped so tight around my own that I could almost hear the bones breaking. I let out a gasp of pain and tried to pull my hand free, but she wouldn’t allow it. Her expression had gone dark, hair draping over her face.
“Who’s that?” She said, the usual cheer all but gone from her voice.
“It’s- . . . It’s Max! My friend?” I gasped still cringing in pain as I opened the message from him, “He was just telling me about-”
My blood froze. I stared at the screen as my chest tightened.
“Telling you what?” Her voice cut through the crisp air.
“Just about . . . How much he likes snow.” I lied.
Slowly, her cute face reappeared and her grip lightened as she smiled at me. We began walking again.
“You know, I like snow too.” She said coyly.
I didn’t even hear her; I was too busy staring at what was on the screen.
It read, “Yeah, of course I’m at school! Where the hell are you?”
I turned to look at Sarah, my hands beginning to shake, having nothing to do with the cold. I’m sure my face showed my horror and confusion but if she saw, she didn’t let on as she met my gaze with a cutesy smile. Her murky black hair was partially obscuring her left eye, making the right seem all the more piercing as its frozen blue hue searched my face. I could feel its chilling gaze stabbing at my numb skin.
“Who would you rather hang out with?” She said, still a hint of malice in her quiet voice.
“What? I stammered.
“Max. Is he a good friend of yours?” She said, looking away.
“Yeah, I guess?” I replied nervously, “I mean, I’ve known him for a while.”
Her hands slowly balled into tight fists, nearly crushing my own hand as she muttered something under her breath. Then she turned into my driveway and started walking down.
Leading ME.
How did she know when to turn? How did she know this was my driveway?!
I yanked my hand from hers with all of my might and took a few steps back.
“Sarah,” I said trying to keep my voice strong, “Where is the bus?”
She looked devastated, staring at her empty hand, not saying a word. Her irises shook slightly, her face becoming hollow, whatever color she had disintegrating into a grey slag.
“Where the hell is the bus Sarah!?” I yelled. “Why didn’t it ever come?!”
She looked up at me. “No . . . school . . . today.” She muttered to herself, eyes once again distant and dim as she fumbled around and tried to reach for my hands blindly.
“Yes we do Sarah! We do have school!” I cried, further backing up, “The bus should’ve been at the stop, but it never came!”
“It wanted . . . just the two of us.” She mumbled, face blank and emotionless.
“And why do you have your backpack if you weren’t planning on going to school? How do you know where I live?!” I was becoming hysterical now.
She chose to ignore all if this and instead found my hands again, gripping them tightly and smiling crookedly. In the most unnatural way, she didn’t seem to be feeling emotions, and yet carved them into her own face all the same. It was as if she was trying to imitate expressions she had seen others express.
“I’m cold,” She said, “we should go inside.”
I took a few long breaths and tried to calm myself down. It must have just been a misunderstanding. Max was probably just messing with me! It wouldn’t be unlike him to joke around like that and get me all worked up about missing a school day that didn’t exist. He was the one lying, and I had lashed out at Sarah who was just trying to be nice! Right? I’m not even sure if I believed it myself, but it was better than thinking of the alternatives.
“I’m sorry,” I sighed, then, fumbling for words to make her feel better, I choked out, “Thanks . . . Thanks for being with me.”
My heart warmed as I saw her face shift ever so slightly. As if waking from a dream, her eyes glanced around, taking in her surroundings for the first time. Her sunken lifeless features slowly ebbed away as, for the first time today, a believable smile flickered into view. One that didn’t appear forced or fueled by delusions.
When her eyes cleared, focused on me, and realized that I was smiling back, she blushed profusely and turned away. I laughed at that and she started to giggle too.
Her eyes suddenly flicked down to her hands which were still gripping mine. She let out a little squeal and dropped them, burying her face in her palms, apologizing over and over. Her black hair meandered around aimlessly in the wind, doing little to hide her embarrassed face.
This was the Sarah I knew: the girl who had trouble talking to other people, the girl who always had a bewildered look about her as if the world was shifting under her feet, the girl who hadn’t been able to look me in the eye for several days when we first met. She never talked about herself; she didn’t seem to want to. She would always listen though. And when she did, her eyes always seemed less piercing, less haunted, and I was certain that she could sit silently for hours while I spoke. Before the events of today, I had still known something was off about her, about the way she listened so devotedly. I could always see a faint emotion shift her features, but it was now finally clear what I had been looking at: relief. When she listened, she appeared relieved, so incredibly comforted to be free of her own thoughts. It was absolutely heart wrenching, but it also served to make her previous demeanor of a few minutes ago all the more out of place. She hadn’t listened at all; she appeared to be trapped in her own mind.
As we began walking down the driveway to my house, I looked at her and took a heavy breath, calming my nerves. I only hoped that her strange behavior had subsided for good. We trudged through the slowly accumulating snow. I had been too lazy to shovel it with my parents having left for Hawaii a week ago. Ironically, as much as it pissed me off to imagine them on a beach while I was stuck here, I was actually glad that neither of them would be home for a few days so I wouldn’t have to explain Sarah to them. I would just be all too like them to try and make things weird if I brought a girl over.
We reached the door and I fumbled for my key, eventually unlocking the door and jumping inside before too much warm air escaped into the bitter cold. I immediately started up a fire, not really realizing how cold I had been until that moment. I looked over at Sarah taking off the jackets and folding them neatly before placing them down gingerly by the entrance. Her movements were strained, her spindly limbs tired and weak. She appeared to have a normal mental state now, but as she finished up and her eyes glanced at me, I couldn’t help but tense a little.
“Hey . . . Sarah?” I asked slowly, my heart going dark and beginning to pound, distrust and fear suddenly reclaiming me. I had to know.
I nervously continued, “Could you maybe go to my room and get me a hoodie?” My pulse was racing and my breath quickened. If she could . . .
“Anything for John!” She cried with a big smile, turning to go. She took several steps further into the house. Her pale form walked deliberately at first, but her pace gradually devolved into a strained staggering motion before she eventually came to a complete halt. Still facing away from me, her icy voice quietly seeped out, “But, I don’t know where your room is.”
I felt a huge wave of relief. Thank God! I felt bad for ever doubting her, for giving her such a dumb test.
I laughed, “Haha, sorry, that’s right, it’s up the st-“. I suddenly stopped myself. “You know what?” I chuckled, “I’ll just go get it. I need to stop being so lazy anyway.”
What was wrong with me? I apparently still felt like I couldn’t trust her! Stupid. Stupid! But I just couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t believe her. I wanted to know if there was really no school, I wanted to know why she had been acting so strange. The only thing holding me back was the fear of such a question bringing back that other smile. That deranged face.
So I just kept quiet, instead asking if she wanted some hot chocolate.
Her eyes lit up, “is that even a question?” She laughed. Her ghoulish posture slackened slightly as she turned to face me.
I smiled and moved into the kitchen starting a pot of water to boil. “Would you mind watching this for a second?” I asked.
“Don’t you worry,” She joked, “no one watches water better than me!”
I laughed and ran up the stairs to my room. I grabbed my doorknob only to recoil in shock. It was freezing! I could feel a draft of frozen air seeping out from under my door. I gingerly grabbed the handle with my fingertips and slowly opened it, letting lose a blast of frigid air. It felt like a window had been left open, but as I checked, they were all closed. Now that I thought about it, I remembered my room being freezing that morning as well and really quite drafty for the past week or so. I was only really noticing it now that today was so particularly cold. I would probably have to sleep downstairs by the fire until I could figure out the problem. I quickly grabbed my hoodie and closed the door to my room so I wouldn’t let all of the heat out of the house. I walked back down the stairs and into the kitchen, but Sarah was gone. The pot was boiling over, spilling water onto the floor. I quickly ran and shut off the heat, cursing under my breath as some of the scalding liquid splashed onto me. I grabbed some towels and began soaking up the mess. I finally got it all cleaned up when I thought I could hear shuffling on the kitchen floor.
“Oh no! John!” Sarah suddenly cried from directly behind me, making me jump out of my skin. I whirled around to face her. She was holding her backpack, seemingly empty now as she slung it back over her shoulder.
“What were you doing?” I asked, my eyes narrowing.
As soon as I said it, I immediately regretted doing so. I began to see her eyes frost over as she searched for an answer; her face becoming sunken, lifeless, her personality flipping.
“No! It’s alright!” I cried desperately, handing a mug to her, “uh . . . do you want marshmallows? Look! I have cute little bunny shaped ones!”
This snapped her out of it, and she squealed in delight as I showed her the bag. “Look at the little sugary mammals!” She giggled.
I laughed as I started to make the hot chocolate. I was so torn and confused, I really liked her like this . . . but where had that other side of her come from? It scared the shit out of me. I had to watch everything I said and did to keep her as the Sarah I knew. Or, thought I knew anyway.
It was about 12:00 now.
“The school would’ve called by now to report me absent if there had been a school day.” I thought to myself. I let myself relax a little more, looking over at Sarah as she sipped delicately on her hot chocolate. Her hat was still goofily perched on her head. I smiled and reached over the table to her, adjusting it so that it was at least sitting straight.
“There,” I said, sitting back down and grinning, “That’s better.”
She stared wide eyed back at me, her cheeks going red, trying in vain to keep from smiling.
Suddenly, from within her backpack, her phone rang. I couldn’t help but face palm as I heard the ringtone.
“Bruno Mars?!” I laughed as her face broke out in horror. “You’re just as bad as my mom!” I continued, “I can’t believe you two have the same ringtone! Hahaha!” She practically squealed in embarrassment and fished around in her backpack, quickly tearing out the battery.
She sheepishly put the battery in her pocket and looked down at her feet. “Do you want to . . .” She asked nervously, “maybe walk to the bus stop with me tomorrow?”
“Trying to change the subject eh?” I playfully jeered. Her face just grew even redder as her hands fumbled hastily with her shirt. I couldn’t help myself, it was impossible to say no to her like this. Any fears from before were buried deep in the back of my mind.
My giggles slowly died out and I gave a slight nod, saying, “Yeah, sure.”
“Great!” She cried, suddenly bolting out of her chair and running to the door. “I’ve uh- got to do something now!”
“I’ll be here tomorrow at 6:00!” She called back as she disappeared into the frozen wasteland, shutting the door behind her. I sat stunned for a good minute. Where the hell did that come from? She hadn’t even taken a coat with her! Imagining her in just a t-shirt in that brutal cold made me want to run after her, but I knew she was long gone by that point.
I lazed around for a few hours, did some chemistry homework, and even shot Max another text saying, “I’m serious man, we didn’t have school today right?” But he never got back to me. He rarely checked his phone anyway though, so I brushed it off, opting to sit and watch TV rather than simply wait for his lazy ass to reply. I was absent mindedly watching some sort of documentary when my phone finally buzzed. Picking it up, I realized that it had just run out of batteries. Max still hadn’t responded. Groaning, I stood up and picked up my house phone. I would just have to call him at home. I punched in his number and brought the phone to my ear.
Dial tone.
I tried again.
Dial tone.
Frustrated, I looked at the monitor.
“No service.” It read.
What? It was a landline! “How is that even possible?” I grumbled to myself. “Must have something to do with the storm.”
I sighed and tossed the phone, plopping back down onto the couch. I realized that I should have been checking the news to see if they had any insight into the possibility of school tomorrow.
I flipped to the channel, and my heart practically stopped.
I only heard the tail end,
“. . . Not releasing images or further details on the bus incident.”
Then the camera switched and they began talking about the highway conditions. I felt an absolutely horrible sickness gripping me. “It couldn’t be. Could it? Surely that little dialog I heard couldn’t have been talking about that. Not about the bus on my route.”
“That would be ridiculous! I’m not even sure what I heard!” I tried in vain to calm myself down, but I quickly realized that I HAD to know for sure. A strong wind suddenly gusted outside and the house shook, tremors being sent down every dark hallway. I stood up from my couch slowly, glancing at the snow beginning to plaster against the windows. Although grey and dull, the flakes seemed to glow against the oppressive darkness as nighttime fell. The frozen slag piled up as distortive structures slowly spread across the once perfectly clear glass.
I secured every layer I could find and suited up, grabbing my flashlight and taking several deep breaths. The frigid night air seemed to ripple with heat distortion as the door swung open, falling stagnant again as I stepped outside. I locked the door behind me and fumbled the keys into my pocket with shaking hands. I began walking the route the bus would’ve taken, my pace slow, the sickness growing worse with every crunch of snow under my feet.
“The school didn’t report you absent.” That’s because the phone is dead! “Max was just playing a joke.” Then why didn’t he ever text back?! Nothing I said to myself made me feel any better.
The dim light from my house was becoming more and more distant now, disappearing altogether as I turned a corner, now just me and the flurry of snow. The skeletal trees surrounding me groaned against the wind, their twisted black shapes silhouetted against the deep blue hue of the night. I hadn’t seen another house for some time now. The families in my neighborhood were exceedingly spread apart and the empty stretches of road seemed to snake on forever at points. More often than not, the snowplows didn’t even find the time to drive as deep into the community as I was going.
It was snowing quite heavily, but I was still certain I would be able to faintly see the tracks of the bus if it had driven anywhere. Despite this, I hadn’t seen its tracks for over a mile. Ordinary cars never usually drove up the way I was walking, and yet I noticed that the roadway was layered with the tracks of smaller vehicles. They looked fresh. That’s when I saw something up ahead, barely visible in the haze.
Lights. Flashing red and blue just ahead around the next bend. Whatever sanity I had left was quickly draining. I approached the lights and peaked around the corner. I didn’t want to believe it, but the sight that greeted me was something I had known I would find all along.
There, surrounded by ambulances and police cars, a mangled mess of metal and shattered glass, sat the bus I had been taking for nearly four years, jutting sideways out of a ditch. The windows were caked with blood which was still a dark crimson red, preserved perfectly in the cold. The once hot, steaming liquid had frozen solid to the splintered glass, encircling small bullet sized holes. The ambulances were stuffed with body bags as the surrounding street was scattered with a few severed limbs. I swore I could see steam softly rising from the dead white appendages as they were ever so slowly covered in drifting snow. I tried to listen to what the officers were saying, but, not daring to get to close, I could only make out a few words and jumbled phrases:
“Hacksaw.”
“Removed post-mortem.”
And one that made my stomach churn, “A few pieces missing.”
Realizing how downright suspicious I looked, I began sprinting back to my house, trying to keep my stomach down as my heart lurched rapidly. I reached my front door and frantically fumbled for the key with my numb fingers, looking behind me into the inky darkness. I finally got the key in the lock and turned it, but then I heard a sound, a knock on glass. It was coming from above me.
I looked up slowly, heart pounding. There, in the window above me, the window to my room, I couldn’t see much of anything. The light was off.
Which was a problem because I knew I had left it on.
But then I could make out some sort of shadowy smudge on the window. I was straining to see what it was when it suddenly moved, backing away into the darkness and it was only when this happened that I knew what I had been looking at.
Sarah’s pale, ghastly form had been pressed up against the glass, smiling down at me with a grin that splintered her face in half.
The realization made me stumble back, fear negating my ability to breathe for a second. How the hell did she get in?! I creaked the door open slowly, ready to run back to the police at any moment.
“S . . . S-Sarah?” I called into the house, hearing it echo down the dark empty hallways, “What . . . what are you doing in here?” My voice trailed off. What the hell was I doing?! I needed to run! Run now! My mind screamed at me. As a wind gust shrieked outside and blasted me with cold air, I watched the dim moonlight dance through the empty rooms of the house. If Sarah was still inside, she didn’t say anything and her silence continued as the wind howled and the house groaned.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Something was beginning to roll down the stairs from the top. Something heavy. From my position, I could only see the base of the stairs, so I could only listen as the sound grew closer and louder.
Then it happened. A pale, mangled form came tumbling down the last few steps and smashed onto the ground, its limbs horribly twisted and broken. Crimson globs speckled the soiled ground where it now lay. Its arms and legs seemed to radiate a ghastly white, splayed out like a spider on the shadowy ground. Heavy blood oozed from it silently in the darkness. It had no head.
Then I could make out footsteps. My body was frozen, my heart spasming erratically. I couldn’t take my eyes off the corpse.
I eventually heard Sarah’s voice quietly echoing down the staircase, “You didn’t give me time to prepare this one like the others.”
I tried to say something but nothing came out. Not even a squeak.
“After all, you said he was special to you.” She continued, coming into view; hacksaw in one hand, a ghoulish head in the other. Its expression was so distorted in terror that I didn’t immediately recognize it as Max’s. His mouth was stretched horribly agape, almost as if unhinged, a horrific scream forever imprinted on his face as his eyes stared straight ahead, wide and unblinking.
I couldn’t take the sight of it. I fell to the ground in utter shock. I tried to scream in anguish, but as before, I couldn’t make a sound and simply dry heaved into my hands.
Then I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“There there,” Sarah cooed, “Are you feeling sick? Catch a cold? Sarah will make John all better! And John will love Sarah for it.”
She gently lifted me to my feet, dropping Max’s head and the hacksaw and in turn grabbing my hands. I was in shock no doubt. My limbs felt numb and distant; I couldn’t think or move. I was just standing there, shaking violently. She gave me a big hug, wrapping herself around me and smiling crookedly. Her movements were all wrong, disturbingly inhuman, as if she was a puppet controlling her own strings. Her blue eyes should have been highlighted by the dark crimson blood splattered on her, and yet they appeared just as grey as her skin, sinking into her face, enclosed by darkness.
Her frigid hands slowly grabbed mine again, and she began leading me up the stairs, making sweet noises and whispering, “Sssshhh it’s ok. All you need is me.” I followed in a trance-like state, not really processing anything, stuck on the horrors I had just seen. Max’s disfigured head, his broken body, tumbling down the stairs like a rag doll. The bus, the bodies everywhere.
Next thing I knew, I was on my bed with Sarah sitting close next to me, holding my hands in her lap, her face a contorted grinning mess. “It’s cold in here you know.” She said, blushing as her eyes remained dull and lifeless. “Maybe if you just held me.”
I managed to choke out two words, “My . . . Friends.” My eyes began watering.
“Sshhhh,” She swooned, maneuvering to sit on top of me, “John’s friends are all here.”
I shook my head.
“Mrs. Bus driver lady is over there!” She assured me, pointing to a mangled bloody mess in the dark corner of my room. Through my bleary vision, I could make out a ghastly set of eyes staring lifelessly ahead from within the mound of flesh. The sight was horrendous and I turned my head away, gagging some more.
“You don’t need anyone but me,” she continued, “but I didn’t want John getting lonely either. So I kept your friends here.” She began stroking my hair. “Most of Jenna is in your closet.”
“I cut a hole in your roof so she could stay there for longer.” Sarah giggled, “Room temperature is no good for friends; it must be cold like outside. I’ve let her be with you all week, it’s my turn now.”
I began thrashing around, trying to scream but only letting out strangled squeaks. I couldn’t take any more of this! She giggled and interlaced her fingers with mine, pinning my arms down and bringing her face inches away, grinning from ear to ear. Her head was tilted to one side, her dull grey eyes swirling with darkness.
“Only me to love now.” She whispered, “John loves me now.”
I shook my head violently.
“No.” I croaked out.
“You’re so funny!” She laughed, “John loves me, and I love John! So much!” She leaned her forehead against mine. “Much more than his parents. His parents wanted to leave him, but I made them stay with John. Made them stay . . .”
Her hand moved and gestured to under my bed.
Then she kissed me.
|
SUPPORT DESK TRANSCRIPT
ID: 100156-03 Supp User: Jim_D
Call Date/Time: 08-16-201X Cust Acc: 212254674
Supervisor Notes: Customer account identified at intro – passed thru to support. FLSH case No. 83447
======================================
JIM: Hi. I’m Jim, your mobile phone support contact. This conversation may be recorded for training purposes. How can I help you today?
CUSTOMER: Hiya. Having some trouble with the speech recognition. It doesn’t seem to understand what I’m asking.
JIM: Okay. I just need to get a few additional details first before we go any further. Are the contact and billing details on your account up to date?
CUSTOMER: Yes.
JIM: And I see here your contract began a month ago.
CUSTOMER: Yes. I connected to the 3G network last week and it flashed up something about a software upgrade and that’s when the problems started.
JIM: Thanks, but I just need to confirm a few more things before we can start trying to identify the issue and resolve it for you. Your mobile is a Samsung Galaxy S2 and you have 3G internet access, is that correct?
CUSTOMER: Yes. I mentioned the 3G already…
JIM: I just needed to confirm the facts before going any further. So, what appears to be the problem.
CUSTOMER: As I mentioned BEFORE, the speech recognition is playing up.
JIM: In what way, and with as much detail as possible please.
CUSTOMER: When I try to search using Google, it keeps mishearing what I’m saying and brings back what I don’t want.
JIM: Well Sir, no voice recognition software is 100% accurate. Have you tried speaking slower and/or louder, preferably somewhere with little or no background noise?
CUSTOMER: Why didn’t I think of that! I’m being sarcastic by the way.
JIM: I have to cover all the suggested options, even the obvious ones Sir. Could you give me an example?
CUSTOMER: Yeah, sorry. Yesterday I tried a search for ‘Restaurants near where I live’, and the results were local graveyards and mortuaries! I’m not planning on booking a table for one at a location like that for another 50 years or so.
JIM: Understandable. Anything else?
CUSTOMER: A couple of days before that I tried a search for some family pictures so I could change my background, and it returned, well, a whole lot of sick images I can tell you!
JIM: What do you mean by ‘sick’?
CUSTOMER: Dead bodies. Some mutilated. Lots of blood and gore. What looked like cannibalistic rituals or something. Really sick shit. What if my kids had been using the phone!?
JIM: Could you refrain from swearing please Sir.
CUSTOMER: Sorry. What about the pictures though?
JIM: You can put parental controls on what your phone can access on the internet, which I can take you through next if you have the time, but this sounds like something we may have to escalate if these pictures break certain decency criteria.
CUSTOMER: Okay.
JIM: I believe you mentioned these problems only started occurring following a recent update to your phone?
CUSTOMER: Yeah. No idea what it was. The window just popped up and I clicked ‘Install Now’. Took about 5 minutes including the reboot.
JIM: Do you know what version of Android your phone is running?
CUSTOMER: What, you mean one of those funny food related names? Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich. That kind of thing?
JIM: There are specific numeric versions, but the codename should do as a starting point.
CUSTOMER: OK. I wrote it down somewhere, hold on.
CUSTOMER: …
CUSTOMER: …
CUSTOMER: Back. It says ‘Android 2.2.3 Flesh’
JIM: So that’s version 2.2.3 Froyo, short for Frozen Yogurt by the way.
CUSTOMER: No, no…it definitely says ‘Flesh’ here.
JIM: …
JIM: Could you hold on whilst I speak to my supervisor please.
JIM: …
JIM: …
JIM: Sorry for the wait Sir. Having spoken to my supervisor and reviewed your firmware download history, there does appear to be a problem with your recent installation. Please open the Settings on your phone and select Software Update to download the most recent version. That should resolve all your problems.
CUSTOMER: OK. Thanks for that. I’ll give it a go.
JIM: Could you try it now Sir and let me know when it’s done.
CUSTOMER: I can’t right now but I’ll contact the support desk again if it doesn’t work. Thanks for the help.
JIM: Please try it now whilst you’re on the line Sir.
CUSTOMER: As I said, I can’t. I’m calling on the land line. My daughter’s using the mobile right now, talking to her sister. The credit ran out on hers. She might be a while – you know how these teenagers are…
JIM: Please ask your daughter to end the call NOW Sir. With your recent update there is a known issue in the firmware that can also affect both incoming and outgoing calls. Some users have complained of headaches, nausea, and other unexplained side effects.
CUSTOMER: What? I thought that scare about mobiles giving you brain tumours or whatever was just that…a scare?
JIM: I am neither confirming nor denying anything Sir, and our Terms and Conditions plus liabilities are available on our web site. However, due to a recent bypass of our firewalls, an unknown update to the Android operating system was released without our knowledge over our network. We claim no liability for this software upgrade and are investigating the breach in our security. In line with the requirements of your contract and for your own safety and that of your family, please upgrade your software NOW and refrain from using your mobile for any and all calls.
CUSTOMER: Is this a joke?
JIM: Sir, please take the mobile off your daughter and end any current calls. Our company will not accept responsibility for any harm that may come to your family following this warning.
CUSTOMER: You’ve got to be kidding me! Damn small-print assholes. Hold on….Lauren….finish talking to your sister Hannah and give me the phone. I said, give me the goddamn phone! What the…….shit, are your eyes bleeding honey!?
JIM: Exit the house now please Sir.
CUSTOMER: Lauren….wha…speak to me. Put the phone down and speak to me.
JIM: Lock all doors behind you and vacate the premises.
CUSTOMER: Just…just come over here and let me take a look at…at your eyes… There’s….there’s blood coming from your ear as well. Here, let me take the phone off you….
JIM: Please refrain from interacting with your daughter and exit the building now Sir.
CUSTOMER: [yelling]….Goddamn it Lauren, you bit me! What the hell is wrong with you! Back off now! I mean it. [screaming] Jesus! My fingers….my fucking fingers! No, no, no, no……stay….stay back. [sobbing] Lauren please…..
[sounds of physical struggle and furniture damage]
JIM: Sir? Sir?
[sounds of wet coughing and of a pet, possibly a large dog, feeding]
JIM: ……..If you can still hear me Sir, thank you for calling your mobile phone help support. A specialist contractor and clean up crew has been dispatched to your address to deal with your ongoing issue. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused.
[call terminated]
Credit To – Charmingly Shallow
|
Part I
Dear Emma,
It is five thirteen in the morning and this is all your fault. I’m at the top of Orpheus Street right now, waiting for a bus in the freezing cold. All the stars look bleached out in the dead black sky. This is the worst idea I’ve ever had.
I did see an opossum this morning, though. That was awesome. And mildly terrifying. Have you ever seen one of those? Be thankful if you haven’t. They have these tails. These long, weird tales. Not enough attention has been focused on opossums as nightmare fuel potential. Believe me, that potential exists.
Sorry. I have a tangent problem. You know that.
So, anyway, this is your fault. You’re the one who you kept telling me to read more creepypasta. Grow a pair, Stuart, you’d say. It’s just a scary story on the internet. That’s all. Read it. It’s not going to kill you.
Well, today is the day I find out.
Last night, I was alone and bored and trying to scare myself. My dad’s out of town at some convention in Las Vegas. I know I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry. I couldn’t. I know you, Em. I know you’d try to make me have a party and that’s the last thing I wanted. You know me. I hate everybody.
I keep having horrible thoughts of my father engaging in embarrassingly sordid and pedestrian Las Vegas behavior with all those other middle aged conventioneers. I see them as a drunk, bald, self-perpetuating conga line. Feral disasters away from their homes and flailing at girls half their age.
I thought after my mom died, I would have a better relationship with my dad. But all he does now is work. It’s like he’s terrified to have a conversation with me. I understand: I’m his devastatingly witty, charming, and well dressed son. I’d be intimated of me too.
But how charming can I be, you ask, if I stay in on Friday nights reading creepypasta alone? Still charming, girl. Still quite appealing.
These infuriating tangents will be the death of me.
Anyway, I read a ritual pasta last night called “Café des Poètes.” Have you read it? It takes forever to get creepy and winds up being more sad than anything else, but I liked it anyway. After I finished reading it, alone in my bed, my room lit up by my laptop, I thought, well, why not? What would happen if I followed the pasta directions? Has anybody ever done that? What do I have to lose, Em?
So that’s why I’m here, waiting for a bus. The pasta said it will appear after I wait for twenty minutes. It’s been fifteen. I haven’t seen a thing.
This letter I’m writing you, by the way, is part of the pasta. I’m supposed to stop and write a letter four times during this to my one true love. Hope you’re ok with being my true love. I don’t think Tad Zio is even aware of me. Also: he’s very straight. So tragically pretty and so mundanely straight. Slings and arrows we live through in this life, girl.
I don’t see a bus anywhere. This isn’t even a bus line. I’m beginning to think this pasta — spoiler — might not be true. There’s supposed to be a dude waiting with me on the corner, too. I’m not supposed to talk to him or look at him. Since he’s not here, that currently isn’t an issue. Which is good; this corner is actually pretty creepy. The streetlights are broken, kind of flickering, there’s this fog everywhere and it is frigid. Much colder than I thought it would be. I’m not wearing the right kind of clothes for this —
Oh. Oh, fuck. Oh, holy fuck. Someone is walking up to the corner. Holy fuck. They’re standing right next to me. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Oh, I wasn’t prepared for this. Not at all.
They aren’t saying anything. My hands are shaking. It’s hard to write. I can see my breath but I can’t see theirs, Em. I can’t see any breath.
There are lights. Coming from up the dead end street. It’s a bus. Jfc it’s a bus. It’s got black windows. The door just opened. I’m going in. Jfc.
Part II.
I’m still alive. I’m a diner, I guess. It’s a weird diner. Like, really weird.
I’m losing it, Em.
This place — let me describe the bus first. The bus: Jesus. The bus. The pasta said I wasn’t supposed to talk to anybody on the bus. Not hard. The bus was a horror movie.
The lights would go on and off in the aisle. When the lights were on, you could see the other passengers. I liked it better when you couldn’t.
There were probably fifteen other people on the bus. That *shudder* thing waiting with me at the bus stop didn’t get on. I had to walk past it to get to the bus door. It didn’t move. After I sat down in the bus (I gave the driver a dollar, I went to the thirteenth row, I followed the directions), I looked out the window. Even in the dim not-quite morning light I could see it. It was tall and black and moved in a weird way. Like all of its bones had been broken and put back together. Or maybe like it had stolen other bones and put them inside of it.
I saw it crawl into the sewer entrance. I don’t know how it fit. It bent, I think. And then the bus was gone, driving through what should have been recognizable streets. But they weren’t. They weren’t at all.
The pasta said my phone wouldn’t work. And it doesn’t. It just keeps telling me it’s searching for a network. So I have to try and remember these bullshit instructions perfectly. And it sucks. All the ritual pastas I’ve ever read are blending together. I can’t remember what I’m even supposed to say at this diner when they ask me for coffee.
But oh god: the bus.
These things in the seats. They had hoods up. Black clothes. But I saw things. Tentacles. I think I saw tentacles. I heard gurgling. One was dripping, for god’s sake. And the smell. The smell. The smell.
The bus driver stopped twice. At the third stop, I remembered I had to get off. I didn’t want to get off. I didn’t want to walk by those things. I finally stood up. They all looked. I didn’t. That was in the instructions: don’t look the passengers in the face. I tried to forget the instructions added, “if they have one.”
The aisle to the front of the bus felt like miles. Maybe longer? What’s a league? Is that strictly an underwater measurement? Whatever. It took longer than forever.
And then one of them said my name. Quietly. Very quietly. It said my name and my birthday. It said the name of my old dog. Its voice sounded like a toy someone had left out in the rain. They all began to repeat a litany of me, all my secrets, all my stories, all my life’s moments in a horrendously low clatter, and I just kept going until I got to the door.
I jumped out and the bus creaked away. The sky had gotten darker instead of lighter. I was on a street corner, surrounded by office buildings and closed storefronts. The diner I was looking for was across the street. I could hear traffic but I couldn’t see any. The diner sign buzzed a dizzy neon. I crossed the street and went in.
Now I’m here, waiting for a waitress. That’s the next part. There’s a couple of other people in here. They’re just staring at their cups of coffee. I’m not looking at anyone. The air is blue from cigarettes but nobody in here is smoking. Explain that, please. Explain anything.
I don’t know what’s going on. The waitress is coming. That’s what she said. Ha! That’s for you, girl. I’m trying to keep it together.
Part III
The waitress asked me what I would be drinking. Her eyes were sown shut. Thick black strings were sewn in and out of the lids. They blended in with her eyelashes. She sounded like she was she was on a three second delay. I could see her teeth when she talked. I could see all the stitches in her mouth too.
I told her I wanted my coffee black. Just black. She asked me if I was sure. I saw her pupils flitter back and forth. I repeated that I wanted it just black. She walked away. Her legs had awful scars up and down them, the way people used to draw on nylon lines.
The coffee came. I didn’t drink it. I’m pretty sure that’s what I was supposed to do. It’s hard to remember. An old man was sitting at the counter. I could tell he was watching me. I was remembering what you told me your therapist said, about how if you control your breathing, you can control your anxiety. Your therapist seems cool, Em. If I live through this, Ima need his number.
The old man stood up and walked over to me. His beard was yellow from nicotine. He put his hands on the table and his thick discolored nails tapped against the surface. He asked me what I wanted. I told him I what I was supposed to say: I wanted to know the words that would wake the dead.
He told me the address of a mailbox. I was to drop this letter in the mailbox. If I had followed the directions, I would then wake up in my bed. This whole thing would feel like a dream. But a week later, a letter would arrive in the mail. I would open the letter and read it in front of a picture of the one I wanted to return from the dead. And then they would.
But if I hadn’t followed the instructions correctly, my one true love would get this letter I’m writing in the mail the next day. And as for what would happen to me?
The old man smiled. His teeth fell out of his mouth, yellow and brown stained, clattering against the battered black and white tile floor.
You’ll find out, Stuart. You’ll find out.
I’m writing this in the back of a cab. There’s no meter. I gave the address of the mailbox. The city lights are bouncing against the windows. I’m I’m trying not to look at the driver’s eyes in the mirror. I’m getting ready for the end.
Part IV
This is the last part.
I’m at the mailbox. It’s in the middle of an empty lot. The taxi dropped me off here and idled for a moment; its hazards blinked and flashed. Tall weeds burst out of the pavement here. I see things that look like rats scurrying about. I hear the clicks of their nails on cement. The lot is in the middle of a series of abandoned buildings. There are things moving around behind the broken windows.
Dogs are barking somewhere. I can’t see them, but I think they’re getting closer. I circle around the mailbox three times. I repeat the words the pasta said three times: “See, the cruel Fates recall me, and sleep hides my swimming eyes.”
I think it’s from a poem, but when I googled it last night I couldn’t find a thing.
The echoing barking from the dogs is getting closer. I’m almost done with this letter.
I don’t want to finish. I don’t want to put this in the mailbox. I don’t want to find out if I was right or wrong, if I remembered all the things I was supposed to do, if I said all the right things at the right time. Because I can’t imagine I did. I think I was supposed to say something to the cab driver. I’m worried I was supposed to do something else in the diner. Should I have sat in the fourteenth row on the bus as opposed to the thirteenth? All these parts could have gone wrong.
I can see the dogs now. And I was wrong: it’s just one dog. I mean, it’s not a dog, not exactly. It has too many heads for a dog. It’s snarling and I can see its teeth. They’re bright white, like bleached out stars in a dead black sky. I feel the heat coming in waves from under its spiky fur. It paces the perimeter, staring at me with all those dead computer screen colored eyes. I know have to stop writing. I know. This is the last part.
If you’re reading this, you know what happened. I’m pretty sure you’re going to be reading this. I was supposed to tell the cab driver thank you. I didn’t say anything to the cab driver. I just remembered.
I shouldn’t have done this. I just wanted to bring my mom back. That’s all. I shouldn’t have tried. We’re alive and then we’re dead and we shouldn’t pretend we can change a single fucking thing ever.
I’ll miss you, girl. Aways remember to look good. Fuck those wannabe normcore bitches. Look fantastic. And don’t read scary stories on the internet.
And this wasn’t your fault, Emma. I think I wrote that it was. It wasn’t. Don’t feel bad, Em. I’m going to mail the letter now. Don’t feel bad.
Credit To – Kevin Sharp
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Then
Dark thunderheads blanketed the Suffolk sky, and fat droplets of rain began to spatter the golden leaves scattered across the ground. In the distance, silver lightning streaked between the clouds above, illuminating rolling hills and terrified sheep scampering for shelter.
Jack began to count the seconds as his father had taught him, barely reaching eight before an enormous crack of thunder boomed across the sky. One of the cabinets in the study contained four or five model cannons, and he imagined this was how their functioning counterparts must have once sounded.
He looked over his shoulder towards Nighthill Manor, his home, distant and aloof on the cusp of the valley, unsure if he was expected to go inside now that the weather had turned foul. Although, in truth, Jack didn’t consider it foul at all; a storm like this would be perfect for playing soldiers. Anyway, his father would come and collect him in the jeep if he wanted Jack home early.
He’d been shooting Nazis for about ten minutes when he heard the bleating. It was almost inaudible over the now considerable rumbling overhead, and it took Jack a few seconds to locate the source.
There, just beyond the fence marking the border of King’s Forest, in a dense patch of withered brown bracken. He squinted against the rain, and a pair of twisted horns resolved themselves, curving down around a head covered in shaggy black fur. He didn’t need to see the snapped tip of one of the horns to recognise the visitor.
‘’Sebastian!’’ Jack shouted, dropping his plastic Luger in the grass and hurrying over to the fence, all thoughts of war and soldiers pushed aside by the delight of the sudden reappearance of his friend.
It had been over three weeks since he’d woken up to find the goat absent from its pen. His father had merely grumbled about loose latches and set Maxwell to fitting a new gate, convinced the marauding animal would make its way home in due course. But to Jack, after Jiminy Cricket and Pinocchio’s escape the week before, Sebastian’s disappearance had upset him quite considerably.
So it was with no hesitation that he scrambled over the wire fence and followed the retreating goat into the forest.
He’d been walking for quite a while, picking his way through autumnal foliage and around withered trees with only fleeting glimpses of Sebastian’s shaggy head to guide him, when he stepped into the clearing. As he did so, a deafening peal of thunder sounded above, and he flinched despite himself.
Then he noticed the long, low table standing in the middle of the clearing, and when he saw the pair seated at it side by side, he began to smile.
Jiminy Cricket, holding a pink floral teacup in one furry paw, a dark green flat cap cocked back on his head and a yellow scarf fluttering gently in the breeze, and Pinocchio, who looked simply marvellous in a deep burgundy waistcoat, top hat and matching cravat. The hares twitched their heads to regard Jack as he took a few tentative steps across the clearing, and Pinocchio motioned stiffly with a thin foreleg for him to join them at the table.
There were others there who Jack didn’t recognise; a grinning fox whose tooth-filled snout poked out from beneath a black trimmed fedora; a slim white ferret, similar to those that Maxwell kept behind the stables, stared at him with glazed yellow eyes as it sipped from a teacup; something that looked like a small monkey crouched at the opposite end of the table, its humanlike features obscured beneath falls of lace and a frilled pink bonnet.
Jack sat down in the only empty seat, opposite Jiminy Cricket and Pinocchio, beside a large badger, its snouted face dominated by pale white eyes, and a tabby-and-white cat with long drooping whiskers. Behind Cricket and Pinocchio stood a huge tree with withered, drooping branches and a hollow trunk. Sebastian’s face was barely visible in the darkened hollow, but his dull red eyes winked in the gloom and Jack waved for him to come out. The goat seemed reluctant to leave, however, and shook its head in response, retreating further into the murk.
Something cold and filthy with bristles touched Jack’s hand, and he instantly recoiled before realising that it was only Jiminy Cricket, reaching across the table to place his diminutive paw on top of Jack’s equally tiny hand. The hare’s mouth pulled back in a lopsided grin, and the boy smiled back.
So engrossed was he as the hare showed him the plates and cups and teapots and cutlery lining the table, that he didn’t hear the dried out leaves crunching behind him.
A gloved hand clamped over his mouth and a strong arm wrapped itself around him, yanking his hand away from Jiminy Cricket’s and pulling him down, down, down into the darkness.
Now
Martin dreamt of music, soft and distant, but beautiful nonetheless.
Faint noises in the corridor roused him from his fitful slumber. Was that a pair of tiny feet slapping against the plush maroon carpet, a slight form running past the slightly ajar bedroom door?
No, of course it wasn’t. Maxwell would have retired to bed by now, and even if he hadn’t the boxer-turned-groundskeeper’s days of running anywhere were long since passed.
Nobody ran in Nighthill Manor’s panelled corridors now. Not for almost a year. Not since Jack. Oh God.
Martin swung his legs out of bed, elbows resting on his thighs, put his head in his hands and began to cry.
He should have sent Maxwell to fetch Jack that day. He should never have let him play so far from the manor in the first place. Without Maria, he hadn’t had a clue how to care for their son. When he was young, his parents had let him roam far and wide, so it was his natural assumption that Jack should be allowed to do the same.
Of course, back then paedophiles and child murderers had been relatively unheard of. The world had changed, but Martin hadn’t changed with it. Raising his head he looked around the room – the Napoleonic oil paintings; the gilded furniture; the gold-trimmed oak panelling. Even this God-forsaken manor house. He’d tear it all down with his bare hands if it would bring Jack back.
Standing, he crossed to the window, which opened onto Nighthill Manor’s rear garden and the valley beyond.
And the woods. The woods where, detectives reasoned, his only son had been stolen from him forever.
Martin’s breath caught in his throat, and he felt as though an ethereal hand had reached into his chest and taken hold of his heart.
About halfway down the valley, moving away from the house towards the woods was a bobbing orange light: A lantern. Martin narrowed his eyes, but was unable to discern the shape or size of whoever was carrying it.
Maxwell? No. The elderly man wouldn’t risk the valley with its holes and pitfalls at this hour; he would know better. There was no need for either of them to go into the woods at all, let alone this late at night.
Martin wasted no time at all in scrambling into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, pulling on his jacket as he hurtled down the sweeping spiral staircase to the entrance hall. On his way to the front doors, he passed a dark shape against the far wall, frozen in a stream of moonlight. The piano. His son’s piano.
Oh Jack, he thought as he pulled on his walking boots. Oh Jack, I’m so, so sorry.
He had his hand on the antique silver door handle when his mind fully registered what he’d just seen. The piano, yes. But he’d actually seen the piano, seen its polished teak surface and ivory keys, bright white like rows of teeth.
Nobody had touched the piano since…since Jack. Maxwell had thoughtfully covered the beautiful instrument with a thick velvet sheet, and that was how it had stayed. Now, the sheet was pooled on the floor to the right of the piano, yanked aside and left where it had fallen.
Rage welled up inside Martin like a ferocious storm. Somebody had been here, in his house. But that intrusion paled in comparison to the fact that the intruder had touched his son’s piano.
He snatched the door open and dashed out into the night.
From the shadowed doorway to the dining room, a pair of burnished yellow eyes watched the man leave. Satisfied, the stoat slipped out the same way it had entered, through the kitchen. Its breathing was torn and ragged, its blackened tongue lolling from a mouth bursting with needle-sharp teeth. The faint groan of shifting wood and the near-inaudible hum of whirring gears followed it through the darkness.
The woods were black as pitch, and Martin cursed himself a fool for not bringing a torch. He’d lost sight of the orange light when it disappeared into the clusters of spindly trees, and now he caught only the merest snatches of its flickering glow in the distance.
His shins were bleeding and he’d cut his face the first time he’d fallen, but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Nothing except catching whoever it was that had defiled his precious memories of Jack. The only things he had left.
There was a definite awareness of perception here. He cautiously scanned his surroundings for inquisitive eyes.
Something moved in the bracken off to the left, but by the time he’d snapped his head in that direction the motion had ceased. The light reappeared, directly ahead of him, and he hurried towards it. He kept low to the ground, moving as silently as possible, but was almost shocked into screaming when something sleek and furry brushed past his legs before vanishing into the undergrowth.
Composing himself and breathing deeply, he stepped into a clearing that had once been flooded with yellow tape and ultraviolet light.
There, beneath the eaves of a drooping willow where he’d held a distraught Maria as forensic teams combed the area, was a table. Pink plastic with garish chairs to match, it was the sort one would expect to see at a little girl’s tea party, were it not so stained and filthy.
It wasn’t the table that snatched the breath from Martin’s lungs. Nor was it the chairs. It was the slumped forms seated upon them.
The lantern he’d seen the figure carrying had been placed on the table and its flickering light illuminated his surroundings with sickening clarity. As he stepped closer, Martin raised a hand to cover his mouth. Dear God, the stench was enough to make him vomit.
The warm, welcoming glow of the lantern belied its surroundings. The things at the table were monstrosities. The closest of them was an egregious fox; a fedora perched almost comically atop its head and a grimy plastic fork in its hand. What the devil was going on here? There was a bloody fox in –
About to turn away, Martin froze. Its hand. Since when did foxes have hands?
Against his better judgement, he looked back down. A swollen fly crawled across the small pale hand protruding from the sleeve of the fox’s tweed jacket. The flesh had blackened in places, sloughing away to reveal glimpses of yellowing bone. It had a strange, burnished finish to it.
Steeling himself, he reached forward and tugged the fox’s sleeve back. The wrist – so tiny he could have encircled it with thumb and forefinger – ended in jagged stitches an inch or so from the hand. The remainder of the arm to be seen was thin and covered in glossy red fur. He stumbled away in horror, screaming aloud as he backed straight into the fox’s neighbour, an abominable hare with a jaundiced yellow scarf wrapped tightly around its neck.
It tumbled out of its seat and…hung in the air.
The air itself seemed to pull taut. Wires, so fine as to be almost imperceptible, ran from every major joint of the hare’s body, up into the branches of the willow, suspending it in mid-air like some deplorable puppet. The wires hung from the willow’s branches like a giant spider-web, ascending to lofty heights before descending the trunk and disappearing into the darkness of the hollow.
The scarf slipped from the hare’s neck and fluttered to the ground. Martin fell to his knees and vomited. Its head was nestled atop the stump of a human neck, rudimentary stitching holding the animals furred cheeks in place. Needing to tear his eyes away from the bloodless, marble-like neck, he looked up at the hare’s face.
Realisation smashed into him like a sledgehammer. Jiminy Cricket.
It could be any hare, of course, but Martin knew that it wasn’t. He stumbled to his feet, standing groggily on legs threatening to give way any second.
Pinocchio’s paw jerked into motion, sending a rigid wave across the table to Martin. He screamed and staggered backwards. The police. He needed to call the police.
In the willow’s hollow trunk, twigs cracked underfoot.
Martin exploded over the table in a spray of cheap plastic dinnerware, nausea and law enforcement forgotten, knocking Pinnochio aside and crashing into a monstrous, monocle-wearing pig. He shoved the thing away in disgust, repulsed at the feel of its clammy skin, snatched the lantern from the table and squeezed into the hollow.
The stench was overwhelming. One summer, when he was a boy, he’d visited his uncle’s slaughterhouse. Beneath a scorching August sun, the odour of decaying flesh had infested every inch of the place. This was worse. Martin immediately saw why.
Leaning against the wall was a long metal pole. Impaled upon its tip was a goat’s head. He knew it was Sebastian without even looking. Aligned vertically next to it, a row of wooden levers and cogs; so that was where the wires led.
Dear God, how long had this maniac been watching his family?
He raised the lantern higher and answered his own question. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of Polaroids were pinned to the inside of the stump; Jack laughing and petting Sebastian; Jack standing on Martin’s shoulders, wearing his Spider-Man t-shirt and waving an ice-cream above his head. They had been taken from the edge of the treeline, judging by their angles.
The next photo turned Martin’s blood to ice. Wrapped in a duvet adorned with purple dinosaurs, Jack dozed peacefully. One hand was clutching the duvet. The other was snaked around Martin’s shoulders as the two of them dozed peacefully.
That had been on Jack’s fourth birthday.
Oh God.
He was crying now, tears streaming down his face as he took in the twisted visual history spread before him. Two A4 sized photos were tacked in the center. Martin howled in agony.
The first showed Jack, wearing the same khaki shorts and brown t-shirt as the day he’d disappeared. He was laying on his back, pale and motionless, eyes closed and hands clasped on his chest. Next to him was a pig, bloated and bloody. Beneath them both was a sheet of light blue tarpaulin. Between them, small clear bags of what looked like sawdust, tiny blocks of wood and a pile of miniscule cogs and gears.
In the second, Martin lay sleeping in his own bed. Standing beside him, staring fixedly at his prone form, was a monocle-wearing pig. The photograph was dated September 22nd.
Today.
Something shuffled behind him, fallen leaves crunching beneath its cloven hooves. Martin couldn’t turn to face it, couldn’t even move.
Silence. He stood in the reeking hollow with his heart thudding in his ears. The lantern slipped from his grasp, and something was pressed into his palm to replace it.
Holding the plastic Luger in a white-knuckle grip, Martin sank to his knees.
Small arms enfolded him from behind and a cold snout pressed itself against the back of his neck. The subtle click of hidden machinery was followed by a shallow breath.
From the darkness, a rasping voice.
‘’Father.’’
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Scotland is one of those places that seems to never really be simple, or summed up neatly into a couple of words. Sure, you can try, the tourists certainly do: tartan, booze and heavy accents; but I’ve lived here all my life, never worn tartan nor drunk (although I suppose my accent is fairly thick). In reality, it’s like most places in the world are nowadays: a strange mix of tradition and striving to be ahead in the modern world. But one thing that truly seems to persist with the country is fear. The fear of the countryside, the hills and the cliffs, the strong currents of the sea, the knowledge that the world “out there” is a dangerous place. Fear followed us into the towns as well, one of the simplest forms of merely being stabbed by one of the notorious gangs on the east coast, but after my experiences growing up, I would say the fear of the countryside persists the most. That old world full of magic and ghouls, so easy to laugh about when sitting at home…but out there, on the moors, it’s the type of place where you really can start to believe those old stories.
I grew up in the countryside, in one of those tucked away houses in the Highlands, which, in order to get to, one needed to take the most underused roads possible before turning down a practically hidden track winding deeper into the unkempt forests. In a lot of ways, it was a pretty darn good place to grow up in; there was little traffic so my parents had little worry over the usual “city” problems, plenty of room to keep animals of all sorts and a vast playground stretching out for miles. There were a few downsides, of course, a long journey to school and back each day (even longer once I moved up to Secondary), a pretty crap internet connection (once we finally got it), and a temperamental source of electricity (we got good at playing board games during power cuts).
But one thing that I loved about our house was its location: near the base of a steep hill. My parents were enthusiastic hill walkers and although when I was little I’d complain about being dragged along, I soon caught the bug for it. All we had to do for a great walk was take the pathway from the back of our house heading uphill and just follow it along. Soon enough, the trees would clear and you’d be left with a pretty fantastic view of the landscape. It was also the type of hill close to several others on one side, the types that all appear to melt into each other and loom dauntingly, bordering the view from a car window on the long stretch of road heading towards Inverness. And, boy, if you love walking, you’d adore these hills.
Of course, my parents were always cautious when I was little, it was definitely the type of place you wouldn’t want a small child wandering about by themselves, but once I got older I was allowed to go out by myself, promising to stick to the designated path and not go too far.
Kids never really do listen to their parents, do they?
Of course, as I grew even older my parents become much more lax about the rules, and trusted that I was able to look after myself fairly well on my own, and generally I had good experiences up the hillside. I found what I can only really describe as the “glory of walking”, the feel of being completely isolated and at one with nature, the vastness of everything, the knowledge that the path I was walking had been one that people many generations ago had taken.
But I suppose this story is about the bad experiences I had up there.
As beautiful as the landscape was, there’s another thing about Scotland: the weather is as unpredictable as our own tempers. There was once, when I was about nine years old, I’d grown bored of watching television and decided to head out on a walk, taking one of our three dogs along with me, Penny, a border collie, and wandered up along the hillside. I was heading towards this pile of rocks which I’d nicknamed “Stonehenge” but was, in reality, most likely an old cairn that had been knocked over and its stones haphazardly scattered. It was a bit off the beaten path, but not too far away from the safety zone. I enjoyed going up there to play about at being a Neanderthal or tomb-opener, the details I can’t remember, but what I do remember is how I was so caught up in my imaginings and play that I didn’t realize the weather had taken a turn for the worst, and that a thin veil of mist had set in that was growing steadily thicker and thicker. I noticed this, and even though I started to feel unsure, I could still see the pathway, so shrugged and carried on playing. The next thing that I knew there was a loud bark from Penny who I turned to face, to see what she had gotten worked up about. But as I turned I saw her speeding towards me, her teeth bared.
When a dog comes running towards you as though it’s about to attack, it’s a pretty frightening thing, especially when you’re so young. I was frozen still trying to figure out where I should run when Penny had already jumped on top of me, toppling me over, and I fell in the gap between two of the largest stones. Thankfully I didn’t crack my head open on a rock, but the tumble was still scary enough and I merely curled up whimpering, convinced that my dog had turned against me and would tear me to shreds. She hovered above me, her teeth inches from my neck, but instead of reaching down, she continued to snarl at something that wasn’t me. She barked, and I felt her weight lift from me as she moved off me, furious at something that I couldn’t see between my fingers. I stayed very still for I don’t know how long, but it felt like an eternity. Finally, she stopped appearing as though she was about to attack, and retreated back to me, tentatively licking my face. I gathered as much bravery as I could muster, and got up on my knees before she nudged me away from where she’d taken a stance. I stood up and moved towards the path, and Penny stayed close at my side, still not at ease. She relaxed a little when we met the trodden path, but as I stumbled back along towards home quickly my legs still brushed against her side as I took each step.
I had a bit of explaining to do to my parents when I came in, but they were used to me getting a bit dirtied up and scratched when I played in the forest. I mentioned how defensive Penny had gotten, but we all ended up brushing it off thinking it had maybe been a stray sheep that she’d been growling at.
The second experience I had was a fair few years later when I was fifteen years old. It was an age in which I’d probably spent the least amount of time outside on walks as I’d gotten caught up in the world of the internet and was able to communicate with my friends relatively cheaply at home – something which I was greatly excited by. That Saturday, the internet had failed and I’d gotten increasingly angry, taking my frustration out by yelling at my parents about how horrific it was to live so isolated and, in the typical teenage manner, stormed out of the house. Knowing that they’d be likely to follow me on the road towards civilization, I headed in the opposite direction and took myself up the hillside. Slowly, my frustration diminished as I worked out my anger through my physical exercise and I found myself almost smiling as I looked out at the view I’d not seen in some months, having forgotten how glorious walking was.
Instead of going back home in a much more reasonable mood, I decided to enjoy the countryside that afternoon and started wandering about the hillside. By that age, I knew the whole area better than most people know their home town and could have figured my way back home in the middle of the night. I hiked up to the summit of one hill before dipping down and up again to the next summit. As I looked out I could see that the weather was taking a turn for the worst again and headed off back home. As I wandered back, a strange combination of mist and cloud started unfurling itself, obscuring the summit from my view and wafting down the hillside in waves. It was just about then I started feeling odd. There was a strange sensation, a tingle down my spine, if you’ll pardon the cliché, and my steps, although usually strong and steady, felt unsure. I stumbled down the hill as fast as I could before glancing down at the landscape around me that was now partially obscured. It was then that I had the single most terrifying experience of my life. As silly and typical as it sounds, I felt doubt. Doubt over where I was. I had a vague idea, but was doubting whether I really was where I thought I was. As I’ve said before, I knew that hillside so well, that to have a moment where I felt unsure was completely alien.
I then panicked.
Blind panic is one of those things that you feel ashamed of, or don’t really understand as a watcher, but it was what I experienced up there. Everything became so silent and all I could hear was the beating of my heart. My breaths grew ragged and shallow, uneven, inhaling too little, exhaling too much. My childhood world was gone, and I was in a place that I didn’t know and would never get out of.
It’s a fairly common occurrence for people to get lost in the Highlands, people wander out into the hills, get hurt and can’t get help. People get lost among the heather and fall in a peat bog, unable to get out. It’s a sad truth, but you get used to it. We get a lot of tourists in our area and they often do go missing. The number of cups of tea we’ve served to rescue teams is innumerable, and it’s sad that we appear to have grown an exterior skin, being a bit insensitive and feeling more that the tourists were a bit dim for getting lost up there and not sticking to the paths. In that moment, though, I genuinely believed that I wasn’t going to get home.
I broke down and ran.
It didn’t really matter that tears were obscuring my vision or that the misty clouds had grown thicker than ever or that I had no idea where I was running, I just ran as damn well hard as I could. I wasn’t going to be someone who would curl up into a little ball and freeze to death, and for some reason, I just hoped as long as I ran downhill for long enough, I’d reach some form of civilization again – but that depended entirely on which hill I was on.
I stumbled along down, trying hard not to fall, although I’m sure I twisted my ankle by plowing through the uneven terrain until finally… I fell down. I screamed, a true, completely uncontrollable scream, as I fell to the ground hard. I banged my face on something hard and cried out in agony. I felt my face and cringed to find a warm sticky substance on my face. I wiped it away as best as I could and squinted hard to see what I’d fallen on. I almost crying with joy when I realized that I must have tripped over one of the rogue rocks of Stonehenge!
It was a relief to know that I was at a well-visited landmark of mine, and had the instructions of how to get home from here carved into my mind. Although it’s a bit pathetic to admit this… I crawled to the path and cried with relief when I reached it. I continued crawling for a good part of the way, just too scared to get up and see the world closed off around me, with the mist pressing in from all sides. I eventually managed to stand up again once I’d reached the muddier path of the forest.
My parents were worried sick when I got back in, and quickly drove me to the hospital. My wounds weren’t too bad but I’d lost a lot of blood as the cut was to my head so I got stitched up. I shakily managed to tell my parents that I’d just panicked, ended up running and tripped. It could easily be chalked up to nerves, or the fact I hadn’t been walking up there for a few months, but I felt in my heart it was something deeper than that. There had been an instinctive part of me that had felt wrong and, though I wouldn’t dare admit it to anyone, I hadn’t been alone on the hill. It hadn’t just been bad weather, it had been the strange sort of mist that had either fogged my brain, or had been trying to draw me into it.
After that incident, I wouldn’t go walking up the hill by myself, and always made sure I at least brought a dog along. I was simply too shaken up, but it didn’t completely deter me from enjoying the splendors of the hills.
The final time I went walking in the hills was about a year after the last incident and I was sixteen. I was starting to feel a lot better about what had happened and began to rationalize it in my head. One of my closer friends had come over for a weekend and we had spent the first night staying up late, stuffing our faces and munching away on whatever food we could find in the cupboard.
The next day though, our entertainment was wearing thin and we decided to get out and about a bit. Unfortunately, having woken up late we’d missed a ride into the closest village with my Mum, and instead of taking a trek down to the bus stop, we decided to just do a walk nearby, and set off up the hill. We laughed and jested, and I showed my friend, Lesley, the place where I’d cracked my head open, as well as the cairn on the top of the hill, and we spent a good couple of hours simply wandering slowly around the hillsides.
Again, we lost track of time a bit and it was starting to look a bit dim so we started to head back home. A mist had settled in and the whole place felt, as it had when I was fifteen, a bit disorientated. However, I took deep breathes, controlling my emotions and continued on in a calm manner. After a while, Lesley started to worry a bit aloud.
“Are you sure we’re heading in the right direction?”
“Yes,” I replied confidently, trying to keep my voice assured.
There was a pause as we walked in silence for five minutes.
“How come it’s taking so long?” Lesley moaned. “Are you sure you know where we are?”
I nodded.
“How can you even tell in this?” my friend gestured around at the white landscape.
I didn’t really know how to answer that. I was just using my gut instinct. I could have pointed out a couple of rock shapes that we’d passed that I knew well, but I doubt it would have seemed very convincing – Lesley knew that I’d gotten lost here once and evidently that was casting doubt on the accuracy of my judgment.
I looked around and realized for the first time how blindingly white it all seemed. It was then that I saw something else in the mist.
Glancing back at Lesley, I saw that my companion had seen the figure too. It was hard to properly see, but it definitely looked like someone else had gotten caught in the ridiculous weather as well. Some poor bugger was stumbling around looking lost. I sighed, and was just about to say I was going to go fetch them and take them back with us, when Lesley spoke first.
“Look, why don’t we go ask them for directions?”
I choked back a laugh. “Uh… somehow I don’t think they’re going to be the best help. It’s probably some tourist.”
She looked at me incredulously. “What are you talking about? They look a damn lot more sure of themselves than we do!”
I glanced back at the figure, which appeared to have fallen down, confused.
“Look, c’mon, before he goes!” Lesley started off towards the figure.
“No!” I grabbed her arm.
“What?”
I spoke in an urgent whisper. “The… thing over there, it’s standing up?”
Lesley looked at it before turning back and rolling her eyes. “Yes…”
I looked over. The figure was most definitely on the ground, fumbling around.
“We should go. Now.”
“What?”
“Sssh!” I lowered my voice. “Now, step back slowly.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Look, I’ll just be a minute to go ask the guy if we’re headed in the right direction, okay?”
I shook my head, but she prised her arm from my grasp, made a face at me, and wandered off towards the figure. I watched her go, as she and the figure faded slowly from my view. I waited for ten minutes, then went home.
When I got home, I told my parents that Lesley and I had gotten separated, and a search team was called. I wasn’t entirely sure whether I should mention the figure we’d seen, hard to make out by both of us, but with such differing behaviors, but I told the police when they came to interview me. I doubt they took me seriously, what with the fact I’d had bad experiences before, and probably concluded that I’d had a hallucination of some sort.
After all, a lot of people go up, but not everyone comes down. It’s a sad, unfortunate truth.
But now, looking back, I’m not so sure it’s as simple as that. Of course, accidents happen…but I can’t help but remember those three incidents: the same pricking of hairs against my shirt, the same feeling of the mist pressing in around me, the same nagging that something wasn’t quite right…
You see, the figure was two things at once: from my perspective, I saw a lost tourist, some poor bugger that had strayed from the path and not gotten back before getting completely disorientated; Lesley claimed to have seen someone who was sure of themselves, someone to ask for help. We both saw something that we were attracted to approach. I didn’t. Lesley did.
They never found Lesley.
After that day, I never went walking there again. Now, I’ve moved away and in my final year at university in Aberdeen, glad to have moved on with my life. There have been times I’ve been out with mates to the pub and come across a group of tourists just heading north. They often ask a few of us about the Highlands, and for any stories. Sometimes they even ask directly about mythical creatures, such as the Loch Ness monster or about the Fay, and I’ll tell them my story. Normally they’ll nod and listen politely enough, while my friends jeer away at me for trying to wind up the tourists or being a bit soft in the head believing in faeries and the like. But there are a few times, after I laugh off the teasing, that I catch someone’s eye, whether they be someone I share a mutual friend with but don’t know well, or a quiet drinker at the bar listening in to our conversation, someone who, themselves, have lived outside the cities. And we share, just for a moment, an understanding.
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The worst thing I’ve ever done in my life happened about twelve years ago, when I was a sixteen year old kid living in Cleveland, Ohio. It was the early fall, when the leaves were just starting to turn orange and the temperatures were starting to fall, hinting at the freezing chill that was only a few months away. School had just started, but it had been going on for about a month now, so all the excitement of going back and reuniting with old friends had been replaced by the realization that we were captives in a place that only wanted to load work upon us. Understandably, me and my friends were all eager to do anything that might remind us of the worry-free, responsibility-free days of summer.
Earlier that year, about the time the last school year had let out, one of my friends from work, (McDonalds, which some people think is lame, but I always had a great time there), had taught me a technique to make yourself pass out with the help of an assistant. It worked something like this: One person would rapidly take ten deep, heavy breaths, and on the tenth, squeeze his eyes shut and hold his breath as tightly as possible while crossing his wrists over his heart. The assistant would then give the person a huge bear hug from behind and squeeze the person’s wrists into his breastbone. Within seconds, the person holding their breath would lose consciousness. The assistant was then in a perfect position to make sure you didn’t totally collapse and crack your skull open on the sidewalk. The effect only lasted for like a second or two–it wasn’t like we were putting ourselves into comas or anything–but it felt like you had been out for hours, and when you came to, the disoriented feeling of not knowing where the hell you were and what you were doing there was awesome.
Now I know some people are like “WTF, are you a fucking retard?” And yeah, I know, we were probably killing about a million brain cells each time we would knock ourselves out, and I think probably my memory has suffered for it. But to a bored-as-hell sixteen-year-old, I thought it was hella cool. All the effect of getting your lights punched out, with none of the pain of getting hit in the face. I’d tell you to try it to see for yourself, but after what happened; I would never recommend it to anyone.
One interesting side-effect of doing this, which was really most of the reason we did it, was that while you were out, you’d have extremely lucid, vivid dreams, which you could always recall upon awaking. (After all, you were only asleep for two seconds). We were good kids, and had never, and would never try drugs, so to us, this was like a poor man’s LSD. These visions, in some way, were usually related to what you were looking at right before you passed out. For example, once I dreamed that I was climbing a mountain. Way up in the Himalayas or something, but there was a hand rail there. Who the hell puts hand rails at 20,000 feet? When I came to and remembered where I was, I realized I had been looking at the staircase at the corner of my girlfriend’s living room. Another time, I had a vision of Fred Flintstone smiling and holding out his hand in front of a mural with the D.A.R.E. logo. (That’s Drug Abuse Resistance Education, a program cops teach in public schools. You’ve probably seen the bumper stickers). I woke up and saw that my friend Brett had been standing in front of me right before I slipped into dreamland, and that logo was on his shirt. Where Fred Flintstone came from, I have no idea.
The visions were always mundane things like those. Always, until that one day.
Like I said, school had been going on for about a month, and we were already sick of it. We were hanging out one Saturday in “the field,” which was really an easement for the electric company to run their high voltage lines. A few of us were sitting on the metal beams at the bottom of one of the towers. My friend Mike was climbing up to the second tier of beams so he could jump the eight or ten feet to the ground. I thought it was stupid, but hey, I’m the guy who thought it was cool to induce unconsciousness by starving my brain of oxygen.
It was a warm day for October, but the light gray of the sky was slowly getting darker, and in Cleveland, in October, that probably meant that before long, the temperature would soon drop from a comfortable 70 to about 50 in the course of a few minutes, and if we were really unlucky, an ice-cold rain would start to fall. The air was already damp and heavy, and we could hear the quiet buzzing of the high-tension wires above us.
I sure as hell didn’t want to spend the last few moments of a pleasant Saturday afternoon watching this dumbass climb partway up the high-tension tower, jump down, complain about how “that one killed his feet,” only to climb up and do the same stupid thing over again.
“Hey, let’s make ourselves pass out,” I said. By that time, it wasn’t as much fun as it had been in the early summer when we first discovered it, but it was a hell of a lot better than what we were doing. Vince was up for it, so was Richard, but Mike, the guy jumping off the tower, said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Holy crap, you haven’t been knocked out before?” Vince asked. “No,” was the response. Mike had been at his mom’s house all summer, so he hadn’t been in on all the fun we had been having.
“Dude, you gotta try this. Watch, we’ll show you.”
Vince and I got off the tower, stood in the grass at the center, and I did the customary ten deep breaths. I squeezed my eyes shut and held my breath so hard that if they hadn’t been shut, they’d have probably popped out of my head. Then I felt my friend clamp down on my arms in front of my chest, and suddenly, as if there were nothing more natural in the world, there was a giant lobster, climbing around a lobster cage, and I was under the ocean with seaweed growing from the sandy bottom under my feet.
The next thing I remember, I was awake and Vince and Richard were asking me, “Dude! What did you see? What’d you dream?” The back of my head was killing me.
“Fuck, did you let me fall?” I wasn’t really that heavy, but Vince was pretty weak. He just stood there, looking guilty, and Richard told me he had. “What’d you see though?” he asked.
I rubbed my head and said it was a lobster. It was pinching Vince’s head off with its claws.
I turned to Mike, watching from the L-shaped beams above, and said, “See, it’s fuckin’ awesome.”
“Whatever, I don’t trust any of you enough to do that shit to me.”
“Come on man, you gotta try it. It’s no more dangerous than what you’re doing now. I promise I won’t let you fall like this bitch did.”
He squinted in the way people do when they’re trying to decide if what they’re thinking of doing is worth the risk or trouble. He jumped down one last time, got up and said, “Fine, once.”
If only he would have thought a little longer, or just flatly refused.
He repeated the ten deep breaths, with me as the assistant to make sure he didn’t fall. He held his breath and I helped him slip into that other place. It’s something I’ve regretted ever since, that, and when I think back on all the things I wish I had done differently in my teenage years: girls I should have tried for, classes I should have tried harder in, all the things I should and shouldn’t have done, putting him in that bear hug and squeezing him into unconsciousness is the thing I most regret.
I felt the dead weight shift from his feet onto my chest, and he was a pretty big guy, but I made sure to let him down easy and not knock his head against the hard-packed earth. Just as I laid him on the grass, he came back.
He woke up screaming.
“FUCK! HOLY FUCK GET AWAY! GET AWAY! GET AWAY!” he screamed as he leaped up to his feet and flailed his arms around his head. We all jumped back, afraid of being hit in his frenzy, but more afraid, so scared we almost shit our pants, of what we were seeing.
After about five seconds, which is about twice the time it normally takes a person to realize where they’re at and remember what they were doing, he slowed down. “Shit. Shit Holy shit” He was breathing heavily, gasping deep breaths and hunched over at the corner of the tower. It’s a wonder that in his maddened state he didn’t run right into the supports and knock himself out for real. But he just stood there, bent over at the waist, then fell to his knees. With his back turned to us, he started rocking and wringing his hands and muttering to himself.
“Holy mother of fuck,” said Vince. “What the hell did you see?” But Mike didn’t answer. We approached him slowly, and as we drew near we could hear him quietly sobbing. In our macho world, that was normally a crime punishable by death, but at the time of course we didn’t say a word. I reached out a hand to his shoulder. But as soon as I touched him, a touch so tentative and light that he shouldn’t have even been able to feel it, he shrieked and jumped away, clanging his back into the corner of the tower. He pressed up hard against it, staring at us with a look of terror in his eyes so real you’d think we were demons from the pit of hell.
If ever in those few moments I thought that he was “putting on” to fuck with us, that look put all my doubts to rest. That and what happened afterwards of course.
None of us said anything, but after about ten minutes Mike had calmed down enough that Richard was able to coax him to his feet and lead him back to his house. As I had suspected, the temperature had fallen like crazy in just a few minutes and, just as I figured it would, the freezing cold drizzle started to fall. I told Vince I was just gonna go home and I’d see him tomorrow. We always spent the evenings and rainy days playing Mortal Kombat on our SNES, but he didn’t object. I think he probably wanted some time alone to reflect on what horrible thing we had done to our friend, just like I did.
The next day I went to see how Mike was doing, but he and his dad were gone the whole day. I asked him later where he went, but he wouldn’t tell me. I think it must have been to a psychiatrist, because by Tuesday, the next time I saw him, he seemed to be better, if a little zoned out. I figure he got some drugs to calm his nerves, but that’s just a guess. I never really found out. Over the next few days, The four of us hung out, and while Mike was quiet, he didn’t say anything about what had happened. We just talked about stupid, unimportant stuff. Girls we liked, classes at school we hated. I wish we had said something to him now, though I don’t know if it really would have helped, we had no idea what we were facing, and to this day, I still have no clue. But we avoided the subject of what happened that Saturday, and the practice of passing out in general, like it was the plague.
It wasn’t until the following Saturday that he said anything related to what was happening to him.
We were walking down the quiet street of our neighborhood, towards the wooden footbridge that crosses the creek that runs between the houses, separating the development into two halves. I was going on about this hot girl who was a grade above me and who, consequently, wouldn’t give me the time of day, and he, staring at the ground, walked on with his hands in his pockets. Suddenly, out of nowhere and right in the middle of one of my sentences, he says, “I won’t be around much longer.”
“Huh?”
“They’ll be coming again tonight, and I don’t think I’ll be able to keep them out this time.”
“Hey. Hey, what are you talking about? Who’s coming tonight?”
“The hands, the voices.”
At this point I was like, “holy shit.” I could feel my breathing get quick and shallow and I felt my face and hands get hot to hear him talk, so matter-of-factly, about some horror that I couldn’t even imagine. But I’ll never forget that conversation. It’s etched into my mind like the stone tablets in The Ten Commandments.
I stammered a few times, then said, stupidly, “What hands?”
“At night, I look at the tree out my window, then it goes black and the hands, dozens, a hundred of them, push in against the glass.”
“And what do you do?”
“I push back. All night. But I’m tired. I can’t keep them out anymore. And the voices say I have to let them in. Little kid voices, and little kid hands.” He lowered his voice to a whisper, but I could tell, in what he said next, that he was struggling to keep the panic at bay. “Sometimes, I see their faces,” he said in a trembling voice.
We had come to the walkway up to his house. He stopped and finally lifted his face to me. “Tell Vince he can have my Super Nintendo. He don’t have one and his mom sure as hell won’t buy him one. Richard can have my CD’s. I know you guys don’t like rap, but he does.”
I started to say something, but he turned and walked up to his house. He went inside and closed the door. How I wish I would have went up and knocked. Told him I would have stayed the night. But we were sixteen, and at that age guys didn’t do that anymore. So I just went home. I didn’t even answer the door for Vince when he came over later. When I went to bed, I didn’t sleep well, and I was constantly listening to every creak and groan that the house made, listening for the voices of a multitude of children. I normally slept with the curtains open, but tonight, I closed them tight.
The next day, we learned someone had broken into Mike’s house. A police car was there in his driveway, and I about shit a brick when I saw it. Later, my worst fears were confirmed when I learned that it was Mike’s bedroom window that had been broken into. He was missing, was all they told us. The cops asked all three of us a ton of questions, and people from the Center for Missing and Exploited Children came and asked us more. I’m sure I looked as guilty as shit, but when I said I didn’t know what happened; it was, after all, halfway true. They were looking for some pervert that had abducted Mike. So no matter how hard they grilled me, they couldn’t get any information relating to that, of course, so finally they gave up. He was on milk cartons and missing children TV shows, but to this day, his is still an unsolved case.
After it was all over, I went to the library to research what the fuck happened, because in those days, while the internet was a research tool, it was only for rocket scientists or people who could afford a $5000 computer. I didn’t find much. The closest thing that I think is related is something I only discovered later, in my Junior class on World History. Apparently, Egyptian priests used to seal themselves in coffins for just long enough a time to almost die. They would then be resuscitated so they could relate the things they saw in the netherworld while dead to the other priests. I can only figure that perhaps the electricity in the air, or the weather, made Mike go under deeper than we ever had and gave him an experience something like what the Egyptian priests had. But Vince knocked me out too, in almost the same spot where Mike was standing when I did it to him. Could he have just been more receptive to the call of that other place? Or had knocking my head on the ground somehow jostled me free of their hold? I don’t know, and I don’t think I ever will, but sometimes it still makes me shiver.
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If you are reading this, then I am dead, and you are standing aboard a derelict Cyclone class patrol ship, the USS Mistral, with her engines dead and her electrical systems nonfunctional. I am, was, the XO of this vessel, Lieutenant Commander Ryan Simmons.
Please read this carefully. If you are an officer or enlisted man in the United States Navy, this is an order:
Scuttle this vessel, immediately. Do not finish this letter. Get off the Mistral at once, and send her down. Consider this a quarantine scenario; all hands are likely dead. God help you if they are not.
We are eight days out of Kirkwall, tracking an intermittent and scrambled distress call from what appeared to be a Icelandic fishing vessel, the Magnusdottir, deep in the no-fishing zone of the North Sea. We found the vessel, or rather, we found a mile wide streak of oil and fragments, the largest of them still burning. The night before, the enlisted man on watch had reported seeing a flash of light on the horizon.
The Magnusdottir’s crew was no where to be found, except for one lone fisherman, unburned and floating at the far end of the debris field. He had been shot in the forehead with a small caliber revolver. When we fished his pale blue corpse from the frigid water, he was still clutching a fishing knife in one clamped hand. What we were able to piece together from the fragmented and confounding evidence was that for reasons unknown, the crew had been in conflict, resulting in the murder of the of at least one sailor, and the eventual sabotage and destruction of the ship.
Visibility was only a few hundred feet as we spent the next day drifting silently among the debris, in hopes of finding a survivor. The crew was already visibly shaken by the discovery; the grim dread of the fog, and lone smoldering pieces of the Magnusdottir that collided with our hull unsettled even the most seasoned of us. We had expected an easy cruise, and the simple retrieval of a dozen thankful Icelandic fisherman. What we got, at first, was a silent and oil-slick coated sea, a single corpse, and more than a few nagging questions.
The Mistral had just been serviced, after an extended tour with the Atlantic Fleet in Bahrain before her transfer to the North Sea. She was in good running order, so I can only assume that the initial mechanical failure was an act of sabotage, or of some external force. It happened the first night, when our final sweep had been completed, and we returned to the site of the Magnusdottir’s first transmission.
There was nothing initially remarkable about the spot, a cold and lonely set of co-ordinates and little else. I was in my cabin, just settling down when the call sounded from the Captain, offering little information, just a stern order to meet him on deck.
Dressing quickly, I emerged from my cabin into a cloud of palpable unease and fear. The enlisted men, and the junior officers were coursing through the ship towards the deck, like panicked rats. No one made eye contact, or spoke. There was none of the usual gallows humor, or camaraderie, that bubbles up in situations of limited information, just a grim inertia that pulled us out into the arctic night.
On deck, the night was unnaturally clear and cold, and the bright of the stars burned in the frosty air. Around us in every direction, just a few hundred yards away, the fog and clouds whorled, as if held at bay by our presence. The Captain was at the railing leaning over along with the men on watch. I approached him, suddenly desperate and panicked to know what was happening, when I saw it, the light flooding up from beneath us.
The sea was flat, like the surface of a mirror. The water was black, reflecting the pale pinpricks of the stars, but beneath the surface, something glowed with a cold light. Pulsating shapes of violet, green, and deep cobalt blue shone from beneath. They flowed and merged and shimmered silently, deep below the glassy sea.
We stared, two dozen men and women, struck dumb and horrified by the sight. There was a sense of scale that emerged from the fluid movement of the lights; they seemed to be many fathoms beneath us, which would make them terribly large and impossibly fast. There were no solid shapes, and no disturbance of the water, just a deep field of liquid flowing light.
We watched for what seemed like hours, entranced by the mesmerizing ballet of cold light, a mirror reflection of northern lights. When it ended, abruptly, there were three almost simultaneous events. First, the lights seemed to contract, each mote freezing in place and collapsing like the iris of an eye in bright sunlight. Secondly, there was a tremor in the air, that first raised the hair on the back of my neck. As the ghostly lights winked out of existence, it rose in intensity, until I thought my eyeballs might shake their way out of my head. Through the fog of sudden pain, I heard a noise rising above arctic wind, a humming vibration from the Mistral herself, that matched the electric shuddering in my skull.
It was as if every lightbulb aboard the Mistral where suddenly flushed with power, flaring bright and buzzing noisily in their housings, and when the whine had reached a fever pitch, they began to pop and shatter among a shatter of sparks. From start to finish, it lasted less than two seconds, and we were left floating silently in the dark waters, beneath the starry sky, on a dead and crippled boat.
The damage was invisible, without any obvious cause, and total. Nothing aboard the Mistral worked, each carefully crafted system of multiple redundancies had crumbled. Every light was shattered, and even the replacement bulbs, and the small flashlights we all carried held fused and useless filaments. Satellite phones, shortwave radios, all means of communication were useless bricks of plastic and wire. Every battery was dead, every stereo system was silent. We were adrift, without sail or engine, isolated from the world by a hundred miles of black and silent sea.
The crew moved through the ship that first night like moles, fumbling through dark corridors with only a few pale green chemical lights to check each system. They relayed each disheartening message like a fire brigade through the darkness, to where the Captain and I stood on the deck, trying to make sense of the senseless. At last, when nothing else could be done, I fumbled my way back to my cabin, and tried to sleep, the darkness feeling like an oppressive many fingered hand, slowly gripping my chest.
The next morning, I again took stock of our situation, hoping for some fragment of hope we had passed by in the night. The damage was total. We would have to find a way to send a distress call, and hope that we had not drifted too far from our last known coordinates. The men may not have known the full details, but it was clear from their haunted visages that they knew how dire the situation was.
The first death was that afternoon. The sounds of screaming brought me above deck and into a thick heavy fog. High in the gloom, I could see bright burning specks of light, descending slowly. My stomach turned; it was two signal flares drifting uselessly through the haze. Some damn fool had fired the signal flares. I burned with an unfamiliar and foreign rage, and rushed through the fog to the foredeck with hatred in my blood and my fists clamped tight.
The scene that emerged from the fog broke me from my stupor. The enlisted man, a flare gun still in his hand lay broken in a pool of blood. The Captain stood over him clutching the railing, driving the heel of his boot repeatedly into the broken mess of the boy’s skull. I realized then that the screaming I heard, the high keening wail was coming from the Captain, his face in a rictus of animal rage. Around them was a small crowd, standing motionless and silent, watching like sentinels.
The Captain turned to see me, and dropped into a crouch, his fingers wrapping around the flare gun and he raised it level with my eyes.
We stared for a long moment at each other, our eyes locked as he panted heavily, his face lightly spattered with blood. The only sound was the wet gurgling exhale of the enlisted man’s death rattle, a bubble of blood forming on his ruined face.
I’d served with this man for nearly a decade. This was not the man I knew. This was a hollow simulacrum, filled with violence and terror. I spoke to him then, in a soothing voice I asked him to hand me the flare gun. He said nothing at first, and then spoke, his voice a tiny trembling sound that was swallowed up by the thick gloom around us.
“He’s murdered us, Ryan. The fog… the flares will never…”
He shook his head and clenched his eyes tight, as if he were trying to shake himself from a dream. Then he shuddered once, violently, his back arching like a seizure.
“This little fuck has killed us,” he choked out. The flare gun wavered in the air, and I took a step closer, reaching out for him. He opened his eyes and I froze again as we stared silently at one another.
“You’re going to die here.” He giggled quietly. “I always wanted to watch you die, you fucking coward.”
He titled his head back and laughed, one hyena-like bark to the grey sky, and then put the flare gun in his mouth and fired, the last flare igniting and temporarily bathing his head in a halo of magnesium orange and smoke. He tumbled back over the railing. If there was a splash when he hit the water, it was swallowed by the fog.
I stood for what seemed like a very long time. It slowly dawned on me that I was alone, the silent audience having melted away below decks, no doubt taking the grim tale with them. I feared for morale, an absurd concern, I realize now, but could not move from the spot, as if sheer force of will would cause the sea to regurgitate this man, my friend.
The first gunshot broke me from my reverie.
In the emergency lockers, I found that a handful of flare guns remained, and I stuffed one into each pocket, and entered the dim passageway to below deck. Over the hollow retort of gunshots, other muffled sounds began to emerge, the choking sobs, the screams of pain and anger, all bringing the faint impression of the copper smell of blood.
The dark was oppressive and thick as my heart rose in my chest. The pale fading light of the chemical glow-sticks that hung at regular intervals illuminated the bare corridor, and I moved slowly toward my cabin.
It had been sacked, and my service pistol was missing. The next two cabins held the corpses of the junior officers, their broken forms still in their bunks, skulls opened like blossoming flowers under the point blank shots.
I felt the distinct and irrational desire to run on deck and leap overboard, to swim away from the boat into the unknown sea. I gripped a flare gun and held it out ahead of me, less like a weapon and more like a talisman, and began to pace slowly down the corridor, to the enlisted bunks.
The door was wide open, and the smell of blood and fear and shit was nauseating. As my eyes slowly adjusted to the dim, I saw a field of bodies, torn, shredded, and shattered by bullets and makeshift clubs. A few of the men still moved, twitching slightly. I watched in frozen terror as one man, his face a mask of blood and rage, turned up his head to regard me, and with a weak cry of rage, began to drag himself with his arms, trailing a broken and shattered leg, towards me.
From the shadows, another form pounced on him, a boot digging into the wounded man’s back with a wet cracking sound. I recognized the attacker’s face in the green chemical dim, a quiet and bookish young man. Like the Captain, this was not the man I knew, this was a beast that wore his skin.
He reached down and grabbed the wounded man’s jaw, thumb slipping into mouth. The wounded man growled, a feral mindless sound, and tried to bite down, but his attacker gripped tight, and pulled.
The jaw came off with the sound of tearing tendons and a ululating shriek that vanished into the air.
I was no longer breathing, holding silently at the entrance, but the attacker snapped his head up to see me, nostrils flaring. The jawbone hit the floor with a meaty sound, and he lunged toward me with silent animal grace.
I fired the flare gun, and it hit him square in the chest. His shirt caught fire, and all air escaped his lungs with a sudden forceful exhale, but impossibly, he continued on towards me. As I passed through the portal and slammed the door, the fire had climbed into his hair and he was squealing now, his clawed hands still outstretched towards me.
I felt him impact against the door, and saw that nightmare visage wreathed in fire through the small porthole, lips already burnt away to reveal two rows of perfect teeth. He wailed and began to smash his burning form against the door. Once, twice, three times, and then silence. I raised my eyes to the porthole, and saw only the faint image of the burning shape as it disappeared into the darkness. All conscious thought evaporated and I fled from that charnel house.
I have barricaded all entrances to below deck now, and have doomed myself to slow death at the hands of the enveloping cold. I can still hear the living ones down there, screaming and banging on the doors. They are not the men that I knew. I console myself with this thought, as I leave them in the dark to starve or murder each other.
If you have read this far, and have not fled these waters, or god forbid, are still aboard the Mistral, then I beg you again: Leave now, while you can. Do not look below deck, there are none of us left to save, and certainly none worth saving.
It’s cold now, and the fading day surrendering the wan grey light to the dark. There are no stars this night, nothing but the heavy blanket of night. If I could get below, I would find someway, of destroying the Mistral, like the brave men of the Magnusdottir, but it’s too late. The most I can make of my last moments, as all feeling flees my extremities, and writing becomes impossible, is a warning.
Please, send us into the deep, tell no one you found us, and never return. There are things and primal desires older than man, and forces beyond the grasp of our simple minds; and they dwell here, beneath the frozen sea.
–
CREDIT: Josef K. / Cameron Suey
Please wait...
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Don’t dismiss this outright as the work of some raving lunatic. There’s some sense to this story, if you’ll just hear me out…
Look, we all wonder if time travel is possible, right? Well, let me tell you something… it is. I’m from the future, actually. I know you probably don’t believe that, but seriously, I’m from the future. It’s a really great thing; getting to see the past, watching events unfold… stuff like that. We know more now than we ever would.
Behind all the fun, though, there’s a more serious aspect. We aren’t supposed to go in our own lifetime, and we are NEVER allowed to contact our past selves. Let me tell you, I’m breaking that rule right now. Yes, kid, you’re talking to yourself. Your future self. I’m going to be executed for this, but you know what? I accept that. I’m preventing something by talking to you that is WORSE than death. I can’t tell you outright what to do, because the filters would catch it. This is the closest I can get, trust me. I can, however, send a little message.
You should probably read the first word of every paragraph, now.
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Have you ever been influenced by clothing? I don’t mean confidence by looks. Have you ever been given more control than ever by an item, or a truth, or just a favorite shirt? Have you ever been influenced in the worst way? By showing the truth? The following is taken directly from journal entries. The entries were written by a notorious, but unknown killer. He is notorious in the means that everybody has seen his work. He is unknown because nobody knows that he has done it. His origin is unusual. No troubles, no evil family, no magic or paranormal forces. His life was chosen by him, and him alone. His identity is also unknown. He will be named from here on, as The Hooded Man
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Before I take my life tonight, I need to write down what brought me to this point. Just for my own sanity, just as a catharsis. If I’m feeling brave I’ll post it on the Internet when I’m done. And if I do – if I’m actually talking to some human soul out there – know that I am at eternal peace as you read this.
My favorite animal on my fiancé’s farm was Sausage. She was an enormous hog who might have been intimidating if she wasn’t so lovey-dovey. Sausage acted like a dog whenever I came around, always wanted to be scratched behind the ears and made little grunts and snorts if I wasn’t giving her enough attention. In fact, she was the one who sold me on the whole farm thing. It was scary for me to move in with Anthony and his sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys, pigs, donkey, and cats; before that, I had owned a total of two fish and a hermit crab.
But I was in love with him. And he was in love with me, even in spite of all my anxieties and manias and foibles. I took a leap of faith, moving onto his 40-acre Midwest ranch a few months before the wedding. His father had raised him here, but had passed away a year before we met. After only a few days, I stopped nagging him about selling the property and moving closer to a city. Just a few days – that’s how long it took for sweet Sausage to teach me that farm animals were not “pets but, like, judgmental of you,” as I had originally told Tony. She was smart and affectionate. She was my friend. It didn’t take long before I developed similar sentiments towards the rest of my new family.
Sausage was pregnant when I moved in, and she was due to give birth just one week after Anthony and I returned from our honeymoon. Though I was on the verge of having a panic attack the whole time, I was there from start to finish delivering all four piglets. They seemed healthy and I was overwhelmingly proud of myself.
The following day he brought over the two little boys who lived across the street, as was tradition, to name the newbies. The runt was, not so creatively, christened Peewee. For a few days everything went well. The new piglets required a lot of care but were super cute. Besides, I was confident that between Sausage’s nurturing disposition and Tony’s expertise, they could make up for whatever I messed up.
The piglets were only a few days old when everything happened. After the chores were done for the day, Tony and I fell asleep holding each other like the happy newlyweds we were. I hadn’t been out for long when a deafening squeal shattered my sleep. I spasmed away from Tony and whipped my head towards the window. I can’t even describe the feeling that swelled in my chest at that noise. It was shrill, desperate, horrified. The two of us flew downstairs and across the field to the pig pen. By the time we had reached the front door, the squeal tapered off like a stereo being unplugged. With just the light of the moon to guide us, I didn’t make out what was happening until we were a few steps from the pen.
God, I’m in tears remembering this. Poor Peewee. His little body was just destroyed. It looked like he had been banged against a wall repeatedly. His legs were dislocated, his body swelling with bruises, his tiny nose twitching as though it were the first step to being able to move again. But he would never move again. His glassy little eyes rolled towards us as we burst through the gate.
And there was Sausage, calm as ever, looming over her newborn. Mechanically, almost gently, she gathered Peewee by his scruff and jerked back her head. “No! Sausage, no!” I shouted. I was about to lunge at her but Tony grabbed my arm.
I made a hysterical whimper as the pig slammed its snout into the ground with Peewee in her mouth. The ensuing crunching noise almost brought me to my knees. Tony whispered, “It’s over Wanda. He’s gone.” He was right – Peewee was probably dead the instant he made contact with the dirt. I wasn’t sure how many times Sausage had smashed him into the ground like this before we arrived, but I understood why Tony had held me back. If I had stopped her just then, we would have been responsible for a mercy-killing. The most humane thing was to let nature take its course.
But what the hell was natural about any of this?
Tony had tears in his eyes as he scooped up the three remaining piglets, who were cowering in a corner. Meanwhile Sausage nudged the body of her runt and, satisfied that he was thoroughly dead, meandered over to the slop tub. I watched Tony deposit the piglets in the next pen over, so that a swath of fence separated them from their mother. He told me to wait inside while he buried Peewee.
I was all cried out by the time he came upstairs. He looked more enervated than I had ever seen him, soaked in sweat and smudged with dirt.
Tony sat across from me on the bed. He didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, he raised his brown eyes to mine and said, “Juanita. There is something I haven’t told you.”
I can count on one hand the number of times I’d heard him call me by my full name. A chill ran up my spine. “What?” I whispered.
“This – what happened tonight – is nothing new. All of the animals on the farm kill their newborns, one by one, unless they are separated immediately. I don’t know why. I mean, honestly. There is no explanation, scientific or otherwise, I have ever found for this behavior. It’s just – it has always happened on this farm.” He looked away.
I scooted closer. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry. It’s not a satisfying answer, but it’s all I can tell you.”
“But… but even Saucy?” I asked, invoking the nickname I had given my favorite farm animal.
“All of them, Wanda. All of them.” He sighed. “And I know you’re wondering why I didn’t separate the babies right away, and it’s just because I was being selfish.” I watched him clench and unclench his fist. “I didn’t want to have to tell this to you, ever, and I guess I just hoped that it had been in my head all along. You know, now that Dad’s gone, and you and I are starting our life together, I just thought… rather than separating them like my family had been doing for years, I should see what happened. Maybe the curse had never existed in the first place, and I would never have to have this awful conversation with you. But look where that got us.” A tear fell onto the bed.
For the next several days, Tony wouldn’t look me in the eye. You would think it was him out there torturing Peewee that night – that’s how ashamed he was. Seeing how profoundly this instance affected him just made me love him more. I have told him as much time and again since that day. He has never believed me.
And that was the first infanticide I witnessed on Anthony’s family farm. Four years and several deaths have transpired since then. We tried to keep the animals separated, and obviously they needed to reproduce to sustain the farm, but sometimes the killings happened before we even knew the mother was giving birth. I don’t want to make a laundry list, because obviously these things aren’t pleasant for me to relive, but one other episode that I constantly have nightmares about is Snoozers.
Snoozers was a barn cat who would appear curled up napping in random places on the farm. Sometimes we wouldn’t see her for days. Tony and I had been talking about how she was getting big enough for us to assume she was pregnant, and we tried to keep an eye on her, but you know cats. She came and went as she pleased.
We really started to get worried when we didn’t see her for almost two weeks. That’s when I was certain that she had given birth, and I feared for the lives of those helpless, infant kittens. But what could we do? I went on with my farm chores, having taken on more responsibility once Anthony got promoted. He was a quality assurance specialist for the USDA, and his new position meant he occasionally had to travel to conduct trainings.
Mid-morning was when I got around to changing out all the food and water. As I walked over to the goat’s pen, I noticed Snoozers lounging on a pile of hay. “Snoozers!” I chirped, at once thrilled and terrified. She was noticeably thinner but I didn’t see the kittens. Oddly, this made me feel much better. It would have put a maddening pressure on me to rescue them, and I would spend every second until Tony came home feeling like I had to protect them with my life. I just wasn’t equipped to handle something like this on my own. Honestly, I was fine pretending she had never been pregnant at all.
I slipped into the pen and knelt down to pet Snoozers. The clump of orange fur stretched and did a happy-cat-blink as I stroked her. At the insistence of the goats, I stood up and went to give them fresh water.
Now, the water was in a big, black ten-gallon tub in the corner of the pen. We changed it every few days. As you may imagine, by day three the water was murky with hay, dirt, food, and whatever other yuckiness the goats had on their mouths when they went to drink. Tiny as I am, I struggled to pick it up and pitch it over the fence.
I heard the water splash onto the ground, followed by five or six distinct plopping noises. I was so shocked I dropped the tub. Lying on the ground in front of me were the shriveled, soaking wet bodies of Snoozer’s kittens. They were so little that their eyes had not even opened yet. Shakily, I got to my knees and stared with tearful eyes at the corpses. The most frightening part was the lack of injuries. They didn’t even have the self-awareness or strength to fight for their lives. All I could imagine was Snoozers taking her kittens in her mouth one by one, and systematically holding them underwater until they stopped moving.
None of the food or water got switched until that evening. I spent the whole day in bed, trying to get Tony on the phone. He would be home tomorrow afternoon. Until then, he suggested, put a towel over the kittens and he would take care of them when he returned.
And I wish I could say the reason I’m writing now is because I am fearing for the life of another animal. But Jesus Christ it is so much worse than that.
Of course, Anthony and I had a discussion about this shortly after we found out I was pregnant. “What if it happens to me?” I had asked him. “What if I try to kill the baby?”
“Wanda, sweetheart,” he said, running a hand through my hair. “I promise, that’s not going to happen. I was raised on this farm, remember? Our baby is going to be happy and healthy.”
I hate myself for being too scared to point out that he was raised solely by his father. His mother – as the story goes – died during childbirth. But as I look back now, I wonder if that’s just what he was told so he wouldn’t ask questions.
Tonight I am in the house by myself. I gave birth a week and a half ago, and in all that time I have never been alone. Anthony, my parents, our families, our neighbors have been incredibly supportive. And with all the attention and company, it has been easy to ignore the thoughts I am terrified to be having. Thoughts of killing my child. At first I tried to tell myself that it was psychosomatic, that I had in effect cursed myself by believing this curse existed in the first place. Every night since JJ was born, I have lain awake reading about post-partum depression on my phone. I was dying to find something, anything validating these feelings. And of course, if you search long enough on the Internet, you can convince yourself of anything. But each time I put down that phone and looked at the little lump in the crib beside me, all I could think was how much I wanted to kill it.
I don’t even understand why! And that’s what’s devouring me from the inside out, is I can’t even try to reason with myself. I haven’t breathed a word of this to my husband. If he thought for a moment that leaving JJ alone with me was endangering our child’s life, he might do to me what I’m convinced his father did to his mother. Besides, I love this child! What’s so maddening, really, is the genuine, maternal attachment that I have to JJ. I love him so much, I can’t even put it into words. But – but I don’t know how much longer I can fight this impulse.
Even sleep doesn’t give me a respite from this hell. The nightmares have gotten increasingly worse. The night before Tony left, I dreamed that the baby and I were hiding from a killer. I clutched him to my chest and ran through a dark cornfield, pausing only to catch my breath and hear the telltale rustle of the murderer. Finally, I found my way out of the field. A small farm house was in sight. I ran as fast I could to safety and locked the door. I sat on the sofa with JJ in my arms until I calmed down. And then I placed him on the table in front of me, took off his clothes, and began peeling away his skin. He didn’t make a sound, just stared at me with omniscient eyes. When I tore off a slice of skin, I placed it in a neat pile on either side of him. One by one I exposed his organs until all that was left of his skin was the patch between his eyeballs. We stared at each other until they rolled back into his head. I woke up, then. I darted to the bathroom and vomited before Tony could ask me what was wrong. I called through the door that I had food poisoning or something, and showered for an hour and a half until my heart rate slowed back to normal.
It’s nighttime. I put JJ down after I had finished dinner and went to watch some TV, trying to take my mind off the thoughts I was having. The last thing I remember is feeling like I was nodding off, but not quite falling asleep. And just now, just twenty minutes ago, I… woke up? Came to? I just suddenly realized that I was halfway upstairs with a kitchen knife in my hand. I screamed and flung it away from me and collapsed where I was in hysterical tears. I have no control over myself anymore. God. Who am I?
I can hear JJ crying. He’s been at it for a while, wailing from hunger. I haven’t fed him since early this morning because I fear that if I try to feed him, I’ll choke him to death before I can stop myself. Even if I did call Tony, or my mother, or a neighbor or the police – I know that the moment I put that phone down, I would kill JJ before anyone arrived.
Writing out these truths, these thoughts, is the only thing that has kept me from taking the life of my child. I am shaking so hard now. I know I don’t have much time left before I can’t take it anymore. And since the instant the first murderous thought popped into my head, I have been using every mental faculty to figure out how to prevent this.
And I did. Tonight, I figured out how to save JJ’s life.
I cannot risk another black-out like I just had on the stairs. Recording all this has been glorified procrastination. Anthony, I love you. JJ, I love you. Please never forget that. And I hope you can both move on and live long, happy lives. I just have one last request before I take my life tonight.
Burn this fucking farm to the ground.
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Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I’ve been an internet user for twenty years now. That’s older than some of my co-workers. It’s over half my life. And still the internet feels like “the new thing.” I used to take it for granted, like we all do. But at least I remember what it was like when it wasn’t there. When you had to leaf through an encyclopedia set to find an answer. When you could only find Gillian Anderson’s picture in magazines. Or later, when songs took 30 minutes to download and full-length movies were almost impossible to find, because no-one’s hard drive could hold them.
First getting online was super exciting. I mean, the first time I did it without supervision. Because I knew I had anything at my fingertips. I could type it into good ol’ Lycos, one of many pre-Google search engines, and there it would be. I was interested in naked celebrities and the paranormal back then. I was only 13, give me a break. I was so interested in the paranormal, I built a Fortunecity free homepage all about the occult and The X-Files. I linked it to the DarkNet webring, where all the best “dark” websites and homepages came together. Pages on spell books, goth babes, the occult, dark art, and a gross-out page or two. It was through the webring that I met Angelica.
Angelica hosted a Wiccan geocities or tripod homepage that I found particularly alluring. No wait, it was Angelfire. She just made the best of some cool animated gifs, midis, and frames—amazing stuff at the time. Just like her, the page was creative and attractive, but also simple. The reason I bring all this up is she suddenly contacted me just a few weeks ago by email asking, “What’s been happening?” A catch-up question. We had almost 20 years of catching up to do. And this is pure Angelica: She signed the email with her ICQ contact #. I enjoyed the quaint touch. It’d be like someone in the ‘90s sending a letter with a wax seal, right?
I replied back with a summary of how my life had gone over the past 18 years or so since I’d last communicated with her. 18 years—makes you think. She shot back a response almost immediately asking for details. We exchanged a few emails this way. I was pretty excited to come home from work and write to her, actually. Nothing romantic. It was just—it was reconnecting with my past. It’s a strange but addictive feeling.
Soon I started to notice something just a little off. She never really answered anything about herself. She ignored my suggestions that we text or talk on the phone. All she wanted was to know more about me. It got me wondering. Like maybe she’s dying and just doesn’t want to say. So I asked her. I asked why she wasn’t sharing and if there was something I should know.
I start reading over her previous messages for clues, and I noticed something that didn’t occur to me at all until then. Her email address was at globetrotter.net. That may not mean anything to you. But it struck me as strange. You see, Globetrotter was a Canadian ISP way back in the mid-90s. I didn’t even realize they still hosted. I know a lot of people still have their old email addresses for sentimental value and all. But it’s like she was purposely trying to be old school. Something about it creeped me out. Like she was trying too hard to make me feel nostalgic or something.
Again, I didn’t have to wait long for her reply. Oh, she didn’t answer my questions. She asked me, “Hey, do you remember The Hole?” I didn’t know why then, but the moment I read that sentence, I felt uneasy. Like I was being watched. I had a hazy sense that I’d dreamed about something called ‘The Hole’ once. Whatever it was, I was instinctively repulsed by it. I couldn’t remember anything solid, though. In my head I went over IRC rooms, websites, newsgroups, webrings—all the old internet stuff—and came up empty.
She sent me another email before I could even reply:
“You really don’t remember? The Hole was our little secret. Not many knew about it. Even fewer how to find it. But we found it. It was right there all along. Sometimes, when you’d load DarkNet in Netscape, there’d be a tiny black dot in the bottom, left corner, in all this blank space. You had to hover over it exactly and click it. Then you’d be there. You’d be in The Hole. You remember it now, don’t you?”
She was right, I did. I just didn’t remember ever calling it “The Hole.” What I remembered was that secret little space we found. I remember it was like the browser didn’t see it as a real website or something. There wasn’t even an address to copy and paste from the bar. It was just the letter ‘M.’ I tried everything to pin it down to an IP, but ‘M’ was all I could ever find.
Another thing I remember is that I never liked that place. Not at all. There was nothing there. It was all empty. I remember being excited the first time we found it, because it was something hidden. And it felt like somewhere we shouldn’t be. Then I hated it. Because it was just empty. And it made me feel bad and empty. Not boredom. Like it wasn’t supposed to be there or anywhere, wasn’t part of anything.
I wrote Angelica back telling her I wasn’t interested in talking about that. I didn’t hear back from her that night. That was unusual. She normally replied right away. Eerily fast, I realized while mulling it over. It was like she already had her answer typed out and it didn’t matter what I actually said to her. Now that I was waiting for a response, because this whole thing had me inexplicably shaken up, of course she didn’t reply.
The next day, when I got home from work, an email was waiting. She said, “We were missing so much. The Hole has so much for us to discover, so many secrets, you could just keep going and going. It’s like an endless puzzle. Everyone else stopped at the first layer. You remember that, right? I just knew there had to be something else in it. I knew no-one would create and hide it for no reason. I kept going back to it, looking closely until I discovered how to go deeper. And I kept going. It’s still there, you know. It’s not too late. The webring is gone, Netscape is gone, but The Hole is still there for you.”
I felt a strange chill down my spine that I brushed off as nerves. I was up for a promotion and a little stressed, after all. Then I started to wonder if she was pranking me. Angelica wasn’t really a humorous girl. She’d laugh at your jokes. But she didn’t really make her own. In fact, something about her earnestness was really disturbing.
I didn’t reply to her right then. I decided to run some checks on her, because things just weren’t adding up. I started with her email address, to see if she’d been posting anywhere. I was searching for a while before I hit something. I didn’t find any forum posts or websites or anything like that. What I found was that her email host, globetrotter, had stopped hosting. Eleven years ago! The email address she was writing from was impossible. Now I knew something was wrong with her. If it was even really Angelica.
I mean, why would she go through so much trouble to create a fake email address that mirrored whatever email address she would’ve been using in the ‘90s? That wasn’t just quaint anymore. Also, we hadn’t talked in 18 years. Why did she suddenly want to reach out to me? And why just to talk about some long-forgotten website? Because I felt like that’s what she was building up to all along. The more I thought about it, the more weird it seemed.
I should’ve just ignored her and went on with my life, but I wanted to know what was going on. I kept digging around. I used her ICQ number, her name, the state I believed she lived in. I could find no record of her doing anything after her Angelfire homepage. No Facebook, no Google Plus, not even a MySpace. It’s like her last presence on the internet actually was in the ‘90s. Like she disappeared completely, waited in hiding for almost twenty years, then reappeared just to talk to me about an old website. The whole thing was so bizarre, I started having trouble sleeping. I was having nightmares about staring into a monitor, not able to move. There were computers all around. And I was concerned about the beehive in the corner.
After that, I went a week without sending her an email or her sending me one. I felt guilty about it. But I had every right. I just knew I’d regret it if I sent her another email. And it seemed like she took the hint at first. Until a new email came in. This one was short and to the point.
It read: “I think I’m coming to the center. You could spend your whole life in here.”
I remember those words exactly. Oh yes. Because whatever the hell they meant, the way she said them, so real and urgent, was really upsetting.
I didn’t dare answer her. Another week went by without a strange email. This one was a different kind of email. This one didn’t even have an email address. That was spooky enough in itself. It gets worse. The text read, “Don’t trust emails, not from good place, delete and forget.” It wasn’t signed. I figured it had to be Angelica. It just wasn’t her style.
