solewoman
Staff member
- Jul 27, 2006
- 19,642
- 21,620
so in 1999....what was the other purpose?
CREEPY STORY THREAD
- Thread in 'General' Thread starter Started by phil le0tard0,
- Start date
caponecartels
Banned
- Aug 29, 2006
- 2,319
- 27
Aunt
Spoiler [+]
Growing up, I knew very little about my mother's side of the family. They had basically disowned her after she decided to do the unthinkable and go to medical school in a time where (particularly in the deep, rural south) women would never be doctors. My relatives were scowling faces that wandered in and out of holiday gatherings, pausing just long enough to pass judgement and leave my dad outraged for about a week.
The only one out of the mob that really made an impression was my mom's older sister. This woman sent me acne medication for my birthday one year when I had started that awkward break-out phase. She once lectured me for twenty minutes about how, since I had inherited my mom's desire to work when I got older, no man would ever love me. I was ten.
I only give you this background so that you'll understand how unsettling it was when my grandmother called my mom one evening and asked her to fly down there to see them. My aunt had experienced what they called a "severe psychotic break" or something along those lines, and none of the relatives knew what to do. Or had the money to do it. My mother dutifully packed her things and I was somehow swept along for the ride. I was only fourteen at the time and still hadn't perfected the art of saying no to my parents.
The best thing about that age was that because I was awkward and mousy, people tended to ignore my existence. I got to sit in while the grandparents told my mom everything they knew about this breakdown and mom stressed over and over that she wasn't a psychiatrist. My aunt's latest ex was a meth dealer. Who knew what kind of stuff they had been brewing and sampling. There were also probably diet pills. She'd become obsessed with ouija boards. Depression runs in the family. She was always a little off. Etc. Etc. Etc.
All they knew was that after her work had called them asking for her, they'd found her completely naked in her living room, curled up and talking to herself. She had covered pages and pages of notebooks with nonsensical symbols and equations about gods and demons.
With few other options in BFE Georgia, my grandparents had locked my aunt up in the guest room and called my mother. Once again insisting that she was not a psychiatrist, my mom told my grandparents that they had to get my aunt sent to some kind of hospital where she could get the proper care and in the meantime they needed the supplies to hold them over while they decided what to do. Mom called in some prescriptions and got ready to head into town.
Unfortunately, the downside to being fourteen is that you're old enough to be expendable and somehow in the shuffle I was assigned the task of waiting at the house with my aunt and making sure nothing happened while they were gone. Mom promised they wouldn't be long and assured me waiting at home was better than being trapped on the hour-long drive into town with my grandmother.
Many Southerners will tell you that not all of the South is barren fields and terrifying locals. Some parts have amazing natural beauty. This is completely true and anyone close-minded enough to bypass an entire section of the countryside based on stereotyping is really missing out. Unfortunately, this house was not located in any of those ares. This was miles of red clay, tobacco crops, pine trees, power lines, the family house, me, and my bat**** aunt in the back room. There was no cable, no internet, and next-to-no cell reception.
I was stuck listening to my CD Player and playing Tetris on the couch, counting the agonizing minutes until my mom came back. Because time moved so slowly out there, I can't really tell you when I was clubbed from behind.
The thud was dull but the pain exploded in the back of my skull. I used to think that cartoon characters seeing stars was just a cutesy animation, but I swear my vision erupted into different colors as I tried to regain my senses. I didn't drop like people in the movies do, though. I was vaguely aware of someone grabbing my arms and dragging me from the sofa to the chair. I even stumbled a little in response.
Unfortunately, the static wouldn't clear enough for me to stop them as my hands were tied to the arms with something thin enough to cut. It was only after my midsection had been bound and my throat was well on its way that I snapped to. I rocked my head back and forth to get away, but it was no good. What I now realized was brown twine was roped around my neck to keep me upright. I can't look at the stuff anymore without itching.
Her work momentarily finished, my aunt moved around the chair to face me. She'd never been an attractive person, but at that point she looked like topless holy hell. The meth had left her with open sores, some of which she had scratched into ragged, weeping holes. Her arms were covered in blackening holes all oozing rot. When she grinned, I got a good look at the infamous meth mouth. I can't even describe the smell. That wasn't just from her wounds, either. She had caked $*!@ all over her legs, up to the scratches around her sagging breasts. But the worst part was the strange glint in her eyes.
There was someone home up there, but it was more feral than person.
When my eyes locked on hers, she grabbed a bit of her short blonde hair and tugged hard enough for her eyebrows to raise. "You see this? They say I can take your hair for myself."
Panic was finally starting to register as I realized what the hell was happening. Too tiny to be much of a fighter, I mostly just started hyperventilating and staring. I remember realizing that I couldn't remember the word for what Indians used to do to their war victims, but it was definitely about to happen to me. I started squeaking a little and trying to yell out as she disappeared into the kitchen for a moment and reappeared with a knife.
Thankfully, she just grabbed a clump of my long brown hair and started trying to saw it off inches off my scalp. It still hurt enough for me to finally cry out over it. Likely unsatisfied with her results thanks to a dull knife and thick hair, her attention turned back to my face.
"That's nothing," She hissed.
From behind my back she produced a hammer - probably what she had hit me with in the first place. The next swing brought it down on my left index finger. The fingernail cracked from the strength of the blow. My sobbing only made my aunt laugh harder and she tossed aside her tangles of hacked-off hair in favor of digging out the nail pieces and ripping them away one-by-one. The pain was so bad I nearly threw up.
This process repeated for the middle finger and my thumb, though for some reason the thumb took three swings to crack, thanks to the odd angle it was at. I vaguely noticed something through the pain as she yanked the left bit of nail from the bed: her head was tilted slightly and her mouth was hanging open. She was listening to something.
She finally stopped picking at my fingernails and leaned over to take my index into her mouth to suck on. My mind started desperately pulling itself together. I had to get out of there, but there was no way out. No matter how much I screamed, no one was around for miles. I had to survive long enough for my mother to get home. What if this lunatic killed my mother, though? Somehow, I chocked out some version of, "Why are you doing this?"
My aunt looked up from where she was sucking and narrowed her eyes, as if indignant that I had interrupted her. She sat up and proceeded to spit some of the blood she'd been drinking into my face.
"They chose you. And I hate you!"
At this point, she started ranting. I wish I could reproduce exactly what she said, but the details are blurred - half because this memory was so diligently repressed for so long and half because none of it made any sense at all. It was something about a dark lord and people in the walls, but there was also talk of the government and radio waves. What I do recall is that she paused and leaned in so close that our noses were nearly touching. The smell of her breath was so horrible I could taste it in my mouth.
"I know," she whispered. "You can smell my brain rotting. But let me tell you. He's not joking. He wants your skin. They all want your $+##."
Her tongue stretched out of her mouth and wormed itself over the lower half of my face.
I started sobbing and gagging at this point. She tried to get her tongue into my mouth but I spat at her, which enraged her. She screamed at me to be quiet and swung the hammer at my mouth. One of my front teeth hit the floor and the others weren't in much better shape. My memory is fuzzy from here on out, mostly a blur of fear and pain. I was completely sure I was going to die an agonizing death and the blood loss now occurring didn't do anything for my thinking.
I was aware of her shuffling away. I know she returned. My next clear memory is of her using a marker on the old wood floor to reproduced what I recognized as an ouija board.
Only half the letters were actually letters. The rest were twisted symbols that must have made sense in her addled mind. However, the standard "Hello" and "Goodbye" were obvious enough for the connection to be made in my head. My aunt took great care in creating this, focusing like a preschooler with some sort of demonic macaroni art. The whole time, she muttered to herself, but I never caught a clear sentence out of this. Using a glass coaster as a planchetter, she set to work summoning something.
By this point, I was silent... save for the sucking of air in through the new gap in my mouth. The room had gone completely still.
Nothing happened for several moments. The atmosphere was suffocating as every nerve in my body stood on edge. Without warning, the coaster slid to its first destination, making a screech as the wood scraped against the glass. I couldn't keep track of what it was spelling out and the nonsense symbols made it all the more difficult, but my aunt watched closely and nodded sagely every so often.
I tried to figure out if it was just my imagination that made it look like the coaster was moving without prodding from her fingertips. The dying afternoon had lowered the temperature considerably; even in the South, early autumn and shock was beginning to make me tremble. Each shake shot bolts of pain from my fingers, teeth, and head, but I couldn't take my eyes off the scene before me. I remember thinking to myself, "maybe they'll tell her to let me go."
A loud crash from the kitchen made me jump (crunching bits of tooth between my molars in the process) and caused my aunt to pause. She raced into the other room, yelled at something giddily, and returned to stalk towards me with feverish delight.
"That was their sign! This is it! He will be so happy!"
She grabbed my breast and twisted it sharply.
"You want this, don't you? This! This!"
She scrambled to pick up the knife once more and eyed the pale flesh on my bare thigh. I'd been wearing shorts. Humming random notes, she began to carve the same symbols into my thigh. At one point, she carefully sliced up and peeled back a circle of my skin. This she placed on her nose and grinned at me.
"Boo!" she giggled. "You just loved that when you were little!"
I firmly believe that shock and blood loss as well as the concussion I no doubt had were the cause of what I began to see next. While she carved into my leg, I stared at the far corner of the room. I was convinced I saw a shadow gathering there. In reality, it was probably just the setting sun chasing away light, but I was so certain that the darkness was taking shape.
I've never experienced sleep paralysis, but the feeling I had was almost exactly the same. Something was watching us. Something evil. It wanted to revel in my torture. The sheer madness of the entire situation convinced me that this was the one my aunt had been babbling about. If there was, in fact, a creature that wanted my flesh, it was definitely descending upon us.
I screamed my throat ragged. I continued to try to get her off, but the wiggling only dug her knife deeper into me.
"If you stay still, I'll be very careful," she sang.
My eyes locked on the shadow and I began to plead. I begged her to let me go. I begged her to remember that I was her niece. I promised her I'd let her run free. I said I'd never tell mom who had done this. I told her I'd let her have anything she wanted if she would just please stop this. In response, she put her finger to her lips and shushed me.
"Do you hear that?"
She froze and I held my breath. I strained m y ears. Honestly, there could have been nothing but the blood rushing in my head, but my poor brain translated this into faint whispers. My aunt grinned at me.
"They come. They. They want you. And He will take it. Yes, yes He will. Yes He will take what He wants."
She said this with a sort of reverence that chilled me. She used her legs to force mine apart and pointed the tip of the knife at my crotch.
"I'll slice your $+## wide enough for them to all crawl inside. I'll stuff them into you. All inside."
She giggled, though her eyes suddenly became pained. She moved her face in close and clawed at one of the sores on her cheeks.
"I can feel them crawling out of me," she moaned.
She held up one of her arms and shoved the abcesses into my sight.
"Can you see them? Can you? YOU AREN'T EVEN LOOKING!"
In her rage, she shoved the abcess into my face, smearing *@%* and dead flesh into my eyes. It was vile enough to wake me up and renew my struggling to break free. Why was it so cold? Why did I hear those whispers? My aunt was wailing and clawing at her arm, momentarily taken by the need to dig out whatever was killing her skin. I desperately railed against the bonds enough to make the chair jump. Ceasing this momentum, I rocked side to side enough to tip over to my right.
Unfortunately, my neck had been tied to something else behind me. I was stuck trying to position my legs to keep the chair from sliding further and further, strangling me. This broke my aunt out of her lapse in attention. With a snarl, she kicked at my leg and the jerk left me gasping for air.
My vision was beginning to blur. My gaze moved past my aunt and onto the shadow. In the darkness it had begun to spread out of the corner like an ink drop. There were faces, I was sure of it. There were faces in that thing that was coming to claim me. I was mesmerized as my eyes tried to focus on the shifting form. I forced my burning, bleeding leg to keep me propped up, but the darkness was becoming deeper and moved closer. It would take me. It would seep out my soul through all the cuts and bruises in my body.
This sounds slightly profound now, but at the time all these thought swere occurring instantaneously as I gave way to pure panic. My heartbeat pounded a thundering cadence in my ears as They seeped towards me. I didn't even hear my aunt slip away before the scream hit my ears and the lights flooded the room.
Again, at this point my memory dulls. My mother rushed in and found me in that state. She raced me to the hospital with my grandparents while calling the police. While I was recovering overnight, the small force of local cops searched the fields and forests for my aunt. Bulletons were put out. A deputy even went door-to-door down the single road by the house and warned the neighbors to stay inside and lock their doors.
What I found more disturbing was the fact that my aunt had been tied down to the bed and locked in that room. The officers said that the ties looked like they had been chewed and ripped off, but the door wasn't forced open. My grandparents, even my mother, swore that it had been locked before they left. They had double-checked it. No one let her out.
They did find my aunt. She had hung herself with twine in a barn not far from our land. Though the nails don't grow on my left index finger, middle finger, or thumb, thousands of dollars were able to correct my smile and my legs healed surprisingly well. Not to be overly spooky or dramatic, but I can't lie to you.
I do still have nightmares. In them, I wake up tied down somewhere with my aunt whispering over me. The markings on my legs sting like they were fresh. She looks exactly like she did that day, down to my blood on her lips. The only thing is... she's just one of the faces in that monster.
The only one out of the mob that really made an impression was my mom's older sister. This woman sent me acne medication for my birthday one year when I had started that awkward break-out phase. She once lectured me for twenty minutes about how, since I had inherited my mom's desire to work when I got older, no man would ever love me. I was ten.
I only give you this background so that you'll understand how unsettling it was when my grandmother called my mom one evening and asked her to fly down there to see them. My aunt had experienced what they called a "severe psychotic break" or something along those lines, and none of the relatives knew what to do. Or had the money to do it. My mother dutifully packed her things and I was somehow swept along for the ride. I was only fourteen at the time and still hadn't perfected the art of saying no to my parents.
The best thing about that age was that because I was awkward and mousy, people tended to ignore my existence. I got to sit in while the grandparents told my mom everything they knew about this breakdown and mom stressed over and over that she wasn't a psychiatrist. My aunt's latest ex was a meth dealer. Who knew what kind of stuff they had been brewing and sampling. There were also probably diet pills. She'd become obsessed with ouija boards. Depression runs in the family. She was always a little off. Etc. Etc. Etc.
All they knew was that after her work had called them asking for her, they'd found her completely naked in her living room, curled up and talking to herself. She had covered pages and pages of notebooks with nonsensical symbols and equations about gods and demons.
With few other options in BFE Georgia, my grandparents had locked my aunt up in the guest room and called my mother. Once again insisting that she was not a psychiatrist, my mom told my grandparents that they had to get my aunt sent to some kind of hospital where she could get the proper care and in the meantime they needed the supplies to hold them over while they decided what to do. Mom called in some prescriptions and got ready to head into town.
Unfortunately, the downside to being fourteen is that you're old enough to be expendable and somehow in the shuffle I was assigned the task of waiting at the house with my aunt and making sure nothing happened while they were gone. Mom promised they wouldn't be long and assured me waiting at home was better than being trapped on the hour-long drive into town with my grandmother.
Many Southerners will tell you that not all of the South is barren fields and terrifying locals. Some parts have amazing natural beauty. This is completely true and anyone close-minded enough to bypass an entire section of the countryside based on stereotyping is really missing out. Unfortunately, this house was not located in any of those ares. This was miles of red clay, tobacco crops, pine trees, power lines, the family house, me, and my bat**** aunt in the back room. There was no cable, no internet, and next-to-no cell reception.
I was stuck listening to my CD Player and playing Tetris on the couch, counting the agonizing minutes until my mom came back. Because time moved so slowly out there, I can't really tell you when I was clubbed from behind.
The thud was dull but the pain exploded in the back of my skull. I used to think that cartoon characters seeing stars was just a cutesy animation, but I swear my vision erupted into different colors as I tried to regain my senses. I didn't drop like people in the movies do, though. I was vaguely aware of someone grabbing my arms and dragging me from the sofa to the chair. I even stumbled a little in response.
Unfortunately, the static wouldn't clear enough for me to stop them as my hands were tied to the arms with something thin enough to cut. It was only after my midsection had been bound and my throat was well on its way that I snapped to. I rocked my head back and forth to get away, but it was no good. What I now realized was brown twine was roped around my neck to keep me upright. I can't look at the stuff anymore without itching.
Her work momentarily finished, my aunt moved around the chair to face me. She'd never been an attractive person, but at that point she looked like topless holy hell. The meth had left her with open sores, some of which she had scratched into ragged, weeping holes. Her arms were covered in blackening holes all oozing rot. When she grinned, I got a good look at the infamous meth mouth. I can't even describe the smell. That wasn't just from her wounds, either. She had caked $*!@ all over her legs, up to the scratches around her sagging breasts. But the worst part was the strange glint in her eyes.
There was someone home up there, but it was more feral than person.
When my eyes locked on hers, she grabbed a bit of her short blonde hair and tugged hard enough for her eyebrows to raise. "You see this? They say I can take your hair for myself."
