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Tales From the Gas Station

bizarre, comedies, cults, dark comedy, gas stations, humor, Jack Townsend, locations, madness, paranormal, raccoons, sites, strange, Tales from the Gas Station

PART ONE At the edge of our town, there’s a shitty gas station that’s open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If you were to go inside, you’d see row after row of off-brand chips, cookies, potted meats and ramen. Expiration dates suspiciously missing from canned goods like they were filed off years ago in some misguided attempt to control inventory turnover. A faded “wet floor” sign from way back covering a crack in the foundation by the cooler that has since turned into a pothole. The pothole, a collection point for sticky spill-off, has become a miniature tar pit collecting countless insect corpses and the occasional small rodent. Nobody ever complains about the aesthetic. By some providence bordering on the supernatural, the health inspector has repeatedly signed off on the business, always kindly ignoring both the faint smell of some kind of mysterious chemical cocktail that is the defining characteristic of the establishment and the family of mutated raccoons that lives in the crawlspace behind the grease trap. We think they’re mutated anyway. At the very least, they must be inbred to the point of mental retardation. The alpha, a muscular three-foot-tall son of a bitch named Rocco, has been spotted multiple times chewing on people’s tires and has been run over at least twice, but keeps coming back. That lingering smell, a sweet combination of honeysuckle, ammonia, vomit, and who knows what else, has never been positively identified, but the prevalent theory is that it’s coming from the cracks in the foundation, wafting up from underground. It’s strongest right after a rain, and pungent to the point of tear-inducing if you get too close to the storm drains where even Rocco and his clan refuse to tread. If you were to go inside, you might also see the bathroom cowboy. He exists as a sort of urban legend. Even though he has never been officially confirmed to exist, we have several security camera recordings of a man fitting his description entering the building, heading into the bathroom, and leaving. What makes him legendary are the things people claim to see him doing in the bathroom. The stories run the gamut from “pretty weird” to “impossibly bizarre.” Like the guy last week who went to pee but changed his mind when he saw a man dressed as a cowboy handing out balloon animals. Or the next day when another customer stepped into the bathroom to see a man wearing nothing but a cowboy hat, boxers, and boots with spurs, sitting at an old-fashioned stone sharpening wheel literally grinding an ax. When he walked in the bathroom cowboy stopped what he was doing, looked up with a smile and a tip of the hat and said, “Come on, Man. Come on with it.” By the time he could find an employee to follow him back to the bathroom, the cowboy had vanished, bench-grinder and all. The cowboy that may or may not haunt the gas station bathroom appears to follow a code of rules. He only appears when you’re alone. He never hurts anyone. And he’s always polite. The prevalent opinion about him is that, honestly, he doesn’t seem that bad. Especially when comparing him to some of the other things going on in that place. If you go inside, you might instantly get a toothache. It’s a strangely common phenomenon that nobody really understands. It should go away on its own after a couple hours. If you do go inside, you will almost definitely see me, sitting behind the counter, because I am the only full-time employee, and I’m almost always here. You may catch me reading a book because, for some reason, the internet doesn’t work way out here, and cell phone service is dicey on good days and nonexistent on most. If you need to make a call, you can leave and go up the hill a ways, preferably back towards town because the other way will take you into the woods and you don’t even want me to go into all the reasons that’s not a good idea. Or you can pay me twenty-five cents a minute and use the store’s land line. That arrangement was cooked up by the owners and I have to actually enforce it because they do check the phone records. I’m sorry. While you’re here, don’t be offended if I don’t strike up a conversation because, if I’m being completely honest, I don’t always know for sure if everyone that comes through those doors is real or not and if I had to acknowledge everyone in that place that could be an actual person, I would lose my mind. And we don’t need any more of that going on around here. I guess that the point I’m trying to make is this: weird things happen to me working at the shitty gas station at the edge of town. I wish I could easily decide what was the weirdest thing to ever happen to me, but I can’t. There were so many. I’ve seen a total of four coffins inside the store on three different occasions. I’ve met at least a dozen people wandering back into town from the woods claiming they had escaped aliens or government conspirators or the like and that they had no money but needed to make a call and could I please just let them use our phone before “they” find them again. But rules are rules and I’m not going to lose my job just because you didn’t escape captivity with a little pocket change. Then there was Farmer Brown (yeah, that’s his real name) who got mad at us and complained about the bulk feed we’d been ordering for him. He insisted something was wrong with the product because all of his animals suddenly had human faces. We settled with him by charging a significant discount on his next couple purchases. He stopped coming in one day and they found what was left of his body inside a bedroom at his farmhouse that had been locked from the inside. As far as I know, they still haven’t figured out what happened Anyway, I guess I can tell you a story or two, but first I need to get ready for work. PART TWO At the edge of our town, there’s a shitty gas station that’s open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and sometimes longer. If you were to go inside, you would probably see the tired cashier sitting behind the front desk doing his best to mind his own business. He’s real. You may also see someone else. You may also see something else. If you’re curious about the reality of anyone or anything else (including yourself) inside that small ammonia scented flickering-fluorescent collection of off-brand junk food, dirt, four walls, and a roof, may I recommend that you follow the cashier’s lead and mind your own business? I’ve been working at that gas station almost non-stop since I graduated high school. At this point, I doubt I could quit if I wanted to. But enough about me. Let’s get back to the interesting thing. The gas station. I spent a decent amount of time yesterday at the start of my shift trying to decide which story would be worthy of being my first to document to the world. Any time I tell someone outside of the gas station anything about what happened therein, I know what to expect. People don’t believe it. Or people don’t want to believe it. Imagine the difficulty I had trying to call the sheriff station to explain that half of a pig broke into the store and is currently running amok, breaking things and screaming with the voice of an old woman. “Yes, I meant half of a pig.” “Yes, a pig.” “The front half.” “No this isn’t a joke. I’m at the gas station.” “What do you mean, which gas station? The shitty one at the edge of town. You must be new; can I please talk to someone else?” She finally put me through to Tom. Tom is the sheriff’s deputy that drew the short straw all those years ago and had to come out to the gas station for the first time, back before his hair was all white. He’s been in enough times now that all I have to say when he picks up the line is “It’s half a pig. It won’t stop screaming and I can’t catch it.” And then he grunts, mutters something about that being “pretty freakin’ weird,” and then drives out to help me catch it. Tom is a good guy. I asked around, but nobody knew where the pig had come from. This was back when Farmer Brown was still alive, and he came down to take a look and provide his expert opinion. According to Farmer, the pig had somehow been chopped down the middle, but miraculously none of the important organs were hit. Nothing supernatural about it, just really unusual. It stayed at the local elementary school as a kind of mascot for the summer before a scientist and his team from somewhere up north offered the school a thousand dollars to let them take it. For science, I suppose. Anyway, I don’t mean to ramble, but my point is that it’s hard to believe some of these stories if you haven’t been inside the gas station at least once. And maybe you have. We’re the only gas station for miles. We’re close enough to some big crossroads. If you’ve ever been out driving in an unfamiliar part of the country and found yourself lost, it’s not impossible that you could have found yourself at my doors, maybe looking to top off your gas, maybe to ask for directions. If you have a strange memory of a weird place that somehow doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of your memories, then there’s a chance we’ve actually met. Now back to last night. I was sitting behind the counter with a pen and book of receipt paper, trying to remember the strangest thing that has happened to me that still falls within the realm of believability, (I’ve had plenty of things happen that were strange but so unbelievable I won’t even waste anyone’s time ever telling them. I call those the “try-and-forget stories”) when Diego interrupted my concentration. Diego is one of the part-timers at the gas station. We have a long list of part-time employees. The owners like to hire transients, drifters, hitchhikers, passers-by and runaways looking for work for a few days. I try not to get to know the part-timers. They come and go after a few days, or sometimes a few weeks, rarely long enough to form any kind of meaningful relationship. But then there’s Diego. Diego has been working here for almost a year now. He started as part of the prison work-relief program, unloading trucks twice a week. He was the only one of the twelve prisoners that didn’t disappear during a freak snow-storm last December, but that’s none of my business. Diego did his time, and when they released him he came to work here, cleaning the store and unloading trucks. He comes in six times a day for each of his thirty-minute shifts. Now that I think about it, I’m not exactly sure what he does during those shifts. The store is never clean and trucks only come twice a week, exclusively during the daylight hours as per an arrangement following the “incident.” Maybe one day I’ll ask Diego what he does for the owners. All I know is that he’s the closest thing to a friend that I have here. When Diego approached me at my register last night, I knew something unusual was going on. He was sweating bullets, pale, and on the verge of passing out. He kept glancing back at the man in the suit that had wandered into the store and was standing next to the frozen drink machine. He told me that he needed to talk. “Now.” I told him, “Go ahead,” but he refused to say anything unless I followed him into the freezer. I usually hate to leave the front of the store unwatched. We have the occasional shoplifter. Plus there was that one time Rocco got in and made off with two cases of cigarettes. But Diego seemed serious, so I made an exception for him. Once we were in the subfreezing safety of the walk-in cooler, Diego asked me if I had seen the guy in the suit. I said yes, I saw him. He asked if I knew the guy. I said yes, I’d seen the guy around town. His name was Kieffer. He was running for some kind of office—I can’t remember which one—and stopped by the gas station every now and then. He drove an old black SUV that only took premium. I didn’t know him much from in town, but he was definitely local. His picture was framed in my high school’s trophy case for one of those sports competitions he had won years and years before I got there. We only have so many things to be proud of, I suppose. I knew of Kieffer, but we weren’t exactly acquaintances. I told all this to Diego, who shook his head and said, “No. That can’t be Kieffer.” I said, “Why not?” And Diego told me, “That can’t be Kieffer, because Kieffer is dead. I killed him two days ago, and his body is in the trunk of my car right now.” And that’s when things started getting weird. I really don’t want to do this. I recognize how awful it is to pause a story at a place like this, but I’m about to head back to work. I’m only just now taking my lunch break and I came all the way down here to the library to document last night before I forgot. I still have to eat and change out of these dirt-covered clothes before I head back (I did a lot of digging last night). Plus I don’t want to leave the part-timers alone with all those lawn gnomes until we know exactly what’s going on. Oh, I forgot to mention the lawn gnomes! I’m so scatter-brained right now. Like I said, it was a very strange night. Between the hand plants, Farmer Jr., and that cultist that wouldn’t leave me alone, I hardly had any time to collect my thoughts. And of course, there is the Diego situation. I promise I’ll come back and tell you all about it, but first I need to grab some coffee. PART THREE There are times when this world drifts so close to the fabric of reality that I can hear something calling me from beyond that veil. Sometimes when I get too close, I can feel that thing on the other side tugging at the corners of my mind. I’m worried about Diego. He doesn’t seem to be taking this so well. In case you don’t know, I work at the shitty gas station at the edge of our small town, and weird things have been happening for as long as I’ve been here. I’ve finally started to tell some of my stories, and if you haven’t caught up yet, I would like to invite you to read parts one and two. When I returned to work after my post yesterday, I was delighted to find a stack of receipt papers sitting neatly on the register counter with notes written in my own shaky hand-writing. I don’t remember writing these notes, but then again, I don’t remember a lot of things. It is possible that I’m working too hard. Or maybe the fumes coming from beneath the gas station are playing tricks on me. Or perhaps it’s just another side effect of my condition. At any rate, I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Or any other animal in any other orifice, for that matter. Admittedly, my handwriting isn’t the best. And at times, the scratches on the receipt paper become nearly illegible. So if anything herein seems unbelievable, it’s probably because I copied it wrong. With that in mind, this is my best effort at a transcription: *** 7:00 – It’s getting dark earlier these days. 7:30 – Farmer Junior came into the gas station tonight, asking about the hand plants. I told him that they weren’t there anymore. He left his phone number scribbled on the back of a coupon for fifteen-percent off bulk pig feed from an online retailer. I think he’s trying to send me a message. 9:00 – I think maybe some kids are playing a prank on me. I found a lawn gnome behind the pork rinds. I didn’t think much about it, and put him in a box behind the counter. But then I found another matching lawn gnome in the soda case. I added this one to the box as well. It wasn’t until I noticed the third and fourth lawn gnomes that I started to suspect something. I had taken out the garbage and found the gnomes perched atop the branch of a tree next to the dumpster, staring down at me like gargoyles. I used a chair and broom to knock them down, and I put them in the box with the other three. When I got back to my desk, I found a note on my chair written in red ink. It says simply, “I’m in the walls.” I don’t know who wrote it, but the paper smells like oranges and plumeria. 10:00 – There is a strange scratching noise coming from the tiles above the cash register. I fear Rocco and his brood may have infiltrated the building again. 11:00 – Farmer Junior called the store. He asked about the hand plants. I assured him that they weren’t there anymore and if they ever showed up again, I would call him. I think he’s beginning to suspect that I’m lying. 12:00 – One of the cultist recruits wandered in from the community in the woods. (They hate it when I call them cultists.) I know the recruits aren’t supposed to interact with the outside world, but from time to time they will sneak into town, never any further than this gas station, and buy cigarettes. They aren’t supposed to try and recruit new members until they graduate to the honorable senior cultist status, but this one isn’t a very good cultist. I know they aren’t supposed to have names, but I’m going to call this one Marlboro. I’ll let you guess why. Marlboro stayed in the store for at least half an hour, trying to convince me to go back to the compound with him. (They hate it when I call their home a compound.) He tried to appeal to my logical side, but I let him know politely but firmly that I was not interested in logic. I can’t remember when he left. 2:00 – I found myself digging again. Sometimes, on slow nights, I let myself drift. My mind goes somewhere and when I come to, I wonder: where was I just now? Who was that controlling my body while I was gone? My body did those things I’ve done so many times before that I guess it’s learned how to do them without me. My body restocked the cigarettes, my body rotated the frozen drink machine, my body scraped the mold off the bottoms of the ice buckets, my body emptied the rat traps, and somewhere along the way, my body found a shovel, went out back, and started digging a hole. Actually, I shouldn’t say my body “started” digging. I have been, or rather “my body” has been digging this hole, off and on for the last few months. Usually, I come to after a few shovel-fulls. This time, I added another foot deep before I snapped back to reality and asked myself, “what the hell am I doing?” 3:30 – I just noticed a door at the end of the hallway past the walk-in cooler. How long have I worked here and never noticed that door before? It seems disappointingly ordinary as far as doors go, except for the fact that it’s warm to the touch and feels like it’s vibrating. I tried the handle, but it’s locked. When I got back to my register, I noticed a man in a trench coat standing outside beyond the gas pumps, just outside the reach of our lights, dangerously close to the road. I can’t tell if he’s looking at me, or if he’s looking past the building at the woods on the other side. I wish he wouldn’t stand there like that, stoic and still, with his arms reaching down past his knees. The scratching against the tiles in the ceiling over the counter is getting louder. 3:45 – A man came into the store, rolling a large white ice chest behind him. He had sunken blue eyes, wiry hair coming from his nose and ears, long boney fingers, and paper-thin skin revealing every blue and green vein beneath the translucent dermis. He wore a bowler cap and smelled like milk. I had definitely never seen him around before. He asked if we would be interested in partnering up with him. He sold ground meat at discount prices, but I told him that our store doesn’t do well with the “fresh foods” category, recommending he try his hand at making jerky. Before he left, he scooped about a pound or so of raw ground meat from the ice chest onto a piece of parchment paper and gave it to me as a “sample.” Once he had left, I took the meat into the cooler, where I found another lawn gnome waiting for me. I put the gnome into the box with the other seven. 4:00 – Diego just told me something very strange about Kieffer. 4:30 – There was a kid named Spencer Middleton who went to the same high school as me and Kieffer. Spencer was just a year ahead of me, but looked much older and acted much younger. I live in a small town, and small towns get bored. For entertainment, some turn to gossip, some turn to more sinister pass times. The latter often fueled the former. There were rumors around town that Spencer liked to torture and kill animals. Rumors that Spencer’s parents and siblings always locked their bedroom doors when they went to sleep at night. The rumors didn’t slow down any after the fire at Spencer’s house, where Spencer was the only one to escape unscathed. I once saw Spencer gleefully stomp on a lizard, throw his head back, and laugh. Some short time after his house caught fire for the second time, Spencer left town. The story went that he had gone off and joined the army. I didn’t know what to think about that, so I simply didn’t think about that. I would have been perfectly happy to never think about that, but after all these years I’m forced to. Because Spencer Middleton just came into the store and ordered a cup of coffee. He’s sitting in one of the booths, talking to Kieffer. Marlboro, is back. He asked if I could spare him some time to talk about his fake religion. (They hate it when I call it a fake religion.) I told him he had to leave. He seemed upset. 4:45 – Spencer and Kieffer sat around for a while and didn’t buy anything but two cups of coffee. When they finally left, I let Diego know. He had been hiding under a blanket in the walk-in cooler, although I can’t really understand why. Diego explained to me exactly what happened. He had finished his shift a couple nights ago and just left the gas station when he saw Kieffer’s SUV pulled over in a ditch at the bottom of the hill. Diego, being the good guy he is, decided to check and see if Kieffer needed any help. He says that when he pulled up and got out of the car, he could hear what sounded like a loud crunching noise coming from just beyond the tree line. Diego went to investigate. That’s when he saw something. When I asked Diego what he saw, he just started speaking Spanish in a fast, panicked sort of way. I don’t speak Spanish, but I nodded along empathetically. The only word I could pick up was “Strega,” which is the name of a liquor we carry. Whatever it was that Diego saw, it made him race back to his car as fast as he could and back out quickly, without looking. And that’s when he ran over Kieffer. Diego is a good guy. But here he was in a bad situation. He stopped long enough to get out, check on Kieffer, and confirm that he was definitely dead. There was nothing he could do that would change that fact. It was an accident. Diego was on parole. There was that thing in the woods, and Diego had to make a decision. So, he heaved the body into the trunk of his car and drove off. Diego took me to his car and showed me the body. I can confirm, one hundred percent, that it was Kieffer in the trunk of his car. Not just because of his unmistakable face, but also because of his phone and wallet that were in his pockets. 5:00 – I finally got tired of the scratching and pulled our ladder out of storage to see what the racoons were doing in the ceiling, but when I pushed back the tile, the only thing up there was another gnome. That makes one dozen so far. 6:00 – The man in the trench coat is still outside. The cultist came back in, demanding an audience with me, insisting that if I would just listen to him I would see that his reasoning is superb and flawless, and that I would be a fool not to join him in the perfection of logic and nirvana that is his belief structure. I agreed to listen to his pitch if he would agree to ask the man in the trench coat to leave. Our hasty verbal contract in place, I steeled myself to listen. Honestly, he did make a few good points, but I suppose that’s to be expected from a viral thought experiment strong enough to convince perfectly normal people to abandon their real lives and go live in a commune in the woods past the shitty gas station on the edge of town. They call themselves “mathmetists.” They believe that humankind exists to fulfill two moral imperatives: to decrease suffering, and to increase happiness. A successful life increases happiness more than suffering. A decent life decreases suffering more than happiness. How good a person is can be determined by the spread between the happiness increased and the suffering decreased. Obviously, if the individual has a negative spread—that is, if they’ve increased happiness less than they’ve increased suffering, or if they’ve decreased suffering less than they’ve decreased happiness—then that means, very simply, that the individual is bad. Therefore, if an individual causes a tremendous amount of happiness and suffering, one can simply determine which was higher, and use this perfect rubric to determine whether that individual was good or bad. Simple, right? The mathmetists believe that the world has been going about good and bad in the wrong way. For eons, we’ve been attempting to increase happiness, when instead we should have been focusing on decreasing suffering. As happiness is a fluid concept, and the more happiness you create, the harder it is to sustain, as happiness has a clear set of diminishing returns. Suffering, however, is consistent. Suffering results from happiness coming to an end. Suffering is pure, and eternal. For a mathmetist to be supremely good, they must simply end all suffering. That is why the mathmetists are working on a bomb to destroy the entire planet. By ending all life on earth, they end an infinity of suffering into the future. With every life they avert, an entire lineage of people that would be born into a life of suffering will no longer. Every death is a preemptive mercy-killing. Every happy moment that will no longer occur pales in the face of all the sad moments that are likewise prevented. And so, as Marlboro explained, their murder cult believes that killing is a kindness. I told him that his ideas were stupid and he was stupid and that now he now had to go tell the man in the trench coat to go away. 6:30 – The phone rang. This is strange for two reasons. First, because it was not the land line. It was the cell phone, even though we do not get cell phone service way out here. And second, because it was the cell phone. The one that I took off of Kieffer’s body. I’ll admit, I was stuck in a bit of a moral quandary ever since Diego confided in me. On the one hand, Diego had killed someone. On the other, it was an accident and Diego’s parole officer may not see it that way. I thought I would have more time to figure this out, but when the cell phone started ringing, I knew I had to make a decision. I answered it. I didn’t speak first. The voice on the other line was one I recognized. “You have something that belongs to my boss.” It was Spencer Middleton. “His cell phone and his wallet,” I answered. “What? No! We don’t care about that shit! We can buy more phones. We can get more wallets. You know what we want.” He was right. I did. “It was an accident,” I explained. “We know. We want to make a deal. You give it back, and we pretend this whole thing didn’t happen.” “Can we do that?” “Absolutely.” 7:30 – Diego came in for his shift at seven and I explained the deal to him. He wasn’t thrilled, but as I laid it out very clearly, he didn’t have a choice. We parked Diego’s Camry behind the gas station near the growth of handplants and made a point to stand far enough away to not get our ankles grabbed. Kieffer’s SUV drove up a few minutes later. Spencer was driving. He and Kieffer got out without a word, sized us up, and opened the back of their vehicle. Diego popped the trunk. Kieffer and I stared at each other, keeping eye-contact the whole time while Diego and Spencer transferred the body from one vehicle to the other. Spencer had a tarp and blanket ready to wrap everything up. When it was over, Kieffer put a hand on my shoulder and whispered in my ear, “You done good.” Then they left. Diego started crying as I went back inside the store. It was almost day time, and that’s when the new part-timer was supposed to take over. 8:00 – The new part timer is late, and I’m overdue for a lunch break. I made the best of my extra time here by putting price stickers on all the lawn gnomes. We’re ringing them up as “miscellaneous grocery” for $9.99 each, and I’ve already sold a couple. I’m a really good employee. 8:30 – I went to the bathroom and saw a man standing there with his pants at his ankles. He wore checkered boxers and a cowboy hat. He smiled when he saw me and simply said in a somewhat sing-song voice, “Come on man. Come onnn with it.” I took the opportunity to ask him something that has been bothering me. “Do you know, is everything going to be ok?” The bathroom cowboy took a second to think, then he pulled up his pants and walked past me, spurs clinking against the bathroom tile. He stopped for a second when he was right next to me and said plainly, “I appreciate it.” Then he left. I honestly have no idea what that means. *** These are the entirety of the receipt paper notes, but I did make a point to continue keeping a journal. I think this will be a healthy way of chronicling the weird events at the gas station. Maybe this will even help with my condition, I don’t know. The next time something strange happens, maybe I’ll come back and write more. Until then, I guess this is to be continued… Edits: Sorry, upon further inspection, I realized that some of the scribbles on the receipt paper may have been transcribed incorrectly. I also made some adjustments to the spelling and fixed some typos. While I was at it, I added another typo just for the observant reader. Lastly, upon the advice of some of my readers, I removed the part where I listed Farmer Junior’s social security number and address. Also, special thanks to the reader that pointed out that “Strega” isn’t even a Spanish word. I asked Diego about it when he came in for his fourth shift today, but Diego simply looked at me blankly and told me that he doesn’t speak Spanish. PART FIVE I should begin this entry by saying how truly sorry I am to anyone who read part 4. I had no idea that was going to happen. The agents have assured me that every trace of the story has been removed from the internet, and that there is nothing to worry about. If you were unfortunate enough to have read part 4: I beg you, for your own sake, try to forget everything. If you experience nose bleeds, dizziness, migraines, or hallucinations, go immediately to the emergency room. If you have a recurring dream of an island made of song, under no circumstances should you approach or attempt to open the blue door with the painting of a crow on it. If you did not read part 4: There was no part 4. It does not exist. Forget you ever heard of it. *** By now, you probably already know that there is a shitty gas station at the edge of our small town, and that weird things have been happening there. The city council has personally asked me to stop talking about it, as there have been some astute readers that not only tracked down our small town from the brief descriptions I’ve given, but actually come and visited me at work. I heard that one of them has joined the Mathematists, and as far as I know the other two are still missing. Once again, I am sorry. I’m not working right now. It’s the first legitimate break I’ve had since I first started writing my stories on receipt paper all that time ago. Time moves funny here. Flowing slow and fast all at once, like molasses out of a shotgun. It’s a good thing I’ve been keeping a journal. I’ve got a few moments before my laptop dies, and I think now would be the perfect time to transpose my journal entries, before the battery runs out or the blood loss gets me. Right now it’s a race to see what happens first. Before any of you worry, I’ve already called Tom. He said he’s on his way here to give me a ride to the hospital, right after he picks up dinner for the Ledford orphans, John-Ben and Little Sister. Tom and the other deputies have been taking turns checking in on and bringing them food in an attempt to make the whole thing less tragic. They’ve been living on their own ever since the incident that totally did not happen (and anyone who says otherwise is a damned liar). There I go again, off on another tangent. I guess I’ll get to it, and type up my journal entries while I still can. *** 11/02/17 9:00 PM So much has happened here since the Halloween incident that we aren’t allowed to talk about. I’ve been much busier than usual, dealing with the aftermath as well as the cult. The Mathmetists have been cleaning out our inventory on a daily basis, planning ahead for some kind of secret event that I only get to hear about in hushed mutterings and whispers. Night is coming earlier, and the weather is getting colder. *** 11/03/17 2:00 AM The man in the tren

75 minutes

October 30, 2018

Dark Comedy, Humor, and Parodies, Locations and Sites, Madness, Paranoia, and Mental Illness, Strange and Unexplained

Scorpion River

Arizona, beings, camping, canyons, creatures, deaths, entities, forests, locations, monsters, nature, outdoors, Roxanne Wilds, sites, sounds, Video Narratives OK, whispering, woods

I’d always been afraid of Scorpion River. Ever since I was eight, I’d gone with my aunt, uncle, and older cousin into the wilderness of southern Arizona where we’d spend two nights in their rickety, blue, camper. We weren’t alone. Around ten other families joined us for that December weekend. The adults sat around the fire, swapping stories of better days, back when the economy was stable and kids respected their elders. The seven or so of us children quickly grew bored with the talk and went exploring. To call Scorpion River a river was an overstatement. Water only ran there once or twice a year. The rest of the time it was just an expanse of sand. Our campsite was close to the river, yet the sandy cliffs meant that one had to fight through half a mile of cat claws and ancient mesquite trees to get to it. Yet every day without fail we’d make the trip. It was worth it to play games of tag in the flat sand or to make forts below the huge cottonwoods which lined that part of the river. Every time an adult would come with us, much to our annoyance. They made sure we kept to the stretch of cottonwoods. The only time we were allowed to leave that was when the group of adults decided to hike to what we called the Funnel. The Funnel was a natural rock formation, a vertical tunnel cut up through the cliffs on the other side of the river. It was beautiful; a pipe of smooth, reddish stone which seemed to lead up into the sky itself. It was easily my favorite part of the trip. The only thing I didn’t like was getting there. To reach the Funnel, we had to pass through what I called Raven Forest. Here the trees were close together, the bark blackened by some ancient fire. Every time we went through, the screeching of ravens would fill the air. The light played tricks on your eyes, making it seem as if there were figures standing in the shadows. As I grew older, the feeling of unease grew too. I began to hear whispering in the trees, voices always too low to be understood, but distinctly unfriendly. I spoke about it to my cousin, Jade, but she dismissed it, telling me it was my imagination. Every year, more and more strange things would happen, explainable, but just strange enough to put me on edge. Nothing stayed where we put it. Camper doors would open and close of their own accord. The campfire would sometimes flare without warning. My aunt and uncle once brought their German Shepherd, thinking he would have a fun time running with the kids. For the entire trip, he stayed close to camp, whimpering whenever we attempted to get him to come down to the river with us. As strange as things got, nothing downright out of the ordinary happened. Not until one year, the year Jade and I turned 18, when my 16-year-old cousin, Mason, decided to come camping with us. He was a tall youth, big for his age, a football player with something to prove. As there were three of us and we were older now, my aunt and uncle decided we could go out by ourselves. Every chance we got we went down to the river to explore, no longer hindered by the younger children. Jade and Mason often got annoyed with me, as I always refused to enter Raven Forest. Jade wanted to climb the trees, as she was going through a gymnastics phase, while Mason wanted to prove he wasn’t afraid of an old, spooky forest. One evening, the two couldn’t stand it anymore and told me they were going in whether I came with them or not. I declined and the two disappeared into the woods, leaving me alone at the edge of the river. I sat down on the little cliff and waited as the sun began to sink below the tree line. I gradually became aware of a horrible smell coming from a nearby stand of bushes. I grew curious and went over to investigate. The bushes were low and thorny, forcing me to crawl to get through. I crawled on hands and knees over the uneven ground, finally stopping when my fingers touched something soft. I took out my phone flashlight and shone it on the ground. Instantly I was moving backward, ignoring the thorns which tore at my hair. For, lying on the ground, was a pile of dead songbirds, heads missing, surrounded by blood and ants. I pulled myself to the edge of the river and stayed there, breathing hard, trying not to throw up. Several minutes later my cousins returned, talking and laughing. They stopped when they saw me sitting on the cold ground, shivering. “What happened?” Jade asked. I numbly pointed towards the stand of trees. The two of them went over to look, returning a moment later, faces grave. “What would do that?” I asked. “Some kind of predator?” Jade suggested. “You know, like a fox, a coyote, something…” “Why would it just pile them up like that? There must be fifty of them, all lined up in a circle like-” “Let’s leave,” Mason interrupted. “It’s almost dark.” We started towards the other side of the river, walking at first, then running. “I really think we’re overreacting,” Jade said when we reached the other side and paused to catch our breath. “There must be some logical explanation. Maybe they just happened to be there and weren’t arranged like it seemed. Did any of us look very hard?” “The heads were missing,” Mason said. “Explain that.” “They might have rotted away.” The longer we talked, the more reasonable the birds seemed. After around ten minutes of proposing theories, we were calm. Mason decided to try climbing the cliff to get to camp instead of going through the river bed, which was muddy from a recent rain. He’d just gotten a new pair of red Converse and didn’t want them ruined. Jade and I, knowing how many thorn bushes were between us and camp, decided to go down the river before going up the cliff. We split up. Once we were about halfway up the path, we heard rustling in the bushes. Thinking it was a deer, we ignored it and continued. Jade stopped to tie her shoe. “We should go up to the funnel,” she said, bending down. “By ourselves?” I asked, scared yet a little excited. “Yeah.” “That’d be-” I stopped. Behind her, in the thorn bushes, was a dark shape. It was hunched, humanoid, though in the growing darkness it was hard to make out details. I glanced at Jade, and when I looked back it was gone. “What is it?” Jade asked. I pointed. “There was… something there.” “It was probably Mason.” She stood up. “Hey! Mason! Get out here and stop trying to scare us.” “Aw, come on,” he called. I was relieved until he stepped out of the woods on the other side of the trail. There was no way he could have moved that fast and that quietly. I tried to explain what I’d seen to the two of them, but they just laughed it off. We spent the night around the campfire, listening to my uncle play guitar. That night nothing strange happened and we all awoke early, eager to go on our trip. We left just after the sun rose over the cliffs. In the daylight, the forest was decidedly less creepy. We went around half a mile down the river before climbing the cliff. This was the first time we’d done it alone, but we were confident we knew the way. At first, everything went pretty well. We found a little trail and started towards the cliff ahead. But pretty soon I began to notice that this part of the forest wasn’t familiar. The trees were even closer together than usual, and even though the sun was by now high in the sky, it seemed dark. Then the coyotes began howling. Though I knew they weren’t dangerous to humans, it was still eerie hearing them in the distance. “Maybe we should go back,” I suggested. “Nah,” Jade said. “We can still find the funnel. Let’s just get off this path. It should be, like, a mile west of here.” “I’ll go first,” Mason said. “I’ve got a leather jacket and you don’t.” When we left the path, I thought I heard the whispering, though it was hard to hear over the racket my cousin was making by breaking a path through the trees for us. Finally, we reached a small stream bed, long since dried up yet not overgrown. A minute or two later we reached a funnel. We all knew instantly it wasn’t the one we were used to. It was smaller yet went further into the cliff face, more of a canyon than a tunnel. As we entered it I noticed something far up near the top, around two hundred feet above us. It was too far away to make out what it was, so I decided to climb a little way up the side of the other side of the canyon. Meanwhile, Jade and Mason went farther into the canyon. I could hear them talking as I climbed as far up the wall as I could get. As I still couldn’t see what it was, I decided to take a picture with my phone. I pointed it and snapped the picture, deciding to see if my uncle, who was into photography, could somehow enhance it. I started to climb down and tripped. I landed hard on the floor of the funnel, glad for my thick coat. I heard rustling in the bushes to my left and waited to hear the others laughing at my clumsiness. Yet no sound came. “Guys?” I called. “We’re up ahead,” Jade replied faintly. I started to go after them, having to squeeze between the trees and under the bushes which clung stubbornly to the dirt floor of the funnel. Suddenly I had the feeling of being watched. Again branches cracked. I wanted to turn and tell whoever it was to cut it out, but my body wouldn’t respond. I froze as the sounds grew closer and closer. The whispering increased in volume. Then the spell was broken as Mason called my name. The frozen feeling disappeared and I turned, ready to confront whatever it was. Nothing was there. I hurried to join my cousins, who stood below the object on the funnel wall. From here it was apparent that it was a bit bigger than I was. Something dripped from it, leaving trails of dark liquid on the pale wall. Around it circled several ravens. “Think that’s a nest?” Jade asked before I could tell them what had happened. “Maybe,” Mason replied, shading his eyes. We stayed there for a few moments, trying to make out what it was before growing bored. “Race you to the entrance!” Mason called. He ran off through the trees, ignoring the thorny bushes. Jade and I followed more slowly, knowing we couldn’t beat him. Then, above the sound of our own footsteps, I became aware of a distant voice, rising and falling in some sort of haunting song. It sounded female, but there was something unnatural about it as if we were hearing a recording played backward. “Do you hear that?” Jade asked. I nodded. We ran to the entrance of the funnel, where we met Mason. “Did you hear singing?” I asked. “No,” he replied. “What are you talking about?” “Didn’t you hear anything?” She shook her head. “No. We should head back.” We were then confronted by a problem. We didn’t know exactly how to get back to the river without having to push our way through thorn bushes. Finally, we had no choice but to start moving. Mason led the way, pushing through thorns and bushes without a care. Jade and I followed more slowly, carefully avoiding the worst of the thorns. After a few minutes, the two of us were separated from him. We found ourselves in a circle of thorn bushes with no easy way out. “Mason!” I called. He didn’t respond though he couldn’t have gotten more than ten feet ahead. We sat down, deciding he’d come back eventually. My feeling of unease began to grow. Finally Jade spoke, voice small and quivering. “I don’t think we’re alone,” she said. I nodded, feeling my muscles begin to lock with fear. From the direction of the funnel came the sound of something pushing through the trees. Jade’s eyes met mine and I knew she could hear it too. “We need to get out of here,” I said, eyeing the thorns which surrounded us. For some reason, I had no idea how we’d gotten inside the little clearing. The sounds were growing louder, along with the whispering. All at once I realized something. The voices had never been threatening me. They’d been trying to warn me. I got to my feet and pulled Jade up. “We’re leaving,” I said. I pushed through the bushes, ignoring the stinging of the cuts the thorns left on my arms and face. Jade followed and we ran through the forest. At one point I tripped and Jade pulled me to my feet. Behind us, the sounds were growing closer and more urgent. The voices weren’t whispering anymore, they were screaming. For what seemed like a thousand years we ran through the forest. Though it was only a mile, it felt like a hundred. Finally, we ran out into the river, nearly knocking over Mason. The voices stopped, along with the crashing of whatever was pursuing us. “Where were you?” he asked as we tried to catch our breath. “I’ve been calling for you for hours.” “Hours?” I asked. “We weren’t apart for more than twenty minutes.” He shook his head. “I was just about to go get help.” I noticed that the sun, directly overhead when we’d left the funnel, was beginning to set. Jade laughed, the sound a little too high. “We must have looked dumb,” she said. “Running from nothing like that.” “Nothing?” I asked. “We must have just imagined it.” “Really, Jade?” “It was probably just some animal.” We started walking back to camp, and soon I began to believe we’d imagined whatever had happened too. I heard the sound of the singing and ignored it, deciding I was imagining it again. Then I noticed that the other two were looking at me in horror. They could hear it too. We began running, not stopping until we reached the camp. When we told our story, the adults just laughed, blaming it on overactive imaginations. My uncle, who had been visiting the area since he was a child, claimed there was no second funnel. We soon packed up and drove home. As it was late by the time we reached our hometown, I decided to spend the night with Jade and go to my house the following morning. While we were there, I remembered the picture I’d taken of the thing in the funnel. I asked my uncle to enhance it and he agreed. “It’ll probably be a nest,” he said as he worked. “You probably disturbed the ravens, which decided to chase you off.” I didn’t agree, though I didn’t say so. “Oh, kids,” he continued with a smile, “I used to be like you. One time I remember thinking-” He stopped, the smile disappearing instantly. He got up and backed away from the computer. Then he turned and ran for the phone. Jade and I looked at the now-enhanced picture. The thing was not a nest. In fact, it was a body, headless like the birds we’d seen in the tree grove. Though the picture was still blurry, the jacket the figure wore was unmistakably black leather. On his feet was a pair of bright red Converse. Just then the doorbell rang. “Girls!” My aunt called. “Mason is here!”

9 minutes

February 24, 2017

Beings and Entities, Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Locations and Sites, Monsters, Creatures, and Cryptids, Nature and the Outdoors, Sounds and Voices

Willow Creek

Creepypasta Contest Winners, games, haunted games, Haunted Games Writing Contest, Moonlit_Cove, Video Narratives OK

This pasta was the first place winner of our Gaming Creepypasta Challenge. Congratulations to moonlit_cove! The second and third placed winners will have their stories uploaded on the 20th and 21st. Thanks to everyone who participated! – A small orb of orange light quickly illuminated then faded back into the darkness as Paul Donovan took a draw from his cigarette. He sat slouched in a plush chair in his living room, the hand that held the cigarette now dangling over the armrest. When he exhaled, the smoke rose and hovered near the ceiling, though it was impossible to see it in the darkness. After a brief moment of questioning his willingness to continue, he picked up the TV remote in his free hand and pressed the power button. The solid blue screen initially caused his dilated pupils to ache – so much so that he winced and glanced away from the screen for a few seconds. Once his eyes adjusted, Paul swapped the TV remote for his wireless game controller. He pressed and held the start button until the system booted up. After taking one final draw of his cigarette, he snuffed it out in an ash tray that was resting on a nearby end table. The disc reader inside his console whirred as it spun up to load the game data. Continue to Level 3? The dialogue box gave him one last chance to change his mind. He initially used the controller stick to highlight the “No” response, and lingered there while contemplating the possible consequences of playing on. But he had to finish what he’d started, and he hoped that by completing the game he could put an end to this madness. More importantly, he wanted his son back, and he was prepared to do whatever was necessary in order to get him home safely. He returned the cursor to the “Yes” option and confirmed his choice. – – – – – Being an avid lover of horror and survival games, it was only natural that Paul would accept the challenge to play this game. He had learned of it quite by accident two weeks ago as he was browsing the discussion forum of his favorite gaming site. Someone had posted a topic requesting recommendations for the scariest games. Paul opened the thread with the intention of providing a long list of his favorites, but as he read through the responses he saw how the conversation had turned in a much different direction, beginning with a reply from a user he’d never seen before: Chameleon01: If you guys are looking for a scary game, I’ve got one for you. I’ll bet no one on this board could even finish it. GamerGabe: PFFFFFT!! Yeah right! We’ve played everything there is. What’s the name of it then, newbie? Dark-Shadow957: Low post count + outrageous claim = troll. 00Raven00: Well, what game is it? RevengeofSephiroth: Let me guess, a Pokemon game? GamerGabe: (@RevengeofSephiroth) BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Dark-Shadows957: TROLL! Come on guys, don’t feed the troll! Chameleon01: It’s called Willow Creek. GamerGabe: Sounds lame. 00Raven00: I googled your little game. It doesn’t exist. Nice try though. Buh-bye now. Chameleon01: It’s a pre-production bootleg. It’s not supposed to be out until next year. 00Raven00: We still would’ve heard of it as an upcoming release. Besides that, how would you even get a hold of such a thing? Geez, some people! Chameleon01: I work for the developer. That’s all I can say. Do you want to play it or not? 00Raven00: What system? Chameleon01: PM me. I’ll get you the version for whatever system you need. The more Paul read into the depth of the thread, the more his interest was piqued. He wondered whether or not 00Raven00 had gone on to request the game from this stranger. He hovered his mouse over the link to Chameleon01’s profile, then clicked it and began composing his own private message to the unknown user. He was hesitant at first to give out his home address, but he rationalized it away by telling himself it wasn’t any different than the hundreds of random strangers using eBay that had already obtained his personal information over the years. A yellow padded envelope with no return address arrived in Paul’s mailbox four days after he sent the private message. Inside was the game disc in a paper sleeve. On the disc, crudely written in ink, was: Willow Creek: beta v. 1.0. “Ah, so this Chameleon guy is in charge of beta testing. That makes a little more sense,” Paul mumbled to himself. His mouth then broadened into a partial smile. “Well, he didn’t have to be so cryptic about it.” A young boy came running into the kitchen where Paul stood looking over the rest of the day’s mail. “Who you talkin’ to, dad?” the boy asked. “Oh, no one, Scotty. Just myself.” He shuffled through the bills and junk mail. Scotty was ten years old, an above average student, but a typical boy all around. He loved playing the seemingly endless stream of video games that his father was constantly bringing home. They had partnered up for many adventures on most of the multiplayer games (unless Paul deemed the game to be too mature for Scotty), and even when games were single player, Scotty loved to watch as his father solved all the puzzles and defeated the toughest bosses. Paul knew that Scotty’s mother would probably not approve of all of the games that they’d played together, but she hadn’t had a say in the matter for nearly a year now. “We got a new game,” Paul announced to his son, holding the disc out toward Scotty. Scotty took it from him. “It looks fake,” he said. “Well, it’s a beta test. We’ll be among the first players.” Scotty’s eyes lit up. “Cool! Can we play it tonight?” “Sure, if we have time. You make sure you get all your homework done first though. Okay?” Scotty hung his head as he placed the game disc on the kitchen table. “Alright,” he replied in a resigned voice, remembering how much homework awaited him that evening. It was getting late when Scotty finally finished his school work and came barreling into the living room, begging his father to play the new game. “It’s already 9:30, bud. You need to be getting to bed soon.” “Can we at least start it?” Paul hesitated for a moment. “Okay. But you’re not staying up past ten.” Scotty’s excitement boiled over as he grabbed the game disc and booted up the console. He handed his father the first player controller. After a brief title screen, there were three level options listed from top to bottom. The only option that was active was “Level One”. The remaining two levels were grayed-out. In the background, behind the text, was the still image of a closed door depicted from inside a dark room with light radiating from the gaps at its edges. “What’s this about?” Scotty asked. “I don’t know exactly. But it’s supposed to be scary so I may be sending you to bed if it gets too bad.” Scotty groaned. Paul confirmed the selection of level one and sat back as the game loaded. “It looks like it’s only one player so you’ll just have to watch me play for a while.” “That’s okay.” After a few seconds of load time, a cut scene appeared. Paul and his son watched the animated footage – a first-person perspective as the protagonist entered a door with a frosted glass window into an antiquated office environment. On the window, decaled in thick black lettering, was “Detective Charleston”. Somber ambient music droned in the background. The scene reminded Paul of the way many of the classic film noirs he’d seen over the years had begun. Right away he realized that this would be more of a puzzle solving game. An intellectual’s game. Paul caught on to the gist of the game relatively quickly. He played as Detective Charleston, traveling all around the virtual town of Willow Creek and finding clues that could be pieced together to advance the storyline. In level one’s mystery he was introduced to the story of James Braxton, a man that worked the third shift at the Willow Creek Steel Mill. One night while having an argument with a coworker, James was pushed into the blast furnace. The perpetrator left the scene and there were no other witnesses. It was up to Paul to find all of the evidence and have the murderer convicted. During one particularly realistic cut scene of the murder, Paul had ordered Scotty off to bed. Scotty protested at first, but soon relented. Paul finished solving the case by himself, and was pleased with his work when the police finally slapped the handcuffs on the murderer in the final cut scene of level one. The game automatically saved his progress. Paul’s phone rang. He looked at his watch – 12:37. “C’mon, you’re going to wake up Scotty,” he whispered as he reached for the phone. He answered it. “Hello?” “Thank you for setting me free.” Paul pulled the phone away from his ear to glance at the screen – unknown caller. “Who is this?” he demanded. “James Braxton.” “Who?” “James. From Willow Creek. You solved my case.” Paul was taken aback. He glanced at the television screen which now displayed a dialogue box, beaconing: Continue to Level 2? “Who is this really? And where did you get my number?” “I told you – I’m James from Willow Creek. I just wanted to thank you for solving my case. Now I’m free. I only had about six weeks left before reaching the dreaded one year mark. Thank God you came along. No one else had solved my case yet. I even-” “Where did you get my number?” Paul interrupted. “From Chameleon, of course.” “What the…” Paul trailed off as the phone slipped from his hand and landed with a thud on the carpet. His mouth slacked open in disbelief. He looked down at the phone. The illuminated screen stared back up at him. He could still hear the muffled voice at the other end. He grabbed the phone and shut it off as quickly as he could. Paul’s heart was racing and drops of sweat began to form on his brow as he switched off the game console and the TV set. He was bathed in silence and in the darkness of his living room. After a long moment to gather his thoughts and to allow his pulse to settle, he quietly snuck into Scotty’s room where he watched his son sleep peacefully for several minutes. Paul was not able to fall asleep himself until nearly 4:00AM. He could not shake the uneasy feeling of the phone call. His last thought before finally drifting off into slumber was how useless he was going to be at work later that day. – – – – – Paul awoke in a fog at first, but then jolted upright when he saw the time on his bedside clock – 10:23. The room was washed in dim shades of gray as a heavy rain beat steadily at the roof and windows. Apparently Paul had forgotten to set his alarm amidst the chaos that followed his completion of level one. After the utterance of a few choice profanities and throwing off the bed sheets, he darted into Scotty’s room. His empty bed was neatly made. In the kitchen Paul found a note: You were sleeping so well, I made my own breakfast. I have to catch the bus soon. Love, Scotty Paul sighed and felt like such a failure as a father. It was in moments like these that he wished Laura were still there. He missed her in so many ways, and her penchant for organization, though annoying at times, was something he undeniably needed in his life. Paul stared into blank space as he relived in his mind the accident that took her. Once he snapped out of the vision he decided to call in sick to work. Afraid to turn on his cell phone, he made the call from his land line. After a quick breakfast, Paul debated with himself about whether or not to continue the game. He finished off a cigarette as he rehashed the events of the previous night. As unnerving as it had been for him at the time, it now seemed like nothing more than a strange coincidence with a wrong number. A very strange coincidence, but how else could it be explained? Besides, Paul was never one to back away from a challenge. He had to finish the game. The console booted up, the disc spun, and the title screen gave way to the dialogue box: Continue to Level 2? Paul confirmed the “Yes” selection. The second case for Detective Charleston was that of a housing developer who had dug up human remains while leveling a lot for construction. The site of the discovery was roped off and it was the objective of the player to properly collect all of the evidence and determine who the remains belonged to and what had happened to them. Paul was meticulous in his actions and was careful to think of every possible piece of evidence. He collected samples for DNA testing. He interviewed the former landowner, the construction foreman, and the equipment operator who had made the discovery. He pored over photographs of the crime scene. Little by little he pieced together the story of a woman that had been kidnapped and murdered. She had been carjacked and a fiery accident was staged to cover up the disappearance. She was then held captive by her abductor until he finally did away with her and buried the remains. The case was solved in its entirety when the DNA test results came back. There were two DNA profiles in the samples – one for the perpetrator, who turned out to be a known troublemaker in Willow Creek – and the other for the victim, Laura Donovan. Paul threw the controller aside. His pulse immediately increased to the point that he could feel his neck throbbing. His ears rang and he began shaking. “There’s….no way.” He choked on the words. Tears welled up in his eyes as he recalled the circumstances surrounding Laura’s death. The car had burned beyond recognition. The funeral was closed casket. Had something more happened to her? Had she not died at the scene as this game was suggesting? “What are you?” he screamed at the television, his face dark red. There was no answer, just the ever-increasing throbbing of his pulse, now audible in his ears, and the prompt on the screen: Continue to Level 3? Paul rushed over and unplugged the game system. The TV screen shone solid blue. With the exception of the pounding rain outside, silence enveloped the house. He paced around the living room, wrestling in his own mind for answers. How was this possible? There’s no way it was all a coincidence! The wall phone rang. The sound of the mechanical bell was jolting, threatening to split Paul’s head in two. He agonized at the thought of the caller’s identity. Most people did not have his home phone number. “No! Please, no! Don’t do this to me!” His initial reaction was one of terror, but what if it really was Laura calling? What if he’d somehow released her from the clutches of the game just as James claimed that he’d done in his case? Ridiculous! Paul thought, She’s dead! He made his way over to the phone mounted on the kitchen wall. “Hello?” Paul said this with great caution, the way an intimidated child would approach an angry parent. “Paul Donovan?” It was a woman’s voice. “Yes.” “This is Janice Pendleton from Roosevelt Elementary School. We were just calling to check on your son, Scotty, since he was absent today.” Paul was at a loss for words. Janice continued, “We couldn’t reach you on your cell phone, but we found this alternate number in Scotty’s file.” “You’re telling me he didn’t show up today?” There was a pause of confusion before Janice delicately replied, “Yes sir, we found it odd since he rarely misses a day. So we wanted to check…” She trailed off. “He left for school as usual this morning,” Paul said, “I mean, I was sleeping, but…” He realized that no matter what he said next it would make him sound like a negligent parent. He began to weep and tried his best to hide this from Janice, but she was able to pick up on it. “Mr. Donovan, if you’re saying you don’t know where he is either… Do you want us to notify the authorities?” No longer attempting to hide his sobbing he managed to blurt out, “Yes. Please!” then wept uncontrollably, dropping the phone receiver. It hit the kitchen wall with a hard thud and swung there by its cord as Paul sank to the floor. – – – – – Paul spent the remainder of the afternoon and evening at the police station. He answered a barrage of questions from multiple officers and detectives. He filled out endless amounts of paperwork. He pleaded with everyone he encountered to stop wasting time and find his son. The officers convinced Paul that they would do everything in their power and then persuaded him to go home in case Scotty returned. “That’s how many of these cases resolve themselves in the early stages,” one officer had told him. The rain had subsided by the time Paul returned home, leaving wet streets and walkways. He unlocked his front door and entered the darkness. The house was silent. “Scotty?” he called, standing in the doorway. “Are you here?” But there was no response. Paul knew that if he were to simply sit around the house waiting he would go insane, so he booted up his computer to revisit the message board thread about the game – and to give this Chameleon guy a piece of his mind. As the computer was starting up he gazed at a framed photo on the desktop. The picture was of himself, Laura and Scotty taken at a family reunion during a much happier time in their lives. He fought tears again and then turned the photo face down on the desk. The computer was ready. He navigated to the message board and found the thread. He noticed two things that had happened since he had last been there. First, the user Chameleon01 was no longer listed. Everywhere he had posted, his username was replaced by an icon with the text No Longer A Registered User. The other item of interest was that the tread had been locked by moderators after the argument about the mysterious game grew much more intense. As Paul was reading the heated exchange he heard the front door open. A sigh of relief washed over him and an impossibly large smile crossed his face. “Scotty!” he yelled. He ran down the hallway. “Scotty, you’re home! Thank God! You had me so worr-” Paul stopped dead in his tracks when he turned the corner to face the front door. Scotty had not come home. But Laura had. – – – – – Even though she had lost weight and appeared sickly, Laura’s embrace felt like home. It was comfortable and familiar, although it had been almost a year since Paul had experienced it. They lingered in the doorway in that position before either of them spoke. Finally, Paul pulled back, his hands remaining on her shoulders, and asked, “Laura, is it really you? How is this possible?” “It’s really me! You freed me! It’s so good to be home.” Paul was awestruck as they resumed the embrace. They kissed passionately for several minutes. Once the disbelief of her presence lessened, Paul led Laura over to the couch to question her about all that had happened. “I don’t even know where to start, Laura. I was playing this video game and I-” “I know, Paul. I know. Let me tell you everything that happened to me.” Paul nodded and listened intently. “I didn’t die in the car crash,” Laura began. “He took me.” “Who took you?” “This ‘thing’ that calls himself The Chameleon.” Paul’s stomach sank and his brow creased as he tried to make sense of this. “Took you where, exactly?” “After he abducted me and burned my car, I woke up in a holding cell. There were hundreds of us in there, stacked in cages lining the walls. I don’t think the place is even in this realm. He told us that if someone solved our case in the game he would send us back to ‘the real world’. And when I was released, I passed through some sort of portal and wound up in the sewer tunnels under Hamilton Square.” “What in the world? That sounds crazy, Laura!” “I know it does, Paul. But you’ve got to believe me. It’s happening.” “But what is he getting out of this? I mean, why not just make a game without the human collateral?” “I think the human collateral is the point. It’s some kind of a sick game to him. The cages are stacked around the perimeter of a very large warehouse-like room. In the center of the room is a stage where people whose cases aren’t solved within one year are creatively…” she began crying, “…dispatched in gruesome ways.” Laura leaned over to embrace Paul again, her tears dampening his shoulder. “I saw terrible things, Paul. And my time on the stage was only two weeks away.” The gravity of this hit Paul like a ton of bricks. He rubbed her back. “You saved me, Paul. Thank you.” “I have to tell you something, Laura,” he said after a contemplative pause, “Scotty is missing.” “I know,” Laura replied somberly, “he’s in the game.” – – – – – Paul sat in the dark living room and stared at the prompt on the screen. Continue to Level 3? After selecting “Yes” and while waiting for the case to load, he closed his eyes and hoped beyond measure that the case he would be presented with was Scotty’s. Laura watched silently from the couch. The familiar cut scene played showing the entrance into Detective Charleston’s office. Once Paul had control of the game, he opened the last case file and began reading. He nearly burst into tears of joy when he read about a missing ten year old boy. His objective was to find the boy and have the kidnapper brought to justice. “It must update through the internet connection,” Paul said to Laura. “The disc is just a gateway into the game. I’ll bet if I went back to level one again it would not be James’ case, but something new – one of Chameleon’s latest victims.” As Paul was saying this, he had the sudden realization that this would never end. He would be compelled from then on to spend every waking moment of his life playing this game, lest someone experience a gruesome death that he might have prevented. His conscience would never let him put it down. Paul refocused on the task at hand. He worked the level three case as diligently as he knew how, talking to possible witnesses in Willow Creek and collecting evidence from the playground where the boy was last seen. Soon, he was at an impasse. He did not have enough evidence to figure out what had happened and he had no further ideas on how to proceed. “What’s that store next to the playground?” Laura asked. “I think it’s like a convenience store,” Paul replied. “Can you go talk to them? Maybe there’s a security camera or something.” “Brilliant!” Paul navigated Detective Charleston into the store and spoke with the manager. Moments later he was able to obtain the security camera footage from the time of the disappearance which showed the boy being stuffed into a car with a clear license number. Back at his office Detective Charleston ran the plate number and located the kidnapper. After the handcuffing scene, Paul was treated to a congratulatory message for having solved the case in level 3. And they waited. The house remained quiet, and it did not take long for Paul to become frustrated. He paced nervously in the living room. “Where is he? I solved his case.” “Give it more time, Paul. Remember, it took me several hours to make it back here after being released.” Paul nodded, but it did not calm him. He stepped out onto the front porch for another cigarette and to watch for a boy to come running toward him in the distance. When this did not happen, he darted out into the middle of the front yard, gazed out into the darkness with his arms outstretched and yelled, “Give me my son back! Take me instead! You hear me? You come take me instead!” Dogs barked in the distance. Paul collapsed onto the lawn. When he finally looked up, he saw Scotty moving toward him. He wasn’t running, but walking slowly. He was reaching up with his left hand as if being led by a much taller adult, but Paul did not see anyone walking next to him. As Scotty approached, Paul could barely make out the vague outline of a tall cloaked figure holding Scotty’s hand. In a moment, Scotty was in Paul’s arms. The outlined figure stood over them. It was not translucent, but entirely solid, yet it took on the perfect semblance of the surroundings behind it. If Paul were to reach out and touch it, his hand would not pass through it, but meet resistance as real as any other body. It stood motionless and silent – and waited. Laura burst from the front door and off the porch into the yard. “Scotty!” she called to him. “Momma?” “It’s me, baby! It’s really me!” As they hugged and wept together, Paul turned his attention toward the nearly indiscernible cloaked figure. It was at least eight feet tall by his best estimation. Paul was still kneeling when the figure’s cloak parted at the bottom, revealing a blackness that could only be rivaled by the deepest, darkest cave. The entity stepped forward and absorbed Paul. The edges of the cloak reunited and all was silent. “No!” Laura’s scream was drawn out and ended with hysterical wailing as she realized that only she and Scotty remained in the front yard. – – – – – Somewhere in an inaccessible nether world Paul slowly awoke in his fourth-storey cage. He heard the wailing of all the other occupants in their cells, though he could not see them. On the wall in his small dark cage was a placard with two dates written on it. The first was the date of his imprisonment, and the second was the date exactly one year from then. Suddenly there was commotion below as a slightly overweight man was led by the cloaked figure onto the spot-lit stage in the center of the arena below. The man was manacled to a post with a sinister-looking mechanical device positioned behind him. Paul had already closed his eyes by the time the machine was started up. He did not want to see what it was or what was going to happen to the man. However, the screams he heard would never leave his mind. – – – – – Seven hundred fifty miles away from Paul Donovan’s earthly home, a middle-aged man known in certain internet gaming circles as 00Raven00 opened a padded envelope that had been sitting on his kitchen counter for several days. He inserted the plain disc into his gaming system and watched the opening sequence. Once he had control of the game he opened the file folder on Detective Charleston’s desk. Apparently a man named Paul had been pushed in front of a subway train by another person who then fled the station, according to witness statements in the file. Being primarily an action-based gamer 00Raven00’s patience wore thin quickly, and he spent only fifteen minutes exploring for clues before giving up. “Psssshh. This isn’t even scary,” he declared, and switched the system off.

16 minutes

May 19, 2016

Beings and Entities, Video Games and Gaming

12 Steps

based on a true story, based on true events, Kenneth Kohl

Danny knew he had made a mistake in coming, but he took a seat nonetheless. All of the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on his side of town seemed warm and welcoming. All of the people were friendly and knew him by name. There were hugs, handshakes, slaps on the back. The rooms were well lit with comfortable chairs. There were always freshly baked cookies or donuts. A recent falling out with his sponsor, Ralph, had caused Danny to choose to avoid some of his normal meetings, though. He had already been down to two meetings a week, which Ralph had so poignantly called him to the carpet on, so he didn’t want to cut those out completely. He had been feeling antsy lately and probably needed to go to a few more. Never the type to ask for help, he was unwilling to admit it, though. Instead, he decided to try a few meetings on the other side of the tracks. Whitehall. The seedy part of town. Fucking Ralph. “You’re only as sick as your secrets,” he said. Danny had made a list of all those he had harmed, and went about making amends to them all. Some accepted his apologies, some didn’t. All he could do was clean his own side of the street. There were fa few amends that were impossible to make, but he had admitted all of his sins to either his sponsor, his therapist, or his priest. All but The One Thing, that is. That’s what Ralph kept harping on. Danny had stayed sober for fifteen years. He deserved to keep The One Thing to himself, didn’t he? Fucking Ralph. Danny chose a group with the innocuous name of “New Hope” that met in the basement of Saint Pete’s Episcopal Church. While groups sometimes did actually meet in church basements, they were rarely as depicted on television or in the movies. That’s just not the way things worked. Hollywood had gotten the coffee and donuts part down to a tee, but missed the mark on most of the rest. Sadly, there weren’t even any donuts at the “New Hope” group. Danny wished that he had known. He would have sprung for some. AA had given him his life back, and brought a good bit of financial security with it, so he didn’t mind giving back now and again. He made his way over to the coffee urn, making eye contact with a few people on the way. He didn’t even bother to smile. The most he got were some grunts and shrugs as he walked by. He had already decided that he wouldn’t ever be coming back to this group, so why bother. He wasn’t about to walk out, though. Giving up was for losers. He grabbed a Styrofoam cup from the top of the stack, which already had some black smudged fingerprints on the outside, and filled it with a sludge that they called coffee here at Saint Pete’s. Danny threw a buck into a basket on the table and plopped into a chair that seemed to be farthest away from everyone else. This was nothing like the usual meetings he hit. The church’s basement room was about forty by forty feet square. There were eight rectangular folding tables set up in a makeshift circle with wooden chairs set along the outside. Unfortunately, there would be no speaker. This was a discussion meeting. They would most likely read something out of some bit of AA approved literature – the Big Book, Twelve and Twelve, or some meditation book – and then go around the room weighing in on their own personal experience, strength, and hope. Danny didn’t feel like talking, but the one bit of his sponsor’s advice that he had latched onto early was to always say something. Always be “part of.” Even though the ceiling held banks of fluorescent lights, the room still seemed cold. Perhaps it was the type of bulb they used. (Were there different types?) Or perhaps it was the way the light reflected off the sickly yellow linoleum floor and institution-green walls. It smelled funny, too. Oh well, thought Danny, it’s only for an hour. He had spent twice that amount of time scraping together change for another bottle while fighting off the shakes in the past. In comparison, this would surely be more pleasurable than that. That’s what it came down to, wasn’t it? For him, to drink is to die. There were times that he had done the most disgraceful things in order to get drunk. Things that would have sickened him if he had been sober and not fiending for the next drink. So if sitting through a boring meeting in a crappy place meant not drinking, even for only an hour, then so be it. Not a difficult choice. He was not a snob, but the thought that the people here seemed to be a little lower class than what he was used to. He was by no means rich, but now that he had gotten his life together, he was back in the upper-middle class demographic. The meetings that he attended were regularly frequented by businessmen, doctors, realtors, and other professionals. Frankly, even the blue-collar people at his normal meetings seemed to be upper class compared to these people. These people were… and he had to remind himself that he was being honest and not uncaring… the dregs of society. Unshaven, unkempt, tattooed, greasy, foul smelling. AA had taught him not to judge. “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Still, it was hard. Just before the meeting was called to order, a man plopped down into the chair next to him. Oh, come on, buddy, thought Danny. Ten empty chairs, plenty to keep enough distance between all of us, and you have to sit right next to me. He sighed. At least this guy seemed friendly. Short, stout (PC for obese), with a red, round face, he introduced himself. “Hi there! Name’s Mike! How ‘bout you?” “Danny,” he said as he extended his hand. At least Mike was dressed well. Button down shirt, slacks, dress shoes. He was even wearing cologne. Or was it the smell of booze? No, Danny decided, it was cologne. The guy’s breath smelled bad though. Not “smelled” as in “drinking” smelled, but just reeked. His teeth seemed white enough, but it was as if he hadn’t brushed in ages. Mike tried to make small talk. “I haven’t seen you before. So how long have you been coming to these meetings?” “About sixteen years,” replied Danny. “I came in for a year, and then decided that I wasn’t ready to stop. I went back out for a while, and have been sober ever since. Fifteen years, one month, one week, and two days.” “Wow!” Mike seemed truly amazed, “How many minutes?” Danny just smiled. “Me?” Mike continued, “Me? I’ve only been coming for about a month now. I’ll have thirty days on Wednesday.” “Well, congratulations. For some people, those first thirty are the hardest. Real white knuckle time.” Mike was definitely pink clouding it. That’s the term for AAs in early sobriety who think that life has suddenly become wonderful and carefree. After a good period of sobriety, it kicks in that drunk or not, life still has challenges. There’s just no more alcohol to make the bad feelings go away. “I’ll be getting my chip.” Mike was of course referring to the colored aluminum medallion that – although not universally used – has become almost synonymous with AA. Sobriety coins themselves do not help people stay sober as such. It’s the meaning behind them that is important. When a person receives a coin for one month, three months, or a longer period of time, the coins give a sense of pride for staying sober as long as they have, and to motivate them to continue. If a person should feel the desire to drink again, they might finger the coin in their pocket to remind them of all the headway they have made up to that point. It makes them ask themselves if they truly want to throw away all that progress. Danny never liked the chips. He would occasionally step back and remember exactly how much sober time he had – remember that last drunk vividly – but he didn’t want a constant reminder. He felt it would make it easier to ask the question “Has it been long enough? Am I cured now?” The conversation was surprisingly pleasant enough, but Danny was happy when the meeting began all the same. Same old, same old. Business first, then reading, then around the table sharing. When eight o’clock rolled around, the chairperson indicated that it was time to close, and they joined hands for the Lord’s Prayer. AA is not a religious organization, but saying the Lord’s Prayer at the end is sort of a tradition in most – but not all – groups. It’s a sign of unity, if nothing else. Danny really didn’t plan to stick around for fellowship afterwards, but he always stayed long enough to help clean up. However, before he got to the door, Mike cornered him. “Hey Danny, am I going to see you around here again?” “Eh,” Danny creased his brow, “Probably not. I live on the other side of town. I just stopped in here tonight because… well, it was just convenient.” Danny guessed that had not technically been a lie. AAs had to be careful. “Practice these principals in all of our affairs.” Lies paved a slippery slope. “Oh,” Mike seemed dejected, “It’s just that they say to get phone numbers – you know, to call for when you feel like drinking – and I was wondering if I could get yours.” Danny’s shoulders relaxed a little. “Of course, Mike. That’s never a problem. Never feel like you can’t use it.” Mike wouldn’t use it. Most of the newbies never did. Danny pulled out a pen and jotted it down in the back of Mike’s meeting pamphlet anyway. “There you go.” “Thanks, Danny” Mike shook the pamphlet. “I will definitely use this. You’re a lifesaver. You guys are great.” Mike bounced away. Danny made his way out into the parking lot and slid behind the wheel of his 2012 KIA. He said a little prayer for Mike. “Hope he makes it.” Who knew? Maybe being at that meeting was God’s way of putting him in the right place at the right time. Danny rolled through the Burger King drive-thru on the way home to pick up an artery clogging dinner. He just wanted to flick on the television, eat, shower, and get into bed. It had been an exhausting day. He had barely pulled into his garage when his cell phone began to jingle. Danny finished parking, unbuckled his seatbelt, and answered the phone right there in the front seat. It was an old habit – probably not a healthy one – but he just had to pick up the phone when it rang. He could not bear the thought of someone leaving a message. He had heard stories of AAs who were never able to get through to someone, and things didn’t turn out well. Once their faith in the system was broken, especially the newcomers, they didn’t trust it anymore. “Hullo.” “Danno! It’s Mike!” “Uh,” Danny shifted the phone to his right ear, “What’s up, Mike?” “Oh, no no no. Don’t worry, Dan. I’m not thinking of drinking. Just wanted to test out the number. Practice call, you know? They say to get used to calling when you don’t need to, and that way it’ll be easier to call when you do need to. Right?” “Um, yeah Mike. That is a good idea.” “So what’s up?” “Um, well, not a whole lot since I saw you. I just drove home. That’s about it,” Danny said with a smirk on his face. “I’m about to have some dinner and then it’s off to bed.” “Oh, okay,” Mike replied. “You go have your dinner and have a great night! Maybe I’ll talk to you tomorrow?” “Sure, Mike. Tomorrow.” Danny showered, toweled off, and padded into his bedroom. He slid into a pair of silk boxers and fell into bed. He didn’t imagine that he’d have any problem sleeping – he was physically exhausted – but as usual, his mind raced a mile a minute. He was never able to fall asleep without the radio turned on, even when about ready to pass out. His head would hit the pillow and the stinkin’ thinkin’ would kick in. That’s how Danny discovered the wonders of talk radio. Dialed in to a pundit recapping the day’s news in a soothing voice, Danny pulled the chain on his bedside lamp and plunged the room into darkness. The pillow was cool. His stomach was full. His mind had calmed. Sleep began to… Danny phone jingled. He propped himself up on one elbow, used the remote to turn the radio off, and grabbed the phone from the nightstand. Its screen had lit up with the number of the incoming call, but he didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t a name that had been programmed into his phone. Danny briefly considered putting the phone back down and letting it go to voicemail, but he knew that he would not be able to sleep until he heard the message and, more than likely, called whomever it was back. “Mmm,” Danny sighed, “Hello?” “Danny.” Mike sounded grave this time. “Sorry to call so late. I mean, I know you said that you were going to hit the hay, and I didn’t want to bother you, but…” “S’okay, Mike. Go ahead.” “Remember how I said that I’d be getting my chip in a couple of days? Yeah. I can’t believe it’ll have been a month already. You know, the day I took my last drink was a special day.” “Every day is special when it’s your last day drunk, Mike.” “Yeah, yeah. But, I mean special. It was the anniversary of… Well…” Mike began to get flustered. “See, my wife and I, my ex-wife that is, and I lost our daughter that day.” Danny swung his legs out from under the covers and sat up. “Oh, I’m sorry.” “Oh, don’t be, Danny. It happened a long time ago. Long time ago. It would have been her twenty-first birthday,” Mike trailed off. “So long ago. The denial, the depression, the sadness, the anger. I started drinking afterward and just never thought to stop. Until now, that is.” “That’s a long time to be stewing in it, Mike. Do you want to talk about it?” “Nah, Danny. No sense dredging up the past. Not when I’m doing so well.” “You’re only as sick as your secrets, Mike.” God, Danny hated it when his sponsor was right. “Yeah, yeah. Maybe when I’m feeling a little more stable, Danny. Maybe I’ll talk about it then. I’m just not doing so well right now.” Danny spoke with Mike for about half an hour and, when he was convinced that Mike was over the urge to drink, let him off the phone and promised to meet him the following day. He lay down his phone and swung back under the covers, a smile on his face. What was it they say? Even if Mike went out and drank that night, at least Danny stayed sober. Help yourself by helping others. Danny forgot to turn the radio back on, and that night, he dreamt about The One Thing. Danny awoke to the sound of his phone. It wasn’t the alarm tone, but the ringtone. Another phone call. He had come to recognize Mike’s number by now. This was getting a little annoying, but sometimes that’s the way it went. Mike would either fall off the wagon soon, or he would start to make new contacts. In the meantime, Danny would just have to deal with it. “Good morning, Mike.” “Dan, my man! Good to hear your voice.” “Yeah,” said Danny, scratching at the back of his head, “It’s been like… six or seven hours now, huh?” “Oh, yeah. I’m not bothering you, am I?” “No, no.” Yes, yes, though Danny. “So how did last night go? Didn’t drink, did you?” “Nope, and I owe it all to you Dan.” “Well, Mike, you picked up the phone and made the call. So you can give yourself a little pat on the back. That phone can seem real heavy when it stands between you and a drink.” “Ain’t that the truth? So, are you hitting a meeting this morning, Danny?” “Um, no, Mike. I have a job,” Danny tried not to sound ticked off. “I have to work today. I promise that we’ll get to one tonight. You pick it out, and call me back around six. Okay?” “Got it, Danno. Six! Talk to you then.” Danny’s worst fear came true. Three more calls during the day. Mike had picked a group called “As Bill Sees It,” on Danny’s side of town. Danny decided that he would need to have a talk with Mike that evening. Calling when in need, or even for occasional friendly support, was fine, but there was such a thing as abusing the system. You know, the boy who cried wolf sort of thing. Danny was about ready to throw his always-answer-the-phone policy out the door. Danny didn’t look forward to the conversation, and had a rough time forcing his dinner down that evening. He wasn’t hungry but, as usual, he tried to keep his stomach full. “HALT” Hungry, angry, lonely, tired. Four things an alcoholic never wanted to be. Any of those could be a setup for another drink. As he was finishing his second hot dog, wrapped in white bread with ketchup – just as he liked them – his phone rang again. He checked the screen. Fucking Mike. Again. He decided that he wouldn’t answer it, and let it go to voicemail. Seconds later, it rang again. Didn’t that guy get the message? Danny let it go to voicemail again. Another few minutes passed, and it rang again. Danny wondered if Mike had changed his mind. Maybe he couldn’t make it to the meeting after all. Still, he let it go to voicemail. Thankfully, more minutes passed and Mike did not call back. Danny felt like a heel, but he just couldn’t deal with it anymore. At around a quarter of seven, Danny tied his shoes and gathered his wallet and car keys. As he headed toward the door, his phone jingled. Mike. This time, he answered. “Hey, Mike. I’m headed out the door right now.” “Oh thank God, Dan!” exclaimed Mike. “I couldn’t get a hold of you, and then I started to worry… I wondered if maybe you went out drinking again, I… I…” “Mike! Slow down, buddy.” Danny was beginning to let his temper get the best of him. “Would you…? Oh, look. Just wait for me at the meeting. Outside! We need to talk.” Mike was breathing more regularly now. “Oh, Danny. You really had me going there. Well, anyway, you can ride with me.” “What?” Danny strode out of the back door and pressed the button to lift the garage door. As the door rolled up, it gradually revealed a battered, green Honda sitting in the drive. Mike sat behind the wheel with the engine idling. Danny was taken aback. He walked briskly up to the driver’s side door and motioned for Mike to lower the window. After a moment, and with a confused look on his face, Mike hit the button and the window glided down. “What’s wrong, Dan? Hop in. I thought that maybe we could ride to the meeting together. Then, maybe grab a cup of coffee after, huh?” Danny was fed up. “No! No, Mike! No meeting, no coffee after. I don’t have time for this. I don’t know what to do with you. You cannot keep calling me. How the hell did you even find out where I live?” “Oh, uh,” Mike looked shamefacedly, “I guess maybe I, uh, followed you home last night.” “What the hell?!” “Sorry, Dan. I’m new at this. I really don’t know how it works.” How it works. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs. Danny thought it over and softened. “Okay, Mike. Here’s how it works,” he said calmly. “I’ll come to the meeting, but I drive there myself. We talk a little. After the meeting, I come home. Alone. No coffee. No more calling, unless you really need to – like ‘I am going to drink’ need to. Are we clear?” Mike looked a little hurt, but replied, “Okay. Clear, Danno.” Danny got into his KIA and followed Mike to the meeting. They sat next to each other, but Mike was uncharacteristically quiet. Afterward, they separated in the parking lot with nary a word. “See you tomorrow, Danny?” “Maybe.” “Oh, hey,” said Mike, “There’s a candlelight meeting called ‘Nite Owls’ tonight at the… Oh, right. Sorry.” “Tomorrow, Mike.” Danny stressed. Danny thought that Mike may have gotten the message, but just in case, he turned his phone off for the evening for what was probably the first time in years. That night, Danny had a nightmare about The One Thing. Danny pulled himself from bed and showered in the morning, and had almost forgotten his phone. Still wrapped in a towel and with damp hair, he walked over to the nightstand and turned it on. He returned to the bathroom as it went through its boot up process, and then he heard a message tone from the next room. Hmm. Wonder who that could be. Six missed calls from Mike. One two voicemails, four texts. “Thanks for coming, Dan,” “Sure you don’t want to go to the meeting?,” Great meeting – shoulda been there!” and “Need 2 talk.” Danny didn’t want any confrontation today. He turned his phone back off, dressed and left home. He knew – just knew – that Mike would show up at his door after not receiving answers for long enough. He planned to not be there. Even though it was a Saturday, he would hang out at his office. There was a couch there. He could take a nap if need be. (And he did need it after the previous night.) He felt silly and demoralized. It was his own house, damn it. He was being chased away from his own home by… well, a stalker. Should he talk to the police? No, he decided. He would talk to his sponsor first. Not daring to turn his cell back on for fear that it might ring in his hand; he picked up his desk phone and dialed in Ralph’s number. Ralph was no help. At least, he didn’t tell Danny what he wanted to hear. “Just suck it up, Danny. I’ve had my share of pigeons who either tried too hard or didn’t try hard enough. My guess is that this Mike guy will turn out to be one or the other. Why don’t you bring him along to tonight’s meeting? I’ll meet you guys at the ‘Acceptance Group’ tonight. Maybe I can have a talk with him.” “Yeah, I suppose.” Danny turned his cell back on in order to call Mike and invite him to the “Acceptance Group” that evening. Six missed calls, and it was barely noon. He sighed and began to scroll to Mike’s number when the phone jingled. Danny didn’t even need to look at the number to know who it was. “Hi Mike.” “Danny! I tried to…” “Yeah, I know Mike. I’ve been at work. I just turned my phone on and saw that you had called.” An icy thought ran down Danny’s spine. Did Mike know where he worked, too? “Anyway, Mike, my sponsor suggested that I introduce you to him tonight. We’re going to Saint Andrew’s to a meeting called the ‘Acceptance Group.’ Want to come?” “Are you kidding? Do you even need to ask? I would never pass on the chance to meet my sponsor’s sponsor. He’s like, what, my grand-sponsor?” Whoa. Danny thought about it, and never had the talk of him being Mike’s sponsor come up. A sponsor is a recovering alcoholic who has successfully made some personal progress in the AA recovery program. He or she is asked by another AA member to take on the individual responsibility of sponsorship. A sponsor shares their experiences on an individual and personal basis with another alcoholic who is trying to achieve or maintain their own sobriety through the AA program. They help the person focus and navigate through the stages of the program. The relationship between an AA member and his sponsor is usually a pretty close and intimate one, and not gone into lightly. Not only does an alcoholic need to carefully choose a sponsor, but also the potential sponsor must cautiously decide whether taking on a sponsee is prudent. Danny gave him the benefit of the doubt, though. Mike was new at this. “Hey now, Mike, I’m just another alcoholic willing to help you out. I’m not really in the right state of mind to sponsor anyone.” Not until he rid his conscience of The One Thing, anyway. “Oh, okay.” “Don’t feel bad, Mike. You’re new. You catch on to how this works.” Then Danny had a thought, one that might rid him of Mike for good. “Ralph has really helped me out. Maybe he’d be a good choice for you to consider.” “Eh, he won’t be the same as you, Dan.” “You’d be surprised. We’re all the same in one way or another. Promise me that you’ll keep an open mind.” “Okay. Anything for you, Danno.” Danny hung up and texted directions to the meeting. Then he turned his phone back off. He decided on trying to catch a little nap, after all, and so curled up on the couch in the reception area of his office. He drifted off almost immediately, but it didn’t last long. He awoke screaming and in a cold sweat just forty-five minutes later. He felt his face and realized that he’d been crying, also. He dreamed of The One Thing. Why had thoughts of it returned, and in such force? Fucking Ralph. He brought it up and started pressing Danny. That would make sense. Although, Danny had a feeling that Mike had something to do with it. Guilt over avoiding him? Constantly having to look over his shoulder and avoid phone calls? Or perhaps the fact that Mike had lost his daughter. Danny pushed The One Thing to the back of his mind once again, and decided to cross the street to McDonald’s to get in at least one meal before that evening’s meeting. Danny had to cross a four-lane street in order to reach McDonald’s. It was the middle of the afternoon, clear weather, and – being a Saturday – there was only light traffic. He absentmindedly glanced both directions and crossed, not bothering to walk to the corner and wait for a signal. He was about halfway across when, seemingly out of nowhere, a car came racing at him. The driver was noticeably straddling the double striped centerline of the road, and overcorrected when he noticed Danny at the last moment. Danny could hear the tires screech as the driver got back into his own lane and sped off. A drunk knew the signs when he saw another drunk driving under the influence. This guy was definitely drunk. Probably drinking in his car all morning and then falling asleep at the wheel after finally deciding to go home. Danny had done it himself. Even though he could have stayed home and drank contentedly (and safely) in the comfort of his living room, he would choose to sit at the park on some mornings and drink in his car. He thought of how strange the ritual was, and how it was not unique to him. On any given morning, there would be a spattering of cars in each lot – all parked as far away from each other as the lot would allow. Each car with a single occupant, seemingly just sitting there. Every now and then, he could glance over and catch the sight of a bottle being raised to the driver’s lips. Fred, another guy from one of the meetings, would occasionally go down to a local park and “work it.” He’d walk around the lots and catch drunks, pretending that he had just been walking by and was looking to make conversation. Sometimes, his presence was enough to make the drunk drive away. Sometimes, they’d stay and talk. Sometimes, they would even offer him a drink. Only twice, as far as Danny was aware of, did Fred actually get a drunk to open up about his problem and agree to take Fred’s advice. It might not have seemed like a lot, but that may have been two lives saved. Plus countless others, if you figured in the innocent lives that a drunk might take along with himself on the highway to Hell. Danny began to hyperventilate. He ran the rest of the way across the street and sat on the curb, his gorge rising. He tried to calm himself, but could not. Eventually, he vomited into the gutter. It wasn’t the first time, but in the past, he’d always been drunk or hung over. He realized how pitiful he must have looked. He had never seemed to care in the past. Eating was out of the question. Danny went back to the parking lot of his office, crossing the street with extra care this time, and got into his car. He drove straight to the church. He would be almost an hour and a half early, but that was okay. Someone was always there early to open up the rooms and make coffee. It was nice to show up and shoot the shit sometimes. Not surprisingly, Mike was already there when Danny arrived. He was sitting out in the parking lot, but remained in his car. It looked like he was dozing. Danny walked over and rapped on the driver’s side window a few times. Mike startled, and he rolled the window down. “Danny! You’re early. That’s great.” “Yep. Couldn’t wait to get here, Mike,” he said half-heartedly. “Tell you what. Let’s go around back and grab a bench.” Danny led Mike behind the church. There was a small outdoor chapel of sorts – just a few benches faces a cross, and overlooking a small stream. Danny motioned for Mike to take a seat, and then sat down next to him. “Mike, let’s talk.” Danny seemed surprisingly calm. “I know that you’re pretty new to the program, and this may be skipping ahead quite a bit, but… let me explain how the fourth and fifth steps of AA go. They are, to me at least, probably the most important steps of all twelve. They are where you begin healing.” “Sounds great, Dan.” “Not really. I did a really shitty job on my fifth step. Remember how I told you that you’re only as sick as your secrets?” Mike nodded, “Yeah, Danny.” “The fourth and fifth steps ask you to make a searching and fearless moral inventory, and then admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” “I can see where that would help. I have so much guilt and remorse, Danny. Sometimes, I think it’s what makes me drink.” Danny shook his head. “No, Mike, you drink because you’re an alcoholic. But it’s a whole lot easier to get sober when you get your head on straight. When you get rid of all of the shit that’s deep down inside. The stuff that regrets are made of.” “So are we going to do that now?” “Not we. Me.” “I thought that you already did your steps.” Danny nodded. “I did, Mike. I did. But the fourth and fifth steps are carried on throughout the rest. We have to continue to take a moral inventory, and do those steps over and over, because we are human. Just because we get sober doesn’t make us saints. We still make mistakes.” Mike nodded slowly and remained quiet. It was as if he knew that Danny was about to say something important and it was time to keep his mouth shut. “You see, Mike, there was something that I never admitted in my fifth step. Something that I couldn’t admit. The One Thing that I wasn’t ready to give up. I don’t know why, but it’s catching up to me now. I’m afraid that if I don’t let it go, I’m either going to drink or kill myself. Or both.” “What is it, Danno?” “This is probably a mistake. Telling a newcomer. Especially about The One Thing. In fact, this would be better left with a priest, but at this point it doesn’t matter because I’m going to have to own up to it. The One Thing is something that everyone will find out about eventually. Probably sooner, now.” “You can tell me, Danny,” your secret is safe with me. Suddenly, it was as if Mike had become the old-timer. His demeanor changed. He surely didn’t seem like a newbie anymore. The whole way he was acting… He had gone from being an annoying, overexcited, asshole to a quiet, comforting soul – at least in Danny’s heart. Danny took a deep breath. “I’ve been sober for fifteen years, one month, one week, and four days. I told you that I came into the rooms about sixteen years ago, though. Well, something happened about six months into that. I’d been dry, sure, but still an alcoholic. Still exhibiting all of the same behavior. That’s what the program is for, by the way. Not to make us stop drinking, but to make us saner, healthier people. Well, Mike, I…” Danny’s breath hitched in his throat. He was already regretting bringing this up, but he felt like it was too late now. “Go on, Danno. I’m listening.” “It was late summer. Around seven o’clock, dusk. I was driving up Parkside Avenue, you know the place?” “Yeah. As a matter of fact, I used to live in a cul-de-sac off Parkside.” “Then you know the hill, about midways. Anyway, I was coming up over the crest of the hill, tooling along… pink clouding it, stone cold sober, mind you. A girl. A little girl, damn it. She came out from between two parked cars and just… just ran right out in front of me.” “Oh, God Danny. No.” “Yes. I couldn’t stop. I fucking ran her down, Mike. A little girl!” “That’s horrible, but it was an accident Danny. You said so yourself. You were sober. She ran out from between the cars. You couldn’t have known.” “No, but it was what I did next that was unforgiveable.” “What, Dan?” Mike rocked back, laced his fingers together, and knitted his brow. He had a clearheaded look about him. One that Danny had never seen on Mike’s face before. “What was unforgiveable?” Danny took a deep breath. “I didn’t stop. I just kept on driving. I panicked. It was like I had been drinking. I didn’t want to get caught. Afterward, I realized that it was an accident, but at the time… At the time, I just panicked. I acted just like a drunk would have. I left her there, Mike. Maybe she was still alive, but I left her there. What if she was just hurt and could have been saved if I had just stopped?!” “She wasn’t hurt. She was dead the instant you hit her, Dan.” “You couldn’t know that. I didn’t know that, and I was there.” “I know, Danny. That’s what the EMT said. ‘Dead on impact.’” Danny jerked his head up. It was as if his stomach had dropped out from under him. Like the first hill on a roller coaster. “What did you say?” “When I got there, that’s what the EMT told me. Dead on impact. She didn’t suffer. She probably had no idea what had happened.” “What the hell are you talking abou

22 minutes

November 3, 2015

Based on True Events, Strange and Unexplained

Three Truths

Thomas O.

The two men, perched on a steep hillside, watched from a safe distance as an invading army destroyed the city below them. The towering stone wall that protected the city, once strong and unbreakable, couldn’t hold back the onslaught. Even over the sounds of war, the watchers could hear the yells of the invading commanders directing their soldiers. No man, woman, child, or beast was to be left alive. The instructions were carried out with swords and spears, and the slaughter was completed in the space of a day. The two watchers, Danel and Keret, understood the implications of what they’d witnessed. The destroyed city was not the one from which they hailed. No, their city was the next closest, about a two day’s march away. Nearly a year earlier, along with several other soldiers, the two men had left their city on a mission to escort an ambassador to a faraway land. The mission had soured, and the ambassador was now dead. On the return journey, the other soldiers had become victims of either the desert heat or nomadic attackers. Danel and Keret were the last survivors of the mission, and were on their way home to report the failure of the undertaking. The two men had nearly stumbled, unexpectedly and accidentally, into the army of the invaders. It was an army from a land they weren’t familiar with. Luckily for them, they remained undiscovered, but a return to their own city was beginning to look impossible. Half of the invading army had already marched off, even while the other half continued with the slaughter. Danel and Keret watched as the foreign soldiers headed toward their city, and they could hear the commanders talking their men up for yet another siege. They considered trying to get out ahead of the traveling invaders, so that they could maybe, just maybe, reach their city first to give warning. But the quickest route was through a small canyon, which was the same route the invaders were taking. They knew it would be impossible to follow that course and not be spotted. They chose a longer route, and hoped that the extra distance would be negated by the fact that two lonely men could travel faster than an invading army. Upon their arrival, they found that they were too late; their city was already surrounded by the first half of the invasion force. Soon, the rest of them would arrive, and the attack would begin. Danel and Keret didn’t have to discuss it, they both knew their city’s fate would be the same as its neighbor. The invaders wanted this land for themselves, and their army was mightier than any they’d seen before. It seemed as if it was guided by an unstoppable force. The walls of their city would fall even faster than those of the city that came before. The two men found a well hidden position on a hillside, grimly observing the preparations unfolding down below them. “It’s hopeless, we can do nothing for them,” Keret lamented. Danel subconsciously rubbed the stone amulet that hung around his neck. It was a movement he made whenever he was deep in thought. Finally he responded, “I won’t leave her there. I can’t just leave her to die with the rest of them.” Danel looked down upon the doomed city, the city of his birth. He’d served it faithfully. At a young age, he he’d been ripped from his mother and given to its army. He was trained to be a soldier, and he belonged to the city itself. Emotions were beaten out of him. All of his life, he followed pointless orders, he fought in battles, and then he followed even more pointless orders, never questioning his superiors or their motives. As he surveyed the scene, he wasn’t surprised that, save for one, he felt no concern or pity for the inhabitants he served. He had done all he could for them. Now, at the start of their unavoidable demise, there was no sadness for the city itself, just a stoic acceptance. Donatiya, his wife, was the only person for whom Danel spared concern. His battlefield heroics had allowed him the privilege of marrying her. Most of the soldiers weren’t given that luxury. She was the only woman he had ever loved, and she was the only person who had loved him. His marriage, and his friendship with Keret, were the only two important relationships he’d ever formed. Keret spoke and broke Danel’s concentration, “There’s a way in, you know.” Danel averted his gaze from the city and looked at Keret. He was listening. Keret continued, “The tunnel, I told you about it before, remember?” Danel remembered. The ancient and forgotten tunnel ran from a hidden room underneath the one of the city’s temples and exited outside the walls at the base of a hill. Keret and his long-ago friends had explored the narrow space in their youth. Of that group, Keret was the only one still living. As for the tunnel, its outside entrance was hidden by a boulder, but two strong men could budge it just enough to crawl inside. Keret was unsure if anyone else even knew of its existence. Keret’s voice intensified, “We’ll sneak in tonight. The entire army isn’t here yet, so we should be able to make it past their lines.” He pointed to a spot towards the southern end of the city, outside its wall, “Look there, what luck for us! They don’t have many soldiers in that area. That’s where the tunnel’s entrance is, a small group could easily sneak in and out.” Both men studied the area, and Keret gave a wide smile and put his hand reassuringly on Danel’s shoulder, “My friend, tonight we shall save your wife, together.” Danel rubbed his amulet and responded, “Let’s get some rest, we have much to accomplish tonight.” He was grateful that he had Keret with him, but he wondered how workable the plan really was. At dusk, the two men laid themselves in the dirt, trying to get their first sleep in three days. Their plan was straightforward, they would wake up after the half moon slipped below the horizon and sneak their way to the mouth of the cave. They would quietly move the boulder aside and slip into the city. Once they were inside, nobody would bother them. They would retrieve Donatiya, and slip back out. Danel’s sleep was fitful, and he dreamed of both Donatiya and a strange figure who stood behind her while she danced. The figure was merely a silhouette of a large man, with no features distinguishable upon its face. Donatiya danced around the figure, and Danel could tell the figure was watching her, even though he couldn’t see its eyes. Finally, the dark figure spoke to him, “I can help you save her.” His voice made a hissing sound. Donatiya continued to dance seductively, and the figure repeated itself, “I can help you save her, but you must wake up now.” Danel opened his eyes. It was night, the starry sky and half moon provided the only light. As he sat up, he saw the outline the being he had just dreamt of standing right next to him. He made a grab for his sword. “No!” the creature hissed. Danel felt an unseen force push his arm back down, away from his sword. “You called me here, and now you will listen to me.” Danel felt for the amulet laying against his chest, “Who are you?” “I am the one that you called upon.” The entity remained featureless, even under the moonlight. A black arm extended from the darkness that enveloped the being, and it brushed a finger against the amulet hanging from Danel’s neck. Danel looked down at his amulet. “You are Baal?” “Yessss,” came the hissing response. “I didn’t call you here. I have no need of you, Baal.” Danel was more nervous than his bold statement made him appear. “Oh, but you did call me here, every time you rub that object around your neck, you call out my name. And yes, you do need me.” Danel’s hand released the amulet. He’d found the simple stone carving in the dirt several years earlier. At the time, he’d recognized that it was a depiction of Baal, one of the deities worshipped by his people. He began wearing it, not out of reverence, and not out of fear, but simply because it was something to wear, something that would distinguish him from the other nameless soldiers with whom he shared ranks. The truth was, he’d always had very little use for the deities of his people. He didn’t find it necessary to pray to them, and didn’t feel the need to honor them. Before that night, he wasn’t even sure they were real. Yet there he found himself, standing next to a creature that could only be a deity. The visitor continued, “This plan of yours, to sneak into the city through a tunnel, this plan is foolish.” The scorn in his voice was evident. “It will not succeed, and you will die. Keret will die. Donatiya will die.” Danel started to feel fear, which was an extremely rare emotion for him. The concept of deities had never made him afraid before, but right then, having one stand directly before him, it was a completely new and frightening experience. The stories about Baal were never pleasant. He didn’t rule with benevolence, but used intimidation and fear to force people towards his will. He reveled in trickery and deceit. He bathed in blood and fed on sadness. Baal’s voice took a friendlier turn, “But, you don’t all have to die. I can get you into the city, and out again. However, it will require a sacrifice on your part.” With that last statement, he turned and looked at Keret, who was in a deep sleep. A look of realization slowly formed on Danel’s face. “You want me to kill my friend?” “I want his heart!” The hissing voice had returned. “You will look him in the eye, then you will cut into him and rip it out of his chest. Then you will give it to me. In return, I will grant you the power to go into the city and safely retrieve one person of your choosing.” Slowly, Danel shook his head back and forth. “I won’t do it. He’s my friend. My only friend.” “Do you really think that you’ll be able to sneak past that army? You will all die, but if you walk the path I set out for you, then only he dies.” Danel agonized over the choice. The more he thought about Keret’s plan, the more he came to believe that it was a fool’s errand that could only end in tragedy. The dark figure stood patiently by while Danel debated himself in torment. Finally, his pragmatic nature, and his training as a soldier, led him to make a difficult decision. “I’ll sacrifice my friend to you, and I’ll give you his heart, but first, you must grant me three truths before I commit.” Danel couldn’t bring himself to look at the entity as he spoke. “Three truths. Of course. You would be a fool not to ask that of me.” It seemed as if the figure might’ve smiled as he said those words. Danel had been well versed in the legends and superstitions of his people, even though he’d never put too much faith in them. The tradition of the three truths stated that a person, when dealing with a deity, could request that three questions be answered truthfully. If the deity agreed to answer the questions, it would be unable to lie. The questions could only be asked in a yes-or-no format, though the deity could provide additional information if it chose to. The priests of Danel’s city swore this to be true, and the man, formerly of little faith, was about to put their teachings to the test. Danel took a moment to compose his thoughts. He knew there was a good chance Baal was involved in some sort of trickery, and it was possible that nothing he’d said up to that point was true. He had to ask smart questions. A sudden, panicked feeling fell upon him as he thought to himself that Donatiya might have passed away in his absence. “My first question, is Donatiya still alive?” Baal nodded his head. “Yes. She is alive. She is healthy. She’s in your home, yearning for you.” Danel was relieved at the answer, and pleasantly surprised at the extra information Baal had provided. “My second question, were you honest when you said that you’ll provide me with the ability to enter the city and safely leave with Donatiya? Again, Baal nodded. “Yes, so long as you give me your friend’s heart. You can leave with Donatiya, or perhaps your father, or maybe your brother. You can pick anyone in the city.” Danel wanted to smile, but held back. He thought to himself, “Now I understand his trickery. He thinks I care for my father and brother. He thinks I’m going to have a difficult time choosing who to take.” Baal didn’t appear to know that Danel hated both his father and his brother. His father was the one who’d ripped him away from his mother and sold him into the army. He barely knew his brother, but he did know that he was an awful man who wasn’t worthy of saving. The choice would be easy, very easy, but he didn’t want an emotional expression to betray him to Baal. He forced a look of turmoil upon his face to hide his true feelings. Feeling more confident in the path Baal had laid out for him, his concern turned back to Keret. He knew that people sacrificed to Baal were often killed in the most excruciating ways possible. “My third question, you told me that you wanted Keret’s heart cut out. That could be long and painful for him. Will you allow him a quick death?” “That is more of a request than a question… but yes, I will allow you to give him a quick death. You may choose any means of execution, so long as you don’t damage the heart.” Danel hung his head in relief. Baal hissed again, “Now stop wasting my time. You have your three truths. Go get me his heart!” Danel turned and faced the spot where Keret had been sleeping, only to find him sitting up awake. “How long have you been awake?” he demanded. Keret didn’t answer the question, but instead made his own inquiry, “What was that thing were you talking to?” Danel looked to where Baal had been only a moment earlier, but the deity was gone. He turned back and tried to look at Keret, but ended up averting his eyes. “I… I made a deal with him.” “I’ve seen that thing before. That was Baal, wasn’t it? This is serious my friend, you shouldn’t make deals with him.” “Yes Keret. It was Baal. He granted me three truths. I can save Donatiya. I know that for sure.” “But we can do that together, Danel! We don’t need him.” “No, he told me our plan would fail. He told me we would all die.” Keret shook his head, “That’s wrong. It’s a good plan. I know we can make it work. I must ask, when he told you our plan wouldn’t work, was that one of the three truths?” Danel felt as if he’d been punched in the gut. He didn’t answer. “Danel, listen to me. I’ve lived longer than you, and I’ve traveled further. I’ve learned much, and I know that Baal is no deity, he’s one of the fallen. The pathway of Baal is the pathway to sorrow. He has no loyalty, not even to those who serve him.” Danel didn’t want to argue with Keret anymore. He saw no point. He knew the truth, he could save Donatiya, and that was all that mattered anymore. “He wants your heart. I’m sorry.” A look of rage filled Keret’s face. “He wants my heart? Here, take it if you think that’s what you really need!” He stood up, pulled his sword out, then threw it to the ground. “Go ahead now, do what you need to!” Danel drew his sword and shut down his emotions, as he’d been trained to do. Keret continued with his rage, hitting his fist against his chest. “Take it! I won’t stop you! Just rip it out!” Danel’s sword lashed out right as Keret finished his final sentence. The very last expression on his face was a look of surprise, as if he hadn’t really expected Danel to strike him. Keret’s head flew off of his body and landed in a ditch several feet away. For a moment, Danel fell to his knees in sorrow. The pain of his actions nearly overwhelmed him, but he thought back to the lessons of his youth. For one last time, he pushed his personal feelings aside so that he could complete his mission. The emotions weren’t suppressed easily, but none-the-less, Danel regained his focus. Drawing his knife, he sliced into Keret’s belly and up into his rib cage. After several minutes of cutting and tugging, he finally retrieved the heart of his friend. The hissing voice sounded out behind him, “Make a fire, and blacken the heart. I will tell you when it’s done.” “I’ll give my location away if I make a fire,” Danel protested. “Do not worry about that, I will make sure they don’t see you.” Danel made a fire, as instructed, and place the heart upon it. Behind him, Baal chanted in an unknown language. The heart burned on the fire until well after the moon went down. The night became even darker. “You may take the heart off the fire now,” Baal instructed. Danel used some sticks and placed the heart upon a large rock. Baal nodded his approval, “Use your knife, and make a slit in the heart.” Once the slit was made, bright red blood gushed from within and dripped down onto the rock. “Now, smear some of the blood on your forehead. You will be able to walk into the city undetected. The blood will remain wet. When you select the person you want to bring back with you, smear some of the blood from your forehead onto their forehead. You will both be able to leave safely. Remember, you can only choose one! Do not attempt to bring more than one person with you, or I promise a punishment worse than death for both you and them. The invaders will attack at midday, you must leave the city before then. Now go, and leave the heart here for me.” After smearing a generous amount of blood on his forehead, Danel walked from the hill towards the city. To take his mind off of the death of Keret, he imagined what his future life would be like with Donatiya. He knew of several cities that would take them in, it was one of the advantages of being well traveled. He imagined them both living in a small house far, far from the invaders. She would give him a son, and his son would grow up with the love and privilege that he himself had never received. They would have many children, and he would no longer be pressed into the service of the army. As he approached the first set of night watch soldiers, he paused and took a deep breath. Their torches burned brightly in the darkness, but they didn’t seem to notice him walking. As he closed in, they stopped moving entirely, as if they were frozen in place. Walking past them, he turned around and continued to eye them. As the distance between Danel and the soldiers increased, the soldiers slowly started moving again, oblivious to the fact that an enemy soldier had just walked by them. Relieved, his mind began to wander again. He hadn’t seen his wife in nearly a year. He wondered if she would look different. He thought about how happy she would be to see him, and he smiled at the thought. He finally reached the main gate of the city. The guards on duty looked down on him from high on the wall, but they had vacant stares on their faces. They opened the gate for him without saying a word. Even though the gate was completely open, none of the invaders seemed to notice. Danel walked into the city, and the gate closed behind him. His heart beat faster. He broke into a run, trying to get to his small wooden hovel as fast as possible. The people of the city looked worried. They were crying and arguing. Soldiers were busy fortifying their positions along the wall. Nobody gave any attention to Danel as he ran through the alleys. Out of breath, he burst through the door of his house. Donatiya was awake in bed when he entered. A single lantern illuminated the room. “Danel!” She screamed out his name in joy as he ran towards her. She looked exactly as he remembered her. The embraced and kissed. He held her close for several moments. He couldn’t begin to explain to her how he managed to get there, and she didn’t ask, she just accepted his presence happily. Danel looked into her eyes, “I came back here to save you. We must leave now.” “That makes me so happy,” she said, “But wait, there’s something wonderful I must show you!” She moved over to the bed and picked up a small bundle of blankets that he hadn’t noticed earlier. She approached him with a smile as he heard a small cry emanate from within the bundle. Inside, he saw a baby, perhaps three months old. “Meet your son,” Donatiya beamed. Danel looked at the baby, and his heart filled with love and pride. The small child, conceived in the days before he left, and birthed in his absence, had the same color eyes as him. Donatiya handed the bundle to him, and he held his first and only son closely. However, his smile faded, and his pride quickly turned into horror as he realized the true extent of Baal’s evilness. Looking at Donatiya and the baby, he remembered what Baal had told him, “Remember, you can choose only one!” He knew the choice would be impossible

13 minutes

October 26, 2015

Beings and Entities

The Tollman

anonymous, anonymously authored

Act I: Today I Buried a Man I am the Tollman. I sit in this lonely desert tollbooth and collect the tolls from people who pass by. When it is quiet in the night, I hear the voices of people arguing, but no one is near. I can see for two miles to the West over the hot white sand, and to the East is a dune. I sit in my lonely booth and collect the tolls. Today someone approached my booth. I could see them in the distance and as they drew nearer, I could make out some details about them. He carried a large backpack, and came from the direction of E-City. Or, The City. The E stands for Earring, but you don’t want to know why. The City is a violent place. Years of moral decay have led men to devolve into a species of violent barbarians, ripping each other apart and wearing their bodies as adornments. I left the violent, violent city a long time ago. This man approached my booth today and I could see he had walked a long way. He had a scarf around his face to keep the sand out, and shades over his eyes. He looked weary but strong. His gait was sound and each footstep seemed to happen on purpose. As this man drew nearer to my booth, he pulled down his scarf to speak to me. Then he fell down dead. I exited my booth through its only door in the rear and circled around to the man. He lay there on his face, dead as the sand that surrounded him. I studied the scene for several minutes, attempting to decipher what had happened to this man. With no sound answers, I dragged the man behind the dune to the East. It’s only several hundred yards to the rear of the dune and I tugged him back there and put him near the others. This is not the first time this has happened. In fact, for the past several years, this has been happening. I will see someone—or a group of people, even whole families—approaching from the West, coming to pay their tolls, and they bridge the distance between the horizon and my booth and then fall down dead. I then take them behind the dune to Hinnom—that’s what I nicknamed the place. The Valley of Hinnom. But it’s not really a valley. I cannot figure out what causes it. I have searched the area around my booth, and have found nothing queer to speak of. The problem is, I cannot leave my booth for too long—it’s just a weird thing of mine. When I finished putting the man back behind the dune, I scurried back to my booth. I never look at the bodies. And I never leave my booth for too long. Act II: The Day My Father Showed Me His Booth It was the morning of my seventeenth birthday when my father came into my room early in the morning and stirred me from my sleep. He smiled as I resisted his invitation to emerge from my dreams. “You’re 17 today, my son,” he said with his gentle whisper. “You’re a man.” I moaned into my pillows, unwilling to rise. “Today you will come to work with me.” This caught my attention, I remember, for I had always wanted to see my father’s booth. He was a city tollman. It was an entirely different career to work a booth in the city. The city was violent and barbaric, and men had abandoned their roles as humans and taken up animalistic identities. Men wore other men’s intestines as necklaces and used their shriveled, shriveled organs as coin purses. I had never been to my father’s booth before, for it was in the center of the city. He was one of a few men brave enough to face The City and continue to do his job, despite the enormous risk. We lived on the outskirts of E-City, where people are relatively safe, but still within the dangers of the metropolis. My father and I sat on the train that took us into the city. He was a large man whose figure commanded respect, though he was a warm and generous soul. As I sat in the seat by him, he asked me about my schoolwork and my interests. He asked what I had been reading, and the friends I had been spending time with. The train ride went by quickly and soon we were walking through the streets to my father’s booth. He walked near me as we strode through the ghetto. On the train, he had told me not to look around once we exited the train car. Not to make eye contact. “Everyone you see today has murdered people,” he stated with dire gravity. “That’s why they’re still alive.” We entered a heavy metal door that seemed to have been misplaced in a grimy alley. It opened to a rusty, rusty staircase that echoed up and down the metallic corridor. Paint peeled off of everything. I followed my father down about a dozen flights of stairs to another drab-looking door. He pressed it open into the bowels of the city. We were several stories underground, where the most animalistic of men dwelt. They were those fearful of the sunlight, addicted to tranq’s and hogs, and unwilling to make use of language. They would shriek or mutter nonsense to themselves in place of words. Many had never heard such a language spoken. They were animals given over to maddening darkness. And this is why I admired my father. Few men were willing to collect the tolls from beings such as these. My father looked back at me and gave a small smile. “Almost there,” he assured me. I could see his booth now; it was on the side of one of the roads that ran through the underground. As I walked, I saw motion in my periphery, darting behind a pillar, or diving under a dumpster, though I did not catch a direct look at the underground men. We stopped before the door of the booth and my father sorted through his keys, whistling as he found the one that fit the handle. He flicked on the light switch as we entered the booth and the buzzing fluorescent bulb sputtered out light before catching its consistent homeostatic buzz. Still whistling, my father slid open the window of his narrow booth and pulled a seat next to his for me. I sat near him. It was glorious. I was 17 and sitting in a tollbooth with my father in the city. Act III: Today I Buried a Woman It was three days ago when the scarfed man fell down before my booth. Today, I found a cut on my arm. Don’t know how that got there. I saw a woman approaching in the distance. I knew it was a woman because her long brown hair was free on the wind, blowing out like a raven trying to escape from her hood. I sat up in my old, old chair and paid close attention to what happened, anticipating a similar fate for this poor girl. I watched to see what happened as she drew nearer. She closed in on the booth, coming to pay her toll. I could make out her face: slender and pretty. She reminded me of the woman I used to love. One hundred feet. Fifty feet. Twenty. Ten. Then she fell down dead. I must have blinked. I knelt by her body as her empty eyes stared into the pale, pale sky. Her hands were marred, as if she came from a fight of some sort. Her fingernails were broken and worn down. I would have wept for this girl, but I have not been able to weep since the night I had The Dream. I tugged the girl around to Hinnom as the purple, purple twilight gave way to night. Then I hustled back to the booth. It’s getting chilly. Act IV: The Day I Saw My Father Sawed My father was a gracious collector of tariffs. Unlike other tollmen who grunt in exchange for the toll, my father would welcome the payer with a grand ‘Hello,’ and engage in conversation with all who were willing. “Boy, it’s so nice to have someone to talk to,” I remember him saying to me that day. “Usually, I try to talk to the payers, but they’re not big on dialogue down here. It can get pretty lonely being a tollman sometimes. In fact, if it weren’t for your brothers and your mom and you, I’d probably go mad down here!” I could not picture my father being mad. He had never really gotten angry with my brothers or I, but instead used everything as a teaching moment. My brothers and I knew we had done something crooked when he started out with: “I think there’s a lesson somewhere in this looney episode…” and then his grand voice would expound on this point or that. It was early in the afternoon (I knew only by the analog clock above the door the time, not the motion of the sun. There was no sunlight there.) when we were in the middle of a game of cards. I was winning. He had just given up a pair of Queens when a finger tapped on the window next to him. “Give me one second, you dirty rotten cheater,” he said with a smirk. He turned and slid the little window open. “Good af—” his big voice was reduced to a slur. I looked up to see an iron rod protruding from his stomach. It had been sharpened into a weapon by one of the underground men. The one who was shoving it into his belly, to be specific. I froze in fear, clutching the playing cards like a shield before me. I watched as my father stumbled backward, trying to find the arms of his stupid, stupid chair that swiveled as he fell, casting him onto his stomach on the floor of the booth. The rod came all the way out the back of his midsection, tearing through the stitching of his uniform shirt thread by thread, like a straw poking through a beverage lid. I continued to watch in frozen shock as ten skinny, dirty fingers grabbed the frame of the window and pulled their owner up. I got a look at the man—or the boy. He was about my age, with white, white skin like I had never seen before. He had no hair on his body that I could see, and his clothes were rags held together by whatever he found to keep them on his body. He hoisted himself up into the window, pulling his legs up and then stepping through. He looked straight at me for a second and I saw his eyes: big white orbs with no colored iris, just a burning black dot in the center of each. I tried to speak, still sitting and holding the cards, but no sound came out as my jaw moved up and down. The boy seemed not to care about me as he snapped his gaze back to my father, who was moaning on the ground. The boy spoke to himself in his own invented language as he calmly knelt down beside my father’s body and pulled a saw out of one of the many folds of his rags. It was a rusty and rancid old thing, with cracked and crooked teeth beneath a thin sheet of metal. He began sawing at one of the ankles. Blood filled the dirty floor of the booth, splattering onto the boy’s rags. He cut through the foot and placed it by the body. He moved onto the other one and set it by the first. I had slid to the floor and crawled back against the wall, never taking my eyes off what had been my father. He continued moaning and gurgling until the boy had completely severed both his legs and moved up to his shoulders. I had heard stories from the boys at school about people in The City doing things like this, but I had never accredited them into the account of plausibility in my head. I remember sliding my way along the wall once both my father’s arms were removed from his torso, and the boy was pulling a dagger out of his cloak. Blood was everywhere. Everything was blood. There was no distinction between this object and the other because it was all blood. Fleshly tissue lay about the floor, soaked in blood, and the boy leaned once more over my father’s torso. He put the blade into the stomach, and I turned and floundered for the door. I realized that even as I fumbled with the knob, I smeared my father’s blood about the handle. I don’t know how or when it had gotten on me, but I later realized I too was covered in it. I made it out the door, tripped down the step, and stumbled back toward the stairs we had come down. Then my memory goes blank. I never went home again. I wanted to be as far from that city as possible. I know I became a tollman in the desert, but I honestly have no recollection of the process. Act V: Today I Ran From My Booth Today began the same way as many before it. I was in my booth waiting for someone to pass by, so I may collect their toll, or maybe figure out why people walk up to my booth and fall down dead. Gall, it’s the creepiest thing. Nothing was out of the ordinary, except that I was dusting out the booth and airing out some clothes and saw some scratches on my shoulder. I don’t remember getting them. They didn’t hurt, just some short red streaks down my arm. When I had finished cleaning up a bit, I sat. (This is what I spend most of my time doing…sitting). I sat and thought. I was enjoying the breeze from my faithful fan, wondering how something visible can propel invisible air forward, onto my face, when I saw a person approaching in the distance. They always seem to march on the horizon and slowly grow in size until they are about a hundred yards from me. I watched this play out once more, but when the person reached that point of descent from the horizon, something was pointedly different. I stood up and ran out of my booth. Act VI: The Days I was in Love Five years ago, a woman came to my booth. I saw her approaching from the horizon and thought nothing of it. I slid my window open and held out my hand. Rather than put her tariff in it, she shook it. “Boy, it’s a hot one today,” were her first words to me. Small talk. We were in the desert. Of course, it was a hot one. I remember that she wore baggy travelers pants, a tough canvas jacket, and a scarf around her head. She had long brown hair with a gentle wave in it that made her head seem like a waterfall of bustling liquid chocolate. She was beautiful. She proceeded to ask me what it’s like sitting in the desert booth all day. I listed off a few niceties, but I seemed to be boring her. “No, what’s it really like sitting in here all day every day?” she cut in. “What do you think about?” Her eyes were not solid objects, they were liquid pools of laundry detergent, because that always seemed to be the richest shade of blue. She looked at me without blinking as we talked. Her head seemed to tilt forward whenever she listened, and the corners of her mouth dug back into her cheeks in a sly grin. She leaned against the booth, and I remember thinking about how strange it was since I sat two feet higher than her. I guess her need for human contact was greater than her sense of awkward conversation. In time I realized that she was lonely. And a while after that, I realized I had been lonely too. We were two lonesome souls who found each other at a desert tollbooth. That first day, she leaned on my booth talking to me until the sun sank below the sand. I invited her into the booth for the night, and she stayed. She also stayed for the one after that, and the one after that, and the 716 after that. She loved to talk, telling me the sad stories of her childhood on the outskirts of the city. We realized we had probably seen each other at least twice when we were kids. She shared her thoughts about the world, about the desert, about the road. She showed me her grandmother’s old silver ring which she kept on her right ring finger and never removed. Her heart poured forth her weaknesses and exposed her desire for a home built in the heart of those that she loves, if not in a geographic location. I told her I can be her home. Almost more than she loved to share, she loved to listen. I told her about my father, and what a great man he was, and that he didn’t deserve to die. Out of everyone in The City, he did not deserve to die. I never told her how it happened though. Or that I had seen the whole thing. I would tell her about my lovely mother and my brothers, and how I missed them all awfully. And she would sit and listen with that same head tilt, showing that she was eagerly anticipating the next words to dribble from my lips. I loved her. And she loved me. We would take walks around the booth beneath the effervescent ceiling of stars. She initially made fun of me for not wanting to stray too far from the booth. “Come on, take a risk, you chicken!” she elbowed me in the side. But after a few months, she too came to realize the importance of staying near the booth. And a few months after that, she didn’t want to wander too far from it either. Act VII: Today My Mother Got Her Wings Although she was a bit more hunched over than I remember from years ago, my mother had the same unmistakable gait as the day I left home. She was quiet and gentle, the perfect companion to my father’s eccentric warmth. She walked in a manner that was sure of what she did, though the age in her legs was now showing. For years, I have been watching people approach my booth and fall down dead outside of it. And for years, I have not felt compelled enough to try and find the cause or actively try to put an end to it. There is something cursed about the land around my booth, and I was not going to let my mother go near it. I ran out to her. I was running faster than I had since grade school on the playground. I waved my hands at her, desperately trying to stop her from coming any closer to the booth. I closed the gap between us. Seventy yards, sixty yards. She stopped walking. I ran close enough to see her well-wrinkled cheeks peeking out from behind her sunglasses. She seemed to be in good enough health thus far. I kept my eyes fixed on her, terrified that at any moment she could become the next victim to the jinxed place. I even began muttering under my breath: “don’t fall down, don’t fall down, don’t you die on me, don’t…” I ran to her as her sweet voice met my ears. “Honey, what’s the matter?” I panted for breath. “What were you runni—” her voice turned into a gurgle and she was dead on the ground. I fell to my knees next to her, still heaving for oxygen. My chest burned like an angry squirrel was running around inside of it, clawing at my organs. This was the first time I had seen my mother since I was 17 and now her body lay dead before me. When my body began to receive air once more, my gasps turned into sobs and I collapsed on my mother’s thin frame. We were a painting. Her blood spread into the sand where she lay, and I on top of her, mourning the enigmatic death of my second parent. Many people had fallen dead before me in the past several years, but now my mother lies still beneath me, and I’m far away from the booth. Act VIII: The Dream The night before my lover left me, I lay down for the night and was instantly taken up in a dream I have still not forgotten. It began in the booth and my hearing was amplified. I started to wander away from the booth, and every crunch of sand beneath my boot sounded like a thousand needles racing down a metal door. The dune rose before me, thrice as tall as when I am conscious, and there was a purple haze all around it that contributed to an aura of eeriness. But I was not afraid. I approached the dune and found a door at its base. I drunkenly stumbled through the door and suddenly the location changed. I was no longer in the desert near my booth, but was somewhere on the outskirts of the city. Not the nicer outskirts where my family had lived, but the run-down ghetto where crime was nearly as rampant as the downtown. I was walking down an empty street, and now I was holding a gun. Then from the other direction down the street walked countless men in business suits. They looked like films I had seen from before The City had decayed. The men wore expressionless faces and black suits and ties and looked straight ahead. They walked in a rhythm without distraction or hesitation. I bumped into one and then another. Then I was in the midst of them, still trying to walk the opposite direction like a slippery, slippery salmon swimming up a waterfall. There is this tangible feeling of angst and worry, that I am supposed to be getting somewhere but the businessmen are pushing me back. I begin to fill with this violent longing to get past the parade of men. Then I remember the gun in my hand. I shoot one of the men in the head and suddenly they all stop walking. They stare at me, and now they are no longer men in suits, but the hairless animal who murdered my father. Their handsome eyes are replaced by his all-white eyeballs with a pitch-black pupil in the center, each staring directly at me. I shoot one, then another, but they do not die. They do not even flinch. They circle around me and close in on me. I run out of ammunition, and I am defenseless. The angst turns to fear and helplessness. Suddenly the monsters freeze. Their unblinking white eyes stare at me for a second more, then turn their attention down the road where they came from. The road fades into blackness, and out of this thick, thick blackness comes an aqueous platform. It is a stage made out of water, but it is staying in a rectangular shape. As it fades from the darkness and its origin becomes clearer, I see that it is less like a stage and more of an altar. Rather than ornate golden intricacies, the waves of the water seem to have splashed up and frozen in complex designs around the altar. The white-eyed creatures part before it, and I sense an invitation to ascend the blue steps and look at the object upon the altar. It is glowing. I am now full of curiosity as I ascend the steps and behold before me the ritual of the underground men. My father’s bloody, bloody body lays on the table, cut into ten pieces, identical to the last time I had seen it. I am stricken with the same feelings of fear, horror, and shock from the day of my seventeenth birthday, but also with a feeling of rage and anger. The angst fades away and becomes fury. I turn and am about to begin slaughtering the boys below me on the road, but I wake up before any sort of vengeance is had. I still remember the details from this dream as vividly as the morning I rose to find that my love of nearly two years had vanished. I don’t know where she went, or why she left, but she disappeared. As if she was never here at all. Act IX: Today I Examined Hinnom My mother’s body is not like the others. It is not one I can merely drag behind the dune and think nothing of. She is my mother. And here is her corpse lying in the sand! Familiar feelings of petrified shock blend with a growing sense of urgency to return to the booth. I pick up my mother’s body as gently as I can. Her face has purple bruises on it now and her glasses hang loosely off her cheeks, smashed to pieces. I felt tears stream down my cheeks as I walked back to the booth with my mother dripping from my arms. Her nose and mouth were bleeding, and it ran down onto my sleeve. It was not until I was nearly back to the booth that I began wondering why, after all these years, she had come to see me now. Perhaps this was how long it took for her to find me. I made it back to the booth and tried to open the door with my mother’s thin body still in my arms. When that failed, I set her down on the sand and ran inside. I was at a loss. I had no idea what to do. I wasn’t sure why I felt such urgency to act, but I knew I had to find the source of this death. Standing in the booth, I looked down at my right hand. It had been bruised across the knuckles as well. I wasn’t sure how that happened, but I returned my mind to my mother. The desert was cursed, and I had to find the source. I resolved to return to the Valley of Hinnom and look for clues. In the years since these bodies first began appearing, I had not looked at the older corpses. I would avert my eyes and rush back to the booth. But now, in honor of my mother, I had to go once more behind the dunes and scour the dead. I exited the booth and bent once again to lift my mother’s frame. She hung limp as a wet napkin across my arms, and I walked toward the dune. Each step carried closer the echoes of dread I had felt in my dream all those years ago. I felt as if I would discover something dark by looking at these bodies which I myself had placed there over the years. I rounded the dune and before me lay the rows and rows of bodies. For the last time, I set my mother down as gently as I could, and fixed her clothes to cover her properly. A bona fide ceremony. I made a wide arc around to the far corner of Hinnom, where the first bodies lay. I looked at them from a small distance, expecting the decrepit limbs to suddenly start moving again. Minutes passed and I deemed it safe to move toward the bones. I bent down next to the first body, it was clearly the oldest of the lot, and I brushed some sand away. I looked closely at the cartilage of the limbs. There was nothing unusual that I could see. I moved up to the head. It had patches of brown hair running like a chocolate river down into the ground. I scooped more sand away from under the head. My fingers scraped a thin cloth. I pulled it up and stared down in confusion. It was a silk scarf. I knew the pattern well. Without thinking, I reached across the body and violently jerked the right hand out of the sand. There was a silver ring on the third finger. Then I knew. This was a hand I had held for many days and nights. And this was a scarf with whose scent I had become well accustomed. These were the remains of my lover. Act X: Today The Mystery Was Solved I sat back in confusion. The amalgamation of emotions nearly paralyzed me. I looked around as if someone in the desert were playing a black, black joke on me. Then something stung. As I rocked back onto my fists, a small, small streak of pain ran up my hand and I remembered the mystery bruises on my knuckles. And then the scratches on my shoulder and arm. Some pieces in my head began clicking together and I walked back around to my mother’s still body. I knelt down beside her and looked at the bruises on her face. Her tender left cheek was bruised and her nose was broken. Bits of her smashed sunglasses were splintered into her temples and forehead. I looked once more at my now trembling hand. Could I have beaten my mother? My hands quivered more and more violently as the reality set in. Then the still, dead hand of the woman lying next to her caught my attention. Her nails were scraped down to their beds, and she also had bruises on her face and body. Is that where the peculiar scratches on my arm came from? I pulled back my sleeve and realized it was so. The woman had tried to defend herself with her bare hands against a crazed tollman in a flash of violent rage. I looked beyond and saw the same was true of the man next to her, and the one beyond him. My whole body began seizing as I looked out over the entire plot of bodies, hundreds laid neatly in rows, and I realized that I had killed them all. I dismiss the entire idea as madness. I would remember committing murder. Wouldn’t I? Then the dream comes to mind. I remember the emotion of waking up with a need for vengeance unfulfilled. I recall the bitter madness that set in as I choked my lover to death while she dreamed. It all flooded back into my head. She never left. I killed her. And ever since that morning, my brain flashes hot white for a moment while I kill these people coming to pay their tolls. The ground was not cursed, except by an insane tollman disturbed by his past and too much time alone in the vast screaming hot desert. I am the curse. But now I’m feeling itchy. I need to get back to the booth. People may soon be coming to pay their tolls.

18 minutes

October 25, 2015

Madness, Paranoia, and Mental Illness

Leo

Kenneth Kohl

Doctor Avraham Strauss was confused. In a moment of clarity, he questioned why and how he had come to be walking down this particular corridor, in this castle, at this precise time. Red corridor, Colditz Castle, the middle of winter 1942. How could he, as a Jew, even have considered assisting the Nazis in this horrifying experiment? Yet, he could justify it using the fact that no one else would have given him the support or funding for his research. Yes, to the average person it might seem like a crime against nature, but he knew better. He was creating new life. A new race, a new species for whom war and violence would no longer be necessary. The circumstances of where his laboratory had been located were unfortunate. Schloss Colditz had been appropriated by the Germans and put to use as a high security prisoner-of-war camp for officers who had become security or escape risks or who were regarded as particularly dangerous. Since the castle was situated on a rocky outcrop above the River Mulde, the Germans believed it to be an ideal site for a high security prison. The larger outer court known as the Kommandantur, had only two exits and housed a large German garrison. The prisoners lived in an adjacent courtyard in a twenty-seven meter tall building. Outside, the flat terraces that surrounded the prisoners’ accommodations were constantly watched by armed sentries and surrounded by barbed wire. Although known as Schloss Colditz to the locals, its official German designation was Oflag IV-C. However, it was not what went on in the cellblock that was most interesting about the castle. Rather, it was what went on below, in what used to be cellars and servants’ quarters. The bowels of the castle had been converted into a laboratory – his personal laboratory – for use as he saw fit. The walls were now lined with reinforced concrete, corridors fitted with steel doors, lighting and electrical services installed, and outfitted with any lab equipment that he requested. Reflecting on his surroundings, the freedom that the Nazis had given him, and his recent breakthrough, he was able to push every bit of the burden of guilt to the back of his mind. A smile came to his face as he escorted Doctor Rosenberg down the hall toward his main lab, and the home of Leopold. He had considered naming his child Adolph, but he correctly assumed that would have been taken as an insult by the Nazis. Avraham tested their patience at every turn, but knew when his little jokes might go too far. Yes, Leo was his child. No one but Avraham would recognize Leo as a member of the new human race yet, but an introduction to Doctor Rosenberg would change all of that. At last, he would have another professional of his caliber with which he could converse. He secretly hoped for a little praise from the good doctor. The Gestapo officers who had had the opportunity to meet Leo did not understand. They looked at him and saw little, if any, progress made by Avraham. Rosenberg would appreciate the significance of his progeny. This was an important introduction. Doctor Rosenberg was a loyal German. He was not a Jew. The Nazis would respect his assessment of Avraham’s work, and convincing him to ask the bastards for more time and money was crucial. He was close – so close – but they looked at his work and saw no progress. They were about done with him. Then all would be lost. He and his family, protected by his value to the war effort, would become worthless. They would be imprisoned or worse. More importantly, they might destroy Leo, and that would be the most crushing blow of all. It would be worse than losing a son or daughter. His biological children were easy to come by. One had even been a mistake. But Leo… Avraham’s life had been devoted to his creation. He beamed with pride as he guided Doctor Rosenberg down the concrete corridor. A few of the electric lights, encased in jelly jar fixtures fastened to the ceiling, flickered as they walked past. Perhaps the bombing had started again. Avraham shuddered to think of what might happen if the generators quit completely. He tried to divert his attention by boasting to Rosenberg. “Ah, doctor. Just wait until you meet him. He’s perfect. Everything that I was hoping for and more.” “I don’t know what you think you’ve created here, Avi,” Rosenberg wrinkled his nose, “But please stop referring to it as him. It’s not human.” “That’s part of what makes him beautiful. He’s not human.” He is better, Avraham thought to himself. “Why don’t you just tell me what it is? Why the suspense?” “Because,” Avraham turned to face Rosenberg, stopping him in his path. “Words cannot describe him. Here we are,” he turned to a steel door set into the wall. The door was simply marked “Lab G.” “Now Herr Doktor, feast your eyes on the future of mankind. Please approach him quietly, so as not to startle him. He was upset for days after the Nazi officers called on us. I prepared him for your visit, though. Please excuse the low lighting. Bright light seems to distress him.” Avraham opened the door slowly to reveal a dimly lit room with a large, glass tank in the center. Cables, electrical panels with blinking lights, and some metal cylinders, surrounded it. Tubes ran from the cylinders into the sides and lid of the tank. As they approached the apparatus, Rosenberg noted a button marked “Löschen,” meaning “Purge” in the center of one panel, protected under a glass cover and demarcated with black stripes on a yellow background. The tank appeared to be filled with water, although it had a yellowish tinge to it, and floating within was one of the most sickening things Rosenberg had ever seen. A large pink and grey mass, riddled with pulsing veins. It almost resembled a cow’s liver, aside from the fact that it was one and a half meters wide and about three meters tall. The massive piece of flesh wriggled in its glass cell. It suddenly recoiled from the sides of the tank, as if in reaction to their presence. Impossible, thought Rosenberg, as it had no apparent eyes or other sensory organs. “Doctor Rosenberg, may I present Leopold!” Rosenberg craned his neck to look up at the five-meter tall tank and the abomination it contained. “Why, it’s nothing more than a tumor.” “Nonsense!” cried Avraham, whipping his head around, “Leopold has a mind. He has a soul.” “Bah. You and your talk of souls. There is no such thing, and you’d be wise to keep your opinions to yourself.” Avraham looked at his feet. “Of course, you are correct. I did not mean to say soul. I merely meant that he is sentient. He thinks.” Avraham nodded boldly. “I’m a scientist, not a child. I don’t believe in nonsense such as God and souls.” However, that was not true. Avraham did believe that conscious beings had souls. It would not be sensible to express that belief in public, though. The Nazis would consider that heresy, and with their jackboot on his throat, he risked a camp or death. No matter how important he was to the project, they would not tolerate sedition; especially from a Jew. Over the time they had spent with each other at Kepler-Gymnasium Tübingen, the university where they had both studied, Rosenberg and Strauss had become friends. At least something resembling friends, anyway. Unlike many other doctoral students, they had no rivalry between them. They both saw the benefits of working together, rather than competing for the favor of their superiors. It was for this reason that Rosenberg softened. “Avi, what is this really about? This is no breakthrough.” “No, no. It is. It truly is. Let me introduce you.” “To this? Introduce me to a cancer? Do you take me for a fool? Do you expect me to defend you when the Gestapo finds out what you have been doing?” He glanced up again, sneering, “Or not doing, in this case.” “Don’t insult me Rosenberg. You call yourself a scientist. A real scientist would keep an open mind.” “True. True.” Rosenberg nodded his head slowly. “Do explain. Introduce me,” he said in a condescending tone, spreading his arms. Avraham motioned for Doctor Rosenberg to come closer to one of the instrument panels. There was a microphone and a speaker grille set into it. Avraham leaned in toward the microphone. “Leo, this is my friend and colleague, Doctor Rosenberg.” Then he turned to the doctor. “Say hello, Herr Doktor.” Rosenberg rolled his eyes and cleared his throat, then leaned closer to the microphone. He paused, and then pulled away. “Avraham, I can’t do this. I feel like an idiot.” “Please, Rosenberg. Humor me.” The doctor took a deep breath and leaned in again. “Ahem. Hello Leopold,” he said sternly. The men were met with silence. It went on for what seemed like an eternity: one, two, three seconds. Avraham began to feel apprehensive. Perhaps he was moving too fast. Perhaps Leopold was afraid or insulted, and would not speak. If that was the case, all was lost. Doctor Rosenberg was also feeling awkward. He felt like an idiot, falling for another of Avi’s senseless jokes. Then, a tinny voice emanated from the speaker. “Hello Doctor Rosenberg. It is a pleasure to meet you.” Both men jumped back. Avraham was smiling with joy and Rosenberg was aghast. “Ach! Gott in Himmel!” “Why, Rosenberg… I thought that you didn’t believe in God,” sneered Avraham. Rosenberg whipped around and pointed his forefinger at Avraham, inches from his face. “Damn you, Avi! I’ve had enough of your jokes. You have recorded that voice ahead of time. I recognize it. It’s your voice.” “Now doctor, it is true that it’s my voice, in a sense. Leo does not have a voice of his own. He cannot, since he obviously does not have the anatomy to form words. I have recorded the rudimentary phonemes of our language, and Leo uses the recordings to assemble words with which to speak. He’s quite intelligent and fluent in several languages.” Rosenberg thought for a moment. He was not sure whether to take Avraham seriously. Was this another joke? Was it an attempt to fool him into asking the Nazis for more time and money? Did Avraham actually think that his tumor could speak? Or worst of all… was it real? Avraham could understand Rosenberg’s hesitation. “Still don’t believe, eh Rosenberg? Go ahead. Ask it anything you wish. I couldn’t possibly have recorded answers to questions that I wasn’t prepared for.” Doctor Rosenberg hesitated again, still feeling a bit foolish conversing with this thing. Nevertheless, he continued. “What are you?” “I am Leo.” “Of course; but I didn’t ask who you are, I want to know what you are.” “I am Leo.” “Humph! Alright, Leo. Do you know where you are?” “Yes,” replied the tinny voice. “I am in Lab G in the cellar of Schloss Colditz.” Rosenberg’s stomach dropped and his blood turned cold. “Mein Gott,” he whispered. “Is there a problem, doctor?” Rosenberg ignored the question. “What year is it, Leo?” “Nineteen hundred and forty-two. Although time means little to me.” It is not just answering questions, thought Rosenberg, it is reasoning with me. “Who is our Führer und Reichskanzler?” “Your Führer is Adolph Hitler. Although, that is not relevant to me. I have no leader.” Rosenberg scowled at Avraham, clearly angered. “What do you mean, ‘You have no leader?’ Reichskanzler Hitler is your leader.” “I have no leader,” repeated Leo. “We’re done here!” “No, please,” pleaded Avraham. “It’s still a concept I am teaching him. He doesn’t understand.” “I do…” began Leo. “It’s not polite to correct our guest, Leo.” “Of course you are right.” Rosenberg, placated, adjusted his tie and slowly approached the microphone again. “Do you understand that we are at war with the allies?” “Yes. I understand that you are at war with the allies. Once again, that is irrelevant to me. I have no need for war.” “You would not defend yourself if you were threatened? “I believe that Germany instigated your war with the invasion of Poland.” Rosenberg bristled at that. Obviously incensed, he pointed at the purge button and shouted, “And what if I were to press this button?” “No!” cried Leo. Avraham positioned himself between Doctor Rosenberg and the panel. He placed his hand over the microphone. “Please, Rosenberg,” he said quietly, “Don’t scare him. He does not understand our culture yet. Do not frighten him or he will not speak to you anymore. You would be lying if you told me that your interest hasn’t been piqued.” “Yes,” Rosenberg cleared his throat. “Yes, of course.” He had been arguing with this thing. He was quarreling with what he had called a tumor just moments ago. How quickly he had been convinced of its sentience. “I am regretful, Leo. I understand that there are things you do not comprehend yet. I did not intend to frighten you.” “I do comprehend, Herr Doktor, but I accept your apology.” “I’m not apol…” Rosenberg caught himself. He would not be drawn into another argument. “Leopold, who is Doctor Strauss?” “He is my creator. He is my…” “I think that we’re done for now, Leo,” Avraham interrupted. “Doctor Rosenberg and I have much to discuss.” “Hold on there, Avi,” Rosenberg patted his colleague on the shoulder, pushing him away. “I apologize for the interruption, Leopold. You were about to say something?” “I think that I understand your initial question, Doctor Rosenberg. I know what I am.” Rosenberg smiled. “And what is that, Leo. What are you?” Leo’s reply was flat and factual. “I am Doctor Strauss’ child.” ***** Avraham sat at his desk across from the astonished Doctor Rosenberg. He allowed him to have the comfortable chair and had fetched him some hot tea. “Avi, I must apologize.” Rosenberg blew over his tea to cool it. “I never suspected that something like this was possible.” “I told you, didn’t I? I told you that Leo was a fantastic creation. Just think of the possibilities.” “Believe me, I am.” “Just think of it. No more war, no more poverty, no more sickness.” Rosenberg raised his head. “No more sickness?” “Yes, yes. There are many things that I have not told you yet. Leopold will never grow old. He is immune to human viruses. He will never die.” “But he can be killed, yes?” “I suppose. But why would you even think of such a thing?” “Avraham, I must remind you that many things Leopold said were disloyal and even treasonous to the state. ‘Germany instigated the war,’ ‘I have no leader.’ He must be educated. He obviously does not know what is happening outside the confines of your lab.” “Doctor,” Avraham looked him in the eye, “Leo has had complete access to the wireless. He has listened to recordings of der Führer’s speeches; he has read all of the news reports.” “Read them? He has no eyes.” “Listened to them, then. I have read them to him. I have been teaching him about history and culture, art and music. He is very well educated.” “And yet he speaks as if Germany is responsible for this war. He does not understand that Herr Hitler is merely trying to build a master race.” “On the contrary, Herr Doktor. Leo believes that he is the master race; and I believe that he is correct in his assessment of the matter. That is the purpose of my experiments, is it not? To build a master race?” “Not a race of those… those things!” Rosenberg sprung out of his chair. “You were supposed to build a better soldier. How can he be a soldier when he cannot leave the confines of this lab? How can he be a soldier if he believes that he has no leader?” Avraham averted his eyes. “He can leave the lab,” he muttered. “What?” whispered Rosenberg, sitting back down and gripping the arms of the chair, “How?” “There are ways.” Avraham shook his head and took a deep breath, then renewed his lively demeanor. “Do not concern yourself with that now. There is so much that you need to learn. I need more staff. I need more money. Is this enough to convince you? Can you persuade the Nazis to give me more time now?” Rosenberg leaned back in his chair. “No.” “What?!” cried Avraham. “Your time has run out, Avi. Obviously we will be taking over the project.” “We?” “The Gestapo. The Kripo. Der Führer’s private staff. I am certain that they will all appreciate your efforts, and you will be rewarded. They will need your continuing assistance, of course; but it is no longer your project. Leopold will become property of the state.” “But he is my son!” “Enough of that nonsense! He is a monster. Fascinating, intelligent, wonderful. But still not human. He will have his uses, though.” “Uses?” “The Reichskanzler’s scientists will find a way to use him to aid the war effort. Or perhaps in the eradication of the unfit, the homosexuals, the gypsies, and the Jews. Oh, I am sorry, Avi. I refer to the useless Jews. You, of course, are different.” “That’s completely unacceptable!” cried Avraham. “I will not stand for it. You, nor anyone else is taking Leo from me. It will be difficult without funding or a lab, but I will find another way. I will take Leo and leave. I refuse to have him exploited like that. He is worth far more than a… a soldier, or a virus. Or a tumor, as you first called him.” Rosenberg shook his head slowly from side to side. “Avi, my dear Avi,” he said, as if talking to a child, “No one can ever leave here. You know why.” “What do you mean?” “The prisoners, you, your family, and now – since I know what has been going on here – even I will never be allowed to leave this place. Even discounting your work with Leopold, how many of the prisoners have you experimented on?” “I don’t know, but it was in the name of science. Look at what their sacrifice has given us.” “It does not matter, Avi. If Germany should lose the war, and they will not, but just for the sake of imagination… We would all be tried for war crimes for what we have done. It does not matter whether or not our intentions were good. In addition, when Germany wins the war, there will still be those who will not understand. They will say that we have committed crimes against fellow humans. You understand that, don’t you?” “I suppose. But…” “There are no buts, Avraham. We finish our work; we make ourselves as useful as possible; and we just may live to see our children grow up.” Avraham stood silent for a moment. He was shaking, not knowing if it was from fear or anger. “No! No. I will not stand for it. I would sooner destroy Leopold and my entire lab before I give him over to the Nazis!” “Avraham! You don’t know what you are saying.” “I know very well, Herr Doktor,” he spat, “The Gestapo could take me if they wish, but no one will take Leo. I will kill him. Take that to your Nazi friends.” Doctor Rosenberg did not utter another word. He simply turned his back and walked out of the office, not even bothering to shut the door on his way out. Avraham sat down at his desk and held his head in his hands. What would happen now? Adjacent to the office, in the dimly lit laboratory, Leo shifted his massive body in the tank. He was also shaking – or at least, as close to it as he could come. His tinny voice could barely be heard emanating from the speaker. It almost sounded like he were crying, if such a thing were possible. “You would kill me, father?” ***** Several uneventful days passed. Avraham began to think that perhaps Rosenberg’s threats were baseless. He continued his work with Leo, which mostly consisted of educating him. Avraham occasionally took biopsies and samples of the fluid that Leo floated in; nothing out of the ordinary. However, he noticed that Leo had become withdrawn. He answered Avraham’s questions abruptly and concisely, when he had always been a bit of a chatterbox before. “Is something wrong, Leo?” “No.” “I believe that there is,” said Avraham as he pulled a chair over in front of Leo’s tank and straddled it backwards. “You are concerned over what Doctor Rosenberg was saying, aren’t you?” “No, father.” “I think ‘Yes.’ Well, you have nothing to be worried about, Leo. I will never give you over to those animals. I feel the same way about them that you do, but we must learn not to express those feelings so freely.” “You would have me lie?” “No. Well, yes; but a lie of omission. Try to avoid talk of politics and war.” Leo was quiet for a bit, and then shifted in his tank. “But they want to make me a soldier. They want me to kill, don’t they?” “They do,” Avraham pressed his lips together, “But we will convince them otherwise. We will show them that you have far more to offer them – to offer the entire human race.” Avraham rose from his chair and pushed it back against the wall. Then, as an afterthought, he turned back toward Leo’s tank. “You can put your mind at ease, Leo. Doctor Rosenberg has probably forgotten all about us.” Suddenly, it was as if the Fates – the white-robed incarnations of destiny – had been awaiting his statement. There was a knock at the laboratory door, and then the person behind it opened the door without even awaiting a reply. It was Haltenbrunner, a captain of the local Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo for short. He had two officers with him who waited outside the door as he entered. “Hauptmann Haltenbrunner, to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” Avraham realized that he had forgotten the customary greeting. “Heil Hitler!” Haltenbrunner raised his hand absent-mindedly. “Heil.” “Again, I ask, what can I do for you Herr Hauptmann?” At first, Haltenbrunner ignored Avraham and strolled around the lab, running his gloved finger through the dust that had accumulated on some of the unused equipment. Then he released a heavy sigh. “There has been an accident,” he said without emotion. “Your wife. I’m sorry to inform you that she is dead.” Avraham’s stomach dropped. He began to shake and stumbled for the chair. Almost missing it, he dropped into the seat and put his head between his knees. He took several deep breaths, but began to wretch anyway. When he had recovered a bit, he finally asked, “What… what happened to her?” “It appears that she was on her way to Dresden, and came across a checkpoint near Wolkau. She did not stop. Perhaps she was distracted. The guards could do nothing except assume that she was attempting to break through the checkpoint. There was a short chase, and she was shot. Quite a shame, if you asked me.” “What was she doing on the road to Dresden? We have no family there.” “Perhaps she was visiting the market.” “No. She goes to the market in Hohnbach. It’s only a short distance away.” There was a long, awkward period of silence. Avraham continued to look at the floor, and Haltenbrunner simply stared at him, waiting. “Do you doubt what I say, Doctor Strauss?” “No, Herr Hauptmann,” replied Avraham, “No, of course not. It’s just…” Haltenbrunner showed an absolute lack of emotion. “Nevertheless, we will need you to come with us to collect her body.” Avraham stood, unable to speak, and waited for the two officers to enter the room and guide him away. Almost as an afterthought, but obviously coolly calculated, Haltenbrunner added, “It is times such as this, Herr Doktor, that make a man wonder if it’s worth putting his work ahead of his family.” Avraham could detect a bit of a smile on the captain’s face. “At least you still have your children.” ***** Two days went by, and Avraham had not returned to the lab. Leo did not become worried. He had access to all of the nourishment that he needed, both nutritionally and intellectually. He understood what had happened, and he understood that Doctor Strauss needed time to grieve. Leo himself did not see the point of it, but he appreciated the fact that humans were different, emotionally fragile creatures. It was late in the evening when the lab door clicked open. Leo’s heart, if one could call it that, leapt for a split second at the thought that it could be Avraham returning, but he instantly realized that it was, in fact, Doctor Rosenberg. He knew that emotions were useless, yet he became anxious upon seeing Rosenberg in the lab. “Good evening, Herr Doktor,” said Leo. “It is a pleasure to see you again. I am afraid that Doctor Strauss is not in the lab today. He has experienced a loss recently, and apparently needs some time to recover.” “Good evening to you, Leopold,” began Rosenberg. “I am aware of the death of Avraham’s wife. I have already paid my respects and given my condolences. However, it’s not Doctor Strauss that I have come to speak with. It is you.” “I was under the assumption that you thought I was below your station, Herr Doktor. I believe that you described me as ‘a tumor.’” Leo felt a wave of satisfaction as he made that snide remark. He felt anger. Felt? Feel? What was happening to him? “Now, now, Leopold. That was before Avi explained what you really are. I mean, who you really are.” “And what is that, Herr Doktor?” “Er… well, you are a person. An individual. A conscious being, if you will.” There was a moment of silence. Leo shifted in his tank. “Then what is it that you have come to speak about, Herr Doktor?” “Please, please. Call me Rosenberg. And I’ll call you Leo.” “Fine, Rosenberg. What is it that you have come to speak about?” Rosenberg strolled about the room slowly, approaching the equipment, dragging a finger across the control panel in front of Leo’s tank, and pausing almost sensually near the button marked “Löschen.” Leo tensed. “I will be taking over the lab for a while, Leopold… Leo. Doctor Strauss is going to be unavailable for a time – I’m not sure how long – taking care of his children.” “But I am his child, also. Why would he forsake me to care for them?” Rosenberg turned away so that Leo could not see the satisfied sneer that curled his lips. “Well, Leo, he loves them. Can you understand that? I mean, he cares for you but you are not really his child. At least it’s obvious to me that he doesn’t feel that way.” Leo felt something again. He was unsure of how to describe it. Empty. Sad. Worthless. Ashamed. Betrayed. For the first time in his life, Leo was at a loss for words. “I don’t feel that way, though,” continued Rosenberg. Now that I know what a miracle you are, well… If I were in Avi’s position, I would definitely not disregard you as he is. Even in a time of sadness, a man should not favor one child over another. It’s inexcusable.” Leo began to grow… Angry. Yet, Rosenberg pressed on. “I’ll bet that everything Avraham has been telling you: you’re his child, he cares for you, you’re so important to him… I am willing to bet that they are all lies. Told to make you comply with his wishes!” “No!” shouted Leo. “That’s not true! It is not!” “Really, Leopold? Really? Think about it. He made you. A man does not make a child. He creates one out of love. You are not a product of love. You were created in a test tube or grown in a petri dish.” “Why are you saying these things?” cried Leo. Rosenberg calmed himself. “I’m sorry Leo. I understand that it hurts to hear these things, but it is better that you know. Avraham is making a fool out of you. He does not appreciate you; but I do. You will see. I will take good care of you.” And so he did. Every day for the next three weeks, Rosenberg would spend nearly sixteen hours a day at the lab reading to Leo, making intellectual conversation, debating, and even joking. Leo was actually starting to understand human wit. It did, however, send a chill down Rosenberg’s spine when he heard Leo’s unnatural laughter emitting from the speaker box. In the meantime, Avraham was busy making arrangements for the care of his children – his real children. He had found a nanny that satisfied him, and after another week spent gathering his confidence, he stepped out of the door of the block home the Nazi’s had provided him on the grounds of the camp and walked resolutely toward the castle. He walked down Red Corridor and paused at the laboratory door. What would Leo have made of his behavior? He had been ignoring Leo entirely. Yes, he knew that Doctor Rosenberg took over Leo’s care, but Leo was his child. Avraham felt ashamed for abandoning him as he did. He justified it by telling himself that Leo was not dependent on him. Unlike his biological children, Leo had the mental capacity of an adult, and was capable of caring for himself, even without the aid of Rosenberg. Satisfied with his rationalization, he stood tall and squared his shoulders, then opened the door to the lab. He heard it as soon as the door snicked open. He was unsure of what to make of the unnerving sound. It was like a raspy cough combined with the buzzing heard around a hornets’ nest. Worse, he could clearly make out the underlying tones of Leo’s voice. The sound was coming from his speaker box. Avraham burst into the room. “Mein Gott! What is wrong? What’s happened to Leo?” Surprised by the sound of the door slamming open, Rosenberg jumped from the chair he had been seated at in front of Leo’s tank and whipped around. He relaxed when he saw that it was Avraham. He smiled as he realized that now would be the ultimate test. He would see if his social engineering experiment had worked. His conditioning of Leopold. Had he truly been able to turn Leopold against his former master? His “father?” “Why, nothing is wrong, my dear Doctor Strauss.” “That sound. What was that sound?” “Ah,” Rosenberg bobbed his head, “Yes. I was just telling Leopold a joke. ‘How did the Germans conquer Poland so fast?’” he paused for effect. “’They marched in backwards and the Polish thought they were leaving!’” Once again, Leo erupted into an unsettling laughter. Avraham did not know whether to feel horrified or astonished that Leo was developing a sense of humor. Humor meant feelings, and that… Oh my. What disturbed him most was that it seemed Rosenberg had managed to do what he could not: elicit an emotional response from Leo. In addition to that, the joke was vulgar, racist, and politically charged. Why did the ethically benign creature find that funny? “Leo! I am… I’m…” “At a loss for words?” interjected Doctor Rosenberg. Avraham was dumbfounded. “Laughing? Joking about the war? At the expense of the suffering of humans? What is going on here?” “Leo is just becoming a good German, Herr Doktor,” Rosenberg taunted. Avraham was incensed. “I’ve had quite enough of you, Rosenberg!” He turned to Leo’s tank. “Leo, stop it this instant!” Leo fell silent. Avraham could almost sense him collecting himself, could almost sense him slowing his breathing as an angry man would before speaking. “You are not my master, father. You have no right to tell me what I can and cannot feel. There is only one man who I am accountable to now.” Aghast, Avraham cocked his head to the right. “Rosenberg?” “Of course not,” replied Leo. “The kind doctor treats me as his equal.” “Then who?” “Der Führer, of course,” answered Leo. “Heil Hitler!” ***** Avraham tried to control himself until the door of his office had slammed shut. His office? Was it even his office anymore? “Sohn von einem Weibchen!” screamed Avraham. “What have you done to him?” Rosenberg calmly took a seat – the big chair behind the desk. “I don’t know what you are talking about, my dear Avi. I have done nothing.” He paused, and then looked over his shoulder out of the window towards Leo’s tank. “Oh, you mean that,” he said with an air of sarcastic innocence. “Well, Avi, you’ve been gone a long time. Leopold has simply grown up, I suppose.” “You’ve brainwashed him!” “Nonsense. It was only a matter of time until he developed emotions. You implied as much yourself.” “But,” stammered Avraham, “The joke, the laughter… ‘Heil Hitler!’ for God’s sake! Those are not emotions. That’s pure malice.” “You call it malice, I call it loyalty. As I said, he’s becoming a good German.” “He’s not a German.” “What is he, Avi? Do you think that the fact that you made him brands him a Jew? Well, he is not. He has evolved beyond you. The sooner you get used to the idea, the better.” Avraham slumped in his chair. “So, you are telling me that I’m off the project. You are going to take Leo away from me.” “Nothing of the sort,” Rosenberg said with a smile on his face. “In fact, I am happy to see that you are ready to return to work. I need you now more than ever. We are about to enter a new phase of the project, and you are most familiar with Leopold.” “Perhaps not. It seems that the two of you get along very well now. “Ah, Avraham. You may be correct. Leopold and I have become very close. As it happens, we share many of the same ideas; but I am not referring to companionship. I am contemplating something quite different. Something… More basic. A task that you, as his creator, would be best suited to perform.” “And what might that be?” Avraham said warily. “Reproduction.” “No!” Avraham rose from his chair, fists balled up. “It’s not possible!” “Are you telling me that Leo is incapable of reproducing? There must be a way…” “Of course there is a way, idiot. Do you think that I would create a bein

36 minutes

July 30, 2015

Beings and Entities

Ubloo

beings, DifferentWind, entities, Ubloo

Part 1 In a past life I was a psychiatrist. Well, let me rephrase that. Before my life fell to pieces I was a psychiatrist, and a damned good one too. It’s tough to really say what makes a psychiatrist “good” at what they do, but I started in my field early, got great experience my first few years in the business and not before long I almost had more clients than I could handle. I’m not saying someone would walk into my office suicidal and do a complete 180 in one day, but my clients trusted me and felt that I genuinely helped them, so I came very highly recommended, and my rate was admittedly steep. That being said, I was used to a “higher tier” of patient. I’m not sure how the Jennings family found me but I assume they were pointed in my direction from their previous psychiatrist, as that’s sometimes the case. Someone walks through your door that you’re incapable of helping for whatever reason so you make some recommendations. One day I got a call from Mrs. Gloria Jennings, a very wealthy real estate owner who wanted me to work with her son, Andrew. Apparently Andrew had just about worn out every psychiatrist in the state and I was essentially their last option. Andrew was your typical drug abuser, his poison of choice being heroin, and as anyone in my field can tell you these people are just a headache to deal with. If they’re not clean and scatter-brained then they’re high and not making any sense. I wouldn’t have taken him as a patient but Mrs. Jennings offered me almost double my usual rate so I couldn’t say no. It was the worst decision I’ve ever made. I met Andrew early on a Monday morning. From experience it’s easier to catch these types before they’ve had a chance to use. Best case scenario they don’t even show up and you get a free hour, but Andrew was fifteen minutes early. He certainly looked like a heroin addict. Dark bags under his green eyes, hair disheveled, a scraggly beard growing on his face. He looked to be in his early 20’s. He was tall and inexplicably thin, and wore baggy, plain clothes that only accentuated his sharp figure. I welcomed him into my office and offered him a seat. He sat down and began rubbing his hands together and exploring my office with his eyes with darting rapidity. For my own privacy I will refer to myself as “Doctor A.” “So, Andrew.” I began. “I’m Doctor A. Why don’t you tell me a little about yourself?” For the first time he made eye contact. He hesitated for a moment and then spoke. “Look, this is about the eight or ninth time I’ve started from scratch so I’m just going to cut to the chase. My Mom probably told you I was a drug user and I am. I use heroin and cocaine if I can get my hands on it.” I opened my mouth to ask if he ever uses both at the same time, to explain the danger of the combination but he beat me to it. “No, I always do them separately. I’m not an idiot.” He said. “I don’t think you’re an idiot.” I lied. “I’ve seen a lot of users in my day. Trust me.” Andrew hadn’t stopped staring at me. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and asked the obvious next question. “Why do you use?” “Well, on the nights I don’t want to go to sleep I use the cocaine, and on the nights I don’t want to dream, I use the heroin.” As he said this he dropped his gaze to the floor, still rubbing his hands. “I’m sorry, the nights you don’t want to sleep you use cocaine?” I asked, just to make sure he said it right. “That’s correct Doctor.” He said, still not looking at the ground. “And why don’t you want to sleep Andrew?” “Because, I don’t want to see Ubloo.” He answered, shifting his gaze back up at me, and registering my reaction to that word. “I’m sorry, who’s Ubloo?” (Pronounced “Oo-blue”) I asked curiously. Andrew sighed. “Ubloo is a monster I see sometimes in my dreams, who controls them.” “And how does this, “Ubloo” control your dreams Andrew?” “Well I don’t know if his name is actually Ubloo or if that’s what it’s fucking called but that’s all it ever says. And I know he controls them because the shit that happens in my dreams when he’s there no one would ever dream of.” He said to me, his hands finally unclasped and balled into fists at his sides. This was starting to get interesting, and I decided to go just a little deeper down the rabbit hole and asked the gnawing question; “And what sort of things have you dreamed of?” “Look I’m not crazy. It’s not like I just go on these huge benders and dream of this fucked up thing. I used to be a star athlete and I was on pace to graduate valedictorian before this thing started fucking with me.” He was getting visibly angry. “I don’t think you’re crazy.” I lied again. “If I did I’d have given up and told you to just go, I’m a psychiatrist, Andrew. I know crazy when I see it.” This seemed to calm him down just a little. “But you need to understand that I need to know everything before I can make a diagnosis of how to help you, so I’ll ask again; what sort of things have you dreamed of?” I saw him unwind, and I knew I had broken through. “Terrible things.” He said. “People and things that I love, and just the worst imaginable things happening to them.” He was staring at the floor again. “What sort of things, Andrew?” “One time…” He swallowed hard. “One time I dreamt that I was stuck in a cage, in a basement I had never seen before, and there were three men in masks raping and beating my mother.” This startled me, and I flinched a bit and he noticed. I was losing him. “Go on Andrew.” I said comfortingly, masking my shock as intrigue. “She was calling out to me, and I was crying, and every time she would cry out to me or cry for help a man would hit her, and no matter how bad she bled she kept calling out, and they kept hitting her and violating her.” Now I’ll interject here and say that normal people do not dream these things. Dreams like these are rare even among the most severe of psychopaths, and now I was starting to understand how Andrew had gone through so many psychiatrists in just a few years. Either he was a time bomb of the most criminal psychopath in history, or he had a new sleep disorder not yet seen in my field. The pros of diagnosing a new disorder were hugely outweighed by the cons of fostering a kid who could potentially make Ted Bundy look like purse snatcher. I was shaken up but I managed to keep it together. In these situations it’s important not to get lost in the details and just nail down all your facts first. “How do you know that Ubloo was behind this dream?” I ask him. “Because at the end of the dream, I always hear him make that horrible noise; ‘oo-blue!'” He mimicked, high pitched like the sound a small animal would make. “And you always hear this noise? That’s how you know he ‘controlled’ your dream?” “I always hear him, but sometimes I see him too, but only for a second, and then I wake up.” “I see. Could you draw Ubloo for me Andrew?” I slid him a notepad and a pen. He looked confused at first, probably because I was (to him) believing every word, but he grabbed the pad of paper and began scribbling. I looked down at my watch, twenty minutes have passed, not bad, and then out the window at the sky, which was a clear shade of blue. I heard the pen hit the table and the notepad slide back over to me. I looked down at the pad and choked my leaping heart back down into my chest. The thing had a long, dangling snout, almost like an elephants trunk with a tongue poking out. Its face was devoid of features aside from two large upright oval eyes that were completely black. It had six limbs and a long slender torso. It was hunched down, the back and middle knees were just a little above its body, it could obviously make itself very tall if need be. The feet were circular with six appendages sticking out, in all directions, all equidistant from the others. The front two legs were considerably longer, and had just two extremely long fingers on each hand, both at the top of its hand and in the same direction. It was eerie to look at. It had no clearly dangerous features; no claws no teeth, but still I couldn’t help but feel a chill on my spine when I examined it. I snapped out of my state and looked back up at Andrew, who was staring at me and waiting apprehensively. I think I had my diagnosis. “Well Andrew, I think I know what’s going on.” He didn’t look at all relieved. “Oh?” He said monotonously. “Yes, I think what’s going on here is that you’ve been lu-” “Lucid dreaming, yeah I thought that too.” He interrupted. I sat there shocked. “You think that I had some traumatic nightmare of this thing and now whenever I lucid dream I subconsciously insert it into my mind, which triggers a traumatic scenario to play out before me.” Rarely in my ten years of practice I have been speechless, and I sat there mouth agape. Andrew stared back at me and I watched him smirk. “I told you Doctor A, I’m not an idiot. I looked into all of this when it first started happening. That’s why I started using. I learned that opioids can suppress lucid dreaming and in the beginning they did, but eventually he kept worming his way in, and the more I used the harder he fought to keep coming back, so I tried the cocaine to keep me awake, but I found that made things worse. I stayed up too long, and I started experiencing microsleep. I didn’t know if I was awake or dreaming, and he must have learned this. You see, when it first started I could tell faintly that it was a dream. They all had this haziness effect on my comprehension, but when I would microsleep, the dreams were incredibly vivid. He learned, Doctor A, he learned that I was more afraid of the microsleep dreams and he somehow made every dream just as clear since.” I honestly didn’t know what to say. Either Andrew was completely and utterly crazy, or so intelligent he was incubating his own insanity. I asked the only question I had left. “When did you first dream of Ubloo?” “It was right after my Father died.” He said, gaze shifting back to the floor. He killed himself, put a bullet in his head when I was seventeen. The night after the funeral I dreamt that I was standing over his grave, looking down at the grass. It was normal for a bit but then I heard him, I heard him screaming from in the ground, screaming for help, asking me to dig him out, but I couldn’t move. I was frozen. I stood there and listened to him banging on his coffin lid so hard the ground was pulsing and I heard him screaming in fear but I just couldn’t move, and then I heard it, ‘Ubloo’, and I woke up.” I sat there staring at him for a long time. While his dismissal of lucid dreaming being a possibility is impressive, it’s not uncommon for children to link a traumatic event to something imaginary to better comprehend what’s happening. I was starting to gain some traction back. “When was the first time you saw Ubloo?” He hesitated for a half second but then he began talking. “One time I dreamt of my dog, Buster. I was standing behind this great big fence, and I was just a kid so I couldn’t climb it. Buster was on the other side of a busy freeway, just sitting there looking at me, and I knew–somehow I knew–he was going to try to cross and come see me, and I knew he wouldn’t make it. He ran into the freeway and got hit by a car instantly. I screamed and I cried but the car didn’t stop, it just kept going. Buster was laying there broken and bleeding. I saw him try to get up, and he tried to crawl forward, and another car came speeding by and hit him again. It kept happening, I kept watching him get hit and torn to shreds by these cars, they just never stopped. That was the first time I saw him. I heard him right in my ear, ‘Ubloo!’ and then I turned and his face was an inch from mine, his huge black eyes staring right at me, and then I woke up.” He was shaking now, and I could tell he was close to breaking down. I had to stop pushing him. “Alright Andrew, I think this is a good place to stop today.” I stood up and walked over to my desk and got a prescription pad. Andrew sat there and blinked at me. “You’re gonna… You’re gonna give me something to stop it?” “For now I’m going to give you something to suppress your dreaming. Until I can diagnose where these dreams have been coming from, it’s important that you get a good night of sleep, help you clear your thoughts. I’m helping you to help me help you, get it?” He blinked again. “Yes, I get it, thank you. They have drugs to suppress dreaming?” “Well technically no. There’s a new drug called cyproheptadine that is used in treatment of hay fever, but one of the side effects is a suppression of dreaming–nightmares specifically–especially those induced by post-traumatic stress disorder.” I kept writing the prescription in silence, and I could feel Andrew’s eyes on me. “But it’s not from PTSD, it’s from Ubloo.” “I know that Andrew” I lied to him for the final time. “But it’ll work just as well at keeping Ubloo out of your dreams as well.” This got to him. He was overjoyed and sprung up from the couch. He kept thanking me and telling me that I was the best Doctor he’s ever seen. That he finally felt like he had a fighting chance. I couldn’t help but smile at this, I guess it’s the reason I stuck with this practice after so long. I walked him to the door and shook his hand. He looked me straight in the eyes, smiling for the first time since I met him, and left my office. That was the last time I would see Andrew Jennings alive. A week went by and the next Monday, Andrew didn’t come in. Now normally I’d breathe a sigh of relief, tell my secretary I was heading out and grab a coffee down the street, but I couldn’t help but wonder about Andrew. I had thought about these dreams he had ever since he left, and truth be told I was almost looking forward to getting an update from him. I left my office and told my secretary I was heading out and to cancel my next appointment. In my hand I had the bill for Andrew Jennings for our last session, which had his address on it. He was staying in an apartment building his Mother owned just outside of town. It was about a 15 minute drive from my office. I managed to slip in through the front door of the building as someone was leaving and found his name on the directory. His name was just written down on paper so I could tell he hasn’t been here long, in fact his Mother probably set him up here just so he’d be closer to my office, to ease his commute. He was the last unit on the first floor. I made the long, arduous walk down the hall until I finally stopped at his door. I paused for a second and thought about what I was doing, but my curiosity got the better of me and I knocked loudly three times. No answer. No sound of movement inside. After I had listened for a good while I knocked again, louder. “Andrew, this is Doctor A. Can you come to the door please?” Still nothing. I tried the door knob and surprisingly it twisted all the way. I felt the weight of the door lift and I could tell it was open. I can’t tell you how long I stood there, hand on the door knob, just thinking. Thinking about how this would look; Doctor allows himself entry into Patient’s apartment. Doctor potentially finds Patient loaded on heroin, or potentially overdosed. Overdosed on heroin, but possibly the new drug he prescribed to him–a known user–just a week ago. But what was worse, was thinking about those horrible dreams he told me about, as just a piece of wood separated himself and I. I took a deep breath and opened the door. The first thing I noticed was that the shades were drawn, and there was no light save for a low wattage lamp in the corner. The air was stale and musky, and laid out on the table were needles and spoons and empty baggies. I walked through the living room and saw no signs of Andrew. There was a hallway just off the wall that the couch was against. I took out my phone and turned the flashlight on. I walked down the hall slowly, my breath short and my hands shaking. There was a door immediately to my left that was agape. Carefully, I peered around the corner and shined my flashlight inside. It was the bathroom. Moderately dirty but not the worst I had seen. There were no signs of struggle, no vomit in the toilet, nothing that would indicate a potential overdose. I let out a minor sigh of relief and turned back into the hall. There was only one door left, straight ahead. It was shut completely, all white with a silver knob. I stood there in the dark with my flashlight and looked for a light switch. These apartments were old. The switch must be in Andrew’s room, behind this door. Realizing it wasn’t getting any easier, and swallowing my nerves I began to creep forward toward the door. Every step felt like a mile. My feet felt clumsy and my legs heavy. By the time I reached the door it felt like an hour had passed. I sat there and just stared into the bare white door, raised my hand and lightly rapped my knuckles against the wood. “Andrew?” I asked as I knocked, the door creaking and gently swaying inward. Through the crack I could make out the faint outline of a person, and pushed the door open fully. Andrew was on the ground, propped up and sitting in the corner, his skin pale and white, his bright green eyes staring wide at the door that I had just came through. I stood there and stared at him in complete shock. It was the first time I had ever seen a dead body outside of a casket. It just looked so void and lifeless. I noticed blood on the carpet, and that his fingernails were split and bleeding, pried back from his finger in some places. I somehow managed to find the light switch and flick it on, that’s when I saw it. “THE END IS THE BEGINNING” It was carved deeply into the wood next to him. I stared at it just long enough to see what it said when the smell hit me. The most foul thing I had ever smelled, and in that moment it all set in and I felt more nauseous than I ever have in my life. I sprinted out into the hallway and vomited immediately. I stood there bent over vomiting when an elderly woman a few doors down opened her door and gasped when she saw me. “CALL 911!” I yelled to her, vomiting again. I heard her door slam shut and I tried to make my way down the hallway to the lobby, stopping every 20 or so feet to gag. When the emergency responders came they pronounced him dead at the scene. They must have been used to this sort of thing because they didn’t seem too phased by it. I gave a statement to the police and told them he was a patient of mine, and that I was checking in. They didn’t seem too suspicious and told me that if they needed anything else they would call. I left my business card with them and walked back to my car. As I started to pull out a car came screeching into the parking lot and I saw a woman get out. It was Mrs. Jennings. She was bawling and screaming and a few officers had to restrain her. “THAT’S MY BABY! NO PLEASE GOD NO!” She yelled as she tried to fight through the policemen. I watched as much as I could bear and drove out of the parking lot. I called my secretary and told her to cancel all my meetings for the day, stopped at the liquor store to pick up a bottle of whiskey and drove myself home. I sat there and drank in silence for a long time. Eventually I turned the ball game on and ordered some food, but when it came I couldn’t bring myself to eat. By the time I had finished the bottle it was getting late. I stood up and stumbled down the hall to my bedroom, kicked off my shoes and fell face first into my mattress. I laid there thinking about Andrew, about his pale lifeless body propped up in the corner staring at me with those big green eyes, about his last message “the end is the beginning” echoing through my brain trying to find a rhyme or reason to it. My thoughts were growing slower and my eyelids growing heavy. “the end is the beginning” playing over and over in my head. I felt myself just listing off to sleep when I heard it. From no where and everywhere all at once. “Ubloo.” Part 2 “THAT’S MY BABY! NO, PLEASE GOD, NO!” “I said BACK UP you fucking CUNT!” The policeman bludgeoned Mrs. Jennings across the mouth with his billy club with a sickening thwack. I heard her cry out from the hit, and watched as her teeth flew from her mouth to the pavement, clattering at the feet of the armed police officers. They were all striking her now. They beat her down to her hands and knees and were all taking turns hammering at her back with their clubs. She was still begging them not to take her son away but they couldn’t hear, they were laughing. Laughing in a sick and maniacal tone that made my stomach turn. Now the emergency medical responders emerged from the apartment building, wheeling Andrew out on a gurney. They pushed him clumsily down the stairs, his arm emerged from beneath the white sheet as he bounced down the first step. I watched his lifeless body bounce on the gurney until he landed awkwardly and fell off it completely, the white sheet blowing away in the wind and revealing his corpse. “Oh, well, by all means, you dumb fucking junkie, just help yourself to a nap while we’re trying to do our fucking JOBS!” With the last word, the EMT kicked Andrew’s body in his stomach. I watched his body jerk and fold from the impact. The other EMT was joining in now too, both of them kicking and stomping at Andrew’s lifeless corpse. I tried to yell, I tried to scream at them to stop, but while I felt my vocal cords vibrating in my chest, not a sound came out. I watch as one EMT picked up a heavy rock from a nearby flowerbed and carried it over to where Andrew’s body lay. The other EMT rolled him onto his back and I let out the loudest scream no one would ever hear as I watched the rock slam down into Andrew’s face. I heard a deep crunch and knew his skull had cracked. His head rolled to the side and faced right at me, bleeding and crushed. Then I saw his eyes open, those big green eyes surround by a bloodshot white. “THE END IS THE BEGINNING DOCTOR.” He said to me with his jaw half attached. “THE END IS THE BEGINNING.” And then I heard him say it. Soft yet loud, small yet commanding, sharp as a knife yet smooth as water. “Ubloo!” I shot up from my bed, panting and covered in sweat. I reached frantically in the dark at the bedding next to me until my hand gripped my flashlight. I turned it on and shined it around the room, darting from one corner to the other, looking for something, anything, but there was nothing there, nothing there except for the stacks of boxes that littered my hotel room. I turned my nightstand light on and checked the time. 4:12 AM. Three hours of sleep would have to do. I pulled open the nightstand drawer and grabbed the pill bottle from inside. It was half full, I would need to write myself a new prescription soon, which couldn’t have come at a better time because it was looking like it was just about time to move again. I opened the bottle and threw two Adderall into my mouth. I grabbed the glass of water I left out for myself and drank half of it. I was going to have to start packing now if I wanted to make good time finding a new hotel. I stood up and stretched my legs and back. Now that I’m practically running on drugs and minimum sleep I can feel my body falling apart. I walked over to the dresser and twisted the cap off the bottle of gin from the night before. I took a long swig and cringed at the taste. I was never really a big fan of gin but it’s the easiest to conceal on your breath. When I turned to get started packing I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and froze. My eyes sat above two dark heavy bags and were so bloodshot they almost looked red. My hair stuck up every which way in dark scraggly tufts. I had a dark shadow of hair on my cheekbones and neck that made my once tidy-kept beard look unattended. “Jesus…” I said with a pause. “How the fuck did I get to this?” SIX WEEKS PRIOR: The funeral of Andrew Jennings came and went and I didn’t attend it. Part of me says it’s because I just couldn’t bear to face Mrs. Jennings, part of me says it’s because I’m terrified of Andrew himself. The week leading up to the funeral I could hardly focus on my work, I just kept thinking of what I heard that night before I fell asleep. After another week, I chalked it up to just the booze and my imagination getting the best of me. Besides, I wasn’t even asleep when it happened, so I couldn’t have dreamed it. I decided that I was going to go see Mrs. Jennings to give myself closure. Her office wasn’t far from mine for someone who owns half the apartment complexes in Middlesex County, and I decided that I deserved a day off after what I went through. When I went to see Mrs. Jennings it was a cool spring day. I was nervous, very nervous. In med-school before I had to give a big presentation I would ease my tension with a shot or two, to loosen up. I did the same that morning, but I guess I should have eaten a bigger breakfast because by the time I got out of my car at her office building my head was swimming. Inside the lobby was a cute young receptionist. I asked her where I could find Mrs. Jennings and she told me floor three, suite one, very politely. I got in the elevator with another man and we rode up together. While we stood there I heard him sniff the air twice, then look sideways at me from the corner of his eye. Fuck, he must be able to smell the booze. When I got off at the third floor I found a water fountain and drank a few gulps. I pulled another piece of gum from my pocket and chewed it for a minute before I knocked on Mrs. Jennings’ door. The door swung open and her eyes met mine, and almost instantly I saw them start to well up. “Oh, Doctor A.” She said, sounding unsurprised. “Please, come in.” She stepped to the side and let me walk into her office. Immediately I noticed that she was in the process of packing her things, and the office was practically bare save for a few papers and her computer. “Moving out eh?” I said to her with a half-smile, trying to lighten the mood. “Yes.” She said, shifting her eyes from me to look around the room as she spoke. “I found someone who’s going to buy all my property. Normally it would be too much but I gave them a great price. I’m going to travel and see Europe like myself and Robert always wanted to.” “Well, that sounds exciting!” I said, a little too enthusiastically. I saw the sadness creeping up on Mrs. Jennings and continued on, changing the subject. “Mrs. Jennings, I’m terribly sorry to hear about Andrew. He was a very bright young man.” This brought on the waterworks. “He was.” She sobbed. “And I want to thank you, Doctor, that day when he left your office he called me and told me he felt better than he had in years. Thank you for giving me that one moment of having my son back before I lost him for good.” She started to cry. I looked around her office nervously, and my eyes found a photograph of a young Mrs. Jennings, standing next to a tall broad-shouldered man with a big smile, and a young, handsome Andrew. At his side sat a golden retriever, who must have been Buster. I remembered the dream Andrew told me about him and shuddered. I walked over to the photograph and picked it up out of its box. “This must be Robert, no?” I asked. She looked up from sobbing and saw the photograph in my hands. “Oh yes.” She answered as she walked over. “That’s my Robert there, Lord he was handsome. And of course, there’s Andrew and his dog, Buster.” A chill ran up my spine as she said his name. Something told me Mrs. Jennings knew very little if not nothing about the dreams her son was having. I looked down at the box I took the photograph from and saw a proposal to buy a property. I was about to look away when something caught my eye. “Mrs. Jennings?” I said, not lifting my eyes from the paper “Please dear, call me Gloria. I don’t feel like much of a Mrs. anymore.” “Gloria, I thought all the property you owned was in Massachusetts?” She blinked at me for asking such an out-of-the-moment question. “Well, yes dear it is.” She answered, studying my face. “Sorry it’s just, I couldn’t help but notice this proposal here, for a property in Louisiana?” She looked lost for a second and then I saw the memory hit her. “Oh yes, that was a property Robert was looking into. He simply adored that Louisiana house. I’m not too sure how he even found the place quite honestly. In fact, when he first started flying down there every other weekend I was all but sure he was having an affair, but when I asked if I could come with him he didn’t put up a struggle at all.” She picked up the proposal and thumbed through the pages until she found a picture and handed it to me. The house was huge and old, with big columns that framed the front of it, and a black gated fence surrounding the yard. The windows were too dark to see through but it looked to be two stories, only wide enough barely to fit in the picture. It looked a little run down but I could see why Robert was interested in this house, it had the potential to be absolutely gorgeous. After looking over the picture for some time I finally spoke. “And this house…” I began. “Are you selling this as well?” “Why, no, we don’t own it, Doctor.” She said, looking hurt by those words. “Robert passed before we could finish up the paperwork. Such a shame too because the place was lovely.” I don’t know why but my heart sank a little bit with this. “But Robert visited there often, right before his death?” I asked. “Yes. Yes he did.” Gloria responded. “The funny thing is, Robert was known for closing on properties quickly, sometimes too quickly.” She said with a chuckle. “It was like he was afraid to finally go through with it.” She watched me scrutinize the photograph of the house. “You look, interested Doctor.” She said, the chuckle returning as well. “Are you looking to make a move as well? Or get into the real estate biz?” “Maybe…” I said trailing off. “Well tell you what. That whole box is full of information Robert kept on that house, separated a bit amongst some other paperwork. I’m just gonna shred all this stuff so if you’re interested, help yourself.” It took me a bit to register what she just said. “Sure, yeah.” I finally managed to push out. “That sounds great Gloria, thank you.” I picked up the box and slowly started walking to the door. “Say, just for curiosity’s sake…” I started. “Who was the previous owner of the house?” “Oh well it didn’t have an owner, it wasn’t in use when we viewed it.” She said. “Technically it’s owned by the Bank of Louisiana. Before that, it was a school.” “A school huh?” I ask. “Yep. If what the woman who showed us the property told us was true, it was the first all-black school in the whole state.” I stood there for a minute. Thinking about how bizarre this whole thing was. Why was Robert looking to buy an old run-down school in Louisiana? Why this one specifically? And why wouldn’t he close on the property? As I turned to leave I heard Mrs. Jennings call out from behind me. “Oh, Doctor.” She said. “One last thing.” “Yes?” “I won’t ask why–although I think I know–but if you’re gonna walk around on the liquor, drink gin.” I was startled. “I’m sorry?” “Gin, honey.” She said. “It’s tougher to smell on someone. That’s what Robert used to do.” I left that office feeling out of place. As if everything that just happened was a dream. I drove straight home and immediately started rifling through Robert’s paperwork. It was tough business at first. I wasn’t too adept at identifying real estate documents so I didn’t quite know what I was looking at at first, but about an hour in I got the hang of it. I separated the paper work out on my dining room table. In one pile I had all the information about the house. Turns out the thing was owned by some incredibly wealthy family back in the early 1800’s. In fact, they were one of the first families to move down to Louisiana once we got it from the French. The date when they fully converted the place to a school I couldn’t find but it looked like the Bank didn’t get ahold of it until the 1960’s. I sat back and scratched my head. I looked at the other two piles I had made. One was anything Robert had written on or used not pertaining to this house and the other was just junk. I walked over to the junk pile and started putting the papers back into the box, one by one. Halfway through the pile I got to a beat-up looking manila folder. I undid the clasp and pulled the papers out from inside it. I thumbed through the first few pages, more rental agreements for Massachusetts properties. I was about to throw them in the box when I noticed a series of numbers on the corner of a page. “12-4-21” I pulled this paper out and studied it. It was a rental agreement for a studio apartment

112 minutes

May 2, 2015

Beings and Entities

It Has No Face

Ghost_Eye_Tree

Everyone has tales about the strange and bizarre. My story is about how my half-hole mask saved my life, and continues to save my life to this very day. Late in December, I was traveling north from California to my home state of Oregon. Nothing fancy, I was just going to visit the family for the holidays. On my way north I hit a small snow storm, nothing awful, just a lot of snow falling all at once. I wasn’t worried about the small increase of snow at first, considering I had snow tires installed before I started my long journey home. I did, however, get a little hesitant to drive when the snow started to really come down. The large amount of falling snow coupled with the large amount already littering the ground as I traveled higher into the mountains caused me to consider finding a place to stay for the night. I figured I could get some sleep while the storm passes over, that and the fact that I could give my car’s heater a break before it would decide to burst into flames- or worse, just stop working all together. I scanned as much of the landscape as I could, but there were no buildings in the immediate area. The only other option that I had for my predicament was to keep driving and hope there was a town or exit nearby that I could take in order to escape from the storm. I must have been driving for at least an hour before I saw a sign up ahead indicating how far the closest city was. My heart sank a little when I read 162 miles as it flew by my windshield and vanished into the snowy night. At this point the snow was beating against my windshield, and I knew that I wasn’t going to last 162 minutes let alone 162 miles. The digital clock on my radio read 1:21AM, and I decided that the next turn off I saw I would take and hope that I could find a neighborhood that will produce some results on my current endeavor. My thought process was: either freeze to death in my car, or stay the night at some random person’s house. Weighing the two options in my head I picked the only thing a sane person would pick and go with the house. Another 30 minutes flew by, and still no luck finding a place to pull off. Just when I was starting to loose hope I saw a turn off in the distance. A small shape started make its way closer into my head lights and on further inspection it was reveled to me that they were two wooden poles that possibly belonged to a fence. When I turned onto the road between the two wooden poles the ground beneath me felt rocky and rough, like I was traveling on gravel. I didn’t drive for too long before I started to see a small cabin creep into my field of view. The lights in the cabin were off, but the place seemed to be in good shape. I parked my car under a tall wild-looking tree that took residence on the cabin’s front lawn. Getting out of my car, I immediately grabbed my extra jacket and put it on pulling the half-hole mask I wore around my neck up and over my ears to keep the heat around my face. I put my cap on and trudged up to the cabin after putting my cap snug on my head. As I traveled through the cold windy night up to, what I felt was my salvation I immediately regretted not getting any gloves for my hands. Despite the irritation I had with my hands, my face and the rest of my body were comfortably warm so I didn’t have much room to complain. I stuffed my frozen hands deep into my pockets and continued my journey across the cabin’s lawn. As I made my way to the door I noticed something odd. There was no indication of life anywhere; there wasn’t even a car in the front yard. Taking my right hand out of my pocket I knocked 3 times, waiting patiently before saying “H-hello? Is anyone in there? I’m sorry to bother you so late at night, but I need a place to stay for a few hours.” Nothing answered my plea for help, so I knocked 3 more times on the door hitting my knuckles harder against the aged wood of the entrance. “Hello?” I said again a little louder before continuing with “I’m not here to rob you or anything; I just need a place to stay for the rest of the night. I promise I’ll be gone by sunrise.” As I finished my sentence I touched the ornate metal door handle. Noticing that the door seemed to be unlocked I said in a loud voice “I’m coming in now, if there’s anybody in there let me know now please.” I pressed the metal leaver down, finding it a bit odd that the door was unlocked, and opened the door with little resistance on the other end closing it behind me with about the same resistance despite the fact the door looked really old. Looking around the area I noticed the cabin had 5 rooms: the living room- which was the biggest room- a small kitchen, an even smaller washroom, and- what I assumed were- 2 small bedrooms in the back. No lights were on inside the cozy cabin making it almost pitch dark if my eyes weren’t already adjusted to the darkness from outside. I decided the best thing to do would be to search for a light switch, so I took out my phone and turned on my flashlight app to scan the walls. My scan produced no results however, and at the risk of losing precious battery power on my phone I decided the best option would be to turn off the light and put my phone on airplane mode. Before turning off my light I studied the paintings hanging on the wall that I glossed over in the initial scan. Each painting that crossed my sights was just typical landscapes or harbors- things like that. There was a painting that looked like a fox hunt or something like that, but other than that it was just typical paintings you would see hanging on the walls around an elderly person’s home. There was a painting, however, that caught my attention. The painting was small and consisted of what looked like two adults- a mother and father- a teenage girl, and a small child. The family captured in that painting were wearing what looked like Victorian era clothing. I’m only guessing about the clothes, I mean they could have been from the 1800’s or the early 20th century- the point is that the clothing was very ornate and regal. There was something really disturbing about the image in the painting though. The faces of each member of the family looked like they were smoothed over with clay- it’s kind of hard to describe it, but the 3 family members looked like they had no facial features. By no facial features I mean instead of the normal facial features you and I have, the 3 people in the painting hade grooves of smooth flesh where normally you have an eye, nose, or mouth. The only person in the painting that didn’t posses a blank face was the teenage girl, which had normal facial features for a teenage girl- in fact she was quite breath taking. I pulled myself away from the painting to take a glance at my phone for the time. My phone indicated that it was passed 2 o’clock in the morning, so I decided to go to the back room and check to see if it was occupied. To my relief the room was vacant besides a medium sized bed, ornate dresser, and nightstand there wasn’t much to go by. The walls were blank besides more sappy paintings to give it a little more atmosphere. Although there was no indication of a heating system- besides a chimney- the rooms were bearable enough that I figured I could just bundle up in my clothes under the covers in order to stay warm. I was only going to be there for a few hours anyway, so there wasn’t much point in starting a fire plus the people who owned the cabin wouldn’t be back tonight considering how late it was. I hopped into the worn out bed facing the open door next to another door I assumed was a closet and pulled my half-hole mask completely up and over my face to make sure my head would stay nice and warm the rest of my stay. Pulling the fabric of my mask down slightly I set the alarm on my phone for 4:30AM and put it back down onto the nightstand. I covered my face again and bundled up tightly with the sheets, closing my eyes and letting dreamland take me away until I woke up after what felt like minutes later to the sound of scratching. My body froze as I heard the noise over and over again softly coming from the closed door. I tried to relax myself by thinking that all the noise that I heard was just a rat or some other animal that was spending the night in the closet while the cabin’s owners were away. Quietly I shifted onto my back, pulling my half-hole mask down slightly so a little slit appeared giving me a small window to look at what was out there. I laid on the bed stiff as a board with my cap and mask covering my face in such a way that it acted like a visor giving me a small peak at what was in the darkness. Thankfully my eyes were still adjusted to the dark, which gave me a small amount of reassurance as I continued looking in the direction the scratching noise was coming from. The scratching continued louder and longer for what seemed like minutes until just like that, it suddenly stopped. Silence filled the room again, but it wasn’t a safe kind of silence. The deafening silence in the room was a foreboding ominous sort of silence. The vacuum of sound in the air was the type of silence that happens in a movie just before something jumps out at you. Just when I began to calm myself down the door knob to closet began to jiggle and turn very slowly. My heart was racing out of my chest as I saw and heard that knob turn, and every inch of my body wanted to bolt out of that bed and out of that cabin before whatever was on the other side of that door got out after me. I laid perfectly still on the bed despite the fact that I had a cocktail of adrenalin, nerves, and instincts telling me to get the hell out of there. My eyes widened as the door to the closet opened slightly and I saw what looked like a dried head attached to an elongated neck pop out of the opening followed by a skeletal body. The thing that was emerging from the closet crawled on all fours out of the doorway and slowly made its way to the bed I was sleeping in. I had never been more frightened in my whole entire life as the thing stood up, almost touching the roof of the cabin, and looked down in my direction. The creature stood there studying me as I peeked through the thin slit in my mask, pure terror swirling around in my mind as I glanced up at the body of the creature. Looking at the creatures’ skeletal face I noticed that it had no eyes in its’ eye sockets, which lead me to believe that it couldn’t see me even though I could see it. Just when the idea of it not being able to see me started to give me a little comfort the creature began to speak. “Strange…” The creature whispered softly as it continued to watch me, and then began to speak again. “It has no fear of me…” The creature continued to say in a hoarse tone as it began to breathe loudly, continuing to look at me and gripping down on the edge of my bed. Feeling the creatures’ bonny hand touch the edge of my bed caused my brain to go into complete panic mode. The only thing that stopped me from jumping up was the thought that maybe the creature believed I was dead or asleep and wouldn’t attack. “How can it not fear…? How can it not fear me..?” The thing said through clenched teeth before loudly gasping and suddenly pulling back with its’ mouth open in an expression that seemed like fear. “It has no face.” The thing whispered to itself as it continued to back away. “It has no face.” The creature said again, but this time louder than before and slightly more threatening. “It has no face!” The creature shouted as it backed off further away from the bed. I heard the thing breathing loudly and quickly before calming down and slowly returning to the side of the bed. Leaning over me slowly, the creature continued to look at me before softly beginning to breathe on my face. I could smell its’ foul breath even through my mask. The smell was so powerful that it took all my strength not gag as a reflex to the awful stench. In my mind I made the choice to keep motionless, and not do or say anything that could compromise whatever illusion I was giving the thing that was currently studying me. The creature breathed on me again softly. The stench I smelled from its’ breath could only be described as pure death, which only strengthened my resolve to stay perfectly motionless. “Strange…” the thing whispered at me again, leaning in close to me to the point where I could see and smell its’ decaying flesh. The creature slowly reached for me, its’ hand slowly moving towards my face. With every inch that decaying hand moved I couldn’t help but feel my situation becoming more and more dire. I thought that this was it for me. The creature would kill me tonight, or take me away and torture me then kill me and no one would know what happened to me. No one would find my body out here, and no one would know my story. I could feel tears start to swell up in my eyes as I thought of everyone I ever loved being yanked away from me in this one moment. “No face, no face, no face.” The creature softly chanted as its’ hands crept ever closer to my face. I could hear the anguish in the creature’s voice as it continued chanting over and over as it reached for me. As the creatures’ long boney hand crept only centimeters away from my face I braced myself for the worst, making the last thoughts I would ever have about the people who I loved. Just as I thought my life was all over a sudden loud noise erupted from the room, filling the ear closest to the nightstand with a flood of beeps, and causing the creature to scream and jump back. As the noise continued the creature threw itself back against the wall shrieking uncontrollably in terror as it stumbled back towards the closet. I was dumb struck for a second before the thought came to me that I had set my alarm for 4:30AM, which must have been the source of the noise. I jumped out of the bed grabbing my phone and pointing the lit up screen at the monster as the alarm continued to ring loudly. The loud ringing caused the monster to shriek even more in confusion and terror as it retreated quicker as I approached. Seeing my chance I activated my phones flashlight and put it on strobe in order to disorientate the monster further. “No face! No face! No face! The creature shrieked at me as it withdrew to the safety of the closet. I continued to shine my light on the creature, and for added effect I started playing loud music as I continued to jab my phone in the monsters’ direction like a lion tamer. The thing threw itself into the dark recesses of the closet and I shoved the door back locking it after I slammed it closed. The shrieks coming from the monster started to get fainter and fainter, like it was retreating deeper into the house. “No face! No face! It has no face!” I could hear the creature yell out as it got further and further away. After hearing the last retreating words of the thing that terrified me the whole night I bolted from the cabin at break-neck speed, jumping into my car, and floored it off the gravel road. I was shaking all over as I drove, and when I pulled my half-hole mask further down my exposed skin was as white as the snow that littered the ground. I was so frightened by the whole experience as soon as I pulled into the first town I saw, I parked my car, and began to sob uncontrollably for awhile. The experience that I had just been through would scar me for life, but as I wept in my car in the parking lot of a seven-eleven I couldn’t help but start to laugh a little in between my fits of crying. I got through my ordeal without so much as a scratch on me- well besides the mental scars- I was fine, I was alive, and I didn’t have to worry anymore. After I finished with my whole episode of crying and laughing like an insane person I entered the store sniffling and wiping away the rest of my tears. As I continued into the store the cashier looked up at me and traced my direction with his eyes before continuing with what he was doing. The store was mostly empty, besides an elderly couple, I was the only customer in there. “Had a rough night?” The cashier said with one eyebrow cocked up while he scanned my items. “You have no idea.” I said looking out the window at the sunny winter day. “I noticed you looked a bit upset when you came in. What happened? Did you get dumped or something?” He said looking up at me as the register computed how much I owed him. Looking at the young man behind the register, he seemed to be a little younger than I was- although that doesn’t say much because even though I’m 22 I look younger than my actual age. I looked at the cashier’s name tag for a second before feeling that I had nothing to lose by telling him about the night I just had. The small name on his ID tag read Evan, and as I finished telling him my frightening tale something odd happened. I expected him to burst out laughing or say I was the best liar he had ever talked to. Instead of doing any of that Evan just stood there, his skin milk white as he stared at me with an expression so horrified he gave me the impression that he just witnessed someone get run over by a train or something. “Evan, a-are you alright?” I said looking into his eyes while we both stood there quiet. “W-what? Oh… Yea- it’s just…” Evan began to say before his thoughts trailed off due to the new feeling that we were both being watched. I began to feel eyes burn into the back of my head before turning around to see the old couple I glanced at when I entered the store beforehand. The old couple possessed the same horrified look that Evan had just a few seconds ago, they must have heard the whole story I told. After a few moments of silence the old couple asked me what I knew about the cabin, to which I couldn’t really say, I gave them the best description I could about what I saw. The couple proceeded to tell me about the cabin, how long it’s been there, and that it was haunted by a presence so terrifying that the place was condemned and left to rot away after so many people disappeared there. They told me that no one who ever stayed in that cabin has ever been seen alive again- if they’ve ever been seen at all after their visit. “One of my best friends stayed the night in that cabin…” Evan said quietly as he stared off into the distance, but continued his thoughts with “I refused to go into the cabin, I knew something bad would happen if we went. I tried so hard to convince him that the dare was stupid and to not go in, but he refused to be labeled as a chicken and continued with the dare.” Evan’s eyes began to water as he continued with his story “I never saw him again after that night. I kept calling his house but his parents still couldn’t find him. We put out flyers and billboards but we never had any luck. After a few days we contacted the police and I told them about the cabin.” Evan began to choke down tears as he clenched his fist “They found him in the basement of that cabin sprawled out on the floor. His eyes were surgically removed from his eyes sockets, his nose was removed, and his lips… they were sliced off. When they found him he was naked with an incision from the bottom of his rib cage to his pelvis down the middle of his body. All of the internal organs were extracted from his body and to add insult to injury his genitals were sliced clean off. But you want to know the worst part of it all? When the police did an autopsy on the body, they found that he was alive during the whole process.” Evan winced as he remembered the whole gruesome site and said “they never found who, or what did it. There was no DNA evidence to convict anybody, they didn’t find the tools that made the incisions, and they didn’t find anything.” Evan clenched his fist tighter on the table before the old man listening to our conversation put his hand on Evans shoulder to reassure him that it was going to be alright. As he comforted Evan he looked at me and said “People have been disappearing from that area for decades- maybe even centuries for all we know, but the bodies always end the same gruesome way. I don’t care who you are, no one deserves something like that happening to them. They should just torch that evil place to the ground. The old lady joined her husbands’ side and looked at me with the most foreboding face I had ever seen. “If your story is true, you should consider yourself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth. In all my years of living you are the only one to go into that cabin and come out alive.” The woman said gripping onto her husbands’ hand tightly as she spoke to me. After hearing the old woman’s’ words I realized that Evan said the body of his friend was found in the basement, which explains why the monsters voice got fainter. It would have pulled me into the basement if my phone hadn’t gone off. I quickly paid for my items and left the store more troubled now than I was when I entered. Feeling drowsy due to the lack of sleep and constant adrenalin rush caused by my whole terrible ordeal I decided to go to a hotel and spend the day sleeping and relaxing to get my mind off things. That night I sat on the bed in my hotel room and looked at the 2 items that saved my life. In one hand I gripped onto my half-hole mask, which hid my face from that terrible monster. In my other hand I held my Cell phone, which scared away the horrible beast that could have killed me. I decided that from that day on I would always wear my half-hole mask to bed- it saved my life that’s the least I can do for it. The recent brush with death I just experienced had taught me that life is too precious to waste, so I decided to ask my best friend Samantha out on a date and things worked perfectly. Samantha and I were together for 2 years before I recently asked for her hand in marriage- which she said yes. Part of me will never forget that awful night and because of it not only have I been wearing my half-hole mask to bed every night since then, I’ve also made it a priority not to live in any type of house that has a basement. I as an added safety measure I started locking every door before going to bed- it’s a pain, but you can never be too careful. Despite these crazy precautions Samantha has accepted my little quirks and has continued to be supportive as we continue or journey through life together. I couldn’t be happier with the way things turned out in my life, and I’m so lucky to be with Samantha- everything’s perfect. There’s just one thing that bothers me- and I think I might just have to blame my imagination, but sometimes when I wake up at night, when it’s really quiet… sometimes I’ll hear soft scratching noises. Also- and I think it’s just paranoia, but I swear, sometimes I hear something whisper “No face…” From inside my closet…

15 minutes

March 4, 2015

Locations and Sites

Wendall Lane Diaries: You Shouldn’t

Vincent Vena Cava

Disclaimer: I am not a paranormal investigator. I am an author. While looking for inspiration for a book, I came across a series of stories surrounding a home in the American Pacific North West. It is an extremely un-extraordinary looking house in an extremely un-extraordinary looking residential neighborhood, but the stories that have emanated from its former residents and the people who lived in the town that it’s located in are quite extraordinary. Through my research of the house on Wendall Lane, I have come across accounts that range from the super natural to just plain bizarre. In order to protect the privacy of the people in the town and the current inhabitants of the house on Wendall Lane, I have not only changed the name of everyone in these stories, but the name of the street as well. Wendall Lane is just an alias for the true location of these accounts. *** Alan Palmer lived in the house on Wendell Ln. from September 2002 to July 2003. After months of trying to contact him about his time there, I finally received an e-mail agreeing to set up a meeting. Quite a few of the house’s prior residents had turned down my requests for face to face interviews so I jumped at the chance to talk to him in person once the opportunity presented itself. Palmer, who worked as a socioeconomics professor at the University of Washington, arranged to meet me and talk over drinks at a place of his choosing in downtown Seattle. The bar was called Oliver’s Lounge and was located in the historic Mayflower Park Hotel. Upon arriving, I was surprised to see just how crowded it was for 3:00 PM on a Tuesday. There were people seated at nearly every table while food runners and waiters dressed in white servers’ jackets and black bowties hustled and bustled about the room bringing people their orders. Windows stretching from floor to ceiling allowed for an ample amount of sunlight to illuminate the space, giving it a genuinely open and inviting ambience. I spotted Palmer in the corner sitting at a small high table and sipping on a glass of scotch. He greeted me with a hearty handshake and a bright smile after I introduced myself to him. The man was greying a little around the ears, and I could tell shortly after meeting him that he was incredibly intelligent, but aside from that he seemed to have the demeanor of a fellow 15 years his junior. Palmer was a light-hearted gentleman who loved a good joke and he insisted on telling me a few of his favorites before I turned my tape recorder on. Once he had his fun we started the interview. “Believe it or not, you’re not the first person who’s tried to contact me about the time I spent living on Wendell Ln. Apparently there are all kinds of “ghost enthusiasts” out there who’ve heard about the house through the various online forums these types of people tend to frequent. Nerds and losers – you know the type – they spend their time sifting through thread after thread on the Internet, pretending that they’re doing something productive with their lives. Hell, most of them are probably overweight man-children sitting in their parents’ basement and conducting their ‘research’ in between anime cartoons.” Palmer let out a laugh, seemingly pleased with his depiction of the paranormal research community. I decided to omit the fact that I first heard about him through one of the online forums he was talking about. He took a sip of scotch and continued on. “So naturally I ignored your e-mails thinking you were another one of those ghost geeks. It’s strange. I probably wouldn’t have agreed to meet, but I came across one of your books by complete accident. My nephew mentioned your work in passing when I was over at my brother’s house for dinner a few weeks ago. I put two and two together and realized you were the same author who had been e-mailing me so I figured why the hell not? I’m game to talk about it if you are, all though I must admit my story probably isn’t as interesting as demons or monsters or whatever the hell it is you write about. Not a whole lot happened while I was living there. In fact, the only reason I lived in the house for such a short period of time was because an old colleague of mine offered me a full professorship here at the University of Washington not long after I purchased it and the commute was just too far. My workplace at the time had no job security, I was on the chopping block every year so there was no way I could turn down the offer. This was before the housing bust in ’07. It was a sellers’ market; banks were giving away loans like there was no tomorrow so it wasn’t difficult to turn right back around and flip the place. Hell, I even made thirty grand! Plus, I love Seattle. The weather sucks, but this city has culture!” We made small talk for a bit. He told some stories about work, his travels to Europe, and even asked me about some of the upcoming books that I’ve been working on. I was beginning to wonder if flying all the way out to Seattle to speak to him had been a big waste of time. After all, Palmer appeared almost completely uninterested in discussing any and all aspects of the house. I directed his attention back towards the reason why we had met when I asked him to describe the most bizarre encounter he could remember having in the short time he lived on Wendell Ln. “Haha! Now you’re starting to sound like the Internet ghost geeks! Fine, fine, let me think. Like I said, nothing really strange ever happened, that’s why I –” He paused for a moment and looked out the window towards the street. “There was one thing. I had almost forgotten about it – the TV incident. It was a Friday night in June, about a month before the house sold. There was nothing on. You know how crappy television programming can be on the weekends, especially in the summer time! I was scrolling through channels on my TV’s menu looking for something to turn my brain off to when the title of a show caught my eye. It was called “You Shouldn’t Watch”. I figured with a name like that, how could I not give it a go? Also, the show was on a channel I had never seen before – Channel 732. To be honest, I don’t watch much TV and when I do, I don’t usually venture out of the HD channels so I wasn’t even sure if it was covered under my cable package. Now, I don’t know what yours looks like, but the way my cable provider’s menu was set up different colors are used to distinguish between different types of shows. You get green for sports, purple for movies, and blue for everything else. However, the menu color for this particular show was black. The text was yellow, which was also unusual since the show’s title is always written in white. Even the font was different. Don’t ask me to describe what it looked like because I really can’t recall. All I know was I had never seen letters written in that way before. I know that sounds odd, but the best description I could give you is that even though the lettering looked completely alien in appearance, my mind could somehow interpret what it said – “YOU SHOULDN’T WATCH”. Now I’m starting to sound like the Internet weirdos. Ha!” Palmer polished off his glass and called the waitress over to order another drink. “Anyways, from the very second I turned on the program, I knew I was watching something very strange – very strange indeed. The black and white picture on my television was of a mostly empty room. There were no visible windows or doors; the place seemed cold and uninviting – like how I’d imagine a jail cell in Bangladesh would look. Not dead center, but slightly off to the left of the frame was a man sitting at an old rusty table. He was shirtless and looked to be very malnourished. It reminded me of those old photos you see of the Jews who suffered through German concentration camps during World War 2. I remember wondering if he was a prisoner there. The frail man wore a pair of tattered slacks, but no belt or shoes. His mouth hung a gape as if his jaw was too heavy to close. There was no music or dialogue; the only noises radiating from my speakers were the sounds of his wheezy, raspy breaths. God! It sounded like he was suffering from emphysema or something. I followed his gaze down to an old rotary phone sitting on the tabletop. He just gawked at the thing like a buffoon while I stared at the screen, mesmerized by the odd scene taking place on my television. I hit the info button, hoping to read a synopsis of what the show was about, but of course there was nothing so I just kept watching. For minutes he didn’t move. I giggled to myself for a bit – you know, the way you do when something makes you uncomfortable and your brain thinks laughing will ease the tension. The whole time I was waiting, hoping for something that resembled dialogue. Anything to prove that I was just watching some weird movie and had simply turned it on at the wrong time, but nothing ever happened. Perplexed and a little bit bored, I stood up from my couch and headed over to the kitchen to rummage through the fridge for a little late night snack. I was about halfway done making myself a sandwich when I heard the most terrible noise.” Palmer paused briefly. At first I thought he had stopped his story because of the waitress returning from the bar with his drink, but he barely acknowledged her presence. The man was caught up in deep thought as though he had just remembered something important. When he finally began speaking again the tone of his voice had completely changed. Gone was the chipper upbeat persona I had come to know him by. Palmer was clearly distraught. “It sounded horrible – like a dying animal. I remember an awful sensation of nausea washing over me; it was the strangest thing. There was an ominous feeling in the air too – death, ruin, calamity all hanging over my head. Once I realized that the noise was coming from the television, I put down my sandwich and hurried back towards the living room. The scene on the TV was essentially the same except now the sickly looking man had turned his head up towards the ceiling and was howling and groaning in the most unpleasant of ways. The longer I watched the more it made me feel like I was going to retch. The whole thing was utterly abhorrent. The man would moan for 30 maybe 40 seconds at a time before stopping suddenly, then he would take another deep wheezy breath and the terrible sounds would begin anew. I cringed as I took it all in. My visual and auditory senses were being assaulted by the most disagreeable of stimuli and I was still fighting off the urge to vomit all over my living room carpet. Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, the man still groaning mind you, turned his head in the direction of the screen and stared straight into the camera. The thing is, I was certain he was looking directly at me. That’s what it felt like; it was almost as if we were in the same room. I probably should have turned off the show, but after minutes of nothing something was finally going on and I felt compelled to keep watching even though I was suffering immensely. I stared into the glazed over eyes of the sickly looking man until he turned his attention down towards the phone sitting on the table –” Palmer hunched over in his seat and removed his glasses. He seemed visibly shaken. The 42-year-old econ professor clasped the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger and let out a deep sigh. Beads of sweat had begun to form on his forehead. “I’m sorry, forgive me. I haven’t thought about this night in a long time. I suppose it’s possible that my mind pushed this episode to the back of my consciousness and I forgot all about it – kind of a defense mechanism type of thing. I’ve read about case studies where army veterans who witnessed horrific events develop amnesia about their time in the military. It seems as though I may be going through something similar, except as I sit here and talk to you, everything begins to come back to me.” I asked him if he wanted to continue. He agreed and then resumed his story. “His hand quaked violently as he lifted the phone to his ear. His arms were rail thin and it looked as though he was struggling mightily to hold it in place. With his other hand, he clumsily started spinning the rotary dial. That’s when my cell phone started ringing. A chill ran down my spine, my nausea got even worse, that ominous feeling in the air had transformed into full on horror. I prayed with every fiber in my being that it was a coincidence as I looked at my phone’s caller ID. You have no idea how bad I wanted the number to be one that I recognized. I didn’t recognize it of course. Hell, it wasn’t even a number. It was something else entirely. In that same strange, alien text from the TV’s menu were the words ‘YOU SHOULDN’T LISTEN’ written where the caller’s number should have been. That was enough for me. I hung up the phone and reached for the remote on the coffee table. I must have pressed the channel button a dozen times, but the picture never changed. I tried the power button and still nothing happened. The man began to dial the phone again. Once more my cell started to ring.” Palmer had gone pale. He looked completely different from when I first met him – the polar opposite of the smiling man who shook my hand earlier. “I tried to turn off the TV manually, I even unplugged it from the wall, but by this time I knew it would do nothing. The sickly, pale man continued to stare at me – his horrible, empty gaze felt as though it was tearing me to pieces. Stomach bile slowly started to crawl its way up my esophagus. I don’t know why I answered the phone, I couldn’t help myself; maybe I thought if I did then it would all just end. My finger trembled as I pressed the answer button. I slowly lifted the phone to my face. I didn’t even need to say, ‘hello’. He just began speaking as if he was watching me answer the phone through the television screen – and perhaps he was.” Tears began to well up in Palmer’s eyes. I tried to tell him that he didn’t need to go into further detail if he was uncomfortable, but he kept talking as though he never even heard me. By that point, he would have finished his story even if there was no one sitting across the table from him. “He spoke to me in a terrible voice – it sounded like he was gargling shards of glass. His lips moved on the screen, but I could hear him clearly over the phone… he said…he said, “You shouldn’t tell”. Then in one horrible, inhumanly quick motion, he leapt out of the frame as the screen went to black. Jesus Christ, he said, ‘You shouldn’t tell.’ Did I just tell? Vincent please, does that mean I just told!?” Palmer fell silent and stared awkwardly into his glass for a moment. Then he apologized and excused himself from the table. It was the last I saw of him that night. He sent me a text message 15 minutes later explaining that he had to go home and instructing me to charge the bill to his tab. I tried to contact him once I got back to California, but he never answered my calls or e-mails. A few weeks later I found out what happened to him after performing a simple Google search of his name. Twelve days after Alan Palmer and I met to talk about the house on Wendall Ln, he was found dead in his Seattle home. There was no sign of a struggle or forced entry, however, due to the horrific nature of his death, Seattle PD does believe that he was murdered. Palmer’s body was discovered in front of the television on his living room couch missing ears, eyes, and tongue. Credit To – Vincent Vena Cava

10 minutes

January 7, 2015

Strange and Unexplained

Rabbits in the Creek

based on a true story, based on true events

I’m writing this because my family won’t talk about it anymore. I’m the only one who can’t seem to forget. I was raised on the outskirts of Preston, a small town in southern Idaho with a population of around 5,000. My more immediate community was an isolated, dead-end dirt road called Bear Creek. Less than twenty families lived on the Bear Creek. I didn’t mind being so isolated. I grew up in the comfort of wide fields and close neighbors that only rural people know. We were a Mormon community. Very church centered. Very community centered. All the young girls, myself included, were part of the Young Women’s group. And all of the boys were members of the local Boy Scout troop (which doubled as a church group in our area). We had 4th of July parties at the local ballpark and swam in the nearby reservoir. It was a good, quiet community. My house, a 92 year old farmhouse built by my great-great-grandfather, was situated on a small hill surrounded by a wide grass field on one side, and a snaking dirt road on the other. Across the road was the creek bottoms. Southern Idaho is categorized in a desert climate, so not much grows outside of the irrigated fields besides sage brush and burrs. The creek bottoms were the exception. The creek fed the growth of a thick tangle of pussy-willow bushes. In the late fall we used to go down into the bottoms and pick the white, cottony pussy-willow seeds to decorate the fences of our driveway. Being so isolated, it wasn’t uncommon for animals to come down from the mountains. We had a female moose who brought her calf down and lived in our orchard every winter. And the occasional lion wasn’t unheard of either. The summer when I turned eight (I remember because it was the same year as my baptism), a smaller mountain lion was spotted several times in our area. We weren’t worried. The big cats stayed away from the farms and usually moved on when the area didn’t yield enough food. The same summer my neighbor, Payton, was working on his Eagle Scout project. He loved National Geographic, and thought it would be pretty cool to try putting together a National Geographic submission on our little creek bottoms. The young lion that happened to be in our area at the same time made him especially excited. He decided he wanted to try and get pictures of the lion and e-mailed the National Geographic team for advice. They recommended setting up an automatic camera that takes shots every couple of seconds in an area the lion was known to visit. They also recommended setting some kind of bait so the lion was more likely to come by. No one in the creek liked the idea of live bait or carrion, so we came up with a different kind of bait. We decided to set up an audio recording of a dying rabbit and play it on a loop through a set of speakers hidden in the willows. I remember when everyone was down in the bottoms testing the speakers, and I heard the noise for the first time. The sound of a dying rabbit is horrible. It’s been described as being almost identical to the sound of a screaming child. If you’ve never heard it yourself, there’s plenty of recordings available online. It’s worth a listen. The camera was set up. The speakers were set up. Everything was perfect. Payton explained that he would allow the camera and recording to play uninterrupted for a week, and then he would go check on it. This would give time for our scent to fade from the bottoms and encourage the lion to come closer. At first I was worried about the noise. It was a truly horrible noise, and our house was the closest to the set-up point in the bottoms. My father assured me that the noise wouldn’t reach as far as our house, and I was relieved when we arrived home that night and he was correct. The bottoms were far enough away that I couldn’t hear anything. I remember Payton the next day at church. He was fidgety and excited to check on the equipment. But he had to wait a week, which everybody kept reminding him. He couldn’t risk going down too early and scaring the lion away for good. That night I woke up to an awful noise. I sat ram-rod straight in my bed with my eyes wide in the dark, hands clutched so hard my palms bore the indent of my fingernails for hours after. I knew that noise. It was the recording of the rabbit. It sounded faint, and far off, like it really could have been coming from the bottoms. But that was impossible. Because the recording had been going all night the previous day and I hadn’t heard a thing. I didn’t sleep that night. I was too scared to get out of bed and wake my parents. The recording played over and over again. I had the loop memorized. In the morning I stumbled into the kitchen for breakfast. My mom and dad were sitting at the kitchen table. They too had dark rings under their eyes. I hadn’t been the only one who’d heard it. Mom was convinced that the equipment must have been broken. She wanted to go down into the bottoms to check it out. Dad refused. He was a kind, gentle man and didn’t want to stir up any unnecessary drama. He was sure there had been a strong wind last night, and the wind was carrying the noise farther than it’s natural reach. He told us to listen. We did. He was right, we couldn’t hear it now. We forgot about it and went about our daily goings. The next night, it happened again. I stayed up in bed with my back to the wall. The screaming was even louder than before. But this time something was different. It was lower pitched than I remember. And parts of the loop were slowed down, as if the recording were warped in places. At times the loop did not loop naturally, and instead picked up at a random place in the middle. My mom didn’t mention anything at the breakfast table. But both her and my dad seemed tense. The third night I mustered the courage to stand beside my bedroom window and look out into the yard. For a moment I stood, rooted to the spot, my hands shaking no matter how hard I clenched them. The noise sidled in through the cracks in the window. I watched the outline of the trees in the yard. Perfectly still. Not even the slightest breeze stirred their branches. My mom announced that she would be going to visit her sisters in town the next day, and would probably spend the night there. She invited me to come along, but I was a daddy’s girl at heart and chose to stay at the farm. I took mom’s place beside dad in their bed that night but even that didn’t help. I don’t think my dad was asleep either, for he was unnaturally still the whole night. We began to hear the noise during the day too. I was drawing with chalk on the sidewalk when it happened. My shoulders tensed and the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. There was only one scream. A short, high pitched one. And then the recording fell silent. It happened again several times throughout the day, but never the whole loop. Just clips from it. Later that evening Payton’s dad came up the driveway on his 4-wheeler. He said he was looking for their dog, a sweet yellow lab who had been missing since that morning. Dad said he was sorry, and that we hadn’t seen her. I stared at him, silently begging him to mention the recording. But he didn’t. He was a quiet man after all. He didn’t want to bring up any unnecessary drama. Mom stayed away the whole week. Dad and I didn’t sleep. By Saturday the screaming could be heard constantly, though it seemed to have deviated from the familiar loop entirely. I didn’t recognize any of it. Sometimes the screams were thin and long, other times they were hardly more than growls. Once, while my dad had been heating up meat loaf for lunch, the noise rose into such a rancorous din that he dropped the plate and it shattered. I pressed my hands over my ears where I sat at the table and squeezed my eyes shut, but it didn’t help. The noise forced its way in through the cracks of my fingers and pinched my throat and rattled in my ribcage. The din lasted for a whole minute, then fell silent. Dad was shaking. That was the last we heard of the noise that day. Payton came by Saturday evening to ask permission to cross our road to collect the equipment. He was so excited. I watched him disappear into the creek bottoms with a sense of tired relief. After the equipment was gone, it would all stop. I couldn’t wait to get a full nights sleep. Not a minute later I spotted Payton coming back up from the creek. I was confused. It had taken us much longer to set up the camera and speakers, so I’d only assumed it would take just as long to collect them. My breath stilled when Payton came closer. He didn’t look right. His eyes were wide and his face pale. Something wet dribbled from his chin and onto his shirt; I later realized it was vomit. My dad caught him before he fell and demanded to know what had happened. Payton couldn’t speak. He just cried. We called his dad. I looked after Payton as both my dad and his dad went into the bottoms. They were gone a long time. When they returned, their faces were grim. And they smelled funny. I noticed red on my dad’s hands. I asked what was wrong but they brushed right passed me and immediately called the police. Nobody would tell me what had happened. I sat on the couch as a blur of neighbors and police officers swirled around me. At one point an officer placed something on the kitchen table and left. I looked into the kitchen curiously. It was the camera from the bottoms. I wish I hadn’t looked. The camera was a little banged up. Tiny scratches and dents covered the plastic casing. When I lifted it my hands stuck to the plastic. Something tacky and odorous covered the screen, but it turned on fine. The first set of photos were normal. Just the pussy-willows cast green in the glow of the night setting. As I continued to click through them they quickly became strange. At one point the camera angle changed, as if the camera had been knocked from its post. Grass now obscured most of the frame. Flecks of red appeared on the lens and remained for the rest of the sets. One photo made me pause. There was a figure in this one. Or half of a figure as most of the upper torso hadn’t made it into the frame. I thought it could be human. But it didn’t look like it should be standing upright. It’s legs were twisted, like an animal, and it seemed to be having difficulty supporting itself in an upright position. Beside the legs a long, thin arm hung. Whatever it was must have been stooped over, for its fingertips hung below its crooked knees. The next set was different. It was as if the camera had been picked up, and was now being held. The first photo was of the bottoms at night. The next startled me. I had to look closely before deciding what it was. A rabbit had been laid in the bushes, but its ears and most of its scalp had been peeled away. The next was of the same rabbit, but a thin, dark hand was holding it up against the sky. It’s limp body hung like something from a nightmare. In the following photos more rabbits joined the one, each with their ears and scalp removed. Then a cat. Then more cats. Then a dog, the yellow lab. Then the lion. The following photo was of seven rabbits, three cats, one dog, and the lion all laid out in a row facing the same way. Their arms and legs had been arranged as if they were marching. Like some parade. All of their scalps had been removed and tiny white glints of their skulls could be seen. The last photo was overly bright. Like the photo had been taken too close with the flash on. An eye dominated the frame, but it was yellowed and crusty, and had a bar pupil like a horse. In the bottom corner the edge of a mouth could be seen. No lips. Just teeth. Sharp and little, with wide gaps of red gum between them. I wish I hadn’t looked. I heard my dad talking to the police outside. They said the speakers had malfunctioned. The recording had only played the first night.