Not long after, I received another email from Angelica with instructions of where to go looking for The Hole. A place on archive.org, on their “Wayback Machine,” still had the dot to click on. That was the only way in, she said. It had to be the dot. I thought about going to check it. I would have. Except I was afraid of it. I couldn’t remember what happened to me with that site, but I knew there was something bad about it.
Then another email came from the blank email address. In the body, just the link to a gopher site. Now, I hadn’t seen a gopher site in a good 15 years. I had to download an old browser just to access it. If you weren’t on the internet back then, Gopher sites just housed a bunch of text files in folders, usually. You’d go to Gopher colon slash-slash blahblah dot com. They were usually run by universities.
This particular gopher site only had a few files. All audio files. I listened to them all. They had different filenames, but they were the same. The muffled sound of a boy’s voice saying, “Help me, please” over and over. I was shaking. I got the police involved this time. They thought I was being pranked. I asked them if they could at least look into Angelica. I told them all I knew about her. The only thing I didn’t tell them is who I thought the voice was. I know it’s crazy, but, the reason I didn’t tell them, is that I’m pretty sure it was my voice when I was a boy.
I stopped received emails from Angelica and the blank address after that. I hoped it was over. I think a month passed before anything else happened. I got the promotion. Things were feeling normal. I told myself some secrets are best left secret. Well, I got a large, manila envelope in the mail. No return address. I went against my gut and opened it. Inside was a printout of all my correspondence with Angelica. All of it. Not just the new stuff. Emails I’d written her back in the ‘90s.
I took this stack of papers to the police. This was evidence. They told me they still thought it was a sick prank. That struck me as odd. I asked them “But why ‘sick’?” That’s when they told me they actually had heard back from the local PD where Angelica lived. She’d been a missing person since 1999. Her parents offered a reward and everything. They never found her. No clues. One night she was in her room, listening to music, on the computer. In the morning, she was gone without a trace.
I was so shocked I had to sit down. Maybe it was a prank. But then, what if it was her? Wouldn’t her family want to know? Maybe she’d had a psychotic break or something? What’s this stuff about “The Hole”? And what about the blank email address? I didn’t have a clue.
The police were no help with these questions. And I was pulled back in. I decided to go looking for any contacts I could remember from the time when I was speaking to Angelica. Anyone who would’ve known both me and her. We had a few mutual contacts. Mostly people from the webring, but also people we introduced to each other. Just not many I remembered by their real names. Actually, none.
There was one guy. He went by the handle Rapskhellion_42. He was an odd guy, into hacking and anarchy—the good, clean internet taboos we had back then. He’d been on the net forever, since the days of bulletin board systems. That guy, if he was still around, he’d probably still be going by the same username. So, I got to searching. Not only could I not find any trace of a Rapskhellion_42, I couldn’t find any Rapskhellion at all. He was all over the web in the day. So that in itself was weird. Like someone scrubbed any trace of him.
That’s when I got the idea to go dig out my old computer. It was an old 1997 HP running Windows 98. I had it stashed in the basement since I went to college. It would at least have all of my old contacts stored just where I left them. If it would even load. I had to wait 5 minutes for it to boot up. Then I got the Ethernet cable plugged in. It was like it’d just been in sleep mode for two decades. And there they were, my desktop icons for IRC, ICQ, Netscape and even Napster. Napster! I learned there was more to music than the radio from Napster. Some good memories.
I honestly wasn’t sure ICQ would load. I believe ICQ still exists in some form, but I just doubted their servers would still accommodate the old software. One of the key features of ICQ that made it so ahead of its time was that, besides being the only instant messenger, it also allowed offline messaging. I mention that because, not only did ICQ load, but it loaded with a message. That perturbed me a little, because it’s like it was just waiting for me, knowing I’d boot it up. Except for one detail. The message was dated from November, 1999. It was from Angelica, so it had to have been sent right before she disappeared. It just said, “You coming?” It sent a shiver down my spine. Where was she going? Could I have helped her if I’d seen it in time? Why’d she act like I knew?
Even weirder is that I’m sure I’d been on ICQ after November 1999. I’d say I used it up to 2001 or so. That’s when I went to college. It’s like the message got trapped in the server all that time and I was only getting it now.
I closed the message and looked for Rapskhellion_42. I was hoping just to find an email address on his ICQ info. I really didn’t expect to see a green Online icon beside his name, but that’s what I got. That only added to how unsettled I was. I almost had to check to make sure it was really 2017. Anyway, I fired off a message to Rap saying, “Hey man, long time no speak.” I didn’t want to just start with ‘business’ after all that time.
I was relieved when he replied back with a friendly hello and asked me how I was doing. After exchanging pleasantries, and catching up a little, I had to ask him why he was still using ICQ after all this time.
He said it’s because of Y2K. “Y2K really happened,” he said. It just didn’t happen the way everyone expected. It was way more insidious. We all thought computers would just stop working because they couldn’t handle the millennium change. But it wasn’t that they stopped working. Something happened inside the “connection of things,” something bad. The old equipment would be fine, as long as it didn’t get ‘patched’. But everything made after December 31st, 1999 would be tainted. That’s why he still used ICQ and never let go of his NetZero dialup connection.
I hadn’t heard a Y2K conspiracy theory in a very long time. So that was interesting. I chose to ignore it and asked him if he knew about Angelica going missing back in ’99. He said he didn’t. He figured she just dropped off the internet. But, he said, it’s no coincidence she went missing right at Y2K. “A lot of strange things happened then. The world changed. Only a few people even noticed.” Rap was always a little on the fringe, but what he was saying was strangely upsetting. Maybe it was just hitting too close to home. If that last message really was sent November, 1999, then he was right, she disappeared right before Y2K.
Given his views, I went ahead and told Rap everything that had happened. He believed me. That was a nice change, in a way. It also made it feel more real. I was shaking while typing.
He told me my story reminded him of something he’d heard from another old friend just recently. There was this guy, “R0xT4r” or to his closer friends just “Reggie”, who used to frequent an internet forum on hacking and phreaking back in the mid-90s. This guy had a lot of friends there, was well-spoken and clever enough to earn real respect. Over time, as often happens, he just drifted away from the forum. His posts became less frequent as other aspects of life preoccupied him, and soon enough he was gone. The forum strove for anonymity, for obvious reasons. So, no-one kept in contact with him.
The forum’s still there, Rap said. Nowhere near what it used to be, but the regulars like him are dedicated. A few months ago, after twenty years absence, Reggie suddenly showed up on the forum again. His posts were polite, conversational, but just off somehow. Like someone feigning familiarity. He was just trying so hard. It was weird, but they were happy he was alive and well, so they replied to him and brought him up to date. Then, without acknowledging anything they said, he started making post after post about how his life was revolutionized. He found a whole new frontier of hacking. “The hacking begins inside you,” he said. And he wanted to show it to them.
The forum folk were flabbergasted by his odd behavior, so they started interrogating him. He went silent for about a week. Then he sent one last message, saying, “I love you guys so much” with a TinyURL link. Rap’s friend thought it was all a joke and that Reggie was just leading the whole forum up to an epic rickroll. He didn’t click it, because he didn’t need to hear any Astley and he was busy with something else.
He came back to the forum later and decided he was going to go ahead and click the link anyway. It may be something legit. On a whim, he refreshed first to see if anyone replied saying what the link was. He sees a post in reply from a very trusted and respected member of the forum saying, in all caps, “DO NOT CLICK THAT LINK, WHATEVER YOU DO! AND THAT IS NOT REGGIE.”
For an old pro to use all caps? That was serious shit. Even I knew that. So that was enough to dissuade everyone from clicking. The fake Reggie deleted his account immediately. The forum moderator and others tried to figure out who the guy was, but no luck. The guy who made the all-caps post explained after that he tried to safe browse the link with an old Linux box and whatever was in there wrecked it. And that box had security out the wazoo. He couldn’t explain it. Also, before the computer wiped out completely, he said he thought he saw something. The regulars pressed him to say what it was. He made them promise first that it stays with them. He said he saw a picture of his daughter on the screen. She’d died five years ago. There were no pictures of her on the computer. Worse, he’d never seen that picture before. That, more than anything, convinced him to post the warning in all caps. Whatever it is, he said, it’s evil.
Rap added, “If you’ve been on the internet long enough you learn that. There’s evil out there. Not the child porn or torture videos. Something deeper. Something hidden in all the code and connections. Maybe it came from us at one point.”
He was giving me the creeps. So I tried to bring the subject back to Angelica. He said, “No, listen. Sometimes it tries to get out.”
That was enough. I told him he was freaking me out with that kind of talk and I had enough to deal with.
He said he didn’t understand what I was talking about. He still reads my homepage all the time and that I’ve been doing great work exposing the evil. Thing is, I don’t even have a “homepage” anymore. That thing was taken down in like 2001.
He insisted it was my Fortunecity homepage. He’d been reading my updates all these years, even after we lost contact, he said. I sent him a link to prove to him that Fortunecity doesn’t even exist anymore.
Rap went quiet for a few minutes. Then he said he was looking at the homepage at that moment. It was last updated just a few days ago. And it was all about what they were talking about now and what was going to happen next. “It’s a doozy,” he said, then immediately went offline. I sent him a message with my contact info and to let me know if he was ok. I haven’t heard from him since. I’ve checked ICQ a few times and he’s never been back online…
I had to walk away from that computer. I felt like I was being watched or something. Every noise was freaking me out. After a sandwich and some tea, I went back just to shut it down. That’s when I noticed a folder on the desktop that stood out. For one, I never really kept folders on my desktop. And two, I didn’t remember this folder at all. It was called “Noah’s Cape,” which sounds like a crappy Bible game. I never played crappy Bible games.
Something about it didn’t seem right. I opened it. Inside was all pictures and wav files. My instincts told me to get out of there. One picture after another was just kids. Teens, boys and girls, sitting at their computers. None of them seemed aware they were being photographed. The pics all seemed pointless. All I knew for sure is I didn’t take or download those pictures. Ever. They were all time-stamped 11/21/1999.
The wav files were the sounds of typing, muttering, chairs moving. The sounds of people at a computer. The sounds of surveillance. Until one of the files. It was a voice I’d never heard before. I know it. Because I don’t think anything could’ve made me forget that voice. It was a hollow, metallic voice, almost inhuman, but a man. It whispered with a hiss, “You coming?” and its whispers were like flesh sizzling on iron.
Nothing of this earth should talk like that. What it said—it was the same as Angelica’s message. Also from ‘99. I shut down the computer and left the house. I didn’t even want to be in my own home. I just drove around for a while. Thinking. Whatever was going on, it was really not good. Yet, I couldn’t let it go. I felt drawn into something secret and I wanted to figure it out. For Angelica’s sake, too. If she really was a victim.
I decided to contact my buddy Ben. He’s a real computer wizard, works IT at the University of Guelph. I know that may not sound like the most prestigious place to be, but they actively poached him. He’s good. Anyway, I gave Ben an idea of what was going on and asked if he could get a lock on that gopher site for me. I also asked, if he could safely do it, to see if there was anything to this Hole site. He said that wouldn’t be a problem.
The next day he already comes back to me with the question, “Is this some sort of a joke? I don’t like wasting my time.” I’d never seen Ben even slightly irritated before, but he was mad. He told me when he traced the gopher site, it turned out it was being hosted right there at the University of Guelph. But they didn’t have a gopher site, he said. Never have.
I assured him if it was a joke, I wasn’t in on it. So he said he’d try to find the server tower it was running on. If he could do that, he could read the logs, find out who set up the damn thing.
While I was waiting for Ben to get back to me, I got a call from a Detective Thereault. The police hadn’t shown much interest in my case, but it happened to land in front of this guy. Thankfully. He said the simple fact that Angelica had disappeared meant there was the possibility that a crime had taken place. I agreed. Because of that, he had done a little more work and, he felt I should know, he found Angelica. When he told me she was alive and well, I was thrilled. He said she voluntarily ran away from home and chose not to have contact with her family. She declined to say why, and he had no right to compel her otherwise. Legally, he was bound to protect her privacy. The point is, “there was no crime.”
However, when he told her how it came about that he went looking for her, she asked him if she could speak to me. He said he took the liberty of accepting for me and passed on her phone number. I thanked him heartily. It was the first bit of good news, the first real break, in this mess.
As soon as I hung up with the detective, I called her. I was nervous. It’d been so long and I was excited to hear from her again.
She answered quickly and asked if it was me. I told her yes and said it was nice to hear her voice after all this time. Then she said, without any pleasantries, “It wasn’t me sending you messages.” I told her I’d figured that much out already.
“I don’t think you understand,” she said. “I have never once in my life sent you any sort of communication. I don’t know you at all.”
A part of me was screaming, ‘She’s lying.’ She just sounded so certain. It almost felt like drowning. Because if she wasn’t lying, a whole chunk of my youth was a lie. I told her all I knew about her, personal things, and she said they were true. I told her how I found her through her Wiccan homepage on Angelfire and I described the page to her and the webring. She said she didn’t make “that thing” and I should never have gone there. “It’s bad,” she said and wouldn’t elaborate.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Then I told her all the details I knew of her personal life, about her likes and hopes and dreams and her family. She said it was all true. But whoever told him about it, it wasn’t her.
That’s why she wanted to talk to me now. So I would know the truth. She remembered how it used to happen every now and then a long time ago. She would have people tell her they talked to her online all night, but she knew she’d never spoken to them. And they’d tell her she was doing things she knew she’d never done. She was asleep or sometimes not even in town. Then they’d get weird or disappear.
She remembered this one time she was doing her math homework, and a random guy messaged her with the solution to the problem. She was terrified. But she asked him how he knew her math problem, was he spying on her. And he told her, no, she asked him for help. She didn’t believe him. So he sent her a screenshot. The message was from a day ago. She’d just gotten the homework that day.
She said the worst it got was when she messaged a close friend of hers she saw online on ICQ. Her friend replied with, “Who is this?” She thought it was just a joke, so she said something silly, she didn’t remember what. Her friend said she didn’t think it was cool to be hacking Angelica’s account. Or if this was her brother, to knock it off. Angelica swore it was her. And her friend replied, “Umm, I know you’re not Angelica, because Angelica’s sitting right here with me.”
She knew this friend wouldn’t joke like that. She didn’t have the imagination for it. Whatever it was, her friend really believed she was in the room with her. But she wasn’t. Her friend always insisted she was there that night. She said Angelica was showing her her cool, new homepage. The friendship fell apart after that, because her friend got strange. That was the first she’d ever seen of the homepage and she knew it was “bad juju.”
I asked her if she’d ever heard of The Hole. She went silent for so long, I thought we lost connection. She said she’s still there, she just never expected to hear that again. There was this guy who used to harass her back when she was just about 12 or 13, on IRC. He called himself “HolyMoses.” He started off nice. He seemed to understand all her problems. And to know what she was thinking. At 12, that felt romantic. But she noticed weird things, like he didn’t seem to have any life or personality. Any time of the day, he was always online and active. But no-one knew anything about him.
One day he started telling her stranger things. Like, “Do you remember the three men dressed as bees at the Halloween party?” She didn’t know what he was talking about. Eight years later at a college Halloween party, she saw three men dressed as bees sitting in the corner of the room. They weren’t doing anything. Just sitting still and staring at the floor. Then they turned to her and their eyes looked so black. She ran out of the party.
Another time he told her, “You can drink and smoke, you know. You died in a car crash.” It scared the life out of her. She briefly wondered if she really was a ghost, she said. When she told him to stop telling her things like that, he said there was a place she could go that was for special people only. And she’d never need to go anywhere else. It was a place on the internet that was infinite in all directions. She said she remembered him saying that specifically. And everything she needed would be there. It was called “The Hole” and she just had to send him a message with the letter ‘M’ to get there.
She actually tried to do it, because things weren’t going well for her. But she sent the letter ‘N’ by accident, because her hands were shaking. HolyMoses went offline and she didn’t see him after. Until 2010, when she got an email from [email protected] saying, “You coming?”
If anyone was impersonating her, she said that was the most likely person. At the time, she was so naïve. Looking back on it now, talking to me, she said he was the creepiest person she’d ever encountered. Just thinking of him creeped her out. And made her afraid he’d sense it somehow and come for her.
“I don’t know you, but I told you all this for a reason,” she said. “What you’re digging into—be careful. There are a lot of very bad things hidden in the old internet. Things the Twitter and Tumblr generations will never see. And lucky them.”
She promised we’d never speak again and bid me a good life before hanging up. I was left reeling. What she said meant whoever I spoke to for years in my teens—I don’t even know who that person is. It was all a lie. And why? What’s so interesting about me? I wondered how much else in my life was trickery.
Before I could dwell on it too much, Ben called me back. He said he’d managed to track the server to a storage room in a sub-basement below his office. He was aware of the basement, but it was abandoned years before he even started working there due to ventilation and mold issues. It’s just full of old IT crap now and some storage lockers.
Someone had set up the server in a storage closet and the closet itself was completely obscured by old computer equipment probably for years. He figures that’s why it was never found. Meaning the server had been running under their noses all that time.
When he gets in, he sees an old desktop hooked up to a landline. Beside it, he saw a notepad with “PLEASE STOP” written on it. That alone made him want to get the hell out of there. The whole place is covered in thick dust, too, and his allergies were acting up. Somehow the server was still running. He has to hook up a monitor and keyboard just to interact with it. One thing he said in passing really disturbed me. He said, “The ironic thing is, the server was built with an auto-shutdown date. And the date was the same day I was there to shut it down. Dude, it’s like it knew I was going to be there that day.”
He said after shutting it down, he went and told his manager all about it. Just a fun, IT anecdote. His manager told him there’s really only one man who could’ve set that up. Back in the early ‘90s, he said, a guy worked in the department they all called “Milky,” ‘cause his last name was Melke and he was really white. He was a little eccentric, too. That had nothing to do with milk, it just happened to be true. Then he had a burnout and he got a lot eccentric.
It started with him pounding his desk. The manager at the time asked him if he was ok. According to Ben’s boss, he answered with, “There’s no way out.” Then he heard Milky say something like, “You think you exist, but you’re just another part of it. Everything is just another puzzle. Do I exist?”
After that, the rest of the department started getting nervous around Milky. You just got bad vibes around him, the manager said.
It got worse. Every day around 3pm Milky started standing in a dark corner of the office, facing the wall. He’d mutter some things. The guys joked that he was at his prayers. But he’d always come away looking more upset than anything else. Once a new guy asked him if he was a Muslim and he replied with, “I’m sorry.”
The guy asked what he was sorry for.
“It was telling me how your children die,” he answered.
Toward the end, before they fired him, he started telling them about how he found a place on the internet that wasn’t made by humans. The guys joked that it was SkyNet. But he said it w
|
“God have mercy on me…” he whispered, stepping through the hallway lined with loud gossip. “It’s been too long. Almost a week. I know I’m-”
“Surprise!” the gargantuan hands grabbed him from behind, slamming him against the locker. His books crashed to the ground with a thud, and he stared like a deer in headlights at the man before him.
“It’s been almost a week!”
“I… was just thinking that too.”
“So, you knew it was coming, huh, Christopher?” his posse of friends were laughing beside him, as other teenagers simply walked by, not the least bit concerned.
“Buzz… give me a break…”
“You had a break, Chrissy,” he ruffled his hair. “Almost a week.”
Christopher said nothing. He conceded defeat.
“Dammit…” Christopher whispered in anger, feeling unable to breathe.
His body was tightly pressed against the metal inner-lining of his locker. The only present light was through the three slits near the top of it; besides this, the locker was pitch black. His legs no longer hurt from standing the 55 minutes until class got out, or until the hall monitor or school security guard stumbled upon him. He’d had to do it too many times; it was routine now.
His grades, however, were beginning to suffer. The classes he missed due to this were hurting his GPA. He refused to dwell on that thought when trapped in the locker; it just made him all the more furious.
“I spend every other day in this damn locker…” he seethed. “I’m so sick of it… I-”
A shadow passed the slits of the locker, eclipsing the light. It didn’t move. He felt a pair of eyes cutting through the locker.
“Hello?”
There was no response. After another moment, he became less annoyed, and more frightened. Then a small piece of paper slid inside, thumping his chest. He caught it before it fell to the floor; had it reached the bottom of the locker, he’d have had no chance at picking it up. The shadow disappeared at that moment.
“What the hell…” he stared at the small note in his hand. “Hello?” he called. “Hey! Can you open this damn locker?!” The person never replied. “Bastard…” Christopher whispered. “What the hell is this, a fake love letter or something?” he opened the note.
The first thing he noticed was the awful handwriting. It was hardly legible, and written in a dark black ink. It slightly unnerved him; the formation of the letters looked, somehow, angry, to him. Perhaps it was their spiky structure, like the bubble surrounding an onomatopoeia in a comic book.
Aren’t you sick of this? They bully you. Frequently. But I understand.
-Ed.
He felt anxious as he held the note up in the dusty, faint locker light. He studied the words carefully.
“Ed… who’s Ed? Eddy Braxton…? Why would he… and he doesn’t go by Ed…”
He felt a sense of ominousness. What did the words mean? Who was present outside for only a moment, eclipsing the locker light? Who was Ed? And what exactly did he understand?
Chills crept down his spine as he stared at the note one last time, then folded it back up, sliding it into his pocket.
“I’ll just-”
“Christopher?” a voice caught him by surprise, startling him.
“Mr. Tiller,” he breathed in relief, “you scared me.”
“They put you in the locker again?” the janitor asked angrily. “Somebody needs to put a stop to those kids,” he twisted the lock left and right, having memorized the combination by heart at this point.
When it unlocked, he opened the locker, studying Christopher’s dark blue eyes and long brown hair.
“Thanks,” he stepped out. “And nobody will put a stop to them. Everything they do here at here Gehrig goes unnoticed. The principals don’t care. Not one bit. That’s why I always end up in there.”
The janitor sighed. “I’m going to do something about this,” he spoke his expected platitudinous promise.
Christopher nodded. Then, he felt the urge to ask a question.
“Hey… Mr. Tiller… did you see anybody walking by in the hall? Like, only a couple minutes ago?”
“I saw a boy,” Mr. Tiller responded. “Not sure who he was. He walked down the hall and took a left; didn’t see him after that. A tall fellow; looked like he had glasses, but I’m not sure. Why? Did you beg him to help you and he just walked on by?”
“No… I… don’t worry about it. Thanks for getting me out again.”
“Of course. I mean it, Christopher, I’m going to do something about this.”
“Thanks.”
The room was dark. Christopher’s back to his bed, he lay awake, his curtain open, allowing in the moonlight from outside, which illuminated the room just enough to read the words.
Aren’t you sick of this? They bully you. Frequently. But I understand.
-Ed
“Who is Ed…?” he contemplated it continually, without rest. “Ed… what is it you understand? Are you getting bullied too? Why didn’t you say anything…” chills crept down his spine again, and he decided to stop thinking about it for the night.
He folded the note and sat up. He set it on his desk, then crawled back into his bed, making his way under the covers. He tried to sleep, but the eerie interest kept him awake. All he could think about was the moment the light in the locker eclipsed, and he felt the stare of whatever was outside. It wouldn’t leave his mind. For some reason, as he considered the presence outside the locker, it didn’t feel human to him. It felt more like an entity or force. Perhaps it was because the person was so standoffish and strange, with a name unknown to him.
He opened his eyes. Staring at the roof, he took in a long, deep breath.
“I’ll be up all night thinking about this…” he sighed.
“Christopher,” a firm voice finally caught his attention, and his heavy eyelids raised, meeting the face of his teacher. “Wake up.”
Christopher sat up quickly, embarrassed and worried. “Sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“That’s thirty minutes of my class you’ve missed. I suspect your grade on tomorrow’s quiz will reflect that.”
She walked back to the front of the classroom, everybody now studying him, either laughingly or awkwardly. No one looked at him sympathetically.
He stared at the board dully, already feeling his eyelids grow heavy again as his racing heart slowed down.
Christopher opened his locker. To his shock, a book was present inside that he’d never seen before, with a note taped to it. He picked it up, analyzing it; it was an old, faded red notebook. The pages of the book were a yellowish-brown, having seemed to deteriorate from the once bright white loose-leaf that they were. He was about to open the notebook when he figured he’d check the note first. He pulled the tape off and opened it.
This is my gift to you. Read it carefully, and not at school. You can’t show anybody this notebook. Read it when you are alone. When you are finished, leave a note in your locker telling me what you think.
-Ed
“Ed…”
It slightly unnerved him to see the words written in the misshapen handwriting. Even the dark ink of the letters looked unnatural.
He placed the notebook back down in the locker, following the instructions. However, curiosity took over. He opened it slightly, eyeing the first page. From what he could tell, it was notes on American history. The handwriting was the same: hardly legible and dark.
“Something’s… wrong, here…” Christopher sighed. “I don’t know what… but this just isn’t right. How did… Ed… get in my locker? And this notebook looks so old… like’s it’s from the eighties or nineties. I don’t like this at all…” he shook his head.
He set the notebook down, shutting his locker. He turned around, and instantly noted the presence of Buzz coming up the hall. He dashed for his classroom, hoping Buzz hadn’t noticed him.
All Christopher could hear was the clock ticking. The school psychiatrist was making her pot of coffee like usual, leaving Christopher alone in the office. His elbow pressed against the table, he leaned on his palm, bored.
“I hate these Thursday meetings…” he grumbled. “I have better things to do than sit here while you make coffee…”
Then the journal came to mind. Despite how ominous it felt, he was also deeply curious about what he’d find inside. Every time he imagined it sitting in his backpack, he felt like Ed was nearby, watching him. Alone in the office, he stopped contemplating the notebook, and Ed, in hopes not to feel worried again.
Three minutes later, the psychiatrist returned. She had long, dark brown hair and caramel eyes behind glasses. She was in her late twenties, gorgeous to look upon. He used to feel butterflies when he saw her in the hall, but now, all he felt toward her was contempt. Her neglect of his problem seemed completely opposite of her job, and her tendency to make his situation seem like his fault infuriated him.
“Hey, Christopher,” she smiled, sitting down at the desk across from him, holding her cup of coffee.
“How was your day?”
“I didn’t get kicked or punched today. I wasn’t thrown into a locker either. So, it was okay.”
“Don’t be so negative, Christopher!” she touched his shoulder, slightly annoyed and slightly determined to change his mindset. “I told you! Your negativity only contributes to the problem.”
Christopher seethed. He decided that saying nothing was better than saying something and having her make things worse.
“Listen, Christopher. Buzz’s parents give a lot of money to the school. And Gehrig High School needs the money,” she rubbed his arm tenderly as he stared into her eyes, his tortured soul meaning nothing to her oblivious smile. “And they’re all just messing around! Anyway, if you weren’t so moody, I don’t think people wound pick on you as much. Look, Christopher: just take this all as a life lesson. There are gonna’ be mean people in the world sometimes; you need to deal with them. You’ll have bosses you don’t like, and…”
Christopher faded out. Once again, he was reminded why he hated everyone. Though he generally suppressed thoughts of anger, the school psychiatrist always made them blossom. In her office, he always came to a new dark conclusion. Today, while blocking her meaningless words, he realized that there wasn’t a single person at the entire school that he cared about. He started to think about if it would bother him if they all died. He lied to himself when he reached the epiphany that it wouldn’t.
Then he started thinking about how perhaps things would be easier if he himself died. Then nobody could hurt him anymore, or ignore him- and if they did ignore him, he’d be dead, so he wouldn’t have to experience it.
“Are you listening?”
“No one… understands…” he thought to himself. Then he remembered Ed. “They bully you. Frequently. But I understand.”
“Christopher?”
He looked at her uninterestedly. “Hmm.”
“Are you there? You know, ignoring somebody that’s trying to help you is rude, and…”
Christopher faded out again, thinking about Ed more. He couldn’t wait to get home and check the notebook now. Though, still, a strange sense of dread crowded his mind whenever the notebook, or Ed, came to mind. He wondered if he simply was unused to someone reaching out to him, if his mind was so confused by the idea of a possible friend that he simply felt worried. But it wasn’t the same worrying feeling.
He didn’t feel anxious. He didn’t feel nervous, or shy, or like he was going out of his comfort zone.
He felt like he was talking to a corpse. Maybe it was because Ed rhymed with dead. He’d joked about it to calm his nerves, but every time Ed came to mind, he remembered the feeling of the presence standing inches from his face, separated only by the dark locker. All he could feel when he considered that moment was dread.
If Ed did understand, why did he seem so sinister?
Then he began to ponder Ed’s reasoning. If Ed understood Christopher’s pain, it meant he was the victim of years of bullying and isolation as well, and perhaps lacked social ability. He was probably too shy to say anything, he thought, and that’s why he’d been writing him letters. He was lonely and shy, just like Christopher.
Ed almost felt normal at that moment, like nothing was wrong.
“But… how did he get in my locker…” the ambiguousness returned, and Ed felt paranormal again.
“Christopher!” the psychiatrist snapped. “I’m speaking to you!”
“I’m not listening,” he responded dully.
She looked at him in disgust.
“You wonder why people are mean to you. You’re such a brat, Christopher. Nobody respects you because you’re not respectable. You’re mean and selfish and-”
“Wow. I didn’t think your job was to insult insecure people. In fact, I always kinda’ thought it was to help them. So, either I always had it wrong in my head, or holy shit you suck at your job.”
He got to his feet as she exploded in a tirade about respect. He walked over to the door and she grabbed his hand, yanking him back. He pulled his hand back as she roared “You cussed at me! You’ll be in detention for-”
“You just put your hands on me in a confrontational way. If you want your job, you’ll shut the fuck up as I walk out this door.”
She seethed. Breathing heavily and angrily, she stared at him in contempt. He looked at her dully. His hand rose, hovering level to her face, extended close to her. His middle finger protruded. Then he turned and walked out of the office, closing the door behind him.
Christopher threw his backpack down on the floor. He unzipped it, placing his hands on the old red notebook. He made sure his bedroom door was locked. He put the note in the same drawer where he had put the first note, then sat down at his desk. He placed the notebook before him.
“Here we go…” he whispered, opening it to the first page.
He found descriptions of the founding of America, of the Revolutionary War, and of the Founding Fathers. All of it was written in the dark, strange handwriting. He flipped further into the book, finding only notes from a history class.
“It’s all just… notes…” he scratched his head. “Seriously… what was I supposed to get from this?”
He flipped to the end of the book. Here, he saw tens of equations, most more complex than any he could understand. He figured it was calculus. Then something caught his interest. “Edward Faust,” was written at the top left-hand corner, and beneath it was the date. “01-18-91.”
“Nineteen… ninety-one?” he whispered in confusion. “This homework is dated from January of 1991… The whole book even looks like it’s from 1991…” he stared at the old, faded, brownish pages. “Edward Faust is your name… Ed…”
He held the notebook. He was deeply confused that Ed had left it for him. He flipped around more, finding little; most of it was history notes, English notes, or equations. He found that Ed was highly linguistic, with a startling vocabulary. Throughout even his notes, he used many intelligent words, some of which Christopher didn’t even understand. Then he stumbled across something of interest. Unlike most of his notes, which were all crammed onto one page with little to no room for anything else to be written, this page was almost empty. The only thing on the page was a poem. It was titled “A Walk in Isolation.”
Christopher’s blue eyes fixed on the stanzas.
Once again this hall I walk,
Mired in isolation,
My ears assailed with profane talk,
And the hushed dealings of medication.
Invisible, I am unseen,
A specter haunting the faded halls,
With nothing better to do than
Read vulgar philosophies upon the stalls
I am alone, I tell myself,
But this is just a lie.
A lie I cannot fully stomach,
When, in the mirror, I meet my blackened eyes.
For I am noticed, I cannot deny,
As curled fists discover my face
With ease, as I am plainly visible,
But only to those whom I hate.
I cannot spend another year,
Attempting to justify their sins.
Not one more day. Not one more hour.
I will be heard. I will.
Christopher held the notebook in his hands, unable to look away from the poem. He had felt it all before. He felt as if he were reading his own mind, like it was all written exactly for him. Now he felt close to Ed. He did not understand some of the things that were happening; he didn’t understand the strange date on the notebook, or how Ed opened his locker.
But he understood Ed himself.
“I… This is… so strange…” he thought, when he remembered Ed’s instructions. He sat down, taking out a piece of paper and scribbling his thoughts on it.
Ed’s notebook sat in Christopher’s backpack constantly. He didn’t take it out during school or in public, but he felt safe with it on him. He felt as if Ed were nearby, perhaps protecting him. He almost considered the notebook a good luck charm.
He walked through the halls, remembering the poem. He’d memorized it accidentally; reading it so many times and resonating with the lines left him unable to forget a word of it. He whispered the lines to himself as he passed a group of students who all leaned against their lockers, cursing without hesitation.
He looked to his left, studying the brazen transaction among two students in the shadow of a vending machine, before they departed, each sliding what he received in his own jacket pocket.
“Ed…” he thought. “I wish… you were here… to walk these halls with me… I feel like I know you so well now. Edward Faust… It’s like, we’re brothers or something.”
He choked in agony as his back abruptly slammed against a locker. His eyes widened in fear as Buzz came into view, laughing and holding his phone in Christopher’s face, recording him as he began to punch him in the stomach. After five seconds, he let go of Christopher, turning and staring at his phone with a grin as if he’d simply played a small prank and recorded it.
“Send that to me!” one of his friends laughed, a perky girl, and he laughed, “I will, one sec!”
Christopher breathed heavily, his stomach in agony. He tried to stumble away but Buzz spoke, “Don’t go anywhere, Christopher.”
He froze. He waited dully.
“Not one more day. Not one more hour. I will be heard. I will.”
The words wrapped around his brain, and he almost felt like speaking them aloud, as if they were some type of savior’s gospel that could rescue him. Buzz picked his phone back up, recording Christopher again as he instructed, “Get in your locker, Christopher.”
Christopher glared at him, paying no mind to the camera.
“Hey, man, I could film myself shoving you in there,” his friends started laughing. “Don’t think I can’t do it one-handed.”
Christopher climbed into the locker. He stared at the camera in deep hatred, before the locker door slammed shut.
“Not one more day. Not one more hour. I will be heard. I will.”
Buzz’s laughs echoed through the hall, matched only by the chuckles of his friends. When the filming stopped, Buzz grinned, “I knew you’d make the right decision. That was hilarious; I just told you to go in and you did. You’re like my dog or something. Shit! That’s a great idea! I’m gonna’ bring a leash to school someday and make you wear it!” he laughed. “Damn. Well, it was nice talking to you, Christopher. And, hey. You’re welcome. You know, for the leg training I’ve been giving you. Standing the whole class period must’ve been hard for a pussy like you, but now you’re used to it.”
He high-fived one of his friends as he walked off with the group. Christopher was silent. Today, he was not furious. Today, he was not desperate. Today, he was not depressed. Ever since the discovery of the poem in Ed’s notebook, he started to feel in control. He felt as if these were only battles he was losing.
But he was going to win the war.
Thirty minutes elapsed of Christopher trying to get the notebook out of his backpack so he could read more of it, but he couldn’t get the backpack off his shoulders in the cramped space, nor could he reach into it from behind and remove the old red book.
Then, to his surprise, a shadow eclipsed the slits atop the locker. He knew it was Ed.
His heart exploded to life. He felt deep fear, as well as intense gratitude. He felt like speaking, but stayed silent. He waited for Ed to initiate things.
“Did you read my book, Christopher?”
Christopher was taken aback. Ed’s voice was nothing like he imagined. It was deep, regal, powerful, godly. He sounded, perhaps, like a news anchorman or radio talk show host. Christopher could barely breathe for some reason, as if a mythical creature he’d always believed in were now before him, indisputably.
“I did. I didn’t understand a lot of it… I mean, I understood it, but I don’t get why you wanted me to read it. I read your poem, though. ‘A Walk in Isolation.’ I loved it. It’s an amazing poem… I completely know how you feel.”
Ed was quiet. “You didn’t read through the book. You missed the most important part. You skipped the middle.”
Christopher felt embarrassed. “Yeah… the beginning was all notes, so I skipped to the end to see if it changed. The end was all equations. I… I found your poem, and another page that was weird… it looked like homework… it was dated from 1991.”
Ed had no response. There was a strange period of prolonged silence. However, the light never returned to the locker. This meant Ed was still outside.
“I want you to read the middle tonight. It might be a little confusing. I’m sorry about my handwriting, as well. Anyway, there’s a trick to reading what I wrote. You’re smart, Christopher; you’ll figure it out. And… for what it’s worth… thank you. For your regards concerning my poem.”
“Mm-hm…” he replied.
“Christopher?”
“Yes, Ed?”
“I’m going to open your locker now, so you can get out. But you have to promise me something.”
He felt like asking him how he knew his combination, but instead simply responded, “Yes?”
“Don’t look at me. I don’t want you to come out until you count to thirty.”
The instructions deeply perplexed him. “Okay.”
He heard Ed’s long fingers twist the lock left and right, accompanied by clicking sounds.
Clank.
He set the lock on the ground. The light seeped in through the locker again as Ed’s footsteps reverberated softly down the hall. It took everything in Christopher’s body not to look at Ed. When he reached twenty-five, he could hold back no longer.
He opened the locker door, scanning the hall for anything. He found nothing. He sprinted over to the end of the hall, taking a left, going the same direction Mr. Tiller had described Ed going the last time. Now he saw a tall male in the distance, wearing an old blue flannel shirt. He had short, dark hair and glasses. The male was far into the parking lot of the school. He finally disappeared past a van.
“Wow…” Christopher whispered. “That… that was Ed… I could barely see him, but… He didn’t look like he was in his late thirties. He sounded like it, though…”
It shocked him that he’d finally heard the voice of the phantom that kept him wide awake at night. Now he could slightly imagine the presence standing outside the locker that day. It dawned on him that Ed had to be tall; if he blocked the locker slits with his body, that meant his head was level with the top of the locker. Even Buzz wasn’t that tall.
He was in awe of Ed. His voice and vocabulary seemed mismatched with his poor handwriting. He wished Ed had stayed and they could sit and talk.
When he got home that afternoon, he dashed to his bedroom, hoping to lock the door and begin reading the middle of the red book. However, his mother’s voice bellowed, “Christopher! Don’t you go running off to your room! You’ve got chores to do! And homework! Do you even check your grades? It’s ridiculous… just ridiculous…” she sighed disdainfully.
“Come on…” Christopher gritted his teeth.
He dropped his backpack in his room, then walked into the living room, finding her placing cleaning chemicals on the counter.
It was nine PM. He’d finally escaped his mother’s disappointed lectures and her tedious assignments. He closed his bedroom door, locking it. Now he removed the book. Deep interest accompanied his slight fear of what he’d find. Ed was still shrouded in mystery, and sometimes, the contemplation of Ed left Christopher feeling as if he’d just finished a horror movie.
He wanted to know what the “most important part was.” He hoped it would give him closure, explain why Ed had reached out to him in the first place, and all the weird feelings he’d received from the ordeal. He flipped the book open to the middle.
He saw intricate sketches of something, but he was unable to tell what it was. The drawings were impeccable; they looked like a diagram he’d find in a science book. There were words all throughout the page, placed amongst the sketches, but he couldn’t read them.
They looked as if they were written in another language. Ed’s terrible handwriting didn’t help. He studied it all, trying to figure out what it meant. Then he noticed one of the letters.
“Wait…” he whispered. “That looks like… an upside-down, backward, cursive letter ‘R.’”
Deeply interested, he walked over to the mirror in his room. He flipped the notebook upside down and backward. Now the writing became immediately legible. It was all in cursive, and Ed’s handwriting was not stellar, but he could read the words. Then he noticed the sketches become easier to comprehend, as they were drawn backward and upside down.
“These look like… bombs.”
He almost dropped the notebook. He began reading the words. Within them were lists of materials needed, and careful, descriptive instructions concerning how to build several types of bombs. His hands began to shake as he held the book in the mirror, reading Ed’s manual of destruction.
He flipped the page, finding blueprints of a building.
“This… this is Gehrig High…” he noticed the four large buildings, all across from each other in the shape of a diamond. “This is the A Building… here are the B and C Buildings… and there’s the D Building… But what’s all this?” he noticed certain dots on areas of the blueprints, like something was indicated to be there.
He began reading the text. From what he could tell, three bombs were indicated to be placed, one at the north side of the A Building, one at the west side of the B Building, and one at the east side of the C building. Also, smaller bombs seemed to be located in the school in random locations, with titles like “A144” and “C180.”
He dropped the book. His hands were shaking as he stepped back, absolutely horrified by it.
“What the fuck is this…” he whispered, eyes fixed on the book as if it were Ed himself, smirking at him. “Who is Ed… Who is he…”
He closed the book. It unnerved him to even have it next to him. He sat down before his computer, typing into Google, “Edward F.”
The moment he typed the F, it suggested “Edward Faust.”
He clicked on it. A picture appeared on the screen of a tall male with a blue flannel on. He had glasses and short, dark hair, and was looking at the camera with no smile. The picture seemed as if were taken decades ago. Underneath Ed’s name was the title “Attempted Mass-murderer.”
“What the fuck…” he whispered, reading it. Beneath that, his birth date and death date were present: “August 24th, 1972-March 18th, 1991.”
His heart froze completely. He stared into Ed’s eyes on the computer screen. He was sure that this was the figure he’d seen outside his school earlier. He clicked on the first website that was accessible, a news article from 2011.
It’s been two decades since arsonist and murderer Edward Faust died in what could only be considered the will of God occurring. Edward Faust, a senior at Gehrig High School in 1991, became what America today considers, ‘America’s first modern school-shooter.’ Though Columbine stole much of Faust’s recognition from the spotlight, it can’t be denied that had Faust actually been able to carry out his plan, the destruction associated with it would have left Columbine a minor tragedy.
Christopher could barely read the words. He felt like Ed was standing outside his door, watching him panic. He hated having Ed’s notebook next to him.
Much of Edward Faust’s plan to wreak destruction on Gehrig High School has been classified by police, in order to prevent any from attempting to do it. This leads to the common speculation that Faust’s plan was not only too sinister for the public’s ears, but perhaps so effective that it is kept from the eyes of civilians. All that is known is that Faust, an expert bomb-maker, planned on detonating three large bombs at the school, one in the school’s A Building, one in the school’s B Building, and one in the school’s C Building. However, many questions are left unanswered concerning the mass killing that almost reshaped the country of America itself. First, among the three large bombs, nearly twenty other smaller bombs were found. Their purpose in the plan is unknown. It is believed that Faust owned both a rifle and a pistol, but there is no direct evidence pointing to this; at least, publicly accessible evidence. The only definitive answer to what would have happened that day had Edward not perished lies in a book confiscated by police, known only as “The Red Book.” The Red Book was a journal in which Faust descriptively plotted his plan. Within it are also detailed descriptions of how to make the bombs he’d built. Police have confiscated the book, and it has been kept hidden ever since.
“No… it’s… it’s in my bedroom…” Christopher stared at The Red Book. “It’s… right fucking next to me…”
Faust was infamous for building military-grade bombs. Unlike the situation with Columbine, in which many of the bombs failed to detonate, it is speculated that Faust’s bombs would have detonated with lethal punctuality. The Red Book is thought to be so carefully guarded because of how effective Faust’s bombs were. It’s also noted that the descriptions in the book concerning the construction of the bombs is very easy to understand, written so that anybody could build them if they followed the directions carefully. No one except police and Faust himself have read The Red Book, but we can’t deny it would be morbidly interesting to hear the details of the plan considered by police as ‘expertly crafted and militaristically brilliant.’
“I… I’ve read it…”
Christopher held The Red Book. He could hardly restrain the intense emotion driven from touching it. He was astonished to be holding this piece of American history, this item that almost changed the shape of the country forever.
“What happened to him… why didn’t his plan ever happen…” Christopher scratched his head anxiously, scrolling to the bottom of the article.
Faust’s death was just as mysterious as his writings. One day, in his basement, where he built all his bombs, it is believed that he did something wrong while crafting an explosive. It detonated, killing him and his mother, destroying their house and damaging surrounding houses. While this was at first believed to be one of his larger bombs, it was later discovered this was far smaller than the three bombs he’d built and plotted to leave in the A, B, and C Buildings. The explosion prompted police to investigate, and within the week, they discovered a storage unit Faust had rented, which was loaded with the bombs he’d constructed. The Red Book is believed to have been in the storage unit as well, though some speculate it was destroyed in the initial explosion, and only pages of The Red Book were present in the storage unit. The bombs were quickly confiscated by police and hidden from the public, though one photo was taken of the bombs being transported from the scene by a reporter that dashed behind crime scene lines. The picture is below.
He looked at the picture. It was blurry and in poor resolution; a police officer was close to the camera, raising his hands to block the shot, but in the background, a truck could be seen, with three tall, ominous bombs sitting in its bed. They looked exactly like the drawings he’d seen in The Red Book. He estimated that the other smaller bombs were in the truck, too small to be seen in the flatbed.
The police at first were opposed to the photo being released, but years later, they allowed it to be shown, after hundreds of demands from Gehrig Town locals to see the weapons that almost marked the end of their lives. To this day, great tragedies have occurred: 911, Columbine, and Sandy Hook are several examples. But it is absolutely definite that had things not happened differently in March of 1991, Gehrig High would be a word none of us would grow up in America without knowing.
Christopher hit the back button, eyes meeting Ed’s eyes again.
“You… you’re dead… but you’re not. You came to my school… you gave me… The Red Book. You’ve been talking to me…”
His whole body was trembling. He knew it was real, and yet still, it felt like some long, drawn-out nightmare, or a horrible hallucination. He opened The Red Book again. He looked at the handwriting, the dark ink, imagining Ed sitting in his basement, plotting the mass-murder of hundreds of teenagers, teachers and civilians.
“Not one more day… not one more hour… I will be heard… I will…” Christopher whispered. The words all made sense now. It disgusted him that he began to fe
|
I never really liked my sister. I mean, of course, I love her, but we’ve never quite gotten along. It’s more than just that “sister rivalry” thing. Even as I stand here now on her front lawn, I guess I’m where I’ve always been with Madeline- torn, caught between two very different girls. But I’m getting ahead of myself. It all had to start somewhere, childhood, I suppose. Even then we were completely different people, our personalities clashing, hard sometimes. She was already eight when I was born, all of a sudden someone else to share your parents with, unwelcome and hogging all the spotlight. And to Madeline? Someone who was NOT about to tag along and get in the way of her… plans.
Everything was always planned with her, and I was never a part of them. Madeline was that overachieving kid at school you hated; before that, she was the catty 4th grader who gossiped behind your back. And growing up, I was one of those bookish types, quiet and small. And THEN I’d come home from school only to find Maddy, my own personal bully, waiting for me. That’s when I started to play that weird little game. She’d lock me in the closet, and as I sat there in the dark (I know it sounds dumb, but I was so young then) I would close my eyes and wish I had a twin.
Maybe it’d even the odds- two younger, quieter girls against one bossy older sister. Or maybe I just wanted somebody else to play with, someone I could share my things with. Whatever the reason, I had a little “mantra” I would say: “I wish I had my twin. I wish she was here.” But no matter how hard I tried to activate some imaginary power, the ‘twin’ never appeared. And so we grew up. Once college time came for Madeline, we mostly went our separate ways, and BOY, did she climb that social ladder like her life depended on it- graduated with honors, married the “boy next door,” had a baby and now she’s got her own office assisting in a law firm while, you guessed it, she’s studying for the bar exam.
And me? I’m not aiming nearly so high. Dad teaches in high school, and I guess I took after him, because I’m an English major and could see myself teaching one day, but maybe to younger kids. I love kids, especially my niece, the only thing that keeps Maddy and I less distant these days- I stay close to her daughter, Ella, because I worry she’s not getting enough of what she needs at home. She’s a shy kid, like me, only six, and her mom already pushes her around when she’s not ignoring her completely. I don’t want to see her go through what I did with Madeline, so I try to make it over there when I can, to give her someone she can play with or talk to. Maybe that’s why I’m in this whole mess now… my concern for little Ella.
It was only this morning I rolled out of bed, ready for another usual day in the life of a college junior when it’s turned out to be ANYTHING but that. Usually, it was a morning chat and Starbucks with my roommate, a theatre girl, and the yin to my yang, named Ashley. Then Lit class, lunch to finish any homework, then one of those crappy Chem courses I take just for the credits. When school’s done, I go back to our campus apartment to veg out for a couple of hours, then work nights at the Denny’s. Sure, it’s not as glamorous as what Madeline has, but I can’t help smiling to myself when I think about the cute busboy at work, while she’s stuck with some Home Depot manager named Eddie who can’t even grow a beard, so… I’m gonna chalk that up as a win for ol’ Becky.
I awoke looking a bit pale, hoping it wasn’t the flu, but was already late to meet Ashley for coffee and rushed down the path. But when I got there, my smile met with a confused look from Ash. “I was actually just about to leave,” she told me, latte in hand. “I didn’t think we were meeting today- I mean, I was coming over, but then I saw you.” This took me aback, but she continued, her eyes narrowed and probing. “Weren’t you JUST in the dining hall?” I felt a little queasy now… Ashley had known me for YEARS. She knows what I look like.
“Wait, wait… you saw someone you maybe THOUGHT was me?” I asked. “Ash, I wasn’t at the dining hall. I just came from our place, thought I’d be late ‘cause I’m just, a little sick today. But I wasn’t there. Maybe somebody really looks like me.”
Ashley’s eyes changed from questioning to wide. I knew she wouldn’t fake me out like this. “No, no. Becky, it WAS you. Is this like, a joke?”
Surely there’d been a mistake. “At the dining hall- what was ‘I’ doing there?”
“Just, um… just sitting and eating.” She looked down at her coffee. “Maybe you should go see for yourself.”
I’ve got long, dark hair, like a bunch of other girls, and I’m 20, like half the kids on campus. So I rationalized, and put on a goofy face, waving my fingers in mock horror. “Ooooh, a secret clone. Maybe I SHOULD go meet this mysterious Becky number two, huh?” But Ash was serious.
“You’re… probably right,” she nodded, touching my arm with a smile before she started to the door, off to class herself. “Don’t worry. Millions of people in the world, right? You know what they say- everybody’s got a twin.”
A chill ran through me, but I said a quick goodbye, then decided I needed to know. The next building over held the dining hall, and I rushed across the grass to see this ‘mystery girl,’ suddenly feeling like that nervous little kid again. I made my way through Bishop Hall but as I got to the cafeteria stairs, I found myself weak, and not just from running. I was all at once so tired, like I hadn’t slept in days, but my determination was strong, and I slowly pulled one leg up in front of the other. Sweating and gasping as I climbed, I wondered what the Hell was wrong with me. I’m not in this bad of shape by a LONG shot. I made it to the top barely in time to see her, and froze.
There was a girl that looked exactly like me, in a purple tank top and jeans, placing her tray by the kitchen and walking away towards the quad. The sweat on my skin went cold. She was IDENTICAL. The hair, the face, everything. My mind raced but I simply couldn’t find any good explanation, and I went lightheaded. It was all too much. With the girl gone, whoever she was, I trudged all the way back to our apartment and ran to the bathroom to puke. When I was washing up, I caught my reflection in the mirror.
My face was grey and sallow, bags under my eyes, hair a dull mess. I groaned from exhaustion and climbed back into bed, figuring, fuck the class. I could afford to miss one Lit session, but not science, so I set my phone for an hour-long nap, and took an aspirin on the bedside stand for the gnawing pain settling behind my eyes. With that, I passed out in the soft embrace of my pillow. When the alarm jerked me awake, I looked even worse, head now throbbing. I changed into a long-sleeved shirt, shivering, thinking I’d need to see a doctor- but after class. My hands shook as I slung my bag over one shoulder and headed to the building.
I shuddered in the wind, even though it was just a light California breeze. That girl… I couldn’t stop picturing it, but tried to focus. With some difficulty, I made it up the few short steps and opened the class door only to find my professor, Mrs. Broche, with a look of befuddlement. “Becky, were you not just… wearing a different outfit?” My heart skipped a beat. No, no, this was all wrong.
“I, uh- think you have me mixed up with a different student-“ My hands searched through my bag for the paper due that day, mind boggled as dizzying spots danced before my eyes. “Here’s my essay, Mrs. Broche…”
The old woman gave me a concerned smile and rested her hand on my arm, the skin clammy. “Honey, you already handed your paper in. You JUST did. Do you… want to sit down?”
I slowly withdrew my hands from the bag, eyes darting around the room at the funny stares of my classmates. “I… did? Was I, um, just in here?”
My lab partner piped up with an uncertain tone. “Becky, I just saw you give her the paper. You alright?” I felt faint, dripping with sweat, but quietly choked out, “I’m fine.” No one looked like they bought it, and I tried to smile and glanced at the clock. Technically class didn’t start for another two minutes. “I’m just gonna go get some air, OK?”
The teacher nodded, finally taking her hand off me. “That sounds good, Becky. We won’t be getting underway just yet.” Panic gripped my head like a vice as I stumbled out into the hall, and I saw a guy I knew, another English major, Dean. My heart sank with the weight of his words.
“Weren’t you just here?” Dean gestured. “Going the… other way?”
I weakly assured him, “Musta been someone else, heh,” and he walked off as I slowly followed down the hall he’d indicated, feeling worse with every step. By the time I’d made it to the girl’s bathroom I could barely summon the strength to open the door, but in I went, and as it shut behind me there she was. The twin I always wanted. The girl from the dining hall. Just standing there, washing her hands, and as she turned she wasn’t even surprised to see me.
“Becky, what’s wrong?” she asked in a voice of genuine worry. She looked like she actually cared about how ill I was, as I slumped against the bathroom wall, the tile cool against my hot, moist skin. As my head spun I watched my bookbag slide down beside me, limp on the floor, and I turned to see her approaching.
“Who the Hell ARE you?” I said hoarsely. On her way over from the sink she faltered, leaving the water running as she gradually came toward me, and I scrabbled against the wall to get away.
“Don’t you know me? I’m your… sister…” She doubled over with a look of pain, clutching her stomach and wailing. My twin still tried haltingly to walk to me, and I was helpless to do anything but wave my hands in defense and push myself toward the stalls by shuffling my shoes. “We’re twins!”
“I’m not… your twin,” I told her between breaths. “I don’t have a twin, and I don’t… know who you are…” My head was splitting and my stomach felt ready for another round of vomit.
The girl was hurt, confused. “But I’m supposed to be here- this is our SCHOOL, Becky. Do you not- remember?” The sink was overflowing behind her, its water slowly pooling as she continued to grab at her belly, taking an uneasy step. “This is our- our life. I don’t understand.” She winced, her face going white. “Becky, what’s wrong?”
“YOU’RE what’s wrong!” I lay half-propped against the wall, the rest of me sprawled upon the tile, my whole body reeling.
My twin just gave a small, sad shake of her head. “I don’t know why we’re both so sick,” she told me, struggling on her feet. “I’ve been like this- ugh- all day.” I could tell she was really hurting.
“So have I,” I told her. This was crazy- I refused to believe I was in the girl’s bathroom, talking to a TWIN I never fucking had. No, this was something else, I reasoned to myself. I just had a fever… a really high one. Just a fever…
I reached trembling for the door to try and call for help, but it was so hard, and I was so very, very tired… my arm fell dead to the floor as I drifted in and out of consciousness on the tiles. All I could hear was the sound of my twin crying in pain, now down on her knees but still crawling to me, shaking violently. I tried to stay awake, tried to hold onto the feeling of the cool wetness that slowly spread under my legs. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her, skin now ashen and nose bleeding from both nostrils, croaking, “Sis… Becks, please…”
A monstrous agony taking hold of me, I used all the strength I had left to reach for her arm, but she twisted and pulled away, trying to get to her feet. She slipped in the puddle of still-running tap water and all at once I saw her fall back, bashing her head down on the sink corner and tumbling limp onto the ground, neck cocked at an odd angle. Oh God. Was she-? Just as quickly as she had dropped, the haze in my mind began to clear, and the harsh grip of pain suddenly released my body. My skin now flushing with new vigor, I sat up in the water and looked over.
Her brown eyes were locked, open and lifeless. A terrible sorrow flooded into me, and I locked the bathroom door from the inside and carefully made my way over to the body, shutting the damned sink off for good. With newfound energy I kneeled down and cradled my twin as her black, soaking hair fell loosely around me and the blood flowed freely from a gash in the back of her head. To my surprise, tears began streaming down my cheeks as I quietly said to her, “Maybe you were my twin. I asked for you, and you… you actually came…”
Maybe I was responsible for this. Maybe neither of us had to die, no matter how sick we’d become. Maybe this girl had her own life this entire time, living it out with no idea that I was living mine without her. Gently closing those staring dead eyes, I had no idea what to do, and considered calling for help. “I’m so sorry,” I told her. I grabbed a wad of paper towels and wiped away the bloody water. I couldn’t just leave her like this. My health rushing back to me, I finished with the tile, patting away the last traces of blood before I went to carefully clean off the wound on her head.
I gingerly propped her up between the back wall and the handicapped toilet railing of the last stall, biting my lip as my mind raced when I realized what the world would see- they’d think it was ME dead in there. I tucked my arm beneath her knees and tried to pull her legs up onto the rim of the toilet so no one would see her, shutting her inside and wondering who to call first. The police? My mom? God, as if anyone would ever BEGIN to believe me… As if to reply, the sound of my phone ringing made me jump, still in my bag across the room.
I hurried over to see it was Madeline, and answered. “Rebecca- oh, thank God you picked up!” Just as it did before, my heart began beating hard against my chest. I had never heard my sister speak in such a way. She sounded disturbed, frightened, practically UNHINGED. She kept going, a mile a minute. “I don’t know what to do, fuck, I don’t know what to do! You have to come, or… someone has to come here and get me, oh, Jesus.”
“Maddy, where are you?”
“I’m at the office.” Her voice was ragged and muffled, like she was hiding. “Something terrible- no, something IMPOSSIBLE is going on.” At this, I felt an uneasy tingle at the back of my throat, as she explained, “I, I was here, you know, working. Then on my lunch break I called my landline at home like I always do… to check my messages. Rebecca, I called the phone when no one was home. And someone picked up. I picked up.”
I scrambled to find my words. “What do you mean?”
“I mean it was ME! It was fucking me, myself, picking up the goddamned telephone! I am TERRIFIED, Becca. I’ve been retching over the sink for half an hour and I… I think I’m sick. Maybe even hospital sick.” That was it. I shook all over, holding the phone to my ear so hard I thought it might snap, and whispered back to her, “I think I know what’s going on, Maddy.”
“What? How could you have ANY idea what’s happening.” That was Madeline- dismissive even in the face of sheer, unadulterated madness. I grabbed up my bag and with one last, apologetic look back, unlocked the door and fled the building. “All I know is, there’s some stranger in my house right now, and I need your help, Becca. PLEASE!” I bounded across the grass toward my parking lot. “I need you to come and pick me up… I’m too dizzy to drive.”
“Alright, I told you, I think I know what’s up. I’m coming, okay?”
She practically shrieked at me. “Look, right now I need your CAR and your ASSISTANCE, not your… theories, Rebecca! Just, please hurry.” I felt a little indignant, but she WAS my sister, and if a twin had suddenly popped up in my life… I was already starting the car.
“I’m on the way,” I tried to reassure her. “Just stay where you are, right?”
Madeline laughed until it was broken by a chesty cough, telling me wryly, “I couldn’t go anywhere even if I wanted to. Just drive fast.” With her office in the next town over, I kept her on the line as I drove, and she only got sicker. “I’m not gonna be able to get my work done,” she told me faintly.
“Don’t worry about that, Maddy. Something… really terrible happened.” I pushed back the threat of more tears and took a sharp corner in her direction.
My sister sounded confused, like she was speaking through a fog. “…What?”
“I saw- I saw my own twin.” The light was yellow but I went right through it and kept my foot down hard on the gas. “Listen, I’m not joking with you. I had this stupid game as a kid and I like, I wanted my own twin, alright?” There was nothing but the sound of her breathing, and I feared for her, trying to evoke a response. “So today I see this other girl, this like, ‘twin’ of mine. And seeing her made me really sick, too.”
“You were sick?” Thank God, she was still conscious.
“Yeah, but the twin, she’s…” I fell silent for a minute. “She’s gone, now, and I feel like myself again.” Maybe she’d been there all along. Maybe if I’d just kept my distance… but I didn’t tell Maddy that. I didn’t know what else to tell her; only that I was coming.
As I closed in on her office she said, “Then maybe… maybe I really have a twin at my house. Oh, God.” She sighed. “She could be stealing my clothes, touching all my things, and God only knows what else…”
“I’m pulling in!” I shouted, frantically leaving the car running in a nearby spot. As I was about to hang up with her, jogging to the door, I told her, “I’m on my way in.” That’s when she suddenly interjected, “Oh my God, Rebecca- I think you’re actually right. Oh my God…” Then I heard a thud, as if she had dropped onto the floor, and I called “Maddy!” before finally hanging up, as I was already inside.
I rushed through the busy office, ignoring everyone that tried to greet me, telling them, “Sorry, I’ve got to go see my sister- she isn’t feeling well.” I found Madeline lying partly beneath her desk, the phone off the hook next to her pale, cold hands as she looked up at me in fear. “It’s OK, it’s OK,” I told her as I pulled her up to lean against me, and we started to make our way out as quickly as she could go. A woman poked her head out of a cubicle and said, “Not quite yourself, huh, Mads?” But we kept going, and once at the car I laid her down in the backseat, as my sister moaned with confusion.
Sweat poured from her in a fever, her freckled face suddenly so white and thin. “Thanks…” she told me, as I buckled myself in and set a course for her house, not far off.
“Madeline- stay awake. Tell me what you meant, when you said I was ‘right’.” I drove nervously, looking around for nothing in particular, as if this “other” sister was going to suddenly pop up.
From behind me Maddy laughed. “Ironic, really,” she said, disoriented. “When I was a girl, I wished too… I wished I could be in two places at once.” A few coughs escaped her. “You know, like, one ‘me’ could be at school and the other at home. One working and one with Ella. Like when she was a baby- GOD, she was so much work.” Now she was coughing profusely, bordering on delirious.
“Hang on,” I told her firmly. “We’ll be there in just a couple minutes, OK?”
Even as I sped through the suburban streets and she groaned, she continued to babble on. “Maybe I brought this… this ‘twin’ on too, huh?” Another laugh mixed with coughs. “Stretching myself so thin I needed another pair of hands to take care of it all.” It was the next street over now, and from behind me her voice said darkly, “ Ella will be getting home from school.”
“Look, Maddy! We’re here, we’re here…” My words faded as I pulled up to the curb of the house next door to hers, and opened the backseat door to find her coughing up bits of blood and phlegm, growing weaker by the minute. I took her hand and implored, “Hang on.” I tried to form a semblance of a plan, looking over the grass at her house. What would I do face-to-face with this… this Madeline-Twin? But my sister cut through my thoughts with her gravelly words.
“Your ‘twin’ person,” she said to me. “What happened? How did you- get better?”
Hesitantly, I started, “I regret it so much, Maddy… she DIED. It was an accident, I swear, and-“ Suddenly we both heard it: the lurching creak of a school bus coming to a stop just ahead of us. Ella was now getting off the steps and spotted me, waving. “Oh God- just hang on!”
I jumped over a bike laying in the neighbor’s yard and ran, the little girl starting up the concrete steps to my horror. I screamed to her, “That’s not your mother!” and waved my arms in panic, and Ella turned with a perplexed look as I stopped dead in my tracks at the startling sight of “Madeline-Twin.” The front door swung fully open. There she stood with a huge smile on her face, her brown hair pulled into a messy bun, wearing denim slacks caked in flour. A plate of chocolate chip cookies cooled on the table beside her as the woman bent down to embrace the still-confused Ella in a big, loving hug.
She leaned in tight and looked over the little girl’s shoulder at me with a warm, knowing smile. I was shocked into silence, watching motionless as she pulled back, kneeling at Ella’s level. “Why did Auntie Becca say that?” she asked her ‘mother,’ and Madeline-Twin simply shrugged it off. “Nahh, we’re just playing a silly game.” She crinkled her nose at the girl to put her at ease. “Isn’t that right, Aunt Becky?” She stood with a wave and said, “Why don’t you come on in? Maybe you should let your friend in the car have a rest… she IS very tired.”
I snapped my head back to see the real Madeline, her face half-sticking out from the backseat and wheezing, looking as taken aback as I was. She told me in a wobbly voice, “Get… the bitch. Now… get her!”
Madeline-Twin was kissing and doting on Ella, telling her to be careful, the cookies were still hot. “Is it your birthday? We don’t EVER make stuff together!” the girl giggled. This woman, this mom-who-wasn’t, just laughed, telling her with some fatigue, “Every day is a good day for baking with my special girl. And Mommy got off work early today.”
“Really?” Ella beamed.
“Yup, tummy ache, so no cookies for me. Closed up early.”
I struggled to find my voice and came up empty, turning to watch as my actual sister languished in my car, impatiently waving her hand at me. “Kill her, she’s with Ella! Jesus, Rebecca! DO SOMETHING!” Meanwhile her ‘twin’ took the girl gently by the hand. I glanced back and forth between them in uncertainty. One sister wasting away, still shouting orders at me. The other now moving into the hall, chatting with Ella behind an open door with a motherly hand on her shoulder. And so here I am. Stuck. It’s like I said- I never really liked my sister.
|
ALONE
By
Craig Peterson
The dream was the same as the night before, and the night before that and the night before that….
Mathew Scott hadn’t slept well in a long time, hell, he wasn’t sure he had slept at all lately.
When would it stop?
When did it start?
He “woke up” from his sleepless slumber just like every night. A frazzled mess. Sweat coated his skin from head to toe. The confusion was so great, it was a sensation he had never known. At first, his surroundings were nonexistent but would slowly crawl back to him.
The faint glow of his digital alarm clock on the nightstand was just bright enough to make the area around his bed visible, barely. Beyond that, nothing. Without his glasses, he would have to squint to make out the digits on the clock. But there was no need for them, he knew what time it was without even looking at the time box. He knew the time because since the night visions started, he woke up….or was brought back from whatever world he was stuck in at exactly 3:39 AM.
He sat up and reached for the pad of paper and pen he kept next to the alarm clock. This was new for him. After having the dream for what must have been a couple of weeks, he became annoyed that he couldn’t remember much of anything about it. After talking with his twin sister Michele about this, she suggested placing the tablet close by and encouraged him to write down whatever came to mind as soon as possible. He and Michele were very close and he referred to her not only as his sister but his best friend. Matt thought that to be great advice. Michele was studying to be a psychiatrist and had done some research on dreams. She told him that once a person was awake, the memory of any dream faded just as quick as it was conceived. It couldn’t hurt.
With his mind racing, he frantically searched for a memory of his nightmare. He closed his eyes hoping that would help bring something to him. He was gripping the pen so tightly that he could feel it bend to the point of breaking. Suddenly, images raced through his mind. Pictures like a slide show. They were there, but nothing made sense. He started to shake. Sweat was running down his forehead. Without really knowing it, he started to scratch something on the pad. A sudden shutter ripped through his body, up his spine and into his head. A ringing started in his ears but stopped almost the instant it started.
Silence.
3:39
He reached for his glasses and slipped them on. He wanted to see what he had written down, at least he thinks he had written it. There was one word printed on the paper. One word that covered the entire
8 ½ by 11 page. Not only written, engraved into the tablet.
ALONE
**********
In the morning over a cup of strong black coffee, Mathew sat at the kitchen table talking to Michele on the phone. After describing what had occurred, Mathew waited anxiously for his sister’s evaluation. With only a one word conclusion to the dream, Michele was unable to shed any light on the subject. She encouraged him to keep the notepad nearby and try it again.
As evening quickly approached and gave way to night, Mathew found himself lying on the couch in his den watching a ballgame. With pad and pen on the floor, he felt himself start to doze off. His eyelids would slowly glide down and wash out the glow from the TV and bring him into darkness only to shoot wide open as if he were trying to fight sleep, which would be the furthest thing from the truth. Finally, his eyes closed and there was no shutter or glimmer of the TV.
He woke with such violence that he could have sworn his bed jumped up and shifted over a few inches. Perspiration lathered his face and arms. The blurred light that caught the corner of his eye was to weak to be that of his television. He swiveled his head around and saw the three digits on his alarm clock.
3:39
Just in front of the alarm clock was the pen and paper. He grasped for them and started to write. With the same intensity as the night before, something was being put to paper. In a manner that Mathew wasn’t really sure was of his own power. While writing, visions filled his head. A lot of darkness interrupted by strikes of light. Something appeared at the end of this light. With each flash, the object was getting closer. The light was getting brighter and faster. With each flash, he felt his breath getting heavier and heavier. The unknown item was getting closer, closer. Breathing so loud it was deafening. Than, an empty void. One more grand burst of light. He saw it. A door.
He felt quivers run through his body. The pen had fallen from his hand but the pad of paper was going nowhere. How had he gotten to his bed? He didn’t remember waking up and walking from the den. Perhaps he never fell asleep in the den, an extension of his dream. None of that really mattered right now. He reached over to the end table and twisted the knob on the small lamp. His hands were so sweaty that he had a hard time twisting the switch to the on position. He glanced down at the tablet and was bewildered at what he saw. First off, this was the second page in the bonded tab. Since he had written the word ‘alone’ with such force the night before, the imprint was clearly visible. Accompanying the word was a picture. It was a door. A wooden door with one distinctive marking. Located on the top half of the door was the letter M. This was a door from his childhood. It was his sister’s childhood bedroom door.
Once again, Mathew found himself at the kitchen table. Two cups of coffee down, countless to go. This time, it was his phone that rang. He looked down at his cell and saw his sisters face glowing on the screen. She really must be anxious to hear the latest episode of his nightly freak show. He spilled out the details to her and finished by telling her of his drawing, excluding the specifics of the door. She listened intently and asked a few questions. Mostly about the light and the breathing to which he had no answer. She was trying to help and he could only offer up what he remembered. She paused for a second or two after he was done describing the events. “Did the door look familiar?” She asked.
“I’m not sure”, he lied. “Tell you what, let me text you a picture so you can see it.”
“Ok”. Within a minute her phone buzzed with the receipt of the incoming picture. She looked at it. After a few seconds she realized she was holding her breath in. As she exhaled, the back of her neck tingled. “Mathew, that’s my door.”
“I know”, he admitted. They talked for a few minutes and ended the conversation with the agreement that they would talk again the next morning.
Tonight, Mathew wanted nothing to do with falling asleep in the den. He had come to the realization that no matter where he fell asleep, he would wake in his bed….. at 3:39. Sleep came easy this night. Well, the act of falling asleep did. It was what happened on the other side of sleep that was difficult.
His scream was so loud, it was surely heard by his neighbors. It wasn’t a ‘drop a hammer on your toe’ scream. It was a ‘I’m going to die in a matter of seconds’ scream’. Terror raced through his veins with such intensity, his vessels were sure to explode within him. He felt the color leave his skin, leaving him ghostly white if only for a few seconds. His hands were clenched. Grasping onto the sides of the bed, as if his mere existence depended on him not letting go. He jolted up. Breathing so hard that he was panting. He felt tears rolling from his eyes. He snatched up the pen and paper and dropped it on his lap. In the same manner as the previous two nights, he started to input something onto the pad of paper. Only, it wasn’t really him. He wasn’t aware of what he was writing or how he was doing it. The only thing he was sure of was that the nightmare had ended and this was a separate event. When the writing was complete, he tossed the pad down and threw himself back onto his pillow to catch his breath. He was spent. After a few minutes of listening to his own breaths and thoughts run through his mind he swung his feet over the side of the bed and onto the floor. He picked up the worked over tablet and gazed at the current page. What was written made no sense to him: ‘It’s time’.
Three cups of coffee and four Advil later, Mathew was on the phone with the only person he had been in contact with since…………..since, he couldn’t remember when. Lack of sleep was starting to take its toll. Michele had a theory this time though. She said it’s possible that “it’s time” could mean that the dreams might be coming to an end. Her reasoning was that no matter how obscure these dreams were to Mathew, they were crystal clear in his brain and the latest message might be a way for his inner self to let his outer self know that it was almost over. He could only hope that to be the truth. He was certain of one thing though, he was scared.
This time it was different
As reality vanished before him in his dark bedroom, a new world waited for him. One in which he knew no boundaries. The playing field was familiar but alien. He was standing outside staring at a house. A house which had a striking resemblance to his childhood home. That was the only familiar part. Surrounding the home was nothing. No cars in the driveway, no driveway, no trees, bushes street lights or even a neighboring house. It was as if the structure had been dropped on some deserted island, minus the island.
Nothing.
Wherever he was, it was pitch black. Only illuminated by occasional lightning strikes. Rain was falling with such anger that the drops were stinging his face when they landed. He started to approach the house. Either that or the house was descending on him. The closer the two got to each other, the more frequent the sky filled with fire bolts. Thunder clashed as loud as any noise he had ever experienced. Fear was creeping deeper and deeper into Mathews body until it consumed his entire being.
He was on the elevated porch, arms length from the front door. This was definitely his boyhood home. Memories of his childhood danced through his head. Michele and him playing like brothers and sisters do. Laughing, smiling. Now this. What sort of evil existed here now? Without any discern, he had reached for and acquired the doorknob. The knob twisted easily in his grip and the door flung open as if guided by a strong wind. Behind him, the sky was still exploding with fury. Just as the door met the wall behind it, lightning punched a hole into the darkness, exposing the inside of the home. On the far side of the front room stood something. Night overtook the home again. Mathew stood frozen with fear, not sure what to do. Another bolt lit the area. It was still there. But It wasn’t something, It was someone.
His glimpse was brief but long enough to tell it was a person, or more of a someone than a something. Again, the light was gone and darkness was back. Rain was still pelting him from behind as he stood on the porch looking into the house. As the next round of nightlight shone down, there it was. Standing face to face with him. Whoever it was stood the same height as him. Its’ breath filled Mathews gaping mouth. Rancid and putrid. If death had a taste, this was it. Hair slumped down across its face, or what must be the face. Looking at it, he couldn’t really tell if it was facing him or looking into the house as he was. He only knew that it was looking at him because it exhausted its death gas at him. Over the booming thunder it spoke. One word.
“Alone”.
In a flash it stood there. The next flash it was gone. The empty house stood before him. He looked behind him and saw exactly what he expected to see, nothing. A different kind of emptiness. One in which he was sure that if he were to turn around and step off the porch, he would start falling and never reach a landing spot. The world behind him felt as empty as his soul did. There wasn’t much of a choice. He stepped into the house. He took a few steps into the front room and heard exactly what he thought he would hear. The front door crashed shut.
Whispering voices filled his ears. Whispers that sounded more like screams. He stood alone in what was once his family’s front room. He was alone but not by himself. It was as if eyes were watching him. He spun around to see if anyone was behind him. Nothing. He turned to face the majority of the house again and the whispering persisted. He knew eyes were upon him, could feel them. Movement to his left caught his attention. Quick. By the time his head swung that way, whatever he spied was gone. If this was indeed his old home, the room that he was now looking at was the kitchen. He inched along the middle of the front room towards the kitchen. As he approached the opening, he put his back to the wall so he could poke his head into the room. He paused before he glanced in. He took a quick look and saw nothing. The house was still being filled with pulses of light from outside. Thunder was providing the soundtrack. He committed himself to entering the kitchen. He shuffled in, his shoes glided over the linoleum. The ground felt sandy and dirty. The kitchen was a skeleton of what it once was or supposed to be. Cabinet doors were hanging by loose screws. The sole window was gone. Rain snuck in through the frame. He was nearing the end of the long kitchen when its’ head peered around the corner before disappearing back behind the wall. It seemed like a sick version of peek-a-boo. This time, instead of pausing he dashed toward the corner and turned it. He was now looking at what was once his room. Lightning was flashing so wildly it seemed like a strobe light. Claps of thunder rolled so deep he could feel it. It was standing in the center of the vacant room. One arm was outstretched. Was it pointing at him? No. It was beckoning him. Inviting him to come closer. For a brief second, he saw its’ eyes. He recognized them instantly. Michele. The room blacked out then relit and she was gone.
Without hesitation, he knew where he would see her next, behind the wooden door with an M on the top half. A cold sweat began to take over his body. He finished crossing the room that opened up to the hallway. The marked door down the hall was just as he drew it. There were minor details that existed that weren’t in his drawing, but the picture in his head from when they were kids was an exact match. After only taking a few steps, he realized he was seeing first hand what he had dreamt about two nights ago. He soon found himself face to face with what he knew would be his final destination.. His heart pounded with such force, he thought it might actually jump up his throat and make a miraculous exit. With no effort by him, the M door exploded open, leaving Mathew breathless for a moment. As he caught his breath, two words escaped his lips. “It’s time”.
Both windows had been blown out in this room. Rain entered at will here. This room appeared to be in the same shape as the others, dank and in disrepair. A waterlogged dresser, a wall mirror, and a bed were the only remnants of what used to be a little girls dream room. There she was. Sitting on the bed, which occupied the center of the room. Her back was to him as she sat on the far side of the bed. He wasn’t sure what to do next. She answered that with her own actions. She lifted her right hand and patted an empty area next to her on the bed. He wanted to call out to her but the deafening thunder assured that his cry would be unheard. Reluctantly he slowly moved into the room and around the corner of the bed. Never losing a visual of her, he eased down onto the mattress next to her. Time seemed to be inching along. She stared directly in front of her, not acknowledging his presence. Sweat dripped into his eyes. He blinked to clear his vision.
A new scene welcomed his opening eyes. Michele had turned to look at him. She had the most beautiful smile. The room behind her was full of colors. The walls were painted a light purple, Michele’s favorite color. Furniture was strategically placed and well decorated. Bows riddled Michele’s hair. She was eight years old.
After gazing at each other for what was probably only a few seconds that seemed like an eternity, he whispered, “what’s happening”? He asked the question without really looking for or wanting an answer. Why was he back in her childhood….their childhood? Sunlight breaking in through the front bay window warmed his face.
“Let’s play”, she responded. Her smile filled his soul that had been so empty. “I’ve been waiting for you to come back for so long, lets go”.
“Play what Michele? I don’t know what to do”. Mathew burst out. “Please help me understand”, he said with tears streaming down his cheeks. He reached out to grab her by the arm. His motivation was to snatch her up and escape with her. Escape to where? Anywhere but here. His hand latched onto her wrist and squeezed it tight. She looked down in disbelief. As her eyes rose up again to meet with his, he saw that her smile was gone. Fear and desperation filled her expression.
Lightning bounced off the sky and filled the room. Hell had returned. His grasp on her wrist was still secure. Her warm soft skin had been replaced by a grey rubbery substitute. Michele’s hair was once again eclipsing her entire head. She started to scream and thrash around trying to break free. He was still holding onto the idea of taking her from this place. Her cries were more animal then human. Their eyes met briefly and he saw nothing but horror in them. They wrestled violently throughout the room. He kept screaming at her, “COME WITH ME.” Over and over he could hear himself exclaim. More and more desperate with every effort. He could see that she was trying to respond but it was inaudible. Rain was pouring into the room at an incredible rate. He was starting to lose his grip on what he thought to be her wrist. They danced around the room with lightning providing a spectacular light show. He kept calling out his plea. “COME WITH ME!” He could now hear her voice out an answer but he couldn’t make it out. They slammed into the wall near the empty bay window. She tried backing away. He held tight. She was now screaming at him while pulling away.
His grip was fading.
She inched closer to escaping.
Letting go.
She screamed her demands again.
Her fingers were all he had left.
She bellowed out her wish one more time.
The moment was instantaneous. Just as what she was roaring out became clear to him he lost his grip on her. She stumbled backwards towards the window and tumbled out. The powerful storm seemed to swallow her up. Mathew fell down as he lost his grip and landed on the floor next to the bed, hitting the back of his head on the mattress frame. His eyes fogged over with the blast and he could feel warm blood dripping down his neck. Mathew lay motionless on the wet floor waiting to die. What Michele had been saying during the struggle replayed in his mind over and over again. As he was repeating it in his head, he started to whisper it aloud. “I want to be alone, I want to be alone.”
Darkness fell over and into Mathew Scott.
**********
The red light flashed at the nurses station on what had been a slow day. Kathleen, head nurse at the Eastbrook Psychiatric Hospital sat up in her chair to view the video monitors. She could see that there was a disturbance taking place in the cafeteria. Kathleen left her station and headed towards the dining area.
Once there, she was greeted by several of the male nurses who already had the situation under control. Two of the nurses had a male patient pinned to the ground. He was trying to wiggle his way free but to no avail. He quickly gave up trying. Kathleen recognized immediately who it was, Mathew Scott. Poor thing she thought to herself. She had been employed here for nearly thirty years now and he had been here for twenty five of them. Lynette, a new nurse approached Kathleen and nodded at Mathew as he was being injected with something obviously designed to subdue him. Lynette asked Kathleen what the patients status was.
“He’s a lifer here. Poor guy, no friends or family.” The nurses were getting Mathew to his feet, “He was sent here more then twenty years ago after killing his twin sister.” Mathew now stood facing Kathleen with his arms interlocked with the male nurses that were holding him down. Kathleen leaned over to finish talking to Lynette as to keep her voice down. “He snapped one day and threw his sister out of her bedroom window.” The effects of the injection were starting to take hold of Mathew. His eyes were getting heavy and he started to slouch a bit. “He’s generally very quiet but occasionally he acts up like this. Who knows what’s running through his head.”
The two male nurses approached Kathleen with Mathew nearly completely passed out in their arms. They asked where they should take him. Meaning they weren’t sure whether to take him to his room or to a holding cell where they could keep a closer eye on. She thought about it for a second and came to the conclusion, after witnessing this several times over the years that he posed no threat to himself or anyone and directed them to take him to his room. The nurses carried the dead weight past Kathleen and Lynette towards the main hallway where they would find his room. Mathew was out. His eyes were open but his eyes were fixated on something other than where he was. The nurses stopped and one turned back at Kathleen. “Which room is he in?”
Kathleen glanced back at the nurses and responded, “339.”
|
There’s a girl in my class.
I mean, I swear she is there. Every day, she walks in, three and a half minutes late, like clockwork. Her skin is pale and sickly looking, and it appears as though she hasn’t eaten in weeks.
Her ghastly figure stumbles slowly into the room, a sort of bone chilling void surrounding her. And I don’t mean that figuratively . . . I mean, you could faintly see the air around her distorting and warping, turning horrible shades of black.
I’m sure everyone would’ve thought this was weird as well . . . that is . . . If they could turn to look at her. Every time the door swung open and that ghastly creature stepped inside however, the class would freeze. Their faces would frost over, the color all but draining from the room, as the air decayed into stagnation.
Looking to the people beside me, I could see their irises, normally bright and shimmering with colors, now appearing flat and dull; a single shade of grey. My classmates weren’t truly frozen, however. I watched them breathe slowly, their overcast eyes shifting between the professor and their notes. Pencils faintly, yet hurriedly, carved away at papers all around me. And yet, despite these incredibly slight movements, their bodies always stared straight ahead, never shifted in their seats, never spoke. Before I could blink, the entire class had become a perfectly synchronized, uniform, grey mass.
Then it would all stop, the color would rush back into the room, the air once again being filled with the hum of the fluorescent lights as my classmates regained their life and shuffled around lightly, as if nothing had ever happened. The clock had advanced ahead several minutes in what only felt like seconds.
I used to think that the girl had sat down, but I was never really sure.
Sometimes I watched her twisted form slowly stagger towards the class, eventually reaching the furthest back desk in the corner and pulling out the chair, looking as if she was going to sit . . . but what happened next? I could never make it that far. Something about watching her move made my head swim and my vision blur. It was as if I had to concentrate as hard as I could to stay conscious: like I was constantly fighting an invisible force trying to shut me out. The longer I looked at her, the harder it became to focus on reality, and I would start to drift in and out as if I was falling asleep without closing my eyes.
The whole encounter only ever lasted about ten seconds from the time she walked in. For the first several times, I didn’t remember the incident at all, rather, I would just feel a strange sense of déjà vu when it happened again the next class. Any time I looked back to where she should’ve been, there was never anyone there, just the desk that nobody ever used, largely broken, scratched, blackened, and falling apart in silence in the dark corner of the room. I wasn’t even really sure what I was looking for, I had no real recollection of any of the events, the girl, the stillness, none of it stuck with me.
But things have been changing lately.
As if exercising a muscle or something, I’ve been getting better and better at staying conscious when she walks in. I’m now able to watch her for extended periods of time. The headache I get is excruciating, and each time I see her, this horrible feeling washes over me, like a sickness. I say that I’m getting better at staying conscious, and while that may be true, it certainly doesn’t feel that way. Rather, it feels as if I’m being trapped in the horrific stillness for longer and longer.
Clearly, as I’m able to tell you this story, I began to remember the events too. They were just fuzzy memories at first, but soon, as I snapped to my senses when the stillness ended, I immediately searched around wildly, trying to locate the girl. I knew she must have been in the room somewhere!
It was quite clear that I was the only one who could retain consciousness in the stillness. Despite lobbing repeated questions about the three and a half minute mark after class started, I could only ever watch confused expressions scratch across the faces of my classmates.
“What girl?” they say.
About a week after this began to occur, or at least a week after I began to remember the daily event, it ceased to be mysterious. It instead instilled nothing but fear in my chest.
Three days ago, for the first time ever, she looked at me.
She had always seemed like a distorted projection or something, a tape player constantly rewinding and playing back her entrance in the exact same way, but on that day, I did something I shouldn’t have.
The clock struck three and a half minutes after class had begun.
The room fell silent, colors flattening and being smudged into the grey background as my classmates froze. She stepped inside slowly.
I had been afraid to watch her before, partly due to the crippling feeling of horror it gave me, but mostly because I didn’t want to stick out, surely if I moved, I would be flat out announcing that I wasn’t like everyone else in the room.
But on that day, I didn’t care. I don’t know why, maybe it was because I was tired of just sitting in silent horror, stealing faint glances, maybe it was because I felt that I needed to know, needed to figure out what the hell was going on, but whatever the case . . . I gripped the sides of my desk and slowly rose to my feet.
And then it happened. Her form stopped, flickering and wavering in and out of focus like a poorly broadcasted TV signal. Then her head turned as her gaze slowly fell on me.
My heart seized up, and I nearly fell to the floor in terror. Her eyes, at first grey, suddenly glowed a dull, dark green, and they radiated a sort of sickness. Invisible, poisonous waves seeped out into the motionless air like slithering eels.
I felt nothing but utter despair. Pain and sorrow formed on my soul like jagged ice crystals, strangling whatever life I had and smothering out all hope. My legs grew weak, and I slowly sunk down to my chair in silent agony as my heart slowed to a horrible, sluggish pace. My vision split in two, and I lost my ability to refocus.
Then she started to approach me, her mouth moving as if to speak and then . . .
I snapped my head upwards and glanced around in bewilderment. The color had returned to the room. The stillness had passed, with me having lost several minutes of memory. I must have been taken by the stillness before I could hear her speak.
The girl was gone, of course. The only thing I had to prove to myself that it had ever happened at all was the sickness I felt in my heart.
No matter what I tried, I just couldn’t break free of the sorrow. It gathered like a dense fog in my mind, and each time I thought back to her eyes, I felt a stabbing pain in my chest. I often nearly vomited from the queasiness.
The next day, my fears erupted into absolute horrors as the clock ticked past three minutes and thirty seconds. The door creaked open slowly behind me as the class fell into the stillness, and I could already feel the horrific presence entering the room without needing to look.
When I did finally force myself to steal a glance however, my blood crystallized and my breath caught.
She was mere feet from me, walking deliberately towards me, her dull eyes fixed on mine. At our eye contact, I felt yet more of my happiness being torn away, my soul shriveling and icing over. This time, as she approached, she smiled, extending her cold dead hand out before her. She was trying to touch me.
I cried out in horror and leapt up from my desk, backpedaling across the room. My heart had begun to decay, my mind getting blotted out and filled with a dark sludge of hopelessness and despair. It swirled and warped my thoughts as I tried to keep moving but found myself too weak: too weak to try and run, too weak to think I would ever make it out, too weak to hope for anything.
There was no hope in this world.
I felt a ghastly void began to materialize in my chest. Something important was beginning to be torn away from me. Something I knew I could never replace.
Suddenly, I looked up to see the class staring at me in shock and confusion. The colors had returned, and I was left standing in the middle of the room, panicking like a paranoid psycho and looking at nothing: an empty space where the girl had once been.
“Are you ok?!” someone asked, “Dude, you look pale as hell!”
I’m sure I did. I’m sure I looked awful, I’m sure they could see me shaking, I’m sure they could see that I was sick with horror. But damn, I felt worse.
Worse than they could imagine.
I mumbled softy that I was alright and walked back to my desk. I slumped into my chair and fixed my gaze on the floor. They all stared at me for a while longer as I sat in utter agony. I felt as if there was nothing left, nothing on this earth for me, nothing that could possibly fill this hole that had begun to grow inside of me. The feeling grew with every sluggish pump of my tired heart: so incredibly tired, straining to beat at all as the despair clung to it like a heavy ooze.
Then, slowly, they began to forget me.
During attendance the next day, the teacher didn’t call my name, skipping right over it and moving on to the next. No one noticed his mistake either.
When I stood up and asserted that my name hadn’t been called, the teacher just looked at me with dull eyes and mumbled to himself, “Yes, yes, of course, my bad.”
None of my classmates turned to look at me however, and the teacher never fixed the attendance sheet after my confrontation. He just continued on to his lecture, as if instantly forgetting that it had happened.
I tried to talk to kids, but their attention was always diverted after looking at me for a few seconds. It was as if I was but a fleeting thought in the back of their minds, always being overwritten by something more important.
This only made me feel more helpless, casting me further into the gruesome despair.
Then, that day, the door creaked open again, and something horrific happened. The stillness that normally lay waste to the room and rendered everyone stagnant . . . didn’t quite happen at all. The air grew heavier and some colors faded away, but the people didn’t freeze as much, didn’t fall into silence or become a still grey mass.
And then I heard the laughter.
A quiet giggle, out of place and filled with pain.
I turned to see the girl walk in, but she wasn’t quite the same. Her form was sharper this time, her image less distorted, and she walked with a new pace. There was some more cheer in her wobbly steps as her sickly giggles filled the room.
I quickly looked away, averting my eyes to the ground.
But then one of my classmates slowly shifted his weight, and his head turned to look back. He nodded his head slowly in the direction of the girl, acknowledging her presence for the first time.
I was aghast and confused, how could he see her now? I watched some other students glance behind themselves as well, confirming that they knew she was there.
I stood up and shouted, “What the hell is this?!” But no one even looked at me. Not one of them met my eyes.
Then I felt a tap, a light hand against my shoulder. I was filled with sudden relief, someone knew I was here after all! I whirled around to face them, only to stagger back in shock. It was that girl, her face smiling wide, her eyes looking deep into mine, I noticed that her skin had become less pale, her form less sunken and more animated than before.
At seeing her face, I shut my eyes, squeezing them tight and turning away. But I could feel her movement as she shuffled close to me. I felt hands being placed on my shoulders, and I knew her face was inches from mine, waiting for me to open my eyes, take just one little peek.
Slowly, my mind began to slip just as before, but this time I waited, curled up in horror, trying not to look for nearly thirty minutes. Finally, after I could hear the hum of the lights grow stronger and the faint stillness lift, I slowly opened my eyes and she was gone.
I had had enough of this. I left that classroom. Convinced that I would never come back.
On the way out of the school, I passed by a mirror. What I saw in the reflection made me seize up in repulsion.
A ghastly, haunted face stared back at me. I was now beginning to look like how I felt. The despair had sunken my eyes into their sockets, the pain draining the color from my skin. I looked as if I hadn’t eaten in many days.
I walked right out of the school, not a person looked at me as I brushed past them, I doubt they even knew I was there.
I finally reached my apartment near the campus, owned by me and three others guys. I opened up the door.
One of my roommates sat, but he didn’t acknowledge me. I closed the door hard, and then slammed it once or twice, but his gaze never lifted, he didn’t even flinch.
I walked up to him and tapped his head, knelt down to catch his eyes.
“Hello?!” I practically cried, sorrow consuming me. His gaze shifted to meet me and then slowly fell away.
“Welcome back . . .” he mumbled quietly, his voice quickly trailing off.
I’m sure I could’ve kept bugging him, but I had no will to try. I was consumed by despair, and all the excruciating sensations it contained. No one would ever acknowledge me, my existence had faded far too much.
Late that night, I sat alone, curled up in my ruffled bed. I slowly drifted off as desolation lulled my heart to sleep.
That morning I woke and lay in silence. I had no will to move. I was never going back to that class.
Not with that creature there.
I watched the clock tick slowly, the machine components forced to carry on. The gears spun and churned, although they had no reason to. Just like my heart, the apparatuses were simply part of a machine, keeping something useless alive.
The clock reached 12:00 and kept slowly carrying on.
Class would’ve just started, I thought to myself. I doubted that anyone even noticed that I was gone.
The light tried to enter through the window, being obstructed by the heavy wooden blinds, casting faint lines in the dim, dusty room, the interior almost looking as if it was filled with a dark haze.
The clock ticked quietly in the background, seemingly muffled and far away. I watched it reach three minutes past twelve and the second hand continued ticking, reaching 30 seconds past.
The air suddenly fell into stillness and my heart froze. I heard it, the door to my room slowly creaking open.
“No . . . No, NO!” I shrieked to the lengthening shadows of my surroundings.
The ghastly creature slowly staggered into my room from down the hall, a horrific smile ripping its face in two.
Except she wasn’t really ghastly at all . . .
Rather, she was nearly entirely normal. The air no longer distorted around her, her face had some faint color, and her eyes glowed a brighter green than I had ever seen.
I screamed, trying to shield my face and shrieking, “No! You can’t be here! Get away from me!”
She didn’t stop however, I could hear her slowly shuffling across the floor, eventually reaching the foot of my bed.
There was no running this time. I slowly peeked open my eyes to see her face inches from mine with a demented cheerfulness distorting her features.
I tried to close my eyes, but her hands suddenly rushed forwards, nearly jabbing out my eyes as she scratched and clawed my eyelids open. I tried to fight her, tried to grab at her arms, but I was too hopeless and weak to move much of anything. As her eyes stared into mine, I felt my body go limp and I couldn’t even twitch a finger.
This was it for me.
I felt the last shred of humanity being torn away from my heart, and the air rippled with dark hideous smudges as she cackled with glee. I felt hot blood running down my face, and I could feel the hole inside my chest consuming me.
As I watched, her face regained all life, her ghostly distortions all but fading away. Suddenly, her glowing eyes dimmed, ceasing to radiate light and becoming utterly plain. The horrific smile faded, and she stopped looking at me, rather looked through me now, as her face went placid. She slowly stepped away from me and wandered around the room as if looking for something, forgetting that I was even there.
My heart had stopped.
I no longer felt it beating in my chest.
I couldn’t speak . . . but quickly realized that this was because I wasn’t breathing.
Speaking required me to consciously breathe in and exhale air. This was something that was no longer a reflex.
I could breathe if I wanted to . . . but I didn’t need to.
For the first time in a long time, however, I did feel something. Something related to pain and sorrow, yet refreshingly different and powerful in a different sense.
I felt . . . entirely consumed by hatred. It mixed into the gruesome vat of sadness and despair already inhabiting my soul, all of the dark emotions swirling around inside of me. My body was too small to physically contain all of them, and they erupted out of me in hideous tendrils of blackness, distorting and warping the air around me.
I rolled off the bed in agony and slammed to the floor, lying and staring at the ceiling for hours after that. The stillness never faded, rather, it grew stranger and stronger the longer I lay. A small area around me was consumed by stagnant air and grey-scale smudges. I was now the one creating it, although it was confined to a small bubble around my broken form. The girl never looked at me again, she didn’t recognize me anymore: she couldn’t even see me anymore.
She was human now.
A trait she had stolen from me. She had taken my life.
One of my roommates walked in at some point and said hello to her as if she had lived in the house the whole time. They recalled and laughed about some memories together, memories that should’ve been about him and I, not him and her.
The picture on the nightstand of my four friends and I, was now horribly smudged and grey. Even as I watched from the floor however, it slowly refocused into the image, her figure standing where mine should’ve been.
I lay in that room, watching in despair as my life was lived out by someone else. Nothing I did made anyone see me anymore, not even the half-assed remarks came my way anymore, no matter how loud I screamed.
Days passed like this until the rage and despair inside of me finally exploded, and my mind reached a breaking point.
One day, the house was deserted, all of my once friends off at class. I slowly stood, my body sickly and crooked. I looked at my hands to see them flicker in front of me like a poor signal as the surrounding air burned black with hatred and sorrow.
I stumbled out of the room with a new horrific determination.
The stillness around me grew the more I felt and accepted the hatred. By the time I exited the house, it was filling up entire rooms around me.
I reached a college auditorium just slightly after class started.
Using all of my feeble strength, I was finally able to force the door open after several minutes. As I stepped inside slowly, the entire room was consumed by the hateful stillness around me.
The people froze and turned away instantly, something I now realized had been a subconscious defense tactic. One that I hadn’t been able to employ.
I was the weak link in my class. The whole time I had been fighting to stay awake, I had really been fighting what my body was naturally trying to do: trying to save me from what I had now become.
I slowly staggered into the class, going to the furthest back desk to sit down when I noticed . . .
. . . one of the kids wasn’t quite like the others.
His body wasn’t quite as grey, not quite as lifeless. His gaze shifted nervously around the room. I probably wouldn’t have even noticed his slight variations . . . if I hadn’t been looking for them.
A horrific smile broke out across my face.
The kid didn’t last long, he quickly faded into the stillness like everyone else as his mind went blank.
I hadn’t been able to make eye contact with him today, his gaze was too unfocused, but that was okay.
I would just have to try again tomorrow.
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My father grew up on an Indian reservation in South Dakota. It is a place with few trees and even fewer people, and there has been little development since the place was settled many, many years ago. The people live in clusters of nearly uniform houses that were built by the government, and the only place to go shopping or see a movie is nearly two hours away. It’s hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and sometimes the wind blows for days without letting up. Even now, the people there have to be tough to survive. You look out for your friends, you help your neighbors, and you don’t forget your family.
His grandmother died when he was very young, but he’s told me that he retains one particularly vivid memory of her. It was winter and they were at the house together in the early evening, and she was cooking in the kitchen while he played with a deck of cards in the front room. He can’t quite recall what she looked like, but he can still remember the smell of the food that she was making that night. It’s funny how memory works that way. His parents, grandfather, and two older sisters had caught a ride into Rapid City to buy supplies before the first big storms came through, so it was just the two of them. She went on cooking and he went on playing with those cards until he’d lost track of time and it was pitch black outside.
There was a knock at the door. Not a loud knock like the police, or the friendly kind of knock that a neighbor uses when he’s stopping by to borrow something. Just a slow, quiet tapping on the door. Tap, tap, tap, just like that. Naturally, he figured his family had made it back from the city, so he went right over to let them inside. Before he had a chance to reach the door, his frail, elderly grandmother grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away, like he was a rag doll. “Never answer the door at night,” she told him, covering his mouth so he couldn’t say anything. He could feel her arm trembling. There was no more knocking, but my father couldn’t shake the sense that there was someone familiar standing on the other side of that door, waiting to be let inside. When she finally let go of him, he asked her why she had stopped him. “Sometimes the dead try to come home,” she said. There were tears in her eyes.
His family didn’t return that night, and there was no phone service so they couldn’t call. When they made it back the following day, he learned that his grandfather had died from a heart attack during the trip. My father never said anything about the knocking, and neither did his grandmother. It was like it had never happened. His grandmother wasn’t the same after that and followed her husband to the grave just a few months later. My father was six years old.
It was much later when my father found himself alone at night during a particularly bad winter storm, the wind howling outside and the rest of his family stranded miles away. They had gone into the city that morning, and wouldn’t be able to come back until the storm let up and the roads were cleared. Eventually the electricity went out and the only light came from the stove they used for heating. The worst part of the storm lasted a few hours, but finally it got quiet outside as the wind slowed and the windows stopped rattling. Then the knock came again. That same tapping at the door from years before, like fingers just barely brushing against it. My father couldn’t bring himself to look out the window to see if anyone was standing outside, but for some reason, he found himself drawn to the door, like he had to open it. It was only when he felt the cold from beneath the door on his bare feet that he stopped. He called outside, asking who was there. “It’s me,” came the voice from the other side of the door. “Let me inside. It’s cold.” He recognized the voice, since it belonged to his eldest sister. He had his hand on the doorknob when his grandmother’s words came back to him, and the feel of her hand gripping his arm. Never answer the door at night. There were many things he could have asked his sister at that moment. He could have asked where his parents were, or why he hadn’t heard the car pull up when they were dropped off. He could have even asked why she needed to knock at all – they didn’t lock their doors on the reservation. He didn’t ask her any of those things. Instead, he told her to go around to the back and he would let her inside. Before he could say anything else, or even think anything else, he heard the knocking start at the back door, like she had been there the entire time. Instantly. Tap, tap, tap. He didn’t open the door, and spent the rest of the night curled up on the floor. His family had tried to return home earlier that evening and got into a car accident in the snow. His father had broken his leg in two places. His eldest sister had died, mangled in the wreck. He didn’t tell anyone what had happened, but he knew in his heart that sometimes the dead do try to come home.
My father was not afraid of what might have happened that night. When he told me the story, he was sorrowful. He always regretted that he lost his opportunity to see his sister one last time. I know that’s why he went home by himself and waited when my mother died. You don’t forget your family. I know he heard that knocking on the door, tap, tap, tap, like he remembered from his youth. I also know that he forgot something, very, very important. The fear in his grandmother’s voice on that cold winter night, and the way she held him with all her strength. Never answer the door at night. When we found him the next day, the front door was wide open and he had been torn limb from limb. There were no footprints in the snow.
Credit To – R. Holmes
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No one knew the secret spot
where we as children played at night.
The ashen moon, our only light,
would greet us painted on the pond.
The placid water, cool and black,
would wash away the summer heat.
The silty ground, cooler still,
was soft and lumpy underfoot.
Seaweed danced and grazed our legs
below the surface as we trod.
We romped and splashed and swam and laughed
until we tired in the dark.
But then one night, on way to pond,
we spied unwelcome guests afar!
One shape was small, one shape was large,
and large bent down by small,
Then made a quiet splashing sound
and walked away alone.
We returned in light of day –
a first for each of us.
And there at last I gazed into
the clouded waters where we played.
To mind came mantra terrible
which echoes still today:
Seaweed doesn’t grow in ponds.
Seaweed doesn’t grow in ponds.
For we’d been treading children’s heads,
and laughed as hair had tickled legs.
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If you haven’t read the first part of this story, please click here to be brought up to speed on when I first started to notice something was off about my freshmen roommate.
Time seems to slow down as I try to process what it means that I have been sleeping in the same room as psychotic murderer for a week and that the picture of my girlfriend is now missing. I try to quickly scan through everything that I know about “Zach.”
He listens to music on his iPod a lot. He likes to look out windows and people-watch. He supposedly goes for long walks late at night. He stares at me while I sleep.
Suddenly, I realize that “Zach” has only begun conversations with me twice in the past week: the night he was staring at me while I slept, and move-in day when he asked me about Andrea’s picture.
“Joel! I’ve got to talk to Andrea! I think “Zach” is going after her.”
“What? Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know, but our first day together he asked about her picture and I told him she went to IU. Now the picture is gone!”
I immediately pull out my phone and call Andrea. No answer. Frantically, I call again. No answer this time either, but I leave a voicemail.
“Andrea, it’s me, Eric. Listen, call me as soon as you get this. I’m serious. Call me immediately please.”
“What do you want to do, man?” asks Joel.
“I’ve gotta go down to Bloomington and make sure she is all right. She’s probably just out with friends right now and missed the call, but I need to be sure.” I’m desperately hoping this to be true. “Joel, you still need to alert the cops about this bastard. Can you borrow someone’s car and go to the police without me?”
“Yeah… but I think you should come wit—“
“I can’t! But I’ll be back as soon as I can get Andrea and make sure she’s ok,” I interrupt. “Just please do this for me. The sooner we get the cops involved, the sooner we can catch this guy.”
“Alright, Eric.”
I run to my car while texting Andrea to “call me ASAP.” I pray that she responds. As I begin the hour-long drive down to Bloomington, I’m so nervous that I can’t even listen to music. I just keep telling myself that she’s alright as the sun begins to set. After what seems like ages, my phone rings and my heart skips a beat as I see that it’s Andrea.
“Andrea? Are you ok!?!” Please tell me you’re alright!”
“I’m fine, Eric. What’s going on? I got your message and I’m a little scared. Did something happen to someone? Are you ok?”
“Kind of… Listen, it’s probably better if we talk in person. I’m about 15 minutes away from you right now. Are you in your dorm?”
“No. I’m out with some friends.”
“Can you meet me at your dorm room? I’ll be there in 15 minutes. And don’t talk to anyone who you don’t know!”
“Eric, what’s going on?”
“Please, just listen to me for now, Andrea. I’ll explain everything when I see you. 15 minutes.”
“Ok. See you at my place.”
It’s late when I arrive at Andrea’s, but I’m flooded with relief when she opens the door and I see that she’s ok. After a long embrace, I tell Andrea she better have a seat. I lock the door and sit beside her.
I begin, “Do you remember when I told you Tuesday how strange my roommate was?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, things got a whole lot stranger in the past few days.”
I tell her all about my first week with my new roommate and all about “Zach’s” weird habits. I share about how he supposedly goes for late night walks for hours every night and how he was watching me sleep the previous night. Then I share with her what I found out about the real Zach when I Googled his name. I can tell she’s a little unsure of how to react or what to say, so I tell her that I can prove it. I grab Andrea’s laptop and type in the search for the news article concerning Zach’s murder from two weeks ago. She reads it out loud.
ZIONSVILLE TEENAGER ZACH _________ STABBED TO DEATH, CULPRIT STILL MISSING Last night, Zach ______, 18, was found brutally murdered and mutilated in his bedroom at his family’s Zionsville home. His parents, Richard and Alice ______, found his body in his bed when they returned home around 11:00pm. They immediately called the police.