Panic was finally starting to register as I realized what the hell was happening. Too tiny to be much of a fighter, I mostly just started hyperventilating and staring. I remember realizing that I couldn't remember the word for what Indians used to do to their war victims, but it was definitely about to happen to me. I started squeaking a little and trying to yell out as she disappeared into the kitchen for a moment and reappeared with a knife.
Thankfully, she just grabbed a clump of my long brown hair and started trying to saw it off inches off my scalp. It still hurt enough for me to finally cry out over it. Likely unsatisfied with her results thanks to a dull knife and thick hair, her attention turned back to my face.
"That's nothing," She hissed.
From behind my back she produced a hammer - probably what she had hit me with in the first place. The next swing brought it down on my left index finger. The fingernail cracked from the strength of the blow. My sobbing only made my aunt laugh harder and she tossed aside her tangles of hacked-off hair in favor of digging out the nail pieces and ripping them away one-by-one. The pain was so bad I nearly threw up.
This process repeated for the middle finger and my thumb, though for some reason the thumb took three swings to crack, thanks to the odd angle it was at. I vaguely noticed something through the pain as she yanked the left bit of nail from the bed: her head was tilted slightly and her mouth was hanging open. She was listening to something.
She finally stopped picking at my fingernails and leaned over to take my index into her mouth to suck on. My mind started desperately pulling itself together. I had to get out of there, but there was no way out. No matter how much I screamed, no one was around for miles. I had to survive long enough for my mother to get home. What if this lunatic killed my mother, though? Somehow, I chocked out some version of, "Why are you doing this?"
My aunt looked up from where she was sucking and narrowed her eyes, as if indignant that I had interrupted her. She sat up and proceeded to spit some of the blood she'd been drinking into my face.
"They chose you. And I hate you!"
At this point, she started ranting. I wish I could reproduce exactly what she said, but the details are blurred - half because this memory was so diligently repressed for so long and half because none of it made any sense at all. It was something about a dark lord and people in the walls, but there was also talk of the government and radio waves. What I do recall is that she paused and leaned in so close that our noses were nearly touching. The smell of her breath was so horrible I could taste it in my mouth.
"I know," she whispered. "You can smell my brain rotting. But let me tell you. He's not joking. He wants your skin. They all want your $+##."
Her tongue stretched out of her mouth and wormed itself over the lower half of my face.
I started sobbing and gagging at this point. She tried to get her tongue into my mouth but I spat at her, which enraged her. She screamed at me to be quiet and swung the hammer at my mouth. One of my front teeth hit the floor and the others weren't in much better shape. My memory is fuzzy from here on out, mostly a blur of fear and pain. I was completely sure I was going to die an agonizing death and the blood loss now occurring didn't do anything for my thinking.
I was aware of her shuffling away. I know she returned. My next clear memory is of her using a marker on the old wood floor to reproduced what I recognized as an ouija board.
Only half the letters were actually letters. The rest were twisted symbols that must have made sense in her addled mind. However, the standard "Hello" and "Goodbye" were obvious enough for the connection to be made in my head. My aunt took great care in creating this, focusing like a preschooler with some sort of demonic macaroni art. The whole time, she muttered to herself, but I never caught a clear sentence out of this. Using a glass coaster as a planchetter, she set to work summoning something.
By this point, I was silent... save for the sucking of air in through the new gap in my mouth. The room had gone completely still.
Nothing happened for several moments. The atmosphere was suffocating as every nerve in my body stood on edge. Without warning, the coaster slid to its first destination, making a screech as the wood scraped against the glass. I couldn't keep track of what it was spelling out and the nonsense symbols made it all the more difficult, but my aunt watched closely and nodded sagely every so often.
I tried to figure out if it was just my imagination that made it look like the coaster was moving without prodding from her fingertips. The dying afternoon had lowered the temperature considerably; even in the South, early autumn and shock was beginning to make me tremble. Each shake shot bolts of pain from my fingers, teeth, and head, but I couldn't take my eyes off the scene before me. I remember thinking to myself, "maybe they'll tell her to let me go."
A loud crash from the kitchen made me jump (crunching bits of tooth between my molars in the process) and caused my aunt to pause. She raced into the other room, yelled at something giddily, and returned to stalk towards me with feverish delight.
"That was their sign! This is it! He will be so happy!"
She grabbed my breast and twisted it sharply.
"You want this, don't you? This! This!"
She scrambled to pick up the knife once more and eyed the pale flesh on my bare thigh. I'd been wearing shorts. Humming random notes, she began to carve the same symbols into my thigh. At one point, she carefully sliced up and peeled back a circle of my skin. This she placed on her nose and grinned at me.
"Boo!" she giggled. "You just loved that when you were little!"
I firmly believe that shock and blood loss as well as the concussion I no doubt had were the cause of what I began to see next. While she carved into my leg, I stared at the far corner of the room. I was convinced I saw a shadow gathering there. In reality, it was probably just the setting sun chasing away light, but I was so certain that the darkness was taking shape.
I've never experienced sleep paralysis, but the feeling I had was almost exactly the same. Something was watching us. Something evil. It wanted to revel in my torture. The sheer madness of the entire situation convinced me that this was the one my aunt had been babbling about. If there was, in fact, a creature that wanted my flesh, it was definitely descending upon us.
I screamed my throat ragged. I continued to try to get her off, but the wiggling only dug her knife deeper into me.
"If you stay still, I'll be very careful," she sang.
My eyes locked on the shadow and I began to plead. I begged her to let me go. I begged her to remember that I was her niece. I promised her I'd let her run free. I said I'd never tell mom who had done this. I told her I'd let her have anything she wanted if she would just please stop this. In response, she put her finger to her lips and shushed me.
"Do you hear that?"
She froze and I held my breath. I strained m y ears. Honestly, there could have been nothing but the blood rushing in my head, but my poor brain translated this into faint whispers. My aunt grinned at me.
"They come. They. They want you. And He will take it. Yes, yes He will. Yes He will take what He wants."
She said this with a sort of reverence that chilled me. She used her legs to force mine apart and pointed the tip of the knife at my crotch.
"I'll slice your $+## wide enough for them to all crawl inside. I'll stuff them into you. All inside."
She giggled, though her eyes suddenly became pained. She moved her face in close and clawed at one of the sores on her cheeks.
"I can feel them crawling out of me," she moaned.
She held up one of her arms and shoved the abcesses into my sight.
"Can you see them? Can you? YOU AREN'T EVEN LOOKING!"
In her rage, she shoved the abcess into my face, smearing *@%* and dead flesh into my eyes. It was vile enough to wake me up and renew my struggling to break free. Why was it so cold? Why did I hear those whispers? My aunt was wailing and clawing at her arm, momentarily taken by the need to dig out whatever was killing her skin. I desperately railed against the bonds enough to make the chair jump. Ceasing this momentum, I rocked side to side enough to tip over to my right.
Unfortunately, my neck had been tied to something else behind me. I was stuck trying to position my legs to keep the chair from sliding further and further, strangling me. This broke my aunt out of her lapse in attention. With a snarl, she kicked at my leg and the jerk left me gasping for air.
My vision was beginning to blur. My gaze moved past my aunt and onto the shadow. In the darkness it had begun to spread out of the corner like an ink drop. There were faces, I was sure of it. There were faces in that thing that was coming to claim me. I was mesmerized as my eyes tried to focus on the shifting form. I forced my burning, bleeding leg to keep me propped up, but the darkness was becoming deeper and moved closer. It would take me. It would seep out my soul through all the cuts and bruises in my body.
This sounds slightly profound now, but at the time all these thought swere occurring instantaneously as I gave way to pure panic. My heartbeat pounded a thundering cadence in my ears as They seeped towards me. I didn't even hear my aunt slip away before the scream hit my ears and the lights flooded the room.
Again, at this point my memory dulls. My mother rushed in and found me in that state. She raced me to the hospital with my grandparents while calling the police. While I was recovering overnight, the small force of local cops searched the fields and forests for my aunt. Bulletons were put out. A deputy even went door-to-door down the single road by the house and warned the neighbors to stay inside and lock their doors.
What I found more disturbing was the fact that my aunt had been tied down to the bed and locked in that room. The officers said that the ties looked like they had been chewed and ripped off, but the door wasn't forced open. My grandparents, even my mother, swore that it had been locked before they left. They had double-checked it. No one let her out.
They did find my aunt. She had hung herself with twine in a barn not far from our land. Though the nails don't grow on my left index finger, middle finger, or thumb, thousands of dollars were able to correct my smile and my legs healed surprisingly well. Not to be overly spooky or dramatic, but I can't lie to you.
I do still have nightmares. In them, I wake up tied down somewhere with my aunt whispering over me. The markings on my legs sting like they were fresh. She looks exactly like she did that day, down to my blood on her lips. The only thing is... she's just one of the faces in that monster.
caponecartels
Banned
- Aug 29, 2006
- 2,319
- 27
The Basement
Spoiler [+]
I was home alone for the week, as my family had gone on vacation while I had to stay and work. It was around 2 AM, and I’d stayed up to watch a scary movie in the dark in my basement. I was intent on really scaring myself and seeing how far into terror I could really go – while still knowing I was safe in my own home.
It was then that I heard pounding footsteps on the first floor. This was a common annoying occurrence when my family was home – every time they passed through the front hallway, past the basement door, I heard their footsteps. This time, fear immediately shot through me at the sound. My reflex was to turn the television off immediately… the basement door was up a flight of steps and around a corner, so whoever it was would not have seen any light.
I heard the basement door handle click and turn as I sat in absolute darkness. I moved slowly so as to be absolutely silent, and crawled behind our large television. As I passed it inch by inch, I noted with panic that its black screen still dimly glowed. I heard footsteps coming down the carpeted but creaky stairs.
I froze in my hiding place, listening. For many long minutes, I heard nothing. Had the intruder seen the television’s afterglow, or had it faded in time? Was he standing in the pitch dark listening for me? I seemed to lie there in total silence for an interminably long time. My panic began to fade, and I began to think more clearly.
Had I really heard an intruder? Could someone possibly be standing there in silence for so long without making any noise? The basement was so exceedingly quiet that the silence itself began to hurt my ears. Could the unknown person really avoid any noise from shuffling or breathing or anything else? If there was an intruder, he was still in the basement, because the creaky stairs were incredibly loud, the door handle clicked, and he wouldn’t know to mask his footsteps on the first floor so that they couldn’t be heard down here…
I began counting in my head trying to pass the time, as drool fell from my mouth onto the carpet – I didn’t dare risk the sound of swallowing. I reached sixty seconds once, twice… thirty times… sixty times… by now my fear had faded and I was more confused than anything. I estimated I’d been crouched in the absolute black for almost two hours, and had still heard nothing. If there was an intruder, none of this made sense… finally, I decided I’d have to make a move. If I did nothing, eventually the sun would come up, and shine in through the small basement windows… and, worse, I began to smell something horrible and cloying.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I began inching my way towards the stairs by way of the walls. If someone was standing there in the dark, I should be able to go around them and then make a break up the stairs… meanwhile, the horrible odor grew stronger. Had something died down here in the night? No living person would smell like that… terrible images of some sort of corpse-monster listening for me in the dark erupted in my thoughts, and I moved as fast as I could without making a sound.
Just as I finally approached the stairs, there was an enormous clatter, as of something falling or collapsing on the floor. It was at that moment I leapt forward and crashed up the stairs, running out through the open basement door and my wide-open front door. Now certain that someone was in the house, I called the police from my cellphone and watched my house from afar.
The police came, checked inside the house, and then grimly came back out to question me. They’d found a body in the house – my elderly neighbor, who seemed to have died of a heart attack. Their belief was that I must have left the front door unlocked, and he must have wandered in my house while dying, looking for help. At first, I felt horrible, thinking that I had sat there in the dark while the old man literally died a few feet away.
Then it occurred to me – what the hell was that loud noise of things falling, that last prompted me to bolt up the stairs and out of the house? I asked the police and they confirmed – the back door of my house had been left open as well, near a single bare footprint in the mud. Somehow, for some reason I’ll never know, there was someone else in that basement with us… silent, waiting, and listening in the dark over the fresh corpse of an old man.
It was then that I heard pounding footsteps on the first floor. This was a common annoying occurrence when my family was home – every time they passed through the front hallway, past the basement door, I heard their footsteps. This time, fear immediately shot through me at the sound. My reflex was to turn the television off immediately… the basement door was up a flight of steps and around a corner, so whoever it was would not have seen any light.
I heard the basement door handle click and turn as I sat in absolute darkness. I moved slowly so as to be absolutely silent, and crawled behind our large television. As I passed it inch by inch, I noted with panic that its black screen still dimly glowed. I heard footsteps coming down the carpeted but creaky stairs.
I froze in my hiding place, listening. For many long minutes, I heard nothing. Had the intruder seen the television’s afterglow, or had it faded in time? Was he standing in the pitch dark listening for me? I seemed to lie there in total silence for an interminably long time. My panic began to fade, and I began to think more clearly.
Had I really heard an intruder? Could someone possibly be standing there in silence for so long without making any noise? The basement was so exceedingly quiet that the silence itself began to hurt my ears. Could the unknown person really avoid any noise from shuffling or breathing or anything else? If there was an intruder, he was still in the basement, because the creaky stairs were incredibly loud, the door handle clicked, and he wouldn’t know to mask his footsteps on the first floor so that they couldn’t be heard down here…
I began counting in my head trying to pass the time, as drool fell from my mouth onto the carpet – I didn’t dare risk the sound of swallowing. I reached sixty seconds once, twice… thirty times… sixty times… by now my fear had faded and I was more confused than anything. I estimated I’d been crouched in the absolute black for almost two hours, and had still heard nothing. If there was an intruder, none of this made sense… finally, I decided I’d have to make a move. If I did nothing, eventually the sun would come up, and shine in through the small basement windows… and, worse, I began to smell something horrible and cloying.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I began inching my way towards the stairs by way of the walls. If someone was standing there in the dark, I should be able to go around them and then make a break up the stairs… meanwhile, the horrible odor grew stronger. Had something died down here in the night? No living person would smell like that… terrible images of some sort of corpse-monster listening for me in the dark erupted in my thoughts, and I moved as fast as I could without making a sound.
Just as I finally approached the stairs, there was an enormous clatter, as of something falling or collapsing on the floor. It was at that moment I leapt forward and crashed up the stairs, running out through the open basement door and my wide-open front door. Now certain that someone was in the house, I called the police from my cellphone and watched my house from afar.
The police came, checked inside the house, and then grimly came back out to question me. They’d found a body in the house – my elderly neighbor, who seemed to have died of a heart attack. Their belief was that I must have left the front door unlocked, and he must have wandered in my house while dying, looking for help. At first, I felt horrible, thinking that I had sat there in the dark while the old man literally died a few feet away.
Then it occurred to me – what the hell was that loud noise of things falling, that last prompted me to bolt up the stairs and out of the house? I asked the police and they confirmed – the back door of my house had been left open as well, near a single bare footprint in the mud. Somehow, for some reason I’ll never know, there was someone else in that basement with us… silent, waiting, and listening in the dark over the fresh corpse of an old man.
caponecartels
Banned
- Aug 29, 2006
- 2,319
- 27
Quiet
Spoiler [+]
I never saw the ocean till I was nineteen, and if I ever see it again it will be too goddamn soon. I was a child, coming out of the train, fresh from Amarillo, into San Diego and all her glory. The sight of it, all that water and the blind crushing power of the surf, filled me with dread. I’d seen water before, lakes, plenty big, but that was nothing like this. I don’t think I can describe what it was like that first time, and further more, I’m not sure I care too.
You can imagine the state I was in when a few weeks later they gave me a rifle and put me on a boat. When I stopped vomiting up everything that I ate, I decided that I might not kill myself after all. Not being able to see the land, and that ceaseless chaotic, rocking of the waves; I remember thinking that the war had to be a step up from this. Kids can be so %%$#!@* stupid.
I had such a giddy sense of glee when I saw the island, and it’s solid banks. They transferred us to a smaller boat in the middle of the night, just our undersized company with our rucksacks and rifles and not a word. We just took a ride right into it, just because they asked us to. The lieutenants herded us into our platoons on the decks and briefed us: the island had been lost. That was exactly how he put it. Somehow in the grand plan for the Pacific, this one tiny speck of earth, only recently discovered and unmapped, had gotten lost in the shuffle; a singularly perfect clerical error was all it took. It was extremely unlikely, he stressed, that the Japanese had gotten a hold of it, being so far east and south of their current borders, but a recent fly over reported what looked like an airfield in the central plateau.
We hit the beach in the middle of the night. I’d heard talk of landings before, and I’m not ashamed to tell, I was scared %%%!%*!#. I don’t know quite what I expected, but it wasn’t we got, that thick, heavy silence. Behind the lapping of the waves and the wind in the trees, there was... nothing, no birds, no insects. Just deathly stillness.
Another hundred yards deeper into the eerie tranquility of the jungle, we stopped in a small clearing for the officers to reconvene, and it was obvious even they were spooked. I wasn’t a bright kid, but I knew enough to know that something was very wrong. It was like the whole island was dead. I remember I could only smell the sea, despite the red blossoms dangling from the trees.