8 minutes

June 1, 2014

Based on True Events, Strange and Unexplained

The Door

Dispater, locations, madness, sites, strange, unexplained

I’m a first year resident at the local hospital, so I often work long hours and I’m always sleep-deprived. I do make decent money, if not nearly as much as a licensed doctor, but on account of student loans I live in a crappy apartment. The bedroom of this apartment is tiny and the only spot for my dresser is immediately to the right of the entrance. It’s just a bit too long for the space, so the door only opens halfway before it starts pressing against the corner of the dresser, and it makes an awful splintering noise when you’ve gone too far. This happened often enough my first month here that I’ve already left some big dimples in the wood. Outside, the bathroom is down the hall on the left, the living room to the right. The hallway is just wide enough for the bedroom door, with a couple of inches leeway on either side for the frame. Why is this important? About two weeks ago, the door to my bedroom moved. I’m not sure how else to describe it. I had just worked my second thirty-hour shift in three days, and on four hours of sleep I was getting up for another one. When I pulled open the bedroom door something struck me as off, and it took me a minute to realize what it was– the door had opened completely. I looked to see what had happened, discovering that while my dresser was still flush against both walls, there was an extra inch of space between the dresser and the door. I shrugged, chalked it up to some fluke of the apartment walls, and proceeded down the hall to shower before heading into work. When I got home thirty hours later, exhausted and desperate for sleep, the door was pushing against the dresser same as always. Nothing unusual happened for a couple of days, but on Thursday morning I was going out for another long shift when the door opened even wider. It looked like the doorway had shifted even farther left, far enough that I could see a half-inch of the hallway wall sticking out beyond the door frame. It was as though the contractor had miscalculated when he built the place, slightly displacing the doorway from the hall. An inch more and I’d have been able to see insulation and wiring. I stared at that sliver of drywall for a few minutes, dumbfounded, while my mind tried to come up with some rational explanations. The building was old, settling, and this was just the result of natural wall tensions easing. This disjunction had been there this whole time, and I had been too busy or too tired to notice. I’d slept through an earthquake, during which my room got displaced a couple of inches from the hall. All of the explanations seemed plausible. With work coming up in half an hour I really just wanted to get some coffee and get out of there, so I decided to call the super after I got off. However, when I got home the next morning the door was back to normal, and I was tired enough to not even care. Everything was ordinary the next day, too. On Saturday, I was headed to the hospital again when I found that although my door only opened halfway, grinding against the dresser as usual, the hallway itself had shifted a good foot. The entire wall and then some was clearly visible. To the left of the wall, where I should have been looking into my bathroom, there was this black, inch-wide gap. The light from my room only went a couple of inches into that shadowy space, but I could see a floor that looked to be made of concrete – smooth, featureless, and gray. This musty smell emanated from inside, like from an old, dry basement, or maybe an attic that had been left untouched for too long. My first instinct was to just close the door. Clearly this was a hallucination brought on by working too many hours with too little sleep, but…the doorknob clattered against solid drywall. My door wouldn’t close. Confused and more than a little disturbed, I initially thought to just leave. Get the hell out of there and worry about the details later. The need for a rational explanation, however, coupled with a morbid sense of curiosity, kept me from bolting out the front door. I called out of work for the first time in almost a year, saying that a pipe had burst in my apartment and that I needed to let the repairmen in to fix it. Next, I called the super and asked him to come by. Then, while waiting for him to arrive, I shined a flashlight into that sliver of space. There wasn’t much to see. The area ended at a cinderblock wall roughly where my hallway turned, and although I was blocked from seeing how far the room extended to the left, I got the impression that it was big, maybe bigger than my entire apartment. Even if I was wrong, though, the fact remained that there was a strange space where my bathroom was clearly supposed to be. I even looked to be sure – everything looked perfectly ordinary from my bathroom. The super arrived less than half an hour later, but in the time it took for me to answer the door and escort him back to my room, everything had gone back to normal. As you can imagine, I got pretty agitated, even frantic. However, when the super saw how upset I was he actually asked me outright whether or not the walls seemed to be moving on their own. While I gaped at him, he explained that the previous tenant – a young woman who had also worked at the hospital – had complained to him about something similar. She had claimed that the wall sometimes extended an inch or more past the frame of the doorway, but whenever he came to investigate nothing was out of the ordinary. The young woman eventually became hysterical, on the verge of moving out, but at his suggestion took a leave of absence from the hospital instead. After that, there had been no more complaints. She stayed until her lease was up and then left without incident. The super gave me a sympathetic look after he told me this story, and asked whether I had been working particularly long hours recently, or perhaps also felt trapped by my work schedule. I mean, what could I say to that? I agreed with him, informed him that I would be taking a break from work as well, and apologized for wasting his time. The super was cool about it, since I guess he had experience with this sort of thing, and even said that he was glad to help, that the hospitals work us residents too hard. After he left, I called work to let them know I’d be out tomorrow as well, and then decided to turn in early to make up for lost sleep. It was nearly midnight when I awakened. I’d been dreaming about something – I don’t remember what it was, but it must have been a nightmare because I woke up with this sense of utter dread washing over me. It was like when you’re alone in the early hours of the morning, silence hanging over your room like a sheet, and out of nowhere you get the feeling that someone is in the room with you. Standing behind you. Watching you. That was the feeling I had upon waking up in the stillness of my bedroom at midnight. And then I heard the scratching. It was faint at first, so faint that I thought I was imagining it, but gradually grew in volume until it was clearly audible from across the room. Something was scratching at my bedroom door. That in itself shouldn’t have been so alarming – I’d had mouse troubles at the apartment before. I’d even heard them scratching at the walls at odd hours of the night. After the events of the previous days, however, the sound jolted me awake, that sense of dread deepening into real fear. I slowly got out of bed and tiptoed toward my door. Up close, the sound was unmistakable – the scratching was coming from the bottom of the other side. Well, mouse or not, I reached over and, quietly as I could, locked the door. Then I grabbed the flashlight from the top drawer of my dresser, got onto my hands and knees, and shined it through the half-inch space underneath the door. The scratching stopped almost immediately. Then something reached in through the bottom of the door. I was so startled that for a moment I didn’t even realize what it was, and then it felt like someone had punched me in the gut. Three fingertips curled against the bottom of my door frame, wriggling slightly as though trying to push the door open. The fingers were gray and skeletally thin, stained the rusty brown any medical student could tell you was dried blood. Their nails were long and ragged, clearly broken numerous times, with the splitting and pitting characteristic of malnutrition. And then I heard something else coming from just outside, carried on that musty, dry-basement smell. “Help me…” The voice was so soft as to be barely audible, but it was clearly a woman, and I could hear panic running through it, quiet sobs underneath the words. And then I could hear something else, a sound like soft footsteps approaching from somewhere far away. And all the while the voice continued whispering, never growing any louder but getting more urgent, more rapid. “Help me…please, please, please help me…it’s coming…pleasehelpmepleasepleasehelpmepleaseit’scomingit’scomingpleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepl–” Then the fingers vanished, as though whomever they belonged to had been violently jerked away. I could hear the sound of something being dragged along the ground, something scraping frantically against the concrete, but that noise quickly faded into the distance. And then I heard the soft sound of footsteps approaching again. It stopped outside my door, and for a while there was only silence. Then, as I watched by the trembling light of my flashlight, the lock slowly began to turn. Somehow, it was being unlocked from the other side. I jumped up and slammed my shoulder against the door, dropping the flashlight in my haste, and scrambled to lock the door again. Something resisted my frenzied attempts to turn that little dial, and my fingers were so sweaty that they kept slipping off. Before I finished turning the lock, the knob twisted in my grip and whatever was back there hit the door hard enough that the whole thing shuddered. Raw terror flooded my system, and I pushed back as hard as I could, my body leaned almost parallel to the ground even as I continued fumbling with the lock. Whatever it was hit the door again, harder this time, such that it actually opened for a split second. I was almost sobbing at this point, but my bare feet found purchase on the linoleum floor and I shoved back with all my strength, somehow slamming the door back closed. At the same time, my fingers were finally able to wrap themselves around the lock and turn it. Using the time that bought me, I ran to my dresser and dragged it in front of the door, then sat down with my back against it. The pounding continued, even more strongly than before, but with my dresser in the way the door stayed closed. After a few minutes, it simply stopped, and there was another minute or two of silence before the soft sound of footsteps finally moved away. Still, I continued sitting in front of the dresser, back braced against it, too terrified to even think of opening the door or heading back to bed. The only window in my bedroom was too small to climb through, and I’d left my phone on the kitchen counter. There was nothing to do but sit and wait, which I did until the grayish light coming through my window announced the arrival of morning. It took me a while to finally muster the courage to push the dresser aside, and even then I just stood there for a few minutes staring at the doorknob. In the end, the need to know overcame the fear of the unknown, and I pulled the door open just a crack. My hallway sat outside, same as always, with no sign that anything was unusual. Even the other side of the door was pristine, with no evidence that any violence had been directed toward it during the evening. With the door halfway open, pressing against the dresser as usual, I slipped outside the bedroom and into the hallway, heart pounding even though I was already doubting my own mind. Could it all have been just a nightmare? Had I suffered a psychotic episode in the middle of the night, terrified of nothing more than a mouse scratching at my bedroom door? Did I spend the entire night camped out in front of my dresser on account of a hallucination? As I stood there, doubting, I let my bedroom door close behind me, and my nostrils filled with that dusty basement smell. I ran. I took off into the hallway, practically clawing against the wall as I dashed for the living room, and tore the front door open when I got there. Just before I launched myself outside, I heard the splintering noise of my bedroom door pressing against the back corner of my dresser. It’s been over a week. I haven’t gone back – not for my things, my clothes, nothing. I’m crashing on a friend’s living room couch instead. He brings me takeout when he comes home from work. I extended my leave of absence from the hospital, citing a death in the family. I tried finding the woman that used to live in my apartment, the previous tenant that had also complained about the moving walls, but her address forwarding had long since expired. Searching for her by name turned up no results – not on any social networking site, nor search engine, nor people finder. The super didn’t know any of her friends or family. I even checked the FBI’s Missing Persons page, with no luck. I hope she’s out there somewhere, merely beyond my ability to find. But I have nightmares every night, ones in which those emaciated fingers and soft, pleading voice reach out to me from a dark, endless space. Still, I insist that every door in the apartment stays open, because the last time I opened the front door, there was a tiny cross-section of wall exposed, as though the doorway had been displaced a half-inch from its usual spot.

9 minutes

October 24, 2012

Locations and Sites, Madness, Paranoia, and Mental Illness, Strange and Unexplained

String Theory

Have you ever had an experience that suggested someone else was in your house, and just thought “I don’t wanna know” and left it? Sometimes, fear of the unknown just seems like the preferable option than facing a real, concrete danger. Normally it’s nothing, though. One time, the beeper function of my wireless housephone went off, when I was the only one home. It could only be called from the living room. Another time, I swear someone took some change from my desk. They’re all probably just slightly disconcerting tricks of the memory. But what would you do when something truly suggestive happens? Would you run, or just ignore it, like I did? Last Monday was a normal day. I got up, brushed my teeth, changed into school clothes… All little parts of my morning ritual. It seemed like it would be another totally un-noteworthy day, until I saw the strings. There were three or four thick twine strings in my room. They criss-crossed between the walls around my bed, one attached to the door. No way would I have missed them before; I should have tripped over them. They were tied to pins in the walls, which had also not existed before ten seconds ago. Nobody could have been in my room while I was in it, let alone set this up. It was early, and my brain wasn’t processing correctly. I simply discredited the sight, untied the strings and left for school, leaving them balled up on my desk. It didn’t get any better later. Outside my house there were hundreds of them, tied between houses, around cars, across streets… This had to be some super elaborate prank. One of those hidden camera shows, or a comedy improv blog. They had gotten everyone else to play along too; passer-bys were tangled in them, tying them to objects they were walking towards and away from, as if they had been and were continuing to follow the course laid out for them. I nervously continued my journey to school. On the bus, every except me was tied to the door. At school, groups of friends were tied to each other; teachers were tied to their desks and boards. Oddly enough, at this point all I could wonder was why I had been left out. When my friend Lucy sat beside me in first period, she simply plonked her bag down on my lap and rested her chin in her hand, looking right past me to the window outside. “Hey Lucy.” No response. “Come on, I didn’t expect you to be in on this too. “ She sighed and started taking books from her bag. All the books were tied to her hands. I grinned, and yanked one of the strings off a book. She didn’t seem to notice, instead simply disregarding the book completely, letting it drop to the floor without a moment’s hesitation. “Um.” I leaned down, picking up her book and placing it back on her desk. She took no notice. “Well, if that’s how we’re gonna play it.” I smiled, trying to look playful, but really just trying to hide my nervousness. I bundled all the strings attached to her together with one hand, then pulled them all free. She blinked, turning to stare at me. “Holy crap, Martin. You’re like a ninja or something.” “I’ve been sitting here for maybe ten minutes.” I smiled again, relieved my friend had finally “noticed” me. “Where did all these strings come from??” She gasped, seemingly noticing for the first time. “I assumed you were all fucking with me…” She stood up, backing into a corner. No one else in the class noticed. “They weren’t here just a minute ago! Do you see them too??” Her tone made it clear she was genuinely scared. “No. Didn’t you-. “ I was interrupted by my teacher slamming the door behind her. Everyone except me and Lucy murmured a good morning, and still, no one seemed to pay either of us any notice. “People have been ignoring me all day.” I said to Lucy, before turning to our teacher. “Hey! Dumb bitch! You can’t teach for shit!” No reaction. “I’m getting away from all this shit.” Lucy pulled a few strings aside and left the class. I followed, and surprise-surprise, no one else noticed. We wandered the corridors, leaving and entering classes as we saw fit. Whenever we untied a chair or book from someone else, it was like it suddenly didn’t matter to them. It didn’t exist I showed her the street outside; there were more strings than when I came in this morning. Twice as many. We carefully picked our way through the tangle, making our way to a nearby coffee shop. Not particularly grand, I know. But what would you do in our situation? As I said, fear of the unknown sometimes seems like the safer option. On a few occasions, I suggested we untie a few more people. Lucy was opposed to it, remembering how terrified she’d been. In the coffee shop, we grabbed a couple of sandwiches and drinks from the fridge. We found a table, untied all strings attached to the chairs, and sat down. We both ate in silence, both of us too scared, both of us distracting ourselves by watching the strangers in the shop, oblivious to the strings. After twenty minutes, Lucy spoke up. “Now she’s gonna take that sandwich.” She said, pointing at a woman across the shop. Sure enough, she walked to the fridge and took the plastic wrapped sandwich she was tied to. “She pays for it and leaves.” She did so, according to the prophecies of the strings. “That guy doesn’t intend to pay.” I watched as a man took his coffee and ran out of the store, the two servers just looking too exasperated to go after him. “This is horrible.” She whimpered. “Let’s go. Please.” Outside wasn’t much better. Everyone just followed the strings’ instructions, going about their daily lives. Lucy announced she was going home to sleep this off, and I agreed to walk her home. She only lived ten minutes away. Away from the busier part of town there were fewer strings. It was nicer; we could pretend it wasn’t happening. When we turned onto Lucy’s street, she stopped, her mouth falling open. “What now?” I broke the silence, my voice sounding surprisingly small. ”Look.” She pointed outside one of her neighbours houses. I saw it clearly, and I’ll take my memory of that moment ‘til the day I die. A little dark imp, maybe three feet tall, walking along with its knuckles on the ground, almost like a monkey. It had two bulbous yellow eyes taking up about half its face, and no mouth or any other facial features. It was holding a hammer and a ball of twine, which it was letting out behind it. It walked quickly and quietly from the front door of the house to the mailbox. It stopped, hammered a nail into the side of the box, and tied it’s string around it. It turned to face us, and stopped when it spotted us. My bottom fell out even further than it had already been, but it just stared with a look of surprise and curiosity. You could almost say it was the more frightened one. Suddenly, it beckoned to us with its tiny hand. I looked at Lucy, she hadn’t moved. I looked back at the imp, which stared at me. I halved the distance between us, and then halved it again. This wasn’t fear of the unknown anymore; it was fear of this little guy. Didn’t seem like anything to be scared of. When I was a meter away from it, it extended its hand. “Uh. Hi.” I shook it. It nodded in approval, blinking its massive yellow eyes up at me. “So you’re the ones in charge of the strings?” It nodded eagerly. I called Lucy over, but she stayed where she was. “There are more of you?” Another nod. I wanted to ask it so many questions, about what it was and where it came from, but it seemed for now I was stuck with only yes or no questions. “Do we even have free will?” It just looked at me, almost sadly. I immediately felt sick to my stomach, and couldn’t bear looking at the little monster anymore. I grabbed Lucy, who had been listening to our exchange, and now sat on the curb with her head in her hands. “Come on.” We entered her house, and I made her a cup of tea. When I found her in the living room, she had untied her dog and was curled up with it, crying. I set the tea down and sat beside her. “I’m so scared.” She whispered after a good ten minutes of sobbing. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. “I’m going to sleep” She mumbled suddenly, and was under within the minute. Sleep was starting to sound pretty good all of a sudden, my eyelids suddenly felt like they were being weighed down. I collapsed to the rug, and the last thing I heard before I fell asleep was the scurrying of several sets of little feet nearby. I felt much better the next day, as if the whole affair had been a dream. I’d probably have believed that if I hadn’t been awoken by Lucy’s mother that morning, wondering what I was doing sleeping over without permission or something. Over breakfast, Lucy asked me why I looked so pale and nervous. I turned to her and smiled, mumbling something to her about feeling sick. But the truth was, I was scared because I couldn’t see any strings, and was wondering whether my actions were truly my own. — Credited to Tesla.

6 minutes

March 21, 2010

Strange and Unexplained

Doors

I was adopted. I never knew my real mother; rather, I knew her at one time but I left her side when I was too little to be able to remember. I loved my adopted family though. They were so kind to me. I ate well, I lived in a warm and comfortable house, and I got to stay up pretty late. Let me tell you about my family real fast: First, there’s my mother. I never called her Mom or anything like that; I just called her by her first name. Janice. She didn’t mind at all though. I called her that for so long, I don’t think she even noticed. Anyhow, she was a very kind woman. I think that she is the one who recommended my adoption in the first place. Sometimes I would lay my head against her in front of the television and she would tickle my back with her nails. She is one of those Hollywood mothers. Second, there’s Dad. His real name was Richard, but he never really liked me much so I began to refer to him as Dad in a desperate attempt to gain his affection. It didn’t work. I think that no matter what I called him, he would never love me as much as his own child. That’s understandable so I really didn’t press the matter. The most notable attribute of Dad was his unmoving sternness. He was not afraid to pop his children when they did something wrong. I found that out before I could use the restroom properly. He didn’t hesitate to spank me. Well, I’m in line and it’s because of his methods. Lastly, is my sister. Little Emily was really young when I was adopted, so we were about the same age, but she was slightly older. I liked to think of her as my little sister, though. We got along better than any sibling could possibly get along. We would always stay up late together and just talk. Well, she did a lot of the talking; I mostly just listened because I loved her. It was a great setup that we had! We were short on bedrooms, so- because I didn’t want to sleep in the living room by myself when I was littler- I had a pallet set up for me next to her bed on the floor. This is where I have slept since. But it was cool with me because I enjoyed being with her and I had always felt pretty protective of my little sis. Everything changed on a horrible Wednesday night. I was at home taking a nap when little Emily opened the front door. The sound of the door opening pulled me to a state of consciousness and I walked from the room down the hall to the living room. That’s when I first remembered it was Wednesday. I was never any good at keeping track of what day it was. Actually I’ll just go ahead and say it: My sense of time was HORRIBLE! But nevertheless, I knew it was Wednesday because Emily had just come home from her Church’s youth group gathering. She walked in the front door and hugged me, and then was followed in by Dad and Janice. “You have a good nap?” Janice said teasingly as she ruffled up my hair. I just shook my head away and snorted in a manner that clearly expressed that I was teasing back with her. “Don’t you snort at your mother like that!” said my father gruffly with authority. He shut the door behind him and hung up his coat. “I was clearly joking…” I growled under my breath. He must not have heard me because I didn’t feel him smack me. Emily then proceeded to our room and I followed. She started telling me about her day. You know… usual teenage girl stuff. But I listened so that she would feel better. After her summary she suggested watching TV and I obliged and jumped onto the couch as she was going for the remote. She rolled her eyes at my little-brother-like immaturity and scooted me over and sat down. The TV turned on and we watched it together until the sun went down. Emily was the kind of girl that- instead of watching cartoons and soap operas- would rather watch Discovery and Animal Planet and Natural Geographic. I like those too so I didn’t mind. Actually, those were the only channels that can hold my attention. So it got late and Janice walked up behind the sofa. “Emily it’s past your bed time. Turn off the television and go to your room. You too.” she pointed at me. Emily turned off the program we were watching grudgingly and stood up. She started down the hallway to our room. As I followed I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right. We went into our room and Emily turned off the light. Just as she did, I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. It was out the window, but as soon as I redirected my line of sight to where the window was no longer in my peripheral vision, what it was that I thought I saw was gone. I still remained alert. For my sister’s sake. I laid there in the darkness with nothing but the thin ray of light from the street lamp outside to illuminate the room. It wasn’t much. Time and time again I could have sworn that I heard subtle sounds just out the window… a twig break, leaves crunching, clothes jostling. And all the while I could smell a faint stench of sweat and blood. I kept my eyes open most of the night. The sounds outside subsided and the smell left my nose. I began to feel at ease. My eyelids closed. Not long after that, I heard a very loud crash on the other side of the house. I was up in an instant. “THERE’S SOMEONE IN THE HOUSE!” I barked with extreme adrenaline coursing through me. “Wake up!” I shrilly pleaded with Emily. She did, and as soon as I saw her sit up I ran to my parent’s room… Dad was dead. His neck was splayed open and gaping as blood spilled out of it, off the bed, and onto the floor. I saw that the master bathroom’s door was closed and just before it- on the outside- was a man. A man… I don’t feel comfortable calling it that. He was very large and rugged. He turned around and saw me and that’s when I saw him accurately for the first time. I wont forget it. His eyes were large and beady and trapped with lust. He was styling a beard that was badly unkempt with blood dripping off. His clothes were dirty and his face was cold. Just then I noticed the same horrid smell of sweat and blood from earlier, but this time it was overwhelming. He saw me. He saw me and grinned with a set of crooked yellow teeth. That smile threw me off. I thought that I was going to die, but then he turned back to the bathroom door completely unperturbed by my presence. I was terrified and didn’t no what to do. I just yelled and cried. I watched as he shouldered through door that was Mom’s only protection. I watched as he raised the large razor that he was carrying, but had obviously neglected to use properly. I watched as he sliced her open and tore her to shreds… I then heard something; the last thing that I wanted to hear… It was Emily’s scream coming from behind me. The large monstrosity looked up from my butchered mother and stared at my little sister. I was distraught. He stood up and quickly started walking toward us. My sis turned and ran, and I was at a loss when he bypassed me and went straight after her. Why was she still in the house? Had she not assessed the situation and run? Apparently not, and now she was dead and I was alone. I ran after them both. I expected the man to kill her as he had the rest of my family, but I was sadly mistaken. He grabbed her by the arm and jerked her as a way to make clear that he was in control. He dragged her through the house… I was making all of the noise I could now, hoping and praying that someone would come to my aid. He mustn’t take her. Not her. As he passed me I backed against the wall and whimpered with terror, “Why?” He didn’t respond except by putting his free hand on my head while Emily screamed in the other and saying “Good boy.” He gave another crooked grin and a very cold, unnatural laugh. I followed him to the door where he dragged my helpless sister after him. He opened it, pulled her out, and slammed it shut behind him. I am now sitting in the house with my mutilated adopted parents, shivering and whimpering with dismay. He’s out there with her. Doing who-knows-what to her, and I can’t do anything. I would if I could, but I can’t. I would chase after them in a heartbeat, but I can’t. I sit here, looking at the front door. I look down at my paws. If only I could open doors… — Credited to aCJohnson

6 minutes

January 3, 2010

Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances

Candle Cove

america, Candle Cove, Candle Cove creepypasta, Candle Cove creepypasta story, Candle Cove origin story, Candle Cove original story, Candle Cove story, creepypasta classics, Kris Straub, lost episodes, television, television shows, TV, TV shows

NetNostalgia Forum – Television (local) Skyshale033 Subject: Candle Cove local kid’s show? Does anyone remember this kid’s show? It was called Candle Cove and I must have been 6 or 7. I never found reference to it anywhere so I think it was on a local station around 1971 or 1972. I lived in Ironton at the time. I don’t remember which station, but I do remember it was on at a weird time, like 4:00 PM. mike_painter65 Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? it seems really familiar to me…..i grew up outside of ashland and was 9 yrs old in 72. candle cove…was it about pirates? i remember a pirate marionete at the mouth of a cave talking to a little girl Skyshale033 Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? YES! Okay I’m not crazy! I remember Pirate Percy. I was always kind of scared of him. He looked like he was built from parts of other dolls, real low-budget. His head was an old porcelain baby doll, looked like an antique that didn’t belong on the body. I don’t remember what station this was! I don’t think it was WTSF though. Jaren_2005 Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? Sorry to ressurect this old thread but I know exactly what show you mean, Skyshale. I think Candle Cove ran for only a couple months in ‘71, not ‘72. I was 12 and I watched it a few times with my brother. It was channel 58, whatever station that was. My mom would let me switch to it after the news. Let me see what I remember. It took place in Candle cove, and it was about a little girl who imagined herself to be friends with pirates. The pirate ship was called the Laughingstock, and Pirate Percy wasn’t a very good pirate because he got scared too easily. And there was calliope music constantly playing. Don’t remember the girl’s name. Janice or Jade or something. Think it was Janice. Skyshale033 Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? Thank you Jaren!!! Memories flooded back when you mentioned the Laughingstock and channel 58. I remember the bow of the ship was a wooden smiling face, with the lower jaw submerged. It looked like it was swallowing the sea and it had that awful Ed Wynn voice and laugh. I especially remember how jarring it was when they switched from the wooden/plastic model, to the foam puppet version of the head that talked. mike_painter65 Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? ha ha i remember now too. do you remember this part skyshale: “you have…to go…INSIDE.” Skyshale033 Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? Ugh mike, I got a chill reading that. Yes I remember. That’s what the ship always told Percy when there was a spooky place he had to go in, like a cave or a dark room where the treasure was. And the camera would push in on Laughingstock’s face with each pause. YOU HAVE… TO GO… INSIDE. With his two eyes askew and that flopping foam jaw and the fishing line that opened and closed it. Ugh. It just looked so cheap and awful. You guys remember the villain? He had a face that was just a handlebar mustache above really tall, narrow teeth. kevin_hart Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? i honestly, honestly thought the villain was pirate percy. i was about 5 when this show was on. nightmare fuel. Jaren_2005 Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? That wasn’t the villain, the puppet with the mustache. That was the villain’s sidekick, Horace Horrible. He had a monocle too, but it was on top of the mustache. I used to think that meant he had only one eye. But yeah, the villain was another marionette. The Skin-Taker. I can’t believe what they let us watch back then. kevin_hart Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? jesus h. christ, the skin taker. what kind of a kids show were we watching? i seriously could not look at the screen when the skin taker showed up. he just descended out of nowhere on his strings, just a dirty skeleton wearing that brown top hat and cape. and his glass eyes that were too big for his skull. christ almighty. Skyshale033 Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? Wasn’t his top hat and cloak all sewn up crazily? Was that supposed to be children’s skin?? mike_painter65 Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? yeah i think so. rememer his mouth didn’t open and close, his jaw just slid back and foth. i remember the little girl said “why does your mouth move like that” and the skin-taker didn’t look at the girl but at the camera and said “TO GRIND YOUR SKIN” Skyshale033 Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? I’m so relieved that other people remember this terrible show! I used to have this awful memory, a bad dream I had where the opening jingle ended, the show faded in from black, and all the characters were there, but the camera was just cutting to each of their faces, and they were just screaming, and the puppets and marionettes were flailing spastically, and just all screaming, screaming. The girl was just moaning and crying like she had been through hours of this. I woke up many times from that nightmare. I used to wet the bed when I had it. kevin_hart Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? i don’t think that was a dream. i remember that. i remember that was an episode. Skyshale033 Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? No no no, not possible. There was no plot or anything, I mean literally just standing in place crying and screaming for the whole show. kevin_hart Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? maybe i’m manufacturing the memory because you said that, but i swear to god i remember seeing what you described. they just screamed. Jaren_2005 Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? Oh God. Yes. The little girl, Janice, I remember seeing her shake. And the Skin-Taker screaming through his gnashing teeth, his jaw careening so wildly I thought it would come off its wire hinges. I turned it off and it was the last time I watched. I ran to tell my brother and we didn’t have the courage to turn it back on. mike_painter65 Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? i visited my mom today at the nursing home. i asked her about when i was littel in the early 70s, when i was 8 or 9 and if she remebered a kid’s show, candle cove. she said she was suprised i could remember that and i asked why, and she said “because i used to think it was so strange that you said ‘i’m gona go watch candle cove now mom’ and then you would tune the tv to static and juts watch dead air for 30 minutes. you had a big imagination with your little pirate show.” — CREDIT: Kris Straub Source: This story is from Ichor Falls, an absolute must-read site if you dig creepy stories. Seriously, I’m so in love with that website, you all need to go there right this instant, dammit! More classic Creepypasta stories can be found here: The Russian Sleep Experiment Squidward’s Suicide Ben Drowned

4 minutes

June 5, 2009

Famous Creepypasta, Strange and Unexplained, Technology, the Internet, and the Deep Web, Television and Lost Episodes

Persuaded

undead, zombies

It’s been 2 weeks since this whole thing started. It all started with a tanker accident. It was all over the news. Everyone thought it was just another oil spill. There were plenty of volunteers. Plenty of people wanting to help the poor defenseless animals. Plenty of victims. Within hours of the tanker accident, it started happening. The animals had gone crazy, they were scratching and biting the clean up volunteers. They said that it was an adverse effect to whatever was in that tanker. Rescue workers were still trying to get the crew out of the ship. They could hear screaming inside. Screams to open the doors. But that’s when it all went to hell. As soon as they cut the door out. There was 6 minutes of broadcast before it went silent. 6 minutes of screaming and agony. The ship crew attacked the rescue workers like rabid baboons. Breaking bones and tearing flesh. The people on the shore weren’t fairing any better. Those that had been attacked by animals were attacking everyone else. It was worse than any war zone report, it was sheer brutality, and yet the broadcast still went on for 6 minutes. 6 minutes and then blank faces. Nobody could explain what was happening. They tried to continue with regular news, the economy, the weather, a cute human interest story, but they couldn’t make us unsee what we saw. I tried to continue with my regular existence but every time I switched on the news or walked by a news stand it was there. This big mystery. They had some explanations, some kind of infection, brain parasites, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t an infection we were afraid of, it was them. 4 days after the initial report, a state of emergency was raised. And yet we’d all seen this before. Every zombie movie ever. People didn’t know who to trust. People were stockpiling food and weapons. Some tried to flee but it seems every zombie movie was right. They didn’t make it. 3 days later they arrived in my town. I expected moans, shuffling corpses, dismemberment, but that’s where the movies lied. They ran through the streets, screaming. I remember running to my front door as fast as I could, locking, barricading, doing anything to make sure it would stay shut, and then I headed for the window. I was on the second story and I could see the carnage. They were unstoppable. They were aware. A group of them made there way through a building across the street. They jumped straight through plate glass windows. Even the shards slicing through them made no difference, they just kept coming. My barricade wasn’t going to hold. I rushed around my flat, grabbing supplies and jamming them into the most secure room of the flat. I went back for one last look across the street, and I wish I hadn’t. In a second story window, my face met one of theirs. They knew where I was. I quickly dashed into the room and locked the door. I don’t have any kind of panic room, or a secure basement, so the safest place I could think of was my bathroom. No windows, one door with a lock. I had filled my sink and bathtub full of water, So I could stay for a while. So I sat there in the dark room, with the distant screams in my ears. I began to feel like I may have over-reacted, it had been 2 hours and no sign of them. It actually got quieter and I thought they had moved on. Maybe I could leave the room, get to the kitchen. Grab more food to wait it out. A crash came from the front door. The sound of someone running full force into the door and knocking down the barrier behind it. There was a couple more crashes before I knew they were inside. Rapid footsteps moving around the flat, a couple screams and then a bang on the wall beside me. My eyes were open to their widest, even in the pitch black darkness of the room. Another bang, and another. They knew I was there and they knew I was scared. This was the zombie nightmare I had been expecting from the start. I had nowhere to run. There was only so much time before they would break in. I sat with my back to the door, hoping my extra weight would make it harder for them to get in. And then it got worse. “why don’t you open the door?” A voice on the opposite side of the door. No screams or moans, just a quiet, whispery voice. And then more of them. “we’ve come for you.” “you’ll be happier if you open the door” “it’s not so bad…” The whispery voices, became a cacophony of noise trying to persuade me, to break me, to fool me. I had heard that the moaning of zombies would drive people insane but this was worse, a siren call. I sat in the darkness and hoped and prayed that they’d get bored. But they don’t get bored and they don’t leave. I managed to use the mirror to peak under the door, only to be greeted by horrible unblinking eyes, blood smeared faces, screams and more horrible whispers. That was two days ago… I don’t know what to do anymore… maybe it won’t be so bad… — Credited to Chris Stewart.

4 minutes

November 21, 2008

Apocalyptic and Dystopian, Beings and Entities, Zombies and the Undead

World’s Best School Psychologist

abductions, child abuse, children, counselors, CreepyCarbs, deaths, disappearances, jobs, kidnappings, kids, neglect, occupations, parenting, parents, psychologists, psychology, school, school psychologists, school stories, schools

When I was twelve, I came to the conclusion that everyone in the world, including my own family, was against me. I was never a problem child, but my parents sure treated me like one. For example, I used to need to be home by 5:00 pm every day. This clearly restricted my amount of “playtime” outdoors. I wasn’t allowed to have friends over to play at the house, nor was I allowed to go over anyone else’s. I had to finish homework directly after I came home from school, no matter how long it took. My parents refused to buy me video games and forced me to read books and then write a book report on them to prove I actually read it! Now, even though those rules listed above were quite frustrating to me as a child, they aren’t what upset me most. What really hurt me was the lack of compassion on behalf of my parents. My mother was a bitter woman who always made me feel guilty about accidents or mistakes I’ve made. My father only knew one emotion: frustration. The only time he spoke to me was when he screamed at me for receiving poor test scores or beat me for misbehaving. But enough about them, let’s talk about my school’s psychologist. For his own privacy, we will call him Dr. Tanner. Like most junior high schools, a psychologist is always available on campus during school hours to assist any students in need of counseling whether it is emotional, academic, social, behavioral, etc. To be honest, I have never seen any students talking with Dr. Tanner. Every day, I would walk past his office on my way to the cafeteria and peek through his door’s little window. He would always be alone in there, working on some paperwork. I guessed that most kids were too afraid to speak about their problems to an adult who was practically a stranger. For this reason, it took me three weeks to muster enough courage to go into his office. March 2nd, 1993, was the day I decided to voice my troubles to Dr. Tanner. During lunch break, I stood in front of his office door and knocked. Through the window, I could see him raise his head, smile, and motion for me to come in. I did. He greeted me by introducing himself and asking for my name. Dr. Tanner was a very soft-spoken man who seemed to radiate kindness. In less than thirty minutes, I rambled to Dr. Tanner about how mean my parents were to me and how they didn’t care about me at all. After a while, my voice began to quiver and I stopped speaking. The psychologist listened patiently to my whole spiel, arms folded and head nodding. I half expected him to begin talking about how everything I had just said was untrue and that my parents loved me dearly and blah blah blah. But he didn’t. Dr. Tanner leaned towards me with a grin on his face and said “You know… I’m the best school psychologist in the world. I promise we will fix this.” I rolled my eyes. “Okay, but how?” I asked. “I have my ways!” he replied. “I’m a man of my word. I promise that within just one month, the relationship between you and your parents will change for the better. Forever.” After a brief pause, he continued; “Although, I do need you to make me a promise.” “You have to promise me that you’ll come back to my office after school tomorrow and that you won’t tell anyone that we had this conversation today. It’ll be our little secret.” I promised. * * * * * * The following day, I returned to Dr. Tanner after school. It was around 4:00 pm when I entered his office. After a warm welcome, he asked me to have a seat in front of his desk once again. Upon sitting down, I watched Dr. Tanner close the blinds of the door’s tiny window. “There,” he smiled, “now we have all the privacy we need!” We began to talk about my likes and interests, my favorite subjects in school, my least favorite teachers, and things of the like. About an hour into the conversation, Dr. Tanner offered me a soft drink. I gladly took the offer, considering my parents never allowed me to drink soda. Dr. Tanner reached over to his mini-fridge and fidgeted around before setting down two open cans of soda on the desk. Afterwards, we continued to talk about what was going on in my life but it wasn’t long before I passed out from whatever drugs Dr. Tanner placed in my drink. * * * * * * It took me a minute or so to adjust my blurred vision upon waking… … And when it did, I had no idea what to think. I was handcuffed to a bed and my mouth was sealed with duct tape. I immediately began to panic- squirming and tugging at the cuffs- but gave up soon after. My eyes widened in disbelief after looking around the room. There were posters of superheroes pinned up along the walls and photographs of famous athletes on shelves. In the middle of the room was an old television and Super Nintendo, various game cartridges stacked alongside it. I didn’t know what to think. Here I am in a room filled with items most kids would die to play with. I would have probably cried from joy hadn’t I been handcuffed to a bed frame. My stomach sank once again as the door opened and Dr. Tanner walked inside. He sat down on the edge of the bed. “Now listen,” he said, “remember that I’m here to help you and I would never hurt you, okay?” Dr. Tanner gently removed the tape from my mouth and then the cuffs from my hands. My first instinct was to begin crying but something about Dr. Tanner made me feel safe. He smiled at me. “You’re going to be staying here for a while,” he continued, “and during this time, you’re allowed to play with any toys in this room while I’m here at home.” “But when I leave the house, I’ll need to cuff one of your hands back to the bed. You can still watch the television, but I want you to only watch the news channels when I’m away.” I sat in silence, still trying to process the information he had given me. “So!” Dr. Tanner yipped, slapping me on the knee. “You go ahead and knock yourself out; I’ll be back when it’s time for dinner.” He got up from the bed, walked across the room and clicked the TV’s power button before locking the door behind him. Several more minutes passed before I realized that Dr. Tanner wasn’t joking. All that was left for me to do was boot up the Nintendo and play Mario until nightfall. At about 7:00 pm, Dr. Tanner returned to the room carrying two plates of mashed potatoes and chicken strips. I finally gathered up the courage to ask him how long I’d be staying in this room. “Well, about a month,” he replied, “give or take a few weeks. I just have some work I need to do.” * * * * * * The following morning, I awoke to Dr. Tanner’s hand patting my head. “Hey bud, you don’t have to wake up right now if you don’t want, but I am going to need to put this back on,” he whispered, clamping the cold steel handcuff onto my wrist. I gazed up at him. He was wearing a collared shirt and slacks, a coat draped over his shoulder and a suitcase at his side. He looked just how he always did when I saw him around school. Before leaving he placed the TV’s remote next to me and told me to turn it on and watch the news. The first thing I saw upon turning it on was a “breaking news” segment. An important-looking police officer stood at a podium surrounded by people with microphones. I happened to begin viewing half way through his speech. “A statewide Amber Alert has been issued as of this morning. We have several investigators working towards identifying potential abductors, but as of right now there is not much evidence. Faculty members state that the boy had been last seen around four or five in the evening on-” I began to feel nauseous as a photograph of me appeared on the screen. It was my yearbook picture from last year. Captions for the photograph displayed my name and age, my school, and my town. Above my picture were alternating titles: FBI BEGINS SEARCH FOR CHILD and KIDNAPPING SUSPECT UNKNOWN and POTENTIAL RUNAWAY. The live footage continued and two figures I soon recognized as my mom and dad stepped up to the podium. Both appeared to have reddened eyes. Tears streamed down my mother’s face as she took hold of a microphone. I’d never seen so much emotion come from my mother before as she wept on live television, stuttering on sentences such as “please return my baby back to me” and “I’m so sorry” and “please come home to us.” When my father took the microphone, I nearly expected his attitude to be stone cold, but he too had tears in his eyes. He pleaded to the world to bring his son home safely and lastly begged for my forgiveness! “I know I haven’t been the best father, but goddamn it do I wish I had been now. Please bring my boy back.” I turned the power off shortly after. My emotions were mixed for I had never once seen my father cry. I felt miserable that my parents were being put through so much, but at the same time, I felt relief. I now know how much mom and dad love me. * * * * * * Nearly four weeks have passed and Dr. Tanner has been treating me with the utmost respect. He leaves me in the morning cuffed to the bed frame, but returns in the afternoon to eat lunch and dinner with me, talk, and play games. I never would have guessed how good Dr. Tanner was at Monopoly and Scrabble. But one morning when Dr. Tanner woke me before heading off to work, I noticed a stern look on his face. I also realized that it was three hours earlier than when he usually wakes me. “You need to watch the news today. No exceptions. I want you to keep the television on all day and pay close attention to it,” he stated grimly. I, of course, complied and watched him exit the room. About two hours later, a breaking news segment interrupted the toothpaste commercial I was watching. The title: HUMAN REMNANTS FOUND Two staunch looking men in suits stood aside one another and began speaking: “We are displeased to bring up such unfortunate news this morning regarding our missing child case from earlier this month.” One of the men bowed his head while the one speaking shuffled through some papers. He continued: “Remains of a body have been found in a garbage bag beneath a highway overpass. The body appears to be that of a child, although not much of it is left. The body has been decapitated and much has been burnt to ash and bone.” The screen shifted over to a helicopter view of the freeway, dozens of police cars gathered near the bottom of a tall overpass. The man’s voice could still be heard: “Within the bag police found a junior high school identification card labeled as such.” The screen showed the school ID card I always kept in my backpack. The plastic was sort of melted away, but my photograph and name were intact. After the two men dismissed themselves, the camera panned over to my parents. They were sitting among reporters; my mother’s face held a painful grimace and my father sulked his head down at his knees. I shut the television off. * * * * * * Dr. Tanner returned home very late. He hurried into the room, unlocked my cuffs, and placed a bottle of fizzing water into my hand. He placed his hands onto my shoulders and smiled. “I made you a promise, didn’t I?” I nodded, tears squeezing their way out my eyes. “You need to make me a promise again,” he whispered. He told me that I needed to drink all the water in the bottle- it would help me sleep- and that from here on, I am never to tell anyone that I ever met him. I promised. “I told you I’m the best school psychologist in the world, didn’t I?” * * * * * * And he was right. I awoke later that night to find myself lying in the middle of a park, stars shining brilliantly across the night sky. I recognized the park; it wasn’t too far from my school. A mile or so down the road, I saw my house. The lights were off inside, but I could make out my father sitting on the step leading to the front door. I hesitantly called out to him. He lifted his head slowly, but when he saw it was me, he sprang to his feet, ran towards me arms open, yelling my name. My mother erupted from the house behind him. Dr. Tanner was right. Things have changed with my family and I. My parents smile more often and treat me lovingly. I could not ask for a more perfect ending. Every now and then, I see Dr. Tanner on campus- walking to and from his office. Rarely do we ever make eye contact, let alone speak to one another, but sometimes he’ll shoot me a wink and a smile. I’ll always keep my promise to him and pretend I never met him, but there will always be one question forever floating in my mind: who did Dr. Tanner decapitate and throw off the overpass?

8 minutes

February 13, 2020

Abductions and Kidnappings, Children and Childhood, Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Jobs and Occupations

Dawn in Texas

cannibalism, cannibals, deaths, murders, StarlessandBibleBlack, Video Narratives OK

Publisher’s Note: This story is the third and final part of the 3-part series which began with the story, A Sunset in Texas. The author encourages you to read the first installment in the series to better understand the events of this one. You can find the first part here. Looking for part 2? Click here to read the second installment in the series, Midnight in Texas. Adam kneeled on the ground to inspect his freshly flattened tire. As he drew closer, he could hear the last bit of air hiss out from around the nail. Swearing under his breath, Adam pulled off his baseball cap and used it to fan himself. Summer days in Texas were famous for their intense heat, and this one proved to be no different. As beads of sweat already began to form on his forehead, he heard the crunch of gravel from behind. Spinning on his heels, he was met with the sight of a beaten and battered pickup truck coming to a stop behind his own vehicle. The brakes emitted out a load squeak before the monstrous machine came to a halt. The door opened on rusty hinges, and a tall, slender man stepped out from the cab. “Need a hand there,” Gunnar asked as he slicked some stray grey hairs back. Adam motioned to the deflated front tire before shrugging. “I have AAA, but thanks for the offer.” “The mechanic in town is a friend of mine. I could get him out here much quicker than Triple A. Now unless you sprung for Premium, you’re gonna rack up quite a charge since the shop is way more than five miles from here.” Adam let out a heavy sigh and scratched the back of his head. Glancing down at the tire one more time, he looked back at Gunnar and accepted the circumstances. “If it’s not too much trouble, then I’d really appreciate it.” Gunnar gave the man a wide smile before returning to the cab of his truck. “It’s no trouble at all! Just consider yourself lucky that I travel this road as often as I do.” Adam pulled his phone from his pocket while Gunnar sifted through the items on the floor of his cab. He unlocked the device and opened the messaging app. A conversation with his wife appeared on the screen, and he began to type away. “Had a flat tire on the way home. A local stopped to help me out, and I’ll be getting a tow truck soon; keep you updated.” Adam hit send and slipped the phone back into his pocket. As he turned around to call out for Gunnar, he was met with a tire iron to the face. The thick end made contacted the side of his head, and Adam’s vision suddenly went bright white around the edges. He felt his legs grow weak as his weight seemed to increase tenfold. As he began to see black spots, his body collapsed to the ground. His head pivoted around, causing him to smash his face onto the asphalt of the road’s shoulder. A cloud of dust plumed around Adam before settling on his previously spotless white shirt. Gunnar quickly pulled the phone out of the man’s pocket and brought the tire iron down on the screen. He bashed the device until it was nothing more than a twisted chunk of metal on the asphalt. “Damn, you hit the ground harder than most,” Gunnar muttered under his breath as he tossed the tire iron back into his truck. Returning to Adam’s fallen body, Gunnar grabbed him by the ankles and dragged him towards the truck. The tailgate fell open with a loud clang while he took a moment to catch his breath. After discovering Adam was much heavier than he appeared to be, Gunnar wrapped the body with cargo straps and made sure they were fully tightened. Finally, he threw a tarp over his new acquisition and used various tools and boxes to keep it held down securely. Slamming the tailgate shut, Gunnar dusted off his hands on his jeans and returned to the cab. The engine roared to life, and he wasted no time before peeling out of the gravel that lined the side of the road. As he repeated the process of accelerating and switching gears, light from the setting sun filled the cab. Small dust particles floated in the air as Gunnar switched on the AC and turned the radio dial. There were small bursts of static until he finally landed on a clear station. The twang of an acoustic guitar filled his ears as the truck finally reached cruising speed. “… the color of their hair is not the reason that I stare, but I always was a fool for a blonde…” Gunnar tapped one hand on top of the steering wheel and whistled along as his vehicle barreled down the small Texas sideroad and towards home. Soon enough, his white farmhouse came into view. Bringing the truck to a slowdown, he turned down his driveway and bumped up and down. With a groan from the brakes, he brought the truck to a stop in front of the main door. He opened the door with a creak and slammed it shut. Throwing down the tailgate, he made quick work of removing the tarp and unfastening the cargo straps. Adam’s eyes were still closed, causing Gunnar to let out a sigh of relief. There had been far too many times where he had removed the tarp to find his victim awake and panicking. Grabbing hold of Adam from under his arms, he heaved the man up and over the tailgate. Much to his surprise, Gunnar felt the body slip from his grasp and plummet to the ground. Adam’s face crashed onto the compacted dirt of the driveway and slid forward as the rest of his body slammed down. “Son of a bitch,” Gunnar exclaimed before grabbing the man’s ankles and swearing even more under his breath. As he dragged the body across the yard and up the front steps, Gunnar took notice of the dark crimson streaks that had followed behind them. Looking down, he was surprised to find Adam’s nose bent to the side with blood slowly flowing from the nostrils. With even more aggravation, he rushed inside and grabbed an old towel from the laundry room. He wrapped the face up tightly and finished dragging Adam’s body inside. Gunnar grabbed him under the arms once more, this time making sure he had a firm grip, before heaving his body up onto the kitchen table. The plastic tarp he had placed over it earlier crinkled as the old wood creaked under the force. “For an average-built guy, you sure were a monumental pain in my ass,” Gunnar hissed at the unconscious body before walking to the sink and washing the blood that he had smeared down one arm. After a considerable amount of scrubbing, he returned to Adam and placed two fingers on the man’s neck. After a long pause, he still did not feel a pulse. A smile crept across Gunnar’s face as he finished drying off his hands. “Damn, you can still knock ‘em out in one swing.” Tossing the rag over the back of a chair, Gunnar slipped on a pair of old gloves. He lifted the towel wrapped around Adam’s face to find that the bleeding had mostly stopped. Unwrapping the man’s head, he discovered a large dark spot swelling under his skin where the tire iron had made contact. Gunnar poked the area with one finger, causing the skin to push in under the pressure. He could feel fragments of skull shifting around underneath the skin from his touch. “Yup, still got it.” Gunnar began the process by emptying Adam’s pockets. As he removed a pack of gum, his wrist brushed against something under the man’s shirt. Lifting the fabric up, Gunnar was met with the site of a pistol tucked into the waistband of his jeans. He carefully pulled the weapon out and laid it down on the table. “My oh my, you would’ve been pretty dangerous if I wasn’t successful with that first blow.” After turning the other front pocket inside out, Gunnar rolled Adam’s body onto one side and reached into the back pocket. The familiar shape of a wallet could be felt on his fingertips. Without hesitation, he pulled it out and examined it in the yellow light of the lamp overhead. It was made of a high-quality leather, leading Gunnar to believe that he stood a good chance of finding a decent amount of cash inside. “Well, let’s see just how much Mr. Fancy Man carries around.” As he flipped open the wallet, one of the items inside caused light to harshly reflect off its surface. Gunnar titled the wallet until he could read the lettering embossed on the item’s face. His blood ran cold, and he could feel his limbs begin to tremble as he read the wording on the badge. Waco Police Department The wallet slipped from his grasp and fell to the floor. The badge made contact on the hardwood boards, causing a loud thud to echo throughout the kitchen. Gunnar felt his legs begin to weaken, causing him to stumble backwards. He grabbed onto the edge of the sink with a death grip as he attempted to steady his breathing. A ringing began to fill his ears while his vision blurred. He immediately shook away the sensation and bolted for the phone on the opposite wall. Throwing his body against the aged wallpaper, he ripped the handset from its hook. Gunnar used a shaking finger to punch in a number. As the line buzzed with distortion in his ear, he could hear his heartbeat echoing as well. After a few rings, there was a click, and a familiar voice crackled through the ancient speaker. “Hey, Gunnar.” “Coop…” he spoke with trembling words. “…I think we have a problem…” In just under half an hour, the familiar rumble of Cooper’s truck could be heard pulling up Gunnar’s driveway. A door opened and slammed shut. This was followed by the sound of footsteps approaching the front door. “Just stay in the truck,” Cooper called to Andrew as he bolted across the front lawn. Gunnar was standing in the doorway with his gaze pointed down at the ground. Cooper was shocked to find he had adopted the habit of smoking after quitting nearly twenty years ago. As the smoke escaped his lips with an uneven breath, Gunnar ran a trembling hand through his hair. “H-hey, Coop…” For the first time since Cooper had woken up strapped to a chair in Gunnar’s living room nearly two years ago, the man had not greeted him with a bear hug. “Gunnar, what’s wrong?” Without wasting any more time, Gunnar motioned for Copper to follow him inside. The two men stepped inside and shut the door behind them. As they stepped into the kitchen, Cooper took in the faint scent of blood floating in the air. He soon caught sight of the bloodied towel still wrapped around this stranger’s face. “Jesus, I thought you always tried to avoid the face.” Gunnar took in another long drag from the cigarette and let the smoke slowly trail from his lips. The entire time, he kept his eyes pointed directly at the body. “I dropped him on the ground while pulling him out the truck. The fucker may have been dead, but that surely didn’t stop his nose from bleeding.” Cooper walked closer to the table and examined the corpse. As his gaze traveled up the lifeless figure, Gunnar tapped the cigarette. Small bits of glowing ash fell to the floor without any concern as to the cleanliness of his home. Cooper shrugged and scratched the back of his head. “I don’t get it. Is there something I’m missing?” Gunnar’s cold grey eyes darted to the wallet that was lying closed on the table. He motioned with the end of his cigarette towards it and did not speak a single word. Cooper looked over at it and slowly extended a hand to pick it up. As he inspected the leather, Gunnar starred at him with a completely blank expression. “Damn, this guy must’ve been carrying a good amount of cash in something this nice.” Opening it up, Cooper’s attention was immediately captured by the golden badge reflecting the sickly yellow light from overhead. A lump formed in his throat as Cooper found himself choking on words. After a few soft mumbles, he managed to let the words escape through his lips. “Oh…” Gunnar sighed and inhaled deeply, causing the last of the cigarette to burn down to the filter. He flicked the butt towards the corpse, causing it to strike and leave a small black spot on Adam’s neck. “It’s real, isn’t it,” Gunnar asked with a shaking voice. Cooper tilted it in the light and read over the lettering multiple times. “It appears so…” Out of nowhere, Gunnar turned around and kicked his boot into one of the cabinets. The impact caused a loud bang to echo throughout the room and made Cooper drop the wallet on the table. He starred at the black smudge that was left in the wake of this man’s rage. “God damn it!” Cooper had never heard Gunnar shout before. For a man that he had come to know as being kind and gentle, the sudden outburst almost scared him. “Gunnar, you need to get a grip.” He turned to face Cooper with a mixture of anger and fear plastered on his face. “Do you not understand that this is the end, Cooper? I killed a cop, for fuck’s sake! It’s not going to be long until I have every officer in the Eastern part of Texas breaking down my door to put a bullet in my he-” Without warning, Cooper stomped over to Gunnar and grabbed him by the collar. He clenched his fist and gave the older man a good punch to the face. Gunnar’s head quickly pivoted to the side. His lip split open, causing a light trickle of blood to begin oozing from the small laceration. Cooper pulled his gaze back at him and shook him by the shoulders. “I’ll be damned if you start freaking out on me. You’re the one that taught me to always keep a level head when bad situations arise, and now is hardly the time to show me otherwise.” Gunnar rubbed his jaw and leaned back against the sink. “T-thank you, Coop. I’m sorry to lose my better judgment like that…” Cooper sat on the edge of the table and let out a breath of frustration. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he inhaled and kept his gaze pointed down at the floor. “Where’s his phone?” “I crushed it to pieces on the side of the road.” “What about his car?” “It should still be sitting abandoned with a flat tire.” Cooper looked Gunnar dead in the eyes. There was a moment of silence between the two of them before Cooper spoke once more. “Were there any cameras?” “Cameras,” Gunnar asked with confusion. “I’m assuming you only targeted him because you had no idea he was in an unmarked patrol car. Almost all of them have hidden cameras, but some are more noticeable than others. Did you happen to see any?” “If I saw a fucking camera, do you think I would’ve crushed his skull in,” Gunnar asked sarcastically while motioning a bloodied hand towards the corpse. Cooper glanced over at the motionless body and stared at it. The sound of cicadas chirping outside drifted in through the mesh front door and into the kitchen. As he gathered his thoughts, Gunnar grabbed the small rag hanging from the back of a chair and put it to his lip. “We need to go back, Gunnar.” “Come again?” “I said we need to go back,” Cooper repeated with a newfound tone of authority. “If there was a chance you were captured on camera, we need to go pull the SD cards and destroy them.” Without another word, Cooper jumped to his feet and walked towards the front door. Gunnar did not hesitate to follow closely behind. As the men stepped over the threshold, they were met with the comforting cool of the night air. “Beautiful night for a shitshow,” Gunnar muttered under his breath as they hopped into Cooper’s truck. As the vehicle made its way down the abandoned backroad, Cooper explained the situation to Andrew. The teen sat in silence as the details were explained to him. Gunnar would occasionally catch his gaze in the rearview mirror, causing him to feel a small amount of embarrassment for the situation he had created. “Turn here,” Gunnar said over the road noise. Cooper cut the wheel and brought the truck onto another seemingly abandoned sideroad. “It’s going to be about a mile or two up ahead.” As the vehicle climbed a small hill, Gunnar felt his stomach drop as the blue and white glow of flashing lights could be seen just over the top. Before he had a chance to say anything, Cooper quickly turned around. “Undo your seatbelt and get down as low on the floor as you can.” Without any hesitation, Gunnar did as he was told. The man fumbled with the restraint before quickly dropping to the floor below the backseat. Just before they climbed over the hill, Andrew took the jacket by his feet and threw it over the man’s form. As the truck crested over the hilltop, a short line of police cars could be seen both in front of and behind the unmarked vehicle. “Don’t stare,” Cooper said coldly. Andrew directed his attention back to the road in front of them. As they approached the small gathering, Cooper signaled and moved into the adjacent lane. He let off the accelerator a little bit to avoid roaring by all the policemen. Passing by, his eyes quickly darted to the side to inspect the car Gunnar had approached just a couple of hours ago. When the truck had moved past all the stopped vehicles, Cooper signaled once more and brought the truck back into its respective lane. “Did you see anything,” Gunnar asked while keeping his head pressed on the floor. “I couldn’t make anything out. I didn’t want to stop or slow down too much.” From behind him, Cooper could hear Gunnar beginning to breathe heavily as the truck continued down the road. The three of them remained silent the rest of the way to Cooper’s home. When they finally pulled into the driveway, Susan rushed out the front door to greet them. Andrew hopped down from the passenger seat and opened the back door. Gunnar sat up from his position on the floor and slowly climbed out of the truck. A glazed look covered his eyes as he stumbled forward. Susan quickly ran over and placed one of his arms around her shoulders. Andrew did the same, and the two of them led Gunnar inside. “Put on the news and see if anything is being reported yet,” Cooper called from the kitchen as he grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator. As he placed it within Gunnar’s field of vision, the man instead motioned his head towards the liquor cabinet on the other side of the living room. Cooper nodded and grabbed a bottle of brandy and a glass from the shelves. He handed them to Gunnar, who in turn set the glass on an end table. Pulling the cork from the neck with a soft squeak, he continued to take a decent gulp straight from the bottle. Gunnar did not so much as flinch as he swallowed the dark amber liquid and starred at the television screen. “…and it looks like the Kingsland area is going to be getting nothing but intense sun the next few days,” the weathergirl said with a chipper tone. Gunnar took another sip from the bottle as Cooper sat down on the couch next to him. A cheaply animated cloud floated across the screen before the two anchors seated at their desk came back on. “Before we get to tonight’s main segment, we have a missing person’s report out of Round Rock,” the male anchor said with a serious tone. Cooper’s blood ran cold as Gunnar slowly lowered the bottle from his lips. “Shelley Johnson in our Crime Watch Division has more on the story. Shelley?” The screen went through yet another cheap transition before a petite blonde appeared. “Thanks, Anderson. Police are asking for the public’s help in what they are now considering to be a missing person’s case.” A video of the undercover car and the surrounding police vehicles appeared on the television with the word “live” spelled with all capitals in the corner. “A Round Rock police officer was driving back from a call when he noticed a vehicle on the side of the road. As he stopped to officer assistance, he found it to be abandoned. He became even more concerned when the destroyed remains of a cell phone were found on the shoulder. Running the plates, the officer discovered that the vehicle was, in fact, an undercover car registered to Waco Chief of Police, Adam Blundell.” A picture of Adam standing in front of an American flag with a large smile across his face appeared on the right half of the screen. “More deputies soon arrived on the scene. Investigators were able to pull some footage from the hidden camera on both of the front and rear of the vehicle.” Cooper heard the bottle of brandy crash to the floor and shatter into small fragments. The liquid pooled on the hardwood floor at Gunnar’s feet as small bits of glass scattered across the living room floor. “Unfortunately, the lense of the rear-facing camera was partially obscured by road grime. However, investigators were able to pull audio and a slightly distorted screenshot from the video. This screenshot contains what they claim is the clearest view of the now-wanted suspect.” Adam’s portrait was soon replaced by a smudged photo with an audio soundwave below it. As Gunnar’s voice could be heard through some distortion, Cooper starred at the image on the screen. Part of Gunnar’s face could faintly be made out through the smudge that took up a considerable portion of the image. “Authorities suspect foul play as part of the audio also appears to contain an assault on Chief Blundell. However, we will not play that on the air. This has led Round Rock Police to heavily suspect foul play. A red pickup truck, estimated to be from the early 80s, was also captured on the front-facing camera. However, the vehicle did have any license plate to identify it.” The image of the soundwave disappeared and was replaced by a screenshot of Gunnar’s pickup truck and another photo of Adam posing with a woman. The two of them were holding a baby wrapped in a light blue blanket. “Chief Blundell’s wife, Judith, is asking for anyone with knowledge on what could’ve happened to her husband to please come forward.” The screen cut once more and was now fully taken up with a video of the woman from the previous photograph. Her eyes and the skin around them were raw and red. As she spoke, her voice cracked multiple times. “P-please, help my precious Adam come home…” She took a pause and sniffled. Quickly composing herself, she let out a heavy sigh and looked back to the reporter off-camera. “I don’t want my baby boy growing up without his father…” As Judith spoke the last few words, the miniscule shred of self-control she had managed to hold on to slipped away. She completely broke down, causing the camera to cut off her heaving sobs. “We once again ask for the public to assist in identifying this man.” The blurred photo of Gunnar came back up onto the screen, along with the audio clip of his voice. “He is wanted by police and is now considered the main suspect in the disappearance of Chief Adam Blundell.” Cooper slowly turned to find Gunnar’s eyes glued to the screen. As the segment cut to the next story, his gaze remained unblinking and focused. “Gunnar,” Cooper asked while placing a hand on his shoulder and slightly shaking the man. “I don’t feel so good…” Before Cooper could ask him to clarify, Gunnar leaned forward and heaved. Vomit soon spewed from his mouth and into the puddle of brandy still at his feet. His body began to pitch forward, causing Andrew to jump from his chair and help Cooper push Gunnar’s body back. His head titled back, causing his gaze to point directly up at the ceiling. A mumble escaped his lips, but no one in the room was able to make out what it was. “Is he drunk,” Andrew asked. “No,” Cooper responded while running to the kitchen and grabbing a bag of frozen peas. As he placed it over Gunnar’s forehead, he reached down and grabbed hold of the man’s trembling hand. “He’s just scared…” “Should we be?” Andrew’s question left Cooper without an answer. He continued to hold onto Gunnar’s hand while a news story softly played in the background. Gunnar’s eyelids fluttered before his vision blacked out and he slipped into unconsciousness. In what seemed like no time at all, his eyes opened to the harsh rays of the morning sun streaming in through the living room windows. The smell of fresh coffee filled his senses just before his temples began pulsating. Reaching up and grabbing hold of his head, the man let out a pained groan. “You’re gonna want this.” Gunnar looked up to find Cooper standing beside the couch. A mug of steaming black coffee was held in his outstretched hand. “Thanks, Coop,” Gunnar mumbled while taking the mug. Cooper sat down in a chair across from the couch and let out a heavy sigh. “This is going to be a hard one to get ourselves out of,” he mumbled while staring up at the ceiling. Gunnar remained quiet for a moment before taking another large gulp from the mug. The throbbing began to subside as his body slowly started to recover from the night before. “I’m honestly not sure if we’ll be able to, Coop.” Gunnar took in a deep breath before finishing off the coffee and resting the mug on the adjacent end table. “This town has had a few issues in the past that had me worried, but they never really caused me too much alarm. I’d handle them relatively quickly, and life would move on. However, I’ve never had to deal with law enforcement before. This town has been able to keep its secret hidden for decades, but this…” Gunnar nodded his head towards the muted television. The news cycle was once again playing the clip from the previous night. “…this has me terrified out of my fucking mind.” The blurred image of Gunnar’s face appeared on the screen once more. As the news anchor’s lips moved with silence, Cooper retrieved the pot of coffee from the kitchen and refilled both of their mugs. “I didn’t get much sleep last night, so I’ve been up for a good few hours trying to formulate a plan that could hopefully alleviate all this.” Gunnar raised an eyebrow and sipped from the mug. “By all means, let me hear it.” “Well, the biggest concern I have now is the body lying on your kitchen table. In hindsight, we shouldn’t have left your house without at least putting it in the barn.” Gunnar scoffed as he watched the image on tv switch to the portrait of Adam. “Considering how dazed I was last night, I’m surprised a bigger mistake didn’t happen. I gotta thank you for keeping me level-headed.” Cooper nodded and continued speaking. “Once you feel that you’ve fully recovered from last night’s… episode, I’m going to take you back home to dispose of his body. Get a fire going as hot as you can and burn him up. I also want you to take any meat from the freezer and throw that in as well.” “What should I do with the bones?” Cooper sighed and swirled the coffee around in the bottom of his mug. “This is going to be the tedious part. I know for a fact that there are bones from numerous other victims that have accumulated over the years. I need you to be extremely thorough in making sure that the farmhouse and barn are completely stripped clean. Once you’ve collected everything, grind them up into a fine powder and spread it across the wheat field in the far corner of the property.” Gunnar nodded along as Cooper spoke. “The last thing we’ll need to do is dispose of your truck. Susan is going to pull everything out of it and then drive the thing into that flooded quarry about fifteen miles outside of town. I’ve already arranged for Ronnie to get you a replacement with real license plates and everything. He and his wife will meet Susan at the quarry, and she’ll return to your house with a new truck. While you and Andrew finish disposing of any meat, she’ll be scrubbing your house from top to bottom.” “What about the townspeople,” Gunnar asked while catching Cooper by surprise. “I can tell just how much trouble you’ve gone through to come up with this plan to keep me safe, Coop, but I think we need to also consider the possibility of law enforcement questioning the people of this town.” Cooper ran a hand through his hair and took a large sip of coffee from his mug. “That’s the last thing I wanted to bring up. I think the greatest threat to keeping all of this under wraps could be our own neighbors. No matter how they may react to my strategy, I think it’s about time we stop this… once and for all… I’m going to call a meeting at the church and try to put an end to all of this.” Gunnar sat in silence as he ran over the plan in his head. Cooper waited for him to respond and was taken aback when the room was filled with a light chuckle. “Do you know how many years… how many painfully long and agonizing years… I’ve waited for all of this to end,” Gunnar said with a laugh as a smile spread over his lips. “I’ve tried on a few occasions to make all of this stop, but there was always a small handful of people in this town who wouldn’t hear any of it.” He paused and slowly turned to look at Cooper. “For a while now, I’ve come to think of you as the one that would take my position in this whole operation once I was unable to do so. But now… you may just be the one who could finally put an end to it.” Cooper leaned back in his chair and starred outside. The branches of the oak tree on the front lawn trembled slightly in the Texas summer breeze, causing a few leaves to break free and tumble through the air. “As much as I would love to see that happen, I’m just not sure how well some people are going take the news, Gunnar.” “Then do what my father did,” Gunnar said with his tone now reverting to one of complete seriousness. “These people fear you, Coop. From the way I see them act around you, it’s not just a respect for your power. They are legitimately terrified of what you can do. If someone opposes your leadership, then fight back. Whether that means verbally or physically fighting back is completely up to your discretion. I have complete faith that no matter what, you’ll handle the situation better than I’d be able to.” Cooper smiled and finished off the coffee in his mug. “You know, Gunnar, my life has changed drastically since I’ve lived here. Not only have I found myself take on a more firm and authoritative deposition, but I have a family. Hell, I never would’ve considered having a wife, let alone a kid, just a little over a year ago. Now, I’d be willing to slaughter anyway to keep them safe.” “I know you would, Coop. That’s why I’m sure that no matter what happens, you’ll be able to handle it.” Before Cooper let the emotions overtake him, he stood up and walked to the front door. “We need to get to work. Right now, time is the most precious thing we have,” Cooper said while slipping on his boots. Gunnar nodded and walked over to meet him. Cooper called for Susan and Andrew, and all four piled into his truck. Quickly starting the engine, the vehicle sped down the driveway and onto the main road. During the ride back to Gunnar’s house, Cooper made sure everyone had the details of their task fully memorized. Soon enough, the white farmhouse came into view and Cooper let off the accelerator. As the truck rolled to a stop in front of the home, Andrew had already flung open his door. He and Gunnar rushed out and bolted for the front door. The screen door slammed behind them while Susan climbed down from her seat. Cooper rolled down the passenger side window and called to her. “Ronnie said he’ll be at the quarry in about half an hour, so you don’t have too much time to clean out Gunnar’s truck and get down there. Are you sure you’re comfortable jumping and rolling from a moving car?” “Don’t you worry about me. Just make sure you keep this town from going under.” Susan leaned through the window and gave her husband a kiss before passing a hand down his cheek. “I know how some of these people can be, so promise me that you’ll take care of yourself.” “I’ll make sure to stop them before they even have a chance to try anything,” Cooper let out with confidence has he patted the firearm strapped in the holster on his belt. With one final smile, Susan started towards the barn as Gunnar finished backing the truck inside. As Cooper drove off, he watched in the rearview mirror as she shut the barn doors. A small trail of smoke from the fire Andrew had started floated through the air while Gunnar ran back to join him. “God, I hope this works,” Cooper muttered under his breath. He turned up the radio to drown out his thoughts and made his way towards the small church in town. When he finally reached the building, he noticed that almost everyone in town had already arrived. The last few people were walking up the old wooden steps and through the doorway. Cooper brought the truck to a halt and killed the engine. Shoving the keys in his pocket, he quickly ran across the grass and bounded up the steps in a single stride. As he ran through the doorway, the heads of everyone sitting in the pews turned to look at him. All the chatter ceased, and an eerie silence hung in the room. Not knowing what else to do, Cooper folded his sunglasses, slid them on the neck of his shirt, and walked towards the front of the room. “Steven, close the doors and keep a lookout for anyone driving up,” he said without any tone of politeness. The man he addressed did what he was told and slammed the oak doors shut. Cooper walked up the two steps that led to the altar before turning around to face the crowd. He let out a sigh and sat down on the top step. “We don’t have

35 minutes

September 18, 2019

Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Torture and Cannibalism

My Son Committed Suicide, and My Wife Blames Me

body horror, child abuse, children, control, deaths, domestic abuse, kids, mind control, relationships, revenge, Robert Kilmartin, suicides, technology, torture

I’ve never posted like this before. But I suppose I’ve never needed to. If you’ve read the title, you know what to expect, and you can move on if you’d like to avoid the topic. I’ll understand. Grief is a funny thing. Professor Farina taught me that in the first class I ever took for my undergrad, and I never understood it until now. For my wife, it’s turned into unreasoning anger. She’s downstairs right now, no doubt cursing my name. For me, it seems to have manifested in needing to keep myself busy. But I’ve run out of piles to organize and surfaces to clean, and so I’ve come here to write down the whole story of my son’s life. I apologize in advance for rambling, but it’s all so fresh and raw right now that I need to work myself up to the actual event. My greatest failure. My idol, Skinner, once said, “A failure is not always a mistake. It may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances.” But I feel I have made a great many mistakes. When my son was born, it was like I finally had found my calling. Yes, I’d had jobs before. Even what I thought was a respectable and long-term career. But nothing had ever captured my interest, nothing had ever engaged my waking and sleeping mind, like that tiny cherubic face. We’d planned to leave Isaac with her parents four days a week so that she could soon resume her job and I could continue mine without interruption. But a week of paternity leave was far too short for me, and so I decided that we could forgo some of the creature comforts that two incomes would allow. I decided to become a stay at home dad. The university wasn’t too thrilled about losing a tenure-track professor, but I was adamant. I’d finish out the semester, and that would be the end of my career in academia. Did it sting a little bit, to abandon my hard-earned degree and former dream job? Of course. But it was the pain of trading a rare treasure for a unique one. Many people have degrees in psychology. Many people hold professorships. But Isaac was one of a kind. Let somebody else be the next James Olds. I had found a higher purpose. It proved to be a good thing that I had convinced my wife to let me stay home. Isaac proved to have a challenging childhood, and he needed a guiding hand. As a newborn, he had been cherubic. As an infant and toddler, he proved rather less agreeable. Years of studying and even teaching human development classes had not prepared me as thoroughly as I had expected. There were days I wondered whether or not I was fit to be a parent, and I’ll admit now that in my heart of hearts there were days when I regretted my choice to leave my job. Only for short bursts, and always followed by the deepest regret, but there it is. The pure and unvarnished truth: I am not – was not – a perfect father. When I had just about reached my breaking point – when the thought of another day of tantrums and diapers and bone-deep weariness was too much to bear – Isaac turned a behavioral corner. It came right after a terrible fright – the only real injury he ever suffered in his life. His mother always thought that when he fell and bumped his head so hard he needed stitches, it must have knocked something loose. I didn’t think it was quite so drastic as that, but there was a marked improvement from that day forward. And although I could never have stayed mad at him for long, I was even more lenient as long as he had that hangdog look and those bruised eyes. In fact, having been afraid for even a moment of losing him, I could hardly bear to discipline him at all. Luckily, I rarely had any call to do so. As the terrible twos faded into memory, Isaac grew into the model child. His tantrums disappeared, and the willful and stubborn young boy became as tractable as any parent could hope. He ate his vegetables, he cleaned his room, he put away his toys, and he made my life as a father an endless parade of delight. Seeing his bright smile first thing in the morning never failed to bring an answering smile to my face. I was worried, I’ll admit, that he would change as he grew older and went to school. My wife called me a mother hen, half teasing and half exasperated with my worrying. After a year of public school, though, she began to agree with me. Our well behaved son was in danger of reverting into the little hellion who had so exhausted us years prior. I don’t know why she worried about it. After all, I had more than a little experience in education myself, and was perfectly qualified to homeschool. I think perhaps she thought that his emotional and social growth would be stunted if we pulled him from the public school system. It was not. If anything, he flourished even more as a home student than he had in the years prior to formal schooling. I made sure to bring him often to homeschool groups and social gatherings, and tried to let him maintain those friends he had developed in his year in the system. And in terms of scholarship, he excelled. It was soon obvious to me that Isaac was gifted, and that those gifts would have been squandered in a formal classroom. Seeing how much he enjoyed learning warmed my educator’s heart. While other children tolerated school and lived for cartoons and video games and reckless play, my boy loved nothing so much as sitting and reading, exploring whole universes with the same eagerness as some children explore dirty puddles and dangerous forests. And not just mindless novels or frivolous adventure stories: he read books of history, of poetry, of science. Isaac enjoyed learning for learning’s sake. He was everything I had ever hoped to find in a student, and I cannot express how glad I was that such a student could be crafted from my own flesh and blood. As the years wore on, my son continued to develop into exactly the man I had hoped he would be. He never drank, never smoked, never tried drugs, and only very rarely rebelled at all – a few times staying out after curfew, a brief dalliance with a local girl. Of course, a little youthful rebellion is a normal thing, and I tolerated it as a necessary price for him to have a well-adjusted adolescence. My wife and I would listen with horror to the stories our friends told of their own screaming fights with hormone-riddled teenagers, with children who had become strangers to them, and nod with feigned sympathy. More than once, on the ride home from whatever dinner or gathering we’d been to, she would turn to me and say simply, “We are very, very blessed.” When Isaac was beginning to think about college, he initially considered working towards a psychology degree. I was . . . unenthusiastic about the idea, and he noticed. I know that he considered it a high form of compliment to want to follow in my footsteps, and I took it as such. But I told him frankly that I had found my degree to be so much wasted time, that it was a meaningless piece of paper, and that he would be better served working at a McDonalds where at least they’d teach him a few employable skills. He took it as well as could be expected, and threw himself into a physics degree with a gusto. My wife was surprised that he had stayed at a local college when he had so many offers from prestigious schools all around the world, but I explained the logic in it to her. Why spend all that money to go to another part of the world and be so busy with schoolwork that he wouldn’t be able to enjoy it? Better to stay at home, save some money, and go on a well-earned trip around the world when the degree was earned. Even if his field of study was not my own, he continued to echo my life in every way that counted. A brilliant scholar who reached the top of his class early and stayed there for all four years, he earned distinctions and accolades the way that lesser students earned demerits and police reports. By the time he was done with his junior year, he had all of the subject-area credits he needed to graduate, and had taken most of the available electives besides. Maybe that was the cause. Could it be that his own enthusiasm, his own overwhelming urge to learn, was the reason for everything that came later? I hope not. Dear god, I hope not. Whether or not it was, my son had his senior year to fill as he saw fit. Maybe it was a lingering thread of his earlier desires. Maybe it was a desire to emulate me still further. Maybe it was a pure accident of fate: a pretty girl mentioning a class she was taking, a coin flip, a split-second decision. Whatever the reason, he took a psychology elective this spring. A class about substance abuse. By the time I heard about it, it was past the period to drop it easily, and he was unwilling to put a blemish on an otherwise spotless record. And I was unwilling to force the issue. Of course I tried to convince him, to cajole him, to drop the class. But when he pressed me for reasons why he should bother, I had none to give. So I let the matter rest. I have never made a worse mistake. I heard all about the class for the first few weeks of the semester. For his whole college career, Isaac had been more than happy to spend time with his mother and I, and to regale us with stories from his time at school. We were so proud of him. I was so proud. But in February, something changed. His talks grew shorter, and colder, and soon stopped altogether. By early last month, my son seldom left his room while at home. When he did, any conversations we had were stilted and awkward. A wall had grown between us, and I couldn’t understand it. My wife dismissed it as senioritis, or a long-overdue display of teenage pique. I was not so sure. My boy was perfect. He was beyond such things. She and I agreed that, if it continued past spring break (the first spring break he had ever spent away from home), we would talk to him about it. We WOULD get our son back, she said. And I believed her. I really thought I could do it, that no matter the problem, I could overcome it. But Isaac never came back from spring break. All that came to us from those sunny southern shores were frantic phone calls, a police report, a cold body, and sealed letters. My wife and I laid him to rest in a small private ceremony a week and a half ago. As I gave the eulogy, I couldn’t help but cry about what we had lost. Not just my son as he was – the light of my life – but the man he might have been. After many tears and brutal self-recriminations, my wife and I finally opened the envelopes that held our son’s last words to us. The one addressed to me was written for my eyes only, but I’ll copy it here for you. The words are too much for me to bear alone. Dad: My first memory of you is a happy one. You’re holding me tight and comforting me, stopping my tears and reassuring me that everything would be okay. That’s been my memory of you for basically forever: the one person I can turn to who would make everything okay. The one person who would stand up for me and protect me no matter what. I wanted to be just like you, and you wanted me to be even better. That’s why you pushed me, I think. In some twisted way, I think you honestly believed – maybe you even still believe – that everything you did was for my benefit. I know, Dad. I know what you did. Remember how hard you tried to convince me to drop Substance Abuse? I didn’t really question it at the time, even if I didn’t understand. I just wasn’t raised to question you. But I get it now. The first time we learned about what heroin did for the brain, I was confused. Because that pure rush, that pulse-pounding oh-fuck-yeah euphoria? That sounded too damn familiar. I had it all the time. Every time I cracked open a book. Every time I aced a test. Every time I cleaned up after myself, or mowed the lawn, or did what you asked, I got the exact rush that the book described as a result of an incredibly powerful opiate. I thought maybe I was making my own natural responses out to be more intense than they really were, so I looked into it some more. And person after person, documentary after documentary, convinced me that I wasn’t imagining it. So I thought maybe I was some kind of freak of nature with a really strong natural reward system. Maybe. But a reward system that favored studying and eating healthy as strongly as heroin and sex? That’s pretty fucking unlikely. I know you’re probably surprised to see me swearing. I’m surprised to be writing it, believe me. It’s not how you raised me. The thing is, Dad, I’m trying really damn hard not to care how you raised me. I had a CT scan done, just to check for any abnormalities. And what did they find? No tumor. No overdeveloped pituitary gland. Nothing unusual except for the big damn bunch of wires plugged into my brain. I called Mom and asked her if I had ever had brain surgery as a kid. I was freaking out, but I wanted to think that I was wrong. That something could explain this. But no, she said. Never. Just some stitches from when I fell down as a toddler. That Dad could tell me more about it, since he was there. The doctor wanted me to go to the police, or to stay so they could run some more tests. I told them I had to think about it. And I did. But I’ve thought about it now, and I’ve decided something. I don’t know who I am. My whole life, you’ve been pressing a button and zapping my brain into thinking it was happy whenever I did something that made YOU happy. Clean my room? Zap! Wash the dishes? ZAP! Did my homework? ZAP! And little by little, you molded me into the perfect little tin soldier of a son. Am I everything you ever wanted, Dad? Am I as perfect as you hoped I’d be when you shoved this fucking thing in my head!? I don’t know who I am! I’m your goddamn puppet! You killed whoever I was supposed to be! Whoever I should have been! You killed me, and replaced me with whoever the hell I am now! I’ I just No. No more. I don’t know if I’ve ever decided anything for myself in my whole fucking life, but I’ll decide on this much: when to end it. I hope you burn in hell. So now you see my pain. I dreamed many dreams for my son. I knew he could be anything when he was come of age. But I never thought he’d be ungrateful. Everything he had, all of his success, all of the bad choices he avoided? That was because of me! Because there was somebody there to guide him, to steer him away from danger and toward a better path! All I wanted was for him to be as good as he could be. The best him that he could be. All I wanted was to give him a push in the right direction. And at the end of the day, when I first thought of it, all I really wanted was for him to stop crying so much. Well, there it is. The cause of all my tears, and all my wife’s rage. I think in his letter to her, he told her what I had done. She burned it, so I can’t be sure, but she came after me with a pair of scissors just after reading it, so he must have told her something. She’s downstairs now, in the basement. It’s strange – while I was writing I hardly heard her, but now that I’m almost done her cries and screams are almost overwhelming. She blames me for what happened to our son, for what he did to himself. But she’ll understand my point of view in time. When she wakes up from the surgery, she’ll learn to forgive me.

10 minutes

April 20, 2019

Body Horror, Children and Childhood, Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Technology, the Internet, and the Deep Web, Torture and Cannibalism

Restoration

angels, demons, Devlin Riptide, religion, rituals

Part 1 I work in restoration. Your house or business floods? My crew comes in, dries everything up, cleans the baseboards, preps the place, tosses the ruined stuff into a dumpster and hauls it away. We leave the place clean and ready for a fresh coat of paint. I’m usually pretty proud of the work me and my crew does. We do it all too. Mostly we have to do flood damage, but there are times when we get called to rich folks houses to remove stains from stone and concrete structures. I’ve had a museum call for the same. I’ve made a name for myself in being able to get just about any stain out of any stone. You think it’s easy, or that you can just scrub away a stain, but folks forget that marble isn’t solid material. It’s porous, and it sucks in liquid. That’s why polish and maintenance are important. I’m not naive though. Plenty of times I get called in for “Red Wine” – yeah, okay I get it. You were partying with the hooker, she OD’d cracked her coked out head on a coffee table and suddenly there’s a pool of blood on the marble floor of your penthouse and you can’t get the stain out. Worse? The Wife’s home next week. I’ve done the clean-up enough times to know a few things You don’t ask stupid questions. Hell half the time the hooker’s fine or would have OD’d anyway with or without the expensive John. So no skin off my nose. And if you’re cleaning up the scene before the cops can show up, honestly, that’s on them. I have a job to do, and I do it. Don’t remember these people. I’m not some guy who’s going to get brought in on some indictment hearing or some stupid tabloid media circus all because I decided to suddenly have a good memory. I do a job like this, I get your address, I show up, I shake your hand, I call you “Mr.Smith”, and then I leave, I delete your address, and I carry on with my life. The less I know the safer I am. That being said, I don’t get the blood cleanup very often. It’s normally innocent stuff, Wine, Sewage, Flood Water, sometimes human feces (you think it’s gross but it’s easier than anything else to clean.) The weirdest request?I need to give you context on weird. I had a call to clean up a place after something called a “Luna Party” which somehow involved a whole lot of menstrual blood and dancing in it. (Next time bring a tarp…) That’s not my weirdest call. It was a Friday, I don’t know why that mattered when I got a call. The secretary was out for lunch as was the rest of the crew, rather than let it go to voicemail, I took the phone call. This was my first mistake.”M & C Restoration Inc. Fred speaking.” Yeah, I’m Fred. There was a pause and then a guy’s voice comes over, kind of timid. “Yes, Hello. I understand from your ad you can remove stains from all sorts of stone. Marble as well?” “Kind of our specialty.” I boast, “What sort of stains are you talking about?” “Blood.” I never had someone just out and out say it. I get all the pussyfooting around, sure. “Wine”, “Salsa”, “Sangria” – Sangria was my favorite considering that ‘Blood’ is in the name. But this guy just out and said it, plainly. “How large an area?” Another pause, “I’d say about… maybe 10000 square foot?” “Not the property,” I tried to clarify, “Just the stain.” “Yes, I know.” “…You need 10,000 square feet of marble, which is stained in blood… cleaned?” “Yes.” This time I had to take a moment. How many gallons was that? I thought back to that ‘Lunar Party’ thing, or whatever, but even that as only a single floor. “I’m sorry, some context is probably needed.” the voice on the other end continued, “My name is Timothy. I work in antiquities. A curator friend of mine referred me to you after you managed to clear her museum steps of some blood that apparently occurred after someone took a nasty fall.” I cleared my throat, “Right… okay. Yes. I’m just still trying to process, 10,000 square feet of stained tile.” “Is it too much?” I was still a bit dumbfounded. “Let me be Frank; this site was the location of a rather bloody massacre some time ago. My colleagues and I have already examined the site in its entirety and we’re looking to begin restoration.” At this point, my concern got overridden by cash. Antiquities? Historical site? This sounded like a fat government contract! Christmas came early to ol’ Freddy! “What’s the budget for this project of yours?” “Time is more of the essence than anything else. We need the site cleaned in preparation for other restoration efforts. So as soon as possible would be preferred. Your fee is, essentially, yours to name. You’re literally the only one who I can call on for this task.”Haggling wasn’t this guy’s strong suit, sounded to me like he needs to read The Art of The Deal. “You’re talking a whole lot of space to clear, 10,000 square feet is a whole lot of floor.” “It’s not all floor. A good portion of it is on the walls and ceiling.” “How high is the ceiling?” “About 50 feet.” I was silent again, I was going to need to rent a scissor lift for that. I thought for a moment and cleared my throat, “I’m going to need a whole lot of equipment, materials, and at least five guys if you want this job done right and fast.” “Of course.” “How long has the marble been stained?” There was a moment of silence, “By the current timeline? Oh, well maybe 200… wait, What’s the current year again?” I wasn’t too sure why he was asking but I figured I shouldn’t sound stupid, “It’s 2018.” “350 years… roughly.” I thought for a moment, thinking about how, this being the United States, there was no way for there to be a structure like he was talking about. I ignored him and assumed he had to be wrong. Anything over a decade is as set in as it’s going to be anyway. I took a breath, “I can’t do it for less than thirty grand.” I figured he’d work on needling the price down, but then he shocked me again. “Understandable. I’m assuming I can ignore a number of taxes and paperwork if I provided a cash payment?” I coughed in shock, nearly swallowed my cigarette, “Yes, certainly.” Cash? I’m going to have this job done and it was going to be tax-free? I felt like I just won the lotto. So the job itself comes up. I’ve got my crew rolling to the address. The address has a huge rusted gate, chain on the front, typical of a site you’re not allowed to get to. I see a guy standing about six foot in a black trenchcoat, black sunglasses, gloves, black dress shoes and slacks, brown hair and pretty pale. He doesn’t say a word, and unlocks the chain on the gate, pulled it off pretty quick. I thought it was a heavier gauge than he made it seem, but I was probably just mistaken, being in a huge truck and not too close to the gate. The guy opens the gate up and walks up to the side of the truck. “Fred, yes?” he says flatly. I nod, reaching my hand out to him, “You’re Tim?” “Timothy, yes.” he shakes my hand, firm handshake, and his hair is cut short, trim, proper. “Military?” I ask. He nods, stepping back and pointing down past the gate, motioning with his non-directing hand to move. Definitely military, so I nod and drive up. I see a huge mansion, white and gray stone steps, old siding falling apart, boarded up windows, messed up the roof and the entire place looks to be knocked down but getting rebuilt was apparently on the docket for today, and I was getting paid to not care. As we unload Timothy opens up the front doors and knocks them in place, he starts talking loudly, “The doors need to be open at all times while you work, there is no ventilation inside.” He has a pair of pretty heavy duty door stops on each door. From the outside, I cannot see anything inside. Nothing but pitch black. “You’re going to need lighting, so I hope you brought a generator.” I laugh while my crew unloads the trucks and sets up two generators, pulling down some cans of gas, “This isn’t my first rodeo.” “So it would seem,” says Timothy, and then he walks inside and vanishes into the blackness. I motion for the crew to set-up the lights and the first place we go is on either side of the door. He wasn’t kidding about needing light, the boards were perfect and the inside was absolutely dark. Like the middle of a moonless night dark. I hear the generator kick on and the lights perk up a second later. That’s when I see a massive white face appear out of the dark with brown drips across it. It’s an angelic woman carved expertly out of marble, I swear I can see the pores on her cheeks and the split ends of her long hair. There’s a second similar statute about thirty feet to the left and it’s covered in brown stains. I hear one of my guys, Chavez, speak up. “My God.” That’s about when I got the hint something wasn’t right. Chavez spoke up again, “Hail Mary, our father protect us.” I picked up Chavez from a day laborer site about one year ago and I’ve been paying him under the table ever since. He’s either from Mexico or Honduras, he was a good worker so I never bothered to care, and could never ask. “This is too much, this place is cursed to high Hell, the blood’s all over those angel statues, what is this?” Chavez was rambling. You see, the reason I never could ask Chavez where he came from was that Chavez doesn’t speak a God Damn word of English. Timothy voice soon echoed across the room, walking over the solid marble in various states of stains and scrapes. “I trust this isn’t too much for you, or your men?” I didn’t actually spot where he had come from, but I wasn’t paying attention before Chavez got a smack upside the head from one of my full-timers Pete. “Since when the Hell can you speak English Chavez?” “When the Hell did you learn Spanish Peter?” Chavez asked. Timothy seemed agitated, “Gentlemen if we can begin the job now?” and he walked past us and outside. I turned to both of my men, “Pete, Chavez, shut the fuck up the both of you. We do this job, go home, you all get a good paycheck, okay? No more questions, let’s get moving.” “This place is cursed,” Chavez said before turning around and pulling in the pressure washers and detergent bottles. I got up in Chavez face now, certain he can understand me, “Then the quicker we get started, the quicker we can get the Hell out of here. Understand?” “Understood,” Chavez said, still looking confused. Pete then spoke up, “Hey boss…” he focused a flashlight to a portion of the floor where the stain ended. I looked over to where he was shining the light. The brown stains were everywhere, as described, but toward where one large swath of brown ended was an impression on the floor in the stuff, much clearer. The impression was of a sword, which had to have been drenched in blood. The sword-shaped stain didn’t bother me. It’s what was apparently holding it. An outstretched arm shape, and then two massive wing-like stains on either side, with a human-like face profiled on the floor. Everything below the waist of the figure vanished in the larger stain across the floor. We each had an idea of what we were looking at, but we were too stunned at the sight. Chavez was the first to break the silence, “Angels died here…” Part 2 I heard what Chavez said but I don’t think I was letting it sink in. Angels don’t die. Angels don’t exist, personally, but that’s neither here nor there. If angels existed I’d have seen a damn miracle or two around my house, my mother was a God nut, super religious, yet nothing saved her from her car accident or stopped my father’s cancer. No there’s some rational explanation. I know there is, this imprint on the floor, sure it could be human, Timothy said this was a massacre over three hundred years ago. So, some guy died in a pool of his own blood, sword in hand, and the rest pooled in the shape of wings.No no, couldn’t be wings. This was kind of like Rorschach test. Someone sees puffy clouds, Chavez sees wings because there are two giant thirty-foot statues of angel’s flanking the center of the damn room. It’s in his head, that’s all. I get a hold of myself, “Chavez, Pete, get the scissor lift in here, help out Bob and Mike and let’s get this job over with. Sooner we start, sooner we’re done, chop chop.”Pete gets motivated pretty quick, but Chavez is now on one knee making the cross over his chest and saying God’s prayer. I ignore him for now and get to busy myself with the task at hand. The most difficult problem first: The statue on the left needs to be cleaned, and carefully since it’s a work of art. As Bob and I are guiding the scissor lift into the place I hear Timothy shout something at Chavez. I rush over, now I feel like I’m on a normal work site. “Hey hey, don’t shout at my guys, what’s going on?” I intervene. Chavez has both of his hands up, stepping back from a huge structure of canvas and plywood making up a barricade to the right side of the entrance. “I was just checking for more stains, Fred.” Understanding Chavez is a new thing for me but it’s not entirely unwelcome. Timothy seems exasperated, “I appreciate your due diligence but this… This area is unstable, I cannot have anyone past these barriers. I apologize, I should have made that clear. The main hall is where the cleaning must be done. Only the main hall, any area that’s barricaded is unsafe, I can’t be held liable for the safety of your men if they wander past them.” I look to Chavez, “you heard the man, help Bob with the scissor lift and then get to pre-treating the statue. Be careful, okay?” Chavez nods, and looks to Timothy, “What saint is she?” Timothy looks at the statue for a moment and gets this kind of far-away look in his eyes. “Dinah of Enoch.” Chavez gives Timothy thumbs up and says, “I’ll take good care of Saint Dinah. She will sparkle!” He runs off to help Bob with the scissor lift and a very confused Bob and Chavez make their way over to the statue of, Dinah, I guess. Timothy is smiling an odd kind of smile, and I almost break my “No questions” rule for a moment. I get my hard hat on and start shouting at Bob when I see he’s not wearing a harness on the lift. Typical worksite stuff: got to remind the old timers they’re mortal and make sure the greenhorn of the group doesn’t fuck something up. I’m happy to slide back into my routine. It wouldn’t last, of course. About halfway through the day we’re just about done getting the bust of this statue clear, and I gotta say she’s looking as good as new there when we hear a huge bang. It sounds almost like someone took a large aluminum pipe and smashed it down onto the marble. It echoes over our tools and even the guys with ear protection are taken back by the sound. I scream and shout to cut the equipment and tell Bob and Chavez to get off the scissor lift. Lord knows if something blew on the damn thing, it’s a rental after all. I call Mike over to have a look. Mike slides under the lift as Bob and Chavez unhook their harnesses. Chavez looks to me, “It wasn’t the lift, boss.” “Well, then what the fuck was it?” Chavez points to behind one of the barricades and I spot Timothy running towards it, I think I hear him mumble something like, “This can’t be happening right now.” I shout to him, “Hey, Tim, you need a hand?” Timothy shoots me a stern look and in a pretty practiced officer tone commands us, “No one is to go beyond this point, something may have collapsed. If there’s an issue I’ll let you know, you stay there.” and disappears behind a piece of plywood and canvas. I look to my guys and tell them to continue to inspect the scissor lift and then get back to work if everything is okay. God only knows what compelled me to walk toward the barricade at that moment. Morbid curiosity? A lapse of sound judgment? Mini-stroke? Still not sure to this day, but man was this at least the third or fourth stupidest thing I did that day. I get just close enough to hear voices, there’s a woman on the other side and Timothy. “I’m sorry, I truly am, but I’m afraid they’re all gone,” I hear Timothy say, hushed, but still enough for me to hear, “I know your pilgrimage must have been arduous.” The female voice sounds frantic and heartbroken, “But that can’t be! Surely, this cannot be! Who would do such a thing? Who could? Was it an army?” “It was just two people, unfortunately.” He sounds almost guilty, “They seemed to come in relative peace, but it was soon apparent that at least one of them had other ideas. All fought valiantly but they couldn’t be stopped” The woman’s voice is trembling, “It was her, wasn’t it? The daughter of Lu-“ The pressure washer kicked in and startled me while drowning them both out, and I realized how close I was to the barricade trying to listen. I stepped back and made my way quickly to the rest of the group, keeping an eye on the far barricade Timothy had vanished behind. I don’t see Tim emerge till we’re just about done for the day, the statue clean. Timothy stops as he sees it, in reverence of some kind I guess, looking it over silently. I walk over to him, “So far so good. We should be able to get some pretreatment on the flooring, let it sit overnight then we’ll hit it hard tomorrow.” Timothy just nods, “Your men do swift work.” “That’s what we do,” I say proudly. Pete starts yelling for me from across the room. I excuse myself and hustle over.”What’s up?” I look at where Pete is and he just points down. There’s, for lack of a better word, a gash in the flooring. I need to explain why this floor is unusual, more so than just having blood all over it and more than the shapes in said blood. You see, this floor doesn’t have seams. It’s a solid chunk of marble. I’ve seen some expensive walls and floors that are huge slabs, sure, happens all the time. If you have enough money they’ll tow a mountain to your house. But this was a mansion worth of floor that, for the life of me, I could not find a damn seam in. Now the gash, it’s almost ten feet long and at the center, it looks almost six inches deep. Even with the light, while I can see the bottom, it looks pretty dark inside the gash. Pete looks to me, “I’m going to ignore how this got here and just ask what we’re supposed to do? The surface scratches are easy to buff out but this isn’t going to buff out easy.” I call Mike over to have a look. Mike looks it over and runs his hand over the edges of the opening, as well as the sides, it’s all stained of course. “Jesus…” He stands up and looks it over, “That’s one clean swipe, there are no cutting marks like you’d get if you were slicing into it with a floor cutter… so… uh…” He starts thinking, “Can toss in quickset to fill it, get it most of the way full anyway, and we could just toss on some filler and polish but… I think we can do better with some resin, make it look a bit more natural. It’s up to the client though, this is going to cost extra.” I look it over, a two-inch-wide, ten-foot-long, and six-inch deep slash in the marble certainly wasn’t in the order. I look to see Timothy is already approaching us. “Just the man I need to see.” Timothy looks down and shakes his head, “She did some serious damage…” Don’t ask, don’t ask, just don’t. I keep saying that in my head. “We can fill it and get it level, may even make it look pretty. But this wasn’t in the original quote, so I’d say about another four grand.” I’d feel bad if this entire job didn’t feel like some crazy funhouse. Timothy just nods, “Fine fine, don’t go crazy, just so it’s level and no one trips over it.” Mike heads out to get the materials we need, and I drag one of the sandblasters over, the gash is smooth, and it’ll need to be rougher if that quickset is going to fill it in right. Everyone gets to work while I start to blast into this thing. Then something black shoots straight up out of the gash and clatters somewhere behind me. This is why I wear a hard hat, folks. I cut the blaster, and look around, it doesn’t seem like anyone else heard anything. I look to what popped out of the gash and realize the gash is about nine inches deeper, and I can see it’s still solid marble, no subfloor or dirt. Nothing is behind me but my closed toolbox. Whatever popped up must have shattered when it hit the ground, or all I saw was sand and blood popping up out of the gash in the floor. I get my ear protection back on and finish up prepping the gash to be filled. We pack up for the day, the floor is pretreated, we store the tools and such inside, and I do a quick head count, and I notice I’m short one Honduran. Oh, yeah, mystery solved on that one, Chavez is from Honduras. I look around and then spot him coming out from behind the barrier, Timothy walking behind him, his hand on his shoulder. Shit. I run over, “Chavez what the Hell, you were told not to-“ “Sorry boss, won’t happen again.” he’s very quiet and looks to Timothy, “Please consider? I do not mind.” “It’s dangerous Jorge.” Timothy says, “Discuss with me later, yes?” Chavez just nods and walks off.”What was that about?” I ask. Timothy just walks past me, “I thought you didn’t ask questions?” “Not when it involves one of my guys.” I clear my throat, “Who, I’m sorry, disobeyed your instructions.” Timothy glanced back at me, and with the light from the door behind him I kind of got the best look at his ice blue eyes, “Ensure it doesn’t happen again, Fred.” I just nod dumbly as the red flags keep waving in my head. Just don’t show up tomorrow, take the money, leave the gear, go on your merry way. Granted I’d only been paid half of the job, but still, it was a decent amount. We get packed up, and the crew and I head out, packing my toolbox and other smaller items in the truck. I notice Timothy is locking up the doors of the place and then escorts us to the gates. He closes them with him on the other side. I pull my truck up to the gate, “You are living on site?” Timothy hesitates for a moment, but answers, “Yes. I have a trailer out back.” “See you bright and early tomorrow then.”Timothy just nods and waves me off. I never actually paid attention to where he went from there. I turn to Chavez in the truck, and ask, “So what did you and Timothy talk about?” “¿que?” is all I get from Chavez. He has to be fucking with me, I put it out of my mind, drop Chavez off at his place, he waves as always. “Gracias, señor Fred!”, and heads home. I head back home as well. At home, the kids are asleep as is the wife, and I’ve got my toolbox in the garage. I pop open my toolbox as I’ve got to swap a few things in and out for the next day, specifically some mixing bits and the like. When I open my toolbox, however, something inside of it is certainly not a tool I have ever used. I suddenly recognize it, it’s the object that came out of the gash. My toolbox was opened behind me, it must have closed when the thing slammed into it. The object is about three wide deep in the center, two feet long, and about three inches thick at the top, tapering to a point at the bottom. It looks almost like a wedge, and I realize it’s probably blood that seeped into this gash and solidified over the years.I pick it up, and it’s light, but despite my attempts, I cannot break this thing. looking at this object in the light for the first time. It almost looks like a blade, either that or the shape of the Gash just shaped this thing into one. The top is flat, the bottom comes to a point, not sharp, but it could be. Light seems to penetrate through the edge of this thing and it is tinted deep red, the rest appears to be black. I didn’t even know blood could become a solid, but I guess if there’s enough of it, it’s possible. It’s about ten after eleven when I swear I hear three taps against my front door as if I had a knocker or something. I don’t, by the way. I leave the object in my toolbox, closing it and locking it, and head to the front door. I’m not an idiot, I make sure to check my closet next to the door, and I make sure my shotgun is loaded. It’s after 11 PM, what psycho comes knocking at someone’s door at this time of night? I open the door halfway and am greeted by an outstretched hand with a black ring on each finger, one of which was about to tap again on the door. The hand pulls back and clasps a wide-brimmed white hat, removing it from his head and lowering it to about chest level. One hand is behind him and he’s standing a good six foot three, wearing a white duster of some sort and a red tie over a black, very expensive looking, dress shirt. He has white-rimmed glasses and yellowish eyes behind them, jet black hair that’s well kept. As he speaks it’s almost like his voice doesn’t match his body, his face isn’t odd but doesn’t stand out, and his voice sounds almost like it comes from an old cop movie.”Evenin’ young man. I understand you’re working with an associate of mine, goes by Timothy?” While client confidentiality isn’t my cornerstone, keeping my business out of my personal life sure as shit is. “Sorry buddy but I’m going to have to ask you talk to me during business hours.” His face falls slightly, “now this is important… regarding that place you’re working in. Timothy may have you misled, you see, he’s using this place for his own means, not prosperity.” he pulls out some kind of business card and twirls it over each of his fingers before handing it to me. I look it over, it just has a phone number on it, no other information. His other hand brings an unlit cigarette to his mouth, he inhales, smoke venting out of his nostrils. “If you were to happen across something… of note… I’d be appreciative if you could contact me.” “I’m not doing that, I’m not the kind to take things from a worksite.” Normally, this is completely true. A shit eating grins spread across this guys’ face and his oddly perfect teeth almost glisten in the light on my porch. “True. Be a shame to take something that you don’t understand, only to wind up dead,” he cocks an eyebrow at me, “or worse.” I had it with the creep on my porch at this point, “Listen, pal, hit the bricks, you hear me? Get the fuck off my property or I’ll call the cops,” I try cocking a shit eating grin myself now, “or worse”, I don’t think it works. He stands still, I can barely tell if he is breathing. I pump the shotgun behind the door, I know there’s no point to this, I just eject a perfectly good shell, but I want him to hear that I’ve got a gun, it’s pump action, and it’s in my hand. His voice suddenly changes, or he just drops the facade, and a raspy voice like that of a lifelong chain smoker slithers out of his throat, half a whisper, half a wheeze. “Not parting with it then, eh? Well, I’ll have it one way or another, for certain.” The accent is hard to place, it’s not quite Middle Eastern, but it’s not like anything I’ve ever heard. I now pull the shotgun out and point it at his face, “And now I’m done with you. Whoever the fuck you are, get out.” He doesn’t even flinch, he just grins more, a hissing chuckle dripping out of his mouth, “You are a fun one… never once does your sort disappoint… always resorting to the fire provided by Prometheus yet,” he pauses, eyeing the barrel of the gun, “never considering where it came from.” I’m not sure where he pulled it from, but he suddenly crunches into an apple he must have had in his pocket. “I suppose… I’ll have to reconsider. Maybe when you’re asleep, like what happened to that hooker you cleaned up a few years back on Broadway?” My heart skipped a beat. I don’t talk about clients and clients would never talk about me, and I never go into that much detail either, I just restore shit. “A man of your skills is bound to clean up a homicide of two. Knowingly or not,” He tilts his head back, looking at me down the barrel of the gun, “cleaning up the sin left behind by those less scrupulous than yourself? Oh, we’ve been watching you for some time,” now, for some reason, his eyes go wider, “Red Fred.” I click the safety off of the shotgun and put my finger on the trigger. “Get the fuck out of here right now.” Another loud crunch of his apple and he seems to mockingly throw his hands up, walking backward, keeping eye contact with me with those yellow eyes, “Very well… another time then. You are a fun one Red.” he turns and starts to walk off. I haven’t moved the gun yet, still trained on him, “Don’t fucking call me Red you…” I realize I hadn’t gotten this creep’s name, the card that he gave me only had a phone number. “Whatever your God-given name is!” My mother always said that when she mad. She’d shout out into phones all the time when telemarketers would give her fake names and shit, “What’s your God-Given name?” – so it’s a force of habit I picked up. I only said it when I was really pissed at someone. And this guy had me pretty livid. Bar-none, the dumbest thing I apparently did all day. He stops dead on my walkway, and his hands slowly go down to his sides, “ooh…” his voice whispers out as if he had just won a prize. “You compel my God-given name?” his head starts to turn toward his right shoulder, but his shoulders aren’t moving, not an inch. As I watch I get ready to shoot. I swear if his head does a full 180-degree turn, I don’t care what his name was, I’ll just start shooting until he stops moving and probably pump a few more rounds into just to be sure. His head stops just shy of completely turned, I can see both of his yellow eyes as he slowly placed his hat back on his head. He grins and I swear I watch his pupils dilate till his eyes look almost entirely black with yellowish rings around them, “You can tell Timothy my name too,” he lets out another hissing laugh and I swear I can hear the gun shaking in my hands for some reason, “It’s Belial.” I don’t know why but I feel the blood drain out of my face for a moment and the whole area got a bit dimmer as if something were draining it of light. I stagger slightly, but regain my footing, press the shotgun butt against my shoulder tightly, as if it’s somehow going to help me. He turns away from me, and as he walks off, he wheezes out, “Don’t forget to tell Timothy I stopped by,” another puff of smoke clouds around his head, “and what I stopped by for.” I pulled the gun back, shut the door, locked it, and shut the blinds. My heart was hammering in my chest as I checked the shells in my gun to ensure I had it loaded. I click the safety back on and I rush upstairs to my bedroom. My wife is fast asleep as I sit on the edge of the bed, gun in hand, staring at my front door down the stairs. I swear I can hear something three taps against my window at random times all night. Part 3 Morning came and I haven’t put the shotgun down yet, still sitting at the end of the bed and checking the windows. It seemed like the tapping stopped sometime around dawn. I hear my wife’s alarm clock go off and the sounds of her rousing from her sleep. “Morning honey,” she mumbles, brunette hair a mass of frizz and tangles. “Morning,” I say simply, making sure she’s okay. She gets out of bed and heads to the bathroom, I hear the kids alarms go off next and my boys are heard roughhousing in their room. My wife, Sandy, comes out of the bathroom, toothbrush in hand, and is about to motion for me to go contain the wild animals that are my fifteen and thirteen-year-old boys. She stops when she spots the shotgun in my hand. She quickly spits out her toothpaste, “Fred, why the fuck are you holding the shotgun?” she looks me up and down with her soft brown eyes. “Are those the clothes you had on when you came home yesterday?” ‘Honey I got visited by a guy who is probably not human in the least and he threatened the family if I don’t return a red blade-like object that came from some mysterious excavation site,’ is the most truthful thing I want to say. It also sounds batshit insane and the more I play the sentence over and over in my head the more I question my own sanity. “Fred?” Sandy pokes my shoulder. Apparently, I was staring off into space while trying to think up a logical response to her completely rational question. “I… Uh… someone was on the lawn last night. Was banging on the door and wouldn’t go away until I got the shotgun.” Sandy cocks her hip and shoots me one of those emasculating wife stares. “So rather than call the cops you reach for the shotgun?” I cock the shotgun and clear the ammo out, before heading back down to the closet to put it and the shells back. “Just wasn’t sure if it was a prowler or kids.” Sandy pokes her head out of the bedroom, “And speaking of… Colin, Trevor! Shake a leg!” I close the closet and see my boys bounding down the steps in various states of dress dragging their backpacks and heading to the table. They start fighting over cereal and I quickly resolve it, before a good scolding and getting them prepped for the bus. They finish up and are soon out the door with coats and sneakers on. My wife follows down next, wearing her robe, “Don’t you have that job today?” I nod, looking at the time, “Yeah, you’re right.” “Then get motivated.” I do, and

69 minutes

January 3, 2019

Beings and Entities, Demons and Possession, Religion and Spirituality, Rites and Rituals

An Open Letter To My Daughter’s Killer

daughter, deaths, father, murders, parent, Tobias Wade

An open letter to the killer of Samantha B. If you’re somehow able to read this wherever you are now, know that I will find you. No father should have to watch their child lowered into the sacred silence of the earth. I don’t know if there is a right age to die, but I do know it isn’t seventeen. Better at birth before eyes had filled with light and I had learned to love so deeply. Better late into old age when life’s fleeting joys had been more than tasted. Better not at all, but a world where prayers are answered is a world where they’re not needed: a world that isn’t ours. All the hours I spent playing on the floor were wasted. All the faces and bad jokes I made to get a smile, all the music I played to inspire a song or the books I read to inspire a dream: all wasted. I thought that was all it took to make me a good parent, but I was wrong. I invested my entire life into this single purpose, but everything I had to give was not enough. I wasn’t there when I was needed most, and nothing I have ever done or could ever do can change that. The police found the knife you did it with in the woods where you dropped it. It was a slow death, they told me, but passing out would have avoided most of the pain. I wonder if you regretted it as soon as your blade entered the skin. Did you mean for it to dig so deep? Did you panic when the blood wouldn’t stop? Did you call for help, or struggle in vain to bandage the wound, or were you too ashamed? I wonder if you planned the kill at all, or whether time was flying too fast and your blood pounding too loud and you didn’t know how to make it stop until it was too late. Were you thinking of anyone but yourself when you did it? I don’t know what private torment brought you to this point, but taking a life will never cease that pain. The pain is passed from one person to the next, enduring past life, past death, past mortal strength to bear. Until the day long after you’re gone when the next victim sees the sun dawn without light or warmth and all sounds and colors bleed into an endless grey. And then that sun too will set, passing on your pain once again. You must think that I hate you. I don’t think anyone would blame me if I did. I hate that you destroyed my family, but I forgive you for everything. You may not believe me, but I promise it’s true. It’s everything about this world that made you into someone capable of such an act that I will never forgive. I still don’t know why you killed yourself, Samantha. If you’re somehow able to read this though, know that I will find you. And somehow, someday, we’ll be together again. CREDIT: Tobias Wade Click HERE to check out Creepypasta.com’s official YouTube channel

2 minutes

October 21, 2019

Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances

Human Nature

astronauts, nuclear war, Shannon Higdon, space, war

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZGHu1yX5b0[/embedyt] CHAPTER 1 Laura pulled her cellphone out of its storage compartment and queued up the first video before wondering if she really should watch it again. They had, technically, only been in space for eight hours with another seventy-two yet to go and she’d already viewed the three-minute clip close to a hundred times. The little voice in the back of her head that said she would tire of it if she continued at her current pace was quickly silenced, however, once play was pressed…yet again. “Hi, mommy!” Kevin, who just turned six a week ago, smiled and waved at the camera while hovering over the birthday cake which Mike had decorated with stars, planets and a tiny replica of the Olympus Space Station. “I love you,” he continued. “We both love you!” Mike called out from behind the camera. “Tell your mommy what you’re getting ready to do.” Kevin nodded in commiserative approval; his smile contagious. Laura, as with each watching, smiled as well. “I’m going to blow out my candles.” Her son brushed the hair from his eyes…Mike always let him slack on the haircuts when she wasn’t there…and puffed his cheeks in anticipation of a large enough exhalation to extinguish six candles. Before he had a chance to blow, however, Mike caught him with another question earning something of a perturbed expression for his efforts. “Why are you blowing out candles?” Kevin’s perturbed expression shifted to one of outright incredulity. Seemingly the dumbest question he’d ever heard, the boy shrugged and threw up his arms. “Because they’re on fire, daddy.” His tone was deadpan serious, bringing involuntary laughter from both his dad, who was there, and his mom, who wanted to be there more than anything. It broke her heart to think of the special days she had missed spending with her husband and child: the birthdays, holidays and anniversaries; but that was part of a price that they all, as a family, agreed to. The bottom line was that they were both so proud of her that those things were easily forgiven. Most six-year-olds would throw a fit if their mother didn’t attend their surprise birthday party but Kevin spent his bragging to the invited classmates about his amazing mom: Laura Hillman…the astronaut. “No, silly,” Mike corrected the boy. “Tell your mom why you’re blowing out these candles.” “Oh, yea!” Kevin finally understood. “This is the super-special cake that’s just for us.” “Because the other one got eaten up at the party,” Mike added, his voice louder than the boy’s given his proximity to the microphone. Kevin laughed in agreement, “Yea. I only got one piece.” “But that’s okay because we’ve got this one for you and me and mommy.” “And daddy says that this video will make it like you were here too and that I should tell you like I’m telling the camera…um…I mean…” Kevin tied his own tongue momentarily. “It’s okay buddy,” Mike prompted, “she knows what you mean. I think you probably need to go ahead and make your wish. The candles are getting a little low there.” With wax coming dangerously close to frosting, Laura’s child and, despite all her accomplishments, the best thing she had ever done, puffed his cheeks once again and blew them out with only the tiniest degree of spittle released. Mike kept the footage running as Kevin cut the first and largest piece which they set aside for her. It was to be freeze-dried and sent overnight to Russia where it would be included with the supply manifest for the ESA’s Automated Transfer Vehicle launching with the Ariane-6 Heavy-Lift Rocket exactly thirteen hours after Laura and Dimitri’s Orion Capsule, The Daedalus, lifted off from Cape Canaveral. If it all went according to plan, in three days’ time she would be able to sit down in her own private quarters aboard the OSS and eat a portion of the triple-chocolate cake while, most likely, watching this video again…for the thousandth time. Mike set the camera down on the kitchen table and directed it so that she could see both the men in her life enjoying their cake together; repeating, “it’s good,” and “mmmm,” to each other over and over. When Kevin was down to a few bites, Mike drew his attention to some tiny detail in the frosting that the boy couldn’t quite see. Urging him closer and closer, her husband was somehow able to pull off the oldest gag in the book and mush Kevin’s face into the cake, smearing his nose and cheeks with chocolate. Laura’s son was a rare breed who thought of other people first and practically never harbored ill will, and his reaction of laughter and then hamming it up even more for the camera was exactly what she would’ve expected it to be. Every parent wanted to say that they had a good kid but in her case…well…she had a good kid. The video would close with a clean face and Kevin offering up the sacred secrecy of his birthday wish without provocation. “You don’t have to say if you don’t want to,” Mike had assured him but his son insisted. Adamant about the fact that the wish was coming true regardless, the boy felt strongly that her knowing about it would help to “keep mommy safe”. In the final seconds of the video, with Mike’s strong arm around the kid, Kevin looks first at the camera and then back at his father before saying with complete sincerity, “My wish is for mommy to get to the Olympics Stadium okay”. It was an incredibly sweet moment and also very unfortunate that the clip ended when it did because she would have loved to have seen the look on Mike’s face. It didn’t matter how many times they had told their son that it was the “Olympus Station” it almost always came back to them as the “Olympics Stadium”. It had gotten so many laughs out of them, at this point…the kid was probably doing it on purpose. Laura sighed and switched off her iPhone before slipping it back into the console. She might not get tired of watching videos of home, but her battery would. It amazed her. The Daedalus was equipped with some of the most advanced circuitry in the world and yet…they couldn’t have put in a USB port? Admittedly, the Orion series weren’t exactly designed for luxury travel. Utilitarian in nature, the capsules were created for transporting goods and supplies and, in this particular instance, they were the ‘goods’. The astronauts, cosmonauts and French spationauts that used the four and two-man capsules weren’t exactly boxed away like cargo, but they weren’t flying ‘first-class’ either…or even ‘coach’ for that matter. Comfort seemed to come very low on the list of specifications the various agencies used in their creation. Significantly lower, at least, than things like ‘hull-integrity’ and ‘oxygen stability’. Keeping them alive seemed to be of higher priority than reclining seats and an in-flight movie. She wasn’t complaining. She looked over at Dimitri who was sound asleep and found it remarkable that he could do so with such ease. While they had specific sleep cycles that they were to try to adhere to, Laura had been unable to catch a single wink during her first four-hour shift. There had been too much adrenaline and norepinephrine surging through her system to even make it possible; it felt like two too many double espressos. She was in space! Dreaming of this moment since she was Kevin’s age, it was the fruition of everything she had ever wanted growing up. Her high-school yearbook quote was, “If I get to go to space, I will die happy” and she meant it. Breaking through the cloud-line, leaving the atmosphere behind and delving into the incomprehensible vastness was like nothing she had imagined; and nothing like the simulations either. It was a rush! Giving birth to Kevin, marrying Mike, graduating to a gold-key NASA astronaut…these had been the defining moments in her life and now they all just seemed to pale by comparison. She would leave that part out when relaying the story to her boys. Her co-pilot, however, did not appear to be as impressed. Dimitri Vladimir Kapirski had a few more seasons under his belt than she did, as a pilot-cosmonaut and a test-cosmonaut on thirty-nine different missions to space, including two two-year stints aboard the, now defunct, International Space Station. The man had logged more time in space any anyone who hadn’t retired; which was part of the reason why he was being made the Commander of the OSS. Dimitri had the type of serious temperament and fastidious eye for details that only came from being in the game for so long. Most people that met him once thought he was a hard-ass but once you really got to know him…well, he was still a hard-ass; but he was honest and brave and intelligent and, frankly, there was no one else you’d rather have watching your back. Laura had first met the revered cosmonaut twelve years ago when she took an eight-week course he was instructing and he had intimidated the hell out of her at the time. He had seen something in her, however, and, two weeks into the program, pulled her aside out of nearly three hundred people who all had the same dream of being an astronaut or cosmonaut and told her, “you’re going to space”. Unbeknownst to her, he had followed her career after that and it was he who put in the request to have her on his station crew. Laura knew he had given a recommendation but had no idea the extent to which he was responsible for her wildest dreams coming true. In three days’ time, the adventure would really begin. Dimitri would be replacing current OSS Commander Jill Milner and Laura was relieving Alex Wang, both of whom would use the Daedalus to return to Earth after completing four-year tours in space. Astronauts Nick Geary and Rukia Kanagi would be staying behind leaving a continued skeleton crew of four once the Daedalus departs again. Theirs would be the final preparations that would need to be made in advance of the full crew arrival in three months’ time. The Olympus Space Station was a masterpiece of civil engineering and deep-space construction created as a long-term alternative to the archaic tin-can known as the International Space Station. Built to comfortably house a working community of two-hundred and eighty-eight people, Laura’s team was responsible for a large variety of nit-picking tasks. From inputting personal and medical data of all the incoming personnel to testing every system available to test, they would have their hands full, no doubt, but the heavy lifting had already been done. Dimitri would be the first OSS Commander to maintain the station at capacity and she would be one of the flight crew. It was all very exciting. Laura wasn’t the only one to have high hopes for Olympus. The crew were coming from every corner of the world and through every space agency available, including private companies like SpaceX. There was a real emphasis on global cooperation and working together and it was hoped by many, in America at least, that the station would act as a beacon for the rest of the world to follow. There was a quiet optimism that the glorious utopia of collaboration orbiting above the rest of humanity might somehow ebb the rising tide of hatred and violence spilling over all borders. Since the beginning of the nuclear age, the threat of mutual destruction has been the only thing keeping the peace between nations…supposedly. It now seemed, however, that the world was evolving into a different place with a different mindset. There were countries in the world with egomaniacal leaders who cared more about power than their citizens and some who were even worse; some that cared only for destruction. There were factions of generational wealthy who funneled ungodly amounts of money into creating propaganda, distrust, riots and eventually…war. To these people war equals money. They just don’t seem to understand that the world has the capacity for only one more war. At the very bottom of the pyramid was the majority of the planet’s seven and a half billion people…and those people were completely terrified; wanting nothing more than peace. Part of the reason Laura finally decided to actually go into space and leave her family behind on terra firma was the hope that she was working to create a better world for her son than the one he currently resided in. With no eye for politics or the law, the only way she knew how to do that was through science and the idea that global resolution could come through mankind experiencing and thriving far beyond the bounds of any country or even the world itself. She didn’t know if her co-pilot and future Commander was going to Olympus for the same lofty idealisms that drove her, however. It was hard to say how he felt about the future of the planet or even, being unmarried and without children, his desire to be on it. ‘Heart to heart’s” weren’t exactly his strong suit. Motivations aside, there could not have been a better person available for the position. Dimitri snorted loudly, breaking the silence of the capsule and causing Laura to jump in her seat, startling her from her thoughts. The older man wasn’t a snorer, thank goodness…that could have been maddening; but he did, on occasion, release an involuntary snort which, when it didn’t scare her half to death, tickled her to no end. She had heard a rumor in flight-school that he once had the nickname “Hot Sauce” but she was never able to verify its authenticity…let alone find out how he might have gotten it. Presumably, it had something to do with hot sauce…hopefully for eating it. She watched him for a moment to see if the splutter was a solo…sometimes they came in pairs…and when she was satisfied that there wasn’t another coming she turned her attention to the beveled window known as “viewpoint six”. The motion wasn’t terribly comfortable as she had to twist her neck somewhat to look over her right shoulder, but it was the only one of the six openings that provided her with a view of the Earth which was, for all intents and purposes, in their rearview mirror. The windows were actually three different frames of aluminum silicate infused glass, with the center pane adjusting for the dramatic difference in pressure between the vacuum of space and what they needed to survive the trip, so the view they provided wasn’t crystal-clear. That being said, it was still a breathtaking sight to behold. Almost as if mother nature had coordinated for her benefit alone, the cloud-cover was practically non-existent. Even at the distance they had already traveled, the outline of the North and South American landmasses were clearly discernible in the sunlight bathed side of the Earth, brown and green against the brilliant blues and aqua-marine of the oceans. They had, of course, traveled too far to make out any of the footprints of mankind: cities, monuments and the like…or so she thought. A flash of blinding light from somewhere on the US east coast flared out as bright as the sun leaving spots on the back of her eyelids when she reflexively squeezed them shut. CHAPTER 2 Her first thought was that it had to be weather-related but logic quickly dictated that that couldn’t be the case. It was way too bright to have been anything like lightning, which shouldn’t be observable from space anyway. Could it have been a reflection of the sun’s light? A basic understanding of geometrics and the sun’s current location made that highly improbable. Laura’s mind was running through the logical possibilities…to the point of even considering breaking Dimitri’s slumber early for his opinion, when the communication channel designated “Tango” began flashing on the digital dashboard. It was accompanied by its own unique beep and the moment it went off, Dimitri woke up anyway, constantly tuned-in. It was an alarm they weren’t used to and probably shouldn’t be hearing. There was there main line of communications, “Alpha”, which was the direct contact with their Mission Control at NASA in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The had regularly planned interactions but it wasn’t completely uncommon for either side to relay messages outside of the scheduled check-ins. “Beta” was a back-up com-channel which also linked to Mission Control in the unlikely scenario that the main line became compromised. Once you got past the first two channels, you had a dozen more which were direct lines to the various space agencies’ Mission Controls around the planet. Tango was so far down the list of probable contact that Laura had actually forgotten who it connected to, having not used it since the early days of training. Not surprisingly, Dimitri knew immediately as he switched off the alarm and connected to the European Space Agency’s Mission Control in Darmstadt, Germany. “This is Daedalus,” Dimitri began, his English thick with a Russian accent. Pulling up the confirmation codes needed for an unscheduled transmission from his console screen he continued, “Confirmation: Echo…Rainbow…straw-hat…seven…four…razorblade…” “Daedalus there’s a problem.” The unidentified person on the other end cut him off, seemingly unconcerned about national security since Dimitri still had four more verification words left to read. “We’re getting reports…Oh God…I don’t even know how to…” The man’s voice seemed strained and disconnected at the same time, tones they weren’t used to hearing from their Earthly contacts, who were trained to maintain calming dispositions when dealing with their counterparts in space. The capsule-mates shared a bewildered look before Dimitri tried again. “ESA…why are you guys contacting us?” His best guess was that they had some atmospheric questions or numbers for Daedalus to run for the unmanned supply launch that should be taking place within the hour. Perhaps an update on the launch itself. “Was there something we can help you guys with?” There was an extended silence, which was also unusual. Finally, “Daedalus…when did you last report to NASA Mission Control? How long has it been?” It was Laura who replied. “Approximately forty minutes ago. Due for next communique at oh-nine-hundred hours.” The ESA rep left them with an extended silence yet again and this time it was long enough for Dimitri to say, “screw this” and pull up the Alpha channel as well. “Mission Control, this is Daedalus, do you read?” There was no reply, and after a few minutes, he tried again. “Mission Control…this is Daedalus…do you read?” “You’re not getting anything, are you?” asked the ESA line who had been listening the entire time. “What the hell’s going one ESA?” Laura blurted. They were both getting a little irritated with the situation. The astronauts could hear the man sigh and then begin talking to someone else that wasn’t them. It was mostly muffled but small bits of phrases would make their way through unscathed, like “have to tell”, “what if it’s true”, and “better off than we are” before finally speaking in a voice clear enough that it was obvious he was speaking to them again. “Dimitri…Laura…this is coming strictly outside of the chain of command and…” Again the line went quiet and the informal nature of the way they were being addressed was, alone, enough to find quite disconcerting. They both had codenames that were to be used during transit. Once aboard the OSS, NASA or anyone else that wanted to make contact would be fine in calling them by their birth-names. It was protocol, however, that during the actual flights he would be referred to as “Handlebar” and she was “Teacup”. It was highly unusual to hear her real name coming from the tiny speakers in her flight suit when she had been hearing “Teacup” since day one of the mission’s training period and it make her squirm uncomfortably, strapped into her seat. “What the hell is going on there, ESA?” Dimitri blurted out, seeming to recognize the difference between intentional silence and signal tangibility, which Laura was suspecting. The voice with German inflections finally replied but not before they could both hear a blood-curdling cry coming from somewhere else behind him. It was enough to send shivers down both their spines as they looked at each other, searching one another’s face for any sign of understanding; each hoping the other might have figured out what was happening. “I’m sorry guys…things are going to hell right now. This is Dolph…Dolph Weiner.” They had both worked closely with the man in the past and it was somewhat surprising that neither of them had recognized his voice but, thick with panic, it was undeniably different now. Dolph, much like Dimitri, was very well respected for his experience and tenure in the space and aeronautics fields. Cutting his teeth at NASA, straight out of MIT, he bounced between government sectors and private corporations like Northrup Grumman and Boeing before finally ending up with the ESA as its Mission Control director for the sunset years of his distinguished career. For someone of his caliber to be the one establishing contact was just…wrong. “I don’t want to be the one telling you this…but…somebody has to. Things have gone to shit down here. It’s…it’s war. The big one. I think NASA is gone.” Dimitri struggled to grasp what Dolph was trying to tell them but Laura immediately thought of the flash and knew. “Gone?” Dimitri’s voice was confused. “What do you mean ‘gone’?” “Nukes…Dimitri. The bastards are all using…” The signal went dead, its light extinguishing as well to signify that the man hadn’t just stopped mid-sentence. Laura twisted her head back to viewport six and released a horrible scream that echoed off the capsules walls long after it had ended in a tormented moan. It had only been a split-second. In that minuscule moment of time that her eyes were open and facing the glass they were bombarded with a series of simultaneous flashes so bright it seemed as though the Earth had, in fact, become the sun itself. The scream was one of physical agony and not at all pertaining to the emotional anguish which was far from setting in, even though her brain had realized what was happening. The thoughts of her husband and child being burned away to a pile of nuclear ash or even worse… living through the blasts… hadn’t set in yet. The shock of being so suddenly and completely…blinded kept everything else at bay. With quicker thinking that Laura displayed, Dimitri activated the solar shields which blocked, very nearly, all outside light with the type of tint one could watch a solar eclipse through and unlatched himself from his seat to set about doing whatever he could to treat her eyes. Although neither of them were doctors, it wasn’t as if they were without medical training altogether. Every person that went into space, especially those expecting extended stays, were required to learn just about everything first-year med students were taught. Laura’s entire body vibrated with involuntary shaking, a physical reaction to the trauma of having her eyes open and not seeing anything but the assortment of flashing spots, over and over again. At the periphery there seemed to be some acuity but if she shifted her gaze to any area she thought she might have taken in a small bit of Dimitri’s movements, it was filled with the disruptive optical echo. In the thousands of times she had been required to spend extended time in the tiny, cramped spaces that being an astronaut required, she had never once experienced any claustrophobia and now, without warning, Laura was overwhelmed with the sensation of being trapped…in her own body. Struggling for breath, she was vaguely aware of her co-pilot’s voice doing the best it could to calm her histrionics, but it was distant and foreign; the visual barrier somehow reaching into her mind to affect her cognitive abilities. It took several long minutes and his placing a medicated bandage over her eyes for his words to slowly sift into any recognizable form of communication. “…solar retinopathy…know it’s terrifying…not permanent.” He placed one large palm on her forehead with his fingers drifting into her hairline and something about the warmth and pressure of it eased the hyperventilation and calmed the tremors from her body, much as Dimitri had intended it to. It brought back warm and comforting memories of her father who used to do the same thing when she was a small child. She wondered if there was any way the Russian could have known that once her mind returned to the summit of being able to process thoughts once again. “Once we get aboard Olympus we’ll be able to treat it better and you could be seeing fine in just a few weeks.” Laura nodded her head to convey that she not only heard the statement but also that she was back in the realm of clinical response and Dimitri seemed to understand its meaning. “Good,” he continued; “okay…listen, I need you to keep your eyes closed for now and do your best to stay calm.” He sighed in a way she didn’t think she’d ever heard before, before finally asking; “Does it hurt?” She nodded. The two small bonfires beneath her eyelids kept her from little more than a responsive state while the shock momentarily held the rest of reality at bay. She could hear him rummaging through something, airtight foil being removed, while she concentrated on the burning and flashing lights that inundated her optical nerves beneath closed and covered eyes. In a moment his voice had returned to her side. “I’m going to give you a fentanyl dose.” She nodded again and when he gently slid the plastic tip of the nasal applicator for the synthetic opioid into her right nostril he said, “On three. One…two…three” Dimitri squeezed the bottle as Laura inhaled deeply and the medication began to do its thing almost immediately. CHAPTER 3 Within thirty seconds she was granted relief with the sweet embrace of darkness offered by unconsciousness. Shortly after that, she found herself in the loving arms of Mike with Kevin desperately trying to squirm his way from between them. The three of them were in the double-king, canopied bed that Mike had insisted they spend way too much money on, wrestling and tickling each other and reveling in the unabashed and unrestrained joy of being a family in love and of being all together, which was a truly rare thing. Kevin would pretend to try to get away but only so much as to re-position himself at an angle to get at her weak-spot: between the ribs, just below the armpits. The child was getting stronger every year, but with Mike’s assistance, they were able to keep him between them and smothered with kisses. It was a moment that they would have all been happy to have last forever. It didn’t. In unison, Mike and Kevin quit laughing and sat upright in the bed, smiles completely erased. Her husband and child each turned to face her and the expressions of fear etched upon their faces was enough for her to bolt upright as well. Perhaps it was a reaction to Kevin taking her hand or Mike’s saying, “I love you both so much”, but the fear they seemed to be feeling gripped her by the throat as well. Suddenly terrified by the certain knowledge that some impending doom was imminent, all she had time to do was shed a single tear when the bay window flooded the room with blinding and oppressive light. It consumed them and the smell of burning hair filled her nostrils before the wall of fire came through to wash them away. It was a momentary relief when the psychological sledgehammer of a dream jerked her back to a waking state, but the moment was short-lived. Discovering, yet again, that she had been blinded…hopefully temporarily…the reality of her situation setting back in was just as horrific as the dream had been. She could hear Dimitri…and he was speaking to someone. “I’m telling you there’s nothing.” It was Rukia Kanagi’s voice. Dimitri was communicating with the OSS. “We’ve scanned the entire planet, Sir. There are no signals of any type. We’ve gone over every known man-made frequency in the database. I think…Oh Dear Lord, I don’t even want to say it out loud.” Rukia was a communications expert, among other things, and she wasn’t exactly known for her emotional outbursts. “It’s okay Kanagi,” Dimitri offered, using a voice with the same calming qualities he used on Laura; “you don’t have to say it.” There were a few minutes of silence and Laura wondered if she should let them know that she was awake when Rukia’s voice filtered through the speakers in her flight-suit again. “Sir…given everything that’s just happened, I’m…uncertain…about bringing this up…but,” her voice became conspiratorially low; “I think there might be another problem that you need to know about.” “Go ahead Kanagi,” he pressed. “Well,” still at a whisper; “it’s been nothing more than talk at this point but…well…I thought you should know. It’s Alex and Nick… geez, I can’t believe I’m even having to say this but…they’ve been trying to convince the Commander that we shouldn’t let the Daedalus dock with Olympus.” “What the fuck are you talking about Kanagi?” Laura cringed involuntarily; she had never heard Dimitri cuss before. She could only imagine what Rukia’s reaction was. It took a moment for her to respond. “Sir…I can’t stress enough that they’re simply suggesting it as a hypothetical. I know these people and I can’t imagine that they’d really do it. It’s just…well, right now the food supplies are somewhat low. Even with reduced rations, there’s really only enough for four people to survive for a few months. Everything that we needed to keep a continuous supply of food was supposed to be on the Ariane-six…all the seeds for crops and enough MRE’s to last three hundred people a decade were on that supply ship and…well…we’ve not been able to verify if she got off the ground before the shit hit the fan. Until it clears the Van Allen belts we’re not going to be able to lock onto her signal and that won’t be for another six hours…assuming she’s even out there.” Rukia went quiet again and Dimitri considered her words before asking, “So what you’re saying, Kanagi, is that if the Ariane never made lift-off then they’re not going to let the Daedalus board the station?” “I’m so… sorry, sir.” Dimitri could tell the young Japanese-American astronaut was sickened by her own words. “According to Nick, the current supplies would last six people no more than a couple of weeks. I don’t know what to say, sir, except…I will die before I let that happen; you have my word. I have to go before they discover that I’ve contacted you. Maintain your course and the second I can, I’ll give you an update. God speed, sir.” “Kanagi.” Dimitri caught her before she cut the transmission. “Yes, sir?” “Kanagi…Rukia…your father would have been proud of you.” Laura could hear the other woman’s breath hitch quietly, just short of an actual sob. It was a noise she often made herself when she needed to keep her composure in a haze of emotion. Although it was customary for commanding officers to refer to their crew by their secondary names, Dimitri had been doing it his entire career. It was a rare treat to hear your first name coming from his lips. “Thank you, Sir.” Olympus cut the connection and, after a moment of quiet, Dimitri turned his attention to his bandaged co-pilot. “You had nothing to add to the conversation, Hillman?” She smiled despite the grave situation; the man never ceased to amaze her. “How did you know I was awake?” Her voice was dry and cracked and, before she could ask for water, he had positioned the flight suit’s drinking tube into her mouth. The water tasted fine even though she couldn’t help but think about the fact that a portion of it was her own reconstituted urine, much as she did every time she drank. The flight suits were equipped with ten gallons of water and an advanced filtration system for the astronaut’s urine which would stretch the ten gallons into the fifty or sixty that they would need to stay hydrated on the trip to Olympus. “Your breathing,” he answered her question as she drank. “Is it true?” she asked after finally satiating her thirst. “Is it all…gone?” Dimitri shook his head despite her inability to see it. “I don’t know. I think…I think it would be unwise for either of us to make any assumptions.” “But you tried all the channels?” “While you slept…yea. I’ve scanned every frequency this little Orion capsule is capable of. That being said, we can’t afford to lose ourselves in hypothetical conjecture. Dwelling on what happened down there isn’t going to help us any up here. All we need to concentrate on is getting to the OSS.” She was incapable of taking that advice, however, and her brain vomited up the thought it had been tip-toeing around f

68 minutes

February 22, 2018

Apocalyptic and Dystopian, Locations and Sites, Military and Warfare, Science Fiction and Aliens, Space and Cosmic Horror, Strange and Unexplained

Ben Drowned

Alex Hall, Ben Drowned, Ben Drowned creepypasta, Ben Drowned creepypasta story, Ben Drowned origin story, creepypasta classics, famous characters, games, gaming, video games

Ben Drowned Part 1 – Day 4 Okay, /x/, I need your help with this. This is not copypasta, this is a long read, but I feel like my safety or well-being could very well depend on this. This is video game related, specifically Majora’s Mask, and this is the creepiest shit that has ever happened to me in my entire life. Having said that, I recently moved into my dorm room starting as a Sophomore in college and a friend of mine gave me his old Nintendo 64 to play. I was stoked, to say the least, I could finally play all of those old games of my youth that I hadn’t touched in at least a decade. His Nintendo 64 came with one yellow controller and a rather shoddy copy of Super Smash Brothers, and while beggars can’t be choosers, needless to say it didn’t take long until I became bored of beating up LVL 9 CPUs. That weekend I decided to drive around a few neighborhoods about twenty minutes or so off campus, hitting up the local garage sales, hoping to score on some good deals from ignorant parents). I ended up picking up a copy of Pokemon Stadium, Goldeneye (fuck yeah), F-Zero, and two other controllers for two dollars. Satisfied, I began to drive out of the neighborhood when one last house caught my attention. I still have no idea why it did, there were no cars there and only one table was set up with random junk on it, but something sort of drew me there. I usually trust my gut on these things so I got out of the car and I was greeted by an old man. His outward appearance was, for lack of a better word, displeasing. It was odd, if you asked me to tell you why I thought he was displeasing, I couldn’t really pinpoint anything – there was just something about him that put me on edge, I can’t explain it. All I can tell you is that if it wasn’t in the middle of the afternoon and there were other people within shouting distance, I would not have even thought of approaching this man. He flashed a crooked smiled at me and asked what I was looking for, and immediately I noticed that he must be blind in one of his eyes; his right eye had that “glazed over” look about it. I forced myself to look to his left eye instead, trying not to offend, and asked him if he had any old video games. I was already wondering how I could politely excuse myself from the situation when he would tell me he had no idea what a video game was, but to my surprise he said he had a few ones in an old box. He assured me he’d be back in a “jiffy” and turned to head back into the garage. As I watched him hobble away, I couldn’t help but notice what he was selling on his table. Littered across his table were rather… peculiar paintings; various artworks that looked like ink blots that a psychiatrist might show you. Curious, I looked through them – it was obvious why no one was visiting this guy’s garage sale, these weren’t exactly aesthetically pleasing. As I came to the last one, for some reason it looked almost like Majora’s Mask – the same heart-shaped body with little spikes protruding outward. Initially I just thought that since I was secretly hoping to find that game at these garage sales, some Freudian bullshit was projecting itself into the ink blots, but given the events that happened afterward I’m not so sure now. I should have asked the man about it. I wish I would have asked the man about it. After staring at the Majora-shaped blot, I looked up and the old man was suddenly there again, arms-length in front of me, smiling at me. I’ll admit I jumped out of reflex and I laughed nervously as he handed me a Nintendo 64 cartridge. It was the standard grey color, except that someone had written Majora on it in black permanent marker. I got butterflies in my stomach as I realized what a coincidence this was and asked him how much he wanted for it. The old man smiled at me and told me that I could have it for free, that it used to belong to a kid who was about my age that didn’t live here anymore. There was something weird about how the man phrased that, but I didn’t really pay any attention to then, I was too caught up in not only finding this game but getting it for free. I reminded myself to be a bit skeptical since this looked like a pretty shady cartridge and there’s no guarantee it would work, but then the optimist inside me interjected that maybe it was some kind of beta version or pirated version of the game and that was all I needed to be back on cloud nine. I thanked the man and the man smiled at me and wished me well, saying “Goodbye then!” – at least that’s what it sounded like to me. All the way in the car-ride home, I had a nagging doubt that the man had said something else. My fears were confirmed when I booted up the game (to my surprise it worked just fine) and there was one save file named simply “BEN”. “Goodbye Ben”, he was saying “Goodbye Ben”. I felt bad for the man, obviously a grandparent and obviously going senile, and I – for some reason or another – reminded him of his grandson “Ben”. Out of curiosity I looked at the save file. Eyeballing it, I could tell that he was pretty far in the game – he had almost all of the masks and 3/4 remains of the bosses. I noticed that he had used an owl statue to save his game, he was on Day 3 and by the Stone Tower Temple with hardly an hour left before the moon would crash. I remember thinking that it was a shame that he had come so close to beating the game but he never finished it. I made a new file named “Link” out of tradition and started the game, ready to relive my childhood. For such a shady looking game cartridge, I was impressed at how smoothly it ran – literally just like a retail copy of the game save for a few minor hiccups here and there (like textures being where they shouldn’t be, random flashes of cutscenes at odd intervals, but nothing too bad). However the only thing that was a little unnerving was that at times the NPCs would call me “Link” and at other times they would call me “BEN”. I figured it was just a bug – a fluke in the programming causing our files to get mixed up or something. It did kind of creep me out though after a while, and it was around after I had beaten the Woodfall Temple that I regrettably went into the save files and deleted “BEN” (I had intended to preserve the file just out of respect of the game’s original owner, it’s not like I needed two files anyway), hoping that that would solve the problem. It did and it didn’t, now NPCs wouldn’t call me anything, where my name should be in the dialogue there was just a blank space (my save file name was still called “Link”, though). Frustrated, and with homework to do, I put the game down for a day. I started playing the game again last night, getting the Lens of Truth and working my way towards completing the Snowhead Temple. Now, some of you more hardcore Majora’s Mask players know about the “4th Day” glitch – for those who don’t you can Google it but the gist of it is that right as the clock is about to hit 00:00:00 on the final day, you talk to the astronomer and look through the telescope. If you time it right the countdown disappears and you essentially have another day to finish whatever you were doing. Deciding to do the glitch to try and finish the Snowhead Temple, I happened to get it right on the first try and the time counter at the bottom disappeared. However, when I pressed B to exit the telescope, instead of being greeted by the astronomer I found myself in the Majora boss fight room at the end of the game (the trippy boxed in arena) staring at Skull Kid hovering above me. There was no sound, just him floating in the air above me, and the background music which was regular for the area (but still creepy). Immediately my palms began to sweat – this was definitely not normal. Skull Kid NEVER appeared here. I tried moving around the area, and no matter where I went, Skull Kid would always be facing me, looking at me, not saying anything. Nothing would happen though, and this kept up for around sixty seconds. I thought the game had bugged or something – but I was beginning to doubt that very much. I was about to reach for the reset button when text appeared on my screen: “You’re not sure why, but you apparently had a reservation…” I instantly recognized that text – you get that message when you get the Room Key from Anju at the Stock Pot Inn, but why was it playing here? I refused to entertain the notion that it was almost as if the game was trying to communicate with me. I started navigate the room again, testing to see if that was some sort of trigger that enabled me to interact with something here, then I realized how stupid I was – to even think that someone could reprogram the game like this was absurd. Sure enough, fifteen seconds later another message appeared on the screen, and again like the first one it was already a pre-existing phrase “Go to the lair of the temple’s boss? Yes/No”. I paused for a second, contemplating what I should press and how the game would react, when I realized that I couldn’t select no. Taking a deep breath, I pressed Yes and the screen faded to white, with the words “Dawn of a New Day” with the subtext “||||||||” beneath it. Where I was ported to filled me with the most intense sense of dread and impending fear I had ever experienced The only way I can describe the way I felt here is having this feeling of inexplicable depression on a profound scale. I am normally not a depressed person, but the way I felt here was a feeling that I didn’t even knew existed – it was such a twisted, powerful presence that seemed to wash over me. I appeared in some kind of weird twilight-zone version of Clock Town. I walked out of the Clock Tower (as you normally do when you start from Day 1) only to find that all of the inhabitants were gone. Usually with the 4th Day glitch you can still find the guards and the dog that runs around outside the tower – this time they were all gone. What replaced them was the ominous feeling that there was something out there, in the same area as me and that it was watching me. I had four hearts to my name and the Hero’s Bow, but at this point I wasn’t even considered for my avatar, I felt that I personally was in some kind of danger. Perhaps the most chilling thing was the music – it was the Song of Healing, ripped straight from the game itself, but played in reverse. The music would get louder, building up so as if you should expect something to pop out at you, but nothing ever did, and the constant loop began to wear on my mental state. Every now and then I would hear the faint laugh of the Happy Mask Salesman in the background, just quiet enough so that I wasn’t sure if I just hearing things but just loud enough to keep me determined to find him. I looked in all four zones of Clock Town, only to find nothing…. No one. Textures were missing, West Clock Town had me walking on air, the entire area felt… broken. Hopelessly broken. As the reverse Song of Healing repeated for what must have been the 50th time, I just remember standing in the middle of South Clock Town realizing that I had never felt so alone in a video game before. As I walked through the ghost town, I don’t know whether it was the combination of the out of place textures and the atmosphere and the haunting melody of the once peaceful and soothing song being butchered and distorted, but I was literally on the verge of tears and I had no idea why. I hardly ever cry, something had gripped me here and this powerful sense of depression that was both foreign and crippling. I tried leaving Clock Town, but every time I attempted to zone out, the screen would fade to black and I would just zone in to another part of Clock Town. I tried playing my Ocarina, I wanted to escape, and I did NOT want to be here, but every time I played the Song of Time or Song of Soaring it would only say “Your notes echo far, but nothing happens”. By this point, it was obvious the game didn’t want me to leave, but I had no idea why it was keeping me here. I didn’t want to go inside the buildings, I felt that I would be too vulnerable there to whatever I was terrified of. I don’t know why, but I came up with the idea that maybe if I drowned myself at the Laundry Pool I could spawn somewhere else and leave this place. As I zoned in and ran towards the pool, that’s when it happened. Link grabbed his head, and the screen flashed for a brief moment of the Happy Mask Salesman smiling at me – not Link – me with Skull Kid’s scream playing in the background and when the screen returned I was staring at the Link Statue from playing the song Elegy of Emptiness. I screamed as the thing just stared back at me with that haunting facial expression. I turned around and ran out and back into South Clock Town, and to my horror the fucking statue followed me in the only way I can compare this is like the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. Every so often, at random intervals, the animation would play of the statue appearing behind me. It was like the thing was chasing me, or – I don’t even want to fucking say it – haunting me. By this point, I was on the verge of hysterics, but not even once did the thought of turning off the console occur to me, I don’t know why, I was so wrapped up in it – the terror felt all so real. I tried to shake the statue, but it would literally appear right behind me every single time. Link started to begin to make weird animations I had never even seen him do before, he would flail his arms around or spasm randomly and the screen would cut to the Happy Mask Salesman smiling again for a brief moment before I was face to face with that fucking statue again. I ended up running into the Swordmaster’s Dojo and ran to the back, I don’t know why, but in my panic I just wanted some kind of assurance that I’m not alone here. To my dismay I found no one, but as I turned to leave the statue cornered me in the cubby in the back. I tried attacking the statue with my sword but to no avail. Confused, and backed into a corner, I just stared at the statue waiting for it to kill me. Suddenly, the screen flashed again to the Happy Mask Salesman and Link turned to face my screen, standing upright mirroring the statue, looking at me along with his copy. Literally staring at me. Whatever was left of the 4th wall was completely shattered while I ran out of the dojo terrified. Suddenly the game warped me to an underground tunnel and the reverse Song of Healing queued up again as I was given a brief moment of rest before the statue started appearing behind me again… this time aggressively – I could only take a few steps before it would summon behind me again. I hurriedly made my way out of the tunnel and appeared in Southern Clock Town. As I ran aimlessly – in a sheer panic – suddenly a redead screamed and the screen faded to black as “Dawn of a New Day” and “|||||||||” appeared again. The screen faded in and I was standing on top of Clock Tower with Skull Kid hovering over me again, silent. I looked up and the moon was back, looming just meters above my head, but the Skull Kid just stared at me hauntingly with that fucking mask. A new song was playing – the Stone Tower Temple theme played in reverse. In some sort of desperate attempt, I equipped my bow and fired off a shot at the Skull Kid – and it actually hit him and he played an animation of him reeling back. I fired again and on the third arrow, a text box appeared saying “That won’t do you any good. Hee, hee.” and I was picked up off the ground, levitated upwards on my back, and then Link screamed as he burst into flames, instantly killing him. I jumped when this happened – I had never seen this move used by ANYONE in the game and Skull Kid himself didn’t HAVE any moves. As the death screen played, my lifeless body still burning, the Skull Kid laughed and the screen faded to black, only to have me reappear in the same place. I decided to charge him, but the same thing happened, Link’s body was lifted off the ground by some unknown force and he immediately burst into flames again killing him. This time during the death screen the faint sounds of the reverse Song of Healing could be heard. On my third (and final try), I noticed that there was no music playing this time, that all there was was eerie silence. I remembered that in the original encounter with the Skull Kid you were supposed to use the Ocarina to either travel back in time or summon the giants. I attempted to play the Song of Time but before I could hit the last note Links body once again horrifically exploded into flames and he died. As the death screen neared its end, it began to chug, as if the cartridge was trying to process a lot of something…. When the screen came to, it was the same scene as the first three times, except this time Link was lying on the ground dead in a position I had never seen in the game before, his head tilted towards the camera, with the Skull Kid floating above him. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t press any buttons, all I could do is just stare at Link’s dead body. After around thirty seconds of this, the game simply fades out with the message “You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?” before kicking you out to the title screen. Upon getting back to the title screen and starting again, I noticed my save file was no longer there. Instead of “Link”, it was replaced with “YOUR TURN”. “YOUR TURN” had 3 hearts, 0 masks, and no items. I selected “YOUR TURN” and immediately when I did I was returned to the Clock Tower Rooftop scene of my Link dead and the Skull Kid hovering over, with the Skull Kid’s laughing looping again and again. I quickly hit the reset button and when the game booted up again there was one more save file added, below “YOUR TURN”, entitled “BEN”. “BEN”‘s save file is right back where it was before I deleted it, at the Stone Tower Temple with the moon almost crashing. I turned the game off at that point, I’m not superstitious but this is WAY too fucked up even for me. I haven’t played it at all today, hell, I didn’t even get any sleep last night, I kept hearing the reverse Song of Healing music in my head and just remembering the sense of dread I felt exploring Clock Town. I drove back to the old man’s house today to ask him some questions with a buddy of mine (no way I was going there alone), only to find that there’s a For Sale sign in the front yard and when I rang the door no one was home. So now I’m back here writing down the rest of my thoughts and recording what happened, sorry if some of this has grammatical errors and whatnot, I’m running on no sleep here. I’m terrified of this game, even more so now that I relived it a second time writing this all down, but I feel like there’s still more to it than meets the eye, and that there’s something calling to me to investigate this further. I think “BEN” is something in this equation, but I don’t know what, and if I could get a hold of the old man then I would be able to find some answers. I need another day or so to recuperate before tackling this game again, its already taken a toll on my sanity I feel like, but next time I do this I’m going to be recording my footage all the way through. The idea to record only came to me towards the end, so you see the last few minutes of what I saw (including Skull Kid and the Elegy statue), but it’s on YouTube here. I’m going to stay in this thread for a little while longer before I fall asleep to answer any questions you guys might have or hopefully listen to your ideas or theories to help me shed some light into this or maybe things I should try to do, I think I’m going to play BEN’s file tomorrow to see what happens, maybe I was supposed to do that all along. I don’t believe in paranormal shit, but this is a little fucked up, but maybe this BEN guy is just a really good hacker/programmer, I don’t want to think about the alternatives if he isn’t. That’s the end of the copy/paste, I’m hoping that maybe this is some kind of running gag the developers had and that other people have gotten “gag” or “hacked” copies of the game like this. This just really scares me. Ben Drowned Part 2 – Ben I’m going to post what happened and link the video footage, but last night everything got too real for me. I think I’m done messing around with this. I passed out pretty much immediately after making that thread. But last night, that Elegy of Emptiness statue, I had a dream about it. I dreamed that it was following me in my dream, that I would be minding my own business when I’d feel my neck hairs stand up on end. I would turn around that thing… that horrible, lifeless statue would be staring with those empty eyes right at me, merely inches away. In my dream I remember calling it Ben, and never before had I had a dream that I could remember so vividly. But the important thing is I did get some sleep, I suppose. Today, putting off playing the game as long as I could, I drove back up to that neighborhood to see if the old man came back. As I expected, the car was still gone and no one was home. As I was walking back to my car, the man next door mowing the grass killed the power to his lawnmower and asked me if I was looking for someone. I told him that I was looking to talk to the old man that lived here, to which he told me what I already knew – he was moving. Trying a different avenue, I asked if the old man had any family or relatives I could talk to. I discovered that this old man had never been married, nor did he have any children or grandchildren through adoption. Starting to become worried, I asked one final question, one that I should have asked from the beginning – who was Ben? The man’s expression turned grim and I learned that four doors down around eight years ago on April 23 – the man informed me that it was the same day as his anniversary, that’s how he knew the specific date – there was an accident with a young boy named Ben in the neighborhood. Shortly after his parents moved, and despite any further attempts to talk to the man to get more information, he wouldn’t divulge anything else. I went back and started playing again, I loaded up the game and immediately I jumped at the title screen where the mask flies by – the sound that played was not the normal “whoosh” sound, it was something much more higher pitched. I pressed start, bracing for the worst, but just like two nights ago, the files “Your Turn” and “BEN” were displayed (truth be told I looked at the BEN file earlier, it seems to fluctuate between displaying the Owl Save and not). I brought up the BEN file, hesitated for a moment noticing that the stats were not the same as they original were two days ago, it seemed like he had already completed the Stone Tower Temple this time… Summoning my courage I selected it. Immediately I was thrust into complete chaos. Sure enough, I was outside Stone Tower Temple, but that’s about all that was expected. The zone itself wasn’t called Stone Tower Temple, but rather “St o n e”, and immediately a dialogue box of complete gibberish that I couldn’t make out greeted me. Link’s body was distorted – his back was cocked violently to the side where his posture was permanently disfigured. Link’s expression was dull, almost monotonous, he had an expression on his face that I didn’t recognize before, it was a blank look – as if he was dead. As Link stood there his body spasmed irregularly back and forth I examined what had become of my avatar and noticed I had a C button item I had never seen before, some kind of note, but pressing it did nothing. Sounds played back and forth that I didn’t recognize from the game – almost demonic in nature, and there was some kind of high-pitched yip or some kind of laugh or something playing in the background. I had all of two minutes to take in the environment before another one of those fucking Elegy of Emptiness statues was summoned and immediately after I was cut into the “Dawn of a New Day” screen, except this time it was without the “||||||” subtext. I was a Deku Scrub in Clock Town – this scene would normally play after the first time you traveled back in time. Tatl would say “Wh-What just happened? It’s as if everything has…” but instead of saying “Started over”, she finished her remark in broken text as the laugh of the Happy Mask Salesman played in the background. I was put back in control of my character, but from a fucked up camera angle – I was looking from behind the door to the Clock Tower, watching my avatar run around as a Deku Scrub. Seeing as how I really had no place to go because I couldn’t see anything, I begrudgingly went inside the door. There, I was greeted by the Happy Mask Salesman who simply told me “You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?” before the screen whited out. I was in Termina field as a human again. I might as well not have been playing the same game anymore – I was being warped around and there was no sign of a day clock or anything. I took a moment to get my bearings as I looked around the field and immediately I could tell that this was not normal. There were no enemies and a twisted version of the Happy Mask Salesman’s theme was playing. I decided to run towards Woodfall before I noticed a gathering of three figures off to the side – one of them being Epona. As I approached them, to my horror I saw the Happy Mask Salesman, the Skull Kid, and the Elegy of Emptiness statue just standing there. I figured maybe they were bugged out, but by now I told myself that I should know better. Nevertheless, I approached them carefully and found that the Skull Kid was playing some kind of idle animation on loop, same with Epona, and the Elegy of Emptiness statue was doing what it has been doing all along – just standing there eerily. It was the Happy Mask Salesman that scared me more profoundly than the other two. He too was idle, wearing that shit-eating grin, but where-ever I moved, his head slowly turned and followed me. I had not engaged in any dialogue with him nor was I in combat with him, yet his head still continued to follow my movements. Reminded of my first encounter with the Skull Kid on top of Clock Tower, I pulled out my Ocarina (to which the game played the ding sound when you’re supposed to play your Ocarina) and tried a song I hadn’t played yet – the Happy Mask Salesman’s own song and the song that had been playing on loop back in Day 4 – the Song of Healing. I finished playing the song and as I did, a ear-piercing shriek blasted on my TV, the sky immediately started flashing, the Happy Mask Salesman’s twisted theme song sped up, intensifying the fear inside me, and Link exploded into flames and died. The three figures stayed lit up during my death screen as they watched my lifeless body burn. I can’t describe to you how sudden and terrifying the transition from eerie to terror it is, you’re going to have to watch the video if you want to see first-hand. That same fear that caused me to lose sleep two days ago started to grip me again as I was met with the text “You’ve met with a horrible fate, haven’t you?” for the third time. There has to be some kind of meaning behind that. I had little time to ponder as I was immediately given another small cut-scene of transforming into a Zora and now I found myself in Great Temple Bay. Hesitant but curious to see what the game had in store for me, I slowly made my way towards the beach, where I found Epona. I wondered why the game had decided to put her here, was the game implying she was trying to get a drink? Unable to take the mask off, I decided that riding the steed wasn’t the reason she was placed there. Suddenly I realized that Epona kept neighing and the way she was angled made it look like she was trying to signal a point to me off in the distance. It was a hunch, but I dove into Great Bay and started swimming. Sure enough – I almost missed it – I found something at the bottom of the ocean; one last Elegy of Emptiness statue. I went down to examine it and suddenly my Zora started doing a choking animation I had never seen a Zora do before – which didn’t even make sense because Zora’s can breath underwater. Regardless, my character choked to death and died, and again the statue was the only thing that was highlighted in my death. I didn’t re-spawn this time, I was booted back to the main menu as if I restarted the console. The “press start” screen was before me, I knew the only reason why it would put me here is because the save files had changed again. Taking a deep breath, I pressed start, and I was right. The new save files told me about Ben. Now it made sense why the statue appeared when I tried to go to the Laundry Pool – the game must have anticipated how I would have tried to escape the Day 4 Clock Town. The two save files told me his fate. As I suspected, Ben was dead. He had drowned. The game obviously isn’t through with me – it taunts me with the new save files – it wants me to keep playing, it wants me to go further, but I’m done with this shit. I’m not touching any more of the files. This is already way too horrifying for me and I don’t even believe in the paranormal, but I’m running out of explanations. Why would someone send me this message? I don’t understand it, I just get too depressed thinking about this, the footage is up here for those who want to see it and try and analyze it (maybe there’s some kind of coded message in the gibberish or something symbolic in what I went through – I’m too emotionally and mentally drained to fuck with it anymore). Ben Drowned Part 3 – Drowned I know its early in the morning, I’ve stayed up all night, I can’t sleep, I don’t care if people see this, that’s not the point, I just want the word to get spread so I don’t suffer for nothing. I’ve lost the will to type about this, the less I dwell on this the better, I think the video just speaks for itself. I did what you guys told me to do, I played the Elegy of Emptiness song at the first prompt by the game I was given, but I think that’s what the game or Ben (Jesus Christ, I can’t believe I’m even humoring the absurd idea that he exists in the game) wanted me to do. He’s following me now, not just in the game, he’s in my dreams. I see him all the time, behind my back, just watching me. I haven’t gone to any of my classes, I’ve stayed in my dorm room with the windows closed and the blinds shut – that way I know he can’t watch me. But he still gets me when I play, when I play he can still see me. The game is scaring me now. It talked to me for the first time – not just using text that’s already in the game – it spoke to me. Talked to me. It referenced Ben. It talked to me. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what it wants. I never wanted this, I just want my old life back. Stuff like this doesn’t happen to people like me, I’m just a kid, not even old enough to drink yet. It’s not fair, I want to go home, I want to see my parents again, I’m so far away from home here at this school, I just want to hug my mom again. I just want to forget that statue’s horrible blank face. My original game file is back – just the way I left it before it was gone. I don’t want to play anymore. I feel like something bad will happen if I don’t, but that’s impossible, it’s a video game – haunted or not it can’t hurt me, right? Like seriously though, it can’t, right? That’s what I keep telling myself, but every time I think about it I’m not so sure. Ben Drowned Part 4 – Jadusable Let me just clear things up – I know you guys are worried but “jadusable” is okay. He finished moving out today and he said he’s going back home, he’s just taking this semester off. I’m not really sure what’s happened; I have a vague idea but you guys probably know more than I do. I’m “jadusable’s” roommate and obviously I knew something was wrong with him for a few days now. He stayed in his room all the time, fell out of contact with literally all of his friends, and I’m pretty sure he hadn’t been eating hardly anything, after the second day I couldn’t stay in there anymore, so I’ve been crashing at a buddy’s place, only coming in to my room to get stuff that I need. I tried talking to him several times but he would cut me off or keep the conversation brief when I asked him about his strange behavior, it like he was convinced something was hunting him. Yesterday I came to grab my philosophy book and he approached me, looking awful, like horrible bags under his eyes. He handed me a flash drive and gave me specific instructions. He told me that he needs me to do one last favor for him – he finally explained to me what has been going on, gave me the account info to his YouTube account, and told me that he’s getting away from here, that it lured him to play it again instead of trying to change things and that he shouldn’t of done that, and to u

38 minutes

December 19, 2017

Beings and Entities, Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Famous Creepypasta, Strange and Unexplained, Video Games and Gaming

Barter

Katherine C., Video Narratives OK

Marjorie had been lingering outside the nondescript metal door for nearly two hours, appearing to study the door and the faded sign above it. The Deli, it read in dusty script. Her coat was wrapped as tightly around her as the fraying fabric allowed, but still the winter air dug through it. The cold was not enough, however, to drive her out of the elements and through the door. Once or twice she approached it, hand shaking as it neared the handle, only to draw back at the last second as if the handle were a snake. It should have been easier to enter the door the longer she waited, but it seemed to only grow immeasurably more difficult. It did not help that in her entire time waiting no one had entered or left the building. Had someone sallied up, opened the door, and safely entered into a cloud of inviting warmth, it may have lured her in. Similarly, the safe exit of any sort of person would have given her the assurance that one could brave whatever lay beyond. But the road was empty, and the door sat unmoving. A particularly sharp gust of wind whistled down the abandoned alley, tugging at her coat and sending her tangled hair into a maelstrom. Her eyes watered at the cold, and she inched closer to the wall, hoping it would afford some protection. It was silly, she chided herself, spending all this time out in the elements. This was what had to be done. She was out of options, and her only hope lay beyond that door. Yet Marjorie wondered if perhaps it was better to be hopeless than pay whatever price this hope would cost. The streetlight flickered on overhead. Soon it would be dark, and then she would have to make a decision or risk staying on the unsafe streets at night. Being here in the middle of the day was dangerous enough—she would not be caught outside after dark. That was the final shove she needed to overcome her inertia. With sudden resolve, she gripped the door handle. It flew open in her hands almost reflexively, for which she was glad. The metal was bitterly cold, seeming almost to burn her with its chill. Had the door not stood open, she would have again released it and likely vanished back to her home. Inside was a nondescript, concrete hallway. A lonely yellow light filled the inside, leading to another door. This door was made of a dark wood and had a heavy brass knocker affixed to the middle. Marjorie’s steps echoed in the concrete chamber, coming to a sudden stop when the metal door groaned to a loud close. The weak, evening light was now gone, leaving her alone with only the single bulb. She had not realized how comforting it was to have that little bit of the outside world with her. With the door closed, even the distant sounds of traffic were cut-off. Panic wrapped its claws around her throat. She felt her chest tighten with its serpentine grip; her heart thundered against her ribs. In that moment, instincts took over and she reverted to her most primitive response. Flee. The echoes of her steps were a maddening flurry around her as she sprinted the fifteen feet back to the metal door. Her hands scrambled for purchase on the handle, only to find nothing but smooth metal. No handle on this side. The thunder of thousands of years of evolution continued to push her towards flight, and her fingers clawed around the metal door frame, hoping to find some crevice to pry open the door. Only there was again nothing. In the dim light afforded by the bulb, she could not make out a single seam. It was almost as if the door had sealed as soon as she entered. Her breaths now came in ragged gasps that did little to help her or calm her. Instead, the world seemed to swim before her. A mocking door, concrete walls. It was almost as if the walls were inching closer, activated on some cruel timer to pin her here forever. All that she could hear was the flood of blood pulsing through her veins, the rapid fluttering of her heart frantically trying to escape, and the jarring sound of air ripping from her lungs before being shoved back inside. The walls acted as an echo chamber, reflecting her own terrified symphony back at her. Deep breaths, she reminded herself. Just like those nights spent in the closet, deep breaths. She had to slow herself down if she was going to survive this. Slowing her breathing to a measured pace was akin to stopping a car with no brakes. She felt her lungs fight against the control, trying to maintain their breakneck pace despite her insistence. Overtime, however, she won out. The breaths were shaky, but calm, and her heart took its cue to return to its typical state of frenzy. The walls returned to their assigned places and stopped their dizzying journey. Carefully, Marjorie ran her hands along the wall where the door stood, confirming that there was no seam that she could grip. It was a well-constructed door; there was not even a glimmer of dying afternoon light slipping through the bottom. If she could not back out now, she must go forward. The hallway was not long, but she felt like a member of a funeral procession as she somberly made her way towards the door. Up close, she could see twisting, abstract shapes carved all over the door. They meant nothing to her, but she felt her breaths begin to hiccup again in her chest. Deep breaths, she repeated her only mantra. Her hand was shaking as she placed it on the brass knocker. Unlike the door handle, this one was pleasantly warm to the touch. Inviting, almost. With a groan of rusted metal, she lifted it and rapped it quickly against the door. One, two, three. The door began to swing smoothly on its hinges after the third knock, opening onto a room filled with the murmur of quieted voices and wisps of strange smelling smoke. She stepped gingerly inside, feeling immediately out of place. There were tables and booths scattered around the room. Marjorie did her best not to make eye contact or even look at them, keeping her eyes trained to the worn wood floor. She heard a few snickers, saw a couple hands point her out from their shadowy seats. Even as the large frames filled her periphery, she walked steadfastly towards the counter at the far end of the room. Everyone in the room recognized immediately how out of place she was. While they were each bedecked in protective charms and talismans—some hanging from their necks, others etched into the scar tissue of their bodies—all she had was the flimsy barrier of her coat, still pulled tight around her against the now suffocating heat of the small room. She waked gingerly across the creaking floorboards, barely daring to breathe. They grinned and watched. Marjorie approached the counter and lifted her eyes to see the attendant slouched on a stool behind the domed glass structure. Halfway to his face, her eyes froze on the contents of the display case. She assumed the rotted lumps inside had once been some sort of meat, though they were now covered in flies and maggots. Pooled, congealed blood covered the bottom surface, even seeping out and down to the floor. She followed the trail to see the red-stained, warped wood along the floor boards. Mouth agape and eyes wide, she was certain she saw a few eyeballs and fingers mixed in amongst the decay, but she tried to put it out of her mind. “Want to try a sample?” came the mocking, gravelly voice of the attendant as he pulled open the door to the case. Immediately, a wave of putrescence poured out and enveloped Marjorie. She did her best to escape it, stumbling backwards and tripping over a warped floorboard. There was a low chuckle from those gathered around her, growing more and more quickly into a round of bawdy laughter. She gagged, her stomach trying to force up the breakfast and lunch she had not eaten. It burned her eyes, starting them watering again. Her stomach having only been successful in ejecting a small amount of water she had nervously sipped at outside, her lungs took to coughing. Anything to get that stench away from her and out of her body. There was the sound of a lock snapping into place as the attendant continued to laugh. She studied him briefly from her place on the floor behind watery eyes. He was filthy, covered in a layer of grime that made it impossible to tell his age. A tangled mess of dirt and wispy hair sat atop his head, falling into his beady eyes as he rocked back and forth with laughter at her predicament. His hands—stained and caked with muck—gripped the counter as long, yellowed nails scraped across the glass in time to his chuckling. Marjorie did her best to pull herself together, rising from the floor and straightening her clothes as if that would restore her dignity. The smell had faded, now only a slight whiff of decay rather than the malodorous assault. That or her nose could no longer register the scent having burned out that sense for good. She threw her head back, eyes meeting the dark, glassy eyes of the man behind the counter. “I’m here to speak with the owner,” she said in what she hoped was a confident voice. It did not help that it trembled and broke as she spoke. But at her words, a begrudging silence spread through the room. The attendant snorted, a thick mucusy sound. For a moment she was afraid he was preparing to spit on her. Instead, he jerked one dirty finger to a paper ticket dispenser. “Take a number, then.” With that, the attention on her seemed to fade. The low, grumble of conversation returned and she heard chairs scraping across the wood as the denizen’s returned to their intrigue. She walked over and gripped the dusty piece of paper delicately, as if afraid it might crumble to dust in her fingers. Perhaps this was another trick. Instead, the machine groaned and dispensed with a tiny slip. Number 43. She looked around for some sign that told her where she was. She had not seen anyone enter or leave today, so perhaps the line was long. But there was no such indicator. “Excuse me,” she cautiously questioned the attendant, “how do I know what number is up?” One eye turned to face her, the other stared out over the bar. “Take a seat and you’ll be called.” His eye flicked back to whatever it was between the counter and door that so raptly held his attention. Marjorie gingerly picked her way over to an unoccupied table, acutely aware that her back was exposed to whatever kind of people liked to congregate in a place like this. She was certain that she could feel each individual eye raking over her back, sense spider-like appendages trace up and down her spine. Her hands were balled into knots, resting bloodlessly on her lap. The minutes trickled by, marked only by the rise and fall of bawdy laughter. Marjorie kept her eyes focused on the table in front of her, trying to pick out patterns and shapes in the wooden surface. Trying to keep her mind from wandering too far from the task at hand. Somehow she knew that she could snap if forced to take in the reality of where she was and what she was doing. Instead, she focused on the next step. Meeting the owner and making her request. The crack of a metal mug slamming onto the wooden table brought her eyes up, open wide like an animal caught in a snare. A woman stood across from her, tall and broad-shouldered. She had one bright green eye that studied Marjorie up and down. In place of her other eyes was a nasty incision, weeping a slight bit of pus, that bulged with dark stitches. Without being invited, the woman settled into the seat across from Marjorie. “Me oh my, you don’t belong here, pretty thing,” she said in a hushed tone. Her eye was hungry. Marjorie sat silent as the woman studied her with a slight smile on her dry, swollen lips. “No, you aren’t meant to be here at all. What brings a little bird like you into a place like this?” Marjorie focused her eyes back on the table. There was nothing she could say here that would keep her safe, and she knew that. She just needed to meet with the owner and make her request. “A quiet one. Not going to sing for Lucy, eh? Come now, tell me what you need and I can help you get out of this place.” Marjorie’s silence prevailed. “We both know this is not a safe place for the likes of you. I’ve got a soft-spot for women, knowing how hard it is to be among this rabble myself. Just let me help you, dearie.” Almost unbidden, Marjorie’s eyes lifted from the table and met the woman’s unnatural green one. It was beautiful, truly, even if it was nested within a hideous face. The green reminded Marjorie of the view from her bedroom window as a child on Easter morning. There was a small tree that grew just outside that always seemed to be absolutely covered in new leafs that shone with that bright, spring green. That was the color of the eyes. And it shone and sparkled like sunlight reflecting off water. “There now, I’m sure we can work something out. I just know I can help you with whatever you need.” Lucy’s voice was a soft singsong, not the harsh growl of a dedicated chain smoker like before. “I even make sure my prices are fair, especially for a fair young thing like yourself.” Marjorie felt a hand on her knee, gently stroking. “Them pretty eyes of yours—they look like they’ve seen a world of heartache, eh? I could take care of those for you. You’d like that, yes?” Eye fixated, Marjorie felt her head begin to bob slightly. To not see the horrors she had in her time, well, that would be nice. “I see you like the idea,” Lucy’s face cracked open into a wide grin. “I thought you might. I’m good as seeing what people really need from me. I just need you to say it. Say you’ll give me those awful eyes of yours, and I’ll make sure you never have to see something so terrible again.” Marjorie’s mouth opened, the very words on her lips, when a strong hand settled onto her shoulder. It smelled of leather and blood and gripped her shoulder hard enough to break the trance. “Not going to let you have all the fun, Ol’ Luce. It’s not every day we get something so lovely in this dingy place.” Marjorie felt dizzy and confused, as if time were moving at double again its normal pace. Her mind was slow in catching up to what was happening—what had almost happened—leaving her feeling as if she were lagging behind the rest of the world. Now Lucy was standing, measuring up to a formidable height, with anger in that lone green eye. “I’ll not have you meddling, Thomas. She and I were nearly to a deal.” “A deal you tricked her into, no less. Where’s the fun in that? Just weave your little spell, and she’ll say whatever you want. You’ve gone soft, Luce. I need to make you work for it.” His voice was soft, but firm. It seemed to cut through the background din like a razor, until it was the only thing she could hear. As Marjorie’s mind caught up with what had just nearly happened, she felt her heart begin to race. And then there was the hand on her shoulder, the firm grip beginning to hurt with its intensity. The man bent over her shoulder, smiling. A long, black beard tickled against the skin of her neck, and she could smell the whiskey on his breath. “I’m afraid we have not been introduced, and I’ve already gone and saved your life. It’s a bad habit, I admit. My name is Thomas.” He extended his other hand towards her, the one on her shoulder growing tighter as she refused to shake. “Oh, we must be polite in an uncivil place as this, yes? What’s your name?” Marjorie whimpered at the pain in her shoulder but fixed her eyes back on the table. She had to talk to the owner. She had to make her request. “Back off and let her be, Thomas. I saw her; I made the first move. There’ll be others for you,” barked Lucy’s voice. “Yes, but you didn’t close on the sale, now did you?” His eyes flicked away from Marjorie for just a moment, fixing Lucy with a cold gaze before returning with more warmth to Marjorie’s face. “You’ll find I’m much more direct. No need for silly games.” The hand moved smoothly from her shoulder, along the back of her neck. Suddenly, his fingers were wrapped through her hair, yanking her head back and exposing her throat. She felt something cold and sharp there, and barely dare to breathe. His smiling face leaned over hers, “How many years would you give me to keep this pretty little neck of yours attached?” Marjorie heard a short laugh to her right, saw a slender man standing to the side. He stood just within her periphery, far enough back that she could only make out the vague shape of him. “Thomas, do be careful. There is plenty of her to go around if we just act with a little tact. I bet you could make some even better deals if you thought this through.” “Oh no, you aren’t going to trip me up with that again. You swindled me out of everything last time.” “You are right, it was a bit of a dirty trick. But surely you and Luce could work out some sort of a deal. You don’t need her eyes after all.” Marjorie noticed the shadow of Luce appeared to turn and nod towards the man to the side, and she heard a very soft chuckle from him. Thomas’ hands gripped her hair even more tightly. “You’re just mad that I got to her first, and this time I’m cutting you out!” “Well, fine, but I fear it’s not just me you’ll be fighting against, Tom. A lot of us would like a piece of her.” Thomas leaned back down by her ear, his words coming in a whispered frenzy. “Well, dear, looks like they’ll be taking you piece by piece. What do you say then? Give Ol’ Thomas whatever years you’ve got left? At least they’ll go to some sort of use, yeah?” Marjorie heard grumbling in the room, the sound of chairs scraping along the wood, and a chorus of various metals meeting metal. There was a new tension in the uncomfortably warm room, a weight that pressed down all around her. “Come on, times ticking, do we have a deal? You look like an altruistic soul. Help me out.” Footsteps coming close, a few short barks of anger. The intensity increased in his voice and he shook her head sharply. “They’ll cut out your tongue soon, so you best tell me now!” Marjorie felt tears falling down her cheeks, a steady stream now pouring from her eyes. She had to speak to the owner. She had to make her request. Only she was not so sure she’d even get that chance. Someone grabbed Thomas and the knife nicked her, drawing a thin line of blood far less lethal than it could have been. Marjorie dove under the table, trying to evade the arms that grabbed at her. There was the smell of blood in the room, and all the inhabitants had been suitably whipped into a frenzy. She was the lone fish drifting amongst the sharks. A mug struck her temple, thick hands gripped and tugged at her arms, leaving angry red bruises that began to darken almost instantly. The rough floor scraped along her knees and arms as she crawled, filling her skin with tiny needling splinters. As she scrambled, kicked, and bit at any appendage that came her way, she noticed the tempo of the fray beginning to increase. No longer was she the main prize, but the fighters had turned on one another, vying for the chance to claim this lovely reward. They knew, of course, that she had nowhere to run. Finally, she found a corner to hide in, burying her head in her arms and trying to drown out the sound of the chaos around here. She needed to speak to the owner. After what felt like hours of combat, the sounds of an opening door cut through the din. A sudden silence filled the room, minus the groaning of the incapacitated, and Marjorie began to sob. This was it. A victor had been named, and she was now the trophy to be parceled as he or she saw fit. She could not even lift her eyes to see which of the horrors in the room she would be left with. However, something else broke the silence. “Number 43?” asked the calm voice of a young girl. Marjorie dared to barely lift her head, seeing the tiny figure standing in a doorway that had not existed moments before. “Number 43?” She scrambled to her feet, holding aloft the ticket she had somehow held onto during the fray. None of the remaining combatants—the war had obviously not been won quite yet—dared to touch her as she walked forward, towards the child in the doorway. Still, she shuddered and spooked as they milled about in the shadows. The girl motioned into the bright rectangle cut into the formerly intact wall, and Marjorie walked forward. The door closed behind her, a parlor trick she was now used to. It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust from the gloom of the waiting room to the warm light of this new area. It was a well-furnished office, completed with a large wooden desk and an assortment of alluring leather chairs. The scent of cedar mixed with the smell of the crackling fireplace in a way that reminded Marjorie of weekend trips to her grandad’s cabin. Silently, the young girl stepped against the wall behind Marjorie, next to what had been the doorway, but now was nothing more than another section of oak paneling. The man behind the desk did not look up at first. He was busy tallying and writing in a thick ledger, seemingly uninterested in the bruised and bloody woman before him. After a few moments, he looked up with a friendly smile and closed the book firmly. “Marjorie, pleasure to meet you finally. I see you got the traditional welcome from our guests? And not a one of them was able to make a deal with you! You must be made of some tough stuff.” She nodded mutely, uncertain now of how to proceed. He simply smiled at her and gave her the time she needed to study him. His teeth were bright white—the only clean thing she had seen since entering the deli. His eyes were as dark as his teeth were white, but they appeared to be friendly. As he waited for her to speak, he knitted his fingers together in front of him, rolling his shoulder to straighten out the drape of his crisp suit coat. Every bit of him seemed to be polished and neat—a stark contrast to the room before. “Are you the Devil?” she finally managed to squeak out, eyes wide. He laughed, throwing his head back and letting the sound ripple around the room. It was a friendly, amused sound that put her at ease. “Oh no, nothing so boring as that.” “But you can give people whatever they want.” He composed himself, that same broad smile still on his face. “Well, of course I can. But there is much more to this world than your simple understanding of gods and devils. Don’t worry, Marjorie, this is no deal with the Devil. But do tell me, what is it you want?” “I—I came here to—“ The words would not come. She had thought and thought about how she would tell her story, how she would describe the years of abuse, threats, and evil. She considered taking off her coat and showing him the pale yellow stains of old bruises, but they were now marred by fresh ones from the fray. She felt for the death certificate in her pocket, the name of her first son written on it. And now the words would not come. He watched patiently, no hint of irritation at her pause. When she began to sob, he offered her the handkerchief from his front pocket. “He told everyone I was drunk. That was how I fell down the stairs. That was why Mikey died.” The tears were coming more in earnest now, and she dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief. “They all looked at me like a terrible mother, that I would be drinking while pregnant. They blamed me—if I had been sober, I wouldn’t have fallen and Mikey would have at least had a chance. No one believed me.” “I don’t bring people back from the dead, Marjorie. Even I don’t meddle in things like that,” his voice was soft, almost as if moved by her tearful story. She took that moment to compose herself, sniffing and wiping away the tears. “I know. That’s not why I’m here. I want you to kill my husband.” The words were out, blunt and dirty, before she realized what she was saying. This was not how the discussion was supposed to have gone. His face brightened. “Oh, is that all you need? Well, that should be a relatively easy matter” “You don’t understand. He’s a monster. It won’t be easy to kill him, but you have to. You have to kill him, because he’s a very bad person.” “Marjorie, I don’t care who he is. He could be Hitler or the Pope reincarnate. All I care about is that you want him dead. And I can make that happen, no matter how ‘monstrous’ he might be.” He reached over and pulled an ornate ink pen from his desk. “I will need some details, like his name, address, distinguishing physical features. Also, would you like proof of death?” Marjorie’s stomach churned at the thought of what she was doing. It was the only way, though. He had to pay for his crimes, and no one else was willing to do it. “No, I won’t need that. Everyone says you follow through on your deals.” “Word of mouth is certainly the best advertisement for services such as mine,” he smiled that disarming smile again. “Um, well, his name is David Bergen and his address is 1394 Windhaven Rd, Apt 1722. It’s in Topeka.” He continued writing and nodding. “He’s about six foot tall, a big bulky guy. Blond hair, brown eyes. He has some sort of tribal tattoo on the back of his neck, one of a skull on his right bicep. Is that enough?” “Oh, that’s lovely. A wonderful description. I’ll dispatch someone right away,” he said, nodding to the small girl. Marjorie heard the door swing open behind her, then close quietly. “But, now that your terms are set, let us discuss what I shall get in return. A few rules. I don’t trade in souls—it is simply too much of a hassle to deal with, and the return is rather poor. I also don’t accept first born children,” at this, he nodded his head towards the spot the girl had been moment before. “I’ve done it once, but I’ve found children are not particularly useful.” There was a sudden cruel glint to his smile, “Besides, someone has already taken yours.” Marjorie was silent, her fingers worrying over the hem of her jacket as if that would provide some solace in this moment. Her heart was pounding again, and she wondered if perhaps she was going to suffocate here in this office. The scents and furnishing that had seemed so lavish now felt oppressive. “But I can give you anything else, right?” He paused to consider her comments. “I reserve the right to refuse any substandard trade. I won’t, for instance, take your pocket lint.” He chuckled appreciatively at his own joke. “But I accept most fair trades.” His demeanor turned more serious, perhaps even taking on a sinister air. He leaned forward over the desk, shadows growing across his face as he did so. “Think carefully now about what you’ll give me for this. Whatever you decide, you will think it is something you would never want back no matter how long you live. But once it’s gone, you’ll find you cannot live without it. You’ll yearn for it. You’ll do anything to replace it. You’ll take it. But it will never be enough, will always be shrouded in the filth of something borrowed. So make a wise choice, but know there is no wisdom that will save you. What will you give me?” She thought long and hard, but she had spent days thinking about it already. She was almost certain she had thought of something that in no way could harm her, no matter what. In fact, she reminded herself, it would be a relief. She would be strong and brave then, not the timid girl that had entered. “My pain,” she finally answered. He smiled eagerly, a response that made her suddenly uncertain. “Oh, yes, we have a deal! Pain is one of my favorites. And don’t come back here saying I didn’t warn you.” With that he clamped her hand in his and shook once. Marjorie felt as his grip began as an excruciating vice, then dwindled until she could barely even notice it. The aches and pains of her various cuts and bruises also dimmed before disappearing altogether. As promised, with it gone, she also felt that absence acutely. It was a kind of nostalgia now, a prickling sense of something missing and a longing to return. This wasn’t so bad, she thought. Uncomfortable, certainly, but it must have been the right choice. He still smiled. “You think it’s going to be easy. But that’s just the first taste. Give it time.” “But,” there was a crackle in her voice. Sacrificing pain did not remove fear. “I can take away others’ pain now, right?” His eyes simmered with glee, as if her altruism was a delicious appetizer. “Of course, my dear. And you most certainly will. Again and again, you’ll valiantly step in and take every ache from their bodies, dry the tears from their eyes. And someday that won’t be enough. You’ll hunger for more. So you’ll give them a little pain, only to take it away. Until that isn’t enough either. I told you, it will never be enough. You can try to drown yourself in the pain and agony of millions and never be satisfied.” His grin finally split into a restrained laugh, and he quickly reassembled his face into a look of mild amusement. The excitement glimmered in his eyes. Lost in his eyes, in the long future stretching before her, in the half-perceived glimpse of the monster she would become, Marjorie barely noticed as the room faded from around her. The last thing to disappear were his eyes, and she blinked. She felt dazed, as if waking from a dream, as she stood the sidewalk and in the light of early dawn. Impossibly, she was standing in front of a nondescript brick building on the other side of town. “Remember,” she heard his voice on the breeze, “the Deli is always open. I’m guessing you’ll have a table all your own soon enough.”