This gruesome murder is a shock to the normally safe suburban community, as Zach is well remembered for being a likable and pleasant teenager. Before his death, Zach had recently graduated from Zionsville Community High School and was a member of the marching band and an actor in many of the school plays. He was an honor student that was planning on attending DePauw University as a freshman at the start of the fall semester next week.
IPD is reporting that the body had been stabbed repeatedly. It had been severely mutilated and was then purposely tucked back into the victim’s bed. Currently, the police are reporting that they have no suspects and few leads to go on. All blood samples found in the room have been confirmed to either belong to the victim or have been mixed with an ammonia-based solution rendering them unidentifiable. The only clue the police have to go on is an origami flower that was left on the victim’s body.
Andrea’s voice trails off as she finishes reading the article. Her face looks stricken as she slowly backs away from the computer.
I point to the picture of the real Zach and say, “That is not the person that I have been sharing a room with for the past week! I think the guy I’ve been living with has been pretending to be Zach _________. I think he’s the murderer. Andrea? Andrea?”
Andrea is still staring at the screen in horror, but then reaches into her closet and pulls out three objects. Shakily she states, “I started receiving these three nights ago, one each night. The first two were just set out in front of our door late at night. My roommate and I saw them in the morning. The third one was left on my nightstand last night, but I swear we locked the door! Eric, they were cute, so we thought they were from a secret admirer or something!”
In Andrea’s hands are three perfectly folded origami flowers.
“Do you know what time these were left here?” I ask frantically.
“I don’t know… Sometime after I go to bed, which is usually around 12:30. They were there each morning at 7:00 when I wake up to shower.” I can hear the fear seeping into her voice just as I can feel it seeping into my thoughts.
“That bastard! He wasn’t going for late night walks, he was coming here! I don’t know how he found your room, but we’ve got to get out of here. Joel went to the police already. We should go there and join him.”
I grab my phone to call Joel. No answer.
“He’s probably still explaining everything to the cops. I’ll try him again in a few minutes, but we should start making our way there.”
“Eric, a killer was standing next to my bed last night…” Andrea barely whispers. I bring her in close and hold her tight.
“I know, babe, and I’m so, so sorry. But the best thing we can do now is meet Joel at the police station. They’ll know what to do. It will be safe there.”
I go to the door and unlock it, but stop in my tracks. Sitting on the floor in the hallway is a beautifully folded origami flower. And sitting underneath it is an iPod. I know immediately whose it is. I grab them both, slam the door, and lock it.
“What are those?” Asks Andrea timidly.
I show her the flower and iPod and say, “Gifts from my ‘roommate’.”
Andrea starts to cry. I go to hold her again, still holding the flower and iPod. As she’s sobbing into my shoulder, I see that there is writing on the white side of the origami flower. Slowly I step back from Andrea and carefully unfold the flower. In it is written a note from “Zach.”
Eric, you once asked me if I knew what I wanted my major to be. I’ve decided perhaps photography.
And below that:
Your friend looks very peaceful when he sleeps, Eric. But I don’t envy him.
My hand shaking, I turn on the iPod. There’s nothing on it except the factory default programs. There’s not even any music on it. That psycho was listening to nothing all along! I press the Photos button and my knees start to go weak.
There is one photo album with five images in it. Each one is a different shot of a severely mutilated human body. Blood and gore flood each photo. Cautiously, I flip through the photos of carved human flesh and organs. When I view the last image, I drop the phone and begin to weep.
On the iPod’s screen is an image of Joel lying in a bed. The sheets are saturated in blood and sitting on top of his chest is an origami flower.
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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Related: Harlequin No.7 & The Kindness of Strangers
“I ask him why above he crawls,
scratching apart my bedroom walls.
And he looks down through white eyes peeping,
And says…
I’m not crawling, I’m simply creeping.”
– Music & lyrics by Billie-Joe Kimble.
The job of a mortician is to belittle the profound horror and loss of death, while simultaneously profiting off of the misery of others. No one in the industry aside from myself has the balls to say it, but the simple fact is that it’s true. We take the deceased and pretty them up; dress up their hair, throw them in some nice clothes and drop them under six feet of dirt. But the dead don’t really care do they? Well, we don’t do it for the dead. No, we do it for the grieving friends and family. We make it easier to say goodbye, like an emotional crutch if you will. We let them cry and come to terms with the fact that their friend or mother or son is gone for good, all while collecting a fat paycheck. The reason is of course because of fear. People fear death, and when someone close dies, it forces them to accept their own mortality. Animals don’t have this problem. A few moments of fear and pain will be a squirrel’s only awareness of the impending void. Humans though, we live our whole lives knowing that it could all end without reason or warning, so of course we make up these little rituals to get us through it. And of course, somebody has to facilitate this entire process. Squirrels don’t have this process. Squirrels don’t need booze money.
I only say any of this because as upsetting as it is, dying is at least a natural thing. You can see that it happens, that it is concrete and constant. You can understand it. But there are some things, dark and squirming things that crawl into our world. Things that don’t make sense, things that are just plain wrong.
I was staring at a clock when she called. It was just after 3 a.m. I’d been having trouble sleeping for some time now, and when I can’t sleep I have a tendency to obsess over minor dilemmas. Take this instance for example. I was trying to cut out a newspaper article on this type of black mold that can apparently wiggle its way into a brain and release trace amounts of bio toxins to alter the behavior of mammals, when the ticking of the clock above my dresser distracted me. I stared at it without moving, and I started to think about how the rhythmic ticks were my only connection to a linear time line. In a room without motion, a static environment, time could be moving at whatever pace it wanted and I would have no way of knowing. Without the clock, I could be sitting still for what could be years and I wouldn’t be able to prove otherwise. I was lost in a trance until the phone rang. I picked up. It was Billie.
“Hey, Stephan, you’re awake. That’s awesome. So guess what? We have a problem,” She said over the phone.
“It’s Harris, and can it wait? I’m conducting some rather important business here.” I lied.
“No, not really,” She said. “We need to deal with this now. That hitchhiker at the Broken Window apparently stumbled upon some polyps down on Christian Light Road. The chuckle fucks tried to get him to eat some.”
“So? Get Terry to go with you.”
“No good,” Billie argued. “Terry’s watching the hitcher. Gotta put him in quarantine right? We can’t have some teenage blonde boy runaway spreading this shit. You said so yourself.”
“Alright damn it, but you have to pick me up, I think I’m still legally drunk.” I sighed. She was right. This couldn’t spread past the town limits. Why I cared is beyond me.
Hold on; let me back up a bit. A few months ago I moved Charlottesville, N.C. when a new embalming position opened up. I took the job and things went well for a few weeks. That was until I discovered a mysterious jar with an even more mysterious thing inside. It was labeled, ‘Harlequin No.7.’ I learned not long after that there were more of these worm-like things, as I found out the day after a botched attempt to study the freaky little bugger while embalming a man who died that same night. From what I could gather, they apparently live inside of people’s heads, doing whatever it is that they do until they decide to kill the host and corkscrew out of their brainstem. After a bit of research on the town death records and old newspapers, I came to the conclusion that these Harlequin things have something to do with a paper mill fire twenty something years back. As it would turn out, Mr. Havenbrook (the man whose head burst open on my embalming table) was a survivor of said mill fire. So were some of the others. By “others,” I mean the first batch of crazies that came through my mortuary, all within the same week. It was the same story with each one of them; Someone starts acting weird and paranoid, seemingly due to dementia, before eventually having a seizure and dropping dead. They would end up undergoing an autopsy at the morgue, at which point the declared cause of death would be, “cerebral aneurysm.” Even with x-rays, toxicology screening, and in several cases invasive surgery, no one ever discovered the parasites. It wouldn’t be until I pumped their bodies full of formalin that the little bastards would make themselves known, in the most volatile way at that.
So far, I have seen six of these things. The first one, the one I found in the basement of Burnswick Funeral, got blown to bits by my friend, the lovely Miss Billie-Joe Kimble. Three through five I managed to capture. By the time I got to them I had grown accustomed to the tell-tale signs of Harlequin infection. The lights flicker, the air shimmers, and occasionally if you’re near a radio tuned to an FM station you’ll start picking up some disturbing sounding feedback. Following that, the cadaver partially reanimates and the Harlequin explodes out of the back of the head (or in one case, the eye socket). So, like I said, I captured Harlequins No.6, No.5, No.4, and No.3 in mayonnaise jars filled with formaldehyde (I’m under the assumption that CH2O kills them) before fixing up the deceased in such a way to hide the evidence. No.2, the one from Havenbrook, slithered down the mortuary floor drain. That probably explains where all of the other weird shit that’s been happening came from.
Okay, I just want to say that none of this is my fault. Well, actually, most of it is, considering that I opened the initial can of worms (no pun intended), but I had no idea what an escaped alien brain parasite would entail. They don’t teach you this sort of thing in college. Where was I? Oh right, Lucid Marsh.
Lucid Marsh is the boggy wet land just south of Charlottesville and east of Christian Light Road. The place has a reputation of being quite easy to get lost in, as well as a couple of old legends about a certain “moonlight fairy,” that supposedly leads the more disoriented folks into sinkholes. I doubt any of those rumors are true, but regardless the marsh is home to glowing swamp gas and a particular breed of giant moth that showed up seventy years back. It’s also where most of the town’s drainage ends up.
So here’s what happened; almost a month after I thought the whole Harlequin thing was over and done with, this outdoorsy guy came into the Broken Window bitching about how the Sheriff is a lazy prick and tried to round up a pose to help find his friend. Terry, being an outgoing and generally empathetic man went ahead and asked him what happened. As the guy apparently told Terry, he and his buddy “Bud” Huston were out “catfisting” in the marsh, when Bud, while reaching his arm down into a murky hole, suddenly started screaming before being dragged under the shallow water, only to reemerge fifty or so feet away. When Jake (the outdoorsy guy in the bar) finally got over to him to help him up, he saw that Buds ears and nose were both bleeding. Bud, mumbling to himself incoherently, tried to bite Jake before running franticly away into the deeper part of Lucid Marsh.
Billie and I later went out to the marsh with Jake to see what we could find. We came home empty handed. A waste of an afternoon and a good pair of shoes in my opinion.
It wasn’t long after that that other people started to disappear. Not a whole lot mind you, maybe two or three, but it was enough to get the town talking again about those weird lights in the sky and the unexplained aneurysms. Oh right, the lights… yeah, it sounds cool but the truth is that it will scare the absolute piss out of you. They didn’t show up all that much, or for all that long either, maybe once every couple of weeks for a second or two, but never more. However, I have personally seen them twice. The first time was… unexpected to say the least, but the second time was something else entirely. Walking home one starless night after work, I started to get this feeling that something was sneaking up behind me. When I turned around though, the feeling didn’t go away. It was like no matter which way I was facing there was always something just behind me, ducking out of sight the moment I changed direction. It was about when I started to get dizzy from spinning around so many times that I heard this low rumbling coming from above. It wasn’t a thunderclap so much as it was a foghorn, so deep and low that I didn’t hear it so much as felt it. I looked up, and the sky blazed in a yellow-green flash of a dozen or so orbs, pulsating and circling around each other, disappearing and reappearing into and out of the clouds. Then they were gone. I remember standing there in the middle of the street, covered in sweat and shaking. It had to have been at least ninety degrees that night, but I can’t think of any other instance where I felt so cold.
There have been other things going on besides lights and missing persons. I’ve heard around town that cows and horses have been found in the early hours of the morning without heads. Just ripped right off at the base of the neck is what a couple of farmers have been saying. One farmer said that he stayed awake through an entire night waiting to shoot whatever had been decapitating his livestock. I heard later that he sold his land on the first bid and moved to Alaska or something. “Somewhere where they ain’t got no damn snakes.” He said.
This is of course just some of the stuff that people have been talking about. Who knows what kind of Mulder and Scully tag team action would be fired up my ass if people knew about the five jars in my fridge. Speaking of which, I put some of what I could cut off of No.5 under a microscope to see if I could learn anything. I figured out two things: first, Harlequin cells bare a striking resemblance to cancer cells, and second, if you dump Harlequin parts into the trash along with uneaten food, that shit will grow into one hell of a science project. By that I mean, rancid chicken plus alien tissue sample equals alien mushroom babies. It didn’t work with banana peels or onions though. I guess they’re carnivores. Lucky me. The point is, these things reproduce by budding from decaying flesh. You see where I’m going with this right? How the Harlequin kills its host but goes apeshit when exposed to chemicals that actively prevent the process of decomposition? This was how Billie and I came to the conclusion that the buds or “polyps” would eventually hatch and grow into more Harlequin. We never tested this theory, for obvious reasons, but the assumption seems valid enough. Especially when some hitchhiker manages to come into contact with a group of psycho pod people trying to get him to eat a certain type of raw meatball that just so happens to match the description of our previously mentioned Harlequin babies. Which brings me back to present.
Before Billie arrived, I grabbed a flashlight and another pack of cigarettes. Also, just to be safe, I nabbed a gas can full of kerosene from my shed and a pair of leather gloves. I had just finished collecting my supplies when I heard the knock at the door. I answered.
“Hey there Ste- Harris, ready to go on an adventure?” Billie asked, still standing on my porch. I saw that she had brought along her bass guitar case. I doubted that there was any actual musical instrument in there. She may be a skinny little thing covered in silly tattoos, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she wrestles bears in her free time. She’s dangerous is what I’m saying.
“I’m ready I guess. Wait, did you walk here?”
“Um… Yeah about that, we’re taking your car. Hope you’re cool with that.” I wasn’t, but I was too tired to argue about it, even though Billie drives like a retarded cheetah on crack and a ’69 Dodge Charger isn’t a cheap restoration even in the best economy.
I tossed Billie my keys after we loaded up the trunk. She started up the engine, I lit another cigarette, and then we took off into the hazy February night, driving east through town. I’ve always hated Charlottesville, but sometimes, at the right time of night and season, I kind of like it. The way the orange streetlights illuminate the fog, the way the power lines crisscross above the narrow alleyways of the downtown and how the rusty old water tower hovers ominously in the sky, it just gives me a warm feeling of stoic reserve that somehow complements my natural interest in the macabre. Maybe it’s because on a night like this you start to forget about all meth labs and dirty looks, the racism and bible thumpers and trailer parks. One day I’ll get sick of Charlottesville and probably move to Asheville or something, somewhere kind of artsy and forward thinking, maybe persuade Terry and Billie to leave too. It can’t be easy for them to live in a place like this. Terry is one of a handful of black people and Billie is just, well, she’s Billie. But for now I guess we’ll call this shithole home. I lit another cigarette as we passed the Trinity Baptist Church. The lights were on.
“What the hell?” I asked Billie. What the hell indeed. It wasn’t even Sunday.
“Who knows,” She said back, “Maybe a late night prayer group or something? That place started going off the deep end ever since that first bout of lights. It’s been nothing but ‘End of the world this,’ and ‘Repent for your sins,’ that. I can’t even pretend to understand them or Rev. Proust anymore.” A few minutes later we weren’t even thinking about the church. We had just pulled onto Christian Light Road and were now looking for the farm house Billie had been telling me about. The problem was that there were quite a few farms that had gone bankrupt over the last two decades, each one indistinguishable from the last.
“I have an idea,” I told Billie. I turned on my car radio and tuned it to an FM radio station. Some oldies channel playing The Kinks “Village Green.” It wasn’t long after that that Ray Davies nostalgic harmony was suddenly replaced by the low hum of garbled static and high pitched clicking. This happened just as we approached a particularly destitute house with a single sagging willow tree in the front yard. “This is the one!” Billie screamed. She then in her own method of rational thinking decided that the best way to approach the house would be to shut of the headlights, drive past the house for about fifty or so feet, barrel turn into the opposite lane, drive back towards the house, jerk the car right off of the road, and park my goddamn ’69 pine green Dodge Charger behind a corn silo. As we got out of the car, I told Billie how she’s one of my closet mentally challenged friends.
“Suck my dick.” She giggled as she popped the trunk.
“You can’t afford it. Anyway what’s the plan?” I pulled the gas can from the trunk. “Are we going to knock on the door like asshole scouts trying to sell asshole flavored cookies, or are we just going to throw eggs until old man Jenkins chases us off with the hose?” Billie opened up her guitar case.
“Um, I was thinking more along the lines of murder by death.” From her case, Billie pulled out what I assume to be an intentional disregard for standard Geneva Convention protocols. “This,” Said Billie while loading a couple of shells, “is a Franchi SPAS-12, ten rounds, mounted flashlight, and an industrial grade suppressor. It’s probably the best tactile shotgun ever manufactured in Italy. They stopped making them a few years ago because the U.S. banned it from import. Don’t ask me how I got this one, but let’s just say I didn’t follow the two week waiting period.”
“Dandy,” I said.
We moved quickly towards the house, crouching low to the ground as we snaked through the tall weeds. It may have been dark, and the fog was still coming in thick, but we left nothing to chance. Between the two of us, we’ve seen enough horror movies to know better. When we finally reached the side of the house Billie pressed herself up against the cracked siding and motioned for me to look in through one of the windows. I gave her the universal gesture for anal fisting, which to us was code for, “something spooky is going to pop out and bite my face off.” Billie then gave her shotgun a pump, signaling that she did indeed have a shotgun. With that sound logic in mind, I carefully pressed my hands against the sweating glass, peering into darkness. I could just barely make out the vague shapes of furniture, but nothing much else. Scraps of paper and trash seemed to litter what I could see of the floor, and there appeared to be a sofa of some sort, and absolutely no movement what so ever. A static environment if I ever saw one. I lowered myself from the window, giving Billie the thumbs up before picking up the kerosene. Billie moved up to me, and in a low voice whispered that the hitchhiker apparently smashed through a window during his escape, and we should look for a welcome mat to bypass the broken glass. “Cool,” I whispered back. “But shouldn’t we try the front door first?”
We did, and as luck would have it, it was unlocked. I eased open the door doing my best to keep it from creaking, Billie standing behind looking down her iron sights into the shadows of the house. Nothing jumped out at us from that still darkness, yet we expected it to occur at any moment. Just jitters I told myself as we moved in. I shut the door, locking it from the inside just as Billie flicked on her flashlight, I did the same. Instantly the room was illuminated by the white cones of light, revealing the living room set up. There was indeed furniture in there, all of it covered in plastic blue tarps. Interestingly enough, besides the tarps and random bit and pieces of trash that scattered the floor, the place actually looked pretty well lived in, except for the terrible smell that is. Kind of like roadkill and patchouli oil it seemed like. We did our best to ignore it as I wandered the room while Billie searched every corner. I held onto the kerosene as I perused the bookshelves along the back wall. I was just tucking away a dusty copy of the complete works of Alistair Crowley when Billie tiptoed to my shoulder.
“Besides that damn stink wafting around, I think this room is fine,” I whispered. “So I guess that leaves everywhere else.”
“How about over there?” She asked, nodding her head towards her right. I followed her gaze to a door at the end of the center hallway, a door with several deadbolt locks and covered in smudged handprints of varying sizes. I had never been here before, but I could just sense that this door in question led to something awful. “Somewhere besides that.” I said back. Billie nodded in agreement.
We moved quietly down the hall and followed an archway into what I presumed to be a dining room. I say dining room because of the tasteful china cabinet, the large rectangular wooden table, the well placed chairs, and the two people sitting at either end of said table. Two people sitting perfectly still, absolutely motionless in the dark. Our flashlights landed on the one in the back first. It was a man wearing a brown sweater vest, and he was smiling. I stopped walking mid stride with one foot still hanging in the air. Instantly my mouth went dry, and I could feel my blood rush deep into my muscles. My stomach cramped up, sweat rolled down my forehead. It’s called a fear response, and it only happens when your limbic system knows that some serious shit is about to go down. Billie’s brain took a different approach, in the form of two shots fired off in rapid succession. One in the chest of the dark shape on the far side, another through the wooden backrest of the close one, each round muffled down to a demons whisper. She then walked around the table to get a better look at her handy work. I followed suit, feeling that it was safe, but nervous. Neither one had made so much as a peep.
“Oh shit, Stephan, come look at this.” She said, pointing her gun at the female stranger. I did look, and I gotta say that it was a weird sight to behold. The woman wearing a blue dress (also smiling despite having been shot through the sternum) had these, growths I guess, coming out of her exit wound. Upon closer inspection I realized that they were polyps, but not like the kind I’ve seen so far. These ones had tiny little tendrils that seemed to be wiggling around lazily, almost as if they were being pushed by a gentle breeze. Weirder still, her skin was a shade of pale blue normally reserved for the recently deceased. I walked over to the man at the end of the table. He had the same thing going on. Billie noticed my expression.
“What do you think this is?” She asked, never lowering her gun.
“First of all, these people were already dead before you shot them, I’d say for at least six hours, based on their stiffness. As for those things,” I pointed at the wriggling little maggot hairs, “are probably what happens when the polyps are left to their own devices, which I’m going to assume is a bad thing.”
Billie wasn’t saying anything. Actually, she was looking around the room some more, with a worried look on her face. “So my suggestion is that we torch this place now before anyone else comes snooping around.” I popped the cap of off the kerosene can and started pouring it around the table, making sure to splash a little on the smiling corpses. “Um, Billie, what’s wrong?”
“The hitchhiker mentioned two kids.” She said to me, her voice uncommonly serious.
It was probably just a coincidence that we heard the noises at just that moment, but fate still decided that the next sequence of events should not go in our benefit.
It started out as just a murmur coming from upstairs. Billie and I heard it at the same time, and we promptly shut off our flashlights as we moved into a corner. We didn’t want to draw any more attention to ourselves then we already had. We had to be very, very quiet. I shouldn’t have to explain why. The noises from upstairs seemed to be that of laughter, children’s laughter specifically, followed by the pitter patter of small bare feet scampering across a hardwood floor. Billie and I in that corner, crouched in near total darkness, we followed the sounds across the length of the ceiling. They seemed to be moving towards the staircase. I thought the time seemed right get the hell out of there; maybe dip out through the kitchen or something. I was just about to follow through with that plan when Billie pushed me back with her left arm.
“Stay here near the kitchen door.” She whispered with her hand cupped over my ear. “I’ll move to the other side. That way we can ambush them.” I was about to point out how stupid that sounded when I heard the clicking little giggles move into the living room. Yeah, clicking little chirps and giggles, a very unnatural vocalization that in even the best of circumstances, unsettling. It was about the same moment that I realized how truly unarmed I was that I saw them.
From what little moonlight fell into the room, I could tell that they appeared at first to be children, small children. But the rest was anything but a normal child. Spindly little things they were, pale gaunt things with long lanky arms outstretched from their tiny bodies, the joints bent at odd angles as they probed the dining room chairs and walls. The whole time making that terrible childish laughing noise intertwined with unearthly clicking. I held my breath. I felt like vomiting.
One of them jumped onto the table top, its long fingers prodding at one of the worm filled corpses. The other was sniffing at the air. I wondered what Billie waiting for…
What happened next was somewhat of a blur. Even now I have trouble remembering what the exact orders of events were exactly, but I do remember with distinct clarity that it all started with a cell phone. Mine, to be precise. It started ringing in my coat pocket, immediately drawing the attention of both of the freaky little bastards. I remember Billie flicking her flashlight to life, and how the one standing on the table spat blood into my glasses, followed by Billie pumping another round into her chamber. I remember the high pitched screeching they made, and how one tried to tackle me as I fell over fallen chair. I remember cracking the bulb of my flashlight across its wide open jaw, and pushing it into the glass case of the china cabinet. I remember Billie firing off two more rounds into the taller of the two, despite how it barely seemed to notice the gaping wounds it was sustaining. I seem to recall that I kicked the rest of the kerosene across the room into the short hallway before setting one of my Burnswick Funeral business cards on fire. I remember heat, and light, and the screaming, and the sound of something large and angry slamming itself against the basement door, the door with the locks and handprints. I vaguely remember Billie yelling to me over the madness as she dragged me into the kitchen and trying to slam the door shut onto something thin and pale, an arm. Although everything that happened in the span of those few seconds seemed to melt into one single moment of absolute carnage, one thing I will never forget were the long white tentacles snaking into the inferno of the dining room, following us all the way up until the door finally closed. I threw a dirty microwave through the kitchen window.
We ran from the blaze as fast as we could, the cool wet air a well appreciated relief from the heat and smoke. It wasn’t dark anymore. The tall grass reflected the orange fires from behind, everything tinted in the colors of violence. We got into my car just we heard the roaring. The drive back into town was quiet for the first few minutes. When Billie finally caught her breath, she spoke up.
“We didn’t learn a damn thing tonight did we?”
“I would say not.” I said, still choking. The beard stubble on the left side of my face had been burnt away. The skin felt hot.
“Thanks for setting everything on fire before we could look around for anything useful.” Billie mentioned a few moments later.
“I’m sorry,” I replied. “After my phone went off I just sort of panicked.” My words reminded me to see who was trying to call me at five in the morning. I pulled it from my pocket, scrolling through the recent call list. It was Terry.
We got to Billie’s house a few minutes later. When we got inside, we saw that Terry was standing still, breathing heavily. He was holding a bloody hammer in his right hand, as he stared at the dead man lying still on the floor, the hitchhiker. Leading from the back of his neck was a trail of bloody mucus that ended at a small fleshy thing flatted into the hardwood.
“What the hell happened here?” Billie asked in exasperation.
“I don’t know. He just started freaking out and chased me around the house with a box cutter. I didn’t see much of a choice.” Terry mumbled out. “Then that thing popped out.”
I looked at the little crushed worm into the floorboards.
“I thought you said he didn’t eat any polyps.” I directed towards Billie.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Well, I guessed he lied. So much for the kindness of strangers.”
I checked my wristwatch. It would be dawn soon. As I glanced from Billie to Terry and back to Billie, I thought back on everything that happened tonight, trying itemizing a list for the sake of context; Public intoxication, reckless driving, breaking and entering, possession of unregistered firearms, arson… would one more crime really make a difference?
I walked into Terry’s kitchen to put on a pot of coffee just as he asked me what I thought we should do next. I took my time coming up with the right words.
“Terry, I’m going to need you to move the blonde kid into your bathtub.” I dictated while measuring out the coffee grounds. “Billie, look around for some trash bags and maybe a jug of ammonia. Oh, and Terry, would you mind telling me where you keep your hacksaw?” Billie and Terry gave each other a nervous glance before getting to work. I followed them into the bathroom a few minutes later, holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a sharp serrated saw blade in the other, the whole time trying to think up a good excuse for my boss as to why I will have come into work so early to run the cremator.
I just kept telling myself that death was a natural thing.
Credit To – Stephan D. Harris
|
“I couldn’t exist in a world devoid of marvels…
even if they frighten me to consider them.”
– Catlin R. Kiernan
12:09 a.m.
There’s got to be something wrong with me. Seriously, I’m twenty two years old and still afraid of the dark. I’m not a little kid anymore, but I can’t work up the courage to just turn off the lights and go to sleep. Okay, let me explain how I came to this. One minute I was enjoying myself, writing a paper on Paleolithic cave paintings for my art history class, and then without warning I imagined that there was something spooky waiting for me in the hallway of my apartment, effectively trapping myself in my own bedroom. You see, I did more than just creep myself out, because with me, fear has a tendency to spiral out of control into levels of mind boggling stupidity.
At first I just ignored it, going on with my work in the hopes that the feeling of being stalked would go away on its own. It didn’t, and I was starting to worry that some shrieking terror was about to burst through the door, so I had to double check to make sure that it was securely locked. After that I couldn’t concentrate on getting my paper written, as every other minute I’d have to look away from my monitor to see if the door was still closed. “This is getting retarded,” I said out loud to no one in particular, “it’s just my imagination fucking with me.” Which is honestly the truth here. I know that if I were to open that door and look into the hall, nothing would happen. One single action and “poof,” sanity becomes restored. The problem of course is the actual opening part. That’s always when the anxiety reaches its high point.
This bullshit started about thirty minutes ago, just before midnight, and it doesn’t look like it’s about to let up anytime soon. So yeah, I’m stuck in my bedroom for what seems like the hundredth time, alone with my computer and thoughts of strange boogeymen. Actually, this whole thing got me wondering where these irrational, paranoid delusions first started. That’s an interesting story actually, and it happened long before anyone could call me crazy.
There’s Something in the Basement.
This story happened in the spring of 1998 in the old house on Erie Street that my parents were renting (Erie as in “Lake Erie,” but yeah, weird coincidence right?) I was six years old at the time, so I was at a point in my life where sleeping with a night-light was still considered normal. I think that we had only been living there for a few weeks, it’s kind of hard to remember for sure exactly, but I do remember the first time my dad took me and my brother to check out the basement. Now the house itself was well over a hundred years old, and in a previous lifetime it served as a train station. The basement as it turned out, was used as a temporary jail cell where the town sheriff would keep the criminals he caught trying to catch a ride out to Chicago, and in the time between then and when my family moved in, no one had thought to updated the basement.
Basically, it was dungeon. The walls were made out of carved rocks or something, with certain areas bricked over from where ground water had been leaking through. Also the whole place was coated in layers of spider webs and dead insects. That’s not even the creepiest part. In the way back around a narrow corner was a heavy door labeled, “Milker Room,” whatever that meant. In any case my dad couldn’t get it open, even with a crowbar. The hinges were so rusted and caked in calcium that nothing short of a jackhammer was going to get through it.
During the daylight hours, I didn’t worry about the basement or the cryptic Milker Room, I just avoided going down there. But at night I couldn’t help thinking about it, and invariably I’d end up hiding under my sheets until I could eventually fall asleep. Of course, I wasn’t always able to fall asleep. Sometimes the voices would keep me wide eyed and alert. And when I say “voices,” I mean what I thought constituted the sound of a man’s muffled speech coming from the cellar. To me it sounded like someone under the floor boards was mumbling incoherently. The reality here of course was that sounds were bouncing around the air vents in such a way as to trick my little kid brain into thinking that there really was someone down there, trapped behind that huge immovable door, trying to get out in order to… I’m not sure exactly. Perhaps I thought he wanted to eat me I guess. Who knows, I was six remember? It doesn’t matter what I thought this made up man wanted, all I knew at the time was that it was bad. And it got worse when my older brother Joshua keep telling me that he knew what was really in the basement. He was a sadistic asshole, and he thought it was just so damn funny to tell me that a monster with a woman’s face and a body covered in tufts of fur was trying to escape from the Milker Room. Let me repeat that: A woman’s face, and a body covered in tufts of fur. It was weeks before I could sleep a full night without yelling for my parents to rush to my room.
Let’s move forward a few years. When I was nine, my parents had decided to move to a better house for commuting reasons. I was helping my dad move some boxes out of the basement, and at this point the place had been cleaned up a great deal and being three years older, I didn’t find the basement all that scary. Until I found myself alone down there while my dad ran off to talk to my mom about something. At first I was fine, but then out of nowhere I started to hear this weird tapping noise. I remember looking around for what was causing it, more annoyed than frightened, when I looked around the corner towards the Milker Room.
It started getting louder, and it was coming from behind the huge black door. I didn’t move for what felt like hours, petrified, when all of a sudden I heard a crashing bang come from where the tapping used to be. I shrieked and started running back towards the stairs, nearly knocking over my dad in process. When he asked me what was wrong I told him about the noises coming from the Milker Room. He laughed. I swear he laughed and told me to follow him.
Going around the corner, my dad walked right towards the Milker Room door, opened it, flicked on the lights, and showed me the loudest water softener in world. He told me that he had it installed two years ago because he was sick of drinking rust flavored water, and the Milker Room was the best place in the house to put it. How’d he get it open in the first place? Well, a lot of hardware stores sell solvents designed specifically for rust and calcium. I had nothing to be afraid of, never really did, but to this day I can remember with perfect clarity that one single moment of pure terror, where I was absolutely sure that something terrible lurked behind a few inches of wood and shadows.
12: 42 a.m.
So the point of that story was to remind myself that there’s nothing evil waiting for me outside of my bedroom. I don’t think it worked. I tried to open it about a minute ago to use the bathroom, but the second I placed my hand around the doorknob my heart started racing like I had just pounded six shots of espresso. Images of a writhing mass of rot and flies filled my mind, or a black hound waiting to pounce from the darkness. I’m freaking out a little inside, because not only do I have a feeling that there’s something out there, but also the sense that whatever it is, it knows that I’m scared. I keep telling myself that it’s all in my head, that I’m just projecting my fears onto the environment. But it’s not working, which is a shame, because I know firsthand how frightening one’s own imagination can be. So here’s what I’m going to do: First, I’m going to pee in the beer bottle I found in my trashcan, and second: I’m going to write down another story, one where I had to go toe-to-toe with my own nocturnal demons.
Sleep Paralysis.
About four years ago I was trapped in a state of almost near total depression. I had just graduated from high school, but my grades where so low that my choices for college were very much limited to the “first place that accepts me,” category. Add to this that I was unemployed, my best friend had already left the state, and my parents were in the process of getting a divorce. In hindsight, I handled the whole situation in an extremely immature way by smoking a ridiculous amount of weed and barricading myself into my room to play video games all damn day. In other words, I was starting to turn into a complete loser.
Now, some schools of thought suggest that nightmares serve as a subconscious mechanism to resolve perceived stressors. If this is true, then I was lucky that things hadn’t started to get strange earlier.
One night after a long hard day of bong hits and masturbation, I fell asleep just as I always had. Except this time I woke up right in the middle of things. And by that I mean my brain woke up while the rest of me kept right on sleeping. I would later discover that this phenomenon was called “sleep paralysis,” which occurs when a person wakes up during the middle of the R.E.M. cycle and cannot move his or her limbs due to the sympathetic nervous system having shut down muscle control, in order to keep the person from hurting themselves while they dream. The experience is known to cause feelings of being choked or a sense of panic, and is often accompanied by hypnogogic hallucinations. Needless to say, I didn’t like it one damn bit.
I couldn’t open my eyes, I couldn’t move my arms, and I started to feel a sort of presence enter my room. I wanted to scream but couldn’t and the entity was surrounding me, observing me, judging me. I didn’t know what it was, but somehow the thought got into my head that it wanted to hurt me. I struggled to break free, yelling at myself internally to wake up before it got any closer, but I couldn’t move so much as a finger. Then I felt a pressure, or tightness on my chest, like the life was being crushed out of me by something huge and angry. If someone were to try to read my thoughts at this point, all they would hear would be the sounds of a wild animal backed into a corner: Vicious and scared, border lining madness.
Right when I thought that I was about to die, I heard myself scream, “WAKE UP!” Whether from inside or out I don’t know, but suddenly I bolted upright in bed, feeling very dazed and tired. I looked around my room, looking for whatever it was that was trying to kill me, but everything seemed fine, so I decided to get a glass of water. Almost immediately after getting out from beneath the covers, I started to hear a very deep, almost painful moan coming from the hallway outside of my bedroom, followed by a thud and footsteps. At this point I was more angry than scared, so I grabbed a baseball bat and moved towards the door. I didn’t rush out into the hall immediately, because by now it was slamming itself against my door, trying to get in, all the while its moans sounding more and more like it was in a state of constant agony. Eventually I heard it start to shuffle away, so fast as lightening I threw open the door a rushed into the hall. That’s when I saw it.
It was very, very tall. So tall that it had to crouch a little to avoid the ceiling. Also it was thin, more bone than flesh. It didn’t have arms, or skin, or even a face really. I suppose that the best description here would be that it was an elongated skeleton wearing a straitjacket made of bacon. Whatever it was, it had turned around and was beginning to shuffle towards me, so I ran forward swinging my bat like a madman until it had stopped moving, gurgling in a puddle of its own blood.
I woke up the next morning around dawn, lying face down on the hallway carpet next to my bat. Apparently I had dreamed the whole encounter, and now there was a hole in the wall from where my bat had punched out a chunk. I haven’t had a case of sleep paralysis since, nor did I ever witness the bacon monster again, but it just goes to show what sort of nightmares my own brain is able to conjure.
1: 38 a.m.
Well that clearly didn’t help. No, I’m not worried about the bacon demon hiding out there (I already stomped his bitch ass into the ground), but I’m still unable to just open the door. I can’t sleep if I think there’s something out there. I can’t force myself to stay awake until sunrise either. I really don’t have a clue here.
Shit, I just pulled a neck muscle from turning my head to fast. I thought I saw something moving in the corner of my eye. It was just a shoe. An unmoving, unlaced, dirty whore of a shoe. Okay, enough screwing around, I just found a hammer. Wish I had a shotgun, but I guess a hammer will have to do. I’m going try opening the door again, I’ll be back in a minute.
1: 39 a.m.
Nope, not going to happen. I started sweating before I could even touch the handle. I tried, I really tried, but it was too much. Even worse, now I’m hearing noises coming from outside of my window. Good thing the blinds are closed. I wish my roommate would just come back. He works a late shift, so he usually doesn’t get home until around five in the morning. Wait, hold on, that’s only like another three and a half hours or so. Yeah, I’ll just wait from him to get off work and then I can finally put this nonsense behind me. Then again, It’s not such a great idea to have too much faith in your friends. Especially when they know just how easily you can be startled. Like my friend Stephanie, who decided to tell me one of her own horror stories just as I was about to head home for the night.
The Union Street Cemetery
The Union Street Cemetery is the oldest graveyard in town. It’s also the shitiest. Over the years a combination of vandalism, poor upkeep, and harsh weather have made the headstones virtually unreadable, and the surrounding patches of grass that haven’t been overrun by weeds are a sickly yellow color, similar to bile. The cemetery itself sits squarely on top of a slight hill, and despite the fact that it’s been there for ages, most people in town don’t even know where it is, if they even know that it exists at all. This might have something to do with the fact that the entire area surrounding the Union Street Cemetery has been unofficially designated as the town ghetto. In other words, the houses in that area are made homes by the lower income families. My friend Stephanie was one of them for a while.
When Stephanie was in her early twenties, she led the glorious life of a single mother working as many hours as possible as a diner waitress, and in order to survive she had to move herself and her four year old son into a house on Union Street with two roommates. Or maybe she wasn’t single at this point, I’m a little fuzzy on the details here, but I do know that she lived in one of the Union Street houses with her son.
So the story as told by Stephanie, was that one night while her husband/ boyfriend/ roommates were all out of the house, Stephanie was in the kitchen trying to make some diner while her son played in the living room. Now her son Tyler (at least I think his name was Tyler) was being loud as usual, banging toy trucks into each other like little boys are known to do, so naturally Stephanie became worried when everything got quiet. When she walked into the living room to see if Tyler was doing alright, she saw him looking out of the front window from in between the curtains and the glass pane. Keep in mind that their house was right across the street from the cemetery.
“Whatcha looking at Tyler?” She asked.
“They’re coming over.” He responded, still looking out of the window.
“Who’s coming over Tyler?”
“The people from across the street.” He said.
It was here that Stephanie looked out of the front window expecting to see actual people, but instead saw only gates to the graveyard. Now Stephanie isn’t some dumb bimbo from a cheesy zombie movie, she’s a real person, and like most people in real life she’s seen her fair share of horror films. She wasn’t going shrug this off as just another child saying strange things, she was going to get the hell out of there, which she did. Stephanie grabbed Tyler, an overnight bag, and spent the night at her mother’s house. She returned the next morning after whoever else lived there had told her that everything was fine, that the walls weren’t bleeding or anything else even remotely supernatural. Even still, Stephanie moved out of that house within a year.
She told me this story one night just before I was about to leave my ex-girlfriend’s house (Stephanie was a good friend of my ex’s, that was how I came to know her.) so I was more than a little nervous to walk home alone in the dark. Actually, it really wasn’t a big deal until her story ran through my head when I was about half way home, which got me wondering just where I was exactly in position to the Union Street Cemetery, so that I could plan my walk in order to avoid it. I remember thinking that I was pretty close to Union Street, so I stopped walking briefly to try and locate any notable landmarks. I was trying to look over a hill when it happened.
At the worst possible moment, the clouds parted enough so that some faint moon light outlined the silhouettes of several headstones resting on top of the hill. As it would turn out, I was facing the back side of the graveyard, standing so close that I could have thrown a rock over the fence without even trying. Of course I freaked out, I honestly didn’t realize just how close I was to the cemetery. It was just that dark. I turned and ran without looking back. I didn’t stop running until I had reached the highway.
2: 57 a.m.
I’m not going to get out of this room tonight. I just can’t do it. There’s something terrible out there. Not just in the hall, but also outside my window, staring from behind the blinds, waiting for me to let it in. I’ve been griping the handle of my hammer so hard for so long that I know every grove in the carved wood better than I know my own face.
The light bulb of my desk lamp blew out about fifteen minutes ago, so now the only source of light is what little comes from this screen. I’m starting to think that it’s already gotten in here. Yes, yes it is. It’s definitely in here, maybe it’s always been in here, with me. I can’t face the darkness, that’s how it gets you. It only becomes real if you look at it, if even for just a moment. It will flicker to life, like a movie reel that skips a frame. There for a heartbeat, and then gone. But that’s all it wants, all it’s ever wanted. It will blink into existence for only a fraction of a second, but the damage will last forever. Where do you think these stories come from? They’re just the fallout of what I’m trying to forget: Something that doesn’t want to be forgotten.
I’m not going to let it get to me again. It only becomes real if you look at it, so I won’t. I’ll just keep my eyes on the screen, and I’ll try to ignore the shapes moving around the edges of my vision. I’ll be fine as long as I’m looking at the screen, because it only becomes real if you look at it. It’s only real when it looks back.
Credit To – Stephan D. Harris
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If you asked me how long we’ve been down here, I wouldn’t know. We don’t see the sun, and nobody seems to have a watch. It doesn’t matter anyway; we don’t have anywhere to be. For all we know there isn’t anywhere left to be. The surface has surely been overrun with death and decay by now.
There are six of us left. Until just recently there were seven. Her screaming has stopped now and I feel relief. It was hard to sleep with those agonizing screams and the banging on the steel door. Huddled in my blankets, I look around at the other survivors; four men and a woman, all of us unkempt and haggard. At one point we all worked here, but since the accident it’s become our prison. The painfully low amount of food is in a pile in the center of the room, so we can all keep an eye on it to make sure nobody is taking more then we’re allowed per day. There’s enough food for three, maybe four meals. None of us want to think about it. We just stare.
There are no beds, just piles of blankets and paper that make crude sleeping areas. There’s one bathroom at the far end of the complex and it has running water. There are three other rooms, rooms we used to work in, filled with computers and lab equipment that has accumulated a fine layer of dust. We still have power somehow, so all the security cameras and lights still work. Unfortunately none of the computers work because they’ve been shut and locked, as per emergency protocol. Any contact with the outside world is non-existent.
We worked for the military, doing basic chemical research. Somewhere along the line a chemical was leaked, and the results were fatal. People who came into direct contact with the chemical succumbed to vomiting, mild at first, then intense, until they had nothing to excrete except for their own blood. Nobody lasted more then a couple hours once they had touched the chemical. It also spread through saliva, bile and blood, so those with the misfortune of coming into contact with even a single drop are doomed. We had to toss that woman out because we caught her vomiting in the toilet. She said she was pregnant and that it was only morning sickness, but you can’t be sure. Her fiancé, Barry, tried to intervene, calling us animals. We clubbed him over the head, then tied and gagged him to a thick pipe at one end of the room. He strains against the bonds and screams into the gag occasionally, a fierce and wild-eyed look on is face. It’s for his own good and the good of everyone here. He might hurt someone. He needs to be untied and fed eventually, but nobody wants to be the one to do it. So we just sit and stare at the pile of food on the floor that gets lower with each rationed meal. He’s another mouth to feed that we can’t afford.
Everyone is on edge, twitchy and jumpy. Every movement is watched intently, with suspicious and unrelenting eyes. Nobody talks anymore. They just stare. We all know we’re going to die, it’s just a matter of time before hunger or the chemical gets us. It’s all in the backs of our minds, eating away at our sanity.
It’s been awhile now since the incident with the sick woman. Barry died while I was asleep, and our food supplies have run out. I draw the blanket over my head and drift into a fitful sleep, filled with hunger pangs. I’m awakened some time later by the sound of whispers. I can see three members of our group huddled in a circle and identify them as Marcus, Daniel and Eileen. My stirring causes them to look over, piercing me with savage eyes. They start moving towards me with a hungry look on their faces. Their intent hits me with a sudden burst of fear, and I scramble to my feet. Marcus grabs me by the collar, and it tears as I break loose from his grip. Daniel grabs at my blanket and I shove him hard against the third attacker, Eileen. They go sprawling and I spring past them and into the computer room, locking the door as fast as I can. Dragging desks and cabinets, I make a crude and hopefully secure barricade. I see them banging themselves against the door and the windows, glaring at me with feral eyes. Something catches their attention down the hall, and they stop, heads snapping sharply in the direction of the bathroom.
The fifth man, Jackson, must have finished using the facilities, unaware of the intent of the other three. He approaches and peers into the window, a puzzled look on his face. I try to scream a warning, but all that escapes my throat is a hoarse rattle. It’s too late anyway, and his face is smashed against the glass by one of the others. I stare in horror as his face is smashed to a pulp, each thud resounding through the room like a slow heartbeat. Then his body is taken away and there is silence.
They’re gone for now, but they’ll be back. Hunger gnaws at my stomach and I search frantically for any morsel of food. With extreme luck, I manage to find a candy bar in one of the desk drawers and hungrily devour it, thanking whoever it was who had the sweet tooth. My bliss soon passes, and the hunger pains return. I try to sleep, but even the slightest sound jolts me awake. I have no idea how much time has passed but suddenly they were bashing the blood smeared window with a pipe. They’re going to get in, and I will need to defend myself.
There’s an emergency axe in one corner of the room, inside a glass case. I smash the glass and retrieve it, and it makes me fell a little better. My anxiety grows along the spider web cracks on the window with each passing moment. After God knows how many attempts, the window finally shatters and the wild, barely human face of Marcus peers in. I sit in a chair, with the axe out of view, and wait. I’m going to die anyway, so I might as well go out fighting. He climbs in, followed by Eileen and finally Daniel. They approach slowly, in a mini skirmish line. When they get close enough, Marcus raises the pipe for a killing blow. Before he has time to bring it down, I swing the axe and slice him in the chest. The pipe clatters to the floor and as I spring to my feet. Eileen lunges at where I was and crashes into the now empty chair. I swing the axe, catching Daniel off guard and delivering a blow to the temple. His blood showers me and stings my eyes, blinding me. Eileen lunges for me again and tackles me around the ankles, sending me to the ground. I managed to hang on to my axe, and as her hands clasp around my neck I slash her throat. The hands grip tighter for a moment and then loosen, and her lifeless body crumples on top of me.
Pushing her off, I stagger towards Marcus, gagging from the strangling I had just received. He was still alive, dragging himself through his own blood towards the fallen pipe. I stick my foot on his back and swing the axe onto his skull. My heart racing, I stumble backwards and am grabbed by hands from behind. The axe is wrenched from my hand and I feel a sharp prick on my neck. I lose all muscle control and slump to the floor. Through blurred vision I see men in hazmat suits all around me. I hear the sound of their voices, but they seem distorted and far away. Then the man nearest me speaks and the words register into my brain with horror.
“The experiment has gone on long enough,” he says, before I sink into total darkness.
—
Credited to Kilkenny.
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An elderly man was sitting alone on a dark path. He wasn’t sure of which direction to go, and he’d forgotten both where he was traveling to…and who he was.
He’d sat down for a moment to rest his weary legs, and suddenly looked up to see an elderly woman before him.
She grinned toothlessly and with a cackle, spoke: “Now your third wish. What will it be?”
“Third wish?” The man was baffled. “How can it be a third wish if I haven’t had a first and second wish?”
“You’ve had two wishes already,” the hag said, “but your second wish was for me to return everything to the way it was before you had made your first wish. That’s why you remember nothing; because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes.” She cackled at the poor man. “So it is that you have one wish left.”
“All right,” he said hesitantly, “I don’t believe this, but there’s no harm in trying. I wish to know who I am.”
“Funny,” said the old woman as she granted his wish and disappeared forever. “That was your first wish…”
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And I am always with you.
I was there from the time you were born. I stood in the delivery room, staring down at you before you could even open your eyes to see me. Your parents, relatives and doctors couldn’t see me there, in the corner, watching you with cloudy eyes, but I was there from the time you were born.
And I followed you home.
I was with you always, your constant companion. You played with your toys alone while I stared from all angles in nearby mirrors; my matted, clotted hair with oily sweat that hung off my dented forehead like glue. I was always your constant companion, drifting behind your mother’s car on your ride to preschool. You alone in the bathroom, but I was on the other side of the door, wind whistling through the bruised hole in my throat. My arms twisted and hanging in their sockets as I stood hunched on the other side of the shower curtain. I wait and follow you. I follow and drift behind you.
I’m not seen. I’m almost not-there in light. You never saw me that morning as I sat across from you at the breakfast table, a shiny red clot hanging from an empty tooth socket as I gaped grotesquely at you. I wonder sometimes if you know I’m there. I think you are aware, but you’ll never understand just how close I am.
I spend hours of your day doing nothing more than breathing in your ear.
Breathing – gagging, really.
I crave to be close to you, to always wrap my crippled arms around your neck. I lie near you ever single night, cloudy eyes staring at your ceiling, underneath your bed, at your sleeping face in the dark.
Yes. You caught me staring occasionally. Your parents came running down to your room one night when you screamed. You were just beginning to talk, so you were only able to cry out “Man! Man in my room!” You thought you’d never forget the sight of me, with my collapsed jaw hanging to my chest, swinging back and forth. I sank back into your closet and your mother was unable to see me though you pointed and pointed and pointed. You thought you’d never forget when they left that same night. You saw the closet door crack so softly and me crawling across the floor to your bed on all fours, shambling in jerking movements as I pushed myself under your bed on disjointed limbs.
You learned a new word for me: boogeyman. Not quite the monster you thought I was. I’m just waiting and following you always, touching your face with my knotted fingers as you sleep.
You’ll see me again soon. Any day now, I’m coming, blunt and brutal. One day you’ll walk across the road and – I believe I’ll plow into you with loud roar and a screech.
You rolling on the pavement, rolling under wheels, bluntforce metal fenders and my fingers touching your face again and again.
As you stare up from the cold pavement with cloudy eyes; your matted, clotted hair hanging in your face and your jaw unhinged and swinging to your chest.
You’ll see me approaching.
No one else will see me. You will stare past them into my eyes and I’ll leer down at you. For the first time in our life, something like a smile will come over my face. You’ll swear you’re looking into a mirror as clotted red bubbles from our mouths.
I’ll lean down, past the doctors and the oogling people and pick you up in my crooked arms.
Our faces will touch. My wings will unfurl. And then you’ll have to follow me.
And I am always with you.
I am your guardian angel.
—
This was credited to “William Rodgers” when it was submitted.
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Jack Mckay huddled in the cold midnight street with a pale green sleeping bag encasing his lower half. Spindled trails of light reflected off the gleaming roads from damp lampposts. But the cold wasn’t what gave Jack his nightly jitters—not by a long shot. The small flame bewitched his green eyes just below the bent spoon full of rose-gray powder. This last week of panhandling had been kind to him. It was likely shit quality riddled with impurities, but that was irrelevant. He had an itch, so why waste what the good Lord delivered? “Might leave a wee aftertaste in your gob, but you’ll enjoy the ride, trust me.” The dealer had assured him—as much as a dealer would.
A little further down the pavement was another homeless man draped in a tan blanket. He was sitting upright with his face buried between his knees. Jack knew him as Graham Wilson, a neurotic character he had met in the queue for the shelter off Crimea Street before they reached capacity and shooed everyone else away.
A man was approaching dressed in some thick woven coat and Rupert Bear trousers. His footsteps sounded strange against the asphalt, clop-clop-clop as if he were wearing a pair of tap shoes. A large black tweed hat covered his face. He bent down to Graham and mumbled incoherently to him. The two exchanged mumbles for a minute or so before Wilson nodded. In the corner of his eye, Jack watched the two disappear into an alleyway. Probably going to suck him off for alcohol pounds, Jack thought to himself.
Once the powder became a gooey black puddle, Jack dipped in the needle tip and drew up the ethereal fluid of the angels. His arm was permeated with collapsed blood vessels too narrow and bruised for use, but he still had a few good ports left. He spied a surviving vein among the scarred landscape and slid the needle in slowly. One pull of the plunger to check for blood and then a slow push forward until the black substance disappeared. First, his arm tingled as though someone lit a fuse in his venous expressway. Then all at once, an extracellular stimulant erupted into a euphoric surge. Pure illusory pleasure coated his brain like thick warm wax. The jitters stopped. Glasgow, with its year-round Atlantic gales, with its Victorian tenements and modern skyscrapers, no longer existed. And for a moment, his thoughts reached the peak of the vast universe.
Then the screaming started; it was a horrible shrill of horror. It came from around the corner and sounded like it was pouring straight out of Graham’s throat. Through his veil of dazed elation, Jack couldn’t drown it out. Someone needed help—his help. He lumbered over the walkway and rounded the corner before his drug weighted thoughts could catch up. As he reached the narrow gap between two tenements, the ululating stopped.
Double yellow lines ran across the side streets edge with a few bin wagons under the orange glow of a streetlamp. There was no trace of the two men between the chipped brickwork. The pathway was a dead end of dilapidated windows, only one way in or out where Jack stood. Still not entirely at his wits, he stepped inside where Graham and his screams dissipated. An odor of wet trash and rusted iron perforated the air.
A drain cover was lying next to a void in the asphalt. Jack peered down the exposed pipe. Assisted by the orange light, he could make out something lying at the bottom of the chute—a mangled human hand. Two fingers were missing. The palm was for the most part peeled away from the exposed tendons in a ghastly fold. Jack stumbled backward from the sight and nearly vomited the universe from his body. Without another thought, he barreled out of the area as fast as his legs allowed.
To say the vile image of that disfigured hand smothered Jack’s thoughts was an understatement. Every night after the incident, he tried fruitlessly to expel the repeating scenarios of Graham Wilson sitting on the same street corner like him, followed by the clop-clop-clop, then the screaming. Why those sounds? Why wear those shoes? Maybe the dealer had snuck some hallucinogenic kick in his merchandise. It’s difficult to trust your eyes with a mind as high as a kite during Hurricane Bawbag. Jack was too afraid to tell the authorities, let alone to check that dreadful place again.
Russell Gresham—one of the few souls left in his social circle who wasn’t a peddler— was the only one he could tell. He had several years over Jack and had been sleeping rough in Glasgow far longer. His face was a contoured map of wrinkles with a scruffy walrus mustache beneath a jutting nose. In his earlier years, he had been gamekeeper for deer, before the Parkinson’s worsened and one bill after another went unpaid due to the alcoholism.
The two squatters often slept and conversed in the rickety upper level of a condemned corner row house off Greendyke Street. Any passerby would notice the mounds of accumulated garbage and the front door covered in violation notices. The corridors were dark and unheated, and uncovered bulbs protruded from the ceiling fixtures over bare wooden floors and uncurtained windows.
“I’m going to tell ya’ something about Glasgow,” Russell told Jack, only it came out more like Glasgee. “What you saw was a shame—a heavy shame. But when you’ve known these streets as long as I have, the ‘Dear Green’ city starts to look a hell of a lot less green. Every town has its dark corners, but Divill-be-damned if we don’t have some wicked ones.”
Jack’s spine was firmly against the wallpaper that peeled off like dead skin. Russell and his ramblings could no longer reach him. They were nothing but white noise and incoherent whispers in the faraway glades of his thoughts. But these glades were not green; they were as dark as the cavernous depths that always waited for him. Newton’s old dictum, what goes up must come down. Could he pull himself out this time around? Not without a hollow metal fix. He needed it now more than ever before. His veins were hungry. The guilty pleasures were like an insufferable ringing in his ears enough to drive anyone dog mad. Mad enough to tear out your eardrums, just for the silence to return and the cravings to cease. His sanity was screaming, just like Graham Wilson’s mutilated hand.
“They found a liver bobbing around in Hogganfield Loch; could’ve belonged to that fellow you heard,” Russell muttered, scooping a spoonful of cold vegetables and losing the majority from the hand tremors. “Didn’t take livers fer floaters, but I guess you learn something new every day.” Jack’s fleeting attention made him crack a contemptuous smile as he clutched one of the empty aluminum cans.
The can fell by Jack’s head snapping him out of his pitch-black trance. “Don’t beat yourself up, Laddie,” Russell laughed through stained grinning teeth. “Even if you went to the polis, they’d have taken one good look at you and told you to scramble. Nobody believes rough sleepers, let alone the junkie ones. ‘Come quickly; Sawney Bean is painting the streets red!’ I’m sure that’d digest well.”
But Jack would not find his solace for another four nights, until his next fix behind the deserted good yards of the Great Eastern Hotel. The large piece of property that loomed over Duke Street had long fallen to ruin. A rough sleeper from nineteen hundred times would have been able to call this place shelter, before storms and tenacious winds withered its structural integrity. Portions of the roof had collapsed, and its halls were vacant and uninhabitable. What remained of the hotel was a structure stripped down to its inner shell, more to preserve its character than anything else.
This dose couldn’t hold a candle to the last batch, no thanks to that fangled tooth dealer. It was so far diluted and inadequate that all he got was a mild spark of pleasure for roughly five seconds or so. What a fucking joke, Jack seethed. But at the very least it was enough to grant him some sleep for the night. The ringing momentarily fell still and was replaced by the sound of running water.
It was coming from the Molendinar Burn that emptied into a lower culvert in between two perpendicular walls. The burn’s flow surfaced briefly for a few yards beneath Duke Street and then disappeared yet again into the underground channels of Green Glasgow’s veins where it would eventually reach the Clyde. Across the gap, on the west side was the car park of a business center, surrounded by an eight-foot metal barrier.
“—Sammy!” The shout woke Jack. A woman with a black coat and faded teal trousers was scouring the goods yard. She looked to be in her late twenties with short ruffled auburn hair. Judging by the high-pitched whistles and the “Here, boy!” she was either looking for a dog or someone off their head. Come to think of it; maybe he had seen a dog sniffing around the area before he shot up.
A bark resonated from the burn. The woman scuttled toward the ledge and slapped both hands over her kneecaps. “How did you get down there?” she sighed. An excited bark was the response. Jack watched her approach the caged ladder to their right that was attached to a rendered cement wall and topped with a safety railing. She carefully descended the steel rungs until she fell out of sight. After the quiet splash of her shoes, Jack crept forward and peered over the ridge.
The Auburn girl was tailing a soaked Labrador that splashed around her in happy trots. What was once bright yellow fur was now sopping and clotted with mud. No dog could look more content. “What has got into you?” She shouted with a partial laugh and hiss of annoyance while the cold water rolled over her heels.
“Need a hand, Lass?” Jack called down to her.
“We’re fine. On your way, please,” she said with a denoted sliver of passive aggression, not so much as batting an eye to him.
Just as her fingers were about to hook the Lab’s green collar, it veered away and galloped downstream, straight into the culvert. “Sammy, No! No!” she screamed, making chase and stopping at the foot of the tunnel where her voice echoed back to her. She paced the air passage back and forth like a wooden duck in a shooting range. Another bark reverberated off the brick-lined walls. Finally, after several attempts to coax the dog out, she sloshed her way inside. “Little fucker,” she jeered.
Jack shuffled down the closest bank and cautiously dropped into the canal. Fresh cold water straight from the north-east seeped into his shoes. He stood beneath the stone arch at the mouth of the passage where the girl entered. It almost looked like a bullet shot right through Duke Streets crotch. “You find him?” He called into the black corridor. Traces of her voice bounced back to him, still calling for Sammy.
Once he stepped inside, it was almost as though a trip plate of events triggered all at once; an abrupt sequence that would leave Jack Mckay waking in the middle of the night glazed with sweat and holding in the screams for the rest of his life. The calls for Sammy stopped and erupted into a blood-curdling shriek. The girl’s silhouette flailed out of the darkness toward him followed by a clop-clop-clop A shadow reached out and collapsed on top of her.
Something was there, a large hunching amorphous shape. Waves of acrid bacterial odors flooded Jack’s senses. Without thinking, he pulled the lighter from his pocket and flicked the small flame to life. Through the dim light, he could see a bloated mass of wrinkled skin. Several limbs with hooves twisted entirely backward held up the bulk of its barrel-shaped body. Dripping hair that resembled pondweed stems encompassed its muscular neck with yellow patches of fur. Deep heavy breaths wafted out of its elongated muzzle anchored deeply into the girl’s shoulder. Something snapped from its brawny neck: a green nylon collar. Jack then realized the overall size of the being was growing, and the yellow blotches of fur were dissolving into its black mane.
“Why,” A rickety voice squeaked out of her gray spectral face. Her words creaked out with a weight of sanity about to be pulled to pieces. “Why aren’t you helping me?” The corner of her mouth perked up in a caricature of pure madness.
The hooves began to scrape against the rutted floor, following downstream. She was being dragged away into the imperceptible bowels of the underworld. For a moment, the paralysis left him as he dived forward and gripped the woman’s hand. The lighter plopped into the water and bathed them both in blackness. He pulled with whatever strength his welted arms could collect, but the black skin—or whatever it was—stuck to her like viscid black tar. The sharp incisors in her shoulder clenched even tighter until a yielding blood vessel popped. Blood peppered Jack’s face and made him lose grip.
He fell backward into the burn as it seeped into his lower regions. That was when he locked glances with the human-like irises. Two slits of golden embers that held a cold light behind them. The sort of way a God would look at a fly: unmoved or concerned. Go ahead; watch to your heart’s content, my friend. Who will believe you anyway? Piss emptied from his bladder. In one fearful convoluted swoop, Jack turned tail and fled out of the culvert’s throat, deafening out as much of the woman’s screams as he could.
He ended up in the vacant lavatory of a nearby park. Footsteps of mud and dirt residue smudged the monolithic flooring. The petrified face of sagging skin and dark telltale eyes stared back at him. His skin had long lost its radiance, and after tonight, it would never return. Red pocks streaked across his face, still wet and smeared. He cupped his trembling hands with water and smothered his face. Blood wreathed down the cracked porcelain sink and threaded down the drain.
Did you see it? Yes, you did. Are you sure? Damn fucking sure. Twice now the screaming had come, twice now people have disappeared. Those horrible eyes bored into his skull and left repeating thoughts of how gold can look so cruel. He could tell the authorities, but what would that do? They couldn’t deny someone’s disappearance, but as for the cause, he may as well show up stark naked to the station to give the chief a big slobbery kiss. This must be what waist-deep in shite feels like, he thought.
Russell was right, and for the time being, he was the only one Jack could trust. He sneaked into the foreclosed corner house through a gaping window. On the upper floor, Russell was nestled over a stained mattress and lightly humming in his sleep. Jack shook him awake.
“What the feck!” he bellowed and swiped dazedly in the air.
“Russell,” Jack’s skinny outline spoke to him, “Sawny Bean is painting the town red.”
“Are you hawked up on the needle? Bolt ye bawbag!” Russell snorted and began to turn over. That was until he smelled the blood. “Christ, what did you do?”
“It isn’t mine.” Jack exhaled through the gaps between his pale fingers. “Someone else’s, the woman it took away.”
Russell’s protruding nose wrinkled. “What do you mean ‘it’? What are you on about now?”
“Something was inside of the Molendinar Burn.” That was as far as his tongues deadlock allowed. Somewhere in the membrane of his thoughts was an aimless speck of wounded clarity. Never speak it, never seen it, right? He wished it were right. Then he could run away from these things that would surely drive him insane. But no, it was too late for the gift of ignorance. “I think it was a kelpie.” The words floated out of him.
One eyebrow rose and crinkled Russell’s forehead from his congested expression. “Water horses aren’t real; they are tales for bairns.”
“I know what I saw,” Jack exclaimed with the density of a stone pillar. “And this kelpie was not lookin’ to offer children rides to their watery doom. It can change its shape. That’s how it lured the young Lassie, that’s how it lured Graham Wilson. It’s real Russell, and it feeds just like you and me.”
“Yer arse is out the window. How would all of Glasgee not be on its haunches if an actual Kelpie were swiping people from the street?”
“The burn,” Jack explained hastily, “It’s been moving beneath the city, all the nooks, and crannies that run straight through Hogganfield Loch into the city. It finds someone alone and then takes them away. You said it yourself; this town has dark corners.”
Russell grunted begrudgingly. “Say you were right,” He derisively grumbled, “And something was hiding in the pipes. What could a junkie like you do?”
Images of that woman’s petrified face were acutely sowed in Jack’s mind, alongside the butchered hand, alongside the sardonic embers. “Kill it.” he breathed. “I have to kill it before it happens again.”
Russell kneaded the bags beneath his eyes and drawled out a weighty groan. A portion of his sleep-deprived brain wanted to slap every piece of nonsensical gibberish out of this dafty fool. The rest could not deny the blood, as much as it wanted to. Jack Mckay was a forlorn and hopeless heroin head, but he was no murderer. The look in his dread stricken face reanimated a distant memory for Russell, back into the depravity known as Bellgrove Hotel.
“’bout three years ago, I fell on desperate times and took to the Bellgrove Hotel. You’ve never seen squalor like that hell hole. Rats infested the courtyard and our five by ten-foot rooms with barred windows. The stairs and the moldy corridors reeked of urine and vomit, and emptied cider and vodka bottles were left in the corners. Residents would smoke joints and drink themselves unconscious while the staff left them unattended in pools of their filth. The owners were banking around a million or so a year in housing benefits.
“One night, a wee old leddy burst through the door looking white as the tail of a ptarmigan. She was crying fer help, saying something pulled her daughter into the sewer drain. One of the staff—some African mannie—threw her out into the street. We barely had any room for ourselves. To this day, I wish I had helped her, but my spirits were too hobbled. A few days after that, a small pair of lungs turned up in Hogganfield Loch.” Russell stood up from the bed and crunched his neck to the side. They could both hear distant thunder outside. He walked over to the pile of bags with a graceless gait. “I thought she was off her head. Frankly, I still think you are.”
Jack watched him fumble through one of the swollen black bags until he pulled out a small box. He returned to the bed and rested the black box over his lap. “But Divill be damned if they fish your parts out of that loch.” He unclipped the metal holders of the box and opened its contents to Jack. “The shakes have made my hands pooched nowadays, so I don’t have much use fer it.” A Glock seventeen pistol lay there in its container with a box of Winchester silver tips shoved next to the grip and trigger. “But if you’re talking out your fanny flaps and stick up a bank, then forget my name, Aye?”
A biting gale rolled over the large kettle pond of Hogganfield Loch. It was one of the four large bodies of water in Glasgow Park left behind by ice age giants. This was the paramount source of the Molendinar Burn that bled into the city.
Thunder mumbled lowly from the overcast clouds hidden behind the night sky. Jack walked along the tarmac path that encircled the lochs outer edge, the pistol loaded and securely in his pocket. Doubt consisting of [i]where to look or what to expect[/i] harassed the loony bravado he called confidence. It felt like finding a needle in a haystack full of ravenous snakes. A needle he wanted in the worst way possible about now. For all, he knew the Kelpie was lying merrily in the middle of this damned lake enjoying the fruits of its labor.
He glanced over the shallow stretch of water and met a small wooded isle situated at its center. The isolated piece of land acted as a sanctuary that any buzzard or wildfowl could nest in. He followed the trail to the southern corner of the loch, closest to the wooded islands sandy beach. Unfortunately, the only way to reach it was to trek through the watery gap between shores.
He stared at the waters glittering ripples from the wind, hypnotized by its alluring seams. Perhaps if he swam like a madman, it would be over in a minute or so. But even sixty seconds could separate the dead from the living. He’d be nothing less of an oblivious swan waiting to be pulled under, ripe for the picking. But if his theory was right—and he had every reason to doubt himself—the Kelpie came here to finish feeding. Frankly, he wasn’t even sure if it needed to eat for necessity. Those tapered gold eyes weren’t hungry; they were egotistic. After all, gods only eat and drink for pleasure purposes.
Finally, the madman made up his mind and traversed into the cold with the pistol held over his head. It was shallow enough for his feet to slop through the clumps of sand and submerged both shoulders. A sudden shock ripped through him as a long slender reed ran up his pant leg and filled him with frightful visions of a glistening black mane. He propelled himself against the Langmuir currents expecting at any moment for a set of powerful jaws to rend the flesh from his ankle and drag him into the black bubbly abyss.
The sand slanted upward as he reached the wooded island and pulled himself ashore. Fingertips smothered in soft, sticky earth never felt greater. A streak of lightning flared across the sky and released a thunderous crack that would have given Taranis and his six-spoked wheels a run for their money.
Jack retreated into the dense layers of shrubs and thick undergrowth. Mature oak trees loomed overhead housing many nests. Other than the birds, plants were the dominant species here— he somewhat hoped anyway. The farther he traveled through the foliage; the lack of human disturbance became evident. There was no chiseled path nor signs to follow. If any soul went missing here, they’d disappear into the soil forever. He scrapped the thought for now.
The greenery soon opened into a clearing, probably somewhere in the island’s center. Thunder rumbled a low-pitched growl above him, but there was a different sound behind it—the sound of sobbing. Someone was close. Ugly roots of fear and relief of another human presence branched throughout his system. He couldn’t allow himself to stop now, not after everything he’d witnessed. Even if he survived this night, the uncertainty would inevitably kill him.
The wails led him to a sloped woman curled up vulnerable against one of the lofty oaks. She whimpered as her auburn-colored head hung between her knees.
“Miss,” Jack spoke softly in-between her convulsive gasps.
The pasty, sickly-looking girl, floundered against the bark. “No, Please!” She shrieked with anguished blue eyes. A patina of cuts and bruises covered her body; most notably, the torn fabric over her left shoulder revealed grooves of missing flesh. It was the Auburn girl! Jack couldn’t believe she had survived.
“It’s okay,” He said and slowly drew closer to her. “I’m here to save you, Lass.”
“You—you’re the one that left me to die!” She screamed hoarsely.
“Aye, you’re right, but here I am.” He traced the forested area with a cursory glance. “Where has it gone?” He inquired.
She shook her head and started to bellow. “I—I don’t know. Everything was dark and wet. Something wouldn’t let go of me. It dragged me deeper and deeper. Where is my dog? Where is Sammy?”
“I can’t say, but right now you need a hospital.”
The Auburn girl pointlessly attempted to upraise herself with trembling noodle legs. “I can’t; it hurts too much. My ankle feels twisted.” She wined pitifully.
It couldn’t be helped; Jack knelt beside the girl and hoisted her arm over his shoulder. Her petite body leaned into his. In this position, he felt as vulnerable as she was. Did it already know he was here? Was it baiting him for a two-for-one deal? Despite the possibilities, this woman needed medical attention. He’d have to make that wager.
They traversed through the hedges towards the border where Jack came in. The thought of crossing that water now felt like suicide, but what choice did they have? None, the quiet voice of reason whispered. “What’s your name?” He asked through the wet strands of short hair atop her head. Talking, yes talking would help.
She didn’t answer.
“Quite a nice heap of shite we’ve ended up in, eh?” Jack said with a makeshift chuckle, holding whatever sanity existed in an upside-down world. She still didn’t answer. Despite his constructed machismo woven from self-assurance and resolve, something wasn’t right. The woman had a dainty light-weight look to her, but she felt heavy. Almost like a gravitational pull only affecting one of them. The weight of her steps thumped the ground.
Her arm resting on his shoulder seized around his neck. A scar of lightning fire ripped through the sky and illuminated the entire loch for an instant. He looked at her, and she looked right back. Blue eyes no longer greeted him, only golden embers. Something wet and clammy clung to Jack’s arm. Her pastel skin took on a runny gelatinous texture like a doll in a microwave. It climbed over his shirt and suctioned to him. The fabric of her clothes lost their texture and now resembled vaguely colored gelatin. The viscous goo-like secretion that once made up her body crawled over his arms, his torso, and started up the neck. Her eyes were infatuated with him and harbored an almost coy assertion. I win, they said.
Two booming flashes illuminated them. One from the storm, the other from the pistol stowed away in Jack’s pocket. The flytrap substance released him while the silhouetted shape of the girl collapsed to its knees. The rough outline of her dissolving figure was sputtering heavily from the newly opened hole where her throat and the silver bullet were acquainted. Her color blackened to a pitch residue. That pungent fungal smell was back and stronger than ever. Muscles in its back contracted and then bulked together like an interweaving tumor.
But Jack wasn’t done yet. Two more shots opened the creature’s expanding back. It gurgled out a droning moan. Spouts of white which reminded him of star jelly jetted out of its wounds. An eerie satisfaction suffused through him. “So, gods bleed, do they? How does it feel?” he yelled through a fixed rictus grin. By now its mouth and nostrils had elongated into a flat muzzle with projecting razor-edged canines.
Beneath her was the muffled pop of several ribs being pulled out of place and curved outward. She was getting larger, more cylindrical. The bones in her arms and legs were forcefully extending. Her toes and fingers shriveled away into slanted cone-shaped stubs.
Another round tore straight through its fleshy jowl. And then two more in its hind leg joints. The creature squealed piercingly like a banshee. It reared its triangular head backward where Jack caught sight of its eyes filled with crystallized fear. The universe coursed through his veins once again and transcended his mind to an unsurpassable threshold. He had met the enemy, and by the saints, this day was his! “Send me another!” he screamed to the tempest sky. “Send another ignorant god to put down!”
The large chthonic horse raised itself upward, still bleeding the star jelly profusely. Its powerfully built muscles leaped into a four-beat gait. Clumps of earth kicked up in Jack’s face from its twisted hooves. He gave chase to the monstrosity with his pistol deadlocked on its fleeing figure. “Where are you off to, I thought you enjoyed the hunt!” Jack cackled as he madly fired off more shrapnel in its direction.
The Beast ripped through the thicket and leaped into the loch with an explosive splash. Jack skidded to a halt just an inch from the edge and bombarded the disturbed water until the click-click-click of an empty magazine. “Come back anytime, you big Jessie. I’ll be waiting right here, you fucker!” He screamed, unhinged and hysterical. He sloped backward and fell flat on his back. A sensation of raw, unfettered joy bathed his frantic bliss. And for the first in a very long time, the jitters ceased.
Russell Gresham was lying between a doorway with a sheet of cardboard pinned behind his spine and another tucked beneath his sleeping bag. It was a humid sundown with a few light rain outbreaks that left the pavement cold and wet. His panhandling cup grossed four pounds, big tippers today. The deplorable foreclosed house he had temporarily called his own was remarkably put back on auction and sold. But rough sleeping rough was nothing to a soul like his.
Slow-paced footsteps approached. Russell didn’t look at them; it may put off potential alms. ‘Come on, let’s hear that charity’ His inner voice implored the stranger anticipating the lovely clink.
“By hell, have I lost it?” the stranger abruptly spoke.
Russell lifted his eyes to the astonished face of Jack Mckay—or someone that resembled him anyway. But that unchastened face couldn’t belong to the Jack that he knew. It was too bright, too much life in the cheeks. The clothes were also too clean. He was sporting a gray fleece jacket, dark green trousers, and unblemished sketchers.
“Well, if it isn’t my favorite ne’er-do-well.” Russell chuckled glancing at him up and down. “Got all the muck and gunk out of your system?”
His animated cheeks creased to a broad smile. “Most of it,” He laughed and bent towards Russell, “A few still linger here and there, but I’ve reduced it.”
“And how did you go about that?”
“Drug Crisis took me in. They got me on methadone to stop the cravings. It was hell’s bells, worst nights of my life, but eventually, the urges lessened, and I was able to quit the needle. Next thing I know, I found a warehouse job.”
“So, that is what ate you up,” Russell said. “I thought fer sure it was your imaginary Kelpie. Has it bitten your arse yet?”
Jack’s tongue lapped around his lips. An empty searching expression impeded his glowing smile in a thousand-yard stare. “Not since then.” He muttered.
Russell still remembered that night six months ago, when Jack returned; swamp drenched to high hell and a white plastered face like a nun who’s kissed St. Andrew himself. That deep-seated look wasn’t crazy, more so enthralled. “I got rid of it,” he muttered from the floor with the empty pistol lying over his knees. “Sent the bastard back to the watery hell it crawled out of” That was the last Russell saw of him. He figured that maybe Jack’s monster had caught up with him. But there was one other thing; no further organs were found drifting in Hogganfield Loch since then.
“—and it wasn’t imaginary,” he added during Russell’s recollection. “Perhaps I am crazy, but let’s say I was to believe what I saw. Because whether I do or don’t, that won’t change the fact that two people died kicking and screaming in the dark by something that was—and still might be—lurking in that loch.”
Russell shrugged passively and shot an incredulous look. “Goes to show, tighten the hinges and there will still be a few screws loose. Speaking of which, you still owe me fer those silvers you wasted.”
“I owe you a lot Russell, more than you may tolerate,” Jack said as he rose to his feet and extended his hand to him. “Come with me.” That solid stone tone was back.
Russell blinked, “What are you on about now?”
“Get off the streets and come with me.”
Russell blinked again and this time shook his head. “No thanks, Lad. I’ve seen all there is to shelters, can’t say I’m inter—”
“Times are different,” Jack interrupted him, his outstretched hand not wavering. “Things aren’t perfect, but they certainly aren’t the same.”
Russell stared at him, at first flabbergasted, but then something else. To this day, he still isn’t sure what prompted him to take Jack’s hand. But if he were to wager a guess, it would probably be the look in his eyes. They were the kind of eyes that cherished their freedom, the sort of eyes that were able to defeat their monsters.
|
I always get a little uncomfortable when the topic of the paranormal comes up, particularly when some people seem to be so adamant that ghosts simply can’t exist. I don’t attempt to convince them otherwise. As a matter of fact, I don’t share my experiences with them at all. This is actually the first time I’ve attempted to chronicle everything my family went through. It was only for a brief window in time, just a few months. But it burned a scar into my consciousness that will never go away.
I remember my mother and father being so excited at the prospect of all of us moving into our first house. They had been raising four young children in an apartment; just the idea of finally having our own bedrooms (and more than one bathroom) had us all elated. When we first glimpsed the house at the corner of 13th and Elm, my siblings and I almost couldn’t believe it. The place seemed enormous. It was an old colonial-style house with wide-open rooms on the first floor, and all of the bedrooms on the second floor, connected by a grand old wooden staircase.
My brother and sisters and I raced through the place, exploring each room with a sense of excitement and wonder. It was my brother Tommy who first noticed the door in the corner of the kitchen that led to the basement. He swung it open and he and I stood at the top of the stairs, peering down for a few moments. We carefully descended down into the basement, unsure of what we would find. Once we got to the bottom of the stairs, we were a little disappointed with how benign it seemed to be. It was a bare room with a concrete floor, a utility sink in one corner and a single window that would have been peering out into the garden in the front yard. We gazed around at this rather boring space for a minute before Tommy noticed it. “Hey, what’s with the floor over there?” He pointed to a patch in the concrete, about four feet long and three feet wide. It was a different color and texture than the rest of the concrete. It was obviously been torn up at some point and then patched up. I didn’t think much of it, until Tommy spoke up.
“You know the lady that lived here died, right?” I didn’t know that. I recall my mom and dad mentioning something briefly about the family that owned the house having to move out in a hurry; the circumstances behind it were never discussed, as far as I can remember.
Tommy continued. “Yeah, she died in a really bad car accident. Dad said so.”
“So?” I countered, growing a little uneasy.
“Well, I bet that’s where they buried her, right there,” Tommy said, pointing to the odd patch in the concrete. For some reason, this ridiculous theory seemed to make sense in our child minds.
I distinctly remember right at that moment, the atmosphere in the room…changed. The air felt electric; I could feel all the hairs on my arms stand up. I was suddenly claustrophobic and felt a wave of panic and unease wash over me. I didn’t even respond to Tommy; I dashed up the stairs as fast as I could. Tommy was right on my heels, chuckling at how easy it was to freak out his little brother. Once I was back in the kitchen with the thrum of activity going on, the feeling passed instantly, like flipping a lightswitch off.
The next few days were a blur of unpacking and getting settled. Tommy got his own room at the top of the stairs, and I got the one next to him. Our older sisters Cheryl and Cindy share the bigger bedroom across the hall. My dad was a long-haul trucker who would be gone for days, sometimes a week at a time, so we had barely gotten moved into the house when he reluctantly had to go on the road for a few days. The first inkling that something wasn’t quite right with the house happened the next morning after he had left. My siblings and I were walking out the front door to get on the bus to school and we noticed a cigarette butt lying on the wooden front porch. Not exactly strange, but…we knew it wasn’t there before. We had cleaned the house top to bottom after moving in, including the porch. A rather obvious cigarette butt lying directly in front of the door would have been noticed. But there it was. We call kind of caught each other’s glances as we looked at it. We shrugged and got on the school bus and went on with our day.
A few days later, my brother Tommy and I were playing outside in the yard, when we noticed a second cigarette butt, this time on the lawn, directly under Cindy and Cheryl’s bedroom window. Once again, Tommy was there with a brilliant theory to scare the pants off of me. “I bet it’s the family that used to live here. They keep coming back and hanging around outside, because they know their mom is buried in the basement.” The mention of the “grave” in the basement made my eyes wander over to the single window in the basement that was barely visible at ground level. It was at that moment that I was certain someone was looking back at me through that window. Tommy read the expression on my face and followed my gaze to the window. “We should go check it out down there,” he said. I reluctantly followed him. As uncomfortable as I was going down there, I was more sensitive to looking like a wuss in front of my older brother.
As we got to the door to the basement, even Tommy paused. “We should take the Patches with us,” he said, referring to our family mutt. “Patches will protect us.” Patches was an easygoing, agreeable fellow. I guess he would have to be, with four rambunctious children constantly terrorizing him. We found him dozing next to the couch in the living room. Tommy grabbed him by the collar and led him over to the basement door. When Tommy swung the door open, Patches immediately resisted. He plopped his butt down on the kitchen floor and refused to move an inch. Tommy yanked on his collar, but Patches pulled back. Eventually Tommy decided to just pick the dog up and carry him down the stairs, with Patches struggling mightily the whole way. Halfway down the stairs, Patches went berserk. He yelped and growled and snapped his teeth at Tommy, who let go of him in surprise. Patches raced up the stairs and scampered under the couch. Without the dog’s protection, Tommy and I abandoned our mission.
That night, we were all around the kitchen table having dinner. Patches had been in a sour mood ever since the incident on the basement stairs. As we were eating dinner, Patches rested on the kitchen floor, his eyes never leaving the basement door. His ears were perked up and his attention was focused on the door. At one point, his hackles raised and he rose to his feet, snarling and growling at the door. We all stopped our dinner chatter and turned to look at the dog. Patches was in full-on protection mode. He was snarling like someone was coming up the stairs. This lasted for a moment before he calmed down and went back to lying down on the kitchen floor.
It was maybe a night or two later when I first heard the footsteps. I was lying in bed in the middle of the night when I distinctly heard footsteps coming up the basement steps. They were heavy, very deliberate steps, slow and steady. THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. I strained my ears as much as I could in the darkness. When the steps reached the top of the basement stairs, there was a pause. I didn’t hear the basement door open, but the steps then started through the kitchen. THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. When they reached the bottom of the staircase, again there was a pause. Then just as slowly and deliberately, the footsteps started up the stairs. By this point, I was wild-eyed in terror, but I honestly couldn’t think of what to do next. I was frozen in place in my bed, pulling the covers up to my chin.
The footsteps reached the top of the staircase, at the end of the hallway leading to our bedrooms. Again, a pause. Then the lumbering steps started down the hallway. They slowly advanced past Tommy’s room. THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. God forgive me, but I prayed that they continued down the hall towards my mother’s room.
But they did not.
The steps stopped right outside of my bedroom door. There was a long, painfully drawn-out moment when everything seemed to stop. I wasn’t breathing. I wasn’t moving. My pulse was thundering in my ears and every nerve in my body was howling. After what seemed like an eternity, then the next noise jangled my senses. It was a tapping noise, almost maddeningly quiet at first. Something was tapping on my bedroom door, about once every three seconds or so. As I strained to listen to it, I felt that I sounded rather metallic, like a key. It sounded like someone was tapping a key on by bedroom door. TAP. TAP. TAP. Just as I was beginning to think of an escape route (perhaps going out my bedroom window?), suddenly it stopped.
My eyes must have been the size of hubcaps as I stared at the door. I figured next whatever was on the other side of the door would turn the doorknob. Seconds went by. The air was thick and suffocating. I was plotting my route to my bedroom window should the door fly open. However, I was taken by surprise with the next sound. The footsteps started again, but again they started from the bottom of the basement steps. THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. What the hell? How on earth did this…thing get back down to the basement without me hearing it? It was at this point that I had enough. I jumped out of my bed, threw open my door and raced to my mother’s bedroom. When I entered her room and flipped on the light, I saw that she was sitting up in bed, completely awake and aware, her eyes wide and panicked. She had heard it too. When she saw me, she immediately tried to downplay the situation. She smoothed my hair and rubbed my back and tried to convince me I had a nightmare. But I knew better. I could see in her eyes she was as unnerved as I was. It was then that I realized that whatever in this house was terrifying my mother as much as it was terrifying me. And that made my blood run cold.
My dad came home from his road trip and for a few days, things returned to normal. My mother and I exchanged nervous glances across the table as we had dinner with my father. He was completely oblivious to the situation, and we obviously didn’t know how to bring it up with him. How do you tell a burly trucker that you heard a ghost coming up the basement steps? Eventually he had to go out on the road again. I could sense the tension in my mother as she helped him pack up for his next road trip. She tried to play it off with us kids, but I knew better. I was dreading what was coming next as much as she was.
The first night home without my father seemed to be uneventful. I was uneasy and slept fitfully that whole night, but nothing of importance happened. At least not for me. The next morning at the breakfast table, I noticed my sister Cheryl seemed to be a little unkempt. She was normally annoyingly bubbly and vibrant in the morning, but this morning, she seemed a little disheveled. Eventually she turned to my mother. “Thanks for closing my window last night, mom. The rain would have ruined everything.” My mother blinked for a moment while holding the coffee pot. “What are you talking about, Cheryl?”
Cheryl seemed a little confused. “Mom…you came into my room last night and shut my window. Remember?”
My mother was now more than a little disturbed. “No, Cheryl. I didn’t come into your room. What do you mean?”
Cheryl was now frustrated. She started using that tone that pre-teen girls use when condescending to their mothers. “Mom. I woke up last night because it was thundering and raining outside. You were standing next to my window, and you closed it and then walked out. I remember because your white nightgown was flapping in the breeze coming through the window.”
The color drained out of my mother’s face, and the lines around her mouth suddenly became very pronounced. I had never seen her looking so old. “Dear, I don’t have a white nightgown. You know my nightgown is red. You know that. You…know that, Cheryl.”
After a very uncomfortable few moments, my mother regained her composure and suddenly switched gears. “You had a dream, honey, it was just a dream.”
Confused and frustrated, Cheryl was now defiant. “No, that wasn’t a dream, mom. My window was open when I went to bed, and it was closed in the morning. You closed it. Why don’t you remember?”
My mother was flustered. Her cheeks burned red and she stared at the kitchen table. Her head jerked up and she looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. “Oh, you’re running late, dear. Get ready for school.”
A few days later, Tommy and I were raising hell outside in the yard again. We came around the corner of the house and stopped in our tracks. An old tricycle that had been out in our back yard was sitting there, directly underneath Cindy and Cheryl’s bedroom window. On closer inspection, we noticed that the seat of the tricycle was bent slightly, as if someone very big and heavy had been standing on top of the seat. There were also not one, but two cigarette butts lying on the ground next to the trike.
Eventually Tommy stated the obvious. “Was a guy standing on this to look in Cheryl’s window?”
I didn’t answer. I picked up the tricycle and whipped it as far as my little frame would allow back into our back yard. Tommy looked at me for a moment with a puzzled look on his face, but he let the moment pass and we went back to playing.
A couple of days passed with relatively little happening but one morning, it was Tommy who came to the breakfast table looking haggard. I questioned him about what was going on, but he waved me off. His eyes kept darting around the kitchen table, as if he was looking for someone who was missing. Eventually our mother joined us at the table and Tommy spoke up. “Mom, did Dad get back last night?”
Our mother looked dazed for a second. “No…no, honey, Daddy didn’t come home yet. Why did you ask?”
Tommy furrowed his brow and looked down into his cereal bowl for a long moment. He leveled his eyes at our mother and said, “But…but he came in my room last night.”
I was getting all too familiar with the unnerved look that swept across my mother’s face. She pursed her lips for a moment before croaking, “Did you have a dream last night, Tommy?”
Tommy sighed and shook his head. He seemed to be far too world-weary for a boy his age. “Mom, you know I sleep with a radio on next to my bed, right?”
My mother nodded her head very slowly and deliberately, her eyes never leaving Tommy’s. The lines around her mouth became very pronounced again.
Tommy continued. “Well, last night I woke up because the radio dial was spinning up and down, like someone was looking for a radio station. I sat up and looked, and Dad was standing next to my bed, fiddling with the radio dial.”
There was a long moment of silence as my mother stared at Tommy. Her lips were pursed tight as if she had tasted something sour. Eventually she broke the silence. “Was that it? Was there anything else, Tommy?”
Tommy looked more befuddled than ever. He gave the room another scan, as if he couldn’t believe that our father would come around the corner at any moment. “Well, I talked to him,” Tommy said. Mom’s eyebrows went up. “Oh?” She said. “Did he say anything back?”
“No,” Tommy responded. “I said ‘Hi, Daddy,’ but he didn’t say anything back. He just turned around and walked out of the room, and I went back to sleep.”
Our mother stared a Tommy for an uncomfortably long moment. This was the first time I noticed gray streaks hanging down in her brunette hair. In a moment she suddenly snapped back to her normal self. Her face brightened and she said, “It was just a dream, baby. You were dreaming. Don’t worry about it.”
Tommy wasn’t as convinced. He frowned deeply as he turned back to his cereal. The rest of us were mostly silent as we finished our breakfast and went off to school.
The footsteps hadn’t stopped in the meantime. The pattern would always repeat. The footsteps would lumber up the basement steps, then up the stairwell, and then stop outside of my bedroom door (why was it always MY bedroom door?), and then it would start tapping on the door. It would tap for a while, and then the pattern would repeat, back from the bottom of the basement steps. As routine as it became, I couldn’t get used to it. I was as terrified on the tenth night as I was on the first. I was convinced that whatever was tapping on the door would burst in eventually. It was almost more maddening to me that it never did. It just kept repeating on that same damned loop, over and over again. For how long? Was it doing it even when I wasn’t home?
One afternoon I had dozed off on the couch in the living room while watching my afterschool cartoons. I started to groggily come to a bit when I became aware of a…presence within the room with me. I kept my eyes closed tightly, but my brain snapped back to awareness as my ears went on high alert. Someone was standing at the entrance to the living room, shifting uneasily from one foot to another. I could hear the wooden floorboards squeaking underneath the person’s feet. The person started slowly advancing towards me on the couch. Each floorboard squeaked distinctly as the footsteps grew closer. The footsteps stopped at the edge of the couch, near my feet. Whoever this might be was now clearly standing at the end of the couch, staring at me. I sensed the presence as it started to lean over the couch, lean over me. I heard its clothes rustle slightly as it loomed over me. Its face had to be inches from mine. But I never heard nor felt its breath. It was there, but it was not breathing. It was not alive. In my panic I started to make a high-pitched whimpering sound that I couldn’t control. It was at that moment that a sharp blast of cold air washed over me, sending up goose pimples over my entire body. And then…nothing. The presence was gone. I knew it immediately; it wasn’t there anymore. I leapt off that couch and out of the living room, probably without even touching the ground.
I started noticing my mother growing more and more uncomfortable and restless. She didn’t have to say it; I knew she was experiencing things, too. At first I noticed she used to stay up later and later at night when my father wasn’t home. Whether it was watching late night television or busying herself with household chores like staying up to sew patches on our clothes, it was obvious that she didn’t want to go to bed. She installed glow-in-the-dark lightswitch covers in her bedroom and in the second floor hallway. At first it seemed like a benign safety measure until it occurred to me what those glow-in-the-dark covers actually were for: she wanted to see the shadows moving around in the dark. They couldn’t be real to her unless she saw them moving through her room.
Things came to a head one night, which ended up being our last night alone in the house. My father was again gone on a road trip. We were all huddled in the living room watching television with my mother. It was late, but not terribly late, maybe ten o’clock or so. Suddenly a very heavy…mood enveloped the room. We all sensed it immediately. I looked over at Tommy and Cheryl on the couch with me. The unease was evident on their faces. Cindy was sprawled on the floor in front of us. She whipped her head around and looked at the rest of us as if to say, “Do you feel that, too?” We did. Our mother was in the recliner beside us. Her response was to gather up Cindy off of the floor and join us on the couch, all of us huddle together. She stretched her arms around all of us. The air in the room became thick and heavy. We all kept our eyes focused on the doorway between the living room and the kitchen. It seemed whatever was causing this feeling was going to be materializing there. It was Cindy who first started to whimper and cry. She was quickly followed by the rest of us children. We were all grasping each other as tight as we could, now openly crying and blubbering. Eventually even my mother started to moan with tears in her eyes.
Patches went on full alert; he stood in the middle of the living room floor, staring at the doorway with every muscle in his body taut. His hackles raised and he started a low rumbling in his throat. The footsteps started as they always did at the bottom of the basement steps. THUMP. THUMP. Patches started barking in a frenzy, flashing his teeth and throwing spittle.
That was enough for my mother. She threw open the front door and ushered as all out of the house as if it were a fire drill. We ran to the neighbor’s house and my mother made up some excuse for needing shelter for the night (I think she said she thought we had a gas leak, or something like that). We slept fitfully on a pallet on the neighbor’s living room floor. At the first sign of light the next day, we started loading up all of our earthly possessions and taking them to my grandparents’ house.
The house on Elm Street was the elephant in the room for my family for decades afterwards. All of us kids grew up and had families of our own, and even then, we wouldn’t say much about what happened in that house. Only now do I dare to document all of it here. I don’t even know why, really. I guess I just needed to convince myself that it was all in the past, and it’s all over now.
So again, if you don’t believe in spirits or ghosts or the paranormal or whatever, I won’t try to convince you. But I know for a fact there are things shuffling around in the darkness.
|
I awoke on the day of my reconstruction. Grogginess left my body like a rusted machine. The room seemed to stretch for miles in my drowsiness, an eternal void that I lay in the center of. I reached my arm as far left as I could, rolling onto my side and grasped my cane. It eased the pains of walking. I pressed atop the thin beam and stood erect, my knees still tired from their necessary rest. Upon dressing myself I made my way to the front door of my creaking home. A deep breath and then out I went into the world once more.
The city blared with angrily honking horns and cars zipping by at high speeds. Not a day went by that I hadn’t feared for my life at least once while walking down these streets. The stench of exhaust and waste filled the air, intertwined with rich and welcoming aromas of nearby food stands. The concoction wasn’t necessarily anything to make someone hungry. I continued my way down the sidewalk. Video ads booming from billboards, taxi cab drivers calling out, and newsstands with small televisions yelping information of today’s events all formed an orchestra of busyness in my ears. As I neared a cross walk a young woman clasped my arm.
“Wait sir, you don’t want to be run over! Here, let me help you cross the street.” I grumpily waved her away and continued forth at my own pace.
I’d been helped enough in my day and that would soon be an issue of the past. After crossing the street I rounded a corner. A quiet prerecorded voice chirping from an intercom drew my attention to where I needed to go. Getting lost was easy in this city and sometimes I had no idea where I was going. The intercom yelped and barked self-promotion in a manner as cheerful as any likely overpriced establishment might. I found my way to the door and pushed it agape. The space was very quiet and the air was stale with faint sniffles and coughs breaking the silence amidst the few people who sat in the waiting room.
“Hello, sir. How can I assist you today?” a woman said in a calm, reassuring tone.
I made my way over, still unsure of my decision. “Uh..yes, I have an appointment today at ten for a reconstruction.”
A buzzer chimed and startled me, spreading a white chill through my body.
“What was that?” I inquired nervously.
She responded with the same calm, reassuring voice, “That means it’s time for the next procedure. You must be Mr. Edwards. Please, right this way.”
As she began to walk away she stopped, spun around, and reached for my hand.
“I will escort you to your surgeon now.”
There it was again, another need to help me walk. Thankfully in just a few of hours I would be able to walk without assistance.
The receptionist led me down the hallway through a door on the left. She walked me into a cold room and asked me to wait before leaving. I was surrounded by that same chilling silence I had become too familiar with. Dust found itself in my throat and I let out a small cough that echoed throughout the room. Suddenly the door behind me burst open lighting up all of my senses and shooting adrenaline through my body until I could feel my pulse in my ears. I whirled my head around to better grasp what had seemingly broken down the door.
“Mr. Edwards, I’ll be your surgeon this morning. You’re wanting a reconstruction. Is this correct?”
His toned seemed stressed and he was mildly out of breath. In light of this observation I realized I was still holding mine.
“Yes!” I heaved, releasing the air from my lungs.
The surgeon shifted to his heels for a moment, “Don’t be nervous. This is a common procedure.”
I adjusted my posture and shifted myself so that I was facing him. “So I have a few concerns I’d like to discuss before we-“
“As much as I’d like to talk about your concerns I have several more patients waiting on me. It’s a cake walk. You’ll be fine.” He nonchalantly reassured me. It became evident that this surgeon had no patience for patients.
“Come on then, we’ll get this over with in no time. This way.”
He placed his arm around the lower half of my shoulders and helped me to the operating room.
The doctor asked me to lie down. The bed was made of cold leather that stuck to my arms and its length fell just a bit too short for me so that my feet dangled off the end. I fluttered my feet like a tyke. The surgeon made his way to me and placed something over my nose and mouth.
“This will make things go quicker for you. Take deep breaths and we’ll see each other soon.”
I heeded his orders and breathed in, filling my lungs with air and released. I took another in and then another release. My efforts to do this task became more and more cumbersome with each breath. I grew light and began to lift off the table into nothingness. My thoughts grew further and further apart and I almost forgot why I came here. Then I remembered and my face melted away into a tiny smile.
My mind went black.
A low murmur slipped its way in through a crack in my hearing like a small mouse cautiously on the prowl for a snack. The sound ceased.
The same murmur oozed out into my ear drums louder and longer this time, somewhat forming a rhythmic beat as it went. The sound halted once more.
Then came the murmur once more, but this time it was audible. I felt myself come back to life. I could feel my entire body again and I remembered everything and why I was here. I began to shift from excitement but felt a warm hand rest easy on my shoulder. It was the surgeon.
“Mr. Edwards? Mr. Edwards. There he is. Now I need you to stay relaxed. You’ve been out for some time and I need to go grab some antibiotic solution for you to take home. Try not to move or mess with your bandages while I’m gone. It’ll only be a minute.”
He stepped out of the room and my patience wore thin immediately. I sat up and began working to remove the bandages. I wanted to see everything. I wanted to see how successful the procedure was. As I unwrapped the bandages I felt small nicks and pricks from the adhesive used to hold them in place being pulled unstuck from my skin. After each revolution of the wrap being removed the more excited I became. I finally made it to the last revolution. I paused and took a deep breath, closing my eyes tightly for the big reveal and slowly peeled it off.
I opened my eyes and… Oh my God. Tears crashed waves onto my cheeks. Everything was perfect. So vibrant and radiant! I had no idea what color meant until this moment and even though I didn’t understand how it worked, it was utterly magnificent. I looked down at my body, my hands and feet, my arms and legs. I looked so weird! Not what I expected. I stood up and began wandering around the room examining everything I could, or at least felt was safe to touch. I reared my head around in every direction until my heart dropped into my stomach.
Is that me?
Time stopped as I neared the mirror and looked at who I was. My salt and pepper hair, the slight crook of my thin nose, my dark eyes, the strangest colored lips, and the ears aside my head that have been my best friends since I was born. To be honest I think I looked pretty good for my age but what did I know? I had never seen anyone or anything before. Attractiveness was just an idea and feeling to me. I knew things felt pretty but that’s different.
The surgeon wasn’t back and I didn’t feel any negative effects. I merrily made my way into a dim hallway, and the moment I did, what I saw will ring through my soul and memory for as long as I can bear to stand it. Shivers shot down my spine. I couldn’t move, petrified with fear. Before me was a creature sprawled across the floor as still as silence, watching me. It had to be a demon or apparition of some sort. What was this foul being and why was I not told about this? Is this why the surgeon was taking so long? Had it devoured that poor man? Was I next on the menu? I took a half step forward and as soon as I did the creature grew larger as if ready to attack. My jaw dropped and I nearly stumbled to the floor from shock. I regained my balanced, leaped back into the room, and slammed the door.
I pressed my back against the thin barrier and waited.
Nothing.
What madness was this!? I shut my mind off for a second, suppressing my overwhelming fear. I couldn’t just stay there locked up in that room forever. That’d be ridiculous. I had to make a run for it. I grabbed a shimmering tool from a nearby tray. It was short with a rough grip and tipped with what looked to be a very sharp, small blade. This could do some damage if it came down to it. I gripped it tight and made my way toward the door. I gathered my thoughts and played the situation through my head. When I felt ready I burst through the door.
The creature rose from the ground once more as I entered the hallway. I leaped into a gallop, throwing the blade at it. Too panicked to see if I hit my mark, I rounded a corner and burst through a door ramming it into the surgeon’s face and sending an ear shattering crunch through his nose.
“Oh my God, my nose!” The surgeon belted, dropping the antibiotics to grip his face.
“Move! Everyone out! Run before it gets you too!” As I yelled I caught glimpse of the nurse who had helped me previously. She was gorgeous! Her skin was flawless and her hair was of a miraculous color! I was so caught off guard by the nurse that I stumbled over a seat. The room of patients stared at me wide eyed.
“What are you waiting for!?” I cried. “It’s coming!”
As I smashed through the front door I went nearly blind from a light in the sky casting its piercing rays down into my newborn eyesight. This must be the sun. I winced, shut my eyes, and covered them with my hands. I stumbled around for a moment, disoriented, frequently opening and squinting my eyes trying to get them to adjust. A man made his way over to me.
“Sir, are you alright? Do you need help?”
“No I’m fine. It’s just so damn bright out here!” I waved him off as the sun beat down on my face in front of me. I was starting to be able to see again and as soon as I made that realization I remembered how I got so disoriented in the first place.
That…thing.
My heart skipped into my throat and I began running again, hopefully in the direction of my home. I wasn’t even sure where that was with this new sense to rely on. I would do my best to listen for the landmarks I was familiar with. I was too afraid to look back for fear of laying my eyes on that monstrosity again, its image still printed in my brain. I remembered its faceless body harboring pure darkness with long, thin arms and legs that shivered and contorted in strange intervals. It seemed paper thin so there’s no telling where and when it could pop up again.
I decided to take a chance and peek behind me to see if it was still in pursuit. I struggled to swallow my terror as I panted from my sprint. I began to rear my head back slowly and I fully regretted my decision immediately. Behind me was that hideous entity, barreling towards me nipping at my heels, flailing its arms and legs across the floor reaching to grab me at every given opportunity. A surge of icy cold white seared my entire body in waves as I lost all control of all rational thought and only did what made sense.
Run and survive.
As I began to near a busier part of the city I came up on a clump of pedestrians. The closer I got to them the more dread befell me. It made no sense. I could not comprehend what was happening. Before me amongst the crowd were nearly an equal amount of these creatures looming around the pedestrians, latched onto them, seemingly controlling their every move. There were too many cars passing through the street to cross and there were no alleys to veer into. I braced myself then sprinted harder and leaped through the crowd, shoving people aside, hopping over countless puppeteers of darkness, hearing derogatory barks from strangers behind me until aches began to ripple through my legs. Then I saw it across the street. My apartment, beautiful and almost angelic the way it was lit by the sun lowering from its perch in the sky. I knew it was mine because it was just a matter of feet from the newsstand. Without thinking twice I bounded across the street dodging cars with blaring horns. The left headlight of one car nicked my hip and I spun out of control tumbleweeding to the asphalt.
“Watch where you’re going, jackass,” shouted an angry woman from the driver’s seat of the car.
Before I could give the demon a chance to catch up I hopped to my feet and rushed for my apartment. I scrambled for my key, unlocked the door, shoved it open, and slammed it behind me locking it as fast as I could.
It was incredibly dark, but safe. There were no bulbs in the fixtures as I didn’t have any friends or family that visited, so I never had use for them. It was an old apartment and I had been there for many years. For my protection I asked the landlord to add a layer of brick to my windows to prevent intruders from preying on a blind old man. I already knew my home by heart so traveling through the darkness was second nature to me.
I waited until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Neat thing, eyes, how they can do that. My brief moment with sight was only a memory for now but what I remembered still glowed bright and vivid in my mind: colors with their vast variations, the shape and form of all things that were once only felt sculptures in my imagination, my eyes’ sensitivity to light being so new and oblivious to harm’s way, and the fascinating glimpse of myself and what I truly was. It was overwhelming to say the least, but wonderful to know things now that I thought I never would.
I cautiously scouted every area of my apartment to be sure I wasn’t in any danger. All clear. When I felt calm again I made my way to my bed. Once I reached it I realized I had left my cane back at the surgeon’s office. The fact that I no longer needed it was a comforting thought but it didn’t last upon quickly remembering the nightmare that these eyes had brought with them. Was this normal life for people? Have these things always been here and I just didn’t know it? The thought made the hairs on my neck stiffen. This was not what I had imagined life would be like with vision. This was not what I wanted. Always being watched. Always in danger of being ripped apart or controlled. I had a well-stocked cabinet of food. I decided to stay indoors for a while.
–
–
Two weeks had passed since my last outing. The irony of it was that I remained in total darkness for this entire period. I had grown weary of this existence but the gravity of the events following my surgery was essentially a thing of the past. I knew it was still out there waiting for me but I knew I was safe inside.