It wasn’t an airfield, on top of the plateau. I can’t tell you what it was, because I’ve never seen anything like it, and I don’t think anyone ever will. If I tell you it was like the Aztec pyramids, but turned upside down, so that it sank like giant steps into the earth, you’d get the basic idea of it, but that somehow fails to capture the profound unearthliness of the structure.
There was no sign of individual pieces in the masonry, it appeared to have been carved out of a single immense block of black rock into a sharp and geometric shape. It was slick and perfectly smooth like obsidian, but it had no shine to it. It swallowed up even the moonlight, so that it was impossible to see how deep it went, or even focus your eyes on any one part of it, like it was one giant blind spot.
Our platoon drew the honor of investigating the lower levels, so we descended the stairs as the rest of the company surrounded the plateau. We took the stairs slowly and carefully after the first man to touch one of the right angle edges slit his hands down the bone.
At odd intervals down the steps, there were several small stone rooms; simple, empty, hollow cubes of stone with one opening, facing the pit in the center. There was no door that we could see, and with the opening being four feet of the ground, you’d have to put your hands on that black razor sharp edge to climb in into it.
We circled the descending floors, shining our lights into each of the small structures; They contained the same featureless black walls and nothing else. No dust, no leaves and other detritus from the jungle, the whole monument was immaculate, as if the place was just built; but that couldn’t be right. The whole structure felt incalculably old to me somehow, despite having no way to articulate the particular reasons.
Down near the bottom you could see that it simply sloped away into a darkness that swallowed the flashlights. We tossed first a button and then a shell casing down into the pit, and waited in the unearthly silence, but no sounds returned. No one spoke, we simply turned away from the yawning abyss and continued our sweep of the bottom rung and the last of the small structures.
The body in the back corner was almost invisible at first in the thick shadows, but the long spill of drying blood reflected the light of our flashlights, and it led right too him. He was coiled tight, arms around his thighs, and his face tucked into his knees. You could see badly he was cut, his clothes opened in ragged bloody tatters to reveal the pale skin and bone beneath it. He may have been dressed in a Japanese uniform, but it had been reduced to ribbons; I only had few seconds to look at him before we heard the first shots.
It echoed like the buzzing of faraway insects in the still jungle, swallowed almost instantly by the blanket of quiet. By the time we reached the top, the rest of the company had vanished. There were shell casings on the ground, and the hot smell of gunpowder in the air, but they were gone. The trees were deathly quiet around, there was not a trace of the nearly fifty other men that had come ashore with us. I could taste bile rising in my throat as panic threatened to cripple me; I felt crushed between the yawning pit and razor edges on one side and the dead jungle and the pounding ocean on the other. The silence rang in my ears and I struggled to still myself.
They were just inside the jungle, waiting for us. They came out from between the trees with all sound of a moth, simply sliding into our view.
I can try to tell you what I saw, the same as I did to the army doc on the hospital ship when I first woke up, and again half dozen other various officers over the following months, and you’ll have the same reaction they did; that I was a dumb country rube suffering from heatstroke and exposure and trauma. That I was crazy.
You know me. You know I’m not crazy. And I remember every second of that night with crystal clarity.
The thing, the first one that caught my eye, was wearing the skin of a *** soldier, all mottled with the belly distended from rot. The head drooped, useless and obscene on the shoulders, tongue swollen and eyes cloudy. I could see where it was coming apart at the ill-defined joints, with ragged holes in the drying flesh. At the bottom of each of these raw pits was blackness, deeper than the stones of the buildings; a darkness that seemed to churn and froth like an angry cloud.
The thing moved suddenly, the head snapping and rolling backwards as it dashed towards us. I had my rifle clasped tightly in my hands, but it simply didn’t occur to me to fire. All I could do was gape silently at the macabre sight bearing down on us, and think absurdly of my mother’s marionettes.
A gun went off beside me, and I turned to see a dozen more of the horrors darting silently in on us. Among them were a few more rotting and swollen forms, but the majority wore the same uniforms as us, and were pale, fresh, and soaked in blood. More bullets zipped through the air, and I saw the grisly things hit again and again, but they never slowed. I caught a glimpse of the First Sergeant's vacant glassy eyes as his head dangled limp from his shoulders; I saw the great ragged wound in his back and the shuddering darkness that inhabited his corpse when he leapt just past me without a sound, landing like a graceful predator onto the soldier beside me. The others around me began to drop in a silent dance of kinetic energy and blurred motion
I was on the track team in high school, and it could have got me to college. I didn’t need an invitation. I just ran. I ran blind through jungle, caroming of tree trunks; I ran until I saw the ocean, and it struck a new ringing note of terror in me. I don’t remember actually deciding to swim, but when I turned back to the tree line, I saw one of the white and bloody things emerge, running on all fours, the hands splayed wide and the back contorted and cracked in an impossible angle.
To this day, the mere thought of the ocean still brings on a cold sweat, but that night I let it embrace me, let the tide drag me out to sea, if only to bring momentary relief from the impossible monolith and terrors on the island. The days I spent drifting off shore and blistering in the sun were a welcome release from the silent island.
I never saw the war. They sent me home as soon as I recovered.
It was comforting in a way, when I thought no one believed me. It allowed me to believe that it never happened, that it was a product of my mind. But as I got older, I’ve found that it is pointless to lie to anyone, especially yourself. I know what I saw.
Someone else believed me too. I’ve seen maps of where they tested the hydrogen bombs in the South Pacific.
You can imagine the state I was in when a few weeks later they gave me a rifle and put me on a boat. When I stopped vomiting up everything that I ate, I decided that I might not kill myself after all. Not being able to see the land, and that ceaseless chaotic, rocking of the waves; I remember thinking that the war had to be a step up from this. Kids can be so %%$#!@* stupid.
I had such a giddy sense of glee when I saw the island, and it’s solid banks. They transferred us to a smaller boat in the middle of the night, just our undersized company with our rucksacks and rifles and not a word. We just took a ride right into it, just because they asked us to. The lieutenants herded us into our platoons on the decks and briefed us: the island had been lost. That was exactly how he put it. Somehow in the grand plan for the Pacific, this one tiny speck of earth, only recently discovered and unmapped, had gotten lost in the shuffle; a singularly perfect clerical error was all it took. It was extremely unlikely, he stressed, that the Japanese had gotten a hold of it, being so far east and south of their current borders, but a recent fly over reported what looked like an airfield in the central plateau.
We hit the beach in the middle of the night. I’d heard talk of landings before, and I’m not ashamed to tell, I was scared %%%!%*!#. I don’t know quite what I expected, but it wasn’t we got, that thick, heavy silence. Behind the lapping of the waves and the wind in the trees, there was... nothing, no birds, no insects. Just deathly stillness.
Another hundred yards deeper into the eerie tranquility of the jungle, we stopped in a small clearing for the officers to reconvene, and it was obvious even they were spooked. I wasn’t a bright kid, but I knew enough to know that something was very wrong. It was like the whole island was dead. I remember I could only smell the sea, despite the red blossoms dangling from the trees.
It wasn’t an airfield, on top of the plateau. I can’t tell you what it was, because I’ve never seen anything like it, and I don’t think anyone ever will. If I tell you it was like the Aztec pyramids, but turned upside down, so that it sank like giant steps into the earth, you’d get the basic idea of it, but that somehow fails to capture the profound unearthliness of the structure.
There was no sign of individual pieces in the masonry, it appeared to have been carved out of a single immense block of black rock into a sharp and geometric shape. It was slick and perfectly smooth like obsidian, but it had no shine to it. It swallowed up even the moonlight, so that it was impossible to see how deep it went, or even focus your eyes on any one part of it, like it was one giant blind spot.
Our platoon drew the honor of investigating the lower levels, so we descended the stairs as the rest of the company surrounded the plateau. We took the stairs slowly and carefully after the first man to touch one of the right angle edges slit his hands down the bone.
At odd intervals down the steps, there were several small stone rooms; simple, empty, hollow cubes of stone with one opening, facing the pit in the center. There was no door that we could see, and with the opening being four feet of the ground, you’d have to put your hands on that black razor sharp edge to climb in into it.
We circled the descending floors, shining our lights into each of the small structures; They contained the same featureless black walls and nothing else. No dust, no leaves and other detritus from the jungle, the whole monument was immaculate, as if the place was just built; but that couldn’t be right. The whole structure felt incalculably old to me somehow, despite having no way to articulate the particular reasons.
Down near the bottom you could see that it simply sloped away into a darkness that swallowed the flashlights. We tossed first a button and then a shell casing down into the pit, and waited in the unearthly silence, but no sounds returned. No one spoke, we simply turned away from the yawning abyss and continued our sweep of the bottom rung and the last of the small structures.
The body in the back corner was almost invisible at first in the thick shadows, but the long spill of drying blood reflected the light of our flashlights, and it led right too him. He was coiled tight, arms around his thighs, and his face tucked into his knees. You could see badly he was cut, his clothes opened in ragged bloody tatters to reveal the pale skin and bone beneath it. He may have been dressed in a Japanese uniform, but it had been reduced to ribbons; I only had few seconds to look at him before we heard the first shots.
It echoed like the buzzing of faraway insects in the still jungle, swallowed almost instantly by the blanket of quiet. By the time we reached the top, the rest of the company had vanished. There were shell casings on the ground, and the hot smell of gunpowder in the air, but they were gone. The trees were deathly quiet around, there was not a trace of the nearly fifty other men that had come ashore with us. I could taste bile rising in my throat as panic threatened to cripple me; I felt crushed between the yawning pit and razor edges on one side and the dead jungle and the pounding ocean on the other. The silence rang in my ears and I struggled to still myself.
They were just inside the jungle, waiting for us. They came out from between the trees with all sound of a moth, simply sliding into our view.
I can try to tell you what I saw, the same as I did to the army doc on the hospital ship when I first woke up, and again half dozen other various officers over the following months, and you’ll have the same reaction they did; that I was a dumb country rube suffering from heatstroke and exposure and trauma. That I was crazy.
You know me. You know I’m not crazy. And I remember every second of that night with crystal clarity.
The thing, the first one that caught my eye, was wearing the skin of a *** soldier, all mottled with the belly distended from rot. The head drooped, useless and obscene on the shoulders, tongue swollen and eyes cloudy. I could see where it was coming apart at the ill-defined joints, with ragged holes in the drying flesh. At the bottom of each of these raw pits was blackness, deeper than the stones of the buildings; a darkness that seemed to churn and froth like an angry cloud.
The thing moved suddenly, the head snapping and rolling backwards as it dashed towards us. I had my rifle clasped tightly in my hands, but it simply didn’t occur to me to fire. All I could do was gape silently at the macabre sight bearing down on us, and think absurdly of my mother’s marionettes.
A gun went off beside me, and I turned to see a dozen more of the horrors darting silently in on us. Among them were a few more rotting and swollen forms, but the majority wore the same uniforms as us, and were pale, fresh, and soaked in blood. More bullets zipped through the air, and I saw the grisly things hit again and again, but they never slowed. I caught a glimpse of the First Sergeant's vacant glassy eyes as his head dangled limp from his shoulders; I saw the great ragged wound in his back and the shuddering darkness that inhabited his corpse when he leapt just past me without a sound, landing like a graceful predator onto the soldier beside me. The others around me began to drop in a silent dance of kinetic energy and blurred motion
I was on the track team in high school, and it could have got me to college. I didn’t need an invitation. I just ran. I ran blind through jungle, caroming of tree trunks; I ran until I saw the ocean, and it struck a new ringing note of terror in me. I don’t remember actually deciding to swim, but when I turned back to the tree line, I saw one of the white and bloody things emerge, running on all fours, the hands splayed wide and the back contorted and cracked in an impossible angle.
To this day, the mere thought of the ocean still brings on a cold sweat, but that night I let it embrace me, let the tide drag me out to sea, if only to bring momentary relief from the impossible monolith and terrors on the island. The days I spent drifting off shore and blistering in the sun were a welcome release from the silent island.
I never saw the war. They sent me home as soon as I recovered.
It was comforting in a way, when I thought no one believed me. It allowed me to believe that it never happened, that it was a product of my mind. But as I got older, I’ve found that it is pointless to lie to anyone, especially yourself. I know what I saw.
Someone else believed me too. I’ve seen maps of where they tested the hydrogen bombs in the South Pacific.
- Nov 6, 2007
- 2,371
- 10
yo NT fam whats good !!!!
aight i had a personal experience that i had about a month ago ( would have posted it earlier but was in ban camp
)
well first off let me say ive always found any story intriguing but was on the skeptical side of things ...
but now i can say ive actually experienced something.....
Okay, this is what happen ... it was your typical sunny cali day i believe it was a Wednesday about 5ish, and me and the bro-in-law along with his cousin were chilling in the back yard playing cards like we normally do ( b4 packing a bowl) but my son was out there with us playing with his toys and the dogs
so while playing cards and trying to keep an eye on him we have this weight bench and there next to some old rims/tires on the side of the house, well i could have sworn i saw my son run by there chasing one of the dogs ( dog was over there barking at the neighbor's dog) so i yell out my sons name to come back over by me and while im staring over there by the tires for him to run by i hear "yes daddy" and he is behind my chair the whole time me my bro and in law and cousin all went
and the first thing i said was please tell me yall saw that and they were like "YO, WHEN YOU CALLED OUT HIS NAME I WAS WAITTING FOR HIM TO RUN BY CAUSE I SWEAR I SAW HIM RUN BY TOO!!!!!!"
what ever it was was the same height and was wear the same colors my son was wearing ..... it didnt feel evil or anything but mod def was a ghost or spirit .... !*$+ was mad crazy tho got me preying at night
aight i had a personal experience that i had about a month ago ( would have posted it earlier but was in ban camp
well first off let me say ive always found any story intriguing but was on the skeptical side of things ...
but now i can say ive actually experienced something.....
Okay, this is what happen ... it was your typical sunny cali day i believe it was a Wednesday about 5ish, and me and the bro-in-law along with his cousin were chilling in the back yard playing cards like we normally do ( b4 packing a bowl) but my son was out there with us playing with his toys and the dogs
so while playing cards and trying to keep an eye on him we have this weight bench and there next to some old rims/tires on the side of the house, well i could have sworn i saw my son run by there chasing one of the dogs ( dog was over there barking at the neighbor's dog) so i yell out my sons name to come back over by me and while im staring over there by the tires for him to run by i hear "yes daddy" and he is behind my chair the whole time me my bro and in law and cousin all went
and the first thing i said was please tell me yall saw that and they were like "YO, WHEN YOU CALLED OUT HIS NAME I WAS WAITTING FOR HIM TO RUN BY CAUSE I SWEAR I SAW HIM RUN BY TOO!!!!!!"
what ever it was was the same height and was wear the same colors my son was wearing ..... it didnt feel evil or anything but mod def was a ghost or spirit .... !*$+ was mad crazy tho got me preying at night
- Feb 27, 2003
- 6,326
- 2,848
Damn, come back into this thread n u post a grip more....im not gona get any work done
caponecartels
Banned
- Aug 29, 2006
- 2,319
- 27
Originally Posted by natrix916
Damn, come back into this thread n u post a grip more....im not gona get any work done
I could stop if you like.
- Aug 10, 2009
- 2,355
- 10
This and who else was watching?
caponecartels
Banned
- Aug 29, 2006
- 2,319
- 27
The police were.
Don't know about the purpose though.
caponecartels
Banned
- Aug 29, 2006
- 2,319
- 27
New Start,New Life,New me.
Spoiler [+]
Moving to a new place was a big thing for me. 3 hours away from home, 3 hours away from the town I loved, the house I grew up in and the ex boyfriend who had been the thing to drive me away. In a way I was looking to escape.
New start, new life, new me, that was what I decided when I moved away.
It was going well within 6 months I was doing really well at my job, I’d even started dating this new guy, Paul, who was everything my ex hadn’t been man enough to be. He was polite and kind and loving but with just the right amount of “I’m a man
New start, new life, new me, that was what I decided when I moved away.
It was going well within 6 months I was doing really well at my job, I’d even started dating this new guy, Paul, who was everything my ex hadn’t been man enough to be. He was polite and kind and loving but with just the right amount of “I’m a man
caponecartels
Banned
- Aug 29, 2006
- 2,319
- 27
The Stairs and The Doorway
Spoiler [+]
I don’t feel like I’m a nosy person. No more nosy than the next guy. I just have what my Ma would call an unhealthy amount of curiosity. I was the kid who climbed to the top of the big oak in the back yard, just to see what was in the crows’ nest. I was the kid who dug a hole in the back yard so deep that I hit groundwater because I was convinced there was a cave under our house, and I wanted to see it. To see.
My folks aren’t dirt poor, but they’re pretty close. They’re part of that missing middle of America, the people who work forty hours a week until they die, with no savings to speak of. I got my first job at a horse stable when I was fourteen. It didn’t last very long. I knew I needed to get a job, because I knew we needed the money, so I bounced around for the next few years, washing dishes, waiting tables, until I graduated high school.
Pop was really tough on me about college. He never went — nobody in his family had — so there were a few fights about where I would go after school. It was a huge shock to me when, just after graduation, he drove me down to the Uni. He’d been classmates with the Dean and they’d come up with an arrangement where I’d get a full scholarship, provided I made good grades and worked for the University.