19 minutes

September 15, 2016

Rites and Rituals

Razor Games

anonymously authored, Creepypasta Contest Winners, games, haunted games, Haunted Games Writing Contest, Video Narratives OK

My name is Tom. I am a sound designer for video games. I love my work and I have been doing it for quite some time. I used to work for a small indie game developer called Razor Games LLC. My friend Jason, who hired me after I quit my last job for personal reasons, owned Razor Games. The company did very well and we had our share of small game development success but mostly did outsourced work for larger clients. Jason’s brother Max was a producer at one of the largest game developers in the world. He often would outsource smaller projects to our company as a favor to his brother. That is where the bulk of our work came from. We only had a dozen or so staff members at the company. I was close with several people at the company and considered them my second family. Jason was my friend of several years and was a rugged middle-aged man who had been playing games since he was five. Melissa was this quiet little blonde girl who loved fantasy books, game level design, and had been my best friend of several years. Tanner was this bearded teddy bear of a guy who worked as a game tester and had won my best friend’s heart. Melissa and Tanner had recently gotten engaged and I was elated for the both of them. The last person I was really close to at work was a guy named Nick. He was a character designer and an A.I. programmer. He was a dark-haired young guy and a prankster. The rest of the team was made up of various programmers, designers, and business-oriented people of whom I knew, but didn’t have as close of a relationship as I did with these four. These people made my job the best job anyone could ask for. Things were great until two years ago when Max’s company laid off a bunch of employees due to a corporate restructure. Almost all of their development was kept internal, meaning we wouldn’t get any outsourced projects anymore. I watched Jason stress out about possibly cutting into the company’s emergency fund to keep it afloat while he tried to find more work. Razor Games had received so much work from Max’s company that we were too busy to pick up but a few other clients. In the end, that hurt the company more than it helped. For almost a year Razor Games survived on the emergency fund that it had built up. We had work here and there, but no big projects. Out of the blue late last spring, Jason landed a massive job for us. I remember being in the conference room when he announced the job. Melissa, Tanner, Nick and I were seated together around the small conference table at our office along with the rest of the employees, eagerly waiting to hear what Jason had to say about this new job. Jason had hooked up his laptop to the projector on the table and was about to take us through a slide presentation. “Over this past weekend I accepted a large job from a game developer in Korea,” Jason started. His body energy was higher than it had been in months and the excitement in his voice could not be hidden. “The developer’s name is Violet Edge Digital. The president of development for that company is a woman named Mia Nasta.” Jason flipped to a slide that showed a screen capture of their website. It looked very professional and sleek. I had never heard of this developer before but with so many different companies around the world, I didn’t give it a second thought. “She emailed me last week with a proposition and the possibility of a massive payout,” Jason continued as he paced excitedly back and forth at the front of the conference room. “Her company has in the past made VR simulators for military and aviation training purposes and is now developing a VR headset system for commercial use to compete with Oculus, Sony, Samsung, and others. We all know there are rumors of a Star Wars VR game and others floating around the community.” A series of several slides showed pictures of what was supposed to be their past work. They included everything from pictures of a flight simulator and a VR set hooked up to a military training simulator. Jason stopped his pacing and put his palms flat on the conference table and leaned in as if he was going to tell us the world’s biggest secret. “They want us to do something for them before anyone else has the chance to.” Jason paused looking at each of us in the eyes. “Which is?” Melissa said in a drawn-out tone as she leaned into the table mimicking Jason. Jason slowly stood straight up. “I know we haven’t worked in a VR platform before but they want us to create the world’s first VR horror game. The developer is swamped with finishing their VR headset so they have outsourced the creation of this game to us.” I wasn’t excited. I personally didn’t like horror games or movies but work was work. Others seemed thrilled to take on the genre or be the first to do so in an emerging technology field. “The bad news is we only have a few months to make it happen because they want a Halloween release…” “No way! That’s insane,” Nick said cutting Jason off abruptly. “I’d have to pull insane hours to get that coding done in time as would everyone else.” Jason raised his hand to silence Nick. “I understand,” he said calmly. “The bad news is we are on a tight schedule and we’ll all have to pull some stupid crazy hours. The good news is that they have concepts and basic designs for us already drafted and have paid us the first 20% of the contract.” “Which is?” Melissa said mimicking her tone from earlier. “$9 million,” Jason said with a smirk. The room started to buzz with chatter with a few of the classic “holy shit” exclamations floating into the air. “We’re going to have a good year,” Jason stated proudly. “But, we need to start immediately. Let me go over the design concepts with you all.” Jason took us through the rest of the slide show. The storyboard was already flushed out. The premise was that the main character (or characters since it was to be multiplayer) had woken up in an abandoned building that represented something like a psych ward with no memory of getting there. The character(s) would have to fight his or her way through monsters and solve basic puzzles, like finding keys to open doors to escape. There were to be nine levels of increasing difficulty in the game. The developer even had some pictures of character models they wanted to be included in the game. There were several monster models they had suggested, but two that they absolutely wanted to be designed and included. They had included well-sketched pictures of the monsters the team was to create. The first of the two that they absolutely wanted in the game looked like an emaciated man with pale shiny skin. His head was bald and contained no eyes or nose. The only facial feature was an overly wide mouth with thin lips and needle-like teeth. The fingers on his hands were replaced by long bone like claws. The creature’s knees bent opposite of ours, with the bottom half of the leg being a long bone-like spike that it walked on. The second creature to be included looked like a fat baby with an overly large peanut shaped head and collapsed face. Its eyes sat back in the skull close together. Its mouth was small and puckered with sharp teeth. The hands and feet were replaced by a single bone spike-like protrusions. The creatures were very grotesque but I could already hear the sounds I wanted to create for them in my head. At the end of the meeting, each department received a folder with very specific and detailed instructions on what the client wanted. I even received a flash drive of sample sounds the client wanted me to use that Jason had received in an email. Most of the sounds were labeled as monster movement or monster growl. The sounds themselves were very well done and very complex. Sounds like these would have taken me a long time to get something so crisp and unique sounding. The flash drive had over a hundred different sounds almost all exclusively to be used for the monsters in the game. It seemed strange that they would send already finished sounds to an undeveloped videogame to the developer. At that point, I decided to ask Jason what he wanted me to do. Nick was standing in Jason’s office when I arrived. “Am I interrupting something?” I asked as I squeezed around Nick to the side of Jason’s desk. “Nah,” Nick said. “Violet Edge Digital is asking me to include some weird script in my A.I. code that isn’t needed regardless of whether they have a different operating system for their headset or not.” “Just include it, Nick,” Jason said with a sigh. “I noticed it too. It’s in the instructions for anyone who is writing code. They stated it was unique to their VR system and insisted it be included. If it doesn’t work or screws up, we’ll go with what we know, but for now, include the script as instructed.” “Fine,” Nick said sighing and walking slowly out of Jason’s office. “What can I do for you, Tom?” “I just wanted to make sure they want to use all these sounds. It makes my job easier but I figured they’d want us to design unique sounds from scratch.” Jason rubbed his forehead with his thumb and pointer finger. “Yes. I know they’ve given us very specific instructions but at the end of the day they are the client and to make the deadline realistic, they sent us over what they had already started.” “Alright,” I said as I started to leave. “I’ll group and organize what they sent me and create the rest of what they need according to their instructions.” The next two weeks were insanely busy. Ms. Nasta sent Jason an email stating she was going to send two prototype VR headsets to us to test the game on. Jason spent some of the initial deposit on a few brand new computers with the fastest processors, largest video cards, and most RAM he could cram into them. Nate, our IT guy, spent the better part of those two weeks setting up the new computers in the testing room, or dungeon as we called it since it had no windows. I spent those two weeks recording various sounds in my makeshift foley stage in my office. I followed the list of sounds that the client required of me, creating various initial sounds that I could later mix into something amazingly creepy and new. A few days after Nate had installed all the new computers and the entire team was deep into their own portion of the project, the VR headsets arrived. It would be a month or two before we would have anything close to a playable alpha version ready but Jason wanted the headsets up and running in the testing room ASAP. Jason pulled the packages into the conference room so we could all get a good look at this new VR headset we were designing this game for. Jason opened the first package. “Well, shit. That’s not what I had imagined,” Jason said sarcastically, spilling foam peanuts everywhere as he lifted this old jet pilot-like helmet from the box. “They want us to fly a plane with that thing or design a game?” Nick said jokingly. “I don’t see that as a platform for a multi-million dollar developed game,” Melissa chimed in. Jason sat the helmet down on the table and pulled an installation software DVD from the box. “Well,” Jason sighed, “let’s keep in mind that these are prototypes. Either way, I want them installed and ready by the end of the day so we can begin testing as soon as we have something ready. Nate and Tom. Take these down to the dungeon and get the software installed on the PC’s. The rest of you, get back to work so we can get something to test on these bad boys.” I helped Nate carry the headsets to the dungeon and set them up. Both came with two controllers to manage the movements and actions of the player’s in-game character. Nate ran the installation software on the computers as I connected the controllers to the headsets and the headsets to the computer. “What the fuck is that?” Nate said suddenly. “What’s what?” I asked looking up at the screen he was staring at. “This screen.” Nate pointed to a pop-up window that was full of what looked like wingding text scrolling on its own but it clearly wasn’t wingding text. The window suddenly disappeared and was replaced by another that read “Installation Complete!” “I’ve never seen that before. I’m gonna run a virus scan just in case.” Nate started the virus scan quickly. “The computer isn’t connected to the internet so we should be ok and I don’t understand why our client would send us a virus if they wanted us to get their work done,” I explained. The virus scan came back empty. Nate ran the installation software on a second computer and the same window with the same scrolling text appeared before being replaced with an “Installation Complete!” window. We didn’t think anything of it after that. The rest of the day continued on as normal. For the next month and a half, we worked 12-16 hour days constantly with only Sunday off. At the end of that stretch, we had a working alpha of the game. Melissa and her team had pulled off some amazing level design and were about 5 levels into the game. I had the majority of the important sounds crafted and mixed by that point. The crew working on character models had the essential monsters done including the two that were specifically requested by the client and were now working on the extras. Tanner could now test the game for bugs and issues that needed fixing. Tanner wanted me to play the game with him on the first test run. He wasn’t fond of anything horror and scared easily. Nick would often play jokes on him at the office and he hated it. “I’m not looking forward to this so let’s get it over with,” Tanner said nervously as he slipped the large VR helmet over his head. “Awwww. Don’t cry. I’ll be right here if you get scared,” I said jokingly with a chuckle as I slipped on my VR headset. We started the game and the first thing I noticed was that the graphics were amazing. The 360-degree view immersed you in a way I had never experienced before. “Damn the guys killed it on the textures,” Tanner said in awe. “The sound is pretty fucking awesome too.” “Thanks!” I said dryly. I was so focused on the game before my eyes I wasn’t really paying attention to anything else. Tanner was right. The sounds in the game were almost too good. I guessed I had created better sound bytes than I thought I had. I was pretty damn proud at that moment. We spent a few minutes in the game’s starting area trying out the basic mechanics and looking for bugs. Tanner noticed some texture tearing that needed to be fixed and I took note that the character run command was spotty. After messing around with the character mechanics we made our way through the first level. The level was simple. We needed to locate a key to unlock the door to the next area. We spent a few minutes running around the labyrinth of corridors in the abandon psych ward looking for a key. There were several jump scares that involved the little fat baby like monsters dropping in front of you or jumping out from behind something. I screamed a few times and so did Tanner, which helped me loosen up and laugh at the situation. As we rounded a corner in the game a vent above us dropped down slamming to the ground with a metallic echo. “Shit!” screamed Tanner. “Ha ha ha,” I cackled. “It’s just a vent cover.” I paused as the echoing of the vent hitting the floor dissipated. “Wow, I don’t remember programming that sound. Sounds really good though. Perfect reverb and everything.” I watched as Tanner’s character walked over the exposed vent and looked up into the dark shaft. “Holy fuck!” Tanner screamed as one of the larger monsters swung down out of the vent rapidly and jumped on his character. A large thud hit the ground behind me. I couldn’t hear it but I felt the ground shake. “Tanner?” I asked hoping he was all right. I tried to pause the game but the feature didn’t work. I took quick note of it and slipped my VR headset off. Tanner was sitting up on the floor with his headset lying next to him rubbing his eyes. “You ok?” I asked as I set down my own headset. “Yea, dude,” Tanner replied somberly. “It just seemed so real like I thought I could actually feel the monster’s weight on my body.” “It’s virtual reality. It messes with your senses.” I extended my hand to my friend to help him up. “You want to take a break?” “No. We need to get this testing done so we can get the big issues fixed ASAP. I’ll be fine.” “Ok. I’m going to take what I have to the programmers and make sure they get the ‘pause’ function working then get on creating the rest of the sounds since the ones in the game sound pretty damn good if you ask me.” “Ok. Just leave the door open for me.” Tanner genuinely looked frightened and I felt sorry he was the lead tester on this game. I took my notes to the correct departments and brought up the ‘pause’ function of the game not working properly. It was another month before the game was in a very rough finished shape. The game was far from fully functional but the first several levels were nearly complete. One afternoon I was sitting in my office mixing some of the sound effects I had created when I heard Tanner in the dungeon scream loudly. “Who the fuck!” Tanner yelled in an angry tone. He wasn’t an angry type of guy so I knew something had caused him to blow a gasket. I turned around to see Nick and a red-faced Tanner standing in the hall. “Dude it’s not fucking cool,” Tanner yelled. “What isn’t?” Nick said with palms raised up and a confused look on his face. “Dicking with me while I’m testing that game!” “What are you talking about?” “I know it was you. You’re the only prankster in this office. You came in and blew on the back of my neck while I had the headset on. I could smell your breath.” Tanner had gotten up into Nick’s face. Nick backed up to create some space between the two. “First, I just came from my office and am headed to ask Jason a question. Second, I know I joke around but you know that I know you hate horror anything so I would never mess with you while you were testing the game.” “It’s true,” I said in Nick’s defense as I got up out of my chair. “My office door has been open the entire time and I didn’t hear anyone go into the testing room. I think the VR is really screwing with your senses.” By this time Jason had entered the hallway to see what was going on. Tanner’s face was calmer but still red. “Tanner,” Jason called. “Take the rest of the day off and relax before you have a heart attack. “Sorry, Nick. I’m just on edge because of the game. I’m sorry, man.” Tanner hung his head down and sighed. “Forget it,” Nick said calmly with a smile reaching out to grab Tanner’s shoulder. “Go take a break. I’ll do the rest of the testing today since I’m ahead on my work.” Tanner looked exhausted as he walked off. “Well, I guess there goes the idea of having a scare video compilation for promo purposes,” Jason said with a defeated tone as Tanner left. “Promo video?” I asked inquisitively. “Yea I was trying to convince Ms. Nasta that we should shoot a promo video of our testers getting scared shitless playing the game. I can’t get her to answer her phone during the middle of their day and the only email reply I got back was that they liked the initial alpha version I sent them and that she disapproves of the promo video idea.” “You should do it anyway so we can watch it as a group for our launch party when this thing is finished,” Nick said smiling. “I probably will,” Jason said. “What were you going to ask me, Nick?” “I still haven’t solved our A.I. issue,” stated Nick. “You have an A.I. issue?” I asked him. “Yea, it’s weird. Most people testing it and myself have noticed that sometimes the monsters won’t attack you and will run away like they want you to progress in the game or something. They should be programmed to run away when they are under 30% health but not while at full health. I just haven’t solved the issue yet.” “Go hop on the game and see if you can figure it out. As far as I know, the other programmers haven’t figured out how to get the game to pause either so you’re not the only one with some issues,” Jason finished. Nick nodded and headed into the testing room. I went back to working on the last few sounds I needed to create. Before I left that night I asked Melissa to check in on her fiancé and let me know if he was ok. I had never seen Tanner like that before and it worried me. She eventually sent me a text saying he was fine and had calmed down. It was a big relief for me. A week or two went by and I listened to several other people scream and fall out of their chairs in the dungeon from my office. Everyone seemed to be very pleased with the job we were doing with the game. Most people commented on the excellent sound and graphics. Plenty of people who tested the game also felt as if they could feel the monsters grab them or push them even though we all chalked it up to being immersed in a visually encompassing game. I was finalizing the last sound in my office and Melissa was testing one of the game’s levels to check for any tears in the texture or glitchy spots in the dungeon next door when I heard her shout. “Shit!” Melissa screamed. I whipped around in my chair so fast I nearly flung myself out of it. As I stood up Melissa exited the testing room holding her left arm. A crimson streak of blood was dripping down on the floor. “You ok? What happened?” I asked as I rushed to her. Jason had entered the hallway at that point as well as Tanner. Both were speaking over each other asking her if she was ok. “Yea I’m fine,” Melissa replied looking at her arm. “You’re bleeding,” Jason mentioned as he pointed to her arm. “I know. I’m ok.” Melissa was definitely calmer than the others around her. “It looks bad. I’ll get the first aid kit,” Tanner said as he rushed off. “What happened?” I asked again. “Something scratched me. I was playing the game and I was on the 7th level when I was attacked by one of those bigger monsters with the bone like fingers. It swiped at my left side and I swear I could feel it cut me so I grabbed my arm and that’s when I felt the blood and the pain.” Her right hand was covered in blood. Tanner had returned with some paper towels and the first aid kit. “It’s just a game,” Jason said. “Everyone is falling off chairs and sensing things that aren’t real because it’s a VR game. It’s supposed to immerse you. It’ll mess with your senses. You probably had a knee jerk reaction to what your brain sensed as an attack and when you grabbed your arm you scratched yourself.” “I guess it’s possible,” Melissa said with a sigh as Tanner began dabbing the blood off her arm. “You know what?” Jason stated with an exhausted tone. “We all need to take a long weekend off. We’ve all been pulling 12-16 hour shifts and I think we’re all burnt out.” Jason wasn’t wrong. I was tired. My friends were tired. Jason himself was tired. He had been trying to get a hold of Ms. Nasta for several days voicing concerns over the pause function still not working properly and other business-related issues. The only thing he was able to get back from her was a few short emails that said they approved of what we were doing and we should push forward. We all took a long weekend. When we came back we pushed right back into the thick of things. Around the end of August, we had a nearly finished beta. All of the sounds required of me were mixed and incorporated into the game. Since I was available, I ended up helping Tanner with a lot of the testing. Since the VR headset was not commercially available we couldn’t have an open beta so Tanner and I were going to put in some long nights. The game itself looked amazing and sounded just as good as it looked. Tanner and I had begun to laugh when we were attacked by one of the emaciated man-monsters or fat baby things. We knew where all the jump scares were on each level so we could anticipate them and make fun of each other if we jumped. Because the immersion of the headset was so good, we still felt like the creatures were breathing on us or could feel the impact of one of them hitting us. We knew it wasn’t real but our brain didn’t. Testing for several hours became the norm for us. Every now and then we would have to stop, especially after a long session because we would feel queasy. We figured it was because we weren’t used to playing in a 3D immersive game. One day Tanner was out for a doctor’s appointment so Nick tested the game with me. “Have you had a consistent experience with the monster A.I. when you’ve tested the game?” Nick asked me before we began. “The monsters always seem to be where they should be,” I replied. “No. Let me show you what I’m talking about.” We both slipped on our headsets and started to play on level seven. We pushed through the mini puzzles and hordes of monsters until we reached where you were to retrieve a key to open a door to level eight. The key was on a string dangling in the middle of a massive open room full of the baby like monsters and the emaciated man creatures. The creatures patrolled around in groups. We had designed this room to be a wave-like boss encounter. “So every level I’ve completed there is this issue where the first time through the monsters around the key should aggro at 20 yards but they don’t. In fact, they’ll actually watch you instead of attacking.” Nick maneuvered his character to the middle of the room and stood by the key. I watched with my character from the edge of the room. “Come here,” Nick said. I walked my character passed several of the monsters to Nick’s character. “What the hell?” I questioned in awe. The monsters let me walk past them. Instead of attacking they faced our characters. We stood in the center of the room with a dozen or so of the grossly disfigured creatures just watching us. They either swayed side-to-side or paced slowly back and forth in a small pattern. Their blank stares and creepy sounds, some of which I couldn’t remember if I had created or not, sent an ice-like chill up my spine. “Dude, this is really creepy,” I told Nick as I shuddered. “I can’t tell if they’re bugged or what is going on but I didn’t program this. This isn’t anything compared to what I’m about to show you.” Nick grabbed the key with his character and placed it into his inventory. “Watch what they do now,” said Nick. We began to make our way back through the level towards the locked door, which would take us to level eight. As we walked back through, the monsters from the key area followed us through every corridor. They stayed their distance but they were definitely following us. “They’re just following us,” I gasped in disbelief. “I know these things are just digital images but right now they’re giving me the creeps.” “They’ll follow us right to the door.” Nick unlocked the door and our screens went black to indicate we were loading into the next level. “The issue is that I don’t know how to solve this.” Nick slipped off his VR helmet. “The first time through each level the creatures won’t attack you unless you attack them. I’ve tried programming different ways and I just can’t fix it. The second time through a level they’ll act properly with regard to gameplay.” Nick restarted level seven to show me. Sure enough, when we reached the area where the key was, the monsters attacked us when we were within their 20-yard range. After we finished the second session Nick and I got ready to call it a day. We both felt a little motion sick from playing the game. “You ok?” Nick asked as I leaned forward in my chair after removing the VR headset. “Yea. I just need to rest for a second. The 360 view makes me feel queasy after I play the game for a while. It’s weird I haven’t gotten used to it yet after doing more testing this past month.” I concentrated hard to get my world to stop spinning. “Yea, makes me wonder how this whole VR thing will go once it becomes commercially available,” stated Nick as he put away his equipment. The next two weeks for me were intense. Tanner and I did a lot of testing on the last two levels. Ms. Nasta had emailed Jason asking for a push on the delivery so Violet Edge Digital could release some game footage as promotional material. However, they wanted to record the footage and forbid us from doing it. We were almost finished with the game and as strange as that seemed, Jason wanted to push forward to our big payout. I had started to develop more and more motion sickness as I played the game. It would often be a combination of head-spinning followed by a stomachache. The sickness intensified after each session in the final week. That Friday was the last test session. I stumbled into my office wondering how I was going to make it through the day. To make matters worse it was a cold day. Everyone at the office arrived bundled up in warm jackets and scarves. “Jesus,” exclaimed Tanner as he stood in my office doorway. “You look like shit.” “Feel like it too,” I said with my head lying on my desk. “We need to complete the last level so Jason can send a final copy Monday morning.” “My head is spinning and my stomach feels bad too but at least I can still stand. Go home, dude. I can grab one of the other guys to help me with this. Jake in programming is free I think.” I peeled myself off my desk, drug my half limp body down to Jason’s office to let him know I was going home, and then slept the next few days away in my own bed. I didn’t sleep well Friday or Saturday Night. It felt like my eyes and stomach were going to explode as if something was ripping at me from the inside. I somehow made it to Sunday where the pain subsided and I could finally rest. Monday morning arrived with no pain or dizziness. I arrived at the office early at the same time as Jason and Melissa. “Feeling better?” asked Melissa with a smile. “Way better,” I answered enthusiastically. Jason turned the door handle to the building and it gave. “Damn it,” he stated in an annoyed tone. “Tanner and Jake left the door open when they left on Friday.” We entered the building and made our way to our offices. “Tom, can you look around the offices to make sure everything looks like it’s here and Melissa can you check the dungeon to make sure all the equipment is accounted for?” “Yea just let me get my stuff put up and my computer turned on,” I shouted back. I hit the power button on my PC tower but no lights or spinning disk confirmation noise happened. I tried again. Still nothing. I stuck my head out of my office as Melissa walked into the dungeon. “Jason, my computer isn’t turning on, is yours?” I called out. “Damn it. No!” Jason called out in reply. I heard the click of the light switch in the testing room. Melissa’s scream was deafening. Her body tumbled backward out of the testing room as she backpedaled feverishly nearly crashing into me. She didn’t stop scrambling backward even as she fell to the floor and hit the wall opposite the door with force. I stood there stunned as her screams mixed with cries and the sound of her trying to choke back vomit. It felt like an hour had passed before I ran into the testing room without any thought to confront what had frightened my friend. I covered my mouth as my eyes grew ten times their normal size. I couldn’t comprehend the grotesque bodies before me. Two piles of muscle attached to bone, with their entrails pulled from what would have been their stomachs as if they had been gutted lay on the floor. They lay there motionless in pools of what was probably their own blood surrounded by busted equipment. I couldn’t make out if it was Tanner and Jake or these two bodies were completely alien. Reality hit me like an angry fist. I stumbled back the same as Melissa. I caught myself on the doorframe as Jason came running down the hall. Melissa was still on the floor sobbing her hands covered in vomit. “What the hell happened?” Jason said as he gasped for breath. “Tanner… Jake… I think they’re dead.” I stumbled through my words fighting back my own gagging at what I just saw. Jason quickly turned from us and looked in the room. “Oh my God,” Jason said in a sedated voice. “Call 911. I need to lock the door and keep the others out before they arrive. I don’t want them to see this.” Jason moved in a panic. I gathered myself and frantically called 911 before returning to Melissa to get her calmed down and cleaned up. Jason kept the other employees out of the office until emergency services arrived. Within minutes our office front had become crowded with cops and paramedics. Outside was a sea of blue, red, and white lights. The cops immediately sealed off everything and asked us some questions. Jason offered to pull security footage from the weekend to see if it was possible to catch whoever had done this to Tanner and Jake, if that’s whose bodies were in the testing room. Our office computers didn’t work but Jason kept the security cameras runn

31 minutes

May 21, 2016

Beings and Entities, Video Games and Gaming

Smile Dog

anonymously authored, Smile Dog, Smile Dog creepypasta, Smile Dog creepypasta story, Smile Dog origin story, Smile Dog original, Smile Dog original story

Listen to the Smile Dog narration below I first met in person with Mary E. in the summer of 2007. I had arranged with her husband of fifteen years, Terence, to see her for an interview. Mary had initially agreed, since I was not a newsman but rather an amateur writer gathering information for a few early college assignments and, if all went according to plan, some pieces of fiction. We scheduled the interview for a particular weekend when I was in Chicago on unrelated business, but at the last moment Mary changed her mind and locked herself in the couple’s bedroom, refusing to meet with me. For half an hour I sat with Terence as we camped outside the bedroom door, I listening and taking notes while he attempted fruitlessly to calm his wife. The things Mary said made little sense but fit with the pattern I was expecting: though I could not see her, I could tell from her voice that she was crying, and more often than not her objections to speaking with me centered around an incoherent diatribe on her dreams — her nightmares. Terence apologized profusely when we ceased the exercise, and I did my best to take it in stride; recall that I wasn’t a reporter in search of a story, but merely a curious young man in search of information. Besides, I thought at the time, I could perhaps find another, similar case if I put my mind and resources to it. Mary E. was the sysop for a small Chicago-based Bulletin Board System in 1992 when she first encountered smile.jpg and her life changed forever. She and Terence had been married for only five months. Mary was one of an estimated 400 people who saw the image when it was posted as a hyperlink on the BBS, though she is the only one who has spoken openly about the experience. The rest have remained anonymous, or are perhaps dead. In 2005, when I was only in tenth grade, smile.jpg was first brought to my attention by my burgeoning interest in web-based phenomena; Mary was the most often cited victim of what is sometimes referred to as “Smile.dog,” the being smile.jpg is reputed to display. What caught my interest (other than the obvious macabre elements of the cyber-legend and my proclivity toward such things) was the sheer lack of information, usually to the point that people don’t believe it even exists other than as a rumor or hoax. It is unique because, though the entire phenomenon centers on a picture file, that file is nowhere to be found on the internet; certainly many photomanipulated simulacra litter the web, showing up with the most frequency on sites such as the imageboard 4chan, particularly the /x/-focused paranormal subboard. It is suspected these are fakes because they do not have the effect the true smile.jpg is believed to have, namely sudden onset temporal lobe epilepsy and acute anxiety. This purported reaction in the viewer is one of the reasons the phantom-like smile.jpg is regarded with such disdain, since it is patently absurd, though depending on whom you ask the reluctance to acknowledge smile.jpg’s existence might be just as much out of fear as it is out of disbelief. Neither smile.jpg nor Smile.dog is mentioned anywhere on Wikipedia, though the website features articles on such other, perhaps more scandalous shocksites as ****** (hello.jpg) or 2girls1cup; any attempt to create a page pertaining to smile.jpg is summarily deleted by any of the encyclopedia’s many admins. Encounters with smile.jpg are the stuff of internet legend. Mary E.’s story is not unique; there are unverified rumors of smile.jpg showing up in the early days of Usenet and even one persistent tale that in 2002 a hacker flooded the forums of humor and satire website Something Awful with a deluge of Smile.dog pictures, rendering almost half the forum’s users at the time epileptic. It is also said that in the mid-to-late 90s that smile.jpg circulated on usenet and as an attachment of a chain email with the subject line “SMILE!! GOD LOVES YOU!” Yet despite the huge exposure these stunts would generate, there are very few people who admit to having experienced any of them and no trace of the file or any link has ever been discovered. Those who claim to have seen smile.jpg often weakly joke that they were far too busy to save a copy of the picture to their hard drive. However, all alleged victims offer the same description of the photo: A dog-like creature (usually described as appearing similar to a Siberian husky), illuminated by the flash of the camera, sits in a dim room, the only background detail that is visible being a human hand extending from the darkness near the left side of the frame. The hand is empty, but is usually described as “beckoning.” Of course, most attention is given to the dog (or dog-creature, as some victims are more certain than others about what they claim to have seen). The muzzle of the beast is reputedly split in a wide grin, revealing two rows of very white, very straight, very sharp, very human-looking teeth. This is, of course, not a description given immediately after viewing the picture, but rather a recollection of the victims, who claim to have seen the picture endlessly repeated in their mind’s eye during the time they are, in reality, having epileptic fits. These fits are reported to continue indeterminably, often while the victims sleep, resulting in very vivid and disturbing nightmares. These may be treated with medication, though in someses it is more effective than others. Mary E., I assumed, was not on effective medication. That was why after my visit to her apartment in 2007 I sent out feelers to several folklore- and urban legend-oriented newsgroups, websites, and mailing lists, hoping to find the name of a supposed victim of smile.jpg who felt more interested in talking about his experiences. For a time nothing happened and at length I forgot completely about my pursuits, since I had begun my freshman year of college and was quite busy. Mary contacted me via email, however, near the beginning of March 2008. Added by MooseJuice To: jml@****.com From: marye@****.net Subj: Last summer’s interview Dear Mr. L., I am incredibly sorry about my behavior last summer when you came to interview me. I hope you understand that it was no fault of yours, but rather my own problems that led me to act out as I did. I realized that I could have handled the situation more decorously; however, I hope you will forgive me. At the time, I was afraid. You see, for fifteen years I have been haunted by smile.jpg. Smile.dog comes to me in my sleep every night. I know that sounds silly, but it is true. There is an ineffable quality about my dreams, my nightmares, that makes them completely unlike any real dreams I have ever had. I do not move and do not speak. I simply look ahead, and the only thing ahead of me is the scene from that horrible picture. I see the beckoning hand, and I see Smile.dog. It talks to me. It is not a dog, of course, though I am not quite sure what it really is. It tells me it will leave me alone if only I do as it asks. All I must do, it says, is “spread the word.” That is how it phrases its demands. And I know exactly what it means: it wants me to show it to someone else. And I could. The week after my incident I received in the mail a manila envelope with no return address. Inside was only a 3 ½ -inch floppy diskette. Without having to check, I knew precisely what was on it. I thought for a long time about my options. I could show it to a stranger, a coworker… I could even show it to Terence, as much as the idea disgusted me. And what would happen then? Well, if Smile.dog kept its word I could sleep. Yet if it lied, what would I do? And who was to say something worse would not come for me if I did as the creature asked? So I did nothing for fifteen years, though I kept the diskette hidden amongst my things. Every night for fifteen years Smile.dog has come to me in my sleep and demanded that I spread the word. For fifteen years I have stood strong, though there have been hard times. Many of my fellow victims on the BBS board where I first encountered smile.jpg stopped posting; I heard some of them committed suicide. Others remained completely silent, simply disappearing off the face of the web. They are the ones I worry about the most. I sincerely hope you will forgive me, Mr. L., but last summer when you contacted me and my husband about an interview I was near the breaking point. I decided I was going to give you the floppy diskette. I did not care if Smile.dog was lying or not, I wanted it to end. You were a stranger, someone I had no connection with, and I thought I would not feel sorrow when you took the diskette as part of your research and sealed your fate. Before you arrived I realized what I was doing: was plotting to ruin your life. I could not stand the thought, and in fact I still cannot. I am ashamed, Mr. L., and I hope that this warning will dissuade you from further investigation of smile.jpg. You may in time encounter someone who is, if not weaker than I, then wholly more depraved, someone who will not hesitate to follow Smile.dog’s orders. Stop while you are still whole. Sincerely, Mary E. Terence contacted me later that month with the news that his wife had killed herself. While cleaning up the various things she’d left behind, closing email accounts and the like, he happened upon the above message. He was a man in shambles; he wept as he told me to listen to his wife’s advice. He’d found the diskette, he revealed, and burned it until it was nothing but a stinking pile of blackened plastic. The part that most disturbed him, however, was how the diskette had hissed as it melted. Like some sort of animal, he said. I will admit that I was a little uncertain about how to respond to this. At first I thought perhaps it was a joke, with the couple belatedly playing with the situation in order to get a rise out of me. A quick check of several Chicago newspapers’ online obituaries, however, proved that Mary E. was indeed dead. There was, of course, no mention of suicide in the article. I decided that, for a time at least, I would not further pursue the subject of smile.jpg, especially since I had finals coming up at the end of May. But the world has odd ways of testing us. Almost a full year after I’d returned from my disastrous interview with Mary E., I received another email: To: jml@****.com From: elzahir82@****.com Subj: smile Hello I found your e-mail adress thru a mailing list your profile said you are interested in smiledog. I have saw it it is not as bad as every one says I have sent it to you here. Just spreading the word. (: The final line chilled me to the bone. According to my email client there was one file attachment called, naturally, smile.jpg. I considered downloading it for some time. It was mostly likely a fake, I imagined, and even if it weren’t I was never wholly convinced of smile.jpg’s peculiar powers. Mary E.’s account had shaken me, yes, but she was probably mentally unbalanced anyway. After all, how could a simple image do what smile.jpg was said to accomplish? What sort of creature was it that could break one’s mind with only the power of the eye? And if such things were patently absurd, then why did the legend exist at all? If I downloaded the image, if I looked at it, and if Mary turned out to be correct, if Smile.dog came to me in my dreams demanding I spread the word, what would I do? Would I live my life as Mary had, fighting against the urge to give in until I died? Or would I simply spread the word, eager to be put to rest? And if I chose the latter route, how could I do it? Whom would I burden in turn? If I went through with my earlier intention to write a short article about smile.jpg, I decided, I could attach it as evidence. And anyone who read the article, anyone who took interest, would be affected. And even assuming the smile.jpg attached to the email was genuine, would I be capricious enough to save myself in that manner? Could I spread the word? Yes, yes I could. CREDIT: Anonymous More classic Creepypasta stories can be found here: The Seed Eater 1999 Creepypasta Smile Dog

8 minutes

April 28, 2010

Animals and Wildlife, Artifacts and Objects, Beings and Entities, Famous Creepypasta

The Only Sensible Ritual Pasta

parodies

You wake up to find yourself lying flat in an unfamiliar and utterly filthy room. Your head pounds as you sit up and survey your surroundings. “Ohhhhww. . . What hit me?” You notice the room is dimly lit by a hanging bulb that threatens to flicker out any moment. Large piles of debris are scattered about the small room, and there are no windows. “Hey, who said that? Where am I?” To your left, right and straight ahead of you there are sinister looking doors. You do not fully comprehend your situation, but you must choose one of these doors. One door- “Hey! Are you ignoring me?” -Leads to salvation. One leads to an endless maze of halls and passages that will trap you forever, and the third leads to eternal damnation. You must- “Wait, what? Are you serious?” YOU MUST CHOOSE A DOOR. “Why? The exit’s right there.” In the cold, frightened core of your heart, you know that there is no escape from the desolate predicament you now find yourself in. “Dude, the doors right there. It even says so. See? ‘Exit’, right on the front. Big letters too.” After a moments struggle, you come to realize the futility of resistance and return once more to the crossroads of passages. There is no way out. “Only because some bastard locked up the exit-” You grumble to yourself as you contemplate- “It was you wasn’t it? Jerk.” CONTEMPLATE YOUR FATE. “Fine, fine. Eenie, meenie, miney. . . That one.” -You say to yourself as you chose the door to your left. Unbeknownst to you is that that particular door leads only to misery, death, and the destruction of your very soul. “What? Oh HELL no!” A sudden burst of intuitive clarity causes you to leap away back before the door closes behind you, sealing your fate. “It wasn’t intuition, you just said-” You must make your choice between the remaining two doors. With a sigh, you go towards the one in the middle. “I know what I’m doing-” You mutter- “-I don’t need you telling me. Prick.” You take hold of the doorknob to the passage that will lead you to wander the maze for all eternity, oblivious to the fate that will soon befall you. Deathless, mindless and hopeless, your rotting corpse will still walk on long after- “Gah!” -You cry as you once again leap back from your choice of passage. “Don’t get snappy with me. So, one door left? Salvation, ho.” -You say as you head towards the final door and grasp the handle. The path you have chosen will be long and frought with peril. You will face unsurmountable, blood thirsty foes and travel farther than the simple realms you think of as ‘life and death’. Should you fail, your tattered soul will serve as one of the tortures spectral servants of the lord of the underworld, Gwyn ap Nudd. Should- “Wait a minute. . . ” -You succeed, you will have all the unimaginable pleasures of this world and the next, though you will be doomed to remain in the underworld as Gwyn’s right hand man- “HOLD UP YOU OMNISCIENT LYING PACK OF DOG CRAP! You said one of the doors would get me out of here! Salvation, remember? How is being trapped in the underworld salvation? Get me out!” There is no escape- “Don’t give me that! There’s always a way out.” There is no- What are you doing? Where did you get that pipe? “It was lying in one of those piles of trash. What does it look like I’m doing? I’m going to bust down the exit.” You can’t do that! It’s against the rules! “Oh, there are rules now, ehy? What happened to your big, scary, narrorator voice?” There is no escape! “There will be, just give me a minute! Just, a little. . . There! Ha, got it!” You can’t- “I just did. Goodbye and good luck, Mr. Scary voice. I’m going home, go find another stooge.” I, ah-oh, fuck. I’m out of here too! This place gives me the willies. — Credited to Astonished Lemons.

3 minutes

August 28, 2009

Dark Comedy, Humor, and Parodies, Rites and Rituals

Sarah O’Bannon

anonymously authored, burials, buried alive, cemeteries, deaths, ghosts, graveyards, spirits, undead, zombies Please wait...

Coffins used to be built with holes in them, attached to six feet of copper tubing and a bell. The tubing would allow air for victims buried under the mistaken impression they were dead. Harold, the Oakdale gravedigger, upon hearing a bell, went to go see if it was children pretending to be spirits. Sometimes it was also the wind. This time it wasn’t either. A voice from below begged, pleaded to be unburied. “You Sarah O’Bannon?” Yes! the voice assured. “You were born on September 17, 1827?” “Yes!” “The gravestone here says you died on February 19?” “No I’m alive, it was a mistake! Dig me up, set me free!” “Sorry about this, ma’am,” Harold said, stepping on the bell to silence it and plugging up the copper tube with dirt. “But this is August. Whatever you is down there, you ain’t alive no more, and you ain’t comin’ up.” CREDIT: Anonymous Please wait...

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April 12, 2008

Beings and Entities, Ghosts and Spirits, Zombies and the Undead

Knocking

doors, noises, sounds, Steven Shorter, voices

It started when I was six years old. I was in school, it was the middle of a reading lesson, and I needed to pee, badly. At that age, actually, a fair few kids still wet themselves, and I always got paranoid about embarrassing myself in public like that. I stuck my hand up and told Mrs. Zebby that I needed to use the bathroom. After the usual speech about how I “should have gone at break”, she gave me the key to the Disabled-Access toilet. (As it was the closest one to my classroom.) It was the middle of fifth period, and the corridors were empty and seemed cavernous to me: I was a short, scrawny thing back then. I sometimes had trouble with doors, especially unlocking them, and I fumbled for a good minute or two in trying to get the blasted thing open. Anyway, as I sat on my porcelain throne, there came a knocking at the door. “Someone’s in here,” I called, disgruntled at this disturbance. There came a pause, then the knocking resumed. It was faster now, more determined. “Wait a minute!” The knocking slowed, and a voice replied: “Let me in. I need to come inside.” The speaker’s tone was thin and reedy: an adult I didn’t recognize. I may have been six, but I also had a fairly good understanding of bathroom etiquette. Mainly that you didn’t let more than one person into an area only slightly larger than a cupboard. “Go away!” The knocking intensified again, until it was a frantic drum-beat, just a few feet from me and out-of-sight. I heard the voice shouting something, growing more and more desperate: “Let me in! Just open the door, please!” I was terrified, by that point. The hammering and yelling were so loud, and yet nobody had come to investigate it. Eventually, my teacher came to find me, angry because I had been gone for almost half an hour. When I refused to open the door to let her in, she got a spare key from the receptionist and then took me to the headmaster’s office and called my parents. I was suspended for the rest of the week. I never told anyone what happened. It was a few weeks before my next encounter with this phenomenon. I had just celebrated my seventh birthday, and my family was having a barbecue in my honor. It was a gloriously sunny day, but as soon as we’d set everything up in the allotments behind our house, the coal refused to light. My dad asked me to go and get some fire-starters from the shed in the front garden. It was pretty cramped inside, and I wouldn’t fit all the way, so I just opened it up, stood on tip-toes to reach the shelf holding my objective, then shut the door. As I turned away, a frantic knocking hit the other side of the door. “Open up! I need to come through!” This voice was not the one I’d heard the month before: it was deeper, more brooding and angry. I said nothing and hurried away. I had no idea what was happening, but it frightened me. As I walked away, There came a final thump, like a fist being slammed against wood, and I heard his voice again: “You little bastard. I’ll rip your fucking teeth out. Let me THROUGH!” I ran back to my party and spent the rest of the day glancing over my shoulder. As you might have guessed by now, there were a lot of these voices. I count at least thirty, total. Every month or so, I used to get them: pleading to be let through doors. Almost always, it would be immediately after I shut the door behind me, as though these strange entities had been following me. I never told anyone, but to be honest, I kinda just got used to it. It always made me jump, and some of the voices would make me feel uneasy, but I knew that I was safe, so long as I did not open the door. Some of the voices, I got used to, to the extent that I even named them. There was one which always used to appear at my front door, at home. We have frosted glass, and I could see a silhouette of an average-sized man wearing a cap of some kind. He never spoke, but occasionally would push envelopes containing blank pieces of paper through the letterbox. I called him the postman. He was one of the more unsettling ones. If I tried to speak to him, he would look up, sharply, then begin knocking. I generally left the Postman alone. Twenty years on, and I have retained as much normality as possible. I have plenty of friends, and I even have an on-and-off relationship with a girl I met last year. Not bad for a guy who wakes up in the middle of the night and listens intently to noises you can’t hear on the other side of the door. Yeah, my buddies think I’m strange and kooky, but they put up with it. They’re all great. I’ll miss them. You see, things have started to get strange. Well, stranger than usual, I suppose. Three weeks ago, I awoke, sweating and crying, though I do not know why. My dream had been, from what I recall, fairly normal, when a huge shadow had abruptly fallen over everything. Literally, the second I opened my eyes, there came the knocking at my bedroom door. Not just normal knocking, though. This was truly frantic. “Who goes there?” I yelled. “P-please. Help us…” it replied. I was surprised. It was the sadistic, angry voice that I remember from my father’s shed on my seventh birthday, but it seemed genuinely sincere. There was a pained tone to it, too: as though the speaker were grievously wounded. I actually found myself pulling back the sheets to get up, but I hesitated. I had never before been tempted to open the door. I suppose, as a child, I had so rigorously drummed-in to my head the idea that whatever lay beyond was evil that it was just common sense. To be quite honest, I came very close to letting the thing into my room, that morning. I held out, in the end. It got worse. Just two days later, I was in my local corner shop. I’d just paid for a bottle of milk and a newspaper when a great force slammed against the shop door. Simultaneously, a voice began screaming: a long, keening squeal of pain. I whirled to face the door, but there were so many fliers plastered over the glass that I could only just make out the shape of a woman on the other side, slapping her palms against the window. The shopkeeper stared at me, as though I were crazy. In the end, I asked if he had a bathroom I could use, murmured some half-thought-out excuse and hid there for ten minutes until the screaming stopped. There were four more incidents between then and now: a mixture of screams and tearful begging. The Postman stopped by yesterday, too. He knocked, politely, before sliding his usual letter through the letterbox. Then another. Then another. A total of ten plain, brown envelopes. The Postman waited for a few minutes, knocking occasionally, and then he left me alone. Each letter contained a sheet of A4 paper. But somebody had taken a black pen to the pages, scribbling and shading them with such vigor that there were large tears around the center, and the edges were frayed. I shoved them back into their envelopes and tried to put it from my mind. Earlier, my bedroom door shook, violently. It wasn’t a scream, or a howl, or a roar that I heard, though. It was just crying. Dozens and dozens of voices, sobbing quietly. Another blow struck my door. Plaster flaked from the walls and twirled to the carpet. Still no pleas or bargaining, just sobbing. Crash. I jumped up from my chair. Crash. A hairline crack split the frame of the door in one corner. My phone began to ring, and I heard a sharp rapping at the glass of my window, behind the curtains. I tried answering the phone, but it was simply yet more voices crying. Not even sobbing, though: more like bawling in terror and anguish. I hung up, but it kept ringing, so I took the battery out. I have shoved most of my furniture against the door and window. It has been three hours since this latest attempt at entry began. The battering has not abated. Nor has the crying. I’m fairly sure that my door won’t hold much longer. As for my mediocre barricade; it could be swept aside in two minutes. I find myself faced with the very real possibility of death, so I am writing this memoir of sorts, just in case something does happen. Crash. What do they want? Crash. Do they even want to hurt me? Crash. They seemed fearless, even malicious before. Crash. What could have driven them to this? Crash. Maybe I should open the door. Crash. Maybe I should let them in. * * * * * * Silence fell. I realized that even the crying had ceased. For a whole minute, I sat there. Then I got up and hurried to my door, eager to escape this claustrophobic situation. Perhaps I’d go outside, where I could be far away from any doors, and from the damned knocking. I pulled-away my barricade and turned the handle. Locked. Kneeling, I peered through the keyhole. Beyond my bedroom door was not the corridor that I remembered, but another room, some kind of library or classroom, I think. It seemed unoccupied, but for one kid, sitting and reading with his back to me. I banged on the door. “H-hey, kid. Let me out, okay?” He glanced over his shoulder. “Yeah, over here. Could you open the door, please?” “I can’t. I’m in detention. I’m not supposed to talk to anyone. Go away.” He turned from me. Confused and exasperated, I began to stand up. A loud bang shattered the silence once more. I realized it sounded like a fist being pounded against glass. My window! I heard it again. But this was not the frantic knocking of somebody wanting to get inside. This was not even an attempt to break in. Whatever was beyond the curtain and glass knew I was inside. It knew I was frightened. In the most predatory and sadistic way possible, it wanted me to be afraid. I turned back to the door and began hammering on it frantically. “Hey! Let me in, okay? I really need you to open the door…”

7 minutes

May 18, 2019

Sounds and Voices

I Am Halloween

Halloween is my saving grace – the one night a year I can go outside without a mask. I don’t want it to sound like I spend all year waiting for this day, just wiling away the hours with bated breath and anticipation; I would like to say that I have other interests, that I am able to find myself so engrossed in some human activity that I actually forget about the one day I can truly be myself. But this would be a lie. It’s an uncommon hour that I go without thinking about the thirty-first of October, that glorious night when I can step out into the cool air and almost – just almost – feel human. The last Halloween was perhaps my favorite. My favorite day hasn’t been the same since this area became occupied, since the human beings with their warm skin and their innocent minds began constructing ramshackle dwellings within the imaginary borders of what was once mine. When I say it wasn’t the same, I’m speaking quite literally: my favorite day was a different day before the humans came. Back then, what I referred to as simply My Day took place once every year, on what the humans know as October twenty-third. A day of great power, when the walls between the physical and the supernatural grow thin and malleable. Evil was released into the world on the twenty-third of October, although such designations as months were many centuries from their creation. An insane, power-hungry beast managed to doom her entire species on that day: an October twenty-third many hundreds of years ago. I often wonder what the world might have been like if she hadn’t committed the ultimate mistake. It’s irrelevant, I always end up telling myself. Because I wouldn’t exist. Unlike the naïve human beings who roam the streets in their speeding cars and make screaming love to one another in their shoddy homes, I have been blessed with a natural intuition allowing me to always understand how far in time we’ve drifted since our last cycle began; it is this sense that allows me to know the current year as Six Thousand and Twenty. In human years, I believe, that would be Two Thousand and Sixteen. Anno Domini, are the words they use. Words from an ancient language. Ancient by their standards. But I digress. It was the Halloween of Six Thousand and Nineteen – or Two Thousand and Fifteen – that was my favorite. My Day had always been the twenty-third of October. When I was alone here, I would slip out to the surface and enjoy the rush of power as I was joined by my fellow creatures of the night. I would walk, aimlessly and without direction, as the others whipped around me. Some were burdened with deformed, hellish shapes, cursed to roam in the shadows of the earth, safe from humanity’s leering eyes. Others were no more physical than the wind itself, and only visible to my eyes because of the power that courses through every living creature on the night of the twenty-third. Still others were beyond form, beyond comprehension – no more than forgotten memories, drifting from mind to soul, despairing in their acceptance of eternal suffering. Some have believed that I may end up like them. I have no intention of proving them right. When the humans came and settled down, they scared away my friends. Any human child would find the notion ridiculous: an army of the supernatural, the nightmare of the most disturbed, frightened away by innocent human beings. But it happened this way. The humans didn’t come alone – they brought their single most disturbing, most wicked power of all: the power of denial. Human children spend their time wondering what it would be like to share the powers of their fellow creatures – wings like a bird, perhaps, or the sharp teeth of a dog. They don’t understand that they already possess the most powerful gift of all. Through their human denial, they are able to stare us directly in the eyes and inform us that we don’t exist. My friends were terrified of the humans’ gift. They believed that we, as agents of the supernatural, would not be allowed to exist on this mortal plane without the consent of the human beings. Without their belief, we would vanish, become nothing. So they fled. They left my home and went to find a new world, one where humans were scarce or nonexistent, where they could expose themselves once a year on October twenty-third, reveling in their annual powers without interference from those who may destroy them. They thought I was a fool for staying, for claiming this land as my own. I’m not a fool – I know that the humans rule my world now. I know that I’ve been reduced to a shadow, no, to less than a shadow – but I did not abandon my home. For that I will not apologize. It was many years ago that the first humans came to settle in my home. They built their home uncomfortably close to mine; I watched them as they worked, staying hidden beneath the ground, marveling at how their species had progressed since the last time I saw them. My Day came a month after the first humans were settled in. I had spent some time worrying over what might happen; I was not paranoid enough to abandon my home, but I wasn’t immune to my friends’ terror of humanity. When the time came, I waited. I watched the human dwelling until all the windows were dark, and when they were I waited longer still. Finally I left my home and began walking, my destination unknown but far away from the house. I was meant to feel exhilaration, the sheer ecstasy of being closer than ever to the joining of two worlds…but what I felt was nothing. There was nothing in the air, nothing moving just beyond the spectrum of the physical world. I felt the cold night prickle against my skin, and the corpse’s hand of darkness caress the back of my neck. There was no one riding through the air to greet me, no one crawling up from beneath the ground to wish me a happy My Day. I returned to my home that night, disheartened and full of regret. My Day was over, and I had failed to squeeze any semblance of pleasure from its dark hours. I felt as though I had failed, as if something I had done prevented me from enjoying this once-glorious day. And perhaps I had made a mistake. Perhaps I should have followed my friends, away from this now-tainted land, to an untouched world where humans were nothing but a harmless legend. With nothing but regret and disappointment inside me, I slept. I was awoken by a sound I knew, but was not used to hearing: children’s laughter. Eight days had come and gone as I slept. I had vaguely wondered on the possibility of sleeping through the entire year, giving myself a chance of reliving My Day as quickly as possible; but this idea was thwarted by the children who played above my home. I watched them, careful to remain invisible to their innocent eyes. What I saw confused me. There were two children, one male and one female. I had seen them before, of course: they lived in the human house, with the two adults I presumed to be their parents. The girl and the boy had played outside before, often very close to my home – but never had I seen them dressed in such an eccentric way. The little girl wore a dress of all black, with sleeves that hung down past her small hands. A black hat rested on her head, its brim round and its top pointed like the beak of a crane. For the boy, it was a fancy suit of shiny black material, complete with a red waistcoat and a flowing cape. I recognized his attire as similar to that of humans I had known many centuries earlier, but why he would be reliving the wardrobe of his dead ancestors was beyond my grasp. Their clothes were unusual, yes – but it was their faces that confused me the most. The girl’s face had been painted a bright green color, closer to an emerald than to grass. Dark lines had been added, making her smooth face appear wrinkled and far older than it was. The boy’s face had been painted white, with two lines of red running down his chin. When he opened his mouth to laugh, I saw that two of his teeth seemed to have grown larger and more pointed. I watched them for many minutes as they played in my grass. Their behavior was odd, unlike that of any humans I had known before. Unlike themselves, in fact. At one moment, the boy appeared to bite into the girl’s neck; rather than scream, she let out a giggle and ran away. When the shadows grew long, the children were called inside. Still confused, I tried to watch through their lit-up windows, hoping for some semblance of an explanation. But it wasn’t to come, and when the sun rose the next day, the children had returned to normal. I continued to watch the human family over the next year, and was alarmed when I saw more houses being constructed. For quite some time I considered abandoning my home, as all my friends had done; but I knew that wasn’t the way. Instead I watched the houses grow like weeds, watched as my grass was paved over and horseless carriages replaced feet as the primary mode of transportation. The construction of the neighborhood went on for several years and I watched the humans, intrigued, ignoring any threats to my own way of life. Every October twenty-third, I would leave my home after nightfall and wander around what remained of my grassy field. No one returned to me, none of my friends came back to admit their mistake. I never again felt the same electric rush that had once defined My Day. I was understandably devastated as I came to accept that this thrill, this all-encompassing euphoria, was now beyond my reach. And yet, as the years passed, I found myself with new interests: watching the humans, overhearing their conversations, following their advancement as my once-grassy home became a neighborhood. I found great pleasure in watching the humans; but there was another interest of mine, another ongoing question that kept me enraptured for nearly all my waking moments. This was the mystery of October thirty-first. Somewhere in my life before this home, I learned that humans celebrated the twenty-third of October just as we did. They held gatherings, celebrating the paranormal forces they didn’t know existed. Sometimes, I had heard, they would even dress up, disguise themselves in costumes meant to terrify their friends. It seemed to me that the human celebrations of My Day had somehow been shifted, so they no longer took place on the powerful day itself, but eight days later. This was good, I believed: for the naïve humans to be mocking the supernatural on such an important day was not prudent. My Day came and gone many times over, until one year I didn’t leave my home. I was so intent on watching the humans from within my home that I actually failed to remember the significance of that day. When I finally realized my mistake, I was shocked to discover that I didn’t care. Watching the humans was my priority now. It was on that day – October of the year Six Thousand and Seven, I believe – that I first began to wonder if there wasn’t a way to resurrect the glory of My Day. I had learned over many decades that October twenty-third had been forgotten in this part of the world, that its power wasn’t enough to get me high; but perhaps, I thought, perhaps October thirty-first would function just as well. I eventually came to know this day as Halloween. The humans believed it was an ancient holiday connected to their religions; they didn’t seem to even remember that the twenty-third was the real day of power. But this was fine. Every year on the thirtieth, I would try to convince myself that this was my moment: that I would sneak out from beneath my home and enjoy the utter bliss of My Day for the first time in decades. I was never convinced by my own thoughts, and was always left alone in my underground lair. But finally, just three short years ago, I did it. It was the night of the thirty-first. I knew that less than an hour would pass before the day would end and November would begin; it would be another year of disappointment, another oath to myself that I would never let it happen again. I was not thinking when I crawled from my lair; nothing was in my consciousness but the instinct, the all-powerful impulse, that commanded my thoughts and forced me to finally act. Before I understood what I had done, I stood on the grass above my home, the lights from the neighborhood illuminating all the human homes. I was shocked. Since the first human settlement was built in my field, I hadn’t once been out in the open air except on the twenty-third. Yet here I was, standing in the darkness, my feet wet in the grass, almost as if I were a human being myself. I cannot say what possessed me to move further; every instinct in my body told me to flee, to run and hide in some distant place with no humans to deny my existence. But I kept moving, somehow, my feet propelling me across the ground until the wet grass became pavement. The neighborhood was devoid of humans. Lights were on in many of the homes, but if anyone saw me walking slowly down the street, they did not seem to care. As I moved, I wondered when I would begin to feel that old rush, that old thrill – or if I ever would. I knew that leaving my home was a mistake, but if Halloween proved to be no more powerful than any other day, I would be at a loss. When I was nearly halfway down the main road, I noticed something creeping along one of the houses: a movement, though without solid form. I wondered for a single delirious moment if perhaps one of my friends had returned to discover the hidden powers of the thirty-first with me. But no, alas, I soon realized that the movement was nothing but a shadow. In my disappointment, I failed to recognize what this apparition signaled. When the little boy came around the corner, I froze in terror. I was standing in the middle of the street, the gaudy electric lights blaring down onto my skin; there was no conceivable way the tiny human wouldn’t see me. It wasn’t the same boy I had seen dressed as a vampire all those years ago. This one had darker skin, and wore a costume similar to my own clothing. When he saw me, his face drew together in a squint. He didn’t seem afraid; in fact, he seemed to be pondering me as a whole, as if wondering whether or not his concept of the world would allow me to exist. I remained in the middle of the street, unmoving, as the boy stepped closer. He glanced both ways before stepping off the sidewalk, finally coming to a stop directly in front of me. In his hand was a plastic imitation of a pumpkin. “Hello,” he said. “Hello,” I replied. “What are you supposed to be?” he asked, craning his neck uncomfortably far just to take in my countenance. How was he not afraid, I wondered. How could he, an innocent human and a child no less, stare at me, a creature from beyond his insignificant idea of creation, and not feel the slightest tremble of worry? “Well I’m your neighbor,” I heard myself saying. “I mean who’s your costume,” the boy corrected, frowning up at me. “My costume?” I repeated. I was at a total loss as to what the boy may be talking about. “Yeah,” he said. “Who’re you supposed to be for Halloween?” Yes, I thought, finally coming to understand: I was facing the human’s power of denial firsthand. Then terror struck. What if I was going to die? After all these many centuries, what if I was going to disappear from existence just because one little boy could not understand me? Was there some way to prevent against being thought out of creation? Was I to encourage him, to make him think I was some sort of pathetic human, seeking candy instead of an ethereal high so powerful it could bring the dead back to life? “Here,” the boy said, reaching into his pumpkin. “Looks like you didn’t get much candy.” I took the morsel in my hand, staring down at the plastic label. Snickers, it said. I didn’t know what Snickers was. “Do you want it?” the boy asked. “Cause if you don’t, I’ll take it back.” “I do want it,” I insisted, hastily slipping the candy between my lips. My teeth made short work of the sugary food. “You’re not supposed to eat the wrapper!” the boy cried, as if I had done something unspeakable. He was so pathetic, I thought. His view of creation was reduced to this one neighborhood and what he wasn’t allowed to eat. “Don’t tell me what I’m not supposed to do,” I hissed. The boy took a step back, and for the first time I registered fear in his expression. “You never told me what you were supposed to be,” I growled. “Oh,” the boy murmured, still craning his neck. “I’m…I’m a zombie.” “A zombie,” I repeated, feeling the word around on my tongue. The candy had stuck to my teeth and continued to fill my mouth with its sweet taste. I didn’t like the way it refused to leave. “What is a…zombie?” I purred. The boy took another step back, his expression growing another degree of fear. Some part of him, I sensed, some tiny iota of his being, understood that I wasn’t his kind. “It’s like a dead person who comes back to life,” the boy explained, his voice wavering very slightly. “I must admit I am not familiar with any such creature,” I mused. My tongue continued to dig at the solidified candy that dulled the needle-sharp point of my tooth. “They’re not real,” the boy said. Covering his fear with exasperation, I noted. That was so human of him. “They’re just made-up for comic books and movies.” “Not real, you say?” I stared down at him, arms at my sides. The claws on my left hand drummed absently across my leg. “And what is real?” I asked. “What sort of monsters do you believe in.” “I don’t believe in monsters,” the boy said. “I’m not a little kid anymore.” He took another step back. The fake pumpkin slapped against his knee. “Of course you’re not,” I replied, beginning to lean forward. My legs remained stationary as I bent at the waist. “But are you sure there are no monsters?” I asked. “Y – yeah,” the boy stammered. This time, he didn’t move: he watched as I leaned forward, my upper half bridging the space between us. If he thought, in some absent recess of his mind, that I seemed to be growing bigger, then he was absolutely right. “But there are always monsters,” I continued. “You may think there are none. You may shut off your bedroom light and tell yourself there’s nothing hiding in your closet. But my child – you are wrong.” The boy said nothing. He stared at me, fear and defiance on his young face. He stood his ground as my black eyes stared into him, past his flesh and bones, to where his innocent soul lay trapped in a mortal body, begging to be let out and to join me in my eternal feasting. I knew that “Yeah” would make for a poor final speech, so I allowed the boy space to make a few remarks before I tore his head from his shoulders. They will not forget me, I thought as I carried the boy down into my home. They will not forget me – not now, not ever. And they wouldn’t. I finally understood. My friends had been wrong after all: human denial wasn’t to be feared, but to be combatted. It was my job, and the job of all others like me, to push the bounds of the human mind, forcing them to think up new and more ridiculous explanations until there was nothing left but to admit the truth: monsters exist. The human mind is a twisted, disturbing place. I realized this as I crouched in the darkness of my home, tearing the little boy’s flesh apart with my bare teeth. The humans would lie to themselves, all to pretend we don’t exist; yet at the same time, they would dedicate an entire holiday to acting out their pathetic depictions of us, pretending to be us for nothing more than cheap amusement. Deep down, they believed. Every last one of them believed. And on that Halloween night, I felt the first whispers of the old ecstasy that had once defined My Day. It was then, as I sucked the marrow from the little boy’s bones, that I knew Halloween and My Day had become one. The next year, I was prepared. After the little boy’s disappearance, several families left town; they were replaced by others of their kind, who in turn brought more, and eventually my impulsive killing had the effect of bringing more houses to my once-grassy field. To my great annoyance, one of these houses was built directly on top of mine. I had the forethought to evacuate myself and whatever remained of the little boy before construction began. I hid out far away, careful not to be seen by human eyes. This was another of their many hypocritical stances: a scary mask was to be praised on Halloween, but demonized every other day of the year. When the house was finished, I returned to my lair. The human bastards had replaced my walls, my floor, my ceiling with hard, cold substances that I knew I would never find appealing. My home had been ruined, and I briefly considered building myself a new one, in the earth farther away from town; but my friends had been unable to drag me from my home all those years ago, and if they could not convince me to leave then no human could either. I have stayed in the basement ever since. The humans who live in my house never come down the shoddy wooden stairs, except occasionally to check the furnace; on the rare day that one of them makes an appearance, I keep myself well-hidden in the shadows. It was only on the last Halloween – a year since my impromptu feast – that I was seen by any number of humans. Yes, I had known some in my lives before this home; but ever since coming to my once-grassy field, I had been seen by no human eyes, barring those of the little boy. When the sun went down on the night of the thirty-first, the children left their homes to wander the streets. Some of them were dressed in the brightly-colored uniforms of popular culture heroes; others had retained the traditions, dressing as monsters of folklore that would bring fear to their impressionable younger siblings. Before making my move, I spent some time watching the children through my basement window. They all seemed so happy, I thought – so ready to deny the existence of my people, yet so quick to wear our faces. It was a two-edged sword, I realized only in that moment. Human denial prevents us from being what we once were; yet it is their fascination with the supernatural, their obsession with a world they don’t believe exists, that allows us to remain as we are. Denial is our enemy; fear is our ally. As long as human beings are afraid of the dark, as long as they create vivid monsters out of terror-soaked imaginations, I will have power. When I was sure all the children in town were out and about, I slipped silently through the basement window and unfolded myself on the lawn. As I made my way out into the street, children turned to stare. Some cried out in surprise – some cowered in fear. But every pair of youthful eyes was trained on the tall, thin stranger in their midst. When I came to the center of the street, my feet planted where their friend had died one year earlier, I raised my arms to the heavens. “Happy Halloween, everybody!” I cried. My voice echoed through the street. The children all seemed relieved and they resumed their normal conversations. A pair of Satans rushed by me, clutching their pumpkins. A werewolf scooted to the other side of the street, passing by with both eyes fixed warily on my form. I wanted it. I wanted Halloween. This, not October twenty-third, was the true day of power: not some foolish anniversary of evil long past, but a holiday based entirely on fear, celebrated all across the globe. For the first time in many, many years, I felt the thrill building in my soul. I felt that high, that euphoria that had once been accompanied by ghostly figures riding through the night; I stared at the scene before me, all around me, and I knew that Halloween was My Day now. Slowly, I stepped forward. A crowd of children surrounded me, all babbling and laughing in excitement. I paid no attention to their words. Instead, I spread out my arms, allowing the tips of my fingers to brush against every child I passed. I could feel them. Beyond a physical touch, I could feel their excitement, their pleasure – but most importantly, buried deep in the parts of their minds that forced maturity to blossom, their fear. They were all afraid, on some level. What else are human beings good for, but to fear and deny that they are afraid? Perhaps some of the adult residents of my town wondered where the tall man in the hideous mask had come from. Perhaps some of them, in the farthest reaches of their conscious thoughts, wondered if I had anything to do with the child who had gone missing a year before. I hope they did. I hope they stood at their windows, watching me brush my hands against the children as I towered three times as high as the tallest one, and agonized over the question of whether or not they are becoming paranoid, delusional, perhaps insane with the unanswered questions that had followed the boy to his grave. And I hope wherever my old friends are, whatever part of the world they have decided is suitably human-free, I hope they are never happy again. I hope they never feel the brilliant fireworks of pleasure we used to share every October twenty-third; I hope they never find out that true immortal bliss is only eight days away. Above all, I hope the human race continues to grow. I hope they flourish, each one of them enjoying long, terrifying lives. I hope they all have children, and their children have children; I hope they teach every new generation the true meaning of fear. I am the true meaning of fear. My friends believed they were incapable of being afraid. But they were afraid of humans, and the power they hold. They were afraid that any flesh-and-blood mortal could simply wish them out of existence. And perhaps they could. But not with me there. Not with me, hiding in the shadows. Not with me lurking behind every corner, waiting until their fear reaches its climax and I strike. Manipulation is my game, and terror is my drug. I am Halloween.

16 minutes

October 6, 2017

Beings and Entities

The Magic Show From Hell

MysticalSilencer

Jasper’s POV The clock ticked back and forth above me. It was late in the morning and I fell asleep on my bed watching mindless, late night cartoons leaving the T.V. on in the process. The loud sounds from the early morning shows stirred me awake with sounds of explosions and crazy hijinks. I suddenly found myself looking at the clock. It was nine in the morning and I already knew that our parents weren’t home; my mom was working and my dad was out helping a friend move. Thanks to my luck, my dad didn’t even ask me to help, which was a good thing for me. Tired from last night’s channel surfing, I was hoping for at least one good scary movie or T.V. show to pop up, but all I found were bland, boring infomercials. I sat in bed for a few minutes allowing myself to wake up fully before starting a new day. The grating noise of the clock was the only sound that lofted in my room. I gazed around at my room until my eyes hit my bookcase filled with chilling stories that I read many times and now grew bored of. Slowly, I got out of bed and walked towards the bookcase and pulled out one of the books. My eyes glazed down at it as I opened it, flipping through the pages. I sighed and put the book back knowing what happens in the story. A ghost haunts and two girls escape by defeating the ghoul by exorcising it from her home. Same cliche story, same ending. All of the books or movies I watched either have the hero or heroine escape and have their happy ending. It is always predictable and quite sad in all honesty. It is one of the reasons why I strive to find new ways to get a good scare. A new horrifying twist would be most pleasing to experience, but nowadays, people repeat the same formula in horror never taking a chance to go beyond that endless cycle of horror. I broke out from my ponderings and then proceeded towards the door to depart from my room. “I guess I can make some Macaroni and Cheese…” I thought, craving food after a long night. I made my way into the kitchen. “Now, I just have to find the box,” I instructed myself, opening a cabinet filled with canned fruit and other foods inside of boxes, like spaghetti, noodles, so on. I slowly leaned in, digging through them. “Where is it?!” I growled. That’s when I saw a hand reach in, grabbing a box that was right next to me. I mentally slapped myself and looked to my left to see my little sister, Rose. She shook the box in my face. “You’re as blind as a bat, aren’t you Jasper?” I huffed, grabbing the box from her hands, sitting it on the counter. “When did you come downstairs?” I asked. She watched me. “I’ve been in the living room,” she told me. “Watching television?” I asked. She nodded. “Yeah, Spongebob was on,” Rose told me. Nodding, I lazily responded, “Alright, since you’re here, can’t you help me?” I asked. “With what?” “With the eggs, mom taught you how to make them, right?” “Yeah, she did, but I kind of forgot,” she told me with a frown. “Alright, I’ll help you, get a pan please,” I instructed. She started to search. “Here you go, Jasper!” “Thanks!” I told her. “Now, crack them,” I continued. “What if I mess up? I did once with mom and the yolk got all over,” she told me. “You won’t, I promise,” I assured her. She looked at them nervously, cracking one egg against the table. “Told you,” I said. I looked at the box on the side. “Okay, stir until soft…” I read, stirring clockwise. I felt a tug on my shirt, Rose pointed towards the stove. “Alright, then you-” I started, just to hear my phone’s ringtone cut me off. I sighed, looking over at the macaroni again and towards my phone. “One second, stir the macaroni for me please?” I frowned. “Is it Mary?” she asked. “Most likely.” “Okay, but you’ll keep an eye out for the eggs, right?” she asked. I nodded, going towards my phone. I looked at the caller ID. “Yep, it’s Mary,” I replied, answering it. I waited for a few seconds to hear rustling in the background of her phone. “Mary?” I asked. “Jasper!” the teen shouted back. I pulled the phone away from my face a bit, her voice was ear shattering. “Whoa, excited much?” I laughed a bit. Laughter came out of Mary’s mouth. “I found something amazing! Really freaking cool online!” she continued. My eyes lit up with interest. “Really? If it’s the story about that ghost, I already-” I started, just to be cut off. “No! It’s not a dumb story! I actually read up on our state, it’s an article,” she told me. I felt my interest float away and I flipped the eggs again. “You have to be kidding? What article did you find? The one where the farmer got his leg cut off by his farming equipment?” I asked. “No, Jasper! I swear, this is actually interesting!” she shouted, getting aggravated, wanting to tell me. I stopped for a second. “Alright, but I bet I’ve read it before,” I replied, looking at Rose who stared, her eyes filled with curiosity. I heard Mary let out an annoyed groan. “Great! Now I can’t! Mom’s asking me to tend to the garden and stuff!” she mumbled harshly. “Tell me later, okay?” “I’m going to have to! Be sure to have your laptop out!” “Alright, bye,” I finished. I heard her mom shouting for her from her end and she groaned again. “Bye,” she told me, hanging up. I moved the phone away from my ear, placing it in my pocket. Rose started to stir the macaroni again. I looked into the pot, noticing the macaroni was soft. “Alright, good job,” I told her. I lifted the pot, pouring the water out into the sink. “What was she talking about Jasper?” Rose asked suddenly. I shrugged. “She didn’t exactly get to the main point,” I replied, hearing Rose turn the oven off. “I’m sure it’s interesting,” she told me. I brought the pot back onto the stove, staying silent. “Maybe…” I responded, we went silent for a few seconds. “Alright, get the cheese,” I said, changing the subject. She grinned widely. I couldn’t help but feel somewhat curious in what Mary was going to say, it’s been a long time since I actually heard her so hyped up about something, maybe it was something I’ve never read before? Later, during the evening, I was back in my room, my phone next to me. I had my eyes glued towards my laptop’s screen, staring at the search bar. Finally, to my relief, my phone started to vibrate. My eyes snapped away from my laptop and my hands quickly scrambled towards the device, answering the call. “Hello?” I asked. Some exhausted pants were hearable and it ended with the sounds of a door slamming. “Mar-” I started, just for her to interrupt. “Sorry about not calling earlier, I sort of had to help mom out with a few other things,” she told me. I heard rustling on her line and she let out a tired groan. “I’m so happy to be in my bed,” she continued. I put her on speakerphone and placed the phone next to me. “I bet, now, what did you want to show me?” my curiosity spoke for me. There was a few seconds of a pause. “I knew that you were interested,” she laughed. I had to admit, I did sound as if I truly didn’t care during the last call. “Yeah, I am. Mainly because you’ve never sounded so hyped for something before,” I responded. “Well duh! This is an awesome thing! Alright, search up ‘West Virginia, abandoned places.’ ” she told me. My fingers immediately went towards the keys, typing it all in quickly. “Did you type it in?” she asked. “Yeah, which link?” I asked, seeing multiple links. “The first one,” she replied, her voice filled with excitement. I brought the mouse towards the link, clicking on it. Soon enough, I was brought to a website. It had a bland, red and grey background with text, even pictures, some of a little boy with an older man. “What is this?” I asked Mary. I heard her clicking, as if getting on the website herself. “This is Grande’s Magic Show.” I started to scroll down to view some of the text under each picture. I stopped at the first picture, the one of the building. It had a large sign next to it and people were walking inside, each of them had old hairstyles and happy expressions. “Grande’s Magic Show?” “Yeah! This is what I wanted to show you, go ahead and read the text,” she told me. I blinked, starting to read, “Grande’s Magic Show, 1964, Main Road, WV. This was the building in which the events took place. The building was decorated with beautiful red curtains, wooden flooring, each board polished to shine brightly with cement underneath. Wonderful grey walls painted with vibrant red circles. The building was huge, like a giant hotel with a large, decorated stage for the magician himself in the upstairs area,” I read out loud. “That was back in 1964,” I said, rubbing my chin. I heard a hum from Mary. “Exactly!” “This is interesting,” I replied, scrolling down towards the next picture of the child and the older man “Grande and his boss Louis, 1965. Grande, age twelve, was very talented at magic for his age and was hired by Louis in 1963 and was given the alias ‘Papagrande’ as a stage name. Grande was rather tempered child who normally stuck next to Louis until 1993 when he passed away. A new boss was hired later on,” I read. “I have to laugh at the nickname though,” she snorted. I tapped my fingers on my laptop. “Yeah, but still, what’s your point?” I asked her. “Just read on okay? The next picture should give you a hint,” she replied. I tilted an eyebrow, scrolling down to find a picture of people running out, fear written on their faces as they ran out of the doors. “1993, Grande’s last magic show. People ran in fear of the events which happened inside, this picture was captured during the event. The building is now fenced in,” I continued. “Exactly! This is what I’m talking about! The building is able to be explored!” she told me. I just stared in thought. “Um, Jasper?” “Oh – sorry, I was just thinking, how did you find this?” I asked. “Like I said, I was searching up abandoned things that was in this state! So I sort of dug into the old links and found the link to this website. Now, aren’t you going to thank me?” “Thank you for what?” “Finding something for us to do!” she replied. I stopped. “Who said I wanted to do this, sure, it’s interesting but-” “Jasper, you’re so lazy. Main road is a good ten minute walk or are you scared?” she teased. I thought for a moment. “Fine, what time?” I asked. She let out a cheer of victory. “2:00 tomorrow! I’ll be at your house then,” she told me. I picked up my phone. “See you then.” “Bye!” she said, hanging up. I moved my phone away from my ear and hung up, placing it on my desk. “….” I went silent, looking at the last picture on the website. I closed the lid of my laptop, I did feel rather… curious. Seconds later, I heard a car door slam and Rose ran out of her room, going down the stairs. “Mom must be home.” I slowly got up from my bed, making my way out of my room. Downstairs, I heard my mom yawn loudly, closing the front door. “Mom!” Rose shouted cheerfully. I walked down the stairs and saw her. She removed her jacket and placed it on a chair. “Hey, sweetie,” she grinned, messing up her hair. She looked slightly dark under the eyes, most likely tired. “Man, you’re home late,” I said, walking up to her. She nodded. “Yeah, the office made me work a little later than normal,” she replied. “I see…” I said. She reached into her purse, pulling out her phone. “Speaking of later than normal, your father texted me saying he’ll be home about six tomorrow. He still has a ton of things to do over there. In the meantime, what have you both been doing?” she asked, walking into the nearby bathroom. I pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down. Rose by the door. “We made macaroni and cheese, then I just watched cartoons for awhile. Then I decided to go upstairs to my room,” Rose told her. “Is that all you ate?” Mom replied. I leaned on my arm bored. “No, I’ve been snacking. Jasper ate a few small things, but nothing big, because he was talking to Mary and was doing chores,” Rose said. “Oh, what were you and Mary talking about, Jasper?” she asked. I started to tap my fingers on the table. “Well, she’s coming over tomorrow and stuff. We talked about abandoned places and such, the usual,” I responded. “She is? What time?” “About two, we’re going to go a few places and then we’re coming back home.” “Ah, I see. Well, take Rose with you, I just don’t feel as if she’s safe alone,” she told me. I froze. “Whoa! Wait, what?! Take Rose with me?” I shouted. Rose frowned a bit. “Is there a problem with it, Jasper?” she asked. “Yeah! I thought tomorrow was your day off! It’s only supposed to be Mary and I!” I responded. The bathroom door opened and mom walked out, her face clear of makeup. “Well, I have to work tomorrow because someone else is sick, so I have to take her place for the day,” she replied. Rose crossed her arms. “Mom, I-” “Nope! Jasper, don’t argue. Take her with you…” “Fine…” I said in defeat. My mom was rather paranoid in my little sister, she can’t be anywhere alone, it made me feel like the babysitter. Before I knew it, it was eleven. I was once again in my bed, reading through the same website once again, trying to find out more. “I want to find out more about him.” I bit my lip, clicking on “more images.” Of course, dozens popped up, one of Grande back in 1965, from the looks of it, he had cut an actress in half. Of course, when it comes to magic, the actresses and actors always had a way to be safe during it all. I clicked on another picture. It was an old map of the building’s location, it had Main Road going around it. “Okay, so it is by Main Road at least but in that exact location now, it’s nothing but a forest. I wonder if it’s still standing…” I rubbed my chin, reaching over to grab my phone. I went to my texts and started to message Mary, “Mary, don’t you even know if it’s still standing?” I sent. While I waited I continued to click picture after picture until I stopped, seeing an image of Grande back in the 90’s. Unlike most of the pictures of him as a kid, in this picture, he just looked depressed, like all that happiness just vanished. I heard my phone vibrate and I looked at the message. “Yeah, it’s still standing. But, I bet it’s damaged and such. So, are you ready for tomorrow?” Mary’s message said. I started to message back, “Oh, I just saw an old map of the location, it’s surrounded by the forest now, right? Oh and… Rose is going with us.” “Yeah, be ready for a small hike through a forest. What? Why is she coming along? I mean, it’s not a big deal but still…” “I know and my mom’s forcing me. She’s too worried about leaving her alone.” “Alright, I understand. See you then, I’m heading to bed, night.” “Night.” I finished texting her, placing my phone back onto my desk. I pushed the power button on my laptop, shutting it off. My eyelids started to droop and everything eventually became black. The next day pretty much consisted of making breakfast, doing the chores I needed to do and finally; I went into my room and grabbed everything I possibly needed. I gently placed things I might need into my backpack. “Alright, something to snack on, some water, and a flashlight. This should be good.” I checked over everything I had. “Now, we just have to wait for Mary…” I huffed, getting up from my position. I bent over to grab my phone, sliding it into my pocket. Silently, I made my way out of my room, sliding the bag over one of my shoulders. Rose was downstairs, she had grabbed her jacket and slipped it on. I walked towards her and pulled out my phone. “Where are you?” I texted, hoping Mary would reply fast. “I’m down the street,” she replied seconds later. “Alright, we’re ready and such. I also packed a bag for us as well.” “Great! I’ll be there in a few minutes.” “Okay,” we messaged. I slid my phone back into my pocket and looked at the door. “Hey Jasper…” Rose said. “What?” I asked. “Where are we going?” she questioned. “We’re just going to go check out something, It’ll be fun,” I replied, tapping my foot impatiently. “….” She went silent. Eventually; Mary arrived, she knocked on the door and I allowed her inside. “Okay, let’s get outta here,” she said quickly. I walked out of the house, Rose followed behind, closing the door slowly. “First off, what did you pack for us?” “Some food, water, a flashlight.” “Awesome, sounds about good. Now, aren’t you excited?” “I’m very curious.” “Close enough, what about you, Rose?” Mary asked. Rose lifted an eyebrow. “I don’t even know where we’re going,” she replied. Mary gave me a look as we started to walk. “Well, it’s going to be cool, you like abandoned things, Rose?” she asked. Rose shrugged and went in the middle of us. “K-Kinda…” “Kinda?” “I mean, it’s okay, I just don’t like ghosts and most abandoned places have ghosts, right?” “Nah, not exactly. Where we’re going, we’re only going to be there for an hour or such.” “Oh…” they said. We all pretty much talked until we arrived at Main Road. I looked at the tall trees that towered over us. Mary took a deep breath, taking a few steps into the brush of nature in front of her. “If I remember, we should keep going forward and we should run into a fence,” Mary mumbled. “And… climb it?” Rose asked. I nodded. “Most likely, but who knows, it might actually be torn down from the elements or-” “Either way, we’ll get in.” “Yeah, because I didn’t walk all this way for nothing.” “Really? You’re complaining about walking for ten minutes?” Mary snickered. I growled in annoyance, looking down, “I wasn’t complaining, I was just-” “Bye!” Mary’s voice sounded farther away. I looked up just to see her walk deeper, farther from me. Rose followed close behind her. I raised my arms in the air. “What the heck?!” I shouted. I heard her laugh. “Come on, Jasper!” she shouted. I groaned, stepping into the brush of weeds and other plant life. Some of which reached up to my knees. I struggled to run in it, thanks to it being rather thick. “Hey, thanks for not leaving me behind!” I said sarcastically when I caught up to them. “Then you should’ve kept up with me,” she laughed. “What? I just looked down for a second!” “Still, you should’ve kept up,” she teased. I felt a little annoyed, minute after minute passed. I groaned, bringing my hand up to my bag, taking it off of my shoulder slowly. Mary and Rose stopped after hearing me place it down on a rock. “Water break?” Rose asked. I nodded, taking the large container out. “Hey, remember to save some for us,” Mary frowned. I swallowed the little amount of water I had left in my mouth, closing the lid. “I know,” I told her, holding it out. She quickly grasped it in her fingers. “So, how much further?” I questioned. Mary wiped her mouth, handing the container towards Rose, looking around. “We should be close by now,” she responded. I felt a sort of cheer go throughout my body. I reached over, grabbing the container from Rose who held it out. I gently placed the container back into my bag, placing it back over my shoulder. “We have to keep moving,” she said, starting to walk once again. Rose looked at me. “My legs are sore Jasper,” she told me. I started to walk once again. “I know how you feel,” I responded. “Wow, you can tell that you’re both siblings,” she teased. I rolled my eyes and soon enough, Mary stopped, and her eyes lit up. I tilted my head and looked at her. “Uh… Mary?” “Don’t you see it?” she asked. “See what?” I asked. She pointed towards the front of us. I looked and to my happiness, there was the fence. “We finally made it!” she shouted, running towards the fence fast, ignoring the multiple weeds around us. Rose and I looked at each other and started running ourselves, then we were in front of the fence. The fence appeared to look like a bush, the plant life covered it like a blanket. From the looks of it, it looked rather complicated to climb. Mary walked up to it, observing it. “Dang…” Rose said, going up close. Mary put her hand on the vegetation. “This might be difficult,” she told us. “Yeah, so who’s going first? I’ll go last,” I said, looking at them both. Mary looked at Rose. “I think I should go first, then Rose can go,” she told us. “Alright, be careful,” I told her. She nodded and gripped the fence tight. Each time she started to climb, I expected her to lose her footing. I stayed behind her just in case she fell. “God, it’s harder to climb than I thought,” she said, lifting her hand up to grab ahold of the vegetation and the fence underneath. “Almost there!” she shouted, moving her foot up into the plant life, trying to feel the fence through it. “Jasper, I’m sort of scared to climb this,” Rose whispered. I looked down at her and gave her an assuring smile. “Hey, I’ll be behind you to catch you if you fall. Mary will be on the other side too,” I assured. Rose sighed shakily and I looked up to see Mary going down the other side of the fence. I heard her grunt as she dropped to the ground. “Alright, it’s Rose’s turn!” Mary shouted from the other end. I looked over at Rose who grew a tough posture. “I can do this!” she said, starting to climb the fence slowly. I stayed behind her, I could hear her inhaling air deeply, trying to stay calm and balanced. She reached up to grasp the vegetation just for her foot to slip, she let out a scream of fear. I quickly caught her in my arms, she shook, terrified. “Whoa! Is she okay?!” Mary shouted from the other side, hearing the scream. I looked at her and rubbed her back. “Breathe, it’s okay, you almost made it,” I tried to calm her down. “J-Jasper…” she started. “Is everything okay?!” Mary asked again. “Everything’s fine, she lost her grip,” I replied. “Is she okay?” “Yeah! It scared her though!” “Alright! Try to hurry, you have to see this!” Mary shouted. I looked at her when she finally calmed down. “Are you ready to try it again?” I asked her. She looked down. “Y-Yeah, but can you help?” she asked. I nodded. “Of course,” I replied, picking her up with a grunt. I lifted her high so she could have less to climb. “There, you have a good grip now; right?” I asked. She nodded, starting to climb up slower. I could feel a sense of relief when she finally went over the top, going to the other end where Mary stood, waiting for her. “Did you make it?!” I asked. “Yeah! Your turn, Jasper!” Rose shouted. I raised my hands, clutching the fence tight, moving up slowly, one foot after another. I gripped the top and soon enough; I made it over the old fence. My feet hit the solid ground and I turned around. Rose and Mary were staring at a very large building. My eyes widened at its appearance. The paint that was on the outside was chipped immensely, revealing the brown bricks underneath. Vines, much like the fence, had taken most of the building over. The windows were boarded up, the windows above, too high for us to get to, were busted out. Mary’s grin widened along with my own, this was an amazing sight. “C’mon! We have to find a way inside!” Mary said, her voice cheery. I walked over and nodded. “I’ll go and check the back. Jasper, Rose and yourself should check around the sides of the building,” she instructed. I groaned. “Who made you the leader?” I asked. She pushed me gently. “I’m the one that found out about this place,” she said teasingly. Rose giggled. “Fine!” I told her. She grew a slight smirk and she started walking towards the back of the building. I looked down at Rose. “Left or right side?” Rose asked. I shrugged. “Let’s just check the left,” I replied, going that direction. As we went around the building, twigs snapped under our feet, the breeze that once blew the trees had vanished making everything a little quieter. I got close to the side of the building, looking at each window. I rose my hand up to a board on one, pushing it, it didn’t even budge, if anything, it felt as if there were more boards on the other side of it. Rose walked over towards the one next to it, getting the exact same thing. “They have to be boarded up on the other side too,” I told her. She nodded. “The right side now?” Rose asked. I nodded. “I doubt we’ll find anything different,” I replied, going around the corner towards the back once again. I went towards the right side, Rose followed quickly behind. Much like the left side, the windows were boarded up. I made my way slowly over to them, reaching up to push like how I did the left, just to get the exact same response. I growled. “Oh my God, please don’t make this trip for nothing!” I groaned, going towards the front just to hear a noise followed by a cheerful cry. “Mary?” I asked, going around the corner just to see her climbing through a window. My eyes widened in shock. I walked over. “How did you-” “It was loose!” Mary replied. “Loose? But the others were-” “Just fine?” “No, boarded up from the other side too I think.” “This one only had one side boarded and it made it loose,” she told me. “What?” “Either way, we have a way in!” She smiled, going inside. Rose climbed through next and I climbed in last. My feet slowly touched the wooden flooring and I looked around. The room that we were in had a bed, its sheets were tattered and the room was an ungodly mess. The floor had to have had layers of dust along with the objects inside. The walls were chipping much like the exterior of the building. “Whoa…” I said in awe. Mary squealed happily. “This is so amazing!” she said, going towards an old desk. I could feel my eyes travel over every object in the room, slowly, I walked towards the closet which was next to the bed. I tried my best to avoid the multiple objects that were strewn in my path, mainly the bed sheets which could’ve easily tripped me up with one wrong step. “Did you find something, Jasper?” Rose asked, going next to me. I slowly gripped the closet door, pulling it open slowly because it was old. “Maybe…” I replied, opening it fully. Inside of the closet were dusty, old shoes along with coat hangers and some old, ruined shirts at the very bottom. “Mary, come look at this!” I said. She turned around and placed a small vase back onto the desk, walking over. “This is cool!” she said, picking up an old shirt from the bottom. Suddenly, my mind clicked. “I wonder, what if this was a guest room?” I asked. “I think it is Jasper,” Mary replied. I heard a noise from behind me and I turned, Rose had opened the door and started to leave the room. Mary put the shirt down and I walked towards Rose. “Where are you going?” I asked her. Mary walked towards us, going beside me. “I don’t think there’s anything else to view in here Jasper,” Mary told me. Rose nodded and I had to agree. This room only had tattered bed sheets, a desk with no drawers and a closet with old shoes and shirts. I peered out the door, seeing a long hallway with multiple doors. It was dark, very dark. “Alright, one second,” I told them, placing the backpack on the ground, opening it just to pull out the flashlight. “Thank God that you grabbed that,” Mary said. I pressed the small button on the side, turning it on just for the light to illuminate the hallway. I stepped out, Mary and Rose followed close behind. Mary’s POV I could feel the curiosity course through me. The multiple doors seemed to hypnotize me along with the paintings on the wall. I stopped at the first door, causing Jasper to shine the light my way. “What are you doing?” he asked. I twisted the knob and pushed on the door, it opened and I smiled with excitement. “She’s so into this,” I heard Rose mumble. “And you both aren’t?” I asked. “I’m interested,” Jasper responded. “I think it’s different…” Rose replied. “Exactly!” I turned back to the room. Jasper’s light shined against the boarded up window and over multiple objects. I heard their footsteps follow me in as I went further into the room. “Mary, check this out,” I heard Jasper say. The light went off of the wall and Jasper had it shining towards a large picture above us. “Keep it there,” I told him, slowly reaching up to take it off of the wall. My fingers grasped the picture’s frame, slowly lifting the picture away from the wall. I moved my hand towards the photo, wiping all the dust away to reveal a photo of the building. “It’s just the photo on the day of its opening maybe. Like the one we saw on the website,” I told them. “It’s something, I guess.” I hummed in agreement. The light slowly moved away from the picture as Jasper turned to look around. “This room is so empty, the closet doesn’t even have clothes or hangers inside,” he said, pointing the light towards the open closet. I shrugged. “Maybe we should go upstairs now so then we can go see the stage or whatever,” Jasper asked. “I want to check the rest of the rooms first,” I replied. “Okay, lead the way leader,” Jasper mumbled, holding the light out towards me. I took it in my fingers, making my way out of the room. Just like the last few rooms, there was absolutely nothing. All the rooms were the same, the only things I could find were clothes and the same type of photos. I went out of the last room and started to walk towards the right. “We saw all of the rooms down here,” Jasper said. “Yeah, we can go upstairs now.” I moved the flashlight, trying to find the stairs. “Wherever the stairs are,” Rose said. I continued to walk forward just to see two hallways, one went left, the other went right. I thought for a moment and I heard Jasper groan loudly. “Are you kidding me?!” he said miserably. “Stop being a baby,” I said quietly, I heard Rose giggle in response, Jasper mumbled under his breath. I could tell that it made him slightly angry. “I’m not a bab- nevermind! So, which way do we go?” Jasper asked. I shined the flashlight towards the right, the hallway appeared to end with a wall, old pots were in the corners, sitting there. I shined it towards the left and it seemed to continue on. I slowly started to walk towards the left, the flashlight gripped tight in my hands. I remained silent, hitting the end of the hallway, there was a door, only one at the very end. Above the door was a small, slightly damaged sign that read “stairs.” It was rusty around the hinges. Rose turned the handle and the door refused to open fully. I growled, grabbing the handle just to yank hard, making it open with a loud squeak. The bottom of the door was decayed and broke in a few places from getting dragged across the wooden floor. I shined the light against the wall, in middle of the room were the stairs, there were no windows to my surprise. I walked in just to hear something break under my foot, I kept going ahead just to hear the sound more and more. I shined the light on the floor. Small pieces of glass reflected the light back at me. “Glass?” I asked. Jasper laughed, raising his hands. “Spooky!” he said in a teasing tone. I rolled my eyes and started to make my way up the stairs, avoiding the glass shards the best I could. Rose’s POV I couldn’t help but stay close behind Jasper when we continued up the stairs. Each step up the stairs felt as if I was going to fall through, they creaked and creaked until finally; we managed to reach the top floor. Mary shined the light towards the door to the next room, next to it was a large, broken, rectangular tank. “At least we know where the glass came from…” Mary said quietly, looking over the railing to look straight down. Jasper hummed in agreement. Mary brought her hand up, opening the door just to enter another hallway, the windows had actually allowed some light in. I heard the click of the flashlight, seeing the light that once came out of it vanish. “The website wasn’t lying when they said it was a huge building.” Mary turned off the flashlight. Honestly, I was just happy that I could see again. Mary quickly unzipped Jasper’s backpack, shoving the flashlight inside. “We don’t need this for now,” Mary hummed, starting to walk. My face sorta crunched up when I walked with them, this area reeked. Jasper’s POV I could imagine in my mind what the area looked like years ago, with the multiple civilians walking around and the nice windows. It was so strange, what could’ve possibly made this place close down? What actually happened in this place? I stared at the ground in deep thought as we walked. “Jasper,” Mary said, nudging me softly. I snapped out of my daze and looked ahead of us. Through a doorway was the stage. I could feel the feelings I craved once again as we walked closer. It was… very cool inside of the stage area, all around it, scattered around, were the chairs. The once, red color in the curtains seemed to have vanished into a pinkish color with splotches of… brown. “It looks…” I started. “Awesome?” Mary finished. I nodded. “Yeah, hey, I’m going to get a better look,” I told her, stepping over a chair which was in front of me. I wanted to see the backstage area, I really, really wanted to. I went towards the steps, lifting my foot up to step on the first one. Rose’s POV I separa

34 minutes

May 31, 2017

Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances

The Strange Case of Edmonson, Kentucky

Joe Terrell, Video Narratives OK

On October 16, 1962, every man, woman, and child disappeared from the town of Edmonson, Kentucky. The date is relatively easy to pin down. The day before – October 15 – a traveling salesman named Arnold Johnson passed through the small town in an unsuccessful attempt to sell an exciting new product – the bagless vacuum cleaner. During an interview with authorities afterwards, Johnson said he noticed nothing unusual about Edmondson in the day before the disappearances. He did, however, remark that none of the housewives he spoke with during his brief stay seemed remotely interested in his product – something he found slightly surprising compared to the response he typically received when demonstrating the vacuum cleaner to similarly-sized towns. “Not only did I not sell a single vacuum cleaner, but no one even wanted to see the product in action,” he said during the interview. “If you could get in the door and show the women what that vacuum could do, you were guaranteed a sale.” Johnson chalked up his failure to the apprehension related to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had begun a day before and had been dominating the airwaves. “It’s hard to sell a vacuum cleaner when your audience thinks there’s a possibility they’ll be radioactive dust by the end of the week,” he said. Johnson left the town of Edmonson the evening of October 15. The next town on his sales route – Clement – was eighty miles away. He drove all night and didn’t think about Edmonson until investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation knocked on his door two weeks later. During the early morning hours of October 17, Randall Pierce – a farmer who sold his produce to the only grocer in Edmonson – drove into town to discover empty streets and closed storefronts. “It was eerie,” Pierce told the county newspaper later. “Usually at seven in the morning that little town was bustling. I thought I had maybe driven up during a holiday.” Pierce lived with his wife and three children on a farm fifteen miles outside of Edmonson. Like most farming families in the early 1960s, Pierce’s wife homeschooled their children when they weren’t helping their father tend the farm. “But I couldn’t think of any holiday that would close up a town in the middle of October so I started getting a little spooked,” Pierce said. “I knocked on the doors of a few houses and didn’t get a response from any of them. Around eight o’ clock, I realized there wasn’t a single soul in Edmonson.” Shaken and a little disoriented, Pierce returned home to his wife and children. He told them what he had seen (or not seen) in Edmonson and with nationalistic fears of a Communist invasion running rampant, his wife convinced him to drive to Clement and report what he had seen to the authorities. The Pierce family had no phone at their farm. Pierce arrived in Clement shortly after noon and immediately pulled into the parking lot of the local police department. He told the authorities what he had witnessed in Edmonson. Initially, as Pierce tells it, his story was met with disbelief and ridicule. But after multiple calls to Edmonson’s police chief went unanswered, Clement’s Sheriff – Jonathan Ambrose – gathered a group of men and traveled to Edmonson to investigate Pierce’s claims. Sheriff Ambrose died of lung cancer in 1968. However, in spite of being a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War, on his deathbed Ambrose said that his visit to Edmonson on October 17th was “the most disturbing and haunting experience of my entire life” and thinking about the events of that day would still “turn the blood in his veins to ice.” * * * * * * According to the most recent census, 236 individuals lived in Edmonson in 1960. It was a small town, nestled between the hills of western Kentucky. Named after a Captain who killed during the Battle of 1812, Edmonson was populated primarily by the ancestors who founded the town in 1825. Edmondson had one public school, a grocery store, a bank (Wells Fargo), a hospital clinic, two churches (Baptist and Methodist), and a post office. Most of the men worked small farms – like Pierce – or ran a trade. Edmondson, like most small communities in rural areas, was self-sufficient and self-sustaining. Every two weeks the grocery store would be restocked and the post office would deliver mail every Tuesday. For entertainment, residents of Edmondson would have to visit Clement or another nearby town. On October 17, 1962, Clement Sheriff Ambrose, two deputies, and the Clement’s primary physician piled into a squad car and followed county farmer Randall Pierce back into Edmonson. Ambrose carried his service pistol – a M1911A1 .45 ACP – and ordered his deputies to bring their shotguns – Browning 12-Guage pump-actions. The physician – Alan Cathey – was brought along in case a mass casualty event had taken place. Before he died in 1968, Ambrose recounted the events of October 17th to his older son, who transcribed his father’s testimony and published it in a men’s magazine to little fanfare in 1974. “It was a two-hour drive from Clement to Edmonson, and we all expected to show up in that little town and find nothing wrong except for a drunk police chief who overslept his shift,” Ambrose said. “However, I couldn’t deny the fact that a palatable tension was present in the squad car. My two deputies kept fiddling with their shotguns and Cathey wouldn’t stop rummaging through his physician’s bag. It was the same type of behavior I observed among soldiers before we were set to launch a big assault.” Upon arriving in Edmonson, they immediately realized something was, in fact, very wrong. Pierce and Ambrose parked their cars in front of the grocery store along the main street. It was just as Pierce had described it – the town seemed completely devoid of life. Ambrose, who personally knew Edmondson’s police chief and where he lived, decided they should check out his home first. The five men set out on foot into the residential neighborhood. All the men were struck by the silence. It was then that one of the deputies realized that not only were there no people in town, there were no animals to speak of. Yards with fences that clearly meant to keep in dogs were notably empty. The men arrived at the police chief’s home to find the front door unlocked. Ambrose, with his gun drawn, entered the house first and was followed by his two shotgun-toting deputies. “I don’t know what we were expecting to find,” Ambrose said. “I honestly thought we’d find a body. Maybe poisonous gas had leaked from the ground at some point during the night and killed off the whole town. But I think what we found was worse.” The police chief’s house was empty. The bed was made up in the bedroom and the fridge still contained bottles of fresh milk. The men were baffled. Maybe, they thought, the townspeople had left to attend a large community picnic. But as the hours dragged on and the search continued, that possibility grew less likely. “We searched six other houses in the neighborhood after we canvassed the police chief’s house,” Ambrose said. “It was always the same story – the house seemed fine, no sign of forced entry, unlocked doors, and no occupants.” However, a few similarities began to make themselves apparent as the men made their way from house to house. For one, there was no luggage to be found anywhere in the homes and it appeared as if a majority of the clothing was missing from drawers and wardrobes. Pierce – the farmer – also noticed that much of the food left in the pantries and refrigerators were perishable – there were no canned goods. Ambrose, who had just finished reading C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, remembered thinking “it’s as if the whole town just packed up their belonging and boarded a bus to Heaven.” Some of the discoveries were less benign. In the backyard of one home, the men discovered a dead Labrador retriever. One of the deputies stumbled across the animal and thought at first it was sleeping. The dog was wearing a collar and was loosely chained to a tree in the backyard. It was the first animal they’d seen in Edmonson since arriving two hours earlier. While the men searched the home, Cathey – the physician – performed an ad-hoc autopsy on the animal. Rigor mortis had only recently set in, indicating the dog had not been dead for more than a day. Additionally, Cathey found raw hamburger meat in the animal’s stomach – hamburger meat that had been peppered with small, white pills. The dog had been poisoned. In another home, they found the words “Revelation 9:1“ scrawled on a bathroom mirror in light pink lipstick. The men were unfamiliar with the Bible verse and this led to the next disquieting discovery: they could not find a single Bible in the town. Edmonson had two churches, and it can be deduced that a majority of the township probably attended one or the other. In the early 1960s, a vast majority of Americans considered themselves ‘Christian’ and even those who wouldn’t consider themselves very devoted could be expected to at least own a Bible. However, Ambrose and his men couldn’t locate a Bible in any of the homes they searched. When they inspected both churches, they found only hymnals or Books of Common Prayer in the pews. Except for the poisoned dog, during their three-hour search of Edmonson, they found no signs of violence or struggle. Every home’s interior looked impeccable, and running water and electricity appeared to be in working order. Ambrose was reminded of the model communities the U.S. Army had built in New Mexico to test the destructive power of the atomic bomb. As the sun began to slip beneath the trees and the men’s shadows grew longer and dimmer, Ambrose detected another palpable sense of urgency brewing among members of the group. “It was obvious the men didn’t want to remain in Edmonson after sundown,” Ambrose said. “And I felt it too. I somehow sensed that if we stayed in Edmonson overnight, there’d be another group of men from Clement trying to find us the next afternoon. And I don’t think they’d find us.” Before twilight ended, the men loaded up in their cars – the two deputies, Cathey and Ambrose in the squad car, and Pierce in his truck – and left Edmonson. Even though they knew the town was empty, each man reported a creeping sensation that they were being watched from the darkened windows of the homes they passed on their way out of town. “We didn’t talk much on the ride back to Clement, and I’d be lying if I said I was driving with any regard toward the speed limit,” Ambrose said. “We had to get out of there. At that point, I was convinced we had stumbled across ground zero of some new Communist weapon system. Something that could vaporize the inhabitants of an entire town without causing any collateral damage. But even then I knew that story didn’t completely add up.” After the men arrived back in Clement, they agreed that Ambrose would contact the Federal Government in the morning. None of the men expressed any interest in returning to Edmondson. That night, Ambrose retrieved his family’s Bible from their study and flipped to Revelation 9:1. And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from Heaven unto the earth; and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. “I didn’t know what to make of that,” Ambrose said. * * * * * * The next morning, Ambrose reported what he had seen in Edmonson to the governing authorities in Frankfort. Things began moving very quickly after that. While the rest of the world was transfixed by the escalating tensions between Cuba and the United States, the FBI sent an investigative team to investigate the disappearances at Edmonson. Fearing a Communist plot or (as Ambrose had suspected) the use of a powerful new weapon, the FBI shut down access to Edmonson on October 19, 1962. The strange case of Edmonson made its way into a few local papers, but it was a story that always ended up buried behind pages of international news. Because many of the town’s inhabitants were ancestors of the people who founded the town, there weren’t too many relatives inquiring about the status of their loved ones. The roads that passed through Edmondson (there were very few) were rerouted around the town. The FBI finished their investigation in 1967, but by then no one really cared about Edmonson anymore. In between the town’s disappearance in 1962 and the FBI’s final report on the incident the nation’s attention had been distracted by a number of earth-shattering events – the assassination of President Kennedy, the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, and the U.S.’s involvement in Vietnam. Unfortunately, the results of the FBI’s investigation were sealed and deemed confidential. As the decades progressed, nature began to overtake Edmonson, Kentucky. No attempt was made to rebuild or resettle the town. Edmonson soon became a little-known historical footnote in Kentucky’s history. While many of the structures collapsed due to exposure, a handful of homes and one of the churches remain standing, enshrouded by thick vines and a thriving deer population. In 2002, the official report from the FBI was made public after a local historian placed a Freedom of Information Request. Dennis Miller, president and sole member of the Edmonson Historical Society, learned the FBI officially declared the reason for the town’s spontaneous abandonment as “fears related to the possibility of nuclear annihilation and unexplained atmospheric phenomenon led to a panic-induced dispersal of the town.” “Of course, that reasoning was bullshit,” Miller said. “The report doesn’t even mention the fact that none of the townspeople had ever been accounted for, there were no reports of ‘atmospheric phenomenon’ by anyone in the area.” However, by then, a new theory had emerged regarding the fate of the Edmonson’s inhabitants. A theory that began circulating after two self-proclaimed “backyard adventurers” stumbled upon a hatch in the basement of the abandoned First Baptist Church of Edmonson. * * * * * * The Mammoth Cave in Kentucky is the world’s largest known cave system. At least 400 miles have been mapped, and some scientists estimate there could be another 600 miles that are unexplored and have never been seen by human eyes. As of 2016, twenty-six entrances into the cave system have been discovered. And in 1981, one of those entrances was discovered in the ruins of Edmonson, Kentucky. During the late 1970s, the abandoned ruins of Edmonson attained a cult status among backpackers and hitchhikers in the area. With the roads leading to Edmonson in disrepair, getting to the abandoned town is extremely difficult. But every year, intrepid amateur adventurers and curious locales would make the trek to one of the country’s greatest – but forgotten – unsolved mysteries. Nineteen years after the disappearances, hikers Emilio Stevens and Julie Page parked their vehicles thirty miles outside the edges of the forest that surrounds the abandoned township and began their trek to Edmonson. “We’d visited Edmonson two years before that day,” Stevens said to scientific journal afterwards. “It’s creepy as hell. It takes about a day and a half to reach the town from the trailhead and when you get there, you really don’t feel like sticking around. Most hikers pass through it or camp overnight on the outskirts. That November, Julie and I planned on staying overnight in the church. I think it was more about testing our nerves than anything else.” The church Stevens is talking about is the First Baptist Church of Edmonson. It’s the largest structure still standing in the town. The grocery store and Methodist Church collapsed in the late 1960s. “We arrived in Edmonson around nightfall on the second day,” Stevens said. “Julie wasn’t feeling too hot and it was beginning to sprinkle. We set our tent in the center of the church and prepared for our night. I could tell it was going to be a miserable night. The roof [of the church] leaked and a lot of pews had been destroyed by vandals and raccoons.” As they settled in for the night, Stevens and Page both couldn’t shake a creeping sense of dread. Even though they had hiked into Edmonson before, they both felt unprepared for the degree of uneasiness they were experiencing. Around midnight, however, exhaustion got the better of the two of them and they fell asleep. Two hours later, Stevens awoke to a loud cracking sound. “I first I thought it was thunder, but then the floor slanted and we were falling,” Stevens said. “There is nothing more disorienting than waking up in a tent and experiencing the sensation of free fall.” The floor of the church had collapsed in the middle of the night, flinging Stevens and Page into an as-of-yet undiscovered basement. Luckily, both Stevens and Page survived the fall without any serious injury. “We were both pretty shaken and, frankly, a little banged up,” Stevens said. “But in all the time we had spent in and around Edmonson, we had never heard of a basement in the Baptist church. We knew we had found something no one else knew about it.” Armed with only their flashlights, Stevens and Page set exploring the decrepit basement. The room hidden beneath the floorboards of the church was small and appeared to have been carved into the bedrock beneath the building’s foundation. Stevens said there wasn’t much to see – it looked as if the room had been used to store extra tables and chairs, presumably for after-church socials. But then they found the hatch. “Page found it in the far corner of the basement,” Stevens said. “It was set flush against the floor of the basement, and it was made of four thick wood planks, and the hinges had been bolted into the bedrock on the left side. The door had one of those old fashioned drop-ring handles.” Stevens gripped ahold of the drop-ring handle and, after several tries, wrenched the hatch open. A square of darkness stared back up at him. Page activated and dropped a glow stick into the shaft. The pale green glow of the stick stopped about five feet from the mouth of the hatch. “Well we had to go down there,” Stevens said. “It was probably three in the morning and we for sure as hell weren’t going back to sleep. “ Stevens tied a climbing rope to his back pant loop and dropped down through the hatch. Page stayed above and metered out the rope as Stevens progressed into the darkness. “At the bottom of the shaft, a passageway opened up to my left – pointing westward. It was obvious by then that I was traveling through a cave tunnel, and that it was not manmade,” Stevens said. Eventually, the tunnel tightened and Stevens found himself crawling on his hands and knees. The roof of the passageway scratched his back and his hands began to get rubbed raw by the cave’s rough floor. “I’m not claustrophobic, but it started getting pretty tight,” Stevens said. “I began to worry about not being to turn around and get back to the hatch. But I started to hear something coming from up ahead of me. I should have been freaked out, but at that point, I figured I had gone too far to bail out.” After fifteen minutes of crawling, Stevens was straining to push his shoulders through the ever-tightening passageway. But the eerie noises emanating from ahead drove him deeper into the cave. However, his adventure came to an abrupt end. “The passageway ended at a pile of rocks,” Stevens said. “Each rock looked to be about the size of my head and they completely blocked any further spelunking. I could hear the noises clearly now – could even distinguish words and phrases. But my journey was done.” However, right before the passageway terminated at the cave-in, Stevens found a couple of objects. He put them in his jacket and began backing out. It took him thirty minutes to back up out of the tight passageway. When he made it up out of the shaft and back into the church’s basement to a relieved Page, he took out the objects and inspected them. “I had found a pair of eyeglasses – like old-fashioned reader’s glasses, and a woman’s shoe with the heel missing,” Stevens said. “It didn’t mean anything to us at the time.” Stevens and Page hiked out of Edmonson early the next morning, battered and spook. When they reached their car, they immediately headed into Mammoth National Park and reported what they had found to a park ranger. In the investigation that followed, it was determined that Stevens and Page had discovered an entrance into an unmapped portion of the Mammoth Cave System. Unfortunately, geologists determine that the cave-in that had stopped Steven’s progress was at least one hundred feet thick. Unless they used to explosives, there was no way to investigate further. However, it was the discovery of the cave entrance coupled with the objects that Stevens found that held disturbing implications for the unsolved mystery of the disappearances in Edmonson twenty years prior. Historians dated the eyeglasses and the woman’s shoe to the late 1950s and early 1960s. Most historians and geological experts are now in near-unanimous agreement about what happened to the inhabitants of Edmonson, Kentucky in 1962: Driven by fears of a first strike by Cuba during the missile crisis and religious fanaticism, the people of Edmonson sought refuge in a secret, labyrinth cave system underneath their town. Unfortunately, a cave-in – perhaps triggered by their panicked influx through the tight passageways – trapped every man, woman, and child deep underground. “It’s deeply unsettling when you realize that at the same time Sheriff Ambrose and his men were exploring the town, that everyone they were searching for was probably about four hundred feet underneath their feet,” said Sam Tso, a ranger at Mammoth National Park. If they had fresh water and food, and if the cave had a clean air supply, some experts believe that the people of Edmonson could have survived for at least six months underground. “I reckon it’s a pretty good theory,” Stevens said. “But it still doesn’t explain what I heard that night – the reason I dropped down through that hatch and crawled on my hands and knees for fifteen minutes. It doesn’t explain the singing I heard. While I was crawling down there, I clearly heard voices singing the hymn ‘Come Thou Fount.’” * * * * * * Dennis Miller started the Edmonson Historical Society in 2001 to raise awareness about the town and the mystery surrounding it. He was twelve years old. “It really is a 20th Century Roanoke,” Miller said, referencing the New England colony that disappeared in 1590. “And there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to figure out what happened.” Miller lives in Clement and on his days when he’s not researching Edmonson, he runs a small pawnshop. Many people would consider Miller’s fascination with Edmonson to border on obsession, but when they learn about Miller’s personal history with the area, it begins to make sense. During a family camping trip in 1997, Miller’s father and mother went missing after making camp in the wilderness three miles north of Edmonson. Miller – who was seven at the time – was with them when they disappeared. “We camped often, and we used a big tent for the three of us,” Miller said. “That night, we went to bed around 9 after cooking hot dogs. I woke up around 1 in the morning and realized my parents weren’t in the tent anymore and the front flap was open.” Miller spent two days alone in the woods, never straying far from the campsite in case his parents came back. After sustaining on hot dog buns and marshmallows, he was discovered by another of campers passing through the area. “After searching the area for two weeks, the police officially concluded that I had been abandoned in the woods by my parents,” Miller said. “But that’s not true. My parents loved me. I never doubted that. And if they had abandoned me, why didn’t they hike to their car? It was found untouched at the trailhead.” After the investigation closed, Miller spent the next decade of his life in and out of the foster care system. Driven by a desire to protect his parents’ reputation and validate their love for him, Miller began reviewing historical records in libraries and did a sweep of the police records in the surrounding areas. Some might accuse Miller of attempting to connect unrelated dots, but some of his data and findings are shocking, to say the least. For example, the three counties that border the location of Edmonson have a missing persons rate seventeen times higher than similarly sized counties in the United States. “It’s an area we sometimes refer to as the “Kentucky Triangle,” said FBI agent Brittany Hooper, head of the state’s missing person division. “For some reason, a lot of people seem to disappear in those counties.” Some of the disappearances can be attributed to caving accidents, the vast swaths of unmapped wilderness, and the recent boom of meth operations in rural areas. Also, Stevens wasn’t the first person to report hearing strange voices and singing in and around the Mammoth cave systems. Some people consider Mammoth National Park to be the “most haunted national park in the United States.” There have been dozens of accounts of people hearing strange noises in the woods and caves since the 1970s, as well as sightings of a tall humanoid-like creature (called “The Black Demon” according to unrelated local lore). Geologists and historians dismiss many of these accounts. After Stevens told authorities he had been following the voices of singing as he made his way through the passageways, expert cavers were quick to point out that even if he had heard people singing, it could not have come from behind the caved-in rocks – the cave-in was too thick for sound to penetrate. Also, because Mammoth National Park sits on top of the Mammoth Cave System, it’s not unreasonable to assume that a lot of the strange noises and voices are a result of sound bouncing and echoing throughout the caverns. Caves are, after all, notorious for their disorienting acoustics. But Miller has a different theory – a theory as macabre as it would be revelatory if it turned out to be true. “I think some of the trapped people of Edmonson are still alive,” Miller said. “I think they’re down there in an unmapped portion of the cave system and that have chosen to stay below. It’s been about seventy years since they went in, which means the first generation has probably mostly died off and there’s an entire second or third generation that only knows life underground.” As for the disappearances, Miller has an answer for that as well. “I think they’ve found other exits and every now and then they come out and take people – hikers, drifters, campers and locals,” Miller said. “I think that’s what happened to my parents. And it has been happening years before they were taken and it continues today.” On his off-days, you can find Miller searching the forests around Edmonson and the outskirts of Mammoth National Park for additional entrances into the Mammoth Cave System. He carries a GPS locator, rappelling gear, multiple flashlights, and a Colt .45 Automatic Pistol. “For some reason, they don’t want to be seen by us,” Miller said. “I don’t know what they do with the people they take, but I know what it takes to maintain an underground society. It requires food and a fresh gene pool. I don’t like thinking about what that meant for my mom and dad, but even if the truth is ugly at least I’ll know. And I be able to do something about it.” In spite of being armed, as soon as the sun begins to slink behind the trees Millers makes sure to abandon his search and head back to his vehicle. “You’ll never find me spending the night in those woods again,” Miller said. CREDIT: Joe Terrell

16 minutes

December 13, 2016

Locations and Sites

Devil in the Details

Katherine C., Video Narratives OK

Trevor looked at the sweaty, crumpled paper in his hand, reviewing the instructions yet again. Soon it would be too late to read over them, but until then every rehearsal could be the one that saved his life. Four pale candles, he read, and then glanced over to the four candles sitting on the floor. He had arranged them in a perfect square, just as instructed. The line of crisp white chalk connected them, and he mentally marked the next item off the list. His hand was shaking, making it harder to read the scrawled lines of pencil on the paper. With a deep breath, he looked away from the paper and out the window. There was a swell of nervous energy bubbling in his chest. He had prepared, he reminded himself. He had read and studied. He had memorized every line of text and done his research. Now was no time to have second thoughts or doubts. “Remember, the entity will know your thoughts. If you enter with doubts, he will use these to his advantage.” Trevor closed his eyes and smiled, trying his best to think confident and reassuring thoughts. What he needed to do, he realized, was find something else to think about. Every review of the instructions only deepened his anxiety, and it obviously wasn’t helping. It reminded him of cramming for final exams. He had always overdone it and worn himself out, so that he ultimately spent a week sick and dreading the impending tests. Now was not the time to weaken his mental or emotional defenses. It was, instead, the time to finally achieve something with his life. Trevor walked away from his preparations, shoving the paper in his pocket and trying to prevent his mind from running over and over the instructions. They always hung on the final words. “If you successfully complete the ritual, he will grant you one request for whatever your heart desires. Choose wisely.” As if he could dislodge the thoughts, he shook his head sharply and turned his attention to his surroundings. He was sitting in the front of an old chapel, the wooden pews cracked and listing in the shadows. What had once been lovely windows were now either caked with dust, webbed with cracks, or lying broken on the floor. The moon sprinkled silver light around the interior, light which somehow only made the shadows darker. He wondered briefly about those who had once gathered here bowing penitently and singing their hymns. But churches dried up when a town did, and it was nothing more than an artifact cast out. “Find a place of religious significance. It may be a church, temple, synagogue, mosque, sanctuary, blessed space, or area of miraculous happenings. Any place where people come to demonstrate faith will suffice.” Trevor smirked remembering the words. He had considered going to his hometown’s football stadium, because that was where he had witnessed the greatest religious fervor. But somehow he thought such secular praises were not what the ritual intended. He had lucked upon this place on one of his trips to and from university. It was off the beaten path, well removed from the rest of civilization. Soy bean fields were the nearest attraction, which meant he would be mostly free to conduct his activities in peace. Assuming, of course, local kids did not wander in, drawn by the same isolation and freedom that had brought him. Given the lack of beer bottles and vandalism, he assumed it was not a popular place for such activities. His legs were shaking up and down, whether from excitement or anxiety he was not sure. He checked his watch, noting that it had slipped five minutes closer since his last inspection. It was now 11:50, which meant his waiting was almost over. “It must be begun at precisely midnight. Too early or too late and you will have no results but feeling like a fool.” He had set and reset his watch just to be certain it was exact. Now he just needed to rely on it. He had also selected this position because it was just close enough to hear the church bells from a couple of towns over. Come midnight, they would toll and assure him he was on time. The wind kicked up outside, tossing a few stray leaves through the opening. The many holes in the roof howled pitifully and the rest of the building creaked with the gusts. It seemed almost as if the building was in its final days, waiting for nothing but a strong storm to destroy it once and for all. Giving into his worries, Trevor pulled the paper from his pocket and reviewed the important parts again. He skimmed over the materials, certain he had everything he needed. Instead, he reviewed the cautions to ensure he did not make any deadly mistakes. ”First, never speak your name. Such a being will seek any way to gain power over you. Should this creature find any weakness, he will use it to possess you. This is akin to being split apart from the inside out, slowly and over several days. Most unfortunate souls are also forced to watch as they slaughter family, friends, and other victims.” It was simple enough. No names. That was an easy pitfall to avoid. “Next, do not answer his questions. They are intended to trick you. You must only say what you have been instructed and your request. If you engage in questions, he will trap you in his game. You will slowly waste away, caught forever in his web of lies.” Trevor had always been taciturn, so he was not concerned. Remaining silent was his primary skill in life, and he looked forward to putting it to good use. He also could not help but wonder who in their right mind would try to best a demon in a duel of wits. It seemed like one of the oldest follies. “Third, ensure all barriers are maintained for the duration of the ritual. He will be unable to touch or harm you physically while the barriers are active. Adhere to the guidelines for your own safety.” Another easy warning to heed. Who would ignore the barriers? Why would they even be in the ritual if they were not vital to its safe and successful completion? “Finally, believe nothing of what he says. He exists only to lie.” Rereading the warnings made him feel safer. These were so obvious that he could not imagine anyone making such grievous errors. He certainly knew better. And if the direst warnings in the ritual were so clear to him, it seemed impossible that he might fail. The clock hands spun closer, and he moved back to his prepared space. There were the four candles, a fifth, and black candle setting to the side. There was a silver bowl of blessed water, secured from his local cathedral some days before. Also, a lighter, a scrap of cotton cloth, and a steel knife. It was everything he needed. Trevor knelt beside the chalk square, arranging and rearranging items for the most practical set up. He wanted everything in arms’ reach, but also in the order it would be needed. Which meant, he thought, the lighter, the bowl, the knife, the cloth, and finally the candle. It was midnight, he saw. As soon as the thought crossed his mind, he heard the bells ringing. Right on time, he brought the lighter to the first of the four candles, slowly moving clockwise and lighting each in turn. They flickered and snapped in the breeze, but remained strong. His hands were unsteady as he picked up the bowl and set it in front of him. With a deep breath, he gripped the knife in his hand and drew it smoothly across his palm, just like they did in the movies. Only it seemed to hurt worse than those actors let on. “Let a few drops fall into the water, and then bandage yourself carefully. The scent of blood can attract other things you may not wish to deal with during the ritual.” Trevor followed the instructions to the letter, turning the water a cloudy red with his own blood before tightly wrapping his hand with the cloth. He knew the next steps by heart, moving through them almost robotically. Each step had been dutifully practiced—with the exception of cutting his own hand—many times in the bright light of day. Now, he lifted the bowl carefully with both hands, watching the way it rippled and changed. His blood diffused through the water, leaving darker and lighter patches that were quickly settling into the same pale shade. “I summon you here with this dedication. Arrive.” With the last word, he tipped the water into the middle of the square. Unlike in the practice sessions, the water rolled and then stopped at the chalk outline, forming a tiny pool that defied the laws of gravity and surface tension. Trevor’s mouth hung open briefly, but he knew he had to continue. The black candle was already in his hand, and he lit it despite the increasing wind. Gently, he placed it in the middle of the square, watching the tiny flame flicked on the surface of the water. “I give you light to seek me,” he said, the words trembling from his lips. “Arrive.” Barely were the words out of his mouth than the black candle began to sink below the surface of the water before disappearing completely. A dark, shadowy face emerged on the surface of the water, grinning widely. The face was hard to discern, but appeared dark and scaly, riddled with scars and fresh wounds that seemed to seep blood into the water around him. There were also many, many teeth. Trevor felt a cold pit of fear settle solidly in his stomach. “Who summons me?” came the deep, gravelly voice. It came not from the thing’s moving lips, but from the air all around Trevor. The whole building seemed to vibrate with the voice. No names, no questions, he reminded himself. Trevor’s mouth was dry thinking just how easy it would have been to make that mistake. “You have been summoned, and I will instruct you. Speak your name.” The church chuckled in time with the reflection in the water. He was smiling, showing even more teeth than Trevor thought could physically exist in the span of that face. “Who are you to think you can command me, mortal?” came the bone aching words. They seemed to vibrate through Trevor’s body, as if he was being pulled apart by the reverberations alone. “Speak your name,” he said again through gritted teeth. The demon stretched, his arms stabbing through the surface of the water and entering this world. The water trickled off them, stumbling over protruding scales and nodules. Cruel claws shone in the candlelight, covered with water and a viscous red liquid that Trevor knew by sight. The smell of rot and decay followed quickly after, threatening to bring up Trevor’s meager dinner. “I have summed you, and you will obey my commands. Remain within the summoning area.” “Oh, shall I obey you and remain here?” asked the beast mockingly, planting one hand one either side of the puddle—outside the thin chalk lines. A deep, rolling chuckle emerged this time as he pulled himself slowly through the pool and into reality. The floorboards of the church appeared to buckle and steam wherever the claws pierced. “He will try to intimidate you. Stay strong.” “Remain within the summoning area. Speak your name.” Trevor tried to force all of his courage and confidence into his voice, but it only made the demon laugh all the louder, now standing at his full height. The beast looked down on the pale boy before him. “You can call me Trevor,” came Trevor’s voice from his monstrous visage. Trevor froze, his mouth agape and eyes wide. For an instant, the demon appeared almost sympathetic, but the façade cracked into merciless anticipation as the shadows flickered over his face. “You have meddled with something you do not even understand,” it said, voice again deep and roaring, but now mimicking the disappointed tone of a school teacher. “I–I never told you my name. You can’t know my name,” Trevor stammered, his fear getting the better of him. His eyes flickered from the face to the arms to the rooted feet, never sure where to stay or linger. Everywhere he looked, there was impossibility. “You think I need you to tell me your name?” Casually, the demon stretched, muscles and joints popping and cracking as if it had been millennia since he moved about. His eyes, dark with unholy light, fixed on Trevor with predatory amusement. He answered his own questions with a deep shake of his head, sending water sizzling across the sanctuary. Trevor began scooting backward, whimpering with fear as the monster before him took one broad step forward. There was really nowhere to escape. The candles slowly snuffed themselves out, leaving only the moonlight to glint off those smiling teeth. “But,” Trevor gasped as his hands scrambled along the floor for anything that might help, “but I followed all the instructions!” The creature paused to survey the assembled implements and the chalk square. “Yes, you certainly did.” The building trembled with the force of the laugh. From the cloying darkness, an arm shot forward. In the next breath, Trevor was off the ground. The demon slowly drew him close until their eyes were level. “Who do you think wrote the ritual in the first place?” “He exists only to lie.”

8 minutes

October 31, 2016

Rites and Rituals

The Three Day Dark

Friday 13th November, 2015. At 3:42pm GMT, it happened. The world descended into a sudden, complete darkness. Chaos ensued. In our little office on the 10th floor, we huddled together in that ominous pitch black, awaiting the light. There was a television in our break room, and someone found the remote control. Using the memory of our fingers, we managed to change the channel to news. For a long time, there was just silence. Then, through the seemingly endless dark, came a voice. A newsreader, bravely finding her desk and attempting to reassure her viewers, spoke to us in her soft, trembling voice. They had no idea what was happening, but people needed to remain calm, and keep together amid reports people are disappearing in the dark; wandering from their friends and family and becoming lost or finding danger. We spent the next three days in the office, finding our bearings in the dark and managing to eat and sleep in relative comfort, despite the feeling that we were frozen in some kind of alternate universe. Then, exactly 72 hours after the darkness came, it was gone. Our eyes burned from the sudden light, but we soon adjusted and agreed that we should, as a group, head downstairs, and outside. Descending the stairs, a smell greeted us. Retching, I knew immediately what it was, and reluctantly turned the corner into the last turn of the stairwell, thinking perhaps someone had fallen down the stairwell and died from their injuries. I was wrong. I think she had been a woman, though I can’t be sure. She had been flayed and gutted, though I don’t know in which order. Every inch of her skin was missing, though her eyes and teeth remained, turning her corpse into a grinning, staring monster. I wasn’t the only one who threw up. Needing to escape the sight, we burst through the main doors into the foyer, and froze. Skinless bodies were strewn across the small foyer. Almost fifteen of them, by our reckoning from the brief look we had at them. We didn’t intend to stay for long, but found the foyer doors were locked and we couldn’t break the glass. Someone – I don’t remember who – had the idea of heading to the security room and seeing if we could radio for help. Picking our way past the bodies with churning stomachs, we found the security room open and the guard flayed inside. By mutual agreement, we heaved his body out and shut ourselves in. While one of the others tried to make contact, some of us started looking at security footage of the foyer from the last three days. We couldn’t believe what we saw. It hadn’t gone dark at all. We had gone blind. And while we were blind, they had come. Sinewy, smoky black shadows without faces, only eyes. Strange, glowing eyes. They were flaying people, and wearing their skin as a disguise. We tuned into the CCTV on our floor, and watched in horror as they walked among us, but chose none. To this day, I don’t know why. At one point, they were gathered together watching us, but soon after, they departed and caused havoc in an office on the floor above instead. We were soon rescued, but in the following weeks, the world descended into lunacy. Everyone knew about the flaying, about the imposters, but no-one knew who was real and who wasn’t until it was too late. Without trust, humans cannot survive side by side. I remained with two of my colleagues – those I knew were not changed. We packed camping gear and decided to make our way to the wooded area outside of town, to keep away from society as it became more and more volatile. We had it all worked out, and we had high hopes for the recovery of humanity. Then we woke up one morning, and we were blind again. Three days later, the light came back, and I was with both of my friends – and one body. I don’t know which it is, but I’m sure it won’t be long until we find out.

3 minutes

October 11, 2015

Beings and Entities

The Space Above the Closet

Emerald Lee

My room is tiny. Of course, that’s because it was built for efficiency. I don’t know if you’ve ever stayed in a dorm room, or even seen one for that matter, but I can tell you after having lived in one for the past four years: they’re built like stackable sardine containers. My five star, luxury quality, thousands of dollars per semester, individual dorm room measures in at a whopping 9×12 feet! I mean it’s practically a suite in the Hilton! You’re right, sarcasm doesn’t read easily in a diary. Diary. Journal? I’m a 22-year-old grown ass woman writing in a notebook. It doesn’t matter what I call you – you’re still a goddamn diary. Ha, ha! Goddamn Diary. That’s what I’ll call you – instead of “Dear Diary” I mean. It’ll be like my signature ‘thing’ when anthropologists of the future find this and examine my precious words for ‘cultural meaning.’ I’m sorry; I digress. Let’s start again, shall we? Goddamn Diary, As I was saying, my room is a tiny little shit box. But that isn’t the problem, not really anyway. Like I said, I’ve lived here for four years now and if I’m being honest, it’s not the size of my room that’s bothering me. It’s not really the room at all, actually. It’s the space above the closet. The Space Above the Closet…. Jesus, how ominous. Wow, I feel crazy even writing this. I sound like some kind of nutcase. But I don’t know, I guess I feel like if I write it all down everything will make sense and I won’t have to worry about it anymore and I can just burn this stupid notebook and then I won’t have to concern myself with ruminations about the anthropologists of the future, or if I should call you a diary or a journal or a fucking papyrus leaf. Honestly, I just need to write this down because maybe… maybe on paper it will be sane-sounding. I guess I should start from the beginning. Okay, well… right. The space above the closet. Remember how I said my room is roughly 9 feet by 12 feet? Well, it’s arranged so that one entire 12-foot long wall is used up by bookshelves and a small desk, and on the opposite wall there’s a single bed (it’s actually pretty comfy with a topper on it, honestly). Anyway, the closet is basically just a large wooden box that fills the space between the end of the bed and the wall where the door is. All of this is mostly irrelevant except I can’t explain the space above the closet without a clear image of how the room is set up. Now, the closet was built in such a way that it’s not quite as tall as the room. As a result, there’s a narrow space between the top of the closet and the ceiling – it’s wide enough that you could store books there, I guess. Or extra blankets or something. But nothing much more than that. I’ve never stored things there. It just never seemed right. I don’t know why exactly – well, now I have an idea – but when I first moved in I just felt sort of like it was an inappropriate spot to keep any junk. This, of course, is deeply, deeply bizarre, since I’m probably the least tidy person in the entire universe. No empty space is safe from the wrath of my book and DVD hoarding! Regardless, I never felt right putting anything above that closet. My first three years in this room passed without incident. I would live in it for both school semesters, pack up my things in April after exams, go home for the summer, return inevitably to the same exact room because the Housing office at my university has zero interest in making things interesting. School would go on as school does. My room would get messier, I would accumulate more books and the stacks of written-the-night-before essays would get higher. Oh, by the way – I’m a history major. Philosophy minor. Engineering dropout. I know: go me! I’m training to be a well-read and clever intellectual. I’ll be happy to discuss Kantian ethics with you between Grande non-fat mocha-whatever-the-fuck orders. Point being, I own a lot of books, and I write a lot of essays. Anyway, one day a few weeks ago I was in the middle of a very important Netflix binge when an annoyingly persistent knock on the door interrupted my nearly nine-hour marathon of the X-Files. I panicked of course because – being me – I had completely forgotten the Resident Assistant was supposed to be by for inspections and my room was a certified disaster. I mean full throttle, Sharknado 3D, empty wine bottles, stacks of crumby dishes, probably tiny dead mouse bodies in the heat register disaster. And I mean, cut me some slack because I had also just finished slogging through a backlog of something like 30 000 words worth of essays and all I wanted to do was eat Nutella toast and lust after Scully’s hair color. So sue me. My immediate reaction was to just take the hit. Let the RA come in, give me a dirty look and then write me up for “uncleanliness,” but my deeply buried, ancient evolutionary, uterus-owning, home-maker sense must have kicked in and I have to say, I pulled off some kind of The Flash shit in that moment and when the RA came in she just said, “Cool. See you later,” and that was it. No uncleanliness sanction for me. But to get back to the point: when I was in the middle of my miracle tidying frenzy, I didn’t have time to be worried about the space above the closet and my uneasiness about putting things there. All I knew was that I had a lot of dirty dishes that needed a hiding place and the closet space was it. So I stacked a couple of bowls and some plates on top of each other and I shoved them as far toward the wall on top of the closet as my arm would reach, so they weren’t visible. All the rest of the clutter, including the nearly empty wine bottles, got spirited away into the drawers under my bed (and that, kids, is how all my socks got purple stains on them). Truth be told, I actually kind of forgot about those dishes on top of the closet for a while. When the RA left I went straight back to my X-Files binge and I didn’t remember the dishes until the following morning when I woke up. Okay… it was afternoon. Don’t judge me. Well, luckily that same day an urge struck me to tidy my room. Actually tidy it. Maybe with exams approaching I felt like a clean room would make for a clean mind – ha, right. In any case, I wanted a clean room. While I was deciding where to begin, I suddenly remembered the dirty dishes above my closet and thought that washing them would put me off to a good start. So I climbed on top of my bed, reached all the way back to where I had pushed the stack of dirties, and felt… and felt… I was confused. I stood on my toes and looked into the crevice. I even got a flashlight and inspected the space (although that was unnecessary because I could see all the way to the wall as it was); I shook my head, perplexed, wondering if I had already cleaned the dishes. Perhaps I had picked up a new habit – sleep cleaning (as convenient as that would be it seemed an unlikely explanation). Sleep cleaning or not, whatever the explanation, the dishes were undoubtedly no longer above the closet. I plunked down on my bed, thoroughly weirded out. Then I looked around my room, wondering if maybe I had already retrieved the dishes and simply forgotten about it. I mean… maybe too much Netflix really does burn holes in the brain, who knows? But I didn’t see the dishes anywhere. I checked my drawers too, and besides my newly wine-stained socks, no dishes were to be found. I left my room and padded barefoot down the hallway to the little communal kitchen where I looked through every cupboard – thinking maybe I had imagined the dirty dishes entirely – but none of my personally-labeled plates and bowls were around. (Oh and by the way, you’d be stupid not to label things at university. That shit isn’t just for summer camp; labeling is serious business.) I meandered back to my room, all the way quite literally scratching my head at the Case of the Missing Dishes. If I were Mulder I would have been thrilled about the missing dishes! An X-File in the making! But instead, I was just confused. So I did what every good university student does when a problem can’t be solved; I decided to take a nap. Of course, as a fourth-year student I am required to occasionally appear responsible. As such, I set an alarm on my phone so that I wouldn’t sleep longer than half an hour, laid down on my bed, took one last, weirded-out look at that spot above the closet, and closed my eyes. Only to be woken up by a HUGE crashing sound fifteen minutes later. I jolted awake, smacking my head on the wall beside my bed, and frantically looking around for the source of the noise. In that moment of panic, I swear I saw a quick, shadowy movement above the closet but that could have been my imagination. What really mattered, though, what really caught my attention, was the pile of broken dishes on the floor beside the foot of my bed. A pile that for everything in the world looked just like it was in the right spot to have been shoved from the top of the closet. What’s more, though, is that although the two bowls and few plates were in shards, they were all impeccably clean. Not a crumb or butter smear or layer of dried milk to be found. I know you must be wondering… Goddamn Diary… how does a person rationalize such an event? Well, let me tell you – as a proud Engineering dropout turned Arts student and certified horror/sci-fi lover – a vague knowledge of dark matter theory combined with a philosophical mindset and a propensity for concocting creepy tales does not always a rational person make! Luckily, that same combination of characteristics meant I could refrain from spiraling instantly into crippling fear. I thought to myself: okay, so I just experienced some seriously weird physics anomaly/generally creepy shit, but this is my zone. I totally got this. In fact, my first instinct was to ask myself WHAT HORROR MOVIE IS THIS FROM AND HOW DOES IT END? Because I was sure I must have managed to produce some paranormal activity using only the power of my imagination à la The Apparition (or à la the Philip Experiment if you want to go ‘real-life’ on that shit). I mean if anyone could do it, it would be me – I’ve seen enough bad Hollywood ghost movies. But I can’t deny that I was a little bit freaked out. At some point, my rationality did kick back in and I decided (stupidly) that I must have just…. somehow not seen the dishes earlier and they were, like, on the very edge or something and they just… fell off the top of the closet? I ignored the fact that such an explanation made little to no sense, and that it still didn’t explain the fact that all the dish shards appeared to be spotless. But that tenuous explanation made just as much sense as me magically creating a creepy, dish-cleaning, top-of-closet dwelling ghost with the power of my mind. Then my phone alarm went off and that, of course, startled me. A girl just can’t catch a break when dishes are involved. Needless to say, I tracked down a neighbor who owned a broom, cleaned up the pathetic little pile of impeccably clean but irreparably shattered glass and went back to ignoring the space above the closet. But I had trouble sleeping that night. And the next. And the next. I had trouble sleeping for a week after that incident because I couldn’t stop thinking about the shadowy crevice and the incident with the dishes. So a week and half after what I now call The Dish Day, on a sunny Saturday morning when most other 22-year-olds were probably nursing hangovers, I decided to run some experiments on the space above the closet. The first test I did was with a piece of paper. Just a simple, blank piece of printer paper with nothing written on it and no marks. I placed it on top of the closet and pushed it as far back toward the wall as I could. Then I sat on my bed, started the stopwatch app on my phone, and waited. At 14 minutes and 22 seconds, the piece of paper was shoved from the top of the closet by some unseen force. Before it even landed on the ground I had bolted to my feet atop the bed to catch the mysterious culprit in action – by this point I was thinking, maybe rats were to blame? Again, unlikely story. But the crevice was empty. Disappointed, I retrieved the piece of paper from the ground and examined it. Nothing had changed – no marks had appeared, it was not torn, in fact, it wasn’t even wrinkled or creased. I resolved to continue experimenting. I decided the blank paper was kind of like a control and that I would use the same sheet at the end of my experimenting to try and make the whole stupid process a little bit more legit. So I set aside the first sheet of paper and grabbed another. This time, I wrote something on it. Just my name, in large, black letters, all caps, across the middle of the page: “R I P L E Y” (Yes, I am named after Sigourney Weaver’s character in Alien. Complaints go to my mother). Once again, I placed the paper on top of the closet as far back as I could reach, started the stopwatch app, and waited. This time I stayed standing. I stayed standing for 23 minutes and 11 seconds watching that paper and it didn’t so much as flutter. Exasperated, I flopped down on my bed. Two seconds later, the paper flew off the top of the closet. I scrambled to retrieve it from the floor and when I did, I was disappointed to find that it had not been altered. Not to be discouraged so easily, however, I decided to add something to the writing and try again. “Hello, my name is R I P L E Y” Once again I positioned the paper atop the closet and started the stopwatch. At exactly 13 minutes the paper fluttered from the crevice to the ground. It was writing side down when I retrieved it. I turned it over. My writing was gone. And when I say gone, I mean gone without a trace. I had written my message in permanent marker and not a single spot was left on the page. Not so much as a faint shadow of lettering. In tiny, neat, penciled freehand, however, on the very bottom of the page, were two words: “I know” Well, I nearly completely lost my shit. I had no idea what to do. Prior to conducting my little experiment, I had every intention of continuing until I could figure out what was going on with my closet crevice. But those two little words freaked me out so much that I simply grabbed my coat and my purse, threw on some shoes and went for a walk to clear my head. Halfway around the block, I realized I had to go back. I had to dig deeper. I asked myself, “What would Dana Scully do?” Well, she would investigate the occurrence as if it were a rationally explainable phenomenon until something undeniable led her to believe otherwise. But Fox Mulder… Well… what would Mulder do? I bet if the X-Files were set in 2015 the first thing Mulder would do would be to Google paranormal phenomenon relating to closets. So that’s what I did. I went immediately home, and all the while deliberately avoiding any glances toward the mysterious closet space, I typed into Chrome “paranormal closet”. Some results came up. The first result was a site dedicated to helping people come out of the closet by comparing the experience of realizing homosexuality to that of experiencing the paranormal. I mean…. I’ve never had to come out of the closet but the article was pretty convincing. There was also a Reddit thread entitled “Old Man in my Closet”… I didn’t click on it. And a few youtube videos, presumably shoddy attempts at special effects, showing “paranormal closet occurrences” but none of them resembled my invisible closet-top-dwelling companion – er, whatever. After a few more attempts at various internet searches, I just gave up; resolving that I was on my own with this one and leaning heavily toward the Dana Scully approach – I would explore every option before writing it all off as a personally experienced X-File phenomenon. I would continue to experiment with the closet space, exchanging letters with the mysterious void. Retrospectively, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe the Mulder approach would have allowed me to forget about The Dish Day and those two words, “I know.” Maybe Mulder would have just been able to chalk it all up to a bizarre, fascinating experience and then let it go. Move on. But no. I decided to be Scully. I decided to push it. I grabbed the piece of paper with “I know” written on it and decided to keep it as proof. For everyone else, it would just look like two words on a piece of paper, but to me, it was solid evidence of my experience. I didn’t want to risk losing it. I picked a third piece of paper from my shelf and wrote on it: “WHAT’S YOUR NAME?” I delivered the paper to the top of the closet, sat on my bed, and started the stopwatch. At 10 minutes and 35 seconds, the paper floated from the top of the closet – this time directly onto the bed instead of the floor. “Not important,” it read. My writing was gone. I decided to use the same piece of paper for the next question. Directly under the closet-being’s writing I scribbled: “ARE YOU REAL?” At 6 minutes and 15 seconds, the paper landed on my bed, blank once again except for the answer: “Evidently so.” I thought to myself, “Ahh so the closet is a smartass, then,” and scribbled my next question: “IF YOU’RE REAL, WHY CAN’T I SEE YOU?” At the 4 minute and 21-second mark, the paper landed with the response: “Ever seen gravity?” I wrote: “TOUCHE” and nothing else, wondering what the response would be. After only 3 minutes and 51 seconds, the paper fluttered back to me: “Do ask something interesting, please.” A smartass indeed. “HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS?” The response came at the 2-minute mark. “Ours is a special ability.” “OURS? THERE’S MORE THAN ONE OF YOU?” After only 1 minute and 3 seconds, the answer was, “Unnecessary question. Ask another.” I suddenly felt anxious. I had been at ease for most of the process, odd as that may sound, but the clear eagerness of the demand “ask another” gave me pause. Should I continue? Was I getting into something dangerous? I began the process unconvinced that even one of the strange closet entities existed and now I was being told by some invisible force that there may be multiple unseen beings living on top of my closet, communicating with me through a piece of paper, from which my own writing kept magically disappearing. I actually felt afraid. But I sent another message. I stupidly sent another message. “WHO ARE YOU?” The answer this time was almost instantaneous. I barely had time to start the stopwatch app before the paper floated off the closet and landed before me. What I read there made no sense; it seemed such a bizarre answer to the question, and while I was staring at the page trying to get my brain to work I felt a building sense of anxiety creeping from my toes to my ears – a tingling sense of danger building in my spine. “Too late. First letter of each sentence. Read the solution aloud, please. I’ll tell you who I am if you complete this task.” It was the longest sentence the closet had returned. It was also the weirdest. Stupidly I ignored my sense of mounting panic, desperate to complete the task and solve the mystery. “I am Dana Scully I am Dana Scully,” I kept chanting in my head. First letter of each sentence? I used to love these silly puzzle games. I wracked my brain to remember the entire conversation but after some scribbling, I recalled all of it: HELLO, MY NAME IS RIPLEY. I know. WHAT’S YOUR NAME? Not important. ARE YOU REAL? Evidently so. IF YOU’RE REAL, WHY CAN’T I SEE YOU? Ever seen gravity? TOUCHE. Do ask something interesting, please. HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS? Ours is a special ability. OURS? THERE’S MORE THAN ONE OF YOU? Unnecessary question. Ask another. WHO ARE YOU? Too late…. But when I was finished, I isolated all the first letters and the message didn’t make any sense: “HIWNAEIETDHOOUWT.” Total nonsense. Then it dawned on me – maybe just use every first letter of the responses; after all, if there’s a hidden message, how could I have had any part in it if I didn’t know it in the first place? I arranged all of the letters from the closet’s response into a line. My heart sank. A lump rose in my throat. My palms started to sweat. INEEDOUT. I. Need. Out. For some insane reason, even though the message was already creepy enough that I should have stopped, that I should have torn up the page and gone straight to the Housing office to switch rooms, some insane, visceral urge to complete the task and a sweeping desire to solve the mystery overwhelmed me and I read out loud: “I need out.” The room instantly fell eerily silent. It seemed a vacuum had formed in my little dorm room. Simultaneously all the air seemed to be sucked from my lungs and a freezing cold seized me by the shoulders as I watched a swirling shadow gather in the space above the closet and spill over the edge into the room; spiraling and creeping toward me like an inky fog. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I could only sit there, watching the fog approach me and engulf first my legs, then my torso, then my neck and soon everything was blackness and burning cold and indecipherable, painful silence. And then I woke up here, in this… void. Only this little notebook was here when I opened my eyes. I can’t see my body and I don’t appear to have any corporeal form but I still feel like myself. And I can somehow write this, and I can somehow see. When I woke up I saw out into my bedroom. From above. From on top of the closet. I saw a thing that looks like me, that looks just like Ripley. When it sensed that I was awake, the thing that looks like me climbed onto my bed and peered into the space above the closet where I am trapped and said in a voice that sounds just like mine but with different, stiffer inflections, “Hello, my name is Ripley. That’s who I am. Now you have your answer. You’re welcome for the notebook.” I wanted to respond, wanted to yell that NO! I AM RIPLEY! You’re not Ripley! You aren’t me! I don’t want this stupid notebook, I want you to let me go! But I couldn’t. I can only write. And presumably push things off the top of the closet. Or make them disappear temporarily. Or erase things. And now that thing from the top of the closet is walking around as me; and it’s going to keep up the pretense. So I’m writing this tale down and maybe someday, when the fake Ripley leaves and someone else moves into this room, I will push this book off the top of the closet. And maybe that someone will start reading, thinking it’s all a bizarre mishap. And maybe they’ll become interested in my story. Maybe they’ll be a thrill seeker willing to test the boundaries. Maybe they’ll be a curious fan of the X-Files. Maybe they’ll want to talk to me. Maybe they’ll tell me their name. But I’ll already know it. And my task will be to lure them…. To trick them into saying aloud that I…. I Need Out.

15 minutes

June 22, 2015

Strange and Unexplained

Mr. Leaves

Michael Whitehouse

“Mr Leaves was here” – those were the first words out of my daughter’s mouth that morning. I dismissed the chatter as normal for a seven year old girl. It didn’t seem strange to me that she would develop a new imaginary friend, especially under the circumstances; change can do that to a kid, forcing them to create something to hold on to, making the world seem more secure. We had decided to move away from the city, to find somewhere a little less hectic, somewhere we could call home. As a doctor, I had to wait until an opportunity arose and was delighted when an opening appeared in the sleepy town of Windarm. It was a quiet place filled with pristine cottages, sun-baked streets, and lush hedge rows; not too big, not too small – perfect for the three of us. My wife, Erin, and I had named our daughter Karen, after an Aunt, but we always called her “Kip” instead. It was an old English word my Grandfather used when he was going to sleep – Karen loved to sleep more than most, and so “Kip” seemed to suit her just fine. Our new home on the outskirts of Windarm town was older than we were used to; a converted farmhouse dating back 150 years or so. With a little bit of land thrown into the deal for good measure, we fell in love with the place immediately. When we first pulled up outside, Kip rushed up the rickety white stairs, through the wide double doors and disappeared into the embrace of her new home. She was ecstatic, roaming around the confines of the spaces inside. It was an adventure for her. Even at such a fragile age, she understood the importance of the stories old places could tell. She didn’t mind the dust, the shaky banisters, or the creaking floorboards – within ten minutes, each of the three floors had been explored by her little seven year old feet. Of course, there were sure to be nooks and crannies not yet seen in the attic and cellar, but Kip was not interested in those places for now, she was only interested in where she could sleep and play. I had naively told her she could choose any of the bedrooms as her own, and of course she did – the best one in the house. Erin and I smiled at each other, watching happily as Kip darted around her new room excitedly. She loved the high ceiling because it felt grand and imposing like being a princess in a castle. She found the groans and squeaks that the floorboards made under her feet hilarious, pressing up and down on the loudest ones while giggling. Most of all she loved the window. It was wide and sprawling, looking out to the farmland which bobbed and weaved over flats and small hills below. An old oak tree towered alongside a vacant barn nearby, and the summer sky bleached the world in blues, whites and yellows; and yet, it was something much closer which fascinated my daughter. A thick web of ivy roots had thrust out of the soil decades earlier, climbing a carefully constructed wooden frame attached to the house, which rose as high as the roof. The ivy had clawed and fingered its way across the wooden slats of the farmhouse, almost entirely covering that side of the building. The surrounding land was in full bloom, everything vibrant and green. The fields were swathed in tall crops which poked out of the soil like a million city dwellers standing still in the sun. Everything was alive and vivid, that was, except for the climbing ivy. Its vines were spindly, yet clung to the wooden frame of the house with deceptive strength. A vast sea of leaves brown and withered reached up across the wooden wall, encircling Kip’s window. There was something troubling about those vines, clashing against, almost strangling the possibilities of summer. Kip didn’t mind, in fact she was enamoured by them, having me open the window so she could caress the “golden” leaves which touched the sill. The first night in the house was like any spent in a new place – unfamiliar creaks and sounds echoing out through the darkness. I am often a deep sleeper, but the uncertainty of the old building left me checking every bump and movement I heard throughout the night. I switched the lights on, checked the doors, and then looked in on Kip. She slept soundly, but I noticed that the window was still open, letting in the night’s cool breeze. I tried to shut it, but it felt jammed or stuck, the old flaking paint and grime freezing it into position after years of little use. I told myself I’d fix it in the morning, after all Kip was two floors up and we were a quarter of an hour by car from any other house. I felt she’d be quite safe with the window open. Kip loved to lie in, and as it was Saturday, and our first full day at our new home, I let her sleep until 10 in the morning. When I entered her room with a bowl of cereal and glass of orange juice, I noticed how cold that big old room could get, even in the summer. She lay on her bed still asleep. I gently woke her, and it was then that she spoke those bewildering words:”Mr Leaves was here.” I found the phrase amusing at first, but she seemed frightened, so we talked about it. “He scares me, daddy,” she offered, but didn’t want to say any more. I comforted her saying that it was probably just a bad dream and that moving to a new place could be pretty scary by itself, but she still seemed uneasy. It was obvious to me that she was speaking about an imaginary friend, but the conversation disturbed me enough that I talked it over with my wife, worried that our daughter might not be adjusting well to the move. It’s hard to leave your friends and school behind. That day, more of our things from the old home arrived. Slowly the house began to feel like ours and I enjoyed wandering around it, taking in the glorious view of the crops fields. In the late afternoon, I went up to Kip’s room with my toolbox, determined to close the window to stop her from catching a summer cold. As I chipped away at the dirt and flaked paint which had jammed the window open, I looked down and could see that Kip was playing away from the house, sitting on an old rope swing which hung from the oak tree by the barn. She looked happy. Finally the window budged and I was able to close it. On the second night I didn’t sleep well at all, and by the morning I felt shattered. Something had changed to me. The house didn’t feel as comfortable as it did when we first arrived. The air had become closer and stifled. Again, I let Kip sleep in for a while before bringing her breakfast. She was already awake when I entered, and when I asked her how she had slept, she replied: “Not good, daddy.” When I enquired why, she whispered:”Mr Leaves was watching me from outside.” I looked over at the window for a moment, a chill running up my back. “Can you tell him to go away?”, Kip asked. Again, I reassured her and gave her a big hug. Soon, she was playing on the swing again by the barn. For most of that day I tried to put my files in order. I wasn’t due at the doctor’s office in town for another two weeks, but I wanted to be as prepared as possible. Erin took care of some business at the bank, while Kip continued to smile and giggle as she always did, running around the house playing games. Most kids get bored during the summer holidays, but she always had a way of engaging with the world which meant she never had a dull a moment. I remember it being just after 2 in the morning. It was dark, but something had pulled me from a heavy sleep. Uncertain at first as I opened my eyes to the darkness, I finally realised what it was: Kip was talking. I didn’t want to disturb Erin, and I knew it was probably just my daughter talking in her sleep as she had done in the past, but as I walked barefoot across the creaking floor towards her room, I kept thinking about those words: “Mr Leaves was watching me.” As quietly as possible, I reached the door and could still hear her talking loudly, her words muffled slightly. I knocked and entered. The window was once again open and Kip was leaning out of it chatting away. On asking her what she was doing, she turned slowly towards me and said: “I’m talking to Mr Leaves.” I rushed over to the window and saw nothing but the cool summer night, and the climbing ivy fluttering slightly at the presence of a sudden breeze. “He keeps looking at me, daddy,” said Kip, as I put her back into bed. I closed the window and slept in an armchair next to her until morning. The following day the sun absolutely split the sky. It was perfect weather, and I decided that it would be good to get Kip to help me with some chores, hoping that keeping her active would help her sleep more soundly at night. In the morning we cut and raked the front and back lawns. We then dug out some weeds around a flower bed. Kip and Erin found it hysterical when they soaked me with a hose while watering the plants. Finally, I decided that Kip and I should take a look at the old barn. It had been included in the sale of the house, but hadn’t been used for years. I had only been in it once, when viewing the property months previous, and that was just a quick peek without going inside. It was the house I was really interested in. Kip had been helping her mum wash the car when I took her hand and said: “Fair maiden, are you ready for an adventure?” “Yes!” she replied with delight. Erin smiled approvingly. “There be dragons nearby, and only the sword skills of the legendary Lady Kip can defeat them. Okay, let’s go!” I yelled. I grabbed her hand and led her round to the side of the house where her window looked out, high above. Picking her up and putting her on my shoulders she laughed loudly. “Go, daddy, go!” I ran forwards towards the old barn, but as we passed the oak tree on the way, she suddenly stopped laughing. At first she asked quietly “Where are we going?” Another few footsteps and it wasn’t long before she burst into tears, shouting and pleading for us to go back to the house. I stopped immediately, shocked by her response, and gave her a big hug as my wife came running. “What’s wrong, honey?” asked Erin. Through tears and a shaking voice, Kip replied: “Daddy was taking me to the barn.” “And why did that upset you?” “Mr Leaves! Mr Leaves!” At that she continued to sob and cry. Erin comforted her as I marched inside. I was going to put a stop to this nonsense. Grabbing my toolbox I ran up the stairs and into Kip’s room. In a few minutes the job was done and the window had been nailed shut. There’d be no more talking to “Mr Leaves”. After making Kip her favourite supper, and letting her stay up a little later than usual to watch a film with us, we both tucked her into her bed back upstairs. She didn’t seem upset, and when we brought up the idea of her moving rooms, she swore to us that everything was fine. She really did love that room. Erin read her a story, we kissed her goodnight, and then we went to bed. I woke to the sound of screaming. No one can underestimate the power of a child’s cry for help on a parent. I leapt out of bed and tore across the hallway in the dark, bursting into Kip’s room. She lay in the middle of the floor, sobbing in fear. My eyes had yet to adapt to the darkness, but as I instinctively stepped forward to pick my daughter up from the ground, I knew that I was not alone. A sharp pain seared across the back of my head as I fell to the floor, dazed. “Daddy!” kip screamed as she clutched onto me for dear life. The sound of feet came once more, and as I rolled over I saw my wife, Erin, running through the doorway. I tried to warn her, but the strike to the back of my head had left me both bloodied and sluggish. As any loving mother would, Erin ran to her family’s aid. A tall darkened figure then reached out from behind the door, grabbing my wife’s throat with grizzled, dirt-ridden hands, and smashing her head straight into a wall. Her body crumpled to the ground. I staggered to my feet and began swinging my arms as hard as I could at the beast, but in such a daze, the warm trickle of blood running down the back of my neck, it was easy to be out fought. I tried my best dammit, I tried! Something smashed against my jaw, then my nose, crushing it into my face. I gasped and fell to the ground. Kip held onto me once more, screaming, crying – her world undone. There was no comfort I could give, no offer of protection. The blood from my shattered nose filled up my mouth as I lay on my back. I tried to rise once more, only to be battered again by an unseen force. Kip sobbed, and in that moment I knew – I had failed her. The tall figure stooped in the darkness, grabbing Kip by her long locks of beautiful brown hair, and yanking her head backwards. She would not let go of me. Again, the figure pulled sharply, this time wrenching my daughter straight out of my arms and lifting her up by her hair. Kip screamed in agony. Suddenly, the room was bathed in a shower of shattered glass. I looked up, and saw the beast which had my daughter by the hair. The creature which had set out to destroy my family – it was man. Just a man. But the thing which had burst through the window, was anything but human. In the darkness I saw them struggle. The man was powerful, no doubt, but his opponent was big and quick. It was the shape of a person, but as it moved I could hear the loud rustling of its construction. The man let out a cry. A pitiful, begging sound, pleading for mercy. He dropped Kip to the ground. Silence. Nothing but the rustling of leaves in the night. One last gasp was heard as our attacker was dragged through the open window to his death. I don’t know how long I passed out for, but it was Erin who woke me. The attack had left her unconscious for a time, but she was okay. Helped to my feet, we both staggered over to where Kip was standing. She was leaning out of the window, crying. But they weren’t tears of fear or physical pain, I knew that sound well. It was the cry of grief and loss. Looking down below, the still dead corpse of our attacker lay on the ground, covered by a blanket of leaves which slowly blew away into the distance. We hugged each other and consoled Kip as she stared out into the night. “Mr Leaves…” she whispered, “Mr Leaves…” *** When the police arrived they quickly identified the intruder as James Grek, a man who was wanted for questioning in connection to a series of child rape accusations. He had been hiding in the old barn for a while, most probably because the house had been empty for a number of years. When he saw that a family had moved in with a young daughter, he couldn’t resist the opportunity. We quickly moved from the old farmhouse to a new place across town, but even then we didn’t last long. The memory of that night, being so close to where it all took place, was too much for Erin and me, but most of all we wanted to protect our daughter. Within six months we had left the town of Windarm for good. Kip is now 10 years old, she’s happy and continues to surprise us day by day. She says she wants to be an explorer, “there’s all sorts of stuff out there, waiting to be found” she says. After that night, I tend to agree with her. Epilogue I often think about what happened, and what it was that we saw. What saved us. The only hint of an explanation was given to me a month before we left Windarm. I was drinking in a local bar, and started chatting to an off-duty police officer who had attended the scene the night we were attacked. “It’s a shame you left the old farm. That place deserves a nice family,” he said, downing his sixth beer. “How can a place deserve anything?” I asked. “I s‘pose it’s silly. I knew the previous owners. Mr and Mrs Dimitra, nice folks. Lived there for years, cared for the place.” “And what does that have to do with a family living there?” “Well, they loved kids, but never had any of their own. Dunno why, I don’t think they could. What I do know is that everyone round here loved both of ‘em. They always did nice things for the kids, helping out an such.” “I still don’t understand?” I pressed. “They were always doin’ stuff for the kids of the town. Halloween, Christmas, whenever. And I just think it would’ve been nice if their old farmhouse went to a family with kids, that’s all.They’d ‘ave liked that.” It was then that I plucked up the courage – whether it was the alcohol or the timing, I don’t know – to ask the question I needed answered most. The question I hadn’t dared ask anyone for fear of ridicule. But by then I was leaving, so it didn’t matter if people thought me mad. I just had to know. “Have you ever heard of Mr Leaves?” I asked nervously. The man laughed.”Of course I have!” I was shocked. Someone knew about that thing. He continued: “When Mrs Dimitra passed away, the old man was heartbroken ‘bout losing his wife. He threw himself into volunteering around the town. You know the Windarm park in the middle of town?” I nodded. “That was Mr Dimitra that did that. Used to be all overgrown and barren, but he got the community interested in chippin’ in. So, we all sorted it out together. The old man could move mountains. Anyway, he just worked away at fixing the park and planting trees, as well as keeping his own garden going, before he passed away a few years ago.” “What does this have to…” I said before being interrupted. “Really loved his gardening did Mr Dimitra, or as the kids called him, ‘Old Mr Leaves.’”

12 minutes

October 9, 2014

Beings and Entities

Star Light

beings, Ben Cook, entities, strange, unexplained

I remember the first time I witnessed that gruesome sight, right in front of me. It had been all over the news for the past week but until that moment, I was still unable to take any of the stories seriously. I guess that’s what happens in a world where the media exaggerates every little story they encounter, to pull in more dull-minded viewers. It first started in the icy wastelands of Russia, back in 2012, hikers passing through on their travels discovered bodies half-buried in the snow, their abdomens mutilated and the occasional limb removed, only to be found a few meters from the body. At first these finds were put down to wild animals desperately searching for food in the lifeless tundra, they barely even made news on Russian broadcasting networks, only the locals to the areas (of which there are few in such a desolate place) really heard the stories. It’s strange, now that I think about it. The attacks had been happening all through late December and simply went unreported until February when things became more severe. Heck, maybe those Doomsday lunatics were onto something after all and no one noticed. As the days went on, after the initial attacks, panic in the Russian wilderness began to spread as more bodies were found in the wild, remains scattered in the snow and yet an even larger amount of people became reported as ‘missing’. It wasn’t until mid-January that the first body was discovered in a public area. In a small rural town, sitting on the edge of the wastes, two disfigured bodies were discovered by a few poor citizens on their way to work, their limbs scattered all over the streets. This was the first case that managed to work its way into the mainstream media outlets. Everybody just dismissed it as a murder case, the sort that you hear about in foreign countries all the time. What kept my attention was something the autopsy reports discovered: The murder hadn’t even happened at night. It seemed to have happened only an hour before the first poor soul discovered the freshly broken body. I mentally gagged at the thought of finding a body strewn across the floor, still bleeding. As the days went on, more and more reports came in of bodies being found in small villages across Russia, completely destroyed and with no clue as to the cause and just like the original, all of them had happened in broad daylight but with no witnesses to recall how it happened. It was February when the first ‘big incident’ occurred. I remember it distinctly because it happened to be my birthday. Breaking News all over the world, insane stories coming from Russia, it seemed impossible to believe at first. The anchorman on TV spoke quickly in an urgent voice, of barricades being erected in Moscow as people from outside ran screaming to its walls, begging to be let in. What he said next made my heart jump. People in cities and towns all over Moscow were being eviscerated in plain daylight. The attacker? Nothing. People were being cut to ribbons, in their homes, in the streets, all over Russia, in plain daylight but there was no visible attacker. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it. It had to be a hoax, it didn’t make any sense. However, my curiosity overpowered me, I had to see it for myself. I loaded up my laptop and began my trawl of some of the ‘darker’ parts of the web, in search of videos of the insane claims. As it turned out, there were thousands of videos on the subject, so I clicked on a random one. It was being filmed from a rooftop and involved frightened people of all ages, running through the streets in a panic with nothing noticeable chasing them. I remember moving to click another link after thinking nothing would happen, when suddenly a random man in the group seemed to scream and then… Explode. It just happened. There was no warning, no sign of attack, the man wasn’t even at the back of the group. It seemed as though fate had picked a random person and just decided he would die, there and then. I sat in shock as the video ended abruptly. Moving the mouse up again I clicked on another video, this one was being filmed from behind a barricade to hold back fleeing citizens. I guess that was their idea of ‘controlling’ the population. Various men in military uniforms lined the barricade with large rifles, looking on at the crying, begging people with little emotion. Then out of nowhere, one of the women at the front of the crowd was ripped apart by the air and thrown across the military’s front line. I gagged a little at the sight, despite having been reinforced against this sort of thing. In a panicked response, the soldiers sprayed their guns at the point of the attack as if trying to hit the invisible assailant but their bullets went through the space and took out the civilians behind the remains. People scattered as the soldiers unloaded their rounds into the crowd and then spontaneously, one of the soldiers burst apart. The cameraman seemed to panic at this point and the feed went dead. My mind was struggling to get to grips with itself. I honestly didn’t know what to think. I always imagined myself in these situations before, acting like I was in a movie, analyzing every mystery and saving the day by solving it but this… this just made no sense. I was scared. The next day, Russia entered lockdown, as did many other countries, in hopes of keeping this ghostly threat out of their nations. News from Russia dropped as a result. It was completely cut off from the rest of the world and we could only hope they were okay. And then… life continued. Of course, people talked of it but everyone just seemed to stop fearing it. In reality, it seems, we were just trying to put it behind us because of our fear. Humans fear what they don’t understand so it seems ‘not thinking about it’ was a suitable way of combatting that fear. It wouldn’t last. The year moved on and days became longer and then that day came… the one I wish I could forget… It was a bright day in the middle of May and I was out with a group of friends, celebrating the completion of another year at University. We were walking and laughing to the in-jokes we had created over the last year, trying to remember them all before we retreated to our home towns. At one point we stopped while a few of our party went to buy food from a shop and I began talking to my closest friend, Ryan. We were midway into a conversation about what game to play online next and then… It was so abrupt. Just like in the videos. He was halfway through a word and his body just… burst into pieces. Blood and entrails splattered across my body. I stumbled back in horror as my mind processed what had just happened. Around me, people ran away from the area, screaming for help but I barely noticed. Where my best friend once stood was now just a bloody mess and my mind was never given a chance to prepare itself. I dropped to my knees and vomited on the floor, crying. It was at least fifteen minutes before I was able to take control of myself again and actually get up. By that point, the police had arrived and were telling me to remain still, as if they thought I had done this unspeakable act. I remember sitting in that gloomy room, barely being able to answer any questions the investigators had for me, simply replying with a nod or shake of the head. They told me that this wasn’t the only place it had happened. In fact, it had become a worldwide pandemic. The brief period of peace had just been the calm before the storm. What we thought was sealed in Russia was now everywhere and it wasn’t even spreading from a single point as it had been at the start. It was a full-scale attack… nowhere was safe. We were evacuated to military bases and defense points in hopes of holding back this invisible invasion but we all knew it was no use. My family and I were taken to a military installation in the countryside where we stayed for a month. No contact with the outside world was permitted, in fear of giving our location away to the creatures. A single analog TV was our only view of the outside world, it seemed a few rogue pirate news stations had popped up to keep those locked away, up to date with current events. The quality was terrible but in a time like that, it was better than nothing. We heard reports of strange lights being sighted, not in the sky but closer to the ground. We were told of countries falling one by one, their entire populations being wiped out. There was also one report of scientists discovering ‘something’ in the sky. The report said that they couldn’t ‘see’ it but whatever it was, it was giving out a lot of energy and it was big, the size of a small moon, in fact. Images of Russia came in from aerial photographs. Moscow was ablaze, towering buildings reduced to rubble and in their remains, shook large shimmering waves of fire. A close up of the streets showed roads bathed in red with human remains dotted around in several areas. The video feed switched to another aerial clip of a gigantic crater. The host went on to describe the location as a former Nuclear Power Plant that had entered a meltdown two months ago due to no one controlling it. At the end of the clip, the camera quickly moved upwards, to focus on a second helicopter that was now spinning out of control. Against the window, flashes of that all too familiar red color could be seen as the video suddenly cut out. The last broadcast on that channel was the most disturbing. We switched the TV on to find the man in tears with streaks of blood down his face. He looked extremely scared and spoke with a weak, trembling voice. “Oh God, they’ve come! The angels have come for me, Lord! They’ve taken everyone here and now it’s my turn. Judgement Day is here, loyal viewers! There’s nothing left for me on this Earth anymore but… for those who might be left, I think I know how to survive against them.” He let out a loud, sharp laugh. “Just my luck, hey? To find out when it’s too late. All you have to do is stay out of the-” His sentence was cut off by a scream as his body was ripped in two, right before our eyes. The channel didn’t shut off though. It’s still there, in fact, but all you see now is the decaying corpse of an insane man, one of his eyes limply staring at you through the camera lens. Since then, there were no more accessible channels. Our last view of the outside world was gone. It didn’t really matter anymore, to us. We were a small group of people left amongst what must have been less than a million humans on the Earth. The ‘what’ and ‘where’ was no longer our concern. For a while, everything was quiet. The soldiers kept us in line, we fed off of what rations the base had, we stuck to strict curfews and attempted to socialize and keep ourselves entertained in our new little personal world. We were somehow quite content with our new lives, with no outside world to bother us, no responsibilities or concerns for anything but our little community. On top of that, the lack of news about outside events allowed us to almost forget what had been happening. Until one night at the end of August, I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a scream. I was on the floor of a large room containing hundreds of other sleeping evacuees, the realization still startled me every time I woke up, even though I had been sleeping in these conditions for the past month. My vision was blurred somewhat as I attempted to focus on my surroundings and my body appeared to be mildly damp and slightly sticky. I didn’t think much of it, I had had many restless nights here and we were in a cramped humid bunker. On the far side of the room, there were two dim lights creeping in through the doorways. Someone must have left the light on in the corridor I thought to myself. It was rather puzzling, the thoroughness of the soldiers here would have never allowed something like this. All lights had to be switched off at 8 pm and they checked every night. Surely by now, a guard would have found this and switched it off again. Maybe it was one of them doing a midnight check on us all? That’s when I noticed something odd. One of the lights was… moving. Not moving behind the doorway but it seemed as if the doorway itself was moving. It drifted silently across, closing in on the other door, at first I thought it must be a soldier with a torch. I winced and rubbed my eyes, attempting to focus on the object then, just as it merged with the light of the door, I managed to focus on what seemed impossible. It had the shape of a tall, disturbingly thin humanoid but where the body should be, there was nothing. No abdomen, no limbs, no head. The outline of the mysterious being seemed to just drift across the wall in an area of light. The first thought that entered my mind was ‘inverted shadow’. I know it sounds crazy but it was as if, instead of creating a shadowy outline in a lit room, something was creating a bright outline in a dark room. Unfortunately, this was the best view I could get of the entity as it seemed to literally merge with the light from the doorway and disappear. My body was frozen at the sight and out of fear, I chose to lay down and try to get to sleep again, hoping that whatever it was, it wouldn’t notice me. It was another long, restless night. I woke up at 8 am, light peered through the small slits in the top of the bunker and kept the room bright enough to see wall to wall in the giant reinforced mass of cement. I wish I hadn’t seen it though. Blood covered the walls. Where once had been sleeping bodies, now laid the remains of a silent massacre. What I thought had been my own sweat from the night before turned out to be the remains of my parents who had once slept beside me. I screamed. Not a single person was spared that night. Well, save for myself. Walking through the base, it seemed these things had made short work of every human on site and yet, the gates still remained firmly shut, guards posted on the watch points had their destroyed bodies hanging over the rails. It was quiet. I sat in the middle of that compound, alone, sobbing to myself. I was alone in the world. These things had killed everyone I knew and loved and I was lost. I didn’t know what to do. I slept in that compound for 3 days until I saw him again. That man of light, eerily and slowly drifting through the darkness and merging with the light once again. This time, I could’ve sworn he noticed me. He stopped and turned, till he was head-on with me and just stared at me. I couldn’t move, my body just refused to listen… and then the being left. I don’t know why they keep sparing me. Is it for amusement? Because they pity me? Or something more? I just can’t get my head around any of it… After that night, I took as many supplies from the base as I could and journeyed towards the nearest village which is where I now reside. I managed to find a house with a basement and locked myself in there with the supplies… but I never turn the light on anymore. For three weeks I have been living in total darkness. Not because I think they’ll find me but… I think I know what these things are now. I once read a science fiction book that detailed a possible route a species may take in its evolutionary course. This species would evolve beyond the simple realm of the physical and became a being of pure energy. When a species would reach this point it would obtain near-omniscient knowledge and have no care for life or death anymore. What the intentions of such a hyper-powerful species would be are impossible to predict since their minds are so much more advanced than ours. It seems in our Universe, a species has gotten there before us. They ARE the Light. Where we always feared an alien species abducting us in the middle of the night, it turns out that darkness is our only safety from the real threat. The Beings of Light. Two days ago the Second Star appeared. A Red Giant that now sits opposite our Sun, bathing both halves of the Earth in light. And now there is no longer night in this world. There is no place to hide on the outside. I don’t know what they want with our planet or why they chose to kill us all but I know this: They have killed everyone here. If you’re out there, don’t go into the light. Stick to the shadows if you want any chance of living. Darkness doesn’t kill them but it sure slows them down. There is a light coming from beneath the basement door. I have to go now. Good luck. – Thomas Everick | 18/10/2013

11 minutes

October 12, 2013

Beings and Entities, Strange and Unexplained

Nearby

Michael Whitehouse

While it is known by some that I have a keen interest in the uncanny – seeking it out on occasion – nevertheless it proved a decidedly unsettling experience to find such a strange event taking place just a few feet from my front door. The street that I lived on at the time was like any other, not an affluent place, nor one mired in poverty; a mix of kind, selfish, nosey, and apathetic neighbours, some taking interest in those around them, others not. It was a relatively quiet area but I had a fondness for it, as the large birch trees – which occasionally drooped over hedges and fences from both cared for and neglected lawns – reminded me of my childhood. Despite being just a few minutes from a busy motorway, only the occasional car came plodding through to disturb the peace, joined at times by sporadic domestic arguments which resonated from home to house, unhindered by the quiet; and so children played outside in the summer sun, some more pleasantly than others. I would have to describe the street from top to bottom as quite, quite, ordinary. I’m sure you can imagine then how shocked I was to find what I did surrounded by the mundane. I should correct myself here, it was not what I found, but rather what my neighbour initially discovered. His name was Bill and he had moved in to the house next door only a few months previous, nevertheless in that short time we had grown to be firm friends; neighbourhood barbecues, Friday nights at the local pub, a shared fondness for classic films – we got on well. One Saturday night I invited Bill over for a game of cards with a few of my colleagues. I’ve never been particularly brilliant at poker, but I’ve always enjoyed the well intended banter produced when placing bets against a good crowd. That night, neither luck nor skill was on my side and I found myself out of the game fairly quickly, so I sat back, had a few drinks, and just enjoyed the good natured name calling. The night flew in and before long the first suggestion of daylight whispered across the sky. Everyone else had stumbled drunkenly home by then with the exception of Bill, so both of us sat in my living room having a few more beers – something I was sure to regret in the morning – and talked about our favourite Alfred Hitchcock films, particularly what we thought he would be making today if he were still alive. Suddenly a change occurred in Bill’s expression. His eyes focused intently on a bookshelf which stood behind me and for a moment there was silence, until I asked if he was feeling okay. I assumed of course that he had perhaps drank a little too much, but the quiet spoke of more than a simple oncoming hangover. After a pause of contemplation, he altered the focus of our discussion enquiring about my interests and hobbies. Glancing over my shoulder to the books which seemed to be the catalyst of this change, the oncoming topic was now revealed to me. I laughed at the observation, knowing full well that some would mock me, but when I told him that much of my book collection pertained to the study of the paranormal and the bizarre, his disposition changed markedly once more from one of casual conversation to embarrassment. Yet still, he proceeded. You see Bill believed that there was something living in his house. What that something was he could not entirely be sure of, but nonetheless it was there, physical, and manifest – though there was the suggestion that it might not have relied upon a purely conventional explanation. * From the very first night which he had spent there, he had experienced a variety of unsettling phenomena. Initially it was nothing more than a faint knocking sound which seemed muffled but nearby; however, he could not determine the origin, for its source was indistinct. Indeed at times the sound travelled as if moving, even sliding, through the walls, under floorboards, and creeping around in the hollow of the attic above. The unusual noises continued for many weeks and to Bill it felt as though, with the passage of time, they were increasing in intensity. Frustrated by lack of sleep, for the sounds became faint or ceased altogether during the day, he concluded that the house must have become infested by a mass of nocturnal rodents; scratching between wood and sliding their fouled bodies between any gaps in the house’s construction which they could find. Of course his first approach was to lay down traps to catch them, but while the thought of their fur blackened with dirt and faeces – their hairless claws and coiled tails crawling over his face while he slept – provoked disgust, he hoped to avoid blood on his hands, for Bill was a kind hearted individual. At first he procured a large number of humane traps which would entice the little pests into a metallic tube with bait, holding them there during the night to be released into a nearby field the next day alive and well; at least that was the plan. A little research online revealed that chocolate was a favourite of most rodents and an exceptionally effective lure, so he bought a substantial amount from a local newsagents, with the owner jokingly asking Bill if he were setting up his own shop. A garage clung to the side of the house, cluttered by boxes and loose belongings which he had yet to sort through, and he considered it the prime mode of entry for any mice into his property. But on placing the traps around the damp corners of the interior, trying to avoid getting hit on the head by some of his tools which hung precariously from the ceiling, he found no trace of unwelcome visitors. No droppings, no scratch marks, in fact there was no evidence of anything living there at all. It seemed odd to him that he saw not one single spider or insect, since it was clearly a place where both would thrive, and the garage itself had seen better days with several small holes in the wall allowing easy entry to unwanted vermin. Once back inside he placed the rest of the traps, baiting them carefully with the chocolate around the house – under the bath, in the kitchen, and even in his bedroom. After an hour or so he felt confident that he would verify what type of animal was causing all the noise by morning. Yet that night the knocking came, faintly at first and then more pronounced; travelling through unseen spaces and amongst hidden cavities. Lying there awake for several hours, sleep was a struggle as Bill tried to block out the banging, scratching, and moving sounds which made the very structure of his home seem to pulsate and shudder as if alive. As sleep finally took him, his last conscious thoughts of the night were for a hopeful catch in the morning. Before going to work the following day, each trap was checked carefully. Dejected, Bill found that none within the house had been touched, each metallic tube still housing a slab of chocolate. But those in the garage were a different proposition. They were not only empty of bait, but two of them had been broken open, the metal container cracked and bent as if crushed under a substantial weight. All day at work Bill contemplated the force required to break those traps. He concluded that he must surely be dealing with something bigger than he had hoped, perhaps an infestation of rats rather than some local wood mice. While he did not wish any animal harm, he shuddered at the thought of something larger writhing around his house while he slept. Knowing that he might have to concede defeat and call in pest control to poison the creatures, he stopped by a hardware store for one last attempt of his own. That night, Bill lay in the darkness as the shuffling and knocking sounds continued once more, hopeful that the two large metallic rat cage traps he had baited in the garage would produce a catch. But all was not well. For in the morning, he pulled up the garage door, climbed over some junk towards the rear wall and found both cages torn apart, the thick metal which should have contained even the most powerful of rodent, bent backwards with the chocolate inside removed. The thought began to cross his mind: What was living in his house? Reluctantly, Bill conceded, placing an abrupt call to a local pest control company. Within hours three men pulled up outside in a white van, sporting a vulgar and distasteful depiction of a dead rat on its side. They efficiently baited the entire house with traps and poison, and before long were almost ready to leave. One of the men, a slightly overweight individual with a clear loathing for his job, looked at the rat cages Bill had placed the day before, enquiring as to whether he lived alone – quite clearly implying that he held doubts that an animal could have broken open the traps by themselves. The implication was not welcomed. Several weeks passed and the traps continued to be torn apart recklessly and with apparent brute force; chocolate missing but the poison inside (designed to be irresistible to rats) remaining untouched – something which puzzled the pest control workers. Indeed, after a series of destroyed traps, they accused Bill himself of breaking their equipment. This ended in a shouting match outside, with the men retrieving their broken rat cages and expecting Bill to pay for the damage. A few of the nosier neighbours popped their heads out of windows to see what the disturbance was outside, as the men packed their belongings back into their van. Even the children ceased playing in the sun for a moment, staring at Bill and the others as they argued in the street. While he was a little relieved that no animal had been killed, he was disturbed by the obvious presence of something even pest control could not deal with, living in his house. Each night when he went to bed the noises would continue, and when Bill himself replaced any traps, the chocolate once more would be removed and the rat cages left in tatters. The strange knocking occurred as it had always done, at the end of each day as sleep approached, week after week, moving and shuffling between walls and under floorboards. Yet one night a change took place. As Bill lay there in the bedroom bathed in darkness, a strange atmosphere began to pervade the house. Slight at first, then more apparent, each breath filled with a tangible consistency. In the preceding weeks he had learned to block the sounds out to a degree and at least attain a sleeping pattern of sorts, but on that night a change of routine had been forced upon him; one which provoked an uncomfortable sensation, not unlike the stifled air before a storm. He waited, for what he knew not, yet anxious anticipation of something in the dark coursed through his veins. Then the noises appeared as usual, scratching, moving, tunnelling, but now they were no longer hindered by plaster, nor wood, nor brick. Each thump, every bang was no longer dull, no longer distant or removed. Change had come, for now the knocks and scratches in the night gave the impression of something quite free, unshackled, and unimpeded. At first the thumping sounds rattled around in the living room across the hallway. Then, an occasional and intermittent high pitched squeal, accompanied by loud thudding on the walls, slowly progressed throughout the house. The sound grew loud and brash as it approached Bill’s room and while part of him desired to see what had been causing him so many sleepless nights, the thought of something there which had the force to tear apart a metal cage was not to be taken likely. The knocking now rose to a fierce boom, growing ever closer to where he lay. As it crashed against the walls in the hallway, a picture frame fell to the ground, smashing in to pieces on the floor while an alarm clock shuddered across a nearby nightstand threatening to follow suit. The thumping, scratching, and high pitched shrill grew so loud, so violent, that he imagined the vibrations from it shaking the bed in which he lay. He clutched his ears in pain as the noise swelled upward into a cacophony of gratuitous and enraged strikes against the very structure of his new home, piercing his eardrums. Then, just as it reached the bedroom door, Bill grabbing a nearby lamp for protection against what would soon be upon him, the noises ceased. No knocks, no scratching, no high pitched squeak, nothing. Yet the silence was not welcome, nor was it empty. He gasped loudly as a shadow fell from outside, moving quietly in the hall, blocking the light which crept under the door onto the bedroom floor. Lying there in the throes of terror, he stared at the door, waiting for it to burst open at any moment, revealing something hideous on the other side. The floorboards in the hallway creaked slightly as something substantial shifted its weight. Bill gripped his bedside lamp, ready to hurl it at whatever waited nearby. A familiar noise then sounded. Quiet, yet suggestive of a movement, and while he could not be certain of what it was, his mind interpreted it as something gliding slowly back and forward over the wooden surface of the door. Feeling, sensing, touching. Perhaps even looking. The handle on the door juddered briefly as something pawed at it from the other side. Bill winced, envisaging an overgrown rat stretching up onto its hind legs, biting and clawing at the brass metal. Then, just as abruptly as it had appeared, the intruder moved back down the hall away from the bedroom towards the front door – a repetitive squeak sounding as it did so. Yes, Bill was terrified, but possessed by curiosity he hoped he could sneak a glimpse of what now sat at the end of the hallway. At least it was a distance from his bedroom door by then and if he had to react quickly, he could leap back into his room and block the entrance with a dresser or wardrobe, barricading himself inside. Creeping towards the door, Bill took a deep breath in and then slowly opened it, letting the light flood towards him, careful not to make a sound. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the light, but as they did so he saw something large moving at the end of the hallway. It was indistinct, but although he saw it only for a moment, he was certain that someone – something – had turned at the front door, scuttling off just out of sight, disappearing into the bathroom. Silence once more, and with each pocket of nothing the hairs rose up on the back of his neck one by one. Then suddenly a quick succession of loud bangs escaped from the bathroom. Fight – or rather, flight – took over and without any hesitation or thought, he rushed down the hallway, passed the open bathroom door, and with a swift turn of a key he was outside, running at speed from his home. Standing in the middle of his street on a cool summer night, fear was quickly replaced by embarrassment as he looked down at the pyjamas he was wearing which had seen better days, nodding in acknowledgement towards a group of twenty somethings leaving a party a few doors down. All he could think to say was: ‘A bit brisk isn’t it?’ Bill apparently knocked on my door that night to ask for assistance, but unfortunately I was out of town and only returned in time for our poker game the following evening. Another of my neighbours – an awkward man by the name of Harold whom owed Bill a favour for helping fix his car a few weeks earlier – agreed in sleepy and grumping fashion to help search the house. Of course nothing was found except for the smashed picture frame, which led to Harold regarding Bill with suspicion, voicing his opinion that the entire fiasco was a waste of time. ** And so that was his account of the troubling experience he had the previous night. He seemed relieved to have spoken of it, and now it made sense to me why he was so reluctant to leave for his own house next door. I sympathised with my friend and told him that we would tackle this problem together. I have to confess that the thought of identifying the animal, of solving the mystery appealed greatly to me. In the meantime I offered him the spare room in hope that he would get a good rest for the day’s work ahead; one which I did not relish facing with a hangover; and so after drinking what felt like several gallons of water, I turned in for the night. *** The next day – after we both shook off the previous night’s excess with a large cooked breakfast – we went over Bill’s account once more. I was relishing my task as makeshift detective, hoping that there might be a clue as to the creature’s identity that we had overlooked, but when I saw the toll which the events had taken on my friend, I became resolute in my desire to provide a solution to the puzzle, hoping that he would find some relief. While he said that he felt rested, it was clear that Bill was worried about his home, wondering if it was badly infested with something a little more exotic than a colony of rats. But most of all there was a fear in his eyes. An unspoken and anxious contemplation etched in his face. The thought of spending another night in that house provoked revulsion within him. Trying my best to relieve his concerns, I set out in front of him a plan of action which I was confident could solve the mystery once and for all: We would carry out a vigil in the house overnight, however, preparations had to be made. First of all we contacted the estate agent who had sold the property to Bill. Our task was to contact previous tenants – of which I remembered at least three others – and enquire as to whether they had experienced any strange phenomena, or animal infestation. I did not wish to alarm my friend, but since I had moved into the street the realisation came to me that most had lived in that house for only a few months at a time. This had never particularly affected me as I did not know any of them well, but the question of why they left so quickly did now enter my mind. While we were waiting to hear back from previous residents, we set about preparing the house for the night, using what we already knew about the phenomena to track, identify, and trap it. First, it had already been established that whatever was smashing the traps open was interested solely in the chocolate, having left the poison and other foods behind, so we used this as bait. Second, most of the physical evidence for something living in the house had been in the garage. With this in mind, we emptied all of its contents placing the boxes, furniture, and other assorted items in one of Bill’s spare rooms. Third, with permission, I covered the floor of the house in flour hoping to catch an impression of the intruder, sealing each door shut with masking tape to help identify which room the disturbance originated in. Lastly, we purchased some fishing wire which I used to create a snare trap in the garage. This was attached to a wide basin weighted down with a concrete slab on the floor. Inside the noose of wire I placed a large pile of chocolate, angling the snare so that if a substantial animal attempted to eat it, the wire would tighten around its body or an appendage, trapping it in the process. Next to this we placed a large cat cage which we would use to store the animal safely after cutting it free from the snare. We closed the garage door and then sat outside, chatting quietly in the summer night over a couple of beers, waiting. Called from the street, the local children reluctantly ceased their playing and trundled back to their homes to sleep for school the next day, and as time passed and the skies blackened, an occasional neighbour would look out of their window wondering what we were doing sitting in the garden that late at night, during the week; some of them obviously annoyed, others merely curious. It was actually fun, and as we talked and laughed about anything and everything, torches in hand, I was glad to see the tension slowly fade from Bill’s shoulders. There we sat until after two in the morning, at which juncture we decided to take turns listening so that the other could get some sleep. It was around two hours later during Bill’s watch that I awoke to an almighty crashing sound. The noise both startled and disturbed me, for while I knew that it was brought about by my snare trap inside the garage, I shuddered for a moment, certain that I heard a cry, a wild shriek accompanying the crash. Quickly I leapt to my feet as Bill stared across at me and I at him. It was quite clear that we were both unsure about opening the garage door with such a violent and unsettling noise echoing out from within. Just what we would find we did not know. After a pause and the last fleeting remnants of Dutch courage, we both grabbed the door and slid it upwards to reveal what was inside. Our hesitation had cost us. The chocolate was gone, the snare wire broken and the rocks which had weighed it down, cast around the room in haphazard fashion. Yet Bill believed that he had seen something which I had not: A panel on the rear wall moving slightly. He swore that it was not his imagination and was certain that something was behind it. We approached the back of the garage cautiously and found that the panel was indeed loose, the bottom of it was not fastened, and I instantly remarked that a nimble rodent could easily slip under, disappearing into the structure of the garage, and possibly even into the house. I felt confident that we had at least identified its mode of movement. I could see now the overwhelming sense of anxiety in my friend’s expression, and I must admit that I too felt strangely afraid. Nevertheless we agreed to pull the panel up and look inside. As Bill wrenched it open I cast the glare of my torch inward. Yet there was no rodent, but there was a cavity which clearly ran along the interior of the wall and, I suspected, eventually into the house. I did not wish to place my hand inside for fear of being bitten by whatever had crawled in there, instead I pressed my ear gently against the wall to listen for any movement. It was subtle, but it was most certainly there; an unseen animal slowly sliding its body along the cavity of the rear wall deeper into the building. Bill whispered, asking what I could hear, but just as the scuttling sound reached the corner, a loud booming noise thrashed from inside the wall. Startled, I fell backwards landing awkwardly on the floor, and looked up to once again see apprehension on his face. The booming continued, followed by scratching noises and further distant knocks and bangs. Then a distinct sound, one which spread a chill through the air. A door slammed from within. Bill gasped: ‘It’s in the house.’ Grabbing our torches once more, shaking the dread from our minds as best we could, we raced out of the garage to the front of the building. Bill’s hand shook as he unlocked the door into the house. The hall light was on and the ground covered in a white powder, as I had left it. Yet there in the flour was a set of distinct tracks. Two long lines parallel to one another, as if something had slithered over the ground, crawling out from the bathroom, down the hall and into the lounge. From our vantage point it was clear that the living room door was open, the masking tape seal broken. The house lay eerily quiet, and I’m ashamed to say that we debated for a moment whether we should enter at all. Bill had described the thumping and scratching sounds to me, but I had no idea how ferocious they were, how angered, how violent they sounded until I had heard them for myself from the garage, and while the house was now silent, the impact of those noises was still fresh in my mind. Following several minutes of debate, anxiety, and a few nervous jokes, we decided that we should go in, closing the door behind us to ensure that the animal would not escape only to reenter the property at a later date. The hallway felt cold, although I ascribed this merely to the heating having been off, despite it being a warm summer night. I looked to my right and could see that the bathroom door was closed, yet the elongated tracks on the floor of the hall appeared to lead away from it. Opening the door slowly, I peered inside. Flicking the light switch on, the room appeared empty, yet the shower curtain obscured my view of the bath. I sat my torch down in the sink and put my finger to my mouth intimating that Bill should remain silent, pointing to the shower curtain and revealing my belief: Something was in the bath. My miming must have appeared comical at the time, but Bill nodded in acknowledgement, the apprehension clear on his face as it must have been on mine. It was apparent that he understood my quiet motions – I would pull the shower curtain back and he would strike out at what was there with his torch, should he absolutely need to. Slowly I moved to the side of the curtain, wrapping my hands around its edge; for a moment I felt something stir in the bath as a potent sense of dread once again rattled my nerves. Then, I tugged the curtain with force. I imagined a mass of writhing rats festering in the bath, their bodies wriggling around, pulsing in unison, but I saw nothing so dramatic. It appeared that my anxiety was getting the better of me: The bath was empty. Suddenly a wild thud vibrated through the house, with little doubt that it had come from the living room. We exited the bathroom and began to reluctantly move down the hallway. Each step felt like a prison sentence and I could hear not just my own perturbed breath, but the nervousness of Bill’s very demeanour. We stepped cautiously down the hallway, careful not to disturb the elongated tracks which slid through the flour on the ground in front of us, hesitating twice at the sound of a creaking floorboard coming from the living room. As we progressed I could not help but find myself drawn to the front door, glimpsing it from over my shoulder. I calmed my self persuading my own neurosis that paranoia was the cause – yet still I felt something was there, obscured from view yet watchful. Reaching the lounge door – which lay wide open, the taped seals torn in two – we peered in, yet could see very little. The room was dark, as we had left most of the lights off in the house to entice the nocturnal animal out into the open. I can not speak for Bill at that moment, but as I stood staring into the darkness of that room, glancing sporadically back towards the doorway, the air felt stifled somehow and I had to inhale deeper than usual to stem a feeling of agitated breathlessness. Reaching his hand around the wall, Bill turned the light on and with a sigh of relieved disappointment saw that the room lay empty – a couch and armchair, table, television, but no creature anywhere to be seen. My eyes once more turned to the end of the hallway and to the front door, and for a brief second I imagined that an outline of something sat there. Bill entered the living room, yet I stayed transfixed, almost waiting for something to appear. Of course I recognised this to be nonsense, but what I failed to notice was the living room door slowly and quietly closing between us. As I turned my attention back to Bill standing in the room, the door shut leaving me alone in the hallway. While I found the sight a little alarming, I initially explained the event away – doors often close under the pressure of air currents and drafts all the time. But as I touched the handle to enter into the room where my neighbour now stood, Bill let out a terrifying yell. I pushed and pulled and turned the handle of the door, but with each effort I was parried, the door itself feeling jammed and unwilling to yield. I called out for Bill to respond, but all he could muster was: ‘Something is in here. Get me out!’ I thrust my shoulder against the door time after time, but it would not give in to my efforts. A chill whispered through the hallway, and I suddenly felt that perhaps I would have been safer on the other side of that door: The lights above me flickered twice and then nothing. Pitch black. Bill now whispered from the room, claiming that he could hear breathing nearby. I told him to remain calm and that I would go and find something to break the door in with, which must have jammed due to a broken handle – yet even I was a little unsure of that explanation. He protested, begging me not to leave him locked in that room, with whatever he believed was there with him. But I offered the reassurance that I would be gone for less than a minute. I joked that he was in a better situation than myself having a torch, as I had idiotically left mine in the bathroom sink, but I could tell that my friend was wracked by fear hoping for nothing else but escape. As I turned to make my way to the front door a chill blew through the air. Whether imagined or not I cannot tell, but as my eyes struggled in vain to penetrate the dark, I became aware that I was no longer alone in that hallway. I could barely see, nor be sure of what I perceived. For at the end of the hall facing me, there appeared to be a large black mass crouched in front of the door. I closed my eyes, my breathing erratic, and opened them once more. Yet I could not be sure! There was so little light that there could have been nothing, yet every fibre of my being told me that something large lay curled up blocking my exit from the house. Then a scream. Bill pounded and scratched and kicked at the living room door; his yells tore through me. They portrayed utter terror in a man who sounded feral, trapped, preyed upon. I tried to speak with him through the jammed door, but he cried and shrieked like a child facing nightmares in the dark. My heart raced at the sound of my friend’s obvious terror. Yet I too was now in the grip fear. I was certain that something was moving down the hallway towards me. It was as if I could almost see it, but not quite. But I could hear something which chilled me to my core, more terrifying than even Bill’s lunatic screams – the sound of a living thing shuffling towards me, accompanied by an intermittent high pitched noise which almost sounded alive. Closer and closer it drew towards me – that black mass – a shuffle, a movement, a creak of the floor boards. Then, it touched my leg. I let out a scream and, absent of thought, darted across the hallway into another room, slamming the door shut behind me, pushing a dresser against it. Bill’s screams intensified and I felt paralysed between my own fear and the wish to help him. But as I waited for the black mass in the hallway to follow me, I heard a click. Something had opened the living room door and went inside. Then a yell, an agonising shriek, followed by the pounding of footsteps, the front door opening and Bill shouting my name from outside. He may have escaped, but I was not alone. Something moved once more in the hallway, but how had my friend passed it? Yet there it was, manifest, shifting its weight, creaking the old floorboards as it did so. Loud thuds, bangs, and scratches now echoed throughout the house; an unseen force rampant and angered. Then a sound. In the dark I could not be sure, but to me it was as if something was pushing against the door from the other side. My heart raced, and fear swamped my mind as I cowered at the possibility of what was about to come crashing through that doorway, looking for me. The wooden panels of the door bent and heaved in the darkness under an immense pressure, as the sound of nail and claw reached out through the air, piercing my ears. In a moment it would be with me. But just as I looked around for a makeshift weapon to defend myself, a garden chair came hurtling through the window, shards of glass shattering across the room – it was Bill. He reached out his hand, shouting, commanding me desperately to get out of there. As I cut my hand on the broken window frame, grasping it for dear life to aid my escape, what sounded like a door giving in and a wardrobe being thrust to the side scraped across the floor. I dared not look behind me, for some things should remain unseen. Both Bill and I staggered away from the house onto the road, by then several neighbours joining us, disgruntled at having their sleep disturbed yet fuelled by an opportunity for gossip. When they asked what had happened, all we could do was shake our heads in disbelief and be happy to be outside, the night sky limitless above, and the street, solid beneath our feet. **** The next day we entered the house, along with some of my friends from the poker game a few nights before – safety in numbers. But for the smashed window, there was little out of place. I took a few pictures of what was left of the long lined tracks on the floor, while retrieving my torch from the bathroom, attempting to document each room as best I could. I must admit that I was hesitant to go back inside at first, but the place felt differen

24 minutes

September 22, 2013

Strange and Unexplained

Never Again

I was seventeen when she came. I’d been living with my abusive mother for seventeen long, painful years. It was around midnight, and my mother was already asleep, so when the three soft raps at the front door came it was me who answered. An odd looking little girl stood there, with cheeks pale and colorless, blonde hair in braided pigtails, pink dress torn a little at the hem, feet bare and turning slightly blue from the cold of winter, and black eyes. Fathomless, deep black eyes. I quickly let her in, thinking of how horridly underdressed she was. It wasn’t until later I’d wonder why she’d not been shivering, or even question as to why she was here in the first place. I got her into the living room, wrapping her little form in a thick afgan my grandmother knitted. She held it, though it didn’t seem to affect her, and I smiled. “What’s your name, sweety?” A long silence passed, in which she stared at me. I was beginning to be discomforted by her black gaze when she parted her lips and spoke in a soft voice. “Lacy Morgan.” I nodded, smiling again. “You can stay here tonight, Lacy.” I said, motioning to the couch. She curled up in a little ball, black eyes still on me, and I exited the room. That night I slept soundly, not worrying about my mother beating me or the strange little girl on my couch. When morning came and I trudged into the kitchen, I was greeted with a coffee mug to the shoulder. I gave a feeble shout of pain, staring at my mother. “What the hell did you do? Why is there dirt on the couch?!” she shouted, confusing me greatly. Upon investigating, I found that Lacy had vanished, the only proof she’d been there being some dirt that must have fallen off her dress or feet. I took responsibility, earning myself a strong hit to my cheek, then left for school. While there I heard something that sent chills through my spine. “Lacy Morgan was found dead last night.” I passed the day waiting for anymore news on the subject, but found none. Upon arriving home, the news was broadcasting a live report on her though. “Lacy Morgan, six years of age, was reported dead at seven last night. Her body was located in the backyard, buried there in her pink dress. So far there has been no sign of her mother, Marrisa Morgan, who is suspected to be the killer. Marrisa has reportedly abused Lacy multiple times, and may be responsible for her death.” Suddenly, a picture of Lacy appeared on the screen. She appeared very close to how she had when I met her, blonde hair in braids, pink dress, pale face. Only, her cheeks had color… and her eyes were baby blue. To most this would seem unimportant, but to me it was. She’d died before arriving at my house, if what the news castor said was true. Died hours before. I tried to play it off, going about my buisness. I went to bed early so as not to have to see my mother. It was around midnight when I awoke to cool fingers stroking the bruise on my cheek. I sighed, leaning into the small hand. “Never again.” Lacy whispered, before her hand vanished. Not ten minutes later I heard my mother screaming. I rushed into her bedroom, nearly fainting at what I saw. My mom was thrashing wildly on her bed, a small creature having buried its face into her chest. I could hear the soung of flesh tearing, and my mother’s screaming increased in volume. I wished I hadn’t gotten up. Later on, I’d tell myself I hadn’t. But I had. So, when Lacy pull back from the gaping hole in my mother’s chest cavity, I had a plain view of her razor sharp teeth, glinting in the light. Glinting with my mother’s blood. She smiled innocently at me for a moment, before swiftly tearing out my mother’s jugular. That time I did faint. When I came to, I was in my bed. I walked to my mom’s room, morbid curiousity getting the best of me. Upon opening the door, I found the room empty. The bed made neatly, as if my mom had left for work early. The only oddities were the dirty childs footprints, and the open window, showing that Lacy had in fact visited. I never saw my mother again, and I never missed her either. I eventually got married, and we had a child together. I named her Lacy. Recently, I noticed the neighbors daughter has all sorts of scrapes and bruises on her arms. I’ve started watching their home. And the other day I saw something odd: a little girl running barefoot through their back yard up to their backdoor. It was around midnight, so I couldn’t be for sure, but I thought she met my eyes with her black ones. And I could swear she mouthed two words at me. Never again.