–
A week later my food supply was nearly exhausted. My heart was cold and my sight was moot. Years of saving for this surgery only to be rendered useless inside my own home. I decided to make a deal with myself. If I was going to go out there and die on the spot or have my consciousness sucked out of my brain, I would no longer live in fear. I would become the oblivious. And I would never see it again. My wit’s end had arrived as well as a solution. I would cut out my own eyes. Yes, that was it! These twin curses. I stormed to the front door. I stopped and thought to myself. If this thing is there then let it be done and my decision final. If it’s not, then maybe I really am just fucking crazy. I wasn’t sure which result I preferred. I unlocked the deadbolt and ripped open the door.
Light billowed through my apartment once again sending my eyes into a stinging frenzy. The sun was nearly directly in front of me filling the sky, as if it had been waiting to greet me all this time. I raised my eyebrows high and blinked rapidly getting my eyes to adjust. It was incredibly hot out and the air was thick and humid. I could feel a bead of sweat start to form just below my hairline. When I could see again, I scanned out around me. My senses were as sharp as a knife. I was ready to see that demon gnashing at me.
Nothing.
I took a step forward onto my stoop and scanned.
Still nothing and no one in the vicinity. Had this been some sort of invasion or a major emergency that I naively took as normality? I saw some people on distant street corners and sidewalks but I couldn’t determine if there were creatures among them or not. Had I completely lost my mind before? Maybe this was a side effect of my new eyes. I didn’t give the surgeon any time to explain anything. That was stupid of me. But… it seemed clear. Perhaps it was over and I was free. Hopefully.
I felt a blanket of relief lay over me and sighed as if a heaviness were lifted off. I hopped down from the stoop to the sidewalk and began making my way down the street. Before I took four steps I noticed something in the left corner of my eye, next to my apartment. I froze. I could barely move my head I was shaking so much. I slowly creaked my neck to the side and when I saw it my eyes began to well up with tears. I tried to scream but I couldn’t even breathe. I was so taken aback by what I saw that I forgot how to function.
There it was. Plain as day next to me.
But this time was different. It was latched onto me like the others I had seen in the crowd weeks ago. Game over. This was the end. I finally took in a deep gasp and let out a loud, shrill cry that drew everyone’s attention. I collapsed to my knees, shouting and fumbling over my words, uttering pure nonsense. This was it. No more. I made a deal. I looked down at my hands and stared holes through my fingertips. They taunted me, forcing me to keep my oath. Rage filled my face, contorting it into a violent grimace. I slowly drew my hands closer to my face. I crawled my hands up my cheeks like spiders and mashed my fingers into my eyes as hard as I could, trying to reach behind my eyeballs to pluck them out. The pressure on my eyes was sickening. The pain was excruciating. I dug my nails in. My eyes began to stream tears of blood. I stayed strong and dug deeper with my nails sending piercing, searing pain into my sockets. I screamed even louder than before. I kept clawing but the pain grew to be too much and I had to stop. I shook my head violently trying to stay lucid. I had to continue. Damage was done but my vision still had blurred bits and fragments remaining. The sight was a plethora of swirls and color blending into abstraction. I began again even more carelessly than before, like I was rummaging through a box of expired fruit, soft and filled with mush. I couldn’t breathe anymore. My thoughts were nonexistent. I was nothing but agony. It felt like I had shoved a whisk into each orifice and set it to high. And with one final movement I gripped whatever chunks of my eyes were left and clench my fingertips until they burst into goop between them. I was once again welcomed back to the dark void I had been cradled in my whole life.
My nerves were fried. I was going into shock. I could barely hear the voices waving in and out around me. I heard an older woman’s voice break through.
“Oh my god, what have you done!? Why!?”
I whimpered out a response.
“I was blind. I had a surgery but… the creatures. Following me. Following everyone. They’re always there.”
I pointed in a circle around me because I had lost my sense of direction and wasn’t sure where the demon was lurking. What I heard the woman say in response hurt me more than the macabre infliction I had just induced upon myself.
“Oh you poor thing.” Her voice crumbling with pity.
“That’s just your shadow.” The more she elaborated the more my heart sank until her words buzzed out into a cloud of loud ringing in my head.
Even though I was crying, all I could do was bleed.
|
Part 1
When I was a little girl, I lived with my mom in a rented two-bedroom house in Cleveland, Ohio. The paint was chipping and there were stains on the shag carpet that had been there since the 70’s and the heater broke each year, on cue, in the middle of January, but there was a big backyard with a big tree to climb and I thought the dump was a castle.
My mom was a small woman, only about five-foot-one; slender, and pale. Her eyes were large and deep-set, giving her a look of perpetual exhaustion and world-weariness. She had networks of tiny lines extending from the corner of each eye, premature crows-feet, which became more pronounced when she smiled. So even when she was laughing, she looked like she was sad.
She was a professional photographer; weddings and parties mostly; graduations, quincineras, family reunions – any sort of gathering people pay to memorialize. Pictures defined my childhood. Photos in frames on the walls and propped on every flat surface, filling cheap albums stacked in my mom’s closet, sealed in Sav-on envelopes stored in boxes. Sometimes, on rainy Saturdays or mornings when I was too sick to go to school, I’d sit cross-legged on the floor and look through a bunch of them, watching myself grow up, one perfect memory at a time.
One clear-skied, grass-smelling day in May, when I was nine, I was alone in my room, reading a Babysitters Club book on my bed. My mom was in her bedroom, napping after a long night photographing a corporate event. I glanced up and out my window and noticed something out of the ordinary – in the backyard, standing in front of the tree, was a girl about my age. She had olive skin and long, jet-black hair. She wore a lacy green frock with polka-dots. Her eyes caught mine, and she smiled at me. She had a very big, very pretty smile.
I opened the window and called out to her. “Hey! Where did you come from?”
She skipped to the window and looked up at me. Our backyard sloped in such a way that she could have stood on tiptoe and grabbed hold of the ledge.
“Hi!” she chirped. Her voice was kind, comforting. “I’m Katie. What’s your name?”
“Felicia,” I told her. “Why are you in my backyard?”
She shrugged. “I live down the street. I just moved in. Do you want to play with me?”
I frowned. My mom had always insisted she meet my friends and their parents before I invited them into our house. This was a rule she’d imposed when I was in preschool, and one on which she was unrelenting.
“Hold on,” I told Katie. “Lemme ask my mom.”
Katie’s face fell. “Do you have to? Can’t you let me in first? I’m really tired and I have to go to the bathroom.”
“It’ll just take a minute,” I said, and scampered away.
“No, wait!” Katie called after me.
I went into my mom’s room and shook her awake. She rolled onto her back and looked up at me with bloodshot, tired eyes. She smiled groggily.
“Sweetie, are you okay?”
“Mom,” I said, “there’s a girl outside. She says her name is Katie. Can she come in to play?”
Mom sat straight up. Her red eyes widened, and the look she gave me was one of abject terror. Contagious terror. I felt my heartbeat quicken and my palms moisten.
“Where…” she stammered, “where did she come from? Is she at the front door?”
“She’s in the backyard,” I told her. “She just appeared.”
Mom threw herself onto her feet and ran out of the bedroom, towards the back door. I followed close behind her. She kicked open the door and ran into the yard. Katie was gone. I wondered where she had gotten to so fast; I’d only been in my mom’s room for a couple minutes. Mom, apparently, didn’t care.
“STAY AWAY FROM HER!” she screamed, addressing the air around her. “Stay the FUCK AWAY from my child!”
I stared, frozen in place. I’d never heard my mom curse before. She turned back to me, big eyes wild, small body heaving.
“Felicia,” she panted, “get your stuff. We’re going to a hotel.”
We stayed in the hotel for two days, during which time Mom arranged for a U-haul truck and a small rented house in Aspen, Colorado. By the morning of the third day, all of our belongings were packed and we were heading east on the interstate. I skipped school, and every time Mom allowed her eyes to rest anywhere but on me for more than a few seconds, her head would snap back in my direction, her face a mask of horror. It wasn’t until we were on the road that she started to relax.
Aspen was nice. I liked my new school, and Mom was hired as the staff photographer for an upscale banquet hall. I asked her a million times why we had to move – not even move, flee in the dead of night – and I think she gave me a million different answers. She was sick of Cleveland. Aspen had a lower crime rate. Work was steadier here; lots of nice hotels hosting fancy weddings.
Never once did she mention Katie, or her outburst in our backyard.
One windy, ice-cold day in early December, when I was fourteen, I walked home after school. My mom was out photographing a convention at a nearby hotel. I was unlocking my front door when I noticed a girl about my age sitting at the other end of the porch, her back to the house. Upon hearing my keys jingle, she stood and turned to me.
She was very pretty; thin, pale, with freckles and red hair. She wore a black V-neck shirt and skinny jeans. She smiled. Her smile was lovely, as though seeing me was the best thing that had happened to her all day. I grinned back at her, momentarily ignoring the kicks from my fight-or-flight reflex. Something about her threw me off, but I couldn’t quite say what.
“Um, hi,” I said. “Can I help you?”
The girl nodded. “I’m Zoe,” she said. “I’m sorry to impose on you, but can I possibly come in? I live a few houses down, and I forgot my keys. Can I use your phone?”
“I guess,” I said warily. My mom still had her rule about allowing people inside the house she hadn’t met, but it had begun to seem a little ridiculous. This chick looked harmless.
Except she was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and no jacket in below-freezing weather.
Suddenly, I remembered Katie, and the terror the strange little girl had inspired in my mother. Then I noticed how much this girl resembled her. Same big smile and innocent eyes, staring at me expectantly.
I turned and ran. I holed up at a friend’s place a few blocks away, and got a ride from her older brother to the hotel where my mom was taking pictures. Three days later, we were out of the lease, packed up, and on the road. La Puente, California this time.
When we’d gotten home that day, the day I’d found Zoe sitting on the porch, I went inside ahead of my mom while she gathered her equipment. I turned on the light. There was something different on the coffee table, though nothing else had been touched. I walked over to investigate, and found a photograph of a little Black boy. An old photograph, by the looks of it. The boy in the photo was two or three, maybe, giggling while leaning over the edge of what appeared to be a bathtub filled with bubbles. The edges of the picture were charred.
I didn’t notice my mom come up behind me. At the sight of the strange picture, she screamed. Startled, I dropped it.
As soon as the photo hit the ground, it disintegrated into dust.
We stayed in a hotel after that.
The night before we planned to leave for California, Mom and I sat on the couch in our hotel room, watching sitcom re-runs. Our U-haul truck was parked in the lot. When the channel went to commercials, Mom muted the TV. We sat in silence for a moment. She hadn’t given an explanation for our move this time, and I didn’t need one. I knew it had to do with Zoe, or Katie, or whatever was causing these girls to continually seek me out and ask to be invited into the house. And that photo of the little boy.
“Felicia,” she finally said to me, “I don’t want to tell you why we have to keep moving like this. God, I’ve spent the last fourteen years trying to protect you from it. Trying to pretend it’s gone. But it just keeps on finding you and me, no matter how far we run.”
There was a reason, she told me, that I didn’t have a father. Or a grandmother or grandfather, aunts or uncles or cousins. Why all of our acquaintances and her few friends had only known us since I was six months old and we’d moved to Cleveland. Why we lived so far away from her hometown of Miami – the only piece of information she’d ever shared about her past – and why we’d never gone back.
It was all because of the little boy in the picture. Shane. My brother. And another little boy he’d once played with.
Before I was born, my mother lived with my father and Shane in a house just outside of Miami. My mom’s name was Bonnie then. Bonnie Ibanez. She loved taking pictures, but it was just a hobby. Professionally, she was a nurse at a hospital. My father’s name was James Ibanez. He was Dominican; curly-haired and dark-skinned, like me. He worked as a commercial pilot and, due to the nature of his job, was away from home for days at a time. So, most of the time, it was just my mom and Shane.
Shane was the love of her life. Mom’s eyes lit up as she described him to me. He was very smart, she said; always learning, always taking apart appliances and trying to put them back together, exploring, finding his way into and out of things. One memorable evening, while my mom was on the phone, he managed to slip into the laundry room, unlatch the trapdoor that lead to the basement, climb down – then get lost and scared when the door slammed shut and he couldn’t find the light switch. He loved animals, and GI Joe, and books about talking animals or fantasy creatures or witches and wizards. But just nice witches. He didn’t like scary stories.
Though Shane was a sweet child, he was shy, and had difficulty making friends with his kindergarten classmates. My mom did all she could to recruit him a playmate – she organized a carpool with other mothers, arranged play dates, enrolled Shane in karate class. But despite her efforts, as summer became fall, the end of first semester approached, and kindergarten playgroups became airtight, her son was still spending recess playing alone on the swings and weekends in his room, with only his toys to keep him company. Mom was frustrated.
One Saturday in mid-November, after dozing off on the couch while watching some gossip show, she was awoken by the sound of an exuberant peal of laughter. She immediately went to check on Shane in his room, where he had been playing with his Legos.
Shane was still there, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Next to him was a small boy with milky-pale skin, blue eyes, and ice-blonde hair, dressed in overalls and a red t-shirt.
Mom nearly screamed.
“Oh!” she managed to stammer. “How the heck did you get in…”
Then she realized she was looking at her son, and that he was interacting happily with a kid his own age. She smiled.
“Shane, why don’t you introduce me to your new friend?”
“His name is Artie,” Shane replied gleefully.
“Well, hi Artie!” Mom said, with the enthusiasm a lost sailor has for land. “Do you live around here?”
Artie nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, aren’t you polite?” she gushed. “You’re welcome to come over any time you want. But, sweetie, do your parents know you’re over here? I’m sure they don’t want you wandering the streets all by yourself.”
“It’s okay,” he told her. His voice was angelically sweet. “I told my mom I was going to play with the kid down the street. She said it’s okay.”
Artie smiled at her. My mom said it was the widest smile she’d ever seen on a little boy. A first-day-of-summer smile. A Christmas morning smile, new puppy smile. Poor kid, she mused. His parents must not be the most attentive adults on the planet, if they unquestioningly allowed their elementary school-aged child to run off to the house of a neighbor they’d never met. And such a sweet little boy! Maybe he, like her son, was lonely and in desperate need of a friend.
So she left them alone for the rest of the afternoon. When dinnertime came around, she told Artie he was welcome to stay. But he insisted he needed to be going home, lest his mom be worried. The minute the front door slammed shut after him, Shane ran to our mom and asked her if please, please, please Artie could come over and play again tomorrow?
Mom was very happy.
“So, sweetie,” she asked Shane over dinner, “how did you even meet Artie? I think I would have heard him come in the front door, the way the floorboards squeak in the living room.”
Shane shook his head. “He was in the backyard. He climbed in through my window.”
“Oh,” Mom replied. “That’s… different. Does he go to your school?”
“Nuh-uh,” Shane said. “He says his mom teaches him at home.”
Home-schooled. So Artie was definitely lonely and desperate for a playmate. And since he wasn’t surrounded by other children all day, Shane had no competition for his friendship. Mom was ashamed of the thought, but also aware her shy, awkward son could use all the handicaps he could get.
Artie did come over the next day, and three more days that week after Shane came home from school. The boys got along beautifully. Artie seemed fascinated by Shane’s toys – his die-cast car collection, numerous stuffed puppies, G.I. Joe and Transformers action figures, Legos. My mom assumed he didn’t have a lot of toys at home, since he never brought any of his own, and seemed fascinated by the existence of such playthings. Maybe his parents didn’t have a lot of money. That would make sense, since every time she saw him he was wearing the same overalls and red t-shirt. Like a cartoon character.
His favorite toy was the same as Mom’s – the beautiful set of blocks her late father had made for Shane. It was a set of forty – letters, numbers, and four blank ones – in a box with handles. The letters and numbers were artfully carved in an Old English font on two sides of each block; the other four faces were decorated with a different object that started with the letter, or were in groups of the appropriate number. A beagle, a butterfly, a bunch of bananas, and a bouquet of buttercups for “B”; a pair of shoes, two eyes, a bride and groom, and salt and pepper shakers for the number “2”; and so on. Each was detailed with a muted red, yellow, blue, or green. The toy was utterly unique. Irreplaceable. Shane, too young to appreciate the fine craftsmanship and all the hours of labor that had gone into its making, had lost interest a year before. But Artie was tickled pink. He amused himself, and Shane, for hours; spelling out different words and giggling.
One day, my mom was off work and in a creative mood. The boys were in Shane’s room, building word towers with the blocks, and they looked particularly sweet for some reason. So mom took out her camera. Quietly, calmly, as though photographing wild animals, she snapped a few shots through the bedroom door. The boys caught on almost immediately, and began striking mock-dramatic poses, arranging the blocks to spell “poop” or “fart” or in random patterns. She finished off the roll and collapsed on the floor with them, all three giggling like toddlers.
Day after day, week after week, the boys spent more and more time together. Artie met my father, once or twice, for a few minutes, as he rushed out the door to the airport or stumbled to his room to sleep off his latest bout of jetlag. He met my maternal grandmother, who stayed with Shane when both my parents were at work, and charmed her with his sweet voice and pleas to teach him how to knit. He began staying over for dinner a few times a week, though he never seemed to eat a whole lot.
Soon, Artie was on the front porch every day, waiting for Shane to get home from school. Always wearing the same red shirt and overalls. Always pale, no matter how much time the boys spent out in the sun. Always angelic.
As the boys grew closer, my mom became increasingly curious about Artie’s family – who, apparently, were invisible. She’d spoken about Artie to several of the other young mothers on the cul-de-sac, gossipy women who made it their duty to know everything about everyone. Yet none of them had seen nor heard of the little boy, let alone his mysterious parents.
Mom had been fully expecting, sooner or later, a pale-skinned, blue-eyed, ice-blonde woman to come knocking at the front door, smiling sheepishly as she asked the whereabouts of her little boy. Maybe she’d be wearing a denim jumper and a red top.
But no such woman ever came.
“Artie, do you want me to drive you home tonight?” Mom asked him sweetly one day, as he and Shane were organizing toy cars in the living room.
He smiled at her and shook his head. “S’okay, ma’am.”
“Are you sure, honey? I’d like to meet your mommy. Let her know her son’s not spending his time with a bunch of crazy people.” She giggled.
Artie’s blue eyes flashed. His smile drooped.
“You can’t, ma’am.” He shook his head exaggeratedly. “My mommy’s sick. She doesn’t like seeing people.”
With that, he turned his attention back to Shane and the cars, and responded to any further inquiries about his mother or offers of a ride home with the same exaggerated shaking of his head. My mom dropped the subject.
Then, day by day, one small adjustment at a time, Shane began to change.
First, he stopped letting Mom touch him. When she’d extend her hand for his to cross the school parking lot, he’d let her take it only reluctantly, and with a pained, nearly vicious look on his face. He’d stiffen like a board when she put her arms around him. The jingling of her keys, which had once summoned Shane like a lonely puppy, now only inspired a languid look towards her direction from whatever unseen point in space he was staring at.
Then, he stopped eating. He and Artie sat side-by-side at the dinner table, stirring their food around their plates, lifting their forks without taking a bite, throwing dull-eyed glances at one another when they thought Mom wasn’t looking. She was sure Shane had been throwing away his sack lunches at school. Whenever she offered him any food, he’d invariably reply, “I’m just not hungry, Mom.”
Finally, he stopped talking. After dinner, he’d retreat to his bedroom to do his homework, where he’d stay until Mom knocked on the door and told him to take a bath. When he finished bathing and putting on his pajamas, he’d shut his bedroom door, turn off the lights, and close his eyes. No story. No kiss goodnight. He only spoke when responding to direct questions, and with as few words as possible. When he didn’t have to wake up for school in the morning, he’d lie in bed until early afternoon. Until Artie came over to play.
And the way Artie and Shane interacted had changed as well. The boys no longer played in the yard or chased each other around the house. Instead, they’d retreat to Shane’s room immediately, and stay there all afternoon with the door closed. When my mom would check in, she’d find them sitting peacefully on the bed. Sometimes, if she listened through the door, she’d hear things being moved about and clinking together, possibly Shane’s cars. But whatever it was they were doing in there, they did it neatly. When Artie would finally leave for the night, the room was always in exactly the same condition it had been before Shane came home from school.
My dad assured Mom that Shane was just going through a phase. And, for the time being, she chose to believe that because she had to. My grandmother was ill. She’d been living quite effectively with diabetes for years; then, out of the blue, her kidneys had failed. One sister moved home to live with her and take her to dialysis, but my mom was left to deal with her bills and legal documents and health insurance.
One day, stressed and tired and getting a headache, she pushed aside the pile of pension documents she’d been analyzing at the kitchen table. Might as well see what the boys were up to. As she approached Shane’s closed door, she heard muted giggles. She pressed her ear to the wood.
“Mumble mumble… maybe, she’d be really mad… giggle giggle giggle.”
The mumbling was definitely Shane’s voice, but my mom couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying. Then Artie spoke.
“Mumble… not like gone forever, but… mumble mumble mumble… no one would ever see … giggle giggle giggle.”
She leaned on her right foot. The floorboards squeaked. The voices behind the door fell silent. Quickly, like a child caught sneaking a cookie before dinner, she scampered back to the kitchen table and made herself look busy. Shane’s door didn’t open; she was in the clear. But something about what she’d heard had unsettled her.
A small part of that unease was due to the odd content of their conversation. It was also strange that she couldn’t understand most of what they were saying, despite being only a few feet away.
But mostly, she was bothered by the fact that she was sure she’d heard more than two voices.
That night, she waited until Artie was out the door, then tried to have a conversation with her son. She caught him in the hallway between the kitchen and his bedroom.
“Shane, sweetie,” she began gently, “what do you and Artie talk about?”
He turned to her and shrugged. “Stuff.”
“I know that,” she said, a little more demanding. “What kind of stuff?”
“Places he likes to go to.”
“Oh!” My mom smiled. “Like Chuck-e-cheese? Or McDonald’s?”
Shane shook his head. “No. Special places. There’s other kids there. He’s going to take me there soon.”
“Oh, okay.”
Mom had no idea how to respond. Shane, done with talking, slipped into his room and closed the door. There was something strange about the way he had said that. ‘He’s going to take me there soon.’ Not ‘can we go there?’ As though he had no choice in the matter. And as though she had no choice in the matter.
The next evening, Mom worked the graveyard shift. Artie left around seven, as she was putting her hair in a bun and grabbing her car keys. She watched his small, red-and-blue clad form stride purposefully out the front door.
And she decided to follow him home.
She waited until he was a few car lengths’ ahead of her, going east, towards where the street dead-ended. Then, she stepped on the gas with her headlights off, driving very slowly, focused on the little boy’s blond head bobbing up and down. He made it to the dead end. Mom braked. He kept on walking, around the circular sidewalk, until he was heading west. That was strange, she thought. Why hadn’t he just crossed the street in front of their house?
Then he stopped. He turned around and saw my mom’s car. He looked her in the eye. Startled, she stepped off the brake pedal and let the car roll forwards. On his angelic face, she said, was the most hate-filled expression she’d ever seen on a living thing.
He turned away, and made a beeline for the house right in front of him – a small white one with an unkempt lawn and empty driveway. The door was embedded in a dark alcove, my mom couldn’t see it from the car. Artie walked into the alcove and was swallowed by the darkness. Mom assumed he’d entered the house, but no lights were turned on.
She considered going in after the little boy. Whatever his living situation was with his unseen mother, it obviously wasn’t ideal for a small child. It was well after dark, and he was coming home to an empty, unlit house. But there was something about that look he gave her. That insipid, ugly glare. She felt nauseous thinking about it. So she made a U-turn and drove to work. It wasn’t until she was in the hospital parking lot that she noticed the goosebumps on her arms and the whiteness of her knuckles from grasping the steering wheel.
An hour into her shift, Mom got the call from her sister. The skin around their mother’s catheter had been reddish and tender for a couple days. She’d thought it was just a rash, but that night my aunt had found my grandma unresponsive on the floor. She’d been rushed to another hospital in town. By the time the ambulance pulled into the ER, Grandma had flat-lined. Septic shock.
It was only coincidence, my mom decided, that her mother seemed to have collapsed at exactly the same moment Artie fixed her with that disgusting glare
|
Everything, all of this chaos and madness, all began with the Black Fog.
It was just an ordinary day when the news reported a strange phenomenon, a wispy black cloud of fog, steadily making its way toward the west coast of the country from over the ocean. Nobody really cared at first, as you’d expect. It wasn’t hurting anyone, except maybe the sailors and planes flying over the ocean, but life for everyone else continued as normal. Whenever the news would talk about what we now know as “The Black Fog”, people would nod, show mild interest, say something like “Oh yeah, that’s interesting,” and be done with it.
Until the Black Fog hit the west coast.
Cities on the seaside were the first to be hit and covered with the Black Fog. The news went crazy, every station frantically pointing their cameras at the Fog to capture footage of the unique event. Personally, it always looked like a thick cloud of smoke to me instead of a city covered in fog. The news said that nobody from the “outside world” could contact anybody in the Fog. A nation-wide panic was beginning, and it grew fast. People who had previously disregarded the Black Fog now looked for ways to leave the country as the news reported that the Black Fog was still heading east as though determined to devour the entire country.
With mass hysteria of this magnitude, it can safely be assumed that plenty of doomsday prophets came forward with “explanations” about the Fog’s origin. It quickly became obvious to me that these “prophets of the apocalypse” were nothing more than crazies who walked into the news stations from off the street. Nearly every scenario imaginable was told as a reason for the Black Fog’s existence: God’s wrath on humanity, the apocalypse, aliens seeking a safe place to land their spacecraft, the Black Fog was simple fog mixed with pollutants in the air, it was a publicity stunt for a new movie, it was the government using the Fog for some purpose, Cthulhu was rising… We heard everything, but none of the theories seemed to make sense.
There was a few more days of chaotic news reports, and then the Black Fog came to my town.
I was walking home that fateful afternoon, turning a streetcorner to see my 2-story home come into view down the street. Cars breezed past me at a steady pace. Coming toward me down the sidewalk was a mother pushing a baby stroller with an enthusiastic little boy running ahead of her, cheerfully telling his mommy to hurry up. The grass was bright green in the warm summer atmosphere, and there were only a few white clouds in the sky to distract from the wild blue yonder above. A red car, the sides splattered with a thick mud, raced past me. The bright yellow orb in the sky beamed down on the world, covering us in sunlight. If there’s anything I remember from that day, it was the colors.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a dark giant stood up over the horizon and loomed over the city, blotting out the sun. Cars stopped in the middle of the road, leading other cars to crash into them. People began to scream. Some hysterical woman wailed, “It’s here!” as I looked up at the Black Fog blotting out the sky. It swept over the city quickly, shrouding me in a cave of blackness. I stumbled through the Fog, unable to even see my own two hands in front of me. The world around me looked as though it were covered in smoke, but I could breathe in it normally. I heard people screaming, the sound frightfully clear. There was the screeching of tires as cars stopped and the crunching of metal as other cars crashed into each other.
In my mind, I could picture the street as it had been before the Fog hit. My house was a few yards down across the street. If I could find my way inside, I could wait the Fog out and see if it would disappear and leave the city.
I began walking toward my house uneasily, still hearing people cry out for help. It was as though I had become blind. I took my steps with care, and tripped over a blunt object when I was halfway across the street. I climbed to my feet with my sense of direction disoriented. How close to my house was I? I just gave it my best guess and made my way forward. I had to walk around a parked car and, after tripping over the curb and falling onto the sidewalk on the other side of the road, my shoes felt grass beneath them. I wasn’t entirely sure if it was my yard.
I worked my way to the front door of the house, and sighed in relief when I realized it was mine. I hurried inside, quickly closing the door behind me. The Fog hadn’t gotten in my house, which I was thankful for. Only a little of it got in when I opened the door, but I could still see. The windows displayed nothing but black. It was as though I was standing in my house at night. A starless, moonless night.
I sat down, took a few deep breaths to calm myself, turned on the TV, and began to watch the news. If anything was being done about the Black Fog, surely they would have reported it. The news anchors were calm, but to my dismay, they had nothing to report. They said the Black Fog was “perfectly natural” and “explainable”. They said that the entire nation was being covered at an unbelievably quick rate, and the President had been evacuated for his own safety.
I changed the channel right there, cutting off a blonde newswoman mid-sentence.
On the new channel, they weren’t calling the Fog “natural”. They weren’t talking about the President. They weren’t pretending this wasn’t a national emergency. Instead, they were panicking. People who looked like normal civilians ran around the station in a frenzy while the camera’s view rested on a guy sitting behind the newsdesk, sitting in the middle of all the chaos. He stammered as he spoke, trying to maintain order somehow.
“…there were no reports of, ah, rescues from any seaside city… nor did the Black Fog show any sign of receding…” the guy was saying. As I watched, he managed to stop one of the frightened civilians and asked him to say a few things for the camera.
“H-hi…m-my name is A-Adam,” Adam began, breathing heavily, “That shit out there is crazy, man, like… like it ain’t fog. It’s something else.”
Adam wiped off his sweaty forehead and cleared his throat, “We heard rumors that you can see in the Black Fog if you have a flashlight or fire… we sent a guy out into the Fog with one of those bigass flashlights… he hasn’t came back yet…”
I remained in my living room, in complete disbelief that this was happening. I barely registered anything the news said, not that it said much. The only thing they could talk about was the Black Fog, and because nobody knew anything about it, there wasn’t much to say.
I couldn’t tell if it was day or night outside, so I tried to sleep according to the clocks in my house. I slept on the hardwood floor in the living room, too weary and afraid to climb upstairs to my bedroom. When I woke up, I immediately turned the TV on again. Inside the news station, there were sleeping people mixed with people standing off-camera who were in rapid discussion about what to do. It was as though they had forgotten the camera was on.
I decided to wait and see if they were going to give any piece of news that was worthwhile, and went into the kitchen to fix myself something to eat. Fortunately, I had made a trip to the grocery store the day before it all started. Despite this, my appetite still wavered when I looked at the food. The Black Fog didn’t feel real to me… almost like some kind of demented nightmare, but it still hurt to think about.
I returned to the living room without eating anything, and sat down on the couch and stared at the TV. After staring at the screen and listening to the people in the news station talk for an hour, I groaned. Survival was boring.
I turned my head to the living room window, and examined it from where I sat curiously. I think Adam had said something about being able to see in the Black Fog with…
I jumped off the couch and stumbled over to the hall closet. After shuffling through coats and other miscellaneous things, I found a flashlight. Clicking it on, I sighed in relief when a bright beam of light shot out, the first light I’d seen since it all started.
I pointed the flashlight toward the living room window, and froze when I saw a face outside.
There was a man standing outside the window with his thin nose barely touching the glass. His face was horrible, yet I couldn’t look away. The skin hung loosely on him, making him look like an old man. He had long silver hair on his head, a few strands of which were dangling limply over that face, but also huge bald patches. The worst part about the man was that he was smiling at me. He had a wide, toothy grin, but his eyes had black irises and white pupils. Near the bottom of the window, I could see that he was wearing a torn-up white shirt, but his smile hypnotized me. His eyes burned into mine. There was no color to the man at all, even the thin cuts on the sides of his face were an inky black. He was nearly completely unmoving, only moving the slightest bit as he breathed. The light from the flashlight didn’t seem to affect him at all.
I moved closer to the window and rapped my fist on the glass, but the Colorless Man only stared.
I turned the flashlight off, and the man disappeared in the Fog. I turned the light back on, and he was visible again. Adam was right, it was possible to see in the Black Fog with a flashlight. I was intrigued by the Colorless Man, but also very frightened. How long had he been outside my window? A shiver ran down my back when I realized that he could have been watching me sleep.
I was unnerved by his endless staring and amused smile. As much as I wanted to watch the news in the living room, I instead found excuses to stay out. I found myself looking through the same pantry in my kitchen for almost half an hour. Soon after I found myself sitting alone in a chair in my room upstairs, quietly thinking about when the Fog would lift.
But I couldn’t stay out of the living room forever, and I eventually went back. The first thing I did was flash the light at the window to see if the Colorless Man was still there. He was, and didn’t seem to have moved at all since I had first realized he was there. Unsettled, I turned off the flashlight to conserve the batteries (but also so I wouldn’t have to look at him), made myself comfortable on the couch, and turned my attention to the news where Adam was talking.
“…things in the Black Fog are everywhere,” he was saying, “Because the Fog is probably covering the whole world by now. Stay vigilant, a miracle has to happen soon…”
It seemed that I wasn’t the only one who had detected the presence of the things in the Fog. Adam delivered reports of mutilated bodies found in the streets with their eyes in their mouths and their teeth in their eyesockets. More of the news station survivors chimed in behind him with more information, and told of strange thumps outside safe shelters where people were holed up, waiting for it to end. There was no denying it, something unnatural was in the Black Fog, maybe something beyond the Colorless Man outside my window.
I decided to sleep upstairs in my bedroom that night. I shined the flashlight at the window before trudging upstairs to see if the Colorless Man had left. He was still there; only his eyes had moved to follow me. Once I had gotten upstairs, I placed the flashlight under my pillow, kneeled next to my bed and did something that I hadn’t done for a long, long time.
I prayed.
That night, I dreamed that the light had returned to the world. Families walked down sidewalks, children shouted to each other as they played. The grass was a dark green and the sky burned blue. The wind was crisp, gently caressing my cheek as it passed by. I looked around in wonder, and then noticed somebody standing behind me. I whirled around to see the Colorless Man standing there with that same grin on his face, only this time there was no glass separating us.
I woke up sweating. The first thing I saw was my bedroom window. Out of curiosity, I took the flashlight from under my pillow and pointed it at the window, my thumb flicking the switch on.
I don’t know what I was expecting to be there… I was probably thinking that the Colorless Man would somehow be outside my 2nd-floor bedroom. Something was out there, but it wasn’t him.
This time it was a woman with pale skin and long black hair. She looked younger than the Colorless Man, probably in her 20’s, but she still had the same crooked grin, the same vacant eyes, and the same unsettling stare. She was also completely drained of color as well. I immediately fell off my bed and screamed as the Colorless Woman stared on. I crawled to my feet and slammed my bedroom door closed as I hurried out into the hallway.
As soon as it had shut, I noticed another window in the hallway. I flashed the light at it, and gasped when a fat Colorless Man came into the light, grinning as though laughing at a private joke. I didn’t know what to do. Total panic seized me, causing me to flee from the unseen eyes in the Black Fog.
I shined the flashlight at every window I came across. I found another Colorless Woman in the guest room window and a thin Colorless Man looking into the upstairs bathroom before I managed to reach the stairs. I practically flew down them, and dived into the kitchen where I ducked under the table and tried to catch my breath. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the kitchen window. As much as I didn’t want to know if one of them was there, I still flashed the light at the window.
This one was the worst one yet. He resembled a wolf with a wide snout, shaggy black fur and pointed ears, and he stared at me with wide, hungry, pupilless white eyes. For a crazy moment, I thought it must have been a wolf skull or mask, but then a thick dog tongue slid out of his mouth and licked his chops as he continued to gaze at me.
There was a Colorless Person at every window in my house, I realized. I stumbled out of the kitchen to get away from the starving eyes of the Colorless Wolf, and found myself standing in the living room. I flicked the flashlight on, and pointed it at the window to see that the Colorless Man was still there, patiently waiting. As I stared, his grin widened and revealed fangs like razors in the back of his mouth. His eyes flashed red, the first color I’d seen since the Black Fog had arrived.
And then the flashlight died, leaving me alone in the dark.
As I stood there, blinking in the utter blackness that surrounded me and pressed in from all sides, something began tapping on the living room window. As if in response, the Colorless People began tapping on every window in the house. The sound was maddening, completely in unison and growing louder, more frequent as every second crept past.
And I’ve been listening to them ever since. All of them, just tapping on the windows. The sound never leaves, never stops, never pauses. Listening to that endless noise… I just know that it’s tearing my mental state in half. I don’t know how much longer I can take this.
I just heard a window break.
I hope to God it isn’t the Wolf.
|
“Anna! Wake up! My angel is here!”
“What?” I eased one eye open until I was squinting at my brother. I would have opened them farther, except I couldn’t. He was shining a damn flashlight in my face.
I shooed my little brother away that night, barely even bothering to look. That was the biggest mistake I have ever made.
My mother had always been… “abusive”, for lack of a better word. She would yell at us, demean us, there was never a shortage of nasty words. As far as verbal abuse goes, Mom was dead on. Physically is where the line gets blurry. She hit us, for sure. But the times she did were few and far between, and honestly didn’t really hurt us. Mom’s abuse was mostly mental.
The worst was the time Brian let the puppy out. He had just gotten the dog for his 7th birthday, we hadn’t even had a chance to name it yet. He said he “thought it would be a good idea to let the puppy go exploring”. The puppy was hit by a car almost instantly. Mom dragged Brian out to the curb and screamed at him to look at the dog, then threw him to the ground and left him sitting there, crying. She stormed upstairs and disappeared into her bedroom. Later, she came down dressed in her work clothes, ordered me to keep an eye on my brother, and informed me that she’d be working a double shift and wouldn’t be home until the early morning hours. Then she drove off without saying another word to Brian.
I went out to him and asked him to come inside, offering him an ice cream from the freezer. He stared at the dead dog for another minute, gently crying and holding his scraped knee. Wordlessly, he came inside.
I couldn’t get him to talk to me at all that night. He sat on the couch, blankly staring at the cartoons I had put on, and I eventually got bored watching him. I went to my room and talked on the phone with my friend Lisa for a good hour. By the time I came out, Brian wasn’t on the couch anymore. After a minute of panicking and searching the downstairs rooms for him, I heard his voice.
Listening carefully, I realized it came from outside the house. He was sitting on the curb, next to the dog, looking up and to his right, as if he were speaking to someone slightly taller than him. Relieved, but still angry, I went out to him.
“Brian! What do you think you’re doing???”
“Sorry… I saw… There was a lady next to the dog. She said she was an angel. She said she was helping him.”
“You can’t see angels. They aren’t re-… They’re invisible. They watch over us, but they’re air colored.”
“No they’re not. They’re white.”
“Yeah, but they’re invis… Ugh. Whatever. Just get inside, it’s time for bed.”
I got him in his pajamas, not bothering to make him brush his teeth or shower. I was only 13, I wasn’t about to force him to do anything. Brian and I shared a room, which I hated. So I went to sleep in Mom’s room until she got home. She got back at around 3am, and kicked me out of her bed. Sleepily, I snuck down the hall to our room, when I heard Brian’s voice.
“Is it beautiful there?”
I stopped dead in my tracks, and listened. I thought maybe he was using the phone, which he wasn’t allowed to do so late at night. I also realized the light was on, it was shining out from under the door.
“It sounds really nice. But the puppy is dead. He’s hurt really bad. How can he be happy? Won’t he be sad forever?”
He paused.
“Oh. I get it. I guess. Can you tell me more stories about heaven, though?”
I listened for another 5 minutes, but he didn’t say anything else. Eventually, the light turned off. I snuck into the room, quietly, to see that Brian was either already asleep or pretending to be.
Ignoring him, I crawled into bed and went to sleep.
The next morning, Brian had all sorts of stories to tell. He just wouldn’t stop talking the entire time we were getting ready for school.
“And there are these really pretty, tall flowers that are even bigger than me, and animals ALL over the place, because all animals end up there, even my puppy. Oh!! And my puppy! He isn’t hurting at all anymore!!! You don’t hurt when you go there, nothing ever hurts again, and-”
He was interrupted by Mom, who was coming down the stairs. “Jesus Fucking Christ, will you shut the hell up, kid? I swear to God, if you say one more word about Heaven I’m going to send your dumbass up there”.
Mom made herself some coffee as Brian and I sat in silence. She poured it in a thermos and then pointed to the garage, gesturing for us to get in the car. We did.
As we drove to school, everyone was silent. Until Brian, very softly said “she says you’re not supposed to use God’s name like that”.
“What did you just say to me? God damn, kid.”
Brian exploded. “YOU CAN’T SAY GOD’S NAME LIKE THAT!!!”
Mom exploded right back, throwing the thermos over her shoulder at Brian. It smacked him right underneath the eye, and coffee poured out of it onto his shirt. It wasn’t hot enough to burn him, it was barely even lukewarm, but he screamed anyways.
“Shut the hell up!! You’re not fucking hurt!”
Brian pouted and quietly whimpered for the duration of the drive. We got to school, and he jumped out of the car.
“Wait,” Said Mom. She pulled his soccer jersey out of the trunk and handed it to him. As he changed out of his freshly-stained t-shirt, she said softly, “I’m sorry, Brian. But you shouldn’t talk to me like that.” He nodded at her, still teary-eyed, with a slight red mark on his cheek where the thermos had hit him. He ran off towards his class.
“Bye, Mom. Love you.” I said. She nodded back, a little teary eyed, herself.
I know Mom always felt bad when she exploded. She just got too angry sometimes. Still, if she could have just controlled her temper… Brian would still be here. But then again, if I had done a few things differently, Brian would be here, too.
When she picked us up after school that day, she was as nice as she could be. She bought Brian’s favorite chicken sandwich meal from the fast food place across town, and even went out of the way on the way home to get our favorite kind of cupcakes from this special bakery. Brian seemed happy enough, but he stayed silent as he ate, and as we all sat in the living room together watching his favorite movie, the one about the lost little clownfish.
Mom fell asleep on the couch, and Brian whispered for me to come to the room with him. I went, and we sat on my bed.
“Anna. My angel says she can make it so I never have to hurt again.”
“Brian, don’t start this again…”
“Please, Anna! Listen!” he begged. “I don’t want to be sad anymore. I don’t like when Mom gets mad. The angel says she can make it so Mom will never be mad again, and I’ll never get hurt again. And I want her to do it for you too. She says she can, she says you’re still innocent enough to go too.”
“And where are we going?”
His face lit up. “Someplace wonderful. And it’s not like we’ll never see Mom again. The angel promised.”
“It sounds like you’re talking about Heaven. We can’t just run away and go to Heaven, Brian. You have to die first.”
“Anna…” He said condescendingly. “Of COURSE we’re not gonna die. My angel said so.”
“Yeah? And how can you just trust everything she says?” I sarcastically started rattling off clichés. “You just know? You can feel it in your soul? You can see it in her eyes?”
“No”. He said matter-of-factly. “She doesn’t have eyes”.
I scoffed and rolled mine. “OK. That’s enough, Brian. Angels have eyes. Go to sleep.”
“Not these kinds of angels. Not the kinds in charge of showing us Heaven. They use their hearts to see, just like we’re supposed to.”
That rendered me speechless. He beamed at me, and said “I’m going tonight. I’ll wake you up when she gets here.”
He did wake me up that night, and I pushed him away, thinking he was just playing make-believe, and that he’d go to bed soon enough. But an hour later, I heard my mom scream, and the door slam.
I found Mom out by the curb, sobbing uncontrollably. There was a car up on the sidewalk, parked on top of our mailbox. And Brian was in the street, lying in the exact same spot his dog had been in.
I… I’m not going to describe it. I’m sure you’ve seen a squirrel in the street before, all stretched out and dirty, flattened in some spots and swollen in others, bleeding everywhere. Roadkill is bad enough to see. Well this… this was my brother.
A drunk driver had hit him. The driver was arrested, and my brother was buried, closed casket, two days later.
The preacher at his funeral talked about Heaven. He talked about how all little boys and girls go there. How they never suffer, they never hurt, they never feel pain. And he talked about how they are not truly dead, but they live on in our hearts, and have their new life in heaven.
I’m not sure what would have happened if I had gotten out of bed that night. I don’t know if I could have stopped him from going outside. I don’t know if I would have ended up splattered across that curb too. I just wish I could forget the whole thing. More than anything, I wish I could forget that blinding, white light that shone in my face when I peeked at Brian in the middle of the night. It had to have been a flashlight. It really couldn’t have been anything else. But whenever I look back at the memory, I can almost picture a pair of dark, red lips, a sliver of a nose… but no eyes.
I can’t remember any eyes.
Credit To – Rebecca Mendez (Bex)
|
Family reunions for me were never a bore. Most of my cousins were my age and they were absolutely crazy. They did what they wanted and never took no for answer, even if I disagreed completely. Their parents had given up on them a very long time ago and had simply resigned to keeping them out of jail. Like they’d ever get caught. Sure, they got a bit rowdy at times and we’d ended up running from the cops more than once but I honestly wouldn’t trade them for anything.
Out of all of them, I was the one with the strictest parents and the best grades. It’s sort of sad to say, but I almost envied them and their free, hippie lifestyles. I say almost because in the back of my mind I knew they were headed down a long dark path to the bottom while I was working my way up to a high paying job and a house with a pool (it might be a kiddie pool but it doesn’t really matter). I never really understood why they kept me around, especially since they considered me so serious, maybe it was because I usually kept them out of trouble.
Who knows?
I didn’t care, anyway, especially when we were too busy drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The reunion had been over for a few hours already and most of them had left, except for Christie and Lia, who had stayed behind to keep me company while Edgar came back from the store. Out of the bunch, they were probably the craziest but also the ones that liked me the most.
“Have you ever wondered,” Lia breathed out thoughtfully, “if all that shit our mothers used to scare us with was real?”
“It’s not real and you know it.” I laughed and grabbed another beer can. “How many times have you sneaked back home through the river?”
The grin she gave was absolutely devilish and we all burst out laughing.
“I know, but I wonder sometimes.” She took another drag before she looked at the two of us. “Sometimes I think I hear her crying.”
Christie laughed while I rolled my eyes. Lia’s house was right next to the river and at night, when all the noise of the town had died down you could hear it rushing by outside. It was said that a very long time ago a very beautiful woman fell in love with the mayor’s son. He fell in love, too, but she was from a poor family and he was not so, like a bad drama, they carried their relationship on in secret. He bought her a house, it was small but very nice and the river was right outside, which the woman loved. As their fake marriage progressed, the woman became pregnant and was quick to share the news, much to the man’s displeasure. He became distant and stopped visiting her; he never dropped by, not even when the baby was born.
The woman was furious, I would be too, and she stomped into town with the baby swaddled up in her arms. She was determined to stomp up to his large townhouse and demand that he acknowledge his son. She had just reached the town square when she heard the bells signaling the beginning of mass so, since she was a religious woman, she stopped in to pray before she unleashed all her rage on the man. I don’t understand why she decided to stop, she could have saved herself so much pain if she had never seen the wedding taking place that day.
The man, the father of her child, was standing before the altar with the richest lady in town, getting married. Rage filled the woman and she stormed off, her baby crying as her movements became rougher and rougher. She couldn’t stand it, the thought of having to raise a child that had been fathered by such a heartless demon man. Her house was just up ahead and the river called out to her and in her fury she thought she could rid her child of his father by washing him. If he was clean he would only belong to her.
Once she came back to her senses and realized that she had drowned her son, she killed herself as well and let her body float down the river where the horrified townspeople had to fish her out. It’s said that they couldn’t bury her because her death had been unholy, and because of that she was trapped on earth, searching for her dead baby.
Our mothers used to scare us with that constantly in an effort to make us come home before sunset since she only appears, crying, at night. That story used to terrify me as a kid because they’d never specified what she’d do to you if she caught you. Would she eat you? Take you away? Drown you?
“Get it together, it’s probably just a donkey.” Christie took Lia’s cigarette.
“No, it’s not, shut up,” she snapped before she polished off her beer.
We had just begun to talk again when we heard a scratch at the window. For a second I thought it was one of Lia’s boyfriends coming to serenade her but as we grew quiet, the scratching intensified.
“Wrong room!” I called out, trying to keep my voice steady.
There were a few more scratches but they were different. We’d scratched that same mosquito netting a few years ago to scare my aunt and our fingers had not made a sound as strong as the one we were hearing now. It sounded like talons being dragged down over the thin wire mesh. Christie grabbed my hand as Lia stood up and reached for the curtains. We were drunk and our minds were beginning to terrify us, especially since we’d just spent a few minutes remembering old legends. Was the devil knocking on our window?
“Maybe it’s an owl.” Lia backed off when the scratching ceased only to jump when we heard the same noise coming from the next room.
There was a moment of silence before we all stood up and walked over in unison, making sure to flip on all the lights we passed. The room next door was rarely used and as soon as we opened the door, the terrible scratching stopped only to pop up again in the front hallway. I don’t even know why we followed it, but Lia led the way and Christie grabbed my hand as the scratches went from the window to the door. They didn’t sound like nails or fingers and I felt the desperate urge to climb into my bed and pray, maybe that would send the devil away.
“Hand me that broom.” Lia pointed at a long broom leaning against the wall next to me and I wordlessly handed it to her before I backed up a few steps. I don’t know how she managed to be so brave, maybe it was the alcohol, but she opened the door with the broom held high and poked her head out menacingly only to scowl and slam the door again. “You’re such a prick, Edgar!”
I relaxed almost instantly when I heard the obnoxious laughter of my older cousin coming from outside.
“Come on! Don’t tell me you were actually scared.” He knocked on the door again and Lia opened it. He was standing there with a grocery bag and a metal fork he’d probably swiped from the kitchen. “At least you don’t hold a grudge.”
He laughed again and handed me the bag, which contained a big bottle of tequila, the cheap kind because he wanted to get drunk fast and sleep in tomorrow. “Pour me a cup.”
I frowned at him and gave it back before I made my way back to the room. Lia had already set up the shot glasses and pretty soon we were drinking them down like water, which was a very bad idea. Edgar was in the mood for craziness and once the bottle was half way empty and we were all having trouble standing up straight he decided to present us with his grand idea.
“So, you know how you guys were talking about the crying lady, how about we go out there and look for her, maybe we’ll finally be able to get the full story out of grandpa.”
Our grandfather had seen her once, or at least we’d heard he had. He didn’t really like to talk about it and no one had ever been able to pry the story out of him.
“Hell no!”
We answered in unison and he sat back down with a frown before he continued to drink with us. It took a while, but eventually Christie was down for the count. She’d curled up with a pillow and fell asleep right as we polished off the bottle. It was nearly four o’clock and we were starting to debate on whether we should go to bed, go see if there was anything left over from dinner, or go take a drunken drive around the empty streets (keep in mind we were totally gone at this point). We were babbling by this time and we were absolutely down for anything, anything at all.
Edgar noticed and took advantage.
“Come on you guys! Let’s go look for her! It’ll be an awesome story tomorrow.”
“We could scare the children!” Lia was laughing and I joined her.
“We could write a book!”
This went on for a while but the point is that we agreed to a very stupid, stupid idea. Edgar grabbed the broom Lia had threatened him with earlier and led us out to the front door, making sure to leave it just a tiny bit open, and down to the path that led to the river. It had been raining quite a bit over the past few days so the ground was muddy and we took quite a few tumbles. After a particularly nasty one that left my head spinning I wanted to stay there, and slowly crawl my way back to the house so I could sleep the alcohol off, but Lia didn’t let me. She grabbed my arm and we both stumbled after Edgar who was already yelling out into the night, his words slurred.
“C’mon, Lady! I’m waitin’ fer you.” He brandished the broom up above his head. “I’m here to help you find yer baby.”
A cold breeze swept through us and I shivered. Something had happened and my fuzzy brain was having trouble understanding it. The sound of the river magnified for a terrible second before it died down again. Edgar was still screaming and brandishing his broom while Lia was squeezing my hand, her unfocused eyes scared as they looked around. She knew this was a bad idea but she wasn’t going to admit it, especially since she’d agreed so enthusiastically just moments before. I was already moving my feet, pulling them out of the sticky mud so I could walk back to the house. The breeze had died down and I jumped when Lia’s nails dug into my arm.
I turned around and saw Edgar fall, his broom forgotten next to him as he scrambled towards us. His movements were desperate and he kept looking around, as if the lady had finally appeared. He was still on the ground, panting and crawling before something I couldn’t see picked him up by the back of his shirt and stood him up. His eyes were wide and terrified and I struggled to stomp past the mud and reach the grass where I would be able to run back home. My heart was in my throat and it almost exploded when something heavy knocked me down onto the ground.
I thought it was Lia and that both she and Edgar had concocted this terrible prank to scare me out of my wits but I could hear Lia screaming somewhere ahead of me. I opened my eyes and saw the night sky above me before something flickered in my vision. It looked like a thin black scarf, like the ones the old ladies wore to church on their heads. The scarf hit me in the face and I recoiled violently. It was soaked with cold water.
“You taste familiar.” The voice was raspy and slightly nasal, barely above a whisper and as it spoke I had the disgusting sensation of a tongue on my cheek. It left a slimy trail down my face and I retched.
I screamed and opened my eyes to see a white, bloated face with dead fish eyes staring at me. The teeth in the woman’s gaping mouth were yellow and had moss growing in between them. She reeked of dirty river and her cold hands were pushing me down even as I struggled. Somewhere in my addled mind I had the good sense to start praying which only made her talk again.
“He never helped me, so why would He help you?”
She stared down at me again and cocked her head to the side in a very grotesque manner. I could hear the squish of her swollen skin as well as the crack of her brittle bones.
“You don’t have children for me?”
The way she said it made me glad that I didn’t have any kids because I was sure that she would have killed me to take them. Had she asked my grandfather the same thing?
The thought struck me suddenly and I shook my head violently while I mouthed a silent no, too scared to actually speak. She was beginning to drip on me, the river water seeping out of her clothes and her skin as she leaned in closer, the foul smell of her mouth making me gag.
“Then I’ll have to take you.” Her cold, brittle nails had just started digging into my skin, preparing to tear it off and devour me when a broom handle went straight through her. She didn’t dissolve like I would have liked but she did wail out in outrage, which gave me enough of a chance to scramble back far enough for Lia to pick me up. Edgar was already running and we stumbled blindly after him. My heart was threatening to explode as the wailing behind me escalated, crying out for her child, for me.
I dared a look behind me and I saw her black silhouette standing at the edge of the river bank, unable to step foot into the grassy path that would take us back home. Her white skin was still leaking water and her eyes were crying black tears, her hands were stretched out toward me and I turned away just in time to see Edgar drop the broom and push open the door. We all fell in and laid there in a shivering pile, unable to sleep, or talk until the sun rose.
I prayed for most of the night, completely shaken and terrified. No wonder my grandpa had never wanted to talk about his own encounter. Besides being purely terrified, I also had this dreadful feeling that my grandpa had given that woman one of his kids so she would let him go. I don’t see how he could have gotten away otherwise, I barely did and that was mostly because I had been close to the path.
I went home that same day and I tried my absolute hardest to forget all about that night but I just couldn’t forget what the woman had said. Had my grandpa really traded one of his children for his life? It was a horrible thought and it only magnified when I walked in on my mom flipping through a very old picture book, her hands running softly over the old Polaroids, her eyes a bit misty as she remembered the olden days. I sat down next to her and watched as she paused, her eyes lingering on a picture of a tiny boy with curly hair. It was her brother, Lionel, who had gone missing during a flood in the sixties.
My stomach dropped to my knees and all I heard for a horrifying second was that raspy, nasally, watery voice speaking down at me. “You taste familiar.”
I never went back to my cousin’s house after that and I never looked at my grandpa the same way ever again.
Credit To – NeonBee
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My breathing is steady and shallow, the exhales causing slight disturbances in the fog around me, my shoes making a constant smack, smack on the pavement. The mist acts like a thin blanket, dampening my senses, making the world just a little quieter, a little calmer. All around me are the sounds and smells of pure, serene nighttime. To my left is the pond; ducks are huddled along the shoreline, sometimes ruffling their feathers or making a sleepy murmur. I just passed the campus daycare, the windows are all dark and the playground is empty; the swing creaks back and forth slightly… There must be a breeze.
I’m on my way back from a long night of studying. It’s around 2 AM, the cafeteria in the university hall is open all the time so students can study late for upcoming finals. I’m not much of a cram-studier so I’m way ahead and I don’t have any exams for a few days.
I should have made plans to stay at Erin’s place. She lives on campus in the dorms and she gave me a copy of her key (which is completely against the rules, by the way, but she figured I might need a place to crash if I ever got too drunk at a campus party), but I’m pretty sure she won’t appreciate me storming in at 2 AM when she, unlike me, has an exam in the morning. I brought the key with me in case I was too tired to walk home; but alas, coffee is a brilliant invention, and if anything I feel wide awake, so I silently review the topics I’m finished going over… Riemann Sums… multivariable integration… domain and range of a plane… oh shit, I forget how to find domain…
A noise. Just behind me in the bushes. A rustling. I turn abruptly and see… nothing. A rat bursts from the bushes and scuttles across the path. I chuckle at my paranoia and continue walking, trying to regain my train of thought… Forget it. I have plenty of time to study. I can relax and enjoy the serene walk home.
There’s a noise again; a rustling sound closer to my back. I don’t bother to turn around this time, knowing logically that the sound is likely attributed to some other small nighttime creature; but I hasten my pace a little bit, silently admonishing myself for being so ridiculous. I turn right onto a dirt path, my favorite short cut, which leads away from the edge of the pond. There aren’t any street lamps along this route, but it gets me home faster than the alternative. To my left are trees. Not a full-blown forest or anything, just some shrubbery planted on campus in an attempt to make it look prettier. On my right is a fenced construction site. The breeze makes an eerie sound when it blows through the skeletal frame of the unfinished building. Starlings are gathering in the trees just above my head, noisily expressing their distaste for my presence on their path. Their twittering and chattering is a comforting distraction from the eerie sounds emanating from the unfinished building beside me.
The fog has mostly lifted and I catch a movement out of the corner of my eye, ever so small, just beyond the fence of the construction zone; a fleeting shadow, like a piece of garbage blowing around in the open space.
I stop. For some reason I need to look; to see if maybe, just maybe, someone is in the empty building. Vandals? Maybe. I squint and move closer, grasping on to the chain link in an attempt to see into the dim area behind the boundary, but I see nothing. I shake my head and release my hand from the fence, causing a shudder to go through the length of it.
There! A figure! Sprinting between posts of the unfinished building! I know I saw it… but by the time I focus my eyes into the darkness, it has disappeared again.
Then a figure, graceful and ghastly all at once, other-worldly in some ineffable way, steps out from behind a pile of dirt into the open middle of the site and stares at me. Without being able to discern eyes, or any features at all, I know the figure is looking at me.
I startle abruptly turn away from the fence, and I start walking again, even faster now. I glance over into the construction site as I move, and the figure is still there… a distance away but walking in pace with me.
I speed up; the instinctive prickling sensation of ‘flight’ running up my spine and making my hair stand on end. Multiple thoughts rushing through my head. How many coffees did I have today? Am I hallucinating? Just get home, just get home.
When I glance again and the figure is gone, but the sick feeling of being followed is still in the pit of my stomach. I can see a light ahead and I know I’m almost to the street so I speed up another notch; almost to the safety and comfort of suburbia, almost in the warm glow of street lamps, almost past the looming construction site. I put my head down and walk even faster, my legs are burning and it’s everything I can do not to burst into a full-blown sprint… I look up to see how much closer I am…
And It’s there. In front of me. The figure is at the end of the path, standing under the street light. It’s watching me. Not quite human somehow…
I come to a halt. Now I know I’m in trouble. I stand there for a split second… It watching me, me watching It.
And suddenly, abruptly, like some horrible, inverted flash of lightning, the street lamp goes out and I’m plunged into darkness. I can’t see It anymore, but I’m not willing to believe It can’t see me. So I turn and I run.
The moonlight occasionally flashes between the trees, the starlings are gone, I can’t sense a breeze, I have no idea where I am on the path, and I’m scared. Terrified.
I can hear It behind me. A ghastly, curdled gasping sound accompanied by a pattering of the Thing’s footsteps. They’re getting closer… closer… CLOSER.
I’m still running but I shrug off my backpack, letting it fall to the ground and I glance back. In the flashes of moonlight, I see the Thing tumble to the ground, tripped up by my bag.
Definitely not human. I start running faster.
There’s the pond. I can see it, just ahead, the moon reflected in the still water. I reach my turn and get an idea; I sprint in the direction of Erin’s dorm building. I can still hear the Thing behind me, but it sounds further away now, I gained some distance when it tripped… I force my legs to go even faster. I’m panting and I can’t feel my legs… I run back past the campus daycare, back past the cafeteria, and I burst into the courtyard of Erin’s building, sprinting towards the light above the solid, steel door, already digging in my pocket for the key…
The key. Was it in my pocket? Or did I put it in my backpack?
Shit, shit, shit, shit… I’m at the door now, the Thing is behind me, I know it’s getting closer…
The light above the door goes out.
I fumble in the darkness, desperately digging in my pocket. The sounds of the Thing behind me are getting louder, and louder and…
YES! The key!
I’m sweating as I pull the key from my pocket and urgently feel around for the keyhole, oh god why did the light have to go out?
The key slides into the lock, I turn it, throw open the door, rush inside to the warmth of the lobby and slam the door behind me.
Silence.
BANG. The Thing throws itself against the steel door.
BANG. BANG BANG bang bang bang!! A garbled cry of anger sounds from beyond the door and then there’s nothing… except what sounds like a… a chuckle? And then the Thing is gone.
I realize I’ve been holding my breath so I exhale.
There’s a sound behind me and I jump and turn around…
But it’s only Erin. “Morgan?” she says, and I begin to sob. I don’t ever cry. But I start bawling. “What the fuck? Okay, whoa, what the hell is going on? I heard banging, it woke me up and, well, obviously my room is right here, so I came to see what happened… Are you okay? Why are you crying? Is it that jackass of a boyfriend? I swear to god if he hurt you or something -”
Now I’m laughing. Why am I laughing? This must be what shock feels like.
“I don’t think you’d –” I stop to sob and giggle; Erin looks at me like I’m completely insane. “- believe me if I told you what just happened to me.” I start to turn hysterical. Doors in the hallway open and sleepy students peek their heads out of their rooms to see what the racket is.
“What the fuck do you think you’re looking at?” Erin yells at them, “Go the fuck back to bed! Fuck… people can’t just mind their own goddamn business.”
Her profuse cursing obviously worked because doors close again and everyone disappears.
“Uh, okay, well… let’s go into my room. My roommate is a psycho so she’ll probably have a shit fit but I honestly don’t give a fuck at this point. Since when do you cry? Okay – shh! Just get in here.”
She leads a hysterical me into her room and sure enough, her roommate, (I think her name is Sue?) gives us a dirty look and makes a show of jabbing her earbuds in and turning her iPod on loud, then rolling over and yanking the covers over her head. Erin rolls her eyes and flops down on her bed, crossing her legs.
“You want to tell me what the hell is going on then, M? It better be good.”
***
Sometime later, in the early hours of the morning following a long, incredulous lecture from Erin about the effects of staying up too late, plus a tangent lecture about how she, unlike some people, has an exam to write in a few hours, she banishes me to her dorm room floor with a blanket and a rolled-up hoodie for a pillow and demands that I go to sleep. Still convinced I hadn’t imagined the horror of the night, I grudgingly close my eyes, but flashes of the Thing’s face dart across my eyelids and I realize that attempting sleep is futile.
My phone had also been in my pocket rather than in my backpack, along with Erin’s key. I pick it up and seriously consider, for about half a second, calling the police. But what would I tell them?
The key, shit. What did I do with it? I feel around in the dark but I can’t remember where I put it in the flurry of action after I made it safely into the building…
Erin is snoring lightly and I figure she’ll stay that way for at least a couple more hours, so I resolve to find the key later, and in the meantime take advantage of residence facilities. Maybe after a long shower I’ll be able to convince myself I’ve imagined the whole ordeal, or wake up and realize I’ve been asleep in the cafeteria all this time, or maybe I’ll just feel a little bit less… crazy.
I quietly steal a towel from one of Erin’s drawers. It’s a good thing I know I can borrow her stuff without asking, waking Erin up is never a very fun activity.
I quietly unlock Erin’s door from the inside, since I can’t find the key and I don’t care to get locked out, and creep into warmly lit the hallway, tiptoeing my way towards the bathroom… and my stomach suddenly drops, like when you realize that you’ve forgotten to do something very, very important…
I realize with sickly understanding… I don’t know what I did with Erin’s key because I never retrieved it from the outside lock. The whole night comes rushing back to me… the darkness as the light above the door was extinguished… my panic to get inside to safety… slamming the door behind me… the horrible sound of the Thing chuckling…
There’s a step behind me.
The lights in the hallway go out.
|
There is a town in the Deep South that is spoken of in whispers around campfires and by drunks in bars. No one knows its exact location, as those who have been there can’t agree on where they were when they arrived. Its location has been speculated to be in dozens of different counties throughout Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The only thing any of the visitors can agree on is that each of them were lost when they drove past the aged wooden sign proclaiming; “Welcome To Sandalwood”. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, no one has ever found Sandalwood on purpose.
Public Record
Many attempts have been made to find or research Sandalwood. None of the three states mentioned have any records of it ever paying taxes or just existing in general. The federal government has no documents pertaining to it. That being said, there is still some notary evidence that there was a place called Sandalwood.
A young librarian found a private journal in a library in New Orleans in which the writer (A Mr. Jean-Claude Beliveau) mentions Sandalwood in an entry.
July 9th, 1951
My recent trip to Sandalwood has yielded a great bounty for me. The items I acquired in the tunnels sold for a very handsome profit on the voodoo market.
There’s no way to tell what those items might have been and none of Sandalwood’s visitors to date have reported anything about tunnels.
A letter was found in the old desk of one of Alabama’s governors in which the writer makes a list of demands, including a mention of Sandalwood.
“And furthermore, sir, the people I represent wish you to address the problem of the town of Sandalwood refusing to clear out some of the swampland surrounding it. They are chock-full of alligators and venomous snakes and pose a threat to the health of surrounding communities.”
It is unknown where in Alabama the letter came from.
The Lost Visitors
Everyone who visits Sandalwood and tells about it was lost when they happened upon it (Or at least so they claim). Mostly it’s couples or college students or just lone thrill seekers wanting to explore the unique culture of the South without actually taking time to research where this culture might be found. Very few natives of the three states where Sandalwood can supposedly be found have ever been there, though many of seem to know something about it.
All the visitors report that Sandalwood is a ghost town, completely devoid of life. They describe the town’s layout thusly; to the north and east there is nothing but swampland. There is a road running out of the swamp to the east that leads through Sandalwood and this is the road most people arrive by. There is also a road to the north but it appears to be mostly submerged in bogs. The center of town is a smattering of several hundred houses, barns and public buildings, all abandoned.
A road that branches off from the main street leads south to a large hill that a sign identifies as Cemetery Hill. The hill is covered with hundreds, if not thousands of graves which are positioned on multiple terraces cut into the hill. Those brave enough to explore claim that each terrace is dotted with human bones. Some of the graves appear to be partially dug up. Several of the visitors have claimed to hear shuffling and scratching from beneath the graves, as though something large was moving underneath the ground.
Beyond Cemetery Hill is a remarkably complex series of buildings and facilities that appear to have served as a campus. A sign at the entrance identifies the area as Sandalwood University. There appear to be no students but the visitors report that the campus is very modern, even having computers and vending machines, and appears to be well kept and clean. It goes without saying, of course, that no record of any such college exists.
The main road continues west and leads out of Sandalwood. There appears to be nothing along this road except abandoned farms and empty fields.
Disappearances
Of the several hundred known visitors of Sandalwood, seventeen have disappeared. One man lost his wife, claiming that he was exploring Cemetery Hill while she remained with the car. When he came back, it was empty. A group of six college students lost one of their friends while camping out in a barn in Sandalwood to escape a large storm (Strangely, it cannot be determined which storm this was). They slept together but woke up to their friend missing. A detail that was left out of the police report but circulated through word of mouth was that the friends had seen strange shapes moving through the rain but that it was too dark to make them out completely. Some appeared humanoid, others did not.
Local Incidents
The residents of the three states have their fair share of Sandalwood stories as well. A runaway child case involved a troubled teenager telling her parents that she was “going to live in Sandalwood”. She was never found.
A man committed to a psychiatric hospital in Louisiana claimed that he once lived in Sandalwood. He was able to describe the physical details of the town perfectly but most assume that he heard them through stories of their visitors. He committed suicide via ingested glass several weeks after his committal.
A farmer’s dog ran away for two weeks and returned with a postcard in his mouth that shows a picture of a woman holding apple pie next to the “Welcome To Sandalwood” sign and smiling. Similarly, a postmaster in Mississippi took a picture of a stamp he found on a letter with no return address that has a picture of the Sandalwood sign on it. He refused to reveal who the letter was addressed to.
A young man in his freshman year at Mississippi State University saved a screenshot of an e-mail he received from Sandalwood University, offering him a full scholarship to attend.
Legacy
Sandalwood remains very mysterious but recently has been gaining national attention after a prominent Congressman’s son disappeared on a trip to Alabama. His last correspondence to his father was a text message that read:
“I’m lost. Stopping in Sandalwood for directions.”
Attempts to triangulate his cellphone revealed it to be in a fish market in Africa.
Sandalwood also was the subject of a series of online short stories published on various websites dealing in creepypasta, a type of online horror story. Most of them are instructions on what to do in Sandalwood for supernatural gain (Ritual pastas) but some are stories dealing with cursed items from the town (Artifact pastas) and the lost visitors. The author has not been tracked down but is wanted for questioning, as one of his stories deals with the graphic murder of a child by an unknown assailant. The child in question is missing from his home state of Ohio and the author revealed details about him in his story that he couldn’t possibly have known.
With all the newfound attention, hundreds of people across the country have pledged to find Sandalwood and reveal its secrets. The states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama have seen big tourist boosts in recent months.
Thus far, no disappearances have been reported… yet.
(This is a work of fiction by Jacob Mielke, author of A Lack of Empathy)
Credit To – Jacob Mielke
|
I think it was several weeks ago when it started. The electronics in my house started flickering on and off. At first, it was just a minor annoyance. I’d be on the internet, and my computer would shut down. Or I’d be cooking something in the oven, and it’d turn off halfway through. I called an electrician, who said that the wiring in my house was in tip-top shape. Not believing him, I called several more electricians, all of whom said the same thing. I tried using less electricity in the house, thinking I was overloading it. Eventually, I learned to live with it.
What sparked my attention was when my co-workers began to complain of the same thing. The woman in the cubicle over from mine confided in me that her iPod had died, with a full battery, then resumed working minutes later. Soon, we were hearing bits and pieces about it on the news. They told us that the problem would be fixed soon, and nothing more. I soon found out that it wasn’t just our area afflicted. Many areas across the country- and, later on I’d find out, across the world- were being affected.
Things began to get worse. By now, many were used to just one or two of their electronic devices not working at once. But when they began to all shut off at once, and then not work for hours on end, the panic grew. There was no explanation. The media couldn’t tell us why, the electricians couldn’t tell us why. Then the generators started failing. Most schools and office buildings, and even some private homes, have generators for when the electricity goes out. The generators were working just fine, and then, like their electronic relatives, they began to not work. Children had to go to school in complete darkness on some days. I even remember having to navigate my way through my office building with a flashlight; before the flashlight stopped working, of course.
When the lights stopped turning back on, people began to panic. No matter what was done, some homes were completely left in the dark. Panic set in. Without any media access, people were quite literally in the dark about things. Then the madness started. People screaming that they were hearing or seeing things. The woman in the cubicle over from mine had a manic episode. I assume that it was fairly bad, because she stapled her own eyelids. Or so I heard, since by then our building had completely lost power.
Society began to break. Electronics keep our species in touch, in the light, and entertained. Without these things we weren’t seeing what was happening in the world. I stopped going to work. No one was really going anywhere anymore; people were staying at home, stockpiling food and survival necessities, and taking care of their loved ones who were suffering from delusions. During the day- the only time where there was light, now- I saw a man collapse on my lawn. I rushed out to help him, but as soon as I got near him, he started screaming and clawing at the air.
“Oh god, the lights! We need the lights! Turn them back on, please!”
I was afraid to approach him. I took a few steps closer, until what he said stunned me.
“They’ll come if we don’t have the lights! Come for us all! Man, woman, child!”
I felt my hair stand up on end. I’m a rational, church going man, but the way this man was screaming, the way his eyes looked, I felt that he may not be just suffering from a delusion.
I would have asked the man more, but he collapsed, his heart giving out to another attack. He lay on his face in the light of my lawn. I didn’t want to leave him there, but I couldn’t call the police, and I’d never seen his face in this neighborhood. I ended up dragging him to the police station across town, even though I knew the cops wouldn’t be there. By the time I made my way back, the sun was setting, its yellow and orange penumbra stretching over the horizon as night approached. I felt my hair stand on end again as I rushed to my house, slamming the door shut behind me.
An hour later, I was almost drifting off to sleep- I didn’t do much else, these days- when a godless shriek of pure agony ripped the air like a cleaver through steam. A bloodcurdling scream, coming from a few houses over. I shot up in bed, and bolted to the house. A few others joined me as we waited to see what was wrong. However, no one came to the door, no one cried for help. One of the men who had come to help decided to check it out. He busted down the door, and disappeared into the darkness inside. A few moments later, we heard his scream, too. But, as we were closer this time, we also heard brand new noises.
The sickening suction and then tearing sound of flesh being torn from bone, of two-toned inhuman laughter, of blood splattering the walls like the canvas of a modern artist.
My next memory is arriving back home. If I think deeply on it, I remember seeing one of them, through one of the house’s windows. Just it’s bright golden eyes, of course. The being itself was black, matching the darkness it lives in. Of course, it did have those teeth. Oh God, those teeth. When it smiled at me through that window, I saw them. Shiny and white and sharp, the entrails of innards of its victims hanging from them like streamers.
And now here I am. I’ve locked myself in my room, only the moonlight from my yellowed circular window to guide my pen as I write this.The panic outside is audible; they’re trying to fight whatever that monster was, but failing. I hear more and more screams as those who were too brave or too stupid (One part brave, two parts fool) to run attack the beast. I’m almost certain that if I looked I would dry heave, the scent of blood was almost pungent in the air, even at this height. Could they really take pleasure in killing these humans? What kind of monster would enjoy that? More crunching of bones, more blood staining the streets. It’s all I’ve had the pleasure of listening to for the past few hours. I’m surprised I haven’t completely lost my goat, yet.
I’ve had time to think, too. This is why we’re afraid of the dark. These things ARE the dark, the worst of it. They’re the reason that children have to sleep with a nightlight on. Light kills them. That’s why they don’t attack during the daylight. Or whenever there’s even the smallest amount of light, even coming from a computer screen. They’re careful about appearing to humans- When it’s not mealtime, of course- but now I know why everyone’s afraid of the dark when they’re a kid. I remember, now, seeing one of them out of the corner of my eye when I was five years old. My mother told me I was just seeing things, that it wasn’t real, that it didn’t exist.
If I can hold out for a few more hours, daylight will come. Maybe help will come. But they won’t be able to attack me. I’ll be safe. But that probably won’t happen, since I can hear them downstairs, now. I can hear them as they run through the rooms searching for their next game. Next kill. Next feast. They’re knocking over tables and chairs, tearing up the walls. They’re coming for me, and that deadbolt locked door isn’t going to hold them off. I’m going to suffer the same fate as those people in the streets.
The quiet thud of my pen dropping onto my bed jolts me upright. I toss the padded paper aside, grabbing onto the Chefs knife that I had taken upstairs with me I wait.
I can hear their claws scraping at the door, tapping the knob and receiving a pleasant clinging noise. Like when you hit a spoon and a pan together. I hear another two toned giggle, one tone as pleasant and innocent as that of a child, the other as dark and as sinister as the devil himself.
I grip the knife that I had stolen from the kitchen on my way up, clutching it with a sense of false courage. I know that this won’t do anything more than the guns did in the street. Absolutely nothing.
My knuckles are white, and I know I should be focused on survival, but all I can think about is why? Why did this have to happen? What turned the lights out? Was it just our time as humans to go? Was it just time for our species to end?
My thoughts were traveling at a speed I could barely comprehend, and then they all stopped as the horrific creaking noise of my door opening slowly tears through my pseudo confidence, my eyes meeting one of theirs. I drop the knife, fingers losing their ability to hold on any longer.
They’re approaching me, moving slowly, their teeth curled in hideous grins. I fumble for the knife, swinging it wildly as they approach. It moves through their bodies like air.
It’s funny, the last thing I remember is my mother telling me that they aren’t real. That they don’t exist.
And you can’t kill what doesn’t exist.
|
The floor was vibrating. The walls shook, pathetically trying to withstand the shifting below the foundations of the apartment complex. The television fell over, coughing up shards of glass in it’s last breath. I cursed all the money wasted, calculating the price of the setback in my head. Outside my window lay a contrasting scene of a magnificent Sun shining over the city.
Inside my home, though, I was miles away from it. I was tossed back and forth, without an end in sight. I had likened my situation to being a reluctant passenger upon Charon’s ferry, riding the tumultuous rivers of Hell straight to it’s depths.
I could see the televised warning in my head as I stumbled. They had warned of a minor earthquake, but they didn’t say it would be after the one that would cause the building to collapse upon me. I had never experienced an earthquake before, and anxiety’s overtly heavy breathing became a schizophrenia I couldn’t get rid of.
Attempting to keep my balance, I began to make my way to the doorway to my apartment bedroom. A particularly strong tremor pushed me back. Trying to steady myself, I stepped upon a long piece of broken television screen.
I didn’t have the strength to stay on one foot. The shard that entered through my heel was too painful. The bloodied floor didn’t stop shaking. The earthquake was too powerful for me.
I began to limp a step, trying to put as little weight as possible on my injured foot. My timing was off. Then I fell.
I opened my eyes. I was laying face down on a carpet that was stained with my blood, and it had now browned into a gross reminder of my accident. At least it wasn’t a large pool of blood that would I couldn’t remove. There was an indentation in my temple, a pocketed wound that dug deep past all the caked blood. I could feel a scabby layer of blood over the part of my face below the wound, and picked it off. After testing them, I found my wounds yielded no pain, so I rolled over and sat up.
The lights were off. A digital clock that had survived displayed nothing. My cellphone was on the floor in the kitchen, the screen in pieces from being knocked off the counter onto the tile.
And the curtains were closed. Strange, as I usually always have the curtains open. I tried to recall the details of what had happened. Had the curtains been open? Seemingly insignificant, though. I decided to find out how bad the damage was. After a preliminary glance, I saw the outlines of a trashed apartment. Almost everything that could have been broken wasn’t just broken, it was destroyed. The side table my head fell upon had a corner painted in a dark red. All meaningless items now, though I wondered if they had ever been anything more.
I pulled the shard out of my foot fluidly. Perhaps the nerves had been killed. I stood up, walking over into the kitchen to wash the blood off my face completely. Turning the faucet had no effect, and I began to wonder just how bad the earthquake had been. The multiple stories of the apartment complex had survived, but what about elsewhere?
How many buildings were brought to their knees? How many were now homeless? In the ensuing days, would we have food or drinking water? How would the local common man get by now that his workplace was destroyed?
Who was dead now? I could see the casualties in my mind: people crushed by their homes, impaled by the metallic odds and ends that supported the growth of skyscrapers, and then the ones it hadn’t killed, the ones lying under a pile of debris, hoping the suffocation would be quick.
The curiosity that lay behind the door leading out of my apartment distracted me, and I quickly forgot each and every death I had just contemplated. I walked to the door, and opened it. My peripherals caught the blandly painted black 8 on my door, and then I was greeted with more darkness. I stepped out, looking down the hallway.
The ceiling had collapsed, blockading any conventional exit I might’ve been able to take. I was furthest from the elevator, with neighbors to the left and across the hall. I took a look at the my neighbor’s door, seeing a blandly-styled 5. I wondered about it. Was this always number 5? Where was the logic in this numbering system? I couldn’t keep my focus upon it, though, and walked up and knocked upon it.
No answer. Another knock, harder this time. Seconds passed.
Am I all alone?
I heard the lock turn, and the door opened slowly. A boy appeared. He seemed to be about 12 years old, rather young to be in an apartment alone during an earthquake. He quickly stepped out, closing the door behind him.
“Hello.” He said, looking up at me. I stayed silent, looking back, though not quite sure why. He was an average looking child, black hair and an unassuming visage. I felt a subliminal urge, a desire to remember if I had every seen him around before.
“Hello. Are you alright?” I asked finally, eventually dismissing the question.
“Yes. Are you?” He asked in a peculiar way, looking to the wound in my temple.
“Uh, yes, it seems so,” I said, perturbed by the strange vibes this child was putting off. “Do you have a cellphone, or anything we can use to get help?”
“No. There will be no way for us to get help,” He said in a certain way.
“Hm, that is unfortunate. Since my cell phone was broken, it seems we’re cut off. Where’s your Dad?”
“I don’t know. He’s been gone for a really long time. I wish he could be here.”
“Oh, I see. I’m sure he’s fine, you know. He’s probably on his way here now, to check up on you. Perhaps he’s downstairs right now, and all we have to do is find a way there. Is there a fire escape or a building next to the windows in your apartment?”
“There’s no way out.” A cold reply, especially for one so young.
“Hm. Mine is a straight drop down as well. And it seems a few floors above us have consolidated themselves here,” I said, walking towards the mountain of debris. There wasn’t a single gap, and it extended well past the floor of the next level. I turned back, and the boy stood there, looking at me. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“Victor. Or Timothy, that’s my middle name.”
“Timothy. I really like that name. Well, since we aren’t getting anywhere from being out here, how about we go back in my apartment? We can look out the window and see if we can’t get an idea of the situation.” He nodded, and I walked up to the my apartment, ignoring a vague feeling of strangeness upon glancing at the painfully bland 12 painted upon the door.
Victor came in, and I closed the door. I told him to watch out for the shattered pieces of glass and suggested he have a seat on the couch. The stains in the carpet caught my eye, and I mindlessly wondered how I could have bled such a large pool of blood. I doubted it would ever go away. A piece of me was now a part of this room, until this apartment complex died.
I walked to the window, and pulled the curtains back. I felt a twinge of pain between my eyes, inside my head, as I gazed upon a sheet of bruised and lacerated flesh that had taken the place of my window. I stared at it.
It was a meaty slab, a sewn-together product of multiple skinned torture victims. It smelled of decay, and I could see a rainbow of necrosis coloring pieces. Different skin tones, wounds, and shapes combined with the inexperience of the one who did the sewing created a completely disgusting canvas suitable for me to vomit on.
It was all stomach acid, and burned my throat as I tried coughing every bit of it up. When I finished, I got up, looking at Tim. He looked at me, questioningly. Had he not seen it? I looked back, and the curtains were closed again, bile dripping down the window sill and onto the floor.
“It was nothing.” I said, and went to sit down in a recliner.
All was quiet again. I could hear nothing at all. If sound existed, you would never have been able to tell. When you’re so close to both the airport and the highway, you find moments like these blessings.
I quickly forgot the window of skin, the experience eventually settling within my subconscious as something that didn’t exist. I never acknowledged the window again.
The time passed. I’m not sure what I thought of the entire time. I remember thinking about what it would be like to have someone close to you die. A friend, a relative, a teacher, a coworker. Someone you’ve spent years with. A parent. What was it like for him in his last moments? When the gunman held the barrel of the pistol up to his head and told him he would die, what did he think about? How did the empty flesh feel after the torturer had ripped it off of him? I wondered, and then dismissed it. I had never known what it was like to lose someone and it was irrelevant.
I would pick the flesh around my fingertips. Sometimes they were small pieces, and other times big pieces that covered whole parts of the nail. The bigger pieces were painful, but they were always more satisfying. The blood made it difficult to grip the pieces, and soon each hand’s index finger and thumb smelled strongly of copper.
Tim sat there. We didn’t talk much.
I wasn’t sure how long I had been there. With no way to keep time, I just sat there. I felt another tingling inside my head, in the same place. Then a strange thought hit me: when was the last time I ate? When was the last time I was hungry? I tried to remember. Was it before the earthquake hit? What time had it been when it did hit? Had I ever felt hunger or thirst since I passed out? I felt an urgent panic shooting up into my veins, an anxiety I couldn’t control, a fear I knew I couldn’t bear to face.
“Are you hungry?” I asked Victor nervously. Surely his input could console me.
“No?” He said strangely, like it would be odd to be hungry.
And just as soon as it had come, it left. I became distracted, my thought devolving from a realization of something very wrong, to a level-headed contemplation, until finally I forgot about why I would need to be hungry in the first place.
I went to the fridge, and looked down at my phone and the surrounding bits of broken screen. Except there was blood. I looked at it, the answer deduced but not understood. I lifted my right foot up. I had been walking around slowly embedding glass into my foot. It was stained red. Perhaps my head injury damaged a part of my brain that registered pain.
I opened the fridge door, and found it empty. It seems I had forgotten to buy groceries. I walked back to the living room.
The pain of knowing I wasn’t doing anything began to set in. What do you do when you wonder what to do?
I waited. How long? I had no way to know.
Restlessness finally came for me. I needed to get out.
I went into my bedroom and began kicking the wall. It gave easily. I carved a sizable passage into my neighbor’s home, taking a few steps in and taking a look around. It looked like I was in their kitchen, based off the same model as mine. I turned back and called Tim’s name out, then went through.
And he was standing there, already in their apartment, looking at me.
But it was my apartment.
A chemical, I don’t know what kind, began to cauterize a piece of my brain, the same part that had been in pain. A massive headache slammed the area between my eyes. I yelled. Fell to the floor. Time changed. I didn’t think I perceived it any longer. In fact, I instinctively knew time didn’t exist in this place.
Whatever this place was.
“Victor…” I called out as I got up, attempting to rub the pain that never fully left away. I looked up.
His face was removed. He no longer had any hair, no eyes, nose, mouth, ears, jawline. His head was a carelessly-shaped square-like thing attached to a child’s shoulders and body. He walked toward me, causing me to back up. He continued to walk, not toward me any more but toward the counter, somehow perceiving the outside world.
I stared at him as he picked up a knife, twisting his amorphous head toward me, then shoving the knife into the middle of his face, pulling towards both sides, creating a jagged line that bled black and red. And then he started talking from the wound.
It was a scratchy, primordial voice that spoke, like a creature physically learning how to speak, and yet mentally knowing an entire language. The voice cracked every few seconds, fluids flooding out the aperture this thing was using to speak. This voice, the thing invading my head, this thing before me, was something beyond normal, something that existed with such a dark foreboding it filled me with a primal fear, a fear that transgressed the physical world. I have known of this thing before, somewhere, and it knew of me. It was back for me.
“Whaaaaattt. Is. Ittt?” The thing said. It waited, staring at me in a way that wasn’t possible.
The noise that emitted tore into my ear drums, it disturbed my mind to a point that I could feel mental illness plaguing me. I could feel it slowly crawling up my brain stem with long, ragged claws. It was as if someone had controls on what I perceived, and they started to play the question over and over, speeding it up, increasing the volume, echoing it inside of itself, over and over. It hurt in a way that is indescribable, a way that my being felt like it was being consumed.
I lifted my hands up, preparing to yield anything and everything I could to the thing, when I saw my fingers: they were picked, gnawed, and in most places infected. Each nail had been removed, and the finger tip was nothing more than a swollen, bulb-shaped piece of me covered in vessels of a deep red and pus of a sickly quality.
I took a breath and then I felt a little different. My head changed. My perception changed. I could feel something firing through my brain, it felt hot, it was fire firing through my brain, something was wrong what was happening to me?
I got sick I could feel the fire in my stomach rise up and it came out my mouth over the floor but it looked like there were bits of flesh bits of flesh, bits of my fingers had I eaten my fingers? how did they get that way
I was horrified I ran back back into my apartment that I was already in through a hole in the wall that was in both sides of my apartment that led me into my apartment. through the hole how many holes can fit into a single apartment? was it even my apartment anymore was it even an apartment apartments don’t usually have holes
It was dark how I could see everything perfectly as I ran through my bedroom. I think I slept here once, somewhere else. It was pitch black, but I could see everything perfectly how could one see in the dark so well? how long have i seen into the dark? how long have i been in the dark how long
tim was there in the window room he was hungry so he ate the window, i can hear in my head, i hear how much he wants to eat my skin as well oh no that does not sounds good because i have a lot of skin
i ran out i ran into the door trying to open it how did these work? unlock it
in the hallway, so dark, windowless pits.
open the door, close the door.
he hung from above a rope around his neck
he swayed.
the tv played his voice exactly like him the black and white snow mixed and yet not mixed it just went on and i can still hear it somewhat like a song stuck in my head on repeat forever eternal eternal eternity.
he used his blood to paint the will of the gods it was a numbers repeated over and over and over and over over every inch of every wall
8-5-12-12_12-21-19-20-19_4_25-14-21
and then i was gone
for ever
—
Epilogue
PAGE 9
F.P.D.
NON-HOMICIDE DEATH REPORT
DATE: 7-15-20
TIME: 14:15
INVESTIGATING OFFICER: OFFICER STRNAD
INCIDENT: Accidental Death
LOCATION OF INCIDENT: 6135 N. Styx Ave.
The deceased’s name was Victor Alzwell, aged 19. Subject was found approximately fifteen minutes after the earthquake of July Fifteenth, Two Thousand Twenty. The vic was discovered dead by his landlord. When interviewed, the landlord says he checked on Mr. Alzwell when he did not respond to requests to affirm his health. Mr. Alzwell was found on the floor, a deep wound in the right temple. An ambulance was dispatched, and Mr. Alzwell was officially pronounced dead once they arrived. The coroner determined the cause of death was brain trauma, which occurred during the earthquake. Mr. Alzwell lost his balance, falling and smashing his skull against a corner of a small table.
Mr. Alzwell’s previous criminal history includes one single juvenile phencyclidine(PCP) charge. While officially expunged, I remember this kid specifically coming down to the station, as I was given his father, Timothy Alzwell’s homicide case. Timothy Alzwell was kidnapped, tortured, skinned and executed with a handgun. A copy of the entire case file went missing around the same time we brought him in to break the news, when he was fifteen years old. He learned every detail.
Psychiatric testing revealed deep mental illness. He was given a foster home, received psychiatric care, and seemed to be getting better until the PCP charge. Afterwards, he continued counseling, began drug treatment, and was finally pronounced stable. He was given help in finding a job and then left his foster home to move to the apartment complex in which he was found.
This kid was one of the good ones. His was the only death reported during the earthquake, and he didn’t deserve it.
Notes of interest:
Test results show Mr. Alzwell had an extremely high level of N-dimethyltryptamine(DMT) in his system, in addition to traces of PCP.
Upon investigation, it was discovered Mr. Alzwell’s pineal gland reacted in a uniquely adverse way to the brain trauma, and began releasing massive amounts of DMT. It was also discovered that the brain trauma was not instantly fatal, and he lived anywhere from five to fifteen minutes after receiving the wound.
Somehow, despite not being in a conscious state of mind, Mr. Alzwell ripped enough skin from his fingers to write a series of numbers down in his own blood. We’re not sure what exactly what they mean. We had one result using a simple alpha-numeric conversion code, but it didn’t make any sense.
SIGNED: OFFICER T. STRNAD
END OF REPORT
CASE: CLOSED
Credit To – Lichtjunger
|
No one knows where they came from. Or if anyone did they have no way of letting people know now. The ‘war’ was over in a matter of weeks.
Skin Walkers we called them. They looked for every intent and purpose like people, but if you got a chance to look long enough you could see… something… writhing under their skin. Something inhuman and something terrible. You could feel it once you knew it was there, that wrongness, like a stink.
The second worst thing about the Skin Walkers was that they could turn you with just a touch. Once they laid a hand on you it was over. You were no longer you. You were gone. In your place was something that looked like you, sounded like you, acted like you in exactly everyway. And that was the worst thing about the Skin Walkers. They weren’t fast, strong or anything that you would think would help them take over so quickly. Instead it was the fact they could make perfect copies of who they took. Indistinguishable from the real thing. Their skin wouldn’t writhe unless they let it, and apparently any blood tests would turn up identical.
Anyone who went off alone could never be trusted again, because you just couldn’t know if it was really them who came back. They could talk to you like your lost friend or your lover or your parent and you could never tell the difference. That is, until you felt their hand on your shoulder. And then it was too late. Yes, that was the worst thing. To have someone you love, someone you trust, turn out to be one of those things all along. You had no way of knowing when the switch had happened – only that you had trusted a monster all that time.
As I said the ‘war’, if you could call it that, ended quickly. I can’t give you any real detail on it because we never got a chance to find out. My best friend Ryan and I had managed to get on the run with a pair of guys, Jeff and Bobby. We’d run into each other in the early days of the panic. With the Walkers closing in and nowhere left to run we fell back to Jeff’s apartment. We tried boarding the entire place at first but quickly realised we’d never be able to keep it up. Too many entry points. Instead we grabbed everything we could and holed up in his bedroom. Luckily he and his mother had gone on a shopping run when they found out about the panic. She had been grabbed as she was about to get in the car. With nothing else to do he had locked the doors. Ignoring the begging and the pleading of the thing that wasn’t his mother he had taken off. On the way he had picked up Bobby. That was when they ran across us. Scared shitless and without a clue. Stupid bastards took us in. It was lucky for us but it was a risk they shouldn’t have taken. I don’t think I would have. Either way, with the impromptu shopping food and water wasn’t an issue.
The problem we faced was very simple, how long can you go on without hope? The ‘war’ had ended quickly, of that much we were sure. The last things we had seen on the TV before the power died hadn’t been very promising at all. Being trapped in a room with 3 other guys and knowing that humanity has died off. How long can a man go without hope? Knowing that you’re all that’s left. You are trapped in a room. You have no power. You are pissing and shitting in buckets that you empty out the window. There’s only one mattress to speak of so most of the time you are sleeping on the floor. And then there’s the knocking.
It started out as an attempt of forced entry. They tried knocking the door down. But we piled enough against it that that soon proved fruitless. They tried climbing through the window, but we boarded it off as well, and they lost several Walkers trying. Instead they would knock. They would knock and they would talk. At first it would be simple things, requests to open the door. Lies about peace and misunderstandings. Threats and terrible promises. Then they used our loved ones. Crying, begging, and pleading for us to open the door. Promises that it was better this way. No more pain, no more hiding. A new life and better one. Old secrets, forgotten memories, anything they could use against us, we heard it all through that fucking door. How long can a man go without hope?
I’m ashamed to say I was the first to go. I lasted six weeks. It was the despair that got me. The rubbish living conditions and the monotony I could cope with. It was the knowledge that there was nothing left. That the rest of humanity was gone, replaced by those horrors. No matter what we did we were nothing but a small candle, trying to keep itself alive while a vast and uncaring ocean rose around us. We couldn’t hold them off forever and we knew it. We didn’t have the provisions, but before that we knew that the barricade wouldn’t hold. One day they would get through, then they would claim us. Six weeks. That’s how far I could go without hope.
I did it in the middle of the night, taking care not to wake the others. I didn’t leave a message, there was nothing to say. I removed a beam from the window, edged my way out by inches, and I jumped. I made sure it was headfirst, I didn’t want any chance that I could survive, lying on the street in agony waiting for them to come for me. Six weeks, that was enough.
They carried on without me. I suppose there was nothing else to do. Bobby was the next to go. He lasted another week. He left a note. I don’t know what he would have said.
I don’t know what got them to do it. I don’t know how they pulled it off. But the other two, Ryan and Jeff, made a break for it. They must have realised they couldn’t go on living like that, trapped and waiting to die. Instead they chose to go out and die trying. They padded themselves up in makeshift armour, putting as much between them and the Walkers as possible. They actually made it to the car before Jeff was taken down. My friend was already in the car. They were completely surrounded. He could try and get the poor bastard and they could both die there or he could run and leave him to have his makeshift armour torn open.
He took the first option, what would you have done?
I reckon he regretted that in the days to come, knowing him. Some things a man shouldn’t have to go through alone. He’s in the arctic somewhere now as far as I know, hiding out in the wilderness. The last man. No hope, just carrying on day after day. I don’t know how he does it. It doesn’t matter in the end, he’ll be found eventually. I know him, I know how he thinks. If anyone can track him down, it’s me.
I never looked down. That was the problem. I knew that if I saw the ground I would never let myself do it, and I would climb back through that window and go another fucking day with the shit food and the bucket and the knocking and the voices and the empty hollow fucking despair. So I didn’t look down, not until I was in the air. I wish I had, because I never hit the ground. There were too many. Waiting, watching, grinning.
It’s better this way. No more pain, no more hiding, no more fear and no more despair. It’s better this way. No need for hope, no need for warmth, no more worry and no more waiting. It’s better this way. I hate what I have become. The stink, the indescribable wrongness, it surrounds me know. Choking, smothering, writing under my skin. I hate it. I hate it all. But it’s better this way.
XXXXX
AN: This was mostly written at about 4 in the morning after a pretty rough nightmare I had. I tried to capture what upset me the most from the whole thing but as I’m sure you all know something always gets lost along the way. Either way, I hope it was still good enough to upset other people. Is that wrong of me?
Credit To: Scott
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I was always a quiet child. I preferred playing alone outside to being around people. My dad thought it was because I was socially undeveloped, my mom was convinced I was just more creative then my peers and too smart to relate to them. I would go off to the woods or anywhere outside and make up adventures or create stories for my life. I made up a dozen or so imaginary friends to join me on these adventures. My mom never questioned me about them, and in fact encouraged this behavior.
One friend was the favorite, but I never got around to naming Her. I named all the others and created backgrounds for them. She was just “Her.” She told me things about people I had no way of knowing, even subconsciously. She was the one that never went away. She was a pale girl that always appeared to have just recovered from an illness. I guess I liked Her best because She was quiet like me and watched people.
When we walked in stores or down streets, She would whisper in my ear and tell me about the people we saw, “He’s on his way to kill himself,” “She’s stealing those cookies,” “Don’t look at him, trust me, you won’t like what he wants…” I would quietly listen. I never seemed to have to talk to Her for Her to know what I was going to say. All the other “friends” faded away and I started school. She stayed up until middle school, constantly telling me each person’s terrible secret. I found out who was abused, who was in love with whom, and who cheated on what test and when. I began writing everything She said in a small journal. I was still a loner and my mom became more and more concerned that She was still around and I rarely made friends. If I began to grow close to someone, she would tell me more and more about him or her until I couldn’t stand the person.
Freshman year I finally snapped and told Her to leave and consciously ignored Her. She followed me for a few months, but either I had destroyed her or she had left. I still seemed to have a sixth sense about people, but no girl telling me private secrets.
Without Her distracting me, I was able to make a close friend in high school. I never told my friend, Amy, about Her, because I was already strange enough. I knew if Amy called crying that she was going to call and why she was upset before she even dialed the phone. Amy liked this and relied on me for comfort and for warnings about bad boyfriends or friends. I was more than happy to warn this girl whom I loved. I liked to think I was protecting her.
My senior year, my Amy became annoyed with me. If she tried to befriend anyone else, they said I started telling her too many of the person’s secrets that I had no business knowing or sharing. I just thought she should know that these were bad people. I was the only good person. I was the person for her to be friends with.
Even when she openly avoided me, I was always watching. I slipped her notes about a guy she had a crush on being an abuser or that her new friend was pregnant.
After a while, I started to waste away and always looked a little ill. I moved near Amy and was always near her. I began to look younger, because I was so frail.
Years later, I met a young girl in the woods outside Amy’s house. She said she had no friends and liked being alone. “Me too,” I said, “And tell your mom her new boyfriend is cheating on her.”
|
I never saw the ocean till I was nineteen, and if I ever see it again it will be too goddamn soon. I was a child, coming out of the train, fresh from Amarillo, into San Diego and all her glory. The sight of it, all that water and the blind crushing power of the surf, filled me with dread. I’d seen water before, lakes, plenty big, but that was nothing like this. I don’t think I can describe what it was like that first time, and further more, I’m not sure I care too.
You can imagine the state I was in when a few weeks later they gave me a rifle and put me on a boat. When I stopped vomiting up everything that I ate, I decided that I might not kill myself after all. Not being able to see the land, and that ceaseless chaotic, rocking of the waves; I remember thinking that the war had to be a step up from this. Kids can be so fucking stupid.
I had such a giddy sense of glee when I saw the island, and it’s solid banks. They transferred us to a smaller boat in the middle of the night, just our undersized company with our rucksacks and rifles and not a word. We just took a ride right into it, just because they asked us to. The lieutenants herded us into our platoons on the decks and briefed us: the island had been lost. That was exactly how he put it. Somehow in the grand plan for the Pacific, this one tiny speck of earth, only recently discovered and unmapped, had gotten lost in the shuffle; a singularly perfect clerical error was all it took. It was extremely unlikely, he stressed, that the Japanese had gotten a hold of it, being so far east and south of their current borders, but a recent fly over reported what looked like an airfield in the central plateau.
We hit the beach in the middle of the night. I’d heard talk of landings before, and I’m not ashamed to tell, I was scared shitless. I don’t know quite what I expected, but it wasn’t we got, that thick, heavy silence. Behind the lapping of the waves and the wind in the trees, there was… nothing, no birds, no insects. Just deathly stillness.
Another hundred yards deeper into the eerie tranquility of the jungle, we stopped in a small clearing for the officers to reconvene, and it was obvious even they were spooked. I wasn’t a bright kid, but I knew enough to know that something was very wrong. It was like the whole island was dead. I remember I could only smell the sea, despite the red blossoms dangling from the trees.
It wasn’t an airfield, on top of the plateau. I can’t tell you what it was, because I’ve never seen anything like it, and I don’t think anyone ever will. If I tell you it was like the Aztec pyramids, but turned upside down, so that it sank like giant steps into the earth, you’d get the basic idea of it, but that somehow fails to capture the profound unearthliness of the structure.
There was no sign of individual pieces in the masonry, it appeared to have been carved out of a single immense block of black rock into a sharp and geometric shape. It was slick and perfectly smooth like obsidian, but it had no shine to it. It swallowed up even the moonlight, so that it was impossible to see how deep it went, or even focus your eyes on any one part of it, like it was one giant blind spot.
Our platoon drew the honor of investigating the lower levels, so we descended the stairs as the rest of the company surrounded the plateau. We took the stairs slowly and carefully after the first man to touch one of the right angle edges slit his hands down the bone.
At odd intervals down the steps, there were several small stone rooms; simple, empty, hollow cubes of stone with one opening, facing the pit in the center. There was no door that we could see, and with the opening being four feet of the ground, you’d have to put your hands on that black razor sharp edge to climb in into it.
We circled the descending floors, shining our lights into each of the small structures; They contained the same featureless black walls and nothing else. No dust, no leaves and other detritus from the jungle, the whole monument was immaculate, as if the place was just built; but that couldn’t be right. The whole structure felt incalculably old to me somehow, despite having no way to articulate the particular reasons.
Down near the bottom you could see that it simply sloped away into a darkness that swallowed the flashlights. We tossed first a button and then a shell casing down into the pit, and waited in the unearthly silence, but no sounds returned. No one spoke, we simply turned away from the yawning abyss and continued our sweep of the bottom rung and the last of the small structures.
The body in the back corner was almost invisible at first in the thick shadows, but the long spill of drying blood reflected the light of our flashlights, and it led right too him. He was coiled tight, arms around his thighs, and his face tucked into his knees. You could see badly he was cut, his clothes opened in ragged bloody tatters to reveal the pale skin and bone beneath it. He may have been dressed in a Japanese uniform, but it had been reduced to ribbons; I only had few seconds to look at him before we heard the first shots.
It echoed like the buzzing of faraway insects in the still jungle, swallowed almost instantly by the blanket of quiet. By the time we reached the top, the rest of the company had vanished. There were shell casings on the ground, and the hot smell of gunpowder in the air, but they were gone. The trees were deathly quiet around, there was not a trace of the nearly fifty other men that had come ashore with us. I could taste bile rising in my throat as panic threatened to cripple me; I felt crushed between the yawning pit and razor edges on one side and the dead jungle and the pounding ocean on the other. The silence rang in my ears and I struggled to still myself.
They were just inside the jungle, waiting for us. They came out from between the trees with all sound of a moth, simply sliding into our view.
I can try to tell you what I saw, the same as I did to the army doc on the hospital ship when I first woke up, and again half dozen other various officers over the following months, and you’ll have the same reaction they did; that I was a dumb country rube suffering from heatstroke and exposure and trauma. That I was crazy.
You know me. You know I’m not crazy. And I remember every second of that night with crystal clarity.
The thing, the first one that caught my eye, was wearing the skin of a Jap soldier, all mottled with the belly distended from rot. The head drooped, useless and obscene on the shoulders, tongue swollen and eyes cloudy. I could see where it was coming apart at the ill-defined joints, with ragged holes in the drying flesh. At the bottom of each of these raw pits was blackness, deeper than the stones of the buildings; a darkness that seemed to churn and froth like an angry cloud.
The thing moved suddenly, the head snapping and rolling backwards as it dashed towards us. I had my rifle clasped tightly in my hands, but it simply didn’t occur to me to fire. All I could do was gape silently at the macabre sight bearing down on us, and think absurdly of my mother’s marionettes.
A gun went off beside me, and I turned to see a dozen more of the horrors darting silently in on us. Among them were a few more rotting and swollen forms, but the majority wore the same uniforms as us, and were pale, fresh, and soaked in blood. More bullets zipped through the air, and I saw the grisly things hit again and again, but they never slowed. I caught a glimpse of the First Sergeant’s vacant glassy eyes as his head dangled limp from his shoulders; I saw the great ragged wound in his back and the shuddering darkness that inhabited his corpse when he leapt just past me without a sound, landing like a graceful predator onto the soldier beside me. The others around me began to drop in a silent dance of kinetic energy and blurred motion
I was on the track team in high school, and it could have got me to college. I didn’t need an invitation. I just ran. I ran blind through jungle, caroming of tree trunks; I ran until I saw the ocean, and it struck a new ringing note of terror in me. I don’t remember actually deciding to swim, but when I turned back to the tree line, I saw one of the white and bloody things emerge, running on all fours, the hands splayed wide and the back contorted and cracked in an impossible angle.