I never felt like a scholar. In high school, I kept my head down and did enough to get by, pulling off B’s and a few C’s. I wasn’t interested in learning, because learning wasn’t interesting. Uni was different. I took mainly core classes, math-English-history-science, but they were fascinating. For one thing, nobody cared if I showed up or not. It was entirely up to me to succeed, so I did.
In exchange for my education, I worked security and did some light maintenance duties. Maintenance was a no-brainer. I’ve always been handy, and most of the fix-it jobs were the type that could be solved with a liberal application of WD-40, or elbow grease, or both. Security was a different story. Security gave me super powers.
The job itself was pretty easy. I got a uniform, a badge, a flashlight, and Ma gave me some keychain mace for my birthday. No, I didn’t get a gun — they weren’t allowed on campus anyway. I worked mostly nights and weekends, and doubles during long holiday breaks. I was to walk around the full campus twice in a night, checking the labs, computer center, and library. The rest of my time was pretty much my own.
There were two other guards, Jake and Al, but they worked different shifts from me. We had “overlap nights
My folks aren’t dirt poor, but they’re pretty close. They’re part of that missing middle of America, the people who work forty hours a week until they die, with no savings to speak of. I got my first job at a horse stable when I was fourteen. It didn’t last very long. I knew I needed to get a job, because I knew we needed the money, so I bounced around for the next few years, washing dishes, waiting tables, until I graduated high school.
Pop was really tough on me about college. He never went — nobody in his family had — so there were a few fights about where I would go after school. It was a huge shock to me when, just after graduation, he drove me down to the Uni. He’d been classmates with the Dean and they’d come up with an arrangement where I’d get a full scholarship, provided I made good grades and worked for the University.
I never felt like a scholar. In high school, I kept my head down and did enough to get by, pulling off B’s and a few C’s. I wasn’t interested in learning, because learning wasn’t interesting. Uni was different. I took mainly core classes, math-English-history-science, but they were fascinating. For one thing, nobody cared if I showed up or not. It was entirely up to me to succeed, so I did.
In exchange for my education, I worked security and did some light maintenance duties. Maintenance was a no-brainer. I’ve always been handy, and most of the fix-it jobs were the type that could be solved with a liberal application of WD-40, or elbow grease, or both. Security was a different story. Security gave me super powers.
The job itself was pretty easy. I got a uniform, a badge, a flashlight, and Ma gave me some keychain mace for my birthday. No, I didn’t get a gun — they weren’t allowed on campus anyway. I worked mostly nights and weekends, and doubles during long holiday breaks. I was to walk around the full campus twice in a night, checking the labs, computer center, and library. The rest of my time was pretty much my own.
There were two other guards, Jake and Al, but they worked different shifts from me. We had “overlap nights
caponecartels
Banned
- Aug 29, 2006
- 2,319
- 27
The Thing in the Fields
The Thing that Stalks the Fields
Spoiler [+]
When I was young, I lived on a farm in rural Oregon with my parents. I was the only child. We weren’t a big commercial farm. Just a family-type thing. We had five cows, three horses, a small herd of goats, two dogs, and one chicken coop. We also had some Indian Runner ducks we kept mostly as pets. We didn’t really make any money off the place, just enough to sustain the animals and a little extra for ourselves. Money enough to take a decent vacation every couple of years. Dad had his other job in town, an insurance agent. He was the only one around really, the town wasn’t more than about 1,500 people. Mom gave horse-riding lessons as well. We weren’t rich, but we were comfortable.
It was really an easy life (or at least it could have been a lot worse), I went to school, Dad went to work, Mom took care of the animals, then we all had dinner together every night, and I would go to bed while Mom and Dad had a beer or two and watched the news. Sometimes at night I would hear things outside. Mostly just normal stuff. The cows or horses would get spooked by a coyote or something, or I would hear the dogs chasing a rabbit, barking their heads off. Every once in a great while we would find a chicken dead. Dad would always tell me about it but never let me see the body, although I asked frequently. He would keep Mom and I inside until he had gone out, did whatever he did with the body, throw sawdust over any blood, and then life would go on as normal. I assumed it was foxes, as I had seen a couple of them out in the pasture over the years, slinking around back and forth through the grass.
The summer when I was ten years old, I remember helping Mom change the bedding in the horse stalls, when we heard a huge racket going on outside. If you’ve never heard the sounds of a horse in pain, you don’t want to, trust me. It sounds almost like a person screaming. Well that’s what we heard, and one of our horses, the palamino, came running into the barn with a wound on it’s left thigh. Four long marks, like claw marks, ran across it’s body for about a foot. It had blood running down it’s leg, and was limping. I was so scared by the sight of that much blood that Mom locked the horse in a stall and made me go inside with one of the dogs. She told me to lock the door and stay inside until she came in to get me. I did.
Eventually Mom came inside and told me that the horse had hurt itself on the barbed wire that ran the perimeter of the pasture, we owned more land beyond that, but it was mostly forested. I guess I believed her at the time, but at dinner that night I noticed Dad was being particularly quiet and Mom was talking a lot more than she normally did. She was being really animated, and I noticed that Dad had gotten his rifle out and set it by the back door. Usually he only did that when the coyotes had been acting up.
That night I went to bed as normal, but I had trouble falling asleep. I turned on my desk lamp and decided to read comic books until I got tired. I have a very vivid memory of reading Uncanny X-Men and hearing the back door open. Looking out, I could see my Dad by the porch light, lighting a cigarette and holding his rifle under his arm. He started walking over to the driveway and then turned to follow the fence line. I couldn’t sleep until I knew Dad was back safe. I kept coming downstairs with the excuse of getting water to see if Dad was back in the house yet, and each time all I saw was Mom sitting on the couch in the living room, staring at a blank TV screen and looking worried, sighing occasionally. Eventually, about 4 in the morning, I think, Dad did come back, and I was so tired and relieved that I fell asleep as soon as I knew he was home. He never told me what he did that night, but I never thought to ask.
Two months later I was back in school. It rains a LOT in Oregon in the fall, and this day was no different. All I could hear from my bedroom was rain hitting the ground and the aluminum roof of the chicken coop. There was light thunder in the distance, but it was slowly getting closer. I thought I had heard a coyote yapping out around the garage, or it could have been one of the dogs. I looked out, straining my eyes to see whatever there may have been. In a brief and distant lightning flash I saw something. It looked almost like a person, but hunched over, and with a long torso. It was tall, taller than Dad, who was a good six foot four, at least. I just barely caught a glimpse of it on the near side of the garage, then the light faded and I didn’t see it again that night.
There was another dead chicken the next morning. The third in just as many weeks. I told Dad what I had seen the previous night. The color went out of his cheeks momentarily, until he told that the storm must have been playing tricks on me. I accepted that.
Four months after that we lost a cow. It was in the middle of the night, and we all woke up at the same time. There was a lot of noise in the pasture, but only briefly. The cry of a dying animal, and a primitive, guttural yell that I had never heard before. Dad rushed up to my room, I could hear him running up the stairs to my room. He had his rifle in hand, and opened my door. He saw I was awake and told me to stay inside no matter what and try to go back to sleep. I don’t think I have to say that sleep wasn’t really an option any longer, but I did stay in my room, with a blanket held tight around my shoulders and staring out the window. Probably about ten minutes later I heard gunshots in the field. I don’t know what he was shooting at, whether it was whatever had attacked the cow, or the cow itself, trying to put the animal out of it’s misery.
Dad rarely, if ever, talked about that night. I later found out that he had gotten to the cow only to find it ripped open on the ground, bleeding out from it’s torso. The shots I heard were him shooting the cow in the head.
It kept going like that. For years. A chicken or a duck here and there. Something bigger only very rarely. It sounds absurd but I almost came to think of it as commonplace. I only ever caught glimpses of the thing until what comes next. It terrified me. It happened in the middle of the day, over the course of a long weekend when my parents had gone to Seattle to see my uncle, who was ill.
It was on a Saturday afternoon, I was 17 years old. I was out in the barn putting out food for the horses and the dogs. The horses were running around out in the pasture and the dogs were asleep in the corner of one of the horse stalls. I heard something rustling in the tall grass outside in the pasture. The dogs looked around a little bit but didn’t seem to mind. I assumed it was just one of the horses waiting for me to leave so they could eat. I kept going about what I was doing, and in several minutes I thought I heard breathing. I turned to look and it was standing in the door. Tall as hell even hunched over. The sun was streaming in behind it, lighting up all the dust in the air around it like some kind of sickly halo. It was looking at me. Considering me. Maybe it was trying to decide whether or not I was food. I remember swearing, turning, and running as fast as I could for the house, not even thinking. Panic causing my legs to move. It was behind me, not even breathing hard. I heard it’s feet hitting the ground in a constant rhythm. I got to the house, opened the door, slammed it behind me and locked it as fast as I could. I tore through the house, locking every door, and drawing the blinds on every window. I could hear it snarling outside the back door. The dogs were barking at it, but they wouldn’t try to attack the thing. It was too big and they knew it. It roared at the dogs and they ran off, probably to hide in the pasture.
I went to my parent’s bedroom and got Dad’s rifle. I loaded it, set up a chair in the living room facing the back door, and waited. It started prowling around the house, I could hear it’s feet crunching on the gravel of the driveway and the wooden planks of the back deck. It kept walking, back and forth. I thought about trying to look through a window to see it, but I was too scared. Eventually, after hours of hoping it would go away, the sun went down. I turned on all of the outside lights and went up to my room. I opened my window, with the rifle in my hands, hoping to be able to pick the thing off from above. I saw it lurking just beyond the glow from the porchlight. It had long, sinewy arms, and walked on bent knee. It was by the chicken coop. Then it disappeared from view. I heard the chickens squawking and screeching. The thing reappeared with a dead, bloody chicken in it’s hands. It bit off one of the wings with jaws that were dripping with slime and drool and let the dead bird drop to the ground at it’s feet. Then it looked at me. It’s eyes made contact with my eyes. It turned away again, back to the chickens. It came back with another bird, mutilated it in front of me, and dropped it. It went back again. And again. I should have taken a shot at it, but I was astounded and confused trying to figure out what it was doing. Then it hit me, it was a show of power. It was showing me that it was stronger than me. That it could do whatever it wanted to do because I couldn’t stop it. At the same time I felt powerless and sickened. Powerless because what it was saying was true. If it was just that thing and me, I wouldn’t stand a chance. Sickened because I realized what kind of intelligence it would need to be able to convey that message. The thought shook me out of my stupor and I remembered the rifle at my side. It was heading back to the chickens, and I decided that when it came back I would take my shot.
It strode back to the porch. Almost arrogant, walking on bended knee with those arms so long that the chicken was nearly dragging on the ground. I raised the rifle up to my eye, and tried to steady myself. My heart was beating so hard I could see the rifle shaking ever so slightly in rhythm with each heart beat I could hear pounding in my own ears. It raised the body to it’s mouth and just as it was about to put the chicken’s head inside, I squeezed the trigger. The crack of the gun echoed in the now shattered quiet of the nighttime standoff and I heard it howl. A painful, loud, startled howl. I had hit it on the outside of the shoulder. It ran off into the night. I never saw it again. It was still out there, though. It still killed chickens, and other things. More often than before.
I’m writing all of this now because my parents died three weeks ago. They were killed in a collision with a drunk driver. He survived. They left me the farm, and I intend to live here with my own family. I’m 32 now, and I work for an Oregon Fish and Game office in Salem. I’m married to a wonderful woman named Stephanie. We have one son, Zachary, who is four years old. We are expecting a daughter in four months. I’ve come to the farmhouse alone today, I told Steph that I just wanted some time alone in my parent’s house. To deal with some emotions. She was very understanding.
I’ve come back to claim what is rightfully mine. I have Dad’s rifle next to me on the table and it is almost dusk. I’ve also brought several portable halogen lights to set up around the house, and my own shotgun. I’m borrowing a handgun from Joe, a guy at Fish and Game who I work with. When I am done typing this account of my memories, I will print it out, and leave it on the dining room table, along with my wedding ring and my key to the safe deposit box where my will is kept. Everything is loaded and ready. Hopefully I will return here to collect these things and nobody will ever know I wrote this.
Steph, in the event that you are the unfortunate soul to find this, which I’m terrified to think seems a likely outcome; the thought of you having to go on alone hurts me more than anything in this world ever can, know that I love you more than anything and I hope you understand that I am doing this to keep you safe. Zachary, I love you and can only hope you grow up to be a good, kindhearted, and strong man like your grandfather was. To my unborn daughter, if I don’t live long enough to meet you, it will be the single greatest regret of my life.
Tell the police, tell fish and game, call Joe, he’s one of the few people who knows about this. Make this situation known. Eventually someone will kill it, even if it isn’t me. Goodbye for now.
It was really an easy life (or at least it could have been a lot worse), I went to school, Dad went to work, Mom took care of the animals, then we all had dinner together every night, and I would go to bed while Mom and Dad had a beer or two and watched the news. Sometimes at night I would hear things outside. Mostly just normal stuff. The cows or horses would get spooked by a coyote or something, or I would hear the dogs chasing a rabbit, barking their heads off. Every once in a great while we would find a chicken dead. Dad would always tell me about it but never let me see the body, although I asked frequently. He would keep Mom and I inside until he had gone out, did whatever he did with the body, throw sawdust over any blood, and then life would go on as normal. I assumed it was foxes, as I had seen a couple of them out in the pasture over the years, slinking around back and forth through the grass.
The summer when I was ten years old, I remember helping Mom change the bedding in the horse stalls, when we heard a huge racket going on outside. If you’ve never heard the sounds of a horse in pain, you don’t want to, trust me. It sounds almost like a person screaming. Well that’s what we heard, and one of our horses, the palamino, came running into the barn with a wound on it’s left thigh. Four long marks, like claw marks, ran across it’s body for about a foot. It had blood running down it’s leg, and was limping. I was so scared by the sight of that much blood that Mom locked the horse in a stall and made me go inside with one of the dogs. She told me to lock the door and stay inside until she came in to get me. I did.
Eventually Mom came inside and told me that the horse had hurt itself on the barbed wire that ran the perimeter of the pasture, we owned more land beyond that, but it was mostly forested. I guess I believed her at the time, but at dinner that night I noticed Dad was being particularly quiet and Mom was talking a lot more than she normally did. She was being really animated, and I noticed that Dad had gotten his rifle out and set it by the back door. Usually he only did that when the coyotes had been acting up.
That night I went to bed as normal, but I had trouble falling asleep. I turned on my desk lamp and decided to read comic books until I got tired. I have a very vivid memory of reading Uncanny X-Men and hearing the back door open. Looking out, I could see my Dad by the porch light, lighting a cigarette and holding his rifle under his arm. He started walking over to the driveway and then turned to follow the fence line. I couldn’t sleep until I knew Dad was back safe. I kept coming downstairs with the excuse of getting water to see if Dad was back in the house yet, and each time all I saw was Mom sitting on the couch in the living room, staring at a blank TV screen and looking worried, sighing occasionally. Eventually, about 4 in the morning, I think, Dad did come back, and I was so tired and relieved that I fell asleep as soon as I knew he was home. He never told me what he did that night, but I never thought to ask.
Two months later I was back in school. It rains a LOT in Oregon in the fall, and this day was no different. All I could hear from my bedroom was rain hitting the ground and the aluminum roof of the chicken coop. There was light thunder in the distance, but it was slowly getting closer. I thought I had heard a coyote yapping out around the garage, or it could have been one of the dogs. I looked out, straining my eyes to see whatever there may have been. In a brief and distant lightning flash I saw something. It looked almost like a person, but hunched over, and with a long torso. It was tall, taller than Dad, who was a good six foot four, at least. I just barely caught a glimpse of it on the near side of the garage, then the light faded and I didn’t see it again that night.
There was another dead chicken the next morning. The third in just as many weeks. I told Dad what I had seen the previous night. The color went out of his cheeks momentarily, until he told that the storm must have been playing tricks on me. I accepted that.
Four months after that we lost a cow. It was in the middle of the night, and we all woke up at the same time. There was a lot of noise in the pasture, but only briefly. The cry of a dying animal, and a primitive, guttural yell that I had never heard before. Dad rushed up to my room, I could hear him running up the stairs to my room. He had his rifle in hand, and opened my door. He saw I was awake and told me to stay inside no matter what and try to go back to sleep. I don’t think I have to say that sleep wasn’t really an option any longer, but I did stay in my room, with a blanket held tight around my shoulders and staring out the window. Probably about ten minutes later I heard gunshots in the field. I don’t know what he was shooting at, whether it was whatever had attacked the cow, or the cow itself, trying to put the animal out of it’s misery.
Dad rarely, if ever, talked about that night. I later found out that he had gotten to the cow only to find it ripped open on the ground, bleeding out from it’s torso. The shots I heard were him shooting the cow in the head.