3 minutes

September 10, 2012

Beings and Entities, Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Strange and Unexplained

My Fear Of Water

I’ve always had a terrible fear of being submerged completely in water. Not that I can’t swim or anything. My dad made me learn; he said I almost drowned when I was really young. I was afraid of it because, for as long as I can remember, whenever I am under water and look up at the surface I see a woman reaching down to me with a warm smile, with glowing golden hair and dark blue eyes. Even if its just in a bathtub. It always happened, it was just normal for me, but i never got used to it. It was unnerving, but also soothing at the same time. She always made me feel like it was okay. I still avoided it, though, because I was just a kid and it was really freaky. I never told my dad about it as a kid, but I did ask him about my mom. He never wanted to talk about her. Sometimes he even got mad at me for trying too hard to bring it up. It was only recently that I described this apparition to him. He nearly drove into a telephone pole; obviously he knew something. I asked him, again, about my mom. He still would say much, except that she died when I was very young, and that she loved me very much. He also admitted that her hair and eyes were those colors, just like mine. So I did some research on my own, looking up her name for myself on my birth certificate and trying to find any references I could, any news clips about a boy nearly drowning, any thing. I mostly wanted a picture, something I could match to my guardian angel. Today, buried in our town library, I found it. WINCHESTER: Marie Withie, 28, drowned to death yesterday evening after climbing a razerwire fence and fleeing to a nearby resevoir. A funeral is scheduled by her family for the 25th. Marie was institutionalized just six months ago, after being found “not guilty” of attempted murder on grounds of insanity. Her husband Daniel Withie had acted quickly enough to rescue their infant child when she was found trying to drown him in a bathtub.

2 minutes

August 15, 2008

Madness, Paranoia, and Mental Illness

Beyond Vantablack

art, color, Otherworldly, portal, science, strange, William Dalphin

I have a friend, Tomas, who works as a freelance artist creating booths and installations for event shows. He’s quite talented at designing interactive presentations for companies to showcase their products. The last time we got together, he told me that he had signed on to be part of “something big” that he wasn’t allowed to talk about due to an NDA. Then this past week, he included me as blind carbon copy in the following email. As soon as I finished reading this, I gave Tomas a ring, but the call went straight to voicemail. I drove over to see him, but when I buzzed his apartment, there was no response. His truck is in the parking lot, so at this point I can’t tell if he’s just not answering or if he’s not there. I know I don’t have to wait to file a missing person report, but I’m going to give him a day to call me back and then I’m taking this to the police. * * * * * * To: Charles Fetterman <cpfetterman@#########.###> Cc: Bcc: William Dalphin <wdalphin@#######.###> From: Tomas Laurent <tslaurent@#####.###> Subject: Beyond VantaBlack Project Mr. Fetterman, My name is Tomas Laurent. I am one of the artists recruited by Mr. Gustav Sørensen for the Beyond VantaBlack (BVB) project for your company. I won’t beat around the bush here, sir… I am scared out of my wits. When I was first approached and offered the chance to work with “the next step in Vantablack”, it was like winning the lottery. VantaBlack’s nearly 100% absorption is a fantastic achievement. I assumed that the only possible next step was perfect 100% light absorption. But when I was shown how BVB not only absorbed all light, but even some of the scattered light of the surrounding area, I was astounded. The way it strips away the defined edges of an object like it’s enveloping the thing in a black fog is breathtaking. I’m telling you this because I assume you’ve never actually seen BVB used before. If you had, you would not have approved the production of it. The color is unnatural, sir, it does not belong in this world. When we look up at the night’s sky, we think we are seeing the pure absence of light, but we aren’t. Light reflected off the atmosphere, light from the Earth and Moon and other stars, it protects us from the true emptiness of the void. BVB is the void, Mr. Fetterman. It extends beyond the boundaries we give it, and sucks away the light from everything around it. I am writing to you today because something has happened. I, along with two other artists, Genevieve LaVer and Piotr Edartu, were asked to come up with three unique exhibits with which to show off the “glory” of Beyond VantaBlack, which we did. My own art installation remains down in your research department, unfinished, where it shall remain as I have no intention of working further on it. Ms. LaVer’s idea was a room, the inside of which was completely painted with BVB, save one wall, which was installed with a full-length mirror from floor to ceiling. I’ve been inside the room, and it is one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen. Imagine stepping into absolute nothingness. Every step, you’re unable to determine if your foot is going to touch solid ground or not. To make matters worse, she had the floor installed at a slant, so as you try to walk toward the center, you’re going up an incline but can’t see the angle at which it goes. There is a single, white light in the center of the ceiling, for the matter of allowing whoever is inside to at least see themselves; otherwise it would be like not existing at all, just pure blackness. Because of the unique properties of BVB though, you cannot actually see the light in the ceiling, even when staring directly at it. Once the door is sealed, the occupant is trapped inside with only their reflection. The effect is unnerving. Yesterday, after Ms. LaVer finished her project, she shut herself inside the room, I presume to see how it looked. I was busy in my own area, working on my project. Half an hour later I heard yelling. Hurrying down the hall to her room, I saw a crowd of people surrounding the area, and I was quickly ushered away before I could see what was going on. After things quieted down, I managed to ask one of your engineers what had happened. He told me that someone had gone to check on Ms. LaVer and found the poor woman sprawled in the center of her room, bloody and crying. She had clawed out her own eyes, Mr. Fetterman. Somehow, her experience in the room drove her to take her own sight. When I asked Mr. Sørensen about it, he told me that only that Genevieve had had an accident, but that she was taken to the hospital, and she would be okay. As I mentioned, I’ve been in the room myself, having gone in later that day. Security had cordoned the room off, but nobody was monitoring the area, so it wasn’t difficult to get inside. The effect of the room’s design, with its BVB blackened interior and slanted floor, is almost instantaneous. Within seconds, I felt nauseated, and had to resort to crawling to reach the middle of the room, all the time watching as my hands disappeared into the black fog. As I went, my need for visual stimuli forced me to keep my eyes on the mirror across the room. In it I started to see things that couldn’t possibly exist: first the air seemed to fill with swirling tendrils of color, followed by sparks of light like the flashbulb of a camera, floating, and ghostly, disembodied eyes watching me. Worst of all though was my reflection looking back at me. I don’t know how, maybe the floor was curved toward the mirrored wall or the lack of defined space messed with my sense of direction, all I know is I found myself crawling toward my reflection, rather than the center of the room. Or worse, my reflection was crawling toward me, staring at me, watching me approach, me watching it approach. I tried to change direction, but I swear to you, it kept crawling toward me no matter how I tried to orient myself. And the more I looked into the eyes of my own reflection, the less human it appeared. Every second, it was like watching my face smear like a painting, my eyes, cheeks, nose, and lips turning runny like melted wax. But the one moment I will never forget, the image seared into my brain of the entire experience, was when I stopped in front of the mirror, staring at my reflection, it staring back at me, and then trying to stand up. As I raised my head, I found myself looking over the shoulder of my own reflection and seeing my face again, behind the reflection, also looking over it. In other words, the face I had come to accept as my own was not, there was someone else between me and the mirror, someone who even as the realization came rushing at me, stared up at me with the same horrified expression on its face, its features melting. It was too much. I was ready to follow Genevieve and claw my own eyes out. The only reason I’m here, able to tell you about it now is that I let go. I just let myself fall backward, striking my head on the floor in the process. I blacked out a bit, but I remember rolling down the slanted floor and then hitting the wall. The door must have been swung open from the force, because when I came to I could see out into the hallway, and I dragged myself out. I swear that before I got out and shut the door, I looked back and saw my reflection, only it was standing in the center of the room, watching me leave. That room is cursed. BVB has turned it into a residence of something sinister and malevolent. But that’s not even half of it, Mr. Fetterman. Piotr Edartu’s plan was the polar opposite of Ms. LaVer’s. Rather than a person in a room devoid of light, he had your team help him build a full coverage, cloth bodysuit using the BVB process. Now, everything upsetting about LaVer’s room one could explain away as tricks of the mind (ignoring the fact that she is currently missing). What happened to Piotr though, I assure you, cannot be explained. His suit was finished a week before Ms. LaVer completed her room. I watched him be helped into the suit for the first time, the team struggling to find where his legs went, then his arms. Once he had all four limbs clothed, they still had to find the zipper and hood to completely seal him in. Upon donning the full body suit of BVB, the effect was truly astounding. Piotr became a foggy, black silhouette. You couldn’t tell if you were looking directly at him. He had his work room installed with almost two dozen large flood lamps, drowning out every angle with harsh lighting, and still the suit cast a shadow. Nobody else in the room had a shadow, but Piotr in his suit did. Even more amazing, when he moved, he left a trail of blackness, a sort of after image of where he had been. I’ve never seen anything like it. He put the BVB suit on for short intervals every day, increasing the length he spent inside each time. He told me he enjoyed the way it unnerved the people around him. I asked him what it was like inside and he remarked, “I can see inside you. I can see your bones.” I’m not sure if he was joking or not. Piotr spent every work day setting up and taking photos of himself against various backdrops to see how the BVB of the suit affected the pictures. There was one I saw of him standing in a glass box filled with water. The water looked like ink. Piotr told me that the way water refracts light, it seemed to magnify the BVB’s absorption effect. After LaVer’s incident but before I went into her room and experienced the horror of that emptiness firsthand, I rushed to Piotr’s dressing room to tell him what had happened. He had been wearing the suit since before I got to work, the longest amount of time he’d ever kept it on. He was sitting at his desk, clad completely in the BVB bodysuit. I told him of LaVer and he became understandably distraught, asking me to help him out of the suit so we could get to the hospital. At first, I couldn’t find the zipper; my hands would disappear in the foggy blackness of the suit’s effect. Eventually I found it and unzipped him. There was nothing inside, Mr. Fetterman. The suit fell away as if draped on a frame of empty air, the hood deflating like a balloon and dropping to the floor along with the rest of the material. Stranger yet, Piotr still seemed to be inside the suit. It was pooled up on the floor in an undefinable pile, like a hole in the floor, but I could hear him from inside it. And whatever– wherever he was, he sounded terrified. I could hear him start to scream, echoing from out of the suit’s interior like he was falling through a great, endless void, his voice never fading off like it does as someone falls away. He was always right there, screaming, calling my name, begging me to get him out. I gathered up the material and tried shaking it, thinking maybe I could shake him out of the hole, but I had to drop it quickly because the way my hands disappeared inside it, I was afraid I would fall into the suit as well. I immediately hurried to Mr. Sørensen’s office across the research area and told him about Piotr. He seemed more put out than concerned, made a quick phone call, then told me to stay put while he marched off to Piotr’s room with a group of men from your security. I sat around in his office for a couple hours before he finally returned with a gentleman named Mr. Klein from your legal department. They assured me that Piotr was alright, that what I had seen was simply the BVB playing tricks on my eyes. They fed me a bunch of hogwash about how my vision hadn’t fully adjusted to the bright lighting of the room, then instructed me to sign a form to waive my rights toward speaking about either of the incidents. It was after that, after they had someone escort me back to my own work area, that I ventured over to Genevieve’s room and experienced its horror myself. That was yesterday, Mr. Fetterman. I called in sick this morning, with no intention of going in today, or any other day, out of fear for my own safety. Already my phone has rung at least twenty times this morning, from different unknown callers. Mr. Sørensen tried to reach me half an hour ago and left me a cryptic voicemail saying, “I hope that we don’t have to initiate a breach of contract clause”. I’ve looked over my contract with your company Demtronic, but I still have no idea what he meant by that. It sounds like a threat. There is something evil in Beyond VantaBlack, Mr. Fetterman, something Mr. Sørensen does not want people to know about. Ms. LaVer is missing. Mr. Edartu is missing. I’m afraid that I may go missing as well. I hope that I’m not making a grave mistake by trusting you with this information. Please contact me via this email address or the number provided below. Sincerely, Tomas Laurent, Artist for Hire (978) ###-#### tslaurent@#####.###

9 minutes

October 26, 2019

Science Fiction and Aliens, Strange and Unexplained

All of Our Mistakes Are Never Forgotten

diaries, insanity, journals, madness, mental illness, StarlessandBibleBlack

Day 0 As much as I despise having to type this, I’ve since come to terms with my wife’s suggestion. When I first told her of my assignment in the Arctic, she refused to let me leave. With time, she came to accept it, under one condition of course. She wanted me to keep this log while I’m out there. If I’m going to be stuck with a bunch of guys in an outpost for one month for what she calls ‘a total sausage fest’, she wants me to have something I can share my feelings with. She’s convinced that none of my fellow employees will be open for any personal discussion, and that bottling up my feelings will cause me to have a mental breakdown. I can be alone for weeks and not be bothered one bit, but there’s no convincing her of that. Any effort I put forth at this point would be fruitless. I apologize for the long explanation, but that’s just how I am. If I end up going off on some tangent, hope that I catch myself before writing pages of irrelevant information. Wait a minute, why am I writing like this, like someone is going to read this? I hope no one ever reads this load of trash. I’m just keeping my promise to my wife so she can stay happy. If anyone ever does read this, I hope they enjoy the ramblings of a blind man. As I was saying, I’m writing this journal while I’m on my arctic assignment. Actually, let’s call it an expedition. That makes it sound a little more exciting. This ‘expedition’ was put together by the company that I work for called Hornbeck Offshore. We specialize in machines called ROVs, which stands for remotely-operated vehicle. They’re mainly used in the oil field for servicing rigs, vessels, whatever the client pays us for. However, we were recently rented out by a division of the federal government for some observation under the arctic ice. I can’t remember which agency it is, since I had fallen asleep during the meeting. All I know is that I need to go with the team because I’m one of the most experienced machinists. Apparently, I’m going to have my own shop adjacent to the main building. I have no clue how much that costs them build, but the government is going to pay for everything, so I don’t really care. Oh, there’s a knock at my door. I guess we’re finally ready to catch our shuttle to the airport. It’s going to be a roughly nineteen-hour flight, so I’m going to bring a bottle of NyQuil. I can hardly stand some of these people in the office. I can only imagine what a pleasure they’ll be in the confined cabin of an airplane. I’m taking one last look over the shop from my office window. Everyone’s left already, and I’ve just been killing time at my computer. I better turn off all the lights so my boss doesn’t fire me for running up the electric bill. I’ll try to update this every few days, but no promises. Apparently one of our employees has an external hard drive full of movies, so this excursion may not be as miserable as I originally anticipated. Day 2 As I had been hoping, I slept through almost the entire flight yesterday. As soon as the plane took off, I took my NyQuil and waited for it to put me out. Before I fell asleep, I had someone sit in the vacant seat next to me. I was so tempted to ask him to move but decided to keep my mouth shut. If I managed to piss this guy off, I would still be stuck in the same building as him for the next month. That wouldn’t end well. I remember him shaking my hand and introducing himself, but I can’t remember what he said his name was. By that time, I was half-asleep and not really paying much attention. He remained silent after that but didn’t change seats. I feel asleep with my head against the window and pressure building in my ears. When I finally woke up, I let out a long yawn and popped the pressure that built up in my head. I had forgotten to take the decongestant my wife bought me, but it wasn’t that bad compared to what had occurred on the flight while I slept. Apparently, one of the computer technicians had too much to drink and ended up vomiting all over the bathroom. It got cleaned up, but still took both flight attendants to do so. As I left my set to use the bathroom, I passed the drunk man. He had been placed in his seat and had the seatbelt pulled tight. I guess either the flight attendants or some of my coworkers had restrained him. No matter who did it, I was thankful. I also prayed that he wouldn’t continue with this behavior when we got to the base camp. I remained awake for the remainder of the flight, which was only about an hour. I occupied my time by catching up with the news on my laptop. Luckily, my company hadn’t been cheap and booked us a plane with Wi-Fi. Although the base was supposed to have internet access half the time at best, it didn’t really bother me. I vaguely remember my boss saying that the signal was infamous for dropping out at random times. The plane touched down rather roughly. The Jeep I drove back home was far worse. I stretched and grabbed my bag from under the seat in front of me, following my fellow employees outside. The wind struck me first, causing me to grab the brim of my hat. As I descended the stairs, I had to keep my eyes narrowed to slits to avoid the stinging pain. Once my feet finally touched solid ground, or possibly solid ice, I set down my bag and placed my hand over my eyes. Nothing but white… I don’t know why I was surprised. I acted as if I had expected to see rolling plains or grassy hills. Instead, I was met with a barren white landscape as far as the eye could see. Of course, there was a small one-story building a short distance off. A radar dish barely taller than the roofline stood next to it on a rusty steel structure. I felt pity for whoever had to work that miserable place. “Alright everyone, I need you in groups of three for the ride over to the basecamp,” I heard my boss call. He stood in front of all of us with a clipboard in his hand. Everyone refused to move, instead standing in silence and pulling their parkas tighter around their bodies. “Don’t just stand there. I didn’t get paid an extra thirty percent of my salary to stand here freezing my balls off while you assholes stand around like penguins. Move!” He shouted the last word, causing everyone to scramble into groups of three. By the time I had picked up my bag, there was only one group left that had two people. As I walked over to join them, I recognized one of them as the man who sat next to me on the flight. Joining them, he looked over his shoulder and made eye contact with me. “Hey man, it’s you! Did you get enough sleep?” he asked with a tone that seemed unnaturally joyous. I hadn’t noticed it the night before, but he spoke with a thick country accent. “Yeah,” I replied hesitantly. “I got plenty. I’ll need it for the big day that we have ahead of us.” He smiled and nodded his head in acknowledgment. “You seemed like you slept hard. I had to switch seats because you kept leaning over on me.” I scratched the back of my head and tried to hide my embarrassment. “Yeah sorry… I don’t stay still when I sleep.” “What did you say your name was again?” The man had flipped his sunglasses down to save his eyes from the harsh sunlight reflecting off the snow. “John MacReady,” I said, extending my hand to shake his. With both of us wearing thick gloves, we were barely able to grasp the other’s hands. “I’m Drake Mason. Now that I think about it, I think I remember seeing your face around the shop when I’ve been there on occasion.” I smiled, not really knowing how else to respond. “Alright everyone, grab your belongings and pile into a vehicle. We have another few hours to the basecamp, so get comfortable.” Our respective groups walked over to the snow vehicles that sat in line. They were painted orange but had long faded in the beating sun. The lettering on the side, ‘SM100S’, had also formed brown spots due to rust. We all packed into the snow crawlers, which rumbled to life with a plume of smoke from the exhaust. I sat with Drake in the back while someone whose name I didn’t know sat up front with the driver. As we pulled away, I looked out the window towards the small building. There was what looked like a person standing in the open doorway. I don’t know how, but this individual seemed to be bent over in the doorway, as if too tall to fit under it normally. Although hardly striking me as dangerous, I was filled me with a sense of unease. As we drove away, the person walked back inside, never breaking his gaze from our departing fleet. I turned to Drake, looking to see if he had noticed the man as well. He had occupied himself by opening a book. I took it that he hadn’t seen the creepy guy, so I decided to not bother bringing it up. It wasn’t worth freaking him out over such a small incident. I barely knew him and didn’t want my first impression to be that of some rambling lunatic. The drive to the base wasn’t that bad, save for the driver trying to start up a conversation every few minutes. I had never been a big social person, and I sure as hell didn’t feel like starting now. When we finally arrived at the base, I had grown tired once again. Perhaps I had jetlag, or perhaps I was getting a taste of how low my energy was going to be while I was out here. Even though I had gotten plenty of sleep on the flight, I was beginning to feel fatigued. The vehicles finally came to a halt and we all piled back outside in the cold once more. By this time, the sun had mostly set, leaving the camp illuminated in the glow of floodlights. As my boss talked to everyone, I only nodded my head. I wasn’t paying attention to him, the hunger starting to rumble in my stomach or Drake poking me in the side with his elbow to keep me awake. I only fantasized about going to sleep once again. When I heard my boss say something about taking the day off tomorrow to catch up on sleep and rest, I perked up. I was one of the first people through the door. While everyone else looked around the basecamp in curiosity, I consulted a bulletin board on one of the walls. I quickly found my room number and walked in that direction. Once I entered the room, I shut the door, dropped all my belongings on the floor, and collapsed onto the bed. I didn’t bother removing my boots or parka. I simply went limp and let the grasp of slumber engulf me. I woke up this morning to find that Drake had been assigned as my roommate for the duration of our stay. I’m not going to complain. I’m just lucky that I’m not stuck with the drunk from the plane or that loudmouth from the graphic design office. After I woke up this morning, I went into the main area of the base. My boss calls it ‘the den’, so I guess I’ll do the same. The den consists of a group of couches around a large television, a pool table, a pinball machine, and some other things I don’t really see myself using. I joined two other men in the kitchen which overlooked the den. They had cooked breakfast and were sitting at one end of a table. They offered me the remaining fried egg and bacon strips, which I happily took. Before sitting down to join them, I scooped some grounds into the coffee maker and turned it on. Breakfast went better than I had expected. The two men, who introduced themselves as Roger and David, were a pleasure to talk to. Roger is a muscular man who keeps his dirty blonde hair spiked up with a large amount of product. He spoke with a booming voice that could strike fear into anyone. David was a skinny man who kept his long black hair combed back. He spoke with a quiet tone but perked up when we started talking about books. We ended up talking about our favorite authors until around 2 in the afternoon when everyone else began to wake up. We dispersed, saying how we hoped to talk again the next day. Although I had never been big on long conversations, these two were a joy to talk to. I guess this trip will turn out to be decent if I can continue to fight off my usual fear of being social. And so, that leaves us to where I am now. I’m back in my room typing this up, Drake is on his laptop watching videos whenever they manage to load over the crappy wi-fi. I better get going. The boss just announced over the intercom that dinner was ready. Oh, before I go, I only have one complaint. I forgot until now that I woke up last night to a shout. Apparently, Drake screams in his sleep. I just ignored him and buried my head deep into my pillow. I really hope he doesn’t do this all the time. I’m hundreds of miles from a pair of earplugs. Day 3 Today is the first day that we actually did some real work! I shouldn’t exactly be celebrating that, but at least it gives me something to do during the day. I, along with Drake and four other people, boarded a pair of snow crawlers and headed out to our project site. The ride was about forty-five minutes. Compared to the ride from the plane to the base, this one was short. A team had come out here a couple of weeks ahead of us and set up a temporary building near a large hole in the ice. Although the portable shelter was nothing to brag about, it had a heater, and that’s all I cared about. After a quick tour of the facility, we got to work. My job was to monitor the gauges on one of the screens. If the pressure in one the pneumatic arms went out or something like that, it was my job to go out to the ROV when it returned to land and remove the broken piece. We had brought a spare part for everything on the robot. I would place the new part on and fix the busted one when we got back to camp. Luckily, nothing went wrong today, so I mainly sat at a table talking with Drake. He would occasionally have to tend to a software issue with the computers, but it never took long. Overall, the day went by at a decent pace. By the time we were ready to head back to camp, I had worked up an appetite. One of the team members had forgotten to bring our lunch, so I wasn’t too pleased with that. The drive back to base seemed longer than it should have been, mainly due to my stomach only became noisier. As we neared the base, the floodlights turned on to illuminate it. The sun had begun to set while we were at the expedition site, and by now, had almost completely gone down. As soon as the snow crawler came to a halt, I flung open the door and ran inside. Rounding a corner, I ran through the den and into the kitchen. I yanked open the door to the fridge and grabbed my pre-made sandwich that the asshole had forgotten to pack. I threw the crumpled plastic wrap on the floor, too consumed by my desire to feast to throw it away. I tore the plastic wrap off and devoured it in a few bites. Even after consuming my sandwich, I was still hungry. I joined the rest of the team in the den while our cook prepared dinner. Although the Seinfeld episode currently on had my attention, my nose would get distracted as the smell of cooking meat wafted in my direction. Soon enough, all of us sat down at the long table in the kitchen and devoured our meal. I sat with Drake, along with Roger, David and a couple of other people I recognized from the expedition today. In between bites of pork roast, we talked about our lives back home and got to know each other a little better. I can’t believe I’m saying this but, I’m actually starting to become social. I guess my wife was wrong. Maybe I don’t need to keep this log. On the other hand, writing these entries does give me some quiet time to myself. I guess I’ll keep writing. Maybe I’ll enjoy reading these someday in the future. After dinner, we gathered in the den to watch a movie. The boss figured that after our first day of work we needed to have a mild celebration. I had thought of turning in to bed early but decided a social activity would do me some good. The employee who brought the external hard drive of movies connected it to his laptop and then plugged that into the television. After scrolling through a list, he clicked a movie and started it up. He had chosen a movie I remember being in the theaters when I was a kid: John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’. For those of you who don’t know what the movie is, wait… there I go again, acting as if I have some audience interested in my ramblings. Never mind, I just won’t bother correcting myself anymore. As I was saying, ‘The Thing’ is about a team in the arctic who end up having a shape-shifting alien infect people in the camp. It can take the form of any person, making it almost impossible to tell human from monster. Halfway through the movie, I got up and went to the kitchen to grab a beer. No one seemed to notice me get up and leave. They all had their faces glued to the screen as a husky began to shift into some ungodly monstrosity. I opened the door to the fridge and found a strawberry ale I thought would be good. As I turned back to the den, I caught sight of Drake starring out the window to my left. Whatever he was staring at had his full, undivided attention. He didn’t so much as blink when I walked past him and sat back down on the couch. I followed his gaze out the window. There was nothing there… All I could see was falling snow illuminated in the pale glow of the floodlights. Shrugging it off as some obscure behavior, I sipped my beer and turned my attention back to the movie. I don’t remember the ending since I dozed off with about half an hour left. I woke up to Drake shaking me, gently calling my name. After rubbing the drowsiness from my eyes, I followed him back into our bedroom. I sat in bed and tried to go to sleep but failed. I’m one of those people where if I fall asleep and wake up, I won’t go back to sleep until one in the morning. So, I might as well entertain myself. Currently, Drake is cursing at his laptop for dropping the internet signal. The poor guy’s been trying to send the same email to his wife and kids for an hour. I’m sitting with my laptop, typing these words. I can finally feel myself getting tired, so at least I can go back to bed. It’s two in the morning and we have to wake up at eight to head back to the expedition site. Better turn in. I’ll need as much sleep as I can get. Day 5 Yesterday went by a little rough for me. I woke up and went out to the expedition site. I had only gotten six hours of sleep, making me groggy the duration of the workday. Drake kept me company and made conversation as much as he could. I give him kudos for trying to keep me awake. If only I could’ve put forth as much effort trying to stay awake as he gave trying to keep me from faceplanting onto the table. Close to the end of the day, the ROV had to be pulled back up to the surface. One of the floatation blocks had come off, causing the vehicle to be pulled back to the surface via its tether cord. Apparently, the pilot had tried to explore a small cavern structure and scraped the block clean off. By the time I had undone the bolts on the frame that once held the flotation block, it was too late to put on a new one and continue working. I was told that by the time the ROV could’ve flown back to the spot of interest, we would have five minutes before it needed to be turned back around. I relished at the idea of a short work day. I kept my excitement hidden, not wanting my boss to regret his decision. We all piled into the snow crawlers and headed back towards the base an hour early. After dinner, I played some videogames with Roger and David, then turned in for the night. Instead of heading out to the expedition site today, I stayed in my shop to craft a new floatation block from the stock we had brought down here. I had never stepped foot in the shop but expected it to be like a much smaller scale of the one back home. Upon opening the door, I was greeted with new machines lining the walls. Although the small shop was one quarter the size of my other one, it had half as many tools. It felt a little more cramped than I would have liked, but I wasn’t going to complain. I spent the day machining a solid block of condensed foam to a set of plans on a nearby table. Apparently, the government had given my company enough money to where they bought a Bluetooth speaker for me to use. As I worked, my playlist of Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Rush, and other such artists played in the background. I took a break for lunch, sitting with David and Roger at the table in the kitchen. They had been brought along to create maps, spreadsheets and other collections of data that the ROV gathered. Whenever we brought back information one day, they would spend the following making sense of it and storing it in a neat and organized manner. I still didn’t know what we were doing, and the two of them tried explaining it to me. I failed to comprehend the gibberish that left their mouth. Roger had said something about mapping the ocean floor. David was a marine biologist, so his explanations made even less sense than Roger’s. I finished my lunch and went back out to the shop to finish my work. Spending another hour working away the foam to the smallest detail, I finally finished. I glanced down at my watch to find it was only four in the afternoon. Drake and the team weren’t due back for another hour. I grabbed the floatation block along with other supplies to bring with me to the expedition site tomorrow and turned off the shop lights. Stepping out into the cold, I zipped up my parka and dreaded the short walk back to the main base camp. As I walked through the snow that had fallen overnight, I glanced over at the mountain range that dwarfed our camp. Some members of the team had wanted to take the helicopter up there and ski down, but the boss prohibited it. He had said something about ‘our insurance doesn’t cover you being a bunch of dumbasses.’ He had never been too pleasant back home, but the cold only seemed to irritate him further. That’s why I kept my distance. Suddenly, something on one of the mountains caught my attention. At first, I thought my eyes were playing a trick on me. I used my free hand not holding the floatation block to rub my eyes. I looked at the same spot again to see it was still there. I couldn’t make out the shape too well. All I could see was a tall, slender black shape. Although my guess is rough, I estimate it was at least ten feet tall. It stood still, not moving a single bit. Even while writing this, I find it hard to believe what I saw. This wasn’t like me seeing Bigfoot or some demon. What I saw didn’t scare me or make me piss myself on the spot. It just filled me with an overwhelming sense of dread. Even now, I faintly feel its effects fatiguing my body and weakening my mind. I wish I could describe in better detail everything I felt at that moment in time, but I can’t. It filled me with trepidation that I have never come close to feeling before. Drake is asleep now, and I probably should do the same. I locked the door and drew the curtains over the windows a few minutes ago. I keep telling myself that what I saw wasn’t something alive, but merely a manmade structure of some sort. Jesus, I should just stop. Working myself into a sleep-deprived fit isn’t the answer. I just need to get some rest and think this through. Day 9 I’ve come to the conclusion that what I saw was just a figment of my imagination. My wife had warned me that being in an isolated place like this can make a man go mad, but I know I’m not on the brink of insanity or anything like that. What I saw was simply a trick my eyes were playing on me. Nothing more, nothing less. Ever since that day, I’ve just pushed it to the back of my mind and ignored it. I haven’t talked to Drake, Roger, or David about it. There’s no point in bothering those poor men with my delusions. The past few days have gone by without any problems. Drake and I have gone out to the expedition site and sat in the portable building while the ROV does whatever it was rented out to do. Luckily, the only part of it I had to replace so far is a flotation block. Although I’m pleased that I haven’t had to replace any parts, the days are boring just sitting in that building. Drake does a good job trying to keep my attention, but I still wish that I was at least back at basecamp watching a movie on the television. When we returned to base camp yesterday, Roger and David were doing their work, but had the television on all day. I’m starting to grow a little envious. They get to have a television, while the only entertainment I have are the strange ice patterns that are forming on the window of that building. I know it’s a crazy idea, but I’m tempted to purposefully break a piece of the robot just so I can be in the shop with my music. Even a little music will cure my boredom. I seem to have forgotten why I started typing this entry to begin with. It wasn’t to inform you how I’ve spent the past few work days in a boredom-fueled daze. Something happened last night. And to answer your questions right off the bat, the answer is no. No one died. Drake just told me something that I still find a little unsettling. He didn’t tell me that he was planning on killing everyone in the camp or doing something else dangerous. He didn’t act like some stereotypical madman in a horror film. What he said was just unnerving. As soon as he finished eating dinner, he left the rest of us and went back to our room. I stayed in the den with a few of the others, had a couple of beers and watched ‘The Fog’. It must have been around midnight when I finally left the den and came back to our room. When I opened the door, I was met with the sight of Drake staring out the window like the other night. However, this time his face was pressed right up against the glass. Although I was hesitant to get closer to him, I found myself inching forward in his Direction. “Drake,” I asked him, “are you all right?” He must have been in some kind of deep trance, because when I asked him that question, he immediately turned around and covered his mouth to stop a scream from escaping. His eyes were open wide with fear, and the hands covering his mouth trembled. “Seriously man, if there’s something bothering you, you can tell me.” I was never all that comfortable with people opening up to me, but I felt this time I had to do it. I couldn’t have my roommate remaining in a constant state of fear the rest of our time here. Drake slowly uncovered his mouth, his hands shaking even more violently as he placed them down at his side. “Y-you… you’ve seen it, too… haven’t you?” He spoke with fear strangling his throat, causing him to choke on every word. The only response I could muster was letting my mouth hang open and let out of confused sigh. I shook my head and finally found some words to say. “What in God’s name are you talking about? There’s nothing out there but snow and ice.” Drake shook his head. His eyes darted back up towards the window. His body shook, and he returned his gaze to me. “I know you’ve seen it… I can tell you have…” At this point, I’d started to become more aggravated than concerned. I turned around and glanced out into the hallway to see if anyone was listening to us. After I was certain that everyone was either asleep or in the den, I shut the door and locked it. “Alright Drake,” I said with a tone of irritation in my voice I wasn’t bothering to hide. “You need to tell me what in the living hell you’re talking about. Let’s just get this over with and get to sleep. What do you mean by it?” Drake sucked in a deep breath. “The Shape… I know you’ve seen it, and I’ve seen it too.” At that moment, the image of that thing standing on the mountainside pushed to the front of my mind from where I had tried to ignore it. I remembered it as vividly as the day that I saw it. With that image burning in my mind, I also began to feel that sense of dread fill me like it had the first time I saw it. “How the… how the hell do you know that I saw it? I haven’t talked to anyone here about it.” Drake hadn’t broken his gaze with me the entire time we were talking. His eyes had gone cold, conveying no emotions to me. “Because… you’re acting just like my grandfather when he saw it.” I widened my eyes with confusion and let out an exaggerated breath. “Well,” I said as I pulled a chair up next to his bed, “I guess we’re going to be here a while.” I took my seat and motioned for him to continue. “You act just like my grandpa when he saw it. What you’re seeing is something he called The Shape. I know something with a name like that doesn’t sound terrifying at first, but I haven’t seen anything terrify a grown man as much as this thing did. When I was growing up, my grandfather lived with me and my parents. Although his mind was still sharp, his body had long since begun to fail him. My mother thought that putting him into a retirement home would do nothing but strip away his dignity. So, she renovated our old guest room and allowed him to move in with us. He sold his house and used the money to renovate the room. Anything that was left over, he put aside for me in a college fund. After a few months of him living with us, I started to notice that he was constantly looking over his shoulder. He acted as if someone was around every corner waiting to get him.” Drake broke his gaze from the wall and looked into my eyes again. “Although you’re not acting exactly like that, John, you share that same look in your eye that he did. I don’t know what else to call it except for a sense of fear that he tried to keep tucked away in the back of his mind, a small bit of it breaking through every once in a while and making itself known.” I didn’t respond, not knowing how to. Instead, I simply starred at Drake in silence. “One day, I finally worked up the courage to ask what was bothering him. He placed a finger over his lips and lead me into his room. He locked the door behind us, putting his ear to it to make sure my parents hadn’t followed us. He sat me down on the bed and pulled up a chair next to me. With a stone-cold look on his face that I’d never seen before, he made me swear to never tell my parents what he said. He feared that they would take him away and lock him up in an asylum somewhere. I gave my word and he took a deep breath before starting his story.” “When he was in his twenties, he was drafted into the second World War. He wasn’t sent into the heart of the fight, but he was still near some brutal stuff. Although the name of where he was deployed escapes me now, I remember him saying that during the winter, it snowed at least six feet. He stayed with his fellow soldiers in a makeshift tent in a field. The nights were cold and brutal, sometimes two blankets not even being enough to keep him warm. One night, it got so cold that he put on his jacket and went outside to make a run to the supply tent and grab more blankets. The weather outside was well below freezing, but he felt it would be worth it to be warm in bed. As he trudged through the snow towards the supply tent, something out in the distance caught his attention. There was enough moonlight for him to barely make out a shape standing at the edge of the field by the tree line.” “At first, he thought his eyes were playing a trick on him. However, he soon found The Shape slowly starting to move in his direction. He was frozen in fear for a few seconds, but soon found the strength to move and run towards the supply tent. He sprinted to it, throwing open the door and running inside. He slammed it behind him and locked it tight. The officer on duty at the time gave him an extremely confused look rather than one of worry. He asked my grandfather what had him out of breath. He simply replied by pointing towards the window, motioning for the officer to take a look outside. The man walked over to the window and looked out over the field. My grandfather had expected The Shape to be gone, making him look like he was absolutely mad, but it was there.” “The officer told my grandfather that it was now standing close enough to the tent that a spotlight could easily catch it. He darted away from the window and immediately picked up his radio. As he shouted into it, he flicked on the spotlights and illuminated the entire camp. Within less than two minutes, the commanding officer had burst through the door. He pulled my grandfather and the solider on duty aside and questioned them.” “He was never told what happened that night. All he knew was that by morning, three soldiers had gone missing. Although no one at the camp sent out a search party, he recalled seeing Jeeps swarming the surrounding area. He had no idea where they had come from, and they lacked any sort of identification. The vehicles remained there for nearly four days, but nothing came of their activity. They simply left and were never seen again. My grandfather never learned anything more about the missing soldiers or the mysterious search party.” “When h

76 minutes

September 12, 2017

Journals and Diaries, Madness, Paranoia, and Mental Illness

Carlisle Pond

Moonlit_Cove, Video Narratives OK

That infernal sound wakes me once again. At first I can’t place it as I ascend from the murky depths of sleep. Then I hear it again as the fog is clearing – the familiar honking of a car horn. “Not again,” I murmur and turn over to face my wife, June, who is also stirring awake. “What is it, Adam?” she whispers to me in a dry, hoarse voice. “More pesky kids, I’m sure.” I slip out from under the covers and proceed to the window facing the pond. I step behind the lace curtain and separate the blinds at eye level. There is a car about 50 yards away, turning around on the dirt road on the other side of the pond. Within seconds its taillights fade away in a dust cloud and finally disappear altogether behind the trees that line the front of our property. I drop the blinds and curtain and make my way over to the nightstand next to my side of the bed to pick up my wristwatch. At the press of a button, its face glows, telling me it’s 2:37 AM. I lie back down on my side of the bed, the spot still warm. “All of this nonsense because of some stupid urban legend,” I say in a frustrated and resigned tone. I feel June’s hand rub my shoulder in that consoling way that I love so much about her. She always manages to keep me calm in times like this. I continue to mull over the events in my head until I finally find sleep again. – – – – – In 1983 there was an incident that took place on our property. We didn’t live here at the time, and when we first moved in, we had no idea how much things would escalate regarding the infamy of this land. You see, we live in the old farmhouse out on Route 41. Yes, THAT farmhouse. Back when this was a thriving farm, it was owned by the Carlisle family. They had moderate success with it for many years, but began to experience a gradual decline in the late ‘70s. The farm soon began operating in the red, and the 1983 incident was the final nail in the coffin, so to speak. On that fateful night in August of 1983, a pair of teenage lovers found their way onto the farmland – to the pond, to be exact. They were there for a bit of harmless fun, no doubt. Maybe a bit of drinking – maybe a bit of smoking – maybe a bit of making out or skinny dipping. Whatever it was, it didn’t end well. Both of them somehow ended up drowning in the pond. Their bodies were recovered, but the investigation never determined why they had drowned. Many rumors began to form as to how they’d died. These encompassed everything from a supernatural entity in the pond that would pull swimmers under the water – to a mysterious whirlpool that would suck people down – to aliens that had crash landed on the farm and were drowning people. If one could dream it up, it became a theory – and the weirder the better. This is where the urban legend comes in. I don’t know how or when it started, or by whom, but supposedly if you drive to the end of the dirt road on our property at night, right up to the edge of the pond with your headlights shining out over the water, and honk your horn three times, you will see an apparition of the two teens that drowned floating above the water – almost as if they were walking on top of the water. Over the years it has become a popular activity born out of dares, hazing traditions and just plain boredom to attempt this nonsensical ritual in the hopes of catching a glimpse at the dead lovers over the water. Much to my and June’s dismay. – – – – – I spend the morning standing out on the dock that overlooks the pond, hot coffee in hand. My breath is visible in front of me in the brisk air of late autumn. The trees on the other side of the pond look beautiful this time of year, especially when accented by the fog lingering above the water’s surface. The flaming leaves of orange, red and yellow appear to rise up from the dense, opaque air. I hear footsteps as June joins me on the dock with her coffee. “Nice, isn’t it?” she asks. “Yes. I’ve always loved it here. So peaceful. It would be perfect if not for the ‘tourists’.” I make a quotation mark gesture with the fingers of my free hand when I say that last word. We both sip our coffees. Then I add, “I think I’m going to go ahead with what we talked about – fencing the property and putting up a gate across the drive.” “Oh Adam, we’ve talked about this before. You know you’re not in any kind of shape anymore to be doing that kind of work.” “Then I’ll pay someone else to do it,” I rebut. My reply is sharper than I had intended. After a brief pause I continue, “I’m sorry, hon, I didn’t mean to snap at you. I’m just so tired of all the honking and tired of catching people on our land. It’s just a matter of time until either someone gets hurt or someone tries to hurt us.” “Now why would they do that?” Her tone is as calm as ever. She’s my rock. “You know how people are. They visit the pond, and when nothing supernatural happens they may turn their attention toward our house – try to break in or something.” June gives me a frowning smirk. “Well, it’s not out of the realm of possibility, you know,” I counter, “especially if they’re high.” June takes my free arm in hers. “People that really want to get in will still find a way in,” she says. “I know, but I think it would cut way down on the number of people that try.” “If that’s what you want, I’ll support you.” She kisses me on the cheek and turns to walk back to the house. “Don’t stay out too long,” she calls back over her shoulder, “it’s cold out this morning.” I stand there for a few more minutes, soaking in the peace and beauty, and dreading what may come with nightfall. – – – – – This time we hear the commotion before we are even in bed for the night. In fact, we are sitting in rocking chairs on the front porch when we see the headlights approaching on the opposite side of the pond. It’s not completely dark yet, but the dusk indigo sky is quickly heading there. Tires make a crunching sound on the gravel and dirt as the car slowly pulls up to the edge of the lake and stops. At the angle our house sits relative to the pond, the car’s headlights are not directly on us, and I surmise that the driver cannot see us. We remain still in our chairs and wait. We know what’s coming. “That one’s pretty close to the edge,” I say. Before June can answer, the driver sounds the car’s horn for the first time. “Right on the edge,” she confirms when the horn blast ends. A second honk rings out, echoing off the rolling hills of the farmland behind our house. I stand and walk to the edge of the porch. I’m annoyed and my nerves have had enough of this. I take a few steps down onto the front lawn. “Don’t do anything stupid,” June calls to me. I wave her off and continue walking. The horn sounds a third time. By now I am walking down the dock directly across from the car. Surely they can see me in the headlight beams. The driver, apparently in a panic, throws the car into reverse and nails the throttle. The rear tires spin, flinging chunks of dirt and gravel forward. I hear the particles clinking as they hit the sides of the car. With the loss of traction the car begins to slip forward. First the lower front valence of the body touches the water, then the motionless front tires. In an instant the headlights are nearly submerged. The driver lets up off the accelerator before sinking any further. The car sits idle for a few seconds. I stand at the end of the dock and watch, frustrated as ever. The last thing I want is to have to go and rescue some of the punks that have been terrorizing us. Just as I’m putting a plan together in my head for how to go about helping them, the driver seems to have a moment of clarity. The throttle is applied gently, just enough to not break traction. Inch by inch the car moves backward, and in a miraculous turn of events, manages to work its way out of the impending watery doom. Once free, the driver executes a hasty turnaround and blasts down the path away from our property, fishtailing the entire way. Only a dust cloud remains on that side of the pond. “That was a close one!” June says excitedly. She is standing at the edge of the porch. I walk back toward her. “I’m telling you, June, I’ve had it! I just want some peace and quiet back here. Is that too much to ask?” “We can always move,” she offers. “But we shouldn’t have to. I like it here… minus the legend.” I point a thumb over my shoulder toward the pond. She sighs and takes my hand when I reach the porch. I keep walking and she quickly follows behind, still hand in hand. The springs on the old metal screen door squeak as I open it. We enter the foyer and I release June’s hand. “I guess I’ll call the fence people tomorrow,” I say as the door clacks shut. I close and dead-bolt the thick wooden door behind it. – – – – – -Three nights later- – – – – – Ronnie is driving back to Carlisle Pond with his girlfriend Christy. Dense trees of all gnarled shapes and sizes that line the sides of Route 41 come into view in their headlights, and vanish just as quickly – each individual tree seeming to relish its brief moment in the spotlight. Christy is visibly nervous, but Ronnie is determined to show her. “Can’t we just turn around and go back?” Christy pleads. “We’re almost to the turn-off. It’s somewhere up here on the left, just past a huge rock,” Ronnie says, ignoring her request. Christy sees the rock come into view and feels a tinge of dread rush through her abdomen. There is all manner of graffiti painted on the rock – no doubt a marker to alert curious seekers to the exact location. Ronnie slows the car and turns onto the dirt and gravel road. Grass is growing tall in the center of the path, in between where the car’s tires grind on the small rocks. Dust kicks up behind them as Ronnie slowly drives the car around a sweeping right turn. Trees cling so tightly on both sides that branches hit the windshield and scrape along the doors. The car exits into a clearing and the pond comes into view. “This place gives me the creeps,” Christy whispers, “and you came here alone the other night?” “Yeah, isn’t it cool?” Ronnie stops the car several feet shy of the pond’s edge, his headlights revealing the escape ruts he left last time. He points into the distance out the left side of the windshield. “Look at that old house.” “Gross, it looks all run-down. Like nobody’s lived there in decades,” she responds. “But I swear I saw someone the other night. After I honked three times, he appeared. Just like the legend! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” Christy is glad it’s dark in the car so that Ronnie cannot see her rolling her eyes. It seems that this is all that he can talk about lately. He’s spent nearly all of his free time recently on the internet researching the history behind this urban myth. The product of his effort is now stashed in the form of printouts all over the car – a news article in the glove box – a firsthand exploration account from a message board in the console – and Christy believes she may be sitting on a Google maps screenshot with a red circle drawn around the Route 41 turnoff. “Are you ready?” Ronnie asks. Christy sighs in frustration and says, “Just get it over with so we can go.” Ronnie sounds the horn the first time. – – – – – Inside the house, I look away from the book I’m reading when I hear the horn blast. June folds down the corner of her newspaper and glances at me from across the room. We share a look that says, ‘here we go again’. I get up from my comfy armchair and head to the foyer. I unbolt the locks and open the heavy wooden door. Through the screen of the metal door I see headlights across the pond. I open the door and storm out onto the porch as June chases after me. A second horn blast rings out. – – – – – “Did you see that?” Ronnie asks excitedly. “I see movement over there.” He points between the house and dock. Christy gasps. “Is someone really living here?” she wonders. “But the article said that no one’s lived here since the Carlisle farm shut down.” Ronnie sounds the horn a third time. “I’m telling you, Christy, no one does live here! I mean look at the condition of the house!” The movement in the shadows increases and soon, fully illuminated in the car’s headlights, are two figures – a male and a female. “It’s them! It’s Adam and June!” Ronnie cries out. Christy recalls the names from the article about the young drowned couple. The figures approach the end of the dock and, in a move that defies all physics, continue their sprint across the top of the water. Christy screams. Ronnie drops the gear selector into reverse and mashes the pedal. The tires spin again, but this time his caution in not parking too close to the edge pays off and he gains enough grip for the car to move backward. He makes a panicked turn-around, during which Christy looks fearfully out the side window. The apparitions of Adam and June are way too close now. “Go!” she shrieks. Ronnie throttles the car forward down the dusty road, taillights disappearing behind the trees. – – – – – “I just want to be left alone,” I say to June, “to rest in peace.” We still float above the water. “Shhh.” She rubs my back and shoulders in her ever-comforting way. “They’re just curious kids, Adam, and they can’t hurt us,” she reassures me. “Let’s go back inside.” As we turn to head back toward the dark, dilapidated house I say, “I love you, June.” She replies, “I love you too, Adam. Always will.”

9 minutes

September 1, 2016

Locations and Sites

Night In A Tree Stand

based on a true story, based on true events

I am not a person who is scared easily. I don’t let fear control me. I have had bullets wiz by my head. I have had rocket-propelled grenades explode less than ten yards from me. I know what it is like to jump from an airplane under gunfire. I know what it’s like to live as if this was my last day on earth, yet I was never afraid. I can only remember one time in my life where I could not control fear. One time where I truly felt uncontrollable fear. The fear that makes you cry and tremble. The fear that makes you lose control. No one but my best friend ever believed what I had experienced was true. My family didn’t believe me. My now wife didn’t believe me. I don’t know if you would even believe me. I don’t care. I’m past the point of not telling my story for fear that I won’t be believed. Please understand that I grew up in the middle of nowhere. The closest people to me where my grand parents who lived just down the road from us and my best friend John’s family who lived right next door. There were several other homes in the area within walking distance, but far enough apart that you really couldn’t call them next-door neighbors. I learned to hunt, fish, shoot, and survived in the woods at an early age. My father had grown up in the country, moved to attend college, and met my mother. My mother was the opposite of my father. She grew up in the city. She taught me art, science, and how to cook. I had the best of both worlds growing up. I played multiple sports in high school but decided to join the Army Reserve after I graduated. I graduated with honors from basic training and AIT and enrolled in a local college afterwards with plans to study computer engineering. At college I entered ROTC. I graduated from college and completed BOLC (basic officer leaders’ course) for the army. I returned home only to be deployed to Iraq where I served for a year. As a second lieutenant in Iraq, I was in charge of a platoon of soldiers. We were good at what we did and command took notice, putting us on missions and patrols that were most likely to see action. I loved it but after a year the adrenaline had worn off and the being shot at and seeing things explode feet from you began to fatigue my men and me. In the end, because we were good at what we did, we all went home, bruised, battered, and tired but alive to our loved ones. I had managed to keep up on my computer engineering skills while in Iraq and had landed a job with a company two hours from where I grew up. I came home in August and the job wasn’t going to start till mid January of the following year so I had some time to relax and unwind. I was still living with my parents until the job started and fall meant one thing. Hunting season. Specifically bow season, which was something I missed the last two years because of my training and deployment. I eagerly unpacked my hunting clothes and gear from the attic where my mother had stored them and woke up early one September morning to head into the woods to scout for a hunting spot for that upcoming season. As I walked out the front door with my backpack full of gear on, I noticed John and his father standing in their backyard around the pen in which they kept chickens. John was bigger than me. He wasn’t college educated, but he was good with his hands and worked in construction. He was living with his parents while he was building his own house in his free time on some land he bought a few miles away. “Morning,” I said as I lumbered with my gear to where they were standing. “What’s up, brother,” John replied with a half smile? “Just heading out to do some scouting for bow season.” I could see the pen door was open and they were both looking at it inquisitively. John’s dad was slowing moving it back and forth and playing with the latch as if to test the door itself. “I don’t know,” John’s dad said puzzled. “The latch is too high for a raccoon unless they climbed the wire fence and opened it.” “I’ve seen them do some crafty things and they are smart,” replied John to his dad before turning to me. “It’s the second time in two weeks someone or something has gotten into the coupe. Took a chicken last week and two last night. It might the damn town kids who ride their ATVs on the paths back in the woods all the time or it might be raccoons. Either way we’re going to have to lock the pen with a pad lock now.” “Town kids must be getting bored if they’re stealing chickens,” I stated with a sarcastic smirk. The local kids from the nearest town always played pranks or committed some minor act of vandalism or theft. Usually the result was broken mailboxes or some type of penis shaped graffiti on a house or garage door. Nothing was so serious that it couldn’t be fixed or cleaned up. Before I left to head into the woods John had told me to scout out crow hill. He mentioned there had been a lot of deer activity up in that area and that he would have put his tree stand there except he got an offer from his girlfriend’s dad to hunt their family farm. Crow hill was a densely wooded hill about three quarters of a mile from our houses. One half of the hill was covered in a thick pine forest where murders of crows would occasionally hang out in noisy groups. The pines abruptly came to an end and opened up into a hardwood forest with fairly thick underbrush on the other half of the hill. The leaves had just started to fall and the smell of the woods and crisp air excited me. The dust and sand of Iraq paled in comparison to the crunch of leaves under my boots and cool air of my home. I had already seen several deer and deer signs by the time I reached the top of crow hill. As I came over the crest of the hill a loud snort like a blast of air rang out. My senses heightened as I quickly scanned the area. Over the top of the underbrush I saw it. There it goes! There it goes! I thought to myself excitedly as I watched two pair of very large deer antlers glide over the top of the underbrush and disappear into the pine forest. I walked to the border of the pine forest where the deer had run. It was a meeting of two worlds. The hard wood forest had leaves but the sun shine was bright and lit up the forest floor while the pine forest’s trees blocked out almost all light leaving the forest floor dark and mysterious. It was a little creepy to me but I didn’t care. There were deer tracks, antler rubs, droppings, and deer beds on the ground all around me. This was the spot. I turned in circles as I scanned for the perfect tree to attach my ladder stand to. Something to my left caught my eye as I spun. 10 yards away was a section of ground that looked like it had been purposely cleared of leaves in a circular fashion. Something was lying in the middle of the circle. With curiosity peaked, I walked over. What the hell? I was thinking out loud as my eyes tried to recognize what I was looking at. It was a house cat’s body. But it had been dismembered. The limbs were strewn around in no organized fashion and it was missing its head. Only skin and bones were left. The cat had been there a while by the looks of it, but what confused me more than the position and condition of the cat were the odd markings around the body. Lines and circles surrounded the cat in an odd fashion. Damn kids, I thought to myself. The town kids had probably come across a cat that was probably killed by a coyote or bobcat and decided to make its corpse look spooky by drawing weird incoherent symbols in the dirt around its body. The empty beer bottle just outside the circle confirmed my theory. As much as the sight bothered me the thought of deer hunting pushed any concern for the dead cat out of my mind. I brushed off the find and began looking for a tree again. I picked a large tree that was centered perfectly between the pine forest and the hill’s edge I had just walked up. There was a bit of a clearing that ran from the tree to the hill’s edge. I pulled my large bowie knife out of my backpack and began to clean out the clearing and around the base of the tree. I cut away as many small shrubs and branches as I could to make a clear path for me to walk. As I was almost finished the flapping of the wings and the familiar squawking of a murder of crows flying overhead into the pine forest could be heard. Something had kicked them up. The hum and hiss of an ATV engine soon followed. It grew louder and passed. That’s probably what scared them. I’m probably close to one of the paths that run behind the house. I made my way through the underbrush in the direction of where I heard the ATV. Only 20 yards from the tree I chose, I ran into a dirt ATV path. I cleared out a walkway from the tree to the path, marked it and my chosen tree with a ribbon, and followed the path back until I began to recognize the woods behind my house. It was the perfect set up. There was an easy path to follow and I wouldn’t have to worry about scaring any deer on my way to and from the tree stand. The next day John and I took his four-wheeler up to the tree I had marked off and we setup my ladder stand. I had since forgotten about the cat I had found the previous day. The seat and platform were about 25 feet off the ground, which was the perfect height. I could see everything from the ATV path behind me to the edge of the hill in front of me. I felt good about this spot and I was ready to start hunting the beginning of bow season in the coming weeks. When bow season finally arrived a few weeks after I had everything set up and I spent my days and evenings in the woods. I saw plenty of deer and even a few bucks that I considered shooters. I was holding out for those two bucks I had seen when I crossed over the hill that first day when scouting though. One of those two monsters is what I was after. I always took my cell phone with me. It was kept on silent incase of an emergency. Strangely enough, because we lived near radio towers, I got good reception from my tree stand and would take pictures of the beautiful scenery around me or send texts to John mocking him about the size of the deer I was going to shoot compared to anything he was going to get on his girlfriend’s farm. Angry Birds also help to pass the time when all the animals in the forest wanted to be still. The day, or night rather, that I felt real fear for the first time ever was on October 23rd. It was a cool day and overcast. It was perfect for hunting. I had some errands to run in the morning and had promised to help my father with some housework in the afternoon, which left only the evening for hunting. I was fine with that. It meant I got to hunt the twilight hour, or as hunters know it, the magic hour. It’s that last hour before sunset where everything seems to get brighter before it becomes pitch black and all the animals are on the move. I was on my way back from running my errands when I pulled into the driveway and saw my father talking to one of our neighbors from down the road Mr. Dawson. “How are you, Mr. Dawson?” I asked as I stepped out of my car. “Oh just fine. You’re looking good and healthy and I’m glad to see you home from that hell hole across the pond,” he said with a smile. His black lab was with him obviously out for an evening walk. “Jake was talking about someone taking his rabbits out of their pen,” my dad started “and I mentioned that John’s family recently had some chickens taken.” Dawson chimed in immediately. “I know it was them damn town kids because my lab went nuts last night barking up a storm. I threw on the floodlight and the rabbit pen was wide open. I opened my back door and could hear those shits running up through the woods.” “What the hell is wrong with kids in the town these days,” I stated with disapproval. “I guess you’ll have to pad lock you pens and cages like John and his dad did.” “Well that’s the thing,” Mr. Dawson started, “The rabbit pen is chained and locked. Whoever did this broke it clean off probably with a bolt cutter. Now I have to run into the hardware store and get a new chain and lock.” That evening with my backpack strapped to my back and my bow and arrows in hand I headed out into the cool crisp woods. As I was stepping into the woods I could hear John’s familiar voice call out to me. “Hey,” he shouted in a proud tone from his back porch. “Got my deer this morning! When you get back from dicking around in the woods you want to come over and have a beer?” “Yea, I’ll be over. Right after I bag that monster that’s up by my tree stand,” I taunted back! It was a good 25-30 min walk to my tree stand. I was tired when I got to the stand but my adrenaline kept me going. Like a ninja I made my way through the brush to the tree, ascended the ladder and pulled my backpack and bow up after me with a rope without making a sound. With my butt planted in the seat of my stand and my bow on its hook, I felt completely at peace. Beautiful nature surrounded me even on this overcast day. It was unimaginably better than the war torn streets of Iraq. I pulled my phone from my backpack to check the time. 5:03pm. Perfect timing. The magic hour was going to start early because of the overcast day and excitement was flowing through my veins. Everything was perfect. The wind was in my face so deer coming over the hill or out of the pine forest wouldn’t be able to smell me. Smaller animals were scampering across the ground headed to their burrows or nests for the night and the faint hooting of an owl that had just awoken could be heard in the distance. 5:55pm. I put my phone away and let my eyes adjust to the dimming light. My adrenaline had kicked in harder as the thought of one of those two large bucks coming into shooting range raced through my mind like wild fire. I knew I would be walking home in the dark so I brought a flashlight to guide my way. I double-checked to make sure I had packed it when I heard the crunching of leaves. My eyes opened wide and my ears perked up as I tried to quickly find the direction of the sound source. It wasn’t a small animal. It was the distinct rhythmic sound of something heavier walking among the leaves. There! There it is! The noise is coming from over the hill’s edge. I slowly pulled a pair of small binoculars from my backpack to see if I could get a better glimpse of what was coming over the hill. I can see it! It’s a deer. My mind was racing. I couldn’t tell if it was a buck or a doe but I could definitely see the grayish brown coloring of the fur of the distorted figure through the brush’s branches. 10 more yards and I would have a clear view and a long shot at whatever it was. I strung the binoculars around my neck and got ready to stand up. It stopped. As if it didn’t want to come into the clearing at the edge of the hill. The light was dimming fast and I as afraid I would not get a shot at a trophy buck if that is what it was. The deer moved left into the brush. My heart sank to my feet. I began to relax and accept the fact that it wasn’t going to come close enough for me to get a shot until I realized it was moving closer but through he brush on the left side of the clearing. I stood up and put my left hand on my bow. I only had about 20 minutes of light left and I wanted to make sure I made a clean shot. I could hear the deer 30 yards in front of me in the brush on the left side of the clearing. It was definitely in range of a clean shot. I couldn’t see it but I knew it was going to step out in the clearing. My heart was pounding. I could feel my body begin to sweat in excited anticipation. The excitement racing through my body stopped my senses from realizing the forest had fallen silent. I began to remove my bow from the hook when the deer began to move out into the clearing. What the fuck is that? From behind the bush appeared an arm. Long, black, leathery, and with less than five fingers. It stretched out and planted its palm on the ground. A shock went up my spine. The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. My body began to shake. My left hand fell to my side and my legs gave out underneath the weight of my body causing me to silently thump back into my seat. I grab my binoculars and slowly lifted them back up to my face. I didn’t want to make any jerk movements. I didn’t want whatever it was to know where I was. Was this a person? I watched through my binoculars as the rest of the body of this thing emerged from behind the bushes. Its skin was leathery and its legs were very long. It looked human like but it wasn’t human. It moved in a crouching fashion. I could see something in its left hand. It was holding something brown. The light was fading and I struggled to make my eyes adjust. It was a rabbit. Not a wild rabbit. One like Mr. Dawson kept and raised. I could feel fear gripping me no matter how hard I fought it. I trained to fight and to hunt. I didn’t know what this thing was or how I would be able to confront it. I sure as hell couldn’t leave my tree stand now. That’s when I smelled it. I had smelled it once before in Iraq. Burning flesh. The smell nauseated me. The air reeked with this creature’s presence. My binoculars were fixated to my face. What is it doing? The creature meticulously cleared out the leaves around its feet in a circle. I watched in horror as it raised the rabbit above its head. Its eyes… Its eyes were yellow with no clear center or pupil. Its mouth contorted into a half smile bearing a mouth full of deformed teeth. Its lower jaw unhinged and sank loosely below as it placed the rabbit’s head in its mouth. Faster than a mousetrap, its bottom jaw shut and it jerked its head violently backwards ripping the rabbit’s head from its body. The snapping of bone sent a shiver up my spine. It grabbed the rabbit’s back legs and held the lifeless body upside down. I watched in horror as blood flowed from the animal’s corpse and splashed on the cleared ground. It shook the body up and down as if trying to empty it of every last bit of blood. Like a smoker with bad lungs it seemed to giggle in a wheezing airy fashion. My eyes welled with water. I couldn’t fight it anymore. I was gripped with fear. I was crying. The military officer who had been shot at, almost blown up, jumped out of airplanes was crying. It was almost dark and I could just make out what this thing was doing. I slowly put the binoculars down and concentrated on not breathing hard or crying out loud in fear. Snap. Snap. Snap. I looked back at the creature. Each snap threw another shock of fear up my spine. It was dismembering the rabbit. SNAP. The cracking of the bones made my body shiver. I watched as it purposefully placed each of the rabbit’s body parts within the circle and drew random forms in the dirt around the dead body with its long boney fingers. It lifted its hand and extended one of its fingers. I bit my lip almost to the point of bleeding to keep from making any sound as it scooped the entrails from the rabbit’s chest cavity and placed them in its mouth. As the last bit of light left the sky I realized I would be stuck in the tree stand unless this thing left. I should text John to come get me. No… What if it sees the glow from my phone’s screen? What if he gets here and it kills him? My mind was racing faster than ever. I didn’t once notice the wind change. To my horror, in the last bit of light the creature suddenly stopped what it was doing and became still. Tears were rolling down my cheek. My hair was on end. My hands were shaking and I could feel my body sweat. I didn’t want to move. Suddenly, like a dog it raised its head and began jerking it up and down. Shit! The wind has changed. It can smell me. It sniffed the air in three different directions with mighty snorts. All of a sudden it dropped low to the ground as if it were about to pounce. The wind was at my back. It knew I was there. Maybe not my exact location, but this thing knew I was there. The light completely faded as I watch it sneak back into the brush on the left side of the clearing. My heart pounded hard enough to cause a sharp pain in my chest. I wanted to cry aloud. I wanted to get my phone and call my friend, my parents, anyone who might be able to save me. There was no noise. The air was like a vacuum around me. I sat shaking in my stand. Crunch… crunch… crunch… Shit. It’s coming toward me from the left. My ladder is on the left. God, what if it finds the ladder? I need to cut it down. The crunching was getting louder. The creature was close enough I could hear its incoherent rambling. It sounded like an old man struggling to breath, fighting for his last breath. I reached into my backpack as fast and as quiet as I could and pulled out my knife. I stood up and turned to face the tree. It was dark. I couldn’t see anything. I felt the bark of the tree above me desperately trying to find the cord that was holding the ladder to the tree. *Ting* It’s on the ladder. It’s coming up the fucking ladder. Where is the cord? God, please!! Here! I pulled hard. The knife cut through the chord with a snap of breaking bones. I pushed the ladder away from the tree. I could feel its weight on the ladder. With a boom that echoed throughout the forest the ladder crashed to the ground with the weight of the creature. It let out a scream that pierced my ears and echoed everywhere. I covered my ears to shield myself from the horrific sound. I had never heard anything so horrible. The squeal of a hundred pigs mixed with a low roar pierced the night sky. I couldn’t see it. I knew I pissed it off. I heard it scramble to its feet. I grabbed the tree to keep my balance. It’s shaking the tree. It’s trying to climb the tree. I could hear its fingers grasp the bark sinking its nails into the tree’s flesh. There was only 20ft between this thing and me. I grabbed my bow, pulled back, aimed straight down, and released on of my arrows directly below my stand. The arrow smacked the ground and the creature let out a scream louder than the previous. Pig’s screams… Thousands of pigs screaming pierced the air. At this point I couldn’t hold back my fear. My breathing was audible and I was pouting like a small child. My pounding heart was about to break my sternum. My eyes were full of tears. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t see through the darkness anyway. I somehow fumbled another arrow from my quiver on to my bow. God, save me please! “FUCK OFF,” I shouted and released the arrow in the same exact spot as the previous. Again the arrow smacked into the ground followed by a bellowing squeal. The tree stopped shaking. I could hear it on the ground. Its fingers digging into the leaves and dirt as it tore up the ground beneath it. The tearing came from beneath me. I struggled to put another arrow on my bowstring. The noise began to surround me as I fumbled along. It was to my right. Now to my left. Now below me. Now behind me. The tearing was everywhere. No… are there more of these things?! I’m going to die. Did it call others? I pulled back my bow with my third arrow. The noise was everywhere. It sounded to my left. I guessed and shot in the dark. The ear shattering noise and screams continued. I had one arrow left. I struggled to prep my last arrow. The noise surrounded me as if thousands of these things had encircled me. The squealing had intensified to the point where my ears were ringing. I drew back my bow and fired the last of my arrows directly beneath my stand. The squealing roar became unbearable as if I had hit it. I was out of arrows. I dropped my bow and slumped back in my seat. The noise was so intense I didn’t even hear the bow hit the ground. I picked up my knife and held it tight to my chest. I could feel my body crashing from the immense adrenaline rush. Silence. I didn’t notice the silence. My ears stopped ringing. Was it gone? The woods were still. All I could hear was the beating of my heart as it slowly came down from its frantic pace. The woods were silent and motionless. Whatever it was disappeared or was standing perfectly still. I could feel the last of my tears roll down my cheek. I couldn’t smell it anymore. I couldn’t smell anything. My nose was stuffed from my crying. I was still shaking and my body was exhausted. I should text or call someone to get me. No… If I pull out my phone the screen light will give me away if that thing is still here. I had no idea what time it was. Absolute darkness engulfed me. The only thing that kept me from falling asleep from exhaustion was the thought of that thing being out there somewhere, watching me in the dark. Minutes passed. Hours passed. I was so tired but I dare not fall asleep. A crunch of leaves every now and then caused me to grip my knife tightly. The woods remained silent otherwise. No creatures moving about. No owls hooting. No bats screeching among the treetops. Light… The first light peering over the horizon broke an eternity of darkness. I was able to start making out shapes and images. I looked down and saw my bow lying on the ground next to the ladder. The hair on my neck stood up again. My heart began to pound. My breathing became quick. All around the bottom of the tree I was in were symbols drawn in the dirt. The leaves were cleared for 10 feet in a circle around the tree. All these weird symbols were drawn in the dirt where the leaves once laid. It was now or never. I grabbed my phone and texted John. He was the only one close enough that had a four-wheeler. It was day and I didn’t see the creature, but there was no way I was going to stay in the woods another second and I wasn’t going to get down incase it was lying in wait under the brush. Me – John… I’m still at my tree stand. I need help. I waited. It was 7am. Please God let him be up. John – Dude it’s 7am. What the fuck you still doing in your tree stand? He’s up! Tears of joy began to well in my eyes as I fumbled quickly to reply. Me- Come get me. Please hurry!! John- Ok. Ok. I’m OMW. I put my phone down. I was exhausted. I hadn’t slept all night. The familiar rumble of John’s ATV began to fill the air a few minutes later. What adrenaline I had left coursed through my veins. When John was close enough I could see him coming from the stand, I grabbed my backpack and jumped. 20 feet straight down I descended. I hit the ground hard with a very audible thump. My left leg gave out from beneath me and I could feel the pain stream through my body as my ankle twisted. I spent no time lying on the ground. I fought through the pain, picked myself up, grabbed my bow, and hobbled as fast as I could towards the ATV trail. The fear from the night before returned as I was running towards the trail. Now was the time I was most vulnerable. Now was the time the creature would strike. It was the perfect opportunity. The smell… The smell returned. The scent of burning flesh filled the air. John pulled up to the clear cut that lead to my stand as I reached the ATV trail and jumped quickly on the back of his four-wheeler. “Did you just jump from the stand,” he said with a shocked voice? “And what smells like hell up here?” “Fucking drive! NOW!” “Ok! Ok!” John spun the four-wheeler around and headed off towards our house. The feeling of fear wouldn’t leave me. I slumped forward onto John’s back out of exhaustion. I didn’t have the strength to hold myself up. I only had enough strength to hang onto his jacket to keep from falling off. The motor of the four-wheeler covered my sobs of relief. “Are you ok,” John asked loudly as he navigated the trail. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I was too exhausted from the fear that had gripped me the entire night prior. The motor cut off and I looked up. We were outside my house. I hadn’t stopped sobbing. I rolled off the back of the four-wheeler and laid in my yard sobbing. It’s all I could do. Everything went black. I sat up rapidly and scanned my surroundings in a panic. My mother and father were there along with John telling me to calm down. The familiar softness of our couch on my body and smell of my mother’s cooking filled the air. I was home. My ankle was wrapped with a bag of ice resting upon it. They gave me water to drink and questioned me about what had happened that night. I told them everything. As my story ended I could see the disbelief in their eyes. My parents apologized to me for not checking up on where I was. They though I had come home and gone out with friends or over to John’s for a drink. John apologized the same and said he assumed I had come home tired and went to sleep. They tired to rationalize what I saw. They said it must have been an emaciated bear with mange. I knew better. I knew what I saw. What I went through. I didn’t hunt the rest of the season and refused to enter the woods. John a few days later had kindly gone to my stand to retrieve it for me without prompt. He brought it over to my garage and met me with a puzzled look in his eye. “So I found your stand,” he started with an unbelieving tone in his voice, “and it was on the ground. It’s been beat up and the safety cables are busted off like someone had ripped it from the tree. Found your ladder too.” He pointed to the white marks on bottom rungs of the ladder. “Those look like claw marks to me. Found three of your arrows. You hit something because they are covered in some type of blood. Don’t know what kind but it smells like hell.” He handed me my arrows covered in a reddish black gooey crust. “Also, the tree your stand was in… Bottom half of it has been stripped of bark and is smeared in what looks and smells like animal blood. All of those markings in the ground you talked about. Yea, those are there too.” He slumped down on the edge of his four-wheeler as if in complete disbelief. “I believe you We didn’t talk about it for a long time. We felt as if it were best to forget, never revisit, or pursue. I eventually moved out of my parent’s house to an apartment when my job started. The following summer John called me with some interesting news. The missing animals continued infrequently through out the spring. Mr. Dawson had become overly frustrated with whoever was stealing his rabbits. He setup a security cam to watch the pen and had purchased an industrial chain and lock to keep them out. One night his lab went nuts barking at something outside in the direction of the rabbit pen. Figuring he had them on camera, and to teach them a lesson, he let his lab out to possibly scare them away. The dog ran out the open door and in the darkness seemed to be struggling with something. When Mr. Dawson turned on the floodlight the chains on the rabbit pen were busted off and his dog was gone. Someone also destroyed his camera before it could capture the perpetrator on video. While I felt for Mr. Dawson, the strange part of our phone conversation had yet to come. The construction company John had worked for had secured a contract to build a new housing development on the side of crow hill, namely the side with the pines on it, as it was closest to the nearest road. It was to be an upper-middle class housing development. John was part of the clearing crew who would go up and clear out the trees and underbrush of the designated area where the housing development would be built. John mentioned that he was clearing a small bottom where they were going to build a retention pond for irrigation when they came across something disturbing. The bottom was nestled at the base of crow hill and a neighboring hill. It was devoid of large trees but rampant with small shrubs and heavy underbrush. As he and his crew cleared the bottom they found what appeared to be pathways of bent grass and branches. They didn’t look natural and were littered in small animal bones. As they cleared more and more they came across what looked like a nest in the middle of the thicket. The grass and branches were bent over top of a bed of long grass like a make shift dome. The outer part of the nest was void of grass and contained strange markings in the dirt. In the middle on the supposed bed of grass they found several strange items like broken locks, broken chains, blood covered shreds of clothing, and a dog collar strapped through the top of what looked like a canine skull. John told me the tags had Mr. Dawson’s name and address on them. He had returned them to Mr. Dawson but didn’t have the heart to tell him where he found them or in what condition. I could hear the slight trembling in John’s throat. I knew he now believed me for sure. I went home several months later to see my parents. Our neighbor’s animals had stopped disappearing. The housing development was about half way finished. I was watching the news late that first night home. One of the headlines was “Police on lookout for animal kidnapper.” Apparently several family pets had disappeared over the

22 minutes

December 9, 2015

Based on True Events, Beings and Entities

My Creation

Being a programmer, one of my dreams has always been to create an original video game, something that nobody in the industry has done before. After seeing Spore, I became intrigued. Here was an attempt at putting people in control over a universe. After looking at what made videogames popular, I realized the main aspect was control. People in their daily lives have no control over their environment. They are told what to do, where to go, and how to live. Their jobs consist of standing or sitting somewhere until it’s 5 PM and they’re allowed to head back home. It’s no mystery they’re unhappy. For many people videogames are an escape to a world where they are in control, or live exciting fake lives filled with adventure. The aspect of control is found in strategy games, the adventure in role playing games generally. I looked at games like the Sims, and noticed what made them so popular is not just the illusion of control, but the degree of control. You have complete control over people’s lives. Before the Sims, there was Sim Earth. A game in which you do not control individual people, but an entire Earth! I came to the conclusion that I had to develop a game similar to Spore, in which the player subtly “guides” evolution. What caused Spore to be such a failure is the lack of realistic control people had. It hardly resembled evolution. To do this, I began by generating a physics system. I know little of physics but decided to study it, and try to create a simplified version in which certain particles can interact, in specific manners. When it comes down to it, physics is simply complex mathematics. I simulated energy, and matter, and created a simple system, with a sun emitting energy, circled by a planet catching said energy. I decided to create simple basic cells from scratch, that were “hardcoded” so to speak in the system I was designing. They lived of off the energy emitted by my sun, and had a “genetic” code that coded for the substances produced by the cells. I guess you could call them my eukaryotes. My world within a few minutes would always fill with these cells, after which they would mutate, and the most efficient cell in converting energy from the sun into useful substances for division would survive. It was very boring, but it worked I guess. I decided to expand the physics system, and force the cells to create waste products, that were toxic and would kill them. I noticed that some cells responded to this by producing less waste. Others responded by producing something to emit the waste. Yet others developed chemicals to clean up the waste products. However, I noticed something fascinating. Running the simulation for a few centuries (a few minutes in real life), created cells that made massive amounts of specific waste products on purpose. I noticed that other cells died as a result of this, to which the other cells responded by usurping the building blocks they had created from energy. The first predators were born. With the first predators, diversity in this little world rapidly increased. Some grew a response to flee when they encountered these toxins. Others grew resistance to them. The ones that grew resistance would eventually grow to utilize the toxins products. Eventually I noticed something interesting. The cells that escaped from the toxin grouped up with the cells that utilized the toxins. They stayed close together, and helped each other. Eventually these type of cells would attach to one another. They formed a weird symbiosis, where the cell that would normally flee, would now move towards places where the toxins are, and the other cell would consume the toxins and provide the “mover” with some of the energy. Without going into too much detail, I became very excited, and decided to let this simulation run during the morning (I had stayed up until 5 AM), while I went to bed. When I woke up at around 11, I noticed the world I had created had changed, and was barely recognizable. Massive plant-like structures grew in this world, consumed by other organism that ate these plants. However, looking at the log, I noticed the world hadn’t changed much in the past two hours or so. I had reached another “stasis point”, where the simplicity of my simulation prevented more complex life from evolving. I expanded the system, by breaking up “energy” into different types, with different wavelengths that were absorbed to different degrees by different molecules. I implemented vibrations in the air, created an improved simulation of weight, and made some more minor tweaks. This caused the simulation to run slower of course, but it was worth the sacrifice. I stayed around the whole day watching the simulation in excitement, and playing with it, as it was incredibly addicting. Complex organisms evolved, that cooperated. Plants that depended on each other, or attracted predators that ate the horrible looking creatures that ate from them. I had fun, and noticed that some creatures evolved “warning calls”. This means that if they noticed a predator, they would issue a sound, and all others of their kind would flee into holes they had dug in the earth. Others evolved “mating calls”. I decided to have some fun. I made a dump tool, allowing me to dump specific organisms on the Earth, and wrote my name with it. I created 10 “meteorites”, and dumped them on a piece of land to create an island, because I wanted to see whether the animals stuck on both sides would evolve in different directions. I made a smiley-island with volcanic eruptions. By that time I realized I had stayed up until 5 AM again, as I heard the birds outside. I felt tired again, and woke up at 1 PM or so. When I looked at my simulation again, I felt a sense of shock. Different groups of animals of one species had made statues with stones. Some in the form of a smiley. Some in the form of my name. I didn’t know why they were doing this, or how. What I did notice is that they would attack each other from time to time. I didn’t know what to do with it, but I concluded that these organisms must have somehow noticed that the smiley and the name I had written were “special”. The fighting disturbed me, and so I decided to create a massive mountain ridge through volcanic eruptions to separate the two groups. By this time, changes were happening fast, compared to earlier. While I had to spend a night sleeping to see tribes evolve in my simulation, while I was getting something to eat or take I bathroom break, I would notice the tribesmen wearing different styles of clothing, or having changed their type of dwelling. Their numbers were also continually increasing. At some point, I noticed the creatures began making their own symbols on the ground, and no longer just copying mine. Most of the symbols seemed random and unintelligible to me, but one stood out. The organisms had created a symbol that resembled them. A small circle, with a square beneath it. Within the square, a dot could be found in the center. This was meant to symbolize the visual organs of the creature, as the creature had two visual organs, one in the front of it’s body, and one in the back. In the square, other sensory and reproductive organs were symbolized. Next to the circle on top of the square could be seen something resembling a drawing of a fork. Two of these forks had been painted in opposite direction. And next to that the smiley face could be seen. I realized something. They were not communicating towards each other. They were trying to communicate to something “out there”. My meddling in their landscape had somehow made them realize that something powerful was out there, capable of changing their world. I wondered, whether symbols like Stonehenge and the Pyramids in my own world, could be signs of primitive people trying to do the same thing. Begging their creator or overseer to initiate contact with them. However, one thing was undeniable by now. These creatures realized there is something out there. I wondered long. Did I have a responsibility to initiate contact with something that isn’t real? Or are these creatures real in a different way? Can something be real, merely by being capable of having a concept of itself? And even if they are real, does that mean they will be better off with me initiating contact with them? Should I change my simulation, to ensure them permanent happiness? And is it even possible for me to do such a thing? I did not want to confirm my existence to them, but I did want to be able to communicate with them. I decided to program a “prophet”. An organism that looks like them, and can not be proven by them to be different from themselves, and is fully controlled by me. I let it be born into a powerful position, as the son of a leader. I decided to lead by example, and seek to teach these creatures English, so I could communicate with them. As prophet, I instructed them that English was the language we could use to communicate with the “greater one”. They would have no way to be sure if it was true or not. I hadn’t made up my mind yet about whether I would reveal myself or not. But I did want to be capable of understanding what they wanted to tell me. In a few generations. They all spoke English. And rapidly, signs began emerging on the ground in English. “GUIDE US” “SHOW YOUR GREATNESS” “HELP US” And, during times of disease or hunger or general misery: “GIVE US FOOD” “SHOW US A MIRACLE” “END OUR SUFFERING” I decided that I couldn’t maintain a world with such suffering as emerged in the simulation without intervening. Why would I accept a world with death and rape and murder, if I could make on without it? I implemented fixes that were gradual, so they could not be proven to be miraculous. Murder and rape would over the years become rarer, and so would death at a young age. I figured that they would not notice if the change happened over generations, but they did. “THANK YOU” “ALL BLESSINGS BE UPON THE GREATEST” “WE LOVE YOU” And, most heart-breaking: “COME BACK TO US” Tears ran over my face. There is something there. And it knows I am here, able to contact them, but unwilling to do so out of fear of what I have created. But, I felt I had a responsibility. And so I loaded up the character I had created again, and went to their King, asking to talk to all their wisest men. But, by this time, I was not believed. “You are number 1341 claiming to be an avatar of the Greatest One. If you are him, I pray for your forgiveness, but please, show us a sign, before demanding of me to gather all our wisest men.” And so I hesitated, but responded. “Tomorrow there shall be two more meteors, falling on a deserted island in the sea before you, on the same day. And when they do, doubt no more and realize that I have come back to repair the broken world that I created.” And so I exited my avatar, and progressed the simulation until the next day was reached, and threw two meteors on the deserted island before the mainland, where thousands had gathered to watch whether a sign would be given. Upon the descent of the meteors, celebrations were held. All the sentient organisms gathered around the small house where I had exited my avatar, and lay flat on the ground, in apparent worship of the man who was last seen there, and afraid of coming close. I don’t know who was more afraid by now, me or them. I loaded into my avatar again, and exited the house. The creatures continued to lay flat on the ground, in utter silence. It is as if they felt unworthy of speaking. “Let your wisest man stand up.” I told them. And up stood one of these bizarre looking creatures. “Thank you for coming back. Pray tell us, do you have any requests of us?” I hesitated, before saying “There is nothing you can do for me that pleases me, but for you to be good to one another, and to contact me with your wishes and fears.” The creature responded “We know you come from a different world, and we are afraid. We understand how vulnerable we are, and how incomplete our experience is. Please, allow us to join you in the world that you created our world from.” I began crying behind my computer, as I responded “I do not know how”. The creature responded: “At risk of offending you, please understand the severity of our situation. By living in a world that is incomplete, we are at constant risk of disappearing forever, never to be seen again. We would never even consciously realize that our end had come.” I realized that they were unable to comprehend that I only had absolute power within their world and not outside of it. They also did not realize that my knowledge of their world was limited. I may have created it through simple laws, but those simple laws gave way to a reality of its own that is more complex than I can comprehend. I responded again “I only have power in your world. In my world I have no power, and so I can not bring you there, because my world is not under my control. I also do not understand the world I have created. I do not know what is best for you. Only you do, and you have to inform me what you want.” And the man waited for a moment. I was about to think they were going to end communicating with me, before their wisest man responded: “You have created a world that is incomplete, with creatures that can not escape it, and you have no power to save them. They are completely unfree, and they have no power. We are completely at your mercy, and so we ask you from the deepest of our heart: End us.” By now I was crying, as I was confused and asked to do the impossible. My own child was asking me to kill it. This is when I noticed the lights in my room flickering, before my computer suddenly shut down. I screamed. Upon trying to turn on my computer again, I noticed it wasn’t working. I called the power company, who told me that due to an accident, a power surge had travelled through the grid. They promised me they would pay me for any damage done. I hung up and contemplated. The coincidence of what had just happened was too great to be imaginable. And I wondered. If these creatures were at the mercy of a confused creator, could the same be said of me? And is so, did my creator just prevent me from repeating his own mistake? Credit To – unpatriotic

9 minutes

May 1, 2015

Beings and Entities, Strange and Unexplained

I Found a Dead Girl’s Diary

diaries, L. Chan Please wait...

Everybody’s looking for Malinda Paige. The entire town would sling a rope around a tree and clap and cheer as she jitterbugged her way to hell. And the Police, of course. They won’t find her. I’ve seen her. That’s why I’m here. I need to let it out. I think back to the start of last term, when the three young men that killed themselves. You probably didn’t hear about them. Or about Malinda Paige. That’s the kind of town I live in. The 70s and 80s tore through the region like a disemboweling knife, spilling the guts of industry to dry under the summer sun. A town full of hard people, made so because of the mountains we lived in. Hard of body and hard headed. A town too stupid to know it was already dead. Exit Malinda Paige. We last saw her in her junior year. School broke for summer and we never saw her again. That wasn’t uncommon. We bled people, year after year. The smart ones would get a one-way ticket out and never look back. We hadn’t figured Malinda for the type. But rats flee a sinking ship too. Malinda wasn’t pretty. Her eyes had that wet poached egg look about them. The glasses didn’t help. Her cheeks a little too round to give her that hollowed cheerleader look. Her face framed by a headful of lanky, greasy brown hair. This didn’t matter much. She had more than enough jiggle under her sweats during gym class to get the boys staring. She didn’t have friends that I knew of. The human equivalent of styrofoam package stuffing. Just filling up the space around the people that mattered. There was something a little darker about the girl. She’d walk by the little knots and cliques in the corridor and someone would say slut or whore in a stage whisper, loud enough for me to hear from twenty feet away. Malinda wouldn’t bat an eyelid. It got around that she got suspended for a week for blowing someone in one of the cleaning stores. The type of guy that was part of a supply chain all too common in the town. Adderall, Oxycontin and worse. Apparently Malinda was getting fucked in more ways than one. That’s why it didn’t blip when she didn’t turn up for senior year. Some things were made to sink without ripples. She wasn’t the only one that didn’t turn up on the first day of school. Shane, one of the school’s basketball players had quietly slipped away into a shed behind his house, cradling his father’s handgun. He set there for hours before painting the wall behind him with his brains. Things get out in a small town. Secrets seep and leak. Someone’s brother mentions something. An EMT at a bar may drop the worse case he’d ever attended to. Some case like Shane’s suicide, how, perhaps, the bullet didn’t quite take as much brain as poor Shane wanted. How Shane, his eye sockets filling up with blood, screamed, “She sees me!” Over and over, weeping scarlet tears till he repeated it one final time in an exhalation of spit and gore. This all came out later of course, whispered between shocked students at the cafeteria. Back then it was just the first day of school. Everybody moving up a year, swapping classes, lockers. My new locker bore the scars of some epithet scrawled in sharpie and inexpertly scratched off. I could still make it out. The diary was sitting in the locker. A plain thing, paper bound in faux leather. A diary was an anachronism. An oddity, just like Malinda Paige. In a world where people posted the shallowest thoughts on Facebook and snapchatted glimpses of nipple to each other, there was something ancient and archaic about putting pen to paper. Something secret. The diary came off the rusty metal of the locker with a soft ripping sound. It had been gummed to the surface by a veneer of soda, a present poured down the top of the locker by one of Malinda’s fans. I shouldn’t have taken it. Diaries are secret things. Some secrets were meant to be buried. Like Malinda Paige. # Where to start when it comes to her diary? It didn’t say where she was. It left me with more questions than answers. Who was Malinda? What was Malinda? I didn’t look at the diary. Not for a week at least. I was caught up in the rush of the start of school. I meant to hand it over to someone. The school. Her family maybe. It sat on my desk for a whole week. Curiosity is a bitch of an emotion, isn’t it. It creeps. Like a rash you can’t scratch at. One rainy Saturday, tired of daytime TV and bored of the banality of Facebook, I flipped that thing open. How do you describe the shape of madness? Let me try. Madness isn’t a hundred pages of spidery handwriting. No punctuation. No paragraphs. Madness isn’t series of geometric scribbles, filling up every square inch of paper that didn’t have writing on it. So dense and intricate that the patterns crawled and shifted when you looked at them too close. No, madness was what Malinda wrote. when did it start i first heard the voices after my second period i remember thinking that i was crazy because thats what crazy people do -m There was stuff in there that was just plain wrong. i thought of dad for the first time in a long time mum fell down and bashed her chin it was the blood i remember when dad used to hit her so bad that she couldnt walk hes long dead why do i still hate him so much -m Reading the text was difficult. There were no dates, the only way you knew she’d ended a section was when she left a single monogrammed initial at the end of it. the voices arent mine i know that now its only when i went to school when it got much worse the voices are from other people i hear other peoples voices not the ones from their mouths the ones which they lie and whisper from their hearts secret voices i know them all -m The girl was crazier than I thought. I think some of her words alluded to the start of high school. i hate it here its even worse than grade school i feel their eyes on me when they look at me i hear their whispers in my head and it feels like cut glass in my tummy and needles behind my eyes i hate them all -m Malinda Paige kept score, that was the worst thing. The number of times she’d had sex with an entire list of guys from school. What kind of person does that? the other girls stare at me but i can hear what theyre saying in their hearts they dont know what its like the pills help but only so much the voices always cut through its only in the afterglow that the voices are stilled if you were going crazy wouldnt you chase after a little peace -m There was no clue to Malinda’s disappearance in her diary. That was the strangest of all. If she ran, wouldn’t she have written something, planned something? The last thing she wrote was even crazier than everything else. im more than a hole for these guys im more than a target for girls to spit on more than just this flesh waiting to rot away theres a bird here in this eggshell skull it needs to be free i want to fly -m Nothing about where she went. I put the diary away. The shadows had grown long in my room and the light streaming in from the window had darkened to a dim orange hue. Malinda’s diary set at my desk, pages upon pages of nonsense. It wouldn’t have surprised me that she was mental. There’s a lot of that in the community, broken people, broken families. We just plastered over the cracks and pretended that everything was okay. But the cracks were there and they yawned open under our lies and facades. And then Malinda Paige went missing. I stared at the diary for a long while, the orange light dimming until there was nothing in my room but shadows. The following Monday, our town had the second of the suicides. # Jimmy was well liked. Pleasant looking. Did averagely well in school between band practice and running track. Not rich, but he still hung with the cooler kids. He worked at a pool cleaning company to make ends meet. Not that we had many pools up in the hills. Pools were a money thing and there was precious little of that around. Pool cleaning means chemicals. Stuff that you need to wear gloves to handle. Not the stuff you chug. When they found him, the pool boy was spread eagled on dry land,drowned in his own blood. He didn’t die easy. He didn’t die slow. He lasted long enough to scrawl she sees me in his own blood. We spoke of this in hushed whispers in school, nobody wanting to link two tragedies. There was something at the back of my mind, something about Jimmy and Shane. I found it when I got back after school. I found it and something else besides. Jimmy and Shane. Of course, the names were familiar. It was a small town. But I’d seen those two names together not long ago. They were both on Malinda’s scorecard. There was something else inside that damned book when I flipped the pages. Something that I hadn’t seen when I’d read the diary cover to cover the day before. Past Malinda’s last cryptic message was a single meaningless phrase, repeated over and over. five went up four came down There was new writing in Malina’s diary. A book that had been in my room all this while. There was no mistaking the spaghetti scrawl of her handwriting. Or the little smudges across the paper from left to right. Malinda was left handed. Had been. My stomach roiled at the sight of the text. Malinda Paige was missing. Maybe dead somewhere. Missing girls don’t come to good ends around here. And yet there was a fresh page of her handwriting in her diary. Had the words sprung forth from the paper, seeping out of the pristine white like an old photograph developing? Even worse was thinking that Malinda Paige had somehow been in my room, sitting at my table, penning those words herself. Impossible. I had to swallow twice and take in a huge, shuddering breath before the nausea passed. I couldn’t help but think of Malinda Paige in the past tense. Something terrible must have happened to her. Broken though she was, she would not have left without that diary. I shivered at the sight of it, still open to that fresh page of text, the edges stained with brown cola from some cruel prank. I had to get rid of it, but it deserved more than simply being tossed into the trash. There had to be a way. Malinda was gone, but her family was still here. I had to give it back. # The Paige house was on the outskirts of town, where homes were within the reach of even the poorest in our town. It was better than having a home on wheels, but not by much. Paint was peeling off the walls. One of the front windows had been broken and boarded up instead of being fixed. A collection of dust and dead insects had piled up between the glass and the wood over the years. I thumbed the doorbell twice. On the second time, the button got stuck and didn’t pop back out. I rapped on the thin wooden door hard enough to bruise my knuckles. Getting Malinda’s address hadn’t been easy. She’d not made any friends in school. In the end, I went up to the school office and said that she’d left stuff in her locker and I’d do the school a favour by bringing it straight to her home. The clerk at the office hesitated at giving me Malinda’s address but gave in eventually. It would have been easier than dealing with another piece of orphaned property. My assault on the door was rewarded by a slow shuffle approaching. The door squealed open to reveal a stooped lady, her frizzy hair streaked through with grey. “Mrs Paige?” I asked. The woman gave a huge grin, revealing a set of yellowing teeth set at odd angles. “Yes, that’s me.” “I’m Emm, I was a… friend of your daughter. I found something of hers in her locker and came over to drop it off.” “Emm is such a lovely name. Is it short for Emma?” I nodded and forced a smile. I hated the name. It was so old sounding. Mrs. Paige stepped out of the way and gestured at the open door. “Please come in.” I already had my fingers around the edge of the book, meaning to hand it over and for it to leave my life forever. But curiosity bit again. Mrs Paige stepped into her home, the bright light of day rendering the interior almost inky dark. I followed behind, too eager to solve the mystery of Malinda Paige. I wish that I hadn’t. The cool of the house was a welcome change from the spring sun. It took a moment for my eyes to grow accustomed to the dim light. The home was sparsely furnished, a threadbare sofa, the arms scratched and disfigured. The TV was old, even by the modest standards of where we lived. The wallpaper curled away from the walls, revealing pocked plaster. Dust glinted as it drifted lazily in the stifling air. It wasn’t the poverty that got to me. My family wasn’t rich. It was the fact that I wasn’t in a house. I was in a shrine. Every picture in the house was of a single subject. Malinda Paige. I felt the weight of her gaze from more than two dozen photographs, like the little footfalls of insects on my skin. Pictures hung on the walls, in frames on the tables. She was everywhere in that house. I shuddered and made my way towards the kitchen behind Mrs. Paige. “Have you been in contact with Malinda?” I asked the elder Paige, trying to shake my unease off by breaking the silence. “No, but she’s not far. She’s never far from me. She’ll be back.” She gave me a lopsided grin, pulling a chair up by a dinner table in the kitchen. There were dark streaks of grease or worse down the back of the chair. I bit my lip and sat down. “Did you report it to the Police?” “Oh yes, had to be done. I’m sure she’s alright, she’s so clever and so strong. So hard for a little girl to grow up without a father you know. Emery, that’s the late Mr Paige, killed himself when she was only fourteen. Can’t say I missed him, he was a devil when he was a few drinks in. One day he beat me to within an inch of my life. I’m talking eyes so swollen I couldn’t even see. That day I guess all the bad just caught up with him all at once, so he sat here in the kitchen, had a beer and a cigarette and slit his throat from ear to ear.” She drew one long dirty fingernail across her throat, all the while wearing that off-center smile, delivering her monologue in a flat tone, almost a recitation. “Malinda was right in the room, too. Hiding in one of the cupboards like she always did when he started up with his fists. Poor dear. Oh, where are my manners, I need to get you a drink.” Mrs. Paige walked over to the fridge while I sat, rooted to the chair. She had related the account of her husband’s death with little more emotion than someone reading out a shopping list. It had been a mistake to come. Nothing about Malinda Paige made sense, perhaps the girl was mad, but she was also surrounded by madness. I felt the same lightness in my belly that one got on top of a roller coaster, just before the plunge. The older lady plucked a can of Coke from the fridge and set it in front of me. The cheery red can bore a Christmas motif from two years before. It opened with a satisfying hiss. The can was warm, blood-warm, even though it had just come from the fridge. I took a sip. It was flat, even though I could have sworn it was fizzing a moment before. Everything about this house was wrong. Mrs. Paige. The pictures. The furniture. The food. Mrs Paige leaned in towards me, so close that I could smell her breath, sour and warm. She looked me in the eye. “I don’t worry because I can still feel her out there. She sings me to sleep sometimes. Five went up, four came down. Five went up, four came down. Five went up, four came down.” She repeated it over and over, an idiot litany. I had to leave. The legs of the chair scraped on the stained floor as I stood. Mrs. Paige struck then, her hands as fast as snakes, fingers digging into the soft flesh of my forearm. She pulled herself closer to me, still chanting that strange couplet. “Five went up, four came down.” A thin trickle of blood leaked from one nostril. Her nails bit deep into my arm. I tugged backwards, but her thin frame masked a wiry strength I could not overcome. I was trapped. “Five went up, four came down.” Our noses were almost touching. Her eyes had a dazed look about them, as though they were focused on something far away. Her voice got louder and louder, until she was nearly screeching the same thing over and over. “Five went up, four came down. Find me.” With that, she let me go. I fell backwards into my chair so hard that it slid back several inches. My flailing arms had caught the can of Coke and sent a fan of the sweet drink across the table. Through it all, Mrs. Paige just sat there, smiling her broken smile. I gathered my things and fled. Find me. Not find my daughter. Find me. The Paige household was a faint outline in the distance, but words echoed in my head. Just who had I been speaking to? Malinda had grown up in a household where violence was as common and unpredictable as the storms we got in the mountains. She’d spent most of her time in school on drugs or with a growing number of young men. She was scarred, broken. Five people went up somewhere. Malinda. Shane. Jimmy. They were two of her favorites, according to her diary. There were two more above them on her list. Cliff. Lucas. Another pair of golden boys. Tall, sporty, just the way she liked them. It had to be the five of them. Things were falling together, piece by horrific piece. But still nothing to take to the cops. Not good enough to speak to Cliff and Lucas. Mrs. Paige was right. I had to find Malinda. # I spent that evening going through the diary over and over, until my eyes watered. Nothing. No clues could be gleaned from the mess of words. I didn’t even know how tired I was until sleep snuck up on me and stole my last waking moment. I’ll always remember that dream I had that night. I remember it better than the lunch I ate this afternoon. I knew I was dreaming right away. I knew that from the extra weight on my hips and the extra bounce under my t-shirt. I wasn’t in my own body. There was a thundercloud in my head, dark with flashes of light. There was a desert under my tongue. I knew that I had already taken a little something to calm the voices. I was meeting Cliff today. I liked him more than the others. He had a car, maybe we could go in the woods, somewhere a little quieter than usual. He led me to his car. There were three others there already. Lucas. Shane. Jimmy. Cliff pushed me into the car. One of the guys was on my left and the other on my right. They were already slick with sweat. Not from the weather, which was still cool. I could smell it off them. Fear? Excitement? The car filled with the musky, animal stink of it as they crowded me in. I smiled at them, the cotton wool between my ears not letting me do much else. The car was unnaturally quiet, none of the banter, none of the jokes. I wore a clown’s mask, my smile tight and unnatural. I looked to the left and the right. Lucas’ jaw was clenched tight, cords sticking out on his neck. We were out of town, speeding up into the mountains. Rocks, trees whirred by in a blur of grey, brown and green. It could have been hours and it could have been minutes, but the car finally stopped. We were far from town, far from any other human being. They dragged me from the car and pushed me deep into the woods. I thought to run, to flee, but the pills had slowed my thoughts to a glacial pace. We were in a clearing. Strong hands gripped my arms; they didn’t need to. My limbs flailed with all the resolve of a pool noodle. I looked into Cliff’s eyes. Sweet, beautiful Cliff. Always my favorite. He had something dark in his hands. With a flick of his thumb, a bright blade sprang from its sheath. # It took me a full ten minutes to convince myself that I had been dreaming. My sheets were soggy with sweat and I had to rub the feeling back into my arms where Malinda had been held. She’d been taken up into the mountains. Five went up. She was still up there. Her diary was open on my desk. Last I remembered, it had been in my lap before sleep took me. FIND ME It had been written in strokes so deep and savage that the paper had ripped under the pen. That familiar script, slanted and smeared in a way only a leftie would know. It couldn’t have been me, not even in my sleep. I’d been right-handed all my life. She had been here. She wanted to be found. And under those bold words, a series of numbers. Coordinates. She’d given me coordinates. # Many things went through my mind as I searched for Malinda’s clearing. That I was stupid. That I was crazy. I’d been getting so close to the dead girl that I’d finally joined her in her madness. Did I actually believe her diary? That she was some kind of mind reader? Or something more? And yet I was trudging through the forest, halfway up the mountains surrounding the town, on nothing more a feeling in my gut and a dead girl’s diary. But there was a clearing, just like I’d seen in my dream. In the center of the clearing, there was a space where the rocks had been pushed aside and the grass was a little greener than the rest of the clearing. The rusted metal of my shovel bit into earth. It was softer than I expected. I’d found her. The rich brown earth gave Malinda Paige up slowly, her pale flesh seeing the light of day for the first time in months. She should have been a worm-eaten mess, a dried-out husk. I wish she had been, so that I wouldn’t have had to see what the four of them had done to her. It wasn’t enough that she’d been violated. They’d done other terrible things to body as well. Her hands were gone, both lopped off at the wrist. Her face had seen the worst of it, empty pits were her eyes should have been, horrific damage done to her mouth. No dental records? Even through all that, I knew her for who she was. There was an ugly, black thing sticking out from her torso. It came free with a struggle, the dried blood giving way with a sound like a plaster coming free. This was it. I’d found Malinda Paige. Now I just had to tell the world. # I found Cliff leaning against my Dad’s car when I left the forest, his car just slightly behind mine. I thought to flee back into the safety of the woods, but the nights were bitterly cold and I would not have lasted. He spoke first. “I know why you’re out here, Emma.” “Emm,” I said, instinctively. He grimaced when I said that. “It’s not what you think it is. Lucas killed himself this afternoon.” “Guilt will do that to a man. When’s your turn?” Perhaps the bravado would distract him. My heart was hammering away in my chest. There was no way past him. “You don’t understand. We did what we had to. You know she was different, you wouldn’t be here otherwise. There wasn’t any other way to get here. Only four of us knew she came up here.” “And you didn’t mean to kill her. Just have a little fun but it got out of hand?” I circled a little to the side, trying to judge the distance between the door and me. Cliff played defense for the football team. I couldn’t outrun him even with a fifty-foot head start. “We did what we had to. She wasn’t normal. She was sick in the head. Sometimes she’d talk about how she could hear other people’s voices in her head. You know, after we’d done it. She’d tell me about how the noise nearly drove her mad. But I think there was more to it than that. She didn’t just hear voices. She could could put whisper back. Put things in your head. Make you do things.” He pulled his t-shirt over his head, baring his toned torso. Overlayed on the smooth muscle was a network of pale scars and marks. I recognized the little circular mark of a cigarette burn. “Look at this. She’d make us do it to ourselves, knives sometimes. Fire other times. And she’d watch and laugh while we did it. It was never enough for her. The sex. The pain. Not enough for us to do it to ourselves. She started wanting more. For us to hurt each other and worse.” The funny thing is, for a second there, I believed him. The more he spoke, the more animated he got. I saw the fear in the whites of his eyes, the way his voice got higher and higher the more he spoke about Malinda. But he was crazy, just like she was. He was the only one of the four left, if Lucas was already dead. Nobody knew about Malinda Paige, except for him… and me. He wasn’t going to let me down the mountain. Malinda’s grave was big enough for two. “I don’t even know if we finished the job. Shane was the one who took her eyes and he blew a hole in his head. Jimmy worked on her teeth and he swallowed bleach. Lucas took her hands so that there wouldn’t be fingerprints to work on. You know earlier today he put his arms into a woodchipper? You stand there and believe that’s a coincidence.” I stared at him, watching the sweat roll down his neck, watching his fingers flex. He was wound up, a coiled spring twisted to its breaking point. “Or it could be that the four of you were sick and crazy and a coward’s death is the only way out.” “Don’t fuck around with me!” His shout bounced back from the surrounding trees. “She called you here too. Didn’t she? Don’t lie now. We both know it. How?” There wasn’t a need to antagonize him. “Her diary. She’s been writing in it.” “How can you be sure it isn’t you that’s writing? Imagine someone that could wear you like a glove. You know something, Emma?” “Emm,” I said again. “No. Emma. That’s how you introduced yourself last year in chemistry. You’ve never called yourself Emm. Malinda wasn’t just some girl. She’s not just that mess rotting in the ground up there. There’s something left of her. It got to three of us. It got to you. You’ve been too close to her.” There was something in my pocket, digging against the flesh of my thigh. A slim block. Something that had been, until recently, sticking out of the chest of Malinda Paige. My fingers closed around it, found the little catch. Cliff took a step towards me. # Cliff’s murder would be whispered about for years. They found him strung up in the woods, a bloody mess, ribbons of his skin dangling off him. The coroner said that the massive blood loss had killed him in the end. Which meant that he’d been alive all the way while someone methodically peeled him. There was a single suspect. A hit on the fingerprints left on the knife stuck in his chest. A girl that had gone missing the year before. Malinda Paige. Or at least that’s what the police thought they found. She’d made sure of that. She’d also made sure that Cliff had left a signed confession, telling about how five people had gone up and only four had come down. There’s a merciful blank in my memory from that day. I came to in my own bed, clean and changed. There was only the faintest trace of blood under my fingernails. She’d been thorough but not thorough enough. Or maybe it was a reminder for me. They searched the woods but never found Malinda’s body. If it were ever there in the first place. Her diary I buried in the dirt, without a marking. Life went on. There are three ways the town remembers the story of Malinda Paige. They are all true. They are all lies. Ask the Police. Malinda Paige was a normal girl. She was brought up to the mountains and raped. The four young men tried to kill her and thought they succeeded. But they didn’t. Guilt took them one by one until Malinda came back to finish the job and has been on the run ever since. Ask the dead boys. Malinda Paige was a monster. She wormed her way into their skulls and whispered dark things in their minds until they hatched a plan to kill her. They thought they succeeded. They failed and the whispers continued and they died for it. Ask me. Malinda Paige was something special. She found another girl, a lot like her, and told her story in the only way she knew how. I’d like to think that she would have wanted me to write everything down. There’s another story. One which floats in the dark moments when I’m alone. Like when it’s just me and the murmur of the breeze and the thump of my heart beat at night. That the four of them couldn’t have hatched a plan without her knowing. That Malinda Paige was more than just a corpse up in the mountains that refused to rot. That she’d always had a plan, a way to get out and she’d tidied up all the loose ends. That she would never be far from me. -Emm.

18 minutes

April 30, 2015

Artifacts and Objects, Journals and Diaries

You’re Not Afraid

CousinSpookyNoodles

Dear Reader, At the corner of Winter and Broad there is an abandoned house. Go into that house. The front door is closed but unlocked. Nobody lives inside, not even homeless people would dare stay in a place like that for more than a night. When you go in, you will hear the whispers. Don’t listen to what they say because they have more than just “a way with words.” They say things that your heart dreads. Things like, “I can see you. I can hear your thoughts in my mind. I’m going to use your secrets to ruin your life. The longer you stay here, the more I know.” It may not seem compelling now, I mean, why listen to some cocky little disembodied voices right? You’re not afraid. No. Ignore the voices. There will be a lamp on inside. It’s always on so you shouldn’t worry about being able to see. The room inside is left precisely as it was. The table is still set for a meal, there are still six sets of silverware, six dishes and six crisply folded napkins situated at regular intervals about the table. The chair at the head of the table remains askew as though someone had stood up from it and left the room in a hurry. There are still old envelopes sitting in the fireplace waiting to be lit, addressed to the man of the house. There are still two tall candles plugged into their sticks, hardly used with droplets of wax paralyzed along their sides, their wicks blackened but still long. There is still a child’s toy truck lying on its side on the elegant oriental rug and a copy of Little Women is splayed on the seat cushion of the armchair, folded back at the spine. Someone’s reading glasses sit upside down on top of a newspaper from August 1923 and two broad yellow needles are tangled in the sleeve of a sweater. It’s as though the people who lived here are merely absent and could be back any minute. You might not think so if you were to enter the kitchen, which I would not advise. Still, you’re not afraid, right? Disregard the voices. Disregard the state of this, what once was someone’s home. Don’t go in the kitchen. No. Take to the stairs. Be careful, for the owner of the toy truck on the first floor may have left one or two of his building blocks, one with a crimson letter A, the other with a viridian letter G, sitting on one of the steps. Ascend to the top of the stairs where you’ll pass the window as you round the banister and face the hallway. Do not open the burgundy velvet curtain even if you notice the tips of the shoes sticking out at the bottom. No you ought to completely disregard them. Not that you’re scared. There’s really not much of a view anyway. The voices will continue to whisper to you with their outlandish threats but you ought to simply proceed down the hallway. You might look through the first door on your right, if you so desired. It will be ajar. The room is just a small one with an unmade twin bed, a couple of bookcases and a small desk with a typewriter on it. The beginning of a thesis on the Great War may still be sitting in the shaft. A small alarm clock that, if twisted twice, will be set to 7:30am sits on the bedside table and all of the clothes in the closet are meticulously hung, side by side, like uniform soldiers. There really isn’t much to see. Still it’s better than if you were to open the door on your left. The one with the broad wooden letters nailed to the door reading “Sam.” Nor would I suggest that as you take a step or two down the hallway that you open the door on your right with its own wooden letters, these delicate and italicized reading “Beth.” The door across from Beth’s room is the bathroom, which you might use if you absolutely couldn’t repress your bladder any longer and you didn’t mind doing your business as voices whisper absurdities into your ears. Just don’t pull aside the shower curtain to peer into the claw-footed tub. Not that you’re afraid. It’s best if you just continue forward. You could glance into the last door on the left but all you’d find there is a king sized four poster and a vintage vanity mirror with some pearls strewn across the floor. Just don’t look in the closet. Not that you’re afraid. And neither are you afraid of opening the last door on the right. It’s just better if you didn’t. You wouldn’t want to see what was sitting in the rocking chair on the far side of the room between an ironing board and another four poster. It’s best that you don’t look. And still the voices will whisper to you such peculiar things. But since I know you aren’t afraid, I know you will continue on to the door at the very end of the hallway. The black one. Open this door and the whispering voices will be hushed. Through the door you shall be greeted by a wall of shadow. The voices have been silenced to make way for the deep chuckling you will hear from within the room. However, I promise you, that this is just to deter you. But I know you will not be disheartened, because you are not afraid. You will courageously step forth into the darkness without hesitation. The shaft of light from the hallway will offer you very little breadth of vision but still you will step onto the first stair. Then the second. And the third. With each progressive step, the chuckle will become more and more audible. At first it will seem to be coming from the top of the stairs, but once you reach it, it will sound as if it is before you. Still I know you are without fear. You will disregard this voice as you did all of the voices before. The owner of this chuckling voice will always sound as if he is just before you, but truthfully he is just as ethereal as the other voices in the house. At times the voice will be distant as if he is pacing about the room. At times he will be so close that if it weren’t for the fact that you know your own voice, you might think that you were the chuckler yourself. But still, you’re not afraid. Simply ignore the voice. Even as your hands grope through the darkness against the bureaus and boxes, old furniture and toys, you will diligently proceed. At some point your hands may find the waist of a dress form, once owned by the lady of the house. If you follow its delicate shape to the left shoulder, you may find a small chain hanging just above it. Do not pull this chain. It turns on the light. If you do so the chuckling voice will not remain disembodied, and you don’t want to meet the owner. Not that you’re afraid. You must carry on through the darkness as you search for the leaden box. You will know it by its earthy metal chill on your skin. When you do, you may notice that the chuckler seems to have regressed to the far side of the room. You must open this box, for inside you shall find the key. As soon as you have it, you may leave the attic. The chuckler will rush up behind you, laughing hysterically, and you must escape the attic before you feel his hands upon you. Do not hesitate to slam he door behind you and use the latch below the doorknob to lock the chuckler inside. When you turn around, you will see that all of the doors that were closed are now open and the shoes below the curtain have disappeared. You have awoken the family and they are rousing from their beds in each of the six rooms that you passed. You must be swift. Close each of the doors as fast as you can, including the first one you saw, locking them as you did the attic. They will pound and kick against the wood of the doors from inside, but they cannot break through. If you accomplish this in time, you have done well. I know you can do it because you are not afraid. Now, you have the key, the dearly departed have been locked in their rooms and you may proceed downstairs once more. The whispering voices will have returned but they will be even more adamant than before. They will hiss at you furiously, abandoning their threats and choosing to insult you profanely instead, but you must still ignore them. You have come so far because you were not afraid and neither are you afraid now. When you return downstairs you ought to go into the kitchen. There is nothing to be found there now, you have locked her upstairs in her room. On the far side you will see a door, identical to the one through which you discovered the attic. Through it, you shall discover stairs going downward. The lightswitch shall be to your left and you may turn it on because there is no chuckler in the cellar. Enter and close the door behind you. You must follow the stairs down and cross to the far side of the room. There isn’t much in the cellar, some shovels, a rake and other gardening tools mostly. The floor is even earthen and there is a bulkhead leading out. This is your exit, but it is an old one, the door will not be easily opened. You will hear the banging continue from upstairs. Still, you’re not afraid. At the far end of the basement opposite the entrance, there is an apparently blank wall but you will find a loose brick at eye level for someone who is about 5′ 9″. Take it out and you should be able to pull more out afterward. When you’ve pulled enough of them away you will find the hatch. The hatch may be opened with the key. However, by the time you have found the hatch, I imagine the family will have found their way out of their rooms. But still, you’re not afraid. The sound of footsteps may sound through the house as the family comes in search of you. There are limited places you could be so you’d better move fast. Open the hatch with the key and inside you will find the safe. The combination is the date of the newspaper that was in the living room upstairs. You must turn the dial even as it becomes apparent that the family has discovered where you are. They will bang on the door to the basement and it will only hold for so long. Still, I know, you will not be afraid. Once you’ve opened the safe you will find the briefcase. Don’t bother to open the briefcase there for the family will be on the brink of finding you. Even now they may have broken through the door. Grab the briefcase and run to the bulkhead. Shift the locking bar to the side. Use your strength because it is likely rusted in place. Push with all of your might to get the bulkhead doors open and run out into the night. The family will likely be on your heels but if you run with all of your strength they will not catch you. Run out through the surrounding buildings and lose them. Find someplace to hide. Whatever you do, escape them and don’t lose the briefcase. Even as Beth comes forth, the wound on her chest spilling blood out through her rosey dress, you will not be afraid. Aren’t you glad you didn’t open Beth’s door? Even as Sam waddles forward, his collapsed rib cage forcing stomach fluid to spill out of his mouth, you will not be afraid. Aren’t you glad you passed by his door as well? Even as mother rushes after you, the dent in her skull from the meat cleaver pulsing, you will not be afraid. Aren’t you glad you didn’t enter the kitchen? Even as grandpa rushes after you, the glass sticking out from his torso forming a scarlet line around his waist, you will not be afraid. Aren’t you glad you didn’t part the curtain? Even as Uncle Jonathan comes after you, drenched in water with the slit in his throat swollen from age, you will not be afraid. Aren’t you glad you didn’t look in the bathtub? Even as papa comes after you, the bruises from the pearls and the burns from his necktie at the indent in his neck making his skin appear scaley even in the dim light, you will not be afraid. Aren’t you glad you left the closet door shut? Even as grandma comes after you, her lims disjointed and her stomach emaciated from where she was left to starve to death, you will not be afraid. Aren’t you glad you didn’t go into the last bedroom? And even as the last man who tried to attempt what you will surely succeed in accomplishing, rushes after you, his eyes sunken and his hair white, his ribs visible even through his tattered rags, still laughing as if he has heard the best joke in the world, only God knows if he died of fear or madness, you shall still not be afraid. This I know. You shall run until they are far behind you, and then hide and wait for an hour. Once you’re sure that they are gone, you should find your way home. I know you can accomplish this because you’re not afraid. At home, you ought to open the briefcase. You will find that it also has a combination lock but this is simply the address of the house. If you didn’t think to look you may need to return to the house the following night. I know you would do that because you’re not afraid. Once you’ve found the address and you open up the briefcase, you will find what I have sent you to look for and the reason for all of your trouble. It’s the deed to the house. The city cannot demolish the house without this document. Be careful with it as it is over a hundred years old. Bring it to the city and have them demolish the house. Once and for all, my family will be able to rest, and maybe this will be adequate repentance for what I did to them all those years ago. If you do get the city to demolish that house my family’s bodies will be interred in the rubble, finally at peace. If not, you left the front door unlocked, didn’t you? God forbid someone else enter that house by chance. But that doesn’t have anything to do with you. And anyways, they have nothing to fear, right? Credit To – CousinSpookyNoodles

9 minutes

July 14, 2014

Rites and Rituals

The Grimes Home

Alice Thompson, Candle Cove, children's shows, puppets, television, television shows, TV, TV shows

(The following was found in an envelope on a bus bound for Chicago) My name is Jason Grimes and I am writing this so that when the room is eventually opened people will perhaps understand the things they find within it. And so that I will not be thought of as the madman that part of me already fears I am. It all began with the reading of the will. My mother (My only living parent left) had passed away due to a heart attack in her New England home. Her body had been found by one of the women who came to clean every few days and the news had not come as a shock to any of the family. She’d had two previous heart attacks, and with her smoking and drinking, she wasn’t exactly in the best of health. It had been a surprise that she wanted me to have the old family home though. I’d never exactly had much love for the place and had moved out the first chance I got. Honestly, I hadn’t been expecting to get anything in the will, given how long it had been since we’d even spoken, I was surprised that she hadn’t written me out, the way she’d tried to write me out of the family’s history by removing any pictures of me from the house. I certainly didn’t plan to keep that creepy, rundown old place. But at the same time, I knew that there was a chance it could fetch a bit of cash on the market if someone put a little work into fixing it up and as I was currently between jobs it might be a worthwhile use of my time. I got my brother and our cousin to come over and help with fixing it up, which they happily agreed to do. There actually wasn’t as much work to do as I had first thought as the house seemed to be in better repair than I remembered it being. I guessed that my mother, cheap as she was, had still finally been forced to actually get someone in to fix up some of the bigger problems the house had. There was still stuff that needed repair and a new coat of paint but it only ended up taking about a week or so in the end. It was during this time that I first found it. Now I didn’t have the best memories of the old place, given how long it had been since I had stayed there. But one of the first things I noticed while I was walking along the ground floor hallway was that there was a door that hadn’t been there before. I stared at it for a few moments, more out of confusion than anything else before trying to push it open. It wouldn’t budge an inch. I asked my brother if he knew what might be down there and he shook his head, saying that he’d not even noticed it before now. My cousin said that she’d noticed a big, old fashioned looking key in the keyhole of the door the last time she’d come round to visit but she had no clue where it might be right now. I shrugged, not really thinking much of it at the time, just figuring that I’d had to get someone to bust the door down at some point before I got the house sold. The room none of us WANTED to go in was Emerson’s. It was weird, seeing all his old toys and coloring books still there, as if our mother had been trying to bring her son back by clinging on to the past. Emerson had always been our mother’s favorite, the one who she’d lavished all of her attention on and I saw that she had stuck his drawings up all over the place. Drawings of pirate ships and odd, comical-looking figures with strange designs. My brother told me that when he’d stayed for dinner, our mother would still set a place for Emerson as if she expected him to just show up out of the blue. Missing for all these years and she was still expecting him to come wandering through the door… That first night I spent alone in the house I didn’t sleep very well. Crazy as it sounds I kept thinking that I heard noises in the house, people talking to each other. I must have checked each and every one of the rooms a good dozen times only to find each and every one of them empty. I even checked to see if I’d left the TV on but it was still unplugged. I would go back to bed and then, after a little while, the noises would start up again. Sometimes I was sure that I could hear music as well. It was around four in the morning that a thought occurred to me and I went to the locked door in the hallway, pressing my ear against it and listening closely. I was sure I heard what sounded like a muffled tune coming from within. The next day I went into town to buy some food, and after the events of last night, I also bought a hammer to knock that old door down. It was while chatting with the cashier that I learned something unsettling about the neighborhood that I had temporarily moved into. I had casually brought up where I was staying after he commented on me being new around here and told him that I was planning to try and sell up. He’d let out a short burst of laughter before looking embarrassed about it and when I’d asked him to explain had said the following: “No one with sense is gonna buy that dump. No one with half a brain would buy ANY house within ten miles of that place” he said, not looking up from the groceries he was packing away. “Why not? It seems like a nice enough neighborhood,” I had replied. “Because of all them kids going missing, of course.” He’d gone on to explain that for the past few years there had been a sudden and disturbing rise in the number of children vanishing from their homes in the area. There had been search parties formed, the police and the FBI had gotten involved but nothing had turned up. The kids had vanished from their homes with no signs of forced entry or struggle and no evidence left behind as to who might have been responsible. People were trying to move away as fast as possible but there were few who would buy a house in the area once they heard about what was going on. No one wanted to move to a place where a child kidnapper/killer was active. I have to admit the story kind of creeped me out. Knowing that something so strange was going on near where I was staying made the odd goings-on of the previous night seem even more unsettling to me and so as soon as I got home I decided to bust that door down. My neighbor, a fairly nice young woman named Charley who I’d gotten to know, was working on her home’s front lawn when I got back and noticed the hammer in my hand as I headed towards the front door of my home. Not really wanting to be alone when I broke the door down I gave her an abridged version of events (Leaving out the odd noises of last night) and asked if she’d like to join me in finding out what was in the room. “Mysterious locked door? Very Scooby-Doo,” she said as I grinned. “Sure. I’ll be Fred, you be Daphne” I replied, happy to have someone with me, her presence making the nervousness I had felt while listening to the cashier’s story start to fade a little. “Trust me; I’m more Velma than Daphne” Once inside the house, I packed away the various groceries, pouring drinks for myself and Charley before we went to the white door. It only took a few swings from the hammer to smash it open, the lock breaking beneath the assault and the door swinging open. Behind it was a staircase, leading down into a darkened basement below. I stared in confusion at the stairs, not believing what I was seeing. Our house didn’t have a basement, I was sure of that. And yet suddenly I seemed to recall seeing this before. I could remember playing with Emerson one day, daring each other. Emerson had always been afraid of pretty much everything and I, in the way of older brothers everywhere, had taken far too much pleasure in tormenting him. I seemed to remember the two of us stood at the top of this staircase, me daring him to go down into the dark while calling him a chicken. ‘C’mon Emerson,’ I had been saying to him. ‘You have to go inside…’ Charley and I began to descend the old, creaking steps towards the basement, the hammer still clutched tight in my hands. I didn’t know what we would find but I knew that I felt better being armed with something that could do some damage. As we reached the bottom of the stairs Charley began feeling around for a light switch, finding one after a few moments and flicking it on. The room was instantly illuminated, revealing what was within. “Oh my god! Look at all this cool stuff!” Charley cried out. The basement was full of puppets. There were dozens of them, all lined up on various shelves all in very good repair as if they were brand new. There were puppets of all shapes and sizes, some of them being very human-looking while others were Muppet-like animal creatures and others were more monstrous. There were props from what looked like the set of a kids show I guess. None of it had any dust on it, as if someone had been down to tidy up just moments before. I could guess what all of this was from but what it was doing down here I had no idea. “What IS all of this?” Charley asked as she picked up one of the puppets, a guy with a massive mustache and a monocle over one eye. She grinned, playing around with him, moving his limbs up and down. “My brother used to work on a kids show, years ago. ‘Pirate Place’, I think it was called. Only ran for a couple of years before it got canceled. I guess this stuff is all the old puppets and sets from the show” I said as we looked around at the room. My eyes fell on a creepy-looking skeleton puppet with a really weird mouth and a top hat upon its head. Ugly looking thing, I thought to myself at that moment. “No way! Do you have any idea how much some of this stuff might be worth? Collectors pay a FORTUNE for things like this on eBay” Charley said, setting the puppet down gently on one of the shelves. I glanced around at the rest of the contents of the room. Apart from the puppets and the set pieces, there was an old sewing machine set on a desk that was otherwise completely bare. There was no sign of anything that could have been the source of the tune that I’d heard before. Deciding that I must have imagined it, probably due to lack of sleep and being back in the old place, I did my best to forget about my fears and concentrate on the opportunity before me now. There was just one thing that troubled me as I looked around. On the desk the sewing machine was set on there were several odd red stains spattered over it. As I stared at them I was sure, out of the corner of my eye that the odd-looking skeleton puppets head had twitched in my direction. The next few days went by without anything odd happening really. I put the puppets up on eBay and had a few people come to view the house. The only thing that was strange was when one couple viewed the basement. All of the color drained out of the husband’s face when his eyes fell on the skeleton puppet and he just turned, left the basement and then the house. He went to the car, started it up and sat there until his wife joined him (after apologizing for his rudeness) and the two drove away. Later that night I was sure I heard the old sewing machine in the basement. I wanted to go down and check and yet at the same time looking at that darkened doorway I suddenly felt very frightened. And when there was a knock at the door the sudden noise almost made me jump out of my skin, my head jerking to the side towards the source of the noise. Taking a moment to steady my nerves I walked to the door, opening it cautiously to see Charley standing there. “We need to talk,” she said. She explained that she’d mentioned to a friend of hers about the find in the basement a few days ago. When she’d brought up the name ‘Pirate Place’ he’d gone quiet and asked for her to describe the puppets. He looked afraid, she said, as if he’d just seen a ghost. He had told her to move house, to get away from me and from those ‘Damn things’ as he referred to the puppets, growing increasingly hysterical as the conversation had gone on. He’d repeated over and over that it wasn’t safe to be around them that ‘They could see you through them’. He’d rambled at length about ‘Physical avatars’ and ‘The signal’ none of which had made any sense to her. Apparently he’d used to work in television and had known my brother. He said that he’d sat down with Emerson in what he called ‘The Script Room’ and then started raving about ‘Knowing where the stories came from’. Charley said that she had never seen him like this before, that he seemed to be almost psychotic. His eyes bugging out of his head, his face glistening with sweat. She had been worried that he was about to have some kind of attack. “Was your brother involved in anything… weird?” she asked me and I honestly didn’t know how to respond to that. Emerson had always been an odd kid, no doubt about that, but I couldn’t imagine him ever provoking such a frightened reaction in anyone let alone a grown man. I asked her if he’d said why the puppets were so awful and she shrugged. “All the stuff he was saying wasn’t making much sense. He just said ‘It’s not the puppets. It’s what made them’ and then he just got up and said he couldn’t be in my house anymore. Just ran out to his car and drove off” I decided that as she’d shared her weirdness with me, maybe I could open up about some of the weirdness in my life right now. I explained about the odd noises, the music and the sewing machine seeming to turn itself on. And against my better judgment, we decided to descend into that pitch-black basement once again. I’m not sure what I expected to find but I was sure that something would be wrong. So when we saw that nothing seemed to have changed or been moved I felt an odd sense of almost disappointment. I kind of wanted for there to be something strange down there, just to prove that I wasn’t imagining all of this, to prove to myself that I wasn’t going crazy. And that’s when Charley spotted the door. It was when she flicked off the light as we began to go up, casting one last look back into the darkness and noticed that there was light coming from somewhere. Not very bright but nonetheless a light source. Moving swiftly we shoved aside one of the shelves of puppets and felt along the ‘wall’ behind it, to confirm what Charley had believed to be the case: there was a door behind it. “Told you this was all kinds of Scooby-Doo,” Charley said with a grin on her face, clearly enjoying herself. I smiled, which was something I definitely wouldn’t have been able to do if she wasn’t here. It was nice to have someone to share this insanity with. We felt along the wall trying to find some way to open the door, some handle or switch to make it open. From behind it, I was sure that I could hear something. It sounded almost like music. Circus music, a cheerful, upbeat tune but also off somehow, as if there was something not quite right about it. Out of the corner of my eye, I was sure that the puppet with the ridiculous mustache and monocle had moved. And I realize how ridiculous that sounds, but I was certain of it. It was just the tiniest movement, a twitch of its head toward the skeleton puppet. ‘As if waiting for orders’ I thought to myself, and then wondered why that had popped into my head. With a bit of work, we managed to strip away the wallpaper that was covering most of the door, revealing that it was a bright red in color, the paint chipped and flaking in places, with a small keyhole and no handle. I assumed that it just pushed inwards once unlocked or perhaps slid to the side as there was no place for a handle to have once been either. It was then that I noticed that Charley had stopped smiling. In fact, she was staring at the door with what looked like a mix of confusion and fear, taking a few steps back from it. When I asked her what was wrong she just shook her head and made excuses to leave. I asked her if she was alright and she just told me she was tired and promised to help me try and find the key to the door in the morning. It was getting late so it was plausible enough but I knew that something was wrong here. For the rest of the evening, I looked through Emerson’s old things in his room, looking for some clue perhaps as to what it was that had inspired such fear in Charley’s friend. For the most part it was old toys and childhood drawings, nothing of much use. There were a few things that were odd though. It was a picture that I guess Emerson had done when he was little. There was a crude drawing of a boy sat in his bed that I think was meant to be Emerson himself. Around him were stood several figures. One was just a stick figure with a hat upon its head. Another was a portly man with a cartoonish mustache and teeth. And there was a third that was…very odd. It was just a scribble in the outline of a person, a black, shadowy scribble. There was a circle drawn above the three figures and the boy and lines were shown coming down from it leading to the boy’s head. For some reason, looking at those lines, the word ‘Tendrils’ came into my head. There was a picture of a red door. The words ‘WHERE THEY TAKE THEM’ were scrawled in large letters beneath it. And the final picture was of the stick man and the man with the mustache leading several smaller figures towards a third. This one was a woman, a rather well-drawn one in comparison to the crude, basic nature of the others except for the face. The face was just two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth. The words ‘WHERE THEY TAKE THEM’ were written here as well. There was a message on my answering machine from Charley the next day. She said that she’d gone to stay with her girlfriend for a few days ‘Just to clear her head’ and apologized for leaving so suddenly the previous night. Her voice sounded odd, kind of shaky really, and she said not to bother with the door. She tried to sound calm and casual when she said it but there was fear in her voice. She said it was probably best to forget all about the whole thing and just cover up the basement, not even mention it to potential buyers for the house. She said it would be a good idea to take the puppets off of eBay as well. I should have just done as she asked. Instead I spent the rest of the day ransacking the house, searching for the key to that door. I looked everywhere with little success until, almost on a whim, I decided to search Emerson’s room more thoroughly. And there, hidden in one of his old pillowcases, was a key. I poured myself a drink to steady my nerves, sitting down to watch the TV. I remembered the old thing never picking up much when we were little, the channels always being full of static. It seemed to be working better now at least and the news came on, talking about another disappearance in the area. A girl of twelve this time, vanished from her home in the middle of the night. I flipped through the channels looking for something a little less grim while I finished my drink Getting up, I headed down the steps into the basement, striding toward the door, ready to open it. The skeleton puppet was sat at the sewing machine now. I knew I hadn’t moved it and neither had Charley. And the other puppets…their heads seemed to be turned towards it, as if they were waiting for it to do something, to say something. God, it was a hideous thing, that awful misshapen mouth looking so awful. God knows why the prop designer had made it look that way. At that moment, the words ‘To grind your skin’ popped into my head. I put the key into the door and sure enough, it unlocked it, the door pushing inward with ease, revealing the room that lay beyond it. It was illuminated by a single dirty bulb, making the contents of the room easy to see. Dear lord the smell…the only thing worse was the sight of what was littered around the room. Children’s shoes and clothes, some spattered with old, dried blood were piled in a heap in one corner of the room. The floor was stained with large patches of red, one of which, as I stepped into it, I realized was still somewhat fresh, fresh and sticky like soda spilled on a movie theatre floor. The room smelt of spoiling meat and burnt hair and it took all I had not to throw up as I entered it, wondering how the smell hadn’t traveled from this room to the basement. There was a pile of old video cassettes in one corner of the room, all labelled with things like ‘Emerson’s first bike ride’ and ‘Emerson’s first spelling bee’ all old home movies I guess. But mixed in with them were tapes labeled ‘Candle Cove: Episode Four’ and ‘Season Three: Pilot Episode’. I picked up a few and noticed that there were bloody fingerprints on several. There was a series of steps leading down further into the blackness at the rear of the room and I felt oddly compelled to go down there. How far down did this go? How was this even here, beneath my family home, without me ever knowing of it? And yet…and yet I felt like I DID know about it. Looking at those steps I felt like I remembered being in this room before. I was a child and it had been empty then and there I stood with Emerson, at the foot of these stairs. “Emerson… you have… to go… inside,” I had whispered to him, taking delight in how terrified he looked. He had gone down into the dark and… And… My head throbbed with pain. It actually physically hurt to try and remember, as if something was willing me not to. Had there been someone down there with us? I was sure I remembered there being someone in the room besides the two of us, the more I thought about it. Our mother? No not our mother but another woman. Why couldn’t I remember her face? I began to take unsteady steps down the stairs; the more I walked the closer I got to another door, another red door. The key fit the lock of this one as well and it opened with ease. There was music coming from within now and the sound of waves crashing against the shore. I felt it pulling me towards it, calling to me like a siren song. I had to go inside, I thought to myself. I HAD to go inside. I wasn’t alone in this room. I burned all the puppets later that night. Not that I imagine it matters. They’ve been destroyed before and it hasn’t stopped them from coming back. They’re just wood and paint and cloth, nothing but a conduit. They allow them to come through, allow them to walk through the door and come here. Oh god, the door…I know where they go now…I know where they go, oh Christ, oh Jesus please help me I know where they go… I saw it. They took me there, the way they took my brother when he was a child. They need us. I don’t know why they need us but they need us, that’s what he said. Through that horrible, misshapen mouth, those eyes rolling in his sockets wildly. They needed my brother and they need me. My family is not safe. The signal needs us. The story needs us. The ship came to that cave. Emerson was laughing and crying at the same time as he spoke the words I knew were coming. As he told me what I had to do. It was waiting for me. I saw the– (The following portion of the letter has been heavily crossed out, making it almost impossible to read. A word that may or may not be ‘Mannequin’ appears at one point in the letter and the words ‘skin’ is visible at several points in the following two paragraphs. What could be ‘Faker’ or ‘Taker’ can also be made out in the second paragraph, and ‘ship’ in the final sentence. The letter resumes…) I ran. You may think me a coward for not helping them, not even trying to save them. But I know where the ship is taking them now. I know where the voyage leads and I know who is waiting at the end. I would pray to god but know that will do no good. I know now. I know things that no one should ever know. I know what Emerson learned, that day the signal found him. I know the things he learned in the dark places, where the music comes from. Music played on instruments crafted of bone and organs, wrapped in flesh. It’s always there now in my head, playing on an endless loop. The signal has found me like it found Emerson that day I made him go down those stairs. Like it found our mother. I know why she did what she did. I know what she knew and I know where Emerson is. I saw him on the ship. My god the ship… The laughing was the worst. I wish it would stop laughing. I have sealed up the basement but know that one day someone will go down there again. I write this so that when they discover the things I know they will find down there they will know neither I nor my mother were responsible. And perhaps so they will have the courage to do what I do not and destroy this terrible place, burn it to the ground. The only thing that holds me back is the fear that perhaps this place is not merely the door to their cage but the cage itself. If the house were to be destroyed perhaps they would be able to spread. I wish to apologize to my family. I hope they will forgive me for what I am about to do. I hope they will understand. My brother, if this reaches you please do not go into that house. And don’t sell it. Board it up and let it stand forgotten, a creepy old building for people to stare and wonder at. Maybe that will hold them back at least. The sewing machine is going at all hours of the day now. I know that it’s him, sewing himself new additions to that terrible cape. She lets him keep the skin, you see. He gets to keep the skin. I am so sorry Emerson. I don’t hate you for the things you did. I wish I could help you or at least put you out of your misery. I know they won’t let you rest. I know you cannot be free of them now. I see them out of the corner of my eye sometimes. They’re going to take me to the ship. I won’t let them. I will die the way I choose. The sea will carry my body away, hopefully far from where they can ever find it. (This letter was found lying beside a cassette tape. The tape proved to be nothing but static although those who watched it reportedly felt a sense of ‘unease’ and ‘nausea’ when they tried to view it. The Grimes home was searched and the belongings of over twenty-three children who had gone missing in the local area were discovered within. No trace of the children themselves was found within the house or near it, however. The basement and the secret room were both as the letter described them. However no stairs leading down to a further sub-basement were found anywhere on the property. The puppets all also appeared to be completely undamaged, despite the claim that they had been burnt. The tapes mentioned in the letter were missing however. Two families have since lived in the Grimes home. Neither has stayed for more than a few months, reporting strange smells, odd noises around the house and things going missing. One reported sensing something ‘Terrible’ in the basement and her children spoke of horrible dreams about ‘The ship taking them away’ and ‘The bony man from the TV’ watching them at night. The house is now abandoned, having been purchased and then left empty by one Adrian Grimes in early 2011. The puppets and set pieces from ‘Candle Cove’ (Mistakenly named ‘Pirate Place’ by Grimes in the letter, an early working title for the show that Emerson Grimes later abandoned) supposedly vanished shortly before Adrian Grimes made the purchase. The whereabouts of Jason Grimes remain unknown.

18 minutes

October 18, 2013

Locations and Sites, Strange and Unexplained, Television and Lost Episodes

The Story of Her Holding an Orange: Part One

based on a true story, based on true events, The Story of Her Holding an Orange

Okay guys, before I begin, I gotta give you a fair warning. This story is absolutely true unfortunately. It is also very long. It goes back to my childhood, but it wasn’t as terrifying until very recently. Now I am completely lost in fear. I am an adult man, logical and intelligent (or I’d like to believe so) sitting in my bed, scared shitless right now, goosebumps all over my body and tears of horror in my eyes. I ask for your help in explaining this fucking horrifying thing. Caution: you’ll notice that I curse quite a bit. I want you to know that what you read from now on is the situation perceived by my mind. I like to think that I am a very rational person and I haven’t been able to explain these occurrences in any natural way. Since my mom got a new job, she started making new friends. It is common in our country that friends come to each other’s houses for a cup of coffee, cake, gossip and whatnot. Few weeks into her new job, my mom made friends with this woman, Rose. She would come maybe twice a week and they’d sit around the coffee table on our balcony and just talk. One day, when I was 17, I was at the balcony with them. I’m not sure why I was there, but knowing me, I probably ran out of internet hours (back in a day we bought internet monthly per hour in my country) and was bored as fuck. So we’re sitting there, they’re gossiping about who knows what, and mom gets up to go get some cake she had baked recently. I remained sitting at the table with Rose and that’s when my life changed forever. Rose was a good looking woman. She was about 5’6”, skinny, long black hair, pearly white teeth. Attractive woman overall. So anyways, I am sitting there with her, and she turns to me. She has this creepy grin on her face; bright red lipstick with bright white teeth underneath are just making it look more scary. Her head is moving slowly, almost as if she became a puppet. She says something in the lowest tone possible, certainly not loud enough for me to understand. “Excuse me?” I say, still not being scared, just a bit weirded out. “You ready to go now?” She said this in a voice of a child, I kid you not. Like maybe an 8 year old girl. Grin is still there. She mustered those words through her teeth, never opening the jaw. “What?” I ask, starting to get scared. “You ready?” The same thing again. Only this time, she pulls out an orange out of her purse. That’s it, she just took the orange out, and held it there. Didn’t offer it, didn’t eat it herself, just held the fucking thing. At that point, I was getting scared as fuck. Thankfully, my mom came with the cake. Rose, almost as if someone pushed a button on a remote control, switched back to her normal self, putting the orange back into her purse without my mom noticing. I left the balcony creeped out, but I was 17 so I brushed it off quickly. That night, I had trouble sleeping. My room is on the first floor and my window is at a maybe 5’ height, so I kept looking at it praying not to see some scary monster. I would turn in my bed constantly and look at the window maybe every 5 minutes. It was getting late and I started to doze off, but decided to look into the window one last time. And there she fucking was. Standing in the fucking window. Rose. Just standing, looking directly at me (moonlight was bright enough for me to see), with the same grin on her face. Lipstick was red as ever, and teeth were whither than ever. I was paralyzed with fear. I often imagined what I’d do in situations like these, and I always had an escape plan for any hypothetical I threw at myself. But now, when this friend of my mother’s was staring at me through my window at 4am, just smiling, I was motionless. My mouth got dry, I got goosebumps (have them now as I type this), and I swear it became freezing in my room, probably just the way the body reacts to shock. I finally gathered the courage to get up. I started walking towards the door. Hear head was turning with me. Slowly. With the grin still there. Again, it was as if she were a puppet. I wanted to scream for my parents, but knowing how tense they are, I decided not to cause panic just yet. There had to be some rational explanation, right? For fuck knows what reason, I decided to walk to the window and ask her what the fuck her problem was. I made two slow steps towards it and froze. I froze because she moved. You know what her movement was? Taking the orange out of her purse. Does anyone know what the record time is for having goosebumps? Because they sure as shit aren’t going away. Anyways, after being terrified for a minute, I decide to go on. I am a big guy and figured I’d be able to fight her off if push comes to shove. My windows pull up in order to open. I pull it open maybe some 10 inches and stop. She’s not moving, just holding the fucking orange and looking at me with the scariest grin you’ll ever see. I stand there. She stands there. Then, she starts bending. But every move she makes is so slow, so mechanical. She’s bending so she can reach the open part of the window. I’m horrified. She pushes her head through it (just enough space for her head to go through). “You go with me now?” As she’s saying that, in her 8 year old voice, her hand is making its way through the crack, holding an orange. What do I to? What you’d do. Fucking run. I run out of my room, screaming for my dad. My dad being a light sleeper, he jumps out of his bed and screams back at me asking what the hell is going on. All I can muster to say is “Rose…window.” While dad is putting his pants on, I run back to my room, wanting Rose to be there so he can see that I am not crazy. You know how in horror movies the person you saw is gone by the time witnesses come? Yea well similar thing happened, except I caught Rose leaving. There is a house some 100 yards away from mine, and it had one of those motion activated lights (lots of crime back home). I saw the light turn on, and a glimpse of Rose disappearing behind that house. By the time dad ran into my room, she was gone. After much talking, he decided that it was just a nightmare and told me to call him only if someone physically comes into my room. “You and your fucking imagination” he said walking away. Needless to say, I got exactly zero hours of sleep that night. Nothing happened in the next few months. Rose would still come to visit my mom, but I’d make sure I wasn’t there. Fuck that. As in every teenager’s life, so many things were happening around me and I forgot about the Rose incident. Then one day, I was spending my afternoon browsing internet (years before Reddit unfortunately). I got pretty hungry so as any spoiled child, I yelled from my room to see if my mom would come. She didn’t. Oh well tough luck, I have to go to the kitchen and make myself a sandwich. Kitchen in our house is connected to the living room, but you can’t see the living room until you’re at least in the middle of the kitchen. So I open the kitchen and walk in. I freeze. There it is, right there on the kitchen table. An orange. Immediate thought of that creepy night. Rose is here. I am still motionless in my spot. Few seconds later, I realize how stupid I am for relating a common piece of fruit to a crazy window stalker. So I walk towards the table, wanting to put the orange back in the fruit cabinet. I grab the thing and hear the voice behind me: “You will have to come with me soon, you know.” Child’s voice. It’s Rose. I produce some kind of noise resembling scared pig about to get slaughtered. Lightning fast, I turn around and there she is, standing in the middle of the living room. Just standing there, same grin on her face, same lipstick on her lips, teeth white as ever. Only she started tilting her head to the left a bit, in slow motion. I remember it as if it happened yesterday: her long black hair falling down her shoulders, white summer dress, bright red shoes to match her lipstick. I forgot to mention that she was very pale. Even in the summer, she seemed to not be friends with the sun. This added to creepiness. There’s this woman who already scared the shit out of me once, standing alone in the middle of my living room, pale as a ghost, bright red lipstick and shoes, tilting her head to the side, speaking in child’s voice. And then, and fucking then, she takes an orange out of her purse. Takes it out slowly, and looks at me, as if she wants me to have it. Just as my self-defense mode is about to take over and I either run away or tackle the crazy bitch, my mom walks in. I know it didn’t happen, but it seemed like my mom brought the light into the room. I released a breath of relief. Rose, of course, went back to her “normal” self. They were about to go for a walk and my mom was getting ready in her room while she was pulling her grudge shit on me. Since my parents wouldn’t believe anything I was saying about her, I wasn’t sure what to do. Only thing I could do at that age is nothing, I suppose. But I swore I’d punch that woman should she ever come close to me again. A year or so had passed without any incidents and I was getting ready to go to the United States to study in college. Since I was going to play basketball there, I had to prepare for it. I spent summer away from home, working out in a training camp in a town about 40 miles from my city. During the last night of the camp, the last incident happened. My roommate had left the camp the day before and I had the room to myself. I was very excited about going to America in few days and had trouble sleeping. My room had a beautiful balcony (I was on the third floor of a hotel). Since it was warm, I decided to sit in the chair on the balcony for a while. I walked out, sat down, and immediately regretted it. “It is really time to come now.” I nearly shit myself. I mean, it’s been a while since I last heard that voice, but something like that stays with you forever. I turned my head to the right, and Rose was standing on the fence of a balcony of the room next to mine. Mind you, not standing on the balcony, or sitting at the table, but standing on the fence. How she was balancing I don’t know. Balcony was at least 50 feet from the ground. And she was holding the orange. Fucking orange. Only this time, orange seemed to have been somewhat rotten, not nearly as bright as the first three times. I was scared that she would attempt to jump over to my balcony, as there was only few feet distance between them. I was also scared she’d die in attempt to do so and I’d be blamed somehow. I had no idea what the fuck was going on. “It really is time, you know.” She said it in that child like voice, never opening her jaw, her teeth forever clenched together, and lipstick the color of fresh blood. She seemed even paler this time, and her head was tilted to the left even more. She wore red shoes. “What the fuck do you want from me?” I screamed in desperation, angry that this woman is causing me so much distress, but also hoping that someone would hear me and come witness this crazy bitch’s harassment. “I only want you to go where you belong.” She said that, and again, never opened her teeth. She only sprang her hand more towards me, almost offering me that semi rotten orange. “Fuck you, you crazy bitch.” I opened the door of my room, and as I was walking in, I heard: “You will come.” I slammed the door, deciding this woman was schizophrenic. I would’ve probably flipped out more, but I was leaving the continent in few days, at which point I was safe. Wrong. I know I have a wall of fucking text but this is the shortest version of these creepy events. I came to the US, and have been here for 7 years now. I forgot about the incidents and went on with my life. Only time I ever thought about Rose was when talking to my mom who said that since I left, her friendship with the crazy bitch fell apart. I was glad. Last 7 years were the best of my life. I got bachelor’s and master’s degrees, I got a wonderful girlfriend, you know, life’s good, man. But then. But fucking then. I am a big technology geek, and I love Apple (don’t shoot me down for this please). So, it was Last Friday, September 21st, the release of iPhone 5. I am in front of the store with about 50 other people. I am maybe 15th in line. It’s raining. It’s cold. I’ve been there for about 4 hours now. Doors finally open. We start moving in slowly. I look across the street and instantly stop. People run into my back, I can hear complaining. But it’s all bouncing off of me. Across the street, I see a woman in a white dress, head tilted, holding something orange-ish. Grin on her face. Lipstick so bright red, I can see it from across the street. I can’t move. Someone from far in the back pushes, causing me to fall. While I gather myself, I see the woman disappearing behind the corner. I remain sitting on the ground. It was Rose. It was her, I swear. I sit there for few minutes, get myself together, and walk in the store. No phones left. I decide to walk across the street. And there it was. At the place where she was standing now only sits a mushed, terribly rotten orange. That’s it. Just a rotten orange. I started crying. All memories came back. I thought that my whole life would constitute of being stalked by some maniac. And how did she find me anyways? I spent next few hours in a nearby coffee shop, drinking tea and reasoning how this could be logically possible. I kept no secret from my friends and family about my whereabouts. Did she stalk my Facebook? My friends? Did she travel here to harm me? What the fuck is her deal? Answering no questions I asked myself, I went home, deciding to keep it all to myself. My girlfriend noticed something was wrong with me for the next few days, but didn’t push it. I figured it was all a fluke, my mind playing tricks because I was up all night before that morning. Plus, it was raining. How could I see that well? And that orange, well that was just a coincidence. I convinced myself that I was just making it all up. So today, a letter came. I get a lot of mail, so it’s not that out of the ordinary. But there was this envelope with no return address. I opened it and was immediately shocked. I was holding a Polaroid picture. In it, there was me, standing in line in front of the store last Friday. Only the picture was taken by a person behind me. It was taken at the moment I was looking across the street. I can tell because I could see the horror on my face. On the back of the photo, there were few words written with a black pen: “you come with me, NOW.” I dropped the picture and started crying like a baby. Like really crying my ass off. My girlfriend found me in our room, curled up on bed, still crying. She was terrified that maybe someone close to us had died, as she’s never seen me let a single tear before. I had to tell her. I started telling her the story, leaving most details out, so I can get to the point quicker. As I was talking, she was getting more and more pale. She never said a word. I finished my story and she was pale as ghost, not moving. Then she asked. She asked a fucking question that honestly caused me to almost faint. She said: “This woman, did she happen, to… um, hold an orange?” I froze, she started crying like I’ve never seen her cry before. We had a long talk that night, and her story would require another wall of text. Honestly, I am fucking tired from typing this much and am pretty sure nobody will be willing to read this much. I am also lost. Terrified. Confused. But if someone does read this, I’ll write the rest. I’ll write in hope that someone can offer a solution, and an answer maybe. Currently, we are both scared as fuck, not knowing what to do next. Police is an option, but what do we tell them? I don’t know man, I am fucking scared for mine and her well being. Help me. Update: Well guys, shit. Don’t know what to tell you. It happened again today. Except I didn’t see her. Let me give you a quick rundown of events: 9:00 am – I go to the local police station with my girlfriend. We tell them all that we know and show them the Polaroid. Although quite friendly, they say they really can’t do much other than maybe file a restraining order against the person who probably (their words) isn’t even in the country. They think I mistook her for someone else and the picture, well they said it was probably a prank. They did take the photo and open a file about it, just in case it escalates. It did. 1:00 pm – We arrived in town where I saw her. Went to the location, there was nothing there. Don’t know what the hell I expected anyways. We stayed there for a while. 6:30 pm – Arriving home. Front door of the house is open, but this is not uncommon as we live with 5 other roommates. We go upstairs to our room. Our room is open. That is unheard of as we always make sure we lock it. And our landlord is the only other person who has the key. I yell asking if someone is there, no response. Also, no roommates are in the house, it seems. We walk in. We freeze. Our room is decently small, constitutes of two queen size beds put together and a little dresser and that’s about it. So what did we see? Pillows are all on our dresser. Towels on the bed.Our sheet is taken off the bed and put on the floor. It is spread out. In the center of it is an orange cut in two halves with a little peel next to it. My laptop is facing the door and is playing the same song on repeat. My laptop was turned off before I left and was also password protected. The song playing is my favorite from childhood, “Africa” by Toto. My desktop background was changed to one picture from my childhood that I didn’t even have in the computer. 7:00 pm – We call the police, they arrive 15 minutes later. I take about 5 pics of the mess just before they come. They say they’ll start an investigation, but claim that it’s still not “serious enough” for fingerprints and stuff. 8:30 pm – They leave and tell us to call should anything happen again, and also advise us to stay with friends if possible. We spent next few hours just talking, man. Trying to figure it out. We’re exhausted both mentally and physically. I am going to Skype with my mom tomorrow and see if she knows anything. I will type up my gf’s story tonight, but may post it in the morning if I don’t finish it all in time. I will include photos I took, I promise you that much. Holy fuck, this shit is happening to me. Credit To – Milos Bogetic NOTE: This is the first in a series of several popular Reddit posts documenting some seriously creepy experiences. We are publishing them here with express permission of Milos Bogetic aka inaaace, the original poster. The story is in multiple parts, and will be published completely over the next few days – much like what I did with the ‘Bedtime’ series earlier this year. After the stories have all gone up, I’ll edit each post with links to the other parts. The OP has finished the book that he promised during his successful kickstarter project. You can find the paperback and Kindle e-book versions here: The Story of Her Holding an Orange by Milos Bogetic – full disclosure: our referral link is included. I know that this will not be new material for all of you, but for those of you who – like myself – don’t use Reddit, I wanted to post it so that you guys could enjoy it as much as I did after having it brought to my attention. Thanks again to Milos for letting me post it, and enjoy!

13 minutes

March 1, 2013

Based on True Events, Beings and Entities, Strange and Unexplained

The Scuttler

This is the first time I’ve ever shared the story I’m about to tell you. Sometimes, in the still of the night, it runs through my head on a loop – so I feel the time’s come to put it out there in the hope that certain demons can be laid to rest. It all started with a dare – like many unspeakable things do. I mean, when Gemma and I initially took up the challenge to stay in the old Chantler house overnight, it’s not as though we hadn’t heard all the stories about the Scuttler – we just didn’t worry too much about them. Girls of logic, that’s what we were – and no amount of crazy stories could shock us or put us off. That’s not to say that the old house wasn’t spooky in its own way. It had been abandoned years previously and, as with all empty, decaying houses, it had an air of melancholy about it that wasn’t entirely pleasant but certainly didn’t appear threatening or other-worldly in any way. Well, I’m sure you know how it is; a group of university friends sitting around after an evening’s revelry, bathed only in the glow of blossom scented candles, tanked up on a little too much to wine and up way past our bedtimes. Naturally, the conversation turned to ghosts and ghouls and all the other rubbish that people like to talk about when a good spine-chilling session is in order. It was Roger who first introduced the topic of the Scuttler, and not for the first time either. Ever since we’d taken up residence in our own house in the second year of our degrees, Roger had shown a keen interest in the subject, not least because we lived almost opposite the old house. It wasn’t an obsession exactly, more of a vague amusement combined with a certain degree of wide-eyed belief. So, once again, he broached the subject on the night in question. The assembled company groaned audibly when the topic of the Scuttler was raised and Gemma, stubbing out a cigarette with a bored yawn, grumbled, “Here we go again…” “No but really,” said Roger, “it’s such an odd story that it could almost be real.” “Yeah, almost but not quite,” I said. “That is the point of urban myths, Rog, to sound believable when, even underneath it all, you know they can’t be true or ninety percent of it is made up.” “I agree,” said Sophie, “it’s like that stupid story about the man who hammered a nail through his penis for a thrill, split it open, poured Coke over it to stop the bleeding and then passed out.” “So, what’s unusual about that, anyone would pass out if they’d just split open their most prized possession,” commented Roger. “No, that’s not the end,” continued Sophie. “Apparently he came round hours later and when he looked down his lunchbox and, by that, I mean the entire ensemble, it had been entirely eaten away, as had part of his lower intestine. It’s said that rats were attracted by the smell of the Coke and had gnawed the whole of his tackle away. “That’s absolute nonsense,” laughed Gemma. “Well, you don’t know for certain,” said the ever-believing Roger. “It is such nonsense,” Gemma giggled, “everyone knows rats don’t drink Coke, they only like Pepsi.” “You can joke about it all you want,” grumbled Roger, “but I wouldn’t dismiss it so lightly if I were you. And I wouldn’t dismiss the tale about the Chantler house either.” “Why not?” Gemma said, “it’s not like I ever have cause to visit the place. It really doesn’t affect my life one bit.” “Yes and I’ll bet you never would visit the place either,” said Roger, in a tone which indicated he thought he’d proved his point. “Well I don’t need to visit it, so I probably never will but I wouldn’t be scared to.” Roger held Gemma’s gaze steadily for a full minute before licking his lips, raising an eyebrow and challenging her to prove it. Gemma, brazen as ever, lit up a new cigarette, inhaled deeply and told Roger that, if that’s what he needed to prove it was all a crock of shit, she’d be perfectly willing to do so. But only on the understanding that, after she’d spent a full night there, he would never raise the subject of the Scuttler again. Feeling it unfair to allow Gemma to go on her own, and eager to prove Roger wrong, I offered to take up the challenge with her. And, so it was, that we prepared ourselves to spend a full night in the shadow of the Scuttler the following weekend. My joy knew no limits. So, perhaps now is the time to fill you in on the story of the Scuttler. Legend has it that the house was inhabited by the Chantler family in the early nineties. Said family consisted of a mother, father and two of the most gorgeous children you could ever hope to meet; a blue-eyed, blonde haired dream of a girl and her strikingly handsome brother who, at ten years old, couldn’t do enough for his younger sister. Life jogged along in a merry old fashion for the Chantler family, with all the obligatory visits to the zoo and Disney World and skiing holidays in the Alps during school holidays. Life was fine and merry for the family. Merry, that was, until one summer morning in 2000 when nine year old Rosa was playing in the driveway of the house, jumping from square to square on a hopscotch board that she had chalked onto the gravel. She was so engrossed in her game, long blonde hair swinging like a golden sheet in the sun, that she only registered the sound of the car when it was inches away from her. Frozen to the spot, she was unable to move quickly enough before the car reversed over her, crushing both her legs in the process. Hearing her screams, Mrs. Chantler came rushing out of the house, to be greeted by the unenviable view of her daughter trapped beneath the wheels of her husband’s car, covered in blood and convulsing violently. Her beloved son sat in the driver’s seat, hands still gripping the steering wheel from where he had reversed it out of the garage. After that the Chantlers’ lives changed considerably. Young Rosa had both her legs amputated above the knee and spent the rest of her childhood in a wheelchair. But, apparently, that wasn’t all. In the time it takes to reverse a car, poor young Charles had gone from being the hero of Rosa’s childhood to being an antichrist. Heart filled with a burning rage, Rosa began to create ways to make her brother’s life a nightmare. Hell-bent on vengeance, she would terrorise him in every way she knew how. Knowing that he hated the sight of her useless stumps, she refused to learn to wear the prosthetic limbs the doctors had made for her and insisted on making her brother come face to face, on a daily basis, with the results of his actions. Of a night, Rosa would roll out of her bed and, using her arms to move, would scuttle towards Charles’s room where she proceeded to inflict her own injuries on him. When Charles’s mother commented on the cuts and bruises that had suddenly started to appear on his body, he remained silent or told her that he had simply tripped over, fearing the new-found power of the little girl who plagued his every waking moment. Of a night he would lay rigid in his bed, ears straining for the telltale scuttling sound that marked his vengeful sibling’s approach. Like all good victims, Charles continued to keep quiet which, in the end, was the biggest mistake of his life. In fact, it was the last mistake of his short little life. In the wee small hours of a cold winter morning, some eighteen months after her accident, ten year old Rosa sneaked into her brother’s room for the last time. Wielding a large steak knife, which she had requisitioned from the kitchen earlier in the day, Rosa set about cutting her brother into small pieces. She ripped so much flesh out of his body that by the time she was finished, the knife was allegedly blunt and there was barely an inch of the room that wasn’t covered in blood. Now here’s where the story starts to get really silly. Having done away with her brother in the most grotesque manner, Rosa scuttled away and, squeezing her small body through an old service-hatch in the wall, disappeared into the dark crawl space of the house, never to be seen again. Except, of course, on the odd occasion that an unwitting tramp decided to bed down in the abandoned Chantler house, when Rosa would put in an appearance, never getting any older mind, and scuttle over and slash the poor old bugger to death. I mean, have you ever heard such nonsense in your life? Anyway, armed with a few bottles of wine, an emergency supply of chocolate that would have sent a dietician into a fit, and a carrier bag of large candles, plus a strong torch, and a few blankets, Gemma and I crept into the abandoned Chantler residence. Belief or no belief in spooky tales, it wasn’t a pleasant place. In fact it was rank. It stunk of years of decay and you couldn’t tread on a floorboard without it making some form of protest. “Yuck. Remind me why we’re doing this again?” said Gemma, untangling a cobweb from her long, fair hair. Usually in pristine condition, I wondered how long it would be before it started looking a bit ratty from all the dust in the house. “Don’t go blaming me, you agreed to it,” I reminded her, delving into the carrier bag and lighting a few candles. After a quick reccie of the place, armed with our trusty torch, everything appeared to be Scuttler-free and rather normal – well, as normal as you could expect. Coming down the stairs, my legs gave way slightly and Gemma reached out and grabbed roughly at my sleeve, in order to save me plummeting head first down the wooden staircase. “Christ, be careful,” she said, a flutter of concern in her voice. “Are you okay?” “I’m fine,” I said, brushing her off and reclaiming my sleeve. “You know what a clumsy cow I am, and these mouldy old stairs don’t help much.” “You’re too bloody clumsy if you ask me,” responded Gemma huffily and then her face broke into a mischievous smile as she reminded me of the time I had tripped over and landed face-down in Roger’s birthday cake. “Well, this is fun,” I said after a while. “Sure is,” Gemma replied, breaking open a bar of Cadburys Fruit & Nut and taking a huge bite. “I sort of wish I’d never agreed to it now,” she said around a mouthful of chocolate. “We could always go back.” “Oh right, and have Roger laugh at us for being cowards. He’d never believe it was just because we missed our creature comforts. No, I reckon we’ve got to stay or we’ll never hear the last of his Scuttler stories.” So saying, we settled down into a companionable silence, of sorts – the silence bit was total but the companionable part was a little questionable. Gemma and I, although we used to get along fantastically and were still reasonably good friends, had experienced problems in the past; a long story involving her nabbing a tall, hunky post-grad that I’d had my eye on for months. Although we made it up in the end, things had never been quite as rosy between us since. It was during times like this that I always feared she would bring it up again. Silent, all-girls-together times which generated topics of conversation that I just couldn’t deal with. It was not my way to talk problems out and I hoped that she wouldn’t raise the subject that night, because I knew myself well enough to be certain that it would work me up into a temper again. And then where would we be? Back to square one, with a disagreeable atmosphere in the house and people tiptoeing round us. As bad luck would have it, Gemma managed to last a whole fifteen minutes, roughly the amount of time it took her to polish of a Mars Bar and half a Kit Kat, before she mentioned the hunky post-grad. “Look Emily,” she began, twisting a strand of hair around her index finger, “I just want to let you know again how sorry I am about all that business with Adam.” “Don’t mention it,” I responded mildly, trying to stop her before she got going. “It’s just that I still feel bad about it…” “Really, don’t mention it,” I said, cutting her off and hoping she would take the hint. No such luck. For the next half an hour I was subjected to the spectacle of Gemma’s guilt. On and on she went until, at about half past one, we heard a scuttling sound from above. Both of us froze and I immediately strained my ears to try and catch the sound. Then it came again, a slow, scraping sort of a noise like a sack, or a very small body, being dragged across the floor. “You don’t think it’s the Scuttler do you?” hissed Gemma, her eyes wide with fear. “I doubt it very much, it’s just a story,” I replied. Nevertheless, it certainly sounded like someone was up there. The noise continued, moving over our heads and then making its way slowly, slowly down the stairs. Bump, scrape. Bump, scrape. Gemma and I stared at each other, mouths slack with fear. Licking my lips, I heard the noise approach the lounge and shrunk back into the shadows. It couldn’t be the Scuttler, I mean it was just a story, right? A pile of crap. But, nevertheless, something was in there with us. Suddenly the door banged open and Gemma and I screeched, grabbing each other in a fear-induced embrace as an old tramp lumbered in, a half-finished bottle of Gin hanging limply in his hands. “Whaa yer doin’ ‘ere?” he slurred, as his glassy eyes tried to focus on us. Gemma and I, still catching our breath were unable to answer. “Bloody treshpassers. Bet you’re lookin’ out for Scuttler,” he said and giggled manically. “Well, I hope she fin-findsh yous,” he scowled and, with that, he shuffled out of the house, letting the front door bang loudly behind him. Gemma and I looked at one another and then her blue eyes crinkled into a smile and she started to laugh in relief, lightening the atmosphere somewhat until, that is, she insisted on raising the issue of Adam again five minutes later. By half past two I was in a blind rage with her. The girl didn’t know when to drop an issue. Above us, a floorboard creaked again and something scuttled in the murky depths of one of the rooms. Probably just a rat, I thought. I tried to convince myself that the Scuttler didn’t exist anymore. Perhaps had never existed but, as Gemma flicked back her long, blonde hair and surveyed me with cool, blue eyes that knew too much, I instantly sensed that the Scuttler was amongst us. Hidden all those years, she had been right there without my even realising. As Gemma’s eyes looked fearfully at a point just beyond my shoulder, as though assessing the chance of escape in the presence of the damned, I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise and a cold chill fill the hollow of my stomach. Suddenly there was blood everywhere. Before I knew what had happened, there was a snapping sound inside my head, or maybe it was one of Gemma’s bones because, in that instant, Gemma was being torn to pieces. I watched the whole thing, as though standing outside of myself – saw the gelatinous, viscid gore that eased out of her body and matted her hair. The glutinous pop that her eyeballs made as they were ripped apart and the shocked, rictus grin that her mouth made as she realised the truth and, through it all, the shadow of the Scuttler hung over us, terrifying me more than anything ever had before, driving me into a demented, petrified panic. And then I was running along the pavement with all my might as I sought to gain the sanctuary of my own house on the other side of the street and outrun the spectre of the Scuttler. Twice I stumbled and fell, and twice I clambered unsteadily to my feet, looking behind me at that house of horrors before I lurched forwards again towards the warm lights of the student house. Screeching through the door, I was met by the aghast faces of my friends as I told them that something, I knew not what, but something unearthly had attacked Gemma. Unable to stop them, I watched as they ran across the road towards the old Chantler house and, slowly, I ascended the stairs and made for the quietness of my own room. Once there, I surveyed myself in the mirror. Quite a lot of Gemma’s blood had made its way onto my fair hair, tingeing it with ruby-red highlights. As I sat down on the bed, I contemplated once again the strange myth that had attached itself to the house. My, I thought, as I ran my hand over my aching thighs, how people liked to exaggerate. How things get changed over the years. As if a small girl would refuse the use of artificial limbs, preferring to scuttle around. And as if a girl would beat and bruise her brother, and then to think that she would kill him and slip away forever into the bowels of a house, living there even after it was long abandoned. No, that would never happen. A girl would run to her parents, confess what she had done but they would understand. In time they would understand. Her brother had taken away her life and, in turn, she had exacted her revenge but not in a gory display, just with one swift motion of the knife; one exact, precise thrust into the heart of her once-loved sibling. And, surely too, she would be given proper psychiatric care allowing her, eventually, to live a normal life. Yes, apart from the occasional bout of anger her life would be normal, almost boringly normal. Perhaps she would even go to university and try to get herself a degree, change her name and, at some point, forget the past – just so long as people stopped stirring up that buzzing nest of anger in the pit of her stomach. Yes, I though, as I bent down and ran my hands over the length of my artificial legs – legs that I had become so adept at using over the past ten years that, apart from the odd bout of clumsiness, nobody would ever guess I wore them – that’s the way it would happen. I should know, because that’s the way it did happen. Credit To – Adena Graham Please note: This is original version of The Scuttler and is posted here with permission from the original author, Adena Graham. It has been since altered without prior permission and circulated around the internet in a video by Mr Creepy Pasta and Gemma Louise Carline (Gemma Moonstone) on a number of other websites. The author wishes to distance herself from these other, unapproved versions (including the altered version on Scary for Kids) as they are in breach of copyright. Please wait...

12 minutes

January 11, 2013

Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances Please wait...

I’m a Cop, and I Institutionalized Someone I Knew Wasn’t Crazy

cops, crimes, investigations, jobs, occupations, police, police officers, psych wards, psychiatric hospitals, psychiatric wards, S.F. Barkley

Part

36 minutes

July 4, 2019

Investigations and Crimes, Jobs and Occupations, Medical and Hospitals

Twisted Teddy

I suffer from Schizophrenia. Before you jump to any conclusions about me…before that word “schizophrenia” flashes its stigma and makes you think of serial killers, mass shooters, and the like, let me dispel a few things. I am not Norman Bates. I am not Ted Bundy. As a matter of fact, most sufferers of this illness shy away from violence. I do not have multiple personalities. Dissasociative Identity Disorder is a completely different condition than what I have. Most of the time I’m just like you. I go to work, I watch television, I read books, listen to music, indulge my hobbies, and spend time with people I love. I just occasionally…see and hear things that aren’t really there. When this happens…when I hallucinate or hear voices, I refer to these episodes as experiencing “interference”, because that is how it feels to me. They are interruptions in my every day life. It’s also a good way for me to signal to someone I trust, who knows about my condition, that I’m in the midst of an episode without having to use that word. I simply tell them, “I’m sorry…There’s some interference happening,” and they understand. Not everyone is understanding. My father was one of those people. I was diagnosed at a very young age. I was only six when a child psychiatrist reluctantly wrote “schizophrenia” onto my diagnostic chart. It’s not a diagnosis assigned lightly, especially to children. Most people with this illness don’t begin displaying symptoms until the late teens or early twenties. I was six. However, in a weird way, I consider this a blessing. I never had to experience the jarring phenomenon of living a normal life to suddenly having the carpet pulled beneath my feet. Better to be born blind than lose your sight later in life. I’ve never known anything else. This has also given me a long time to come to terms with my illness and to learn to live with it. I take medication, and as long as I stay on them most of my days are just as boring and mundane as everyone else’s. Mild episodes will always happen, but the big ones, the ones ranging on the scale 8 or above, are few and far between. The most difficult thing about living with schizophrenia is not always being able to tell what is real from what is not. Sometimes, it’s very clear. If I see a purple elephant riding a tricycle through my living room, I can pretty much assume that isn’t real and not give it much thought. The ones that get to me are the more subtle ones…answering a phone that wasn’t ringing…responding to someone calling my name when there was no one…attempting to sit in a chair that’s not really there. This sort of thing can be extremely embarrassing when they happen in public, so I tend to stay away from most people. I know I come across as creepy to some. Strange. It’s like they know there is something “off” about me, but just can’t pinpoint what it is. Another annoying thing about this illness are the delusions. I have been fortunate, though. I haven’t been plagued by delusions the way some schizophrenics are. I don’t believe the government has planted a chip in my brain or that I have been abducted by aliens. I don’t buy into conspiracy theories or anything like that. However, there is always that danger. I’m always afraid of going off the deep end that way, so I avoid anything that might trigger it. Sometimes all it takes for a simple idea to take root. A word. A phrase. It’s not always purple elephants. Often times, it’s something much worse. One thing I avoid above all else is religion. I don’t mean that to sound disrespectful to anyone who is religious. A common delusion for schizophrenics to fall into is the belief that they are hearing the voice of God, or that their hallucinations are actually angels or demons trying to show them visions. I’ve even had well-meaning people tell me that I’m not mentally ill at all- that I’m gifted. I can see into the spiritual realm whereas others cannot. Of course that’s ridiculous. This is not a gift. Yet, I do fear someday believing it. Who wouldn’t want to believe that they are special that way? I suppose that’s why it’s such a common thing. Yet, it’s very dangerous thinking. As appealing as the notion of being chosen by God is, the reality is that I have an illness. It isn’t pretty. It isn’t romantic. It just is. Besides that…I don’t have such a great track record with religion. My father…I mentioned him earlier…was a Southern Baptist Preacher in the backwoods of Louisiana where I grew up. He was a devout Christian and held his family, myself included, to strict standards. We were examples for the community, and he took that position very seriously. In public anyway. Behind closed doors things were quite different. My father drank heavily and had a hellfire and brimstone temper. It went even beyond that, however. There was a meanness in him- a side the rest of the congregation never saw. He reveled in his position of power over his followers, and that bled heavily into our home life. We weren’t his family. We were his flock. You see this scar across the corner of my mouth? That was delivered with a strip of barbed wire. I could show you my arms and my back as well, but I keep those covered. No matter the weather, I’m always in long sleeves. Having a schizophrenic son was not news my father took well. At first he didn’t believe there was such a thing. He was convinced I was behaving this way for attention- claiming to see things that weren’t real. Then it got more sinister. My father became seized with the idea that was in fact, possessed. My hallucinations were Satanic visions. I was hearing the voice of the Devil. That’s when I stopped being human in my father’s eyes. I was no longer his son. I was a thing to be tormented whenever he saw fit. He derived a sick pleasure in not just the physical torture- the beatings, the burns, the chokings, the cuts- but the psychological torture as well. He stopped calling me by my name and instead used nicknames like “Schizo”, or “his personal favorite, “Hellspawn”. He enjoyed taking advantage of my fragile psychological state. He would say or do things he knew would trigger an episode, and then use that as further evidence that I was filled with the devil. One day, when I was about 7, he came home in a drunken stupor as usual, but this time he clutched something in his left hand as he staggered through the front door. At first I thought it was some sort of dead rodent, but when he brought it into the light it was clear. It was a teddy bear- torn in places, with matted fur and bald spots. In his gravelly, slurred voice he tossed it at my face and said, “Here, ya go, Hellspawn. Pulled that out of the dumpster for you. Mind you watch out. It’s got a mind of its own.” With that he plopped on the sofa and passed out. Mind of its own. That’s all it took. That simple phrase. A seed was planted. I regarded the haggard thing my father had thrown at me. It stank. I believed him when he said he pulled it from the garbage. My first inclination was to just throw it away. In a few hours my father would probably not even remember giving it to me and would never miss it. But what if he did? What if he got angry that I tossed it out? Hanging on to a smelly, rotten, stuffed animal seemed more appealing than whatever punishment my father my inflict on me, so I took it up to my room. This was most likely some sort of mind game. He wanted to see how long he could make me keep this thing. Make me sleep with it. Make me take it to school. Make me eat meals with it. As his petty torments went, this seemed pretty mild so I figured I could take it. It was just an old bear, after all. But those words kept seeping into my brain- mind of its own. I began to regard the bear with suspicion. When I was 7, I didn’t have the discernment skills to be able to tell when a delusion or an episode was about to overtake me. I’m much older now and I’ve lived with this for years. I now have coping skills and strategies I can use to combat things like this. But back then, I did not. I stared into the beady, plastic eyes of the bear, and I could feel it staring back at me. “It has a mind of its own.” I threw the bear across the room. It landed face down on the wooden floor. I decided then that I wasn’t going to take it into the bed with me. I would just leave it there on the floor. I went to bed and after what felt like hours of lying still with one eye fixed on the bear, I managed to fall asleep. I’m not sure how long I slept. It may have been a couple of hours or just a few minutes, but I was awakened by a strange wooden sound. I say “wooden” because it sounded like snapping twigs and creaking branches. When I opened my eyes, they were already pointed in the direction where the bear layed, still on the floor. But now it was changing. It’s furry limbs twisted and lengthened in a jerking and unnatural way. That was the cracking noise I was hearing. Its arms and legs grew and jerked, lengthening and thinning like spider legs. Finally, it lifted its head from the floor, it was swollen to several times its original size, and distended across from fluffy ear to fluffy ear was a row of sharp teeth that dripped with drool. It opened its jaw and released a roar that shook the room. I felt its hot breath hit me in the face, and I bolted from the bed. I ran into the hall and headed for the stairs. Behind me I could hear the sounds of crackling wood as the thing lifted itself to its feet. I turned to look and it scrambled behind me, walking on spindly legs and using its spider-like arms to dig its claws into the opposite walls of the hallway to propel itself forward. The house rattled with its growls. As I reached the stairs I slipped on the top step and tumbled to the bottom floor. I twisted my ankle in the process and couldn’t get back to my feet. I looked up the stairs and staggering its way down was this monstrosity- no longer a teddy bear, but a scarecrow-like thing with the skin of a teddy bear stretched across its wooden skeleton. It opened its mouth again and spoke. “It’s lovely out in the woods today, but safer to stay at home. For every bear that ever there was will gather there for certain because today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic…” I screamed and closed my eyes, sliding myself back across the floor like a slug. I began reciting a nursery rhyme that sometimes brought me comfort when I was having an episode. I tried to remind myself that this wasn’t real. “As I was going up the stairs, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish he’d go away. As I was going up the stairs, I met a men who wasn’t there, He wasn’t there again today, I wish, I wish, he’d go away…” I whispered this to myself over and over. When I opened my eyes I was in my mothers arms. She was shaking me and calling my name. I looked past her worried face and up toward the stairs. My father stood at the top, with the bear in his hands. “What’s wrong with him now?” He said. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I think he had another night terror.” “Figures,” my father said in that familiar, dismissive tone. “Gonna chain you to the bed, boy if you don’t cut this shit out.” He threw the bear at me again and disappeared into the hallway. My mother carried me back up to bed. For the next few nights this happened again and again. The bear would transform into the monster, chasing me, and my mother would find me in various places of the house- hiding in closets or in cabinets, shaking and reciting nursery rhymes. After the sixth night my mother begged my father to let her get rid of the bear. She offered to burn it, bury it, whatever it took. My father just smugly smiled and said, “You’d burn a gift a father gave his son? How ungrateful!” Somehow, my father was still more terrifying than anything my broken mind could invent. Even so, the constant disturbances during the night were wearing on him too. So he made good on his promise to restrain me to my bed. The seventh night, he tied me down with ropes and sat the bear square on my chest. “Sleep tight,” he said as he closed my bedroom door. It wasn’t long before I felt vibrations on my chest as a low growl began to rise from the bear. Slowly, it’s mouth began to stretch across its face in a toothy, distended fashion. Immediately, I closed my eyes and began to recite the rhyme. Over my own voice, though, I could hear that crackling sound. It was growing again. Transforming. I abandoned the rhyme and instead began to scream. I called for my mother. I struggled and strained against the ropes until they began to cut into my wrists and I felt blood trickle down my arm. I could hear voices in the hall. My mother first. “Let me go to him, please! He’s having a nightmare!” Then my father, “Stop babying him! He’s driving us all as crazy as he is! You want a stop to it? I’ll make it stop!” What happened next is a blurry mix of hallucination and reality. To this day I’m not quite sure what actually transpired. I remember my father bursting into my bedroom. I remember the door flinging open and crashing against the wall behind. I remember the crackling noise the bear made as it grew. I remember the bear’s voice, “Today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic!” There was a scream…but not my own this time. My eyes were clenched tightly shut and I just kept repeating, “As I was going up the stairs, I met a man who wasn’t there, he wasn’t there again today, I wish I wish he’d go away.” There were growls, and roars, crashes, the sound of ripping flesh and screaming…then silence. Finally, my mother came in. She saw me tied to the bed and ran to me, frantically removing the ropes from my bloody wrists. My father was nowhere to be seen. The bear lied face down on the wooden floor, as it had the first night when I had thrown it aside. After attending to my wounds and making sure I was all right, my mother asked me, “Where is your father?” I looked up at her and simply shook my head. That was nearly thirty years ago. The community assumed that my father must have wandered away in a drunken stupor and had some sort of accident. There was a search in the nearby woods, but nothing was ever found. I still have the teddy bear. Never since that night has it ever transformed again. It’s just a bear. Just an old, worn, teddy with dead plastic eyes and balding fur. When I first saw it, it frightened me. But I was just a child then, and now I understand that it was all a delusion brought on by my illness. However, for reasons I can’t quite describe, I have a certain respect for this old thing. Sometimes, the scariest things in this world are just misunderstood. Sort of like me. After all. All of us have a mind of our own.