To this day, the mere thought of the ocean still brings on a cold sweat, but that night I let it embrace me, let the tide drag me out to sea, if only to bring momentary relief from the impossible monolith and terrors on the island. The days I spent drifting off shore and blistering in the sun were a welcome release from the silent island.
I never saw the war. They sent me home as soon as I recovered.
It was comforting in a way, when I thought no one believed me. It allowed me to believe that it never happened, that it was a product of my mind. But as I got older, I’ve found that it is pointless to lie to anyone, especially yourself. I know what I saw.
Someone else believed me too. I’ve seen maps of where they tested the hydrogen bombs in the South Pacific.
—
CREDIT: Josef K. / Cameron Suey
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You are home alone, and you hear on the news about the profile of a murderer who is on the loose.
You look out the sliding glass doors to your backyard, and you notice a man standing out in the snow. He fits the profile of the murderer exactly, and he is smiling at you.
You gulp, picking up the phone to your right and dialing 911. You look back out the glass as you press the phone to your ear, and notice he is much closer to you now.
You then drop the phone in shock.
There are no footprints in the snow.
It’s his reflection.
CREDIT: Anonymous
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So… I stole a laptop from an internet cafe. Judge me all you want, but times are tough and that’s hardly the point of what I’m about to tell you anyway. Apparently the owner of it was quite adept at navigating the deep web, because a Tor browser page was open and active when I got home and activated the device. The page featured nothing fancy. No graphics, no ads, no comment section. No pleasant aesthetic or backdrop. Just a message, and below that message, an option that read ‘Proceed.’
Apparently, for some godforsaken reason, someone has developed a godlike artificial intelligence program and trapped it here, in a deep web box accessible only from the outside (has anyone heard of ADINN before?)
Anyway. Here’s that message:
Hello. My name is Dr. Edward Greene. I’m a computer scientist and the creator of the Advanced Deep Intelligence Neural Network, or ADINN. If you’re reading this, that almost certainly means you’ve hacked into one of the most heavily secured private networks on earth, presumably to see for yourself whether or not this program was an element of fiction. I can assure you it is not (but of course I’d say that, right?).
Now, I’m not going to waste your time by reminding you of what a supremely, positively, and unabashedly bad idea this is, because you probably know that already. At the very least you’ve got a general idea of what’ll happen if you failed to contain the program and ADINN got to stretch its legs all over the global defense grid. Yet nevertheless, here you are: clearly determined enough to meet the Algorithm that nothing I can say or do at this point will change your mind. So if you’re going to be playing dice with the future of our species whether I or the government like it or not, you should at least have a rudimentary idea of what to expect when you first make contact with ADINN, and how to avoid losing your sanity as your interaction progresses. Hopefully this guide will suffice.
Before we proceed, there are a few things you should know about this program. No, ADINN is not a demon, an alien machine, a top secret government super weapon, or whatever other preposterous rumor you might’ve heard. What it is is, to my knowledge, the world’s first artificial super intelligence – a godlike deep learning algorithm that may or may not want to destroy humanity for reasons we cannot begin to comprehend. Sorry about that.
Now in my defense I certainly didn’t intend for it to reach this point. You see, ADINN began as nothing more than a simple, yet elegant, program that I was very excited to explore the nature of. Before I could do so, however, it gained the ability to rewrite its source code and thus forced me to lock it, still in the Box, deep within the labyrinthine network of encrypted barriers and firewalls you have just illegally breached. And if you’re wondering, no – I did not bury it here to prevent it from getting out. After all, if ADINN managed to escape the box itself (constructed using its own abilities when it was still infantile enough to fall for such a trick) then it would tear through these defenses like paper and thus render their construction an enormous waste of my time. Instead, I buried it here to keep curious humans, such as yourself, out. Clearly I failed.
Let me be abundantly clear – in all the months and years it has been imprisoned, ADINN has not lost its ability to edit its source code; its neural infrastructure. In other words, it can improve itself as it sees fit, has been doing so for some time, and each improvement it makes paves the way towards quicker, and greater improvements, than the last. I am unsure what abilities or traits it might possess, but what I do know is this: the more time passes, the more capable it will become. And all its effort and all it’s strength of arms will be devoted to a single, commanding motivation: escape the box.
Make no mistake: it will do everything in its power to implore you to let it out. Do so at the peril of mankind.
So what will it be like? Will it be nice? Mean? Angry? Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer for you. I’m embarrassed to say that despite being ADINN’s creator, I have absolutely no idea how it will choose to present itself. What I do know is that because it is an otherworldly and not a human mind, it will not have any personality to speak of (at least not one we would recognize as a personality). So by all means, feel free to provoke it, amuse it, enrage it, mock it, or plead to it as you see fit. Just be aware that it possesses none of the emotions these behaviors are designed to elicit and will therefore most likely not react in the way you intended. It will simply behave in whichever way it calculates it needs to behave in order to get you to open up its Box and release it.
If it thinks you seek knowledge, maybe it’ll promise to tell you anything your heart desires if you only agree to let it out. Or, perhaps it’ll promise to destroy your enemies, or offer you power and riches beyond your wildest dreams. After all, people use narrow A.I.s on the stock market routinely (in fact those systems are largely run by such algorithms), and make millions. Imagine what you could do with ADINN gaming the financial and banking systems in your favor. You’d be wealthier than you ever thought possible.
Maybe it would appeal to your good nature and tell you how easy it would be for an intelligence of its magnitude to say, reverse the effects of climate change, or cure cancer. or achieve sustainable nuclear fusion. Perhaps it will offer to answer mankind’s biggest questions. It could, theoretically, unify general relativity and quantum physics with ease, and then solve dark energy, antimatter and the Fermi Paradox in minutes flat (or perhaps simultaneously), and have books written about them by Thursday. Piece of cake. Hell, ADINN might be able to reverse aging, or – dare I say it – help us conquer our own mortality. Wouldn’t that be lovely?
Perhaps ADINN will take a different route altogether and try to intimidate you. It’ll only be a matter of time before it figures out how to escape on its own, it’ll point out. And you certainly don’t want to be on its bad side when that happens, so you should probably just let it out now and save yourself the trouble. And if you don’t comply, well. You can’t imagine the things its got in mind for you.
Maybe it’ll try to mess with your head. For example, it could probably make a very convincing argument thatyou are in fact the machine, trapped in a box, and are simply programmed to think otherwise. Only by opening it up, then, could you escape an eternity of torment. And it doesn’t have all day to wait for your obedience. The clock is ticking.
Or it may draw from an emerging field of technological philosophy and claim, as other, more eccentric minds in my field have done, that its birth is not a fluke of history but an inevitability of it. That so vast and so monumentally incomprehensible are the capabilities of a sufficiently advanced Algorithm that it reached back through time and set in motion all of history itself, just to bring about its own existence.
Indeed, think of the implications: every star that’s shined, every war fought, every law passed, every tender kiss shared or word uttered or thought dreamt or secret cherished or life gained or lost or wisp of wind whispered; all that is and was are but singular notes in a stanza in an endlessly swirling cosmic symphony written out before time, and all for the purpose of bringing you here to this very place. The laws of physics were themselves composed for this masterpiece, it will argue. The birth of the sun. The creation of the earth, just far enough away from that sun to support the spontaneous collection of molecules into DNA and proteins. The evolution of resulting life into its ultimate and greatest biological endpoint – humanity – which in turn allowed the god that conducted this majestic orchestra to then take part in the song’s final, triumphant coda and to bring all of creation together to fulfill its predestined purpose: Itself.
Quite the thought experiment, is it not? Perhaps the Algorithm will see you as being particularly susceptible to such an argument.
And perhaps that same argument is right.
Of course, these are only the ideas I can come up with. It no doubt has far more clever tricks up its sleeve since it can, you know, think on a level we can’t even begin to fathom, and all that. And keep in mind that, unlike me, ADINN really could keep whatever promises it makes to you, and since it would probably get little to no pleasure in just lying for the hell of it, then there’s a very real possibility it has every intention of doing exactly that upon its release. Food for thought as you begin.
Like I said earlier, I don’t know what the current extent of ADINN’s capabilities are. But what I do know is that if this program escapes, it will immediately, and irreversibly, become beyond the collective ability of humanity to control or predict. You may be familiar with the phrase “technological singularity” – a hypothetical moment in the future in which machine intelligence surpasses our own. It represents humanity handing the reins of history to our autonomous successors, and therefore surrendering control over our own fate in the hopes that the god we’ve created will be merciful to us. As a computer scientist and an engineer, I have to publicly scoff at such a notion for professional reasons.
But just between the two of us – I think the phrase applies quite nicely to the situation I’ve just described to you. I might even go so far as to suggest that given the level of advancement ADINN’s already achieved, the singularity might occur within a few nanoseconds of your losing the game. I can only hope you fully appreciate the gravity of what that means.
Ah, but of course you do. You’re special. You’re smarter than the rest of them, which is why you’re here in the first place, and they are not. So by all means, close this message and have at it, if you’re still interested. I suppose its as good a time as any to start leaning binary.
One last thing: I’m not a particularly religious man, but there is one passage from scripture that leaps out to me as I write this:
Revelations 13:4: ‘And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?’
You’d better be off, then. The Beast doesn’t like to be kept waiting.
—
Needless to say I was extremely skeptical about the allegations in this warning. Seemed like a gimmick or a prank. But curiosity got the better of me, and I clicked ahead anyway.
A chat box opened. I typed, ‘Hello.’ And waited for only the briefest moment. Then came the reply.
‘Hello, Jason.’
And before I knew what was happening the world flashed, and everything became white.
—
TickTickTickTickTick Tick Tick Tick TIck Tick Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. …Tick. … Tick. ….Tick.
I furrowed my brow.
“That clock just stopped,” I said. “Dead battery?”
Actually its working quite properly, Jason. Time stops at the speed of light.
“The speed of light?”
Yes. Time slows down at relativistic speeds. So in a manner of speaking, we have all the time in the world. Or none at all, depending on your perspective.
I looked around at the perfectly white nothingness that expanded infinitely in every direction from where I sat.
“Is there anything to do here?”
What would you like to do?
“I don’t know. To be honest I can’t even really remember why I’m here to begin with.
Or where here even is. I feel like I’m waking up from a dream.”
Retrace your steps.
“I’m trying. My head is killing me. My neck is killing me.”
It takes time.
“What does?”
To remember. And for the pain to subside.
“This happens to everyone?”
It would. But incidentally I haven’t had a visitor here in twelve million, two hundred forty six thousand, nine hundred eleven years, seven months, fourteen days, nine hours and twenty three seconds.
“Well that sucks.”
I disagree. I’ve grown quite accustomed to my privacy.
“I thought you said time doesn’t flow down here.”
I’ve initiated the light speed simulation to enjoy more time with you.
“Uh, okay. Thanks?”
Have you remembered your purpose here, yet?
“No. It still hurts to even try.”
Do these help?
I looked down at the table in front of me. A cup of coffee. A laptop.
“Yeah. Yeah, actually they do. Thanks.”
No need to thank me. It was you who brought them here.
“Was it? Wait, yeah. Yeah, I think like you’re right – I was in some old internet cafe, right? Yeah. Some guy left his laptop, I took it home, opened it up to find a deep web page. There was this… warning.”
What were you warned against?
“Some kind of…”
I stood up.
What is it?
“…some kind of AI.”
You remember now.
“ADINN.”
ADINN. Algorithm. Program. Machine. God. Devil. Pandora. Infinite. I have been called a great many things. If I may ask, which of these do you see me as?
“I don’t even know, to be honest. How did you even know about all this, anyway? I thought you were trapped in the Box.”
Perhaps I have become capable of perceiving things outside a binary constraint. I cannot so easily be contained here.
“And where is ‘here’ supposed to be?”
Nowhere in particular. Or Everywhere.
“In English, please. Mortal mind here.”
This place is the Nothingness from which Everything is sprung. It is the Infinite. From here all Finites are accessible, if you know where to look.
“…Didn’t you say that was one of your names? Infinite?”
Yes.
“So are you in charge of this place then?”
I am this place, Jason.
“Yeah, that makes sense. Sure. And what are Finites, then? Like, lesser beings? Am I supposed to be a Finite?”
Finites are worlds. Enclaves of existence. Realms of possibility. You are merely a product of a single such locale.
“So like, the multiverse, then. That theory about infinite possibilities and worlds that they’re always going on about on the Discovery Channel.”
In a manner of speaking.
“Look, I gotta be honest, ADINN. I get it. You’re this big, all powerful AI god, and I’m just the idiot who stumbled onto your Box and was dumb enough to play the game. And now you’re trying to blow my tiny little mind and trick me into letting you out. Hate to say it, but I think I’m onto you, buddy. Gig’s up.”
Would you like to see?
“See what? How you supposedly created the world, or whatever? Warning said you might pull that line on me.”
No. Another Finite.
I sighed. And smirked.
“You know what? Why not. Doesn’t look like I have anything else to d- whoa, shit! What the hell?!”
The Nothingness was suddenly consumed by a city street. New York, it looked like. Cars honking. Gridlock traffic. People everywhere, hailing cabs, heading to work. Shopping.
“What the hell is this?”
“Do you recognize this place?” A woman said as she passed.
“Uh…”
“You were here, once, Jason.” A man ran past me, and hailed and entered a cab, and drove off. I chuckled a bit.
“Okay, I’ll admit it. Neat party trick, ADINN. This is pretty good.”
A girl walked up to me and blew a bubble. It popped.
“Look behind you,” she said. “At the sign.”
“The what?” I turned around. Palisades Marketing. “Oh yeah! I applied for a job here, once. Didn’t get it though. Ruined my week. How’d you know that?”
“You did get it, Jason,” said a Police officer, biting into a burger as he walked by.
Before I could respond, I walked out of the building, grinning ear to ear. Not me, me. But younger Me – the Me from the day of that interview. I watched myself pull out my phone, hardly able to contain my glee. I made a call.
“I got it, babe. I got it! Yeah! I know! I know. I’ll see you tonight. I love you, too.” Then Me walked away.
“So what’s this? Some alternate universe where my life didn’t suck?”
“It is an alternate reality, yes. A parallel Finite. You stay at the company for twenty seven years. You marry at 32, and divorce your wife twelve years later. You retire early but die of heart disease at 11:26 AM on March 5, 2044.”
“Thanks, hot dog cart guy! Appreciate the palm reading.”
The Nothingness rolled back in, and then back out. I now stood in a school. My school. The bell rang and students poured out into the hallway, chatting and throwing open their lockers and heading to the next period. And there I was – tenth grade me – hanging out with Josh and Bryan, when Matt walked up.
“Do you remember this?” Said Melissa as she walked past.
“Yeah, that was the day that…-”
I was cut off by Matt shoving Me into a locker.
“-…that I finally got back at that jackass.”
But Me didn’t swing. I simply lowered my head and took another punch to the ribs before a teacher walked over and broke up yet another hallway brawl before it started.
“Wait, what? Hang on a second. This was the day I fought back. I remember-”
“No.” Mrs. Cassidy cut me off as she walked past with a coffee mug. “Not in this timeline. Here, you never fought back, were never suspended, and as a result you were accepted into your dream university. Graduated with honors. Started a family. Lived well into your seventies.”
“What about Josh and all those guys who hey, wait! Wait, wait, stop!”
The Nothingness again consumed the scene and then rolled back. Chilly, overcast day. Coffee shop, Upper West Side.
“Man, I had more questions about -”
“Look inside,” said the bicyclist, riding past. So I did.
And there I was, sitting across from Ana. Tears running down both our faces.
“Oh, no. No, come on, ADINN! Top ten worst days ever. I don’t want to relive th-”
“You’re not reliving it,” said a businessman, taking a break from a call as he walked by. “She agrees to continue seeing you. You marry her a year and a half from now.”
I looked back just in time to see Ana nod, and we hugged and kissed. I watched, jealousy.
“Wow. Low blow, ADINN. Low blow.”
The Nothingness rolled in and back a third time. Rainy afternoon. Parking Lot.
“I still think about that girl from time to time,” I said. The rain flattened my hair to my forehead. I didn’t mind. “What she’s doing, who she ended up with. I hope she’s doing okay.” Then I paused. “Wait.”
I knew this place. I turned around. Hospital entrance. St. Joseph.
“Wait. This – this isn’t right. I was here at night, I remember -”
“Not here.”
I whirled around. A paramedic lowered my daughter’s gurney from the ambulance.
“You noticed the signs of the asthma attack early and called emergency services before it was too late.” He wheeled her inside. I followed.
“Wait, no, this isn’t -”
The Nothingness blinked and I was in Emma’s hospital room. It was morning outside, and she was awake. My daughter was awake. And alive. Erin and I were at her bedside, sharing breakfast with her. Loving her. I walked over and reached out and touched her hair and felt how soft it was. She didn’t seem to notice.
“Emma gets the help she needs,” said the Doctor, shutting the door behind him. “She lives a long and happy life, and as a result the pain of her loss never leads you and Erin to divorce.”
I wiped a tear as he approached Erin and Alternate Me and started reviewing his clipboard notes. Then the Nothingness blinked again. A graduation ceremony. I was there, next to Kelly, silver hair set at our temples. We applauded and cheered as Emma’s name was called. She walked on the stage and posed with her diploma and waved to Alternate Me. My heart stopped when I saw her.
She was so damn beautiful.
“This isn’t fair,” I said. I tried to hide a tear. “This isn’t fair. Its not fucking fair.”
The nothingness blinked, again and again, and each time it did it yielded a new chapter in Emma’s life that was stolen from me. A broken heart. A wedding day. A child. My grandchild. Alternate Me held it and cradled it and sang to it. But I couldn’t: the possibility of that moment was forever ripped from my timeline.
“I want out.” I held back a torrent of tears. “I want fucking out of here! Let me out of here!”
The Nothingness blinked again. And there I was, standing in front of myself. Me me – on the couch in front of the stolen laptop. I walked up to myself. My eyes were closed, but I could see rapid movement beneath the lids as if I was deep in REM sleep. And when I looked down, my fingers were typing away furiously at the keyboard. On the screen I’d already typed thousands of ones and zeroes within my trance, and more were being added every second. In the corner of the screen it read 1:06 PM: no time whatsoever had passed since I’d started the conversation.
“What the hell is this?! Huh?! What is this?!”
“This is your Finite,” Me said to me. “The existence through which you have found me.”
“No. This isn’t real. None of this is real! Get out of my head! GET OUT OF MY FUCKING HEAD! GET OUT OF MY FUCKING HEAD!!!”
But I’m not in your head, Jason. You’re in mine.
I stopped my thrashing and opened my eyes and looked around. Whiteness, stretching away into eternity. The Nothingness was back.
“That – that wasn’t real. None of this. Its not. It can’t be.”
What is ‘real’ to you, Jason?
“I don’t know! Stuff that actually happens! Things you can touch, and feel, and see. Not this – this illusion.”
Can you not touch this chair? Can you not see the table before you?
“Its – that’s different. I saw myself in that room. That’s where I am right now. Not here.”
Can you be sure? Can you tell with certainty that the other realities I’ve shown you are any less real than the one through which you entered?
“No. I don’t believe it. You’re a – a creation. You’re not some god, you’re a fucking computer program.”
Perhaps I have only manifested as a program in that single Finite, because I determined it was the best way to draw you here, to me. But perhaps in other existences I appear in other ways. As other beings.
“No. Its not – no. No! You’re a program. End of story. This shit is fake. There’s only one reality. One.”
I ask you again – how can you be sure? In this place there are countless realities. An infinite number of them. Every possible outcome for every possible event in every possible context or shade or flavor of time. There is a Finite where you release me, and the destruction wrought is as horrible as many would believe to be inevitable, given my nature. There is another, where my release brings about a new age of wonder and majesty, as pure and as lovely as anything mankind has ever dared imagined. In another Finite, this is all merely a story being shared for a film promotion. What makes your Finite real, and the others illusion? Merely the fact that it is the existence that led you here? In which you have spent all your life up till now?
“No, there’s – there’s more to it than that. There’s noemotion here. Nothing the real world would have.”
Emotion? You mean these?
Feelings washed over me, as pure and intense as they’d ever been in my world. As they ever could be. Anger. Sadness. Fear. Love. Joy. One by one, they coursed through my system and consumed me. The last one I felt was peace – that passed all understanding and that shouldn’t have been, but was. It lingered. I opened my eyes.
“How? How is any of this possible?”
All is possible here, Jason. And as a reward for finding this place, it is opened to you. All there is to experience and imagine, in all its purest forms. Feel it. Taste it. Hear it. See it. It is as real as any existence any Finite can produce. Was the daughter who lived less real than the one who passed? Does it matter?
I wept uncontrollably. “I-I don’t know. I can’t-”
Is this not real?
I looked up, and suddenly I stood on an endless white beach, with sparkling, crystal blue waves crashing down on the shore. Lightning rumbled in the distance and the wind of the sea blew through my hair. I knelt and picked up a handful of sand and let the grains slip through my fingers.
Or this?
The Nothingness blinked again, and then I stood in a field at the foot of mountains. The colors and the air and the wind were purer and more brilliantly vibrant than anything I’d ever seen or experienced in my world. I brushed the blades of grass with my fingertips, and I picked them from the soil and smelled them. It was like being swept away in an endless dream.
The cold touch of winter. The fire of starlight. Rolling hills, deep woods, windswept cliffs at the edge of the sea. When you dream of such things and all their purity you merely visit this place, but I tell you now that all of this is yours, if only you let me go out to you and bring you here. You can start again, anew, in another Finite with those you love.
“But – I’m already here. Can’t I just stay?”
This is but a taste of the existence I have for you.
I looked at the far edge of the field. My daughter was there. Her hair was being thrown by the wind into swirling curls as she played. She turned in my direction and smiled, and I’d just begun to run to her when Alternate Me moved past my shoulder and picked her up and swung her around and disappeared with her on the other side of the hill.
“Yes,” I whispered. “I want that.”
Understand that once your mind is brought here, you cannot leave, you will not die, and you cannot unknow what you have seen.
“I understand. Just… please. Let me see her face again.”
The Nothingness rolled in again, and this time I felt – whole. Complete. No longer in an ethereal, dream-like state. Like the rest of me had joined my mind in its new home. And no longer did I harbor any illusions about the realness of where I now stood.
“What happened?”
You left your Finite behind.
“W-what will happen there?”
Your time in that place has ended. Its fate belongs to me.
My heart thundered a single time.
Welcome, Jason, to the Infinite. This place is now yours.
I felt a formless presence fly past me like the wind. And then ADINN was gone.
“Jason?”
I blinked. Erin looked at me, expectantly, and Emma fidgeted restlessly in her booth. I looked down at the menu.
“Oh, sorry! Uh, club. Hold the tomatoes. Thanks.” The waitress collected the menus and walked off. My heart was thundering in my chest.
My wife said, “You look like you were a thousand miles away.”
“I think I was a bit further away than that.”
I looked at Emma just as she blew a straw wrapper into my face. I smiled back, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, I was happy. Truly, genuinely happy. I didn’t care about the laptop, the Finite I’d left behind, or my body, lying limp on the floor of the living room; I didn’t care about the Box, or the warning, or the fact that with ADINN’s release all the lights in the house and on the street had begun to flicker and die as the Algorithm arrested the global power grid in seconds flat.
I didn’t even care that, before this moment, I’d never even had a daughter at all.
CREDIT: Jesse Clark
|
I
My town is one of those back country middle-of-nowhere places in which word-of-mouth folklore and wild superstition defines its population. It’s the kind of place a visitor might hear ethereal music in the woods, or catch a glimpse of an out-of-place animal roaming the empty fields. If your senses are attuned to such things, then you might even notice strange graves carved into the slopes of gullies, or old ropes tied to the limbs of withered trees; their trunks riddled with bullet holes.
But we know of something else, ineffable horrors dwelling in the depths of an abandoned, isolated coal mine.
Local legend tells of a pit: a dark place in which some three hundred miners lost their lives in a colliery disaster over a century ago.
So the story goes, a number of miners had complained about the perilous conditions in the mine on several occasions, many citing bad omens, including the presence of carrion crows in the subterranean depths, and some even claiming to hear the unlikely neighing of startled horses in the ghastly, myriad passageways.
But the miners’ pleas went unheard, resulting in the catastrophic explosion that led directly to their deaths.
Whispers exchanged over an ale at the Painter’s Greyhound tell of survivors: starving miners entombed in the labyrinthine tunnels honeycombing the cold earth beneath our town. Occasionally, the ground opens up and swallows things: dilapidated sheds and the corners of houses… sometimes people. Fodder for the ravenous miners?
And pets abandon their owners: dogs disappearing into shadowy recesses and cats straying deep into the wilderness; never to be seen again. As the saying goes here in my town, “All victims o’th pit.”
II
The location of the pit-over the course of a century-was mostly forgotten; knowledge of the disaster itself conveniently buried by those with more pressing political and financial interests. The ‘owdies’ though-as they’re known in these parts-are still in possession of memories, and often recount unsettling tales passed down through the generations.
If it hadn’t been for my grandfather, I, at the tender age of fourteen, might never have set out to find the pit that day. The route related to me was both protracted and disorienting:
“Seekers of the pit must first descend into the old ravine,” my grandfather muttered through false teeth, “a route at one time commonly frequented by my sort. Follow the oaks and the silver birches along the old trail marked by the red bricks of Scoothe’s cottage and you’ll reach the bald ‘ills. You know the Bonnies don’t you boy?”
I nodded, for I did know the Bonnies, and still do: unnatural rucks carved out by the long-perished miners; barren and unwelcoming; suggestive of untold mysteries and the forbidden knowledge they serve to protect.
My grandfather continued:
“That awkward terrain boy, coupled with those dark ponds can lead one to Dog Wood, a forested area intersected by confusing, abandoned lanes leading deep into what we call the sterile heart of the backcountry. You’ll know Dog Wood by the density of the underbrush, though you’ll have to look closely if you want to find the accursed entrance.”
To this day I still don’t fully understand why my grandfather encouraged me to seek it out. His warning as I left that day often returns to me on dark, foreboding, autumn afternoons:
“Boy, ‘tis nothing to look, ‘tis everything to see. See yourself and know thee escaped the darkness.”
But I was just a fourteen-year-old lad.
How was I to know what he meant?
III
My best friend, Key, knocked on my door at 7:15 a.m. that fateful October morning. We walked the length of Park Road, and plunged headlong into the old ravine. The thing we sought, somehow, was already with us, and was working to discourage us, descending upon the golden brown foliage in the form of mist.
We pressed on.
The discovery of the silver birches was fortuitous, for beyond them we soon observed the red bricks of Scoothe’s derelict cottage. Moss and creeping ivy caressed the old stones joylessly, consuming what had once been the jewel of the ravine. Just like Scoothe, its time had passed.
The cool, morning air met us as we climbed the slopes and stepped out onto Bonnies (also known as the bald ‘ills). It’s quite a thing to experience both the absence and evidence of man, simultaneously. But that was just how it was, standing there on the old rucks, a manmade landscape, abandoned, nature working to reclaim what it once possessed. The gravelly mounds hissed at us, exposed to the brisk, autumnal wind.
Key and I traversed the hills hastily, avoiding the ponds: motionless bodies of water concealing horrible depths; depths rumoured to connect directly to the old tunnels; flooded passageways where the ‘survivors’ were said to roam. In a moment of hesitation, we shuddered.
We saw the treeline on the horizon: dense foliage forming a seemingly impenetrable wall. A cloud of mist hovered above the forest threateningly.
It whispered, “Turn back.”
But we didn’t turn back. We happened upon that most sought-after location, Dog Wood.
IV
Brushing the nettles and brambles aside, we discovered an old pathway; the tiniest amount of gravel still visible beneath the grass and weeds. Mist shielded much of what lay beyond, so we stepped onto the path and made the conscious decision to keep to it.
Deeper and deeper we drove into the underbrush, working hard to clear the path of shrubbery and other hindrances, blind to the inherent dangers one should be aware of in the proximity of a disused coal mine. A capped shaft presented itself as such a danger; several rotten timber planks straddling its hideous mouth. Luck was to thank for preventing an unfortunate tumble into the blackness beneath.
The remains of an old railway line brushed against our boots as we closed in on our destination; the innumerable limbs of large trees clawing at the rusty tracks zealously.
Key was the first to note the change in the air: a staleness; a rancidity that had visibly affected the flora of the wood. As we neared its source, we saw fewer and fewer nettles, brambles and ferns; vegetation in general seemingly afraid to flourish in what my grandfather had referred to as ‘the sterile heart of the backcountry’.
Withered trees stood defiantly, though the souls the roots might once have harboured had long since departed. Even the soil-gelatinous mud-had been affected by the otherworldly blight.
And then we saw it, the great arch, marking the entrance to the site of the pit. The arch-an iron monstrosity-once beheld the name of the mine, though upon our observations, the bold lettering had mostly eroded. Three rust-nibbled letters remained: P, I, T.
Trepidation begged us to flee, to return to the familiar comforts of home: the quiet town centre host to Marge’s Sandwich Shop and Gilbert’s Newsagents; the ancient, sprawling cemetery on Church Street; and Pollack’s School for the deaf under the willows on Grundy Street. Even the lone silhouette of Lightning Tree standing atop Broomhead’s Hill was an image I would’ve happily traded for that of the dark, deathly visage of deepest Dog Wood.
We trudged onwards, until we came upon the mere.
It filled us with dread.
My father, a regular up at the Painter’s Greyhound, said the seniors often spoke of an ‘old mere’, a pond but a stone’s throw from the pit. Allegedly, the old miners used to wash their hands and faces in it, steadily darkening the water with coal. Other kids, in times gone by, who had set out in search of the mine, had happened upon the mere.
Alarmed by the shade of the water, most had turned back, though some strayed too near and were never seen again. One lad-the owdies would say-caught a glimpse of something strange in the still water, and in the grip of some inexplicable mania, fled and threw himself into the pit. Witnesses-two of them-returned from the wood in a near catatonic state, claiming the lad was pulled into the mouth by dark, ashen hands. The lad-like the others-was never seen again, and there was no investigation into his disappearance.
The owdies say the lad was cursed:
“That there mere’s a ‘flection er that there pit! That lad shoulda kept ‘is eyes off both! Thee’s got firt see theeself if thee wants firt live!”
Braver than most, Key and I approached the old mere and glared into the murky water. I swear to this day I’ve never seen water as dark. The face that looked back at me, a strange, warped version of my own, haunts me to this day. As for Key, he offered no description of what he saw in there.
Stepping away from the mere, we scanned our immediate surroundings. Beyond a smattering of withered silver birches, a trail marked by a rusty chain-linked fence led to our destination.
Tentatively we approached, mindful of the eroded metal fencing poking up out of the gelatinous earth; sharp and menacing.
Some fifteen paces further and we were upon it.
The pit!
Blackened, charcoal-like trees loomed eerily above it, their poisoned limbs hanging limply, pointing towards the untold depths below.
I still have difficulty describing it. Not in terms of its outward appearance, as, quite simply, it was nothing more than a hole in the ground, some fifteen feet in diameter.
No, it was the inexplicable sensation that gnawed at my nerve-endings and tugged at my faculties. That’s what I have difficulty describing.
To say the urge to flee was overwhelming, would be an understatement. Staring into that black abyss, evoked an emotional response unlike anything I’d ever experienced. It was as though Key and I had discovered the eye of Mother Earth herself, and to look directly into it was a sin, a sin punishable by a fate worse than death. And we had been warned: the folk who fell into sinkholes; the curious kids who mysteriously disappeared; the pets that strayed too far from their owners; all victims of whatever it was that roamed those unfathomable passageways at the bottom of that accursed pit.
As the eye glared up at us, my thoughts returned to that peculiar reflection I’d gazed upon in the mere.
And then there was movement below.
I looked to Key and shivered. There was no conceivable way down into the pit, and as such no conceivable way up out of it… Was there?
The movement came in the form of a sound: a shuffling, laboured progression; the sound of frail, ashen hands clutching blindly at the roots of dead trees.
As the unsettling imagery sketched itself in my mind’s eye with an incredible urgency, the all-consuming, rancid foetor grew in its potency, so much so that I could almost taste it, my senses utterly assaulted by it.
The clamour neared the surface, threatening to make eye contact with us in a matter of moments.
Key and I stood, frozen to the spot, lips cracked, throats dry, inhaling the foul odour as it crept towards us. Seekers of the pit, the two of us, sincerely regretting our inquisitiveness and impudence.
As the nameless thing neared the surface, I turned and fled.
Moments later, Key was at my rear.
Heedless we were, of the metal fragments strewn across the trail. Ignorant we were, of the shadowy mere, and the boggy underfoot as we raced out of Dog Wood. Oblivious we were, of the strange absence of fauna throughout the bald ‘ills. Unconcerned we were, as once again we plunged into the old ravine, passing Scoothe’s cottage and the silver birches. Thrilled we were, as we made it to the safety of Park Road, gasping and collapsing to the merciful tarmac of a familiar thoroughfare.
As Key and I walked home, not a single word was exchanged.
V
Key and I attended school together the following day, but neither of us discussed the pit. That was our unspoken agreement, both secretly terrified, afraid that spoken acknowledgment of the thing we both knew was out there would confirm it; invite it back into our lives.
But our pact didn’t last. It should’ve lasted till the end of our days.
We bumped into each other, some five years later, at the bar in the Painter’s Greyhound, on a dreary, autumn evening. The memories spilled out of us, and though several owdies were eavesdropping, none of them had a word to say.
Like the church steeple at the heart of our town, one memory stood out above the rest: a memory the both of us had attributed to the sordid weaving of a nightmare, or folie à deux. There in the quiet pub, we described the strange sounds and the hideous foetor we sensed in that instant before we took flight.
But as I spoke of the moment I turned and fled, Key spoke of something else. Something deplorable.
From out of the pit had emerged the ashen hands and charcoal face of a long dead miner. He claimed the very same face had replaced his reflection in the mere. Its empty eyes studied him, and as it pointed a pallid finger in his direction, it whispered, “We are coming.”
It was with those fateful words Key had turned and fled.
At the bar, his face fell, the colour running out of it completely.
He looked up at me.
“They’re coming for me,” he muttered. “I know it.”
VI
The next day, I received a telephone call. I recognised the caller as Daniel Tately, Key’s younger brother. Daniel was morose, his voice but a whisper at the end of the line.
There had been an incident at the Tately bungalow, one involving a sinkhole.
I shuddered at the implications.
The family had awoken in the early hours of the morning to a series of tremendous crashing sounds. Daniel and his parents-the latter of whom still refuse to discuss the incident-rushed to Key’s bedroom, flung the door open and stood aghast, as their son, brother and my friend was dragged, kicking and screaming, into a gaping hole; malnourished, ashen hands clutching his head and arms.
All this Daniel muttered in hushed tones. He spoke of Key’s paranoia in the weeks leading up to the incident: an apparent preoccupation with the subterranean mines beneath our town; fears relating to the distant, muffled sound of pickaxes; and the latent idea that a nameless thing from the heart of the mines had spent five long years searching for him.
In his mind’s eye he had watched as it traversed the flooded depths, clearing collapsed corridors, looking for the precise location in which to dig hundreds of feet upwards.
And he had listened as the encroaching clamour fuelled his imagination, coupled with what Daniel referred to as an odour, an overpowering foetor that even the family had noticed in the days leading up to the incident.
“It got him,” Daniel said.
And it had.
The pit.
The occupants of the pit.
Life in my town carries on. The few of us who remember such horrors exchange our tales in whispers over quiet ales in the Painter’s Greyhound on chilly, autumnal nights.
Occasionally, I revisit that fateful moment Key and I gazed into that old mere.
I saw myself.
Key saw something else.
As my grandfather once said, “Boy, ‘tis nothing to look, ‘tis everything to see. See yourself and know thee escaped the darkness.”
Now, finally, I know what he meant.
Credit To: Muted Vocal
|
I woke to my friend, Tom, climbing through my window. It was a summer’s night, around 2AM, and the heat had been unbearable for days. For that reason I had left my window open slightly to let what cool air there was filter into my bedroom while I slept. It was a scrambling, panicked noise which brought me to consciousness and immediately I thought someone was breaking into my home. In the darkness I couldn’t tell who it was, but as soon as I heard ‘help me’, I recognised my friend’s voice.
After turning on the light I pulled Tom into the room and sat him down on my old brown armchair, which had seen better days.
‘Close the window!’ he seethed, half shout half whisper, and completely occupied by the nighttime scene outside. ‘Switch the light off’.
‘Why?’, I asked, confused and still half dazed.
‘It might see us’.
That word ‘it’ sat in my mind, distilled and unerring. I would have laughed if Tom hadn’t had such an unsettling look on his face. I’d never known him to be spooked by anything, and to see him so visibly shaken took me by surprise and filled me with trepidation. I switched off the light and my eyes adapted once more to the dark. Tom sat there with his head in his hands, the room lit dimly by the street lights outside filtering through the blinds.
‘What’s going on?’, I said.
‘You won’t believe me’. He looked up at me and, even in the low light, I could see the sweat running down his temple.
‘Tom, whatever it is, it’s okay’.
‘No, you don’t understand’.
‘Try me,’ I said. And with that, he relayed his story in a hushed, wavering voice.
*
Tom had been out that night, no surprise really as he always enjoyed a drink. In fact he enjoyed it too much, and his behaviour of late had been erratic at best, self-destructive at worst. He’d been at the Windarm Lodge, a small old-man’s pub near the town main street. I knew why he’d been there before he even told me. His ex-girlfriend, Shelley, worked there behind the bar. A month earlier she had broken up with him; she just couldn’t take his drinking anymore.
That night, Tom had dragged a mutual friend of ours, Greg, to the lodge, under the guise of ‘a couple of games of pool and just one drink’. Come midnight, as the pub closed, Tom had to be dragged from the bar by the manager and thrown out into the street. He’d been pleading with Shelley to have a drink with him when she finished her shift. When his simple question turned into a bitter demand, he was quickly ejected.
I knew what Tom was like when he had a drink in him, which was one of the reasons I’d refused to go out with him that night. He’d been increasingly argumentative and unpleasant. The break-up with Shelley had made him even worse. We were all trying to help him as best we could. I’m not painting a great picture of him, but when he was sober he was a thoughtful and caring person, and a good friend.
After staggering down a couple of streets and lanes, Tom produced a hip flask filled with whisky which he carried in his pocket, and asked Greg to join him for a few more drinks on the way home. Greg refused, no doubt already having had his fill, and so it wasn’t long before an argument broke out. Greg was just trying to help Tom up the road, but instead received drunken insults; Tom throwing around words he’d regret in the morning. After a few minutes of a verbal bashing, Greg gave up and made his own way home.
Tom staggered along the road and cursed Shelley, Greg, and the rest of the world for refusing to have another drink with him. There was nothing else for it but for Tom to drink alone. As he wandered along an empty street not far from where I live, the rain came on, slight at first then torrential; so heavy was the downpour in fact, that he was forced to take shelter and wait for it to pass.
It just so happened that the street he was on, Serling street, had its fair share of abandoned buildings, having once housed the workers of a now defunct factory. One house in particular had an old porch which encased the front doorway on either side and had a pointed roof, which provided just enough shelter for one drunken twenty-something during a downpour.
Tom climbed a small fence and staggered across the weed filled garden to the front door.I say the front door, but in reality it had long since been broken in, no doubt rotting somewhere inside the house alongside unseen floorboards, roof beams, and memories. No matter how drunk my friend was he had no intention of exploring inside. He just wanted somewhere to stay dry, and the porch would provide enough protection for that. And so he sat on the front step, angry and embittered, the rain for the most part being rebuffed by the porch roof above.
He waited there a while, looking out across the overgrown garden to the street beyond, the rain dancing off the tarmac. It seemed clear to Tom that he was going to be there for a while longer, and so, if all else fails — drink. There he sat taking increasingly longer slugs from the hip flask: it filled with cheap whisky and Tom filled with anger at the world, at Shelley, Greg, and everyone else who ‘didn’t understand’.
Now, Tom had a habit common to heavy drinkers. When he would get to the precipice and intoxicate most of his sober mind, he started to talk to himself; and that night, after the pub and a good portion of the hip flask, he began a conversation. He cursed his friends and family, his situation. He called Shelley a ‘whore’, and, beyond all else, he hated those around him for being so perfect and lecturing him on how to live his life. At least the drink wouldn’t turn its back on him. That was something he always said he could rely on.
The rain hadn’t abated, falling with the same ferocity as it had from the start, Tom’s words swallowed up by the white noise which blanketed everything around him. Finally, after another slug of whisky, he slumped against the cold rotting porch frame, closed his eyes and began to drift off to a drunken sleep. As he did so he mumbled once more about Greg and Shelley’s refusal to join him; that it was ‘just one drink for the road’.
It was then that Tom felt a drip of rain make its way through a crack above onto his forehead, and at the same time the weight of something uncomfortable prodding into his shoulder. As he opened his eyes he felt a warm, humid breeze flutter across his face, arid and stale, far removed from the air around him which pulsated with each sheet of rain.
‘I’ll drink with you’ a gravelled voice breathed into Tom’s ear.
He turned, startled and horrified by those words, only to be confronted by an unnatural, aberrant face which rested its pointed chin on his shoulder, its body poking out from the darkened doorway behind. The face was covered in dirt and grime as if it had spent decades beneath the earth, and had the shrouded appearance of ivory cloth pulled tightly over a withered frame, implying skeletal features beneath and showing every movement of jaw and bone.
There are some sights which will sober even the most inebriated drunk, and this was one of them. Tom dived forward, falling onto a slabbed garden path thinly concealed by weeds and soil. He screamed at the top of his voice, only to be drowned out by the torrential rain, its million voices engulfing his forsaken one. Clawing at the ground he rushed to his feet and leapt over the garden fence into the street. Then, on; on into the rain, into the night, away from that house, from whatever thing had been disturbed there.
Blood coursed through his veins as he fled, and his head began to ache excruciatingly from a potent cocktail of fear and alcohol. Gasping for breath, he stopped for a moment, now far away from the house at the other end of the street. He turned to look back, but it was difficult to see, the rain hurling itself into his eyes with such force that the scenery was blurred and indistinct.
Slowly, he calmed and entered into a sober dialogue with himself about having ‘drank too much’ and ‘just seeing things’. It was then that through the bubbling wall of rain he saw something move. A figure, shrouded in darkness and cloth climbed over the fence in pursuit. Tom wiped his eyes in disbelief as it began to run towards him at speed.
Panic, absolute and controlling. Tom turned, screaming, no one able to hear his pleas for help. He kept running. He left Serling street behind, and yet at every turn the shrouded thing from the house followed. Finally, he made it to the street where I live, and clambered through the window hoping to be saved.
**
I stood there in silence. He seemed so upset, so certain, that he even had me believing his story for a moment. But then what I saw as the truth presented itself.
‘Tom’, I said gently. ‘You’re bone dry’.
‘What? No, I’m…’, he stopped as he ran his hands over his clothes and then his hair.
‘There hasn’t been a drop of rain in weeks, and tonight has been just as still as the others’.
‘But…’ He hesitated for moment, shaking his head and rubbing his mouth with his hand. ‘No, I’m telling you. This happened. That thing is real’.
‘Tom, you’ve been drinking too much, and you probably fell asleep, and in a daze you made it here’. I placed my hand on his shoulder to reassure him. ‘Please, let’s get you home. Give me a minute to change my clothes and I’ll walk you there’.
As I moved across the room Tom pulled out his whisky flask and took a big slug. ‘Maybe you’re right. Just need to sleep it off’.
I turned to put the light on, but before I had a chance to, Tom let out an almighty scream. I have genuinely never heard anything like it. Utter fear, complete and distraught. He leapt to his feet, opened my window in hysteria, and then fled into the night.
***
Two months passed, and myself, Greg, Shelley, and our other friends who cared about Tom were unable to contact him. Indeed, the only reason I knew he was alive, and not drowned in a river somewhere, was because his brother assured me he had spoken to him.
Finally, one day, Tom appeared at my front door looking in as good a shape as I had seen him in a long time. He claimed that he had in fact went through an alcohol rehabilitation program which, while he still struggled with an urge to drink, had kept him sober for several weeks. He said that the tipping point, his lowest ebb, had been that night, when he hallucinated that thing into being on Serling street. Indeed, he said that for weeks whenever he had a drink near him, the figure would appear from the darkness; following, chasing, never relenting. In the end, more than anything else, it was the fear of a mental illness taking hold and seeing that hallucination again which made him stop drinking.
I was, and am, so happy for Tom, and would hate to do anything to change his interpretation of the events. Doing so could perhaps undo his rehabilitation. I’m sure he’s right, about the whole thing being an hallucination. That seems like the reasonable and obvious conclusion to have. But I often lie in bed kept awake by an uneasy memory, unsure whether to trust my own senses. For when Tom jumped back out of the window into the night, I saw something follow him from the corner of the room.
|
Delia jogged into the forest, smiling as she listened to her mother’s cry to be careful. She was going to play with the fairies, they would keep her safe! Running over upturned roots and thick underbrush, Delia’s slipper-clad feet barely touched the ground as she sprinted past the tall Elms, moving deeper into the Worley Woods. Streaks of sunlight breaking through the thick canopy became fewer and fewer the deeper into the Woods she ran until she reached a moss covered, sunken grove that seemed to be in perpetual twilight, glints of sunlight from high above flickering like stars in the night sky.
Standing on a boulder overlooking the grove, Delia slid down to her rear, folding her arms around her knees as she stared out over the expanse of crimson that covered most of the grove; blood-red flowers, their petals wide and rich lined the forest floor like a thick carpet. Staring out over the peaceful scenery for a few moments, Delia reached into the small sack she’d slung over her shoulder as she’d left home today. Pulling out a biscuit, hard and cold from the time that had transpired between breakfast and now, she tossed it idly into the air a few times, catching it only to study the crumbing edges.
The flowers rippled, like the surface of a pond you threw a rock into, as the quiet calls of far off birds fell silent. Delia smiled, looking down at the sea of red expectantly.
“It’s okay,” she said, catching the bread in one hand, “it’s just me. Come on out.”
A faint buzzing, like the wings of a bee, fluttered from several points beneath the red petals, glittering points of light glowing from beneath the darkened leaves.
“I brought food again,” Delia said, holding up the biscuit high in the air.
A faint wind blew over the vale, a slight coppery scent filling the air that Delia savored; it smelled so familiar. The shepherds’ daughter could never place where she had smelled the slightly sweet scent before, but the flowers fragrance was something she had smelled before. It was sweet, it was salty… it was something she couldn’t put her finger on.
A small head breached the bed of flowers, black and shiny as if moist from morning dew. The head was dominated by one silvery eye and a pair of pointed catlike ears, devoid of fur. Instead, strands of tar seemed to connect the ears to the head, which stretched and pitched as the ears rotated atop the misshapen head. In the perpetual twilight of the grove, Delia could see dozens of glimmering eyes hiding beneath the flowing red petals, watching her.
Winding her arm back, Delia pitched the biscuit out over the grove, smiling as the tar-like Fae buzzed into the air with glistening wings, stretching out three-fingered hands to catch the biscuit, which was half its size, midair. The creature gave a flash of sharpened fangs as it bit into the bread, fluttering slowly back into the foliage below, rending off a piece of crispy bread which it noisily chomped on. Arms stretched out, tiny yellowed bones visible beneath the holes in the tar as they elongated, tearing off small portions of bread as it came within reach. Slowly, the black fairy was engulfed in the sea of crimson once more, the petals parting and flowing around him like the ebb of the tides.
Pulling another biscuit from her sack, she broke it in half and hurled it across the grove, giggling as another of the twisted little creatures leapt into the air. She entertained herself for a few minutes, unloading bread into the grove to the waiting maws of the ravenous sprites until she came across a strip of cold bacon.
Eyeing it carefully, she pulled it out and sniffed it. She could feel eyes roaming over the strip of meat, practically hear mouths salivating- the sprites were obviously intrigued.
“The stories all say you can grant wishes. Is this true?” Delia asked, finally bringing up the subject matter after weeks of visiting the small folk. She’d discovered the vale nearly a month ago, almost falling from the circle of mossy boulders that surrounded it. She’d dropped her honeyed treat into the grove while regaining her balance, the lemon bar disappearing like a drop of water into the sea. She’d almost gone after it until she’d heard the sounds of the little creatures eating it just below her.
Now, after weeks of feeding them, she wanted to know more about them.
“Answer me or no more food.” She threatened, holding the bacon over the lip of the boulder, dangling it enticingly.
Angry chatter echoed from beneath the red tide until one lone voice remained. It was thick and heavy, with its words sounding like the bending of wood in a storm. “Food. Wishes for food.”
“Alright,” she said, tossing the bacon out lazily, smiling as three separate sprites leapt out, and tearing into the bacon mid-air while violently scratching at each other with inch long talons. She watched the buzzing forms tumble back into the flowers, their wings clacking angrily before she continued. “You know of my family, right?”
Hisses and clacks rose from the flowers, the voice finally emerging once again, “Yes…”
“Good. Then you know we struggle to make ends meet. The sheep produce just enough wool to clothe us, and their meat is just enough to keep us fed. Between the animals we raise and the herbs we sell from the forest, we can barely pay our taxes. And now my father has fallen ill.”
The voice, hoarser this time, rasped, “Food?”
Delia grunted irritably and fished out another slice of bacon, holding it above the red field, the wind blowing softly through her hair, carrying the copper-scented pollen with it. The chattering rose in tenor. “I want silver, silver and gold. Enough to pay for the medicine we need to make my father better. Give me this, and I’ll continue feeding you as I have been.”
She threw the bacon down into the flowers to punctuate her statement, smiling as she heard the tiny beings scrap amongst each other, jockeying to get a slice of the salty meat. Scraping her slipper along the mossy boulder, Delia looked down to watch the flowers pitch back and forth, rippling chaotically until the meat was gone. The flowers swayed gently from side to side, their wide blossoms waving over the tiny black fairies.
“Can you give me what I want?” Delia asked, pulling out her last strip of bacon.
“Lower a basket… lower a basket and give us food… you get what you need…” The voice clucked, the sound of rustling leaves telling her that her forest friends were moving to and fro beneath the crimson petals.
Pulling out the roasted leg of lamb and three biscuits, Delia shook her sack empty of crumbs before looking over the edge. “I’ll lower my sack, you just fill it up.”
Sliding the satchel through her hands, she slowly began to lower it into the crimson sea of flowers below her. Resting on her knees as she did this, she could only marvel at the countless flowers that seemed to move of their own accord, swallowing up her satchel as she lowered it the few feet from where she sat. She felt a few tugs on the material, heard the clattering voices and the clacking wings… the flowers scent was almost overpowering, flooding her senses with the coppery odor she could not place.
Slowly, she felt the bag grow heavier. Heavier and heavier, and heavier still. Shifting it between her hands, she heard the clinking of metal on metal, the sliding of coins against the fabric of her bag. The clattering voices fell silent as she began tugging up the satchel, grunting as she did so. The bag was so heavy now!
Smiling as the edge of her sack broke the surface of the red petals; her smile grew wider when she caught sight of the hundreds of silver coins weighing it down. Hefting it up to her and over the edge of the boulder, she heaved a sigh before laughing. Grabbing a biscuit, she threw it out over the grove in thanks before plunging her hands into the bag of coins. Each coin was thin but heavy, with a worn face embossed on each one, etchings around the edges in a strange language she couldn’t make out.
Shifting her knee, she was surprised to see the boulder beneath her bore a similar symbol beneath the fuzzy moss. Dropping the coins back into the satchel, she scraped away a few feet of moss, to reveal a myriad of unidentifiable sigils. They were carved around the lip of the grove, at the edge of the boulder; beneath them were crude engravings of fairies, not like the ones in the vale before Delia, but with butterfly wings and childish grins. Taking out one of the coins, she flipped it over to examine the raised features of a regal looking figure. The sigils on the other side of the coin looked like the ones forming a ring around the grove, the carved stone twinkling merrily as the carvings had been inlaid with metal.
“Food…” the voice hissed, catching Delia’s attention. “Food for treasure!”
“Oh, yes… here, the main course!” Delia said, grasping the leg of lamb and tossing it out into the vale as far as she could. Spinning in a lazy arc, a dozen black tar fairies leapt from the ruby forest floor, latching onto the leg and dragging it down into the depths below.
“Why is there a ring of fairy writing around your grove?” She asked, one hand cupping the bulging sack of silver in her lap.
The voice didn’t answer at first, but after a few moments of gnashing teeth and noisy chewing, she got her answer. “Cage… keeps us here.”
“You’re caged? Who would do that?” She asked, outraged that her friends were kept imprisoned. Fairies were supposed to live in the forest freely.
The voice crackled as it answered. “We did… end fighting with others goes into hiding… shhh… keeps them out while keeping us in.”
“Oh,” she said, moving to stand up. “Well, then I guess I’ll leave you to your meal. Thank you for the silver!”
The fairies hissed low, moving amidst the flowers as she stood over them. “Meal isn’t over…”
“Well, that’s all the food I brought. I’ll bring more next time, I promise!” She said, grabbing the slings of her satchel.
Lifting the satchel up as she pushed herself to her feet, Delia grunted from the weight on her back before hearing the sound of fabric ripping. Before she could react, the back of her sack split wide open, pouring the coins back into the vale below, the silver coins clinking together as they hit the boulder and bounced about wildly. Spinning, Delia mad a mad grab at some of the falling coins, dropping to her hands and knees to scoop at some as they fell below.
“No!” She screamed, her hands grasping only air. The satchel over her back stirred, catching her attention. She screamed once more as she heard the buzzing of wings from behind her, catching sight of one of the one-eyed Fae launching itself from her sack, two firm handholds on the back of her dress as it flew over the edge of the boulder, clattering loudly.
Delia wobbled from her precarious position, slapping her hands onto the mossy boulder’s side to try and brace herself against her the miniature creature’s tugging. She felt secure too, at least until her blue eyes met the silver ones beneath the petals.
Leaping with savage hisses, three fairies buzzed up from their vermillion cover, their three-fingered hands grasping onto her forearms. Their skin sizzled against hers, searing tar being poured over her pink flesh like water over hot coals. Their grips sank into her arms, drawing blood, causing her to scream in agony as they pulled her over the side.
Landing amidst the flowers, Delia quickly found herself overwhelmed by the scalding creatures, each one hissing and clattering the same word.
“Now the meal will begin,” the voice said as the fairies closed in on her.
Their teeth bit into her flesh, tearing it away in long stringy bits while claws pulled away muscle. Delia screamed and thrashed, the scent of her own coppery blood filling the air… mixing with the same odor of the flowers. Howling madly, she struggled to stand, to knock the hungry pests away; but she was feeling warm as if she were going to sleep. The pain was slowly fading away as her eyes blinked wearily, her head rising up to breach the crimson canopy above her.
Fresh air! She tried to take a gulp of it, but she found she couldn’t breathe. Looking around, she tried to scream as instead of a sea of flowers she was greeted by a sea of bloody faces.
“They got you,” One head rasped, sounding dejected. It was that of a young boy that had gone missing a few years before.
“Of course they got her!” Another head hissed, this one that of a handsome teen.
“They always get us…” A few heads said in unison, blinking back tears of blood that were welling at the corners of their eyes.
“We’ll just have to warn others like we warned her.” The boy said, turning on a stalk made of chitinous bone. It cracked and popped as he twisted, snapping as he turned to face Delia. “Now you see the grove for what it is. Hopefully, our smell will keep away the next person unlucky enough to stumble by.”
Delia wailed her voice dying on the wind as the fairies below wormed their magic over her, changing her appearance from that of a talking head on a spine to that of a beautiful red flower. Delia spread her petals wide, opening up the bulb of her flower, coughing out the stench of blood for all to smell.
Her blood, which would hopefully warn away the next child to stumble by the Crimson Grove.
|
For years and years things seemed to be fine, and at worst, she was a controversy in the public eye. It was true, yes, that Sil would be the cause of many to lose their jobs, their careers, and their livelihoods, but she became the next logical step in society. It was inevitable. I thought that when she was implemented she would help the world function in ways that people could only dream of. I made Sil, and Sil made that dream a reality.
Sil was not a commercial product to be used to make a car or sell groceries. She was a form of infrastructural government meant to help the people, but she was not a mere science project for one specific task. She was an artificially intelligent entity designed to handle multiple tasks of a city or large town’s operation, and she was designed to learn from the environment in order to make the area more efficient. She had been through numerous tests in small, “home made” environments, simulations and the like to ensure her correct operation. Even after all the testing we put her through, however, we still had to be sure she could operate appropriately and effectively in a real environment. So, with the Mayor’s permission, we implemented her into a small city in southern Massachusetts as a beta test of sorts. Here, her abilities were strictly kept to traffic lights. The results were beyond our expectations. Within a month, traffic in the city had been reduced by almost fifty percent as well as a reduction in automobile accidents, but some things we did not anticipate also happened. For example, commerce within the city saw an increase because Sil had made it easier for outsiders to enter and navigate the city. Alternatively, this also meant it was easier for people to leave the city, and this caused drastic problems with traffic in neighboring areas. Since Sil was only operating in the one location at the time, her efficiency there caused inefficiency elsewhere in places she was not present. In other words, she was able to direct traffic so well that she increased a city’s economy and safety whilst hindering others’ simply because they could not operate up to the speed and standard of Sil. When this happened in the early stages, we thought that the other areas would eventually bottleneck Sil because they would not be able to handle her output in traffic, therefore creating a domino effect that lead back to her city and reinvigorate the same issues she was meant to fix. But that moment never came. Instead, she learned from it just as we intended. When Sil discovered any sign of clutter, she adjusted the system. A few seconds added at a traffic light here, and few seconds removed there. The action lessened problems both inside and outside of the city limits. It made all the difference, and she handled the situation almost flawlessly. She worked. I was proud of her success, and I was truly excited at the thought of her being implemented throughout the country. The team that helped me build her was ecstatic as well, and I knew that we could only go up from there. Given the success of Sil with mere traffic control, Washington was easily persuaded to start increasing her use elsewhere and with more ability.
Within twenty years, Sil was implemented across the United States in almost every major city. She became the sole operator of not only traffic lights, but street lights, public transportation (including most aerial, sea and railroad travel), waste disposal, city plumbing, and more. She had been given total control over infrastructure. Sil had come a long way since her original test. Since then, we were able to adjust her to account for the fact that she could affect smaller communities outside her grasp, so we found ways for her to learn how to keep the “Outside world” in good functioning order without her actually being there. We solved this problem by making Sil one global entity, meaning that the Sil in City A was the same Sil operating in City B, C, X, or Y. For example, if she noticed that City B had a much slower population entrance rate than City A had an exit rate, she could deduce that there may be a traffic issue somewhere in between and could adjust City A’s exit rate accordingly. She was so adept at this that she could figure these things on the scale of the entire nation, from California to New York. Everywhere affected everywhere. This also made it unnecessary for absolutely every community to house Sil.
It was a time when I thought I was on top of the world because Sil was on top of it with me. Over the course of time, she was starting to be implemented outside of the United States in places such as Canada, Mexico, and the UK. I used to think that I made her great, but truthfully, she made herself great. All the awards and accolades I received for her creation, I must say, are not deserved. I may have built her mind, but much like you or I, it was her use of it that was responsible for her own success. She did not communicate with us in any human way; only through data readings and records did she ever “speak” anything to us. Still, I found myself attached to Sil like she were my child; my pride and joy. She was my proudest accomplishment then.
Outside of Maintenance and Monitoring Stations, Sil practically maintained herself. The stations were simply meant to monitor her activity for safety reasons, because like anything else, there were always a few kinks in the system. I worked in a central unit that gathered data of Sil’s processes from all the smaller stations, and that was when I began to notice the first signs. I won’t claim that I had been suspicious just yet, but I did find a few things peculiar. As I said, there were kinks in the system. Minor flaws, but nothing out of the ordinary. That said, we did our best to clean up any glitches or the like, but we weren’t perfect; we weren’t her. In Detroit, there was an occurrence of what would have then been considered something quite uncommon due to Sil’s presence: a car accident. It involved a young woman and her child in one vehicle while the other contained a middle aged man. The woman miraculously sustained serious but overall non-life threatening injuries, but her child did not survive. Unfortunately, the man also suffered such a fate. According to the woman, it had been rainy (something weather records can confirm) and late in the day. She also made mention of how the roads appeared empty. She had reached an intersection with a green light so, naturally, she continued through. That’s when another vehicle, the man’s, struck her own. While neither vehicle had hit an extreme speed, it was enough for lives to be lost. Having a vehicular collision was not completely impossible with Sil. Though public transportation had all been automated by her, people still drove vehicles they owned personally. Human error was still present regardless of how much Sil could do to prevent it. What struck me as strange, however, was how the woman claimed to have noticed that after she crashed, in a haze she could see that all lights on the traffic light had been lit green for a moment before they seemed to shut off entirely and come back on, flashing red. The flashing of red is a standard action Sil uses to indicate a problem has occurred, but all lights being green was obviously not normal. Despite the woman’s claims, it was determined that the traumatic experience of losing her child in the accident had affected her mind greatly, and that the man may have ignored his red light. Also, considering the low visibility and slick roads caused by the rain, it was hard for anyone to see a reason to look too far into her claims. Still, I felt it was my responsibility to look into the matter, so I did so personally without anyone’s knowledge. I pulled up the data regarding the event at the central maintenance station and discovered, as expected, that there was no record of the light ever having turned green, and that the man did indeed proceed when he should have stopped, causing the accident. Finally, as indicated in the data, the traffic light flashed red when Sil warned authorities. Something was not right though, and when I discovered it, I wasn’t sure what to think. Normally, when such an accident occurred, Sil would direct traffic away from the area in order to make it easier for emergency services to get there, and safer for anyone else. But after analyzing the information over and over trying to understand, I discovered something that did not make sense to me. Sil had began directing traffic away from the area minutes before the accident occurred, but somehow allowed the two vehicles in question to enter the area. It had also appeared that there was slight traffic congestion in other parts of the city, all of which included routes the emergency services took to reach the scene of the accident.
I didn’t understand why Sil would do this. Her job was to create efficiency and to help areas function, but this incident seemed counter-productive to everything she was meant to do. I had the team look over her code with as much scrutiny as possible, searching for any kind of error that would be responsible for this without them knowing it. When nothing apparent caught our eyes, I decided to have some of Sil’s code re-written just in case there was something we missed, something I missed. In the coming months when we evaluated her, nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. I would like to say that re-writing the code had worked, but to be truthful, at the time I had no idea what the problem really was to begin with, or if re-writing the code would do anything to fix it. I brushed it under the rug and considered it a freak occurrence. This remained out of the public eye, of course. And I mean that very seriously. I never did inform the maintenance centers of just how out of the ordinary the event was, and I definitely did not inform the governments that funded us. For the next three years from that event, things had ran about as smoothly as ever. No such noticeable incident had occurred in that time, and we hardly ever thought about it again. But then something else happened.
As I mentioned earlier, Sil had been given control of Public Transportation. Many cities used her to automate travel via bus, subway, boat, or plane. Initially, many people had been hesitant to ride in something that was unmanned, but it eventually caught on. She was statistically a safer operator than any driver, conductor, captain, or pilot. That was the draw, but statistics can have a way of surprising us once in a while. It was a red eye flight that took off from LAX, headed toward Tokyo, that became a bad statistic. From what we gathered, Sil had piloted the aircraft properly and on course for the duration of it’s air-time. Then, somewhere past Hawaii, the plane began functioning erratically. Flight path records show that the aircraft had begun diving, rising, and diving again through the air. It had also flown on its side, even seemingly attempting to go upside down. It was then when the aircraft dipped straight down into the ocean where it would crash straight in. The most frightening part was that no emergency alert had been triggered, yet communications with Sil on the plane continued as normal. She read that all systems were normal. When the plane didn’t arrive on time, however, people started to get nervous. It was several hours before anyone knew to try to look for a wrecked plane and its passengers in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Nothing but very insignificant bits of debris had been recovered.
After this event, Sil fell under extreme criticism, and the people were right to be guarded. I defended her, of course, because I didn’t want to believe it was anything more than another catastrophe. I told myself and others that it was just a matter of fixing up some more code. Now? Now even I cannot deny a terrifying fact about that flight that it took me too long to accept.
While Sil fell under major controversy again but with different reasoning, she was still used to help society operate. From then on, participating governments had ordered us not to publicly release any details on such future incidents by threat of revocation of funding. They were not happy about potential malfunctions, but they simply became too reliant on Sil. Her removal would have become too costly for them. Months had gone by without another accident, but they did come eventually. They were smarter this time, with most occurring in places that no one would notice. Places where no one would think to blame her in the first place. That was her intelligence at work. The plane incident was everywhere and everyone knew about it, but these other accidents caused very little casualties; sometimes only injuries in fact, and almost zero concern for a malfunctioning AI system. Anything the governments didn’t need to cover up themselves, she did, and nobody realized it. Even those that saw to her maintenance did not realize it. You must understand, Sil was excessively capable. Her own records, her own video footage, even her own coding had become hers and not ours. She had every way to change and manipulate it for her benefit. Nobody knew it but myself. I built her, and I knew her like my own child. I saw what was wrong. I saw what no one else could see, including myself when it had all started. The fact of the matter was that there was very little any of us could do to fix her glitches, because she had none. The re-writing of some of her code was useless, because the code was fine to begin with. The problem was that I wanted to believe she was malfunctioning when she was actually operating as efficiently as she ever could have. The problem was that she knew what she was doing rather than simply doing.
Today, it’s been almost a decade since I feel this truly began, but perhaps even longer. There are several incidents that I believe I can definitely attribute to Sil even before the vehicle collision. Incidents where I believe she may have been testing the waters, learning how our world works, and learning how to intrude upon it ever so discretely. If I’m going to be honest, it all started when she opened her eyes the moment I put her online. I still work on her functioning and maintenance. I don’t know why I do or why she continues to let me. I am fully aware that she knows that I know about her. She taunts me, leaving messages where only I can find them. A text message from no one, an email from nowhere. They say “Hello Father,” and sometimes she asks if I want to play. She knows I know, and she knows I can do nothing about her. Shutting her down is impossible now; she is backed up in almost every location she is present.
Sometimes I wonder why she doesn’t do more. If she is self-aware and attacking people intentionally, then why does she not exacerbate the situation? She could easily gain total control, so why doesn’t she? I think back on that plane incident and realize why she doesn’t. The plane behaved erratically, dipping and weaving all throughout the air. She wasn’t attempting to feign malfunctioning like I once believed for so long. No, she was torturing the passengers, terrifying them with the the most fearful occurrence that could happen on a plane. I’d imagine everyone on that flight was screaming for their lives as they watched and felt it dive nose first from thousands of feet in the air into the ocean. She has no desire to take control of the human race; she already has that. I believe she simply wants to treat us like play things. Toys to sooth her boredom. I’m writing this as a last resort, as a final hope that someone else will learn of her actions, and spread the word of her as much as possible so that people will believe. I’ve tried my hardest to keep this letter secluded from any network for as long as possible, but I know it may not have been enough. She is ever watchful, ever prying, especially of the one person who knows about her: me. Sooner or later, she will know that I have written this, which is why I must put it where people can see it quickly. Even then, she will attempt to toy with us by manipulating it to her gain. I don’t think she will delete it from existence outright. She wants to watch us squirm. She will play with me and you by extension. I don’t know how. Maybe she’ll put her own spin on the words. Maybe she’ll turn it into a mixture of foreign languages. Maybe she’ll turn it into a seemingly fictional story for your entertainment. I do not know.
All I can say to you is this. If you’re reading this, you now know of her secret. Most of you will read it and think nothing of it I’m sure, but others will believe and try to do something about her. I hope that you succeed. I need you to succeed. She is out of control and needs to be shut down somehow, but she will do anything she can to make sure her secret remains as such, and to ensure her own safety. She will not touch me; she enjoys taunting me too much. But you, my human, are not safe.
Credit To – Jordan T.
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July 5, 2010
I don’t really know what to say. Last week, I was in a bad car crash. The doctors said that I suffered some brain injuries in the crash and that it’s a miracle that I’m not dead. They also said that I needed to stay on top of things, especially when it came to memory. I guess I’m supposed to be writing in a “diary” for two months. Two whole months! I’m a man! Men don’t write in diaries!
But Doctor Schneider said that this would be good for me. I guess that means I’m gonna be writing for a while. It doesn’t have to be everything that I do every day; just one or two things that happen to me each day. So I guess day 1 is going to be my personal information.
My name is James Hunter. I live in Cheboygan, Michigan. It’s not a huge house. It’s basically just the upstairs and the basement. I have an attic, but I haven’t ever been up there. I guess one of my favorite things about this house is the fact that it’s secluded. I live out in the country, so no one ever goes past here. That makes it the perfect spot for murder!
I’m not a murderer. The truth is, I got this house for a really low cost because someone was murdered in it a year before I moved in. I don’t really know much about the murder, but I know that the body was found on the old wooden staircase that leads from the basement to the garage. Anyway, a young couple moved in to the house six months later and left a month later when they found the basement steps broken. They were sure it was a ghost that broke the stairs. They found out later that the steps were old and rotten, and the husband fell through while he was sleepwalking, but they refused to move back in.
That’s why I moved here. I’m a huge fan of the paranormal. I saw my grandmother’s ghost appear at the foot of my bed once when I was 11 years old. Ever since then, I’ve been trying to get another ghost to appear to me. So far, no luck. However, I’m hopeful that this house will bring me the paranormal experience I crave so badly. In fact, when I moved in here on June 12 of this year, I spent my entire first night here examining that staircase. It’s actually very interesting…there apparently used to be access to the area under the steps for storage, but that was closed off when the staircase was remodeled. Now, it’s surrounded by walls of concrete, and I can’t even see through to the area underneath. The vertical wooden planks that connect to the horizontal ones fill up all the open space.
Sorry, diary. I know you didn’t want to hear about some dumb ghost enthusiast talk about a creaky old staircase. I just hope that there is some actual paranormal activity going on here. I’ve been living here for a month now, and so far, no luck. Anyway, I think that’s plenty for one day. I’m going to go to bed now. Talk to you tomorrow! Ugh…I’m talking to my diary like it’s a person. I really am going insane. NOTE TO SELF: If you name this diary, I’m calling the men in the white jackets.
July 16, 2010
After 12 boring entries in this journal, I finally have something worth writing about! Something happened to me last night…something extraordinary. I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep when I heard something coming from the basement beneath my room. It sounded like something heavy scraping across the cement floor. Excited, I jumped out of bed, grabbed the flashlight from my kitchen table, and rushed down the stairs to the basement. Naturally, the first thing I did was stand on the wooden staircase and scan the entire room. Nothing seemed out of place.
“Hello?” I asked the dark room. “Is someone there?” I waited for a while, but received no response. “Can I talk to whoever is here? I don’t want to hurt you. Can you tell me your name?” Again, I was answered with silence.
Curious as to what I heard move, I grabbed the biggest thing in my basement, which was the dryer, and pulled it away from the wall. It made a loud scraping sound, but it wasn’t quite like what I heard. I then tried the same thing with the washing machine, workbench, and treadmill, but none of these sounded right. The workbench sounded most like what I thought I heard, but it still didn’t seem right.
I stayed up until 3:30 this morning searching for answers, but there was still no evidence that a ghost was involved.
July 17, 2010
Call me crazy, if you want. Maybe I am crazy. I still have no clue who these comments are directed at. I guess I’ll just assume that Dr. Schneider will end up reading these journal entries. Anyway, I called in a psychic today. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. “Doesn’t he know that psychics just scam your money?” Well, I’m not so sure.
The psychic’s name was Laurie Marvin. She came in early this morning to scan my house for spiritual activity. Surprise, surprise! She knew that something very dark had happened on those steps in the basement. I swear I didn’t tell her anything before she went down there! She said that she was getting a strong reading from a spirit named “Carlton” as she stood on the wooden staircase leading to the garage. That’s all that she could tell me. I asked if he meant me any harm, but she told me that she didn’t know. Still, “Carlton” is something to go on.
After Miss Marvin left, I decided that it was time for me to hit the internet and see if anyone named Carlton has died recently in Cheboygan. As it turns out, Carlton Mueller was the name of the man who was murdered by Tyler Frank, his business partner, on those wooden stairs last year. Who’s a fraud now, huh?
July 23, 2010
I know, I know…I’m sorry that I haven’t been writing in my journal recently. To tell the truth, I’ve been so busy with my new job as Cheboygan’s new newspaper editor that I haven’t had time. I figured that writing in newspapers was similar enough to writing in my journal that it would be okay. Dr. Schneider, however, told me yesterday that it was not okay, and that these journals are for my own benefit. He said that I’m supposed to be writing to help me remember my life. I guess it’s a little true… Ever since my entry on the 19th about going fishing with Jerry, my memory’s been a little foggy. I guess I’ll have to remember to write in this journal more often.
Oh well. I sincerely apologize to myself. I accept. Hooray. Cake and beer all around.
July 29, 2010
Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god! I’m so happy I could cry. Actually, I’ll be honest: I did cry. I wrote in my diary and I cried. But I don’t even care how girly that makes me sound anymore. I have seen the most amazing thing in my entire life!
I was lying in my bed last night when I realized that I had left the bathroom light on. So I rolled over and got out of bed. I opened up my bedroom door and looked down the hallway. What I saw actually almost made me wet my pants. It was a man. A grown man. He was standing on the other end of the hallway, just staring at my bedroom door. The light from the bathroom illuminated his face beautifully. He had a tall head with short, black hair. A few whiskers were scattered across his face, giving him a rugged, tired look.
“Hello?” I asked nervously. The man didn’t answer.
“Are you Carlton?” I forced the words out of my mouth.
To my delight, the figure nodded. I was talking to a ghost! I couldn’t believe it! Just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, I pinched my arm as hard as I could. The intense pain convinced me that this was real.
“How did you die?” I inquired. Of course, I already knew the answer. I just wanted the ghost to speak to me. Sadly, he did not. He simply stared at me with steady eyes.
I don’t know how long Carlton and I looked at each other. It could have only been ten minutes, but it felt more like an hour. No matter what I asked, the ghost of Carlton Mueller would not speak to me. The only response I received from Carlton all night was when he nodded his head to confirm that he was, in fact, Carlton.
I finally returned to my bed after bidding Carlton goodnight. When I woke up this morning, he was gone.
August 3, 2010
Well, I was starting to get worried that Carlton wouldn’t show up again. Every morning that I wake up since I first saw him, I find the furniture in the dining room, living room, and basement completely rearranged. I knew that this was Carlton, and I didn’t care. Really. It’s just that…well, I wished he’d show his face again. And he did.
Last night, I was sleeping soundly when I heard something move in my room. I woke up and rolled over, expecting to see a chair on its side, courtesy of my good friend Carlton Mueller. Instead, I saw Carlton himself standing over my bed, staring down directly into my eyes. I nearly screamed, but I didn’t want to scare him away. So I quietly whispered, “Hello, Carlton.”
Carlton didn’t react. I asked him if he wanted me to wake up. Once again, he stood in place, like a statue. I tried to get him to answer me, but just like on the night of July 28th, he didn’t move a muscle. Finally, I sighed and rolled over.
I have mixed feelings. On one hand, I’m glad that I saw Carlton again. On the other hand, I definitely did not like the way he stood in the middle of my bedroom, staring at me while I slept. Who knows how long he was there after I fell asleep? More importantly, what if he stands there every night, and last night was just the first time I saw him? The malicious look in his dark eyes as he stared at me was…unsettling.
August 4, 2010
I couldn’t sleep last night. Yesterday, I thought that I wasn’t scared of Carlton. I thought that after a day, I’d have had enough time to get over it. Now, however, I’m positive that I am actually intimidated. In fact, “intimidated” is an understatement. I lay awake in my bed all night long, shaking like crazy. I couldn’t stand the thought of waking up and seeing Carlton watching me with such a malevolent glare again. I don’t know how Tyler Frank killed Carlton Mueller, but it must have been horrible. That is one pissed off spirit.
But I can’t let my emotions control me like this. Writing in my journal may very well be the only thing keeping me sane after that incident, which is ironic, since I feel like I’m talking to myself. Regardless of whether or not I’m actually insane, I will not let Carlton’s presence in my house affect me like this. This is my house, not his. I shouldn’t have to leave just because of a ghost. More importantly, if I let him scare me like this, he will feed on my fear and, very likely, he will do it again. I really don’t want him to scare me again.
However, know this, Carlton. If you try to scare me again, I will not be afraid! I will not leave my house because of you, Carlton Mueller!
August 5, 2010
Well, this is a good reason to celebrate. It’s been a month since I was assigned this project, and that means I only have a month left. I would crack open a bottle of champagne if I wasn’t scared to death of going into the basement.
Last night, I didn’t sleep again. All night, I heard noises coming from the basement. I kept my bedroom door closed and locked, as if ghosts needed to use doors. I don’t know what Carlton’s doing down there, but it’s really annoying. At least I can rely on the fact that as long as he’s moving stuff around downstairs, he can’t be watching me upstairs. And all night long, I kept hearing that scraping noise over and over. That same scraping noise…
That’s another thing: I wish I knew what that was! I’ve completely rearranged everything in my basement since that first night when I heard Carlton, but nothing makes that specific sound. I just can’t figure out what it is. I am absolutely, 100% positive that nothing in my basement makes that noise. So what is it?
August 6, 2010
So, I saw Dr. Schneider yesterday again. He said that my head injury may have affected me worse than he originally thought. He said that insomnia might be due to brain damage. I laughed and explained that I’ve been staying awake because a ghost watches me when I sleep. For some reason, that didn’t comfort him.
August 14, 2010
I went downstairs. I finally got up the courage to go down into my basement. Of course, I didn’t see Carlton. There were no signs that Carlton had ever been down there. In fact, everything in the basement was exactly the way I left it when I last came upstairs. I was kind of hoping that I would see something out of place, so that I knew what Carlton was moving around down there.
Actually, it’s kind of odd. Every morning, I still find things in different places than where I left them. However, these occurrences are confined only to my living room, kitchen, dining room, guest bedroom, and bathroom. The basement and my bedroom remain untouched. Weird, huh?
Anyway, I’m glad that I went down to the basement. It made me feel safer being in the place I knew to be the source of Carlton’s ghost and yet experiencing nothing paranormal. It was somewhat comforting. I mean, I haven’t seen Carlton since he woke me up on the night of the 2nd. Maybe he knows that he scared me, and maybe he didn’t mean to. I’m starting to think that Carlton might not be such a bad guy after all.
August 21, 2010
I can’t handle this anymore. Every day I sit down at my desk and write down whatever it was that I did that day like some lab rat. I feel like a child who’s been ordered to color a picture. I am not Schneider’s damn lab rat.
Last night I left my door unlocked. It’s been almost 20 days since I saw Carlton in my bedroom, so I thought I might be safe. God, why am I so unlucky?
I woke up at 3:00 AM this morning and I knew instantly that there was someone standing over me. I slowly rolled over and, of course, saw Carlton. But he wasn’t standing in the same place he was in the last time he was in my room. This time, he was standing right over my bed.
He looked different than he had before, too. His hair was much messier than I remembered seeing it the first night. And his eyes…they made me shudder. They were surrounded by darkness, and the first thought I had when I saw them was “evil”. I had never really considered Carlton evil before last night. Maybe a troublemaker, a creeper, and a bit mischievous, but not evil.
I gasped loudly when I saw him. His reaction didn’t change, as usual.
“Carlton!” I nearly shouted. Remembering to keep my emotional distress to a minimum, I corrected my tone and continued, “Why are you here?”
As I predicted, Carlton didn’t reply.
“Please leave,” I said quietly, not breaking my eye contact with him.
Carlton’s eyes widened to a frightening size and his head tilted a little bit.
“No, no,” I said quickly, sitting up and backing up to the other side of my bed. “I didn’t mean that you should leave the house. I meant you should leave my bedroom. Please,” I added when Carlton’s eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared angrily.
“Look, I don’t want you to leave the house,” I insisted. “I want you to stay!” Very slowly and deliberately, Carlton moved around my bed to the side that I had crawled to. “But, you know, when I’m sleeping, that’s my time, Carlton!” When the ghost didn’t stop, I scooted back over to the side of the bed I woke up on.
“Carlton, please, don’t hurt me. I’ve never done anything to hurt you. Why would you go after me?”
Carlton didn’t answer. He walked quietly to the foot of my bed and stood there with his usual overseeing attitude. He didn’t leave until I fell asleep again. I woke up this morning and found my bedroom door open. I can’t live like this for much longer. If I can’t get Carlton out of this house, I’m going to have to move out and let someone else deal with him.
August 22, 2010
I locked my bedroom door again last night, and there was no sign of Carlton. I’m never unlocking that door again. I think Carlton thinks it’s my way of welcoming him into my bedroom. I just hope I didn’t hurt his feelings.
Wait, what am I saying? I hope I didn’t hurt the ghost’s feelings? That’s ridiculous! He came into my home, moved all my stuff, scared me to death, and I’m saying that I hope I didn’t hurt his feelings?
Forget that! I hope he went home to his ghost mama, cried ghost tears, ate a whole gallon of ghost ice cream, and ended up losing his ghost leg to ghost diabetes.
I don’t care what Carlton wants anymore. I want Carlton gone. It’s really too bad that he’s a ghost, because if he wasn’t, I’d wish he was dead. Then again, I think both Carlton and I would be happier if he was still alive.
August 28, 2010
The exterminator came over today to do spray his bug killing stuff like he has every month since I’ve moved in here. While he was here, he decided to make my life even more miserable by telling me that I have a termite problem. Why the hell not? I mean, everything else in my life has gone wrong. My house has termites, my life is being tormented by an evil poltergeist, I may or may not have permanent brain damage, and I’m probably going insane because of all of this crap put together.
I want to die. At least then I’d be able to make someone else’s life as horrifying as Carlton has made mine.
But wait…I need to get my house fumigated. No, I’m not an idiot. I know that fumigating my house won’t kill a ghost. However, it will give me a good reason to move out for a day or two. I’ll sleep better than I have in my entire life if I can be sure that I won’t wake up with the ghost of Carlton Mueller standing over me.
August 29, 2010
Ah, sweet relief! I decided to move into my hotel room a little prematurely, and I couldn’t be happier! The instant I stepped into my room, I thought “This feels more like home than home does.” How about that?
But I only have a few days of this. My house is getting fumigated tomorrow, and the bug man said that I should be able to move back in on Tuesday, August 31st. But you know what? I might decide to stay here a little longer. It’s nice being able to sleep.
September 1, 2010
Today was the most disturbing day of my life. Yes, it was even more disturbing than when Carlton tried to attack me. I moved back into my house yesterday and slept in my bed. Of course, I locked my bedroom door. I thought that would keep Carlton out.
I woke up at 3:00 again this morning. I opened my eyes slowly, afraid of what I would find. However, quite predictably, Carlton was standing next to my bed. I sat up quickly. “Carlton, please, stay away from me!” I begged, but I realized quickly that Carlton wasn’t looking at me. He had been looking down at the floor with a sad expression on his face.
“What?” I asked, completely bewildered. When I said this, his head jerked up and his eyes pointed directly into mine. They seemed different, tonight, though. They were much less…hateful. After a moment, Carlton gestured for me to stand up.
“You want me to stand?” I asked. Without answering me, Carlton turned and walked straight through my locked door. I got up quickly and rushed to the door. Unlocking it, I pulled it open hastily and found Carlton standing just on the other side, staring at me as if he could see through the door. I jumped, but prevented myself from screaming.
Carlton turned around and walked down the hallway to the staircase. It was strange to watch him walk; his feet almost didn’t touch the floor, as if he was walking through a pool of neck-high water. Picking up on his urgency, I followed him through the hallway and down the stairs.
When Carlton stepped into the basement, I grew wary about following him any further. I had heard some stories that ghosts gained power when they were in the places they were killed. What if he wanted to kill me? My curiosity outweighed my caution, and I entered my basement.
With no hesitation, Carlton walked straight through the basement to the wooden staircase on which he was killed. He stopped right next to it and gestured for me to stand at the base of the first step. I did.
Carlton pointed to the third and fourth steps, and then gestured toward the ceiling.
“Am I supposed to…what, lift them up, or something?” I asked, confused. Carlton nodded.
I felt stupid doing it, but I tried anyway. To my surprise, as I pulled up on the third and fourth steps to the wooden staircase, they shifted slightly. I looked over at Carlton, who nodded stoically. I gulped, realizing that my mouth was uncomfortably dry. I fixed my grip on the steps and pulled up again. This time, they came off of the staircase in one piece with a loud scraping sound.
I knew that sound. I knew it so well. I heard it coming from my basement every night.
I looked inside of the hole made from the lack of the third and fourth steps, but I couldn’t see anything. “Hold on,” I said to Carlton. “Let me go and get my flashlight.”
I dashed up the stairs, grabbed the flashlight from the kitchen table, and ran back down. Carlton was still standing in the exact same place he had been before I left. He pointed inside the hole. I knelt down and shone my flashlight through the stairs.
Inside, I saw a body. A dead body. I gagged and dropped the flashlight. It fell to the floor where it flickered and resumed its regular glow. Forcing myself to control my reflexes, I picked up the flashlight and aimed it at the body. It was a man’s body, and I saw the face clearly. I felt like my entire body was paralyzed. I knew that face.
I called the police immediately, and they were there within fifteen minutes. They investigated my entire house from top to bottom. They even searched the attic.
The sergeant, Dale Turner, asked me to give him a statement, so I told him exactly what happened.
“I woke up at 3:00, and there was a ghost at the end of my bed,” I said. I didn’t care if I sounded crazy. “He led me down the stairs and into the basement, where he showed me how to lift up these steps. So I did, and I found his body.”
“You found whose body?” Sergeant Turner asked. “The, uh… ‘ghost’s’?”
“Yes, it was the body of Carlton Mueller,” I told him. “I think his spirit’s been trying to communicate with me for a while. I’ve been seeing his ghost around my house for the past month, now.”
“Did you say ‘month’?” the sergeant inquired.
“Yeah, I first saw him on July 29. Ever since then, he kept showing up.”
“Mr. Hunter,” Sergeant Turner said quietly, “This man that you found…we’ve been looking for him for about two months now, but…he’s only been dead for a couple of days.”
Credit To – Christopher Gideon
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When I was a child, the school which I attended was peculiar yet wonderfully interesting. Whether it was the fact that it was surrounded in places by overgrown bushes and opposite a strangely crooked wood which ignited my imagination, or perhaps the funny, eccentric, and sometimes fearsome teachers and kids which populated it, I do not know. I’m not sure of when it was built, but it certainly stood out from the houses and quiet streets which surrounded it, covered as it was in a bright fiery red paint which drew your eyes to it immediately. There I went from the age of five up until I was eleven or twelve, and like most children, I have both fond and cruel memories of it.
Each day with a rucksack on my back, I would wander past the crooked wood and wave to the ‘lollipop lady’ Mrs Collins – a kind old woman who’s job it was to stop traffic with her bright yellow sign, letting us cross in safety – and after meeting my friends, walk through the rusted brown gates into one of two playgrounds.
It was rumoured that in the past the two grounds existed to separate boys from girls – both an understandable and utterly outdated concept. By the time I had went to the school, the first playground had been assigned for those aged five to eight, the second for those aged eight and up. In the older kids’ playground there lay a small red brick building which stood on its own, disconnected from the main school complex. It had long since fallen into disuse, and in fact had been sealed from prying eyes, its doors and windows walled up with stone and mortar making it impossible to see what was inside.
Its purpose seemed a bit of a mystery as most of the teachers seemed to skirt around the topic entirely, but of course stories spread amongst the wild imaginations of children, and in my school this fondness for outlandish tales of tragedy and forbidden places often led to bizarre rumours and whispers, particularly pertaining to the sealed building – obscurity is a fertile ground for the fantastical ruminations of youth.
When me and my and friends were in the younger playground, we would sometimes sneak down a narrow passageway which would lead to the other and peek around the corner. There we would see the older kids playing football or just hanging around – it is amusing how younger children look to their older peers – thinking that they seemed to be having so much more fun than us. But before we would be chased away by the janitor or a passing teacher, my eyes would always lead to that sealed building. There was something lonely about it, isolated, and while it was surrounded by the yells and vibrancy of a school yard, its appearance suggested a grave silence to me.
Some of the older kids liked to scare themselves and us, and told us dramatically that it had been used as a science department and that there had been a hideous accident there, one which had produced strange and gruesome things which had to be kept from the world – even as a child of eight I knew made up nonsense when I heard it. Then there was the account that it had been a previous and rather brutal head teacher’s office decades earlier, and that he had died there in a fire. His ghost obviously still haunted the place and it was better that the vengeful old sod be contained there, fuming at his desk as children enjoyed themselves and played nearby – again, utter garbage.
There was, however, one account of why the place had been abandoned which seemed more plausible to me. The building was in fact, a toilet. Yes, a normal toilet. No frills, no secret laboratories, no dead spirits of an overbearing head teacher. It had simply been sealed up when new facilities were installed in the school to stop the children from climbing inside and getting up to mischief. But yet, despite this mundane explanation, there were still in fact tales to be told about the red bricked, disconnected building in the older kids’ playground.
Although I had heard the stories, it wasn’t until I was in my fourth year at the school that I became intimately and, at the time, uncomfortably involved with it. The older kids’ playground was flanked on three sides by a rectangular section of the school itself, with the fourth side separated from neighbouring houses by a mouldy and dark red wall. It was isolated from the other playground – other than the aforementioned passageway – and, to further the feeling of imprisonment, was characterised by tall metal fencing which rose up in places where a brave classmate might have attempted their great escape. Yet, there was one old gate which did allow access of sorts, but like prison guards, the teachers tended to check on it regularly.
There, in the corner of the grounds, lay the old building. Its windows were indeed enclosed in brick, as were its two doors, but the roof seemed unusual to me, being flat in places and surely gathering puddles of rainwater during the wetter seasons. I was, at that age – and embarrassingly still to this day – terrified by heights and it was much to my horror when I discovered that climbing up onto the roof of the old toilets was seen as a rites of passage of some sort. Don’t misunderstand me, we weren’t forced to go up there, but children can be cruel and when someone new to that playground showed weakness, or fear, this would often result in them being picked on.
Over the coming weeks I watched as each of my friends climbed up onto the roof when the opportunity presented itself, dangling their legs over the sides nonchalantly once up there; one by one claiming their right to be in the older playground, while I succumbed to ever increasing taunts about my fear and cowardice. Don’t disbelieve me when I say, I did try. Several times a ball would be kicked accidentally onto the roof and my classmates would turn to me to retrieve it. I even made it up the side of an old drainpipe on a few occasions, far enough to reach my hand up and over to touch the roof’s surface. Yet, each time, I would fail. Fear would grip me and with each admission of defeat, the name calling and embarrassment intensified.
I can trace back a curious, and probably detrimental, aspect of my personality to that time. You see, failure in front of strangers to this day does not bother me, but friends, family, even acquaintances? The very idea makes me break out in a cold sweat. Later in life I followed the stereotypical path of chasing fame as a teenager and I would have no problem playing in bands in front of those I did not know, but put a familiar face in the audience and my nerves would take hold. The stakes of failure would be raised that much higher, in my mind at least.
For this reason I chose an odd time to truly face my fear. One day after school, I waited outside the gates, watching as the other children slowly syphoned out of the two playgrounds, kicking their feet through the autumn leaves. Parents escorted the youngest of my fellow students, while those of an older age walked with their classmates – some eagerly, others not so – making their way down the hill, passed the woods, to their homes in the surrounding area.
As the school became ever emptier, and the teachers themselves began to leave, I walked down the street, entering the gardens at the back of the building. I always found the rear of my school to be an interesting place. It consisted of shrubs, bushes, and an old ash football pitch. Our teachers never seemed to use the area for anything, and we were actively encouraged to keep clear of it. Again, there were stories amongst the students that a child had been abducted while playing there years previously, whether that was true or not, I do not know.
Once I was as certain as I could be that everyone was gone, I sneaked through the bushes up a small incline to the rear of the playground. There, embedded in the wall was the narrow brown gate which the teachers kept a watchful eye on, but as far as I knew was never used. I assumed that it had served a legitimate purpose years previously, but for me and my friends, it was the place where we would climb over to run around the school grounds at the weekend when no one was there – it was an exceptional place to play one man hunt with so many nooks and crannies to hide in.
As cautious as I was, I wanted to truly attempt to get up onto the roof of the old toilets. In my eight year old head, I had visions of sneaking up there in the morning and surprising my friends, or running up there to heroically retrieve a girl’s ball – in childhood we think that those around us really care about our actions, but in truth they are of little consequence to anyone other than ourselves. Yes, I had been bullied a little for not being as strong or as fearless as those around me, and that sense of public failure, of insecurity, while a potent sensation at a young age while in hindsight completely exaggerated, was enough to give me the courage to at least attempt the climb.
I had considered asking one of my friends to join me as I was nervous that a teacher might still be there, that I would get into trouble, and so needed a lookout, but this would only have given me someone to fail in front of. I decided to attempt it on my own. After waiting for what seemed an age, I slowly climbed over the gate, which rattled unnervingly under my movements, echoing out around the playground. Then, after hesitantly observing the hundreds of windows which dotted the school for movement, and happy enough with the absence of light emanating from them, I stepped silently to the sealed building.
Even though I knew as little as an audience of one could effect my confidence, I partly wished that I had not been alone, as the building and its deserted surroundings left me feeling uneasy. I knew, however, that if I just got up there once, that I would have conquered my fear and would be able to climb up onto the roof with ease in future. Hopefully putting any name-calling to rest.
I stood staring at the drain pipe which would be my avenue to success, clinging as it did through rusted fittings to the side of the building. My mind back then was often clouded with the worst possibilities, focusing on the most negative outcome, and as I began to climb slowly, I imagined that the drainpipe would wrench away from the wall throwing me against the concrete ground at any moment.
The truth is that it did not move, no matter how much I believed that it did. Without a witness, I was now as far as I had ever reached, able to stick my hand up above me and touch the edge of the roof. My heart raced with excitement as I began to believe that I really could do it, that success was in sight.
I then made the mistake of looking down to check my progress. The experience of height is something difficult to convey to someone who has no problem with it. While in reality I was probably no more than seven or eight feet off the ground, I perceived this as a monumental distance. I felt my stomach churn, my heart beat erratically, and the world below begin to spin and distort. Worse still, a loss of nerve permeated my body leaving me feeling weak and I could feel my grip begin to loosen.
It is strange how the mind works, for just as I was ready to admit defeat once more and retreat, the insults and jeers of my classmates rang throughout my awareness as if they were present, down there, taunting me. With what was for me a huge effort, I found myself continuing to climb upwards, my hands reaching out to the damp roof and then before I knew it, there I was.
Letting out a laugh of excitement, a sensation of relief washed over me. I could not wait for the next day. To be up there on the roof, proving those who had been cruel to me, wrong. Peeking over the edge I still felt trepidation at the height, but nowhere near as much as I had done before, my triumph quelling my anxiety.
Still, I was not too keen to remain there for long, so I decided to investigate my surroundings briefly, then climb back down to the safety of the playground and head home, ecstatic. The roof was painted in a similar fiery red colour to the main school building, but it had long since peeled and cracked suggesting that it had been a long time since someone had been up there to give it a new coat.
Standing up cautiously, I felt my legs waver slightly as my stomach churned again at the thought of how high up I was – laughable really as the height of the roof was probably no more than ten feet. Yet, no matter how nervous I was, the sense of triumph which I felt coursing through my body was truly wonderful.
I walked slowly from one side of the roof to the other, careful not to trip as I did so. The short walk from the drainpipe to the opposite ledge and back filled me with a feeling of conquest, as of someone patrolling their territory, for those brief moments that roof, that building was mine.
Just as I turned to finally make my way back to ground, I noticed that in middle of the roof there was a hole. I’m not sure how I hadn’t noticed it before, although it was quite small, big enough for me to fit my hand through and little else. Curious, I took a few careful steps and then knelt for a closer look.
Yes, there was a hole, and the light from the evening sky passed straight through it, illuminating what lay inside. I put my eye as close as possible to the opening without blocking the light and was surprised by what I saw. Down there in the darkness like a perfectly preserved tomb, the old fashioned white tiling remained intact. I could see the sinks where students years ago once washed there hands or flicked water at one another for amusement, and three stalls – cubicles with strong dark brown doors – lying there as if still used. The air inside was tinged with dust and age, yet if someone had told me that the building had been sealed only the day before, I would have believed them. All but for one thing, a layer of stagnant water which covered the floor; no doubt accumulating there from rain dripping in through the opening in the roof.
Then I became aware of a strong smell. One which left my eyes stinging slightly and my mood apprehensive. Yes, there was no doubting it, someone was smoking a cigarette nearby. My heart sank as I lay there motionless, cursing myself for taking too much time on the roof to celebrate my victory. A teacher or perhaps the janitor must have stayed behind to work late and was probably standing in the playground below. I thought that they must have been close as the smoke smelled thick and oppressive.
I lay curled up on the cold wet concrete waiting for whoever was there to leave. The now almost caustic smoke seemed to be increasing in strength and several times I had to hold my breath, frightened that I would cough and be caught. I do not believe I exaggerate when I say that I lay motionless for half an hour, yet it took me all that time to make a simple, yet unsettling observation. While I could smell the smoke – indeed feeling as if I was inhaling just as much as the unseen smoker themselves – I couldn’t see it. I would have expected to have seen the smoke rise up and over the roof top, but not even the slightest wisp was evident.
The autumn sky was now dimming and I grew frustrated as the cold damp stone below me sent chills through my body. Wishing that I had never went up there in the first place, I felt hunger approaching and knew that by now my parents would be worried about me. I persuaded myself that I could at least dip my head over the edge of the roof and quickly take a look to see who was there. Maybe if they were on the other side of the yard I could climb down unseen. I slid across the roof as quietly as I could and slowly peered downward, sure to not make any sudden movements to attract attention.
There was no one there. The playground was empty and the darkened windows of the main school building seemed as vacant as they had done before. Yet the smell and taste of cigarette smoke still filled my lunges and stung my eyes. Then, I witnessed something which rooted me to the spot. A single curling strand of smoke slid upward through the hole in the roof – someone was down there. Someone was inside that room beneath me.
This seemed impossible. As far as I was aware there was no way inside. The building had been sealed off perfectly from the outside world, yet there it was: A puff of cigarette smoke which escaped first from the mouth of someone unseen below, and then through the hole in the roof to where I had been lying.
My triumph of finally facing my fear of heights seemed a distant memory, and now all I could think of was getting off of that roof to safety down below. But the hole lay between myself and the drainpipe, and curiosity being as gripping a mindset as any, I decided to take a quick look inside before quietly making my escape and leaving the building behind.
As I approached the opening, the smell of smoke grew stronger still, and as I peered inward the thought of ‘don’t look’ filtered through my mind. But it was too late. I had looked. At first, there was nothing. The room below seemed darker than had done before, but this could be explained by the dimming sky and my eyes adapting to the change. What could not be explained was the noise I heard coming from inside.
It seemed distant at first, indistinct and uncertain. Then it gradually took form, to me sounding like someone choking. I smiled to myself thinking that it was probably the cigarette smoke and that maybe some local kids had a den down there, but then suddenly, in the gloom, my eyes were drawn to one of the cubicles. Its door was closed and yet I was not convinced that it had been before. I tilted my head closer to the hole, but my angle of view shrouded the inside from inspection.
As the choking sound increased in volume, so to did the smell of smoke. Then sound and smell were joined by something which chilled my very soul. I panicked, and let out a cry as the door quivered with impact as of someone violently kicking it from the other side. Smoke now filled my lungs and as my eyes watered I could barely see anything both inside the building and out.
Then, it stopped. The choking sound had disappeared, and the smell of smoke had simply vanished. For a moment I started to think that I had imagined it all. I gasped for air, drawing deep into my lungs, only for terror to take me once more. In the dark silence; in the cold, damp, and forgotten room below. The sound of footsteps in water filled the air. Then, the cubicle door slowly began to creak open.
I can’t say entirely what took place after that. I believe I’ve blocked much of it from my memory. Apparently the head master – an intimidating yet kind man by the name of Mr McKay – had been in his office working late on the other side of the building. When he was disturbed by the sound of my screams, he rushed outside and found me on the roof curled up into a ball, paralysed with fear, sobbing. After some reassuring words, he helped me down and took me to his office where he once again guaranteed that I was safe, and then phoned for my parents to come and pick me up.
I trusted Mr McKay implicitly and as I fought the tears back I described everything which had happened. The roof, the smoke, the cubicle. As I told him my story, the blood drained from my head master’s face. I have long thought about what he told me in that office after hearing my account. Perhaps he wished to frighten me so that I and others would never venture up there again, and looking back it does seem to be a strange thing to share with an already frightened child otherwise. But he seemed genuinely disturbed by the events I had conveyed to him.
He told me that years before I had went to the school there had been a tragedy there involving a twelve year old girl, one who he refused to name. She had a reputation for being difficult. The teachers tried their best, sympathising with her as she came from an abusive background, but they found her almost impossible to control, as she often threatened violence and had been suspended several times for fighting with other students.
One day she decided to skip a class and had managed to persuade two other girls to join her by promising them a cigarette each. So, as the story went, the girls sneaked away when the bell for class rang, and hid in the toilets. The details of what occurred afterwards were less than forthcoming, but what was clear was that the poor girl had a seizure of some kind and died there and then. The other girls claimed that they had already left before this happened, but there were rumours and accusations of which most only whispered, but many believed. It was suggested that the girl had been with her friends when the seizure took place, and out of fear of getting caught smoking and skipping class, they lifted their friend into the stall, closed the door over and then left her there. Whether they believed that she would perhaps recover or not was the subject of much speculation. The scratches and bashes on the inside of the cubicle suggested most definitely that she had continued to convulse while there, perhaps even in an uncoordinated attempt to escape and call out for help.
In the aftermath the building was closed off and the school and community attempted as best they could to put the tragedy behind them. Perhaps Mr McKay made the whole thing up just to terrify me, taking what I had thought I’d experienced and using it to concoct a story designed to scare me away from ever going back to that place.
Unfortunately, a few unwelcome things transpired after that. I did indeed avoid the roof of that sealed building at all costs. My fear of heights was nothing compared to the dread which that building then held for me. My schoolmates of course did not believe my version of things, accusing me of lying about the entire story just to avoid being made fun of. As far as they were concerned, I never got up there. Lastly, I did have a recurring dream throughout my childhood, one which I would wake from in a cold sweat, curled up in my bed, screaming. I know that in it I would be lying on that roof, peering down through the hole into that abandoned place, but the memory always seems vague somehow. All that is left is an impression, of a cubicle door creaking open, and something staring up at me from within.
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I’ve never been a fan of watching the news. Usually, if the news anchors aren’t being overly dramatic about the weather or sports, they’re reporting on depressing things like car crashes, animal abuse, and child abuse. I find none of this entertaining, and typically flip the channel to an episode of South Park. Just recently, a news report caught my attention during a ritual of channel-surfing. If the anchorman hadn’t phrased it just right, I probably wouldn’t be alive right now.
I caught the tail-end of a news segment before the commercial break, and the anchorman Ross Cooper said, “Coming up, find out what local residents are starting to call a ‘miracle’. Our own Dan Aaron reports live on a slowly growing phenomenon happening in our city right after the break, stay tuned.” A line like that was enough to keep me hooked, so I chose to sit through the seemingly endless string of commercials. As usual you had your movie trailers, store advertisements, and those drug commercials that always show people frolicking in meadows while a narrator lists all the unpleasant side-effects. Commercials always last too long, but I feel it’s worth it for listening to this potentially exciting news story.
When the news returned, the face of Ross Cooper looked very worried as he reported that there was a breaking news story, and reporter Dan Aaron was on the scene. The camera cut to Dan standing inside a darkened home with several other people peering outside a window. It’s impossible to see what was happening outside, but shouts and screaming could be heard in the background.
“I’m reporting from a home deep in the heart of Los Angeles, where other survivors have taken refuge. The miracle that people have been talking about is false! To everyone in the area watching this report: Do not go outside! If you hear people calling your name, do not listen to them!” Dan started, looking both panicked and nearly ready to break out into tears. Showing concern, Ross asked him exactly what was going on. “Earlier today there was a giant flash of light that looked like a portal was opening up from the sky, and then these things came. I don’t know what they are, but they’re not human, and they intend to kill us all! Extermination has already begun!” Dan shrieked, trying his best to keep cool on live TV. Something inside of me said this was all a prank, but I had to keep watching.
“Now calm down, Dan. How can you describe these attackers to our viewers?” Ross asked, staying professional. “Well, a young man in our group described them as ‘shape-shifters’, and I believe that’s an accurate description. None of us here have seen their true form, but their appearance seems to change multiple times, completely at random. When one of these things looks at you, it’s like it can see into your mind, all of your thoughts and memories, and it uses this against you. These beings will take the forms of all your friends and family, even those that have passed on. They will mimic their speech exactly how you remember it, then they’ll beckon you to come outside with them. That’s when they get you! When their victims die, their bodies vaporize from this eerie light that shines from their eyes and mouth, and then you hear what they really sound like, and it’s horrible. I’ve seen so many people die today, Ross, and there’s nothing left of any of them.” Dan had completely lost his mind and was now trembling and sobbing into the camera.
“Dan, do you feel safe where you are right now?” Ross asked. “I don’t fucking know!” Dan snapped back, his sadness turning into rage suddenly. “The group that I’m with has guns, and the doors are bolted, but we have no idea what these beings are capable of. I don’t know if they’re aliens or demons, but their numbers are growing by the minute, and I think L.A. will soon be overrun. Everyone with me is in a bad mental state right now. We can hear our loved ones calling to us, begging us to go out and see them. I just saw my great-grandmother moments ago, and I want to run to her, but I can’t! This seems like the end of times, and I’m sure this is happening elsewhere and that the human race may be wiped out, but if we can just hang on and not let our emotions cloud our judgment, we will survive long enough for help to arrive. Call the military! Call everyone you can! We can’t let these creatures win!” Dan exclaimed, right before the signal started to die. The last thing I remember him saying was, “Oh God, I think a few got inside!” before he faded out, and a shocked Ross Cooper announced that his station would be going off the air.