It kept going like that. For years. A chicken or a duck here and there. Something bigger only very rarely. It sounds absurd but I almost came to think of it as commonplace. I only ever caught glimpses of the thing until what comes next. It terrified me. It happened in the middle of the day, over the course of a long weekend when my parents had gone to Seattle to see my uncle, who was ill.
It was on a Saturday afternoon, I was 17 years old. I was out in the barn putting out food for the horses and the dogs. The horses were running around out in the pasture and the dogs were asleep in the corner of one of the horse stalls. I heard something rustling in the tall grass outside in the pasture. The dogs looked around a little bit but didn’t seem to mind. I assumed it was just one of the horses waiting for me to leave so they could eat. I kept going about what I was doing, and in several minutes I thought I heard breathing. I turned to look and it was standing in the door. Tall as hell even hunched over. The sun was streaming in behind it, lighting up all the dust in the air around it like some kind of sickly halo. It was looking at me. Considering me. Maybe it was trying to decide whether or not I was food. I remember swearing, turning, and running as fast as I could for the house, not even thinking. Panic causing my legs to move. It was behind me, not even breathing hard. I heard it’s feet hitting the ground in a constant rhythm. I got to the house, opened the door, slammed it behind me and locked it as fast as I could. I tore through the house, locking every door, and drawing the blinds on every window. I could hear it snarling outside the back door. The dogs were barking at it, but they wouldn’t try to attack the thing. It was too big and they knew it. It roared at the dogs and they ran off, probably to hide in the pasture.
I went to my parent’s bedroom and got Dad’s rifle. I loaded it, set up a chair in the living room facing the back door, and waited. It started prowling around the house, I could hear it’s feet crunching on the gravel of the driveway and the wooden planks of the back deck. It kept walking, back and forth. I thought about trying to look through a window to see it, but I was too scared. Eventually, after hours of hoping it would go away, the sun went down. I turned on all of the outside lights and went up to my room. I opened my window, with the rifle in my hands, hoping to be able to pick the thing off from above. I saw it lurking just beyond the glow from the porchlight. It had long, sinewy arms, and walked on bent knee. It was by the chicken coop. Then it disappeared from view. I heard the chickens squawking and screeching. The thing reappeared with a dead, bloody chicken in it’s hands. It bit off one of the wings with jaws that were dripping with slime and drool and let the dead bird drop to the ground at it’s feet. Then it looked at me. It’s eyes made contact with my eyes. It turned away again, back to the chickens. It came back with another bird, mutilated it in front of me, and dropped it. It went back again. And again. I should have taken a shot at it, but I was astounded and confused trying to figure out what it was doing. Then it hit me, it was a show of power. It was showing me that it was stronger than me. That it could do whatever it wanted to do because I couldn’t stop it. At the same time I felt powerless and sickened. Powerless because what it was saying was true. If it was just that thing and me, I wouldn’t stand a chance. Sickened because I realized what kind of intelligence it would need to be able to convey that message. The thought shook me out of my stupor and I remembered the rifle at my side. It was heading back to the chickens, and I decided that when it came back I would take my shot.
It strode back to the porch. Almost arrogant, walking on bended knee with those arms so long that the chicken was nearly dragging on the ground. I raised the rifle up to my eye, and tried to steady myself. My heart was beating so hard I could see the rifle shaking ever so slightly in rhythm with each heart beat I could hear pounding in my own ears. It raised the body to it’s mouth and just as it was about to put the chicken’s head inside, I squeezed the trigger. The crack of the gun echoed in the now shattered quiet of the nighttime standoff and I heard it howl. A painful, loud, startled howl. I had hit it on the outside of the shoulder. It ran off into the night. I never saw it again. It was still out there, though. It still killed chickens, and other things. More often than before.
I’m writing all of this now because my parents died three weeks ago. They were killed in a collision with a drunk driver. He survived. They left me the farm, and I intend to live here with my own family. I’m 32 now, and I work for an Oregon Fish and Game office in Salem. I’m married to a wonderful woman named Stephanie. We have one son, Zachary, who is four years old. We are expecting a daughter in four months. I’ve come to the farmhouse alone today, I told Steph that I just wanted some time alone in my parent’s house. To deal with some emotions. She was very understanding.
I’ve come back to claim what is rightfully mine. I have Dad’s rifle next to me on the table and it is almost dusk. I’ve also brought several portable halogen lights to set up around the house, and my own shotgun. I’m borrowing a handgun from Joe, a guy at Fish and Game who I work with. When I am done typing this account of my memories, I will print it out, and leave it on the dining room table, along with my wedding ring and my key to the safe deposit box where my will is kept. Everything is loaded and ready. Hopefully I will return here to collect these things and nobody will ever know I wrote this.
Steph, in the event that you are the unfortunate soul to find this, which I’m terrified to think seems a likely outcome; the thought of you having to go on alone hurts me more than anything in this world ever can, know that I love you more than anything and I hope you understand that I am doing this to keep you safe. Zachary, I love you and can only hope you grow up to be a good, kindhearted, and strong man like your grandfather was. To my unborn daughter, if I don’t live long enough to meet you, it will be the single greatest regret of my life.
Tell the police, tell fish and game, call Joe, he’s one of the few people who knows about this. Make this situation known. Eventually someone will kill it, even if it isn’t me. Goodbye for now.
The Thing that Stalks the Fields
Spoiler [+]
It was a few weeks ago that the hay bales started creeping slowly away from the house. Every morning when I woke up, each had moved a few hundred feet from where it was before. I assumed it was pranksters with nothing better to do, and I so I ignored it. Within a few days, though, the bales began to approach the boundaries of the farm. I was tired of the whole game by then, and decided to move them back. It took a tedious hour to bring them all from where they were to over near the house again, and by the time I was done I was ready to snap the neck of whatever little pissant was deciding to screw with me.
The next morning, I found each and every one of my horses messily decapitated. The smell was what woke me up. Each one was slumped over against the side of its stall. There were no signs of the heads. I spent the rest of the day cleaning up the mess and burying the remains. It was only when I was done that I noticed the bales of hay had all returned to their positions from the day before, scattered far out into the fields. This time I left them where they were.
That night I sat on my porch with my shotgun in hand and a pot of coffee on the table beside me. I sat for hours, straining my eyes into the fields to catch a glimpse of who was moving my hay bales. Finally, I was beginning to nod off. I would have, but just as my eyes began to close I heard a clamor and a rustling of trees from the nearby woods. I leaned forward, my heart racing with excitement; I was going to catch the bastard. I fumbled with my gun and fidgeted in my seat, waiting anxiously for whoever it was to get close enough to ambush. It was only when the thing got close enough for me to make out its silhouette in the dark that I was frozen still. The thing that crept into my fields from the nearby woods didn’t seem to notice me sitting there. It stalked, hunched and deliberate, through the field with the posture of a tiptoeing thief. If not for the fact that it must have towered to over ten feet tall even in its crouched position, it might have seemed almost frail. The thinness of its arms and legs and the emaciated, caved-in quality of its chest reminded me of a starving animal. Still, this thing was undeniably strong, and I watched it hoist each bale up into its arms with ease, and set it down carefully a while away, taking only a few strides to cover the distance. I watched it work, moving each bale thoughtfully. Every once in a while it would straighten up to look around at the other bales’ positions in the field, before adjusting the one it was working on ever so slightly.
Before it left, it looked towards the house. I felt its eyes sweep over me in the dark, but whether it saw me or not I couldn’t tell. Then, it turned silently and crept back the way it came, disappearing into the dark of the woods. It took me an hour before I had the courage to move at all. I went inside after a while, but didn’t sleep that night. It was only when the sun rose that I dared step off my porch into the fields. The hay bales were where it left them. Strangely, it didn’t move them as far as it had in the previous days. They were approaching something invisible in the fields, and as I looked at them I realized that they seemed to be marking some line. Indeed, as I walked around the house, I saw the distinct circle that they formed with me at the center. At first I thought the bales were just being haphazardly moved away from the house, but now I could see that they were instead being moved towards some boundary. The thing was sending me a message. I slept uneasily that night, and only because I was exhausted.
The next morning the bales hadn’t moved at all. They didn’t move at all for the rest of that week, in fact. They were finally where the thing wanted them. I made myself sick trying to interpret them. Why would this thing expend so much energy moving my hay bales, and threaten me with such violence should I try to interfere? Killing my horses was just that – a threat. An intelligent threat, at that. It knew what would scare me, and it knew that I would understand the implications.
The sound of an automobile working its way along the road to my farm one morning gave me a little rush of excitement. I’d been planning to abandon the farm since I saw the thing, but I couldn’t hope to leave on foot without risking it treating me like it treated my horses. But, if I could get in the car with whoever was coming my way, I might be able to escape before it could stop me. I didn’t know or care who it was. I decided that the moment they stopped the car, I would jump in the passenger’s seat and tell them to get the hell out of here. I didn’t get the chance.
The car worked its way slowly along the road, trundling across the uneven ground. I urged it silently to hurry. It was when it passed between the two bales placed on either side of the road that I began to hear a booming clatter from the woods. The thing burst suddenly from between the trees, sprinting on all four of its terrible, gangly limbs towards the car. Within a few seconds it was there, pouncing on the automobile like a predatory cat. Within moments it was picking and peeling the vehicle’s steel frame apart, working to get at the driver. The man, whoever he was, screamed all the while and I could hear him even over the crunching of metal and the shattering of glass. It was only when the thing crushed him carelessly in its hand that the screaming stopped. It tossed him away, and straightened up to look at me once again. In the sunlight, I could see the inhumanity of it. It was composed entirely of something awful and alive which was lashed together in a messy semblance of a human form. Whatever it was made of looked so polished and hard, that if it weren’t for the minute writhing of the stuff, I’d think it was made of granite.
The thing retreated back into the woods, and I was left to my shock. My eyes wandered to where the car sat, the engine still sputtering, between two of the hay bales. Suddenly, I understood. The message was clear. I am this thing’s captive, and I am not allowed visitors. Nothing may cross the borders it has set. I’m trapped here, by the thing that stalks the fields, and it demands nothing except that I never leave. Still, I don’t know if I can handle being that thing’s canary. I’ve been thinking hard for the last few days since I saw it crush that man’s chest, and silence him before he could finish his scream. If I crossed the hay bale border, it’d probably do the same. It’d smash my skull before I could put my hands up to protect myself. It’d go and find a new pet, and probably keep looking until it found someone who could stand knowing that it was waiting just outside, watching it at all hours with its shiny, insect eyes.
I've been thinking hard for the last few days, and I might just make a run for it.
The next morning, I found each and every one of my horses messily decapitated. The smell was what woke me up. Each one was slumped over against the side of its stall. There were no signs of the heads. I spent the rest of the day cleaning up the mess and burying the remains. It was only when I was done that I noticed the bales of hay had all returned to their positions from the day before, scattered far out into the fields. This time I left them where they were.
That night I sat on my porch with my shotgun in hand and a pot of coffee on the table beside me. I sat for hours, straining my eyes into the fields to catch a glimpse of who was moving my hay bales. Finally, I was beginning to nod off. I would have, but just as my eyes began to close I heard a clamor and a rustling of trees from the nearby woods. I leaned forward, my heart racing with excitement; I was going to catch the bastard. I fumbled with my gun and fidgeted in my seat, waiting anxiously for whoever it was to get close enough to ambush. It was only when the thing got close enough for me to make out its silhouette in the dark that I was frozen still. The thing that crept into my fields from the nearby woods didn’t seem to notice me sitting there. It stalked, hunched and deliberate, through the field with the posture of a tiptoeing thief. If not for the fact that it must have towered to over ten feet tall even in its crouched position, it might have seemed almost frail. The thinness of its arms and legs and the emaciated, caved-in quality of its chest reminded me of a starving animal. Still, this thing was undeniably strong, and I watched it hoist each bale up into its arms with ease, and set it down carefully a while away, taking only a few strides to cover the distance. I watched it work, moving each bale thoughtfully. Every once in a while it would straighten up to look around at the other bales’ positions in the field, before adjusting the one it was working on ever so slightly.
Before it left, it looked towards the house. I felt its eyes sweep over me in the dark, but whether it saw me or not I couldn’t tell. Then, it turned silently and crept back the way it came, disappearing into the dark of the woods. It took me an hour before I had the courage to move at all. I went inside after a while, but didn’t sleep that night. It was only when the sun rose that I dared step off my porch into the fields. The hay bales were where it left them. Strangely, it didn’t move them as far as it had in the previous days. They were approaching something invisible in the fields, and as I looked at them I realized that they seemed to be marking some line. Indeed, as I walked around the house, I saw the distinct circle that they formed with me at the center. At first I thought the bales were just being haphazardly moved away from the house, but now I could see that they were instead being moved towards some boundary. The thing was sending me a message. I slept uneasily that night, and only because I was exhausted.
The next morning the bales hadn’t moved at all. They didn’t move at all for the rest of that week, in fact. They were finally where the thing wanted them. I made myself sick trying to interpret them. Why would this thing expend so much energy moving my hay bales, and threaten me with such violence should I try to interfere? Killing my horses was just that – a threat. An intelligent threat, at that. It knew what would scare me, and it knew that I would understand the implications.
The sound of an automobile working its way along the road to my farm one morning gave me a little rush of excitement. I’d been planning to abandon the farm since I saw the thing, but I couldn’t hope to leave on foot without risking it treating me like it treated my horses. But, if I could get in the car with whoever was coming my way, I might be able to escape before it could stop me. I didn’t know or care who it was. I decided that the moment they stopped the car, I would jump in the passenger’s seat and tell them to get the hell out of here. I didn’t get the chance.
The car worked its way slowly along the road, trundling across the uneven ground. I urged it silently to hurry. It was when it passed between the two bales placed on either side of the road that I began to hear a booming clatter from the woods. The thing burst suddenly from between the trees, sprinting on all four of its terrible, gangly limbs towards the car. Within a few seconds it was there, pouncing on the automobile like a predatory cat. Within moments it was picking and peeling the vehicle’s steel frame apart, working to get at the driver. The man, whoever he was, screamed all the while and I could hear him even over the crunching of metal and the shattering of glass. It was only when the thing crushed him carelessly in its hand that the screaming stopped. It tossed him away, and straightened up to look at me once again. In the sunlight, I could see the inhumanity of it. It was composed entirely of something awful and alive which was lashed together in a messy semblance of a human form. Whatever it was made of looked so polished and hard, that if it weren’t for the minute writhing of the stuff, I’d think it was made of granite.
The thing retreated back into the woods, and I was left to my shock. My eyes wandered to where the car sat, the engine still sputtering, between two of the hay bales. Suddenly, I understood. The message was clear. I am this thing’s captive, and I am not allowed visitors. Nothing may cross the borders it has set. I’m trapped here, by the thing that stalks the fields, and it demands nothing except that I never leave. Still, I don’t know if I can handle being that thing’s canary. I’ve been thinking hard for the last few days since I saw it crush that man’s chest, and silence him before he could finish his scream. If I crossed the hay bale border, it’d probably do the same. It’d smash my skull before I could put my hands up to protect myself. It’d go and find a new pet, and probably keep looking until it found someone who could stand knowing that it was waiting just outside, watching it at all hours with its shiny, insect eyes.
I've been thinking hard for the last few days, and I might just make a run for it.
- Mar 17, 2006
- 8,410
- 52
Posting for later
caponecartels
Banned
- Aug 29, 2006
- 2,319
- 27
A Hands-On Approach
From: —— @ —— .com
Re: entries/information requested re: compiling psychological profile
Written below are the journal entries of Christopher Young, brother of Daryl Young, found saved as individual files on his personal computer, with file names Prologue.doc, Ch1.doc, Ch2.doc, etc. Apart from being compiled into one document, they have not been altered in any way.
—
Prologue
Two weeks later, there was a sound. There was a humming. It came from that place on the carpet, the spot near the corner. His spot.
Ch 1
I’m getting concerned. I guess I was a bit distracted before, but my mind is clear now. They’re gone, and I am frankly growing more concerned by the minute.
A chalk-white amorphous thing. A hideous, absolutely hideous thing. I saw it. I saw it on the rug, and it scared me. It looked at me, grinning with half-formed white eyes filmed over. It writhed towards me. A heat, some sort of sickening heat radiated from it, and it saw my disgust and thrived upon it.
I had hoped it would live in one of the closets, but it was content to ooze about my home, leaving trails as it went. I am quite sure that if I had not put the towel under the bathroom door it would have tried to come in and join me while I bathed myself.
Ch 2
Today it has appendages. I am not sure if they existed before, but now they most certainly do. It has two, with one on either side, and it crawls haphazardly along like some sort of horrid lopsided insect. It tried to follow me out through the door, but I kicked it and it did not try any longer.
It thumps around as I try to sleep, dragging its body everywhere and leaving residue all over the house.
I took my cat to Daryl’s. The thing didn’t follow me. I’m glad. It may get me, but it will not get my cat.
Ch 3
It now has four appendages and is beginning to form a skull-like dome under its pulsing skin. It has a mouth, a crooked little mouth, and I am afraid it will begin to make sounds at me. Three of the appendages are longer than the fourth, so it mostly wobbles around in crooked little circles. It is getting bigger, and it never stops changing. I was hoping it would stay and become some sort of indiscernible monster, but now I am sure that it is becoming a person, or at the very least something similar. I would like to kill it. I wonder if I could.