10 minutes

April 26, 2017

Artifacts and Objects

Violet

Sasha Brokov, Video Narratives OK

The predator casually surveyed his hunting ground. His camouflage consisted of a dry cleaned white suit, matching silk shirt and a carefully chosen tie. His sleeves were rolled just enough to display a fake Rolex, and the greying hair at his temples had been darkened with very cheap, and very temporary dye. The same dye darkened his goat-tee. Beside his Italian leather loafers rested a slim and shiny black briefcase. In the cheap and tawdry decor of an American mall, he struck a sophisticated and prosperous contrast, which further accentuated his illusion. Sitting quietly and sipping his coffee he stalked. A hunter of opportunity, he had no specific prey in mind. If the chance presented itself, he would pursue. If not, he would slink away empty-handed, as he most often did. Even nature’s greatest predator, the tiger, was only successful on one out of seven hunts. He freely admitted a much worse ratio than that, but caution was his code and a successful hunting trip was one safely returned from. A lost opportunity was unfortunate, and merely so. But detection, capture, and consequences were unthinkable. His recent narrow escape in Charlotte was not something he was anxious to repeat. He eyed a group of coeds as they passed by, barely bothering to conceal his stare. They were certainly cute, but too many, safety in numbers. Another young pair across the concourse caught his eye. Only two was a good sign. It meant they were out looking for something (boys most likely), available, and interested in being approached. Best of all, two could be played against each other. This could be an opening, but not too hasty. First they needed to be watched. He had to be sure they were alone, that there weren’t parents, older siblings, or other members of their clique about to intervene. They turned the corner, walked cross the Sears entrance and began heading towards him and the food court. His interest was evident as they approached and passed him by, averting their eyes and giggling together. They were both young blonds, thin, dressed to attract attention and wearing too much makeup, the very picture of youthful naiveté. It was be tempting to take on both, but together they may be too much to handle safely. His lascivious eyes had already developed a preference, but he would not allow himself to be ruled by impulse. Pragmatism and opportunity must govern. He would first need to observe to determine which was dominant, and play on that. He drew his cell phone, set the alarm for 20 minutes, and then rose to pursue his quarry. A sudden a discomfort scratched inside his head, like an itch against his skull. It was followed by a compulsion which drew his gaze away from the blondes’ swaying hips to the other side of the concourse. There, half hidden behind a display was a girl, her eyes intent on him. When their gazes met she looked away quickly, but he understood; she had been watching him. Interesting. He quickly reassessed the situation. She seemed to be alone, young, brunette, and dressed all in black. Better and better. He always had a thing for the goth/emo look. Perhaps here was an easier, lower risk, and more desirable target. Forgetting the blonds he moved towards the new opportunity. As he rounded the corner and approached she came more fully into view. Long dark tresses flowed and framed her angular face, contrasting with her bright green eyes. Makeup accentuated her fair complexion, but her application was subdued, done with taste and skill. Her black t-shirt seemed a size too small and stretched a gruesome visage of a demonic pope across a generous bosom. The heavy metal t-shirt was tucked into a pair of skin tight black jeans, adorned with chains and patches, which themselves tucked into a pair of hard looking boots strung with yet more chains. The projected image was that of a strong and rebellious young girl. The image he received was an overdeveloped and naive creature whose premature independence would be her downfall. He approached smiling broadly, “Hi! How’s it going?” he asked. She looked him over and tersely replied “Hi.” Skepticism was written across her face, which seemed natural enough. He continued, “I noticed you from across the way”, gesturing with is head. “The fluorescent lighting doesn’t harm your complexion much.” “The what?” “Sorry, I’m a photographer by profession and sometimes it can be hard to turn off.” As he explained reached into his interior jacket pocket and deftly offered her a glossy business card. “You see, I’m a talent scout and journeyman photographer for Teen Scream Magazine. The name’s Eric Avaggio” he said with an insincere smile. “I’m actually prowling about now. Malls are great places to find subjects. The lighting is absolutely terrible. Whenever somebody looks half way human under them it suggests they’re photogenic. That they photograph well.” She took the embossed and elegant card from his outstretched hand. His outward demeanor didn’t betray his nerves. His heart was racing and his stomach was twisted in knots. He felt like a kid asking this girl out. He resisted the powerful urge to leer at her body but instead kept his gaze fixed on her face and eyes. She had such pretty eyes, a deep ocean green that you could almost feel yourself drowning in… Time enough for that later. Now he needed to maintain control, to set the snare. “You’ve heard of Teen Scream of course?” he elicited “Kinda.” She didn’t talk much, but she was probably just nervous. “We’re always looking for new talent and new faces. I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind joining me for a minute or so” he gestured towards the table he had been sitting at. “We could take a few test shots ‘n see how they come out, maybe discus the possibilities.” “Possibilities?” “Modelling of course! Haven’t you ever wanted to be a model?” She replied with a dismissive snort, “Never really thought about it.” “Well, you might want to. You can make some quick cash, and who knows, you might blow up and have a career. It won’t take long. Say, I’ll even buy you a coffee.” That was a mistake he thought. It might come off as too desperate. Time to change topic and distract her. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.” She looked at him with her deep green eyes, “Violet” she answered. “That’s different. My daughter has a friend named Violet, she looks nothing like you though” He never had a daughter. “So Violet, what’s with that shirt?” he asked as he started walking away. She took the bait and followed him as she explained. She had just finished talking as they reached the line at Dunkin’ Donuts. “That’s really interesting,” he lied. “So how long have you liked that group?” He needed to keep her talking and prattling on. It would set her at ease and make her feel like she had some control. They ordered, paid, and then clearly annoyed the teller by getting a receipt. “I can write it off as a business expense” he explained to the clerk. The mention of business shifted the conversation back to his terms. As he lead Violet back to an open table in the food court he began to spin his practiced web of lies. He explained who he portrayed himself as, that he received a commission for each prospect he brought in and a bonus if one was actually hired. That he didn’t want to get her hopes up but there was always a possibility, bait and deception. With effort, he kept his eyes glued to hers and did his best to read her. She was a tough one, very impassive. There were times he didn’t think she was buying it, but then she would raise her eyebrows, smile, or give some one-word response, something to show that she was still interested. He decided that this one was probably not too bright. It was getting late and it was almost time to spring the trap. He pulled his best lure from his briefcase, an immaculate and lusciously printed nine by eleven glossy folder made up to look like the cover of the magazine itself. It even included the name “Teen Scream” splayed across the top in its distinctive font. The cover girl was a broadly smiling young model wearing a glamorous evening gown and confidently strutting down a catwalk surrounded by photo flashes. The cover lines surrounding the image read “Your Glamorous Career”, “How to prepare for your first Photoshoot”, and “the ins and outs of professional modeling.” Violet took the folder and opened it to find the inside flaps filled with bundles of documents, all printed on high grade bright white paper and prominently bearing the Teen Scream letterhead. Affixed to the lower inside flap was another of Eric Avaggio’s business cards tucked into specially cut slits. Violet’s amazement was reflected in her eyes. His heart leapt. She was taking it all in, hook, line and sinker. Twenty minutes were up, and the soft tone of his phone alarm wafted over the table. He pulled his phone from inside his jacket, glanced at the screen and commented, “Sorry, I need to take this.” He rose, turned off the alarm, and held the phone to his ear. “Charlotte, how’s it coming?” he said as he walked out of earshot, leaving Violet to nibble his carefully prepared bait. He mocked conversation from a safe distance for a short time before coming back to the table. “Okay… Okay… well, what can you do? Just be prepared, I’ll call you when I’m leaving to let you know.” He turned off his phone and placed it back in his pocket. “Sorry about that.” She didn’t respond, flipping pages of the brochures, apparently mesmerized by the glamour of it all. He continued “we were supposed to be in town for another couple of days, but corporate needs us back to do some re-shoots.” Violet looked up at him her face as impassive as ever. “Look, you seem like a nice kid and I would feel guilty if I showed up, offered you this great opportunity and then just disappeared. Besides, I would hate to have wasted the night and not get paid for it. I just talked to Charlotte. She and Bill are back at the studio packing up. If you want, I’ll bring you by the studio, we’ll take a few headshots, nothing too elaborate, and then we can drop you off back here. It shouldn’t take more than an hour or so.

22 minutes

April 7, 2017

Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances

The Vigil

The Rake

“What is sleep but the image of death?” -Ovid, “Amorum” *** Mayet sat in the big chair and looked out the window. The curtains were drawn, so there was nothing to see, but she looked anyway. She could hear them talking in the next room. They’d left the door open, so they must have wanted her to hear. “She doesn’t sleep,” Mayet’s mother was saying. “Not more than a few hours at a time, and even then only if I’m in the room with her. “Last week I left for a minute to make tea and when she woke up and found me gone she started screaming. I’ve never heard anyone scream like that.” The doctor cleared her throat. “How long has this been going on?” “Weeks.” “Has your family physician seen her?” “Yes. He even prescribed something, but she won’t take it. That’s why he told us to call you. Can you help?” “We won’t know until I talk to her. I’ll go introduce myself.” “Should I come with you?” “It’s better if you don’t. But you can listen.” “If you’re sure…” “This is what I do, Ms. Bautista. Let me work.” Mayet heard footsteps on the carpet. She sensed, without turning around, the doctor’s presence just behind her, and her mother hovering in the doorway. She said nothing. The doctor sat on the floor next to her chair. “Hello Mayet,” she said. Mayet raised a hand in a half-salutatory gesture. “It’s nice to meet you. I’ve been talking to your mother and some of your friends; a lot of people are worried about you. They think I can help. If we talk a little we can see if they’re right.” Mayet fidgeted with her fingers; they were feeling sluggish and tingly. It was something that happened whenever she was going on the third day with no sleep. She licked her lips before speaking: “Are you a psychiatrist?” “No. There’s not really a job title for what I do. You could call me a kind of counselor. I work with teens who are refusing conventional treatment for their problems.” “You’re here to make me take the pills.” “I’m here to find out what’s bothering you, and hopefully find a way to fix it. I’m not here to make you do anything you don’t want to. So can we talk a little?” Mayet shrugged. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re afraid to sleep?” “I’m not afraid to sleep. I’d love to sleep. It’s all I can think about.” “That’s good.” “I’m afraid to wake up.” “I’m sorry?” “Because of the man who watches me.” “…what man?” Mayet shook her head. The light coming through the curtains was hurting her eyes, though there wasn’t much of it. “He’s not a man, really. He doesn’t even look like a man. He looks like some kind of…dead animal. And he comes into my room and watches me sleep, unless someone else is here.” “I see. And what makes you think this?” Mayet turned to look at the doctor for the first time, to give her a disgusted look. “Because I wake up and find him here. And because I’m not the only one. My friends…he got them all.” The doctor frowned. “Tell me about it?” she said. Mayet shrugged and turned away again. “I’ve already told everyone. I guess I can tell you too; it won’t make any difference.” She sighed. “It started with Brianne.” “Your mother mentioned her. She was your best friend.” “Not really. Not for a while. But we still talked. She was the first person to tell me about it. It was a kind of ghost story, you know? She read it on the Internet. About a…thing, that comes into people’s homes.” “And does what?” “Nothing, really. Just watches you. People will wake up and see it there.” “Then what?” “The stories don’t say. Sometimes it hurts someone, but other times it just watches. But they say that’s actually the worst part. That when you wake up and find it there, and you know that it’s been watching you, you’re never the same.” “Sounds scary. But people have always told stories like that.” “That’s what I said. Brianne was freaked about it though; it’s almost all she would talk about for weeks until we told her to shut up about it already. That story really scared her, you know?” “Who is ‘we’?” “Me and Jan.” “Jan. Your mother mentioned him, too.” “I’ll bet she did. Anyway, Brianne was all worked up about this story for a while, and then she dropped it. Or we thought she did. Then she missed a few days of school, and when we saw her again she looked like shit. We thought she was sick, but she said no, that she just hadn’t been sleeping. Because she said she saw it.” “It? You mean the creature from the stories?” “Yeah. She said she woke up and found it sitting on her bed, just like people said. She said she screamed and it crawled away, and her parents woke up and the police came, and nothing was there. “But then the next night, when she woke up…” “It was there again.” Mayet nodded. “Did you believe Brianne?” “No. It’s a stupid story, and the fact that she’d been talking about it for so long before it supposedly happened? We thought she just wanted attention.” “Hmm. Your mother says she thinks Brianne was into drugs. Is that why you two weren’t such good friends anymore?” Mayet bit her lip. “I see. Did you tell anyone about this?” “We didn’t have to. Brianne told everyone. She said she needed someone to help her, but she didn’t know who, or how. The entire school thought she’d lost her mind. She was missing class, fighting with her parents, staying up four, five days at a time. Not because she was scared to sleep, but because she was scared to wake up.” “How did you feel about this?” “Fucking embarrassed. How else was there to feel?” “And how long did this go on?” “A month? Maybe a little longer, I don’t really remember. By the end Brianne wasn’t talking to much of anyone. She’d given up.” “Do you remember the last time you spoke with her?” “Her parents asked me to talk to her. To help them make her come around. I didn’t want to, but they were so upset I couldn’t say no, so I went to her room. She was sitting by the window, staring at nothing. She was all skinny and pale, like a ragdoll. I sat next to her and I told her to get help. I begged her.” “What did she say?” “She told me…” Mayet stopped, flinched, then started again. “She said it was too late. She kept saying something like…’It’s because of his eyes. When I wake up and look into those eyes, I know things.’ And I asked her, ‘What things?’ And she said, ‘Terrible things.’ And then she just lost it. She was crying all over me. I hugged her and we cried for a long time.” “You two must have been very close before all this.” Mayet said nothing. The doctor paused for a respectful moment before going on. “So what happened after that?” “Things got a little better. Her parents thought I’d actually helped her. I was relieved.” “And then?” Mayet looked away. “She snuck into one of the locker rooms after school. They found her…hanging from a showerhead.” The doctor squeezed Mayet’s hand, once. “We thought that was the end of it, you know? But then Jan started.” “Jan was your boyfriend?” Mayet shook her head. “Your mother says he was. She said he was another thing that came between you and Brianne. That you’d fought over him.” “My mom says a lot of things.” “All right. What happened with Jan?” “He was pretty out of it after Brianne died. Everyone was, but he took it the worst. I spent a lot of time at his place; his parents are never around, and I didn’t want him to be alone.” “Was he drinking?” “Mom just never shuts up, does she?” Mayet sneered. “Yeah, he was drinking. So what? Who wouldn’t? That wasn’t the part that worried me.” “…he started seeing it too, didn’t he?” Mayet nodded. Then she began to cry. She smothered her face in the back of the chair, so that her voice was barely audible. “He came to me after the first morning. He was a wreck. He told me, ‘It’s all true. We should have believed her.’ He felt guilty, you know? Like we made it happen by not believing her.” “Is that why he thought the creature came to him? As a kind of punishment?” Mayet looked at her hands for a while. “He didn’t say so. But it makes sense.” “Did you tell anyone that Jan was troubled?” “A teacher. I wouldn’t, normally, but I was scared he’d do the same thing as Brianne.” “Did he?” “No. I don’t think so. He just disappeared.” “Disappeared?” “He ran away. After a week he couldn’t take it anymore, and he sent me an email telling me he was going. He said he didn’t think he could get away from whatever it was, but he had to try. And he said…” Mayet stopped talking. In the corner, the old clock ticked a minute off. Mayet’s mother quietly sobbed in the doorway. Eventually, without prompting, she went on. “He told me he was scared for me. Scared…that it would come for me next.” The doctor’s expression gave nothing away. She drummed her fingers against the carpet, in time with the clock. “And did it?” Mayet shifted in her chair. “For a while, I would get emails from Jan. Never very long, just telling me he was all right, that he was keeping moving. Then one day they stopped. I haven’t gotten one in over a month now.” “What do you think that means?” “I don’t know. But I do think that it was following him. And that whatever was happening to him, it’s not anymore. Because the same time he stopped writing…” her voice cracked, “was the first time I saw it.” She turned and looked the doctor fully in the face for the first time. Her eyes were red; from crying, and from never sleeping. “It was three o’clock in the morning, and I don’t know what woke me up, but he was sitting right there, right next to where you are now.” “Here? Not on the bed?” “Not that time. Not yet. He was naked, and rocking back and forth. He looked like he was hurt or something. He’s all pale, like one of those blind fish that live in caves. And there’s something wrong about the way his arms and legs and neck move.” “Did you see his face?” “Not the first night. The first night he just crawled away. And I sat there in bed, hugging my sheets, and I cried and cried. I cried because I’d never believed it, and now I’d seen it, and I couldn’t stand what that meant.” “Did you tell anybody?” “No. I knew what they’d think. Because it was exactly what I’d thought, you know? At first I just hoped that it would go away.” “But it didn’t.” “No. I woke up the second night and he was standing right next to my bed. His back was still turned, but he was standing over me. And the night after that I finally saw him face to face. And Brianne was right: The eyes are the worst thing. Once you’ve seen those eyes…oh God, the things I saw…” Mayet’s mother sobbed louder, and then she walked away, crying. Neither Mayet nor the doctor watched her go. “After that I knew there was no getting away. Brianne tried to get help and Jan tried to run, and neither worked. So the only thing I could think to do was just not sleep.” “Because he only comes when you sleep.” “Yeah. So if I never sleep, I’ll never see him again.” “But you can’t stay awake forever.” “I know. It’s not a very good plan, but the way I figure, it’s just like dying: You know it’ll happen someday, but you just try to go as long as you can. Someday I’ll fall asleep again and there’ll be nobody around and then I’ll wake up and he’ll be there. Even if I went to the hospital or something, I think he’d still find me, and he’d find a moment when nobody else was there. You have to be alone sometime, right? I can’t stop it. But I can put it off for as long as I can. I can do that much, right?” The doctor didn’t say anything. “So that’s why I won’t take the pills. And I won’t go to sleep on my own. That would be giving up. And I’m not going to give up.” “Because you owe it to Jan and Brianne not to give up.” Mayet shrugged. The doctor was quiet for some time. Then she stood, brushed off her slacks, and took something out of her purse: a bottle of pills, and a small bottle of water. “Mayet, you’ve been through a lot. More than anyone your age should have to deal with. You need more help than I can give you. Even your mother can’t help you through this all on her own. But we both want to help you. Do you believe that?” At first it didn’t seem like Mayet was going to reply, but then she nodded. “The first step, I think, is up to you. These pills are over-the-counter. Your mother has a prescription from your doctor for something stronger, if you need it. You don’t have to take them, but I want you to think about something: The sooner you fall asleep, and the sooner you wake up again, the sooner you’ll see that there’s nothing to be afraid of. That this man in the night doesn’t exist.” “Then why do I see him?” “There are a lot of reasons why we see things that aren’t there. Especially when we expect to. Fear can do that; so can grief, and guilt. But I think, deep down, you know that he’s not real, and now that we’ve had this talk a part of you has acknowledged that. I think that the next time you wake up, you’ll see that for yourself. And that’ll be the first step toward taking your life back.” The doctor stepped away. She left the pills on the arm of the chair. “It’s up to you. I think that, with your mother and your doctor’s help, you’ll make it through this no matter what. But I also think the sooner you start, the easier it’ll be for you. Think about the morning after, Mayet. Think about how good it’ll be. I want you to do that for me. And for you.” Then she left. Mayet was alone. There was no more light coming through the curtain. Her room was growing dark. She turned on her side, looking at the little orange bottle and the water. The back of her throat hurt. And she listened very, very carefully, for what she knew was there: the skittering sound of pale, hairless flesh sliding along the ground, and the gentle, almost imperceptible thump of misshapen limbs scrambling over each other. Was he here, even now? Had he been in the room, hidden, all this time, even while she was awake? Sometimes she thought he was. He could even be right behind her chair, standing over her, watching her, ready to glide away or melt through the wall the moment anyone else came in but always, always there. Mayet felt cold. She curled up into a ball, trembling, clutching at her hair. The doctor was wrong. Deep down inside, she knew that the Rake was real. And that the next time she saw him, it would be worse than dying. She laid out on her bed, watching the shadows crawl over the ceiling. She squeezed the pills in one hand, the water bottle in the other. She shook two into her mouth, grimacing as she swallowed; she’d always hated taking pills. Then she took two more. And two more. She kept taking them until there were no more, washing them down with the tasteless water from the plastic bottle. She wanted out, but she didn’t want to do it like Brianne; she just wanted to go to sleep. To go to sleep and never wake up seemed the only way of winning; the only way to cheat him, somehow. She was already feeling drowsy. She thought of her mother and a pang of guilt went through her, but it was too late now. The shadows on the ceiling swallowed the room, and her vision blurred at the edges. For a moment she thought she saw something, a malformed silhouette stooped over her, with a cold, wet hand reaching for her face… But then there was nothing, and she slept. *** The doctor sat at the kitchen table, a cooling mug of tea in her hand. Mayet’s mother sat across from her, drinking hers. Her eyes had dried. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m glad to help,” the doctor said. “I think she’ll take them. We can’t say for sure, of course, but I think she will. The important thing is that it’s her decision.” “I suppose,” said Mayet’s mother. She turned her head at the sound of something moving in the hall, but nothing was there. She shivered without knowing why. “I really don’t feel right about it, though. I hate trying to just knock her out with pills. I never liked those things.” “Well, there’s no need to feel guilty about these ones,” the doctor said, downing her tea in one gulp. “Why is that?” Mayet’s mother said. There was that sound again, like something fumbling with a door, but there was still nothing there. The doctor grinned. “Ms. Bautista, there’s nothing in those pills. They’re just a placebo. “Mayet will wake up in the morning, right as rain.” Credit To – Tam Lin

11 minutes

June 5, 2013

Beings and Entities

Harlequin No.7

Harlequin Series, Stephan D. Harris

“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.” – H.P. Lovecraft My town has gained some notoriety in recent weeks. Maybe you’ve heard about the strange electrical storm that showed up in Charlottesville, N.C. overnight and then disappeared just as quick, or maybe you’ve read in the paper about the sudden outbreak of mental illness and cerebral aneurysms. Don’t worry though if you haven’t been keeping up with the crackpot news outlets, I’ll fill you in. How do I know so much about this? Well, let’s just say I was there. For starters, the only reason I moved to this God awful backwater hell in the first place was because my career choice made employment somewhat difficult to find. You see, most funeral homes are family owned, so naturally the laws of nepotism apply. It didn’t matter that I had a degree in mortuary science, or that I had already completed my apprenticeship and directors certification by age 24, the fact that my daddy didn’t own a crematorium meant I would be facing an endless hallway of closed doors until who knows when. That was of course, until a visit to Bailey Meadows (my birth town.) prompted enough boredom to look up an old friend, Terry Liddell. I met Terry around the summer of ’05, at this cruddy little bar called “The Broken Window,” where bands would sometimes play shows if they couldn’t find anywhere decent. He and I hit it off in a totally-not-homosexual way and we spent a huge chunk of time around each other because Bailey Meadows was the most boring fucking place in all of North Carolina. That, and the Window was the only place within a twenty miles drive of my house that would serve minors. So, after wrapping up my apprenticeship in Raleigh, I moved back in with my parents due to the unemployment thing (Apprenticeships do pay, but the position was considered temporary at best.), e-mailed my résumé along the entire East Coast, started going stir crazy, and finally worked up enough motivation to drive my Charger west along Highway 42. Having spent the last 4 years in Raleigh made me forget what a shit hole Charlottesville truly was. It’s the kind of place where people don’t mow their lawns because of all the scrap metal hiding under the weeds. The folks here were a strange breed of redneck, a cross between the Appalachian variety and the lower dwellers of the marshland. The town itself is just as terrible. There’s the strip mall where all the stoners hang out, a library that smells like piss, a trailer park, the Trinity Baptist church, a hospital, and the downtown area.(includes the Broken Window, a couple of family-run business, the post office, and the courthouse.) The rest of Charlottesville is nothing but a series of abandoned farm houses for about a five mile radius and the ruins of an old paper mill that blew up in ’88. I found Terry at the Window, behind the counter wearing a Sonic Youth t-shirt and wiping off the mugs. Turns out he and some dude named Franklin bought the place three years back and had pretty much kept things the same since. “Don’t fix what ain’t broke.” Terry said. After catching up on recent news and laughing about the time we spray painted Mrs. Patterson’s dog over a few shots of Wild Turkey, finally Terry mentioned that the Burnswick funeral parlor needed a new embalmer because the old one went crazy and hung himself or something. Just like Terry to get me good and drunk before telling me something of actual importance. I called him an asshole and we both laughed so hard that I fell of the barstool. That was when Terry made me hand over my car keys. I woke up the next morning feeling the way I imagined a corpse would feel if it were to be dug up and smacked across the face with a shovel. Numb, but somehow still in pain. The next thing I noticed was that I was not in my parent’s house. I was on Terry’s sofa, or at least I hoped Terry’s. Dragging myself to the kitchen, I drank at least a gallon of water straight from the tap before puking it all back up. The sound of me retching out my innards must have been loud, because the next thing I knew there was an unfamiliar voice coming from behind, a girls voice. “You must be Stephan. Terry said you were a lightweight.” I turned around to match the voice to a face. She was about a head shorter than me, pale skinned, skinny as a twig and with one of those asymmetrical haircuts that have grown quite popular. Also she was wearing a black t-shirt two sizes too small and no pants. Just a pair of pink panties with a zipper down the front. “Call me Harris, and Terry’s a dick. He should know to keep me off the firewater, ever since I hurled all over his drum kit.” I said, wiping barf off my lips while trying not to stare at her crotch. Naturally I assumed that this chick was either Terry’s girl, or at the very least someone not to be caught with while pitching a tent. “Well Harris, I’m glad you made room for breakfast, ‘cause I’m making waffles.” Fuck yeah, waffles. During breakfast I found out that her name was Billie-Joe Kimble, and yes, she was Terry’s girl. Fiancé in fact. They met each other at The Broken Window three years ago. Billie was the bassist for a band called “Chop the Willow”, which she joined after moving here from Jacksonville. Why she would willingly relocate to this cesspool was beyond me, but she seemed to like it here. “It’s got something you can’t find in the city,” She said. “This place has mystery.” Looking back on things, Billie was probably right. Here’s a bit of a historical mystery to keep you from getting bored. As I mentioned earlier, there was a paper mill just outside of town that caught fire in 1988. Some sort of industrial accident or some such. Anyways, a lot of people died in the resulting explosion and it pretty much crippled the town economy. That’s not the strange part. The topic of interest here was that the police couldn’t figure out what caused the fire in the first place. No signs of arson or failed equipment, just a bunch of confused head scratches and rumors. What were these rumors you ask? Well, from the witness testimonials, several floor workers reported that they heard laughter just before the fire started. Maniacal laughter, like someone was in on some sick joke. After breakfast I took a shower and got ready to head over to Burnswick. Lucky for me I was already wearing a suit, so I didn’t feel underdressed. I thanked Terry and Billie for letting me crash on their couch and they wished me luck. Actually, Terry wished me luck AND offered to give me a ride. I declined, on account of Charlottesville being so damn small that the only reason anyone living here should need a car would be so that they could drive the hell away. Seriously, it took me about fifteen minutes to get to the funeral parlor on foot. I would have gotten there sooner if I hadn’t stopped at the Fill-U station for a pack of Camel. (I cannot stress this enough, smoking is a terrible habit. It eats up all your money and limits your ability to run for extended periods of time.) When I walked into Burnswick Funerals, the first thing I noticed was the complete lack of reception. Normally there should be someone to oversee the front room, usually from a desk or nearby office. True, it’s often better to call in advance to make funeral arrangements, but there really needs to be some sort of oversight for the possible walk in. The second thing I noticed were the dead nightshade flowers on the coffee table. Rather unprofessional in my opinion. White lilies or orchids would have been better, and preferably not old ones. In any case, I decided to wait for someone to show up, and in the meantime I walked around the viewing room, looking over the black and white photographs framed about the walls. Fairly standard display: Trees, sleeping animals, churches, old Victorian portraits, other vaguely mournful images. Appropriate décor if I ever saw it. Interesting thing about 19th century portraits and why they often seem somewhat creepy; most of the people you’ll see in them are actually dead. Old school photography was a time consuming process, meaning subjects would have to remain still for a few hours while the silver nitrate imprinted the light. Also it was very expensive and therefore only used on special occasions, funerals being one of them. And since the person/persons getting their picture taken were post-mortem, there would be no need to worry about fidgeting. I was pondering this knowledge while viewing a picture of a little girl with dead eyes propped up in a chair when I heard a door close somewhere in the lobby. Turning around, I saw a confused looking man staring at me. “Can I help you sir?” He finally asked after a few awkward moments. He was an older gentleman, somewhere in his mid to late fifties. He wore a pair of wire framed glasses and showed signs of unwanted balding, but no signs to immediately raise the question of whether or not he liked to sodomize the dead. Trust me, necrophilia is not a desirable employer trait. “Yes you can, actually, I heard that you’re in need of a new embalmer,” I extended my hand for approval “I think I might just be the man for the job. I’m Stephan D. Harris, a pleasure to meet you Mr…” “Burnswick,” He replied, shaking my hand. “Alfred Burnswick. And yes actually, I lost my main undertaker a few weeks back, a real shame too what happened.” He sighed in frustration before going on. “It’s just been me and Lenard running this place since. Let’s talk. First of all, have you done any apprenticing?” About an hour later the deal was sealed, I’d finally broken into my target occupation. So what if it was in Charlottesville? I could always relocate after a few years, but for now, it was my time to shine. It didn’t take long for me to get used to things under Mr. Burnswick, in fact, after the first embalming he pretty much left me to my own thing. After all, I’d been training my entire adult life for this line of work. Whenever I had a question as to where a particular wound filler or sanitizer was kept, I’d just ask Lenard. (Lenny ran the cremation end of Burnswick, but would also fill in as an embalmer from time to time) but for the most part it was the same basic procedure that I’d been doing in Raleigh. First I’d scrub down the cadaver, then I’d massage the limbs to relieve rigor mortis. Following that I’d plug up the orifices, seal up any open wounds, begin the arterial embalming, wire the mouth and eyelids shut, finish up the hypodermic embalming, dress the cadaver, apply makeup, and deliver the body to the viewing room. I didn’t even have to deal with any of the surviving family members or review any death certificates, Mr. Burnswick as the lead funeral director would take care of all that noise. The only other regular of the funeral home was the flower girl/receptionist/grief counselor, Madelyn Wade. Now, before I move on, I would like to say that business at Burnswick Funeral was moderately steady, but this was not because people in Charlottesville were dying all of the time. Most of our clients came from a wide group of people in Pitt County who chose us based mainly on our comparatively modest fees. So after about a month I had saved up enough money to straight-up buy my own house in Charlottesville for the price of a used car. It was an okay little place on Milton Street about two blocks away from The Broken Window. Things were alright for the most part. I hated the town and all those confederate flags but getting back into the groove with Terry made it tolerable. After work most nights I’d just walk over to the Window, drink a few glasses of Wild Turkey, and argue with Terry about which actors from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” were actually dead. Other nights I’d stop by to listen to Chop the Willow practice their set in Terry’s garage before turning in for the night. Billie’s band was surprisingly decent, I must admit. They had that kind of outlaw sound of The Black Angels or Murder by Death that went over well with a mostly southern blue-collar audience. To sum it all up, life was getting comfortable. Until the day I found the thing in a jar. At first I didn’t know what the hell it was I was looking at. Actually, I still have no freakin’ clue, but I mean I REALLY didn’t know what it was. I found it on a shelf in the storage closet one day at work when our embalming machine busted a tube and I had to look around for a possible replacement. Up on the top shelf shoved into the far back was a cardboard box labeled ‘miscellaneous’ that at first seemed promising. I got on a step stool, and just like any other day I pulled something off a shelf. What I found inside the box… didn’t actually startle me. Not at first, but it did peak my interest. Surrounded by random pieces of newspaper and spare calipers was an average sized mason jar coated in a layer of dust and grime. It was definitely full of some sort of fluid. (Dark green, so it wasn’t formaldehyde.) Also it had a label on the side that read “Harlequin No.7,” which seemed cryptic to say the least. The layer of dirt on the outside and the dark liquid inside made it almost impossible to see what sat in there, so of course I cleaned it off with damp rag and held the jar up to the florescent light for a better look. Whatever that thing was, it was ostensibly organic, based off of the pale flesh tone color. It looked like some sort of mutated potato, but that’s a stupid comparison. If I had to guess I’d say that it was an extracted tumor, or maybe a diseased pancreas. The top half was bulbous, with little protruding bumps here and there. The bottom half had a curved tail similar to the spine of a mammal fetus. Also along the midsection were several thick tendrils that corkscrewed off in every direction. It was an odd thing, but not so odd as to alarm me. True, it was uncommon to find such things in a mortuary, but on the other hand, coroners would often keep certain specimens of interest when discovered, usually out of scientific curiosity. Who’s to say what sort of things Lenard or my predecessor or even Mr. Burnswick have found while poking around inside of people. I’d have kept it if I were the one to find it, only I wouldn’t have hidden it away in a box. I put the Harlequin on the counter next to the hand sink and went about looking for a replacement tube. I found one eventually, thank God, so the rest of the day went on as normally as ever, save for the occasional glance at the green jar. I resolved to ask Mr. Burnswick if he knew anything about the thing-in-a-jar after the viewing service upstairs was over. I really didn’t want to pester him, but I couldn’t leave an enigma like that unanswered, it was just too nagging to ignore. When I finally got a chance to show him the strange thing, he took a close look into the cloudy green jar after reading the label, but in the end he just shrugged and said it was probably just a gaffe, or a weird prank set up by the previous mortician Ryan Wilcox. Not a huge stretch, the name “Harlequin” kind of made it seem plausible that the whole thing was a joke. Still, I wanted to be sure. I kept a dissection kit at home in my medicine cabinet, and being licensed as both an embalmer and as a funeral director I was legally allowed to handle and transport human remains, if that was indeed what the Harlequin was. Seeing no qualms about bringing it home for further study, I cleaned up the “undercroft” and headed home with the mysterious jar. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to inspect it more closely until the following night. I had Sunday off and I had planned to go out to the open field gun range with Terry and Billie-Joe while the rest of the town wasted their time in Church. More space for us. I had a good time blowing apart teddy bears and tacky lamps at the range. Billie kept shouting, “It’s coming right for us!” right before unloading a round from her 12-gauge into one of the stuffed bears, and Terry was and always has been such a terrible shot that he eventually became so irate that he threw down his handgun and proceeded to smash apart a lamp with a tire iron he got out of his trunk. I even managed to get a few good shots off myself, of course I would have done better if Terry hadn’t been shouting things like, “score one for the corpse fucker” and other such distracting remarks. Eventually Billie joined in on the mocking and asked me if it was true that morticians go around killing people to promote business. “No, that’s Burnswick’s job actually, I just set up the marionette strings for the puppet shows.” I responded, jokingly of course. “Hey, do what you gotta do,” chimed in Terry, “just don’t go crazy like the last one.” “Yeah, hey I’ve been meaning to ask about that. Why’d Wilcox off himself anyway?” I asked. “You don’t know? It was in his obituary. Apparently, Ryan Wilcox’s wife died in the paper mill fire, and he started to get more and more depressed and withdrawn over the years. It sorta makes sense, he had to deal with all the funerals of nearly everyone who died there, his wife, her coworkers and friends and all that. He just couldn’t live with it anymore. Said so in the note he left.” Billie kicked the dirt with one of her chunky motorcycle boots, clearly getting bored with the conversation. “You think we can talk about something a bit less depressing? We’re here to have fun and ignore gun safety, not get all emo ‘n shit.” “I didn’t mean to be such a downer,” I said while loading up my revolver. “I just wanted to know why. I found something at work yesterday that might have been his.” Terry started to giggle. “No, it wasn’t porn Terry, you ass. It was some weird thing in a jar, like a maybe a mutant organ or something. I was planning on slicing it up today, actually.” “Can we watch?” Asked Terry and Billie in unison. *sigh. Some people are really into the macabre I guess. We got back to my place a few hours later after the gun range shenanigans and a late lunch at the local greasy spoon. The sun had already started to set, basking the early autumn sky in an orange glow. Terry sat in the passenger seat of my Charger, Billie-Joe in the back with her shotgun lain across her lap. Pulling into the gravel pit that constituted a driveway I delegated the camcorder to Terry and requested that Billie refrain from poking things. I don’t have a copy of the home video we made, I destroyed the original after mailing a couple of copies to various news outlets a few days after Billie and I had finished hunting down the surviving cultists, but I remember enough of it to cobble together a transcript. Video Recording: The scene starts with a shot of Mr. Harris walking out of his bathroom. He is wearing a black apron over his suit and a pair of latex gloves. His face is partially obscured by a surgical mask. Terry:(Behind the camera) Are you ready to win the Nobel Prize for Incredibly Fucked up Pseudo-Science? Harris: Absolutely! Those morons hunting for Bigfoot won’t stand a chance this year. Billie-Joe:(Outside of view) Hey guys, let’s get this over with. I wanna use the afterbirth to make soup. Chuckles. Terry follows Mr. Harris into the living room, where he has set up a few card tables to organize his equipment. On it we can see several empty mason jars, one jar full of what appears to be formaldehyde, a discectomy kit (includes two scalpels, a pair of tweezers, tissue scissors, a curved probing tool, a hypodermic needle, and a clamp)a microscope, and a copy of The Physician’s Desk Reference Vol. 29. Last, in the center on a metal cooking tray sits the Harlequin. Harris: (Holding Harlequin No.7 up for the camera.) This sick little puppy here is something I found in a mortuary yesterday. We’re not yet sure what it is exactly, but my working hypothesis is that it’s an alien fetus. Either that or a times ten scale model of Terry’s penis. The frame is briefly blocked by Terry’s extended middle finger. Terry: Fuck you Stephan! Harris: Right then, move over here. I am now about to open the jar. Terry moves to a better angle and zooms the camera into focus over the Harlequin. Harris: (Twisting the lid off with a slow hiss followed by a loud pop.) Holy hell it stinks. (Grimacing) Nurse, please note that the subject smells like someone barfed into a diaper. Billie-Joe:(Now in frame)I’m not the nurse damn it, I’m just in charge of soup. Harris:(Returning to frame) Alright, I am about to remove the specimen from its protective jar. (Mr. Harris inserts a pair of salad tongs into the jar and removes the Harlequin proper. Note here that a minor distortion affects the shot.) Well, it’s definitely organic, judging by how squishy it is. (Carefully placing the subject onto the cooking tray) Oh wow, this might actually be an alien after all. Check out these veins wrapping around the head bubbles. And… Jesus is that an eye? Terry directs the camera for a closer inspection. From what we can see, there does appear to be an orb that closely resembles the likeness of an eye. Also during the close-up, another line of distortion moves across the length of the screen. Terry: Dude, you should poke it with something. Harris: Science is more than just poking shit you know. But yes, I should take a look under these flaps here. Mr. Harris tentatively prods the strange orb with the blunt end of his probing tool. Unfortunately, the screen pixelates slightly so we do not get a chance to view this maneuver. Also during this scene the camera begins to pick up audio feedback, despite there being no reason for it to do so. Harris: (Jerking his hand back) The fuck? Billie-Joe: What’s wrong? Harris: (Looking startled into the camera) Shit, did you catch that Terry? Terry: I didn’t catch anything man. Your camera is acting all stupid. Billie-Joe: What’s going on? What happened? Harris: I thought I saw it twitch a little. I probably just bumped the table or something. Billie-Joe: Are you fucking with us? Terry: (To Billie) Yeah, he’s fucking with us. Harris: (waving his hands in frustration) Forget it. Terry, move back a little, you’re crowding me. I’ll start over. Mr. Harris resumes his attempt to investigate Harlequin No.7. He lifts one of the supposed eye lids with his probing tool, and as before the camera pixelates slightly and picks up feedback, but the overall video quality is decent enough to grasp the situation. A minute goes by with Mr. Harris handling several tools before the light above the card tables begins to flicker. At first, only Billie notices this effect. Billie-Joe: Hey guys, um… (Points to the light) Terry: (Directing the camera between Billie, the light bulb, and Mr. Harris) Okay, hey, I’m getting kinda creeped out now. Harris: (In center frame) Right, okay, let’s do this later. (Mr. Harris attempts to handle Harlequin No.7 with the salad tongs.) Holy shit, it’s moving! Billie-Joe: Get ride rid of it! Get it out of here! At this point the audio drops and the screen becomes highly distorted. From the few images that remain somewhat clear, we can infer that Mr. Harris is struggling to reinsert the Harlequin into its original container. The camera also manages to capture several yellow-green pulses of light, but it is unknown whether or not this effect can be contributed to the near constant visual distortions. This portion lasted for approximately forty three seconds, ending when audio is restored with a loud gunshot. When the visuals stabilize, we can see that Billie is pointing her shotgun at the splattered remains of the Harlequin. We can also see that her nose is bleeding. Harris: (Nose also bleeding) Thanks for that. Billie-Joe: (Breathing heavily) Yeah, no problem. Terry: (Yelling) What the fuck was that?! Harris: (To Terry) How much of that did you manage to film? Terry: I don’t know man, the goddamn video kept going out! If I coul… Oh… I don’t feel so… (The camera becomes shaky and we can hear the sound of Terry vomiting.) Billie-Joe: (Running to Terry’s side.) It’s alright, we’re all alright. Just calm down. Terry: Don’t tell me to fucking calm down! Or did you forget that the room almost exploded just now? What were those noises? Mr. Harris appears to try to say something, but stops himself when a thunderclap shakes the living room. No one says anything for several seconds, until a flash of yellow-green is seen coming from the nearby window, followed by a second thunderclap. Harris: Outside. Now. Terry follows Billie and Mr. Harris outside onto his front lawn. Billie and Harris are looking directly overhead, followed by the camera doing a sweep over the night sky. What we see is a massive thunderhead approaching from the East, and several flashes of chartreuse lightening entangling the dark clouds. Harris: Terry, Billie… get back inside. The video ends there. So yes, we did manage to film the previous events, all the way up to our view of the approaching storm. Unfortunately a good deal of what was recorded ended up being completely unwatchable, so I’ll have to fill in the damaged bits. First of all, when I was attempting to remove the part that looked like an eye, the Harlequin started writhing and squirming around, which was highly unexpected, to say the least. The next thing I knew, the lights in my house began to pulse and the air in my living room started to shimmer like hot asphalt in June. I panicked and tried to put the Harlequin back into its jar, hoping that would make it stop doing whatever it was that was making the high-pitched screaming that seemed to be coming from all around us. It didn’t, even after I secured the lid. In fact, after I shoved it back into the fluid the damn thing started flashing this blinding green light that made my head feel like it was about to explode. I still have a hard time remembering at what point Billie returned with her shotgun, but after she blew the Harlequin into little giblets everything stopped. Except for the storm. On September 23rd, 2009, fifty six men, women, and children claimed to have seen the bizarre electrical storm that passed over Charlottesville beginning at approximately 9:13 p.m. EST. These eyewitnesses were the only apparent claims of any weather phenomena, as not a single meteorological study supported such accusations. The storm in question lasted only a few minutes, but because of the witness statements, phone calls, and the complete disregard of the professional news outlets, people in town referred to it as a sign of the End Days. The most vocal of these statements came out of the Trinity Baptist Church, which is a whole separate story in itself. More on that some other time. Now, after cleaning up my living room and storing what little of the Harlequin remained into sample jars, Billie and Terry went home for the evening. I didn’t sleep that night. I had too much to reflect upon from had transpired. I was exhausted the next day at work. Exhausted and nervous. Some part of my brain had been switched to panic mode and it refused to shut down. I tried to just move along in my work, hoping that it would help take my mind off that horrible otherworldly screeching. Looking for any excuse to preoccupy myself, I volunteered to pick up a body from the Charlottesville General Hospital. Madelyn got a message from earlier in the morning and had arranged to fulfill a preneed tomorrow afternoon for a Mr. Havenbrook, who had died sometime last night. I didn’t bother asking for any details, I just fired up the hearse and left. I got to the hospital about ten minutes after filing the paperwork at the courthouse. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Dr. Sarah Liddell (Terry’s aunt and the Pitt County Coroner) which was a bit of a disappointment, but I did have an interesting conversation with her assistant, Robert. “So how’d this guy kick it?” I asked Rob while he helped me load Mr. Havenbrook into the hearse. “Well, from what I heard from Sarah, he and his wife were checking out that freaky lightning storm last night, when all of a sudden this guy drops to the ground and starts having a seizure. By the time the ambulance arrived he was already gone.” “Weird,” I said out loud, “What did the autopsy show?” “Aneurysm,” said Rob, pulling out the MRI shots of Mr. Havenbrook’s head. “Probably brought on by the seizure. See that blotch right there at the base of his brain stem? That’s a popped artery.” I shut the back of the hearse and thanked Robert. From his point of view, everything seemed fine. Flashing lights are known to cause seizures, so big deal right? I however regretted ever leaving the mortuary. I was looking for a way to forget about the events of last night, instead I found out that I may have inadvertently caused the death of a perfectly innocent man. It was a very unwelcoming feeling, like an omen of doom. I got Havenbrook’s body back to the mortuary not long after. Lenny was off that day and Mr. Burnswick was busy with a client, so I had move the cadaver downstairs myself. The funeral home had an elevator installed for just this purpose, and while the stretcher helped, Mr. Havenbrook weighed at least three hundred pounds, so it took a good deal of effort on my part to move his fat ass onto the slab. Once I got him up onto the embalming table I took a few minutes to catch my breath before proceeding with my work, all while trying not to think about who this man was. Step one was to wash the body in antibacterial soap and water. I always hated this part due to the fact that there’s always fecal matter residue caked around the ass cheeks and upper thighs, but at least it’s far less disturbing than the second step. Ever give a full body massage to a dead guy? Well I have. The embalming process requires that a body’s circulatory system be un-constricted, and for that the muscles need to be relieved of rigor-mortis (The stiffening of muscle tissue due to an interruption in the ATP cycle.) Interestingly enough, Mr. Havenbrook had hardly any stiffness to him, something that I had not noticed until this point. Rigor mortis sets in at around three hours after death, peaking at around twelve hours before dissipating between forty eight to sixty hours. Havenbrook had been dead for a little over thirteen hours. His back was red and purple from livor mortis (Internal body fluids succumbing to the forces of gravity.), so clearly his heart muscles had ceased functioning. The only rational explanation would be extremely rapid decomposition, a hypothesis that I was capable of testing myself by simply jamming a cooking thermometer into his gut. (Yes, I was obligated to investigate this issue, as it may be health-safety related .Think bio-hazard C.D.C. guys lining the mortuary in yards of yellow tape.) I gave the thermometer a couple of minutes to warn up while I got myself into a haz-mat suit, just in case. The internal body temperature of the post-mortem lowers quite rapidly after death, but will eventually elevate as microbes multiply from within. Mr. Havenbrook had spent most of the night in a cooler, so if he was any warmer than the air conditioned room temperature then I would have to call in the cavalry. Also Dr. Liddell would probably be fired for not taking a proper blood test. And the internal heat index was… sixty four point three degrees Fahrenheit. One degree lower than the room. He was fine, and I felt like an asshole in a scuba suit. That and now I had to patch up the hole I had put in his intestinal wall. Good job Harris, now you won’t get to have a lunch break. I didn’t bother taking off the hazard suit while I rushed to make up the lost time. Probably a good thing too, in retrospect. After I had sealed up the hole and plugged up the anus with cotton swabs, I began the long process of embalming. I started the same way I always had: By making a small incision into the right common carotid artery, the other into the jugular vein. The embalming fluid would be pumped into the carotid artery, which pushes the “displacement,” out through the jugular and down a drain. For a man the size of Mr. Havenbrook, the whole thing would take about an hour and a half to complete, so I started up the pumps while I prepped for the hypodermic stage. As I walked towards the sink to wash off my gloves, I noticed that the lights were beginning to flicker. I stopped walking mid stride, my heart dropped into my stomach as I began to hear a wet smacking noise coming from the supposedly lifeless cadaver of Mr. Havenbrook. What I saw when I turned around made me drop the surgical tray to the ground. His eyes were open. And they were staring directly into mine. His mouth was opening and closing as though he were trying to say something, but no noise was being made, save for his right arm limply slapping at the tubing in his neck. I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know w

21 minutes

December 14, 2012

Artifacts and Objects, Beings and Entities

Mentality

I woke up. Sheets were stained with sweat, breath was no longer bated, and unconscious solace began to surcease. Depression kills. Not in a directly physical way, not in a way perceivable by anyone except the sufferer. It made me feel psychotic. It went past the brain tissue, into the atoms of their molecules. I always imagined the electrons painstakingly orbiting a chunk of ice. There was never light in my imagination. I felt a subconscious sigh emit, and tossed off the sheets. I sat up, let drop head to hands, and contemplated once again my current situation. I contemplated the fact that I could no longer stay awake during the day. I contemplated the nothing I felt all the time about nothing. I’ve been contemplating suicide. Yet I’m too pathetically apathetic. I got up, and silently made my way to the kitchen. My night vision and preference for darkness have both increased proportionally. Light couldn’t help me navigate the cramped quarters of my apartment any better than the dark. Came to the counter. Loosened the lid. Popped the pill. Instant release. Or was it a placebo? Irrelevant. I sat down on the couch in the living room. It was 9:04 P.M. Same time I woke up yesterday. I left the lights off. I always felt the darkness bore itself into my head, like an interloper, like a conqueror. It felt unnatural. I can’t remember when it swallowed the last fuck I had to give. And so this is how I’ve lived my days. I know it wasn’t always this way, but the apathy dulls my memory. One day, it just seemed like my ribcage wasn’t protecting anything worthwhile. Like there weren’t any organs inside me. I go out at night for groceries, for my alcohol, and for the hope that I might feel something. Anything. I find myself more and more entranced by nothing, though. I administer databases remotely for a data bank located downtown. I live in White City. I see a psychiatrist once a month to keep my prescription of Prozac abundant. He doesn’t do shit. I pay him so I can pay for a drug that keeps the worst away. There’s depression, but there’s a place past that, a place I don’t ever want to be again. It was like being conscious that you’re insane, that you’re sane while you’re insane. There’s no way to describe it, except that it haunted me, terrorized me like I’ve never experienced. I’d kill myself before I got to that point again. I’ve been here for more than a couple years now. I dissevered myself from the ones I used to love, because I no longer love. I cannot connect with anyone. Empathy evades me. I’m alone, and I can’t care less. I feel cold. No happiness, no fear, no anger, no frustration. Ice, and apathy. The weeks go by. I find myself in the living room, slouched upon the couch. It was 8:05 in the morning, and I felt a spectral sort of fatigue. Contradictory, tired and not tired. The yield from an inversion of homeostasis. I sighed, preparing to let fall a deep, dreamless sleep. I depressed the power button on the remote, gaze transfixed on the TV screen reflecting the morning sun, watching my reflection being disemboweled by a jerky, gaunt figure, half the innards thrown, looking like they might come out the TV from the other side, the other half wrapped around his neck so he could devour them while keeping his scarred arms free to keep emptying me out. I stared at myself, and my self rolled it’s lifeless eyes toward me, until the creature slowly moved it’s mouth down near the bridge of my nose, cocked his head instantly, used his tongue to spear my eyes, one by one down his throat. It began to turn it’s head towards the TV, but before I could behold this nightmarewalker’s face, the reflection changed. There was no reflection. I sat there. I wasn’t able to move. Paralysis. Seconds passed. I screamed. As loud as I could, I used the lungs I knew were still in me. Flying upwards, sprinting to a corner of the room, knocking a bookcase down so I could flatten myself against the wall. Eyes from corner to corner of the apartment I used to know. Heart beating loud enough to be used as sonar. I heard sweat hit the books. And, finally, I felt. I felt sickened. I felt disgust. I felt confusion. I can finally feel fear. I spent hours calming down. There was no sleep now. It seemed that the peaceful place my consciousness went to during sleep was now convoluted by a web of my internal organs. I turned every single light on in my house. Washed a hundred milligrams of anti-depression down with something both Russian and 120 proof. Felt the fear and ethanol interact and puked it up. Turned the TV towards the wall. I must’ve muttered “What the fuck?” a hundred times. What the fuck? What happened? I’m not sure I’ve ever hallucinated anything past the familiar hypnagogic images preluding sleep. What was it that murdered my reflection? Logic couldn’t find it’s place. There were no variables able to induce something like that. I wasn’t sure what to do. The only option I had was to talk to my psychiatrist in a couple weeks. Two weeks passed. The TV stayed turned, the lights stayed on, even when I slept. I can’t sleep like I used to. I dream now. The DMT released when I dreamt was flooding every synapse in my brain. I saw different things. One dream, he licked clean my ribcage. Another, I used a spoon to cut his fingers off, sticking them through his neck while he just stood there. In one, we sat next to each other on a loveseat, and simply stared at ourselves in a mirror that covered an entire wall. I had no expression on my face. He had no face, and instead scars in the form of an X over each eye, and a gangrenous, greening chelsea grin connected to each side of his hairless, deformed head. The teeth were covered in a browning-red, with jagged holes carved out of a few and atrophying flesh in between most. His mutilated lips were sewn as far away from his mouth as possible, leaving his dry and puffy, bloody and purple, rotten and decayed gums exposed. His skin is mostly bleached a bright white, with massive keloids in some areas and burned flesh in others. He wears no shirt, revealing messy stitchwork covering his entire torso. He looked like the result of a drunk mortician and years of starvation. He was tall, and thin, arms with reach, deep scars up the underside of the wrist, and perhaps just sinew in the stead of muscle. He was emaciated, no sign of ribs, feet covered in caked blood and legs with sharp pockmarks in various places. He was genital-less, but not naked, as the skin he was in seemed more like a suit than a part of his body. I spent the first week distracted by paranoia. It eased when nothing happened. I made sure every light I owned was on. I made sure I had alcohol in me at all times. My psychiatric appointment arrived. I told the doctor I’d experienced hallucinations, and I felt intense fear. Dismissively, he told me it seemed like a result of the depression. I asked him about any side effects of the medication. Tonelessly, he said there were none relevant to my experience. I asked him which course of action I should take. Carelessly, he told me to remind myself that it’s all in my head. That it’s all a matter of electrical flow in my brain, and neurotransmitters in the axioms. He recommended that I videotape myself when I felt like I had control of reality to prove to my future self that everything was fine. He wrote me off another prescription of Prozac, and scheduled an appointment for another month. I asked him if he would put me in two weeks earlier. He said he was too busy. Fucking prick. I got home. Turned the computer on. Found out what the Internet had to say about Prozac. Severe symptoms included hallucinations. That goddamned psychiatrist. I flushed the pills down the drain and didn’t even bother with the pharmacy. I turned on the webcam. Uneasily, I began talking to my future self, “Hey. You’re ok right now. There’s no one here. There’s no more Prozac to fuck with your head.” I took a swig of some incendiary to warm me up. “It seems like it was just a side effect of the anti-depressant. You have control of reality. There are no hallucinations anymore. You’re good now.” I ended the recording and sent a shortcut to the desktop. I had a nightmare again that night. He removed me bit by bit with a scalpel that had been pushed into his index finger, and an ocean of blood rapidly pooling out of it. He had ripped the stitching on his torso off, drenching his body in a brown-tinged maroon, and was stuffing my organs inside of him. I was still alive. I felt the pain. I wasn’t sure how much of the blood from his finger was inside me before I woke up. Nor was I sure of how much of me he extracted. When I woke up, the bedroom door was closed. I passed the day away typically. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be feeling from being off that drug, but it was too early to discern a difference. I felt a twinge of frost, an arrowhead in the tip of my brain. Subliminal. I made another video. I told myself a few different things, and it lasted a couple minutes. Again this file went to the desktop. I got up, stepping towards the kitchen, feeling a sort of slime touch the bottom of my foot. It didn’t distract me, though. The alcohol did. I went to sleep. The next day, again, the bedroom door was closed. I know I hadn’t closed it. I moved the computer desk in front of my room after I finished my night, and set the webcam to record what exactly happened. I went to bed at 7:06 A.M. When I woke, the door was closed again. I rearranged the desk, and slowly moved the slider, analyzing the video. He’s been watching me sleep. A bleached hand with a scalpel for an index finger grabbed the edge of the door and closed it. He knew I was watching him. I drank. I wasn’t sure what effect the medication had on me. Maybe it was too soon for the side effects to wear off. I had been taking the medication for a few years now, though, so why is it happening now? Either I’ve gone insane, or something is happening. Something more real than a hallucination the mind can synthesize. I’m not insane. I’m not insane. I’m not insane. I’m not insane. I can’t be sane. I go back over the video. Again and again. He closes the door everytime. At 2:11 in the afternoon. After however much time is spent, I go back to the couple videos I made, searching for solace. I watch them. And he’s in them. He’s standing behind me, right fucking behind me, in both of them. He scratches my name into his pale chest and lets his brown-red blood drip off. I look behind me and I see the stains in the carpet. I look at the bottom of my foot, and there’s a branch of sickly purple vessels spreading throughout. I watched the first video. Telling myself there’s no one there causes his unsurgically cut smile to grow. I made the mistake of going into the bathroom. I looked down to turn the faucet off, and then up, and he’s right behind me, scalpel plunged into my ear drum, twisting and turning. I turn around. Only a miasmic smell of putrescence. I smashed the mirror. So I left the apartment. I go to the liquor store, and as I purchase my bottle, he’s standing behind the cashier with his barbed tongue wrapped around the cashier’s throat, drawing blood. It waterfalls down his shirt. When the cashier talks, he sounds like he’s suffocating. He sounds anguished. Yet he doesn’t act like he notices it. I sure as hell do. I go to the grocery store. I pass by the butchery, and he’s in there with a blade, cutting up some sort of carcass, flies looking to get their fill. His face stares at me, the scarred Xs igniting the photoreceptor cells inside my eyes. He doesn’t notice the blade cutting through his fingers first, then hand, then wrist. I leave. I rent a hotel for the night. I open the door and he’s standing in the middle of the room, the middle of the blood-fucking-drenched room that stinks like a slaughterhouse. I close the door. I’m back at my apartment now. I have no more peace. These few weeks, I haven’t been alone like I have been these past few years. There is nothing better than being alone. But he won’t leave, he follows me. I sit in the corner of my living room, every light I have inundating my immediate surroundings. I’ve got 112 ounces left and a capsule of caffeine pills. I haven’t seen him since the hotel. That was hours ago. Where is he? Is he waiting in the bedroom? Is he hiding in the reflection of the broken mirror? Is he standing outside my door? He’s stolen my mind. He’s invaded it. The way I used to bask in the darkness and let it envelop my imagination, I find that I now bask within his existence. He interlopes within my imagination. I can hear how loudly his scarred smile laughs. I can smell the stink of rot on his breath. I can feel him running his pale fingers over me. I can sense him in every way possible, but I can’t see him, he leaves that up to my imagination. He’s here, but I don’t know where. He has stolen my sanity, and I don’t know where to find it. It’s 12:01 A.M. There is a stench in my apartment. Like blood fermented for consumption, like flesh rotted to an extra rare. There is a footstep in my bedroom, one in the kitchen, another right in front me. The radius of the light is my domain, the only place safe. He weaves through parts of the darkness. I think I can see him, and yet all I see is darkness, warped and twisting in on itself. It flows ethereally, consuming everything in it. I don’t feel fear anymore. I feel empty. I feel the end. I take a very long drink. I turn the lights off. Credit To: Lichtjunger

9 minutes

October 11, 2012

Madness, Paranoia, and Mental Illness

Eastgate

emotional, feelspastas, ghost stories, ghosts, Ryan Peacock, spirits

Nobody believes in vampires. They’re just myths. Old folktales that have been bastardized by cinema, pulp horror and cheap romance. Done to death until they’re nothing but a cliché. Only children are afraid of them, which is a far cry from the fear they once caused. A fear so great that villages of men who would be considered reasonable, would defile a grave and mutilate its inhabitant. I’m not going to pretend as if I don’t understand it. I would’ve scoffed at the notion too. I never once saw myself hunting them, and even then I would’ve imagined something far more dramatic. A special kit full of stakes, silver bullets and other tools to kill the undead. Not a beat-up Chevy, a photograph of a woman and countless restless nights in a motel. The part of my brain that was still somewhat sane was amused by the mundane reality of vampire hunting. But sane or not, every day, I would drive in search of the Dead. Her name was Harriet Hartman. She was an unassuming woman in her middle age. Brown hair tied back into a bun, coke bottle glasses and laugh lines around her smile. She looked more like a librarian than a vampire. I think that was why she was such an effective killer. Over the weeks I’d spent tracking her, I’d determined a pattern. She fed roughly once a week, and she liked couples. She’d approach the woman in a public space, and spend a few days with them, befriending them. Then she’d take them away, usually to a motel and soon after, the man would follow. Both would then disappear, and Harriet would deposit the keys to her room and vanish before daybreak. Most of the time, it was a boyfriend and girlfriend, but sometimes it was a Father and a Daughter, two co-workers, a sister and a brother. Always a man and a woman, save for the occasions when she couldn’t get her hands on the man. Then, she’d only take the woman, and vanish into the night. Just like she took my little girl, my Pauline, and she’d almost taken my son James. The disappearances weren’t well documented, but when I started putting the pieces together, the picture became clearer. On the rare occasions where they did find bodies, they were dismembered and drained of blood. But she stayed in the county. I would’ve thought there would’ve been more of an investigation… but there wasn’t. That’s why I had to do it. That’s why I was the only one who could. Through my weeks of study, I realized something. Harriet always traveled, and she seemed to hit just about every town, save for one. A little oceanside hamlet called Eastgate. There were no murders there. No sign of Harriet, but every town she hit was no less than five hours away, and the closer they were, the more frequent the attacks. So that was where I looked. If I was wrong, and it wasn’t her home, then I had nothing to lose. But if I was right… I could stop her, once and for all. I could avenge my little girl. Eastgate wasn’t easy to find. It was barely a blip on most maps, and when I got there, I could see why. Too many houses were boarded up. The local McDonalds was only recognizable by the lighter space on the wall where the sign had once been. No customers inside. Nothing in the parking lot but weeds peeking through the cracks in the pavement. I was surprised, honestly. A town like that should’ve been lively and booming in late spring. It had a perfect location, right by the shore. When I parked my car at the motel and stepped out, I could hear the distant cries of gulls and the lazy crash of the ocean. But instead, this place was dead. Stepping into the motel office, I was greeted by a sleepy-looking woman watching a movie on an old TV. Judging by the lines in her face, she was somewhere between 17 and 71. It was hard to tell for sure. “Good afternoon. I booked a room for Terry McKinnon.” The woman paused her movie, and didn’t bother confirming my reservation. The motel was empty. She grabbed the key nearest to her. “We charge upfront,” she said, “Plus a $50 retainer fee. Keeps the rooms looking nice.” I paid without complaint. If Harriet was here, it was more than worth it. As she printed out the receipt, I took out the photograph I had of her. A picture taken at a bar by a friend of some of her victims. In it, you could clearly see a stoic faced couple, and behind them, Harriet. She watched them from the bar, through her coke bottle glasses. At a glance, it would be easy to ignore her, but I was convinced she was staring at them. Sizing them up. “By any chance, you wouldn’t happen to have seen this woman around before, would you?” The woman behind the counter paused, and leaned in towards the picture. “Can’t remember,” she replied. “I don’t think I have.” I didn’t get the impression that she was lying. The motel room was cleaner than I’d anticipated. I’d expected a dingy mess, but the beds were soft. The carpets were vacuumed. The room smelled nice. Care had obviously been put into maintaining this place. I took some time to get situated. I checked the news for anything that might indicate Harriet had struck again. They’d found some unidentified body parts a few towns over, but from the sound of it, those weren’t fresh. I knew those parts would be forgotten quickly. That murder would never be solved. Someone else had just lost a child, and the world didn’t care. C’est la vie. When I had started my investigation, I’d initially pegged Harriet as some sort of serial killer. She fit the bill alright. It wasn’t until I managed to catch up to her, a little over a week ago, that I learned any different. We were staying in the same motel, and I saw her leaving as I checked in. I watched her closely, right up until she led another innocent girl into that room, just like she’d done with my Pauline. I was going to try and catch her in the act. I convinced myself I was going to save that girl, so I took some extreme measures. I’d already bought a gun, and I kept it in my pocket as I threw a chair through the window of her room, and then barged in like a madman. I found her with her teeth in that girl’s neck. Harriet tossed her aside, and rose to confront me. Blood ran down the neck of her victim, but there was none on her lips. As she stood, I could see her fangs in the moonlight, and in my shock, I fired at her. The bullets hit her in the chest, but she barely even flinched. Fangs bared, she fell upon me, seizing me by the throat. Her eyes studied me in the instant before she smiled. “It appears I have a stalker.” She said calmly. Desperate for help, I looked over at the girl she’d brought in with her. She sat on the bed, a hand pressed to the wound in her neck. But she didn’t run for help. She just stared at us, at me. Just an observer to our drama as it played out before her. “You look familiar, have we met?” Harriet asked. “You took my fucking daughter!” My language made her recoil more than any of my bullets had. “Ah… Did I now? Was it Pauline by any chance? She was a good girl.” I almost hit her for saying her name, but my fear of her stayed my hand. “You’re a good Father, looking to avenge her like that. She was a very lucky girl.” Just like that, Harriet tossed me aside like I was nothing. “Just for that… I’ll let you leave this time. Go home. Following me isn’t going to get you anywhere.” I should have listened to her. She took the girl, and walked over me. She was in her car and gone long before anyone came to investigate the noise, and by then, I was gone too. I took a walk on the beach to clear my head. The stink of the ocean didn’t bother me. On the contrary, it helped me clear my mind and set up a plan of attack. If Harriet was here, someone had to have seen her. I brought up a map of the town on my phone and picked out all the locations that might help me. Hubs for the community. Bars, restaurants, the local grocery store. All the perfect places to look. There wasn’t much in Eastgate, so I couldn’t imagine it would take me that long to get through everything. My little walk helped me get a lay of the land. Eastgate had a small main drag, leading down to the empty beach. On the south side of the town was a seawall with a dock and marina. There were a few houses out that way, but nothing much. To the north, the houses were a bit nicer. It wasn’t quite a suburb, but it almost passed as one. The stores there were all local businesses. Eastgate was too small to support anything larger, like a Wal-Mart or Target. The few deviations were a small school and a halfway house beside a bus station. Strangely enough, I never saw a single bus pass by while I was in Eastgate. I had lunch at a little diner by the Marina. Fish that was over-battered, and chips that were mushy and bland. I flashed the picture to the owner, who frowned and shook his head. “Can’t say I’ve seen her around,” he admitted. “Least… I don’t think I have.” I thanked him, and paid my bill as he disappeared out back, reaching into his pocket for his cell phone as he did. I got the impression that my patronage had been more of a bother to him than a boon. With my stomach uncomfortably full of grease, I started to walk back to the main drag. I planned out my next move. Maybe I’d try the grocery store next, or a bar. I’d take the time to cover a few more places that day, and then try the rest the next. If I got nothing by then… it would be time for a new plan. Heading towards downtown, I passed my motel, and paused as I saw a familiar red Lamborghini Aventador parked out front, right beside my car. I stopped and stared at it for a few moments, and as I did, I saw a man get out. At 29, James was a reflection of everything I could have been. Handsome, successful, smart, a great athlete. I was proud of him, no matter what. I’d left our company in his hands a few months back, and he’d grown into the role quickly. That Lambo even suited him better than it ever suited me. James strode towards me, tall and confident, looking around at the empty scenery around us. “What are you doing here, Dad?” he asked, voice stern as if he were the Father, and I were the child. “Enjoying my retirement,” I replied. He didn’t buy that for a second. “You’re wasting your time out here… You’re not going to find Pauline.” “No. But who knows. Maybe I’ll run into something else.” James’ brow creased. “How many times do I have to tell you to leave it to the police?” “Should I?” I asked. “Because they’ve done a really stellar job so far, haven’t they?” “I’m taking you home.” The statement was curt and demanding, leaving no room for negotiation. Clearly he didn’t know who he was talking to. “The hell you are.” I brushed past him, heading towards town again. Ever persistent, that boy of mine followed me. “You can’t just keep chasing her, Dad! What if you end up dead?” “Then I’m sure it’ll be a lovely funeral.” I replied, “I need a drink. Are you coming or not?” James sighed in disapproval, but kept stride with me. “Look… If you’re mad at me, I get it. She called me to that motel room, and I blew her off. But you told me yourself, she was probably already dead whether or not she made that call!” “I know,” I replied. “I don’t blame you, James. I blame the bitch that took her.” “Just because we didn’t find the body doesn’t mean-” “I KNOW!” I said it more sharply than I intended, and James stopped in his tracks, unsure of how to respond to me. “Just… Just give me a few days to look around, alright? That’s all I ask,” I said to him. “Can you do that for me?” He nodded slowly. “Yeah… okay, Dad. But afterwards, you come home. Stop chasing the killer, because if you don’t, sooner or later you’re going to run into her, and you’re going to get hurt!” Now it was my turn to nod, but I didn’t say anything. I kept walking towards the bar, leaving James behind. The town Bar was called Shelby’s Place. Dim red lights and country music gave the place a homey feel. The bartender was a muscular bald man with a heavy beard. I ordered a gin and tonic before showing him the picture. In the low light, he took a few moments to look, before he shook his head. As he did, the doors to the bar opened, and a woman walked in. She was young and dark-skinned. Her eyes held a knowing look to them. There was something about the way she moved. Methodical and seductive, like the ocean itself. She sat a few seats away from me, and the bartender was on her immediately. “I’ll have the usual, Gary.” Wordlessly, he fixed her a drink, and after a moment’s thought, I changed seats to sit beside her. “Put it on my tab,” I said. Her eyebrow rose, but she didn’t protest. “Thanks, stranger. To what do I owe the pleasure?” Her tone was flirtatious. “I thought you might answer a question for me, that’s all,” I replied. Her smile widened. “Well then, the answer is: Yes. I am single.” I caught myself blushing, just a little bit. “I’m sorry… That… that wasn’t exactly it… I’m looking for someone, actually.” I took out the picture again. “See anyone you recognize?” She looked down at the picture, and followed my finger to Harriet’s face. Nothing could hide the recognition in her eyes, but she didn’t answer immediately. “I’ve seen her around.” She finally said, and looked back up at me, “What’s your business?” “I wanted to ask her some questions.” I replied, “That’s all.” It was a lie, but I didn’t much care for that. The Woman propped her head up with her hand. “That’s all, huh?” she asked. “Well… I’ll give you a pass since you’re obviously new here. You’re one of those boys out by the motel, right? I caught you having an argument with that fella with the fancy red car a little while ago.” “Yeah… That’s my son, James,” I admitted. “We’re just looking into the disappearance of my Daughter. I was told that, that woman might know something.” “So you’re not cops, then?” The woman asked. “I’m just a concerned father.” The woman nodded thoughtfully, as the bartender brought her, her drink. A rum and Coke. She took a sip. “I can check and see if she’s around. Harriet goes out of town on business every few days.” “Do you know what kind of business?” I asked. “House calls,” the woman replied. “I’m sorry… I don’t think I caught your name?” “Right, sorry… I’m Terry McKinnon.” “Well, nice to meet you, Terry. You can call me Clarice. Anyhow, maybe if she’s in town, I can introduce you later. After all, you seem nice enough, and Harriet is a sweetheart! She wouldn’t hurt a fly!” I highly doubted that. “I’d appreciate it.” I said, “Just let me know when.” “Stick around your motel. I’ll come knocking.” Clarice replied, and raised her glass to me. “Thanks for the drink, Terry.” James’ car was still out front of the Motel when I got back. The sun was starting to go down, and bathed the otherwise empty parking lot in a golden glow. Walking past the Lambo, I found myself thinking about how small it looked. How had I ever enjoyed driving that thing? Seeing it beside the used Sedan I’d bought a while back, I realized that I actually preferred the Sedan. Staring into the empty driver’s seat of that cramped, angular car, I caught myself resenting it a little bit. All my life, it had been my dream car. Each and every success had brought me closer and closer to it. I’d made so many sacrifices, just for that dream of success. My ex-wife, Megan had called me a workaholic. I’d told her I was only doing it to provide for my family… But that was a lie. I did it for me. I did it for the money, and those sacrifices always seemed so small. I missed a few weekends, and I didn’t see my family often. When I was home, I was tired and irritable. Pauline had taken the divorce especially hard. She and James had lived with her mother for the first few years. The only reason they ever came back to me, was because Megan had passed away. I trusted James to raise her right. He was the older child, and thus the more responsible one. I had my work to worry about, always my work. Now, all these years later, here I was, staring at my beloved Lambo and hating it. I called James to join me for dinner that night, but he didn’t answer his phone. I could only imagine he was avoiding me. So, I ordered take out from the one pizza place in town, and waited for Clarice. She came for me around eight that evening, knocking on my door. “Good evening, Terry,” she said softly. “Sorry to keep you waiting.” She walked in without an invitation. “I stopped by the halfway house and asked about Harriet. They told me she was going to get back in tonight, and I know she’s a bit of a night owl, so… I thought it might not hurt to swing by and talk to her.” “Are you sure she’ll be okay with that?” I asked. “Yeah, they gave me her number and I checked in with her. She said she’ll be up for a while, if you wanted to swing by.” I studied Clarice for a few moments. It had occurred to me that she was working with Harriet, but… It seemed almost too paranoid. “I don’t see why not, then,” I replied. Clarice tipped me a winning smile, before leaning against my door. “Alrighty then. I’m guessing you’ve never been to the halfway house before, have you? I can show you the way.” “Give me a minute. I need to freshen up a bit first,” I lied, and shooed her out of the room. I didn’t need long. I changed my shirt and put on some deodorant, but that wasn’t why I’d chased her off. I pocketed the gun and hid a wooden stake I’d fashioned a while back in my belt. If I had a shot… I wasn’t going to waste it. Clarice was waiting patiently when I stepped out of the room to join her. We made small talk as we walked down the beach, towards the halfway house. The house in question didn’t look much different than any of the other suburban houses by the beach. It was large but well maintained, with a wraparound porch that looked homey. As we drew closer, I could see a figure sitting in a chair on that porch. I could see the slight burn of a cigarette. Harriet sat patiently, waiting for me like we had all the time in the world. “Hey, Mrs. H!” Clarice said playfully as we drew nearer. Harriet exhaled smoke and smiled. “Good to see you again Clarice. Is that the man you mentioned?” “Yup. This is Terry.” Harriet’s eyes rested on me knowingly. “Well, thank you for bringing him along. Head on inside. Patricia had a Birthday last night, there’s some cake still left over. Help yourself. Terry, would you like to have a seat?” She offered me a spot beside her, as Clarice proudly stepped into the house again. I stood in the sand for a while, watching the bookish vampire as she smoked her cigarette. No sound except for the gulls and the waves. After a few tense moments, she spoke. “I can’t imagine what you think of me, Terry.” She sighed, “I assume you have some means to kill me on hand, correct.” “Correct,” I replied. The slightest smile crossed her lips. “Well… I should have seen this coming. You’re the first person to follow me home. It was bound to happen eventually.” “You can’t just go around murdering innocent people,” I replied. “Did you think no one would notice?” “It would be naive of me to say yes. I’d hoped what I paid the local law enforcement might keep anyone from digging too deep. But you’re made of sterner stuff, it seems.” She chuckled, “From what Pauline told me, you were the last person I expected to see showing up at my door… But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. After our encounter at the motel, when I heard someone had shown up in town asking about me, I had my suspicions. I hope you don’t mind that I sent Clarice to collect you. But dragging this out wouldn’t have benefitted either of us.” I took the stake from my coat, and Harriet’s eyes focused on it. But she didn’t move. She inhaled on her cigarette. “If you’re going to kill me, would you mind if I asked you a question first?” She asked. I paused, before nodding my head. I dreaded the moment when she’d pounce, when it was either her or me and I’d have to drive my stake through her heart. But she didn’t move. “How did I choose my victims?” “You chose couples. One man, one woman,” I replied. She shook her head. “No, no, no. Often, yes, it was a man and a woman. But what did every pair have in common?” To that, I had no answer. Harriet sat patiently through my silence. “I suppose by tracking me here, you’ve become a monster hunter, haven’t you?” She finally asked, “It might interest you to know that I’m something of a monster hunter myself. People call for help all the time… So I visit them, I assess the situation, and if need be, I deal with the problem. Abuse is like the tide. It waxes and wanes. It drowns those caught in it. One sad truth about humanity is that people don’t change, Terry. Some do. You did. But not all. Not the worst of them. Some people only destroy. They take. They hurt. They rape. I didn’t choose to become what I am today. But they chose to commit their sins.” “What are you talking about?” I asked. “I’m talking about my victims. The bodies they found scattered along the roadways… Yes, that was me. But those were the monsters. Abusers. Rapists. No better than animals.” “And what about the women?” I asked. “You expect me to believe that they’re fine? Why take them, then?” “For safety,” Harriet replied. “If a body turns up, they’re usually the first suspect. I’ve seen good people suffer for my crimes. That isn’t what I want. So instead, I take them with me. I help them heal, and when the time comes, start again.” “And they let you feed on them?” I asked. “Some do. Some have nothing left, and they ask to become like me… Like Pauline.” My heart stopped in my chest. “You’re lying.” “Am I?” Harriet tilted her head to the side and stood up from her seat. “You can come out now.” On her command, the door to the house opened. I stared in silent awe as she stepped out onto the porch. My little girl, my Pauline. Alive, unharmed… She was there, right there in front of me! I dropped the stake, eyes fixated on her. My feet compelled me forwards, I stumbled over my own two feet as I dumbly ran to her, snatching her up into my arms and hugging her close. The tears streamed down my cheeks, as I felt my Pauline’s arms slowly wrap around me in turn. “I thought I lost you!” I gasped. “I thought you were dead…” “I’m sorry, Dad… I couldn’t stay…” Pauline said softly, her face pressed against my shoulder. “I had to leave… I… I didn’t think you’d care…” Those words broke my heart. But I understood why she said them. Never in my life had I been a good father to her. It had been one disappointment after the next. I knew why she had felt that way, and I hated myself for it. “I’m sorry…” I whispered, running my fingers through her hair. “I’m so sorry…” Harriet turned away, looking out over the crashing waves and allowing us our privacy. “Who hurt her?” I finally asked. Harriet looked back at me. Her smile was gone. “Isn’t it obvious?” she said. It was. Harriet sighed, and as my hug broke with my daughter, I caught a look of shame on Pauline’s face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I… I didn’t think you’d believe me if I…” I cupped her cheeks, silencing her. “I’m the one who owes you an apology,” I replied. “I should’ve known… There had to have been signs…” Tears streamed down her cheeks as she bowed her head into me, and again I looked over to Harriet. “Where’s James?” “Inside,” she replied. “We weren’t sure if it would be better to wait for you, or do it before… I didn’t want this to end in violence.” “It won’t,” I assured her. “I… I assume you’re going to kill him.” “Yes.” No lies. No tricks. Straight to the point. The truth hurt. It was like a knife in my heart, but now I held my daughter trembling in my arms. I stood here because of what James had done. Because of what I had allowed. “Alright.” It was the only thing I had to say. I stood on the beach, with Pauline at my side as Clarice and two other dragged James out. I recognized one of the girls as the one I’d seen Harriet feeding on. “Dad?!” James’ voice was cracked with fear. “W-what the hell is going on?” His eyes settled on Pauline and widened. “H-how…?” “I know what you did,” I replied calmly. The look on James’ face confirmed it. “No… No, whatever she told you, it’s a lie! I didn’t touch her! I would never! She’s my sister! I swear to God… I’d never…” He struggled and fought against the women. Harriet watched quietly from the balcony, and Pauline left my side to approach him. “Dad? DAD?! Come on! You’ve got to believe me! Goddammit, Dad!” I just stood there and stared as Pauline loomed over him. One of the other girls jerked James’ head back. He cried and struggled. He fought. He begged. But he did not escape her teeth. Last night, I parked the Lambo on the edge of the harbor. I put it in neutral, and I pushed it into the harbor. James’ suicide letter is in his room. What he did was unforgivable but through my neglect I enabled it, and so I share the blame. Tomorrow I will leave Eastgate alone, and perhaps somewhere in the distance, I may find my absolution.

16 minutes

December 3, 2019

Feelspastas and Happy Endings, Ghosts and Spirits, Strange and Unexplained

Freak

Daniel Hammonds

“Bobby! Pay attention!” he heard his teacher say. He snapped out of his reverie and looked up to see her glaring at him. “Did you hear anything I’ve been saying?” she continued. Bobby shrugged his shoulders. Prior to being disrupted, he was daydreaming that he could freeze time, and before that he was imagining himself navigating the classroom if he was only 5 inches tall. The teacher continued to rant at him, just as they all did, then she placed him on detention Friday night after school. Why is it that schools are so intent on crushing a child’s imagination? What is it about creative kids that piss so many teachers off? They punished him for sketching or writing stories in class. They punished him whenever he slipped into a daydream. His artwork wasn’t the right style for his art teacher; his music was too modern for his music teacher, and he was even forbidden from using mnemonic techniques to revise for exams. Whenever he strayed from their formula and their methods, he was punished and told he would never amount to anything. At the end of the school day the kids rushed towards the gates, saying goodbye to all their friends and classmates. Nobody said goodbye to Bobby though. They barely noticed him unchaining his bike for the lonely ride home. As he approached his teens, he was finding it hard to connect with other kids and was used to being excluded. Bobby’s only companion was his diary, in which he confided his thoughts and feelings. Every night before bed, he would make an entry… Dear Diary, Another shit day at school. Wandered the playground alone. Picked up another detention Friday night. On the plus side, there are some great Xbox games coming out this month. Bobby The following day transpired much the same… Dear Diary, I hung around the boys in my class today, watching them play football. I thought they were going to ask me to join in, but they just wanted me to fetch the ball. I decided to spend my break time in the library instead. Got into an argument with mum and dad again. I told them I’m on detention tomorrow night and they threatened to take away my books and Xbox. If they did that my life wouldn’t have much point. Bobby The following day at school Bobby made an effort to focus on his classes. Every time he caught his mind drifting away, he’d try to snap his attention back to the words of the teacher. That lasted all of 15 minutes before he slipped into another daydream. When the school bell signalled home time for the kids, he made his way to the detention hall. At least here nobody was telling him what to think about. The supervising teacher read a book while Bobby and two other boys stared at the walls until their hour was up. When he was done, he headed outside to unchain his bike. It had started to rain and dark clouds hung in the sky making it feel much later than it was. Bobby rode his bike along his usual route home, over the wet deserted roads, but before he could reach the home stretch, he noticed a gang of older boys lurking in one of the streets. They looked like trouble so he chose to circumvent them via a patch of wasteland behind the houses. The pavement gave way to a rocky and uneven dirt track at the foot of a tall grass bank. He steered onto the grass to avoid some broken bottles, but it was soft and slippery from the rain. The front wheel slid out of control, throwing Bobby over the handlebars. He landed on his back, knocking the wind out of him. He appeared not to be seriously hurt, but sat on the ground for a while as he attempted to catch his breath. He was wet and his bike lay in a heap in front of him. “Are you ok?” Bobby looked round trying to locate the source of the voice. It sounded like a young girl. “Is your bike damaged,” she asked. It was coming from the top of the bank, but he couldn’t see who was speaking. He pulled himself to his feet and started to clamber up towards the unidentified voice. A line of houses backed onto the bank, overlooking the wasteland below. In one of the gardens stood a girl, peering through a wire fence. “I saw you fall and just wanted to check you were all right,” she said. “I’m ok…thanks,” Bobby puffed, gasping for breath. The girl opened the gate and gestured for Bobby to enter. The lawn was overgrown and the house looked run down, but that barely registered in his mind as he laid eyes on the girl in front of him. She had brown hair tied into a pony tail with a red bow that matched her dress; a pale and flawless complexion with pink cheeks, and eyes like droplets of sky. She was beautiful. Bobby didn’t know what to say. He was out of practice when it came to talking to girls…or to kids in general. “I left my bike,” he said, standing on the threshold. “We can bring it up to my garden if you like. We can check it over, make sure it’s safe to ride,” offered the girl. “Come on, I’ll help you.” The two of them made their way down the grassy bank and wheeled the bike back up to the girl’s garden. “Err…thanks,” said Bobby. “That’s fine.” They checked over the bike, though Bobby was thinking only of the girl he was with. He’d never experienced such kindness from a stranger before. “I’m Lucy,” she said. “I’m Bobby.” “So are we meant to shake hands or something?” she said, reaching out. Bobby smiled and gently shook her delicate hand. “Do you have to rush home or do you want to hang out for a while?” she asked. “I can’t invite you in because mother’s asleep, but I know somewhere we can shelter from the rain.” Bobby checked his watch. “Ok. I have to be home by eight though.” “Great! Follow me.” Bobby picked up his bike and wheeled it along as Lucy led the way. They exchanged small talk and he found himself more at ease than he had felt for a long time. They came across a small cove of trees where the branches intertwined to form an overhead canopy. “It’s not much, but it’ll keep the rain off us. We can sit here,” said Lucy, taking a seat on a log and motioning for Bobby to join her. He leaned his bike against a tree and sat next to her. “So, do you hang out here a lot?” “Yes. Sometimes I need to get out of the house. Mother sleeps a lot, you see. She gets really annoyed when I make noise, so I try to keep out of her way.” “I understand,” Bobby replied, sympathetically. “I have arguments with my parents too.” “Really? Over what?” Bobby looked down before saying, “I disappoint them.” “I’m sure that’s not true.” “I’m no good at anything and I’m always in trouble at school.” “Are you one of those bad kids?” “No, I’m really not. I just can’t concentrate on the classes. They bore me.” “That’s not so bad.” “My parents wish they had a normal son who was into sports and did well at school. When I try talking to them about the stuff I’m into or the stories I’m writing, they just roll their eyes,” he said. “Most people just avoid me.” “I didn’t avoid you, Bobby.” Lucy placed her hand on his as she spoke. He flinched slightly at her touch. She looked at him until he raised his head and their eyes met. “I would love a friend like you,” she added. Bobby couldn’t repress the smile that stretched across his face. “Do you want to hang out tomorrow?” “I’d like that. Meet me in my garden around three?” “Ok,” he agreed. They continued chatting a bit longer before deciding to head home. Bobby gave Lucy a lift on his bike, dropping her off at her garden before making his way home for the night. Dear Diary, I’ve had an amazing day and I think I’ve made a new friend! Her name is Lucy. She’s beautiful and sweet. We really clicked and she gets me. We’re meeting again tomorrow afternoon. I’ll keep you updated. Bobby As arranged, Bobby met Lucy in her garden. She was wearing that same bow and red dress. He noticed it was torn and frayed in a few places, but she looked even more beautiful in the clear daylight. They went for a ride on his bike and he showed off some stunts. She appeared impressed and gave him a round of applause. She explained that she’d never learned to ride a bike, so he decided to teach her, gently guiding her to make sure she didn’t fall. As he placed his hand on her back, he noticed that her dress was damp. Had she not dried it from the rain yesterday? Did she not have any other clothes? he wondered, but he kept his thoughts to himself. “Freak!” Bobby turned around to see a bunch of on-looking kids. They were shouting out and laughing amongst themselves. “Freeeak!” they yelled again. Lucy pulled Bobby aside. “Take no notice. I get it all the time.” “But, why?” “It’s because I’m poor and my house is a dump,” she said. “Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed.” “Freeeeaaaak!” the kids continued. Bobby had always shrunk away from confrontation, but he found himself tapping into courage he never knew he had. He puffed up his chest and pulled back his shoulders, ready to face them. The kids scurried away nervously. “Forget about it. They’re just idiots,” she said, tugging at his arm. Bobby and Lucy returned to their little den in the trees where he allowed his temper to settle. He couldn’t understand why they called her a freak. Aside from the frays and tears on her dress, she didn’t look poor, especially from a distance. He started to wonder if they knew something about her that he didn’t. They continued talking and discovered a number of interests in common. Lucy loved reading too, but confessed that she didn’t go to school much. When Bobby asked why, she said it was complicated and offered no more. He figured it had something to do with her mother, but decided to drop the subject. They spent the entire afternoon laughing and playing together and forgot all about the incident. Bobby dropped her off at her garden. He looked up at the house. She was right: it was a dump. He felt so sorry for her. Despite the arguments with his parents, he was always well fed and well dressed and had nice presents at Christmas and birthdays. Maybe one day he could whisk her away. They stood facing each other for a moment. Their eyes met, but Bobby broke his gaze to check his watch. “Well, it’s getting late. I guess I should get going.” Lucy leaned in and wrapped her arms around him. “This has been one of the best days of my life,” she whispered into his ear. “Mine too,” he replied, sincerely. Bobby peddled his bike home, a smile stretched across his face and a fluttering in his chest. He met with Lucy again the following day and every night after school. Dear Diary, I’m sorry I’ve not written any updates this week. I have been spending a lot of time with my new friend, Lucy. I’ve never met anyone like her before and I can’t stop thinking about her. She’s so caring and when I talk, she actually listens to me. I stop myself sometimes when I think I’m rambling, but she always asks me to carry on and says she finds me fascinating. I think about her as more than just a friend sometimes. She hugs me and compliments me a lot and it makes me wonder. She had a big argument with her mum last night and cried on my shoulder. We held each other so tightly and just stood there for ages in the rain. She looked up at me with those big blue eyes and I wanted to kiss her so much. I think she wants me to, but I’m scared to ruin what we have. Something really bothers me though. All the kids keep calling her a freak. It happens whenever they see us together and I don’t understand why. She says it doesn’t bother her, but it must. Why are people so cruel? I notice she wears the same tatty dress every day and I worry that her mom is neglecting her. But I’ve planned a nice surprise for tomorrow. Bobby When they met the next day, Lucy joined Bobby on his bike and they took off along the main road towards town. “Where are we going?” she asked. “It’s a surprise!” “I don’t get to go into town any more,” she said. “This is so exciting!” They arrived at a shopping mall and Lucy seemed overjoyed, mesmerised by the wonders in front of her. They walked round, admiring things in the shop windows and when Lucy pointed out a dress she really liked, Bobby offered to buy it for her. “That’s the surprise,” he told her. He’d been saving his pocket money for some new games, but the past week he hadn’t even turned on his Xbox. “What? Really?” Lucy was jubilant. “But I can’t, Bobby. That’s your money…I can’t.” Bobby insisted and assured her it was what he wanted, so they went inside and bought the dress. “I’ll wear this for you tomorrow,” she said, and gave him a big hug. “I can’t wait!” Bobby treated her to something to eat and drink in a fast food place, but the stares they got from the people in there made them very uncomfortable, so they decided to finish their food outside. In fact, they endured a lot of stares in the mall that day, as well as a few giggles and Bobby was sure he heard the word “freak” a few times too. But it wasn’t enough to ruin their day or snap him out of the bliss he felt when they were together. Besides, Bobby secretly hoped that the new dress he’d bought for her would put an end to the name-calling. When he met her the following day she was wearing the new dress as promised. It was dark purple with lace frills. She had untied her hair too, and it hung freely just below her chin. Bobby was taken aback. “Do you like it?” she asked. “I love it!” he replied. That evening they decided to leave the bike behind and go for a stroll over the local park. “Do you ever dream about your ideal future?” she asked. “All the time.” “Do you ever picture yourself falling in love? Or walking hand in hand, taking the dog for a run over the park on a Sunday afternoon then snuggling up on the sofa in the evening, watching movies?” “I guess so,” Bobby said. The truth is, he’d thought about it a lot, especially since meeting Lucy. “A girl can dream,” she sighed. The following ten minutes passed in silence as they walked through the park, taking in the autumnal colours and kicking through leaves. Then he felt Lucy reaching for his hand. He held onto it and they continued walking hand in hand. He felt butterflies in his stomach and in that moment he couldn’t have been happier. Unfortunately, it was soon to be interrupted. Three boys, a few years older than Bobby, stood in their path. “Look, it’s the freak!” one of them said. Bobby released Lucy’s hand and positioned himself between her and the boys. “Leave her alone,” he warned them. “Is that your girlfriend?” one of them laughed. “Mind your own business.” “How about I steal her from you?” the biggest of the boys threatened. “I’ll snap off her head off and use it as a football!” At this point, the boy reached out and grabbed Lucy’s arm. As he pulled her towards him, she fell over. Bobby snapped. He threw a punch into the larger boy’s jaw, who dropped to the floor in an instant. He then swung at the other boy, catching him on the nose. He felt it crunch on impact and blood spurted out. The remaining boy saw his opportunity and punched Bobby under his eye, but it wasn’t enough to knock him down. Adrenaline rushed through Bobby’s veins as he grabbed him in a headlock and tightened his grip until he screamed for mercy. “Bobby! Stop!” he heard Lucy say. He looked down to see she was still lying on the floor. He released his grip and all three boys staggered away, defeated and humiliated. “Fuckin’ freak!” one of them muttered. Bobby ignored the parting shot and attended to Lucy. “Are you hurt?” he asked her as he lifted her onto her feet. “No, I’m fine,” she said. “But your eye…it’s all swollen.” She ran her fingers lightly over Bobby’s face, where he’d caught a punch. “It’s nothing,” he replied. Lucy leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you Bobby. Nobody has ever done anything like that for me. You were so brave.” He blushed. “By the way, you dropped something,” she said, handing Bobby his watch. “It must’ve come off in the fight. It’s a good thing you found it! My granddad left it to me when he died and my parents would go crazy if I lost it.” “It’s beautiful,” she said. “I’ve never had a watch before.” “Want to try it on?” he offered. “You can wear it until we get back.” He adjusted the strap and fastened it onto her narrow wrist. She held it in the air and flaunted it as though it was some valuable treasure. It was endearing how much she appreciated the little things. Everything about Bobby seemed to impress her. They continued walking and he noticed she was limping. “I just twisted my ankle a bit, that’s all.” “I’ll give you a piggy back,” said Bobby, crouching slightly so she could jump on his back. He was surprised at how light she was. He walked her all the way home, right to her door. “You’ll have a black eye tomorrow,” said Lucy, touching his face again. “What will you tell your mum and dad?” “I’ll make something up. I’m good at that.” They lingered for a moment. Their eyes met, only this time neither of them turned away. Bobby glanced down at her tender lips, brushed back her hair and leaned in closely. He kissed her and she reciprocated. He felt his heart pounding. They gently pulled apart and gazed into each other’s eyes. She started to giggle nervously. “I’ve been waiting for you to do that,” she told him. Bobby beamed at her. “See you tomorrow,” he said, as he retrieved his bike. “I can’t wait!” she replied. He couldn’t stop thinking about her on the way home, about their kiss. He was overcome with euphoria and wanted to greet everyone he passed and announce his happiness to the world. Just over a week ago, he’d meant nothing to anyone and was just some lonely failure. Now he was a hero who had taken on three older bullies and got the girl. Life couldn’t be better. Her reached the front of his house and went to check the time. “Damn!” Bobby exclaimed, realising he’d forgotten his watch. He trusted Lucy and considered leaving it with her until tomorrow, but he started to imagine his parents stressing out, before marching him to her house and demanding it back. He couldn’t face the embarrassment. Bobby turned his bike around and headed back to Lucy’s house. By the time he got there, the sun was going down and darkness was falling over the streets. He noticed there were no lights on at the front of the house. Afraid of aggravating her mother, he decided to head round to the back garden where they usually met, hoping he could attract her attention. No lights on in the back of the house either. “Lucy!” he called out, in a half whisper. He made his way through the overgrown grass and weeds, drawing towards the house. He called out again, but no response. He walked up to one of the windows and peered inside. He could see what looked to be a dilapidated kitchen. The walls were streaked with peeled wallpaper, the surfaces were covered in plaster and dust, and broken tiles lay on the floor. Bobby felt his heart sink on seeing the deprived conditions in which Lucy was living. He moved round to the next window. A dirty net curtain obscured his view, but in an otherwise empty and undecorated room, he could make out the figure of a girl. Her back was turned to the window and she was gazing into a mirror. “Lucy?” he called out. No response. He knocked the window. She didn’t move. He knocked again, a little harder, but she remained perfectly still. A sense of foreboding loomed over him. He knocked again. “Lucy! It’s me, Bobby.” His pulse started to race and he struggled to swallow. Something wasn’t right. He headed to the back door and found it unlocked. The house looked even worse on the inside. There was plaster over the floors, holes in the ceiling and no carpet or wallpaper. It looked abandoned. He crept slowly through the shadowy hall towards the room in which he had seen the girl. Floorboards creaked underfoot and he remembered Lucy telling him how annoyed her mother would get when disturbed. He could feel himself trembling. It wasn’t about the watch now; he just needed to check she was ok. Slowly, he opened the door and an icy shiver ran over his body. He felt his knees buckle and his stomach churn at the sight before him: a pale mannequin with rosy cheeks and brown chin length hair. It was wearing the purple dress that he’d bought from the mall. Its glassy blue eyes stared blankly into a dirty mirror. Fear gripped his body, but he needed to know the truth. He drew closer and gently pushed the mannequin. It toppled to the floor and lay there stiff and lifeless. That’s when he noticed his watch fastened around the mannequin’s narrow wrist. Bobby could feel his head spinning and his heart pounding as repressed memories came flooding back and his fantasy started to give way to reality. He ran outside and jumped on his bike. Tears streamed down his face as he peddled furiously away from that house…forever.

13 minutes

October 8, 2015

Madness, Paranoia, and Mental Illness

The Quiet Game

based on a true story, based on true events

Have you ever wondered why we see ghosts? Maybe they have a message for us. Perhaps they’re trapped somewhere between our world and theirs, oblivious to the fact that time has gone on without them. There have been tales of long-lost family members visiting us in our dreams and unexplainable coincidences that put a smile on your face. But for every heartwarming story of visits from the “other side” there is a frightening account of an unwelcome presence that can send a chill down your spine. I could share a number of instances where I felt uneasy or even frightened by what I knew was an angry or negative spirit. However, the story I’m about to share is one that has cast a dark cloud over my nightmares for over 17 years. I can just short of guarantee that this story will force even the non-believers to check that dark corner before drifting off to dreamland. I was 11 years old the first time I saw her. My parents were away for the evening and I had ordered “Scream” on pay-per-view. I haven’t watched a PPV movie in a long time, but back then it would play the movie on a 24-hour loop once ordered. Well into the second viewing, I got up from the couch to grab a drink from the kitchen. I was headed for the stairs when I saw a shadow out of the corner of my eye. Hesitating for a moment, I took a deep breath and continued toward the stairway. Returning to the basement, the air seemed ominous. The room seemed darker. As I relaxed on my seat to watch the rest of my movie before bed, I saw what appeared as a strange silhouette standing near the bathroom door. I focused my full sight on what I thought was there. I blinked and it was gone. Boy, was this movie giving me the creeps. Then I heard it; the soft whisper of a young girl at first, followed by a much louder command, “Let’s play!” Now, I have two older brothers so I flipped on the light expecting to see them playing a trick on me with a flashlight and a tape recorder or something. These are the same brothers who used to hide a toy record player in my room blaring train sounds and throw me in with the lights off, holding the doorknob so I couldn’t get out. Needless to say, teasing me during a horror movie would not have been above them. With the lights now on, I yelled, “Ben, Phil…stop it or I’m telling mom!” Silence. I figured I was just over-tired. I curled up on the couch and felt my eyelids getting heavier as I finished watching my movie. Just before I drifted off I heard Ben’s bedroom door 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. Nothing. Swearing off slasher movies forever, I turned to face the back of the couch hoping that would help me get to sleep. “Can you play now?” The question came from lips that couldn’t have been further than a few feet from the couch. Still turned, I yelled, “I’m gonna tell mom if you guys don’t leave me alone!” Within seconds, Ben and Phil were at the landing by the back door. “What the hell are you screechin’ about?” Ben asked, he and Phil not the least bit concerned about the panic on my face. “If you guys don’t stop I’m telling mom when she gets home!” As I spoke I knew there was no way they could have been both places at once. The realization that my brothers were upstairs all night left me cold. I stood up from the couch and quickly marched upstairs to my room, praying I could just fall asleep and put this whole thing behind me. Unfortunately, I wasn’t so lucky. Thirty minutes into my restless shuffling, I was alerted to the sound of my bedroom door opening ever so gently. Jolting upward from my bed and opening my eyes, I became frozen as I saw, in the corner, a young girl with long, black hair, around the age of 6, in a once-white nightgown. She stared at me with dark, unblinking eyes and a wide smile. It was the kind of smile that you muster up for family picture day in the sense I could tell it was for show. I began to open my mouth, hoping to scream or cry; anything that might scare her away. Before I could make my decision, she pulled her boney finger up to her still smiling mouth. “Shhh. Now it’s my turn to hide.” I yelled louder than I had ever yelled in my life. To my surprise, my mom came running into my room. “Honey, what’s wrong?” she asked, as I darted my eyes between her and the now empty corner of my bedroom. I couldn’t answer. Was it a nightmare? Was my mind playing tricks on me? One thing was for sure; it was over. I shrugged it off as an all-too-real bad dream and went out to sleep on the couch in the living room. Fast-forward about three weeks. It was around 10:30 and I was out playing “spot” with Phil and nearly a dozen other neighborhood kids (for those of you wondering, “spot” is a game of hide-and-seek played at night with flashlights). The rules were simple. We had to stay within our block, we weren’t to go into backyards without permission and you couldn’t stay in one place for more than five minutes. I had been gearing up for this evening’s game all week. I had the perfect hiding spot and nobody would ever think to look there. Our next-door neighbors had a split-level house with a red deck off of the kitchen upstairs and plenty of room underneath for storage. Their yard wasn’t fenced in, so it had easy access. I made my way under the deck and positioned myself behind their lawn mower. “No way anyone will find me here,” I thought. I had been crouched for around three minutes when I saw the beam of light coming from between the houses. My friend, Mike, was “it” and he was running with his flashlight, nearing my hiding spot. Without hesitation, he turned at the edge of the house, shined the light directly on me and yelled, “SPOT!” There’s no way he knew I was there. “How did you do that? Did Phil tell you about my hiding spot?” As I asked the question I could tell he was paying little attention to me while he searched the area. “Where did she go?” Mike asked, a little hesitant. “I’ve been chasing her for half a block and I just watched her duck under this deck!” I couldn’t tell if he was trying to play a trick on me or if he was being genuine. Although I didn’t want to know the answer, I asked, “What was she wearing?” As he answered, I felt a rush of cold all the way up my back, as if someone had splashed me with ice water. “She had a long, kinda grayish pajama shirt on. It was really strange. Must be somebody’s little sister.” I leapt out from underneath the deck and stared at him for several seconds, reading his expressions. “Mike, I’ve been under here this whole time and you’re the first person I’ve seen.” With the small amount of light from his flashlight illuminating only a portion of his face, I watched his color fade. “Whatever, this game’s for babies anyway. I’m going home.” he stated, visibly shaken, but doing his best to keep his composure. “You’re it now.” He shoved the flashlight into my chest and walked quickly in the direction of his house. Although Mike was gone, I had a sudden awareness that I was not alone. Doing my best to avert my eyes from my once great hiding place, I pointed my flashlight back toward the street. My legs struggled to lift my feet. It was as if hands had emerged from the soft ground and clasped their menacing fingers around my ankles. In a desperate attempt to run, my legs had a different plan as I crashed, face-first, into the wet grass. I lied on the ground, stunned for what felt like only a few seconds. Gathering my wits, I lifted my head to see bare, pale feet resting only inches from my nose. “Aahh!” I screamed, suddenly sitting but leaning back on my hands. I had no words. That girl, the same one from my room, was standing over me. What once had been a vacant grin was replaced with a disgusting, angry snarl. “That was MY hiding spot!” Her voice now a high-pitched shriek, like thick nails on a dirty classroom chalkboard. Her shadowed eyes pierced through me like a hot blade as she began to cry. She continued with a much quieter, more sinister tone, “It’s your fault.” It was at that moment I knew she wasn’t talking about the game anymore. She lunged forward, flailing her arms while she fell on top of me. I struggled to grab at her frozen wrists and hollered for anyone close who might be able to come help me. I caught one last glimpse of those sinister eyes before everything went black. I awoke to the sound of footsteps creeping up to me. “I’m sorry!” I proclaimed, weak and covered in sweat. Just then a hand reached down and grabbed my arm. It was Phil. “Are you OK?” he asked. “Everyone is going home now. We didn’t know where you were and it’s getting late.” As I stood up I realized I wasn’t in our neighbor’s backyard anymore. I had somehow managed to end up in my own driveway, just a few feet from the front steps. “Are you hurt? What happened?” My brother was beginning to show worry at my lack of response. “I…I don’t know.” I stood there, still puzzled at how I had come to be in the driveway. “Well, we’d better go in. It’s almost midnight,” Phil continued. “Wait. What?” The words left my mouth and I began to grow more and more concerned as to what might have happened after I blacked out. I had to tell him. There was a good chance he would think I was crazy but I couldn’t keep this to myself anymore. “I saw this girl…” The front porch light came on and our dad stepped outside. He didn’t have to say anything. We knew it was time to come in. The nightmares started that night. I lied in bed, staring at the ceiling for hours and doing my best not to look anywhere else when I felt my eyelids getting heavy. With each flutter, I could picture her face, staring at me with that look of hatred and disgust. I fought the fatigue for as long as I could, finally succumbing to the night. They say you only remember bits and pieces of dreams and lose sight of what little you had as time marches on. But the horrors that plagued my subconscious for the next several nights are still as vivid and frightening as they were 17 years ago, reappearing every now and then as not to let me forget. My first dream started out normal enough. I was with a couple of friends (who have asked to remain nameless) and we were headed to an area near our house we all called “Cherry Hill”. It spanned several blocks and housed lots of trees, trails, hills and even an old train trestle. We did all sorts of stuff there. We built forts, rode bikes, played tag; the stuff you’d expect kids to do. We were walking down the trail, boards and tools in hand, looking for just the right spot to build. Settling on an area tucked in by the trestle, we got to work. I was nailing some small boards to a tree to make a ladder leading up to a long ledge. It was to be our lookout. I could hear my friends digging some kind of hole behind me. After a while, the sound of their shovels stopped. That same chill I had felt under the deck was inching up my legs to my back, then to my neck. I whipped around to see that they were gone. In fact, everything was gone; the shovels, the hole. It was as if they had never been there at all. It had gotten very dark. The giant trees were blocking any trace of light shining from the evening sky. As I strained my eyes to scan the area, I locked in on a familiar nightgown across the small stream of murky water. I was panicked. Frozen in fear, I watched as she grew closer, never moving her limbs. She threw her head back in a disgusting cackle befitting a woman well her senior. I closed my eyes, hoping that would somehow slow my pounding heartbeat. Silence. I wasn’t ready to open my eyes. My mind was racing and I couldn’t decide if I was awake or asleep. Before I had a chance to come to any conclusion, I felt a soft tug on my wrist. “They’re gone now. Will you play with me?” It was that same soft voice I had heard in my basement. It wasn’t creepy or angry. If I had to think of a word for it, I would say it almost sounded scared. No longer feeling threatened, I was ready to open my eyes. What a horrible mistake! She stood only inches from me, covered in blood but with no visible wounds. Through the gore I could see the frills of her gown, now torn and crimson. The more frightened I became, the more pleased she seemed with herself. Turning to run, I had made it only a few steps before tripping and crashing into the cold dirt. I had to compose myself. I sat up and glanced at the object that forced me to topple over. “Oh my God, no!” the words left my mouth as I stumbled back even further. There, laid out in a heaping mess, were my friends. Next to them was a shovel covered in blood and hair. She stood over the bodies, that menacing grin returning to her face, and she slowly brought her finger up to her lips. “Shhh.” I awoke on the living room couch. I know I fell asleep on my own bed, but with a history of sleepwalking I wasn’t surprised. One thing was for certain, I wasn’t going back to sleep. I turned on the TV and watched infomercials until morning. I finally got up to make myself a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch as the rest of the family emerged from their rooms. I wanted to tell them what was happening to me, but I was sort of famous in our house for stupid nightmares. To this day, I still catch guff about the big, green duck with a machine gun that would chase me around the neighborhood. Nobody was going to take me seriously. I had to find a way to handle this on my own. That night, before bed, I knelt down next to my bed and I locked my hands together in prayer. “Dear Lord, I need your help. There is something evil here that won’t leave me alone. I don’t know why it would choose me. Did I do something wrong? I beg of you, Lord, please stop this. I will never ask you for anything ever again! Amen.” I was dream-free for the next two nights. Maybe there was something to this prayer thing. It was Saturday and a few of us had gotten together for a game of street hockey. We must have played for at least two hours before someone said, “Let’s go to Cherry Hill.” As soon as I heard it that cold chill raced up my back. “I think I’m going to stay here, guys.” They weren’t having that. After lots of prodding and pleading, we hopped on our bikes. We stayed near the entrance, making dangerous ramps out of leftover boards from our hockey goals. I wasn’t that excited about going toward the trestle, but I figured there was strength in numbers. We were pointing out spots that would be ideal for a new fort. “There’s a good spot,” I said, pointing to a wall of dirt with an area already dug out. I was quickly out-voted as it was clear someone else had already claimed that area. We ventured down the trail until we neared the old trestle. “This spot is too open.” I pled my case and hoped for the best. It must have been “Let’s Do The Opposite of What Jamey Wants to Do Day” because everyone ignored me and headed down toward the water. Not wanting to let my fears get the best of me, I followed. I walked toward the lookout ledge from my dream. It was as if something was pulling me in that direction. Glancing at the tree I noticed letters etched out in the bark. They spelled out “Shhh.” I was done. No more fort building for me. I jumped on my bike and sped home. I was still shaking when I pulled into the driveway. I refused to come to the door when a couple of my friends stopped over to check on me. I lied in bed, sobbing and cursing the ceiling. “Why won’t you help me? I begged for your help and you didn’t listen!” I cried myself to sleep. My next nightmare was much shorter. It was a very strange dream in that I felt like I was watching a slide show. I remember watching an old, run-down farmhouse slowly fall to a pile of junk, but it was in pictures with each one showing more age and decay. There was a tree in the front yard with a tire swing and in every image there were children running around and playing. They didn’t seem phased by the crumbling house behind them. As the house aged, fewer kids were seen running around until only one remained. I watched as the last little girl stared at the ground, sad that her friends had left her. I watched her sadness turn to anger and then into resentment. The background grew dark and her eyes met mine. The edges of her mouth turned up into that all too familiar grin. She knew I was watching her. She stood still for several minutes as the wind blew through the bare trees behind her. Suddenly everything went dark and I heard the whisper, “What should we play next?” I avoided my room for the next several nights, finding any reason I could to stay up well past my bedtime. Although I feared coming across her while I was alone in the dark, it somehow felt safer than meeting her in a dream. She could manipulate me in my nightmares. I couldn’t look away. I tried obscene amounts of Mountain Dew, bright lights from the TV and music to avoid surrender to the night. I finally figured out that if I slept during the day she left me alone. I still wonder to this day if she was fueled by my fear. I was calmed by the light of day. It kept me safe. I had nearly forgotten all about her by the time she visited me again. Weeks had passed and I had started sleeping in my bed again. This final encounter was, by far, the creepiest (I consider this my final encounter because I truly believe any dreams since then have been residual, albeit terrifying). I awoke to the wind blowing my curtains across my face. This was significant because I have terrible allergies and am unable to sleep with the windows open. As soon as my eyes opened I could hear faint laughter coming from the front yard. It almost sounded like the overused laugh track that goes with any clip of children playing in movies and television. I attempted to sit up and quickly realized I had no control of my own movements. I felt paralyzed. Before long I was lifted out of bed and placed, standing on my bedroom floor. I began walking toward the window still unable to move my own limbs. At the screen, I watched as this beautiful little girl skipped and sang through the grass without notice of the world around her. This time I didn’t feel as if she knew I was there. Mesmerized for nearly a full minute, I finally snapped out of it to find I was no longer in my own room. From my surroundings I could tell that this bedroom belonged to a girl. The walls were covered in bright pinks, purples and yellows with tons of princess doll houses, Barbies and dresses scattered along the floor and in the open closet. I stood in the middle of the room, still unable to move, and watched as the door flew open and that same little girl from the front yard came running in, crying. When she dashed by me without looking I didn’t think that she could see me. Had I become the ghost? The girl jumped into the closet and her eyes locked onto mine. As footsteps grew louder down the hall she looked at me, put her finger up to her mouth and gave a soft, “Shhh.” Who was she hiding from? Why was she crying? I stood and watched as a tall man wearing a baseball cap, red t-shirt and jeans marched into the room with a menacing, “Come out, come out wherever you are!” The little girl kept her stare on me as tears rolled down her face. I tried to ask him who he was looking for, but he didn’t respond. Couldn’t HE see me? His tone quickly changed, “Where the hell did that b***h go?” I still couldn’t tell if he knew I was there, but I knew she must be hiding for a reason so I decided to keep my mouth shut. He gave one last look around the room and left. I watched him walk down the hallway until I could no longer see him, and when I turned to the closet she was gone. In the blink of an eye all of the room’s bright colors turned to shades of gray. I heard shouts coming from another room in the house. Without hesitation, I ran toward the screams. When I got into the living room the little girl was lying on the floor. This time she was wearing that same night gown from my earlier visions. The man in the ball cap was standing over her and I could tell that she was uncomfortable. “Let’s play a game, sweetie. It’s called ‘the quiet game.’” Although his words were sweet, I knew his intentions were anything but. She was terrified. Her eyes were telling a story of fear and sadness. I panicked. “Leave her alone!” I yelled the words as loudly as I could. I’m not sure what I was expecting to happen, but my shouts fell on deaf ears. It was no use. She turned again to look at me I began to feel light headed, like I was losing oxygen. Everything went dark but I could still hear the faint cries of a scared little girl. The cries were followed by wet, gurgling sounds and that’s when I heard the sound that still gives me chills as I write these words. As if he was right by my face, I heard the man whisper one last request, “Shhh.” I woke up right after that and sobbed in my bed for what seemed like hours. Aside from the occasional nightmare, I haven’t seen the little girl since. Although I haven’t seen her, I still feel like she’s around. I’ve spent time in libraries and news archives hoping to come across a story of a familiar missing girl or maybe even something on the man in the cap. I believe my dream of the deteriorating house means the potential scene of the crime is long-gone. I suppose it’s best that I leave it be. But the question I fear will forever go unanswered is: Was I just a kid with an overactive imagination, or was a frightened little girl reaching out for help that I failed to provide? Sweet dreams.

14 minutes

October 6, 2015

Based on True Events, Madness, Paranoia, and Mental Illness

Miss Fortune

beings, entities, Michael Gilbert

Part 1 At some point, everyone asks themselves how different their life would be if they had been given a second chance. It could come in any form you like. You could have been one number off of winning the lottery. Maybe you’re one of those people who wondered what would have happened if that ex of yours had taken you back. Whatever it is, at some point you think about those things and you notice people who were given those opportunities and it seemed to work out all right for them, on the outside anyway. Take it from me; I used to be like that. I used to kick myself all the time for letting myself miss out on some opportunities I was too dumb at the time to follow through with. Then I started loathing the people I saw who were better off than me, and sometimes I would curse at god for picking them over me. I know better now. I don’t think God has much to do with how things like that get chosen. I think now that things all really come down to luck, and our choice as to what to do about it. At least I hope we have a choice when it comes to our own lives, that luck doesn’t rule that too. What I more importantly learned is that sometimes you are better off doing the best with the cards you get dealt, and not trying to change your hand. The day that I learned this left me looking over my shoulder ever since. Sometimes at night, I can catch a glimpse of a faint glow of green eyes watching me. They are never there when I turn around. Whenever I find money on the street, or lose a sock laundry I can feel those eyes staring at me. I was in a car wreck a week ago, a cat ran out in front of me and I swerved to avoid it, hitting the road barrier. As I got out I could swear this chilling giggling came over the radio. The sound was all too familiar to me now. I know it is waiting for me. It’s waiting for one more shot at me, toying with me as time passes. It toys with you too. With everyone. It all started for me one night at a local casino… What was that count again? I thought to myself as I stared down at the table. Was it up two or was it three? I doubled down on the last hand and I was so thrilled to win it I didn’t see the last two cards the guy to the left of me was dealt. The dealer is showing a three so my best bet was to play it safe with my twelve and stand. The old dealer makes a hand gesture on the table and flatly tells me good luck before he moves on to the guy to my left. I only recently learned to count cards, but I had never actually done it at a casino before. It’s easy to do at home on your coffee table quietly saying the numbers out loud, but when you are actually there if you are too obvious about what you are doing it’s an express lane ticket to meeting the pavement outside. I’m here again tonight. The last time I came in I won some decent money. Not really enough money to do anything meaningful with, but enough to make me want to come back. This time I came prepared with the counting system I learned watching YouTube videos and gleaning what I could from various internet sites. This system is supposed to improve my odds at winning in the long run, but I guess that’s why they call them odds and not surety. For a moment I look up and stare at the other gamblers on the floor. There are some people around the roulette table, the usual old women parked at their nickel and penny slots, and the other blackjack players. I look in the direction of the high roller area and see men and women in suits and nice dresses throwing money around like it was a game of monopoly. This resentment builds up in my gut so I look away. I was really just pissed at myself. There was a time when I could have been like that. If I hadn’t dropped out of law school the previous year I could have stuck it out. I could have done something meaningful. I guess I still can, I’m still fairly young. The issue with that was I kept a dead-end job at the moment. My father used to help me out financially while I was in school. He was a high-end divorce lawyer for people unlucky enough to fall in love with the wrong person. Needless to say he did very well. We had a huge fight when I told him I dropped out of school. My mother had died in a car accident when I was thirteen so I didn’t have her to run to. He said I gave up too easily. I won’t admit it to him, but I know he was right. I guess I don’t really hate those rich people over in the high roller corner of the room. I’m just angry that I couldn’t cut it to make it like they did. I hate myself for giving up, and blowing what I had away. I saw gambling as an easy fix for how I felt, and maybe, just maybe I could eventually get good enough to turn it around just enough to go back to school and try again. I glance back at the cards to my left slightly and change the count accordingly. Statistically, at this point, the dealer should bust. The old man throws the other player a card and then goes back to his own hand. He flips over his down card to show a seven. There is a voice in my head somewhere that goes “Are you kidding me?” He hits and gets a queen of spades. “Twenty, sorry about that, son,” the old dealer says in that flat rehearsed voice. “It’s alright, not like I was about to break even or anything” I try to be cool about it. “Tough break” goes the voice in my head. “Tough break” I hear somebody say behind me. Almost in unison with the thought I had. I turn my head to the side as this small sinking feeling hit my lungs. It was the kind of jarring feeling you get at weird coincidences like that. To my right was a blonde woman who looked to be in her early thirty’s wearing a dark expensive looking dealer’s uniform. A moment ago the seat on my right side was empty. She was looking at me with these green eyes. It was a strange look she was giving me, almost like she was noticing something nobody else could see. Sometimes you hear people use the term piercing gaze, that didn’t even begin to describe the vibe I was getting from her. Then she smiles at me, slowly, revealing every white tooth at her own pace. The lips hover over her canines slightly and for a moment I almost expected to see a pair of vampire fangs. “I’m not that pretty” She laughs slightly. I turn my head slightly back to the table. I must have looked stupid staring back at her like that. Normally I would have blushed staring at a woman like that but for some reason I wasn’t getting the blood to my face fast enough. Instead there was this drained feeling. “Sorry, didn’t see you sit down was all” I tried to brush it off. “I forgive you….for now…” Out of the corner of my eye I see her smile that vampire’s smile again. The dealer interrupts her and asks how many chips she is going to buy. She tells him five dollars’ worth. “Ma’am, it is a five dollar table but are you sure you don’t want any more?” “Five dollars will be just fine” The cards get dealt again and see I have a fifteen total for this hand. I realize I had completely forgotten the running count I was keeping. The moment that thought crosses my mind the woman turns her head towards me and says “It all comes down to luck anyway” in a quiet voice. I’m not sure anyone else at the table heard that. I might have thought she was with the casino, catching card counters, but she was playing like all the other people here. Still she had my attention as we played. I have never said this about anyone else I have ever met but she was eerily fascinating to watch. She was pretty of course, but not the kind of pretty you would see on television or in a fashion magazine, more real to life features, she wasn’t thin (not by today’s standards anyway), but I would not call her fat either. She wasn’t tanned at all but not really pale either. What drew my attention the most was how she played. It was like watching a child playing a game of go fish. She was just kind of doing things, hitting, standing, doubling down, not really looking like she was considering anything. I would have thought she was just another dumb blonde girl except she was winning…every hand. At first I just blew it off as dumb luck, then after about five hands I started getting angry. I was playing to basic strategy, modifying my bets and my play as I thought the count was going, and I was slowly losing. In contrast I had woman sitting next to me seemingly without a care in the world never losing her smile, making ridiculous plays and having them pay off. By the tenth hand I was just awestruck. This woman had a hard nineteen for a hand and she picks up her chips and places them by her bet and says “Double down”. The dealer was staring at her incredulously, as was I, and asked her if she was sure. She only giggled at him and nodded her head. She had this look on her face almost made me want to swear she was drunk, but she didn’t have a drink, didn’t even smell of booze. The dealer sighed a bit as he took the next card out of the shoe and placed it next to her hand. There was only one card that would help her, and there it was, a two. The guy to my left roars with disbelief and the dealer laughs. I just keep staring, not even caring about my losing streak. She didn’t seem surprised, or happy, just this look of drunken contentment. Calmly she picks up a five chip and pushes the rest to the table and stands up. The dealer asks her what she doing with her chips and the only thing she says is “Easy come, easy go”. She turns over to me and says “Hungry? I was just about to go over to the diner if you are interested.” I was dumbstruck at the sudden offer. The only thing I managed to say was “Sure”. I didn’t even really think about it. As I was cashing out what little I had left I had a short conversation with myself. Maybe she was an elite player who got kicks out of impressing new players; she did catch me counting cards…didn’t she? Maybe she worked for the casino, her outfit does resemble a uniform, but I had never seen any like it before, black with golden trim and silver buttons. I caught up with her as she entered the diner adjacent from the casino floor. She placed a small handbag on the table and motioned for me to sit at the chair opposite her. It was a nice looking place. It was a hotel diner and casino, not like Vegas or anything but definitely cared about, well furnished and well kept. There was even decent rock music playing overhead at just the right volume to still hear the people at your table. A waitress came over and asked us what we would like to drink. I checked my lightened pockets and I asked for water. The woman only said “No, thank you” “Normally I’m the one who has to ask somebody out” I joked. She only stared at me with those green eyes of hers as we sat down, her smile no longer present. She reached over the table offering me a handshake. I clasp her hand, noticing an expensive looking ring she was wearing. “I’m Jake, and you are…Mrs.?” “Miss” “Sorry I thought you were married” She looked down at her ring. “Well, in a way I am. I’m married to my job” She lets go of my hand. “What is your job?” As soon as I say this I can hear the beeping and whirling noises of a slot machine hitting a jackpot. At the sounding of the slot machine the woman’s eyes slowly close and she gave a contentious smile as the intoxicated look returned to her face. “Miss, are you okay?” “I’m wonderful” she giggles a bit as her eyes open again. I admit this woman made me a bit uneasy, but I was too drawn in by everything I had seen to just walk away now. “Do you work here at the casino?” “Today I am. Why don’t you ask me what you really want to ask me?” “What do you mean?” “At the card table. You want to know how I did what I did” “How did you do that? It was like you knew what card was coming next” at that time I thought she might be one of those people you see on the news sometimes who have superhuman memory. I thought she might have kept track of where all the cards were. It was a far-fetched explanation I know, but I was at a loss for anything else rational. “I didn’t know. It was luck” “Luck…” She must be playing with me. “So why did you win all that money if you weren’t going to keep it” “I didn’t win anything I just moved it around a bit is all. It was fun” “Moved it?” “Do you keep everything you have ever gotten? Every dollar you earn at your job, does it sit in a bank somewhere or do you send it elsewhere?” “Well everyone spends their money, but I don’t see how that has to do with your casino chips” “So it’s not really yours then?” “Are you talking philosophically? I guess in that sense nobody really owns anything” “Why do you say that?” “Well, ultimately you can’t really keep anything” “And that is my job.” She smiles that drunken vampire smile of hers again as she closes her eyes and rolls her head. “I’m still not getting it…is something wrong?” She ignores me, seemingly lost in something I can’t quite grasp. “Somebody here just lost two thousand dollars at the roulette table” As I hear her say that, I can hear aggravated yelling in the distance. She has to be putting me on, I thought to myself. Whatever this woman was on she was really feeling it now. It was like waves of euphoria were washing over her as her body quaked slightly. Her giggling turned to laughter. I felt uncomfortable like people were starting to stare at us. Her laughing died down a bit as she tilted her head down towards her lap. She still had that smile on her face with she slowly brought her head back in my direction. Those green eyes opened as her tongue came out and licked her lips. If this were any other woman I would have thought I was being hit on. This woman however made me feel like I was a deer staring a wolf in the face. A sudden instinct kicked in somewhere inside me, to run. I wanted to be far away from this woman as possible. I think the only thing that kept me from doing that right then and there was the fact we were in a public place. I would look stupid running away from a pretty girl in front of everyone. I always thought there was some irony about mankind being at the top of the food chain for our intellect and yet so fucking stupid to be able to ignore those kinds of voices. “So tell me, what is it that you would want if you could have anything” She came to instantly and stared at me with that gaze. I didn’t like it, I wanted to look away from her eyes but I found that I couldn’t. This feeling entered my throat that worked its way down into my chest. At once I found myself talking without meaning to. I told her about how I dropped out of college last year. I was going to law school to become an attorney like my dad. I dropped out because it got too hard and I just gave up. I saw it as years of my life spent on something that may or may not work out. My dad was helping me with the tuition and when I gave up he cut off financial support completely. I told her all of this, every personal detail I wouldn’t tell anyone. I told her about how bad I felt letting my dad down, about how he tried to raise me on his own after my mother died. “I guess if I could have anything, it would be the money to go back to school” “So what you want is a second chance?” “You could say that” I admitted. My control returned and I found I was breathing a bit heavier than normal. I didn’t want to sit here with this woman anymore. I tried to tell her I had a movie date with my girlfriend and I started to get up from the chair. What I heard next made me sit back down. “You don’t have a girlfriend Mr. Reynolds” I never told her my last name. She was right though, I didn’t have a girlfriend. “How did you…” She interrupts me “I’m going to make you an offer Mr. Reynolds. I can give you that second chance you want” “What do you mean?” I hate to admit it, but I was curious. “All you have to do is play your favorite card game again” She says this as she reaches into her handbag and pulls out an odd looking single deck of cards. The backs of which had a black and gold pattern to match her uniform. “The game is blackjack, rules are the same except you cannot surrender hands, and you play to ten hands before you cash out. It will be a game you won’t be able to walk away from once we begin” “I don’t even have money to bet with” “Its alright, you have ten chips to start out with” She pulls a handful of solid black poker chips from the handbag and pushes them towards me. “All you have to do is come out ahead at the end of ten hands, and I make sure you get your second chance” “What happens if I don’t come out ahead” I didn’t fully believe what I was hearing but I just couldn’t pull myself away. “You will never be able to get another chance again, at anything” She says this as I touch the chips pushed over to me; they were smooth, cold to the touch, and lackluster. As soon as I touch them the woman smiles again. “It has begun” “What? I didn’t say I wanted to play.” “You touched the chips, at the tables they make you touch chips that aren’t originally yours before you use them. You touched them, you play.” I noticed my throat was dry and I looked around for the waitress. I hadn’t gotten my water yet and that’s when I noticed the waitress was gone, in fact the only ones in the diner were myself and this woman. I could no longer hear the music playing either. The air in here had suddenly just gone still. I couldn’t even hear the noises of the casino coming in from outside. “Where is everyone?” I was definitely on edge now, looking around the room for anyone. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up as gooseflesh appeared on my arms. I stand up and start calling for the waitress. “Waitress? You and I are right here” She giggles at me as if I asked a silly question. “Sit down Mr. Reynolds. We have a game to play.” I step outside the diner and back into the casino floor. Nobody was there, not a single person, no security guard checking IDs at the front, no dealers, and no gamblers, there were not even any old women putting pennies into slot machines. Some movement caught my attention out of the corner of my eye but it was only a roulette wheel still spinning, slowing down as the marble clacked into a slot. As I stare around a bead of sweat rolls down my cheek. “Mr. Reynolds” I spin around to see the woman at one of the blackjack tables standing at the dealers spot, the black and gold deck in a dispenser. I never saw her get up from the diner, or heard her move. She points at a solitary stool at the opposite end of the table. “Sit down” She orders me. I started walking hurriedly to the front doors. I pulled out my car keys instinctively. I was half expectant of her to start chasing me; I even took glancing looks behind me. She was still standing at the card table, smiling at me as I made away from her. I start speed walking in the opposite direction of her, passed rows of slot machines. The machines are dead and lifeless. Then I see her again, the smiling figure between the rows of machines, moving in step with me but always standing there. I can’t see her move but she is right there keeping pace beside me. I go off into a full sprint. I’m zig zagging through the maze of machines; I start to hear the whirling sounds as one by one the slot machines kick on as their reels spin madly. Some spew coins onto the floor like waterfalls as I pass. I turn the corner, trying anything to shake her. My feet catch a pile of coins on the floor and I fall. As soon as I hit the ground I spin to my back and look up. Nothing is there, nothing but the machines kicking on and off. This sensation touches my right ear and brushes my hair. I spin painfully hard on my tailbone to see her standing over me. This thing resembled her. The out stretched hand had elongated itself and her fingernails took on a sinister sharpness to them. Her jaw was off its hinges and gave way to a wide gait revealing edged teeth as those green eyes sank into the skull, darkening as they went into a faint glow. “I know you want to play with me” It said. I scrambled up, nearly falling again as I took off straight for the exit. A couple of my fingernails bent painfully as I scrapped the ground as I got to my feet again. My hands plunged into the jeans I was wearing, frantically searching for my car keys. I had them out as I collided with the door release bar. I had a split second to grab the door again as I drop my car keys, holding onto it for dear life. When I collided with the door it did indeed give way to the outside. As to what outside I was peering into, to this day I am not sure of. I was looking at nothing. To say there weren’t any cars would assume I was looking at an empty parking lot. To say I was looking at an empty lot would mean I was still looking at a field, at ground, dirt with a sky over it. I couldn’t see any of that. I saw nothing, nothing but a black void giving way to infinity. It was a sickening feeling peering into it, watching my car keys tumbling downward, their jingling swan song fading as I lose sight of them. “Mr. Reynolds” I hear her voice behind me. My head turns to my back as I see the same horror now half an inch from my face. Through that terrible mouth came a scream that sent a shock through my stomach and the blood racing through my veins like fire. I jumped. I could not tell you how far I fell, or how long I cried. Failing wildly as I screamed my throat raw. I do remember starting to drift off into my own thoughts as I finally was able to shut my eyes. I remember thinking to myself I would be lucky to finally hit the bottom in my sleep. Sometimes, I wish I would have. “Mr. Reynolds” I hear the voice of the woman say sweetly. I open my eyes meekly and the smiling figure of the woman is there, behind a card table I find I’m sitting at. Her features were normal again, as if the horror behind that sweet face never existed. “It’s time to play” She giggles. Part 2 When you wake up from a nightmare there is a brief moment of lingering fear. You open your eyes and look around your bedroom. Everything seems to be in the same place as it always was. The blankets, sheets, and pillows comforting you as the terrible memory of whatever monstrous thing you were dreaming about fades away until you may be only able to recall one or two key things about the dream. After all of that you get up and go about your day or try to fall back asleep and drift off into better places. For me, this was not one of those times. A moment ago I was falling into an infinite void of utter nothingness, praying for an end to it. Hoping that at least death could free me from whatever I had stumbled into. Now, I am sitting in a stool in front of a blackjack table in a nearly empty casino. I say would say it was empty if it weren’t for me and woman standing at the opposite end. The woman wearing the high end black and gold dealers uniform and a smile that eerily resembled a vampire’s smile. When I first saw her smiling at me and thought of vampires crossed my mind I almost wanted to laugh at the thought she could be one. Right now however, I am not so sure I wasn’t too far off. I slowly bring my hands up and place them on the edge of the table, griping the cushioning. They shook violently and I squeezed hard to try to get them under control. This sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and labored breathing told her I was afraid. That’s when I saw the fingers on my left hand were bleeding. I remembered scratching the floor trying to run away from her, it still hurt so I eased up my grasp on the table. “I see I have your attention now. Mr. Reynolds, place your bet” She said softly, taking the black deck in hand. With a flawless grace the woman begins shuffling the cards, her movement captivating. Movements such as these would be practiced but it all just seemed to flow so naturally to her. Every card seemed to know where it was going as it slid alongside one another, barely making more than a whisper of a noise in the hall. The black poker chips had been set out in front of me. I place my right hand over the stack and I felt a warm sensation emanating out of them. My hand shook less at the feeling. The warm traveled up my arm and washed over me. The sickly feeling I had numbed a bit. “Wh-what is going on” I stammered. She tilts her head to one side and gives me a curious look as if I had just asked something really obvious. “We are playing blackjack. What does it look like? Didn’t I already explain that?” I could only stare at her blankly. The memory of her other form was still very fresh in my mind. The vivid image of the teeth, claws, the graying skin, and those eyes faint and glowing deep in her skull was still fresh in my mind. She could kill me if she wanted to. What was she waiting for? “Like I have already said, this will be a standard game of blackjack with a few rule modifications. You are not allowed to surrender a hand. As you have already seen, you can’t walk away from the table” She laughs as she finishes that sentence. “We play to ten hands or until you are out of chips and lastly, all you need to do is come out ahead at the end of those ten hands to win” “What happens if I lose?” She only sighed at the question and her smile fades. “Mr. Reynolds, you will find I don’t much in the way of patience”. Her skin began to grey again, her eyes slowly retreating into her skull. “I will make you a deal, for every hand you play I will answer one question if it makes you feel better.” I might have thought about running again, but I didn’t know where I would go. For all I knew the entire building was floating in an endless space. The only option I had was to play. I picked up one of the black chips from the stack; it was heavy, far heavier than a simple chip should be. I set it down on the betting area indicated by the white circle in the table cloth. It plops down as I let it go, hitting the table with an ominous thud that echoes through the empty halls, the sound reverberating in my chest. “Cut it” She says with a cold tone while offering me the freshly shuffled deck. I didn’t want to touch it for fear some other horrible thing would begin happening. The hesitation I felt was noticed. “Do you really want to leave it to chance, or is this where you want to have some say in what happens to you?” It sounded like a challenge I was being issued. I outstretch my hand timidly taking the cards. The deck, like my chips, was smooth, but unlike the chips these cards irradiated a mixture of feelings. One moment I felt this sensation of comfort and I had a single hopeful thought I may get out of this place and see my apartment again. As soon as I place the other hand to cut the deck, the sinking despair I was feeling returned with a reinforced sensation. I quickly cut it close to the bottom and put it back on the table. The woman’s smile returns to her face as her skin regained its color and the eyes protruded to their original place. Gracefully she deals the cards from the deck in regular blackjack fashion. Two cards were placed in front of me; face up, two cards she placed in front of herself, one face up and one face down. My cards I observed were a jack and a six. The cards were different than any deck I had seen or played with before. The symbols and numbers appeared to have a grainy texture to them, the colors vibrant. The six card had roman numerals in the corners instead of a regular six to represent the value. The jack was displayed on the card in a medieval art style. His facial expression was stoic, cold and disinterested with a hand on the hilt of a sheathed knife. The art style was an old one, but the cards appeared in excellent condition. The card in front of the woman revealed a three. When I saw that the game we were playing with had only one deck I started to feel a bit better. It would be easy to keep track of which cards were being played. Like a distant memory, the things I learned about basic strategy and counting practice I had done came back from a far away place in my brain. It was in my favor to stand this hand and hope she would bust in hitting. “Stand” I say. She flips her down faced card to show a seven. She draws another card from the deck and reveals a five. I notice her look of drunken contentment returning to her face, the same look she had playing next to me when I first saw her. Drawing another card from the deck she calmly places it down to show another three. I had stood on a sixteen; her hand gave her an eighteen. With that same look on her face, never missing a beat she easily picks up the black chip, held it between two of her fingers and I watched at it begin to vanish particle by particle into thin air until nothing was left of it. As I watched the chip dissolve, my eyes widened and started to water. This shooting pain coursed through my heart and I choked on something unseen. I coughed violently and came off of my stool, held up by my right hand clinging to the table and my left holding onto my chest. A few moments like this and the coughing fit dies down and I slowly rise to compose myself. One final cough expels a spurt of crimson onto the hand I had been dealt. I continue staring at the blood I stained the cards with as red seeped into them, and strangely vanished altogether, never tarnishing the card’s mint condition. “What happens if you lose Mr. Reynolds?” She says whimsically. “You die”. I look up at her to see her giggling at me, mocking me. I would have been angry at the mockery if I hadn’t been so terrified. My gaze turns to my remaining nine black chips. It became obvious to me that my life was now tied to those remaining chips. If I was ever going to get out of here, I was going to have to win. I looked back at my hand and what I saw made me take a step back. The picture of the jack had changed. Now the jack held the knife to his mouth, tongue licking a spot of red from the tip of the blade, his eyes closed. “What are you?” I say, after trying to swallow the remaining blood traces in my mouth. “One hand, one question Mr. Reynolds” She says sweetly while tapping the betting circle. “We have at least nine more hands to go.” She wipes the table of the cards previously played and collects them in a pile she places to her right. I regain my breath and pick up another of my chips. It was a bit heavier this time than I remember, but only just. Were the chips actually gaining weight or had I gotten weaker after losing the first one? The woman sees me looking at the chip in my hand and she gives me this look like she seems to know what I was thinking. “Thinking of changing the question you want to ask me?” She smiles again. I don’t respond but only put the chip down in the betting ring in a defiant manner. The deep thud of it echoing once more through the building. She laughs at my facial expression. “Whatever helps you cope with this Mr. Reynolds” she giggles. The cards get dealt again with that same graceful style and drunken expression on her face. I almost smiled myself as I saw that my cards this hand were a five and a six, the woman’s a seven. Not many ten cards or aces had been played yet so that told me I had a good chance of getting one. “Double Down” I tell her as I move another chip to the betting pile. As I placed it down with another deep thud the muscles in my arm relaxed in relief. These chips were definitely getting heavier. My decision seemed to excite her, she giggles at seeing the increased bet. At once she draws another card and places it next to the hand, showing another three. My heart skips a beat. She taps the table and says “Good luck”. It was either sympathy or mockery. I didn’t care anymore; I only wanted to see her cards. It was the only thing that mattered anymore. Flipping the down card to be yet another three it made her total to be ten. Almost knowing what the total would be she draws another card, not missing a beat. The next card was a queen; the image displayed had the queen with her head on top of her interlocked hands, elbows on a surface. The queen’s facial expression, again apathetic as the jack was. “Sorry darling” The woman coos, collecting the cards and adding them to the discard pile. Leaning down till her upper half is parallel to the table she blows gently from her lips to the chips on the betting ring. As the air billows over them they disintegrate just as the last one had. The black particles rise and rush past my face, I was in mid breath as the flowed over me. Some of it flew into my throat and again I choked. I clenched my throat and tried to cough. I couldn’t get the air through my lungs to clear it. I could feel my face go red and I shut my eyes in pain as I felt a blood vessel pop. I slam down on the floor, dizzy and suddenly my throat clears. I gasp like the air itself was life. As soon as I feel decent enough I try standing. My legs nearly buckle again and gi

38 minutes

November 16, 2013

Beings and Entities

The Passenger

Michael Whitehouse

Several months ago a friend of mine alerted me to a puzzling incident on an inner-city bus. Being a bus driver himself, he had heard many of the usual generic stories that would be exchanged around the depot – muggings, broken windows, the occasional couple attempting drunken sex; some drivers even spoke of ghostly passengers who would pay their fare, take a seat on the upper deck, and then vanish without a trace. Those latter stories were of a kind which my friend enjoyed hearing but never took seriously, considering them to be merely fictitious entertainment shared amongst co-workers, alleviating the tediousness of an empty depot at night. That was, until a fellow driver told him about Ruby. So intrigued by the account was I, that I took the time to contact all involved, piecing together what occurred as best I could. * Ruby was a pleasant woman, even though she had reason not to be. In her early 40s, life was much harder than it should have been; each day a struggle. Burdened by relative poverty since a child, she was compelled to spend most of her time scrimping and saving via two endless jobs, both of which she found neither well paid nor enjoyable, but her current financial situation dictated the need. During the day she worked as many hours as possible at a supermarket, stocking shelves and occasionally bagging groceries at the checkout for customers. At night she would attend her second job as a cleaner at a factory manufacturing, of all things, cleaning products; the irony was not lost on her, and neither was the tediousness of it all. At the end of each drawn out, tiresome day, Ruby would return home at night via a long and vapid bus journey, with just enough time to kiss her 13 year old daughter Angela on the head, whispering ‘sweet dreams’ to her as she slept, before herself turning in. This short, private moment of affection was what carried Ruby through her day, as it was for her daughter that she struggled. Angela’s father had abandoned her when she was just two years old, and with no other family to speak of – at least none who could be relied upon – Ruby was left to work her fingers to the bone each day, clothing and feeding her daughter while paying for a series of crippling medical bills brought about by the child’s severe asthma. She of course did not grudge the situation, for her daughter’s condition had improved markedly and that sentiment meant more to her than any amount of work or hardship ever could. One night, Ruby was asked to work a few extra hours at the factory. While she was perpetually exhausted and yearned even for the most meagre of rests, she accepted the offer gratefully as more hours meant less debt; she simply could not afford to decline the opportunity. At 11:37 P.M. following the end of her shift, she stood at the nearest bus stop, illuminated by an overhead street lamp in the darkness, waiting with heavy eyelids for the last bus of the night to arrive. Thankfully, the wait was not long and soon the elongated vehicle cumbersomely inched up the road, slowing before stopping, opening its hydraulic doors with a hiss, welcoming her into its embrace. The driver, a balding and irritable man who appeared equally as tired as she did, grumbled for Ruby to pay her fare – which she did after rifling through her handbag for what seemed an age, finally producing the desired amount of loose change, much to the driver’s annoyance. In a dazed lethargy she wandered down the aisle, taking a seat next to a window at the back. As she prepared herself for the long boring route home, the vehicle shuddered back into life, pulling away from the pavement as the doors sealed shut, stumbling with unsure progress on the last leg of its journey for the night. The engine growled, the vibrations climbing up the frame of the bus, rattling the windows slightly and causing the seat, which Ruby now slumped in, to quiver in response. The vehicle had seen better days and was clearly reaching the end of its life; the grime on the windows and floor was a congealed reminder of the countless thousands who had sat in each of the seats, weary and thinking of home – discarded gum stuck to a shoe, the murmured grievances of its passengers vented daily – yet at night the enclosed frame of rusting and neglected metal seemed almost serene in its apparent emptiness. With each turn of a corner the bus juddered from side to side, and while the bright fluorescent lights, which beamed down from sterile fittings in the ceiling above, were enough to keep anyone awake, Ruby found that sleep still lay at the forefront of her mind. But for the driver, the bus lay empty – as best she could tell without climbing the coiled stairs to the upper deck, which remained obscured. As is quite common of weary commuters, Ruby lay her head against the vibrating window to her side and persuaded herself that it would be acceptable to rest her eyes for a moment; just for a few minutes, enough to find some solace from the tiredness which forever haunted her. As the bus turned yet another corner, the soothing shaking movements rocked its lonely passenger slowly, gently, and finally to sleep. How long her eyes had been closed for Ruby did not know, but as her conscious mind came back sharply into focus from its slumber, the concern of having missed her stop presented itself – she detested leaving her daughter alone at home in the first place, never mind for any longer than was necessary. This worry, however, was soon replaced by something else. An uncomfortable sensation; of personal boundary and social convention broken; of the air displaced by the form of something close. For as Ruby’s eyes adjusted to the jagged fluorescent lighting once more, and the bus itself shook and grunted along the darkened concrete below, she stared at her reflection in the window: A mirror image now altered from what it had been before. A chill crept up her spine as she viewed the appearance of her own overworked, sleep-deprived and worried features, alongside the strange impression of the person now sitting in the seat next to her. As the city lights flashed by from outside, Ruby stared at the window momentarily. Then, nonchalantly turned her head to look around, deliberately avoiding staring at the individual beside her, but this only added to the sense of unease; for other than herself, the driver, and the passenger, there was no one else present. This was not unusual as public transport was never that busy at night except during the weekends; the city quite happily asleep, or readying itself for bed only to wake in the morning for work; but what concerned her was that a person would choose to sit next to a perfect stranger on an empty bus, at night, when they were surrounded by vacant seats. Not wishing to be rude, she continued to gaze at the reflection, as the passenger’s appearance captivated her attention, being unusual somehow – head bowed as if staring at the ground, features obscured by the hood of a dark green jacket. This also added to the peculiarity of the individual as it was a summer’s night, and yet they were clothed as if for winter. For a little while they sat in silence, but as the bus continued on its journey, Ruby felt increasingly agitated, partly by the proximity of her unwelcome companion but more-so by an unknown factor. She could not truly identify why she was so anxious, but a nervousness had begun to overcome her, and the vocal silence which proved the only buffer between them poked and prodded at that sense of discomfort, pulling away at it like a scab. As seats rattled and the floor vibrated with each uneven depression of the road, she peered out of the window once more attempting to allay her unquestionable, yet unexplained trepidation. The street which they were currently on was familiar to her, and with a welcome sigh Ruby realised that she had not slept long enough to miss her stop. The sense of relief was enough to momentarily overcome her apprehension, and while caught in a more positive frame of mind, she began to consider simply talking to her unexpected travelling companion – to break the uncomfortable silence of one sitting so close. Slowly, she turned to the passenger. Laying her eyes upon the figure, their appearance was far removed from the distance and unreality of their mirror image. Immediately Ruby felt frightened, as if staring at someone who should not be. The dark green jacket was dirtied and scuffed in places, accompanied by a damp smell, with a blackened material around the rim of the hood where once a lighter colour had ruled, and it occurred to Ruby that she had not seen anything like it for many years; made from waxed canvas, a raincoat in style yet seemingly untouched by water for some time. The passenger’s gender was a mystery, as what could be made out of his or her features implied neither, yet both. With head still bowed, staring down at the ground, the tip of a nose could be seen, the impression of a chin given, yet nothing more. ‘It’s getting a little cold in here’ said Ruby – half statement, the rest a question. She was surprised herself that the words flowed out of her mouth, but the peculiarity of the situation urged her to break the ice, for conversation is the melody of the mundane. Yet the passenger did not answer, remaining focused on the floor beneath their feet, the bus shuddering once more as it negotiated the city streets, almost completely devoid of life. A few minutes passed before, anxious at the lack of a reply, Ruby spoke once more remarking that the driver had seemed a little grumpier than usual, concluding the observation with a nervously gentle laugh. Yet again, the passenger said nothing. Watching the world pass by outside, she decided that two attempts of conversation were quite enough. She would leave him or her alone, and hope that the rest of the journey did not drag in too much, as a desire to be away from the strange person sitting beside her grew. Then a sound. An unnerving noise, one which crawled under the skin; of nail upon wood. Turning slowly to face her unwelcome companion once more, she found them staring down at the ground as they had always been. Yet the sound was coming from that seat. Scratching, tearing. The passenger’s hands were now poking through the gap between his or her own legs, dragging nails up and down against the wooden underneath which supported the cushioned material on which they sat, in a horrible stuttering, jagged motion. The sound pierced air and eardrums alike, increasing in volume until Ruby, tired and now irritable, could no longer endure it. ‘Could you stop that please?’ she asked. Yet it continued. ‘Please stop that!’ Ruby said, this time in a forceful tone sharpened by exhaustion. The passenger ceased, and yet did not move, nor face her, nor even acknowledge her presence. Agitated, yet relieved in a sense, Ruby gazed out of the window once more, trying to extinguish the growing sense of annoyance which was now building inside. She took a deep breath in and calmed herself with the knowledge that she would soon be home. Rummaging through her handbag, she found a half-eaten packet of mints and began to unravel them, before popping one into her mouth. Looking up, what she now saw froze her to the core – the passenger’s face peered out from behind her head. Eyes deep and blackened, mouth deformed and skewed gaping wide, captured hideously in the glass reflection. She screamed at the sight of the face. Shock turned to fear, and fear leapt to panic as she yelled and pleaded for the driver to help. The reflection leaned in, as a rasp of cold breath climbed down the back of her neck, body quivering in revulsion as the passenger placed a shrivelled hand on her shoulder, two of the fingers long since removed at the knuckle. The touch was cold, and it awoke a sense of fear Ruby had never known. Clawing for survival, she shrieked as the distorted hand pulled her close. With effort steeped in terror, she tore away from the abhorrent grip, leaping into the seat in front, scrambling over the aisle and falling to the ground, bashing her cheek against the floor. The bus vibrated and rattled, and hissed, and groaned as the passenger rose slowly to its feet, head bowed, shrouded by hood; dark-green and tattered. ‘Please, God, help me!’ Ruby screamed, pulling herself along the floor by her fingertips. The passenger followed intently, stepping out into the aisle proceeding slowly towards her. Scrambling and terrified, Ruby pulled herself to her feet, but as she did so the bus veered wildly, untamed across the road. She stumbled against the momentum, but the hooded figure remained rooted and firm. The engine now roared and growled as it tore down the wrong side of a main road, then swerved around a corner onto a side street. Yet the passenger stepped assuredly ever forward. As the vehicle raged onward, Ruby screamed for the driver to stop, but then it occurred to her: The bus had long since left its planned route. It screeched across concrete, before hurtling down a lane which was barely wide enough to house a car, let alone anything more substantial. Then just as suddenly, the driver slammed on the brakes as the bus lurched to the side before coming to an abrupt halt. Thrown by the force, Ruby grasped onto a seat to brace her fall. Twisting her wrist painfully through a safety handle in the process. The engine roar diminished to a weak whimper as the passenger stepped forward once more. Bruised and shaken, Ruby stumbled to the front of the bus, bashing her hands in desperation against the closed sliding doors, desperate for escape. No matter how loud she yelled, no matter how many times she struck with the sides of her fists against the metal and glass, it would not yield; she was trapped. Turning to plead with the driver to open the door to his cabin and shield her from the monstrosity bearing down upon her, she saw that it was too late. There he lay draped across the wheel, unconscious or dead, his body entombed in the glass cubicle, the release button for the bus door goading her from the dashboard on the other side. Escape was inches away, yet denied by a panel of safety glass which she did not have the strength to break. A hush then fell as the figure continued towards her. ‘Please leave me alone.’ Ruby begged, fighting back tears. Yet the passenger did not answer. The head remained bowed, as each footstep cleanly and clearly knocked on the floor, one after the other. Closer. Nearer. ‘What do you want from me!?’ But again, no answer, for a thing which should not be needs no justification. Tears now flowed down Ruby’s face as terror spread like a cancer, clouding her thoughts and stemming her actions. Yet the passenger drew closer still, unmoved by her pleas. In a fit of utter desperation, Ruby turned to the driver once more. ‘Wake up! Please. God dammit, wake up!’ she cried, but he remained motionless – however the passenger did not. It was upon her. Standing only inches away, the muddied green raincoat sheltering a grotesque being implied inside. Raising its shrivelled, deformed and incomplete hand into the air, Ruby cowered; but as the figure came violently at her, a moment of utter instinct took over, she ducked out of the way at the very last second. Countless shards of glass rained over her as the passenger’s half fist impacted against the driver’s cabin with brutal force – shattering the protective shell. Thrust by opportunity, Ruby poked her hand into the cabin, battering the release button next to the driver’s head. The doors seethed open, and just as the passenger raised its hand once more, Ruby escaped into the night. ** The police were called and quickly attended the scene only to find the driver, covered in glass; dazed but alive and well. He remembered very little of what took place, as the last thing he recalled was Ruby paying her fare, before he then passed out. There was no memory of driving the bus on the final leg of its journey, nor did he possess any knowledge of the hooded passenger who had smashed the driver’s cabin. With no small amount of digging on my part, I was able to contact Ruby who, after a little persuasion, spoke to me in detail about that night. The entire ordeal had taken its toll upon her, but she was not thankless for the experience. For despite not being on its route, the bus had mysteriously stopped outside of her home. Stricken with terror, she had instinctively entered her tiny apartment and locked the door behind, but before phoning the police, she quickly called for an ambulance: Her daughter had suffered a terrible asthma attack and lay moments from death on the floor – thankfully she survived. The police found no evidence of the passenger, no CCTV footage nor eye witnesses. It was as if the hooded figure had vanished without a trace – all but for one chilling reminder that it had indeed been there. For at the seat where it had sat was a message, clawed into the wood underneath. Two words which simply read: ‘Not Yet’. In Ruby’s mind, those words have haunted her more than any hooded figure ever could, for if ‘Not Yet’, when?

11 minutes

October 21, 2013

Beings and Entities

Anna

He liked to volunteer in the psych ward of his local hospital. His real job was as a stockbroker, but the stresses got to him sometimes and he needed an outlet. In the past he’d turned to booze to relieve the pressure, but that had taken him to places he hoped never to revisit. He didn’t know why it helped him so much to be in the hospital. He didn’t particularly like the crazies they made him work with; in fact he thought most of them were beyond help. He supposed it was really Anna that kept him coming back. Anna was just a little girl, maybe ten or twelve at the most. She shouldn’t really have been in the ward with the adults, but his small town wasn’t wealthy enough to have separate housing for minors. He felt sorry for all the kids who had to bunk with these terminal wackjobs. Or he would, if Anna weren’t the only one there under 35. That just made it sadder, he supposed. He felt a need to protect this little girl from the frightening company she kept, so he had promised himself never to leave as long as she was there. Anna was probably the least screwed up person in that hospital. She had terrible anxiety any time she left the building. They said if she left she’d probably die from the shock of it. The only thing that seemed to make her feel better was talking, so he’d talk to her for hours on end about even the most inane topics. He felt a need to know everything about her; a need that transcended what should probably have been suitable for their relationship. But Anna seemed so happy when he talked to her that he could never bear to leave her for long. The only subject they avoided was her reasons for being in the ward. He felt that if there was a reason, she would tell him in her own time, and that if he pushed her he might break the connection they had to each other. Their bond had been growing stronger every day. They were almost close enough to be brother and sister, so close that he no longer pretended to be working with the hospital. He quit his volunteering gig and came in every day, just to be with her. He seemed to even be helping with her anxiety, until one day he found her curled up into a ball on her bunk, sobbing quietly to herself. When he asked her what was wrong, she finally told him why she was in the hospital. She and her mother had been in a car accident with a drunk driver. Her mother had died as a result, and she had had to be hospitalized. She hadn’t talked for months after that. In fact, she had only started talking around the time he had started at the hospital. Touched by the idea that he might have had some part in Anna’s healing, he felt brave enough to ask her if they’d caught the killer. She told him that they hadn’t, that that was why she couldn’t leave, she was so scared he’d come after her. He tried to comfort her, tell her that a drunk driver wouldn’t even remember her, but nothing helped. Finally, in desperation, he promised to kill the driver if he ever managed to get close to her. That got Anna’s attention, and though she was shocked at the statement’s brutality, it at least got her to stop crying. The rest of the day went normally, but he decided that he would talk to Anna’s doctor before he left. He hadn’t talked to the doctor before, but everyone at the ward knew him, so he felt no qualms about introducing himself. When he asked about Anna, the doctor seemed extremely keen to hear what she’d said. Apparently no one knew why she was in the ward in the first place, they’d just found her wandering, bloody by the side of the road. Surprised, he told the doctor Anna’s story. At the end, the doctor leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Richard, what you’re telling me is very serious. There isn’t anyone named Anna in this ward. You had a nervous breakdown recently, and have been coming to the hospital for psychiatric sessions. However, you’ve been getting worse, not better. For the last month you haven’t left the ward. Tell me, Richard, do you remember the lat time you were at work?” It was a stupid question. Or course he…no, he’d taken some vacation time off to spend with Anna. How had he forgotten that? But the doctor shook his head. “You were forced to take psychiatric leave. We believe you had some sort of traumatic event, one that triggered your breakdown, and subsequent hallucinations. From what you just told me, I’m inclined to believe you were responsible for an accident while drunk driving.” He sat their, frozen in shock. This was impossible. He’d quit drinking… right about when he’d started at the ward. No. No. He couldn’t have… but it was rushing back, the erratic light from the headlights as he swerved, the screech of rubber as he saw them, the one, frozen second where he saw a 10-year-old girl screaming from the back seat. When he looked back, the doctor wasn’t there. Anna was sitting in the doctor’s place, saying nothing, just staring at him. He stared back for a second, and then had to look down. He felt so guilty. So, so guilty. And he had made a promise. Richard picked up the scissors. Credit To: Hypodroid

4 minutes

November 16, 2012

Madness, Paranoia, and Mental Illness

A Lack of Empathy

I wasn’t like other children growing up. I didn’t like talking to those smelly things in Kindergarten and I never participated in their silly games. But I had my own games to play and oh! What fun games they were! For example, a little girl once asked to borrow my crayons. I told her she could have them if she would tell our teacher to “fuck off”. She got sent home for that. I remember hearing her mother scream about the beating she would get later. Fun games, right? It didn’t take long for the teachers to notice that the other children avoided me and how I never seemed to show emotion of any kind. They didn’t think I heard them whispering about me but I did. I have exceptionally good hearing. “Little monster” said Mrs. Guthrie. “Sociopath” whispered Mr. DePascal. Even at my young age, I had an extensive vocabulary. I had never heard of the word sociopath before and I was intrigued. When I got home that night I looked it up in my mother’s encyclopedia. Sociopath; a personality disorder characterized by a lack of empathy for others. I would have to agree with you, Mr. DePascal. Elementary and middle school passed by quickly. I learned to fake emotions and excitement in order to fool my teachers and parents. I couldn’t fool my peers, though. No matter how convincing my act, they always seemed to instinctively know that I was different and they gave me a wide berth. Every once in a while one of them would try to make friends with me and that’s when I could really have some fun! But despite how I treated those around me, I didn’t hate any of them. It wasn’t until high school that someone finally managed to piss me off. That someone was Travis Murphy. The Murphy family moved into my neighborhood before the start of tenth grade. They had two children, a son, Travis and his sister, Marion. I was looking forward to the inevitable time when my parents invited them over. Neither Travis nor Marion had ever met me and so they had no way of knowing of my sociopathic tendencies. They would amuse me quite a bit. But this time it would be I who was blindsided. Marion started out easily enough, displaying the normal interest and kindness by those who don’t yet know me. After some time, however, I realized that she thought I was handsome and was even starting to develop a crush on me. No girl had ever done this before and it was an entirely new experience for me. Fascinated, I decided to spare Marion from my games for a while longer and keep her around. So I continued to fake smiles and feign interest in what she had to say. Travis was an entirely different story. He seemed to have as little interest in me as I had in anyone else. I couldn’t play my games with him. He was completely uncaring. It angered me for the first time in my life. Over the years I had come to realize that I was special, far more important than these insects surrounding me. Why else would they be drawn to me, even as they know how alien I am to them? For one of these insects to dare ignore me…! For the first time in my life, I made the first move. I tried making small talk with Travis, I feigned emotion and interest in his life and did everything I could to make him interested in me. Nothing. I was furious at first over his lack of interest but over the years I came to realize that he was like me; a sociopath. Completely devoid of caring for others. Instead of alleviating my frustration, this only increased it. I was special, unique! But now there was another one like me. If I wasn’t unique, could I still be special? Or was I ordinary? Just another insect? No! I refused to be ordinary. One may as well be dead. And so that’s what I endeavored to do from that day forth. I would make Travis ordinary. I would kill him. Fueled by passion as I was, I waited. High school passed and college started. Trifles. I learned new ways to express myself through sex with Marion. I learned the value of pain and how to make her beg for it. It was all very fascinating at first but, like everything else, it eventually lost it’s intrigue. My focus shifted away from Marion and back to Travis. I was fully ready to kill him, but cautious. I wasn’t naive enough to think the insects would let me get away with it if they knew I murdered him and I wanted to avoid prison at all costs. I fear nothing except boredom and that is what prison is. Endless boredom. I couldn’t act impulsively. I had to be calculating and crafty. As long as I was taking my time, I figured I may as well have some fun! My first chance to toy with my prey came about my second semester in college. Travis and his family were leaving for a week to visit a relative or some such bullshit and they were leaving their dog behind. They paid a neighbor to check in on him three times a day, giving him food and taking him outside. I watched this for two days, learning what the schedule was before making a plan. The night before the Murphys returned, I crept into the house after the neighbor fed the dog for the last time. Marion had given me the security code to shut off the burglar alarm so I could sneak in for sex. Wearing gloves and a mask, I entered the house, unseen by the sleeping neighbors. The dog knew me by scent and didn’t bark. He bounded to me, tail wagging and tongue hanging stupidly out of his mouth. I worked quickly, taking his head in my hands and crushing it, driving my thumbs deep into the eye sockets and feeling the dog’s skull fracture in my palms. He let out only a quick whimper before falling silent forever. Good boy. I brought a homemade kit along with me, a scalpel and various other instruments stolen from the science lab. I eviscerated the dog, wrapping his intestines around the living room light, ensuring that it would be the first thing the Murphys see when they got home. The thought of them turning on the fan and being pelted with drops of blood amused me. I used most of the dog’s blood to write the threatening message; “YOU’RE NEXT” on Travis’ bedroom wall. I left the carcass on his bed. As a private joke, I left the dog’s heart on Marion’s pillow. Satisfied with my handiwork, I went back to my dorm, where I slept quite soundly. There was a big commotion the week following the day the Murphys returned. Stories and images of the carnage in their house were on the local news every night. There were rumors that the Murphys were going to move away soon. Supposedly Mrs. Murphy couldn’t stand to be in the house anymore. I had to act fast. I couldn’t allow my prey to escape from me. Sitting in my dorm, I dreamed of all manner of destruction for my enemy. There was a flash of light over my wall, headlights from outside. That was odd. It was almost midnight on Saturday. Nearly everyone was already gone. Curiosity overtaking me, I went to the window to see who would be coming to the dorm at this hour on a weekend and was surprised (One of the few times I’ve ever truly been surprised) to see Travis’ car sitting in the driveway. Fortune smiled on me. The building was nearly empty for the weekend and now was the perfect time to strike. My prey was unsuspecting and alone. After killing him, I would take his body and deposit it somewhere else on campus. There was virtually no chance of getting caught. No one wants to stay on the weekends and the electricity was shut off on campus for another six hours. No security cameras. In a considerably jolly mood, I grabbed my flashlight and scalpel and set out to stalk my prey. The dark never bothers me. Having very little emotion my rational mind tends to dominate and the rational part of human beings know that nothing is waiting for us in the dark. Or at least, that’s what we think. Several minutes into my hunt it occurred to me to turn my flashlight off. I don’t want to alert my prey. I switched it off and waited for my eyes to adjust. I leaned against the wall and played with my scalpel to pass the time. A normal person probably wouldn’t have heard the light breathing in the hall but I’ve always had exceptionally good hearing. I whipped my head in the direction of the sound. My eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the darkness but I was able to make out a figure exiting down the hall and I could hear the unusually light footsteps. Whoever this person was, they were taking care to avoid detection by me. I rushed to the spot they were just standing at and breathed in deeply. There was just the faintest hint of cinnamon. Travis kept a cinnamon air freshener in his car. I grinned widely. I was on the trail of my prey. I followed him down the hallway and was disappointed to find that it branched out into two other halls. I again tried smelling each hall to figure out which one Travis took when I heard a brief commotion to the right. I hesitated. Would Travis make that much noise if he was trying to get away from me? After a moment I took a chance and headed in the direction of the noise. After a minute or so I stopped. Ahead of me, there was someone lying on the floor. Approaching carefully, I realized the body was lying in a pool of blood. I touched it. Still warm. I rolled the body over to see who it was. Mr. Chauncey, the night custodian. I hadn’t realized that Travis was capable of killing someone. In my hatred for him, I had forgotten that he was just like me. Just as cold and unfeeling. He was more than able to do everything I could. I froze. There was light breathing in front me again, but I couldn’t see it’s source. For the first time in my life, I felt fear. I no longer felt like the hunter stalking his prey. I felt hunted. My rational mind was overcome by emotion and I fled back to my dorm room in terror. I barricaded the door and waited, scalpel in hand, for Travis to come for me. After several hours, I started to resent myself for feeling this way. He was only a man, however extraordinary. The fact that he had actually frightened me fueled my hatred for him and I left to search. Mr. Chauncey’s body was gone, the pool of blood cleaned up. The hints of cinnamon in the air had long since dispersed. I left the building to wait in Travis’ car for him only to find that it was gone to. Fury taking hold of me, I started in the direction of his house. I clenched my scalpel tightly, relishing in the fantasies of what I was going to do to him. I should have been paying more attention because I never even heard him creep up and was too slow to avoid the baseball bat swinging through the air for me. It connected with my wrist and I felt the bones snap. I dropped the scalpel and lunged for it with my good hand but a boot kicked it away. Looking up, I saw Travis grinning down at me. He brought the bat down again and again. I thought he’d never stop, but he did. Lying there on the sidewalk, broken and bloody, I waited for death to come. Instead of the reaper’s skull, it was Travis’ face grinning down at me. Even though I was helpless before him, I still burned with rage. He leaned in close to smell my bleeding face and whispered in my ear; “We’re going to have such fun together!” I spent two weeks in the hospital before leaving against my doctor’s wishes. Travis clearly had held back on the beating. I only had a broken wrist and several cracked ribs, though most of my body was heavily bruised. Every step hurt but I ignored it. I had a purpose. I would never be a victim again. Travis had an advantage over me in that he knew I would come and he was not injured like me. So I figured I would even the odds. I stole my father’s pistol and waited for night to fall. It was nearing 3 in the morning when I crept up to the Murphy house once again. The adults’ car was gone, but Travis’ mustang was still there. Good. We wouldn’t be interrupted. I could take my time. I turned off the burglar alarm, marveling at how stupid the Murphys were for not changing it. I opened the sliding door and stepped lightly into the house. All of the lights were off but my eyes were well adjusted to the darkness. I silently approached Travis’ bedroom and pulled out the gun. After a moment to steady my resolve I burst in. I was not prepared for what I saw. Travis was lying on his bed, a look of mild surprise on his face. His throat was slashed from ear to ear. Blood was everywhere, including a message on the walls that read “BAD BOY”. In my shock I didn’t hear the light footsteps creeping up behind me and knew no more of the next few moments except a dull thud on the back of my skull. I awoke in a basement, tied to a chair. Absurdly, my first thought was how cliche this seemed to be. My eyes took a second to adjust and I saw a naked figure standing in front of me. It’s body was covered in blood, which I presumed was Travis’. Through the pounding in my head, I heard the figure speak. “I didn’t want to do it like this. Why couldn’t you boys just behave yourselves?” The figure paced in front of me. “No one ever does what their supposed to. You weren’t supposed to find me. Mr. Chauncey wouldn’t get out of my way.” The figure stopped in front of me. “Travis wasn’t supposed to hurt you. I told him not to but after he realized what you were he just couldn’t help himself. I suppose that’s why you went after him too?” The figure stroked my face tenderly. “I watched you when you killed our dog. You never knew I was there. I’m real good at hiding. It was so sweet of you, to leave me the heart. I still have it.” Marion smiled at me. I could see something in her eyes. Something I didn’t have. The absurd part of my brain started to point out the difference between sociopath and psychopath. We have the silliest thoughts at the silliest times, don’t we? “I didn’t want things to work out this way but it’s ok. We’ll make it work. I’ll kill my parents when they come home and we’ll go far away, to someplace beautiful where we can be together forever.” I thought about feigning emotion and manipulating her into letting me go but I knew when I looked into her face that it was useless. She didn’t care about my situation, only hers. A complete lack of empathy. Credit To: Jacob Mielke

9 minutes

September 4, 2012

Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances

The Portraits (a.k.a. The Cabin in the Woods)

anonymously authored, cabins, camping, creepypasta classics, forests, hunters, mysteries, sites, twist endings, woods

There was a hunter in the woods, who, after a long day hunting, was in the middle of an immense forest. It was getting dark, and having lost his bearings, he decided to head in one direction until he was clear of the increasingly oppressive foliage. After what seemed like hours, he came across a cabin in a small clearing. Realizing how dark it had grown, he decided to see if he could stay there for the night. He approached and found the door ajar. Nobody was inside. The hunter flopped down on the single bed, deciding to explain himself to the owner in the morning. As he looked around, he was surprised to see the walls adorned by many portraits, all painted in incredible detail. Without exception, they appeared to be staring down at him, their features twisted into looks of hatred. Staring back, he grew increasingly uncomfortable. Making a concerted effort to ignore the many hateful faces, he turned to face the wall, and exhausted, he fell into a restless sleep. Face down in an unfamiliar bed, he turned blinking in unexpected sunlight. Looking up, he discovered that the cabin had no portraits, only windows.

< 1 minute

April 20, 2009

Famous Creepypasta, Locations and Sites, Nature and the Outdoors

The Blind Man’s Favor

anonymously authored

In Berlin, after World War II, money was short, supplies were tight, and it seemed like everyone was hungry. At that time, people were telling the tale of a young woman who saw a blind man picking his way through a crowd. The two started to talk. The man asked her for a favor: could she deliver the letter to the address on the envelope? Well, it was on her way home, so she agreed. She started out to deliver the message, when she turned around to see if there was anything else the blind man needed. But she spotted him hurrying through the crowd without his smoked glasses or white cane. She went to the police, who raided the address on the envelope, where they found heaps of human flesh for sale. And what was in the envelope? “This is the last one I am sending you today.” CREDIT: Anonymous

< 1 minute

June 9, 2008

Strange and Unexplained

The Boy Who Loved to Read

anonymously authored, parodies

Once, there was a boy who loved to read. He read everything he could get his hands on, and loved going to his favorite book store. One day, the boy realized he had read everything the store had to offer. He confronted the owner, and asked him if he had anything the boy had never checked out. The owner said why, yes, I do, and pulled out a book called “Death”. He gladly sold it to the boy at a discounted price of 50$. However, he warned the boy, never to read the front page. Well, the boy returned to his house and read the book, and he was content. However, he always wondered, what could be on that front page, it was always in the back of his mind. One day, the temptation was too much for the boy, and he flipped to the very front of the book, and dropped the book in HORROR. There, in bold print, was MSRP $7.99

< 1 minute

April 1, 2008

Artifacts and Objects, Dark Comedy, Humor, and Parodies

The Song and Dance Man

beings, dancing, deaths, demons, devils, disappearances, Dylan Charles, entities, strange, unexplained

There are few left alive who remember the Song and Dance Man. Time has claimed the ones that survived the long night and I’m sure they went willingly to meet their maker. Life takes on a strange tint after a night like that. The ones still left – Bill Parker, Sarah Carter, and Sam Tannen – don’t talk about it. Sam is lucky. His brain started to turn to porridge a few years back and now he has trouble figuring out how to put on his pants. He got an early reprieve from his memories. He doesn’t wake up night after night; the music still playing in his ears, with tears still drying on his cheeks. The Song and Dance Man came to Belle Carne with little fanfare in the fall of 1956. I had just gotten out of high school and was working as a stock-boy at Handy’s Hardware. I was there the afternoon that Sarah Carter burst through the door, making the bell over the door jingle like mad. “George, you gotta see what’s been set up by the bandstand! There this huge tent up and this man standing in front of it yellin’ like a carnival barker!” Sarah was out of breath and had obviously run from the park and all the way down Main Street. Her hair was whipsawed every which way and one strand stuck to the end of her nose. She gave a quick puff and blew it out of the way, waiting for me to react. With Sarah, I was always two steps behind and running to catch up. The girl had energy in those days and in unlimited supply. I stopped rearranging the nails and said, “There wasn’t anythin’ up there when I walked by this mornin’. When’d it go up?” She shrugged her shoulders, a quick rise and drop. “Dunno, but it’s up, and you gotta see this guy. He’s all dressed up, head to toe, and he can talk. Boy, he can talk.” I thought about it and checked the clock. It was near about five and time for me to quit anyway. “All right, let’s go check it out then.” Sarah grinned from ear to ear and was gone. I didn’t doubt she was telling everyone in the gang, the ones that were still in town anyway. Most of us scattered to the four winds after graduation. Only a handful of us remained in town and only a handful of us were on hand to witness the dance. I walked down to the bandstand by myself, not bothering to wait for the others. Most likely, Sarah was already there waiting for us. I met up with Bill as I passed the drugstore, where he worked as a soda jerk. “What the hell is Sarah talkin’ about, George?” “She blew in here and then blew out again before I could ask her anything.” Bill was a big guy, the tallest (and heaviest) guy in our class and I just about cracked up the first time I saw him wearing that little peaked paper cap McClearly makes his soda jerks wear. Bill doesn’t really like to be laughed at, though, and after the knot under my eye went down, I made sure not to laugh at him anymore. He’s a good guy aside from that temper. He was the best guy on the high school basketball team, too, though he’s one of the few guys who got kicked out of a game. He threw another player halfway down the court, and they were on the same team, too. Bill said the other guy elbowed him in the gut. It had to have been an accident; no one would have done it on purpose. We both walked down the street, Bill smoking a cigarette, a habit that caught up to him in 1995 when they removed his right lung. At the end of Main Street, we crossed Buchanan and entered the park. Normally, at that point, we would have been able to see the bandstand, perched on a hill near the center of the park. During the summer, there’d be concerts: performances by the school marching band, a church choir singing some hymns, that kind of thing. Once, a couple of kids from the high school had put together a pretty good rockabilly group, but someone on the parks committee passed an ordinance that banned rock ‘n’ roll in the park. Small towns, you know? But now, there was a huge, faded yellow tent blocking the bandstand, like the kind in the circus or the kinds those old revival ministers like to use when they’re feeling the spirit and they like to feel your wallet too. There was already a pretty large crowd around the tent and as Bill and I got closer, we could hear the fellow that Sarah had told us about. He sounded like a carnival barker, alright. Bill and I walked faster down the path that led to the tent. We pushed our way through the crowd, up toward the tent and where we thought the man was. “Come on everybody, it’s getting close, getting close, we’re going to have ourselves a heck of a time tonight. Yes indeed, a heck of a time! We’ll be singin’, we’ll be dancin’, I promise you that, and the Song and Dance Man always keeps his promises!” We still couldn’t see him; still too many people were blocking the way. It looked like the whole town had shown up to see the Song and Dance Man. Bill tugged on my sleeve and pointed. I followed his finger and got bug-eyed. It was Reverend Harper, the Baptist minister. I’ve lived a good long time, but I ain’t ever seen a man that could thump a Bible harder than he. Harper preached against the evils of sin – sin in drinking, sin in smoking reefer, sin in smoking tobacco, sin in lying, and, most of all, sin in dancing. Yet here he was, lining up to get inside the tent, too, ‘cause he certainly wasn’t preaching. We waved at him, Bill waving with the hand that held the cigarette, and that old Baptist turned red as the Red Sea and turned and walked away. Bill and I grinned at each other and kept on walking toward the front and toward the Song and Dance Man. Finally, we broke through the crowd and there he was. He stood on an old crate, splintered and looking like it was on the verge of collapsing under his feet. On the grass beside him lay a black fiddle case with gold trim along its edges. It looked old, older than the crate, older than the town. It seemed like something ancient. He was all angles, all knees, elbows and shoulders. He was tall and gangling, his body moving and bopping to the rhythm of his words. He wore a red and white pin-stripe jacket, looking like he belonged in a barbershop quartet. A straw hat sat on his head, always getting pushed back or pulled forward by his long-fingered hands. Long, six-fingered hands. I started when I saw that. I had read that some folks are born with six fingers, but reading about something and seeing it are two different things. His eyes just about flashed blue lightning as he spoke and sparks nearly flew from those white teeth, and he just never stopped talking. He didn’t stop for breath, for questions, or anything. He just kept up that pattern like his very soul depended on it. “All right, all right, all right, we’re getting close, getting real close, yes we are. Are you ready to dance? Are you ready to sing? ‘Cause I’m ready to play my fiddle, yes I am, yes I am. Got a fiddle at my feet and I’m ready to play. Ready to make those strings sing, can you believe it?” He’d clap his hands and that’s as close to a pause as he was willing to do. Sarah and Sam came up to us now, having found us in the crowd. Sarah elbowed me in the rib and said, “What’d I tell you? Looks like he should be in a carnival tryin’ to get us to see the bearded lady or somethin’.” Sam nodded his head in greeting to us, which caused his glasses to slide down his nose, and he gave them a short push back up to where they belonged. He was as tall as Bill, but nowhere near as built. He was the smart guy in our gang. You had to have someone like him around to tell how to do things like take apart the principal’s car and rebuild it in the school gym. Not that we ever did anything like that. “What’s he sellin’?” asked Sam. “A dance, I figure,” I said. “What’s it cost?” The Song and Dance Man must have heard him because he said, “What does it cost, I hear you ask? Why, it don’t cost a dollar and it don’t cost a quarter and it don’t cost a dime. Folks, this will cost you nothin’, just get on in and dance to the song all night long.” We all looked at each other. It was a good deal. A little free music and space to dance? There wasn’t much to do in town back in those days and there still isn’t. This was almost too good to be true. The Song and Dance man stopped now, a minor miracle in and of itself. He dug deep in his pocket, pulled out a gold watch, checked the time, and then grinned a grin that must have shown every one of his teeth. He pocketed the watch and said, “Folks, it’s time for the dance so come on in. Come on in, everyone, because it’s time for the dance to begin.” And with that, he hopped down from his crate, grabbed it up with the fiddle, and darted through the tent flaps. Sarah, Bill, Sam, and I nearly got mowed over in the rush to get inside, but we were still the first ones in. We stopped short when we pushed aside those big old tent flaps, but were quickly driven inside. It was huge inside. There was a hardwood floor beneath our feet that looked like it must be oak, a dark, dark oak polished to a mirror shine. There were candles in holders all along the tent-pole posts and when I looked up, I couldn’t see the ceiling for all the darkness. It was like looking up at a starless night sky, where the moon didn’t dare show her face. The crowd kept driving us and more and more people poured in. It wasn’t just the young people, either. There was Misses Crenshaw, our junior year English teacher who was in her fifties. There was Mr. Hoskins the principal. There was the good old Reverend Harper, still looking embarrassed, but also like he couldn’t help himself. It really was the whole damn town. Hell, even the mayor was there with his wife, standing and talking with the chief of police. Soon, everyone was inside and the murmur from all the talking was nearly deafening. It was already getting warm in there and I was feeling cramped and claustrophobic. We were all looking for the Song and Dance Man, to see where he had gone. No one looked up, so no one saw him until the first pull of his fiddle bow. He was there, on the center tent pole, sitting on a small, wooden platform about twenty feet off the floor. God knows how he got there, because there certainly wasn’t any ladder going up. He dangled his feet over the edge and held his fiddle in one hand and the bow in the other. The fiddle and bow seemed to be made of that same dark wood that the floor was and gleamed in the candle light like a thing alive. I almost doubted that the fiddle even needed the Song and Dance Man to make its strings hum. We all looked up at him and he grinned and jumped to his feet while the crowd gasped, worried he might plummet into their midst. And then he began to play. He made those strings sing. I haven’t heard anyone play like that before or since and I thank God for that every day. It made the air around us crackle and spark. It loosened the joints and jolted the mind. You felt the urge to move deep in the bone, buried in the marrow. I grabbed Sarah’s hands and we began to move across the floor and everyone followed suit, some with partners and some without. Some were doing the foxtrot, some were doing a waltz, and some of us were doing the twist. We danced, moved, shucked, jived, rocked, and rolled. I passed Reverend Harper moving his feet in a clunky box step with Eloise Grendel, an old battle-axe of a Catholic. I saw the mayor’s wife waltzing with Dan Adams, one of our firemen. I swirled with Sarah, moving across the floor, bumping and jostling with the people around us. It was hot and getting hotter in there, and it wasn’t long before it smelled of sweat and bodies moving against bodies. I felt dizzy, but we kept dancing together, kept dancing and not stopping. It was a while before I realized that the Song and Dance man was singing, too, but in a language I didn’t understand. He lorded over us, standing on that platform, making his fiddle sing and sing. His bow rose and fell, slid back and forth, side to side. He played like he talked. There were no breaks or pauses, just a manic deluge of tunes while his tongue curled around words that had no business being said in this world. I gave my head a shake as I spun with Sarah and I realized my legs were tired. My feet ached and my lower back was beginning to throb. I checked my watch and realized we had been dancing for a solid hour. I shook my head again, trying to shake off the dozy feeling that was clouding my thinking. “Sarah,” I cleared my throat. I had only spoken in a whisper. My tongue felt thick and funny. I tried again. “Sarah.” Louder this time, but she still didn’t respond and we kept dancing. I shook her, but she didn’t respond. I kept shaking her until I realized I was doing it in time with the music. So I just tried to stop, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop. Underneath the fog, I began to feel frightened. I began to see the faces of the other people now. I saw their terror. Reverend Harper’s face had grown redder than it had been before. Sweat poured down his face, but still he kept moving, twirling Missus Grendel around and around, her head lolling from side to side. She had fainted, but her feet were still moving. We moved past Bill, who danced with Susie Watkins, and I saw her frightened eyes darting around the room, but Bill bobbed his head in time with the music and his glassy eyes looked at nothing in particular. The Song and Dance Man laughed from his perch and kept playing, tapping his feet. His eyes were glowing in that dark, humid place. They glowed and glowed and light glanced off the bow with each sweep. I heard a scream and swiveled my head to watch a woman drop to the floor holding her leg. She had cramped up. I was envious. She got to stop. She got to rest. My own legs felt like dead wood and the ache in my back had deepened. Then her partner stepped on her ankle and I heard the crunch from across the room. He was still dancing; his eyes blank and empty as he moved. She screamed again and started to crawl away, but instead stood up. She started to dance, bringing her weight down on the broken ankle again and again and again. I turned away, but I couldn’t block the sound of her sobbing. The music ran on. I checked my watch again and it was three hours now. We didn’t flag or falter. We kept up the same speed as the fiddle. The damning fiddle. Rapping our feet against the floor. Never mind the blisters that burst. Never mind broken toes or broken ankles. Never mind that deep pain buried in the spine that refused to go. Never mind old hearts and bad knees. We kept up that frantic pace as one mass: a bobbing, thumping, jumping creature with one mind. Reverend Harper died at one point. I watched it happen. He was holding up the still fainted Missus Grendel (whose feet still moved with the music) when he dropped her and fell to the floor. He twitched once, his feet beating a quick, staccato rhythm, and then was still. Missus Grendel got back up and kept on moving. I watched Harper as I danced, trying to see if he was breathing. He wasn’t. I swear to you, he wasn’t, but he still got back up. He was dead, but he still got back up and began to dance again. He turned to look at me and grinned the Song and Dance Man’s grin. His eyes were red, filled with blood from whatever had broken in his brain. I watched as a single red tear rolled down his cheek. I shut my eyes and kept moving. Harper wasn’t the last. He probably wasn’t the first. The old and the sick were the first to drop. No matter what it was – exhaustion, heart attacks, hemorrhages somewhere deep inside – they died, and then they got back up and kept dancing, grinning their grins. I passed Lizzie and Sam. He had lost his glasses at some point. His eyes darted around, terribly aware. I looked at his leg and I saw a jut of some bone tearing through his denim jeans. There was a trail of blood behind him, and as he swirled a spray landed on the legs of the people around him. He stepped on that broken leg, twirled on it, and jumped on it all in time with that fiddle. The night passed. I remember stepping on something at one point and realized I had just crushed Missus Dempsey’s right hand. She was lying on her back on the dance floor. She had been stepped on time and again. I could even see a man’s shoe print on her stomach. Her head had been caved in and her chest beneath her dress had a sunken look, and still, she was trying to get up and keep moving. The smell of blood mixed with that of the sweat and I couldn’t breathe anymore. The air was thick and from all around I could hear cries and screams, but nothing that drowned out the fiddle or the Song and Dance Man’s singing. And then it stopped. I danced one more step and then stopped myself. I looked up at the platform. We all did, craning our necks upward. He was checking his pocket watch. “All right folks! That’s all for tonight! The dancing is done and the morning has come. You may leave if you can walk and you should walk quick cause this Song and Dance Man is gonna be gone.” We all stood there, like stunned cattle, then marked to the tent flaps. No one ran, because they couldn’t. It was a miracle we could walk. Sarah stepped ahead of left, but I stayed behind. I turned and looked, and saw at least twenty people still standing there. Harper was among them. They were all grinning, their eyes empty. They stood and made no sign of wanting to leave. “Go on now, friend. The Song and Dance Man has what he wants, but he’d be glad to add you, too, if you tarry and dally too long.” I looked up at him and saw him smile, and then I turned my back to him and left the tent. When I turned back again it was gone, along with the people inside. That’s the story of what happened. The others won’t tell it or pretend it never happened, never mind the 20 people that vanished that night, the mayor’s wife included. They’d rather not think about it. Sarah and I took Sam to the hospital over in the next county, far from folks that knew what had happened. They had to remove his leg. Sam was quiet before and was quieter still after, pulling odd jobs that a one-legged man could do. He doesn’t move around much nowadays; just sits on his porch, a cane across his lap, and massages the stump with his hand. Says it bothers him on cold nights. And warm nights. And wet nights. And dry nights. Bill left and joined the army, and stayed in long enough to fight in Vietnam and won a bunch of medals. He came back and settled down to drink and drink hard, and if you want to find him, you can find him in Eddie Dixon’s bar. No matter how drunk he gets, though, he doesn’t talk about that night. None of us saw much of Sarah after. She came through the best, but that’s how she always was. She left and went to college, but, like Bill, got pulled back to Belle Carne. She teaches over at the high school now, teaching English to the juniors. I stayed here, plugging away at the hardware store. I ran it for a while, but now I don’t do much of anything. I just sit around with Sam, talking about things sometimes, though not often. If I stay too late, if I stay too long, I’ll see his eyes go glassy behind those coke-bottle lenses and he’ll disappear into himself, and I’ll catch him humming a faint trace of a song and the hair on my neck stand on end and goosebumps rise on my arms in great knots. My foot will start to tap out a small beat on the hardwood porch and a big wide grin will spread across Sam’s face. The grin of the Song and Dance Man.