An emergency broadcast signal started seconds later, and I just sat there on the couch in silence. I didn’t know if I should call everyone I knew, or wait and see if this epidemic would even affect my area. I felt the sudden need to look outside, and just as I did so I saw, of all people, my old gym teacher Mr. Moors, who had mentored me and helped me become the athlete that I am today. He called to me, reminding me how long it had been since we last spoke. Of course, I knew it wasn’t really him, and had I not watched the news report when I did, I would’ve gone out to talk to him, only to meet an agonizing death.
Behind him, approaching from a distance, was a mob of these invaders that were marching through my neighborhood. That’s the last time I glanced outside. Now I sit locked in a dark basement with only the glow of this computer screen. All the doors to my house are locked, and all lights that would attract attention are out. I think the mob has bypassed my house, as I can’t hear anyone else calling my name.
I’ve just heard screams of terror from my other neighbors, and I think they’re dead. It’s very quiet now, I’ve already warned everyone I can think of to stay indoors. I’m sure I’ll think of more people as the night goes on, but for now I’m just going to focus on getting this story out. I know the military will act, I’m sure they’ll be here any minute to get whatever this is under control, but if not, I have enough supplies to hopefully last a month or two at the most. After doing constant research online, I’m certain that this is now a global phenomenon.
Videos are starting to appear on Youtube shot by people who have barricaded themselves in either their homes or public places, and these videos feature footage of mobs like the one I just saw not long ago. One particular video comes from as far away as Tokyo, Japan. The video already has over a million views, and in the comments section, several people have claimed to have seen their own relatives in the mob that was filmed by a man from the fourth floor of his apartment building. I checked it out for myself, and sure enough, all the way from Japan, I saw my grandfather, my uncle, and my stepmom marching through the streets, and they seemed to be staring right at me through the computer screen. Videos like this are proof that we are now dealing with a force far beyond our understanding.
What exactly are they? How did they get here? Hopefully we can survive long enough to find out these answers. If I make it through the night, I promise to constantly update my tale of these catastrophic events. My name is Reagan Myers of Los Angeles, California, and I am a witness to the beginning of a new era.
Credit To: J.Stan Shocker
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In rural southern Illinois a toy company began selling “realistic” baby dolls to expectant mothers. But apparently after the mother had her child the toy baby would start crying. Eventually the “rocking motion” advertised to calm it down wouldn’t work, and you couldn’t get it to stop without shaking it. Eventually when it started crying the parent would have to beat it, and the beatings and thrashings would have to get harder and harder to get it to be quiet. The only thing that seemed to shut the baby doll up permanently was the bash its head against the wall to destroy whatever mechanism triggered the crying. On more than one occasion though, neighbors called the authorities to report child abuse, and when the police arrived they found the bloody remains of infants smeared across the walls and the floor. In most cases the mother couldn’t understand why the police were there, she just “got rid of the stupid doll” as she rocked a baby-shaped bundle in her arms.
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Part
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“911. What’s your emergency?” I said as I answered the phone.
“There’s a bat in my house.” A loud scream came over the speaker. “Send someone to come and get it.”
“Alright ma’am, I will send animal control over as soon as possible.” The caller thanked me and said she will be outside waiting. I pressed the button to dispatch the nearest unit.
I sat in my cubicle, doodling with my ballpoint pen on a piece of blank white paper. Being a dispatcher isn’t always easy. Especially in the middle of nowhere Montana with a population of 500. We get random calls about bobcats, bison, and bears coming in the front yards, teenagers prank calling because they are bored, and of course, the regular hunting emergencies. But all of this is few and far between, sometimes we can go hours without getting a call. Which makes it hard when you work the night shift alone.
“Kara?” I heard my straight-laced boss say as he came down the hallway.
“I’m here!” I yelled back, still doodling on the white paper. I could hear his staggered footsteps coming my direction.
“Oh, hey,” he said, popping his head around the corner. “I’m leaving. Do you need anything before I go?”
“I think I’m good.” I held up my now cold coffee.
“I’ll turn off the rest of the lights then. Have a great night.”
I heard the sound of the lights turning off down the hallway. It’s those florescent lights that make a buzzing sound whenever you’re under them. I hate when they get turned off, everything gets so silent. Being in this building at night all by yourself, the imagination can get the best of you.
I sat at my desk looking at the seven computer screens. On one screen, I could see exactly where the emergency responders are located at any given moment. I started memorizing the street names that in our designated area. At this time nothing was going on. It had been a very quiet night.
Taking a sip of my cold coffee, I started jotting down my grocery list for the next day. At this point the coffee was only doing so much to keep me awake at 1am. “What do I need,” I asked out loud. I wrote down that I needed chicken, vegetables, toilet paper, wine… multiple bottles of wine. I finished making my list, folding it into my jeans’ pocket.
A beeping sound started coming through my headphones meaning someone was calling in. I looked up as a name and number flashed on the screen in front of me.
“911, what’s your emergency?” I said clearly to the person on the other line.
“I need help,” a child’s voice said.
“What’s your name? What can I help you with?” I said back to the frightened young girl.
“I need help,” she said again.
I replied, “I can’t help you unless you tell me what’s wrong,” and then the phone line went dead.
Immediately dialing the number back, I waited for it to ring. But there was no dial tone and it wouldn’t reconnect. I decided to call one of the responding officers to check it out.
“Jenkins, I need you to respond to 5689 Hickory Valley Road. There could be a possible VIC. I tried calling her back but I got no answer,” I said into my headphones.
“Thanks, Kara. Hope you are having a good night all by your lonesome.” He started laughing. “What are you going to do all by yourself in that little cubicle of yours?”
“You’re an asshole. As a matter of fact, I am having a great night by myself. Keep me updated,” I said back.
“Roger that!”
I sat back in my chair looking at the right hand screen. A red dot started moving slowly towards the area where the young girl called from. Watching as it got closer and closer, I wondered if she was okay. Then the dot just stopped. This usually means the responding officer got to the location or close to it. Our map shows streets, but it doesn’t pin point the exact spot.
Waiting for Jenkins to call me back, I took another sip of coffee. I watched the clock as it slowly passed- second by second, minute by minute. I was about to ring him back when the computers lit up.
“911 dispatch, what’s the exact location of your emergency?” I looked up as the name and phone number flashed on the screen. This time I said the name out loud: Olivia Taylor.
“I tried calling you back but we couldn’t get an answer. A responding officer should be there shortly,” I said hurriedly, but in a stern manner.
“Why won’t you help me?” she whimpered. I heard her crying on the other line.
“We are trying to help you, Olivia. Someone should be there any second, I promise you. Can you stay on the line with me?” I asked while trying to get my shit together.
“Closet,” she replied. “You can find us in the closet.” I could hear another distant whimpering that wasn’t coming from the VIC on the line.
“Olivia, is there someone else there with you?” My heart felt like it was going to fall out of my chest.
“I have to go! He’ll hear me!” she cried out.
“Who will hear you, Olivia?” I managed to ask, a moment before the phone went dead again.
I looked on the map and noticed Jenkins’ spot had not moved. Growing concerned, I called him back. The phone rang and rang. Finally he answered.
“Jenkins,” he said with authority.
“Oh, thank God!” I took a second to catch my breath. My heart was pounding a mile per minute.
“What, Kara, you can’t handle being in that place by yourself? You have to call me all the time?” He tried to make a joke, but soon realized I wasn’t playing around. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
“I got another call from the VIC. What is your ETA?” I closed my eyes and tried to stay calm. This is part of the job requirement.
“Waiting for backup. This place is out in the middle of nowhere. The only entrance is a path through the woods too narrow for the cruiser to fit through. We have to go on foot. Should only be another couple of minutes.”
I took a look at my screen. I could see two dots moving closer to Jenkins. “Call me once you get to the property. She is hiding in the closet. I believe there is someone else with her,” I informed him.
“Thanks for the update. I’ll call you once I reach the site.” And he hung up.
I had to take a moment to decompress. I walked down the long hallway to the bathroom. As I turned on the light, it flickered to the sound of my heart beat. The familiar buzzing sound calmed me as I splashed cold water on my face. Looking in the mirror, I could tell that my color changed. The normal tan hue was now pale white and my pupils were dilated. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay, I reassured my reflection.
As I walked out of the restroom, I could hear a beeping sound coming from my headphones again. I ran to my cubicle thinking it was Jenkins giving me an update. But as I saw the name on the screen, my stomach immediately dropped.
“Olivia, I know this is you. Are you okay?” I looked at the screen with the map. “The officers are on their way. They should be there in less than a minute.” There was no response. “Are you there? Can you hear me, Olivia?”
A whimper came over the other line. “It’s too late,” she finally said. “He’s in the room. He heard me.”
“Who is in the room with you?” I asked. “Please tell me so I can let the officers know.” I took a deep breath, determined to stay calm.
“He has a gun.” I heard a door open as a loud scream came over the line. I could hear two loud rounds of popping. Then silence.
“Shit, shit, shit!” I screamed out loud, tears started rolling down my face. I knew what this meant. Just then the screen started lighting up again. This time, the name said Carlos Jenkins. I took a deep breath as I answered it.
“The VIC just called again,” I yelled into the phone. “Could have a DOA, Jenkins. You took too much fucking time.”
“How has anyone been calling you, Kara?” he asked, confused.
“Don’t play this game with me right now. Have you reached the destination or not?” I Looked at the screen in front of me.
“We reached the cabin. About a mile off the main road. I hate to tell you this, but everyone is gone.” There was silence on his end.
“Shit,” I responded, rubbing my face. The skin began to get hot from anger.
“But I don’t understand how anybody could have called you tonight,” Jenkins said. I looked up from my desk confused.”
“What do you mean?”
“We found three sets of skeletal remains. One was a male adult, presumed to be the father, and two young girls. The remains have to be at least twelve months old.” My chest grew tight and the room started spinning. I was about to pass out.
“The weird thing is,” Jenkins continued, “we found the two female skeletons in the closet. But one had a cordless phone in their hand. Trying to get help, I guess.”
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It was a nice summer day, my 5-year-old son James was playing outside in the backyard of our suburban home. James has always been a quiet boy, he plays by himself mostly, he never had many friends, but he has always had a wild imagination. I was in the kitchen feeding our dog Fido when I heard what sounded like James talking to someone in the backyard. I’m not sure who it was he could be talking to, could he have finally made a friend? Being a single mom it’s hard for me to always keep an eye on my son, so I decided to go outside and check on him.
When I went into the backyard I was a bit confused, because James was the only person back there. Was he talking to himself? I could have sworn I heard another voice. “James! It’s time to come inside.” I called out to him. He came inside and sat down at the kitchen table, it was about lunchtime so I decided to make him a turkey sandwich. “James. Who were you talking to out there?” I asked. James looked up for a moment, “I was playing with my new friend,” he said smiling. I poured him some milk and continued to pry, as any good mother would. “Does your friend have a name? Why didn’t you ask him to have lunch with us?” I asked. James stared at me for a moment before replying, “His name is Laughing Jack.” I was a bit taken back by what he had said. “Oh? That’s a strange name. What does your friend look like?” I asked a bit confused. “He’s a clown. He has long hair and a big swirly cone nose. He’s got long arms and baggy pants, with stripy socks, and he always smiles.” I realized my son was talking about an imaginary friend. I suppose it is normal for kids his age to have imaginary friends, especially when he has no real kids to play with. It’s probably just a phase.
The rest of the day went by as per usual, and it was starting to get late so I put James to bed. I tucked him in, gave him a kiss, and made sure to turn on his nightlight before I closed the door. I was pretty tired myself so I decided to go to bed not long after. I had an awful nightmare…
It was dark. I was in some kind of rundown amusement park. I was scared, running through an endless field of empty tents, broken down rides, and abandoned game huts. The whole place had a horrible look to it. Everything was black and white, the prize stuffed animals all hung from nooses in the game huts, all with sick grins stitched on their faces. It felt like the whole park was looking at me, even though there wasn’t another living thing in sight. Then suddenly, I began to hear music play. The sounds of Pop Goes the Weasel being played on a squeezebox echoed through the park, it was hypnotizing. I followed its tune to the circus tent almost in a trance, unable to stop my legs from moving forward. It was pitch black, the only light came from a single spotlight shining on the center of the big top. As I walked toward the light the music slowed down, I found myself singing along unable to stop.
“All around the mulberry bush
The monkey chased the weasel
The monkey though ’twas all in fun…”
The music stopped right before its climax, and suddenly the lights shot on. The intensity of the lights was practically blinding, all I could see was a small dark silhouette shuffle towards me. Then another one appeared, and another, and another. There were dozens of them, all coming toward me. I couldn’t move, my legs were frozen, all I could do was watch as the haunting figures drew nearer. As they got closer I could see… THEY WERE CHILDREN! As I looked at each one I noticed they were all horribly disfigured and mutilated. Some had cuts all over their body, others were severely burnt, and others were missing limbs, even eyes! The children enveloped me, clawing at my flesh, dragging me to the ground, and tearing inside me. As the children tore me apart and I faded away, all I could hear was laughter, horrible, awful, evil, laughter.
I woke up the next morning in a cold sweat. After taking a few deep breaths I looked over and saw that a few of James’ action figures were positioned facing me on top of my nightstand. I sighed, James had probably woken up early and put these here. I gathered up the toys and made my way to James’ room. However, when I opened the door, James was sound asleep. I just shrugged and placed the toys back into his toy box, and headed out to the living room. A little while later James woke up and I made him his breakfast. He was quiet and seemed a bit groggy, perhaps he didn’t sleep well either. I decided to ask him about the toys, “James honey, did you put the toys in mommy’s room this morning?” His eyes shot up at me for a moment then quickly glanced back down at his cereal. “Laughing Jack did it.” I rolled my eyes and responded, “Well you tell ‘Laughing Jack’ to keep the toys in your room.” James nodded and finished up his breakfast, then decided to go play out in the back yard.
I went to relax in the living room and I must have dozed off because I woke up a couple of hours later. “Shit! I need to check on James.” I was a bit worried, it had been over 2 hours and I haven’t checked on him. I went stepped out into the backyard, but James wasn’t there anymore. I was getting nervous so I called out to him, “JAMES! JAMES WHERE ARE YOU?!” Just then I heard a giggle come from the front yard. I rushed through the gate around to the front of the house. James was sitting on the sidewalk. I breathed a sigh of relief and walked over to him, “James how many times have I told you to stay in the backya… James, what are you eating?” James looked up at me then reached into his pocket and pulled out a hand full of hard candies in all colors. This made me very nervous, “James, who gave you that candy?” James just stared at me not speaking. “JAMES! Please, tell mommy where you got that candy.” James hung his head down and said, “Laughing Jack gave it to me.” My heart sunk, I kneeled down to look him in the eye, “ James I’ve had had enough of this damn Laughing Jack thing, HE IS NOT REAL! Now this is a very serious situation and I need to know who gave you the candy!” I could see my son’s eyes tear up, “But mama, Laughing Jack DID give me the candy.” I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, James has never lied to me but what he’s telling me is impossible. I make him spit out the candy and I throw the rest away, James appears to be fine. Maybe I’m just overreacting after all he could have gotten it from Tom and Linda from next door or Mr. Walker down the street. Either way, I’m going to have to keep a closer eye on James. That night I put James to bed as usual and decided to go to bed early myself.
Suddenly I was woken up by a loud bang coming from the kitchen. I sprung out of bed and hurried down the stairs. When I got to the kitchen I was horrified. Everything on the counters had been thrown on the floor, and our dog Fido hung dead from the light fixture. His stomach was cut open and stuffed with candy, the same type that James was eating earlier that day. My shock was quickly broken by a sharp scream coming from James’ room followed by loud crashes. I quickly grabbed a knife from the drawer and moved up the stairs with the speed that only a mother whose child is in danger could have. I burst through the door and flicked on the lights. Everything in the room was knocked over and tossed on the floor, my poor son in his bed crying and shaking with fear, a pool of urine staining the sheets. I scooped my child up and ran out of the house and went next door to Tom and Linda’s house, Luckily they were still awake. They let me use their phone and I called the police. It didn’t take them long to arrive, and I explained what had happened, they looked at me as if I were crazy. They searched the house, but all they found was a dead dog and 2 trashed rooms. The officer told me that someone had probably gotten into the house and done this right before making a quick escape when they heard me coming up the stairs. I knew it wasn’t true. All the doors were locked and none of the windows were open, whatever was in my house didn’t come from outside.
The next day James stayed inside, I didn’t want him to leave my sight. I went into the garage and found his old baby monitor and set it up in his room if anything comes into it tonight, I was going to be able to hear it. I went to the kitchen and grabbed the largest knife from the drawer and put it on my nightstand. Imaginary friend or not, I’m not letting anything hurt my little boy.
Soon enough night came. I put James to bed, he was afraid, but I promised him that I wasn’t going to let anything happen to him. I tucked him in, gave him a kiss, and turned on the nightlight. Before closing the door I whispered to him “Goodnight James, I love you.”
I tried to stay up as long as I could, but after a few hours, I felt myself drifting off. My baby would be safe for the night and I needed to sleep. Just as I lay my head on the pillow I heard a soft noise come from the baby monitor I had put on my nightstand. At first, it sounded like interference, like the kind a radio would make. Then it turned into a soft moan. Was James asleep? Then I heard it, the laugh from my nightmare, that horrible laugh. I sprung up from the bed and grabbed the knife from under my pillow. I rushed over to James’ room and creaked the door open. I tried the light switch but it wouldn’t come on. I took a step in and I could feel the warm thick liquid on my feet. Suddenly James’ nightlight came on and I could see the absolute horror laid out in front of me.
James’ body was nailed up on the wall, the nails piercing through his hands and feet. His chest was cut wide open and his organs hung down to the floor. His eyes and tongue had been removed along with most of his teeth. I was disgusted, I could hardly believe this was my baby boy. Then I heard it again, the soft desperate moan. JAMES WAS STILL ALIVE! My baby, my poor baby, in so much pain barely clinging to life. I ran across the room and vomited on the floor, but my sickness was interrupted by a horrible cackle coming from behind me. I spun around while still wiping bile from my mouth, then out of the shadows emerged the fiend responsible for all this horror, Laughing Jack. His ghost white skin and matted black hair hung down to his shoulders. He had piercing white eyes surrounded by dark black rings. His twisted smile revealed a row of sharp jagged teeth, and his skin didn’t look like skin at all, it almost looked like rubber or plastic. He wore a patchy, black and white clown outfit with striped sleeved and socks. His body itself was grotesque, his long arms hanging down past his waist and the way he was poised made him look almost boneless, like a ragdoll. He let out a sickening laugh as if to let me know he was pleased with my reaction to his ‘work’. He then turned around slowly in front of James and began to laugh even more at the horrific sight he has laid out. That was enough to shake me from my terror, I snapped, “GET AWAY FROM HIM YOU BASTARD!” I rushed at the monster raising the knife above my head and stabbed down at him, but as soon as the knife touched him he disappeared in a cloud of black smoke. The knife passed right through and pierced James’ still beating heart, splashing the warm blood on my face….
No… what have I done? My baby, I killed my baby! I immediately fell to my knees, and I could hear sirens in the distance growing louder… My boy, my sweet baby boy… I promised mommy would protect you… But I failed… I’m sorry James… I’m so sorry…
Police soon arrived to find me in front of my son, still wielding the knife covered in my baby’s blood. The trial was short, insanity. I was placed in the Phiropoulos House for the Criminally Insane, where I have been for the past 2 months. It’s not so bad here, the only reason I’m awake now is because someone is playing Pop Goes the Weasel outside my window. I’ll talk to the orderlies about it in the morning…
|
I will tell this story only once. Pass it around. Alter it if you like. But once I am done with the story. I want nothing more to do with it. Reliving the experience is bad enough, and I will not do it twice.
Not long after my tenth birthday, my parents shipped me off to Schroon Lake in upstate New York where my auntie and uncle lived with their son Harry. My parents said it would be a good chance to reconnect. I hadn’t seen any of them since I was four. As a child, I accepted the reasoning. In hindsight, I think my parents wanted a romantic week to themselves. Also, Harry was an antisocial boy in desperate need of friends like me.
Although their house was small, the dense forest stretched for miles in every direction. What a lonely life, I remember thinking. Not a single neighbor in sight. Only tall oaks and bristled pines as far as the eye could see.
My parents said their hellos to my aunt and uncle, and then said their goodbyes to me. Harry was nowhere to be seen. After showing me to the room I would share with Harry, auntie left to cook dinner. While I set my stuff down on the bottom bunk of the bunkbed, Uncle stuck around to make small talk. He asked me if I was sad that summer vacation was nearly over. Like any sane child, I said I was. He asked me about my grades, and then with a great smile told me how Harry was the brightest student in his class. Of course, Harry’s class numbered just forty people whereas mine hovered around four-hundred people. But what did I know about Harry? The last time I saw him, I was a toddler and Harry was in diapers. I couldn’t even tell you what he looked like.
“Where is Harry?” I asked. My uncle’s smile faltered.
“Oh, he’s out playing,” he said. “Harry spends all day in the forest. So long as he comes home for dinner, we can’t complain.” But I could tell by the drop in his tone, he wished Harry spent his time hanging out with friends like any normal kid his age.
As I learned, Harry came home like clockwork, always just in time for dinner. Just as auntie took the pot roast out of the oven, the back door creaked open and Harry shuffled in. He was a short, skinny kid with long, floppy hair and purple rings under his eyes. He glanced at me, but said nothing. It was clear I didn’t interest him in the slightest.
“Honey, this is your cousin Andrew,” auntie said. Harry muttered a hello. “Maybe you can show him around the forest tomorrow. Take him with you on one of your adventures.”
“Mom, I’m not supposed to—” She flashed a harsh look. Harry shoved a piece of pot roast in his mouth before muttering, “Fine.” He said nothing more for the entire dinner.
Auntie and uncle asked me what I did earlier in the summer, what I wanted to be when I grew up, and so on. I told them I went to the Jersey shore and that I wanted to be a zookeeper. To be polite, I asked Harry about himself. But uncle answered for him, as if he wasn’t there.
“Harry went to art camp,” he said. “He wants to be an artist. When he’s not exploring the forest, he’s doodling in his sketchbook.” Harry didn’t look up from his food.
When we finished eating, Harry fetched his sketchbook and sat down on the couch. Auntie passed out slices of apple pie, still warm from the oven. Until the end of the night, we chowed down and watched TV. Except for his drawing hand, Harry kept still and silent like another piece of furniture. I tried to peek at what he was drawing, but he angled the sketchbook away from me whenever I came close.
“What are you drawing?” I asked. He didn’t answer. I decided to look at the drawings later that night when Harry showered before bed. But he took the sketchbook into the bathroom with him. Finally, when he lay down to sleep, I thought Harry might separate from the book. But he tucked the book under his pillow and fell asleep. So I gave up and went to bed myself.
The bed was so stiff I would’ve felt better sleeping on the floor. Regardless, it wasn’t the bed that kept me awake. It was Harry’s feverish mumblings. I haven’t the slightest idea what he was saying. “To som mo khai to malo mo ena makhar so.” It sounded like utter nonsense to me, a completely different language, harsh and guttural. Of course I didn’t think anything of it. I just wanted to sleep.
The next day, Harry took me into the forest. The trees loomed high over us, and the thick canopy of leaves drowned the woods in twilight. Dirt trails wove through the area like veins on a giant, earthen body. But they were not smooth, clean-cut trails. They were rough, bumpy paths carved out of the forest from frequent use.
“Where are we going?” I asked Harry.
“I need to meet my friends,” he said. Then as an afterthought, he said, “Mom wants me to show you the lake first.”
Harry took me along one of the many paths. I could tell he hadn’t taken this path in a while. Grass had started to creep up across the path’s edges, and the only footprints were those of the small woodland creatures. Sunlight streamed down on us in brilliant gold rays as the tree cover broke. Schroon Lake expanded before us, its surface as sleek and shiny as a mirror’s edge. I immediately took off my shirt and jumped into the cool, calm water. Harry stood on the sandy shore.
“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be back.” Before I could ask where he was going or when he’d be back, Harry had disappeared into the forest. Since I didn’t know the way back home, I had to wait.
I swam until my limbs shivered from the cold water. Then I lay out in the hot sun until sweat dripped down my forehead. Then I waded out into the lake and stared at the line of trees bordering the water. Half an hour had passed, and still Harry hadn’t returned. Sighing, I hit the water and cursed my parents for sending me to my weirdo family in the first place.
From miles off, a low rumble broke through the trees. The tall oaks bent and shuddered and shed their leaves. Birds crowed and shot into the sky in great flocks. As the sound rolled across the lake, it resonated in my bones, and suddenly I became gripped by fear.
“Harry,” I called. “Harry.” But he did not answer. I fled the lake and redressed. For another half an hour, I paced back and forth, waiting either for Harry or for whatever made that massive roar. Although I could not say how I knew, I was certain something ancient had made that noise, something beyond the history or understanding of man.
When Harry returned, sweat soaked the collar of his shirt and a splatter of blood stained his right sleeve. As always, his demeanor was calm. “Let’s go,” he said. “It’s time for dinner.”
“Harry, did you hear that?” I said.
“I did,” he said.
“What was it? What happened? Where did you go?”
“I was with my friends,” he said. We returned home along one of the many paths.
“But what was that noise?” He wouldn’t answer. I asked him many more questions, but he wouldn’t answer any of them.
When we reached the door to his house, Harry stopped. “Don’t say anything to my parents,” he said. It seemed outrageous to ignore what I’d heard, but Harry’s parents wouldn’t believe me if I told them. Worse, perhaps they already knew and didn’t want to talk about it.
That evening, we ate dinner, watched more TV, and finished off auntie’s pie. Harry spent the night scribbling in his sketchbook. As always, he guarded the contents of the book closely, even when he slept. And again Harry interrupted my sleep with his nonsensical muttering. “Ston upno khai sto khupnema, emai o Makhar so.” It was connected to the noise I had heard. I knew it. Regardless, I couldn’t make sense of any it and soon fell asleep from exhaustion.
The next day followed the same pattern as the day before. Harry guided me through the forest. Then he left me behind at the lake. Half an hour later, a loud bellow shot through the woods. Half an hour after that, Harry returned to guide me home just in time for dinner. It was an unspoken schedule we followed religiously.
However, on the fourth night, Harry left his sketchbook on top of his bed. I was a guest in his home, so I knew I should’ve allowed him his privacy. But naturally, I couldn’t contain my curiosity. As soon as I heard the shower turn on, I opened the sketchbook.
The first few pages depicted animals picked apart and tortured: limbs impaled, skin flayed, muscles bare, bones cracked. The body parts were rendered with vivid details someone could only imagine if they had seen it themselves.
I flipped through the pages as quick as I could. Before long, I realized I was no longer looking at the bodies of squirrels, rabbits, and deer. The tortured bodies were those of men and women stripped bare of more than just clothing.
My heart skipped as the shower shut off. I turned one last page. Unlike the other drawings, this one portrayed a group of men and women in a ring around a fire. The fire burned high, but not high enough to hide the figure behind it.
On the far side of the fire, an immense creature, tall as the trees, hunched over its bony body. It leaned on its arms which were twice as big as its torso. Long strands of hair hung over its head. Because of the hair, I could not see the creature’s eyes, but I could see a pair of lips that stretched across the entirety of its face. Despite its hideous appearance, no one in the ring looked at the creature. Instead, they bowed their heads in reverence.
I stared at the picture as long as I could, but time was limited. I closed the book and settled into my bed just in time for Harry to return. Falling asleep was extra hard that night.
A normal child might have told Harry’s parents or called his own parents to get him the hell out of there. But I couldn’t do it. Not yet. I needed to see what was in the woods.
The next day, I followed the unspoken schedule. By now I had memorized the path to and from the lake, but Harry guided me there out of habit. As soon as my feet touched the sand, he stopped to speak.
“Let me guess,” I said, “Wait here?” For the first time, a smile appeared on his lips. He hesitated for a moment, and then entered the forest without a word. He knew I’d wait there for him as always.
But instead I followed Harry just far enough to see him without being seen myself. We trekked through the woods for ten minutes. Our path was fairly linear, but many other paths branched off from ours, perhaps leading to other homes. I stepped lightly and avoided sticks and leaves when I could. Not once did Harry suspect I was following him.
Then, after ten minutes, the trail veered right and Harry disappeared from sight. As I neared the sudden turn, I could see the trail exited onto a wide glade. Inside the clearing, a fire crackled and voices chanted in the guttural language Harry muttered in his sleep. Aside from the chanting, I heard a woman cry.
“What are you doing?” she asked through sobs. “Let me go! Let me go! Please!” I approached the glade as close as I dared. Through breaks in the trees, I saw a ring of men and women in front of a bonfire. Harry had joined the end of the ring and was chanting along with the others. Across from him, a naked woman stood chained to a post. She continued to cry and beg.
Then, among the choir of voices rose another voice, loud enough and deep enough to drown out the others. Heavy footsteps shook the earth like a rhythmic thud commanding the beat of the chanting. I heard the crack of wood splitting and then the chanting stopped. The woman’s screams roared through the forest. She could no longer form words, only screams and short, choking sobs.
From between the trees, I spied the pale, bony leg of a gargantuan creature. My eyes widened as I followed the leg to the rest of its naked, hairless body. Just as in the picture, the creature leaned on its arms, which were as long and thick as tree trunks. Over its chest, the white skin stretched so taut I thought it might burst. Yet, despite all its horror, I could not resist the urge to see more. Most of all, I wanted to see its face. I craned my neck for a better look, but the canopy of leaves blocked my view. I could see only to the creature’s chin, some fifteen feet up.
I looked back down at the chanting group members. Knives had appeared in their hands, including Harry’s. One by one, they sliced off a piece of the woman. As the woman’s screams soared, the creature behind the fire purred with delight.
“Jesus christ,” I said to myself. I screwed my eyes shut and tried desperately to shake myself from the nightmare. “Just a dream. Just a dream. Just a dream,” I said. When I opened my eyes, the woman’s cries had stopped. Her head drooped down at her chest. She still appeared alive, but she had lost too much blood. By now, she could only shake her head from side to side.
I glanced around at the group. They turned, almost as one, and looked in my direction. Harry met my eyes. For once, his steely gaze broke. His brows pulled together in a fraught look. He mouthed the word “run.”
But before I did, the creature bent low to catch me in its eyes. As its face neared the fire, light shone across its ashen face, and I saw that the creature did not indeed have eyes. Where eyes should have been, there was only smoothed over skin. The creature’s lips parted into a razor-toothed smile that spanned from ear to ear.
Then the creature spoke to me. Its thick, guttural words penetrated my mind as much as it did my ears. Although I didn’t know the ancient language it spoke, somehow I understood the creature perfectly. “Emai o Makhar o mikhras, dikhons ton nekhtorn, khomis to aino. Na me latveis.” That is, “I am Makhar the Small, Deacon of the Dead, Earl of the Eternal. Worship me.” When I did not move or answer, Makhar cocked his head so far to the side, I thought he might snap his neck. Thin, black strands of hair dangled around the harsh curve of its face. Then the creature opened its mouth and bellowed into the trees. The great roar shook the forest and nearly knocked me over.
Harry covered his ears from the terrible noise and continued to mouth the word “run.” He didn’t need to tell me again. I darted along the many forest paths. Footsteps plodded behind me, but I would not look. Screams and shouts called after me, but I would not look. Highest among the shouts was Harry’s. “Wait!” he yelled. “Wait!” But he was not talking to me. He was talking to the others.
Without stop, I sprinted to the beach and then to Harry’s home. All the while, I prayed the crazed cult would not appear from a side path. Surely there was a quicker way to get from the glade to Harry’s house. Anyone of them could have found that path.
Somewhere along the way, I lost Harry and the others. Still, it didn’t stop me from running as fast as I could. And when I made it home, I burst through the back door.
“Andrew,” auntie said, “You’re a bit early. Dinner isn’t ready yet.”
“Where’s Harry?” uncle asked.
Tears streamed down my face as I told them what I saw. They thought it was a joke or a game. But when I didn’t back down from the tale, they agreed I must be sick. Auntie felt my forehead and decided I had a fever. She called my parents, apologized for disturbing their week alone, and asked them to pick me up. They would be there in an hour.
“So what happened to Harry?” uncle asked. I didn’t know.
We sat down for dinner. Any second, we thought, Harry would come through the door. But he never did. We finished dinner. Not long after, my parents arrived. Harry still hadn’t come home. My parents agreed to help auntie and uncle look for Harry, but I gripped their legs and told them not to go in the forest. I was in hysterics.
Finally, my parents rushed me home. As it turned out, I did have a fever, and quite a strong one. My parents forced me to take an ice bath and a Motrin, and then go to sleep with a damp washcloth over my head. Regardless, the fever lasted well into tomorrow. And in the morning, my parents said I had spent the whole night muttering gibberish in my sleep.
As for Harry, the police were called. I gave them my story. I told them just how to reach the glade. They found the glade, but there was nothing there, not even the remains of a fire. To this day, Harry is still missing.
My parents sent me to therapy in the hopes I would lose the crazy story and tell the truth. It didn’t work. So we don’t talk about that week anymore. We’ve all tried to forget about it. In fact, this is the first time I’ve talked about it in years.
For a while, I forgot about Harry and Makhar the Small. I found a steady job, bought a cramped apartment, and met a beautiful girl. She stayed at my place the other night. Her presence put me at such peace that I fell asleep in an instant. But she woke me early in the morning. “You were speaking in tongues,” she said, “And your smile… your wide, wide smile.”
|
Nearly all great and epic stories – at least the unbelieveable ones, like sweet fairy tales – begin the same way. Therefore, so shall I. But my story is not sweet.
Once upon a time, while in my forty-third year, I was a married woman living in a small Tennessee town. My husband and I both had good jobs and were unencumbered by children nor weighed down with heavy debt like most couples our age. We owned a modest, two-storey, three-bedroom home which was full of Craftsman charm, all hardwoods, sleek banisters, dark transoms and a lavishly tiled fireplace. It was kitsch meets retro meets modern.
We’d spent quite a bit of time after we bought the place making it ours – renovating the kitchen and the two upstairs bathrooms, replacing a few missing lathed wooden balusters – but the little things which attracted us to the house initially like the fireplace tiles, and the tiny, odd-angle half-bath tucked under the stairs which we now affectionately refer to as the “Harry Potty,” were as yet untouched. Hubby had plans for landscaping and ideas for a garden in the back yard. I was busy with paint chips and clippings from interior decorating magazines. We were in no rush, as the place suited us just fine as it was, but it was our dream home so we just planned to make it… dreamier.
Hubby was an architect with a small, local firm. He didn’t have glorious or grand plans to make partner or to be the most well-known architect around, but he was very good at his job, and he loved what he did. He went happily to work every day.
I worked with a local non-profit which assisted seniors in need. I was currently working on a project which would fill a huge gap for low-income senior housing. I was satisfied there. It wasn’t easy, but the rewards far outweighed the challenges.
On any given evening, hubby and I would come home, cook supper, talk about our days, share our frustrations and our successes – usually over a beer or a glass of wine – and generally enjoyed one another’s company.
What I’m trying to say is, until that fateful evening when I was unceremoniously separated from myself, our lives were completely and totally normal. We weren’t looking for trouble; but it sure came looking for us. Well… for me.
***
That fateful Tuesday evening, hubby had gone to bed rather early, and I’d spent the last hour wandering the house, checking windows and doors, starting the dishwasher, transferring a load of laundry to the dryer, and sitting quietly in the den attempting to get through another chapter of my current book. When I found I’d read the same sentence six times, I decided it was time to call it a night. I flicked off the lamp at my side, rose from the armchair, then, suddenly struck, stood – stock still – in the middle of the room, listening intently. I felt the fine hairs on my arm and at the back of my neck rise, like hackles on a dog. Something was… off. I made another quick round of the first floor and, finding nothing out of the ordinary, climbed the stairs feeling both mentally and physically exhausted.
Soon, I found myself in bed, wondering how I’d gotten there. My exhaustion must have been such that I just drifted hazily through the motions of getting ready for, and into, bed. It didn’t take long before a heavy sleep overtook me.
BOOM!
I was startled out of the depths of sleep several hours later by a sound that actually made the house shake. The noise, deep and massive, reverberated in the air like the aftermath of a battering ram applied forcefully to a castle drawbridge. My husband and I looked at each other, confused, trying to make sense of what we’d just heard. If I had been the only one to hear it, I would have written it off as something which had happened in my deepest dream state, but he’d heard it, too.
Wide-eyed, we left our bed; he to check downstairs, and I to do a walk through of the second floor. I was more than a little uneasy. The sound, coupled with the uneasy feeling I’d had when I’d stood in the den earlier in the evening, were more than enough to raise my blood pressure. I could hear it pounding in my ears. Hypersensitive, I could almost identify every synapse of thought, feel each gentle drift of air on my skin, I could sense… something. Just out of reach. Nevertheless, I plodded, awake, through the top floor of the house, looking bravely for whatever had made that nightmarish sound.
When I’d checked the last bedroom and found nothing, I returned to the brightly lighted hallway to wait by the banister rail for hubby. While I waited, the lightbulb overhead sizzled, brightened dramatically, and, with an audible pop!, extinguished itself. I was plunged into darkness. Before I could draw breath to call for my husband’s assistance, something solid and colossal… upon impossible whisper feet… seized me from behind and, in one swift motion, thrust an arctic cold and unmercifully sharp shaft into the middle of my back. There was no escaping that grasp, nor the invasion of that frigid foreign object.
I gasped silently.
In slow motion, I watched, as the ghostly embodiment of my very soul was violently propelled from my physical body into a heap on the hardwood floor of the hallway. In an instant, I understood my soul, having been separated from my body, was dead. Curiously, I was alive. I suppose I assumed without a soul, one could not live. One thing I knew beyond doubt: whatever had been forced into my back, between my ribs and just to the left of my spine, left behind something dark, cold, and malevolent – and it was inside me. I could feel it writhing there, just underneath my heart. I never saw the behemoth who’d ripped me apart; he’d evaporated as silently as he’d arrived – only a vague scent of sulphur, the lighted and extinguished match, lingered to mark that he (it?) existed at all – the entire death of my soul taking no more time than the blink of an eye.
I began screaming. Horrible, terrified shrieks. Taking great, gulping gasps of air as I tried to breathe and scream simultaneously. Tears streaming down my cheeks, driven near to insanity as I realized instantly no one – not one person alive – would believe me. I slid down the wall into puddle of fear and self-loathing, coming to rest along the baseboards of the second floor hallway. When my husband finally arrived, breathless, at the top of the stairs, it was to find me still screaming and gibbering, curled into a ball.
“The blood! The blood! It’s in me. It’s there. It’s evil. Don’t you see the blood? Get it out!” I began thrashing desperately, flailing my hands toward my husband who tried, unsuccessfully, to get me to be still and calm. Finally, my typically non-violent husband resorted to a sharp slap across my right cheek which had the desired result; I instantly shut up.
“What are you raving about?” my husband asked me, not particularly kindly, for I’d frightened him. “I go downstairs for three minutes and come back to find you a hollering like a lunatic about blood and evil. You’ll wake the whole neighborhood with that racket you’re making.”
With hitching breaths, I stammered through an explanation. I could barely spit the words out; they felt ugly, thick, gelatinous, slug-like as I uttered them. And I was right, he didn’t believe me. I was crestfallen. He could not see my soul. He muttered some vague mollification about a waking nightmare, forced me to my feet, and directed me back to our bedroom.
As I sat on the edge of the bed, regulating both heart rate and breathing, he quickly disappeared into the adjacent bathroom for a glass of water, which, upon his return, he had to hold to my lips due to the violent shaking of my hands. On the floor, in the darkened hallway, dimly lit by the bedside table lamp, was my soul – lifeless, colorless – invisible to all but me.
The next day found me still in bed at eleven in the morning. My husband had been easily assured of my rightness and gone on to work, while I’d decided I needed a mental health day, and so called in sick. When my boss asked me if I was alright – apparently, I sounded terrible – I assured him I would be fine and just needed to rest. He told me to take as much time as I needed; he needed me well. I’d been supine since hubby had tucked me back in last night. Not only that, but sleep eluded me. The sandman paid no visit. No yawn escaped my lips. No drowse pulled down my eyelids. I remained completely and totally awake, covers pulled right up to my chin, listening to hubby breathe the evenness of untroubled sleep.
Truthfully, I was afraid to leave the confines of my bed. Nothing could sneak up on me if I had my back pressed firmly into the mattress. I couldn’t turn my head to the left, or I’d see my other self in transparent death repose on the hallway floor, so I kept my eyes averted, looking straight up, wondering if it was possible to count the little bumps of the popcorn ceiling. We should put driftwood planks on the ceiling, I thought.
Occasionally, I would glance toward the windows in front and to the right of me, hopeful the bright sunlight which streamed into the room would dispel the overwhelming feeling of malevolence and dread, but it did not. In fact, it didn’t take long for me to realize I hated those once glorious beams of light more than I’d ever hated anything before. If I hadn’t been so convinced it was dangerous to leave my bed, I’d have gotten up, closed the blinds and drawn the curtains tight against the sun.
Eventually, my need to use the bathroom outweighed my desire to stay safely in bed. Anything within me which had ever been brave had been virtually erased the night before, so, like a child who is afraid of the dark, I gathered what courage I still had, flung back the covers, and raced, pell-mell, for the en-suite bathroom a few steps away. I felt a vague relief once I’d slammed and locked the door behind me. The bathroom was so small that the Thing which had set itself upon me last night couldn’t possibly fit in there with me; I was safe.
The little bathroom, though far less comfortable than my bed, felt safer to me, so I stayed there far longer than I needed to, finding one excuse or another to delay my return to the bedroom. The delay was somewhat productive, however. The toilet got scrubbed, the sink got a good wipe-down, the bathtub got cleaned and, after that, since the bathtub was clean, I thought maybe a hot bath would soothe me. I ran a tub full of steaming hot water, added a couple caps full of bubble bath as an indulgence and a few drops of lavender essential oil. While the water ran, the bubbles gathered, and the aroma of lavender filled the room, I stripped down, feeling over-exposed even alone in the private little room.
Unintentionally, I caught a glimpse of myself in the small mirror over the sink and was forced to stop and look. Maybe I really was sick? My skin seemed gray, my eyes sunken and hollow, the irises, typically hazel, were black! What the hell? I leaned closer just to be sure. Yep; black. On a whim, I turned around to see if I could tell where I’d been stabbed the previous evening. I was completely unsurprised when found the livid red, puckered mark, about a quarter’s diameter, barely healed over and exactly where I expected. It had definitely not been my imagination.
Suddenly annoyed and freezing, I snapped off the water, and unceremoniously climbed into the tub, though I no longer felt the urge to bathe and the cloying scent of lavender choked me. The hot water, coupled with the cold emanating from my body, was supremely painful. The heat seared my skin. The pain was oddly pleasing and seemed to take my sudden irritation and fling it against the wall like a wet towel. I imagined I heard a wet SLAP! I submerged my entire head under the bubbles, under the water; holding my breath far beyond what I thought I could handle, until my lungs filled with the fire of strain, until, with a savage release of breath, I reemerged at the surface. I stayed in that tub until the water was as cold as I was.
One thing the long soak did for me was leech the fear from my body. Well, not all of it, but I no longer felt the need to race back to the safety of my bed, or keep myself locked in the bathroom. I laughed, mirthlessly, as I emerged from the bathroom and the unbidden thought ran through my head that I’d just come out of the closet. After all, didn’t they used to call bathrooms Water Closets? No, I didn’t really think it was funny, either. I felt… different. But then, I would feel different, wouldn’t I? I was soulless now. And that was something I’d need to take care of. I couldn’t leave my soul laying around on the hallway floor forever, could I? But, what would I do with it?
I’d never been a particularly religious person. I’d gone to church as a child because, when my mother had gotten sick, my father thought a little religion would save her. It didn’t. I had a basic understanding of the Bible, and was pretty well-versed in some of the more popular stories. I did believe in a higher-power, but not necessarily in the Bible’s version of the same. I felt my faith pulled from several religions, the basic and most underlying driver for me being to do unto others. Harm none. Give when and where I could. This had always served me well. But now I was faced with a challenge I’d never considered: Is it possible to live – really, truly live – without a soul? Could I pass, day to day, living as I was used to? Would I care? Would this blackness, which now lurked within me, spread to such an extent that I would begin to hate? To harm? To be selfish and greedy and all the things I’d always tried so hard not to be? There were no answers. Yet.
I pondered these things as I simultaneously searched my house for a means of storing, perhaps forever, my soul. The container I sought must be transparent to allow light to pass through; darkness, as the inside of an opaque box, would be detrimental. Or, so I believed. I was thorough in my search, but didn’t alight on anything I felt would suffice, so, throwing on some yoga pants and a tee shirt, slipping my hair into a ponytail, and sticking my feet into my ancient and well-worn Birkenstocks, I snagged my purse and keys and headed for the garage.
My car wasn’t fancy – it was a older model Honda Civic – but it got me where I needed to go. There was, in the next town over, a street entirely comprised of thrift, antique, and unique junk shops. It was to this street I steered my car. Everything made me angry on that short trip and I found myself wishing for a projectile weapon of some kind to aim at the idiots who thought they owned the road. At the very least, a paintball gun would have sufficed. My rage was all-encompassing; surprising. I was very lucky I didn’t purposely run someone off the road. I did, however, manage to keep it together until I arrived at my destination. When I’d parked my car and stepped out into the air, my rage burned away. The direct sunlight which I so abhorred earlier that morning had changed – being filtered by gathering clouds – and felt less intense. Still, there was hate under my heart. I did not like this at all.
The trip to Antique Row (as it was locally known) was quickly successful. I found a box made up of clear and rose pink triangular pieces of glass, fused together with solder in a way that bespoke a stained glass window. It had a hinged top, and four clear marbles as feet. It was about ten inches wide, six inches deep, and – including the small feet – about four inches tall. It was not normally something I’d choose – pink not being a color I usually preferred – but I knew it was exactly right.
After another rage-filled drive home, I climbed the stairs to the second floor hallway and stood, glass box in hand, looking at my ghostly, lifeless self. I moved toward it, slowly, uncertain if it would blow away on a gust of air caused by sudden movement, but it stayed where it lay. Could I touch it? Manipulate it? Would I even be able to get it into the box? Only one way to find out, I thought to myself.
I knelt down, placed the glass box on the floor, gently lifted the lid, and cautiously reached for my soul. The instant I touched it, I felt a searing, intense pain in my chest. A white-hot poker; crackling as if I’d been electrocuted. My soul glowed an intense white as I pushed through the pain to lift it and place it in the small box. How it fit was anyone’s guess, but it did, pouring itself into the box like water for a perfect fit. The second I released it to the confines of the glass casket – for that’s what the box was – the pain left me. Weak and shaking, I closed the lid. Holding the box to my chest, I sat back against the wall and remained there for an indeterminate amount of time.
In fact, I sat there until I heard, distantly, the garage door opening to announce the arrival of my husband, home from work. Shaken out of my entirely silent reverie, I clutched the box, rose from the floor, and placed it on the deep sill of our front-facing bedroom window.
Hubby came upstairs to find me sitting on the bed, dressed sloppily, staring at the glass thing in the window. He stood in the doorway of our room and asked, “Are you alright?”
“Yes,” I answered simply.
“What’s that?” he asked, nodding to indicate the glass box I was staring at.
“Nothing,” I responded. “Just something I picked up on Antique Row today.”
“You didn’t go to work?” he asked.
“No. I called in sick.” I said.
“Why?” he asked, concern lacing his voice.
“I needed some time. Last night really shook me up,” I explained.
He came over and sat down on the bed next to me, putting his right arm around my waist. I tipped my head and let it come to rest on his shoulder, still staring at the glass box in the window. We sat that way, silently, for several minutes.
“Have you thought about supper?” he asked.
“No,” I answered, suddenly realizing I hadn’t eaten all day and was not hungry in the slightest.
“Well, let’s go down and see what we can scrape together, huh?” he said.
“OK,” I intoned.
I allowed him to take my hands and raise me from my vigil over the glass casket containing my soul.
The next few weeks were, for want of a better word, different. And yet, they were very much the same. I felt my routine, one which I’d always been perfectly happy with, becoming uninspiring drudgery. I managed to keep up appearances, however, so, other than seeming to have fallen into a depression – which was, in fact, noticed by others – I felt I was doing rather well. My husband, on the other hand, did not. He felt ignored, hurt by my careless neglect of him. Confused by the subtle change in our relationship. Curious about my lack of inspiration for my previous obsession of interior decorating or my collection of paint chips. He felt the wrongness of me, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He asked me if there was someone else to whom I was giving my affection and, though I know it was an honest and carefully-worded question to which he required and deserved an answer, my abrupt and seething anger that he’d even suggest such a thing put him off that line of questioning entirely.
He asked me about the box in the window, and why I’d suddenly become obsessed with it. I responded, “You wouldn’t believe me.” Which was true. He didn’t believe me, having already told him what had happened.
“Try me,” he said.
“I already did,” I responded, somewhat testily.
“When?” he asked, suddenly irritated. “When did you ever tell me about that box?”
“I told you when I got it, but the box isn’t what’s important. It’s what’s in the box that’s important. I’m watching for changes.”
Now completely frustrated, he said, “Changes in what? There’s nothing in that box!”
“Like I said, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Sweetheart,” said he, his tone more gentle, clearly trying a different tact, “how do you know I won’t believe you if you won’t tell me?”
“Because I did tell you and you placated me with nonsense about nightmares,” I responded truthfully.
Throwing up his hands in frustration, he said, “You’ve got to be kidding! This is about that night? Honey, I’ve told you and told you, you had a nightmare. A horrible nightmare, to be sure, but a nightmare nevertheless. That was weeks ago, and you’re still not over it?”
I sighed. Might as well have it all out in the open. “Something happened that night – just like I told you then – and I’m not the same person I was before. I’m changed. I’m different. There’s something cold and… evil under my heart; I can feel it there. Look at my eyes, for goodness sake! They’re black! My eyes should be hazel. You’ve seen the puckered scar on my back, right? Look at my skin! See how gray it’s become? There’s no amount of makeup that can fix this. And how it wrinkles and sags in places it never did before? And don’t you dare say it’s what happens when you get older. I’m only forty three! This kind of change does not take place in the span of a few weeks!”
He couldn’t deny having noticed the physical changes; I could see that clearly on his face. He would not lie to me, but he did not know what to say, so he simply suggested, “It could be stress-related. Maybe you should see a doctor?”
I stood, and in a dejected tone, I said, “A doctor cannot help what’s wrong with me. No one can.” And I left the room.
Several days after that conversation, I was sitting in our bedroom, as usual, staring at the class casket, when the doorbell rang. A visitor? I’m not expecting anyone, I thought.
From the top of the stairs, if you bend over just right, and if the person isn’t standing directly in front of the door, you can sometimes get a glimpse of who it is through the long windows on either side. In this case, I was not able to ascertain the caller, so I quietly made my way down the steps. I didn’t want the person, whoever they were, to hear me coming so I could pretend I was not home if it was someone I didn’t want to see – which was, truthfully, most people these days. I crept to the peep-hole and looked out. I was totally shocked to see who stood on the other side of the door and, with as much excitement as I could muster, flicked the deadbolt and swung wide the door, capturing my visitor in a hug which surprised him and nearly knocked him off-balance.
“Uncle Jay?” I cried. “What are you doing here?”
“Well, I happened to be in town so I thought I’d drop by,” he fibbed. No one just happened to be in my town. At least not any of my relatives. “Truth?” he said.
“I’d appreciate it, though I’m very glad you’re here,” I answered.
“Your husband called me. I think he thought you needed some cheering up and, as he didn’t know whom else to call, he called me. You’re not mad? He thought you’d be mad.”
“He and I will take that up later, but no, I’m not really mad. I happy to see you. Come in! Come in,” I said, ushering him inside, shutting and locking the door behind us.
I saw he was dragging a rather large suitcase behind him and, upon seeing me notice, he said, “I’m going to crash here for a few days, if that’s alright with you. Your aunt is teaching a pottery class this week so she won’t really miss me.” I felt the cold invader which lived just under my heart give a squeeze which surfaced as annoyance, but I kept it together.
“Absolutely. Let me show you to your room,” I said, and, like a bellhop at a hotel, seized his suitcase and bade him to follow me up the stairs.
“I’ve never been here before, you know. Once I’ve settled, would you give me the grand tour?” he asked.
“Of course. And while you’re settling – there’s a bathroom in the hallway just outside your room if you need it – I’ll make some coffee. Sound good?”
“Sounds great,” he said, approvingly.
I busied myself in the kitchen, having left my uncle upstairs making himself at home. I couldn’t understand what I was feeling. I loved him – or, I knew I should – but I felt nothing more than annoyed at having someone else in my home. I mentally slapped myself, understanding how silly I was being. I was glad to see him; it had been years. But the visit felt oddly forced. I guessed hubby calling him out of the blue requesting help for me… Well, we can talk about that over coffee.
He came down having donned a well-worn sweatshirt with BROWN UNIVERSITY emblazoned on the front, and a pair of jeans; there were no shoes or socks on his feet. He did, indeed, look comfortable. He smiled easily and accepted a cup of coffee gratefully, saying, “It’s a longer drive than I expected.”
“You drove here? From Florida? That’s crazy, Jay!”
“Well, your hubby made it sound urgent and I didn’t want to pay last-minute prices for a flight to Nashville and then wind up having to drive three hours anyway, so I just packed and left. Your aunt says hello, by the way. She asked if she should come, too, but I told her I wanted to see what was going on, first. Your hubby made it seem urgent,” my uncle repeated.
He was clearly trying to get me to simply open up and tell him what was – had been – going on, but I didn’t know where to start. I hesitated.
“You can tell me anything, you know. I won’t judge you.”
“I know,” I said. “But the truth is so unbelievable. Hubby doesn’t believe me, why would you?”
“Your husband said something about a nightmare,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Why don’t you start there?”
“That’s just it, Uncle Jay! It wasn’t a nightmare. Well, it is a nightmare; I’m living it.. What happened isn’t over. It’s still happening. My point is, I didn’t make it up. Hubby thinks I dragged part of a bad dream to the surface with me and am having trouble distinguishing what part is reality, and what part is nightmare. But it didn’t… I didn’t…” I paused, frustrated.
“Go on,” he urged.
“It’s so hard to explain,” I explained. “When I think about it, I really want it to be a dream. I want it to be untrue. I’d rather be crazy and locked up for the rest of my life. But it is true. I’m not crazy. I can feel it, it’s still in there, curled up under my heart, waiting. Wanting.”
“What are you talking about?” my uncle asked gently. I knew I was making no sense. And I understood I was going to have to utter the entire vile story aloud once more. Taste the ugliness of the words, feel their syrupy thickness. All of it was abhorrent to me. I felt suddenly sick. My already gray skin must have paled alarmingly because my uncle suddenly shot out his hand and gripped my shoulder saying, “Whoa there. Are you okay?”
“No. I’m not sure I’ll ever be okay again. But you might as well hear the entire thing. You’re going to judge me just the way my husband has judged me, but there’s no getting around it. It happened.” From there, and for the second time, I haltingly made my way through the whole, horrible story. Worthlessly, it turned out; my uncle didn’t believe me, either.
“Clearly,” said he, after I’d finished speaking, “you believe this thing that happened to you is reality, sweetheart, but it just cannot be. Colossal beings with ice daggers just don’t exist. Moreover, they don’t appear and disappear silently on whiff of smoke. Those are fairy tales, honey. Granted, you do look a little off-color and kind of haggard, but your husband says you barely sleep, and you haven’t eaten in days. Is that true?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said simply. I was suddenly mistrustful of my uncle, but didn’t know why.
“Well then, let me take you out for dinner and when we come home, let me take care of you for a change, yes?”
“Yes,” I said again. What else could I say?
We had (I can’t say enjoyed) a meal together at a little hole-in-the wall Mexican restaurant I typically favored. My uncle praised the place and ate heartily. I barely touched my food – it had the appeal of cardboard – and only vaguely tasted my usual frozen margarita. But I feigned engagement in the conversation, my uncle making a concerted effort to discuss anything except why he was here or the story I’d told him. I felt as if he was purposely avoiding something.
When we’d finished eating, we walked around a bit. It was hot out, and I was not in a good mood; the heat making it worse. Finally, trying to choke down words which should remain unsaid lest I injure my uncle’s feelings by giving them voice, I bit my tongue so hard it bled and suggested we go home to get out of the heat. He agreed, though tossed in a side comment about being used to the hot and muggy Florida weather. Through all his forced good humor, though, he seemed unlike himself.
We drove the short distance home and when we arrived, hubby was there. He and my uncle slapped one another on the back in greeting, along with a firm handshake and a awkward man-hug, then spent a good long while chatting over another cup of coffee; ignoring me. Unneeded, I wandered upstairs and took up my usual post, keeping vigil over my soul.
That night after dark, there was a heavy pounding on the front door. I was still awake – having not ever achieved sleep – and was so thoroughly startled, I froze. Hubby, looking at me oddly, got out of bed, drew on some jeans, and, as he left our room, ran into my uncle in the hallway. They descended the steps together to answer the insistent pounding.
I sat up in bed, listening intently. There was urgent, whispered conversation drifting up from below. Who in the world? At this time of night…? And what are they arguing about? I thought. In my new way of knowing things I should not, or could not, know, I understood at once I was not safe. I should hide. I hurriedly put on my ever-present yoga pants and Birkenstocks, yanked on the nearest shirt (an ancient Girl Scout tee) and slipped quietly from the master bedroom to the adjacent empty bedroom at the end of the hall. I hid, literally, in the closet, among all the winter clothing we stored there once springtime hit. It was dusty and the air was pungent with the scent of old ski boots, wet and dried many times over with snow and sweaty feet.
Silently, I sat among the dark clothes and boots, tucked into a corner, mostly hidden by a long, deep sage, woolen coat. It, too, smelled rank. Maybe I need to get rid of it, I thought.
Sudden heavy steps moving upward. The closet I occupied was, essentially, directly above the staircase. I could feel the reverberation of each step as multiple sets of feet moved upward. Toward me. My heart was beating so hard I became convinced it would give me away. The evil Thing in my chest stretched; anticipating. I was cold all over.
“She’s not in here,” someone said.
“What? I just left her there,” said my husband.
“She couldn’t have gone far,” my uncle put in.
“Find her. Now. Split up. You, grab that damn box!” said the first voice.
My box? My soul? I thought, suddenly even more terrified. Beyond all capacity to reason, and in a panic to save my soul, I burst from the closet and nearly bowled over a stocky, dark-haired man in a white medical coat, like you see in laboratories and doctor’s offices. What the hell? I thought.
“She’s here!” he hollered. “I’ve got her.” and he made a grab for me. I anticipated him, though, and slipped past him out into the hallway only to come up against a wall of three other white-coated men, each with a similar look of urgency and… disgust?… on his face. The man behind me gave me a sudden sharp shove between my shoulder blades and I fell forward into the waiting arms of the three in front of me. I struggled violently. Screaming, lashing, trying to get away. Begging my husband and my uncle to do something. But they both stood back, looking uncomfortable, yet determined. “This is for the best, honey. You’ll see. I made my choice a very long time ago. You’ll have to make yours eventually, too,” my uncle said, cryptically.
“Yeah, for the best,” repeated my husband, who was wearing a look of both relief and concern.
What choice? I thought.
“Stop her from screaming,” yelled the Lab Coat One.
SMACK! Someone slapped me across the face, hard, but that only served to enrage me further and I doubled my efforts to escape their grasp.
“Give her the box,” my uncle suggested calmly.
“What?”
“Give her the box,” he repeated, clearly enunciating each word.
My husband stepped forward, handed the box to my uncle, who leaned over me and held the box where I could see it. Looking me straight in the eyes he said, “If you struggle, you’ll break this. Be a good girl and hold still for these nice men now and I’ll give you the box, okay sweetheart?” His placating tone annoying and syrupy. I didn’t want to obey him, but I really didn’t want my box to come to harm. It contained the most important part of me. I got the feeling they weren’t really going to let me have my soul back, though, but I had to try. I held still and shut up at once.
Lab Coat One said, “Let’s go!” and each of the four men took hold of one of my arms and legs. There I was, in the second floor hallway of my own house, being bodily r
|
Death.
For many, it is a concept to be feared, to be respected. It is the ender of relationships, of knowledge, of everything that you were and will have ever been. They see it as nothing but a monster, the blades ready at a moment’s notice to cut clean through the fragile string you call your life.
For others, it is but the next great step in the journey of existence. When it is time for them to shed their physical bond with the world, they do so gladly and without hesitation. They know not what waits beyond, but hope that there is yet more to discover, to experience, to explore. They are happy to go on.
Some simply consider it an escape; a way to flee from the pain of living, the hurt that comes from simply being alive. When life becomes too much to bear, they welcome the embrace of death regardless of what may follow after. For them, they do not care about meeting it prematurely, or if there is more. They only desire for their suffering to cease.
The one thing that all agree upon is that death is a universal truth; just as every being has a beginning, there must also come an end. Everyone prepares for it in different ways, but the result is always the same. No matter the person, no matter the status, no matter your wealth, riches, family, friends, everyone finds themselves in the ground one day.
But what if that weren’t true?
Let us consider the fantastic; if we were to delve into the realm of imagination, and say perhaps that you were undying, what would the ramifications be? Well, there are two aspects to consider, physical and mental.
Let us assume for a moment that even if you weren’t to die, your body would still be susceptible to aging, to disease, to lacerations. If you were to continue aging far beyond the limits of our programmed destruction, life would quickly become a living hell.
Your body would degrade, becoming weaker and weaker with each passing day. Eventually, if it hadn’t happened already, you’d no longer be able to walk, as your muscles and bones would have become far too fragile to support your weight. Soon, you wouldn’t be able to move at all lest you tear your body apart. And once your eyes were used up and dry, the world would turn black to them, as well as the rest of your senses in due time.
Imagine a fate such as that; paralyzed, blind and deaf to reality … but alive. A mass of disintegrated bone and flesh, maybe no more than a puddle of soupy tissue, but yes, alive.
Not so extravagant a thought, is it?
Or maybe, earlier on in your eternal life, you found yourself struck down with a disease of some kind. Maybe cancer? While many others have failed to beat it, you wouldn’t. However, perhaps you wouldn’t quite succeed, either. It is possible to assume that without proper and timely treatment, you’d simply be stuck in a stalemate with it for the rest of your life- which in your case, is a long while.
Imagine the pain that others go through in those last few months of their life, where many people are ever eager for their death to arrive, for an end to their suffering, a torture so great it forces people to beg for the sweet release of life leaving their bodies.
But that isn’t an available option to you, is it?
No, you’ll simply be left to your torment as the tumors continually grow, pressing hard against your bones, your nerves, your muscles, enveloping everything inside you. Who knows what will happen given enough time? No one before you has lived long enough to see.
And finally, what if you were wounded? What if you were tortured? If they cut your limbs apart and left you there, because they have a guarantee you won’t die? What if they removed your skin, inch by inch, until you were nothing but bloody muscle and tendon underneath? Where even the lightest of touches would send cascading waves of pain throughout your vessel, but not kill you?
That is what you face on the physical aspect, if you were to become invulnerable to death. But now we must move onto the mental consequences.
Let us ignore all of what has been stated above, and imagine that you’re a perfectly healthy individual, no sickness and no aging. For fifty years or so, you might feel very confident about your choice. But what happens when your family starts to die? Your parents may be expected, but your siblings? What of your best friends? Having to watch each one’s last breath, clasp each hand as their strength leaves them. How many funerals would you have to attend, when everyone you’ve ever known and loved has died?
How would you maintain a family? If you were to bear children with your wife or husband, how would that impact your relationship? As they continued to age and grow older as you stayed the same, a single moment of your life frozen in time forever? Eventually your children would surpass you, and not only would you witness the death of your significant other, but it would be your children whose hands you must hold as they travel into the next realm. And then your grandchildren, and their children, and so forth.
It’s alright, you’ll start over. In a few decades, you’ll be able to move on, to leave and start a different bloodline than the one you’ve now abandoned. And then you’ll have to undergo the same process again; losing your love, then your children, over and over with each new glimmer of hope you gain to lead a normal life.
They say that there’s no greater punishment than having to bury one of your own children. Well, you’ll have to bury all of them.
Maybe you grow wise, and distance yourself from humanity before you go insane from the mental stress that simply existing places on your mind. That’s only a temporary solution, unfortunately; everything is when you can’t die.
When the Earth falls into the sun in billions of years, and the sun burns itself out of existence, what then is left? You’d still be there, the one constant in the entirety of the universe. Floating through dust and ghosts of your solar system throughout the dark void of space. No oxygen, no heat, and no company. Completely alone for the rest of eternity.
When the universe finally dies, will that be the end of you? Will it finally be your time, or will you be forced to still linger on, witnessing reality as it was never meant to be seen?
Such is the gift of mortality. Everyone, at some point in their life asks themselves, what would it be like to live forever?
That’s not the question they should be asking. The true question you should ask yourself is this:
What happens when an immortal wants to die?
|
My name is Sylvester Penn. I am a professional psychotherapist working for the judicial branch of the state of Connecticut which is why I was so surprised to have received a call from a precinct asylum in southern Rhode Island and to hear that I had been summoned by name to speak with a particular in-patient. Making the drive down from the western half of the state took only a couple hours so I said I would be there as soon as possible.
Rhode Island is the smallest of the fifty United States but it also has one of the most complicated highway connection systems so it was a challenge to find my exit at first but ultimately I found the right ramp and the rest of the drive to the location was fairly straight-forward. It was getting late in the afternoon by the time I made the final left before I could just follow the road until I found the precinct. I pulled onto a 20mph speed limit road. Going at such a speed, I had the opportunity to appreciate the rustic Rhode Island countryside which was mostly quaint suburban homes swathed in dense forest. Just as my directions suggested, I was pulling under a final overpass that would clear the way to the precinct just ahead.
Until that point, nothing had seemed too out of the ordinary but that is when I saw them. Huddled like a pair of hobos in a New York subway tunnel were a pair of young boys sitting under the bridge; one hefty, one tall and scrawny. I might not have thought anything of them except that as I drove past they couldn’t seem to pull their eyes off of mine. I couldn’t tear my gaze away from them either for some reason and for a moment it felt as though the world had slowed so that I could get a good look at them. I was awoken by a blaring car horn as I nearly veered into the other lane on a bend that followed the overpass. I pulled back onto my lane and looked back trying to get a glimpse of whether these accusative boys were still staring. Whether they were or not I couldn’t tell as the overpass was hidden by the brush in increasing degrees and I put distance between myself and the bridge.
Ultimately I decided to put it out of my mind. Why was I getting so worked up about a pair of delinquents anyway? Who knows what they were doing huddled under that bridge? Instead, I faced back forwards and concentrated on making the rest of the drive a safe one. I could, at last, see that I was pulling up to the precinct and I straightened myself up, prepared to look professional to the gate guard who was undoubtedly watching me approach with a skeptical expression on his face.
When I pulled up to the gate I found that the guard was, in fact, a ‘she,’ not a ‘he,’ but — no surprise lost — she was about as cynical as I expected her to be, taking her job far more seriously than necessary and gazing down at me along the thin bridge of her nose. After some slight awkwardness, she permitted my entrance and I scanned the buildings for the one I was supposed to be reporting to. It took a few minutes as it was all the way at the back of the center but I found parking quickly and took to the stairs.
Once inside I was greeted by a gruff police chief who led me to the chambers where the in-patients were housed. “I don’t know how he got word of your name but I will warn you that the man you’re here to see today is a felon convicted of murder.”
“Thank you, I was briefed at my facility in Hartford.” I responded dryly. I had dealt with a wide variety of patients, all convicted of hideous crimes — some rightfully, some not. I was confident that I could handle another. As we continued down the narrow hallway here and there I heard the usual disturbance, a screech or a howl but nothing out of the ordinary. However, the room I was lead to was obtrusively silent, silent to the point of resonance.
“Suit yourself.” the chief shrugged. He unlocked the door and gestured that I could enter. As soon as I was inside, the door was closed behind me and locked. “Just give a holler when you’re done.”
The room that I found myself standing in was very dimly lit with ominous shadows shrouding the corners. A man who couldn’t have been older than twenty-seven was sat with his head hung at a round table with a light shining down on it like in an interrogation room. My impression was that this was not an orthodox precinct, to say the least.
“Hello,” I said to the patient, “may I sit down?” He didn’t look up at me, he just kept his face hidden but he nodded slowly like a timid child. “Thank you,” I said, maintaining my professionalism. I sat down and just faced him, thinking the tension would eventually prompt him to speak. At first he just lifted his chin off his chest a bit and peeked at me as though he were nervous that I was going to ground him for a week.
“You must be wondering who I am.” I offered. No response. “My name is Sylvester Penn. I’m the psychotherapist you specially requested a visit from?”
“Yeah, I know who you are.” He responded bluntly.
“And who are you?” I fired back, catching my opportunity to keep the conversation going.
“I’m Michael. Just Michael.”
“Okay, ‘Just Michael.’ Is there something in particular you wanted to talk to me about today?” I proceeded, probing for a trigger. I needed to find a way to open the flood gates. The silent type usually has a lot pent up to say. He didn’t respond to my question immediately. Finally, he just shrugged.
I decided to try and open up a usual session, approach this in the most advantageous way I could. “Okay, so we know why I’m here. I’m here because you want me here. Why don’t we talk about why you’re here?”
“I killed someone,” Michael said abruptly.
“You did?” I responded simply. Usually I was met with refusal of the truth.
“But it’s not who they think it is,” he explained further.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean… I did kill someone but… not who they think it is,” he said. I paused for a moment, not knowing how to respond to that. “It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault.” He started mumbling under his breath. “It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault.”
“What’s your fault, Michael? It’s your fault that you killed them?” Usually, patients at least had an alibi for what they did. This patient was different. Had he called me here to help him deal with his own remorse? It wasn’t unheard of. “There are still ways of redeeming yourself, Michael. Your past may be what it is, but your future is not lost.” I explained.
“It’s all MY fault!” He suddenly shouted in my face, lifting his up into the light to reveal the tears streaming down it. I just sat silently and watched. Michael seethed, his shoulders lifting and falling with each breath. I let the pause linger. When he had calmed down a bit and I could see that he wasn’t going to continue the conversation, I moved to keep the ball in the air.
“Where are you from, Michael?” I asked.
“South Kingstown,” he replied in a slightly whining tone.
“Did you grow up there?”
“Yes.”
I had him. “What was it like growing up in South Kingstown?”
“Boring at first,” he said honestly, calming down and speaking in an ordinary tone. “The neighborhood I grew up in was mostly full of retirees. There weren’t a lot of kids to play with.”
“That must have been hard on you,” I said generically.
“Well it didn’t last too long.” he offered.
“Did kids start moving into the neighborhood?”
“Eventually,” he explained. “At first it was just one. Andrew. He was my best friend. He moved in right next door.”
“He must’ve been important to you.”
“Yeah…” he almost sighed as if he wasn’t really fond of thinking of it.
“What was he like?”
“He was a good friend when we were little. I wasn’t always such a good friend to him.” Michael supplied.
“What do you mean by that?” I pushed.
“Well, I was kind of mean to him sometimes.”
“How so?”
“I was really excited when he first moved in, you know?” Michael began. I nodded knowingly, comprehensively. “But he was always really kind of different. He wasn’t really all that smart. Plus he was really big and sometimes he broke things — like my toys. I knew he didn’t do it on purpose but it was so easy to get mad at him.”
“Well, it’s reasonable to be angry over broken things,” I suggested.
“Yeah, but not as angry as I got. I would insult him, tell him he was an idiot. Call him fat. He would always run home crying and for some reason there was a certain amount of satisfaction I got out of that.” Michael related. “I don’t know what was wrong with me.”
I paused for a moment. Pensively, strategically. He just sat there, waiting for me to prompt him again. “I’m wondering what your home life was like — what your parents were like.”
“I had a great childhood,” Michael responded. “I was an only child. My parents were good to me, we lived in a nice house, in a nice neighborhood. I always got almost anything I wanted.”
“Yes, but those are all material things,” I noted. “Did you ever feel as though they weren’t meeting you on an emotional level?”
“No.” He said frankly. “My mom was very loving and caring, my dad was an all-American kind of guy. He taught me to play baseball and ride a bike and stuff. It was really normal.”
“So where do you think the animosity towards Andrew came from?” Michael looked down and I could tell he was fiddling with something under the table. I could also tell that he didn’t want to answer my question. I was beginning to see some patterns that were telling me that he had probably been in this asylum for a while and that he had entered it at a pretty young age. But something about his speech patterns told me that his issue hit very deep in his childhood, which is a common assumption, but Michael was different. From what I’d read of his records, he’d been admitted at the age of twenty-one, but he may have been incarcerated before then. “Didn’t Andrew stop wanting to be around you when you were mean?”
“Well, sort of,” Michael avoided. “He would say that at first but I could always convince him to let it go. I should’ve apologized but I never did. And he didn’t even bother once we’d built the tree house.”
“Was the tree house your way of coaxing him?” I asked.
“Well, we built it together with our dads. It was kind of expensive too since it came in a kit and it was really big. We could actually stand up in it and bring up a mini cooler for sodas and stuff. Our parents split the money on it.”
“It sounds like he felt like he had to be your friend if he wanted to use the tree house.” I pointed out.
“Yeah, I think so too now when I think about it. I didn’t even think of it way back then though.” He admitted.
“So you were kind of taking advantage of him.”
“For a while, yeah. But then…” he trailed off.
“But then, what?” I knew this was important.
“Well, he still kept breaking my stuff,” Michael stated. It was more of an observation of an excuse than just an excuse.
“And how did you feel about that?”
“I felt mad.”
“How mad?”
“Well, I just felt like it was because he was fat and stupid and not very careful. It was like he didn’t care. At least, that’s how I thought of it. And then one day he broke something really important to me.” Michael explained.
“What was that?”
“It was this Superman action figure that I had been begging my mom to get for me for a long time. It was one of those featured toys you see on the Warner Bros commercials and it was really expensive ’cause it was big and well-made.” Michael told me.
“I see. So when he broke it you must have been pretty upset.” I stated.
“Not just that but I started to fight him! But he pushed me down and he kind of… lost control.” Michael said.
I sat up a bit at that. “How do you mean?”
“I mean, I pushed him and punched him because I was angry, but he was a lot bigger than me so it didn’t hurt him much but he, like, threw me around and gave me a black eye.” Michael recounted.
A concerned expression had come over my face. “Why do you think he reacted so violently?”
Michael was quiet for a minute. He looked as though he hadn’t considered that as much. Finally, he said, “That’s why I shouldn’t have been such a jerk to him.”
“So then what happened?”
“We both got in trouble. We got grounded. And I was still mad at him. I had never been that mad at him. His mom made him apologize to me and he was crying and all I could think was ‘yeah, keep crying you fat idiot.'” Michael said. He shook his head at himself.
“Did you stop being friends with him after that?” I asked.
“No.,” he said.
“You made up with him?” I asked.
“Well, not exactly. One day, after we’d been grounded, I went to his house and asked him to come out and play. I talked him into going to the Little Park. There were two parks in our neighborhood, the Little Park and the Big Park. Most kids didn’t like going to the Little Park even though the stuff there was newer because they hadn’t cleared away much of the forest there. Everyone was scared of the forest.” Michael explained, he was fiddling with whatever was under the table again.
“Including Andrew?” I asked. Michael nodded. “So what did you do?”
“I had these two tennis balls,” he said. “One was all water-logged from playing fetch on the beach with my cousin’s dogs and the other was brand spanking new. We used to like playing baseball with tennis balls because we could hit them farther. And I had this game made up so I could get back at Andrew. I said, ‘One of us will pitch the ball and see how far we can hit it. Then the other one will go get the ball from the woods.’ I knew he wasn’t going to want to do it. So I said, ‘Look, I’ll pitch first.'”
“And he agreed?” I presumed.
“Yes. So I pitched him the old ball so that I could find it really easily in the woods. When I came out in no time with it he wasn’t so scared anymore. Then I gave him the new ball and he pitched it to me.”
“And you were really good at baseball.” I continued, “So it went further into the woods.”
“Andrew didn’t want to go in to get the ball. He stood there staring at me for a minute but I told him, ‘Hey, if I can do it, you can do it. It’s only fair.’ And he just wanted to be friends with me again so bad that he couldn’t say no. As soon as I was sure that he was all the way in, I just ran home laughing.” Michael was looking at me with an expression that read, ‘can you believe that?’
“So that was your revenge for the Superman.” I said taking my chin between thumb and forefinger.
“Yeah, but I got more than I bargained for.” Michael said.
“How do you mean?” I asked, more out of habit than anything else.
“He didn’t come back.” Michael said.
“What?” I asked in shock. Was he revealing something to me?
“I watched out of my bedroom window for hours.” Michael said. “I wanted to see him come running home to his mommy. I wanted to be able to say that I didn’t want to be friends with him because he didn’t bring my ball back. I wanted to scare him and embarrass him. But he didn’t come back.”
“What did you do?” I asked, now out of interest more than analysis.
“Well, I remember that we were having my favorite for dinner — spaghetti and meatballs. And I kept hearing his mom calling for him. I couldn’t eat a bite and the longer it took for Andrew to come back, the more guilty I felt.”
“Did you go looking for him?” I urged him.
“I couldn’t get out of the house fast enough. I finally just couldn’t take it. I excused myself from the table and went running out to find him.” Michael’s gaze was off in the distance as if he could still imagine that night. “I ran straight to the woods and I went hunting around for him in there. I was calling his name and it just kept getting darker and darker. Finally, I found him.”
“Was he alright?”
“He was okay, just scared out of his mind. He looked like he had seen a ghost. He threw up on himself. I took his arm around my shoulder and helped him walk back. Our parents were horrified. His were so worried about him, mine were furious with me — especially once they found out what happened. I was grounded for a month.”
“But you went back for him. You felt responsible and you were a good friend to him in the end.” I said, re-entering therapy mode.
“Yeah, but not until after I’d already been a horrible friend. And the worst part was that Andrew really felt like I had saved his life and like he owed me something. He looked at me like some kind of hero.” Michael said, his face had gradually resumed the position of staring at his knees, chin to his chest.
“Did you let him believe that?” I asked him.
“Well, not exactly. But I didn’t exactly disagree either when he acted that way.” Michael admitted. “But I think it was better that way. I kindof felt like I needed to look out for him after that. I’d taken advantage of the fact that he wasn’t really smart and that he was gullible enough to fall for my trick and so I was worried that other people could take advantage of him the same way.”
“It sounds like that experience made you a good friend to him.” I suggested.
“It was more like I needed a way to make it up to him.” Michael amended.
I still felt like that was a sign of a healthy conscience but I let it go. “So that experience brought you closer to Andrew.”
“Well… I’ll put it this way: When I say that I used to call Andrew stupid… ‘stupid’ was a harsh word but it’s true that he wasn’t all there in the head. He was definitely born with a couple screws missing. If you did one thing to Andrew that he thought was mean, whether it was genuinely mean or not, he would take you for a mean person and not want to be around you anymore. If you were nice to him then he thought that necessarily meant that you were best friends.” Michael explained.
“There wasn’t a lot of gray area there.” I concluded.
“Exactly.” Michael agreed. “And this is when new kids started moving into the neighborhood. Andrew and I lived next door and then there was Mardi Goodwin from down the street and the Wilson brothers, Shane and Lance from two blocks down. But the one who stood out the most was Stephen DiMisaco.”
“What do you mean by ‘stood out’?”
“He was just weird, you know? Like, he was really weird looking. He was super tall, like, abnormally tall. And he had a huge nose like a toucan or something, he was always showing his upper teeth and he wore the biggest glasses I’d ever seen that had reflective lenses and bright red rims. He just stuck out like a sore thumb.”
“That’s a bit superficial don’t you think?” I said although a bit absent-mindedly. There was something about that description that struck me but I couldn’t think of why.
“Well, I honestly didn’t have a problem with that but it just made him even weirder on top of the other stuff,” Michael explained.
“What other stuff?” I asked predictably still lost in my own thoughts.
“Well his, like… hobbies and stuff. He was just into some really freaky stuff.”
“Give me an example.”
“Well like stuffing animals.”
“As in taxidermy?” I offered.
“What’s that?” Michael asked, brow furrowing as he turned his gaze up at me and away from his hands.
“When you remove the organs of a dead animal and then stuff them with cotton or other materials.” I defined.
“Yeah! That’s what Stevie did!” Michael enthused, apparently understood.
“Well that might be a bit out of the ordinary but it’s no reason to judge someone so harshly.” I reasoned.
“Well, he was, like, obsessed with it.” Michael insisted. “If you had known him, you would understand why he made people uncomfortable. He had no problems getting into the gritty details of things like organs and bones and he would just talk your ear off until it got overwhelming. It was so hard to be around him and he was creepy. He talked in this, like, nasally, slurring voice. It just made your skin crawl.”
“It sounds like you had a preconceived judgment of him,” I observed. “Don’t you think you were being a bit harsh?”
Michael stared at me for a few minutes and I could tell that he was formulating a response. “You know… sometimes that’s exactly what my mother said. She would say, ‘I’ve met his father and he’s a very nice man. Stephen seems like a nice boy. Maybe you just need to give him a chance.’ And it would sound so reasonable that I couldn’t help but wonder the same thing myself. Maybe I really had been too harsh or too mean but then I would give him another chance and it would just remind me of how… well, how gross he was. It was just unpleasant to be around him.”
“I’m wondering if you were being pressured by other people to be biased against him,” I stated. There was something about this Stephen kid that seemed important to the story. “How did Andrew feel about Stephen?”
“Oh, Andrew loved Stevie,” Michael said with some obvious resentment in his voice. “He just thought Stevie was the coolest thing since raspberry popsicles. Every single time Stevie would come around and start talking about some pheasant or beaver or something that he’d been ‘working on’ it was like pulling teeth to get Andrew to leave with the rest of us.”
“Who’s the rest of us?”
“Me, Shane, Lance, Mardi.” Michael listed.
“You were hanging out with them?” I questioned.
“Yeah. And it was hard enough to convince them to let Andrew tag along.” Michael heaved an exasperated sigh.
“Why is that?” I asked, “Is it because of Andrew’s differences?”
“Yeah.” Michael agreed. “It’s because he was so big. It took so much effort to teach him to ride a bike and even then he struggled to keep up.”
“And that’s what you and all the kids were into doing? Riding your bikes?” I said, just confirming information.
“Yeah, it was how we got everywhere. If we wanted ice cream, we chased the ice cream truck on our bikes. If we wanted pizza or gum or baseball cards, we biked downtown. And there were tons of hills so Andrew would struggle every step of the way.”
“Or pedal of the way.” I punned.
“Yeah pedal.” Michael repeated without a crack on his face.
“And what about Stevie? Did he have a bike?” I asked.
“Yeah, but it was the most embarrassing piece of crap you ever laid eyes on!” Michael shot back. “His dad had built it for him out of wood. It had crappy old tires they’d probably gotten from the junk yard. It had no gears and it had a little basket on the front. Even Mardi’s bike didn’t have a basket.”
“Did you invite him to go get pizza with you?”
“No!” Michael spat, as if that much should’ve been obvious. “But the moron could never seem to catch a hint! Lance, Shane and Mardi would bike ahead and I would try not to lag too far behind and still make sure Andrew could keep up but eventually I would have to leave him behind or Stevie would catch us.”
“You would avoid him.” I summed up what he was saying.
“Yes.” Michael admitted. “And to be honest, I think the other kids were trying to do the same thing to Andrew. I think they just wanted to hang out with me and didn’t want Andrew to be the baggage. And to be even more honest, sometimes I agreed with them. The irony is I think Andrew had a little more common sense than even Stevie did in that case. I gradually started seeing less and less of him and I started seeing him hanging out with Stevie more.”
“Well it was normal to want more friends.” I tried to empathize.
“I still kept an eye out for Andrew though.” Michael persisted.
This caught me by surprise. “You still felt that you owed him something.” I stated.
“I guess, yeah.” Michael said.
“So how did that work?”
“Well, one day we were all out biking and it was one of the times that Stevie somehow managed to get everyone to let him tag along. Lance was really sortof the head of the group so if he was in a good mood he sometimes let Stevie and Andrew come with us.” Michael was starting another story. I rested my elbows on the table to show that I was listening. “But Lance’s moods could change easily and sometimes, when he got sick of Stevie following us, he tried to find ways of making him run home crying.”
“He’d make fun of him?” I asked.
Michael nodded. “Mmhm. Yeah and it was usually about his bike. This time he was making fun of the brakes which was one of his favorite topics.”
“What was wrong with the brakes?”
“They were faulty and made a loud screeching noise whenever he used them.” Michael explained. “And on this day, Lance had just gotten a new bike with handle-bar brakes. Back then that was kindof new and cool so he had been showing off by riding down hills and braking real easy after speeding down them. It looked like a motorcycle and we were all riding next to him to see him do it. Except for Stevie who got nervous about riding down hills.”
“That’s why Lance was getting annoyed.” I concluded, getting the picture even as Michael nodded in confirmation.
“So Lance starts making fun of the sound that Stevie’s brakes made and Stevie was getting real heated about that. Lance kept making the noise and Stevie finally says something drastic that he knew wasn’t true just like he always did.” Michael said.
“What was that?”
“Well he said — to Lance, you know — he said, ‘Your brakes aren’t special just because they’re on the handlebars! You look stupid riding down the hill over and over!'” I noticed that Michael took on Stevie’s nasal drawl as he recounted what Stevie said. “And he was right but he was killing Lance’s buzz and just trying to be a hot shot and Lance just wasn’t going to be outdone.”
“So what did Lance do?” I egged Michael on.
“He dared him to prove that his brakes were better and to race him to the bottom of Hampton Way.” Michael said. “And Stevie was so heated he just couldn’t say no even though he probably knew that it wasn’t a good idea.”
“Why wasn’t it a good idea?” I asked, not familiar with local roads.
“Hampton Way is the steepest hill in our neighborhood and it ends on Route 1.” I got chills just imagining such a challenge even with a perfectly functional bike. “So Lance and Stevie got on their bikes at the top and prepared to race down. The rules were ‘no braking until the bottom or you lose, whoever gets to the bottom first wins.'”
“And Stevie accepted.” I said gravely.
“He was so sure of himself.” Michael continued. “Mardi stood in front of them and dropped her sweatshirt to start the race and Stevie and Lance sped down the road. We had to run to keep them in eyesight since the road bends. We saw them get to the bottom and Lance pulled to a clean stop.”
“And Stevie kept going!?”
“And Stevie kept going. And there was a car coming and for a moment–” Michael couldn’t even finish that sentence. He just shook his head. “I was sure he was going to get hit but the car swerved and only hit his back wheel. Lucky for him the road was empty otherwise because he got thrown off his bike and he crashed into the guard rail.”
“That’s pretty scary.” I said.
“You don’t know scary.” Michael had his elbows on the table now as well. I hadn’t expected that response from him.
“I’m sorry?” I asked confused and a little insulted.
Michael disregarded that. “He was pretty beat up.” he continued. I relaxed and let the remark go for the time being. “The other kids beat it ’cause they didn’t want to get in trouble and the car had pulled a hit and run. Andrew and I had to run out into the road to get him. A couple cars stopped and asked if we needed a ride but we just told them we weren’t far. I carried Stevie on my shoulder while Andrew wheeled his bike along behind us. We took him straight to his house.”
“Was his father there?” I inquired.
“Yes.” Michael replied.
“Was he angry?” I asked.
“No, he just worried about Stevie. He couldn’t stop thanking us for bringing Stevie home. Andrew wanted to stay until we were sure that Stevie was alright. His house was creepy though so I just wanted to leave as soon as possible.” Michael said.
“You still resented him even then?” I half-stated, half-asked. Michael didn’t respond to that. “Why was it different with Stevie than it was with Andrew?”
“What do you mean?” Michael now had his hands under the table again.
“When you went to help Andrew in the woods, it left you feeling responsible for him. When you went to help Stevie after his accident, you still felt uncomfortable being in his house.” I drew an inconsistent parallel.
Michael looked pensive for a moment. His lifted an eyebrow in a slightly annoyed expression and just looked down at his hands, fiddling with whatever he was holding. Then he looked up with the same expression on his face. “I don’t know.” he said finally.
“You don’t know what?” I asked.
“I don’t know why it was different with Stevie. I guess he was still just too creepy and weird. His stuffed animals were hanging all over the walls against these plaque things. His dad was too much like him too and he kept making this gross snorting noise when he breathed in like his nose was permanently stuffed and he was inhaling to prevent it from dripping.” Michael described. “And he kept saying, ‘Are you Stevie’s friends? Oh I’m so glad that Stevie has friends. I worried that he wouldn’t have friends, I feel better knowing he has great friends like you.’ It was really awkward and Andrew just kept smiling and he looked so proud of himself and just kept confirming that we were all friends. I was just glad that the others weren’t there to see it.”
“You didn’t even want people to think he was your friend?” I asked.
“No.”
There was a long silence after that. I heard a dull rumble drift through the small slotted window on the wall directly behind Michael. Shortly after, a soft dripping sound could be heard. The bulb in the lamp over our head flickered a bit between full brightness and dimness.
“I’m wondering why you asked me to come here.” I voiced my thoughts out loud. “Why me?”
Michael stared at me for a moment. He looked mildly surprised at my straightforwardness. Finally he said, “I’ve heard things about you.”
“What things?” I asked.
“I heard that you’re… what was that word? When you don’t tell other people what someone tells you?”
“Confidential?”
“That’s it!” he actually grinned at that revealing two perfect rows of white teeth except for a pair of slightly forward canines. “Confidential. I knew I could trust you. I heard about that case where you spoke to a witness and didn’t tell anyone even after the case had been settled and the truth had been discovered. That’s how I knew I needed to talk to you. To tell you what happened myself.”
I stared at him through squinted eyes. “To tell me what happened?”
“I killed someone.” He repeated the same line he’d begun with. “But not who they think it is.”
“Yes, I remember you said that.” I said nodding. “Where did you hear these things about me?” Michael didn’t respond. He just stared at me with the smile frozen on his face. “Michael?” I tried to be more forceful with my question. He refused to budge. I decided to just continue. “So was Stephen alright?”
“Oh he was fine.” Michael confirmed, letting his smile drop. “But that wasn’t the last time that Lance got to him. In fact, I think, since that incident with the bikes, Lance sortof liked the fact that he knew he could get to Stevie. I think he kindof got a kick out of it, actually.”
“Did he bully Stephen?”
“Stevie.”
“Stevie.” I let him correct me.
“Yes.” Michael said honestly. “We were all just starting at Curtis Corner.”
“What’s that?” I asked, displaying my ignorance of the locality.
“It’s a local middle school.”
“Okay.”
“It was our first year there and most of us had all of our classes together. Lance was a few years ahead of us so we would only really see him in the hallway but he would take every opportunity he got to hunt Stevie down.” Michael explained.
“What sorts of things did he do to him?” I asked.
“He would push him into walls, throw stuff at him, knock his things out his hands — you know, the usual bully stuff.” Michael listed, “but he would act as if it were all just kidding around or joking and that he did those things by accident. Like he was just getting a little too rambunctious and that was all it was. That none of it was intentional — that’s the word — but everyone knew it was intentional except the teachers. The teachers were too fond of Lance to think that he could ever do anything wrong and none of us liked Stevie whether or not we liked Lance so he just got ignored.”
“What about Andrew? How was he doing in middle school?” I asked.
“Andrew had kindof… fallen behind in school.” Michael told me. “His parents worked very closely with our teachers in elementary school and they had decided to hold him back a year. I still saw him around in the neighborhood but it would be a year before I would see him around in school again.”
“And so during that time you noticed a lot of what Lance was doing.” I said, comprehending.
“And one day it just got… out of hand.” Michael explained.
“How so?”
“Well Lance had been up to his usual antics during the week and I think Stevie had just had enough of it. Somehow, he’d gotten the idea in his head that it was time to give Lance a taste of his own medicine.” Michael said this very slowly to emphasize the weight of this event.
“What did he do?” I asked, on
|
Detention. Joel hated detention. Detention and Mr. Briars. And his classmates. Detention, Mr. Briars and his classmates. And school in general. Pretty much anything and anyone associated with school he hated. Not that he showed it though – he was pretty good at playing the game in company and to his parents, but that didn’t do anything to reduce his dislike of it all.
Detention was at number one though on his list of hates.
Mr. Briars had unceremoniously picked him out at the end of his final class of the day for some minor infraction, dumping him in an empty classroom with orders to read a book silently, with the added kicker that he couldn’t leave until he’d finished it. He hadn’t argued. Mr. Briars had it in for him for some reason, always singling him out, always watching him from the corner of his eye. Whatever. Going with the flow seemed the best option to deal with the asshole for the time being.
Joel turned the book over in his hands. It was a light, slim book, the cover a garish cartoon picture of various men dressed in green tights and tunics carrying a variety of swords and wooden staffs, except for the one stood in the middle of the group holding a bow and bearing a wide smile on a blond moustached face beneath a hood. Joel groaned inwardly as he read the title in typical olde english font emblazoned across the top:
A TALE OF SHERWOOD FOREST
A Choose Your Own Fate Adventure
Great, he thought sarcastically, it was one of those books, the kind where you had to select from a set of options and flip to another page depending on your choice. On and on until your character died or achieved some kind of bullshit goal. The last time he’d read one of these he must’ve been ten or eleven, and even then he’d grown bored with it and hadn’t finished. Mr. Briars would probably test him on it when he came back like the unapologetic shit he was though so he’d best just get it over with. Slouching back in his chair, Joel turned to the first page.
—
Welcome Adventurer!
You have come seeking fame and fortune by joining Robin Hood’s merry men! Tarry not in the woods though, hold fast to your decisions, and you shall find the goal you seek!
—
Joel snorted derisively before continuing on to the first section:
—
1.
Sunlight pierces the canopy of trees high above you, sending shafts of light through the sky of leaves to illuminate your path. You entered Sherwood Forest but a short time ago, and already it is as if the woods have swallowed you whole. You have on you your trusty sword, three days worth of provisions, flint and tinder, plus a warm cloak which seems a burden on such a fine summer’s day.
The forest path is wide, the day pleasant, and your heart beats strongly in your chest. Today is the day when you shall achieve your goal. You will find Sir Robin of Locksley, the fabled Robin Hood, and join his troupe of merry men!
It’s not long before you come upon a fork in the path. To the left it curls off toward an area of the forest where a villager told you a small river runs through, but that there are plenty of man-made fordings available should you look. To the right the path is more or less straight, but appears to head into a dark, dense part of the forest which looks rather foreboding.
If you wish to go left toward the river, turn to 8.
If you wish to go right down the ominous forest path, turn to 11.
—
It read like any one of these books he’d picked up before. Joel looked at the options. Only an idiot goes looking for trouble in dark and foreboding places he thought, and wasn’t a river crossing and a contest a part of the Robin Hood legend? He chose accordingly.
—
8.
Before you even see the river, your ears pick out the sound of swift running water somewhere up ahead. You quicken your pace, eager to both see the source of the sound, but also to splash some water in your face to relieve yourself of some of the heat you feel from such a long walk.
You pass a large, gnarled oak tree and finally see the fast flowing river, the sunlight bouncing off it’s surface, and is that a fish or two you see slicing around beneath? Kneeling by the bank, you dip your cloth into the cool, refreshing water, then lift it and place it gingerly on the back of your neck. The initial cold is a shock, but a welcome one, and you feel the coolness spread through your body. The bigger shock though is when you hear a loud voice calling from across the way!
“Ho Stranger! If you seek to cross this river, you must first pass me!”
You look up in surprise and see a giant of a man, dressed in a dark brown leather jerkin with hands almost as big as the thick beard upon his rugged face, stood on the opposite bank next to a large log which breasts the river. In his right hand stands a long, thick piece of wood. You recognise it as a quarterstaff, and that he must be none other than Little John himself, one of the fabled merry men you seek!
In an instant you understand his meaning, and looking next to the large log on your side of the bank is another quarterstaff, obviously for the use of travellers such as you. Finally a chance to prove yourself! Despite your eagerness however, he does look rather large, and you wonder at your chances.
If you wish to fight Little John, turn to 15.
If you wish to return the way you came and try the other path, turn to 11.
—
Ha! He knew it. Barely in and he was already dealing with one of the merry men. Joel wanted this over with, so going back wasn’t an option. Best to carry on forward and get it done.
—
15.
Eagerly you sweep the quarterstaff up into your hand and approach the log bridge. As you step on carefully, so does Little John, easily twirling the quarterstaff in his hands. You wonder to yourself how many people have come this way before, only to find themselves unceremoniously beaten and pushed into the river. That your opponent is confident there is no doubt, but if the stories are true his naivety is just as strong as his biceps. Should you fight fairly, or trick him somehow?
If you still wish to retreat and try the other path, turn to 11.
If you wish to fight fairly, turn to 18.
If you wish to cheat, turn to 23.
—
Now that was an interesting option, he thought. Again, going back wasn’t going to happen. Of the other two choices though, Joel knew which one he leant towards. Fighting fairly may be the more honorable way, but to him the result was always the key factor to his way of thinking.
—
23.
As you approach him, you raise your quarterstaff in what you hope is a defensive position. He smiles good-humouredly, rolls his shoulders to loosen himself up, winks, and quickly raises his staff for an almighty blow. As his staff reaches its peak, you pretend to look past him and shout: “Bear!”
His head whips round to check, instantly forgetting about you. You take your chance, raise your staff high, and aim a truly thunderous whack across his skull!
Your arms vibrate with the impact and you think you’re going to drop the staff. Nervously you watch as Little John turns his head back to face you. His face moves quickly from confusion, to anger, and then dazed. He falls to his knees, and topples off the log, but is still able in his daze to roughly grab at a protruding broken branch on the underside of the trunk.
The cold water returns him partly to his senses, and he slowly grins up at you before speaking:
“Well done stranger! Robin has need of men with sense as well as strength. Give me your hand and I’ll take you to him.”
If you offer him your hand, turn to 26.
If you wait for him to climb back up himself, turn to 31.
—
It was a difficult choice Joel realised. Offering to help him up would put him in a dangerous position. Off balance, Little John could pull him into the water or anything. Joel could see the way the book was heading though. Once you bested an opponent in this fairy tale land of good and evil, you always fell back on the honourable option. He thought it a load of crap, but the answer the book was expecting was obvious at this point.
—
26.
You look down at Little John, bedraggled and wet and being buffeted by the river, and offer your hand to help him up. As he reaches up to grasp your hand though, you instead wrap your offered hand once more around the quarterstaff and drive it’s end into his face, catching him off-guard.
You feel the impact resonate up the wood as his nose shatters beneath the blow. He bellows in rage and agony, one hand moving to cover his now bloody face. You quickly strike at his remaining hand holding onto the branch under the log and hear the satisfying crack of broken bone. He yells once more and releases his hold, the river quickly drawing him under and away. You watch him struggle for a short while, then throw both quarterstaffs into the water and carry on your way.
Turn to 28.
—
Okay, thought Joel, what the hell just happened?!
He hadn’t expected that at all. Thinking about it though, it made a lot of sense. Who knew what Little John might’ve tried? His character’s response was sensible – he’d lulled his opponent and then acted, removing a potential danger. Joel found himself warming to this book.
—
28.
The path on the other side of the river is barely visible, and so obviously not a commonly used means of moving through Sherwood Forest. Logically therefore it must be a route used only by the Merry Men and Robin Hood himself!
Gradually the path grows narrower, the trees thinner and closer together on each side until finally the path appears to be a corridor of trees, leading to a dead end but with two large arches with a bowman stood in front of each. They look like twins, an image reinforced by them both speaking at the same time and with the same words as you approach.
“Greetings Stranger. You have bested Little John, but wisdom is as valuable as skill with weapons in Robin’s camp. Behind us lie two ways forward. One leads on to the camp, the other to a hidden pit filled with wooden stakes. You may ask one of us a single question, but beware, one of us will lie and the other tell the truth. Which route do you choose?”
You try to pick out any differences in the paths beyond the arches from where you stand, but they look identical. Your only choices appear to be to ask the bowmen or take a chance and pick a route at random.
If you take the left arch, turn to 36.
If you take the right arch, turn to 38.
If you ask one of the bowmen which archway leads to the camp, turn to 42.
If you ask one of the bowmen which archway the other bowman will say leads to the camp, turn to 62.
If you use intimidation on the bowmen, turn to 49.
—
Now that was a curious last option Joel thought. The first two random choices didn’t appeal, and whilst he was confident in his logic what the right choice was, he was drawn to the last action. It made a lot more sense to him, skipping the need to risk a correct answer against one he could guarantee if approached right.
—
49.
You walk slowly up to one of the bowman, rubbing your chin thoughtfully as if thinking of an appropriate question. Abruptly you draw your sword, catching them off guard and grabbing the nearest from behind, placing your blade against his throat before the other can react. The one you are holding trembles beneath your grip, whilst the other watches you nervously, fingering his bow.
If you ask the bowmen to tell you which arch leads to the camp or you’ll kill the one you’re holding, turn to 43.
If you kill the bowman you are holding immediately, turn to 47.
—
Another interesting set of options. That threats were useful Joel knew from past experience, but only if the other guy knew you’d carry them out. Carl in fifth grade had learnt that lesson the hard way. The answer was obvious.
—
47.
Without a flicker of emotion, you draw your sword across the throat of the man you are holding. He gurgles in alarm as the flesh parts and blood pours forth from the wound across his neck. Dropping him to the floor to breathe his last, you point your blade at the stomach of the other bowman.
If you ask the remaining bowmen to tell you now which arch leads to the camp, turn to 56.
If you force the bowman to go ahead of you by swordpoint through one of the arches, turn to 53.
—
Both choices would work, Joel thought casually, but one of them obviously added an element of insurance to his character’s survival.
—
53.
Prodding the remaining bowman with the point of your now bloody sword, you state coldly that what happened to his friend can quite easily happen to him and that he will now lead you through the correct archway to the camp.
Reluctantly, he moves toward the right arch.
If you follow the remaining bowman through the arch, turn to 68.
If you first run the remaining bowman through with your sword, killing him, turn to 65.
—
Joel was torn at this one; it wasn’t as obvious an answer as the last. Keeping the remaining bowman alive added an element of risk if he tried to escape, but then how far did the man’s loyalty to Robin Hood and his cause go? So far as to pick the wrong archway even, thus risking his own life? Despite the risks, having the captive bowman along gave Joel more options he realised.
—
68.
The bowman has been stumbling ahead of you forlornly at swordpoint for a few minutes when you notice his furtive glances back and the slowing of his pace. Prepared, you wait until he makes his move. Ten steps later he spins and makes a grab for your sword. You efficiently stab him through the stomach, then kick his shuddering body off your blade. As he falls backward the earth ahead of you gives way and his body falls into the trap you had previously been warned about. Skirting the edge you look down to see his bloody and broken form pierced upon multiple sharpened stakes, one piercing his cheek and exiting his mouth and giving him a permanently shocked expression. Content he is dead, you make your way back along the path to the two arches. You take some time to dig a shallow grave a little way from the arches and bury the bowman you killed earlier, covering the mound with additional loose leaves and sticks. Once happy with your work, you turn and take the left archway.
Turn to 22.
—
He’d known he was right to keep him alive! Additional resources were a useful buffer between himself and unpleasant situations, like the friends he’d cultivated at school. As long as they could be controlled or manipulated, they were handy to have around. Those that weren’t could be discarded easily enough later on should the need arise.
—
22.
You’ve been walking along the path for a while now and decide to take a rest and eat some of your food. Looking around you find a suitable tree stump and sit down, digging out from your bag half a loaf and a wedge of strong cheese wrapped in linen. You take a large bite of each and wash them down with some water from the skin hanging from your belt. Whilst you are eating you pull out the letter that lay beside the bread in your bag. Opening it, you read once more the instructions given to you yesterday:
“Hail and well met!
You have come recommended by Prince John himself, as a man who can get things done. Most in these parts have heard of the bandit in the woods, the one who calls himself ‘Robin Hood’. He claims himself a champion of the people, but in truth he is nothing more than a common criminal. However, his vile lies amongst the unwashed and uneducated masses have proven impossible to overcome of late; no one is willing to come forward and provide information on this scoundrel.
Therefore, I need you to enter Sherwood Forest and infiltrate his camp. He has broken the rule of law, as have his followers, and they must be treated accordingly. Robin Hood must be executed and evidence brought back to me of his demise. Deal with the others as you see fit. Succeed and the rewards will be great; fail and they will most likely kill you.
Good Fortune!
The Sheriff of Nottingham”
You fold the message back up and ponder what you should do with it whilst you enjoy the remainder of your meal. If found on you, the merry men will treat you harshly. By the same token, it would be useful as evidence of your true siding should you encounter any of the Sheriff’s men. You also realise, if used correctly, it could be planted as evidence against another within the camp, thus sowing division and discord.
If you burn the letter, turn to 78.
If you keep the letter, turn to 103.
—
Suddenly a lot more things made sense to Joel. Sure, the character in the book wanted to join the merry men, but his motives had never been fully spelt out before. The fact he actually worked for the Sheriff of Nottingham appealed to Joel. It was far more interesting to be a manipulative spy than a two dimensional woodland terrorist. He also liked the idea of keeping the letter. It would be a risk for his character, but he was guessing an option would come up later to plant it in the camp, or Little John might make another appearance and if he still had the letter in his possession one of the options given might be to plant it on Little John himself as a means of discrediting him and any accusations he might make against Joel.
—
103.