Ch 4
The appendages are even now. It’s disgusting, with abhorrent little limbs forming perfectly. They’re currently flippers and nubs, cartilage and bright blue veins under translucent white skin. It sits and stares at me as the cat did, but instead of curiosity it looks on with a hunger and a disquieting energy. Just as the cat’s did, however, its eyes reflect the slightest light in the darkness. They’re omnipresent and wide and green and yellow as I try to sleep. The eyes are not (yet?) the same size, which only serves to make the thing more unnerving.
Ch 5
It sits at the top of the stairs, waiting for me, smiling down at me with crooked reflective eyes and a small mouth full of small black teeth. My bedroom is upstairs. I am afraid to go up.
It also has hands and feet now; the nubs gave way to small, slender fingers and toes. It is beginning to walk and climb about, and there are small white hand prints smudged on all of the doorknobs. I think at this point towels will do me no good.
Ch 6
It can open doors. I’m sure of it now. It’s androgynous in anatomy, but for him I think it male. It still smiles at me and stares, but says nothing. A small mercy.
Ch 7
Last night I picked up a favorite old anthology and decided to read it while resting in the rocking chair next to my bedroom window. In response, the accursed thing stood in my doorway, leering at me, intent to ruin any escape. It succeeded. Frustration and fear gave way to rage, and I pushed up the window, ripped a hole in the screen, and flung the book outside into the night.
The thing ventured down the stairs, in and out the front door, and brought the book back- an arm snaking against and over the arm of my chair, depositing the small book in my lap, complete with bony hand print. That was the closest it had ever gotten to me. I became frightened.
I stared at the thing and then tossed the old book to the carpet. To think; to only have to deal with a beating beneath the floorboards! This thing mocked me and tormented me and lived and breathed and watched. It looked at the book for a moment, then curled up in the corner and stared at me, large uneven eyes with skin pulled back around. It stared at me and smiled with its little teeth.
Ch 8
The thing has started polluting my food or hiding it or both, and I found that shampoo burns my scalp and razors jut from the pages of my books. No longer content to mull around and lurk in corners, it is now actively making my life miserable.
Ch 9
Eventually, I had no choice but to venture out to the local supermarket and replace my now useless toiletries and food. I had become accustomed to it staying at my home, content to violate my private space, but I always held a suspicion it would begin to follow me. My fear was confirmed.
I drove to the store, did my shopping, and checked out. Nothing unusual happened. I walked outside. Nothing! I approached my car and believed to have seen it, but had not. I then glanced up and saw it.
It was far away. I do not know if it was making an attempt to hide, but it was there; it was there, looking at me, half-hidden behind a tree. Our eyes met, and I shivered. It appeared pleased, then it crawled its thin body back behind the tree, paused, and stuck its head out to continue watching me. The eyes were even, but they seemed to be getting larger, and darker, and more vacant; even from the distance between the two of us they stood out much against the bleached skin that surrounded them.
It smiled, but showed no teeth. I suppose it did not want to show them in public. I wondered what it had planned for me. I blinked and it was gone.
I paused for a moment, worried it would appear somewhere closer, but nothing happened. I then packed up the groceries and returned home. I stopped, retrieved my mail, pulled up, parked, got out, glanced up, and a light happened to catch my eye; I saw a foreign light my bedroom window. Faintly silhouetted against my window was the thing, staring intently down at me, shuddering against the glass, violating my room. I’m sure it had been watching the entire time, waiting for me to notice. In silhouette it looked so much like a person now, though was really little more than a lumpy childlike skeleton with enormous dark eyes.
If I killed it, would the authorities come back and blame me for killing a person, I wondered? I wondered. I wondered if it would try to snake a hand through the hole in the screen and reach for me.
Ch 11
Last night I sat on the couch flipping channels, desperate for any distraction or escape. The phone was next to me, but I was too afraid to call anyone for help, lest what happened before be found out. It must be said, though, that the pressure was becoming unbearable.
It sat in his corner again, sat in a sphinx-like position despite looking so human now, and just as I hit the one channel with static for the umpteenth time the thing in the corner began to whisper. I ignored it and changed the channel, hoping it would shut up. Its whispering merely grew in speed and intensity, and while it did not move, its eyes reflected the television screen and widened and its small chest heaved as it rattled off. I turned up the volume and began flipping rapidly, infomercial then sports channel then a cartoon, then suddenly his face was on the screen, tongue lolling out and blue face gasping for air and mercy and the thing was in front of me and in front of the television, facing me, gibbering and staring and I screamed over it and the television and the room went dark
Ch 12
This is too much, and I understand now the extent of blind terror the idea of certain death instinctively brings about in people. I have known the thrill of killing and the fear of being caught, but neither the idea of retribution nor of my life itself ending were ever real to me.
The mere thought of this thing, however, drives a black and bleak and cold and nearly unbearable fear to my core, let alone the feeling that I get when I feel it mulling about my room at night or when I awake to find small bruises, cuts, and white chalky smudges on my person.
I want to kill it, but I don’t know what would happen if I tried. I don’t know what to do.
Ch 13
I’ll say it here. Maybe it will help. It has been a while, but
I killed him.
It’s all clean, but I did it. He looked at me and looked at me and looked at me and would not stop. I should have known he would never stop. I knocked him down and strangled him until his throat collapsed under my thumbs and I dumped the body somewhere far away.
At first I had nightmares about him screaming then wheezing then his eyes and skin bursting like blood and confetti. I had them every night.
Then the police left, and I was left to read in my warm bed with my cat sleeping alongside me or pawing at the pages. The investigation ceased, the nightmares ceased, and I was at peace. Then the humming started.
The humming and the warmth all over and I can see its reflection in my computer monitor
Ch 14
My home, my bed, my person, and now my dreams. I’m having nightmares again, but they’re much, much worse. In my dreams it’s there. It has no eyes, but it stands tall and with its wide mouth and talks to me and laughs at me and screams and looks ready to devour me. Sometimes I understand its words and sometimes they’re incomprehensible, but whenever I wake up I cannot remember their precise nature. The dreams feel dark and hot and cramped and I wonder if anything worse could possibly happen to me if I die.
I wonder if it would depend on if it killed me or if someone else did.
Ch 15
Maybe I will do it. I have a pistol in a box in my bedroom closet, and if I were to fling the thing from its watching place down the stairs it would give me enough time to run and grab the gun.
I just wouldn’t be sure who to use it on.
I have worried about the thing reading these entries and figuring out my intentions, but I have not seen any evidence of it examining the keyboard or monitor. I comfort myself in regards to this matter by believing that its form of comprehension is much too primal and hunger-driven to allow for much complex thought.
Maybe I’m a fool.
Maybe it knows everything.
Regardless, it’s in my dreams and my brain and every waking moment and I am determined to end it.
Ch 16
I found my solution. I purchased a shotgun. If we’re both within range when I pull the trigger, it should do the trick. Wish me luck.
Ch 17
Why didn’t I die
Why didn’t it die
Ch 18
I don’t understand
I cleaned the carpet after before but now it’s soaked with blood
I
wonder if with the way my head is, looking at it is like a mirror because
I bled like a person and the thing bled black and it’s all everywhere and I haven’t looked in the mirror but I blasted half of its skull off and there’re bits of red and blue flesh everywhere and it’s still looking at me leering at me smiling at me spurting and bleeding at me
the keyboard is covered in my blood and I don’t know how long I can keep this up
I only have one idea left
I think I am going to go
far away.
—-
Written above are the journal entries of Christopher Young, found dead in a rock quarry next to the mutilated, partially decomposed, and recently moved remains of Shaun Dawes, his young neighbor and (former) friend. Dawes’s death was one of head trauma followed by strangulation, but Young’s cause of death is as of yet undetermined, though he was malnourished and his hygienic state was in vast disrepair. In fact, thanks to his physical and mental state leading up to his death, it is uncertain how he managed to drive the relatively great length from his home to the quarry in which he ended up.
It is also worth mentioning that neither fresh blood nor any of the firearms Young mentions in his writing were found in his home; all our forensics team found were older traces on the carpet and mantle corner that likely belonged to Dawes. We’re currently probing autopsy reports for any information they can provide on Young’s mental health from Dawes’s death onward and requesting further investigation by every department involved. All we have to go on in regards to Young apart from his cadaver’s physical state and these entries is virtually nil; as of my writing this, we haven’t come up with a single witness or piece of evidence outside of what I mentioned above, apart from an interview with “Daryl
From: —— @ —— .com
Re: entries/information requested re: compiling psychological profile
Written below are the journal entries of Christopher Young, brother of Daryl Young, found saved as individual files on his personal computer, with file names Prologue.doc, Ch1.doc, Ch2.doc, etc. Apart from being compiled into one document, they have not been altered in any way.
—
Prologue
Two weeks later, there was a sound. There was a humming. It came from that place on the carpet, the spot near the corner. His spot.
Ch 1
I’m getting concerned. I guess I was a bit distracted before, but my mind is clear now. They’re gone, and I am frankly growing more concerned by the minute.
A chalk-white amorphous thing. A hideous, absolutely hideous thing. I saw it. I saw it on the rug, and it scared me. It looked at me, grinning with half-formed white eyes filmed over. It writhed towards me. A heat, some sort of sickening heat radiated from it, and it saw my disgust and thrived upon it.
I had hoped it would live in one of the closets, but it was content to ooze about my home, leaving trails as it went. I am quite sure that if I had not put the towel under the bathroom door it would have tried to come in and join me while I bathed myself.
Ch 2
Today it has appendages. I am not sure if they existed before, but now they most certainly do. It has two, with one on either side, and it crawls haphazardly along like some sort of horrid lopsided insect. It tried to follow me out through the door, but I kicked it and it did not try any longer.
It thumps around as I try to sleep, dragging its body everywhere and leaving residue all over the house.
I took my cat to Daryl’s. The thing didn’t follow me. I’m glad. It may get me, but it will not get my cat.
Ch 3
It now has four appendages and is beginning to form a skull-like dome under its pulsing skin. It has a mouth, a crooked little mouth, and I am afraid it will begin to make sounds at me. Three of the appendages are longer than the fourth, so it mostly wobbles around in crooked little circles. It is getting bigger, and it never stops changing. I was hoping it would stay and become some sort of indiscernible monster, but now I am sure that it is becoming a person, or at the very least something similar. I would like to kill it. I wonder if I could.
Ch 4
The appendages are even now. It’s disgusting, with abhorrent little limbs forming perfectly. They’re currently flippers and nubs, cartilage and bright blue veins under translucent white skin. It sits and stares at me as the cat did, but instead of curiosity it looks on with a hunger and a disquieting energy. Just as the cat’s did, however, its eyes reflect the slightest light in the darkness. They’re omnipresent and wide and green and yellow as I try to sleep. The eyes are not (yet?) the same size, which only serves to make the thing more unnerving.
Ch 5
It sits at the top of the stairs, waiting for me, smiling down at me with crooked reflective eyes and a small mouth full of small black teeth. My bedroom is upstairs. I am afraid to go up.
It also has hands and feet now; the nubs gave way to small, slender fingers and toes. It is beginning to walk and climb about, and there are small white hand prints smudged on all of the doorknobs. I think at this point towels will do me no good.
Ch 6
It can open doors. I’m sure of it now. It’s androgynous in anatomy, but for him I think it male. It still smiles at me and stares, but says nothing. A small mercy.
Ch 7
Last night I picked up a favorite old anthology and decided to read it while resting in the rocking chair next to my bedroom window. In response, the accursed thing stood in my doorway, leering at me, intent to ruin any escape. It succeeded. Frustration and fear gave way to rage, and I pushed up the window, ripped a hole in the screen, and flung the book outside into the night.
The thing ventured down the stairs, in and out the front door, and brought the book back- an arm snaking against and over the arm of my chair, depositing the small book in my lap, complete with bony hand print. That was the closest it had ever gotten to me. I became frightened.
I stared at the thing and then tossed the old book to the carpet. To think; to only have to deal with a beating beneath the floorboards! This thing mocked me and tormented me and lived and breathed and watched. It looked at the book for a moment, then curled up in the corner and stared at me, large uneven eyes with skin pulled back around. It stared at me and smiled with its little teeth.
Ch 8
The thing has started polluting my food or hiding it or both, and I found that shampoo burns my scalp and razors jut from the pages of my books. No longer content to mull around and lurk in corners, it is now actively making my life miserable.
Ch 9
Eventually, I had no choice but to venture out to the local supermarket and replace my now useless toiletries and food. I had become accustomed to it staying at my home, content to violate my private space, but I always held a suspicion it would begin to follow me. My fear was confirmed.
I drove to the store, did my shopping, and checked out. Nothing unusual happened. I walked outside. Nothing! I approached my car and believed to have seen it, but had not. I then glanced up and saw it.
It was far away. I do not know if it was making an attempt to hide, but it was there; it was there, looking at me, half-hidden behind a tree. Our eyes met, and I shivered. It appeared pleased, then it crawled its thin body back behind the tree, paused, and stuck its head out to continue watching me. The eyes were even, but they seemed to be getting larger, and darker, and more vacant; even from the distance between the two of us they stood out much against the bleached skin that surrounded them.
It smiled, but showed no teeth. I suppose it did not want to show them in public. I wondered what it had planned for me. I blinked and it was gone.
I paused for a moment, worried it would appear somewhere closer, but nothing happened. I then packed up the groceries and returned home. I stopped, retrieved my mail, pulled up, parked, got out, glanced up, and a light happened to catch my eye; I saw a foreign light my bedroom window. Faintly silhouetted against my window was the thing, staring intently down at me, shuddering against the glass, violating my room. I’m sure it had been watching the entire time, waiting for me to notice. In silhouette it looked so much like a person now, though was really little more than a lumpy childlike skeleton with enormous dark eyes.
If I killed it, would the authorities come back and blame me for killing a person, I wondered? I wondered. I wondered if it would try to snake a hand through the hole in the screen and reach for me.
Ch 11
Last night I sat on the couch flipping channels, desperate for any distraction or escape. The phone was next to me, but I was too afraid to call anyone for help, lest what happened before be found out. It must be said, though, that the pressure was becoming unbearable.
It sat in his corner again, sat in a sphinx-like position despite looking so human now, and just as I hit the one channel with static for the umpteenth time the thing in the corner began to whisper. I ignored it and changed the channel, hoping it would shut up. Its whispering merely grew in speed and intensity, and while it did not move, its eyes reflected the television screen and widened and its small chest heaved as it rattled off. I turned up the volume and began flipping rapidly, infomercial then sports channel then a cartoon, then suddenly his face was on the screen, tongue lolling out and blue face gasping for air and mercy and the thing was in front of me and in front of the television, facing me, gibbering and staring and I screamed over it and the television and the room went dark
Ch 12
This is too much, and I understand now the extent of blind terror the idea of certain death instinctively brings about in people. I have known the thrill of killing and the fear of being caught, but neither the idea of retribution nor of my life itself ending were ever real to me.
The mere thought of this thing, however, drives a black and bleak and cold and nearly unbearable fear to my core, let alone the feeling that I get when I feel it mulling about my room at night or when I awake to find small bruises, cuts, and white chalky smudges on my person.
I want to kill it, but I don’t know what would happen if I tried. I don’t know what to do.
Ch 13
I’ll say it here. Maybe it will help. It has been a while, but
I killed him.
It’s all clean, but I did it. He looked at me and looked at me and looked at me and would not stop. I should have known he would never stop. I knocked him down and strangled him until his throat collapsed under my thumbs and I dumped the body somewhere far away.
At first I had nightmares about him screaming then wheezing then his eyes and skin bursting like blood and confetti. I had them every night.
Then the police left, and I was left to read in my warm bed with my cat sleeping alongside me or pawing at the pages. The investigation ceased, the nightmares ceased, and I was at peace. Then the humming started.
The humming and the warmth all over and I can see its reflection in my computer monitor
Ch 14
My home, my bed, my person, and now my dreams. I’m having nightmares again, but they’re much, much worse. In my dreams it’s there. It has no eyes, but it stands tall and with its wide mouth and talks to me and laughs at me and screams and looks ready to devour me. Sometimes I understand its words and sometimes they’re incomprehensible, but whenever I wake up I cannot remember their precise nature. The dreams feel dark and hot and cramped and I wonder if anything worse could possibly happen to me if I die.
I wonder if it would depend on if it killed me or if someone else did.
Ch 15
Maybe I will do it. I have a pistol in a box in my bedroom closet, and if I were to fling the thing from its watching place down the stairs it would give me enough time to run and grab the gun.
I just wouldn’t be sure who to use it on.
I have worried about the thing reading these entries and figuring out my intentions, but I have not seen any evidence of it examining the keyboard or monitor. I comfort myself in regards to this matter by believing that its form of comprehension is much too primal and hunger-driven to allow for much complex thought.
Maybe I’m a fool.
Maybe it knows everything.
Regardless, it’s in my dreams and my brain and every waking moment and I am determined to end it.