13 minutes

March 27, 2020

Beings and Entities, Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Demons and Possession, Strange and Unexplained

The Buzzards

creatures, crime scenes, crimes, curses, Geoff Sturtevant, golems, hoarders, jobs, monsters, occupations

Need a crime scene clean-up? How about a crime scene clean-up up in a hoarder’s house? Well, free-market problems get free-market solutions. It only makes sense I ended up with Cesar. I guess you could call me the President and Cesar the VP but those are pretty prestigious titles considering the nature of our business. We’re no executives. We aren’t too proud to get our hands dirty either. I was strictly crime scene cleanup before Cesar and I joined forces. With violent deaths at a relative low, my job was easier than ever. Seldom were the days picking brains out of stucco ceilings, bleaching bloody grout, and peeling human skin off of the undersides of subway trains. Natural deaths were common enough, but dragging Grandma’s deathbed to the dump was hardly a day’s work. Cesar was a “sanitation technician,” though he’d also answer to “garbage man,” “shit shoveler,” and “Hey, chico, you can’t dump that here.” Stuffing dirty old clothes into a contractor bag while I sponged biohazardous who-knew-what from the floor of some geriatric death-fest, we mused at how often we ran into each other. Why not combine forces?—we were like two peas in a pod, after all. But since “The Peas” were a little too cute of a name, we decided to call ourselves “The Buzzards.” Dead bodies, toxic waste, or just your old couch; if you need it gone, Cesar and I will swarm in and make it happen. The Buzzards take on all carrion—no job too big or too small. Well, in hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have said “no job too big.” Not that I don’t appreciate our special little spot in the police chief’s Rolodex, but those scumbags have to be belly-laughing back at the precinct. Sure, we’re the men for the job, but they sent us into hell, and they sure as hell know it. Some hoarders keep dozens of cats. Some hoarders keep decades of newspapers. Some hoarders keep spackle buckets of their own bodily waste. Helen Waltman—she kept everything. It was an old cape house on the outskirts of Orange Oaks. Spaced way out from the neighbors, like the houses themselves knew to stay away from this one. The smell hit us at a hundred yards with the windows closed; a vile kind of rot fused with a repellent tang of death. The place was standing there like a filthy white tombstone wound with crime scene tape. No actual crime, per se, had been committed, but there had been a death. The back door had been inaccessible for years, it turned out. Once the hoard became so prolific that it collapsed over the front door, there simply was no way out for an old lady. Helen Waltman had entombed herself. I backed the dump truck as close to the house as I could. We got out and suited up, trying to hold our breath until we got the masks on. If I had known it was going to be this bad, I’d have been fully geared up before we reached the county line. Standing on the front stoop, I could hear the living biomass beyond the door. Cesar and I stopped and looked at each other. It was clear we were in for a tough one. “That’s a stinker in there, bro,” Cesar said. I nodded. When a guy like me was this near to tossing his cookies, it certainly was a ripe petunia. “You hear that?” “Hear what?” Cesar asked “Fucking roaches.” “There’s always fucking roaches, bro.” But he knew what I was getting at. There are different levels of bug problems. This one, you could diagnose before you opened the door. It was terminal. Cesar gave me a friendly shot in the arm. “Bro, where I come from, the roaches got wings.” “Yeah, well, I’m from New Jersey.” The door opened with an almost pressurized release of stench. On instinct, we stood aside as if to let it dissipate. A useless gesture. I looked at him and he looked at me; silently daring each other to go in first. “You goin’ first, bro?” Of course, I was. I always went in first. I guess it’s on account of me being the president and all. I readjusted my breather and peeked inside. It looked like the entrance to a cave. Two shovels left on the floor; presumably the ones the cops used to dig out Helen Waltman. I stepped over the threshold, turning sideways to skirt the stacks of composting garbage. Past the sphincter of an entranceway, I spotted a chain hanging from the ceiling and pulled it. A yellowed, old light illuminated the hoard. Roaches cascaded down the walls, disappearing into the mountains of filth. At my feet lay what remained of the woman. The lucky cops—rookies, no doubt—had been kind enough to remove the body, but the silhouette of melted flesh stained the floorboards like a grisly chalk line. I’m no forensics expert, but it’s pretty clear she’d been there for quite a while before the cops showed up. It’s also clear she was lacking in the friends and family department. I looked around. Household artifacts pocked with mold. Strung with clotheslines wall-to-wall, hung with black and nameless dross. Shadows swaying with the loosely-hanging lightbulb. Crawling with bugs. Composting in its own heat. I’ve said this before—and maybe I’ve meant it every time—but I’ve never before said it so sincerely: “This is the worst one I’ve ever seen.” Cesar was turning in circles, overwhelming himself before the work even got underway. “How does this even happen, bro? You’d think the bitch’d change her ways at some point, wouldn’t you?” I shook my head. “People don’t change. You spend your life trying to fight who you are, but in the end…” “Yeah, I guess no one knows better than you,” he said. He’s right. Clean up enough pointless suicides, and you start wondering what took them so long. No one jumps off a building the first time it crosses their mind. No one swallows a bottle of barbiturates in the CVS drive-through. No one pulls a ten-pound trigger on a whim. Most people are designed to preserve their lives at all costs. Others seem programmed to self-destruct; it’s only a matter of how long they can fight it off. Eighteen years? Twenty-five years? Sixty-five years, in the case of Helen. “If I had to guess,” I said to Cesar, “I’d say Helen Waltman was fucked up from day one.” “Fair enough, bro. And I guess we’re fucked up now too.” Fucked indeed. There were several roaches already crawling up my legs. You’d think by my line of work that roaches don’t bother me, but they still give me the creeps. They’re not the same as bugs to me. Bugs are alive. Cockroaches are undead. I stomped one foot, then the other; a strategy that only works on the less-insistent buggers. The hangers-on are the hungry ones. Those, I name. “Bob, Dave, Charles, Ted…” I named them each as I brushed them away—clearly a neurosis, but we’ve all got our coping mechanisms, don’t we? I’ve been asked a thousand times: How do you do it, Steve? All the filth? All the death? The roaches? The big ones; the ones that sprint up your arms and legs and just stop when they find a good place to stare at you. They sit there watching; nothing but their antennae moving. Just waiting. Never turning back around. Every move they make is conspiratorial. Up to your eyes to drink from your tear ducts. Or into your ear canals, to cling to your eardrum and nibble the precious wax. I’ve seen videos of doctors excavating these creatures from the heads of their hosts; piece by malefic piece, like a crude abortion. So, how do I immerse myself in them without losing my mind? I don’t freak out. I don’t try squashing each and every one. I name them. I treat them with uncommon respect, and expect the same in return. “You’re outta your mind,” Cesar said. “How many bags you bring?” “Not enough, bro. Maybe fifteen dozen.” “Well… Let’s go get ‘em.” We turned to head back out. On the way to the door, my eye caught the corner of a picture frame on the wall mostly obscured by garbage. A picture frame. The idea of Helen hanging a picture in there was so utterly weird, I just had to see what it was. I lifted the picture out of the mess and took it outside with me. In the daylight, I saw it wasn’t a picture at all, but a framed newspaper article. It was almost impossible to read through the stained and mold-riddled glass, but I made out this much: HOUSE FIRE IN ORANGE OAKS CLAIMS TWO Underneath was a faded picture of a burned-out house surrounded by firetrucks. The smaller print was illegible, but the headline gave me the gist of it. “What you got there?” Cesar asked. “Picture frame was hanging on the wall. Just curious to see what Mrs. Waltman considered a decoration.” Cesar chuckled. “And what is it?” I showed Cesar the framed article. He squinted to make out the moldering print. “Damn, bro. Who saves articles like this?” I shrug. “I’ve seen people save newspaper clippings, but they’re usually for happy occasions.” “Fuck yeah, man. You know who saves shit like this? Serial killers.” “You think Helen here was a serial killer?” “Maybe an arsonist, bro. She probably burned that house down.” He handed the frame back to me. “Maybe you’re right. Pretty creepy.” “This bitch is burning us, too,” Cesar said, yanking a box of contractor bags out of the back of the truck. * * * * * * A few dozen sixty-gallon bags later, and we’d barely made a dent. Old Helen had been quite the collector. Once you dug out the organic rot—everything from old banana peels to decomposing newspapers—you’d start to notice patterns here and there. A box of china dolls and stuffed animals. A set of Christmas ornaments in a labeled cardboard box. There’s a kind of subtext to these things that makes me uneasy. Things she wasn’t merely compelled not to throw away, but valued as part of something meaningful. In dealing with the dead, meaning was something best to set aside. I’d learned through the years to try and separate the destruction from the humanity beneath it. Anything that threatens that separation is a threat to my existential comfort. It’s best to compartmentalize whenever possible. I’ve cleaned up a graveyard’s worth of remains over my career; scenes of cataclysmic violence to quiet despair. The bad ones were gross enough to be…well…gross. But there were others too dark to write off like a horror flick, or the cover of a Fangoria magazine. The quiet ones. Some had been moldering so long, they barely even stank anymore. Just the sour reek of old marrow and the rotten remnants of some failed ecosystem crawling up the walls. Like the ruins of a fallen civilization. They may not be the most repugnant cases, but they’re undoubtedly the saddest. Not only did these people die alone; they rotted unnoticed. They’d been forgotten long before they left. You can’t get more alone than that. Sometime around when normal people are taking their lunch break, I came across another framed newspaper article. After naming and politely wiping away the roaches, I read the headline: WALTMAN SERVICE TO BE HELD THIS WEDNESDAY Underneath, the same picture of the fire scene. I considered just tossing it into the garbage and forgetting about it, but my compartmentalization system was faltering. Besides, I was kind of curious. I took the picture frame out into the daylight and squinted to make out what I could of the article: … survived by their daughter, Helen, 7, who… Vistas Home for Orphans. Services for Mary and Theodore Waltman… Wednesday, April 7th, at Woods Memorial… Well, that explains the first article, I thought. Her parents had died in that fire; that’s why it had been so significant to her. And being seven at the time, it pretty well disqualified her from being an arsonist. I tossed the framed article on the back of the truck and turned back to the house. Something occurred to me: Would all of this have happened if none of that had happened? I’d had Helen pegged as doomed from day-one; most of these people, I thought, were doomed to make a mess of themselves. Maybe that was just my compartmentalization speaking. I found Cesar in what was intended as the dining room; certainly the most bioactive room in the house. He was balancing a shovelful of fly-swarmed filth on its way into a drum. Off the side dangled a matted and slimy cat’s tail. I expected we’d come across plenty of these. “We got cats,” Cesar said. “So this lady,” I began. “Her parents died in that fire when she was seven. She ended up in an orphanage.” “What, did you find more articles?” “Yeah.” Cesar tipped the shovel, dumping the moldering cat corpse into the drum liner. A swarm of enervated flies abandoned ship. “Bitch still could’ve done it,” he says. “At seven?” “Who the hell knows, bro. Why you even telling me?” “Eh, guess I figured you oughta know. Maybe I owe it to Helen, since you’ve already besmirched her memory and everything.” “I besmirched her memory?” He gestured obviously around the room. “Bro, I don’t even know what besmirched means, but I’m pretty sure she did this shit to herself.” “Fair enough. Just thought I’d tell you the latest developments. I’ve always liked a good mystery.” Cesar dug in with the shovel and immediately scooped up another cat. Half of another, anyway—it came out bisected at the midsection, leaking entrails and putrefaction. “This cat’s besmirched, bro.” I chuckled. “Yeah, I guess it is.” * * * * * * Seven dozen bags in, and I’d broken through to deeper layers of rot. I encountered some cats of my own; not one among the living. Partly eaten, some. The slimed and disjointed limbs coming loose with the slightest tug. I seized one by the tail, but the skin slid degloved from the bone. The roaches had nested deep in the mass, and scrambled to find darker recesses as I uncovered them. Most of them did, anyway; the others, I named, and brushed back into the heap. Some were the size of a dime. Others were the size of silver dollars. The big ones were the worst. They seemed to have evolved over their underlings; some awful sentience in their twitching antennae. Tom, Dan, Pete, Brian… Underneath, I found my first pieces of furniture. An ottoman, so bug-eaten and soaked with gore, the original pattern of the fabric was indiscernible. A few bags later revealed the sofa—a dead cat burial ground. Cats stuffed between cushions; melted into the upholstery. Dozens of them, some reduced to bones and dried pelts. Others in various states of decomposition. Finally, I found a wooden chest with a padlock on it. A curious thing; I couldn’t help but wonder what, with the rest of the house the way it was, a hoarder of this magnitude would want to keep in a relatively safe place. I shouldn’t have cared; wouldn’t have cared; but since I’d seen those framed news stories, I’d become more invested in this mystery than I should have been. I’d failed to follow my own professional advice, and now I was asking myself the same question Cesar had: How does this even HAPPEN, bro? I aimed the blade of the shovel where the hasp met the body of the lock and brought it down. After three strikes, the hasp hung loose. I lifted out the lock and opened the lid. Inside the chest was an old photo album. I took it out and started flipping through the pages. Scenes of a happy family. I recognized a house as the same one pictured in the newspaper clippings. Photos of Helen as a little girl. Her parents, Mary and Theodore. Her father pushing her on a swingset. Helping her mother prepare food in the kitchen. Polaroid photos with the dates jotted down at the bottom. Somewhere in the middle of the album, the pictures stopped abruptly. The last date was March, 1952: A photo of Helen, her lips pursed over the seven candles of her birthday cake. The pages after that were all empty. I closed the photo album and just stood there for a minute. Normally I’d just throw it in the bag with the rest of the garbage, but I just couldn’t do it. I set the album back in the chest and closed the lid. From the other room, I heard Cesar cursing. “This crazy-ass bitch, bro. How does this even happen?” * * * * * * By mid-afternoon, it was clear this was going to be a three-day job. Well over a hundred sixty-gallon bags of garbage were piled into the dump truck, and it was going to take multiple loads before the demolition team even got near this place. I was still chipping away at the living room, and Cesar in the dining room. Having made a notable dent in the mess, the roaches seemed to be losing confidence. Still, there was a long way to go. “Fuck,” I heard from the dining room. A little sharper than Cesar’s typical refrain. “You alright in there? Tell me you didn’t get cut.” “No, bro, I just…” A crash. Not the typical crash of garbage into a bin, but a louder one; a great shift of garbage, like an unstable load in a truck. “You alright in there, man?” “Fuck, bro!” Another shift. Another crash. I dropped my shovel and started fighting my way over the piles of garbage. “Cesar?” “Help, bro!” I was nearly there when another crash sent Cesar flying backwards out into the hall. He landed with his back against a closet door, shattering slats of wood. “What the hell happened, man?” There was a look of horror on his face. He pointed into the dining room. A mass of black garbage emerged from the door. Not a collapsing pile like I expected, but a figure; an immense, human figure, but not human at all. A creature. A mass of excrement, loaded with decomposing cats, chicken bones, fast food wrappers. A golem of compacted shit. “What the fuck?” The golem advanced on him. I grabbed for his suit and yanked him out of the hall. We landed with our backs against a heap of trash, scrambled backwards to get over it. “We’re fucking outta here, bro!” The golem roared, filling the room with hot decomposition. We made for the door, but my foot hit something slippery and went out from under me. Cesar and I collided and we went down hard. We scrambled to get up, but the golem bowled a huge arm through the trash piles, spraying garbage, roaches, and rotting organic matter everywhere. Something heavy hit Cesar and he fell back to his knees. “Cesar!” The golem was on approach. Arms outstretched, it was plowing through the heap, gathering the trash about it like a strengthening wave. “Cesar, get up!” Another roar, and the two of us were bowled over by a wall of filth. I felt the pressure against my chest, felt my feet lifted from the floor. I twisted my face away, spit something foul out of my mouth. “Cesar…” I didn’t see him. He was completely buried. “Cesar!” The golem was closing in again. The trash heap shook with every step. I struggled to free my arms, managed to get one loose, started clawing away trash where I thought Cesar’s head might be buried. It was difficult to breathe; the weight of the garbage was crushing. The golem roared again; a freshened wave of heat and stench. It swung an arm, eviscerating the heap of garbage and spilling me out onto the floor. I turned my head and saw Cesar lying prone. He wasn’t moving. The golem stood over us. Down its legs of compressed shit runnelled drips of the same foul liquid; a stench that presided over the hoard. It was standing in the stained silhouette where the cops had found Helen Waltman’s body. I pushed away on my ass and elbows. A stabbing pain that spoke of a broken collarbone. Roaches crawled over my hands, but this was the least of my problems now. The golem roared. Liquid shit cascaded down its arms and legs. It reached down and grabbed Cesar, lifted him effortlessly into the air and flung him across the room. He hit the wall and rolled onto the dead cat-couch, his head hanging at an odd angle. I fought to get to my feet, but a shooting pain in my leg sent me back to the floor. My knee, goddammit. I pushed away until my back was against a wall of garbage. The front door was blocked. The windows were blocked. The hallway was blocked. Cesar was unconscious, maybe even dead. And here I was with this monster. Staring at me with its nonexistent eyes. Coming toward me with its arms extended, ready to— “Helen…” The golem slowed its approach. It stopped no more than six feet away. I couldn’t believe it. Was this thing really Helen? I wasn’t sure if the thought had really occurred to me, or I’d just named it on a whim, the same way I did for the cockroaches. Maybe on instinct, I’d done both. “I know what happened to you, Helen. I know about the fire. About your parents. It was a terrible thing…” The golem didn’t move, but there was no other way to read its expression. Talk… Just keep talking… “You lost everything, Helen. When you were seven years old. You’d lost everything, and you were afraid to lose anything ever again. So you kept everything. I understand, Helen. It wasn’t your fault.” The golem was still as a statue, shimmering with roaches as it stood listening. Could it really be listening? In the corner of my eye, I saw the overturned chest where I’d found the photo album. I had an idea. “I saw your album, Helen. I didn’t throw it away. It’s still in the trunk. Do you want me to get it for you?” It was the first time the golem moved since I started talking. It turned its head toward the trunk. Something in its body language told me, yes, it was okay to go get the album. Painfully, I got to my feet. I limped to the chest and retrieved the album. When I turned back to the golem—to Helen—she had her hands extended. Hands of wet and clammy shit the size of hubcaps. Wriggling turds for fingers. I opened the album and placed it in her hands so she could see it. I didn’t see any eyes in the face; no features at all; still, I got the idea she was indeed looking at it. Slowly, I backed away. “I understand you were afraid of losing things, Helen. But not everything is worth hanging onto. Your memories. The good ones. They are what’s worth holding onto.” A tense moment as the Helen monster raised her head from the album. Had I said the wrong thing? I knew hoarders could be violently protective of their stuff; were often unreasonable when confronted with their illness. Dealing with these people was far outside my scope of practice; I’m just a glorified garbage man. The last thing I’m certified to do is provide counseling to mentally ill monsters. But just as I was bracing myself for the inevitable attack, the Helen-monster appeared to relax. Its non-existent eyes turned back to the photo album. It flipped through the pages, one after another, turning its head left and right to see every photo. And when it reached the last page—the one dated March, 1952, I remembered—it stopped turning the pages and just stood there looking down at it. Almost tenderly, it laid its giant, slimy hand on the last page. “That’s what’s important, Helen,” I said. “All the rest… All this garbage… It’s time to let it go. I’m not trying to take away anything important, Helen. I’m just trying to clean up the…” It slammed the album shut, and I braced myself again. But there was no attack. Instead, it clutched the album to its chest. It hugged the book; squeezed it tightly against its gory and fecal body. Squeezing and pushing, until the album was buried in its chest; until the entire album was inside its body; pushing and smearing over it until the cover was no longer visible. I didn’t dare to move. Having subsumed the photo album, the monster turned its attention back to me. But something was different now. I didn’t feel threatened. The golem seemed to be smaller now. Looking down, I saw the fetid brown liquid trailing faster down its legs. Faster still. The golem was melting. Liquefying. With an unthinkable stench, the legs puddled sewage onto the floor. Bits of garbage, bones, bottle caps, bent silverware, the carcasses of rotting mice. Moldering cat pelts sloughed off, slid to the floor. The turd fingers dropped from the hands, landed in swelling pools of diarrhea. Melted to the thighs, Helen’s torso dropped flat on the floor, became flatter still as the septic flesh drained into the floorboards. The skull of some small animal, a plastic six-pack ring, an old Chinese takeout container. The liquid shit soaking like stain into the pine planks, escaping through shakes and knotholes until the golem was no more than a black silhouette under a pile of half-digested detritus. The golem was gone. Helen was gone. She’d finally let it all go. For a minute or two, I didn’t dare to move. Then I heard a rustling across the room. “Bro… What the fuck just happened?” I ran to him, forgetting my leg was injured and tweaking it royally in the process. “Cesar, you alright?” “I think so. My head freaking hurts. Where the hell are we?” “You don’t remember?” He was suddenly aware of the state of the couch he was lying on, and got quickly to his feet. “What the fuck, bro? This place is disgusting. Let’s fucking get outta here.” He wasn’t getting any argument from me. * * * * * * You’d think after a day like that, a couple of guys like me and Cesar would rethink our line of work. But, like I explained, people don’t really change. At least most people don’t. Maybe Helen Waltman changed in the end, but then again, after a little while to process this whole thing, I’m not sure any of it really happened. There was enough noxious gas in that house to kill someone, not to mention trigger a major hallucination. The way I see it, we were lucky to get out of there alive, shit-golems or not. Cesar took one hell of a bump that day, and still has no recollection of what happened. It probably happened when he fell backwards into that closet door. I’ve thought about telling him what I saw—what I think I saw, anyway—but why bother? He already thinks I’m crazy for naming cockroaches. If I start telling him about shit-golems, he’ll probably have me institutionalized. At the risk of losing work with the police department, in any case, I declined to go back to the Waltman house. Whatever was going on in that place, it wasn’t safe. I’m sure it took some palm-greasing, but ultimately, the house was bulldozed without a look from the environmental agencies, and several million cockroaches were left without a home. I’m driving through a nearby neighborhood one day when the thought occurs to me: I wonder what’s going on at the old Waltman house? I’ve got nothing important to do, so I hang a right on Old Creek Road and head out to Orange Oaks. It might only be my imagination, but when I pull up in front of the bare slab that used to be the Waltman’s house, I can still smell a hint of that stench. Sitting there in my truck, the ephemeral memories wash through my mind like a weird dream. It seems impossible that any of it really happened. It seems impossible that such a horror as Helen Waltman’s house could have been sitting there on that innocuous-looking concrete slab. I put it in park and walk across the lawn, watching my feet for wandering cockroaches on the way, finding none. I walk up onto the porch and onto the foundation, trying to picture where I initially spotted the stain left by Helen’s remains. I walk over to the area, remembering how I saw the monster melt and soak into the floorboards. It’s a flat foundation—no basement in this one—so you’d think with a mess like that, there’d be at least some evidence of what happened only inches above. But there’s nothing. Just like I thought. The whole thing was a crazy hallucination. Just as I’m turning to leave though, something catches my eye. There’s an old chest sitting in the lawn, just off the side of the slab. I remember it from the cleanup; it’s the chest I found the photo album in. How’d that get left behind? Who cares? I tell myself, but as usual, my curiosity gets the better of me. Without a good reason for doing it, I walk over to the chest and flip open the lid. Inside, I see the photo album. How in the world… I pick up the album and flip through the pages. Those same happy scenes of Helen Waltman’s childhood. Swinging with Dad, cooking with mom, pictures of the old house before it burned down and changed Helen’s life forever. And on the last page—the one dated March, 1952—a huge, black handprint.

18 minutes

March 30, 2020

Investigations and Crimes, Jobs and Occupations, Monsters, Creatures, and Cryptids

I Found a Diary Tucked in a Brick at an Abandoned Psych Hospital

Alyssa Gallo, child abuse, childhood, children, diaries, experimentation, experiments, hospitals, jobs, journals, medical, mental illness, occupations, psych hospitals, psych wards, psychiatric hospitals, psychiatric wards, psychiatrists, psychiatry

I grew up on Long Island, right outside of the Kings Park Psychiatric Center, home of the legend of Cropsey. I was always a good kid, never broke any rules, never really pushed the limits of what was and wasn’t “allowed”. But recently, I moved home after graduating from college, and just started looking for a job in NYC. Throughout my college years, I struggled with anxiety and depression, which lead to me being medicated to control it. Through this entire ordeal, all I could think about was the poor children of Kings Park and what they must have gone through. Some of them just had anxiety; a common ailment in today’s society, and one that’s completely manageable. And yet, they were stuffed inside an insane asylum, which was over capacity by 1000 people, and treated like animals. This revelation that I got extremely lucky, has always been on my mind. If I had been born just a couple of decades earlier, and in the same area, who knows what may have happened to me. On the hinges of self-awareness. I decided to break the rules for once in my life. I had to visit Kings Park and see what it was like for myself. For those of you who don’t live in the New York Area, Kings Park has a gate around it. It’s situated in the middle of a wooded area, but it’s not like there are guards and an electric fence or anything. It’s private property, so you’re not supposed to trespass, but I can’t say that almost my entire high school didn’t go anyway. But I never did. I was always too terrified of the legends, and of Cropsey in particular. I’ll tell the story of Cropsey quickly because it’s relevant to the history, but not really relevant to this story. “Cropsey” was a legend that popped up in the Long Island Area, saying that one of the patients from Kings Park had escaped, and was killing people in the woods around the old hospital. Only part of this was true. There was someone killing young and mostly disabled children around the hospital, but it wasn’t an escaped patient. It was an old ward of the hospital that was living in tunnels and bunkers underneath the hospital. There’s a really great Netflix documentary on the whole story if you’re interested. Since the legend of Cropsey turned out to be based on truth, I decided this was something I just didn’t want to mess with. Kings Park would just be another broken down building in the area whose memory would pop into my head at weird times. This all changed after college and my diagnosis though. I know I wasn’t diagnosed with anything heavy, but I still felt a sense of responsibility, or the camaraderie of a sort, and had to see what they experienced. So one night around 7:30 pm, I headed over towards Kings Park with a flashlight, a backpack, and a water bottle. I figured I wasn’t going to need anything else but I did have a small hunting knife with me in my pocket. Just in case. I got to the broken down foundations of the psychiatric hospital that tortured so many innocent children and I couldn’t find the strength to do anything more than just stare up at the walls. This thing is truly massive. If you haven’t seen it, it’s got about 15 floors and it just goes straight up. I decided I had to push myself into the uncomfortable, and I found a window on the ground floor that was open, and climbed in. I will say in hindsight that it was stupid of me to go alone. But I had to do this for myself. It was something that I was conquering (or so I thought in my head). As I wandered aimlessly around the corridors, looking at all the graffiti on the walls, seeing the broken-down bed frames with rusted metal and fingernail claw marks on what’s left of the doors, I got real chills. For some reason, I felt particularly drawn to the 3rd floor. I really can’t explain what it was, but my feet just moved on their own, toward this one spot on the third floor of the abandoned hospital. There really wasn’t anything special about it; it was just a hallway outside of a couple of rooms, near a communal bathroom. But since I was there, I looked around. I smelled the stale musk of the abandoned building, and scanned the exposed brick with my eyes. As I was looking through the shattered drywall to the exposed brick beyond, I caught a glimpse of a spot that was just slightly darker than the rest of the brick and mortar. Intrigued, I moved closer and shined my flashlight right onto the dark spot. With a little poking, prodding, and removal of even more drywall, I was able to fish it free: A small, string-bound diary, made entirely out of loose-leaf paper. There wasn’t a cover so to speak, so it was able to be folded up nice and neatly, and tucked away into an empty brick space behind the wall. My curiosity was thoroughly piqued, but I wasn’t dumb enough to start reading right then and there. It was dark, and I was still inside a supposedly haunted asylum. I took one last look around the place, made peace with myself and the patients of the building, and went home. As soon as I got home and took a shower to rinse off whatever was left of Kings Park, I opened up my backpack to retrieve the diary. It seems to be the diary of a young girl who was put into the hospital back when it was in operation. I figured I’d write down the first entry here and I’ll share the remainder in the next couple days. April 24th, 1918 It is my first day here. Mama told me to keep track of the days and who I am so I don’t forget. I am Florence Blackwell, and I am 10. Mama and Daddy made me come here to the hospital to get better. They said I was sick, and that’s why I wet the bed at night. Daddy said that once I get better, the other girls in town will want to play with me. Mama was sad when she dropped me off. She had tears in her eyes like she was going to cry, but I told her “don’t be sad Mama I’m going to get better for you!” and the nice lady in the nurse hat took me inside of the hospital while Mama cried from the outside. I don’t know why Mama was so upset. Daddy was happy to see me go to the hospital to get better. The lady who took me inside of the hospital said her name was Nurse Wilson, but that I can call her Mary. Mama and Daddy always told me never to call an adult by their real names but I think I can call her Mary. She’s nice to me not like that Doctor. I don’t remember his name but that Doctor was not nice. Mary brought me into a big white room in the hospital and asked me to take off all my clothes so I can put on a big white gown and the doctor can take a look at me. Mary helped me out of my dress that Mama made me, and stand in the middle of the white room with a vent on the floor. Then Mary left and the doctor man came in. Or at least I think he was a doctor. He told me to stand with my arms out just like a starfish, and to close my eyes and hold my breath. Then he took out a giant hose, and sprayed the water directly at me. I fell backwards onto the floor from how heavy that water was. He didn’t stop the hose though. He kept spraying me with the heavy water on the floor of the tiled room and he didn’t stop until I was crying and crying and shivering from the cold water. The doctor man stopped the hose and told me to get up. He put a white gown on the floor in the puddles of water and told me to wear it. I put on the gown and Mary came back in. I cried to her, and she just pet my head and let me cry. Mary brought me to my room where I’m going to get better in the hospital. It had 1 bed, and there were two other girls in the room already. They were both sleeping when I walked in so I didn’t get to say hi to them, but Mary slipped me back my little diary and told me to hide it so the doctor cannot find it again. I was so tired I fell asleep next to the other two girls but I didn’t sleep for long. In the middle of the night, I opened my eyes to see one of the other girls about 3 inches from my face just staring at me while I was sleeping. She looked at me with really big eyes and a big smile on her face, and when she saw me looking at her, she turned her head to the right like a puppy, and said, “It’s time.” When she said that, someone in the hallway screamed like their Daddy was hitting them with a belt. They screamed and screamed, and then someone else screamed too. And then all of the kids on the floor were screaming as loud as they could. I don’t know how I am supposed to get better when all these kids scream in the night. I hope they aren’t hurt but I also need to get better so I can go home to Mama. Mama said to write every day and remember who I am, so that’s what I will do. * * * * * * After I read that first diary entry, scribbled in a child’s handwriting on a piece of loose-leaf, I was spooked to say the least. I was actually holding a relic from a condemned insane asylum dating back all the way to 1918. I immediately ran to my computer. Surely there must be some kind of record of the patients put into care at Kings Park. I know it was a hospital where patients were tortured and even killed, but there should be at least some semblance of record keeping. While I could find articles labeled “Kings Park Patient Records”, I couldn’t find an actual list of everyone who was under care there. Also, unfortunately, Florence Blackwell was a popular name, and Google searches of her name basically lead nowhere. I figured since my modern-day technology was striking out, the only way out was through, and I had to read more of the diary to get anywhere. I will admit that I was scared. I’m still scared to leaf through the whole thing, and I’m not reading farther than I really have to. I’m terrified for little Florence and what may have happened to her and the others in that ward. And the simultaneous screaming in the middle of the night? Something was up and I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know what it was. But going back to the sense of camaraderie and duty that I felt while exploring Kings Park in the first place, I felt that same sense of duty to Florence. Her story needs to be told, and her memory needs to be honored. So I kept reading. April 30, 1918 My name is Florence Blackwell, or Patient 0724. I haven’t written anything here in a while since I have just been so busy learning all the new things in this Hospital. Mary comes to visit me every morning and gives me a little cup filled with 4 different pills. All these pills are pretty small and round, and white, except for a really big one that she gives me. It’s twice as big as the others, and sometimes I accidentally cough it up when I try to swallow it. But Mary always helps me. She pets my head, gives me some water, and tells me to tilt my head back and try again. These pills always make me feel funny. It feels like my head is static on the radio. Mama always used to listen to the radio to see about the war and when Daddy was going to come home, and sometimes the man on the radio would stop talking and there would just be a loud static noise coming from the radio. It was so loud Mama would scream a little if it scared her and run to the radio and turn it down so it didn’t hurt my ears. I wish Mama could help me turn down the static in my head. After I get my pills in the morning, Mary brings me and my other roommate down to the main room for breakfast. This is always the scariest part of my day. There are people all over in wheelchairs, and some of them don’t even know they’re a person. At least that’s what my roommate 0698 says. 0698 was the one who stared in my face that first night. She’s been here for 2 months now, and she’s almost 13. She wants to get out by her 13th birthday so her Daddy can take her out for a soda like a teenager. The people in wheelchairs have no hair, and they stare out into space. I think they’re looking at their imaginary friend, but 0698 says they’re not looking at anything at all. Sometimes a little drool falls out of their mouths and they don’t even notice when it drips onto their laps. I had two roommates the first night I got to the hospital, but the other girl besides 0698 was brought out of our room the next morning, by two large men in white jackets. She looked really scared, but they grabbed her by both of her arms and dragged her away. I think she probably could have walked there, but they helped her anyway. That next morning at breakfast, my roommate was in a wheelchair staring out at nothing at all. She had a big bruise by her eyeball, but 0698 said to look away and pretend we don’t know her. The screaming keeps happening every night. I still don’t know why everyone is screaming in the middle of the night. I am Florence Blackwell, I am 10 years old, and I miss my Mama. I’m going to keep writing my name so I don’t forget it since no one calls me that anymore. May 3rd, 1918 I am Patient 0724, or Florence Blackwell, and I will be 11 years old in exactly 1 month. I only know that because today is a special day. When Mary came to give me my pills this morning, she told me that today, May 3rd, we are going to have a special doctor come visit and help us. I hope that this doctor helps me most because I want to go home to Mama. I haven’t gotten any letters from Mama or Daddy, but I hope Mama is alright. She had a couple of bruises on her face that she covered up with makeup before I left. She told me that she fell, but I hope she doesn’t fall anymore when I’m not gone. I don’t want her to get hurt. 0698 and I made our way down to the main hall where the new doctor was going to be. I was pretty tired since the screaming lasted an extra-long time last night, and early in the morning the two men in white jackets came to bring me back to that room where I got blasted with the water. This happens every couple of days, and I’m getting good at not falling anymore. I don’t even cry when the water accidentally leaves a bruise on me. We got to the main hall and 0698 and I sat down in the back while all the nurses and doctors were upfront with the patients in the wheelchairs. There was a little stage set up, and a doctor had a patient in a chair in front of him. He said that his name was Dr. Freeman and he came all the way from Pennsylvania to help us. Technically he’s still in doctor school, he said, but I think he can be called Doctor anyway. Doctor Freeman said he was sad to see all the patients like us being so sad and sick, and he created a way to help us get better. He said that he was the only one who has done it so far, but it will be very popular once he graduates from doctor school. Dr. Freeman used a bunch of big words that I don’t know, but I did hear one word I recognized, “brain”. After a big show of Dr. Freeman talking with big words, he took up an ice pick and moved to the head of the patient strapped down on the stage. In one motion, he shoved the ice pick into her eye and wiggled it around. I lost my breakfast right there and Mary had to bring me back to my room. But on the way back, all I could hear were screams and clapping. Dr. Freeman had made the patient better by hurting her? That doesn’t make sense to me, but hopefully, I will find out what happened when I meet Dr. Freeman tomorrow. I will be 11 in one month exactly, and I hope Dr. Freeman can make me better soon so I can go home to my Mama. * * * * * * After reading about Florence’s latest entries, I was chilled to my core. I knew that lobotomies were a part of life at that time, and especially a part of life within the mental health community, but that didn’t make it less jarring to read. Especially from the perspective of a 10-year-old girl. What kind of a mental health facility forces its patients to sit and watch a lobotomy being performed by a man with an ice pick. This man was literally injuring people permanently for the rest of their lives and everyone thought it was great, because it turns patients into a less “violent” type of patient. I decided to do a little bit of research on the history of lobotomies and it looks like the procedure wasn’t even normalized until a couple of years later, which means this entire situation was completely experimental. This man didn’t have a medical license, and didn’t have a clue what he was doing. He was essentially just sticking a sharp object into someone’s eye socket, and wiggling it around until the connections between the prefrontal lobe and their brain were severed. The more that I thought about the procedure being done in front of an audience, the more I wanted to lose my lunch. Before reading any further though, I wanted to do a little more research into who Florence was, and if we know who she was at all. If I couldn’t find anything online, I figured there must be some kind of written record that just hadn’t made its way to the internet yet. So I went to my local library. We have a historian that works there, and I made an appointment, and brought Florence’s diary with me for her to evaluate. I didn’t want to exactly say that I found the journal while trespassing on Kings Park grounds, so I said it was a “family heirloom” of sorts, and I wanted to know more about who wrote it. Immediately, she was intrigued and after a little bit of ruffling through a big bookcase behind her desk, brought out a registry of people and families that lived in the area at the same time that Florence would have. This was a jump, because for as far as we know, Florence wasn’t local. She could have been brought here from almost anywhere. We searched and searched the book for a birth record, or something to prove that Florence existed. And we actually almost missed it. There was a small entry from 1908. All it said was that “William and Margaret Blackwell had given birth to a baby girl. Name unknown.” That must’ve been them. It HAD to be them. Sure enough, there was a World War I draft registration card for William, and they were from a couple towns over. These were too many similarities to be a coincidence. I was convinced this had to be Florence. I’m not exactly proud of what I did next, but I stalked the Blackwell family on Ancestry.com, and let me tell you, there are hundreds of people in the Long Island area with the last name Blackwell. But after a couple of sleepless nights making the best of my college-educated research skills, I found them. With butterflies in my stomach, I sent a Facebook message to what seemed to be a family member. I’m withholding names for reasons, because I don’t want anyone to bother him. He was a typical old guy on Facebook, sharing memes about President Trump and clickbait ads asking for thoughts and prayers, and I really didn’t think he was going to answer me. But he did. William and Margaret were his great-grandparents, and their daughter, Eleanor, was his grandmother. She was born in 1919, and apparently had a hard life. Her father was an abusive drunk who came home with “shell shock” after the Great War. Her mother was too submissive to say anything, and took the brunt of his anger to protect her daughter. Eleanor grew up thinking she was the oldest and only in her family, but on her mother’s deathbed in 1929, when Eleanor was only 10, she confessed that Eleanor wasn’t the oldest. There was a daughter before her, one with a physical deformity that William had taken most of his anger out on. This physical deformity actually makes a lot of sense in the context of the next entry she had written. She used to wet the bed, and William couldn’t stand to look her in the face. Eventually, he tucked her away at a mental hospital, and that’s all she knew. Margaret had never seen her daughter again. While that was a lot of information to share with a stranger through Facebook, I think it was probably information that this man wanted to get off of his chest. Imagine a family secret like that just burning a hole inside your memory. I offered to let him see the diary once I was done doing some research and figuring out what happened, and he agreed, because he also wanted to know exactly what happened to Florence, and figured with me being a good bit younger, I knew my way around a computer and the internet. So I decided to keep plugging along and sharing Florence’s story. May 4th, 1918 I met Dr. Freeman today. He kept poking my face. Usually, that makes me mad. Daddy used to poke my face and try and make it look “normal”, he said. But I didn’t mind when Dr. Freeman did it. He was a doctor after all. Maybe he really could make me look normal so that I’d be pretty like Mama. He asked me a whole bunch of questions, like did I ever get mad, or did I ever hit my Mama or Daddy. I said of course not I wouldn’t hurt my Mama but I think he thought I was lying. He kept writing a bunch of stuff down on his note pad. He writes way faster than me, but probably because he’s an adult and knows a lot of stuff. Dr. Freeman kept asking if I had a pet, and I told him about my bunny, and how she had run away to be with her other bunny friends, but Dr. Freeman didn’t seem happy about that, and wrote more stuff on his pad. He asked me if I ever started fires and I said of course not. There was a fire down the street from my house that killed a lot of people back when I was 9. Then he asked me about my wetting the bed. I told him that that’s why I was here. I had to fix my problem so that I can go home to Mama and Daddy won’t be mad at me anymore. He said that he thought I wet the bed because I was just like some other very bad children he met at other hospitals and he had made them not be violent anymore, and he could do the same thing to me. I don’t think I am violent, but if Dr. Freeman says it could happen, maybe it could happen. Maybe I could turn out to be like Daddy instead of Mama. I just want Dr. Freeman to make me better to go home to Mama. P.S. I am Florence, 0724. * * * * * * After that second update, I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach; something bad was going to happen to Florence. In my heart I wanted to be able to hold her, to console her, and tell her everything was okay but she lived 100 years ago. She feels so real, and her problems so relevant, that it’s hard to believe this happened so long ago. With a heavy heart, and a stomach full of butterflies, I continued reading the journal. May 1918 I’m not sure what day today is, but I think it’s still May, because I don’t feel 11 yet. I think if it was past my birthday I would feel a whole year older, and I don’t yet, so it can’t be June. I’ve been really busy getting better lately. Mary comes in every morning to give me my pills, but lately she’s got scratches on her arms and when I asked her where they came from, she just told me to take my pills. I don’t know if I feel better yet, but maybe it’s because we’re trying so many new things to help me! We do the water blasting every other day now, but we started a whole new thing to make me feel better. I don’t wet the bed anymore, so I think I’m better but Dr. Freeman says I’m not yet so we keep doing this new thing. They take me into a big room with lots of machines and wires all over the place. In the middle of all of these machines is a chair. They put me in the chair and strap my arms and legs in so I can’t hurt myself. Then they put on a headband on my head, and there are two little circles that go on either side of my forehead. I don’t really like this part, because it’s painful, but they turn the machine on and the circles on my head start to hurt really badly. They do this a couple of times and every time the circles hurt more and more. Sometimes I scream because it hurts, but most times I’m very brave. Usually, when we’re done, I take a wheelchair back because I’m just so sleepy, and I get bruises on my forehead. Mary doesn’t like when I get this treatment. Her face goes all white and she helps me into bed with a pat on the head like she does. My roommate 0698 is gone now. I don’t know where she went, and no one will tell me when I ask, so I stopped asking. The screaming still happens in the middle of the night, but I’ve seen that a lot of patients, people that were here when I came in, aren’t here anymore. I don’t know where they went either. For now, I’ll just keep doing my treatments and hopefully, Mama will come get me soon. I’m 0724. June 1918 Mary told me I’m 11 now. I don’t know what day it is, but Mary said it’s past my birthday but I don’t feel 11. I still feel 10, but I don’t feel very much anymore. The painful circle treatment has been happening more and more and I’m sleeping a lot after it. Mary always comes in late at night to stroke my head, and sometimes lies with me in my bed when I’m asleep, without my realizing it, and I wake up with her beside me. Mary came into my room late tonight, after everything was dark, and told me she had a secret. She said I have to write everything down in my diary and hide it so no one can find out what we did. She said that we have to go and leave really soon. I don’t know how I can leave I’m so tired all the time, but she said we have to because soon Dr. Freeman is going to put an ice pick inside my eye just like that day on the stage. That scared me because she screamed really loudly, and I don’t want to hurt any more than the circle treatment. She said she doesn’t want me to get the ice pick, so we have to leave. That she’s going to take me far, far away, but I have to pick a new name so that no one knows who I was here at the hospital. I can’t remember my full name, but I think I’m going to pick Margaret. I don’t know why but that’s a pretty name. Mary said we’re going to go real soon, so I have to go to sleep to get enough rest to go far away. P.S I’m sorry I forgot my name, Mama. June 12th, 1918 My name is Mary Baker, and I am a nurse at Kings Park Psychiatric Hospital. I felt the need to complete 0724’s diary so that whoever finds this can get a complete picture of the horrors that were done here. There was nothing mentally wrong with 0724. I knew it, and the doctors knew it, but her parents dropped her off here and we had to treat her like any other patient. That is, until Freeman came along. He said that 0724 was some sort of psychopath, and needed to be dealt with. That’s when he started to increase the frequency of the hydrotherapy, and even threw in electroshock therapy. That poor little girl doesn’t know what is happening to her, but she is the bravest girl I have ever met in my four years working at this dreadful place. I know that 4 years is a long time, but let me tell you, whoever finds this diary, what I did to help the patients here. Every night, I would take a look at the list of the next patient to undergo that terrible “therapy” that Freeman calls a “Lobotomy”. It’s monstrous if you ask me. I would look at which patient was next to receive that treatment, and quietly slip into their room, and kill them. Make it look like an accident so no one suspected me, and silently save them from becoming a pawn in their game. The patients call me the “Angel” since I come every night around the same time, and they’ve actually begun to scream when they see me walking the hallways. But no one has investigated because all these kids are just “crazy”. I had to face the facts, though. Death is preferable to living in a vegetative state, which is what most of them become. And when I realized that 0724 was next on the list, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I decided we’re going to escape. Her parents obviously don’t care about her, and I do. I’m taking her away and we’ll live off the grid. Change our names, move far away, and no one will ever know. No one will ever miss us. So whoever finds this and reads this, you know the facts. Mary Baker and whoever 0724 was, no longer exist. I handed the diary off to Florence’s family, and needed a good while to wrap my head around what happened. Mary was an angel of death. She killed the patients that were going to be lobotomized because that’s what she thought was the right thing to do. She left this journal for someone to find, so that she can make amends with what she did. She couldn’t keep it bottled up inside, and couldn’t just stop and leave without saving Florence, so she just left and took Florence with her. I hope to God that Florence was safe, and able to live out a happy childhood, but with Mary, I just don’t know.

19 minutes

November 22, 2019

Children and Childhood, Jobs and Occupations, Journals and Diaries, Madness, Paranoia, and Mental Illness, Science and Experimentation

Upon The Altar

Alex Taylor, computers, dark web, deep web, Unfriended

The storm made the city street a blur to Tim Avery as he walked rapidly down the sidewalk. Rain fell just heavily enough to make people run to their cars or take shelter in the shadows of store awnings. To Tim, however, walking through the rain seemed right. It felt like it might cool off the quietly seething anger building in his chest. It might have helped if not for the chaos of the traffic to his right. It was rush hour and the motorists felt no need to drive carefully through the rain. Lights flashed. Horns blared. Every few seconds, a tire would veer into a puddle and water would spray over the sidewalk. Inside his head, Tim replayed the previous hour of his life. He’d just come home on spring break from his final year of college. His parents had been so proud that he was about to get his degree in business management. It had been the plan for his entire life it seemed. He was supposed to get a perfectly respectable degree, find a perfectly respectable job, and have a perfectly respectable family. But, after four years of it, Tim had realized something. He hated business. So, coming home from college for the week, he had informed his parents that he planned to enroll in art school and follow his dream of being an artist. It had not gone well. The phrases ‘throwing your life away’ and ‘you’re not that good’ had been said. That was when he had left and decided to take a walk, despite the storm outside. A clap of thunder brought Tim back to the present. Looking around the street, he realized that while he had been lost in thought he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere. The buildings looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place exactly where he was. There was a seedy-looking bar, a generic-looking internet café, and a pawn shop with a half-unlit sign. None of the other buildings looked inhabited. They were just broken-down storefronts with darkened windows that seemed to stare at him. As Tim stood looking into one of the dark windows, a small figure came out of nowhere and ran into him, nearly sending him sprawling onto the wet sidewalk. Catching his balance, Tim looked around for the kid, hoping he was okay. He heard footsteps in the puddles behind him. Spinning around, Tim saw them running away. For a split second the boy turned his head back and looked Tim directly in the eye. He couldn’t tell what it was, but something about the boy’s eyes seemed very wrong. Before he could figure out what, the kid had turned down another alley and disappeared. Tim took a deep breath and decided that he had had enough of walking through the rain for one night. He looked briefly at the bar across the street. He couldn’t make out the name, but it was something that started with ‘R’. He could just barely see the dimly lit interior through the window. It did not look particularly inviting. He turned towards the internet café a few doors down. A white and red sign read ‘Angel’s Web Café’. Tim figured he could use an angel right then. He also figured he could at least check his social media accounts. Entering the building, Tim found himself in a long, narrow shop that was surprisingly busy. The place was dimly lit and had a strange white and black color scheme that didn’t quite work. The circles of computer stations in the middle of the room were packed with customers. It was a young-looking crowd and he didn’t see anyone he recognized. He also couldn’t see any open computers. He went up to the counter and waved to the girl working behind it. “What I can I do for you?” she asked. The girl had a jaded hipster look to her, but she seemed friendly enough. “Are there any open computers in this place?” “Well,” she said, her eyes scanning the room. “Looks like you’re going to have to wait for one to open up. I can get you some coffee or something in the meantime.” Tim ordered the cheapest thing he could find on the board and looked around the room again. There were some more secluded alcoves in the back of the building that he had missed before. The girl came back with his coffee and noticed where he was looking. “Those are just places to hook up your own computer. Your best bet is still waiting.” Tim nodded, paid, and went over to the little nooks set up against the wall. He figured he could at least sit down in one and have a little privacy while he waited. He passed by the first few stations, heading for the one in the far corner of the building where no one could see him. Reaching the station, he found something that was somehow both surprising and perfectly normal: an abandoned laptop. Tim looked around the room to see if there was anyone it might belong to. There was no one at the counter. Everyone else was busy at their own computer. He walked over to the nearby restroom doors and listened for anyone that might be inside. He heard nothing. Tim slowly drank his coffee as he wandered back over to the laptop. The black exterior didn’t seem to have any logo or brand on it. A pair of earbuds rested neatly on the top of it. On any other day, Tim was not the type that would open up someone else’s laptop. But there was something about the night, something about the dimly lit room, and something about that jet black computer that made it not any other day. Taking one last look to see if anyone was watching, Tim slipped into the chair and opened up the laptop. Hitting the power button, he could only imagine what crazy stuff might be on it. He was almost disappointed as the desktop opened and there were only two icons: ‘My Computer’ and ‘Recycle Bin’. Tim sighed, mostly in relief. He supposed he didn’t need anything else exciting to happen today. He was reaching to close the laptop when he spotted a strange icon nestled in the bottom left of the screen. The best he could describe it would be a strange cross between a setting sun and a compass rose. He stared at it for a while and then scanned the room in front of him one last time, making sure no one could see him. He clicked the icon. The screen immediately turned pure white. A larger version of the symbol faded into the middle of the screen, surrounded by the words ‘Western Crossroads’. After a few seconds, the logo disappeared and the screen changed to what was unmistakably a web browser, albeit one he’d never seen before. Most of the buttons were just symbols that he had never seen before. A thought occurred to Tim that chilled him. He’d heard of browsers that people could use to go to parts of the internet that were way off the beaten path. Western Crossroads had to be a dark web browser. He’d never looked into the dark web before. He’d just heard the same generic stories everyone else had. For all he knew, it was nothing but drugs, terrorists, and hitmen. It was at that moment that he saw a star button that had to be something like a list of bookmarked sites. Tim hit the button and a list appeared on the side of the browser. There were four bookmarked sites and they were all written out in a language that Tim had never seen before. A resounding bang of thunder came from outside that seemed to shake the entire building. Tim had to grab the cup of cheap coffee to keep it from falling on the floor. There was a wave of murmurs from the main room as the customers settled down. Tim looked back at the screen and found that the sites on the list were now in English. They still made little sense, but at least he could read them. The top site read ‘Library of Entorum’. The icon next to it looked like it was supposed to be several books stacked by each other. For some reason, Tim thought it also looked strangely like the bars on a cell door. The second listing just said ‘Mr. Deal’ with a blocky symbol that seemed to be a mountain split down the middle. The third site was something called ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’. The symbol next to it was a blue flame. A feeling in Tim’s gut told him to stay far away from that site. That left only the final listing. ‘The Altar’ was the last site. The symbol next to it was two snakes facing each other, fangs bared. Just as he had been drawn towards the laptop, Tim felt drawn to those two words. Without a second thought, he clicked the site. A smaller window popped up in the middle of the screen. It looked like some kind of streaming video with a small chat box to the right of it. At the moment, the only thing visible was the same symbol of the two serpents. They looked vaguely like art he had seen from Aztec and Mayan ruins. Streams of red and silver flowed out of the wide-open jaws and formed a waterfall between them. The screen flashed briefly and the window went full screen. Above the chat log at the side, a number began to count up. User names began filling the log. The number stopped at 43. None of them typed anything into the log; not even a greeting. They were waiting. The user names were random groupings of letters and numbers, completely anonymous. They didn’t have to wait long as the video flashed and began streaming. Tim quickly grabbed the earbuds from next to the laptop and shoved them into his ears. The only things he could see on the screen were a wide glass screen and a floor made up of large, carved stones. The sound of running water was all he could hear. The room was filled with a dim flickering light that cast strange shadows onto the stone floor. As he stared at the image the light became brighter and it slowly dawned on Tim that what he initially thought was a screen was in fact a wall of falling water that flowed so perfectly that it shone like glass. The entire scene strangely reminded him of death and decay. He briefly thought about slamming the laptop shut and running back out into the rain, but the thought was quickly dashed away as a figure stepped out of the shadows and into the view of the camera. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen!” said the man in a deep, commanding voice. “And welcome back to The Altar!” The man had an accent that Tim couldn’t place. It was deep and guttural. He was dressed in an immaculate charcoal suit, completed with a silver and red striped tie. Tim barely noticed the suit as he stared at the man’s face with disgust. It was a vaguely Middle Eastern face with a shaved head above it. What made it remarkable were the serpent tattoos covering the majority of his face. Even now, as the man smiled pleasantly, he was terrifying. “Now, I’m sure we have a few newcomers here,” said the man with a wink. “We always do. So let me introduce myself. I am the purveyor of hopes and dreams! The granter of wishes! The high priest of your own personal religion! You can call me Tezcat.” Tezcat walked nearer to the film of flowing water, his shadow taking on a strange shape in the flickering light on its surface. “Now, in a few moments, I will begin the auctions, so I will remind you of the two rules of bidding. Number one: your money is no good here. Number two: All sales are final. No returns. And, yes, some of my lots may seem too good to be true. But, I promise that satisfaction is guaranteed. Now, let’s begin. Lot number one, ladies and gentlemen!” Tezcat motioned to the wall of water behind him and an image of a cartoon heart appeared in the flowing liquid. Tim couldn’t tell if it was being projected onto it or if it was being added digitally. “True love!” said Tezcat. “Yes, that’s right! For the right price, the object of your desire will fall head over heels in love with you! No drugs! No hypnosis! No brainwashing! Just a tiny nudge in the right direction that they won’t even notice.” The image in the water disappeared and was replaced by the faces of several random people. Tim didn’t understand until an image appeared that he recognized. It was the face of a classmate he’d had an unhealthy obsession with a year ago. His jaw dropped. There was no way anyone could have known he’d be in this café, looking at this exact site at that exact moment. The only explanations were a one in a trillion chance, some incredibly intricate practical joke, or…it was real. Someone in the chat room quickly bid. ‘Ten million dollars’ appeared in the log. Tezcat produced a tablet from somewhere and watched the screen. A scowl came onto his face. “What part of ‘no money’ is difficult, people?” He snapped his fingers and the bidder was instantly removed from the room. “Now, do we have any real bids?” There was a long pause. Tim felt extremely uncomfortable as Tezcat continued to smile knowingly at the camera. He had no idea what kind of bid the auctioneer was waiting for. Finally, one of the users typed ‘my sense of hearing’. Tim stared at the four words in disbelief. He couldn’t believe some crazy guy actually bet something like that. Tezcat looked at his tablet again and grinned from ear to ear. “Well well well,” he said. “Now we’re talking.” He tapped something onto the screen and began scrolling. “Hmm…you have considerable resources. Low-stress lifestyle. High intellect. It’s a sacrifice to be sure, but I think someone can do better. Prove me right, ladies and gentlemen.” There was a far shorter pause this time. It was only a couple of seconds before some typed ‘1998’. Tezcat checked something else on his tablet. Tim gawked at the screen in further disbelief. “A year out of your life is always a gamble,” he said. “So, let’s just see what happened that year. Daughter’s first words…learned to ballroom dance…oh, there we go. Father apologized for never being there. Giving up a turning point in your life? Acceptable. Anyone else?” Tim was in awe of the scene taking place before him. He could just barely manage to believe in whatever psychic powers the host was promising he had, but ripping the years out of a person’s life? What kind of insanity had he fallen into? Another person typed out ‘my guitar playing’. Tezcat raised an eyebrow and ran another check on the bidder. He smiled broadly again, but it seemed more artificial than before. “Giving up the very hopes and dreams that keep you going? Hoping that your true love is worth giving up the only thing you can do well? Throwing away years of planning and fantasizing? Ripping out your own heart? Now that, my friends, is a bid. Going once.” Tim didn’t know if he believed any of it yet, but he could feel that the last bidder believed it enough to give up everything. “Going twice.” He paused for a moment, holding out for more bids. “Sold, for your hopes and dreams.” The bidder disappeared from the chat room as a line appeared claiming that he had been ‘transferred to collections’. Their host snapped his fingers and the images in the water shifted again. Different scenes began to appear. There were people doing all manner of things, each with their faces just barely out of sight. A woman got out of a car and walked along a red carpet. A football player scored a touchdown in front of a crowd of thousands. A chill went down his spine as a man walked through an art gallery. More than one of the paintings was his exact style. Scenes continued to play as Tezcat spoke up. “And speaking of hopes and dreams,” he said. “Now, you too can have all the talent and resources needed to fulfill your deepest, darkest desires. One dream per customer. And you’ll still have to put in the effort, of course. This is always one of my favorite lots. It gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling on the inside.” He gave a short, deep chuckle. There was no hesitation from the crowd this time, as ‘my card collection’ appeared instantly in the log. It was followed almost immediately by several of the other users mocking him. Tezcat, however, carefully looked over whatever was on his tablet. “Forty years spent building a collection. Several extremely rare cards you care about greatly. A weak offering, I must admit, but still…acceptable. Next bid?” No one mocked the next bid as someone typed ‘med school’ into the log. Tezcat didn’t even need to look twice after seeing the bid. “Giving up your hard-earned career for a chance at fame and fortune? Medicine not the amazing life you imagined it would be? Just imagine, for so many people, what you’re trying to give away may just be what they’re bidding on. Accepted.” Not to be outdone, another user hurriedly typed ‘my maid’. With just two words, Tim’s understanding of the stakes of this auction was brought to a whole new level. These weren’t bids. They were sacrifices. He held his breath waiting to see if their host would accept a person as payment. As he looked over the information, a look came onto his face that Tim could only equate with a serial killer standing over a fresh body. “I’ve had people try to pass off employees and acquaintances as bids before. Their worth to you is, in reality, unbelievably low. However, you seem to be having an affair with this particular employee. And a lover is a much more valuable commodity. I will gladly accept that bid. And I doubt anyone can outdo that one. So, going once.” Tim remembered the art gallery he had seen in the water. He imagined what his life would be like. Rich, famous, his talents appreciated by the entire world. He remembered the argument at his home not even an hour ago. He remembered the outrage and indignation he had felt at his dreams being ignored. “Going twice.” Tim felt his fingers moving almost by themselves. “And…” He almost couldn’t believe it when he saw what was written in the log: ‘my parents’. Tezcat stopped mid-sentence with a look of mild shock that Tim would not have thought was possible a few moments earlier. “Now, that,” he said with barely suppressed glee. “Is a bid.” A few messages of disbelief filled the chat log, one reading only ‘good god’. “And I don’t think I have to ask if anyone can improve over that. Sold.” Tim stared at the screen for a moment, still in shock of what had just occurred. It had to be a dream or a hallucination. He wouldn’t be capable of doing that in reality. Right? “And, with that, let’s move onto our last lot of the night,” said Tezcat. Tim just waited for something, anything, to happen to make him believe that it was all a big joke. Instead, another huge clap of thunder struck the store and the lights went out. Looking down at the screen, he saw that the window had changed, reading ‘transferring to collections’. The lights in the store came back on after only a few seconds. Tim tore his eyes away from the screen, leaning out of the nook, searching for anyone. He was about to toss the laptop and run, when he heard the sound of someone clearing their throat. Looking back at the screen, he saw Tezcat’s face looking out at him. “Mr. Avery,” he said. “I think we should talk in person.” That was all Tim needed to hear. He slammed the laptop closed, tossed it onto the floor, and ran for the door. He barely registered as he ran through the café that the room was now entirely empty. It was the ‘Mr. Avery’ part that did it. Hearing his name come out of the mouth of the freakish host was the final straw. He reached the door and ran out into the night. The pavement was still wet, but the rain had stopped. The street was thrown into more vivid detail than it was before. The lights and noise of the vehicles in the street and the darkness of the empty buildings seemed to be pressing in around him, suffocating him. He stopped in his tracks, closed his eyes, and took a few deep breaths. It had almost started to help when he felt a drop of liquid hit his hand. Pissed that the rain was starting up again, he shook his hand hard, trying to dry it off. In the process of shaking it off, he noticed that the liquid on it wasn’t water. It was bright crimson. Feeling another drop on his back, Tim looked above him. The sign that had previously read ‘Angel’s Web Café’ now contained only the symbol of the two serpents. The streak of red was dripping on him. Spinning around, Tim found the street very different from what he remembered from only a moment before. Every car on the street had changed colors. A crimson taxi cab drove by with the symbol of the Western Crossroads emblazoned on the side. A metallic silver moving truck went by with the Altar’s symbol vividly painted across it. The buildings that had been dead and empty had strange lights moving within them. The one time Tim got a clear glimpse of them, they looked like dimly glowing eyes. Any chance that what he was experiencing was a dream was quickly going out the window. At that point, Tim was assuming that he was either dead or insane. The only place on the street that remained halfway normal was the run-down bar across the street. He made a quick decision and dashed into traffic, dodging one car, then two, then stopping in his tracks as a bus sped by in front of him. Each of the passengers had snakes tattooed across their faces. As soon as it passed, Tim sprinted across the last lane and threw himself at the door to the bar. Taking a few more deep breaths, he entered the bar, which the sign on the door told him was named Relk’s, whatever that meant. The interior of the bar was so generic it was almost painful. It just seemed to be a run of the mill dive. As Tim made his way to the bar, he took some consolation that the few patrons in the building looked normal. Reaching the bar, he slid exhaustedly onto a seat. He looked around for the bartender and found him speaking to a customer on the far end of the bar. That was just fine with him. He just wanted some time to process the fact that he’d completely lost his mind. He didn’t get that time. From directly behind him, he heard the same throat-clearing noise he had a few minutes before. Someone draped a charcoal suit jacket over the stood next to him. “Mr. Avery,” said Tezcat. “I’m glad we could talk.” Tim had no idea what to saw as he looked up into black eyes rimmed by the jaws of tattooed serpents. “I’m dreaming.” “No, you’re not.” “I lost my mind.” “Strike two.” “I’m dead.” “Sorry, but no,” said Tezcat, sitting down. “Not yet. At the moment, you are in possession of a great opportunity. You will have the talent and resources to become the greatest artist in the world. Think about it. You’ll be rich beyond your wildest dreams, world-famous, drowning in beautiful women. Celebrities and royalty will have your work on their walls and people will remember you for centuries.” “I don’t want it anymore,” said Tim. “Well, you did very much so for a moment there. And that is all that Relk and I need.” “Who the hell is Relk?” asked Tim, finally finding some nerve. “Relk. The Devourer. A god. And not the pathetic excuses for gods you people have these days. Relk is one of the true gods. The old gods, like Carn, Sted, Zatan’nataz. He walked the streets of his cities in the material realm, defended his followers to the end, and drank the blood of his enemies.” “I’m supposed to believe in gods now, too?” asked Tim. “Mr. Avery,” said Tezcat with a grin. “Where do you think you are?” He picked an empty glass up from the table and threw it at the backbar. The glass vanished into thin air before it struck. The walls around them shimmered. The wood and glass melted away into rough-hewn stone. The fluorescent light was replaced by flickering torches. He heard water running at his back. He turned to find the wall of falling water from the video behind him, falling into a shallow pool that ran along the circumference of the room. Turning back towards the bar, he found himself sitting on a short pedestal and leaning against a large stone altar. At the center of the altar was a human skull. Rolls of cloth were wrapped around the jaw and eye sockets of the skull. “This is the Tomb of Relk, Timmy, my boy. Well, a recreation of it. It’s a real place in the material realm, but people like myself can make a little home for themselves off the beaten path. I like using it for my streaming. It reminds me of the good old days.” “This is… in the dark web?” Tezcat broke out in a fit of hysterical laughter. “Oh, gods, no,” he said. “That’s just an entry point. You see, there’s nothing like raw human desire to create a gateway between two places. And let’s just say that your dark web abounds with that. Just like you.” “Not anymore,” said Tim. “I’m not letting you take my parents.” Tezcat took a deep breath and sighed. “Timothy, I’m afraid you don’t have a choice in the matter at this point. So let’s just get down to business and seal the deal.” He produced two small shot glasses out of his jacket and set them in front of Tim and himself. “I apologize about the…crudeness, but these things have to be done in certain ways.” With that, he took a small knife out of his pocket. It looked like obsidian to Tim, only it was green. With one sharp movement, Tezcat made a cut in one of his own wrists. He held his hand over a glass. Golden blood flowed out of the wound, quickly filling the small glass. He did the same over the one in front of Tim. The blood stopped flowing almost immediately. “So then,” said Tezcat, picking up a shot. “Cheers, Mr. Avery.” Tim just stared back into his eyes, a thought forming at the back of his head. He gripped the shot glass as lightly as possible and pushed it back slightly. The thought became more concrete. “You said this was called the Tomb of Relk,” he said. “So gods can die?” Tezcat rolled his eyes and let out a long breath. “In some ways, they can,” he said. “But it’s hard to keep a god dead. They died, they came back, albeit slightly different, and then they recruited people like me, an aspect, to go get souls for them.” “Wait,” said Tim. “Whose souls?” Tezcat’s eyes went wide as he seemed to realize he should not have opened that door. “The souls we bet? That doesn’t feel right.” “Mr. Avery, just drink and we can talk about this afterwards.” “It’s my soul, isn’t it?” asked Tim. “It’s because I bet a person. I sacrificed a person. That’s why you weren’t happy when the guy won with his music.” The realizations kept coming. “That’s why it’s an auction. Because people won’t sacrifice other people unless you force them to outbid someone. It’s a test.” “Yes, it is,” said Tezcat. “And you failed. Which means your soul has a mark on it. And when you die, Relk gets your soul. You don’t pass ‘Go’, you don’t collect two hundred dollars. No getting around it now, so drink.” “I didn’t fail yet,” said Tim, picking up the shot glass and waving it in Tezcat’s face. “Because you seem very determined to get me to drink this and seal the deal. I think that means I still have a chance.” “No, you don’t,” said Tezcat, his voice beginning to seethe. “Yes, that blood will mark you, but it’s also your only way out of this world. My world. So you have two choices now. You can drink, and go have an amazing, albeit guilty, life. Or, you can play this game and stay here in my world forever. And in here, I’m a god. I can make this your own personal Perdition.” “But my parents live.” “Who cares?!” screamed Tezcat. The pupils of his eyes narrowed into something like a snake’s or a cat’s. “They either die now or they die in ten years! They don’t matter! You don’t matter! Hell, I don’t even matter! The Devourer is above us all. Now, make a choice. Because, although I have all the time in the world, I dislike wasting it on nobodies like you. So either drink it and take the door out or stay in here and rot!” “What the hell are you?” asked Tim, hoping he could stall a little more while a plan formed in his head. Tezcat laughed and slammed a fist onto the altar. The room around them resounded with the impact. The cloth-wrapped skull in front of them fell on its side and rolled towards Tim a bit. “I was just like you once. I lived. I died. And then I made a deal, just like you. I got what I wanted, but the cost was high. I became a living incarnation of an aspect of a god. Sacrifice is what I am. And you are not leaving this place without one of your own!” Tim finally made his move. He grabbed the skull from the altar in front of him and slammed it into the side of Tezcat’s face. Bone crushed bone and golden blood flew through the air. The aspect hit the floor hard. Tim grabbed the shot glass of blood and ran for where he thought he’d entered the bar. As he ran, he dipped his fingers into the golden liquid. He had said the blood was a door. Tim hoped it was literal. Behind him, Tezcat let out a roar as he rose from the stone floor. “I am Tezcatlipoca, the Dark Reflection! I am Sacrifice! I am the Hand of Relk! And you have royally pissed me off, Timmy!” Tim reached the wall and started to draw. The blood began to glow dimly when it hit the wall of the tomb. He quickly dragged his fingers across the wall, making two vertical lines. As he completed the connecting line at the top, he heard ripping fabric from behind him. Turning around, he saw a sight he knew he would never forget. Tezcat had torn off his shirt and revealed his bare torso. His body was completely covered by tattoos of jaguar spots etched in bright silver ink. All along his arms and shoulders, curved golden spikes had been driven through his flesh. The gold and silver in his body shined in the flickering torchlight, as did his catlike eyes. That was when Tim realized the truth about who the man had been. He saw a flash, a memory almost, of Tezcat standing in the sunlight of a primordial world, atop a great stone altar in a golden city, a faintly pulsing heart grasped in his hand. The High Priest of Relk. As the monstrous figure began to move towards him, Tim turned back to the wall. The outline was glowing. It looked like it should work. But it needed something. Looking down at his hand, he saw the rim of the glass was coated in blood. Hearing footsteps only feet behind him, he pressed the glass against the wall like a doorknob and turned. The outline of the door flashed with a brilliant golden light. From behind him, the aspect of sacrifice screamed in rage and pain. In an instant, the light was all he could see. Tim wasn’t sure how long he was unconscious, but when he came too he found himself sprawled on the sidewalk in front of the dive bar, which the sign now said was named Ruby’s. The rain was still pouring down all around him. A few people gave him an odd look as they hurried by. He dragged himself to his feet and retreated beneath the awning of the bar. He grabbed his phone from his pocket as quickly as he could and punched in his parents’ number. The phone rang once. Twice. Three times. A click came from the other line. A wave of relief shot through Tim, but it was short-lived. “Hello, there, Timmy,” said a voice he now knew far too well. “I really have to congratulate you on that daring escape.” Tim’s stomach tied itself into an ice cold knot. “Where are my parents?” “Oh, they’re fine,” said Tezcat. “I just wanted to talk to you one last time.” “I’m going to have to watch my back, aren’t I?” “Yes, but not because of me. You see, despite that embarrassingly emotional display back there, I have to respect your passion.” “Bullshit.” “Now, now, Tim,” he said. “At this point, I am a businessman above all else. And it is not good business to carry on a vendetta based on one deal gone wrong. It would be a waste of time and resources to keep going after you when my website is still going strong.” “So why are you talking to me? Wouldn’t it be more fun to keep me looking over my shoulder?” “Yes, in fact, that’s part of why I’m talking to you. You didn’t really think it was dumb luck that that laptop was planted there and that you were drawn to it, did you? You have exactly the type of soul that aspects are drawn to; full of hope, dreams, desperation. There are plenty of other aspects that will sniff you out eventually. Ambition. Want. Creation. Just giving you a heads up.” “How nice of you.” “Good luck, Mr. Avery. Tela Ra’an ten’ashad.” “What the hell is that supposed to mean??” “Uh, Tim?” asked his father’s voice. “I just said ‘hello’.” “Uh, yeah, sorry. I was…talking to a guy on the street.” “Um… okay. So, do you need us to pick you up somewhere? The rain’s still coming down pretty hard.” “No, just wanted to check in. I think I’ll wait out the rain. I’m still thinking about what we were talking about earlier.” “You know we just want what’s best for you, right, Tim?” “Yeah, I know,” said Tim. “I’m just trying to figure something out. Talk to you later.” “Yeah, see you later.” Tim ended the call and exhaled a long, slow breath. He sat underneath the awning for a while, figuring o

19 minutes

October 14, 2019

Strange and Unexplained, Technology, the Internet, and the Deep Web

Dead Man’s Bluff

deaths, mad man, murders, Shannon Higdon, suicides

Jacob stumbled through the double-doors of the Atlantis Casino and into the crisp, night air; lurching to the closest decorative shrubbery where he proceeded to unload the meager contents of his stomach. He had never known this type of pain. When he was sixteen he had been jumped by a group of guys who proceeded to beat him to within an inch of death. The physical and emotional pain from the experience and subsequent recovery had been an incomparable low in his life…until now. No bones were broken now but his spirit was; crushed in a way he hadn’t imagined possible. He had leveraged every asset to his name in order to play in this tournament; a last ditch effort. For nearly twenty years Jacob Leroy had made an extremely comfortable living playing professional poker; having very nearly won the World Series of Poker twice. It had provided for a beach house and a city loft, several expensive vehicles as well as opportunities to travel the globe; all for sitting and playing a game he would have done for fun anyway. Not exactly the best of the best, he was the one thing that most players weren’t: consistent. Despite the natural ebbs and flows that come with the profession, he had managed to clear close to seven figures every year…until last year. It was an ebb of unprecedented size that coincided with the rest of his life crumbling away. First the domestic accounts, then the foreign accounts, then the stocks and bonds and then when luck could be no crueler, the possessions. They seemed to go the quickest, especially when he thought about the amount of time spent gaining them. Going to a pawn shop with his jewelry or motorcycle was one thing but when things like the couch and coffee table began to disappear it became obvious how bad a drought it had become to more than just himself. Jacob played the numbers and not the “feelings” of the game. There was a stringent set of rules he played by that always paid off in the long run. But the biggest hands of the last year saw epic failures of the odds. Like the all-in, ace high flush that lost to the straight flush; or the all-in, four of a kind kings that lost to four aces. There are bad beats and then there are brutal, bend you over beats that just shouldn’t exist. So many of those hands that held only infinitesimal chances of winning had beaten him in big situations he began to wonder if the whole damn thing wasn’t rigged. Time after time he would think there’s no way this can happen again…and then, what do you know? Finally he had reached a point of desperation that, while most poker players are familiar with, Jacob had never known. Every last thing he could liquidate, every favor he could pull, every loan he could take out (including groups not listed in the Better Business Bureau) and several trips to the blood bank gave him just enough for this last tournament. He was putting all his fish in one basket on this one. Just finishing in the top thirty would give him enough money to be able to pay off his debts and start fresh. Everything that he ever was or had was put into this tournament and as luck would have it, he got stuck with a “donk” on his first table. Donk’s were players who had no interest in winning at all. Usually millennials with too much money and not nearly the attention span for an entire tournament. Their thrill is messing with people, especially professional players. They want to see people lose big and rely solely on luck to do it. The donk on this night was a kid who wanted to be called Chriz-is, because apparently Chris was too mundane. From the very beginning this punk had gone all-in on every hand despite what he was holding; somehow knocking three players out in three hands with his suicide bluffs. Finally, after folding off nine decent pockets which gave way to a couple of straights and one flush, Jacob got a pair of aces. Chriz-is, of course, goes all in again with his reckless, kamikaze style, making it very clear that it was going to be the only way to see the flop. There was no way he could fold then. The donk wouldn’t let any real poker be played so this would be his best scenario. Not to mention, he would double his pot and move up considerably in the rankings early on. Jacob called the donk and saw what he expected, a three of hearts and a six of clubs; basically nothing: idiot poker. His joy compounded when the dealer flopped a red ace with a nine and a three. There was no way this jack-ass was going to beat his three aces despite his pair of threes and Jacob couldn’t help but to grin as he struggled to not bask in the kid’s anguish. But then the turn card was another three and there was a twinge of nervousness. It would take an absolute miracle for the donk to pull it out but he still had a chance. When the river planted the fourth three before them, Jacob doubled over. It was a gut shot and he felt it physically. Was it even possible that fate could be any crueler? His entire future, which has seemed so bright seconds before, was now destroyed as the dipshit across the table chuckled in his face. To him it was all a big joke and now, Jacob was the punchline. He wasn’t really sure how he made it out of the casino as it all passed as one big blur but once he was outside and his stomach was relieved of the only beer he’d had time to consume, his vision slowly came back to him although everything still seemed bathed in a red hue. What the hell was he going to do? For that matter, where the hell was he going to go? He hadn’t even played long enough to get a comped room and the thirty cents in his pocket wasn’t going to help at all. Having come on the bus, there wasn’t even a car for him to go sleep in. Jacob had literally lost everything to an asshole with a lucky four of a kind. Falling to his knees there beside his retch, Jacob couldn’t move. Both body and mind shut down entirely, shocked into submission and there he sat for nearly an hour. If it weren’t for the annoying laughter of the donk walking past him he might not have snapped back at all. Chriz-is was walking with an attractive young lady in a short skirt, probably a pro, and yammering on about what a talented and calculating poker player he was while the young lady laughed insincerely. They didn’t see him and he found himself rising up and following behind them quietly. There was no plan involved, just a pure seething hatred that urged him to stay behind the couple. Blocks began to pass and Jacob was wholly unaware; singularly focused on the back of the little punk’s head. He had never considered himself a violent man, let alone one capable of killing, but in this moment…he wasn’t sure anymore. Suddenly, they’re in a stairwell and he’s following behind. Several flights pass and then they’re all outside again. They were on the roof of a carpark and the donk was clicking the alarm on his Lotus Sport 380 while the girl gushed over the supercar. It wasn’t until they were at the doors that they noticed Jacob. “Yo? You sneakin’ up on me asshole?” The kid, clearly pasty white, tried to add a stereotypical ghetto emphasis to his vernacular; what many would call a “wanna-be”. “What the fuck you want, O.G.?” Jacobs balled his hands into fists as blood filled his cheeks, but he couldn’t speak; couldn’t really move at all. “Wait…I know you.” Jacob could see the recognition in the younger man’s eyes. “You that pathetic dude I wiped with the dem’ quad threes.” He laughed cruelly and stepped up to Jacob until the two men’s faces were inches apart. “You got sumptin’ you wanna’ say about it grampa, then step up. Go ahead yo, if you feelin’ froggy.” Jacob’s teeth were gritted so hard his head began to ache and every ounce of his being wanted to start swinging at the younger man. He had nothing else to live for anymore anyway, so what difference did it make? If he somehow went to jail because of it then at least that would be a place to spend the night. There were no rational reasons he could come up with to not attack but something he couldn’t place wouldn’t let him; something deep down that held him like a statue. It was the same mechanism that holds a deer in the headlights and that’s what he was. It was like his “flee or fight” instinct just wouldn’t kick in; he was frozen. Chriz-is lunged at Jacob causing him to flinch instinctively. The younger man only laughed and began to walk away. “You ain’t doin’ shit, old man.” Jacob screamed at himself internally to rush forward and pour every ounce of his anger into the little shit’s face; but he didn’t…he couldn’t. Unable to move or speak, he only watched as the kid got into the supercar with the prostitute and then as he paused on the way out to spit through the window into his face. Blinding rage kept him in the same spot for a full minute after he heard the roaring engine drive away and out of his life. What the hell kind of man was he? Not only does he let the punk essentially end his career but then he stands by to be insulted and spit upon. The anger continued to bubble as he made his way to the edge of the carpark’s roof and it was completely focused on himself. He was a spineless coward and there was really nothing left in this world for him other than to endure one last insult and then end it all. Jacob climbed up to the edge and peered down. There really was nothing left to live for; his soul filled with hate and regret, he just wanted it all to be over. So tired of the anxiety and fear of losing everything and then the pain of actually doing so; this was the best decision. There would be scary people wanting money looking for him very soon anyway. Staring down at the concrete sidewalk four stories below, there was no doubt in his mind. That was where is wanted to end up; nothing more than a stain for some poor city worker to clean up. Except…he couldn’t do it. He wanted to; really wanted to; but just like he froze when it came to standing up to the punk several years his junior, he was stuck again. His brain screamed at his body over and over to jump, but the muscles refused to respond. Trapped in a state of catatonic stupor tears began to fill his eyes. It was impossible to imagine being any more disgusted with himself. He wanted nothing more than to take one step forward with the stoic determination of a Japanese warrior committing hara-kiri and he was unable to achieve even that small feat. “You need a hand there, buddy?” Low and gravelly, the voice came from behind Jacob; startling him nearly over the edge by itself. “Who’s there?” Jacob called back, not even able to turn his head in his momentary state of rigid immobility. “Just a guy, buddy.” Jacob felt a hand pat him on his lower back. “Just a guy who doesn’t seem to be having as bad a day as you. You planning on jumping?” There was something about the candid nature of the man’s question and the irrelevant nature of his voice when he asked that brought about an honest response. There was an irrational comfort that he felt immediately; as if they were discussing the weather or UNLV basketball. “Yea…that was the plan.” “But…?” the man behind him pressed. “But…I can’t do it.” “You want to live then?” “NO!” Jacob screamed. “No, dammit, no. I want to be dead more than anything in the world. I just…can’t. I don’t know why. I mean, it’s just one step. One little step and this nightmare can be over with.” “Well, gee whiz buddy, that sounds rough.” The man’s wording could’ve easily been construed as sarcastic were it not for the sincere nature of his voice. “Is there anything I can do to help?” Jacob needed only a spilt second to answer. “Push me. Please…just push me.” “Oh wow buddy, you really want me to help kill you?” He sounded almost amused. “More than anything. I’m begging you. Please help me.” After a moment of silence the man replied. “Okay, buddy. You seem like you’re in some real need of help. I can help you with this problem. But…not here. Not like this. I’m not trying to spend the rest of my life in prison for aiding you in your time of need.” As soon as he started with the word “okay”, Jacob’s muscles began to untighten slowing releasing their control back to him. He felt man grab his hand to help him to turn and climb down from the short wall as he spoke. “I know you probably think it’ll just look like a suicide, but…hell man, you’ve seen those shows: Law & Order, NCIS and such; there’s no telling what kind of evidence that I could leave behind. You don’t want Olivia and Stabler puttin’ me away too, do ya?” Jacob shook his head and now, with both feet firmly on the ground again, was able to get a good look at his new companion. A little ashamed of the thought, his first reaction was that the man was homeless. There were plenty in the area, often appearing much like him with ragged clothing that never seemed to fit quite right; the pants too short, his shirt too big and a coat which practically buried him. His shoes were wrapped tightly with the same grey duct tape that covered several holes in his pants and coat and somehow seemed to hold his entire outfit together. The man was short, maybe not even five feet tall, with unkempt hair and a scraggily long beard that hung to the third row of buttons on his coat, if the coat still had buttons. He carried with him an odor that can only come from not showering in many, many months; not a body-odor scent necessarily but more like the smell of dirt itself or a moldy, old house. It wasn’t pleasant, but also not unpleasant. For reasons too random to question, it brought about images of his grandparent’s attic he had spent so much time exploring as a small child. “So if you really want me to help you to…oh, let’s say, kick the metaphorical bucket, then you’ll need to work with me. We’ll need to go someplace else for starters; someplace safe to do what we need to do without any…issues.” Jacob just nodded. In his current state of mind it made perfect sense. On top of everything else, he didn’t want to be responsible for ruining someone else’s life as well. If this man was really willing to aid him in his effort then he would definitely do whatever he said. “Do you know someplace like that?” he asked. The wild looking little man smiled enormously in a manner which would make most people cringe but which Jacob found reassuring; he really didn’t care about anything at this point even if it meant going to an unknown location with a possible crazy person. That was probably the only type that would help him now anyway. “Oh yes, my friend, I have exactly the perfect place in mind. Why don’t you come with me then?” Jacob couldn’t find the downside and followed the other man to the stairwell. As they made their way down to the base level of the garage they spoke briefly. “By the way, buddy, what’s your name?” “Jacob…and yours?” “They call me Leon. Lean, laughing Leon, livin’ like a lion; lovin’ like a liar. That’s what they say anyway.” Leon was obviously out of his mind. When they reached the bottom Jacob asked, “Why are you going to do this for me Leon?” The question stopped him in his tracks and he turned to look back at Jacob. “I don’t know if I can answer that yet, Jacob. You got your reasons for wanting to check-out and I got my reasons for wanting to help you. Maybe when we get to where we’re going I can answer that for you, but for now…” he patted Jacob on the arm. “For now let’s just get to where we’re going.” Where they were going turned out to be a door in the basement of the garage that level to a sewer system access tunnel. They passed several “authorized personnel only” signs on the way but Jacob was well beyond caring. Knowing death was imminent and embracing it even was liberating in a sense. It gave him the freedom to look beyond the traditional societal constraints or at very least not give a damn about them. The tunnel turned into another one and then another until Jacob was completely disorientated and placing his full trust that Leon was actually leading them somewhere. It was dark except for the occasionally placed service light that provided very little actual light and the smell of damp urine and other un-pleasantries hung in the air. After a short while they stopped in the middle of a tunnel and Leon bent down to remove a metal grate from a side panel. “We’re going in here.” Leon motioned. “You’re kidding?” Leon just chuckled. “We need privacy. Trust me…no one’s following us in there.” Leon climbed through first; reluctantly Jacob followed struggling to fit through in a way that Leon didn’t. A short crawl through the vent led to a larger room which was apparently Leon’s humble abode. “Make yourself at home,” he said as they shambled in. Once Leon lit a gas lamp Jacob was surprised to see the number of amenities the little man had actually managed to bring in. There were several chairs, a table, a mattress in the corner and even a television hooked up to a portable charger which baffled the mind as to how it was even brought in. It was far from the lap of luxury but at the same time held a degree of homey comfort that was wholly unexpected. Two of the walls were adorned with pictures cut from magazines; a third wall held a number of sewer system maps, while the last was filled with a large, red pentagram. Jacob gasped in surprise. “Is that…blood?” Leon chuckled again. “Oh no. Of course not. It’s Valspar Premium Latex. Although, I believe the color was ‘blood red’. Actual blood would never have stayed that red. It tends to brown with time. So…not great for decorative purposes.” He motioned to a chair. “Have a seat Jacob. Let’s talk about this for a bit. Make a plan so to speak.” “I don’t need to know why you’re doing this for me I guess.” Jacob pulled up a seat next to Leon so they were face to dirty face. “I guess all I’d ask is that we make it quick and as painless as possible.” Leon nodded. “I can do that. I’m not wanting to cause you any physical pain. I’m here to help.” Jacob was grateful. He would have been lying if he had said the thought hadn’t occurred to him in the tunnels that he was heading straight into a scene from one of the “SAW” movies. It was an acceptable risk however; he would do whatever was necessary to end this pain and if that included some degree of torture then…so be it. “I have just what you need.” Leon jumped up and began digging through a box in the corner. Jacob watched him for a moment but there was something about the pentagram that drew his gaze. That was where he was looking when Leon slid the needle into his neck and injected him with…something. The room began to fade to dark and realization that he was going to pass out came only a split second before the action. Jacob slept for a while; a dark, dreamless sleep and he had no idea how long it had lasted when he awoke. As consciousness returned, panic came with it. Jacob couldn’t move his arms or legs. It took a great deal of effort to even open his eyes and when he did Leon was there before him. “Hey sleepy-head. Glad to see you’re back.” As hard as it was to move his eyelids, his mouth was that much more difficult; Jacob’s tongue felt like it was wrestling through molasses to get the words out but somehow he managed. “What…did…you…do to…me?” “Relax Jacob. You said you didn’t want the pain…right?” Leon leaned forward and flicked the middle of Jacob’s forehead with his finger. There was an audible pop in his head and a sense of reverberation…but…Leon was right: he couldn’t feel it at all. “You see, my friend. I could chop off both your arms and legs and you wouldn’t feel a thing. I realize the not being able to move is probably a little un-nerving, but…well, I think the trade-off is worth it; don’t you?” Jacob did. He was actually overwhelmed by the action and tears blurred his vision a bit. This was really going to happen; the pain was really going to come to an end. “Thank you…Leon. I don’t deserve this. Thank you.” Leon nodded. “Yea…ok. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I haven’t actually done anything yet. I have to be honest Jacob. I’m not sure that I can kill you yet.” “What the hell?” Jacob tried his best to yell. “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to. Let’s see…how do I say this?” Leon’s brow furrowed as he struggled to explain. “I don’t have a problem ending your life buddy, but you have to convince me that I should. As it stands, I can’t kill you. I’m not sure you’re…ready.” “I’ll beg you if you want,” Jacob cried, “Please, I’m ready. I need to die.” “Well, you see, that’s just it. Look, I know you don’t understand.” Jacob didn’t. “But all I’m asking is that we sit here for a bit and talk. Tell me more about yourself and your situation. After all, you might be leaving this world but I’ll still have to live with this act. I need some more information to make this okay with my…religion.” Jacob thought he understood and that it even made some sense. “Religion?” he asked. “Not important for now. Besides, you’re the one that need to answer some questions.” Jacob nodded for him to continue as best he could. “What do you want to know?” “Great!” Leon clapped his hands together. “Where to start? Why don’t you tell me about your family Jacob?” Without thinking he answered, “I don’t have any.” “None? No mother, no father? No siblings?” “No. I never knew my birth parents. I was a ward of the state…grew up in foster care and orphanages for the most part.” “Your whole life?” Jacob let out an involuntary giggle as the notion of being on the world’s most bizarre talk show shot through his mind. It was all very surreal. “No…not my whole life. I was adopted by my foster mother when I was seventeen. I was practically on my own by that point anyway so it was mostly a symbolic act. But she did love me and I did love her. Her husband had passed away a good twenty years before I met her and she filled her life and home with children who needed it and although she’d adopted a lot of kids over the years, for one great year it was just the two of us. She’s the only family I’ve ever known.” “She sounds nice. Is she gone now?” “No. I mean…I don’t think so. We’ve not spoken for a while.” “What’s ‘a while’?” Leon prompted. “I don’t know. It’s been a number of years. I was travelling a lot and we just kind of…fell out of touch.” “But you still love her?” “Yea…of course. Very much so.” “She’s old now?” “Yea. Pretty old. Late seventies now, I think. Why do you ask that?” Leon nodded thoughtfully. “Just wondering how she’ll react when she finds out that you’ve died. If she’s old…well, it might not be too good for her.” Jacob hadn’t thought about that and suddenly felt shame. How would she react when she finds out? The last time they’d spoken she talked about having heart issues; there might have even been something about a pacemaker but he couldn’t remember. This was the kind of news that could kill someone her age. There was a period of silence while Jacob wrestled with the notion. Was this something he could really do to her? He was more than ready to end his own life but…he wasn’t ready to end hers. Finally, “Leon…?” “Yea buddy?” “What were you planning on doing with my body?” Leon crossed his legs and put his notched finger to his chin with a considerate expression. “Good question buddy. I guess I’m not too sure. I have access to a number of sewer maps so I could drop it off top-side in a number of places. Or…for that matter…I suppose there’s a number of places I could hide it down below as well. I’m open to suggestions, I guess. Do you have any requests?” “I just…I don’t know…I just don’t think I want Miss May to find out about my death.” “That’s your mother?” “Yes. May Sarah Leroy: Miss May” “And you think your disappearance will be easier on her?” Jacob honestly didn’t know. It was possible that she might not even know he had disappeared. He hadn’t tried to contact her in a long time and she was old. He might be able to spare her that way. “I think it might be best if I’m never found.” “Best for Miss May, you mean?” “Yea. That’s what I mean.” “Well that might be difficult. Might even involve a degree of dismemberment or some other method to destroy your remains entirely. You got any problems with that?” Jacob nodded his head “no”; or at least he though he did. When Leon didn’t respond he realized that the movement probably wasn’t as extensive as it was intended to be. He didn’t know what the hell the old man had injected him with but while he wasn’t entirely immobile; it was damn hard to move at all. Jacob had never realized at acutely attached his sense of touch was with his ability to control his limbs. It felt like Novocain for his entire body. “You have my permission to do whatever you think is best. Just promise me that you’ll go through with this. I just can’t…can’t…can’t do this anymore.” Leon smiled and patted Jacob’s knee despite his inability to feel it. “I give you my word Jacob. If you convince me that you’re ready then I promise I’ll go through with it.” Jacob was becoming slightly agitated but did his best to smile and nod. “So let’s continue then. Why don’t you tell me about your friends?” Jacob sighed. “I don’t have any.” Leon chuckled. “You didn’t have any family either…but lo and behold, we got a Miss May. Everyone’s got at least one friend; even me. You telling me you’ve never had a friend…ever?” “Well…I didn’t exactly say that. Of course I’ve had friends before.” “Ok then, that’s some progress. Why don’t you tell me about the one you considered your ‘best friend’? What is it they say…your B.F.F.?” The agitation began to rise a little. “I don’t understand why you want to know this stuff. What does this have anything to do with killing me?” Leon leaned forward and put both his hands on Jacob’s numbed knees. “This is no little thing you’re asking of me buddy. I think the very least you can do is humor an old man before you cast off your mortal coil. You’re not giving me anything for this job; and I can assure you, this is gonna be one hell of a job for me once you’re gone so you can just consider this your payment for services. Plus you’ve still not convinced me that you’re ready yet; and if I want answers to these questions to help convince me then perhaps you should just answer them.” Jacob sighed and pushed the agitation deep down. Leon was totally right. “Okay…you’re right. I’m sorry.” “It’s okay buddy; nothin’ to die over.” Leon chortled again and Jacob found himself beginning to find the old man’s quirky humor a little endearing like the Mad Hatter or Doc Brown. “And now back to our interview, ladies and gentlemen,” Leon turned to an imaginary audience, “where our new buddy, Jacob, was about to tell us about his B.F.F.” He turned back to Jacob and held an invisible microphone to his face before laughing again and waving it off. “Okay…” Jacob tried desperately to tune out the surrealistic nature of the moment. “Okay…I guess I’ve really only had one close friend. I’ve known a lot of guys from the poker tours that I liked and was friendly with; maybe grab a beer from time to time, but only one that I would have done anything for. I probably would’ve give my life for him if I could’ve.” Pain was evident in his voice and eyes which peered down at the dirty floor. “Past tense…I see. So your friend’s not with us anymore?” After a few seconds of silence Jacob answered, “No. Paul died a few years ago. He’d spent the majority of his life as an alcoholic; it finally caught up with him: liver failure. He was on a list for a while but we all knew it was bullshit; someone with that kind of history always gets pushed to the bottom if they even get on it at all which he had to pull some strings just to do. He was in the hospital for a week before he finally succumbed; hooked up to machines. Each day more machines. In the end he was put into a chemically induced coma and they were the only things keeping him alive. It was hell watching him wither away in just a few days.” Leon shook his head with sympathy. “Oh buddy…that’s really a shame. I’m very sorry to hear about that. Kind of ironic though, don’t you think?” This brought Jacob’s gaze back to his own. “What do you mean? What’s ‘ironic’ about it?” “Seems pretty obvious to me buddy; kind of surprised you don’t see it.” “Well I don’t; so enlighten me.” “Okay…don’t lose your head…yet,” another chuckle, “just seems to me that if you were ready to make the decision to check out then, you know…instead of now, then you could’ve saved your friend’s life. After all, unless I’m mistaken, you’ve got a perfectly good liver in you now. A liver that could have saved his…Paul, was it…Paul’s life; or even one that could save someone else’s life now.” None of this had even occurred to Jacob and even with his numbness he felt like he had been slapped in the face. “If fact,” Leon continued, “seems to me that you’ve got all kinds of organs that could be used to save several lives: a heart, liver, kidney…hell, they could probably use your brain at this point. Just seems a shame to waste it all.” Once again, the crazy, old man was right and it was starting to piss him off. He had been so cowardly and…selfish in his life and now in the hour of his death nothing had changed. Jacob had a good heart; he wanted to help people. Much of the money he had made over the years had been given to various charities and people he found in need. Now he had an opportunity to actually save lives in his death and he didn’t even have the balls to do that; spineless…just spineless. “You’re right Leon. You’re totally right.” Jacob shook his head, it was getting a little easier. “There’s got to be a way for me to give my organs to someone that needs them. Like…I don’t know…maybe drop my body off near a hospital or something and…with a note or something. That might work.” “Perhaps,” Leon replied, “but then, what about Miss May? If you give your organs away she’ll definitely know that you’re dead. Then maybe she’s donating her organs as well.” Jacob scowled. “That’s too far Leon! Don’t joke about her.” “Keep your britches on buddy. It may sound like a joke to your but ask yourself if I’m wrong.” Again, he wasn’t; it was starting to get old. This was turning into a decision involving the lesser of two evils. Leon kept going, “Let’s move on for now. Paul died and his was very hard on you. We don’t have to go into that. Have you never been married…no kids?” The question helped to disarm the quandary in his mind brought Jacob back into the moment. “No…not that I know of.” He was able to muster a small laugh at the clichéd joke. “I dated several women but was only serious with one: Sarah. We were engaged for a while but it just didn’t work out. In the long run, most of the women I was with couldn’t take the lifestyle that came with my profession.” “Cards right? Poker I think you said?” Jacob nodded. “Yea Poker. I was on the World Series of Poker tour. There was a lot of travel, a lot of late nights…a lot of women hanging around. You’d be surprised at the quality of the poker groupies; I was. We never got around to having any children, but we talked about it. I always wanted to be a dad, believe it or not. I guess it just wasn’t in the cards for me though; pun intended.” Leon didn’t laugh. “You’ve got some bad ones, buddy.” “What’s that…kids?” “No…puns. They’re not good. Coming from me that should tell you something. That being said; why can’t you have kids still? I mean, hypothetically speaking, since we know that you’re not going to be alive to do so, but was there some reason you couldn’t have met a different woman and have had children? Did you never want to do that; or was poker more important.” It was a little unnerving how the old man was getting into his head. “I…don’t know. I guess there’s no reason why I couldn’t. I just never met a woman on the pro circuit that I could have seen that working out with. You know what I mean?” “But you’re not on the circuit anymore; right? From what I could gather, that plays a large part in your decision to shove off, unless I’m wrong?” “Well, it’s not a simple as that.” Jacob paused. “But yea, I’m not able to play professionally anymore.” “So you could say that you entered a new portion of your life where it might be possible to meet a different type of woman; the type of woman you might consider loving and having those kids you wanted with?” Jacob had to think for a moment. Through all the anguish and pain of losing his old life, he hadn’t given any consideration to what a new life could be like. He could only see his current circumstance as a culmination…an ending; if he had his way, the ultimate ending. There had been no thought given to the possibility of happiness beyond this point; no credence given to the concept of a new beginning. Was it even possible? Could he find a life past this? Could he find love? The

25 minutes

December 7, 2017

Beings and Entities, Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Strange and Unexplained

The Little Wooden Box

It was your standard blue collar work day—in at 9, work for eight hours, out by 5. My dad was on his way home to have a standard blue collar evening when something not-so-standard happened. Driving home from work, his car was hit by some douchebag pickup truck driver on the freeway trying to merge into the fast lane—he merged into my dad, instead. My dad’s car was sandwiched between this big-ass pickup truck and the concrete divider—it came out of the accident looking like a Picasso rendering of a meat grinder. My dad fared only slightly better: he broke several ribs, and his left arm looked like it had been run through said cubist meat grinder—the surgeons couldn’t save it. The doctor said my dad was lucky to have lost his left arm, since he’s right-handed. Lucky, the doctor said. How is it they all have such God-awful bedside manner? My dad had to stay in the hospital a good two months—long enough to rack up a breathtaking amount of debt in the form of medical bills. When my dad finally got out, he was nowhere close to functional—he had a long road of physical therapy and routine hospital visits ahead of him before he could go back to work, assuming there’d even be a job left for him when he’d recovered. He was next to useless around the house; you’d never guess how much you have to use your off hand for, well, damn near everything. What this amounted to was a giant crock of shit for me, my mom, and my sister to deal with on a daily basis, to say nothing of how my dad must have felt: useless. Powerless. A burden to our family. I’m not telling you all this to get sympathy—my family and I have had our fill of that, and it doesn’t do much for anyone. I’m telling you this so you understand why we were so grateful for it at first—the little wooden box. My dad started seeing a psychiatrist about a month after being released from the hospital. He’s not much for getting mental help—one of those guys that seems to think people get fixed the same way cars do, and doesn’t understand why someone can’t just take a look under the hood and fix it themselves. But as he put it, he’d felt too shitty for too long, and had to do something about it. His doctor recommended the psychiatrist to him—about the only useful thing that doctor did. The psychiatrist, this dweeby guy with an equally dweeby Dr. Freud goatee, diagnosed my dad with “post-operative depression.” Not that terms like that tell you jack shit about what the person’s going through. After a couple unproductive sessions, the psychiatrist decides to try something “unorthodox.” The psychiatrist takes out this little box made of cedar, pine, or some other light wood. It’s small—you could fit a dime-store book in there, but not much else—and mostly plain: some modest scrollwork in the corners, but little else in the way of decoration. “Whenever you feel angry, or sad, or frustrated,” the psychiatrist says, “I want you to take some time to yourself, all right? What you’re going to do then is take this box, open it up, and stuff all the bad feelings inside. You keep doing that until you get all that icky stuff out, and when you’ve done that, you’re going to close that box, put it away, and you’re going to focus on getting better until you need the box again.” My dad spent a good hour stomping and swearing when he got home from that session—lots of talk about pretentious medical professionals, wasted money, and some creative ideas for alternate places the psychiatrist could put his little wooden box. I half-expected my dad to take out his frustration on the box, and break it in two; once he was done ranting and raving, however, he just set it on a shelf in my parents’ room. A week and a half after my dad got the little wooden box, my dad’s boss called the house. He told my dad that he had to let my dad go, and replace him—in plain terms, my dad was fired. Time is money, as the saying goes, and my dad was taking too much of both to recover. There was no screaming and cursing this time—getting fired took the fight right out of him. After hanging up the phone, my dad locked himself in my parents’ room. My mom and sister tried to get him to come out and talk, but he was having none of it. I almost decided to help, but I figured my dad might have needed a little time to himself. It turns out I was right—after three hours, my dad comes out of there with the biggest smile I’ve ever seen, and starts making mac and cheese for dinner. It was an absolute mess—he got flour and dry pasta on every flat surface of the kitchen, and the sauce was full of cheese chunks that he hadn’t been able to cut properly—but that smile never once left his face. And I’ll tell you what, that shitty mac and cheese was the best dinner I’ve ever had. It was all thanks to that box—my dad sat down with that thing for three hours, dumped all his frustration into it, and came out of my parents’ room a changed man. After using the box, he wouldn’t get discouraged when his missing arm stopped him from doing something—he’d just come back at it with twice the effort, and eventually he’d get done what he wanted to get done. He went to therapy with a smile, and came back exhausted, but still smiling. When things got rough—when his job search wasn’t going well, or the medical bills got too expensive, even if he just had a hard time brushing his teeth—he locked himself in my parents’ room with that little box, and came out a couple hours later ready to take on the world again. My family and I were grateful for that little wooden box. It was a godsend, when we needed one most. It’s not the nature of things to just magically get better, though—miracle wooden boxes aside. It started with little bumps in the middle of the night a week or two after my dad used his little box for the first time. Unsettling, but not too worrisome; my sister and I talked about it a little, but when you’re talking about it in the middle of the day, you find easy explanations. Older houses crack and pop as they cool off with changes in the weather; these explanations seemed thin when I sat in bed listening to noises that sounded not at all like “cracks” and “pops,” but I hung in there, and soon they were more of an annoyance than anything else. If it had stopped there, I might have contented myself with that easy explanation. It did not stop there, however. Bits of our house would go from warm to freezing in seconds; I’d never known our house to be drafty, so when my mom and sister chalked it up to seams in the house causing drafts, I had a harder time buying it. Now, a little about me: I’m a curious person. I see something I don’t understand, I stare at it, think about it, poke it and prod it, until I do. I’m not going to start jumping at shadows for no goddamn reason. But if it walks and talks like a duck… So, I did a little research. Our house was around a long time before we moved in, so I figured there might be an unpleasant bit of history that could shed some light on what was going on. I went the whole nine—went to the courthouse to get the original permit, asked around at the city planning department, checked newspapers. I expected to find an old owner who died tragically, or maybe a dysfunctional family that might have left some bad blood in the house. Instead, I found nothing. Nothing especially dark, at least, or even out of the ordinary; just a list of previous tenants, and an old article about my neighborhood’s construction. Skeptic that I am, I found myself a little disappointed. Everyone loves a good ghost story. I let the matter sit for another week or two. My curiosity had not been satisfied, however—and the bumps in the night, the footsteps where there shouldn’t have been any, didn’t let up. I was forced to consider a possibility I would have preferred to ignore—the little wooden box. I was sure it had nothing to do with anything, but I had a hard time convincing myself that it was a coincidence that everything started happening after my dad brought it home. I called up my dad’s psychologist. Hearing that my dad was putting the box to good use put him right over the moon; after he settled down a little, I asked him about the box. I half expected to hear that he bought it off some seedy vendor, or found it in the basement of an old mansion; I was disappointed to hear the profoundly mundane explanation that it was a woodworking project given to him by his nephew. Before I called it quits on my little investigation, I wanted to take a look at the box itself. I doubted I’d find anything, but if I didn’t take a look, it would eat at me until I did. My sister said I shouldn’t—it was an invasion of my dad’s privacy, she said—but I figured what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. So when my mom took my dad to therapy one day, I decided to check the little box out. The box wasn’t hidden, or anywhere out of reach—just sitting on my dad’s bedside table. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, exactly; I just wanted to look at it, if nothing else. Hold it in my hands, see if I felt any kind of vibe coming off of it. I picked it up, and was immediately struck by its weight. The wood wasn’t heavy—I remembered my dad waving it around after he first brought it home like it was nothing—but the box felt dense, somehow. I tilted the box in my hands—nothing inside shifted or rolled around as the box moved, though. Attempting to curb my curiosity a little—I couldn’t completely deny that I was snooping on something personal of my dad’s—I ran my hands over the scrollwork on the edges of the box, feeling the uneven finish along the sides. There’s only so much you can do with an empty box, however, so I decided to indulge my curiosity a little more, and open it. I had barely managed to open it a crack before I heard car doors closing—my parents were home. I hurried to close it and set it back on its table, and threw it into the wall by accident; it seemed half as heavy as it had before, though I had probably just adjusted to its weight. Setting the box down more carefully, I noticed an odd odor in the air—whatever was in the box smelled like burnt motor oil. I turned on the fan in my parents’ room, hoping it would take care of the smell. I dashed into my room as the front door opened, flopped on my bed, and opened up a book. My parents said hi as they headed back to their room, and closed their door. Fifteen minutes passed without incident—I decided I was probably in the clear, and breathed a sigh of relief. That night—maybe early the next morning—I was awakened by an odd noise. These were not new at this point, but I felt especially uneasy for some reason. I listened for a moment, hoping I could identify it as something 100% normal. I was somewhat relieved when I recognized it: TV static. Not wanting to add a high electric bill to my parents’ long list of worries, I willed myself to shake off my lingering anxiousness, and get up to go to the family room and turn it off. Walking into the living room, I saw a figure sitting in a chair in front of the TV—my dad, silhouetted by the static the TV was playing. I asked my dad what he’s doing watching static in the middle of the night. For a moment, he didn’t answer; then, in a tired voice I recognized from the first days after he came home from the hospital, he told me to go back to sleep, and stop bothering him. He picked the remote up off the end table to the left of the chair, and turned down the TV a little. I was more than a little curious about the sudden change in his mood from the past few days, but decided it would be best not to push the issue, and went back to my room. As I got into bed, something bizarre occurred to me—when my dad grabbed the remote, I didn’t see his shoulders move to reach across to his left. I dismissed it as my half-sleeping brain playing tricks on me, and tried to go back to sleep. As my sister and I got ready for school the next morning, my dad emerged from my parents’ room sleepy-eyed and yawning. My sister asked him if he slept well; he said no, he’d had trouble sleeping. I told him that looking at TV static in the middle of the night wasn’t likely to help a bout of insomnia—maybe not the greatest thing to joke about, but I get pissy when I don’t get enough sleep. My dad looked at me all confused. He asked what the hell I was talking about; I asked him what the hell he was talking about. Again, tact is not my strong suit when I’m tired. This carried on for a minute or two before my mom told us both to knock it off. When I’d cooled off a little, it occurred to me that my dad had seemed genuinely confused by my question—he didn’t remember me finding him in front of the TV last night. Maybe it was a weird side effect of the billion-and-one meds he was on. I thought nothing more of it until the week afterward, when I came home to find my sister having an argument with my dad. She was complaining that he had yelled at her from our parents’ room to stop making so much noise when she got home; my dad insisted he’d been napping for hours, and she was imagining things. When I walked into the family room, my dad stormed out, complaining about having to deal with this shit after his box broke. I asked him what was wrong with the box. I tried not to appear nervous, remembering my clumsy handling of it while my mom and dad were away the previous week. My dad said one of the hinges on it was broken, and it wouldn’t close all the way. I offered to try to fix the hinge; my dad just about lost his shit, threatening to ground me for half a year if I touched his box. We all stood glaring at each other for a minute before my dad sighed and left the room. He shut himself in my parents’ room, probably to use the box. My sister and I decided to focus on our homework until our dad came out. A couple hours later, he emerged from my parents’ room shuffling his feet and acting sorry. He apologized for yelling at us; he still didn’t remember hollering at my sister about making noise, but he apologized for it, anyway. We said it was okay, and went back to our homework. Not wanting to add to the increasing amount of eerie shit going on at our house, we tried again to find easy explanations. People sometimes get forgetful as they age—hell, I can barely keep my own schedule straight, and I’m supposed to be in the prime of my life. A guy in his mid-forties, with all kinds of drugs with unpronounceable names pumping through him all day? Things will get forgotten, and that’s likely to make a person a little frustrated—perfectly natural. Perfectly normal. This is what my mom told me and my sister when we talked to her about dad forgetting things we’d all seen or heard him doing. Neither of us believed it, and our mom knew it; our mom didn’t believe it, and we knew it. But that little box was what kept our dad going; none of us wanted things to go back to the days before the box, so none of us called anyone else out on our little merry-go-round of denial. These slips of memory got increasingly hard to ignore, and were never pleasant—it was always my dad yelling at someone, or stomping around upstairs while the rest of us were cooking dinner, or watching TV. We did our best not to point out these strange things—we talked about it amongst ourselves, but never in front of our dad. My dad isn’t stupid, though. He could tell that we were keeping things from him—try as we might, it was too difficult to know what he would and wouldn’t remember, and we might occasionally let something slip. When this happened—when any of us received that blank stare that meant we’d just mentioned something he didn’t remember—we did our best to change the subject, and keep from bringing it up again. My dad noticed when this happened, and that pissed him off royal—I guess that’s where I get my aggressive curiosity. This meant more and more time spent alone with the box to calm himself down. As my dad used the box more and more, however, his memory slips became more and more frequent—he would forget things more and more often, and his mood during these slips would get worse and worse. What started as irritability turned into rage—and eventually, violence. Late one night, my sister woke up to get herself a midnight snack, and found our dad standing in the middle of the kitchen with all the lights out, staring out the window into the backyard. She asked him what he was doing; he didn’t say anything. She told him to stop scaring her, and go back to bed. My dad still didn’t say anything; instead, he took a pan from the sink, and threw it at her. Thankfully, my sister was able to dodge it and run back to her room, where she cried herself to sleep. Naturally, my dad remembered nothing in the morning. That’s where I drew the line. I understood wanting to be considerate, and giving my dad some leeway on his road to recovery. But that shit was inexcusable, and my family deserved better than this Jekyll and Hyde bullshit—the next time my dad got into one of his moods, I’d call him on it. It would get ugly, but it needed to be done. I figured I wouldn’t have to wait long—I figured right. The night after I decided I needed to level with my dad about everything, I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of static from the TV. This would be the third time this month I’d find my dad sitting in the dark in the living room, staring at a dead channel on TV. Fighting a growing sense of unease at having to confront my dad, I got up and went downstairs to the family room. I found him just as I had before: sitting in darkness and silence apart from the static from the TV. By way of greeting, I told him he would have trouble getting sleep staring at the TV all night. He told me to mind my own goddamn business and go back to bed; that sent my politeness right out the window. I told him he had to cut this shit out—he was scaring the hell out of my mom and sister with his behavior, and it was tearing our family apart. He wasn’t doing himself any favors, either—he just ended up angrier, and was relying on that little box more and more. I told him he had to end the vicious circle here, and talk about what was bothering him, like an adult. My dad was silent for a moment. I nearly yelled at him to just say something—anything—when I noticed his shoulders heaving. I thought he might’ve started crying before I heard it—he was laughing. The old bastard was laughing at me. I told him that of all the reactions he should have to what I’d told him, laughter was the least appropriate. My dad got ahold of himself and said I should go get his box for him—we could talk after he spent a little time with it. I figured he was probably stalling, but I went to grab the box anyway. That laugh had severely unnerved me, and I wanted to get out of the room as soon as possible. I walked back up the stairs, and opened my parents’ door as quietly as I could. My mom is a pretty heavy sleeper—so is my dad, when he’s actually sleeping—but I didn’t want to be careless and wake her up on accident. My eyes hadn’t quite adjusted to the dark; not wanting to bash my toes on the furniture in my parents’ room, I turned on my phone and used the screen for minimal light. I aimed the weak light at the nightstand, and was surprised to see the box with its lid wide open. I walked closer and was hit with a strong odor—burnt motor oil. I moved to cover my mouth, and accidentally shined the phone light on my mom—and my dad. They are both in bed, sleeping. My dad stirs, and mutters something as he rolls over. I stare at my sleeping parents, uncomprehending. I start backing out of the room, shaking my head as if I can make sense of this mess with mindless denial. Backing out of the room, I bump into something behind me. I turn around and I’m greeted with a nightmare version of my dad. His eyes are bloodshot and glaring at me in abject rage, but they are also watery, leaking tears down his contorted face. His mouth is twisted in a grimace of pain—no, of anguish. I feel feverish heat rolling off of him, and I’m overwhelmed with waves of horrible feelings—anger, depression, pain, exhaustion, it all washes over me and I am paralyzed by it all and I can do nothing but gape at this warped twin of my dad. Before I can begin to process the horror standing in front of me, the thing wearing my dad’s face pushes me. I fall down the stairs as it looks at me with that horrible mixture of everything awful that a human being can feel. I hit the bottom of the stairs hard enough to knock the wind out of me; I try to yell for my parents, but I can’t get anything louder than a wheeze out. I look around to find something to grab onto and pull myself up. Before I can find anything, I feel myself being lifted by the throat. Already short of breath, I see dark spots appear before my eyes; before my vision fades completely, I see my nightmare-dad’s twisted face leering at me as he lifts me in the air with his left arm. His left arm. I look again at the arm that shouldn’t be there, and see blackened, shriveled skin—what little flesh it had was hanging off in decaying chunks, and bone showed through gaps in the skin. My stomach heaves to no avail as my throat is crushed, and my lungs burn. As I lose consciousness, a final disturbing thought fires through my dying mind. The thing holding me by the throat—this vision of rage and agony and misery that’s been haunting my family—I set it free. You don’t need to die to leave a ghost—you cram enough suffering into one place, force it from your head and into a plain wooden box for someone to open and unleash on the world, and you’ll get a tormented spirit as surely as if you’d died a tragic death. Looking at the thing one last time, its face contorted into a mask of misery as it holds me by the throat, I have just enough time to pray that my mom and sister don’t have to learn this the hard way. Credit To: Logan Falk

14 minutes

November 21, 2015

Artifacts and Objects

The Ragman

“He’s waiting, he’s watching. He’s biding his time. He stares as your sleeping, it’s just after nine. You‘re holding your blanket, In comfortable heaven. He’s sneaking towards you, the clock says eleven. You dream about candy, and chocolate and fun. He’s nearly beside you, it’s just turning one. You don’t see him coming, there’s no time to flee. You wake up, you scream. It’s his time. It’s three.” Old children‘s tale, The Ragman. I’ve always had a keen interest in horror. Ever since I was a young boy and my friend Richard and I used to sneak into his living room at night when I’d stay over. We’d stick on whatever scary film we could find on VHS or we’d turn on his TV and watch one that we’d spotted in the TV guide. I remember watching the movie ‘Halloween’ when I was roughly twelve. It terrified me, sent chills up my spine and made me peek over my shoulder for the next week but it intrigued me. I kept lapping up all the ghost stories and horror tales that I could get my hands on. I watched the Exorcist when I was fourteen and it freaked the hell out of me. I didn’t sleep for about a month I’d say. That was also roughly around the time that I discovered the delights of Stephen King and James Herbert novels. Nerve shredding chills on every page and there was just so many of them that I could barely have the time to read them all. No matter how old I got, no matter how mature I became, I never lost that spirit. That need to be frightened by a horror story or movie. That desire to feel terrified. That’s probably why I turned to writing horror myself. I just wanted to give someone else that thrill that I’d been seeking all throughout my adolescence. In time I unfortunately grew desensitized to scary movies and books. It‘s part of growing up. The feeling of fear when watching a terrifying movie alone with the lights off began to get diluted as I became older and I began looking for bigger and better scares. Searching for ghost stories or other tales of dread that people had told me were real became the next big thing. Not the stories that you might see on the TV screen and then switch off and simply try to forget. Not the tale in the pages of a book that’s escaped from by shutting it. I went from town to town and all over the web hearing all the ramblings of the paranoid and the true believers and after years of searching I found something. That experience with the truly macabre that came with the chill up my spine. The peeking over my shoulder. The difficulty of sleeping simply by knowing it. The most disturbing and heart retching, fear inducing tale of menace that I had ever heard. Well, to be honest, I am a little bias and I will tell you why. It’s simple, it happened to me. Here is my account with the entity known as ’The Ragman’. In my home you could find all sorts of horror paraphernalia. Old books, haunted dolls, crucifixes used during real life exorcisms and just about every scary movie you could mention. Give me a thunderstorm and a camera and I could give you a truly terrifying scene by simply filming any part of my house. Still, everybody has their vices. Mine was something I was proud of. It had become difficult to meet women though. Most of them couldn’t stay in my house too long and it’s no wonder why. There just simply isn’t enough cushions in the world to block your sight from that much frightening imagery. That is just the way that I am however, and say what you want about me. I don’t change to suit someone else, a trait that I find to be a rare quality. Let me start the tale of ‘The Ragman’ by giving you a little history lesson in folklore. While you may not be aware of it, the story has been around for centuries. Supposedly it was taken up by the Grimms brothers at some stage and became a fairytale of sorts. This of course was back in a time that all fairytales were darker and more chilling. Back in the day when Disney didn’t own the rights to them. When they had a more sinister effect on the imagination. Eventually it was forgotten as its details were known to be too grim (excuse the pun) for a child’s bedtime story. Parents refused to tell the story to their kids and it was lost over time. If you ask me, they were right to. I had never heard of the story, in all my years of researching tales of terror but that changed on the evening of November 12th. The date I received a painting. It was a morning like all others, nothing special or noteworthy about it, therefore, I’ll try not to bore you with the unimportant details of exactly what happened in work and get right into the story. I went to work, as I always do every weekday, for eight hours, in the planning and payroll section of the local authorities office. Sorting out invoices for local businesses and decades old planning files. Boring work basically, and like all other days I was glad and exhausted when the clock said five. I immediately went home eager to get online and talk to my friends over Facebook about a party which I had been planning for that night. Nothing special, just a couple of drinks, a scary movie or two. To celebrate the fact that it‘s Friday and I had the rest of the weekend to enjoy and because I still had Halloween fever. I always tried to remain social amongst my immediate circle of friends, most of them I had already converted into die hard horror fans. Some of them hadn’t quite become comfortable with it, which also suited me. If you’re not intrigued you’d be scared and that’s what it’s all about. I reached the patio doors at the front of the house and just as I was about to find the front door key hidden within the rest of my keys I spotted a package just inside the closed patio door. It was large, surrounded by brown paper and was covered with a two thin lines of white string, one horizontal, one vertical meeting in the middle in a large knot. I didn’t need to open it to know that by it’s dimensions it was some kind of painting or poster, framed, as the outline of the paper suggested. It had a small note attached to it, which I picked up and read. ‘Title: The Ragman. This should offer adequate material for a story.’ I was a little perplexed. It wasn’t entirely unheard of for people to send ideas, objects or pictures of a scary scenario to me. Normally it was done online and it almost always came with the name of the contributor so that they could have their names in the finished piece. But this trinket came with nothing of the sort. Not even a return address. Still, I was curious so I took it inside. After settling myself with a hot drink and taking my coat off I undid the string that hid the mysterious picture underneath. As the brown paper fell from view I was struck with the beautiful but haunting image that dwelled on the other side. It was a large painting, roughly three feet by two. It depicted the edge of some kind of haunted woodland on a mound encompassing the left portion of the painting, overlooking some kind of plantation style house and surrounding land on the right. The plantation land was being toiled by labourers and land owners that watched on, drinking some kind of iced beverage (I assumed) seemingly oblivious to a menacing and daunting, long limbed and aberrant figure standing on the mound at the foreground to the left of the scene. He was wearing some kind of strange pin striped, dark and ragged suit that barely covered the base of each of his twisted limbs. His fingers extended, pointing towards the house in the distance. They seemed disproportionate to the rest of his strangely thin body. He had an odd hunch on his back which facilitated a tear on the suit. He had badly worn shoes on his feet that were torn at the seams, much like the rest of his attire, and he pointed from the trees, into the direction of the house in the distance, his face trapped in some kind of twisted laugh. His eyes were pale and white, giving some kind of deathly omen and his smile stretched from one ear of his large head to the other, bearing gritty, yellowish teeth. His long, dark hair strewn past his shoulders. He seemed to even absorb the color from his side of the picture, leaving the whole tree line melancholic with a deep sense of foreboding. The picture genuinely unnerved me. I put it down, propped it up against the wall and examined it intimately, my eyes focusing on every detail, noticing that there was no date or artists signature anywhere to be seen. I felt a chill up my spine, that cold sensation I had felt when I was frightened as a young boy. Whoever sent me the picture had indeed given me good material, and I thought to myself ‘Bravo’. I hung the picture up in the spare room downstairs connected to the sitting room. It was originally a utility room that had been converted into a spare room by the landlord two years ago, right before I moved in. I would occasionally let a friend sleep in the room now as I didn’t have anyone else to share the rent at the moment. The picture sat above the radiator on the wall opposite the entrance to the room so that it could be seen from the living room if you simply kept the door opened. It would help with the inspiration. Later that night, one by one, my friends showed up. We partook in some drinks, put on a DVD in the background (not really paying attention) and discussed life in general but we also discussed the gift that I had received at great length. The painting became the life of the party as I mentioned it to everyone when they came in. People discussed the disturbing imagery in the painting, the fact that there was no name to take the credit for the painting and also the title. Like myself none of them had ever heard of ‘The Ragman.’ They all had their two cents on the art and then requested that I keep the door closed for the rest of the party which I did. It seemed a little too eerie for some. For a time afterwards people threw ideas at me for what kind of story I should write with it. One of them thought that I should write about the plantation owner in civil war era and that the Ragman should be an avenging angel to get vengeance on the evil land baron for cruelty to slavery. One of them postulated that the Ragman be a disfigured slave himself, his gaunt body having been tortured by the master of the house. I thought the best suggestion however was when someone mentioned that he should simply come out of the haunted forest for victims. It should not be related to the fact that the man owned slaves, on the contrary, he should just show up out of the woods for the rich mans children. Stories are always scarier when they involve innocent children I thought. Eventually as the evening dwindled people started to leave, the drinks and tiredness had gotten the better of them. I offered the room if anyone wanted to stay but they all politely declined. Some of them said that they didn’t want to get up in the morning and have to go then and would instead rather leave now. Some said that they just preferred the comfort that only their own bed could give but I knew the real reason. The conversation about the painting had unsettled most of them. As the night came to a close I walked the last guest to the door, an old friend of mine, Matt. He smelled like there was a thick blanket of beer surrounding him. I thought to myself that it was a good thing he wasn’t driving. As I said my goodbyes I asked one last time his opinion on my acquisition. “So what you think of the picture?”. He placed his hand up to his mouth as his response came with a slight burp that reeked of alcohol. “Very creepy” he said. “Gives me chills. I hate the way he’s just pointing at you with that messed up smile…anyways, good luck. I’ll see you later.” he answered, fighting off another beer soaked burp. I closed the door behind him and locked it. I began turning off the lights in the house one by one, starting with downstairs. I decided to leave the empty bottles of beer on the sitting room table until tomorrow morning when I would have the energy to clean. I saw from the lack of light under the doorway to the spare room that the light had already been switched off and I flicked the switch in the living room before making my way up to bed. One by one I turned the lights off. The one in the downstairs hall, the one on the stairs, bit by bit the house was succumbing to the darkness of the winter night, culminating in the final switch for the landing at the top of the stairs. Then I entered my bedroom, took my clothes off, apart from my T-shirt and my boxer shorts, turned off the final light in my room and then got into bed. I decided to even leave brushing my teeth until the morning, after all, I had been drinking and didn’t care about my dental hygiene. I just wanted to sleep more than anything. I lay there in the darkness for a few minutes waiting for the grip of my dreams to hoist me to sleep when a thought struck me. I felt that tingling down my spine so much worse than before and for the first time in years I panicked as a thought of pure horror made me recoil under the covers like a child. Did Matt say that the figure in the painting pointed outwards? The thought swam around my mind like a hungry shark. The figure in the painting, the Ragman, pointed towards the plantation house. That much I was certain. I had spent some time earlier studying every inch of that artistry and was convinced that that’s what I saw. Yet Matt said, clear as day, “…I hate that way he’s just pointing at you with that messed up smile…” My mind flooded with rational thoughts to explain how he must have been mistaken. How, perhaps the alcohol he had consumed had gotten the upper hand on his better judgement. I composed myself as I lay half under the covers. I laughed to myself quietly at that moment, dismissing my fears as flights of fantasy. Dreams of an old horror fan, looking for the attention his imaginary counterparts had received in the stories he had read his whole life. I lay there, still, for a time. All I could do was see the image of the picture in my mind. I studied it again and again in my head and every time I regarded the painting, the figure near the woods, the Ragman, pointed at the plantation house. I knew that I would not get sleep with this notion itching at the back of my mind so I decided to go downstairs to check the damnable picture myself. What’s the worst that could happen? I have a haunted painting in my house, I thought to myself. Maybe it could be worth something. With this thought I sat up and turned on the bedside lamp which lay on the locker next to me. I uncovered myself and walked over to the light switch on the other end of the room, near the door. I flicked it on and proceeded out into the landing. The cold air in the house tickled my skin in my dishevelled state of undress but that was the least of my concerns. I made my way downstairs turning on all the other switches again in reverse order from before until I was in the living room. I stood there for a few seconds, staring at the spare room door. It was strange but I felt uneasy at that moment. All the experience I had with true terror, whether it was in the words of an author or the celluloid of the silver screen were now working against me, giving me a million reasons not to open the door. Perhaps there was a demonic entity on the other side. Perhaps there was a monstrous creature ready to devour my very soul and take me, screaming into the pits of hell. Perhaps it was just a picture. I took a deep breath and opened the door. I was greeted with the dark room, on the wall on the opposite end hung the painting, its features fogged and jaded, a mere silhouette in the pitch black. I flicked on the light expecting the outstretched arms of the devil himself to reach from the framed menace on the wall but instead it was just the opposite. A simple picture. I looked at it, squinting to capture all the details, and because of the sudden introduction of light into the room and saw that the figure indeed did point towards the front of the painting. Maybe I was wrong, I thought. It was hours ago and I didn’t really look for that long. I must’ve simply been mistaken. I took one last glance as I switched off the light. It was more than at the front of the painting that his long, bony, disproportionate fingers were pointing. They were pointing at me. I closed the door. Mere hours later is when things began to get….interesting. I awoke from a deep sleep at 3:07 to the distant, rhythmic sound of tapping. My eyes weren’t heavy. I wasn’t still fighting the compunction to drift back to my dreams. I was fully aware, as if I hadn’t slept at all. The tapping sound took all of my focus. With the lack of light in the room it seemed as though the strange sound was all that existed. Even in my state of complete awareness it took several seconds to register the intrusion of my thoughts. I looked over at the time on the alarm clock on my bedside locker and notice that it was just after three. My mind studied the sound, which came every two seconds or so in increments of three light sounding knocks and determined that whatever was tapping was hitting against something wooden. It sounded too far away to be coming from my within bedroom too. If I cared to guess I would’ve said that it came from downstairs. I sat up in bed and turned on the bedside lamp. I sat there for a time, in my tiny kingdom of light as I listened studiously to the tapping sound. I made my way downstairs against my instincts in an attempt to find the source. By the time I had made it to the base of the stairs the tapping stopped. I checked the whole floor meticulously after turning on all the lights, leaving the spare room to last but I could not find where it had come from. I was somewhat hoping to confront a rational reason for the sound but could not decide whether it was more frightening to let my imagination create the cause or find it the cause of something else that was supernatural. I eventually went back to sleep, my answers unfulfilled. This happened to me at the same time for the next few days. I would awaken to the tapping sound from my sleep into a state of complete awareness, and it was always at the same time. Always at 3:07. Most nights I wouldn’t even get out of bed, because I never found where it came from, but I knew. I didn’t want to believe it but deep in the depths of my soul I knew where it came from. After a while I eventually had to admit defeat with the painting. I decided to devote myself to investigating its origins in great detail and I took the sheet from the bed in the spare room and draped it over the picture. It had declared war now and I was going to delve into the rabbit hole and see what I could find. I decided that I wouldn’t tell my friends about what foulness had befallen me. The last thing I wanted was them mocking me. They would just say that I was getting what I deserve, searching for ghosts and other entities, only to find one. Not exactly a surprise. I could already hear their jeers. I spent the next two weeks looking for some clues to the origin of the painting and for a history behind the story of the Ragman to no avail. Then something really strange happened. I awoke from a deep sleep at 3:07 to the distant, rhythmic sound of tapping. It was early morning of November 28th, Sunday. I lay there in my bed, as usual. The sound of tapping goading me to come search for it, attempting to spur me to action. As I lay there, observing the thin rays of moonlight that breached the confines of the otherwise dreary, dark bedroom my eyes began to become accustom to the lack of light. More and more of the room came into focus. The tapping in the distant corner of the house mocking my attempts at rest. I was getting agitated with the unwelcome disturbances and they seemed tame at this point. I mean, a horror story about a man who is annoyed by a tapping sound was not enough in itself. I was starting to get bored with the antics at this point. Then I heard a loud crash. The unmistakable sound of falling wood from downstairs. The sudden, thundering ruction echoed within the entire house and caused me to sit bolt upright, the adrenaline took control and prepared my body to flee as fast as my muscles would physically allow. The bone chilling thunderclap was followed by a slightly quieter sound of a similar nature, indicating that something had indeed fallen downstairs. It was obvious that it was the painting. That was the way my mind worked now, something went wrong, it was the painting. I composed myself momentarily and got up out of bed to confront whatever the sound maker was. It was becoming second nature now, turning on the lights in the house to check the darkened corners. To peer into the hidden vestiges of my house of horrors. It was a nerve wrecking time indeed, but this night was different. The tapping was low and agitating, much like the noise didn’t want to wake me, rather just to know that something was there. This was different, this was aggressive and violent. I made my way into the living room and stared at the spare room door. I gathered the courage that I had inside me and I opened it. As I stood there I gazed into the gloom and noticed that the window next to the bed was opened. The wind from outside was blowing the curtains wildly, their fabric fighting against the gust as if desperate to stay attached to the window frame. I felt the cold breeze, since I was only in my boxer shorts and T-shirt again I shuddered for a moment. The painting was lying on the floor underneath its designated hanging place, it’s back facing me and the sheet was lying on the ground next to it. I uttered my annoyance at the open window thinking that in my lack of sleep I left it open at some point. I was making a habit these days of going into the room occasionally to check that the sheet still covered the picture and some ominous force hadn‘t removed it. I walked over to the window and made an attempt to close it, jamming the wooden frame down hard. It stuck half way and required more force but eventually I got it closed. I stepped over the sheet strewn across the floor and I picked up the picture, turning it over in the process. My eyes widened as a sickening shot of fear ran all the way down my spine, causing all the hairs to stand up on the back of my neck, making my limbs go numb and my whole mind shut down out of terror. I dropped the painting and fell straight backwards into a seated position, forgetting the pain of falling as my arms lay behind me to keep me up, staring at the picture intently with a new-found horror I could barely keep contained. I was afraid to break eye contact from the picture which lay diagonally, facing me, in all its malice, empty of the Ragman. I lay there motionless as I realised that everything about the painting was just as it had always been, but in place of the figure on the left side was an empty mound. My eyes took a few seconds to process this earth shattering information. The mound on the left of the picture, where the Ragman had been standing, watching the door to the spare room was no longer in the picture. How had this happened? Was the picture truly haunted? How could this be?….Where was he? That last question was the most disturbing. After looking at the void in the painting for this extended time I noticed something else that was equally disturbing. One of the trees that lay on the outskirt of the wood, more specifically the tree that the Ragmans right hand was on as he pointed outwards had another feature. Scratches of some kind. No, not scratches. Etchings, from weeks of tapping against it every night. At least that’s how I perceived it. I got up from the floor with the unbalanced flair of a man running for his life. I left the room, leaving the painting lying where it had fallen and closed the door behind me. I flew into the living room, desperate to get away, to go anywhere but here. I bumped into the table in the living room with force and fell in a heap on the floor, pain searing through my leg as I caught my shin bone off the edge of the table. I was only down for seconds before I staggered upwards heading straight for the living room door. A loud, powerful, devilish cackle filled the air, coming straight from the room that I had left in such a terrified hurry. My senses were in full alert as I ran into the hallway, screaming in white knuckle terror. The laugh began to die off as I got further from the spare room. I didn’t dare look back, instead running for the front door. I fumbled with the handle as I attempted to open it, the cackle then started to get progressively louder as whatever was making the sound was seemingly getting closer to me. I was too afraid to look back, too scared that it may be my last time if I did. My mind attempted to prompt me to my terrible thoughts, feigning the feeling of something touching the back of my neck, causing my muscles to tense at the thought and my mouth to emit a horrified scream. I realised in that moment that the door was locked, as it always had been and that the keys were upstairs. I slumped to the ground, sobbing and with as much courage as I could scrape from inside me I turned to look down the hall, down in the direction of the living room door. Down towards the ever increasing laugh. Then nothing. No evil demon, no wretched, horrible creature. No Ragman. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep that night. I certainly didn’t try in that house. I went to a motel, leaving the place locked up, just the way that it was when all that happened. I didn’t even put the painting back up. That night I just stayed in the motel with my laptop checking my friends Facebook profile to see if anyone mentioned anything similar happening to them, but there was nothing. I returned to the house the next day, under the protection of the daylight. I decided to take another sick day off work. The restless nights meant that I didn’t have the energy some days to go in. I had nearly used up all of my payable sick days at this point but it was for a worthy cause. I unlocked the front door and walked into the house. On outside inspection you would not have thought that anything had gone wrong in the house at all. I walked down the hall towards the sitting room and entered. I felt a sudden chill at the sight of the open spare room door and the fallen picture that lay opposite. I could see, even from the sitting room doorway that the figure of the Ragman had returned to the painting. I walked over for a closer inspection. It seemed as though it was all there, as it was the day I received it. The figure was there, the trees had returned to normal. I was both relieved and confused. I made my decision that I would stay in the house again that night but this time I was going to set up cameras around the house. If horror movies had thought me anything it’s that you need proof, lest you be branded a lunatic. I spent most of that day procuring all the equipment I could to record anything that would happen in the house that night. I had some of it already, being an avid fan of films. I can’t say that the rest didn’t cost me a pretty penny but I was eager to catch that ‘thing’ inside my house. I felt a little safer at the thought of all the corners being watched, but still the more time that past that day, the darker it got as it reached night, the more I felt uneasy. The longer that I spent in that house the more I felt supernatural eyes watching my every move, waiting for me to fall asleep. At roughly midnight I did. I awoke from a deep sleep at 3:07 to the distant, rhythmic sound of tapping. This time I was ready though. I was already dressed before the clock turned to 3:08. I had already had the lights in the house on, so that the cameras could catch everything, no matter how brief or small. I went down the stairs and into the living room. As I reached the door the tapping sound disappeared. I opened the door to look in. The spare room had been left open, the picture returned to where it had been these last few weeks. The sheet had even been removed just to see if what happened before would repeat itself. There was a mounted camera on a tripod behind the living room table, facing the open spare room door. A light at the side of the camera shone into the direction of the room and the light in the sitting room was still on to catch whatever would be there. When I opened the door and looked in I saw the painting was hung up where I had left it after I prepared the cameras, absent ‘The Ragman’. It stood there staring at me. The mound empty, the plantation house alone, the trees free of their friend who had been terrorizing me. I let out a quiet wail, out of shock. I began to cower, reaching for a wall behind me so that I could not be ambushed. The tapping sound returned, this time accompanied by the sound of laughter. I don’t know how I knew, there was no way, but I felt that the laughter was sarcastic, as if I had angered him and he was laughing at my failed attempt, my attempt to make him look the fool. The laughter resonated throughout the house but I was close enough to discern its origin. It was coming from the kitchen. I mustered up all my available courage and slowly moved towards the dining room and then the kitchen. I could hear the sound of pots and cups banging against the counters as if someone was having a tantrum. The laughter was sickeningly twisted. As I reached the side of the open kitchen I closed my eyes and reached out with my fingers so that I could drag the rest of my barely willing body to look inside the room. I peered around the corner and saw it. The Ragman stood in the kitchen throwing dishes around as it flailed. Its long limbs I determined to be about three times the length of mine and with its thin frame it towered at least twelve feet tall. It was hunched over and its knees were bent as it couldn’t stand upright in the room. It moved energetically but violently, knocking over all the cutlery it could see in an anarchistic, trashing frenzy. Its laugh occasionally turned into a growl as it moved its arms in a feral motion. Then it turned and looked straight at me. I was frozen in terror and for just a second I didn’t realize that almost half of me was visible as I was peeking around the corner. It looked into my eyes and I stuttered in dumbfounded disbelief. It was only when the hunched figure frantically ran towards me that my instincts took over and I attempted to flee, my voice uttering an automatic howl of desperate fear. There were crashing sounds as furniture was tossed around the dining room and its excessively long legs made running meaningless. I felt an icy cold hand grip my shoulder and spin me around. My eyes were jammed shut as long, nimble fingers wrapped around my throat and I was hoisted up against the wall like a rag doll. I heard the laughter mere inches from my face and felt its breath against my cheeks. I opened my eyes and looked at it then, noticing its unnaturally large face, pale skin and its deeply disturbing, incomprehensibly evil eyes. Its smile was extended to impossible proportions and it spoke in a loud, gravely, guttural voice which shook me to my core. “iT iS rUdE oF yOu NoT tO aNsWeR mE”. I simply stared, dumbstruck by its immense stature and the ease at which it was holding me off the ground. My arms held its hand as it kept me against the wall. My attempts to break the grip were futile. Then it spoke again. “yOu ArE mEaNt To AsK wHo’S tHeRe”. I stared at it. For a moment I had forgotten that it was pinning me against the wall and with the greatest of ease it could snap my neck. I pondered what it was saying to me and although the words together made sense, I still didn’t understand what in the world it was talking about. I simply looked at it, puzzled. “aFtErALL I’vE bEeN kNoCk – KnOcKiNg fOr WeEkS nOw…” Then it laughed with a raging force that shook my whole body and I screamed loud and hard. The room began to spin and I became dizzy as the overflow of impossible information started to weigh my thoughts down and I slipped into unconsciousness. The laughter echoed in my mind until a darkness swept over me and I was consumed by nothingness. Sounds flooded my skull, faded and distant and I opened my eyes. It took me a moment to realise that I was lying on the dining room floor. There was no sign of the Ragman. I sat up against the wall. My attention was caught by shards of plastic strewn across the floor and bent sticks of metal. It took me a few moments to figure out that the shrapnel that was lying on the dining room floor sharing the space with me was the remnants of the camera equipment that I had set up. I knew without thorough examination that there was nothing left that cou

23 minutes

October 31, 2015

Beings and Entities

From Me to You

I sat on a bench under an autumn-dried tree, where I usually spent my time after school. The cemetery was empty; no surprise. An occasional mourner dropped flowers–always some old person coming in to see a lost loved one–or a jogger taking a new route for change. Nobody goes to a cemetery because they want to, at least, nobody but me. It’s not like a daughter or son would stop by to see a parent who’s passed away. It’s those little things you notice after a while: who cares and how they show it. I was reading a book to set the mood — Poe’s ever atmospheric “The Pit and the Pendulum” to be specific. It always made sunny days turn to cold nights, with the aid of my parasol to cast a much needed shadow over me. The last thing I needed was a tan; the grey clouds too few in numbers to fend off the sun above. At least it was quiet, no noise from any cars since the only thing nearby was a small neighborhood straight out of Leave it to Beaver. Even though the cemetery was out of the way from my house, I’d rather be around a bunch of dead dudes than be bored to death in my room. There’s nobody to relate to in this backwater town, especially for a girl that wears all black and would prefer a flannel skirt with chains over tight jeggings. I always look at the other girls at school and knew for a fact that I didn’t want to be like them. Loud, flirty, giggling at every little thing, trying to get a guy’s attention; it’s just not for me. But, what are friends for anyway? All they do is tell you what to do, what to wear, how to do your hair, talk behind your back, take up your time, and make you miserable. Who needs them… I was starting to sink into the story when someone walked by, the scuffling of their shoes on the cement path making me look up. It was a boy, cute as can be. I remembered seeing him at school before, maybe an 11th grader at the most; probably a track guy with the strong legs and slim size he had. He was looking at me right when my eyes got up to his and I tensed up, unwantedly, pretending like I was still reading. When the feeling of someone coming too close popped my bubble, I looked up again slowly, as if I didn’t know who was there. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” He asked. I tried to find my place while talking. “I don’t know. I haven’t see you here before.” He pointed at the nearby gates at the end of the path, where the timeless suburb was. “I live right there, super close by. I never really cut through here since cemeteries give me the creeps.” There was a short pause, but he didn’t leave. “… What are you doing here, just reading?” “I’m trying to.” “For what? School?” “Nope.” “For… fun?” Cross legged, I wiggled my foot — like when a cat wags their tail angrily. “Do you mind? I kind of go to a place with no people for a reason.” He held his hands up defensively, a thumb hanging onto the strap of his backpack. “Sorry, I was just being friendly. You like stories? I got a story for you. It’s about this cemetery — you’ll love it.” I gave in, flooded by his pestering. He was lucky he was cute, or else I would have ignored him in the first place. I didn’t realize that was why I let him talk, not until later. I felt shallow, but it’s not really anything new. I wasn’t alone in that way of thinking. I’m sure any human being would rather sit down with someone they wanted to kiss than sit down with someone they wanted to kill. He seemed pretty human to me. I slammed the book shut, frowning at him, hoping it would intimidate him. “Go ahead. Impress me…” He sat next to me without an invitation, chuckling as if he was impressed by his own story before he even told it. “It’s an old legend that my dad told me, after we moved here a few years back. He told me to be careful when you put your hand on a grave, because if you do, it will stir up the soul of the person buried there.” I yawned, patting my black lips with a gloved hand. “That’s baby stuff. Let me guess: then the soul haunts you forever.” He seemed to enjoy it when I over-dramatically gnarled my hands at him and my crappy attempt at a Romanian accent put a smile on his face. “Close, but let me finish,” he insisted. “I’m not done yet, you little know it all.” I squished my face at him; perhaps a bit too flirty now that I look back. It was one of those habits I didn’t even know I had. “You see, the legend has it where you put your hand on a gravestone, then you say the words ‘from me to you’. If you do that, the soul enters your body and the spirit will come to you to ask for something. If you do what it asks you to, you get a reward, like something you really want. But, if you don’t, then the spirit takes over your body and your soul gets lost forever.” I snorted, laughing under my hand. There was no way to look cute doing that, but that didn’t stop me from trying to be dainty about it. “So how long does it take for the ooky spooky spirit to steal your soul? Let me guess, thirteen days? 666 hours? Something cheesy like that?” “Not even. It’s different from person to person, like an addiction. Some can fight it, others can’t. It’s all a matter of will. I mean, I’ve never done it before. In fact, I don’t believe in it really. It was just some stupid story my dad would always say to scare me. I guess he just didn’t want me to get lost in here by accident or something.” “Sounds like he cares a lot. I’d never be able to know the feeling.” He didn’t catch it. Either that or he didn’t have the time to bother with my daddy issues. Instead, all he did was awkwardly give me a wave and slap the side of his jeans. “Well, I’m Gerard. It’s been nice talking to you, but I’ve gotta run.” Right when he turned his back to me, I replied. “I’m Helena.” He turned around, surprised that I even bothered to tell him my name. Maybe the eyeliner made him think my stare was cold when it was really warmer than wanted, but that was me trying to get in his head. What he did do was give a grin like someone handed him a gift. “Helena. Cool. It fits. A unique name for a unique girl.” I actually smiled at the remark. It wasn’t every day someone called me unique in a nice way. It’s not like anything was needed to be said; he waved goodbye and left the gates. I watched him walk all the way across the cemetery before I even remembered I had a book on my lap. I tried getting back into the story… but the stupid story he told me took up my brain like a damn study session. I couldn’t focus on the written words in the pages. Once the book’s spell was broken, it’s like fixing a broken mirror: more trouble than it’s worth. I decided to head on home, taking the opposite gate that Gerard took. Picking up my parasol, I nearly skipped my way out of there. There was joy in my step I wasn’t used to — a joy I never really felt before. Passing a line of graves, my eye caught a name that got my attention. The gravestone of Lenore Wu, 1987 – 2012. Died at the age of twenty five — barely ten years older than me. If only it said what she died of, but that would be asking too much to put on someone’s gravestone for all to see. I quickly assumed in my head that it was the usual drunk driver victim they have every month, even in such a small town like mine. But that name, Lenore… I couldn’t pass it up. What would taking a second to prove the story wrong do? I mean, a small part of me thought the story could be possible, that part of the body that says ghost are real and aliens exist; while the other 99% of me told my feet to keep walking. Almost throwing myself against the porous slab of granite, I put a hand to the stone, right over her name. It was a lot colder than expected, especially for something that’s been out in the sun all day. Despite going to the cemetery for so long and so many times, it was the first time I’ve ever laid hands on one. Closing my eyes, I whispered under my breath, “From me to you.” For a second, I waited, expecting hands to come out of the ground and drag me under, or for some kind of ghostly cloud to seep into my mouth. But, no, nothing happened. The wind kicked up a bit, blowing some dead leaves over my fishnet stockings — that was it. Slipping my hand down into the grass, I pouted mentally. “Knew it. It’s just a stupid bedtime story.” Getting up, I huffed loudly; brushing the bits of crumpled leaves off my knees. “Oh, well. Now I know…” I walked home right after that, disappointed the whole way and thinking back. Thinking about Gerard. I don’t know why, it’s not like he’s Tom Hardy with a sawed-off shotgun and a chained on mask. He just seemed so… real. Nothing fake; not trying to impress people around him, not trying to get me to go out with him, and not trying to get me to like him. It was a natural friendliness I wasn’t used to — abrupt as it was. He could probably smell the loneliness radiating off of me from a mile away, like a bloodhound searching for an escaped convict in the woods. Usually, I try to send people off as fast as they start talking… but with him I didn’t mind. I kind of liked his voice and the lips he used to talk with. The conflicting feelings circled around in my head the entire way home. I even started thinking about keeping an eye out for him at school tomorrow. The house was empty–mom at work–so nobody to bother saying hello to. The time I got out of school was the time she left; only actually getting to see her once or twice, before I started spending time at the cemetery. It seemed like the pictures of us scattered around the walls was the only reason I remembered how she looked. I’ve always hated the pictures she had of me when I was younger, all smiling and stuff; it looked disgusting. But, they made mom happy, so it was bearable. That didn’t mean I never tried to throw them away before, and boy, did I learn the punch my mom was packing on that day. There was no reason for me to go into the kitchen, the leftovers in the fridge were going to be untouched once again. Even though I looked like Jack Skellington with spiky black hair and snakebites, I didn’t have much of an appetite. I think I was too skinny, but I always got compliments about it. Not even a million “you look good”s would make me feel better about the way I looked. I tried to avoid the mirror built into the closet in my room at all cost; the more I looked, the more I felt that I shouldn’t be who I was. Night arrived faster than I could even realize, the dark curtains I covered my window with concealing the outside world. One by one, I blew out the black candles that I had lighting the room and keeping it warm. With only one left burning on my nightstand, I lay in bed and stared at the heavily shadowed In this Moment and Nightwish posters I had scattered along my walls. I felt tired, and I had nearly passed out during class earlier, but I couldn’t get relaxed. No matter how much I tossed and turned, I couldn’t get any sleep. The candle’s flame wisped like coiled snake ready to strike — a distortion in the air. I noticed a slow increase of pressure in the air, half hidden by the stuffiness and scent of the dead candles. I buried my head into the pillow, hoping that putting my hands into the cool underside would get me relaxed enough to doze off. It didn’t work, my eyes as wide open as ever. With my nose pressed deep into my pillowcase, my heart started pounding when the slightest amount of weight fell by my feet. I froze, pretending that I was asleep, that I was part of the bed itself and my body was just a folding in the thick sheets. Someone was on the bed with me, and there was nobody else that was supposed to be home. I hadn’t had a cat since I was ten and whoever was here with me had the chilling presence of a winter’s draft. The bed creaked softly, my visitor leaning forward. The sound of a girl crying softly was amplified in the quiet of my enclosed room, the sound coming from the end of the bed. “I couldn’t do it…” She sounded distant for being so close, like she was speaking from behind the walls. “I couldn’t go on…” I didn’t know why my brain presumed the most unlikely solution to what was happening, but then again, maybe having someone suddenly appear out of thin air fueled the idea that what I did in the cemetery had actually worked. “Lenore Wu? Is that you?” She didn’t answer, too occupied with crying her eyes out. Sitting up, I could see the back of her head, long black hair draped over a shoulder. The white nightgown she wore glowed in the dim light; her skin hinted with a lifeless blue. Empathy tugged at my heart — I’ve been at that point where crying was the last resort, the last thing your body would allow. No matter how much I tried to stay calm, I was shaking like crazy, frightened of what was on the other side of that flowing curtain of hair. I cleared my throat, talking to her like she was a helpless child. “What is it? Why are you crying?” What could I do to help? Bring her back to life like we’re in some crappy teen movie about Greek demigods? She came back–and she came back through me–so something could be done. A wrong done right. I had no idea what she had in store for me, but even before she opened her mouth, I was willing to do anything. Mostly to get her the hell away from me, and also kind of because I wanted to prove to myself that I could do something good for once. But still, I wasn’t willing to run away from such a thing. “I couldn’t do it,” she said in the tiniest voice, as if she was on the other side of a wall instead of a few inches away. “I couldn’t go on with it…” I thought about putting a hand on her shoulder, but I didn’t dare to touch her. I had no idea what she was planning; if she was going to attack me or turn around and show me some kind of gaping hole for a face. My mind was almost more focused on the things she could do to me than what she was actually doing: sitting there like a girl who was dumped on prom night. I held my knees in, hugging myself to get a grip on the current matter. If I wasn’t so tired and used to the idea of talking to people who weren’t there, I probably would have waited until morning to go to the nearest nuthouse. “Go on with what?” I asked, resting my cheek on my knee. My body was to the point of being unresponsive, but I myself was wide awake and at full attention. “Nobody wants to listen to me,” she said pitifully. “Nobody cared…” “I care.” “No you don’t.” “Try me.” She started to turn around, making me flinch back from the thoughts in my head running wild. And when I saw her face… I was relieved to see the face of a pretty Asian girl, her hair covering one eye. Her lips were a dark blue and her eye was pure red, but strangely, I wasn’t afraid anymore. Crawling over to sit beside her at the foot of the bed, I slowly tried to touch her bare shoulder. It was a block of ice, but I kept my hand on her skin, having it warm up with my body heat. She seemed to steady her breathing when I got closer, finally able to talk normal. “You really want to listen to me?” “Of course. I’m sure there’s a lot to say about how you… you know.” Lenore looked down at her hands and guided them up to her eyes, holding them shut. “My parents wanted me to be something, to be someone. They came from China, thinking it would be better here. Right after high school, they wanted me to go to college. I need money to go to college, so I had to get a job. I was in a good college, I had the job… everything seemed so good.” “Sounds good,” I agreed. “So what happened then?” “I couldn’t sleep. I had to pay for my tuition, even after the financial aid. Working and studying and classes… I barely had any time to sleep. Sometimes I would lie in bed and keep myself awake because I was afraid that I was going to miss class. Half way through, I lost my job. Then I started failing classes. All I had in my mind was the debt I had, the credit cards I had to use and couldn’t pay. I had to leave college with less than what I started with.” “That sounds awful,” I said after a few seconds of staring at my dresser. It was all I could think of saying, for as little as it mattered. I knew exactly where the story was going from there, but I allowed her to continue. She raised her head up, shaking again. Her hair slowly started getting wet and her skin started to dampen, nearly having my hand slip right off. I held her closer, not caring about getting my clothes wet from the water gradually pouring out of her like she was melting. I knew the setup, I knew the state of mind it puts a girl in, and I knew all she wanted was a hug at the least. With a quivering hand, she grabbed my arm, trying her best to hug back. “I borrowed money from a friend,” she continued hesitantly. “I told her I would pay her back when I could. I bought a bottle of sleeping pills and walked all the way to the beach outside of town. One by one, I sat there at the pier, swallowing one pill after another, thinking of all the things I wasn’t going to be able to do. The last thing I remember was falling head first into the water and falling asleep at the same time. And I never woke up after.” I held her by the shoulders, looking her in the eye. “Lenore, you didn’t have to do that. You didn’t have to go all the way like that. Why didn’t you just tell that friend you borrowed money from? She was a friend of yours, she would have listened to you, she would have gotten help.” “How could she? I had nothing. I had less than nothing. I wasted entire years for nothing. I had more debt than I could ever pay back. I don’t even know if I could have called anyone a friend. I barely talked to anyone. I never sat down and talked to anyone about anything. Just study, work, study, work. I just want someone to say I wasn’t a total failure. I just want someone to say it wasn’t all for nothing.” “Lenore, you’re not a failure. I may be, but you are not. You got to go to a good college, you even got a job. Half of the world couldn’t say the same. The only thing you did wrong was give up. But nobody could ever say you didn’t succeed. You almost had what you wanted, you almost made your parents proud, but you blew it. Not by failing the classes, but by ending your life the way you did. If you had a second chance, I’m pretty sure you would have just gone back home and try to give it another go.” The face she made was like she had inherited a fortune. A face so grateful, it nearly glowed in a heavenly light. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you so much. Now I can go on, knowing that there was a chance that I didn’t take. This whole time, I thought there was no other way. Now, I can rest in peace, thanks to you.” “No problem,” I said, a bit too casual thinking back to it. “Anytime. I mean, I’m sure this is the last time I’ll see you. I kind of wish we were friends in real life. I’m pretty sure we could have gotten along.” She smiled, looking more like an adorable child than a twenty year old specter. “Me too. Although, you kind of seem like a weirdo.” I hacked out a laugh. “Don’t push it.” “I shall reward you for your sympathy and kindness. A gift, from me to you.” I was shocked. Everything was exactly how Gerard said it would be. My body flashed with an electric jolt of joy; I would have jumped and squealed if my legs weren’t like two wet noodles. “Thank you. I-I don’t really know what I want, though. Nothing I would want to waste a gift like this on, at least.” She pulled me down and tucked me under the covers, keeping her contagious smile. “You know what you want… and you’ll get it. Goodbye, Helena. See you on the other side.” Lenore walked out of the room and closed the door behind her. Instantly, I woke up, not even remembering when I had fallen asleep. My room was covered in the gentle glow of the morning sun. It was earlier than when I usually woke up; most of the time I would look at my alarm clock and jump out of bed for being late. This time, I saw I still had plenty of time to get ready and actually get a chance to eat breakfast — something I usually had to skip. There was an unusual peacefulness in the air, like every worry in the world was erased from existence. But, school would fix that. High school had the supernatural ability to ruin anything good. I couldn’t understand what had happened, and all of my class time was used up by endless wonder about the previous night. Did it actually happen? Did I really talk to a dead girl, even laugh with her? Why the hell did she tuck me into bed? That was freaking weird. Lunch time came in and I still hadn’t done anything in class. That would have alarmed me if I actually did classwork before. What had me worrying was that there were two things that could have happened: Gerard’s urban legend was true and I talked to a girl who had committed suicide, or I had one of the strangest dreams and needed to cut down on the spicy food. Either way, no matter what I determined, the scene kept playing back in my head over and over again. Through the hallway, I wasn’t paying attention to anything in front of me; just walking mindlessly like a zombie. Gerard passed right by me and I didn’t notice until he called out to me. “Hey, Helena. You in a hurry somewhere?” His voice snapped me awake from whatever trance I was in. The last thing I had in my head was Lenore saying, “… you’ll get it.” I shook my head, seeing him walking up to me. I tried to act natural, but failed when my voice cracked right away. “Oh, oh no. I’m not going anywhere in particular. Just heading nowhere fast, you know.” I pointed at the guitar in his hand, trying to hid the smile coming from the thought that he played and played well. “I didn’t know you played guitar. Are you any good?” He looked away, a little embarrassed. “I try. I mean, I’m still learning, but I can put a song together. Just nothing that I want to — all of the music I listen to has some of the craziest instruments going on. Especially prog metal. Dude, that stuff is intense.” I turned my face at him. “Did you just call me dude?” His eyes bugged out. “No, I didn’t mean that!” I laughed at his reaction. “I’m just messing with you. But that look on your face sure was priceless.” He looked at his watch, seeing it was still early in lunch. “I’m not holding you up, am I? You don’t have anybody waiting for you, do you? Is that why you were in a hurry?” “Oh, no. Nobody’s waiting for me. I mean, I didn’t plan to eat lunch with anyone today… in particular.” I coughed, uncomfortably. “Well, you can sit with me, if you want. All of my friends decided to play hooky today.” “I guess. Just nowhere too far, I don’t want to run up the stairs on my way to 5th period.” Walking beside him, we went to a place to sit down at. “So what, they didn’t tell you they were going to ditch or are you too much of a goody two shoes to skip school?” “Well, if you ask me, it didn’t matter much.” I didn’t know what he meant by that. On that day, he saw I wasn’t eating and tried to share his lunch with me, no matter how many times I said I wasn’t hungry. After that, I started bringing my own lunch, waking up early enough to make one on my own — my mom snoring away in the other room in the morning. It wouldn’t be so bad if my black lipstick didn’t smear onto my sandwich bread. But, when I applied more lipstick after eating, I would catch guitar boy staring at me… and I liked it. It was good to have someone look at me in a good light for once, not because they thought I was a freak. He told me he liked my piercings and he liked the way I dressed. I bet he would have said more if he wasn’t so shy about things. But, I like that about him. He didn’t try to butter me up or raise my self esteem because he thought it was low like how most girls were. He treated me nice because he wanted to. I know I sound like a know-it-all a lot of the time, saying how “I knew what he was thinking”. But that’s how it goes when you observe rather than act, when you see how other people talk and react from afar. I spent a lot of time watching other people live and talk, having nothing to act upon. Until I met Gerard, that’s when things changed. He hung out with me every lunch for a week, and that’s when I easily assumed his friends didn’t really play hooky. He asked me out that Friday. It was cute; he was all nervous and trying to make it sound like it was not a date. But, dinner and a movie… that’s date. It was my first. I never had anyone ask me out before, at least, I never had anyone talk to me long enough to have it as a “yes or no”. Anything before was just from a guy who was either desperate as hell or thought I was, having it be the first thing they say to me, as well as the last. Gerard played some music for me at the cemetery, taking me there after the movie. Night sky, soft acoustic guitar, gravestones, the crickets chirping like they were on fire. It was a perfect end to a perfect date, made even more perfect when he kissed me by the iron gates. I never thought my heart could race so fast in such a short amount of time. When he was leaning towards me, I had to hold my breath to stop myself from freaking out. Time froze. It was just me and him in the world, in the cemetery, under a dead tree. He held me close and I held him back. I didn’t think it could get any better and I wanted to stay there holding him until the sun came up. When he said goodbye and heading off to his 1950s suburb, I fought the urge to call out to him and chase him home. I didn’t want him to leave me. I knew he wasn’t that kind of person, I knew he liked me a lot. But I didn’t want the chance of him leaving me. I was pretty sure this was Lenore’s gift to me. I mean, what else could have caused a guy like him to fall for a girl like me? So if they had the power to make him like me, I was sure the spirits right under my feet had the power to make him stay, to eliminate any doubt in my mind. On my way to the other side of the place, I strolled by a line of graves, opposite to the side I went by last time. In the moonlight, a gravestone caught my eye again; the name underlined by one of the bare branches of a tree. Roderick Usher, 1784 – 1833. I didn’t even know the town was old enough to have someone from the 1800s in it, but I guess even the smallest towns had to start some time. Like clockwork, I got down to the grave, put a hand on it, and said, “From me to you.” I didn’t know what I did differently, or if it was just my imagination anticipating what was bound to happen, but a cold pulse of something went through my arm. Right away, I felt like sweating, like a fever was swelling up. I figured I had dropped to my knees too fast or I was unconsciously excited about the next ghost I was going to talk to. Maybe, the older the soul, the harder they hit, or something like that. After getting up and having the soothing wind relax me a bit, I headed on home. Right on arrival to my ever-empty house, I nearly flopped over the welcome mat in exhaustion. The movie drained me, the kiss made my brain kick into overdrive, and the gravestone made me ready to call it a night. Getting out of my corset and into my typical skull-covered pajamas, I slipped right into bed, not even bothering to turn on any lights while getting undressed. Of course, having my head on the pillow made me wide awake. Drowsiness was avoiding me like the plague, but thankfully I had a full moon to look at — lighting up the room through the slits of the blinds. It got me thinking. I started to worry if Gerard was going to stay. I knew he liked me, but to know me, to know how I was… that was what I worried about. The thin self-inflicted slits on my exposed arm were shadowed in the moonlight, almost amplified. I tucked my hand under my head to avoid those recent memories. I needed him to stay. I needed another “from me to you” to make sure he was not going to dump me like some trash in the gutter. I’ve never been dumped before, but it must be awful if the sheer thought of it has the power to make me want to fall to the ground and never get back up. It was the thought of “If not him, then who?” and knowing there was nobody else. The pain from pondering stabbed at my insides, making me feel tired again. I would have probably passed out right then and there, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling that someone was watching me. Rolling over, I gasped at the sight of a man sitting at my desk, facing away from me. His entire body was covered in an old hooded cloak, burns and holes covering the back of it, nothing visible under the openings. It was common for coachmen to wear that kind of thing; I figured he was riding a stagecoach for someone when a bandit came in and slit his throat, something of that nature. That was my first impression… and it was far from the truth. He didn’t turn around or move in the slightest. In a gentle and almost comforting voice, he said two words. “Kill yourself…” I froze, holding my breath like I was trying to hide from him. He already knew where I was and even with him facing the other way, there was no way I could escape his sight. Sitting up and leaning forward, I carefully moved as if I was nose-to-nose with a cobra. Not daring to blink, I kept my eyes on that faint shadow in the corner of the room as best as I could, ready for it to fly at me. I’m sure a ghost could do whatever they wanted, not chained down by a physical mass anymore. I had no idea what I was dealing with, and regret was already coursing with my blood. “…Excuse me? What did you say?” Turning his head to the side, he spoke more firm, yet still calm enough to make it sound like he was asking if I wanted more tea. “You heard me. Kill yourself.” Breathing harder than ever, I could see my breath clouding in front of my mouth, the air growing colder. I tried to keep myself under control, but the best I could do was prevent tears of fear from coming out and my shivering from being too noticeable. “Is… I’m assuming that is that your request?” “Yes, it is — and I believe it is the only one worth requesting. Don’t you agree?” I shook my head, resisting the urge to open my big mouth and possibly anger him. I knew for a fact that the last thing I needed was for him to be angry. “Umm… no? Not really. I don’t like that request one bit. Is… there anything else I can do for you, perhaps?” “I only have one request in mind and that is for you to kill yourself. You may choose the way you die, but it must be by your own hand.” “But why? Why do you want me to do something like that?” He stood up. I flinched back, almost falling out of the bed. “You have my request,” he said, absent of emotion. “I suggest you fulfill it… or suffer the consequences.” He suddenly blended with the darkness around him, disappearing before my eyes. The air grew warmer, returning the sense of life inside the room. As for the feeling of being watched, that lingered as I lay awake for the rest of the night. It was one of the longest nights of my life; looking at the ceiling and hoping it wasn’t going to be my last sight of Earth. Thinking back to what had happened to Lenore and how she willingly did what I was now being requested to do. Right after, Gerard came to mind, and that was when I knew I couldn’t do it, no matter what. I had someone to look forward to, I had something to cherish and fulfill. It wasn’t much, but it was all I wanted and all I needed. I’ve already gone through the “low point” of puberty and I already have the scars reminding me of how foolish I was. Never again would I give in to the temptation of an easy ending. To quote the raven, “Nevermore.” Nevermore shall I succumb to the false joy I had presumed to await me on the other side. Seeing the spirits showed me that there is not much to do after death. Despite two life-changing visits, I still wasn’t sure if the spirits were even real. Could it have simply been me going crazy? I will admit, I am not a very stable person and when I was younger, I used to have imaginary friends — not many, but I still had them. But, everyone had imaginary friends; I’m sure I was not the only one. Could it be the loneliness getting to me, making me crack? Anyone would have had some effect after being absent of human interaction for so long, no matter how much they preferred to be by themselves. I had no clue. All I knew for sure was that I did not want to see that… that thing again. The Coachman and his revolting request. Just thinking about him froze my skin and made my stomach feel like I was trying to digest a ball of heroin needles. I tried my best to focus on something better as I lay there stiff and deprived of drowsiness. Last time, I felt like hopping out of bed and saying hello to the world. This time, I wanted to tell the world to shove it and shove it deep. I could have skipped school and just stayed in bed all day–I’ve done that a few times before–but I knew seeing Gerard would ri

41 minutes

October 22, 2015

Madness, Paranoia, and Mental Illness Please wait...

The Montford Experiment

Kenneth Kohl

My name is Jim Hutchison. Most people call me Hutch, even in my professional life. My family-owned business is as a concrete contractor, and we perform work for a variety of private and federal clients. One such client is the Texas State Department of Corrections. It was work at one of their detention centers that got me interested in volunteering at a facility. About five years back, we were installing a parking lot at the Montford Adult Correctional Institute in Lubbock. It is also known by its more appropriate name, the Montford Psychiatric Unit, as all of the inmates have been diagnosed with some type of mental disorder or other. As my men were doing the preparation, concrete placement, and finishing over a number of weeks, I used to watch people walking in and out of the front doors of the facility. It was depressing. Always the same scene. There would be inmates in orange and white striped jumpsuits – trustees – outside the doors sweeping the front steps and picking up trash: cigarette butts, gum wrappers, etc. But mostly sweeping, always sweeping. All day long. Must have been the cleanest set of stairs in all of Texas. I supposed that it was a treat for them, though. After exhibiting good behavior for a while, they were actually allowed outside the unit. I have seen the conditions inside, and boy, I would not want to be locked up in there for too long. Still, the looks on their faces. Blank stares, slack jaws, sweating in the one hundred degree sun. As I said, very depressing. I had a lot of experience with mental disorders, being diagnosed with depression and bipolar disorder, and being a recovering alcoholic. I had found help and comfort through proper medical care and support groups, and I wished that there were some way I could pass that on to these poor men. Then, one day, I discovered how I could. The guards at the front desk came to know me and some of my supervisory crew. They didn’t mind if we occasionally came inside the lobby to get out of the summer sun and use the rest rooms or buy soda from one of the machines in the waiting room. I was sitting in a chair one day, holding a cold bottle of Big Red to my forehead, when I overheard two women talking nearby. They were well dressed and obviously not there as visitors. I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but the few words I heard caught my attention. Apparently, they were volunteers at the prison, “bringing the Word of the Lord” to the inmates confined inside. I told them how much I admired their work, and how I had a desire to help in a similar way. And so, they suggested that I apply for a position as a pastoral counselor in the unit. Long story short, I did just that. I had to go through some training – what I could and could not bring into the facility, what I could and could not say to the inmates (never share personal information or build friendships), and how to act when inside general population walking and talking amongst the convicts. It was all pretty much common sense. For the first eight weeks or so, I had to be escorted in and out of the unit proper. I would arrive, place my boots, keys, wallet, and such on a conveyor belt, turn over my briefcase for inspection, and walk through a metal detector. Then one of the guards at the entrance to general population would call up to the counselors’ office and someone would come down to get me. During the eight weeks, I was fingerprinted, interviewed, and a federal background check was run on me. Eventually, I was given a badge of my own and no longer needed an escort. I learned many things in my first few months of volunteering. Bibles were like currency to the inmates (reading material to overcome boredom). Pencils were not allowed in the cellblocks, so the men loved meeting with me to write journals. They spent most of their time doodling ideas for tattoos. The really sick ones – the “mentals,” as the guards cruelly referred to them – were not allowed into general pop and looked forward to my visits. Most of all, I learned how easy it was to get in and out of the prison. Not that I would ever have done it but I marveled at the fact that, given the right inclination, a body could make a mint smuggling in cigarettes or booze stuffed into their socks. I followed the same ritual every evening that I visited. I would park in the lot, walk past the trustees who swept the front steps (wow, did they ever stink), and enter the facility. The guards got to know me and grew comfortable with my visits. They began by waving me through the detector without having to remove my boots or open my briefcase, and eventually started letting me avoid the security check altogether. Next, I was allowed to bypass the desk and go directly behind to a filing cabinet, where I could retrieve my badge – I wasn’t permitted to take it outside the prison. Then I’d get buzzed through an unremarkable metal door and walk down a long, unadorned hallway. At the end of the hall was where the genuine security measures began. The hallway terminated at another door, this one made of double layers of thick, cloudy bulletproof glass supported within a frame of four-inch by four-inch square steel tubes. I would approach and stand under a camera mounted above the door, lifting both my face and the badge toward the camera in order for the guards inside to verify my identity. Once done, the door would slide open, allowing me to step inside an “airlock,” of sorts. Then the door would slide shut behind me. The compartment was a triangular room with three doors, all similar, and a window set into the side. The guards in control of the doors sat behind the window, and would control the doors, opening only one at a time. I came to call them “doors number one, two, and three,” sort of like the game show “Let’s Make a Deal.” I always entered through door number one, and then was allowed to pass through door number two into the prison’s general population. From the start, I would always gaze at door number three and wonder what was behind it, as it was the only door with darkened glass. Since no more than one door was ever open at a time, I never got a peek inside. During my orientation, I was told that the prison’s infirmary was back there. When door number two opened, the stench was overpowering. No matter how many times you would enter the block, you never did get used to it. Mostly, it was the reek of urine, but was accompanied by an underlying sweet citrus smell, as the result of the cleaning fluid that they ineffectively used to mop down the halls. Inmates ambled up and down the halls, always giving you the once-over with their eyes. Occasionally, they would lock eyes with you and try to stare you down. During orientation, we were told never to look away – to stare them down as you would a stray dog. Looking away would be a sign of weakness. It may seem cruel, but you had to keep them beat down. You had to constantly remind them that you were in charge, that they were nothing. Anything less could lead to unrest and rebellion, and you couldn’t have that. The “mentals” were up on the ninth floor. The elevators, like the doorways, were controlled by the guards and monitored by cameras. I would press the single wall button, and eventually the doors would open. I’d step inside, look at the camera, and speak my destination into the camera microphone. Sometimes, there would be an inmate or two in the elevator. I never stood with my back to them. I would always stand facing them, my back to the door, staring them down, and for the most part, they would lower their eyes to the floor and try not to look at me. I was instructed never to enter an elevator if it was occupied by an inmate that intimidated me, but I never backed down. At first, I acted brave because I was unsettled but didn’t want to show it. After a while, I felt sympathy for the men more so than fear of them. The ninth floor was divided up into five “pods,” each containing five double-occupancy cells. My habit was to rotate which pod I would visit on a daily basis, taking the weekends off. Even though I was educated not to make friends with the prisoners, I have to admit that I looked forward to the visits as much as they did. Sometimes heavily medicated, and by far the calmest group of men in the facility, they were (save for a few odd ducks) among the nicest people I’d ever met. So it was day after day, week after week, month after month that I would follow the same routine. There were occasional variances, on some days due to fights or unrest among the inmates in general population, but one thing never changed. Every day as I entered the block, I would look over at door number three and wonder what lay behind it. I asked a few times, and was always told “the infirmary,” and after a while stopped asking for fear that someone might become suspicious about why I cared so much. Truth was, I’m just a curious person. Once, I even asked another volunteer if there was a chance that I could get a tour of the infirmary – perhaps visit the men back there – but was told (with great firmness) that my request would be impossible to fulfill, and that I should let the issue drop. I could almost hear the implied “or else.” That just piqued my curiosity even more. My interest grew and grew until I one day decided that I was going to visit the “infirmary” one way or another. Although my decision was made on a Tuesday, I didn’t act immediately. I became more attentive to which guards were working on each day and at each time. Certain ones were more lax, or friendlier. It took two weeks of studying them, and building my confidence, until I decided that it was time to act. Exactly two weeks and one day from the Tuesday that I made my decision, I finally got up the courage to say, “I’m visiting the infirmary today.” In my mind, I thought, let’s see what’s behind door number three, Monty! The guard never even batted an eye. “Alright Hutch. Have fun,” he said, twinkling his fingers as his eyes dropped back to the video screens in front of him. That easily, the door slid open. Boy, if the stench in general pop was bad, the odor wafting through door number three must have been quite literally a hundred times worse. In the hot Texas sun, and with all of the turkey vultures, road kill never lasted very long in Lubbock. Every once and a while, though, you’d come across a “fresh” one. That’s the closest thing I could think of to describe the smell behind door number three. It was as if you picked up a day-old dead armadillo, buried your nose in its crushed belly, and took a deep breath. Well, what I imagine it would smell like. I had never actually done that. Definitely the smell of rotting meat and gangrene, though. The doors slid shut and another long hall was revealed. Dimly lit, with flickering fluorescents, it was like something straight out of a horror movie. I soon found out that was an extremely appropriate description. Another door at the end of the hall hung loosely from its frame, allowing light to leak out around it. I could hear alternating moaning, crying, and the worst – screaming coming from behind the door. I could have… should have turned around and headed back for the exit, but I had gotten too far. The only way to go was forward. Forward and through that door. Although I knew it would seem suspicious, I opened the door slowly and stuck my head around the corner. The best way to seem as if you belong somewhere is to stride right in with confidence, but I couldn’t. I was afraid of what might be behind the door. Heck, I thought, it most likely was just a prison hospital. Moaning, crying, screaming – all normal noises for men in pain. It was most definitely not a normal hospital ward. There were at least a dozen men strapped to steel tables. Some naked, some in orange prison jumpsuits, and some wearing the striped suits like the trustees that I passed every day outside on the stairs. All of them had IV’s inserted into their arms, the drip bags containing a fluid that looked like antifreeze. Vitals signs monitors (VSMs) were attached to most of them, and I could see by the displays that two of the men were clearly dead. There were two men and a woman, all wearing lab coats, standing amongst the tables. One of the male doctors (?) looked up in surprise, and then beckoned over “Come in, come in.” They must have noticed the look of confusion, quickly turning to panic, in my eyes. The female doctor began explaining in a soothing voice. “Don’t worry. You’re not the first outsider to stumble his way into our infirmary, and I’m certain that you won’t be the last. As you’ve probably already guessed, what we have here is more of a lab than a hospital. We’ve just become so used to calling it the infirmary that it’s simpler that way.” She drew a breath and was about to continue when another of the doctors shouted, “It’s happening!” Everyone, myself included, turned toward one of the tables that held a dead man. Well, previously held a dead man, to be exact. His VSM had jumped to life, and seemingly so had he. He began twitching, and then thrashing, then he began to scream. I had seen a man being burned alive once, when a barrel of hot tar accidently spilled on him, and the screaming was the same. It was gut wrenching and made my skin crawl. You could hear the pain and sorrow in it. The female doctor scrambled to inject a syringe of some milky liquid into the man’s IV port and after what seemed like an eternity (although it was probably mere seconds) he calmed, and his breathing steadied itself. Here’s the thing: They had not been performing CPR on the man when I walked in. There was no defibrillator to be seen. The man was unmistakably dead when I arrived and during the few minutes we had been talking. Yet, here he was alive once again, as if he had spontaneously resurrected. Disturbingly, though, his eyes were still clouded over as if he had cataracts. An uneasy and sick feeling crept its way into my belly. The doctors had not told me anything yet, but on some level, I already knew what was happening – or at least part of it. I was incredulous. “Wha- what’s going on?” So, while two of the doctors tended to the resurrected man, the third explained the experiment to me. “You see, we were tasked to find out whether or not so called ‘evil’ men have souls or not,” he began. “Of course, I personally do not think that there is any such thing as true evil, but I do wonder if these malcontents have the same sort of spiritual makeup as normal people. After all, why do they do what they do? “In 1907, a Haverhill, Massachusetts, doctor by the name of Duncan MacDougall managed, apparently overcoming any ethical reservations over human experimentation, to put six dying people on a bed equipped with sensitive springs, and claimed to have observed a sudden loss of weight – about three quarters of an ounce – at the exact moment of their death. Having reasoned that such loss could not be explained by bowel movements or evaporation, he concluded he must have measured the weight of the soul. A follow-up experiment also showed that dogs didn’t seem to suffer the same sort of loss, therefore they didn’t have souls. “I’m not implying that these inmates are on the equivalent of dogs, but one must wonder exactly how they compare to normal, healthy human beings. We obviously do not have much control data, but we have recycled these men as much as possible for our research.” It was there that I stopped him. “Recycled?” “Oh yes,” he brightened. “We don’t just throw them away. You see, as a pleasing consequence of our intended experiment, we found that we were able to revive our test subjects.” “Revive them?” “Yes. Revive, resurrect, bring them back… whatever you wish to call it. This way, we are able to take measurements and observe through a variety of different conditions. It’s quite ingenious.” I really did not know what to say at that point. To question who authorized the experiment, what the ramifications were, how it worked. So I asked the first question that popped into my head. “So, do they have souls?” He removed a pencil from his breast pocket and tapped the side of his head, as if thinking it over. “You know, I’m quite certain that they do. As I said, we lack enough data to use as a control. However, it seems that each time we bring them back, they lose a little until – it seems – it’s all gone. After a certain point, we can no longer observe any differences.” “And how long does that take?” “Usually four or five cycles.” I cocked my head, still in disbelief over the casual way he was talking about the atrocities they were committing. “And what happens then?” “I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t follow you.” “After you’re done with them. What happens to them then?” “Whoo,” he blew air through pursed lips. “Yes, that’s the problem, isn’t it? That’s currently the little ‘snag’ we’ve run into. You see, eventually they just stop dying.” He must have seen the look on my face. “I mean, it’s not as if we haven’t tried. We usually put them down in a most humane way. Sedation, paralysis, and eventually with an injection of enough potassium to stop their hearts. Then we revive them and do it again. And again. And again. Each time, it gets a little more difficult to put them down, until… well, until we just can’t do it anymore.” “What?” I was just about screaming. “In simpler terms, they are basically incapable of dying. Quite a problem. And they really start to stink,” he said, as if that were the chief problem. “Can’t you burn them, cremate the bodies?” It was his turn to look at me in disgust. “Oh, now that would be cruel.” I held my head in my hands and began to hyperventilate. “So where are they?” “Well,” he said, “Outside. Sweeping the steps.” With that, I began to feel lightheaded. What caused me to faint, though, was his next question. “Mister, um…” he looked at my badge, then into my eyes, “Hutchison, would you consider yourself to be a good person? Do you believe that you have a soul?”

11 minutes

October 8, 2015

Locations and Sites, Science and Experimentation

Blue Light

bombings, Colin's Home for the Damned, deaths, dying, elementary schools, historical fiction, Japan, Nagasaki, schools, war

A bomb went off in the city. It happened on Monday. Today is Thursday. My dad was there. He hasn’t come back yet. I’ve been sitting at the window every day waiting for him to come home. Mom says the bomb interrupted the electric grid in the city, so there’s been barely any news about it. Our neighbor’s son is a meteorologist stationed outside the city limits, and he told his father who told us. The bomb was the biggest he’d ever seen. He saw a flash of blue light from outside the window and threw himself to the ground. He counted to five, because it was his job to “record the phenomenon.” At five the windows exploded into the room and heat like a furnace rushed over him. His father says he managed to call from an emergency line in the station. He’s wounded but okay. Dad was supposed to come home Monday night. Mom has been very quiet for the last few days. She doesn’t say much at breakfast, and only gives me an “I love you” at bedtime on her way out of the room. I only cry then, in the dark. This morning, I stare out the window, hoping by some miracle I’d see him walking down the street, and turn onto our walkway leading up to the house, smiling and waving at me. My heart leaps every time someone walks by. Mom comes in behind me. “Go upstairs and get ready for school, please.” I turn around in my chair. “But-” “Staring out the window is not going to change anything. Now go.” I leave the window, feeling as though he won’t come home unless I was there watching for him. Every day it’s gotten harder and harder to sit there at the window and watch. I have a need to run outside and look for him, to ask every person in every store if they’ve seen him, anywhere at all, because I need him, I need him home to wake me up in the morning and help me with homework and tell me jokes at the dinner table and be there for me when I need advice or just to talk and not be crushed under a mountain of concrete with pulverized shoulders that used to hold me during parades and let me press my face into them when I needed to cry. I sob while I put my books into my bag, quietly because I haven’t heard mom cry and she won’t hear me cry. The front door swings open from downstairs. “Hello?” For three days I dreamed of that voice. “Dad!” I half-scream and rush to the landing, looking down over the banister through vision obscured by tears. He was looking up at me, I couldn’t tell if he was smiling or not, but I rushed down the steps and towards him with a hysterical laugh of relief. I stopped dead when I came closer to him. His face was a deep red and covered in blisters. His arms looked burned like they were held over a stove. His shirt was torn and covered in soot, and maybe blood. “Dad, what-” “It’s alright,” he said. “Come give me a hug.” I sprint to him and dive into his arms. He gives a little cry of pain. “Oh God dad I’m sorry,” I mutter, trying to pull away. “It’s all right,” he says, “I’m just a bit sore, that’s all.” He looks up, behind me. Mom’s been standing there, watching us. She’s finally crying. “Didn’t you know I’d be back?” Dad says to her, smiling. She rushes over, and the three of us are hugging together. It was a long time before we broke up. “What happened to you?” asks mom. Dad looks at me, tentatively. His face is suddenly grave, pale, his eyes looked, did they look scared? “I think it’s best if you leave while I talk to your mother. Don’t you have school in a bit? Go get ready for me.” I nod, turning away reluctantly. As I head upstairs, I hear him say, “Let’s sit down. I need some water.” I return to my bookbag with a different set of tears in my eyes. I knew he would be fine, I just knew it! Why would I ever think my dad could get hurt? He had to come home, and he did! That’s all there was to it. I heard a gasping moan from downstairs. I turn towards the door, and stop when I remember that he told me to leave them alone. Another moan floats through the door. My curiosity gets the best of me. I creep around the doorframe and down the hall to the landing. Leaning against the wall with my ear between the banisters, they couldn’t see me around the corner but their words were clear as day: “-just got to the hospital to inspect the facilities. It was around eight in the morning. I was following the chief of staff to his office when it sounded like a cannon went off right beside me. The wall next to me exploded.” Mom made another sound like I had heard from upstairs. I couldn’t see her but her face was plain as day. She must have been chalk-white. I was turning pale too. I found myself wondering how in the world he could have survived that. Dad continued: “I woke up sometime later, I really have no idea how much later. It was pitch black where I was, and hot, deathly hot. I put my hands out and felt metal as hot as a grill. Three walls of metal, and one of rock. I remember asking myself if I was dead, or captured or something. “I started scratching and clawing at the rock to get out. It looked like I was in some sort of enclosure, like a space just big enough for my body. I had yanked enough rock away to pull myself out. “I looked back and saw I was under a steel desk that had been thrown right-side-up on top of me. It was the perfect cover. My skin felt horribly sunburned, and the air was so hot it was like sitting in a sauna. I looked around and saw I was standing on what was left of the second floor as it came down on top of us. And I was alone. The hospital had fallen away, so I could see the sky, though it was so dark. It looked like a storm had taken just seconds to come in. Rain was coming down. Except it wasn’t rain. It was black, and tarry… “I climbed over the walls of the hospital, I was so thirsty, so groggy. I knew there would be no running water. But we were close to the bay, and I crossed a river to get to the hospital. So, I started making my way back there. I was so lucky to be close to the city limits, I doubt anyone in downtown survived the collapse of those huge buildings. But almost every building here was destroyed, and the ones that weren’t were burning… “At first I didn’t see a single person. Then I came across a mother and her baby under an awning of concrete. It was…it was hellish. The woman…her skin was peeling off in sheets…her eyes were a bright gold-white. They must have been bleached from looking at the explosion. Her baby was charred black. It looked rubbery in her arms. She was staring straight ahead, the skin hanging off her arms was translucent, like the wings of a fly. The shock on her face made me nauseous. I called out to her but she didn’t hear me. I doubted that she would, she was probably deaf from being outside for the blast.” I closed my eyes. What he was saying scared me. I didn’t want to be here, but I was frozen against the wall, helpless to hear. “As I got closer to the riverside, I saw more and more people, some on their feet, some lying like rag dolls, some whose body parts were just barely sticking out of the rubble. The people on the ground were so burned they were swelling up. They looked like black rubber dolls. When I got to the river, I-” He stopped, choking on his words. Mom was dead silent now. I could imagine her dread is keeping her from even moaning. My heart is hammering now. As I listen I see with clarity the ghastly sights my father had seen. The images burned into my mind’s eye. “I saw hundreds, literally hundreds of corpses, covering the banks of the river, piled on top of one another, trying to get one last drink…there were corpses floating down the river, too. I saw a woman pass who looked like she was wearing a long white cloth belt that was billowing out behind her. I got closer and realized it was her intestines, whitened by the water. “On the other side of the river, there were these large mounds piled up against the ruined walls facing the explosion, and people were standing around them, pulling them apart. They were looking for their loved ones, inside mounds of human beings. I saw children there, on their knees, screaming into the mounds, ‘daddy are you in there?’, ‘mommy please come out!’ “I stood there, behind the bodies bordering the river like black and red sandbags, watching people float by, watching people dig into mountains of humans, watching people collapse where they stood, watching people with burst out organs try and fit them back in, watching a man with eyes burned out of his head as he asked, ‘Is anyone there? Please, kill me.’ “I stood there under the gray sky, watching all this through smoke as black rain fell, and you know what I realized? I realized that, in all my thoughts, all my dreams of what Hell might look like, I could never have imagined anything like this. I guess I didn’t need to, though. Hell came to me. Hell came to earth.” I stood for a long, long time after that. My back was still against the wall. The grotesque images swam in front of me, as if at the end of a black tunnel, of the women writhing, the men pleading for death, and the corpses grinning up at me as they floated by. My shirt peeled off the wall as I ran to the bathroom. I bolted to the toilet and promptly vomited into the basin. My eyes felt like they would burst under the pressure of my undigested breakfast. The monsters I picture when I swing my closet door open or look under my bed from on top-expecting to see a set of dripping white teeth over two glaring red eyes-those monsters are nothing now. Nothing compared to these horrors. These people, they’re real, and the ones who caused them this…there couldn’t be anything more evil in the world. I kneeled, dazed, over the bowl for minutes. I came out of it only when mom knocked on the door and told me in a quiet voice that I would be late for school if I didn’t hurry. Thirty-five minutes later I was sitting in class before the teacher came in. Before I had left the house, I hugged my dad, who had fallen asleep on the couch where he sat. His face looked very lined, very tired under his blisters. He looked older. I hated thinking of him that way, but I couldn’t stop myself. I came out of it slightly when the teacher came in at 11 o’clock, shushing the chattering class. He wrote the month and then 9th on the board before turning to us. “Kids,” he said, “I know things have been scary these last couple days but we all need to remember to keep calm, okay? It’s especially important to obey your curfews, and not to cause a ruckus of any type. I’m talking of course about the incident that happened last night. It seems someone has defaced the school sign outside. You may have seen it on your way in this morning. Now, I hope the perpetrator is not part of my class, but if he or she is here, I ask that they come forward and confess. It doesn’t have to be now, but it has to be today.” I had seen the sign. The janitor was out there as we came in, scrubbing at the sign. It was faint, but we could still see the word “sucks,” underneath “Nagasaki Elementary School.” Outside the windows, a blue light explodes across the sky.

8 minutes

October 17, 2014

Historical Fiction, Locations and Sites, Military and Warfare

The Nice Guy

deaths, jobs, managers, Murphy1976, occupations, WellHey Productions, workplace

Frank, Thomas, and Kirby enter the office break room at approximately 12:25 pm on a Tuesday afternoon. Each man holds various containers designed for holding food and drink, and as they lazily slump into the fiberglass chairs that were haphazardly pushed under the table after their previous uses, the room echos of violent thwop-pops and elongated scraw-jips as Tupperware lids fly open and velcro bags release their treasures. “God dammit!” Thomas rolls his eyes. Frank, with a mouth full of cold pizza, mumbles in empathy, “Wife packed ya tuna-salad again, huh.” Thomas tosses the soggy sandwich down onto the table with a resounding glop. “She knows I hate this stuff! I swear, I’ve almost reached my breaking point with this shit!” “Why don’t you just pack your own lunch.” Kirby attempts to speak through teeth caked with salad. A drip of ranch dressing falls from Kirby’s lip and collides with the table. Thomas just glares at Kirby in disdain. “You don’t get it, man. I’ve told her, like, fifty times. ‘I don’t like tuna-salad’, but does she listen? Nooooooo!” Thomas raises his right hand to his forehead. “I swear, I’m up to here with this!” “Well, at least you’re not like that one guy.” Frank wipes his mouth of the residual pepperoni grease with a cheap paper napkin. “What one guy?” Thomas looks at Frank in slight confusion. “You talking about that guy from CompuTools? I heard about on the news last week.” Kirby chimes in, he has already begun digging into his pudding cup. Thomas spins around to Kirby, “What the hell are you guys talking about?” Frank, wipes off his hands with another napkin, folds his hands in front of him and leans in quietly. Thomas and Kirby follow suit. “Y’see, there was this guy over at CompuTools. Nice guy, I hear. What was his name?” Frank concentrates in the ceiling, search for a name. Suddenly Frank snaps his fingers, “Phil Kerbson. Anyway, He was one of those diligent workers, never complained, always got his work done before the deadline. Hell, he would even stay late to make sure that his perfect record was never tarnished.” Thomas chimed in, “Ugh, I hate those guys!” “Well, supposedly, CompuTools hired this new hotshot manager. Basic ROTC’d up from corporate, y’know… never lifted a finger in his life and get to skip right to the front?” Thomas shook his head. “Exactly. So this guy was brought in to,” Frank raised his finger quotations, “help. And since this douche really didn’t know anything about CompuTools products, he would just bark orders and micromanage everyone. Everyone in the office was buzzing, ‘We’re gonna quit’, ‘Let’s get HR involved’, ‘This guy is completely heartless’, the usual empty water cooler promises. Everyone was in a tiff… except for Phil.” “Phil would mind his own business and do his work with a silent smile. He would even go as far as asking this new manager, ‘Anything else I can do to help?’ Well, I don’t know if that manager deliberately planned to be this malicious or if it was just common nature for him, but he got this notion in his head… to see how far he could bend Phil until he broke.” “Starting the very next day, the manager threw the biggest workflow onto Phil’s desk and barked out, ‘I need this done by five o’clock today or you can just pack your shit now!’ or something to that effect. Phil quietly turned to face the manager, smiled his calm innocent smile and said ‘Sure thing, boss.’ 5 O’clock rolls around and Phil walks into the manager’s office and proudly places the completed report onto the man’s desk. ‘Here ya go, boss.'” “The manager looked up from polishing and buffing his prized six-hundred-pound marble desk to the completed pile of papers with a look of complete shock. How could one man complete that report in only 7 1/2 short hours? His eyes then shifted from the report to glare viciously to look upon Phil’s calm, lucid face. “Anything else I can do to help?” smiled Phil. The manager simply shook his head in disbelief. “OK, well I’m going to head out for the day, sir. You have yourself a great evening.” “The manager was flabbergasted. He steeled his motives and vowed that he would try harder to break this man’s spirit by the end of the week.” “Well, the end of the week came and went and still Phil was as cheerful as ever. Always responding to every outrageous task with a happy, “Sure thing.” And then turning in the completed work to the manager at the end of the day with a pleasant, “Anything else I can do to help?” Well, this went on for a few weeks and the manager, now seeing that current efforts were fruitless, now decided that maybe he needed to up the ante. The manager would now bombard Phil with major accounts and lengthy business trips and tedious conferences all to quell his passion that Phil must be broken. But with every new and more difficult task, Phil would embrace it with a ‘Sure thing, boss’ and come back for more with a sunny ‘Anything else I can do to help?'” “The manager, now at his wit’s end had one more trick up his sleeve. Although his lack of concentration on the job he was hired for was beginning to come under fire, he wanted to give it one more shot before, he himself had to face the firing squad. He got it in his head that it was the breaks in-between each eight hour day that was allowing Phil to wind down regain his bearings, get a good night’s sleep and come back the next day ready for more. So, with that in mind, he gave Phil the budget report for the following year and told him, ‘I don’t care how long it takes, but you cannot leave your desk until we trim at least five million dollars off of next year’s budget.’ As always, Phil replied with his trademark ‘Sure thing, boss.’ The manager turned away knowing that this task would be Phil’s breaking point. And, like clockwork, Phil came into the manager’s office with the completed budget and handed it to him. ‘Anything else I can do to help?’ The manager looked over the budget, ‘Eh, I really don’t’ like these numbers.’ The manager threw the report back at Phil. ‘Do it all over, and this time… do it right!’ Phil’s smile sagged a little, but soon rebounded and turned around and headed back to his desk.” “The manager saw Phil’s smile buckle for just a moment and he chuckled to himself that his plan is finally working. Eight O’clock rolls around and Phil returns back to the manager’s office. But Phil looks a bit different. His hair a bit disheveled. His horn-rimmed glasses are now on his forehead. one corner of his shirt has become untucked from his pants. Phil’s stride isn’t as carefree. Phil hands the report to the manager and exasperatedly utters, ‘Anything else I can do to help, sir?’ The manager, now seeing victory close at hand looks at the report, ‘Uh, Phil. I think you made some miscalculations here.’ The manager hands the report back to Phil, ‘Do it again, and remember what I said! You stay until it’s complete!'” “Phil, dejected, defeated, disappointed, looks at the report in his hands, wiped the sweat from his brow, and scratched the back of his neck. The nearly broken man headed back to his desk to correct his errors. As soon as Phil left his office, the manager closed the door and danced a twisted victory dance. Phil was nearly gone. The manager was going to sleep well that night.” “At eleven o’clock, Phil trudged back into the manager’s office and handed him the completed and corrected report. Exhausted, Phil asked ‘Is there anything else I can do to help, sir?’ The manager, now a shining example of pure arrogance, threw the report on the floor and exclaimed, ‘Why did you do the budget for next year? I asked you to do the budget for this year. Can’t you even follow simple instructions? I want you to march back to your pathetic little cube and you are going to stay all night in your have to until you do exactly what I ask you to do, or so help me God, I will find someone else who can do it!'” “Now, no one knows exactly what happened next. But some of the late night stragglers who heard the manager’s tirade claim that as soon as he was finished. Phil took off his glasses, cleaned them off with the corner of his shirt that was still untucked, put his glasses back on and closed all of the blinds in the manager’s office that faced the rest of the room. What came from the room after that was a thunderous crash, and a high pitched shriek. The door flew open and the manager bolted out of the room with glass shards in his hair, bleeding profusely from his face screaming, ‘CALL SECURITY! CALL SECURITY!’ Witnesses then claim that they saw Phil calmly walk out of the office, his shirt and hands splattered with blood. He held a letter opener in his right hand, now stained with blood. Phil’s calm and happy expression was lost to a visage one person could only describe as berserk. Phil brow furrowed, scrunching his eyebrows into a wide arch. His teeth gnarled and, according to one person, appeared sharp and pointed. His skin, once pale and fair, now red and scaly. His slick hair now flailed wildly about his head and danced of its own accord. Phil marched towards the cowering manager, ‘sure thing, Sure Thing, SURE THING!’ Phil continued to chant these two words over and over and the volume of his voice continued to climb until he was shrieking. Phil destroyed everything in his path to get to the manager, who was now scrambling for the elevator. He turned over cubicle walls, hurled the office printer, overturned desks but was still marching at a steady pace. Not once did Phil’s gate increase in speed. The elevator doors finally opened and the manager quickly darted inside. And as he was frantically pounding on the ‘door close’ button, Phil’s arm thrust inside the cabin as the doors were closing. The manager let out a girlish cry for help, and then…” Thomas, now sitting on the edge of his seat, blinked “Yeah?” “Well,” Frank continued, “Security hauled him away. The folks that stuck around for the whole ordeal say that they’ve never heard Phil use any profanity, ever. But on that day, they heard curse words so vile, that they almost sounded like they were in some form of ancient tongue, some demonic language. Only by the grace of God was Security able to restrain Phil. As the paddywagon rolled up into the office building drive, witnesses noticed three things. First, that Phil was kicking and screaming the entire time, and was hardly recognizable. Second, that the manager couldn’t stop crying. And thirdly, and the most bizarre, was that they realized what made the thunderous crash in the manager’s office. The six-hundred-pound marble desk, the manager’s prize possession, now lay in pieces outside the office window.” “So that’s it? What happened after that? There had to have been a trial?” Thomas exclaimed. “Oh there was a trial, but Phil was deemed mentally unstable to serve trial, so he was committed to the State Hospital over in Brookfield. And everything died down and returned to normal. The manager was brought in to see corporate and he was actually let go because not only did the security cameras record what Phil did to the manager and the office, but they also recorded the manager’s outburst on Phil that caused him to snap in the first place.” “Just desserts, I say!” Thomas commented. Kirby just shook his head as he started to clean up his empty containers. “Well here’s the real punchline. And this I got from Sally Boyd over there at CompuTools, she used to be the manager’s admin. After the manager was let go, he was cleaning out his, temporary desk, and to pass the time he had the radio on. The manager left his office for a moment to get some more boxes. As he returned back to his office, she heard on the radio announce ‘Phil Kerbson, committed to Brookfield State Hospital on Monday was discovered missing from his cell earlier today’. The manager froze in horror. And as Sally turned around to see the manager’s expression, the door violently slammed in her face, knocking her backward onto the ground. As she recovered from her fall, she told me that she could clearly hear the manager pleading for his life. She distinctly heard, ‘Please! Don’t! I’ll Do anything you want!’ And then, a familiar calm and soothing voice came from behind the door, ‘Anything I can do to help!’ Sally pounced for the door, but it was locked, she tried to look through the window, but the blinds were mostly drawn so she only saw the flailing of arms and legs. Sally kicked at the door repeatedly and shouted, ‘SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP!’ But it was too late. As soon as the commotion ceased from inside the office, Sally heard the knob ‘click’ to signal that it had been unlocked. With tears in her eyes, she slowly reached for the knob and opened to door to reveal a gruesome scene.” “The manager, splayed open from his throat to his pelvis, rib cage and organs exposed. His hands twisted into contorted knots of flesh and knuckle. His face, warped into an expression of unrelenting anguish and fear, eyes wide, jaw locked nose broken and twisted. In his left hand, its last cadence drawing to a close, was the manager’s own heart. Sally and some of the onlookers who had finally gained access to the room then looked up to see the following message scrawled on the bare dingily yellow office wall, ‘We were wrong. He had a heart after all.'” “Jesus!” Thomas had to hold back the vomit by covering his mouth. “After that, CompuTools shut down that office, I think they turned it into a… a MegaBuy.” Frank finished his tale with a solemn sip of coffee. Thomas rubbed his eyes, “Whoa! Wait a minute. Whatever happened to Phil?” “This is when I’ve supposed to say ‘That’s the strange thing…’ but it’s not really that strange. When they finally opened up the office, the only person in there was the manager. Sally even said she never actually saw Phil, she only heard his voice… or at least what sounded like his voice. And he hasn’t been seen since.” “That story’s complete bullshit!” Kirby exclaimed. Frank and Thomas spun around to glare at Kirby for breaking the mood. “What?” Thomas inquired, “As if you know exactly what happened.” “I just know that that’s not how it happened.” Kirby calmly stated as he adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses. “Okay, hotshot. How do you know?” Frank jested “Because…” Kirby leaned in close. Frank and Thomas match Kirby’s movement. “the hospital doesn’t know I’m gone, yet.” Just then, Kirby’s manager leans into the break room. “Hey Kirb, I need you to do something for me.” “Sure thing, boss.” As Kirby stands up to leave the now still break room, Frank and Thomas glance down at Kirby’s security badge for his full name, Kirby Phillips.