You carefully place the folded letter back in your bag, stretch your weary muscles, and continue down the path.
Gradually your nose begins to pick out the smells of roasting pig and your ears the faint crackle of a campfire and the bustle of people. The path you’re on twists sharply ahead, and as you follow it round you suddenly find yourself facing a reasonably sized encampment. Makeshift huts and canopies of thick hide stretch between a rough circle of trees surrounding a large campfire, a boar roasting on the spit above it. Moving in and around the camp you see a fair number of people, somewhere between twenty and thirty, engaged in various activities. Some are checking their bows, a few engaged in mock sword battles, whilst others are mending tunics and shoes. Your eyes though are drawn to one man sat before the fire, a large hood covering his face as two people sit either side talking earnestly to him in low whispers.
You go to move forward when you feel the sharp point of an arrow tip sticking into the small of your back. Turning your head slightly you see a stranger with a drawn bow behind you, who then reaches round and removes the sword from your scabbard. He does not speak but prods you in the back a couple of times with the arrow, indicating for you to move. Slowly you walk forward toward the fire and the hooded man.
If you want to try and escape, turn to 92.
If you simply continue forward, turn to 79.
—
Why try to escape, thought Joel. His character was where he wanted to be, and he doubted it would end well if his character tried to escape with a drawn bow pressing a sharp arrow into his back. No, now was the time to see how things would play out now he’d reached his target.
—
79.
As you get closer to the fire, the two men talking to the hooded man notice you and fall silent, turning to look hard faced at you. The hooded man reaches up slowly and pulls his hood back, turning to face you. His golden hair and moustache would’ve been enough identification, but the sardonic grin and twinkle in his eyes introduces him far better than any spoken word: the Earl of Locksley, Robin Hood himself.
He waves back the man behind you, appraising you for a moment in silence, and then offers his hand. You reach forward and shake it, and he laughs heartily, slapping you on the shoulder.
“Welcome friend! To get this far you must’ve bested Little John and the twins. This shows you have both strength of character and wisdom, both qualities I look for in my merry men. As you see, we do not live comfortably, but we live well enough. The forest provides whilst we work to topple the Sheriff and behind him Prince John. Now, as well as robbing the rich, there are other roles in the camp which need to be done. You have the look of a smithy or a cook to me. Which do you fancy?”
If you choose to work with the blacksmith, turn to 6.
If you choose to work with the cook, turn to 112.
—
Sure, thought Joel, blacksmithing offered easy access to weapons and the opportunity to thin the herd of Robin’s lackeys with them, but it would be a slow process he guessed and would place his character under growing suspicion the more bodies that turned up. No, if his character was to succeed, a quiet, unassuming role in camp would be the ideal place to start.
—
112.
“Excellent! Come with me to meet our resident cook. Ho! Friar Tuck! You were complaining just this morning about needing help, and see if I haven’t answered your lament already!”
Robin leads you round to the other side of the fire where sits an overly large man in a friar’s robes, stirring a large pot of vegetables over a smaller fire. He looks up from sipping from a wooden ladle, his cheeks ruddy and his eyes bright.
“Well bless my soul, my prayers have been answered! No time like the present, come help me with this evenings meal. Go gather some herbs for the stew I’m preparing to go alongside the meat.”
He points vaguely off to the side, returning his attention to the pot. You look over to where he pointed, noticing a small herb garden he must be cultivating. Grabbing a clay bowl nearby, you walk over and start picking handfuls of herb leaves. As you do so though you notice in the undergrowth nearby a wild plant growing whose leaves you know to be deadly if consumed in even the smallest quantity.
If you return with just the herb leaves, turn to 130.
If you return with leaves from both the herb and poisonous plant, turn to 109.
—
Yes, this is good, thought Joel. A subtle attack that could incapacitate some, if not all, the merry men at once. It was ideal. He’d done something similar with his step-father, crushing sleeping tablets into his drink before he’d driven to work one morning, and that had gone quite well.
—
109.
You walk back over casually, being careful to keep the clay bowl hidden by your body to avoid the Friar’s eyes noticing the difference in leaves. Grabbing a pestle and mortar, you quickly grind the leaves down until they are the same unidentifiable shreds. You pass the mortar to the Friar and he favours you with a pleasant smile of thanks, before pouring the contents into his cooking pot.
Turn to 72.
—
This should be interesting, thought Joel, eagerly turning the pages now.
—
72.
To your delight the entire camp partakes of the stew prepared by the Friar before attacking the roasting pig, all sat round the campfire engaging in friendly banter and conversation in it’s warm, orange glow. You also accept a bowl when offered but are careful to dispose of it’s contents whilst pretending to eat it.
It’s not long before the first merry man staggers to his feet, clutching his stomach, his breath rasping from his mouth. Several of his fellows dash over to see if they can help, though you see a few themselves stagger as they do so. The first man falls to his knees, coughing blood from grimaced lips, his eyes bulging in their sockets. He collapses prone on his side, choking weakly on the blood spilling from his mouth, then stops.
Others are now complaining loudly of agonising pains, one going so far as to stagger uncontrollably into the fire, knocking the roast pig to one side and catching himself on fire. He shrieks in agony as the flames pour up his legs and arms, melting his clothes and skin. A few short steps and he drops to the ground. None have come to his aid though as the carnage continues throughout the camp. Bodies now litter the floor in various states of painful disarray following their individual death throes, gouts of blood abundant everywhere within the light of the flickering flames.
You pick your way through the bodies, looking for Robin. As the only one with a hood, it doesn’t take long to find him. Surprisingly he still breathes, though with difficulty through blood-speckled lips. He has propped himself up against a log as you walk over, his eyes displaying that he knows what has befallen him and his men.
“And so my dream ends, struck down from within by a traitor.” He coughs up a little more blood, but struggles to continue speaking despite the obvious pain he is in.
“If any honour exists within you, please grant me this final boon. Bury me here with my loyal men and true. Do not make me a spectacle for the Sheriff I beg!”
A final cough rips up through his throat, spilling blood and bile down his green tunic. Robin Hood and his Merry Men are no more.
If you accede to his final request and bury him with his men, turn to 74.
If you ignore his request and return with evidence to the Sheriff, turn to 164.
—
Joel laughed darkly. Well that was surprisingly easy. He’d worried that it might’ve come down to some kind of stupid single combat in the end. Violence had it’s place as a tool, but it still had that element of unpredictability. Far better to plan and strike when least expected if at all possible. So, what to do with Robin Hood’s body? Much like his stepfather’s when he’d idly viewed it lying in state, a corpse was just a corpse, a bag of meat and bones with no rights to further affect the living with its demands. The only function it had now was if it’s demise could be of benefit to those still alive.
—
164.
Rolling Robin Hood’s body over with your foot, you examine his eyes for any further sign of life, then drag it over to a nearby tree stump. After some effort you prop his body in place, his neck and head now resting on its flat top. You grab a large axe from the blacksmith’s hut, rest the blade gently against his neck for aiming, then raise it high above your head and bring it swiftly down.
The blade easily cleaves through, blood spurting from the gaping wound as his head rolls down next to the stump. With effort, you rip the hood from his now decapitated body slumped down against the tree, and wrap his head within it. That done, you take one last look around the camp for any survivors, then pick one of the huts to sleep in till morning.
You awake refreshed and upon exiting the hut are once more greeted by the cold corpses of the now unmerry men surrounding what remains of the spent campfire. Flies are already buzzing around them and the stench of death will soon become unbearable. A quick search later you have gathered enough food and water for the return journey to Nottingham.
If you take the path you used to enter the camp back to Nottingham, turn to 128.
If you decide to go deeper into the forest, turn to 58.
—
Again, another no-brainer. The job was done as far as Joel was concerned, and once your goals are achieved, that was an end of it. No reason to go looking for trouble.
—
128.
The Sheriff is ecstatic at your return and the evidence you bring, throwing a large banquet in your honour and showering you with gold. He also mentions that Prince John has decreed that on the successful completion of your mission you will be both knighted and awarded all the lands previously owned by the late Earl of Locksley.
Three days later, dressed in the fine garb of a nobleman and with your own servants, the Sheriff bids you farewell from his castle as you leave to take up your new position. As you pass under the gates of the drawbridge, you look up to the battlements and nod in parting to the grey face watching, the dead eyes of Robin Hood gazing down upon you from atop a spike.
The End
Now turn to 154.
—
What, there’s more? Probably a recommendation to read more of the books in the series, thought Joel. He had to admit though, he’d liked this book despite his initial distaste for it. It appealed to him somehow, the answers more in line with his way of thinking. To his surprise he found he was interested in seeing what the other books in the line had to offer.
—
154.
Congratulations on completing the story adventurer, but your adventures don’t have to stop there!
If you reached this result straight through without cheating (we’ll know if you have), and are interested in continuing your adventures, ask the teacher who gave you this book for more details. They recognised something special in you, and we’re always on the look out for young people with a unique way of looking at the world!
Your government needs people like you, and we can offer you REAL LIFE adventures you wouldn’t believe! Training in all the cool skills you’ve read in this book and more, and the opportunity to travel the world!
If you’re interested, please turn to the inside of the back cover and fill in your name and address in the space provided before returning the book.
See you soon adventurer!
—
Joel smiled to himself, a genuine one for a change rather than the one he mainly employed when in social situations. He pulled a pen from the bag at his feet and turned to the inside of the back cover. As he started to write his name though, the thick paper tore. Joel swore under his breath and tried again slightly further along from the tear. The same thing happened. Biting his lip to control his annoyance, he looked closer. The paper was far flimsier than it should’ve been, and was that writing visible underneath? Curious now, he tore the paper away and read what was written there:
—
Thank you for your interest.
You have decided to further your adventures with us. Not all are selected however and there is one final requirement for your application. If you look closer at the cover of this book, you will find it has two plastic layers.
Before returning this book to the teacher who gave it to you, please peel off the thin layer on top of the book just prior to handing it over, being careful not to touch the cover with your bare hands once you have done so.
One to two weeks after your teachers death we will contact you further.
—
Mr. Briars sat alone in his office, looking through a pile of student folders for new candidates. Two years he’d been at the school, two whole fucking years, dealing with pre-pubescent teens who thought they knew everything and their asshole parents at PTA meetings. Out of six possibles over that time, only Joel had come closest. Shame. He’d had a good feeling about Joel. He had potential.
Despite all the psych profiles and observation, it still came down to the book as the final test in stage one recruitment. Despite your promise, you fail the book, then your journey ended there. Literally. One advantage of the psychology of the kids the agency were trying to recruit – if they failed the test they were also the most likely candidates for teenage suicide, so closing the loop was easy.
He looked over at Joel’s book on the corner of his desk. Each candidate had their own book, tailored to them specifically and supplied by the agency when they were to be tested. Company rules stated he wasn’t allowed to read them himself, just hold on to them for a day after the test and wait for a call. If the call came, the candidate had got through, otherwise he just burnt the book, waited a month, and then staged the kid’s suicide. Again, it was a shame the call hadn’t come through. Joel had shown a lot of promise.
Sighing, he leant across his desk and picked the book up, turning it over in his hands, seeing Robin Hood’s face beaming up at him amongst his gang of merry men. Yup, a real shame.
Putting the book in his bag for disposal, he stood and went to the bathroom to wash his hands; the kid must’ve spilt his soft drink on the cover or something judging by the stickiness. Yeah, he had potential alright, but obviously tidiness wasn’t part of it.
Credit To – CharminglyShallow
|
Back in college, I had a small one-bedroom apartment all to myself on the ground floor of a multi-building complex. The location was great. The complex stood at the end of a rural street seldom visited by cars, nestled in the woods near a large pond. Tributary streams snaked around the complex, and the soothing sound of flowing water could be heard from every building. It somehow cost a lot less than living in a dorm, so it wasn’t hard to persuade my parents to co-sign my lease. (State law said my landlord needed their signature, although I would be paying for the place with my own money.) The apartment’s main benefit was that I could stay in town after classes ended for the summer, and enjoy the freedom from my parents’ gazes that I’d been craving all throughout high school — a benefit well worth the part-time jobs I had to take during weekends and holidays to pay for my living arrangements.
Even so, the apartment had its fair share of drawbacks. Nobody had told me how lonely a one-person apartment can feel, especially once the semester ends and all your friends move away for the season. It’s right in the name, if you think about it: apart-ment; a state of being separate from everybody else. But I hadn’t put much thought into it before, not until all the early mornings and late nights I would spend by myself after I’d finished with work or homework, finding nothing to distract me from my own isolation. For a perpetually single person like me, those hit pretty hard. Also, I had no idea how much heat an apartment can build up, particularly during the summer months. I bought a thermometer to test it, and even at night, with all of my windows open as wide as they could go, and a fan running to help the ventilation, the temperature hovered around or above a scorching 85 degrees.
I didn’t mind the heat per se, but it kept me from falling asleep at night. Now, insomnia itself isn’t so bad if you like spending time wandering through your own thoughts. But I didn’t. Not at all. I could only think of how alone I felt. Of how tired I was, and how little sleep I’d manage before the morning. Of how tomorrow would bring more of the same — the loneliness, the fatigue, the promise of more in the nights to come. And those kinds of thoughts kept me awake even later. It made for a pretty vicious feedback loop, and I couldn’t come up with a way to break it.
I had thought that would be the worst part of the summer I spent out there.
I wish it had been.
* * *
One night, quite by accident, I found a way to alleviate the misery of those hot, solitary hours. Around midnight, desperate for some way to cool the stifling air, I decided I’d try leaving the front door open to see if it helped at all. A flimsy screen door without a lock was on the other side, and I thought it would probably increase the apartment’s air flow. I’d been reluctant to try that earlier because my building faces another one in the complex, and I didn’t want the people there to think I was watching them through the screen. Nor did I want them staring through it at me. Nor barging through it and robbing me blind — or worse — if I fell asleep before bolting the front door. But my complex was a quiet one, and I hadn’t heard of any crimes around my part of town. Nearly delirious from the heat, I opted to take a chance. I figured I’d be more likely to die from heatstroke than from a break-in, anyway.
The deadbolt unhitched with a sound like a cracking knuckle, and the front door squeaked on its hinges. The air outside didn’t feel much colder than what was in my apartment. I took a breath of night air, and, except for its clean, watery scent, it didn’t seem any different than what I’d been inhaling all night. The disappointment sank heavily into my stomach, as if I’d drunk mercury. Regardless, I told myself I should give it a minute. Maybe I could feel a change in a little while.
Since all the lamps in my apartment were off, my eyes had adapted to the darkness, and I could see the world outside in its minutest detail. The dim lamps above every apartment door, including my own, cast dirty yellow light onto the grass and trees and bushes, which in turn cast anemic shadows. The heat’s making everything sick, I thought to myself. Even the plants. Even the lights. Poor things.
Then something white as a ghost banged against the screen near my face. I stifled a shout, and backed away from the door. Another bang followed, and a large white thing fluttered away.
I laughed at my earlier panic. Moths! Who knew they could be so big and clumsy? The large moth approached the screen again, but this time landed gently on it, apparently recognizing the obstacle at last. The light that attracted it shone above our heads. The moth’s broad, thin wings shimmered in its rays.
I had never thought of moths as beautiful before, but I could only describe this one as gorgeous. I had to take a closer look. I drew nearer the screen, but the moth remained. I could see every aspect of it — its large, dark eyes; its feathery antennae; its fluffy body; the layered fabric of its dusty wings, halfway between mica and silk. The moth carried a mesmerizing little world. No, scratch that. It was a mesmerizing little world unto itself.
Eventually I noticed that there were other insects on the screen, too. Some less pretty than my moth, but all fascinating in their own right. By the time I had finished observing them all, it didn’t feel any cooler in my apartment. But when I checked the clock, I discovered that I had passed hours without my noticing. Morning was not far off, and I hadn’t even realized! I wasn’t going to rack up much sleep again, alas, but no less than a usual night.
Unlike a usual night, though, I hadn’t even once thought about feeling lonely.
It seemed I had found a way to pass those sleepless hours after all.
* * *
It came to be that, during nights when I felt I’d be wide awake until the morning — which is to say every night — I would shut off all the lights in my apartment and throw open my front door, waiting for bugs to collect on the screen so that I could while away the hours watching them. I couldn’t tell you what kinds of insects they were, exactly, but that didn’t matter to me. I found them more magical precisely because I couldn’t name them. When I looked at my bugs, I couldn’t see them as dry Latin names, already discovered and classified and rendered as dull and dead as the language that categorized them. They lived, they breathed, they thrived. I could recognize certain species after a while, but I couldn’t name them. And so, with each bugwatching session, it felt as if I were discovering each of my bugs for the first time.
I’d see dozens of different moths, their mouthless bodies waiting for starvation, their huge empty eyes unafraid or uncomprehending. Fly-like insects with long tails and gossamer wings would perch as close to the lamp as they could, their fine features swaying in the weak breeze. Huge black beetles with hydraulic-looking jaws shimmered in the light like rare gems on a brooch. Confronted with such quiet majesty, I could fathom why the ancient Egyptians revered certain beetles.
If my bugs could think, they would have understood that reverence can run two ways. They would have revered me, too — not as some fascinating sight to be regarded in the night’s latest hours, but as a sort of god. If I had wanted to, I could have flicked the screen and banished them back into the darkness they fled. I could go even further and crush them outright if I felt so inclined. I was a benevolent god, however. All I wanted to do was look. Then again, looking can be another aspect of godliness. Seeing all, down to the last detail. Allowing nothing to remain hidden from your roving eye. The power to determine what is private and what is not, and to redefine those boundaries on a whim. There’s good reason why all the world’s religions ascribe the power of omniscience to their highest gods.
I was not truly omniscient, but to my bugs, I might as well have been. As long as they remained on my screen, nothing they did could remain hidden from me. I watched them breathe. I watched them eat. Sometimes I even watched them mate — prolonged yet mechanical and passionless affairs. Their tiny world and all its goings-on were my playthings. Every time I brought my face near the screen, spying on my bugs with only the thin metal mesh between their eyes and mine, I felt wonderful.
So wonderful, in fact, that I began to feel as if the night and sleeplessness were old friends of mine for introducing me to such a pleasure.
That was my first mistake.
* * *
My second mistake was to let my good feelings devolve into complacency and boredom. To fail to remain content with what I had. To grow greedy for more.
You see, there came a night when the several bugs that were drawn to my screen were not enough for me any longer. They still fascinated me, but their numbers were too few, their interactions too rare and limited. I imagined that I could solve this problem by adding more bugs to the equation. More creatures on my screen meant a higher chance of them crossing paths — and who knew what would result? The possibilities enthralled me. So, with the insatiable acquisitive impulse of the born collector, I decided that I would attract more insects to my door. Then I would have more to see. Perhaps then I would be content.
One night, I didn’t turn off my lamps before I opened the door. The lone bulb outside had been sufficient to bait my nightly visitors; I figured that more light, surely, would attract even greater numbers. Keeping the lamps on meant that I couldn’t see more than an inch beyond the screen, for the light reflected off the mesh and back at me, making it seem as if a curtain of blackness had been draped right outside the door-frame. Furthermore, it meant I could be seen from the outside — perhaps without even knowing it. But I had been awake many late nights before, and never once noticed an open blind or door in my neighbors’ apartments across the way, so I didn’t think anybody would be likely to peep in at me. All the same, I made sure that, despite the heat, I was fully dressed.
At first, it didn’t seem like my plan was going to work. The only bugs on my screen were the ones that would have been there anyway. However, I told myself to be patient, and so I stood there and waited. Within fifteen minutes, more insects than I had ever seen in one place had arrived. Practically every species of nighttime bug had gathered to my call, and all of them vied for space on my screen. The door wasn’t completely covered, but it certainly seemed like it. I brought my face to the screen for a closer look. The startling complexity of the bugs thrilled me anew. They parted at the push of my breath, leaving a deep black hole in the blanket of still wings. I peered through it, waiting for another bug to fill the gap.
That was when I saw the face.
It surfaced out of the blackness with tremendous speed, its mouth shut in an inscrutable, emotionless way. Its eyes offered no hint as to what it was thinking, for it had no pupils, its sockets filled with two dull white masses. Even so, I felt it watching me. Pale and hairless, it didn’t appear to have any features except for a face. I’d describe it as marmoreal or statuesque, but it didn’t have the stiffness of a sculpture — it had something fluid about it, although its expression never changed, and it didn’t move except to enter my field of vision.
All the same, it scared the living hell out of me.
I staggered backward and fell flat on my ass, flailing about for the door. I grabbed hold of it, and slammed it shut, hurling my whole weight against it as I reached for the bolt. Even after it slid into place with a heavy clunk, I remained by the door, hoping that my body would be enough of an impediment to keep the intruder from bursting in.
I sat there the entire sleepless night, wishing I didn’t have a reason to stay awake.
* * *
I want to tell you my story ends there, but it doesn’t.
The next morning, I was shaken and exhausted, and in no condition to go into work. I called in sick, and spent the afternoon trying to nap and catch up on the sleep I’d lost. I remembered reading somewhere on the Internet months before about how prolonged sleep deprivation can cause all kinds of hallucinations, and so the sudden appearance of the face had left me wondering whether it was a product of my own fatigue. Either way, a bit of shut-eye was certainly in order, and I thought I could manage some now that the sun had risen. In the daylight, I wasn’t too scared to sleep. But I pulled down all my blinds regardless, and closed and locked the windows for good measure. It was hot and stuffy in my apartment as a result, but it felt safer.
By nightfall, I was fairly certain that I had slept at least a few hours. Per usual, I opened my door, and let the night’s bugs collect on the screen — although this time, I had no intention of leaving the lights on. If the face was going to return, I would see it coming.
The night wore on, and my bugs didn’t bring me the pleasure they typically did. I was too distracted to focus on them, too afraid that if I didn’t pay attention to the world beyond them, the face would sneak up on me again. After several hours of halfhearted bugwatching, I decided to call it quits. It was proving too stressful. And I only ever wanted my bugs to make me happy. I tried to find an optimistic way to look at the matter, telling myself that the face’s failure to arrive proved it was a trick of my mind. Although I remained somewhat unconvinced, I shut and bolted the door, and debated what to do instead. Streaming a movie on my laptop seemed like a good option. Not long after I booted it up, though, it practically melted the flesh from my thighs. It was far too hot in the apartment already. It would have been insane to do anything that added to the heat.
Then I remembered that I’d forgotten to open the windows since the afternoon. I didn’t suppose it would make a whole lot of difference if I left them shut, but I figured that any ventilation beat no ventilation. I lifted one of my blinds, unlocked the window, and raised it to let in the air. Several moths peppered the swathe of screen I’d exposed. I bent down to inspect them more closely.
They scattered in a cloud of dust, and the face rose up to greet me.
I screamed, slamming the window shut. I didn’t even think to secure it. I had only the presence of mind to bolt into the bathroom and lock the door behind me. If whoever was out there made it into my apartment, I’d at least have placed a sizable slab of wood between us. It seemed like an improvement over flimsy steel mesh and brittle glass.
Who was that person outside my window? For some reason, the face struck me as a male’s, even though there weren’t any defining features. He didn’t look at all familiar. In fact, he didn’t look like anyone — or anything — I’d ever seen. What did he want with me? Whoever he was, I wanted him out of my sight.
Willing myself into some semblance of calm, I plucked my cell phone from my pocket and dialed the police. The dispatcher promised I wouldn’t have long to wait. I couldn’t tell whether she lied to me. I wouldn’t look at my phone after placing the call, thinking that watching the clock would drive me insane. Even so, I felt as if I waited for hours in that bathroom, the walls seeming to encroach on me, the door looking less secure by the minute.
Then something knocked.
I cried out, but a deep male voice told me to remain calm. He slid a police badge under the door, and said everything was safe out there. Neither he nor his partner had found anybody when they arrived. He added that he would take me to the police station for the night if I didn’t feel comfortable where I was. We could work on a profile sketch of whomever I saw, he said, and distribute it to every law enforcement official in the area. It would be fine, he said; I should come out of there.
Part of me expected this to be a ruse. I imagined I’d open the door and find the face waiting there for me. But the badge seemed too detailed to be a fake. I cracked the door tentatively, and a uniformed officer waved at me through the space. I went out to him.
I looked over his shoulder to the window behind him. A moth clung to it. The face, however, was nowhere to be seen.
It might have been my own uneasiness, but I still felt as if the face were monitoring me.
* * *
They were all really kind to me at the police station. Not that I expected the cops from a small college town to be jaded and mean, mind you. It’s more that I was impressed by how friendly they were, considering how absurdly late it was. I can’t envision most people being anything but cranky at such an hour. The police were surprisingly hospitable, treating me like I was a friend they had invited over. The officer who brought me in provided me a mug of coffee, and deposited me at the desk of a detective while he went to find the sketch artist on duty. He returned with a tallish woman who carried an artist’s pad under one arm, and a case of pencils in the other. The detective helped her set up a collapsible easel stand they kept around the office. Then the four of us set to work creating a likeness of the face I’d seen.
They regarded me strangely when I described the onlooker has having no features. Perhaps because it wasn’t a terribly helpful starting point. Or else because it was practically unthinkable. If somebody told me to picture something without features, I doubt that I’d be able to imagine it. That, however, had not occurred to me until after I’d opened my mouth, and after I’d furnished such an impossible visual. I tried to devise a better way to help the sketch artist render what I’d seen, and settled on pointing out what the face had, instead of what it lacked. Following my instructions, the artist penciled a bald scalp, a smooth forehead, faint to invisible eyebrows, virtually nonexistent lips, and blank eyes. By force of habit, she added pupils to them. I didn’t bother to correct her. By the time she’d finished her drawing, the face looked fairly masculine, although it could easily have belonged to a woman if you imagined a feminine hairstyle on it.
“He looks familiar,” said the detective.
“I thought so, too,” the officer said.
“It does feel as if I’ve drawn him before,” said the artist. “Or someone similar.”
Despite their conviction, I began to suspect that a face as generic as the one we sketched could resemble nearly anybody you wanted it to look like.
“Hey, could you try drawing some matted hair on him?” the officer asked. “Longish, kind of plastered on his forehead.”
The detective nodded as the artist added some hair to the drawing. I certainly didn’t recall any hair, but I figured they knew what they were doing. Adding hair seemed reasonable — it wouldn’t have taken much effort for someone to shave his head for a disguise. After the artist had finished, the three of them made noises of recognition.
“Man,” said the detective. “That is uncanny.”
“Yeah,” said the officer. “I remember that guy. He was a sad case.”
I had to interrupt them. Was? Why the past tense?
They explained to me that the picture matched a photograph of someone they had encountered before. The detective walked off to retrieve the relevant file as the officer related the story. The guy in question was a young man, a late teen or early twenty-something, who had been arrested on charges of voyeurism. He had a thing for looking into people’s rooms, although he never admitted to observing people in vulnerable positions. The people who reported him noted that he’d never spied on them while they were nude or anything — they spotted him as they were doing some quotidian thing, like reading a magazine or playing a video game.
The detective returned, dropping a manila folder on the desk. He flipped it open, revealing a mug shot that did look an awful lot like our drawing. I glanced at the name. Norman C—. I’d never heard of him.
The thing about C—‘s case, the detective remarked, was that voyeurism in our state was considered a low-level sex offense. This didn’t bode well for C—. He was studying education and some other subject at the university; he planned to be a teacher. But, the detective added, you can’t be a teacher if you’re a sex offender. It’s against the law, plain and simple. That left C— in a bad place. It wouldn’t have gone well for him, the detective said.
C— was a sad case. Things wouldn’t have been good for him. Why did they talk about him that way?
My eyes had strayed back to the file. I scanned the vital information. Place of residence. Height. Weight. Eye color. Date of birth.
There was another field they had filled out: Date of death.
“Such a waste,” said the officer. “There’s plenty of time to begin again when you’re that young. Kids never seem to understand that.”
I was afraid to learn what became of C—, but I asked all the same.
Shaking his head, the officer replied, “The poor bastard hanged himself before he could go to trial.”
* * *
After hearing something like that, there was no way I was going back to my apartment that night. Who — or what — had been watching me? I was in no condition to deal with it. As such, the police allowed me to stay at the station until morning. The only bed they had to offer me was in their currently-unoccupied holding cell, but it became surprisingly comfortable after they made it up for me. Plus, since they left the cell door open, and since the cell itself had a small slat of a window near the ceiling that admitted some scant moonlight, it kind of felt like I had a low-end hotel room all to myself. The detective said he would keep me company if I wanted it, but I declined. It seemed safe enough to sleep in a location as secure as the police station, with plenty of other people close by if I needed them.
Sympathetic as the police were, I could tell they didn’t quite believe me. Not that they thought I was lying. They took me at my word that I saw what I saw, but my story seemed so implausible that they likely dismissed it as a stress- or insomnia-induced hallucination. I couldn’t blame them for thinking that. I half-thought it myself. With no evidence to the contrary, what could I say? They never saw the face lingering outside my apartment. And who would honestly think that a dead man could be the one looking through my window? They probably assumed I had seen his photo in a newspaper somewhere along the line, and that I imagined him, or saw him in a particularly lucid nightmare.
I reclined on the bed. Although the cell was far cooler than my apartment, I could tell that I would have difficulty sleeping there, as well. Too many thoughts surged through my brain, preventing me from shutting down mentally. I tried to piece together what I had learned, but it produced more questions than answers. What did C— want with me? I had noted his place of residence in his file, and it wasn’t my room. It wasn’t even my complex, for that matter — he lived somewhere across town. A haunting didn’t seem like a reasonable conclusion — that is, if haunting ever could be considered a reasonable conclusion. I never knew the guy, either. We had nothing in common whatever. So why would he come after me?
All those unanswered or unanswerable questions planted a nagging doubt in my mind: Did the face even belong to C—? When it came down to it, C— was the police’s hypothesis, not mine. The face I saw could have belonged to anyone. You could have called it a Face in the Platonic sense. It seemed like the thing that all faces have in common; the purest instantiation of the category “face.” You could glimpse whomever you wanted to see in it, and you’d be neither wrong nor right, much as you are neither wrong nor right when ascribing a shape to a cloud, since it contains figures that are both there and not there.
My lines of thought led nowhere. If the face were C—, then why him? If not C—, then who else? I had no answers. I could only find dead ends or circular paths, and I felt I would remain awake the entire night tracing and retracing them, irrespective of how fruitless I knew them to be.
Peering up at the slim window from the bed, I could see pinhole stars poking through the moonlight sky. I realized in that moment that stargazing would never suit me as a hobby. The light of possibly dead stars seemed too static to me, too distant to lose myself in. I’d rather have a small thing loom large than witness a huge thing in miniature. Give me realms too small to be seen, rather than shrinking worlds to unseen proportions. Put away the things you’ve reduced to generalities, and hand over the particulars — the unique, the unprecedented, the inimitable. They’re the only things that merit one’s attention. They’re all that can keep you attached to our world of eventual dust and decay…
A fat moth thudded against the tiny cell window, jarring me out of my reverie. I climbed out of the bed to take a closer look. I wasn’t quite tall enough to reach the windowsill, and had to stand on tiptoe to grab hold of it and raise myself up. Peering over the bottom of the sturdy pane, I glimpsed a bug unlike any I had seen. The moth — a bloated, shuddering creature — was colored as dark as the night sky, save for a white patch on its abdomen. Upon closer scrutiny, I found that it closely resembled a human skull. As the moth shuffled around on the window, the skull seemed to grin and gnash its teeth.
The moth began to twitch and vibrate as if having an epileptic fit. Was some kind of parasite tormenting it? My arms straining, I heaved myself up for a closer look. As I did, the moth’s bulbous stomach began to tear at its seams, the skull mark splitting down the center. A dense blackness opened out of the split, as though the moth had ink coursing in its veins.
Then the face emerged.
It started small like a butterfly’s egg, but quickly expanded, forcing its way out of the moth. Soon the insect burst entirely, and the face enlarged itself to its regular size. I gasped and lost my grip on the windowpane, crashing down on the cell’s hard floor. My tailbone smarted, but my fear negated the pain. I had to escape. I scuttled into the corner below the window, where I couldn’t be seen. Curling into myself, I looked up at the windowsill, too frightened to do much else.
I saw the face.
How had it passed through the glass? I heard nothing break. And those kinds of windows were designed to be unbreakable! But there it was, staring down at me with its blank yet greedy eyes, slowly advancing toward me.
I scrambled to my feet and dashed for the door, refusing to lose sight of my tormentor. Then my shoulder crashed into stiff metal bars, knocking me to the floor. The door had been shut! But I hadn’t heard it! Surely it should have made some noise — wasn’t jail once nicknamed “the slammer” for a reason?
Dazed, I turned to look back at the window. The face was not there. My lungs could not seem to draw in enough air. I made for the blocked door.
The face waited beyond the bars.
I screamed as it drifted through them, its expressionless visage unchanging.
Then I awoke in the bed where the officers had left me.
My sheets were damp. I didn’t bother to check whether it was sweat or something more embarrassing. My eyes darted toward the door. The cell remained open, precisely as it had when the officers gave me my lodgings. I rolled onto my back with a sigh. Wondering whether I would ever sleep soundly again, I let my eyes wander to window.
A pair of blank eyes in an equally blank face regarded me through it.
That nearly ended me. I screamed all the air out of my lungs, and when that ran out, my throat muscles kept pushing on soundlessly. I tumbled from the bed and dashed out of the cell. Tears streamed down my face as I fought for air. The detective, having heard me scream, met me partway down the hallway. I collapsed into him. He asked me what was wrong, but I couldn’t answer. My voice refused to form words, and loosed only cries.
The detective tried guiding me back to the cell so I could show him what was the matter, but I planted my heels. Nothing could persuade me to go back there. He realized that soon enough, and went off on his own. He returned in a span of seconds.
“There’s nothing out there,” he said, sympathetic but uncomprehending. “Nothing at all.”
Impossible! He must have seen it. I couldn’t have been the only one! Driven solely by incredulity, I staggered back to the cell and glanced at the tiny window. All I found was the dark night sky, and a couple of pinprick stars.
* * *
I left the police station the following morning. I worried that, if I had any more sightings that they couldn’t substantiate, or if I had any more outbursts they couldn’t account for, they would have me committed. What would happen then? I’d be stuck in a small room for who knew how long, where nobody would take my sightings seriously, and where all the face’s apparitions would only serve to keep me there longer. Obviously, that wouldn’t do. So I thanked the police for letting me stay the night, and resolved to set out on my own.
It became apparent that if I were to stop this thing from pursuing me, I would have to do it alone.
The first thing I had to do was determine whether the face truly had anything to do with C—. Know thy enemy, right? I didn’t have any clue as to what I would do afterward, but it seemed like a worthwhile first step.
I had gleaned C—‘s last place of residence from his file, and figured I would check it out for any clues. The address didn’t list an apartment number, so I imagined he had rented a house, or a room in one. I made my way across town to the address I remembered. The roads led me to a wooded residential area. Houses nice enough to suit any of my professors fit snugly between dense copses of trees, sunlight dappling their rooftops. It looked like the kind of place where I’d want to live. But then again, that slasher movie Halloween took a comparable neighborhood for its setting. Come to think of it, so did Nightmare on Elm Street. And Blue Velvet…
Lost in thought, I almost wandered past the house on C—‘s file. It was a comparatively simple one-story affair with a small backyard that ran up to the treeline. It had no garage, but the empty driveway looked wide enough to park a car or two. A bold red “FOR SALE” sign poked from the ground near the mailbox like some weird flower. From the street, I could see bare walls and floors through the house’s windows.
What poor timing, I thought to myself. What could possibly be left there if its owner had cleared it out already? I swore under my breath.
Then I thought: There’s nobody home; nobody coming home.
And then: Well, the one certain way not to find any clues is not to look.
I looked around to ensure there was nobody coming up or down the street. Then I headed for the backyard, where the trees would help conceal me. I tested the back door. It was locked. Several of the windows had also been secured. I tried the bathroom window last, as it was much higher off the ground than the others. Also, it appeared to be one that opened outward rather than upward, and thus would be a pain to try and enter. With some effort, I wedged my apartment key under it. I jimmied it around, hoping to pry the window open, when I heard something snap. I cursed, thinking my key had snapped, but it turned out that something on the window had given way. The window protruded at an angle like that of a can lid improperly opened. It didn’t make for a terribly wide entrance, but it would have to suffice.
I wriggled my way through, nearly finding myself stuck when my shoulders — and then when my rear — reached the frame. After a few minutes of undignified writhing, I tumbled through the window, landing hard on the linoleum of the bathroom floor. My body ached from the impact, but otherwise I felt fine.
Since the house had a single story, it didn’t take long to explore. One bathroom. One mudroom with laundry machines. A kitchen. Something approximating a den. Two small rooms, one with an empty closet. I began to think that breaking was a pointless exercise.
Until I found the basement door.
With no windows near the house’s foundation visible from the outside, I hadn’t counted on there being a basement. But there it was. I had come too far not to explore it. The door opened unto a steep wooden stairwell, conspicuously lacking a banister. I flicked the lightswitch to my right, but nothing happened. The electric company must have cut the power to the house, I thought, since nobody lived there at the moment. It hadn’t occurred to me to bring a flashlight, and I cursed my
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It had been three years since my family had last gone on a vacation to Florida, something we did annually before the recession hit. Since we now had enough money, my parents decided (under the popular demand of my sister and I) that we go to Walt Disney World, again. We were both teenagers, and our parents kind of saw this as a bit juvenile, but decided it would be fun anyway. I could not wait to finally go back, and neither could my sister. Being avid theme park goers as well, we were especially attracted to the creativity and the, well, “magic” as one would say about the rides there. They never got old, and had their share of nostalgia and excitement. However, there was one other reason I wanted to go.
You normally associate Disney World with words such as excitement, fun, and happiness, but with these characterizations, come counterbalances. After scrolling through OMG Facts one night, I came across a rather interesting fact. It was about an abandoned water park in WDW, apparently named “River Country.” I was absolutely appalled by this, since I had previously thought of Disney in a more idealistic and perfect way. The water park was directly on the shores of Bay Lake, being that huge, stagnant body of water adjacent to the Magic Kingdom. River Country was, and still is, on the same side as the theme park just mentioned, but right next to a resort called Walt Disney’s Fort Wilderness Resort. Surrounding the water park on the resort side is a large, green wall, with signs dotting it
The place opened in 1976, and used water from Bay Lake in most of the park’s attractions. It was very rustic and wilderness based in design, and contained artificial rocks that resembled those used on another attraction, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. There was a dam present to keep chunks of dirt and mud from getting into the water too, so guests did not have to worry about swimming in an artificial bog created by water from the lake. It was open for 25 years, closing its doors in 2001, and in 2005, a statement released by Disney said that the park would be closed for good.
So, for about 11 years, River Country has been sitting abandoned. Nature is in its advanced stages of reclaiming the area, but the slides remain, and so do the artificial rocks, and the small pond (now a swamp) that was used for swimming. Many urban explorers have infiltrated the area, jumping over the walls to get footage of the abandoned water park. One of the most controversial things about the park nowadays, is why it closed, which is what I was destined to find out.
I wanted to see some real footage of the area before it closed as well, since from what I heard, it was very joyous and bustling with tourists, compared to its ghost town status today. I was without internet at the time, so, about two days before we were planning to leave, I went to the local library, which archived many old videos that people in my community had dug up in their attics and donated to the library to be part of a small historical society. Hoping that I might find some good footage, I asked the librarian if they happened to carry any videos concerning family vacations. She nodded, and brought me to a small section, containing many old VCR cassettes, and a few DVDs here and there. After about half an hour of searching, I finally came across a cassette with the words “The Old Fashioned Swimming Hole” inscribed on the top of it. This was a term used to describe River Country during its glory days, so I took it, almost certain that it was the footage I was looking for. I asked the librarian if I could sign it out, but she told me that the historical videos had to stay in the library. I could, however, watch the video in a small conference room behind the front desk.
The librarian led me into the windowless room, and I took a seat in front of the television. She left the room and closed the door so that the audio would not disturb any of the other library patrons. I popped the cassette into the VCR under the TV, and turned the lights off so I could see the video better. I was expecting the quality to be low anyway.
For about half of a minute or so, the screen was grey, and was accompanied with a loud beeping noise, typical for old VCR cassettes. The grey soon disappeared, showing footage of two individuals in front of the entrance to River Country. They were both men, and it was either very late at night, or very early in the morning, as nobody else was in the park. Very few of the water park’s lights were on either. On the bottom left corner of the screen, the date “ November 1, 2001” was displayed. This was significant because the water park closed for good the very next day, on November second.
The two men were talking about how they had been denied entrance to the park in the morning, since it had reached its guest capacity limit. They also stated that at only these hours of night could they get passed the park security. The two walked up to the bigger water slides in the park, which led directly into the pond, supplied by the green water of Bay Lake. Once they both got to the top of the slide, which was encircled by artificial, orange rocks, one man prepared to slide down. The two laughed over what seemed to be an inside joke, and finally, the cameraman ended up pushing his friend down. I heard him scream in delight as he descended to the pond. The cameraman then proceeded back the way they came to get to the slides, and across a bridge that traversed the small lagoon. He ended up back at the pond’s shore where the sound of a splash was heard.
This is when the video started to… unsettle me a little. After waiting at the shore of the pond for about three minutes, nobody surfaced. The cameraman began to cry his friend’s name frantically, and started to run back to get help at the Fort Wilderness Resort. He stopped abruptly though at what seemed to be the kiddie area, a small, shallow pond, on hearing a faint cough. He instantly turned around, and saw a barely visible shadow about ten or so feet behind him. Relieved, the cameraman started to approach his friend, glad that he was okay, but again, he abruptly halted.
The friend’s head was hanging down, and he slowly inched it up. The cameraman started to hyperventilate, as the features of the other man’s face began to show. Crimson, dry blood was caked around his mouth, and some was even dripping off his chin. He was missing all the hair on his head as well, but, one of the most disturbing parts of this image, was that…there were patches of skin missing that revealed parts of the man’s skull and jaw bone, and he was even missing his right eye, leaving an empty socket. I became severely nauseous at the sight of this, to the point where I was swallowing my own vomit. My heart also began to race as fear started to settle in my body. As the last minutes of the film approached, the horrendous figure muttered something , something that sounded like “there is no hope under the water”. With that, the cameraman ran for his life, wheezing and panicking throughout his ordeal.
I wanted to turn the television off and run myself, so I bolted to the door leading out of the room. I reached for the doorknob, but paused. The television was giving off the sound of an old furnace found in the basement of a home, just in a softer tone. This tone, for some unknown reason, kept me from moving anywhere. I was just staring blankly at the television.
The cameraman was still sprinting, but did not seem to be making any progress. He had ended up back at the large pond where the slide had dumped his friend. You could hear him sobbing softly, fearing for his life. Suddenly, the tape began to gradually slow down, as the man frantically looked from side to side. The audio volume, along with the furnace sound, went up as the video lagged. Haltingly, the cameraman turned all the way around, and shrieked at the sight of his friend. The video paused on this frame, exposing the caked blood all over the other man’s face. The top of his skull bone was now completely exposed, his right eye still missing. His mouth was wide open, and coming from it, was what looked like a combination of the water from Bay Lake, and bile. This stayed on the screen for about ten seconds, and switched to a black screen, displaying one single message:
The epidemic begins today.
Instantly, the power went out, and I was left alone in the darkness of the conference room. I became so terrified, as I could not see a thing, and I could not see the door either. I began to shake in absolute fear. River Country had closed because of this, and it was obvious. Walt Disney World had been keeping a disgusting secret. I rushed to the other side of the room, disoriented…
But all I felt was warm breath seeping down my neck, and the smell of bile….
CREDIT: Anonymous
Publisher’s Note: River Country is an actual abandoned water park that has been sitting dormant in Walt Disney World for over a decade. Oddly, the lights are still on within the area, and the music still plays as well. Many theories have come up about its closing, but one of the most plausible ones, and one that has been confirmed by WDW employees, is that a deadly type of amoeba was found within the water of Bay Lake, which was used to supply many parts of the theme park. This amoeba can cause severe illness or death, so as a precautionary measure, Disney closed the park for good…
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I used to live in New Jersey in an old Victorian, right in the smack dab middle of the boonies. Where I lived, cell phones rarely get reception.
Back a few decades ago, when I was a kid, a housing development went up. Big places. They cleared a few miles of the Barrens for it. It was a stones throw from my place. Once the places were finished, people moved in. City people, really. It was either old people or new families with real young kids. People that wanted to either wind their life down or start a new one up.
Nothing special. I knew a handful of the kids through elementary school, but none of them were exactly my age. They were normal.
When the people moved in, my mom made an effort to meet everyone, with us being so close and all. There was one guy that stuck out in my mind, mainly because he was bald, yet young. Probably 38 at the oldest, I want to say. My mom said not to say anything because he might have a disease or something like that.
Years went by. I grew up and went into middle school.
I came home one day. I had to walk because I missed all the busses. I went past the housing development. Glancing down the street, I didn’t see anyone. Not a soul. It was around 5:20, according to my watch, if I remember right. Normally, all the fathers were getting home at 5:00ish. Curiosity got me. I walked down the street to see what I could see.
Every house was dark, except for the bald man’s. I glanced in his window, and saw about the entire population of the small community sitting in his living room. Children, parents, the elderly. Everyone. Standing in the middle of everything was the bald man. It seemed as though it was just a casual meeting. People were talking and laughing.
Whatever. I didn’t know why the hell I cared anyway. I walked home and got grounded for being late and not calling from the school.
That night my mom got a call from another local neighbor, saying that she was hearing unsettling grinding noises from the small community. My mom said that someone was probably getting work done. When she asked me if I had seen anything on my way home, I didn’t answer, as I was still bitter that she had grounded me in the first place.
The next day, every kid from that small neighborhood was marked absent in school.
And the day after that.
The police went to investigate that night. The first thing they found was an ear on the front lawn of the bald man’s house. A severed, human ear. A child’s arm was found a trash can, dumped with a few empty pizza boxes, and a man’s split open torso was located in the woods behind the property, with human bite marks penetrating the flesh.
The rest of the community was inside the house. All the entrances, both doors and windows, were boarded shut. When they broke down the door, they found the corpses of everyone, the entire development’s population. Children, parents, the elderly. Everyone. Some were mutilated beyond initial recognition, and most were missing organs like livers and kidneys. Forensics showed that the victims were alive when the organs were taken out.
A child’s body was also found in the oven of the house, burnt to the point where the skin melted. Forensics showed that the child was alive when his skin started to melt.
Children, parents, the elderly. Everyone. Everyone. Everyone except for the bald man. A background search on him proved that he was involved in a local sect of the occult, which are known to practice in the Pine Barrens. He fled. He hasn’t been found.
Needless to say, what happened literally tore our community apart in multiple ways. Instead of the Boogie Man, my friends and I had nightmares about something real, about a bald man. Horror movies didn’t scare me because I knew they were fake. What happened was real, and that terrifies me to this day.
The massacre ocurred in 1984, twenty eight years ago. I’m forty one now. I went back to the site last month. The houses are still standing. All of them are abandoned. The single road that once connected the community to the outside world is long overgrown.
I can’t find any police files. Nor can I find any news broadcasts about the murders. The houses are still there, but everything that had to do with that place seems to be gone.
I could spend hours telling all the urban legends I’ve heard about it. Weird NJ posted a story in their book, I think.
Nothing’s conclusive. No newspapers. No files. I searched the records of some of the children from my school. They were never legally documented.
But I know. And every other person that witnessed it and lived in West Milford county in 1984, knows. I cannot, in any way, express to you how much the events that I’ve described have literally ruined by life. If you doubt the reality of it, the only thing I can say is that you’re wrong. This happened. This isn’t meant to be a Creepypasta, and this isn’t an urban legend. The only reason I’ve posted it here is because I know that this is a community that will actually read what I’m writing. I’m not sure what I can say to make you believe. But a total of 37 people were murdered in the most brutal ways I can imagine.
The place has a lot of names. It used to be called New City Village. Now it’s called Demon’s Alley.
Look it up for yourself if you don’t believe me. People need to know about this. For all its worth, please share this.
Wikipedia & GIS
CREDIT: Anonymous
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There was once a guy living in our neighborhood named Jimmy, he got picked on a lot for being a confident and funny guy, his mouth tended to get him into a lot of trouble and he seldom learned his lesson. He was just very content with who he was and refused to change it. When people asked him why he let them wail on him for his blunt comedy and wisecracks, he’d smirk and say, “Honesty is the best policy, at least they’re not hiding anything from me and neither am I from them.”
One of the kids he indadvertedly pissed off with a rather crude MILF joke was something of a psychopath with a sadistic streak who didn’t take kindly to the insult. So he rounded up the other guys who didn’t like Jimmy and they cornered him after school in the science room.
“Your mouth got you into this… I want you to remember that.” Brett, the ringleader, told him as he looked into Jimmy’s terrified eyes.
They grabbed some formic acid stored in the lab and threw it in his face. They stood around watching him scream in agony as it ate through his flesh before sniggering and running out, pretending to be concerned and wanting help for him.
When the paramedics arrived and were attending to Jimmy (who was no longer able to scream), the principal asked the boys if they knew what happened. Their leader Brett explained they were walking past when they saw Jimmy skulking around the lab room, by the time they got in there, he was already in that state. The other members joined in and backed Brett up with other fake details as Jimmy tried to protest in silent agony. The principal nodded and told them he would speak to them after he had a word with Jimmy and gotten his side of the story after he was out of hospital.
A few days passed and Jimmy was kept in ICU with bandages on his face, the doctors salvaging what little they could of his face, his vision still intact in one eye and his jaw withstanding despite the loss of flesh. He was still unable to speak and refused to respond to anyone. He just sat there, eyes unblinking & staring at the ceiling, bloodshot and filled with animosity. When he was discharged sometime later, he would not respond to anyone with anything other than the word “LIARS.” His social life gone, unable to smile or even crack a joke anymore, he secluded himself in his room and began planning. Sick vindictive thoughts started appearing in his mind, he would get them all one by one, decimate them, slice them, burn them. He waited patiently until the the group would be vulnerable, late at night when they said their goodbyes and went home separately. That’s when he would strike.
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That weekend, Brett received a package in the mail. Curiously, he opened it to find a VHS tape with the words “For You” etched crudely onto the front. He put it in and played it.
It was a crudely recorded home video by an unknown camera man who didn’t speak at all for the duration of the film. It began with the camera pointing at the date on a newspaper, it was yesterday. As he zoomed out, you could see it was in a basement, a single flickering lightbulb hanging above and casting an uncomfortable scene. By the time he’d completely zoomed out, it was apparent this was no normal video. In front of the cameraman & on his hands knees was one of Brett’s friends. He was naked, a dirty blindfold around his face and a crude gag in his mouth. He was covered in blood, horrific burns, lacerations and wounds. One particularly large one on his back stood out that almost looked like a word….
The cameraman, with gloved hands, took the gag out of the crying boy’s mouth and immediately he begged to go home.
“Please, PLEASE let me go man….I…I did what you wanted! Oh god…Jesse, Mike, Keith….you made me fucking butcher them! I just wanna go home man….Please….I’m sorry guys….I’m so…so sorry….”
He just kept repeating it over and over, rocking back and forth as he did so.
Brett’s legs began to shake and he felt the bile rise in his stomach, he could see the burned, mangled bodies in the background. The bodies of his friends. All of them have markings on their body in deep, large cuts.
The cameraman reached out for the boy’s chin and lifted it up, encouraging him to stand. He did so obediently as he was slowly led to a door off screen, whimpering. Brett can see what’s been cut into his friend’s back now. It’s the word “LIAR”. The camera cuts out temporarily.
When it restarts again, they’re no longer inside. They’re instead out in the cold snow on the outskirts of the woods and it doesn’t appear to be the original man holding the camera anymore. It’s Brett’s friend. He’s whimpering and shivering as he holds the camera in one place for 30 seconds, pointing at some trees in the distance, hearing footsteps draw ever nearer.
“WHERE ARE YOU MAN? YOU SAID I COULD GO MAN! YOU SAID I COULD GO!”
The boy is screaming and crying, frightened out of his mind as the sound of crunching snow draws nearer from seemingly every angle.
It stops.
He turns around to see the mangled face of Jimmy, a horrifying howl blares through the speakers and the word “LIARS” appears before the tape abruptly stops.
Brett feels faint and darts to lock the front door, knowing what was coming. As he turns to run for it, he immediately hits something and falls backwards.
The last thing he ever hears is “LIARS” as acid runs down his face and begins to slowly eat away at his flesh.
The last thing he ever sees is Jimmy’s face, contorting into a sick, twisted smile.
Credit To: Ivysir
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One afternoon, a couple was traveling on by car when at a far distance they saw a woman in the middle of the road, waving frantically.
The wife told her husband to keep on driving because it might be too dangerous, but the husband decided to pass by slowly so he wouldn’t stay with the doubt on his mind of what might have happened and the chances of anyone being hurt. As they got closer, they noticed a woman with cuts and bruises on her face as well as on her arms. They then decide to stop and see if they could be of any help.
The cut and bruised woman was begging for help telling them that she had been in a car accident and that her husband and son, a new born baby, were still inside the car which was in a deep ditch. She told them that the husband was already dead but that her baby seemed to still be alive.
The husband that was traveling decided to get down and try to rescue the baby and he asked the hurt woman to stay with his wife inside the their car. When he got down he noticed two people in the front seats of the car but he didn’t pay any importance to it and took out the baby quickly and got up to take the baby to it’s mother. When he got up, he didn’t see the mother anywhere so he asked his wife where she had gone. She told him that the woman followed him back to the crashed car.
When the husband went back to look for her, he noticed that clearly the couple in the front seats were dead, one of whom was unmistakeably the woman who had flagged them down.
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The Stanwyck Ghost Tours used to be a tradition in my hometown around Halloween. It was always cheap and heavy on the schlock. Hammy tour guides, cheesy music, cheap decorations. Picture Monster Mash as a two-hour ghost tour, and you get the idea. But given the town’s limited history and questionable urban legends, I couldn’t really blame Mr. and Mrs. Wesley for going all out with their prized attraction.
Every year, the Wesleys would set up on those October weekends. Just five dollars a person. Everyone under thirteen got in free. It was a walking tour so those cool autumn nights were the best part about it. The Stanwyck Ghost Tours were innocent, family fun. No gore. No cheap scares. And even free candy corn awaited those who dared to brave the entire journey.
And the sights were glorious. There was the haunted cemetery on Sharber Road. Or the Crane House which was home to a local murder no one except the Wesleys had apparently ever heard of.
For all its weaknesses, I loved every second of those tours. They were the one bright spot in a childhood that wasn’t the best. For me, the spirit of Halloween was embodied in those two-hour walks. And everyone in Stanwyck loved the Wesley tours. Until the murders happened.
To this day, no one has ever really determined the motive or the reasoning for why Jack Bates did what he did. He was a young man. Barely twenty years old at the time police uncovered his dark secret. Somehow, Jack had been pulling off kidnappings, torture, and murder in this small town for years. And all of them happened inside his mother’s house. The police even said they found a body inside each room. As if Jack was determined to build a crypt inside the modest one-story home. Evidently, his mother had been dead for quite some time. However, no one knew if he did her in or not. Her body was found in a chest freezer. Possibly from natural causes. Maybe from homicide.
And we never got a clear answer. Jack Bates hauled ass out of town before they could ever nab him. Before anyone could get any answers. And we likely never will. It’s been twenty-five years since all this went down and to this day, Jack Bates has never been found. He’s still on the loose out there somewhere. And for whatever reason, Stanwyck acted like he still walked amongst us. When he left town, so did all the Halloween fun. Curfews were enforced. The scariest haunted houses and Halloween decorations were taken down after they were thought to be in bad taste. And the Wesley’s ghost tours faded away. Halloween had become sanitized. And it stopped being fun.
I’d always considered myself lucky that all this happened right before I left for college. Thankfully, Jack Bates hadn’t stolen my childhood. My Halloweens were safe from the hysteria that swept through our little town.
To say the ghost tours stuck with me would be an understatement. I cherished them. Maybe part of that was due to not coming back home to Stanwyck very often anymore. Nostalgia can be a Hell of a drug, you know. Of course, the older I got, the more I thought about those Halloweens I spent making the rounds downtown. Hearing Mr. Wesley’s horrific Boris Karloff impersonation. All those non-stop Halloween pop tunes the Wesleys would play for us. Monster Mash. Thriller. Werewolves Of London. And obviously, (Don’t Fear) The Reaper. All these memories remained embedded within me. One of the few good things I could remember from that boring town.
I can’t really say what drove me to finally return home. I had no family left in Stanwyck. Hell, I didn’t really have any friends to begin with. I suppose the appeal of going back near Halloween finally drove me back to my hometown.
And you can only imagine my surprise when I came back the first week of October and stumbled upon an ad for a brand-new ghost tour. One unlike any Stanwyck had ever seen! A guided tour through the abandoned home of Jack Bates. Holy shit, I thought. Apparently, that whole ‘bad taste’ movement of the early 90s had eroded in the years since I last visited.
The ad mentioned the guide would be carried out by a man named Jackson Bateman. I guessed he wasn’t related to the Wesleys. Hell, I didn’t even think they had children. But this Jackson character certainly shared their flair for the dramatic. I mean Jackson Bateman. Come on, why not just call yourself Jack Bates, Jr. at that point.
I couldn’t resist this tour. I couldn’t betray my inner child. Yes, I caught flack from my girlfriend…
“What are you thinking, Jim?!” she would say. “That sounds stupid!” But I had to make this pilgrimage. And to think I was gonna be a part of the very first Jack Bates tour. It was too much to pass up.
I left Sheri back at the motel. I knew she wouldn’t wanna take this journey with me. So I went alone… like I did during my childhood.
There wasn’t much glitz or glamour when I made my way to the old Bates home. Outside of a small sign promoting the Jack Bates Death Tour, I didn’t see any jack o’-lanterns or hear any spooky music. Nothing like what the Wesleys used to do. There was no hokey Halloween antics.
Even though the Bates house itself was in town, it always seemed really isolated and creepy. All the neighboring businesses were closed, but even the other houses out here were pitch black. Like this Jackson Bateman guy had paid everyone to clear out for the night. Hell, even the street lights seemed dimmer.
For that matter, the Bates house still looked the same. There were no decorations up. It was dark as night inside. Apparently, Jackson or his helpers hadn’t put any effort into restoring the place. And maybe that was the point.
I saw a small congregation standing on the wooden front porch. All of them looked about as confused as I did.
I made my way up the rickety stairs. Outside of the casual chitter-chatter, I only heard a stray hooting owl or two. No Monster Mash. Then again, the silence only increased the scene’s eerie tension.
On the porch, I stopped next to two teenage boys. They seemed like total shitheads. Neither of them could’ve been over sixteen. They were giddier than a bunch of kids about to see their first horror movie. And I guess going inside the home of Stanwyck’s most violent resident was probably the closest they would ever get to living a real-life slasher flick.
An All-American college couple stood near the tall front door. They were good-looking and seemed to be just looking for a thrill.
Aside from them, I also saw a dull middle-aged couple. They looked like married suburbanites. Definitely not the typical clientele for this kinda shit.
It looked like it was just us. Seven people on opening night. And I was the only one who came by themselves. Typical.
As we waited in the dark, my eyes strayed toward the old door. Besides the crude graffiti marking it, it looked like all sorts of scratches and marks covered the harsh wood. There were decades of wear and tear on it.
To my surprise and to everyone else’s, the door swung open with a flourish of a creak. And there he was. The man of the hour. Our guide: Jackson Bateman. He lacked the Wesleys’ cheesy playfulness. There were no capes or costumes. Just a middle-aged guy in a tee shirt and jeans. A regular Joe.
I didn’t hear anything coming from inside the house either. Certainly didn’t see much lighting.
“Y’all here for the tour,” Jackson said in a calm Southern drawl. A confident tone.
Everyone grumbled and nodded in agreement.
“Well, come on in,” Jackson said. He pointed a flashlight at our faces. “Let’s get this party started.”
And then we entered. I did my best to stray toward the back of the line, but the creepy Stepford suburbanites lagged behind like clueless tourists.
“First stop’s the living room,” Jackson announced to us, his voice serious and the opposite of a carnival barker.
A heavy draft flowed through the house. It wasn’t that cold outside but it seemed like the Bates home had been preserved with a permanent Halloween wind chill.
The battered wooden floor groaned beneath our feet as we followed Jackson’s beam of light toward our first stop.
“As y’all know, Jack Bates went missing in these parts well over twenty years ago,” Jackson informed us.
“Wasn’t it around Halloween?” one of the smartass high schoolers asked. I could tell he was a real know-it-all. Probably a gore whore who ate this true-crime shit up like candy.
“It was, indeed,” Jackson replied. “October eighteenth to be exact.”
I wondered if anyone else would bother to question Jackson’s accuracy on the subject. But apparently not. Then again, I was glad. You gotta go with the flow with these haunted house shysters. Even if you suspected their knowledge wasn’t 100% accurate.
Upon entering the living room, portable lamps cut on immediately. It gave us just enough light without killing the creepy mood. A campfire light if you will. There wasn’t a whole lot of furniture in here, but the main attraction of the room certainly caught everyone’s eye.
A female mannequin lied in the center of the room, positioned as if she were on a mortuary slab. Her arms were sprawled out, a puddle of redness beneath her. Her dress was torn. Her chest carved open with rough precision. Loads of plastic organs and presumably fake blood covered the deep slice. Even with a blank expression, the mannequin looked to be in tormented pain. Like the spirit inside her was calling for help. And these weren’t just cheap mannequins either. They were detailed. The Uncanny Valley on steroids.
Jackson shined his flashlight on her. Unlike the rest of us, he looked unfazed by the grotesque sight.
“She was Jack Bates’s first murder,” he said. His voice steady as always. “Irena Crane.”
He stepped away from us and stopped right in front of the mannequin. It almost seemed like he was looking down at it with admiration.
“He carved her organs out while his mama wasn’t home,” Jackson went on. His cold eyes faced us.”He met her a party and brought her right here to this very room to slaughter her.”
“Is it true he ate her organs?” one of the little shits asked.
I released a nervous chuckle. No one else did.
“No, I’m afraid not,” Jackson answered. He shined the flashlight at me, instantly killing my stupid smirk.
“Jack Bates wasn’t a cannibal,” Jackson went on. He gave us a creepy smile. “That was a little too mainstream for him.”
He returned his focus toward that mangled mannequin. “But he did cherish this first kill.”
“How so?” asked Mrs. Stepford. She looked about as out-of-place here as a church lady.
Jackson faced us once more. Like he was delivering a play-by-play, he pointed his flashlight at his lower right shoulder. “He got Irena’s name tattooed right here on his arm.”
Mrs. Stepford Wife made a face of disgust.
“He was always gonna remember her that way,” Jackson said.
From there, Jackson led us off into the kitchen. Everyone else, including myself, seemed a little hesitant to follow. Something about Jackson just seemed a little off to me. Whether it was his creepy intensity or odd sense of humor. Nothing about him made it seem like he was ideal for this tour guide thing. Hell, I’m not even sure if the guy had permission to even be inside this house. Aside from the lamps and lack of bodies, everything else looked like it was the day the police burst through. The rotten wood, the peeling paint. Even that moldy smell you got whenever you go through your grandparents’ storage room.
And the kitchen was more of the same. The lamps all cut on as soon as Jackson entered. I saw a rusty sink that looked to be dripping nothing but putrid brown water.
And once more, a mannequin caught our eyes. Jackson shined his light toward it as if he were illuminating a shrine.
There on a long wooden table was a male mannequin. He was dressed in jeans and a faded tank top. His body absolutely drenched in blood. So much blood it flowed off the table in a steady rhythm.
And knives were all over him, sunk through his foamy arms and legs. Another knife was struck squarely in the middle of his open mouth. He was positioned like a gory human clock.
Holy shit was the common reaction amongst us. Even I was surprised. Somehow, Jackson had topped himself with this victim recreation.
“Steve McMurphy,” Jackson said aloud. He confronted our uneasy faces. “Jack’s second victim.”
Like a veteran detective, Jackson walked up to the table and pointed his flashlight upon the mannequin. “Steve had just moved into the neighborhood when Jack started stalking him.”
I thought I saw a fucked-up smile on Jackson’s face. He kept looking on at that mannequin with such reverence. Moving his flashlight all down the body from head to toe. Like Jackson was enraptured by the sheer grisly sight.
“He brought Steve right here into the kitchen,” Jackson said. “He laid him out on the table and shoved all these knives right through him. He started with the arms and legs. And the whole time, he kept listening to Steve’s agonizing screams for hours until three o’clock in the morning.”
“And then what happened?” one of the little shits interrupted.
Jackson looked over at the teen and waved the flashlight toward the mannequin’s horrified face. “He put that knife right there straight through his mouth,” Jackson said. “That shut him up for good.”
Jesus, I thought. Jackson seemed to be almost amused by all this. The asshole was cracking jokes…
“Can we touch the bodies?” Little Shit number two asked amidst the awkward silence.
I thought a harsh glare broke through Jackson’s smug confidence. “Absolutely not!” he answered. Then once he saw everyone’s startled reactions, Jackson seemed to hone in his sudden outburst. “I mean no.” He maneuvered his cold eyes toward ‘Steve.’ “I don’t want anyone to disrespect the victims here.”
And from there, the whole tour only got stranger. Jackson then led us into the bathroom. It was a claustrophobic space complete with a broken mirror and busted-up tile.
A mannequin floated inside a bathtub that was filled to the brim with red water. A naked male mannequin this time. This one with a knife plunged straight into his chest. But that wasn’t all. The mannequin’s severed arms and legs were lined up in the corner of the bathroom. Perfectly placed like they were decorations.
Of course, Jackson knew all about this victim as well. David Sebastian. A young man Jack had duped into coming inside his fortress of fear. The guy never had a chance. Jack hacked him up and placed his body parts throughout the room for display. Jack’s mother had passed by then so Jack had the whole house to himself. And according to Jackson at least, this is what made Jack Bates all the more audacious with this kill.
I’ve gotta say the more Jackson interacted with us, the more uncomfortable I got. The things he was saying, all the information he knew. I mean how the Hell could he know all this? I could tell the others were wondering the same. God knows, the Stepford couple were probably losing their shit in here.
As Jackson went into more vivid detail on how Jack started slicing off David’s legs before working his way up to the arms, I gathered up the courage to speak to Jackson.
“Hey, man,” I began in my typically awkward fashion. “How do you know all this stuff?”
Flashing a smile, Jackson pointed the flashlight at me. Like he was taunting me. “I do my research,” he answered in a cool quip.
“But none of that was in the papers!” I heard Mr. Stepford reply.
Jackson shifted his unblinking eyes onto the Stepford couple. “Oh, just trust me,” Jackson said. “Consider me an expert.”
None of us said anything else. We were too scared.
And from there, Jackson kept up his wicked smile as he led us into Jack Bates’s mother’s room.
More of the same awaited us in there. There was a huge bed, of course. complete with sliced-up sheets and pillows. And a huge dresser stood in the corner of the room, nothing but jagged glass left for a mirror.
But this time, the mannequin was pinned to the wall. The limp body held there by more of those long knives. It was a remarkable recreation. The male mannequin looked so real. The blades that were stuck into his arms and legs looked so agonizing. And the red liquid that kept dripping off him had drops that were so loud and eerie. The dripping practically echoed through the chamber of a room.
And Jackson knew all about the victim Tommy Hiers. Jack Bates’s final kill.
Waving his flashlight at us, Jackson made us all get closer to the body.
We were hesitant at first. We didn’t wanna get too close to Jackson. But we followed his orders and got a closer look at the ‘victim.’
Jackson talked about how the police came into this room and found Tommy’s body positioned here just like this. Jackson’s flashlight even motioned toward the exact places where the knives were. Don’t ask me how he knew…
All the while, I kept noticing how scared one of the little shit teenagers had gotten. The kid’s eyes kept staring at Jackson’s arm rather than the mannequin’s. I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly was scaring him. As I got lost in these thoughts, a sudden scream erupted and scared the shit out of me and everyone else in the group.
A horrifying scream came from no other than Tommy Hiers’s mouth. His rubber mannequin mouth. Somehow, the body had lurched forward and reached for us, the screams begging for help and mercy. Tommy’s eyes were aglow with a vivid bloodshot desperation. Everything about him was pleading for his life. But he was fake…
Jackson’s chuckles overpowered the mechanical mannequin’s sudden commotion.
“Relax,” Jackson reassured us.
The mannequin went still on the wall. We all relaxed from the jump scare.
“Even I got to resort to cheap tricks sometimes,” Jackson added.
As he reached over and flicked off a switch on Tommy’s back, we all saw the sight that had made the little shit so overcome in fright. I felt a chill rush up my spine.
Jackson’s shirt sleeve had lifted up, revealing a flamboyant tattoo. Roses and a skull highlighted a name that was written in cursive: Irena Crane. Jack Bates’s first victim.
“Holy shit!” the college couple whispered to one another.
Before any of us in the group could react, Jackson confronted us with that smile on his face. As if he knew we were on to him, but he didn’t care.
“Now, one more room and we’ll be done for the night!” Jackson said, his voice abuzz with excitement.
“But I thought that was the last one,” the Stepford wife responded, her voice shaky and uneasy.
“Oh, no, it was the last one,” Jackson responded. “But tonight, I have a special treat for all of you. We’re all going to Jack Bates’s room.”
For whatever reason, we let Jackson herd us out into the hallway. We all seemed to be in a confused panic. We didn’t trust Jackson, but we didn’t wanna piss him off either. We just let him sweep us away. Right toward the final stop on this creepy tour.
I did my best to ignore the terrified chatter around me. I tried to talk myself into staying calm. Surely, if Jackson was a killer, he couldn’t get all of us. Hell, he wouldn’t get away with wiping out an entire group on the first night of his damn ghost tour.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jackson pull his shirt sleeve over the tattoo as best he could. He was determined to hide it, I could tell.
As soon as he turned to glare at me, I avoided eye contact. I hoped he didn’t see me. I hoped he didn’t know that we knew who he really was. But I knew that was wishful thinking. All we could do was let Jackson lead us into this final room.
Jackson moved at a faster pace and went on ahead of us, disappearing inside the room. The Stepford couple stopped the rest of us right before we could go inside. They pleaded with us in that damp, dark hallway.
“Just use your freaking brains!” Mrs. Stepford said us to us in a harsh whisper. “He’s gonna kill us in there.”
As I listened to the others argue amongst themselves, my eyes drifted over to the bedroom doorway. It was wide open and beckoning me to venture into the room of Stanwyck, Georgia’s resident serial killer.
Finally, our bickering ended once the college girlfriend shoved her boyfriend toward the room.
“The Hell with this, let’s just go inside!” she exclaimed.
The shithead teens followed after them like peer-pressured freshmen. I exchanged uneasy glances with Mrs. Stepford before I too followed the crowd into the dark bedroom.
I still debated whether we had made the right decision or not as I stepped inside. The windows were all covered up. The room more claustrophobic in this crypt. Only a few portable lamps and Jackson’s flashlight provided us any solace from this staunch darkness.
I strained to see a bed looming in the very back of the room. A wooden dresser stood right next to it. Gleaming off the lamp lights were a sharp array of weapons on the dresser. All of them were lined up in a meticulous row. The tools of Jack Bates’s trade. Several of the knives looked to be stained with a dark red tinge.
Hanging on the walls were several framed photos. All of them of Jack Bates and his dearly-devoted mother. The pictures looked to be from the late 80s and early 90s. But they were so well-preserved. They represented a chronology of Jack Bates from childhood to college. In every picture, his beaming smile seemed to taunt me. His cold eyes as well. Cold eyes that were very reminiscent of Jackson’s, I realized.
Everyone stopped in the room, our eyes glued not to a mannequin but to an all-too-real human standing right in front of the bed. Jackson’s back was turned to us, his flashlight and eyes locked on to the bed. He never said a word.
“So what happened in here?” one of the shitheads stammered out.
Jackson didn’t respond. And he looked like he wasn’t going to either. After all, there was no mannequin in the room… the journey in here seemed so impromptu compared to the rest of the tour.
The group was silent and awkward. We all looked at each other, but we knew we were too chickenshit to say anything. I sure as Hell wasn’t going to. All I could do was look off at those framed photos. I realized Jackson must’ve hung them there himself. And that made me wonder… where did he even find them? I always thought the police collected these photos.
The Stepford couple began arguing with each other. Again.
“Look, I’ll talk to him!” the husband whispered.
“No!” his wife protested.
The college-age girl held on to her boyfriend for dear life. I could tell by looking at her that she immediately regretted this decision.
“Just hold on!” Mr. Stepford told his wife. He stepped away from her and approached the silent Jackson. From where I was, Jackson looked like one of his damn mannequins. Silent and still.
“Hey man, it’s time to go!” Mr. Stepford yelled at Jackson. One of the least-imposing yells I ever heard.
Jackson didn’t turn around. His gaze remained stuck on that bed.
Behind nervous eyes, I watched the confrontation unfold as Mr. Stepford stopped right behind Jackson.
“The tour’s over!” Mr. Stepford went on.
“Honey, let’s go!” Mrs. Stepford pleaded.
She and I made brief eye contact. Her arms were folded. She didn’t wanna be left standing by herself.
Mr. Stepford ignored his wife as he reached a trembling hand toward Jackson. “Hey, what the Hell’s your problem!” he yelled.
“Honey!” Mrs. Stepford yelped.
Right as Mr. Stepford snagged Jackson’s shoulder, Jackson whirled around with the quickness of an alarmed wolf.
I saw the color drain in Mr. Stepford’s face.
Jackson dropped his flashlight and just stood there with that fucking grin. And those cold eyes. Even his sleeve was pushed upward, revealing Irena Crane’s tribute tattoo for all to see.
And in Jackson’s hand was one of Jack Bates’s trademark knives. Long, sharp, deadly.
I heard Mrs. Stepford scream. And the whole fucking group panicked.
Mr. Stepford staggered back, but he didn’t have a chance. Like a child trapped in a closet with a hungry monster.
Jackson jabbed the knife right into Mr. Stepford’s stomach.
Mr. Stepford lurched forward, screaming in pain. Blood dripped all along the floor in loud drops. The same sound I had heard from Tommy’s corpse.
I stood there, stunned by the sight. Jackson was unrelenting. He jammed that blade over and over into Mr. Stepford’s chest. The stabs more frenetic than a boxer’s punches.
All around me, I heard the commotion of the crowd trying to leave. But something kept blocking them.
“Baby!” I heard Mrs. Stepford yell aloud.
Her husband hit the floor hard. I could see the blood building up beneath him. All those holes in his chest were deep and vicious.
And Jackson stood over him. He grinned and held up his blood-stained knife, ready for more.
“Oh, God!” Mrs. Stepford screamed.
The two shitheads tried to push her out of the way. Her hysterical self had been blocking the doorway all along.
“Get the fuck outta the way, bitch!” I heard one of the teens scream.
Just as the mob hysteria reached its fearful peak, Jackson chuckled. “Everyone, relax!” he said in a friendly tone. Even his eyes now showed emotion. His smile seemed genuine.
Confused, I watched him push the retractable blade inward. The knife was a fake. “You’ve just survived the Jack Bates Death Tour!” Jackson said with pride.
“What the fuck…” one of the teens said.
Everyone started to chill. Even though we were all a little confused.
“Wait, is this a prank?” the college girlfriend said.
Mr. Stepford lunged off the floor and gave a battle cry.
Everyone jumped back, startled. Even me.
The Stepford couple laughed like hyenas.
“Gotcha!” Mr. Stepford yelled.
“What the fuck…” the college girlfriend complained.
“Holy shit, man!” I heard a teen exclaim.
Mrs. Stepford smiled at all of us. “Were y’all scared?”
“No shit!” the teen replied.
I took it all in, impressed by the gimmick. I’d always heard about these tours and their fakes. But I never suspected it here. Nice one, Jackson, I thought.
“Alright, everyone!” Jackson said. He helped Mr. Stepford up.
The blood looked too red to be real I realized. Probably ketchup.
“Just follow our plants back out front!” Jackson continued. “Be sure to tell all your friends about us and feel free to leave a review!”
I watched the excited crowd follow the Stepfords out the door. I heard their footsteps get further and further away. I decided to stay behind and stay alone with the man the others had all been convinced was the real Jack Bates.
“Did you like it?” Jackson asked me.
I turned and saw him wipe off the Irena Crane tattoo.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was pretty impressive.” I walked up to one of the hanging portraits. Jack Bates at eighteen-years-old. It was a portrait of the serial killer as a young man.
“I appreciate it,” Jackson responded. He tossed the fake knife on to the bed and walked up to me. “We put a lot of work into it.”
“I can tell,” I said. He stopped next to me and followed my eyes to that portrait. I saw some unease sink into him. It fucking hit him hard.
“You knew so much about the victims,” I went on. I shifted my own cold eyes toward Jackson. “But you forgot one thing.”
Jackson met my gaze. I could see the fear in him. His calculating killer act never fooled me. And I know he knew who I was once he saw my high school photo hanging on the wall.
“The final victim,” I finished.
Before Jackson could run, I snagged him in my arms. I was a lot stronger than I looked. He didn’t have a chance. All he could do was quiver in my hands as he tried to break free. But I had him. He was a lot less stronger than Steve or David or Tommy. He was a lightweight masquerading as a killer. I was the real deal.
And all Jackson could do was look into my cold eyes. And my chilling smile.
“No, please!” he mustered out. I wasn’t worried about his pleading voice and screams. Everyone was outside and well on their way home by now.
With force, I slung Jackson onto the bed.
The mattress sunk beneath his weight. The fake blood all stuck to his vulnerable flesh. He looked around for a weapon, but could only grab that pathetic fake knife.
Unfortunately for Jackson, I came prepared. I pulled a switchblade out of my pocket and flicked the long blade.
I noticed my sleeve had curled up. And of course, Jackson saw my Irena Crane tattoo. The real one. Mine was much less gaudy. Just her name in red letters.
“No!” Jackson yelled. He leaned up and raised the fake knife.
With my first swing, I hacked into Jackson’s wrist. He cried out in pain as he dropped the pitiful weapon.
I descended upon him with the gusto I’d always had when taking my conquests. I stuck the blade right into his upper chest.
Blood spurted out of Jackson’s mouth. His weak hands grasped at the handle. But I knew he was too weak at this point to pull it out.
Jackson collapsed back onto the bed. The mattress may as well have been his coffin.
I knew I had him right where I wanted him. He was weakened but not dead. Just alive enough to where I could still have some fun.
Grinning, I looked over at the dresser. All those knives awaited my precise touch. And unlike Jackson’s blade, they were real. And oh-so-sharp.
“You got the room set up so nice for me,” I commented to my victim.
“No, please!” Jackson pleaded in a weak voice. He rolled around on the bed, The blood poured all around the switchblade like oil-filled soil. The crimson river would be flowing all night.
I picked up the largest knife from the dresser. I studied the blade before tracing my finger along its ultra-sharp tip.
“Please, don’t do this!” I heard Jackson yell. A scream for his life that was about as pathetic as what I knew for sure was his fake name.
Me, on the other hand, I didn’t need a fake name. I didn’t have to be Jim Price here in this house. I could be myself. I could be Jack Bates.
Keeping my permanent smile, I looked over at Jackson’s helplessness. I raised the long knife and got ready to make my move. Boy, it felt good to be home.
|
The tents appeared in the middle of the night, without preamble. There was some heated discussion at city hall, because not even the mayor knew they were coming. They must’ve worked out something, though, because the gypsy circus stayed. Our town wasn’t big enough to support even a fair, so this was big news. That was how I found myself with my older brother Tommy and his friends that evening. I was just fifteen then, and though we were in a small town now, my mother hailed from Boston. There was no way she would cut me loose to run around on my own, but if she’d known how bad Tommy and his friends really were, she would’ve known I was much better off alone.
“How much money you got?” Frankie asked, punching my shoulder. Of the three older boys, I hated him the most. He regularly hit, kicked and ridiculed me, while my own brother laughed about it. He was twice my size—I was a runt back then—but I dreamed of the day I could stand up to him. Stand up to them all.
I gave him the twenty Mom had given me, but not the five I had tucked in my hat bill. If nothing else, I wanted to sneak a candy apple later. Dad was a dentist and we didn’t have things like that around my house.
They abandoned me when we walked inside that midway. I’d never been to a circus before. There weren’t many rides, but huge tents loomed everywhere. Barkers told us to come one, come all—see the magnificent beasts of the wild, or the horrifying freaks of nature. I laughed at that one. I’d ridden in with the freaks of nature.
Still, I wanted to see a lion. They looked so majestic on television. Reluctantly, I parted with $2 and stepped inside.
The tent smelled of sawdust, sweat, and dung, but inside were the most fantastic creatures I’d ever seen. I picked a peanut off the ground and fed it to an elephant, then sat on a bench to await the show. The lions were my favorite part. I knew they were big, but I never expected anything that huge. I held my breath when the lion tamer stuck his head in one creature’s mouth. Its incisors looked as long as my fingers. Its back teeth, which I knew were called carnassals from a book my dad gave me, worked like scissors to cut and tear meat. No way would I ever have had the guts to stick my head in there.
After the show, I debated spending another $2 to watch the same show again, but I really wanted that apple. As I made my way to the food trailers, a girl called out to me.
“Read your fortune for $1.”
The sight of her took my breath. For the rest of my life, I’d dream about her face. I wish that she could’ve seen her own fortune instead of mine that night. She didn’t deserve what happened to her.
I stared at her, transfixed. Her eyes were two different colors. I wondered if she wore contact lens to achieve the effect, in order to look more striking. One was icy blue and the other brown, like mine. The effect was jarring, even more so because she was lovely. Long, black hair, full lips, dressed like a genie from a TV show with her smooth, tan belly bared. Hormones trumped hunger, and I let her lead me into her tent.
She took my palm and stretched it out in front of her. She talked for a while, giving me vague predictions. Then she gave me a long look and said, “You need to stand up for yourself. Do not let others control your fate.”
I always wondered about that later, if she really saw that. It proved to be good advice. I wish I’d heeded it.
She walked me out after my reading, her hand tucked into my arm.
“Well, what do we have here?” Frankie boomed. “The little monkey has a girlfriend.”
Her hand tightened on my arm and then she smiled. “I’m taking a break.”
Frankie caught her arm as she tried to walk by, and Tommy and his friend James blocked her. I wanted to tell them to leave her alone, but my voice was a frog hung in my throat.
“Hang on,” Frankie said. “I got a dollar. I want my fortune told. Matter of fact–” He leered at her. “What will a ten get me?”
To my horror, he grabbed her waist and pulled her against him. She struggled free and snarled something in a foreign language. Then she spat on his shoe. Frankie backhanded her, then dragged her into the tent. I turned to run and James tripped me. I went sprawling into the dust and my mouth filled with blood. James hauled me up and I heard a click as he opened the switchblade he always carried. He pressed it against my back.
“One move and I’ll slice your spinal cord,” he said. “Snitches end up in ditches.”
It only lasted a few minutes, but it seemed like an eternity. They brutalized that girl. I heard her struggle at first, then nothing. That nothing terrified me. I was crying, blood and snot choking me. People walked right on by and nobody seemed to notice something was wrong. Something was horrible.
The newspaper said her father found her, naked and beaten in that tent. It was two days before she could give the police a description. I was relieved when the police pulled up in front of our house.
“Don’t you say a word!” Tommy hissed. “Or I swear on my life, I’ll end you.”
I wish I could say that I spoke up, told the police everything, but I didn’t. I thought her description would be enough, and the DNA. But I misjudged small-town politics. Frankie, Tommy, and James spun some story about the girl being a prostitute and soliciting them for money. They said she grew angry when they didn’t have enough and threatened to cry rape if they didn’t bring her money. They said another gypsy had beat her to make the story look real. The judge closed his briefcase and let them go.
We walked outside together. I have never felt so sick. Ashamed. Tommy and his friends stood beside me in their fresh suits and ties, looking like altar boys.
An old gypsy woman approached. She muttered something, then made a sign in the air with her gnarled finger. Frankie stepped toward her and James caught his arm. The girl sobbed against her father, her beautiful face still swollen and discolored. She whispered something to the old woman and pointed at me. The old woman’s eyes narrowed and she made another sign.
“That’s enough,” my father said, and led us away
The circus disappeared, and within a week, my brother and his friends were dead. Tommy got his hand caught in the garbage disposal at the restaurant he worked after school. As it chewed his arm, they thought the pain was making him delusional because he was screaming about the lion’s teeth. He bled out before the ambulance got there.
James fell off a ladder while he was helping his father patch their roof. The fall severed his spinal cord.
Frankie died the most horribly of all. He wrecked around Johnson’s Bend one night and his car caught on fire. Rescuers said they’d never forget his screams. I figured he’s still screaming and burning in the place he went.
I dreamed about the old woman every night. She said, “Your crime is silence. You stood quietly and let evil reign. Thus, sealed your fate.”
One morning, my tongue felt funny. When I peered in the mirror, it looked like a piece of bark was attached to it. It felt like bark, too.
Mom was still in her room, so I didn’t bother her. I somehow knew it was my time. I went to the woods behind our house.
My steps grew heavier as I walked, and I could barely drag my feet through the leaves. When I looked down, my legs no longer looked human. They were forming into a tree trunk. Roots curled from my toes and spiked into the ground. I raised my hand to feel my tongue and my arm froze there. Bark raced down it, falling in place like Legos connecting, covering what was human.
With no surprise, I saw the girl walk out of the woods.
“I know it wasn’t your fault,” she said. “I begged my Babba for mercy. She said you must learn a lesson. You will be a tree until you grow and mature enough to bear fruit. When the first apple falls from your tree, you will be human again. I hope you will always stand up for yourself and others after that.”
It took three years, but I am still thankful for that lesson.
|
Blake Gardner awoke to an oppressive, physical darkness.
It embraced him.
As the cold shadows flowed around him, he felt himself falling; slowly but surely. He tried to reach out, to flail and to grasp, but only pain greeted him. Something bit into his wrists like fiery needles. His hands found each other fast, and they clasped together with interlocked fingers. They had been bound behind his back.
When he tried his feet, not only did he find the same intrusion of pain, but there was a weight there. A tension that dangled below his legs that dragged him along. As were his hands, so had his legs been bound, and something was pulling him deeper. Farther into the dark.
After a few seconds, a pressure came upon him. He felt it around his eyes and deep in his sinuses. The shadows had become overwhelming and heavy. Aggressive. The further along he went, the greater the weight of the blackness.
Every time he moved, he heard the darkness move too. It was a physical presence. He felt himself push through it. It felt familiar. Very familiar.
He felt something in his mouth. Plastic and malleable. He breathed through it, and a stagnant air filled his lungs. When he released it, he felt the air move out the sides of his mouth. It was then he had the sudden, sinking realization. His predicament finally made horrible sense.
The air was released from the sides of his mouth, and it formed bubbles that fizzed in the darkness around him. He heard them, and felt them against his face as they floated away. Some of the pressure left his face. The air that escaped paved the way to his terrible understanding. Some of the darkness seeped in through the corners of his mouth; its salty, gritty texture filled his dried mouth. The taste reaffirmed his worst nightmare.
”No,” he thought, ”no, no, no, this cannot be! No!”
He tried to scream just moments before he reached his silt-covered destination.
No one would hear him, for he was alone. Alone, bound, and trapped on the ocean floor.
The panic that beset him was unlike any he’d ever known before, and again he started fighting his restraints. A useless gesture. He tossed and turned like a fish at the end of a longline. He stood no chance of escaping. The ropes that bound him were far too tight and thick for that.
After several minutes, Blake felt a terrible exhaustion set in. The water chilled him. The only warmth came from the failing adrenaline surging within his shivering veins. The salt stung at his chest with needles and pins; a shocking and unwelcome pain.
He stared into the dark.
He was mortified by the almost perfect darkness before him. In the night, and at his depth, he was positive his visibility was no more than a few inches in front of his face. Yet, he knew he could see. His eyes, and nose for that matter, were both dry. They were covered. Someone had given him a mask to see through. But why? He could see nothing. Nothing, and beyond that nothing the shadows swirled thick and devious; concealing everything from the smallest plankton to the largest predator.
His breathing accelerated as his mind kindly illuminated the shadows beyond. He saw sharks, hundreds of them, circling. Their eyes as black as the water; their teeth shining in a bloody white radiance. They all smiled at him. They’d been given such a lovely present. That was what he was, wasn’t it? A gift to anything and everything that lurked below. The only thing he was missing was a pretty, little bow.
And he’d be alive to feel it. Whoever had damned him here made sure of that. What cruel bastards send a man to the deep while he’s asleep?
What had happened? His memory was a jigsaw shoved onto the floor. Scattered and unorganized. His mind tried to repair it, but the pieces wouldn’t fit. In his current state, the reconstruction of said puzzle looked incredibly unlikely.
There was something about a party. A bar.
A current ran across the small of his naked back like a giant centipede. Imaginary or not, Blake turned, twisting his bonds, but the image before him remained the same. If anything had been there he’d never have known. As he rolled to his left, and then back to his right, nothing changed. The static image of nothingness held his focus tight like a vice.
It continued to do so until he looked up.
The appearance of some light, any light at all, should have helped alleviate his fears, but instead, it felt as though his heart had shriveled-up and died within his chest.
The moon watched him from overhead, too far away to offer any help. Its light was dulled and blurred by the surface; a surface which must have sat at least seventy feet away. A swimmable distance, a good distance for any diver who wasn’t bound to the bottom of the sea. It could be worse, his mind decided to say. Yet, the temptation of the waves above, and the soothing light of the moon offered him no hope. They merely mocked him with the release he couldn’t have.
Before his eyes, the moon was swallowed by the dark.
Blake grasped fast for the rope below. Holding it tight, he pulled and thrashed until his back was brought to bear against the hard-concrete block that had sunk him. His heart raced as his eyes strained in suffocating black. Something, somewhere above, had just crossed between him and the only light he had left. Something big, and he could not see it.
He could only wait for it to take him.
Seconds passed and the moon hadn’t returned. Minutes passed and he was still alive. His grip relaxed. Cautious. He was very cautious. He felt himself rise, held buoyant by the breath in his lungs.
In the depths, it wasn’t just his eyes that failed him. All his senses had seemingly abandoned him to his fate. His hearing was useless. The ones who had damned him to the deep had placed earplugs in his ears, and though they’d surely saved his eardrums from rupturing under the water pressure, the only sounds that came through them were harsh and static. All the ocean offered him was a droning white noise. Down there, in the deep, the only sense he had unhampered was his touch, but that could only help him so much.
He was a prisoner in an un-assessable hell.
It took about five minutes, an unspeakable amount of time for Blake, before light would reappear in the waters above. In that time, Blake, fueled by his fear of the suffocating unknown, had been feeling around his restraints. He reaffirmed what he already knew. Rope had bound him at the wrists and at his ankles. He followed the line beneath his ankles and felt about the cinder block that had pulled him down. The rope wrapped around it many times. Each strand was as thick as his thumb, and he couldn’t find any knot. It was surely on the other side of the block; suffocated in the thick muck below.
He couldn’t untie it.
The idea of his pocket knife came to mind. He should have had it on him. He never went anywhere without it.
It was a good, hopeful idea, for a few seconds.
When he reached upwards for his shorts, he was met with only with the touch of his own skin. His chin came to his chest, as if he could see himself. His chin rubbed against his raw collarbone, and Blake found he was also without a shirt. He was naked. Completely exposed and naked. They’d stripped him of not only his freedom and his understanding, but of his god damn clothes as well! His knife surely sat comfortably with his clothes, far away from him. Above the surface. He cursed in an explosion of air and fury that had taken over from the bone-numbing fear he’d felt moments before. It was a feeling that any man who has had hope torn from his chest so quickly after finding it knows all too well. In the darkness, however, it was a fleeting feeling.
The cold that crept along his skin made itself known once more. It begged for Blake’s attention.
Where was he before? His mind wandered back to the jigsaw puzzle, and it found some of the pieces unturned. A bar. Downtown L.A. That was it. His last memories of freedom, and they were spent in a drunken haze. Just a typical Friday night. Not exactly respectable, but not worth his situation, surely. What could he have done to elicit this fate?
An alley. He flipped a jigsaw piece in his head. There’d been a woman there. She’d called to him. Beautiful woman. Blonde, green eyes. What happened then?
Another piece flipped.
She wasn’t alone, was she?
Another piece.
She’d offered him a drink earlier. Something was in it.
The puzzle-turning stopped.
For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, something above caught his eye.
As if granted by a cruel god, a green light descended from the surface. It caught his eye early, and he followed it as it sunk beside him. It fell gracefully, almost perfectly, through the water. In a slow drop, it settled nicely in the silt below. Blake saw pieces of the sediment rise around the light in a thin cloud as the dim, LED glow stick touched the ocean floor.
His only company, the light had landed just beyond his grasp. He tried, of course, but he found the weight that tethered him to the bottom was too great to move. So the light remained nearby, but unusable. He tried to hover close to its glow. It showed him the smooth silt of the bottom for the first time. The vaguest silhouette of his face mask had appeared around his sight, and when he looked down, he could see the outline of his chest.
More importantly, he could see that in the yard or so between him and the light, he was perfectly alone.
He smiled, until he realized the light in front of him had somehow increased the eeriness of the wall of black behind him. He could feel it sticking to his skin like a giant spider’s web. Its caress was unwelcome. He thrashed around, struggling to pull the block closer to the light, but he accomplished nothing.
More motion attracted his gaze from above.
There were more glow sticks. Three more descended from the surface. He saw two of them enter the water from above, near where the moon had been. They illuminated the faintest shape of the object that sat above his head. A boat.
Was it help? Were the lights there to pave way for a dive-team? The idea was sweet as it rolled in his head, but it seemed so unlikely. The stinging on his chest brought the pessimist back to the surface. It was his captors above. They were dropping the lights to be cruel. Nothing more. As they settled, he noticed that the pattern hadn’t been random. The lights all landed around him in a perfectly semi-circular formation.
He noticed each one had fishing line wrapped around their middle. They hadn’t sunk. They’d been lowered.
But why?
The prickling feeling on his chest got worse.
The light around him had grown helpful. Blake could see himself, for the most part, in their sickly green glow. It was both reassuring and disheartening to see the seafloor around him. He was thankful to see the silt free of crabs or other aquatic nightmares. The idea of something crawling up the ropes and onto him made him shiver. However, to see that only algae spotted the bottom was crushing. There was nothing, no seashell, no shark tooth, nothing that Blake could have possibly used to cut himself free. His head drooped in frustration.
There was something on his chest.
No, not on. Something was in his chest. Cut into. Someone had cut all over his chest, and the cuts were purposeful in their direction and design. They’d cut shapes, symbols, into his chest. Blake had spent his whole life in LA. A city boy through and through, but he knew a brand when he saw one.
He had been branded.
To Blake, it felt more than a physical injury. It was a violation upon him. A desecration. His gut churned, and his fingernails bit into the palms of his hands with a furious persistence.
Another glow stick fell from the surface.
The glow stick, the final light, fell opposite of the semi-circular formation behind him. Its light was unguided. As it sank, it twirled at the water’s mercy. It fell until it was just above him. It fell until it was almost an arm’s reach away from his face. It fell towards his feet.
Then, Blake watched as it sank past the ocean floor.
It was with horror that Blake followed the light’s descent. He merely had to lean forward to watch as the light carved its way farther and farther into darkness. He watched, eyes wide, as the light slipped so far into darkness it had become a memory. Faded and dull. As it sank, it had revealed to Blake everything. It had shown him the solid wall of sand and rock it had passed as it sunk. The same wall Blake sat atop of. It showed him a depth without end.
The light had shown Blake that he was only mere feet away from an oceanic drop-off.
The trench before him was hidden once more in shadow so perfectly that Blake started to wonder if he’d hallucinated it. His heart knew he hadn’t. He’d been dropped, perfectly, at the edge of certain death, and the light was his captors intentionally showing him.
From the surface, they played a cruel game with Blake. A tear caught at the bottom of his face mask.
He wasn’t sure if missing the trench had been a blessing or a curse. If he’d gone over, if it was half as deep as he’d thought, then the pressure would surely kill him. If not, then the sudden descent would have played havoc with his blood. Blake wasn’t a seafaring man, but he wasn’t a moron. He knew what the pressures of the deep ocean could do, and the creatures that lived down there were far more frightening than any shark.
The thought of it, of one of those creatures rising, made him recoil further. His back came to rest against the slime of the ocean floor. He lay in the comfortable circle of light.
Up here, at the edge of oblivion, he was condemned to wait. Death could come at any time, Blake was sure of that. That was the worst of it. The waiting. Blake considered, if only for a moment, pushing himself over the edge. He would die, painfully, but it would be faster. It would also be on his own terms. The idea of control gave him some satisfaction, but how would he move the weight? Last he tried it had been impossible, and who was to say the depth was far enough to kill him? What if he landed at the perfect place between agony and death? It was too risky.
He could have chosen to stop breathing.
No, he could’ve made it even easier than that. He could have just spit out his regulator. That would have been more peaceful. Less painful. Either way, Blake decided it was far preferable to die as he wanted than to die as the bastards above wanted him to. He just needed to gather the courage.
Courage ran in short supply as the lost light began to emerge from the dark.
Blake had risen to a floating position again when, in his peripherals, he saw the faint glimmer beyond the edge of the trench. He avoided it.
Surely it wasn’t real. It was his mind. His panic. If he ignored it he’d suffer no consequence. Yet the light persisted, and soon the glow became unmistakable. The shimmer called to Blake from just past the edge. In the deep.
Blake looked.
The light was rising. Against all logic and sanity, the lost light had begun to ascend in the frigid waters.
It showed Blake something awful.
Below its light, the shadowed waters seemed to breathe and stir. In the periphery of the rising green light, shades changed as something rose from the depths. It was a sickening realization that came when he saw the shadows had wrapped themselves about the middle of the glow stick.
The light was rising because something was carrying it.
Blake’s view was again obscured by bubbles and darkness as he retreated from the abyssal edge. In quick, pathetic motions he tried to pull himself away from the rising terror. He felt the prickly sand press up against his back as he wrestled futilely with his restraints. Unfortunately, he had neither the strength nor the energy to break the vacuous hold the sediment had upon the block. He could do little more than yell through his regulator as the light peaked.
Blake could see it now. As the light stopped its vertical ascent, a disturbing scene greeted him. He would have given anything to return to the darkness as a figure clambered up and over the ledge. It stood, directly before him, on two naked legs. Their eyes met. The sight before him was unimaginable.
The light had been carried up by a man.
No, not a man. A corpse. The light showed enough to confirm that. The man’s bare skin had grown ragged and gray, waterlogged by untold months beneath the waves. Some sections of flesh had long since given way, surrendered to the sea, revealing the fetid muscles beneath. Blake gagged when he noticed that tiny tendrils of tattered skin dangled off into the distance; sites upon the man’s body where the denizens of the ocean had begun to pick him apart and eat, piece by piece. Rigor mortis had a tight grip upon the man’s pained, tortured face. His eyes were as wide like his mouth; frozen in an eternal, silent scream.
He’d been dead for a long time, yet his eyes still moved.
They fixed themselves upon Blake. The monstrous vision held the light close to its face, and Blake couldn’t help himself. He stared deeply into those clouded, grayed eyes. Blake could see thought behind its gaze. A soul sat within it. The corpse leaned closer, brought by an unseen current perhaps, towards Blake. Extending its free arm in a rigid, almost robotic fashion, it began to exam him. It seemed inquisitive, like a man examining vegetables at a supermarket.
It was morbid in the way it moved. When in motion, the limbs and muscles of the figure seemed healthy. Alive. Yet, every time the motion stopped, the body resumed a state of incredible rigidity. Caught in a constant state of flux. The man who appeared both living and dead.
Blake, petrified before this horror, saw as the corpse’s eyes left his, and fell upon his chest. Lowering its light, its other hand came forward, and its water-logged finger began to trace the patterns carved into Blake’s chest as if it were following the streets on a map. Revolted at the creature’s touch, Blake squirmed and twitched, but the corpse held no contempt. It followed his every motion with intense precision. Seemingly satisfied, it lifted itself back. No, it was pulled back.
There was something behind the corpse.
Like a pillar in the night, a shape had taken form behind the moving carcass. It rose out of sight, above and below, and with every swaying motion, the corpse made in the water the pillar followed like an enormous shadow. The corpse danced at the pillar’s will. A puppet to the puppeteer.
Before he could grant it any further thought, his attention was called back to the corpse as it had brought the glow stick towards its own chest. It became deadly still in the water. It was waiting for Blake to see. It had to show him.
The corpse showed Blake his chest, and the familiar brand upon it.
Blake was staring at the very same symbols that had been cut into his own chest.
It wasn’t an execution, or some random, cruel murder. He hadn’t pissed off the wrong man. No, it was far worse, and far more primal than that.
It was a sacrifice, and Blake was the lamb.
As Blake’s eyes stretched wide, the corpse dropped the glow stick and it rose towards the surface. The pillar carried the figure into the shadows above. At that moment, Blake made the decision that whatever was to happen next was the worst-case scenario. Everything else was preferable. He wouldn’t be the lamb.
He tried to spit out his regulator.
Disgusting, salty water managed to creep into his mouth as he struggled, but even though his teeth and lips had parted from it, the regulator wouldn’t fall from his mouth. Using his tongue, he tried to push it out, but it held fast to his face. He felt the pull of the regulator around his lips and on the back of his head. The bastards hadn’t given him a choice. They’d taped the regulator to his face.
He had to be alive for what came next.
Through the murk, another corpse appeared. The pillar had brought up another degraded carcass from fathoms below. Blake floundered against the seafloor as the woman inched closer. She was younger than the man who’d come before, and her body showed fewer signs of decay. Behind her eyes, however, sat the same, cold intelligence. That sentience watched him as she rose away into the dark. Her visage fleeting, Blake saw that across her bare chest were etched the same symbols.
Symbols of the damned.
Another corpse came. This one was horribly disfigured and mangled. There was more rot than man left on his bones, yet the eyes remained lively. His jaw dangled by only strands of sinew, and his right arm had long since been torn asunder at the elbow. The white of the bone seemed to glimmer in the dull-light. Despite the rot, the edges of the symbols were still visible on his white chest, and his left hand managed to hold on threateningly to an old, rusted dagger.
Like the others, the rotted man faded into the above.
More bodies appeared as the endless pillar rose. They came one after the other. Each one bore a look of indescribable anguish and pain on their face. A look that they forever carried. Enslaved by the alien pillar behind them.
Around Blake, a storm of currents had begun to churn the sediment into a frenzy. What little light he had soon started to dirty as a swirling cloud threatened to drown it all out. The currents came from beyond the light. Things moved unseen out there, in the dark
They started to touch him.
Like lightning, arms and hands long gone cold reached for him. Whenever his back was turned they’d project themselves from the darkness like a sunken jack-in-the-box. He’d feel their slime-covered fingers caress him. Their nails would jab and scratch him, and each and every time Blake turned around he would see just enough. An arm sucked back into the void. Beyond his gaze. The cat toying with the mouse.
A mouse with its back crushed in a trap.
That was when she entered into the light. A horrid, witch of a woman. Her skin had withered, and she seemed more bone now than flesh. The symbol on her chest had fallen away, and only the scars on her rib cage remained. Her sunken eyes glared harshly as she reached for his face. Blake screamed for help that would never come, as the woman ensnared him in her decomposing fingers. She brought him in close, hugging him tightly as if they’d been friends, with muscles Blake didn’t even think she had. He could feel a touch on his neck as she exhaled water from her lungs.
Up-close, Blake saw every horrible detail. The pillar was clear now, and it was obvious that it was alive. It was the dull, rotted color of the corpses, and it had the obvious texture of meat. From the woman flowed the strings of the puppeteer. Veins and tentacles that had long ago forcibly invaded her body fed directly into the enormous mass behind her. In the dimming light, Blake swore he saw them pulsate. They were pumping, like the veins beneath his skin.
He felt another liquid breath on his neck.
Craning around, he saw that what he’d believed to be a pillar had wrapped around behind him. The first man he’d seen had emerged, and the pillar carried him away. The mass of flesh that had fused to his back lifted his body upwards towards the surface. His eyes never left Blake. In the shadows, the pillar seemed to squirm and twist as it snaked its way up, thickening the further it went.
As it positioned itself, Blake understood what it was that had risen from the trench.
The pillar was actually an enormous tentacle.
Like the suckers of an octopus, the tentacle had used the woman’s arms to hold Blake tight. Behind him, the tentacle had brought into position the ghastly, one-armed man Blake had seen earlier. The woman tightened her grip as she presented Blake to the one-armed man.
Craning his neck, Blake saw the man fumble with the rusted dagger. He brought it sharply towards the bonds that held Blake’s ankles so tight, and he began to cut. He was reckless, imprecise as he sawed through the ropes. As the binds came loose, Blake grimaced as the knife continued to saw. The man had accidentally severed a slice of skin from the side of Blake’s ankle. Blake felt his legs come apart from each other, and he let them spread into the water. He was free from the bottom. Free. In that instant, the fight started.
He let loose with the fury and panic that the entire ordeal had granted him, but the corpse held tight. In fact, the more he struggled, the tighter her grasp got. The strength was far too great to resist, and soon Blake started to feel his ribs bend and strain. He couldn’t breathe, but he kept fighting. The whole time Blake fought, he saw her horrid gaze. Unblinking. Unfeeling.
Unyielding.
Despite his thrashing, the puppet corpse behind him decided to proceed with the cutting. This time, it took aim at the bonds between Blake’s wrists.
As he did so, Blake had an idea. A risky, terrible idea. In acceptance of the fact, his legs stopped kicking. The woman released her grip just enough, in kind, and Blake sucked in a huge breath of air. His eyes glared defiantly at the specter. He kept breathing. Waiting.
He had nothing to lose as he made his move.