Ch 16
I found my solution. I purchased a shotgun. If we’re both within range when I pull the trigger, it should do the trick. Wish me luck.
Ch 17
Why didn’t I die
Why didn’t it die
Ch 18
I don’t understand
I cleaned the carpet after before but now it’s soaked with blood
I
wonder if with the way my head is, looking at it is like a mirror because
I bled like a person and the thing bled black and it’s all everywhere and I haven’t looked in the mirror but I blasted half of its skull off and there’re bits of red and blue flesh everywhere and it’s still looking at me leering at me smiling at me spurting and bleeding at me
the keyboard is covered in my blood and I don’t know how long I can keep this up
I only have one idea left
I think I am going to go
far away.
—-
Written above are the journal entries of Christopher Young, found dead in a rock quarry next to the mutilated, partially decomposed, and recently moved remains of Shaun Dawes, his young neighbor and (former) friend. Dawes’s death was one of head trauma followed by strangulation, but Young’s cause of death is as of yet undetermined, though he was malnourished and his hygienic state was in vast disrepair. In fact, thanks to his physical and mental state leading up to his death, it is uncertain how he managed to drive the relatively great length from his home to the quarry in which he ended up.
It is also worth mentioning that neither fresh blood nor any of the firearms Young mentions in his writing were found in his home; all our forensics team found were older traces on the carpet and mantle corner that likely belonged to Dawes. We’re currently probing autopsy reports for any information they can provide on Young’s mental health from Dawes’s death onward and requesting further investigation by every department involved. All we have to go on in regards to Young apart from his cadaver’s physical state and these entries is virtually nil; as of my writing this, we haven’t come up with a single witness or piece of evidence outside of what I mentioned above, apart from an interview with “Daryl
caponecartels
Banned
- Aug 29, 2006
- 2,319
- 27
Ha Ha Tonka
Spoiler [+]
Ever since I can remember I have always loved to hike. I grew up near the Mark Twain National Forest and fell in love with the dense woodlands, countless swift rivers, and rolling hills. You could walk for miles without any signs of civilization. There is something special to me about discovering new places and exploring nature at your own pace. Eventually I had to move away from the country to go to college. I was disappointed at the established hiking trails near my university city. Not because of the scenery, but because of the people. The city environment spoiled what made me passionate about my hobby. The once pristine trails from my memory were now littered with trash. People made to much noise and scared away the wide life. These were not true hiking trails, but more exhibits of nature that was spoiled by its convenience.
I remember the first night I had the idea to go hiking at night. At night everyone left the parks and nature trails, and the night was much cooler than the 100 degree daytime summer heat at the time. All it took was one trip, and I was hooked. Usually I would go to the trail in the daytime and take a moment to scope out the park. My primary concern was avoiding the attention of the forestry wardens. Although there would probably be no serious consequences if I were caught it added a small element of danger which made it more exciting. Up until this point I had been night hiking 15 or 20 times, but what happened during this trip changed everything. I have not been able to bring myself to go back since.
I had to been to Ha Ha Tonka State Park a couple of times before, but had never had a chance to see it at night. The park is beautiful as I am sure anyone that has been would say. The main feature of the park is the ruins of an old turn-of-the-century castle constructed on a huge bluff overlooking the Lake of the Ozarks. The scenery consists of glades, meadows, natural bridges, sinkholes, and caves. Ha Ha Tonka is said to be named by the Native Americans which is translated as “Laughing Waters
I remember the first night I had the idea to go hiking at night. At night everyone left the parks and nature trails, and the night was much cooler than the 100 degree daytime summer heat at the time. All it took was one trip, and I was hooked. Usually I would go to the trail in the daytime and take a moment to scope out the park. My primary concern was avoiding the attention of the forestry wardens. Although there would probably be no serious consequences if I were caught it added a small element of danger which made it more exciting. Up until this point I had been night hiking 15 or 20 times, but what happened during this trip changed everything. I have not been able to bring myself to go back since.
I had to been to Ha Ha Tonka State Park a couple of times before, but had never had a chance to see it at night. The park is beautiful as I am sure anyone that has been would say. The main feature of the park is the ruins of an old turn-of-the-century castle constructed on a huge bluff overlooking the Lake of the Ozarks. The scenery consists of glades, meadows, natural bridges, sinkholes, and caves. Ha Ha Tonka is said to be named by the Native Americans which is translated as “Laughing Waters
caponecartels
Banned
- Aug 29, 2006
- 2,319
- 27
Return to Earth
Spoiler [+]
I think this might be the end. For us anyway. Man and all that we’ve accomplished. I’ve had plenty time to think about it since the last time I saw the sun. The last time I’d ever see it. It’s not the end of the world but it is for us.
I guess it started almost a month ago, although it could be longer, there’s only the clocks scattered around the house to tell me how long and half of those are dead now. Anyway I’m straying from the point. It was on the news, a cruise ship sank for no reason. It wasn’t damaged, just pulled straight down. Then the rest of the stories flooded in. Everything in the water was sinking. Oil Rigs disappeared. People on the beach pulled down into the abyss. Nobody seemed able to explain why this was happening. Nothing floated anymore. It was bizarre. This filled the news for a couple days until it just got frightening.
It was during one broadcast that it changed for the worse. It was a report from some beach, an on-location report about this strange phenomenon. They were just recycling the same questions we had all been asking for days. Suddenly panic seemed to grip the face of the reporter, she screamed as the camera quickly tilted down. Her feet were sunk into the sand down to her shin. I remember smirking thinking it was just some overly-sensitive reporter messing up, but then the camera dropped. The remaining 10 or so seconds that followed showed not just the reporter sinking into the sand but all of them. The whole media circus that had descended on the beach to cover the same story. The reporter who was down to her shin a minute ago was now down to her chest. The shot of writhing, screaming, sinking people ended shortly as the camera was engulfed by the sand.
The news stayed on a few more days but there was nothing to say. Some blamed sink-holes for what happened on the beach, while others argued against them from the safety of their downtown studio. The news was a waste of time now. It was much easier to look out the window. It was more or less a ghost town outside. Everyone was inside, afraid to leave their homes. It didn’t seem to make sense. The roads and pavements were being absorbed by grass and dirt. Street signs and traffic lights were being consumed by the plants. Houses too.
Some people tried to run, jumping from roof-top to roof-top, looking for higher ground. Occasionally while flicking through what was left of the TV broadcasts, skyscrapers had become refugee camps. I had made one trip out of the house since this started, across the roof-tops. An attempt to get supplies from a nearby supermarket but that planned seemed to be a waste of time. It was a husk by the time I got there. Looted and pillaged. There was all the evidence I needed to see how bad this whole thing was. It’s easy to be in denial about something like, whatever this was, until it really seems to effect you. When I got back to my house. I noticed something. My car was gone. Well almost, you could still see the top poking out from the overgrowth and loose soil. And not just my car, all of them. Bigger vehicles were still in sight, only partially obscured but they were going down too.
A few days later, my whole bottom floor was subterranean. I had managed to block the windows and door from bursting in from all the dirt and soil, but it was just a cell now. A mausoleum. Not somewhere I wanted to be. I spent most of my time by an upstairs window, staring at the hostile world outside.
My neighbor died yesterday. He fell off his roof and was swallowed by the earth. He’s not the first person to do that either. What made it notable was why he fell. He was trying to stop his dog from getting out. The dog’s fine. Well I assume so. It ran off. They’re not effected. The animals. This is our fate. That nihilistic little discovery was too much for me to bare. This whole thing. A living ++%@#+’ nightmare. I hit the bottle hard and passed out for the night.
When I woke up my head pounded in the darkness. I flicked the light switches and the fuses but the power was out. I took the flashlight by the fuse box and looked around the house for any supplies. While checking the upstairs I saw it. The last glimpse of natural light I’ll ever see. I had been thinking it was just night, that I had slept all day in an alcohol coma. By the time I could cross the room to the window it was gone. I was underground. I tried to get out. Smashing through plaster and tiles to be greeted with a stream of soil pouring out from where the sky should be.
I don’t know how much longer I’ve got in here. In my house-sized coffin. There’s only so much food and so much air. I’ve got a little bit of light, a couple candles and a book of matches. The flashlight died sometime ago. But this is our fate. Man’s fate. Our return to the earth.
I guess it started almost a month ago, although it could be longer, there’s only the clocks scattered around the house to tell me how long and half of those are dead now. Anyway I’m straying from the point. It was on the news, a cruise ship sank for no reason. It wasn’t damaged, just pulled straight down. Then the rest of the stories flooded in. Everything in the water was sinking. Oil Rigs disappeared. People on the beach pulled down into the abyss. Nobody seemed able to explain why this was happening. Nothing floated anymore. It was bizarre. This filled the news for a couple days until it just got frightening.
It was during one broadcast that it changed for the worse. It was a report from some beach, an on-location report about this strange phenomenon. They were just recycling the same questions we had all been asking for days. Suddenly panic seemed to grip the face of the reporter, she screamed as the camera quickly tilted down. Her feet were sunk into the sand down to her shin. I remember smirking thinking it was just some overly-sensitive reporter messing up, but then the camera dropped. The remaining 10 or so seconds that followed showed not just the reporter sinking into the sand but all of them. The whole media circus that had descended on the beach to cover the same story. The reporter who was down to her shin a minute ago was now down to her chest. The shot of writhing, screaming, sinking people ended shortly as the camera was engulfed by the sand.
The news stayed on a few more days but there was nothing to say. Some blamed sink-holes for what happened on the beach, while others argued against them from the safety of their downtown studio. The news was a waste of time now. It was much easier to look out the window. It was more or less a ghost town outside. Everyone was inside, afraid to leave their homes. It didn’t seem to make sense. The roads and pavements were being absorbed by grass and dirt. Street signs and traffic lights were being consumed by the plants. Houses too.
Some people tried to run, jumping from roof-top to roof-top, looking for higher ground. Occasionally while flicking through what was left of the TV broadcasts, skyscrapers had become refugee camps. I had made one trip out of the house since this started, across the roof-tops. An attempt to get supplies from a nearby supermarket but that planned seemed to be a waste of time. It was a husk by the time I got there. Looted and pillaged. There was all the evidence I needed to see how bad this whole thing was. It’s easy to be in denial about something like, whatever this was, until it really seems to effect you. When I got back to my house. I noticed something. My car was gone. Well almost, you could still see the top poking out from the overgrowth and loose soil. And not just my car, all of them. Bigger vehicles were still in sight, only partially obscured but they were going down too.
A few days later, my whole bottom floor was subterranean. I had managed to block the windows and door from bursting in from all the dirt and soil, but it was just a cell now. A mausoleum. Not somewhere I wanted to be. I spent most of my time by an upstairs window, staring at the hostile world outside.
My neighbor died yesterday. He fell off his roof and was swallowed by the earth. He’s not the first person to do that either. What made it notable was why he fell. He was trying to stop his dog from getting out. The dog’s fine. Well I assume so. It ran off. They’re not effected. The animals. This is our fate. That nihilistic little discovery was too much for me to bare. This whole thing. A living ++%@#+’ nightmare. I hit the bottle hard and passed out for the night.
When I woke up my head pounded in the darkness. I flicked the light switches and the fuses but the power was out. I took the flashlight by the fuse box and looked around the house for any supplies. While checking the upstairs I saw it. The last glimpse of natural light I’ll ever see. I had been thinking it was just night, that I had slept all day in an alcohol coma. By the time I could cross the room to the window it was gone. I was underground. I tried to get out. Smashing through plaster and tiles to be greeted with a stream of soil pouring out from where the sky should be.
I don’t know how much longer I’ve got in here. In my house-sized coffin. There’s only so much food and so much air. I’ve got a little bit of light, a couple candles and a book of matches. The flashlight died sometime ago. But this is our fate. Man’s fate. Our return to the earth.
caponecartels
Banned
- Aug 29, 2006
- 2,319
- 27
Shower Princess
Spoiler [+]
What is it about being naked that makes someone feel so vulnerable? I mean, really, are you suddenly stronger with clothes? Maybe if you’re the type who goes around wearing steel toed boots and Kevlar, but if you are, something tells me that even in the buff you probably know more than the average Joe about self-defense and would stand a good chance in a fight either way.
I attribute my particular fear of having to fight commando to the classic Psycho. Chalk it up to poor parenting that my earliest childhood Halloweens were not spent dressed as Snoopy out getting mountains of candy, but were instead spent in a darkened room, alone, and with access to cable t.v.
The shower scene always stuck with me, traumatized me you could say, and brought many a day where family fights would erupt over me staying firmly locked in the single shared bathroom until I was fully clothed and ready to face whoever was on the other side of the door. It is a habit, a fear, which saved my life a little over a year ago.
I live in a big city, and with it comes big city crimes. Nightly news reports of robberies, shootings and the like are not uncommon. Still, I liked to think myself well protected. I lived on the second floor of an apartment building, which coincidentally means a pre-installed alarm system came with the package. The front desk was manned at all hours of the day, and my place was at the rear of the building, facing another building directly behind my own. I could see their 24 hour security guard booth from my bedroom window and between us sat a tall dividing wall. You could say that the nightly news didn’t give me much bother.
All those thoughts of security went out the aforementioned bedroom window in the course of a single night.
I normally take my showers in the morning, but this evening I just felt like soaking under the hot water for relaxation more than for hygiene. I went through my pre-shower check. Front door locked, windows locked, sliding door locked, alarm up. I sauntered into the bathroom, and firmly closed and locked the door behind me.
I stood under the warm jet stream, eyes closed and hands upstretched toward the water, soaking in the calm when I heard a rattle. I quickly opened my eyes and ripped back the shower curtain. The door was closed, the handle was still. It wouldn’t have been the first time I imagined the scene.
I took a deep breath and slipped back into the water, trying to let it go and relax my now tense muscles. A few minutes passed. It must have been my mind, and then I heard a thump on the door and the rattle once again. One hand slammed down on the water faucet while the other once again tore back the curtain.
The door was still closed, but I was sure that it wasn’t my imagination anymore. The whir of the bathroom fan seemed deafening. The door handle was motionless, and any sound beyond that was muffled by the fan. My eyes strained watching the knob, my hair and body frozen with fear even as rivulets of water continued to stream off me.
Suddenly the handle stated convulsing and a loud thud rammed against the door. I screamed as I sprang out of the tub and shoved my body against the door. The figure on the other side rammed against the door again, and I felt the impact run through me. I screamed again, a deep chuckle responded.
My body was trembling from the tips of my soaked hair to the points of numbed toes. My back remained firmly pressed against the door, bracing for another attack. None came.
A minute passed, two. It seemed like an eternity when I heard that chuckle again, but it seemed to come from a lower height than before. I looked down and saw the knife reflecting my body against its silver surface. Its edges were smeared with what I knew instantly as blood.
I slammed the light switch off, refusing to let the menace outside get any kicks from seeing how terrified I was inside. The whir of the fan stopped, and the only sound I was left with were the shallow gasps of my own breath. I heard the knife slip back out from the crack beneath the door, a slow deliberate withdraw making me all the more aware of its presence so close to me.
“Come on out my little shower princess…..
I attribute my particular fear of having to fight commando to the classic Psycho. Chalk it up to poor parenting that my earliest childhood Halloweens were not spent dressed as Snoopy out getting mountains of candy, but were instead spent in a darkened room, alone, and with access to cable t.v.
The shower scene always stuck with me, traumatized me you could say, and brought many a day where family fights would erupt over me staying firmly locked in the single shared bathroom until I was fully clothed and ready to face whoever was on the other side of the door. It is a habit, a fear, which saved my life a little over a year ago.
I live in a big city, and with it comes big city crimes. Nightly news reports of robberies, shootings and the like are not uncommon. Still, I liked to think myself well protected. I lived on the second floor of an apartment building, which coincidentally means a pre-installed alarm system came with the package. The front desk was manned at all hours of the day, and my place was at the rear of the building, facing another building directly behind my own. I could see their 24 hour security guard booth from my bedroom window and between us sat a tall dividing wall. You could say that the nightly news didn’t give me much bother.
All those thoughts of security went out the aforementioned bedroom window in the course of a single night.
I normally take my showers in the morning, but this evening I just felt like soaking under the hot water for relaxation more than for hygiene. I went through my pre-shower check. Front door locked, windows locked, sliding door locked, alarm up. I sauntered into the bathroom, and firmly closed and locked the door behind me.
I stood under the warm jet stream, eyes closed and hands upstretched toward the water, soaking in the calm when I heard a rattle. I quickly opened my eyes and ripped back the shower curtain. The door was closed, the handle was still. It wouldn’t have been the first time I imagined the scene.
I took a deep breath and slipped back into the water, trying to let it go and relax my now tense muscles. A few minutes passed. It must have been my mind, and then I heard a thump on the door and the rattle once again. One hand slammed down on the water faucet while the other once again tore back the curtain.
The door was still closed, but I was sure that it wasn’t my imagination anymore. The whir of the bathroom fan seemed deafening. The door handle was motionless, and any sound beyond that was muffled by the fan. My eyes strained watching the knob, my hair and body frozen with fear even as rivulets of water continued to stream off me.