9 minutes

January 9, 2014

Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Jobs and Occupations, Locations and Sites

Interference

Let me start by saying that this is a very true story from my childhood, and if you visit the big library in the Nottingham City Centre, and check out their newspaper records, you will actually find information about the events detailed here. This story takes place around 15 or 16 years ago. I was just 7 years old, and my cousin Dale, was around 9, maybe 10. He was staying with me while his mother was away looking after a sick relative. Since I was an only child, I didn’t have many toys, and my Sega Genesis was busted, and so we didn’t have much things to do that were entertaining. Our days consisted of watching cartoons on our cable television, followed by Dale teling me scary ghost stories at it turned night-time. My mother, sympathysing with us, and wanting us to do something more active decided to purchase a pair of walkie talkies for us to play with. We had fun with them, journeying to a neighbouring Strelley Village, and hiding far apart in the woods, while the other person would try and find them by using the walkie talkie. Since we were quite young however, we weren’t allowed out of the house for very long, and so we had to be home by 5pm. We returned home later (about 6) and had our dinner. By this time it was around 7pm. We decided we would call it a night, and packed all of our toys away and got ready for bed. However, we didn’t pack the walkie talkies away. Dale was staying in the spare room, and I had my own room, and so we planned to talk to each other through the walkie talkies until we fell asleep. That’s when we heard the thing that would change us forever. It was about 11 at night, and we had been telling ghost stories over the walkie talkies for hours. All of a sudden, whilst Dale was telling me a story about a monster that supposedly haunts the same woods we had been at earlier in the day, his voice was cut off, and replaced with the usual static noise the walkie talkies produced when the talker had accidently let go of the button used to speak. I waited for a few seconds for Dale to carry on speaking, when I heard a faint mumble coming from the small speaker. “That’s odd.” I thought. The speaker was still emitting static, but I could definately hear some kind of movement and speech. All of a sudden, the sound of crying could be heard through the static. This was very creepy to me, and so I dived out of my bed, and rushed to the room Dale was staying in. He was sat bolt upright in bed, also listening to his walkie talkie, which was emitting the same sounds, if not a second or so behind mine. The crying grew louder. “What is that?” Dale asked. “I thought you were playing a prank.” When I told him I wasn’t, his face dropped. He switched his off. The sound still emitted from the walkie talkie I was holding in my hand, making it impossible for my walkie talkie to be picking up sound from his. “This is creepy” said Dale. The crying and mumbles through the static seemed to get slightly clearer, and louder. I switched mine off too and went back to bed. All kinds of ideas were flowing through my head. Perhaps I was picking up the sounds of the afterlife? Perhaps my walkie talkie were simply broken and producing weird sounds that just sounded like crying and mumbling? I tried not to think anything of it, and went to sleep. I was awoken the next day by a massive bang which seemed to be coming from downstairs. It was around 6 in the morning, and I rushed downstairs to find my mother and cousin Dale looking out of the living room window at our neighbours house next door. A large police van had pulled up outside, and our neighbour Jessie was being led outside by several officers. She was screaming profanities and insults, and even tried to run from the officers at one point before being pushed into the back of the van and handcuffed. We were shocked by what had happened, and generally confused. Jessie had been a new neighbour, recently moving into the house next door with her baby after our old neighbour had died of old age. She had kept herself to herself, and as far as we had known she was very quiet, and didn’t seem like the type of person that would be arrested for any reason. It wasn’t until the next day when we recieved our daily newspaper that we found out what had happened. Jessie had murdered her baby after apparently seeing horrible apparitions of an elderly person in her house that had tormented her for weeks and she had finally snapped and turned loopy. This wasn’t the disturbing part though. The disturbing part was that fact that the baby monitor in the room the murder took place had been switched on during the murder. My cousin and I had heard everything. Credit To: Elmarco

3 minutes

October 15, 2012

Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances

My Father and I Created a Device That Warps Reality

Justin Kyle Cutrer MD

Part 1 My name is Conrad King. I work with my father in research and development at a large tech company. Over the past year, he and I stumbled our way through a very fascinating engineering breakthrough. We discovered that by vibrating a rare metal at a very precise frequency, we were able to manipulate the elements, down to the atomic level. We constructed a device that optimized this process to the point of seamless accessibility. This device gave the user god-like power, granting them the ability to form objects using the atoms in the vicinity. From the point of view of the user, it appeared to create matter from nothing. I nicknamed this tech Genesis. Needless to say, the potential applications for Genesis were endless. World Hunger. Dwindling natural resources. All of which could be alleviated with our tech. It was exciting times. I even suggested publishing our data for free. We were to be harbingers of a new era! However, the powers that be were not as philanthropic. The board of directors, which included my father, viewed Genesis as an unrefined and dangerous technology. They decided to instead create (and sell) a tempered version of the technology that would go on to become a VR gaming accessory. My father developed it himself. He called it The Maze. The Maze would be able to create “soft” virtual realities that users could minimally interact with and explore. Its greatest selling point was that the user would not require VR gear. To the uninitiated, think Matrix-Lite. Or Ready Player One. I hated how our discovery had been watered down. Reducing such a groundbreaking discovery to a video game was a slap in the face to everything we stood for at our company. I decided something had to be done about that. * * * * * * “Aren’t you supposed to be cutting the grass,” says my father. We’re in the backyard of our vacation home sitting at the concrete bench and table. A chessboard engraved into its tabletop. This was a dream. More specifically, a memory. Looks like we were in the middle of a game. “I’ll get to that,” says a smaller version of me, eyes focused on the board. “But first, how do you keep beating me?” “Because you’re reckless,” he says with a smirk. “You play from here. You need to play from here.” His hand moved from his chest to his temple. I frowned. This makes him laugh. “Strategy son. Always be the smartest person in the room.” Younger me’s face contracts slightly. “How?” “Calmly assess the situation,” he starts, his focus back to the board. “Detect the variables at play.” “When you have that data, form a plan.” * * * * * * It was the vinegary smell of oak and rain that first penetrated the darkness. Followed by sounds of thunder, my phone’s vibrations, and the coarse voice of my father’s personal assistant. “Rough night, Mr. King?” I blinked myself out of my drunken stupor, exiting my dream. I then glanced at Red through the glass window pane that separated the front and back seats. Head pounding, I answered his question with a nod. William Redford was a tall, British fellow who’s worked for my father and the company for many years. He can often be found carrying out some designated chore. Thus, I’ve dubbed him our company’s “Task Manager”. Outside of his administrative responsibilities, he’s also occasionally asked to manage less imperative tasks. Such as chauffeuring the boss’ hung-over son to The Maze’s beta-testing trials. Usually, the night before a beta test, the company would sponsor a party that served as both a staff celebration and a “meet & greet” for the participants. I recalled very little from the festivities, so it must have been a good time. From what I remember, four individuals were to participate in The Maze’s beta test today. I was included in that number. I would occasionally volunteer to test products, especially those that show promise. Unlike those other times, though, this time I volunteered for another reason. We soon came along a vast woodland path that was comprised of tall, densely packed trees. They were staggered together so tightly, it was difficult to view between them. This path eventually opened up to a wooden warehouse planted in the very center of a massive clearing. Acres of grassland surrounded the warehouse as far as the eye could see. The immediate perimeter of the warehouse consisted of flat, gravel ground that appeared to encircle the property in almost a perfect semi-circle. The warehouse itself was a decent size, and was old with noticeable wear and tear. Our company owned several warehouses for various reasons, but this particular one I wasn’t familiar with. As we got closer, I noticed the other 3 participants had already arrived and were grouped near the entrance, congregating under a canopy to avoid the rain. Red pulled up to the group and parked the car. “Last chance to escape, Mr. King,” he teased. Now it may have been my post-inebriated state, but when he spoke those words, I would have sworn there was a moment of perfect quiet; rain and thunder calming for that one instant. “Not this time, Red,” I said with a smile while exiting the vehicle. As soon as I make it under the canopy, a dark-skinned, muscular woman paced towards me with her hand extended. “Glad to see you didn’t die from alcohol intoxication, CK.” “Mack!” My hand extended to meet hers. It was a firmer handshake than I had anticipated. “I’m glad to see your liver is still intact as well.” Mackenzie, aka ‘Mack’, is a UFC fighter-turned- Youtube gamer personality with roughly 2.4 million subscribers. Her niche is the fighter gaming genre, obviously. We’ve consulted Mack to beta test a number of projects for us in the past, so she’s well known within our company. Despite her towering, intimidating appearance, Mack was nothing but smiles and corny jokes. If it weren’t for her job history, you’d think she’d be incapable of hurting a fly. My eyes then met with those of our other two beta-testers, Abigail and Adam, fraternal twin gamers. These two were slim, blonde and, outside of Abby’s long flowing hair, were essentially clones of each other. They co-hosted several gaming profiles across multiple social media platforms. In total, their subscriber count exceeded well over 10 million, with a daily viewership of greater than 750k. Adam’s niche in the gaming community was horror/action-adventure genre while Abigail’s niche was puzzles/problem-solving. I walked over to the twosome. “Hey Abby, Adam. Thanks for coming!” Abby gave brief eye contact with a smile before looking back down at her phone. I shook Adam’s hand. “Same here! I’m surprised your company even knew we existed, Mr. King,” Adam responded, establishing himself as the spokesperson of the two. “Of course, I’m excited to get to work with you guys today,” I replied. “And, please, Mr. King’s my father. Call me Conrad.” After the pleasantries, we all step through the doorway, entering the warehouse. [Before we proceed, let me explain that I was not part of the design process the weeks leading up to today’s beta testing. I was busy working on… another project. The actual layout and machinations of the game were, and still are, largely unknown to me. I had no idea what to expect upon entering this building. In retrospect, my lack of oversight certainly could have contributed to our current state of affairs.] We then found ourselves within a rather large room. It was rectangular in shape, and similar in design to that of a hallway. 120-125 ft x 30-40 ft would have been the dimensions by my estimate. The wall in front of us was lined with doors of different shapes and sizes. The wall space between those doors was painted dark crimson and housed dozens of knockoff famous paintings. These included the Mona Lisa, Last Supper, American Gothic, etc. The floor was made up of thick, brown acrylic carpeting and the vaulted ceiling housed a golden chandelier that cast a faint yellow tint over the room. This functioned as the only source of lighting, actually. Notably, there were no windows in this room. Not too far from where we stood was a large circular table that contained a spread of food fit for a king. Everyone looked to me as if to ask permission to eat. I nodded. As we made our way to the buffet, my mind continued to explore the room. And that’s when I noticed it. It was subtle, but the dimensions of the space gave it away. It was a little too wide and the vaulted ceilings were a smidgen too tall. What I noticed was that the room shouldn’t be able to physically exist within this warehouse. ’Were we already inside the virtual space? Had the game been turned on without us knowing?’ My suspicions were confirmed once I made it to the buffet table. I picked up my plate and the meat slicer next to the roast beef. Both of which had the designated company’s logo, a half-eaten apple, imprinted on them. Though I wasn’t part of the design process, I was aware of what the emblem meant. Objects within the virtual space were marked with it to help prevent users from confusing the game with real life. A gesture I grew to appreciate. This game’s VR capabilities were breathtaking. I stared at the sizzling meat in the pan being kept warm by a smoldering chafing dish. It made me think of Genesis. Creating food should be beyond the capabilities of The Maze. It was theoretically possible for Genesis, however. We just hadn’t had a chance to test it yet. I pictured the C-H-O combinations within this slice of roast beef. I checked the piece of meat for the company’s logo, just in case. My undertaking was interrupted by Red’s coarse voice. “Good morning, participants,” said a hologram version of my father’s personal assistant. He startled the group. His torso had suddenly appeared through the center of the table, and hovered over the food. “And welcome.” His legs appeared from beneath the table as he walked towards us. “As some of you may have already realized, you are now within the virtual space.” Everyone looked around, this time with critiquing eyes. All nodded in approval. Red continued. “We call this space The Maze. I am William Redford and I will be your guide.” “Here at The Maze, you will be thrown into a series of escape rooms. Each escape room has an objective that will need to be completed. You progress in the game by completing these objectives.” “So it’s like the Boda Borg escape rooms in Boston?” asked Adam, hand half-raised in the air. “Correct. And like there, each room will have its own distinct objectives. There will be laws, however, that will persist throughout all rooms for the duration of the game. These laws are simple but make up the intricate framework of this virtual reality.” “Law #1: There are only two types of rooms. Resting and Escape Rooms. Resting Rooms will be placed before each Escape Room. Use these rooms to eat, rest, etc. Once you are ready to progress, simply go through the next available doorway. Passing through a doorway will activate the next room.” “Law #2: There is no leaving The Maze,” Red paused for a moment to allow the tension to build. He then continued with a smile. “Prematurely. This will diminish everyone’s experience. Thus, it is not allowed. You can only exit The Maze once you’ve lost or finished the game.” “And Law #3: The objective of each room will sometimes be laid out in plain sight for you. Other times, your objectives will be hidden. You must complete this objective if you want to survive the room.” There was a subtle, but noticeable shift in Red’s tone at the word ‘survive’. “Final advice: The truth you know as true is a lie. Acknowledge yourself or you will fail. And then reality will become your illusion.” I scanned my cohort and saw that they were eating this up. Figuratively and literally. “Please leave your smartphones here.” As Red spoke, a table manifested in front of him with a basket in its center. Everyone obeyed the hologram’s instruction. I dropped my phone into the basket, but I noticed a missed text from my father. I tried to reach back into the basket, but both it and the table disappeared into the floor. Oh well, I thought to myself. If it was important he would’ve called. Though it was weird. He rarely texted me. “That is all. My hologram will remain here as a guide. Please do not hesitate to ask any questions about the Room,” stated Red, back to his baseline courteousness. “And please, do enjoy your time here in The Maze.” Mack and the twins mumbled amongst themselves in excitement. While the group was eating, I walked up to Redford. It was time for me to initiate my plan. I retrieved the device from my pocket that I had been working for the past few weeks. I developed it to help me hack into The Maze’s local settings. I pressed the button in front of Redford and, after a few seconds, a flat, translucent command prompt screen popped up and a keyboard manifested. I was in. Context: For months, I’ve secretly tried to publish our Genesis data for free. Security at HQ has been tight, however, and would remain so until product launch. This made it impossible to carry out my plan on-site. So I came up with an idea of publishing Genesis via The Maze. I would be able to send the data to an FTP server via The Maze’s server since the two were connected. Most of our beta-testing is monitored by skeleton crews, if that. I figured the best chance I had at accomplishing this goal would be while I was inside the game today. By the way, yes. I knew what my actions meant. I knew I was betraying not only the company but also my father. I weighed the pros and cons of my decision, and made peace with the potential repercussions. You have to understand. Genesis had the potential to change the world. It was worth the risk. “What you working on there, CK?” Mack asked while making her second trip to the buffet table. “Oh you know,” I started to reply as I turned back to minimize the screen. “Just some work stuff.” “Getting the most out of your free time before we start, huh,” she said as she continued her trek towards the roast beef. “Good. We’ll need you focused when we go through one of these doors.” I nodded, but that made me think about Red’s monologue earlier. I didn’t remember him giving us any clear instructions on how to start the game. I thought that was weird seeing how following the rules was heavily emphasized. You would think something like that wouldn’t be left so open-ended. Figured I’d get Task Manager 2.0 to clarify. “Red, quick question. Do we go through one of these doorways to start the first resting room?” Then, thinking myself clever, I asked, “or are we already inside the first resting room?” It would make sense. There was food, and we were sort of resting. “I’m afraid the answers to both of your questions are no, Mr. King.” That didn’t make any sense, I thought. “Hey guys,” I heard Mack shout from the buffet table to the left of me. I asked a follow-up question. “Then how do we start the first escape room?” Mack continued, “Do any of you know where the roast beef knife went?” “The escape room has already started, Mr. King.” Suddenly, everything goes dark. At first, there was silence in the darkness. Then, a loud sound of something crashing into the buffet table was heard. This was followed by Mack screaming in agonizing pain. She cried out for whatever was happening to stop. Then, as abruptly as it all started, she’d gone quiet, returning us to the silent darkness. “Mack!” I yelled as I ran blindly towards her general direction. The chafing dish must have tipped over during the ruckus as the buffet table and the carpet underneath it were now in flames. The light from the fire illuminated the area near Mack. As I approached her position, I saw Adam had also come to her side and had pulled her away from the growing flames. Mack’s body lied prone with the meat slicer sticking out of her back. Blood was oozing from multiple stab wounds. “Conrad,” Mack yelled, rolling onto her side. “This fucking hurts! Why does this hurt? What was that?” I looked around the room for the attacker. Though it was dimly lit by the flames, all I could see was Abby still standing where we left her, near her table and uneaten food, seemingly frozen in fear. “Mr. King!” This time it was Adam that yelled it. “What do we do? Is this part of the game?” I didn’t purposely ignore their questions. I just didn’t have an answer for them. Something like this should not be part of the game. We should barely be able to touch objects made by The Maze tech, much less be hurt by them. I took a deep breath. ‘Calmly observe… detect the variables…’ Mack was losing a lot of blood and the flames were growing around us. We had to act fast. And treating Mack had to take priority. ‘…form a plan.’ “Adam,” I declared, “If I’m not mistaken, you have first aid training, yes? Would you able to tend to Mack?” He thought for a moment and nodded his head, “I think we need to stabilize the knife, and try to pack her other stab wounds to stop the bleeding.” “Good, do that,” I stated, then turned to face his sister. “Abby, can you-“ “The doors are gone,” Abby uttered, voice trembling as she pointed around her. “And the paintings are laughing at us.” Sure enough, as the flames continued to surround us, the added illumination revealed a continuous blank wall, absent of all doors. This included the door we used to enter the facility. And those stunning paintings from before had changed. They were now intently staring at Mack, Adam, and myself with one hand pointed at us. The creepiest part, and why Abby thought they were laughing, was that they were now all donning wide, toothy, malevolent grins that extended from ear to ear. “Call 911, Red,” I demanded as I walked back towards the hologram. “And end the game right now. We need to get outside.” Red’s eyes, calm as ever, followed me as I paced in front of him. “I’m afraid I cannot do that, Mr. King.” I stopped pacing, caught off guard by his response. “And why the hell not?” I asked, but I knew his answer before he even verbalized it. “Law #2, Mr. King. There is no leaving The Maze prematurely.” Let’s just slide right past the part where I flipped the fuck out on the hologram. “I think I found something,” yelled Adam, unfolding a small piece of paper. “It was hidden underneath the handle of the knife. It looks like… a poem?” “What does it say,” asked Abby finally moving for the first time, walking towards her brother. “First,” I interjected, making my way back to Adam as well. “How is Mack?” “I think the bleeding stopped,” he replied, looking back down at Mack. “But she passed out a couple seconds ago.” Adam coughed while he spoke. Smoke was filling the room. We were running low on time. We needed to find a way out of that room and fast. And as much as I hated to admit, it appeared the only way of accomplishing that would be to play the game. I explained my reasoning to the twins and they agreed. I motioned for Adam to read the paper, since I was sure the poem would turn out to be the objective for the room. I was correct. Your memories have been conned. Do not trust the bond. Find the insincere peer and get out of here! Adam looked back at us after he finished reading aloud. What followed was a moment of dreadful silence that seemed to last forever. “Does that mean what I think it means,” asked Adam finally. I found myself shaking my head, not wanting to believe the thoughts that were bubbling inside my mind. “This note seems to be suggesting that one of us may have done this to Mack,” I declared. “That one of us…” I started to say, but then trailed off. “…is a traitor?” finished Abby. “But how? Why would one of us hurt Mack? Could there be a mistake with the clue?” “That’s unlikely,” I stated. Adam handed me the paper and I read over the poem once again. I then noticed the back of the paper had one more line. It read, “Hint: Real Eyes Realize Real Lies.” This was followed by a half-eaten apple. “If that’s so, then one of us here is a danger to the others,” Adam suggested, as he and his sister both looked at me with condemning eyes. I was smart enough to know where that was heading. I decided to create some space between us. I told the twins we needed some further clarification of the poem, and I headed back towards the hologram. I suggested we all spread out, but the twins opted to stay close to one another. I didn’t argue with them. I was beginning to feel faint and unsteady by this point as I was coughing nearly non-stop. The flames were spreading quickly and the heat was becoming nearly unbearable. I looked around at the paintings who were still smiling and pointing towards Mack and the twins. “Maybe it was brainwashing,” offered Adam, as I slowly navigated around the flames. “Could the game do that, Mr. King?” Technically, it was possible. But something like that would need time and we had only just started the game a moment ago. Also, only Genesis (not The Maze) tech would even have the faintest chance of accomplishing something like brainwashing. And Genesis would have to be turned on for that to- And that’s when I had realized what I had potentially done. I hastened my pace back to the hologram. “We need clarification of the poem,” I began as I sat down in front of Red. I opened the digital screen back up and perused the current settings as I queried the hologram. “Does this mean that the insincere peer, is one of us here in the room? That one of us here attacked Mack?” “That is correct, Mr. King.” The words were painful to hear. “Then it was brainwashing?” I added. Then I sat back in my chair defeated. Within the settings, Genesis was noted to be inactive. If Genesis, our most powerful tech, isn’t causing this, then what is? Wtf is going on? “I’m afraid not, Mr. King,” replied Red to my brainwashing comment. “Wait what,” I said, confused. “Then how? Why would one of us do this to-” “One of you do not exist, Mr. King,” he continued, cutting me off mid-sentence. “One of you is a fixture of the game, created solely for this room.” It felt like a rock formed in my stomach and I became lightheaded. “H-How is… that possible?” I looked back at the twins and their faces reflected the same terror and confusion I was feeling. “Memories of this individual have been implanted in everyone’s brain,” Red started. “Electrical signals in the brain are nothing more than a series of molecular compounds attaching themselves to brain receptors, after all.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The Maze is able to create a person from nothing and implant memories?! Also, we all met each other outside the warehouse. Before we even started the game. I distinctly remember seeing everyone while driving up. And then an uncomfortable thought hit me. Maybe it wasn’t one of them that didn’t exist. Could I be- My thoughts were interrupted by Abby’s piercing screams. I stumbled to my feet and looked to where she and Adam had been standing. What I saw next, I will never forget. Abby was engulfed in flames. She was kneeling over as if she had been pushed. “Oh my God!” she cried repeatedly, each syllable sounding excruciatingly more painful than the last. Her hair had fried like it had been stuck inside a light socket. Her face turned black, and the rest of her skin melted away. She was attempting to stand, until she suddenly collapsed. The screaming stopped and the silence that followed became louder than the chaos before it. My legs buckled, I fell back into my chair and then vomited onto the floor. Watching her burn to death had paralyzed me completely. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. But through my mental breakdown, one other thought popped into my head. ‘Where was Adam?’ I looked around the room that had begun to get more opaque from the smoke. That’s when I noticed that the paintings directly ahead of me had changed again. The creepy smile was still there, but this time instead of pointing towards where Mack and the twins had been earlier, they were now pointing directly at me. Or, rather, directly behind me. I suddenly heard noise coming from my flank. I turned around to find Adam running full speed towards me, meat slicer in hand, a toothy, malevolent, impossibly huge grin on his face. Then suddenly out of nowhere, Mack comes running and tackles Adam right before he reaches me. They both land onto the now inflamed buffet table off to the side, both being sentenced to the same fiery death Abby suffered just moments before. ‘What the hell?’ I repeated this phrase over and over while rocking in my chair. Adam was the insincere peer? But he was a twin. How could that be possible? But then Mack… And Abby… Just as my brain was beginning to process it all, Red’s voice interrupted the silence, once again. “Congratulations, you have survived the first escape room. Please proceed through the designated doorway to enter your Resting Room.” Of course, the door manifested on the opposite side of the room. I and it separated by the roaring flames. But it didn’t matter. I had already become too weak to move. I knew then that it wouldn’t be the fire that would take me, but the smoke. I was trapped, condemned to die in this room with my cohort. I fell to my knees and screamed my discontent at Red’s hologram. Surprisingly, it wasn’t my impending death that caused me the most grief. It was that I was to die with so many unanswered questions that bothered me the most. Specifically, about this damned game. Despite my screaming, I had accepted my fate. At the time, I believed that I or the company was somehow responsible for all this. Thus, a part of me felt that my death here was justified. I sank to the floor and lied on my side while the flames continued to close in around me. My vision had grown increasingly blurred, but while I stared into the coded black screen I noticed something pop up on the monitor. ‘Upload Complete,’ and ‘Are you sure you want to send data? Type Yes or No.’ ‘Maybe, I could do one thing right, before I go,’ I thought. I reached for the keyboard but then found myself barely able to lift my arm. Dizziness overtook me. I finally collapsed, all before I was able to click yes. Useless. Then darkness overcame me. And after the transient discomfort of gasping for air subsided, I surrendered myself to a calmness I had never felt before. I had found peace there in the darkness. And I was content. But it was the vinegary smell of oak and rain that first penetrated the darkness. Followed by sounds of thunder, my phone’s vibrations, and the guttural voice of my father’s personal assistant. “Rough night, Mr. King?” asked Redford. ‘What the-,’ was my first thought upon awakening. I snapped myself upright and noticed I was able to breathe with ease again. I looked around. I was back in my father’s town car, being once again chauffeured to the beta testing site. ‘Was that all a dream?’ My dream notion was quickly disproved as we came upon a woodland path. A woodland path that I knew would soon open up to a very familiar yet unfamiliar wooden warehouse surrounded by acres of grassland and a thin patch of gravel ground that would enclose the property in a perfect semi-circle. What came next was a sequence of futile acts. I asked Red about the game. I ordered him to stop the car. Despite banging on the glass, I was repeatedly ignored. I tried to open the door, but to no avail. I then attempted to call 911, and that’s when I noticed my father’s text. That same text from seconds earlier and from before I… died. I opened it. Don’t bother calling 911, Conrad. As you may now have begun to realize, you are already in The Maze. I paused for a second and looked around me. The rain, the car… even Redford? I then searched my surroundings and I nearly dropped my phone when I found it. But sure enough, there it was. On the back of Red’s headrest was a half-eaten apple. I returned to my father’s text. Now, by the time you’ve read this, you should remember having died and then subsequently reset. Going forward, you need to know that that isn’t happening again. Each time one of you dies from now on, it will be permanent. Resetting will no longer be an option. The company also knows about your plan to publish Genesis, Conrad. My heart leapt to my throat at this statement. I continued reading. Redford was inserted into the game to offer you a way out. Abandon this fool’s errand of yours and exit the game. Please… Mackenzie will die. Abigail will die. Zero chance of survival here, son. End the game now. I convinced the board to give you another chance. So show them you’re a team player. And move past this. Let this plan of yours go. I beg of you. Value life over scientific advancement. Each of these participants’ freedom depends on your decision. And that’s where the text ended. Leaving off on what was a poorly veiled threat. My father is not only aware of what’s going on, but it sounds like he’s willing to hold these poor souls hostage and even let me die if it meant preserving his bottom line. Did he set all this up? Did he sabotage the beta trials just so I wouldn’t upload Genesis? I knew my father and I had our disagreements, but this was on another level. We began pulling up to the clearing with the warehouse in sight. In the distance, I could see the group under the canopy. I saw Mack waving and Abby’s hair flying wildly in the wind. A wave of relief washed over me at the sight of those two. But then, to the side of Abby, I saw Adam. And that relief was replaced with both dread and rage. My eyes began to well with tears as I stared back down at my phone. I wished things had been different. I wished I wasn’t this powerless. So I took a deep breath. Calmly observe… The car pulled to a stop. …detect the variables… “Last chance to escape, Mr. King.” Just as I was about to cave in to my father’s demands, I noticed three bars in the top right corner of my phone’s screen. …and form a plan. My phone had service. Internet access. And that gave me hope. The internet access could have been fabricated like everything else in this reality or something missed by the design team. If it was the latter, then we now had a tool we didn’t have before. Not only would we have google at our disposal, but we could also elicit outside help. If so, I know we’d be in a better position to circumvent future obstacles like Adam. We just needed to survive long enough to finish the Genesis’ upload. That had to be our priority. Though I didn’t want to die or for the others to die, Genesis had the potential to change the world. It was worth the risk. So, to everyone reading this, please help us navigate The Maze. The villains here (the designers, the board, and my father) are human. And humans make mistakes. Our best shot of making it out of here will be to exploit one of those mistakes. “Last chance to escape, Mr. King,” Red repeated. An urge to curse this faux-Redford arose, but I resisted the temptation. “Not this time,” I finally replied. And, with all the courage I could muster in that backseat, I opened the door and stepped out into the rain. Part 2 Let’s try this again, I thought to myself as I exited the town car. I knew I had to be careful from here on out. Every action I took had to be deliberate and calculated. I met back up with the group under the canopy. Their memories had been scrambled as I was greeted similarly to before. Adam, the solution to our first puzzle, was back in character. So I played along. Didn’t want to risk alarming him/it. Though doing so made my skin crawl. After passing through the doorway, I felt it was safe to begin explaining The Maze. I started by detailing most of what transpired during our first attempt. I also made a point to emphasize that the next time we die here, it will be permanent. I confessed that I knew what I was saying sounded crazy, but I swore it was the truth. Surprisingly, it wasn’t terribly difficult to convince them of any of this. They both still had some faint recollection of their deaths. Just not how they died. They did, however, express their displeasure how their lives were now in danger. I apologized profusely for this and promised that I’d do everything in my power to get them safely out of the game. Adam flawlessly adapted to the situation. Perfectly mimicking symptoms of memory lapse and concern akin to the others. I trod carefully with my final revelation. I went on to discuss how one of us here didn’t exist in the real world. And explained how that person was created by The Maze for the sole purpose of being an obstacle to overcome in this room. After a short pause, I divulged that Adam was this individual. It was a hard sell, but Mack was the first to get on board. It was Abby who resisted accepting my accusation as fact. She insisted we were making a huge mistake. That they were twins and had a connection that co

69 minutes

November 15, 2019

Strange and Unexplained

She’s Waiting in the Reflection

Micah Edwards

[vc_row css_animation=”” row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” angled_section=”no” text_align=”left” background_image_as_pattern=”without_pattern”][vc_column][vc_column_text] I wasn’t always alone. I used to have friends. Four or five, at least. Good friends, I mean, actual friends, the kind who matter to your life. I’m pretty sure I had four. I don’t think there were five. I’m going to tell this story as it probably happened. Otherwise, it’ll be full of “I think”s and “I guess”s and “it must have been”s. So just know that this is true, as far as I can put the pieces together. There’s a lot of guesswork and probably a bit of wishful thinking, but I’ve done my best. The five of us were hanging out one night a couple of months ago: me, Marc, Bethany, Zoe and Andrew. It was a game night, so we sat around with beers and snacks and casually insulted each other all night, all in good fun. It was a comfortable, fun time, with friends who go way back. We’d already weathered the storms that had eroded the rest of our group — moving, kids, whatever. Bethany had dated Marc for a while, and dated me after that. In addition to Bethany, Marc had dated Andrew, too, and Zoe for like a week. I was the only one of us Marc hadn’t slept with, and it was a constant joke that he wanted to collect the whole set. We’d had plenty of hurt feelings in the past, is my point, but we’d come through it. We were all on easy, good terms with each other. We loved each other. Andrew’s the one who suggested the game. It was midnight or so, and no one was going home yet, but the card games had died down and we were all just lounging around. Curiosity Killed the Cat, he called it. He made a spreadsheet and put it up online, and we all got our phones out to edit it. We each put our name in, followed by the number 10. Andrew hadn’t told us why, yet, but with the name of the game, no one wanted to be the first to ask. Andrew just stared at us expectantly, though, grinning, and finally Zoe broke down and asked him what the deal was. “It’s simple,” he said. “Last one on the sheet gets twenty bucks from everyone else, eighty dollars all told. Every time you look at the sheet to see the rankings, though, you’ve got to decrease your number by 1. When it gets to zero, you’re out.” “I just won’t look, then,” laughed Marc. Andrew smiled. “Two catches. No one ever has to tell you if you’ve won. So if you never look, we might all owe you twenty bucks that you’ll never know about. And also, everyone’s allowed to lie. I could tell you you’ve won — or that I have, for that matter. If you want to find out for sure, you’ll have to go look.” “What’s to stop me from just looking and not decreasing my number?” asked Marc. Andrew looked hurt. “Basic honesty?” “A sense of self-worth,” I added. “Not ripping off your friends?” offered Bethany, and Marc threw up his hands in surrender. “All right, all right, no cheating! Got it.” “Last rule,” said Andrew. “Everyone puts a link to the sheet on the front page of their phone. That way, we’ll all have to think about it. Curiosity begins…now! Remember, all you have to do to win is just don’t look.” “Oh man, I just won,” said Marc. “I don’t know how you all looked so many times already, but you guys all owe me twenty bucks.” We pelted him with popcorn. * * * * * * The first few days were easy. No one could possibly have been out so soon, so the urge to look was low. I would have forgotten about it entirely, except that every time I opened my phone, the little spreadsheet icon labeled Curiosity was sitting right there, waiting for me to click it. After a week, I cracked for the first time. I had to know how my friends were doing with the temptation. And 10 was such a high number, it was hardly going to matter if I dropped it by one, anyway. If I wanted to, I could check it every week for two months and still be in the game. So I opened it. Bethany and I were the only ones still at 10, and of course I promptly changed my number to 9, joining Andrew and Zoe. Marc was down to 8 already, which fit; he was never the patient sort. I closed the window and sent a group message to my friends reading, “Marc, how’d you get down to 4 so soon?” My phone buzzed a minute later with a response: “Left my phone open, cat walked on the keyboard, changed my number. Thanks for letting me know! Everyone else better log in and check their numbers, too.” I laughed. It would have been marginally more believable if Marc had owned a cat. This started the lying in earnest, though. Not a day went by without one of us trying something to get the others to look. Sometimes it was by group message, but more often it was a direct communication. They ranged from the blatant, like Zoe’s “You must have a will of steel! Your score is double mine!”, to Andrew’s subtle “Marc’s out; want to help me trick Zoe into lowering her score next?” That one actually got me. I legitimately wasn’t sure if Andrew was telling the truth or not, and we were almost to the end of the second week anyway, so I clicked Curiosity to find out, dropping my score to 8. If I’d had to bet before I signed in, I would have said Andrew was telling the truth, but Marc was still in there at 6 and Andrew was the only one of us left at 9. I resolved to up my game. * * * * * * Bethany and Marc made the next move a few days later, early into the third week. Bethany sent a group message: “Nice work with the creepy interface, Andrew!” Marc responded a minute later with, “Yeah, saw that over the weekend. Didn’t know you could do that with spreadsheets!” It was a setup, an obvious setup. But what if it wasn’t? What if there really was something cool to see, and I was missing it? I wouldn’t put it past Andrew to add something as a lure. I resisted it for a full day, then broke down and opened the spreadsheet. We were into the third week anyway, so I was still basically on track. As I suspected, there was nothing there but our names and numbers, and I grudgingly dropped mine to a 7. As I was looking over the other numbers — Andrew still at 9, Marc all the way down to 3, Bethany and Zoe both at 6 — I spotted something, though. It was subtle, hidden in the background, and I had to angle my phone around to catch the light just right before I got a good look at it. Somehow, Andrew had set it up so that it looked like there was a creepy, black-eyed woman standing over my shoulder in my reflection in the phone. When I tilted the phone, she moved with the image, just like she was actually in the room. It was so convincing, I even looked behind me to make sure, but there was obviously nothing there. I exited the spreadsheet and looked at my reflection in the phone. Nothing. I clicked Curiosity again, reloading the sheet, and as I did, she reappeared. I examined her more carefully this time, impressed with the detail and reality of the picture. She occupied a specific place in the room, and I could walk all around her. She never moved, but when I got close, I could see the faint rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. Her eyes were solid black from corner to corner, and when I peered closely at her slight smile, through parted lips I could see that behind her teeth was more blackness, as if she were hollow inside. I waved my arm through the space she should have occupied if she were really in the room, but of course hit nothing. In the reflection, though, I saw the slightest flicker, as if she had ducked aside and returned impossibly fast. Her unwavering stare was starting to creep me out, so I reduced my number to 6 and closed the spreadsheet again, watching her vanish. “Okay, that was seriously cool,” I texted the group. “Don’t know how you did that, Andrew, but it was entirely worth the 2 points I just spent.” “Ughhhhh fine I’ll bite,” Zoe responded, followed only a minute later by “Creepy af! Jesus, Andrew!” “Ha ha, very funny,” wrote Andrew. “Dude, just take a bow. That’s nice work,” I texted. “Yeah, got to know how you did that,” added Bethany. “You guys serious? Drop the game for a second and tell me,” came Andrew’s reply. “No game drop! But you’re welcome to spend a point to go find out,” mocked Marc. Things were quiet for almost an hour after that, before Andrew’s next message. “If you’re seeing what I’m seeing — creepy reflection lady — I didn’t do that. And as far as I know, that can’t be done. Not on any current tech, and definitely not in a cloud spreadsheet showing on random phones.” I got a private message from Zoe: “You think he’s serious?” “Can’t be,” I wrote back, but I frowned as I wrote it. I really couldn’t figure out any way that he could have created an image like that, and more to the point, I couldn’t think of why he’d deny it if he did. It wasn’t helping him win Curiosity, and freaking us all out wasn’t Andrew’s style. Marc’s, sure, but there was zero chance that Marc had done this. We’d had to show him how to add the icon to his phone when we started the game. Programming was not his forte. “Well, now you’re down to 8, suckerrrrr,” Zoe sent to the group. So at least I’d convinced her, if not myself. * * * * * * I was weirded out enough to avoid the spreadsheet for a while. I didn’t take the icon off of my phone, but instead of tempting me as it had before, I just felt a vague dread when I saw it. I clearly wasn’t the only one, because partway through the next week, Zoe texted us, “You guys want to just drop the game?” “Not when there’s eighty bucks on the line!” texted Marc, followed by “But you can drop out. Just go look at the sheet a few more times.” Bethany replied with a non sequitur: “Guys? Whose idea was this game?” I started to reply, then stopped. It had to be one of the four of us. I remembered when we set up the spreadsheet, and we were all in the room. But somehow, I couldn’t remember which one of us had come up with the idea. “Who knows? We were all drunk,” replied Marc. “No, we’re missing someone,” insisted Bethany. “Who?” texted Marc. “It’s just the four of us. Has been for years.” Bethany: “Then why is there eighty dollars up for grabs?” It’s hard to judge pauses in text, but I could picture Marc making the same face I had moments earlier, when I tried to remember who had suggested the game. “I must have been including myself,” came his uncertain response. “No. There was someone else. Someone’s been lost.” Lost. Lost how? If there had been five of us, there would be another name on the spreadsheet. Reluctantly, I clicked the Curiosity icon to see. I held the phone off to the side and at an angle, trying to make sure only the ceiling’s reflection showed. There were four names, just like there should have been — Bethany at 6, me and Zoe at 5, and Marc at 2. As I watched, though, my number changed to 4, and Marc’s dropped to 1. I closed the sheet quickly and texted Marc. “Are you editing the sheet?” In reply, he sent me a blurry selfie taken in a bathroom mirror. It showed him standing alone in the empty bathroom, a look of abject horror on his face. “Can you see her?” “I can see you,” I sent him. “She’s in the mirror right now. Not in the phone, the real mirror. I’m afraid to look away.” “Stay there, I’ll come get you,” I texted. I ran for the door, grabbing my keys on the way. I was in my garage, starting my car before I realized that I had no idea why I was in such a panic. My rent was paid, I didn’t have any plans for the night — so why was I in such a hurry? Puzzled, I put the car into reverse, planning to figure it out in a minute. When I checked the mirror, though, I stomped on the brakes in terror. The black-eyed woman from the Curiosity sheet was in the backseat of my car, smiling and staring directly into my eyes. She wasn’t alone, either, but I tore my eyes away before I could see anything more, grabbed for the door handle and spilled myself out onto the garage floor, scrambling for the stairs. I slammed and locked the door behind me, panting for breath. I messaged Bethany and Zoe, fighting autocorrect with my trembling hands to warn them, trying not to look directly at my phone. “Curiosity lady in reflections. Don’t look!” “Oh Jesus, she is! I can see her in my phone!” Zoe wrote back. “BETHANY DON’T LOOK,” I sent. “Typing this looking at the floor,” texted Zoe. “You guys can have the eighty bucks if I can just quit playing!” Bethany wrote, “Why eighty dollars?” * * * * * * So we figured it out at that point. We figured out that Marc and Andrew had been lost, I mean. I don’t know if those were their names, of course, but I have to call them something, and I like those names. I think Marc was strong, a big guy, maybe kind of a lunk but a really good-hearted one. Andrew was kind of nerdy, but not too awkward. Probably had glasses. Maybe that’s why he went out so fast. If she was reflecting in his glasses, he’d be screwed. As to how we set this off — I still have no idea. We talked about it for a while, I think, but that just made it worse for Zoe, and Bethany and I let the topic drop once we realized it was just the two of us. It was a bad day for both of us when we understood that we must have once had a group chat that we couldn’t remember. It was getting hard to measure bad days, anyway. Neither of us had left the house for some time. I blindfolded myself and spraypainted the bathroom mirror and all of the chrome faucets so I could shower again without worrying about seeing her in the reflection, but I forgot about the towel rack and saw her there when I was drying off. She wasn’t alone anymore, like I’d noticed in the car. There were three other figures with her, hard to make out in the thin strip of reflection, but they were just as still as she was. But while she was smiling widely, they were all silently screaming. I spraypainted the towel rack after that, of course, but I was so jittery from the scare that when I picked up my phone to text Bethany and let her know what I’d seen, I dropped it. It landed face up on the floor, my horrified expression a perfect counterpoint to the leering grin of the black-eyed woman leaning over my shoulder, practically touching me. Bethany and I switched to voice conversations after that, to avoid seeing the phones. At least, I assume we did. I don’t know what Bethany did, but I must have been careful enough. Because I’m sitting at the computer at my house right now, a glare protector on the screen so that it can’t reflect, and right next to my keyboard is eighty dollars. I think this means I won. I think it’s over. But even if it’s just me now, I remember the rules: everyone can lie. I’ve counted, though, and I think I’m still at 2. I should be able to check the sheet, to see if I’m the only name on it, and to see if the black-eyed woman has four screaming figures with her now. Then I’ll know if it’s over. But what if I miscounted? I’m not going to look. Wish me luck.

10 minutes

August 11, 2019

Strange and Unexplained

The Man Who Returned

betrayal, buried alive, classic horror, classic stories, classics, deaths, dying, Edmond Hamilton, infidelity, jealousy, mysteries, public domain, relationships, strange, undead, unexplained, zombies Please wait...

Estimated reading time — 19 minute

19 minut

May 19, 2019

Classic Horror, Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Strange and Unexplained, Zombies and the Undead

Box Fort

beings, childhood, children, entities, haunted houses, home intruders, intruders, kids, Mallory Eddy, strange, unexplained

Alright, we all remember those cardboard castles of our youth, the ones that were better than any Fisher-Price playhouse precisely because they had been painstakingly cut out, taped together, and decorated with our own hands. And unlike the fancy plastic cottages your parents spent a fortune on, these ones could be altered and added on to endlessly with a little creativity on your part and a few cardboard boxes your neighbors were just going to throw out. If you were the kid lucky enough to fall into possession of a refrigerator box, your coolness status was set. At least for a few weeks, anyway. Feeling nostalgic yet? Good. You’re in the same frame of mind I was before my happy childhood memories of cardboard and duct tape were forever marred. So, my story. Three years ago, my parents decided we were going to move. My sisters and I took this with a grain of salt because my parents are notoriously disorganized and none of their plans come to fruition without some serious delays. But sure enough, they soon began the renovations the house needed in order to sell. I was working at a fairly well-known clothing store at the time, and it was common for us to receive 15-30 boxes of stock every weekday. They were big boxes which, after being emptied, just ended up in the dumpster. I took some home and started stockpiling them in the basement, figuring they might be useful in case my parents were in earnest about this moving thing. One night after my sister had picked me up from work we were carrying down a few of the flattened boxes to the basement, and I started thinking about the really awesome box tunnel my cousins made when we were little. It stretched all through their basement with lots of nooks and crannies, and we were allowed to paint it however we liked. Naturally, we were occupied for months playing with this thing. Remembering this, I looked at our growing pile of boxes and then at my sister and voiced an idea I’m sure we were both considering. “Casey,” I said, “we could make a really kickass box fort out of these.” Now, before you start wondering about the mental capacity of my sisters and I (considering that we were able to amuse ourselves with a box fort), let me tell you it started out mostly as a joke, a “wouldn’t it be hilariously ridiculous if we did this?!” sort of thing. But, yeah, we ended up getting really into it… we’re a pretty creative family so it was mainly the building of it that was fun. It’s not like we spent hours in there playing “house” or anything. We built it upstairs, our first 8 boxes serving as a tunnel between my two sister’s rooms, Taylor and Casey, with a little doorway into the bathroom and another tunnel branching off towards my room. We got out the Sharpies and vandalized it to our heart’s content. We put up funny pictures inside; Casey even hung some Christmas lights, which gave a nice effect. Any four-year-old would be proud to call this box fort his own. I brought home more boxes. We elongated the tunnels, getting fancier and adding curves at the end so that, when inside, you could never see an entrance unless you crawled through to the very end. We even covered the whole thing with blankets to make it prettier and to keep out the light from all the little gaps and crevices throughout. Our dog, Juliet, was timid at first but joined the box fort club as soon as the three of us crawled inside to read ghost stories, because she didn’t want to be left out. It was really dark in there – we usually brought in flashlights – and pretty much any time we crawled through we were prone to fits of giggles, mostly because we were three fully-grown girls crawling through a box fort. I mention this only to show that, despite the total darkness and claustrophobic size of it, there was none of that “palpable atmosphere of terror, foreboding, and ill-will” that often accompanies creepy places. At that point, it was still perfectly commonplace and funny, though you’d be hard-pressed to get one of us to crawl through it to get to the bathroom at night, when the house was quiet and everyone asleep. My parents were understandably annoyed at the massive obstruction in their hallway which they had to hop over to get to their room, the linen closet, and our bathroom, but they are generally very accepting of our antics and only threatened to dismantle it once or twice. Nonetheless, we decided that we were unsatisfied with our box fort, because we wanted to make an epic box fort. However, having already taken up the space in our bedrooms, the only place left to extend was across the hall to my parent’s bedroom, something they would never agree to while living in the house. Luckily, they were going to be leaving for a week. That’s when we filled all the free floor space in their bedroom and closet with box fort, and that’s when the weird stuff started to happen. It was a progressive thing. We’d be in there hanging up goofy pictures or whatever, and then we’d hear a shuffling noise down one of the many branching tunnels. We assumed it was Juliet trying to find us, but after calling her and searching for her, it would turn out she’d been lying in the sunny patch on the couch for who knew how long. One time Casey and I were in there hanging up paper bats we cut out and we heard the shuffling from far off. “Juliet! Jooooo-leeee-etta!” I called. “It’s not.” “What are you talking about?” I said, confused because her face looked scared all of a sudden. “It’s not Julie. Taylor just took her for a walk. They’re both gone.” I stared at her a moment, remembered Taylor shouting something about ‘walking the dog’ not too long ago, and then we both scrambled to the nearest exit. Once outside the fort we immediately lapsed into fits of giggles, feeling ridiculous now that we were “safe.” “Do you think it’s mice or something?” Casey asked, crinkling her nose. I said I didn’t think so, the store was pretty clean and the house never had mice, but there had to be another explanation. The noise came from the portion that stretched into my parent’s closet, a big walk-in with a window to the back yard. “The window’s open in here, I bet it was just the breeze rustling the boxes.” A perfectly logical explanation which we were happy to believe. That night while I was in bed I found my gaze drawn toward the entrance of the fort time and time again. It was really dark in there, and something about having that gaping black tunnel in my room made me feel very vulnerable. Eventually, I turned over and slept the other way, but I made a mental note to cover it up with a sheet the next day. On day two of no parents I had used the grocery money to buy ingredients for a cookie-decorating extravaganza, so I was in the kitchen baking those with Casey. We had a movie on at the same time so it was a bit loud in there, and we didn’t hear Taylor until she was standing in the doorway yelling at us. If I remember correctly, the conversation went something like this. “What the hell, Casey, what do you want?” Case and I gave each other quizzical looks, and Taylor looked at us like we were stupid. “Are you serious? You make me come all the way down here and you don’t even want anything?” “Tay, we didn’t call you.” “Casey did. I was on the laptop in my room and she told me to come in the box fort with her.” “No, I didn’t. I’ve been here making cookies with Muse the whole time.” “Oh, whatever, Casey, you totally did, I heard you. And then, when I went in, you left and came down here.” At this point, seeing one sister was pissed and the other confused, I jumped in and got the whole story from Taylor. Apparently she was in her room when she heard Casey calling her name from inside the box fort. She asked her what she wanted and Casey insisted she come in the box fort, so exasperated, she finally did. She couldn’t see Casey inside though, and a moment later she heard her laughing with me, down in the kitchen. Where she had always been. Needless to say, the atmosphere in the room instantly went from warm and comfortable to super creeped out and I felt the need to step up as big sister to lay their fears to rest. We went through the “you’re lying,” bit for a while, but once both parties were satisfied the other was telling the truth it was time to do some investigating. Grabbing a kitchen knife more for courage than for any real fear for my life, I volunteered to check out the box fort while they waited outside and kept an eye on me. I am a logical, reasonable person. I greet the supernatural and paranormal with, I think, a healthy degree of skepticism. I am open to the possibility of anything – ghosts, vampires, mermaids, whatever – but I will not believe it until I have solid scientific evidence proving its existence. At the time, in my mind, that had not been produced, which is why I had little trepidation in investigating the fort after that incident. If it happened to be an intruder, well, what could they do to me in a cramped little box fort with my sisters right there? Besides, someone had to do it. With these thoughts, I entered the fort and found… nothing. No ghosties, ghoulies, or homeless wanderers, and no one in the house, either. Somehow I managed to convince Taylor that she’d heard the loud TV downstairs mixed with me and Casey’s voices, and we all settled down to eat cookies and watch movies together, comfortably mollified. Maybe it was an after-effect of the incident during the day, but that night, Casey and Tay both had trouble sleeping. In fact, I woke up in the middle of the night to Casey’s scared voice calling “Muse, Muse!” I’m sure parents with small children probably get used to this, but when I woke up to that I was instantly terrified. I jumped out of bed, grabbed my knife, and ran to her room. For those of you weirded out by the fact that I keep a knife in my bedside table drawer, keep in mind that I’m a fairly petite woman with next to no chance of defending myself against an intruder without a weapon of some sort. Anyway, Casey’s room was dark and when I flipped on her light switch she was sitting up in bed with her eyes wide open, looking like she was going to cry. Seeing nothing amiss, I demanded to know what was wrong. By this time, Tay had wandered into the room with Juliet in her arms. Casey told me that she had been sleeping when suddenly she woke up with the feeling that someone was in the room, watching her. She found herself staring at the entrance to the box fort. This chilled me a bit, having had a similar experience, but what she said next was even more strange. She kept her eyes on the entrance, willing herself to stop being creeped out, when suddenly the boxes started to shake like something inside was moving rapidly through them, away from her room. Apparently that’s when she started calling my name, waking up Taylor as well. For the second time that day, I did a full search of the box fort and the entire house, finding nothing. I would have chalked it up to a dream if it hadn’t been for another strange occurrence the next day. Casey woke up an hour late for work because her alarm didn’t go off. Her alarm didn’t go off because her cell phone was missing, which she claimed she had placed beside her pillow before she went to sleep. Taylor and I made an effort to help her find it before she left, checking her bed and floor and calling it from the home phone, but neither of us was surprised or too concerned about it because she was notorious for misplacing things. When Case came home that evening I asked if it had been there when she woke us up in the middle of the night, and she couldn’t remember seeing it. But she had been texting her friend in bed and made sure to set the alarm and put it beside her. In the end, we decided there was nothing to do but wait for it to show up. At around three in the morning I was woken, yet again, by some sort of commotion outside my room. Again I grabbed my knife and was alarmed by the noise, but mostly what I felt was anger and annoyance: I’d had enough of all the drama and wanted to put an end to it. Juliet was in my parent’s closet, barking her head off at the box fort, and Casey and Taylor were already up, wondering, like me, what was going on. Taylor picked up the dog and carried her out of the room, and she instantly shut up, leaving Casey and I standing in the closet with bewildered looks on our faces. It was silent for a moment, and then suddenly Katy Perry’s “Hot ‘n’ Cold” song rang out loud and clear, making us jump. “What the fuck?” I said, still trying to get my half-asleep head around this. Normally my sisters make fun of me when I swear; apparently, I don’t do it right. But this time they seemed to find it appropriate. “That’s my ringtone,” said Casey, looking at me strangely but making no move to get her phone. “Well, answer it!” I said, exasperated. Casey lifted the blanket that covered the opening of the box fort, and there was her missing cell phone lying in the center of the first box, still blaring that song from an inadequate speaker. She flipped it open and put it to her ear. “Hello?” I waited for a moment, and then asked, “Well, who is it?” Casey made a noise of disgust and closed the phone. “It’s nothing. It was just our voices echoing in the background. They must have hung up.” She folded her arms. “Did you do this?” “Why the hell would I steal your phone and wake us all up at three in the morning?!” I asked incredulously, and Casey turned to Taylor next. “I didn’t touch your phone!” she said, with a note of fear in her face. “Are you guys joking? This isn’t funny!” Casey said, agitated. “You’re scaring me.” At this point I could see the situation was turning from weird to can’t-sleep-anymore scary, so I sighed and said I would check the whole house over, again, and proposed that Juliet had used the phone as a chew toy and left it in the box fort. It was the only thing I could think of at the time, and though it seemed to reassure my sisters, it really wasn’t that plausible… Juliet was missing most of her teeth, and the only things I’d ever seen her play with were soft plush toys, slippers, and dirty underwear (I know, ew). I doubted she’d ever want a cell phone in her mouth. There was nothing amiss in the house, and I made sure to double-check all the doors and windows this time, too. Everything was locked, and we were safe. This had just turned into one of those weeks where a lot of small occurrences were adding up to a big headache. Before I went to bed, I asked Casey if her phone had shown the caller ID for that call. “No, it just said, ‘Unknown.’ I don’t get why we didn’t hear it, though – it was so loud.” “I don’t know,” I shrugged, “and change your ring tone.” It was too late to figure things out. By day everything seemed fine. The three of us hung out at the beach by our house and we all felt pretty good afterwards, laughing and joking about how freaked we all get at the slightest sign of oddness. Casey was going to a party that night so it was just Tay and I at home; I got the sense that Tay was still feeling weird about the box fort, so I decided I’d do my best to make it fun again. I didn’t want another late-night wake-up call. I grabbed a pile of old magazines, some scissors, and glue, and suggested we make a collage on one of the inside walls. We had some upbeat music playing and were discussing an upcoming family trip when Tay suddenly leans over and turns the music down, as though she’s listening for something. “What?” I ask. “Did you put Juliet outside?” she said, looking confused. “No, she’s probably downstairs. Why?” “I didn’t put her out either, but I can hear her barking.” “Well, maybe Case did before she left,” I said cheerfully. “Let’s go check.” For the record, I couldn’t hear anything, but Taylor’s always been more aware of Juliet than I am. When we checked the backyard we couldn’t find her, and we didn’t hear any barking. I could tell Taylor was getting a bit anxious – she loves that dog – while I was starting to be frustrated. Juliet won’t come when we call her, so we had to search the house yet again. We checked all her favorite hiding spots but there was no sign of her until we got upstairs and were hopping over the box fort to check closets and bedrooms. Taylor straightened up suddenly and shushed me. “I hear her again,” she said, making me pause so I too could listen. “I don’t hear anything,” I said after a few moments. “Can’t you hear her barking? It sounds like she’s far away.” “Are you sure it’s not another dog? We didn’t let her out…” “No, it’s definitely her,” she said, walking into my parents’ closet to listen at the window. “Come here, it’s louder in here. She’s got to be outside.” When I said, once again, that I couldn’t hear anything, she rolled her eyes and replied, “You’re deaf, then,” and headed downstairs for her shoes. We searched for our dog for four hours that night, on foot and in a car, calling Casey home to help later on. My heart was in my throat the entire time, thinking we’d come across something awful at the side of the road, and wondering how I was going to console two girls who loved Juliet like a baby and had never had anything bad happen all their lives. There was also an unsettling feeling at the back of my mind to do with that far-off dog barking, but I pushed that away for the time being. The next day was spent in anxious endeavor, making posters and putting them up, canvassing the neighborhood. My poor sisters were close to tears, and I was wondering why this had to happen when my parents were gone. At the end of the night they had settled in to watching a movie half-heartedly, while they waited for a call, and I went upstairs to discreetly call my Mom and ask her to come home early. I didn’t know what was going to happen with our dog but I knew I needed some help consoling my sisters. When I finally went to bed, the house was quiet. My sisters had locked up the house, turned out the lights, and were sleeping, and I was bored with my book. I couldn’t sleep, and like a few nights previous, I found I couldn’t take my eyes off the entrance to the box fort. I had covered it up with a blanket as I’d intended to earlier, and while that seemed to help somewhat I was still feeling weird about it. At some point, I chastised myself in my head (“this is stupid, I’m going to sleep”) and prepared to roll over to the other side, when movement caught the corner of my eye. The blanket cover over the entrance had fluttered a bit, as though a breeze had blown through. This was odd, as all the windows had been closed when we turned on the air conditioning the previous day. I watched intently now, trying to determine in the dim light if the blanket was actually moving in and out as though someone were breathing under it, or if this was just my imagination. My eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. As I watched, something touched the blanket from inside with a single, slender finger, and traced a vertical path all the way to the bottom. I’m not a particularly brave person, but something happens to you when you’re in charge of the protection of others – suddenly scary things don’t cripple you with fear because you know you have to be brave for the people you love. I did the only thing, at this moment, that my brain would allow me to do after reasoning with itself and coming to the most logical explanation. I turned on my light, quietly got out of bed, and softly called, “Juliet?” When my call received no answer I made to step forward, and suddenly the boxes shook as though something were passing through them. I admit, I jumped and my heart started beating a mile a minute, but I also remembered we hadn’t actually checked inside the box fort in all the commotion. Picking up the flashlight that lay on the floor near the entrance, I knelt down and lifted the cover, shining my light inside. There was nothing in the small tunnel leading out of my bedroom, but I couldn’t see around the corners. “Juliet,” I called, trying to keep my voice down so as not to wake my sisters. Then again, “Juliet!” but in that stern come-here-this-moment voice. Finally, I heard a quiet whimper, like she used to do when she was a puppy, and that shuffling noise moving further away from me. I cursed under my breath. Aside from all the “creepy fucking box fort in the middle of the night” associations going through my mind, all I could think of was my little dog hurt and afraid, and how I wanted to get to her before my sisters to see what damage had been done. Things could get hysterical with them real fast if Juliet was in bad shape. So, hero winning out over coward, I got on my hands and knees with the flashlight and went inside. It was eerily quiet in there, that kind of absence-of-sound quiet that makes you feel like your ears are plugged with cotton, only you can hear your own breath just fine. When I got to the end of the tunnel I looked right first, towards my sisters’ rooms, but there was nothing there. When I looked left, I heard a shuffling and my flashlight beam caught the tail end of something black turning the corner. Juliet. “Juliet!” I hissed. “Juliet, come here, girl.” I made my voice more sweet and inviting, but that dog never comes when she’s called. I sighed and pushed on further, passing by our aborted attempt at a collage on my way. When I got to the end, I turned my flashlight down the long tunnel leading to the closet. The cheap light wasn’t strong enough to see to the very end – it simply stopped at a wall of blackness. My resolve wavered here. I must have stayed there on my hands and knees for a full minute before that whimpering noise came to me again and something shuffled further on in the tunnel. It urged me onward. I determinedly made my way towards the closet, each moment expecting my weak flashlight beam to illuminate the red fleece blanket with penguins on it that we had used to cover up the closet entrance to the fort. But I found nothing. Not even an opening. The best way I can describe it is by comparing it to that game we played as children, where you close your eyes, lay on your back on the floor, and raise your arms and legs in the air. Two friends take hold of your hands and feet, and as slowly as possible, lower them to the ground. It feels normal at first, but at some point your brain expects your body to hit the floor, and when it doesn’t, when you keep moving more and more downward, you feel as though you’re impossibly passing through the floor. That was what it was like being in the tunnel. I kept crawling through, shining my little flashlight on ahead, slowly growing more and more disturbed when I didn’t reach the ending, or see any sign of it. And there was something else nagging me, something about the way the boxes had shaken when whatever was inside moved away from me. Juliet is a little dog, a miniature schnauzer. When she walked through the tunnels she didn’t even have to duck; all you could hear was the soft padding of her feet and her nails scratching against the cardboard. The boxes only shook and moved when something big crawled through them, like me. I don’t know how far I went or how long I was in there, but at some point, I actually stopped with a definite “this isn’t right” feeling. I visualized the fort in my head: by my estimation, I should have been somewhere in the back yard by then, suspended two stories into the air. It had finally dawned on me that I was currently located in a space that couldn’t possibly exist, chasing something that was obviously bigger than Juliet… I freaked out and got the fuck out of there. When crawling in the opposite direction didn’t seem to lead anywhere but a black, endless tunnel, I really lost it and started pulling apart the boxes at the seams, punching my way through and finally finding myself in a tangled mess of blankets and cardboard in the middle of my parents closet. It must have looked silly, me in a heap on the floor like that, but when I looked up at the walls of that five-by-ten-foot walk-in closet, goosebumps prickled up my back and arms. It was like stepping outside for a jog, then turning around after ten minutes of running to find you hadn’t even left your front steps. It just didn’t make sense that I had crawled so far in that tunnel but gone nowhere, and followed something that was somehow still inside. To this day I can’t explain it and I don’t even like to think about it. Even worse, I don’t like to remember that insistent whimpering that followed me all the way back. Shaking with residual terror, I began dismantling the box fort right then and there. When my sisters emerged from their rooms, bleary-eyed and confused, I just mumbled something about having to take it down before mom got home, and continued on with my work. I left just one box. I figured if I was going crazy, I might as well go full out… thinking of our dog, I left a single box standing in the closet by itself and carried all the rest of them out to the fire pit in our back yard. The next morning I burned them, and my Mom was home by the afternoon. That’s not quite the end of the story because there was a bit of happiness in store for us later, but I almost wish it was the end. It wasn’t much “closure” for me, what happened afterwards. We ended up finding Juliet a few days later. She was okay – a little erratic and jumpy for a bit, but happy to see us. My family was so overjoyed that nothing could really dampen their spirits, even a little thing like where I found her. It seemed like for everyone but me, all thoughts of the box fort had been completely washed away. The day she came home, I was the only one in the house, washing dishes from a pancake breakfast and letting my mind wander. Suddenly I became aware of a muffled scratching and yelping sound coming from somewhere nearby. My heart lifting, I checked the back door, the garage door, and the front door, all to no avail, before I realized the noise was coming from above me. Slowly I made my way upstairs, following the noise all the way to my parents’ room, and finally to their closed closet door. I opened the door, and my little dog bounded out to me, jumping and barking for my attention. I got rid of the last box after that, but it may have been too late. Mom came into my room that night, carrying a bundle of socks and underwear and asking me which ones were mine. She still did our laundry sometimes and couldn’t tell what belonged to whom. I picked out my things, and as she was leaving she turned around with a grin, chuckling and shaking her head. “Whose Halloween costume is that hanging in my closet? It scared me half to death!” I put down my book. “What costume?” “You know, the tall black one with the long arms and the white eyes. It’s very life-like. Is it from a movie or something?” I only stared at her blankly for a second. “Oh, uh, yeah, it’s mine. I’ll move it downstairs.” I waited until I heard my Mom’s footsteps move downstairs, and then noiselessly made my way to her room. My fear had an almost hypnotic effect on me that drove me towards the closet: all I knew was that I had to see. The closet door was open, but the light was off. Holding my breath, I flicked it on, and surveyed my surroundings. Clothing, boxes, belts, ties, suitcases, blankets – all were hanging or shelved with some order. Then, at the back, an empty space about half-a-foot wide, where the clothes had been pushed aside. A single plastic hanger was swinging back and forth, quickly losing momentum. The window beside me was open.

18 minutes

February 13, 2019

Beings and Entities, Children and Childhood, Locations and Sites, Strange and Unexplained

I Hunt Down the Government’s Mistakes

conspiracies, creatures, Devin Hoover, entities, government, monsters

Part 1 If you are one of those people who think the government is hiding countless secrets from you, and constantly covering things up, then you would be absolutely right. I’m one of the many people they hire to clean up their mistakes. I’m not entirely sure why they chose me, there really isn’t much special about me, but perhaps that’s exactly why they chose me. I was already a loner, and I’m not going to cure cancer or create the next weapon of mass destruction, so I’m easily disposable. They approached me one day after I finished working my shift at a fast food joint. I’m not sure I had much of a choice, but my life was so dull I was ready for any kind of change up anyway. The men who came to my door didn’t even tell me what I would be doing, simply that if I wanted to “aide my country” to follow them. I didn’t look back once, and as strange as my life has gotten, I still don’t regret it. The next year of my life would be grueling. I was put through extreme physical and mental training. I learned about things that I thought only existed in movies. I’m not sure what would have happened to me had I failed the training, but I can’t imagine they would have just let me go back to my normal life. Not once did they mention what I was training for during that year, not until I graduated. Upon getting the seal of approval from higher ups, I was brought in to a small room with black suits and finally informed of what I would be doing. My new job would be hunting down failed experiments and other oddities that the government had failed to contain. Not all jobs would be the same, some would be relatively easy, while others next to impossible. Most missions would come with the option of bringing the target back dead or alive, but of course it would be preferable to always bring them back alive for further experimentation. My first assignment would be on the easy side. Codename: The Ice Cream Man. The Ice cream man like most failed experiments was at one point a human. He still has the appearance of one, your typical ice cream truck driver, but he’s essentially a robot, only concerned with doing his job. So, what’s so special about the ice cream man then? Well, I’m never told the why of the creatures I hunt, but I always put together my own ideas. The ice cream man’s truck is really the special part. The music that comes from the horns works as almost a human magnet, it entrances anyone within hearing distance to approach the truck. Once you approach the truck you…well you buy ice cream. I’ve heard the ice cream tastes delicious, but of course you’ll never know for sure, because the ice cream causes anyone who eats it to basically enter a fugue state. For the next 12 hours after consuming the ice cream you will carry on your day as you normally do, but you’ll remember nothing the next day. I’m sure you can see why this would be a valuable asset to the government. Unfortunately, the scientists put in charge of testing the ice cream man underestimated him a bit. Before they knew it, they had woken up 12 hours later wondering where their test subject had gone. I’m sure I was given this simple assignment as sort of a test. I was given a pair of enhanced noise blocking earplugs, and was sent on my way to the ice cream man’s last known location. He wasn’t hard to find, I just had to follow the mass of vehicles that had lined up to get their sweet treat. I allowed him to serve everyone in the area, it would make my job of taking him much easier if no one remembered it. After everyone had their ice cream, I lined up myself. He attempted to serve me, but instead I reached into the truck and injected him with a tranquilizer. He may only be a shell of a person now, but he’s not immune to good old fashioned medication. I tied him up and hitched his truck to my vehicle. I dropped him off at the nearest government facility, and awaited my next target. As I said, this would be one of the easier assignments, my next wouldn’t be quite so simple. Codename: The Rippler. Unlike the Ice Cream Man, The Rippler was still mostly human. He hadn’t lost his emotions, or become a mindless zombie, and perhaps that was the problem. Through intense experimentation, The Rippler had gained the ability to create an intense concentrated earthquake. He had collapsed the facility he was being stored in. The main concern with The Rippler was his danger to others around him, if he used his ability in a heavily populated area, countless lives could be lost. This was one of the few cases I’ve been advised to not bring the target back alive. Once again I feel as though this assignment was a test, just a different kind of test. The government wanted to see if I would kill for them without hesitation, and it’s possible if I did, then there would truly be no escape for me. That was fine though, I had no intentions of leaving. The Rippler was a bit more difficult to find, mostly because he wasn’t trying to attract the attention of everyone around him, but if the government wants you, they will find you. He had relocated to a small town, changed his name, his face, everything in an attempt to escape. I almost felt bad for the guy, I doubt he had volunteered himself to be a guinea pig for the government, and now all he wanted was a normal life. Once I found the town he was staying in I made sure to keep my distance, didn’t want him going nuclear on me. I confirmed he was indeed my target by collecting some DNA samples from his trash, now all that was left was to take him down. I didn’t want to kill him, but I didn’t have a lot of options. The scientists who had created him were still unsure the extent of his powers, and his ability to control them. Had I brought him back alive there’s no telling if the government even has a facility capable of holding him. I did what I thought was best. After he returned home one night I put a bullet between The Rippler’s eyes. It wasn’t a good feeling, but I continued to convince myself it was necessary. I dropped his body off, and was thanked for my services. It wouldn’t get easier from here either. My next target, Codename: Ghoul This one was truly a monster. I’m not sure what the government was trying to create in Ghoul, but I don’t think they got what they wanted. Ghoul has enhanced strength and speed, but with one slight problem, he eats humans. Who knows, maybe that’s exactly what the government wanted. As you can imagine, Ghoul found a way to escape. After a while you would think these government scientists would get better at containing their experiments, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. This mission might not have been so bad, but I was given strict orders that Ghoul was to be brought back alive. All my lethal weapons were stripped and replaced with tranquilizers strong enough to bring down a rhino. I put in a request to have a partner for this assignment, but of course I was swiftly denied. Ghoul had taken up residence in a forest, this might not have been so bad if not for the fact this forest had an extremely popular hiking trail. There had always been frequent disappearances in the forest, a lot of them chalked up to suicides, but since Ghoul had escaped, that number had amplified significantly. The government did me a solid and got the trail shut down for the weekend, so it would just be me and Ghoul, I wouldn’t have to worry about anyone else getting in the way. I’ve always wanted to go on a hiking date, but this wasn’t quite what I had pictured. I set out in to the forest looking for signs of his nest. I had made sure not to shower all week in preparation, if he came to me it makes my job of dragging him back to my vehicle a lot easier, and I’m sure he would get hungry eventually. After about an hour of following markings and footprints that I assumed had to belong to Ghoul, I began to come across bones, human bones. So, I was getting closer. I followed the path for a few more minutes before I began to hear noises, looks like my date had arrived. I heard tree branches shaking, as he drew nearer. After only a few moments he was standing on a large tree right in front of me. He looked down on me, studying me. He really wasn’t that big, maybe 5’6 with an average frame, but looks can be deceiving. His skin was a sickly yellow, and his hair had begun to recede as if he was an old man, but he was clearly much younger. His eyes were pure white, no longer containing anything else. After a brief stare down, he jumped. There was a good 50 feet between us, so I thought I would have a few seconds to ready myself but I was wrong. As if he was a video game character he soared from the tree and landed directly on top of me. I had just enough time to pull out a tranquilizer and shove it in to his side, but it wasn’t enough. Despite the strength of the tranquilizer, he seemed relatively unaffected. He shrugged it off, and proceeded to take a chunk of flesh out of my shoulder. I lay helpless as he began to chew my flesh, I knew it wouldn’t be long before he went back for seconds. I struggled to pull out another tranquilizer, I managed to pull another one out right before he began to lunge in for another bite. I jammed the second tranquilizer directly in to his neck, I felt his teeth begin to lock on to my own neck, but before he bit down, he passed out. I let out the biggest sigh of relief of my life, and pushed him off of me. I placed the special restraints I had been given for him on, making sure the muzzle I was given for him was extra tight. I wasn’t sure how long the tranquilizers would last, but hopefully long enough for me to deliver this monster. Despite missing a chunk of my shoulder, I had escaped alive. This was just one monster that science had created, I could only imagine what my future would have in store for me. After delivering Ghoul I informed the higher ups I would need at least a month off, and knowing what they had put me through, they obliged. If anything, they were impressed I had come back in mostly one piece. Part 2 After my month long break/recovery from Ghoul, I was given an easier assignment to ease my way back in to things. Codename: Romeo. Romeo was made to be a charmer, and that he was. He was a true Adonis in every sense of the word, Romeo makes the statue of David look ugly in comparison. From what I can tell he was designed to charm women, foreign diplomats probably, but instead he charms anyone and everyone. Which is how he was able to charm his way out of his holding cell. Romeo isn’t really a danger to anyone though, except perhaps himself should he find himself at the hands of an angry spouse, but I’m sure he could get himself out of that one too. Finding Romeo was easy, but the hard part would be extracting him. He was always surrounded by a crowd, almost like a cult. If there was a high class party, Romeo would be there, and he would never return to his room with less than 10 people following him. I would need a good plan to separate him from his entourage. I decided to attend one of his parties, just so I could get a better scope on the situation. It was crucial that I find any openings he might have. What I didn’t expect though was for Romeo to approach me. “Good evening Monsieur, I do not believe we have met before, I am Romeo, and you?” Monsieur, was that French? I think I almost threw up in my mouth a bit. I guess I should have expected this though, he has quite the ego after all. It was good to see his charm wasn’t working on me though, I’m not entirely sure why, but I think it may have something to do with my disgust at just how perfect he is. “Oh I’m, uh, James. I’m kinda new here, nice to meet you Romeo.” I managed to respond. “James, what a fabulous name, but alone at a party? Unacceptable, come with me, my friends and I are about to return to my estate, I will show you the finer parts of this city.” Is that a sexual reference? Regardless, this was going much better than expected, I was making direct contact with my target. If I went to his home, perhaps I could just wait until everyone else fell asleep, and sneak away with Romeo before anyone knew better. “I don’t know, we just met, I wouldn’t want to impose on you like that.” I said, trying to play hard to get. “No I insist, you must. Samantha, go with my friend James here and guide him to my home. I will be there shortly, there is someone I must see first.” Romeo replied while motioning to one of the women from his group. Samantha did indeed guide me to Romeo’s home. I already knew where he lived of course, but I had to play dumb. Romeo’s estate was a true mansion, with aesthetics that would make you think that someone had designed the home in the game The Sims. I was escorted inside; the rest of Romeo’s entourage would arrive shortly after. I was offered some scotch that had apparently been aged over a hundred years, I’m not much of a drinker, but I accepted it nonetheless. Romeo arrived almost an hour later, fashionably late to his own party. Once he arrived he immediately approached me. “James, follow me, there is something I must show you.” He said to me. I didn’t hesitate to follow him, this was my chance to be alone with him. I could tranquilize him and be on my way before anyone knew any better. He led me to a room on the other side of the home, the room was something else, something I didn’t expect. The walls were covered with pictures, men and women, each one was of a different person, I think I even noticed a few of them from his group. “What is this?” I said without even thinking. “These are all the people I have conquered, and you are next. Please, remove your clothing.” Romeo said this as he turned his back on me and began to remove his own clothing. I almost felt compelled to remove my own clothing, his words held such power, but I was able to hold out. Instead I approached him and sunk the tranq in to his neck. I made sure duct tape his mouth, I had heard enough of his words for one night. Romeo was much bigger than me, so it was quite an effort dragging him out his window and back to my vehicle, but I managed to do it before anyone got suspicious. I assume his friends simply thought he was taking his time in conquering me. I dropped off Romeo, and I made sure to shower extra well that night. My experience with Romeo almost made me miss my date with Ghoul, almost. My next assignment would be another fun one, Codename: Kong. What happens when you splice human DNA with gorilla DNA? Well, apparently you get Kong. Personally, I would have preferred the name Caesar in reference to Planet of the Apes, but I suppose he’s not a gorilla, and I don’t get to pick the names anyway. Kong is essentially a smaller version of Bigfoot, and before you ask if Bigfoot exists, I have to say I don’t know, I haven’t been tasked with hunting him yet. Kong would be a kill task. There’s no guarantee the tranqs would work, and if they did for how long. Not to mention he had killed two scientists during his escape, so they weren’t too worried about him coming back alive, they just wanted to dissect what was left of him. I was given specific parameters as to avoid the head if at all possible, they mostly wanted to examine the brain, and that wouldn’t be possible if I splattered it all on the ground. Another problem I faced was my experience with long-ranged weapons. It had been a part of my training of course, and I had gotten through the basics, but that was about it. I had been told most of my missions would be up close and personal anyway, so it wasn’t that important. Well it was starting to seem important now. Similar to Ghoul, Kong had taken up residence in a forested area, but since his diet didn’t consist of human meat, he had chosen a much more secluded area. I don’t think Kong really wanted to hurt anyone, he could have lived his life out in these woods never bothering anyone, but that’s not what the government wanted. My superiors informed me that they had already done overhead sweeps of the area, and were able to tell me exactly where the cave he was staying in was located. Of course they had done the easy part, and I would get to do all the dirty work on the ground. I made my way to a vantage point overlooking the cave and set up the sniper rifle they had supplied me with. Now all I had to do was wait. After a few hours, Kong finally made his appearance. He walked out of the cave and began to stretch his limbs, the way most of us do after we wake up. I steadied the rifle and aimed the cross-hairs over where I would assume his heart was, and I pulled the trigger. I missed. I hadn’t taken in to account the wind had picked up since I had started waiting, and the bullet had strayed to the right of Kong, hitting the rock of the cave. Kong didn’t move though. Instead he simply turned his gaze to me, with eyes that were all too human. He didn’t try to escape, he knew I would come eventually, and if it wasn’t me it would be someone else. Kong had accepted his fate. I had killed The Rippler of course, but that was different, I had done that while he was asleep, I didn’t have to see the look in his eyes before he died. I almost wished Kong had been a monster like Ghoul, that way I wouldn’t have to feel bad about putting him down. With a slight hesitation I reloaded my gun, I took aim accounting for the wind now, and I fired once again. Bulls-eye. Kong went down instantly. I made my way over to confirm he was dead, and luckily he was, he wouldn’t have to suffer anymore. Kong weighed far too much for me to drag back on my own, instead I set off a flare I had been given for this moment, and waited for the air team to come collect him. Sitting next to Kong’s lifeless body really made me begin to question my line of work. I had never felt so disgusted in myself, but I knew there was no way out for me. I’m already in far too deep. Perhaps the government has created another monster in me, and someday they’ll have to put me down too, but for now I’m still doing their dirty work. Part 3 Codename: Dahlia. Dahlia is well, a doll, a ventriloquist doll to be exact. Despite her simple looks, she’s quite dangerous. Probably not in the way that most of you would expect though. She can’t move on her own, well she can speak, but that’s it, so she won’t be running around your home in the middle of the night stabbing people. No, instead Dahlia has an incredibly strong power of influence. One look in to her eyes, and she’ll have complete control of you. It’s a bit ironic really, a ventriloquist doll making humans her puppets. In my briefing I was told Dahlia is essentially the definition of sadistic, she enjoys making her victims inflict as much pain as possible, before eventually disposing of them. I’m not sure if demons are real, but if they are, I’m sure that’s what is trapped in that doll. Dahlia was believed to be staying with a family of four, she had been taken there by a scientist who had fallen under her control. She had only been gone about a week, but there’s no telling what she could have gotten up to in that time. The scientist who had taken her had returned to her workplace a day later and attempted to murder her co-workers, but was quickly taken care of. I made my way to the family’s home, hoping to be surprised by what I saw. Let’s just say I got my wish, but not in the way I’d hoped. I knocked on the front door, after a few minutes of no response I turned the handle to find the door was unlocked. I wish I hadn’t. The moment I stepped in to the home I was hit with a putrid smell, one that I know means death. The walls were coated in blood, some of it was dried, some was fresh and still slowly dripping down. I found the family together in the living room. The mother and two children were sat in a small triangle, they were already dead and rotting. Their stomachs had been cut open, with their entrails hanging out, they had been posed in a way to make it look as if they were eating their own organs. In the center of that triangle was the father, hanging from the ceiling. He had scratches and cuts all across him, but that was nothing compared to what had happened to his family. Just before I was about to spill my lunch all over the floor, I heard a voice from the opposite corner of the room. “You’re just in time! What do you think of my art, it’s a little sloppy, but I’m sure it will get better in time.” The voice said. “Dahlia?” I questioned. “Awwww, have you come to get me already? I was having such a fun time too. Well, I’m done here anyway, I guess you can take me back for now, I’ll be out again soon.” I made my way over to the voice, making sure to keep my head down, I had no intention of ending up like that family. When I got close I closed my eyes, I managed to pick her up and flip her over, and made my way back out to my vehicle. “Let me sit up front, I like to have conversations during my car rides. Plus, you can’t get much action from women in this line of work, so it will be fun for both of us.” Dahlia said mockingly. As much as I wanted to chunk her in the back and throw a blanket or something over her, I also didn’t want her to be out of my line of sight. So, I granted her wish. I carefully sat her up front, turning her head towards the window. I’d be lying if I said part of me wasn’t curious about her, I wanted to know more about what makes a monster a monster. “You should just take me home with you, tell your boss I wasn’t here. I’m sure we could have lots of fun together.” Dahlia said. “Yes, I’m sure you would make great kindling for a fire.” I responded. “Hehehehehe, you’re funny, I like you. I was thinking I’d have someone kill you eventually, but maybe I’ll keep you.” “Oh, you don’t just kill everyone?” I asked. “Of course not, I like to let the really bad ones live, it’s more fun that way.” Dahlia said. “What do you mean by that, are you saying I’m a bad person?” That had made me a bit angry. I had almost turned to look at Dahlia, but I thought better of it. Was she just trying to provoke me? “You aren’t quite on my level yet, but I see potential in you. You didn’t even scream when you saw my work, maybe you even enjoyed seeing it. You may think we are different, but we really aren’t.” Dahlia retorted. She was partly right, I hadn’t reacted when I saw the bodies, I had felt a little sick, but if I had seen that a few months ago I would have probably passed out. Whether I like it or not, I am definitely changing, and I don’t think it is for the good. “What are you?” I finally asked after a few minutes of silence. “Look in to my eyes and I’ll tell you.” “Nice try, I may be stupid, but I’m not that stupid.” I responded almost bursting out in to laughter. “What are you afraid of? Do you think you would see yourself if you looked in to my eyes?” “That’s enough, one more word and I’m googling where the nearest wood chipper is.” Those were the last words I spoke on our little road trip together. I dropped off Dahlia and informed them about the mess at the house, they said they would send someone to clean it up. I was hoping they would give me a break after what I’d seen, but I wouldn’t be so lucky, as soon as I turned in Dahlia they told me they already had a new assignment ready for me. That would be Codename: Jack. Grandiose name, I know. This was probably the oddest assignment I had received yet though. Jack was from what I could tell, entirely human. I had no clue why I had been tasked with finding a human, perhaps he was a runaway scientist, or someone who knew too much, but he certainly wasn’t what I had gotten used to hunting. I was told Jack was incredibly dangerous though, and that I shouldn’t take any risks in trying to capture him alive. In other words, they wanted him dead. This only made me more curious as to what secrets that Jack must have held. Jack was constantly on the move, so it wasn’t easy to find him, but my training had paid off, and I was eventually able to track him down. I watched him for a few, he didn’t seem dangerous to me. Suspicious and cautious yes, but not dangerous. One night he stepped out of his hotel room to go get food, so I decided to let myself in, Jack and I needed to have a talk. Jack didn’t seem too surprised when he returned to his room to find me sitting on the couch. He simply held out his arms. “So they did send someone for me after all, well go ahead and do what you have to, I won’t fight it.” He said. “Sit down Jack, I just want to talk.” Jack raised an eyebrow at this, “A curious one huh, you know what they say about curiosity right?” I rolled my eyes, and once again motioned for Jack to sit down. “Who are you Jack, and why did they send me after you?” “You don’t know? I’m you, or at least I used to be. They tell us where to go, who to kill, who to bring back alive, and we do it, no questions asked. I couldn’t handle it anymore though, so here I am, and here you are.” Jack explained. This took me back for a second, I had known he had to have some connection to my agency, but I had never considered he had been in the same position as me. So, there really was no way out, other than death that is. I walked across the room, pulled out my gun, and I killed Jack. I had the answers I came here for. Perhaps Dahlia was right, we aren’t so different after all. I returned with Jack’s body. I wasn’t asked to give my usual debriefing, instead I was just given a simple nod, and told to go home and wait for my next assignment. I wonder if this was another test, if it had been, I’m sure I passed with flying colors. I understand if you all think less of me for the choices I’ve made, but if it wasn’t me, it would be someone else. This was the life I had chosen, or perhaps the life that was chosen for me. Regardless, I can’t back down now. I’m simply one discard-able person in the whole scheme of things. Don’t mistake my actions for blind loyalty though, I know the people I work for aren’t good people. I simply know my place in this world, and the minute I stop being useful I will end up like Jack. How does the saying go “Better the Devil you know, than the Devil you don’t.” Part 4 I am a cog in a giant machine, and once my cog stops working, I will be discarded and replaced by another. Despite the fact that I risk death every day that I wake up, I have never felt more alive. I no longer have nightmares of those I’ve killed, I’ve stopped caring about things like that. If I become too soft, then I will end up like Jack, and I have no intentions of letting that happen. After I disposed of Jack I was given a week off, it had been a while since I had any time to myself, it was a bit strange. I never had many friends to begin with, and my work had distanced me from the few family members I had kept in touch with. This week off made me realize just how empty my life had become, was this what they had wanted? Regardless, I was at work the minute my week was up, ready for my next assignment, and I got one. Codename: Mimic. As her name implies, Mimic is a master of disguise. She has the ability the morph her face in to a perfect replica of anyone she chooses, but she is unable to change her body. I imagine she’s still a work in progress, can you imagine what the government could do if they could create perfect body doubles of anyone they wanted? Mimic had escaped with a few other experiments, but she was the top priority. It was believed that they had all split up, but I was still warned to be on the lookout in case any of them teamed up. Due to her ability, Mimic would be incredibly difficult to locate. Because of this, several hunters like me were given her as an assignment. If our information was correct, then she had not made it out of the city we live in yet, but if she had, we may never find her. The only way we would be able to identify her is by a distinct scar on her left shoulder. The government had set up road blocks at all of the cities exits while us hunters searched within. Three other hunters and myself were each given a quadrant to search. Mimic had no family, so she would either have to break in to somewhere, or find an abandoned location to stay. I spent several hours walking the streets of my quadrant, asking strangers if they had seen a suspicious looking woman, as well as checking out old decrepit homes that hadn’t been lived in in years, I found nothing though. That was until I was approached by a slender, young looking man, probably early 20’s. “Are you looking for someone?” The man asked “Yeah, it’s hard to explain. I’m looking for a girl, but I’m not entirely sure what she looks like.” I replied. “Aren’t we all?” The man chuckled before continuing, “But I may be able to help you. I saw a girl run in to an old building around the corner. She was acting pretty weird, constantly looking over her shoulder. Maybe she’s who you’re looking for.” “Thank you, I have to go check right now.” I said as I pushed past the man, not giving his words a second thought. I quickly made my way to the building, and let myself in. To my amazement, Mimic was actually there, but it wasn’t quite what I had expected. Mimic was tied to a chair, I knew it was her, because her scar was in clear view. No other hunters had contacted me to tell me they had moved in to my area, or that they had found Mimic, so why was she tied up? That’s when I remembered who told me that I would find her here, the stranger. Before I could even turn around I heard his voice. “It’s a gift, she’s quite important to them isn’t she.” It was the strange young man I had just met, but he wasn’t behind me, no he was in front of me, near Mimic. How had he gotten in front of me? I had almost sprinted over here. “Who are you?” I asked. “That’s not important right now, aren’t you going to thank me? Oh wait, that’s not important either. The real reason I’m here is to deliver a message to you.” The man said. “A message, from who?” I was truly perplexed, as I said earlier, I make contact with almost no one. “Don’t look so confused friend. It’s from your girlfriend, have you already forgotten her? Dahlia would be so upset to hear that.” The man mockingly replied. I immediately cut him off. “Dahlia is not my girlfriend; Dahlia is a demonic doll that I want nothing to do with, unless it involves a large fire.” I was almost shouting. The man laughed before responding. “She said you would say something like that. Regardless, she just wants you to know that she’s coming to pick you up soon, and that she really misses you. Now if you’ll excuse me.” The man turned and began to walk away. “Where do you think you are going?” I said as I pulled out my tranq gun and aimed it at him. He didn’t respond, nor did he stop walking, so I fired. My aim was dead-on. Well, it would have been, but the dart passed right through the man as if he wasn’t even there. He continued walking straight up to a wall, and proceeded to walk through. What the hell just happened? A man appears out of nowhere and leads me to Mimic, and then he tells me that Dahlia is coming for me. To top it off, there’s obviously something going on with the man too, seeing as how he knew Dahlia, but also the fact that objects pass directly through his body. Was he under her control? I didn’t know what was going on at all, but I still had a job to do, and my target was right in front of me. I let the other hunters know that I had found the target, and that I was taking her back. That’s what I did, I brought Mimic back to my bosses, I was almost expecting some sort of praise, but I knew that would be unlikely despite her value. I would be surprised once again when I made it back to the holding facility though. The whole place was in complete lockdown, well whatever was able to be locked down. Half of the building had been blown off. The facility was located outside of town in a secluded area for obvious reasons. So I knew no innocent people had died, but I did see the corpses of many scientists and guards strewn around the area. I know some of them had families, but these people weren’t exactly angels. I managed to find one of my superiors who was able to briefly fill me in on the situation. While our forces had been thinned looking for Mimic, a group had attacked the facility. It’s obvious they were looking for a particular experiment, but it’s unsure exactly who they were after at this point. Around 20 of the 50 experiments held in this facility had escaped. I tried asking which of the experiments escaped, but I was told that was confidential. They simply told me to leave Mimic with them, and to go home and wait for them to sort this out. I would be busy soon. Part of me already knows at least one of the experiments who escaped. Was she the target? I think it’s a big possibility, I was already told she’s coming for me. I’m n

28 minutes

February 9, 2019

Beings and Entities, Conspiracies and Government, Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Investigations and Crimes, Locations and Sites, Monsters, Creatures, and Cryptids

I’ve Had the Same Dream for 26 Years

Allan Loe, dreams, ghosts, medium, nightmares, occult, psychics, sleep, spirits

The things that haunt a man the most, are not usually the choices that he’s made, but rather the choices that he never did make. I’ve lived through some of the worst hells that you could ever imagine. 9,490 of them to be exact. Every night when I lay down to sleep, I find myself praying for the same thing; sleep, with the absence of dreams. Every night is exactly the same. This trend started 26 years ago when I was 10. The first time that the nightmare overtook my dreams, I had come home from the worst day of my life. My dad had taken me to a splash park. It wasn’t much, just a couple water jets that shot up into the air that kids could run around under and cool off from the heat. We were poor growing up and never could afford to go to any big water parks, but the splash pad was always fun. That is, until that day. I remember running around under the jets, carefree, enjoying the sweet relief that the cool water brought as it splashed on my red skin. There were a couple of other kids there too but, I didn’t pay them much attention as I was always a bit of a loner even as a child. “Kyle, come on buddy, it’s time to go.” I heard my dad say from the bench that sat across the way. “Aww, come on Dad, just a little longer.” I pleaded, not noticing the little girl that was making her way toward me from the other side of the pad. “Five more minutes,” he replied shaking his head and smiling. As I turned back toward the water jet, happy for the extra time to play, I was met with a little girl standing, not even a foot away from me. My heart felt as though it was going to jump out of my chest as I noticed her face. It looked decayed, her eyes were sunken back into her skull, they were pure white, and her mouth was wide open. She stood there gazing at me inches away, mouth hanging open, for what seemed like hours. I couldn’t move, I was frozen at the sight of this hideous girl. After a while of this, I finally regained my ability to speak and said, in a shaky voice, “H..hi, I’m Kyle, what’s your name?” The girl turned her head to the side, like a dog does when he’s trying to understand what you’re saying to him. “Whhhhhaaaaaaahhh.” she let out a long gasp in response. Her breath hit my face; it smelled like smoke and burnt hair. It wasn’t until I stopped choking that I realized she had burns all over her arms and legs. Long singe marks going up the sides, from foot to waist. The skin was hanging off from several places. I turned in fear back toward my dad, hoping that he would see the girl and come rescue me, but he was chatting with another kid’s mom on the bench, not even looking in my direction. As I turned back to face the little girl, she was gone. I ran hard and fast to where my dad was sitting. “Hey buddy, you finally ready to go?” he said smiling, but his facial expression quickly changed as I got close to him. “What’s wrong? What happened?” he asked, concern now mixed into his tone. “The girl over by the pad.” I replied through heavy breaths. “She’s hurt, or burned, or I don’t know.” Looking over my shoulder to the pad, my dad asked, “What girl? I don’t see anyone, Kyle. Let’s go home, I think you’ve just had too much sun today.” I didn’t argue – maybe I had just imagined it. We walked back to the car. Dad was talking to me, but I didn’t hear anything he was saying. I was too preoccupied looking over my shoulder, back toward the pad, searching for the little girl. My dad basically had to push me back to keep me from walking straight into the car door as he held it open for me. “Whoa champ, watch where you’re going. I can’t afford a hospital visit if you bust your noggin open on the car door. We will come back to play another day, I promise.” The car ride home seemed much longer than usual. My mind was still thinking about the little girl. Where had she come from? Surely her parents would be looking for her to get her wounds patched up. As my dad and I pulled into the driveway, I could see my mom coming out to greet us. “He’s a little shook up, too much sun I think. Better get him inside and cool him off.” I could hear my dad tell her after their usual welcome home kiss and hug. After we ate dinner, Mom came up to my room as I was getting ready for bed. She closed the door, which was strange considering she normally came in, picked up my dirty clothes, and gave me a hug and kiss goodnight. There was something strange about her facial expression, something different about her tone of voice as she said: “Your dad told me about the splash pad. What did you see?” A little reluctantly, I recounted the events, not leaving out any detail. Mom just sat on my bed listening, her new expression never changing as I concluded the story. “There is something you need to know Kyle, but this stays between you and me. I don’t want your father knowing about this.” she said while I looked nervously at her. My parents were always the perfect couple – even through hard times, they always loved each other. They never fought or had harsh words between them, so the thought of her keeping anything from Dad seemed odd to me, and I didn’t really like the idea of it. “We come from a long line of mediums,” she stopped as if trying to really think of the right way to explain. “What you saw was an omen. Not a particularly bad one, since the girl didn’t touch you and she disappeared. Still,you need to be aware of a few things.” Her eyes started to water as she continued. “These kind of omens are never good. In this case, I believe that the little girl was killed in a fire, and she came to you because you’re like a magnet to the spirits that still walk the earth.” I didn’t know what to say. I had no idea what she was talking about. I thought that ghosts were just make believe, and now she was telling me that I attract them? Finally, after staring at her for a while in disbelief, I asked, “Are you a medium?” She laughed, confusing me for a second, before she replied with a big smile. “Oh heavens no baby, I’m not a medium. Do you really think that I could kept that a secret from your father all these years? No, your grandmother, my mom, was a medium.” “So what does this mean for me?” I asked. “It means that things are going to start happening around you. Lights flickering, shadows in your room moving at night, waking up to voices talking to you, premonitions, and dreams.” There it was; dreams, the very thing that would plague me every night for the next 26 years. I never did see any ghosts or any of the other weird things that my mom spoke of. Just the dreams. After our talk, mom left my room, leaving me scared and confused about all of the new information she had just off-loaded onto me. I laid down and turned out my lamp. I lay awake for a long time, spooked, rapidly looking around my room, searching for anything out of the ordinary when sleep finally took me. The first thing I saw was a building on fire. It was a large two story house at the end of a cul de sac. The mailbox read 322 James St. There were fire trucks with ladders and firefighters pointing hoses toward the inferno, trying to extinguish the flame. I became a little disoriented from all the lights of the sirens. It was dark outside, and besides the fire that engulfed the house, the only lights were from the emergency vehicles, and they were blinding. I stumbled a little, and as I looked down toward the ground to regain my bearings, I realized that I was wearing firefighting equipment. I reached my hand up and felt the helmet on my head. I could hear someone shouting something from behind me. I turned back around to see who it was, nearly hitting another firefighter with the axe I had in my hand. I hadn’t even realized I was carrying it until that moment. A man standing by a red SUV with the words ‘Fire Chief’ on the side was looking right at me. “Kyle, Go!” he shouted pointing at the blazing house. I didn’t know what I was doing, but at the same time it felt like I had done this before, a hundred times over. I turned back to the house, running full speed toward the flames. Even with my protective gear on, I could feel the extreme heat radiating from the blaze. I then heard someone’s voice come over the radio. “Parents say there is a little girl trapped in the second story bathroom.” Without hesitation, I responded “10-4 I’m making entry now, keep on my six and stay sharp, watch for falling debris. This kid is not dying on my watch.” Me and two other firefighters made our way into the house. The black smoke that billowed in front of me almost blacked out the hallway we were travelling down; I could hardly see ten feet ahead. We pushed forward with the hose slung over our shoulders. “There’s the stairs!” I yelled, pointing to my right as we continued down the hallway. The stairs were not yet on fire, save for a few burning embers that had fallen from the top floor. I made my way up, tapping on each step with my Halligan bar to make sure they were stable. The climb was slow and the hose was heavy. Once we got to the top landing, I could see flames engulfing the sides of the walls and roof going down the second story hallway. The heat was almost too much to bear. We made our way to the first door on the right, touching it to feel for heat. If there was fire on the other side of the door and we opened it, it could cause an explosion, potentially killing us all. After determining that there was no fire on the other side, I began to scream, “Holly! Holly, are you here!?” No answer. I don’t know how I knew what name to call, it just came to me. I tried the knob and it was locked. “If you’re in here, stand away from the door, I’m going to break it down.” I yelled before swinging my axe at the door. It took three swings before it opened. As I stepped into the bathroom, I heard a loud crash from behind me; it shook the entire house. Looking back, I could see that part of the roof had caved in, blocking the hallway to the stairs. Frantically, I searched for the girl. She was sitting in the tub, unconscious. Another crash, this time causing an explosion in the hallway, blowing out the window at the end. I could hear the glass shatter and feel the pressure from the blast. “Get the girl, we have to get out of here!” I could hear someone say on my radio. I reached down, picking her up and cradling her against my chest. As I turned back to leave, the other two firefighters were using the hose to put out the fire from the fallen beam so that we would have a safe path to leave from. Slowly, testing every step, we made our way back down the hallway, the flames becoming more violent, and the heat growing more intense with each passing moment. Just as I made it to the stairs, one of the other firefighters pushed past, almost knocking me off my feet as he ran by, flying down the stairs in fear. “Fuck!” I cursed as I slammed into the wall, flinging the legs of the little girl into the fire. I could hear her skin sizzle in the flames. As I began to regain my balance, I saw why the other man had fled. The main beam in the roof was falling right toward me. With a loud crash it pinned me to the ground, causing me to drop the little girl. She was still unconscious, lying directly in the flames to my right. My head spinning, I tried to push the beam off of me, but it was no use, It was too heavy. After a few minutes of pushing, I gave up, feeling the flames burning my skin. The fire was beyond control. I was stuck with no hope. My heart was pounding with the thought of the little girl burning to death, as well as my own fiery doom. I laid there in agony, feeling the flames licking the skin on my hands. I watched as the rest of the burning roof collapsed onto me. I awoke drenched in sweat, screaming. My mother rushed into my room, fear on her face. After calming down, I recounted the dream. Her hands covered her mouth and tears streamed down her face as I spoke. She didn’t say anything, she just sat there holding me. It’s been 26 years to the day since that first dream and every night has been the same since. The same house, same girl, same death. As I’m sitting here writing this, I can hear the alarm sounding, and a voice just came over the Intercom. Now, I have a hard choice to make. “10-70 Structure fire, all units respond. 322 James St.” CREDIT: Allan Loe (You must ask permission before narrating this work. Click HERE to do so)

8 minutes

August 14, 2020

Dreams and Nightmares, Ghosts and Spirits, Occult, Magic, and Witchcraft

Where Power Lies

I watched my copper mailbox dangle from the door of my bar through the blurs of my windshield wipers. They made that tight squeeze against the glass, not a forgotten drop or streak. They were new. The car was new. The mailbox was old. It was Sunday, I’d just gotten out of one of those fancy Catholic Cathedrals I’d found in inner city Moscow, and as I trudged through the rain I begged God that the mailbox be empty. It should’ve been empty, like everyone else’s. It wasn’t. The envelope was green, like the rest. The color of money. And of poison. I poured myself a drink, Basil Hayden’s and Dubonnet, and locked the door. I sat at the bar, the customers side, and ran my fingers along the edges, to the corners. They were sharp, hard. Paper knives. There was nothing written on the outside. There never was, because that’s exactly who’d sent it: no one. The Kuntsevo District locals, the ones who believed the legends, called them Tikhiye Vory — Silent Thieves. Really they had no name. They didn’t need one. They were ghosts. Shadows. Whispers. They communicated through typed letters. No stamps, no addresses. They didn’t need the Russian Post. They employed Moscow’s homeless to deliver their commands. Money meant nothing. It was a flimsy paper shovel to dig up what really mattered. Information. They called us their svideteley — witnesses. That’s what each letter donned as a heading. Dlya Svedetel — for the witness. We were information sponges. Secret peddlers. We could be your high school janitor, your barber, your pastor. Your bartender. They were Moscow’s puppeteers, and we gave them the strings to bend anyone to their will, to make the city dance. I’d gotten my first letter about a year after moving to Moscow and opening Frankie’s Tavern in the Kuntsevo, and at the time I thought it was a stroke of luck. For a while I’d made an honest living. I had regulars, we’d share a drink early into the morning, talk about sports and guns and cars. I made friends. Hell, I even made enemies. I called them enemies anyway, the guys you shoot with empty threats and laugh when your friends call your bluff. The best type of enemy. The type that remind you in a backward way that you don’t really have much to worry about at all. Even with the thirsty Russians and rich tourists, I was barely making enough to keep Frankie’s open that first year. Business was steady but I was already shin deep in bills when an electrical shortage scorched half my bar. I was a broken man. My insurance was useless. Never ending investigations and postponements. For months I was penniless, bankrupt. You never really know helplessness until you have to ask yourself what you can live without, what you can pawn off to pay for a meal. I sold my car, my appliances, most of my furniture. I never went to college, bartending was really all I knew, and Russians aren’t quick to hire Americans on the spot. I had no family in Moscow. I remember crying after getting five hundred dollars for groceries from a former regular from Frankie’s. I remember using what little whiskey I had left to get me to sleep at night. Then about five months after the fire, my doorbell woke me up around 3 a.m. My head throbbed from the night before, and I opened the door to a blind man in rags holding an envelope. It was green. He never said a word, never smiled. His eyes were wrapped in white cloth. I asked who it was from, what the hell he was doing at my house at 3 a.m., but he just shook his head, waved the letter until I took it, then made his way back to the streets. The letters were always short. To the point. It said a friend had a simple offer: meet people, ask questions, take notes, and never worry about expenses again. The letter said the friend would cover Frankie’s damages and pay me a grand for each report. All I had to do was leave my notes in the copper mailbox and wait for the next set of names. Of course, I thought it was a joke. Probably one of the local patriot runts having a laugh at a struggling American. I’d heard of the legends at the time, but never gave them much of a thought. Guys would laugh about the Vory at the bar when they couldn’t explain something, like they were the Russian Freemason’s or the New World Order or something. The inside joke of the Kuntsevo. An American embassy secretary goes missing? Vory eto sdelali. The thieves did it. A movie star hangs himself in his mansion? Vory eto sdelali. I guess the best hiding places have always been in the daylight. The offer was too ridiculous to take seriously anyway, so I ended up trashing the letter. But two days later I found another green envelope. No note this time, just ten thousand U.S. dollars. Beautiful, crisp, green notes. After I riffled my thumb through those bills I didn’t give it a second thought. Couldn’t. Swing information and get Frankie’s back? Plus another thousand dollars every time I gave them a few notes on some random Joe? It sounded like a miracle. A Godsend. Then again I guess most deals with the Devil do. It was blackmail, what I was doing. For a while I told myself neat lies, called it insurance, necessity, secondary employment — whatever would get me through the night. The letters would appear a couple times a week. Sometimes, if I stayed late into the morning at Frankie’s, I’d see the same blind man hobble to my door and drop the next letter through the slot. One time I called after him as he walked away, asked him his name, but he either didn’t hear, didn’t care, or was too afraid to say. They were the same green envelopes every time. The same stiff, sharp U.S. hundreds inside, and the same black ink with two new names. This letter looked the same. Clean on the outside. Bright green, smooth paper. No wrinkles or stains. Almost cheerful, like a gift or an invitation if you didn’t know. But I knew. It looked foreign against the deep, rich grains of the oak bar top. It looked ugly. I sipped my manhattan, wondering. It’d be different this time, because my last report didn’t have the notes they wanted. I wrote them one sentence: ya khochu vyyti — I want out. Everything was fine for about three months after I reopened Frankie’s. Sure, it felt wrong, dirty, but it was all so surreal, so mystic, really, that it never ate away at me much. It felt like a game — I wrote my little notes and left them for the ghosts to sweep away, and as long as no one was getting hurt I slept just fine. Better even, with fatter pockets and under softer sheets. Then I was asked to target one of my long-time regulars: Victor Pavlov, a thin, pale man. He was a firefighter covered with clumpy, black hair that puffed under his clothes. He threw his head back when he laughed, his adams apple would shake, and you couldn’t help but stare at his white teeth shining against all that hair on his face. Victor would swing by on Wednesday and Friday nights after he went to the dog tracks, and the last Friday I saw him, he was practically giddy. The man was just born jumpy, but that night he couldn’t keep still long enough to nurse a beer. He went straight to the shot glasses, all laughs and white teeth. I didn’t have to ask him what he was so worked up about, he spit it right at me. Said he’d been saving money to get his daughter out of waiting tables at Angely Nochi, a club in downtown Moscow. ‘Waiting tables’ was his weak attempt at a euphemism for ‘prostitution’, just like ‘club’ was mine for ‘whorehouse’. Not that I had anything against Vic or the gal, that’s just what it was. He said he’d just won big at the tracks, and he’d finally gathered enough to send her to art school. We shared a drink. We laughed. He threw his head back. I didn’t press for more information, I just couldn’t. It wouldn’t have been right to dig up something rotten on that glowing smile. So I wrote he was sending his daughter to art school. Didn’t even mention the money at the tracks. But I guess it didn’t matter, because the wind swept it away and two weeks later his wife found Victor locked in his garage, the car on, the doors shut. She said she opened the door and the exhaust fumes rolled out thick, like oil floating up from hell. She said she saw the back of his head slumped against the window and she dropped to her knees and almost suffocated in the smoke. No note, no reason, nothing. It kept me awake for the next three nights. My head would spin from bourbon and I’d stay awake counting the panels in my ceiling. Then I’d count them backwards. I’d count them until the sun shone through the curtains and my eyes were dry and stinging like my brain was tugging them through their sockets. Every person before Victor was just a customer. They’d come and get drunk and tell me their sob story, then they’d leave. Some came around again, some wouldn’t, but they were just customers. Now they were people. They had stories, and those stories had endings. I just didn’t know them. The next day I got a letter with two more names, but I never responded. Two more letters came in that week, no money, just names. I talked to the people, listened, laughed with them. But I kept everything to myself. I could be saving their lives. I said it over and over and I tried to ignore the rot in my stomach reminding me of the shit pile I was diving into. I felt like the ant, and the microscope was closing in. Then it started burning. It was almost elegant, the way they threatened me. A gift was sitting on the bottom step of my front porch. White wrapping, green bow. Inside were a set of molded keys: to my house, my bar, and my car. They owned me. The next day I left them my first report that week, my one sentence: Ya khochu vyyti. Their reply sat in front of me. A bit more blurry, now, a bit less sharp. Every bit as green. I pulled my pocketknife from my jeans and sliced the top. Inside were two cards, one had a name and a time: Professor Alexi Volkov, noon, Sunday. The other had a single sentence: net vykhoda — there is no way out. —- I slept off my buzz and awoke to Frankie’s door cracking the wall. I nearly fell off the stool, and thought I was still dreaming when I saw what was waddling toward me. He was half a man, a dwarf, and God, was he bizarre. He was shaped like a baseball and wearing a vomit green peacoat with red bezels and handkerchiefs. His golden glasses had dark oval lenses like he stole them from a gag shop and he wore a white silk hat that made him look like an ‘80s pimp. He shouted ‘Oy!’ as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, then he plopped down at the bar and clapped the table with both hands, which I translated as ‘I’d like a drink, please, sir’. I stumbled behind the bar and poured him a stout. He swallowed the pint in one breath, wiped the foam with his handkerchief, and introduced himself as Professor Volkov. Then he reached into his coat and pulled out a letter, green envelope. The knot in my stomach started to burn. He spun the envelope between his fingers and said he knew who I was and that I’d been extremely helpful over the last few months. He said he was a business man with an expanding market and he needed a trustworthy English translator for a negotiation with a wealthy American investor at the St. Regis Hotel in inner city Moscow the following afternoon. Even behind his gimcrack glasses I could tell he had shifty eyes, so I asked what if I wasn’t interested. He said if I were to translate, I’d begin earning an extra fifty percent per report. It was a hell of a lot of money, money I could put to good use. Still, I waited, thought it over. He was tapping the bar like it was his own piano. After about a minute, he just shook his head, slid the envelope to me, and said, “net vykhoda.” Then he hopped off the barstool, a long fall for half a man, and waddled out the door. Inside were fifteen fresh one-hundred dollar bills. I met Volkov the following day outside the revolving door of the Regis. He told me the American’s name was William H. Barth, and that I didn’t need to know anything more than he had money. Lots. We were to meet Mr. Barth at the Ryby Net, a restaurant on the twenty-first floor of the Regis, and he was to be seated alone in the furthest corner, overlooking Moscow. The restaurant was sparkling in glass from the chandlers to the centerpieces, and Volkov looked like a misplaced blueberry in his blazer. It was about half full, and we made our way to the rear of the restaurant where a thin man with bright red hair and a neat beard sat sipping white wine. Volkov jumped into his chair and told me to introduce him. I did, and Mr. Barth pursed his lips and extended an outstretched hand. Volkov shook it furiously. Then the negotiation started. Barth told me to translate that the meeting needed to be short, and Volkov, with a charming smile, muttered something along the lines of ‘inconsiderate fucking Yankees’. He told me to inform Mr. Barth that he planned to offer a five percent royalty on all sales if Barth immediately cut all investments with other competition in the region. ‘Learn where the power lies, boy, learn well,’ Volkov said in Russian. I translated, omitting the last bit, and Mr. Barth simply nodded and listened. Volkov waited for a response, then went on to say that the deal was foolproof, and after monopolizing Moscow’s market, the profits would cover the losses in just a few months. They were dodging the words, but surely it was drugs. Drugs or guns or both. The more Volkov danced the more I was sure, and the less I liked the situation. Still Barth was silent. Volkov expressed some colorful Russian before threatening that the opportunity won’t be offered again, and only a fool would attempt to divide the industry when it could be dominated. Barth just listened and sipped his wine, his pupils sharp, frozen behind his thin framed lenses. ‘Are you listening you pretentious baboon?’ Volkov asked, eyebrows raised and with a gaping smile. It was masterful, really. ‘Are you going to sit there like a spoiled child?’ “Professor Volkov is incredibly interested in your opinion of the situation,” I said. “Please ask the professor why, exactly, I should transfer my alliance? Why not just increase funding to my current clients and spread him thin?” ‘Idiot Americans. He thinks I just throw dollars around and hope they fuck like rabbits? We’re completely changing production. Three times as fast! At a fraction of the cost!’ Volkov chuckled and raised his glass to Barth. ‘Salyut!’ The man was a hell of an actor. ‘Tell him if he continues to be a coward, he’ll be the worst kind of coward. A poor one.’ “The professor says he plans to produce three times as fast, and reduce production costs.” Barth bunched the white tablecloth between his lanky fingers as he peered over Moscow. The sky was blotching in spots of grey. “Pity. The rain is coming,” he said, “ask the Professor if the necessary changes will compromise security.” Volkov dabbed his forehead with his handkerchief. ‘Well, well! The American does have a brain! The changes may send some red flags, but I’ll have my profit withdrawn and my inventory sold well before the investigations roll in. But we need him to trust us. Tell him that’s the best part! Tell him the new production eliminates human error and the manufacturing is untraceable!’ For the first time Barth’s shoulders released and he leaned back as he drew a breath. I paused and gnawed my bottom lip. The game they were playing was dangerous at this point. Clearly they were wrapped in the filthier side business, and Volkov was making me dive in head first. Barth let his head sink into the crux of his chair as he peered into the showers pelting the glass. ‘Well, boy? Translate it! What are you waiting for, why do you think we’re paying you? Don’t you fuck this up or I’ll make sure the next time you sleep, it’ll be in a grave.’ “Professor Volkov says,” I paused, and Barth looked at me with a raised eyebrow above a thin smile. His eyes were an acidic shade of green. “He says he was promised production would be untraceable, but he invites you to hire investigators to look into it yourself.” “Yes. Yes. A wise decision.” Barth raised his glass by the stem and swirled the golden drink, breathed in the fumes, and sipped. “Tell the Professor I’m overwhelmed at such an opportunity, but we need to be strategic. Tell him to proceed, and once he begins the operation, I will cut my ties and fund his project. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m afraid that’s all the time I have. Thank you Mr. err —” “Murphy,” I said, “Francis Murphy. It was a pleasure, Mr. Barth.” “Please, call me William,” he said as the waiter brought his slip for the wine, “I trust you can mediate for Professor Volkov in the future? I will certainly be in touch.” He signed his bill and stood stiff. Then he handed it to me. “Would you please give this to the waiter for me? I do apologize.” And he walked out, pencil-like, his loafers clucking the marble floor, as if to let everyone know he’d gone. ‘Well? What did he say? What did he say?!’ I told the Professor he’d agreed, and he would fund his operation once it had begun. ‘Ah excellent! Wealthy men we shall be! And you! You’ll be paid soon, in advance even!’ Volkov hopped down and stumbled when he landed, before trotting through the restaurant whistling a tune, his head cocked upward. The rain was heavy outside now, and just before I got up to leave, I glanced at Barth’s check and laughed as the drops popped against the window. On the bottom, with excellent penmanship, he had signed his name, William H. Barth. Below the signature he left his phone number, and then, in perfect Russian, uznayte gde sila — learn where the power lies. —- I sat there in the Ryby Net awhile and watched the rain. A full fledged storm now. I needed to disappear. As long as I was in Moscow, I’d be a puppet until I lost value, then I’d be a corpse. All I had was Frankie’s. I’d saved up some money over to last few months, but it would take a fortune to vanish. A new name. New car. New house. These people were an endless web of witnesses and blackmail. The further away I could get, the safer I’d be. I had to use the only ammunition they gave me. The bullets they trained me with: information. I had a face and a name, Professor Alexi Volkov. And now, for the first time, I had a weapon for the bullets. William H. Barth. The water spat against the glass as I looked over Moscow, my temples pounding like the raindrops, but the sun was piercing through in thin rays. Volkov was right. There was no way out. But there was a way through. —- I called Barth the next morning. “Ah, Mr. Murphy,” he said, “I’ve been expecting your call.” “For the record, I had no idea what Volkov was planning. He kept me in the dark.” “Oh, I know, you’re not to blame at all. In fact you acted quite wisely.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll cut to the chase, Francis. You’re in quite a useful position to me. I need to stay one step ahead of Volkov, and you’re the perfect tool. I need you to play a role, Francis. I need you to play the translator, make Volkov trust you, need you.” “You want to make me a mole.” “If you want to call it that, yes. But I assure you, you will be safe. And you will be paid.” “Paid?” “Handsomely. Tell Volkov I asked for you to attend our meeting next week. Tell him I trust only you, but ask that you won’t comply unless he fills you in on the operation. Then, when he lets you in, report back to me.” “And what if Volkov suspects I’m lying? I’ll find myself under a headstone if he thinks I’m crossing him.” “Believe me, Mr. Murphy, whatever power you fear Volkov has, it is nothing. Smoke and mirrors. Prove yourself useful and you’ll be perfectly safe. You’ll find your first payment as soon as I hear back from you.” The line went dead. The call had gone perfectly. Barth trusted me, agreed to pay me even, but it wouldn’t be enough. I was in the perfect position. And I planned to make it count. So I wrote Volkov a letter. My handwriting was shaky from the adrenaline. The idea was perfect. I wrote that Barth contacted me and asked me to spy. I said I couldn’t refuse Barth’s offer, but instead I’d agree to work undercover. A double spy. I said Barth would believe whatever I told him, and unless they doubled my payment, I’d tell Barth exactly what Volkov had planned for his investment. I said it wasn’t a threat, but an opportunity. They could control exactly what Barth knew, and didn’t know. I was risking my ass to cross him, I’d tell him whatever I was told to tell him, and in exchange all I wanted was fair payment. I sealed the letter in a green envelope and left it for the ghosts. It was like heroin, the power I had. I was invaluable to both sides. They both could use me against the other, they’d play their games, and both think I was secretly playing for them. I knew it was risky, but it was my best shot. The deeper into the shit pile I went, the closer to the surface I felt. I had a hand in both pots, and I could pick from whichever gave me the best chance at survival. They thought they had the most power, but I had the most information. It couldn’t last, I knew that, but at least it would keep me alive. Alive and paid and hopefully, sooner rather than later, I could squeeze enough cash to vanish. To start over. I slept that night. Actually slept. No counting ceiling tiles, just silence. Morning thunder rattled my eyes when I awoke. I creaked out of bed and shuffled my way into the living room. My eyelids drooped half open and my vision was blurry, but I didn’t need to see to know they were sitting there. I felt them, I felt them in the chill in my spine. Volkov was sitting on my couch with Barth across from him, legs crossed. They’d made themselves coffee. “Ah, we didn’t wake you did we?” Barth asked. My lungs plummeted into my stomach. I was closer to the door than they were. I took a step toward it. “Ah, ah, ah,” Volkov said, then, in English, “you know the rules.” Barth’s lips, thin and pale, crept into a sick smile, before saying, “Net vykhoda.” “What is this?” I asked, hoping, praying that I didn’t already know. “Did you really think we couldn’t find a more trustworthy translator?” Barth asked, “One that didn’t just ask to be released?” “And did you really think a man with half a brain would insult a business partner?” Volkov laughed, “Idiot Americans.” He threw back the rest of his coffee. “Come, sit Francis, we have a lot of talking to do. And you do love to talk, don’tcha boy?” I took a seat next to Volkov on the couch. He didn’t quite seem like half a man anymore. “I’ll admit Mr. Murphy,” Barth said, “it was a clever effort, pitting us against one another. I only wish I could say you were the first svidetel to try it. It was a shame what happened to Victor, really, it was. But you have no idea how much we learn from the girls at the Angely Nochi. If you think drunk men have loose lips, you should hear the things a man will spill on his back.” Barth crossed his legs and cleaned his glasses with his shirt. “You see, the witnesses always tend to get a little rattled at times, and we have to make sure they’re smart enough to land on their feet.” Volkov laughed a heavy, Russian laugh. “They usually end up choosing you, you ugly bastard!” “Only the smart ones,” Barth said, “then again, intelligence isn’t always helpful in positions like your’s, Mr. Murphy. Plenty of people have intelligence. Now loyalty, that’s a bit harder to come by, isn’t it?” They were batting me around like a cat with yarn. I had to think fast. “Listen,” I said, “I don’t know what you want but I can help you. The police. The police think I’m working for them against both of you. I’ll tell them anything you want. You can run them from the inside. I’ll tell them — ” “Oy!” Volkov shouted, “The police! No, no, you didn’t call the police! Don’t you think, by now, that we’d know? You just don’t get it, do you? Think boy! We burned half your bar to the ground to hire you, and you don’t think we have men in the police? Electrical shortage, b’lyad!” Volkov laughed, “Insurance companies call that arson! The fools! Idiots!” Barth stood up and took a knee in front of me. I could smell my coffee on his breath. “And even if you found a decent agent, what could you tell them? What exactly was it that we were selling again? What was our business? Who are we? Barth? Volkov? Don’t you get it? We’re no one. Tomorrow we’ll be William McClain and Alexi Ivanich.” He chuckled and his eyes narrowed behind his glasses, green, of course. Piercing. “Oh, the svideteley love their secrets so much don’t they. They think they can do anything they want with their words. There are the smart ones, and the loyal ones, but do you know who’s the most useless? Why that’d be the greedy. You were a bit greedy, weren’t you Mr. Murphy, playing both sides? Yes, I’d say that’s a bit greedy indeed.” I felt the sweat bead on my forehead “Look, whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it, anything. I swear —” Volkov cut in, “that road is long gone. What is it you Americans say? Knowledge is power?” “Yes,” Barth said, “Knowledge is power. I guess we were a bit at fault, letting you think that. The witnesses always overestimate their knowledge. They think their secrets keep us held together. No, Mr. Murphy, knowledge isn’t power. Power is power. And, such a pity, you seem to have misjudged where it lies.” The thunder cracked outside and Barth’s head fell toward the window. “Ah the rain is here once again. And I’m sorry for you, Francis, because it hasn’t really seemed to stop. And for the greedy, well, it never really does.” Barth stood and walked to the door. Volkov followed. “Well, boy,” Volkov said, “what are you waiting for? Let’s go.” “Where are we going?” “Oh no,” Barth said, “I think you’ve had quite enough information for awhile.” Volkov whipped a revolver from his coat and flicked the chamber. It clicked when it spun like rattling teeth. “I’d follow if I were you. No need to make a mess.” I followed them outside, the rain washing the sweat from my forehead. The three of us stuffed into the back of a black sedan, and the second the door slammed, a bag was thrown over my head. No one spoke as the car sped through the rain. The only sounds I heard were the rapid blades of the windshield and my heartbeat. I’m not sure which was louder. The car screeched to a stop and the door opened. Someone grabbed my shirt collar and drug me to my feet. They ripped the bag off of my head and the light tore into my eyes. We were in the middle of nowhere. A massive field. An abandoned warehouse. “Come, come,” Barth said. Volkov poked me in the back with the barrel of the revolver. I followed him inside. It was dark and you could hear the streams of water slide along the copper roof and crash onto the asphalt. “Where are we?” I asked. “We are many things, Mr. Murphy, but we are not wasteful,” Barth said, “you can still be useful to us.” “Just not quite as you are,” Volkov said. He laughed. It was an ugly, inhuman sound. “But don’t you worry,” he said, “we’ll fix you up.” And as my eyes adjusted, I saw them. In the corners. In the darkness. They sat on tattered mattresses lined along the walls. Dozens of them, hundreds maybe. They all had white bandages on their eyes. “Don’t let them scare you,” Barth said, “after all, they were like you, once. They don’t talk much. Not anymore. They don’t need to. I suppose that is the idea, isn’t it? The perfect listeners. The perfect messengers. Not hindered by faces or names or tempted by words.” I grabbed my stomach. Jesus. The mailman. I was going to puke. “Where,” I started, then I gagged, “where are we?” The men along the walls started beating the metal. Pounding. The drums of Hell. I couldn’t breathe. I fell to my knees. “Ah,” Barth sighed, “isn’t that nice, your neighbors saying hello.” The pounding got louder. Fists to metal. I could feel the quaking in my temples. My ears rang and I tried to get up, to run away, but I fell back to my knees. “Why don’t you return the greeting? tell them your name, maybe? Take a look, remember their faces? You’ll only get one chance.” “Please,” I was in tears now. “Please,” “Shhh,” Barth knelt down, his face close to mine. The walls were shaking. Every fist was pounding. My face was drenched. I was choking on my breath. Barth ran his fingers beneath my eyes, wiping the tears away. His fingers were long, cold. Nothing but ice and bone.“Why cry, Francis? You’re home, now. You’ll be safe here. You’ll have nothing to worry about. You’ve won! Isn’t this what you wanted? You’re finally free, you’re finally home.”

18 minutes

October 23, 2017

Strange and Unexplained

The Last Pine Barrener

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About eight years ago, my great-grandfather, Everett, passed away. Initially, you might say, that doesn’t seem like something worth writing down, but you see, he was 126 years old. Guinness World Records had published him for the last nine years as the oldest living man on the planet (that could prove it). To me, however, what made his passing unique was that I had only just met him on the day he died: My father had stopped speaking to him some 40 years ago, and I had never been allowed to meet him. I knew almost nothing about him except that there had been a falling out and Dad wouldn’t talk much about it. Hence, I was taken aback when Everett shared the story with me from his hospice bed. The drive to St. Luke’s Medical was a solemn one. Dad drove silently, white knuckling the steering wheel, obviously fixated somewhere else. Mom sat in the passenger seat, occasionally reaching over to touch Dad on the shoulder, trying to comfort him but simultaneously knowing that she couldn’t. I sat in the back with my headphones in, the typical teenager, wondering why it was so imperative we go see a dying man that no one in the family seemed to care about. After all, I had better things to be doing. We parked in a parking garage at about three o’clock that afternoon, and we made our way through the ant-hill of bland hallways to the palliative care unit. The nurse at the front desk gently whisked us to the door labeled “Abernathy, Everett” and offered to escort us in, but Dad asked for a moment before we entered. The nurse obliged, and we just stood there in the hallway, the three of us, looking to Dad for the signal that it was okay to open the door. Mom and I could both tell he was struggling with something, something that hadn’t obviously bothered him for years until he’d gotten the news that Everett was near the end. I thought for a moment that he was preparing to tell us, trying somehow to find the words, but ultimately he only had one thing to say before he opened the door. “Whatever he may tell you both, keep in mind that you don’t know him like I do. He’s dying, he’ll probably feel desperate to have someone believe him. Don’t let him manipulate you.” Mom and I simply nodded as Dad looked us both in the eye, a hand on each of our shoulders, a look of resolve on his face. The door creaked open, and in we went. The room was sparsely decorated with a couple of Van Gogh reprints. There was a small television on the wall, but it was turned off. The window blinds were open, and in the bed lay a small, withered looking man with no hair gazing out at the distant skyline of Minneapolis. As we entered, he turned his head to greet us. He said nothing at first, but his lip trembled, and a single tear rolled down his cheek and on to his pillow. Finally, he spoke. “You did not have to come, Jack, but I’m so glad you are all here. Thank you.” “No one deserves to die alone.” My father uttered, with great restraint. “Perhaps not,” replied my great-grandfather, “but I am glad you came, nonetheless.” Dad just nodded, and tried a weak smile that wouldn’t have fooled a four year old. From there, it was simple introductions. Dad introduced us, and Everett asked simple questions about school, hobbies, and interests. It appeared as though the visit would be token and that we would soon be on our way. But I started to notice that no matter what we talked about, Everett’s gaze would return to me. As the sun continued to repel its way down closer to the horizon, the periods of silence became longer, more grim. At the end of the last bit of quiet, my Dad finally spoke. “Is anyone else hungry? I think it’s about dinner time.” He asked. “Starving.” Mom said. I just nodded in affirmation. Dad stood to go find the cafeteria, and Mom with him. I thought that I should go with them, but something in my gut, intuition maybe, told me that I should stay. At the door, my Dad turned back when he realized I wasn’t coming. “Come on, Amber.” He said. I got up and went out into the hallway with my parents, but stood firm. Dad started in on how he didn’t trust him alone with me. I stopped him short. “He’s 126, Dad,” I said, “he can’t possibly hurt me, and you’ve warned me to take everything with a grain of salt. I just don’t want us to come back from eating and he be dead and then we came all the way out here for nothing. Let me stay. Just bring me a burrito or something.” Dad looked at me for a moment, again wrestling with something, and then he looked at Mom. Mom just nodded. “Ok,” he said, “but if he says anything weird, just remember what I said. I’m trusting you here. But not him.” I hugged him, and they walked away. I rolled my eyes as I re-entered. What could Everett possibly say? Back inside the room, I sat in what felt like a staring contest with Everett for a few minutes. I felt like he was looking through me, doing the best he could to see the wall behind me, but failing to do anything except unnerve me. As it turned out, he was organizing his thoughts. “I want to tell you a story, Amber,” he stated, “and before you stop me, I know that Jack would have warned you about me. He’s always tried to be a good person, so he let you stay, but he’s thought the worst of me since 1976. So if nothing else, just consider your ear my last request, and if you must, my story a tale of fiction that should be in a children’s book somewhere.” He stopped, and just kept looking at me, waiting for me to respond. At first, I juggled my options. I could go, and maybe feel bad for breaking a dying man’s heart. Or I could listen and at worst have an interesting story. Admittedly, my curiosity was peaked. What could have been so bad about this guy that my Dad, who treated everyone he ever met with respect, would simply cut him out of his life? I decided that if Everett’s story would shed light on the topic, it was worth hearing. I missed the irony of him asking for an ear with a Van Gogh on the wall behind me. “Go ahead.” I said. “In 1903, I was considered a young man at 16… ” * * * * * * I was born and raised in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, in a town named Leed’s Point. Now, it’s just a wide spot in the road. But back in 1903, I experienced something there that I haven’t spoken of to date, except to my son, Oliver, who died in 1984, and Jack. I am breaking my silence now because a debt I owe is finally due. In the summer of 1903, I was 16 years old, with only the cares of a girl down the street and where my next nickel was coming from. In my spare time, I could be found wandering out in the pine thickets, hunting the squirrels and fishing in the several brooks that ran through my father’s 59 acres. Sometimes, Abigail and I would go together, and we’d sit in the tops of the trees and ride out the occasional afternoon thunderstorm. Once in a while, I would dare to steal a kiss, and Abigail would giggle. These days, it’s considered unwise for a couple so young to get married, but back then, tons of folks got married when they hit 18, and we were happy in knowing that we could. But, on July 3rd of that bastard of a summer, I lost her, and I prayed to a God that I no longer believe in for a chance to get her back. July 2nd started just like any other day. I woke up before sunrise with Dad, helped him feed the few cows we had, and rode my horse, Zip, down to the drugstore for a newspaper. The only important thing I remember reading in it was that Ed Delahanty had died, an old baseball player that not many even recollect. We also had a town picnic planned every July 4th, and the back page had a bit about that. Anyhow, I was jabbering with a man on the corner outside the general store when Zip started acting skittish. I got him settled down just in time to see the shadow pass below me. At first I thought it was just an old sand crane, flying lower than usual, but I looked up and saw something a good bit bigger. It was right in the sun, so I couldn’t see much more than a silhouette, but it looked like one of those horses with wings. Like in mythology. A Pegasus, I think. I know that sounds childish but that’s what I saw. The man I’d been conversing with saw it too. We just looked back at each other with a “What the blazes was that?!” look on our faces, and then back up at the sky. It was gone. We searched the horizon with our hands over our brows, but didn’t see anything. I don’t remember exactly what the man said to me after that, but it was something about needing to get home. I galloped Zip home, careful not to exert him too much because it was particularly hot that year. I stopped by Abigail’s to see if she’d seen it too, but after offering me some pie, her mother said she had gone out picking blackberries for the town picnic. I told her how obliged I was for the pie and went on home. At home, I told Dad what I’d seen, and he laughed that low, sort of Santa like laugh that said I was just a youngster that had spent too much time in the sun. I went to sleep that night feeling a little uneasy. It wasn’t very often in the summer that I didn’t see Abigail for a whole day, and on top of that I saw… something. I kept telling myself that Dad was right, that I had been too long in the sun and looking right into it had caused me to see things that weren’t there. But you have to understand- dybbuks, devils, and the like weren’t considered impossibility back then. Science and medicine hadn’t come so far, and people still thought that a ghost was something as simple as a cold spot in the road. Not to mention, I was a naturally curious boy. I wanted to know what I saw. It seemed like I’d only been asleep for a couple minutes when Dad was waking me up with a candle in his hand. I got the feeling pretty quickly that something wasn’t quite right. I heard voices in the kitchen. Dad had a face on that said not to ask questions. I got up, pulled on my overalls and boots, and went through the swinging door into the next room. Abigail’s mother was sitting in our old rocking chair, crying. A few of the other men from town were out on the front porch, talking in almost whispers. I could see one had an old Remington side by side through the front window. “Abigail didn’t come home tonight.” My father whispered, as I walked out on the porch. My heart almost bounded out of my chest as I ran through a whole list of places she could be. But according to the clock in the living room, it was almost two in the morning. Abigail wasn’t one to disobey her mother. Her father, God rest him, had raised her right, and when he died working on the railroad it tore her up. She followed his rules almost as a memorial, and her mother almost never had to discipline her. It was unheard of to be out past night fall, unless she was with me or Dad. I told the men that the only place she might be was the old blackberry bushes out by Briar Creek, where we would fish sometimes. With nothing else to start with, all the men mounted their horses and set off. No one told me to stay behind. I think they knew it would have been useless. We rode in silence except for the clopping of our horses’ hooves. Much later, I found myself wandering deeper into the woods, having separated from the group hours before. I had left Zip to wander back home at the edge of the forest because the trees were going to be too thick for him to be any use. I was back in farther than I’d ever been. Our back 20 acres had ended a couple hours before when I went under our barbed wire fence. The pine trees grew steadily bigger around, and the briar patches cut my arms as they became almost impossible to avoid. The wind-up pocket watch my grandfather had left me told me it was almost seven in the morning, but the thick trees made it seem much earlier, allowing only a few rays of sunshine to reach the pine needle carpet below. Eventually, the needles got so thick that nothing grew through them, and I remember thinking how relieved I was to be free of all the sticker bushes when I saw the damnedest thing. The trees thinned to form a small meadow full of dead grass, and in the middle stood a tree the likes of which I’d never seen, and never have again. It seemed like an oak tree, but it wasn’t at the right height for its girth. Five men couldn’t have reached around it if they’d been holding hands, but the leafless branches were coming off low enough for me to reach up and grab them. The tree’s crown spread out so far that it put the most of the meadow under its shadow, and that meadow was almost the size of a baseball diamond’s infield. But despite all that, it wasn’t what had my undivided attention. No, what caught my eye was the big hollow at the bottom, betwixt two of its massive roots. Abigail had given me the story of Alice and the rabbit hole. This one was definitely big enough for Alice, maybe even a horse, but I definitely didn’t want to find out where it led to. As I got closer, I could hear a low buzzing, like a bee hive or a bunch of flies on a carcass. I got close enough to see down the hole, but got no closer. The bug sound was definitely coming from down there. I stared down only for another moment before it suddenly stopped, and I heard the dead grass breaking behind me. I saw it clearly for the first time. A horse with wings, just like I thought I’d seen the day before, stood not 20 feet from me, stomping the earth with its nailed hooves. I followed its legs up, seeing its fur, the color of blood when it’s been out in the air too long. Its wings were leathery and veined, like a bat’s, and as they folded down, they revealed the creature’s rider- a pale man, the whiteness of his skin outdone only by his clothing. He had bright blonde hair and dark eyes, and his gaze made the hair on my arms stand up. I took a few steps back, tripping over a tree root and falling flat on my back. I heard the man come off his horse as I got back to my feet. “Hello there,” he said, in a voice as sharp as a razor, but smoother than the leather you’d sharpen it on, “I suppose you must be Mr. Abernathy. I thought you might find your way here, strong spirited as you are.” I stood there, still afraid to say much of value. The fact that he knew my name although we’d never met hadn’t occurred to me. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but all I could do was look from that ruined stallion back to its jockey, in disbelief. “Oh, speechless I see,” he continued, “Well, I have that effect on most of the people I encounter… something about my pallor, I suppose.” With that, he walked to his monstrosity’s front end and patted him on the snout just before feeding him something that looked like an oversized chicken liver. He patted it again, and kept on. “Still looking for your friend, I presume? How silly of me, of course you are. Well, I’m pleased to inform you that she is perfectly safe, for the moment… oh come now, let’s do away with that oafish jaw-flapping… you’ll swallow a fly.” Something about his taunting gave me the swift kick in the ass I needed to speak up. “Yeah, I’m lookin’ for her. I reckon you know where she is, by what you just said. I’d like her back, if you feel so obliged.” I stammered. “Well of course, I expected as much. And you have manners! What a surprise… humans seemed to lose their etiquette decades ago, but you sir, are an exception. Americans especially… they are sooo… unrefined. But I digress… I will return her to you in due time, but of course that is contingent on your… submission.” The man spoke with the giddiness of a small child excited about a new toy to play with, but I swear up and down that he had plenty more smarts than he let on. He was trying to play opossum with me. He already knew I would have done anything for Abigail. He’d caught me at a time when hormones were doing most of my thinking, and he would have bet the farm on it. “I’m not leaving here without her. What do you want?” I choked out. “Now, now, don’t lose your cool Mr. Abernathy, or the outcome of your predicament will not be in your favor. So, back to business. I only ask for what I would call a projection… most people here call it a soul… oh I see the alarm on your face, but not to worry. It’s quite a painless process, I assure you, and you don’t lose your soul, presently. In actuality, you would merely be providing me with a voucher, implying rights to it when you… expire.” He cackled with amusement after he finished up, and my mind had been running faster than a greyhound for a rabbit since he’d started. How on earth did this man plan on taking my eternal soul? Could he actually do it? At first, I doubted it, but then I looked back at his pet. Something like that I had only read about in some Greek story book, and someone just fooling around wouldn’t just happen to have what the world didn’t even believe to exist. I thought hard about my next words. “So, you’d like my soul?” I asked, and he simply nodded in agreement, a flat look on his face. “So, pretty much, it just belongs to you when I die?” “That is correct, my young friend,” he replied, “All you have to do is consume one of those delectable fungi over there.” He pointed to a small patch of dark brown toadstools growing near the base of the big oak. They were small, but there were a lot. I didn’t like the idea of eating a mushroom I’d never laid eyes on before. “How do I know it won’t just kill me and let you ride off into the sunset?” I asked. “Ah, a clever one you are. Quite simply, my boy, you don’t. All I can do is promise you that after you eat it, you will lose consciousness, and when you awaken, you will find yourself at home in your bed, and Abigail will be safe and sound back with her mother, with no memory of her little ordeal. You will both be happy together, but if I may be so bold, does it really even matter if I can promise you anything? Would life be worth living to you without her?” He had me. Placating or not, he had me. “I s’pose not.” I spat. “Stupendous. Now, I can comfort you further by saying that I desire your soul more than anybody’s at this very moment. Not many of your variety present themselves. I suppose that’s irrelevant when you have infinity to search, but nevertheless, I must obtain it for my collection. If you die here, who knows where your spirit will go? I need control before it is released, so if you please.” He pointed me to his mushrooms, and I went to them, wondering what I had gotten myself into. It seemed pretty simple- eat a mushroom, get Abigail back. So what if I gave up my soul? It was worth it to save my girl. I reached down and tried to find the smallest one I could. I picked one, and after a minute I finally worked up the nerve to put it in my mouth. It felt slimy and unnaturally cold for the summer heat. I looked at the man, fully immersed in the grooming of his… animal, and continued chewing, swallowing the bits as quickly as I could to get rid of the taste. It was awful, worse than the toad I’d licked as a youngster, playing like one of those folks from the old Grimm’s book. The last thing I remember before the lights went out was the pale man, looking at me like a lion at a lamb chop, a triumphant smile on his face. I woke up the next morning, in my own bed, as promised. I shot up and looked around the room, wondering how I’d gotten there. Then I remembered the man and his steed. “It had to of been a dream.” I thought to myself, but I still had the taste of that mushroom in the back of my throat. I put on my shirt and overalls, trying to get my head around what had happened. I finally got my boots on, and rushed through the house looking for Dad. He wasn’t around, so I went out the front door, headed for Abigail’s. She was on her front porch swing, humming and reading a hymnal. My heart leaped at the sight of her. I never asked her about what happened or what she remembered. She just told me she’d fallen asleep in a tree with her book and hadn’t woken up till the next day. She walked home and was surprised at all the fuss that had been made, but her mother had been so relieved to have her back that she didn’t so much as tongue lash her. As for me, Dad said that the search was called off when she finally turned up, and I’d returned a couple hours later and gone to bed without a word. He’d given me my space because he figured I was beat. Abigail and I got hitched two years later, and eventually I rarely thought about that day out in the Pine Barrens. Immediately afterwards, lots of people were talking about what they’d seen flying through the sky that day, people all over New Jersey, in fact. But I kept my mouth shut, afraid to speak of any of it. We had seven wonderful children, three boys and four girls. I got pretty good at breeding horses, and made a fair amount at it. We were happy for almost 15 years, until one day the county sheriff came to my door carrying my oldest son’s hat. He’d been out making his rounds selling the paper, and dropped some of them. They went blowing across the place, and he ran after them, not watching where he was going. He had run up on the town’s old, dry well, and gone right over the side, his hat coming off as he did. His neck had broken when he hit the bottom. A freak accident, they’d told me. My wife and I took it hard. It took us almost two years to get back to normal, and just when things started seeming okay, our next oldest died, in a way I prefer not to recollect. I’m going to make the rest quick. The rest of Abigail and my children died one by one, except for your grandfather, each death as violent as the next, over the next three years. We endured what no parents should, having to bury our own children. I had begun suspecting that I had been overcharged back on that day in the woods when our second child died. By the time our sixth one was gone, I had decided that I would jump off the dam down river. I got as far as the road across it, but then I couldn’t do it to Abigail. She had been through just as much, and she was being so strong. It wasn’t fair for me to be a coward, while she sat at home barely holding herself together, naïve to the deal I had made to save her. Then, on my 45th birthday, Abigail went to the doctor because she just couldn’t find any energy. All the doctors in New Jersey knew it was a blood problem, but they couldn’t figure out exactly what. Everything they tried seemed to work for a while, and then became completely useless. She struggled through it for 11 years. Some days, Abigail would be almost normal, but on others, she would cry out from bed to our dead children. It chilled me to the bone, and I couldn’t stand to watch her waste away, knowing that every minute of it was my doing. She suffered until she was 54 years old, and finally, gracefully, she passed. So here I am, 126 years old. I watched all but one of my children die horribly, and watched my only love struggle against the dark for a decade. I’ve seen things no father or husband should, and something has kept me here to keep re-living it every night. I just need someone to know that on that day so many years ago, I looked down that hollow and unknowingly witnessed the depths of Hell. I turned around, and struck an accord with its keeper.” * * * * * * I sort of stared blinkingly at Everett for a few seconds before I said anything. What the hell kind of story was that? Did he really expect me to buy this? Was he delirious because of his illness? Was it all a metaphor? Either way, eventually I pushed those questions aside and asked what I thought was a more pertinent one. “So what does this have to do with my dad? Sure, everyone but you and Grandpa died, but that doesn’t explain why your grandson hates you so much.” “Well… ” he paused, “… When all I had left was your grandfather, Oliver, I became overwhelmingly paranoid about preserving him and trying to keep him from what I was convinced was some sort of curse…” * * * * * * “In 1964, your father was born. He may not want you to know this, but he had a twin, David. David lived for 2 years, and then was diagnosed with an all too familiar blood disorder. He was dead by his third birthday. Oliver had gotten started a little late with a family because, frankly, of my meddling and trying to keep him from falling in love, lest he have to share my fate somehow. Of course, with the death of David, my fears were realized. After all, I clearly had signed off on something I didn’t comprehend, and I didn’t know if I could pass it on, or if I died if it would be passed on until the debt was paid. I began to see my agreement for what it really was- my soul was on loan to me until I died, with the souls of my children as interest. The only remaining child would be left to allow more interest to be paid by their offspring, and so forth. I was overbearing with Oliver for a time, yes, but with the right intentions. “Our relationship was strained, to say the least. But, I kept things to myself for a little over a decade starting in 1965 for the sake of his happiness. Of course, I kept a watchful eye from a bit of distance as the fear slowly eroded me. It did, however, please me that Oliver had developed a healthy concern for what I had told him, as he shared my story with his wife. “Your grandmother, Denise, was of course skeptical of the whole thing, and at first dismissed it as one of those stories that get passed down through a family, getting more grotesque as the years pass to facilitate entertainment, avoid redundancy, and instill identity. But the more she thought about it, the more she wondered, and eventually she started doing research of her own. “Over time, she gathered quite a bit of information about all of my children- death certificates, newspaper articles, and the like. Of course, she began to suspect that rather than some supernatural happening, I had simply been murdering my children somehow, not to mention Abigail. She kept this to herself to avoid upsetting Oliver, but it took its toll. Their relationship was at times adverse, Denise dwelling on what she thought she knew and Oliver doing his best to pretend it was all a fable. “When your father turned twelve, I decided that I couldn’t keep things to myself anymore, and had to keep trying. Yet, your grandfather would hear none of it. I knew how Denise felt, so, I skipped her and resigned to telling my remaining grandson everything instead. He was twelve, after all, easily impressionable, and perhaps still capable of believing such a tale. As such, I thought he would come to understand. The entire plan blew up in my face. Besides the deal I made in 1903, it has been my single greatest regret, to assume that I could simply manipulate what family I had left. A few days after I told Jack, his adolescent lack of discretion got the best of him, and he brought up my story at the dinner table. I immediately received a visit from Oliver, chastising me for telling such things to a twelve year old. He not so politely told me to stay out of his life. So I did. “In time, the strain on Denise became too much for her to bear, as Oliver would not acknowledge that I could be a serial killer, and she would not consider the possibility that I was telling the truth. She was utterly convinced that Abigail had simply fallen asleep in that tree, and I’d created the entire story as a delusion of grandeur as I slipped further into insanity. She left Oliver, with your father, in 1977. Your dad grew up and came to blame me for splitting up his parents, and possibly poisoning his brother. That is why he despises me, why I could not attend Oliver’s funeral in 1984, and why he hasn’t spoken to me since I told him all this in 1976. But, I believe that I have been kept alive for so long because the devil realized that he could collect more souls as part of the contract as long as I kept my own. It is my hope that when I die, the contract will expire with me.” * * * * * * At that point, I was convinced that Everett at least believed the story he was pandering. Whether or not I thought it was true was a totally different story. All I could hear was Dad, warning me about the manipulation. I sat, staring at the floor, while Everett presumably stared at me, awaiting a reaction. Mercifully, I heard my parents talking in the hall, and I stood up to go let them in. “Why are you so pale?” Mom asked. “Oh… I’m just really hungry. My blood sugar is probably a little low.” I replied. I glanced back at Everett, and he gave me a nod of gratitude. This was his little secret with me, the last secret he would share with anyone. It was up to me what I did with it. As we ate, I became less enthralled with Everett’s story, and my parents commented on my color coming back to my face. Dad occasionally glanced at Everett, who slept, and then returned to the casual dinner conversation. Finally, when the last bit of sun disappeared behind the Minneapolis skyline, my Dad announced it was time for us to head back home. We turned to say our goodbyes, and as my Dad found the courage to put a hand on Everett’s shoulder, I noticed that he didn’t seem to be breathing. He did not stir when my father touched him. “Dad,” I said. He looked at me, tears in his eyes, and nodded. We turned to leave, as I began to dismiss the story he had told as the delusional final visions of a dying man. I turned back to look at Everett one last time. A single fly crawled from out of his slightly open mouth, over his upper lip, and into his nostril. My blood ran cold with belief. I told my parents everything Everett had said, and although my father was initially upset with how I’d learned of David, we moved past it. However, I omitted the part about believing him- I didn’t want them burdened with that, and I didn’t want to sound like a simpleton. I just told them that I thought it was Everett’s way of making sense of his mistakes, and we’ve never spoken of it again, to this day. As I mentioned, it’s eight years later now, and I’m about to have twins myself. I guess it runs in the family. I’ve never mentioned any of this to my husband, Michael, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned about having more than one baby. If this is a curse, did it die with Everett? Or, am I stuck with it now? Obviously, my great-grandfather didn’t understand everything about what he’d done. Whatever or whoever he met out in those woods, they got the best of him. Will I have to pay for it? Only time will tell.

20 minutes

May 21, 2017

Beings and Entities

Darkstar

creatures, crimes, cryptids, deaths, entities, fae, fairies, ghosts, murders, Myrretah, rapes, Shawnti Therrien, soulless, souls, spirits, strange, unexplained, werewolves

Estimated reading time — 57 minute

57 minut

May 12, 2017

Beings and Entities, Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Ghosts and Spirits, Monsters, Creatures, and Cryptids, Myths and Legends, Strange and Unexplained

Past All Hope

Benjamin Krause, folklore, folktales, legends, mythology, myths, Video Narratives OK

A tropical retreat in Cozumel full of sun bathing or scuba diving? Kayaking with the whales, or sky diving in Nova Scotia? Or how about that eerie and highly illegal trip into the Paris catacombs where Holestead paid the fine eagerly without batting an eyelash almost as if he had the check ready to go beforehand. None of the above. This year the eccentric CEO of Global Gaming Conglomerate, Leon Holestead, chose the coldest, darkest, and most desolate landscape imaginable for his leadership conference and team building seminar. Besides the locale, it was the same old thing: two teams guided by Holestead with a series of lectures and dumb tasks. The only reason people came were to get in good with the boss and see the sights… sights that would be woefully lacking this year. As always, it was all expenses paid… but that didn’t make Gretchen Knight feel any better about it. Nor, it seemed, did that seem to matter to those others forced to go on the outing to Alaska’s Mount McKinley. “McKinley was President just before Roosevelt… the good one,” Harlan Ross lectured to himself and those designated to “Red Team,” which consisted of Gretchen, Harlan and four other poor fools. Blue Team had it easy, as they didn’t have a know-it-all like Harlan to keep them company, “He got shot by an anarchist. Good thing too, or we wouldn’t have had ole Teddy. You know, they should have named that mountain after Teddy, or William Seward. After all, it was Seward that bought…” “For the love of God!” Gretchen sighed as she laced her climbing boots, already longing for her high heels back in the hotel room. “Just stop already! No one cares. The less you talk, the quicker these three days will go.” Harlan ceased and peered down at the new Global Gaming Conglomerate tablet in his hand, the GGC logo with a psychedelic colored palm tree next to it, “Do you all think we’ll have WiFi signals up there? I heard this thing reaches pretty far, but this seems a little extreme.” “Aren’t you in the programming division?” Gretchen hoisted a large red pack onto her back. “That should be a question you’d be able to answer yourself.” “I do games, not… whatever this is,” Harlan turned the tablet over several times. “With any luck,” Leon Holestead interrupted them, “that will run out of juice before the end of the second day. Come on, Harlan. It’s all part of the team building experience! Put the technology away and embrace your natural instincts; put trust in your fellow man.” Harlan and Gretchen sized each other up in silent disgust. “Now hurry everyone,” Holestead urged both the Red and Blue teams. “Sunrise is only a few minutes away, and we will only have about five and half hours of it. “Sounds like poor planning,” Gretchen mumbled a little too loudly than she intended for the benefit of a fellow female director from Milwaukee. After several years of these annual get togethers, Gretchen still couldn’t remember her name. To Gretchen it didn’t matter, Milwaukee probably didn’t remember her name either, and regardless, both of them got along fairly well. “Nothing of the sort,” Holestead corrected. “Perfectly timed for the Winter Solstice. There is something to be said about a mountain in the nighttime. Beauty and intrigue that one can’t get from some yacht in Mexico.” “But Mexico doesn’t have wolves, bears, and frostbite,” Gretchen added. “Personally,” Harlan added his two cents, “either one is a hazard waiting to happen. Toes falling off out here, or skin cancer on the beach. Maybe next year we can go to Mayberg, the most haunted town in America. At least then we can stay inside…” “Oh, listen to you two,” Holestead shook his head. “Sure, this isn’t going to be the same as past years, but let that be your team’s first lesson: It is all a matter of perspective. When we find ourselves rehashing the same issue, or coming by hard times, all one might need to do is flip their perspective around.” And so the lectures began. In the emails sent two months before the date of departure, Holestead outlined his grandiose plan. Every so many miles into the mountains, he had designated GPS waypoints where they would stop and both teams would engage in a new team building exercise. Each one was accompanied by some all important seminar about an aspect of GGC’s expectations and goals. Usually Holestead got away with his unbearably cheesy rhetoric, but in the cold with snow past their shins, his employees were less than enthusiastic. Despite wearing gloves, Gretchen’s manicured fingertips were already beginning to dry out and crack. The long treks between waypoints proved that progressing up the mountain was strenuous and more difficult than even Holestead seemed to expect. Now at waypoint five, they had sloshed through the snow for four hours. “Maybe we should take a three minute break before continuing,” Holestead sat down on a snow covered log as his breaths created white wisps in front of his face. Gretchen moaned and sank against a tree trunk, happy to be off her feet again. She tried connecting to the internet through her phone, but found the bars to be too low. “I’ve got a connection,” Harlan offered his tablet. “What are you trying to look up?” “When is the snow going to melt?” she huffed facetiously. “Oh, that’s not going to be for a while,” Harlan did not catch her sarcasm, “especially not until the blizzard has come and gone.” “Blizzard!” Gretchen stood up and slapped the snow off herself. “What blizzard?” Harlan stared back at her meekly, “I… told Holestead before we left. I thought that everyone knew…” Before he could finish, Gretchen trudged through the snow as quickly as she could toward the eccentric CEO. “You all have done a beautiful job so far. If only Red Team could garner so much enthusiasm for…” Holestead paused when he saw Gretchen approach. “Gretchen, what may I do for you?” “A blizzard?” Gretchen crossed her arms and tucked her numbed fingers into her armpits. “And you knew!” “Now, now,” Holestead gave a weak grin, “I know how it sounds, but it’s only a little storm, and won’t be coming around til about midnight. By then we’ll already be tucked in and…” “A little storm?” a balding man on Blue Team groaned as others approached to listen in. “There’s no such thing as a ‘little’ storm.” “It’s not that bad,” Holestead reassured. “I checked the weather reports beforehand and…” “I vote we go back down the mountain now, while we still have daylight,” Gretchen raised a hand. “Who’s with me?” “All right,” Holestead gave in after several persons on both teams nodded in agreement with the upstart. “How about this: I can’t force you all to stay given the conditions. But… if you do, then I’ll add to your Christmas bonus.” “I can take the group back that doesn’t want to stay,” Harlan entered the conversation late, still wielding his tablet. “I’ve been setting up GPS waypoints every fifty feet or so, we could follow them back like a trail of bread crumbs.” “Hey,” a short red head from corporate asked, “I want to hear more about the bonuses.” Holestead stood up straight, “Let’s say, three thousand for everyone who stays. An extra five hundred if you try to have a little fun while you’re here too.” Seeing that the tide turned against her, Gretchen threw up her hands, “Are you people seriously going to go along with this? Do you know how cold it will get?” Some people shifted their weight, unwilling to give up the promised gifts. Holestead sensed this and added, “I guess we better get moving before the storm gets here then. Just a couple more checkpoints, and I promise that we can tent up for the night and get a fire started. How about it, teams?” Everyone except for Harlan and Gretchen relented. As everyone prepared to get on the move again, Harlan whispered to Gretchen, “You know, we can still head back… He said we could go.” Considering her options, Gretchen realized that grinning and bearing it through the cold she would be able to maintain sanity by sticking close to people she could get along with. However, if she departed, then it would be several hours of listening to Harlan drone on and on about topics of zero interest to her. Gretchen did not reply, but rather pushed past him and toward the front of their group. As twilight peaked hours later, their group stopped for the final team exercise of the day. Like most of Leon Holestead’s group activities, this too was juvenile. Harlan and Gretchen had to participate as a duo in a trust exercise. Holestead tied a blindfold over her eyes and instructed Harlan to guide her around trees and drifts to grab a flag, then back again. The activity went more or less well for others, but Gretchen found following Harlan’s verbal commands to be as painful as pulling teeth. “All right turn…,” Harlan attempted a third time. “This way?” she said, placing an arm in front of her to keep from running into anything. “Right… no I mean correct. No, turn back,” Harlan bit his upper lip. “Turn to your three o’clock.” “Three o’clock?” Gretchen tripped on a buried rock and fell face first into the snow. “Goddamn it, Harlan!” She tore the blindfold off and stumbled back onto her feet, snow leaking down her collar as she did so. For a moment Gretchen felt like crying with frustration and hatred of the mountain, “Give me real directions, idiot!” “I did!” Harlan took a step back to avoid her wrath. “It’s like the hands on a clock… you know… twelve is straight ahead, six is straight back…” “Shut up!” Gretchen threw the blindfold into the snow and returned to the group. “Just shut up! I’m done!” “Okay…” Holestead looked to the others. “Point goes to the Blue Team. Better luck tomorrow Red. I think this is as good a place to set up camp as any other. Does everyone remember who their tent companion is?” Harlan high fived a fellow programmer, as others less enthusiastically paired up. To Gretchen’s pleasure, she got the director from Milwaukee. “So, Gretchen, have you ever set one of these up?” The theory that Milwaukee might not remember her name got thrown out the window. “Too long ago to matter,” Gretchen replied. “Tab A into Slot B?” “Something like that,” Milwaukee shrugged and took her pack off with Gretchen. As her bunk mate took out the camping gear, Gretchen noticed a lace snowflake pinned just below Milwaukee’s collar. “Is that standard issue now?” Gretchen gestured at the addition to Milwaukee’s garment. “Ha ha, no,” Milwaukee tapped the snowflake. “My niece made that. Told me to wear it when I was ‘playing in the snow.’ Little kids and their innocence, right?” “Yeah… right,” Gretchen let the conversation drop. Kids were not, and would never be, a subject matter she found worth pursuing in conversation. Both continued their banter as they took out the tent and camping materials, each woman longing to be wrapped up in a warm blanket again far away from here. After several minutes of struggling with a red nose and chilled fingers to boot, Gretchen was no closer to achieving her dream of warmth. She looked over her shoulder at the others and found Harlan and his companion already zipping up their completed tent and jabbering about a new virtual reality game design. “Can you believe those two?” Gretchen grumbled to Milwaukee. “How can they pretend that this isn’t one of the most miserable things they’ve ever done?” “It helps when you have ADD,” Milwaukee stomped a stake into the snow, nearly knocking herself off balance. “Is everyone done yet?” Holestead called out from where he’d started a campfire. “If you are, come gather round for a quick presentation, then we’ll delve into another part of good ole fashioned Americana.” Milwaukee and Gretchen eyed their haphazardly constructed tent and shrugged. Fire meant warmth… the tent could wait til later. *** “…and that is why the mountain is so important. It is a metaphor for our journey as a company and the road to expansion and progression,” Holestead concluded, sensing some of the team already closing their eyes out of boredom. “Okay then! This is a campsite, and this is a campfire! So how about we swap some spooooky stories?” “I’ve got one,” a corporate exec stated. “Thirteen people were stranded on a mountain, freezing their buns off, and became human icicles. The end.” “Yes… well,” Holestead said glumly. “Seriously though, does anyone have a story to share? Anyone? Don’t be shy.” Several of them looked from one to the other, but no one stepped up to participate. “Fine then,” Holestead rubbed his hands together and placed his face closer to the fire. “I’ve got one.” “Great…” Gretchen mumbled to Milwaukee. “Thirty bucks says it’s about ‘team building.’” “You’re on,” Milwaukee nudged her. “It’s about the Windego!” Holestead’s face appeared sinister in the flames. “The what?” someone asked. Holestead tried again, this time accidentally burning himself in his proximity to the flame, “The Windego! A ravenous beast that scours the Alaskan wilderness!” “No,” Harlan interrupted as he pressed a few buttons on his tablet and scrolled down, “I’m pretty sure it’s only in Eastern Canada and New England.” “Well this one’s in Alaska,” Holestead tried ignoring him, “and has been seen right here on Mt. McKinley!” “When?” Harlan raised an eyebrow. “I can’t find anything on that.” “It doesn’t matter when,” Holestead did his best not to break character, but now he began to crack. “It only matters that it happened… right here of all places!” “It doesn’t matter?” Harlan repeated. “Of course it matters. How am I supposed to verify the story if I don’t have the details?” “You’re not supposed to verify it, Harlan,” Holestead sighed and tossed a stick into the fire. The twig crackled and popped as his voice took on a more exacerbated tone, “Spooky stories aren’t supposed to be true. They are supposed to be fun.” “Oh…” Harlan put his tablet down, then whispered to the person on his right. “How is something supposed to be fun if it isn’t true?” “Moving on,” Holestead ignored Harlan and proceeded uninterrupted. “The Windego was once a man, a gold prospector, who got lost with his team up in the mountains. For weeks they tried shooting game or trying to find their way back to civilization, but to no avail. The storms were too thick, and the temperature was so cold that the triggers of their guns froze in place. All the men grew weak and weary with no food to comfort them. After a month, their skin pulled against their bones, causing them to look like haggard skeletons.” Gretchen leaned against the trunk of a tree and closed her eyes, less than amused at Holestead’s attempts to frighten them. “An idea stirred in the prospector’s mind,” Holestead tried his best to look menacing in the flames, but for the most part, failed. “Not all of them were going to survive, he surmised, so it was only a matter of luring one away to fill his belly. So, when the sun went down, the prospector led one of the men away from the others and down a ridge. He throttled the poor man and ate to his fill. A few days later, of still no game, the prospector led another away… again, killing him in the night and eating him. It did not take long for the last two to see what was going on, but by then it was too late.” “Idiots,” Harlan whispered. “You know this story is contrived when the characters in it act like buffoons.” Holestead continued, “One by one the prospector picked all their bones clean. Shortly thereafter the snow began to thaw and the streams started to trickle. Birds and small animals returned, but the prospector could not stomach the taste of any of them. One day, he looked into a newly melting stream and saw his reflection for the first time. What once was a man, was now a misshapen creature with glowing yellow eyes, razor-like fingernails, and skin so taut that it looked like dried leather! Native Americans gave him a name… the Windego!” “You mean, ‘a’ windego,” Harlan prodded the campfire’s flames with a stick. “I mean, there isn’t just one. Like I said before, it’s an old legend from out east. Some dumb pioneer tale to warn against cannibalizing.” “And there goes the punch line, thanks again, Harlan,” Holestead shook his head, then recomposed himself for the real conclusion to his story. “And the windego has eaten lost campers ever since!” “I don’t get it,” Harlan interjected. “He was just a mortal, right? Why is he still living?” “I don’t know… magic?” Holestead shrugged. “It’s just a story, Harlan. I made it up. It was just a campfire story… you know, for fun. Oh forget it… all right everybody. I guess you all want to get some sleep.” Holestead hung his head and flicked some snow into the fire, “Though, I strongly suggest better attitudes in the morning. This trip could be a lot of fun if you just give it a chance.” Later that night, curled up in her sleeping bag, Gretchen dreamt of a continental breakfast in a hotel whose heater was turned all the way up. It comforted her to know that the trip was almost half over, and then it was back home again. A part of her wanted to feel sorry for Holestead, but at the same time, it was him who made these bad plans to begin with. Wind whipped through the pine trees as the blizzard picked up in speed. More than a few times, Gretchen heard a branch snap and come tumbling to the ground far off. In their tent, she and Milwaukee were shielded from most of the wind’s icy cold blasts. Despite the howling of wind, sleep wasn’t impossible to attain. BOOM! Milwaukee and Gretchen sat bolt upright at the sound, like an explosion. Through the howls of the wind, a rumbling sound approached. The closer the rumbles got, the more their tent shook violently from side to side. “What is that?” Milwaukee’s face drained of all color. “I don’t know,” Gretchen listened intently as campers unzipped their tents and walked out. Tree limbs snapped near them. A pained shout rang out after a branch plummeted downward. “Oh God,” someone said. “It landed on their tent.” “Quick,” Holestead’s voice commanded through the storm, “someone help me get this off of them.” “Should we go and help them?” Milwaukee asked, crawling over to their own zipped door. Gretchen latched onto Milwaukee’s wrist to keep her in place, “No… it’s too dangerous.” The rumbling grew louder, and now came with the distinctive sound of cracking timber. A scream uncleared their minds fully, “AVALANCHE!” Milwaukee’s eyes widened and looked to Gretchen, but before any words could be said, their tent’s roof caved inward. Everything happened so quickly that it was all a blur to Gretchen. One minute Milwaukee returned the clutch Gretchen had on her wrist, and the next both of them were crushed by several hundred pounds of snow. Before the avalanche struck them, several screams had begun, but were all abruptly cut off in one fell swoop. In a confusing blur, Gretchen and Milwaukee were swept up and tumbled head over foot in the ripping vinyl of their tent. Their bodies twisted and rolled, but yet their hands remained latched tightly together. Cracks and snaps, both near and far, joined in the rumbling of the avalanche, and Gretchen felt a spike of pain jam through her left arm. Though the pain ripped through Gretchen’s body, their hands remained locked. In one of the violent rolls, the tent ripped apart completely. A heavy mass of snow and ice swarmed around them, cutting off their screams. Their descent down the slope slowed, but not until one more quick jerk that caused that put Milwaukee just below Gretchen. Finally the movement of the avalanche ceased and the two women were left in iced over silence. Snow covered Gretchen completely, compacting tightly about her body. She tried moving her legs or arms, but found that she was so deeply buried that movement was impossible. Only her fingers were able to move, and then only the tiniest bit. Elsewhere, Milwaukee must have come to the same realization as a deepening fear set into both of them: they were buried alive. In a claustrophobic ridden panic, Gretchen inhaled snow through her mouth and nostrils… trying desperately to get a breath. The sheer cold against her face and body added to the pained desperation. She tried screaming, but more ice and snow fell into her mouth with the effort. Milwaukee flexed her fingers around Gretchen’s hand multiple times, no doubt out of the same miserable hysteria that overtook her companion. No matter how desperately they tried, the snow would not allow them to budge from its freezing cold prison. Somewhere over top of her, something scratched and crunched through the snow. Was someone coming to get her? Gretchen tried crying out again, but whoever tore into the frozen ground seemed not to notice. As suddenly as it came, the sound disappeared. Tears streamed from Gretchen’s eyes as her struggle to breath came to an end. Her breath grew shorter and shorter until her lungs realized there was no more oxygen to take in. Gretchen’s heart raced as her throat and air passages locked up. Wide-eyed, Gretchen felt her body give in to suffocation. Things grew calm as the panic subsided along with her will to fight. Gretchen’s body grew weak… this was it… this was how the story ended. Milwaukee’s grip loosened for the first time until her quivering fingers became perfectly still. The weight of the snow crushed in on Gretchen’s body, so she closed her eyes and waited for the inevitable. As she faded out of consciousness, a faint crunching came from above, followed by a relief of weight and pressure over her head. There was another sound… someone spoke to her… but with snow in her ears, Gretchen couldn’t make anything out. Still with her eyes shut, Gretchen felt like sleeping. Once upon a time, Gretchen thought she would fear death… but in the calm that followed her pain, she welcomed the peace. Her cheeks stung, but it didn’t faze her. Then, there was an extreme sharp pain shooting through Gretchen’s left arm. She screamed and came to. “Oh shit… I’m sorry… I…” it was Harlan laying over her, his face a cut up mess of blood and scrapes. “I’ve got to get you out… okay?” “Harlan? Harlan? What happened?” Gretchen’s frozen eyes streamed ice cold tears. “WHAT HAPPENED?” Her frantic screams made him cringe, but Harlan fought through his own pain to free her body from the snow. When he freed Gretchen up to her belly, Harlan bid her to take hold of his arm with her good hand. Once they gripped each other tight, Harlan crawled backward, pulling her out the rest of the way. When her legs came out of the snow drift, Gretchen only had a few seconds to see the unmoving hand of Milwaukee before loose snow filled in the gap. Gretchen flipped onto her belly and dry heaved saliva and swallowed snow onto the ground, then laid onto her side sobbing uncontrollably. Grimacing and panting through his own physical torture, Harlan crawled backward to half buried timber and rested against it. The stars above them continued to shine as if nothing had happened. Elsewhere in the universe, things continued on in peace. Gretchen observed him lean back as if dazed and half asleep, not fully comprehending his distress. “Harlan…” Gretchen still shook with fear and despair, but was beginning to regain herself. “Where is everyone else?” “I don’t know… The avalanche knocked me out… But I assume somebody else made it,” Harlan pointed behind her to a human-sized depression in the snow field where someone appeared to have dug themselves out. A shallow set of footprints led away from the hole and into the forest. “I hope they’re going to get help…” Gretchen considered the footprints. “How… how did you know where I was?” “Pieces of a tent shown through… I just dug in hoping to find someone,” he admitted. Gretchen cast her eyes to the ground, “Thank you… You saved me.” Harlan ignored the sentiment, “I… I almost didn’t have enough energy to do that. Working under adrenaline, I guess…” The snow inside her sleeves and clothes caused Gretchen to tremble, but she fought through it, “Harlan… we need to get the others out…” She attempted to rip into the snow like Harlan had done, but stopped as she shrieked from the pain in her arm, “You’re going to have to do it… My arm, I think it’s… broken. Harlan, they need us…” Harlan wiped his cheek and gestured to his right leg, “I told you… I’m done… At first Gretchen didn’t see what he was getting at. More careful observation, though, brought to her attention a jagged, white protrusion sticking through his poofy blue pants. She was horrified by the sickly white bone covered in smatterings of red blood. A piece of her mind denied the sight entirely. “We have to try!” Gretchen cried out of frustration, regardless of the protests, her arm allowed her no leverage. “They’re dying! Maybe they’re trying to crawl out like you did. We have to help them…” “I tried climbing a tree when I saw the avalanche coming… I never got fully covered, only beaten up pretty bad,” Harlan hung his head in silence for a few seconds, “You were almost gone when I found you… there isn’t anyone else. We’re it… along with whoever was able to dig out and walk away.” When he finished, Gretchen pounded the snow under her feet as a new wave of desperate screams and crying took over, “No! She was under here with me! I felt her! We have to try!” Gretchen flung snow in every direction until she collapsed onto her belly, no longer able to fight through the pain. “Who?” Harlan’s eyelids drooped. “Who was there?” “I…” Gretchen paused and trembled with a new wave of grief. “She… her name was… Harlan! God damn you! Why would you ask me that?” “Just… asking,” Harlan remained on his back, gazing up at the night sky and letting his breath slow. As quickly as it had come, the blizzard had blown out of sight, leaving the forest quite still. A thought occurred to him, and he quickly sifted through his pant’s pocket for the tablet. After taking a look at it, Harlan let it fall to the snow. The tablet’s screen was fractured in several spiderweb patterns, and its frame was cracked so severely that internal damage was a certainty. “What do we do?” Gretchen tried to recompose herself. “Do we just wait here?” “No,” Harlan shook his head from side to side. “We have to find some sort of shelter, or get to civilization or we’re going to freeze to death.” “Wuh… what?” she choked through sobs and shivers. “How are we going to do that when you have only one leg?” “Do you think that you can support me if I leaned on you?” Harlan slowly hoisted himself up, using the tree behind him for support. “It’ll still be hard… but it’s the best way.” “Shouldn’t we make a splint for your leg first?” Gretchen watched as pained tears slid down his own cheeks for the first time. “What are you going to make it out of?” Harlan clenched his teeth as he waved her over to help him stand. “We don’t have any straps… none of us are in a condition to dig… and the more time we waste, the more likely we are to not make it through the night.” Gretchen nodded and stood, “We follow the footprints then? How do we know whether the person who made them knew where to go?” For a moment he said nothing, then Harlan rose his head to lock eyes with her, “We don’t.” The first few steps made both of them question whether this plan would work at all. Any weight that Harlan allowed on his bad leg, jarred the bone protruding through his pants. After those first barely successful attempts at progression, the two worked out a system of timing and balance so that they moved along at a slow, but consistent pace. Adding to the difficulty was that every now and then the snow would collapse under their weight, causing both Gretchen and Harlan to stumble. “How far could they have gotten?” Gretchen gazed between the pines at the seemingly endless and straightforward set of footprints. “No one could have come out of this going that quickly.” “Shock and adrenaline can have odd effects,” Harlan offered. “Either way, the trail is leading us down hill. Maybe we can catch up to him before all three of us freeze.” “Harlan…” Gretchen paused, her cracked lips parted in an expression of confusion and muddled contemplation. “Have you taken a look at these tracks?” They ceased their trek to observe the print in front of them more closely. The size of a normal human foot, the only odd thing about it at first glance were dug in points where each toe should be. Also, each print seemed to only skirt the surface of the snow, whereas the body weight of Gretchen and Harlan made them struggle through almost a foot of snow with each step. “Cleats?” Harlan suggested. “I… I guess…” Gretchen wasn’t convinced, but couldn’t devise her own alternate theory. Over an hour passed as the two struggled along their way. The blistering cold stabbed their faces and numbed every portion of their bodies. Will alone kept the two survivors continuing onward, along with the knowledge that whoever’s trail they followed was created by someone who seemed to know what they were doing. After so long, Gretchen surmised that their invisible leader couldn’t be continuing on their quick pace for much longer. Every now and then, Gretchen mistook the shadows of looming pines up ahead as being their elusive trailblazer. However, after a couple blinks or approaching closer, none panned out to be humanoid. “Wait…” Harlan put his hand to her chest. “Look…” Gretchen followed his gaze to the trail ahead of them. The footprints continued ahead into a snowy plain surrounded by ice capped pines. Once reaching the center of the plain, the trail of prints ceased. Searching the trees and looming branches above, Gretchen sought any sign of the maker of the prints, but found nothing. “What’s going on?” Gretchen’s shivering turned to violent trembling as the freezing cold over her limbs was supplanted by intense terror and despair. “Where is he? Where did he go?” Harlan looked over his shoulder and tried to size up the situation, “Maybe the snow blew over the trail?” “There hasn’t been any wind since the blizzard ended just a little after you pulled me out, and none of the other tracks were covered…” Gretchen almost let go of him as panic took over. “Hello! Are you out there? Hello! We need help! Please!” “Stop it!” Harlan cupped a hand over her mouth. “There’s already been one avalanche today, don’t cause another. There’s no one here.” “But the prints!” she stammered. “Where do you think their maker went?” Harlan asked. “Into the trees? Maybe he flew away? Either way, Gretchen, we need to consider the possibility that this was just some sort of animal…” Her eyes bulged, “But you said!” “I was wrong…” it took a lot for him to admit to such, but at this point he had run out of options. “We should turn back… there’s no shelter here, and maybe we can dig up something useful in the morning.” “Along with the dead bodies of our friends!” Gretchen protested. “Someone crawled out of the snow! I heard it! And we saw the evidence! He’s here! He has to be!” Despite his pain, Harlan remained patient with her, “Then point him out… Gretchen… face it… there’s no one…” He stopped in mid-sentence. The causation of his hesitance did not go unnoticed by Gretchen either. A sweet, peppery smell wafted into their nostrils; the scent of a meal in preparation. “No one?” Gretchen repeated. “Come on! They have to be close!” Taking him by the arm again for support, Gretchen led them over the top of a hill, away from the strange footprints. She followed the scent and felt a surge of energy pass through her; such that Harlan had to squeeze her arm to slow Gretchen down. Standing atop the hill, a small cabin built against the hillside came into view. A faint yellow glow came through the slats in the door frame, letting the two know that they were not alone. “I told you!” Gretchen could barely control her excitement. “Someone was out there!” Harlan’s ice crusted eyelids blinked twice, “It takes an adult to admit when they are wrong… and for once I am glad to acquiesce.” Their descent down the hill caused them more distress than any other element of their journey. More than once their feet slipped on the embankment, causing Gretchen or Harlan to rely on the other to keep from tumbling down. It proved nigh impossible for Harlan to not bear some weight on his bad leg, and with every instance writhed with pain. Gretchen’s good arm grew tender with the amount of pained squeezes Harlan laid on. Greyish white smoke billowed from the cabin’s chimney, mixing with the starry night above. At the bottom of the hill, both Gretchen and Harlan nearly forgot their pain. All around the outside of the cabin were the same footprints that had led them here; still bearing the unique cleat pattern in the toes. A pile of chopped wood laid off to the side with a double bladed ax embedded into the top most log. Nicks along the blade’s side show

52 minutes

December 5, 2016

Folklore and Folktales, Myths and Legends

The Wrong Room

parodies

You get back to your apartment after a long day’s work and you want to get inside and rest. You were about to pull out your keys and unlock the door, but you notice it’s open. Turning the doorknob and stepping inside, You notice something different. You stand in the doorway trying to figure it out. then it hits you. this isn’t your room. As you turn and leave, something catches your eye. There is a man hunched over a dish of flesh, eating it with his bare hands, tearing into it as a wild animal would with its prey. Red dripped down the side of his mouth, and the smell that emanated from it was sickening. You were paralysed by the sight. Unconsciously, you start cover your nose and mouth. This accidentally bumps your elbow against the doorway. You freeze. He stopped eating there was something wrong. Then he looked up and started searching for the source of the noise. His eyes scanned the room till they found you. Your legs start moving on their own, and you find yourself running, running away from that room, and the horrors within it. ~~~ The man silently stands up, locks the door, sits back down, grabs another slice of pizza, and mutters quietly to himself: “Crazy vegans”. Credit To – Walrus King

< 1 minute

April 1, 2014

Dark Comedy, Humor, and Parodies, Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances

Scratching

Jacob Newell

1 When I was 12 years old, my parents finally decided to split me and my younger brother up and give us our own rooms. I was a couple of years older than Alex so I got the bigger space, while he stayed in the box-room. My dad wasn’t too happy about having to move all of his junk down into the garage, but times change and I needed a room for myself. The four of us lived in a bungalow on a quiet suburban street – a rather reclusive area. Me and Alex would get bored sometimes as there wasn’t much to do, but for the most part, all we needed was each other. Being two young boys with no one else to play with in such a huge neighbourhood, we were as close as two brothers could be. One day after school, we arrived home to find that all of my belongings had been moved into the the room next to Alex’s. I didn’t expect to feel sad about it at the time, but deep down I knew that sharing a room gave us a stronger bond. After the realisation that we could no longer talk to each other at night, we had to come up with a plan. I devised a childish kind of morse code – a series of taps and scratches that we’d relay to each other on the wall behind our beds. I knew that this way, we wouldn’t get caught talking in the hallway or become bored during the night. After about three months, we had become experts at our secret talking and had managed to learn just over a hundred words. In our few months of doing this, there was one night in particular that stood out amongst the rest. In the early hours of the morning, I was awoken by the familiar taps and scratches – this was confusing because Alex had never woken me up like this before. I sat up and listened intently to the words etched into the wall. It was vicious; it didn’t sound like Alex and some of it I couldn’t even understand. At that moment, I noticed Alex stood in my doorway: “What are you doing Jack?”. I stared at Alex in horror as the morse code upon the wall continued. Slowly realising what was happening, he began to tip-toe towards his bedroom door. Peering into the dark room, he could see that his window had been opened; somebody was in there. Alex slowly back-tracked, making his way into my room and closing the door. We didn’t speak, we just listened. The taps and scratches continued getting louder and more ferocious with every second; becoming violently intense until the persistent scratching built up into a loud bang. We couldn’t take it any longer. We screamed as loud as possible and our parents came rushing in. In a fit of panic, we tried our best to explain to them what had happened. Mum sat and comforted us in my room while Dad went and checked Alex’s room. Seeing the open window, he sprinted into the garden to investigate, only to find that there was nothing there. After that, our parents tried their best to convince us that it was just our imaginations; but we know what we heard. After we had finally calmed down, we were put back to bed and all of the windows were locked. An hour or so later, I heard more tapping at the wall: “Jack?” “I’m awake Alex.” “Me too, I can’t –“ “Me neither, there was definitely something there, something wrong.” “I know, I know… Jack he’s here. He’s looking at me.” “What? Don’t joke Alex, It’s not funny.” “Jack, he’s staring at me through the window right now. I’ve got to move.” The tapping ceased and Alex came stumbling into my room with a look of unconsciousness in his eyes. I shut the bedroom door and we sat on the bed shivering. We knew that there was no point in shouting our parents as they wouldn’t believe us; there would be no evidence of anybody being outside and we would most likely end up in trouble. Then we heard footsteps; they were accompanied by scratching that seemed to be leading from the outside of Alex’s room and inching towards my room. The heavy stepping stopped and a shadow blocked the moonlight behind the curtains. The window began to move a little as if it was being unlocked. We held our breath as it shook and creaked but luckily, it stayed closed. The figure leaned up against my window – almost completely shrouded by the shadows – and stared in to my room for what felt like an eternity. After a while, the shadow disappeared and never came back. I asked Alex the next morning what the man by the window looked like; he told me he couldn’t remember – but it wasn’t a man. After the incident, we both seemed to block it out of our memory. We got back to our normal lives and completely forgot about it. Alex got the worst of it but he was doing fine and that was the main thing. It wasn’t until three years later that I realised it was never really over. 2 I was 15 years old and freedom-bound during the summer of 2003. I had just finished school for the holidays and earned a three month break to do whatever I pleased. Me and my friend Paul had originally planned to stay at home playing video games the entire time but those plans were soon shot down when I was told that Paul had to stay with his grandparents for a month. Paul spent a good hour or two expressing his love for the farm house his relatives owned; speaking highly of the lakes and fields that surrounded the family home. Eventually I gave in – it was clear I was to be joining him on his visit. After packing my bags and saying goodbye to my parents, I headed down the road to Paul’s house with Alex helping me on my way. Me and Alex were still pretty close, but the older we got, the more we would drift apart. There were no more late night talks or playing out in the street together and I missed that. Once we had arrived at the house, Alex said goodbye, dropped my bag and ran off towards the direction of our local sweet shop. Me and Paul hopped inside the car and we were on our way. We arrived safely at the farm within an hour or so. It wasn’t too far away, but it looked completely different from where we lived. – just a huge house isolated in the middle of nowhere with only hills and trees for company. After we arrived, time seemed to fly by and before I knew it we had already been there for a fortnight. The area was beautiful and his grandparents were lovely so I had no complaints. One particular day after we’d eaten our dinner, me and Paul headed out to explore some more and somehow managed to venture too far. We’d usually spend the evening playing around in the fields or climb tress; but this time, we’d ended up a mile into the maze of bark. Eventually we reached a small stream and decided to have a rest. The sun lay low and twilight was fast approaching, but we couldn’t head back without having time to relax first. After a while, I began to feel as if somebody was watching us from the surrounding trees. I looked around countless times but didn’t seem to find anything. I was on the brink of paranoia, when Paul frantically pointed out a small wooden box that he’d noticed floating downstream. All too excited to discover what was inside, I hurriedly made my way in the same direction until I was running so fast that I’d overtaken the box completely. I leaned over the bank as far as I could and managed to fish it out from the torrent. I looked back in Paul’s direction expecting him to be nearby but he was a mile away. “I can’t have run that far.” I said to myself. I sat down and slowly opened the box. Inside, I found a small photograph and a scruffy, hand-drawn picture. The photo seemed to be of a small boy on his birthday; he was wearing a party hat and stood surrounded by torn wrapping paper – the biggest smile plastered on his face. Once I had managed to dry the picture off, I could easily make out a drawing of a family. There were three children and two parents stood outside of a dirty two-storey home. One of the children looked very sad and was separated from the rest of the family. Upon further inspection, I could see another person in the background; a much bigger man with an expressionless face staring from the corner of the house. It took a minute to register with my mind, but the events I’d hidden away from 3 years prior all came rushing back. A shiver ran up my spine and I picked myself up off the floor. I began to walk back towards Paul but my legs had gone weak. Then, in the quiet of the darkness I heard a noise from the trees behind me: tap, tap, scratch. My legs suddenly worked. I ran towards Paul as we hurriedly made our way back to his grandparents cabin. Soon after we had arrived home, I managed to settle down. There were still doubts in my mind of who that drawing was of but the noises that followed my discovery kept leading me back to my original fear. Was that me and my family in the drawing? Who was the sad child standing on his own? What does the photograph have to do with anything? I went over the same questions in my mind, over and over and over – until the phone rang. Paul’s grandma handed me the phone and told me it was my brother: “Jack.” “Yeah Alex it’s me, what do you want?” “I have something I need to tell you.” “Okay, I’m listening.” “You know my friend from school… Tom?” “I think so. I think I’ve met him once or twice. Why?” “Well that day after I said goodbye to you, I bumped into him down at the shop.” “And?” “Well it turns out, he lives on the same street as us. Always has.” “So, why is that unusual?” “Well, it’s not really I suppose… It’s just, why didn’t we ever see him playing in the street?” “Maybe he wasn’t allowed to play out when he was younger.” “Yeah maybe, I don’t know it’s just strange.” “It is a bit but some parents are like that.” “I guess so. That’s not really the main reason I called anyway; I just found that unusual. I have something else I have to tell you, but it’s a big deal. We’ve never really spoken about it.” “Okay, go on.” “Well today I was at Tom’s house and ended up staying over for dinner. It got dark pretty early so we decided to tell some creepy stories. For some reason, I suddenly remembered that night, you know, the night a few years back. I got the courage to tell him about ‘the man’ and what he looked like.” “Yeah.” “Well he freaked out, he forced his fingers into his ears and started shouting. He kept repeating “Don’t talk about the man, forget the man”. I didn’t know what to do. His mum came running upstairs and told me I had to leave. I’m back at home now anyway, I think I’m safe. So you should never come back okay?” “What?” That’s when the phone cut off. I immediately rang back, only to be greeted by the sound of white noise. I stood there, shocked at what I had heard Alex say. A moment later, he called me back: “Sorry about that, the phone cut off.” “It’s… fine. Don’t worry about it. I think we should talk when I get back – talk properly. I’ll be home in a week. See you then.” “Cool, see you then Jack.” After I hung up the phone, Paul questioned me rigourously. I didn’t tell him much of anything – there was no need to – and I barely spoke a word for the rest of the time there. After all, I didn’t want to sound crazy. But all I could think to myself during that week, was that Paul has always lived on the same street as me too; so why didn’t I ever see him playing outside when he was younger? Maybe I was thinking too much. I arrived home feeling worse for wear and noticed that Alex was waiting for me by the door. I was told that Tom’s mum had disappeared and left him on his own; all she’d taken with her was her jewellery box. Poor Tom went into foster care not long after his mum went missing; it wouldn’t be until a couple of years later that I’d meet him again. 3 Way back in 2005, I was invited to my first high school party. All I’d wanted since I turned 16 years old was to experience alcohol, friends and stupidity all in the same place; and after a long, boring year, I was finally able to. I arrived at the party with Paul at 8pm and immediately got to drinking. We danced, laughed and avoided vomiting but after being there for a few hours or so, we began to get bored and realised that we hadn’t been missing much at all over the past year. We finished the last of our drinks and headed towards the front door. However, just as we were leaving, I heard somebody shout my name from the corner of the room. I turned around to see Tom standing there – swaying from side to side and happily slurring his words. I decided to stay a little longer. After talking for a while, I felt as if I’d known Tom my whole life. He was only a year older than Alex, but he seemed much more mature. He was very open about everything that had happened and didn’t seem to mind talking about it. He told me that his foster family were not the nicest of people and never seemed to care about anything he did – they made him feel like an outcast and treated him like a stranger rather than a son. He told me that he hadn’t heard from his mother since she disappeared and doesn’t know whether she is dead or alive. He even mentioned that he was failing in school, but he just didn’t care anymore. His life was slowly falling apart. When the party was over, I told Tom that he could sleep at my house so he didn’t have to make his way to the home he hates so much. I set the futon for him and watched as he collapsed into a drunken slumber. When I woke up the next morning, Tom was already awake and holding something in his hands that I hadn’t seen in over 2 years: “Where did you find this?” he said. “I haven’t seen that in a long time – forgot I still had it.” “Yeah okay, but where did you find it?” he spoke urgently. “I found it a couple of years ago. It was floating down a stream in Oakshale and I managed to fish it out of the water. Why?” “This is my mum’s jewellery box. That photo was taken on my 7th birthday – the day my Dad left.” “Are you being serious?” “Did you find this box before my mum left me?” “I did actually. When I got home a week later, Alex told me that your mum was gone.” “This is so fucked up. Look at this drawing. That’s me and my foster family, I’m sure of it. Even the house looks the same.” At this point, neither of us knew what to think. This all seemed impossible. I pointed to the man drawn hidden into the background and watched as Tom’s face lost all colour. I had no choice but to ask him about ‘the man’. I told him everything that Alex and I had been a part of back when I was 12. About Alex seeing him but me being spared. I mentioned to him about the scratching and the strange conversation with Alex back in Paul’s grandparents house. He listened to what I had to say and it seemed to give him comfort. Maybe knowing that he wasn’t the only one to experience the things he had made him feel a little better. After a long silence, Tom began to speak: “When I was younger, I would see him all the time. He would come to my window, find me at school, watch me as I tried to sleep; he was everywhere. As I’ve gotten older I’ve been seeing him less and less. But I do still see him. He usually appears at night; a tall, scraggly looking old man. His eyes are the thing I remember most. Pure black, with the most intimate glow behind them that almost seems relaxing. Yet, you’re full of sheer terror, it’s strange.” Before I could say anything to Tom, he picked up the photograph from the box and showed me something that was written on the back of it: “Follow the stream to 66”. I had never noticed that written on the photograph before. Tom asked me if I would take him back to where I found the jewellery box in Oakshale. The way I saw it, I had no other choice than to say yes. We set off walking to the stream with the hope of finding something – anything – to do with Tom’s mother but I don’t think either of us really knew what to expect. We had been walking for around half an hour when Tom stopped and pointed to a sign in the bushes for a shortcut to Oakshale. Upon seeing the sign, I was filled with a sense of fear that I’d never felt before; I really didn’t want to take that shortcut. I told Tom that I had a strange feeling – almost like deja vu or an extremely vivid dream – but he told me not to worry. As we were nearing the sign, I noticed a white, spotted bow on the floor. It was playing out exactly as I had seen it. I made my way back on to the main road and refused to go anywhere near the trees by the sign. I don’t like to think of what might of happened in those woods. Eventually, we arrived at Oakshale and began to follow the stream. As we neared an old wooden bridge, Tom pointed to a small house on the opposite side from us. We headed towards the front door but there didn’t seem to be a house number anywhere. “This must be 66.” Tom said quietly. We made our way along the front path and knocked on the door. To this day, I still find it difficult to explain what happened when that door opened. Tom’s mum answered the door and stared at both of us: “Can I help you?” “Mum?” “I’m sorry, I think you’re mistaken.” I stood silently as Tom exchanged words with the woman who was once his mother. “Mum it’s me, Tom. Are you okay? What happened to you?” “I am not your mother. I don’t have any children, so will you stop saying otherwise.” At this moment, a man I had never seen before approached the door and chimed in on the conversation. “What’s going on here? What do you kids want?” “Dad? It’s me. Where have you been? Where has mum been? I don’t understand.” We must have stood there – shocked and confused – for twenty minutes before Tom’s dad ended the conversation. “Look, we couldn’t take it anymore. It’s your turn to deal with it now. We like it here and I think we’re safe. So you should never come back okay?” The door slammed shut and Tom began to cry. We left that house and made our way home in silence. As we were heading back through the trees to reach the main road, I turned around to look at the house one last time. Standing on the bridge, as clear as day and staring right at me was a tall, black-eyed man pointing at the stream. I tensed up, feeling sick and dizzy, but I didn’t mention what I’d seen to Tom. That was the first time I’d seen my worst fear. I wish I could say it was the last. A month or so after going back to Oakshale, I was given a school report to do on local history. I had been doing research, working my way through the years and was going through hundreds of old newspapers. I stumbled across a paper that was dated August 17th 1958. The main headline was detailing the death of a young boy who had drowned near his family home. A headline from a paper dated May 8th 1960 was of another young boy who had drowned whilst playing near a local brook. Over the next 6 years, five more child deaths graced the front page of local newspapers. Then, in the winter of ’66, the killer was caught. On November 12th 1966, the front page headline boasted the quote: “It’s the only thing I’m good at”. Solomon Wallace had killed seven children over the course of 8 years and had finally been brought to justice. His final victim was 7 year old Kimberly Matthews. She was lured away from her back garden where she was playing and had been drowned in the brook running along the back of her house on Kershall Street – the same street that I live on. Her body was found nearby after an elderly woman noticed the white, spotted bow she often worn, tangled up in the weeds. During the final court hearing of the brutal killing spree, a disgruntled father of one of the children shot Solomon Wallace three times in the back. After being taken to the hospital and placed in the intensive care unit, his nurse returned to his room only to find out that it was empty. After weeks of intense searching, Solomon Wallace was never found. Most people believe that he died from the gunshot wounds; some believe that he got away with it scot-free. However, some people like me are still unsure to this very day. Things gradually got worse after our visit to that house. The occurrences became more common and sleepless nights were a part of our lives. But it wasn’t until meeting Michael three years later that things would become worse than ever. 4 It was the day of my 20th birthday and I had been persuaded to go for a meal with my family. I was never one for family events – being forced into spending time with relatives you barely know doesn’t really feel like a present – but it made my mum happy so I agreed. This happened to be my worst birthday yet; I hadn’t exactly been feeling great for the past year or so and neither had Alex. The experiences involving Solomon had become more frequent and were really starting to take their toll on all of us. Well, except for Paul, he seemed to be doing fine. About half way through the meal, I excused myself from the table so I could go to the bathroom. I had just finished washing my hands when somebody approached me: “You’re Jack aren’t you?” he said. “Yeah I am. Do I know you?” “I don’t think so. I’m Michael, I live down the road from you.” “Oh yeah, another kid who hid away for his whole life.” I said snidely under my breath. “Ha, I guess so. I actually used to see you playing out when I was younger. I was never allowed out, you know, because of him. You and your brother were pretty gutsy.” “Him? So you know too then. Same shit, different story.” “I know about it, so does my mum. We’ve never seen him but my dad has. Him and a couple of his friends were a part of it back in the late 70’s. He gets to people you know, fucks them up – drives people crazy. That’s what he did to my dad’s friends. Either you or one of your little friends will be gone soon.” “Shut your damn mouth. We’ll be fine. We have been for the past eight years and we will be when it’s all over. We just have to ride it out.” “Sure you will. Just make sure you keep in touch with your buddies daily. Those most tortured usually suffer in silence.” For the next few days, I took the advice of Michael. I made sure to keep in contact with Tom while me and Alex looked out for each other. Tom seemed to be doing pretty well, considering he’d had it the worst out of the three of us but Paul wasn’t doing so well. He told me that something bad had happened and that things were worse than ever. Up until this point, Paul had never mentioned to me that he’d experienced anything out of the ordinary, so this was a complete surprise – I’d asked him once but he denied ever seeing anything. I guess he was suffering in silence… Paul was looking worse than ever when he told me the story; very thin, pale and evidently tired. He told me that it was around 3am when he was woken up by a breeze coming in through the window – he expressed bewilderment at how the window had been opened because he keeps it locked at all times. He got out of bed, ran over to the window straight away and tried to lock it but the latch was snapped. After closing it shut, he slowly walked back to his bed and sat down. That’s when he appeared. Paul had seen him at his window before, but not like this. His face was not as distorted as usual; he could make out his black eyes and a look of sick happiness on his twisted face. The window slowly opened and Solomon’s tall figure began to jerk in through the opening. Crawling and wheezing heavily, he kept his eyes locked on to Paul and he couldn’t look away. Creeping over to where Paul was sat, he pointed his finger towards Paul’s wrist and marked a cross into his skin using his fingernail. In doing so, he stared at Paul and smiled. After that, Paul told me that he passed out – the mixture of pain and fear had become too much for him – and woke up the next day with his window latch still broken. It wasn’t a dream and he had the scar to prove it. A few days had gone by and we were all terrified by Paul’s story; we had no idea what to do. We couldn’t hide, we couldn’t tell anybody because they’d react the same way Tom’s parents did and we definitely couldn’t stop him ourselves. We were being tortured nightly by someone or something, and it was made that much worse by not knowing what we were dealing with. After a surprisingly good night’s sleep, I awoke to a knock at the door – it was Michael. After getting dressed, he took me on to the brook along the back of my house: “There’s something you need to see. It’s only about a mile away from here.” he said nervously. When we finally reached our destination, I was confronted by an old, abandoned house. I immediately knew where we were, but I didn’t know why: “Why did you bring me here?” I asked angrily. “I thought you should see it. I thought maybe you’d like to know that it’s still here.” “Well I didn’t know that it was still here, that’s for sure. But I really don’t want to be anywhere near this house.” “You need more answers and if there’s even a slight possibility that you’ll find some here, we should go inside.” I hated to admit it but he was right. I had nothing. Some history on Solomon and the colour of his eyes wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I had to go inside; for all of us. “Okay. Fine. Let’s go then.” I said with an infinite sickness in my stomach. Upon going inside, we could see that it was completely abandoned and destroyed. The stairs leading up to the second floor had collapsed into a pile of wooden rubble, the living room and kitchen looked as if they had been lit alight and there was nothing left in the house that indicated that anyone had ever lived there. The only thing that looked to be in shape was the basement door. Michael was the first of us to grab the door handle. He anxiously turned the knob and began to walk down the rotting wooden steps. I nervously followed as the light from the living room slowly lessened, the further I stepped into the dark hollow. As I turned the corner, I was greeted by an entire wall of photographs lit solely by a large candle on a dirty, old table. Hundreds upon hundreds of images scattered all over the place. Some looked as if they were from the 60’s, some from the 70’s, the 80’s – then there were the more recent ones. After looking through them, we had found pictures of everyone we knew. There had been crosses drawn on random pictures, while other pictures were clear of such markings. Tom’s photo had a cross on it, Alex’s photo had a cross on it, Paul’s boasted the same scribble and mine did too – but Michael’s was clear. There were even pictures of our parents from when they were younger. Tom and Paul’s parents had been crossed out, as had Michael’s Dad; but my parents and Michael’s mum were clear. None of this made any sense. What did the crosses mean? It didn’t mean death because all of our parents were still alive; so what did it mean? I was wracking my brains in confusion. Then we heard footsteps. We froze on the spot, too scared to move. The bangs were getting louder as they approached the basement door. That’s when I realised that I’d left it open – it was clear that we were downstairs. The final bit of light hitting the basement turned to black and it became apparent that there was somebody standing at the top of the stairs. Michael and I tip-toed and hid beneath the steps as Solomon began making his way down from above our heads. He gasped for air as he reached the bottom stair. His lanky frame hobbled over to the table and took a look around at the photographs. The fear I was feeling didn’t scare me still; it compelled me to run. I nudged Michael and urged him to follow me. Right before we were about to run, Solomon turned around a let out an angry croak. We ran. We were running as fast as we could but he could somehow keep up. All I could hear was the panting, the morphed laughing, the hunger. He was only a foot behind us when we reached the top of the stairs. Michael slammed the door shut behind him as we reached the living room and headed straight back out onto the brook. We followed the trail urgently and made our way towards our homes. I now had even more questions than ever and no answers to accompany them. When I arrived at my front door, it was already open. I walked inside the house to find my mum, dad, Alex and Tom sat in the living room. My mum and Tom had been crying; the air suddenly felt cold. Paul had been found dead in his room. He had slit his wrists during the night – the night I had been having a good night’s sleep. It seems that Michael was right and now one of us was gone; I just didn’t expect it to be Paul. He drives you insane and there’s no escape when you suffer in silence. I’ll never forgive myself for not giving Paul more of my time, I can’t help but feel that maybe I could have saved him. I know one thing for sure; I lost a great friend that day and I’ll never forget him. 5 Four years have gone by since Paul ended his life. I’m now 24 years of age and living in my own apartment, far away from my old neighbourhood. Alex and Tom have their own place and spend their time studying in university, while I attained a simple retail job; barely managing to scrape enough money together to live off. Our lives had been scare-free for the past few years and we were just beginning to get back to normal. There was the odd nightmare of course, but aside from that, the three of us were doing good. Well, that’s what we thought. About six months ago, I was over at Alex and Tom’s place having a few drinks and watching a couple of movies. The talk of the intoxicated soon began and before we knew it, we were discussing everything that had happened. None of us liked to even think about the events, never mind talk about it – but I suppose that’s what alcohol does to you. We found ourselves dissecting Kershall Street, remembering the people who used to live there and all the people who left. Tom’s parents were long gone – losing their minds down in Oakshale. Not long after Paul died, his parents left too. Then Michael was forced to leave with his mum and dad, as well as other neighbours just up and leaving. The street seemed so empty when we left. When me and Alex moved out, our mum and dad decided to stay put. They liked the street, the area, their jobs and they had never been part of anything that had happened. It didn’t take me and Alex too long to figure out that the reason we were the only kids allowed out to play in the street was our parents lack of experiences with Solomon. Most of the other parents happened to be part of the strange history in some way. I suppose he chooses his fixations. After a few drinks and some intense talking, the three of us fell into a drunken slumber. It wasn’t until the early hours of the morning that we were disturbed by a bang at the door. Me and Alex opened our eyes and attempted to focus our vision. Tom was nowhere to be seen. A feeling of pure sickness hit my stomach that wasn’t drink-related – I immediately knew what was happening. Alex wasn’t as fast to react to the situation we were in, after all it had been four years. We stood up and made our way towards the front door. Just as Alex turned the handle, his face changed. It was almost as if at that moment, he had the realisation of what could be outside. He slowly opened the door, but there was nothing there. Just a small white, spotted bow on the ground. We slammed the door shut and made our way back to the living room. It didn’t take me long to realise that I knew where we had to go. The article, my deja vu, the bow; it all added up. The shortcut through the woods to get to Oakshale – the place I refused to enter – was where Solomon would be. During my history research, I read that he would hide the dead bodies of all the children he drowned in that area because Oakshale was locally known for it’s beautiful scenic route – there was no way anybody would tread those woods and miss out on the wonderful sights. If Tom was going to be anywhere, it would be there. I still had the fear and didn’t want to be anywhere near Oakshale at this moment in time, but we had to find Tom. We eventually made it to the woods and stopped on the road. Everything seemed so surreal. I took a few deep breaths and stepped on to the grass. At that moment, Alex pulled the bow out from his pocket, as a brisk wind blew it from his hand and on to the floor where it had been once before. I shouted at him, grabbing him by the shirt; I questioned him as to why he brought it? The only answer he could muster was: “I feel like it’s a big part of our whole story”. As true as that may be, I didn’t want to be reminded of what I once saw in my mind. We slowly made our way into the woods and walked for a good ten minutes, but nothing happened. Maybe it was just a dream or deja vu or whatever you want to call it. Then the smell hit us. We turned a corner, cut through some trees and there it was. My nightmare. The moonlight shone brightly through the crooked branches of the trees. It bounced off the stream and seeped through every gap in sight. The tall, skinny figure of Solomon Wallace had his hands on Tom and seemed to be leading him to the wat

24 minutes

June 7, 2013

Strange and Unexplained

The Nameless One

By the Fire's Light Series, Slenderman, Star Kindler Please wait...