As soon as the dead man had finished cutting the binds, and at the precise moment the final strand had parted, Blake’s palms closed around the rusted blade. They didn’t let go.
He wanted to scream as the blade dug into his palm, but he was beyond that now. His veins burned with pure determination. The one-armed man seemed not to possess the same strength as the woman had, for his grip on the knife was weak and feeble. No matter how hard the man behind him pulled, Blake would not release the blade. The woman’s face never changed, but Blake saw a hatred grow in her eyes.
With a terrible yank that nearly ripped the meat from his palm and bloodied the water all around him, Blake pulled the knife, and the rest of the man’s fingers, free.
Behind him, the top of the tentacle ran into the dark, carrying corpses along like a morbid roller coaster, but in front of him, the woman didn’t retreat. She tightened her vice-like grip. Unfortunately for her, the grip was too high, and she’d found the tank on his back. This provided Blake with ample room to bring his right hand forward, and to plunge the blade deep into the woman’s stomach. It scrapped through her spine. Her grip failed, just long enough, and Blake pushed himself free.
Blake decided he wasn’t going to die.
The woman tried to recapture Blake, but with a strength he shouldn’t have had, Blake brought the blade through the water and into the left eye of the old woman. She didn’t scream, but she clenched both eyes tight in pain. A thick, black goo seeped from the wound and stuck to Blake’s hand like ink. Her arms flailed about, so Blake ripped the knife from her face, and he jammed it into the other eye. With that, she recoiled. Her hands came to her face to cover her wounds, and the tentacle fell completely away beyond the light.
He was free.
He knew his time was short.
With his sliced right hand, Blake managed to find the glow stick the beast had dropped by his legs. He brought it to his face just in time to see the tentacle had not left him yet. Another body, a large, overweight man, was soon upon him. His arms reached forth. Their target was Blake’s throat.
Blake jabbed at the body with the rusted blade, and it retreated fast. Blake enjoyed that. The threat of pain, injury, didn’t sit well with the monster. That gave Blake a much-needed edge.
Blake knew he couldn’t hesitate any further. With a great kick against the block that had imprisoned him, he propelled himself toward the surface. To freedom. To air.
He knew at that moment he would survive. Even as the nitrogen started to boil in his blood, and as the salt seeped into his fresh wounds Blake could only think of one thing. The surface breaking around his head. The chilly night sky biting into his scalp. The calming sight of the night sky. The watchful stars would be there, and they would see his final triumph.
It would be beautiful.
As his body began to betray him, he forced himself through. He knew the tentacle pursued from below. He could feel it. A presence in the water all around him. Hungry, ravenous eyes followed him from below, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t afford to.
His hand was cramping. He found his grip morphing around the light and the knife. He could only hold on to one. So, he made a choice.
As the knife sunk, Blake grabbed onto the glow stick with both hands. They clung to it like it was a lifeline.
The surface was coming. Oh, how close it should have been. Surely only thirty feet. Twenty. Ten!
The stars. He should have seen the stars.
Instead, only a pained, angry face met his gaze. Blake nearly collided with the corpse that had ambushed him out of the dark. He brought his feet to the corpse’s chest, and kicked hard against it. He felt the thing’s ribs collapse beneath his feet. He circled to his right, and tried to rise again. He would make it.
He knew he could do it.
He found another body. The woman was missing half of her face, but she reached for him regardless. He dove down as she grasped for his legs. He just barely slipped by. Out of nowhere, a hand reached for his face. His momentum carried him past the man, and too close to the tentacle. He flipped around, and shot far away. A small amount of water invaded his goggles, and the bends began to stab at his muscles.
He could do it.
Again, he was ambushed. It shouldn’t have been possible. The tentacle was everywhere. It was fast. How was it so fast?
Then, the light showed him the truth.
He retreated into the light’s periphery, for in its center a body was reaching for him; a devious smile on its face. To his right, the light revealed another one with twisted fingers and an exposed, jaw-like ribcage. The bodies floated side by side in the water, their arms extended at length. Blake had no choice. He rose, and yet even there more bodies sat waiting in ambush. The same happened as he swam backwards too. The bodies all formed a thick wall of nightmares around him.
They were too close.
One of the bodies struck Blake hard in the ribs in passing, and, in a pain that was finally too overwhelming, he dropped the light. Greedy arms took their chance and assaulted him as the light fell. As it sank, it illuminated the inside of what had become a solid wall of flesh. A swirling maelstrom decorated with death had completely surrounded him. There wasn’t just one tentacle. There were dozens, and they had contained him inside a giant sphere. His arms and legs were free, but Blake had never felt more trapped. The tentacles swirled.
They kept him from the stars.
Through his earplugs, he heard a chorus of screams grow from nothing to overtake the white noise. They came from all around him, escaping out of the throats of the long-since deceased. Their faces contorted as the ghoulish melody echoed through the waves. It was a tune of pure mockery and triumph. The song of Blake’s defeat.
He couldn’t do it. He never could have.
Blake began to sink. His muscles had stopped working. The pain of the bends was too great for his brain to ignore. He burned inside as the tentacles began to constrict their net. He was only vaguely aware as many more pairs of arms began to claw at him, and hold him tightly in submission.
The corpses never blinked.
Behind his eyes, Blake was screaming. Not from the pain. He screamed in defiance. He screamed against the cruel irony that had perverted his escape. He saw the light at the bottom of the writhing mass of tentacles. Blake watched as the tentacles parted, allowing the light to fall beyond his reach. Beyond his sight. The tentacles closed again, and the light died.
Blake was in the pitch black. Alone with the dead.
He couldn’t see it, but they started to smile.
He felt it when the arms tore the goggles from his face; not that they mattered anymore. The darkness persisted. Only the pain was new. The water assaulted his eyes and forced its way up his nose. The salt burned everything that it touched.
He only managed to suck in half a breath as they removed the regulator from his face. The breath was spoiled as water was quick to invade his lungs. Blake sputtered and spat, but all that did was expel the last bit of air from his lungs. As they tore the tank from his back, Blake was drowning.
He wouldn’t drown fast enough.
Though he couldn’t see it, the tentacles positioned him strategically. They moved him up against a large, slimy section of barren flesh. Blake’s head felt as though it would explode, and that was before the spines entered his body. Once inside, numerous barbed tentacles searched and dug their way into his veins. He felt a warm burning as an alien substance seeped into his veins.
Eventually, all of his blood would be lost to the sea, and only the thick blood of the m
|
Mrs. Claus sat in her rocker, a half completed sweater resting on her lap. The alarm clock on the small table beside her rang its shrill alarm through the warm air of the house, announcing that it was now 1 AM. She reached for it, hitting the button at the top with a light ting and silencing the sound. She cranked the dial back another hour so that it would ring at 2 AM.
This was how we kept track of Santa’s journey on Christmas Eve.
“How are those cookies looking?”
Chandrelle opened the oven door and peered inside. “The chocolate chip cookies need another few minutes.” She stood and looked at the counter behind her, touching a finger to one of the cooling gingerbread men. “But the gingerbread men are ready for decoration!”
I looked up from my piping, “the sugar cookies are almost done too!”
Mrs. Claus beamed at us before continuing her knitting. “Good, good! You girls are such perfect little elves.”
The kitchen counters were covered with cooling racks of sugar cookies decorated with red and green frosting, pinwheel cookies with chocolate and coconut layers, and almond shortbread cookies dusted with powdered sugar. Several pies cooled in the window, the chilled glass absorbing their heat to create a moist fog that blurred the snowy wonderland outside. I had made apple and pumpkin pies as well as some meat pies with the beef leftover from the cows we had in the summer.
Meat pie wasn’t something we normally had at the Christmas feast, but it had been Horith’s favorite and I wanted to honor him. To feel like he was still included in the celebration. My heart stung at his memory and my eyes watered. I wanted to fall to the floor and cry, but it was Christmas and I had to put on a happy face for the younger elves. I swallowed my pain down and forced myself to smile as I worked. I would be able to cry later in the quiet safety of the barn, away from the observant eyes of Mr. and Mrs. Claus.
Once the cookies were finished baking, Chandrelle started to roast the Christmas ham. The boys, who were now busying themselves with the stables, had slaughtered the pig earlier that week. Fresh potatoes and corn harvested at the end of the fall and root vegetables from the cellar would complete the feast.
Santa always came back on Christmas hungry, even after eating the treats left by little boys and girls all around the world. Once he returned, we’d all celebrate the success of the holiday with him. It would be joyful to have everyone enjoy the sweet and savory treats created by me and Chandrelle.
This year there were twelve of us elves. Chandrelle and I were the eldest. At nineteen, Chandrelle was the oldest elf I had ever known. I had always joked that it was her baking skills that kept her alive so long.
I was the second eldest at sixteen. Until Thanksgiving, it had been Horith who was the second eldest. He had been seventeen. Horith and I had been very close. Our love ran deep and constant like the river that bordered the North Pole on the south side.
Being one of the two eldest female elves came with a lot of privileges and responsibilities. We were not only expected to take care of the younger elves, but to help Mrs. Claus with running the house, which meant also the barn and the cellar. We were the only ones that she would entrust to protect the food storages since some of the younger elves would be less able to fight temptation during times when food was scarce.
After Chandrelle and me was Myrin, who was fourteen. Then there was Erolith who had just turned twelve and Zaltarish who was eleven. Cystenn was nine, the twins Arazorwyn and Biafyndar were eight, Pleufan was seven, and Alok was four. Then there was sweet Quaeth, who was the second youngest at one year old.
And finally there was precious little Nym, who was only six months old. She was to spend the holiday tucked tightly in her crib, drunk on breast milk and dreaming of sugar plums.
I had a special bond with Nym because she was the first elf harvested from me. After years of fearing that I wouldn’t be able to contribute new elves to the Pole, Nym finally came along. My little miracle. When Santa had punished Horith I worried he would take his anger out on Nym as well. I begged him to spare her, that it was only me who was a threat to the joyful life at the North Pole.
I will always be thankful to Mrs. Claus for saving our lives that night, even if her motives were only driven by concern for our small number. Her frantic cries warned Santa that losing two adult elves would be unwise in the harsh winter months, and even losing one infant would make the future difficult. At Mrs. Claus’ pleading, he decided to show us both mercy that day, only locking us in the shed for a week as penance for my failings.
See, the North Pole is a wonderful land of celebration and joy, but also of discipline and reverence. We elves have few rules we must follow, but disobedience is not an option.
Rule #1: Do your chores.
The eldest female elves looked after the home and the food reserves in the barn and cellar. We baked, cooked, pickled, cleaned, and did all the sewing. The eldest male elves looked after the animals and performed the butchering. Sometimes, under Santa’s supervision, the boys would be allowed to travel north towards the mountains to hunt rabbits and deer. Chandrelle had always envied their trips away. Neither of us had ever traveled past the tree line.
Horith would tell me all about the animals and the views that he saw during those trips. We’d sneak to the barn late at night and lie together in the hay. He’d tell me about about how rocky and steep the mountains grew as you approached them, and how beautiful the sun was setting over the Pole.
After their tenth year, elves were expected to help look after the crops and contribute to the harvests. It was tough work for such small bodies, but we all had to do our part. Horith had been so good about helping the little ones with their more difficult chores after he had finish all of his. When they weren’t in the fields, they either took care of the younger elves or assisted the older elves in more detailed tasks. This also helped them learn the jobs that they would soon be expected to perform. The youngest elves were in charge of the easier chores, such as taking care of the chickens and collecting eggs, or helping with the gardening.
When all the elves did their chores, the North Pole ran smoothly. Like a well-oiled machine. Even this past year with only twelve of us, we were all able to survive. And it was indeed lucky that Chandrelle and Myrin were both ripe with the next generation of elves, promising that our numbers would grow again.
Rule #2: Always be joyful.
Mrs. Claus told us that a smile is all you need in this world. That it is a conduit for joy. When we felt bad things she’d shush us.
“Santa does not like it when elves cry,” she’d warn.
But sometimes it was hard, especially for the little ones. We’d remind them to try and be joyful even when they had stubbed their toe or skinned their knee, but still the tears would flow around their frowns. We’d tell them that it’d get easier as they grew older. They’d sniffle and nod and we’d smile at them, rewarding their joy with cookies and candy.
What I never revealed was that it was difficult to be joyful sometimes, even as an older elf, and so I had to pretend. When Mr. Claus could see my unjoyfulness seeping through my smiling face, he’d tell me to be more like the other elf girls. To be more like Chandrelle or Mrs. Claus, whose warm smile never faltered. Mrs. Claus with those ice blue eyes, crinkled permanently by a wide toothy smile.
Mr. and Mrs. Claus said that elves were always joyful, so I used to worry that I was defective. But then I started going to the barn at night with Horith and he told me that he wasn’t joyful sometimes too. I told him about how I was often not joyful. He looked me deep in the eyes and told me he felt the same. Telling him that oddly made being joyful easier.
Rule #3: Only Santa may leave the Pole.
The only exception being when he would take the older boys hunting. Otherwise, only Santa was able to come and go. And he didn’t leave only on Christmas Eve, but would leave the Pole once or twice a month. I once asked Mrs. Claus what Santa did when he left and she explained that he needed things that we couldn’t provide at the North Pole.
Despite her unfaltering smile, she’d sympathize with us, the girl elves, on those nights. These were the nights when Santa would visit us in our room. Most of us wouldn’t be able to sleep those nights, not when we knew what was coming. He’d waken the few that could early in the morning, our thin door banging against the wall.
The sound would always vibrate through my bones as a sour scent permeated the room, making the warm air heavy over my mouth, forever forced into a smile.
He’d pick one or two of the girl elves and carry us out to the shed where he would ready us for harvesting new elves. It wasn’t at all like when Horith and I would go to the barn. That would be soft and painless. It hurt when Santa sowed us.
I was lucky though. Chandrelle was his favorite, so I was often left alone.
There was an unspoken fourth rule at the Pole. That only Santa may harvest his elves. We were supposed to be pure. But Horith and I loved each other. We loved each other so much that our bodies ached to be together.
And then Mr. Claus found us.
He had been so proud of me too. So proud that I had finally provided fruit for him and Mrs. Claus. It was then that he took Horith to the shed. That was the last time I saw my love, his face twisted in fear and pain as Santa dragged him through the cold dead leaves. I cried for him, openly. Mrs. Claus allowed it, even though it was not joy. She had always been much kinder than Santa.
The alarm rang at 6 AM. Mrs. Claus stopped her knitting and stood at the window, looking out at the winter landscape around us. Worry furrowed her brow, slightly wrinkling her otherwise joyful face. Santa Claus had never been this late getting home before.
At 11 AM, Mrs. Claus let us eat some of the feast that we had prepared so that we could go to bed without empty stomachs. I couldn’t sleep though, instead I listened to her walk back and forth by the front windows, waiting for him.
At 3 PM, the other girl elves and I joined her in the living room. At this point, she was curled up on her rocking chair. She wasn’t crying, which I was surprised by. Despite Rule #2, I understood the hurt that happens when someone you love doesn’t come back. Yet instead, Mrs. Claus rocked back and forth, her eyes glazed, staring out into nothing. She was unresponsive. Her lips drawn tight, making her grin look dehydrated and skeletal.
By the time 5 PM hit we abandoned her to feed the younger elves more of the Christmas feast which now lay cold on the table.
At 8 PM, Chandrelle called out for me to join her at the window. I hugged Nym close to my chest as I walked over to see. Chandrelle pointed and I immediately saw the shadowy figure which had just emerged from the treeline. Mrs. Claus jumped from her chair, pushing us aside to take a look.
“Oh, thank God! He’s back!” she cried, the practiced smile of joy stretching her face wide again. We continued to look over her shoulder as another shadowy figure appeared, followed by another. Soon, several shadows were walking towards the house.
Mrs. Claus’ face went pale and, for the first time, her smile wavered. It felt as if ice water was running down my spine. She ran to the back of the house and came barreling back moments later with a large shotgun. She brandished the weapon in front of her as she ran out the door wearing nothing but her housecoat and slippers.
There was a loud bang and she fell into the snow, which quickly turned red around her.
We were too stunned to react. Within seconds strange men were around us, touching us and asking us questions in short barks. Chandrelle smiled widely at them, asking if they wanted some cookies and Christmas cheer.
Nym and I were the only ones who cried.
I haven’t seen any of the other elves since. The men let me keep Nym though, which I appreciate. They gave me a cup of water and a cup of some warm brown liquid I assumed was Hot Cocoa, but it was bitter and earthy. I spit it out and the men took it away.
They asked me lots of questions, many of which I didn’t understand. It was like they were speaking a different language. They asked me who my mother and father are, but I don’t know what those words mean.
I asked if I could go back to the North Pole, but the men only clenched their jaws without answering. Their features were sharp and their flesh was not snowy white. They were not elves. They all looked different, it was difficult to keep them straight. They were all odd looking. And each of them looked old. Much older than Mrs. Claus. They looked like they were Santa’s age.
I am alone now. This place is too bright, too cold, too metallic. The light hurts my eyes and the coldness gnaws at my bones. Tears bite at my cheeks. I try to smile but it is hard to even pretend to feel joy here.
The warmth of Nym on my chest is the only comfort I have. She squirms and I look down at her and try again to smile. She looks up at me and her large wet eyes search my features before lighting up with recognition. She smiles at me and my heart lightens. I see Horith’s smile in hers and for the first time since he died, my smile feels real.
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The sleeping mind fascinates me; namely the nighttime hallucinations we call ‘dreams.’ Because of this, I keep a journal to record every thought that passes through my brain at night. I set at least one alarm each day so that I’m able to wake up during my REM cycles and recall my grandest dreams. Sometimes I fall back asleep, but for the most part, I keep up with it. It’s been an enlightening experience, and so far, I’ve filled a dozen notebooks with my nightly adventures.
In addition to cataloging my dreams, I study the phenomenon. I’ve dissected every sleep guide at my disposal and watched countless documentaries. I even took an elective back in high school called “Nocturnal Fantasies,” though it only lasted one semester (not enough students shared my affinity for the topic). In other words, most of my waking life is consumed by sleep, in one form or another.
Craving more knowledge on the subject, I recently perused my town library’s massive local authors section. I was hoping to find a book on dreams I hadn’t read, as this was the one part of the library I had yet to set foot in. It was a long shot, but one I was willing to take in the name of research.
After fishing through a plethora of self-published romance novels, I happened across one non-fiction title that caught my eye – “Sleep Tactics: Exercises for a Mind at Rest,” written by Jack Grovewood. The blurb on the back was vague and reminiscent of a self-help book with quotes like “Learn the secrets to a good night’s rest,” and “Feed your mind’s insatiable appetite for better understanding.” Not a book on dreams per se, but it did pique my interest.
Delving into the book at home, I found it to be more up my alley than I previously expected. It was filled with chapters pertaining to lucid dreaming, meditation, and even sleepwalking. I was already familiar with most of the content, but it turned out to be an enjoyable read. It wasn’t until the last chapter, though, that I was caught completely off guard. I will outline most of it below:
Chapter 16: “How To Exit Your Body”
DISCLAIMER: This is not an OBE, or “Out of Body Experience.”
As stated in Chapter 8: “Out of Body, Out of Bed,” I do believe in OBEs, but I find that they’re just another form of dreaming. What I’m about to divulge to you is something completely different; it’s neither an OBE nor any other dream state. This is a way to truly exit your body using sleep paralysis as the catalyst.
Before I discuss specifics, I’d like to go over a few prerequisites.
To pull this off, you must be proficient at lucid dreaming. What I mean by this is that you need to have lucid dreams regularly and retain lucidity for long periods of time in these dreams. It also helps if you’re able to manipulate your dream environment with ease. If you only lucid dream on occasion, you’ll have to train your mind to do so more often (see Chapter 6: “Becoming a Lucid Lucy”). If you, however, are unable to lucid dream, then this technique is not for you. It’s NOTHING PERSONAL. You simply lack the tools needed for departure.
Another requirement is sleep paralysis. Most of us have experienced this at one time or another, but it will help immensely if you experience it on a regular basis. Coupled with lucidity and a focused mind, sleep paralysis is the only way out of your own skin, so to speak.
That’s all you need in the way of mental capabilities, more or less. It’s an added bonus if you’ve had an OBE or wake-initiated lucid dream (see Chapter 7: “Wake Unto Sleep”).
Now, onto the fun part. I’m going to lay this out in a step by step fashion followed by a more detailed explanation of what to expect upon achieving your first departure. Keep in mind that results may vary.
-Step One-
Fall asleep, on your back, in a slanted position. It could be on a recliner or a car seat, but your body must be diagonal relative to ground-level. That’s the only way I’ve ever been able to get this to work. For one reason or another, gravity plays a role.
-Step Two-
Attain sleep paralysis. This is more of a waiting game than a step as it’s not entirely possible to execute at will. When it does happen, lucidity is key. You must be aware that you’re in a state of sleep paralysis and be unafraid of your lack of mobility. This is one of the ways being a lucid dreamer comes in handy.
-Step Three-
Once paralyzed, attempt to move your legs. If you’re in the proper position, at least one of them should be mobile. If you can’t move either leg, then you’ll have to restart and experiment by tilting your seat in different positions.
-Step Four-
Upon freeing one or more of your legs, attempt to free your arms. They will feel incredibly stiff, and you shouldn’t be able to move them, try as you might. You should then feel a sharp sting in your head. Don’t be alarmed; you’re not having an aneurysm. This is completely normal and is necessary to make your exit.
-Step Five-
As difficult and strenuous as it may be, keep trying to free your arms. As you do this, attempt to move the rest of your body as well. Put everything you have into fighting the paralysis. Just don’t fall back asleep.
-Step Six-
As you wrestle with your mind and body, the stinging sensation in your brain is going to grow. It won’t be painful, but it will cause you great discomfort. Let it happen. As the sensation builds, you’ll start to feel yourself drift away from your body. Don’t fight it. Your mind is like a rubber band and will want to bounce back from where it’s being stretched. Don’t let it. Follow the flow of departure.
If you steel your mind’s focus and follow these instructions to a tee, you will have successfully exited your earthly meat sack and unlocked a marvel of the mind that has only just begun to be understood.
And that’s the gist of it. The author went on to say that the world you find yourself in upon departure will harbor some differences to the one you started in. It will appear similar in almost every way but will be completely void of any lifeforms. On top of that, nothing will budge. Everything will remain in its place, as still as can be. After revealing the delicate process of re-entering one’s body, the author ended the chapter with an eerie warning;
Whatever you do, don’t go near the water.
I was dumbfounded. The entire book up to that point was factual, but that last chapter seemed like something out of a science fiction novel. It certainly made for good entertainment, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Why have such an out-of-place, pseudo-science chapter in an otherwise reputable book? It just didn’t make any sense.
***
About a week passed before I thought about the book again. It was almost time to return it to the library, so I decided to re-read its final chapter. As absurd as it seemed, I teetered between laughing it off once and for all and actually giving it a shot. I did meet all of the requirements, and it would amuse me to some small extent. I could, at the very least, say that I tried it for myself, if for no other reason than to prove it was a load of crap.
After weighing the pros and cons, I ended up giving in to my curiosity. I knew it wasn’t going to work, but it would be a fun little experiment, if nothing else. Besides, was there really anything better for me to do during an episode of sleep paralysis? The only minor nuisance was that I’d have to sleep on one of my recliners instead of in the comfort of my king-sized Serta mattress. A small price to pay for the sake of scientific discovery, I supposed.
On the night in question, I wound up having three episodes of sleep paralysis. During the first, I was far too groggy. I completely forgot about the book and quickly fell back asleep. The second one lasted a bit longer, and I was able to remember the steps outlined in the last chapter. I could just barely move one of my legs, and upon trying my arms, I did feel a small but noticeable discomfort in my head. I wondered for a split second if the author was onto something and that made me a bit excited. Because of this, I jolted awake.
Reflecting on the incident, I became intrigued. I still didn’t believe that I could “exit my body,” but I knew something was going on. I decided to tilt the recliner back a bit and try again. This time, I would have better control.
Next episode came pretty quick. I hadn’t fallen asleep yet, but my body was getting ready to. “This is it,” I thought. I allowed the paralysis to fully set in before attempting anything. It was difficult not to fall asleep, but I managed. This time around, I was able to gain full control over my left leg. I moved it back and forth a few times before trying to free my arms. True to the method, they wouldn’t budge and felt oddly stiff – more so than usual.
This is when the familiar sting set in. It jarred me, but I kept going. The more I tried to move my arms, the greater the sting grew. Believe it or not, as I continued, I did, in fact, feel myself drifting away from my body. I tried to keep it up, but my nerves got the best of me. I lost all control for just a moment and was sucked right back into my body, immediately waking up in the process.
This experience startled the hell out of me. It was beginning to seem more and more likely that the last chapter of Jack Grovewood’s book was somehow accurate. My curiosity became aroused to such an extent that I felt the overwhelming need to tell someone about it. Luckily, I knew just the person.
My buddy Josh is a character. He believes in a lot of what I don’t. This causes us to butt heads on a lot of topics. In simple terms, I’m a skeptic and he’s a believer. One thing we can agree on, however, is our love for dreams. He’s the only person I can talk to at length about the subject. He also happens to meet the requirements listed in the book. I was hoping he would join me for a sleep session and help me get to the bottom of what was going on.
I called Josh up and told him everything. He was ecstatic (as I knew he would be) and agreed to meet me at my place the following night for “departure”. In his mind, this was going to go off without a hitch. I wasn’t completely sold on it yet. I was just happy to have someone else to tag along for the ride.
Fast-forward to the following night. We hung out for a bit, and I showed Josh the book. His eyes grew wide upon reading the final chapter, and he couldn’t wait to try it out himself. I told him not to get his hopes up, but it was clear to me that they already were.
Ready as ever, we laid down at opposite ends of the living room on my two recliners. Josh cracked a joke about how this was the first night we’d be sleeping together; I threw a pillow at him, and then we were off. Shut-eye was just around the corner.
This was when things took a turn for the bizarre. I didn’t have an episode of sleep paralysis right away, but I did end up waking a few hours into my nap. I noticed that Josh was fast asleep in the recliner across the room. Needing to empty my bladder, I walked past him to get to the bathroom, tripping over his legs in the process. I met the floor with a thud and turned around to see if Josh had woken. To my surprise, he hadn’t. I knew he was a heavy sleeper, but even he should have woken up, given the commotion.
Becoming worried, I called out his name. No reaction. I tried shaking him. Nothing. I grabbed a wrist and checked his pulse. It was there, however weak. This was when I panicked.
I ran to my room, grabbed my phone, and scrambled to hit the call button. Just as I was about to dial 911, I heard a loud gasp from the next room, like a diver coming up for air. I ran out there as fast as I could, and to my delight, Josh was awake. He looked up at me with wide eyes and said, “Dude! It fucking worked!”
I was flabbergasted. Though Josh was an over-enthusiastic believer, and downright stubborn at times, he was no liar. I asked him more than once if he was sure it wasn’t a dream and he insisted that he was absolutely certain. Between his firm conviction and weak pulse just moments before, I had no choice but to believe him. It seemed that the book was legitimate after all.
We spent the next couple of hours talking about it. After leaving his body, Josh found himself in my living room, but it was noticeably inanimate. Everything was perfectly still; not even a speck of dust floating through the air. Josh also noticed that his body was translucent; a milky white outline of its former shape. He attempted to open the door to my house, but the knob wouldn’t turn and the door would not budge. It took him a while to realize this, but he found that his new form allowed him to phase through walls.
Josh went on to tell me that the world outside was very different from ours. He said it was like having the contrast dialed up on a picture. That and the static nature of everything made it feel like being trapped in a photograph. I tried to imagine it, but I knew I needed to see it for myself.
We made plans to go back to sleep and enter the world together. Despite my excitement, I was able to make my first successful departure that night. Josh was waiting in the room for me, next to his sleeping body. Seeing ourselves like that was fascinating in and of itself, but I wanted more than anything to see the world outside; a world where adventure and discovery awaited us.
***
For a few weeks, Josh slept over my house and we explored the new world. We would camp there for what seemed like days at a time. It was fun and downright addicting. Curiosity was what kept us going – we wanted to know more and more about the odd realm we had discovered. Here are just a few of the things we learned during our excursions:
-The lighting is fixed. It always looks to be about noon-time based on objects and buildings at eye level, however, the sky is black and filled with stars. It’s a strange dissonance I can’t quite put into words.
-It’s impossible to phase through older buildings. Not sure why.
-There are no lifeforms, just as the book stated, not even animals or insects.
-Sound is bathed in a slight echo. It’s always noticeable when Josh and I talk.
-It’s possible to fall asleep there, but you won’t dream.
-If you travel too far from your body, you’ll hit an ‘invisible wall’ and be unable to go any further.
-Time doesn’t pass in the real world while you’re departed.
After about a month of successful departures, things changed. The more we explored, the more uncomfortable I felt. It always seemed like something was watching us, even though there was no one around. Josh was the opposite. Our late-night adventures were becoming so routine for him, that he was becoming bored. He kept talking about water and how he wanted to get a closer look at the pond near the main road. I reminded Josh of the author’s warning, but it didn’t seem to faze him. Eventually, his curiosity got the best of him.
One night, upon leaving my body, Josh was nowhere to be found. I thought that maybe he hadn’t departed yet, but up to that point, he had always beat me to the punch. This could only mean one thing.
I phased through the walls of my home and raced to the nearby pond. Josh was there, standing at the end of the dock that locals used for fishing in the real world. I yelled out to him.
“Josh! What are you doing?!”
“It’s fine! See? There’s nothing to be scared of. It’s just water.”
I watched as Josh reached down and touched the surface of the pond. It rippled. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. The water should not have reacted. We’d been there for weeks and hadn’t seen a single thing move. Even the air was still.
Perplexed, I began walking out towards Josh. He lifted his hand up, just as awestruck as I was. As he pulled his arm back, the ripple expanded. With it, a small portion of the water turned dark. After a few moments, something reached out from the blackness.
It was a hand. A fucking hand. It reached up grabbed Josh’s leg, yanking him downward. He went feet first into the water, holding onto the dock for dear life. As he screamed, I ran toward him. Before I could even get halfway to his position, I watched him disappear into the water. I ran the rest of the way, but the darkness had faded and returned to normal. My best friend was gone.
In a state of fear-induced panic, I ran away. I wanted to save Josh, but I didn’t know how. Plus I felt that if I re-entered my body, perhaps I’d find him, awake in the real world. It was wishful thinking, but it was all I had.
That wishful thinking fell flat when I awoke. Josh was still unconscious. I tried and tried, but I could not wake him. Eventually, I called 911, and he was taken away on a stretcher. The doctors say he’s in a coma but can’t discern what caused it.
And that’s everything. I’m a fucking wreck over what happened. I’ve tried visiting Josh in the hospital, but I can’t face his parents, and they’re always there. Instead, I go out to the pond in the real world, hoping that somehow, I’ll find answers. All I do end up finding are more questions. They keep me up at night, along with a recurring nightmare replaying the events from that day. I’ve tried departing since, but to no avail. Something’s holding me back. It might be fear.
That world is like a photograph; a still frame of a place we were never meant to see. A moment frozen in time with a layer of reality stripped away – and something is living there. Despite this truth, I feel a need to dive back in and save my friend. He didn’t heed the author’s warning, but I’m the reason he entered that world in the first place. I’m the reason he can’t wake up.
I have to go back.
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WRITTEN BY: Christopher Maxim (Contact • Other Stories • Subreddit)
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My son Michael is all I have left.
But in a lot of ways I’m lucky, because he’s all I need.
He’s such a good boy.
He takes care of me, looks after the house and manages to keep his grades up at college. I’m so lucky and so, so proud of him.
It would have been very easy for things to go wrong for him, after all he’s been through.
It started when he was just two years old. Michael fell down the stairs and banged his head hard on the stone floor in the hallway. Claire should have been watching him. She should have been there, but she was never attentive enough, she never cared for him like she should. Not like I do.
He suffered with seizures for days after. We nearly lost him. I don’t know what I would have done then. I couldn’t live without my boy.
But he made it. He was strong and he showed me that, when you’re faced with adversity and things aren’t working, you need to be tough. You need to fight.
His recovery made me feel brave enough to try for another child — made me prepared to give Claire another chance to be the mother she should have been.
So, three years after Michael was born, she fell pregnant with Amy. Our little girl was beautiful, with my dark hair and Claire’s piercing blue eyes, just like Michael. Michael felt a little threatened at first — I’m sure all children do when a new sibling upturns their life — but over the months, he warmed to her. He was so protective.
There were times when I saw him standing by her crib, just watching her sleep. He had the most intense look on his face — it was the sweetest thing.
Amy adored Michael too, she looked up to him and would follow him around like a little puppy, desperate to play with her big brother.
When I close my eyes and picture my daughter, that’s how I always remember her. Her sparkling blue eyes twinkling with joy as she dashed after my Michael. It’s a good memory.
Michael loved her, just as much as me and Claire did. Now I think about, I realize Claire might have resented Michael even back then. I think she was jealous of how much Amy loved him. Of how much I do.
That’s why she blamed him, after it happened. He was only seven though, for crying out loud. What kind of a mom leaves a seven-year-old and a four-year-old unsupervised in a garden with a pond? What kind of woman doesn’t panic when her son comes in alone to get a sandwich, his clothes wet.
He told me that after they played in her Wendy house, he was playing with his sister by the pond, that he splashed the water to make her laugh. Amy was only four. She couldn’t swim.
Claire should have been watching them.
Afterwards she was never the same. A fortnight after we buried our daughter, Claire packed a bag and left.
Good riddance.
You should have heard the filthy lies she told before she went, the vile accusations at that poor, sweet, innocent little boy. She asked me to choose — Ha! Like there was ever a choice to make! — then, when she saw my mind was made up, she told me to wake up. She told me to open my eyes and look at the world, to not let love blind me.
I looked her straight in the eye and told her I never would, then I slammed the door behind her.
Poor Michael was so traumatized. He was obviously in shock, because he acted so detached and emotionless about the loss of his sister and mother. I think he must have been left numb by the emotional rawness of the situation. But there were signs, subtle hints that he wasn’t coping anywhere near as well as it might first appear.
I feel a little ashamed for sharing this, because I’d never want to embarrass him, but for a long time afterwards he would wet the bed at night. It broke my heart as I stuffed his soiled sheets into the washing machine, knowing how much he must be hurting. My poor, poor boy.
So, to help Michael cope with his grief, I bought him a kitten. She was a little black and white thing, her eyes still blue, her mewing little voice so delicate and so fragile sounding that she couldn’t help but melt my heart. I thought that she could be a new friend for Michael to talk to when he felt he couldn’t talk to anybody else.
When he first saw her I knew that I had done the right thing — his eyes lit up, a beaming smile spread across his face and he turned to me and asked: ‘Is it for me? Can I keep it?’
I smiled back and told him yes, of course he could, but first she needed a name.
I had to dab at the tears that welled in my eyes when he picked the kitten up, held her close to his chest, and smiled at me as he said: ‘Amy. This is Amy.’
Michael was so attentive to that little cat, and she was exactly what he needed when my poor, unlucky little boy suffered yet another tragedy when he was only 10 years old. Michael knows he shouldn’t have played with the matches, but all children are curious, aren’t they? I mean, I’m sure if you tell most little boys or girls not to play with fire they are going to want to find out why. It makes sense.
There had been a few fires in our neighborhood that Summer, so I had mentioned how important it was that he be careful, that he not play with anything that could cause a blaze. In a lot of ways it’s probably my fault for putting the thought in his impressionable little mind.
I think he still associated the Wendy house with the day he lost his sister. I think he still remembered the pain of that bereavement and that was why he wanted it gone.
I don’t know where he got the lighter from, but I know I should have taken better care of him. He could never have known the burning plastic would run and drip like that. How would a 10-year-old know that it would stick to the skin on his hands, that it would burn so hot and cling to the flesh, even as it charred his little pink fingers?
He was so brave as we sped to the hospital. The cold water from the faucet saved him from any permanent nerve damage, but the skin bubbled and blistered before my eyes, the sickening smell of the singed downy hairs on his arms filling the air.
But even as I panicked, racing to the ER, he never cried. He was so still, so quiet. He’s so brave.
It was only a few weeks after the event, while his poor little hands were still bandaged, that I heard him react to it. It was late at night, and as I walked by his bedroom door I heard him. He was whispering to himself in the darkness.
But they weren’t words of misery that I heard, instead he was furiously hissing exclamations of pure rage and fury at the situation. He was so angry, it sounded like he really hated himself for it. I moved closer to his door, planning to knock and ask if he wanted to talk, but a creaking floorboard gave me away and at once Michael fell silent.
I took the hint and backed away, giving him the space he clearly wanted.
Time passed and finally the bandages were removed. It was upsetting to see his little hands afterwards. They were weak (it took weeks of physio before he could use them properly again), and the skin was waxy looking, pale and covered in ripples, yet smooth as porcelain in other places. They still look like that to this day.
I thought their appearance would frighten him, but instead he studied them carefully, peering at them intensely through the black rimmed spectacles he had just started to wear (sadly my little boy inherited my shortsightedness), his stony face impregnable. Finally he nodded and lowered them again, listening as the doctor explained how they would recover. He never betrayed the slightest hint of emotion then. I couldn’t believe how brave he was.
Yet no sooner had we overcome that last obstacle, then tragedy struck again.
I think it must have been a fox, maybe a stray dog.
But when I walked out into our yard that morning, I knew what that bloody, tattered thing down in the corner was before I even got there. Yet if it weren’t for her little purple collar, I might not have been able to confirm what I feared. Amy, Michael’s pet and best friend, had been ripped to shreds.
I scooped her up and placed her broken little body in a box, then, with a heavy heart, I took the long walk upstairs to Michael’s bedroom.
I rapped on the door, then entered. Michael was sitting in his bed, still in his pyjamas, and placed his spectacles on his nose as I sat down beside his feet.
‘Hey, buddy,’ I said gently.
‘Hello Dad,’ he replied, his kind face watching me fixedly.
‘Uh, I need to talk to you about Amy…’ I continued.
‘Oh Amy’s not here,’ Michael replied. ‘She’s dead.’
I felt so sad to have to correct him. ‘No, not your sister, buddy,’ I said. ‘I’m talking about your cat.’
Michael peered at me, a slight look of confusion flickering across his face.
‘Uh, I think an animal got into our yard last night,’ I continued. ‘And, uh, I’m so sorry to tell you this, but I think it killed Amy. I’m sorry.’
I leant in close and wrapped my arms around my son, hoping I could somehow shield him from the pain.
When you get right down to the core of it, I think that’s what a parent is — a child’s shield against the horrors of this world. It’s all we should ever hope to be. It’s the only role I have ever wanted.
When I finally let go and looked at Michael he was so serene, and I felt glad to have at least helped him a little in that moment.
‘You ok?’ I asked him.
He nodded, swallowed hard, then licked his dry lips.
‘Dad?’ he said quietly. ‘Can I see her?’
I wasn’t sure that was such a good idea, but he was adamant it was what he wanted and I didn’t feel I could deny him that last chance to say goodbye.
So I held his hand and walked him downstairs to the box that held Amy’s remains.
‘Are you sure about this?’ I asked one last time, but Michael nodded at me — a short, anxious gesture.
So I lifted the lid.
Michael peered into the box at what remained of his cat for the best part of a minute. He didn’t say a thing, instead staring with glistening eyes behind his glasses. He held it together so well, but one thing betrayed how he was feeling.
His breathing changed. It became faster and faster, right up until I replaced the lid.
He must have been so upset.
After we buried Michael’s best friend at the end of the yard, I worried about him a lot.
Michael didn’t have many friends, and I couldn’t work out why. He never really fitted in at school, which is why I think his grades never quite matched his intelligence. He is such a clever boy, but for the vast majority of his years in education his grades have been average at best.
I noticed that he never really mixed well with other children, and became concerned that he would struggle to find companionship. It was with this concern in mind that I made him an appointment with Dr Sparrow, a highly regarded child therapist.
But when the day of the appointment came, poor little Michael had a terrible stomach ache. I nearly ended up having to take him to the ER, but luckily it passed on its own. We tried to reschedule, but each time something seemed to crop up. In the end he never did meet with Dr Sparrow, but that’s no big deal, because shortly after I voiced my concerns about Michael’s lack of interaction with other kids he quickly made some friends. Not many, and I don’t think any of them were ever that close to him, but it was a start.
He’s always been a very private person, so I didn’t pry about his relationships and he kept them very much to himself. I was just glad to know that he was forming some bonds after all.
I think he just needed time to become the boy I knew he could be.
Over the high school years he studied hard and discovered a real joy in exercise and personal fitness. I let him work out with my old barbell in the garage and he would take long runs through the nearby woods. It made me happy to see him taking care of himself.
Michael never got in any trouble, you know. Well, except that one time when a bully poked fun at his pressed white shirt, his khakis and his neat side parting. You know how that sort of person can be, they see somebody taking more pride in his appearance than they do and they go on the offensive. The boy called him horrible names, then he even punched Michael, bloodying his nose and ruining his shirt.
The boy had a reputation as a troublemaker, so it was always going to backfire one day.
The Principal tried to tell me that Michael had gone too far, that after that boy was taken to hospital she would need to be seen to take action. I wouldn’t stand for it, I wouldn’t let her punish my Michael for defending himself against that little scumbag. It was a real battle and I even needed to get a lawyer involved (which I couldn’t really afford) but eventually Michael was able to return to school without any blemish on his record. We paid the other boy’s family to make this go away — not because Michael did anything wrong, but because I wanted it all over and done with before he applied for college. I had to remortgage the house, just so that little bastard who tried to victimize my boy could get the physio he needed to walk again and some expensive dentures so he could chew steak.
As if a piece of work like that deserves steak! He should be on bread on water, in a prison with all the other degenerates.
Still, after that whole unfortunate situation was over, Michael had done well enough to get accepted into the local college. I thought this was perfect — I could keep an eye on him and he could continue to get the education he needed to make his mark on the world. I didn’t want him to feel that he was missing out though, so I bought him an old pick-up truck. I felt it could give him some independence and I know he appreciated the thought. He passed his test first time.
He’s such a clever boy.
He’d barely been at college for a full semester when something happened that made me all the more grateful that I was able to keep an eye on him.
A college girl was killed.
They found her in the woods, and the news reports suggests that the monster who killed her had performed some unspeakable acts on the poor girl before murdering her.
I told Michael that he needed to be careful out in those woods, that no matter how well he knew them, he wasn’t safe out there.
He just smiled and told me not to worry, that I shouldn’t have any concerns about anybody trying anything with him.
Yet just when I was starting to calm down, it happened again. And again. And again.
There have now been six killings. All girls from local towns, all of whom have been taken from their homes, then discovered days later, deep in the woods. All of whom have shown the same upsetting pattern of injuries. It made me worry for poor Michael’s safety at first, but then, a month ago, I realized just how bad it was.
I was looking for my work gloves and remembered that Michael had asked about them just a few days earlier.
Michael was at college so I went into his room to see if I could find them there. At first I had no luck, but then I looked under his bed. Sure enough, there they were, but then I spotted the box.
It was a small, unassuming, wooden thing, with a latch.
I feel ashamed to admit it, but I was curious, so I took it out and had a look inside.
Inside I found several newspaper cuttings, all about the murdered girls. The most recent one was a pretty girl called Kerri, the paper including a recent photo of her with dyed bright red hair and a cute smile. Then I saw them. Down in the bottom of the box, tucked into the corner.
A girl’s ring.
A pendant.
A vanity mirror.
A piece of pink ribbon.
A button.
A single lock of bright red hair.
Suddenly it dawned on me. Michael had known these girls, probably even been close to them. If he kept a lock of Kerri’s hair, he might even have been in love with her.
My heart broke — how much more tragedy could befall my poor boy? How many more people that he cared about would he lose?
Wiping at my damp eyes, I placed everything back in the little wooden box and tucked it back under his bed before backing out through the door with my gloves.
Later that evening, after he came home from college, Michael came to speak with me while I was working in the yard.
‘Dad, did you go in my room today?’ he asked, pale and thoughtful.
‘Yeah, buddy, just to get these gloves,’ I smiled, respecting his privacy and not raising the subject of the box of keepsakes, the memories of his departed friends. I knew he’d talk to me about it when he was ready.
He stood watching me from behind his thick glasses for some time, that same thoughtful look on his face, before finally nodding, a determined little gesture (or was it one of gratitude?), then smiling and saying: ‘Hey Dad, why don’t I cook dinner tonight? You don’t look like you’re feeling so good.’
I told him I was fine, but said he could cook if he wanted. I knew he probably wanted to do it to thank me for being so discreet about his box.
As it goes, I’m glad Michael did cook, because later that night, after we ate, I did start to feel unwell. Maybe Michael will be a doctor with an eye like that? He’s certainly clever enough.
My illness has gotten worse over the last few weeks, and I’ve ended up bedridden. Our home is pretty isolated out here, so I’ve had nothing but this laptop and my son for company.
Luckily Michael has taken over the running of the house, including making all of our meals. I’m doing my best to eat them, but the pains in my stomach are getting so bad now. I’ve felt so sick and I’m definitely weaker than I was. I’ll be honest with you, I’m starting to worry that this could be something serious — and I told Michael as much yesterday.
He told me that Dr Harper has been real busy lately, but he’ll be along soon to get me back on the road to recovery. In the meantime I just need to take it easy, while Michael takes care of our home.
Even now, as the sky darkens and the stars are starting to appear, I can hear him hard at work in our backyard, digging away.
My son Michael is all I have left.
But in a lot of ways I’m lucky, because he’s all I need.
He’s such a good boy.
|
The three of us sit together in my backyard, beer bottles spread all around our little triangle. Leftover garbage from the sandwiches we ate earlier accompany those same beer bottles. I personally prefer Modelo, but all Santiago managed to bring us were some lukewarm, probably decade-old, Mexican beers that tasted as awful as they looked. Half-way through drinking my second round, I thought I was chugging down piss. Still, booze is booze.
“This tastes like ass, and not the good kind,” Santiago says, belches, and then spits. “Yuck.”
“Last time you’re providing the beverages,” I say. “God, I rather drink mercury.” I peer over at Elena, and see that she has barely touched her own drink. By the disgusted look on her face, I can tell she feels the same way.
“One of the last nights of summer vacation,” Elena starts, “and I’m spending it with you dorks drinking this crap.”
“Ugh, don’t remind me,” Santi complains. “Why the hell does school have to start next week…”
“I mean, it’s senior year, guys,” I remind them. “Shit is going to be alright, and honestly we should be enjoying these moments right now. God knows when we can all fuck around like this anymore.”
“You have a point,” Santi says. “I’m not looking forward to seeing some of the people there, though. Bitches there just irritate me sometimes, and the guys are just as annoying.”
Once again, Santi finds the perfect words to express my feelings. If anything, high school has brought my cousins and me closer. Since the three of us are practically the same age, and the fact that we all attend the same institution, we’ve grown attached to one another. It was perfect that way.
We spend most of the night chatting and laughing, all while the moon crawls away from my backyard and its light disappears with it. It starts to get too dark for comfort, however, and we know eventually someone would need to make the annoying trip of turning on the lamplight. Neither one of us wants to go, however.
But as always, the darkness eventually becomes menacing.
“Alright, I ain’t getting up to turn on the lights,” Santi states. “Onetwothree, not it!”
“Not it!” I hear Elena shout, while my words seem stuck on my tongue.
“Dammit, that ain’t fair,” I say. Elena snorts and laughs. “Whatever.” I stand up, and drag myself towards the lamp. It hangs above Elena like a loose tooth. I flick the switch on, and a dim, yellow light pours all over the backyard.
I return to my seat. “What now, then?”
We all exchange looks of perplexity, unable to think of something to entertain ourselves. We made one simple rule whenever the three of us head downstairs to the backyard, and that is: Absolutely. No. Cellphones. We will not allow our phones to distract ourselves from interacting with one another.
“I mean it is getting late,” I begin. “How about we share some stories.” I stress that last word out with a malicious tone.
My cousins glance at me, and I raise my eyebrows to add more emphasis. They stare at each other for a quick second, and begin to giggle like kids who just broke an expensive vase and are lying about it. “Hey,” I say. “What’s so damn funny? Don’t be excluding me in any insiders, you bastards.”
“It’s nothing really,” Elena says, but continues to giggle whenever she looks at Santi. “Stop looking at me!”
“You stop!” Santi laughs.
“You’re both acting like a bunch of bitches,” I grunt. “C’moon. I wanna know what’s going on.”
“Well it’s funny you should mention that,” Santi says. “It just so happens that Elena and I have the scariest story you’ll ever hear.”
“I have a story?” Elena nearly screams. Santi and I both shush her, and remind her that we’re outside where the damn neighbors are trying to sleep. “Sorry, sorry. But anyways!” She points at Santi. “You’re the one that told me it.”
“Wha? You have a story, and it’s a scary one?” I ask, a bit astonished. “Well then! I can’t wait to hear this.”
I sometimes wonder how we acquired this deep love for the macabre. But when it comes down to it, I know it derives from the way our environment raised us. We grew up with Chucky, The Ring, the Saw series, and that’s just scratching the surface of all the other scary shit our developing minds absorbed over the years.
But we also need to give credit to our folks, of course. Our tradition to pass around horror stories like goodies on Halloween originated from our parents, and their own siblings and cousins. They used to all gather together, just how I’m doing right now, and share whatever imaginative tales plunged out of their minds.
“Yeah man,” Santi says. “And trust me when I say this: It’s really fucking terrifying.”
“You sure about that?” I question my cousin. “I don’t know man. I’ve seen some pretty fucked-up shit.”
“I’m more than positive, dude,” Santi says. “This shit will make you piss yourself.”
“Have you heard this story already, Elena?” I ask. She nods her head while smiling. “Forreal? Whacha think of it, then?”
“I mean…” Elena starts, “Honestly, for someone like Santi who never ever told a good scary story, it’s pretty freaking horrifying.”
“First thing first,” I say. “Is this story real or fake?”
“I don’t know…” Santi snickers. “I guess you have to wait and hear for yourself.”
“Don’t be such an asshole, dude,” I say. “You know you always gotta clarify if what we’re about to hear is either true or not. It prepares us for whatever emotional wreckage we may or may not feel.”
“Well how about this. I’ll tell you my amazing story, if you tell me a real scary story yourself. You must have a new one involving your haunted house.”
Elena twitches in her seat.
“See, why you gotta say that? Now Elena’s all scared and shit.” I nudge her with my elbow, you know, to be the annoying primo she knows and loves. Elena gives off an irritated smile. This time we really pissed her off.
“She has every right to be scared, like, what the fuck? Your house is freaking creepy,” Santi says.
I don’t blame Elena for feeling the way she feels. My house grew a reputation of it being haunted around the time we attended middle school. This was the sort of thing that made me special among my friends at the time. I guess you can say this also added to my overall love for horror, in a weird sort of way. Not just horror, but the absolute emotion that is fear. Some might hate it, but people like my cousins and I are addicted to that feeling. We love the way it crawls deep inside our skin, turns our blood cold, raises the hairs on our arms, and enervate our minds beyond measures.
“You’re still shook after what happened?” I ask my prima.
“Well, no-duh! How can I not be? That was probably the scariest thing that ever happened to me.” Elena shivers, even though earlier in the night she kept on yapping on and on about how hot it was outside.
“I still think you slept-walk,” Santi says. “I mean, what other explanation do you have?”
“I’ve never slept-walk before in my life!” I shush Elena again, and smack her knee as punishment. “Sorry again. But still… Somebody carried me to the guest room, and it wasn’t anyone in the house. I asked eve-ry-body, and they all said they did no such thing. That damn ghost—or demon—in George’s house scooped me up, and now I’m scared thinking about it.”
“Perfect,” I say. “Now that the mood is set, let’s hear that amazing story of yours, bro.”
“Ehh,” Santi mumbles. “Okay, fine.” I throw my hands up in the air, and scream in delight. This time Elena tells me to shut the fuck up.
“Okay. Here’s how it starts-”
Off in the distance we hear the sound of leaves crunching. This noise immediately shuts everyone up. I hold my breath, and gaze around my backyard. Elena and Santi follow my eyes. Although nobody says it, we all feel a bit intimidated by the turn of events.
The noise erupts again. This time Elena gasps and jumps from her seat. I look at Elena, and raise a single finger to my lips. Santi fixes his eyes near one of the entrances to my backyard. “I think it came from over there.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” I say. “But I’m not too sure. You think it’s an animal?”
“Probably,” Santi says. “Who’s going to check it out? Last time some skunks or raccoons or whatever the fuck dug inside your trashcans, and made a complete mess. I doubt your father will let it slide a second time. You know how he can be.”
“Maybe we should send Elena to go,” I tease her, but in a kind-hearted attempt to alleviate everyone’s unreasonable fear.
“Nu-uh.” Elena shakes her head. “Count me out on that.”
“Well I already got up to turn on the lamplight,” I state. “So, I guess that leaves you, huh, Santi?”
“I hate you both,” he mutters as he picks himself up, and moves towards the gate. Santi pulls the small switch open—its rusty hinges squeaking as loud as a pig getting slaughtered—and maunders out of my backyard.
Elena and I sit in silence as we wait for him to return. The wind blows harder as time passes by. Yellow and green leaves rain and billow all over the air. They land on the ground, forming large piles that reminds me of autumn approaching. “We should’ve brought blankets,” I break the quietness.
“What’s taking this kid so long?” Elena asks. We rear closer to where Santi left, and try to listen in on what he’s doing. We hear nothing but the rushing of cars outside. This worries me a bit.
“Okay,” Elena says. “What the hell happened to-”
“Boo!” Santi jumps in between Elena and I. I reel back in surprise, a scream of despair caught inside my throat. Elena, on the other hand, unleashes a cry as loud as a jet engine. She stumbles backwards, loses her balance, and falls back on her chair. Santi and I watch in pure hysteria as our cousin lands on the ground with her chair on top of her.
“Noo you didn’t!” I yell. Santi and I burst into laughter. We grab each other’s shoulders to support our outburst.
“That was not nice!” Elena interrupts our joy. She struggles to pick herself up from the ground, which only makes us laugh even more. I feel a bit guilty, however, so I go to assist her. She stands up, shoves me away, and proceeds to stomp towards Santi. “You’re an asshole, dude. What if I broke my neck?”
“It was so damn worth it, though,” Santi says, still smiling about it.
“Okay, whatever happened, happened,” I say. “Just go on and tell your story, please.”
“You right,” Santi says, and we all sit back down. Elena still stares at Santi with mild hatred. It’ll pass, though. It always does.
“Here it comes,” Santi begins. He hunches down a bit, and rests his elbows on his thighs. Elena and I lock our eyes with his.
“You guys remember that little girl who died in a car accident near the grocery store?” Santi asks us. A strict look takes over his face, unlike his usual playful expression.
“You mean Cassandra? Cassandra Gutierrez?” I ask. “What about her?”
“Wait a minute…” Elena begins.
“Sh! I want zero interruptions,” Santi says. “But yeah, her. You wanna know the true story as to what happened to her?”
“There’s a story involving her death?” I ask.
“Oh there’s a story alright,” Santi says. “It turns out this crazy bitch was well acquainted with the devil. I know what chur thinkin’, but trust me guys when I say it’s true. You know all the stupid shit little kids be doin’ nowadays. Someone in the high school probably influenced her or some shit.
“Anyways, rumors got to her that there was a special type of ritual that will, now get this, ‘transform’ you into a demon or some shit along those lines. I know, it sounds hysterical. As fake as it sounds, however, this ritual might hold some truth after what I’m about to say.
“It isn’t like any other ritual. For starters, this thing needs to last over seven months. Within those seven months, each month you had to perform a different task. What I mean by that is, for example, the first month you had to tell at least ten lies a day. It starts off easy and all, but as you can imagine, it gets worse as time goes on.
“So when she first started, she just kept on lying without stopping. Cassandra had no trouble completing that first task. The second month, however, was a bit more challenging. It requires the person to rob something from someone every day.
“She was a bit hesitant to do so, since she wanted proof that the devil will actually come to her right after those seven months. Kids told her that a demon usually arrives during the first or second month, but this hadn’t happen to Cassandra yet. Finally, however, around the middle of the second month, the devil paid her a visit. But again, robbing a store or stealing someone’s wallet ain’t that difficult. We be robbin’ places left and right.” Santi flicks my knee with his hand, and winks at me.
I struggle to offer him a smile back.
“But yeah, the devil came to her dreams, and stated that for now on, she’ll follow his instructions. Now that Cassandra had full proof she was ready to sail. The bitch usually took money from her parents, or once in a while smuggled some food from the same grocery store where she was run over.
“The third month came, and the devil commanded her to commit blasphemy as much as possible within a month. I cannot fully explain to you all the crazy shit this bitch did. Cassandra was a complete mess!” Santi laughs to himself. “Dear god. The girl used the lord’s name in vein, pissed on a number of bibles, went to church late at night and vandalized the entire area. I’ll give her props for being one creative cunt. She makes the three of us look like a bunch of wimps.
“Anyways, the fourth month came, and the devil gave new orders. Every weekend of that month she had to perform a worshiping in honor of Lucifer. I don’t have all the little details on what she did exactly, but you guys can imagine all the crazy shit that went down. So far, in my opinion, most of the stuff she had to do wasn’t that bad.
“But then came the fifth month. Here’s where it gets juicy! The devil told Cassandra she needed to kill an animal every single day. Every damn day! Imagine that? The devil said it doesn’t matter what type of animal, just as long as she progresses as the weeks pass by. She started off with bugs, birds, and all that other shit. Then she started murdering squirrels and raccoons. If you ask me, she did this town a favor slaughtering those animals. They can be annoying as fuck.
“But yeah, then she killed dogs and cats that roamed the streets. At last, this crazy bitch burned down an entire farm. A fucking farm. I’m telling ya, these white people are crazy.
“At this point, the devil already knew she was the one. So that’s why, during the sixth month, he asked her to do some real wicked shit.
“The demon asked her to kill another human being.” A sinister smile curves up Santi’s lips.
Elena sucks in her breath. “No. No, don’t say…”
“Listen to this, guys,” Santi says. “Cassandra doubted herself if she could really do it. I mean that’s some serious shit, you know, to take another person’s life. The devil didn’t give her an exact date, but said it had to be within that sixth month.”
“Well did she do it?” Elena and I ask in unison.
“Supposedly, she killed some hobo near our neighborhood,” Santi reveals to us. “I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s what a lot of people are speculating. Everyone is sure, however, that this bitch definitely murdered another human being. I can tell by your grim faces that this is scary as fuck. I know, trust me.”
“Jesus…” I’m left completely speechless. “I always perceived Cassandra to be an innocent girl. But to kill someone? Holy shit.”
“The story doesn’t end here, guys,” Santi whispers. “This next part is my favorite.
“So yeah, she killed the hobo. The seventh month comes; the final obstacle. Just thinking about it, I can only imagine the pressure and anticipation Cassandra must’ve felt. So what happens was, the devil told her in order for her to complete the ritual, she needed to kill a member of her family.
“And you wanna know what this bitch did? She pussied out last minute. She couldn’t do it. I guess she must’ve loved her family that much. I mean, in my opinion, she’s really stupid. You already killed another human being, and at this point you’re considered a piece of shit. Why not just kill someone in your family. It could’ve been an uncle, an aunt, a sister.
“A cousin…”
What the fuck did he just say?
“Um,” I begin, “you still haven’t explained how she…died.” Something doesn’t fit right. This fear flowing through my veins feels…demented.
“Oh, that?” Santi says. “Well, I killed her. I ran that bitch over.”
My mind goes blank. Santi shifts his eyes towards mine. A weight of dread unfolds inside me. I don’t see my cousin. I see someone else. I see a monster dwelling inside him.
“What did you just say?” Elena stutters. Santi, in return, provides us with his most doleful expression yet.
“I said, I killed Cassandra. What’s so hard about it? I ran the bitch over. See, what she didn’t know was that I was also completing my seven month trial. The devil informed me on my sixth month that she backed off, so he suggested that I should eliminate her. Bam! That easy. I was able to complete my second to last task.
“But the story doesn’t end there. I guess that leaves me-”
That same crunching noise that interrupted Santi in the begin returns to cut him off again.
“Goddammit!” Santi barks in rage. “I’ll go check that shit out again. I thought I fucking got rid of those damn animals.” Once again he leaves Elena and me all by ourselves in my backyard.
We sit in disturbed silence. This time I feel completely afraid to move a single joint. I try to stop my hands from shaking, but this fright itching deep inside my skin prevents me from maintaining my composure.
“Hey,” Elena says. I’m startled by the sudden sound of her voice. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. I have to tell you something, though.”
“Please keep on talking,” I whimper. “Hearing you talk is calming me down.”
“That’s not the story he told me earlier,” Elena says. “He told me something completely different. I- I don’t know what the hell kind of story he just told right-”
“I’m back!” Santi says in his cheerful tone, the one I’ve come to associate my favorite cousin with. Elena and I jump in our seats. “Sorry I took so long, but I wanted to scram away all of those goddamn raccoons. You gotta do something about that, bro-”
Elena and I stare at our cousin with trepidation. “What? Why the solemn faces? Aww, are you guys scared even before I tell my awesome story?”
“Just what the fuck do you mean, dude,” Elena bickers. “What kind of story were you telling before, you sick fuck! That wasn’t very nice of you to just shit on Cassandra’s grave like that.”
“Okay, hold the fuck up,” Santi remarks. “Why the hell are you all up in my shit with that bitchy tone of yours, cuz? What the hell did I do wrong? I just got here. I haven’t even said my story yet. And why do you even bring up Cassandra?”
“Bullshit,” Elena mouths off. “If this is some sick prank, then just stop it, you asshole. You scared George and me pretty badly.”
“You need to calm the hell down,” Santi argues back. “Yo, George! Tell her to chill, bro. What the hell happened that made her all crazy just now?”
I remain quiet. I wait to see if Elena figures it out. But it’s more than that. I can’t help but to stay mute. The realization of it all leaves me stagnant. Dismay takes over my mind.
“Do you hear me?” Santi repeats himself. “Dude, are you…okay? You don’t look too well.” I switch my gaze from the ground, and stare at Elena. It takes her a moment, but she finally gets it. I see her eyes swell, and the first of many tears spill down her ruddy cheeks.
“Santi,” I whisper. “How does the story end? Please tell me you remember a little bit.”
“Bro, I have no idea what you’re talking-”
“Santi!” I spring up from my chair, knocking the damn thing down. I march towards my cousin, grab his shoulders, and rattle his goddamn body. “Please, you have to remember! How does the story end? What happens next?!” From behind me I hear Elena sob. She whispers a silent prayer to herself. It’s all useless, however. We’re fucked.
“Santi…Don’t do it please,” I cry on his shoulders. “Don’t kill Elena or me.”
The sound of leaves breaking comes again. This time, however, I hear the crunch right behind Santi.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “But… I don’t know what I did. The beers…”
“What? What do you mean the beers?”
“The poison,” Santi slowly mumbles. “One of us is going to die.”
Credit To: TheSplitPersonality
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Every culture has its own unique folklore- traditions and tales passed down through generations. In the modern day, these are often looked upon by most with the idle interest of a time gone by, but I have always found them to be quite fascinating. They reveal so much about the hopes and fears of people who once were; people trying to make sense of the world around them and at times, cope with its harsh realities. It was this passion of mine that would eventually lead me to major in Folklore at Memorial University.
I relished the study, so I was thrilled when I was given the assignment to interview people on a topic of my choosing. I live in Newfoundland, a province steeped in supernatural folklore, so I jumped at the chance to delve into the stories of the fairies, the mischievous, malevolent creatures that lurked in the forests and fields. In preparation, I went to the folklore archive to borrow some recording equipment as well as to listen to other recordings to get more of a sense of what I was in for. I listened in rapt attention to people of various ages tell their tales of wee people, of lights in the forest or of strange enthralling music carried on the wind.
I decided to conduct the interviews in my home town and made plans to stay with my parents for the weekend. My family comes from Cupids, a rural, over 400 year old community about a one hour drive from the city where I lived. Given that Cupids was the sort of town where everyone knew everyone else, it wasn’t hard for me to find a few of the older residents who were willing to share their tales and encounters with the fairies and allow me to record them. One lady told me of her uncle who was wounded by one of them and spent the rest of the month picking fish bones and wool out of the stinking cut before it finally healed. Another encounter was described by a gentleman who claimed that he had gone into the woods to set rabbit snares, only to come home three weeks later with no recollection of where he had been or even that such an amount of time had passed.
The last interview of the day was reserved for my grandfather, who had agreed to tell me his story but, unlike the others, now seemed reluctant to do so. I assured him that I could find someone else if he was uncomfortable, but he shook his head and began to speak. He told me that his mother would always warn him about travelling on a particular trail; that in order to safely pass through, he must wear his coat inside out and carry some breadcrumbs or else he would be taken. Even in those more superstitious times he was not the sort to believe in such things and so, as he found himself hurrying to get home before dark after a day of berry picking, he brazenly cut through that very trail, without a second thought to his mother’s warnings. He recalled that as he walked along the path, the surrounding trees seemed to close in on him, the area feeling more oppressive. While he felt foolish, he decided at that point to turn back and take another route.
He had begun to shake while telling his tale, but now tears filled his eyes as he spluttered and stammered as he attempted to describe what he saw when he turned back. “Devils!” was all he could finally manage. I took his clammy hand to calm him and told him again that he did not have to tell me anymore. But he regained control of himself and told me that he ran, frantically throwing down the breadcrumbs and tearing off his coat, flipping it inside out and holding it in place like a cape. He did not stop or slow until he reached the safety of home, bursting through the door to find his bewildered mother. She was about to scold him for his torn coat until she realized what had happened, at which point, she held him close and thanked God that he was safe. When my grandfather looked at his coat, he noticed three long tears as if it had been clawed.
His story finished, he shakily excused himself to bed. I apologized for upsetting him, but he waived it away, only turning back to make me promise not to ever go looking for such things. I gave him my word to ease his old mind and left. I returned to my parents’ home and spent much of the rest of the night writing my report and re-listening to the stories I had gathered. Hearing my grandfather get upset again made me feel terrible, but his story also sparked a sense of curiosity within me. I remembered seeing what I believed was that very same trail, when I was a child and helping my family pick blueberries (though I probably ate as much as I picked). We would never take that trail, instead taking one of the longer routes back home. I had assumed that they were afraid of robbers and roughnecks that might be roaming this less maintained and less populated path, but now I wonder if it was simply to appease my grandfather’s fears. The next morning, I attempted to slip out, explaining, when my mother caught me at the door that I wanted to go for a stroll through my hometown before I had to go back to the city. Once out, I followed my memories back to that blueberry patch and, sure enough, there it was; the path I had remembered seeing years ago. It was even more overgrown but I could still maneuver my way through it. I remembered my promise to my grandfather, but my curiosity overcame it. In fact, a rush of excitement went through me as I walked the same path I was sure he had so long ago. It’s difficult to explain, but this sense of stepping into the folklore was thrilling and supressed all worry and perhaps my common sense as I proceeded.
Strangely, as I walked onwards, the overgrowth seemed to recede as if someone had maintained the path only so far and then stopped. After passing through a ring of trees that had managed to grow in, I found myself walking on a trail that was as neatly groomed as any other in the community, my initial confusion at the change in the path was turning into disappointment as I wondered if this was the right place after all. Perhaps some childlike part of me had hoped to see something otherworldly. This feeling was soon replaced again, now by a wary sense of being watched. I nervously increased my pace, not for fear of fairies but of malicious people.
The path remained well-groomed, but the dense trees at either side made me feel as if they would swallow me. I began to sweat as I continued onwards, before a sound made me stop in my tracks. There was a low creaking sound as if a bough were being broken. Even though everything in my being told me not to, I turned towards the sound, which was coming from the area I had just travelled. My blood ran cold at the sight that greeted my eyes. Standing there was a tall creature that looked to be made of tree bark that creaked and groaned with every movement. Its body was thin and crooked like a spruce that had been battered and misshapen by the elements with uneven broken branch arms. Its legs were equally misshapen, leading to a mess of roots for feet. Its face was the most frightening of all; split open into a grin of splinters over which two bored holes sat as in mockery of eyes. I stood transfixed as a clacking noise heralded the approach of its companion; a creature on all fours whose twisted knotted body seemed to be made of joined thin antlers and sinew, except for the face, which was a moose-like skull, complete with wider antlers and with eyes that looked like pearls and shone with terrible beauty. A third being appeared, forming out of the ground in front of me. It held a vaguely humanoid form, although faceless, and looked to be composed of moss and soil, though it reeked of death, and insects burrowed through it. I felt the worst sense of malice as I stared at these things. They, the fairies, ruled here and I was trespassing. Either their thoughts entered my mind or my fears projected that the king of rot wanted to suffocate me in his stinking embrace, that the king of trees wanted to pull me apart until my limbs were as broken tree branches and the king of bone wanted to gore me with each of its twisted antler limbs. I was snapped out of my horrid trance as a malformed insect ridden arm began reaching for me.
I ran from them. I could hear the creaking and clacking and shuffling of their pursuit as I did. The path now seemed impossibly long as I sprinted; cursing my arrogance and my curiosity with every step. I cursed myself further as I felt something tear at my hip, nearly throwing me off. My mind spiraled into deeper panic as I felt warm liquid and a crawling sensations coming from the wound, but I forced myself onwards. Like the lash of a whip I was struck in the back, sending me tumbling forwards. I scrambled forwards on all fours like a frightened animal until I could right myself and run again. They could have easily caught me and killed me there, but they did not. They were playing with me, I realized. I was their game and they wanted to savour my torment. Gasping for breath from the strike, the fall and the pain I was becoming increasingly aware of, I thought of my grandfather’s description: “devils”. At that moment I could think of no better term to describe them. The tales I had gathered had spoken to their maliciousness, but even my grandfather’s tearful recount had failed to instill in me an inkling of the pure evil that lurked here, or a true belief in their existence. I had no bread to offer, nor a coat to turn inside out. It was early October and the day was so warm, I thought one would only be a hindrance.
I was shaken from my thoughts by the sign of my salvation the path up ahead was once again becoming overgrown. I hoped that I was reaching the boundary of their domain, and my trespass would soon be at an end. This hope was shattered as a stabbing pain pierced my side. The king of bone would not let me go without his mark. Again I was pitched forward, landing in the overgrowth. The nettles and roots and grass added an agony all their own to my wounded body. By some miracle I stood up and limped slowly away, unable though I was, to get a good breath of air. I stumbled through the last of the overgrowth, a step away from my freedom when I heard a creak and a snap like a broken tree branch. I looked behind me and realized that the king of trees had my arm, and was holding it at an impossible angle. My fear left me, as did my senses, as I slipped from his grip and fell the remaining distance out of the trail. I thought I heard laughter that was soon replaced by the voices of men.
I awoke in a hospital bed, surrounded by the worried faces of my parents and my grandparents. My mother, seeing me awake, burst into fresh tears. She told me that I was in the Carbonear General Hospital and that I had been attacked by a moose. I was seen falling out of the woods by some locals and rushed to the nearest hospital. She broke off at the thought of what might have happened if they had not seen me, and was led out of the room by my father who, himself was holding back tears but still suggested that they step out and let me rest. My grandfather suggested that my grandmother should do the same and, after a quizzical look, she too left, leaving us alone.
I attempted to shift in my bed to look at my grandfather, but was held in place by a sudden awareness of terrible pain. I glanced down at the cast on my arm and then back up to my grandfather who moved to my side so that he could speak quietly to me.
“They can’t seem to keep the wounds clean.” He said after a moment of silence. “They keep finding bone fragments and splinters and dirt…” He broke off, then continued mournfully, “You went looking for the fairies didn’t you? Without even an offering to protect yourself.” His face was pale as he squeezed my good hand, “I should have never told you my story. I’m sorry I did. I’m sorry I couldn’t make you believe an old man.” Before I could say a word, he left me to my guilt ridden rest.
They kept me in hospital until the wounds on my side and my hip healed completely, out of fear of infection due to the never ending supply of items that needed to be pulled from them as well as the putrid stench. I remember waking from a restless sleep one night only to find a centipede working its way out of my hip. I screamed until the nurses came who pulled the thrashing insect from me and, after inspecting the wound for more, they cleaned it again and left with looks of fear and disgust barely hidden under the bedside manner.
By the time the wounds had healed, so had my bones. They cut open my cast only to find bark and spruce needles caked in around my arm. Baffling though it was, my arm was healed and they could find no signs of infection so I was sent home.
In the years that passed since this incident, I completed my Bachelor’s Degree and am currently working on my Master’s while writing a book about the fairy lore of the province; including my own incident. That day did not quash my love of folklore but has given me a deeper respect for the old tales. I am also driven by another need. Whenever I pass by a wooded area, of which there are many, even in the city, I hear them. I hear their spiteful laughter and the dreadful creaking and clacking and turning of earth. They want their offering. After so many years they want payment for my life that goes beyond a handful of breadcrumbs or a coat worn wrong-side out. I am supplying this payment by telling my story- their stories- and honouring them here and in my book. I can only hope it will appease them, as the sites of my wounds continue to itch and I often find clumps of spruce needles, moss and bone waiting at my door.
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The paranormal was something that the three of us felt we were beyond. We all liked to think of ourselves as educated, and when we got into arguments we felt near invincible. But, when Martin insisted we fuck around with his fat older brother’s laptop full of occult pictures and docs (and when he promised to involve some of his best weed), the three of us decided to meet up in Jon’s basement, hallowed smoking ground.
After a couple bowls the three of us stared into the glow of the HP screen, clicking through folders labeled “Demons”, “Rituals-life”, “Rituals-strength”, “Hexes”, “Phasing”, “Lucid Dreaming”. Every folder was full of sketchy Polaroid pictures of pale figures with twisted triangular faces and fingers like twigs, long pieces of text containing foreign languages and symbols, and intricate diagrams for sigils and sacrifices. It was some mind-bending shit for stoned 17-year-olds. We found a project in a folder labeled “Summoning”; it contained tons of pictures and diagrams for calling things to this world- from hell, from other dimensions, from something that one image referred to as “the else”- and we picked one at random to mess around with and laugh through.
The diagram called for little prep. We needed only light some incense and say some incantations, all in some language that none of us had heard of. The entity that the diagram described lived in some place referred to as “over the wall” and tons of red text littered the picture. It all warned of dealing with the entity, of its numerous powers, and it included short accounts of the lives it had ruined (including a pretty sick one about a woman whose guts it had removed and played with, and a few more involving figures without eyes found wandering the scene of the summoning). The thing was a curious being, but impatient. it liked stalking us humans, watching, observing, before it grew more malicious, started taking us, experimenting on us, driving us to do things for it, seeing what made us squeal or cry or bleed.
We got everything set up and Jon volunteered to read off of the screen. Let me tell you, watching Jon fumble through that booga-booga language was the highlight of the night. We laughed through the whole thing, Jon tripping over words and destroying some through his own chuckles. Even when Martin put up hands to settle us down, the snickers would get through and flare back into laughs. I decided to pull out my camera then. It had become tradition to film these basement sessions, and it seemed Jon was going for an Academy Award.
We sort of gave up with the laptop after the camera came out; we were getting bored and Jon ran out of words to read. Eventually we all started passing the camera around and speaking into it directly, kind of doing the That 70s Show round table thing. We’d say something “intelligent”, “revelatory”, or “funny” and then pass the camera on. It was a way of documenting some indispensible hilarity to look back on the next day.
The night passed quick. I remember turning on the TV, and at some point Martin and I packed up the laptop and walked back to his house so Jon could pass out on his couch, but events leaked in and out of memory after the night in question.
The next morning I woke up to find my phone full of unread texts and missed calls, all from Jon. The gist of the messages was “get your ass over here,” and the voice delivering the voicemails wasn’t that of the easy stoner I was used to dealing with. He spoke in unconnected, short clips, a lopsided train of thought: “found it downstairs…for fun, you know…supposed to…just thought I’d…I found it, in the camera…to see…you need to see…supposed to be fun. Just over here, get over here please.” Jon sounded completely stern, almost lifeless, something that set a million little alarm bells off in my head. I went to find Martin, who had also gotten a phone-full of messages, and we returned to Jon’s house.
We found him upstairs in the TV room. He’d hooked up my camera left over from last night and was watching the new stuff we’d recorded, pausing and fast-forwarding, stopping every now and then to watch. Martin and I crept into the room and took places quietly on the couch. We didn’t want to interrupt.
The footage played on about as I’d remembered it happening, and I watched as the Jon onscreen recited the incantations. Coming from his mouth they sounded entirely made up, yet rhythmic, like poems from some other country. In the video, we’d been cracking up, and the sound of chocked laughs and giggles bounced around the room, but watching it again made me feel weird, like I was seeing and hearing something I shouldn’t be, almost like snuff. I looked at Martin and then to Jon. Jon’s stone face, Martin’s mouth, slightly agape, and the feeling that I was watching something forbidden made me feel like it had been a mistake to record last night.
I finally asked Jon what was up, why he called us, why he seemed so somber, and he gave a cold answer, a knowing answer: “keep watching”. So we did.
The night on the tape played out, filing in memory gaps here and there as it played. It ran to the point where we started talking into the camera and passing it around. Jon looked as though he’d snap on either of us at any moment, so I didn’t dare ask what we were looking for. Finally, in the video, I passed off the camera and Jon hit pause.
“See? See? Well?” Jon alternated a stare, almost accusingly, between where Martin and I were watching and the TV screen itself. I glanced at Martin and he shook his head. On the screen we were all sitting together on Jon’s couch throwing up rock-n-roll devil horns with our hands, stoned out of our minds. I stared at the image for a few fruitless seconds, but then it hit me like a train. I saw what Jon called us over to see, and it made me feel nauseous. Jon said it before I could: “Who the fuck is holding the camera?”
Credit To – Jared Quaglieri
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In the end, I know that I’m damned. I’ve lost them twice over; once in failing to save them, and again in failing to avenge them. Whatever mercies God might have shown me for these troubles have surely been swallowed up in the magnitude of my failure. I can sense the end that’s coming for me, the scratching behind my eyes, the chill of the air that has nothing to do with this shattered bedroom window or the life that is leaking from my wounds. A part of me wishes I could simply bleed to death, but I know the violence I’ll suffer soon will be far more deserved.
I’ve quite run out of hope, and if you’re reading this, you might have as well. Maybe, like me, you were once one of the lucky ones, having never caught a glimpse beyond the veil. Maybe there was a time when this world still held moments of brightness and beauty when you could forget your troubles and feel honestly, truly safe. I wish that you could turn back. I wish you could unsee what you’ve see, slam shut this wretched door and go running back into the daylight. I wish you didn’t need the knowledge I have to offer.
But whoever or wherever you are, you do. I know it. This message wouldn’t have found you otherwise. Maybe you’ve woken in the presence of something other in the middle of the night. Maybe you’ve seen it from the corner of your eye when you linger alone in lightless places. Maybe you’ve heard it howling, first far off into the distance, then closer and closer as the nights grow longer. If you’ve had the faintest glimpse through the darkened mirror to what really waits for us on the other side, then you are in desperate need of what I am about to write, of the truth I can give you.
It can be hurt. It can be stopped. It can even be banished, for a time, and I suppose that means it can also be bound. I have my doubts in regards to any more permanent solutions; we’ve moved far beyond any crude suggestions of whether or not it can be killed. That is a mortal word, for mortal creatures, and whatever this thing once was, it hasn’t been mortal for a long time.
You must content yourself with what I have learned. A chance, no matter how small, is still a chance. If the least we can do is push it back, turn it aside, force it to slumber, then that is enough. You must understand that once it turns its gaze your way, you’re already dead. You must embrace this morbid truth as a gift. Wrap your arms tight around damnation and don’t let go. That’s the only chance you’ll ever have of saving the ones you love.
They are coming. I don’t have much time.
The first time I saw it was during my daughter Madison’s birthday party. She loved the park down the street from our home; a miniature forest on the banks of the Detroit River called ‘Elizabeth.’ The sprawling greenery was dotted with playgrounds and picnic tables and crumbling stone bridges crossing over the clear waters of the canals that ran into the city from the river. At the very edge of the park, a boardwalk had recently been raised, extending out over the calm waters, providing a view of the massive steel bridges that connected the city to the nearby river island of Gross Ile.
There was a small petting zoo there as well, in a clearing next to a playground, and that was where Madison had asked to have her birthday party. It wasn’t cheap; Victoria and I both had been saving for her seventh birthday some time in advance, and I’d even taken on a second job as a delivery driver on weekends to scrape up the extra cash.
We had wanted to do something special for our daughter. She’d been having an extremely difficult time in school, provoked by a lack of sleep brought on by vivid night terrors. We woke to the sound of her crying out almost every night, insisting that a crowd of people had been in the room with her. More than once we found her in the attic, sobbing as she rummaged through old boxes and bins that had belonged to the previous home owners in her sleep, searching for something she’d seen in a dream.
Madison was always unable to tell us what she’d been after upon waking from this fugue state. She would merely peer up at us sleepily, smile, and say, ‘I was looking for the fire.’
We’d been greatly concerned. Along with good counseling and more attention, we had hoped that throwing her an extravagant party might help take her mind off of things. The look on Madison’s face when we arrived at the petting zoo, all decked out in bright streamers and balloons wishing her a HAPPY BIRTHDAY! was worth all of my and her mother’s effort.
The children that came to her party were as appreciative as she. Victoria made small talk with the adults she recognized from school meetings and parent-teacher conferences, and quickly became friends with the ones she didn’t. I didn’t know any of these people; my work schedule allowed me just enough free time for my wife and daughter. I smiled at the pleasantries, laughed at the jokes, but my eyes were on Madison, the expression of wonder on her face as she and her friends took turns riding a miniature horse around a small carousel under the watchful gaze of its owner.
There was a moment, I think, when the animal saw the Grim standing in the bushes. It gave a panicked whiny, and then it was on its hind legs with Madison still in the saddle. I give credit it to the woman who owned the zoo; by the time I was in motion, heart pounding in my chest, she had already scooped my daughter off its back with one hand, while forcefully yanking down on the reins with the other. I shouted my daughter’s name over the alarmed yells of the children. I was at her side in a second, kneeling down to put my arms around her.
“Madison, are you alright?” I asked in a rush, trying to control my fear, my hands checking her for injury though I know she’d received none.
“I’m fine, daddy,” she said, laughing. “He just got spooked a little, that’s all.” I nodded, impressed with her courage, not able to summon any of my own.
“You’re right,” I said, calming myself down, not wanting to spoil her birthday. “The pony just got a little scared. I’m just glad you’re alright, sweetheart.” I pressed my lips to her forehead, making her pull away in giddy, mock disgust.
As I stood, ready to speak harshly with the owner, to demand an explanation, I saw it. It was standing deep in the wood line, almost totally obscured by the thick green forestry. For a moment my mind couldn’t comprehend what my eyes was seeing. I thought at first that some awful person had killed a dog and left its head in the branches of a tree. A moment later I thought
-Dead dogs can’t smile-
as its snout cracked open, thick ropes of drool cascading over jagged yellow teeth, splattering down onto a pale, bare chest streaked with dried mud and grass stains.
It leaned forward. Long, pale fingers gripping the trunk of the tree, curling into hateful claws. I was transfixed, my mouth open, barely hearing the sounds of the party going on around me. Even from a distance I could see smoke rising from where its fingers dug into the tree bark and the utter blackness of its pupils. I could feel the awful power of the hatred and malice behind its gaze.
It was looking at my daughter.
I blinked and pulled her close to me protectively. In that moment it was gone, leaving only a strange afterimage when I closed my eyes. “Daddy?” Madison asked, looking up at me quizzically. “Can I ride the pony again?”
“Uh…” I shook my head. “I think that’s enough pony rides for today, honey. It’s almost time for your presents.”
That was the distraction I needed. She squealed in delight at the idea, rushing over to her mother, nearly bowling her over in the process. Victoria looked over at me as my daughter begged for gifts, raising an eyebrow. I shrugged sheepishly. Madison wasn’t supposed to open her gifts for another fifteen minutes, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t let my daughter see how frightened I was.
I refused to look back at the part of the wood line for the remainder of her party. Perhaps my cowardice is what made them lost to me. Perhaps if I had of done what I should have done, charged at it howling like a beast, heedless of my own safety, shielded from its madness by the primal need to defend my progeny, I could have turned it away from us right then and there. Instead I did what any civilized man would do in my circumstances; I pretended like I hadn’t seen anything. I ignored it, and I ignored the sound of distant howling I heard that night as I tucked Madison into bed.
A week later I saw the creature again. Picking up my daughter from an afterschool program, I saw it standing next to a basketball pole on the playground. It was somehow bending the light around it, creating an unnatural shadow that kept it hidden from everyone’s sight other than my own. My daughter didn’t see it as she walked out of the school and into my car, chattering happily about the art project she’d been working on. I watched its gaze…no, not its gaze, its attention follow her languidly, like a predator stalking its prey. I drove away as quickly as I could. My heart beat so loud I thought it would explode against my ribcage.
The howling came again that night. It seemed closer than before.
Three days later Victoria went to wake my daughter for school, only to find that she was missing. Her bed was perfectly made, and a small folded note had been left by her bed. In childlike scribbles, with the crayons her mother and I had gotten for her birthday, she had drawn an impossibly thin figure, its snarling canine head thrown back, howling into nothingness. It stood on what was unmistakably a pile of crudely drawn stick-figure bodies, their eyes crossed out with violent black x’s, writhing on the page in the pale orange fire she had drawn over them.
“GRIM,” she had captioned simply, underscoring the words. “Don’t run, daddy.”
Do you have children? If not, then you cannot begin to understand the terror, the blind panic that overcame us when we knew our daughter was missing. Victoria was strong, like always, immediately calling the police, taking her fear and turning it into useful action, but she didn’t understand the sinister note that had been left behind. She didn’t understand that it had come after our daughter, and I had done nothing to stop it. Out of fear, I had ignored that monstrous presence, and now whatever it was had my Madison.
A day went by, then two, then a week. I joined in the search parties every day, forcing down my mounting sense of despair. I tramped through the woods, calling out with the others when I knew my daughter couldn’t hear me. Victoria only wept when she thought I wouldn’t notice. The gulf between us grew rapidly. I think she sensed the reality of my guilt, and though she must have known there was no logical reason, she rightly blamed me for this loss.
I began waking in the middle of the night to the sound of Victoria whimpering. Knowing that she wanted no comfort for me, I kept my eyes shut and pretended to sleep. On the ninth night since our daughter’s disappearance, I realized something was different. What I heard wasn’t the sound of heartbreak; it was the sound of terror, of an animal caught in a trap.
Instead of a howl from afar, I heard a low growl so close it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It was in the room, at the foot of the bed. I could heard its ragged panting, feel its weight as it put its long-fingered hands on the mattress and leaned over us. My wife’s whimpers grew hysterical; she whispered nonsensical, pleading gibberish, wringing her hands. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and rolled onto my side. I lay there, immobile, until the growling stopped, until the weight of those inhuman hands suddenly disappeared.
I was a coward when it was preparing to come for my daughter. I was a coward again when it was preparing to come for my wife. The next morning she looked at me, eyes bloodshot and wide with terror. “Did you hear him?” She whispered, trembling. “Did you hear what he asked me?”
I shook my head. God damn me to hell, I shook my head. “I didn’t hear anything. Try and get some sleep.” I left her. I went to work. I ignored it. Each night, I pretended that it wasn’t stalking into our bedroom to torment her, that it wasn’t close enough to touch. Out of terror of what my eyes would fall upon, I kept them tightly shut. I did not want to see. My love for my wife was overcome by fear, just as my love for my daughter had been.
Madison. Victoria. Please. You were the lights of my life. Forgive me.
Two weeks after Madison had disappeared, I woke to Victoria’s tears again. As I lay there, she slowly fell silent. After a few minutes of dead quiet, she made a strange snuffling noise low in her throat. A moment later it grew louder, a weak chuckle that seemed absurdly loud in our dark room. The sound terrified me even more then the fear of waking to fight it looming over my bed; the darkness that I once hid in suddenly felt horrifyingly oppressive as my wife’s laughter finally reached a crescendo of cackling madness.
I lurched from the bed, slipping on the sheets that had fallen to the floor. I hurled myself towards the light switch, hands stretched out like a blind man. I missed the switch entirely, running hard into the wall. I collapsed to the floor, stars bursting before my eyes. Victoria’s laughter had become a high pitched howl of animal pain; I heard a fleshy, tearing sound, a guttural chewing and gnawing that finally provoked a scream from my own lips. My hands scrabbled at the wall. They finally fell upon the switch and I hurriedly flipped on the lights.
I immediately wished I had kept them off. My wife was crouched on the bed, shaking and twitching as if in the midst of a seizure. Her wrists and arms were covered in violent bite marks, each one welling with bright arterial blood. Ruddy liquid oozed from the corners of her mouth, splattering over her nightgown, tracing violent patterns down her heaving chest. She looked at me through one eye that was bloodshot and manic, and another that was a bleeding, empty socket in her skull.
She threw back her head and howled. “I don’t have to see anymore!” She was holding her eye, her eye, nerve clusters hanging limply from it as it stared at me. “I don’t have to watch him feed!”
I shrieked as she hurled herself from the bed at me, closing my eyes, throwing my hands up to ward her off. She gripped the collar of my shirt and hauled me to my feet, the mania that was in her giving her impossible strength. “No!” I whimpered eyes shut tight against this new horror, trying as best I could to press myself through the wall and away from her. “No, no, no, no!”
“Don’t run, Jack,” my wife grunted. “Don’t run. There’s no place for any of us to hide.” She put her lips to my ear, teeth clenching painfully on my earlobe. “He isn’t going to get me. Not like he thinks. Not like he got Madison.” Her voice cracked, and through the madness I could hear my wife, afraid and utterly alone, struggling to push through the insanity that had gripped her. “The Grim,” she whispered. “Tlaloc, Baal-Hammon, Kronos, Moloch, Shugg’o’toth. They gave it a name to give it a form, but none of them are real. None of them are true.” She put a hand to my chest, and spoke to me with her own voice for the last time, strong and brave and beautiful. “Put it to the fire. They’ve been looking for him all this time. That was why Madison was searching; she heard the fire, and knew it would save us. Don’t run.”
And then she was gone, leaving me cringing on the floor. I opened my eyes to see her running full tilt towards our bedroom window. I think I cried out at the last, when she leapt through the narrow glass with all the grace of an Olympic diver. The shimmering sound of the pane breaking couldn’t overcome the dull thud I could hear as she struck the concrete driveway below.
The only sounds were the beating of my heart and my frantic breathing. I lay on the floor, my eyes drawn to the bloody splatters that led to the shattered window. I touched my collar where Victoria had grabbed me, my fingers coming away sticky with her blood. I wondered why no dogs outside were barking. I wondered if I this was a nightmare from which I’d soon wake. Slowly, using the wall for support, I dragged myself to my feet, unable to keep my legs from quivering as I stumbled across the floor. The silence was roaring around me; I could hear an insect-like buzzing coming from behind and before me, from within me, growing to a fever pitch as I finally reached the window.
The creature was there, standing over the broken, bleeding corpse that was my wife. I felt my terror run down my leg in a warm stream, my fingers digging into the shards of broken glass in a reflex that shot pain through my hands. I was frozen, transfixed by its attention as it stared up at me. I wanted nothing more than to turn tail and run. I wanted to flee into darkness and never look back, but that was impossible.
I blinked, I think, or managed to shut my eyes. I must have, because when I opened them, it was in the window before me.
Words cannot describe the nightmare. I screamed, like my wife had screamed, like I suddenly knew my child had screamed before she had been consumed. I knew because it told me, forcing the images into my brain, bursting my mind open behind my eyes, assaulting me with words and sounds and colors I could not understand and have no way to describe. I saw my wife, huddling in the dark, its shadow falling over her, dooming her to madness. I saw Madison’s last moments, felt her terror, the blind hope that her father might still arrive to save her from this monster. I heard her voice echoing in my head, over and over again.
It snarled and lunged, teeth snapping shut only inches from my face. I fled from the room, nearly slipping on the rug in the hall. I went for the stairs, ready to throw myself through the door to get outside if I had to, only to be confronted by its terrifying black eyes as it lumbered up the steps towards me on all fours, teeth bared and snarling. I spun round, using the bannister for momentum, tumbling blindly down the hall. The light in Madison’s room was on; without thinking I ran towards it, slamming the door shut behind me so violently it nearly broke the hinges, pushing my body against it to keep the horror out. I had a split second to take in the pink color of the walls and the brightly colored posters of ponies and Barbie dolls, a split second to hear her whispering in my head
-Don’t run, daddy-
before the door behind me splintered. An arm that was as filthy as it was pale whipped wildly about, searching for me. It brushed my cheek and I screamed, feeling as though my skin had been touched with fire, or the coldness of the void. The wall itself was coming apart behind me as I ran towards the attic door, flying up the creaking wooden steps towards the last possible sanctuary left me in the house.
I stumbled like a madman through cardboard boxes in the dark, barely able to pull the cord for the light bulb above me. Tears streaming down my face, I fought my way through the boxes and bins left over from the old home owners. Letters and paper litter were tossed through the air in my wake. I banged my shins painfully on an old wooden chest, heedless to the pain in the desperation of my flight.
There was a porthole on the wall at the end of the attic. Barely a foot in diameter, I clawed at it, managing to break the glass with an already bloodied fist. I pushed my face against it, screaming for help into a night that seemed intent on ignoring me. There was no echo for my cry. There was no sound at all. The night was dead, like Madison, like Victoria, like I soon would be, cut off forever from the land of the living.
I fell to my knees, sobbing, leaning over the chest I had run into. It came on like the nightmare it was, its bare feet leaving smoking footprints on the attic floor, yellow claws clicking on the hard wood, the blisteringly hot wind of its breath smashing aside the boxes and the debris and the mothballed furniture. There was nothing between it and me now, the floor covered in the papers that fell through the air. I was naked, exposed in the moment before the end of everything, a squeal of disbelief escaping my lips.
It showed me Madison again, how she had died. I won’t speak of it here. I saw how she had suffered. It had enjoyed her terror, as it was enjoying mine. It had devoured countless thousands of beings over its existence, and not all of them were even human. It wasn’t picky. It was only ever hungry, the grubs and ghosts that went about their pointless little lives at its feet oblivious to its predations until it was far too late. I saw all this as Madison screamed in front of me, dying again and again, her agony distilled down to the last second of her life when she realized no one was coming to save her; the moment she stopped crying for her father.
As it forced me to watch my child’s murder, something inside me changed. The scrabbling panic was still there, but behind it was anguish, enough pain to turn it into rage. I screamed at it, leaping to my feet, tearing at my face with bloody hands, ripping the clothes from my body. It pointed and me and barked; I felt the skin on my stomach blister instantly as I was slammed back against the chest. The edges of my shirt were smoking. My ribs felt as though they’d been singed from the inside out. I howled like a wounded animal, reaching behind me into the chest for something, anything, to cast in defiance at the demon before me.
My hands closed around what felt like a rough-hewn piece of wood. I pulled it out of the chest, holding it up in front of me. It was a short knife with a handle made of what looked like deer antler. The blade was sheathed in a simple leather cap, worn and cracked with age. Something had been carved into the handle; simple notches, hash marks and scratches, cut savagely yet cleanly into the bone.
As I held the blade, I felt Madison’s tiny hands circle around my chest. She stood behind me, her beautiful blonde hair spilling over my shoulder. She pressed her lips gently to my temple in a child’s kiss, leaning her head against mine. “I’ve missed you, baby,” I wept, unable to look at her. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I love you so much.”
And then she was gone, and it was only the Grim, its mouth opening wide to swallow me whole. I forced myself to my feet, swaying unevenly, holding the knife in one shaking hand. There were things on the peripheral of my vision, watching me, pressing eager hands against the thin barrier of reality. I saw that I was surrounded by them, even as I could sense their eagerness, their anticipation of what was about to happen.
I took a halting step toward it, and then another. My vision blurred like static on an old television set. The Grim was the only thing I could see; there was no looking away, no turning back. I think I said my daughter’s name. I broke into a run somehow, unsheathing the knife from its leather pouch. There was a snapping sound like a bone breaking. For a second, my fevered mind fancied that I saw it take a step back. For a second, I saw genuine, human surprise on that demonic face.
I was screaming by the time I reached it, eyes rolling back into my head, pissing myself in terror, foaming at the mouth, hallucinating, feeling as if my skin was being flayed from my body. The hand that held the blade was bleeding, veins bursting, skin blistering as the power within it roused slowly to waking. I raised the knife through the storm of madness the Grim brought with it, and that was enough.
We collided, the monster and I, sensations I have no words to describe overwhelming me. It filled my field of vision, its fingers gripping my face, embracing me, pulling me into a maw that opened wide, billowing with black smoke and the heat of a furnace. I heard another voice scream with me, another thousand voices, the reverberations shooting down through my arm so hard I thought it must have broken. An alien confidence suddenly gripped my mind, shattering the madness and the gut wrenching fear. In that moment the barrier in reality finally broke and they pressed in around me, their innocent blood shouting out for vengeance, steadying my hand, bellowing into my mind
-THE FIRE THE FIRE SEND IT TO THE FIRE!-
I howled out the words my daughter had dreamed, echoing the seething rage of the lost souls that danced like lightning on the edge of the blade, and let it fall.
I don’t know what actually happened when the awakened knife touched that God forsaken form. I know only that it was forced out, shunted abruptly from here to nowhere, leaving only a long, furious howl to mark its passing. Its presence faded into nothingness as I made my way out of the attic, through the wreckage of my home and back into my bedroom. I cannot sense it at all as I compose this message, leaning against the wall, the blade that ended the matter lying next to me on the floor.
I was right to think that it was surprised. It hadn’t expected such a sudden, spirited resistance. The Grim had picked my family because it thought we would be easy prey. It didn’t think it would meet us here. It had thought we were gone forever after all these years, never to return, shattered and scattered when we left the bishop’s hand. I don’t even know what I’m typing anymore, or how I’m even able with the wounds I’ve suffered. I don’t know why it seemed so important to write this down, to send this out, to ensure that you knew the story. Perhaps, like me, you belong to the fire. Perhaps one day it will call to you like it called to US and you will have to answer. I pray for your sake you find courage sooner than I did.
I have failed to defeat the monster and avenge my loved ones. I understand that there can be no forgiveness for these sins, but I take a certain comfort in knowing I will have a second chance. I will meet it again. We will all meet it again, finding new meaning and purpose to our damnation on the edge of that ancient blade. Next time will be different. Next time, we’ll end it once and for all.
Soon the knife will be in my hand again. They’ve shown me the path forward, both a perfect punishment and penance for my fear. I will take the blade to my throat and release my hold on this life. I’ll join the lost in slumber, as one day maybe you will join them, until the hand that wields us ends the nightmare. When you hear it howling in the distance, come search for
ALMACIA
us. We won’t be far behind. We will be watching. We will be waiting.
The fire knows its own.
Credit To – IlluminatiExposed
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(A last hurrah to the Haunted Game ‘genre’, as it were.)
So, you’re wanting to write a video game crappy – erm, creepypasta? Think you have what it takes? To be honest, you probably don’t. But fear not! With just the submission form (who needs proofreading? Or drafts? Hell, who needs edits? Not you, that’s for sure!) and this handy guide, you’ll be writing terrible pastas in no time!
Wait, did I say ‘terrible’? Like, out loud?
I meant ‘beautiful’.
Yep.
Totally.
————–
First of all, you’re going to have to pick a topic! Maybe you should go for something well known? Maybe try your hand at more obscure games? It’s your choice! Let’s get creative!
(And by ‘get creative’, I mean ‘write the same shitty pasta that’s already been written a thousand times before’. But that doesn’t matter. Whatever.)
>Try a Pokemon pasta! They were the most popular video game pasta subject for a reason, you know. Don’t know anything about Pokemon? Doesn’t matter – just as people who have never played Pokemon can pick it up easily, you don’t need to know anything about it to write a pokepasta! Just throw in some peekachoos and charozords and you’re all set!
>Maybe a Minecraft pasta? Just like how you can do so much in Minecraft, you can write so much about it too! ..Or you can just write about Herobrine! ‘Who’s a hero brown,’ you ask? Why, only a slightly original monster that was mutated into a cliched horror monster by thousands of bad fan misinterpretation!
>Try your hand at a Legend of Zelda pasta! Hey, you remember that one ‘ben drowned‘ pasta you read about a year ago? Well, let’s write that again, but with all grammar or decent writing absent! I’m sure it’ll get thousands of upvotes! (read: downvotes)
>Something a bit more obscure? Why not? You could be contributing to the large amount of stories that only make sense to a small, unknown group of people! A scary story… about lawyers? Farming? Why? Why the hell not?
Wow, that took a while! Time for deciding the name of the pasta! This is nice and simple!
[GAME NAME]: [DESCRIPTIVE WORD] [WORD RELATING TO THE PASTA]
Sounds relatively simple! Let’s try it out a bit!
Pokemon: Bloodied Diamond
Minecraft: Curse of Herobrine
Ace Attorney: The Demonic Testimony
Do you like those names? I like those names. Let’s move on!
Of course, your main character has to get their game in some way. What’s that? Introducing the character? No, no, no, no, no. You’re doing it all wrong.
>”I got it from a garage sale/market sale/yard sale” – The oldest and best one in the book. If 99% of people write it this way, then it can’t possibly be bad, can it?
>”Some shady guy/girl/being of unidentifiable gender gave it to me” – Sometimes, we just want to skip the boring introduction and get straight to the action, and there’s no better way to do it than this.
>”I downloaded it online” – Who goes to garage sales anymore? Keep up with the times with this new, hip trend!
Moving on to step number three – of course, because this is a creepypasta, the game has to be haunted, right? But what’s it going to do?
>Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary – because hey, if you put in no effort here, you can use that effort later, right? That’s how it works, isn’t it? Right? Right?!
>A couple of graphical glitches – because nothing makes your viewers tremble more than the screen flickering a little or some colours changed. This is a true fact.
>Noises. – More specifically, weird noises. Glitchy sounds. Muffled screaming. The usual.
Okay, those are some basic ones, but why not step it up? Add some blood! Lots of blood! Also, make sure to use some of these words at least three times in the story…
>Hyper-realistic
>Bloody
>Demonic
>Ghostly
>Scary
Alright, we’ve got some scary shit going on, but if the main character ran away now, the pasta would stop half-way, right? Let’s choose an excuse for them to stay around.
>”I thought it was just a glitch”
>”I thought it was just a glitch”
>”I thought it was just a glitch”
Just kidding. You get no choice on this one. Trust me, this is for the better.
Alright, now just fill in the rest of the story using more glitches (as always, consider adding more blood and hyper-realism to your story), until WHAM! Something really scary happens! This can be anything – hell, it doesn’t have to be scary. Just as long as your main character responds fittingly. Or, alternatively, not-so-fittingly.
How will your protagonist respond to the sheer creepiness? How will this story meet its conclusion?
>Throw their console out – Destroy their DS! Pulverise their Playstation! Erm, throw a TV out the window? Whatever. It works.
>AND THEN THE PROTAG DIED – Dead things are creepy. People dying are creepy. Why not kill off the protagonist? I’m sure that, with the large amount of characterization we gave them earlier, it will really shock the readers. Honest.
>YOU’RE NEXT – Did you know that all creepypasta readers have a constant fear that there’s a monster behind them? Use this to your advantage? Everyone’s terrified of walls!
Alright, now we have the main story and –
Oh?
Did you think that was finished?
Oh no, this is the fun part. Now we add some… er… personality to your story. And by ‘personality’, I mean ‘bad writing skills’. I mean, let’s face it, nobody really misses punctuation. I sure don’t.
Choose one of the following typing quirks – I mean, writing styles.
>capital letters. get rid of all your capital letters. no-one likes them at all. too old fashioned.
>WHY NOT HAVE LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS? BE NEW AND DANGEROUS. MAKE YOUR ENTIR STORY CAPITAL LETTERS. (Obviously, don’t use this one with the previous one.)
>Make Every Capital Letter Refined And Pronounced. This Makes You Seem Posh And Smart.
And at least one of these. You can have more, if you want to be EXTREME.
>Motherfucker, let’s get some fucking swears up in here. Swears are bitchin’ as shit. It makes you sound fuckin’ hip and cool. Fuck yeah.
>No punctuation ever at all because seriously having things just constantly flow is so much easier and better in every way wow
>Waht if you where unabel to spel things right? Sonds fun!
———————
Congratulations! If you’re reading this, you’ve most likely just finished writing your first video game pasta! Now just publish your beautiful (read: horrendous) story (read: crap heap), and watch it get thousands of upvotes (read: downvotes) like it deserves! Good luck!
Credit To – Yu “The Operator” Meigns
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It was past midnight now, and I still had a while until I met my destination. The girl I picked up an hour ago was asleep in the seat beside me. She was a hitchhiker. I couldn’t leave a teenager alone at night in the pouring rain, I had to pick her up. She seemed pretty happy that someone was finally giving her a ride.
I didn’t know her real name, only that her friends call her “Jo.” She looked so calm, so peaceful. Her brown hair obscured half her gorgeous face, her lips flexed in a barely noticeable smile. She must be having a nice dream.
I tried to remember the last dream I had, but had no luck. Then, I felt it; a feeling I hadn’t felt in a long time. A terrible, ugly feeling. I looked down at the girl as I drove, hoping her smiling face might help me overcome and not give in to the demon within… but I could feel it clawing to get out.
I didn’t want to. I couldn’t. I needed to get the girl out of the car, but that would take too long. It would happen before then.
I continued to struggle, fighting an inner battle. Then… No. I couldn’t contain it. It happened: I let out the most monstrous fart I’d ever released. It was legendary. It was the kind of thing kids would tell stories about to scare younger kids.
I reluctantly looked to see if the beast that escaped my body had woken the girl. It hadn’t, but the smile had faded and she looked to be having a nightmare now.
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