Suddenly the handle stated convulsing and a loud thud rammed against the door. I screamed as I sprang out of the tub and shoved my body against the door. The figure on the other side rammed against the door again, and I felt the impact run through me. I screamed again, a deep chuckle responded.
My body was trembling from the tips of my soaked hair to the points of numbed toes. My back remained firmly pressed against the door, bracing for another attack. None came.
A minute passed, two. It seemed like an eternity when I heard that chuckle again, but it seemed to come from a lower height than before. I looked down and saw the knife reflecting my body against its silver surface. Its edges were smeared with what I knew instantly as blood.
I slammed the light switch off, refusing to let the menace outside get any kicks from seeing how terrified I was inside. The whir of the fan stopped, and the only sound I was left with were the shallow gasps of my own breath. I heard the knife slip back out from the crack beneath the door, a slow deliberate withdraw making me all the more aware of its presence so close to me.
“Come on out my little shower princess…..
- Feb 27, 2003
- 6,326
- 2,848
Thanks again bro...now i got something to read on my downtime
caponecartels
Banned
- Aug 29, 2006
- 2,319
- 27
NoEnd House
Let me start off by saying that Peter Terry was addicted to heroin.
We were friends in college and continued to be after I graduated. Notice that I said “I
Let me start off by saying that Peter Terry was addicted to heroin.
We were friends in college and continued to be after I graduated. Notice that I said “I
caponecartels
Banned
- Aug 29, 2006
- 2,319
- 27
The Journal of Carter Pormon
Spoiler [+]
August the 15th, 1931
Today is a sad day. It is with a heavy heart that I report my dearest grandmother has passed away. I must say I am not shocked, as her illness has been with her for many years (she actually surprised us by living longer than we expected). The family doctor allowed us to see her but one last time before the remains were to be moved to Wickman’s funeral home. I found it hard to look at her, as the illness has caused her to age most awful; she seemed to be nothing more than a shrunken skeleton wearing a coat of skin much too small for her. After we bid our final goodbyes we were informed that the reading of her last will and testament will be tomorrow at her home. I feel strange for some reason.
August the 16th, 1931
It’s nice to know that my grandmother’s illness didn’t keep her from her interests, as painting, upon painting, upon painting lay askew across her walls and even the floor. She told me it was a hobby she had ever since she was young. It seems painting is all she did for the last remaining years of her life, it’s beautiful and tragic, really. We met with the Executor where he read grandmother’s will, and I was surprised to see that she had left me some of her belongings; a crate full of original works and a box full of her childhood toys. Odd. What was even more odd was the last request she made; she asked that her home, upon being emptied of its contents, be burned down. This is all rather odd, but I feel tired now so I will rest.
August the 20th, 1931
I have yet to open the box that I was given, or even glance at the paintings. It has been five days since her death and four since I got the possessions, but for some reason I find it hard to look at their contents. I decided to wait until a week after her death to look inside.
August the 22nd, 1931
It has now been a week since grandmother’s passing, which means I could now look into the contents of the box. Inside were typical things; a stuffed bear, a small piece of silk (likely from a blanket), a toy horse and finally a small diary. Setting aside the box I looked at some of her paintings. Among the selections included various pieces of flowers, a self portrait, and a painting of her childhood home. There was, however, one painting that caught my eye; it was an incomplete painting (I assume, being that it was not colored) that depicted a tunnel, with a crumbling road running through it to the other side. There was something inside the tunnel, a tall figure standing there. That is what I thought it was, at least, being that it was smudged. The piece was entitled simply “The Home.
Today is a sad day. It is with a heavy heart that I report my dearest grandmother has passed away. I must say I am not shocked, as her illness has been with her for many years (she actually surprised us by living longer than we expected). The family doctor allowed us to see her but one last time before the remains were to be moved to Wickman’s funeral home. I found it hard to look at her, as the illness has caused her to age most awful; she seemed to be nothing more than a shrunken skeleton wearing a coat of skin much too small for her. After we bid our final goodbyes we were informed that the reading of her last will and testament will be tomorrow at her home. I feel strange for some reason.
August the 16th, 1931
It’s nice to know that my grandmother’s illness didn’t keep her from her interests, as painting, upon painting, upon painting lay askew across her walls and even the floor. She told me it was a hobby she had ever since she was young. It seems painting is all she did for the last remaining years of her life, it’s beautiful and tragic, really. We met with the Executor where he read grandmother’s will, and I was surprised to see that she had left me some of her belongings; a crate full of original works and a box full of her childhood toys. Odd. What was even more odd was the last request she made; she asked that her home, upon being emptied of its contents, be burned down. This is all rather odd, but I feel tired now so I will rest.
August the 20th, 1931
I have yet to open the box that I was given, or even glance at the paintings. It has been five days since her death and four since I got the possessions, but for some reason I find it hard to look at their contents. I decided to wait until a week after her death to look inside.
August the 22nd, 1931
It has now been a week since grandmother’s passing, which means I could now look into the contents of the box. Inside were typical things; a stuffed bear, a small piece of silk (likely from a blanket), a toy horse and finally a small diary. Setting aside the box I looked at some of her paintings. Among the selections included various pieces of flowers, a self portrait, and a painting of her childhood home. There was, however, one painting that caught my eye; it was an incomplete painting (I assume, being that it was not colored) that depicted a tunnel, with a crumbling road running through it to the other side. There was something inside the tunnel, a tall figure standing there. That is what I thought it was, at least, being that it was smudged. The piece was entitled simply “The Home.
caponecartels
Banned
- Aug 29, 2006
- 2,319
- 27
Tulpa
Spoiler [+]
Last year, I spent six months participating in what I was told was a psychological experiment. I found an ad in my local paper looking for imaginative people looking to make good money, and since it was the only ad that week that I was remotely qualified for, I gave them a call and we arranged an interview.
They told me that all I would have to do is stay in a room, alone, with sensors attached to my head to read my brain activity, and while I was there I would visualize a double of myself. They called it my “tulpa.
They told me that all I would have to do is stay in a room, alone, with sensors attached to my head to read my brain activity, and while I was there I would visualize a double of myself. They called it my “tulpa.
caponecartels
Banned
- Aug 29, 2006
- 2,319
- 27
Mr.Widemouth
Spoiler [+]
During my childhood my family was like a drop of water in a vast river, never remaining in one location for long. We settled in Rhode Island when I was eight, and there we remained until I went to college in Colorado Springs. Most of my memories are rooted in Rhode Island, but there are fragments in the attic of my brain which belong to the various homes we had lived in when I was much younger.
Most of these memories are unclear and pointless– chasing after another boy in the back yard of a house in North Carolina, trying to build a raft to float on the creek behind the apartment we rented in Pennsylvania, and so on. But there is one set of memories which remains as clear as glass, as though they were just made yesterday. I often wonder whether these memories are simply lucid dreams produced by the long sickness I experienced that Spring, but in my heart, I know they are real.
We were living in a house just outside the bustling metropolis of New Vineyard, Maine, population 643. It was a large structure, especially for a family of three. There were a number of rooms that I didn’t see in the five months we resided there. In some ways it was a waste of space, but it was the only house on the market at the time, at least within an hour’s commute to my father’s place of work.
The day after my fifth birthday (attended by my parents alone), I came down with a fever. The doctor said I had mononucleosis, which meant no rough play and more fever for at least another three weeks. It was horrible timing to be bed-ridden– we were in the process of packing our things to move to Pennsylvania, and most of my things were already packed away in boxes, leaving my room barren. My mother brought me ginger ale and books several times a day, and these served the function of being my primary from of entertainment for the next few weeks. Boredom always loomed just around the corner, waiting to rear its ugly head and compound my misery.
I don’t exactly recall how I met Mr. Widemouth. I think it was about a week after I was diagnosed with mono. My first memory of the small creature was asking him if he had a name. He told me to call him Mr. Widemouth, because his mouth was large. In fact, everything about him was large in comparison to his body– his head, his eyes, his crooked ears– but his mouth was by far the largest.
“You look kind of like a Furby,
Most of these memories are unclear and pointless– chasing after another boy in the back yard of a house in North Carolina, trying to build a raft to float on the creek behind the apartment we rented in Pennsylvania, and so on. But there is one set of memories which remains as clear as glass, as though they were just made yesterday. I often wonder whether these memories are simply lucid dreams produced by the long sickness I experienced that Spring, but in my heart, I know they are real.
We were living in a house just outside the bustling metropolis of New Vineyard, Maine, population 643. It was a large structure, especially for a family of three. There were a number of rooms that I didn’t see in the five months we resided there. In some ways it was a waste of space, but it was the only house on the market at the time, at least within an hour’s commute to my father’s place of work.
The day after my fifth birthday (attended by my parents alone), I came down with a fever. The doctor said I had mononucleosis, which meant no rough play and more fever for at least another three weeks. It was horrible timing to be bed-ridden– we were in the process of packing our things to move to Pennsylvania, and most of my things were already packed away in boxes, leaving my room barren. My mother brought me ginger ale and books several times a day, and these served the function of being my primary from of entertainment for the next few weeks. Boredom always loomed just around the corner, waiting to rear its ugly head and compound my misery.
I don’t exactly recall how I met Mr. Widemouth. I think it was about a week after I was diagnosed with mono. My first memory of the small creature was asking him if he had a name. He told me to call him Mr. Widemouth, because his mouth was large. In fact, everything about him was large in comparison to his body– his head, his eyes, his crooked ears– but his mouth was by far the largest.
“You look kind of like a Furby,
caponecartels
Banned
- Aug 29, 2006
- 2,319
- 27
Psychosis
Spoiler [+]
Sunday
I’m not sure why I’m writing this down on paper and not on my computer. I guess I’ve just noticed some odd things. It’s not that I don’t trust the computer… I just… need to organize my thoughts. I need to get down all the details somewhere objective, somewhere I know that what I write can’t be deleted or… changed… not that that’s happened. It’s just… everything blurs together here, and the fog of memory lends a strange cast to things…
I’m starting to feel cramped in this small apartment. Maybe that’s the problem. I just had to go and choose the cheapest apartment, the only one in the basement. The lack of windows down here makes day and night seem to slip by seamlessly. I haven’t been out in a few days because I’ve been working on this programming project so intensively. I suppose I just wanted to get it done. Hours of sitting and staring at a monitor can make anyone feel strange, I know, but I don’t think that’s it.
I’m not sure when I first started to feel like something was odd. I can’t even define what it is. Maybe I just haven’t talked to anyone in awhile. That’s the first thing that crept up on me. Everyone I normally talk to online while I program has been idle, or they’ve simply not logged on at all. My instant messages go unanswered. The last e-mail I got from anybody was a friend saying he’d talk to me when he got back from the store, and that was yesterday. I’d call with my cell phone, but reception’s terrible down here. Yeah, that’s it. I just need to call someone. I’m going to go outside.
—
Well, that didn’t work so well. As the tingle of fear fades, I’m feeling a little ridiculous for being scared at all. I looked in the mirror before I went out, but I didn’t shave the two-day stubble I’ve grown. I figured I was just going out for a quick cell phone call. I did change my shirt, though, because it was lunchtime, and I guessed that I’d run into at least one person I knew. That didn’t end up happening. I wish it did.
When I went out, I opened the door to my small apartment slowly. A small feeling of apprehension had somehow already lodged itself in me, for some indefinable reason. I chalked it up to having not spoken to anyone but myself for a day or two. I peered down the dingy grey hallway, made dingier by the fact that it was a basement hallway. On one end, a large metal door led to the building’s furnace room. It was locked, of course. Two dreary soda machines stood by it; I bought a soda from one the first day I moved in, but it had a two year old expiration date. I’m fairly sure nobody knows those machines are even down here, or my cheap landlady just doesn’t care to get them restocked.
I closed my door softly, and walked the other direction, taking care not to make a sound. I have no idea why I chose to do that, but it was fun giving in to the strange impulse not to break the droning hum of the soda machines, at least for the moment. I got to the stairwell, and took the stairs up to the building’s front door. I looked through the heavy door’s small square window, and received quite the shock: it was definitely not lunchtime. City-gloom hung over the dark street outside, and the traffic lights at the intersection in the distance blinked yellow. Dim clouds, purple and black from the glow of the city, hung overhead. Nothing moved, save the few sidewalk trees that shifted in the wind. I remember shivering, though I wasn’t cold. Maybe it was the wind outside. I could vaguely hear it through the heavy metal door, and I knew it was that unique kind of late-night wind, the kind that was constant, cold, and quiet, save for the rhythmic music it made as it passed through countless unseen tree leaves.
I decided not to go outside.
Instead, I lifted my cell phone to the door’s little window, and checked the signal meter. The bars filled up the meter, and I smiled. Time to hear someone else’s voice, I remember thinking, relieved. It was such a strange thing, to be afraid of nothing. I shook my head, laughing at myself silently. I hit speed-dial for my best friend Amy’s number, and held the phone up to my ear. It rang once… but then it stopped. Nothing happened. I listened to silence for a good twenty seconds, then hung up. I frowned, and looked at the signal meter again – still full. I went to dial her number again, but then my phone rang in my hand, startling me. I put it up to my ear.
“Hello?
I’m not sure why I’m writing this down on paper and not on my computer. I guess I’ve just noticed some odd things. It’s not that I don’t trust the computer… I just… need to organize my thoughts. I need to get down all the details somewhere objective, somewhere I know that what I write can’t be deleted or… changed… not that that’s happened. It’s just… everything blurs together here, and the fog of memory lends a strange cast to things…
I’m starting to feel cramped in this small apartment. Maybe that’s the problem. I just had to go and choose the cheapest apartment, the only one in the basement. The lack of windows down here makes day and night seem to slip by seamlessly. I haven’t been out in a few days because I’ve been working on this programming project so intensively. I suppose I just wanted to get it done. Hours of sitting and staring at a monitor can make anyone feel strange, I know, but I don’t think that’s it.
I’m not sure when I first started to feel like something was odd. I can’t even define what it is. Maybe I just haven’t talked to anyone in awhile. That’s the first thing that crept up on me. Everyone I normally talk to online while I program has been idle, or they’ve simply not logged on at all. My instant messages go unanswered. The last e-mail I got from anybody was a friend saying he’d talk to me when he got back from the store, and that was yesterday. I’d call with my cell phone, but reception’s terrible down here. Yeah, that’s it. I just need to call someone. I’m going to go outside.
—
Well, that didn’t work so well. As the tingle of fear fades, I’m feeling a little ridiculous for being scared at all. I looked in the mirror before I went out, but I didn’t shave the two-day stubble I’ve grown. I figured I was just going out for a quick cell phone call. I did change my shirt, though, because it was lunchtime, and I guessed that I’d run into at least one person I knew. That didn’t end up happening. I wish it did.
When I went out, I opened the door to my small apartment slowly. A small feeling of apprehension had somehow already lodged itself in me, for some indefinable reason. I chalked it up to having not spoken to anyone but myself for a day or two. I peered down the dingy grey hallway, made dingier by the fact that it was a basement hallway. On one end, a large metal door led to the building’s furnace room. It was locked, of course. Two dreary soda machines stood by it; I bought a soda from one the first day I moved in, but it had a two year old expiration date. I’m fairly sure nobody knows those machines are even down here, or my cheap landlady just doesn’t care to get them restocked.
I closed my door softly, and walked the other direction, taking care not to make a sound. I have no idea why I chose to do that, but it was fun giving in to the strange impulse not to break the droning hum of the soda machines, at least for the moment. I got to the stairwell, and took the stairs up to the building’s front door. I looked through the heavy door’s small square window, and received quite the shock: it was definitely not lunchtime. City-gloom hung over the dark street outside, and the traffic lights at the intersection in the distance blinked yellow. Dim clouds, purple and black from the glow of the city, hung overhead. Nothing moved, save the few sidewalk trees that shifted in the wind. I remember shivering, though I wasn’t cold. Maybe it was the wind outside. I could vaguely hear it through the heavy metal door, and I knew it was that unique kind of late-night wind, the kind that was constant, cold, and quiet, save for the rhythmic music it made as it passed through countless unseen tree leaves.
I decided not to go outside.
Instead, I lifted my cell phone to the door’s little window, and checked the signal meter. The bars filled up the meter, and I smiled. Time to hear someone else’s voice, I remember thinking, relieved. It was such a strange thing, to be afraid of nothing. I shook my head, laughing at myself silently. I hit speed-dial for my best friend Amy’s number, and held the phone up to my ear. It rang once… but then it stopped. Nothing happened. I listened to silence for a good twenty seconds, then hung up. I frowned, and looked at the signal meter again – still full. I went to dial her number again, but then my phone rang in my hand, startling me. I put it up to my ear.
“Hello?
- Mar 31, 2011
- 3,224
- 101
i ont get the ending of an apple a day someone help
solewoman
Staff member
- Jul 27, 2006
- 19,642
- 21,620
if i read it correctly...back in the day doctors would make house calls with the little leather black bag and a stethoscope around their neck. which described the person who took the apple. food was scarce so the premise was there was a doc making house calls (the home invasions) to get some food. but since someone willingly gave some to him the home invasions stopped....amirite?