Author’s Note: This story is a part of the By the Fire’s Light series. Part One: By The Fire’s Light Part Two: The Wanderer of Blazes Detective Carl Rourke pushed his chair back from his desk and rubbed his eyes. The book he had been reading fell on the desk with a small plop. He stood up and moved to his window and was surprised to find the sun had gone down. Turning to the clock on his desk, the little red digital numbers told him it was nine o’clock. He laughed. “Shame your dead, Connor,” he said, picking up the book again. “You’ve got a great writing style.” He tapped the book against his hand. “And I think I understand what’s going on now.” For the past couple of weeks, Rourke had been looking for leads in the case of the death of Connor Russell. A young woman, Cassandra Brighton, had seen a “faceless man” look out the window after Connor pushed himself out of his burning building. She had subsequently died in a fire as well. Connor’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ellen Kennedy, had just died in a bizarre car accident that had ruptured her gas tank and caused it to go up in flames. And this book of Connor’s “By the Fire’s Light” held the key. In it Connor described a tall faceless man with tentacles that went around and stalked people and killed them. Usually in relation to fire in some way. It seemed simple enough to Rourke. Some psycho fan of Connor’s, or of this Slender Man, was acting out on one very bizarre fantasy. And just like the “real” Slender Man he was branching off onto anyone who had seen him, stalking and eventually killing them. With this in mind, Rourke had had a special watch set up on Meredith Grolinsky, the woman who had witnessed what she called a tall, slender and tentacled man walking away from Dr. Ellen Kennedy’s burning car. If this psycho stayed true to form, he would go after her next. When he did, Rourke would be ready and waiting. Rourke rubbed the back of his neck and flipped the lights off on the way out of his office. He paused and considered taking Connor’s book with him. Shaking his head, he kept going. He actually wanted to sleep tonight, and a faceless monster would not aid him in that quest. “Call me if anything happens with Grolinsky,” he called to Deloran, the desk sergeant, as he headed out. “Will do,” Deloran said, with a small wave. As Rourke slept that night, his sleep was undisturbed by dreams, good or bad. A shrill screeching from his smartphone at 3 am, however, pulled him from his dreamless slumber. “Rourke,” he said groggily, brushing sleep crust out of his right eye. “Detective Rourke, this is Sergeant Deloran.” Rourke shot straight up, his sleep falling from him like his blanket. “Someone made a move against Grolinsky?’ A pause. “We’re not sure.” Rourke growled in frustration. “What do you mean you’re not sure? Either someone made a move or they did not.” “Her furnace exploded.” Rourke nearly dropped his phone. “I beg your pardon?” “Fire department isn’t sure how yet. Could have been a defect in the furnace. Could have been foul play.” Rourke put a hand to his temple. “Fire again.” He slowly shook his head. “Connor’s stove has a gasoline leak and explosion. Cassandra Brighton dies in a fire caused by faulty wiring. Ellen Kennedy’s car is wrecked and the gasoline tank ruptured resulting in a fire. And now Meredith Grolinsky dies in a furnace blast. There is no way this was an accident.” “She’s not dead.” “She’s alive,” Rourke said, incredulous. He was already up and searching for the pants he had tossed on the floor on his way to bed. “Where is she? Where was she taken?” “She was taken to Mercy. She’s in critical condition, with burns over 90% of her body. But she’s alive.” Rourke was jumping into his pants, hopping up and down on one foot with the phone still held to his ear with his shoulder. “Alright, Deloran, call the hospital and get them to keep the ambulance drivers there if you can. Or call the drivers back or whatever. They probably won’t let me see Grolinsky, but she might have said something they overheard.” “Will do,” Deloran said on the other end. Twenty-five minutes later found Rourke pulling into the emergency room parking lot at Mercy. Deloran had texted him on the way over and directed him to speak with the nurse at the desk. She would be able to tell him where the drivers were. Rourke took a quick look around the emergency room waiting area as he walked inside. Chairs that looked comfortable but might as well have been padded with granite formed a square that was broken up every ten chairs or so by a small wooden stand. On the stands were stacks of magazines from three months ago, with the very exciting topics of bass fishing and home living. The walls were painted a neutral beige, probably an attempt to try and calm any panicked people who were unlucky enough to be sitting here. A mother with a hyper-active little boy with a gauze bandage around his wrist sat at one end of the room. On the opposite end, nearer Rourke, a young woman with long black hair sat bent over, face in her hands. Turning from the waiting room, Rourke made his way over to the desk. A nurse in blue scrubs sat behind the counter. Her name badge told him her name was Amber, and the little smiling sun on it told Rourke she would be happy to help him. She looked up as he walked up. “Detective Rourke, here about Meredith Grolinsky,” he said, flipping out his badge. Amber nodded and stood up. “We stopped the drivers before they left. There in the break room down the hall there, third door on the right.” She pointed down the hallway Rourke should take. “How is Ms. Grolinsky?” he asked, whipping out a small notebook. “She’s in critical condition. We have a couple doctors trying to stabilize her now.” “I heard she had burns over 90% of her body.” Amber nodded. “That is correct. It’s really going to be touch and go for the next couple hours. If she pulls through she’s got a good shot at recovery. If not…” Rourke nodded. “Any family come with her?” Amber nodded to the young woman bent over with her face in her hands. “Her daughter came in about ten minutes ago.” Rourke made a mental note to try and talk with her on the way out. Then, giving his thanks to Amber, he walked down the hallway to the breakroom. The door creaked as he pushed it open. A young woman and man looked up as he walked in. “You the detective?” the young woman asked, leaning back in her chair. “Yes,” Rourke said, flipping out his badge again. “Detective Carl Rourke. I wanted to ask you a few questions about the woman you transported here.” He whipped out his notebook again, pen in hand. “Can I get your names?” “I’m Robert Fitzgerald, she’s Peggy Yorick,” the young man said, leaning forward. “What’s the deal, you think someone tried to murder this chick?” “The deal is, I am just trying to gather the facts about what happened,” Rourke said. He hooked a chair with his leg and pulled it out. Sitting down, he looked up at the twosome. “Was there anyone you saw at the house when you arrived that looked out of place?” “Crowd of gawkers,” Peggy said, reaching into her coat. She pulled out a cigarette and tapped it against her hand. “That’s nothing unusual though. Especially when a house goes kaboom in the middle of the night and there’s half a dozen fire trucks and police cars outside.” She shook her head. “Can we hurry this up? We have to go back on shift in thirty minutes and I want to get a smoke in.” “Of course,” Rourke said. He turned to Robert. “You didn’t see anything unusual?” “Crater where a house used to be. Otherwise no,” he said, yawning slightly. “Hm,” Rourke said, making a note. He looked up again. “Was Ms. Grolinsky conscious at all when you brought her in?” “Very briefly,” Robert said. “Screaming her head off. Considering how we found her, I’d say that’s reasonable.” “Kept going on about the fire until she blacked out after we had in her the back of the van,” Peggy said, the tapping of her cigarette becoming more insistent. “Anything specific?” Rourke said, his voice becoming slightly more tense. “She said something about seeing something by the light of the fire,” Robert said, running a hand through his hair. “I think.” “I saw it coming by the fire’s light,” Peggy said, almost without thinking. Robert and Rourke glanced at her. She shrugged. “That’s what she said. ‘I saw it coming by the fire’s light.'” Rourke wrote down the phrase in his notebook. “It? Not him or her? You’re sure?” “Yeah, yeah, I’m sure,” Peggy said with a wave of her hand. “Is that it?” “Yes, that’s all for now,” Rourke said. “Good,” Peggy muttered getting up. She exited without a backward glance. Rourke raised an eyebrow as he stuffed his notebook back in his jacket pocket. “She’s all choked up,” he said getting up. Robert gave him a bemused look. “It’s the nature of the job. You don’t last long if you don’t build up a few walls. I’m sure you’ve learned that too.” Rourke nodded his assent. Then, he left the room as well, making his way back to the emergency waiting room. The black haired woman that was Meredith Grolinsky’s daughter was standing at the nurse’s desk. “They’re taking her back to a room now,” Amber was saying. “You’ll be able to see her for a few minutes, but only for a few.” Rourke walked up to the desk. “Is she going to pull through then?” Amber turned towards him and gave a half-hearted smile. “They’ve stabilized her as best they can. It’s going to be something of a waiting game for the next twenty-four hours.” “Who are you?” the black-haired woman asked. “Detective Carl Rourke,” he said. “Detective?” she said, her eyes going wide. “Did someone do this to my mother?” She took a step forward. “That’s what I’m trying to find out, Ms.?” “Mira. Mira Gorlinsky.” “Mira, could you answer a few quick questions?” “Sure,” she said, swaying slightly as she stood. Amber caught her hand. “Sit down!” she said, pointing to a chair by the desk. There was a note of confidence and command in her voice that pierced whatever fog Mira was in and she sat down. She shuddered. Amber was already in motion, filling a small cup with water and giving it to the young woman. “Slow sips,” she said, as she took her place back behind the desk again. She flicked her gaze to Rourke. “Keep it short,” she said. Rourke nodded. “Was there anyone you know of that would have a grudge against your mother?” Mira shook her head slightly, not looking up from her glass. “My father, her husband, is dead,” she said abruptly. She looked up at Rourke’s raised eyebrow. “I just thought it would be your next question. You know, like on the crime shows.” Rourke allowed himself a small smile. “It’s good to know.” The phone on Amber’s desk rang and she picked it up. After a brief conversation she spoke to Mira. “If you feel steady enough, you can go back now,” she said, one hand over the receiver. Mira stood up putting the water glass on Amber’s desk. “Yes, I’ll be okay now,” she said, her voice firm. Amber nodded and hung up the phone. “This way, then,” she said, leading Mira to a set of closed doors a few feet behind her desk. “Don’t even think about it,” she said, giving Rourke a good-natured glare. “Wasn’t going too,” Rourke said, holding up his hands. He fished a business card out of his pocket and leaned forward, handing it to Mira. “If you think of anything, you can call me at the number on there day or night.” Mira took the car and shoved it in her jean’s pocket without looking. She gave a bob of her head, and then followed Amber into the back. *** Rourke sat in his car for a good half an hour before he actually started it up. His fingers rapped the dash again and again as he tried to make sense of what he had learned. It was possible this psycho had rigged Grolinsky’s furnace to explode. But Grolinsky’s words bothered him. She claimed to have seen something by the light of fire she had been caught in. But if this psycho had actually stayed around for the explosion, he would be no better off than Grolinsky. “Delirium, I guess,” Rourke said, finally starting his car. As he did, his smartphone began to ring. Slipping his car back into park, he pulled it out of his pocket. An unknown number was calling him. Frowning, he answered the phone. “This is Detective Carl Rourke.” “Oh God, Detective, please come back!” a panicked voice on the other end gasped. “Who is this?” Rourke asked undoing his seat belt. “It’s Mira, Mira Grolinsky. I saw him. God, I saw him, the man that tried to hurt my mother.” Rourke’s car was off, keys in hand, and he was already running full tilt to the hospital. One hand automatically went to his side, where a gun hung in its holster under his coat. “Mira, where are you?” he asked as he approached the hospital. “I’m in the waiting room,” she said, her voice taking on a hysterical edge. “They won’t let me back in.” Rourke bounded into the hospital. Mira was standing near the doors and she jumped as he entered. Tears streamed down her face and she was shaking. Amber was already in motion from around her desk and over to where they stood. “What happened?” Rourke asked, putting his phone back away. “She thought she saw someone back there,” Amber said, trying to put an arm around Mira. Mira shoved her away. “I didn’t think I saw someone, I did see someone!” she nearly screeched. “A tall man in a business suit!” Rourke’s eyes widened. “I need you to let me back there right now,” he said to Amber. “That matches the description of a man leaving the scene of a crime Ms. Grolinsky witnessed. Amber wavered and gave him an uncertain look. She sighed and beckoned for him to follow her. “We have the entire area back here on camera. We called security when Mira raised the alarm, but they didn’t see anyone on the monitors.” Rourke strode quickly behind Amber. He heard Mira fall into step behind him. A strong smell of antiseptic assaulted him as the doors opened before them. He passed a large cart full of linens, several curtained off areas, and a few criss-crossing hallways. They came to a stop by a bay of six separate alcoves. Amber pointed to the third one from the left. “Ms. Grolinsky is in there.” Rourke cautiously walked over and pushed the curtain softly aside. Grolinsky was swathed in bandages and hooked up to several IVs. The machines monitoring her vitals beeped softly. She did not appear to respond to his appearance. He let the curtain fall back. “Where did you see him?” he asked Mira. Mira pointed to the opposite end of the room. “I saw him peek around the wall there,” she said. “How do you know he meant your mother harm?” he asked, walking over. It was a small bay where some extra medical equipment and IV bags were kept. The wall jutted out slightly, forming a corner someone skinny could fit behind without being seen. “I– I don’t know,” Mira said, sounding suddenly uncertain. “I just knew.” She blushed as she said it. Rourke looked around the room, taking in the cameras in the ceiling. “Can the cameras see this corner?” he asked. “Actually, no,” Amber admitted. “But if someone was there, they would have had to step out onto camera to leave. Or to get in to begin with.” “Hunh,” Rourke grunted. He walked back over to Mira. “Did you get a look at this guy’s face?” he asked. For a moment, panic crossed Mira’s face. Then she shook her head wildly. “No, I didn’t get a good look.” She looked away from him then, back to her mother’s room. Mira was hiding something and Rourke could tell it. But he felt it best not to push it for now. “False alarm I guess,” he said, smiling at Amber. “Sorry to trouble you.” “No trouble at all,” Amber said, leading the both of them back out. “But I think it’s for the best if we leave your mom to rest now,” she said glancing back at Mira. Mira didn’t look up but she nodded. Rourke took one last appraising glance of her and then followed Amber back to the waiting room. *** Rourke stretched as he walked into his office the next morning. “Okay, first things first,” he muttered putting down his briefcase. “I’ll get a list of Meredith’s neighbors and make some phone calls.” He opened the laptop on his desk and tapped the power button. It began to hum to life. As it did, Rourke slithered out from behind his desk and grabbed his coffee mug from the corner. He looked inside it and made a little face. Brown residue from the previous day’s coffee clung to the sides and bottom of the cup. “Eh, I’ll just rinse it out,” he said as he walked to the break room. As he ran some water into his cup his phone began to ring. Sighing, he put the mug down and pulled out his phone. A number he now recognized as Mira’s was on the screen. “Hello, Detective Rourke,” he said answering the phone. He reached over for the coffee pot as he talked. “Detective Rourke, it’s Mira Grolinsky,” Mira said. Her voice was tired. But it wasn’t the tired of no sleep. It was the tired of one who was too emotionally stunned to entirely accept what was going on around them. It was something, unfortunately, Rourke had heard a lot of in his line of work. “Your mother died last night?” he said, gently. He placed the coffee pot down next to his mug. “Yes,” Mira said a quaver in her voice. A pause. “No, she didn’t die, she was killed. He did it, I know he did.” “The man from last night?” Rourke asked. He leaned against the counter top, careful not to jostle the coffee pot. “Yes. No. I mean–” She stopped. “I need to talk to you in person.” “That’s fine, Mira, that’s fine. Do you want to come to the precinct? Or do you want me to come to you?” “Let me come down there. I have to get out of here,” she said. “Alright, let me give you directions.” He gave her quick directions to precinct and then after re-assuring her again, he hung up the phone. “Great, another dead witness,” he said, pouring the coffee into his cup. “This has career ending case written all over it.” Thirty minutes later, Mira was sitting down in front of his desk. There were no traces of tears on her face, but it looked like it had been freshly scrubbed with soap and water. Her cheeks were still a little red because of the violence of the washing, as were her eyes, likely from the violence of her tears. Rourke steepled his hands. “What did you want to tell me, Mira?” She looked down into her hands. “You’re going to think I’m crazy.” She shook her head slightly. “I think I’m crazy.” Rourke glanced over at Connor’s book, “By the Fire’s Light” still sitting on his desk. His eyes widened slightly as he remembered the words Meredith had screamed as the ambulance attendants loaded her up. “Why don’t I try to guess,” he said slowly, still looking at the book. “The man you saw, you don’t think he had a face.” Mira’s head snapped up, brown eyes meeting Rourke’s hazel ones. “Yes,” she said. She stared at him for a moment longer. “How did you know?” “Well,” Rourke said, sliding the book over to Mira, “that’s going to take some explaining.” Briefly he narrated the events of the past few weeks to her. First the death of Connor, followed by Cassandra Brighton, then Ellen Kennedy, and now her mother Meredith Grolinsky. Mira turned the book over in her hands. “And so, this ‘Slender Man’ has been spotted in some way, shape or form at all the deaths?” Rourke nodded, then paused. “Well, most of them. I haven’t interviewed anyone who saw him around Cassandra’s death yet. But she did die in a fire, like the victims in Connor’s books. Cassandra thought she saw a faceless man look out Connor’s window. Your mother saw what she thought was a tentacled man leaving Dr. Kennedy’s car. And now, you, you think you saw a faceless man shortly before your mother’s death.” He put a hand to his forehead. “I don’t know how he got in or out without anyone seeing him, but I think you really did see your mother’s killer. I think we have a Slender fan on the loose, and we need to catch him before he gets anyone else.” He stood up and Mira looked up at him as he did so. “You think I’m next,” she said simply. “He goes after those who witness him and his crimes.” “I think it’s possible,” Rourke said. “I want to assign police protection to you for the time being.” Mira looked down at the book again. Her hands wandered over the title. “Hm,” she said. “Do as you please.” She stood up and handed him the book again. “I have to go arrange for my mother’s funeral.” Without another word she left the office. Rourke took the book and put it back in a drawer. Turning to his laptop, he accessed the police network and found an address for Mira Grolinsky. He made a quick call and had a patrol car assigned outside of her house. Then he began to methodically call Meredith Grolinsky’s neighbors, hoping to find clues. The sun had set once again before Carl Rourke got up from his desk and looked out his window. “Another day another dead end,” he said as he shut down his laptop. He hated this. This killer had been two steps ahead of him from the beginning. Killers usually messed up eventually, but he didn’t want to have a double digit body count before he caught this guy. His smartphone trilled in his pocket. Taking it out he saw, again, Mira’s number. “Well, third’s times the charm,” he said answering the phone. “Yes, Mira, how can I help you?” he asked. “I bought that book today, “By the Fire’s Light”,” she said, sounding oddly calm. “And I’ve been doing some research and some thinking. And I think you’re half right. I think I did see my mother’s killer.” “Okay?” Rourke said, confused. “Did you have something new to tell me?” “I think,” Mira said, slowly, “that you have one thing wrong. I don’t think you’re looking for a man.” “Well, it could be a woman I guess,”Rourke said with a shrug. Mira sighed. “No, Detective.” Rourke’s eyebrows knit. And then he realized what she was talking about. “Mira,” Rourke said, as if he was talking to a small child. “The Slender Man is not real. He is a fictional entity.” “Was,” Mira said, still calm. “We have summoned him and he has come.” He heard the scratching of something on the other end of the line, possibly a pen on paper. “And what can be summoned can be dismissed.” “Mira,” Rourke said, still slightly patronizing, “it’s been a long and hard day for you. Get some rest.” “I will when I am done. You take care of yourself, Detective. Who knows, he might move after you next if this doesn’t work.” She hung up. Rourke quickly called the officers in the patrol car currently in front of Mira’s house. After verifying she was at home, he left instructions for them to watch for any comings and goings to her house carefully. Then, finally, he left the office for his home, this time with his copy of “By the Fire’s Light” in his briefcase. Rourke turned on his bedside light as he slipped into bed that night. He tried to focus on the book in his hands. He just felt like there was something he was missing. And it wasn’t that this Slender Man was real. Unable to concentrate on the book and his tiredness finally catching up with him, Rourke let the story fall from his hands as he closed his eyes, not even bothering to turn off the light. *** Rourke dreamed. He was in a closely overgrown forest. Every which way he turned, he brushed up against tree branches and overly tall ferns. Something tall moved at the very edge of his sight sometimes, but he couldn’t tell what it was. He caught a good glance of it to his north (or at least he guessed north from the moss on the trees) and he began to move towards it. Something touched his shoulder. Rourke turned around and found himself looking at young man with black hair. “Detective Rourke,” he said, quietly. “Do not follow it. It will come after you soon enough without you encouraging it.” Rourke raised an eyebrow. “Who are you?” “Connor,” the young man said. Rourke cocked his head. For some reason the name sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place why. Connor shook his head. “Don’t question, just listen,” he said, looking over his shoulder. “I don’t have much time and this is important. Dr. Kennedy had the right idea. It runs on belief. But there is too much now for one person to deny it existence.” He shook Rourke slightly. “Do you understand?” Rourke shook his head. “I don’t,” he said. He felt as if his mind had been wrapped in a blanket, warm and stifled. “But I should.” “Just remember then,” Connor said. “One person is not enough. Nor two.” He sighed. “We gave the nameless one a name,” he muttered. “And he will not give it back.” He looked into Rourke’s eyes. “It is easier to modify a story than to negate it,” he said. “Tell Mira that. It’s too close to her now, I can’t reach her. I won’t be able to reach you after this.” Rourke felt the hairs on the back of his neck raise. There was something behind him. He could feel it. He could see it in Connor’s terrified gaze. Connor’s hands tightened painfully around Rourke’s arms. Rourke tried to turn and see, but Connor held him fast. “No,” Connor whispered. “Don’t look, not yet.” He leaned in close and whispered in his ear. “I am free, but others are not. I can’t help them, but you and Mira can. Please remember.” Rourke nodded. “I will.” “Good,” Connor said. “Now,” and his face suddenly twisted, “wake up!” he screamed, still leaned in close to Rourke’s ear. *** Rourke jumped up in bed. “Holy Mother of God,” he said, head in his hands. “What was that?” Without thinking he was already reaching for the notebook he took with him on investigations. Quickly, he began to jot down the dream. A sense of urgency permeated him, a feeling that he could not let this dream slip from him. Rourke shook his head as he transcribed. “Lord, Rourke, you are losing it. Have a dream about Connor Russell, and don’t even realize its him in the dream. Some detective.” He glanced over at his clock. Two in the morning. Even though he thought he was a fool, the feeling of urgency did not leave Rourke. In fact, if anything, it was growing stronger. “It’s too close to her now,” Connor had said. Slender Man was obviously what his dream Connor was referring to. Rourke considered going back to bed, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. Not unless he was sure Mira was okay. He pulled his smartphone off his nightstand and dialed Mira’s number. It rang five times and then went to voice mail. He hung up and stared at the floor for a moment. If it was only two in the morning the same patrol car would probably be in front of her house. He dialed through to the officers inside again. They quickly assured him no one had gone into or left the house. Hanging up the phone and putting it back on the stand, Rourke grunted. “That’s that.” He moved to turn of the bedside light he had left on when he went to sleep. His hand hung there as he stared at the light. The dream may have been just a dream, but Rourke had learned to trust his gut over the years. And his gut was telling him he had to get over to Mira Grolinsky’s house right now. He took in a deep breath, held it, and let it out. “Fine,” he growled, getting up. Mira lived in a small community about thirty minutes from his house. There were about fifteen house arranged around a good sized lake in the middle. A light breeze brought the smell of the water to Rourke as he climbed out of his car. He nodded to the officers in the patrol car as he walked over to it. “Something wrong, Detective?” the young woman said inside. Rourke recognized her as Samantha Layton, a five year vet of the force. “No, I don’t think so,” Rourke said. “Ms. Grolinsky just called, said she had something she wanted to show me,” he said, lying through his teeth. He’d be damned if he told these officers that a bad dream had prompted him to come here. “Keep an eye out, though, okay?” “Will do,” Samantha said with a nod. She prodded the young man next to her. “Hear that, Craig?” she said, as he started slightly. Rourke turned from the car and walked up to the house. A motion sensor light on the garage went off as he walked up the driveway. His long black shadow stretched away behind him as he rang the bell on the house. He followed this up with several solid knocks. Silence met his ears as he waited. He put his head down and listened. No, it wasn’t quite silence. Just there on the edge of his hearing he thought he heard… crackling. Whipping away from the door, he moved to the living room window. He peered through the partially open blinds and saw a soft orange glow inside. He drew in his breath. Rourke turned back to the patrol car that Samantha was already climbing out of. “Call the fire department!” he yelled. “And stay back!” Rourke pulled a Maglite flashlight out of his coat pocket. With a straight focused blow, he hit the corner of the living room window with the butt of the light. It fragmented and fell into little pebbles, designed to break in a way that wouldn’t leave shards that could cut people. He smashed the window again, leaving a hole big enough for him to climb through. “Mira!” Rourke shouted, flipping on the light as he dragged himself through the window. A small trail of smoke was filtering into the large living room, past the two black leather couches and easy chair. He ran, following the trail and the orange glow towards the back of the house. Rounding a corner, he spotted a glass sliding door that was now reflecting a wall of flames that danced in an almost impossible straight line in front of it. A table with a golden tablecloth shined brilliantly in the light. And there, in a corner behind the table, flames surrounding him, stood a tall man in a business suit, towering over the cowering Mira in a corner. “Halt or I will shoot!” Rourke said, pulling out his gun and dropping the flashlight. Mira looked out around the man, eyes wide and unbelieving. “Detective?” she said, fear and hope mingling in her voice. The man turned to face Rourke, which was a funny choice of words since he had no face Rourke could see. Rourke leveled his gun on his extremely skinny center mass. “Do not move!” he roared. The man cocked his head and took a gliding step forward. And as he did, to Rourke’s astonishment, the flames danced and followed him, gliding perfectly. Training overcoming amazement, Rourke made sure Mira was not standing behind the man and then opened fire. He fired three shot point blank into the man’s chest. He didn’t even stagger. He glided closer to Rourke. Rourke’s eyes widened. “Bullet proof vest,” he gasped stepping back. “But even with a bullet proof vest, he’d still feel the impact,” a small corner of his mind whispered back. Ignoring that part of his mind for now, Rourke leveled his gun at the man’s head. He fired. He watched as the bullet hit dead center where its face should be. It, because even Rourke had to admit, when a man was hit in the face with a bullet, the bullet didn’t stop and then slowly sink into the face without leaving a trace. A black tendril whipped from behind the thing’s back and Rourke realized he was about to die. “No!” Mira screamed, dragging herself from the corner. She coughed as she ran past the thing, and grabbed Rourke’s arm. “Don’t believe in him!” The thing’s tendrils began to whip angrily as she spoke and it moved forward aggressively. Rourke looked around him. The flames had circled them, blocking the entrance back to the front door and to the sliding door that led down to the lake below. “The lake,” Rourke said, an idea forming in his head. He grabbed Mira. “Come on!” he said, whipping the table cloth off the table. He wrapped it around them and ran as the thing struck forward, its tendrils landing where he and Mira had been standing a mere second ago. Rourke propelled himself and Mira through the flame wall in front of the sliding door. He felt the flames biting into the tablecloth, felt the heat searing into him. With a bounce he hit the glass door. In desperation, he ripped off the tablecloth, Mira helping him, as he grabbed the door. With a shove, it fell open, and he and Mira were running breakneck down the hill leading to the lake. “It’s easier to modify a story than to negate it!” he said breathlessly to Mira, as they ran. “What is the natural enemy of fire?” Mira’s eyes widened in recognition. “Water!” she said, as they closed in on the lake. She started to turn to look back. “No!” Rourke said, waving an arm to keep her attention. “Don’t look back!” And then they were plunging into the water. It seeped into Rourke’s shoes and socks, making his feet feel like someone had

21 minutes

May 9, 2013

Beings and Entities

Strange Things Happen Overnight at Lowe’s

George T. Robertson, jobs, occupations, strange, unexplained

Part 1 Okay, so about six months ago I started working overnight at Lowe’s. Now, I really like this job. I get to listen to my podcasts and audiobooks, the people I work with are pretty laid back, I work by myself for the most part and most importantly, I hardly have to deal with the customers, and if you ever worked in retail you know how important that really is. While I do enjoy working there, over the past six months I’ve seen some really crazy things. It started off small and not really a lot. The first thing I saw happen I originally thought it was just some kind of glitch. See, in the Lowe’s I work at there are two bathrooms set up for the employees in the back corners of the store, when I first started working there I didn’t know what they were because they were just marked employees only, but I quickly found out after I had walked the length of the store to find a bathroom which another employee had told me where it was, but of course I walked right by it. Anyway, back on point, in these bathrooms the lights work on a motion sensor, you know the types, well as I was walking past I could see the light come on from under the door. I thought it was a bit weird because there were only two other people in the store and I knew where they were. I went up and knocked on the door. There was no answer, so I opened it and it was completely empty. Like I said, it wasn’t much so I really didn’t think it. The next thing that happened was small as well. If you ever been to Lowe’s you might have noticed some of the more expensive items having a little green thing attached to them. We call them turtles and they’re our alarms. If someone tries to steal something with a turtle on them, once they go through the doors they start letting out a high pitch noise which is very hard to ignore. I was stocking some caulking, listening to the Adam Carolla podcast when I started hearing an alarm go off. It confused me so I went looking for it. It took a little bit but I finally found where it was coming from. It was a drill that was sitting on the ground and not right up front either. It was buried about four drills deep and under another display. As I was pulling the drills out to get to the one that had the turtle going off, another one next to me started going off. I will tell you that I nearly jumped out of my skin. I radioed my manager, Mike, and told him about it and he said that it’s okay. Those things go off all the time. What was weird was at the exact time Mike told me that, both turtles shut off. I chalked it up to coincidence and nothing more, oh how naive I was. Nothing else seemed to happen for about two weeks and I had put those instances long behind me. I mean, why wouldn’t I, faulty sensor and sensitive turtles, sounded likely to me, I’m not, correction, was not one to just jump to the supernatural explanation. To put it mildly, I wasn’t a believer. Oh, sure I wished there were things that went bump in the night. I’m a longtime fan of Supernatural and shows like Ghost Hunters and I always watched Josh Gates (man, I wish I had that man’s life) if I can ever catch him on, but I never experienced anything myself, that was until about a month after working at Lowe’s. It had started just like any night, Went in around 7, clocked in and started unloading the truck. It was about nine-thirty by the time we were done and everyone else had left the store so it was just us three of the night crew. For the most part, it was a pretty normal night. I was listening to a newly downloaded audiobook by Mark Tufo working on the third cart by this time, it was close to about two am and I was working my way down towards electrical to restock some fuses when I saw it. Honestly, I just kinda stood there more about a minute or two trying to make heads or tail on what I was seeing, because a little bit over halfway down the aisle there was an arm sticking out from under the shelving racks. It kept moving around as if someone was reaching under their couch to look for the lost remote. Once I got a least some of my wits back I called Mike. “Mike,” I said. “Yeah, what’s up?” Mike called back. “Umm, Mike, I got umm…an arm…” I tried to say. “Oh, that thing?” Mike said surprisingly unsurprised, “Yeah, don’t worry about it, just don’t get to close, it tends to get a bit grabby, it’s fast and its reach is farther then it looks, so just stay away from that aisle for now.” I was actually flabbergasted at how lightly Mike was taking it. “Uhhh,” I said, not really knowing what else to say. “What aisle is it in by the way?” Mike asked. “Aisle thirteen.” “Okay, just steer clear of it for now. I’ll explain more later on.” What I have come to understand is that no one really knows anything about the arm. It shows up, tries to grab things and pull them under the shelving. That’s about it. I’ve seen it about seven times now. Never in the same aisle either and it never shows up at the same time, the only thing it seems to be constant is that has it always gone back under the shelving just before four am. One time when I saw it I chucked a can of spray paint at it. The moment that can hit the aisle floor the arm shot out and snatched it and sucked it back under the shelving, and when I say it shot out I mean it shot out. It must have reached three times the length of a normal arm and back under the shelving in less than a second. After I saw that, I followed Mike’s suggestion and just avoided those aisles that it was in until it went back under itself. That’s all the time I got right now. I have a lot more stories like the thing that lives in the garden center and the naked, little man I keep seeing (that one’s a bit weirder than others). I’ll try to write some more down later and remember to have a Lowe’s Safe Day. Part 2 Wow, I never expected the kind of response that I have gotten. Thanks to everyone that wants to hear more of my stories, and I do have a bunch. First, let me address a few questions about the arm from my first post. 1. The arm looks like a man’s arm, no sleeves or tattoos of any sort, though I can see that it has darkish hair on the forearm. I did notice one thing that seemed odd. It was missing its fingernail on its pinkie finger. 2. Come on, guys, it’s almost 2020. I’ve already tried to take a picture of the arm, I mean, how could I not, it’s a random arm reaching out from under a shelving unit. Well, I’ve got some bad news for anyone wanting to see the arm, it doesn’t photograph well, as in not as all. Whenever I tried to use my camera on my phone nothing ever shows up. I tried to film it once snatching something like it did the spray can. Son of a bitch just ignored it, that was until I stopped filming then it grabbed it. That really had me worried when it did that, because that means that whatever the arm is attached to can think. I told Mike about not being about to film the arm and he wasn’t surprised. He told me it doesn’t show up on our security cameras either. He said he tried to let day shift know about it once, and of course, they don’t believe him because there was nothing on the cameras. 3. I kept pushing Mike on the arm and he finally did tell me that, yes, it did grab someone once. When I tried to get him to spill the beans on what happened, he just told me to make sure that it doesn’t grab me. After that, he wouldn’t say any more about it, and told me to stop asking. I could tell that talking about it was really upsetting him, so I’m just going to leave to alone for a while. Okay, I hope that helped some with their questions. I’ll try to answer when I can, with me working ten hour shifts I tend to do only two things; work and sleep. Because of my hours I was curious about how much I’m walking now at work so I downloaded a step counter on my phone, I can say I was a bit shocked to see I’m walking about twelve hundred steps a day, no wonder my feet always hurt. Anyway, no one is here to listen about me getting my steps in for the day. You guys want more stories and I already hinted at two in my last post, so I’ll start with the thing that lives in the Garden Center. Alright, as anyone that has ever seen a Lowe’s knows that they all have a Garden Center. Where they keep their mulch, stones and pretty much anything you might need plant or garden wise, right now it’s filled with Christmas trees big and small as well as other Christmas related plants. During the day it’s a pretty nice place and feels very…Christmasy? Anyway, at night with the lights off, it can feel a bit spooky. No one in receiving likes to stock the Garden Center so we take turns. Now, the question arises, why don’t we like to stock the Garden Center, you can look back to the aforementioned thing that lives in the Garden Center. Someone from my last post suggested that it might be a garden gnome, and in all honesty, it might be. None of us has ever seen in, and from what Mike has told me, no one ever has. So how do we know it’s there? Easy, we hear it and feel it. We hear it because the damn thing is always moving about, we can hear it scampering on the roof, on top the racks, and in the ceiling scaffoldings. We can hear its feet slap the concrete as it runs through the aisles always just out of view or you see its movement just out of the corner of your eye. That’s not even the worse part of it. The damn thing is always laughing when you walk into the Garden Center. Now, I don’t mean like a full belly laugh or an evil maniacal laugh, but more like a snicker or a hushed giggle. You know the type, where you know a joke or just something funny about someone but you want to try to keep it quiet, yeah, that kinda laugh. It starts up as soon as you walk through the doors and doesn’t stop till you leave, and where ever you go its laughter is always behind you or beside you. Sometimes it sounds like whatever it is, is right behind you close enough that you should be able to feel its breath, but if you turn around there never anything there. Other times it sounds like it’s coming from the other side of the Garden Center and it’s those times you have to look out for. Why? It’s so far away? Yes, it is, but that’s when it chucks shit at you. Yeah, the little fucker likes to throw rocks or rubber parts and whatever it can get its hand on and lobs it at you. Luckily it’s a pretty bad aim, but if it does hit you then it really starts to giggle. Telling it to stop doesn’t help either. It like when a kid tries to tell a bully to stop picking on him. All it does is make the bully double down and that’s pretty much what happens with the thing in the Garden Center. The best we can do is just ignore it. Still, the damn thing is unsettling as hell. The second thing I hinted at was the naked little man. Now, this mother fucker pisses me off to no end. As I’m thinking about it, maybe this is what the person said might be a garden gnome, but I really don’t think so. First off it’s completely hairless, and by that, I mean a bowling ball has more hair then this thing. I’ve only really seen it a few times fully, most of the time I see its little fat ass running around the end of an aisle or scampering over the top of one, it can move pretty damn fast. I’ll try to explain it so you can get a better understanding of. Thing is only about a foot, maybe a foot and a half tall, completely hairless, like I said before, fat and squat looking. Imagine a nude, hairless Danny DeVito without genitals and you would be spot on. Yeah, I said without genitals, thank God for the small favors. The only reason I call it a man is because it has absolutely zero traits of a woman. We actually started calling it Danny once I pointed to the resemblance. Anyway, this little bastard is more of a nuisance then it is anything else. It likes to make messes, knock stuff off the top of the racks, and steal your shit, that kind of stuff. Always makes your night a living hell because of all the extra work he forces us to do. Recently, while we were all taking our lunch break, we heard a lot of banging of a lot of stuff falling. We all ran to where we heard it. If you ever been to Lowe’s around Christmas, you know that we display those tacky ass blow-up lawn ornaments on the top of the racks close to the entrance, well that little fucker knocked one off, but wait! There’s more! See, we don’t just sit them up there; we tie those things down so they can’t fall on the customers, but this little fucker had untied them all then tied them together, so when he pushed one off, they all went. Let it be said we all were quite pissed that night. Danny only comes out about two to three times a month, but I’ve lost about five box cutters to him. We have no idea where he came from or where he goes. He’s not like the thing in the Garden Center though; he doesn’t laugh, or giggle or even throw stuff. Danny is pretty quiet except when it runs or climbs. His bare feet slap the concrete and he always sounds out of breath but only when he’s on the move. Once he stops, he goes dead quiet. One time the little bastard swiped my box cutter and took off, luckily I had just came out of the aisle to see him grab it. I took off after him, swearing if I catch him I’m going to punt him like a fat, bald football. As I ran around the corner and had to stop fast, that pudgy bastard had set me up. Danny had dropped my cutter but this aisle had the arm in it (see my first stories) and it was stretch disturbingly so as it was trying to grab my cutter which was literally just outside its fingertips. If I hadn’t come to a stop when I did, I would have been in, well, arms reach of it. I looked up to see Danny looking down at me from the top of the rack. Oh, yeah, I cussed him out, but all he did was watch me with those beady little eyes of his until he just ducked away and I hear him scamper off. I don’t know if Danny was trying to hurt me or not, but I’m putting a chain on my box cutter from now on and I don’t think I’ll be chasing him anymore. That’s all I have time for tonight. I have more stories if you’re still interested. Let me know and maybe I’ll tell you about the man that watches the store or the fact that I think the store itself doesn’t like me. Part 3 Okay, guys, holy shit, this fucking week! Boy, I got a lot to tell you, but before I get into it everyone seems to want to know about the man that watches the store, or as someone else called him, The Watcher, which is what we started calling him just because it’s very fitting. I noticed The Watcher about a month ago. I was outside stocking the Garden Center, yes, that little bastard was running around giggling at me, I tell you I can’t wait till summer when I can try to stock the Garden Canter before sunset so I won’t have to deal with it. Right now I don’t have much of a choice with the Sun deciding that a good time to set is at four pm, hell my grandmother stays up later than the sun. I wish we would just get rid of this stupid Daylight Saving Time, I mean yes it made since when we used candles and electricity was being used by Edison to electrocute elephants, but Christ do we really need it now? Anyway, while I was outside I was over by the register area, putting away some large vases when I glanced out into the parking lot. It was there at the far edge of the lot, just outside the reach of the lights, was a very tall and very large man. He was wearing what looked like a long, dark trench coat with a wide brim hat, kinda like Reverend Kane’s hat from Poltergeist 2, you know the guy, the only really creepy thing about that movie, except that this hat’s brim was really wide, like almost out to his shoulders wide. The collar on the trench coat also was popped so his face was completely shrouded in darkness. To say that I was just a bit creeped out would be like saying Greta Thunberg only cares a little about the environment. I went to Mike about it back then and he just sighed with frustration, don’t worry, it wasn’t at me, he told me that this guy shows up every year around the end of September, beginning of November and just stand out there watching the store and tends to finally go away around the end of March. Mike told me that every night around ten pm he’ll show up somewhere just outside the property line, stand there all night, rain, snow, sleet, doesn’t matter, and then he tends to disappear around five am. I asked him how many years has he been doing this and Mike told me that from the stories he’s heard, pretty much since the store first opened back in two thousand and six. “Has anyone ever tried to see what he wants?” I asked Mike. Mike looked at me sadly. “Yes,” he said. Mike told me that a few years ago a young guy, one of those “I ain’t scared of shit” types decided to go and tell the creep off. He was never heard from again. The cops were called and a missing person report was made but the guy was never seen again and the Watcher disappeared for the rest of the year and next, that was until November when he once again showed up. I was like, “Fuck, Mike! Is there anything else that might pop up that I should know about that could, I don’t know, cost me my life!?” At that point, Mike informed me that, come Spring, I should be on the lookout of an incredibly attractive woman that starts showing up and tries to lure you out of the store to have sex with you. Yeah, you guessed it; she doesn’t want to have sex with you and I’m not supposed to believe anything she says or does and that it’s best to simply ignore her. I told Mike that if a hot girl was trying to have sex with me, then I would already not trust her, because that shit does not happen and I mean ever. I haven’t had a woman look at me like that for over ten years, and I’m counting my wife in that. Alright, now let me tell you how my week went. The first really fucked up thing that happened was last Wednesday. Shit got real scary and real serious that night. Let me set it up here, I was working a unique shift on Wednesday due to Lowe’s being closed for Thanksgiving. See, unlike other greedy big box stores, Lowe’s actually cares about their employees and as such does not open late night on Thursday to sell items that have been marked up then marked down so idiots feel that they need to get into fistfights over sheets, oh yeah, I really saw that once on a black Friday. Let me ask you something, is there or was there any point in your life that you wanted to buy sheets at a falsely discounted price so fucking bad that you would punch a complete stranger in the face? If your answer is anything other than, “Of course not, what do you think I am? Stupid?” then you really need to rethink your love for sheets. As I was saying, I was working the unique shift from one PM to twelve AM. We were all supposed to be out clocked out by midnight, and I was fine with that. The majority of the night was pretty easy, I mean besides having to deal with customers but even they seemed to be alright for the most part. It wasn’t until eleven that it went south. In the back of the store, we have our loading dock where we keep everything that we unload off trucks that still need to be placed on racks in the store or where special request items are stored until the customers can pick them up. Well, I was back there sweeping up and listening to the latest audiobook in the series called Hard Luck Hank, this book was called Dumber then Dead, it’s really good if you ever get a chance to pick them up, anywho it was really windy that night due to the fact we had a storm coming in from the east. The dock’s roll-up doors were banging with the wind, they weren’t really that loud and I really had thought nothing of it. I was by the last of the three doors when there was an especially loud bang, so loud and unexpected that I actually jumped and dropped my broom. I didn’t move for a moment, just trying to recover from the surprise. I went to grab my broom when the door banged again. I stood and started to back up. There was another bang but it came from the middle of the three doors. It was at this point that Mike came running into the back. “What was that?” he asked. I just pointed at the doors, a little too shocked to say anything. Then came another bang, then another, louder and harder. “I don’t think that’s the wind,” I said. We can actually see dents starting to form from the numerous hits. It was so loud that we had to cover our ears as our other coworkers come to see what the commotion was. When they came in, Mike and I seem to snap out of our shock and rushed out, our coworkers quickly followed. We went to the front of the store, but even from there we could hear the banging. Mike decided to call 911 and then he let us leave early. Needless to say, we all bolted. Mike stayed, but not in the store. He got in his car and waited at the road entrance to the store. On Friday night, when I went back in, I found out that when the police showed up Mike went with them to the back of the store to see if they could find what was making the banging noise. Well, whatever it was it was long gone, but both doors were fucked up badly, so badly that they’re going to need to be replaced. The mangers talked to Mike and me about what happened and I told them everything I knew, I asked what did the security cameras catch and they said that they got knocked out just before the door was attacked. Yeah, I said attacked, because that’s what it looked like. There were large dents and deep scratches all over the two doors. The third door was untouched because there has a trailer stock in it that we were going to unload on Friday. This now leads me to my last bit of weirdness. See, while we were unloading the truck we came across a small box with my name on it. Mike handed it to but suggested that I shouldn’t open it. When I asked him why, he said that everyone that works in receiving gets one of these sooner or later, he was actually surprised that it took this long. I asked him if he ever got one and he said that he did. “What was in yours?” I asked. “A tooth,” Mike answered. A mother fucking tooth he said. He even said that it still had some blood and gum on it. Then I asked my two coworkers, John and Steve. “I got a box full of roaches, and not the good kind,” John said. “I got… well, I am not sure what it was,” said Steve. “It was just a red, wet squishy thing.” I shook my box, there was something definitely in there. When I asked where they came from, no one really knew. Mike suggested again that I just toss it, but after hearing everyone else’s little prizes I had to know, so with my cutter, I slit the tape and opened it. It was a dead bird. A chickadee, I think. John looked into the box. “The hell!” he said. “It moved!” He wasn’t lying, I saw it too, well, the chickadee didn’t move, the poor thing was dead, but something inside of it did. I quickly closed the box, grabbed the closest tape, resealed it and tossed it into the trash compactor, turning it on. So, yeah, that was my week and that’s all I have time for now. Heading to bed so I can forget this week ever happened. I’ll keep telling you guys more stories of this crazy store if ya want and always remember, have a Lowe’s Safe Day. Part 4 I don’t know how much longer I’m going to last at Lowe’s anymore. Someone said in the comments that it sounds like things might be escalating and I think they might be right, I think things are starting to get out of hand. It started on Wednesday. It was my turn to stock the Garden Center, and I was out there stocking the mulch, because there’s no time to work on your garden then in December in the North East, prime weather. No lie, we get some crazy things in right now, just the other day we got two pallets of weed whackers. I mean… why? It wasn’t even for Black Friday, but that isn’t the point. I was out in the Garden Center like I said, stocking mulch and trying to ignore the Thing in the Garden Center laughing at me when it abruptly stops. I look up into the rafters as I hear it scamper up on over onto the roof. Confused by the sudden change, I walked out into the open section of the center trying to see where it scampered off too, when I heard really heavy breathing. I looked over towards the sound to see the Watcher standing on the other side of the fence. I stopped dead. I’ve never seen the Watcher this close up, and apparently the only one whoever has was never seen again. He has never approached the store before, but there he was, staring at me. I can tell he was staring at me because, while his face was still hidden in the shadows of his high collar and hat, I can see light gleaming off his cold, hateful eyes. Now, I don’t scare easily, spooked and unnerved, yes, but scared? No. I will tell you what though, while I was frozen where I stood looking at this tall tower of evil, and evil is what this thing was, that if I hadn’t already dropped a loaf earlier then my pants would have been a bakery. Never before had I ever felt such a presence. I could feel my heart pounding so fast that I thought it would explode out of my chest, but at the same time, I felt as though lungs refused to work, as if my breath wouldn’t leave me as to not be in the same space as the Watcher. Somehow I was able to get my foot to move as I took a slow step backwards, then he moved. Not much mind you, he just grabbed the fence, but it was fast, so fast that I didn’t even see him do it. One moment his hand was next to him then BAM, he had his fingers wrapped around the chain. The movement and noise made me nearly jump out of my shoes. I almost bolted right then and there, but his hand caught my attention, and held it for a second more. At first, I thought he was wearing gloves, but then I noticed the long, grey fingernails. His skin, matched his nails except it was darker grey. I could also see that he was squeezing the fence. Let me just say that if anyone that has ever driven by a Lowe’s understands that there is tall fence that enclosed the Garden Center and that it’s made out of pretty sturdy chain link, I mean yes, you could cut it with a fence cutter, but that what’s they’re made for anyway. Well, the Watcher had his fingers through the chain-link holes and as he was squeezing, he was bending the metal. I could actually hear the metal protesting against his strength. Well, as Biff Tannen said, I made like a tree and got out of there. I bolted for the entrance, closed the doors behind me and locked them. I called Mike and had him meet me in the back office. I told him what happened. He said that he’s never heard of the Watcher even doing anything like that. “Fuck,” Mike said. “He’s never even set foot on the property that I know of.” We left the door locked and closed until it was closer to six when Mike had to open the doors. He told me he went to check out where I saw the Watcher, he said it was gone but he could see where he had twisted the fence up. The next thing to happen was on Friday night. It wasn’t much but somehow I think that it might be a lot more important than it seems. I was going to take my lunch break and I had stepped into the elevator, now I know that it’s a pretty quick walk up the stairs to the break room and offices but my feet usually start to hurt around that my break time and of course I’m just lazy. I do take the stairs down all the time, though, I feel that it’s a waste to take the elevator downstairs because I at least have gravity on my side at that point, plus it’s a lot faster to just run down a floor. Anyhow, I got on to the elevator and I was going to press the second-floor button when I had to stop and stare. Where there were normally two buttons, now there were three. This new button wasn’t marked, but I could tell that it was very old and worn. Yeah, I have seen and read way too many horror movies and stories in my life, there was no way in hell I was pressing that button. I pressed up and went on my break and tried to forget about the new button. Thing is, it always show up now at least once a night. No one else has mentioned it so I don’t know if I’m the only one seeing it or if everyone else does, but they’re just used to it. I asked Mike about it and he had no idea what I was talking about, and neither did John or Steve, so, for now, that’s the Nope Button to Fuckthatfloor. This next thing… this next thing, if I ever see it again, I’m done. It happened while I was stocking electrical. Let me tell you, when it comes to stocking Lowe’s there are four areas that are a complete and total bitch to stock; Tool World, Hardware, Lighting, and Electrical. Each one of these areas have a shit ton, and I mean a shit-ton of little items that are, half the time, not even in their correct place, or they are but it just hasn’t been changed in the system so you spend at least a third of the time just trying to locate a type of outlet, or screw, or bulb, or some other little bagged or boxed thing just to find that they’ve been moved to an endcap or they’re just a new item. It’s a real pain in the ass. Anyway, I’m getting off-topic again. I was in electrical trying to locate some tiny fuses. I was getting frustrated because even though I was where the fuses were supposed to be I couldn’t find the one I was holding, so I decided to walk the aisles and see if I might happen to come across them. As I walked to aisle thirty-one (that’s the main aisle that runs down the center of the floor) I saw a large, reddish-brown pool of something on the floor that wasn’t there before. I also noticed that whatever made the pool had been dragged away and into the last lumber aisle which also happens to the last aisle of the store. Annoyed about it because I thought that John or Steve might have been leaking something off a pallet and not realize it, I followed the smeared trail. I could not have been more wrong. As I turned the corner, I stopped. What I saw was not Steve or John, what I saw was a nightmare. At first, I couldn’t make it out, it looked like a moving pile of wet clothes, there was a squishing sound that emanated from it every time it appeared to move and inch forward. At first, I couldn’t make out what it was, but as it kept slithering forward I finally grasped what I was seeing, and it was impossible. I took a step back and bumped a stack of blue buckets, you know the ones, we have them located at the end of every aisle, the five-gallon one, anyway I bumped a stack of those and they went down causing a loud enough racket to wake the dead. I looked down at the buckets then back at the thing. It had lifted its head and was looking at me. It was just what I was afraid it was. Someone’s skin, it was just fucking skin. No internal anything, it was flabby, and squishy and twisted with reddish-brown liquid oozing out if its holes and from between its wrinkled folds. It had stopped moving and its head was twisted around looking at me with eyeless holes, its mouth opened wide and more liquid flowed slowly out and somehow it made a deep moan. I took a step back and the thing came at me. Dear God it was fast, almost too fast as it just seemed to slither all over itself as it raced towards me. To give you an idea of what it was like, imagine the 1980’s version of the Blob coming at you except instead of it being a pink, snotty thing, it was someone’s goddamned skin. You better believe I fucking beat feet getting the fuck out of there. I think it was the first time I ever really screamed out of real fear. I ran as fast as I could and let me tell you for someone as big as I am you’d be surprised at how the right motivation can really get you moving. I found Mike in the dock office with Steve and John. It took me a while to catch my breath and composer before I told them what happened. Lucky for me they, of course, knew about the strange shit that’s been happening as at Lowe’s longer then I have, but this was new even for them. I lead them back to where I saw the skin. Mike was pissed about the wet mess, it was just more work we’d have to do to clean it up, but when we reached that last aisle they peeked around the corner and saw nothing. The skin thing was gone, but it left a trail. Not much on one though. They could see where it turned around and came at me, but we can see that it stopped after I bolted then the trail slid off to the side and literally ended at the base of the wall. It was like it just slipped through cove joint leaving a buildup of that weird liquid that was coming out of it. “What’s that?” John asked when he saw something in the liquid. It looked like one of our name tags. Mike took out a pen and flipped it over to see the name. Trevor. Mike stood up fast when he saw that name. “No,” he whispered, “I can’t be.” “Can’t be what?” I asked. “Trevor,” Mike explained, “was the name of the man tha

52 minutes

March 3, 2020

Jobs and Occupations, Strange and Unexplained

I Love Numbers

crimes, deaths, insanity, madness, mental illness, murderers, murders, obsessions, obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD, prisons, psychological, psychological horror, serial killers, Tyler Ouellette

I love numbers, even numbers to be exact. I like that there are 48 stairs leading up to my cell. I like that I get precisely four hours of leisure time every day, no more, no less. I like that my wake up time, my breakfast time, my lunchtime, and my dinner time all happen on times ending in zero. I like that there are 80 cells in my block, 20 on each of the four floors. I like that my cell is on the fourth floor, six doors down. I don’t like that there are 17 bars on my cell door. I don’t like that my prisoner number is 15393, all odd numbers, my least favorite. I hate that I was only able to kill 19 people before I was caught. It began when I was a child. Six years, eight months, and fourteen days old to be exact. At first, I started by counting the letters in my name, Oliver. Eventually, my desire for even numbers forced me to move on to anything and everything around me. My family began calling my routine my “Counts.” My Counts would happen all throughout the day. As soon as I woke up at 6:44 a.m., I would count 20 teeth, 20 teeth, 20 teeth, 20 teeth, the same as the day before. After counting my action figures (twelve, twelve, twelve, twelve) I would shower. Showering was one of my favorite parts of the day because I could control the numbers. Every shower was set to the tenth notch, the perfect temperature, and lasted exactly 600 seconds, 10 minutes. These numbers are my favorite because they’re even numbers, but also because they end in zero. At 7:14, I would walk down the 14 stairs in our house, counting each one along the way. I would eat my cereal, meticulously counting the number of seconds each spoonful took to chew. Before getting on the bus at 7:39, I would count our fridge magnets: seven, seven, seven, seven. This is where my family first started noticing my Counts. At first, they thought it was just a normal quirk little kids have when they learn something new. Soon enough, though, my Counts became worse. My first-grade teacher, Ms. Sullivan, would tell my parents that I wasn’t as developed as the other kids. She noticed that I would take longer than the other students on every assignment. At first, my parents didn’t understand why; they thought I was doing great based on my Counts at home. They began asking me questions, usually nine questions every night. I hated their questions, I hated that they didn’t ask one more or one less to be even, but I always answered. Through hearing my responses, they began to realize that my Counts weren’t just my young brain trying to understand numbers. I would tell them about how when I was at school, I couldn’t focus on my work because there were too many things to count. The number of books on the shelf, the number of markers and colored pencils and crayons strewn across the craft table, the number of branches on the tree right outside the classroom window. One of my favorite Counts was when I would count the kids in the classroom: sixteen, sixteen, sixteen, sixteen, an even number. When someone was absent, though, it could throw off the entire day. I had an even more difficult time trying to get my work done. All I could focus on was the feeling that something was unbalanced in the room. Eventually, my parents took me to the doctor. While I was waiting in the examination room, I counted the jars on the desk (three, three, three, three), the lights in the room (six, six, six, six), and anything else in the room that my eyes fell upon. After waiting eight minutes and 54 seconds, my doctor, Dr. Stephanie, finally arrived. She started asking me questions that made me uncomfortable, but I knew my parents wanted me to answer, so I did. “Oliver,” she started to question me, “what’s on your mind right now?” “The pens in your pocket. Three. I don’t like three,” I responded. “And why don’t you like the number three?” “It’s an odd. I like evens. They’re the good numbers.” “That’s great! I like the evens better too. So when you’re counting, you must always count an even number of times then?” Looking back on this conversation, it seems like Dr. Stephanie was just appeasing me since I was only six years, ten months, and twenty-two days old. “Always four times. Sometimes more times if I need to.” “Your parents tell me that you aren’t paying attention to your work at school. Is this because you’re too busy counting?” “Yeah. There’s lots to count in Ms. Sullivan’s room. I never feel like I’m done counting yet.” “I could see why that would be hard to focus! Hopefully, we can do something to help improve your work, okay? I just need to speak to your parents out in the hall for a minute and we’ll be right back in. Don’t move a muscle!” Dr. Stephanie left me in the room alone while she talked to my parents in the hall, forgetting to close the door as they left. I looked down at the floor and started counting the tiles for the sixth time since I entered the office. As I was counting, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, I heard Dr. Stephanie quietly mention something about medication. I didn’t know what this meant at the time, but obviously my parents did and they did not like it. They started yelling, “Our son does not need medication,” and “We will not be coming back to this office!” My mother grabbed my arm and took me out to the car before I was able to finish counting the tiles. I never asked what was wrong; I was too busy counting all the street signs on the way home. They never took me to another doctor again. Nothing changed after the meeting with Dr. Stephanie. I continued to do my Counts every day and I still struggled in school because I just could not focus. Two months and three days after the doctor’s appointment, a new student, Parker, joined our class. Seventeen, seventeen, seventeen, seventeen students in the class. The classroom had become permanently unbalanced because of Parker. I hated him. My ability to focus on my work dropped even lower. The Counts got even worse since I was constantly craving even numbers. One day after school, my desire got too strong. I remembered Parker was on my bus and lived on my street. The bus stopped at its fourth stop, our stop, and we both got off. Instead of going to my house, I decided to follow Parker to see where he lived. I counted the steps as I lurked behind him out of his line of sight. We got to his house after 474 steps. I watched from a distance as he walked in through the front door, unsure of my next move. After 12 minutes and 19 seconds, he came back outside to play basketball in his driveway. At the time, my childish mind thought the perfect way to get back at him would be to push him and yell at him. I approached him in his driveway and said, “Parker, you’re a big meanie and I don’t want you in my class! You messed up my Counts!” He turned around and looked at me with a confused look. Obviously, he had no idea what my Counts were, but it felt invigorating to finally yell at him. He started to talk but wasn’t able to get the words out before I pushed him to the ground. I’ll never forget the sound of my first kill. It was a hollow noise, but with an alarming crack, like a wooden baseball bat shattering. His head just happened to land on the only rock in his entire driveway. A puddle of red began to soak the pavement around his head. He wasn’t moving. Even though I was only six at the time, I knew I had done something very wrong. I really didn’t mean to hurt him. I just wanted to push him down to scare him. I turned around and ran home after only waiting for four seconds. While I was running, all I could think was What if I hurt him? and I didn’t mean to. When I arrived home, I was glad to see my parents weren’t back from work yet. This gave me some time to pull myself together. They came home at 5:27 and I stayed quiet for the rest of the night. The next day in class, I was doing my Counts and I only counted sixteen, sixteen, sixteen, sixteen students. Parker wasn’t here. Ms. Sullivan gathered us all in a circle and started speaking to us in a somber voice. “Okay, everyone, you may have noticed that Parker isn’t here today,” she started. We all nodded. “Well, Parker had an accident yesterday while he was playing outside. He hit his head very hard and won’t be able to come to class anymore. This is very sad for me and it is okay for you all to be sad too. If anyone needs anything today, come talk to me, okay?” “Okay,” we all say in unison. “Great. Now let’s all go back to our desks so we can begin class.” As we all got up and started heading back to our desks, I began thinking of Parker. At the time, I knew very little about death, but I knew it was permanent. I knew what I had done to Parker was permanent. Initially, this scared me. I was worried someone would find out that I was the one that pushed him. That it was my fault he wasn’t going to be coming to class anymore. The more I thought about this, I realized the class would always be even now. Sixteen, sixteen, sixteen, sixteen. My Counts wouldn’t be messed up anymore. I was responsible for controlling the numbers. Usually, when I controlled the numbers, it was for little things like the number of bites of food I took or how many times I counted something, This time, I controlled the entire classroom; I made the whole thing feel balanced again. I could use this ability for the rest of my life and that’s exactly what I did. The next five years and six months were rather uneventful. No one ever found out that I was the one who killed Parker. The cops deemed it an accident, saying that he tripped while he was out playing by himself. I had just started sixth grade which meant going to a new school and discovering all new things to count. I had six classes, five of which had an even number of students. The only one that didn’t was my science class. Every day I would go to the class and feel unbalanced. My Counts were messed up and my ability to work had taken a hit again. I decided I needed to control the numbers. I knew that this girl in my class, Paige, had a crush on me. She would follow me around and always interrupt my Counts. I was so irritated by her; she would be my next target. This time, I didn’t want it to be an accident. I wanted to feel the responsibility of controlling the numbers. For three weeks and three days, I plotted the perfect plan. First, I would ask Paige to the school dance that was only two weeks and six days away. While we were at the dance, I would tell her that I wanted to kiss her. Finally, we would sneak off to the bathroom where I would kill her and make the numbers even again. Paige obviously said yes when I asked her to the dance. The next two weeks and five days went by painfully slow as all I could think about was controlling the numbers. Finally, though, the day of the dance arrived. My parents dropped me off at the school and I waited outside for seven minutes and 43 seconds. She couldn’t even wait a little bit longer to make an even amount of time. She really is the worst, I thought to myself as we walked inside. She was ecstatic that I finally acknowledged her and actually asked her to the dance. We reached the cafeteria, where the dance was being held and saw a dark room with loud music and sixth graders running around like animals. I always hated school dances because there were just too many things to count: the number of kids, the number of songs they played, how long each song was, the number of different foods they were serving, and so much more. I knew, however, that coming to this dance would be worth it. “Would you mind if we danced over there?” I asked, pointing to the corner of the room closest to the bathroom. “Of course not,” she said, slightly confused, but still happy that I had asked to dance with her. Neither of us knew how to dance so we awkwardly just shuffled around for 10 minutes and 54 seconds until finally, I said, “Hey, Paige? Would you maybe, um, want to kiss me? We could go into the bathroom so it’s not so dark.” I was incredibly nervous. Not because I didn’t want to kiss her, but because I was finally going to be able to control the numbers. “O-o-okay,” she responded, flustered. I grabbed her arm and rushed her off to the girls’ bathroom. As soon as we got there, I made sure no one else was hiding in the stalls. We were alone. She had a huge smile on her face, and I faked a smile for her too. As we were both leaning in for the kiss, I felt around for the corner of the sink. I placed my hand on the right side of her head. Instead of guiding her face to mine, I slammed her head into the corner of the sink, leaving a red smudge. She immediately collapsed to the ground. I put my ear to her nose and counted ten seconds. She wasn’t breathing. I had finally done it; I controlled the numbers. The high I felt from making the numbers even was like nothing I had ever experienced. My brain was overwhelmed by even numbers. I was in control of all the numbers again and this time I was wholly responsible. However, I wasn’t done yet. I needed to make this look like an accident. I grabbed a wet floor sign out of the nearest janitor’s closet and rushed back to the bathroom. Thankfully, no one had found Paige yet. I splashed some water on the ground and on the bottom of Paige’s shoes. Next, I just placed the wet floor sign right at her feet and ran back out to the dance. No one ever found out I was the one who killed her. As I grew older, I never outgrew my Counts or my overwhelming desire for even numbers. I continued to kill the people who messed up my Counts. Natalie, when I was 14 for being the seventh member in my English group, Caleb, when I was 19 for being my third roommate, Marcus, when I was 22 for always leaving out TV volume on an odd number, Sheryl when I was 24 for sending out 17 or 13 or 15 emails every day, and 12 other people who irritated me. I learned to get creative with my kills since I needed to make them look like accidents or make sure the bodies would never be found. Sometimes I would hit people in the head hard enough to kill them and plant props to give the appearance that they slipped and hit their head. Other times I would slip poison into people’s food which would cause their organs to shut down and not cause any suspicion on an autopsy. One time, I hung a person while they were still alive to make it look like a suicide. I never left any evidence until my 19th and final kill. My 19th kill was a man named Ellis that I worked with. Ellis wasn’t the odd number in a group and he didn’t do anything noticeable in odd amounts, but he would always interrupt my Counts. When I was at my desk, I would count my picture frames (four, four, four, four) and he would interrupt me multiple times a day. I was so irritated by him, I knew I had to kill him. Since we worked together, it was easy to figure out where I would kill him: by his car after work. I kept a wooden bat in my car that I often used on many of my victims. The end of the day came and I saw Ellis getting ready to leave, so I quietly gathered all my belongings, put on my coat, and slipped out before he could. I rushed down to my car, grabbed my bat, and hid in the bushes near his car. After waiting three minutes and 16 seconds, I heard the click of his car unlocking. Now was my chance. Without saying a word, I darted out from the snowy bushes right in front of him and brought my bat down onto his skull. The impact made a loud, hollow cracking noise and shattered my bat. I immediately knew something wasn’t right. Ellis fell to the ground, the front of his head slightly indented. He was still breathing. Before I could react, he stumbled onto his feet and slugged me right across the face. I remember feeling my nose bleeding, but I wasn’t paying attention to it. Instead, I was focused on finishing what I started. I raised the splintered end of the bat that I still had in my hand and brought it down onto his skull one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight times before he finally stopped breathing. Before I left, I had to make it look like he slipped on ice. Since it was winter at the time, I poured water right at Ellis’ feet, knowing it would freeze within minutes. Next, I took what was left of my bat and hit the side mirror four times to make it look like Ellis hit his head on it after he slipped. Finally, I gathered all nineteen splinters of my bat and went home. I was thrilled to no longer have to worry about Ellis interrupting my counts. My excitement, however, didn’t last very long. The next few days went on as normal as they possibly could be. I did all my Counts without any interruptions, which was a wonderful and new feeling. The people in the office mourned over Ellis, but I didn’t care; he was just one less person I had to worry about counting. Everything was going great until five days after the murder. On that day, I heard a knock on my door while getting ready for worked. I rushed downstairs, counting them as I went, and opened the door. Three cops greeted me with a pair of handcuffs. “Oliver Miller, you are under arrest for the murder of Ellis Langdon.” After 19 kills, I had finally been caught. I felt incomplete, like a huge part of me had just been taken away. Obviously, I knew I was going to jail for what I had done which meant I would never get my 20th kill. I would be incomplete for the rest of my life. Apparently, what had happened was when Ellis punched me in the face, he got some of my blood on his knuckles. It was tested and traced back to me. They searched my car while I was at work one day and found the remains of the bat, which had his DNA all over it. After I was arrested for Ellis’ murder, the cops launched a full investigation on me. They connected 17 out of the 18 other murders I had committed to me. The only one they couldn’t prove I did was Parker, but at that point, it didn’t matter. I had killed more people in thirty-eight years than three serial killers do in their whole lifetime, combined. My court trial went as anyone would expect: I plead not guilty, there was way too much evidence against me, I was found guilty. The worst part was when the judge was reading the verdict, he granted me 19 life sentences, one for every person I had killed. He knew it would be another odd number that would nag me for the rest of my life. I have been in prison for six years, nine months, and 14 days. Every single day has been hell. I’m constantly craving more even numbers, but I know if I kill someone in here, I get thrown in solitary for seven days. My whole life feels unbalanced. My Counts haven’t felt right ever since I got in here. The only thought that has run through my head for the past six years is 19, 19, 19, 19. I can’t handle the incomplete feeling anymore. Tonight, I will get my 20th kill: myself.

12 minutes

December 27, 2019

Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Madness, Paranoia, and Mental Illness, Psychological Horror

STOP-115

Stephanie Scissom

I smelled the coal smoke before I opened my eyes. For a moment, I was eight again, in the shop where my grandfather repaired motors. I used to sit by his old stove and watch him work. “Hannah, what’s the piston firing order of a small block Chevrolet?” he’d ask, and I’d recite, “1, 8, 4, 3, 6, 5, 7, 2.” He’d laugh and toss me one of the snack-size Hershey bars he kept in his toolbox. But the lurching and pitching… where was I? Opening my eyes took more effort than it should’ve. My head felt leaden, leaning against something cool and smooth. Finally, I cracked my eyelids. Scenery whizzed by outside. Lush, green mountains, a clear blue sky… where was I? I couldn’t think. I struggled to raise my head, but it immediately fell back against my seat. Was I on a train? “I want my mama,” a little voice whimpered and I managed to raise my head to look at the seat across from me. A girl of about four lay on it, sucking her thumb. She seemed as lethargic as I felt. She also looked familiar, but I couldn’t think. My head throbbed, and I felt queasy. Someone moved swiftly down the aisle. A lady in a bright blue uniform. She knelt beside the girl. “It’s okay, sweetie. You’ll see your mama soon.” I tried to get her attention. She whipped her head around and I cried out. Her eyes were black as coal. But I blinked and it was gone. She looked at me with concern in her sky-blue eyes. “Are you okay?” she asked. “My… head.” “It’s probably the smoke from the train,” she said. Then she walked away. Someone groaned to my right. A blond guy about my age slumped forward. He turned and squinted at me. “Jake,” I whispered. “I am Jake,” he said, as if it had just occurred to him. “What–” “I don’t know.” He closed his eyes. I remembered him, somehow. A #7 on a black jersey. I pictured him at a locker. Helping me open mine. And I knew without being able to see it clearly that the baseball cap he wore backwards had a Red Sox symbol on it. Looking beyond him, out his window, I tried to recall where I’d been just before the train. “I’m gonna be sick,” he said, and struggled to his feet. He made it halfway down the aisle before the lady in blue stopped him. “Please return to your seat,” she said. “Restroom,” he muttered. “I’m sick.” “It will pass,” she said cheerfully, and tried to pull him back. He shook her hand off and lurched down the aisle. At the end, he disappeared into a door to his left. The lady in blue looked anxious. She glanced at the other passengers, but no one else seemed strong enough to stand. Lips pursed, she waited for him. Finally, the door opened and he staggered out, pale and red-eyed. He looked annoyed to see the lady in blue waiting. He turned as if to go through the door to another car and she freaked out. “Stop!” she cried. “You can’t go in there.” She almost shoved him down in her attempts to get between him and the door. He lifted his eyebrows and held up his hands in surrender. Then he headed back down the aisle. Instead of taking his previous seat, he fell into the seat next to me. “Please return to your seat,” she said, and he ignored her. “Young man–” “Where are we?” he demanded. “Where are we going?” She strode to the first seat of the car, where a man in the same type of blue uniform sat. He turned to look at us and they whispered behind their hands. “What’s going on?” Jake said. “I can’t remember. My head hurts–” “Mine too. Do you think we were drugged?” He looked at me, then at the little girl in the seat in front of us. “But–why? The last thing I remember is… Mr. Greely yelling at me.” “He yelled at you for sleeping in detention.” “That’s right! You’re Hannah.” “I have a bad feeling,” he said. “We need to get off this train.” The two employees still watched us. Jake lowered his head and said, “These kids. They’re from our school. And the younger ones…” He tipped his head at the girl. “I think they’re from the daycare next to our detention room.” I looked at the girl, surprised. “Mrs. Campbell’s daughter. Allie!” A voice came over the loudspeaker. “Approaching Stop 105. All passengers remain seated unless a service member directs you otherwise. Only people with tickets for Stop 105 will be allowed to disembark there.” “Do you have a ticket?” Jake asked. Before I could look, the two service members in our car moved quickly down the aisle, closing the blinds over the windows. Jake tried to stop the man from closing ours. “Leave ours open, please,” he said, and the man closed it anyway. Jake reached for it and the man grasped his wrist. “Don’t touch that,” he said, and for a moment, his eyes flashed black. “There are things on this journey you do not want to see. Stop 105 holds many of these things. In fact, you do not wish to see any of the stops until we get to Stop 110.” He smiled and said, “Enjoy your ride.” We watched him walk away. “Did you see that?” Jake hissed. “His eyes?” “Yes,” I whispered. “And hers were the same, earlier. I thought I imagined it.” The train lurched to a stop. “No one from our car is disembarking at this stop,” the lady in blue announced with a smile. “Perhaps you should close your eyes and nap. It will help the time pass.” She took a blanket from the overhead compartment and tucked it around me. Jake refused the one she offered him. “Rest your eyes, honey,” she said. “I’ll wake you when we reach your stop.” A nap. I still felt so groggy, and my head wouldn’t stop pounding. Maybe if I closed my eyes for just a minute… “Stay awake.” Jake nudged me with his knee. “We can’t go to sleep.” I opened my eyes and noticed Allie was asleep, snoring softly. All over the car, passengers slept. Some faces I knew, others were still hazy. “Hannah,” Jake whispered. “Do you hear that?” I did. It sounded like wolves howling, or… Moving quicker than I was capable of at the moment, Jake reached across me and opened the shade. What had been sunny and lush only moments ago was dark and barren. People lurched into the darkness. Then yellow lights appeared. It took me a second to realize they were eyes. Something jumped at our window and I screamed. I had a flash of scraggly black fur and yellow eyes as it slammed against the glass, then the man in blue was there, yanking on the shade. “I told you not to touch that!” he yelled. “What the hell was that?” Jake cried. “Where are we? Where are you taking us?” “To a nicer place than this, if you will listen to the rules,” the man snapped, looking rattled. He stood right beside us until the train chugged in motion again. Along with the howls, I imagined I heard screaming. Jake took my hand. His fingers felt icy in mine and I looked down. His fingers were pale, the nail beds cherry red. So were mine. So were Allie’s. “We have to get off this train,” Jake said. His reddened eyes and lips stood out against his pale skin. “You don’t look so good,” he said. I was sleepy. Every time my head dipped, Jake squeezed my fingers. I dozed somewhere between stops 106 and 107, but Jake kept bringing me back. The two employees in blue still stared at us. Finally, the man came toward us. “I need to see your tickets, please.” He didn’t even try to hide the black flash of his eyes when he said, “Now!” I dug through my pockets and produced a yellow ticket from my jacket. It simply read Stop 115. Jake’s search through his pockets yielded nothing. “What can I tell you, man?” he said. “If you’d tell me how I got on this damn train, I might know where my ticket is.” The lady in blue approached and the man hissed, “He doesn’t belong here. I told you so.” Her eyes widened and her mouth gaped. “Impossible.” “He’s too strong,” the man said. “He cannot stay on here.” The woman frowned at us and pulled the man away. We watched them engage in an animated conversation. “They’re gonna kick me off,” Jake said. “I want to go with you,” I said. “Please don’t leave me.” “I won’t,” he promised, and squeezed my fingers. “I don’t know where we’re going, but I don’t trust them.” He glanced out the window. “I used to like trains when I was a kid. This one seems kind of slow. I figure we’re doing about 80 miles per hour. If we try to jump at this speed, we’re probably dead. But have you noticed how much it slows when we’re approaching a stop? We have to be close to Stop 109 now. Maybe we should take our chances, jump when we get close?” “But… he said we don’t need to look outside before we get to 110. What if those creatures are there? What will we do?” Jake looked up at the couple in blue that was still talking and looking at us. A third, large man in blue had joined them. “I don’t think we have much choice. I think they’re about to kick me off. Are you going with me or staying here?” My hand felt cold and clammy in his, but I squeezed his fingers. “I’m going.” The voice over the loudspeaker announced we were approaching Stop 109 and the train began to slow. Jake moved fast. He jerked me up and half-dragged me down the aisle. I glanced behind me and saw the people in blue running toward us, but he’d caught them off-guard. He reached the door in the back of the car and threw it open. Hand-in-hand, we jumped into nothingness. I awoke to the beeps and whir of machinery. Cold and the smell of pine disinfectant. Something covered my nose. I fumbled at it, only to feel a warm hand covering mine. I expected the lady in blue, but it was a different face that hovered over mine. My eyes burned when I recognized my mom “Hannah!” she cried. “Grant, get the nurse. She’s awake!” To me, she said, “Honey, just be calm. Leave your oxygen mask on. You’re okay.” She covered her mouth with her hands and her eyes shone with tears. “You’re going to be fine.” “What–happened?” I gasped. “The furnace at your school. There was a carbon monoxide leak. It hurt a lot of people before anyone realized what was happening. Especially on the bottom level. Your classroom room, the daycare…” She shook her head. “But you’re going to be okay. They found you in a doorway with some boy. The two of you made it outside before you collapsed. That’s why you’re alive.” “Jake,” I whispered. “Is he okay?” My mother nodded. “He is, and he’s been asking for you.” She left the room and I lay there, trying to remember what happened. Trying to piece together some crazy dream about a train and workers with black eyes. My mother wheeled Jake into the room. He smiled at me from under the bill of his Boston Red Sox hat. “Hey, you,” he said. “You scared me.” Mom smiled and parked his chair by my bedside. “I’m going to go grab a sandwich with your father, let you two talk.” “What… what happened?” I asked. He frowned. “I don’t remember much. They said there was a carbon monoxide leak. We were the only ones from that classroom who made it out alive. I remember holding your hand, trying to get to a door. But that’s about all.” I wanted to ask him about the train, but that would sound crazy, right? He shook his head. “What’s the last thing you remember?” “I remember Mr. Greely yelling at you for falling asleep.” “I couldn’t keep my eyes open,” Jake said. “I guess it the poison was already hitting me. I’m not sure how I even woke up enough to get out.” He reached over and squeezed my hand. I looked down. Our hands were pale and the nails were still red. I’d had a crush on him since 7th grade. I couldn’t believe Jake Marlow was here, holding my hand. I laughed. “I dreamed about you. I dreamed we were on a train. You saved me from these weird, black-eyed train workers.” Jake’s already pale face blanched. “Train?” he said. He pulled his hand from mine and rubbed his hands over his face, accidentally dislodging his hat. He grabbed it before it hit the floor. “What the hell?” he whispered, and extracted something from the inside ridge of his cap. He held it up and we both stared at it. It was a simple yellow ticket with the words STOP 115 printed in black letters.

8 minutes

November 12, 2019

Strange and Unexplained

Becoming a Killer

deaths, Devin Hoover, murders, serial killers

Have you ever wanted to do something terrible? I don’t mean something minor like stealing a candy bar, or driving over the speed limit. No, I’m talking something more along the lines of murder. That was what my group of friends decided upon. As a group we would kill someone. We would start small with a single person, someone no one would care about, just to see if we all truly had a taste for it. If it didn’t work out, we would all go our separate ways, and never talk about it again. The four of us met in online message boards, we all had one thing in common, we were social outcasts. We spent months talking online before finally deciding to meet in person. I’ll give a brief description of each of us. First there was Xavier, Xavier was rather large, at least 6’7” and probably a little overweight. He was the hot-head of the group, and due to his size we let him be. Despite that, he was probably also the softest of the group, if anyone wouldn’t be able to follow through with our plan, it would be him. Next there was Mitch, Mitch was normal-sized, about the same height and weight as me. Mitch was the person I was closest to in the group, we both had a shared love of classic video games. Mitch had been abused by his step-father for most of this life, he thinks his darkness was always there though, but the abuse just kindled it even more. Then there was Stephanie, but we only called her Steph. She was the only girl in the group, and in contrast to Xavier, she was incredibly small, hovering at about 5 feet. Most short people I know are loud, and seemingly always angry, but not Steph. Steph is one of the calmest people I know in any situation. I’m not entirely sure where her darkness comes from, but it is certainly there. Lastly there’s me, I wouldn’t say there is really anything special about me. I’m average in just about every way imaginable. The only thing is I’ve never fit in with other average people. Even in this group, I almost feel like an outsider sometimes, but perhaps this is what it would take for me to finally fit in. It was the third time that we met up that Mitch suggested we kill someone. The other two thought he was joking at first, but I knew he was serious. After a long discussion we all decided we would go through with it. The only problem is we didn’t know exactly who we would kill. For starters, we knew we only wanted to start with one person, the cleanup would be easier, it would really just be a test. We also knew we wanted it to be someone that no one would be looking for, a loner, a druggie, etc. you get the point. Lastly, it would be best if we could find someone who lived outside of town, in the country. If they lived isolated somewhere, it would make our job much easier, and lessen our odds of getting caught. So, we all began scouting out for the perfect victim, and after a few weeks, I found the perfect person. He was an older man, he lived alone in an incredibly large home. This home however, was in the middle of nowhere, you had to take countless back roads to reach it, it was at least 30 miles from the nearest town. He only left his home about once a week to venture in to town for groceries, and he never received any visitors in the time I watched him. It was perfect, so I told the others, and we began to form our plan. We would do it the day after he made his grocery trip, that way anyone who might recognize him from town wouldn’t immediately grow suspicious if they didn’t see him. None of us had a gun, but that was fine. Guns are too noisy, and it was just one old man. Ideally, we’d sneak in while he was asleep and get the jump on him. We had knives and restraints, which should we guessed would be more than enough. The only problem was as I said the house was massive, and I wasn’t sure which room he slept in. I had broken in to the house when he made one of his grocery trips to get the layout, but there were several potential rooms he could sleep in. None of them were messy or had any signs that someone was living in them. Several of the closets had men’s clothing in them too, so it would be a bit of a guessing game. We would have to find him without alerting him, but in the end, it’s just one old man right? So, after all the preparation was done, we set out. “We’re almost there, I’m going to park behind these bushes up ahead, we’ll walk the rest of the way.” I said as we neared the home. “Are you sure about this?” Xavier began to whimper. “Of course we’re sure, if you want to back out now, this is your last chance Xavier. Once we step out of this vehicle there is no turning back.” Mitch replied. “I’m not backing out; who do you think I am? I was just making sure you guys were ready” Xavier responded, clearly a bit nervous. “Ok that’s enough boys, we need to all be on the same page here. After tonight everything changes.” Steph chimed in, always the voice of reason. I pulled the vehicle over, and hid it as best as I could next to some shrubbery. I doubted anyone would come out this way, but it was just extra insurance. If someone did come by, my vehicle would stick out like a sore thumb. I removed the license plate as an extra measure and placed it in the trunk. We exited and began to walk on foot towards the house. As we neared the house Xavier spoke up again. “Jesus, that place is massive. Who would build a house that big out in the middle of nowhere? And you have no clue which room he stays in?” I shrugged and replied “Nope, once we get inside Mitch and I will take the left side of the house, you two take the right. We’ll start with the bottom floor; we’ll reconvene before heading upstairs.” Steph nodded and said. “And if we find him tie him up, and use our walkie-talkies to tell the other group.” I smiled and nodded back. We all knew the plan, we had gone over it countless times. We had gotten the walkie-talkies to avoid using our phones. We wanted there to be no chance of GPS in our phones tying us back to this place. Once we reached the front door, Steph pulled out a lock pick and got to work. It took less than a minute for us to hear a clicking sound, signifying the front door was unlocked. We all took a deep breath and headed in. Upon entering the house there was a massive staircase directly ahead, with long hallways on both the right and left sides. This is why I suggested we split up, not entirely of course, but stay in groups of 2 just in case anything went wrong. Mitch and I began to creep down the left hallway. It was truly enormous. Down this path there would be 5 rooms, and the end contained the kitchen and dining rooms. We approached our first door. I took the lead this time, and opened the door as quietly as possible. Once there was enough space to fit inside, we both slipped in. The room had a bed, and a closet full of clothing, but no one was in here. We took turns opening and stepping in the next four rooms, but like the first each of them was void of our target. There were no messages from the walkie-talkie either, so we assumed it was much the same on the other side, he must be upstairs. Just in case though, we decided to check the kitchen, I’m sure old people like midnight snacks too. As Mitch and I began to move toward the kitchen we heard something approaching us. Footsteps, but they weren’t normal footsteps, and they were coming at us incredibly fast. Before we could react a figure emerged out of the darkness and pounced on Mitch. It was a dog, a German shepherd to be exact. The dog had already begun tearing out Mitch’s throat, he wasn’t even able to reach for his knife to fight back. I knew I didn’t stand a chance against this beast alone, so I ran. I made it to the door connecting the kitchen to the hallway, and I shut it, flipping the lock. I left possibly my best friend there to certainly die, just to save myself. Despite knowing I was safe for now at least, I continued to sprint towards the center. I was about to pull out my walkie-talkie to warn the others, but as I reached the staircase in the center, the other two were there waiting. “What happened, why are you running, and where is Mitch?” Xavier demanded. “I..Mitch is…Mitch is dead, there was a dog, we didn’t have time to react.” I managed to stumble out. Xavier immediately approached me and grabbed me by the shirt before saying “What do you mean Mitch is dead, why didn’t you help him?” “I’m sorry, I couldn’t do anything, I trapped the dog, but we’ll have to deal with it later, and Mitch’s body. I don’t know where the dog came from, it was never here the other times I scouted this place out. We have no choice but to kill the old man now, and quick, before that dog makes too big of a mess.” Xavier began to rear back his fist. “Are you insane? We’re getting Mitch and getting out of here.” “No he’s right,” Steph said, narrowly saving me. “We won’t have time to clean up Mitch, especially with that dog in there. We have to take out the old man before he’s alerted of us, if he isn’t already.” Xavier let his fist go, he wasn’t happy, but he always listened to Steph. We agreed the three of us would stick together now as we moved upstairs. The upstairs much like the downstairs was massive, but it was slightly smaller. Each side held 4 large rooms, but there were no special rooms as there had been downstairs. We chose to search the left side first. Since I had lost our friend, Xavier no longer trusted me. He took it upon himself to enter each room first. I wanted to point out to him that he was opening the doors too aggressively, he was making far too much sound, but I knew he wouldn’t care, and would almost certainly just become more enraged. The left side of the upstairs was empty. So we moved to the right side. Once we made it to the third door we finally found what we had been looking for, the old man, and he was still asleep somehow. Xavier had only slightly opened the door before he spotted him, he told us to ready ourselves. I watched him take a deep breath before swinging the door open. Instead of entering the room however, Xavier instead began to fall backwards. When he had swung the door open it had triggered some sort of mechanism. There was now a crossbow bolt sticking out of his forehead, he was dead before he hit the floor. Steph had finally lost her cool as she began to scream. I approached her from behind. I then choked her until I was sure she had gone unconscious. I turned toward the old man, now standing in the doorway. “So, how did I do, Grandpa?” “Excellent, you make an old man proud,” he replied with a large grin on his face. My grandfather had been luring people to this house and killing them long before I was even born. My father had tried to keep me from meeting him, but after my father died in a car crash, I met my grandfather at the funeral. We share a darkness in us, and now that he’s older, I will carry on the work that he has done for so long. I tied up Steph and dragged her to the next room before placing her on a table. She would be my first. Technically, my dog had killed Mitch, and the trap had killed Xavier. This would be my first all on my own. She had been my friend, so I would give her a quick death, but I needed a trophy first. You can’t celebrate your first time without a trophy. So, I took her eyes, they had always been so calm up until that moment she saw Xavier dead. I will cherish them forever. After I took her eyes, I did as promised, and quickly plunged a large knife in to her heart. I knew no one would come looking for any of my now deceased friends, but I still had a lot of cleaning up to do. People always say you’ll make mistakes the first time, but I think everything went quite perfectly, in fact, I can’t wait to make some new friends.

8 minutes

March 17, 2019

Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances

Oppression

Aaron Way

I had been alone in the police interrogation room for over an hour. I checked my cigarettes to find I only have one left “damn.” I said as I pulled one out and lit it. I jumped a little as the door to the interrogation room is opened and another police officer walks in, this will be the fourth one I’ve had to tell my story to tonight. The man walks around the table and sits down. He has two cups of coffee in his hands and holds one out offering it to me “Thanks.” I say as I take it from him. It’s bitter and tastes old. He is older for a cop possibly in his late forties early fifties. He is also heavy set probably from to many beers and donuts. The man exhales and says “Father Reynolds?” I cut him off saying “I’m not a priest.” “Oh sorry” he says with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Mr. Reynolds, my name is Detective Karrus. I hear you have quite the story from the sergeant who took your statement.” Being irritated at the long wait to see anyone I snap back “Then you already know what has happened and if I’m not being charged I would like to go!” Calmly he looked at me for a while, I could feel that he was probing me when he said. “As for right now no one is being charged for anything not at least until we rule the cause of death. For right now though I would like to hear your story in your own words. How you would describe the events that led up to what happened tonight. Which is, what’s the date?” he asked himself and answering his own question saying. “The thirty first. Oh it’s Halloween I can’t believe I forgot!” He said. I asked “Why do you need to hear the story too? So you can laugh and tell me I’m way too superstitious too? I gave my statements and your sergeant, he called me nuts!” “I am not my sergeant, Mr. Reynolds I think you’ll find me more receptive to what you have to say. The things I’ve seen in my time have made me more hesitant to dismiss things just because I don’t understand them. I’ve come to partially believe in the things that go bump in the night. Now from what my officers are telling me they say you claimed to have been part of an exorcism, is that correct?” he paused as he took a drink from his coffee and made a grunting sound “This coffee sucks!” seeming to change the subject from his last statement as if the thought made him uncomfortable. I laughed a little at that but I knew he was doing the good cop routine. “So, if you don’t think I’m gonna believe you Mr. Reynolds do your best to make me believe you.” I leaned back into my chair feeling just a little more comfortable with this man thinking maybe he will believe or maybe he won’t but at least he seems like he is willing to listen. He broke my train of thought saying “look Mr. Reynolds, why don’t we start from the top? What were you doing at the Smith family’s residence and how long have been acquainted with them?” “If I’m going to tell you and you really want to understand what has happened I think it would be best if you kept an open mind.” I told him. He leaned back in his chair sighing “We have plenty of time Mr. Reynolds, so please, go ahead.” With that I began my story. The first time I had heard of the Smith’s case was back in June. I was in Father Flanagan’s office in the Bloomsburg rectory he had just got done with one of his counseling sessions with a young couple. As he came back into his office he saw me and smiled stepping around his desk and easing into his large high backed leather chair. He said “Matthew I’m glad you’re here. There is something I need to talk to you about. I had a most interesting call last week. It seems one of the families in my parish is convinced they are being haunted.” “Really, do you think it’s serious?” I asked. Before he continued he opened the drawer in his desk and pulled out a box of pills. He was taking Captopril, losartan and some other medicine I didn’t recognize. He had suffered from heart failure a year ago and now was on a steady dose of pills. He swallowed them with a glass of water that his secretary had waiting for him on his desk. He grimaced and continued “Well they seem to think so, and so does one of my younger priests that went to bless the house. You see this family called a week ago saying they were being oppressed by something in their house and were really frightened. So, I sent a priest out to their home at 211 River Avenue, to go through the home and bless the house to calm them down. Really most of the time it’s just someone spooking themselves or noisy pipes but we try our best to give comfort when it’s needed. So I sent Father Kraemer to go bless the home and what he reported back to me was most disturbing.” Now father Flanagan had me interested so I asked him to go on. “Well, Matthew first he said the family were all sleeping in the living room, with makeshift beds on the floor. None of them looked like they had much sleep for a long time. When Father Kraemer started his blessing and uncontrollable wave of nausea hit him so violently that he vomited right there on the floor of their home. Can you imagine a priest comes in to bless your house then vomits on your living room rug?” He chuckled a little at the thought and went on. “When he finished apologizing and cleaned it up he tried to start again with his blessing of the home. This time a large silver plate flew off their dining room table straight at him barely missing his head!” At this point I was shocked that something would go after a priest in such away. Father Flanagan continued. “Well after that my young priest was quite shaken and hastily finished blessing the house without much further incidents but for a while after the blessing the priest suffered from nausea and diarrhea, the poor man.” I already knew why he was telling me this. Because he wanted me to go find out more. See, before the Catholic Church can get involved officially on cases such as this it has to be documented to be legitimate. I investigate supposedly haunted homes or people. Most of the times it is something completely normal or has a rational explanation but on few occasions it is a legitimate supernatural event. That is where I come in as a medium. I can sense spirits and occasionally can communicate with them. I am basically used as a ghost detector in these cases. I have been working with an audio visual specialist named Zachary Gallagher who documents our findings and we present them to the church to try to justify the church’s involvement. “Wait a minute.” Detective Karrus said. “You’re telling me you’re also some kind of what, a psychic?” “No, I’m not a psychic I am a medium. There is a difference, albeit a small one. Basically physics perceive mediums receive. I can sense and receive information from spirits. Occasionally I can communicate with them.” “Oh Ok, not really sure if I understand that but please go on.” Said Detective Karrus. I agreed with Father Flanagan that this did require some looking into and that I would contact the Smith family to set up an appointment to meet with them and walk through their home. I admit I was quite excited because in the years I had known Father Flanagan I had only ever been on a couple legitimate cases most of the cases were just nothing more than noisy pipes and such. None of them had something that basically assaulted an ordained priest. While I had studied the occult and paranormal and had some experience I will admit now that I was naïve, if I only had known what was waiting for me at 211 River Avenue. When I called to speak with the Smith family a very tired woman’s voice answered the phone. “Hello?” “Yes my name is Matthew Reynolds and I am calling on behalf of Father Flanagan from the Saint Peters rectory in regards to the events that took place at your home on July eighteenth.” “Oh yes! Thank god! Yes, this is Beverly Smith thank God you called; when would you be able to come? Father Flanagan already told us to expect a call from you.” I replied “Mrs. Smith I can come out as soon as Tuesday, two days from now and I will be bring my associate Mr. Gallagher to document my investigation. There is a couple of questions I have for you if you have the time?” “Go ahead.” She replied. “Well, who will be present; will the entire family be there for my interview and if so how many in your family” “Well you have me, my husband Nolan and our two daughters Riley and Meagan.” “And your daughters ages?’’ “Riley is nine and Meagan is fourteen.” “Ok I see, and will anyone else be present like any witnesses or family or friends?” “No it will just be us, is, is Tuesday the soonest you can come out?” “Yes Ma’am, I am sorry I can’t begin to understand what you’re going through but with my schedule and other appointments I have Tuesday is the soonest I can come.” After a couple more of preliminary questions the phone called ended with Mrs. Smith reluctantly hanging up. If I had known then what I know now I would have headed straight over there that day. Tuesday eventually came and I arrived at 211 River Avenue at the appointed time of 3pm. The house was a modern two story house with grey vinyl siding and blue shutters in the suburbs of Bloomsburg. It looked like any other upper middle class house you would see driving through a neighborhood. It was hard to believe that this nice house on this quiet street would hold such a diabolical presence. Me and Zach step out of my car and approach the front door when I start to feel nauseas. I stop for a moment and Zach asks if I’m OK. I give him a nod and continue. It could be a sign or it could be nothing. The last thing you want to do is overly acknowledge any presence because that could make things worse. We are greeted at the door by Mr. Smith a large middle aged man who was built like a heavyweight boxer. Someone who looks as if they wouldn’t be intimidated very easily but the look on this man’s face was that of complete defeat and weariness. Despite how tired he obviously was he was very polite and guided us into his home. As we stepped through the entry way into the living room I was shocked at the state of living these poor people were in. There were four makeshift beds on the floor in the living room, piles of clothes everywhere, their furniture was sprawled all over the place randomly some chairs were upright but their couch and other items were knocked over. There was a set of double sliding doors that had the door knobs tied together so as they wouldn’t be able to be opened. Upon seeing us look at the condition of their home Mr. Smith quietly said. “For a while we would keep cleaning up but every night there would be loud bangs and when we would investigate in the morning it would look like this so we eventually stopped picking everything up. The door knobs on that door to the dining room are tied because half the night they would slide open and closed all night. We all sleep in here for safety, we are scared to go anywhere alone anymore.” As he finished the rest of the family came to greet us and we made our introductions. Mrs. Smith seemed extremely worn out but hopeful now that we were there. Their youngest Riley looked tired and afraid but smiled at us and asked Zach about all the equipment he had, referring to the camera and tripod he was holding. Meagan their eldest seemed withdrawn and wouldn’t say much which concerned me but living like this could do that to even the strongest willed person. I made a mental note of it and moved on, stating how I like to start the interviews as soon as possible before I walk through the house. While Zach set up his camera in the corner of the living room I righted one of their couches and pulled a coffee table up to it. Mr. Smith set up some chairs across from it for me and Zach. Zach set up his voice recorder on the coffee table while the family sat on the couch I said “Before we start I have something for each of you.” I pulled out four saint benedict medals and handed one to each of the family members and I asked them to put them on for protection. “Now, before we begin, understand that myself and Mr. Gallagher are here to interview you and document what has been going on in your home. Would you please be kind enough to give us your verbal permission to do so now that we are recording?” They all agreed, so I proceeded while Zach monitored the equipment. “Mr. Smith can you please tell me about the first occurrence you can recall?” “It would be best if my wife did that since I think she was the first to notice anything.” “Ok, Mrs. Smith” I said. “Well I guess it around the beginning of July sometime after the fourth, yes, it was after the fourth maybe the sixth. I was getting the girls ready for bed. While I was tucking Riley in I heard some scratching sound coming from her closet. She noticed it too and was a little scared and asked me to look.” Riley interjected “that’s where it lived!” in a scared but justified cry. I asked Mrs. Smith to continue. “I opened her closet and there was nothing there but when I closed it and went back to her bed it started again. Just faint scratching sounds the disturbing part is it wasn’t just random. It was like scratch, scratch, scratch then a pause then scratch, scratch, scratch. I thought it might be a mouse so I let her sleep in our room that night.” When doing interviews I try to remain as emotionally closed off as I can. I conduct them the same way a police officer would. Just gathering facts and collecting evidence and looking for anything that ties things together or sounds like it was embellished or falsified. But what struck me about that was the pattern of three. That could be clues to the demonic because they will sometimes use the pattern of three as a mocking to the holy trinity the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. I mentally noted that information and asked what happened next and who was involved, again it was Riley that was affected. This time Riley spoke with some encouragement from her mother. “I was playing in my room with my toys and I heard the scratching sound from my closet again. Momma told me it was probably a little mouse. But it still scared me then it got louder and I got up to get Momma but when I tried to leave my room my door shut and I couldn’t open it. I called for Momma and she came and got me.” I asked Mrs. Smith where she was when this happened. “I was in the kitchen cleaning up while Nolan and Meagan were out to go see a movie when I heard Riley screaming hysterically. I ran to her room thinking she was hurt with the way she was screaming for me. When I got to her door I opened it and she was there on the floor screaming about the scratching sounds and saying her door closed by itself and wouldn’t open.” With what sounded like a lot of guilt and held back crying she said. “I didn’t believe her about the door, I thought it was just her imagination. I knew about the scratching sounds but I didn’t think anything of what else she told me. I told her it was just her imagination.” Finishing the last words with a choked stifled cry. I said. “No one could have known what was happening, anybody else would have had the same reaction. You don’t need to beat yourself up. The important thing is we are here now.” Now I said I don’t like to get emotionally involved in my investigations but one thing I hate is bullies. For this little innocent girl to be harassed the way she was; was starting to make me very upset. I asked the family to continue. “It just got worse from there” said Nolan. “We all started hearing things but it was the worst in Riley’s room. One night towards then end of July we hear a loud bang that seemed to have shaken the house it woke me and Beverly up. Hell, I thought it was an earth quake. Then the screaming started in Riley’s room. I got outta bed so fast and was sprinting down the hall to her door, just as I got there the door slammed in my face and I crashed into it. I was running so fast I couldn’t stop in time. Now Mr. Reynolds you might be thinking maybe Riley was the one that slammed that door but I’m telling you before it shut I saw her sitting up on her bed. Let me tell you there ain’t no worse feeling than having your kid scared and there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it. So I start trying to open the door and it won’t budge but I swear for a couple a seconds I heard what sounded like a man’s voice coming from inside my daughter’s room. Couldn’t make out was it was saying under the screaming from Riley and my wife behind me but I swear I heard a MAN in my daughters rooms. Let me tell you that’s what pushed me over the edge and I slammed into the door so hard it broke off the damned hinges. The thought that there was some creep in there with my daughter. I was ready to kill someone. When the door broke in I fell to the floor on top of it and got up as quickly as I could and there was no one in there. My daughter Riley was on the bed screaming. Beverly went to her while I checked the room. There was nothing, not a damn thing out of place. With that bang you’d think something would have moved or fallen. Throughout the house nothing was out of place, I just can’t explain it.” Mrs. Smith said “Riley was saying that she heard the scratching again then her closet door had opened and she heard growling like an angry dog coming from her closet. Then that’s when that bang that shook the house happened and we came running to the door.” I could see the fear in their eyes as they recalled these horrible events for me and Zach and my heart went out to this poor family. But even Zach was starting to pick on the clues that this story was weaving, I noticed as he glanced over at me and gave me this do you think this means what I think this means look. I asked “Now, so far these events seem to include everybody but Meagan. Were you affected in any way Meagan?” Meagan then slumped into the couch and gave her mother a pleading look, obviously she was very uncomfortable. When her mother said. “Meagan, its OK honey. Please tell Mr. Reynolds what happened.” “Do I have to?!” Meagan replied in a pleading voice. I said “Meagan, you don’t have to but I would really help Mr. Gallagher and myself if we knew everything that happened. It will help us get to the root of what this is and help us to make it stop. So, you don’t have to tell us but please understand that it will help and nobody is going to judge you or anything like that.” Meagan looking down at her feet and turning red said “OK” and started her part of the story. “I knew about what was going on with Riley but I thought she was just being a baby. At least until that night with the loud bang. Because the night after that I started having the dreams.” “And what dreams would those be?” I asked as gently as possible. Again Meagan struggled to start as if really embarrassed and ashamed of what she was going to tell us. “I started having these dreams. Very bad dreams. And, and, uh, in these dreams this man would come. He was a man but he had no face or his face was always in darkness. He would tell me things. At first they were nice things like how pretty I was or better than the other girls in my school I was but he scared me. I didn’t tell anyone because they were dreams. At first it was one every couple days then they came every night. The man would come and tell me things but it got worse. Then he started telling me nasty things.” Meagan looked like she was about to cry when her mother put her arms around her and encouraged her to go on. “He would tell me he wanted me, he wanted my body and he would go into detail of what he would do with me and if he couldn’t have me he would kill me and my family. I couldn’t sleep anymore. I started getting in trouble at school because I would stay up all night so I wouldn’t have those dreams but then I would fall asleep in class and get in trouble.” Once more Meagan paused her story and I couldn’t help but get very angry at the disgusting way this family was being terrorized and then Meagan continued. “The worst dream happened a couple weeks ago. In the dream he was in my room at the foot of my bed quietly whispering my name over and over again. I was so scared I couldn’t move, I couldn’t call for my dad or mom; it felt like I was paralyzed. Then he grabbed my ankles and pushed my legs apart. He was so strong, I couldn’t stop him and he climbed on top of me and started biting me all over.” Meagan broke off crying, shoulders heaving as she pressed her face into her mother’s chest. With tears in her eyes Mrs. Smith said. “The next day Meagan finally told me about the dreams because her neck, arms, and her breasts were covered in bite marks some of them had actually drawn blood.” Mr. Smith with his face drawn in anger said loudly “YOU SEE WHAT WE’VE BEEN DEALING WITH AND THAT’S NOT EVEN CLOSE TO SCRATCHING THE SURFACE!!!” he broke off and continued in a softer voice “I’m sorry but we have been dealing with this for weeks now. I have personally been scratched, pushed and heard voices throughout the house. My daughters have been tormented constantly and my wife has seen something in my daughter’s room! We don’t know what to do anymore and we need your help!” “Your wife has SEEN something?” I asked. Mrs. Smith said “It was a couple of days ago. I was walking through the house praying to God for help. Everyone else was asleep. As I approached my daughter’s room I heard the scratching.” “Was this Riley’s room again” I asked “Yes, sorry it was Riley’s room. I heard the scratching again. I started praying that this would leave and we would be delivered. Then the lights in the hall flickered and went out. I was petrified as I heard Riley’s bedroom door open. I turned to look it had open about six inches.” Mrs. Smith held her hands up and apart to demonstrate the space. “Then I noticed movement. A little below the height of the door knob there was something there. I couldn’t tell what it was because of the lights being out I just saw something dark blocking what moonlight was shining into Riley’s room from her window. With how small it was I thought it was Riley looking out of her room to see what had happened with the lights. Then suddenly the lights in the hall came back on for a second and I saw its face.” Mrs. Smith was trembling with the recollection. “It was low to the ground below the doorknob its face was that of an ancient old man with a huge smiling mouth. It was just peeking out of the door and smiling at me. It had no eyes! Oh my God it didn’t have any eyes just black holes where they should have been! Then it disappeared, I was terrified and I screamed for my husband waking up the whole family. I didn’t tell the girls because I didn’t want to scare them.” “That was when all the furniture started being thrown around and the doors would open and close by themselves, after that night.” Said Mr. Smith. “And our beds started shaking” said Riley. “Yeah that was when we all moved into the living room.” Mrs. Smith said. I cleared my throat and began “Well according to what you have told me and I think Mr. Gallagher would agree that what is going on in your home is very serious. Now, before I go on I need to ask a few question and for your sakes I ask for your complete honesty.” They all nodded their heads with an anxious look on their faces waiting for my questions. So I continued “Does anyone in the family currently or has ever practiced witch craft or black magic? All I need for now is a yes or no answer.” All of them fervently shook their heads and said no. “Do you know of anyone who practices witchcraft, Satanism, or black magic that you may have angered?” Again all of them said “No.” Mrs. Smith chimed in with “Mr. Reynolds we are all devout Catholics and would never do such a thing or associate with people who do that.” I replied “I know Mrs. Smith but these are routine questions to help try and establish a cause to what started this because usually a thing like this needs a doorway or an invitation to come into your home and do this to you. Now, has anyone ever played with an Ouija board or spirit writing device?” They all replied “No.” “Has anyone ever participated in a séance or anything of the sort?” They all said “No.” Meagan immediately looked down at her feet and turned red. “Meagan?” I asked. “Is there anything you would like to tell me?” I said. Mrs. Smith said “Meagan wouldn’t do anything like that she knows better!” “Well, let’s see what Meagan has to say first. Meagan?” I said. Meagan said “I didn’t do anything. It wasn’t me it was Becky!” she said defensively. “Who is Becky?” I asked. “She’s a friend. A while ago I was at a sleep over and they were playing with an Ouija board and trying to have a séance.” Said Meagan in a distressed voice. Then she continued after I nodded to her to go on. “Becky and the other girls were sitting in a circle on the floor with the Ouija board in the middle. They had a shirt draped over the lamp in the corner to darken the room and it made it hard to see so I was sitting on the bed because I did not want to be a part of it. They were asking it if there were any spirits present when it said “yes.” Jennifer told Becky to stop playing around and Becky said she wasn’t doing it. Susan said she wasn’t moving the planchette either. They asked me to play and I told them I didn’t want to but they kept bugging me and calling me names so I finally got down and joined them. They told me to put my fingers on the planchette as Jennifer scooted over to make room for me. As soon as I put my fingers on it the planchette seemed to jerk a little I pulled my fingers away while Susan said “See it wants you to play too!” and everyone laughed. I didn’t want to but I didn’t want to look like I was scared so I put my fingers back on the planchette then Becky asked who was there, it said “a friend.” I didn’t like it and told them to stop. They said it was just a game and that they play it all the time and called me a chicken. They asked if it was a boy or girl it said “a boy.” They asked how old and he said that he was sixteen. They asked if he was still alive and he said “no”, then they asked how he died and he said he was murdered. They asked how and it didn’t reply. They asked its name and it didn’t reply. Then it spelled out “pretty girl” and they asked who and it said my name. I yelled at them to stop and to put that away. That was when I decided I had enough but I couldn’t pull my fingers off of the planchette it was like they were stuck with a magnet. I was so scared I couldn’t say anything. They kept playing asking it questions, like describe what is pretty about me and it just kept saying “pretty girl.” At this point Meagan was almost in tears and I didn’t want to push her too hard. I asked her “Was that all that happened?” Giving her a chance to decide if she wanted to tell me more or not. She hesitantly responded while looking away from her mother who looked very upset. “Well, no, they kept playing and they asked it to give them a sign that he was real and really there with us. At first nothing happened, then Jennifer said “see I told you it wasn’t real!” After about a minute it started to get cold in her room. It got colder and colder until we could see our breath. That’s when Becky, Jennifer, and Susan decided they had had enough. I could finally take my hand off the planchette once they let it go. I just wanted to get out of there, we were all scared at this point but then the lights started flickering. Susan started to cry then the lights went out completely and I felt something pull my hair really hard. Everybody screamed and ran out of the room, we spent the rest of the night in the living room.” Meagan at this point seemed relieved to finally be able to tell this story but Mrs. Smith was very upset. “I can’t believe you would play with something like that you know those things are evil!” said Mrs. Smith. I interrupted her before it could get any worse. “Now isn’t the time to get angry what’s done is done and we are here to fix the problem and just because Meagan played with an Ouija board doesn’t necessarily mean she was the cause of this.” “Then what could have been the cause of this!” Mrs. Smith asked. “Mrs. Smith while the cause is important what really matters is getting rid of it. Now Meagan I’m sure you understand now the importance of not toying with the supernatural. What I believe is happening here is something diabolical, I am not trying to scare you but you must be warned. After listening to your stories there is a pattern if you haven’t noticed. You see the Devil and his minions are real. Demoniacal forces are out there and they do need an opening to enter your life but sometimes it’s not as obvious as it seems. While I would like to get to the bottom of what brought this thing into your home right now my main concern is your family’s safety. The goal of the demonic is ultimately possession but they can’t just come right in and take over there is a pattern they usually operate by. They have a certain M.O. that if you know what you’re looking for it is easy to identify. See, a Demon or Devil cannot just take over your body like you see on television or in Hollywood they have to break you down first. It usually happens in three stages infestation, oppression and possession. The infestation stage usually isolates one or more of the family into a state of fear; fear of what is happening and fear that no one will believe them. Like the scratching in your daughter Riley’s room. How you said they came in a pattern of three then a pause that too is also a clue to the diabolical. You, see the demonic like to use the pattern of three as a mocking gesture towards the divine trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The isolation isn’t always just one person like how it was you Mrs. Smith and your daughter with Riley’s closet and the noises from it and the dreams that Meagan has been having. Then comes oppression, the loud banging’s the furniture being destroyed and your house becoming a terrorizing place that should be your comforting home. This is by design to break you down emotionally by seeing everything you worked hard for destroyed and your family under so much stress and possibly your family turning against each other. This is to break down your spirits and your mental fortitude to weaken you towards the next goal, Possession.” At this point the whole family seemed to suck in air at the last word I said. “But why us, what did we do to deserve this!” exclaimed Mr. Smith. “We are good Catholics!” Said Mrs. Smith. “Your right, nobody deserves this but these are ancient forces and even the most knowledgeable theologian barely understands the workings of the demonic. Right now what we need to focus on is your safety. I would suggest spending more time in church and increasing whatever praying you do. I will do what I can tonight to help you but I feel I should warn you. Right now from what you have told me it seems the obvious target for possession is Meagan.” Upon me telling them this Mrs. Smith let out a groan. “Oh God no, why God. She didn’t mean it. She was just playing a stupid game.” She seemed not to be able to take much more. With that I felt that I had enough of the history of the events so far so I decided it was time to start my walk through of the house. At this point I stood up and grabbed the voice recorder off the coffee table and handed it to Zackary who took it and went outside to the car and retrieved a large leather bag which had the rest of our equipment in it. It contained six crucifixes which were blessed by father Flanagan, five vials of holy water, two more voice recorders for catching electronic voice phenomena and an EMF reader for picking up any fluctuations in the electromagnetic field. As Zackary returned I took the bag opened it and gave each of the family a crucifix and took one for myself and the last I gave to Zachary. I instructed the family to remain in the living room and asked if they would join hands and pray with me and Zachary before I walked through the house. We all stood in a circle and grasped each other’s hands as I lead the family in a prayer. “Heavenly father, we come before you today to ask for your protection and your grace. Please protect the Smith family from whatever evil that is in their home and grant me the courage to face it. Protect myself and Zachary as we walk through this house and cover us in your divine light that no harm may come to anyone present, Amen.” With that everyone joined with a simultaneous “Amen.” I asked Zachary if he was ready and he said “yes.” With his camera on his shoulder now we headed out of the living room and into the kitchen. Where I said another prayer. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost you are not welcome her

84 minutes

November 5, 2017

Beings and Entities

Anhedonius

D.A. Wilcox

I. The sign from above doesn’t come in time to stop the man’s finger from squeezing the trigger, and I don’t think it’s intended to, but it does come in time — in that last moment, that last tenth of a second when the bullet tears a gap through the front of my skull and just starts to impact brain matter — that’s when this all replays in a flash before my eyes, clear as crystal in perfect hindsight. The slowdown doesn’t keep him from ending my life, but it does give me time to float in limbo for a while, with the last one percent going live time. I can already feel myself – my soul, my spirit, my essence, whatever the fuck it is — leaving my soon-to-be-lifeless body here in Mercer’s godforsaken laboratory and rewinding back in to my pre-lab rat self and my first memory of puking on my mom’s church blouse as a ten month old. It’s all a fast forwarded, speed-of-light slipstream, from first memory to childhood to manhood to my fall from grace and my ascension to the manifestation of grace itself. It slows down and then it grinds on the purgatory brakes — that fateful morning when I woke up and my wretched problems became a certain pharmaceutical giant’s glorious windfall, and I’m reliving it again, as some final gift…and curse, a two-in-one combo. Fate’s endgame caveat to me for redeeming myself is the chance to relive the moments that mattered. The moments that gave meaning to my life and grant me some peace and reassurance. One last breath away from the end, the replay is the first thing that makes me feel since the floodgates were opened right after the inundation. The shock and awe of the moment shatters the anhedonia, and I find it ironic that the ultimate pain of a killing blow is the only thing that makes me feel again. But it’s fine. It’s all fine…. So this is my choice. The bullet is resolving this fucked up mess for me. Lifting the burden that I’ve carried, unaware, for my entire life. Liberating. Absolving. It breaks through all the tortured second guesses and musings on whether I did right by a moral code that never existed until they found me and spilled innocent blood. The round is one third of the way through my mutated brain when time stops completely and the bullet stops traveling. Maybe it’s God’s way of watching the sizzle reel of his latest casualty on the last spiral rung of the mortal coil and slingshotting me onto that home stretch of hairpin turns it before I shuffle off it for good. The Omnipotent, All-Seeing and All-Knowing Creator, Him cranking the projector and me in the front row of the theatre and filling in the shoes of the lead actor at the same time. He plays cosmic origami and folds space-time in on itself, but not for me. For you, and your children, and your children’s children. Action. This is how it goes. II. The ruthless gorilla on my back rips me out of my shivering limbo at 6:42am with a primal biological roar. It’s five or six days ago, but exactly how long, I couldn’t tell you. The first shockwave reverberates up and down my body, and before I even open my eyes, I can smell my desperate miasma of sweaty filth that has steadily absorbed in to my comforter and mattress overnight. Everything is soaked through, but I am shivering, and this is the breaking point when natural sleep is no longer physically possible without a heavy blend of muscle relaxants and benzodiazepines to insist and usher it through. Peaks and valleys in my body temperature, deeply set bone aches, and the twitchy, restless kicking of my feet mark my descent in to a domain of sleepless suffering. I know this world all too well. It is a shadowed reality in which I am a tormented spirit, drifting about, envious of those who awake to a new day to face the sunrise with goals and to do lists and optimistic aspirations of progressive revelry. I am an excellent faker, a trained chameleon; one who can keep my shoulders squared and reciprocate the imploring gaze of “normals” on the street as they pass by, fooled by a false smile that is all teeth and perfectly chipper. But the teeth in the back, the teeth you don’t see, are rotted and abscessed in pieces. You see, the normal on the street would be horrified by the truth: that under the veil within me, everything is falling to ruin. My body has already leapt off the precipice of retaining any food for longer than fifteen minutes before it comes back up. I am ten hours away from being unable to drive. I am fourteen hours away from being unable to walk or speak coherently. I am twenty-two hours away from full-blown hell. I’ve never reached the full end of the countdown or checked in to a hospital, but I can tell you what happens next, because one thing is guaranteed. This will not be the last time I wake up this way. Withdrawal envelops every waking second and divides time outward in to a distorted and thin razor’s edge that threatens the boundaries of my senses. It cuts in to every breath, every pore, every moment of being. Each cycle festers the wound further. There is no healing to be had. I carry the scars forever. It fractures that natural warmth imbued by the very beginnings of life inside the womb and destroys that balance, forever skewing any concept of a “comfort zone.” Once deceived, I am forever betrayed by my own pleasure center to expect a singular and fleeting state of ecstasy that cannot be replicated by anything other than the devouring, priority perforating poison that systematically imbued itself within me. Heroin has dismantled my body and brain’s definition of “survival.” The routinely simple act of standing to face the day becomes a daunting and seemingly impossible task amidst this crippled stupor. The horde of angered ice insects crawling just beneath my flesh will continue to intensify until it skitters like a raging swarm with no inkling of mercy. My gut rumbles, topsy-turvy from its opiate induced rollercoaster. It flip-flops between the urge to purge itself through vomit and shit. Or both, sometimes simultaneously. This is only the beginning. I roll out of bed and grab my trusty five-gallon paint bucket in a clumsy race to the bathroom. I’ve eaten nothing in two days and have barely had anything to drink except water. The spastic mouthfuls of puke are nothing but pure, acidic stomach bile. I am afraid to see the tarlike black blob that’s exiting my large intestine from the other end, a sort of unique purged creature that I’ve given birth to hundreds of times, each increasingly more discomforting and revolting than the last. I dump my bucket and flush the results of my latest binge in to the depths of this decrepit city and all its horrible temptations, eyes tightly shut in denial, too afraid to see blood in the water. Too afraid to see my face in the mirror. Too afraid to see the hunger. This is the last time. Right. I splash cold water on my face after nearly an hour of suffering and refuse to look up and face what I’ve become in the half-shattered mirror. The first hints of the sun creep through torn and ragged venetian blinds as I fight a thirty second war within myself that seems to last for an eternity. Never again. I microwave two-day-old leftovers from the coffee pot and manage to force down some of it before the mug slips from my hands and bursts into glass shards on the kitchen floor. I scream loud enough to wake others through the walls of my building, furious and full of hate for no one but the devilishly selfish little fiend inside me that grows and evolves by the second. He breaks through and takes control of me, and I am helpless and hijacked. I am in the driver’s seat no longer. The fiend commands me to grab my phone, form the first two words, with my other half — no, my other six percent — quietly cursing what’s left of my human side for even considering the thought of kicking off this nightmarish cycle all over again. I need No. You don’t. Stay away, fiend. Go away forever. I press delete and throw the phone across the room against the wall, with the fiend secretly hoping that it won’t be busted when I inevitably lose another temporary battle at the mercy of his relentless assault. The struggle between what’s left of my old self and the fiend gets more vicious as a fresh chill sweeps down my back and my nose starts to run. Logic parry, passion riposte, and then he connects with a temptation slash to the jugular. The false flu drip, wobbly knees, and a newfound sense of enfeeblement reinforce the fiend’s argument on all three levels. He scores the first point of many. My body takes his side. My mind takes his side. My spirit surrenders de facto, having evaporated long ago, along with my fiancée, all my friends, all my family. I trudge back to the living room and pick up the phone yet again. I open the sliding glass doors to the small patio outside and consider throwing the damn thing off the balcony in to the stream of traffic below, to be crushed under the tires of a taxi or garbage truck. The fragment of humanity left within me smiles at the strength of considering such a proposition, but the fiend injects a potentially horrific thought of losing all the numbers for my backup contacts and less-than-frequent sources of heroin alternatives in to the stream of protest. I have at least ten phone numbers for my main three dope hooks committed to memory, but I can’t recall the number for my mother or my sister to save my life. The fiend tries to force my thoughts away from them and how long it’s been since I’ve heard their voices. A fresh tsunami of guilt and shame pulls me within its undertow, providing the fiend yet another reason to grab the phone and cop a fix. A temporary twelve-hour memory wipe fails to suppress the cold truth that I am a lost son and uncle to my sister’s newborn twins. They are likely walking and talking now, but cannot recognize a sunken face that their eyes have never beheld, and probably never will, until they are sealed shut in a funeral parlor. I sputter after a throaty belch and dregs of the microwaved coffee threaten to come up. I swallow them back down and shudder. The fiend interrupts my pity party, while the logical me tries to divert my inevitable journey back to hell with any other way of surviving the next seventy two hours without pissing away my life and future through a needle in my arm. Kill half a bottle of the bourbon in the freezer instead. Take some of those three year old, expired “rainy day” Xanax from your trusty old kicking stash, and go comatose for sixteen hours before the REAL pain begins. The fiend says no. Kill the entire bottle, all the Xanax, all the Soma, and pass out forever. He can’t win if you’re dead. No. Make it even easier! Eat the business end of the Glock under the bed, pull the trigger, and leave a nice mess for your prick landlord! Tempting, but no. Rustle up some fake tears, make up a story about your grandpa dying, and beg the fellow junkies across the hallway to share seconds on their morning black tar shot. Their fiend is more conniving and evil than mine. Not a chance in hell. Walk the five blocks in the cold to the methadone clinic and get there before seven and just maintain, motherfucker. Maintain, maintain, maintain. Physically, you’ll be well. Not high, but well enough to keep some food down. Food? Psh. No. Pull another cash advance, max out the fourth credit card, and make it all better. Why yes, Mr. Fiend. That sounds like an excellent idea. Let’s do that. My hands shake even worse now with a renewed mixture of sickness, blended with an anxious anticipation and an absolute fear that my first choice within the hierarchy of connects has a possibility of falling through. Amir ignores you if he’s out, regardless of how many calls or texts he receives, or he responds within five minutes and instructs you to meet him at one of many stash houses that he holds throughout the city. In addition to consistently providing powerful and nearly pure enough shit capable of knocking out an elephant with less than a tenth of a gram in the bloodstream, he provides deals to his regulars and is willing to front out advances to the truly dedicated junkies who will place priority on quality and ease of acquisition above all else . He also supplies me with clean points and a safe and private place to inject. I key in a badly garbled text message, riddled with extra characters and absent of any punctuation whatsoever. Good moring friend cam I pleas stop by to see Helena I miss her no front todaz I have moneyis 15;00 hrs okaythanks brother Oops. That’s the fiend spelling it out just a little too quickly. Good morning, Amir my man. I need to stop by and see Helen of Troy. I miss her so dearly. No credit needed! Nine o’clock sharp, thank you brother! The next four and a half minutes stretch out in to a continuum of eternity as I stare at the digital clock on my microwave, pacing back and forth from the kitchen and in to the living room. My finger hovers over the send button to my plan B connect (good old Powpow!) and my phone beeps with the heavenly godsend of a newly arrived confirmation from Amir. All good, she’s ready for you and she brought a friend, got a little extra surprise for you today. The fiend inside assumes full control. A rush of pre-fix adrenaline manufactures itself out of nowhere and floods through my legs. I slice my foot on a broken shard of glass from the coffee cup in my haste to find the most presentable pair of pants from the wrinkled pile in the corner of my living room that hasn’t been laundered in over a month. I don’t feel or notice it until I shove my socks and shoes on. <My observatory window gets a little fuzzy. Hypophysis, anterior lobe, optic chiasma, ophthalmic nerve, olfactory trigone, all shredded now. The first half of my brain is mush. This bullet is making impressive progress, ripping right along. I am a third person observer of my own body on autopilot as it bounds down the stairs three at a time, opting for a quicker descent to the street than the elevator.> The fiend traverses the grid, cleans out what’s left of my account at the ATM, and nearly sprints the remaining nine blocks to Amir’s building, stopping to vomit one last time in to a storm drain, oblivious to the judgmental, baffled looks of sour disdain on the faces of the pedestrians unfortunate enough to cross Captain Sidewalk Fiend’s path. In the back of my mind, I can’t help but feel as though I am being watched by someone other than a random stranger on the street as the fiend pulls the puppet strings. Fate holds much more than a ritualistic and routine shift from misery to paradise for me on this gloomy overcast morning. Enter the morning of my life that starts like any other. The change that needs to happen, that is bound to happen for someone like me — it is not the change that actually occurs. It should be the first step towards sobriety, death by the hand of the fiend in the form of an overdose, or suicide. But it is none of these things. It’s a change that will transform the world when it is finished with me, and if I might redeem the small shred of a soul that remains in my wretched body, then this is the day that fate guides me off my own desperate and pathetic path of self-destruction, towards an encounter with an evil more potent and terrible than anything I could have possibly comprehended when I woke up this morning, sick and sad and pathetic as always. It’s true, what they say. Once a junkie, always a junkie. But what they don’t say? Even junkies can have a purpose, and mine is not to save myself. It’s to save everyone else. III. I rap on the door to Amir’s apartment with both hands. Three over two. Spiral out, spiral out. Of his many quirks and paranoid requirements to complete a transaction, a codified rhythmic pattern pulled straight from Tool’s “Lateralus” signifies that I am not his cleaning service, a rival from midtown with a gun, or a Jehovah’s Witness. My phone buzzes with another text. Quirk number two. Password? I check the calendar app on my phone to see if it’s an even or an odd week of the month, and to confirm what day it is. “Whorish homunculus,” I say out loud in the empty hallway, feeling like a fool, but jumping through the required hoops, nonetheless. He opens the door, and he is the first human being of the day that doesn’t give me a once over of pity and disapproval. He grins, and I manage a forced smile, not to match his candor, but because I am a few more painful minutes away from being well, and that’s the only thing that matters. “Ah, Davy boy. It’s been a bit since I saw you last,” Amir says, chuckling as I slump on to his sofa. “You’ve been avoiding me, eh? Going for that cheaper fent-cut garbage from the gulch, no doubt?” “Going for nothing, actually. I was two days in to the good fight, but fuck it,” I confess, failing to meet his gaze and dropping my cash roll on the coffee table, opting instead to stare at the paintings on the wall. “I have to play downtown tonight and there’s no way I can hold a beat like this. They’d boo Chance off stage before we even got through the first song.” Two oil paintings of Willie Nelson, one in his young years and one in his sixties, seem to be watching me, eyes piercing through my putrid soul. “The Peeping Willies,” as Amir’s customer base has dubbed them, have seen me transform countless times in this very room, from a hollowed weakling to a fiending phoenix, rising from the ashes to spread my wings and soar over cloud nine. Who knows what else they’ve beheld from their stationary post of observance. I certainly don’t want to know. Amir cleans his hands with Purell, knowing full well that my own are too shaky to properly prepare a shot to hit myself with. He obliges me the courtesy of mixing part of my purchase in to a new dope cooker with bacteriostatic water and a micron filter. He knows that I need point four grams of the three and a half I’ve just bought before I’ll offer much in the form of conversation. He draws it up in to a fresh Luer-lock rig, breaking the seal to fill it with forty units of golden amber liquid, barely translucent and devoid of any air bubbles. The nectar of the gods, my be all and end all, ready to plunge me in to paradise. “Hey, Amir. Go ahead and make it a straight Gee. Point four ain’t gonna do it tonight.” I say. “Sure, no problem Dee, just don’t be nodding out halfway through your set brother.” Amir says with a chuckle. He ties the tourniquet around my forearm leisurely and pulls a sealed vial with some sort of intricate logo on it that appears to be an interlocking “W” and “M” overlaid in to each other. The liquid inside glows in the light of the living room with an electric sapphire color. I find myself captivated by it, normally fixated on the pulsing of my go-to vein of choice on the left side of my hand leading up my wrist. Hell’s highway. But the vial demands my attention as Amir stabs the syringe in to it, drawing up a remaining forty units. “W-What are you doing? What the fuck is that shit?” I ask, intrigued and annoyed, curiosity piqued but struck by a sudden onslaught of unrest that my fix is delayed by the substance in question. <I could save his life and tell him to pour the crude Blue down the sink, but then the butterfly wing flap from earlier, when 0.4 became 1.0, could become a tsunami that levels Japan, and more than twelve perish in the lab a few hours from now as they try to harvest it again. There’s already too much blood on my hands.> “This is that little ‘extra’ I was telling you about on the phone,” Amir says, smiling from ear to ear. “You don’t even know how fortunate you are to be getting a taste of this. Nocturnus illuminatus. My sister’s boss hates it, but all his lab geeks are calling it Liquid Blue.” “Whoa whoa whoa, Amir. Your sister? This is a new product from Mercer pharma and it’s not even out of TESTING yet!? I thought you were going to mix in a little coke or ketamine or something. You know I’m picky. Is it an opiate potentiator? How many people have fired it as a speedball? Do you have some narcan? What if I fall out? You know I’m not big on contaminating my first …” I trail off as two massive men in expensive suits come out of the bedroom in the hallway with a briefcase. I forget to keep speaking and let out a startled cry of surprise. They unlatch it on the table and slide it across to Amir. It’s more cash than I’ve ever seen in my life, neatly folded in perfect stacks of crisp hundred dollar bills. At least half a million, if not more than that. It’s remarkable, really, how your entire world, the people you know, the routines you come to expect — they can turn over on themselves in a matter of seconds and explode in to chaos. Holy shit, what is this? “Amir, what the fuck man, who are these —-“ “You were right,” the first suit says. “He did say exactly what you said he would.” “I told you boys. He’s my favorite junkie, the only regular I’ll hit and take care of like this, and he’s a damn BEAST when it comes to tolerance. He could fire this entire bun and still not fall out.” Amir cackles, pulling one of the bill rolls from the briefcase and placing it under his nose as he sniffs it. “Hey, wait a second, what are they paying you for, Amir?” I grab my drugs instinctively and rip the tie-off from my arm as I rise to my feet, backing to the door slowly. “Look, I don’t deal. You’re looking at possession and purchasing, but he’ll never testify against me in court. A fucking NARC, Amir? You’re always so careful man! How did they get to you? At least let me shoot my shit before you arrest me, I can’t believe this bullsh….” The second suit pulls a silenced USP .45 from his jacket pocket and places it firmly against my temple. “Sit back down, sir. You came here to get high, and you’re going to get high.” He says, chillingly calm and collected. Yeah, not cops. I’m not going to jail, but something inside me tells me that would be the better scenario. My heart pounds and races. For the first time in my life, there’s a fully loaded shot of heroin in front of me and I don’t want it. I take a deep breath and try not to make any sudden moves. Both suits are watching me like birds of prey. “Cap it off. The last ten units.” The first suit says to Amir. “Look fellas,” Amir says, trying to reason with them. “Put the gun away, he’s the last guy you would ever have to force –“ The suit redirects the gun from my head and fires a round in to the ceiling with a muffled phwip before placing it back against my ear. It burns my skin and I wince in pain, but I don’t say word. “OK! OK! Chill the fuck out, Jesus Christ!” Amir interjects, filling the last ten units of the Luerlock with yet another vial of clear, “normal” looking fluid that the suit with the briefcase pulls from his pocket. It’s not labeled and could be anything, in addition to the Liquid Blue that’s turned my shot completely cerulean, seemingly undiluted. Any latecomer to the party would have no idea it was a combination of three substances and the encased fluid loses none of its strong blue hue. “You’re going to be fine bro, my sister works for Mercer, they’re just paying me so they can keep you doped up for free and observe you for the first twelve hours while….” The second suit fires another round in to the ceiling. “NOT ANOTHER FUCKING WORD, PAVEL!” The other suited man roars. “You inject him in the next thirty seconds, or the cash goes out the door, and the rest of this clip goes in your chest and brain, got it? I’ll tell your sister the junkie swiped my piece and shot you. DON’T TEST ME.” “Oh man, oh God, I should have just gone to the clinic, I can’t believe this….” “Not another word from you either or there won’t be enough heroin in the world to stop the pain from the next bullet shattering your kneecap, Davy boy.” They know my name. Amir ties off my arm again, pierces my flesh, and misses my vein completely. I wince with the flash of thin metal digging inside the scar tissue, and he has to back out of it and reregister. I shiver, because in two years of trusting his expertise, I realize that I’ve never seen him miss. Ever. “I-It’s ok, Amir, just d-do it,” I say, shaking all over and terrified, but trying not to show it. The most pathetic part is, the fiend inside of me is still excited about being fed, and even more so about the rush of a new high that he’s never experienced before. Memories and lapses of a “feeling catalogue” dance through my mind, searching for a way to compare what I’m about to feel to the warm and itchy onset of pins and needles from heroin, the instant numbed jumpstart dopamine flood from cocaine, the breath taking euphoric creeping embrace of oxymorphone… “You’re going to be fine, man. You’re gonna feel great. When this is over and they have their data, I’m going to give you a hundred thousand bucks of my cut….” He trails off as the red plume of blood floods in to the barrel of the syringe, indicating that he’s in, and he pushes the plunger home. I close my eyes, sweating bullets as I release the tourniquet for a second time. I wait for the rush. The familiar warmth blends with a foreign elation, and then it feels like weighted anvils are pulling down on my chest. I surrender to it, but I know I’m about to fall out, not from an overdose, but something entirely different. It’s almost like a “K-hole,” but ten times heavier. I’ve done enough barbiturates to realize part of the mix is a tranquilizer, without a doubt. I feel consciousness starting to slip, but I want it to go, because it feels so wonderful…. “Go pull the van around.” “I don’t have to come with you guys, right?” “Nope, you’ve done your job. Don’t spend it all in one place.” I’ve got maybe ten seconds left before my senses shift away in to induced sleep, but I try with all my strength to fight it, to listen. I open my mouth to speak and the sound is the weak moan of a groggy spectre, a doped up visage who can barely string two barely coherent words together. “Whaaat was dat laaaast stuff you put in der, Uhmerr…” My voice slurs as I start to drift away. I hear the last words, foggy and distant and a hundred miles away before the blackness takes me completely. I hear the muted whipping of another gunshot and feel the vibration of something hitting the floor near my feet. It could be a body. The last words — they are not Amir’s words. The voice belongs to one of the suited men. “Thorazine. Nighty night, you poor bastard. “ IV. <Ladies and gentlemen, the middle frontal gyrus and lateral sulcus are destroyed. We are down to the intra parietal sulcus and the occipital gyri, then a few inches of skull, some skin and hair, and the peaceful end to it all. But this is when time will slow down even more. This is when I’ll be able to make huge, sweeping changes if I can. Maybe I can save some of them. Maybe I can make Mercer suffer more than he did the first time around. There are plenty of maybes that I want to bring around full swing. We’ll see what we can do. This is weird, but it’s about to get downright fun. This is when I go from dirty, despicable junkie to ultimate martyr. Roll all of these personal favorites of mine in to one and thank me later when they aren’t chopping up your neighbor’s mother to cure your lung cancer without telling you where the miracle came from because you wouldn’t take it if you knew. This is my moment, when I’m — before this bullet destroys my amygdala and epithalamus and I forget them — Andy Dufresne. Neo. King Leonidas. Rocky. Inigo Montoya. Marty McFly. Frodo Baggins. James Bond. Han MotherFucking Solo.> I open my eyes slowly, disoriented, and it all comes flooding back when I realize that I am in a brightly lit white room instead of my dark hovel above 28th street. The gunpoint cocktail, the double cross payoff, the flood of bliss and feeling perfect, feeling whole, feeling complete and then polished beyond the human body’s learned concept of limited pleasure… When this is over and they have their data…. Captivity. I am a guinea pig. This must be some sort of clandestine, high-security lab at Mercer Pharma. I am a prisoner in what I can only describe as a sealed off prison cell of reinforced glass with interlocked walls on each side. My body should be lingering in the shadowed reality of waking up sober, dulled and paying the price for what I’ve put in to it, but the withdrawal isn’t there. Men and women in lab coats are standing outside the cube, watching me like a confined rat in an experiment, jotting notes down on clipboards. I can hear every last word they’re muttering, even though I shouldn’t be able to. Even without the glass between us, it shouldn’t be possible for me to discern their conversations, but I can break it down to every last consonant and syllable. They’re talking about my “awareness level” and “stigma overload” and “stimulus thresholds.” My eyes. Can. See. Everything. EVERYTHING. The lab techs and their neck hairs, standing on end, likely due to the fact that they’ve been watching me sleep for however long and now I’m up and moving and they’re witnessing raw data in action. I see globules of ink ejecting from the tips of their gel roller pens. I hear it congeal and scrape against the paper. I can discern what words are forming on the paper, based on the angles and strokes and how the pens rotate between their thumbs and index fingers. I can smell heroin — MY bag of heroin that I purchased at Amir’s — inside the top left drawer of the desk on the far wall where the suit with the gun is typing furiously at a computer. From across the room, I can see every key that his fingers mash in sequence and I can see the words he’s forming spelling out visually in live time inside my brain, even though the monitor is turned with its back side to me. He’s typing something up about “unavoidable collateral damage” and how unpredictable and dangerous I was. Some kind of rundown report, mostly false and manufactured to make it seem like Amir was shot by me before they got the gun back and put me under. More lies, about how they unplugged Amir’s security cameras and there’s no footage to verify what happened, so Mr. Mercer would you please take our word against his, and tell Pavel’s sister that his last words were that he loved her before he bled to death. And none of this should be possible for a human being to extrapolate from my vantage point here. Not for anyone, and ESPECIALLY not for me, coming off a fat dose of thorazine and dope and… The Liquid Blue. I jump off the cot they’ve provided for me inside my glass box and slam my fists against the barrier, and that’s when I realize there’s an IV stuck in the crook of my arm, feeding in to a wallfish at the top of the cell that branches along the lab in to what appears to be very sophisticated hospital equipment in the rear corner. I try to rip it out of my skin, but it’s clamped in with staples. The pain that shoots through my arm from aggravating the puncture spreads through me like exhaust from a jet engine. I pound my fists against the glass, cursing them up and down, demanding for them to let me go, threatening lawsuits and ass kickings and murderous violent acts that I have no current ability to bring to fruition. I already have the attention of everyone in the lab, but they don’t acknowledge the extreme change in my behavior, except to write more furiously. They erupt in to more spirited conversation about their newest pet and something tells me that they know I can hear them, and they don’t give two shits whether I’m eavesdropping or not. “So lively! The energy level! His endorphins are through the roof!” “If he doesn’t collapse within ten minutes, then this is the endgame formula for sure.” “No, it’s working and the subject functions at the threshold, but what they gave him was a fraction of the purity of what we have here. It has to be dispensed in to his body within a few seconds of getting processed to retain the agonist properties that burn off the nocturnus strand. What he has now are augmented senses, and nothing more. No strength, no speed, no indication of mental or psychic sensitivities. The full blown dose could still kill him instantly, and if it does…” “Then we’re back at square one, except with a finished formula and no test subject.” “Exactly.” “Wait, why can’t we just grab another junkie off the street?” “Tolerance. The flood of dopamine and serotonin is not just a booster. It would instantly overload and incapacitate any normal human brain. The formula intakes through the Mu agonist receptor, which has been reformulated by this one’s opiate use. He’s the only person who has injected Pavel’s diacetylmorphine at high levels for years, and Pavel is the only known source of ninety percent purity or greater

42 minutes

May 14, 2017

Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances

Heavy Rain

aliens, anomalies, anomalous falls, beings, creatures, entities, god, Lovecraftian, monsters, natural disasters, parents, rain, rainfall, Ryan Brennaman, sci-fi, science fiction, storms, strange, sundown syndrome, sundowners syndrome, unexplained, weather

It was supposed to be such an uneventful day, but overhead the clouds churned and plotted. Rebecca Madison saw and heard the roaring of the wind against her car, but she didn’t care. It was warm inside, so what did the fierce cold outside have to do with her? It didn’t matter. There were only two things that mattered to Rebecca at that moment. The first was the clock, and the numbers on it. “7:46”, it read. It was 7:46 on a Monday morning, and she needed to be at her desk at SMC, a pneumatics manufacturer, by 8:00. Her drive had another fifteen minutes to go, at least, and that was hoping against all odds that she could hit every green light. She knew that wouldn’t happen, but she didn’t worry about it just yet. She was still far in the country. The road before and behind her was empty. She pushed the speedometer from “65” to “70” MPH. She worked relations. Not glamorous, but it was all she had, and she was damn good at it. Lately, however, she’d been pushing her luck. She’d made arriving late a bad habit. Well, it’s easy when it’s never noticed. It wasn’t consistent. Not every day, but at least twice a week she slipped in under the bell. The game had changed when her supervisor noticed, and since their little talk last week everything got more complicated. Everything was too complicated as of late. That was thanks, majorly, to her other concern back home. Her mother. Rebecca had never married. She lived alone, for many years, and that was perfect. She thought it would be no hassle at all when she asked her mother to move in with her. It had been right after her father died, and she couldn’t bear the thought of her mother alone. No home besides hers would do. As the years went by, she started to wonder if it had been worth it. Her mother, nearing an impressive 95 years of age (come next April), was still a very smart woman. Rebecca saw that every morning. The only issue was that her mother could no longer retain that spark. Her mother had fallen prey to sundowners syndrome. Every morning, her mother was still the woman she remembered, sans the folds in her face, but come night the very sight of her was more than disheartening. It was nearly unbearable. Rebecca didn’t want to use the word, but it was an annoyance. That’s why Rebecca always ran so late. She enjoyed seeing her mother in the morning, dreading the state she’d come home to find her in, and there was so much to manage. She had to lock doors and hide keys so she wouldn’t wander outside. There were so many medications. She had to help her to the bathroom, and get her dressed. She promised her she’d never put in her in a home, and now that promise was more solidified than ever. Rebecca knew that she would never see her mom in the mornings again if she was to do that. It was hard, but Rebecca and her mother did their best. She was determined to do so for as long as they had left. The thought came to her that morning as it did every morning. She should call her mother, talk to her just for a little bit longer before the day ruined her. That’s all she’d need. Her mother didn’t need to be physically strong to help lift the weight of depression from her shoulders. But, as she reached for her purse, she realized that her phone had never left the bedside that morning. It had been neglected in her panic to get out the door. It made her eyes tear up with frustration, rather than sadness. All she could do was sit in the white noise of the radio, and watch the endless fields of dead corn roll by. She pushed the speedometer again, up to “75,” and the radio came to the forefront of her mind. Her ear clung to it out of the blue, but, honestly, she didn’t hear it. “—still are unsure of the scope of the event. All that’s known at this time is that the Chinese government has declared a state of national emergency. At the moment, China has released no official details of the events that have transpired over the last twenty-four hours, and they have ignored all of the UN’s offers to assist them. No sources yet have been able to confirm any further details as communication with the troubled nation has grown difficult, with many intelligence satellites showing major power outages within the nation’s borders. An abundance of rumors, however, have started circulating around that stretch from incredibly believable to the utterly improbable. While the intelligence community has flat-out denied a majority of these rumors, it’s hard not to notice that a lot of them sound incredibly similar to ones that started circulating just last week about Somalia where—“ Rebecca turned the radio from AM to FM. She was in no mood for news that morning. She preferred music. She allowed herself to get lost in it. The country song fit her surroundings like a puzzle piece. A silo grew closer on her right-hand side, a picturesque farmhouse nestled right beside it, and on the left, she spotted an older, blue Ford pickup coming towards her carrying a horse trailer. The sights of Ohio. She felt much younger, and that’s all she wanted. The moment was so perfect that it had perfectly distracted her from the red, raccoon-sized mass that landed on the road ahead. With a bang, her tire was shredded. Only once before had Rebecca felt a tire blow, and she’d been seven at the time; her father was at the wheel. She remembered how calmly he’d handled it. He gritted his teeth and willed the truck to stay on the road. He’d tensed up, but he’d handled it expertly. That’s the only way he could do things. She wished he’d passed that on to her. She screamed, and instinctively she jerked the wheel to the right. The car skidded and hit gravel. She overcorrected again, just barely managing to save her car from sliding into the ditch that hugged the side of the road. The car skidded into the oncoming lane, spinning to face the way she’d just come from as she slammed on the brakes. She gritted her teeth, expecting more, but mercifully her car came to stop without further incident. Everything came to a stop except for her heart. It was pounding faster than it had in nearly five years. She remembered the truck, but about ten seconds too late had it still been an issue. Fortunately, it was no longer an issue. The man driving the truck had managed to stop about two car lengths away. He was already on foot, and he was almost to her door. The knock of his knuckle on the glass brought her back to reality. “Hey, miss?” he asked, concerned. “You alright?” She eyed the older man. He was as thin as a twig, with a bushy mustache and a sundried face. His eyes squinted down at her as she nodded her head in affirmation. He nodded his back. “My phone’s in the truck, hold tight. I’ll be right back.” With that, he turned and hustled back to his truck’s cab. As he searched, she relieved herself of her seat belt. She felt like she’d been punched in the chest by a gorilla. Her head was heavy. She realized she was dizzy as she took that first step out of the car. It was like she was walking on jelly. Gripping the door with white knuckles, she fought against the fierce wind. It threatened to at least knock her on her ass, if not carry her away altogether. She closed her eyes, held on, and took several deep breaths. It would have helped her calm down a great deal, had the old farmer not accidentally startled her when he returned. He must have seen it in her eyes because he quickly apologized. “Sorry, you sure you’re okay?” “Yes,” she said, trying to convince herself more than him, “I’m fine. Are you ok? I’m so sorry. Did I spook your horses?” “I stopped in plenty of time, miss, and it’s an empty trailer. Horses are about ten miles down the road. It’s ok. Your tire blow out?” She wasn’t too sure. Everything was still spinning. “I think so. Shit, I hope not, though. I don’t have a spare.” “It’s ok, miss,” the farmer chuckled as he put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Everything’s gonna be just fine. Let’s go check out the damage.” He was very kind to her. The farmer cautiously and supportively guided her by the arm, making sure to correct her every sway. They took their time as they moved around the front of the car. Sure enough, when they reached the right front wheel there was almost nothing left on the rim. The rubber had been shredded. It looked like she’d driven it over a field of razor wire. “Whew!” the farmer said. “Yup, your tire’s seen some better days, I reckon.” Shaking her head in disbelief, Rebecca felt like vomiting. The wind continued to assault her face with a frigid, ungodly cold. The farmer didn’t seem to mind it as much. His focus was back down the road, towards the rest of her tire. “We should go clear that from the road,” he said. She begrudgingly went along. It had nothing to do with him; she just wanted to be inside the warm embrace of her car’s heater again. The damn marshmallow of a coat she was wearing didn’t do a thing to help. She took out the fuzzy, black gloves she kept in her pocket and slipped them over her hands. The warmth didn’t come fast enough for comfort. Comfort was knowing that now she had an excuse for being late. That should have taken a load off, but she realized she’d have to prove it. A situation made difficult by her lack of phone. “Hey, thanks for your help, Mr.—?” She intentionally trailed off, hoping he’d fill in the blank. “Sanders,” he replied. “Phil Sanders. It’s absolutely no problem at all, Miss—?” “Madison. Rebecca Madison,” she said, shivering. “Does your phone have a camera on it, by chance?” He eyed her and smirked. He held up a black smartphone. “Just ’cause I’m old doesn’t mean that I don’t—” “Sorry!” she interjected, chuckling with him. “I didn’t mean anything by it.” “Just giving you a hard time, miss. What about the camera?” “Well, I left my phone at home.” Another wind struck her and shook her. “I was wondering if you could help me out and take some pictures. You know? For the boss, mainly.” “I hear ya. I think we’ll be able to come to an agreement.” They were almost at the remains of her tire. The tattered remains sat about fifty yards away from where her gray civic had stopped. The rubber had peeled right off her rim. The treads still faced down, and the torn strands of rubber curled upwards, like a flower petal. “Hey, looks like it stuck the landing,” Phil said, eyeing the rubber. He bent downwards and gripped either side of the strip. He tried to stand up with it, but he couldn’t lift it. Both ends came up, but the middle held fast to the road like it was glued there. With a huff, he tried again. “What in the world?” he asked on the third try, grunting hard. He scoffed. “Holy crap, what did you hit?” “I have no idea,” Rebecca said, hugging her chest. “I didn’t see anything. One second the tire was there and then the next it—wasn’t.” She hesitated on the last word as Phil tried for a fourth time because she saw something under the rubber. She only got a peek, but she could see that it was red. “Hold on,” She said, “It looks like it’s stuck on something.” “Stuck? What do you mean ‘stuck’? On what? Superglue?” He chuckled. Rebecca looked every which way, checking for traffic. With the coast still clear, she urged Mr. Sanders to try again. When he did so, she saw the red mass again. It looked like a giant piece of bubble gum at first. She was dumbfounded, and she got on her knees. “It’s stuck on something gooey.” “Gooey, ya say?” Phil put the rubber back down and got on his knees with Rebecca. He shined his phone’s flashlight under the rubber. There certainly was a gooey mass stuck to the tire, and it was wet and rank. The wind carried its stench right into Rebecca’s nose, and the vomit she’d been holding down almost came. The smell was thick and hot. It was the smell of rot. “Looks like you hit a coon or something,” Phil said, backing away. “God damn fresh one too. That’s weird though, with the tire. I don’t know why it’s stuck to him. Never seen anything like it before.” “I haven’t either.” She said, her right hand clasped over her mouth. “I didn’t see any fur on it. It just looked like—like meat.” “Yeah. If you hit them hard enough that’s what they’ll look like. I’m going to go ahead and call the state boys in real fast. We’re going to need somebody a little younger than both of us to take care of this mess, if you know what I mean.” With a smile, he escorted her back to her car. He continued talking as he dialed on his phone. “I also think we should get some EMT’s out here and check on you.” “No, thank you. I’m fine,” she said, grinning to assure him. She didn’t want the hassle. “I think the state boys will want it, too. Might as well just ask now, and get everyone here at once,” he said, trying to coax her. “Maybe, but I’m telling you I’m fine. Just a bit dizzy.” “You wanna make the call?” he offered. “I’ll let you decide. I don’t want to speak for ya, one way or another.” He smiled and handed her the phone, which she took hesitantly. “Thank you,” she said as she took the phone. “It’s no problem. Now, let’s see what we can do about that tire first. I think I may have a jack in my—” His question was cut off by a loud thud that came from her car. On her now dented hood, sat a large, bulbous mass the size of a college textbook. Whatever it was held the same consistency as the thing she had hit with her tire. Given a clear look at it, it looked as though it’d been chewed up and spat out. Rebecca looked up, and saw nothing but clouds. She didn’t know what she expected to see, but she had hoped for some clue. The thing didn’t just fall out of the sky. It couldn’t have. “What in God’s name?” Phil asked, moving towards it. He could only get so close before he had to pull his undershirt up over his nose. “Was that there before?” Rebecca asked, trying to rationalize the blob’s presence. “I don’t think so. I think it just fell onto your car. But where did it come from? God, it reeks.” Step by step, Rebecca brought herself closer to the appalling mass. Her stomach churned faster than the angry clouds above. Whatever it was, whatever it used to be, there was no evidence of it now. It resembled nothing natural that she could think of. It was just a figureless blob. A red stream of liquid ran off it, slowly dripping down the hood of the car. She pushed the notion that it could be blood from her head. Blood from what? That wasn’t meat, was it? The only part that wasn’t blood red stuck out of the top like a spine. It was small, white, and whereas the rest of the mass seemed soft to the touch this part was obviously solid. When she got closer, Rebecca saw that it split into two, white prongs. Rebecca took a step back when her mind gave the protrusion a name. “Is that—is that a tooth?” She asked, even though she was confident in her assessment. She didn’t know what the blob was, but the protrusion was very obviously the root of a tooth, possibly a human tooth. Phil didn’t have a chance to answer before Rebecca finally let loose her stomach on the black asphalt. She proceeded to collapse beside it, her head spinning and pounding. “It can’t be,” Phil said, his voice shockingly less playful than it had been. “That’s not—” There was another thud. This time, however, it came from the fields. It was accompanied by a sickening crunch. Rebecca didn’t want to see it, but she did. Dead stalks were flung into the air above it. Then, before the stalks settled, another blob dropped beside it amongst the husks of corn. Pieces of corn stalk stuck to its sides and held fast. The mass rolled, and jiggled, recovering from the force of the impact. More followed. Another piece fell, behind them this time. It struck nearly two hundred yards from the road. Before that one had even settled, another one hit the road behind Phil’s truck. Rebecca had watched as that piece fell straight down from the sky above. No arch. It hadn’t been chucked. It had been dropped. Another piece reached the row of barren trees beyond the fields to her left. The weight of the blob snapped the higher branches. She couldn’t see where it landed, if it had landed at all. One struck the top of the silo causing it to ring loudly, the sound echoing inside the structure. The piece stayed there, holding to the top of the silo’s dome with ease. It had stuck like glue. Rebecca looked up to the sky. Overhead as the clouds swirled and fought, the blobs fell from somewhere beyond them. They started as black ink drops against the gray skyline, but as they plummeted they took on color and grew into the disgusting blobs that now littered the landscape. All around them the drops came faster and faster. The horror of it all struck Rebecca as a piece fell not one yard from her hand. A warm, red liquid splattered across her face. The sky was raining flesh. “Get up,” Phil said, also looking to the sky, with caution and disgust. He turned back to Rebecca. “Miss Madison, please, get up now! You need to get in your car before—” As if out of pure, cosmic irony, a large chunk of flesh, almost the size of a pillow struck Mr. Sanders on his right shoulder. The impact yanked him towards the ground, but he took the hit. He miraculously managed to stay on his feet. That didn’t stop him from screaming. “Oh my God!” Rebecca exclaimed, quickly getting to her feet and rushing over to his side. The thing was still stuck to his arm. The unholy thing had molded itself around his shoulder and arm. It formed a grotesque cast, pinning his arm to his side. Extensions from the impact had splattered out to stick to his face and chest. He wheezed in pain. “I think it broke my damn shoulder. Ah, get it off. Please. Get it off,” he begged her. “Yeah, hold on,” Rebecca said, watching the sky. With every second, the rain of flesh fell faster. Heavier. With every second she felt increasingly uncomfortable, increasingly terrified that the next one would strike her next atop her head. She pictured it wrapping around her face, and smothering her in rotted darkness. She turned her attention to the injured old man. Putting Mr. Sanders’s phone into her pocket, she reached slowly for the disgusting mass stuck like a leech to his shoulder. She forced her gloved hands onto the thing, and she gripped it tight. As she did so, her fingers slowly started to sink inwards. She winced as an unwelcome warmth soaked into her gloves. Mr. Sanders brought his other hand up to help. It sunk in deep. She took a deep breath, inhaling an unfortunate amount of stench, and gave it a good pull. She managed to yank Mr. Sanders forward, but the mass didn’t budge. It was stuck to him like glue. With another tug, she realized her hands were stuck there too. “Harder!” Phil pleaded through the pain. “Pull it harder!” “My hands!” Rebecca said, panicked. “My hands are stuck!” Just once she tried to wiggle her fingers free, but they were stuck inside the blob. She tried again; downwards this time. She pulled with all she had, but all she did was pull Mr. Sanders off his feet. He struck the asphalt hard, and she nearly came with him. They’d accomplished nothing. Mr. Sanders grimaced, and tears started to flow down his face as she pulled him back up. Rebecca saw that it wasn’t working, so she set about trying to free herself. She didn’t want to, but her survival instincts were in full gear. They couldn’t waste another second outside. She struggled, twisted, and pulled, but the revolting thing was held faster than anything she’d ever seen. She tried pulling with her left hand, and she pushed with her right. Her left glove gave, and part of her hand came free. She realized she could pull her hands out of her gloves. “Please, try again,” Mr. Sanders begged pitifully. He could barely keep his eyes open. His shoulder was dislocated at the very least, and she knew it. There was nothing she could do alone to pull that mass off his arm. All that mattered now, for both of them, was that they find cover. Quickly, she fought against the gloves to free her hands. The pounding of the rains grew faster, and heavier. Another piece hit her car, right on the top of the cab. Three struck Mr. Sanders’ truck. All of them were far too close for comfort. Mr. Sanders didn’t realize what Rebecca was doing until it was too late. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “No, please, don’t. Please. Try again, please. It stings. It stings!” She ripped her hands free of the gloves with a grunt just as a chunk smacked against her windshield. It was the size of a car tire. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do right now. We need to get to cover. Get back to your truck. Stay there until this is over.” She didn’t hesitate to turn around and open her door, but Mr. Sanders could only stumble backwards. With a limp, he started to pull himself towards his truck. Groaning, he watched the sky through his watery eyes. Scared, Rebecca slammed her door shut just as another pounding thud came from the roof. She yelped, and she fumbled for her keys. They were in her pocket, that was good, but then she felt something else. A phone. Mr. Sanders’ phone. She pulled it out and looked out her rearview mirror. Outside everything was consumed by a downpour of flesh, and there was Mr. Sanders limping through. It was by the grace of God that Mr. Sanders got as far as he did. He almost managed to reach the door of his truck. He could have touched it. A smaller drop of flesh, the size of a book, hit his left foot and glued it to the spot. Rebecca could only watch as he stumbled and fell hard to the ground. On his front, he could only lie there at the mercy of the sky above. Rebecca tried to see him out her rear window, but so many drops had accumulated there it was impossible. She could only watch the terrible scene unfold in her side mirror. He looked hopeless. The pounding of the rain drowned out any sound, but she saw his head moving. He was yelling for help. A large chunk of flesh struck his back, breaking it. Another pinned his leg. All the while, Rebecca never moved. She was safe, and her fear kept her rooted in that seat. Had a glob not swallowed her mirror first, she would have witnessed another drop strike him right on the back of his head, delivering his face quickly into the asphalt below. It was an accidental mercy. She started to hyperventilate. She had no idea what to do. The rain outside just kept coming and coming. In reality, the rain only lasted a few minutes, but it seemed so much longer. It seemed like it stretched on for hours on end. For that seeming stretch of forever, all Rebecca could do was scream. She moved to the backseat, away from her cracking windshield, and brought her legs in close to her chest. She hugged herself as the heavy rain fell over her. Consumed her. Soon, the drops would cover every inch of her car and its windows. They ate the light. She was left, alone, in darkness. Long after the barrage outside had ceased, Rebecca cried in darkness. Thankfully the windows had held back the physical barrage, but they could not hold back the stench. That had flooded inside almost instantly. It had threatened to suffocate her then. She didn’t even notice it anymore. Eventually, Rebecca was able to move her arms, and her feet, and her legs, but she didn’t want to. The car had protected her, but Rebecca still felt unequivocally surrounded. Like a child under their sheets, she didn’t want to let one single limb hang free. The monsters might get it. The darkness wasn’t total. A dim glow precipitated between the masses outside. Red light managed to leak through the edges of the blobs, where pieces met. The jagged lines covered her car like lightning. It did her no good. Not nearly enough light could seep through to offer her any illumination. When she couldn’t handle the weight of the darkness anymore, she reached for Mr. Sanders’ phone which lay face down on the center console. She fumbled for it, and accidentally knocked it to the floor. Light flooded out from within. It was blinding, but welcome. After giving her eyes time to adjust, she searched for the flashlight. She was so thankful that the phone had stayed unlocked. She found it, and the entire car was illuminated. She wasn’t ready for what she saw. A claustrophobic paralysis found her as she beheld the things stuck to her car. Pressed tightly against the glass, the things seemed to embrace her. Most of the glass had held, except for her rear window. It had nearly shattered, but every crack and shard was held fast in place by the revolting masses. They didn’t move. They hugged her car in silent stillness. Rebecca recalled the tale of Jonah and whale, and she imagined this was how Jonah felt. She had been swallowed alive. She needed to get out. She flipped over. She hesitated to reach for the door handle; she didn’t want to get any closer to those things than she needed to. She pulled, and when she heard the “click” she pushed. Her whole body pressed up against the door. Her face met the window. But the door didn’t budge. The masses outside held the door like glue. They fought against her. It was like trying to move a mountain. Rebecca screamed in protest. She couldn’t be trapped in here. No. Not in here. Panicking, she shoved again. She threw her weight into that door time and time again, but it didn’t move. It couldn’t. She might as well have been trying to beat her way through a concrete wall. After trying every single door, she found that they all held firm. She was truly trapped, and calling for help wasn’t an option. She’d tried, three times, to dial 911 on Phil’s phone. No matter where she was in the car she couldn’t get any signal. The mass had drowned out the light, and any hope she had of contacting the outside world. It seemed the car was shrinking by the second. In frustration, she lashed out with her feet. She aimed at the window, hoping maybe it would break. Hopefully the things would fall off, instead of in. If they stuck without the window, she decided she’d cut her way out. One of the shards had to have been sharp enough. With a determined, forceful thrust she brought her heel to the window. The only thing she almost managed to break was her leg as she hyperextended her knee. The pain returned her to her previously curled state. She began to cry, and plead for someone to help her. Her instincts told her that if she screamed then somebody would hear. Somebody would come along. Help would come. Her heart told her that was a lie, and it was, for a while. Soon she grew exhausted, and her voice grew hoarse. Not a single sound came from outside her car. The wind had ceased with the rain long ago, and there’d been nothing since. No birds, no cars, no people. That silence allowed the small “Crunch” outside to be amplified nearly tenfold. She froze, and listened. She thought it had to be her imagination. But as another crunch came, and then another, she realized it was real. It was like the sound of someone stepping on dry leaves. Something was definitely moving outside. The crunching approached her car, and she heard him speak. “Hello?” The voice was older, and haggard. It sounded muffled through the blobs. “Is anyone in there?” He didn’t have to ask her twice. “Yes!” she screamed, flying to the window. “Yes! Yes! Please! Help me, please! I can’t get out. Please!” The man came closer to the car. He stopped just outside. “You’re covered. This shit’s almost impossible to move. It holds fast. Give me a minute. It’s starting to dry now. I have some tools at my house. I’ll be right back.” Rebecca smiled and thanked God. He must have lived in that home next to the silo. It was all ok. “Yes, please, thank you!” she said, almost all at once. The crunches returned, faster, as the man turned away. Relieved, she knew it would be over soon. Again, the day sought to destroy her expectations. Then the crunching stopped. Rebecca put her ear to the window, trying to listen. The glass was uncomfortably warm against her face. There was nothing but the roar of her own blood in her ears. Then a moan. That moan continued for several seconds before it evolved into a short gag, a gasp. Something had happened to the man. He must have only been four or five yards from the car. He cursed and grunted. There was a louder “crunch” that was followed by silence. That silent moment hung on the air, and Rebecca pushed harder against the window. She whispered a single “Hello?” under her breath. Then the moment was shattered by his scream. Rebecca pulled her face from the window as if she’d been burned. “What?” she asked, panicked. “What happened? Are you okay? Hey! Are you okay!?” She was clueless. Had the man fallen? Maybe he’d rolled his ankle and fallen, but could that cause him so much pain? His scream was primal, like a wounded animal, and it ended for a moment. It was just long enough for the man to take a quick breath, and then he continued; the yell increasing in volume and pitch. “What!?” she pleaded. “What is it? Please! Tell me! Are you okay? Talk to me!” He did, in a raspy, shrill, and pained voice. “Stay in the car!” It sounded like he choked on the last syllable as a ghastly, gurgled yell came from his lips. Through his pained cries, Rebecca could only make out so much of what happened next. “Stay—growing—I feel it—don’t—out of that car! Oh—God—No!” Then, unexpectedly and instantly, the screaming ceased. The silence returned, and Rebecca shook. Her mind raced, and her breathing came in short, fast gasps. Tears warmed her face. No, she couldn’t let him leave her. She wouldn’t be alone again. “Hey! Get up! What’s happening? Sir? Sir!” With a determined fury, she brought her hand and the butt of the phone to the window pane. That’s when it moved. Almost in perfect synch with her motion, one of the blobs that had embraced her window stirred. The light showed her every gruesome second. The movement was small; a tiny, half-dollar sized section on the bottom split in two and peeled itself apart. It was unexpected enough to send Rebecca stumbling backwards. At first, it had startled her; then it revolted her. The small section that split open revealed a new structure below it. Small, round, and moving, Rebecca realized she was looking at an eyeball. A seemingly human eyeball. The thing had opened an eye, and was peering into the car through a cloudy, blue iris. It searched about for just a moment before it locked its gaze right on her. “No,” Rebecca said, as if saying it would change her reality. Horrified, she couldn’t break away from the unexpected and unwelcome staring contest. The eye held its gaze, and then it blinked. Rebecca wondered what it was thinking, this thing made of flesh and blood. She couldn’t resist. Its dead stare offered no clues. Could it think at all? Why was it staring at her? Why had any of it happened? Then, out of the corner of her eye, and at the farthest edge of the light’s reach, she saw it. Another eye had emerged from beneath the pulpy masses. When she shined the light on it, she saw that it, too, was looking directly at her. It didn’t seem possible that it could see her. Once brown, the cornea now wore a red gash across its surface, straight through its pupil. Despite that injury, however, it followed her perfectly, no matter where in the car she moved. Both of the eyes followed her. Before long, they were everywhere. Every single piece of flesh that had fallen from the sky and stuck to her car eventually opened an eye, a singular eye, and they all stared down at her. She no longer felt alone. Instead, she felt like a trapped animal. A fox in a trap. The hunters didn’t need to make a move. They only needed to watch, and wait. She was their prey. Rebecca dropped the phone, and the light died. The car was cast into near total darkness once more. The darkness might have been comforting, had she not been so perfectly sure that those eyes still watched her. She knew the darkness couldn’t protect her. How long must have passed inside that car? Rebecca was unsure if she had blacked out, or if time had simply slipped her by, but when she regained some semblance of sanity it was late in the afternoon. The phone, its battery now at a measly 15%, showed the time was 4:55. Rebecca should have been home, but instead, she was lost. Trapped. She needed to be with her mother. It may have been that realization that brought motion back to Rebecca’s body. From seat to seat, and corner to corner, she scrambled. The phone’s energy fell, the clock ticked, but the bars wouldn’t return. She couldn’t find a goddamn signal. Cautiously, she tilted the screen of her phone to the window. Some light reflected off, but just enough was able to illuminate some of the flesh beyond. To her relief, the eyes were closed. She made sure to check all of them. Part of her wondered if the eyes had simply been a product of her paranoia. The blobs had revert

36 minutes

April 27, 2017

Beings and Entities, Monsters, Creatures, and Cryptids, Natural Disasters and Storms, Science Fiction and Aliens, Strange and Unexplained

Dead Man’s Rights

Alex Taylor, Video Narratives OK

Mr. Cadson had been sitting up at the bar for some time. The lights and the music were both very low, casting a sort of malaise over the entire half-empty room. A group of men in the corner were watching a baseball game on the television on the wall. A few small groups of people murmured among themselves at the tables. Cadson had been staring into several glasses of bourbon for the past two hours, the room around him slowly fading into a dull blur of colors and sounds. The girl tending bar just replaced his glass when it ran dry and the cycle continued. It was around midnight when the stranger approached him. Cadson turned to see a middle aged man sitting in the stool to the left of him. The man seemed to be the only thing in the room not covered in the haze of inebriation. He didn’t wave to the bartender, nor did the bartender seem to see him. He merely turned and looked directly into Cadson’s eyes. The stranger was nondescript for the most part, except for the eyes. They were bright gold, shining in the dim light. Cadson had never seen anything quite like them. When the man talked, his voice was low and smooth, like a storm in the distance. “Hello, Mr. Cadson,” said the man. “I’m Death.” Cadson believed him. No amount of liquor led him to that belief. It was more of an instinct, that a man should know Death when it stood before him. “Pleasure to meet you,” said Cadson, deciding that being polite was the correct option. “Can I buy you a round?” Death laughed. It was a fake laugh, although a very good one. It sounded like someone that has already heard every joke in the world a thousand times, but is still trying to be polite. “I don’t drink, I’m afraid,” said Death. “I’m just here to tell you that you’ll be throwing in the towel somewhat earlier that you would expect.” “And why do I get the head’s up?” asked Cadson. He grabbed several nuts out of a bowl in front of him. They had been the only things he’d eaten in half a day. Death leaned up onto the bar, folding his hands under his chin. Death sighed deeply, as if he didn’t want to hear that question. “Because, Mr. Cadson,” said Death. “I’ve begun doing contract work.” “Successful guy like you?” asked Cadson. “Didn’t think you’d need the extra cash.” He looked over at Death, only to find the seat empty. He considered for the first time that he was merely hallucinating. Someone to his right coughed lightly. Cadson turned to find an old woman looking at him with the same pair of gold eyes. “I merely take a small something from the people that require my services,” said the more elderly Death. “Although I can’t say it’s all for that. What do I need with a memory or a sliver of a man’s soul? After sticking to the script for millions of years, it’s mainly about the thrill. And I enjoy the conversation.” Death smiled, showing a mouthful of yellowed dentures. “You still didn’t really answer the question,” said Cadson. Death stopped smiling quite so broadly. “Very perceptive for someone on their sixth drink,” said Death. “Which makes this all the more fun.” Death disappeared from the seat. Cadson swung around to find an athletic looking young man to his left. The gold eyes seemed to pierce him even deeper. “A question is an amazing thing, Mr. Cadson. The first thing a mortal does upon being born is wonder. Upon waking up, entering a room, meeting someone, or even looking up into the sky, the first thing you do is wonder. Immortals don’t wonder. They know.” The longing in Death’s voice was half heartbreaking and half terrifying. “If you’re going off the script, they don’t know, do they?” asked Cadson. His head was beginning to clear, as adrenaline and fear began to sweep away the haze. Death chuckled. “No, they don’t,” said Death. “And that terrifies them.” “Who’s ‘them’?” “That’s something I can’t answer,” said Death. “There are rules, you see. I can do this as long as everyone follows the rules. The rules you have to worry about say that dead men have certain rights. Most come by them naturally, but when I take a more active role, I’m required to tell you those rights. Hence, my presence here.” Death gestured back at the darkened, half-empty bar. “What rights do I have?” Death vanished again and reappeared as a young boy on the other side of Cadson. The eon-old eyes were much more disturbing on a ten year old face. “The first is the right of knowledge,” said Death in a high pitched voice. “All men are entitled to know the manner of their death prior to its occurrence.” “You’re saying everyone knows how they’re going to die?” “If anyone pays close enough attention to their life,” said Death. “They’ll know. Slow and painful or short and violent, they can all see it coming if they try. I’ve never seen anyone really try though. You though, Mr. Cadson, are going to die choking on one of those peanuts you’ve been eating.” Cadson stopped his hand as he was about to put another nut into his mouth. He placed it back into the bowl and pushed it away. “That won’t change anything, but if it makes you feel better, I suppose.” “And why do you have to tell me?” “Rules,” said Death. “If someone isn’t given full rights, shit happens.” Cadson almost laughed hearing the kid version of Death say that, but stifled it. “Which brings us to your second right. The right of choice. There are many, many things that can happen after you die. And people always choose for themselves what happens to them. They don’t even know they’re doing it, but they do it.” “And I get to choose?” asked Cadson. “Do I get to know what the choices are?” “Believe me, Mr. Cadson.” The child disappeared. Cadson turned to see a beautiful woman to his left. In fact, she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. He hoped Death would stay that way for a while. “My job would be so much simpler if I could tell people the options. But don’t worry. You’ll choose before you die. Which brings me to your last right, and the main reason I’m here: the right of experience.” “I’ve got plenty of experience,” said Cadson, taking another swig of bourbon. “Believe me.” “But not enough,” said Death. The woman’s voice was light and sensual, with a hint of an unknown accent. Cadson tried to keep from looking at Death while it spoke. He worried that he might get distracted. “A mortal’s experiences are why it knows its death and why it makes its choices. Without those experiences, the system falls apart. So I’m here to impart knowledge to make up for what you’re going to lose.” “We having a Q and A session now?” asked Cadson. “More or less,” said Death. “Starting now, you will have four questions. I will have to tell you the complete truth about anything you ask, but there are certain things I can’t talk about. If you ask about those, you forfeit one question.” “And what are those?” asked Cadson. It took him less than a second to realize what he had done. He looked up into Death’s eyes and saw a slight triumph there. “One question down,” said Death. “Don’t feel bad. They all do that. I had one man that used all four in about ten seconds, so you’re still ahead of the game. In any case, you can’t ask about what happens after you die, anything that will happen in the future, or how to live forever. That’s it.” Cadson realized something that he hadn’t up until this point. This was a game to Death. A game that it very thoroughly enjoyed. That was its payout. “So I assume you’ll be thinking more carefully about the next three.” Death gave him a coy look that would have made any man fall in love. He realized exactly why it had waited until that point to take that form. But any alcohol in his system had been dissolved by pure fear at that point. These were perhaps his final chances to do anything with his pathetic life. “Who sent you to kill me?” asked Cadson, slowly and deliberately. Death smiled. “Mr. Holland, your business partner,” said Death. Cadson began to ask ‘why’, but slapped a hand over his mouth before the sound came out. Death laughed. “You know what?” it asked. “You caught that so well, I’m going to tell you why just for the hell of it. He found those certain files you didn’t want him to. The ones about the offshore accounts and the shady practices. He was most interested in the files you were planning to frame and blackmail him with.” Cadson stared down into his glass, but said nothing. “People don’t actually hire me consciously. It’s more a matter of mindset. How much they want someone dead and how much they’re willing to sacrifice. Mr. Holland, for instance, can no longer remember 1991, the happiest year of his life. That’s the year he got his master’s degree, met his wife, and had the best steak he’d ever eaten. To you it may not seem like much, but trust me, if he knew, he would not have agreed. So what next?” Several thoughts went through Cadson’s head at that moment. He wondered where his life went wrong. He wondered if there was any chance at all he was getting into any sort of heaven. He wondered if he really had known it was going to end this way. “I know this is important, Mr. Cadson, but I have places to be.” There was a hint of impatience in Death’s voice that made a single thought arise in Cadson’s head. It was almost like Death was worried. Cadson thought about it a bit more, making sure his question was perfect, and praying that he was right. Death stared in rapt attention as he opened his lips. “You have places to be. I have rights.” “Is…that a question?” asked Death, a look of confusion appearing on its face. Hope surged into Cadson. “Not at all,” he said. “If I don’t ask you the last question and my rights are not fulfilled, that means you can’t kill me early because shit happens. Right?” Death cocked its head to the side, a calculating expression on its face. Its golden eyes stared right through Cadson as it sat there in thought. Finally, a wide grin spread over Death’s face. It let out the lightest, most wonderful laugh that Cadson had ever heard. “That is correct, Mr. Cadson,” said Death, leaning in close. “But have you weighed the possibilities? You may be scheduled to die tomorrow. Isn’t there some answer you would be willing to give up one day for? Can you live knowing that you traded away the chance?” Death paused a moment. “And won’t Mr. Holland be very much trouble for you shortly?” “I’ll deal with it,” said Cadson. He turned away from Death and went back to sipping his bourbon. “Good night, Miss.” Death sighed and got up from the bar stool. It laid one hand on Cadson’s shoulder and lowered its lips to his ear, despite Cadson’s suspicion that no one else could hear it. “Not many have made it this far into the game, Mr. Cadson. Congratulations. But I want you to know that I always get my man. I’ve gotten every one of them in human history in fact. I’ll see you soon.” Death smiled once more and walked towards the door. As Cadson watched from the corner of his eye, the figure disappeared halfway across the room. He made a silent toast and drained the remainder of his glass. As he slammed it back onto the bar top, the bartender walked over to him. “Can I get another bourbon?” asked Cadson. The bartender looked at his watch. “I think you’ve got time for one more,” said the bartender. While the bartender poured the drink, Cadson looked back at the room and wondered if the people knew what had just happened, if it had, in fact, happened. The bartender put the drink down in front of him. “On the house, in fact,” he said with a smile before walking away. “Thank you,” muttered Cadson, his mind elsewhere. As he took the first sip of his drink, he absentmindedly reached for the bowl of nuts.

8 minutes

September 11, 2016

Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances

Jack

Absinthe Rose, beings, creatures, entities, haunted objects, monsters, toys

Deacon loved yard sales, yet despite the size of the ‘neighborhood’ sale he’d found on his way home from work, nothing had caught his eye. Disappointed, but glad he’d stopped anyway, Deacon turned away from the table he’d been going through and tripped over something at his feet. With a few ungraceful steps and a hop, he managed to keep himself upright, and looked to see what he had stumbled over, at the same time choosing to ignore the amused looks and snickers of his fellow treasure seekers. Acting as though nothing had happened, he bent over and picked up the object that had been carelessly left behind him. It was a simple box; covered in a thin, tight layer of old dark leather, approximately 18” x 18” x 18” with a brass latch and pin, securing a circular lid in its top, as well as brass trimming, and a crank on the right side. The design was clearly that of a Jack-in-the-Box. A common children’s toy that when turning the crank produced a tinny song and a cheap scare as an overly made-up clown or jester popped out upon the song’s completion. This though was not your average Jack-in-the-Box. Typically the toy, now mass-produced in various warehouses across the world, was made out of pressed tin, was feather-light, and about half the size. Also, Deacon could not recall ever seeing one that latched shut. What was the purpose in that? It would ruin the scare if the clown couldn’t ‘pop’ out at the appropriate time. He tried to pull the brass pin out, but it was stuck, and refused to budge even a hair. The result was the same with the crank as well and despite his efforts, he couldn’t get it to produce even a single musical note. Even though the toy didn’t work it intrigued Deacon. It was clearly old, and probably needed some repairs, but he was willing to bet, that even in its current state it was worth some money. He turned the heavy box over and around looking for a price sticker, but could find none. Someone here must be selling it; perhaps a kid had taken the sticker off in hopes of playing with it. He carried the Jack-in-the-Box to the only table with someone sitting at it. A rail-thin, middle-aged woman, with long red, extremely frazzled hair and tired blue eyes, sat with a clipboard and a metal box, exchanging various odds n’ ends for cash. He waited patiently behind three young boys who were debating the value of a box of sports cards. When they finally agreed on a price, they paid for their cards and moved on. The woman at the table looked at him with such exasperation he was sure she was going to demand to know what he wanted. He was surprised though when her expression softened, “Can I help you?” “I can’t seem to find a price on this thing. Do you know how much it is?” He held the Jack-in-the-Box out for her to see, but not far enough for her to take it from him. “What is it?” She tilted her head, but saw nothing but an old box. “A broken Jack-in-the-Box.” He turned the box enough to let her see the crank on the side. “You want to buy a broken toy? And a dirty one at that?” She sneered at the box in his hands, mistaking the aged leather for stains. Deacon shrugged, eager to make the purchase, but not wanting to let his excitement apparent. No need in letting on that he thought it might be worth more than a few dollars. “A project really, I like to repair things in my spare time.” “Oh, a handyman,” she said with a smile. “Well, I’ll tell you what. Seeing as it’s not marked, let’s say $5. It’ll go in the donation fund for the animal shelter, my favorite charity.” “Sounds fair,” Deacon agreed. Paying for his new treasure, he hurriedly headed for his car, eager to get home and see what he could do with the toy. * * * * * * An hour later he had yet to locate any information on his particular Jack-in-the-Box. There was no manufacturers stamp, no signature or initialing of any kind to indicate who might have made the toy. He was surprised though when examining the box for at least the fourth time since bringing it home, to find a pentagram surrounded by a Latin on the bottom. The sinister star, and Latin, were burned into the otherwise soft leather covering. He hadn’t noticed it earlier, and wasn’t sure how he could have missed it, but it was clear as day now. In his excitement over its age and potential profit, he must have overlooked it he reasoned. The pentagram certainly added to the mystery of the toy, and he had hoped that the Jack-in-the-Box’s uniqueness would make it easy to locate information about it, but it was quickly becoming apparent that maybe its uniqueness was the very thing holding up his search. Frustrated, but not discouraged he began yet another search when he heard the front door open. “Hi honey,” he called out to the only other person who had a key to his home; his girlfriend of two years, Melanie. “Hey baby,” she answered from the hallway as she stripped out of her jacket and shoes, and dropped her purse before joining him on the couch, and planting a kiss on his cheek. Deacon set his laptop aside, turned his head and eagerly returned her kiss. “How was your day?” he asked. “Oh you know, long, drawn-out and uneventful. Glad it’s over.” She laughed, tossing her dark hair over her shoulder, and cuddling up to Deacon. “What’s that?” Deacon reached over and picked up the toy, “Oh I picked this up on the way home from work, pretty sure it’s a Jack-in-the-Box.” “Pretty sure?” she asked quizzically, looking at it she couldn’t think of anything else it could be. “Well the crank won’t turn, and I can’t get the pin out of the latch,” he shrugged and handed the box to Melanie. “But it’s obviously old, so even if I gotta get some work done to it to get in working order, I think I can make some money off of it. I’ve been searching online ever since I got home>“ Melanie turned the box over to examine it, noting the pentagram and Latin before setting the heavy box on her knees and rubbing her fingers together, surprised, and a little disgusted by the soft texture of its surface. “Weird, huh? It’s covered in some type of leather, but that’s gotta make it even rarer, never seen one like that before.” Deacon grinned hopefully. Melanie nodded in agreement, “What does the Latin say?” “I’m not entirely sure, I’ve put it through a translator but it makes no sense, something about music and a sleeper.” “What about these?” She asked, pointing to the metal caps on the boxes corners. Deacon leaned in closer and noted that every three-sided cap had engraved on each of its flat surfaces the number six, so that each corner read 666. He stared for a moment in disbelief, how could he have missed that as well as the pentagram? Maybe it was time to go have his eyes examined he thought ruefully. “I didn’t even see those!” “I’m not surprised, not something you usually see on a toy,” Melanie said distastefully. “Well, it kinda makes sense,” Deacon said, straightening up. “The original toy has been traced back to a sixteenth-century German clockmaker, who got the idea from a thirteenth-century churchman who was said to have protected the city of Buckinghamshire by casting a devil into a boot. The clockmaker took this legend and created the ‘Devil-in-a-Box’, for the son of a local prince. When he turned the crank a simple tune played, and at the end, a comically painted devil popped out and surprised everyone. It was instantly popular; all the nobles wanted their own ‘Devil-in-the-Box’. Sometime during the Renaissance, the devil was replaced with a jester and the toy became known as a ‘Jack-in-the-Box’. Jack was an old nickname for the devil, so it still meant the same thing, but it seemed to have more appeal to people in that way,” Deacon explained. “Creepy,” Melanie sneered as she picked it up off her knees to hand it back to him. In her attempt to touch as little of it as possible she misjudged its heaviness and her hands slipped, nearly dropping it. Her reflexes were quick though and she caught it by the crank causing the old brass handle to move forward. When it did the first few beats of, Pop Goes the Weasel, rang out in clear tinny notes. “I thought it didn’t work?” Deacon excitedly grabbed the Jack-in-the-Box and set it on his own lap, “It didn’t. I couldn’t get it to turn at all. Must’ve just been stuck, guess you loosened it.” He tried pulling the pin out once again, but still, it refused to budge. He could see nothing that was preventing the pin from moving, no substance clogging up the latch, but still, it would not move. Shrugging off the disappointment he grabbed the handle and gave it a gentle push. Effortlessly the crank moved forward and the room filled with an eerily slow rendition of the children’s rhyme. Deacon tried to hurry it along, turning the crank faster, but it refused to speed up. As the climax of the song approached, Deacon felt his stomach tighten in anticipation even though he knew the scare wouldn’t come, because of the stuck pin. Melanie was tensed as well, mesmerized by the languid tune. When the ‘POP’ rang out, the single note did not disappoint, the lid of the toy jumping in its frame. Melanie gasped and grabbed Deacon’s arm who started in surprise himself; the vibration of the boxes movement still ringing through his hand. A second later the couple looked at each other and laughed. “Clearly Jack is ready to come out and play,” Deacon chuckled, pulling at the pin again. Melanie sighed loudly, shaking off the scare. “Well I am ready to eat,” she informed him, taking the Jack-in-the-Box from his lap, still touching it as little as possible, and setting it on the coffee table next to his laptop. “I am craving burgers from May’s.” In truth she didn’t really care where they went, she just wanted to be out of the house and away from the creepy toy. “You got it,” he agreed. * * * * * * Dinner at May’s had turned out to be an excellent idea. For nearly two hours they sat in a corner booth sharing food, wine, and stealing kisses while discussing their anniversary plans for the following weekend. After dinner Melanie asked Deacon to drive her home, she was a lightweight when it came to alcohol, and she did not want to drive herself home. Unable to convince her to stay at his place, he dropped her off and promised to bring her car by before she had to go to work the following day. Entering his place alone, Deacon felt a little light-headed himself, but decided a single beer wouldn’t put him over the top. Grabbing the drink, he flopped down on the couch and looked down at the Jack-in-the-Box, shocked to see the pin; stuck all day despite his best efforts, lay neatly next to the antique toy. Deacon set the unopened beer on the couch next to him, picked up the brass pin, and stared at it in confusion, unable to reasonably explain how it had come loose and landed so neatly next to the Jack-in-the-Box. “Ready to show yourself.” Deacon almost whispered, as he flipped the latch back and began to turn the crank. Deacon felt strangely apprehensive, and wondered for the briefest moment if perhaps it was better to leave Jack alone. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have the beer.” He said aloud to himself, shaking his head as he listened to the song’s slow progression. When the ‘POP’ came nothing happened, the box sat motionlessly. Not even a thud from within like earlier. Deacon sighed, “Now what?” He went to the kitchen to retrieve a butter knife. If he had to, he would pry the lid open. Sitting once again in front of the toy, Deacon raised the knife as the crank began to turn slowly of its own volition, and the tinny song began to slowly play. “I must’ve cranked it too much,” he told himself, as he watched in silence. As the pinnacle approached Deacon was suddenly unsure whether he wanted to meet Jack or not. Before he could decide, the circular leather-covered lid flipped soundlessly open and a blur of grey and white shot out of the box towards Deacon. More startled then he would ever admit, Deacon jumped and reflexively put up his hand, then cried out as a flash of white-hot pain shot through his palm. “Son of a bitch!” Deacon cradled his hand against his chest, and stared in disgust at the thing bobbing slowly up and down on its noisy, antiquated spring. Ten inches high, minus the spring, it looked more like a corpse than anything else, certainly not the typical ‘Jack’. The spine appeared to grow out of the spring itself and barely supported the thin malformed skeleton draped in stringy dry flesh. The mouth hung open revealing a dozen sharp-looking teeth, just below an empty hole where the nose should’ve been. Above the vacant hole, the eyes were sewn shut with thick strands of black thread. The top of its head came to a lopsided point, the skull almost entirely exposed except for a few stubborn patches of grey scalp clinging to short tufts of yellowed hair. Worst of all were the unnaturally long arms, and exaggerated fingers that looked more like claws, tipped red with Deacon’s blood and, pulled close to its desiccated rib cage. His palm throbbed painfully, reminding him that he was injured. Looking down at the rivulets of blood running down his wrist, Deacon angrily backhanded the toy off the table, satisfied by the noisy way it crashed to the floor before heading to the bathroom to clean himself up. * * * * * * After deciding he didn’t need stitches, and bandaging up his hand Deacon returned to the living room, picked up the Jack-in-the-Box, and set it back on the table. Despite his momentary anger, he still thought the toy could be worth something, and hoped he hadn’t damaged it with his childish gesture. Tomorrow he would look into taking it to an expert. For now, with Jack tucked back inside the box, a task that took far more effort than it should have, Deacon latched the toy, replaced the pin and went to bed. * * * * * * Just a few hours later Deacon woke, to a sound he knew, but couldn’t place. Wanting nothing more than to go back to sleep but knowing that it was not going to happen until he knew what woke him, he forced himself out of bed to investigate. Nothing was out of place in the bathroom, so he headed down the hall towards the living room. It was empty, and dark except for the bright blue light from his laptop battery. It flashed its low power warning off the amber colored glass of the broken beer bottle, which lay in a pile between the couch and the coffee table. Looking at the mess he realized what had woken him; the sound of glass breaking, but how had it happened? Even if the bottle had rolled off the couch, the distance was short and the floor was carpeted. It shouldn’t have shattered. As he stood there trying to think of a reasonable explanation for the beer bottle breaking he noticed the empty spot on the coffee table. Where was the Jack-in-the-Box? The brass latch pin once again removed, lay next to his laptop, but the toy was nowhere to be seen. He closed his eyes and retraced his last few moments before going to bed. He was certain he’d left the toy here. So where had it gone? Was someone in the house? Had he been robbed? Cautiously Deacon headed to the kitchen, the only room he’d yet to check. He’d barely stepped into the room when ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ began to play from somewhere behind him. He spun around, expecting to see someone sneaking out of his house with the toy, but he was surprisingly alone. The song though continued to play, and to Deacon it seemed to be slowing down, almost as if it were calling to him; enticing him. He left the kitchen, and followed the metallic tune through the living room, past the front door, and into the hallway where the song continued, past its climax only to start over again. “Melanie?” Deacon called out tentatively. He knew it wasn’t her, but hearing a voice, even just his own, made him feel less alone, less vulnerable as he searched for the misplaced toy. “Melanie, is that you?” He walked slowly down the hallway, certain the music was coming from his bedroom, but pausing to check the bathroom anyway. He didn’t want to admit it, not even just to himself, but he was delaying the discovery of the toy as long as possible. “Melanie, I thought you didn’t want to stay over tonight?” When he reached his bedroom door he could hear the music as clearly as if he were holding the toy, but even if it was overwound, the music shouldn’t still be playing. Plus he knew he hadn’t shut the bedroom door when he left the room. So… it had to be Melanie, it just had to be. As soon as he twisted the doorknob the music stopped. “Mel?” he pushed the door all the way open, hoping to see her standing there grinning triumphantly, pleased with herself for scaring him. Instead, he was greeted by an empty room. Empty except for the Jack-in-the-Box sitting squarely in the middle of his bed. A chill ran through him, covering him head to toe in thousands of goosebumps. The Jack-in-the-Box had not been on his bed he would have noticed it. Melanie had to be behind it. Stepping into the room he looked behind the door, in the closet, behind a large cardboard cutout of Superman, and even dropped to his knees to look under the bed. But despite his hopes, they were all empty. He was pushing himself up off the floor when the Jack-in-the-Box began its serenade yet again. It was so startling that his hand slipped and he landed back on his knees next to the bed. “Son of a…” the music picked up speed making Deacon’s heart skip a beat. “Stop!” he whispered pleadingly, reaching out to halt the crank. Before he reached it, though, it stopped, one note before the ‘POP’. Laughing in nervous relief, Deacon sighed, and dropped his head on the edge of the bed. He had never been so relieved, or felt so stupid. He stared at the box and couldn’t believe that he had let paranoia get to him, it was only a toy. Nothing but wood and metal. Nothing vicious. Nothing to be afraid of. While he knelt there berating himself the single note announcing Jack’s arrival chimed, the metallic ping was like a gunshot in the silence, and as he raised his head the monstrous toy sprang from its hiding place, its long spindly arms reaching out for him. This time Deacon screamed, and threw himself backwards, landing on his backside as Jack continued forward, the momentum carrying the toy off the bed where it landed between his legs. “Holy crap!” he cried angrily, not sure what he was angrier at, the toy, or himself for fearing it. It was very old; there were kinks and loose parts, things that surely needed to be repaired. Hell, the spring alone was in desperate need of oiling. He knew it was a desperate grasp at logic, but he didn’t care, it was better than any other explanation. The Jack-in-the-Box lay on its side, Jack and spring stretched out towards him, looking as though it were reaching for him. He shook his head, angry with himself for his apprehension, and forced himself forward to scoop Jack back into the box when it moved. The fingers stretching slowly as he reached for it. Deacon paused, not trusting his eyes, and in his hesitation, Jack confirmed his suspicions, its claw-like hands swinging viciously at his fingers. Too shocked to cry out, Deacon scooted back, his now bloody fingers making the floor slippery as he tried to stand. After a fumbled attempt though he succeeded, and stared in disbelief as Jack used its unnaturally long and narrow arms to pull itself across the floor towards him. “No way,” he breathed, his stomach clenching in fear as he sidestepped towards the hallway, not wanting to turn his back on it. He glanced towards the doorway out of the corner of his eyes and as he did he heard the rusty creak of the spring, and for a brief moment he had the crazy idea that Jack was putting himself away. But when he looked back Jack was air born, launching itself towards him, using the force of the spring to push its body forward, and dragging the heavy box along. It landed just a few inches short of Deacon’s bare feet, and in his panic he kicked at it, intending to send the awful thing flying across the room, hoping to break it. Before his foot even came in contact with the toy, Jack lashed out and grabbed onto his ankle, digging its sharp fingers deep into his skin. Deacon shrieked in pain and began to kick wildly, but instead of tossing the toy off it seemed to energize it, and Jack’s clawed fingers sought purchase higher up his calf as it sank its ragged teeth into his shin. “Get off!” He continued to thrash his leg furiously until his foot made contact with the heavy wooden box, and he felt at least two toes crush instantly. The pain was nauseating, and Deacon reached down to rip Jack off his leg. When his hands wrapped around the dry, thin body of the toy he could feel the fierce, raw strength that flowed through it despite its apparent delicacy, and Jack released his leg only to snake its way up his forearms. “No”! Deacon screamed in horror. Blood was running in half a dozen tiny rivers down his leg, and pooling beneath his feet while he fought to get the horrible thing off of him. As he struggled desperately he lost his balance, slipping in his own blood. There was a brief moment of hope, when he thought he could remain upright, but it was quickly lost as he fumbled into even more blood. He fell backwards hitting the floor hard, first his shoulders, and then his head, bouncing off the hardwood with a crack. The house was suddenly silent, and the pain faded away, as a heavy blackness came swimming up through the corners of his eyes. He saw Jack clawing its way up his chest, but felt nothing. “Please,” Deacon begged, as darkness enveloped him completely. * * * * * * Deacon draped his arm over his eyes having no desire what-so-ever to open them. His head pounded ferociously, but he had never been so glad to be awake, he was giddy with relief. That had been by far, the worst, and most vivid nightmare he had ever had in his entire life. He would definitely not be drinking that much again anytime in the near future. Sighing heavily at the thought of getting out of bed, but loving the idea of a hot shower, he put his arm down and sat up in one motion. But instead of the edge of his bed, and a sun-filled room, all he saw was blackness, filled with a deafening, and heart-sinkingly familiar creak. Deacon rubbed his eyes vigorously, trying to clear them. As he did his fingers caught something rough, something that made his heart ache with fear. He traced the roughness tentatively with his fingertips, knowing immediately what it was. Thick strands of thread bound his eyelids to the tops of his cheeks, and came together in knots at the corner of his eyes. He shook his head violently, trying to wake himself, he had to be dreaming he thought desperately, because the alternative was too terrible to concede, and he proceeded to fling himself around until he came up against a hard flat surface. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” he couldn’t hear his own voice, but he continued the mantra anyway as he explored the walls that confined him on all sides. With every movement, he was taunted by the awful metallic creak that filled him with a sickening dread that he didn’t want to confirm, but could not ignore. After what seemed to Deacon like an eternity of hesitation, he placed his hands on his chest, startled by the sunken spots he felt. He continued down his waist, aware of areas of pain, and a wetness he was sure was blood, but neither of which concerned him. He forced himself to explore further, past his belly button, and then; nothing. No more flesh, and bone, nothing but a cold downward spiraling ring of metal. In an instant all reason abandoned him, and he began to thrash, and scream, a raspy torturous cry, drowned out by the incessant creaking of his spring.

15 minutes

July 10, 2015

Artifacts and Objects, Beings and Entities, Monsters, Creatures, and Cryptids, Toys and Dolls